Chapter 17 – Katsuki Bakugou's Purpose

When Ochaco Uraraka's eyes opened, the first sun had barely climbed into the early morning sky, and was still hidden by the high ridge that encircled Lasandu. The first few hours of spring had come, cold and dewy purple, and though her surroundings had the hush of night, there was something frantic in the air.

As she looked about, she found that the bed was empty, but that the pillow beneath her head was wet. She pushed back her curtains and slipped on her clogs, wiping away the trails of salt that had taken root on her face. Her eyes were heavy enough to pull themselves through the bottom of her skull, and yet she felt wide awake.

She stood staring out of her wide window, out over the valley and to the high ridge beyond. The light of the white sun cast a soft glow from behind the rocky impasse, and the glacier snow twinkled warmly, like scattered stars on a field of white. Spring had come. Morning had come. What now?

Soon the snowdrops would push their bowed bells through the ground's frost, and the eagles would return to soar about the summit, and… and what of her?

Izuku had not come in the night. Katsuki Bakugou had not been found. She would marry him, and become queen.

She clutched at her head, tottering over to sit at the stool of her loom. Her mind began to race.

He hadn't been found. She hadn't found him. And yet every night he had found her, in their dreams, he had found new ways to cut pieces from her.

How could she not have found him? She had searched for him where she could. She had followed the clues. She had followed the rules.

The rules- the rules! The words from her dead mother's lips danced through her mind. That he should not die at the hands of the spirits, that he should hide from mortal and immortal eye. And Bakugou's smirk, that he would be either at her side or dead.

And she had seen him in her dreams, and the immortals had put him there, and suddenly all the ugly pieces were falling into place.

She stood suddenly, pacing as she ran her fingers nervously through her hair. The fantasmin, fresh awoken, watched her curiously from its nook, and her eyes whipped frenetically to it.

"Your master-" she said "Your master, he was never really hiding."

She placed a hand on her forehead and used the other to gesticulate emphatically.

"Your master, I think he found the only way out. I think he saw the only way through. Gods, I'm so stupid! I should have known immediately, as soon as he came to me in a dream. Because people only visit you in your dreams for one reason and- gods, I should have known! I should have seen it! The rules said that you would lose if the spirits killed you, but they didn't specify anything else. Your master-" she rubbed her lip nervously "your master is dead. He has been dead since the first day, and visiting me in my dreams, and now I am cursed to marry a ghost. He has won this game and doomed me to a life of loneliness."

There was silence. She stared at her clogs, and the ground seemed to swallow her up.

Then, ringing off the round stone walls around her, an echo came.

"That," said Katsuki Bakugou's voice "is the stupidest shit I've ever heard."

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The fantasmin… unfolded.

It shook off its white goat skin and mangy cape, and its bone white skull and golden beak tipped cleanly onto the floor with a jarring clink. From underneath the casing of its cranium, a head of spiked blonde hair emerged, and as Katsuki Bakugou's long legs straightened from their crouching position his lion skin unfurled over his back.

Presently, he stood towering over her, arms crossed and with an unmissable look of disappointment.

The princess froze and then thawed in a matter of heartbeats, twitching with surprise.

"What the fuck?" she shrieked, stumbling backwards.

"Oh, fucking calm it would you?" snapped Bakugou, and he dusted off his lion fur mane "You're the one spouting stupid-ass ideas right now. I mean, for fuck's sake. I literally said I didn't plan on dying any time soon, dumbfuck. Why the fuck would I kill myself for you? What kinda…"

He trailed off, frowning at her.

"What the fuck is wrong, cheeks?"

Uraraka had turned a spectacular shade of red. A blush so fierce as to be mistaken for rage had set her cheeks on fire, almost obscuring her bruise.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she shook.

"Uh, because I didn't want to fucking die?"

She pointed an accusatory finger at him.

"And yet you slept in my bed! You watched me change!"

"I didn't watch you change!"

"Yes, you did!"

"I did fucking not!"

