Chapter Text
There is an explosion. Katsuki didn’t do it.
He’d been walking around, looking for some hole-in-the-wall ramen shop that supposedly had noodles kissed by the buddha or some shit. Obviously, he was only getting them because Mina was having weird cravings while Eijirou was busy on patrol, so maternal care had fallen to him.
Fucking typical.
(It really was. He might kick them around to get them up and working, but he’s spoiled them rotten, he fucking knew it, and he didn’t even mind.)
So it was his Sunday off and he was walking around a shit part of Shinjuku, because even after decades of city-shattering villain attacks Shinjuku just refused to get decent, trying to find some good goddamn ramen, when he managed to run into some villains.
Two no-names turned a corner, running through apathetic pedestrians, a hostage dragged behind them like a ragdoll.
Katsuki was off duty, in sweatpants and a T-shirt, but he had no quicker seen the three of them before he was blasting forward to cut them off. He punched firecrackers into their faces, carefully avoiding the hostage, and they skidded to a halt. Katsuki jumped off of them before they could even recognize him, and stared them down with all the spite of an off-day being ruined.
One was a metamorphic type, with a crocodile head and a pair of normal sunglasses perched on his snout, dressed in a slick black turtleneck and jeans. No visible weapons, but the stretchy fabric of the turtleneck contoured around bulging muscles that screamed gym-rat.
The other was tall but gangly, with a sly face and thick glasses, dressed in a black suit. Most notably his fingers had turned into little blades. Scalpels maybe, one of which was pressed teasingly against the hostage’s throat.
Katsuki had hardly lowered his hands, already mentally walking through hostage protocol, when Croc rushed him, letting Scalpel stand back and keep the hostage’s neck securely guillotined. Katsuki kept his eyes glued to the edges of those fingers as he avoided the Croc’s shitty swings, waiting to attack.
Only after Katsuki had been driven twenty feet away and had half a ton of Crocodile bearing down on him did Scalpel’s fingers drop away from that delicate jugular. Katsuki tore off like demon out of hell, completely blowing past Croc and bulleting straight to Scalpel.
Scalpel did the unthinkable and threw aside the hostage. Katsuki couldn’t even watch as her body tumbled onto the pavement; he was going far too fast to try and catch her. He could stop himself, though, and steered sharply to plant himself in front of her so she wouldn’t be snatched again. At last, explosions crackled to life at his fingertips and a grin lit across his face as he prepared himself to let go -
Something fucking stabbed him.
His explosions flickered for a moment as the pain spiked through his back. It was a blade, small and dull, probably a pocket knife (he’d been stabbed plenty of times at this point in his career to know the feel). They were nice for quickly running someone through a dozen times; Katsuki didn’t give them the chance.
He pushed himself to the side and off of the knife, cringing at he heard blood splatter on the pavement. Pressing a hand to the wound- dangerously close to where his kidneys were -he turned so he could see this new opponent clearly, but he already had a good idea. The two goons were on the right, and the hostage was on the left, a bloody knife in her hand. The pale, bruised thing that they’d tossed to the side was now grinning, their features shifting into a different, more familiar face.
He knew all the slime villains, and hunted them down with something the media called passion. Mina and Eijurou called it vengeance. He’s already fought with this particular asshole several times: Clayclone. As skeevy and shitty as they come, but pretty pathetic in terms of villainy.
“You motherfuckers are real stupid. You plan this shit? You think just cos’ I’m outta uniform I can’t crush your slimy asses onto the asphalt?” he snarled, widening his stance even as it pulled at his wound. He ignored the feeling of the blood soaking his shirt and pants.
There were three of them but they were all weak, so even without his grenadiers Katsuki was confident he could beat them. Lacking armor and his hero pager, however, was going to be ass. As much as he could grit through the pain, with two metamorphic types, their endurance was definitely going to be better, and he didn’t have any sidekicks to make up for it. At worse, it would become a fight of his destructive ability against their endurance. Unfortunately, they were in a pretty narrow, urban street in a high populated area. His usual blasts had to be watered down.
The only bright side to this mess was that Shinjuku was patrolled fairly often because of its high crime rate. He was sure there’d be some sort of backup within the next few minutes…
They attacked with two circling around him and one going straight for him, trying to crowd him and make an opening for themselves, but Katsuki had fought against far more… intelligent villains.
He blasted through their little formation with ease, and kicked Scalpel in the temple. He toppled over like a pile of sticks, but Clayclone was quick to try and stab him again. Katsuki grabbed the offending hand and fired off an explosion with great prejudice. The hand charred and cracked, but Clayclone had no issue breaking it off and letting a new one slowly reform. Croc attacked him in the meantime, and managed to keep Katsuki in blast radius of those damn pedestrians, to the point Katsuki was basically brawling.
Even sooner than Katsuki expected, someone in a bright green costume came around the corner.
“Hey, Fuckwit! I got a situation here!”
No sooner had the words left Katsuki’s mouth did he process who exactly had come on scene. This little coincidence was making a lot more sense with him at the helm.
His round, freckled face broke out into a grin, his obnoxious green suit making him seem far younger than Katsuki knew he was. Over his eyes, where Katsuki had ripped them out of his skull just a few months ago in an attempt to finally stop him-
(--to save his own life. To save his lovers’ lives. There was nothing fucking heroic in him when he desperately dug into that nerd’s skull to buy them precious seconds. He’d learned the nerd just didn’t care , and Katsuki couldn’t afford to either, anymore--)
-was a black visor with an LED screen. Pixelated eyes blinked at him, disturbingly innocent. Almost sheepish.
“ Deku!”
“Hi, Kacchan! Long time no see! I can see your hands are a little full, so I’ll give you a hand, okay?”
“I don’t want fuckshit from you!”
Deku pulled out a detonator from his pocket. Katsuki heart plummeted, pure ice running down his skin. Behind him, the villains ran away.
“Deku, no, stop-”
Deku smiled, and it was so disgustingly dead it made Katsuki want to vomit.
“Even you wouldn’t- I know you don’t want to! Stop it!” he screamed. He’d scream himself hoarse if he had to.
Deku ate it up. He loved that there was still something in Katsuki that had yet to break. Deku, the good and moral person that had stood under that name for so long, had been ground to ash, and the Deku that now proudly donned the slur loved nothing more than to constantly remind Katsuki of that fact.
“I’m really hoping this is it, Kacchan. Please die this time, okay?”
Katsuki launched himself at Deku so fast his sneakers left rubber streaks on the asphalt. The air rushed out of his lungs, unable to breath his eyes stayed hyper focused on that button. In a blink, he was inches away, his fingertip just touching it--
He couldn’t see Deku’s face when the asshole pressed the button. Katsuki imagined a cruel grin, a self-satisfied, smug smirk that would brand every screen in Japan, would be immortalized in textbooks, and be raised as a righteous flag to lead in a new generation of villains.
(It wasn’t.)
The building closest to them exploded violently, only a few meters away, and the force sent Katsuki flying into a metal bench. He blearily looked up at the explosions running through the ten story apartment building like a volcanic dragon, and the horrible cracks it was leaving in the cement. He blacked out as the first chunks started falling towards him.
~~~
When he woke up, his leg had been amputated and he was on dialysis.
The news headlines running along the hospital TV screen read: Ground Zero Collateral Kills 600 people, Including Hostage, in Extreme Overkill Against Two First-Time Villains.