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Chapter Text

The Reckless Head and the Healer

The flickering light of torches danced across the shattered stone walls of the ancient fortress. Smoke curled up from collapsed beams, the scent of charred wood and iron thick in the air. Outside, the faint rumble of thunder echoed through the mountains — the storm that had witnessed their battle now moving on, leaving the guild amidst ruins and ash.

Bakugo’s clawed leather gauntlets, topped with metal, were scraped and blackened, the metal still faintly warm from explosive bursts. Leather belts wrapped his frame, streaked with soot and dust, one half-torn where a claw had grazed his ribs. He stood tall anyway, the stubborn set of his jaw daring pain to try him again.

“Tch. Damn overgrown lizard thought it could take me on.” His voice was gravelly, his hands still trembling from the fight.

“K-Kacchan!” Izuku hurried to his side, his must-take yellow backpack thumped against his back with who knows what's inside of it. The slightly loose hem of his pants brushed along cracked stone as he moved — nothing dragging, only urgency in every step. His hands glowed faintly with green light, mana gathering between his fingers. “You’re hurt—sit down, please!”

“I don’t need your damn help,” Bakugo snapped, but his knees betrayed him with a faint quiver. He stumbled once before Izuku caught his arm, steadying him with gentle force.

The others followed close behind — Todoroki with frost still clinging to his hair, his cold magic leaving trails of ice along the scorched floor. Ochaco used her staff to lift fallen debris from what had once been a throne room, while Kirishima let out a shaky laugh, his skin still roughened with his hardening spell.

“You say you don’t need help, man, but your gear looks like it went through a meat grinder,” Kirishima grinned, clapping a hardened hand against his back.

Bakugo gritted his teeth. “Shut it, Shitty Hair—”

His words cut off as Izuku’s glowing hands pressed against his side. A wave of warmth spread through his body — steady, healing, alive. The torn skin closed, pain fading into a dull throb. Bakugo’s breath hitched, not from the wound — but from the look on Izuku’s face.

Focused. Gentle. Too damn kind.

He pulled back sharply, nearly swatting Izuku’s hands away. “I said I don’t need you babying me, Deku!”

Izuku flinched but stood firm, his voice soft and raw. “It’s not babying, Kacchan. You fought recklessly again… If I wasn’t here—” His words faltered, worry flickering in his emerald eyes.

For a second, Bakugo’s chest tightened, something clawing up from beneath his ribs — something unspoken, unwelcome. He turned away, clicking his tongue.

Che. Don’t waste your pity on me.

Midoriya’s lips parted, but before he could speak, Aizawa — cloaked in black, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion — interrupted.

“We set camp here. Dawn departure. Stay alert. The storm hasn’t cleared the mountain fully.”

The group began their quiet routine — Momo drawing sigils to seal open walls, Jiro tuning her magic through her cords to listen for lingering creatures. A small fire flickered in the center of the ruin, warm against the cold draft that whispered through broken archways.

But Bakugo couldn’t sleep. Not when Izuku’s voice still echoed in his ears.

When the others finally drifted off, Bakugo sat by the dying embers, the firelight tracing the sharp line of his jaw. Across from him, Izuku had fallen asleep mid-watch, head bowed, one hand still faintly glowing with residual mana — as if even in sleep, he refused to stop healing the world around him.

Bakugo clenched his fists.

Damn nerd… why do you have to care so much?

Chapter Text

Shadows in the Canyon

 The morning mist still clung to the rocks when the guild broke camp. The ruined fortress they’d left behind was silent now — only fractured stone and the faint smell of ash to prove what they’d survived. Wind howled through hollow towers as if whispering about ghosts that refused to rest.

Their new path wound into a canyon, jagged cliffs rising on both sides like the ribs of a colossal beast. Shafts of sunlight fractured across the stone, scattering gold and shadow alike. The air here was wrong — too quiet, too still — like the canyon itself was holding its breath.

Bakugo walked ahead, dagger strapped at his thigh, gauntlets gleaming faintly beneath the sun. His posture was sharp, shoulders taut — not from pain but something deeper, unknown gnawing under his skin. Every footstep felt like a fuse, every breath a spark waiting to ignite. He didn’t want to remember how Deku’s eyes had looked last night — soft, stubborn, the kind that saw right through armor he didn’t even wear. It made him want to break something.

Izuku followed a few steps behind, staff tucked under his arm. Though exhaustion traced faint circles under his eyes, his pace never faltered. He glanced often toward the front — toward Bakugo — but said nothing, knowing too well the look that would greet him if he tried.

Kirishima stretched with a groan. “Man, after last night’s mess, couldn’t we get one quiet road for once?”

“Don’t jinx it,” Todoroki muttered, eyes flicking toward the canyon walls. Frost ghosted from his breath despite the heat.

Then the ground trembled.

A screech split the silence — high, piercing, ancient. Dust rained from the cliffs as something blurred between the shadows: sleek, scaled, too fast to see clearly. A ripple of black muscle and talons. The wind of its passing knocked loose stones into the abyss below.

“Move!” Bakugo barked, slamming Kirishima out of the way just as the creature struck. The impact shattered rock, sending shards flying like knives.

The guild snapped into motion, instincts honed through blood and battles. Ochaco raised her staff, manipulating broken stones into a barrier that shimmered briefly before collapsing under another shockwave. Todoroki’s ice surged from the ground, carving jagged cover. Kirishima hardened his arms, bracing against the debris with a shout that echoed in the canyon’s ribs. Blood streaked her cheek, but Jirō didn’t falter. The canyon walls echoed with her heartbeat.

And Bakugo—he laughed. A low, sharp-edged sound that didn’t belong in this kind of place.
“Finally. Something worth blowing up.”

“Kacchan, wait—!”

Izuku barely got the words out before Bakugo charged, explosions flaring at his palms. The air rippled from the heat and force as he leapt across crumbling ledges, chasing the blur of movement.

The monster twisted midair, tail snapping like a whip. Bakugo dodged — barely — the blast of his own making, propelling him sideways into a rock wall. He hit hard, spat blood, and grinned through it. “You picked the wrong damn place!”

He launched himself forward again, explosions strobing through the haze, every strike more reckless, more furious. The creature screeched, claws striking sparks against his gauntlets. He caught one arm, twisted, blasted upward, then ducked a swipe that split the ground.

And then — it turned. Too fast. Too close.

Izuku didn’t think.

His feet moved before his mind did, staff flying from his hand as light flared around his fingertips. “Kacchan!”

He dove — straight into the path of the claws.

Magic gathered too late. claws met flesh. The sound was sickening — a wet, tearing crack — and crimson misted the air.

Bakugo’s world went silent before the scream left his throat.

“DEKU!”

The explosion that followed wasn’t technique — it was instinct, terror, rage. He tore through the dust, both hands igniting as he slammed into the creature with enough force to split the earth beneath them. Blast after blast — until the shrieks stopped, until the air stank of blood and burned scales, until the canyon floor was slick with it.

When it was over, Bakugo staggered, chest heaving.

He turned—and saw Izuku.

The healer lay sprawled across the rocks, robes shredded and stained dark, blood pooling beneath him in a cruel halo. His breathing hitched shallowly. His hands — trembling, crimson, still trying to glow with useless magic.

Bakugo dropped to his knees beside him, dirt grinding into his palms. “Deku—hey—oi! Look at me!”

Izuku’s lashes fluttered. He looked up, smile faint and fragile. “K…Kacchan—are you… hurt?”

Bakugo’s throat locked. His arms shook. His own blood barely registered — all he saw was Izuku’s slick red on his gauntlets, soaking into the ground.

“You—you idiot…” He choked on the words. “Why the hell would you—”
Because I wasn’t fast enough.
Because you’d rather die than let me take the hit.

His voice broke before the thought did.

Izuku’s lips curved weakly. “That’s what I’m here for… isn’t it?”

Momo knelt beside them, sketching sigils across the air with trembling fingers. The light from her magic etched against Izuku’s skin, sealing torn flesh with threads of gold. The smell of burned blood filled the space, and even Bakugo, hardened as he was, felt sick.

He crouched lower, one knee sinking into the crimson-stained dirt. His hands hovered uselessly over Izuku’s body — too rough, too clumsy to touch. Rage surged, but it had nowhere to go. It burned him from the inside, clawing at his ribs until he could barely breathe.

Hours later, the guild found refuge in a shallow cave. Wind whistled through narrow cracks, carrying the scent of dust and copper. A small fire flickered weakly in the center, throwing long shadows over the walls.

Izuku lay near it, swathed in bandages, his skin pale beneath the faint shimmer of Momo’s enchantments. His chest rose and fell in an unsteady rhythm. Bakugo hadn’t moved from his spot — sitting close enough that the firelight brushed his boots, far enough to pretend he wasn’t watching every breath Izuku took.

Silence hung thick until Kirishima muttered something about Bakugo’s “terrible aim.” Ochaco snorted, the sound cracked and weary, and for a moment — just one — it didn’t hurt to breathe.

Izuku stirred then, eyelids fluttering. His vision blurred before clearing — and the first thing he saw was Bakugo. Sitting not far, elbows on his knees, head bowed low, jaw clenched. Waiting.

“Kacchan… are you okay?” he whispered.

The question hit harder than any blow. Bakugo turned his face away, shadows cutting sharply across his features. “Shut it,” he muttered, voice rough. “Worry about yourself, damn nerd.”

Izuku exhaled softly, almost a laugh. “You’re okay… good.” Relief washed through his expression before his eyes slipped shut again.

Bakugo sat there for a long while, watching the slow rise and fall of Izuku’s chest. Only when the rhythm steadied did he finally stand, pushing past the cave’s mouth into the cold night.

The canyon stretched silent beneath the stars. He leaned against a rock face, breath clouding in the air, nails biting deep into his palms until they bled.
You should’ve been me. Damn it. It should’ve been me.

Footsteps approached.

Todoroki’s voice broke the quiet. “You’re blaming yourself again.”

Bakugo didn’t look up. “Shut up, Half-and-Half Bastard.”

Todoroki’s expression didn’t change. He simply folded his arms, gaze steady on the sky. “If you can’t protect him, then fight harder. That’s all there is.”

Bakugo’s breath hitched, but he said nothing. The silence that followed said everything.

When Todoroki left, Bakugo stayed behind. The canyon wind howled softly through the cliffs, brushing his hair, carrying the smell of ash and iron. He looked toward what looked like a small, dim mouth of the cave, where faint firelight flickered — and the boy inside it, whose heartbeat had almost stopped for him.

Chapter Text

Chains in the Dark

The fire had burned down to quiet embers, barely a pulse of light against the cold stone. The guild slept in uneasy stillness, exhaustion dragging them deep. Only the faint hum of wards lingered — tracing golden lines over the healer’s body, holding his fragile pulse steady against the dark.

Izuku lay motionless, skin pale, his breath soft as frost. The glow around him wasn’t just magic anymore — it was life clinging stubbornly to flesh that refused to fade.

Far from the cave, Bakugo stood on a cliff’s edge, where even a scream wouldn’t have reached him. The canyon stretched wide below, nothing but wind and shadow. His arms were tucked tight, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the stars that didn’t answer back.

He muttered under his breath, low and hoarse. “Damn nerd.”

The words vanished into the wind — too quiet to matter, too heavy to mean nothing.

He didn’t notice the shimmer that slithered through the air behind him — faint, colorless, wrong.

A breath of magic slipped into the cave like mist. It was silent, elegant in its cruelty. The air thickened, pulsing once — and then bodies began to falter.

Ochaco’s staff slipped from her grasp before she could cry out. Kirishima turned, skin hardening, but his knees buckled, stone armor shattering mid-activation. Momo’s sigils flickered, light stuttering, as if smothered by unseen hands.

The enchantment worked fast — precise and merciless. One by one, the guild slumped where they stood.

Only Izuku, already half-lost to pain and exhaustion — unconscious, didn’t stir at all. The magic brushed past him — and the faint gold of Momo’s preservation light dimmed into gray.

