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“I don’t know what the hell to do with you,” Katsuki mumbles. “No survival skills.”
Though the words aim to jab, his fingers are far more gentle. With careful precision he dabs at the deep cut in Izuku’s shoulder, disinfecting as quickly as he can so that wince would melt off his face.
Izuku opens his mouth—likely to cough up some smart-ass comment—but instead thumps the cabinet with his heel and hisses at the next dab. Serves him right.
“Seriously, I look like a goddamn medic to you?”
Through watery eyes, flushed cheeks, and grimaced lips, Izuku manages a shaky smile. “You’re way easier on the eyes than the medics that were there.”
That earns Izuku a rougher dab, and his head thunks against the mirror behind him.
“Kacchan!”
“Quit wigglin’ around. One of these days, I’m gonna sign for an apartment closer to the hospital so I can just send your dumbass next door.” Katsuki readies butterfly closures and balances them on Izuku’s thigh. There’ll be no All Might bandaids for him today.
“The civilians needed the medics way more than me,” Izuku murmurs. “Plus, I missed you…”
Shut it, Katsuki tells his fluttering heart. It always acts like they’re still teenagers and not pushing thirty, like they haven’t been in this exact position a thousand freaking times, Izuku gritting his teeth on the bathroom counter while Katsuki plays nurse. Just outside the bathroom door lies a mess of their shoes, red boots and loafers and matching Dynamight and Deku slippers in the genkan.
After applying a generous layer of antibiotic and securing the butterfly closures over Izuku’s cut, Katsuki tenderly raises his arm to wrap it with gauze. It’ll scar nicely on that landscape of raised skin; when Izuku’s students ask, he’ll joke that he fought a bear and walked it off instead of the real story, where he turned up like a stray dog and then subjected Katsuki to the terrible lines he called flirting.
“All done,” says Katsuki, barely louder than the humming of the space heater in the living room. He rests his hands on thighs still clad in that same green jumpsuit and finally meets Izuku’s eyes.
The nerd is already looking, to be expected. A bead of sweat trails its way into the valleys of faint crow's feet that frame his eyes. With a tired sigh, Katsuki thumbs it away, and for some godforsaken reason, his hand lingers to cradle a cheek that never lost its roundness.
“Thank you nurse Kacchan,” Izuku says smugly. Too easily, he turns to plant a featherlight kiss on the blue veins just under Katsuki’s palm. “You’re always saving me.”
He can’t help the snort that leaves his nose. “Seriously. No damn survival skills. How’d you make it this far?”
“Hmm,” Izuku tangles their fingers together and drops their hands into his lap. Thumbs trace over Katsuki’s knuckles and in their wake, goosebumps rise. “By the grace of an awful lot of people, one of them being you.”
Katsuki’s not so sure how their foreheads ended up meeting—he’s been too busy studying all the shades of green in Izuku’s eyes. “This better be the last injury for at least a couple of months.”
Long, long eyelashes kiss his cheekbones as Izuku closes his eyes and the distance between their mouths. The golden ring on the chain at his neck glints in the fluorescent bathroom light. “Love you too, Kacchan.”
It happens on a random Wednesday evening after patrol.
Technically, Katsuki is rushing; it’s freezing and raining outside, a combo straight from hell, and a warm idiot is waiting to cuddle up at home.
He thinks he imagines it at first, or that his hearing aids are amplifying ambient noises again—the barely-there squeaks and sounds of struggles that he follows into a dark alley.
As someone who was kidnapped by villains in his teens and held hostage a couple of times in his early twenties, Katsuki always stays vigilant; there’s never a sound too innocent or a situation too mundane for villains to stage an ambush. So he dips into the shadows of the alley with a stealth grenade tucked into his palm and a finger hovering over his work phone for a quick SOS.
Slowly, he approaches the source of the struggle; with years of balancing on Jeanist’s thinnest fibers, his footsteps are delicate enough to make no sound. It’s an average metal trash can with countless disgusting stains on it, rattling and growling. He imagines yet another villain with a pesky shrinking Quirk and wastes no time ripping the lid off the trash can.
Silence. Katsuki waits to be jumped on, ambushed, anything, but nothing happens. He dares to take a peek inside and nearly fucking gasps when two glowing yellow eyes blink back at him.
There it is, between a dirty pair of jeans and a gutted salmon. Tiny and helpless, filthy and flea-ridden as all hell, gigantic bug eyes, and utterly pathetic. You can’t even tell if it’s a black cat or just that damn dirty.
Coming from a household that his mother never allowed pets into, Katsuki frowns at it for a good minute. Sure, a classmate would foster a cat here and there and Izuku would show him countless videos in failed attempts of coercion, but he’s never been this up close and personal with a kitten before.
