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Katsuki Bakugou didn’t spare his classmates much thought.
Extras were extras. A faceless mass that followed whatever society had decided to be worth worshiping this week—pro heroes, their flashy exploits, the manufactured dream of becoming one themselves. They talked because that was what people like them did. Noise without substance.
Hero worship was unavoidable. You couldn’t walk down the street without a billboard looming overhead, couldn’t step into a convenience store without racks of glossy magazines shouting headlines about feats and rankings. Talk shows. News segments. Everywhere you go, heroes were packaged and sold.
Not that he was immune to it either, though if he was going to worship a hero, he’d only worship the best—All Might. And the moment he learned his number one hero had gone to UA, the school’s brutal admission rate of 0.3% burned itself into his mind. That was the margin. From that point on, he oriented himself toward being inside it.
His quirk was stronger than average. That wasn’t arrogance; it was fact. Everyone around him knew it too. Enough to fawn, to follow, to gush and flatter and orbit like moths drawn to a flame. He didn’t push them away, but he didn’t encourage them either. They lingered, convinced they were witnessing the rise of something inevitable.
They weren’t wrong—but they were still extras. Side characters with no bearing on where he was headed.
But there was one kid he couldn’t neatly file away.
He couldn’t dismiss Midoriya Izuku as an extra.
He’d first noticed him when they were three. A mall in the neighboring town, a Yamada Denki tucked into the complex. Katsuki had been crowded by a couple of kids whose names he no longer remembered, their ears attuned to his loud raving about All Might’s latest move on the television display. While he talked—while he boasted—his attention kept drifting to a green-haired boy in a hoodie standing somewhat apart from the group.
The kid wasn’t clamoring. Wasn’t interrupting. He just stood there, eyes bright, absorbing every second of the replay in silence.
That was the strange part. He didn’t try to join in.
Katsuki wasn’t even sure if the kid had been looking at him at all. If he had, it was subtle enough to be missed. Eventually the display shifted to something unrelated, and the hangers-on took that as their cue to move on.
In most timelines—short of a direct invitation—Midoriya never followed.
And in the few times Katsuki did extend that invitation, on some rare and inexplicable spark of social initiative, Midoriya followed. Those were the beginnings of something messier. Complicated.
Years passed. Katsuki realized they lived in the same neighborhood—or at least shared the same school zone—when he started seeing Midoriya in the halls of their elementary school. The kid kept to himself. He spoke only when called on, answered roll, took notes with an intensity that bordered on fixation.
He didn’t clown around. Didn’t chase attention.
The pattern didn’t change when they moved up to Aldera Junior High.
If anything, it became more pronounced.
While the rest of the class drowned in petty drama and shallow chatter, Midoriya opted out entirely. He wasn’t bored—he was occupied. Writing. Studying. Watching. Everyone knew he tested well. Good grades, consistently. He stood apart not because he deemed himself superior, but because he seemed focused on something no one else could see.
And like him, Midoriya was part of the going-home club.
That much, at least, made sense. Katsuki didn’t waste time lingering after school either—not when every spare minute could be spent refining his quirk, pushing its limits, carving himself into something undeniable by the time it mattered. Extras could loiter. He had work to do.
It was now the third year.
Their homeroom teacher stated the obvious: most of the class planned on becoming heroes.
No surprise there. What was irritating was how loud they were about it—showing off their crappy quirks in blatant violation of school policy, puffing themselves up as if enthusiasm alone could close the gap between them and reality. Tch. Extras. All of them. Katsuki shut it down immediately, calling them out without hesitation, earning a chorus of indignant protests in return. How dare he talk like that.
Then the teacher added—almost offhandedly—that Katsuki Bakugou was aiming for UA High.
Damn right he was.
He’d aced the mock exam. He wasn’t walking in blind, wasn’t gambling on luck. He’d been preparing for this for years, shaping everything he did around the entrance exam waiting for him next year. The extras whispered among themselves about impossible odds, clung to statistics like lifelines—but even they couldn’t deny it. The one student they despised enough to strip his surname from their mouths? He was getting in.
Katsuki’s gaze drifted, briefly, to the familiar mop of green hair bent over a notebook. Midoriya was writing as usual—noticeably the only other student who hadn’t joined the idiotic quirk display. The teacher’s statement had been a generalization. He wasn’t going to single out the few who clearly weren’t chasing heroics.
Katsuki didn’t know what Midoriya wanted.
It didn’t matter.
After junior high, they’d go their separate ways. Katsuki would move on, and Midoriya would fade into the same mental void as everyone else.
Or at least, that was how it should have gone.
He didn’t know it, but in a matter of hours, this same quiet kid would charge headfirst into danger to save him from a villain, against all sense and reason.
Ten months later, Katsuki glimpsed a familiar shade of green in the crowd and wondered, distantly, if it was the same person—or just someone with a similar haircut.
But in a year—
In a year, Midoriya Izuku would stand beside him as one of nineteen classmates in UA High’s Class 1-A.
And that was where everything stopped being simple.