When Todoroki returned minutes later, water jug still in hand, the air in the cave was thick and still. He froze. Everyone was down — unconscious, unmoving — and the healer’s bedroll was empty.

The ground beneath it was bloodless.

Cold.

Untouched.

As if he’d simply… vanished.

Izuku woke to cold.

Not the soft chill of dawn or canyon breeze — this was metallic, suffocating, seeping into his bones until even thoughts hurt. His wrists were bound above his head, chains heavy and biting. His bare feet brushed wet stone. Every breath came with a rattle of iron.

The smell was rot and rust and something bitter underneath — old blood.

He tried to move. Pain lanced through his side like lightning, setting every wound from the canyon ablaze again. His vision swam; dark spots bloomed at the edges. He swallowed, his throat cracked and dry.

Then came footsteps.

A figure emerged from the shadowed archway — tall, draped in a cloak dark as ink, face hidden behind a mask carved with jagged symbols that seemed to shimmer faintly in the gloom. When he spoke, the sound was almost human. Almost.

“Well, look at you,” the voice purred — smooth, poisonous. “The healer of the great guild… All Might’s prized disciple.” He stepped closer, the clink of his boots echoing. “The one who shielded the warhound from death. How noble. How stupid.”

He chuckled lowly, dragging the whip through the puddle at his feet. “Wasn’t easy taming that freak of a creature in the canyon… but it did serve its purpose. You all danced nicely while I took what I needed.”

Izuku’s eyes widened — the creature, the way it had lunged at Bakugo instead of him, how it had cornered them exactly where the cliffs narrowed. It hadn’t been a coincidence. The monster wasn’t wild at all.

“You…” Midoriya breathed, voice hoarse, “…you used that thing to get to us.”

The man’s grin deepened beneath the mask. “To get to you, healer. You just made it easier.”

The last words cracked like a whip.

Izuku flinched as the real one followed — an actual whip this time, striking across his shoulder. Heat exploded beneath his skin, and a sharp breath escaped before he could stop it. Another lash tore through bandages, then another.

He sagged against the chains but lifted his head anyway, green eyes dim but defiant.
“If you think… I’ll tell you anything…”

The masked man tilted his head, voice curving into a mockery of amusement.

“Tell me?” he said softly. “Oh no, boy. I don’t want words.”

He dragged a gloved finger across Izuku’s jaw, slow, deliberate. “I want truth. I want to see how long All Might’s little heir can keep believing in his ‘ideals.’ How long before you see what side of the world actually wins.”

He leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper that crawled down Izuku’s spine.

“You could serve better than your guild ever did. Heal the right people. Learn what power really is. That mentor of yours — he plays at being divine, but even the strongest bleed when you cut deep enough.”

Izuku’s breath came ragged. His arms trembled under the chains. “You can… say whatever you want,” he rasped, blood trickling down his chin. “I’ll never… be one of you.”

The man laughed — short, sharp, metallic. “Then you’ll learn the slow way.”

Pain followed like fire. The whip cracked again, then something heavier — a blow that tore through half-healed flesh. His body jerked, breath breaking into groans that echoed off the iron walls. The scent of iron thickened, pooling beneath his feet.

He hissed between clenched teeth, each breath a tremor. His vision stuttered — dark, bright, dark — but through it all, his thoughts anchored to one name.

Kacchan…

Even as the pain clawed through him, he whispered, “He’ll come… He always does…”

The torturer paused, blade gleaming in the faint light. “Pointless hope,” he sneered.

Izuku’s lip curled into something that might have been a smile.

“No,” he breathed, barely audible. “It’s proof.”

Back at the camp, chaos erupted the moment Bakugo returned.

The fire was dead, air thick with the stench of magic residue. Momo gasped awake, trembling. Ochaco coughed, clutching her staff. Kirishima’s skin still flickered between flesh and stone as he blinked through a fuzzy feeling. Dizziness took over Jiro's head.

Todoroki stayed stood, already pale and rigid, eyes sharp as ice.

“He’s gone.”

The words hung there like a curse.

Bakugo’s steps faltered. His pulse went still, like his body forgot how to move.

“What?”

Todoroki’s voice was even, but his jaw clenched hard. “Midoriya’s missing. The spell hit everyone… by the time I got back—he was gone.”

The cave seemed to close in on itself. The sounds around Bakugo — groans, questions, footsteps — blurred into a dull ringing. His gaze locked on the empty spot beside the extinguished fire. The blanket flopped aside — the faint smear of blood near the rocks.

Nothing else.

A hollow sound built in his chest — not a roar, not a word, just something tearing through him that couldn’t be released.

His fists clenched so tight that blood slipped between his fingers. His teeth ground together, breath shaking through his nose. Every muscle in his body coiled and trembled.

But he didn’t scream.

He didn’t have to.

The silence on his face — the wild, hollow glare in his eyes — was the scream. It burned through the air around him, scorching even the cold.

His jaw worked, the words ghosting past his lips like smoke.

“What in the hell—?!”

The fear beneath his fury pulsed once, deep and strangling — like chains tightening around his ribs. The kind that no strength could break, only chase.

And in the quiet that followed, something in him finally snapped into motion.

Chapter Text

Rage and Chains

The cell stank of rust and dried blood.

Izuku’s breaths came in shallow, rasping pulls, each one jagged as broken glass. The iron above his head bit into his wrists where the chains chafed raw; his feet dragged along damp stone every time he sagged against the bonds. The flame torchlight threw pale, pulsing shapes across the walls and made the blood at his seams look darker than it should.

When the torturer returned, it was with a basin overturned like a mockery of mercy; the icy water slammed into Izuku, ducking him back into the stunned, aching nightmare of being awake.

The man’s voice slid out of the dark like oil over steel — soft, practiced cruelty. “Clinging to that foolish hope still?” he said. “The boy who runs to fight? He’s reckless. Your what again…? Ka— something…well whatever. He isn’t much of a cool-headed guy, is he? You’ll rot here long before he gets clever enough to find you.” He smiled beneath the mask — a slit poison. “We’ll see whose patience is thinner.”

Izuku coughed, water and blood tasting metallic on his tongue. Pain fluttered through him like the wings of a trapped thing, and with it came the sharp, impossible worry that swallowed his stomach. His thoughts clawed to Kacchan — to the image of Bakugo’s face in the canyon, the way his hands had moved, the way he’d charged without thinking.

Did he… figure out something was off? Have... have I failed him?

Each question came with a stab:

I walked into this. I let him risk himself for me. I—

The blame burned hotter than the whip.

The torturer tightened his grip on the blade at Izuku’s side. The cut was almost ceremonial — precise, meant to remind, to resurrect anguish. Izuku hissed, teeth clenched around a scream that didn’t fully form.

“Shall we test that supposed ‘hope’,” the man said, but more venomously. “Break the things he cares about. Make him watch you become nothing. We’ll find out if his fury can become anything more than noise.”

Far above the canyon, in the brittle gray of early dawn, the guild stirred. The residue of the enemy enchantment clung to hair and lips like grit, and everyone moved with the slow, exhausted efficiency of people who’d been robbed at midnight. Their healer was missing. Their wards had been hollowed. The taste of it was iron in their mouths.

There was a small comfort in the guild’s tools — not a machine, not a GPS, but a set of linked mana beacons Aizawa had merged on their wrists when they joined the guild years before: small sigil marks that recorded each member’s unique magical wavelength. They pulsed faintly, like hearth-lights a long way off, and when one went dark the others noticed instantly. That was how they knew Midoriya’s signature had fluctuations.

Bakugo stood apart from the group, gauntlets whispering as he flexed his fingers. The little stones in his boots scraped the ground; his jaw clenched so hard the muscles at his temples moved. Sleep had not touched him; rage had hollowed out the place where exhaustion would be. He had the look of someone who had decided the world would obey him or be broken.

“Bakugo.” Aizawa didn’t hide the edge in his voice.

His tone was low and dry, a cut of tiredness running through it. “If you charge in without plan, you’ll get yourself killed — and him along with you.”

There was a quiet that followed, and in it Aizawa’s eyes flicked not only to Bakugo but to the empty space where the ward was meant to be. He had been out searching for a rare herb rumored to be around dry places like the one they were in— an ingredient meant to help mend the deep wound Midoriya had suffered earlier in the canyon — and the guilt undercut his authority like a stone under glass. Had he been there at the time, things might have turned out differently. He didn’t say it aloud, but Bakugo saw the tightness at the corner of his mouth.

“Like hell I will!” Bakugo snarled, pivoting on one heel. The firelight in his eyes made them molten. “I don’t care if I have to blow through a hundred of them, I’m not leaving him with those shits for another second.”

Todoroki stepped forward, arms folding like bands of ice and ember. His voice was calm, but the steel under it was obvious. “We’ll go together. But you keep your head. Don’t let the rage make you reckless.”

“IT WON’T!” Bakugo snapped, too loud, too brittle. The words cracked, and silence slammed back down on the camp as every face turned toward him.

He didn’t speak the sentence others could hear — not aloud.

I can’t lose him. Not now.

It lived in his chest like a hot coal, a private confession that made his hands quiver.

Ochaco’s grip went tight on her staff. Kirishima slammed his own fist into his palm, eyes burning. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s move,” he said, all blunt steel and hot heart.

Aizawa’s gaze lingered over Bakugo, calculating and reluctant. Finally he inclined his head, small and sharp. “Fine. You lead this. You’re the one who knows him the most. That responsibility falls to you.” There was no softening in the words; only the quiet weight of trust — and of burden.

Bakugo didn’t blink. “Already was,” he said, voice flat as iron.

In the cell, the torches threw the healer’s body into stark relief. His shirt was shredded in greyish red strips, the cloth gouged by whip and blade, embossings of old wounds torn open, and a dozen new, angry slashes added as if to map his suffering. Bandages were threaded through with Momo’s sigils like flecks of gold, but those too, had been frayed and cut where the torturers had worked. The smell of salt and iron hung close.

The torturer leaned into the torchlight, the mask’s edges reflecting the flame. He spoke, words slow and designed to press. “He won’t come,” he said, almost conversational — a certainty coated in menace. “Even if he does, how long before your usefulness is spent? Where will he find the strength to pull you back from what we’re making you into?” He tapped the blade against Izuku’s ribs, a casual punctuation, like it’s the most common thing to do.

Izuku’s lips cracked into a smile that was paper-thin and stubborn. He tasted blood everywhere, and yet the color of the sound in his head was bright when he said, “You’ll see.” The word scraped out like a promise against the edge of his broken teeth, simple and defiant.

You… don’t know…him.

At the edge of the enemy stronghold, the fortress rose like a wound across the land — black stone and spire, foul banners snapping in the wind. Bakugo stood before it with the guild arrayed behind him. Gauntlets primed, he breathed in cold air and let the anger settle into a weapon.

“We go in fast and hard,” he said, voice tight, spare, perfectly Bakugo — not grandiose, not poetic, just a blade’s promise. “Hit their eyes, their ears, everything that tells them we’re coming. Don’t stop until I get him. Understood?”

Heads dipped in agreement. No speeches; only the business of movement and the shared, iron focus of people who had trained for moments like this.

Bakugo’s grip on his gauntlets tightened. Determination was a low heat in his chest, not softness, not vow — only the thing that kept him moving forward.

I’m coming, damn nerd. Hold on.

Then, with a thunderous blast, they moved into the maw of the fortress and the teeth of the enemy.

Chapter Text

 The Fortress of Shadows

The fortress groaned beneath the assault.

Explosions shook the black stone as Bakugo tore the front gate apart in a rain of fire and rubble. Shards flew like meteors, the smoke curling upward into the storm-dark sky.

The guild surged in behind him, weapons flashing.

