Work Text:
Katsuki learns, at the ripe age of four, this—the brighter the light he can see, that much more darkness and shadow lies beneath, where he can’t.
The first time Katsuki and Izuku meet, they’re too small to remember much, realistically. And yet, Katsuki remembers everything.
The first thing Katsuki remembers is the forest.
The way the trees stand tall and firm high above, enduring and steadfast. The tops of their canopies filtering the warmth of the summer sun. Swathes of light and bright rays bouncing off the curves and contours of the leaves. Tall, soft wisps of weeds swaying gently in the breeze. Pebbles of dirt dusted on his hands. The red and green colored koi fish slinking through grass in the clear river water.
It’s easy to believe, really. That the forest will still be here, existing simply and surely, even when Katsuki himself is buried six feet under the ground. The trees are too tall, too broad and too strong, to be cut down by any effort of Mother Nature. The koi seem to resolutely continue swimming regardless of what may happen outside the water.
Too easy.
The second thing Katsuki remembers, as he absentmindedly threads his fingers through the grass, is the gentle squelching of footsteps upon damp soil. He sits at the mouth of the river, watching the water ripple into waves when he tosses a pebble.
He lifts his chin at the sound.
There’s another boy that approaches him.
Katsuki silently pats the dirt beside him, gesturing for the other boy to sit.
He does.
They sit there, for a few minutes, in silence.
Well, not really silence. The river continues to ripple and lap at its edge. The bird nestled in the leaves still makes the tree whisper sweet nothings to the sky. The world spins around them in a bustle of background noise, but they themselves are silent and still.
Katsuki cranes his head and looks to the clouds. From the corner of his eye, he sees the other boy bring his knees close to his body and hug them with his arms. He lays his cheek on his knee and looks at Katsuki from the side.
Katsuki points to a cloud. It’s puffy in the middle, but wispy at the sides. “That one looks like your hair,” he whispers, as quiet as the trees.
The other boy raises his head, his gaze searching for what Katsuki’s pointing at.
When he finds it, a puff of breath leaves his nostrils. The lines of his little mouth curve a little. A silent acknowledgement.
His gaze still searches the sky.
“What about you?” the other boy asks. Points to Katsuki’s head with a small finger.
Katsuki considers this. He brings his hands to his own hair, carding his fingers through the texture of it. He’s never seen a cloud with spikes before, and he isn’t really sure if one exists. Clouds are soft, not spikey. They’re billowy and huge and like marshmallows. And there just aren’t spiky marshmallows in this world—a fundamental truth.
“I don’t think you’ll find one,” he says, after a moment.
The boy’s cheek returns to its spot on his knee. He looks at Katsuki. “Oh,” he says. “Okay.”
He doesn’t really sound disappointed. He doesn’t really sound like anything.
“What’s your name?” Katsuki asks.
His mother would be proud. He hates talking to the kids at school because they simply don’t matter to him.
The boy’s eyebrows furrow a little and his lips turn down slightly, as if it’s a difficult question to answer. Or it’s one he’s reluctant to answer.
“Izuku,” he says eventually. It’s phrased a little bit like a question, and Katsuki can’t figure out why.
He doesn’t offer a last name.
“Bakugou Katsuki,” Katsuki says. “That’s me.”
Izuku’s lips attempt to shape the word, curving around the difficult syllables, but the effort seems to heed no results.
He hangs his head in regret. “I’m sorry,” he says.
A response bubbles up Katsuki’s throat, but he forces it back down. Instead, he brings a hand to Izuku’s head to reassure him. But he also wants to card his fingers through the soft looking strands and see if they feel like how he thinks the clouds above them would.
It doesn’t.
Izuku flinches at the contact, and his breath catches dangerously, and the world around them seems to go horrifyingly still.
Something that feels sticky, almost oil-like, comes off on the tips of Katsuki’s fingers.
This time, it’s Katsuki’s turn to say, “I’m sorry.”
His mother would be proud. He never likes to apologize to the boys in his class when he says something rude to them. They’re wimpy crybabies anyway—not Katsuki’s problem.
Izuku sniffles a little but appears relatively unruffled when he raises his head. “S’okay, Kacchan.”
Some of the boys in Katsuki’s school call him Kacchan, because their lips can’t form the letters of his first name. He hates it.
Katsuki doesn’t say anything of the sort to Izuku. Maybe Kacchan is okay. Just for this particular boy.
