Book of Katsuki

“The transformation is not a kindly thing on the body. It twists and distorts the certainty of form, and organic angles that could once be called limbs are broken and remade, sharper than they were before, more erratic in their movements. This is only the beginning. Do you know of bones sounding like grindstone when they elongate? Though, you wouldn’t. For this is a mortal fact for a person to learn.”

-Author unknown, Book of Observations, Vol. VI

It starts with a howl.

It started thirty minutes before the howl, if Katsuki had been keeping an ear to the wind like he’d been trained to do. Growing up in the heart of the wilderness had instilled a peculiar instinct in him, wearing over his hands, beading his hair with burrs that at the end of every day he picks out and drops into the fireplace, listening to them crackle as the eyes of the sun go down. He’s something fierce enough to deserve his own niche in the ecosystem, prey below him and very few predators above. Katsuki should be right at home in the forest. It’d molded him, after all.

Though, the word home doesn’t have as much definition as it should. He’d be there if it did. It’s after dusk, and there’s work to do and a rabbit to skin and gut, and his mother will be disappointed when she grabs his wrist later and flips his hand over, glaring at the lack of red stains that are supposed to mottle him. Prove him capable.

He kicks a rock. Another, which hits a stump, then another one, another one. He’s making a lot of noise for someone who knows what kind of animals—and people—only open their eyes in the dark, but this has simmered inside him for so long it’s like his whole body is made from that steam, inflating him. He’s spent too many sleepless nights listening to the trees outside clawing each other to bits, the wind making every loose shingle on the roof dance. He’s tuned to that irritation. Feels the burn in his shoulders from chopping firewood all afternoon to let out his anger, the knock of his mother’s knuckles on his door two mornings ago to impart that anger—Katsuki, you need to answer me. You need to think of the future. You aren’t a boy, anymore.

The hair on the back of his neck knows how to stand for her impatient raps on that old, oak door, but right now, it doesn’t remember how to do it for the sound of paws in the dirt, hunting him. The muted thuds catch up to him quickly—Katsuki doesn’t even realize there’d been a chase in the first place. He doesn’t hear leaf-litter being kicked up, or branches being messily stepped over by hind-limbs, careless in their footfalls, because he’d been moving the very same way.

It’s eager for him. Whatever it is. Something huffing out there, juvenile and hungry, looking at him through the bush.

Enter the howl.

Because it was always going to come for him, one way or another.

Katsuki’s head swivels towards the sound. There’s only so much he needs to identify before those instincts of his activate, stirred from their dormancy. He sees grey-black fur, gangly legs like toothpicks against the size of its head, a snout wrinkled by teeth, ears pulled back. There’s more black on the top of its head than anywhere else, like a mohawk, and a notch is missing from its right ear even big enough to notice while it’s charging. A lone wolf is one you fight. Katsuki knows the code. If it’s already decided it wants you—if it’s been watching you for who knows how long, sized you up against the width of its maw, and carrying, in its heart, the intent of every wolven ancestor successful in this very act, killing you—then yes. You fight with all the grit in your body.

Katsuki has every intention of fighting. He’d be reaching into his boot for his knife if the wolf wasn’t actively charging, if his step backward hadn’t tipped him off-balance enough to force his choice between steadying himself and meeting the thing’s teeth on ground, pinned beneath it. In a last ditch effort, he bends his arms tight to his chest. At least this way, the chunk it rips out of him will be from his forearm and not somewhere precious, like his neck. Katsuki plants his feet, breathing and grunting and tensing every muscle in his body at once, and he doesn’t, for one, rotten second, think it’s going to be the end of him.

And then there’s a second howl. Louder.

It comes from somewhere beyond him, high-pitched and wrong. The first wolf lunges at Katsuki just as he’s caught by the strangeness. His arm rips. He yells, and something else huffs as it rushes into him, sweeping him from behind like an inevitable force of nature, an ocean wave that lifts you up and tips you back like you’re made of nothing but twigs and prayers, like you’re just another rock concaving at the mercy of a thousand years of water eating you down to a nub, and Katsuki thinks this, now. This might be the end.

His feet are off the ground, and there’s pressure all around him, distracting him from the pain in his arm. Worse, from his instincts.

The wolf is struck by a blur of movement and flies twenty feet, landing on its side with a sickening crunch and going still. Limp. The blood starts spilling from its mouth, the internal soup of the impact steaming in the frigid air, pouring out of it, red, red. Red. Black.

Black—that isn’t right.

This is the moment Katsuki finally feels his throat tighten, his tongue swell. The fear. He doesn’t get scared, can’t remember the last time he’d been, he wasn’t even really scared of the wolf. That was nothing more than Katsuki handing himself over to his instincts. The ones that are yelling at him now, adopting the voice of every wise hunter Katsuki had exchanged knowledge with in the village merchant square along with a jar of hard-earned fat for their troubles:

Nothing should be able to do this. Nothing that lives in these woods can do anything like this, and if it could, no one’s lived to describe it.

He’s aware that he’s being held off the ground, that he’s in more danger than he was with the wolf. Than maybe he’s ever been. His injured arm is barely a thought when pitted against the rest of his circumstances. The body that seized him is cold everywhere, and Katsuki feels it start settling around him, an old house in its rickety foundation, amplifying through the years. He thinks he might be hallucinating in shock. Thinks he should be bleeding more than he is. The arms cupping under his body to support his weight are locked-up, they clutch and squeeze at him, ceaseless, have him wondering if this is what it’s truly like to be prey, making him empathize with the lowly rabbit hanging from the ceiling back at home with its cold, vacant, doll-eyes. The hands on his nape, they’re colder still. Katsuki is nearly folded in half in this grip, against its chest. It breathes when he does.

Katsuki shivers before snapping himself out of it. When he twists for his knife, that second howl comes again. The wrong one. It isn’t from the forest, it’s from this thing that’s holding him, from the sheer depths within it, a distorted echo in a room of ribs. Katsuki immediately pinpoints the reason it sounds so strange, the off-nature of it. It’s cycling through the same howl over and over, the same stutter-start, the same pitch, a trill at the end. Repeated. Repeated. Repeated. Repeated.

—Repeated

It says Katsuki’s name, but he’s already going under.

There is here, and there. You think you see the divide, you think you know not to cross it.

But you will.

The lines are already blurring when you realize you might not know as much as you should. That counts for something.

Who are you?

What are you?

What do you want?

It goes and goes.

It’s a slow crawl back to awareness. Katsuki opens his eyes enough to let the light in, then shuts them again as he tries to make sense of his person. He’s on something hard. He’s inside a room warmly-lit by a fire. His arm hurts the whole way down. There’s a pair of eyes on him, their intensity like nothing he’s ever known, and it’s going to be whoever—or whatever—carried him here.

Katsuki wonders if his knife is still in his boot, wonders why his shirt is off. He’s asking more questions than he knows what to do with. How much danger am I in? feels like an important one to ask, and More than if it killed me is the answer that sticks.

Very, very slowly, Katsuki moves his hand towards his right boot.

“Does it hurt?”

Katsuki’s eyes rip open, and he’s—a boy, just like him, standing at his side. His hair is green, his face rounded like it was permanently smoothed by a cupped hand, and his shirt is bloodied on the sleeve. Whether this is blood of the wolf, or Katsuki, or himself, he doesn’t know. Things make less sense now than they did in the woods while he was being puppeted by his adrenaline, barely able to follow what was happening right in front of him.

It was him. But it wasn’t, couldn’t have been. But it had to be.

Katsuki jolts upright, realizing as he meets his eyes that he’d been placed on a sturdy, wooden dining table. Realizes that even though his arm still aches, it’s been wrapped in bandage cloth. This feels almost worse than if the wound had been left open. Katsuki immediately demands, “who the hell are you? Where is this?” He doesn’t ask what happened, because something about the chain of events still feels like a shackle snapped around his mind, tugging when he tries to find order in it.

The boy doesn’t startle. His eyes are greener than his hair, reflecting more than Katsuki can even begin to identify, and he remembers the second howl now, more vividly than the first. Remembers where it came from.

There’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with Katsuki too, for sitting here, injured, wasting time humoring one question after another like the word danger isn’t presently a thousand needles at the back of his neck. He’s a hunter who should know better. His mother raised him to act. His hunting knife is within reach.

“I won’t hurt you.” Danger. The boy’s voice is pitched in the way you would speak when approaching a street-cat, emaciated and wary, in a feeble attempt to offer it scraps.

“You took me here?”

Katsuki’s hand inches toward his leg, subtle shifts of position that would allow him to strike, and he knows his reflexes are fast from spearfishing. He has to believe he’s faster than the boy. He pushes the image of the wolf on its side from his mind, and how quickly it’d been sent flying, just as easily as a rock you hold in a three-fingered grip.

“I had to tend to your wound. And please, don’t do that.”

Katsuki swallows, letting his hand go still. “Why?”

“Because I’d have to stop you, and you’re already injured. You’ll hurt yourself.”

This spikes Katsuki’s blood, being assumed to lose in this pretend scenario. It settles in him like embers, glowing mad, begging for a reason to shift and catch fire again. Katsuki’s anger is something he’s learned to keep on a short leash, and he only heels it in the face of so many unknowns. “Why,” Katsuki starts again, “did you help me?”

