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In All Might’s shitty defense, he waits for two weeks after the funeral to ambush Katsuki.
It’s stupid of him, really — if Katsuki had wanted to share his secret or whatever, he’d have done it already.
But then again, in Katsuki’s experience, adults are often stupid.
It is also remarkably easy to ambush the number one hero when he looks like a strong wheeze might blow him over, and Katsuki sets his up by the trash beach he runs past every day.
“You stalking me, old man?”
All Might jumps, coughing up blood, and Katsuki rolls his eyes as he hands out a tissue. “That can’t be healthy,” he says.
All Might laughs bitterly. “It’s not. You’ve seen...” He gestures at himself — his shrunken, sickly body — with a sharp wave of his hand. “I was wounded, years ago. Lost a lung and my stomach.”
“Makes sense,” Katsuki replies nonchalantly. What else can he do? Say he’s sorry?
All Might’s probably heard that often enough.
(God knows Katsuki has.)
“Who was it?” he can’t resist asking though. “Toxic Chainsaw? You disappeared for a while after that fight…” Katsuki frowns — news outlets had ended up explaining it with All Might going abroad for a while, but the dates had never quite matched. There were still plenty of online conspiracies about what might have happened to the number one hero back then.
(Deku had known them all.)
“Ah… None of those, I’m afraid,” All Might confesses. He’s really awkward, for the number one hero, and Katsuki eyes him impatiently. “It wasn’t one of my publicized fights — you won’t find any information on it, but...” He trails off, his hand curling at his side. “It cost me.”
“But you won, though?” Katsuki counters. His mind reels at the new information and he clenches his hands into fists. “You beat that villain, whoever it was.”
“I did, yes,” All Might replies. He sounds nonplussed, though Katsuki can’t imagine why. “But I —”
“So what?” Katsuki interrupts, scowling. “If he was as bad as you say he was, then it’s better he was stopped, no matter the cost. That’s what heroes are about, isn’t it?”
“I…” All Might opens his mouth, blinks, and suddenly starts laughing. “You’re right,” he says, slowly and like it’s a revelation. “You’re absolutely right.” He laughs again, and Katsuki rolls his eyes.
“Great. Now if you’re done having your whole…” he waves a hand over at All Might’s… everything “thing, maybe you can tell me why you were stalking me.”
All Might sobers up. “I wasn’t stalking you, young Bakugou.” (All Might knows his name!) “But you see, now that you are privy to my secret, I —”
“I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you’re asking,” Katsuki interrupts, rolling his eyes again. “I’m not an idiot, I know you’re keeping that under wraps for a reason.”
All Might deflates — not literally, this time, though. “Oh, good. That’s good.”
“Great,” Katsuki answers with a drawl. “Now, is that all? Or did you have any other reason for stalking me?”
“Again, I must insist, I wasn’t stalking you,” All Might replies, his voice ringing with faint panic. To Katsuki’s horror, though, his sunken blue eyes soften with worry. “But I was wondering how you were doing, after what happened to your young friend.”
Here’s how Katsuki’s really doing: he jumps when someone sneaks up on him and he has to sleep with his door and blinds open to let the light in.
He has nightmares about Deku’s fucking smile, because that shitty nerd looked happy as he died to save Katsuki, and that pisses him off so much he’s been running twice as much as usual to try to keep the thoughts away.
He’s taken to drinking his water either ice-cold or almost boiling-hot in an effort to avoid flashing back to the lukewarm feeling of the sludge pouring itself down his throat, and he’s never, ever going to walk through that tunnel again.
He wants, desperately, for the past weeks to have been a dream.
But it’s not, so all he says is, “I’m fucking fine, okay? You don’t need to worry yourself, or whatever.”
But All Might only grins back. “I think you’ll find, young man, that a hero will worry either way.”
Ugh. All Might really is just as bright as the news make him out to be.
The nerd would have liked him.
School was boring before already, but now it’s a whole different type of hell. Katsuki keeps thinking class is too silent, and it fucking takes him days to realize it’s because shitty Deku isn’t mumbling in the background anymore.
That he never will be again.
He blows up his pencil case like a six-year-old and has to wave off their shitty teacher’s fake-ass concern, and the extras are no help either.
And then...
And then someone laughs and says Katsuki’s probably glad Deku isn’t there anymore (he had told him to jump off the roof, hadn’t he, never mind that he hadn’t actually meant it and that the nerd wouldn’t have listened to him anyway).