“Do you go to school?” Katsuki asks instead. A safer question.
“No,” Izuku says.
Oh. Katsuki wishes Izuku went to school, with him. Maybe they could have been friends.
“Where’s your mama?” Izuku asks, out of nowhere.
At first, Katsuki thinks it’s a strange question. But when he ponders it a bit more, it starts to make sense. His mother would want to meet Izuku before allowing Katsuki to play outside with him. Maybe that’s what Izuku wants to ask about.
“She’s at home,” Katsuki replies.
Izuku nods.
“What about you?” Katsuki asks. “Where’s your mom?”
Izuku brightens at the question. For the first time since they started talking, Izuku begins to truly smile. It’s not much, though. Simply the gentle curve of his mouth upward and the crinkle of the corners of his eyes.
“Mama,” Izuku says. His mouth parts a little to accommodate his sudden smile.
Katsuki stares. His teeth are not white.
Izuku looks to the sky. He raises his arm and points to the sun. As he does, its rays seem to bend around him, encircling his head in a gentle halo. “She’s in the fire,” he says, strangely a little enthralled.
Katsuki takes a moment to think. He remembers the way his mother would look to the sky during the New Year’s Day ceremony, when she prays, looking to their ancestors above and those long gone from this world.
In a way, even they endure, just like the trees and the koi in the river. Even when the world burns down, the sun and the sky and everything beyond persists.
Katsuki doesn’t tell Izuku something like, “I’m sorry,” like his own mother would probably instruct him to. Not because he isn’t sorry, but because how could that possibly be the right thing to say? What even is?
“Okay,” he chooses to say instead.
Izuku turns to Katsuki and offers him a smile, showing a couple of more teeth.
Katsuki glances away, despite himself.
“What’s your quirk?” Katsuki asks, then.
Izuku shakes his head, which is and isn’t an answer.
“You don’t have one?”
He shakes his head again.
Then, “Want to see mine?”
A nod—the miniscule shake of his head.
Katsuki grins. He puts his hand in between them, palm up, and wills the sparks to appear. Flares of red and yellow and orange flitter and dance across his palm in little starbursts of explosion and noise.
Izuku is utterly transfixed. His eyes never leave Katsuki’s palms. The sparks reflect in his deep emerald eyes, and they glisten with something that Katsuki can’t discern. He strangely feels a bit of pride at the reaction.
“The fire is beautiful,” Izuku says, and it’s the last thing Katsuki expects to hear. Nobody has ever called his quirk ‘beautiful’ before. It’s frightening and dangerous and powerful. Not beautiful. He wants to tell Izuku that.
“It’s not really fire,” Katsuki says instead. “More like explosions.”
Izuku nods in understanding. “Like fireworks?”
Katsuki smiles a little. There’s something a little odd about Izuku, and it makes something flutter strangely in his chest, but it’s kind of endearing. “Yeah. Like fireworks.”
Izuku scoots a little closer to him. He takes both of Katsuki’s hands in his own two smaller ones and takes in a breath so deep Katsuki can feel it through his own skin.
Something in his hands, a sensation in his stomach, starts to pull away from him. At first, it’s only a gentle tug, but then it escalates quickly.
It begins to feel like his intestines are attempting to force their way through his throat, his insides engaged in a violent tug of war.
“What are you doing?” Katsuki tries to say, but the words won’t fit. Something’s lodged in his throat and is choking the oxygen out of him. His lungs feel like they’re bubbling with burning gasoline.
His knees buckle weakly, and he falls forward toward Izuku. In the process, Katsuki’s hands are ripped from Izuku’s grasp. The violent twists and yanks in his stomach immediately cease.
He heaves a breath, having fallen into the tufts of grass below them. His teeth and his jaw sing in pain.
“I’m sorry,” Izuku says. He falls to the grass beside Katsuki. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
The inside of his mouth is bone dry, and his veins feel like they’ve been injected with burning lead.
Katsuki can’t stop staring at Izuku’s hands and arms on the grass. He forgets the pain in his knees and in his hands.
Ugly patches of puckered skin crisscross his small hands, and some of them look much more recent than others. Some of the scars look like the types of blisters Katsuki got when he first started using his quirk. It used to burn his hands a few times, but his hands eventually got used to the heat.
Izuku notices Katsuki staring. He looks down, and Katsuki can’t help but think his new friend looks a little sad. The way he looks at his own hands makes him think Izuku himself gotten used to the heat, but that his body hasn’t.