The boy leans his head to the side, and Katsuki thinks through the logistics of lunging at him. The table might fall, he might end up on top of him with no weapon to show for it besides his hands, and Katsuki knows whose are capable of throwing the weight of an animal twenty feet. Katsuki knows which one of them walked away from that encounter, and which of them was carried.

“What matters right now is that you stay calm,” he tells Katsuki, and it makes him twitch. Distracts him so much that the next words aren’t as alarming as they should be, to hear outright. “I’m sorry,” the boy rubs his head, “the next three days are going to be terribly confusing.”

Katsuki is halfway through constructing a ten-step plan to kick the table between them and break one of the legs off as a blunt weapon. The words drift over like lazy, unassuming smoke. Slowly, Katsuki realizes he’s about to be caught in something as dire as a brushfire. Slowly, is how he recognizes the high-pitched sensation of dread.

“What?”

The boy’s eyes flicker down to where Katsuki is bracing his injured arm with the other, and now Katsuki wonders something starkly. Something he should’ve questioned from the very beginning.

He grasps the top of the bandage and ignores the boy’s plea to stop, tearing the cloth down like a sleeve. He’s flinching the way you would, learning you’re made of the same meat as any other, as all the unfortunate animals you’d cut into strips. It looks and feels like his arm might be more suture-thread than sinew, at this point. Katsuki holds it up, confirms that he can still move it—painfully, very much so—and trails his finger parallel to the wound. His skin is stained dark red where the blood had sat. Dark, dark, dark red.

So dark that it makes Katsuki’s eyes narrow.

“The wolf did this?” His voice is firm but rising. He is not staying calm.

If Katsuki expected the boy to lie about this essential question, he doesn’t know what it means, when he doesn’t.

“I did,” the boy admits, “when I grabbed you.”

He has the nerve to soften his tone, apologetic. Tilt his head while he waits to see Katsuki’s response. Danger. His throat starts to tighten again, and he hopes he isn’t visibly struggling to swallow. Danger. Prodding at his arm makes for a momentary distraction. Katsuki needs to feel it blister, needs hurt of any kind to wrap around him and squeeze, needs it to cloud out everything else and bury his uncertainties. The swish of an axe connecting with a stump. The slam of an old, oak door. Blood wiped across his own cheeks. A scream, underwater.

He pinches the top of the gash, by his bicep, flaring his nostrils when that dark, dark, dark red makes its firsthand appearance and seeps out, and isn’t just a shadow on his skin anymore. It isn’t something leaking from the mouth of a wolf that’d met a force so virulent, it might as well have been a bug caught in the destined path of a heel. It’s his blood. He’s bleeding it.

Katsuki’s anger is a thing he tries to keep on a short leash.

But every so often, it manages to slip the collar.

“Why is my blood—black? What the fuck is this?” Katsuki swings himself to the opposite side of the table and drops down, kicks the edge so it topples to the floor with a bang. The wood is too thick to crack. The leg will be the same. He growls, “what did you do to me?”

Katsuki is on his feet in front of his savior, accusing him, and isn’t being attacked for it. Worse—he’s being reasoned with.

The boy steps back, lifting his hands to soothe him, like a wound-up animal more in danger of hurting itself more than anyone around it. “Listen to me,” the boy says, “I didn’t- I didn’t mean to, believe me when I tell you it wasn’t meant to be like this. Look at me. Please.” And despite himself, despite everything, Katsuki does look. It’s like staring down a well, trying to guess how much water would catch him. He teeters forward and the vertigo takes hold, he didn’t even realize he felt this weak. How much blood had he lost, he grapples, and his mind slips from him like oiled rope, dark, dark, how much blood had been taken.

Katsuki falters, crouching to the floor. He can still fight, because he must. He can always fight.

The boy holds his palm open from the other side of the table. “Katsuki,” he addresses him like they aren’t strangers dancing on the point of a knife, like he’d ever been told Katsuki’s name. His tone is so soft, so familiar, so much of everything it shouldn’t be. “I just, don’t want you to be scared when it happens.”

Katsuki goes rigid, curls his fingernails against the floor. “When what happens?”

The boy pauses. His gaze searches every hard surface of Katsuki’s body, like he doesn’t yet know where to land.

“When what happens?” Katsuki asks again, and watches the boy’s eyes go as dark as the wolf’s blood, his blood. Three days, he’d said. Three days until—

“When it starts to move.”

One - Day

“Of vampyres—

“One must imagine a splinter entering the body through the sole of the foot and migrating upwards through it, day by day, hour by hour, ever-present in these fleshly layers, in which only the briefest respite is allowed when the body is completely, unnaturally still. Now imagine this to be a hunger so integral to said body that it cannot be isolated and picked out. Imagine vasculature bedding around this hunger, that it throbs wherever it takes hold. That it does not quiet until it eats. And even then, it only lies dormant.”

-Author unknown, Book of Observations, Vol. X

The wrongness pervades everything around him. It starts in the veiled comfort of the living space, which is decorated exactly how a person would be expected to furnish, no more, no less. If there’s a touch of the boy’s personality, it isn’t held in the paintings of rolling hills on the walls. It isn’t with the couch, where the edge of the cushions is pristine, not rough and white from the inhabitants rubbing the fabric. The rug doesn’t have a single fray. The kitchen table—once it’s righted again, and Katsuki is gestured to sit at a chair, held out for him—has no markings. The top isn’t stained from wine or scraped from ceramic dishes. No knife has ever been driven into the wood in a fit of rage.

Katsuki keeps his chin up, like he doesn’t notice any of this. Like the boy’s eyes aren’t capable of holding him to the chair all on their own, his pupils the nails hammered into the toe of Katsuki’s boot.

“Eat.”

The boy had cooked food in the cast-iron pan over the fire, where he could still keep Katsuki in view, throwing glances that are not met. Katsuki keeps his eyes straight ahead after taking painstaking mental notes of the cottage. They blur over the painting of rolling hills. He doesn’t react when a plate is set down in front of him, or when the food is thoroughly scraped onto it with a wooden spoon.

Katsuki is weak and eating would help this somewhat, but he refuses to look down and acknowledge that fact. He blinks instead, slowly, like a cat, turning to meet the boy’s strange intensity.

“It’s just meat,” he promises Katsuki, like there’s no reason to scrutinize, no reason to remember the fact of his violence in the woods. “Some root vegetables too. I can take the first bite, if you want me to.”

Katsuki chews the inside of his cheek for a minute before answering. “Rabbit? Deer?”

His mouth twitches. “The wolf.”

Katsuki feels his stomach rise to the challenge of this, growling. “I’m going to take an educated guess, say that after I finish this, you won’t just, sit politely and watch me leave.”

He almost smiles, like he enjoys the game of Katsuki trying to guess him right. Which he had.

“It’s not that simple.”

“‘Course it isn’t,” Katsuki scoffs. “why not?”

“First, will you please let me-” The boy pauses, changing his approach. Katsuki isn’t one for pretty words. “You broke the stitches open. I need to close your wound while the edges are still fresh.”

Katsuki looks down past his bare chest, where his arm is in his lap, and sure enough, blood is seeping from the places the stitching had ripped. The color hasn’t returned to red. He wonders why he feels no pain from it. Why he feels everything like a whirlwind when he looks at the boy. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“I’ll do it myself.”

“I worry about putting a needle and shears into your hands, after that display.”

Bastard. “You must think I’m very capable.”

“I think you’re a hunter in more ways than one,” he says, “and that unless I convince you it’s not worth trying, you’re going to attempt a lot of things that aren’t good for you.”

Katsuki’s hand has been thumbing aimlessly at the plate, and he pinches the edge. “Like you know what’s good for me,” Katsuki says, and then finally asks him, after holding out in his stubbornness for too long, “what’s your name?”

“Izuku.”

“Izuku,” he repeats, grinding his teeth, “thanks for whatever the hell you did out there. To the wolf. But I can’t stay here. I have to go back to,”—Katsuki, why can’t you just make your mother happy. You’re digging my grave, I swear, I can’t stand it, all I’ve done to get you this far and—“I can fix myself up, don’t need you to.” Katsuki stands before Izuku can object, but it feels strange, so strange, like the howl did. It feels like he’s standing upside-down. He’s back on the floor before he can find his balance, and Izuku is above him, reaching out, and he is there, suspended, like the moon, like the stars, like a permanent and otherworldly force.

“I need to seal your wound,” the boy’s—Izuku’s—voice has changed, suddenly. The pivot is like a physical blow. Dark, dark, dark.

Katsuki grits his teeth and juts his chin up in defiance.

“You can put yourself back at the table, or I can carry you to the couch.”

It’s no choice at all. Katsuki remembers his ear at Izuku’s chest, in the woods, and the way his hands cupped him. The way he made no effort to disguise their roving. Katsuki isn’t sure how much of that memory he can trust, considering the state of him then, and now, but he knows at least two things with certainty. One, Izuku is a killer. Two, Izuku is not a killer of Katsuki, but whatever he wants from him is worse.

Katsuki sets his jaw. “Fine.” He gets up and manages to fight his body’s unnerve, sitting back at the chair, and Izuku is already snatching a bowl of water and new strips of cloth from the kitchen. When Izuku comes next to him, he doesn’t grab another chair. He kneels, right there, on the floor.

