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The localized police scanner on the floor is still hissing low static, a reminder of the emergency waiting outside, but for right now, the room is suspended in a fragile, heavy stillness. Izuku is already suited, the red-and-blue fabric fitted tight against his frame, but his mask is pulled up to his nose. He’s standing by the edge of the mattress, looking down at Katsuki with an expression carved entirely out of reluctant surrender.
Before he turns to leave, Izuku's hand dips into a hidden compartment of his utility belt. He pulls out a small, sleek piece of technology—a dark, matte-metal disk no bigger than a coin, engineered with clean, precise lines.
He holds it out, resting it flat on his palm between them.
"Keep this," Izuku says, his voice low, steady, and entirely serious.
Katsuki, half-propped up against the pillows with his chest bare and marked from the night, glares down at the metal disk. His brow furrows sharply, a familiar, combative spike of irritation rising in his chest. "What the hell is that? A leash?"
"It’s a tracker," Izuku answers without flinching, meeting Katsuki’s crimson glare head-on. There’s no apology in his tone, only absolute, uncompromising need. "A middle ground. You want me to stop running away every time we're done? You want me to stay, to actually be here? This is what it costs."
Katsuki’s jaw tightens. He shifts forward, opening his mouth to snap back a caustic refusal—to tell him he doesn't need a babysitter or a tracking device to prove he's safe. But the raw, haunted exhaustion in Spider-Man's tone stops him cold.
"I can't live like this, Katsuki," Izuku continues, his voice dropping to a rough, quiet plea. "Every second I'm out there, every time a siren goes off or a building blows up, my head is going to be right back in this room. I won't be able to focus on keeping anyone else safe if I'm terrified of what's happening to you. If you want me to give in...if you want me to stop leaving you behind…I need to know where you are. I need to not worry every damn second of the day."
The raw honesty of it hangs in the air, thick and suffocating. It isn't about control or distrust; it's the anchor of a hero who is terrified of losing the one thing that actually matters to him.
Katsuki stares at the small metal disk in Izuku’s gloved hand. The abrasive, knee-jerk instinct to reject it—to fight for absolute, reckless independence—stalls out against the heavy weight of Izuku's confession. He realizes this is the compromise. This is the price of keeping the hero of the city tethered to his bed instead of bolting into the night.
Slowly, the sharp defiance drains from Katsuki’s posture. He reaches out, plucking the tracker from Izuku's palm with two fingers.
"Fine," Katsuki mutters, his voice raspy and laced with a quiet, dangerous possessiveness. He presses it securely into the band around his wrist, locking it down against his skin. "Keep your damn eyes on it, then. But don't think this means you get to ghost me whenever you feel like it."
Izuku lets out a long, shuddering breath, the tension finally snapping in his chest. He leans down, pressing a firm, lingering kiss to Katsuki's forehead before pulling the mask down his face and launching himself into the sky.
The window clicks shut behind Spider-Man, leaving the room instantly too quiet, too cold.
Katsuki sits up against the pillows, the indentation of Spider-Man’s body still warm beside him. He lifts his right wrist, staring down at the matte-metal disk locked securely into his band. There’s no anger, only a heavy, steady pulse of satisfaction. A leash, sure—but it's a two-way street. If Spider-Man is going to anchor himself to a tracker just to survive a patrol without losing his mind, it means Katsuki has the ultimate leverage.
He tosses the heavy duvet aside, swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress. His body aches—a deep, lingering soreness that acts as a constant, vivid reminder of the hours before.
He spends the next hour moving through his morning routine with deliberate slowness. He showers, fixes up his hair, and gets dressed for yet another day of university.
When Katsuki finally steps out into the morning air to head toward the local campus, his mind is entirely dialed in.
He knows the physical blueprint now. He knows the hard, calloused press of Spider-Man's palms against his hips, the exact angle at which his left wrist takes the weight during a high-rise swing, and the rough, gravelly rasp of the voice that only comes out when the hero loses his composure.
The city looks different today. Every shadow looks like a hiding spot; every corner looks like a potential crossroad. Katsuki shirs his hands into his pockets, fingers brushing against the cold metal of the tracker against his pulse, and decides it’s time to start looking closer at the background extras populating his everyday life.
Katsuki spends the rest of the morning navigating the brutal, fluorescent-lit labyrinth of the university’s science building, his mind a mile ahead of his actual classes. His thoughts keep cycling back to the physical evidence. Calluses. The specific, rough texture built up from gripping high-tension fiber cables and heavy webbing. Wrist strain. The dull, chronic ache in a left joint that takes the brunt of every physical impact and recoil. Voice. That low, gravelly command that only slips out when the vigilante loses his patience.
When Katsuki’s morning lecture finally lets out, he grabs his heavy lab bag, shoving his notebooks inside with sharp, impatient movements. He has a gap before his afternoon organic chemistry lab, so he heads down the corridor toward the main department lounge to grab a coffee.
The hallway is crowded with students shifting between classes—undergrads arguing over lab reports, post-grads debating reaction yields, and the usual low-tier background noise of campus life. Katsuki keeps his eyes sharp, scanning the crowd with a predator's detachment.
He’s halfway to the vending machines when a sudden, frantic scramble breaks out near the corner by the analytical chemistry labs.
"Oh—shit, watch out, I've got it, I've got it—"
A stack of heavy, loose-leaf lab binders and color-coded structural diagrams careens wildly through the air, scattering across the polished linoleum floor.
Katsuki stops dead in his tracks, his eyes narrowing as he tracks the source of the chaos.
Kneeling frantically among the spilled papers is a guy swallowed up by an oversized hoodie, a shock of unruly green curls hiding a pale face, and a pair of wide, anxious eyes darting everywhere at once. He looks like the absolute definition of a stressed-out science major—completely harmless, entirely ordinary, and drowning in midterms.
The high-pitched, anxious babble scattering across the linoleum doesn't trigger any immediate alarms. To Katsuki’s ears, the voice scrambling over the fallen chemistry papers is entirely pedestrian—thin, nervous, and pitched up in typical academic panic. It bears zero resemblance to the low, gravelly, command-driven rasp that echoes in Katsuki's bedroom at night.
Katsuki just clicks his tongue in mild annoyance, steps right over a stray sheet of structural diagrams, and walks past the flustered student without another glance, grabbing his coffee and heading straight into his afternoon lab.
But as he stands over his fume hood later that afternoon, staring blankly at a flask of refluxing solvent, the gears in his head are turning.
The reality of where he is hunting hits him with cold clarity. How did he narrow his search down to this specific campus? It’s simple, ruthless logic.
First, there’s the physical radius. The tracker on his wrist doesn't give away Spider-Man’s identity, but it registers proximity when the vigilante is in the area, pinging a localized network whenever Spider-Man swings back into the district. More importantly, the city’s high-density hotspots—the financial sector, the downtown commercial district, and the sprawling university corridor—are where the heaviest vigilante activity happens, and the fastest he reaches the area the moment of warning.
Second, and most critically, is the schedule. Spider-Man’s emergency departures always spike around late evening and early morning hours, but the blackout periods—the times when the city goes quiet and the vigilante is completely unreachable—consistently align with standard daytime academic blocks. And given the sheer physical conditioning, the precise spatial awareness required for web-swinging, and the advanced chemical makeup of the web-fluid compounds Katsuki has occasionally tried analyzing while they were in bed, whoever is under that mask isn't just some random street punk. They have access to heavy-duty organic chemistry labs, high-end materials, which only the top university happens to have; Musutafu University.
He’s not looking for a corporate executive or a street kid. He’s looking for a university student. Specifically, a science major.
Back in the hallway earlier, that green-haired kid had been an absolute nervous wreck, drowning in structural diagrams. Katsuki hadn't noticed the voice then, but as he reflects on it, the guy fit a very specific, obsessive archetype.
Katsuki doesn't have a smoking gun yet. That green-haired nobody isn't a confirmed match—not by a long shot. But he is officially file-card number one on a very short list of suspects worth watching.
—
The next morning, Katsuki stands leaning against a structural pillar in the hallway near the organic chemistry lecture hall, his arms crossed over his chest, waiting.
He doesn't have to wait long.
The double doors swing open, flooding the corridor with a wave of exhuasted students. Right in the middle of the cluster is the green-haired student.
The student is muttering under his breath, head down, clutching a thick stack of lab reports to his chest.
Katsuki pushes off the pillar. He times his stride with ruthless precision, stepping directly into the guy's blind spot and cutting him off mid-stride.
There's a soft, muffled gasp as the student plows right into Katsuki’s shoulder. The impact sends a few loose sheets fluttering to the floor, but Katsuki doesn't give him a chance to apologize or scramble away.
Instead, Katsuki steps forward, invading his personal space entirely. He’s fractionally shorter than the green-haired student, but he uses every ounce of his imposing, aggressive posture to force the guy back against the cold concrete wall.
"Watch your footing, nerd," Katsuki says.
For a single, breathless second, the student freezes completely.
Katsuki's eyes lock onto him, hunting for micro-expressions. He watches the exact moment the color drains entirely from the kid's pale face, the violent spike of a pulse hammering hard against the skin of his throat, and the way those wide, freckled green eyes dilate in sudden, unadulterated panic. The student’s fingers convulse so tightly around his lab reports that the paper crinkles sharply under his knuckles.
It lasts only a heartbeat before the kid forces a nervous, breathless laugh, shrinking back into his oversized hoodie.
"S-sorry! My bad, I wasn't looking—" The voice is pitched right back up to its jittery, high register, practically vibrating with nervous energy as he ducks his head and hurries past.
Katsuki doesn't turn around. He just watches the retreating figure slip into the crowd. The high-pitched stutter and the frantic retreat are enough to make Katsuki’s lips curve into a smirk, but deep down, his analytical brain isn't entirely sold yet. A fake voice is easy to put on; a nervous civilian act is child’s play. If Katsuki is going to pin the mask on this specific, hoodie-swallowed nerd, he needs more than a hunch and a rattled apology. He needs the physical checklist to line up.
So, the game doesn't end in the hallway. It deepens over the next week. But as Katsuki starts watching, a stranger, more unsettling realization begins to settle in.
He starts noticing him everywhere.
It’s jarring because Katsuki is not a man who misses details. He lives his life with a razor-sharp, hyper-focused perimeter—yet somehow, this green-haired extra has been orbiting his space for months without ever registering on his radar. Was Katsuki simply too tunnel-visioned on his own academic perfection to notice anyone else? Probably. But now that his focus has shifted, the illusion shatters completely.
Once you actually look, the guy isn't even easy to miss. Bright, unruly shockwaves of moss-green hair stand out in any lecture hall, and once Katsuki starts tracking him, the statistical improbability of their overlapping schedules becomes glaringly obvious. They take the same transit routes, frequent the same campus library corners, and end up in adjacent rows during mandatory seminars. It’s like the universe—or the guy himself—is constantly hovering right at the edge of Katsuki’s peripheral vision.
And the longer Katsuki watches, the more his objective, clinical assessment starts getting derailed by something entirely unwelcome: sheer physical attraction.
Beneath the oversized, shapeless hoodies and the slouched posture, there is a dense, coiled weight to the guy's frame. When the oversized fabric shifts during a lecture, Katsuki catches the broad sweep of shoulders and the solid line of a back built from something far more punishing than campus life. Up close, he doesn't just look like a stressed-out nerd anymore; there’s a raw, hidden magnetism to him.
Katsuki’s jaw tightens as he realizes he’s spending more time tracking the slope of the guy's neck and the sharp curve of his jawline than he is taking notes.
The next time their paths cross in the organic chemistry lab, they are assigned to a shared glassware cleaning station. As the green-haired student reaches across the stainless-steel sink to grab a rack of heavy, wet Erlenmeyer flasks, his sleeves ride up for a fraction of a second.
Katsuki’s eyes lock instantly onto the base of the student's palms and the inside of his fingers. The skin is thick, heavily reinforced with rough, hardened layers of skin built up from friction—not from holding a pen or typing lab reports, but from the brutal, high-friction burn of grabbing high-tension polymer cables and thick web-shooters under immense G-force. It’s an exact, physical match to the texture Katsuki has felt pressed against his own skin in the dark.
