(A/N: This takes place sometime after Deku began his ten months of training with All Might but before the UA entrance exams)
It was the beginning of Golden Week and Bakugou Katsuki hated it. This isn't to say that there was anything particularly offensive about Golden Week; it wasn't like clipping his fingernails or alarm clocks that didn't function or the piece of extra-sweet gum that came in a pack of Flavor Burst. He hated Golden Week with same dispassion with which he hated all of the other things that he couldn't quite justify hating. He hated it because he had to hate it. He hated it because he'd die if he didn't.
It was 6:00 AM, which was normally the time of day when his mom would force him out of bed and out into the world (which he hated). His parents, however, had left yesterday evening to enjoy the string of upcoming holidays somewhere more colorful. His dad had wanted to go to Europe but they had settled on a Hawaiian island-hop because it ended up being a fourth of the price. Conveniently, the budget still didn't allow for a third—and perhaps even more conveniently, the Bakugous no longer needed to hire a house sitter. The previous year's family trip to Okinawa had resulted in what some people would call an 'incident'. His mother called it 'our Katsuki being a shallow, joyless drain on his parents' emotional well-being'.
There had been quivering lips and teary eyes before their departure, the last lamentations of a couple about to have their first Children's Day without their only child. They got over it before the door even closed on their way out.
Katsuki had a very rare opportunity to sleep in. Instead, he forced himself to wake up an hour earlier than normal. In some small way he had done it to spite his mom. She'd never know she had been spited but that didn't matter to him. What mattered was that he woke up even earlier without the old nag.
And he hated it—because he'd die if he didn't.
If you get happy then you die, he thought.
Happiness meant complacency, it meant that you were content with what and where you were. In order to avoid this he decided at a young age that he should hate on principle alone.
Didn't hate coffee though. It gave him the energy he needed to keep on hating.
He drank his canned vending machine coffee (light milk, no sugar) in a single, continuous chug and punctuated it with a light belch. The early morning Spring weather was just chill enough to allow a cloud of white, wispy steam to accompany this and for some reason it gave the teen a sense of fleeting satisfaction. That little bit of joy left him quickly. It was for the best; after all, if it had lingered for too long he would've had to shoo it away like the wild animal a child befriended at the end of a bittersweet family film.
The crisscrossing streets of suburban Musutafu smoothed out into long stretches of uninterrupted sidewalk as he moved further out. For a moment he thought that—perhaps subconsciously—the habit-forming part of his brain had encouraged him to walk because it expected him to go to school. He had even been halfway-dressed in his school uniform before correcting himself and slipping into his Sunday casuals.
He hadn't really known where he was going until he got there. It was a decently leg-straining walk and several sharp turns until a long stretch of empty road led the way to a modest collection of shops and small businesses; the modest marketplace served as a last-chance buffer before the full wave of urban cityscape overtook you. There was a convenience store, the Nightly Hamada, that he didn't hate as much as he could have; they sold the XXtra spicy potato sticks that other stores didn't sell anymore. Katsuki's continuous patronage and habitual buying of them, unbeknownst to him, was the primary contributor to the store's continued restocking of his own favorite snack.
His plans for the day formed as he moved. He'd stock up on a day's worth of snacks and extra coffee and then he could enjoy hating the day with renewed feeling. He considering going home to study, getting an unusual early start for when school was back in session.
That old woman probably thinks I'm gonna sleep in and goof off, he thought. But that'll show her. Don't even need that old bitch. The effectiveness of his mother's parenting was lost on him.
#
He tossed his empty can of coffee into a nearby waste bin before entering the Nightly Hamada. The transition from natural day to glowing, chalk-white fluorescent lighting was always jarring. Katsuki blinked in minor irritation and turned his eyes to the floor to him a moment to adjust before scanning the store.
"Welcome."
The worker behind the register was about as enthusiastic as you'd expect from someone at the end of a nine-hour shift on a holiday. He a young man with tired eyes and half-cocked glasses. His pale hair hadn't but been combed but, rather, sloppily smoothed over with his fingers and it showed in the presence of numerous clumps jutting out in random directions from his scalp. Despite his clear lack of sleep and emotion he stood perfectly straight like a fence post that had joined the military.
Katsuki had seen him before. He never spoke more than necessary, checked his items out fast, and always gave the correct change so the teen had a healthy tolerance for him.
The store was less occupied than usual with the holiday interrupting so many usually strict schedules. An older man in a heavy coat and a cheap baseball cap shuffled aimlessly through random aisles. He was a broad-shouldered older boy with what Katsuki thought was a heavy stomach but could've also been his hands stuffed into the front pockets of his coat.
Katsuki, for a moment, swore that he'd been watching him for a moment before jerking his eyes away. He heard the shopper mutter something incoherently under his breath and his pace quickened.
