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The human conception of Creation is a myth, mostly.
Sure, in the beginning there was Light - from another Maker first, or so he’s told, but Shouto only knows the way Midoriya’s smile illuminates the entire galaxy.
His first memory is of kneeling down in front of Her, receiving his assignment for Earth and thinking that he’ll be close enough to Midoriya to do some really interesting things but not so close that he’ll burn up just by being in his orbit.
He meets the group of Makers coming to Earth with him, gathered together on a small moon near the Edge. There’s a man with hair like fire but hands like rock, who will sculpt mountains and trenches and flat plains all across the surface. There’s a woman with long, dark green hair tied into a bow, speaking lowly to a man who seems to have hardly any voice at all. Around them is the aura of vibrant, overwhelming life just waiting to be poured out.
Shouto finds himself off to the side of the group and speaking with another woman, this one with lovely, dark hair falling all around her. When he asks her what she Makes, she blinks once at him and says, “Anything.” Later he will come to know and adore the power she holds, entire cities and societies rising from her fingertips. She asks the same question of him, and when he replies that he Makes weather, a yellow man with a zigzag etched into his hair gasps and says, “Oh, Todoroki, we are gonna have so much fun together!”
Shouto smiles. He thinks he will very much like being on Earth.
And then, there is Bakugou.
Bakugou, who at this initial gathering said nothing and talked to no one, who stood at the Edge of the universe scowling at the nearest star as though it had personally offended him. Bakugou, whose name Shouto only even learned because he asked Midoriya about him one day, some few millennia later. He’d been laying on his back atop one of Kirishima’s newest mountains, tired from all the work they’d been doing Making a season Midoriya wanted to call ‘summer.’ It’s quite exhausting, all the scheduling and practice rotations and temperature control. Shouto turns his right palm upwards, calling a cool breeze up and over the cliffside.
Midoriya rests with him, a quiet warmth on his skin. Shouto can see him even with his eyes closed, in all his golden brilliance. He opens his mouth to ask about Bakugou, because in all the time that has passed Shouto has never quite managed to stop thinking about him, but closes it upon realizing that he knows exactly nothing about him. Momo had showed him something she called a ‘dandelion’ recently - he’d thought of Bakugou immediately then, the unruly spikes of his hair caught in a cosmic breeze, and describes him thus to Midoriya.
“Oh, of course I know him!” Midoriya says, then becomes so warm that the grass Shouto’s laying on starts turning crispy.
The first time he really meets Bakugou, he’s in the middle of coordinating the winter tides with Uraraka. Kirishima had Made him a rocky plateau in the sea to perch on, and Midoriya had kindly gone for a rest so that they could speak more easily. Uraraka is bright and beautiful (well, the half of her he can see, at least) and very good with the tides. She shows him a couple gentle variations and timings, and he’s just about to ask to see the first one again when she gives a startled cry and goes completely dark in the sky.
To his right, Shouto watches in mild horror as the sea rises up into a mighty wave, building and building as it rolls towards the shore. He’d put it at well over 20 meters high by the time it crashes onto the land in the distance, where thankfully nothing has been Made yet besides a few stray boulders that Kirishima had left behind.
“Pretty cool, right?”
Bakugou is all wild blond hair and a manic smile and black jacket billowing in the wind that he’d stirred up with that wave. Shouto holds a hand up to calm it. He’s the one in charge of wind around here, thank you very much.
Bakugou finally looks away from where the sea is still churning and flooding over the coastal land, frowning up at Shouto. “Why’d you do that?” he asks, pouting obnoxiously.
“It’s you,” Shouto says, which does not at all answer Bakugou’s question but does express his own internal monologue nicely. None of the other Makers have so much as glimpsed Bakugou in the last hundred millennia, and now here he is, standing shoulder to shoulder with Shouto in the middle of the sea.
“Yeah.” Bakugou peers at him as though he doesn’t understand what an anomaly his presence is. “I’m gonna help you with the fucking tides. Need one of these every couple years.” He nods to where the wave had struck. “Not in a predictable pattern, though.”
Shouto blinks at him, trying to catch up. “You want to regularly destroy some of the coastline?”
“I said not regularly, dumbass,” Bakugou huffs. Above them, Uraraka is showing just a crescent of her face, watching them intently. “You idiots are always trying to Make everything so perfect - god, it’s so fucking boring around here. How can you stand it?”
“And what do you Make, exactly, that is so much more interesting?”