It feels inescapable to look at him. Katsuki imagines smashing the chair over his head before he can get up, but also imagines a thing so unlike himself that he struggles to explain how it came to be. Something that shouldn’t have residence in his head. He imagines turning his body toward Izuku, giving him unfettered access to the wound, to him. Spreading his knees. Letting him in.

Katsuki swallows. He brings the hammer down on his mind. “I don’t have blood to spare, for you to go this slow. Remember.”

“I’d like to take my time.”

A scoff. “And I’m going home when you’re finished.”

Izuku holds the bowl and swirls the water gently, around and around. “I didn’t figure you’d be so eager to get back to your mother.”

For once, Katsuki doesn’t bite back. He studies Izuku while he wets the cloth and wrings the excess water above the bowl, and then gently, deliberately, wipes the trails of blood down Katsuki’s arm to his wrist one by one. He follows them top to bottom like he fears getting lost if he doesn’t follow them. He blinks in a series of twos. The water is warm, and again, wherever Izuku’s fingers brush is unnaturally cold. Katsuki knows there are some who have trouble regulating their body temperature. Some who have cold extremities.

And there are some who carry incredible strength and secrets, hidden behind funny little mannerisms.

Katsuki misses the security of knowing his knife is in his boot. He doesn’t know where it is now, and his nails would make a poor man’s substitute. “You’ve been watching me.”

The cloth goes back into the bowl, and the water spins grey instead of light pink, because Katsuki’s blood isn’t red, anymore. He’s not as alarmed by this color as he should be.

“Yes.” Izuku looks up and his eyebrows twist in concentration. “Not to hear your arguments. It was just you. Just to see you.”

“Why?”

Izuku opens a small, wooden box and unwinds a string. He threads the bird-bone needle as he talks, and Katsuki turns his body towards him. He does not open his knees.

“The same reason you crouch by the river and see the salmon jump upstream. The same reason you look up when the jays call. The same reason you sit and sharpen your knife on a whetstone, in the last light of the sun, and the predator-eyes in the shadows of the woods start to glow.” he looks down at his own hands, fondly, “It’s such an interesting thing to watch a person, when they’re only doing what they’re meant to be doing.”

Katsuki scoffs as he tries to fathom it. “What am I meant to be doing?”

The silence that follows is so long, so full, that it almost cripples him to wait in it. Izuku has watched him enough to wonder this himself already. Izuku might’ve never thought so hard about anything, as he has about this.

“Disrupting.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Izuku rubs his wrist in habit. “Do you know when lightning strikes a tree, how sometimes it travels right through it, and the ground sucks it up like water, and other times the tree explodes into a million, glowing splinters of wood, and there’s a trace of it in every direction for a half a mile around?” He looks calm in his explanation, the edges of his mouth curl upwards. “You’re that tree.”

Katsuki blinks. “Which one,” he wonders.

“Both.”

He doesn’t know what to say about that. The way Izuku talks is far-removed from Katsuki’s world, abstract from a life of hunting and rules and traditions, and each and every thing that comes from his mouth seems to bend Katsuki’s thoughts backwards. He stops trying to fight it, because he can’t. Because he might like the feeling of being bent.

“So what, you’re the lightning?”

“No,” Izuku replies, “I’m the one who finds every piece.”

Katsuki feels dizzy. He looks down at his hands. Izuku starts suturing, doesn’t warn him when the needle is going in or when he needs to tug the thread through. It grows fuzzy, the visual of watching him throw the knots after every clean edge comes together. His skin has a sort of glow. The fire is behind him, and too low to be the thing doing it.

Izuku shifts on his knees, and Katsuki feels his eyes cross and separate out two of him. The outlines don’t come back together.

“Do you see that?” Katsuki would’ve kept this to himself, if he didn’t feel Izuku’s words like the tip of a knife softly tracing his spine.

Izuku pauses. “Tell me what you see.”

Katsuki sets his mouth, wondering how much he should divulge. It isn’t like him to relay weakness, but it isn’t like him to let a stranger stitch him back together, either. “Things are blurry. My hand is like-” Katsuki squints, flipping his hand on his uninjured side over, then right-side up, then over again, “like two hands on top of each other, moving just off-set, and I can see them both.”

“Good,” Izuku says, sounding relieved about this development. Sounding positively eager.

“Tell me what it is.”

“I will.” But he remains silent. He ties the last two knots, and with this, Katsuki’s arm is knitted back together without a trace of the blackness in him. The water in the bowl is all that holds that secret, and it’ll be thrown outside into the dirt, steaming in the cold air, just like the wolf’s blood had and-

“Tell me now,” Katsuki demands, “or I’ll kill you.”

“Katsuki.” Izuku stands, wielding his name like a family sword he’d taken from the wall of Katsuki’s home, because he’d never offered it himself. Izuku crowds him, at the edge of his seat. “You can’t even stand. Finish your food, please, for me. You’re going to need the vitality.”

He clenches and unclenches his teeth. “Well, look at that. Guess I’m not fucking hungry anymore.”

Eat.

Katsuki doesn’t know what comes over him, then. Everything that was blurry before becomes two separate visions entirely, and he breathes, and breathes, and he doesn’t know where the air goes because he’s still gasping when he drops to the floor. Then Izuku lays the plate down in front of him, and he eats.

The second outline of his hand is the one that takes the food, a betrayal of the highest order. His mouth doesn’t exactly feel like his own, either. He glares at Izuku from underneath his brow ridge, and Izuku squats down to oversee him, watching Katsuki tear into the meat with his pronounced canines, the strip so red it’s apparent it barely touched the fire’s heat. Just enough to char the skin in the cast iron. Katsuki swallows the morsel, rubbing the juice from his chin with the back of his hand. His goosebumps feel like something ancient, like they’ve been passed down out of necessity, and he’s spitting in the face of his benefactor not taking heed.

Whatever spell first put him on the floor is already fading.

He could’ve tried to fight, then.

But he doesn’t.

Katsuki scowls, writhing in himself. “You’re sick.”

Izuku watches him take another bite of the meat, and isn’t satisfied until he swallows it. He’s sincere in even this, the way he watches Katsuki satisfy his needs. The twitch of his mouth as he admires him. His gaze encroaches further and further toward the cold, hard boundary that Katsuki has managed to uphold his entire life, against the weight of everyone else. It trembles here. No amount of bracing could hold him back fully. Katsuki watches the shadows dance on the floor from the fireplace, which is now inexplicably roaring in its hearth, and maybe Katsuki trembles too. Maybe he swallows diligently.

“You’re pretty,” Izuku says back to him, and Katsuki’s heart is so much like a wildling’s, laid fierce, right at the winter’s edge.

One - Night

He doesn’t want to sleep, but the exhaustion beds him down. At least his arm and the injury are no longer at the forefront of his mind, now that he’d wrapped it. Now that he can stand. Now that he’d eaten.

Katsuki shivers.

Instead of pain or weakness, now there is only the starkness of Izuku. The memory of lines blurring, doubling, Izuku’s skin trailing behind a memory of itself when it moves. The echo of his voice is in Katsuki’s head—three days. Danger. It’s already been one, and he understands less than he did in the forest, caught in Izuku’s arms.

You can take my bed, Izuku had offered, and when Katsuki asked him where he’d sleep, he’d just smiled. It’s becoming noticeable that his eyes go glossy when he knows something Katsuki doesn’t. His attention is something he winds and throws again and again at Katsuki, hoping to loop him, and draw him in.

Katsuki figures it’s better to take the bed than the couch, because it’s a new room, and maybe there will be something worthwhile in it. Maybe he’ll be able to fashion a makeshift weapon, and escape won’t feel like a distant possibility, one that’s gaining speed like an avalanche as it runs from him.

This possibility all-but vanishes when Izuku doesn’t leave him alone after depositing him, and instead inhabits the room like a specter. Not that there’s anything Katsuki could’ve used. The bedroom is decorated like the rest of the house—exactly, like a stage play. Not a thing out of place, but nothing really in place, either.

He’s been tense since Izuku commanded him to the floor, his bones like steel rods whose junctions need oiled. He’s already running down the clock.

What would his mother say?

His fingers curl into the sheets as he gets in. It smells like pine when he pulls them to his chest, like a fire-warmed room, and whatever deep, earthy scent beyond it that it’d taken from Izuku.

Katsuki is glad, at least, that Izuku doesn’t attempt to join the other edge of the bed.

Izuku watches him from across the room, transfixed, like Katsuki is a wonder. Like he’s a cosmic abstraction in the sky, rippling in his anger, set in his stubborn mouth, and not a lightheaded hunter-boy fumbling through how best to incapacitate his captor. Izuku will sit eventually, sure. But he won’t leave. His guard will never fall as low as Katsuki needs it to.

So he lies back, alone—but not really—and Izuku pushes at the corners of him where he’s beginning to crack.

Like always, you disappoint me, is what his mother would say.

Katsuki does the only thing he can think to, and stares back. Eventually, his eyelids grow heavier than his hate.

Who are you?

What are you?

What do you want?

I don’t know, you finally say back, but in this, you are so firmly planted it would take god’s hand to uproot you.

