Chapter Text

Chapter 1 - Bakugou

Bakugou Katsuki haphazardly sat by his school desk in class, feet laid down on the hardwood table while he thought about a certain pain in the ass so early in the morning.

It had been almost a month since Bakugou had last seen the nerd.

At first, he thought that the little fucker had finally gotten the message and dropped out of school (and consequently, any ambition to get into U.A. despite his uselessness). But apparently, apparently, Deku had been in the hospital the entire time.

For observation, the old hag relayed the news, since they’ve just manifested their quirk and it had some nasty side effects.

Bakugou seethed for days from the fact that the stupid nerd actually had a quirk all along. A “latent quirk”, apparently, which was a load of crap. Little shit must’ve been hiding it all along, always looking down on him. Probably got too flustered after his last talk with him and sent himself to the hospital with a training accident.

Yeah, that had to be it. No wonder he had the balls to keep spouting that he was going to be a hero. Deku probably thought he could get a free ride into U.A. with his secret quirk. Did the bastard think he had a chance with that scrawny body of his? Hah!

The old hag said something about a villain attack being the reason for Deku’s manifestation, but Bakugou could only scoff at that. All the more reason that the nerd had no hope. A measly villain attack and he was down for weeks? He’d been suffocated by that sludge bastard and he was fine after a weekend.

(Bright green eyes. Otherworldly square pupils. They pierced into him in a way that left him paralyzed.

“W…why?” he gritted out, frustration evident in his voice.

Why did he have to be saved?

“...you looked like you needed help.”

The reply was delivered in a dull voice, yet tense with an emotion he couldn’t identify.

“Y-you—!”

Before he could say anything else, the chains binding him—that saved him—disappeared into ether.

In the jarring moment between his back slamming unceremoniously onto the ground and getting back his bearings, his savior was gone.)

“Tch,” Bakugou clicked his tongue in frustration.

The extras around him froze at the sound, but he didn’t bother paying attention to what else they did. None of them mattered except maybe Deku, but that was only because it was Deku. If the extras were like sand grains, then Deku was an unexpected pebble he wanted to grind down to dust.

His thoughts kept circling back to the nerd because he caught the old hag chatting with Auntie Inko on the phone last night. Of course, the old hag rapped his head for eavesdropping (accidental as it was) but she had some good news from Auntie Inko that she was going to share anyway.

Deku was coming back to school today.

Bakugou tried to intercept the bastard but he was irritatingly absent from all the usual paths he would usually take when entering the school. He would’ve tried harder, but he was cutting it close to the bell and he didn’t want to be written up for anything, not when it was his last year before U.A.

So here he was, brooding over a deluded dumbass that couldn’t take the hint and leave.

The bell rung and the teach walked in, though he raised a hand to stop the extra in charge of the call for attention and greetings from doing her thing.

“Before we begin, I have an announcement for you all,” he said, his face a shade paler than usual today, “We have a classmate returning from convalescence. While you may know hi—errr, her already, I requested her to introduce herself again for clarity’s sake due to the extent of the changes that her quirk has put upon her.”

Bakugou perked up at that, as did his classmates around him as they started muttering about the news. He quickly discounted Deku due to how the teach referred to the student. There were some mutters of an old student from a year ago that had to leave for unknown reasons and he didn’t really care enough to think deeper than that, not when the ‘mystery’ would get solved in a few moments anyway.

The teach nodded to someone out in the hallway, “Come on in.”

The moment the new girl all but glided into the room, several alarm bells started ringing in Bakugou’s head because she looked familiar and he couldn’t figure out why.

His eyesight wasn’t shit, but with how far back he was seated and how she was positioned towards him, he couldn’t make out everything about her except that she was pretty tall (almost as tall as the teach, actually) and that her long green hair was wavy in a way that almost looked like it was curly.

And then, she was beside the teach and facing towards them.

Bakugou’s brain stuttered as bright green eyes with otherworldly square pupils locked eyes with him behind a pair of tinted glasses.

No.

“It’s nice to meet you all again,” she said while bowing, her voice soft yet somehow clearly heard all the way to the back of the room.

She straightened up and Bakugou realized that she had locks of pink hair framing her face. Not that he could process that because it was her.

“I’ve been in the hospital for the last month due to the side effects of my quirk finally manifesting,” she continued with the same soft, matter-of-fact tone, “I hope I won’t be too much of a disruption for the class, now that I’m back.”

Silence, long enough that it became painfully awkward to maintain yet no one wanted to break it.

The girl fidgeted under the attention of the entire class, a hand clasping against the sleeve of her all-too-new uniform. She glanced at the teach, who sighed.

