Work Text:
London at the turn of the century sure is a blast. It’s in the air really—probably it is the austere intransigence of old, paired with the innate human need to live life with levity.
It’s the perfect time for people like him, Eijirou thinks as he bangs around on the instruments tied around his body and junctures. People pluck dimes from their pouches as he sings funny verses for each of them, and he grins around each thank-you.
He’s still high with exertion and the rush of people-pleasing, when words suddenly escape him with a gust of wind.
It’s changing.
His heart squeezes in his chest, and Eijirou resumes his singing with renewed mirth.
***
The other governesses are fucking shit, so the East Wind does him a favor and blows them away.
At eight in the morning sharp, he raps the silver dragon head of his cane on the door to the Kaminari’s household because despite what Kirishima says about the unpredictability of the wind and all that shit, punctuality is a thing he prides himself on.
A housemaid throws open the door to shout out instructions. As it is, he’s the only tutor waiting, so he dumps his overcoat in her arms and strides into the living room, a woeful disaster of garish wallpaper and dark furniture.
“I am Bakugou Katsuki, for my interview as a tutor,” he announces to the room. He knows he cuts an imposing figure with his gray suit, his black leather gloves, and his long cane, the little splash of red on his chest in the shape of a lively dahlia. Kirishima can never shut up about it.
As it should be, stunned silence follows his declaration. Katsuki taps his cane once and digs his contract out of his breast pocket. The head of the house is a burly man with few blond hairs slicked back with too much grease and a voice like a croaky rocking chair. Katsuki is honestly amazed this man can read through the dirt on his glasses.
He signs the paper.
“I am going to meet the kids now,” Katsuki announces as he walks over to the staircase in the corner, “I take it their rooms are this way.”
To assert his dominance, or maybe just to show off, he skips over the effort. He slides right up to the second floor sitting on the railing—up to the two wide-eyed children gaping at him.
“Mouths shut, pipsqueaks, you don’t want to bite on mosquitoes, do you?”
:::
Katsuki’s assigned room is a nightmare. It lacks a key to the closet and the wallpaper is a hideous pattern of hedera and small orange forget-me-nots. “It’ll fucking have to do,” he mumbles under his breath, and he begins unpacking.
He doesn’t mind having Mina and Denki in the way. It’s fun watching them try to figure out how his leather suitcase works as he pulls out of it a gramophone, his library, and an additional quilt (the one provided is a dirty light blue, clashing terribly with the fiery yellow-green scheme of the walls). He only calls them off when Denki nearly pitches inside the suitcase himself. It’s time for measurements anyway.
Denki is a lanky kid with hair so blond, the sun reflects right off it and makes him a very special kind of lightbulb. “What have you done here?” Katsuki asks pinching the black strands on his brow.
Mina laughs in her hands, and Denki pouts. “It was an accident,” he claims nasally.
The locks have the distinct texture of burnt hair, and they smell like it too. He lets it go. They were under a different tutor then, so it’s not his business.
Katsuki unrolls the tape and measures Mina first. She’s a cheerful kid with laughing black eyes and her hair a strawberry blond that is more similar to her father’s than to her mother’s, after whom Denki takes in full.
The tape says ‘high maintenance, laughs a lot’ for Mina, and spells out ‘smart but impulsive’ for Denki, which ultimately is the tape’s polite way to tell him this time he’s got his hands full.
“But what does it say about you?” Denki asks when he makes to put it away.
Katsuki indulges them and lets them measure him. Mina reads out the words. “Bakugou Katsuki, The Best Tutor with The Worst Attitude.”
Katsuki bites down on a smirk and rolls back the only useful product of Kirishima’s brief stint as a tailor.
:::
The kids’ room is a mess that Katsuki is all too happy to vanquish with a snap of his fingers and a stern word to the stubborn overflowing drawers. The tree they came from did not die so they could escape their responsibilities as furniture.
The kids laugh and squeal snapping their fingers, though Denki had to be explained once or twice how to do it right before he could squirrel around the room bringing back some semblance of order to the space.