Katsuki was suspicious that he'd said something snarky but chose to forget about due to lack of evidence and lack of caring about what some weirdo thought about how loose some kid wore his pants.
He snagged the spicy snacks and a four-pack of canned coffee quickly but then chose to loiter as so many rebellious youths are wont to do. In doing so he discovered a second customer who had escaped initial scan of the store. Her meager height—Katsuki would guess around 4'11"—made her easy to overlook.
The short, awkward girl couldn't have been much younger or older than himself. She struck him as a very 'round' girl. Her ink-black hair was cut perfectly into the shape of an upturned bowl and her cheeks, round and glossy, reminded him of those blush-colored apples that wouldn't come into season until Autumn. A baggy hoodie and similarly fitting jeans added to the perceived roundness of her short, pudgy figure. She hovered near the magazine and manga racks and seemed to take no need of anything around her. Her wide starry eyes betrayed her enchantment with whatever it was she was reading. Katsuki didn't quite care enough to sneak a peek.
He placed his items within the angle of his elbow before settling near her and browsing the collection of magazines. He picked out a copy of Old Japan Alpinist—he hated rock climbing but he loved to hate it—and idly flipped through the pages by flicking at them with his thumb.
The sound of gloss paper broke the girl from her reverie and became uncomfortably aware of the blond boy's presence. Her arms drew closer to her body and she hunched over what she was reading.
"Is there a problem?"
It wasn't a threatening question on its own but Katsuki didn't speak it, he barked it. His lips peeled back and he sucked on his teeth as he spoke without looking up from an article about people who attempt the Seven Summits.
The girl didn't look up. She blindly snatched several manga from the rack and bundled them to her chest. She hoisted up an oversized, novelty pin-covered canvas bag that she'd placed to the side in similar fashion to Katsuki's 'supplies' and bowed like a drinking bird toy.
"Sorry. Sorry. Sorry." She repeated it as a reflex and shuffled away, presumably to check out.
He side-glanced her as she scurried away and caught the faint ghost of someone who had been watching him, a blur of motion as the shopper in the ball cap jerked his neck to the side and once again pretended to be interested in something else.
Katsuki pretended to read while angling his eyes to the bag of snacks that laid near his feet; the foil-like surface of the bag was just reflective enough to give him a blobby image of what was behind him. He aimed his eyes at differing slants until he got a clear enough view of the older person's head above the rows of item-stocked shelves.
From his movement Katsuki could tell he was focusing on the girl who just fled the magazine rack. She had looked, at first, as if she'd been set on going straight to the register but she instead ducked into another aisle and returning to quietly reading. She hugged to a shelf but positioned herself in the middle of the aisle, listening intently and glancing to her sides every few pages.
The heavily distorted image of the guy in the snack bag was all Katsuki needed to know that this upset him. He heard more hushed, angry whispers from the shopper in the coat and he began to pace.
Katsuki returned the magazine to the rack and then gathered up his things. He began to lazily walk towards the register but then suddenly veered into another aisle to continue browsing. He held his breath and turned his ear towards the guy in the coat. He could just barely manage to catch a few snippets of whispering self-talk.
"Dammit…just…damn damn…leave…"
Katsuki could think of quite a few explanations for this. Maybe he wanted to buy something embarrassing and preferred as empty a shop as possible or maybe he was having a casual conversation with his buddy behind the register before the two kids strolled it and started muddying up the place.
But those options were all boring so he decided that the guy wanted to rob the place. This gave his continued loitering a strange sense of accomplishing something.
Katsuki and the man prowled through the clean, brightly lit aisles. It made for a strange simulation of Pac-Man with the young, irritable blond gaining more entertainment the more the would-be-thief became worked up.
Tick tock, tick tock. Clock winding down. More people will be coming in the longer the day drags on. Gonna get it over with? Gonna come back later? Gonna chicken out? The schadenfreude was too good to resist.
They occasionally walked into whatever aisle the bowl-haired girl was in, causing her to retreat to other aisles like a gawky machine programmed for pacifistic self-preservation.
Katsuki had become certain that nothing would come of this. He didn't have to prepare himself to confront the guy as he was always prepared for that, but before he could the man in the ball cap finally decided to just take the plunge. His walking pattern ceased and he marched anxiously towards the register.
The sleep-deprived cashier regarded him with an apathetic yet attentive practiced stare. Before the employee could speak he was silenced by the raising of the cap-wearing man's hand.
"Hold on," the 'customer' insisted.
He then backed away slightly from the counter and positioned his hands in front of him as if using them for balance. He licked at his lips while inhaling deeply and causing his stomach and chest to swell beneath his dense coat. His lips formed a pronounced 'O' shape and he began to blow.