“Your name,” he reminded her and her expression brightened up in a painfully familiar way to Bakugou.

Everything started to click before she even opened her mouth.

“I’m Midoriya Izuku!”

Chaos.

==

The hours after that were agonizing for Bakugou.

Even if he wanted to throttle Deku for being the girl that (saved) took him away from the sludge bastard, he barely got the chance to even confront her (and yes, he might hate quirklessness, but Bakugou had some standards, he was going to be a hero!) before all the extras swarmed Deku during the breaks to ask about useless things like why was she hospitalized, what was her quirk, what did it feel like to suddenly become a girl, or what was her haircare routine.

And somehow, somehow, the nerd managed to answer everything without turning into the usual crying wreck she was in the past when too much attention went her way.

“My body reacted badly when my quirk came in since so much got changed, and the doctors wanted to hold me in observation to prevent any relapses.”

“It’s a bit tricky to explain but most of it is tied to my eyes. That’s why I have these glasses, because they automatically activate at anything I look at. Mom was so surprised but she said there was a chance it came from her side since one of my great-grandmothers had an eye-based quirk.”

“Um, I’m still getting used to it, but Mom’s been a great help! There’s so much to catch up on, though…”

“It’s… natural, I think? My Dad’s always had curly hair so I think that stuck through all the changes. I’ve been varying what I use every week since there’s so much to wash.”

It pissed Bakugou off a lot. The hell was Deku on about to be so calm about this? He wanted to punch her face (which resembled Auntie Inko more except… sharper) so much with how she was acting. She didn’t even acknowledge him!

(That was a lie and he knew it. She kept glancing at him when she had the chance, when she wasn’t busy trying to entertain the extras. He didn’t know if that was better or worse.)

Her voice pissed him off the most. The way it sounded soft and quiet, yet carried a calm and confident cadence that was never there before. It should be soothing to the ears, or maybe even more if someone was weird about it, but all it did was ratchet up his anger at every word. Because her voice reminded him of one of the worst days of his life.

“...you looked like you needed help.”

*BAM*

The crash of his palms against Deku’s desk silenced the class and made all the extras surrounding her shrink back at the intensity of his glare towards them and then the subject of their interest.

“Deku,” he gritted out, thankfully without the same cloying paralysis as before, “Meet me in the usual place. After class. To talk.”

She stared at him for a long moment, enough so that he could feel his joints start to stiffen. So she wasn’t lying about her eyes after all. It was unnerving that it could even work through that Support Item.

“Okay, Kacchan,” Deku agreed easily, a small smile on her lips.

And he was off, stalking away while grumbling under his breath.

There was still enough time in the break for him to fuck off somewhere until it ended. He’d just keep getting pissed off otherwise and he’d rather not blow up and get written up. Not when the nerd had a quirk that mattered now, one that meant that the teachers would finally start giving a shit. And wasn’t that fucked up?

It still didn’t mean a thing, though. Deku was Deku, even if she had power now.

(even if she saved him a month ago)

==

Bakugou found Deku waiting at “the usual place”, a small clearing in a nearby park, about an hour after classes finished.

She stood in the center of the clearing, eyes half-lidded as she seemingly meditated while standing still, streaks of sunlight playing across her uniform. There was a… pressure in the air that Bakugou couldn’t identify, but felt all too familiar to that time almost a month ago.

It made it easier for him to stay angry.

“DEKU!”

The girl turned towards him with serpentine ease with none of the reactions that Bakugou expected to see when she saw him all but charging towards her. No flinches, no shrinking back, no trembling, or stuttering.

She didn’t fear him anymore.

“How long!?” he yelled at her, pushing into her space.

She stepped back as he stepped forward, again and again and again, until her back was against one of the trees and there was no space for her to escape.

Bakugou smashed his fist against the tree, barely missing her face and showering her with shattered bark, “I said, ‘How long’, Deku.”

Her expression was carefully blank, but her new eyes glinted behind her glasses.

More bark showered her other side as his other fist crashed beside her.

“HOW LONG WERE YOU PLANNING TO HIDE YOUR QUIRK FROM ME?”

“I wasn’t,” she answered with no hint of nervousness, “I wasn’t lying, Kacchan. I got this power a month ago.”

He glared at her, “Bullshit. You’ve always looked down on me, Deku. I’ve always wondered why, but now I get it. You’ve been faking being quirkless this entire time.”

That did it. Her calm facade shattered as he hit the nail right on the head.

