Chapter Text
For all that he had an excellent memory – no matter what everyone thought he hadn’t passed tests at Aldera solely due to quirkism – Bakugo Katsuki could safely say he was baffled by the sight in front of him. His memory was failing him, the last thing he recalled being pain.
“Kacchan!”
The scream echoed in his ears, the childhood nickname his… Katsuki felt his thoughts trail off, confusion the most prevalent feeling as he wondered what Deku had been to him. They had been friends as children, and then his quirk had come in fire hot, and Deku—no—Izuku’s hadn’t. That had been the first tear in the curtain of their relationship. Quirkless meant useless, or so everyone had told him, and he’d believed them, and in turn, turned that belief upon Izuku.
That truth was plain to see to his eyes by that point, because he’d grown up from the bully he had once been.
Maybe they had been friends once. Maybe then their so-called friendship had turned into something one-sided, with Katsuki not wanting to hang out with the weird quirkless kid… and Izuku hadn’t known when to quit – in fact, that was something he had never learnt. It had been frustrating, Izuku not understanding that he didn’t want to be friends anymore, and that frustration had turned to anger.
Anger he’d taken out on Izuku if only so he could get it into his thick head that their friendship was over. That certainly hadn’t been his finest moment, Katsuki mused, peering around the space he had ended up in after…
He remembered All for One. He remembered the spikes through his chest. The way they had pierced his chest. The way Izuku had held him in his arms, begging him to stay conscious so they could get him to Recovery Girl. The way he had looked at the green-eyed idiot who didn’t know a dying teenager when he was holding one in his arms. The way he hadn’t been able to tell him he was sorry for everything and for the fact he’d never be able to make up for what he did and said. The way he had choked out his final words, “Beat the shit out of him, nerd.” Because I won’t be able to, went unsaid, blood choking out those words before they could leave his lips.
Then—
“Oh,” Katsuki mumbled, the damning realisation that he was dead coming to him there, even as the darkness around him was lit by torches. A corridor loomed before him, dry grey stone bathed in the amber glow from the flaming braziers which lined the short length of room. And the door there was at the end of the corridor, leading to some place he didn’t know or have the strength to understand.
He glanced behind him, finding another door behind him, charred black wood with an immovable iron bar across it. A burnished metal plaque on that burnt door proclaimed it to be Bakugo Katsuki. Something in his stomach twisted at that, something about the iron bar declaring to his mind that the door was barred. There was no going back. Because he was dead.
There was no way to come back from that.
His feet started moving of their own volition, Izuku’s voice ringing in his ears – the last thing he had heard. It was funny what growing a conscience over the past couple of years had done. He would never forget all the cruel things he’d done and said, and perhaps that was the worst thing. What with how he had supposedly died a hero. He wondered, if the public knew what he had done when he was an idiotic child, if his friends came to learn what he’d used to be like, whether they’d turn on him like they had turned on Endeavour.
Certainly, the man himself had been a terrible father, but as a hero… Katsuki bit his lip, wondering then what the point of lingering on thoughts of the could have, would have, should have. He had never been one for self-introspection. That only led to hesitancy, and he didn’t want to be hesitant. He was Bakugo Katsuki, he was trying to be a better person, and could no longer try to be a hero because he was dead.
Yet there was still a way forwards – a corridor lined with crackling torches, if he wanted to be specific.
Red eyes narrowed as he approached the door in front of him. It was the colour of lacquered pine, motifs of western dragons lining its boundaries, and there was a name written on it. In English. He had tried to excel in all subjects, certainly, yet that didn’t quite explain how he knew and understood the meaning of that name carved into the treated wood.
Draco Rigel Potter.
His fingers traced the letters, nervousness bubbling in his gut for a few moments before he opened the door and learnt exactly what that name was to him. He stepped through the door, breathing in the air on the other side and pausing even as the door at his back slammed shut behind him, iron bar resting over it to block his way back. Because Bakugo Katsuki was dead, and Draco Rigel Potter was alive.
It was like a switch had flipped in his mind, despite the panging sensation of loss it brought.
Draco blinked, staring around at the odd environment he suddenly found himself in. It was as if he had found himself inside a volcano, a lake of magma dotted with blackened rocks which made a pathway across the cavern. Heat licked at his skin, hot and blistering – yet he didn’t blister, and he could breathe amidst the thick stench of sulphur and other gases which ought to have killed him.
“Where…?” he mumbled, recognising the words which came out of his throat as English rather than the Japanese he was so used to. It was a conundrum, a puzzle which tickled at the edges of his mind. Just like the way he had gone from thinking about himself as Katsuki to thinking of himself as Draco the minute he had crossed the threshold.