Kirishima hardened his body against a wall of spears, smashing through like a living battering ram. Ochaco launched herself into the fray, twisting midair, using her gravity to slam enemies into the ceiling before dropping them like stars. Jiro darted through the fray, sound-waves crackling from her boots as her cords lashed out like whips. Each pulse shattered enemy sigils mid-cast, her rhythm sharp and relentless — a battle fought in perfect tempo. Todoroki ripped through the corridors with his ice — sharp, precise, freezing both spell and steel mid-motion.
Momo’s sigils blazed bright gold through the storm of chaos, each mark unraveling a curse before it could touch her teammates.
Aizawa rushed through the shadows, with a red glint nullifying the glow in their eyes as their magic died.

But Bakugo was already gone.

He shot forward through the maze of corridors, each blast propelling him faster, harder — the sound of his explosions shaking the iron bones of the fortress.

“DEKU!”

The shout tore from him raw, half-rage, half-plea.

Damn it! Where the hell are you nerd…

Down in the cell, Izuku stirred at the echo — distant, broken, but real. His lashes fluttered, his breath hitching through cracked lips. For the first time in days, he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming.
That voice cut through the haze like light through storm clouds.

Kacchan’s voice.

His pulse stumbled, faint but alive. Hope — fragile, trembling — flickered inside the darkness.

The torturer caught it immediately, a sliver of life he couldn’t allow. His mouth twisted into a grin.
“Still dreaming?” he hissed. He drew the blade from the table, its edge glinting with a crimson sheen. Slowly, he pressed it against Izuku’s throat — the cold steel kissing torn skin until a thin, trembling line of blood rolled down to his chest.

“Let’s see if he comes before you bleed out.”

Izuku’s chest heaved. His throat burned. But even through the pain, his lips curved, his voice trembling between defiance and faith.

“...He…will...”

The fortress roared alive. Spells collided, stone cracked, and lightning burned through the halls.

Iida’s boots cracked the stone as he sprinted through enemy lines, drawing their strikes away from the wounded. He moved like lightning — one blink here, the next behind them, each step compromising that no one in his guild would fall. The guild moved like a storm given form — blades, magic, and fury intertwined. Every strike had purpose, every step forward.

Their presence was war itself.

At the heart of it all — Bakugo.
Every breath came out a snarl. Every blast, a heartbeat. He didn’t fight for victory; he fought to reach him.

Walls shattered. Doors buckled. His explosions lit the hallways like suns in a dying sky.

“DEKUUU!”

He tore through another wall. The green mana signature on his wrist grew fainter and fainter.

Hold on, damn it. Just hold on—

Chains rattled. Blood dripped.
Izuku lifted his head, barely, the world spinning in gray swirls. That voice was closer — not just echoing now, but shaking the very ground beneath him.

Tears burned down his cheeks.

A broken smile ghosted his lips.

“I knew it…”

The torturer’s smirk wavered. His hand trembled for the first time.

Deep beneath the fortress, the villain watched the battle through a veil of magic, his tone dripping with satisfaction.

The door of the cell shook. Dust rained down in soft trails.

The torturer snarled, pressing the blade deep into Izuku’s ribs, twisting just enough to make his breath hitch and blood pool warm at his side.

“Then let him find you already broken.”

Izuku’s mouth moved — the faintest whisper escaping between the trembling of his lips.

“...K-Kacchan…”

The wall exploded.

Chapter Text

Shattered Chains

The wall disintegrated in a roar of smoke and stone.

Bakugo burst through the haze, lungs burning, heart hammering, every nerve braced to fight, eyes darting in panicked search. The heat of his own blasts still licked at his skin, smoke coiling around his silhouette like a ghost refusing to leave.

What he saw rooted him to the spot.

Izuku.

Chains stretched him from the ceiling, his body limp, blood dripping steadily into the pool beneath his feet. His skin was ghost-pale, his breaths jagged and shallow. Torn bandages clung uselessly to him, soaked crimson. The sight hollowed Bakugo out — like the world itself had been ripped apart around a single point of pain.

“No…” The word tore from his throat, strangled, breaking halfway out. His knees nearly gave away before he caught himself, stumbling forward. “No, no, no—”

A low laugh coiled through the haze.

The masked men stepped from the shadows, his blade slicked crimson. his cloak rippling with tendrils of dark energy that hissed like serpents. “So the rabid war-hound of the guild does bleed for his prey,” he sneered, voice curling with amusement. “I wondered what would drive you through my walls. Guess now I know. Pathetic.”

Bakugo’s head snapped up, teeth bared, eyes flaring with something feral. “YOU FUCKING BASTARD—”

He lunged, explosions flaring bright — but the torturer’s sigils burst to life, wrapping the chamber in scarlet light. The air warped, ripping open like a wound in space itself. He was barely an inch away, fingertips reaching for his throat when the pull of magic dragged him back.

The villain’s grin split wider, eyes burning behind the mask. “Tell your precious guild,” he hissed, “that their light can’t reach what’s already rotting in the dark. Your healer’s pain is only the start —.”

And with a roar of laughter that clawed down the walls, he vanished into the void — leaving behind the stench of smoke, iron, and death.

Bakugo stood frozen, staring at the space where the villain had been — and beyond it, at the ruin left behind. Chains, blood, and Izuku. The world narrowed to that single image.

“D-Deku…?”

His voice cracked on the name.

He moved carefully, hands trembling as he raised them. Sparks danced weakly at his palms as he blasted the chains — not with fury, but precision, like defusing a bomb he couldn’t afford to trigger. The iron links shattered with sharp, reluctant screams.

Izuku’s body dropped, but Bakugo was already there — catching him before he could hit the stone. He pulled him close, feeling the awful cold against his hands.

Izuku’s head lolled against his shoulder, blood soaking through his fabric. Izuku’s breaths came in shallow, fleeting gasps.

“NoNoNoNo…” The words tumbled from Bakugo’s mouth in a rush, panicked, uneven, as if saying them fast enough might undo reality. His grip tightened, even his explosions flickered like dying stars. “Stay with me, damn it! Don’t you dare—”

Izuku stirred faintly, lips parting. “Ka…cchan…”

Bakugo’s whole body shook. “I’m here, nerd. I’m here. Don’t talk. Just— stay still— save your breath— ”

But Izuku’s eyes fluttered open, the faint green light within them still stubbornly alive. He forced a trembling smile.
“I knew… you’d come.”

Something fractured deep inside Bakugo’s chest. His throat constricted, words dying halfway out. “Of course I came, damn it! I—” His voice broke.

Izuku’s fingers twitched, brushing weakly against Bakugo’s wrist. “Sorry… for making you worry…”

For a moment, silence stretched — fragile, aching — like the world itself was holding its breath.
And then it broke.

The warmth drained from his fingers. His hand slipped free. His chest fell still.

Bakugo froze.

“No.” The denial cracked through the silence. He shook him gently — then harder. “No! Don’t—! Don’t you dare quit on me, Deku!” Sparks sputtered from his palms, desperate, useless. “Hey! Wake up! WAKE THE HELL UP!”

But Izuku’s eyes had closed. That faint smile still lingered — peaceful, cruel, final.

A sound ripped from Bakugo’s chest — not a scream, not a sob, but something rawer, unshaped, torn straight from the soul. His body convulsed with the force of it. Memories blurred past his eyes — Izuku’s laugh, his voice, the way he always looked at him like he believed. Like he mattered.

Now, all of it was gone.

He gathered him tighter, arms trembling violently. “You can’t— You can’t just— Damn it. Please— Deku! Don’t leave me here!”

The fortress shook with the echo of his voice — a sound that wasn’t rage anymore, but grief too deep to name.

When the others finally arrived, they found him kneeling in the wreckage — ash and stone all around, smoke curling through shattered beams. Bakugo’s arms were wrapped around Izuku’s limp body, holding him close like if he let go, the boy would vanish entirely. His face was streaked wet with tears, eyes hollow, burning red from the smoke and from everything else.

The rest of the guild stood frozen at the threshold. No one spoke. The only sound was the quiet drip of blood and rain through the broken roof above.

Chapter Text

Echoes of the Fallen

The rain came harder, thin rivulets tracing down Bakugo’s face — he didn’t know if it was water or tears anymore. It washed over his arms, over Izuku’s blood that clung stubbornly to his skin, and ran down to the shattered floor. Crimson and silver mixed, swirling together before seeping into the cracks — as if the storm itself tried to cleanse the world of what had happened, and failed. The scent of iron clung to the air, heavy and sharp. Each drop struck like a reminder that no rain, no thunder, could drown the silence Izuku left behind.

The fortress had fallen silent — a carcass of smoke and ruin beneath the storm-lit sky.
The only sound left was the slow drip of rain through the broken roof and the echo of boots shifting uncertainly on stone.

They found Bakugo still kneeling in the shattered cell, unmoving. He wouldn’t speak.

Wouldn’t even look up.

His arms were locked tight around Izuku’s body, as if his strength alone could hold the soul inside.

No one dared approach at first. The air itself felt brittle. After what no one knows, time passed, Aizawa crouched near him, his voice low, calm, but his eyes shadowed with an unreadable sense yet edged with quiet command.

“Bakugo. We have to go…”

Nothing.

The others exchanged uneasy glances. Kirishima took a hesitant step forward. Momo’s hands shook at her sides.
Even when Aizawa reached to pull him up, Bakugo didn’t move — didn’t seem to hear. His body was stiff, trembling, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

It took all of them — Kirishima’s strength, Todoroki’s steady hand, Momo’s magic dimming the bloodstains from the floor — to finally make him stand.
He never let go. Even as they led him toward the main hall, he carried Izuku pressed to his chest, each step dragging like it might split him apart.

Bakugo heard nothing. Saw nothing.

The world was smoke and static.

His hand brushed Izuku’s hair — still soft, still faintly warm — and something inside him cracked.
His voice broke into a whisper no one else could hear.

“…You dumb idiot. You weren’t supposed to go first.”

The words scraped from his throat, raw and trembling, were swallowed by the desolate hall.

Then came the echo— that last moment—.

The one moment before Izuku’s eyes had finally closed.

Izuku’s voice, small and trembling, had reached through the haze of blood:
“I’m glad… I got to…see you again. You…were always…my reason...to make myself...better, Kacchan…always.”

He had smiled then — the same gentle, ridiculous smile Bakugo had seen a thousand times before — and everything had gone quiet.

The image looped endlessly in Bakugo’s mind, blurring with the sting of every breath.

He had pressed his forehead against Izuku’s for a heartbeat that felt like eternity — whispering something that never reached the air.

Flashbacks burned through him like shrapnel.

The sound of Izuku’s laughter after a near-death mission.

The stubborn look he’d wear when patching Bakugo up.

The kid who kept chasing him, never giving up, even when Bakugo’s words cut like knives.

And then — that same boy, broken and bloodied, because of him.

The weight of it split his chest open. Rage. Grief. Self-loathing. They mixed until he could barely breathe.

Momo’s voice trembled from behind. “Bakugo… we need to… need to clean him. I can seal the wounds with preservation before they worsen.”

Her hands glowed faintly, sketching circles of light into the air — intricate, layered, burning with gold and crimson. The symbols twisted and folded around Izuku’s form like fragile glass, flickering with each breath she took.

It was an 'advanced preservation sigil' — one far beyond normal field use. It wasn't the same as a healer's healing energy. Her body shuddered under the strain, veins lighting faintly with the recoil of magic.

But Bakugo still refused to release Izuku. He lowered him gently onto the faint glow of the spell, one arm still hooked beneath his shoulders, watching every spark as if daring the magic to fail.

Momo’s breath came unevenly. “I can’t… keep this open for long.”

Bakugo’s voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. “You won’t have to.”

Kirishima stepped forward, voice soft. “Bakugo… we’ll bring him home. I promise.”

No reply. Only a faint sound — something between a growl and a breath — as Bakugo’s grip tightened.
His jaw clenched so hard it trembled.

“Home…” he muttered under his breath, eyes locked on Izuku’s still face. “He’s not staying in this hellhole for another damn second.”

The words came low, more vow than grief. “Whoever did this — I’ll fucking find him. I’ll rip the world apart if I have to.”

That night, the campfire burned dim. The air was still.

No one spoke.

Bakugo sat apart from the others, beside the faint golden shimmer of Momo’s sigil.

