Chapter Text
The first thing Aizawa-sensei does when the bus explodes and Class 3A spends exactly three seconds airborne (and screaming) is whirl around and look at them all like they had something to do with it, which, at the end of the day, is frankly just insulting.
Then they land, hard, and Katsuki stops being able to see Aizawa-sensei at all.
Katsuki sort of doesn’t think most of the class even realizes they’d been exploded. He thinks this because, after the bus slams back down (sideways) onto the hard asphalt of the road and the smoke starts pouring in, they’re all still screaming. Fucking drama queens.
“EVERYONE!” Katsuki can hear Four-Eyes’s voice towards the front. “Remain calm! Begin to make your way towards the emergency exit!”
“Holy shit!” Sero yells. His disembodied voice carries through the smoke just as Katsuki starts coughing. Fuck, it’s pouring in.
Katsuki coughs harder. He whacks an arm out to hit Kirishima in the chest where he should still be sitting next to him, to make sure he didn’t brain himself on something. Kirishima catches his arm and locks his grip. He starts coughing, too.
“HEYY!” Kaminari shouts. “IS EVERYONE OKAY?”
“Up—” Katsuki tries, throat raw. He’s too fucking claustrophobic for this. “Fucking get up.”
Around them, the class’s voices are starting to filter in, along with the shuffling of feet. He makes out Uraraka saying “—okay! Are you—” before she’s drowned out in the haze. Katsuki squints to make out Kirishima’s red hair as Kirishima stands and drags Katsuki with him.
“Slow and steady, everyone!” Kirishima calls over the noise when he gets his voice back. He lets Mina and Kaminari out in front, before starting to shuffle into the aisle with Katsuki on his heels. Katsuki doesn’t reach out for Sero, but he feels a hand grab his shoulder like an awkward game of line leader. He rolls his eyes.
Jesus.
He and his friends were already one of the closest groups to the back, so, by default, they’re one of the first to get out. Once the emergency exit door is open, Katsuki squints through the smoke and hops down without taking Mina’s offered hand.
Katsuki has to take a second on his feet again to hack the phlegm out of his throat, sticky and raw from the polluted air. He feels unnaturally winded, for something so minor as a (possible) villain attack. Ugh.
Ugh.
They were on their way to get ice cream, too. Aizawa-sensei organized it and everything.
“Man!” Sero coughs when he hits the street. Katsuki knows what he means. There’s a fucking—crater or something where their bus first got hit. Like the street had been blown open. It certainly doesn’t look like an accident.
Kamanari’s got his hands braced on his knees as he catches his breath next to Sero. “Are you oka—”
Katsuki tunes him out. He turns in a slow perimeter, scanning the stores and office buildings (and civilians pouring into the street to see the commotion) for any signs of a villain. There isn’t anything obvious. Distantly, sirens blare.
“Hey, help me help the girls get down.” Kirishima whacks him in the arm to get his attention. There’s soot on his face and shit. Katsuki doesn’t imagine he looks much better.
“Whatever,” Katsuki says, but follows Kirishima diligently when he steps closer to the exit. The bus is on its side, yeah, but it’s still tilted at a weird angle, so the distance to jump might be tough to judge with the smoke.
Kirishima holds out a hand to help Tsu; he grabs her other arm when she hops so he can brace her landing. Katsuki reaches out to grab Uraraka and thinks about maybe bracing her weight by grabbing her elbow or some gentlemanly shit, but she grins at him and skips his hand entirely—she leans forward and braces both of her palms on his dirty shoulders and—fucking—falls.
“Fuck—!” Katsuki yelps, off-balanced by the attack, and he barely has time to grab her waist in blind instinct. She doesn’t seem to need it, though, because when she lands, both of her shoes land on top of Katsuki’s boots.
“Fucking ow!”
Uraraka laughs. Her hands are still braced on his shoulders, but she lets go with a little pat-pat and a step out of his way. Fucking smile’s still in her voice when she says, “Sorry!”
“Yeah, keep fuckin’ laughing, angel face.”
Uraraka laughs again. Katsuki can see Kirishima smile in his peripheral, too.
Katsuki scowls. He’s still scowling when he reaches up to help Jirou, but she gives him the respect of keeping her expression neutral when she grabs his offered hand. She doesn’t do any fancy shit; she hops down without even needing his other arm for balance. Katsuki reminds himself to make sushi the way she likes it for dinner when they get back.
The same with Momo, after. She even thanks Katsuki when she lands. Fuckin’ A, pink cheeks.
He turns his head to make sure Momo steps far enough away before he raises his hand again for whoever’s next, only to flinch back. “Burn in hell.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Izuku says exasperatedly. He coughs into his sleeve.
