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Katsuki Bakugou had spent two years learning how to live with the possibility that Izuku Midoriya was dead. He had spent two years learning how to carry the words he had left him with, and two years pretending that becoming a hero might somehow make him the sort of person who deserved to be forgiven.

He had never considered that the past might give him another chance.

He had never considered that Izuku might be waiting for him there.

And he had certainly never considered that the boy he remembered would be the one to take that chance away from him.

The first thing Katsuki remembered about the day Izuku Midoriya disappeared was the weather.

It was raining.

Not the sort of rain that made a dramatic entrance in the middle of a summer storm, hammering against windows and sending people running for shelter, but a miserable, persistent drizzle that turned the streets grey and left the hems of school trousers damp. The clouds had hung low over the city all morning, and by the time the final bell rang at Aldera Middle School, the pavement outside had become a patchwork of shallow puddles.

Katsuki remembered the rain because Izuku had not brought an umbrella.

He remembered the green curls plastered to the boy’s forehead, the way his backpack hung crookedly from one shoulder, the way he had stood at the school gate with that ridiculous, hopeful expression Katsuki had spent years trying to beat out of him. He remembered being angry. He could no longer remember what he had been angry about, not precisely. Some stupid comment, perhaps, or another notebook full of scribbled observations about heroes, or the way Izuku had looked at him as though Katsuki was still the person who had once held his hand crossing a street.

There were so many things Katsuki had done that they had blurred together over the years. Cruelty had become a habit before he had been old enough to understand that habits could be choices, and by the time he understood, he had grown so accustomed to the shape of his own ugliness that he mistook it for strength.

That afternoon, though, he remembered every word.

“Stop following me around, Deku.”

Izuku had stopped walking.

Katsuki had turned back, furious at the silence, furious at the way Izuku’s face had gone so carefully blank. He hated that expression. He hated it because it made him feel as though Izuku was looking at him from somewhere far away, somewhere Katsuki could not reach no matter how loudly he shouted.

“What?” Katsuki had demanded. “Got nothing to say now?”

Izuku had opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Katsuki had stepped closer. He could still remember the rain ticking against the metal fence behind them, the smell of wet concrete, the familiar green of Izuku’s eyes. He remembered how small Izuku had looked beneath the overcast sky, and how little that had mattered to him at the time.

“Why are you even trying anymore?” Katsuki had asked. “You’re quirkless. You’re always going to be quirkless. You think you can just keep pretending that you’re going to be a hero because you want it badly enough?”

“I’m not pretending,” Izuku had said.

His voice had been quiet, but it had not shaken.

That had made Katsuki angrier.

“Then prove it.”

He had pointed toward the school building, toward the roof that rose above the surrounding streets, though he had not meant for Izuku to take him seriously. At least, that was what Katsuki told himself later. He had meant to frighten him. To make him stop looking at Katsuki with that awful, unwavering hope. To make him understand that the world did not owe him anything simply because he wanted something.

“Go jump off the roof,” Katsuki had said. “Maybe you’ll get a Quirk in your next life.”

Izuku had stared at him.

For a moment, Katsuki had thought he might cry. That would have been easier. He could have laughed, called him pathetic, and walked away with the familiar satisfaction of having won another argument that had never needed to happen.

Instead, Izuku smiled.

It was not a happy smile. It was not even a particularly sad one. It was a small, almost thoughtful movement of his mouth, as if Katsuki had finally answered a question he had been asking for a very long time.

“Okay,” Izuku had said.

Then he had turned and walked away.

Katsuki had stood in the rain, watching him go, waiting for him to turn back. He had expected the familiar pattern to resume by the next morning: Izuku would appear at his side, clutching a notebook to his chest, and Katsuki would tell him to get lost. Izuku would ignore him, and the world would continue as it always had.

Izuku never came back.

For the first eight months, Katsuki refused to believe he was dead. He told himself that Midoriya had run away, that he had found some relative in another prefecture, that he had finally gotten tired of being treated like a nuisance and decided to start over somewhere nobody knew him. He insisted that the police were incompetent, that Inko Midoriya was being dramatic, that a person could not simply disappear from the world because of one stupid argument.

He did not say the words I told him to do it.

He did not say them when the police searched the neighbourhood, or when divers checked the river, or when Inko sat in a station waiting room with both hands wrapped around a paper cup she never drank from. He did not say them when his mother came to collect him from the police station after he had been questioned for the third time, or when Mitsuki held him by the shoulders in their kitchen and demanded to know what he had done.

He did not say them when the school counsellor asked him to describe his last conversation with Izuku.

And he did not say them when the missing-person posters began to fade.

For eight months, he kept expecting Izuku to walk through the door.

For the next sixteen, he learned to stop looking.

By the time Katsuki was seventeen, he had become very good at looking like a person who had moved on.

He had entered U.A. High School, passed the entrance examination with a score that made several teachers openly proud, and fought his way through the first year with the same fierce determination that had carried him through every challenge he had ever faced. He had learned to work with other people. He had learned that being the strongest person in a room was not the same as being the most capable one, and that shouting orders did not make people more inclined to follow them. He had learned, slowly and with considerable humiliation, that there were things he could not fix by hitting them harder.

Kirishima had helped with that. So had Kaminari, in his own infuriating way, and Sero, and even Todoroki, whose calm, merciless observations could reduce Katsuki’s most carefully constructed excuses to ash in a matter of seconds.

Aizawa had helped most of all, though Katsuki would rather have swallowed a handful of nails than admit it aloud.

“You keep treating regret like a punishment,” his homeroom teacher had told him once, after Katsuki had lost his temper during a training exercise and nearly injured a classmate. “It isn’t. It’s information. It tells you what you did wrong. What you do with it afterward is your responsibility.”

Katsuki had hated him for saying it.

He had remembered it anyway.

He had become a better person, or at least a person who understood that becoming better was a process rather than a destination. He apologised when he was wrong. He learned to recognise the difference between confidence and cruelty, between protecting someone and deciding what was best for them without asking. He stopped using the word Deku as an insult in his own head, though the name still appeared sometimes, uninvited, when he woke from dreams he did not discuss.

None of it changed the fact that Izuku was gone.

The guilt had not softened with time. It had simply become quieter, settling into the spaces between his thoughts until Katsuki could go hours without noticing it, only to find himself standing in front of a vending machine with his hand hovering over a can of green tea because he remembered the boy who used to drink it after school.

He could live with the guilt. He had learned how.

What he could not live with was the uncertainty.

He did not know whether Izuku had heard his words as a joke, a threat, or the final confirmation of something he had secretly believed about himself for years. He did not know whether Izuku had walked away crying, or whether he had gone somewhere quiet and made a decision that had nothing to do with Katsuki at all. He did not know what he would have said if he had been given another minute, another hour, another chance to speak to the boy he had spent so much of his childhood hurting.

He knew only that the last thing he had given Izuku Midoriya was permission to disappear.

And that was the one thing he could never take back.

By the beginning of their second year at U.A., Katsuki had stopped dreaming about the roof.

He dreamed about the school gate instead.

In the dreams, the rain always fell at an angle, and Izuku stood on the other side of the street with his backpack slipping off one shoulder. Katsuki could never hear what he said. Sometimes he was smiling; sometimes his expression was so empty that Katsuki woke with his heart hammering against his ribs, unable to shake the certainty that he had missed something important. He would reach for his phone, check the time, and sit in the dark until the feeling passed.

He never told Kirishima about those dreams.

Kirishima knew about Izuku, of course. Everyone who had been close to Katsuki for more than a few months eventually learned that there had been a boy before U.A., a childhood friend who had vanished before Katsuki could figure out how to stop being the person who drove him away. He knew the outline of the story, though Katsuki had never given him the whole thing. He knew about the police interviews and the missing-person posters, about the way Katsuki went quiet whenever someone mentioned a rooftop, about the fact that he sometimes stood outside convenience stores staring at the green tea section as if there were a decision he had not yet made.

He knew enough to be careful.

That was why Katsuki was grateful when Kirishima did not ask why he had spent the entire train ride to their work-study placement staring out the window.

“Hey,” Kirishima said, nudging his knee with his own. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking like you’re planning to fight the entire city.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Terrifying.”

Katsuki shot him a glare, but Kirishima only grinned and leaned back against the seat. Across from them, Kaminari had one earbud in and was attempting to balance a packet of crackers on his forehead while Sero filmed him. Todoroki sat beside the window, reading through the briefing materials they had been given that morning, his expression as unreadable as ever.

They were all seventeen, all second-years, and all far enough into hero training that the novelty of wearing their costumes in public had faded. The work-study placement was supposed to be routine: a joint patrol with a small agency specialising in urban search and rescue, followed by an afternoon assisting with a string of minor incidents in the commercial district. Their supervising pro had warned them that the district had experienced an increase in Quirk-related thefts, but there was no indication of a major villain presence.

Katsuki had read the report twice.

He knew better than to assume that a quiet day would stay quiet. He also knew that he was tired of being treated as if his past made him fragile, as if every sharp noise might send him spiralling back into a middle-school corridor. He had spent two years learning to live with what he had done. He was not going to let a missing boy from his childhood dictate how he performed as a hero.

The train slowed into the station.

Their supervising hero, a broad-shouldered woman whose rescue name was Lifeline, stood and adjusted the straps of her utility belt. “All right. Stay in pairs until we reach the agency. If anything feels wrong, you tell me immediately. This is a training placement, not a competition.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Kaminari said.

“You absolutely would,” Sero replied.

“I would dream of winning. That’s different.”

“Bakugou,” Lifeline said, turning toward him, “that includes you.”

“Tch. I heard you.”

“Good. Then you can repeat the instruction.”

“Stay in pairs, report anything suspicious, don’t run off like an idiot. Happy?”

“Delighted.”

The train doors opened.

The station was crowded, the air warm with the smell of wet coats and coffee. Commuters flowed around them in hurried streams, and Katsuki stepped aside to let a mother guide her small child through the crowd. The child glanced at his costume and waved. Katsuki gave him a brief nod, which seemed to satisfy him.

