Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rain patters on the roof of the building, pooling in patches where the concrete is uneven. Katsuki, crouching behind the railings of the intricate metal banister, low enough to hide while also being able to gaze at the square below, can feel drops beading on his neck. His suit is, as luck would have it, waterproof, among other things, but anything above the clavicles is fair game for the rain. Suppressing the urge to sneeze, he squints at the figures ruminating about below and waits for orders. 

Ashido and Kaminari are arguing over the comm. “No, that’s not how you squat, idiot—” Katsuki’s ears register before he mentally shuts that avenue of conversation off. Pink dreadlock weirdo from support worked her ass off to build them a proper communications system, and here it is being wasted in the hands of his dumbass friends. 

“Can you fuckers zip it,” he grits out, offhand. The other end of the line explodes with muttered complaints, but Katsuki doesn’t have time to reply, because his target has begun to move. “Chicken is moving south.” Immediately, the two cease bickering, and he can hear the hushed alarm spread across the communication line. 

The target in question, Chicken, is a plain-looking thirty-ish-year-old man, who’d be unassuming if it weren’t for the giant gem-encrusted tail jutting out of his ass, and the empty cell in Tartarus with his name scribbled on the nameplate. He’s a middle-ranked goon part of a crime ring operating right in the buildings flanking the square below, and he and his squad have been holding hit and runs to loot supplies or just be bitches on the local shelters for weeks now. They fancy themselves the new League, and after catching and imprisoning over six small fries from their ranks, Aizawa-sensei said enough was enough and handed them police-issued orders to stage a hit on the organization’s main base.  

 As it turns out, getting rid of All For One and the League won’t magically teleport all the criminals they freed back into jail, or restore social order overnight, or even fix the trillions of yen in structural damage spread across the country, and especially Musutafu. No, no, all that has to be remade from scratch, or well, rubble. Three months of anarchy is all it takes to wreck decades worth of developments, and since the HPSC is a shadow of its former self and the regional governments are nowhere near stable enough, big chunks of the population have deemed it fit to stop following the law, make their own law, or look for “help” from the Yakuza organizations that have spawned like spores in keeping them safe. What’s amazing is that this mess is still the best-case scenario. Katsuki is ninety percent sure they were a hair’s breadth away from the US straight up invading Japan in the name of "restoring stability" after Shigaraki murdered their number one. How they dodged that bullet, he’s not sure he wants to know. 

Regardless, since the foreigners (luckily) ain’t gonna handle it for them, Katsuki is one of the unlucky bastards who will. And this organization is thought to be big enough that it ain’t just him, Spark Plugs and Raccoon Eyes on the case today, oh no, it’s half the fucking class. 

Underneath him, Chicken hands off a box to a questionable hoodie-clad figure, before making a full one-eighty turn and a beeline back to the glass-doored ex shopping district where he came from (and where intel says the base is located). The voice of Glasses, armor covered by frankly ridiculous baggy clothes in an attempt to be inconspicuous, rings through Katsuki’s earpiece. 

Glasses pretends to be a stray passerby and makes conversation with Chicken, asking about nearest shelters and places to find food. This ward of Musutafu is still too wrecked to be repopulated, so saturated in cement powder and dust as it is, it feels akin to a ghost town. To think that a few blocks down is the arcade Deku and Katsuki used to buy their hero trading cards from, now a pathetic husk of a store with barely two broken slot machines left. 

“Careful with your words, class Prez,” Katsuki mutters, prompted by the shady figures growing like weeds across the square as Iida’s conversation with Chicken goes on a little too long. “Deku, for fuck’s sake,  tell me we’re all clear on your end so we can put Four Eyes out of his misery.”

The nerd doesn’t offer so much as an exasperated Kacchan. “Copy, Dynamight,” Round Face replies for him, “We’re almost through. They’ve got security on the windows and Deku decided to pick the locks instead of breaking them.” 

“I can hear a full bar right behind the window,” Jirou, who’s also part of that team fills in. “Brute force would be too obvious.”

Katsuki doesn’t think it matters, but Izuku has been extra fragile and paranoid as of late, courtesy of his quirk taking a big hit and becoming a lot weaker following the fight that ended the League, so he keeps his complaints to a minimum, because he’s honestly happy that Izuku is at the very least back, and Katsuki doesn’t have to go back to the dorms every night to see the nerd with that look on his face that screams “I wanted to be out there busting my ass too”. 

“I don’t care. Hurry the fuck up.” A little grumbling will have to do.

Seconds tick by, Chicken’s suspicions continue to rise, and it’s as if Katsuki can feel the dino-tailed dickhead weighing the risk of murdering a seeming civilian with only his bitch buddies as witnesses.  His hands ache to crackle despite the dampness in the air, and fuck, he wants to get moving if only for the sake of warming the fuck up. 

Then, Deku’s voice is saying, “Green,” into the mic, and the entire world is exploding into motion. Katsuki and the rest of his team leap from the rooftops into the square below, and there’s a muffled bang from inside the building followed by a plume of pink smoke Katsuki knows is not supposed to be there. 

“One of the sedative grenades was blocked,” says Round Face, and that’s the last thing Katsuki gets to properly hear before the “sneak attack” devolves into an all-out melee. 

He’s not sure how it happened, or why it’s always him who gets stuck in these situations. He was fighting some lady with slingshots for fingers and their scuffle ended up bringing them indoors, into a six-story or so building cracking at the seems and smelling heavily of gunpowder. Most of the windows are blown out, and in the very corner there’s a yellow-painted trapdoor that must lead to the basement. The woman is easy enough to defeat, she’s a normal lady with little to no training who thought it would be a good idea to become a gangster instead of head to the shelters like the rest. Cuffed and tied up, Katsuki leaves her propped up against one of the building’s exposed loadbearing columns. He’s supposed to head back outside again, but there’s an unsettling feeling prickling under his skin, and the scent of gunpowder only seems to grow stronger and stronger. 