“I’m not giving you my damn hand.”
Izuku hops down on his own, shooting him a look as he passes. “I didn’t ask you to.”
“‘I’m not giving you my damn hand,’” Kamanari whisper-mocks somewhere in the background. “‘That’s too gay.’”
“‘That’s where I draw the line,’” Sero whispers back.
A vein pops on Katsuki’s temple.
He looks over to yell at them, explicitly embarrassed and unsure why—he’s used to their teasing after three years of it—but decides it’s a losing battle when the two of them are standing five feet apart in the positions one would imagine someone standing in after being told to “act natural,” and Izuku is already distracted licking his damn thumb and wiping some soot from Uraraka’s cheek.
Her arms are crossed, but she’s leaning into his hand with her eyes closed and her brows scrunched and her mouth fighting a smile. Izuku says something quietly as he cups her jaw with his other hand, mouth curled into a teasing smile, and her eyes open in surprise as she laughs. It’s so easy—that dynamic between them. No wonder he has a fucking crush on her.
There’s something about Izuku, is the thing. The same something that’s been building like a livewire between them since Katsuki took the first bullet for him and since Katsuki said “I’m sorry about everything I’ve done until now” and since everything after, with the war that plagued the end of their first year.
There’s something about Izuku. Some indescribable feeling. He’s spent three years trying to place it; he’s never been able to place it.
Katsuki wonders what it would be like for Izuku to cup Katsuki’s face in his palms like he does to Uraraka. He’d be a little rougher with it—or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d still be gentle, and Katsuki would pretend to hate it, and Izuku would laugh and keep being gentle anyway ‘cause he knows him so damn well.
He stares at the two of them, talking and laughing quietly, for a few more seconds.
And then he physically jolts, a few tiny explosions popping off in his palm, because where the fuck did that come from?
Talk about intrusive fucking thoughts. What the fuck. Katsuki shakes his head. Ew, what the fuck.
He blinks hard to clear up whatever the fuck that was, and looks back towards the opening of the bus.
“Are you gonna help me down, too?” Shinsou drawls, when he and Katsuki just spend a few seconds staring at each other and Katsuki doesn’t coil away.
Katsuki coils away. “Fuck you.”
He can’t read Shinsou’s expression well through the mask he’d presumably put on to fight the smoke, but his eyes crinkle a little as he crouches and levels himself to the ground. Aizawa-sensei and the bus driver follow at his heels. Aizawa-sensei has his scarf wrapped around his face, and he’s given some of it to the bus driver to help him breathe, too, because he’s so damn cool.
As soon as Aizawa’s touching asphalt, Katsuki watches him swivel to do a quick head-count. Katsuki doesn’t blame him for the barely-there worry in his good eye. “Is everyone alright?”
A pause. Everyone seems to glance around, like they’re confirming for their friends, too. Katsuki crosses his arms and doesn’t look over at Izuku and Uraraka.
“Fine, sensei!” Kirishima says at last. He puffs out his chest in the picture of confidence and knocks his quirk-hardened fists together. “Everyone seems to be alright, from what I can tell!”
“A miracle,” Aizawa-sensei mutters to himself.
Katsuki snorts.
Aizawa surveys their surroundings once he’s sure there are no major injuries. “We need to get off the street. Some Pros should already be on their way, but we can’t cross out the fact that this could be a targeted attack. Let’s all—”
The second explosion comes out of nowhere.
Aizawa cuts himself off when the ground physically rocks beneath their feet—there’s a boom from inside the office building behind them; someone shrieks as every window on their side of the street explodes outwards.
Katsuki barely has the instinct to throw his arm over his face and turn away as the shards ricochet towards them. Something sharp stings his bare arms once or twice, but nothing hits his sides or his back. He whips around to see the damage just as Aizawa gets a hand on his shoulder and drags him back towards the rest of the class.
The top of the fucking building collapses.
He watches it happen in slow motion; it just. Caves in on itself. Cement lurches and voices shriek and—fuck—a fire flares to life somewhere inside, visible from a few of the dark windows on the upper floors.
The screaming doesn’t stop. Katsuki has the nauseating realization that this isn’t a video he’s watching, or a level in a video game where it doesn’t fuckin’ matter. There are people inside, screaming. There are people on the street, who could get hit next, screaming.
And there’s Uraraka, too, screaming— “Deku!”
Green electricity. The sharp smell of ozone. Disappears directly through a window on the first floor of the building.
Katsuki stops breathing.
Aizawa-sensei swears so loud and panicked it jars the bones in his fucking spine, and then everything clicks into place. Katsuki fires off an explosion, tunnel vision, and shoots off after the damn freak.