Bakugou shrugs, kicking a stray pebble into the sea. “This and that. Nothing to worry your pretty little head over.” He nods to the coastline again. “Put in on the calendar, weather boy. Not regularly. I’ll be there when it’s time.”
Shouto blinks, and Bakugou is gone before he even has a chance to respond.
It’s a short fifteen years before they meet again, in which time Shouto does little more than think about Bakugou and practice making snow at the poles.
He’s sitting in a low-hanging cloud above a chain of islands, gradually letting more and more of the clouds around him fill with condensation. He licks his lips and feels the air thicken with humidity. It’s been on his mind, the phenomenon Bakugou had Made last time, and he’s of the opinion that the effect might be heightened with some rain. He wants, with a particular kind of desperation, to know if Bakugou will agree.
“Ready to go, weather boy?”
Shouto inhales sharply, some of the rain slipping from his grasp. How Bakugou even managed to get up here, let alone sneak up on him like that, he can’t say. He clears his throat, tries to compose himself.
“I made some rain. For you. I thought it might make your...wave...more exciting.”
Bakugou blinks up at him. His eyes shine with something mischievous, would almost be playful if it weren’t for the brutal intensity of them.
“Huh,” he says. “Who knew you had an imagination.” A wicked smile crosses his sharp features, and Shouto finds himself smiling back. “Hold onto it for a sec, yeah? I’ll be right back.”
He’s gone as quickly as he came, and Shouto’s left with only the building pressure of the rain under his skin. He presses his palms together, conjuring as much intensity as he can.
It’s only a handful of seconds before Bakugou’s back, flushed and breathing heavily and absolutely soaked to the bone with water, like he’d just dove into the sea. “Go, now,” he says, but Shouto doesn’t even move. He’s transfixed by the droplets making rivers down Bakugou’s pale skin, by the hand he uses to shove his dandelion hair off his face.
Bakugou catches him staring and smiles at him, all teeth and mischief. His laugh sounds like thunder to Shouto’s ears. He gets up on his knees and leans fully into Shouto’s space, putting both his calloused palms over Shouto’s clenched hands.
At the edge of his perception, Shouto can feel the way the Earth is moving below them, something harsh and grinding deep in its belly.
“Now, weather boy,” Bakugou commands, and pries Shouto’s hands apart with his own.
It’s absolutely torrential, probably more rain than he’s ever made in one go before. Bakugou keeps his grip on one of his hands as he drags Shouto over to the edge of the cloud, peering down through the storm to watch the wave rise up from the ocean’s depths.
It’s even taller than the first one he’d Made, and Shouto can feel Bakugou holding his breath as it peaks and starts to topple over itself, collapsing under its own force. Shouto tears his gaze away from the destruction and watches Bakugou instead, this Maker unlike any other he’s met. Chaotic and unknowable, wild and a little crazy and a lot beautiful.
Entropy, Shouto realizes abruptly.
Bakugou doesn’t Make, not at all.
He Unmakes.
They clamber down from the cloud after the sea retreats into itself, walking along the ruined shore together. Bakugou, inexplicably, is still holding his hand, swinging it between them gleefully as they walk. It’s bizarre and disorienting and Shouto never wants it to stop.
“What about when humanity comes?” Shouto asks him. “Will you still Make the waves?”
Bakugou side-eyes him. “‘Course I fuckin’ will. Why wouldn’t I? And it’s called a tsunami, by the way.”
Tsunami. Shouto tastes the word in his mouth - it’s a bit ugly, a bit harsh. It’s perfect.
“Because people would get hurt?”
“Tch. Don’t pretend like you were never gonna Make anything to hurt them.”
Shouto considers this, and says nothing. Perhaps that is an answer in and of itself.
They walk for a bit in silence, reaching the end of the destroyed beach.
“I don’t Make the tsunamis,” Bakugou says, weirdly quiet. “I don’t- I can’t do that. Not like you can.”
“How, then?”
Bakugou huffs, untangles their hands. “Why the fuck do you wanna know?”
Shouto blinks, startled but undeterred by the sudden shift in his mood. “Because it was amazing. And I’d like to do it again sometime. With you.”
A complicated series of emotions flits across Bakugou’s face. “You would?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Shouto reaches for his hand, locking their fingers together. “Don’t go away again.”
“Okay.”
True to his word, Bakugou stays.
He becomes a near-constant presence at Shouto’s side, mostly nagging and bitching about Shouto’s preference for colder weather and thinking out loud about how to split the Earth into chaos. He’s there while Shouto meticulously covers the poles in layer after layer of ice, touches a single scarred finger to the glossy surface and sends chunks of it splashing into the sea. He argues pointlessly with Kirishima about the shape of a mountain, yells and fusses and stomps his foot until part of the slope just collapses and slides down into the riverbed.