A bubble formed at his lips of the kind that you'd see children making with soap wands. It expanded to about the size of a golf ball before he sealed his mouth completely and allowed his creation to float freely. The cashier squinted in confusion and instinctively backed away as the bubble gently floated as if attracted to him.
"Wh-"
"This thing? This is my Quirk, got it?", the man explained. His speech was fast and jittery with anxiety-induced shakiness. "I make bubbles, right? Bubbles like this. That's a small one, y'know, but I can make way bigger. Biggest one I ever made was about 9-feet across, I measured it."
The cashier seemed to try and force a smile but he failed at it; the attempt only resulted in some unusual puckering as if he'd just started sucking on a sour piece of candy.
"That's…that's nice, but-"
The man across the counter flicked his hand forward. A bright, metallic gleam caught the cashier's eyes a fraction of a second before it happened. The man thrust a sharp, metal sewing pin into the bubble he had just created and popped it before leaping back on his heels.
There was an echoing pop that strained the cashier's hearing and a violent burst of what felt like wind. It had enough force to push him back. His glasses flew from the perches of his ears and landed somewhere behind him. The flesh of his face seemed to indent in for a split second before the burst of impossibly enormous air pressure forced him off of his feet. He crashed into the counters behind him with a painful yell.
The man who had caused it grinned in nervous self-praise at the effectiveness—apparently even he'd underestimated how much 'bang' he could give a bubble of that size—and once more began to suck in air. He pursed his lips and began to blow a second bubble. It quickly swelled to the size of a golf ball.
Then to the size of a ripe tomato, then to the size of a small watermelon, then to the size of a very large watermelon, then to the size of an exercise ball. The man turned his hat backwards as it grew to increasingly unreasonable sizes, presumably so that the brim wouldn't scrape against it.
The cashier brought himself to his feet and, upon seeing the size of the new air bomb and realizing how the force of it could scale upward, raised his hands in a pleading terror.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?"
"Imme ahh dah mo-hee!"
"Wh-…what?"
"Imme! Ahh! Dah! Mo-hee!"
"I do-"
"Inna aaahsh re-sturr!"
The cashier stared dumbly for a moment. "I can't…it sounds like you're underwater or something, probably because there's a bubble in your mouth."
Exasperated, the robber pointed aggressively towards the cash register. The tired cashier slowly glanced over to the cash register, then back to the robber, and then back to the cash register before finally settling on staring in disbelief.
"...You're robbing a convenience store at 6:00 AM on Showa Day?"
"..."
Lacking a response but overcoming the weakness of shame and stupidity, the robber narrowed his eyebrows and continued to inflate the bubble.
The girl with the bowl-shaped jumped at the sound of the initial bubble pop. She jumped twice as high when the mean, red-eyed boy from earlier grabbed her shoulder and hissed an order into her ear.
"If you don't wanna get killed get ready to open the door."
The main doorway was a scant ten feet to the side of the register where a nervous, overworked twenty-something was now hurriedly trying to explain that the register was programmed to allow only certain small increments of money to be taken out at a time.
The nervous girl froze as soon as physical contact was made. She became statue-like as if to avoid the attention of a predator with movement-based vision. Her fingers straightened like dowels and allowed for a death grip on her manga without creasing any of the pages—a useful adaptation for someone with both a taste in collectible comics and chronic anxiousness. She made a series of sounds that may or may not have been words but the boy had already left her. He snaked around aisles and ended up on the side of the thief opposite the exit.
The bubble-blowing man continued to back up from the register as the still-forming air bomb grew in size. He held his arms away from his body while still brandishing the sewing needle, at all times keeping it just close enough to the bubble to be unnerving.
Then a hand pressed to the side of the bubble.
The thief froze in much the same way as the girl. He glanced to the side without daring to budge anything but his eyes. Katsuki gave a broad, tooth-licking grin as he pushed his hand further forward. It was considerably sturdier than a normal bubble and it allowed for the pliable, liquid-solid texture to mold around his fingers like exceptionally water-y gelatin.
"AHH DA ELL AHRU DOIN'!?" The thief enunciated as clearly as he could.
"Huh? Whazzat? Say again? I can't hear you!"
Katsuki turned his head and pressed his ear into the bubble as well while taking step after step forward. The thief shuffled awkwardly away from him to try and alleviate some of the pressure. He began to inhale; the bubble very slowly began to shrink. Pinpoints of tears formed at the corners of his eyes—not out of terror or sadness, necessarily, but from the strain and forcing the pressure back into his lungs.
Getting a good look at his face the boy saw that he was a young man with an upturned nose, hooded eyes, and the barest dusting of stubble covering dense, square cheeks. Katsuki thought he had an appropriately forgettable face.
