Introspective: characterized by or given to introspection.
The next time they came to school was decidedly very strange. Bakugou couldn't decide if it was real or a dream, which threw him off the entire day. Things were just so normal and then they weren't. It irritated the hell out of him. They went to their regular school classes during the day, the pro heroes acting like it was just another day during their lessons. Present Mic was his giddy, loud self, like he hadn't demolished some villains on campus the other day. No one even mentioned the USJ Incident, which it was now being called on the news.
Students from the other classes kept giving them odd looks, some opening their mouths like they wanted to say something, but then he'd shoot them a heated glare or a scowl and they'd scurry away from him. He was not about to deal with stupid people asking him stupid questions.
Bakugou had heard one student from Class 1-B ask Kaminari if he had been afraid. Bakugou scoffed at that. Hell no he hadn't been afraid. The second that stupid ass warp gate villain had sent him and Kirishima to another zone, he had vowed to blast that foggy bastard to high hell. Sure, it hadn't happened that way, but that was because All Might had come in. Even if he had been afraid, Bakugou found it hard when All Might was around.
Not to mention when the Flame Alchemist had arrived in true form.
Those flames were still stuck in Bakugou's head a full day later. The way they'd roared down the steps like a dragon and then wrapped themselves protectively around Deku and All Might, blocking them from the villains. It had looked just as simple as when that tiny pop of fire had knocked that villain's hand away from Deku's face. Two very big differences, but neither one of them less in strength. It was easy to get overwhelmed by the grandness of those large flames, but Mustang had been so far away and that bit of fire that struck the villain without hitting Deku despite being inches away was what really got Bakugou.
Would he ever be capable of such precision? He thought so, but then his quirk didn't allow for long range attacks. If he needed to hit something far away, he had to let off a massive explosion. He liked doing that. It was flashy and it brought all eyes on him. A huge explosion was impossible to ignore. The Flame Alchemist was a showy pro hero as well; it was why Bakugou had noticed him first. Seeing him work on both a large and small scale had been eye-opening. It made him want to explore his quirk more.
Bakugou was sitting in their homeroom class, feet on his desk and thinking darkly on the fact that he'd had to be saved by All Might and maybe even the Flame Alchemist when the door swung open. He didn't know who he was expecting to come in, seeing as how Aizawa had been brutally attacked by Nomu, but it hadn't been Mustang, especially not almost entirely in his pro hero costume.
"Evening class," Mustang greeted coolly as he walked up front. Everyone snapped into attention, although Bakugou didn't pull his feet down from his desk. Instead, he folded his arms and hardened his expression as he gazed up front. Normally, Mustang did as All Might sometimes did, wearing plain clothes, but he'd switched it for the costume that anyone would recognize as the Flame Alchemist. It was somehow flashy and understated at the same time, like he was going to a fancy party and maybe rob every single rich asshole there if he felt like it with a smile on his face.
Engine Legs raised a hand. "Where is Aizawa?"
"He's still recuperating," Mustang explained. "Give him another day or two and I'm sure he'll show up."
"That's way too soon!" Round Face exclaimed. Pft, not for a pro hero.
"So manly," Kirishma added. "Maybe too much, if that's possible."
Mustang grinned goodnaturedly. "He'd be here sooner if it didn't give him an excuse to stay in bed longer."
Despite the fact that Aizawa wasn't here for a very serious reason, most everyone managed to laugh at the comment. It was easy to picture their homeroom teacher curled up in his blankets all day, although the lightness was interrupted by the remembrance that he was there for a reason. Bakugou hadn't seen Aizawa fighting the villains on his own or get overwhelmed by that huge brain bird villain and hands villain, but from what he'd heard, it had been more than horrific.
"In the meantime, you're stuck with me as a substitute," Mustang continued. Braid Boy groaned out loud and sunk in his seat. It didn't affect Mustang's positive bordering on smug attitude in the slightest; in fact, it seemed to make it worse. "Oh trust me, this isn't a joy for me either. This means extra work."