"You lied to me! You violated my privacy at every turn!"

They stood staring at each other, only feet apart, breathless from shouting. The white sun spilled over the high ridge, slowly filling the room with cold light.

"Listen, I only did what I had to." Said Bakugou.

"You had to?" responded Uraraka "Had to on whose account? You said nothing to me of your purpose no matter how hard I asked, and you have said at every opportunity that you don't want to marry me! Just what do you have to do?"

He rubbed the back of his head.

"It's not that easy." He said, avoiding her eyes.

"Oh, it will certainly become a lot harder for you very quickly if you don't explain soon, Bakugou. You seem to have exploited me with perfect ease these past few nights."

"I wasn't trying to exploit you. It was bloody cold out, alright? The other things just sort of happened."

She stepped towards him.

"Why are you here, then?"

"It's not that easy!" he repeated urgently "Nothing has turned out the way it was meant to!"

Her hands balled into fists at her sides.

"How was it meant to turn out?"

"I really don't think you want to know that."

"I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much."

"It's really, really, not that simple."

She grabbed his shirt.

"You are going to explain yourself right this instant, or else I am going to make you." She spoke through gritted teeth.

He smirked condescendingly at her.

"Oh yeah? And how are you going to do th-!"

He buckled over as her fist slammed straight into his gut. He barely dodged the following slap, angled from the side, and put up an elbow to block a kick from the other with a wheeze.

His red eyes connected with hers as he dropped to the floor and swept his heel out in a low kick, knocking her off her feet. They were both caught up in the fight, frenzied as wild foxes.

She tumbled and rolled backwards, dropping to a defensive stance as he righted himself and advanced. She aimed a quick jab at his shoulder just as he bound forward to grab her, and they slipped ineptly past each other to reversed positions.

Whipping around to cover her back, she caught him with a palm to the ribs, and he twisted around the hit to grab her by the wrist. In retaliation, she levelled a knee to strike him by the hip. The hit landed, but he did not yield. He remained firm as a wall, using her momentum to grab her by her thigh.

She let out a strangled noise as his fingers tightened around the material of her nightdress, and punched him blindly with her free hand. It grazed off his shoulder, and her eyes flickered up to his face as she felt herself tip helplessly back behind the force of his hold. His grip slackened for a split second; he let her fall backwards then struck her in the chest, pushing her to the ground.

Her elbow crackled painfully from the impact with the carpeted floor, and her wrist in his hand was wrenched above her head. She tried to lash her free elbow out at his cheek, hovering above her own face, but he caught it and pinned it with her other arm.

His stare was cautious and deliberate as he sat squarely on her hips, straddling her as she squirmed breathlessly. Her heartbeat flew beyond her, and adrenaline rushed in sides of her neck. She was trapped, and that felt far, far too vulnerable for her liking as they watched each other catch their breaths.

The sun climbed even higher, no longer obscured by the mountain rock. Bakugou sighed.

"Are we done here?"

She glared at him.

"Listen," he continued "I'm going to let you go, alright? But you have to listen to me. I'll tell you everything, but have to listen to me the whole way through."

She nodded curtly. He released her hands, but remained leaning over her hesitantly. She noticed the sunlight glint off the knife on his belt.

"I came here to kill you." He said.

XXX

It started with the letters.

Well, it had already started long before that, with the hunt, and Old Man Priam, and the Ocean Sisters, but that hardly mattered anymore. He might as well say that it started with the letters.

He had been terrorising Deku since early childhood, and as they grew older this hardly changed. When they wound up together training under that hero of heroes, All Might, he used the cover of the green Capcana forest to find new ways to exact his cruelty.

He destroyed his training swords by magic, filled his boots with mud, and ripped the lacings from his Capcana vests.

And still Deku improved.

It filled Katsuki with rage to see him succeed. Though he had fought so hard to get where he had, though he had always excelled beyond his peers, he was beginning to fall behind.

