Chapter Text
The Sunken City's Unfathomable Labyrinth is an intimidating structure even now, after centuries of being submerged in the furthest depths of the ocean's Yawning Deep. More intimidating, maybe, though Izuku obviously can't compare. The branching spikes of bleached coral that jut from its stone surface manage to make it look both sharp and skeletal.
Izuku doesn't see Kacchan at the entrance. But it's Kacchan, after all. He wouldn't expect Kacchan to wait for him anyway.
"Kacchan, we have to talk," Izuku calls, passing through the rune-carved arch of the Labyrinth entrance before Kacchan gets too deep.
"Don't go through that, go over it– Deku–!!" Kacchan yells back at him, right as the runes of the arch flare to life. A massive wall of magic rock suddenly slams down on the entrance behind them hard enough to shake the stone floor under them and loud enough it leaves Izuku's ears ringing.
It gives a muffled quality to Kacchan's own attempt to reach a volume just as loud with his resultant howl. "Oh great fucking job, legendary hero! Now you trapped us in here!"
"So you're making it all my fault when you didn't tell me about this!" Izuku responds, marching to close the distance between them.
Kacchan doesn't let him. He stomps forward to where the spreading web of glowing runes flowing down the stone walls lead to the first hazard in their path. It's a section of shifting platforms above a pit of darkness the light from the runes doesn't reach.
Kacchan doesn't even slow. He just swings his arms testingly before firing off a blast to propel him onto the first of the sections. Then he whirls to face Izuku where he left him at the ledge of it. "I told you, you just never listen–"
"Well, well you should have tried harder to tell me, too! If you only ever tell me right when I'm one misstep from getting it wrong–"
"Go to hell! I fucking tried!" Kacchan yells from the other side of the literal chasm between them, then spins on his heels and jumps several platforms further.
When Izuku reaches the jumping puzzle, he activates one of his own-well-kind-of powers. The limited flight that had Kacchan sulking for days after he'd gotten it unlocked allows him to float right over the moving pieces. "Kacchan, if you were trying, you'd have told me at the entrance, because you would have waited for me there!"
Kacchan whirls on Izuku again when he draws even. His face has contorted into one of his snarls. "No one said you had to come."
Izuku gives himself a moment to be utterly aghast before his affront is back and doubled. "You did! You just did!"
Izuku's distracted from that for a moment when they reach solid ground again and are suddenly beset by a stampede of small stone golems shaped to look like some kind of bipedal bull creatures. "Kacchan, that's why I'm here!" Izuku continues as they clear the first wave.
"And like you've ever done anything I tell you to?" Kacchan says, spiking the crumbled head of a golem into the next one to with enough vicious intensity. It staggers the target golem back to crash into the next one, settling off a chain reaction in a jumble of stone. "Just go the fuck back to your prince, shitnerd!"
"But Kacchan," Izuku says helplessly, spinkicking another golem down into the jumping puzzle's pit. It obviously can't be jealousy, not the way Todoroki thinks, but– "Why are you mad?"
"I'm not fucking mad," Kacchan snarls, driving his fistful of explosion down into where he's cornered the second wave's last handful of cowering golems. The result is half-blinding and leaves nothing but dust and a crater in the stone.
Izuku blinks through it. "Well you stormed off into here like you were! Isn't– isn't me being with Todoroki-kun what you want?"
"Yes," Kacchan snaps. That hurts to hear in a new kind of way. Izuku's rekindled feelings are still fresh enough it hits somewhere raw. "Doesn't mean I want it shoved into my fucking face."
"What?" Izuku squawks, wasting the breath he'd been trying to get back before the inevitable third wave. "Kacchan, we were touching hands."
"So?" Kacchan says scornfully, glaring at his own hands as he works his fingers out.
"Kacchan, you've been planning my dates!" Izuku says, unable to keep out the sheer exasperation.
"That's– fuck you, shut up and pay attention to the goddamn minitaurs," Kacchan says as what should be the last charging line of golems converges. It never is more than three.
"No! I'm still paying attention, and no I will not shut up! Hand-to-hand contact?" Izuku says plaintively, activating his sort-of-uncomfortable tentacle powers to wrap up the whole battalion and fling them down the pit. "Kacchan, even if I was with Todoroki-kun, that's ridiculous! And," Izuku continues, recalling his new appendages at the fade of the last squeal. "And, why should you even care!"
