Chapter Text
How much longer 'til I'm taller?
How much longer 'til it's midnight?
How much longer 'til the morning?
Are my legs gonna last?
Is it too much to ask?
Is it too much to ask?
Is it?
___________________________________________
The chalk squeaked against the board as Izuku finished sketching a timeline of the Pre-Quirk Era. It was a Monday morning at UA, and Class 1-A, well, the new 1-A, was unusually quiet, their eyes tracking his every move with that mixture of awe and exhaustion that came with being a hero student in a history class.
"Now, it’s important to remember that the rise of Vigilantism wasn't just a response to crime," Izuku said, dusting his hands off. "It was a failure of the existing legal framework to adapt to-"
BANG.
The heavy classroom doors flew open and hit the wall with a force that made the windows rattle. A few students jumped, several instinctively activating their quirks, but Izuku just let out a long, weary sigh. He didn't even have to turn around.
"Deku! Get your gear. We’re leaving."
Katsuki Bakugo stood in the doorway, looking every bit hero. His hero suit was pristine, his grenades glinting under the fluorescent lights, and his expression was a familiar mask of aggressive impatience. He didn't look at the students; his focus was entirely on the man at the front of the room.
"Kacchan," Izuku said, turning around with a faint, apologetic smile for his class. "I’m in the middle of a lecture. You can’t just-"
"I don't care about your history lesson," Katsuki barked, stepping into the room. The air seemed to heat up around him. "The HPSC just flagged a lead on that cell in the Shizuoka ruins. High-level kinetic quirks. It’s a messy one. I need a heavy hitter who can read the field, and I’m not taking some rookie sidekick who’ll just get in my way."
Izuku felt a familiar pull, the itch in his hero's soul to follow that blonde back into the fray. But then he looked at his students, thirty pairs of eyes watching the two legends.
"I can't, Kacchan," Izuku said softly.
Bakugo froze, his eyes narrowing. "What do you mean, you can't?"
"I have two more classes today, and then I have office hours for the third-years' work studies," Izuku explained, his voice steady despite the spike of tension in the room. "And besides, you have your own agency. You don't need me for this."
"I’m not asking for an agency, I’m asking for you," Bakugo growled, taking a step closer. "The intel is fresh. If we go now, we end it by sunset. Quit playing teacher for five minutes and do some actual hero work."
Izuku winced at the jab, but he didn't move. "I am doing hero work. I'm training the next generation. I made a commitment to these kids, and to UA. I'm sorry, Kacchan. I really am. But I'm staying here."
The silence that followed was heavy. Bakugo stared at him, his jaw set so tight Izuku could almost hear his teeth grinding. For a second, Izuku thought he might argue further, might even try to drag him out by the collar. Instead, Bakugo just scoffed, a sharp, bitter sound.
"Fine," Bakugo said, turning on his heel. "Stay here and play with your chalk, Deku. Don't come whining to me when you're bored out of your mind."
"Kacchan, wait,"
But the doors slammed shut before Izuku could finish. He stood there for a moment, the echo of the bang ringing in his ears.
"Sensei?" one of the students asked tentatively. "Are you okay?"
Izuku forced a smile, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "I'm fine, Handa. Let's get back to the timeline."
He picked up the chalk, but his hand shook just a fraction. He told himself he had made the right choice. He was a teacher now. But as he looked at the door, a cold, irrational knot of unease began to tighten in his chest.
___________________________________________
The ruins were a skeletal reminder of what happened when quirks went unchecked. Concrete pillars, stripped of their rebar like picked-over carcasses, leaned precariously against one another. It was quiet… too quiet for a location that was supposed to be a hive of activity.
Katsuki adjusted the gauntlet on his right arm, the metal cool against his skin. The sun was low, casting long, distorted shadows that danced across the rubble. He was alone. Usually, he didn't mind the solitude; it meant no one was in the blast radius, no one to slow him down, no one to worry about.
But today, the silence felt heavy.
Stay here and play with your chalk, Deku.
The words he'd spat in the classroom felt like honey in his mouth now. He’d wanted Izuku here, not because he couldn't handle the mission, he was Dynamight, for fuck's sake, but because Izuku saw the things he missed. Izuku would have noted the way the dust was settled, or the specific frequency of the quirk residue humming in the air.
He kicked a piece of debris, watching it skitter into the darkness of a collapsed stairwell.
"Scout the perimeter, they said," Katsuki muttered to himself, his voice echoing flatly. "Fresh intel, they said."