Later that same afternoon, during a grueling three-hour synthesis experiment, the student drops a heavy reagent bottle. His left hand snaps out instinctively to catch it off the edge of the lab bench.
The heavy catch requires a sharp, violent pivot of the wrist. The student succeeds in saving the glass, but the moment his fingers close around it, a sharp, involuntary hiss escapes his teeth. His left hand spasms, and his thumb immediately digs hard into the joint of his left wrist, kneading the exact spot where the kinetic recoil of a fifty-foot swing would constantly hammer bone and tendon. It’s the exact same dull, chronic stiffness Katsuki has traced with his own fingers while straddling him on the mattress.
And then there’s the final, agonizing puzzle piece: the voice.
Katsuki realizes the high-pitched stutter is just a defense mechanism—a deliberate vocal shift. But slips happen when human beings are pushed to their absolute limits.
A few days later, a fume hood malfunctions in the back of the lab, filling the room with a sharp, acrid plume of noxious vapor. Panic ripples through the students as everyone scrambles for the master shut-off valves. Amidst the chaos, someone yells out an order to kill the main ventilation system.
It’s not loud, and it’s buried beneath the panic, but for one split second, the civilian pitch drops away entirely. It is low, gravelly, and commanding—carrying that exact, rough-edged resonance that vibrates against Katsuki's throat in the dark when Spider-Man loses his patience.
Katsuki stands frozen by his workstation, the acrid smoke stinging his eyes, while his heart slams a heavy, furious rhythm against his ribs.
The voice. The wrist. The calluses.
The pieces click together with the terrifying precision of a loaded gun. It's him. But if Katsuki wants proof—real, undeniable proof that bridges the gap between the daytime student and the midnight vigilante—he needs to get hands-on.
The opportunity arises on a rainy Thursday afternoon in the crowded, slick-floored foyer of the science building.
Students are bottlenecked near the exit, shaking out wet umbrellas and bottlenecking the doorway. Katsuki pushes through the crush of bodies, his crimson eyes locking instantly onto that familiar shock of green hair standing a few paces ahead.
Instead of waiting for a casual bump, Katsuki alters his trajectory with deliberate, predatory calculation. He closes the distance, timing his steps so that as a sudden surge of the crowd pushes people backward, Katsuki lets his footing slip just enough, pitching himself directly into the green-haired student's space.
There’s a sharp intake of breath.
Before Katsuki can even hit the slick floor, a pair of heavy, remarkably fast hands shoot out, gripping Katsuki firmly by the waist and forearm to steady him.
The impact sends a jolt straight up Katsuki’s spine.
The hands gripping him are wide, iron-solid, and rough—the palms heavily reinforced with the exact dense, hardened calluses Katsuki has memorized in the dark. There is no fumbling hesitation; the reflexes are instant, honed by years of catching free-falling bodies out of mid-air.
Katsuki is slammed right against a solid, muscular chest. Up close, the oversized hoodie is no match for the radiating body heat, and the scent hits Katsuki all at once—clean rain, ozone, and a faint, lingering trace of sweat that smells impossibly, dangerously intimate.
"W-whoa! Careful, are you okay?"
The voice stutters, pitched up into that frantic civilian register, but it vibrates straight through Katsuki’s chest. And because they are trapped chest-to-chest in the crush of the doorway, Katsuki can feel the violent, jackhammer rhythm of the guy's pulse hammering against his ribs. Worse—he feels the hot, ragged rush of the student's breath hitting the skin right beneath Katsuki's jawline, coming in hot, shallow gasps.
Katsuki doesn't pull away immediately. Instead, he stays flush against him, lifting his chin just a fraction to stare straight up into those wide, panic-diluted green eyes.
His fingers curl experimentally against the thick fabric of the hoodie, pressing right over the heavy muscle of the student's forearm, feeling the instinctive, bone-deep tension lock up under his touch.
The proximity is suffocating. The realization is absolute.
The breath that leaves Izuku’s lungs is sharp and ragged, hot enough to ghost across Katsuki’s collarbone as the realization hangs heavily in the static air between them.
For a terrifying second, Izuku doesn't let go. His massive, calloused hands remain bolted to Katsuki’s waist—not just holding him steady, but lingering with an instinctive, possessive grip that completely betrays his civilian act. The panic in his wide green eyes warps into something raw, wide-open, and dangerously exposed.
Katsuki doesn't break eye contact. He lets the silence stretch, pressing his weight forward just enough to force Izuku to take a half-step back against the glass doors.
"Handsy," Katsuki murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register that has nothing to do with public annoyance and everything to do with a trap finally snapping shut.
Izuku’s throat bobs violently as he swallows hard. The color completely drains from his face, and his fingers twitch against Katsuki’s waist, hovering on the agonizing edge of whether to pull away or pull him tighter.
"I—I'm sorry, the crowd just—you slipped—" Izuku stammers, his voice pitching upward into that desperate, thin civilian register again, but it sounds hollow even to his own ears. The defense is cracking down the middle.
"Right," Katsuki replies, a slow, predatory smirk finally breaking across his face. He deliberately slides one hand down, his fingers pressing straight over the thick muscle of Izuku’s left forearm—right over the spot where the chronic wrist strain flares.
Izuku flinches, a sharp, involuntary hiss cutting off his nervous excuses. The sudden, rigid tension in his frame is all the confirmation Katsuki needs.
Without another word, Katsuki steps back, breaking physical contact just enough to leave the air cold between them.
"Watch your step, nerd," Katsuki says, turning on his heel with a sharp spin, leaving Izuku stranded in the doorway with his heart hammering against his ribs and the distinct, terrifying certainty that the game is over.
The silence in the hallway is absolute, even with the surrounding tide of students streaming past. Izuku stands frozen by the glass doors, his chest still heaving, his fingers curling inward where Katsuki’s hands had just been. He knows. There is no mistaking the look in those crimson eyes—the absolute, predatory certainty of a hunter who has finally cornered his prey.
A hot wave of self-directed fury flushes up Izuku's neck.
Damn it.
He isn't even primarily panicking about being caught—what's genuinely making his stomach twist with annoyance is how thoroughly he botched his own cover. He had spent months carefully engineering his civilian persona: the chronic stutter, the slumped posture, the deliberate, hyper-anxious wallflower routine designed to make him look as far away from the confident, lethal, impossibly fast Spider-Man as humanly possible. He’d actively avoided Katsuki in the halls, keeping a wide, calculated berth to ensure the sharpest kid in the department never registered him.
And yet, the very first time real contact happened, his instincts had completely betrayed him.
The muscle memory of catching a falling body, the iron-clad grip, the refusal to let Katsuki hit the floor—it had all been pure, unadulterated muscle reflex. He’d moved like the vigilante instead of the clumsy, overworked student, and now his own body had handed him over on a silver platter.
Izuku grits his teeth, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his oversized hoodie as he practically flees down the corridor. The sheer frustration of it burns under his skin. He was supposed to be smarter than this. He was supposed to keep the lines drawn—civilians on one side, the mask on the other. Instead, his own tactical error had just handed Katsuki the keys to the kingdom.
—
Izuku’s operating on a razor's edge of absolute devotion and blinding terror. Staying means he has officially chosen his weakness. By locking that tracking chip onto Katsuki’s wrist on their first night, Izuku thought he was playing the role of the cautious guardian—giving the blonde a tether so Katsuki would always know he was anchored, so he’d feel safe. But in reality, he handed over his own lifeline.
Every single night when Izuku launches himself off a rooftop into the smog-choked skyline, the dynamic is entirely different now. Before, patrolling was a solitary mission of pure kinetic focus. Now, every second he spends away from Katsuki is a slow-burning panic.
He finds himself constantly pulling up the encrypted telemetry feed on his HUD while swinging between high-rise glass towers. A tiny green blip pulses steadily in the corner of his field of vision, mapping Katsuki's exact location—whether he's grinding through late-night lab reports in the chemistry department or asleep in his bed.
The tracker was supposed to keep Katsuki safe, but to Izuku, it has become an obsession. He tracks the coordinate obsessively, a silent, invisible leash that hums against his internal clock. Every movement Katsuki makes is a data point; every quiet hour in the apartment makes the countdown to his return tick faster.
And because Katsuki now knows the truth—because the mask is still technically on, but the illusion in broad daylight has completely shattered—Izuku’s visits back to that apartment are heavier, sharper, and soaked in a desperate, suffocating possessiveness.
When he drops through the window at three in the morning the other day, bruised, bleeding under the suit, and smelling of ozone and asphalt, he doesn't just hold Katsuki—he clings to him like a drowning man. Every touch is harder, more frantic, as if the sheer skin-to-skin friction can erase the hours he spent away staring at a green dot on a screen. He’s more protective, more hyper-aware of every inch of Katsuki’s body beneath his hands, terrified that the inevitable breaking point—the moment the mask finally falls off completely—is rushing toward them like a freight train.
The panic of the near-misses on campus, combined with the raw, vibrating intensity of Katsuki's knowing glances during the day, has him locked in a state of hyper-vigilant paralysis.
The window clicks shut, sliding open just enough to let a rush of cold, damp midnight air spill across the bedroom floor before it’s sealed again.
Izuku doesn’t even wait to peel off the damp fabric of his suit. He crosses the room in three heavy, silent strides, wrapping his arms around Katsuki from behind as the blonde sits at his desk reviewing organic synthesis mechanisms. The impact is solid, heavy, and desperate—Izuku’s face buries straight into the crook of Katsuki’s neck, his hot, ragged breath hitching against the sensitive skin right below Katsuki's jaw.
Katsuki doesn’t flinch; his pen stops moving across the paper.
"You're bleeding," Katsuki murmurs, his voice a low, gravelly hum that vibrates straight against Izuku's chest. His fingers instinctively curl into the heavy muscle of Izuku’s forearm, feeling the faint, sticky warmth of fresh blood soaking through a torn section of the red-and-blue fabric near the elbow.
"I'm fine," Izuku mutters back, his voice muffled against Katsuki’s skin, thick with exhaustion and an underlying, frantic edge. His arms tighten around Katsuki's waist like a vice, pulling him so flush against his chest that there isn't a millimeter of air between them. "Just...give me a second."
This has become their nightly rhythm—a dangerous, intoxicating blur of routine. Most nights, Spider-Man drops in through the glass not just for the sex, but simply to sit quietly in the corner while Katsuki burns through late-night problem sets, occasionally leaning over his shoulder to murmur a sharp, brilliant correction to a complex molecular equation. But tonight, the underlying panic wired into Izuku's frame is too loud. The constant, gnawing anxiety of watching the green blip on his HUD all evening while dodging heavy-hitter syndicates has left him entirely frayed at the edges.
"Stop clinging like a damn parasite," Katsuki scoffs, though there is no real heat behind the insult.
Instead of fighting the embrace, Katsuki’s hands move deliberately down to Izuku’s wrists, prying the iron-tight grip apart with steady, unyielding pressure. He twists around in the chair, turning to face the vigilante who is still half-swallowed in the shadows of the desk lamp.
Izuku looks wrecked. The red mask is rolled up to his nose, exposing bruised cheekbones, dark exhaustion shadowing his eyes, and a raw, bleeding gash tracking down his forearm.
Katsuki’s crimson eyes narrow, a dark, possessive flash of anger igniting in his chest. Without a word, he stands up from the desk, grabs the medical kit from the bathroom shelf, and shoves Izuku down onto the edge of the mattress.
"Sit," Katsuki snaps, dropping the antiseptic and gauze onto the sheets. He steps between Izuku’s spread knees, his hands moving with rough, practiced efficiency to tear open the damaged fabric of the suit. "If you're going to bleed all over my damn floor every time you play hero, you're at least going to sit still while I patch you up."
The harsh, clinical sting of antiseptic hits the raw skin of Izuku’s forearm, but he doesn't flinch. His entire focus is entirely consumed by the warmth of Katsuki standing right between his knees, leaning in close as he works.