Kirishima shouts his name, but Katsuki isn’t fast enough. Aizawa’s ready for it. Katsuki drops mid-explosion, quirk hollowed out, just as Aizawa’s capture weapon cuts into his torso and jerks him back.
“Absolutely not!” Aizawa shouts when Katsuki’s sneakers skid against asphalt.
Katsuki whips around, twisting desperately. There’s a gnawing sense of fear in his gut. He has to get Izuku—he has to get Izuku out. “Fuck you! Someone has to go after him!”
Aizawa rarely gets actually pissed at anyone in class 3A, but his eyes are livid red as he pulls Katsuki another foot back, even as he digs his heels into the ground to resist it. “That’s my job. That is my job, do you hear me? Your job is to take cover until the Pros get here.”
“The Pros aren’t here! Your job is keeping your fucking class safe!”
Civilians are still screaming. A cursory glance at his classmates tells him about half are holding themselves back from racing after Izuku anyway while Aizawa’s distracted with Katsuki. Icy-Hot’s eyes haven’t left the building. There’s frost curling up his arm.
Katsuki’s foot slips, and Aizawa pulls him the rest of the way in. Aizawa towers over him, like this, even though Katsuki’s grown a foot to hit eighteen years old. He snaps, “That includes you. Your classmate may have just put his life in danger to play hero, but that doesn’t mean you—”
“What happens when another bomb goes off, hah!?” Katsuki shouts. It actually shuts Aizawa up, whether in surprise or consideration, so he struggles again at the restraints snaring his arms to his sides and barrels on. “What happens when someone out here gets really fuckin’ hurt because there was another attack, and you’re not here to save them?”
“That’s—”
Katsuki snaps his teeth. “Izuku’s my problem. Mine. You wouldn’t trust him to go after himself because he’ll throw himself on the knife if there’s someone left to save, but you trust me. I’ll prioritize my safety, and then his, and then everyone fuckin’ else’s.”
They’re running out of time, standing here yelling at each other. Why doesn’t he see that?
Katsuki smells ozone again, flaring too close, and registers by the way his quirk floods back to him that Izuku must’ve dropped some people outside, and Aizawa-sensei had just glanced up to try to intercept him. Clearly doesn’t do a damn bit of good, though, because Aizawa makes a frustrated noise, and the restraints around Katsuki loosen all at once.
“Be careful,” Aizawa snaps, and that’s all Katsuki needs.
He registers his teacher shouting something to Icy-Hot the second he turns his head and Katsuki blasts off again—something about the move he’d been practicing (an ice blast and a precisely-placed flame to melt it into water at the last second) to help douse the fire—but Katsuki doesn’t catch his response before he slams into the now-open doorway of the first floor of the building.
He’s not in his hero costume; he pulls his tank top up to cover his nose and mouth the second the air gets thicker, and has to dodge around a few people running for the exit before they run right into him.
He’s not in his hero costume, but that means Izuku’s not, either.
Katsuki turns to survey his perimeter. There’s no visible fire on the first floor—the lobby—which makes sense from what they’d seen from outside. His first instinct is to wait until Izuku shows his ugly face again with whichever civilians he’s delivering to the front and grab him, but he crosses it out instantly. After clearing the first floor, he’d head higher. It would be a waste to run back and forth when time could be running out for someone trapped; he’d make sure everyone uninjured knows the way to the emergency stairs and keep going. They’d already missed the one chance they had to grab him when he appeared again, damn it.
Katsuki starts running for the staircase.
Izuku would check every office on the second floor, banging and shouting for the workers to come out, but he could do it faster than Katsuki should anticipate, if he’s using his quirk. He’ll move up the building as quickly as possible, assuming no one’s hurt. His main priority is going to be the top few floors that haven’t caved in, where the fire actually is. Where the injuries probably are.
Katsuki rams his way past a few more panicked people because he doesn’t want to risk starting another fire with his quirk, and locks eyes with the still-swinging doorway of the entrance of floor two. It hasn’t been that long—Izuku could still be there—but a wrong guess could cost him the couple seconds he needs to catch him if he’s already on the third story.
Katsuki swears. He takes the gamble. He dodges a new crowd of people and keeps charging right up towards the next floor.
He shoulders his way through the third story doorway, and has to ram past a new crowd of screaming people and avoid a few fast-opening doorways, and smells before he sees what’s in front of him.
Ozone.
