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Later, Katsuki will realize that he only has fractured memories of the battle once he took the hits meant for Deku. The doctors and therapists will tell him this is a trauma response meant to protect his psyche, but the not-knowing gnaws at him.
Here’s what he does remember: Searing pain. Intense shifting pressure in the atmosphere that had his ears popping - the familiar sensation of Deku’s Quirk activating. The sticky feeling of his own blood drying on his hands. Intense fear squeezing his heart in his chest.
Before Katsuki finally, finally blacked out, the last thing he saw was Deku laid out on a stretcher beside him, unconscious and covered in soot, limp and broken.
---
He knows he’s dreaming, but is unable to control it.
Katsuki finds himself standing at the front of his old middle school classroom, watching his younger self blow up Deku’s notebook and tossing it out the window. Shame, guilt, disgust - all of these emotions toss inside of his stomach in a violent storm. He clenches his fists and tries to move, to step forward and stop the next words from coming out of that stupid boy’s mouth, but he can’t. His limbs are heavy, and he’s stuck in place.
Why don’t you take a swan dive off the building?
Now, Katsuki gets to watch the way Deku’s face crumples after his younger self leaves the classroom. This isn’t quite a full memory because he hadn’t looked back at the time, as full of stupid arrogance and anger as he was. He’d been such an idiot. How could he have said that? Katsuki knows he’s said a lot of things out of anger in his short life, but that had been his lowest point in their middle school years.
This is Katsuki’s imagination, filtered through the lens of all the other times he’s hurt Deku and seen the disappointment and pain on his face. This Deku looks so small. He's completely unlike the Deku he knows now, who appears larger than life during battle.
“De...ku,” Katsuki grinds out between clenched teeth, making an exhausting effort to speak. The other boy looks up, surprise blooming in his expression.
Kacchan? His voice sounds strange, almost far away and underwater. He reaches out to him, but as Katsuki finally wills his body to move, the whole room is engulfed in darkness and he begins to fall backwards into nothing.
---
Katsuki, open your eyes! Can you open your eyes for me?
He tries, he really does, but his eyelids feel so heavy. There is a persistent, steady beeping in the background. What is that? Who—
Katsuki, c’mon, please. A distant sob. Is that his mother’s voice?
---
Katsuki finally forces his eyes open and is now staring at his younger self in the mirror. He watches this younger Katsuki finish forming the knot on his tie - this was the first time he put on the UA uniform. The first day of school.
He can’t control his actions here either; he’s just along for the ride. He remembers this day well, how his emotions oscillated between pride, excitement, and annoyance for one specific green-haired thorn in his side.
There’s a knock on his open bathroom door. He turns and grunts in annoyance as a camera flash goes off in his face. “What the hell?!” he yells as his mother laughs.
“That uniform is hideous,” she says, reaching out to straighten his tie. “I really wish they’d redesign.”
“Shut up,” he grumbles, swatting her hand away. She reaches up to ruffle his hair instead, making it stick up on the sides even worse than usual.
“You’re going to do great, Katsuki.” She smiles at him, something gentle and fond that he doesn’t see often from his mother. It works to soften the sharp edges of his own scowl, although it still stays on his lips.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “Nothing less than, all right?” He shoulders past her, picking up his school bag as he walks out of his room.
“Try to be nicer to Izuku-kun at least for today, will ya?” she calls out as she follows him down the stairs.
“Fuck no!” he yells and slams the front door behind him as he leaves for emphasis. The fondness he’d felt for his mother for an instant is gone, replaced by rage at the thought of going to UA with Deku. Of all the fucking losers!
Quirkless Deku! Impossible!
Katsuki suddenly feels himself pull away from that body and that memory, weightless. He’d stomped his way to the train station, and then to UA, fuming all the while. There had been a brief moment of peace as he’d sat in the classroom, watching the rest of his idiot classmates wander in until—
Kacchan?
Deku?
Katsuki falls into another memory.
Deku is standing in front of him on the school steps, an annoyingly earnest expression on his face, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes as he babbles some nonsense about having a power that isn’t his own. Katsuki remembers this moment in sharp contrasts. He’d had this piercing pain in his chest since he lost to Deku’s intellect during the first training exercise. The event had unveiled a series of suffocating realizations that had choked him into a dark, broody silence the rest of the day. Now, he is horrified to realize his eyes are stinging.