“Oi, what’s with the smell?” he demands of the woman, who’s a bit beat up and swollen but otherwise fine. “Fuck you,” she says and tries to spit at him. 

“Bitch,” Katsuki says back and spits back too. 

Her face contorts in disgust. “What sort of hero are you?”

“What’s with the smell?” Katsuki repeats.

“Zero manners…” She squints. “Ain’t you that little prissy boy who got kidnapped a while back?”

Hairs on his neck stand up, and the way his heartbeat changes has nothing to do with adrenaline. The world rumbles and tremors. Outside a few of the weaker buildings topple over. They’ve got someone with a giantification quirk, maybe a lot of someones. Paperwork’s going to be a fucking nightmare, Katsuki thinks, as another flimsy kiosk gives under the weight of a giant arm. 

“Goddamn, bitch, tell me why it smells like fucking gunpowder—” 

“I’d hope you’re smart enough to know that. Or do you need All Might to hold your hand again?” 

They keep actual fucking gunpowder in here, don’t they?

Motherfuckers. 

Stomping over to where the woman is collapsed, Katsuki grabs her by the ashy collar of her shirt. “What are you—” She gets no chance to finish her sentence because Katsuki has blasted her outside and into the waiting arms of his team with a gentle explosion. If this basement is their firearms storehouse and Katsuki the walking bomb hazard is the one taking care of it, the building might not make it, and he doesn’t want to deal with having to rescue the villains on top of whatever else is down there.

The yellow trapdoor proves difficult to pry open, but the lack of dust and rubble is a good sign because it indicates it’s been in recent use. Upon pushing up the board a hair, Katsuki is forced to recoil to avoid a spray of bullets coming straight through the trapdoor. Definitely firearms storehouse. That’s a fucking machine gun. It goes on and on, poking holes in the painted wood until there’s that click of the bullet cartridge running out. Katsuki seizes the chance, breaks through the abused trapdoor with ease, and sets his sights on the two motherfuckers “guarding” the guns and explosives. 

“I found their supply room,” he lets the comms know. More bullet spray forces him behind a hard brick wall.

“You got it handled?” Icyhot says, out of breath. “It’s messy out here, we’re a little short-handed, can’t send backup.”

“Yeah.” Another click. Another empty cartridge. “I got it.”

He does not have it. Or he does until the building decides to fucking collapse. While he’s inside. In a massive crash of concrete and steel and broken tile, the basement’s ceiling (and the first floor’s floor) gives and takes Katsuki with it. He’d seen the giant’s hand coming, felt what was about to happen, but he’d stupidly tried to check the last of the rooms instead of deciding to jump the fuck out. 

For a moment, his vision goes black and there’s nothing but silence. Katsuki is floating, can’t feel a single thing. 

“Shit, was anyone in that big six-story?! One of the giants toppled over and knocked a couple columns clean off—” Kaminari says frantically, his voice all static. “Shit—”

“I’m okay. Was on the other side of the square,” Todoroki replies, still audibly panting. 

“Seconded,” says Yaoyorozu. 

“Bakugou?”

It filters in one ear and out the other as the pain hits. And fuck does it hit hard. His every nerve end burns with agonizing flame, and there’s this sharp, jutting pain blooming in his lower left abdomen that feels an awful lot like Shigaraki’s spikes way back in Jakku. His waterproof costume seems to be backfiring because whatever liquid is pouring out of him, part of it is making a warm and sticky mess on the inside of his clothes. It’s not blood. It’s not blood. It’s not blood… Please don't be blood. Worst of all, he can’t actually see what’s happening below his sternum, because there’s a huge slab of concrete pinning him down, torso and hands and all. The scent of gunpowder is heavy in the air, reminding him that he can’t risk getting himself out with an explosion, lest he ignite all the explosives scattered down here and cause even more massive a disaster. 

He coughs and is relieved to taste no blood.

“Bakugou?!”

“Shut up,” he manages with surprising stability and gets a sigh of relief in response. 

“Bakugou-san, please respond as fast as you can. The situation is very dire—”

Sucking in a deep breath, he explains: “Bad news is that six-story crash got me and I can’t risk blasting myself out because there’s a lot of residual explosives everywhere from their storehouse. Good news is it’s just me. I got the three villains out before—”

“I have em—” Ashido cuts in.

“—and I found no civillians.” That’s the whole reason he’d come back inside after disposing of the villains in the first place. 

“You sound out of breath,” says Deku, who is really not one to talk. From his end of the line, there’s a crash and a thud of flesh. “I’m okay!” he’s quick to assure them. “Just… a little… busy. Kacchan?”

“I’m stuck.” As much as he hates to admit it, “Someone needs to come get me.” He turns off his mic to cough so they don’t get up his ass with worry, and his heart drops as he tastes iron and sickly sweet nitroglycerin. Katsuki might be more resistant to NG’s effects than most, but it makes him lightheaded regardless. 

“How—” A grunt. “—urgent is it? Our hands are sorta full up here— ouch!”

“Are you stable?”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“This is Bakugou we’re talking about.”

The debris aren’t moving at all despite the earthquake-like tremors shaking the ground every couple seconds. Does that count as stable?

“I’m fucking stuck,” he repeats, unable to coherently elaborate further. 

“But like… safe stuck?” asks Round Face, whose voice screams two minutes away from vomiting. Damn. It must be brutal up there. 

Katsuki considers her question. Sure, he might be bleeding out and caught under a bunch of rocks, but even if someone did try to get him out, they wouldn’t be able to do much in the heat of battle without risking the gunpowder igniting, or losing heaps of time. The wound on his abdomen doesn’t feel that bad, and the air pocket he’s in is stable. Weighing the importance of himself versus the win here, he decides on the latter. 

“Yeah,” he says, the words thick and foreboding on his tongue. “Yeah. Won’t be able to contribute much anymore though.”

