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“I call being the seeker first!” Katsuki declared.
“No fair, having you as the seeker means we’ll all be found super quickly!” One friend complained.
“Not my fault, you all suck at hiding.” Katsuki rolled his eyes.
“I promise I’m gonna find the best hiding spot, Kacchan! I’ll give you a challenge,” Izuku declared.
“Good luck with that, Deku,” Katsuki replied.
Izuku climbed up high in a tree, where his hair practically blended in. Also, his friends didn’t really know he could climb now. They’d made fun of how he couldn’t climb trees multiple times, so he’d insisted on his mom taking him to the park to practice. And now he was up higher than Kacchan would expect.
He could still see Kacchan from his high spot. The boy was still counting, but was close to done. He watched as Kacchan found one of their friends, then another.
Izuku got distracted when he heard something. He turned his head, seeing a man wearing all black, with a slingshot in hand. It was aimed straight at the boy’s head, and the man loaded it with a rock.
The man’s aim was precise. A rock came straight for Izuku’s face. The rock hit his face, and the last thing he remembered before the world went black was falling from his perch.
“Wow, Deku really did find a good hiding spot,” Tsubasa commented. Katsuki had been looking for a good five minutes on his own, but was now coming back to his other friends without the green-haired kid.
“Need some help?” One friend asked him.
Katsuki sighed. He didn’t want to admit it, but “...Yes.”
So, they were all searching different areas of the park. Katsuki was searching in the trees, but saw nothing out of the usual, except a broken branch pointed at the ground. He simply scoffed and continued searching.
After twenty minutes, he met up with his friends again. Not a single one of them had seen Izuku anywhere, not even a trace of where he could have been.
“He really hid well,” Tsubasa stated. “He isn’t anywhere on the playground.”
“He wasn’t by any of the picnic tables,” Another friend updated.
“He wasn’t near the basketball court,” The other added.
“He wasn’t in any of the trees. And he wasn’t near them either,” Katsuki joined.
“That’s everywhere at this park. Did we miss him somehow?” One friend wondered.
“Maybe he’s moving around to throw us off,” Tsubasa suggested.
“No, we made a rule against it. Deku hates breaking the rules,” Katsuki replied. “We probably just missed him somehow.”
They went off searching for fifteen more minutes. That meant Deku had been hiding for a while. 30 minutes total were spent looking, but a few minutes had also been spent finding the others, then the small meeting they had. All in all, Katsuki guessed it had been about 35 minutes since any of them had last seen their friend.
Katsuki almost wondered if Deku had left the park without telling them, but when he looked over to where all their parents were sitting, Auntie Inko was still happily chatting with his mom. If Inko was still here, Izuku should still be too.
40 minutes since Deku was last seen. Katsuki was beginning to panic. Deku couldn’t be that good at hiding, could he?
In the next little friend meeting, they decided it was probably time they got help from the adults. Katsuki was tasked with getting them while the others continued searching.
45 minutes. He was fully panicking now. He knew he teased Izuku a lot, but he still cared. So, his being gone this long? That was stressful. He ran to the parents who were still happily chatting, blissfully unaware of the current predicament.
Katsuki couldn’t get himself to speak at first. He just stared at the ground, his hand rubbing his arm, trying to calm his nerves.
“Katsuki? What’s wrong?” His dad asked. He recognized Katsuki’s habit of rubbing his arm when scared or nervous.
“W-we were playing hide and seek, but… We still haven’t found Izuku, and it’s been like 48 minutes since we last saw him.” Katsuki’s eyes were starting to tear up from the stress.
The adults immediately sprang into action. They joined the search, and once it had been an hour since Izuku was last seen, Inko called the police. The officers had everyone not involved in the situation leave the park and roped it off like a crime scene.
The only trace of the kid the police found was a small tuft of green hair stuck on the broken branch Katsuki had ignored earlier. After a while, the police ruled that the kid had likely been kidnapped.
Katsuki couldn’t sleep that night. Why would someone take Izuku? What did they do to him? Were they ever going to give him back?
The next day, the police still hadn’t found any other clues. The hair tuft was saved in a bag, which they said they could use as a DNA sample. Katsuki wasn’t sure what they needed that for.
