Three days.
Katsuki wailed on the punching bag in his living room, heedless of the heat that wafted through the open balcony door in thick, oppressive layers. He wanted the burn, and the rain of sweat that dripped to the floorboards at his bare feet.
Fuck air conditioning. He was building some goddamn character, unlike some people.
Three days and nothing.
Katsuki snarled and spun, throwing a roundhouse kick that slammed the bag against the wall behind it.
What the hell had Deku been thinking?
No, Katsuki was past the point of misunderstanding. He knew where Deku stood – knew enough to gather Deku was still treating him like the guy he'd been before – before what?
Before Deku. Before all this, and them, and the 'us' and 'we'.
And wasn't Deku the one constantly harping on about opening up and honesty, transparency and whatever-the-hell he probably read on the internet, written by angsty fourteen year-olds who'd never been in a relationship minus the one with their cellphones?
What did anyone know about his and Deku's relationship, minus the two of them?
And where did Deku get off on shoving these ideals down Katsuki's goddamn throat when he wasn't even at the same table with him?
The fucking nerve.
Katsuki snarled, fist streaking past the bag and impacting with the wall.
Breathing hard, arm immobile and buried in the crumbling crater of drywall, Katsuki curled his lip at the destruction, instantly bogged down with disappointment in himself for letting Deku get under his skin.
"Shit."
Katsuki yanked his hand from the wall and frowned a little as he spread his fingers wide, eyeing the scraped and bleeding knuckles.
"Shit," he said again, softer, resigned, as he blew on his stinging hand and wandered from the destruction, toward the kitchen.
A rapid knock jolted Katsuki from his thoughts, his heart rapping harder than the fist on the door.
He didn't need to guess who was on the other side.
Grabbing a t-shirt draped over kitchen chair and using it to wipe his brow and chest, he yanked open the door with narrowed eyes.
"I'm going to pretend you're not distractingly half-naked and sweaty," Shinsou said, his usual smug smile replaced with an ominous, thin line of mouth, "and proceed to ask you just what you're doing at seven in the morning throwing dead bodies against the wall."
"Dead – hah?" Off-guard from the unexpected visitor and frankly pissed about it, Katsuki stepped into Shinsou's space, glowering up at him with his shoulders squared and jaw jutted forward. "Oiy, if you wanna be one of them bodies, keep talkin'."
Deep, sunken eyes of shadows stared blithely down.
"Please take whatever internalized frustrations you've been carrying for the past eighteen years and aim them somewhere other than our shared wall. It's bad enough I have to listen to you destroy poor Midoriya like it's the apocalypse on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon. Which is, in case you didn't know, is prime sleeping time."
"You still talkin'?"
"Pretty much what I do for a living."
"Well," Katsuki said, cocking a hip and aiming a murderous grin up at Shinsou. "I hurt people for a living. So maybe –"
