AN: I'm back!
At the Point of Ignition
"Sweet lad, o' come and join me, do! Such pretty games I will play with you. Will you, sweet lad, come along with me? My daughters shall care for you tenderly. I love you, for your comeliness charms me, my boy! And if you're not willing, my force I'll employ." 'Once Upon a Nightmare' -Epica
Ochako was one of the youngest students in class 1-A, her seventeenth birthday having only passed recently. Seventeen. It had felt like such a big deal not long ago- before all of this.
Now it felt like nothing, a pittance. Young and fragile and so, so inexperienced.
U.A. offered all kinds of classes, and she'd participated in more than one emergency-situation simulation. None of them had covered anything like this though. The terrible, debilitating fear. The crippling doubt and adrenaline. The injuries, the impenetrable dark that left her floundering at the loss of such a heavily relied upon sense.
Ochako regretted not working harder at her hero training when she had the chance. She regretted all that time wasted on shopping trips, and all the times she spaced out in class and failed to pay attention. Maybe if she had taken this more seriously, maybe if she had gone at it like Bakugo always did then she would be in a better position to save his fucking life right now. But what was done was done, and this was the only idea she had and she prayed to whatever god in any pantheon that might be listening that this would make things better and not worse.
Neither of the heroes in training had anything to say as Ochako pulled them to the ground, muck and foul water sloshing up her sock clad legs. The echo of moving water sounded muffled and distant. Ochako wasn't sure if it was this moment of stillness, or the drop in her frantic heart rate to something relatively normal- but the smell of sewage seemed to be getting a whole lot stronger.
She bit down on the urge to gag, as familiar as breathing for her- but perhaps not so much for Bakugo who made a terribly wet, hacking cough. She felt it crawl its way out of his chest with a deep reverberation under her palm.
A shiver crawled up her spine at the sound.
She gave him a moment, but honestly it was probably more for her than for him, before her hands guided his arm up. Her fingers trailed along the brachioradialis muscle of his forearm until she had the appendage curled up and over his shoulder. He bent easily, as flexible as ever. Ochako held the underside of his upper arm, worried he might pull away at the last moment.
Not on purpose- but the body had all sorts of mechanisms to keep from damaging itself; and a muscle jerk at the wrong time could do more harm that good in this situation.
"Okay." She murmured, nervous and expectant.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
"You're an idiot." Bakugo finally announced quietly, and Ochako jerked at the sound, fingers twitching.
"Katsuki-" She hissed, irritation rising at his avoidance, only for him to interrupt her.
"My quirk creates explosions not fire dipshit." He stopped to cough again, and Ochako gathered all the harsh things that she had been poised to leap at him with behind her clenched teeth.
"So?" She prompted, letting go of his arm so he could relax out of the awkward way it had been bending.
"Sound travels faster than heat." He swayed under her touch, words murmured but still coming across as short and aggravated. She marveled at his ability to still be himself, even now.
"The point, please." She bit, frustrated and nervous and afraid.
His customary 'Tch' sound was oddly comforting.
"Do you pay attention in physics at all?" He grumbled, and Ochako had to resist the urge to shake it out of him. In the back of her mind there was a swinging pendulum, counting each second as it passed with a deafening tick-tick-tick. Seconds they would never get back, the precious few seconds they had before their pursuer caught up. Seconds before either of them succumbed to unconsciousness, or fever, or blood loss, or worse.
"My quirk relies on concussive sound," He told her with bite. "The point of ignition would only tear my body apart. Any heat generated wouldn't come until after, and by then it would be fucking pointless because sound travels faster than heat, that's what an explosion is Ochako." By the end of his explanation his breath was huffing out in shallow pants, breathless and exhausted.
There was a moment of throbbing silence, which might have just been her aching ears, while she absorbed his words- and the second use of her given name.
"Oh." Was all she could manage over the slowly sinking sensation that overcame her entire being. Somewhere, tucked and buried under so many other thoughts was the growing realization that came with this explanation- Bakugo had a quirk very suited to killing people; and the fact that he controlled it so tightly was a real testament to his abilities.
