#Already tryna figure out who I could cut a deal on a car with lol

[applejarjar]

By the way I got the job!!!

[theolddarkmachine]

Imaginary - Chapter Eighteen

Midoriya Izuku’s life was turned upside by fate.

Eri’s life was turned upside down by circumstance.

And Bakugou Katsuki is about to learn that even imaginary friends need to grow up.

Chapter 18 of 19

Also on AO3

A/N: I'M SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG. Since posting the last chapter of this, I interviewed for a new job. Got that new job. Had to deal with all the fun stuff that comes with leaving your old job. And have been dealing with the huge change that came with starting a new job lol 

So, it's been a bit of a trainwreck tryna figure out a schedule.Good news though, I went ahead and just knocked out the last chapter and epilogue since 1) I'm scared of making y'all wait hella long for the epilogue and 2) the epilogue was not long at all. which would honestly have made waiting suck lol 

Anyway, WELCOME TO THE ENDING OF THIS FIC! THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING ON THIS RIDE WITH ME! <333333

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The park is beautiful, Izuku thinks, as he watches Eri skipping happily ahead of him holding a fuzzy stuffed fish haphazardly in one hand. 

After making his grand declaration that they were going to go out, he had found himself a bit at odds with what exactly they were going to do out. Which was how they had found themselves parked in front of the aquarium before deciding to cap things off at the botanical garden.

Which is how he finds himself thinking about how beautiful the park is. 

It truly is, and yet, he can’t help but feel like something is missing.

Like someone is missing.

And there it is. The aching void at the center of his chest, rearing its ugly head yet again to taunt him. 

To remind him that while their little family was more than enough, he also could have had just a little something more. Had, in fact, had something more before it had slipped cruelly through his fingers right after the realization. 

It made him feel selfish in his desire, which only made his chest ache worse.

“Daddy Izuku?” Eri’s voice is colored bright with her curiosity, pulling him back from his thoughts as he finds himself stopped several feet from his daughter. The same brightness colors her gaze as she looks up at him, her head cocked just to the side as if to further punctuate her questioning tone. Izuku gives his head a small shake to dislodge the feeling.

It doesn’t go anywhere, but it was worth a shot, he supposes.

“Yeah?” He asks, trying to bite back the defeat that threatens to turn his voice bitter as he looks down at her.

“You’re happy, right?” She asks. It’s an innocent enough question, filled with a childish naïveté that Izuku misses, and it hurts. It hurts because, well, that was the question, wasn’t it.

“Of course I am, Eri,” he answers immediately, because he is. In the beginning of it all, he hadn’t been sure he really could be. Had wondered if the decision he had made to become a single father to a young girl who had lost everything had been the right one, for either of them.

It had been though, that he was certain. Izuku wouldn’t change that decision for anything in the world.

And yet that acrid, burnt taste of his bitter selfish want was still tainting the edges of that happiness.

“Of course I am,” he repeats, voice softening as he knelt down to her height. Gently reaching out, he brushes his palms over her shoulders before softly squeezing her arms in what he hopes is reassurance.

“Why do you ask?”

Eri shifts her gaze down to the ground where she twists the toe of her bright pink Chucks into the grass.

“I just thought you might be missing Kacchan,” she says earnestly, her voice wobbling slightly at the admission. Izuku huffs a small sound of surprise, if only to mask the way he winces at the sudden flare of pain that dances along his sternum. 

He releases his hold on her right arm to lightly tap her chin upward, lifting her gaze back up to him.

“I’m happy, Eri,” Izuku says before shifting his gaze back and forth around them as if to make sure no one was within earshot. 

“But can I tell you a secret?” He continues, voice lowered conspiratorially. Eri’s eyes go wide at the question, her gaze shifting around them before she looks back at him and nods quickly. It takes everything in him to swallow down his laughter as he leans in closer.

“I do miss Kacchan,” he whispers. The confession leaves him easily, taking with it the most infinitesimal weight, and yet he already feels as if he can breathe easier. 

“I guess I can do both,” Izuku continues as he ruffles her hair and pulls way. “But I’m more happy than anything. How could I not be when I have you?”

A comfortable quiet fills the space between them for the briefest of moments before Eri’s mouth twists upward into a wide smile.

“I’m happy too, because I have Daddy Izuku!” She exclaims as she launches herself at him and wraps her arms tight around his neck. Heat burns at his eyes as he wraps his own around her middle, holding her close. Another chunk of weight, larger this time, falls from his chest and is replaced by the full warmth of his love for Eri. 

