Fuck You, Pay Me!

17. Nostalgia

A/N: challenged myself to see how well I could write while sleep deprived and off my meds. I think I did pretty well.

Katsuki can't remember the last time he's had a home-cooked meal. Even before current events had taken place, he'd simply just been too busy or too broke to be bothered with going grocery shopping and cooking for himself. Sure, Izuku kept him fed but with his hectic schedule, it wasn't as if he'd had time to sit down and enjoy his Auntie Inko's cooking. If he wasn't working then he was in classes or working on some stupid fucking essay that took up a majority of their grade but had been overall pointless in typing because the professors usually only ever skimmed through them instead of actually reading them. Honestly, why assign all of this fucking work if you're not even gonna use the same amount of effort to grade it as the students did in writing it?!

But Katsuki digresses.

He's been living on gas station coffee and cheap, greasy take-out and fast food for the last two years or so. Admittedly, it's a hell of a step up from surviving on ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches but the last time he'd even see a home-cooked meal was...

The dinner Auntie had made for them in celebration of Katsuki graduating high school.

It seems like such a distant memory even though it was only two years ago---he can't even remember what she'd made. All he remembers is feeling like he'd taken it for granted when he finally got on his own and realized that those meals back home were a privilege.

Today, for the first time in years, Katsuki is eating a breakfast meal that was handmade from scratch just for him.

He hadn't expected for Hitoshi's father to be such a good cook but he supposed that killing people didn't make you less likely to be skilled in something like preparing food. It sounds like such a horrible stereotype but he just figured they'd be much too busy learning how to hide bodies or make murders look like accidents to be concerned about making the perfect flapjack.

Go figure.

"Thanks for the meal, Aizawa-san."

"You can call me Shouta, sweetheart. Or dad. Whichever you prefer."

Hitoshi half-heartedly whacks his father in the back of the head with the towel that he's drying the counters with, an annoyed grumble slipping past his lips. "Are you going to be this embarrassing the entire time that I'm here?"

Shouta shrugs. "Maybe. I don't get to do this often, kid. Let me have nice things."

"Bullying your son when he comes to visit is considering having nice things?"

"Letting me be a father for once is considered giving me nice things."

Katsuki can't see his face, but he can practically hear Hitoshi roll his eyes from here.

"Fine. Sure. Whatever." He relents, sitting next to Katsuki at the table after setting a glass of orange juice in front of him. "You don't have to wait on me to start eating, baby. We don't say grace in this family. Eat up; it's been awhile since you've been fed properly." He suggests, digging right into his meal without much fanfare. Katsuki almost doesn't want to eat his own---it looks so perfect that ruining it seems like such a waste but his desperate stomach growls angrily so he, too, relents and finally begins to eat the meal gifted to him.