Izuku’s body rested within it — suspended, untouched by nature’s law for the dead, the glow humming softly against the night wind.

Bakugo hadn’t moved in hours. His hands hanging from his knees were still bloodstained, trembling faintly. His eyes, hollow but blazing, never left the light.

Every time he blinked, he saw that moment — Izuku’s hand falling away. The smile. The silence.

It looped again and again, until something in him hardened.

He didn’t cry this time.

He just whispered — low, sharp, unshakable. Eyes as if they could drill whatever it came in its line of sight, leaving behind nothing but a molten mess:

“I’ll bring you back. I don’t care what hell it takes. Whatever crazy shit I have to do. You will come back to me.”

And the night held its breath.

As if his words carried a truth the world had already accepted — that defying death was simply his next act of defiance. The storm around him didn’t roar; it listened. The earth didn’t resist; it waited. It was as though the universe itself knew better than to question Bakugo Katsuki when he made a promise.

Chapter Text

Pace of Ash and Memory

They carried him as if the world itself had ended and this vessel was all that remained worth saving.

Momo had forged it from blackwood and sigil-thread, a coffin-sized construct that hummed faintly with preservation magic. Its surface shimmered with runes like veins of pale light, and the air around it pulsed with a faint hum that felt alive. Inside, wrapped in silken cloths, Izuku’s body lay untouched by decay. The runes bled a cold luminescence across his skin — pale, still, and far too serene for what he’d endured. His freckles had dimmed to ghostly echoes, like stars fading at dawn.

They traveled slowly — not because the terrain demanded it, but because grief had a way of dragging time itself.
The mountains pressed close on one side, the sea roared endlessly on the other, and the path between them wound through a landscape torn open by war. Scorched villages, fields blackened by sigil-burns, and hollow-eyed survivors marked their way. The enemy guild’s corruption still lingered in the soil like rot, and the smell of burnt incense mixed with old smoke.

Rumors preceded them — whispers of a guild that had lost its healer, of a fighter whose fury shook fortresses. Some called him the “ghost knight,” though Bakugo had never been a knight; he was the guild’s blade, rough and restless, cutting through grief as he once had through steel.

Drifters built small stone markers along their path — rough cairns stacked by trembling hands. Each was a console, a fragment of prayer, a symbol of memory carved into dust. These couldn’t ease Bakugo’s guilt, but it stood anyway, quiet witnesses to their pace.

Bakugo’s expression stayed carved in iron.

To the others, he was unshakable: the fighter who’d torn through the fortress to retrieve what remained of their healer. He barked orders, mapped routes, and kept the group moving like a machine with no off-switch. When they made camp, he sat alone, expression blank, eyes half-buried in the fire’s reflection. His movements were efficient, emotionless — eating, cleaning weapons, calculating. The rest of them leaned on his steadiness; none realized it was built on exhaustion so deep it had turned to habit.

Every night, when silence swallowed the camp, he went to Momo’s watch.

The vessel was never left unguarded. Momo refused sleep for more than moments, constantly adjusting runes and recharging the sigil light. Her hands trembled, but never faltered; each line of blue carved across her face from fatigue seemed to glow with stubborn faith. “It will hold,” she would say — simple, firm, unyielding.

Bakugo clung to that phrase like a rope in a storm.

It will. It has to.

He couldn’t stand to see Izuku hidden behind curtains or ceremony. He hated the rituals people used to make death polite. So he stayed — near enough to feel the soft hum through the wood. Sometimes, when the others talked quietly by the fire, Bakugo slipped away, sat on the floor beside the vessel, and leaned his head against it. The runes thrummed under his temple like a heartbeat that wasn’t Izuku’s but was close enough to fool him.

Up close, Izuku looked peaceful — too peaceful. His face was gentle even in stillness, youth refusing to leave him. Bakugo reached out, brushed his knuckles against that cold cheek. The touch burned him worse than any flame he’d ever conjured by his explosives.

He didn’t remember the last words — not exactly. Memory twisted them, distorted them, until they blurred between hope and farewell. What haunted him wasn’t what Izuku had said, but the way he’d looked — the softness in his eyes even as life drained away. That expression had cut deeper than any goodbye ever could.

He replayed it often. Not as a sad prayer. As punishment.

He didn’t kiss Izuku anymore. Not like before. The first few nights had been desperate — reckless attempts to hold onto something already gone. Now, he simply leaned close, breathed the same air, let silence do the talking. Sometimes he’d whisper — not apologies, not promises — just the name. Quietly. Like it might still mean something.

By day, the road was endless. The guild’s movements were sharp, tactical and restrained. Bakugo led raids against outposts tied to the enemy guild. He fought like a storm wrapped in human skin — not wild, but precise, controlled and coordinated. His blasts carved paths through ambushes; his voice cut through chaos. Kirishima guarded the frontlines, Todoroki froze the flanks, Ochaco cleared rubble and escape routes, Jiro scouted with sound, and Iida’s legwork outpaced enemies before they could blink. Along with now and then commands of Aizawa’s flat voice. Bakugo trusted them — truly trusted — in ways he never had before. Trust was no longer optional; it was survival.

Each battle was followed by silence, each silence by exhaustion. Between fights, he’d catch flashes of the boy he used to be — the one who had once mocked, dismissed, and turned away from the green-haired dreamer who believed too hard in everyone but himself. Those memories were knives he carried willingly. They kept him from resting.

Kirishima tried to keep him grounded. He’d shove food into Bakugo’s hands, bark back when Bakugo snapped and drag him into conversation until the anger turned into brief laughter. It was clumsy, raw, real — and it helped, if only for a heartbeat.

Then night came again.

And always, Bakugo would find his way back to the vessel.

Sometimes he’d just sit beside it, resting his hand on the cold edge as though anchoring himself to something real. Sometimes he’d speak — short, clipped fragments, updates about their journey, muttered half-sentences like “We’re close. Hold on.” There was no repetition, no procedurals, just a stubborn refusal to let silence have the last word.

His dreams became crueler. He’d see Izuku laughing, walking ahead on the road, sunlight catching his hair — then turn, and find the figure replaced by the corpse he carried. He’d wake with a snarl caught in his throat, palms bloody from where his nails dug in. And when dawn came, he’d wipe the blood, steel himself, and keep walking.

Momo’s updates grew shorter. “The preservation is holding,” she’d say, but her tone shifted. Holding no longer meant safe. The magic would last, but not indefinitely. The closer they came to the mainland, the more the runes flickered under strain. Bakugo noticed — and refused to ask. He didn’t need to hear it aloud. Every mile became a countdown.

When midsummer’s haze finally broke into view, the mainland rose on the horizon — green, golden, and distant. The guild stopped on the ridge overlooking the coast. None spoke. They had crossed ruined towns and burning plains to reach this sight. The air was heavy with sea salt and ash; even the wind seemed hesitant to touch them. Bakugo stood at the prow of the ferry that carried them across, hand on the vessel as if his grip alone could anchor it to the world. He looked at the approaching shore with the kind of hunger that only grief can breed — desperate, hollow, alive.

That night, while the others slept in the inn they’d rented by the docks, Bakugo slipped out the back door into the alley. The moonlight painted the cobblestones silver. He sat by the vessel, opened the top, and stared down at the one thing the world had no right to take.

He didn’t kiss him. Not again.

He only leaned forward, let the breath leave his lips, and whispered — hoarse, rough, almost a growl as if the one lying down would reply to him:

“You better be listening, nerd. We’re almost there. Just wait… wait a bit longer. And don’t you dare quit now.”

He breathed into the silent face, closed the vessel, and pressed his forehead to the lid.

When he returned, his hands trembled — not from weakness, but from something rawer. The others saw only the steel. They didn’t see the small quivering that betrayed the storm inside.

They had crossed months of ruin, but the hardest miles still waited ahead. The preservation hum carried through the air, steady but thinning. Momo’s hands never stopped working, her faith holding what science could not.

And Bakugo — relentless, grim, unyielding — carried forward the same quiet blaze that refused to die.

He would burn through hellish paths if he had to.

Because for him, this wasn’t devotion or a vow.

It was the truth.

He will reach for him.

Chapter Text

The Stronghold Of Rot

The coastline was supposed to mean reprieve — a promise of salt-sweet air and open sky after weeks of mud and death. A horizon to aim at, a place where light waves might wash the worst of ash from their boots.

For the weary guild, it should have been a glimpse of freedom. For a moment, they had all let themselves imagine it.

But the sea gave no welcome.

Instead, it bared its teeth.

Later, when they left the inn, from the bluffs above the saltwater flats, the guild stared down at an expanse of stone and shadow that should not have been — a fortress carved straight into the cliffside, as though the mountain itself had been hollowed to house something unholy. Its towers jutted like splintered ribs from the earth, black banners thrashing in the sea wind. The sigils embroidered upon them didn’t simply shimmer — they writhed, alive and whispering, threads pulsing with a dim, diseased glow. From the crags below, an unnatural fog bled into the waves, its tendrils coiling like the hands of the drowned.

A cold haze crawled from the cliff-face to the sea, curling and re-forming across the flats like breath from some buried lung. Where it lapped the surf, the water was wrong: slow, viscous, reflecting shadow more than light.

Momo’s fingers hovered over the air in front of her, pupils narrowed until her normally bright eyes were slate, the faint sheen of magic glinting behind them. She didn’t need to say why the place felt different — the runes screamed it in the hairs of her arms. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was small, sharp, full of that professional awe that always made people listen.

 “Those sigils aren’t the usual junk we’ve ripped up,” her voice was quiet, edged with unease. “They’re layered. Old glyphs under modern bindings — the kind you only see where someone’s been keeping a place for decades, rewriting wards over the years. They’re strong, and they’re rooted. This isn’t a cache or a branch we’ve seen these past months. It’s a long-term anchor.”

A hush fell over them as the meaning settled. The air hummed with residual power. The symbols on the banners pulsed in a rhythm too deliberate for chance, their design meant to repel and consume both light and soul. Rooted. Anchored. That is, this place had been fed and tended by something that wanted to stay.

Even from a distance, it was clear: whoever had built this stronghold hadn’t simply claimed the land. They’d tainted it.

The ground itself seemed to shudder beneath their boots, not from quake or thunder, but as if the earth were remembering something — an involuntary response to corruption sealed in its marrow. The sensation made the hairs at the back of Bakugo’s neck stand up; it was the kind of small, useless detail a fighter notices without thinking.

Iida’s gaze swept the horizon, every muscle taut. Kirishima slapped his shoulder plate and squared it like a preparation. There was no pretense or chivalry here — only the blunt edge of people ready to harm those who had harmed them.

Kirishima shifted his stance, boots dug into the shale, let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-curse.

“Guess we found the bastard,” he muttered.

The name passed through every mouth like ash: Shigaraki.

That night, Bakugo dreamt.

Not of the battlefield. Not of the corpse-still vessel.

He dreamt of the past. A yard of memory long gone.

The old training yard came to him in dust, splintered wood, and sunlight, familiar and cruel. He saw himself — younger, sharper, fists raw from training, pride sharp as a blade across his mouth — a storm in human shape, every word he’d once flung sharpened to wound. Across from him, Midoriya stood small, knees scuffed and dirt streaked across them, cheek split and rimed with grit, trying to make a grin work on a face that said too much, fists trembling from a spar gone wrong. A small bruise swelled beneath one eye.

“Kacchan,” he’d said, voice hoarse, forcing a smile through blood. “I’m fine, Kacchan! You don’t need to—”

He never finished.

Because the Bakugo of then — proud and furious and stupidly young — had already turned his back. He had told himself it was because weakness disgusted him. But the truth, buried and rotting for years, was that the sight of Midoriya refusing to give up terrified him. That stubborn light in those eyes — it made Bakugo feel small and — weak.

So, he walked away.

But the present Bakugo was forced to turn, compelled by a weight he could no longer ignore.

And what he saw hollowed him.