"Boo hoo, we work a lot too!" Braid Boy said.
"I'm not denying that U.A., as the most prestigious hero school, puts you through the ringer, but come back to me when you're running your own pro agency and teaching at said school," Mustang countered with ease. Braid Boy turned a little red in the face and turned away with a scowl, but he didn't complain anymore at least. He still hadn't gotten over Mustang using him as a guinea pig on his first day. Bakugou thought it was genuinely amusing.
The rest of the class was relatively boring, especially after their fight with villains at USJ. It was weird doing such normal, boring things with that looming over their heads. Even though they went through the motions of school, it was in the back of all their heads, waiting to be brought up. No one did though, at least not in large groups. As they got into smaller ones though, talk of it could be heard. The problem was that they'd talked through it so much already, but it was hard to let go of. After all, they were just kids and they'd been attacked by villains.
It hadn't been the first time for Bakugou though.
The memory of the sludge monster rested in the back of Bakugou's mind at all times, like an itch he couldn't get rid of, but the USJ attack had brought it to the forefront. He'd had to be rescued - again. By All Might - again. While he knew that he was stronger now than he was a year ago, he could admit that he was nowhere near the level necessary to defeat that Nomu guy. The thing had been created to specifically fight All Might. Bakugou swore that he would surpass All Might one day, but it was not this day and those villains had proved it.
He hadn't even seen the villain dashing to attack him. All he had heard was the command to free the warp gate villain and then he was on the ground next to Deku. It was less than a second, but he hadn't seen a single thing. He hadn't seen All Might knock him out of the way and take the brunt of Nomu's punch. It was like when the sludge monster had got him. He hadn't been able to react in time before it felt like the sludge was trying to squeeze his organs out of him to make room for itself.
All he could do was explode. Bakugou tightened his hands into fists under his arms. Was that all he could do?
No, no, he could do more than that. He would do more than that. He was going to be the best.
By the time class was over, everyone was eager to leave school. Bakugou was slower, taking his time in dragging himself out of his desk and getting his things together. Kirishima gave him a look that he pointedly ignored and then the spiky-haired boy left with Sparky and Alien Girl. After slinging his backpack over one shoulder, Bakugou made his way up to the front where Mustang was shuffling papers that Aizawa had presumably given him in order to teach the class.
As soon as Mustang noticed him, Bakugou burst out accusingly, "You held back."
The statement was so out of the blue and with no context that a surprised glow actually flickered in Mustang's eyes before they went back to their usual guarded. For someone that came off as so open and confident on television and even while teaching, Bakugou had started to notice that there was a very large wall in between Mustang and everyone else. It was like he gave off the aura of being open without actually being so. Bakugou never hid how he felt and never tried.
"You want me to be meaner to students?" Mustang quierred, though Bakugou could tell that his teacher knew that that wasn't what he was talking about.
"At USJ," Bakugou reiterated. "You held back."
Mustang considered him for a moment with that unreadable expression on his face. It was like nothing could get past him or get out of him. No emotion or thought that he didn't want to share could get past that look. Bakugou held his stare, forcing himself to look equally as blank, although he couldn't hide the heat from his eyes. It was one thing to see in person just how strong his favorite hero was; it was quite another to know that said hero could be stronger.
"If you'd been paying attention in my lessons," Mustang said, "then you would remember that going all out isn't always the answer."
"Bullshit," Bakugou ground out. Mustang didn't react. "That's bullshit and you know it." Maybe he shouldn't be swearing at a teacher that could blast him out of the building or give him a weeks worth of detention, but someone had to call him out and he wasn't sure if anyone else realized it. Those flames had been overwhelming. "You could have ended those villains right then and there!"
"Are you certain about that?" Mustang asked him. "Sure I wasn't at my quirk limit?"
Bakugou shook his head. "No way, I know you could've done more, but you didn't. You held back."
