Chapter Text
It started with a knot in the left shoulder. Something simple. An ache anyone could ease out with a few simple stretches and pain killers or just wait it out a few days till it was gone... This though, this was something neither his quirk specialist nor his regular doctor had a simple fix too. Bakugo would take any alternative method. Anything but what he couldn’t help be see as quitting his dream. Falling behind and coming up short yet again. Imminent failure.
Katsuki wasn’t sure if he wanted to scream or to cry. He felt a little like both would be fitting but couldn’t bring himself to do anything but grit his teeth out of frustration and ever-present anger. A violent emotional release wouldn’t bring his aching head relief anyways. It was hopeless.
He was about to lose everything. To become a washed-up has-been, only ever having touched the Hero Chart’s Top Ten. A hero crippled, even by migraines, was clearly useless. Especially, when their own quirk which was loud and flashy that hurt them.
In the silence on his trip home, he turns the diagnosis and his doctor’s words over and over again in his head. It eats at him, gnawing out the soft parts of his insides. Leaves him dry and aching in places so deep, he refuses to think of them.
“So.. What did the doctor say?” Shoto asks.
“He said not to expect much from my shitty brain and fucking useless stupid fucking piece of trash body.” Is his first, thoughtless reply. Time has made sure his partner knows him well enough to read between the lines.
Shoto is always stoicism and soft smiles. Patient enough to take Bakugo apart gently, like the soft breaking of bread, and not at all like Bakugo’s personal method of going at anything with brute force and an attitude of hit till it breaks. Blunt aggression, not unlike smashing eggs on the edge of a granite countertop, not caring if they explode and end with a complete mess. No, Shoto waits him out. They let the silence drag on between them, pressing but not heavy.
“Ok, fine! No, that’s not what he said! He said I have to take a break or else the migraines could become something permanent.” Pain becoming a never-ending road of recovery and relapse, rather than a short detour in his career. It terrified him. He could’ve lost an eye. Or been facially scarred by a wayward self-explosion. There were worse fates, he told himself. “I’ll get over it!”
“And what does this mean for the time being?”
Bakugo winced. Leave it to his partner to dig at what he’d rather not say. “Guess it’ll just be you knee-deep in bullshit by yourself for a while. Maybe it’ll be nice to get some peace from all the fucking paperwork I won’t have to do with you interrupting me half the damn time!”
Shoto just eyes him and lets out a small “Hmm.” before turning back to looking at his phone and playing with the little cat charm dangling from the bottom. “Perhaps.”
“What then? You gonna be lonely while I’m fucking stuck in the damn house like a loon?”
“Well... It might be nice to spend a few days together.”
“What? Like a shitty vacation in the house?”
“Basically, yes. That is along the lines of what I was thinking.” Shoto still isn’t looking at him and his lips are drawn into a tight line.
It stings. He swallows down the frustrated knot that’s lodged itself in his throat. “You just don’t want to do your paperwork alone.” Katsuki weakly accuses, watching with some relief as the corner of Shoto’s mouth turns up just a bit.
He wants to kick himself a bit for putting what could count as a frown on his partner’s face, to begin with. He’s come so far from being the jealous, insecure teenager who worried about “losing” to people. Before he had really grown into himself and begun to really understand what success really was. What it really meant.
He reaches over and gently pulls Shoto’s hand away from the phone charm and gently holds it in his own. “We should do. That. have a shitty vacation in the house.” He doesn’t call it their home, even though it is. He’ll leave that stuff to Shoto.
“Ah.” Shoto almost looks as though he’s played Bakugo. Sometimes he looks a bit too much like a cat who successfully had gotten away with theft. It makes Bakugo reconsider the other man through squinted eyes. “Will you cook for us then?”
“Tcht.” At least the catch was something as simple and stupid as his Shoto was. “As if I would let you eat that shitty garbage you call food when I’d have to watch it go in your mouth!”
Shoto gives him a full smile for it. It’s small but it’s there and Bakugo hopes to god he can get past this stupid migraine shit so that he never becomes some pathetic weakling and loses it.