Chapter Text
There were sad things in this world. Were there ever. Was any one of them worth even a single tear? Maybe. This one, though? This one deserved exactly one response:
Fuck this.
Maybe it wasn't the most eloquent thing he could've said, but what else was there? Thank you, God, for saving me? Please. Katsuki wasn't religious, wasn't anything, really. He didn't believe in any god that might swoop down and save his ass. Still, in that exact moment, he decided that even if God wasn't good, He had better exist. Because someone had to be there for Katsuki to tell Him to go fuck Himself.
Fuck this.
Situation: Villain attack. Current status: Out of commission.
And who the hell were the dumbasses that engineered this building?
The whole damn place had been wobbling like a Jenga tower. One particularly nasty fight on the third floor, and the entire shopping mall folded in on itself. How many people left in time? How many were still trapped? How many should've been trapped, but left anyway?
The truth was, Katsuki didn't remember exactly what had happened, or at least not all of it; there'd been a villain. He had some kind of quirk... no clue what it was...., there'd been a fight, and then Katsuki got hurled into a support pillar. The pillar shattered, everything else followed.
And now here he was. Buried beneath a few tons of concrete, twisted steel, shattered glass, dust, debris, and every other damn thing you'd expect to find inside a shopping mall. Maybe even buried under a few people.
(Or maybe they were buried under him.)
Seriously. Fuck this.
He didn't feel all that hurt, and he didn't know if that was a relief or an oh-shit-moment. Although maybe he'd cracked a rib or all of them, because breathing sure felt like broken glass was entering his airways; with all that debris around him, maybe it indeed was.
He couldn't feel his right leg. It was pinned beneath a chunk of loose rubble, and somehow, by some cosmic accident, he had avoided being crushed completely. He'd ended up inside a little air pocket beneath what he thought was a customer service desk, or maybe a checkout counter, hard to tell. But there is a splintered wooden chair leaned beside him. One of its legs had snapped clean off, leaving a jagged point aimed straight at his face. Fucking wonderful.
With more effort than he cared to admit, but less than he'd expected, he managed to drag his waist forward and wrench his right leg free. Still couldn't feel it. The only thing that actually hurt was his tail.
...
Wait.
His what?
Katsuki froze.
No. Nope. Absolutely the fuck not.
He twisted as far as the cramped space allowed, ignoring the fireworks going off in his ribs. Something long and ash-blond flicked instinctively behind him. It flicked, he hadn't told it to, it just... did.
There was a beat of perfect silence. And then he said:
"...What."
His voice came out all wrong, or well, not his voice. No. No no no no— His hands shot to his throat, or, not his hands, not hands at all. Just those things, covered in short sweat-and-dust-caked fur, paws. He stared, and blinked once, twice, five tiny claws slid out of his toes without permission... the claws slowly retracted... then popped back out... Fuck.
He was going to kill someone. As soon as he figured out who, as soon as he figured out how, as soon as he figured out how to do literally anything when he was apparently the size of a fucking lunchbox. His ears flattened. Wait, his—?
God damn it. His ears flattened. He reached up to grab them, but missed, and tried again. Somehow managed to smack himself in the forehead instead. His hair? Mostly gone; or, well, not gone. Not gone, he had fur. Everywhere. This had to be an hallucination, or a concussion. A near-death experience, for sure, maybe he was dying under the rubble and this was his brain trying really, really hard to make the transition as insulting as possible. He rolled his eyes and looked down: he had cream-colored fur, which was filthy with gray dust. A broad ugly streak of dried blood matted across the underside of his belly, disappearing into the fluff along his side. The wound itself had already clotted, but every breath tugged at it with this burning sting. Gotta be kidding me!
He gingerly pressed a paw against it, bad idea! Pain exploded across his stomach. He hissed so violently his own ears rang.
"...Motherfucker..."