Katsuki’s movements are characteristically brisk and heavy-handed, but there is a deliberate, grounding care hidden beneath the roughness.
"You're an idiot," Katsuki murmurs, his voice dropping an octave as he presses a strip of sterile gauze over the cut and secures it down with medical tape. "How many times do I have to patch you up before you learn how to dodge a heavy hit instead of playing target?"
Izuku lets out a quiet, tired huff of air, his head tilting back slightly against the edge of the mattress. Through the half-pulled mask, his green eyes never leave Katsuki’s face, tracing the sharp slope of his nose and the concentrated furrow of his brow.
"I can't exactly ignore a warehouse full of weapons," Izuku replies, his voice low, gravelly, and laced with a quiet, exhausted fondness. "Not when I spend half my patrol staring at a screen trying to make sure you haven't moved an inch."
Katsuki stops taping, his hands lingering on Izuku’s arm. A sharp, cynical edge curls his lips, though there’s a strange, heated awareness in his crimson eyes. "You're still checking that damn thing?"
"Every thirty seconds," Izuku murmurs honestly, his voice dropping to a rough, gravelly hum that vibrates straight between them. His large, calloused hand moves slowly to rest flat against the side of Katsuki’s waist, his thumb tracing the hem of the blonde's shirt. "When I'm up there, the only thing keeping me sane is watching that little green blip stay completely still in your room. Knowing you're safe. Knowing you're where you're supposed to be."
Katsuki’s breath catches, just for a fraction of a second. He hates how easily Izuku turns the tables, hates how transparent his own static coordinates are on that glowing HUD. But instead of pushing him away, Katsuki leans in closer, invading Izuku’s space until their chests are nearly flush. His fingers shift from Izuku's wrist to grip the solid line of his forearm, pressing his thumbs deliberately right over the dense muscle.
"You like keeping a leash on me, don't you?" Katsuki challenges, his voice low and raspy, dripping with a dark, simmering challenge.
Izuku’s eyes darken. The heavy, suffocating anxiety that has clung to his shoulders all evening abruptly melts away, replaced by a sudden, electric heat that surges straight down his spine. He tilts his chin up, his gaze locked onto Katsuki's mouth.
"It's not a leash," Izuku breathes, his thumb pressing harder against Katsuki's hip, pulling him flush against his knees. "It's survival. And you're the one who let me put it there."
Katsuki’s gaze drops to Izuku’s lips, lingering there for a fraction of a second before snapping back up to meet those intense masked eyes. A low, dangerous hum vibrates in the back of Katsuki's throat—not anger, but the heavy, intoxicating acknowledgment of a trap they’ve both willingly walked into.
"Yeah," Katsuki murmurs, the defiance in his voice fracturing under the sheer weight of the proximity. "I did."
He doesn't give Izuku room to answer. Katsuki’s hands slide up from his forearm, gripping the firm line of Izuku’s shoulders before tangling directly into the damp curls at the nape of his neck, yanking him upward.
The kiss is hard, bruising, and desperate—a violent collision of heat and adrenaline that completely strips away the last remnants of their control. Izuku groans into it, the sound rough and vibrating against Katsuki's mouth as his arms wrap like steel bands around the blonde's waist, hauling him off his feet and right onto his lap.
All the anxiety of the patrol, the frustration of the near-misses in the hall, and the suffocating terror of distance vanish, burned away by the friction of skin and the heavy, possessive slide of Katsuki’s tongue. Katsuki straddles his lap, his knees locking at Izuku’s sides, fingers clawing fiercely at the shoulders of the red-and-blue suit as if trying to rip the fabric away just to get closer to the pulse beneath.
"You're going to reopen that damn cut," Katsuki gasps against his lips, breathless and flush, though his hips shift down deliberately against Izuku's thighs in a silent, demanding friction that completely ignores the fresh gauze on his arm.
"Don't care," Izuku groans back, his hands sliding up under the hem of Katsuki’s shirt to map the burning, familiar heat of his skin. "Then you can patch me back up again."
The room narrows down to the heavy slide of skin against skin, the frantic tangle of breath, and the crushing weight of relief as they lose themselves in the heat of the touch.
Katsuki is still straddling Izuku's lap, utterly spent, his breathing gradually slowing. With a soft, uncharacteristic sigh, he slumps forward, burying his face directly into the crook of Spider-Man’s shoulder and wrapping his arms tightly around the thick muscle of his neck.
As Katsuki lies there, eyes half-lidded in the quiet dark, his gaze drifts downward.
From the corner of his eye, where the fabric of the mask is rolled up just slightly above the collar, a strip of skin is exposed. In the dim shadows, a patch of thick, untamable green curls peeks out right at the nape of the neck. It's subtle—shadowed and blurred to look almost black in the low light—but to anyone who has spent the last week tracking every subtle shift, every nervous habit, and every lingering detail of a certain stuttering chemistry major across campus, it is glaringly, undeniably clear.
Katsuki’s breath catches for a fraction of a second. He freezes against Izuku's shoulder, recognition flaring sharp and hot in his chest.
He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t reach up to rip the mask off. Instead, a slow, quiet smirk touches the corner of Katsuki’s mouth as he closes his eyes again, burying his face deeper into the shoulder of the boy he's been hunting all along, willingly accepting the warmth and the heat as the world fades out entirely.
The quiet settling over the room shatters in an instant.
To anyone else, Katsuki’s posture would seem entirely relaxed, his weight heavy and boneless against Izuku’s shoulder. But against Izuku’s chest, the biological reality of the moment is deafening.
Underneath his ear, Katsuki’s pulse—which had been slowly leveling out into a steady, post-exhaustion rhythm—suddenly spikes. A sharp, violent double-beat hammers against the bone, followed by a micro-second of total suspension as Katsuki’s breath stutters in his throat.
Izuku freezes. His heightened senses, fine-tuned to catch the slightest shift in the environment, pick up the sudden adrenaline surge as clearly as if an alarm bell had gone off in the dark.
"Katsuki," Izuku murmurs, his voice dropping instantly into a low, protective rumble. His hands, which had been resting loosely on the blonde's waist, tighten immediately. "What is it? Did I hurt you? What's wrong?"
For a fraction of a second, Katsuki’s body goes board-stiff. The realization that his own physiological reaction just betrayed him to a guy whose senses are practically super-human makes a hot bolt of panic flare through his chest.
Damn it. Damn him and his stupid spider senses.
Katsuki forces his muscles to uncoil, dragging in a slow, calculated breath to steady his racing pulse before it completely gives him away. He shifts his weight slightly, leaning back just enough to look down at the masked face inches from his, schooling his expression into a mask of bored annoyance.
"Get your head out of your ass, idiot," Katsuki snaps, his voice a little too sharp, a little too breathy to be entirely convincing. He forces a lazy, dismissive roll of his shoulders. "Nothing's wrong."
"Your heart rate just spiked," Izuku says quietly, his green eyes narrowing behind the fabric of the mask, unblinking and hyper-focused. He doesn't buy the act for a second. "You're tense. Tell me what happened."
"I said it's nothing," Katsuki fires back, his tone defensive as he pushes a hand against Izuku's chest, trying to put physical distance between them. "Whatever, my brain is just fried from organic chemistry finals next week. The midterms are brutal, and I've been staring at reaction mechanisms until my eyes bleed. I'm stressed, alright? Not everyone has mutant spider-reflexes to carry them through life."
It’s a lie, but it’s anchored to just enough truth about their grueling academic schedules to sound plausible.
Izuku holds his gaze for a long, agonizing moment, his enhanced hearing still tracking the frantic, underlying tempo of Katsuki’s blood rushing through his veins. He knows Katsuki is hiding something. But seeing the tight, defensive set of Katsuki's jaw, Izuku decides to let him keep his secret for now. Slowly, his grip softens, and a faint, knowing hum vibrates in his chest.
"Right. Finals," Izuku says, his voice dripping with a quiet, dry amusement that tells Katsuki he didn't fool anyone at all. "Good thing I'm here to tutor you then, isn't it?"
Katsuki glares down at him, a sharp, heat-laced snap in his crimson eyes that’s half-defensive and half-impressed he got caught so fast.
"Shut up and go to sleep," Katsuki mutters, though he doesn't try to scramble off Izuku’s lap anymore. Instead, he lets out a slow, heavy breath, his rigid shoulders finally melting back down as the lingering adrenaline bleeds away into the quiet dark of the room.
He shifts back against Izuku’s chest, pulling the edge of the blanket up over them both. But the dynamic in the room has fundamentally shifted. The playful, reckless cat-and-mouse game has tightened its boundaries. Katsuki now knows—or at least strongly suspects—the truth hiding just beneath the red-and-blue fabric, and Izuku knows he knows.
Yet, for tonight, neither of them breaks the illusion. They just lie there in the dark, wrapped around each other, the steady, synchronized thrum of their heartbeats filling the silence until exhaustion finally takes them both.
—
The alleyway smells of wet concrete, and copper. Izuku’s lungs burn like he’s breathing in glass. His entire right side is a dull, radiating throb, the red-and-blue suit torn to bloody ribbons along his ribs where a heavy-hitter syndicate’s brute caught him with a reinforced steel pipe, his mask is half-torn, doing nothing to cover his face. He’s been running on fumes, empty adrenaline, and less than three hours of sleep for a week straight, and the cumulative exhaustion is finally catching up with him in the worst possible way.
There are three of them left. Syndicate enforcers, heavily armed and circling him like sharks in the suffocating dark of a dead-end street.
Izuku stumbles back, his boot heel slipping on slick pavement. His vision blurs at the edges, a static-heavy haze creeping into his field of view. He’s losing too much blood. If he passes out here, exposed and broken, they’ll unmask him right on the pavement. The city will know. Katsuki will find out the hard way, lying dead or captured in a pool of his own blood.
The terrifying thought cuts through the fog of shock. No. Not yet.
Then, from the mouth of the alley, a sharp, familiar voice cuts through the ringing in his ears.
"Hey! What the hell do you idiots think you're doing behind my building?!"
Izuku’s head snaps to the side. Through the blurred, sweat-soaked fringe of his curls, crimson eyes flash under the flickering amber glow of a streetlamp. Katsuki. What is he doing here? Panic spikes hot and violent in Izuku’s chest—he’s too close, too vulnerable, right in the middle of a slaughterhouse.
The three thugs turn, distracted by the sudden interruption, snarling as they shift their focus toward the blonde standing defiantly at the edge of the alley.
"Get lost, kid, or you're next—"
That’s all the opening Izuku needs.
It isn't a clean, calculated maneuver; it's a desperate, feral burst of pure survival instinct. Moving faster than his shredded muscles should allow, Izuku launches himself forward off the brick wall. He doesn't let them get a single step near Katsuki. With a brutal, concussive wave of momentum, he slams into the remaining enforcers with terrifying, bone-crushing force, sweeping their legs out, pinning the primary threat against the dumpster with a sickening thud, and delivering a final, blinding blow that drops the last man cold to the concrete.
It takes less than four seconds.
And the second the last thug goes slack, the adrenaline completely evacuates Izuku's veins.
His knees buckle. The wall rushes up to meet him, but he never feels the impact. The darkness rushes in, heavy and absolute, pulling him under before he even hits the ground.
When consciousness slowly drags Izuku back, it doesn't come with pain—at least, not yet. It comes with the steady, familiar hum of a desk lamp, the faint scent of antiseptic, and the distinct, unmistakable warmth of a familiar mattress beneath his back.
He groans, his eyelids fluttering open against the harsh, indoor light.
He’s lying flat on Katsuki’s bed. But the realization hits him like a physical blow when he registers his face: the red mask isnt on him, leaving his entire face entirely exposed to the open air.
Izuku’s breath catches, his eyes snapping wide open as he tries to sit up—only for a heavy hand to press firmly down against his uninjured shoulder, pushing him flat again with unyielding force.
"Don't move, you reckless idiot. You'll tear the stitches."
Izuku freezes. He looks up.