Fine, she says, you can live in the woods like a wild mutt, for all I care.

Your heart roars.

You don’t tell her why.

You think she always feared it.

Two - Day

“Of fae—

“There are those creatures who feed on the underlying hum of all things. Emotions, hopes, and dreams are powerful sensations, enough to plant themselves wherever they first came to be. These are the seeds, and fae, their gardeners, tending as they grow and grow until these vines travel the distance of oceans. They reach so immensely for others of their kind. Their connection becomes the hum of magick itself, and this hum lives, much the same as you or I, as a constant state, between violent bursts of existence.”

-Author unknown, Book of Observations, Vol. IV

Katsuki wakes up to one thought, alone, in a bitter expanse of confusion.

“You aren’t human.”

His voice croaks with sleep. Izuku only blinks at him, which is as much a confirmation as any. Izuku blinks at him in a way that says, You keep trying to guess me, and you keep guessing right.

Izuku quirks his head from the corner of the room and asks a great many things of him. Polite, level-headed tone; invasive questions. He’s wondering how he slept, did he dream, what he dreamt of, does he see anything strange, like before, please tell me these things, Katsuki. Do you feel it? All of this prying Katsuki ignores in service of stomping over to the wardrobe, ripping open drawers, and throwing a handful of clothes onto the bed. He remains mute, because it seems to work wonders on Izuku listening to him.

Izuku does, and steps out.

Katsuki changes in the bedroom, into Izuku’s clothes and out of his dirt and sweat and bloodstained ones. There’s a small relief in finally wearing a shirt, but it’s negated by the way it smells when Katsuki tucks his chin in the collar. Earthy and deep and lived-in. More alive than any other part of the house. More like Izuku.

Izuku stands just outside of the door listening in, but allows him privacy, even though he must know what Katsuki’s really doing in here. Must not care. In these precious many minutes, Katsuki manages to sneak a look through the closet—which is empty, save for an old sheepskin blanket—and then through all the other drawers in the room. They’re devoid of usefulness. He’s on his own, it seems, which is something he’d made peace with about eight years ago, as the first sharp, red print of his mother’s hand was still-forming on his arm.

“Good morning, Katsuki,” Izuku says when he leaves the bedroom, but he’d already said it an hour ago when Katsuki was still blinking away his sleep and accusing him of inhumanity. His arm raises like he’s going to touch him, but it doesn’t. Something hums in the interim. His eyes are so green—and glossy.

Katsuki pushes past him into the open living space, occupying the area near the hearth. There is a rocking chair, a small wooden end table. There is a fire-poker. He’s sure that Izuku would have him on the floor again the moment he reached for it, just by nature of his words, and Katsuki must consider this against the shrinking possibility of incapacitating him.

Katsuki goes right back to prodding for information, “so, what are you?”

“I hope it doesn’t unsettle you.”

Katsuki doesn’t tell him that really, it’s a relief. That only thing able to render him so uncertain, so unlike himself that for once, fighting back isn’t an option he recklessly pursues to the detriment of everything around him—that the only force capable of meeting him, is something entirely inhuman.

Katsuki doesn’t tell him how this makes his palms sweat. How his thoughts linger on what exactly Izuku could make him do, with just his voice.

“I’ve seen stranger things in the woods than you.” He hasn’t. Katsuki doesn’t believe in magic, and it doesn’t believe in him. All of this must be painfully apparent on his face, and Izuku smiles at him.

“You think I’m strange?” Izuku is asking this sincerely. Katsuki answers much the same.

“Your hair is strange.”

“It is?”

“Very. Like the forest spit on you.”

Izuku laughs. It travels like a curved wire through the entire length of Katsuki’s guts. The wind outside howls suddenly, pitting itself against the shutters and doors like it wants to take part in the atmosphere of such a wild sound, and the fire crackles, and two days. Two days.

“What color do you prefer?” Izuku wonders.

The word preference isn’t part of Katsuki’s vocabulary, he’s someone who’s always seized whatever he could and made do. Now he looks at Izuku, and tries to picture him made of any other color. A meadow before the wildflowers open. Basil in a mortar and pestle, spread onto grain loaf. Conifers in the sun, their needles vibrant when they’re not outside of his window clawing in the dark, when his mother isn’t stoking the fire to spit it back at him. When Katsuki is left to himself in the woods, boiling in the deep greens of the forest like a forever-soup, a thing that hasn’t stopped hungering since the minute it started.

“Orange,” Katsuki says.

Green eyes, green, green and glossy.

“I see,” Izuku says thoughtfully, stepping towards him, softly but sure of the distance he can get away with closing. “You don’t seem as impatient to return home.”

Katsuki shifts on his feet.

This is something, this is a thread to follow, keep him talking until an opportunity to strike presents itself as he inches closer. There is always an option to fight. Even if that possibility has been slipping further into the dark, splitting off, even if it now feels counter-intuitive to the image of Izuku he’s been building in his head, with his layers peeled back, his projection from the dullness of human existence. Even if Izuku looks wrong, and it’s starting to not matter.

Still, Katsuki pushes on. “Well, the last conversation I had with my mother wasn’t exactly pleasant.”

“What did she say?”

Katsuki goes prickly. Izuku’s voice had dropped, something protective, something he has no right to be. “That I’m good for nothing until I do what’s expected of me. She…” he furrows his brows and trails away with a hmph.

“You don’t have to tell me.” Izuku rubs his thumbs together. “But I’d listen.”

Two days. Katsuki rolls his shoulders. Shouldn’t his arm hurt more than it does, after being ripped open?

Katsuki looks at him, and feels his vision split before combining again. He doesn’t mention it to Izuku, but holds the weight of it, heady, strange, unnatural. Unloading a burden might make it easier to think. Telling Izuku his troubles might bring him closer, and Katsuki’s hands might clamp around his throat before he can speak an order.

This is how it must go. This is what Katsuki’s fight must become, the act of giving himself to Izuku in pieces he has to reach for. It’s the only thing he seems to respond to. Everything else comes second to this, including Katsuki’s own comfort, and the tearing of his tightly-held self.

He breathes out. “She doesn’t see me. I think I look like an animal living under her roof, to her, one she’s convinced herself she needs to tame.”

“Tame you?” Izuku wonders, and Katsuki can’t tell which word was supposed to get the inflection, can’t understand what Izuku wants. Katsuki’s tongue grows looser, and his vision is wrong again when he looks down at his crossed arms, the clean bandage inking itself black and then siphoning away again, whiter than before. White as the moon.

“I bet you think I’m a lost cause, like her. Bet you formed a wretched opinion of me the second I opened my mouth,” Katsuki challenges, but he doesn’t even believe it himself. Izuku isn’t sour on him. The way he acts is like something half-human, the rest of him a darkness not meant to be understood, and that darkness is what leans towards Katsuki like it’s in need.

“Why do you imagine that?”

“It’s always been that way.”

Izuku doesn’t accept this. “So tell me about the Katsuki you want people to see.”

There’s no reason to give him the truth, except that he’d moved closer, within reach. Almost. Katsuki bites his tongue, at first. Then the more he holds this particular, stubborn silence in a stranglehold, the more it grows into something worse. It grows an equally stubborn heart.

“I feel-” Katsuki swallows. Wonders why it feels so easy to start a sentence he’d been avoiding for almost a year. He looks at Izuku, and his mouth starts again without permission. “I always felt like I was meant for something greater than—this.” He gestures widely, meaning everything beyond the walls of the cottage. “I want to put my hands on as much as I possibly can. I want to make something last. I don’t want the things I’m supposed to want, to marry someone plain and acceptable, live in a house I inherited, follow a thousand other, unremarkable footsteps. What’s the point? What’s a legacy if it’s the same as all the rest? It’s like already being dead.”

Izuku chews on his words for a long time, and Katsuki gets to watch his expression double, and recombine, and his body feels on edge with the absolute uncertainty of him. His otherness. It feels like it’s coming into him. It feels like it’s already making a mark.

“You’re unlike anything. You’re lonely in yourself,” Izuku finally says. He designates him like this. Fondly, like he knows him, knows anything about him. Katsuki boils and Izuku steps closer and the fire roars, and where there was silence, now something hums like distant music.

“Get away from me,” Katsuki raises his voice, his stomach lurching into his throat.

“I told you already, I’m not going to-”

Katsuki sees the opening, and lunges.

He has no weapon save his fist, so he makes use of it, winding back before striking him in the cheekbone. Or, this is where he aims. At the last second, his fist swings just left of him—and just right, like his arm had come undone through the middle.

The momentum spins him outward. His body doesn’t feel like his own, his hand without the motion of the hunt, a lifetime of killing blows delivered, the sinking of an arrow in the neck. A knife in the heart. A chest cavity opened. An animal, beholden.

Down.

No, no—Katsuki bends his body to the floor, until his cheek is against the scratchy fabric of the rug, his chest at the hardwood. He can’t move. He is where Izuku put him.

He is exactly where he should be.

What?

Izuku shifts, and Katsuki fears he might kick him with the force he’d shoved the wolf with. Or worse, picking Katsuki up while he’s immobilized, carrying him to the couch like he’d threatened, like he’d wanted, manipulation of his body inside and out.