He moved deeper into the ruins, his boots crunching on broken glass. He picked up a faint thermal signature deep underground, but it was erratic, blinking in and out of existence like a dying lightbulb. It didn't feel like a cell of villains. It felt like a trap. Or worse, a mistake.
He stopped in the center of what used to be a courtyard. He could smell the ozone now, the sharp, metallic tang of a high-output kinetic quirk. It was familiar, but distorted.
He should call it in. He should wait for backup. He could almost hear Izuku’s voice in his ear, mumbling about strategic patience and structural integrity.
"I don't need a lecture," Katsuki whispered to the empty air as he walked towards a sinkhole that lay at one end of the ruins. He could smell the ozone now, the sharp, metallic tang of a high-output kinetic quirk.
He raised his palm, a small, controlled spark flickering in the center. He just needed to see what was down there. One quick look, then he’d head back to the city, grab some shitty takeout, and maybe send a text to that nerd to tell him the mission was a bust.
He stepped toward the edge of the descent, unaware that the very ground beneath him was vibrating at a frequency he couldn't yet detect.
He took one more step, the spark in his hand illuminating the first few feet of the dark, crumbling tunnel.
"Come on," he breathed, the competitive fire in his chest flickering against the creeping dread. "Show me what you've got." He stepped forward, the spark in his palm igniting into a controlled explosion that lit up the tunnel. It revealed a steep, unstable descent, the walls slick with some kind of dark, viscous fluid. The thermal signature pulsed again, stronger this time, deeper within the earth.
"Tch. Looks like a damn sewer," he grumbled, but his eyes narrowed with a hunter's focus. This was more than just a quick sweep. Something felt wrong.
He should have listened to his gut. He should have turned around and walked away. But the lure of the unknown, the challenge… It was too strong. He took another step, his boot crunching on loose gravel. He stumbled, feeling the gravel give way. He jumped back, grabbing onto a nearby wall as much as his sweaty fingertips would allow him to. The crumbling concrete offered little purchase, and he slid down, landing with a jarring thud on the uneven ground. He cursed, the sound swallowed by the oppressive silence of the ruins. His left leg buckled beneath him, sending a white-hot jolt up his spine.
“Shit! Twisted my damn ankle,” he hissed, his focus quickly being drawn to the sound of the ground groaning and cracking as it gave way under him, the hole he was looking down crumbling open wider and wider. He yelled, a raw sound of surprise, as the ground beneath him gave way completely. He tumbled into the darkness, his injured leg screaming in protest with every jolt and impact.
The air was thick with dust and the metallic tang of something foul. He landed hard, a choked gasp escaping his lips as his already screaming ankle took the brunt of the fall. Darkness pressed in, absolute and suffocating. He tried to push himself up, but his arms trembled, and the pain in his leg flared up his body.
“SHIT!” He snapped, pulling himself up. God, this was embarrassing, but at least he could blast his way up. A weak, sputtering explosion erupted from his palm, barely lifting him an inch off the ground before fizzling out. He stared at his hand, then at the darkness above. Not even close.
“The fuck…” He muttered, confused as to why his quirk seemed to barely work down here. It was as if Aizawa was using erasure on him. He tried to summon a larger blast, but only a pathetic puff of smoke came out. "What the hell?!" he yelled, frustration boiling over.
His fists slammed into the crumbling wall beside him, a shower of dust and debris raining down. The impact sent a jolt up his arm, a dull ache that was quickly overshadowed by a surge of pure, unadulterated rage. "Why the hell is my quirk acting up NOW?!"
Katsuki decided, if he couldn’t go up, he would just go forward. He took a step into the crumbling tunnel, ignoring the tremor that ran through the ground. But the tremor wasn't just in the ground. It was in his bones, a deep thrum that vibrated up his legs and into his chest. His quirk, usually a roaring inferno at his command, felt like a sputtering ember, weak and unreliable. He tried to summon a small explosion, but only a pathetic puff of smoke came out.
He wandered forward for as long as his jacked up leg would take him, along the dark tunnels that seemed to have no ending, and the air grew thick with a strange, metallic tang. He tried to push down the rising panic, focusing on the faint glow of his gauntlet. This was stupid. He was Bakugo Katsuki. He didn't get scared of dark tunnels. He made them. He took another step, the spark in his palm flaring brighter, illuminating the crumbling walls.