Katsuki is sitting on the edge of the mattress right beside him. He’s wearing an old black t-shirt, his sleeves pushed up, holding a blood-stained piece of gauze in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other. His expression isn't screaming or furious. Instead, it’s a terrifyingly calm, deadpan mask of intense, simmering realization.
He looks down at Izuku—at the unruly green curls, the freckles dusted across the bridge of his nose, and the tired, wide green eyes staring back up at him.
"You know," Katsuki says, his voice dropping into a low, dangerously quiet hum, "I spent the last week piecing together every single puzzle piece, narrowing down your height, your build, your scent, and your goddamn academic schedule." He pauses, holding up the gauze. "And yet, seeing your actual freckled face looking back at me while I patch up the city's favorite vigilante in my own bedroom is still a surreal experience."
Izuku swallows hard, his throat dry. The secret is completely out. No masks left, no clever cover stories to hide behind.
"Katsuki—" Izuku starts, his voice raw and gravelly.
"Shut up," Katsuki interrupts, though there is no bite to it. He sets the medical supplies down on the nightstand, leans in close, and gently places a warm, steady hand directly against the side of Izuku’s face, his thumb brushing his cheekbone. "You didn't think I'd let some random street thugs or—heaven forbid—a hospital full of doctors get their hands on you and blow your cover, did you?"
Katsuki stares down at him, his thumb still resting motionless against Izuku’s cheek. He’s spent weeks analyzing the vigilante—obsessing over Spider-Man's terrifying efficiency, his impossible strength, and the raw, unyielding devotion that keeps him coming back to this apartment every single night. But civilian Izuku? The quiet, perpetually overwhelmed university student who slumps in the back of the lecture hall? Katsuki hasn't really known him. Not truly.
To Katsuki, the guy in the oversized hoodies had just been an invisible obstacle, and that’s the knot tightening in Katsuki’s chest. He didn't fall for the brilliant, terrifying vigilante because of some grand romantic fantasy; he fell because of the quiet, brutal intimacy of these four walls. He fell for the way the masked man holds him like he's the only real thing left in a burning city.
So why isn't he having a different reaction? Why isn't he pulling away, feeling like he was duped by a double life?
Because as Katsuki looks down at the bruises blooming across Izuku's pale skin, at the messy green curls stuck to his forehead, and the fierce, protective desperation burning in those green eyes, a startling realization hits him: He doesn't care about the mask.
The guy bleeding on his bed and the guy dodging his gaze in the chemistry department aren't two different people. They're the exact same exhausted, over-protective idiot who would tear the world apart just to make sure Katsuki is safe.
A slow, exhausted breath escapes Izuku’s lips, tension melting out of his frame as he leans slightly into the touch. "You're not mad?"
"Mad?" Katsuki scoffs, a dark, possessive smirk finally breaking across his face as he looks down at the boy who has been driving him insane day and night. "I'm going to rip you a new one for pulling that stunt in the alley. But right now? You're staying right here."
Izuku holds his gaze for a long moment, the vulnerability that had flickered in his green eyes during the panic of the fight slowly hardening back into something steady, quiet, and entirely sure of itself. The nervous, stuttering civilian act is dead and buried on the floor with the torn mask.
Without breaking eye contact, Izuku shifts his weight, his large frame seamlessly reclaiming the dominant, unshakeable presence he carried on the rooftops. He reaches up, his calloused fingers wrapping firmly around the back of Katsuki's neck, anchoring him in place with an effortless, heavy authority that leaves no room to argue.
"Don't think I forgot seeing you standing at the edge of that alley tonight." Izuku murmurs, his voice dropping an octave into that low, gravelly register that completely commands the room.
"You shouldn't have been anywhere near there," Izuku continues, his tone dropping into something sharper, heavy with a fierce, underlying frustration. His grip on the back of Katsuki's neck tightens just enough to make sure he's listening. "I told you to stay back, I gave you the tracker for a reason, and yet you wandered right into the middle of a syndicate hit just to what? Watch my back?"
"I didn't need you playing hero and taking a steel pipe to the ribs either," Katsuki snaps back, his crimson eyes flashing with defensive heat as he tries to lean away from the accusation. "You were bleeding out before you even dropped the last guy. What was I supposed to do, sit at home and wait for your corpse to show up on the news?"
"You're supposed to stay safe," Izuku fires back. "I do this so you don't have to look at danger. The whole point of keeping my distance during the day, the whole point of playing the quiet, anxious student in your classes, was to keep a target off your back. If anyone connected you to Spider-Man, you'd be dead in a week. And you just waltz right into the crossfire?"
Katsuki glares down at him, his chest heaving, the anger flaring hot and bright between them. But beneath the fury, the brutal honesty of it hangs heavy in the air. Katsuki didn't stay away because he couldn't handle the risk; he stayed close because the thought of sitting safely at home while Izuku tore himself apart on the streets was entirely intolerable.
"Again, I'm not some fragile civilian you need to lock away in a glass box, Izuku," Katsuki whispers, his voice dropping its sharp edge, turning into a low, gravelly challenge as he leans down until their lips are nearly touching. "I figured out who you were because I was paying attention. You think I'm going to cower just because things get messy?"
Izuku holds his gaze, the anger in his chest slowly giving way to a heavy, possessive warmth. He sees the absolute stubbornness in Katsuki’s eyes—the exact same unyielding, reckless pride that mirrors his own.
"I know you aren't," Izuku says softly, the rough edges of his voice smoothing out into something steady and deeply resonant. His thumb strokes a slow circle against the nape of Katsuki's neck. "Which is exactly why you drive me out of my mind."
Katsuki lets out a breath that’s half-sigh, half-scow, his rigid posture finally collapsing as he lets himself sink down against Izuku's chest. "Next time," Katsuki mutters against his skin, his fingers curling into the fabric of Izuku's shirt, "you finish the fight faster so I don't have to watch you get hit."
"Deal," Izuku murmurs, sliding his hand up to cup the back of Katsuki's head, pulling him in close and sealing the argument away in a deep, heavy, and absolute kiss.
—
The next morning arrives with a heavy, overcast sky pressing against the windows.
Izuku leaves the apartment first, slipping out while the city is still shaking off the dawn. They agreed on the separation deliberately—walking into the university together would invite too many questions, too many eyes, and too much unwanted attention. For now, the public civilian facade has to stay intact, even if the dynamic between them has completely shattered behind closed doors.
By the time Izuku’s mid-morning lecture finishes, his mind is already halfway across campus. The burn of the bruises along his ribs is a dull, throbbing reminder of the alley fight, but the dominant pulse in his chest is just the restless, low-grade hum of wanting to find Katsuki, to anchor himself to the blonde again after a long morning of sitting in a cramped auditorium pretending to take notes.
He takes the shortcut across the quad, where Katsuki's lecture is wrapping up its second-period block.
Then, his stride stutters. His eyes lock onto a familiar figure standing near the entrance of the lecture hall.
Ichiro.
The tall, broad-shouldered senior leans casually against the stone pillar outside the double doors. He isn't just standing there; he’s waiting with a casual, unearned familiarity—the kind that comes from routine.
Izuku’s steps slow to a crawl, a sharp, cold spike of possessive fury twisting violently in his gut. Before that first night—before Katsuki let Spider-Man into his bed and subsequently unraveled Izuku’s entire world—Izuku had watched this exact scene play out more times than his sanity could handle. He had sat across campus, tracking them through the lens of a restless, lovesick vigilante, forced to watch Ichiro trail after Katsuki, watching them slip up the stairs to that exact apartment building under the cover of night.
Izuku has been entirely consumed by survival, torn muscles, syndicate enforcers, and the terrifying, exhausting reality of keeping Katsuki alive that the casual hookup Katsuki used to have before their world turned upside down completely slipped his mind. They haven't talked about Ichiro.
Standing a few feet away in the crowded corridor, Izuku freezes.
The heavy double doors of the lecture hall push open, students spilling out into the hall. Katsuki steps out into the open, looking effortlessly sharp, his expression unimpressed until Ichiro steps directly into his personal space.
Ichiro flashes an easy, familiar grin, casually looping a hand over the back of Katsuki's shoulder and leaning in close to say something.
Izuku’s chest seizes. A sharp, ugly spike of pure jealousy twists violently through his ribs, instantly aggravating the healing bruises underneath his hoodie.
He had convinced himself he was nothing more than a passing obsession, a masked vigilante used for convenience while Katsuki had an actual, physical life right here on campus with guys like Ichiro.
And now? Seeing Ichiro’s hand resting casually on Katsuki’s back makes the blood roar in Izuku’s ears. His knuckles clench white inside the pocket of his hoodie. His jaw hardens into a rigid, dangerous line.
Izuku doesn’t care about the rules anymore. He doesn't care about keeping a safe distance, doesn't care about the crowd of students milling around them in the hallway, and he damn well doesn't care about looking like an anxious, unassuming college student.
The thin thread of his restraint snaps entirely.
Before logic can catch up with him, Izuku is moving. He strides across the corridor with a heavy, deliberate pace that parts the crowd of students like water, his green eyes locked exclusively on the hand resting against Katsuki’s back.
Ichiro barely has time to blink before a large, vice-like hand clamps down brutally hard onto his wrist, forcing him away from Katsuki with enough raw, unyielding strength that the older student stumbles backward with a startled gasp.
Before Katsuki can even register the intrusion, Izuku’s other hand shoots out, his long fingers wrapping tightly around Katsuki’s wrist. The grip is iron-hard, fueled by a terrifying, suffocating mix of possessiveness and adrenaline that leaves zero room for argument.
"Wha—hey, what the hell—!" Katsuki snaps, his crimson eyes flashing wide with genuine shock as he’s violently yanked out of Ichiro’s space.
He tries to dig his heels in, to wrench his arm free from the sudden assault, but the sheer, unnatural strength behind the grip makes it impossible. Izuku doesn't say a single word. His jaw is locked into a harsh, dangerous line, his chest heaving under his hoodie as he physically drags a completely stunned and disoriented Katsuki away from the lecture hall entrance, cutting straight through the middle of the corridor and heading down a deserted, dimly lit side-hallway.
"Let go of me, you idiot!" Katsuki barks, his voice spiked with a sharp, panicked edge as he stumbles over his own feet, forced to march right along with Izuku's blistering pace. "Are you out of your damn mind? What are you doing?!"
Izuku doesn't answer. He doesn't slow down until they’ve rounded a sharp corner, far away from the prying eyes of the student body, shoving open a heavy, rattling door that leads out into a secluded, concrete maintenance stairwell.
The heavy metal door slams shut behind them with a deafening echo, cutting off the rest of the university entirely.
Before Katsuki can even pull his arm back or let loose another round of furious shouting, Izuku shoves him gently but firmly back against the cool concrete wall, caging him in with an arm braced right beside Katsuki’s head.
Izuku’s breathing is heavy, his green eyes burning with a dark, untamed fire that makes the air in the stairwell crackle.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Katsuki finally snaps, trying to mask his shock with a fierce glare, though his chest is heaving. "Dragging me down a damn hallway in front of half the department like a lunatic? Have you lost your mind?"
"Don't play dumb with me, Katsuki," Izuku interrupts, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly rumble that vibrates right against Katsuki’s skin. He steps even closer, his gaze burning holes into the blonde's face. "How long were you going to let him touch you like that? How long were you going to let him hang around your shoulders while I sat back and played the quiet, clueless fool?"
Katsuki blinks, genuinely baffled by the sudden explosion of rage. "What are you even talking about? It was nothing. He's just a guy from the literature department, we're friends—"
"Friends?" Izuku barks out a harsh, humorless laugh, the word tasting like ash. "Don't feed me that bullshit. You think I didn't see the way he used to trail after you? You think I didn't see the nights I sat out in the cold watching him walk you to your apartment door just to sleep with you?"
Katsuki freezes. His crimson eyes widen in absolute disbelief, the color draining slightly from his face. "Wait...how do you—how the hell do you know about that?"