Izuku said he doesn’t have a quirk.
Katsuki is too young to know where those scars and blemishes that mar his skin may have come from, but he’s cognizant enough to know that something is terribly, horribly wrong.
“They’re from the fire,” Izuku mutters. Whether to reassure, to explain, or simply to release the words into the air between them, Katsuki can’t figure out.
He doesn’t know what that means. But that doesn’t stop his heart from sinking into his stomach. He knows the ruthless scars and the blackness beneath his nails are wrong, and the hair that seems like it hasn’t been washed in weeks is wrong, and that the teeth that are discolored and a little misshapen are wrong.
“What about your dad?” Katsuki asks. He doesn’t know why he asks.
Izuku shakes his head again. “Sensei takes care of me,” he says in lieu of an answer to the question that was actually asked.
Katsuki’s mind feels a little befuddled. “Sensei? You said you didn’t go to school...”
Izuku shrugs. It isn’t an answer.
Katsuki doesn’t know what drives him to do this or say that. Something in his forehead, something in his hands, burns, with an instinctual need to do something. Anything.
It’s like something is violently twisting his intestines inside his stomach all over again, and the sensation is what Katsuki thinks torture feels like. He needs to say something.
This time, Katsuki grasps Izuku’s hands in his own. He can feel the flinch through every bone in his body, and it makes him feel sick. He pulls Izuku close with urgency, even though everything in his chest and his stomach is screaming at him to run away.
“Come with me,” Katsuki says. “Please.”
He begs.
Izuku’s eyes suddenly close off. He turns away, and the haze of the sun around them seems to disappear.
“I can’t, Kacchan. No.”
The quiet little bubble of peace Izuku and Katsuki had created between the soft rays of the sun and the whisper of the trees above them, shatters like a brick hit glass.
The third thing Katsuki remembers is this—the big, scary man, whose footsteps in the damp soil make a completely different sound than Izuku’s soft ones.
A shadow descends upon them, and Katsuki’s blood runs cold. Something encircles his lungs and his rib cage, closing tighter until he can’t even breathe.
A laugh sounds. It’s very quiet, but it’s potent, and the sound makes Katsuki’s feet root themselves into the ground, and it feels like boulders are crushing his shoulders.
This is nothing like standing up to fourth graders at his school who think they can mess with him. Katsuki’s perfectly fine with showing them who’s really at the top.
But this?
He’s never felt fear quite like this.
“Izuku,” the voice says, and the way it echoes down to Katsuki’s ears makes it sound like it’s reaching them from miles above, and the hints of deadly power that snake between the three syllables makes Katsuki tremble in a way he’s never trembled before.
The man’s shoulders are broad, and his jaw is sharp and strong, and he’s tall—several feet taller than Katsuki and Izuku. So tall, in fact, that Katsuki has to crane his head and bend backwards if he wants to see anything above the pearly grin on his face.
He doesn’t.
The grin, clean and blinding and white in a way that Izuku’s just isn’t, is about as unsettling and deadly as the single word that came out of his mouth.
Katsuki can’t look higher than it—he just can’t. Shame crawls up his throat. He turns his gaze to Izuku instead, and even this takes colossal effort on his part.
Izuku’s head is bowed, and his eyelashes spill so low across his freckled cheeks that Katsuki can’t see his eyes. The only thing that Katsuki can see is his hand trembling by his side.
Katsuki can’t look. He can’t speak. He can’t do anything but stare at the exact spot where Izuku’s standing and continue staring once Izuku moves away from that spot.
He can’t see, but he can hear. Izuku’s sneakers squelch against the dirt as he ambles to where the big, scary man stands. Katsuki hears the slide of scarred and smooth hands against one another, a hand settling on a neck, and he can hear the big footsteps walk away. The big ones are so loud and overbearing that they completely drown out Izuku’s smaller ones.
Guilt stabs at his chest, and the strange fluttering feeling from earlier returns to his stomach. Katsuki is now able to interpret the feeling.
Every fiber of muscle and tissue he’s made of is telling him to run away—as fast as he can.
Fear has Katsuki in its cruel clutches, and he finally gives in.
He runs away, directly opposite the direction Izuku and the big, scary man are walking. Along the way, he trips over a stone and falls into the dirt, scraping his knees and his elbows. He scrambles to his feet and continues to run, until the forest around him dims to darkness. Until he can’t pick out the scent of the summer grass right by the river anymore.