Okay, okay. Inventory check, he started on his mental list. Stomach? Slightly ripped open, probably not currently bleeding. Ribs? They felt like shattered glass. Right— No. Left? Which— Whatever. One of his back legs. He tried to move it, but nothing. It simply dragged behind him like it belonged to somebody else, he stared at it, again, and willed it to move, nothing, again, not even a twitch. Well. That... that wasn't ideal.
He hooked both front paws against the broken floor and hauled himself forward. But his useless hind leg scraped over chunks of concrete, and so white-hot pain shot through his hip.
He mentally added Hip? Die. to the list.
"RRRAOW—"
The sound burst out before he could stop it, it echoed around the tiny pocket beneath the rubble, but only silence answered. Katsuki closed his eyes, he had just... He had just made the most pathetic noise any living creature had ever produced.
"...I hate everything," a tiny, involuntary chirp escaped him. He wanted to die. Preferably after murdering whoever had turned him into a cat, assuming they hadn't already died when the building came down. In which case, fine, he'd wait until Hell.
He felt a sudden nausea, and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ride out the fresh wave of agony. Speaking of pain, that dull and throbbing ache at his backside was getting impossible to ignore. He shifted his weight, dragging his useless hind leg, and craned his neck to look over his shoulder.
He stared, he stared some more, because of course, of fucking course almost half of his tail was missing.
And it wasn't just some genetic bobtail, either, but morelike a quarter of that appendage had been violently severed, leaving behind a crusted stump that looked like raw meat. The fur around it was matted with thick and sticky blood, and fresh droplets were starting to bead at the edge from his sudden movements. A new wave of nausea hit him, hard and fast. If he had a human stomach right now, he'd be puking his guts out.
Okay, he thought, gritting his tiny needle-like teeth. That is serious. That is bleed-out-in-a-ditch-you-bitch serious.
He needed medical help, and he needed it ten minutes ago. If he stayed huddled under this stupid checkout counter, he was either going to bleed to death from his mutilated tail, succumb to whatever was wrong with his stomach, or get squashed flat when the rest of the ceiling inevitably gave out.
He had to move. He had to get the hell out of here.
(How many people also had to?)
He scanned the suffocating darkness of his tiny air pocket. Above him, a chaotic web of rebar and concrete blocks shut out any hope of light; but to his left, just past the splintered chair leg that had nearly lobotomized him, there was a gap. A tiny and jagged fissure between a slab of collapsed drywall and what smelled like a crushed vending machine. It was incredibly narrow, barely the width of a baseball.
He hated that his first thought was: I think I fit. Wait, no. cats fit, he didn't. He wasn't— Whatever.
He dragged his front paws forward, ignoring the screaming protest of his torn stomach and hip, and shoved his face into the crack. His whiskers (gross, whatever, don't think about it) scraped against the concrete edges, and he pushed harder, expecting his shoulders to get stuck immediately, but they didn't.
Instead, his collarbones just... folded? It was the most unnatural and horrifying sensation he had ever experienced, his entire skeleton felt like it was made of rubber bands and wet spaghetti. He dragged himself deeper into the rubble, his torso stretching out impossibly long as he contorted through the jagged labyrinth. He felt his ribs compress, his spine elongating and twisting between chunks of twisted metal in a way that defied every single law of biology he knew. It was sickening. He felt like a furry tube of toothpaste being squeezed from the bottom.
Concrete dust coated his wet nose, making him want to sneeze, but he choked it down. Keep moving.
He dragged his front paws, then hauled the rest of his stretched-out, liquid body forward, his hip wincing as his paralyzed back leg scraped blindly over the broken glass and debris. The mutilated stump of his tail snagged on a piece of rebar, sending a white-hot flash of agony straight up his spine.
He let out another muffled, involuntary hiss, but kept pulling. Drag the front paws, squeeze the spine, ignore the dead leg! ...Ignore the blood.
