Chapter Text
The street was cold that night.
Not winter-cold, not the kind of cold that bruised skin or burned lungs— just the kind that settled under the ribs and stayed there, a quiet, steady pressure, like something pushing outward from the inside.
Katsuki didn’t remember walking out of the parking lot. One moment he was standing by the curb, hands shoved deep in his pockets, staring at the place where Izuku’s back had vanished into the crowd— and the next he was halfway down the block, breath fogging in front of him, steps too quiet for someone wearing boots.
He felt… hollow.
Not shattered.
Shattered implied pieces.
This was something else.
Something weightless. Like someone had scooped him out from the sternum outward and left everything looking the same but… absent.
He kept walking.
Lights passed, people passed, Cars honked.
Voices murmured, laughed, cursed, lived. Though, he didn’t hear any of it.
Something was wrong with his hearing, maybe. Or his brain. Everything sounded like it came through a thick pane of glass, even his own breathing. Even the small, involuntary sounds of his quirk fizzling at his palms— little crackles that normally snapped sharply against the air, now muffled, like sparks hitting water. He flexed his fingers but nothing changed.
Katsuki walked away to his apartment limply.
Leaving his car in the parking lot.
—
The sign came quickly as it was.
Katsuki reached his apartment on autopilot. He didn’t even remember the elevator ride nor opening the door. Though, he did remembered the moment he stepped inside. He remembered because the world tilted sideways.
Not violently.
Just… slightly.
Like the building leaned a little too far to the left.
Katsuki blinked at his hallway.
It was still. Majestic in its awful silence.
He dropped his keys onto the counter. The metallic clatter sounded distorted; too slow, too deep, like a recording dragged through water.
Katsuki frowned. He opened his mouth to breathe in deeply, steady, grounding. But the air didn’t feel right sliding down his throat. It felt heavy. Too heavy, to the point it’s too much.
“Get a grip,” he muttered, though it came out slurred. “You’re fine.” He walked to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, stared at his reflection.
Pale.
Eyes too wide.
And the faintest tremor crawling along his jaw.
He looked like life had sucked out of his body.
That wasn’t true.
It was… probably not true.
“I’m fine. Totally fine.” He told his reflection again.
But he didn’t look fine.
He looked like a stranger wearing his face.
He shut the light off and walked out.
His quirk sparked at his fingertips—
sharp pain, nerve-deep, like snapping live wires inside his wrist.
He hissed.
Another sign. Ignored.
Katsuki tried to sleep. He really did.
Though, the bed rejected him or maybe his body did. He lay there with his eyes closed, muscles stiffening one by one, the silence too loud to bear.
Every time he exhaled, he heard it echo. Every time he inhaled, the air scraped.
After fifteen minutes or an hour or a handful of seconds—he wasn’t sure,
he sat up abruptly.
His hands were shaking. He tugged his shirt over his head.
Breathing too shallow.
His scars felt hot.
Not the dull warmth they usually carried, but feverish.
A warning.
A fuse burning.
He pressed his thumb to one of them, the long one running down his left shoulder—and felt the skin twitch under his touch.
He needed air.
Katsuki grabbed his hoodie and left the building, he didn’t remember him walking out or entering elevator again. He only remembered the cold biting his cheeks.
He walked. And walked. And walked.
Streetlamps passed in identical intervals. Cars blurred by like smears of color, Storefront windows reflected a shape that resembled him
tall, broad-shouldered, face sharp—but never quite right.
He turned the corner. Then the next. And the next one after that.
When he looked up, he was back at the first street he had walked after Izuku left. Katsuki froze.
How?
He hadn’t meant to walk here. Katsuki didn’t remember walking here.
He stared at the familiar sidewalk, the familiar lamppost, the indentation in the concrete he remembered stepping over, a pressure bloomed behind his eyes like a fist slowly closing.
Not pain but something worse.
A memory congestion. Too many thoughts trapped in too small a space.
Katsuki stumbled back a step. His quirk crackled again, a hiccup of sparks. But this time, he didn’t feel it until the burning smell hit the air.