Until he can escape that pearly white smile, once and for all—except he can’t, because his brain isn’t keeping up with his body. His body wants to run away from that smile, but his brain is staying adamantly in place.
Something ugly climbs up inside him and makes a home in his ribcage, in the lump of muscle where his heart is supposed to be. It thumps and thumps, loud and intrusive, until it’s the only thing that he can hear.
Katsuki claws away.
He tries to tell his mother about the boy he met by the river. The boy named Izuku. The boy with green hair like summer grass, and even greener eyes, and freckles like little shooting stars across his cheeks.
The boy who was taken by the hand, away from Katsuki, by a big, scary man that Katsuki couldn’t defeat.
His mother is a little concerned, so she takes Katsuki to the police station so he can tell them instead. So he can tell people who can help.
But they can’t. They say they can’t help.
Katsuki wishes he could have done it all himself.
The officers tell him that the boy he's talking about may be named Midoriya Izuku.
They say Midoriya Izuku was a child who had died in an apartment fire a few months ago, and that there was no way he could have survived. They’d found his remains, as well as the body of his mother. They say Katsuki must be seeing things—it’s okay, they say. He’s a child. It happens. No worries.
Katsuki wants to scream. He wants to let out that ugly feeling in his chest and hurl it back at everyone. Anything, anything, to get rid of the misery he feels, horrible and exquisite, before it swallows him whole. Maybe it already has.
He knows he’s not crazy. He’s not. They’re making it sound like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s not crazy.
He tries to tell them that Izuku is alive because Katsuki sat next to him, had a conversation with him, touched his hair and held their hands together. He was real. He’d made something fundamental in Katsuki pull away so viciously before the sensation was cut short.
All of that was real, and it had happened to Katsuki. He wasn't stupid. He could tell apart dreams and hallucination from reality. He wasn’t crazy.
So, why can’t they understand? Why can’t they help?
Katsuki wishes he could have done everything all by himself.
He wishes he didn’t run away. He wishes the big, scary man wasn’t too big and too scary for him to stand against.
He wishes the big, scary man hadn’t made him feel so small. Like an insignificant human in comparison to a surmountable force of nature. As if he was staring down the eye of a hurricane, daring to step close and get swept away in the deadly, slicing storm.
Nothing ever gets done right if you rely on anybody but yourself. Everyone else is useless.
He's learned his lesson.
Katsuki returns home with his mother. As she drives them both, he sits in the back seat, staring at the windows and the sky. He wishes the clouds above didn’t look so soft.
He’s tired of wishing and never receiving.
The monster claws and claws.
As Katsuki gets older, he finds himself thinking about that boy more and more.
It’s not even on purpose.
One evening when Katsuki is eight years old, he and his parents are sitting at the table for dinner. The newspaper in front of him shows a picture of an apartment complex burnt to the ground.
The headline reads, Four year anniversary since tragic apartment fire that killed a single mother and her four-year-old child.
Katsuki growls at the paper and viciously rips a piece off the top. His mother smacks the side of his head in admonishment and yanks the paper away from his grasp.
He spits at her rudely and gets up from the table, storming off in a frustrated huff. His chest is tight and his lungs feel constricted. His line-of-sight blurs together until his head spins, dizzy.
Izuku was always bathed in a halo of blessed sunlight. And Katsuki’s no hero.
The bitter feeling of regret and guilt never stops clawing, like an eternal demon trapped between his lungs, ripping the tissue to shreds slowly and surely.
Katsuki is in his last year of middle school, and he’s ready to leave this hellhole and finally achieve his dream of becoming the greatest hero. He’s good as guaranteed a spot in Yuuei High School’s prestigious hero course.
When his homeroom teacher asks the class why they want to be heroes, most people talk about a hero they admire and want to emulate. Some say they want to save people. A lot say they think it would make them look cool, and others want to show off their quirks.
Katsuki, however?
His answer is a little more complicated than that.
He knows that most amazing heroes show signs of greatness even as young children. They all say how there was this one moment where their bodies simply moved on their own to save someone in danger. They all say how the early signs of their power and potential were evident.
Katsuki had his chance. He had the chance for his body to move of his own accord to save a boy who so clearly needed his help. He had the chance to save that boy from a man that felt like the personification of a nightmare.
And when the time came, he couldn’t even move a muscle. Even now, thinking about it, Katsuki feels sick.
