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All things considered, they were lucky that Bakugou’s dying body fell from the sky above Yuuei grounds. The media wouldn’t get to see it, that way.
In all other respects, Bakugou didn’t feel so lucky.
The Bakugou on the ground, that is. The one who watched another, broken version of himself, fall to his death.
Almost-death, perhaps. At least when it came to the fall. Actual death came later, but we’re not there yet. We’re still watching this: sixteen-year-old Bakugou Katsuki, freshly out of the worst thing that had ever happened to him (being kidnapped for three days by loser psycho villains, one of which was covered in fucking hands), stood in the training area of Ground Beta, staring up at the sky as a golden swirl appeared, promptly dropped a body, and vanished into thin air again.
We’re watching as Bakugou Katsuki’s eyes narrowed, his brows meeting at a harsh angle, before he exploded away from the ground, careening high and fast into the air to meet the falling body before it hit a skyscraper on the way down. His arm hooking around the torso; the other thrust out to direct the fall back towards the ground.
We’re watching as Bakugou Katsuki lowered the body, and the body’s head rolled back with a groan, and he saw the blood smeared mouth of another maybe sixteen-year-old Bakugou Katsuki, and the original dropped him as he jumped back.
“Fuck!” he swore, body wired. He took a few more jerking steps, hands shaking.
The dying Bakugou’s eyes rolled around, hazy, looking for something to latch onto. They found the living Bakugou, widened only a fraction. A breath rattled out of his lungs in surprise.
Footsteps echoed around them, before their time alone was abruptly cut off as the students flooded the courtyard Bakugou had landed them in.
“Bakugou!” Iida called, the first to arrive. He tripped, landing hard and breaking his glasses, when he caught sight of the duplicate classmate. A moment later, Kirishima, who had been close by, who jerked to a stop, eyes wide and staring, then, worst of all: Deku.
Wreathed with green lightning, that perpetual worry in his eyes, Deku arrived, and saw, and let out a kind of howl that Bakugou, the living one, was reaching for and yet could not find in his throat. He could not find anything, just the faintest cowardly whimper, so he made no sound at all.
Deku skidded to his knees beside the new Bakugou, careful with his gloved hands. He arched himself over the dying boy, so he could be seen properly by him as more classmates arrived in droves, Mr Aizawa only seconds behind. The living Bakugou watched his dying counterpart’s eyes as they locked with Deku’s, his mouth opened as if desperate to speak. He watched the word Izuku, so unfamiliar on his tongue, be mouthed by this other version of him.
This dying version of him.
This version of him who had experienced something a lot fucking worse than a kidnapping.
“Iida,” Mr Aizawa barked, horror cracking through the usually placid expression on his face. “Go fetch Recovery Girl.”
“Uh, y-yes sir,” Iida said, broken glasses in hand, bruising beginning to swell on his nose. He fished a second, undamaged pair from a compartment of his costume, before speeding away from the scene.
“Bakugou,” Mr Aizawa said. Bakugou turned his head, saw that his teacher was not talking to him at all. Instead, he knelt down beside the dying version of himself, hand holding his. “Help is coming. Who did this to you? Can you speak?”
The living Bakugou watched his counterpart’s mouth move, to no avail. Watched the way he blinked, a tear rolling down the side of his face. He looked as if he were in a state of agony. He looked as if death had already claimed him, but was simply taking its time with the paperwork.
The horror within him calmed to a low simmer as he watched. Something tugged on his stomach. What would he want, if he were dying? Who would he want to see? Would it be the same as this other Bakugou? They looked similar enough, likely close in age – a whole other horror reared in the back of his mind – but had they had the same experiences? Izuku implied not. Izuku implied a closeness this Bakugou had all but eradicated at four years of age when his Izuku failed to conjure a quirk.
He stepped forward, uneven. He’d want to see Deku anyway, wouldn’t he? And Mr Aizawa, who was a comfort he wouldn’t admit to. And Kirishima, who was standing unsteadily at the dying boy’s feet, sharp teeth clenched and eyes dangerously close to leaking.
Was this Bakugou Katsuki from the future or from another world? Was he the version that didn’t escape The League of Villains, or the version who achieved his provisional licence the first time around and got caught up in the yakuza shit that he knew was ongoing, but only because he’d snuck a look at Kirishima’s notes when he was in the bathroom? Or, he dreaded to think, was this just him tomorrow? Him in half an hour? Him in two years?
Was this his future; falling into the past and dying there?
His legs felt like they were about to give way. The trembling made him lightheaded. Instead of letting everyone see him fall, he landed heavily on his knees near the dying boy’s head, shaking hands clenched into fists, breaths taken in hissing inhales.
He met Deku’s shaky gaze. Tears welled in the other boy’s eyes. This was no surprise, no uncommon occurrence, yet—they felt worse today. This felt worse.
Slowly, Bakugou pulled off his gloves, settled his bare hands around the head of his counterpart, gently pressing his fingers into the blood-damp hair and towards the scalp. He curled his fingers in, scratching softly, and watched the tears fall, one after the next, and
the crease between his dying self’s eyebrows vanish.
This is what he would want, he had decided, and he was glad the other version of himself felt the same way. He would want his mother’s hands in his hair, scratching at his scalp in gentle motions, as she had on lazy afternoons or after tear-soaked tantrums, calming him down from the peak of his rage and upset and melodrama. His knee bloodied, she would scratch into his hair. His tiredness curling around him, she would lie beneath his tiny body, scratching until he fell asleep. His worst nightmare, and she would calm him down with a soft lullaby and her gentle motions, until the fear had finally seeped out of his body and his bed.
Bakugou’s body twinged with the knowledge that he was being watched, but he whispered to his other self anyway. “Shh, it’s alright,” he said. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
His other self’s mouth opened, eyes rolling back to find Bakugou’s. Blood red, like all the colour on his skin, like the dampness on the torn chest and stomach of his costume, at his arms and legs. A demolished body, the colour of his eyes. There was an urgency in them, though, so Bakugou tipped his head forward, lowering himself until his ear was beside his dying self’s mouth, and he strained to hear the whispers.