His hand was bleeding, tiny burns across the knuckles.
He didn’t remember triggering an explosion. He didn’t remember anything.
His breathing sharpened.
Something is wrong.
Something is very, very wrong.
—
The following day—if it was a day, Katsuki found himself sitting on his couch, staring at a wall. He had no idea how long he’d been there. The sun had changed position three times or maybe the lights from the neighboring building shifted.
Katsuki wasn’t sure.
He blinked. His vision lagged a second behind the movement.
Another crack.
He rubbed his face, His cheek was wet.
Had he been crying?
He touched his jaw. But he felt nothing. A numbness spread across his skin, barely perceptible but wrong.
He stood quickly—too quickly as the world swayed again. He put a hand on the table yet the table didn’t feel like a table.
It didn’t feel like anything.
He swallowed hard.
A thought surfaced. Weak but unwanted.
Shouldn’t someone have called me?
He checked his phone.
18 missed calls.
4 from Kirishima.
2 from Kaminari.
1 from Sero.
11 from Edgeshot.
And text messages. Lots of them. Mostly from Edgeshot and Kirishima. He stared at the screen until the words blurred together. Somewhere in his numb mind, he hoped that certain someone freckles would call or at least texted him.
He typed nothing. He turned off the phone. And the silence returned.
He exhaled.
It felt like breaking glass inside his chest.
—
The next night or maybe the same night— he walked again.
Katsuki didn’t choose a direction. Didn’t think about where his feet were taking him.
His body knew howbeit his brain didn’t.
He ended up near a forest that have a beautiful river.
A place where he used to catch bugs with… someone. A place where he used to yell at a small green boy who kept following him like a shadow.
The place that started it all.
His breath hitched. His quirk fizzled. His hands burned. It’s like his tolerance of Nitroglycerin had gone, just like his will to live.
His chest tightened with something sharp and sudden.
A voice. Izuku’s— not real, not present, but echoing from some memory deeper than thought,
“Kacchan… Are you okay?”
His entire body flinched. Like Katsuki had been struck.
The world tilted again.
Harder this time.
He grabbed at a nonexistent railing and fall.
He fell into the river once again. But this time, no one is offering a hand to help him out.
The impact reverberated up his spine. He stayed there. Breathing too fast, fingers twitching, and sparks spitting from his palms like dying embers.
Something inside him was coming apart. Not all at once, but thread by thread. Unraveling something.
Katsuki woke up in a stairwell.
Concrete under his cheek. Cold and grainy.
His head pounded as he pushed himself upright with sluggish arms. His throat was dry. His hands were numb.
He looked around blearily.
Where…
Where was this?
A parking garage?
An apartment building?
A school?
No.
None of those. His brain refused to place it.
He failed to stand as his legs buckled. He caught himself against the wall, panting. His palms left faint scorch marks. He stared at them.
His name felt far away suddenly.
Katsuki.
Katsuki Bakugou.
Bakugou Katsuki.
It sounded wrong in his head.
Like he was reciting someone else’s resume.
He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. Then another.
He opened them but nothing improved.
Something was slipping. Something essential. Something he needed. Yet Katsuki didn’t know what.
The next seventy-two hours—
or twenty—
or a hundred—
He didn’t know, it blurred into a sequence that didn’t follow time.
Wake.
Walk.
Forget.
Walk again.
Eat?
Maybe.
Sleep?
Barely.
Think?
Impossible.
He kept ending up in the same places; outside the park where he first play with Izuku as kids, the street where Izuku saved him from the danger of the sludge villain incident, the rooftop of Aldera, the alley behind an old market where he once threw a temper tantrum at age ten, the corner where Izuku had just walked away from him after rejecting his offer.
And every time he arrived, he felt the same nauseating deja vu. The same tightening behind his eyes. The same white noise in his skull. The same sense that his brain was trying to reroute broken circuits and failing.
However, He would stop. Blinking to snap him out from whatever sick trance he was in, Turned. And walk away.