This is enough, he thinks as he squeezes her just a little tighter. It always will be.

“You’re squishing me, Daddy Izuku!” She laughs as she tries to tug backward out of his hold. It pushes another laugh from deep within his chest as he turns his head to blow a raspberry on her cheek.

“Alright, alright, I’ll let you go. I just have to give you as many hugs as I can before you don’t want them anymore,” Izuku says before ruffling her hair again. 

Eri scoffs as she shakes her head, fixing him with a look of indignation. 

“I won’t ever stop wanting hugs,” she huffed as if the very thought was preposterous. 

“Okay, I’ll remember that when you’re in middle school,” Izuku says, more to himself than to Eri, as the young girl turns her attention back toward the direction they had originally been heading in.

“Can we go see the butterflies now?” She asks excitedly, any remaining ire falling away in the face of the fluttering insects. 

Laughing quietly, Izuku just nods as he pushes himself upward to stand.

“Of course we can. Lead the way,” he gestures forward before pressing his hands deep into his pockets. 

A high pitched sound of happiness tears from Eri as she turns around and starts skipping toward the glittering dome of glass situated on the other side of the park. 

Standing there, he watches the way she bounds across the grass with the sun tangling itself in her hair. It radiates off her in the very same way as her happiness and he can’t help but smile.

At least, not until he notices that she’s headed straight on a crash course with a power unsuspecting bystander.

Stepping forward, Izuku opens his mouth to call to her, only to feel her name catch in his throat as he hears her cry out a name.

“Kacchan!”

Time seems to slow, almost stopping entirely as Izuku sees the man Eri was about to crash into turn around. 

It’s him, he thinks as his mind clumsily trips over itself at the realization. It’s him, it’s him, it’s him.

Katsuki.

And he looks the same and yet wholly different as Izuku watches the way his face eases into something like pure joy as he looks down at Eri. From this distance, he can’t hear what Bakugou says, but he can see his mouth move as he speaks quickly to Eri. It’s as unassuming as anything, and yet something about the ease in which Bakugou has as he talks with her, as if he hadn’t disappeared on them for a month, breaks the spell that held Izuku frozen in his tracks.

Time falls back around him with the suddenness of a car crash as he pushes himself across the distant between himself and the pair, catching up just in time to hear Eri squeal as she jumps up to hug Bakugou.

An aching, burning anger lights his veins as he watches Bakugou return the hug, his face turned into Eri’s hair before pulling away and standing to look at him.

The seconds pass all too quickly and yet all too slow until Bakugou finally speaks.

“Hey, nerd,” he says slowly, unsure, and that’s all it takes to break down the only resistance between Izuku and his roiling, burning rage.

Stepping forward, he reaches out and grabs a fistful of Bakugou’s shirt.

He’s so fucking angry, but also so fucking happy. Painfully so, in fact, as he pulls Bakugou in close. Izuku’s teeth pull back from his teeth in a sharp snarl as he hisses, “what the fuck are you doing here?”

This close, he doesn’t miss the way Bakugou’s eye widen, leaving his own vision filled with their startling scarlet as he fixes Izuku with his silent, open wonder. 

“No, you know what,” Izuku says harshly, cutting off any chance Bakugou may have had to answer. “I don’t care. Fuck you.”

The words push through his lips with a hissing contempt, each one biting into his own skin in the very way that he hopes they’re biting into Bakugou’s. Pausing to search the blonde’s stare for any hurt or shame, he bristles as he’s met with the same brazen awe.

As if he’s seeing something beautiful. As if he’s finally found what he’s been looking for.

That damned look sparks something bright and wanting within him, and it only pushes him further toward anger as he jerks Bakugou just that much closer.

“Actually, no. I do care. Because what the fuck, Katsuki? I said I-” Izuku stops, his next words falling away like ash and coating the back of his tongue with their dry taste. 

Swallowing around the lump they’ve created, he pushes on, ignoring the way his voice wobbles around its edges.

“You just left. And then I have to find out that somehow, impossibly, you were Eri’s imaginary friend? And what? You thought we should just have to deal with that?”

“It was the job,” Bakugou finally says, and god, had Izuku’s memory not done his voice justice at all. It rolls over him, like thunder, cascading through him and cracking the hardened weight clinging to the center of his chest with the bright flare of hope at the past tense that he uses. 

Pushing the optimistic feeling down, Izuku holds onto the vestiges of his anger as his knuckles ache with the tension in them.