From this forage in their bedroom, Katsuki realizes two things: one is that all these zebra patterns and overly-bright colors in the house is the kids’ doing themselves; two is that together they are one recipe for disaster. Mina wants to be entertained, and Denki is all too eager to come up with strange and twisted plans to make it happen.
The things these two could do if their energy were rightfully channeled, instead of liquidated for the sake of the stale hierarchy of this household.
As it is, Katsuki happens to know how to handle the situation.
“Grab your jackets,” he says, “We’re going for our afternoon walk.”
:::
Katsuki feels him, like a pull at the bottom of his chest. He follows the attraction; he pretends he knows the way as the kids try to extort more songs, more stories, more tricks out of him. They hang onto his overcoat, and he lightly taps the jaws of the dragon against Mina’s back to keep her straight.
They pass an intersection, and Katsuki is sweating under his coat because he’s here, he’s here, and he knows it, he feels it in the thrumming of his bones, in the sudden increase in temperature that wraps around him as he steps in a pool of sunlight—
“Stop right there,” and Katsuki wouldn’t have moved either way, frozen as the screever he hadn’t seen jumps up at work on the sidewalk, armed with chalk.
“I would recognize this shape everywhere,” Kirishima tilts his head up, his grin like salve on Katsuki’s irritated skin, “Bakugou Katsuki.”
Kirishima is still beautiful, and warm, and wondrous in the comfort he finds in his skin as he was years ago, the last time the wind blew this way over London. His hair is loose under his worn-out ascot cap, and there’s chalk dust everywhere—on his chin, on his left earlobe, around his lovely eyes, on his neck, and on the sides of his hips where he must have patted his hands clean—and Katsuki never loved him more. The East Wind may take him all over the world, but beside Kirishima will always be his favorite place.
But he’s Bakugou Katsuki, so he says, “It’s good to see you, loser.”
Kirishima laughs and wipes at his face, smudging more yellow dust on his cheek. He grins and winks. “I rather feel as I’ve won the lottery.”
Mina bends down to inspect the chalk drawings on the sidewalk, and Katsuki remembers the kids hanging off his coat, so he taps them over their heads and introduces them.
Kirishima grins and performs a flamboyant introduction for their delight, full of flying hand gestures and made-up epithets, that ends with Kirishima bowing and his hair tumbling out of his cap and Mina’s laughter at the unnatural color of it. Kirishima’s eyes glint, and not for the first time Katsuki wonders what did the world do to deserve a man whose self-assigned mission is to steal a smile from everyone.
“You’ve done these yourself?” Denki asks, pointing at the beach drawing next to his scuffed shoes. Katsuki taps the end of his cane against the side of his foot, and belatedly Denki tacks a “sir” to his sentence.
“Did I draw them? Yes! Have I invented them? No, those are all real places, right there, beyond the chalk.” Kirishima kneels down to his level and points to a small country road. “Like, you can totally cross over to the fair they’re hosting behind this hilltop. Put your ear to the picture; can you hear the carousel?”
Denki scrunches up his nose. “I don’t hear anything. You’re mocking me.”
Kirishima, predictably, laughs. “Champ, I’m sure Bakugou already showed off his magic, didn’t he? Maybe I’m a little magic too!”
Little is not a word readily associated with Kirishima.
Mina perks up at him. “There really is a fair? Can we go, Bakugou?”
Katsuki doesn’t see any constructiveness to bringing the kids to a country festival while they should be having their midafternoon nap. But then Kirishima bats his eyes at him in that devastating way of his, and pleads, “Yeah, can we go, Bakugou?”
He knows the effect he has, the fucker, for Katsuki made the mistake to tell him once. So he scoffs and says, “Just because you’d make a mess of the magic if I let you go alone.”
Kirishima leads the cheering choruses and promises the children extraordinary adventures, even though they both know the kids will scurry away to the merry-go-round as soon as they touch down on the other side, and they’ll forget all about the jewels of the fisherman’s wife, or the silver lake that reflects your inner being.
“Come on, come on, line up,” Katsuki urges, shaking the hands he holds with the children, “Chin up, Mina.”
They jump.