The next thing Katsuki knows, that asshole isn’t laughing anymore. He’s nursing a bloody nose, and Katsuki is heaving as the whole world just rings in his ears.
His knuckles ache.
Nobody tries to stop him as he leaves.
Why would they? Katsuki thinks bitterly, hands clenched into fists by his sides. They never did anything to stop him (or anyone) when he was going after Deku, and they won’t stop him now either.
He’s going to go to UA, after all. He’s going to be a hero, and he’ll be the first one to come from this shitty school, and these fucking idiots probably hope they’ll be getting some kind of recognition from it.
Like anyone cares what middle-school you were from.
Like Katsuki wants to remember any of these no-good losers after he leaves them in his dust.
He would have remembered Deku, though — that is, if the nerd hadn’t found a way to follow him to UA after all.
He’d never had much luck at getting Deku to leave him alone — right up until he’d had too much of it.
“Why’d you have to go and do that, you fucking nerd,” Katsuki half-mumbles half-swears as he kicks his feet against the asphalt. “I didn’t ask for your fucking help!”
Deku, of course, doesn’t answer him.
He doesn’t have to, of course — Katsuki already knows the answer.
(“I’m gonna be a hero, Kacchan!”)
“Tch.” Katsuki scoffs, kicks up the ground again, and gets moving. He’s got some training to do — next time he faces a villain, Katsuki’s quirk won’t fail him.
(Next time, Katsuki will be a hero too.)
Katsuki doesn’t really know how to behave around Auntie anymore — other than being nice ( thanks, Mom, like he needed the reminder).
She hasn’t been around this often since Katsuki was… maybe six, when he and the nerd had truly fallen out.
But now the old hag invites her to dinner at least once a week, and Katsuki has to sit there for painfully awkward dinners he really, really doesn’t want to be at.
Auntie will smile and laugh, sometimes, but those shitty pretenses never last long, and her face will fall back to that empty blankness that makes Katsuki’s stomach roil sourly.
(She looks like her son, in those moments — like that shitty nerd always did when he thought his world had ended because someone had been mean to him.
… How many times had Katsuki been the one to put that look on his face?
How many?
(Why can’t he remember how many times he did it?))
It makes him angry, that blankness. It isn’t something he can fight, and that angers him more.
He’s spitefully cleaning his room — too much training would be as bad as not enough, if not worse, and Katsuki’s still aiming for UA, after all, but he needs to be doing something — when he stumbles upon the drawings.
They’re shitty, really. Crayon drawings, stuffed at the bottom of a drawer and something Katsuki had tried very, very hard to forget was even there.
He’d mostly succeeded, it seems.
He snorts as he falls back on his bed, the handful of sheets of paper held loosely in his hands.
“Fuck.”
It’s him and shitty Deku, because of course it is — in all their crayon glory. Deku’s shape is really only recognizable because it’s green, and Katsuki’s own for the explosions drawn by the blobs that are supposed to be his hands.
It’s their hero team — the one they’d planned on making, King Explodo Kills and All Might Jr, when they were four, after Katsuki’s quirk had come in and before they’d learned about Deku’s… condition.
And just like that, Katsuki’s throat goes tight and his vision blurs.
“Fuck!” he repeats, and he’s about to throw the drawings away — blow them up so that he never has to see them again — when he remembers Auntie.
Be nice, Katsuki, the old hag’s voice whispers in his ears, and Katsuki scowls.
“I get it,” he mumbles, setting the papers down on his bed and smoothing them down. Auntie’ll like the shitty things.
He goes back to cleaning his room and doesn’t look at the drawings again.
If his vision stays blurry, it’s clearly because he needs to vacuum clean this room more often. The dust simply irritates his eyes, that’s all.
That’s all.
In his dreams, Deku is alive.
He’s grinning, wild and bright, and his hair shines emerald in the sunlight as he says, “I’m gonna save you, Kacchan.”
And Katsuki is drowning still, drowning and choking and he knows how this ends, he knows how this always ends, but he’s dying and in the dream, he’s too weak to say no, and he lets Deku pull him free.
And then Deku turns away from him and starts fading, that damned grin still on his face, and nothing Katsuki does will bring him back.
He wakes up choking on a scream every time, sheets tangled around his limbs and throat, and he punches his pillow to avoid punching the wall.
It doesn’t help.
It never does.
The third time Katsuki runs into All Might on his way past the trash beach, he stops.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asks, eyes narrowed as he huffs heavily, trying to get his pulse back under control.