“You’re always so reckless, Kacchan,” Kaminari teases. Katsuki knows humor is Spark Plugs’ way to cope, and that his friend is worried as shit, but the comment still grates on him. There’re shuffling noises and a big spike of interference. 

“Chargebolt, forget about Dynamight for two seconds and guard your own ass! Bakugou can handle it—”

Yeah. He can handle it. He’s used to having to handle it. He’s expected to handle it. Always, he’s had to save himself and rely on his own abilities. People trust him to be strong. Plus, until Deku builds himself back up a little more, Katsuki is by technical terms the strongest of them. No use looking like a whiner now. It’s his own fault for not clearing out of the building sooner anyway. He’s got this. He’s fine.

He doesn’t want to be a burden.

But there’s sweat beading on his forehead, and the feeling of claustrophobia pricking at his skin begs to differ. 

“Kacchan, hold on while we wrap things up? There’s more of them than we expected, and the two with the giantification quirks are big problems. Is a quarter-hour okay?”

“M’kay, nerd,” he says, not quite processing what he’s agreeing to, fighting the tendrils of panic, and turns off his microphone.

For the next twenty minutes, he stares at the pitch black of the wrecked ceiling, vision fuzzing in and out, swirling with thoughts and memories. He’s more thankful than ever for pink dreadlock support girl. The speaker in his ear does double duty, the sounds of his friends, alive and fighting, keep his sanity, while the turned-off microphone prevents them from having to hear the odd embarrassing moan of pain or whimper. His entire lower body is on pins and needles, and the slab on his chest restricts his breathing enough that it’s like being on the constant verge of a panic attack. 

“Fuckers, how long exactly will I need to wait?” he gathers the strength to say after the space has begun to smell a nausea-inducing mix of sweat and copper and burnt sugar.

“Relax, Kacchan,” Kaminari drawls.

“Not long now, Bakugou-san. Please continue to rest.”

“Rest in peace at this rate—”

“Be serious, Bakugou-kun!” Iida scolds, scandalized, and a little alarmed. Katsuki is serious, yet he still feels bad for saying it. 

“Yeah yeah, dad. Come get me now, pretty please?” he mocks.

“Deku, watch your left!” 

“Thanks Shouto-kun!”

“Bitches? You coming or not?”

“Bakugou! Settle down. A little longer, we promise—”

He wants to vomit. 

Twenty more minutes and the blood has climbed up his top, soaking the fabric and mixing with all the concrete powder into a stinky, sticky mess. Katsuki knows he’s starting to lose hope because his head keeps playing highlight reels. The truth is that ever since Jakku, and the hospital, and Deku’s brief stint as an Eldritch horror, and the apology in the rain, there’s been this feeling nagging at him. Self-hate dates back to the Sludge Villain, further back even, but recently, it’s climbed up a few notches. He needs to be better. He needs to be useful. He needs to make up for everything. He has to. He can’t be dead weight or an annoyance. Not like before, not like that asshole. Not the villain. He…

Katsuki doesn’t do well with small spaces, and impalement wounds, and restricted breathing. It’s as if he can feel gunk in his mouth, spikes in his shoulder, charred hands around his neck. It’s as if he can taste slime and fire and death. 

“Bakugou?”

Will he ever really be able to make up for it? Will he ever really become a good person? It’s the sort of question that thrives in this kind of damp darkness, ugly and mushy and vulnerable in a way he hates. Will he ever amount to anything, or will he fall back into old habits again? Fifteen years of bad surely can’t be reversed, can they?

“Riot, two of them went south—” Kaminari says, then asks, “Who’s an annoyance?”

Did Katsuki say that out loud? Is his mic on? What else have they heard? He’s losing it.

“Shut up,” is the autopilot reply that immediately has him feeling like a dick. “…Sorry. Din’n mean it.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, it seems, because there’s a noticeable pause in the line. 

“No, I’m sorry. Did he just apologize to me, god, has he been replaced by a clone or— ow shit!”

“Chargebolt? Copy? Are you okay?”

“I’m—”

“Not okay—” says Jirou, her voice crisp. “He got stabbed. The enemy is dealt with but I’m moving him out of the square to do some first aid—Kami, stop squirming—”

“How grave is it?” Iida questions.

“They got his arm, big vein, lots of bleeding, his quirk’s being difficult. I’m heading to Creati now, but it’d be best to get him some proper medical.” True to word, Kaminari’s earpiece appears to have short-circuited, and Jirou sounds out of breath. She’s probably exhausted, and Dunce Face is heavier than he seems. 

“Alright. Deku, all done inside?”

“We’ve got the last of them tied up.”

“Good. Someone get Dynamight and we can report to Sensei.”

Thank fuck, Katsuki thinks (because he’s too spent to say it aloud) and a weight lifting off his chest (though only metaphorically). 

“I can get you,” says Round Face, who’s well suited to rescue courtesy of her quirk. Katsuki feels stupid for not having considered her before. He feels stupid about a lot of things, but at that moment, all that feeling is overshadowed by bone-deep relief. “Where’s your exact location?”

“The six—” His head lolls to the side in a flash of whitening vision, and he pukes laying down. It’s disgusting, and half of it is blood. 

“Bakugou?!” Oh, now she sounds alarmed. 

Spitting a couple times in a pathetic attempt to get rid of residual bile, he picks up where he left off, “The six-story that fell over. ‘M in the basement.”

“Like… near the basement?” There are some nervous and awkward chuckles from the rest of the team.

“Like in it, Angel Face.”

Dead silence. Katsuki starts feeling self-conscious. Maybe they need more info?

“There’s guns and gunpowder, and a big slab of column right over me? No light so it’s kinda hard to see? That help at all?”
 
More silence. His heartbeat is so loud it’s deafening. Has the earpiece broken—

“Kacchan,” Izuku breathes, and he sounds every antonym of pleased. 

“Izuku,” he parrots flatly. “You coming or not?”

The comm lines are wracked with disbelief. “It’s been ages since it crashed! You’re not seriously under there are you?”