For a moment, the ordinary world pressed in around them so completely that Katsuki almost forgot the dreams.

Then every screen in the station went black.

It happened so suddenly that the crowd barely had time to react. Advertisements vanished mid-frame, the departure board flickered, and the overhead lights dimmed until the station was washed in a strange, colourless half-darkness. A collective murmur rose from the platform.

Katsuki felt the change before he understood it.

The air had thickened. Not physically, exactly, but in the way the atmosphere changed before an explosion, when the world seemed to draw a breath and hold it.

“Everyone back,” Lifeline ordered.

A sound came from the far end of the platform, like glass being dragged slowly across stone. The shadows between the pillars stretched in the wrong direction. One of the digital screens blinked back to life, displaying a single line of white text.

YOU HAVE BEEN EXPECTING ME.

Kaminari’s crackers slipped from his forehead.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “That’s not normal.”

A man stepped out of the shadow beneath the departure board.

He wore a long black coat over an ordinary grey shirt, and his face was covered by a smooth, pale mask that reflected the station lights without revealing anything behind it. He looked unremarkable in every way except for the fact that the space around him seemed to bend. The lines of the tiled floor curved subtly toward his feet, and the metal railing beside him appeared stretched, as though the world had been drawn too tightly around his body.

Lifeline moved in front of the students.

“Identify yourself.”

The man tilted his head.

“I’m not here for you.”

“Then you’ve made a mistake.”

“No.” His voice was young, almost conversational.

The station erupted.

A distortion rolled outward from the man, swallowing the platform in a wave of warped space. The crowd scattered. A section of the ceiling appeared to fold in on itself, then snapped back with a violent crack. Lifeline lunged forward, her Quirk forming a shimmering barrier between the villain and the students.

“Move!” she shouted. “Get the civilians out!”

Katsuki was already moving.

He launched himself over a bench, explosions cracking from his palms as he cleared a path toward the villain. The man raised one hand, and the space between them stretched impossibly long. Katsuki’s next blast seemed to travel for seconds without reaching its target before the explosion was pulled sideways and detonated against an empty wall.

“Spatial distortion,” Todoroki called from behind him. “He’s altering distance!”

“Then I’ll just have to get closer!”

“Bakugou, wait-!”

Katsuki did not wait.

He drove himself forward with a succession of controlled explosions, changing direction whenever the floor bent beneath him. The villain watched him approach with the calm interest of someone observing a familiar performance. That, more than the Quirk, made Katsuki’s skin crawl.

He knew that look.

Not the face, not the voice, but the sense of being expected. The sensation that someone had already seen the next ten seconds of his life and was simply waiting for him to catch up.

Katsuki fired a blast directly at the man’s chest.

The villain lifted his hand.

The explosion vanished.

There was no impact, no deflection, no burst of smoke. One moment the blast existed; the next, it had been removed from the world as neatly as a sentence erased from a page.

Katsuki’s eyes widened.

The villain stepped forward.

“Bakugou Katsuki,” he said, with a familiarity that made Katsuki’s stomach tighten. “Seventeen years old. Second year at U.A. Hero course. Excellent combat instincts. Terrible impulse control.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Someone who owes a friend a favour.”

The man’s hand closed.

The world lurched.

Katsuki felt the floor disappear beneath him. For a fraction of a second, he was suspended in a space that had no ceiling or walls, a place where colour and sound had been stretched into thin, trembling threads. He heard Kaminari shouting his name. He heard Todoroki call out something he could not make out. He heard Lifeline’s barrier shatter.

Then he heard a voice that did not belong to anyone standing on the platform.

You’re late.

The words were quiet, almost affectionate.

Katsuki twisted in the empty space, searching for the speaker. There was no one there.

He’s been waiting for you.

A second voice answered, older and colder than the first.

No. He’s been preparing.

The space around Katsuki folded inward.

For one terrible instant, he saw a thousand versions of the same street, each one layered over the next. In one, the sky was bright and blue. In another, rain fell over a deserted schoolyard. In another, a small boy with green hair sat alone at a desk, writing furiously in a notebook while the rest of the class laughed.

In every version, the boy looked up.

In every version, he smiled.

Then the worlds collapsed into one another, and Katsuki fell.

He struck the ground hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.

For several seconds, he could do nothing but lie there, palms pressed against wet concrete, trying to understand why the air smelled like rain and dust instead of smoke and electricity. His ears rang. His body ached. Somewhere nearby, a bicycle bell chimed, followed by the distant sound of children shouting.

Katsuki pushed himself onto his knees.

The street was familiar.

Not in the vague way that cities often resembled one another, but in the unmistakable way of a place he had known so well that he could have walked it blindfolded. The narrow convenience store on the corner still had its faded yellow awning. The vending machine outside the pharmacy still stood crooked against the wall. Across the road, the old apartment building with the broken balcony railing had not yet been renovated.

He stared at it.

He knew this street.

He had walked it every day for years.

“No,” he whispered.

The word came out thin and unsteady, and he hated himself for it.

He looked down at his hands. His costume was intact, his gauntlets secured around his wrists, his utility belt sitting where it should. His body was the same one he had brought into the fight: taller than he had been at fifteen, broader through the shoulders, marked by the small scars and old injuries he had accumulated during training. He was still seventeen. He still had the power in his palms, the knowledge in his head, the memories of a life that had apparently ceased to exist around him. 

Katsuki stumbled to his feet and looked around for a clock. The convenience store’s display showed the date. For a moment, the numbers refused to make sense. He read them once, twice, and then a third time, as though the date might change if he looked at it long enough.

Two years into the past.

Two years before, Izuku Midoriya disappeared.

His mouth went dry.

He turned around.

He did not remember deciding to run. One moment he was standing in the street, staring at a date that should not have existed, and the next he was sprinting toward the place where he had spent his childhood, his boots striking the pavement with the heavy rhythm of a body that had been trained to fight. People turned to look at him. A woman called after him. He barely heard them.

He was going to find Izuku.

He did not know what he would say. He did not know whether this was a second chance or a trap, whether the villain had sent him here out of cruelty or for some purpose he had yet to understand. He did not know if the timeline could be changed, or whether he had already become part of the sequence of events that had led to Izuku’s disappearance.

He knew only that Izuku was alive.

At this point in time, Izuku was alive.

And for the first time in two years, Katsuki had a chance to tell him that he was sorry.

The Midoriya apartment building looked smaller than Katsuki remembered.

That was the first stupid thought that crossed his mind when he reached it, breathless and sweating beneath his costume. He had spent so many years imagining the places of his childhood exactly as they had been that he had forgotten how memory enlarged certain things, how a stairwell could become a mountain and a familiar front door could turn into the entrance to a world he could never return to. The building stood exactly where it always had, its pale walls streaked with rain, the entrance light flickering in the afternoon gloom.

He stood outside for nearly a minute before he could make himself move.

What if Izuku was not home?

What if Inko opened the door and saw a stranger in a hero costume, a grown-looking boy with her son’s face reflected in his eyes, and asked him what he wanted?

What if he saw Izuku and discovered that two years of guilt had taught him nothing about how to speak to the boy he had hurt?

Katsuki had fought villains who could level buildings. He had faced opponents whose Quirks could tear through concrete and whose intentions had been so cruel that even the sight of them made his hands itch to explode. He had stood in front of danger and moved toward it because he had finally learned that being a hero meant doing so even when fear was the only honest thing left inside him.

But standing in front of the Midoriya apartment door, he felt seventeen in the worst possible way.

He pressed the buzzer.

Footsteps sounded on the other side. A lock clicked, and the door opened.

Inko Midoriya looked up at him.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Her gaze moved over his costume, his gauntlets, the familiar shape of his face, and the small, pale scar near his jaw that he had acquired during his first year at U.A. Her expression shifted from surprise to uncertainty.

“Can I help you?”

Katsuki swallowed.

“Midoriya-san.”

She stiffened slightly at the sound of her name, as if she had been bracing for bad news for so long that even a stranger addressing her politely could make her afraid.

“Do you know Izuku?” she asked.

The question hurt more than it should have. Of course she had no reason to know who he was now. The boy she had once watched walk home beside her son was gone, replaced by a hero student whose face had grown sharper with age and whose voice no longer cracked when he shouted.

“Yes,” Katsuki said. “I knew him.”

Inko looked at him for a long time.

Then, very quietly, she said, “Did you come to see him?”

Katsuki’s heart lurched.

“He’s here?”

“He’s out at the moment.” She hesitated, glancing past him toward the street. “Are you a friend from school?”

The word friend settled between them like something fragile that neither of them dared touch.

Katsuki looked down.

“I was,” he said. “A long time ago.”

Inko’s face softened in a way that made him feel suddenly, unbearably ashamed. She stepped aside to let him into the apartment, and he followed her into a space that was so familiar it felt as though someone had opened his chest and placed his childhood inside it. The furniture was the same. The curtains were the same pale green. A stack of hero magazines sat on the low table beside a mug decorated with tiny smiling All Mights.

The apartment smelled like rice and laundry detergent.

Katsuki had forgotten that smell.

He had forgotten how ordinary the Midoriya home was, how warm it felt, how easily it had once been possible to walk inside without wondering whether he deserved to be there.

“Would you like something to drink?” Inko asked.

“No, thank you.”

She sat on the edge of the sofa, folding her hands in her lap. Katsuki remained standing because sitting down would have meant pretending he belonged there.

“You said you knew Izuku a long time ago,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you visiting before.”

“We used to go to school together.”

“Oh.” Her expression brightened a little, though the weariness beneath it never disappeared entirely. “Then you must have known him when he was younger. He used to talk about his classmates all the time.”

Katsuki looked at the floor.

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t talk about school much anymore.”

Something in her voice made him look up.

Inko was smiling, but it was the kind of smile people wore when they had grown accustomed to being careful with their own unhappiness. She had not yet reached the point where she could say that something was wrong without feeling guilty for thinking it. Katsuki remembered the way she used to apologise for Izuku’s existence, the way she had stood at the school gate with her shoulders drawn inward whenever someone complained about her son, as if she could somehow make herself smaller enough to compensate for the space he occupied.

