Chapter Text
“Explain to us why he was chained up at the Sport’s Festival? If he was a hero student, why did you have to restrain him so?”
Katsuki watches as his teacher stares tiredly at the reporter that had just spoken.
Aizawa has his hair tied back from his face and is wearing a suit. Katsuki had never seen him in anything other than his black jumpsuit. That had to mean a good thing right? That he actually did care about all his students? That he was actively trying to rescue him instead of just trying to save face for UA?
He’d known what the other staff members had said about him, about his attitude. He knew his classmates thought he was a dick but he’d never thought they’d question him about wanting to become a hero. He hadn’t fucking asked for the League of Villains to kidnap him!
Are you fucking kidding me right now?
He watches the television intently, holding his breath to see what the hero would say about him.
“Bakugo Katsuki was the top of his class at the entrance exam and again at the Sport’s Festival. He has shown that he belongs at UA.”
Short and to the point, but not exactly winning the crowd over. Katsuki digs his fingers into the arm rests of the chair.
“I guess I should revise my question. Mr. Aizawa, the student in question, Bakugo Katsuki, has an extremely volatile quirk, has attacked a classmate outside of school hours, and now may have willingly just left with the villains who attacked your class during a field trip. This isn’t the first time your class has been attacked this year. How did they know where you were? Evidence points to there being a mole. Do you think Bakugo Katsuki is working with the villains? Is he a villain?”
The villains in question shift their weight from where they stand around him in the run down bar they’d taken him to. All of them had grins on their faces as they watched the dingy tv play the newscast from behind the bar top.
They all watch as Aizawa purses his lips for a moment, leaning back in his chair. He seems to be waiting for something, or someone to indicate how he should answer as his eyes search the crowd behind the reporters. He doesn’t find whatever he’s looking for as disappointment flashes across his eyes and he leans back in to the microphone.
“No comment.”
The reporters go wild and Katsuki’s heart sinks as he closes his eyes in surrender.
First my parents, then my friends, now my teachers.
They’d all given up on him. He knew he had an attitude, an anger problem, but he couldn’t help it – it was a side effect of his quirk. The damn nitroglycerin that fueled his quirk could also stop his heart if his body wasn’t in a constant state of stress to negate it’s vasodilating effects. He always had to be in fight or flight mode – and every fucking time he would choose fight.
Because that’s what heroes did. Or so he thought. They were supposed to fight for what was right, no matter how difficult it would be. So that good would prevail over evil and all that shit that they’d preached as he’d watched them on tv growing up.
But now there was a hero taking the easy way out and letting Katsuki become the scapegoat for a failed mission in which the villains had infiltrated what was supposed to be a secure school trip out in the middle of bum fuck nowhere.
Blaming a fucking child for their mistakes instead of fucking protecting him. Helping him.
He opens his eyes and turns them towards the other red ones in the room. The only ones who had been watching him instead of the tv. Katsuki wasn’t stupid, he knew why.
“Turn it off.” He growls out.
The room is suddenly silent as the tv is turned off and the villains all quiet down, waiting to see what their leader has to say.
“The very ones who are supposed to protect you have just let you become their scapegoat instead,” Shigaraki Tomura says quietly, still studying Katsuki. “Do you know why the heroes are always desperate to take down groups like ours, before they can become bigger?”
Katsuki remains silent from where he sits, strapped to the chair. Chained to the chair.
“Because we are all each other has left in this shitty world. We are the outcasts, the trash, the dirt beneath their shoes. But to ourselves? We’re fucking family. The only fucking family we want and need. And unlike heroes,” Shigaraki walks up to Katsuki and pulls out a key. “We take care of our own,” he unlocks one of his bound wrists, “morals be damned.” He unlocks Katsuki’s other wrist.
“I can see it in your eyes, Dynamight. You’re as tired of their judgements as we once were. You’re tired of no one being there to save you.”
Katsuki looks down and rubs his wrists as Shigaraki continues to speak. He can’t deny that his words are hitting a little too close to home.
“It’s time to save yourself.”
A hand enters his field of vision and Katsuki looks up to stare at the leader of the League of Villains.
“Join us and help us take down those self-righteous bastards. Take your revenge on the people who fed you those false lies all your life. Who let you climb on top of the pedestal only to rip it out from under your feet. You wanted to become a hero to save people? Heroes only save themselves. Villains are the true heroes. We save the forgotten, the beaten, the outcasts. We fight with no rules, only to win. Don’t you want to win, Bakugo Katsuki?”
He'd always wanted to win. To be the best. Ever since before his quirk had manifested he had proudly proclaimed that he would be the next number one hero. That he would become stronger than even All Might. But the world had been viewed through rose colored lens back then. The Katsuki of today had had those lenses shattered months ago. Shattered like fucking Deku had shattered the bones in his arm as Katsuki had learned that the number one hero had chosen him. Not Katsuki.
Katsuki had been working hard, training his ass off so that Deku wouldn’t surpass him, so that he could be number one hero. But All Might didn’t care about that, only cared about his precious fucking successor. His hard work would be for naught.
He eyes the hand still reaching out to him.
Bakugo Katsuki wouldn’t settle for number two. He knew he was damn strong, a good fighter, and deserved to be number one. But he wouldn’t be given the time of day after tonight’s press conference. Not as a hero teacher from the number one hero school in Japan just painted him as a potential fucking villain in a broadcast to the entire country. No one would believe he was innocent anymore.
So you know what? Fuck the heroes.
Katsuki reaches his own hand out and clasps the leader of the League of Villains’.
He wouldn’t join them. He would beat them. They just didn’t know it yet.
If I can’t become the number one hero anymore then I’ll become the number one fucking villain.
He’ll join the League, take them down and be a better goddamn villain than the world has ever seen before.
He was Bakugo-fucking-Katsuki and he was the goddamn best.
Fuck you, too.