There was another beat of silence where they stared each other down. Bakugou couldn't help but feel like it was either a competition or a test and if he backed down then he would lose something. This was a man that Bakugou had spent years looking up to and admiring. If he crumbled under this pressure, he'd lose any sort of respect as a future hero that he'd gained.
Finally, Mustang nodded his head and sat down in the seat behind the desk. "You're right. I did."
"Why?" Bakugou felt vindicated in not only getting an answer but being right - and yet he didn't feel good about it like he normally did. It was hard to feel good about something that didn't make sense to him.
Mustang leaned back in the seat and propped his feet on the desk as Bakugou had done for half the class, looking as if the position was more familiar to him than sitting upright. He looked at ease despite talking about something that he had avoided. "I made a promise to myself when I wasn't much older than you that I wouldn't kill anyone with my quirk. I don't know if it was the right decision, but it's the one I made."
"That's stupid," Bakugou responded with all the bluntness of a dull knife. "Villains aren't going to be that noble. They won't hold back or hesitate to kill you or innocent civilians. Why should you?"
"That's a good question and one we can discuss without ever getting a good answer," Mustang conceded. Again, it felt like Bakugou had given the right response but was still wrong somehow. He laced his fingers together. "The thing with my quirk though is that it is very easy to kill someone with it. Bringing a difficult villain to their knees or forcing them to surrender without killing them is much harder. I have to remind myself that daily."
Bakugou flexed his free hand at his side while his other tightly gripped the one strap of his backpack. Already he could feel the nitroglycerin sweat building up on his skin. It was so easy to let off explosions. Ever since his quirk had manifested, he'd used it all the time to build up its strength. He wanted to be the strongest. He wanted to be the best. The idea that Mustang routinely held himself back was a concept Bakugou couldn't understand. Why? If he could be stronger, then he should be.
Even if that strength killed someone? Bakugou hesitated. It wouldn't be that difficult. He had made sure that the massive explosion he let off during the combat simulation wouldn't killed Deku, but if he'd actually aimed at the little green-haired shit instead of to the side, it would have killed him. He would have killed him. And it wouldn't have been anything. Setting off his quirk was like breathing.
He wondered if it was like that for Mustang. If the reason he held back was because killing someone would've been as easy as breathing.
"Quirks like ours Bakugou are something that a lot of people admire because they're powerful," Mustang told him. Try as he might not to, it did affect Bakugou that Mustang was lumping the two of them together. "But they are also something that people fear."
"I don't care about that," Bakugou said. "If people fear me, it's because of my strength and they're weak."
"If you look down on those that you see as inferior, you're never going to become a good hero," Mustang said. The statement cut Bakugou down to the bone. "Trust me; I have worked alongside plenty of people that I consider to be weaker than me. I've worked with people that I loathe and want to light on fire and I know I can. I know I could put them in their place."
"So why don't you?" Bakugou asked. "What's the point of having all that power if you aren't going to use it all?"
Mustang held his hands up briefly and then let them fall back down against his chest. "I don't have to use it all in order to accomplish what I want." To think that he'd made it to the number four hero spot while still holding back was an accomplishment in itself, but Bakugou didn't understand. "My quirk is very deadly and I have to recognize it as such and also understand that it's important that I control it instead of the other way around. When I do lose control, when I stop holding myself back, things can get...dicey."
Bakugou frowned further. "Like how?"
"You remember the fight you talked about in class the other day?" Mustang prompted.
"Yeah, the villain with the fire resistant skin and healing quirk whose eyes and mouth you burned." Bakugou shrugged his shoulders. He kind of thought that was one of Mustang's coolest and impressive takedowns. It was unfortunate that no footage had surfaced, only one anonymous eye witness recount. Even stranger was that he didn't seem pleased about it. "What of it?"