“Wha—”

He roughly grabbed the front of her uniform and slammed her back against the tree. It wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped, as he had to use more strength than he expected to move her. Heavier, then. Made sense with the height change.

“The sludge bastard,” he sneered at her shocked face, “Prime ‘debut material’, wasn’t it? Do some little vigilantism to prop up how ‘nice’ you were to ‘save’ me. Disappear for a month and come back like a king or,” he pushed her harder against the tree, “like a queen, was it?”

“Let go, Kacchan,” she said, her voice worried, “This is my only uniform—”

The punch to her gut brutally cuts her off.

“I’ve been tolerating you, you know?” he growled as she fell limp against his grasp, “Ever since that time you actually thought you could help me after I fell off that log. I always thought it was weird that you kept wanting to help even when you were quirkless, but you were never quirkless, were you? Every time you acted like you wanted to help, you were laughing on the inside, mocking me by pretending that someone with no power could even hope to be a pro, that I needed your help from your ‘quirkless’ ass.”

Deku didn’t say anything, probably too shocked that he actually saw through her plan, the bitch.

“Did you even know how humiliating it was to have a quirkless loser like you tagging along with me going ‘Kacchan, Kacchan’ all the time? Oh wait, you did, that’s why you kept with it, just like you kept making plans about becoming a quirkless hero even when you didn’t train for shit,” a flinch, one that Bakugou immediately noticed, “Oh, did you think I was too stupid to notice? You kept spouting about wanting to be a hero but you didn’t even bother to train for it. I thought it was all bullshit, but then I realized… you had a quirk all along, one that’s probably strong enough to let you be cocky without needing to build up your body, all while playing the victim against me. Was that your idea of fun, Deku? Play a little gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss before you pull the rug out from under me, huh?”

No reply, as expected. It pissed him off even more.

“Fucking answer me, Deku!” he yelled, his free hand letting out pops and crackles as his control started slipping and he instinctively ignited the nitroglycerin building up around his hand.

Still no reply. Was she going to play dead until he made her talk? If that’s her game, then he was 100% willing to play it.

He wound up a huge punch, one that he would use his quirk the moment hit her, just like old times when Deku didn’t know when to stop being Deku.

A beat. Then, he started to move—

“Is that what you think, Kacchan?” Deku finally replied, her voice dead and tense, just like that time after she pulled him out of the sludge bastard.

“It’s what I fucking believe!” Bakugou yelled back, “Anyone who knows you can see it. I can’t believe you managed to get Auntie Inko in on it, too. What did you say to her, huh? That you’d be extra special if you pretended to be quirkless? You must’ve done something good to get her to cry all the ti—”

“Enough.”

The pressure around Bakugou intensified tenfold. No, more than that. It was a choking aura of power that made it hard to breathe, a cloying sense of strength that made him want to puke.

He was too distracted to notice the leg heading for his gut.

Bakugou’s sense of time skipped and the next thing he knew he was picking himself up from the ground, his entire torso screaming at him for the hit that he just received.

This time, he puked, staining the grass and dirt of the clearing with his lunch from earlier.

A choked voice called out to him, all the way to the other side of the clearing. Deku.

“We were never friends, were we, Kacchan?”

Bakugou glared at her with all the hatred that he could muster. She was crying, like she always did. Fucking crocodile tears.

“I fucking hated you, Deku!” he screamed at her as he got up, both his palms now crackling with a series of mini-explosions, “I hate you even more now, you bitch! You think you can get away with this now that you have your quirk out in the open? I’m going to fucking ruin you!”

She closed her eyes to keep crying while he used a pair of explosions to launch himself towards her. It would be too easy, but it always was, to blast her as he landed. Then, he’d knock her down and pummel her as hard as he could. Maybe then she’d know how much she fucked up by going back and mocking him like this.

Closer and closer he went, his body cutting through the air as he stretched out his hands towards her, nitro built up and primed to blow. It won’t wreck her uniform, but it would definitely mess it up and she won’t say anything, anyways.

She didn’t seem worried about his approach, too busy crying. She’d even taken out her glasses—

In an instant, she looked straight at him, a glare set in her face even with all the tears streaming down her cheeks. Her eyes flashed

and

everything

froze

==

In the next moment that he was coherent enough to think, he was on the ground.

“You were right about one thing, Kacchan,” Deku said out loud, her voice hoarse, “and even All Might agreed with you.”

Bakugou couldn’t reply. His entire being was bound. This was beyond the cloying paralysis that brief moment of eye contact a month ago had inflicted. He was worryingly still and if not for the frantic beat of his heart in his chest and the breath entering his mouth, he would have thought he had died.