Katsuki's lips peeled back and the pale redness of his gums made a grisly frame for the white of his teeth. He clenched his jaw as he smiled and the sound of straining molars, squeaky and straining like a string being pulled tight, tingled in the audible background.
"Are you seriously tryin' to rob a convenience store in broad daylight on Showa Day? Are ya stupid!?"
The thief said nothing while continuing to do away with the bubble. The wild-eyed maniac of a child continued to plow forward.
"Or do ya think you're being funny? Huh!? Maybe people won't take you so seriously so you'll get off light? Maybe I'll underestimate you?"
Maybe I'll underestimate you. Like a cornered rat or one of those spiders that pretended to be ants or a certain freckle-faced, green-haired simpering little nobody who thinks he has what it takes…
Katsuki's smile disappeared as his thoughts raced. A familiar oily wetness began to seep from the boy's palms and it showed on the transparent surface of the bubble. The thief said nothing but his widening eyes betrayed curiosity to his assailant.
"You wanna know what that is? Well, you play these slow, useless bubbles? I just kinda sweat and then things…blow up. It's kind of a problem for me sometimes. See, I sweat when I get pissed."
His smile, disturbingly, returned. His face darkened and the thief could swear that his teeth were stretching the boy's mouth out enough that it should've been painful. Katsuki rubbed his teeth, making a dry noise much like a mortar and pestle grinding peppercorns.
He continued. "I don't care about helping people. I just hurt people when I get mad. But hey! I lucked out! 'Cause it's lowlifes like you that I hate the most and people are pretty enthusiastic to see guys like you get hurt. So I think, 'Hey! I should be a hero! I can hate and hurt people as much as I want without having to deal with any of the guilt! I just let it all out and people thank me for it! Guys like you make it so that I have a positive future ahead of me. I see oxygen thieves like you and I get angry. I start to sweat a little too much and my teeth start to itch and I feel like I wanna scratch 'em outta my mouth."
He gave an extra painful-looking twist of his jaw to emphasize this. The bubble had now been reduced back to small watermelon status but, from the thief's facial expression, it looked like it wouldn't be able to get much more back in.
Nevertheless, Katsuki continued. "Then things blow up. Then that makes me madder. Then I sweat even more and my teeth feel like they're gonna burst and pretty soon I can no longer fight my urge to kill!"
He layered it on extra-thick, so thick that the tears in the older man's eyes no longer seemed to result from physical exertion alone. He managed to whimper out a few pleas of what could've been anything, but Katsuki chose to believe it was something along the lines of 'wait, no, I'll do anything'.
"D I E!"
Maybe he exaggerated, went a little too far. Fear, however, was a very useful tool for deterring crime.
A yellow-ish light flashed the boy's palms and a white-hot heat hit the thief's face in a strobe-like pattern; black, slightly sweet-smelling smoke and a torrential rush of air followed.
None of the others present had seen when the girl opened the door, her short stature giving her a modicum of stealth. She pushed the doors open and clumsily stumbled away as the bubble ignited.
The force of the explosion pushed the tremendous air pressure straight through and onto the streets to dissipate with relative safety. A small display shelf was toppled and a collection of complimentary coupons were turned into a convenient kind of street litter. Broken glass and other such hazards were thankfully avoided when the girl decided to take Katsuki's forceful advice.
The man rolled out of the store like a runaway tire. He was singed and breathless but alive. He caught his breath within seconds—thanks in no small part to the extra lung capacity afford by his Quirk—and scrambled off into a nearby alley like a struck dog.
Katsuki calmly scratched at his the fleshy bumps where his teeth met his gums and glanced over to the rattled cashier with all the bright cheeriness of a broken light bulb. "Hey, ring me up."
"Uh…y-…yeah, uh…hey kid, you want a discount or something?"
"Do I look like I want your charity?"
The cashier went back to being silent and mechanical. It was a swift return to the no-nonsense business relationship he and the teen had. It almost felt comforting, like an unspoken and intimate bond of two people choosing not to care about each other.
Katsuki didn't take notice of much as he left. He basked in the satisfying glow that hatred made for him and seemed to completely forget about the whole incident as he left for home.
He didn't notice the girl staring at his back as left. The cashier didn't notice her either. Whether by lack of height or strangeness of disposition she seemed to have a natural talent for avoiding attention.
She left without paying and started off in the same direction as the blond boy from earlier.
She scratched at her teeth.
(A/N: I think I'm okay with calling this an experiment for now. I'd like to continue it but for now I'm just gauging interest. I used to write some Albel Nox stories and, in a lot of ways, the characterization is similar. I have a thing for narrating events from the point of view of the nastiest, meanest people around who still technically count as 'good guys'.)