"You think I give a fuck?" Kacchan says scornfully, dusting his hands off once before stalking further into the maze. The Labyrinth branches before him, strange runes and carved gargoyles marking the directions. Kacchan heads down the furthest one without even a pause to consider, let alone stopping for a bit and maybe letting them actually talk about their route forward.
"I don't know," Izuku says as he follows after. It's all he can do so long as Kacchan doesn't stop. "You don't, then you do, then you don't, and that's the problem."
"Whatever you do in your own time is your fucking business," Kacchan says venomously as he takes the hard left. "So keep it there and no more problem for both of us."
"But I don't understand," Izuku near-pleads. He's still lost down here, and Kacchan's given him nothing else to grasp onto but his own spiking aggravation.
Izuku feels impossibly frustrated, because even with all that he feels and he wants he's really been trying to keep the space Kacchan wants between them. But even if it had begun with Izuku, there's still two ends of it, and Kacchan should be trying harder, too.
He'd promised he would, and after all that's been between them Kacchan owes Izuku that much.
Kacchan skids to a stop on his heel. He brings his arm up to keep Izuku there right before the wall in front of them crumbles in an avalanche of stone. Then he jerks it back like the mere contact burns. "Fuck you! It was your fault in the first place–"
"Shut up, Kacchan!!" Izuku snaps. Kacchan's mouth abruptly shuts with an audible click, eyes open wide in his shock.
It's not the first time Izuku's yelled at Kacchan, and Kacchan only has ever yelled back before until Izuku gives up the yelling. But fine. Kacchan owes Izuku some yelling. It's time for Kacchan to be the one who has to take it until it's too much, for once.
"Whoever got us into this, we're both in it now! And I don't care who's at fault for what, or why, or, or when!" Izuku throws his hands wide at the everything around them and trapped between them still. "What matters is we're trapped! So we need to get ourselves out!"
Kacchan goes from still wide-eyed to a sudden scowl. "You think I'm not fucking trying?" he snipes at Izuku before he turns and starts scrambling up the new tower of rocks.
Izuku floats up after him. "Well I haven't seen it, not when you're like this! You just go off and act like l did something and you never tell me what it was and then you just leave me here to deal."
One of the rocks under Kacchan's feet slips, nearly sending him tumbling back down. He then nearly tumbles further in his attempt to shove off the hands Izuku had outstretched to catch him. "Then go away."
"Then tell me why seeing me doing what you want from me makes you so mad!" Izuku demands as Kacchan slide-stops his way down the other side of the pile.
"I'm not fucking mad!" Kacchan snarls over his shoulder in Izuku's general direction. His palms spark like they always do when he's very, very mad.
"You are!" Izuku insists. Kacchan's next step forward onto a chessboard-like stretch of tiling comes with a barely-audible click. "Kacchan, don't dodge tha– Kacchan, dodge!!" Izuku yelps. Kacchan doesn't even pause, smoothly blasting the pressurized dart that fires from the wall right out of the air right when it reaches him. "–Don't dodge that!" Izuku continues.
"I'm not having this talk with you here!" Kacchan says. He stomps forward over the tiles, utterly heedless of the triggered darts now whizzing by them beyond destroying the ones in his way.
"Then when, Kacchan?" Izuku demands, floating over the sunken tiles of sprung traps in the path Kacchan's left behind him in case there's any more surprises. "When will we? When have you ever unless I'm the one dragging you back through the whole way!?"
"Shut the hell up and fucking dodge!!" Kacchan yells back at him. Kacchan's distracted enough his foot slams down on the final tile, the one broad enough to cover the floor. It's absolutely covered in the etched black arrows that had dotted the rest of them. It's right then Izuku suddenly realizes in the buzzing back of his mind the meaning of those markings: the darts' numbers and angle of fire when it's triggered.
"You spend half the time pushing me away, you–" Izuku gives Kacchan a hard shove away from the final volley, the ring of darts whizzing above them. "You always have, even from the very start–"
"You think you're fucking special there?" Kacchan snarls up at him from where he'd been shoved, caught by Izuku halfway through his own process of ducking.