All Might startles — he does this a lot, Katsuki notes with disdain — but this time, at least, he doesn’t throw up blood. He does, however, almost drop the microwave he’d been holding onto his own feet before setting it aside.
“Oh, I, erm, I’ve been cleaning the beach?” All Might says, rubbing his neck. He sounds embarrassed, somehow, which is beyond ridiculous considering who he is.
Katsuki rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. “Why?”
He’s being aggressive and he knows it, but
All Might just smiles, though. It is disturbingly similar to the smile he has in his heroic form, considering how skeletal he looks now.
“This place used to be beautiful,” All Might explains, his eyes far away. “It doesn’t deserve to be used as a garbage dumping site.”
Katsuki snorts. “People are fucking animals sometimes.” He eyes the piles of rusting appliances and other less identifiable things with disdain. “This place’s been like this for a while now, though.”
It’s not a question, but All Might hums in answer like it was. “I would be able to do this faster as All Might, of course, but my time is limited.”
“I didn’t ask,” Katsuki retorts. Obviously, All Might’s saving his hours for actual hero work — that way, maybe the next kid he tries to rescue won’t die before he gets there.
An awkward silence falls between them, and Katsuki rolls back on his heels. “Couldn’t you just put out a message to your fans or something? Ask them to help?”
“I… think that might count as inciting vigilantism,” All Might replies after a beat, but Katsuki’s pretty sure the thought hadn’t occurred to him.
“Whatever.” Katsuki rolls his eyes. “It’d just be picking up some trash, I don’t see how that’d count as vigilantism.”
“You might be right, young Bakugou! More hands would make this go faster.” The way All Might practically perks up is disgusting, and Katsuki’s scowl deepens. “Thank you for your kind insight!”
Katsuki snorts again, shaking his head as he stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, well, you’re really not that subtle, you know that, right?”
All Might’s smile widens into something closer to his hero smile. “I have no idea what you mean, young man!”
“Sure you don’t,” Katsuki retorts with a scoff.
But All Might starts coughing as he bends down to pick up his rusted microwave again — has he never heard of taking care of himself?? — so Katsuki just has to intervene, pushing past him to grab the thing again.
It is heavier than he’d expected, and the strain on his back and arms has him short of breath for a few moments.
“Where to?” Katsuki bites, adjusting his grip and glaring at All Might, daring him to say anything.
All Might, not even pretending like this hasn’t been his plan all along, grins at him proudly.
And as All Might guides him toward the pick-up truck he’s apparently bought just for this, Katsuki can’t resist one last quip.
“You’re lucky I know who you are, because otherwise, this would be shady as fuck.”
He lets his grin turn savage as All Might does a spit take — and to his surprise, Katsuki even finds himself laughing.
Well, would you look at that? he thinks to himself, so surprised his brain blanks out for a second. I can still laugh.
“I don’t know why I’m here.” Katsuki clears his throat and cuffs his feet against the too-green grass, and he buries his hands deeper into his pockets. “It’s not like you’re here or anything, or like this’d change anything.”
Izuku Midoriya, the gravestone reads. Katsuki doesn’t look at the dates, and the blank platitudes written below the nerd’s name, Beloved son and friend, make him want to puke.
“You didn’t have friends,” he says, scowling. “The son’s part’s true, though,” he reluctantly corrects.
He hadn’t come here to argue, after all, even if he apparently can’t help himself.
“Auntie misses you,” Katsuki continues, cutting himself off with an annoyed sigh. He feels like tearing at his hair, and instead digs his nails into his legs through his pockets. “Fuck, this is dumb.”
He turns around, ready to leave, a rage-filled scream stuck in his throat, and spins back around.
The words spill from his mouth like knives.
“I’m sorry, okay? Fucking sorry. I didn’t mean it — I didn’t want you to…” He heaves a deep breath, feels it catch in his chest, and snarls. “Why couldn’t you save yourself too?!”
His voice rings loudly in the crisp early morning air. Katsuki’s the only one in the cemetery, though Auntie’s been there recently — the flowers by the nerd’s grave are fresh and he feels stupider for coming by the second.
There are no answers to be found here, by this cold, lonely grave.
There are no answers to be found anywhere. Deku’s dead, and maybe Katsuki didn’t kill him or push him to it, but he also hadn’t saved him.
And Katsuki can improve as much as he’d like, but he’ll never be able to make up for that.
“DIE!!” The broken-up fridge Katsuki blows at doesn’t blow up so much as is blown away, and Katsuki unleashes blast after blast until his wrists hurt too much to move and he’s heaving, gulping air in and out.
