Chapter Text
What happened?
Katsuki groans, his head spinning. He tries to cast his mind back to figure out what happened, but all he can recall is going home from school.
There was… a man, he thinks, who ran into him, and Katsuki had shouted at him, and then…
And then…
Pain threatens to split his head open, and Katsuki shuts his eyes tighter, moaning.
Where the fuck is he even? He doesn’t remember any street on the way back home being this rough — or this silent.
As though his very thought summoned it, Katsuki hears something.
Footsteps, coming from someone unhurriedly coming closer.
It’s never been this hard to get up, but Katsuki manages to get his hands underneath him, digging his fingers into the grovel to prop himself up.
He sees the red shoes first, and then, when he finally manages to raise his head and eyes up, he finds himself staring at a familiar man's face, framed with a curly mop of green hair and freckled with red specks of blood.
The man smiles, his grin bright and chilling, as he looks down at Katsuki.
"Deku?" he asks weakly.
"Kacchan?" The little shit sounds surprised and Katsuki clenches his fists even as his stomach roils with unease. "Haven't I killed you already?"
Deku — or whoever this faker is — can’t kill him. It looks disappointed at first, but when it realizes that a quirk must have somehow projected Katsuki into his world (into the future, from Katsuki’s point of view), it becomes fascinated.
It is a twisted parody of the boy Katsuki knows, but no matter how hard Katsuki rages and how badly he wants to blow that… thing ’s face off, nothing he does can hurt it, or stop the man from laughing as he dances away from blows that wouldn’t even touch him.
“What a great quirk!” Not-Deku croons, his eyes feverish. His fingers twitch like he’s yearning to write his thoughts down, and Katsuki’s mind rebels at the familiar tick in this impossible stranger. “I wonder, are you truly here now, or did only your mind travel this far? What are the limitations? Does it only work with the future, or would the past also…”
The mumbling is also sickeningly familiar, and Katsuki takes vicious pleasure in the way Not-Deku jumps when he lets his quirk flare.
“Shut up, nerd,” Katsuki snarls, explosions cracking between his fingers. They may be useless here, but his quirk always, always makes him feel better about himself. “Who the fuck cares? You can’t touch me, and that means —” Katsuki lets his grin widen savagely on his lips “— that when I go back, I’ll find a way to stop you.”
Not-Deku doesn’t like that — and this time, Katsuki is the one laughing.
By his count, Katsuki is missing for eighty-seven days.
By his parents’, he was out for two days, laid up in a hospital bed and unresponsive.
“What happened?!” his mother asks, her eyes alight with vengeful light. “Who did this to you?!”
(Katsuki’s missed her.)
“Shut up, old hag,” he mumbles out through a dry throat. “You’re giving me a headache. And I don’t know — some dude I bumped in on the street, I think.” He scowls and crosses his arms. “I’m fine.”
(He isn’t — not yet. The images of Not-Deku are still there, imprinted on his brain, from this awful future where heroes were dead or dying and that imposter still thought he was making the world a better place by tearing it down.
But Katsuki is back now, and he has a promise to keep.
I’ll stop you, Deku.
I’ll stop you. No matter what, that future I saw won’t come to pass.)