“‘Midoriya Izuku cannot be a hero’, that’s what you’ve been telling me all along,” her voice was as bitter as it was tense with that unknown emotion, “When I asked All Might if I could be a hero without a quirk, he said I couldn’t. That’s when I realized you were right.”

An unfamiliar sound entered Bakugou’s ears. It took him a moment to realize that Deku was laughing. There was no happiness in that laugh.

“I always knew you were right, that’s why I never did anything else but dream. Because that was the only thing that kept me going. Being a quirkless pro hero would be unrealistic, but I could probably make it work. Maybe if I actually got serious about being an analyst, maybe if I trained hard as hell everyday with money that I don’t have, maybe if I started making Support Items out of random scrap to get the smallest edge that I could. Maybe, maybe, maybe… it wouldn’t be enough.”

There was a shift in the air beside him. Bakugou could barely spot her at the edge of his vision, sitting miserably while she monologued over his completely frozen body.

“There’s quirkless heroes in America, you know?” she said as casually as she could, despite the bitterness in her tone, “Some of them don’t even use guns to ‘level the playing field’, just pure guts and charisma to save the day. I looked up to them, but I never dug deeper into what they could do, what they were, because all of them had something I didn’t have — someone that believed them.”

“You know, it’s funny that you wanted to accuse Mom of being my accomplice. She was the first to say I never had it in me,” she choked out another laugh, “Then you came along and said the same. And everyone else followed, on and on and on… until I got to All Might.”

“He meant well, I think,” Deku admitted, wistful, “Showed me some really nasty scars to drive the point home. I don’t think anyone but him could’ve survived that. Someone like me would’ve died on the spot and that’s years of hero school wasted.”

Bakugou wished he could tune her out, but whatever bullshit that she did to him forced him to choose to acknowledge that his everything was not moving at all, or keep listening to her. Unfortunately, he wished he could’ve done anything else but be here because her next words figuratively made his heart stall.

“In hindsight, it was lucky that I was already on the ground when I started to really logic everything out. If I was still on the roof, I might’ve taken your suggestion to heart since I would’ve thought that the world would be better off without me.”

Suggestio—no. Nononono!

(You know, if you really wanna be a hero that badly, there actually might be another way. Just pray that you’ll be born with a quirk in your next life and take a swan dive off the roof of the building!)

He did say that, but it was a meaningless taunt, right? Just something to scare Deku off the idea of being a hero and nothing else… right? And Deku had a quirk all along, so it shouldn’t have worked at all!

…right?

“You don’t need to worry about it, Kacchan, I might have given up, but I’m that far gone, not anymore” she said, somehow reading his mind and added some clarification for his next question, “It’s a bit of enhanced hearing on my part and I can roughly guess your mood. It won’t really work on anyone else until I get more practice.”

Deku got up and dusted herself off the bits of dirt and bark that had gotten on her. He couldn’t really get a read on anything else she’s doing with how he’s positioned on the ground.

“Regardless of what you think, Kacchan, I’m really not lying to you when I say that I just got this power. I manifested it when I saw you and the sludge villain. No one was doing anything and you… you were drowning,” there was a hitch in her breath again, like a half-aborted sob, “I couldn’t do anything. ‘Midoriya Izuku cannot be a hero’. That’s the truth you’ve pushed onto me, and the truth I accepted. So, I became someone else… or at least I tried to.”

“You won’t get it, really, but I won’t say anything else… because you don’t deserve anything else from me. We’re not friends, Bakugou Katsuki.”

Bakugou raged inside his head at the sheer gall of what Deku was saying, the unmitigated bullshit that she was feeding him to make him feel sorry for her. He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. He shouldn’t want to feel sorry for her. But if there was any chance that his own words led to something like ‘that’...

He heard Deku start to walk away, her steps almost silent on the grassy clearing, only for her to pause before she was too far away for him to hear.

“The binding should wear off in a while,” she said, her voice tense with that emotion yet again, “but you should know this: You and everyone else might’ve thought that I was worthless because of what I’ve been born with, but I’m fucking done with being your doormat. I don’t deserve this second chance, but I’m taking it anyway because I finally have someone that believes in me.”

“Goodbye, Bakugou,” her voice was now steel, cold and impartial.

She said something else, one that he barely heard because of how soft her voice became, but he understood it all the same, “Goodbye, Kacchan.”

And she was gone.

The binding bullshit wore off just like Deku said, even if Bakugou had to endure the agonizing stillness for what felt like hours (but ended up being minutes). His own rage sputtered out into seething embers, ready to burst into a bonfire of anger, but he was exhausted in many ways than one to even bother.