There isn’t much of the fridge left anymore, but the coiled anger in Katsuki’s chest is still there, waiting.
“I… think this might be enough for today,” All Might tells him, and Katsuki scoffs.
“Fine. I’ll just go back to carrying this dumb stuff off the beach then.”
“I meant maybe you should go home today.”
And Katsuki knows, logically, that All Might’s just worried. Concerned.
He doesn’t mean for it to come across as pity.
(Poor little Katsuki, he hasn’t been the same since Midoriya died.
They think Katsuki can’t hear them whisper. Shows what they know.)
It does anyway.
“I’m fine,” he bites back, stalking back to the closest trash pile. There’s less of it than there’d been when they’d started this ridiculous endeavor, but the beach is far from clean still.
Luckily, it also makes it a great place to practice his quirk without disturbing anyone — and All Might even counts as adult supervision.
(Or, as Katsuki had told him on day one, “If anyone asks, you’re my personal trainer for the UA entrance exam.”)
All Might sighs. “You do not have to be fine, you know. I know what happened to your friend —”
Katsuki cuts him off, tossing back the piece of… something he’d picked up into the pile. “He wasn’t my friend.”
It isn’t the first time Katsuki’s said so. It doesn’t ring any truer this time, even if Katsuki isn’t lying.
“It’s just… it’s been six months,” he finally finds himself saying, looking at everything but All Might’s too sympathetic face.
He doesn’t even know why he’s saying it.
“It’s been six months, and nothing’s changed.” Everything’s changed. “It’s —”
“The world keeps on going,” All Might tells him, and Katsuki nods vigorously.
“Yes! That! Exactly. It’s… It’s bullshit!” He kicks at the sand, scowling. “It’s bullshit,” he repeats, voice softer.
All Might sighs tiredly. “It is.”
The moment stretches, quiet and heavy, until Katsuki heaves a frustrated sigh and kicks the sand again. “Tsk. Whatever.”
He gets back to work — this beach won’t clean itself, will it?
"You all want to be heroes, don't you?" their teacher calls out, and Katsuki rolls his eyes with disdain as the class descends into chaos. “I hope you’re all ready for your entrance exams!”
Katsuki tunes the extras out, and only tunes back in at the sound of his name.
“— and of course, Bakugou will be aiming for UA! Only the best of the best for our best and brightest!”
It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before — and, in particular, on that one day that Katsuki wishes he could forget.
Unlike last time, though, Katsuki only scoffs and crosses his arms, balancing on the back legs of his chair as he gazes around the room. “Duh.”
He doesn’t add anything else. The Katsuki from before would have. He would have screamed this whole bunch of extras into silence and proclaimed his superiority for all to hear (because Katsuki is better than them).
The Katsuki from before had done all of those things — but then again, Katsuki isn’t such a fan of the Katsuki from before anymore.
That Katsuki may have been better than these fucking extras, but he still hadn’t been enough.
UA will make him be enough, though. Katsuki’ll make sure of it.
The day of UA’s entrance exam dawns early, it feels. Butterflies fizzle in Katsuki’s stomach, and he goes on a morning run to chase them away — better this than sitting in his room and worrying.
“Don’t overdo it!” the old hag shouts at him as he goes, and Katsuki rolls his eyes as he shouts back, “I fucking won’t!”
All Might, of course, is somehow on the beach when Katsuki gets to it. It’s clean now — people have even started to return, though not this early.
For now, they’re alone.
Katsuki slows down. “Oi!” he calls out. “Shouldn’t an old man like you be in bed still?!”
He’s treated to the sight of one of All Might’s now-familiar spit-takes. Katsuki would be more respectful, except he knows how badly All Might’s actually hurt, and how hard he’s trying to cling to the few hours of hero work he has left.
Lingering on a beach at ass o’clock in the morning isn’t very conducive to that.
“Young Bakugou!” All Might greets cheerfully. “Don’t you have an exam to get to?”
Katsuki scowls. “It’s not for a while yet. I have time.”
“Ah, I see.” All Might nods knowingly. “Well, even so, you probably shouldn’t overexert yourself before the exam.”
It’s the pot calling the kettle back, and Katsuki’s scowl deepens. “I won’t if you won’t,” he bites back, and All Might laughs.
“Touché, young Bakugou.” He shakes his head, long bangs flopping by his head. “How about this instead — we start heading back together?”
“Fine.”
They part ways about halfway back, and by then the sun’s risen enough that Katsuki knows he no longer has any time to waste.