But Izuku doesn’t touch him, and his voice is smooth and quiet. “Please,” he says, “don’t make me do that again. I don’t like influencing you.”

“Fuck you,” Katsuki spits, “what is this?” He’s able to flip himself onto his back, kicking at Izuku’s ankles until he moves to the side of him, out of reach.

“Oh,” Izuku brightens in realization. “You can break so quickly! I thought, before…”

Katsuki pants with exertion while Izuku lowers himself to the floor next to him, on his knees, sitting up like he’s buzzing. His head quirks. Instead of lunging up at him like Katsuki should, like he’d planned to, again and again until blood had been drawn and skin was wedged under his nails, he swallows. He doesn’t. He waits for what’s to come.

Izuku reaches over, pressing his thumb lightly to Katsuki’s chest, just left of center.

“Your heart is strong.” The touch is cold. He pulls back.

It happens then. There’s a massive surge within himself, like his body holds the wind that was beating so longingly outside. Like his organs are the trees beyond his window, clawing at each other and snapping off the weakest links, leaving scars on his body, underneath, on the inside. This feeling grows until it breathes. Katsuki clutches his stomach, willing it to settle, but it doesn’t. It never will, in Izuku’s presence, infected like this, with him, green, green.

“You feel it,” Izuku guesses. Where his finger was pressed to before, there’s a sudden lack.

Katsuki imagines the wolf. Imagines a sea of black blood within himself. There’s a change, something rising to the surface of him, but he isn’t sure he’s part of it so much as he is a spectator. He’s splitting. He’s splintering like a tree, and Izuku-

I’m the one who finds every piece.

He nods his head. The anger he held onto so easily last night is splitting too, and every time it halves it grows so much weaker.

“Are you scared?” Izuku wonders, and he is unapologetic as he watches Katsuki get up from the floor, standing to meet him. He is right in front of him, weaving him back into fullness.

Katsuki can’t find an answer; he doesn’t know what he is, anymore.

Although, he never quite did.

As the day goes on, Katsuki ruminates. There’s something inside of him, sowing the distrust he feels now against his own senses. Sometimes he blinks, and it’s delayed. Sometimes he moves his fingers, and they fork like a snake’s tongue. The strangest thing is when Izuku steps close to him, the way these abnormalities start to make sense. They become steady parts of him. He welcomes more of his body to do the same, and only minutes later, when Izuku goes to the other side of the room, is Katsuki able to retract these thoughts like they’d spoiled inside of him, churning out the remnants; Izuku. Izuku.

The sun is setting when Katsuki realizes his instincts have changed most of all. He hasn’t fought again. He’s bleeding time, time that he doesn’t have anymore. Two days. Now, as it nears one, he’s no closer to escape.

He eats.

The wolf’s meat tastes richer than it did the day before. He tears into strip after strip, wondering if his teeth would even be enough to rip into Izuku’s throat. Or if they’d just break against his skin like glass, like they were never meant to bite, leaving him without anything, in the end.

He blinks.

Because Izuku suddenly asks if he’s ever killed someone, and he hasn’t, and he doesn’t know if he can. Izuku isn’t human, but he wears himself like one, to the point that Katsuki imagines what he’s made of—what he’d feel like. If the darkness would come through. What it’d be like to be touched by it, if it did.

He watches.

Izuku stares back, and his eyes contain worlds. They are green like the forest, like life, a glossy veil to cover their vastness. They shimmer in the light-dark. Hungry. Katsuki hasn’t seen him eat, and wonders if this is how he satisfies himself. If he’s been gnawing at Katsuki piece by careful piece since the woods, armed only by his gaze, working him over like a favorite bone, never quite dragging his teeth to scrape the marrow. Never biting hard enough to wear him down properly. What do you see? Izuku asks this every so often, and Katsuki doesn’t answer, but wants to ask him the same.

Katsuki stands at once. He is unbalanced, there is extra to account for now, though he isn’t sure where it attaches to himself. He makes a fist, phantom fingers interlocking.

Command me, he thinks, Push me. Make me angry. Make me fight.

“I’ll have the bed,” is what he says, but Izuku hadn’t even offered the choice of it.

He feels unstable, without borders. He feels the parts of himself like overlapping stitches, across his skin, pulling him together. Izuku takes his place in the bedroom as a pair of watchful eyes, shimmering in the moonlight, and Katsuki realizes this is more about being in his proximity than a healthy fear of Katsuki killing him.

Make me look. Make me reach. Ask me anything. Force my answer.

Katsuki crawls into the bed, allows the scents into his lungs again, the woody-fragrance. Izuku. His heart murmurs, its steady, predictable beat becoming two in dissonance, like two equally fierce entities circling each other endlessly until their trails wear desire-paths into the earth. This is where the fight lies, now. Izuku watches him, and the whole room seems to rumble.

Make me hurt. Make me want. Make me better.

If Katsuki looked at his reflection, he might not see himself. He might see that wolf, on its side, its eyes held together in one, final image of Izuku—and he’d find himself there. Curled in his arms.

Make me.

Two - Night

There is no fight, but there is also no peace in its absence. Katsuki tosses and turns in Izuku’s bed, in Izuku’s clothes, pumping black, black blood that was fed into his body by Izuku’s errant touch, and sleep will not come. Not tonight. He wonders if it ever will again.

“You want to be close to me.”

Katsuki holds his breath. Not that he’d forgotten Izuku was in the room, but he hadn’t said anything the first night, and Katsuki didn’t expect him to break this pattern. He should’ve. He should see how Izuku holds him like a creature in a jar, like he’s stroking his thumbs over the glass where Katsuki throws himself against it from the inside, each time nothing more than a small tink.

Katsuki steels himself, like he isn’t sure what’ll come out of his mouth. “No. I don’t.”

“Your body seeks balance, it would hurt if I wasn’t here. That’s why I stay,” Izuku tells him, as if this feeling inside him isn’t already alive, taking hold of every corner of his body, restless animals before a heavy storm, whipped into a frenzy. As if Katsuki doesn’t feel his nerves like worms after that storm, writhing to the surfaces it wet. Izuku keeps pressing, “let me come. See how it feels. You can always ask me to move away, again, I won’t hold you hostage.”

His tongue feels heavy when he swallows. “Bastard. That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

“To an extent. You’ll be free to go, after.”

Katsuki blinks.

There is here, and there.

There is a before, and after.

“After what?”

Izuku smiles softly, and in the dark his teeth shine, his eyes are glossy, and he clutches the end of his shirt sleeves tightly in his fists. It’s the clearest he’s ever looked to Katsuki. His paths laid out, and all of them lead his way.

Then, Izuku waits.

The air is still. Katsuki’s body is alive, moving in itself, liquid, turbid, hungry. So hungry to come out.

“Just—” Katsuki makes a violent noise from his throat. “Sit on the mattress. Over there. And then don’t move, don’t even blink.”

Izuku does what he’s told, no more and no less. He’s exact now in a way he wasn’t before. The way he decorated his home, is how he decorates himself.

Katsuki breathes in and out for a minute, until he’s sure his vision isn’t going to split, and his hand isn’t going to act for him. Then he pushes the covers down and goes to Izuku’s side of the bed, sitting near his back. Not touching him. Not yet. He could still not touch him at all. He tells himself this, and it doesn’t do much to convince him.

The underlying hum is so strong it’s more like a thunder.

Katsuki pulls his knees up and hugs them with his bandaged arm, white where it was seeping black. So much is not what it seems at the surface, including himself. Katsuki could be anything underneath, made of dirt, made of nothing but interlocking bones and devoid of anything of substance, just that blackness set forth, creeping around them. What Izuku is capable of is a question he isn’t sure has a definitive answer.

“Don’t move,” Katsuki threatens again, though Izuku hadn’t even tried to.

He leans, all at once, until the edge of his jaw meets the bony protrusion of Izuku’s shoulder. They shiver together. It feels like the end of a process—and the start. Feels like the snapping of splinters back into the shape of a tree, a painstaking undertaking. A return to form. Feels like something that should’ve happened a long time ago.

“Better?” Izuku’s voice rumbles through his back, into Katsuki’s ear.

“Not the word I’d use.” Katsuki frowns, rocking his cheek against Izuku’s shoulder. He starts to feel dizzy again, like before. There’s a trail of skin-pink whenever he moves his hand to the sheets, clutching them, relaxing his fingers to clutch again.

“You’re so tense, I’m not going to do anything.” Izuku pauses, in what must be the loudest seconds of utter quiet known to man, “not unless you want me to.”

“No. Stop talking,” he immediately spits back, lifting his head, and Izuku listens to him. Katsuki’s eyes move over the shape of his shoulders, the curve of his back, the spiral of his green, green curls, all of these things that itch at his mind and whisper a thousand times in succession, Izuku.

“Turn,” Katsuki says, and doesn’t know what comes next, only that it must. Izuku turns towards him, looks back. The exactness of his movements hasn’t faltered. Katsuki thinks he’d do anything, if only Katsuki asked—the same exact way he’d ordered Katsuki to eat, Katsuki could order him to the floor. To throw himself in the fire. To tell him everything. To lean in.

