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“T-take m-me instead,” Izuku manages to mumble through the fear that paralyzes him (if he moves too much, the villain might kill Kacchan faster — how long does Kacchan even have left?).
His heart races in his chest as the villain… stops. Kacchan, of course, redoubles his efforts, but his explosions are useless against the slime that holds him, and the harder he tries, the faster he tires.
And without air…
He won’t last long.
“Take me instead,” Izuku repeats, and this time his voice doesn’t shake even if his heart has never pounded faster. “I-if you really want to hide, you should use me instead. I… I’m quirkless,” he says, a sad, bitter twist to his lips as he looks away from Kacchan’s terrified and furious eyes. “I’m useless — no one anyone’ll look for.”
Except for his mother, Izuku knows, but Kacchan…
If Kacchan lives, he can tell her what happened.
He can tell her that Izuku was a hero, just once.
“I w-won’t fight.”
The villain laughs, its voice deep and low. It echoes through the tunnel, and Izuku risks a glance back towards Kacchan.
He’s choking, and Izuku’s legs jerk him forward before he can think about staying put. “Please,” he begs, his voice falling into a sob. “Please just let him go.”
The villain surges forward, still laughing. “Maybe you are right, after all. A plain meatsuit would be useful,” it muses, and Izuku’s heart soars with hope even as his stomach sinks with dread.
But he doesn’t have time for regrets, or to say anything else — what would he even say?
Izuku opens his mouth anyway, his eyes falling to Kacchan — I’m saving you! — and as the villain says, “Looks like you’re not gonna be useless after all, meatsuit!” he surges forward again, a wave of slime that drops a screaming, coughing Kacchan on the wet ground, dampened explosions still loud in the enclosed space.
And Izuku…
Izuku just
drowns.
The moment the sewer started talking, Katsuki had known sticking around to wait for Deku had been a shitty idea.
(He hadn’t been worried, after all. So what if Deku had looked through the window with a little too much longing after Katsuki had said… what he’d said?
So what if Katsuki’s chest had seized as soon as the words left his lips, and he’d had to turn back after he’d left, just to check that…
He hadn’t been worried — and anyway, Deku had been fine.)
I was right, Katsuki thinks vindictively as he heaves and coughs and heaves again, desperately trying to inhale enough air to stop feeling like he was dying still.
(His hands do not shake.)
Something swishes and splashes behind him, and suddenly Katsuki remembers what’s going on, and his heart kicks into overdrive as he spins around.
“Deku!” he yells, voice half-rage half-fear he will never, ever admit to. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
He launches himself forward — clumsily, too clumsily (come on, Katsuki, you can do better than this!) — but all his hands will produce are weak fireworks, the kind he used to make when he was six.
He can barely make out the nerd’s silhouette in the middle of all the sludge, but that doesn’t stop him.
“DIE!” he screams, jumping at the villain and willing his strongest explosion into being.
But his hands are still cold and slimy, and the villain merely laughs in his face.
The humiliation only makes Katsuki’s rage grow stronger though, and he tries again.
And again.
And again.
And every time Katsuki fails to stop him, the villain moves closer to the end of the tunnel, Deku’s body still so very still under the slime.
(why won’t that damn nerd move and fight??)
“You should just give up,” the villain says. He’s still laughing, like Katsuki’s attacks don’t even phase him. “Your friend was right — he really will make for a much better hiding place than you. But I do need to leave — and if you keep coming at me, I will stop you.”
The villain doesn’t have a face, but Katsuki can tell that if it did, it would be grinning maliciously.
He flinches back despite himself, the memory of the slimy sludge pouring itself down his throat making him gag.
But he’s Katsuki Bakugou, future number one hero — and it’s not some two-bit second-rate villain that’ll get the best of him.
“DIE!!! YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!” he screams, launching himself forward again, aiming to cut off the villain’s path and maybe yank Deku out of the villain’s hold.
(He’s not looking forward to the nerd’s hero-worship after Katsuki saves his dumb ass, but he is looking forward to murdering the damn idiot for thinking Katsuki couldn’t take care of himself, that he needed rescuing.
He hadn’t.
He had.)
But just as Katsuki’s fingers reach out for the sludge, someone else arrives.
A tall shadow, cutting off the tunnel’s entrance.
All Might.
Katsuki’s heart soars in triumph even as —
“TEXAS SMASH!”
— the villain falls apart from the wind pressure and Deku drops to the ground —
“Oh dear,” All Might says, somehow very distant.