When the teacher gets to Katsuki, asking him his reason for becoming a hero, Katsuki doesn’t have an honest answer.
Because how can he admit that he wants to become a hero solely for the boy he was never able to save?
Instead, he spits something nasty, and nobody asks him the question again.
Katsuki’s mom sends him to the grocery store five minutes away to buy milk every week.
In some ways, he thinks his mother still pities him. He feels trapped, suffocated, and this is her way of giving him a little bit of respite, of relief, of freedom.
He doesn’t need that old hag’s help. He’s fine on his own—he doesn’t need someone coddling him like he’s a little kid when he can handle himself. He doesn’t need help at all.
(As if the ugly, rotten creature encircling his chest with murder on its mind could be defeated simply by a trip to the supermarket. It’s almost laughable.)
(Almost—because still, it tears him apart.)
He doesn’t need his mother to give him relief. When he finally goes to Yuuei High School, he can pour everything he has into tireless training, into becoming a hero. Into becoming the person he’s always been destined to be.
He’s almost there. He just needs to wait a few more weeks, and then everything will be okay. It’s all right within his reach. So close he can almost grasp it.
It’s not a distraction—of course it’s not. If only it was.
The supermarket run becomes a routine for Katsuki. They all tell him he needs dependable constants in his life, a set schedule to follow, goals to achieve—all to keep himself held together. They tell him a weekly trip to the supermarket is but one baby step, one miniscule activity to accomplish, to feel like he’s progressing in some way.
It’s a bunch of bullshit. He's always had a constant in his life. He’s always had goals to achieve, and he would never settle for something so small and insignificant.
Of course he holds himself together. He’s done it for years.
Katsuki doesn’t need anybody’s shitty advice and he sure as hell doesn’t need their goddamn pity.
He goes to the store to get milk anyway. It’s a little different, he’ll admit. Being out of the house is better than nothing. It’s better than his parents hovering over him as if he’s a volatile ticking time bomb with the wick worn to a thread.
He watches the clouds as he walks. Sometimes, he forgets to look both ways before he crosses the street, and some driver honks at him. He flips a middle finger back.
See? Routine.
Perfect.
The neon sign above the doors is dim and mellow, the paint on the inside walls is cracked, and the wheels on the carts creak like they haven’t been oiled in years. The air conditioning can barely be called air conditioning. The lights on the inside of the freezer doors flicker on and off steadily.
The place is ominous as any place could be. But Katsuki doesn’t mind the eerie quiet. It’s peaceful. Sometimes, the voices stop chattering in his brain, and the monster stops clawing. Everything sleeps, for those thirty minutes he’s away from home.
Katsuki holds the handles of his basket in the crook of his elbow as he looks through the milk aisle, then peers at the list in his other hand, the one that his mother gave him before he left.
The door is open, and the chill from inside the freezer makes the hairs on his arms stand up. But he ignores the sensation, grabbing the correct cartons and closing the door quickly.
He looks down to set the two cartons snug in the corner of his basket, and he pockets his list with his other hand as he does so.
When he looks up, he’s met with deep emerald eyes so, so close to his own, and the whisper of the trees of that forest from so long ago hits Katsuki’s ears like a brick. His nose is suddenly clouded with the pleasant fragrance of the summer sun.
Midoriya Izuku, the boy who died in that raging inferno eleven years ago, stands a foot away from Katsuki. He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie and navy sweatpants.
Katsuki’s breath catches in his throat, and suddenly he can’t breathe. He swallows the lump in his throat.
Izuku is no longer that four-year-old boy in the forest. Those worrying features of his Katsuki saw that day in the forest are no longer clearly visible in the same places.
He’s gotten taller and he’s filed out into his body. His hair is wondrously wild with curls, and the line of his jaw is sharper than Katsuki remembers. The curve of his neck is visible, and the skin is bright red.
Something slices up his spine at the sight.
Izuku’s mouth breaks open into a winsome smile.
A pearly white grin, clean and blinding.
Katsuki’s feet root themselves deep into the ground, just like they did that day, when the light above them vaporized into monstrous shadow.
Izuku steps closer. Katsuki’s fist trembles and shakes at his side. His nails dig ugly, red crescents into his palms.
Izuku’s scarred hand comes up to gently brush Katsuki’s hairline. Then his thumb traces across Katsuki’s cheekbone in a featherlight touch.