The other side is exactly as it appeared drawn on the sidewalk. Bright, happy green, lively with people, animals, flowers. The dirt road climbs mildly over the hilltop, the sky is baby blue on their heads, the air smells of flowers and candied apples. The carousel jingles in the distance.
Kirishima in white is—is a masterpiece. There is no other way to the describe the absurd way a sun-washed white suit lined with light blue doesn’t horrifyingly clash with his hair, or the way his broad shoulders fill the jacket just the right amount, or how the blinding smile on his face makes him want to look closer instead of squinting.
Katsuki distracts himself directing the kids to the carousel and watches them skip ahead until they reach the gates of the ride. Once they’re alone, and Kirishima is back at his side, bouncing on his toes, Katsuki slings him a look. “I’ve got children to look after, so you better fucking stick close.”
Kirishima laughs. “As if I’d rather be anywhere else.” He offers Katsuki his arm. His eyes dart to Katsuki’s cane though, expecting the sharp rap he gets every time he pulls shit like this.
Katsuki lives for the times he surprises him. He loops his arm through Kirishima’s.
Of course, then he’s got to go and make a big deal out of it. “Miss me much, yeah?”
More than oxygen in his lungs, but saying it aloud would make it real, concrete, unbearable. Katsuki rolls his eyes and starts them down the path to the fair.
Kirishima walks warm and solid next to him as he whistles low under his breath, and then starts singing, Oh it’s a jolly ‘oliday with Bakugou, he makes your ‘eart so light!
Katsuki snorts. “Have you fucking met me?”
Kirishima laughs and keeps singing with the cheer of a child in his soothing tenor of the delight of having Katsuki there.
Katsuki lets himself be pulled over under a white wrought-iron canopy, away from the carousel but still in view of it. He’s not afraid for the kids, for this is Kirishima’s world, Kirishima’s magic, and he shapes it the way he wants, so soon penguins, ducks, and lambs are singing Bakugou’s praises with him, as he twirls around Katsuki’s chair on squeaking Oxfords.
And even if Katsuki pastes a suffering expression on his face as he follows his dance, he adores every second of it.
He loves every second of the ride that follows, and both the stupid race he wins and the one he shuts down between Denki and Kirishima, and he even loves the easy smile on Kirishima’s face in the torrential rain as he says, “I was going to be something different tomorrow morning anyway,” as they watch his drawings wash away in the water.
:::
Once, Katsuki asked why Kirishima would not settle down with one job and stick with it.
Kirishima laughed, and said, “My mother used to tell me that change is good—change is magic.”
And then Katsuki asked, blurted out actually, if that was why he put up with Katsuki disappearing on him overnight.
“No,” he answered, surprisingly sober and at peace, “It’s because having you here for even an hour is worth every year of waiting.”
That was the first time Katsuki let himself think I love him. It was also the first time he felt the dread for the shift of the wind dig deep in his bones.
That’s why he doesn’t sugarcoat the truth when the kids ask if he’s going to stay forever, once they’re back in the warmth of their house, each holding a spoon of medicine. Stone-cold truth is his way to cope.
“Mmm, it tastes of strawberries!” Mina exclaims while Denki licks his own spoon clean of the syrup.
To Katsuki, it tastes like vodka.
He shoos the kids to bed, but they won’t stop asking for more magic, something exciting, since now they have to cram the fun of a lifetime in the short few days before the changing of the wind. So Katsuki sits back in a chair and weaves a tale for them. It is about a boy of age undetermined, living penniless and yet feeling the wealthiest man alive. He collects smiles and not dimes, he dances and sings like the day would never end, and he has so much magic running through his veins that Katsuki’s pales in comparison.
A different kind of magic—but magic all the same.
:::
Today the Kaminaris try to fire him, but he makes quick work of their worries and finally gets a foot in the door to pull this family straight.
The next day is his day off, and the kids are going out with their father for a change.
He bids them goodnight and tucks them into bed. He sits in the chair next to them, reading until the specter of the changing wind fades enough to let him sleep.