He didn't care if he had to slither through this entire collapsed mall like a goddamn centipede. He was getting out of here, he was finding a medic, so he dragged himself through the dark, not much different from a liquid shadow made of pure spite and agonizing pain. He slid into another air pocket (this one smelling strongly of ruptured cologne bottles and dust) and didn't even pause before forcing his shoulders into the next fissure. And the next. And the next.
Time lost all meaning, it was just a cycle of compressing his ribcage, dragging his dead leg, biting down on his own tongue to keep from screaming when his severed tail bumped against the ruins, and pushing forward, he was operating purely on rage. If he stopped, he was going to die in a dark hole, and Katsuki Bakugou refused to die as roadkill.
(And there were people that still needed him.)
Then, suddenly, the oppressive weight of the ceiling vanished.
One final, desperate heave through a gap in some warped steel scaffolding, and he tumbled forward, face-planting onto smooth, unbroken tile. He lay there for a second, his tiny lungs heaving, spitting out a mouthful of drywall dust. He blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the sudden shift in lighting.
He wasn't in the rubble anymore.
He had crawled his way into a massive and cavernous section of the mall's main concourse that had miraculously survived the collapse. Emergency lights bathed the area in a harsh crimson glow, and water dripped from the ceiling where the sprinkler system had busted. It looked like a war zone, and it was, but there was air.
He tried to stand, instinctively putting weight on his back leg, and the limb buckled instantly, sending a nauseating spike of pain right up to his damaged hip. He collapsed back onto his stomach with a pathetic breathy wheeze.
Right, he reminded himself, glaring at his useless paw. Still a cripple. Fantastic!
He resorted to an ugly lopsided army-crawl, dragging his lower half across the cold tiles. His bleeding stump left a faint but morbid trail of red behind him, and he couldn't bring himself to care. He just needed to find—
"Katsuki!"
The scream echoed through the hollow concourse, raw and desperate enough to scrape the paint off the walls. Katsuki's flattened ears suddenly swiveling forward like radar dishes, because he knew that voice, he'd know that loud, obnoxious and relentlessly earnest voice anywhere. So he hauled himself around the edge of an overturned planter box and looked down the hall.
Flashlights cut through the dust clouds. There were several figures in the distance, firefighters, policemen, medics and, of course, heroes. He recognized friends (which he does have). His friends, he saw Soy Sauce, Raccoon Eyes, Dumb Face, the whole squad was here. But at the very front of the pack, frantically tossing a slab of concrete aside with hardened arms, was Eijirou.
Shitty Hair. His idiot. His perfectly fine, uncrushed, breathing idiot.
"Katsuki! Hey! If you can hear me, make a noise, man! Anything!"
Eijirou's voice cracked on the last word. Even from this distance, through the red emergency lights, Katsuki could see the sheer panic etched into the redhead's face. He looked wrecked, covered in soot, his hero costume torn, his eyes wide and bloodshot as he scanned the mountain of debris that Katsuki had just crawled out of.
And so a weird and tight feeling bloomed in Katsuki's chest that had absolutely nothing to do with his broken ribs. I'm right here, you moron, he thought. He opened his mouth, gathered all the air in his lungs, intending to yell out "Shut the hell up!," but what actually came out was... well. Not one of his proudest yells. It was more of a raspy and gargling croak? Somewhat half-drowned in blood and dust. It was the least intimidating sound in the universe.
But Eijirou had always possessed freakish hearing when it came to Katsuki. He whipped around, his flashlight beam slicing through the dark and landing dead-center on Katsuki’s trembling and dirt-caked, or cream-colored, but surely feline... body.
"What... what is that?" he muttered, taking a hesitant step forward. Through the thick haze of drywall dust, Katsuki supposed he just looked like another piece of bloody breathing debris. The some of the other idiots, seeing the comotion, started getting closer as well.
Eijirou took another step. Then, the shape finally registered. "Hold up," Eijirou gasped and holded a hand out to stop the others. "Guys... it's a cat."