He had once thought she was weak.

Now he understood that there were kinds of courage he had never bothered to recognise.

“Is he doing okay?” Katsuki asked.

Inko’s fingers tightened around each other.

“He’s doing well in school. His grades are good, and he’s been spending a lot of time studying.” She looked toward the hallway, where Izuku’s bedroom door stood closed. “He’s always been a thoughtful boy, but lately he seems… distracted. Sometimes I’ll be speaking to him, and he’ll look at me as though he’s listening to someone else.”

Katsuki’s blood cooled.

“Someone else?”

“I know it sounds strange.” She laughed softly, embarrassed by her own concern. “He says he’s thinking. He has a very active imagination, so I suppose I shouldn’t worry. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find the light under his door still on. When I ask him about it in the morning, he says he couldn’t sleep.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I just want him to be happy.”

Katsuki could not answer.

He had come here imagining that he would find the Izuku he remembered: lonely, frightened, perhaps a little more withdrawn than he had been before. He had expected to find a boy who needed help, someone whose suffering had begun to accumulate in ways Katsuki could recognise. He had expected to be able to look at him and understand what had happened, to identify the precise moment when everything had gone wrong and somehow reach back to stop it.

Instead, he was beginning to understand that he did not know nearly enough about the boy he had spent his childhood claiming to know better than anyone.

Inko stood to retrieve a glass of water, and Katsuki took the opportunity to look toward the hallway. A door stood slightly ajar at the end of it. Beyond the narrow gap, he could see the corner of a desk and the edge of a green notebook.

Izuku’s room.

He remembered sitting on that floor as a child, watching Izuku draw hero costumes and scribble down statistics while Katsuki complained about the characters he had chosen. He remembered the way Izuku had always made room for him, even when Katsuki had done nothing to deserve it.

He remembered the last time he had been there.

He had been six years old, angry because Izuku had followed him home after school, and he had thrown a toy at the wall so hard that it had broken. Inko had hurried out of the kitchen, apologising to Katsuki for the noise as though it had been his apartment and his property that had been damaged. Izuku had knelt to pick up the pieces while Katsuki stood there, waiting for him to say something.

Izuku had not said anything.

He had simply gathered the broken pieces and put them in a little box beneath his desk.

Katsuki had never asked what he planned to do with them.

“Would you like me to tell him you came by?” Inko asked when she returned.

“Yes,” Katsuki said. Then, after a moment, “Actually, could you tell me where he usually goes after school?”

Inko looked uncertain.

“Why?”

“Because I need to talk to him.”

She studied him, and Katsuki forced himself not to look away.

“Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” he said.

The honesty startled them both.

Katsuki drew a slow breath.

“I hurt him,” he continued. “A long time ago. I need to apologise.”

Inko’s face changed. Not dramatically, not with the sudden anger he might have deserved, but with the quiet understanding of someone who had spent years collecting fragments of a story and had just been handed one more piece.

“I see,” she said.

She gave him directions to the small park behind the shopping district, where Izuku sometimes went to read after school. Before Katsuki left, she touched his arm.

“Please be gentle with him,” she said.

The words were not an accusation.

That made them worse.

“I will,” Katsuki promised.

He meant it.

He would have promised anything.

The park was nearly empty when he arrived. A few children were playing on the climbing frame near the entrance, their voices rising and falling beneath the rustle of the trees. An elderly man sat on a bench feeding crumbs to a flock of sparrows. Beyond the playground, a narrow path led toward a quieter section of the park, where the trees grew close together and the city noise faded into a distant hum.

Katsuki walked slowly.

He had imagined this moment so many times that it no longer felt real. In his dreams, Izuku was always standing just beyond his reach, and no matter how quickly Katsuki moved, the distance between them never changed. He had spent two years trying to find the right words, constructing apologies in his head and tearing them apart because every version sounded too small for the harm he had done.

I’m sorry.

It was not enough.

I was a child.

That was an excuse.

I didn’t know what I was doing.

That was a lie.

He had known enough to understand that he was hurting Izuku. He had known enough to see the way the boy flinched when he raised his voice, the way his shoulders tightened whenever Katsuki approached him from behind, the way his smile sometimes vanished when Katsuki laughed. He had known, and he had continued, because being cruel had made him feel powerful and being powerful had seemed more important than being kind.

He could not undo any of it.

But he could tell the truth.

He could say that he had been wrong.

He could stop making Izuku carry the burden of pretending that their childhood had been something it was not.

At the end of the path, beneath the spreading branches of an old tree, a boy sat on a bench with a notebook open on his knees.

Green curls. Freckles. A school uniform that hung a little loosely around his shoulders.

Izuku.

Katsuki stopped walking.

For a moment, the world narrowed until there was nothing but the boy on the bench and the sound of his own heartbeat. He had seen Izuku in photographs, in dreams, in the faces of strangers who happened to have the same shade of green hair. He had imagined him older, imagined him in a hero costume, imagined him standing in a hospital corridor with tired eyes and a kind smile, imagined him anywhere except dead.

He had never imagined that seeing him alive would hurt.

Izuku looked up.

His expression changed as he took in Katsuki’s costume, his height, the unfamiliar scars on his hands. He closed his notebook carefully and placed it beside him.

“Can I help you?”

Katsuki tried to speak.

Nothing came out.

Izuku waited.

He was so small. That was the second stupid thought Katsuki had that day, and it was worse than the first because it came with the knowledge that he had once been smaller than this and had still managed to make another child afraid of him.

“Deku,” Katsuki said.

Izuku’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“I don’t know you.”

The words struck Katsuki harder than he expected.

Of course he did not know him. To Izuku, he was a stranger in a hero costume, a boy with a familiar face and an unfamiliar presence, someone who had approached him in a quiet park without explanation. Katsuki had been expecting recognition, though he had no right to expect it. He had wanted Izuku to look at him and remember something good, some remnant of the childhood friendship that had existed before Katsuki had poisoned it.

Instead, Izuku regarded him with the wary politeness he used for adults who approached him at school.

Katsuki swallowed.

“My name is Bakugou Katsuki.”

“I know that name.”

Katsuki went still.

Izuku’s expression remained mild, but something in his eyes had sharpened.

“Everyone at school knows it,” he continued. “You’re good at sports, and your Quirk is strong. You’re the one who always gets picked to demonstrate things in class.” He tilted his head. “But you’re not my friend. Not anymore…”

Katsuki felt something twist behind his ribs.

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

The honesty seemed to surprise Izuku. His gaze flicked over Katsuki’s face, searching for something, and Katsuki had the unsettling feeling that he was being examined rather than observed.

“Then why are you here?”

Because I hurt you.

Because I told you to die.

Because you disappeared, and I spent two years learning how to live with the possibility that the last thing you ever heard from me was a command to end your life.

Because I thought I knew you, and I was wrong.

Katsuki sat at the far end of the bench, leaving enough space between them that Izuku would not feel trapped. He kept his hands in his lap, palms turned upward, resisting the instinct to clench his fists.

“I came to apologise.”

Izuku blinked.

“For what?”

Katsuki stared at him.

There were a hundred answers, and all of them felt inadequate. He could have listed every insult, every time he had shoved Izuku aside or made him feel small, every occasion when he had used his Quirk to frighten him because he knew Izuku could not defend himself. He could have described the way he had treated their friendship as something he owned, something he could break and still expect to find waiting for him the next morning.

But an apology was not a confession designed to make the person offering it feel better. Katsuki had learned that much. It was not a performance, and it was not a request for forgiveness.

“I was cruel to you,” he said. “For years. I treated you like you were less than me because you didn’t have a Quirk, and I made you feel like you had to apologise for existing. I acted like being stronger meant I was better than you, and I used that to justify doing things I had no right to do.”

Izuku watched him without moving.

Katsuki’s throat tightened.

“I told myself I was just teasing you. That you were annoying, that you should have stopped following me around, that you made it easy because you never fought back. But that doesn’t make it your fault. You didn’t deserve any of it.”

He forced himself to look directly at Izuku.

“I’m sorry.”

The words fell between them, simple and terribly small.

Katsuki had imagined this moment with so much fear that he had forgotten how quiet it might be. There was no thunder, no sudden burst of light, no dramatic revelation that would make the past rearrange itself into something he could live with. There was only a boy on a park bench, a notebook lying beside him, and the distant laughter of children who had never heard of either of them.

Izuku looked down at his hands.

“You came all the way here to tell me that?”

“Yes.”

“Why now?”

Katsuki let out a breath that felt as though he had been holding it for years.

“Because I should have said it a long time ago.”

Izuku was quiet.

Then he asked, “Did something happen?”

Katsuki’s mouth went dry.

He could not tell him the truth. Not all of it. How could he explain that he had come from a future where Izuku was missing, where his mother had spent two years waiting for a son who would never come home, where Katsuki had become a hero while carrying the memory of a boy he had helped destroy? How could he tell him that, in his own timeline, the last time he had seen Izuku had been in the rain, and that he had never had the chance to take back the words he had spoken?

He did not know what would happen if he told Izuku about the future. He did not know whether the boy would believe him, whether he would be frightened, whether he would ask questions Katsuki could not answer without exposing things he had no right to reveal.

So he told him the truth that mattered.

“Something happened a long time ago,” Katsuki said. “I didn’t understand how bad it was until I couldn’t fix it anymore.”

Izuku looked at him for a long time.

“How bad was it?”

Katsuki’s hands tightened together.

“Bad enough that I still think about it every day.”

Something passed over Izuku’s face.

It was so quick that Katsuki might have missed it if he had not spent years watching him, if he had not become accustomed to searching for the smallest signs of pain in the boy he had once pretended not to understand. It was not surprise. It was not sadness.

It was recognition.

As though Katsuki had said something Izuku already knew.

“I see,” Izuku said.

Katsuki waited for him to say more.