Midoriya had collapsed the instant his back was turned and was no longer in sight. The smile shattered. His hands had clawed into the dirt, shoulders shaking, sobs torn from him so raw that even the wind seemed to hesitate. It wasn’t weakness. It was heartbreak — the cry of someone who’d believed, just for a moment, that the one person he admired might finally reach out… and was instead left alone again.

Bakugo reached for him, desperate to bridge the years between them, but his hands slipped through air. The world dissolved to mist.

He woke with a sharp gasp. His chest ached as if something had torn open inside. Not that of the sharp flash of anger, but a deep heat that made him ache.

The tent around him was dark, rain whispering against the canvas. For a moment, he didn’t move — then he let himself down sideways, his body folded in on itself. He pressed his forehead to his hugging knees, shoulders trembling, breath coming in broken waves. The warmth of his tears pooled against his temple, and for the first time in years, Bakugo Katsuki cried like a child.

He whispered into his knees.

“Is this how you felt… all those times… Izuku?”

The words came out cracked and trembling. Carrying the tone of a child who has lost something that used to give it warmth.

A pause, then softer, almost a plea — “I’m sorry. Izuku, I’m so sorry…”

The rain outside hid the rest.

Dawn came colorless, soaked in the ghost of a storm.

When the east light bled over the horizon, they were already awake.

They had spent the night planning.

The plan had been meticulous because the stronghold required it. They’d spent hours mapping wind channels and tide-turns, diagrams still glowed faintly in the dirt — lines and runes drawn in silver dust, charting patrol arcs and watch rotations based on the patterns of the sigil-fog. Momo and Todoroki had traced magical ley-lines with ice and ink, marking every blind spot in the fortress’s defenses. Kirishima and Jiro mapped choke-points; meanwhile, Iida marked the rhythm of patrols below with measured precision.

Ochaco checked the positioning of their escape paths and arranged rescue routes and lift-lines for the unlikely — if worst came to worst, something they’d rather not imagine.

Bakugo had spoken little. He’d only listened, gaze fixed on the map, jaw locked. The night’s softness was gone from Bakugo. Whatever tenderness had wrapped him in the dark had hardened into a blade. Every movement, every breath, carried the quiet potential of annihilation.

When dawn finally broke, the guild stood at the cliff’s edge once more, the wind tearing at their cloaks. Mist veiled the fortress like a shroud.

No one spoke.

Then Bakugo raised his hand. A single spark flared between his fingers.

It was the signal.

The assault began.

The onslaught moved like a shark — a silent, focused streak through surf and fog. Bakugo led the vanguard; there was no trumpeting here, only breath and the steady controlled explosions. He had spent the night tasting apology and tempering it into aim; his hands were steady, his decisions swift. This was vengeance fused with precision.

They struck the watch patrols first — quick, clean, and merciless. Jiro’s sonic stomping-steps sent enemy sentries stumbling over their own spells, while Iida’s speed tore away support veins before they could harden, barely giving them a chance to even scream. Kirishima tore through armored soldiers bare-handed, his skin split and bleeding but unyielding. Todoroki sealed a flank with an ice wall that hissed and boiled in the sigil-fog, buying them the gravely needed space. Ochaco’s lifts made paths where none existed.

Up front, Bakugo was the storm that trailed. Explosions erupted in furious rhythm, the shockwaves flinging the black-cloaked guards aside like dust. He detonated small, sharp charges that peeled the fortress skin like the shell of a crab, opening seams that the others exploited. He didn’t shout commands — he didn’t need to. The others moved with him as if they’d trained for this their entire lives.

By the time the gates fell, the stronghold’s front lines were in ruins.

At the rear flank, Momo received an update on something small and crucial from Aizawa, who was on standby at the camp. The wards on the vessel — the careful, humming architecture of preservation she maintained like an anxious mother — began to strain. She had kept Izuku at camp away from the field, a hidden tent veiled with camouflage spells so intense she could not remain near and fight at the same time.

Her voice carried over telepathically: “The wards are breaking faster than expected. I’m moving back to the camp — if I stay too far, the preservation spell will destabilize.”

Bakugo only nodded, though he couldn’t see it. He knew what that meant. If the link faltered, Izuku’s body — his last connection — would be lost. She had to go.

And that left them to face whatever waited in the heart of the fortress, themselves.

They had not expected how tidy, what looked like a commander of this rotten place could be.

“Oh, it was you guys who were making these noises,” he appeared, cloaked, the same voice that had once mocked Izuku in chains rang out. Now with delight it wasn't a cry but with a motion like the raven’s, efficient, intent, and precise. He seemed to melt through the smoke and sigil-mist as if the air itself bent for him. His cloak hid the rough lines of his features, and his hands wove sorcery as naturally as a carpenter would split wood. Chains formed mid-air at his fingertips — pale, quick, and razor thin — and they darted across the field like hunting lines. Wherever a chain brushed armor or flesh, it froze the target with a knowledge-snap of pain.

Bakugo went straight for him.

They collided in a place where stone had been turned to low embankments and rune-gore. The man was fast — a blur of warp and blade — but Bakugo’s ignorance of caution had been refined into a weapon. He blasted at a pace that bent the commander’s rhythm, planting blasts that staggered and cracked armor, forcing the man to fight off-balance. Around them, Kirishima and Todoroki engaged squads; Ochaco lofted rubble into collapsing halls to deny reinforcements; Jiro’s pulses turned the man’s binding sigils into chaff.

Bakugo didn’t fight to end; he fought to punish. Every strike carried the weight of Izuku’s screams.

“Die fucking slow,” Bakugo snarled, not a thoughtful line, just noise thrown at a thing that had taken everything. He moved with a single-mindedness that left holes in the air: a blast to force the commander’s block, a sweep of hit to break his blade, a controlled backstep to line up the next explosion. Each strike landed with the sound of punishment: stone cracking, steel splintering, the commander’s breath ragged and drawn through his teeth.

The commander answered with warping strikes that tried to peel Bakugo’s footing from the earth. He shifted the plane under Bakugo’s feet once, twice; Bakugo’s boots skidded on wet stone. The man lashed chains that clipped gauntlets and labored to close the distance. Bakugo flung himself into the gap with a hand that produced a blast like a hammer. The force slammed the man into the wall; Bakugo charged after him, smoking claws meeting ribs with a thunderclap. Bone-taste and grunt, the man twisted, then drove through Bakugo’s guard with an elbow, stinging his jaw.

Bakugo didn’t slow. He gave the man no time to feel victory. He gripped, slammed, detonated in a series of narrow, brutal bursts that turned control into panic. He knocked the commander across the courtyard and didn’t stop until laughter turned into shrieks and the man hit the wall in a heap and lay still, chest rising with shallow, angry breaths. Around them, what once was a great hall, stank of gunpowder and old iron; Bakugo’s palms smoked.

He looked down at the fallen, and something like relief — or the closest thing to it he allowed, flickered. He had made it pay in return. He punished a touch of what it had done.

And his eyes darted like a sharp reflexive habit, for a presence of what reality didn’t let him find: he did not seek the vessel on the battlefield. He knew it was not there.

He knew. Yet still he let himself imagine. A figure running to him — worried.

Nothing.

With that slow horror, that some parts of the plan had already been carried out long before their first charge.

Momo had not been absent from this field because she’d shirked combat — she had gone to do the only thing she couldn’t leave to anyone else to do.

When the commander lay broken, Bakugo did not celebrate. He pounded the ruined stone with a fist until his knuckles bled. He screamed until the sound did not make sense — a wordless animal noise. He had not known how much of himself he had left to burn until that moment, when he felt himself nothing but scorch-mark and ash.

Fight wasn't over yet... 

Deep inside, something was waiting.

There was still one left.

And that one was waiting.

Shigaraki emerged from the ruin like a disease given form.

He was taller than the stories, but thinner. The sound of his approach preceded him like a warning.

Shigaraki came out of the heart of the stronghold the way rot finds daylight, white hair falling in ragged strands over hollow eyes. His skin seemed to flake where it met the light, as though decay itself clung to him.

Fingers twitching as if to touch and unmake. The air warped around his presence, the stone beneath him graying, crumbling to dust with each step.

He stopped, regarding them with the slow amusement of someone who had watched a tide rise for years.

“You came here for what?” he rasped, a smile that did not belong to a sane world spread across him. His voice scraped like dry paper. “Offering your light to the place I least want. Brave, or stupid — I forget which you are. All this noise and blood… for?”

Bakugo’s eyes narrowed.

Shigaraki tilted his head, a smile stretching too wide. “Two decades ago, your precious ‘Great Mage’ took everything from me.” His laughter broke the air, harsh and hollow. “They named him a hero for it. The savior of humanity. But tell me — when a man gives you a reason for hate, what should you do with it?”

Before Shigaraki could speak further, the air briefly shifted. The group's older told tale uncoiled into the present — not from Shigaraki’s mouth, but in the silent history that hung like an unwelcome portrait in the room.

Twenty years ago, a darkness rose that had to be cut down. The man then known as Toshinori Yagi had been the blade who cut deepest. The corpse of a renowned terror — Shigaraki Zen — had been left in stories and old bones, and Toshinori’s victory had become a legend of light pitched so bright people still said his name like a spell named ‘All Might’.

That victory had not extinguished the ember of revenge; it had fanned it into a slow, patient fire. Shigaraki — the student, the spawn of ruin — had been raised in the shadows of that defeat, fed on the need to unmake the world that had taken his master.

So when the guild came now — hauling their grief and their rage across shore and stone — they were walking into a reckoning that had been decades in the making. This was not the simple score of men; it was an old calculus of hate.

Shigaraki stared at Bakugo as if they were the summation of every insult to his mentor, and his expression made it clear: the past had only sharpened his appetite.

His gaze toward Bakugo was cold and knowing. “So I did what balance demanded. I couldn’t kill your ‘savior’… but I could take his legacy. Your little healer. The one who carried his teachings in his hands. I made it even.”

A ripple went through the guild — fury, horror, disbelief.

Todoroki’s voice cut the air taut. “We’re not here for you stories.”

“What the hell did he ever do to you, bastard?” Bakugo’s voice was low but shaking, barely human. He did not call out Midoriya’s name — the thought of it flaring too hot — but his voice ached with everything that name carried. “That dumb head…HE’D HAVE EVEN PATCHED YOUR ROTTEN SKIN BACK TOGETHER IF YOU’D LET HIM, YOU COWARD!” he growled.

Iida’s yell tore through the air. “Midoriya had nothing to do with your vendetta! You killed him because you were too afraid to face the one who beat your master! How absurd can your logic be?!”

Shigaraki laughed then — a short, wet sound. His grin widened. “An eye for an eye. Isn’t that how the world keeps turning?”

He raised his hand. The stone beneath him blackened, the cracks spreading outward like veins. “Let’s see how long your logic lasts when I rot it in front of you.”

The wind died.

And then the world erupted.

“I will break you down to your fucking bones. I’ll leave nothing to curse you with.” Bakugo threw at him, low and cold. It was not a promised fanfare; it was an ugly, honest self-oath.

Todoroki’s fire collided with Shigaraki’s decay in a burst of heat and ash. Ochaco tore debris from the air and hurled it like spears. Iida struck from the flanks, blurring between blows, his movements too fast for sight. Kirishima charged through the dust, fists like thunder, holding ground for the others.

“You think you’ll break me? You think storming and shouting and blasting will do anything but amuse me?” He spread his hands as if to embrace the ruin. “You come dragging a corpse, and yet you think you can change what’s been growing here a long time. I’ll congratulate you all for your senselessness. It’s quite quaint.”

Bakugo answered with an animal sound, then let the rest be action.

He didn’t fight for glory. He fought like a man exorcising his own ghost. Every explosion tore the air apart, lighting the battlefield in violent flashes. His eyes locked on Shigaraki’s silhouette through the haze, every blast echoing with the words he couldn’t stop hearing — an eye for an eye.

Shigaraki met him blow for blow, the space around his fingers warping as everything they touched crumbled.

Bakugo lunged, grabbed his wrist mid-decay, and detonated. The shockwave rippled through the fortress, shattering walls and scattering ash.