Only to end up there again.
Again.
And again.
His life became a spiral staircase without steps. Just falling. Endlessly falling.
—
It hit him on the fourth night or the seventh or the second—Stop with the fucking timeline already.
Katsuki returned home to find the apartment too bright, too loud, too sharp.
He would shut off every light, sat on the floor and held his breath.
Then— A surge. A violent one. Like his quirk ignited inside his bones.
His vision whited out. His right arm spasmed.
His wrist snapped backward from the force of his own uncontrollable explosion; it fires off like misfiring synapses. Pain shot up to his shoulder.
Katsuki gritted his teeth. The burn crawled under his scars like someone dragging a razor across them. He gasped.
Too loud.
Too revealing.
His quirk went off again. This time the explosion tore through the room huge. Volatile and wrong. He slammed back into the wall.
Something cracked.
His ribs?
Katsuki’s breath breath stuttered. He pressed his palm to his chest. His heart was beating too slow. His vision blurred at the edges. He tried to stand. But he couldn’t, like his body is refusing to cooperate with him.
He slid down the wall to the floor, breath shaking, pulse irregular, hands trembling violently. Weak sparks flickered from his fingertips, like dying fireflies.
That was when it hit him.
This wasn’t fatigue. This wasn’t stress. This wasn’t overwork.
His quirk was failing.
And if his quirk went— He didn’t finish the thought.
He closed his eyes. Darkness pressed closer.
Katsuki let it swallow him whole.
Katsuki woke up standing. Not lying. But standing. In the middle of a busy intersection.
Cars honking.
People shouting.
Lights flashing.
He didn’t know how he got there.
He blinked at the headlights barreling toward him. Someone grabbed his arm—just as he hears a stranger’s voice yelling, “Hey! Watch out!”
Katsuki stared at him blankly.
The voice sounded like buzzing. The man’s face had no details.
Just a blur.
Katsuki pulled his arm back mechanically. “Sorry,” he heard himself say, except it didn’t sound like him.
And then he walked away without looking back.
Katsuki didn’t go home. Fuck, he didn’t know where home was.
Instead, he walked until the city thinned. Until the lights dimmed. Until the noise softened into nothing.
His footsteps slowed.
He ended up on a pedestrian bridge overlooking train tracks.
A place he’d never been.
Or had been.
He wasn’t sure.
The moon hung low.
The air bit at his skin.
He put his hands on the railing. His fingers twitched.
Sparks sputtered— dim, tired, barely alive.
He stared at them.
Once, they were bright.
Once, they were powerful.
Once, they were him.
Who was he without them?
His chest tightened. A thought surfaced through the fog.
You’ve lost.
He blinked.
Another thought surfaced.
Who are you?
He swallowed hard. His breath shivered out of him. He didn’t know the answer.
He stared down at the tracks. His vision blurred.
Lights smeared into streaks.
The world muted.
The air felt heavy.
His mind drifted.
He felt—
light.
Weightless.
Empty in a way that almost felt peaceful.
He leaned forward slightly— Not enough to fall.
Just enough to feel the wind slide across his face.
His eyes half-lidded.
Somewhere far away, a voice whispered, “Kacchan!”
He didn’t flinch this time.
Didn’t respond.
Because Katsuki couldn’t remember whose voice is that.
Couldn’t remember whose name it called.
He didn’t need to respond. Didn’t need to remember.
The voice faded. Silence again.
Total.
Complete.
Beautiful.
He closed his eyes.
The last remaining spark of his quirk flickered at his palm.
Dim.
Fading.
And fading.
Gone.
And with it—
Katsuki Bakugou vanished from Musutafu.
Not with a scream.
Not with a fight.
Not with an explosion.
Like someone blowing out a candle.
The world kept moving. Trains roared beneath the bridge, cars passed, people talked lights flashed. And no one noticed the empty space where a boy had been standing.
No one noticed the slight burn mark left on the railing. No one noticed the quiet. No one noticed him.
Katsuki Bakugou was gone.
And the world did not stop.