Suddenly that petrified look in its eyes melts away and it actually has the balls to fucking spit at Katsuki, trembling legs and watery eyes and all.
Ignoring its entire hissing and spitting and huffing and puffing debacle, Katsuki picks it up by the extra skin on its neck like he’s seen in videos on the internet. He raises the bony little thing so that they’re face-to-face, and it’s like all the fight leaves its body.
“Mrow,” it chirps weakly, so unwell that it doesn’t even scratch at Katsuki. How can such a weak thing not dare to fight back? How on earth could it not defend itself—what if Katsuki had been a predator, or even worse, a human that meant harm?
“Stupid. Where’s your mom?”
Despite the lack of physical fight, a stubborn fire burns behind its amber eyes. It glares at Katsuki like he’s the damn one who put it in a trash can and bares the few teeth that have grown in.
It’s a fighter.
“No survival skills,” he murmurs, taking off one of his gloves and gently tucking its body into it. The kitten is trembling; whether from fear or the snow falling around them, Katsuki’s next decision is simple. He zips it into his jacket, pinches his nose to block its horrid smell, and heads home.
In the shower hours later and with countless tiny red scratches over his wrists that served as proof that yes, the kitten indeed needed a bit more energy to fight back, Katsuki sighs. He lets the hot water wash away the grime from digging around in a trash can and literally wrestling with an animal about fifty times smaller than him.
As if on cue, the bathroom door slams open so hard it ricochets shut again. It opens again, slower this time, and Katsuki feels the weight of eyes on him.
Eyes squeezed shut from the shampoo lather dripping into his face, Katsuki scowls. “Have you ever heard of fuckin’ knocking?”
“There’s nothing here I haven’t seen before,” Izuku dismisses. “Please explain the thing in the living room.”
“What is there to explain? It’s here. It’s in a box. That’s it.”
“Kacchan,” Izuku emphasizes. “There’s a baby cat in the living room.”
“There is. Could you order ramen for pickup? Tonkatsu for me.”
“Kacchan. You brought home a kitten. Do you know what this means?!”
“We can’t keep it if that’s what you’re saying,” says Katsuki.
“Give me three good reasons why we shouldn’t keep it.”
Well shit, he prepared for everything except that. If Katsuki opens his eyes, he’ll have to deal with Izuku’s pleading face, and he simply doesn’t have the energy for that today. Sticking his face directly into the running water, Katsuki tries to pretend that Izuku doesn’t exist.
“You always say it’s me who’s more likely to bring home strays,” Izuku says fondly. “What happened?”
Fighting a losing game is the story of Katsuki’s goddamn life. He groans and shuts the water off, steps out, and snatches the towel from Izuku’s hands. Izuku very patiently and very not-so-subtly checks him out as he throws pajamas on.
When Katsuki leaves to the living room, Izuku’s hot on his heels, and he can nearly physically feel the questions brewing in Izuku’s brain; so with patience gained from years and years of knowing each other and being together, Katsuki crouches by the shoebox on the floor.
The suspicion that she wasn’t black was true; under all that grime and muck were stripes on stripes of down-soft gray fur. In retrospect, she’s a run-of-the-mill stray; small for her age (three weeks, according to the internet and the fangs barely starting to peek from her gums) and painfully unremarkable.
“Found her in the damn trash,” Kacchan mumbles. “Thought it could’ve been a villain but nope, just her rustlin’ around.”
“It’s a girl?” Izuku whispers, almost like he’s too scared to speak loudly lest it bother her. She has her face smashed into a corner of the box, hiding as if Izuku could ever do a thing to hurt her. He raises a crooked finger to gently trace along her arched spine, but at his touch, she flinches and burrows further into the old UA shirt Katsuki had given her.
“Real skittish,” he adds. “Probably been away from mom a few days. Look how skinny she is.”
Izuku coos low in his throat. “Poor baby. Do you need me to pick up formula?”
“Who d’you think I am, Izuku,” Katsuki says. He ducks into the kitchen and returns with a syringe he’d prepped before getting into the shower. There’s enough formula ready for her intense feeding schedule over the next few days; every four to six hours Aizawa had said. He’d already set alarms to wake up throughout the night, too.
“Pay attention nerd, ‘cause you’ll be feeding her too.”
Gently, he reaches into the box to pluck her away from her corner, swaddling her tight in a towel so she’d stop fucking his arms up. Katsuki holds the syringe to her face, and without wasting a second, she makes a complete disaster of herself as she slurps the formula.
“Oh my god,” Izuku croaks. “This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Hah? She’s a little ugly to me.”
“Oh, quit lying,” he tuts. Izuku scoots closer to watch her milk mustache grow as it collects on the fur under her chin.