“Shi…ga…rak… merge… all… one…”
Bakugou blinked, frowning, the sounds barely making sense. He didn’t say this though. He would hate to feel as if his last words had gone unheard or misunderstood.
“Okay,” he whispered back.
“Kill,” his dying self breathed. “Kill… him…”
He understood that.
Bakugou nodded jerkily. “Okay. Okay, kill him.” He met his own gaze again. “It’s okay,” he said, hand buried in his hair. “It’s okay now.”
In the distance, he could hear Iida returning. The whispers of his classmates, of Deku. But that was all secondary. He held his own gaze, face above his own. Watched his mouth curve around Izuku once more, like a goodbye, or a regret, or a plea.
It was only because he was watching that he saw the life fade out of himself. The dying Bakugou exhaled one final breath, and became the dead Bakugou.
The living Bakugou, as if in a mirror state, lost the ability to breathe as he hunched over himself, forehead to forehead, and trembled.
Recovery Girl arrived with Iida, several seconds too late.
-
He let Deku hug him minutes later. He pretended it was for Deku, but he knew the ways in which he would fall apart if no one held him together right now. He hugged him back. He told himself that Deku was the one shaking.
-
Bakugou laid on the bed in the medbay, listening to the pro heroes talk on the other side of the curtain. In the room next door, currently functioning as a morgue, the dead version of himself laid in a body bag. The living Bakugou was uninjured, and didn’t need the mockery of privacy the curtain implied, but he laid there anyway, listening.
Originally, while they waited for All Might and Nezu to arrive, Mr Aizawa and Recovery Girl had debated whether they should call his parents or not. Their son was dead; their son was alive. Their son wasn’t their son; their son had cradled himself until he breathed his last breath.
He’d listened to Recovery Girl make the call. She hadn’t conveyed anything at all, just that they should endeavour to get to campus as soon as possible; someone would meet them at the gate.
Now, they were questioning what to do. Nezu knew a guy whose quirk could age a person to the hour; they would be called to determine how old the dead Bakugou was. All Might begrudgingly suggested they might call Sir Nighteye in to read Bakugou’s future and learn what was going to happen. Mr Aizawa wondered if they should be scouring the quirk database to determine whose quirk would have created the portal in the first place.
Bakugou snapped an elastic band he’d swiped from Recovery Girl’s desk against his wrist and thought about the look in his own eyes as he’d died. It was sad, it was grateful, it was angry, it was so, so scared.
He had never thought about dying young until the day Dabi closed his hand around the back of Bakugou’s neck and pulled him through the inky black warp gate of Kurogiri’s. He’d always assumed he would die old and successful or middle-aged and on a victory lap, perhaps pulled out of retirement for one last job with the young upstart rookie hero who had idolised him his whole career. He’d go out in a blaze of glory, taking the bullet for the younger hero and imparting wisdom through his final breaths.
Not kill him. Not Shigaraki.
Since Dabi and the kidnapping, he’d thought about dying young quite a lot. Thought about regrets and unfulfilled potential, thought about what he might leave behind. He’d angrily shoved most of it away, so as not to let those thoughts drag him down from all the greatness he would achieve, and needed to start achieving soon. But they lingered in the nighttime; pestering thoughts of what his obituary might read – could’ve been great, disliked by many, everyone who knew him was jealous of his talent – or what his friends might say at his funeral.
Deku would cry, obviously. Kirishima too, and the rest of those idiots who followed him around and sat at his table for lunch. They’d sob and share all the things they loved about him. Deku would sob and share all the mean shit Bakugou had said, but put that ridiculous spin on it like he always did about how take a swan dive off a roof was actually inspirational.
His friendship with Deku played a lot on his mind at night. The parts he’d liked, the parts he’d hated, the parts he’d regretted. It circled his thoughts now, too, in a vague way. Izuku mouthed but never said aloud. Eyes latched onto that blubbering face like he was happy to see him. Like he’d wanted to see him.
On the other side of the curtain, they all went off to call their guys. Mr Aizawa sighed loudly, stepped around the curtain. Stared at Bakguou, who stared at the ceiling and snapped the elastic band against his wrist. His gauntlets were lost to the floor somewhere, half of his gear removed methodically and yet without conscious thought.
Mr Aizawa said, “Your parents will be here soon.”
Said, “Counsellors will be available if you need them. We’re going to sign you up for a mandatory session for tomorrow.”
Said, “Bakugou, could you tell me what he… what he said to you?”
Bakugou swallowed a breath. Snapped the band against his wrist. Thought about how he would look when he died. About the voice, soft and broken and hoarse. Desperate to say so much and yet unable to.
“Shigaraki,” he said. He couldn’t get the words out of his head if he tried. They were seared into the meat of his brain. “Merge. All. One. Kill. Kill. Him.” He rolled his head to the side and met Mr Aizawa’s passive gaze. “The kills and him were separate from the rest.”
“Right.”
The two stared at each other. Bakugou looked away first. Mr Aizawa paused a moment before saying, “I’m here if you need me. I’m sorry this happened.” He vanished around the curtain, and it wasn’t pulled aside again for a long while, until his parents arrived, nervous and frayed and rushing into the room like they were about to see their boy dead or something. No, of course not.
Bakugou let them hug him and manhandle him and speak loudly over his head and also to him but barely at all, his father’s hands sturdy and strong on his shoulder, his arm, and his mother’s lithe and graceful as they cupped his face and searched for bruising undetectable to the average gaze. They smoothed his hair away from his face, smacked him lightly when he didn’t reply, stroked the spot afterwards.
He said, “I’m fine,” and watched their eyebrows creased just like his dead. Did. Like his did. He blinked, swallowed, shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said again, unsure how true the words were.
“Then why the hell were we called down here?” his mother demanded. “You’re surely not fine.”
