Work Text:
Bakugo sat in the ruins long after the gunfire stopped.
The war had ended, they said. Heroes had won, they said.
But there was no victory in the ashes where you lay.
Your body had been carried away under a gray tarp, blood dripping in a line he followed for a mile before losing it.
You had been warm once. You had laughed, had screamed at him for being reckless.
Now you were just a memory the world refused to hold.
Weeks turned into something unmeasurable.
He stopped training. Stopped sleeping.
His palms, once alive with explosions, trembled like a dying fuse.
His voice — once a snarl — dissolved into whispers of your name.
They told him to “move on.”
They told him he was still a hero.
But every time he closed his eyes, he saw you falling, the sound of your breath caught on smoke.
So he stopped closing his eyes.
Stopped eating.
Stopped being anything at all except grief and rage.
He began to wonder if he was even real anymore.
Was he born, or built?
Was his fire even his, or just something forced into him by a world that made weapons out of children?
Nights stretched longer. His skin itched. His hands clawed at his own arms in the dark, trying to find where they’d hidden the switch that turned him into this monster.
He found nothing but red lines, nothing but shaking fingers.
The war never left him. It became his bloodstream, an infection crawling beneath his ribs.
And still, your face hovered there — the one soft thing left in his mind — until even that began to rot.
He muttered to himself as he dug deeper, nails splitting, searching for wires, bombs, buttons, anything that explained the hollow ringing in his head.
His sweat turned to blood. His breath turned to smoke.
Nobody came.
No one stopped him.
He was alone with his questions, his fury, his scars.
Finally, as the night swallowed him whole, Bakugo realized:
There were no wires. No plan.
No one had made him into a weapon but himself.
He had dug up his skin, to find the wires they had hid in him, but all he saw was flesh and blood.
That’s when he realized, he had gone insane.
He could call for help, or heal himself with the emergency kit he had in the bathroom.
But instead, he layed on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Why wasn’t he moving?
He bled out onto the white mattress of his bed, right in the middle of his empty and dark apartment. The noisy streets numbed out by his thick apartment walls. His heavy corpse, layed there cold. The world kept on spinning, time kept on flying by and people kept on living. The world hadn’t ended, only his did. To be fair, his world died when you did. That day the war ended, two people died but only one heart stopped beating.
At least now, he could finally be at peace, and join you.