Katsuki puts his hand on Izuku's shoulder, then moves it to the center of his chest, a slow, cold rub of his hand that drags the fabric of his shirt. The cotton is thin, but not so thin that Katsuki couldn’t feel the gallop of his heart, if he has a need for one. But maybe it’s too primitive a thing for him to rely on. Katsuki wants to find it if it’s there.

His hand is still for almost thirty seconds before it happens—a single beat. A slow, methodical, push of blood through his body. Or blackness, because who’s to say he isn’t hollow inside the way Katsuki’s imagining himself to be.

Katsuki thinks for a moment, pictures an abyss around a glowing heart. Tendrils of light pushing out, seeking, groping for him. Endless.

He feels his stomach lurch, pushes Izuku down, down to the mattress, and finds that he meets no resistance at all. Izuku settles there, under the force of his hand and the weight of his determination.

Another beat.

“I could kill you. Right now.”

Izuku smiles fondly. He still hasn’t blinked. “I think you could do a lot of damage.”

Katsuki considers him deeply. There’s a chill in the air, from Izuku’s body. Branches snapping against the window pane. He feels sharp in service of something else, like the steel tip of a sword is at Katsuki’s neck, and he’s rubbing his skin against it, letting it pet him. Letting it play pretend-cuts. One day, one day.

“You did something to me,” Katsuki says this out loud, to remind himself, put the sense back into his body. You are my enemy.

And you want to do so much more.

The shiver of these thoughts are small, practically unnoticeable, unless you were against Katsuki’s palm, a body sending out two heartbeats per minute, repeated, repeated. He inhales deeply.

A third beat.

“It was an accident.”

“I bet it was. Like the accident of spying on me, and following me into the woods at night,” Katsuki replies, pushing the heel of his hand in, wondering if a howl will come out. The wrong one. Instead a rush of air leaves Izuku’s lungs like a quiet gasp. Katsuki quits biting his cheek so he can speak more. “You said three days, right. So what then?”

“Sixty-six hours, actually.”

Katsuki blinks at him.

“It’s been sixty-two,” Izuku explains. He’d been counting every minute, panning the seconds like gold. The chill runs into Katsuki’s open hand. The branches are relentless at the glass, snap, snap, snap. The steel rubs so vividly at his throat, now, he’s almost sure it’s real.

“Tell me what’s going to happen,” Katsuki orders him, “tell me what the fuck you are.”

Izuku makes a noise, unfiltered. It might be the first he’s ever let slip. “Do you want that, really? It won’t change the outcome. There’s no stopping it.” There’s no stopping me, he might say, if there was a need for it, if Katsuki didn’t already feel him like a second breath in his chest, dead air hanging like mist. A squeeze to let it all out.

Katsuki’s hand moves up, covering Izuku’s rounded jaw and tilting it up, pushing his neck out and baring it. The skin here looks as soft and fragile as any man’s, and Katsuki’s teeth just as capable. He leans over him with intention.

He could try. He could kill him, do damage, anything at all. He thinks about what waits for him at home, if he manages to—how being exposed to the strangest corners of the world has only deepened his resolve to escape from his own. There’s nothing novel about a good hunter, you could find a dozen more within a day’s walk from here, and they’d all have stories just like Katsuki’s. A daring encounter with a wolf or a bear. They’d all say the only reason they’re alive is because they didn’t hesitate.

Katsuki isn’t hesitating, he’s brewing. The way he’s done over and over since the second howl, he opens himself up, ferments, becomes stronger. The chill reaches his bones. Branches snap. Cold steel slides through his sweat. Here, inhuman knowledge hangs in front of him like dripping, red meat until he salivates for it, and this time, Izuku wouldn’t need to say the word for Katsuki to drop to his knees and eat.

He doesn’t feel watched.

He feels seen.

Izuku isn’t a predator, he’s a doorway. A culmination of never-before-seen shapes, like shadows at the edge of your vision. If they too had shadows themselves. He’s whatever happens when a set of footsteps stops and there’s no mortal trace of them, and you wonder if wherever they’d ended up is any better than this.

The chill, the branches, the steel. Katsuki falls away from everything he knows.

“Yes,” he says, “tell me.”

Izuku leans back, eyes wide.

Like this, your father says, and the knife curves around the deer’s body to peel it. The layers distinguish themselves easier than you’d think.

The job is half-done when he wipes the blade on his pants and turns it around, holds it out. He smiles.

Me? you ask if he means it.

You, he answers, because he knows what you are.

You wonder how.

You keep wondering even once he’s gone.

It takes you ten more years to figure it out.

Three - Day

“Of weavers—

“Are you so sure of what you see? Are there not cruel imitations found in every art form, from metalworking to alchemy, and is the creation of life itself not the most anciently held art? Ask yourself thusly, is the mother who’d raised you from infancy the one who welcomes you home from your travels? Is the mouser-cat who’d wandered from the barn the very same that watches you now; have its eyes always held such awareness? Do you trust the world not to betray your rawest senses? Do you wonder how you would know the difference? Take heed of your answers, dear reader. Think again.”

-Author unknown, Book of Observations, Vol. II

And so, doused in moonlight, Katsuki learns.

Think of it like this, Izuku had begun, simplifying something so inconceivable and abstract that it’d take more than this single night to explain it, and more than a year to come to terms with it. You cut your finger off, it doesn’t come back. But you cut a vine, and from a node it pushes out another. The same vine, the same form, over and over you could do this, forcing its twin, perfectly identical. I don’t make the finger grow back. I find the node, and it gives me everything. He’d reached for Katsuki’s hand to use his finger as a prop, curling it down, and Katsuki let himself be manipulated.

It’ll be alive.

Yes.

It’ll be me.

Yes.

It’ll have my memories, act like me. Want what I want. Hate what I hate.

Only I would ever be able to tell the difference.

And what if I wanted to kill it?

I’d put your knife back in your hand, and remind you I never meant for it to happen.

Not like this, you mean.

No. Not ever, not unless you asked me to.

Then what would you’ve done to get to me?

I’m not sure. But I wouldn’t do it until I had it right.

There was a long pause, and Izuku let him work his thoughts to exhaustion, until all that was left was one, slow-beating heart against one quicker.

So, where’s my node?

It’s different for every living thing, and also not something in the physical body.

Describe mine.

Perfect. Light forced to open. Vast and brilliant when it does. Orange, then every color, then colors you’ve never seen, fiercely protective of itself. It exploded in size when I touched it, even by accident, and then receded so it was ready to do it again. The heat could’ve boiled an ocean into a salt flat.

You sure like to talk.

I like to observe. I like to tell you things that matter to me.

Katsuki stared, unblinking.

So tell me everything else.

The witching hour came before Izuku was finished with even the abridged version of himself, and Katsuki opened his mouth to ask for more, and all at once his eyes went dark. Darker than dark, multiplied, repeated. What followed was this, or something like it.

The shape of Katsuki’s body, more itself, and more exact than it ever has been. He’d never thought of himself in this way, before. He never realized there was an alternative.

In the right hands, he is a great sword, split down the middle and handed off still-molten to two, unwavering halves of a whole. They too are named sword. He is

half of what he could be,

in the right hands.

There is a room, and this room is like any other, could fit itself into any story like a wedge. It’s decorated by way of observing a thousand separate lives lived by a thousand separate people, and you’d never know which was the real one.

A rabbit swings from the ceiling in throes, eyes glossy, it cannot see what’s right in front of it. Its guts are inside. They are wanted out. Something about this feels so familiar.

The chill, the branches, and the steel. Maybe these things have always made you.

The woods awaken with need, howling with it. Howling through the trees. The sound echoes around a singular point of destruction, like a stutter-start, a trill at the end of time. A wolf. A death like all the rest.

Or, was it—?

No, a wolf.

A boy crosses the divide.

You are Katsuki, even when you feel like you aren’t.

When he is more or less than you want to be.

When you act, it’s in excess. When you need, you cripple. When you hurt, it’s all of you.

A heart, held warm in your hands, pressed raw to your lips. You bite because you are one who has always bitten. Sure enough, it has never served you wrong.

You’re not a boy, anymore.

The hunt agrees. Your spear rips through a fish, agape. It screams underwater. Let it out, you think, and you reflect, and you open your mouth to try it.

You.

Who are you?

Like always, you disappoint me.

Who are you?

You’re unlike anything.

What are you?

A boy. Green.

A boy. A wolf, on its side. Black.

A boy. A node, touched by the hand of a creature-god if he were named by any other hunter, any poor soul already dropping to their knees to plead mercy, oh mercy—but to him, Izuku. To him, always Izuku.

You’re lonely in yourself.

Katsuki bares his teeth, and they rattle, afraid of the skin he’ll bite into, afraid that he can’t be anything else, afraid that he won’t know what lies underneath until it’s already in his mouth, and by then,

by then he will want it.

Down.

Katsuki goes down, until he has fallen so deep that he is within his own body. He is a splinter, clawing its way out, to emerge forth into that room like any other, and the branches are right beside him, peeled white like ribs.

Eat.

Katsuki eats, he eats himself and is full, and is empty, having been consumed, yet this hunger was always meant to give more than it was meant to devour. The bones are picked clean. He is red-stained, and raises an arm to show the world.

What am I meant to be doing?

He feels the whole and the halves. He is forced to open, but he is willing, nonetheless.

Disrupting.