“You think this makes us fucking even?” Bakugo roared, voice breaking. “You think taking him fixes ANYTHING?!”

The two forces collided again — explosion and decay — light and ruin.

And somewhere in the depths of that chaos, the stronghold itself began to scream.

Chapter Text

The Decay of Hope

The fortress shook with every breath of Shigaraki’s power.

Stone walls split and crumbled into dust beneath his fingertips, the air itself tasting of rust and death. His grin stretched too wide for a man, white hair whipped in the salt wind, eyes glowing with something beyond malice — the thrill of watching the world rot with him.

The guild spread out across the cracked courtyard, battered but unyielding. Rain lashed through the ruin, mixing blood with dust and salt. Every droplet fell like a curse, running red down broken stone, washing over corpses and sparks of fading magic — as if the world itself couldn’t decide whether to cleanse or mourn.

The final clash erupted with the sound and shape of all the things that could end badly. Stones and dust spat against them.

Todoroki’s twin elements braided into jagged strikes, leaving trails of steam that curled like ghosts. He raised a glacier wall, its sheen reflecting Shigaraki’s silhouette. Jiro turned sound into weapon and shield; Iida blurred across the flank in clean arcs. The air hummed with magic and purpose, bodies moving in a choreography of anger, keeping any annoying extras from interrupting the main center.

Ochaco floated above, arms spread as she lifted the debris and sharpened them into tiny obelisks. Each swing sent arcs of light across the rain, her control bending them and flinging them like guided meteors. Kirishima’s hardened body stood like a shield on the front.

And Bakugo—

Bakugo ran at Shigaraki like a man who had already lost everything. Each collision between them sounded like the breaking of an old world: Shigaraki’s decay reached with fingers of whitened stone that crumbled armor and bloody flesh, while Bakugo’s explosions burned with the rawness of someone denying loss. They traded takes: a palm blast, a shuddering counter that flung Bakugo across a half-destroyed rune wall. Another flare, and Shigaraki’s arm crackled where Bakugo’s sweat detonated at close range. The two of them were not evenly matched in technique, but they were matched in grief and intention. That made them dangerous to an extraordinary degree beyond ordinary measure.

“Pathetic,” Shigaraki rasped, voice grated raw. “You cling to a corpse. To an illusion. Tell me—” his cracked grin widened, “—what makes that boy so special? You’d burn countless for someone that’s replaceable?”

Bakugo’s eyes widened for a heartbeat. His teeth ground so hard his jaw trembled, his chest heaving under rain and rage. His breath came like a growl.

“Say that again,” he hissed, voice low, shaking. Eyes darkened.

He shot forward, propelled by an explosion at his back that sent him flying like a missile. Shigaraki’s decaying hand reached, but Bakugo twisted midair, palms snapping forward, explosions folding the air in on itself. His gauntlet slammed, grabbing onto Shigaraki’s shoulder — a thunderclap followed by the stench of burnt flesh.

For an instant, Bakugo thought he’d landed the kill.

Then he felt it. The decay crawled up the gauntlet, the metal crumbled at the seam like old rust.

He tore it off with a curse and blasted backward, landing hard on the fractured courtyard.

“Tch—like I need that piece of junk anyway.”

The words came out sharply, but his eyes flickered. He’d put these gauntlets on once to shut up a certain worrywart — the one who’d never stopped pestering him to wear them. Over time, it became part of him, a weight that felt like home.

Now it was gone, and his hand felt bare, wrong. The lie tasted bitter even to himself.

The wide space became a chaos of will and weather.

Shigaraki’s laughter cracked the sky.

The air turned sick, thick with decay.

Todoroki let his fire blaze across the stones, a torrent of molten light splitting the courtyard. Ice followed instantly, walls blooming like frozen flowers to hold the decay back. Jiro’s sound burst outward — the scream of strings and fury — making the air itself quake, and Kirishima watched her back, punching the chunks that came their way to useless shards.

“Enough games,” Shigaraki answered with a smile that ate light. He slammed both palms down on the stone floor in a ring of pressured air — a wave of putrefaction crawled outward in dizzying speed. Pillars already tattered, blew, and the courtyard collapsed into ruins; black dust fell like rain.

Jiro sharply turned, “OCHACO!” she called out.

Uraraka raised her staff, spun it, and planted it on the floor; the gem at its head pulsed, sending ripples of mana that lifted every ally.

“Everyone, above!” she cried.

A surge of light enveloped them, weight peeling away — they rose, carried by her mana field. Her staff thrummed from the pressure.

Bakugo refused the command to retreat. Not on blind fury. He detonated downward, pushing through the lift, explosions chaining under his palms, the heat scorching through the air and steaming away the rain. Uraraka’s field flickered to support him. He let her gravity field lift his weight while his blasts propelled him forward, turning his descent into flight — his blasts keeping him just above the decayed earth that could erase him in a touch.

Every step forward was defiance itself.

Kacchan…

Izuku’s voice — warm, shaking — ghosted in his head.

Bakugo didn’t see Shigaraki anymore.

He saw every moment he’d wasted, every word he’d bitten back, every time he’d turned away when he should’ve stood closer to a someone.

He grit his teeth so hard they almost cracked.

He breathed. Then louder—

“I’LL MAKE YOU REGRET YOUR FUCKING EXISTENCE!”

His explosions erupted, scorching the clouds, his voice breaking as the fire carved across the battlefield as a lever — one he used to push everything he had into a strike. His blasts became brighter, sharper, a pattern that cut through the decay like a saw through rotten wood.

The courtyard was a furnace of noise and light. Shigaraki howled as decay gnawed at Bakugo’s edges, trying to erase the ripples of flame the fighter left in his wake. Shigaraki’s laughter was a wet, slow thing — a noise that tasted of defeat and hunger at once.

Shigaraki turned his head, amused. “Such devotion. All this rage — for a one that’s already gone?”

Bakugo froze. That word — gone — hit something that hadn’t healed.

It hit like a thrown knife at that place where he had ignored. Reality.

It made something split inside Bakugo, not into softness this time, but into a sharper edge. He had no patience for Shigaraki’s poison. His snarl deepened, and the world seemed to shrink around his rage.

He blasted forward, faster than reason, faster than pain. His palms roared in chained detonations — right, left, forward — a storm that shook the dying fortress apart. He closed the distance and slammed his shoulder into Shigaraki’s chest, the sound more like a detonation than a strike. Shigaraki staggered, ribs cracking audibly beneath the blast’s recoil.

“HE’S NOT—” another explosion split the air, “—GONE—” another, scorching the courtyard, “—AS LONG AS I—” his throat tore with the force of his scream, “—KEEP FUCKING BREATHING!”

The entire yard became a sun. A vortex of fire and fury swallowed sound. Shigaraki howled, decay bleeding from his body to counter the inferno — white death against orange light. The clash burned through everything: rain turned to steam, sky split open, the fortress a furnace of war.

But it wasn’t enough.

Shigaraki laughed — a hollow, broken noise. “You burn so bright… It’s a shame your light won’t last.”

He spread his arms, decay leaking from every pore, flooding outward with the intent of something that had been patient for decades. The fortress, the sea, the cliffs. It looked as if the world withered.

The guild fought to hold the line. Ochaco’s field faltered, her arms shook as she held onto her staff that was losing ground in the air. The desperate ice Todoroki was holding shattered under pressure, Jiro’s sound walls cracked, and Iida ran as fast as he could with his exhausted legs, carrying away Jiro in the process, before the hungry rot reached them. Kirishima caught Ochaco before she fell, steadying her to remake her field once more.

And above them—Bakugo was already midair.

The air trembled around him, explosions propelling him higher, blood dripping from his ruined hand. The smoke burned his lungs, but he didn’t care. He wouldn’t accept the reality Izuku has left behind — rather, he would mold it into a blade to shove it forward.

Not titles.

But Strength.

Izuku had seen it, believed in him long before he could prove it to anyone.

“I’ll be damned before I don't become that strength,” he muttered, voice shaking, “to hell with whatever comes at me.”

He pulled his hands together, palms facing inward, the air between them vibrating — sweat and blood mixing into a volatile spark.

He locked on and then let it set off.

Light burst across the horizon. The sea itself recoiled. The fortress shattered in a single breath of fire — and Shigaraki, roaring and the decay that had been his armor, began to turn against itself, decaying even his own flesh to fight it, was swallowed by the inferno.

For a long, terrible instant, the world tilted as if the sky itself had been cleaved. Shigaraki’s form broke. The ruin he was had no place to anchor itself anymore; the decayed flesh and stone crumbled in on his own hunger. Where he had once touched the ground, ash and dust were the only proof left of what had been.

Silence followed.

The fog thinned, revealing nothing but ruin. The fortress was a carcass of molten stone and burned cinders, the sea licking its remains. Ash drifted in the wind like snow, gray and ghostly.

The guild stood where the courtyard once was, hung in the rubble like breathing wrecks.

Iida’s legs gave off, armor cracked.

Todoroki collapsed to one knee, frost burned off his arm.

Jiro’s fingers trembled as she steadied her bleeding ears.

Ochaco sank to her knees and put both hands to the ruined ground, chest heaving. She leaned on her staff, the mana quivering shut.

Kirishima rested a greased palm on his face and let the breath out in a sound like a laugh that was also a sob

And at the center stood Bakugo barehanded, the skin of his right arm blackened and raw, veins glowing faintly under the surface from the residue of the blast. His hair was drenched, his chest rising and falling in ragged gasps, but his eyes — his eyes were steady, staring into the far distance.

He did not look victorious. He did not look whole.

A certain appreciating worried voice didn’t run to him then.

The sea stretched to the horizon, far and merciless beneath the sun. Dark and restless waves folding onto themselves with the fatigue of work. Two or three hours had passed since dawn, and the day had leaked thinly into a heavy mid-morning sun, already carrying the salt and the sweat from the fight.

He lowered his head, voice so small it belonged only to the wind at his feet.

 “You saw me worth your worry,” he whispered, voice heavily hoarse, barely audible beneath the wind. “So I’ll make damn sure I’m at least close to that worth… even if it kills me.”

His ruined hand clenched, trembling — then steadied.

The storm had passed, but nothing was calm.

Only quiet.

Chapter Text

Silent March of Buried Light

The aftermath smelled like iron and ash.

They had walked out of the fortress on their feet, but the land itself felt fossilized. Where the fortress had been built as a wound, now lay as broken ribs of stone clawing the sky, and the wind carried the ragged scrapings of what the battle left behind.

From the bluffs, the group descended, the ruined inlet spread below them: blackened stone, toppled parapets, a coastline rimmed with ash. Dust drifted like confetti over smashed banners that still clung to poles and were shredded like ragged teeth of wards; the coast lay quiet beyond the cliffs. No welcoming, only gulls circled, ignoring the living

They did not call it a victory. The word felt short, brittle. The work that follows a war is always longer than the fight — sorting, counting, repairing, cleaning the stains that refuse to wash away. They moved in that long, heavy way now: business folded into quietus.

Inside the camp’s carriage stand — a wide barrier meant for keeping storage and transport, now packed with wagons and men settling after the fight — the small, battered group came together to prepare the long road home.

The preservation vessel sat at the center on a low cart with iron wheels. The dense blackwood and sigil-threaded vessel’s surface hummed under rune-mesh and rim that showed faint veins of pale light. The runes streamed a thin glow across the cloth-wrapped form inside. No one touched it without asking Momo first; no one crossed the line she cleared. The vessel was heavy with enchantment and the weight of what it guarded.

Bakugo paced along the edge of the cart like a caged storm. His boots left dark prints on the mud; his jaw worked with an exhaustion that was not merely physical. He barked orders when needed, but the words came clipped, mechanical. When no one was looking, he would stop, hands hovering over the vessel as if the sight of the glow might help him measure loss into something practical to solve. Then he would move away because measured grief was bearable — the sight of it was not.

This was not the way the others moved. They wore grief in different shapes.