For the first time, she starts vibrating—purring—in Katsuki’s hand, and it startles him so much he nearly drops her. It’s soft, nothing compared to the motor of a purr that Shouto’s cat does, like she barely knows how to purr too.
“Kacchan, I’m in love with her.”
“I thought you were in love with me.”
“Both of you. Can we please—oh, look at her, when they blink slow like that it means she likes you. Little kitty, how’d you end up in a trash can all by yourself?”
How did this little thing end up in a closed trash can, Katsuki thinks. Too curious for her own good, most likely. “No damn survival skills.”
Not noticing Izuku’s jaw nearly hitting the ground, Katsuki raises the kitten to eye-level to wipe the dribbles of milk on her chin, and her tiny paws knead in the air as he cradles her gently. Her spotted belly is ridiculously round from a good meal; that seems to be a theme in this household, with the way Izuku indulges in his food too. “Stupid little thing.”
“Kacchan, say that again.”
“Stupid little thing?”
“No, the other—“ Izuku sniffles, and finally, Katsuki turns to him. He furiously wipes his tears away, and as soon as Katsuki rushes to put the kitten down, he laughs. “I’m okay. It’s just—you—I just love you so much.”
There in the middle of the living room with a kitten swaddled in his arms and the soft light of their Christmas tree casting soft shadows over Izuku’s face, Katsuki’s heart squeezes. It seems like he has an affinity for things with no survival skills, whether it’s the man he’s loved for the better part of his life or this kitten he found in the trash mere hours ago.
Ever so familiar with Izuku’s so-happy-he’s-devastated tears, Katsuki uses his free hand to tug his head down onto his shoulder, and Izuku goes easily. His bare shoulder grows wetter and wetter with each minute that passes by, but he’s long past the point of caring. Through his hiccups, Katsuki presses his cheek into Izuku’s curls and breathes in the scent of his tea tree dandruff shampoo.
Enough time passes for the kitten to doze off in her blanket. When Izuku’s hiccups calm down, he finally speaks, voice thick with emotion. “Look how the spots on her tummy get bigger at the roundest part.”
Katsuki ghosts a finger over the exact spots in question, and in response, the kitten yawns with a broken squeak.
“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” Izuku whines. “First, it’s you. Then, it’s you with a kitten. Shirtless. And now she’s purring and yawning. How am I gonna live through this?”
“I’ll wake you up about every five hours,” says Katsuki. “Someone’s gotta feed her.”
“What she needs is a name,” he whispers. The kitten blinks so slowly it’s like her eyes are held down by tons and tons of weight, and soon enough, she’s out again. “You should name her.”
“Good point. Trash.”
“Kacchan, no.”
“That’s where I found her, she needs to remember her roots.”
“You can’t name a kitten Trash.”
“I’m number one this year, what I say goes.”
“Well, since I’m taking number one back next year, you have to consider my input too!”
Katsuki clicks his tongue and pushes more of the towel atop the kitten like a blanket. She doesn’t even stir. “Go on, Izuku.”
“Well, I didn’t get that far…” Izuku scratches the back of his head and hunches over to study the kitten. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Treasure?”
“That’s cheesy as fuck.”
“Oh, what’s left then? Great Explosion Murder Goddess?”
“You got somethin’ to say about my hero name, Izuku?”
He hides a laugh behind a freckled hand, and for some sick reason, Katsuki lets Izuku get away with it. These years have done nothing but make him soft.
“C’mon, do you really still like it as much as you did when you were sixteen? Hey, wait—ow! Kacchan, stop it!”
“Say my hero name is cool,” Katsuki tugs Izuku’s adorably round ear harder between his fingers. “Say it.”
“Alright, alright, it’s a cool name! Lemme go!”
Barely hiding his smirk, Katsuki releases his ear with a flick. Izuku cradles his ear in a palm and pouts.
“That was mean, Kacchan.”
“Insulting my hero name wasn’t?”
Taking a long, good look at the kitten, Katsuki thinks. Goddess has a nice ring to it; it’s a name fitting for a pet of his, but not necessarily her personality as seen in bits and pieces so far. There’s not much he knows about her besides her humble beginnings in a trash can and stubbornness.
“Yeah, just call her Treasure for now,” he utters. “If it sticks it sticks. If something better fits her, we’ll just switch it to that.”
“Treasure-chan,” Izuku sings, testing it on his lips, arms threading around Katsuki’s torso. He plants a kiss on Katsuki’s collarbone. “Welcome to our little family. You’ll love it here.”
Together, they watch her flop around in her sleep for about an hour. Somehow, Izuku manages to fall asleep sitting up against Katsuki.
Weaving crooked fingers with his own, Katsuki whispers back what they’ve shared with each other a thousand times over. “Love you too, you damn nerd.”