Suddenly, the ground beneath him gave way. A guttural roar, not his own, echoed from the depths as the metallic tang in the air intensified, burning his nostrils. He barely had time to register the blinding flash of emerald light before a concussive force slammed into him, throwing him backward into the rubble. He landed hard, the impact jarring through his bones. Dust and debris rained down, obscuring his vision. A searing pain shot up his left leg. He tried to push himself up, but his arm buckled under the strain. "Shit," he rasped, spitting out grit. This wasn't just a trap, it was a goddamn ambush.
He could see two figures growing closer, one surrounded by a faint green glow, the other barely illuminated by the glow of the other. He pulled himself up, he hadn’t even started fighting yet, he would not be defeated like this. He roared, pushing off the ground with his good leg, a small explosion erupting from his palm.
“Hero Dynamite…” The green-fucky one said, just close enough for Katsuki to hear.
“Yeah, and what are you? Green Goblin?” He spat, aiming his hand towards the two figures. He wasn’t going to sit here and listen to a monologue, he didn’t have time for that. But he was alone, with a quirk that wasn’t working right.
The "Green Goblin" didn’t laugh. He didn't even speak again. He simply moved, a blur of sickly green light that was too fast for Katsuki’s sluggish reflexes to track.
Katsuki swung a heavy punch, but his quirk sputtered out in a pathetic hiss of smoke. The second figure, a massive, shadow-draped brute, caught his wrist with a grip like a hydraulic press. With a sickening crack, Katsuki’s gauntlet shattered, the reinforced metal crumpling like tin foil.
"Get... OFF!" Katsuki roared, aiming a point-blank blast with his free hand.
The green one didn't flinch. He stepped into the explosion, what little of it there was, and drove a knee into Katsuki’s solar plexus. The air left Katsuki’s lungs in a wheezing rush, and for a terrifying second, the world went grey at the edges.
The brute didn't let him recover. He swung Katsuki like a ragdoll, slamming him against the uneven stone wall before pinning him there with one massive hand around his throat.
Katsuki clawed at the hand, his vision swimming. He could see the green-glow figure standing just a few feet away, watching with a clinical, detached interest. The figure raised a hand, and the emerald light intensified, coalescing into a jagged spike of pure kinetic energy.
"You're not the one we wanted," the green figure said, his voice echoing with an unnatural resonance. "But you'll do to send the message."
The brute didn't stop there. He let out a low, rumbling growl and delivered a massive, earth-shaking hook to the side of Katsuki's head. The force of it sent a sickening crack through his skull, and the world dissolved into a blinding white flash. Katsuki’s head snapped back, his left eye suddenly filling with a hot, stinging wetness as blood poured from a jagged gash across his brow. He tried to blink, but the world was half-dark now, the vision in his left eye reduced to a hazy, crimson blur.
"Is that... all you got, you oversized shadow-fuck?" Katsuki spat, the words bubbling through the blood in his mouth. He didn't wait for an answer. With his one good hand, he reached up and slammed a palm directly into the brute’s throat. There was no explosion, just the raw, desperate force of a man who refused to die quietly.
The brute didn't even flinch. He caught Katsuki's wrist in mid-air, his grip tightening. Katsuki groaned, a raw, jagged sound that echoed off the damp walls, as the brute began to twist. He could feel the bones grinding against each other, the pressure building until,
snap.
The sound was like a dry branch breaking in a winter forest. Katsuki’s arm went limp, but he didn't stop. He threw a headbutt, his forehead colliding with the brute’s mask with a dull thud that sent stars dancing across his remaining field of vision.
"Die! Just... fucking... die!" Katsuki roared, his voice cracking with the strain. He tried to ignite his quirk again, his palm smoking, the skin blistering as he forced his sweat glands to pump out every last drop of nitroglycerin. A tiny, pathetic spark sputtered, a mockery of the suns he used to hurl.
The brute responded by driving a heavy, steel-toed boot into Katsuki's already painful left leg. The sound of the femur splintering was audible over the hiss of the failing quirk. Katsuki’s vision went white. He felt his stomach turn, the sheer agony of the bone being crushed into the dirt making him dry heave.
He was being dismantled. Piece by piece. The hero, reduced to a broken heap against a crumbling wall. But even as his lungs rattled and his vision failed, he was still clawing at the brute’s hand, still trying to find a way to hurt the thing that was killing him. He was Dynamight. He was the man who won. And he would fight until his heart stopped beating, even if he had to do it in the dark.
With a flick of his wrist, the figure sent a concussive wave of force through the floor. The ground exploded upward.
