Chapter One: Denial (With a Heaping Helping of Anger)

Katsuki heard the news when he got home from the arcade. Deku died. Katsuki's blood froze in his veins. For a heart-plummeting moment, he expected to hear that Deku had thrown himself off the school roof, just like he told him to. Katsuki almost sighed with relief when his mom said Deku got attacked by a villain. He nodded numbly as his mom droned on about funeral arrangements and being nice to Auntie Inko, and he dipped into his room at the first opportunity.

With the door slammed shut behind him, Katsuki flopped onto his bed. He let off small pops in his hands as he struggled to crush that uncomfortable feeling of shame in his chest. Sure, the last thing he ever said to Deku was to kill himself, but it wasn't like he did kill himself, right? It wasn't his fault. Deku was Quirkless, too weak to fend for himself, it was just a matter of time before something happened.

No matter how much he told himself that, the knot in his chest wouldn't go away.

Katsuki's mom offered to let him stay home the next day, but he brushed her off. U.A. wouldn't take slackers, and the world wouldn't stop turning because one weakling got himself killed. No one else took off either. Every desk was full when he strolled into the room.

Katsuki did a double-take. At the back corner, right next to the window, Deku absently scribbled in the notebook Katsuki had scorched and thrown away yesterday. The pages were still damp from their dip in the koi pond. When Deku met his eyes, Katsuki hurriedly looked away and took his seat.

As the homeroom teacher went on about picking their high schools, Katsuki glanced around at his classmates. No one paid Deku's desk any mind. He caught a few murmurs about Deku dying, which made no sense, he was sitting right there in the corner like nothing happened. Was this some massive prank? Was this Deku's idea of making him look stupid? How did he get everyone in on it?

The arrival of the first period teacher interrupted his musing. Katsuki resolutely put thoughts of Deku out of mind as he took notes for English. As the class went on, he heard Deku muttering under his breath. Morbidly curious, Katsuki listened in and heard Deku musing whether he was stuck in limbo or had actually manifested a Quirk.

Now fully tuned into Deku's mumbling, Katsuki couldn't concentrate on the teacher. He felt his anger boil over until he turned and snapped at him. "Will you shut up Deku?"

The class went dead silent. Everyone turned to stare at him. Katsuki felt himself shrink under the confused and worried glances. Deku stared with open wonder and shouted, "Wait, you can hear me! Kacchan, it's me, Deku! I don't know what's going on, but I guess I'm dead, and you're the only one who can hear me-"

"Bakugo-kun, are you feeling alright?" the teacher asked.

Katsuki looked at everyone around him. As he stared them down, they looked away, unnerved by Katsuki's attitude, but not a single one of the extras glanced back at Deku's desk. Katsuki shivered and said, "Forget it, force of habit."

"O-of course," the teacher said nervously. "If you need a break, just let me know." He adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. "Right, then, where were we?"

For the first five minutes, Izuku stood in front of his desk, waving his hand in front of Katsuki's face. Katsuki stared past him, resolutely not giving him the satisfaction of acknowledging his existence again. Deku even tried touching Katsuki. Katsuki's shoulder felt chilly as Deku's hand passed right through it. An involuntary shudder ran through him, but Katsuki gritted his teeth and ignored the sensation.

After he got no visible reaction out of Katsuki, Deku tried the rest of the class. He went from desk to desk, shouting in everyone's ears and waving his hand through their bodies. No one showed the slightest sign of discomfort.

As he watched Deku's antics out of the corner of his eye, Katsuki realized it wasn't a prank. If Deku's incorporeal body wasn't enough of a hint for him, all the shouting would have at least drawn irritated glances. Not a single person twitched as Deku screamed in their ear.

Deku was Quirkless. The doctor said it, Auntie Inko said it, the teachers and principal said it, even Deku admitted it. Quirks didn't linger after a person died anyways. That meant there was only one possibility.

Katsuki was insane.

Katsuki spent the rest of the day wondering exactly how he had gone insane. It's not like he actually felt anything for the worthless Deku, right? Who cares if he got killed by some villain? It's not like it was his fault. So why the fuck was he seeing Deku follow him home, walking through throngs of people like they weren't even there?

"Hey, Kacchan."

Katsuki glared at the back of the cactus-headed man in front of him. Deku floated in front of him and waved its hand in his face. Katsuki forced himself to ignore it.

"Come on, Kacchan, I know you heard me that first time. Why are you ignoring me?"

Katsuki jammed his hands in his pockets to keep himself from popping them. Beads of sweat trickled down his clenched fists.

"I don't remember how it happened. I think I drowned? One second, I was walking under a bridge, and the next thing I remembered, I heard a manhole cover pop, and I was drowning in this putrid liquid." The hallucination shivered. "I think jumping off a roof would've been a better way to go, especially if it was high enough."

Katsuki shivered as guilt coiled like a boa around his insides. He walked faster, but the phantom easily kept pace with him.

"When I woke up, I was lying on the ground, right next to the open manhole. I saw All Might. I almost asked him for an autograph, but he was with the EMTs as they loaded a body bag into an ambulance." Deku chuckled dryly. "I still had no idea, then. I left, went back home and found mom crying at the kitchen table. I asked her what was wrong, but she didn't hear me. When I tried touching her, my arm passed right through her."

Katsuki felt the coins jingling in his pocket. He thought about hitting the arcade, drowning out the phantom Deku with the flashing lights and noise of on-the-rail shooters, but he didn't trust himself not to snap in front of a huge crowd.