“I don’t care what ever the fuck it was. A job, a game, whatever it was that wasn’t what it was to us.”

He pauses, breathing in, then breathing out before he continues, his voice lowered as he flicks his gaze down just long enough for his confession to drop between them.

“That wasn’t what it was to me.”

Glaring a hole into the center of Bakugou’s chest, he breathes again, counting each inhale and exhale before he slowly shifts his attention back up to the blonde’s face. Astonishment still colors Bakugou’s stare, his expression still schooled in a look of softened disbelief. It stays there, frozen, as if he isn’t sure what to say.

As if he can’t say anything at all.

“Tell Daddy Izuku what you told me!” Eri says, her voice shattering whatever spell had come over Izuku as all the sounds of the park around them come rushing back into his ears. His grip on Bakugou’s shirt loosens just slightly, but he doesn’t shift away from him.

He can’t.

“About how the brat after you was nowhere near as cool?” Bakugou asks, words nothing but hard, rough edges as he replies to Eri without shifting his attention from Izuku.

Giggling loudly, Eri softly kicks at Bakugou’s shoe.

“No, silly. The other part!”

Deflating slightly, Bakugou continues to hold Izuku’s stare.

“Oh, that part,” he says lowly. So low that Izuku suspects he would have missed it if he wasn’t so close. Gritting his teeth, he swears he hears his jaw creak.

“Spit it out, Bakugou,” Izuku pushes out.

The order earns him a quick, sharp tsk as Bakugou cuts his gaze down toward the ground between them.

“I was wondering if maybe I could stick around for awhile,” he mutters, his bangs falling across his eyes, shading most of his face as he keeps his stare turned downward. It does nothing to stop Izuku from catching the flush of pink that runs itself across his skin and over his ears.

His gasp punctuates the short quiet as Izuku pushes back every so slightly from him, but still not letting go of his shirt. 

“Ya see, I’m a bit unemployed at the moment,” Bakugou continunes, “and a lot more visible.”

Shifting his attention again, Bakugou drags his stare behind Izuku’s shoulder, as if to stress that latter fact. Quickly, he raises his hand in a placating gesture toward what Izuku can only assume are some bystanders they’ve undoubtedly attracted.

That alone makes Izuku’s stomach roil.

Disbelief, and happiness, and anger, and exhausted content mix themselves at his core until they fizzle and crack like popping candy. He feels the way all the emotions creep up his chest and tickle the back of his throat as he tries to push back the burn at the edges of his eyes.

He’s so, so angry.

But god, is he so fucking happy too.

“Well, nerd?” Bakugou speaks up, the question colored with a hopefulness that seems foreign for him. 

Rearing back slightly, Izuku watches the way Bakugou’s eyes widen as he snaps his head forward. It isn’t until the very last moment that he slows his momentum, softening the blow so that their foreheads tap together gently.

“You aren’t allowed to disappear anymore,” Izuku mumbles as he presses gently against him. The soft brush of Bakugou’s relived sigh tickles across the bridge of his nose.

“As long as you both want me, I won’t be going anywhere,” he assures with a low chuckle that Izuku feels vibrate through both of their chests. Dragging a slow breath through his nose, he can’t stop the high curl of his lips as he pushes up onto his toes to capture Bakugou’s own.

The kiss burns through him, colored by the sun that continues to dip down into the horizon. It fills him, and chases away the lingering ache just over his heart as he feels the way Bakugou presses closer into him. 

It’s a good kiss, one filled with a honey colored promise.

“Daddy Izuku!” Eri cries, her sudden exclamation cutting quickly through their haze and finally pushing them apart. 

“Stop hogging Kacchan!” She continues, mouth turned into a pout as she reaches a hand out to Bakugou. His laugh as barking as he steps back from Izuku’s hold.

“We’re going to see the butterflies! C’mon!” She says, stretching her hand out closer to Bakugou, impatience thrumming vibrantly through her small form as she waits for him to take it. Izuku doesn’t miss the way his gaze slides between him and Eri, or the way his lips twisted slightly upward at their edges in a small, secretive smile before he takes her hand.

“Alright, shortstack. Lead the way!” Bakugou says loudly, barely finishing his sentence before Eri takes off with him in tow. Her voice lingers behind them as she begins to fill him in on what he’s missed. 

Watching as they move toward the butterfly enclosure, Izuku lets his mouth part around his own bright laughter before he follows behind them.

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