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The plant on his windowsill doesn’t need water, but he pours some anyway. It’s fake—plastic, molded to look real. It catches the morning light too perfectly. No wilt. No death. No life.
Katsuki would’ve hated it.
“Looks like something your grandma puts next to the toilet,” he’d probably say, arms crossed, voice biting.
Kirishima presses his thumb into the smooth, cold stem. He can’t even pretend it’s alive anymore. “Still better than me,” he mutters. “At least it holds its shape.”
He leaves the apartment without thinking. Just walks. Past glass towers, polished sidewalks, a city rebuilt on the bones of the war. Everything’s shining now. Everything’s healed. Except him.
Except the part of him that’s still stuck five years ago, on a rooftop with bleeding skies and a war that cracked open the world.
The cemetery is too clean.
Even the crows don’t come anymore.
He crouches before the headstone like a man crumbling into pieces—because he is. Because he has been. For five years. Every day wearing him thinner, stretching him out like cellophane until he barely holds form.
Katsuki Bakugo. Hero. Friend. Beloved.
“‘Beloved,’ huh?” he mutters. “You would’ve bit someone for putting that on there. You would’ve hated it. Makes you sound soft.”
His voice shakes. His hands shake. Everything shakes, except the stone.
He places the spicy miso bottle down—something real. Something that tastes like memory and heat and those nights Bakugo would sneak into the dorm kitchen just to fix a recipe “better than that idiot chef on TV.”
“They gave me a medal,” Kirishima says, staring at the grave. “For living. That’s all I did. That’s all I ever fucking did.”
He clenches his jaw, biting down on the words he always swore he’d never say. The ones that eat at him every day. The ones that hum under his ribs like static. Like the song that won’t stop playing in his head.
He lives with a broken man. A cracked polystyrene man. Who just crumbles and burns. Red Riot: The Sturdy Hero. Cracking.
“You weren’t broken,” he says, low. “You burned too bright. That was the problem.”
His voice catches. His whole chest feels like plastic melting under a heat lamp.
“I—I should’ve told you.”
His breathing speeds. Heart thudding, limbs and quirk twitching like the grief crawling under his skin.
“I loved you, Katsuki.” He says it, finally. It tears out of him like glass.
“I fucking loved you. And I didn’t say it. Not once. Not when I should have. Not when it would’ve mattered. I smiled at you like a dumbass, told you good luck like we were in a fucking school play.”
He presses his forehead to the stone. It’s cold, too cold.
“I wanted to be enough. Wanted to be good. Manly. Strong. You always made it look easy. But I couldn’t even say three damn words to you when it counted. Some fucking man I turned out to be.”
The wind rises. Trees sway behind him—like fake trees in a fake breeze, and suddenly everything’s hollow. Nothing’s real except the weight on his chest.
“I was supposed to be Red Riot. Unbreakable. But you cracked me open and I never came back together.”
His voice is unraveling now. Loud, broken, rising with the chaotic pulse in his ears.
He snarls, almost laughing. “My fake plastic love.”
He beats a fist to his chest. Once. Twice. “I pretended it was loyalty. I pretended it was brotherhood. But I wanted you. I wanted you.”
Silence. And then—
“I thought if I said it out loud, I’d fall apart.”
He grips the headstone like it might hold him together.
“And now you’re the one in the ground, and I’m up here still pretending I know how to live. Still pretending I’m not in love with a ghost.”
His knees hit the dirt.
“I couldn’t be who you wanted. I didn’t even know if you wanted me. But if I could be who you wanted—all the time—I would’ve done it, Katsuki. I would’ve done anything.”
The grave doesn’t answer. The miso bottle tips over, slow, quiet, anticlimactic.
Kirishima stares at it, and something inside him finally gives way.
“I don’t want to be a hero,” he breathes. “I just want to be yours.”