“Kacchan,” he says. Whispers the nickname like a prayer. Like there are leaves above them swaying in the breeze, full of secrets.
His two hands move to cup Katsuki’s face. Izuku stares at him, and his eyes glitter.
They’re so beautiful. And with but a pinprick, they paralyze Katsuki. He can’t move.
The fluttering feeling returns to his stomach. He doesn’t know whether it’s because there’s something about this boy that makes him want to dare tread closer, or if it’s telling him to run away, and he hates that he can’t tell the difference.
This boy has ruined Katsuki. For good.
His smile is too similar to the big, scary man’s—even though he feels stupid referring to him like that.
“Do you remember me?” Izuku asks.
He smiles when Katsuki can’t respond.
“I think about you every day, Kacchan. Do you know that?”
Izuku’s hands trail down his neck, sweep over his shoulders and down his arms, all the way to Katsuki’s own hands.
Katsuki would never say that his mind has been plagued with the same thought every single day for the past eleven years. They’re not the same.
When Izuku tries to take Katsuki's hands, he yanks them away. He knows what will happen if he doesn’t.
Izuku laughs a little at the movement. “Fine. You caught me.”
What is this? Who is this boy who has masterfully cleaned up the broken shell of Izuku and is shamefully wearing it as if it were his own?
Who are you?
“Why did you leave?” Katsuki whispers. He doesn’t want to attract attention—despite the fact that the grocery store is as well as deserted.
(He doesn’t think his voice could handle anything more than a whisper.)
His fists clench back at his sides, trembling despite himself. He’s stronger now. He’s not the same four-year-old weakling who ran away.
So why can’t he move?
Izuku closes his eyes and his mouth curves upward slightly. He doesn’t answer the question, but when his eyes open again, they fixate on Katsuki’s hands again, and they glisten with want.
But what does he want?
“Why did you run away?” Izuku asks in response, so innocently.
Katsuki wants to know the answer to that question, too. He wants to know the answers to so many questions. What became of this boy?
But nothing comes out of Katsuki’s mouth.
A phone buzzes in a pocket. He isn’t sure whose it is.
“I’m sorry,” Izuku says. Strangely, he sounds like he means it, but not in the way Katsuki desperately wants him to mean it. He begins to back away from Katsuki, ever so slowly.
Don’t go, Katsuki wants to say. Not again.
If this were any other boy, perhaps Katsuki would brave the nerves and ask for his number so they could continue to talk. That’s what kids their age do, right?
But Izuku is no ordinary boy. And fear, not nerves, has Katsuki in a vicious chokehold.
Katsuki wants to chase after him, to make up for the horrible mistake he’d made years ago. He won’t make it again, he won’t.
Izuku walks away. His eyes don’t leave Katsuki’s.
Katsuki’s feet stay rooted in the ground, as if they were stuck in quicksand. He wants to rip out his throat.
It awakens, like clockwork, clawing up his spine like it always does, burrowing a gaping hole in his chest.
Izuku’s gone. Again.
Katsuki is sprawled on top of the couch of the Yuuei dorm common room with his eyes closed, thinking about nothing at all while the TV drones on and on in the background.
“Whoa,” one of his classmates says, coming into the room suddenly. “Check this out! It’s that guy again on TV.”
He’s about to snap at whoever it is for disturbing his peace, but the scene on the TV steals his attention.
A couple more of his classmates enter the room and circle around the couch, watching the TV.
Katsuki sits up.
“He looks our age, right? Doesn’t he?!” One exclaims.
Another one sighs. “It’s truly a shame.”
Katsuki watches, transfixed. The events they’re reporting look like they’re scenes straight out of the apocalypse.
The entire street’s almost been incinerated to smithereens, and the sidewalks are littered with fallen streetlights. Huge chunks of concrete move through the air of their own accord, and flames rage in windows of buildings nearby. Utter destruction.
In the middle of it all, is a dynamic figure. All of the destruction—his doing. All of it under his control, all of it in his mercy. His will, his pleasure, is the only thing that spares. And he spares nothing.
People have died.
By the time the heroes arrive, the villain is gone.
He calls himself Deku.
(It’s like Izuku is mocking him. It makes him sick.)
“Have you seen this, Bakugou? It’s crazy,” one of them tells Katsuki.
Of course he’s seen it. The flames drift through his daydreams and rage in his nightmares. His mouth fills with the coppery tang of blood every single time. When the figure is zoomed in on, he is always staring directly into the camera, directly into Katsuki’s eyes.
