Katsuki Bakugo: 26

July 14

Path One

Tsukauchi Naomasa's day absolutely could not have gotten any worse. It seriously couldn't have.

This was supposed to be his time off, since he had just closed a massive case the night before. He'd gotten home late at night, or 'early morning', depends how you see 4:30am. His plans were to sleep the whole day, maybe stop by at night to check up on everyone and possibly bring in some coffee for his boss.

Instead, he barely scraped up a few hours of sleep before a violent shaking and the sound of terrified screams echoed through him home, forcing him up against his own will.

In the back of his head, he knew he was one of the luckier ones. The apartment had been constructed fairly recently, with new technology to balance out any quakes that made their way through. Made to stabilize when something like this hit, and keep its residents safe.

Not all of Japan was built like that… or all of the city, even.

Turning on the tv reminded him of how… unfortunate the rest of the citizens are, despite efforts to utilize this technology in more and more buildings.

Instead of safety, he's forced to see what really happens to everyone else.

Ruins. Nothing but ruins, piles of buildings that had suffered from the massive quake that had rolled through. The dust clouding in the air, broken water pipes gushing water into the streets, cracked and crumbling roads. Cars turned over, people in pain...

"Natural origins." they called it.

A sinking feeling was starting to set in, icy cold needles of horror sinking its teeth into his heart. Shocking, sending shivers down his spine and causing goosebumps to rise. The sinking feeling was all too familiar to him.

Fear.

This is bad.

His thoughts were racing, like a ticking time bomb disguised as a string of letters clouding his brain, but this is what kept repeating.

This is bad.

But he didn't know just how bad it was until Naomasa saw him on live tv.

Right before the whole world saw him live on tv.

"Is… is that…" The reporter on the screen, a lovely young lady with snakes for hair turned and stared at the rescuers digging through the rubble. Her hand holding her microphone started to lower, her jaw going slack. She looked roughly put together, he would say extremely well presenting for someone who just got dragged into work not even an hour after an earthquake.

His eyes caught what she was staring at, and they widened as the icy cold teeth sunk deeper into his heart.

"Oh… oh god oh...oh no that…" the reporter's voice choked on her own words, and she nearly lost all composure on camera as she watched the scene behind her.

Just a little ways back, maybe 7 or so meters, there was a rescue worker frantically moving to remove chunk after chunk of crumbling cement. Beneath the rubble, Naomasa could see a tuft of striking green hair. Ordinary, familiar, dark green hair, buried beneath fallen cement.

The world was given a moment to realise, as no one said a word.

"That's Deku…" The reporter's voice was soft. Hopeless.

He wasn't moving. They could see dark red coating the debris around his body. No sign of One for All, or life, came from that tuft of deep emerald hair.

Naomasa watched, on live television, as a team of people pulled a limp, broken Midoriya Izuku from the rubble. Shattered and without structure, dead weight hanging from the hands of a worker who didn't have to be the one to find him like this. His body was drenched in blood, already drying and flaking off, a deep wound in his chest with twisted metal wedged inside of it.

Izuku was so young. He was a young, hopeful kid that Naomasa took on himself to help, to be a mentor for him as he reached number one, someone so strong and so… young.

This isn't fair.

This shouldn't be happening.

A few minutes passed. Eventually, Deku is removed from the view of the screen. The reporter is still staring at where he was pulled from. Her snakes were waving nervously, nipping at her ears and her shirt, anxious and soft hisses making it through her mic.

She was barely holding it together, through the breaks of live silence there were small choked noises, like she was trying to hold back a sob.

As she turned back to the camera, Naomasa knew the words she was going to say before they left her lips.

He begged for it not to be true.

"This just in…" Her voice cracked and he could see the glassiness in her eyes, tears threatening to spill out. "Number One Hero Deku is announced dead from extreme blood loss due to a large cut in his chest."

Truth.

The tears slipped from her eyes and she lost all composure on live television, for all of live japan to see. The icy cold fangs of fear squeezed into his heart until he felt blood spill out into his lungs, and he lost his own composure as he reached for the remote, switching the screen off. There was a soft fuzzing noise from the static forming on the old screen, as it all turned to black.

He collapsed onto the couch, and let himself dissolve into a thought process he would usually prevent himself from falling into. Guilt, pain, sorrow, helplessness. This wasn't the first time he's watched something like this happen but…

This was it.

A kid with so much hope, and wonder. Who was nothing but stubborn courage, and pure energy. The symbol of Peace, the last holder of One for All.

Dead.

Three Weeks Later

"I did it."

Naomasa sat in an interrogation room, staring eye to eye with a nameless man who showed up on his porch 2 hours ago, asking to be arrested. The man stared back, his face calm, he wasn't tense or anxious. But he wasn't malicious, there wasn't a hint of hurtful intentions.

Dare he say it, but the guy looked blank, bland.

Nearly everything about him was bland. From his short wavy salt and pepper hair, turning slowly to silver from age, to his meek brown eyes dull of life. His wrinkles around his eyes, the way his skin sagged, his face was forgettable. He dressed in long sleeves, turtle necks, long paints.

However, if he moved a certain way, you could see a flash of colour. Names, dates, times, places… etched into his body in an array of rainbow tattoos, coating every centimeter of skin that showed when he would scratch his neck, his sleeve running up his arm a little, his chin giving away secrets.

Naomasa wondered just how much of this man's body looked like a bag of melted skittles.