Deku watched him closely. Dissatisfied by the lack of a reaction, Izuku smiled nervously and said, "I'm the first person that All Might lost in five years. I wish I wasn't responsible for breaking his perfect record. He got there just a bit too late, I think. Not his fault. Even so, he should still get the number one spot. Sure, his activity's dipped in the last five years, but he's so far ahead on the public opinion polls that Endeavor doesn't stand a chance."

As Deku poured out more and more hero facts, Katsuki ground his molars hard enough to crush coal into diamonds. Yet, through the haze of anger reddening his vision, he knew that the hallucination wanted a reaction out of him. It wanted him to lose his mind, go crazier. He couldn't let it get to him.

With an irritated huff, Deku stopped rambling and crossed his arms. "You're either trying really hard to ignore me, or you can't hear me right now for some reason. Maybe I need to concentrate? I wasn't concentrating when you first saw me, though, so it can't be that. Am I trying too hard?"

As Katsuki drew closer to home, Deku turned his gaze towards his mother's apartment. His voice took on a pleading tone. "I don't think mom's eaten since I died. Kacchan, I'm worried, and I can't do anything about it because she can't hear me. No one else can." Tears stream down his face, but the pavement beneath him remains dry. "I need you to tell her it's okay, that it wasn't her fault, that everything's better this way."

It would be better, Kacchan thought irritably, if you would leave me alone.

"I just want her to be happy. She doesn't have to worry about me anymore, so why is she crying? Please, Kacchan, please tell her you can hear me. I can even tell her things you couldn't know, so she'd know you weren't lying."

Or crazy. Kacchan almost faltered in his steps. The phantom's offer tempted him, not for Auntie Inko's sake, but his own. If Deku really was a ghost only he could hear, the test Deku proposed would prove it. Yet, if he even tried, it meant acknowledging that he could hear Deku. He wouldn't give in, not when he knew that Deku was dead and he shouldn't still be hearing his voice.

The pebble in his path was gone. Katsuki could concentrate on getting into U.A. without that dead weight around his neck. He just needed to ignore the hallucination until it went away. It had to stop. Heroes weren't crazy. He wasn't crazy, just feeling a bit weird, that's all.

When he walked past the front door, the hallucination lingered outside. It sullenly stared at Katsuki as he resolutely strode up the stairs to his bedroom without a glance back.

"Goodnight, Kacchan," Deku said sullenly as he drifted back to his own home.

Alone in his bedroom, Katsuki let out the screams and curses he had been holding in all day. Once he felt better, and his pillow had a few more scorch marks on its flame-retardant pillowcase, Katsuki firmly put Deku's ghost out of mind and resolved to get a good night's sleep. Surely, that would sort out the mess in his head.

When the next morning came, Katsuki woke with an apprehensive feeling that he couldn't place. Looking around, and seeing that he was alone, Katsuki realized that he had half-expected Deku's shadow lurking around. He grinned, firmly shoved all thoughts of the deceased weakling out of his mind, and scarfed down breakfast.

He swaggered up the school steps, threw open the classroom door, and grinned at the empty seat in the corner. The teacher announced a pop quiz, to the collective groans of every student in attendance, and Katsuki was smiling as he sharpened his pencil.

As the teacher handed out the tests, Deku sprinted through the closed door. Katsuki's pencil snapped in his grasp. Deku rushed in, swerving around the teacher, and took the empty seat. He got out a pencil, but the teacher never set a quiz on his desk.

Brushing graphite and wood splinters off his fingers, Katsuki scrawled on his quiz while his attention wandered towards the hallucination lurking behind him. Deku looked sheepish as he peered over another student's shoulder to copy the questions into his notebook. When he handed his quiz in with everyone else's, the paper slipped from the teacher's grasp and disappeared when it hit the floor.

For the rest of the day, Katsuki watched Deku out of his peripheral vision, searching for logical inconsistencies in the hallucination to verify it wasn't real. At lunch, Deku took a lunchbox out of his backpack, the same one Auntie Inko always packed for him. Despite the fact Deku had eaten out of it yesterday, the lunchbox was packed to the brim with chilled soba, peeled carrots, and savory meatballs.

At gym, Deku's school uniform warped into a white t-shirt and running shorts. Deku looked winded after running laps, while Katsuki had barely worked up a sweat. Katsuki snorted to himself. Ghosts shouldn't tire, not without a body. Deku was tired because that was how Katsuki remembered him, and that's what his messed-up mind was pulling from.

But then, how did I get messed up like this? Katsuki asked himself. Why am I seeing him, and how can I make it stop?

For the rest of the school year, Katsuki tried everything he could think of to rid himself of his hallucinations. Sleeping pills, herbal teas, hand-shaking levels of caffeine and sugar, fasting and sleepless nights, exercise until every muscle ached, and blowing up trash on the beach until the skin on his hands turned raw and bled from blisters. No matter what hell Katsuki put himself through, Deku showed up in class the next morning, sometimes already in his seat and watching him, sometimes sprinting in well after the bell, but as he had in life, in death, Deku would not stop following him.

It ticked Katsuki off to no end.

A/N: This had been posted to the Emerald Library as part of a competition. Specifically, the challenge was to write the best character death.

I killed mine in eleven words.

Anyways, I had held off on posting it to my personal site until I had finished the subsequent chapters (5 or 6 in total). It's only halfway done, but I'm posting it anyways, because Merry Christmas! I'll polish the rest of this off once Precognition's done.

Anyways, Bard out!