A beat of heavy silence stretches between them. Then, the realization hits Katsuki with the force of a freight train. The secret late nights, the obscure angles from the street, the lingering shadow of Spider-Man watching his every move long before they ever crossed paths—he was watching.
Katsuki’s mouth opens, a flush of utter mortification and panic rushing up his neck. "Right. You were literally stalking me. Right. Never mind, I was being stupid."
He tries to press himself flatter against the wall, rubbing the back of his neck with a sudden, uncharacteristic awkwardness. "Look, there is nothing real between me and Ichiro, alright? It was a few casual hookups months ago, and nothing more. It was over before we even—before I even knew it was you."
Izuku doesn't look convinced. The muscle in his jaw ticks violently, his eyes dark and unyielding. "You let him put his hands on you today."
"Because I didn't care enough to push him off!" Katsuki fires back, his own frustration flaring up as he glares at the towering green-haired man boxing him in. "I don't care about him, Izuku! I care about you, you paranoid idiot. What more do you want from me?"
Izuku’s eyes narrow, his voice dropping to a dangerously quiet, possessive growl. "I want him away from you. I want you to stop letting him touch you, stop letting him look at you, and stay the hell away from anyone who thinks they can have even an inch of what's mine."
The sheer, suffocating weight of Izuku's possessiveness hits Katsuki like a physical blow. The absolute dominance radiating off the guy—the terrifying, raw jealousy of a man who refuses to share—doesn't anger Katsuki at all. Instead, it sends a sudden, scorching hot rush of heat straight down his spine, making his stomach flip and his heart hammer against his ribs in a completely different way.
The fierce glare melts right off Katsuki’s face, replaced by a breathless, dazed look as he stares up at Izuku, completely captivated.
His usual sharp, abrasive voice drops away, leaving him unusually small and entirely compliant.
"...Yeah," Katsuki whispers, his crimson eyes locking onto Izuku's, a faint flush dusting his cheeks as he swallows hard. "Yeah, I will."
"Good," Izuku murmurs, his voice a low, rough rasp that leaves zero room for argument.
Slowly, deliberately, Izuku shifts his weight. He lets go of Katsuki’s wrist, but his hand doesn't stray far—sliding up instead to cup the side of Katsuki’s jaw, his thumb dragging a firm line across his cheekbone.
Katsuki’s eyes slip half-shut at the touch, a low, frustrated breath escaping his nose. He hates how easily he folds, hates how fast his pulse races the second Izuku looks at him like he’s the only thing that matters in the world.
"Don't look at me like that," Katsuki mutters, though his fingers instinctively curl into the thick fabric of Izuku’s hoodie, anchoring him close rather than pushing him away. "We're still in the middle of a damn university building, in case you forgot."
"Let them look," Izuku replies quietly, his voice dangerously steady as he leans in, closing the remaining distance until their lips are barely a hair's breadth apart. "Let everyone out there see exactly who you belong to."
Katsuki’s breath hitches, a sharp, heat-laced shiver cutting down his spine. Before he can fire back a snarky retort, Izuku kisses him.
Katsuki gasps into the kiss, his hands bunching into fists in Izuku's clothes as he yields completely to the weight of it, letting himself be backed further against the wall until his feet barely seem to matter. The lingering jealousy, the shock of the hallway confrontation, the stupid games with Ichiro—it all incinerates under the sheer, suffocating heat of Izuku's grip.
When Izuku finally pulls back just an inch, his chest heaving, his thumb traces roughly over Katsuki’s swollen bottom lip. His green eyes are dark, heavy with an absolute, undeniable claim.
"You're mine, Katsuki," Izuku murmurs against his mouth, low and absolute. "Every second you're out here in these halls, you remember that."
Katsuki’s chest rises and falls rapidly, a breathless, flushed smirk breaking across his face as he glares up through heavy-lidded eyes, entirely addicted to the chokehold of Izuku’s obsession.
"Shut up and kiss me again, you possessive freak," Katsuki mutters, pulling him right back down.
—
The next few days bring a subtle, entirely foreign rhythm to Katsuki’s routine—one utterly hijacked by an annoyingly persistent vigilante who apparently refuses to focus on his own life.
It starts in the middle of a brutal three-hour organic chemistry lab on Tuesday afternoon.
Katsuki is currently standing over a fume hood, glaring daggers at a bubbling Erlenmeyer flask that is refusing to yield the correct color change. His lab partner is across the room fetching reagents, leaving Katsuki alone to curse under his breath at his textbook.
A soft buzz vibrates against his thigh from where his phone rests in his pocket.
Assuming it’s a standard department update or a useless group chat notification, Katsuki pulls it out with a gloved hand and glances down at the screen.
Spider nerd: hey, quick question.
Spider nerd: if i accidentally drop a petty syndicate enforcer into a dumpster three blocks from campus, does that count as community service? asking for a friend.
Katsuki’s jaw drops open. He stares at the screen, a split-second of pure, unadulterated disbelief warring with a sudden, traitorous twitch at the corner of his mouth.
Katsuki: you are an absolute idiot. get back to your patrol before you crack your ribs open again.
Spider nerd: ouch. harsh. and for your information, my ribs are healing great. mostly because i’m fueled entirely by the memory of you looking like a flustered mess in that stairwell yesterday.
Katsuki: i will literally block your number.
Spider nerd: you wouldn't dare. besides, who else is going to send you terrible villain puns while you suffer through titration?
Spider nerd: speaking of—what's red, white, and currently hanging upside down by a web?
Katsuki: if you say some stupid joke istg izuku
Spider nerd: me, thinking about how you're going to make me dinner tonight.
Katsuki lets out a sharp, breathless huff of laughter, his shoulders shaking as he aggressively types back a string of insults. He looks up just in time to catch his lab partner staring at him with a confused expression.
"Everything alright?" his partner asks, eyeing the rare, unguarded smirk lingering on Katsuki's face.
"Peachy," Katsuki snaps, instantly wiping his expression clean into a scowl, though his thumb fires off one last message beneath the lab bench.
Spider nerd: hey, wanna try the spiderman kiss ;)
Katsuki: fuck off zuku
Spider nerd: :(
By Thursday, the dynamic has bled seamlessly into their shared lectures.
They’re sitting three rows up in a packed, tiered auditorium for a grueling economics seminar. The professor’s monotonous drone is practically begging the room to fall asleep. Katsuki is half-listening, aggressively scribbling notes, when a folded piece of lined paper lands neatly on top of his notebook.
He blinks, glancing sideways.
Izuku is sitting right beside him, looking the picture of innocent, wide-eyed academic focus, casually twirling a mechanical pencil between his fingers. But the slight, wicked twitch of his mouth gives him away entirely.
Katsuki unfolds the note. Scrawled across the paper in Izuku’s remarkably neat handwriting are three distinct sketches:
-
A stick figure of Professor Aizawa looking like a literal zombie.
-
A very detailed, highly dramatic drawing of Spider-Man dramatically clinging to a chandelier.
-
An arrow pointing from the chandelier straight to the words: he's thinking about you right now and it's distracting him from crime-fighting.
Katsuki’s face heats up instantly. He shoots Izuku a murderous glare, snatching his own pen to scold him on paper.
You are twenty-one years old, stop passing notes like a middle schooler, Katsuki writes viciously, shoving the paper back across the desk.
Izuku glances down, suppresses a laugh that sounds dangerously like a snort, and writes back beneath it: can't help it. You look too good when you're trying to pretend you aren't paying attention to me. also, heads up: after class, I’m stealing you for lunch. my treat.
Katsuki rolls his eyes hard enough to strain a muscle, shaking his head. But as the lecture finally wraps up and the auditorium empties out, he doesn't pull away when Izuku casually falls into step beside him in the aisle, his shoulder brushing warmly against Katsuki's as they head out into the midday sun.
The sun is beating down on the campus quad, casting long, sharp shadows across the concrete pathways as the lunch rush hits full swing.
True to his word, Izuku doesn't just fall into step beside him—he smoothly angles himself closer, casually shouldering the heavier strap of Katsuki’s bag and taking it off his hands without missing a beat.
Katsuki shoots him a sideways look, raising a single eyebrow. "What are you doing? I can carry my own damn bag, nerd."
"I know you can," Izuku replies easily, a bright, teasing grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. He shifts the bag over his shoulder with a theatrical flex that is entirely unnecessary and 100% designed to show off. "Just letting my boyfriend play the pampered academic for five minutes. Enjoy it."
"Shut up," Katsuki mutters, though a hot flush of satisfaction prickles at the back of his neck, completely betrayed by the small, involuntary twitch of amusement at the corner of his lips. He refuses to give him the satisfaction of a real smile, shoving his hands into his pockets instead.
Then, Katsuki stops dead in the middle of the crowded campus pathway, his shoes scraping against the concrete. A few students dodge around them with muttered apologies, but Katsuki doesn't move. He just stares at Izuku, the light teasing smirk completely evaporating from his face.
Izuku realizes it a second too late. He halts a half-step ahead, turning back with a confused blink, the playful grin faltering as he watches the guarded look shutter across Katsuki’s expression.
"Wait," Katsuki says, his voice dropping low as he crosses his arms over his chest, narrowing his crimson eyes. "What did you just call me?"
A rare flush of genuine embarrassment creeps up the back of Izuku’s neck, the bright, cocky vigilante persona instantly melting away into his usual flustered, awkward self.
"I...uh," Izuku stammers, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand, his green eyes darting away for a split second before forcing themselves back to meet Katsuki's intense gaze. "I mean. Did I get the title wrong?"
"You didn't ask," Katsuki points out, though there’s no real bite to his voice, just a sharp, assessing curiosity. He tilts his chin up, watching the way Izuku suddenly looks like he’s trying to mentally calculate the trajectory of a re-entering spacecraft. "We haven't exactly sat down and had a formal chat about it, have we? You just decided to stake your claim, drag me down a stairwell, and start throwing around domestic labels like it's nothing."
"Can you blame me?" Izuku mutters defensively, his shoulders dropping as his posture loses its performative swagger. He steps closer, closing the distance between them until he's standing right in Katsuki's space again, completely ignoring the curious glances from passing students. "You let me kiss you, you let me move in half my stuff, and you told me you'd stay away from Ichiro. What was I supposed to think?"
"There's a difference between assuming and actually communicating, nerd," Katsuki fires back, though the heat in his tone is entirely softened by the quiet, breathless flutter in his chest. He hates how effortlessly Izuku backs him into a corner without even realizing it. "You don't just get to slap a collar on me and call it a day."
Izuku goes quiet at that, the playful teasing completely gone, replaced by a sudden, intense seriousness. He lets go of Katsuki’s bag, letting it slip down to the pavement so both of his hands are free.
He steps in closer, reaching out to gently catch Katsuki by the wrist—not with the iron-tight, possessive grip of the hallway confrontation, but with a slow, deliberate touch, his thumb smoothing over the pulse point there.
"Okay," Izuku says softly, his voice dropping below the ambient noise of the quad. "Let's fix it then. No assumptions."
Katsuki’s breath hitches. He looks down at Izuku’s hand on his wrist, then back up into those steady, earnest green eyes that somehow managed to turn his entire life upside down. The defensiveness chips away, leaving only the raw, undeniable truth of what they’ve been building.
"I don't need a formal contract, you idiot," Katsuki murmurs, his voice dipping into a rare, quiet vulnerability as he looks away, a faint flush dusting his cheekbones. "...Just—Don't go around calling me your boyfriend to random people if we haven't even made it official ourselves."
A soft, disbelieving laugh escapes Izuku’s throat, bright and entirely fond. The tension drains out of him completely, replaced by a sweeping wave of warmth.
"So," Izuku whispers, a lopsided, radiant smile breaking across his face as he steps even closer, his thumb tracing a slow circle against Katsuki’s skin. "Does that mean if I ask you right now, you'll say yes?"
Katsuki rolls his eyes, though he can't fight the crooked, helpless smirk that pulls at his own lips. He reaches up with his free hand, giving Izuku a hard, exasperated shove right against his chest.
"Shut up and ask it already, you absolute nuisance."