A boy. Sword.

A boy. Katsuki.

And when he breathes, the rest moves into place.

He will not remember any of it, not for a long, long time, until the memory is regrown from his mind like a dormant rhizome. He will think of last night as a deep, unbroken sleep which had remained unbroken until the first light of morning. Until something breaks the silence. Until something comes back.

Until the howl.

Because it was always going to come for him, one way or another.

Katsuki wakes to hot, hot breath on his face, huffing over him in a frenzy. It’s a dream, of that much he’s sure, because when he opens his eyes, it’s a wolf with a black patch on the top of its head and a notched right ear. He feels no fear when he looks at it. He doesn’t know what he feels, exactly.

But then it nuzzles at his arm, and if the wet nose and wiry scruff of its fur isn’t enough to make Katsuki a believer, then the figure at the side of his bed is. It’s—him. Himself. It’s Katsuki the way he knows himself to be. Exactly.

The Katsuki that Izuku made.

The wolf—the other wolf—trots off into the house, satisfied they’d made their amends when Katsuki felt its domestication.

Katsuki tries not to imagine how that same level of domestication to Izuku would look on him. He’d said lower animals were different. He’d said a lot of things, and they spin in Katsuki’s head like a coin until the eventual topple.

“Fuck. It’s really-” Katsuki goes fuzzy.

“You,” the other Katsuki echoes. He’s purposeful in what he says and what he doesn’t, firm in his body, wry in his red red eyes. He’s everything Katsuki is, right down to the clothes on his back, the fire that longs at his fingertips.

Is it normal, he wonders, to want to put a hand on a heart he knows is identical.

He turns his head, finding Izuku here, because of course he’d never left. He’s standing by the other end of the bed the same way Katsuki might sit fifteen feet high in a sturdy tree, wedged patiently between its split-trunks until a deer makes the last mistake it ever will of walking out into the open.

Katsuki clears the sleep from his throat, rubbing idly at his bandaged arm. He hasn’t looked underneath, but he knows, impossibly, that it’d be sealed, and that Izuku had done it with an intentional movement of his hand as soon as Katsuki guessed he wasn’t human. How stitching him up was just another long, deliberate exercise in observation.

Katsuki blinks at him, keeping the other Katsuki pinned to the inside of his cheek, for a moment. “What was the wolf’s node like?” It’s the first thing he thinks to say.

“Nothing, compared to yours. A black moon.”

“Thought it died.” Thought you killed it. There’s so much he doesn’t know. It itches just beneath his skin.

It makes him wonder.

“It did, though not before I touched it.”

Katsuki tosses the blankets aside, pushing himself over to Izuku, until he’s standing exactly where Izuku’d stepped aside to leave him space. The back of Katsuki’s knees press against the bed. His vision has never felt clearer, his body never so sure. “Give me my knife.”

There’s less hesitation than Katsuki thought there’d be. Izuku pulls it from his side pocket and holds it out, an iron blade as long as his hand from wrist to fingertip that Katsuki had traded for fresh venison, and he reclaims the very thing he would’ve driven into Izuku’s chest two days ago, had he found the opening. He holds it, experienced, the feel of the leather gripped at his palm. He ignores Izuku’s reminder that it wasn’t intentional. He squeezes the hilt.

“What would happen if I cut you? Are you even alive? Do you bleed?” Is it black? Do you die? Would you die if I wanted it?

Izuku’s eyes are glossy.

“I’m what gives rise to a node.”

Katsuki swallows. He passes his knife to his right hand before holding it outstretched, and flips it around so he’s holding the blunt edge. “Katsuki,” his own name is foreign in his mouth, “It’s yours. Close the door behind you.”

The knife leaves his hand, and the door closes with perfect understanding, and his eyes never stray from Izuku.

There’s barely time to take a single breath before Katsuki asks it. “Can you do it to yourself? Make another you.”

This, he sees, stuns Izuku. It’s a powerful feeling, like he’d raptured him from a world he thought he knew the limits of. Izuku ruminates while Katsuki holds his gaze, watches his mind turn, and his eyes that were glossy before are now full and bright, opening the last, ancient doors up to him.

“I’ve never tried,” Izuku’s mouth twitches. He sounds breathless, but does he even need to breathe? What is the truest extent of his existence? Katsuki’s questions brim into his mouth, needy, alive, he can taste them, the way they pull, and he wants to test the outer bounds of Izuku until he breaks them. The rules he lives by. The darkness. He wants everything.

Izuku admits more to him, “I’ve never had a reason to try.”

“I’m your reason. Do it.”

Izuku hums so deeply it’s like a purr, “close your eyes.”

Katsuki does, and the hum from Izuku’s throat gains a dozen more sounds until it becomes the whole room, filling his ears like warm water that his heartbeat then echoes in. It makes him look past what Izuku is, for a moment. Then makes him want to look into him all the more deeply.

“Open,” Izuku says.

Katsuki peels his eyes open, and almost smirks when Izuku stands alone in front of him. “What’s the matter, couldn’t make it happen?”

Izuku’s eyes never lost their fullness. “I could make anything you wanted. I could push the sun down if you asked me to,” Izuku tells him. “Look behind you.”

Katsuki feels eyes on him before he even twists around—green, green, green—and feels wild at the sight of another Izuku, looking at him, sitting back on his calves on the bed. Katsuki leans towards him—the replica. Izuku, but not the same one that’d done this to him. Not the one watching him take hold of other Izuku’s hand. Katsuki feels the familiar chill of him, looking at the same lines on his palm, like the imprint of a leaf in a book, rocks piled on top of it to build the weight as it dries. Katsuki brings the hand to his mouth. Bites into the lump of flesh under his thumb. He’s hungry. He’s hungry in a way not so different from what he’d felt his entire life, for an experience that no one’s ever had before, and no one ever will again.

The noise Izuku makes strays from human. “I’ve watched people form religions around someone like you.” He touches the back of Katsuki’s neck, and Katsuki reads him, moving to the bed again and looking up when he settles. Izuku. Izuku.

“Really.” Katsuki burns. His lips are still at the other Izuku’s hand, and he needles his canine at a knuckle. “Show me how they’d worship.”

The ever-present hum from both Izukus is like a rippling trail that follows them. The other Izuku moves first, taking his hand back to pull Katsuki against his chest. The cold is welcome for how hot his body is, the culmination of three days of surging and then suppressing adrenaline. He tips his head back, knocking against the other Izuku’s collarbones as Izuku, his Izuku, bends forward—god help him—like he’s going to pray.

Katsuki feels fabric sliding down his legs, leaving him bare, and wanting, and the arms wrapping around his chest aren’t nearly enough to keep him still enough for a ritual.

“Fuck,” Katsuki hisses through his teeth, digs his nails into the other Izuku’s thighs where they clamp on either side of him, keeping him in place.

“Katsuki,” Izuku presses his lips to his bare knee, and they’re cold, but of course every part of him would be. Katsuki feels raw between his legs, he needs friction. He needs to rub into the first thing pressed against him, give way to the ache. Izuku licks the side of his knee where the skin turns soft again, and his tongue lifts up goosebumps, pulling them up like weeds. “I’m an extension of your will, your body. Do you even realize? Do you know what you are? You’ve given me something new, after millennia. Like it was nothing to you. Like I haven’t seen everything up to the stars blinking out.”

Katsuki’s head thrums, like a bird beating itself deeper into a net. The other Izuku squeezes him once, and Katsuki rolls his hips, his voice low, “tell me,” he stares and stares. “Exactly why you want me.”

“I want you,” Izuku stops here, to curve his hands under his knees and lift them, thumbs pressing in, and Katsuki’s stomach flips. “Because of the way you occupy me. My whole existence, I never thought of the space by my side as empty. But I watched you, and you were yelling something fierce, at your mother, and your hands were inside of the deer I’d observed you kill with a single arrow to its neck. You handed her the heart to end the argument, and stared her dead in the eyes as you wiped the blood from your thumbs onto your cheeks, and do you understand how you looked to me? How you’re bursting out of yourself. I held you in my head like a dream of a dream. I imagined you next to me. I realized,” he pauses, nuzzles into the softness of Katsuki’s inner thigh. “I felt your absence before I even knew you.”

“Mine,” the other Izuku whispers in his ear, and Katsuki curls from his toes upward.

“Talk so fucking much,” Katsuki blushes, mean on his cheeks, in his words, but he’s spreading his legs open, “come here. Put your mouth right here.”

Izuku leans forward and does just this. His mouth is mercifully cold, and he’s telling him how wet and sweet he is, inbetween kisses, exploring him. He works his tongue until Katsuki can’t keep a single noise inside, and adds it to the hum of the room as they vibrate.

The other Izuku roams over his body, just like he had in the forest, holding him. Now it comes sacred. A permission he didn’t have before invigorates both of them now, and Izuku laps like a wolf would through his warmth, tongue flat, dipping into him, something inhuman in its fervor, teeth just grazing his clit. He sucks it into his mouth, lavishes it. Izuku rolls him like a pearl on his tongue. The other Izuku marvels at the noises he makes, turning Katsuki’s head so their lips criss-cross, and every guttural huff is traded between them.