Katsuki remembers walking away from both All Might and Deku, swallowing hard and ignoring the eyes on his back as he’d strengthened his resolve to improve. The wake up call he’d received that day had been impactful.
Kacchan?
He spins around, searching for Deku. Where is he?
Even in his own head, Deku says his name like it’s something precious. In the past, that would have pissed him off, but now it makes his heart tumble over and over in his chest.
“Deku!” he calls out into the darkness.
Come back to me.
“I’m trying!” Katsuki shouts, surprised at the frustration bubbling up inside of him.
The world around him goes dark once again.
---
His inner world is now a kaleidoscope of memories:
A playground and a dog off its leash running at them full speed while barking. The two of them start to back away but Katsuki trips, falling onto his back with a cry. He freezes as Deku shifts his small body to block him from the oncoming dog, little fists up, Quirkless but brave. Katsuki feels two emotions too big for his body at that moment: fear for Deku (not himself) and anger at Deku. He clambers to his feet, shoves him aside, and creates loud, crackling sparks between his palms that scare the dog away.
“That was awesome, Kacchan!” Deku calls out, smiling and grateful.
“You should have run away!” Katsuki yells, furious in a way that would become the baseline for him moving forward.
“B-but I couldn’t leave you!” Big, fat tears fell from Deku’s eyes.
Katsuki can’t stand it. Why is he always trying to be better than him?
The two of them playing with All Might figures under their mothers’ watchful, fond eyes.
“Let’s be heroes together, Kacchan!”
Deku smiling, always—always—
That isn’t true.
Deku didn’t always smile. Katsuki remembers the way Deku’s tears welled and burst through as gut-wrenching sobs just as they had when they were kids, only this time it was as he watched a weakened All Might making his last stand on TV. Katsuki himself had felt devastated but inherently numb in the aftermath as he contemplated Deku’s raw display of emotion in a sea of cheering fans.
Katsuki also remembers later holding him down, Deku’s expression twisting into something frustrated and angry as he accepted a well earned defeat at Katsuki’s hands. He felt a sick satisfaction from pushing Deku to fight, to take his blows and give back just as good. It didn’t do anything for the pain and guilt inside of him, but deep down Katsuki knew only Deku would ever understand these overwhelming emotions.
There is no one moment where Katsuki realizes that all of his misplaced anger and hatred have been replaced with guilt, shame, and a new feeling, one he doesn’t have a name for yet, but it gives him butterflies in his stomach every time Deku smiles at him or touches him in any way, all scars and calloused hands and infectious optimism. In this rollercoaster through his memories, the one singular point of consistency is Deku - always Deku.
But Katsuki knows he doesn't deserve the smiles he gets now, or the trust. He doesn’t deserve to be welcomed into Deku’s private spaces like this, after all the pain he’d caused him before. He sees it now, how selfish and arrogant he’d been. How blind he’d been to Deku’s heart.
He doesn’t know how much longer he’s going to continue this walk down memory lane, or what this might mean is happening to him in the real world. Each moment is a reminder of how he had failed himself and Deku. How much he has to atone for.
---
Katsuki’s stomach lurches again. When he falls this time, he goes splashing into water.
He’s back in his own body now, battered and bruised and bleeding. His limbs feel heavy, and there is a deep ache in his arms - a sure sign of Quirk overuse. Never before had he felt so, so tired; it takes great effort to lift his head and look around.
His heart skips a beat. He knows this place. He’s sitting in the cool, shallow water of that creek he’d fallen into as a child. The water around him swirls with small eddies that are rust-colored. The sun is bright, but he sits in the shadow of the log above.
It’s quiet. Peaceful. Katsuki turns his face up to the sky and closes his eyes against the breeze.
He contemplates dozing off but the sudden splashing nearby draws him out of that stillness. When he opens his eyes, he isn’t all that surprised at this point to see a young Deku, no more than 5 years old, looking like he’s been plucked right from Katsuki’s childhood memories.