Trudging back home was an exercise in pushing his limits and waving off the hag from fussing over him strained his concentration even further. It was a welcome relief to crash onto his bed, even if he had to haphazardly spray his neutralizer while half-asleep. It should be enough.

(In a moment of clarity before he succumbed to sleep, Bakugou finally realized what that unknown emotion that colored Deku’s words was, a recent memory of his grandmother’s funeral coming to mind.

That tense and bitter feeling that followed the hag’s words over those days, a farewell that she couldn’t fully let go.

It was grief.)

==

Submission for Quirk Registry Update

Subject: Midoriya Izuku
Quirk: Mythic Mimic (formerly Quirkless)
Type: Transformation

Effect: A late-blooming quirk that gives the user the power to transform into mythological individuals and replicate their feats. Risks the loss of personality if pushed too far. Due to the user’s uncontrolled first use of this, she now carries traits of the Gorgon Medusa even when the quirk is not active.

==

Hero Notebook for the Present - Volume 1 - General Entry #1

GENERAL ENTRY #1

Wish

Incarnation

Demi-Servant

Holy Grail…?

Medusa has been tight-lipped on how my power exactly works, so I’ve been working mostly from what I’ve observed and what she’s shared so far.

It’s not a quirk, that much I’m sure of. It does too much to be one. It’s not even like how some quirks only do one thing but the user has enhanced strength or speed or intelligence, because people with quirks always have those invisible mutations that support their main quirk which is why quirkless can’t.

The transformation can be explained, the physical enhancement can be explained, and even some Skills can be explained as some sort of quirk emulation. But the Noble Phantasms can’t be explained. The histories. The memories. The personalities. The voices.

Medusa said that I was a Holy Grail. I don’t know what that means. But she said that I could grant wishes, even to myself.

I wanted to be a hero but I knew I couldn’t be one. I wished for someone else to be a hero for me

…

I kind of get it now. I was lucky.

The wish I made when Kacchan Bakugou Kacchan was dying drowning was as close to suicide as it was. No wonder the heroes that I called didn’t answer, they didn’t want to kill me. And Medusa said I wasn’t that far gone to accept any of the villains that were fine with taking over me to live again.

Even Medusa wasn’t sure if accepting was the right choice, but Breaker Gorgon’s isolation effect kept us separate enough that I was left with some semblance of myself after the Full Install.

So, luck.

As it is, apart from the obvious physical changes, there’s a lot of mental contamination going on. It sucks, but I don’t mind it too much. It could’ve been much worse.

Sometimes I think about my sisters but I remember that I’m an only child

So, to summarize: I’m some sort of mix between an Incarnation and a Demi-Servant. Medusa’s not exactly an expert in magecraft, but she knows her way around some of it.

I can’t release Medusa at all now, not with how tangled we are on too many levels. If I had normally gained use of this power, I would call this state “Part Install”, but this is my new normal now. I could probably call up other heroes in the future, but Medusa said that now that I’ve been ‘stained’ with her essence, I’d likely only have connections to individuals tied to her legend. She was a villain through and through, so my ‘pool’ is drastically smaller than it could have been.

That’s fine.

Even if it’s just her, I have access to the entirety of her legend, but I understand all too clearly that I have to steer clear of her more Monstrous aspects. Her Rider aspect is the safest manifestation.

Even if it’s just the gift and the curse that’s my new body, it’s fine. The Mystic Eyes of Constriction is dangerous, but not as lethal as Cybele. Support Items can keep it suppressed so I wouldn’t need to use Breaker Gorgon all the time. Her daggers are also enough, I have her skill in using them.

The output and strength of what I could do is weaker than expected, though. I have no Magic Circuits to properly conduct the mana inside me, so I can only improperly diffuse it through my body and clumsily mold it. The efficiency is bad and doing it is painful after a while. Using anything beyond my output is more painful than what I can describe in words. I can probably use Cybele up to 3 times at most and it hurts. The Bridle is impossible for now, I might die.

But it’s enough. The changes I have basically put me in the starting line. If I improve my physical conditioning while I practice manipulating my mana, I can probably improve my output and efficiency. It’ll be painful, but I’m used to it. At least I can use it to improve myself, this time.

I have 9 and a half months until the U.A. Entrance Exam.

…I can be a hero, huh?

…

…

…

Medusa said that the Holy Grail is a cup. Did she mean that literally? If my memory isn’t wrong, there was a time when I was 6 that an odd man handed me a weird cup. That can’t be it… right?