Izuku says he’s perfect—he can’t tell which Izuku, but does it really matter, does anything matter—and Katsuki feels a tear roll down his cheek. Something wet and guttural forms like a ball in his throat.

“Izuku,” he calls, and there will always be an answer.

“It hurts?” He lifts his head, his mouth and chin soaked in Katsuki’s need. Izuku licks the wetness from his lips and kisses the rest back into Katsuki’s stomach. The other Izuku squeezes his chest in comfortable possession of him. “You’re crying.”

“I’m not. It’s nothing, it’s just so-” Katsuki stutters. The other Izuku wipes his cheek from behind, smearing the salty tears and pushing them into his mouth, asking him to suck them away. He swallows the taste of himself, Izuku’s fingers pet his teeth. “It’s so much,” Katsuki finishes. So heavy. The lap of Izuku’s tongue is more than enough to empty him until he’s grasping for the smallest thoughts.

Izuku sits up on the bed, leaving Katsuki to whine until he shushes him. “Sit on me. Take as much as you want.”

The other Izuku lets up his grip, allowing Katsuki to dip forward, climb onto Izuku’s lap. He’s panting underneath him, like the wolf on his face this morning, so he must need to breathe. Or it must feel good to do it, like this. Panting with Katsuki.

Katsuki leans forward, and there’s a hand on his back trailing down the bumpy rod of his spine. He doesn’t know what the other Izuku is doing until he feels it at his swollen lips, the shape of Izuku’s cock being rubbed into the wetness, the spit, and Katsuki’s beyond himself, he’s going to burst right out of his skin, like how Izuku saw that eventuality.

“Mmhh,” Katsuki eats his tongue to keep the moans in, and sinks down onto Izuku’s hardness. It’s a fullness he’s never known before. Katsuki grinds in an off-rhythm as soon as it’s inside, moans as it opens him up and convinces him he’ll never feel more alive than this, never be more of himself than he is with Izuku, when he’s coming apart.

“I need,” he whines. The tears are rolling. He falls into Izuku’s chest, feels his arms around him, sturdy, alien, everything he could want pressed into that sweet squeeze. A third hand is on his back, guiding him down and keeping him folded.

Izuku fucks him, worships him, keeping them moving together like one, solid mass. Their bodies rock. “Tell me what you need,” he wonders, kissing the column of his throat.

Katsuki twists in his skin. “I don’t—fuck, I don’t know,” he says, but he does, and Izuku bites his neck to push it out of him.

“Katsuki.”

“I want to taste you, want you at the back of my throat,” he says, and the other Izuku is already in place, like he knew, can see every still-forming desire in Katsuki’s head, his body, his heart. He kneels beside Katsuki’s head when he turns it toward him, pets his hair in these careful, guiding strokes as he edges his mouth open with the tip of his cock. It’s cold, he wants to fix that, and Izuku—his, his Izuku—is the one to hold and feed it past his lips.

The sensation of it stretching his mouth makes him whine like an animal. Makes him buck his hips, breathe through his nose and struggle with it, persist, swallow around his cock while his throat rolls it down. Izuku fucks into him from below. He wants so much it’s like an affliction. Maybe it’ll always be part of him, pulling his limbs forward just like this, toward Izuku and everything he touches.

Tears well in his eyes, and Izuku calls him divine, leans over and licks them away when they fall—slow, tender, like Katsuki would derive any pleasure from it. He suckles at the head of the other Izuku’s cock, swallowing spit and going hazy with the taste of him. Katsuki moans, wet in the base of his throat, right where he wanted him.

Izuku grabs his jaw and pops his mouth off the other Izuku’s cock to kiss him, licking into a trail of drool. The groans coming through him are visceral, strings of need, tying him down. Izuku pushes his lips up to Katsuki’s ear after taking his fill.

“Katsuki,” his voice is like the sun, hitting his whole body at once, “let him live. Send him away to your little home in the woods, let him cherish whatever’s still dear to you. Let him break whatever is not.”

Katsuki hears a howl from within the house, the copycat wolf, longing. Then a second howl, from Izuku’s chest, like before, like it’d always been this way, sounding between the slow gasps of his heart. Dark, dark and beautiful. This darkness holds itself open to him until there’s no choice for Katsuki but to go into it, lose himself in the pitch. Izuku lets him wander there, be held by it. Only pulls him back when he reaches. The howl is at his ear, and he is at Izuku’s core where there won’t ever be more than a knife’s edge of space between them.

He was always going to come for him—just like this.

“What about-”

“Mine?” Izuku mouths at the curve of skin between his hair and the back of his ear. There’s a laugh in his voice. “I think he might like to watch him.”

Katsuki swallows, holding tight. “And me?” he asks, clenching his thighs. He feels inevitable. His whole body rises like a wave, ready to crash down around Izuku the way he did to him, dissappear him into the blue-blackness. “Fuck,” he says. Just how their others were rended into existence, Katsuki feels like he’s being pulled out of Izuku, arm to arm, eyes to eyes, blood to blood, a perfect complement, and if you’d look closely enough, you’d see the threads between them like roots.

“Fuck,” Izuku echoes, and he pushes himself deep, deep, deep, coming inside him, telling him while it happens, his voice is a hum like a vibration. This is worship, Izuku says. He fucks slow, wet. He fucks possesively, like he’s always been this, an arrow shooting across time, and Katsuki writhes, and gasps, rubs the tears all over Izuku’s neck as he mouths at it. Mouths his name. His orgasm takes hold as Izuku buries the last twitches inside of him, doesn’t stop rutting until Katsuki is through to the other side.

Izuku answers the question against his jaw, kissing sweet sweet worship into the ridge. Although this answer would’ve been the same three days ago as it is now.

“You’ll be by my side. There’s no other place I’d have you,” Izuku promises. His voice is tranquil, satisfied, for now, while he’s still got Katsuki in his arms. While he’s wet with Katsuki, and Katsuki with him. “If you’d be willing to forget everything you’ve ever known.”

Katsuki stays quiet and wisplike until he remembers Izuku is expecting an answer, and then he sits up. Izuku is still inside him; the other Izuku looking on. They want him, deliciously, alive, hot, sweated-out, blood on his hands, his teeth, his tongue. All of him.

This is how religions start. Pitted against the story of creation, Katsuki feels like he could not only stand his ground, but rise.

“What do you mean?” he asks. There are embers in Katsuki’s voice, so ready to catch fire, again and again.

“I know a place. I can’t describe it, I can only promise it to you. Do you trust me?” Izuku holds out his palm, the weight of it like a star when placed atop Katsuki’s thigh. Katsuki’s breath feels like something he needs to hook and rip out of his throat to exhale, holding it in the air after while it flutters free. It’s the wildness that’s always lived in him; the thought of being folded into these great unknowns.

“Where?” he asks.

Izuku makes a deep noise. “Somewhere you’ll be the first to leave a mark. Somewhere that’ll bask in the importance of you for a thousand, thousand iterations, where the earth will move like silk under your fingertips,” his eyes widen, green and bright, “somewhere you can wax like the moon, there in the darkness of all time.”

“Where?”

Izuku answers, “I’ll show you.”

And Katsuki, god help him, takes his hand.

Who are you?

You rise, and show your teeth.

??? - ???

“Of humans—

“Some might say there is no creature more wretched, more filled with longing, more fraught in its nature, more borne of opposition and violence and greed—and the very same, no creature more driven by its heart, or more capable of performing the softest acts known to this earth, than human beings. Some might also say their suffering is destined to come swifter and in greater number than their pleasures. To all of this I reply, perhaps. But to be so much is a gift.”

-Author unknown, Book of Observations, Vol. XVII

Katsuki thinks, sometimes, of how it all began.

He thinks of howling. Of Izuku’s eyes and the worlds within, torn open to bring him home. How everything now seems to hum, and he listens, and he doesn’t know when he started believing in magic, but he does. He thinks of darkness, of light, how the divide is not so simple. How he walks it. He thinks of how it feels, here, always, to sink into green green meadow-grass and look to the sky while the forest pulses around him, like he’d become its heart.

Of how his mother would sour if she saw him the way he exists now, telling him, Katsuki, you know, all things must come to an end.

Of how Izuku would put his lips to his ear and say, Never.

“Of you—

“I thought I knew. I thought I had turned over every last rock and parted every treetop, peered into the condensated window of every warm cottage that stood in my path. I spread myself across land and sea for so long that I thought, sure enough—everything there was to be learned had already been tucked neatly away into these fine journals. It’s been so long since I had something worth writing. I find myself excited. Ravenous. Humbled. Deeply so.

“Now I think, when every piece of you is endless, one day I might run out of pages. One day I’ll have to write you into the dirt and watch patiently when heavy rainfalls wash away my hard work, diligently returning when the clouds part to rewrite it. I’ll take my quill to your back and decode you, against your very bones. You’ll feel me in the cursive loops of my handwriting on your spine, and I’ll feel your back move as you breathe and I mimic you, and I think I’ll wonder, then, if I'll ever be sated. But I’ve been wondering that since the day I found you.

“So here, my call begins. I write of you.”

-Izuku Midoriya, Book of Katsuki, Vol. I

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading!! I tried to leave more unsaid and unanswered than usual. I hope the length was enough to get what I was going for across 💚

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Book of Katsuki

Nicolefrickle

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