“Kacchan,” Deku’s voice wavers. His brows are furrowed with worry, but his small hand is steady when he holds it out. “Are you okay?”
This Deku looks so earnest. Katsuki’s response sticks in his throat, his eyes stinging. How long has it been since someone asked him if he was okay? He’s almost afraid to look at this young Deku, unscarred and innocent, still naive to Katsuki’s nastiest sides, but then again Bakugo Katsuki had never been one to let his fears rule his heart or his actions.
“No,” he finally admits, shaking his head. “I’m hurt.”
“I can help you, Kacchan!” Deku smiles at him, gentle and sweet. “C’mon,” he insists, shaking his hand out with emphasis. “Lemme help you.”
Katsuki stares at that hand. It always comes back to this moment, when he’d first consciously made the decision to push Deku away. He remembers it this way: The burning embarrassment at someone like Deku, Quirkless, powerless, trying to save him. Looking down on him! He’d rejected Deku then, slapped his hand away and pushed him aside. Then he would continue to do so for the rest of their childhood. So stupid and misguided.
Now Katsuki feels differently. He often burns with regret. He hasn’t yet put words to these emotions, the ones that make his heart feel tight when he’s around Deku now. When they work together under All Might’s oversight. In the quiet moments when they share a meal, aching and tired after a long day of training. As he listens to Deku ramble on about tactics and techniques and new ideas. When he feels fondness lodge under his rib cage, which usually translates to something like heartburn.
Katsuki hesitates for only a brief moment, his heart thudding in his throat, before he finally, finally reaches for the hand being held out to him.
His hand dwarfs Deku’s. It is so small in his grasp.
Another small hand pats his hair a little clumsily. “See, you’ll be alright, Kacchan,” Deku says, giggling. He throws his arms around Katsuki’s neck, nearly choking him as he pulls Katsuki into a hug.
“Yeah?” Katsuki asks, closing his eyes against the rush of emotion. He is slow to return the hug, limbs feeling like molasses, but still he does so, wrapping his arms around Deku’s tiny form as a surge of protectiveness rises up inside of him. “I hope so. I promised I’d fight you all the way to the top.”
“And you always keep your promises, right, Kacchan?” This question is whispered into his ear by an older Deku, his Deku.
As he pulls back from the hug, Katsuki opens his eyes to find himself face to face with the Deku he’d just fought side-by-side with. Gone is the wild expression and the rage in his eyes. His smile is soft, kind, and warm, the kind of smile that Katsuki still doesn’t think he deserves. Their faces are so close, he can count the freckles spread like constellations across the bridge of Deku’s nose and his cheeks.
“I don’t know, Deku, I—” Katsuki chokes and tastes the bitter tang of iron in his mouth. “It may not work out this time.” He takes Deku’s hand again and tries to pull him closer. “Listen, I need to tell you—”
“You can tell me in person, okay? When you wake up,” Deku says, moving to help Katsuki stand up. He’s shorter than Katsuki, but even in this weird dream landscape his strength is shocking. Still, the effort to move makes Katsuki groan out loud. When he was just sitting in the water and slowly bleeding out, it didn't hurt so much to breathe, but now it feels like he has a big stitch in his side with every inhale.
“You need to wake up, Kacchan,” Deku insists, forcing Katsuki to take one step, then another. He is walking him out of the water and up onto solid ground. “I’m waiting for you on the other side of this.”
They pause together on the water’s edge, Katsuki shivering now. There is that incessant rhythmic beeping noise starting up again in the distance, the world’s most annoying white noise.
“I’m scared,” Katsuki blurts out, an admission that comes easier here than it ever will in real life.
“I know,” Deku nods. “That’s why I’m here with you. But you need to walk, okay? I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’ll be there?” he asks again, wracked with pain as his feet sink into the soft ground and feel like lead with each step. Warm hands are at the small of his back, pushing him up and forward.
“Yes,” Deku whispers.
The sun seems to get brighter too, almost blindingly so, Katsuki having to shield his eyes as he continues taking one step, then another, and another. Suddenly, he can feel that there is no one behind him anymore. He pauses, paralyzed by the thought of taking another step. Whipping his head around, he shouts, “Deku?!” only to—
Only to—
Open his eyes to an empty hospital room.