Katsuki let out a shaky breath, relief washing over him so fast it made him dizzy. He started trembling from the cold, but even that didn't stop him from grinning. Yeah, no shit. Now pick me up, fix my damn tail, and let's go—
Eijirou dropped to his knees on the wet tile, the flashlight trembling slightly in his grip. The beam swept over Katsuki, and Katsuki watched as Eijirou processed the damage. It was excruciatingly slow, painful, even. First, he saw the back leg, which dragged uselessly at a sickening angle, and his jaw tightened. So next, the light caught the broad ugly streak of blood matted across Katsuki's belly, and the boy inhaled sharply, it was a wet sound. And then, the flashlight beam hit the tail. He stared at the jagged stump, and he just kept staring.
Katsuki couldn't read minds, but he didn't need to. He knew Eijirou, he watched the color completely drain from the his soot-stained face, and his eyes widened, his pupils blown wide with a very specific creeping horror. And so his breathing hitched, and quickned into rapid shallow gasps.
"Oh god," Eijirou choked out, his voice barely a whisper. He reached out a trembling hand, terrified to even touch him. "Oh man. If you buddy got crushed this bad... if it's this heavy down there..."
He's projecting, Katsuki realized, his tiny tufted ears flattening. He's looking at a half-crushed animal and picturing people under that concrete. Picturing me.
"Hey! We need a medic! Now!" Mina yelled from behind them, after rushed up to see what Eijirou was looking at. But her voice cracked too.
Heavy footsteps crunched over the glass. Katsuki forced his heavy eyelids up to see Aizawa-sensei stepping out from the shadows flanked by two firefighters. Their teacher looked wrecked, he had a deep cut bleeding down his forehead, but his eyes were sharp anyway. He took one look at Katsuki's mangled body, then looked at the squad of teenagers.
And, well. To put it lightly, thank you Sensei for not being a fucking bat. You are seeing this catastrophe too. They look like shit, don't they?
Katsuki's friends, for lack of better description, weren't much different from the collapsed building around him. They were falling apart.
Eijirou was hyperventilating, his hands was shaking so violently he nearly dropped the flashlight, and he was utterly paralyzed by the thought of his boyfriend bleeding out under a collapsed mall. And Mina was crying. And Denki looked like he was about to vomit. And Hanta was... not really there.
They were liabilities. In a high-risk extraction zone, panicking kids with quirks were a death sentence to themselves and the rescue teams.
"There are no veterinary medics on site," Aizawa said with voice hard, which cut through the panic in authority. "Human triage only."
"But, Sensei, he's bleeding out!" Eijirou pleaded, finally managing to gently scoop his hands under Katsuki's front legs and waist, terrified of hurting him worse. He continued: "We can't just leave him!"
"I know," Aizawa said seamlessly. "Which is why I'm pulling you four off the line. We have pro-heroes and search dogs moving into this sector now. Kirishima, Ashido, Sero, Kaminari, take this animal to the emergency veterinary clinic three blocks down. Now."
"But Bakugou—!"
"The pros will find your friend," a firefighter stepped in, physically steering Denki away from the rubble. "We're putting all our of men and women into it. So don't have any more hands for this task, you need to go save this cat."
It was a tactical dismissal, a blatant bold-faced excuse to get a group of teenagers away from a collapsing hazard zone before someone else died. Katsuki knew it. Aizawa knew it. The firefighters knew it. But Eijirou, drowning in anxiety and desperate to save something from this nightmare, bought it hook, line, and sinker.
"Okay," Eijirou gasped, clutching Katsuki against his warm chest. Katsuki hissed as his ribs compressed, but the steady thumping of Eijirou's frantic heartbeat beneath his ear was oddly grounding. "Okay, we're going. Hang in there, buddy. I got you."
As they sprinted toward the evacuation exit, Katsuki let his heavy head drop onto Eijirou, utterly exhausted.
Buddy, Katsuki thought, slipping into a pain-hazy semi-consciousness. When I turn back... I'm going to kill you.