Chapter Text
When "Bakugou Katsuki" is typed into the search bar of YouTube, the first video that shows up at the very top is titled Bakugou Katsuki vs All For One.
It has over three and a half billion views. Everyone and their grandmother have watched it at some point.
Ochako has watched it. Not more than once— she’d admit. It’s one thing seeing the aftermath lying on a hospital bed, buried under tubes and layers of bandages, fighting for his life. But to watch it happen— frame by frame, each wound getting a story behind them, the action in motion— when Ochako herself hadn’t healed enough, clutching the phone closer to her chest and hearing the nurse changing her IV suck in a sharp breath as the scene of Bakugou’s battered body flying across the field played on her screen— to watch it happen is different.
Ochako remembers it being so unsettling to see Bakugou being so nonchalant about losing an eye, about the inevitable scarring taking over half his face and an ear, the fact that his arm had a high chance of never returning to its full mobility, or the fact that his heart was barely holding up, so delicate that any strain on it could instantly become fatal.
He had been so calm, and collected, so unnaturally accepting of the news that he may never become a hero. The extent of his physical injuries— especially his heart, may limit him to a healthy civilian life on his best days, and a little too fatigued on his worst.
It felt weird. Ochako had believed Bakugou would have his heart crushed (no pun intended) that there were limits being placed on his hero career before it even began. Maybe it was the drugs pumping into his vein, maybe it was simply the absurdity of it all, but Bakugou didn’t even look bothered, and that had bothered Ochako a whole lot.
He was still Bakugou though. He still made his grinch faces and chewed out his mom when she tried to feed him. Threw a fit every time they changed the dressings on his face. Snickered at Kirishima for reasons Ochako doesn’t remember.
Despite that, and despite the shrieking reminder that Bakugou had been considered clinically dead— dead, and that this was a devastation that was going to change his entire life, he almost looked like he was at peace with it. Sometimes when he looked down at his cast-bound arm, for the tiniest of moments, he would look like he’d been set free.
The video on YouTube is titled Bakugou Katsuki vs All For One. Ochako thinks it’s only fitting that it’s Bakugou Katsuki and not a hero name nobody’s ever heard of. She wonders if Bakugou’s ever watched the video. She wonders what was going through his mind.
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Uraraka Ochako is sixteen years old, standing at the threshold of a hospital door, watching the second-best of her class casually shrug off the fact that he's pretty much done for.
It doesn't sit right in her chest. She searches his face and finds nothing— if not for the glint of freedom that's absolutely momentary. It makes her head fuzzy, equations crash landing over each other. She watches and wonders. What does it really mean to save a hero?
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Bakugou Katsuki is seventeen years old, with a flashy little quirk, and one hell of a dream.
When you are seventeen, you are innocently naive, but you don’t realize it until when you’re not seventeen anymore, and your brain has had enough time to process the full capacity of trauma you’ve been through, and once it finally soaks in all of the aftershocks, you truly realize how fucked you are.
At least that’s what Katsuki registers all throughout his third year at U.A.
The heart of a seventeen years old is too young to be thrown into a war, too soon to be expected to play tough, too fragile to gain the weight of a world too big, and too late to be fixed from its mangled pieces— spiritually, that is.
Seventeen years old Katsuki has danced in tandem with death far too freely than it should’ve been allowed.
Eighteen years old Katsuki takes his time to heal. It’s quite the struggle.
Nineteen years old Katsuki has his hero license in his hand, but he’s made a promise to the little kid he never let himself be, and he’s not going to half-ass it this time around, or anytime in the future, so he declines every offer he receives from agencies all around Japan, and asks Aizawa for a favor instead.
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The top comment on the video of Bakugou Katsuki vs All For One contains four simple words:
He’s just a kid.
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Sixteen years old Ochako never really managed to piece it all together.
Nineteen years old Ochako is brighter, sharper, with two years of pro-hero experience under her belt.
So on the night of April 19th, as she slides down to sit against the wall where her couch used to be, phone in hand and thumb hovering above a small thumbnail that says Bakugou Katsuki vs All For One, she thinks she finally understands.