---
Later, his bedside nurse will tell him that it took three people to sedate him. He nearly made it to Deku’s room, too, before their damned classmates intervened. He railed and shouted, but no one seemed to hear him.
Why? It’s the only question that rattles around his head as he has nothing to do but lay in the hospital bed and steadfastly ignore the sitter assigned to his room when he didn’t have visitors. She’s a well-meaning old woman who knits in relative silence, so he can’t really complain.
He knows he brought this on to himself, but when he’d awoken and found himself alone, it had been an impulse he couldn’t ignore. He has to see Deku to know he’s okay. Even now he’s still only getting bullshit platitudes from their classmates. Katsuki had been ready to lay down his life for that asshole and now he has the audacity to make it all for nothing by being stuck in a coma.
Katsuki had been so far gone that his mind had conjured up the most pathetic images to lure him away from death’s door, so it burns at him that he remains separated from Deku.
Katsuki isn’t the best with words. In fact, he might say they are probably one of his only weaknesses, but he can feel them now, tangled up inside of him, eating away at him with the desire to be said. The things he hadn’t been allowed to say to Deku in his dreams.
The taste of failure is bitter in his mouth.
His self-loathing is interrupted by yet another soft knock on his door, which swings open before he can tell the person on the other side to fuck off.
It reveals All Might, gaunt as ever but somehow more pale and tired around the eyes. “Can we have a moment?” he asks mildly, the question appearing to be directed to the sitter but really, he’s asking Katsuki.
Katsuki grunts, shrugging. The old woman is already leaving, gently reminding Katsuki to behave, which triggers a silent snarl from him that she ignores with a pleasant smile.
“Young Bakugo, I was happy to hear that you were awake. It's a relief that you’re still so lively.” All Might sits at Katsuki’s bedside and maintains a level of eye contact that is unnerving and makes him itch with restlessness.
Katsuki ignores him and says, “You left him alone?” Immediately he wishes he could take the words back because they reveal too much all at once, more so than his crazed shouting from earlier in the week.
“His mother is with him now,” All Might replies quietly, as ever patient with Katsuki and his rudeness. “I wanted to give her some privacy.”
Katsuki nods, then slides All Might another sideways glance before asking, “Is he going to wake up?”
“Yes. He’s been communicating with the former users of One For All, so it’s just taking him a little longer than normal.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can feel it.” All Might touches his hand to his heart briefly, then smiles. “He’s going to be okay, young Bakugo.”
Katsuki huffs a laugh, but it’s sharp and bitter and devoid of joy. “I think you and I have different definitions of okay.”
“Young Midoriya is strong, and I have faith—”
“You didn’t see him,” Katsuki interrupts. His gaze has turned inward, pulling at fractured, chaotic memories: a feral scream of rage; a reckless, relentless effort to fight with a broken body. He’d done much the same, fighting beyond the very limits of his tolerance for pain, desperate, but there had been another edge to Deku that he’d never seen before. “You don’t know what it was like.”
“I know that you did a very heroic thing,” he says, and smiles again when Katsuki looks at him with surprise. “Young Iida told me.”
Katsuki clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Four Eyes doesn’t know anything. Battle was chaotic.”
“Young Midoriya has a great burden on his shoulders. I know that’s my fault,” All Might continues as if Katsuki hasn’t even spoken. He’s looking down at his hands now, clenching and unclenching them in turns. “But he’s very lucky to have you.”
Katsuki feels this great heat rising behind his ears as he sputters a few false starts, before settling on a shout of, “Don’t read too much into shit, All Might! I just did what anyone else would have!” But even as he says it, he knows it isn’t true. It meant all that much more because he did for Deku.
The door slams open then, his mother bustling in with his father close behind.
“I can’t believe you’re causing all this trouble when you’ve literally just woken up, Katsuki!” his mother scolds, scowling as she walks up to his bedside.
“Do you have any idea how scared we were?” Her grip on his hand is tight, trembling.
All Might excuses himself with a quiet murmur, leaving Katsuki to his mother’s lecture and a burning embarrassment he can’t define.