He wanted anger. He wanted Izuku to call him a liar, to tell him that an apology did not erase years of cruelty, that saying sorry now did not make him a better person, that Katsuki had no right to come into his life and ask for anything. He wanted to be told that he had done something unforgivable, because at least then he would know where he stood.

Izuku only looked down at his hands.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Nothing,” Katsuki answered quickly. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Do you want me to forgive you?”

“No.”

The answer came out so fast that Izuku looked up.

Katsuki shook his head.

“No. I mean-” He struggled to find the words. “I want you to know I’m sorry. That’s all. You don’t owe me forgiveness. You don’t owe me anything.”

For the first time, Izuku smiled.

It was a small smile, almost shy, and it looked so much like the one Katsuki remembered from childhood that his chest ached.

“Thank you,” Izuku said.

Katsuki could not breathe for a moment.

He had not expected those words. He had not expected gratitude. He had certainly not expected to see the boy he had hurt look at him with something that resembled relief.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he managed.

“I know.” Izuku’s gaze drifted toward the notebook beside him. “But it’s nice to hear someone say they were wrong.”

Katsuki looked at him.

Izuku seemed to realise what he had said. His smile faded, and he reached for the notebook, running his thumb along its worn cover.

“People don’t usually apologise,” he said. “Not unless they want something.”

Katsuki felt a chill creep up his spine.

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“I believe you.”

The answer was immediate.

Too immediate.

Izuku looked back at him, and for one strange moment, Katsuki felt as though the boy had stepped away from the conversation without moving at all. His expression was still open, his posture still relaxed, but something behind his eyes had gone distant, focused on a point far beyond the park.

Then he blinked, and the moment passed.

“I’m glad you came,” Izuku said.

Katsuki wanted to ask why.

He wanted to ask whether he had been bullied by anyone else, whether school was all right, whether he had anyone to sit with at lunch, whether there were nights when he lay awake and wished he could become a different person. He wanted to ask why Inko had said he seemed distracted, why he sometimes looked as though he were listening to someone else, why a boy who had once clung to the possibility of becoming a hero now spoke about apologies as though they were rare objects that people hoarded.

But he had promised himself that he would not turn this conversation into something Izuku had to endure for his sake.

So he stood.

“I should go.”

Izuku looked up at him.

“Already?”

Katsuki hesitated.

“I’ve got somewhere to be.”

It was a lie, but a harmless one, he hoped. He had no idea where he was supposed to go. He did not know whether he could return to his own time, whether the villain who had sent him here would find him again, whether the timeline would allow him to remain. He knew only that he had said what he came to say, and for the first time in two years, the memory of Izuku’s face was not quite so painful to hold.

He had apologised.

He had looked at the boy he had hurt and told him the truth.

It was not enough to undo anything. It was not enough to make them friends again, or to change the past, or to bring back the life Izuku might have had if Katsuki had been kinder.

But it was something.

And for now, Katsuki thought, something would have to be enough.

“Take care of yourself, Deku.”

Izuku’s smile returned.

“You too, Kacchan.”

The nickname stopped Katsuki halfway through his first step.

For a moment, he was six years old again, standing in a sunlit playground while Izuku ran after him with scraped knees and a grin so wide that it seemed to make the whole world brighter. He remembered the first time Izuku had called him that, the way the name had sounded like a promise between them, something warm and private that belonged to a time before they had learned how to hurt each other.

He turned back.

Izuku was watching him.

Katsuki’s throat tightened.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah. You too.”

He turned away before the boy could see his face.

He had taken perhaps three steps when he heard Izuku speak again.

“Kacchan?”

Katsuki stopped.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

He turned, already smiling despite himself.

“Sure.”

Izuku had risen from the bench. The notebook was tucked beneath one arm, and he stood beneath the tree with his head tilted slightly to one side, looking so young that Katsuki felt a sudden, fierce urge to protect him from everything he had ever done.

“Do you think people can change?” Izuku asked.

Katsuki considered the question.

He thought of the person he had been at twelve, the boy who had mistaken fear for respect and cruelty for confidence. He thought of the person he had become, of the people who had stayed beside him long enough to help him understand that strength meant nothing if he used it to make other people smaller. He thought of the years he had spent trying to become someone Izuku would not have been afraid of.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Izuku smiled again.

“That’s good.”

Something about the way he said it made Katsuki hesitate.

“What about you?” Katsuki asked before he could stop himself. “Do you think you can change?”

Izuku’s expression did not shift.

“I think people change all the time.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” Izuku agreed. “It isn’t.”

The wind stirred the leaves overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn sounded, and a child shouted for his mother.

Izuku looked at Katsuki with the same quiet attention he had shown throughout their conversation.

“I think people can become whatever they need to become,” he said. “Sometimes they do it slowly. Sometimes they have to learn from someone who has already made the mistakes they’re about to make.”

Katsuki frowned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you should go home, Kacchan.”

There was something so gentle in the words that Katsuki did not question them. He gave Izuku one last nod and turned away.

He did not see the expression that settled over Izuku’s face once his back was turned.

He did not see the way the boy’s smile vanished, leaving behind something still and watchful.

He did not see Izuku reach into his pocket and touch the small, dark object he had been carrying all afternoon.

And he did not see the boy’s lips move as he whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The first blow struck between Katsuki’s shoulder blades.

For a fraction of a second, he thought he had been shot.

He stumbled forward, his body reacting before his mind had time to understand what had happened. Pain flared through his back and spread across his chest, sharp enough to steal the breath from his lungs. He reached instinctively for his palms, trying to summon an explosion, but his fingers slipped against the concrete as his knees buckled.

He heard footsteps behind him.

Then Izuku’s voice, close enough that it seemed to come from inside his own head.

“You always did turn your back too easily.”

Katsuki tried to move.

A second strike came before he could turn around.

He collapsed against the path, one hand clawing at the ground, the other pressed against his chest. His body felt distant and uncooperative, his thoughts coming apart beneath the weight of a pain he could not fight his way through. He tried to draw a breath and found that his lungs would not obey him.

The world narrowed.

He turned his head.

Izuku stood over him, the small knife held steadily in one hand. There was no anger on his face, no wildness, no expression of someone who had lost control. He looked exactly as he had moments earlier: quiet, composed, almost apologetic.

That was what frightened Katsuki most.

“Deku,” he tried to say.

His voice came out broken.

Izuku crouched beside him.

“I know,” he said softly. “You have a lot of questions.”

Katsuki stared at him.

He tried to understand. He tried to fit the boy in front of him into the shape of the Izuku he remembered, the child who had once shared his lunch and followed him home and looked at him as though he were the most extraordinary person in the world. He tried to understand how the same hands that had once held a notebook against a small chest could now hold a knife without trembling.

He tried to understand why.

Izuku watched him struggle.

“I did mean it,” he said. “I’m glad you came.”

Katsuki’s fingers curled against the ground.

“Why?”

It was barely a sound, but Izuku heard it.

For a moment, the boy looked almost sad.

“Because I wanted to know whether you would apologise.”

Katsuki’s thoughts stuttered.

“What?”

“I’ve wondered about it for a long time.” Izuku glanced down at the knife, then back at Katsuki. “You were always so certain you were right. You were so angry whenever I did something you didn’t understand. I wanted to know if there would ever come a day when you could look at me and admit that you were wrong.”

He paused.

“You did.”

Katsuki could not make sense of the words.

“You-” He coughed, struggling for breath. “You asked-”

“I didn’t ask you to come here.”

Izuku’s voice remained gentle.

“I didn’t ask you to apologise. You chose to do that yourself.”

He tilted his head, considering Katsuki with a strange, almost scholarly interest.

“That’s important, I think. It means you can change.”

Katsuki tried to reach for him.

Izuku moved out of reach.

“I’m sorry,” Katsuki rasped.

“I know.”

“Please-”

“I know, Kacchan.”

The nickname sounded wrong now. It was the same word Izuku had used on the playground, the same word Katsuki had heard in a thousand childhood memories, but stripped of the affection he had once believed it carried. Izuku said it with the familiarity of someone speaking to a person he had known for a very long time, and the tenderness of someone who had already made peace with what he was about to do.

Katsuki felt the ground tilt beneath him.

He understood, suddenly, that the apology had never been a beginning.

It had been the end.

Izuku had allowed him to speak because he wanted to hear what he would say. He had let him believe that something might be repaired, that the past might offer a small mercy after all these years. He had given Katsuki exactly what he had spent two years wishing for: the chance to look at him and say he was sorry.

And now he was taking it away.

Not the apology itself. Katsuki could not unsay those words, and Izuku could not make them untrue.

He was taking away everything that might have come afterward.

The chance to see Izuku grow older. The chance to learn who he became. The chance to return to U.A. and tell Kirishima about the boy he had found, to tell Aizawa that he had finally said the thing he should have said years ago, to stand in front of his classmates and admit that the person he had been was not the person he wanted to remain.

The chance to say goodbye.

Katsuki’s eyes widened.

His classmates.

Kirishima would be waiting at the agency, probably annoyed that Katsuki had disappeared without warning. Kaminari would make a joke about him being late. Todoroki would ask where he had gone, and Aizawa would call him an idiot with the tired certainty of a man who had spent two years trying to teach him not to run headfirst into danger.

They would be looking for him.

They would search the station. They would interview the witnesses. They would look for a body, for blood, for some indication of where he had gone. They would find nothing, because Katsuki had not been killed in their world. He had been removed from it.

No one would know.

No one would know that he had found Izuku alive.

No one would know that he had apologised.

No one would know that the boy he had spent two years mourning had looked him in the eyes and killed him.

The thought hurt more than anything else.

He had spent so long believing that he had failed Izuku by leaving him alone, and now he was going to leave everyone else without even the courtesy of a final word.

He tried to speak, to tell Izuku that there were people who would miss him, people who would search for him, people who would spend years wondering what had happened. He tried to tell him that whatever he had become, he did not have to keep becoming it, that there were still choices left to make.

But his body was failing him.

His breath came in shallow, uneven pulls. The park blurred around the edges, the trees dissolving into smudges of green and grey. He could hear children playing somewhere beyond the path, their voices bright and ordinary, untouched by the terrible thing unfolding beneath the old tree.