Izuku doesn't hesitate for a second. The exasperated shove against his chest barely registers; he just catches Katsuki’s hand mid-shove, tangling their fingers together and pulling him firmly into his space right there in the middle of the crowded campus quad.
"Katsuki," Izuku murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, steady hum that cuts straight through the ambient chatter of passing students. The playful banter vanishes, leaving behind an intense, undeniable sincerity in his green eyes. "Be my boyfriend. Officially."
Despite walking right into it, Katsuki feels a sharp, violent flip in his stomach. The heat rushes up his neck, turning his cheekbones a bright, furious red, but the defensive scowl refuses to stay put. A breathless, half-helpless laugh slips past his lips.
"Took you long enough, you nerd," Katsuki mutters, his voice dipping to a rough, quiet register as his free hand comes up to grip the lapel of Izuku’s hoodie, pulling him down the rest of the way. "Yeah. Obviously."
Izuku’s face lights up with a grin so blindingly bright it practically outshines the midday sun. Before Katsuki can lecture him about making a scene, Izuku wraps an arm securely around his waist and dips him slightly, kissing him right there in broad daylight with a total disregard for the hundred-odd students walking past.
Katsuki snaps his head back, his face burning a brilliant crimson as he shoots a murderous, glare-of-death look toward the students who gasped and wolf-whistled, his hand automatically hauling off and smacking Izuku hard against the shoulder.
"If you ever pull some stunt like that in public again, I'm breaking your other arm," Katsuki snaps, though the sharp, vicious grin breaking across his own face completely betrays the threat.
Izuku just laughs, catching Katsuki's hand and lacing their fingers together, completely unapologetic as he tugs him forward down the path. "Come on, boyfriend. I'm buying you lunch, exactly like I promised."
"Stop calling me that out loud, you idiot!" Katsuki hisses, dropping his voice to a sharp, mortified whisper as he yanks his hand out of Izuku’s grip just long enough to shove a hard palm square against Izuku's chest, trying to push him out of his immediate personal space.
Izuku doesn't budge an inch, standing his ground with that infuriatingly fond, untouchable confidence. He just catches Katsuki’s wrist again, smoothly entangling their fingers together so Katsuki can't pull away.
"What?" Izuku asks, his voice dripping with an innocent, mocking sweetness that makes Katsuki want to throttle him. "My boyfriend? Is my boyfriend embarrassed?"
"I am going to murder you," Katsuki snarls, though the threat is completely ruined by the bright red flush still dusting his cheekbones. "I swear to God, if you say it one more time before we're off this damn campus—"
"Alright, alright," Izuku chuckles, finally giving in as he pulls Katsuki along beside him, his thumb brushing reassuringly over the back of Katsuki's hand. "Keeping it under wraps in public. Got it. Only code names from here on out."
"Shut up," Katsuki mutters, shooting him one last lethal glare, though his fingers automatically tighten right back around Izuku's. "...Asshole."
—
The heavy oak front door of Katsuki’s apartment clicks shut, locking out the noise of the campus and the restless afternoon traffic. The sudden, quiet stillness of the apartment wraps around them, a sharp contrast to the sunlit chaos of the quad.
Katsuki kicks off his shoes, tossing his keys onto the small tray by the entryway with a sharp clatter. He takes off his bag and lets it drop heavily to the floor, but instead of heading straight for the kitchen or his desk like usual, he pauses. He stands in the middle of the living room, arms crossed tightly over his chest, his gaze fixed on the floorboards.
Izuku follows him inside, locking the deadbolt behind them. The light, teasing energy that carried them across campus evaporates, replaced by the heavy, sobering reality of the walls they've just broken down. Izuku drops his own bag by the door and takes a slow step forward, reading the rigid tension in Katsuki’s shoulders.
"Katsuki?" Izuku prompts softly, closing the distance until he's standing just a few feet away.
Katsuki finally looks up, his crimson eyes sharp, searching, and uncharacteristically clouded with doubt. He lets out a slow, heavy breath.
"So what happens now?" Katsuki asks, his voice dropping into a quiet, raw register. He gestures between the two of them, the frustration bleeding out to reveal the underlying vulnerability he usually keeps locked away. "We’re actually doing this. You’re...whatever we are, and I know your secret, and we’re practically living together. But you're Spider-Man, Izuku. Syndicate enforcers, armed thugs, half the criminal underworld—they don't care about collateral damage."
He steps closer, his hands dropping to his sides as the weight of it crashes down. "If someone connects the dots, if they figure out that the masked vigilante everyone’s hunting has a soft spot for some guy in the chemistry department...what happens to us? How long before I become a target again?"
Izuku stands still, his mind racing, weighing every terrifying variable of the life he leads in the shadows against the person standing across from him. He doesn't offer empty platitudes or fake reassurances. He knows the weight of what Katsuki now carries just by being tied to him.
When Izuku finally breaks the silence, his voice is quiet, stripped of any bravado.
"I'm not going to lie and tell you it's safe," Izuku says softly.
Katsuki doesn't look up, but his shoulders tense even further at the blunt honesty.
"I won't pretend the city is suddenly going to stop being dangerous, or that targets aren't going to follow me," Izuku continues, taking a slow, deliberate step closer. "And I also know you aren't weak. I've watched you fight your way out of corners most people wouldn't survive. You can take care of yourself."
Katsuki's jaw shifts, the hard line of his mouth softening just a fraction at the acknowledgment. He isn't some helpless civilian who needs to be coddled, and Izuku knowing that—respecting that—matters.
Izuku stops just a foot away, his green eyes steady and entirely unyielding in the dim light of the apartment.
"I can't promise nothing will ever touch us," Izuku murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, absolute promise. "But I will do everything in my power to keep you safe. No matter what it takes."
"But i need you to listen to me." Izuku adds, "please, Katsuki for my sake—both our sake. I gave you that tracker for a reason. Just stay as far away from Spider-Man fighting villains. I want you on the complete opposite direction. I need to see you on that tracker away from danger."
Katsuki stands in silence for a few seconds, letting the weight of it settle over him. Hearing it laid out like that sends a slow, deep warmth rolling through his chest. The jagged edge of his anxiety doesn't vanish entirely, but the suffocating tightness around his ribs loosens.
He lets out a slow, heavy breath, his arms dropping from his chest.
"'Kay, i will," Katsuki mutters, his voice rough around the edges.
He looks up, meeting Izuku’s gaze, and though his expression is still guarded, the sharp defensive edge is gone. He steps forward, sliding his arms around Izuku's waist and resting his forehead firmly against his chest.
Izuku freezes for a fraction of a second, then, his arms instantly come up, wrapping securely and tightly around Katsuki’s back, pulling him flush against him as he buries his face in the blonde's messy hair.
They stand like that in the middle of the silent apartment for a long, quiet stretch of time, the heavy tension of the real world locked firmly outside the door.
"You're an absolute pain in the ass, you know that?" Katsuki mumbles against Izuku's shirt, his voice muffled and unusually soft.
Izuku lets out a low, rumbling laugh, pressing a brief, gentle kiss into Katsuki's hair. "Yeah. I've been told."
Katsuki gives him a light, half-hearted shove back, finally breaking the embrace, though he keeps one hand firmly fisted in the fabric of Izuku's hoodie. He refuses to look completely soft for too long, clearing his throat as he steps back an inch.
"Alright, that's enough heavy garbage for one day," Katsuki grumbles, though the edge of his mouth twitches upward into a faint, reluctant smirk. "If you're staying for dinner, you're chopping the vegetables. I'm not doing all the work, 'm tired."
Izuku smiles, all the lingering weight vanishing from his shoulders as he easily holds his ground. "Yes sir."
—
Two days have passed since the heavy talk in the apartment, and the rhythm of their new reality has settled into something almost normal. Katsuki is back to his usual schedule—pulling late hours in the advanced chemistry labs, running titrations, and finalizing data sets for his department—while pretending he isn't constantly checking his phone to see if Spider-Man is currently swinging across the city skyline.
Izuku, for his part, has been meticulously following his own rule. He hasn't let Katsuki anywhere near a crime scene. Whenever the police scanners crackle to life or a syndicate faction starts moving contraband through the district, Izuku intercepts them early, dragging the fights blocks away just to ensure the glowing green dot on his phone stays safely anchored to the science building or Katsuki’s apartment.
He thinks he’s keeping him safe. He thinks the distance is working.
It’s past 9:00 PM when the shift happens.
Katsuki is walking back from a late lab session, cutting across a wide, open municipal plaza that sits right between the science campus and the subway line. His bag is slung loosely over one shoulder as he scrolls through a set of reaction notes on his phone.
He doesn’t notice the sound at first—just a sudden, heavy metallic screech echoing across the open pavement.
Then comes the frantic chatter of police dispatch bleeding through a cracked-open window across the plaza, followed by the deafening roar of a heavy engine tearing over the concrete curbs.
Katsuki stops dead in his tracks, his head snapping up toward the disturbance.
In the back of his mind, the sensible voice—Izuku's voice, low and earnest—tells him to turn around. Walk the other way. Get out of the zone.
Instead, Katsuki steps closer to the edge of the plaza's grand staircase, his jaw tightening. He isn't looking for a fight; he just wants to see what's happening.
Right in the middle of the open plaza, a heavy cargo van has skidded violently to a halt, spraying gravel across the pavement. Its doors are thrown open. Two masked men—heavy-set enforcers wearing the distinct, tactical body armor of the local syndicate Izuku has been dismantling all week—are aggressively shoving metal crates toward the open back doors.
Katsuki takes half a step back, realizing immediately that he’s stumbled into an active, high-level drop right out in the open. This isn't a petty purse-snatching; these are the guys Izuku has been bleeding over.
He reaches into his pocket, his thumb brushing against his phone to pull up the emergency comms link, ready to drop a silent ping.
“Don't move, kid.”
A cold, heavy barrel presses hard against the back of Katsuki’s neck.
Katsuki’s breath catches. His entire body locks up, the blood rushing violently in his ears as a second enforcer steps out from behind one of the concrete pillars, a heavy-gauge pistol steady against his spine.
"Thought you could just stand there and watch, huh?" the enforcer mutters, his voice rough and low. "Boss has been looking for anyone poking around our routes. Get in the van."
Miles away, crouching on a water tower overlooking the financial district, Izuku taps his comms unit, pulling up the local grid monitor just to double-check that the sector is clear before he finally calls it a night.
On the corner of his HUD, a small, static-free beacon glows a steady, reliable green.
Science department building.
Izuku exhales a slow, quiet breath, the tension in his jaw easing just a fraction. He knows Katsuki is still buried under titration logs and post-grad lab reports; he can practically picture the blonde sitting under the harsh fluorescent lights, rubbing his eyes and muttering curses at a stubborn flask. Knowing Katsuki is safely anchored in a secure building miles away is the only reason Izuku’s finger even hovers over the button to toggle his comms into standby mode.
Then, the tracking app on his secondary wrist-display gives a sharp, single ping.
It’s not a distress signal. It’s a velocity warning.
Izuku frowns, his eyes snapping down to the glowing interface. The green dot—the one that had been rigidly stationary at the university quad for the last forty minutes—has suddenly detached itself from the grid.
It isn't walking. It’s moving at forty miles per hour.
A cold spike of adrenaline stabs straight through Izuku’s chest. His fingers fly across the glass screen, zooming in on the trajectory. The dot isn't following any pedestrian walkways or subway lines. It’s cutting a jagged, linear path straight across the municipal district, accelerating past intersections where no civilian on foot or public transit could possibly travel.
Someone has him in a vehicle.
For a fraction of a second, Izuku doesn't panic. His brain, conditioned by years of split-second tactical calculations, immediately tries to rationalize it. An Uber? A rideshare? Maybe he caught a lift with a lab partner.
He opens the audio feed he embedded in the tracker’s secondary layer—a feed he swore to himself he wouldn't abuse unless it was a worst-case scenario.
Static hisses through the tiny earpiece. Then, muffled by the roar of heavy tires and the tinny rattle of a vehicle interior, Katsuki’s voice cuts through.