Katsuki felt the world tilt. The brute let go just as the floor beneath them buckled and surged. Katsuki fell backward, his hands grasping for anything to stop his descent, but there was only jagged concrete and cold air.
He hit the floor of the lower level with a force that should have killed him. But the impact wasn't what stopped his breath.
It was the cold, sharp bloom of fire in his side.
He gasped, a wet, rattling sound. He tried to move, but he was pinned. He looked down, his eyes widening in a slow realization of horror. A rusted, jagged length of rebar, thick as a man's thumb, had punched through the floor and straight through his abdomen, anchoring him to the concrete below like a butterfly to a board.
Blood, hot and terrifyingly dark, began to soak into his hero suit, spreading outward in a rapid, rhythmic pulse.
"D-Deku..." the name was a ghost of a sound, a reflex he couldn't control.
Above him, in the hole in the ceiling, the green light flickered and then vanished. They were gone. They had left him there, impaled in the dark, the silence of the ruins returning with a deafening, final weight.
Katsuki’s hand hovered over the rebar, his fingers shaking too much to touch it. Every breath was a jagged blade in his lungs. He was Dynamight for fucks sake. and he was dying in the dark because he’d been too arrogant to wait.
I have to get up.
The thought was desperate, stripped of ego and pride. He tried to draw a breath, but his lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass. He looked down, and the sight of the rusted rebar protruding from his stomach, slick with a dark, pulsing river of his own blood, triggered a surge of pure panic.
"N-no... no, no, no..."
Suddenly, the ruins weren't the ruins anymore. The air grew hot, thick with the smell of decay and the roar of a crumbling fortress. He wasn't just pinned to the ground; he was lying in the dirt of a battlefield, staring up at a sky that was falling apart. He could feel it again, the terrifying, hollow weightlessness in his chest where his heart should have been.
Shigaraki.
The name was a phantom in his mind. He remembered the feeling of his ribs snapping like dry kindling, the spray of his own blood across the sky, and then the nothingness. The absolute, terrifying silence of being dead.
"Not again," he wheezed, his fingers clawing at the dirt, his eyes wide and unfocused. "Not... not like this..."
I have to get up.
The rebar in his stomach, It was the same cold, invasive presence, the same certainty that he was being erased. His mind fractured, the present moment bleeding into the past until he couldn't tell if the blood on his hands was fresh or years old. He felt the pressure of Edgeshot’s threads trying to stitch his soul back together, the desperate, frantic thrum of his life force weaving into his own.
He wasn't Dynamight. He was just a kid in the dust again, staring at the monster who had ripped the life out of him.
"Deku..."
He needed the nerd to tell him he was still alive. Because right now, with the metal through his gut and the darkness closing in, Katsuki couldn't tell the difference between the ruins and the grave.
I have to get up.
The sounds he made were small, pathetic whimpers he didn't recognize as his own. His good hand, shaking so violently he could barely control it, flew to the rebar. The cold metal was slick with his warmth. He gripped it, his knuckles white, and tried to push.
The scream that tore from his throat was raw, a sound of absolute agony that seemed to vibrate through the very concrete he was pinned to. The movement sent a fresh wave of white-hot fire through his abdomen as the jagged rust of the bar scraped against his internal organs. He fell back, his head thumping against the dirt, his vision swimming with black spots.
"Get... it... OUT!" he gasped, his fingers clawing at the blood-soaked ground.
He tried again, his survival instinct overriding the blinding pain. He braced his good foot against the floor and shoved upward, his entire body convulsing with the effort. He felt the rebar slide, just a fraction of an inch, and the sensation was so sickeningly wrong, so fundamentally unmaking, that his mind buckled.
He could feel the wet slide of his own insides shifting, the hot splash of blood hitting the floor beneath him in a steady, rhythmic drip-drip-drip.
"DEKU!"
He screamed the name into the darkness, a plea to the only person who had ever been there to catch him when he fell. But there was no light, no reassuring mumbling, no "I'm here." There was only the smell of rust and iron, and the terrifyingly slow fading of the world around him.
His hand fell away from the rebar, dragging a trail of crimson through the dust. He was too weak. He couldn't pull himself off. He was just going to stay here, pinned like a bug, until there was nothing left.
The panic began to ebb, replaced by a cold, numbing lethargy. The fire in his side was dulling to a throb. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling, the light so far away, and for the first time in his life, Katsuki Bakugo felt truly, utterly small.