With a solemn look the doctor walks out of the room, leaving the two of us in a deafening silence. Your biggest nightmare just came through — you’re infertile. All those daydreams you used to have.. holding a newborn for the first time, raising a ‘mini me,’ watching your child take their first steps, graduate, fall in love, discover who they are — they vanish in an instant. A future rewritten in a matter of seconds, gone in a flash.

The only sound that was heard is the hum of the fluorescent light and your staggered breathing. At first Bakugo didn’t say anything, he just sits there. Leant over his knee, palms pressing together and heating up against each other. You know that tells you everything — he’s trying to control it. Trying to regulate that overwhelming mix of emotion in the only way he knows how. Trying to find some sort of calm in this storm.

He’s not angry — not at you, never at you — but you can see how hard he’s fighting with himself, trying to figure out how to be strong for both of you when he’s just as lost.

The feeling that you both mutually share is helplessness. You can’t change the future, you can’t biologically have children of your own. A grief you both didn’t know how to handle. You feel weightless and heavy all at once, like your body doesn’t know how to hold this kind of grief. He finally looks up at you, flexing his jaw like he’s trying to hold himself together. “It’s not your fault.” He knows you too well, he knows the whirlwind your mind is throwing at you. His voice was low, scraping at the back of his throat. You can tell this is effecting him just as much.

Later that night Katsuki doesn’t curl up next to you, not right away — instead he goes out to the gym. He’s not looking to beat anyone or anything, but to lose himself in the physical, the tangible. The punching bags take the brunt of his fury, each strike a violent attempt to push away the anguish clawing at his insides. He doesn’t stop. Not until his muscles ache and his knuckles are raw and bleeding. He runs the track until his chest burns with exhaustion, until his legs feel like they might give out. He keeps going, not because he wants to, but because it’s the only way he can silence his mind. The only way to escape the suffocating grief of the life he thought he was going to build with you.

Coming home after a long day of being a top hero, you welcoming him home with a nice meal waiting to be eaten by the whole family. The girl who would look up to him with those wide eyes full of wonder, and his son that is his carbon copy. But that’s not real. But even so, he doesn’t want to leave you. Even if children are off the table, you’re still everything he wants. You, and only you. And somehow, in his broken heart, he knows that. And right now you need him.

By the time he returns home, it’s late. The apartment feels quieter than usual, and as he steps inside, he grimaces at the sound of the door creaking open. It’s a small, insignificant sound, but it cuts through the silence like a knife. He wonders if you’re awake, if you’re laying there in the dark, just as he is, fighting to hold yourself together. Or if you’re asleep, your mind finally at peace for the first time in hours.

He hasn’t been able to be the man he wants to be for you tonight. He hasn’t been able to give you the support you need, the comfort you deserve. But he’ll find a way. Even if it means picking up the pieces of his shattered future and trying to rebuild something new. With you.

And he will. Because he loves you. And that’s enough.