“—tell your boss that if he thinks a pair of cheap zip-ties is going to keep my hands tied behind my back while I map out the structural integrity of this tin can, he’s out of his damn mind.”
A rough, gravelly laugh barks in response. "Be quiet, kid. The boss wants a clean interrogation, not a lecture on material fatigue.”
The audio feed cuts off with a sharp, fumbling click as if the phone has been shoved deep into a pocket or tossed onto the floorboards.
The silence that rushes back into Izuku’s ears is deafening. A terrifying, hyper-focused clarity drops over his mind like a sheet of industrial plate glass. Every heartbeat drops deep into his stomach, heavy and deliberate, pumping ice-cold adrenaline through his veins.
Izuku stands up slowly from the ledge, his joints popping in the quiet night air. The green dot is approaching the old industrial docklands—a maze of rusted shipping containers, abandoned warehouses, and narrow service roads far away from civilian eyes.
He doesn't scramble. He doesn't trip over his own feet.
With mechanical precision, Izuku reaches up, his fingers gripping the edge of his cloth mask and pulling it down just long enough to adjust the respirator seal, locking it tight across his face with a sharp click. His eyes, completely devoid of their usual warm, anxious light, lock onto the glowing red coordinates flashing on his HUD.
He steps off the edge of the high-rise. He drops like a stone into the empty air, pulling his limbs tight to maximize his terminal velocity before snapping his wrist forward at the absolute last microsecond. A thick, reinforced cable of high-tensile webbing fires upward, striking a steel crane arm with a deafening thwip.
He swings low, clearing a ten-story billboard with inches to spare, the wind tearing violently at his suit. He isn't flying blindly out of panic; he is calculating vectors, wind shear, and interception routes. The van is doing roughly sixty down the interstate connector, heading straight for warehouse district 4B. Izuku adjusts his trajectory, cutting hard across a diagonal avenue to intercept them before they even reach the gates.
They wanted a target. They wanted leverage.
As Izuku launches himself into the next arc, his knuckles whitening around his web-shooters, a dark, absolute promise settles over him. They are about to find out what happens when you back a cornered animal into a room with the only thing in the world it refuses to lose.
The heavy cargo van cuts its headlights a block away from the abandoned docklands, its tires crunching aggressively over loose gravel before slamming to a halt beside a corrugated metal warehouse.
In the back, Katsuki doesn't wait to be handled.
Before the rear doors can even be thrown open, he shifts his weight, sliding his wrists upward. The cheap plastic zip-ties biting into his skin groan under the friction, but Katsuki ignores the searing burn, leveraging his shoulder against a stack of metal crates to force his hands forward.
The door flies open, flooding the dark interior with the harsh glow of a single overhead security light.
"Alright, get out—ack!"
The enforcer pulling the door back barely gets the word out before Katsuki’s booted foot snaps upward, catching him square under the chin with enough velocity to snap his head back and drop him instantly into the dirt, unconscious.
But the sound of the heavy thud echoes sharply across the quiet docklands.
From inside the open bay doors of the main warehouse twenty feet away, a collective shout goes up.
"Hey! What the hell happened out there?!"
Katsuki’s head snaps toward the voice. Through the shadows, the harsh glare of overhead floods reveals a secondary group pouring out of the building—not just one or two guards, but a full squad of nearly thirty syndicate enforcers, all heavy-set, armed, and sprinting directly toward the van.
Katsuki scrambles over the threshold of the vehicle, adrenaline spiking into overdrive. He tries to bolt toward the perimeter fence, but he's barely taken three steps across the uneven gravel before heavy boots slam into the ground around him, cutting off his escape route.
Three enforcers intercept him instantly, lunging forward from the pack.
Katsuki ducks a wild, haymaker punch, pivoting on his heel to drive his elbow hard into the nearest man's ribs. The enforcer wheezes, stumbling back, but a second guard tackles him fiercely around the waist, bringing them both crashing down onto the jagged stones.
Katsuki thrashes violently, twisting his core with every ounce of strength he has, wrenching his right arm free. He drives his fist straight into the guard's jaw, sending him rolling off with a bloody nose. But as Katsuki scrambles back up to his knees, his breath catching in his throat, a third enforcer looms over him with a cold, desperate look in his eyes, realizing they are losing control.
"Not this time, you little rat," the enforcer spits, his hand flashing downward in a vicious, blurred arc.
A heavy, five-inch combat knife catches the light, plunging deep into Katsuki’s stomach.
The world abruptly stops.
A sharp, agonizing gasp tears itself out of Katsuki’s throat. His hands fly down instinctively, his fingers pressing hard around the hilt of the blade buried in his abdomen, feeling the warm, wet rush of blood immediately soaking through his dark sweater and spilling over his palms.
The enforcer wrenches the blade free with a sickening squelch, stepping back as Katsuki’s knees finally buckle.
Katsuki collapses sideways onto the cold gravel, his vision instantly tunneling into jagged black edges. The white-hot pain radiating from his stomach is blinding, stealing every breath from his lungs. Around him, the shouting of the approaching swarm of enforcers grows deafening, but the sound feels miles away, muffled beneath a thick wall of static.
“Spider-Man!” someone yells from the edge of the pack. “It’s the freak—take him down!”
A high-pitched, deafening sonic thwip splits the night air above the warehouse roof.
Down drops a shadow, fast and heavy as a falling meteor.
Izuku hits the asphalt in the dead center of the rushing crowd, his boots cracking the pavement beneath him. He doesn't waste a second on warnings. The moment his white lenses lock onto the sprawling pack of thirty enforcers—and then, past them, onto Katsuki’s motionless, bleeding form crumpled on the ground—every trace of human restraint evaporates entirely.
"Move," Izuku’s voice vibrates through his mask, sounding less like a person and more like an industrial engine grinding to a halt.
The frontline enforcers charge him all at once, raising heavy iron pipes and sidearms.
Izuku explodes into motion. He catches the first swing with his bare hand, the sheer kinetic force stopping the pipe dead in its tracks before he twists it out of the man’s grip and sweeps his legs out from under him. He fires a double-handed web-line into the chests of two more enforcers, hurling them backward into a stacked pallet of shipping crates with a bone-rattling crash.
They keep coming—wave after wave of bodies pressing in from all sides, trying to swamp him under sheer numbers.
Izuku's tearing through the pack with merciless efficiency. He flings bodies into shipping containers, webs weapons out of hands, and drops men left and right, but thirty armed enforcers in a confined space take time to clear. Every second that ticks by—every punch he has to throw, every heavy body he has to forcefully subdue and hurl out of his path—is a second burning away in his chest like acid.
Get out of my way, he screams internally, his heart hammering against his ribs with a violent, deafening roar as he floors a massive brute into the dirt with a brutal roundhouse kick.
“Shoot him!” someone shrieks from the back.
Izuku spins, firing a fan of high-tensile webbing across a cluster of three men, yanking them off their feet and slamming them into the ground simultaneously.
The last of the thirty enforcers scrambles backward, terrified out of his mind, before Izuku grabs him by the tactical vest and launches him ten feet through the open door of the warehouse, where he crashes into a stack of metal barrels and stays down.
The entire warehouse yard falls dead, echoing silence.
Thirty men are scattered across the gravel, groaning, unconscious, or completely immobilized.
Izuku stands alone in the center of the debris, his chest heaving violently, his tactical suit torn at the shoulder, leaking the sound of his ragged, frantic breathing through his respirator.
His white lenses snap down toward the spot where Katsuki fell.
There is a dark, spreading pool of crimson soaking into the gray stones beside Katsuki’s side.
For a terrifying, fractional second, Izuku’s legs refuse to work. The absolute worst fear of his entire existence—the nightmare he has tried to outrun every single night he put on the mask—is lying right there in front of him.
Izuku crosses the distance in a single, desperate lunge, dropping hard onto his knees beside Katsuki in the dirt.
"Katsuki," Izuku chokes out, his hands hovering frantically over Katsuki’s body, terrified of where to touch him, terrified that applying pressure won't be enough.
The blood is hot, thick, and continuous, pouring out between Katsuki’s pale, trembling fingers as he weakly tries to hold his hand against the wound. His lips are colorless, parted in shallow, hitching breaths as his heavy-lidded crimson eyes struggle to focus on the mask above him.
Katsuki’s fingers scrabble blindly against the rough gravel before his trembling hand clutches onto the fabric of Izuku’s tactical suit, his knuckles whitening with a desperate, white-knuckled grip.
Izuku doesn't hesitate for a fraction of a second.
His gloved hand presses heavily and directly into the jagged tear in Katsuki’s sweater, sealing his palm over the horrific wound to apply absolute, unyielding pressure to stem the bleeding. Warm, thick crimson immediately slicks his reinforced tactical glove, but he doesn't blink, locking his weight down to block the hemorrhage.
Katsuki’s breath catches in a sharp, rattling gasp, his body violently shuddering as white-hot pain flares through his stomach. Panic, cold and primal, claws at his chest, and his hands blindly scrabble forward, his fingers clutching desperately onto the fabric of Izuku’s suit with a white-knuckled, bruising grip. He can't get enough air, his vision tunneling rapidly into dark, suffocating edges.
"I can't—" Katsuki gasps, a sharp, choked wheeze breaking his voice entirely as another wave of dark blood spills over his fingers. "Izuku, I—"
"I know, I know, I've got you," Izuku murmurs, his voice cracking violently, stripped of every last layer of disguise or control.
Without waiting, Izuku slips his other arm securely under Katsuki’s knees and heaves him up against his chest, sweeping him off the ground entirely. Katsuki instinctively buries his face against Izuku’s shoulder, his fingers locking tighter into the material as the sudden, jarring movement sends another wave of agony through his stomach.
With a deafening, desperate thwip, a thick line of high-tensile webbing fires upward, anchoring deep into a steel crane arm.
He swings hard into the arc, hurtling through the night air at breakneck speed, using his own body as a rigid shield to keep Katsuki pressed safely and tightly against him against the rushing wind.
"Stay with me, Katsuki," Izuku yells over the roar of the wind, his voice trembling with raw, unadulterated terror as he fires another web-line, propelling them faster toward the city skyline. "Keep your eyes open. Don't close them, look at me—stay with me!"
Katsuki’s head lolls weakly against Izuku’s shoulder, his breathing shallow and erratic, but he forces his fingers to squeeze the fabric of the suit tighter, holding on for dear life as the glowing lights of the emergency ward's rooftop come racing into view through the dark.
The doors of the hospital’s trauma rooftop burst open with a violent, deafening bang as Izuku hits the concrete hard, his boots sliding across the surface before he breaks into a dead sprint toward the medical bay entrance.
"Help!" Izuku roars, his voice stripping away every last shred of his vigilante composure, sounding raw and terrifyingly human as he barrels through the automatic doors. "Trauma response now! Stab wound, massive internal hemorrhage—move!"
Nurses and ER physicians scramble instantly at the sound of the panic in his voice, wheeling a gurney forward out of the trauma bay.
Izuku gently deposits Katsuki onto the mattress, but the second he tries to pull his hand back, Katsuki’s fingers weakly slip off his tactical suit, his pale hand going limp as his eyes roll back, plunging into unconsciousness.
A doctor calls out, saying something incoherent, reaching for the trauma shears to cut away Katsuki's blood-soaked sweater, as they wheel Katsuki down the corridor, a nurse locking the secure doors behind the team.
Izuku stands alone in the stark, fluorescent-lit hallway, his chest heaving under his torn tactical suit, his gloved palms completely coated in Katsuki's blood. The silence that follows is deafening, leaving him staring at the closed doors with his heart hammering a violent, terrifying rhythm against his ribs.
Minutes bleed into what feels like agonizing hours. Every muffled clatter of surgical instruments, every sharp beep of a distant monitor bleeding through the heavy doors sends a fresh spike of white-hot panic straight through his chest. He can’t sit still, pacing a frantic, jagged line back and forth across the narrow corridor until his boots squeak against the floor.