“Mrs Bakugou, Mr Bakugou,” Nezu said, for once not curled into the scarf wrapped around Mr Aizawa’s neck. “We have something we need to discuss with you.”
-
His father refused at first to see the other Bakugou Katsuki. His mother didn’t hesitate. It was when she cried over the corpse of himself that Bakugou Masarou entered the makeshift morgue and cast his gaze upon the face of his dead son. Immediately, he turned back to the living one, sitting on the bed and watching them mourn.
They returned to him soon after, closer and softer and even more affectionate.
“Why did you look?” he whispered to his father while his mother held him tightly, rocking them side to side, one hand scratching small circles into the back of his head. Soothing the storm that tore through his insides.
“Because he’s you,” Masarou replied, arms around them both, forehead crooked against his son’s temple. “Because you’re him. He deserves to be mourned by his parents.”
In his periphery, he saw a tear trail down his father’s cheek. It mimicked the ones on his own living face.
-
Bakugou’s parents had to wait until the guys the teachers knew had come by before they could take their living son home and arrange for their dead son to be buried. They spent time with both boys while they waited. It felt strangely touching to see them grieve him.
He’d never doubted that they loved him. He was the spitting image of his mother and she adored it, as much as they fought, and his father was riddled with burn scars from every uncontrolled explosion that tore out of a tantruming or sobbing baby Bakugou, five years old and unable to stop them sometimes but taking comfort in his father’s arms who held him all the while, ensuring that he would never feel like the weapon, like the bomb about to explode, because he knew that he could receive tenderness and care all the while.
And yet, despite this, he had never considered how they would hurt if he was gone. If he were ever going to doubt it, now he wouldn’t – not after seeing them cradling his dead self’s body, hands gentle around his face, in his hair. They cleaned him of the blood with damp cloths and pressed soft kisses to his forehead, to his nose, like they did when he was small.
When the teacher’s guys whom they knew arrived, the first one got to work carbon dating the dead boy while the second, Sir Nighteye, with dark hair and several blond streaks, stood in front of him. He’d been awkward around All Might, who had been awkward in return. Sir Nighteye had spared a look for the dead boy, before approaching the living one.
“In a moment, I will read your future. Understand that I can see it all, second by second, and it is 100% accurate.”
“Don’t give me too many spoilers,” Bakugou said in a flat voice.
Sir Nighteye looked like he found this hilarious, but stifled himself and waited until the other man returned from the morgue. Bakugou didn’t watch the man, but instead his parents, in the doorway.
“I have determined,” Nezu’s guy said, “that the boy died at seventeen years, eight weeks and three days old.”
His parents’ faces crumpled. His mother sobbed.
“June,” Bakugou said, slipping down from the bed. “I die in June.” It was September now. He looked at Sir Nighteye. “Read my future. I’d like to go home.”
-
He didn’t come back to Yuuei for four days, but that didn’t mean that Yuuei didn’t come to him. First the counsellor the next morning, who talked to him but didn’t mind so much that he didn’t have much to say. Then All Might, that afternoon, followed by Mr Aizawa after school had finished and Kirishima that evening with his homework that Mr Aizawa could’ve definitely brought but was evidently just an excuse to check on him.
Nezu visited the day after, and the counsellor again the day after that. His friends squeezed onto the sofas in the living room, Kaminari and Ashido and Kirishima and Sero, the four of them jostling and talking and acting as if he wasn’t going to die in nine months in an evidently brutal and gory way, and at dinner time, Deku and his mother arrived for a dinner with lots of effort at engaging him in conversation but minimal success.
Mostly, he laid on the sofa or on his bed or with his head on his mother’s lap, thinking about the dead version of himself. On the fourth day, they buried him in the family plot, a Bakugou Katsuki doppelgänger who would never be buried by his own parents, but by a version of them who loved him just as much.
Bakugou spent half the ceremony wondering if they would take solace in that fact, nine months down the line when he went missing in battle and his body was never found – that almost a year before, they’d already mourned him and held his funeral. There would be no need for a second burial plot; he would loop around. The living Bakugou would become the dead Bakugou and be buried right in front of the previous, living version of himself.
This was his ending, right in front of him, and so he gave himself all the love and care that he could. They dressed him in his favourite clothes, buried him with a few of his favoured All Might possessions, including the blood-soaked limited edition trading card that was slipped into the pocket of his hero costume – the same one in pristine condition Bakugou had now, in his suit pocket.
A few teachers from school came to the funeral too, as did some of his friends. It was strange, to watch their speeches about him, while he still stood there. Stranger, that he knew that something had changed in the nine months before his death, that he was different when he died and his relationships with the people around him were different too.
At the end, as his parents thanked the small group for coming, Bakugou said, “Hold another one next year, yeah? I think he’d want the speeches at his funeral to be up to date with the person he was when he died.”
He left for his parents’ car before anyone could say a word in reply.
-
On the day he returned to school, a quarter of the class was out on their work study. By the end of the day, Kirishima was in the hospital, and rumour had it that Sir Nighteye was on the way out, too.
It was dark out by the time Mr Aizawa approached him in the dorms, studying half-heartedly at the dining table, and said, “Get your coat.” He did so without protest. A lot of the fight had leaked out of him recently.
He had never been in a teacher’s car before. Mr Aizawa’s Toyota was a twenty-year-old clunker. The passenger side window no longer rolled down and cat hair coated every surface. His teacher didn’t seem to care; his dash was covered in stickers, including several ones advertising Present Mic’s regular radio show, Put Your Hands Up. Bakugou sniffed at the state of the car but said nothing. The week before, he might’ve yelled and complained, but the fire was gone, snuffed out by witnessing death firsthand. He sat silently and only moved to fiddle with the radio, so it always played music rather than the talking in between the songs.
Soon after, they arrived at the hospital, and Mr Aizawa led him up to a floor with police officers standing guard. All Might sat in a plastic chair, head in his decrepit hands. Mirio Togata, the third year, paced nearby.
“You’re here!” he said when he caught sight of their arrival. “Sir has been asking after you.”