“I mean, yeah?” This is getting annoying. Fatigue alone is preventing him from losing it outright. 

“The building fucking fell on you and you didn’t say anything?!” Kirishima sounds pissed.

“I did say. Told you to come get me.”

“You didn’t say you were—” The sentence breaks off into angry sputters and protests. 

“Building’s unstable, too much of a pain to get me mid-battle, can handle myself, getting the villains 's more important,” he counts off, slurring, though no one seems to be in agreement with his very rational arguments. “Now come fucking  get me before I puke again. I’m sitting in my own sick. Whatever’s lodged in my abdomen’s starting to hurt again too—”

“Lodged in your abdomen—”

“What the fuck?!”

“Mmn, m’like swiss cheese.”

He passes out after that. 

“You’re definitely something, kid,” is the first thing Katsuki hears when he wakes up, tucked into a hospital bed and connected to a dozen tubes and wires. Typical of a hospital, everything is a sterile white, and the beep of the heart rate monitor fills the air. 

Sensei is sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed, arms crossed and lips twisted into an unreadable expression. One of his arms is in a cast, the rough feel of bandages marks his lower belly, and any pain is dulled by what he knows must be a shit ton of painkillers. 

“No restrains this time?” he says, words coming out like slurry from his very dry mouth. Sensei has the decency to look guilty.

“That has happened a few times too many now, huh?” Katsuki stares. “I should apologize.”

“Ya weren’t even there,” he finds himself saying, because vulnerable Sensei is weird, and Katsuki wants none of these icky feelings this situation is stirring. 

Aizawa sighs, then levels him a tired, one-eyed stare. “You almost died, Bakugou.”

So? It’s part of being a hero. “Mhm.” 

Sensei’s frowning. Was that the wrong thing to say?

“You never struck me as a hypocrite”

Now it’s Katsuki’s turn to frown. He isn’t a hypocrite. 

Sensei keeps going. “You did all that work to convince Midoriya that he was included in that ”everyone“ heroes need to save, but… you’re just as reckless as Midoriya. All Might tried to warn me about it since way back, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it myself.” That is not what he was expecting. Katsuki isn’t like Deku in that way. He’s not that kind of hero. He spent a decade envying Deku for it. “Because unlike him, you don’t look it. You’re too reliable. You make it seem like you’ve got everything handled, so no one even thinks to worry.”

“S’not… no. If I couldn’t blast myself out, it would take even longer to get help. We didn’t have that kind of time. Judged the risk and thought I’d be fine. The mission was more important. I’m fine.” He wants to hold out his hands in a sort of, see, it worked out, gesture, but doesn’t have the strength to. 

“You almost died,” Sensei stresses as if Katsuki is a toddler who can’t understand the word. 

“Comes with the job…”

“Did you honestly think they would have left you down there for an hour if you’d said you’d been crushed by the building?”

“The mission takes precedence over the heroes.” Sensei knows this. He’s the one who taught them this. 

“When the mission includes civilian lives at risk, which this one didn’t. Bakugou, you should have communicated how bad your situation was right away, you know that.” There’s this unstable wobble in Sensei's voice, and Katsuki can feel how much this whole thing’s affecting him. 

“I didn’t know there weren’t any civilians. I couldn’t have known— I wasn’t worth it—”

“If Kaminari, or Kirishima, or Midoriya, or whoever, had been under that building and lied—”

“Neglected to mention—”

“—lied about it, you’d have been okay with that?”

“Fuck no.”

“So why is it any different when it’s you?”

“I—” Katsuki blinks, unable to come up with an answer that doesn’t sound like psychiatrist fuel. 

“I thought you’d learned to be vulnerable and accept help from your teammates, but you still prioritize the win over yourself. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes, it needlessly puts you in danger. There’s a place for self-sacrifice, and this wasn’t it.” 

Those words linger for a while, in silence. Feeling thoroughly embarrassed and scolded, Katsuki doesn’t know what to do but mumble out an apology. 

“Don’t,” Sensei says, so soft it feels out of character. “Just never do it again. And say sorry to them. Kaminari short-circuited half the hospital twice while we waited for you to wake. ”

He gets out of his chair, opens the door, and lets in the flood in the form of a worried class.  

Chapter Text

“I’m stuck,” Bakugou’s voice rings through Denki’s earpiece, vulnerable in a way that’s uncharacteristic. “Someone needs to come get me.” It’s said bordering on a gasp. 

Mina, who’s fighting two goons at the same time right in Denki’s line of sight, grunts as she tries to respond. “How urgent is it? Our hands are sort of full up here—ouch!” Denki rushes to shoot an electrified disk over and help his friend a little, while also doing his best to dodge his own assailant. Being outnumbered sucks. 

“Are you stable?” asks Iida.

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“This is Bakugou we're talking about.”

For Denki, the fact that Bakugou admitted he needed someone to pick him up in the first place raises a shit ton of red flags, but this is Bakugou they’re talking about, and he’s pretty sure Bakugou could get run over by a steam train and still come out of it unscathed. Bakugou is strong, stable, an unstoppable, inevitable, constant force one could liken to gravity. If Bakugou is down, Denki isn’t sure what that means for the rest of them. So Bakugou isn’t down, he tells himself, and it’s easy enough to believe. 

“I’m fucking stuck,” he repeats as if further elaboration is too mentally taxing. Maybe he has a concussion? The knife zipping past Denki’s cheek distracts him from contemplating. 

“But like… safe stuck?”

There’s silence on Bakugou’s end, and Denki doesn’t miss how the team is practically feeding Bakugou what he’s supposed to say by asking yes or no questions and assuming his status. Like Denki, none of them want to reconcile with the idea of Bakugou being anything but okay. 

“Yeah,” he says finally, in a way that makes Denki’s hairs stand on end. “Yeah. Won’t be able to contribute much anymore though.”