---
The next morning, Katsuki demands to see Izuku. “It’s not fair that everyone else already got to parade through his room like he’s in the fucking zoo.”
Round Face had been in the night before, just before the end of visiting hours, to update him on Deku’s status. All Might thinks he’ll wake up soon - I hope he’s right! Katsuki had barely held back a snarl. He didn’t know why he was so angry at her, at All Might, at everyone.
“See who, sweetie?” his nurse asks as she presses buttons on the IV pump at his bedside.
His mother answers before he can: “His friend, Izuku.” She’s even smiling now, a little too fond for Katsuki’s liking. “You said his name a lot when you were in and out of it.”
“No, I fucking didn’t,” Katsuki denies automatically, even though it’s not like he can remember. The thought makes that same heat start to rise up his neck, ears burning once more.
“Actually, yeah,” his nurse chimes in. “You mumbled ‘Deku’ a lot, which I thought was strange. Is that Izuku’s hero name?” She laughs at Katsuki’s now murderous expression, then adds, “He woke up this morning, so I’ll see what I can do.”
His heart traitorously lurches into a gallop, stomach swooping as he simultaneously feels relief and irritation that he wasn’t there to see it himself, that he has to hear Deku’s woken up secondhand.
His mother murmurs her gratitude on behalf of her ungrateful son. After the nurse leaves, Katsuki mutters, “Shut up,” preemptively cutting off his mother’s next words.
“I wasn’t going to tease,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We’re all worried about him.”
---
Later, Katsuki is finally wheeled to Deku’s room. He raged at first (I can walk there myself, asshole, my legs are working perfectly fine), but his bastard doctor put his foot down. Wheelchair or no Deku. So Katsuki swallows his pride and gets in the wheelchair. An easy equation to solve.
There’s a brief moment outside the door when the nurse pauses to knock and there’s only silence on the other side. Here, Katsuki’s heart is gripped by a familiar fear that maybe they are all wrong and Deku isn’t really awake. But then his nurse is opening the door and wheeling him through and Katsuki is being subjected to the most blindingly bright smile and a soft, raspy, “Kacchan!”
The smile is a little wobbly, and he can already see the tears welling up in Deku’s very green eyes.
“Don’t cry,” Katsuki snaps instinctively. There’s no real heat in it, but it forces a strange little intake of breath from Deku all the same. It sounds like he’s trying to bravely choke back tears, but it’s a pointless effort as they start to spill down his cheeks anyway.
“I’m just so happy,” Deku says in between little hiccuping gasps, reaching out for Katsuki. “I was so worried.”
“You idiot!” Katsuki snarls, but he’s reaching back for Deku all the same. “Worry about yourself!”
Their fingers intertwine in a squeezing grip, like each is afraid the other will fade away if they’re not holding on hard enough.
The visit is brief, too brief for Katsuki to find the courage to say the words he’s been keeping safe since he woke up. Just long enough for Deku to whisper to him about what he’d seen in his mind, in Shigaraki. Katsuki has to bite his tongue with the urge to tell Deku that Shigaraki needs to die because he knows that Deku will never accept that reality. Instead, he tells Deku that he’s got his back.
“We can do this,” he says, and it’s quite possibly the most sincere shit he’s ever said to Deku.
“Thank you,” Deku whispers, pressing their clasped hands to his lips. His face is red and blotchy from the amount of crying he’s done, but Katsuki can only think that he looks beautifully alive.
“Shut up,” Katsuki replies. “Just don’t scare me like that again.”
Deku only smiles, even when Katsuki is finally forced to return to his room by the nurses.
---
Later, Katsuki will venture into Deku’s room at UA and find it quiet, still, empty.
Katsuki finds a letter on the desk addressed to him and signed by Deku. He didn’t even merit a personal delivery like the others had. He resents that wholeheartedly. Once again, he’s been left behind, words stuck in his throat. Blinded by a placid smile that should have clued him in.
He opens the letter with trembling fingers only for his gaze to go red with how suddenly, all-consuming his rage is at the words written inside.
Don’t come, Kacchan.
He crushes the paper in his fist and kicks the desk chair so hard that one of its wooden legs shatters, splinters scattering across the room.
That night, Katsuki starts to pack.