Iida methodically checked every talisman Momo had tied to the wagons, the speed-bracing sigils that let them keep moving without collapsing; Jiro and Kirishima swapped small, quiet jests that were mostly to keep their hands busy and their faces from cracking. It gave the air a brittle warmth — an attempt at normalcy that made the camp humane, not cold.

Momo herself kept constant watch near the cart, pale but steady. Her fingertips grazed the runes now and then, adjusting threads of light. “It will hold,” she told those who asked, voice thin. “If we keep feeding it mana at intervals, it will hold until we reach the city.” There was no drama, only ledger-like facts softened by exhaustion. That practical certainty steadied them more than any speech.

They set out two days later. The road to the city was not long on a map — once a five-day stretch of clear ground of steady travel — took them twice as long now. They moved slowly because the injured couldn’t be hurried. Wounds needed tending, wards needed feeding, and the cart that carried Izuku had to be moved gently over every rock and rut.

Small groups heading to the city joined them as they passed villages; people bowed their heads or carried lit stones for them. The few who spoke did so softly. The march itself was a quiet thing: a slow chain of cart wheels and footsteps and the low hum of mana-maintenance. Nights were short, restful periods. Momo replenished the wards where needed, and the younger ones took turns keeping watch in shifts.

Bakugo walked on the outside of the convoy, not with the column but always at the edge, where the land fell away or a wind could carry sound. When the cart’s wheel hit a stone, he felt it in his teeth. Every time Momo leaned to adjust a sigil, he watched as if he could memorize the motion and keep it in his hands. He would spend long minutes looking at the cart, then look forward as though seeing the world anew and pushing himself onward. He barely spoke. And when he did, it was a map command or a cut-order. Giving orders gave him an edge to sharpen until he could look at what sat on the cart without collapsing. The rare sleep he fell into was short, waking up with hot bursts with hands still curled as if ready to strike.

Todoroki kept to Bakugo’s flank for much of the march, placing small ice anchors at the cart’s corners when the road grew treacherous. He said little, but the quiet presence mattered.

Uraraka carried provisions and small comforts. Jiro stayed front, picking up distant rumblings or movements of any beasts worth cutting down, and sent warnings faster than anyone could have walked.

On the eighth day, the convoy crossed a low stone bridge and came into the city’s outer ring. The towers of the guild’s precinct rose above them — tall, complex, and precisely ordered. Banners limp with the news that never truly simmers back into joy. The broad city gates opened like a promise everyone was terrified to claim. People gathered, not in celebration but in a respectful distance: a guarded reception for a famed group that had come back with a cost too large to word.

At the guild gates, All Might waited.

He looked every inch an elder of legend: his robes embroidered with circle-stitched runes, his posture still bearing the broad, defiant line of a man who had stood against ruin. But when the cart rolled through and the vessel was lifted into the great hall, his face changed. The light caught the hollows under his eyes; the steadiness in his hands trembled. A small wind moved across his face.

For a long instant, he said nothing. Then he stepped forward, his voice even and low. “You did well to bring him intact,” he said. The sentence was a statement, not a judgment. He looked at Bakugo last of all. “You all did everything you could.”

Bakugo did not move at first, but when he heard it, it was like a match dragged across stone. He snapped forward before he knew himself doing it, palms clenching, breath a serrated thing. “Everything we could?” His voice was a blade. “Don’t use words like he’s been… settled. He’s not something you put away and call it done!”

No one moved. The hall thickened with that rare, dangerous quiet that follows a sudden split: some people taking sides by instinct, some stepping back.

All Might’s hand rose in a small, patient gesture. “Katsuki,” he said without heat, “We honor what was lost. We will not pretend otherwise. But before we know what can be done, it is not only final, but it will prevent the chance to do more. Still, we must consider the consequences.”

Bakugo’s laugh broke out, raw and animal. “Consequences? The only consequence I see is them closing the lid.” He stepped nearer to the vessel, every line in his body tight as a tilted bow. “You want to bury him like he’s already done. Fine. Then bury me too. Just—” He swallowed. The word he hadn’t allowed himself to say tightened in his throat and broke into something harder. “Don’t you dare make final what I haven’t finished fighting.”

Kirishima moved in, voice rough with effort to steady the room. “Bro, I don’t wanna see you like this, but you’re not thinking clearly.” The words were small but real, an attempt to stitch the frayed edges of the conversation.

“Shut up!” Bakugo’s voice cracked. Sparks seemed to barely appear on his palms. “You don’t know what clear is!”

One of the elders in the hall — a man with more years than the younger members stepped forward. His robes whispered. “We must be practical. The sigil holds for only so long without the source we used to forge it. We can offer ceremony and rest, but we cannot leave him in limbo forever.” He spoke with the humid caution of one who measures grief in law.

The words landed like a stone on a pond.

The room felt suffocating. Legalities and respect, tradition, and the weight of a guild’s charter. Names like “honor” and “closure” were held up as shields. Bakugo’s anger rose until it was less about words and more about action. He spoke until he had nothing left to say, until his voice was a raw wire in the room.

He snapped his head. “So the answer is ‘formalize’ and move on? Just like that?” Sparks flared, now more visible from his fists; the air tasted of static.

It was Aizawa who moved then, not All Might, not any elder, but the man whose silence had always been the kind that stopped fights because of the blade behind it. He did not speak; he simply looked at the unsteady boy with the glint he always had in his eyes, and Bakugo’s sparks hiccupped and faltered. His nerves narrowed to a hard, metallic focus. Bakugo’s muscles tried to push through a force that took his fire away.

“Don’t make this harder for him, or for us,” Aizawa said flatly. His voice was not an appeal; it was a perimeter. Bakugo raged against the cut-off like a body stripped of heat. He thrashed, he shouted. He said things that sounded like orders and grief entwined together. “Let me go! You don’t get it— you don’t get to end this for me!” he cried.

“Lock me up, fine. But put him under the grass and the dirt, and I will tear him out of there!” Bakugo yelled his throat out.

Miss Chiyo moved, small and steady. “Dear boy…” she sighed softly, shaking her head slightly and with practiced hands administered a sedative talisman — a faint pulse into the air that folded rested muscle into sleep. The movement was clinical; it was a necessity. Bakugo’s fists went slack mid-spark. His knees hit the stone. He shouted once, a single raw sound, then pitched forward. Miss Chiyo eased him down with someone’s help. For all their training, none of them enjoyed the gentle coercion of caring.

The hall did not erupt. No cheering. No one felt relief. A thick, raw hush draped the great room. All Might’s shoulders loosened, as if a man had been carrying a shield he’d finally let rest, though the pain made no promises of ease.

Aizawa looked at the vessel, then up at All Might, his expression unreadable but his voice firm. “We buy time. Do what needs to be done. Just do not bury him yet.” He glanced back at Bakugo, who was unconscious next to the vessel.

All Might nodded, slow and grave. “We will keep watch, set wards. We will search for anything that can be done beyond the sigil.” His voice carried the weight of a leader who knows the balance between kindness and cruelty; his choice was to press forward, not to close the book. Yet he himself wasn’t sure to hope.

Kirishima gathered Bakugo’s arm around his shoulder together with Iida quietly, pulling him off to the quieter corner while those who could stand watch leaned into their watches. The hall filled with the low hum of maintenance: magic circles retuned, reinforced, and the vessel glowed, tended with care.

In the small pocket where Bakugo lay sleeping in ragged, dream-thin breaths, Todoroki stayed for a moment and laid a hand lightly on his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t let this ruin you,” he said, not unkindly. It was not an order; it was a small effort to take off at least a bit of the strand that felt heavy, even being thin.

No one left the vessel's side. No one turned away from the work. But the room had been split by Bakugo’s collapse — not broken entirely, but more honest now. They would press on and carry the weight of what they could not fix today. The question of final rest had been deferred, the argument postponed, but the fire in Bakugo had been shown for what it was: not spectacle or posturing, but a furnace of something that would not be allowed to die quietly.

Outside, the city slept fitfully beneath a sky that promised rain. Inside, time moved in measured beats: one, to tend the runes; two, to check the wards; three, to let the men who could still stand do the simple, exhausting work of keeping watch.

When the last candle had guttered and the hall softened into near-dark, All Might stayed a moment more near the cart. He looked down at the sigil-lit face and, for the first time in a long while, allowed himself to speak plainly, not as an elder of legend but as someone who had lost and would continue to fight.

“I will find a way,” he said quietly, a promise with no bravado. “We owe him that.” He looked at Bakugo

It was not a finale. It was a direction: a plan laid thin like a thread through a net. The walk back to individual works was quiet, the steps heavy with the knowledge that those who trailed must carry more than supplies — they would carry time, hope, and the reckoning Bakugo had loudly refused to allow.

And somewhere in the small, sleeping shape of the boy not so far from the vessel, a mutter of protest — half-curse, half-broken plea — “Don’t you die on me, you idiot.” drifted through dream-time before it was smoothed away.

The fight had not ended. Not by a long measure.

Chapter Text

One More Chance at Turning the Wheel

When he came to, the room smelled of linen and lamp oil and the faint chemical tang of runes. Dawn had not yet seeped through the window; the room was dim, a single strip of weak light cutting across the wooden floor.

Leather straps held his wrists to the bedframe — not cruelly tight, but enough that his hands tingled from lack of circulation. A thin rune-band was set into the mattress beneath him; the pattern hummed with a low, steady thrum that ate at the edges of his power.

Bakugo blinked. He became aware of the leather straps first. The straps bit into his skin when he tested them with a habitual, involuntary twist, expecting the old flash of panic that always came first. The leather made a soft creak; the stitches held. Whoever had put them there had done it properly.

He lay still for a few patient seconds, looking around. His breath now steady, and he listened with those sharp, experienced ears.

Beyond the door came the usual household sounds of a guild in motion: a low murmur of voices, the scuff of boots, the distant clink of metal. Nothing that hinted at what his inner conscious wanted the most.

Slowly events came in pieces. The fortress. The fight. The hollow vessel Momo had built that had traveled with them. The silence that followed. And above the rest, Izuku’s face returned like a splinter — pale, still. Not gone from his head, but fixed there in a small, impossible way.

He turned his head toward the far side of the room because his hands reached forward for what they wanted first: the vessel, the coffin-shaped box that had kept Izuku safe. The scene where it should have been was empty. No blackwood. No faint blue glow of rune light under the cloth. For a moment, he did not understand — the absence felt wrong in a way that prodded panic into his chest.

“Where—” His throat worked. He could not tell whether the word had been a thought or an out-breathed sound of a dry scratchy voice.

His throat closed. The word left him before he could measure it into silence. “Deku,” he rasped — then louder, because the room offered no answer and the name was weight enough to fill the quiet. “Dekuu—where the hell—”

He pushed at the straps again. The straps did not give in. He tried the simplest, reflexive thing: wills his palms to snap free, but he could feel the faint pulse of a cancelling weave, weaving into his veins. — not visible, but immediate in his muscles. A line of suppression that choked the edges of the explosive mana he used to tear everything away in a heartbeat.

He felt the sense of something reaching down and muting his mana exactly above his head; the cot, the ceiling over him now with a newly glowing magic circle. Everything felt arranged to stop him from blasting his way out.

Aizawa’s cancellation.

His wards. Smart, clinical, and utterly immobilizing if you tried to solve it with fire and force.

That knowledge itself was worse than the straps.

He worked until his palms stung and the leather creaked. When his jaw started to tremble with the effort, with the impatience that wanted to rip the house apart to find that one missing thing, sleep — a merciful, terrible doze — took him over.

“Izuku…”, he let out. He folded inward and blacked out on the mattress, due to overexerting himself to turn on his mana. Ragged breaths, dragging the straps tight across his wrists. And in return, the reply was only the hum of wards and the distant, ordinary clatter of life outside the private chamber.