At the door, Bakugou peered in to the dark room. Sir Nighteye was a thin figure in the bed, hooked up to breathing apparatus.
“Would you like me to come in with you?” Mr Aizawa asked.
Bakugou paused, shook his head, whispered, “No, thank you,” and entered the room alone. Sir Nighteye watched him the whole way. He hadn’t been cognizant enough that day he died to see how uncanny and eerie Sir Nighteye’s eyes were, how deeply they scoured into his very soul. Or, perhaps, they simply hadn’t. Maybe it was now that Sir Nighteye knew everything he would do his whole life that he looked at him this way, like a foregone conclusion.
He approached the bed, said, “I told you not to give me spoilers,” and watched Sir Nighteye hack out a laugh.
Long fingers pulled away the oxygen mask as he said, “You’re funny.”
“I’m not,” Bakugou replied. “I’m a lot of things, but funny isn’t one of them.”
Sir Nighteye hummed. “Perhaps you are not yet in your comedy prime.”
Bakugou looked him over. Evidently the yakuza thing had gone a lot worse than anyone expected. He wondered if Mr Aizawa would let him visit Kirishima while they were here.
He asked, “Are you alright?”
“No”, Sir Nighteye replied. “I’m dying.”
Bakugou stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Guess you’re beating me to it. Didn’t see that coming.”
“I did,” Sir Nighteye sighed. “When you can see everyone else’s lives, you can see corners of your own where you intersect. I’ve known I would die around now for years.”
“And yet you still went on the mission.”
“My prophecies have always been exact,” he said. “There’s no fighting it. I had a duty today which I always knew I would complete. And when the moment came, I knew that I could avoid it and skip this conclusion – but I knew even more so that I could not. My being there was paramount to its success.”
Bakugou hummed. Sir Nighteye took a few breaths from his mask. Bakugou wondered how long he had left; why he bothered to waste some of that time with him.
He pulled the mask away once more. “That is what I saw for you, too.”
Bakugou raised his eyebrows.
“Your being there, on that fateful day, is paramount to its success.”
“I’ve gotta die to win the day?”
“That’s what I saw. It intersects well with other futures I’ve read in the past, battles I’ve skipped over and others I’ve watched, years before they would ever occur. I recognised your work. I recognised the win that would occur because of it. Your skill, your talent, your power – there is no victory without you, whose name, if I’m not mistaken, has always promised it.”
My Katsuki, his mother had always said, my victory.
He was born and bred to win.
“So I’m dying for a cause?” he asked. “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
“No. I wanted to tell you what I will tell Midoriya when he arrives shortly. That my visions have always been truthful, accurate without diversion. Until today.”
Bakugou’s eyes narrowed.
“Today, a reversal quirk was used. I saw Midoriya’s death, but the young girl we rescued from the Shie Hassaikai reversed him, saved him, again and again. My prophecy did not come true. So perhaps, there is a chance for you, too. That if you can utilise her gift, or a gift like it, you might thwart the future fate has given you.”
“But we’ve seen the body. We buried me. Him.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t it break, like, the space time continuum or something, if I were to live? Wouldn’t it erase all of this so that it never happened in the first place, if I were to live at the end of it?”
Sir Nighteye pulled a strained smile. “Don’t think so hard,” he said. “No one ever said the portal was certainly time travel. Time travel quirks are exceptionally, exceedingly rare. More likely, and your teachers will attest to this, it was a space travel quirk. Teleportation not through time, but through area. One version of events to another, one universe to another.”
Bakugou looked over his shoulder at Mr Aizawa in the doorway, evidently listening but not entering. Mr Aizawa pulled a considering face, then nodded, as if this made sense to him.
“Have faith, boy,” Sir Nighteye said. “There is still hope for you yet.”
-
Deku arrived shortly after, and within the hour Sir Nighteye was dead. His funeral garnered over five thousand fans lining the street his hearse drove down, carrying a man who could see any future he wanted, except for his own.
A man who didn’t know until it was too late that the future was secretly a malleable thing.
-
Bakugou Katsuki had a date circled in his calendar. June 18th. The day he would be seventeen years, eight weeks and three days old. The day he was due to die.
He counted down the days, he spent more time with his parents than he used to, he tried very hard to make the most of the time he had left, but otherwise, he just went about his life like normal.
He didn’t know if he entirely believed in this reversal quirk saving him. The pro heroes seemed to, as did his parents, who latched on and demanded use of that little girl’s quirk the moment they found out, but he wasn’t holding out hope. He wasn’t going to make it to eighteen, and he was gradually making his peace with that.
So, perhaps his grades slipped in the meantime. Maybe he didn’t try as hard to prove himself, although he did manage to get his provisional licence and Todoroki invited him to join he and Deku in a work study with Endeavour, which he agreed to, because if nothing else it would be an experience to work with the new number one hero – but there wasn’t as much to care about if he wasn’t going to live to see the fruits of his labour.
He didn’t care about being top of the class because he was never going to be the top of the hero rankings. He didn’t care about studying so much because his exams would never amount to anything. He didn’t care about sowing seeds now that he would never get the chance to harvest.
He played more video games – the ones he never got around to because he was always so busy. He read more manga and books. He stopped going to the gym to achieve the ideal body and strength for his hero work, and instead went because it was fun to mess around with Kirishima by the weights and laugh at Kaminari getting crushed while bench pressing.
Mr Aizawa talked to him about it, but his teacher also couldn’t fault him for it. Bakugou’s parents had asked him, even, if he’d like to drop out of school if there wasn’t going to be much time left – but he saw no point in that. Sure, he didn’t like the uniform and barely even wore it anymore, because the teachers didn’t like giving him detention and he didn’t like the idea of wearing something he didn’t like on one of his limited remaining days – but he liked being around his friends. And he liked using his quirk. And he loved training to be a hero, even if he would never become one for real.
“Besides,” he told them. “I’m going to be at that battle, whatever it is, no matter what I do now. It’s set in stone. I might as well be good in my last fight.”