He stepped forwards, walking unafraid onto the moving rocks which made up the only pathway through the room. The molten magma swirled around the stones, heat searing at his ankles as he made his way across, leaping from rock to rock. Whispering filled his ears, unintelligible sounds brushing against his mind as he made his way through that strange room.
Red eyes narrowed, fixing upon the sight of a door a little ways away – a way out of that strange room—a cavern—full of molten rock and fire which unnerved some small, logical part of him.
He leapt across to the next platform of rock, a pitiful yelp leaving his lips as lava bubbled up with a loud pop. Scorching hot magma flew up, and suddenly his leg felt like it had been immersed in warm bath water – hot, yet the furthest thing from uncomfortable. Red eyes glanced down, staring at the trickles of lava slowly dripping back down to the scorched earth beneath him. His gaze darted back to the pool of magma around him, mind thinking of that toxic air he could somehow breathe. “What is this place?” he wondered, pondering then if it was what that vine girl had liked to call hell.
Yet there was a door there, across the room from him – a way out, and Draco didn’t think there would be a way to escape hell. Still, those sorts of thoughts didn’t stop him from advancing on that door. A passageway to something he would soon discover, he decided, continuing on his journey that much more confidently. He wasn’t about to be burnt to a crisp, which had been his main worry, and that made his journey across that strange room a lot quicker and simpler.
The doorway loomed before him, the door a mimicry of the one before it – all lacquered pine carved with dragons, rubies inlayed in place of eyes as they circled the wooden door, tail to snout. His fingers brushed against the ornately carved wood, feeling the cut of the scales, swallowing thickly as those red rubies almost seemed to shimmer for a moment.
His hand closed around the handle, twisting it and throwing the door open, stepping over the threshold before abruptly coming to a stop—
Because there, sitting in the middle of the circular room made of stone and seven doors, was a figure he would recognise anywhere. From his last life. He swallowed at the thought, sadness and loss welling up within as he stared at the head of curly green hair, despite how oddly young that familiar stranger looked. His freckles might have been gone, but the glowing green eyes still remained, turning to stare at him as his door shut behind him.
“Hey Kacchan!” Izuku-who-probably-had-a-different-name greeted, all smiles and cheer as if Bakugo Katsuki hadn’t just died and created Draco Rigel Potter. “Or, I suppose it’s Draco now, isn’t it?”
Draco sucked in a sharp breath, some small part of his brain warning him he was beginning to hyperventilate—because no-longer-Izuku being there meant that he had died too. What had he even died for? Draco wondered, a sinking feeling in his chest as he stood there feeling both too old and young. He had only been seventeen when he’d died, not even graduating from UA, and though heroism was known for sometimes shortening life expectancy quite drastically, there had always been some arrogant part of him which had thought that wouldn’t happen to him. Heroes were always supposed to win, some tiny part of his brain whispered. The joke was on him, it seemed, even as movement drew his eye to the other person in that strange, circular room which felt just as eerie as the last.
The second figure in the room peered out from the damned nerd he couldn’t even escape from after death all green hair and eyes. Yet for all the eerie resemblance she had to not-Izuku-anymore, she was a girl, and ergo not no-longer-Izuku. “He looks like he’s about to fall over,” the girl said. “Heya, Draco, sibling dearest, be a dear and come and sit down before you pass out!”
If his mind had been a computer, Draco was fairly certain he would have just blue-screened. As it was, he just blinked, unable to comprehend what the female-no-longer-Izuku was going on about.
“I’m Lucent, by the way – or at least that’s the name that was on my door, and my alternate self is going by Leo,” Lucent said, and Draco blinked once again, brain feeling as if it were having a silent meltdown. “You should come and sit with us… I think we’re waiting on four more!”
Draco didn’t move, brain still trying to figure out the scene before him, and it was only when wispy black whips branched out from the girl’s hand that his mind finally came to the only logical conclusion. “Oh god,” he mumbled, blankly staring at the alternate version of his previous life’s Izuku, knowing any scientist who had studied the multiverse would probably be salivating at the proof that there were other dimensions. “There are two of you.”
Lucent smiled, an expression which looked like she’d snatched it right of the face of that winged, goddamn troll. “Well done,” she said. “You can count!”
Draco felt his eyebrow twitch, the urge to yell and make a lunge for the alternate-Izuku almost overwhelming him. Then he reminded himself that he was trying to be better. New life, new start, part of him mused with a morbid amusement. Scowling at the reminder that he’d died, he trudged away from the door – his door – to the centre of the room and the rug the other two were sitting on. “So, nerds,” he said, sitting down and folding his arms. “Anyone want to let me know what the fuck is going on?”