Deku was favoured by All Might above all the other boys. Under his encouragement he adopted, instead of the Abrassan beads and drapes that he had grown up with, the prim and proper dress of a knight, and the almost fatherly familiarity between the two was undeniable when they stood side by side, equally dressed.

All Might, hero of heroes, believed in Deku. It filled Katsuki with rage and jealousy.

And still Deku improved, and his prospects grew ever brighter as Katsuki began to grow further and further outcast.

Deku received letters. This, in itself, was not particularly impressive, nor worthy of jealousy. Many boys received letters from their families or friends. But the letters that were sent to him were written on thick pink parchment, and stamped with a royal seal. All Might would tease him as he blushed over the encouragements contained within, and his royal connections began to stir into significant conspiracies.

Katsuki seethed. He just couldn't understand it.

What had Deku done, tiny, snivelling Deku, to deserve the attention and the praise that was poured upon him? How could he possibly have earned the respect of a royal? He was disrupting the natural balance of things, and he would not stand for it.

He began to rip up the returning letters.

He knew full well the punishment that he would be handed if he was ever caught, but the relish with which he watched Deku, always disappointed, find his letter-cage empty was unmatched by any fears of castigation. Destroying Deku's happiness made him feel better about himself, as though he had never really needed to worry about him.

Finally, the pink letters stopped. It brought him no small amount of joy to see Deku tumble down the rankings, mumbling to himself and distracted.

He thought for a time that he had won. He let his guard down.

In the autumn a pink letter arrived, and he did not notice until it was too late. Its contents were so secret that Deku would not show it to anyone but All Might. Their teacher told Deku that it would be a fine thing to serve a princess (Katsuki boiled; a princess) and gave him his knighthood, and just like that he was gone. Katsuki thought then that at least he would be the best amongst his peers. And he was, for a bit.

He excelled in physical combat, in climbing, in running, in tracking, in hunting, in everything that he thought a knight must be. But he had no heart, and did not help people when they asked, and one day All Might pulled him aside and said plainly that he was not on track to be a hero.

He was enraged. All his life he had trained and endured solely to be a hero, and within a single year all of his dreams were overturned. That night he pulled together his things, changed into his beads and draped trousers from home, and ran away into the forest.

XXX

"You know how that went."

The princess did not look at him. She was rubbing her wrists, feeling along the new purple bruises, and still measuring her breaths as her heart beat fast.

Bakugou seemed slighted by the empty reverberation that served as a reply.

"Fuckin' alright, you know most of how that went, at least."

XXX

It was good for him to wander the earth, and watch the stars, and fall in love.

It was good to watch the rabbits run over the barrows, and the skylarks dip above the wheatfields, and the deer skitter in the clearings. It was good to taste the rain and feel the pollen settle on his eyelashes and sense the heat of the rising day. It was good to see the world.

But it was not enough.

Katsuki Bakugou was a new man. He had learned to talk, and to care, and to love, and the knowledge ate away inside of him. He was incomplete. He wanted, he desired, a thing that he did not yet know the shape of, and it tormented him in his dreams.

Already the suspicion that Eijirou would never love him back had begun to permeate his fantasies, and the excitement of brown soil and greenery was fading. He had eaten enough venison to taste it in his sleep, and did not find the thought of eating more enough motivation to wear his sandals even thinner on the hunt. He derived little enjoyment from the everyday tasks that had once brought him so much peace, and sometimes his longing for Eijirou took hold so strongly in his heart that he could not even bear to look him in his face.

But his travelling partners (his friends, his saviours) were not blind to this. Having seen him at his worst, they were anxious that he did not fall back to it, and quietly did the best they could to help him find the pleasure in life.

It was thus that they ended up on the Great Plains.

The Great Plains were, without a doubt, spectacular. Leagues upon leagues of flat, dry grassland, sandy and windy and silent as the night. They had both an air about them of abundance and the underlying stillness of perfect death, of the ancient tombs that he had once seen in Mycenae as a child.

The tranquillity unnerved him. He often thought (knew, in his hunter's way) that they were the only things alive there, the only beating hearts for thousands of plethrons around.