Izuku watched him with an expression Katsuki could not decipher.

“Do you know what I learned?” he asked.

Katsuki could not answer.

“When people disappear, everyone wants a reason. They want a story they can understand, something with a beginning and an end, something that tells them what went wrong and who should have stopped it.”

Izuku’s gaze drifted toward the park entrance.

“They’ll look at you and think about what happened to you. They’ll wonder whether you were attacked, whether you ran away, whether someone wanted revenge. They’ll look at your life and try to find the moment when you became someone who could disappear.”

He looked back at Katsuki.

“They’ll be looking in the wrong place.”

Katsuki felt a coldness spread through him.

“What did you-”

“Nothing you need to worry about anymore.”

Izuku reached out and brushed a damp curl away from Katsuki’s forehead.

The gesture was so gentle that, for one terrible moment, Katsuki remembered being a child and falling asleep on the Midoriya sofa after a long afternoon of playing. He remembered waking to find Inko had placed a blanket over him, while Izuku sat cross-legged on the floor beside the couch, drawing heroes in a notebook. He remembered the way Izuku had looked up and smiled when Katsuki stirred, as though Katsuki had never done anything wrong in his life.

The memory was so vivid that Katsuki wanted to scream.

“Deku,” he whispered.

Izuku’s hand stilled.

Katsuki tried to hold his gaze.

“You don’t have to…”

He could not finish the sentence.

He did not know what he meant. He did not know whether he was asking Izuku to stop, or to live, or to tell him that some part of the boy he remembered was still there. He did not know whether he was trying to save Izuku or himself.

Perhaps there was no difference anymore.

Izuku’s expression softened.

“I know,” he said.

Then he withdrew his hand.

Katsuki watched him stand, watched him put the knife away, watched him look down the path to make sure no one was coming. The boy moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had rehearsed every step. He did not appear frightened. He did not appear exhilarated. He did not appear to be struggling with a decision.

He looked like someone finishing a task.

Katsuki’s vision dimmed.

He thought of Kirishima’s laugh, loud and bright and impossible to ignore. He thought of Kaminari leaning over his shoulder to look at his phone, of Todoroki silently offering him half a convenience-store dessert because he had noticed Katsuki had skipped lunch, of Aizawa standing in the training field with his capture weapon draped around his shoulders, telling him that talent was no excuse for carelessness.

He thought of his mother, who would call him an idiot and then hold him so tightly that he would have to pretend to complain.

He thought of Izuku.

He had wanted to save him.

He had wanted to tell him that he was sorry, that he was wrong, that he had spent two years trying to become someone who would never again make another person feel as small as he had made Izuku feel. He had wanted to offer him a future in which the boy could become anything he wished, even if it was nothing like the dream he had carried as a child.

He had wanted to give him back the chance to choose.

But Izuku had already chosen.

And Katsuki, for all his strength, for all the years he had spent learning to fight, for all the power that had made him the strongest boy in his class, could do nothing to change it.

His last clear thought was not of the knife, or the pain, or the fact that he was dying in a world that had never been his.

It was of the rain.

Of a school gate.

Of a boy with green hair turning away from him, and the terrible, unforgivable words Katsuki had thrown after him because he had been too young and too proud to understand what they might mean.

Go jump off the roof.

He had spent two years wishing he could take them back.

Now, as the world faded, he understood that he had been given the chance to apologise, but not the chance to undo what he had done.

Those were different things.

He had mistaken one for the other.

The last thing Katsuki saw was Izuku’s face, calm and terribly young, looking down at him with an expression that might have been pity.

Then the boy turned away.

And Katsuki Bakugou died without anyone knowing where he had gone.

For a little while, Izuku remained beside the path.

He watched until Katsuki stopped moving, until the silence settled into the space between the trees and the distant sounds of the park returned to their ordinary rhythm. He did not kneel beside the body again. He did not reach out to check whether there was anything left to be done. He knew what death looked like, and he had known what he was doing long before he had ever taken the knife from his pocket.

Still, he felt compelled to wait.

He had been told to wait.

Not by the boy who had just died, but by someone who had lived long enough to understand how easily people mistook the end of a thing for the end of its consequences.

Don't leave until you're certain, the voice had told him.

So Izuku waited.

The leaves shifted overhead. A sparrow landed on the path near Katsuki's hand, pecked once at the ground, and flew away. Somewhere beyond the trees, a child laughed so hard that he began to cough. The world continued without acknowledging that anything had changed.

After several minutes, Izuku crouched and took Katsuki's phone from his utility belt.

The screen lit up beneath his thumb. There were missed calls already, notifications from the group chat Katsuki shared with his classmates, and a message from Kirishima asking whether he had reached the agency. Izuku read the name, then the message, with the careful attention of someone examining a document he intended to memorise.

He did not reply.

Instead, he switched the phone off and placed it in his pocket.

Then he looked at Katsuki one last time.

“You really did change,” he murmured.

There was no satisfaction in the words. No triumph. If anything, he sounded disappointed by a result he had anticipated but still wished had been different.

“You just didn't change soon enough.”

He stood, picked up his schoolbag from where he had left it beneath the bench, and walked toward the park entrance. He did not look back.

By the time he reached the main road, he was once again an ordinary middle-school boy on his way home. His uniform was neat, his notebook tucked under one arm, his expression mild enough that a passer-by might have mistaken him for a child who had spent the afternoon studying. He stopped at the convenience store to buy a bottle of tea for his mother. He thanked the cashier. He waited for the pedestrian signal.

When he reached the apartment, Inko was preparing dinner.

“Welcome home, Izuku.”

“I'm home, Mom.”

She turned, smiling at the sight of him. “Did you have a good afternoon?”

Izuku set the tea on the counter.

“Yes,” he said. “I talked to someone.”

“Oh? A friend?”

He considered the question.

“No. Not exactly.”

Inko glanced at him, but he was already washing his hands, humming softly beneath the running water. She asked him to set the table, and he did. They ate together. She told him about a neighbour who had adopted a cat, and he listened, asking questions at the right moments. When she mentioned that the weather might clear by the weekend, he agreed that it would be nice to have some sunshine.

He was polite. He was helpful. He kissed her cheek before going to his room.

And when she asked whether he would be staying up late again, he promised he would try not to.

That night, after the apartment had gone quiet, Izuku opened the notebook on his desk.

The pages were filled with handwriting that looked almost exactly like his own.

Almost.

Some entries were written in a childish, rounded script, with little sketches in the margins and hero statistics copied from magazines. Others were cramped and hurried, the ink pressed so deeply into the paper that it had left grooves on the pages beneath. A few were written in a hand so precise that the letters looked printed rather than formed, every line carefully measured, every word chosen with the certainty of someone who had long ago stopped needing to guess.

There were dates beside the entries.

Some of them had not happened yet.

Izuku turned to a blank page near the back and wrote:

Bakugou Katsuki came to see me today.

He paused, tapping the pen against the paper.

Then he continued.

He apologised. He meant it.

For a moment, he stared at the words.

He had expected the apology. He had known, from the versions of himself who had lived through other possibilities, that there was a chance Katsuki would come to him with regret in his eyes and a voice that had learned to be gentle. He had known that the boy who had once hurt him would grow up, that he would learn to understand what he had done, that he would become the kind of person who might kneel beside a stranger and offer help without expecting anything in return.

He had known all of this.

And still, hearing the apology had felt different.

Izuku had spent much of his life listening to people explain who he was. His teachers called him clever but impractical. His classmates called him useless. Adults spoke about his Quirklessness with the careful, pitying voices they used for things they believed could not be changed. Katsuki had called him Deku, and for years Izuku had carried the name like a wound, then later like a joke, then finally like something he could choose to redefine.

But the voices in his head had never called him useless.

They had called him many things. They had told him he was patient, that he was observant, that he was capable of becoming something far more interesting than the world expected. They had taught him how to recognise a lie, how to understand a person's habits, how to make himself appear harmless, how to find the small, unguarded spaces in other people's lives where a secret could be placed and allowed to grow.

They had never pitied him.

They had never asked him to become someone else.

And sometimes, in the quiet hours when his mother slept and the city outside his window was dark, Izuku wondered whether that was why he had begun to prefer them.

He set down the pen.

The room was silent.

Then a voice spoke from the other side of his thoughts.

You should have asked him more questions.

Izuku closed his eyes.

“I asked enough.”

You wanted him to say he was sorry.

“I wanted to know if he could.”

And now you know.

Izuku opened his eyes again.

The voice was his own. It always was. There were no ghosts in his room, no spirits following him through the corridors, no strange men whispering from behind the walls. The voices came from the same place as his thoughts, and yet they did not belong to the version of himself who sat at the desk. They carried memories he did not possess, knowledge he had not yet earned, and beliefs that had hardened over years he had not lived.

His Quirk had first manifested when he was eleven.

The doctors had told his mother that he was Quirkless when he was four. They had examined the small joint in his little toe, looked at the results, and explained that he lacked the biological marker most commonly associated with Quirk development. Inko had cried. Izuku had cried because she was crying. The doctor had spoken gently about statistics and exceptions, and the world had gone on as though a door had closed.

For years, Izuku believed that was the end of the story.

Then, one evening, while studying for a test, he heard someone say his name.

He had looked up from his notebook, expecting his mother to be standing in the doorway.

No one was there.

He had checked the hallway. He had searched the apartment. He had asked Inko whether she had called him, and she had looked at him with mild confusion.

He had returned to his desk.

Izuku.

The voice had been so familiar that he had not been frightened at first. It sounded like his own voice, only older, lower, worn by an exhaustion that did not belong to an eleven-year-old boy.

He had looked around the room.

“Who's there?”

It's me.

Izuku had laughed nervously.

“That's not funny.”

I know.

The voice had told him to open his notebook to a blank page and write down the date. Then it had asked him what he remembered about his first day of school, the name of his first teacher, the colour of the lunchbox he had carried, the first time Katsuki had called him Deku.