"The villain did have a healing quirk, so I had to constantly keep burning him from the inside out in order to bring him down," Mustang explained coolly. "He had to be hospitalized before he could be arrested and he eventually recovered - for the most part." That didn't make sense. The villain's healing quirk should've done the trick, even if it was on the inside. "The damage I inflicted was so great that it essentially burned his quirk out in those areas. I didn't allow it the time to fix it and after several failed attempts it just...accepted the damage as normal."
That was a little more horrific that Bakugou expected. He'd never read anything about that and he'd done a lot of digging around when he was younger on hero forums. From group chats and threads speculating on All Might's true quirk to hidden footage of the Flame Alchemist's more brutal villain takedowns that were kept out of the public eye, there was a lot to be found online. He'd never heard of someone using their quirk so much that it more or less quit on them. After plenty of recuperation, a quirk would come back. It would do its job. But give up? That was unheard of.
"His eyesight was permanently damaged and he was no longer able to talk," Mustang finished. "I think it took a year before he could eat on his own. All this done in prison." He pulled his feet down and sat leaned forward, his forearms pressed on top of the desk. "I did all of that while completely in control and holding back. I'm not overly fond of considering what I'm capable of if I didn't do that. Are you?"
Bakugou shoved his sweaty hands in his pockets. "I'm in control. I don't need to hold back."
"I hope you're right." Mustang shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe you are. Maybe I shouldn't have held back then. Maybe I should have killed those villains. They were going to kill you, after all." Not fucking likely. No way was Bakugou going to let those jackasses get him. "If we cross paths again, I doubt I'll be as...merciful."
If that was merciful, then Bakugou really wanted to see what Mustang was capable of when he wasn't. Then again, he thought back to the cold expression on Mustang's face at the top of the USJ stairs after he'd saved Deku. What had he said to the warp gate villain?
"Shall we see if fog burns?"
It was nothing worse than what Bakugou had told that villain while holding him down with an explosive palm. But that vicious grin on his face and the way he'd said it had given Bakugou pause. Like Mustang was more than ready to burn the place down. Like he was asking for an excuse to let loose. Bakugou could understand that very well. He felt that itch so often, but he couldn't scratch it and didn't know where it was coming from. He didn't want to do evil; he didn't want to be a villain by any means. He wanted to be a hero more than anything. But that didn't stop him from feeling like he was burning from the inside out too.
Todoroki couldn't get the flames out of his head. He'd never seen anything like it before and he had lived with fire his entire life. His father had excellent control over his quirk and was incredibly powerful, being able to bend fire to his will in several unique ways to even create weapons, but Todoroki had never seen him manipulate his hellfire in such a way before. Mustang's fire had looked alive. It had snaked around Midoriya and All Might like it had a will of its own, as if it wanted to protect them and not just Mustang. It had roared to life down the stairs in a way that made Todoroki think that the fire was separate from the hero.
The moment Todoroki had seen the pop of fire struck the villain's hand and saved Midoriya, panic had flared in his mind for a second. Fire was so intrinsically connected to his father that for a second he had thought that his father was at the USJ. He couldn't even say why he had panicked. It hadn't lasted longer than two seconds, seeing as how he was no longer afraid of the man.
Maybe the high of the battle had thrown him off course. Those two villains had been in a different class from the ones he'd dealt with in the earthquake zone on his own and he'd been unsettled after the Nomu had broken through his ice. He had been sure that All Might could take on the hands villain and warp gate villain, but then Midoriya had jumped into the battle before anyone could even blink. Midoriya would have died if not for Mustang's intervention. Any of them could have - that had been the villains' plan - but they hadn't.
Mortality had already been ingrained in Todoroki's head through his father's constant training of him over the years, but none of his classmates had ever been forced to deal with it before. He wondered if any of them felt differently about wanting to become a hero after seeing what they would be forced to deal with. It was one thing to train to become a hero; it was another to face death head on. Even for Todoroki, it had felt different, but he'd been so in the moment that he hadn't noticed it until after the fact.