So the year passed, the new one began. He played drums for the class band and helped run that class hero agency on that tiny island for a few weeks, then travelled the world with the Endeavour work study while Deku became wanted or some shit, and all the while, the pro heroes convened and planned and met about the warning a future version of him had imparted:
Shigaraki. Merge. All. One. Kill. Kill. Him.
-
“So,” Nezu said, in one such meeting only a few days after they returned from their trip. Bakugou had enjoyed the whole incident; they’d given him a new stealth suit, he’d seen parts of the world he never thought he would, and he’d felt like a real hero as he fought villains. Something he’d started to think would never really happen.
His teachers were letting him spend more time than he should on his work study. Some days, while Todoroki and Deku were back at Yuuei, catching up with classes, he was allowed to stay at the Endeavour agency, going on patrol with the sidekicks or tagging along with Endeavour himself if he noticed Bakugou hadn’t left. At some point, there’d been some meeting between his parents and Yuuei, and he figured they’d all decided that Sir Nighteye’s idea of his survival was unlikely, so letting him live his dreams for even a short time was perhaps kinder than sitting him in a classroom.
“After discussing it with numerous high intellect quirk users, and posing the last words of the now deceased, potentially alternate timeline Bakugou Katsuki – whom we will henceforth refer to as Bakugou Two – the consensus for the meaning is as follows.”
Nezu paced at the front of the meeting room. Bakugou slouched in his seat as he watched. Many heroes were attending the meeting; he wondered if they’d been attending these for the past six months.
“Shigaraki and All For One have merged, or will merge, the consequences of which will be devastating. Bakugou Two has advised killing Shigaraki early, before the merge has taken place, in order to stop it before it happens.”
Bakugou raised an eyebrow. They needed the most intelligent people in the world to tell them that? Really?
“Combined with recent intel gathered by our agent on the inside of the League of Villains – or perhaps, better known now as the Paranormal Liberation Front – and the interrogation of the warp gate villain, Kurogiri, we believe we have located Shigaraki, as well as their base of operation. For this plan to work, and for us to follow the guide left for us by Bakugou Two, we must endeavour to commit an action grievous and incompatible with heroism. We must kill Shigaraki Tomura.”
-
The heroes argued a lot. About morals and who would have to do it, and if they should trust a kid who was dying and saw only one option, let alone a kid who screamed DIE at least once a day.
At the end, when it was quiet, and a lot of decisions had been made – all of which compromises, which made no one happy – Bakugou asked, “Why am I here?”
Nezu blinked. “We thought you would be interested in fulfilling the plan your counterpart set into place.”
Bakugou sighed, and shoved himself out of his seat. “You thought wrong,” he said. “You’ll fail to kill Shigaraki.”
“I’ve done the math,” Nezu replied. “The plan has a ninety-six percent chance of success.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Bakugou said, pulling his jacket from the chair as he headed for the door. “I’m already dead.”
-
Perhaps, he would’ve been burning with the seething passion to live had he not seen the light fade from his own eyes, or watched his parents grieve over his dead body. If he hadn’t fallen to the ground beside his dying self, and put his hands in his blood-damp hair, and cradled his head as he died.
If he’d stayed back, thought it all a freak occurrence, let Deku do the crying and instead grabbed Kirishima and walked away to punch something, maybe he’d be different. Fiercer, stronger, more determined to live.
Unfortunately, that must’ve been in the next timeline along. In this one, he was resigned to his execution date.
-
Obviously, the meticulous operation to take down Shigaraki and the Paranormal Liberation Front was a shitshow. Buildings exploded, decayed, fell to ruin. A giant walked the earth and killed thousands. Shigaraki Tomura was born again, a monster, a beast, a body within a body.
Mr Aizawa cut his own fucking foot off.
Bakugou, thinking of his other self, of Izuku, of that day in the river and how badly he wished he could’ve just grabbed Deku’s outstretched hand and taken it, because fuck all the wasted time that he hadn’t, moved without thinking.
His brain only caught up when he found himself impaled six times.
He felt himself detach, rise.
Perhaps the carbon dater was wrong and that was the thing that killed him. Or perhaps Sir Nighteye was right and things could change – only, they’d sped it all up.
Neither was right. Bakugou lived, hit the ground, blacked out.
When he woke up, Shigaraki had escaped, medical personnel surrounded him, and Midnight was dead.
That night, All For One escaped prison, and thousands of criminals from six prisons flooded the streets of Japan.
Bakugou closed his eyes and slept the night away in his hospital bed, wishing he could’ve been more specific and coherent in his deathbed warning.
-
Bakugou exploded the letter Deku had left behind and stormed out of the dorm. Mr Aizawa found him while he was trying to leave the Yuuei campus past the time the gate would open for students, and then Bakugou stared at him long enough that his teacher sighed heavily and fished his car keys out of his pocket.
Bakugou used Mr Aizawa’s phone to call All Might, who hummed and hawed but eventually shared their current location when Bakugou said he would just call Endeavour next anyway; he’d gotten the new number one hero’s phone number after spending so long at his agency and he wasn’t afraid to hunt him down.
When they arrived, Endeavour, Hawks, Best Jeanist and All Might were stood around a sleek, black sports car. All Might leaned against the hood. Mr Aizawa’s janky Toyota pulled up beside Best Jeanist’s flashy red convertible.
“He would’ve just come alone,” Mr Aizawa said when Hawks raised his eyebrows at their arrival. “I don’t feel good about letting a student wander around criminal-infested Japan alone right now.”
“Neither do we,” Jeanist replied, glancing up.
Bakugou followed his gaze, spotted the shadow of his childhood best friend on the edge of the rooftop.
“And yet you enable him,” Bakugou replied.
“All For One will be after him,” All Might sighed, waving a vague hand. “He’s right that the class would become collateral damage if All For One were to attack if he stayed at school.”