And there he is—he’s all energy and power, like this, banging on a few unopened office doors down the hallway, the piercing energy of OFA crackling around him. Blackwhip flares, too, and Izuku is so in-tune with his body and his quirk by now that he doesn’t even look like he’s controlling it as it perfectly twists and curls and picks up a few straggling workers and ushers them towards the exit.
Katsuki can’t help it; he blasts off with his quirk, propelling himself forward. Straight-shot.
“IZUKU!”
Izuku jumps—fucking jumps, like he’s not a fucking behemoth of limitless power—and glances over his shoulder as Katsuki speeds towards him. “Kacchan!”
Katsuki’s feet touch the ground barely a second before he’s up in Izuku’s space, grabbing his shoulders like a death warrant. “Are you fucking stupid!?”
Holy shit, he’s gonna kill this fucking idiot.
“We don’t have time!” Izuku argues back, and there it is. Switch flipped: sharp determination.
He’s always had this way about him, when he’s able to smooth his soft edges into something hardened at the first sign of pushback. None of that soft, teasing expression he’d been looking at Uraraka with remains. He glares at Katsuki like Katsuki isn’t about to drag him six feet under for that fucking stunt; he glares at Katsuki like he’s not fucking afraid of him. Stubborn fucking asshole.
There’s soot from the bus smoke on Izuku’s lower lip and chin, and a few surface-level cuts curve across his cheeks and nose. He grabs Katsuki’s wrists with his strong, calloused hands. “Kacchan, if you help me, we can get everyone out!”
Katsuki thinks of what he told Aizawa. That he’d prioritize his and Izuku’s safety.
But then he realizes: neither of them are hurt, and he wants to be a fucking hero.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” Katsuki vows solemnly.
But Izuku’s grip tightens. “I’ll finish third and fourth, you do fifth and sixth.”
“Sixth has a collapse risk. It’s the highest one standing.”
“You counted?”
“You didn’t?”
Izuku exhale-laughs, and it sounds fond for some fucking reason, but he’s already distracted before Katsuki can call him on it. His brain’s visibly going haywire. It’s a small miracle he doesn’t start mumbling. He nods again. “We cover six together.”
Katsuki grunts. Izuku’s hands are searing-warm where they grab him. “Yeah. Are you good?”
“I’m good.”
“Go.”
They break at the same time, and Katsuki kinda hates to admit it, but he’s never worked better with anyone in his entire damn life. Izuku may take up all the air in the world talking his ass off normally, but on the field, they’d managed to figure out a shorthand that involved a lot of clipped phrases and body-language reads. It’s fucking exhilarating.
He tears down the rest of the hallway in the direction he’d come from, shouldering past the door and dodging a few more screaming people. Skips right past the fourth floor and shoves his way into the fifth. There are already less people here, which bodes well for a quick cleanup on the last two floors. There’s also a weird fuckin’ smell that he files away into his “this might be concerning” bank: faint enough, but acrid and bitter all the same.
Katsuki bangs on a couple closed doors like Izuku was doing, shouting, “Fire!” before moving on, ‘cause he can’t wait around to see if anyone was there when there could be someone who needs real help.
And there is.
He spots her on the ground, teeth grit and fists clenched, with who’s presumably one of her coworkers trying to heave a piece of heavy rubble off of her leg. The hallway he finds them in is vacant otherwise; he insults everyone who ran past without stopping with a few colorful adjectives in his head.
The woman looks like she’d been doing a good job at keeping her composure so far, but she sobs openly in relief when Katsuki skids to his knees at the man’s side.
Katsuki gets his fingers wedged under the massive concrete slab, right next to the worker’s, and nods once. “Lift.”
Credit where credit’s due: it’s heavy. The guy who stayed to help probably had no chance of heaving it on his own—Katsuki groans through his teeth even with their combined strength, and digs his knees harder into the ground as it slowly starts to budge up—but he kept trying anyway.
The cement slab rises higher, enough for the woman to squirm out from under it, but she needs a few seconds since one of her legs looks unnaturally pink and useless. Katsuki screams low in the back of his throat, through clenched teeth: “Fucking die!”
The final surge of strength gives them enough time.
The second she manages to roll away, her coworker and Katsuki let the rubble drop with a resounding slam. He just barely manages to get his fingers out of the way before they’re crushed.
He looks back towards the civilians the second he’s able to spare his focus, one hand half-raised. “Are you—”
“Fine,” the man speaks for the first time, trembling from head to toe, but he leans down to heft the woman into his arms like it’s nothing. She sobs again when she sees the state of her clearly broken leg, covering her face in his shoulder. He clutches her closer to his chest, stumbling back a step. Looks at Katsuki. “Where should—”
“Closest exit’s that way,” Katsuki points. He’s getting to his feet again, wiping his hands. The air is even thicker up here. “Go.”