Izuku had answered, growing increasingly unsettled.

The voice had answered every question he asked in return.

It knew the details of his life because it was him.

Not a recording, not an imaginary friend, not a person who had been watching him from somewhere beyond the walls. It was a version of himself who had lived through a different sequence of events, a person who existed at another point in the vast, branching collection of possibilities that made up his life.

His Quirk did not move him through time. It did not allow him to step into another world or reach into the past and alter what had happened. It simply let him speak with other versions of himself, each one connected to a different history, a different chain of choices, a different future.

At first, the voices had been gentle.

They told him that he was not alone. They told him that being Quirkless did not mean he was powerless. They told him that there were things he could do, things he could learn, ways to make the world take him seriously without needing the kind of strength everyone else seemed to possess.

Some of them had become heroes.

Some had abandoned the dream.

Some had discovered that they did not want to save the world at all.

And some had become villains.

Izuku had learned to distinguish between them. He knew the bright, idealistic version who still believed that a smile could save anyone. He knew the older version who had become a hero and spent years trying to reconcile his childhood dreams with the compromises of adult life. He knew the bitter version who had watched every door close and decided that the world deserved nothing from him. He knew the one who had learned how to survive in places where the law did not reach, and the one who had discovered how to make the law look away.

He knew versions of himself who had done things he could scarcely imagine.

He knew versions of himself who had done things he had already begun to consider.

And he knew that, no matter how different their lives were, every one of them had started as a boy who wanted to be a hero.

That was the most unsettling part.

They had not been born with their choices already made. They had arrived at them by different roads, each one convinced at some point that there was no other way forward. Some had been guided by kindness. Some by fear. Some by anger, some by desperation, some by the simple, quiet discovery that the world was easier to navigate when they stopped expecting people to be good.

Izuku had listened to all of them.

He had asked questions.

He had learned.

When Katsuki bullied him, the voices had told him that he did not need to endure it forever. When the other children laughed at him, they told him that humiliation could become information if he learned to pay attention. When adults looked at him with pity, they told him that pity was a kind of power, and that people who felt sorry for you rarely noticed what you were doing while they were busy deciding what you needed.

When All Might told him that he could not become a hero without a Quirk, the voices did not comfort him.

They asked him what he had expected.

They asked him why he had trusted a stranger's opinion of his future more than his own understanding of the world.

They asked him whether he wanted to be a hero because he wanted to save people, or because he wanted to be the sort of person people could never laugh at again.

Izuku had not known how to answer.

The voices had not forced him to.

They had simply waited.

He had spent years believing that the voices were a gift, proof that there was something special about him after all. He had also spent years wondering whether the Quirk had changed him, whether he would have become the same person without it, whether the boy he might have been had been lost somewhere among all the versions of himself who spoke to him at night.

He had never found an answer.

The voices disagreed with one another too often for any one of them to be trusted completely. One told him that he had a choice. Another told him that every choice had already been made by someone else. One begged him not to become a monster. Another laughed at the idea that there was any meaningful difference between a monster and a person who had finally stopped pretending.

And all of them were him.

That was the part he could never escape.

He turned back to the notebook and wrote one final sentence beneath the entry about Katsuki.

He was kinder than I expected.

He stared at the words for a long time.

Then, slowly, he crossed them out.

They were not quite true.

Katsuki had been kind today. He had been honest, and he had tried to take responsibility for the harm he had done. He had come to Izuku without asking for forgiveness, without insisting that his remorse deserved to be rewarded. He had done something that the boy Izuku remembered would never have done.

But kindness was not the same as innocence.

And a good apology could not undo a bad life.

Izuku closed the notebook.

From somewhere deep within his thoughts, the older voice spoke again.

Are you satisfied?

Izuku leaned back in his chair.

“No.”

Then why did you do it?

He looked toward the window. The glass reflected his face back at him, a boy with green hair and freckles, a boy who had been told he was powerless and had spent his life proving that the world had misunderstood him.

“Because I wanted to know whether he would change.”

And did he?

Izuku thought of Katsuki's face when he had said he was sorry. He thought of the way the boy had sat at the far end of the bench, leaving him room to move away. He thought of the careful honesty in his voice, the way he had refused to ask for forgiveness even when it was clear that he wanted it.

“Yes,” Izuku said.

The voice was silent for a moment.

Then you have your answer.

Izuku closed his eyes.

“No,” he said softly. “I have one answer.”

He could still hear the other voices, farther away now, murmuring among themselves. They were never truly silent. They were simply more or less interested in speaking, depending on the choices he made and the choices he had yet to make.

One of them had once told him that the worst thing about becoming a villain was that, eventually, the word stopped sounding like an accusation.

Another had told him that there was no point in being frightened of a future he had already chosen.

A third had said that he should never trust any version of himself who claimed to know what was best for him.

Izuku had found that one particularly amusing.

He opened his eyes and reached for his pen.

On the next page, he wrote the date.

Then he began a new list.

Not of heroes, or Quirks, or the weaknesses of people who might one day stand in his way.

He wrote down the names of the people who would come looking for Katsuki Bakugou.

Kirishima Eijirou.

Kaminari Denki.

Todoroki Shouto.

Sero Hanta.

Aizawa Shouta.

He added the names of the others in Katsuki's class, one by one, drawing a neat line beneath each entry. Beside every name, he wrote a few notes: the sort of questions they would ask, the people they would contact, the places they would search. He wrote down what he knew about their habits, their relationships, the ways they might react to the disappearance of someone they loved.

He did not write any of it with anger.

He wrote it because he needed to understand what would happen next.

And because, somewhere in another timeline, a version of himself had already told him.

The hardest part is not killing someone, that version had said. The hardest part is allowing everyone else to continue loving them.

Izuku had not understood it at the time.

He was beginning to.

The first person to realise that Katsuki was missing was Kirishima.

It happened at 4:17 p.m., while he was standing outside the agency with his costume jacket tied around his waist and a half-finished bottle of water in his hand. Katsuki was late. That was unusual enough to be irritating, but not unusual enough to be frightening. He had a habit of wandering off when he thought he had noticed something important, and Kirishima had long ago learned that attempting to predict his friend's movements was a form of self-inflicted misery.

He sent a message.

Where the hell are you?

No response.

He called.

The phone rang until the call went to voicemail.

Kirishima frowned, glancing toward the street. Their supervising hero had finished the afternoon briefing ten minutes earlier, and the others were beginning to gather their things. Kaminari was complaining about how tired he was. Sero had already changed out of his costume. Todoroki stood beside the agency entrance, reading a message on his phone.

“Have you seen Bakugou?” Kirishima asked.

Kaminari looked up.

“Wasn't he with you?”

“No. I thought he was with you.”

“Why would he be with me?”

“I don't know, man. You two were arguing about something on the train.”

“That was because he said my tactical analysis was stupid.”

“It was stupid,” Todoroki said without looking up.

Kaminari stared at him. “You're supposed to be on my side.”

“I am on the side of accuracy.”

Kirishima barely heard them. He called Katsuki again, then checked the group chat, then sent another message. The little notification remained unread.

Something cold began to settle in his stomach.

He found Lifeline inside the agency, speaking with another hero about a report from the commercial district. She stopped when she saw his expression.

“What's wrong?”

“Bakugou's missing.”

The words sounded ridiculous. Katsuki was seventeen, not seven. He was capable of taking care of himself, and he was more than capable of surviving a few hours without someone watching over him. Kirishima knew that. He had spent enough time training beside him to know exactly how dangerous Katsuki could be when he was focused.

But there was a difference between Katsuki being late and Katsuki vanishing without a word.

Lifeline's expression changed.

“When did you last see him?”

“On the train. We got to the station together, and then…” Kirishima stopped. He remembered the lights going out, the strange distortion in the air, the masked man stepping out of the shadows. He remembered Katsuki launching himself toward the villain, and the way the world had seemed to fold around him.

His stomach dropped.

“The attack,” he said.

Lifeline was already moving.

They returned to the station with the police. The platform had been cleared, and the damaged section of ceiling had been cordoned off. Witnesses were still being interviewed. The screens had returned to normal, displaying train schedules and advertisements as though nothing had happened.

There was no sign of Katsuki.

They found fragments of his gauntlet near the far end of the platform, though the damage was too slight to explain his disappearance. They found scorch marks on the wall where one of his explosions had struck. They found a security recording of the moment the villain appeared, but the footage distorted whenever anyone attempted to enlarge the image.

They found nothing that explained where Katsuki had gone.

For three hours, Kirishima refused to leave.

He called Katsuki's mother. He called the U.A. staff. He called every number he could think of, and each time he explained what had happened, he heard his own voice growing thinner, more desperate, less like the voice of someone who believed that his friend would come back.

Mitsuki Bakugou arrived at the station just after seven.

She was still wearing her work clothes, her hair tied back in a hurry, her face pale with an anger so sharp that Kirishima could barely look at her. Masaru followed close behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder.

“Where is he?” Mitsuki demanded.

No one answered.

She turned toward Kirishima.

“You were with him.”

Kirishima swallowed.

“Yes.”

“Then where is my son?”

He had no answer.

Mitsuki stared at him, and for a moment, Kirishima thought she might strike him. Instead, she pressed a hand over her mouth and turned away, her shoulders shaking once before she forced herself still.

Aizawa arrived shortly afterward.

He listened to the report without interrupting, his expression growing more severe with every detail. When Kirishima finished, Aizawa asked for the security footage, the witness statements, and the precise location where Katsuki had last been seen.

Then he asked one question.

“Did Bakugou seem different today?”

Kirishima hesitated.

He thought of the train ride, of Katsuki staring out the window with his jaw clenched and his hands folded tightly in his lap. He thought of the way he had looked when the lights went out, the sudden focus in his eyes, the way he had moved toward the villain without hesitation.

“No,” Kirishima said, then stopped.

He had been about to say that Katsuki had seemed normal, but that was not entirely true. Katsuki had seemed distracted. He had been quiet in a way that was unusual even for him, and when Kirishima had nudged his knee, Katsuki had looked at him as though he had forgotten where he was.