“Didn’t you listen to Nezu’s speech about the new security? All For One wouldn’t stand a chance at getting in.” Bakugou stalked past them, towards the fire escape. He heaved himself onto the dumpster and jumped onto the lowest level, pulling himself up. “He’s gonna get himself killed, you know,” he said louder, so they could hear him complain. “And you’ll just end up watching it happen.”
He climbed the ladders of the fire escape until he reached the roof, finding Deku sat with one leg pulled up to his chin and the other swinging off the edge. A bento box sat beside him, the food picked at.
“You kidding me with this shit?” Bakugou demanded, landing heavily beside Deku on the edge of the roof. His body ached faintly in all the places he’d been impaled; Recovery Girl had done a good job putting him back together again.
“Kacchan,” Deku said, pressing his cheek into his knee. “Want some katsudon?”
Bakugou blinked, shrugged, said, “Sure,” and grabbed the bento box. He ate silently until half of it was gone, then he passed it back to Deku and watched him eat the rest of it. The two of them looked out at a burning city; fires raged, people ran, chaos ruling the night.
“We want to fight with you, you know,” he said at last.
“I know. But it’s not anyone else’s problem. It’s mine. I have this quirk—”
“It’s my problem,” Bakugou replied. “Not least because you have been my problem since the first day of kindergarten, but because I’m going to die for you in about forty days from now.”
Deku exhaled. “You don’t know it’ll be for me.”
“I do,” Bakugou said. “Sir Nighteye gave me a few spoilers.”
He watched Deku blink, shake his head. “You never said.”
“None of your business,” he shot back. “Until now.” He kicked the backs of his shoes against the brick work. “There’s going to be a big battle. We’ll plan it out meticulously, who will be where, who will fight which villain. We’ll be assigned to the same location, but you’ll be late or something.”
Deku snorted. “I’m late for the big battle?”
“Something like that. Or you get lost, go to the wrong place.”
“You never were any good at giving directions.”
“No. You were just never any good at listening to directions.”
Deku grinned. Bakugou continued, “I’ll have to hold down Shigaraki and All For One in their new weird combo body until you get there.”
“Alone?”
“No. He said he saw Mirko there, too, and that he’d read Jeanist’s future once a few years ago and recognised it. I won’t be alone, but Shigaraki will be stronger than we can possibly imagine. And he’ll kill me.”
“Kacchan,” he exhaled.
“He’ll kill me so you’ll have to see my body.”
Deku’s hand clawed around Bakugou’s, tight and trembling. “I can’t do that again,” he whispered, and Bakugou watched the tears well in his eyes. He remembered Deku crying a lot after the second Bakugou died. They just never cried near each other.
“You’ll have to. I figure it’s Shigaraki with the portal quirk, probably, with too many quirks and no idea how to use them” he said. “Or maybe there’s just someone else on the playing field. It’s unclear why he’d come to us seven months ago. Nezu’s league of super geniuses are playing with the idea of divine intervention.”
Deku laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. When there are no more logical answers, the only one left has to be illogical,” he said. “And illogical counts for religion, magic and the otherworldly. I had to sit through a PowerPoint on the topic.”
Deku breathed out, and Bakugou watched the clouded air curl. His childhood best friend shook his head, looked over at him, and said, “Will you punch me if I ask for a hug?”
Bakugou rolled his eyes, flung his legs over the edge of the roof so he could stand, and said, “Come on, loser.”
Their hug felt like a goodbye and a regret and a plea all at once. Familiar to Bakugou, at least, because that’s what his dead self’s Izuku had felt like.
He returned a few weeks later with the rest of the class to bring Deku back to Yuuei.
When he called him Izuku, it felt like a homecoming.
-
He woke up on June 18th and called his parents.
He said, “I’m sorry I have been such a little shit my whole life.”
Said, “Please don’t forget about me.”
Said, “I love you and I wish I had said it more.”
Then he pulled on his costume, ate his breakfast, and got to work.
-
Deku did not make it into the right warp gate, instead dragged at the last second into another. Bakugou watched it happen. Bakugou knew this was why he died.
It pieced together in his head like a puzzle. His Izuku. The surprise in his eyes. The way he looked at him like he had been waiting for a long time. Sir Nighteye had been telling the truth, and even when they tried like hell to subvert the future he’d warned of, it had happened anyway.
The reality settled in front of him as he arrived in the coffin, twisted merged Shigaraki-All-For-One ahead of him: he would hold the line. He would fight like hell. He would be the opener for Deku’s arrival. He would keep going until Shigaraki Tomura was dead or he was.
And he knew which would happen first.
So he fucking fought.
He burned.
He exploded and tore himself asunder.
As Shigaraki became a thousand times larger than himself, his flesh rippling into a million twisting fingers, Bakugou dipped and dived. He flew, he soared. He rocketed from one side of the coffin to the other; he called out plays and responded when others did the same.
He released explosion after explosion. Bomb, missile, nuclear explosion. He was all of them, he controlled them all.
Bakugou endeavoured to be the most dangerous thing in the battle, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t quite reach the standard of Shigaraki in this new, hellish form. Even quirkless, with Mr Aizawa and Monoma in the nearby cage, Shigaraki’s body was a grotesquerie, a vile mutation that twisted like roots, grabbing and pulling and splitting bodies apart.
He watched Mirko lose her other leg. Her arm. She screamed on the ground, still trying to stand and fight. The moving panels of ground swallowed her, spiriting her away from the battlefield.
Shigaraki laughed and cackled and howled.
Bakugou bled and bled and bled. He smiled all the while, determined and moving faster than he ever had before. He was a fucking masterpiece; he would’ve been the greatest hero in Japan.
He knew it, as he tore through the coffin, as his explosions grew larger and more powerful, as he started beating down Shigaraki only the tiniest bit faster than he could heal. He had never been this excellent, this astonishing. His support gear allowed for bigger and better explosions to rock the entire coffin, but it was his honed skill and earned talent that made him feel like maybe—maybe he could win.
Maybe he could defy the future.
Sir Nighteye had thought it possible in the moments before he died. Had thought that there was chance that Bakugou could repeat the impossible. He could change destiny.