Landslide, Bakugou says to him later, while they’re curled together under a pitch black sky, everyone resting. Shouto warms the space around their bodies and makes him promise to go apologize to Kirishima before the decade is up.
He argues even more intensely with Midoriya, staring directly into him and dragging Shouto up to the highest peaks so they can be closer. Midoriya gives as good as he gets, flaring so hotly that the Earth becomes dry and scorched in the places where Bakugou taunts him. The snow at the peaks all melts away, and Shouto sighs and resigns himself to another few decades of snow production. At least he’ll have some company this time around.
Bakugou is there in the dead of some unnamed winter, sitting in a cloud and egging Shouto on while he curiously drops tiny spheres of ice down to Earth. Come on, weather boy, you can do better than that, he mocks, and so Shouto makes the spheres bigger and bigger until they fill his entire palm before he drops them.
Bakugou laughs and abandons his cloud then, fits himself into Shouto’s lap and kisses him until Shouto accidentally Makes the first ice age.
(He gets a stern lecture from Tsu and a lot of disappointed looks from Koda for that one.)
(It’s kind of worth it.)
In time, humanity comes.
Made in their Makers’ image but not quite in their likeness, they crawl and stumble their way into existence.
Shouto loves them. His hands Made their whole world and they never stop trying to understand his methods. They write down his patterns and attempt to predict his next move and plan their lives around him. It’s addicting.
Bakugou, perhaps predictably, despises them. He sees only the places where their cities overtake the lush forests, how their gluttony destroys the fertile soil, how they clog the air with smoke and exhaust.
It makes him angry, and it makes him disappear. He hides from Shouto in the aether and emerges only to rattle humanity’s foundations or blow their homes to pieces or orchestrate the perfect conditions for them to light themselves on fire. Shouto chases him across the cosmos but can never quite catch up, gets sidetracked trying to save humanity first from Bakugou and then, ultimately, from themselves. Their anger only fuels Shouto’s more extreme tendencies, and coupled with his race to find Bakugou it forces him to run hotter than ever.
He loves humanity. But he loved Bakugou first, and so if they perish by his hand he will just have to find a way to forgive himself for it later.
There is a wide, barren wasteland, the rocky ground scorched black by flames and any life upon it a distant memory. A million millennia ago, they laid here together in lush, vibrant grass and spoke for the first time of how to Unmake.
Of how there was never any other choice, not for him. Of how She touched him and he simply unraveled, how She doomed him to take apart the universe piece by piece.
This is where he finds Bakugou, finally. There is nothing left, everything Made with loving hands destroyed by hands that loved. For the first time since they stood at the Edge, the Earth goes quiet.
Shouto falls to his knees in the ash, pulls Bakugou’s hands away from his splotchy face and holds him tightly in his arms while he cries.
“I’m- sorry. Fuck, I’m so sorry,” Bakugou wheezes into his shoulder, over and over as though he could absolve himself through sheer repetition.
“It’s okay. I found you, you’re okay.”
Bakugou shakes his head, scratches blunt nails down Shouto’s back like he’s trying to crawl into his skin. “It’s not, it’s- it’s all gone, everything we...everything you- ” He cuts himself off with a broken sob, and in that moment Shouto hates Her with a vitriol he’d previously thought himself incapable of.
“Everything we Made, yes,” Shouto says gently, emphasizing the we. All the things he’s done, all the phenomena he’d Made, the good and the bad - he’d Made them with Bakugou’s hand in his. Couldn’t have done them on his own, and wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway.
“And,” he continues, pulling back a bit so he can press their foreheads together, “we’ll Make it all again. Remake it. Better and brighter and stronger and - god, Katsuki, let Her try and stop us. Stay with me and let Her try.”
Bakugou blinks up at him, and it’s so much like the first time they Made together that his heart aches with the memory.
“Okay,” he says simply, and Shouto kisses him so hard that he falls backwards onto their new Earth.
time slips from great to good or, from terrible to wors'ning
down entropic road we pay our toll
paved start toward never ending
time slips from me to us or, from you and i to loving
our valentine then seeks its mate.
goes the prolific downward sending
time drives us from then to now, its final destination reaching
tho next can never touch our lips
it's law, relatively speaking
that god, what god? the question begs, and who should i tell him's asking?
an urge to love and proliferate…
life's sentence, and time's unmasking.