But that was not the sort of thing that mattered in a missing-person report.

“Maybe,” Kirishima admitted. “He seemed like he had something on his mind.”

Aizawa's gaze sharpened.

“Did he tell you what it was?”

“No.”

The answer seemed to settle over the room.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then Aizawa turned toward the police officer standing beside the door.

“Expand the search radius. Check every camera within five kilometres of the station, including private security systems. I want a full analysis of the spatial distortion and a list of every known Quirk that could have produced it.”

He looked at Kirishima.

“And you are going home.”

Kirishima stared at him.

“What?”

“You've been here for three hours. You're exhausted, and you won't be any use to anyone if you collapse.” Aizawa's voice was firm, but not unkind. “We will find him.”

Kirishima wanted to believe him.

He wanted to believe it so badly that he nodded.

He went home, but he did not sleep.

None of them slept much that night.

Kaminari stayed awake until sunrise, scrolling through old messages and sending new ones that remained unanswered. Todoroki reviewed the footage until his eyes hurt. Sero visited the station the following morning and asked the officers to let him help search the surrounding streets. Kirishima returned to U.A. only because Aizawa ordered him to attend class, and even then he spent the entire morning staring at the empty seat beside him.

The school opened an investigation.

The police opened another.

The Commission became involved when the details of the attack reached the news, and the disappearance of a promising young hero student became a story that attracted more attention than anyone wanted. Reporters gathered outside U.A. asking questions about the masked villain, about the safety of work-study placements, about whether the students had been adequately protected.

Katsuki's name appeared in the headlines.

U.A. STUDENT MISSING AFTER VILLAIN ATTACK.

BAKUGOU KATSUKI: HERO COURSE SECOND-YEAR STILL UNACCOUNTED FOR.

POLICE INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE QUIRK-RELATED ABDUCTION.

Mitsuki refused to speak to the press.

Masaru asked them to leave her alone.

Aizawa stopped answering questions that had already been answered three times.

And Kirishima began to understand what it meant to love someone who had disappeared without leaving a body behind.

There was nowhere to put the grief.

No funeral. No grave. No final moment in which someone could stand beside a coffin and say the things they had not said while the person was alive. There was only an empty seat, an unanswered phone, and the persistent, humiliating hope that every time the door opened, Katsuki would walk through it with an annoyed expression and complain about how everyone was making such a big deal out of nothing.

For months, Kirishima kept a spare key to Katsuki's apartment on his keyring.

He told himself it was practical. Someone needed to check the place, to water the plants Mitsuki had left on the windowsill, to make sure the mail did not pile up. But the truth was that he could not bring himself to remove it. As long as he carried the key, there was still a part of him that believed Katsuki might return and need somewhere to go.

He did not know that Katsuki was already dead.

He did not know that, in another version of the city, a boy with green hair had gone home for dinner after killing him.

And he did not know that the villain responsible for the attack had never intended to bring Katsuki back.

The man in the black coat was called Kurose by the people who knew him, though it was not the name he had been born with. His Quirk allowed him to manipulate the connections between timelines, creating temporary passages through the spaces where different histories touched. He could not travel freely through time, and he could not choose every destination with perfect precision. The power was dangerous, exhausting, and difficult to control.

But he had learned to use it.

He had learned that every person existed in a multitude of possible lives, and that certain people seemed to leave deeper impressions on the structure of those lives than others. Some choices echoed. Some relationships appeared again and again, even when the details changed. Some people found one another in nearly every world, as though the universe had developed a habit it could not quite break.

Izuku Midoriya was one of those people.

Kurose had met him in a world where the boy had never become a hero.

He had met him in a world where Izuku had become a doctor, a detective, a teacher, a revolutionary, a criminal, a man who lived quietly in a small apartment and never spoke about his childhood. He had met versions of Izuku who had saved thousands of people and versions who had ruined hundreds of lives. He had met a version who had spent decades trying to repair the damage he had caused, and another who had decided that the damage was the point.

They were all recognisably the same person.

That was what frightened Kurose.

He had expected the differences between timelines to produce different people. Instead, he had found the same mind shaped by different experiences, the same stubborn curiosity, the same ability to notice things other people overlooked. The same capacity for kindness. The same capacity for cruelty.

The first Izuku he had befriended had been a young man with tired eyes and a scar across his cheek. He had rescued Kurose from a group of men who had been trying to kill him, then sat beside him on the floor of an abandoned warehouse and asked whether he could help with anything.

Kurose had laughed.

“You don't even know me.”

“I know you're hurt.”

“That isn't the same thing.”

“No,” Izuku had agreed. “It isn't.”

He had helped anyway.

Kurose had never forgotten it.

The Izuku who eventually became his closest friend was not that version. He was younger, quieter, and far more unsettling in the way he watched the world. He did not ask Kurose to explain the things he had done. He did not tell him that he could change, or that he was better than his worst mistake. He listened when Kurose spoke, and when he offered advice, he did so without pretending that he knew what it was like to be anyone other than himself.

They became friends in the way people sometimes did when neither of them had much use for the lies that passed between strangers.

Kurose knew that Izuku had a Quirk. He knew that it allowed him to communicate with versions of himself across timelines, and he knew that the boy had been speaking with those versions since he was eleven. He knew that some of those versions were villains, and that they had taught the younger Izuku things no child should have needed to learn.

He also knew that the boy had never asked them to make his choices for him.

They had offered possibilities. They had offered warnings. They had told him what happened when they made certain decisions, and what they regretted, and what they had never regretted at all.

Izuku had listened.

Then he had chosen.

That was why Kurose had agreed to help him.

Not because he believed Izuku was innocent. Not because he thought the boy had been made cruel by bullying or that All Might's rejection had created the person he had become. Those things had hurt Izuku, but they had not been the beginning of his villainy. The beginning had been quieter, harder to locate, hidden beneath the ordinary life of a boy who had learned early that people preferred stories that made them feel comfortable.

The world wanted to believe that Izuku had become dangerous because Katsuki had bullied him.

It wanted to believe that All Might had crushed his dreams and turned a hopeful child into something bitter.

It wanted to believe that the villain had been created by the cruelty of others, because then the world could condemn the cruelty and imagine that it had understood the villain.

Izuku had always known that.

He had known how easily people accepted a simple explanation when the truth required them to look more closely at themselves. He had learned that a person could be underestimated not only because others failed to recognise their strength, but because others needed them to be weak.

Kurose had asked him once whether he hated Katsuki.

Izuku had considered the question for a long time.

“No,” he had said at last. “I don't think I do.”

“Then why do you want him dead?”

“Because I want to know what happens when he gets everything he thinks he deserves.”

Kurose had frowned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I want to see what he does with a second chance.”

“And if he uses it well?”

Izuku had looked at him.

“Then I'll know he was capable of being better.”

Kurose had waited.

“And if he doesn't?”

Izuku had smiled, and Kurose had felt the first real unease of their friendship.

“Then I'll know I was right.”

Kurose had not liked the answer.

He had helped anyway.

The attack at the station had been planned for months. The work-study placement had been selected because Katsuki would be there, because his classmates would be close enough to witness the disappearance, and because the distortion created by Kurose's Quirk could be disguised as collateral damage from a villain attack. The destination had been chosen with help from Izuku's other selves, who had spent years studying the patterns of their own lives.

They had selected a point in the past where Katsuki would be old enough to understand what he had done, but young enough that Izuku could still be the one who received his apology.

They had selected a quiet afternoon.

They had selected a place where the body could remain undiscovered.

And they had selected the exact moment when Katsuki would turn away.

Kurose had not been present in the park. He had remained in the original timeline, waiting for the passage to close. He had known that the return path would not open again. He had known that Katsuki would not come back.

He had also known that, once the passage closed, there would be no way to prove what had happened.

When he returned to the place where the attack had taken place, he found the others searching the station and the surrounding streets. He watched them from a distance, his mask tucked into the pocket of his coat, and felt something like shame settle over him.

Kirishima was speaking to a police officer, his hands moving as he explained something about Katsuki's habits. Kaminari stood beside him, looking as though he had not slept in days. Todoroki had his arms folded tightly across his chest, his expression fixed on the empty platform.

Kurose could have told them.

He could have walked up to them and explained that Katsuki had been sent to another timeline, that he was dead, that the people who had planned the attack had known exactly what would happen. He could have given them a place to direct their grief, a name to hate, a reason to stop searching.

But he knew that telling them would not bring Katsuki back.

It would only give them a truth they could never use.

So he turned away.

He had done what Izuku had asked.

He had sent Katsuki to the past.

And the rest had happened exactly as planned.

Two years passed.

In the timeline Katsuki had left behind, the world learned to speak about his disappearance in the past tense without ever quite believing it belonged there.

The investigation was officially closed after eighteen months, though the police continued to review new information whenever it surfaced. The Commission released a statement acknowledging the failure to recover the missing student and promising a review of the procedures used during the work-study placement. U.A. held a memorial for Katsuki in the school courtyard, beneath a tree that had begun to turn gold at the edges as autumn approached.

There was no body to bury.

His mother placed a photograph beside the flowers. Masaru stood with his arm around her shoulders, holding her steady when she began to cry. Kirishima stood near the back, his hands clenched at his sides, staring at the empty space where Katsuki should have been. Kaminari cried openly. Sero held him by the shoulders. Todoroki stood with his head bowed, and Aizawa remained beside the memorial long after the others had left.

No one knew what to say.

They had all spent months imagining the moment Katsuki would come home. They had imagined him walking through the front door of his apartment, annoyed by the fuss, complaining that everyone had made him sound like some tragic figure from a news report. They had imagined him showing up at U.A. with a bruised face and a story he would refuse to explain, or sending a message from an unknown number, or appearing on the other side of a crowded street and raising a hand as if he had only been gone for a few hours.

They had imagined so many possibilities that, eventually, the possibilities had become their own kind of grief.

Kirishima stopped carrying the spare key.