(He’s not late by any mean, and he won’t be, but…)
He still longer for half a beat longer than he has to — just long enough for All Might to chuckle and ruffle his hair.
“Good luck, my boy.”
“I don’t need luck,” Katsuki retorts, but he still has to hide a smile. “Thanks, though, I guess,” he mumbles quickly, turning on his heels and hurrying away, All Might’s booming laughter echoing behind him.
As expected, Katsuki doesn’t need luck. The written exam is a breeze after all the studying he’s done, and the practical one…
“DIE YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!”
Well, the practical exam is against robots, and Katsuki’s quirk is excellent at blowing those up.
There’s still time left on the counter and Katsuki’s confident he’s got more points than anyone else in his exam site — probably than anyone else, if the extras here are representative of what Katsuki could have expected somewhere else.
He’s still grinning over the sparking remains of a three-pointer when the ground starts shaking. He sees the other examinees running away first, and then the huge, looming shadow.
The zero-pointer.
A savage grin splits his lips. “Damn,” he breathes. His palms itch to go after the thing, show he’s truly the best, but there’s still time on the counter, and that robot’s not worth any point.
And then he sees her.
A girl, brown-haired and rather plain, trapped under some rubble in the path of the zero-pointer.
And Katsuki would have helped her anyway, except that suddenly, he’s not seeing the girl anymore.
Suddenly, the girl has green hair and green eyes, filled with tears and pleading at him to stop, to be better.
Katsuki’s feet move before he can make them — and he saves that girl.
He blows up the robot and he saves that girl, but she is back to plain auburn hair and a plainer round face.
And just like that, his victory doesn’t feel like much of a victory at all.
Katsuki doesn’t have the exam results yet, but he knows he passed.
Waiting is boring, but that’s not why he’s here, standing in front of Auntie’s door, old, crinkled-up crayon drawings held in front of his chest like something fragile.
Katsuki had saved that girl during the exam. He hadn’t saved Deku, but he’d saved that girl, and it doesn’t fix enough, but maybe it can still be something.
Maybe Katsuki can make it be enough for him.
He takes a deep breath, and knocks on the door.
He almost turns around when he hears Auntie’s footsteps hurry toward the door, but Katsuki holds his ground.
He’s not a coward.
“Here,” he tells her when she opens the door, showing the drawings at her chest. “They’re Deku’s, he left them at my place. You should have them.” Each word grates like sand against his tongue, but Katsuki says them anyway, staring straight into Auntie’s green eyes.
He swallows. Now comes the hard part.
“And… I’m sorry I wasn’t the friend Deku wanted me to be. The one he should have had,” Katsuki corrects. The words leave a bitter taste in his mouth, and he feels even worse when Auntie starts crying after barely a glance at the drawings, already clutching them to her chest.
Auntie blinks and stops crying, eyeing her with eyes slightly less dead than usual, and right here, right then, just in front of her front door, Katsuki tells her everything — the bullying, the name-calling, how he’d told Deku to…
How he’d told Deku to fucking jump off the roof, and then Deku had fucking traded his life for Katsuki’s, and it just wasn’t fair.
Wasn’t fair at all.
And through all this, Auntie just looks at him, her eyes filling up with tears again, and Katsuki feels lower than low.
And yet, it still feels better than holding it in.
Once he’s done — once the words have stopped spilling forth — Katsuki falters, and Auntie draws him up into a hug.
“Why aren’t you mad at me?” he cries out against her shoulder, voice muffled by her shirt.
(He might be crying. It’s a little hard to tell, when his chest aches so much and his head hurts.)
He hears Auntie sigh against his ear. “I’m too tired to be angry,” she says. “And… you’ve been trying since…” She doesn’t finish her sentence, only shivers. “That matters. To me, it matters.”
She pulls away, lips pulled into a bittersweet grin. “Besides, Izuku would probably have already forgiven you.”
Auntie’s words pierce his chest like knives, but it’s true — the nerd would have forgiven him pretty much anything. Katsuki used to think it was weakness, but now he wonders if maybe it was something else.
He wishes he could ask.
“I’ll be better, Auntie. I promise,” Katsuki vows.
And finally, finally, Auntie smiles.
“I know you will, Katsuki,” she says, looking so much like her son that it hurts. “You’re going to be an amazing hero.”
And if Katsuki pretends, in that moment, he can almost believe Deku’s saying those words with her, bright and enthusiastic and just like he used to be back when they were kids.