“You’re always so reckless, Kacchan,” he finds himself drawling out by habit in a subconscious attempt to calm himself down. Denki is bad enough at focusing on one thing at a time — multitasking is asking for trouble. The annoying knife villain he’s still fighting has found themselves a friend, and one of his knives hits a little too close for comfort, startling Denki into letting off too strong an electric shock. 

“Chargebolt, forget about Dynamight for two seconds and guard your own ass! Bakugou can handle it—”

Denki feels himself flush. That’s right. Bakugou’s going to be fine. 

For the next half hour, Bakugou is a constant buzz in their ears, grumbling about how slow they are and how long he’s having to wait. Multiple times Denki wonders what exactly has happened to Bakugou that he’s this stuck, though he suspects the extra grouchiness is the fault of some sort of concussion. The asshole probably just got whacked a little too hard or injured a leg or something. He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine. 

More importantly, the villains keep coming, and the sooner Denki gets this part of the job done the sooner he can get to Bakugou. He needs to concentrate. 

About thirty minutes since he first announced he was stuck, though,  Bakugou’s mumbles go from annoyingly comforting to… worrying. He’s muttering for one, which is a habit ripped off Midoriya he only does when he’s deep out of it, and what few words Denki does manage to catch don’t paint the greatest picture of fine. He hears a whisper about “not being an annoyance” and his heart drops.

“Riot, two of them went south!” he warns, as he’s tightening the restraints on this lanky masked villain he’s managed to subdue. “Who’s an annoyance?” he can’t resist asking then. 

“Shut up,” comes the instant reply, and it would have relaxed Denki substantially, were it not followed by, “…Sorry. Din’n mean it.”

Those red flags he’d earlier suppressed rear their ugly heads full force, and every bone in Denki’s body aches with this feeling of intense wrongness. An involuntary laugh bubbles out of his throat. 

“No, I’m sorry. Did he just apologize to me, god, has he been replaced by a clone or—” He’s so distracted he doesn’t notice the knife flying right at him until it’s a split second too late, and the thing is embedded into his upper left arm, having torn straight through the leather of his costume. Seems that guy with the blade quirk he subdued before woke up and managed to shoot this one out despite the restraints. “—ow shit!”

Moving on dumb, blind instinct, he rips the knife out with his other arm and watches the quirk-made thing degrade into ashes in his hand. Blood spurts from the now open wound, and he feels stupid for unplugging himself. The thick red liquid crackles with charged sparks, and the current it produces is so strong that his own hand gets shocked when he tries to use it to tampon the wound. 

“Chargebolt? Copy? Are you okay?”

“I’m—” The earpiece sputters and cracks right in his ear, letting off a plume of smoke. His knees buckle and he’s sure he’s going to slip in the mud when a pair of lean arms wrap around his waist and help him lay down gently. Jirou’s scent of musk and cherries and old vinyl records is only a little muffled by that of dust and blood. 

“Not okay,” her crisp voice says, not looking at Denki’s face because it’s a statement meant for the comms he no longer has access to. Her hands try to press a thick wad of gauze to the cut on his arm, but the electricity that’s decided to form a field around him isn’t making things easy. She’s half afraid of getting shocked, and he’s half afraid of shocking her. Having given up on the tampon plan, she hooks her arms around the nonconductive part of his hero costume and drags him away from the open battlefield, somewhere covered where the rain won’t be a pain in the ass. “He got stabbed. Enemy is dealt with but I’m moving him out of the square to do some first aid—” Her eyes shift to his, alarmed. They make it to the shade of a stable building before Jirou is forced to let go of him because the electricity is making it through his hero costume. “Kami, stop squirming—”

“Can’t,” he says, tongue thick. “Hurt you—”

“You won’t. You need to calm down. It looks worse than it is. Your quirk’s going haywire because you’re panicked.”

“Can’t.” He gasps, sensing the first bits of that quirk overuse buzz. He can’t go all derp mode now. He needs to help Bakugou. The humidity in the air makes it all the more conductive. “Gonna… whey… no.”

Jirou has one of her jacks in the ground, looks left and right until her shoulders perk up. “Hold on,” she says and helps him stand. He feels useless, and he has no idea what they’re even doing. Jirou is shaking beneath his arm, and Denki knows he keeps shocking her, nothing bad enough to do permanent damage but nothing light enough not to hurt either. 

“They got his arm, big vein, lots of bleeding, his quirk’s being difficult. I’m heading to Creati now, but it’d be best to get him some proper medical,” she says, again for the earpiece. 

Yaomomo is two buildings down, wrangling villains into cuffs. She drops the one she was checking the restrains for with a little less care than strictly necessary and rushes to them as soon as she sees they’re coming.

“We need some insulators,” Jirou tells her. “Like a current proof blanket so he can wrap it around himself and not shock anyone else until his quirk relaxes.” Yaomomo nods and gets to making the blanket immediately. Denki can see how thin she’s gotten from expending all her fat stores. She stretches herself to one last creation though, because she’s amazing like that.

“You can still feel the arm, right?” He hopes the wince is enough a positive answer. “Good. Think you can clean it yourself? As much as you can, we’re wrapping things up and going to Recovery Girl soon anyway.”

Denki nods, tired of feeling useless, and allows Momo to wrap him in the plasticky blanket. Water beads on it fast.  Jirou leaves her first aid kit for him to use. He tears open a packet of disinfectant wipes and prepares himself for the inevitable sting of cleaning off blood. 

“It’s like USJ,” Jirou points out, and Denki is struck by an odd melancholy. Jirou and Momo had hidden under a blanket of insulation while he’d let off the most current he could because back then, that was the only thing he knew how to do. Over a year later, despite the ridiculous shit that’s happened to lead up to this, here they are, still together. A loopy grin stretches across his face, one both girls return. 

The sting of alcohol replaces the smile with a hiss, and he remembers all at once that they just busted a villain organization, and he doesn’t have access to the comms, and he still doesn’t know what happened to Bakugou.

“Bakugou?” he asks.