He kept it in a drawer for another six months before finally giving it back to Mitsuki, who held it in her palm for a long time without saying anything. When he asked whether she wanted him to stay, she nodded, and he sat beside her at the kitchen table until the afternoon light faded from the windows.

She did not tell him that she still set out two cups of tea some mornings.

He did not tell her that he sometimes woke from dreams in which Katsuki was standing in the doorway, looking at him with an expression that seemed to say he had been gone for a very long time.

Some things were easier to carry when no one tried to name them.

At U.A., Katsuki's desk remained empty for the rest of the term. Eventually, another student took the seat, and the classroom rearranged itself around the absence. His name appeared on the list of graduates who would never graduate, and later on the list of students whose records had been transferred to the Commission archives.

The world continued.

It was not cruel enough to stop.

In another timeline, the one into which Katsuki had fallen, autumn arrived without anyone noticing that a seventeen-year-old boy had died beneath a tree.

The body remained where it had fallen, hidden from the path by the angle of the ground and the thick growth of the underbrush. Rain came and went. Leaves gathered over the concrete. Winter passed, and the branches above the clearing stood bare against a pale sky. Spring returned, and the grass grew high enough to conceal what remained.

No one found him.

The park was renovated the following year. A new playground was installed near the entrance, the path was widened, and the old tree was marked for removal because its roots had begun to damage the paving stones. The work crew cleared the underbrush, hauled away fallen branches, and replaced the broken sections of the path.

They did not look closely enough.

By the time two years had passed, there was very little left that could have identified Katsuki Bakugou. The rain had washed away the traces of his arrival. The earth had taken what it could. The rest had become part of the quiet, ordinary decay of a place that had never known his name.

In that timeline, people remembered Katsuki as a boy who had disappeared.

His classmates remembered him as the loud, furious child who had grown into a young man capable of more than anyone had expected. His teachers remembered his grades, his temper, and the way he had begun to listen when someone spoke to him. His mother remembered the boy who had once run through the apartment with sparks popping from his palms, announcing that he was going to be the greatest hero in the world.

Izuku remembered all of them.

He remembered the Katsuki who had laughed at him in the schoolyard, the Katsuki who had called him Deku, the Katsuki who had told him to jump from the roof. He remembered the seventeen-year-old stranger who had sat beside him on a park bench and apologised without asking to be forgiven.

Sometimes, he remembered the way Katsuki had looked at him just before he died.

That was the memory he returned to most often.

Not because it was the most frightening, or because it gave him any particular satisfaction, but because it was the one that refused to become simple. Katsuki had been afraid. He had been hurt. He had realised what was happening and understood, too late, that he was not going to return to the people he loved.

But even then, he had tried to speak to Izuku.

He had tried to tell him that he did not have to become this.

Izuku had heard him.

That was the problem.

He had heard him, and he had understood him, and he had chosen to continue anyway.

There were versions of himself who told him that this made him a monster. There were others who insisted that the word was meaningless, that morality was only a collection of rules people invented to make the world feel less frightening. One version told him that he should regret what he had done. Another asked him why regret mattered if he would make the same choice again.

Izuku had no answer that satisfied all of them.

He kept the notebook.

He kept the entries about Katsuki, the notes about the attack, the careful record of what had happened and what he had learned from it. He did not destroy the pages, though several of the older versions of himself suggested that he should. He did not hide the notebook in a locked box or burn it in the kitchen sink.

He placed it on the shelf beside his other notebooks, where anyone looking through his room might mistake it for another collection of hero statistics.

It was not a confession.

It was not a memorial.

It was a record.

And the longer Izuku lived with what he had done, the more he came to understand that the most frightening thing about his Quirk was not the fact that it allowed him to speak to versions of himself who had made terrible choices.

It was that every one of them could explain those choices.

They could tell him what they had believed, what they had feared, what they had wanted badly enough to sacrifice everything else. They could describe the moment they had crossed a line and the reasons they had given themselves for doing so. They could show him the paths that led to ruin and the paths that led away from it.

None of them could tell him which path he was supposed to take.

They could only show him what happened after he chose.

One evening, several months after the renovation of the park, Izuku sat at his desk with the notebook open before him. He had grown a little taller. His hair had become more unruly, and his school uniform no longer fit quite as comfortably as it had when he was younger. He had learned to keep his expression mild when people spoke to him, to lower his eyes when they expected humility, and to smile in a way that made adults feel reassured.

He had learned how easy it was to be underestimated.

He had also learned that the people who underestimated him were not always wrong to be afraid.

The room was quiet.

He turned to the page where he had written about Katsuki's apology.

He apologised. He meant it.

Beneath it, in a different handwriting, someone had added a sentence.

You could have let him live.

Izuku stared at the words.

He knew which version of himself had written them. It was one of the few who had never become a villain, a version who had grown into a hero and spent much of his life trying to understand how a person could know so much about the world and still fail to save the people closest to him.

That version had spoken to him only once since Katsuki's death.

It had not shouted. It had not threatened him. It had simply asked why.

Izuku had never answered.

Now he ran his thumb over the sentence, feeling the slight indentation where the pen had pressed against the paper.

“You know why,” he whispered.

The voice came quietly.

I know what you told yourself.

Izuku's expression did not change.

“That isn't the same thing.”

No, the voice agreed. It isn't.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Outside, a car passed along the street. Somewhere in the apartment, the refrigerator hummed. Inko was watching television in the living room, laughing softly at something one of the characters had said. Her laughter drifted through the hallway, warm and familiar, and Izuku found himself listening to it with the same strange attentiveness he had felt as a child when he first heard the voices.

He loved his mother.

That had never been in question.

He loved her enough to keep his grades high, to come home when he promised, to remember the small things that made her happy. He loved her enough to understand what it would do to her if she knew what he had become, and to keep that knowledge from her as carefully as he kept everything else that mattered hidden.

He had learned that love did not always stop a person from doing terrible things.

Sometimes it only gave them more reasons to be careful.

Izuku closed the notebook.

The voice spoke once more.

Do you regret it?

He looked toward the window.

The glass reflected his face, his green hair, the freckles scattered across his cheeks. He looked like a boy who wanted to become a hero. He looked like the child who had once sat in a classroom and listened to his classmates discuss their future Quirks, who had filled notebooks with sketches of rescue strategies, who had believed that the world could be made kinder if only someone were brave enough to try.

He looked like someone who could still become anything.

That was what made the question so difficult.

“I regret,” Izuku said slowly, “that I can't give him back.”

The voice was silent.

Izuku looked down at his hands.

“I don't regret that he came to see me.”

The words were quiet, and he knew they would not satisfy the version of himself who had asked the question. They did not satisfy him, either. They were simply the closest thing to an answer he had.

He had wanted Katsuki to apologise.

Katsuki had.

He had wanted to know whether the boy who had hurt him could change.

He had.

And Izuku had killed him anyway.

There was no lesson that made those things fit together neatly. There was no revelation waiting at the end of the story that would transform his choice into something necessary, or make the dead boy's final moments mean more than the fact that he had been afraid and had not wanted to die.

Izuku had known that before he did it.

He knew it now.

He rose from his chair, switched off the desk lamp, and went to the living room when his mother called him for dinner. She asked him about school. He told her about a test, about a teacher who had assigned too much homework, about a classmate who had forgotten to bring his lunch. She laughed, and he smiled, and for a little while they were simply a mother and her son sharing an ordinary evening.

Later, when the apartment was quiet again, Izuku returned to his room.

He took the notebook from the shelf and opened it to a blank page.

For a long time, he did not write anything.

Then he began.

There was a boy who wanted to be a hero.

He paused, listening to the voices.

Some of them were silent. Some were waiting. One laughed softly, as though it had heard the beginning of a story it already knew the ending to.

Izuku continued.

He wanted to save people. He wanted to be brave. He wanted to become someone the world could be proud of.

The pen hovered over the page.

He thought of Katsuki, who had spent two years trying to become a better person without ever knowing whether the person he had hurt would live long enough to see it. He thought of Kirishima, waiting beside an empty desk. He thought of Mitsuki standing in front of a memorial with no grave to visit, holding a photograph of a son who had vanished from the world without leaving behind a single answer.

He thought of himself at eleven, hearing his own voice for the first time and believing that being understood meant being safe.

Then he wrote the final sentence.

He was not the first version of me to believe that wanting to do good was the same thing as being good.

Izuku set down the pen.

For a moment, the room was completely silent.

Then a voice spoke from somewhere deep within his own thoughts, one he had not heard in months.

You know, there is a version of us who saves him.

Izuku's fingers tightened around the edge of the notebook.

“Is there?”

Yes.

He stared at the page.

“What happens to that version?”

The voice took a long time to answer.

He lives with what he did.

Izuku waited.

He tells Katsuki the truth. He lets him go home. He watches him become a hero. He watches him grow older, and kinder, and better than either of them expected.

Izuku swallowed.

“And is he happy?”

A quiet laugh came from somewhere beyond the reach of his understanding.

No.

Izuku closed the notebook.

He did not ask why.

He already knew that there were answers he would never be able to use, futures he would never be able to inhabit, versions of himself who would make choices he could not imagine making and still wake up every morning with his own face in the mirror.

He knew that there was a world where Katsuki Bakugou was alive, where Kirishima still had a friend to argue with, where Mitsuki could call her son an idiot and hear him shout back that she was one too. Somewhere, a version of himself had made a different choice and was living with the consequences.

That world did not belong to him.

He turned off the light.

In the darkness, his reflection disappeared from the window, and for a moment he could almost imagine that the room was empty.

Then the voices began again, speaking softly to one another in the dark.

One told him that he had done what he needed to do.

Another told him that he had made a mistake.

A third asked whether he could tell the difference.

Izuku lay down and closed his eyes.

He did not answer.

He had learned, by then, that the voices would keep speaking whether he listened or not.

And somewhere, in a world that no longer knew his name, a boy who had once wanted to be a hero remained missing.

No body was found.

No goodbye was given.

And no one ever learned that, for one brief afternoon, Katsuki Bakugou had been given the chance to make things right.

He had taken it.

It had not saved him.