"Well apparently!" Izuku answers while he offers Kacchan a hand up. Kacchan's snarl this time is wordless and almost animal. "Because you still act like you care! So maybe you could actually tell me this time why you're really so mad at me!"
Kacchan surges up at Izuku and grabs him by the collar. "I'M NOT! FUCKING!! MAAAAAAD!!!" Kacchan howls in raw fury right in Izuku's face.
Izuku jerks out of Kacchan's hold. He scrubs Kacchan's rage-spittle off his cheek with his sleeve as he yells back. "You are mad! You get mad, and you decide it's all my fault, like you never have anything at all to do with it! You always act like this! You only ever push it all away, you never, ever solve it! But I'm supposed to solve this all, this– this everything on my own? Kacchan, that's not fair!"
"Fair? The hell you care? So go," Kacchan says, the sudden drop in volume leaving his words stark. "And just fucking stay."
Kacchan doesn't wait for a reply, because he never does like he always does, stomping down yet another winding path into the Labyrinth.
"I don't want to!! I want to solve this! And, and you owe me!!" Izuku shouts after him, still too overstrung himself to bring his own volume down.
Kacchan flinches, hands balled back into fists. They'd have already been sparking now, a start to the looming inevitable intimidation so Kacchan could push him away again and again and again but never ever just leave him there.
Kacchan made an effort not to spark at him like that, after he apologized. So Izuku knows Kacchan is trying, but Izuku's trying a lot harder. This maze they're still trapped in makes it clear Kacchan hasn't been trying enough.
"You owe me the chance to do what I want about us for once!" Izuku continues on, feeling it swell in his chest. It's the pull of the pulled stitches over the rift that maybe Izuku did start. Kacchan's the one who made into a wound. "You've done it enough all your life!"
"I never wanted–"
"I know you really just wanted to push me away, Kacchan," Izuku cuts off. "But it still hurt, and you hurt me for a long time, and you promised you'd be trying to be better at all this."
Kacchan skids to a stop when they reach one. He turns, face twists into something dark and resentful and yet still entirely inscrutable as to why. "I'm being fucking better at this than you!"
"This is better?" Izuku says, gesturing in front of him to the sudden dead end Kacchan's led them to. "Us having to get trapped into a trap-dungeon before you'll even try to talk about this is better? Well no it isn't!" Izuku insists. "Not for me and not for you, either!"
Kacchan kicks at the back wall with a rumbling growl before pushing past Izuku again, clipping him on the shoulder with his own before stomping back to take the first entrance they'd passed. "You're the one who chased me here!!"
"Then let me try to get us out of it!" Izuku snaps back, trailing behind Kacchan undeterred. "Stop pushing me away before we get anywhere else so we can solve it for once in our entire lives and I can, can get over this! You keep pulling me back here, too!"
Izuku doesn't have to say how. Kacchan knows. Kacchan's always been the other half of what's keeping them inseparable. Kacchan's the one who calls him out from class and back into it every time.
Izuku takes a painful breath. "I've been trying to get us somewhere else than here, and then you get, get so mad at me and pull me back in just so you can push me away and, and hurt me!"
"Well you –"
"I don't care if you felt you needed to. You never cared what I needed. You still didn't have to act like that!" Izuku says. "I never made you act like that! So why are you still acting like this!"
"Eat shit, Deku" Kacchan says without looking back, ground out harsh enough it sounds like it hurts. "I'm trying to be better. That doesn't mean I fucking owe you everything about me."
"But then how can I do what you actually want?" Izuku asks, plaintive and with everything he feels and doesn't know what Kacchan feels behind it.
Kacchan slows to a stop. He doesn't say anything at all.
"Say something!" Izuku demands.
"I don't know, " Kacchan says quietly. He slowly turns to face Izuku, face drawn and only half-focused. "I can't think of anything mean to say."
"So why does it have to be mean, Kacchan," Izuku forces out, summoning everything within him to keep from his all-consuming need to just make Kacchan stay. "Why can't you ever just say?"
They stare at each other for a moment long enough that it feels like a lifetime.
From Kacchan's face, maybe it feels like a lifetime for him, too.
Kacchan takes a breath. "I–" he starts, and that's when the floor under them turns out to be a pit trap.
"MOTHERFUCKER," Kacchan screeches as they fall down in deeper, and Izuku can't do anything but heartily agree.