Are you watching, Kacchan? he always says, with those beautiful and destructive eyes. They always reflect the inferno he’s created.
With a vicious snarl, Katsuki gets off the couch and storms out of the room, leaving his classmates staring after him in shock.
“Are you stupid?” his classmate admonishes the other. “It’s a touchy subject for him. Just don’t.”
Their classmates continue whispering to each other.
“What’s the history behind that?”
“Do they know each other or something?”
Katsuki will never, ever, ever, answer those questions. On his deathbed, his head held at gunpoint, it doesn’t matter—he’ll still take it to the grave. Katsuki’s made his bed, and now he must lie in it. This is nobody’s burden, nobody’s misery, to bear but his own.
Yuuei would ask him why he wants to be a hero, too, sometimes. His answer has changed from back in middle school. But he could still never, ever say it.
How could ever he say that he wants to become a hero for the boy he was responsible for turning into a villain?
His classmates are still chattering amongst themselves.
Katsuki lets out a guttural yell and punches the wall of his dorm room with his shaking fist. It makes a gaping hole in the plaster, and it splits open his knuckles. Blood drips to his floor and they all go silent immediately.
He gets detention for a week.
Katsuki’s starting to see Izuku every fucking place he goes.
When he walks to the station to take the train back to Yuuei after visiting his parents for winter break, there Izuku is. Sitting on the edge of the platform, swaying his legs absentmindedly in the empty space. He waves to Katsuki.
He grits his teeth and whirls away. But when he turns back, Izuku is gone.
When he picks up groceries for their dorm, Izuku is there, still in the milk aisle. He gets whole milk every time and places it gently into his green basket.
Katsuki exhales violently and digs into the freezer for the right milk. When he looks back, Izuku is gone.
When he goes to the temple to celebrate New Years with his family, Izuku is at the table underneath the snowy trees, collecting his fortune. When their eyes meet, he bows to Katsuki.
His fists clench and fire singes at his heart. He wants to punch something, but he knows he can’t make a scene. When he goes to collect his own fortune, Izuku is gone.
He doesn’t read what his fortune says. He already knows he’s fucked.
When his classmates forcibly take him to a restaurant to celebrate his birthday, he sees Izuku sitting at one of the tables, heartily eating a bowl of Katsudon. Izuku tries to wave him over to sit with him.
Katsuki glares at his own food. He’s lost his appetite.
When he looks back up, there’s nobody there.
He doesn’t know whether Izuku is stalking him or if he’s just fucking going insane. Katsuki can’t tell whether Izuku is a ghost, a hallucination, a product of his own demons; or if he’s a real person, a true villain, a product of his cowardice and hesitation.
What’s even the difference between his nightmares and reality anymore? The face of the boy from the forest haunts him in both, either way. The boy he used to be.
This new and improved Izuku isn’t the same anymore. He’s cleaned up. He’s hidden every ugly aspect of himself behind that refined, winsome smile. Bone-white, like the moon that lives in the darkness inside Katsuki. He’s now hard lines and muscles. He’s strong and powerful and dangerous. He looks like heaven but makes Katsuki feel like hell and it’s torture just thinking about him.
It all makes him sick. Something always claws up his throat and squeezes his heart like a vice. Shame fills his lungs until he feels like he’s suffocating.
Katsuki has nobody to blame but himself.
Katsuki visits his parents over the weekend, just weeks before graduation. It’s become more of a habit these days.
When his mother opens the door for him, it’s like his knees give out right then and there. He collapses into her arms.
They sit on the couch. His mother strokes his hair, and he slumps on the armrest, saying nothing. He barely even breathes.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “I promise. Don’t blame yourself.”
The words feel empty.
“You were small,” she continues. “There’s nothing you or anybody else could have done.”
“I see him everywhere,” Katsuki says. “What do I do?”
He’s helpless. He’s given up on anger. All he feels anymore is the void in his chest, eternal, like an old friend that never leaves him, because God knows he has enough of those.
“It’s not your fault,” she says again.
She has good intentions. He knows that. She’s trying her hardest to help.
But Katsuki doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t think he ever will.
Everything around him burns.
Huge clouds of smoke billow into the sky, masking the sky in ashes. Rescue workers are frantically trying to dig mutilated corpses out of the rubble. His friends are all separated, some fighting smaller villains, and others assisting the rescue workers.