There had been life there once. Everybody knew it; the myth was as old as time.

Exactly how the Warrior King of the Great Plains had met his end was never quite clear. Each story was different, tinged in its own way by the morality of the speaker. Usually, though, it involved hubris and a petty argument with higher beings.

This version of events was easy to imagine. All that was left now of that noble lineage were the towering ruins of great stone fortresses, empty and wind-eaten. Whole cities, ornate with statues and carvings, sat asleep on the Great Plains. The grand palaces, grander by far than anything ever known afterwards, were gutted by time and forgetfulness, and the temples yawned for their missing altars. Their old gods languished, forgotten, faceless. The ruins lay bare, as they had for far longer than any man could know, slowly eroding into the pale silt upon which they stood.

Mina, never one to be discouraged by such things, wanted to explore.

So Katsuki loitered about the halls of dead men, watching and waiting for something to happen. The air swirled with yellow dust, illuminated by thinning beams of light, and his footprints on the sand of the old stone wavered in the shifting air. The corridors were tall and long, drawing him into the abdomen of the palace, and when his feet had taken him without his knowing to the end of the path, he found that the final room was taller and longer still. Glass from a shattered offering-bowl was scattered over the floor, reflecting and refracting a swirling storm of light on the walls of the throne room.

From the depths of the cavernous hall, lofty and lonely, the Warrior King's seat loomed. It was impossibly tall. Its murky shadow cleaved the room cleanly into two halves, and he stood in the light of the broken glass trying to make out the distant carvings that crowned it. Sitting atop a set of stairs so maltreated by the passing of aeons as to be completely inaccessible, the carvings of lions all along its arms had worn smooth, no longer fierce but muddled and meek.

Katsuki stared at the throne.

It was the edifice of a man who had been greater than he would ever be. It was a declaration of his ascendancy above the race of men, an artefact of supremacy, a conqueror's prize.

And what was Katsuki before it? Who would he ever be? The ranks of men who would hear of his inevitable death would be thin, and those who would mourn him thinner still.

He watched the light glance off of the glass shards at his feet, sharp as the blade of the knife at his side, and he noticed that amongst the stones scattered around him, there were some that were strangely long and thin. Crouching to pick one up, he turned the thing over in his hands and found that there were shallow notches in the side.

A child's jawbone.

He recoiled. Suddenly the sight of spines, pelvises, the filaments of ribs, the branches of clavicles, sprang out at him from the walls and the stairs, and he realised with horror that before him, tangled, were the remains of someone's father, lover, child. Hundreds of skeletons, all broken and disarrayed. There were scratch-marks in the stone, and the clay-like smears of dried blood in the grooves of the carvings. How many innocent dead wept before him?

Katsuki stared at the throne.

It was terror made solid. It was the trophy of a man who had mastered brutality and whose bones now lay forgotten in an unloved tomb.

And suddenly, he knew what it was that he must do.

He found Mina and Eijirou in the tall shadow of the entrance-way, waiting for him to return in that wide-eyed, anxious way of theirs. Mina was cradling the white skull of some great prairie bird, and the sun-stained dust stuck to her sleeves.

"Guys," said Katsuki, and he knew that they had been waiting for him to say it for far longer that he himself had ever known, "I think I wanna be a hero. I wanna be a knight. I need to help people."

They sat around the campfire that night straightening out the edges of his ideas. The fireside gave a lovely crimson glow to Eijirou's already burning hair, red as the blood that coursed through his aching veins.

"You ran away." Observed Eijirou.

"I did."

"So, how can you make the order of the Capcanish knights take you back?"

He thought of All Might's words.

"I have to really prove myself. I have to do something good. I have to make the world a better place."

"That's a tall order." Said Mina.

"I can do it."

She poked the fire.

"Oh, I never doubted it."

Eijirou plucked the stick from her hands and shifted a larger log.

"We don't doubt you bro. We want to do it with you, is all. We don't wanna let you go yet."