He’s strong. He’s tough. He survived worse in the alleyways, Izuku tells himself, desperately trying to anchor his racing thoughts to anything rational, but the memory of how pale Katsuki looked, how weak his grip had grown, suffocates every logical argument.
Finally, the heavy double doors swing open with a soft pneumatic hiss.
A surgeon in scrubs, his forehead dotted with sweat and a clipboard clutched tightly in his hand, steps out into the hallway. He pulls down his surgical cap, his eyes scanning the corridor before locking onto the imposing, blood-stained figure standing rigidly in the corner.
Izuku crosses the distance between them in two long, desperate strides, his voice cracking raw.
"Is he—?"
"He's stable," the surgeon interrupts, holding up a hand to steady him, letting out a heavy, exhausted breath. "You brought him in just in time. The blade missed his peritoneal artery by less than an inch, but it caused severe internal bleeding. We managed to close the laceration and repair the tissue damage. He's currently under anesthesia, but his vitals are stabilizing."
The crushing weight pressing down on Izuku’s lungs evaporates all at once, leaving him gasping for air as a violent, shaky exhale tears itself from his throat. He presses a blood-stained hand against the wall to steady himself, the sheer relief hitting him like a physical blow.
"Can I...can I see him?" Izuku asks, his voice dropping to a broken, quiet whisper.
The surgeon hesitates, glancing at the blood covering Izuku's tactical gear, before nodding slowly. "Recovery room three. He's going to be out for a while, but...yeah. Go on in."
Izuku doesn't wait. He slips past the doctor and down the corridor, pushing open the door to recovery room three with a gentle, cautious click.
The room is dim, lit only by the steady, rhythmic green pulse of the heart monitor beside the bed. Katsuki lies motionless against the white pillows, looking far too small under the thin hospital blanket. An IV line snakes into the back of his hand, and the steady, mechanical rise and fall of his chest is the only proof that he's still breathing.
Izuku steps slowly to the side of the bed, pulling up a plastic chair. He doesn't touch him right away, terrified of hurting him, but his gloved hand reaches out slowly to gently curl over the edge of the mattress, right beside Katsuki’s limp hand.
"I'm here," Izuku murmurs into the empty, quiet room, his voice thick with unshed tears as he bows his head, pressing his forehead against the edge of the bed. "I'm right here. You're safe."
The steady, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor is the only sound breaking the heavy silence of the recovery room. Hours slip by under the harsh fluorescent lights, Izuku sitting rigidly beside the bed, his blood-stained hands clasped tightly together, refusing to move an inch.
Finally, a low, raspy groan breaks the stillness.
Izuku’s head snaps up. On the bed, Katsuki’s brow furrows sharply. His eyelids flicker, fighting against the heavy fog of anesthesia, before they slowly crack open. He stares blankly at the sterile white ceiling for a long moment, blinking away the blur, before his head shifts weakly to the side.
His crimson eyes land on Izuku.
For a few seconds, neither of them speaks. Katsuki tries to shift his weight, a sharp hiss of pain escaping his teeth as his hand instinctively twitches toward his bandaged stomach.
"Don't move," Izuku says, his voice thick, cracked, and barely above a whisper. He instantly stands up, hovering awkwardly over the bed, terrified to touch him. "Let me...let me get a nurse—"
"Shut up," Katsuki rasps out, his voice dry and gravelly. He forces himself to swallow, glaring up at Izuku through half-lidded eyes. "Stop hovering like a damn ghost. I'm not dead."
The words are supposed to be sharp, but they lack all their usual bite, sounding dangerously weak and exhausted.
The brief flash of relief on Izuku’s face instantly crumbles, replaced by a dark, suffocating wave of guilt. He looks away, staring down at the floor as his hands clench into tight fists at his sides. The blood dried across his tactical suit feels like lead.
"We need to stop this," Izuku says quietly.
Katsuki freezes. His brow pulls down into a hard, confused frown. "What?"
"This," Izuku repeats, his voice trembling as he finally looks back down at him, his green eyes swimming with absolute, agonizing defeat. "We stop. We go back to how it was—You go back to your labs, your normal life, and I stay in the shadows where I belong. I’m putting a target on your back, Katsuki. I almost got you killed tonight."
The words drop into the room like a physical blow.
Katsuki just stares at him. The initial exhaustion in his eyes doesn't vanish into anger right away; instead, a heavy, sinking weight settles deep into his chest. He blinks slowly, trying to process the words, the sheer absurdity and pain of hearing Izuku hand him a ticket out of his life like it's some kind of favor.
"What are you talking about?" Katsuki mutters, his voice barely a breath, sounding far smaller and more tired than he ever lets himself be. "We...we just talked about this."
"And tonight proved we were wrong," Izuku says, his voice cracking, looking away because he can't bear to meet Katsuki's gaze. "I told myself I could keep you safe if I just set rules, if I kept my distance. But I couldn't. You were lying on that gravel bleeding out because of me. If I step away, if we end this now before it goes any further, you won't ever have to look down a barrel again."
As the words sink in—as Izuku systematically lists every reason why Katsuki is a liability, why letting him go is the 'right' thing to do—a slow, burning ache unfurls under Katsuki’s ribs.
It’s not just the physical pain from the stitches. It’s the creeping, humiliating realization that Izuku is standing there actively deciding to shut him out, talking about him like he's a fragile, broken glass object that needs to be packed away for its own good.
Katsuki’s jaw tightens. His hands, gripping the edges of the thin hospital blanket, start to tremble, not from weakness anymore, but from a sudden, rising tide of betrayal.
"You think..." Katsuki’s voice drops into a harsh, ragged whisper, his crimson eyes locking onto the back of Izuku’s head with a dangerous intensity. "You think you get to just decide that? For both of us?"
"Katsuki, I'm trying to keep you alive—"
"Don't you dare give me that bullshit," Katsuki snaps, his voice suddenly sharp, slicing through the room with a rising tremor of fury as he forces his upper body to move, ignoring the white-hot pull in his abdomen. "You're not keeping me alive, you're running away because you're scared out of your mind!"
Izuku flinches, finally turning back to look at him, but Katsuki is already surging past the hurt, the raw vulnerability entirely overtaken by a fierce, blazing rage.
"I didn't ask you to wrap me in bubble wrap, and I sure as hell didn't ask you to make my choices for me!" Katsuki breathes heavily, his chest heaving as the monitor beside him starts to beep in a frantic, escalating rhythm. "You think I don't know what the risks are? You think I didn't sign up for this the second I looked past that stupid mask and decided I cared about the idiot underneath it?!"
"I can't lose you!" Izuku breaks, his voice cracking into a desperate, agonizing shout as he takes a step forward, his hands flying up in a plea. "If you died tonight—if I had been two seconds too late—I wouldn't survive it, Katsuki! And knowing that I dragged you into the crossfire would destroy me every single day!"
"Then stop acting like a martyr and start trusting me!" Katsuki fires back, his voice thick with a mixture of anger and unhidden heartbreak as he glares up at him, his chest burning with every agonizing breath. "You were there!" Katsuki adds, "You got there, you tore through thirty guys, and you brought me here. I knew what I was getting into when I found out your secret. I let you walk into my life—"
He tries to force the rest of the words out, but his chest suddenly seizes up. The sheer, overwhelming frustration of being sidelined, of having the person he cares about most try to hand him away like a discarded problem, crashes over him all at once.
His vision blurs, hot and sharp, burning behind his eyelids before he can stop it. A single, furious tear breaks free, cutting a clean, hot path down his dirt-streaked cheek, followed immediately by another.
Katsuki lets out a ragged, humiliated gasp, his hands violently twisting into the hospital blanket as he tries to blink the moisture away, furiously angry that his own body is betraying him when he's trying to yell.
"Damn it—" Katsuki chokes out, his voice cracking horribly, the rough edge dissolving into a wet, broken sound as another tear slips down. He glares up at Izuku through a shimmering, furious blur, his chest heaving. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to look at me like I'm...like I'm something that broke and just throw me away because you're scared!"
Izuku freezes dead in his tracks.
The argument, the panic, the desperate excuses—everything grinds to a violent halt. Seeing the tough, unyielding, fiercely proud Katsuki sitting in a hospital bed with tears streaming down his face, trembling with absolute frustration and heartbreak, breaks something deep inside Izuku's chest.
All the defensive walls Izuku had built up over the last hour crumble into dust.
Without a single word, Izuku closes the remaining distance between them. He doesn't care about the monitors, the sterile room, or his own blood-stained suit. He drops heavily onto the edge of the mattress, sliding his arms around Katsuki and pulling him straight against his chest, burying his face into the blonde's shoulder.
Katsuki stiffens instinctively, a fresh sob catching in his throat, his hands coming up to shove weakly against Izuku's chest.
"Get off—don't touch me—" Katsuki stammers out, his voice thick and wet, trying to push him away while simultaneously, desperately clutching onto the back of Izuku's suit, pulling him closer.
"I'm sorry," Izuku breathes against his skin, his own voice cracking violently as he holds him tighter, burying his face in the crook of Katsuki's neck. "I'm so sorry, Katsuki. I won't do it. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not leaving."
Katsuki’s shoulders hitch violently, a choked, ragged sob breaking past his lips as he caves in entirely. He stops trying to hold it together, pressing his face harder into the crook of Izuku’s neck as tears stream hot and fast down his cheeks, soaking into the dark fabric of the suit.
Izuku feels the shift instantly. His arms tighten around Katsuki's waist and back, pulling him as flush against his chest as the hospital bed and the IV lines will allow, taking the full weight of his collapse.
"I've got you," Izuku murmurs over and over, his voice thick with unshed tears as he rocks him gently, pressing a soft, lingering kiss against Katsuki's messy blonde hair. "I've got you, Katsuki. I'm right here."
One of Izuku’s hands moves up, sliding carefully to the side of Katsuki’s face. With a thumb as gentle and steady as he can manage, he wipes away the fresh tears spilling over Katsuki’s eyelashes, tracing his cheekbone with infinite, aching care.
"You're okay," Izuku whispers against his temple, his thumb brushing a stray tear from his jawline. "I'm so sorry you had to go through that. I'm sorry I ever made you feel like you were something I could walk away from. You're never getting rid of me, okay?"
Katsuki lets out another wet, shuddering gasp, his fingers clutching desperately at the back of Izuku’s suit as he leans heavily into the touch, letting the steady, grounding warmth of Izuku's hand anchor him through the storm.
Katsuki’s sobs slowly taper off into quiet, ragged breathing, the adrenaline and sheer emotional exhaustion finally taking their heavy toll on his battered body. He stays pressed against Izuku’s shoulder, his forehead resting heavily against the crook of Izuku's neck, too tired to move or even pretend to care about how vulnerable he looks right now.
Izuku doesn't pull away. He keeps one arm firmly locked around Katsuki’s waist to support his weight, while his other hand continues to gently card through the damp, messy blonde hair at the nape of his neck, offering a steady, rhythmic comfort.
"Do you want me to call a nurse?" Izuku whispers softly, his lips brushing against Katsuki's hair as he feels the blond's body grow heavier and more slack against him. "Or...do you want me to get the bed lowered?"
"No," Katsuki murmurs, his voice a gravelly, exhausted rasp that barely carries across the room. He shifts his face just enough to press his forehead against Izuku’s shoulder, his fingers lazily curling into the fabric of the tactical suit. "Don't move. Just...shut up and stay here."
"Okay," Izuku answers instantly, a faint, tender smile touching the corners of his mouth even as fresh, quiet tears prick at his own eyes. "I'm not going anywhere."
Slowly and carefully, Izuku helps guide Katsuki back down against the pillows, easing the tension off his freshly stitched abdomen. But even as Katsuki lies back, he refuses to let go entirely, keeping a tight, white-knuckled grip on the sleeve of Izuku’s suit.
Izuku pulls a chair right up against the mattress, sliding his hand into Katsuki's uninjured one and lacing their fingers together. The monitor beside them ticks along in a calm, steady rhythm, and under the pale, quiet light of the hospital room, Katsuki's heavy eyelids finally slip shut, dragging him down into a deep, safe sleep with Izuku right beside him.