He swore he felt it; the change in the air, the shifting tendrils of time and possibility.
He was going to be the greatest hero the world had ever seen.
He was going to live, and grow, and become something fucking incredible, just like he had always planned.
Bakugou Katsuki could see it. Could feel it reaching out towards him, his palm stretched outwards and reaching back.
-
Shigaraki’s tendrils caught him, pierced him, slammed him into the ground.
He would be the thing for Deku to see when he arrived. A sign of his failure.
“Izuku,” Bakugou breathed.
He would be the gift in the neat bow, the horror show.
Bakugou waited for the golden light, the portal that would spirit him nine months into the past to traumatise a younger version of himself. He waited for the erasure quirk to fail and for Shigaraki to unleash a teleportation quirk he hadn’t known about. He waited to see his own face, tear streaked, eyes hollow, witnessing his death.
There was the tiniest part of him that was already thankful to his former self; that he wouldn’t die unwatched, alone. He would die with Deku holding his hand and fingers scratching soothing circles into his hair.
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, all things considered.
Maybe the agony would subside to the care and attention of his younger self.
But no golden portal arrived. No flicker of teleportation, no unforeseen quirk.
Bakugou laid in the battlefield, waiting for something that never came.
And while Best Jeanist tried to race to his side, Bakugou Katsuki died before anyone could hold his hand and comfort him.
-
In a white place, far removed from time, the burning ember of One For All watched him. A golden flame in the shape of All Might, a figure that strangely brought him no comfort, nor any sadness either.
He knew he was dead. He had no idea why One For All would be in his dying space. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his limited edition All Might trading card and admitted that he wished he had asked for him to sign it.
-
The pro heroes of Japan had been given nine months to save Bakugou Katsuki’s life. It would be an embarrassment to fail with so much lead time.
In the hour Sir Nighteye had to watch Bakugou’s life, he did so with avid attention to detail. He pored over the seconds, the movements, watched it backwards and forwards. Bakugou Katsuki was a prodigy who did not rest on his laurels; Sir Nighteye mourned the loss Japan would face without him protecting them. He watched the battle, watched the death, watched the causes and effects of all the choices that day would present; what he ate for breakfast, his movements entering the warp gate, his choices on the battlefield.
Notably, there was no golden portal in Bakugou Katsuki’s future.
It was why space travel – one universe to another – was more likely than time travel. If he had been moved backwards, Sir Nighteye would see the movement, would see the portal and the fall and the death surrounded by classmates. It stood to reason that, rather, Bakugou Two was from another timeline entirely, and had been transported across.
The heroes who had met regularly to discuss the boy’s fate and the words of warning had brought this up regularly.
How similar was this alternate universe to their own? They had their own Shigaraki, likely their own All For One – but there was nothing to say that anything else was the same. Not beyond Bakugou Two’s almost identical outfit, the collar a clear homage to Best Jeanist (implying the same internship, the same school, the same win at the Sports Festival so perhaps other similar, related events also taking place). He’d also held the same trading card Bakugou One carried.
So, they argued, a similar universe. A similar series of events. They could not act as if it wasn’t, as if Bakugou Two’s struggles were complete separate and detached from the struggles of their own.
So they planned for a death. He noted how the death came about, the organs he believed to be damaged. He noted that Mirko would be gone from the arena by that point, that Jeanist was on site, as was Edgeshot, with Eraserhead nearby.
They argued a lot. Mainly because: “my visions are 100% accurate. There is no avoiding them.”
Nezu would then argue that the entire meeting was a moot point then, if they were not willing to try. Best Jeanist would then swear them out from behind that ridiculous collar. They all sat again.
“I don’t want to change your vision,” Jeanist stated a moment later, having regained his calm. “I want to add to it. Your vision saw until death. You do not know what will happen after it.”
Nezu looked intrigued. “And what might that be?”
Jeanist and Edgeshot gazed at each other. Jeanist said, “I would like to resurrect him.”
Sir Nighteye might’ve laughed uproariously if Edgeshot hadn’t nodded and said, “And I know I can do it.”
-
Of course, the discovery that his Foresight wasn’t 100% accurate added a brand-new layer to the whole scenario. Eri’s reversal ability could, too, potentially bring Bakugou Katsuki back to life, or even stop him from dying altogether.
Eraserhead argued against using the girl’s ability at all, not because he wanted Bakugou dead, but because he didn’t want to bring a small child into a warzone nor take advantage of her ability before she was old enough to understand matters of consent.
If Sir Nighteye had been alive at that point, he would’ve called bullshit and expressed that this was the answer. The answer to the question they had been posing, desperately hungry for the answer. But he was dead, and so it was Jeanist who actually argued that while Edgeshot could feasibly sew Bakugou up on the inside after death, by turning himself into thread and risking his life in the process – there was no way to definitively restart his heart. Eri could potentially do this. If they could move Bakugou, Eri could reverse him back to being alive, and that wouldn’t require any strenuous technique on her shoulders regarding all of his organs.
This discussion persisted, and the resulting compromise made no one happy, as usual.
Bakugou was completely unaware. While he was brought in for some meetings, others he was not, and another group entirely could be listed under meetings he was invited to but declined to turn up for.
He did not know about this plan because they did not want him to.
Because no one was sure that it would work, and the fact that Edgeshot was almost certainly offering his life for Bakugou’s months in advance would cause more arguments than they were willing to fight.
So instead, they planned and prepared and compromised ten more times. They trained Eri, and she reversed Mirio Togata, and she reversed Eraserhead’s foot, and she reversed his fucking eye, and on the day of the final battle she was not in the refugee centre, as they had planned to place her – well out of the way – but in the cage opposite the coffin, Eraserhead holding up Erasure and Monoma Neito alternating between Erasure, Warp Gate and three other quirks he needed access to in order to make the battle end in a success.
So when Bakugou Katsuki died, he thought he was alone. He was unaware just how many people were turning to him, reaching out their hands, desperately trying to save his life.