Ah! Foolish, loving boy that Katsuki was, what could he do after such words? He almost choked on the air he breathed, and thanked the cover of darkness for hiding the colour of his face.

"Of fucking course." He growled.

The fire crackled. Eijirou smiled at him so softly, so agonisingly softly.

"So, what are we going to do, bro?"

"Give me a fucking chance! It's not like the opportunity to do something great pops up all the time."

"Well," offered Mina "I think that it just so happens one has popped up."

The boys raised their eyebrows.

"How about liberating a whole country? Freeing the impoverished ci'izens o' a world's-edge kingdom from a cruel princess? Because Lasandu seems pretty in need of a hero right now."

Katsuki thought of the child's jawbone, how fragile it had been in his fingers.

"I'll bring her head back in a walnut-wood box." He said.

XXX

"But you didn't," said Uraraka "or you haven't, yet."

Bakugou scowled at her.

"I'm not going to fucking kill you, already."

"Don't treat me as though I am hysterical! In what way have you earned my trust, or my hand in marriage? Why should I believe you? Killing me was your life's purpose!"

"I'm definitely not going to kill you."

"Why?"

He pulled at his cloak and looked away. His voice was very quiet, all of a sudden.

"I couldn't take an innocent life."

Her eyes widened, darting up to his. She stared. Innocent?

To fill the growing silence, Bakugou continued.

"I know that doesn't make any sense to you right now, and, fuck- I don't have the right words for it, but you have to fucking trust me on this. Trust me, this is my selfishness. I knew, knew as soon as I saw fucking Deku, actually, that you couldn't be the monster people said you were, and cutting your head off wouldn't make me a hero. I'm not going to kill you. It's not going to bring me any good."

It was more than that, though he could not bring himself to say it. He was Katsuki Bakugou, after all, and those precious words would remain stewing inside him for a while yet.

"So, you're going to marry me."

"Yeah, I guess."

The sunlight twinkled on the beads around his neck, and Uraraka recalled that this was only the second time that she had seen him in the day-time. In the white light it was easier to see how tanned he was, and she could make out the faint knot of an acne scar just above his lip.

Just then, a faint knocking came echoing up the stairs. He rolled his eyes, and went to unlatch the heavy metal bolt at the door.

"That'll be your mates." He said.

He stepped out onto the stairs, and she followed him. Instead of moving, however, he stood still, blocking her path and giving her an irritated look.

"What?" she demanded.

"You going down in your nightdress?"

Reddening, she turned about.

"Uhm, I'll b- be down right after you." She stammered, heading over to her wardrobe.

She heard him click his tongue, and then his footsteps disappeared below.

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A/N: Please use the comments section to your heart's content. I want to know exactly how many people saw this twist coming. And if you did, was it still satisfying, or was it frustrating? I'd be really interested to know.

I can finally tell you about the inspiration for this story: A short French film from the 2000s, "La Reine Cruelle Et Le Montreur de Fabulo". The original is set in the far future, and the queen has a radar system that detects where the suitors hide. You can watch it, 7 minutes long, here: watch?v=QlelP658rIU (you can use the autotranslate feature for subtitles, or watch it silently, both work)
The fantasmin ought to be called the "fabulo", but I didn't think it worked that well in English, and it would also have been a giveaway for anyone who happened to have watched the film, so I localised it a bit.
The story takes inspiration from the Puccini opera "Turandot", which also features a mad challenge on threat of death for the suitors. I didn't know it at the time, but perhaps that's what made it stick in my mind so strongly. I write fanfiction only when I feel passionate about the story, and this really seemed to be the one for me. I know that it's wacky, and probably not everyone's cup of tea, but as long as I can convey my love for the story to some other people, I'll feel like I accomplished something.

The song of the fabulo is beautiful, and something that has stuck with me all my life. Listen to it here: watch?v=nxzW6tqOMd4

+ due to life stuff I may not be updating for 3 weeks. I deeply apologise.