— Deku drops to the ground, like a marionette whose strings were cut and —
“Give him here!” All Might tugs Deku closer and puts him on his side, opening his mouth and trying to clear up the slime from his nose and mouth. “Call someone!”
— and Deku isn’t breathing, he isn’t moving, why isn’t he moving?
The tunnel suddenly fills up with fog as All Might shrivels up into some scarecrow man, who coughs up blood as he tries to apply pressure to Deku’s ribs, but Katsuki doesn’t even register it.
He’s gone mad.
The villain killed him — it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Hysterical laughter bubbles up his throat and Katsuki falls to his knees. His phone clatters to the ground as he falls (when had he taken it out?).
Katsuki’s dead or this is a nightmare.
Distantly, he sees All Might apply more pressure on Deku’s chest before bending down to breathe air into his lungs, and it doesn’t work.
But that’s okay, because this isn’t real.
(He keeps laughing, but it’s getting hard to breathe. He tastes salt, and his chest aches.)
This isn’t real. It can’t be.
Deku can’t…
He can’t…
Katsuki can’t have failed him.
(All Might’s hands fall to his side for a moment and he bends his head down. It almost looks like he’s praying, as he so very kindly lays Deku back on the ground and closes his eyes.
Like that, Deku almost looks like he’s sleeping — but no sleeping person has ever been this still.)
At first, Toshinori thinks he’s gotten the wrong place, or the wrong time.
He’s about to shuffle his way back out awkwardly when he feels a glare on his shoulders — young Bakugou, his red eyes distinctive where the black suit isn’t, standing stiffly between a couple that has to be his parents.
And the mother is hugging a short, plump figure closer, a spot of green hair all he can really see as the woman sobs against her friend’s chest.
(Inko Midoriya. Toshinori had met her before, when…
When…
When she’d had to come to the station to pick up her son. Tsukauchi had told him he didn’t need to stay, of course, but Toshinori had wanted to.
He’d wanted to stay and meet the mother of the boy he’d been too late to save, to apologize and beg for her forgiveness even though he would never, ever deserve it.
Instead, she’d thanked him through her tears for trying to help, and invited him to the funeral.
Toshinori hadn’t had the heart to say no.)
Toshinori looks back at the door, but no one else seems to be coming, and his heart twists in his chest. If he still had a stomach, he thinks it would be roiling — as it is, he still feels ill at ease.
Are they really the only one coming to this young boy’s funeral?
(They are.)
The funeral is a somber affair. The mother won’t stop crying while her friend looks angry at the world, her husband hovering by her side like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and young Bakugou’s face keeps swinging between world-shattering grief, blank grief and aimless rage.
And Toshinori… Well, Toshinori is growing increasingly uncomfortable. Not only because Midoriya-san hadn’t stopped crying to greet him — young Bakugou had glared at him while his parents had given him polite nods of acknowledgment — but because Toshinori shouldn’t be there.
He had failed this child.
A quirkless boy, Tsukauchi had told him. A quirkless boy, who had wanted desperately to be a hero — and who had been, for one singular moment, when he’d traded his life for his friend’s.
Some part of Toshinori — the part that is still a child and learning that he can be a hero — wonders what he could have become, had he lived.
It’s easier than it should be, to bury that part of him deeper and stop wondering. What-ifs have never helped anyone, after all.
(The boy is buried with his notebooks, as per his mother’s request. Toshinori had signed the latest one. The pages were singed and soggy and that had made All Might’s loopy signature come out lopsided and weird, but...
It’s the least he could do.)
Toshinori silently follows the little family to the graveyard. It isn’t far, and he isn’t sure whether to be grateful or not that this means it will all be over soon.
The coffin that is lowered seemed small before, but it looks even smaller now.
It’s too small.
Toshinori’s hand drifts to his side — he’s not in any more pain than usual — but if it hadn’t been there…
If Toshinori had been better, had been faster, had been stronger, all those years ago…
Maybe they wouldn’t be here now, gathered around on such a beautiful day for something so achingly unfair.
Unbidden, his eyes drift away from the filling grave to the other boy there, raging silently as he glares at the grave like it will make the body it contains rise up again.
(It is a feeling Toshinori had known, once. Sometimes, he doesn’t think it’s really left him.)
Toshinori sighs, and takes as deep a breath as his broken body allows.
He failed one child already.
God help him, but he will save the second.