A week. It’d been a full week since Izuku was last seen. Missing posters were put up all around town. The police were spending lots of time trying to find the kid. Underground and limelight heroes alike took time out of their usual patrols to search. And of course, Inko and the Bakugo family kept searching. Sometimes their other friends would help too.
Seven years. It had been seven years since Izuku’s disappearance. He’d been officially declared dead. The funeral was to be held next month.
The funeral was basically a close on Izuku’s case. Katsuki didn’t want to accept that the boy was probably dead. He wanted to insist they keep looking, but the search efforts had gone down when Izuku had been gone for a year. Of course, they weren’t going to keep looking for someone missing for seven.
Katsuki became distant from people a long time ago. He was afraid of other friends going missing. It had already happened twice, first with Izuku, then with Tsubasa, just a few months before. The second boy had moved in with his grandfather, then never contacted any of his friends again. It wasn’t until last month that they found out that he’d gone missing, too.
It had been about 8 years ago. Katsuki often came to Izuku’s grave, talking as if he were speaking to Izuku himself. He knew Izuku wasn’t there. No body was ever found, so this grave was merely a memorial to the boy.
“Hey, Izuku. I’m going to the UA entrance exam tomorrow. If I get in, I’ll be training to become a hero, just like we always wanted!” Katsuki smiled, but it wasn’t happy. Tears streamed down his face. “I wish you could be there with me…”
He looked at the headstone. “You know, that park got shut down. Too many reports of kids going missing there. You were just the first of many.” He wiped some tears out of his eyes. “And just like you, none of them have been found. Where did you all go? Is there some place where you’re all alive?”
“Tsubasa went missing a couple months ago. Is he with you?” As expected, there was no answer. “I don’t think I can handle losing anyone else, Izuku. I know you probably wouldn’t want this, but I’m not going to make any more friends. I’ll just focus on becoming a hero, fulfilling our dream! I don’t need friends for that. Maybe when I’m a hero, I can reopen your case and continue searching for you…”
The entrance exam went well, and Katsuki got top scores. He had just imagined the robots were whoever took Izuku away from him, fueling a deep anger that stopped him from hesitating. He could tell that other examinees thought he was kind of terrifying. He’d blown up more robots than he could count. So when he was told he got in, he wasn’t that surprised.
“Hey, today’s my first day at UA!” Katsuki was at Izuku’s grave again. “I should be heading out in a few minutes, so I’m not late. I just wanted to tell you. Man, I wish you could actually hear me. People around here probably think I’m crazy for talking to a dead person. But I want to believe you aren’t dead. Please, if you’re alive somewhere… Come back.”
Katsuki certainly hadn’t expected someone to get expelled on the first day of class. He’d thought Mr. Aizawa was likely joking, but he apparently wasn’t.
That expelled student later got replaced with some general studies extra with a brainwashing quirk after the kid won the sports festival.
After a couple of months, a kid with sticky purple balls for hair was expelled. Katsuki didn’t know exactly what the kid did; he didn’t pay attention to the class at all.
His classmates often tried to talk to him, but he’d usually ignore them. If he did say something to them, it was during sparring exercises, where he’d often have witty comebacks to any taunting his classmates used.
He was third in the class, only being under the class president and a guy with engines in his legs. He’d heard their names before, but he didn’t really care to remember them. He wasn’t going to care about them; that would just lead to more emotional pain.
So he wasn’t particularly thrilled about this class camping trip that was for training, but also for ‘strengthening class bonds’. That didn’t fit with Katsuki’s plan. Everyone else was excited, while he tried to figure out an excuse not to go. But when he’d tried getting his mom to help him, she insisted he was going.
It didn’t help that the trip would start on the ninth anniversary of Izuku’s disappearance. He barely had any time to visit Izuku’s grave in the morning, and ended up almost being late to board the bus with the rest of his class due to it. This meant he hadn’t been able to do anything to make it seem like he hadn’t been crying. His face was still red and had tear-streaks down his cheeks. He ignored any questions about it, though, just sitting in the back corner of the bus, ignoring everybody.
The campsite was in the middle of a forest. The clearing they were camping in was nice and spacious; hopefully, that meant he could try to stay on the other side of the place away from his class.