:::
What he doesn’t expect upon returning from his afternoon stroll is the one and only Kirishima Eijirou desperately snatching at Denki’s ankles as he gets swept up the column of the chimney.
“What are you doing here?”
Kirishima turns and spreads his arms wide, blazing smile in place, to show off the black of his clothes and the giant brush across his shoulder. “I’m a chimneysweep!” As if that weren’t clear already from the harrowing amount of soot on him and the one—two missing children, now.
“We need to get them right the fuck down!” Katsuki yells, chucking his overcoat in a corner and not his gloves, and striding to the fireplace himself. He shoves Kirishima in the column. “You first,” he barks and follows right behind.
He emerges from the cloud of grime on the rooftop of the Kaminari’s house. Thank fuck Kirishima already found both of the kids. Denki’s hair is almost entirely black now, and Mina is wiping tears out her irritated eyes.
Katsuki is this close to rip Kirishima a new one and fuck feelings, when Kirishima looks out to the horizon and says, “Look at that, there’s the whole world at your feet. And who gets to see it but the birds, the stars, and the chimney sweeps.”
Katsuki deflates. It’s true. The East End sprawls before them, and at their back the sun sinks under the horizon, setting the smoky atmosphere of London on fire, each cloud splashed a different shade of red. There’s magic in every thread of Katsuki’s soul, but he tends to forget that the whole world is stitched with it—where you don’t think to look, where you’ve looked too many times, where you think transformation is only routine.
Like a stab to his gut, Katsuki feels the pull of the wind. His stomach bottoms out. It’s going to change soon. He turns to Kirishima and Katsuki knows he feels it too. He sees it in the anguish in Kirishima’s eyes, and the desperate pull of his brow. Katsuki’s heart fractures another bit.
But then, because he’s Kirishima and he’s more magic than Katsuki is, he sweeps him up in his arms and begins singing, Chim chim-in-ey, chim chim-in-ey, chim chim cher-ee! as if time couldn’t touch them as long as they kept dancing. Kirishima twirls him around and around, until the only things Katsuki can think of are the weight of Kirishima’s hands on his waist as he picks him up and accompanies him back down, the slap of their feet on the blackened roof, and the lovely smile on Kirishima’s mouth every time they’re face to face.
Kirishima dances and sings, and because he’s lord of this world and shapes it the way he wants, soon they’re joined by all the chimney-sweeps of the city. The fear in Katsuki’s heart drowns in chaos, and the children’s squeals, and bright eyes, and the feel of Kirishima’s lips on his when Katsuki can’t take the distance anymore and closes in.
:::
The next day the wind changes.
It does not change for Katsuki alone: Mr. Kaminari comes home a changed man after his harrowing night out; Mrs. Kaminari is back to having a husband she can talk to; the housemaids have something to gossip about that is not the kids’ erratic behavior.
Kirishima is out waiting for him, sitting on the steps of the Kaminari’s mansion.
Katsuki’s chest is lead, and he half-fears, half-hopes that the wind won’t be able to carry him off today and never again, but Kirishima as always is smiling, and that alone lifts some of the weight off his diaphragm.
Katsuki’s cane clacks on the marble as he descends the stairs. He stops one step above Kirishima, looking down in those red eyes he wants to burrow in.
“You’ve always been so beautiful,” Kirishima whispers and wipes away a tear Katsuki did not realize had fallen.
He wants to—he wants to everything. To laugh, to cry, to get angry, and to kiss Kirishima senseless until the wind has to take them both. He asks instead, his voice cracking, “Wait for me?”
Kirishima hums. “Always,” he says, and then smiles. “But I don’t think you’ll stay away too long.”
Katsuki tilts his head to the side.
“Chimney sweeps are lucky people, and this one wants you right here.”
Kirishima welcomes him when Katsuki sinks against him, but the pull of the wind becomes stronger, always stronger—until Kirishima is slipping out of his arms and Katsuki is airborne over the garden, and the roads, and then the roofs of London.
He watches Kirishima smiling up at him until he fades into a tiny dot below, and allows himself to trust his words and his magic, because Kirishima is king of this world and shapes it the way he wants.