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Katsuki looks between face and body and hopes his grimace isn’t palpable through the smoke. Even with his mask chafing his face, he isn’t positive Izuku can’t see the disgust threatening to surface.
“Are you okay?” he asks because the silence is making him want to curl up under his bed and never crawl out again. Izuku’s eyes track his movement as he slowly approaches the scene, but his body’s as still as stone.
Izuku says nothing. Under a mountain of rubble, he lies motionless.
“Izuku? Hey, can you talk to me?” Katsuki tries again. He hefts a part of the collapsed ceiling off the man. What lies beneath nearly makes him to lose his footing. “Izuku,” he calls more urgently now.
Izuku makes a noise like an animal being skinned alive. It makes every hair on Katsuki’s body stand on end. Goosebumps cover his arms and legs, prickling him under his suit.
“I’ll get you out,” Katsuki promises. He doesn’t mean for his voice to waver or for Izuku to notice. He can feel the idiot’s heavy gaze on him even as he directs the fire and rescue team to cover other parts of the folding building and get a fucking ambulance here. ‘Dynamight’s got this,’ one of them says. Katsuki’s heart sinks to catch on the unsteady floorboards.
“Kacchan,” Izuku attempts, throat utterly fucked, smoke clogging his lungs. That’s all he can manage before the coughing begins.
Katsuki’s head snaps to his face. He’s in his suit. Or... what’s left of it. His head is the only part of him that hasn’t been burned to hell and back.
He has an arm lying beside him, severed from his body. It’s reaching out to Katsuki, empty. Grasping for a hand that will never hold it.
Katsuki makes quick work unburying him. He can't think now. He has to save him, he can't think.
“You look like shit,” he chokes out to fill the silence. He hates himself for it. Hates that it’s the only thing he can say.
Katsuki succeeds in bringing a twitch to Izuku’s mouth, but nothing more. He decides he’d die to keep him alive.
With the last bit of debris removed, Katsuki can take everything in. Izuku must have been right by the bomb. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all.
Izuku doesn’t seem to agree. “Should’ve... known,” he huffs angrily as Katsuki pulls him into his arms. “Always some... one in... here.”
Katsuki shushes him. He has Izuku’s head cradled on his lap, but his—his arm is gone. His legs are burnt up to the knee from what he can see. He swallows the bile in his throat as he finds globs of melted flesh strewn around Izuku. There’s no way he can do this without gagging.
“You don’t... have to,” Izuku murmurs quietly.
Katsuki glances down at the man in his arms and instantly wishes he hadn’t.
Izuku hides a world of hurt behind his smile. Katsuki reckons it’s like that for most of them. Katsuki lost his friends, his parents later on down the line. Even now, years later, the hurt is fresh. But Katsuki can’t even begin to comprehend the extent of Izuku’s trauma. What happened to let that look of quiet acceptance settle across his face? What so utterly destroyed him that he’s resigned to death so completely he doesn’t even fight it anymore? Because nothing about Izuku is quiet.
Katsuki can’t even hear him breathe.
“You can go.” Izuku’s voice is fading fast, barely a whisper anymore. “You don’t... have to see this.” He closes his eyes, expression carefully blank. He’s resigned to his fate. The fate that deigns it necessary to suffer alone, again and again.
Katsuki wants to cry until he can’t anymore. Instead, he forces the tears back and hugs Izuku to his chest as he leaves the rotting building to burn itself into the ground.
“No,” he whispers back, “I’m not leaving you.”