“Uravity’s getting him,” Yaomomo supplies, and Denki feels himself unwind. That is until the faces of both his companions twist and he gets the sense that he’s missing something really important. 

Looks of light unease only grow worse and worse. “Hey, what’s happening? Guys—”

Momo covers her mouth with a hand and whips her head around to look at the mass of crushed buildings that has become of the square. Jirou mutters, “That bastard—” in a way that conveys more fear than anger.

“Guys. What happened? Let your portable phone charger in on it too, please. Who’s a bastard? Did Kirishima break someone’s arm again? Guys?”

His eyes shift behind them, to the mess of classmates crowding around a particularly wrecked building. The yellow brick of its exterior is familiar. 

Shit was anyone in that big six-story?! One of the giants toppled over and knocked a couple columns clean off—

Bad news is that six-story crash got me and I can’t risk blasting myself out because there’s a lot of residual explosives everywhere from their storehouse—

If that’s the building crash that got Bakugou, there’s only one way a guy might get stuck due to it. 

But that’s… it’s insane.

“Yaomomo, hey, tell me he isn’t—”

“The building fucking fell on him,” Jirou confirms, her voice trembling. 

Denki’s stomach drops, and he feels sick all of a sudden. “But he’s fine. Right?”

“…There might be something lodged in his abdomen, and he’s not responding— hey Kami you need to rest—”

Clutching the blanket tight to himself, he takes a few tentative steps forward and is pleased to find his legs stable. “I could be useful. In case we need to… you know…” Use me as a defibrillator. A few wild sparks fly from his fingers. 

As much as they don’t like it, neither of his teammates can deny the validity of Denki’s proposition, so they follow him as he hobbles to the rest of the group with all the speed his fatigued body can manage. The crowd from before disperses to handle various sections of cleanup — it would make no sense to have everyone waiting around together like civilians watching a lifeguard perform a rescue when they could be finished much quicker by splitting the load of work. Todoroki and Ojiro, for example, have been tasked with watching over the villains they captured. Uraraka, Midoriya, and Shouji are the three who have actually gone inside to get Bakugou out. Denki knows that’s already more people than the rulebooks recommend be allotted for rescue of another hero, and that he, Jirou, and Momo simply loitering around isn’t doing anyone any good, but he has to stay here and make sure Bakugou is fine for the sake of his sanity. 

Iida, wet hair sticking to his forehead, is speaking to who must be Sensei on his phone. “We’re not sure. It’s been around forty minutes…Yes…. No…. Of course not…. Yes. I think we’re going to need it… Right. I shall notify you again. Thank you.” 

“We thought we should ask Sensei for backup. Might need help with transport,” a grim Kirishima lets them know. The local shelter is a twenty-minute sprint, and UA (i.e. Recovery Girl) is a full two hours away. Depending on Bakugou’s state, that could be too far.

“Ei… Katsuki’s fine, right?” Denki says, leaning into Kirishima’s familiar comfort. He’s spent enough by now that the blanket does more than enough to suppress all the crackles. 

Kirishima doesn’t reply. Denki can feel his hands start to shake. Even though he has the training to be a defibrillator, he hates doing it with every fiber of his being. The stress, the pressure, the responsibility, the power of having a life on his fingertips, it’s nauseating. He had to resuscitate three civilians like that during the war, and he still gets nightmares about heartbeats giving in under his palms. And those three were strangers. If it’s a friend…

They wait, and wait, and wait, for what feels like ages but can’t be longer than ten minutes. Denki pesters Kirishima for constant updates on what they’re saying over the communication lines. “No, they’re still looking.” “Not yet.” “No.” “They found him.” “He’s stuck bad.” “I don’t know man, we need to wait.”

Then, after way too long, there’s a collective intake of breath as the largest of the bits of rubble begins to float, and the debris open up to reveal three figures caked in dust. Denki surges forward, trying to read from their faces the severity of the situation. He can’t see Bakugou anywhere and he starts to freak out, because he’s too stupid to realize Shouji’s carrying him, and his arms are obscuring his friend from view. They’ve prepared a stretcher, on which Shouji places the unfortunate guy of the hour. 

Katsuki looks… small. It’s the only way you could describe it. Denki leans over him and his heart clenches. His friend’s face is pale in the might fuck around and die kind of way, his normally pristine hair is matted by powder and stones and something greenish that may or may not be puke. The rise and fall of his chest is labored and painful to look at. 

“Why is he on his side?” Denki asks, dazed, as Uraraka cuts a patch off the bottom of Bakugou’s blood-soaked hero costume with a pair of scissors from the first aid kit they all carry and reveals the shredded bit of skin where a twenty centimeter or so piece of rusted rebar has embedded itself dangerously close to Bakugou’s spinal column. Oh god. What if he’s been paralyzed? Or a vital organ has been hit? At least the rebar hasn’t gone all the way through.

“To make sure he doesn’t swallow any blood.”

Uraraka prods at the entry wound, a deep crease in her brows. Her hands are trembling. Bakugou’s body jerks and for a moment Denki is afraid he’ll start convulsing or having a seizure or some shit. 

“Kacchan? Hey?” Midoriya says gently, hand cupping Bakugou’s cheek. He’d been trying to take his vitals, wipe his face and check for blood, but it seems Bakugou has woken up. From where he’s crouching, Denki can’t see his face, but he can very much hear the croak of Bakugou’s voice in the relative silence.

“Izuku? M’cold—” You can tell how out of it Bakugou is by the fact that he’s unashamedly leaning into Midoriya’s touch, instead of pretending not to like it and grumbling as he usually does. 

“I know, Kacchan. Hang in there.”

“Wh’appened?” His body jerks again, as if in an attempt to get up.

“A building fell on you, Kacchan. You need to stay still. Uraraka-san will take care of you.”

“’Ngel Face? M’stuck. Whappened?” Midoriya shines a penlight at his eyes, and Bakugou recoils with his whole body.

“He’s got a concussion.” 