Outwardly, Ochako hung her head, her spine losing stability under the crushing weight of this new information. Her forehead found Bakugo's shoulder, and she might have been surprised if she had the energy for it. Instead she took a breath of moist, tepid air that was far more disgusting than anything she'd ever had the misfortune of stepping in. Her head was still pounding, a siren's wail of pain that rippled across all her nerves and it was all she could do for the next minute to just breathe.
Existing was such a chore.
Bakugo's hand smoothed across her back hesitantly, tangling into the hair at the nap of her neck as he murmured unintelligible things into her crown. His palm was scorching on the sensitive skin of the back of her neck, and the sensation enticed a shiver out of her that crawled across her scalp and down her spine.
She felt it when his chest vibrated with the next cough.
"Smells like fucking shit down here." She heard him complain, but she was too busy trying to jump start her thought process into coming up with a solution to the very serious issue that was still spilling Bakugo's life out of his skin.
"We're gunna have to pack it." She finally declared, pulling away to sit up straight. The motion tilted her sense of 'upright' to something unrecognizable, but she powered through it. Bakugo's hand slipped from her neck and made itself comfortable on her folded leg. There was another momentary pause before:
"Pack it with what?" Followed by a gagging cough, even Ochako wrinkled her nose this time. The smell was definitely getting stronger.
Her hand unfurled in the dark between their bodies like a blossoming flower, and even though she couldn't see the gesture the benign normality of it felt comforting. "We have… mud," A disgusted snort followed this, 'mud' being a generous term for the slimy muck under them but she ticked it off her index finger anyways. It's not like they were rolling in options… just a lot of mud.
Ochako hesitated on the next finger, scraping at the bottom of her creativity for any idea she could muster. "What if we found some metal, and used your quirk to heat it-"
"Concussive sound you fuckwit." He interrupted her, and as if to prove his statement light fizzled from his newly illuminated outline. Like a rave light it flickered in and out- and if Ochako hadn't already had a headache she knew the use of his quirk would have given her one. The sweet smell of nitroglycerin mixed with the myriad of other scents, and for the first time Ochako noticed the small displacement of air that accompanied the loud crackling pops of his quirk. Not that she had missed it before with his larger explosions, but now that she was armed with a better explanation of how, exactly, his explosions worked it seemed harder to miss even with these small ones.
In the few seconds of light that Ochako had she could see that Bakugo's features were haggard and filthy; half his face smeared with red and the rest of his skin a shallow pale that set off immediate alarm bells in her head. His hair was in wild disarray; some of it plastered flat to his forehead and some of it spiking up in what she could only assume was sheer stubbornness. Ochako caught a glimpse of the murky grey water that flowed between them, Bakugo's upturned palm crackling loudly enough to make her wince.
There was a moment when her brain seemed to stall, the sight of Bakugo Katsuki's red gaze heavy on her, sitting right in front of her, half dead and struggling for consciousness- it was in this surreal moment that she realized she had yet to reconcile the boy in the dark with her actual classmate.
And then her eyes flickered up over his shoulder, and this fleeting thought was immediately tabled for later.
Rising out of the dark was a looming Thing, crawled straight from some child's nightmare and into hers. The creature towered behind Katsuki, a slimy hand tipped with knife-like claws reaching for her companion, dribbling a greenish fluid all over itself and reabsorbing the liquid in a constant cycle. A bubble on the Thing's shoulder filled, and then subsequently burst like a soap bubble, releasing a noxious scent that she put two and two together to realize was the putrid smell that had been getting stronger for the last however-many-minutes. The Thing's eyes glowed yellow, too-bright and crazed, boring down on Katsuki like it was contemplating thoughts of eating him.
What could loosely be considered a face was split entirely in half in a grin wider than her arm was long. Yellow teeth grew like stalks from the opening, numerous and crowded and sharp. It reminded her of an angler fish's mouth, and this was the last thought she had before Ochako stopped thinking entirely.
The light went out.
Ochako lunged.
AN: I now have a Tumblr, you can find it at Kanna Kyomu dot Tumblr dot com.
I have to do the link weird because FF has a deep seeded hatred of links so here we are. In any case you can find a random smattering of my interests and updates for my various stories there. I'm still trying to figure out how to add the 'Ask' tab so y'all can give me prompts, questions, or suggestions. Thanks again for taking the time to read! Please let me know what you guys though of this chapter!