weary travelers.

BOMBS AWAY

The bar is quiet, empty except for the two customers chattering and the clinking of glasses like a back tape. It's blue noise drowned in strawberry syrup and cherry wine, Kurogiri's favorite. He can drown himself in it too, pouring sweet drinks for them when they come over, tripping over air and slurred words, laughing. Kurogiri must've been like that too, once, laughing with someone, he had friends once, in the before, when there was a before.

Kurogiri is half-dipped in dry wine and lemon juice, maybe something more like absinthe, the green blood in his back corner, he turns to the kids on the barstools drinking strawberry milk and peach soda respectively. Kurogiri wonders why the scene is so familiar like he's watched it over and over, on loop, a record.

"Hey, Shouto?" Izuku asks when he puts down his cup of soda. He isn't shaking, today. It's nice out, warm, the kids on the block aren't dying. Kurogiri wonders when summer will rot out this year, styrofoam houses blowing into snow when cold comes in. He hopes not, but winter has a way of making people cruel.

"Yes?" Shouto says quiet. He is something like a travesty, Kurogiri can't help but think. He's all tired eyes and hate; it's eating his up, making him worm food. He's going to die like this, bright and bitter and bleeding rage from every scar. Kurogiri knows. He's bleeding too. Somewhere in him is an open wound, spilling Gin right out. Sour. He wonder's if the alley cats will swallow his spoiled insides up, or if he'll be noting but motionless mist, sitting in one place, a bad fog.

"Why don't you ever use your fire-side?" Izuku must know why, of course he does, he can see it in the way Shouto flinches and holds his breathe like a dying wish, but he wants to hear it, even if it's a lie, he wants to know for sure. Kurogiri watches the way absinthe eyes rake over Shouto's half finished strawberry milk.

(Shouto' s gaze hardens, he takes a deep breath. Ozone crackles around them, his hands start to hurt. He tells Izuku about it, like it's some sort of dagger in his chest, an open wound spilling out. He tells Izuku about a screaming in the hallways that only stopped when his eldest brother, Touya, died. He tells Izuku about warped reflections and mothers that hate their children, about fathers with angry, angry eyes and sisters that blend into the wall like their made of shadows, about how the oldest haunts the same hallways he was screaming into. Shouto tells Izuku a story about a marriage that went up in smoke; that disappeared in the scratches in the closet. Shouto tells Izuku about how everyone knows which floorboards are creaky and which ones are not; how they know who someone is by the weight of their step. About how nobody screams anymore but you can still hear crying down the hallway. He tells Izuku why he doesn't use his fire.

Something must break in him when Izuku doesn't care, fractures like a hand grenade in the desert. Kurogiri wonders what triggered that kind of apathy, the one that makes heroes into monsters and sheep into wolves. The kind of emptiness that makes fate cruel.)

"B-but, then― wh-what if there- there's a v-villain y-y-you can't b-beat with j-just your i-ice?" Kurogiri wonders if Izuku even thinks of the way fire has to crackle against burning skin, that smell, it takes up a whole room. The way it makes buildings fall and rubble crush the people under it, Kurogiri thinks that weight sits heavy on his suit, a stain of something. He remembers the strangest things, coughing up blood when he doesn't have a mouth, crying when his eyes are just barely there, "W-wouldn't not using your left side make things w-worse? A-and even if you didn't u-use it, uncon-uncontrollable f-fire is m-more d-destructive th-than con-controlled fl-flames."

"I―I guess I never thought about it." Shouto sounds like his throat is closing up, Shouto must be good at this part by now, Kurogiri thinks. Ignoring the panic and the fear, he makes it angrier than it is, makes it hate. Shouto hates his father, hates his purpose, his very being, a whole half of himself because a woman on the edge of insanity told him he looked like the monster that crawled out from each of their beds,