“I can’t do much about this either,” Uraraka says, referring to the chunk of rebar. “Can’t know if it’s safe to take out.” 

“So we keep him awake until backup gets here.”

Denki shuffles over to face Bakugou head-on. The blonde’s murky eyes take a while to focus on this new arrival. “’Chu,” he says. Is he trying to call Denki Pikachu or something? “Y’re hurt.”

“No, no I’m fine, man.” He holds up the bandaged arm for Bakugou to see. “Yaomomo helped me out.”

“Good ponyail,” he mumbles, eyes drooping. Denki places a tentative hand on his shoulder and squeezes.

“Don’t fall asleep dude.”

“F’ck you. Sleepy.”

“Bakugou, you’re not sleepy, you’re dying!” He regrets it as soon as it slips out, because Bakugou’s eyes go wide, and it’s as if a realization of his situation has only then dawned on him. 

“Wh’re’s my hand? Dun… wanna die.”

“Shhh. It’s okay. Help’s coming. You’ll be fine, you’ll be okay. Stay with me—”

Denki’s voice sounds level as he says it, but he’s not sure if he believes it.

Backup arrives in the form of two policemen, a team of paramedics, and an ambulance some five minutes later, record time considering the state of the roads. Denki watches them heave (very confused) Bakugou’s stretcher and carry it to the portable bed inside the ambulance. 

“Does anyone else need a ride? We have room for two more as long as they can sit,” says the lead paramedic of the team, an older woman with salted hair and rounded features. 

Denki looks around as if to check for anyone raising their hands. Someone bumps his shin. 

“You should go,” Kyouka tells him. “Your arm.”

“It’s fine.” It is. It’s not bleeding anymore, and it only hurts on the scale of like…five. 

“Please hurry. The sooner we get this one to the hospital the better. He needs surgery stat.”

Jirou bumps him again. Denki stares at the room encased in the back of the van. At its sterile interior that has to stink of disinfectant, and the scary medical supplies scattered about the walls and floor, and the promise that if you’re in there, something’s capital W Wrong, and feels like a child for being terrified of stepping inside. He’s a hero. This is a part of the job. He’s been in ambulances before. He’s been strapped to ambulance beds before. He’s been the one forced to play paramedic before. He’s done it all. But going in there means he’ll get at least a ten-minute show of Bakugou fighting for his life, and his brain is already conjuring up images of the guy following Jakku when he did die on the battlefield (if only for a minute) enough of his blood splattered about the ground to water a garden. 

“Last chance.”

His feet move on their own, making a beeline for the empty chairs in the back of the ambulance, its siren blaring red in his ears. As he walks his boots squeak with rainwater, and he’s unable to peel his eyes away from passed out Bakugou’s ashen figure, now naked from the waist up and strapped to a dozen machines. 

To his surprise, Todoroki is already inside, sitting solemnly in one of the chairs. 

“One of the villains had a gas emission quirk and hit me with it while he was restrained. I feel fine but Iida pestered me into a checkup,” the other boy explains as the doors slam shut and their seats bounce with movement, even though Denki didn’t ask. 

He and Todoroki aren’t close the way say… he and Kirishima are close, but they aren’t not friends either, and Todoroki doesn’t complain when Denki leans a little closer than the norm the further the ride goes on. 

The paramedics discuss the situation in rapid-fire half-sentences Denki wishes he couldn’t understand. Words like fractured ribs and punctured lungs and cardiac arrest and abdominal tearing are thrown about in a panic fuel soup. 

“Does he have any particular medical conditions we should be aware of?” asks one of the paramedics halfway through the ride. Denki’s mouth opens and closes without uttering a word, but Todoroki is there to save him the embarrassment. 

“His quirk involves secreting nitroglycerin, some of it is in his blood, his blood pressure is higher than average to balance that out. His body doesn’t react well to medicine that contains aspirin. He’s a little hard of hearing and allergic to peanuts.”

“I didn’t know you knew so much about Bakugou,” he says much later, when they’re in their joint hospital room, beds placed close to each other. Denki needed some bone and tissue repairs Recovery Girl will handle tomorrow, and that quirk that hit Todoroki materialized in the form of very bad diarrhea. Hell of a quirk. They’ve been instructed to stay overnight. Bakugou, meanwhile, is in surgery. 

“I care about him,” Todoroki admits simply. “And we interned together, so I know his medical details.”

“Makes sense.” Denki rolls over so he’s laying on his unhurt arm and pulls the covers further over himself. “He better be okay.”

“Todoroki?” Denki asks between pants, his voice high pitched with alarm. Every part of him is sticky with sweat, his throat is dry, and he’s positive he was seeing the world’s scariest nightmare two seconds ago. No memory of the dream itself remains, only the heart-stopping feeling of irreversible damage, of churning stomachs, and overwhelming grief. Lightning cracks the sky, illuminating the room in a vicious flash. The adjacent rumble of thunder is so loud he fears the sky might have an actual chip in it. “What happened to the lights?”

“Blackout,” answers his friend’s steady voice.

He doesn’t stop to contemplate the leftover static at his fingertips, or what a blackout might mean for a hospital because he doesn’t want to edge closer to a panic attack than he’s already standing. 

He asks about Bakugou instead, because that’s definitely a topic that doesn’t induce panic attacks. 

“He’s out of surgery. They said he went into cardiac arrest on the operating table but they managed to save him. It’ll take a bit to know if he’s stable.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

“What’s the time?”

“Two am.”

“Why are you up?”

“Bathroom.”

Denki winces in sympathy. “That bad huh?”

More silence. Denki swallows dry.

“Do you…” He grapples with the question carefully, pokes at it as if it’s a bomb or a delicate glass flower. “Do you think we messed up today?”

“With what?”

“With Bakugou.”

Todoroki’s breath hitches, slight enough that it would be unnoticeable if their room wasn’t so silent. 

“He didn’t tell us his real status.”