-
In the dead body of the once-living Bakugou Katsuki, Edgeshot unwound himself into a fine spidersilk and sewed the ravaged organs back together. Outside of it, Deku arrived, saw, and screamed.
-
In another place entirely, Bakugou Katsuki watched the embers of One For All vanish, and the white place around him fade. He sunk into death without much fear. It simply grasped him, and then he was gone.
-
In the cage outside the floating coffin, Monoma Neito left the platform and entered the underneath space, where Warp Gate Villain Kurogiri was imprisoned. He copied his quirk, returned to the platform, and awaited Jeanist’s signal.
-
Best Jeanist and Edgeshot had prepared extensively for this moment, but there was still inherent risk. Edgeshot could die with this manoeuvre, but they had practiced making him so thin and strong a lot in the past nine months, and so they both faced the situation with something akin to confidence.
Minutes passed while the battle raged on. Then Edgeshot, a tiny sharp fragment of himself, left the body of Bakugou Katsuki. He flopped onto the earth, and Jeanist waved to the cage before hefting the dead body of his pupil into his arms. The warp gate’s placement was excellent, right beside them, and they stepped through immediately.
It closed behind them only a second later, before Shigaraki even noticed it.
He placed the two heroes down, and looked to little Eri, who sat nearby, her back to the coffin. There was a lot of fear in the rigidity of her body, but Jeanist held out a hand and she approached them nonetheless.
“What if I can’t do it?” she asked, squeezing her hands together, stood on the opposite side of Bakugou’s body.
“Then we tried our best,” Jeanist replied.
She sniffed.
“Do you really think I can do it?”
“Give it your best try, Eri,” Eraserhead said from his chair still staring at the battlefield, holding back Shigaraki’s true power. “You have the power to do it.”
Eri nodded, determined, and crouched by Bakugou’s side, little hand placed on his shoulder. He looked a lot like the other version of himself did; torn in all the same places. Chest, stomach, limbs. Blood smeared across his mouth, damp in his hair.
Eri squeezed her eye shut and her horn glowed.
-
The dead Bakugou Katsuki became the living Bakugou Katsuki in a heartbeat that felt like getting struck by lightning. He jolted back to life, Eri squealing in surprise, and heaved in large gulps of air.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“That’s rude,” Eri replied.
“Yeah, it was,” he agreed.
His body was agony, his heart beat erratically in his chest, and his mouth was slick with blood, but—
It had never felt so good to be alive.
-
Several hours later, after the end of the world had been avoided and the heroes had won the day, Bakugou Mitsuki paced the floor at the foot of Bakugou Katsuki’s hospital bed. At the open door, nurses, doctors and patients alike poked their head in as subtly as they could before darting away to avoid being caught in her line of fire.
He knew that his friends and inspirational heroes were all listening from their own beds in their own rooms on this floor. They were probably all wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the language or the volume, but Bakugou just watched on, passively, while his father completed a crossword in his chair.
“You goddamn fucking IDIOT!” Mitsuki continued, as if she hadn’t said a much six times over in the past two minutes. “Did I raise an imbecile? A shitting moron? Make it make sense, Katsuki! Make it make a motherfucking iota of sense! You were brought back to LIFE! You were the pissing modern day holy Jesus Christ getting resurrected! A man made his body into bloody string to stitch you back together where you had been eviscerated by a fucking flesh demon, before a six-year-old shitting child braved a warzone to reverse your heart to a state of WORKING, and then you got back up, and FOUGHT A MOTHER SHITTING DEMON LORD FROM HELL?!”
Bakugou cleared his throat. He was pleasantly numb from the pain killers. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds about right.”
“WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK, KATSUKI. You are GROUNDED ‘TIL YOU DIE.”
“Til I die?”
She pointed a finger at him. “’Til you die,” she seethed. “For the second time.”
A grin cracked across his face. Fighting All For One had likely been foolish, but it was also a necessity—and he had won. He had won. He’d immediately collapsed afterwards but that didn’t make the win any less satisfying.
It was only upon waking up in the hospital that the rest of the truths had hit him: that his life was no longer a blackhole, that there was no certainty to his death any longer. He might live another week, he might live another forty years – the same mystery everyone else got to have was finally returned to him. He could plan for the future once again.
“Stop smiling, you ingrate,” his mother said with all the love in her heart. “I’m pissed at you.”
“And the whole hospital knows it,” his father commented, idly filling out the letters of the crossword.
He kept grinning. In fact, he started laughing, and his mother kept yelling, and eventually she was holding him tight as anything, squeezing the life out of him herself. He was alive, her boy was alive.
And he was a fucking hero.
-
He had to catch up with all the work he missed. There was a lot of it, more than expected, but Bakugou was nothing if not a good student and worked through the summer break to get back on level with his classmates. His teachers, admittedly, did a lot of heavy lifting and extra sessions for him to ensure he wouldn’t be left behind.
Otherwise, he lived.
He played video games and went out with his friends and got tickets to the next hero ranking ceremony, to which they all attended, crammed into their seats together and cheering as the heroes appeared on stage, all of them worse for wear after a war but still smiling as they always had. He sparred with Deku and went running with Kirishima and yelled at Todoroki every time he called them friends but went out for soba with him anyway. He lived like he hadn’t before. Not like there was all the time in the world, not like there was no time left at all, but like he now knew the value of it. Of having been given a life.
In September, he and his parents laid flowers on the grave of the dead Bakugou, the only from the other universe, whose parents never got to bury him. He was grateful that his mother and father had taken the time to mourn this boy, to clean his skin and dress him gently, to show love and care to this other version of himself, whose parents were unable to show theirs.
He was grateful for a lot of things, actually, and he listed them to himself as he dusted off the gravestone and his father lit incense.
He was grateful for his family and their love, his friends and their care, his heroes and their grace.
Mostly, he was grateful for the second chance. For the construction of it, by a hundred hands, all working to give him the shot at life he deserved.
He wouldn’t throw the opportunity away.