Flames of wrath gather and flash viciously. Windows explode and streetlights crash to the concrete and shatter into pieces.
People scream.
Katsuki intimately feels the familiarity of the scene. It’s what lives in his head, personified. They’re well acquainted.
This is reality. It’s strange, the relief he feels, at knowing that what he’s seeing isn’t a hallucination. This is hell. He can see forever in the flames.
“Behold,” a voice says. Loud and proud, and it makes every single person in the vicinity tremble with everlasting fear. “This is my creation!”
Katsuki now knows the big, scary man from years ago as All For One. And he hasn’t gotten used to hearing the voice, being able to feel the grin in the inflection of it. It still makes him feel like he's staring into the eye of a hurricane.
But he doesn’t stop moving.
Katsuki’s honed his quirk almost to perfection. He’s trained his body and his instincts, and they haven’t failed him once, not since that fateful day. And they sure as hell will not fail him today. There’s no way. He hasn’t gone through years of this for him to have not learned his lesson.
“I’m gonna kill you, you filthy bastard!” Katsuki yells into the sky with all the rage that lies in his heart.
He’s not getting away, not again.
“I’m afraid you can’t, Kacchan.”
The world knows him as Deku. The villain trained with multiple quirks, born solely to become All For One’s successor. Created to burn and destroy—himself, and everything else in the process.
To Katsuki, in the air between them, through the memories and nightmares and desperate yearning, he’s Izuku.
“Izuku,” Katsuki says.
Izuku stands atop the tallest building, admiring the destruction before him. “The fire is beautiful, isn’t it?”
Katsuki’s used to Izuku’s nonsense, because sometimes it feels like he’s just as insane.
“It can be something to fear, something to hold you back, or it can be a weapon. You can embrace it,” he continues. “When it’s under your control, you can wield it however you want. You can mold it into whatever you please.”
“And your precious Sensei taught you that, right?” Katsuki spits.
Izuku doesn’t react to it in the way Katsuki desperately wants him to. He never does anymore. He isn’t his own person anymore. He hasn’t been for a long, long time.
Katsuki knows this, now. He knows the way it feels intimately—not unlike the creature that lives in him too, another one of the many constants in his life. He’s tried everything under the sun to forget it, to break away from that iron prison, to free himself from the monster that rips him up every night.
He’s realized there really is only one thing left that he can do, if he wants it to sleep again. If he ever wants to sleep again.
Katsuki must break Izuku out of his own prison. Because as much as the world around him tells him that Deku is a villain, as much as they tell Katsuki Deku’s a monster, unreachable, unattainable, too far gone, unredeemable, can’t be saved , Katsuki knows better.
He learned that lesson the hard way, when the police told Katsuki there’s nothing we can do.
If he wants to save himself, he must save Izuku first. He’s made a vow to himself, and he’ll never break that promise.
“What do you want?” Katsuki asks, desperately. “With me?” He knows the answer already, but he asks anyway.
Izuku sighs. “I wish you’d listen to me. You could join me, let me have your quirk. I could make sure no harm ever came to you. I could protect you.” He shakes his head in disappointment. “So stubborn.”
“Well, guess what? You ruined me a long time ago,” Katsuki replies, incensed, his rage fueled by the fire in his heart.
The flames scorch away every doubt, every sensation of fear, everything that holds Katsuki back from going to Izuku for good. He's supposed to become a pro hero for real by month's end. This is his last chance.
Izuku raises his scarred hands into the air. The fire grows exponentially, burning around him in a hellish halo, lighting up his beautiful green eyes. They glisten with want, even now.
Katsuki finally knows what exactly it is that Izuku wants. But he’s never going to get it.
“I’ll save you this time,” Katsuki yells, a promise to the sky, to himself, to the boy beside the river. “I swear on it.”
Katsuki’s no hero, sure. But he’s not a liar.
Izuku laughs, loudly and joyously. The sound makes Katsuki’s heart plummet into his stomach, but it doesn’t stop him from moving.
His explosions power up, and he can feel the sheer force of the ignition before it happens. Propelling himself into the air, fueled by his feelings and his stubbornness, and everything that lies within his heart, Katsuki presses toward the flames.
This is real. The singes on the hairs of his skin, even from this distance, are indisputable proof. Everything is real, and the realization is strangely cathartic.
Even if it all burns him to ashes, even if it destroys him completely, Katsuki knows what he has to do.
After all, the creature inside is calling.