“Yeah, but the six-story came down, and he said it got him and he was stuck. Where else could he have been stuck but under? We just… didn’t want to believe it. We kept saying that he was fine and safe and giving him ways not to tell the full truth.”

There’s a pause as Todoroki considers the thing that’s eating at Denki since the morning. “You’re right.”

“I forget you stronger ones are human sometimes, to be honest.” He breathes in, wants to talk about this more but can’t because he realizes the way he sees Todoroki is quite similar to the way he sees Bakugou, and these overpowered morons with questionable self-perceptions may have acted in the exact same way if it had been Todoroki under that building. So he moves on to more embarrassing admissions. “And I’m scared of first aid.”

A dramatic flash of lightning strikes at that very moment, so well-timed it makes an inappropriate laugh bubble in Denki’s throat. 

“It’s pathetic because I’m a hero and it’s my job, but I clam up whenever someone in critical condition’s in my hands—” Now that he’s started he can’t seem to stop. The words are running away before he can catch them. “—and I’m the one who has to bring them back from it. Like… I’m relieved I didn’t have to be the one who played defibrillator for Bakugou. Imagining doing the wrong thing with anyone, never mind someone that close, relying on me is fucking terrifying… That came out of nowhere but…Uhm…yeah—”

“I get it,” Todoroki interrupts, and it sends a surge of validation so strong through Denki his heart is practically leaping. “I know what it’s like to double as hands-on first aid.” The room floods with a warm reddish light as Todoroki lights a wisp of flame on his fingertip. Denki feels his eyes widen. 

How could he have not considered it? Todoroki’s a walking flamethrower, and he’s had to do things way harder on the personal end than defibrillating a bunch of civilians. Like keeping Bakugou alive after two impalement wounds, and sealing up Sensei’s severed leg, and cauterizing his abusive father’s injuries mid-battle. Holy shit.

“I hated my fire to the point of being unable to use it to even half of its capabilities without getting flashbacks to my father beating me or burning me as a child for years. Having to learn to purposefully hurt people with it so there’d be higher chances of helping them later was hard.” Todoroki has always been intense, but ever since he started going to therapy after the end of the war, his trauma dump filter has kicked the bucket altogether.

“Your life is fucked, man.”

The guy can’t deny it because it’s the truth.

“It’s more intimate when it’s a medical emergency, compared to rescuing someone in battle,” he admits, echoing the exact problem Denki has with this whole situation. 

“Exactly.”

“It’s not good, that it stresses us out.”

“It’s not.”

“We’re going to have to move past it.”

“How?”

“I’d imagine it comes with experience.”

“What if I also find the prospect of gaining experience terrifying?”

“Then you’d have to quit being a hero.”

“No way.”

“Exactly.”

As the conversation hits a lull the lights whir back on with a loud thrum. Their room’s lights are turned off anyway, but the hallway is so bright it’s blinding. Todoroki shifts on his bed, moving to stand up.

“Where are you going?”

“Bathroom,” he says, a slight flush on his cheeks.

Cuz there’s explosive diarrhea to worry about too.

Come the morning he gets the scolding of the century for short-circuiting the lights as he slept. Because that blackout was his fault. 

“You can see him now,” Sensei says, having moved past the door and clicked it shut. “Be gentle. He’s still out of it.”

“You got it teach,” Denki says, brushing past Aizawa with a carelessness he wouldn’t have afforded himself in any other situation. Gathering the courage to push open Bakuou’s door is as complicated as convincing his derpy brain that no, it’s not a body bag waiting for him behind that door, but a grumpy steamed sewer of a very alive best friend. 

That’s wrong because Bakugou’s not quite very alive yet, pale and drowned by hospital smocks as he is, but he’s alive enough and that’s what matters. Denki doesn’t care anymore, he lunges at Bakugou and gives him a hug, which the guy is either too stunned or high to resist. 

“What the fuck?” he says before Denki has even begun to let him go.

“Say fuck again.”

“Fuck.” It’s perfect.

“And never say sorry to me again.” Oh, shit his voice wobbled. He can’t cry, he won’t.

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” he asks the rest of the class as if Denki isn’t there. “Pikachu I ain't your personal teddy bear. Let me go god damn it. I’ll kill you.”

Denki does let him go, but his emotions are nowhere close to being spent. “Dude, you died!”

“So I’ve been told.”

“What part of holding up a building with your chest is considered ‘safe stuck’?”

Bakugou has the decency to look guilty. “I was fine—”

“Kacchan, Kaminari-kun’s right. You should have told us,” Midoriya cuts in. How the guy is keeping those leaky faucets he has for tears in check is anyone’s guess.

“And we shouldn’t have assumed you were fine and asked questions you could give easy deceptive answers to.”

“Did you think we’d see you as weak for needing help?” Midoriya presses, a tense inflection to his somber tone.

“No, hell no… you know I don’t have that problem anymore Deku it’s just… The mission was more important, and I thought I’d be fine and…”

“I doubt you believed you’d be fine knowing you were bleeding out.”

“…I didn’t want to be a burden.”

Denki’s chest twists. Damn prideful perfectionists. There’s a deeper issue underlining all of this, something sewn into Bakugou’s fabric that they couldn’t hope to undo with a couple of talks and a hug or two. Denki can feel it swirling there, bubbling under the surface of Bakugou’s conflicted face. For now, they can only stick to temporary solutions.

“Burden? Do you think you’re so special, explosion boy? We all need saving sometimes. Think you’re different from the rest of us?”

“Yes.” So that backfired.

“You’re horrible,” Denki says fondly. Bakugou’s smirk isn’t visible behind his oxygen mask, but Denki knows it's there from the way those sharp eyes tilt so. “Never do that again. I mean it. I was making fun of you while you were getting crushed alive in a tiny air pocket. We’d never make you wait so long if we knew how bad it was. You’re worth more than some dumb mission.”

“That’s really fucking corny.”

“Said Explosion Muder God Dynamight.”

“Fuck you.”

They’ll be okay, and this time he means it.