Every one of them was given a tent-mate. Each tent had two people, except for Aizawa's, as he was on his own. Katsuki ended up with this red-haired guy who was always saying ‘manly’. He learned the guy’s name was Kirishima, a name he hadn’t bothered to remember before but figured he should know the name of his tentmate for the next week.
“Man, you’re probably not gonna have any fun in your tent.” Katsuki heard voices outside his tent, maybe a few meters away. Kirishima had gone to hang out with his friends, a boy with black hair with funky-looking elbows and a pink, alien-looking girl. He recognized this voice as the elbow boy.
“Yeah, you have Mr. Refuses-To-Make-Friends.” The pink girl’s voice.
“Is he really so confident in himself that he thinks he doesn’t need anyone else? Because even the greatest heroes get help from others,” The elbow guy continued.
“I don’t think that’s it, Sero.” Kirishima’s voice.
“Then what do you think it is?” Elbo- Sero asked.
“To me, he seems almost… Sad? He always kind of looks like something is weighing on him. I’ve kind of been wondering if it’s something in his past that makes him hesitant or afraid to make friends.” Kirishima had no idea how right he was.
The three continued talking, probably not realizing Katsuki could hear them. Part of him was tempted to scare the crap out of them by unzipping the tent window and making it known that he’d heard everything, but he decided against it.
At dinner, he sat by the fire pit instead of at the tables that had been set up. Away from his class, where he wanted to be. He could feel people glancing towards him, but ignored everyone of them all.
“You know, this is supposed to be bonding time, not ‘sit over here by yourself’ time.” Katsuki slightly jumped at Mr. Aizawa’s voice. The man sat on a seat near him, and the purple-haired brainwasher sat a few seats away from the teacher.
“Though, with this class of chaos, I can’t blame you,” Aizawa continued.
Katsuki simply hummed at the words. He didn’t mind Aizawa’s company. The man was usually pretty quiet and didn’t ask him too many questions. The brainwasher was very similar in those aspects.
The three of them ate dinner together in silence while everyone at the tables was hanging out together. Most of the class had bonded after the incident at the USJ, except for Katsuki, who refused, and the brainwasher, who hadn’t been part of their class yet. Katsuki briefly wondered if that made the purple-haired boy feel left out.
The students were sent to bed pretty early, for Aizawa was taking them on a ‘nature walk’ early in the morning. That didn’t stop students from talking with their tentmates, though.
“Hey, you want to hear some stories about this forest? It’s kinda spooky,” Kirishima tried starting a conversation.
Kirishima continued when Katsuki didn’t answer. “Many people say they’ve heard screams in this forest. Children’s screams, from the sounds of it. But when people try to find anything, they get nothing.”
Katsuki scoffed.
“Other than the screams, the only abnormal thing here is an overgrown building that doesn’t appear to have any entrances or exits. An abandoned building in the middle of a forest, and not even on any of the main trails, is pretty weird, no?”
“I couldn’t care less about creepy rumors,” Katsuki grumbled. But Kirishima simply smiled.
“Is there anything you’d rather talk about?” Kirishima asked.
“I don’t want to talk at all. I want to sleep. You should, too,” Katsuki replied, getting into his sleeping bag. He ignored any other attempts Kirishima made to talk to him.
Katsuki was getting tired of his classmates trying to talk to him. He had tried to make an effort to sit farther away during lunch when they’d stopped in a clearing. But the class chose to move closer to him, while Mr. Aizawa was farther away, seemingly inspecting something.
When Katsuki looked, he realized at least one thing Kirishima had said last night was true: there was indeed an overgrown building off any of the main paths. Mr. Aizawa seemed to be looking at a specific spot now, and that lasted a couple of minutes.
Huh. Weird. Aizawa left the side of the building, standing closer to his class now. Katsuki wondered what that was about.
The rest of the day continued as normal, except Aizawa seemed distracted.
It wasn’t until night that something weird happened: a scream. A scream had sounded through the forest, waking up the entire class.
“I thought the rumors were just made up…” Katsuki heard Kirishima mumble.
This was certainly going to be an interesting camping trip.