Dude doesn’t need to be told twice. He breaks off into a sprint; adrenaline’s a crazy fucking thing.
Katsuki utilizes his adrenaline to speed through clearing the rest of the fifth floor, tank top bunched at his nose again, and finds no other problems. He’s just gotten back to the exit staircase by the time he hears footsteps charging up behind him. He doesn’t flinch; they’re too familiar.
Izuku closes the gap between them in record time, just as they hit the stairwell for the sixth floor. They couldn’t go higher if they wanted; the staircase is all collapsed and caved in a few feet above, metal twisting and concrete crushing, like some sort of daunting reminder of their fate if they don’t hurry. Whatever he’d been smelling before is also stronger here. It’s familiar, in a way he doesn’t like.
He takes all of this into account right before he turns to see Izuku.
Panic jolts into him like a sledgehammer. “What the fuck?”
Izuku leans heavily against the wall next to him, uncharacteristically out of breath. What is less uncharacteristic, though no less panic-inducing, is the mess of dark blood drenching half of his face and the top of his pale shirt—the awful red darkens the kanji that says “t-shirt” in mockingly playful lettering.
Katsuki grabs both of his arms, like he’d done before. “What the fuck!”
Izuku shakes his head hard, almost panicking for Katsuki. “I’m fine! I’m fine—I knocked my head hard after I fell trying to carry someone towards the stairwell, and head wounds bleed a lot.”
“The fuck they do. Come on, we have to go back—”
“No! We haven’t checked the last floor!”
Katsuki snarls, “Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you left a bloodtrail up three fucking stories! I’m not putting you in more danger!”
“I’m not in any more danger than I would be!”
“You are if you have a fucking concussion!”
Izuku plants his feet down hard, hand drifting towards the doorknob, and Katsuki groans inwardly. Here they fuckin’ go. He should’ve sent him flying back to Aizawa when he had the chance.
“We have to make sure there’s no one who needs help.”
“No shit, I’m looking at—”
Izuku yanks the door open with a huff and a bitchy fucking attitude that does not suit him, but by then, all bets are off.
Smoke instantly pours out of the room. It’s awful and thick, and that goddamn bitter ass smell hits him tenfold.
Katsuki snatches Izuku by the collar of his shirt and yanks him back when he goes to move, and then he hisses: “Do you know what collapse zone means, idiot? You can’t just walk in, let alone blindly.”
Izuku takes a second to process this. Then he nods. “We’ll just peer in.”
“Oh, we’ll just peer in,” Katsuki mocks under his breath. At this point, he might as well be fucking babysitting.
The amount of blood drenching Izuku is climbing very high on his list-of-things-to-deal-with, ordered by both concern and frustration. They usually go hand in hand. He’s just leaning around him to try to get a good glance at the back of his head when there’s a shuffling noise from just inside the landing.
They both go stock-still.
Katsuki’s narrowed red eyes do a perimeter scan, but it’s hard to make out anything through the smoke and the heat of the fire... fuck, if there’s someone in there, he’ll have to figure out the structural integrity of the building before he makes his move. If he’s lucky, he can coax them out.
One thing is certain, though: Izuku is not going anywhere near it.
“Don’t,” Katsuki hisses when he shifts forward again, feeling much akin to someone gripping the scruff of a dog. “You are not about to go in there and get yourself killed, understand me?”
Izuku glares at him. His eyes say, I can handle this.
Katsuki thinks his own eyes say fuck you.
Towards the floor, Katsuki calls, “Hello?”
Silence.
They both wait with baited breath, maybe halfway for the Pros to show up so they can leave, but halfway for—
“Hello?” Someone calls back.
The emotion that hits Katsuki next isn’t relief, but it also isn’t the unease of the expectation of a rescue stunt.
He can’t explain why, not to anyone who will ask, but in the second the human voice floats back to them, composed and strangely clear and close, a terror he’s never felt in his life wrenches over him like a bucket of icewater.
It’s compounded when Izuku rips away from his hold to be the damn hero. It’s compounded when he finally recognizes what he’d been smelling.
Motor oil.
C-4.
It’s instinct when he moves—throws himself in after Izuku and catches him in his arms. He uses the momentum to twist so his back is to where they’d heard the voice from. He hears Izuku gasp. It’s like everything moves in slow-motion. He feels every point of contact.
He also feels the last explosion.
It’s not much through the adrenaline, just heat-white and blinding. His vision blacks out.
He’s not fully conscious when the floor collapses, but he doesn’t have to be. Izuku screams, and Katsuki feels his stomach drop far enough to understand anyway.