They had exhausted every sensible option. Endless arguments and experiments in studies had narrowed the field of possible treatments into a long list of dead ends. Mana herbs that strengthened sigils burned when put on the wards; more powerful renewal spells reacted unpredictably with Momo’s preservation threads. All Might, who had been out gathering obscure lore and bargain-strings among old collectors, came back with tomes and half-remembered clues that bent and frayed with every scholar he questioned. The guild had tested every contact, every merchant of antiquities, every scholar at halting university halls. The answers were variations on the same blunt truth: the preservation was holding, but it was a complex architecture, and its longer-term endurance was not something anyone in the present age could guarantee.

The attempts had a pattern: a glimpse of possibility that lasted only until someone checked the readings and said, ‘No, we have nothing further to offer right now.’ That sameness had the feel of never-ending gears: work, fail, revise, fail.

When the options blinked out one after another, the ordinary, conventional decisions closed like a trapdoor. There were burial rites recommended by the elders, practical processes to move the heart of the problem into a known closure.

There had been talk too, about what could be done if they took the corpse somewhere else, about distances, about keeping the preservation running while searching for unusual answers. Spent scrolls and half-remembered rituals produced outlines, not certainties. The result was known and always the same: Momo’s preservation could hold for days, then weaken.

The best they could do was buy time and keep trying. Even All Might — the mage who had shaped so much — felt the sharp, naked edge of impotence. He sat with his head in his hands and had no immediate answer. That admission was heavy enough that the others had left the room in small knots, hands on their faces, muttering alternatives that felt less like plans and more like pleas.

Bakugo woke with a start some long time later, in his own room because someone had insisted it to be so.

Aizawa had not wanted him loose in the compound while tempers were raw and wards fragile. The straps were part protection, part containment. The sort of thing that kept the violence quiet for their own good.

But now the straps were gone, and a plain wooden platter rested on the small table by his window; the setting sun draped a warm hue over it. The food smelled like stew; runes faintly seamed around the tray’s rim, keeping the heat from bleeding into the air. He sat up, muscles aching as if he’d fought for days. His wrists were raw where the leather had bitten his skin; the marks were already tender, and redness spread wherever it touched.

He did not get up. He tried moving his legs. They obeyed. So he slid into a loose linen shirt of a laced-up collar, thumb worrying with the cords, leaving them untied, and padded to the door. For a long moment, he simply listened in the corridor, pressed to the wood as if the walls would tell him where his missing piece had gone.

Voices drifted down the corridor — All Might’s deep, measured tones, Todoroki’s cool baritone, the occasional clipped syllable of council elders, the girls' futile pleas against the majorities. 

The words made his stomach coil.

“…it will not hold indefinitely.”

“We cannot promise miracles either.”

“…there are no other options…”

........ 

“It’s decided then?”

........ 

“…burial next dawn.”

Those words and sentences made something churn inside him raw and immediate. Each one felt like a small chisel working at something brittle inside him.

He slid down the wall and let his chin rest on his knees. He had not been restrained to keep him safe from himself; they had not put Izuku under the same roof as him because they feared what Bakugo might do in a heartbeat. He understood the reasons — the sigils, the girl’s fatigue, the risk of tampering — but understanding was a poor match for a logic that matched his skin’s heat.

He stood too fast that his head throbbed and the room felt it tipped over. He steadied himself on the doorjamb, breath coming in teeth-rattling pulls. He could have screamed. He could have ran and barged into the hall and ripped every decision out of the older men and made them apologize to him for thinking themselves clever enough to bury the thing that meant more than their comforting orders did.

Instead, he went slow. He had to. Because if he lost control now, Aizawa would step in and leave him drugged in a cell until the burial was done.

No.

He could not afford that. He would not give them that mercy.

“Like hell I’ll let them,” he muttered into stone. Anger rose into motion. He would not let them put Izuku under the earth and close the world around him like a trap. To bury Izuku was to bury whatever thread in Bakugo’s life still kept him upright. He thought of that, and the thought itself was a small, savage truth.

He held the latch with a hand that did not shake as much as his belly did; it wasn’t locked as he feared. He moved back in and waited for the sky to darken.

The rest of the guild had gathered in tight clusters; Momo stood at the center by the vessel with the same mechanical composure she always wore when her hands were full of too many spells. The preservation glow was dim enough that a casual glance could miss it; close up, the rune-lines braided like frozen veins. Momo had insisted on a watchful setup, every change logged, every feedback noted. She looked like she had aged a decade in the last month.

All Might’s presence changed the air in the room. He did not speak at first; he walked to the vessel, reached out and let his fingers hover a few inches above the rune-stitched cloth. He did not touch. He would not risk the sigils on a whim. He closed his eyes, and for a span there was only the sound of the old man’s breath and the faint tick of the preservation charms.

When the night fell, the hall had emptied, and only candlelight flickered across the stone. All Might stayed by Izuku’s side. He traced a trembling hand across the faintly glowing sigils, his face shadowed with a quiet, breaking sorrow.

He remembered the boy’s endless questions, that unshakable trust that refused to fade — even when everything else did. The way Izuku had looked at him, not as a legend, but as someone who could still make things right.

As he looked down now, something in his expression shifted — like a man saying a final farewell. And that was when the thought struck him, sudden and sharp as lightning.

The sigils.

Preservation magic was never meant to last forever. It wasn’t made to defy death — it's meant only to hold on, to guard what was left until something could return to it.

Return.

All Might’s breath caught. He let his mind run like that of a young kid dreaming of flying.

Old teachings, half-buried in the dust of memory, surged to the surface — ancient whispers about powers that once brushed the edge between life and death. Things he’d long dismissed as impossible, as stories told to comfort the desperate adolescent eyes.

But what if they weren’t?

His eyes widened, a faint tremor in his hands. Slowly, he stood, his shadow stretching over Izuku’s still body. “One more day,” he murmured, almost to himself. The words were fragile, but his tone had changed — the hollow grief replaced by something raw and burning. “Just one more day.”

And for the first time since Izuku’s fall, the great mage’s silence wasn’t mourning. It was the sound of resolve hardening into purpose.

The hall was silent — only the faint hiss of torches broke through the dark. Their flames leaned and whispered against the walls, throwing long, restless shadows across the floor.

Bakugo slipped into the hall — silent and flat, a shadow that pretended to be dead.

He sat in one of them. Hidden from the center of the hall, he’d settled near the pillars where the light didn’t reach, half-concealed behind the carved stone. His head was tilted toward the vessel resting on the flat dais at the center of the hall — the faint glow of the sigils brushing across his face like a reminiscence he refused to look away from.

His arms were crossed tight against his chest, every muscle drawn and locked, as if the tension itself was keeping him sane. His eyes, red around the edges from nights without proper sleep, stayed fixed on the glowing sight of still form. The exhaustion showed, but the fire beneath it hadn’t dimmed. It lingered in the quiet clench of his jaw, in the barely-there tremor at his throat. He hadn’t spoken since the last confrontation, but even in silence, his presence was volatile — a storm waiting for something to move.

Outside, the guild had gone still. Whispers had turned to weary decisions — tomorrow, they said, would be the burial. Momo’s sigil had done all it could; even preservation had its limits. They spoke of acceptance, of the mortal order of things, of how even healers couldn’t outlast the laws of the world.

Bakugo had listened. But only enough to hate every word.

Then the great doors creaked open.

All Might stepped into the hall again, his robes trailing dust from the long corridors beyond. The heavy doors sighed shut behind him. The torches along the walls burned low, throwing thin, wavering lines of gold across the stone. His expression was unreadable — grief worn thin, carved into something quieter, colder.

Bakugo tensed, his body shrinking further into the shadows, pressing himself deeper behind the pillar’s curve. The torchlight flickered by the intruding wind through the doors, but it didn’t reach him — he moved with it, hidden in plain sight, unseen yet watching.

All might approached the vessel. The linen drape caught the light, faintly reflecting the sigils beneath. For a moment, he stood still, his hand hovering above the edge, close enough for his fingertips to graze the cloth. The silence was the kind that pressed against the ribs — vast, waiting.

“My boy,” he murmured, voice low and frayed. “If you were in my place, you would never stop fighting, would you?”

It wasn’t reproach — more a fragile confession, the sound of a man who’d run out of ways to protect what mattered.

From the shadows, Bakugo’s jaw clenched. He could hear every word, see every small tremor in the mage’s shoulders. His fists curled tight enough for his nails to cut skin, the quiet rage almost shaking through him. He wanted to yell — to demand action, not sorrow — but he forced himself to stay still, hidden in the dark behind the pillar’s curve.

All Might’s gaze stayed fixed on Izuku as his mind drifted back — just moments earlier, when he’d gone to the elders’ chamber.

“One day,” he’d told them, voice steady but unyielding. “Give me one more day before we bury him.”

A murmur had rippled through the chamber — disbelief, confusion. One of the elders had found his voice, frail and uncertain. “For what purpose, All Might? What could a single day change?”

The mage’s eyes had lifted then — calm, sharp, and absolute. The kind of gaze that ended questions before they began.

At the far end, Aizawa said nothing. But the set of his jaw, the weary steadiness in his eyes, spoke louder than words — he would agree to whatever All Might decided, no hesitation needed.

“That,” he had said quietly, “is for me to find out.”

Their faces had shifted — confusion, hesitation — but none had found the courage to argue. The great mage’s tone left no room for it.

…..

The memory faded. His eyes returned to the vessel. Something faint but definite stirred there — not warmth, not yet hope, but the bare edge of intent. His posture straightened, the grief settling into quiet determination.

From his place in the shadows, Bakugo caught the change. The faint glint in All Might’s eyes, the way his expression hardened with purpose. It wasn’t something a grieving man should wear — and that alone was enough to make Bakugo’s breath catch.

Before he could look longer, All Might turned and walked out, his cloak whispering against the floor. The doors closed softly behind him, leaving the great hall empty again.

Outside, the night deepened. The guild slept uneasily.

All but two.

Bakugo stood before the vessel, motionless, the dim gold glow of the sigils tracing faint reflections in his eyes. His jaw was locked, his breathing uneven — not from exhaustion, but from the ache of a heart refusing to understand. For a moment, his hand hovered above Izuku’s still chest, trembling yet defiant, as if the sheer heat of his presence could reignite a spark within.

“You’re not done yet,” he muttered under his breath, voice low, roughened by sleepless nights. “…I am not…done yet,” …with you, he let his mind speak the two words. “You don’t just… get to leave like that.”

A bitter scoff followed, more broken than angry — the sound of a boy who didn’t know what to do with grief.

He stayed there longer than he should have, eyes narrowed toward the faint shimmer of the tranquil body. There was something in All Might’s earlier words, in the strange steadiness of the mage’s tone, that didn’t sit right with him. But Bakugo didn’t chase the thought. Not now. Not when all that mattered lay still in front of him.

The torchlight on the far right crackled, a single ember breaking free — drifting upward, fading into darkness. Somewhere above, that same ember’s echo seemed to find its reflection in a candle’s wavering flame.

Meanwhile, in the upper wing of All Might’s study burned with candlelight. The walls smelled of ink and dust. Ancient scrolls were unrolled across his desk and floor, their edges curling under the weight of time. Stacks of sealed manuscripts, half-forbidden texts, and fragments of maps littered the surface. The air was thick with incense and urgency. He was tracing, connecting, remembering — sifting through every scrap of lore he had ever collected or confiscated, even the ones seized after his battle with Shigaraki Zen two decades ago.

Those fragments had been locked away, dismissed, probably as myths. Their language as good as lost to the centuries. But tonight, as his trembling fingers brushed an old sigil carved into parchment, something in the pattern caught — something that spoke of the threshold between worlds.

Whispers from the past pressed at the edge of his mind. Words of the old scholars, forgotten prophecies, the faint echo of power he had once felt but never understood.

His quill slipped from his hand. His eyes widened. His breath stilled.

Down below, Bakugo bowed his head, unaware that far above him, the mage who had once taught him discipline now trembled with revelation.

Outside the guild, the storm began to fade, leaving the faintest hum of wind.

And as the first light of dawn spilled through the tall windows, gilding the worn pages in pale gold, All Might’s lips parted in a whisper — not of triumph, but of fragile, perilous hope.

He hadn’t found a way yet.

But for the first time, he believed one might exist.