Nonetheless, it wasn't the fact that he could have been killed that stopped him. The villains that he'd dealt with on his own had been lower levels than him. He would've been humiliated and felt the urge to leave U.A. if he had let them beat him. Mustang's quirk though set Todoroki on edge.
Was this why his father hated the man so much? Because he had different sort of power over his fire quirk? Because he was so strong? Was it just the fire itself? Endeavor had been the only hero around with a fire quirk until the Flame Alchemist showed up seven years ago. The idea of what they might be able to accomplish should they work together had come up in multiple interviews, all of which Endeavor had shut down aggressively. The hatred Endeavor held towards Mustang was different from the kind he held against All Might. It felt more personal.
And there was nothing so personal as fire, in Todoroki's mind, as he struggled with it on a daily basis.
Without really thinking about it, Todoroki held up his left hand, palm up, and produced a flame a few inches over it. He could still remember fire hurting him when he was a child first learning his quirk. It had turned against him during the beginning of his training with Endeavor and he'd feared it. Nowadays, it didn't hurt him anymore. The fire was nothing, just a warm breeze, but it was strange seeing it. He hadn't produced an actual flame in months, using his left side for little more than to melt the ice he created with his right. Still, it came to him as naturally as breathing when he thought about it.
Before Todoroki could put the fire out or consider what he was doing, he heard someone exclaim, "Whoa! I've never seen you do that before!" and he glanced over to see Edward Elric staring at him an excited expression on his face.
Todoroki clenched his fist and the fire went out. Stupid. How could he have been so careless as to use the fire half of his quirk while at school? And right before a hero class too so that anyone could see him? Discomfort rattled inside of him as Edward walked over to him. His younger brother was behind him talking with Uraraka, Midoriya, and Iida. Only Edward appeared to have noticed what Todoroki had done.
"It's nothing," Todoroki decided on saying, despite the fact that it really wasn't. At least not to him.
"It looked pretty cool to me, considering I've only ever seen you use the ice half of your quirk," Edward pointed out. His tone was matter-of-fact, neither judging the fact that Todoroki only used his ice half nor saying that he should use his fire half more often. It was just something he'd noticed. "Seems like you're not using your quirk to the best of your abilities if you only use half of it."
Even though he knew that Edward was only making an observation, Todoroki bristled. Edward wasn't trying to tell him how to use his quirk, not like Endeavor or even Mustang, but it still put him on edge. "How I use my quirk is up to me."
Edward held up his hands in defense. "Okay, okay, sorry. I didn't mean anything by it." He dropped his hands and gave Todoroki a shrewd grin. "It'll just make it easier to beat you."
Todoroki narrowed his eyes, but didn't say anything in response and it appeared as if Edward didn't expect him to. The other boy turned back to his brother and friends, jumping into the conversation effortlessly as if he hadn't been talking to Todoroki a second ago. For all of Edward's hardheadedness, he did get along well with people when he wanted to, even if he did have a habit of inserting his foot in his mouth a lot. He had a lot of confidence that bordered on arrogance sometimes, but it wasn't near as bad as Bakugou at least.
Just when Todoroki told himself to forget about USJ and turned away from the other students, he looked up and caught eyes with Mustang. The hero was teaching their class today, along with homeroom. How long had he been standing there? Had he seen Todoroki produce the flame? It was hard to tell with Mustang, who knew how to be even more closed off and cold than Todoroki.
However, when Mustang held up his hand and produced a similar flame, tilting his head, a hard look came over Todoroki's face, lips pressed together and eyes flat, and he walked away. That was all Todoroki needed to see in order to know that his teacher had seen him. He didn't know what Mustang's response meant though. Was it a challenge? A question? But to what end? He'd sworn that he would never use his flames in combat and he wasn't about to let that go.
And still, those flames rested in the back of his head, calling to him, demanding to be seen. It made him feel like he was burning from the inside out. From anger, frustration, insecurity - he didn't know and he loathed it more.