"Did what?" the detective leaned forward, his arms resting on the cold metal table. The man didn't hesitate to respond.

"I killed them."

Truth

"Who?"

"All of them."

Naomasa frowned, shifting a little in his chair from slight suspense building up.

"That doesn't offer much insight."

"Well there's a lot of people." The arrested man shrugged. "The blood's on my hands, I killed them."

The detective didn't know what annoyed him more, the fact the man asking to be arrested was being vague with his answers, or the fact his quirk was still detecting wholehearted truth.

"How many?"

"Too many."

No he just hated the vague answers.

The guy finally shook his head.

"My name is Kuroda Hajime, I'm responsible for an estimated three thousand deaths."

Naomasa stares at Kuroda as his quirk pinged with a very deep and unsettling Truth.

"My quirk… it's something terrible, something no one should have. There's no good that comes from it. It's not even registered because there was no way to tell anyone what it was without them arresting or villainizing me as a child."

There was a moment of quiet as Kuroda scratched his neck, revealing a splash of bright neon colours hiding beneath the fabric. It was then did the man in custody look away, staring at the door.

"I remember when it first developed. I wasn't a happy kid, I think my classmate stole my pencil or something in class. Looked him in the eyes and thought 'i hope you die so i don't have to deal with you tomorrow'. I didn't think much of it, I was just an edgy kid waiting for my quirk like everyone else. But, as it turns out… the kid died on his way home that day, found drowned in a ditch. His name… it showed up on my arm, where my wrist is, along with a date, time, and location. His death was etched into my skin, in neon green vibrancy."

"I had no clue what happened. I just covered it up and moved along with my life. But then more deaths started happening and I realized… All of them were because I looked at them and thought 'hey you should die'."

Naomasa was silent as a stone. Kuroda still wasn't looking at him, instead straight at the door, his hand still pulling a little bit of turtle neck down to reveal the vivid colours of names… Dead people.

"I experimented with it. Gave it a name. Never told anyone what it was until I dropped out and became a hitman."

"What did you name it?" The detective's voice was soft, almost borderlining the edges of emotions. Weak.

"Death Clock." Kuroda said. "How it works… I lock eye contact with you. I give a date, something as vague as 'before tomorrow' or as specific as 'at 11:35 am on Tuesday, June 12th' and… no matter what, you die. I can't control where you die, fate does it's own thing. But it embedded a dead clock in you, and one way or another you… die."

He shook his head, salt and pepper hair glittering in the horrendous lights of the interrogation room.

"I was a part of the USJ attack."

Naomasa's heart dropped in that instant. He didn't have to hear the next words to know what was going to happen next, but for the sake of the confession… he didn't intervene.

"I… they promised pay, didn't really think much of it at the time. Hired because I was known for having a 'deadly quirk' and I could be 'vital to the mission', but I didn't really tell them what exactly my quirk… was."

"I have a policy. I didn't kill kids. Stupid policy, stuck by it because that first death kinda jarred me, not gonna lie. So I figured 'eh why not' and I gave death dates to almost every one of those kids. I staggered them too, but apparently I missed one. Oh, and the teachers, it's kinda hard to kill Thirteen when she doesn't have… concrete eyes. Or Eraserhead because of his stupid goggles."

"But I did… I gave them all death clocks, except for this one kid who I couldn't lock eyes with. Hell, I even got the invisible kid but I couldn't catch his."

"Bakugo Katsuki?"

"Yea, that's the bitch."

Kuroda shook his head, then looked at the table. "I… forgot about it. Until I saw their names popping up on my body." He slowly pulled more fabric from his neck, showing off the splatters of colour.

Naomasa couldn't see a patch of real skin beneath the cluster of names. What hurt was how vibrant the colours were, how potent and saturated they were, for a list of dead people. It was sickening how beautiful each colour was.

"I tried… Detective, I swear I tried to stop it. To stop it all from happening, to reverse the damage I was causing."

Truth.

"I tried to cancel it, counteract it, force another date into them so they wouldn't die too early. I met a few of them in person, under cover, and tried to help. To save them."

He cleared his throat.

"I got better after about… 2 years Post-Kamino ward. I kinda just… gave up on it. I killed so many people, I look like some kid's confetti riddled birthday party floor, it doesn't look pretty when you're trying to land a date. But also because I just… got over it. I got over the high of knowing I could just kill people with a thought, without getting my hands dirty. I worked at a grocery store for a while…. I quit three weeks ago."

"Midoriya Izuku's death?"

Kuroda nodded, his eyes still fixed on the cold metal table.

"I couldn't stand it. I felt horrible. On the floor, recovering from an earthquake, buried under groceries and surrounded by screaming people. And in the back of my mind, I wondered if someone I had… Used my quirk on, if they had died."

"And I looked on my arms. Didn't see any new splotches but… Man, I'm covered in it. I'm a walking pinata of names. I could show you all of them but I don't feel like taking off my shirt."

"Please… please don't."

"Yea good choice there, bud. But… I saw the news. Saw it live, and it… sake my heart. I thought I could have saved him, Detective. But… I couldn't even save the number one. So… I decided to turn myself in."

Then it fell quiet. Horribly quiet. Naomasa was stuck sitting in his seat, still as stone, mentally processing everything that had just been stated.

Each of them came back to him all the same.

Truth

Truth

Truth

His own heart twisted with pain, grief, and sorrow.

For once in his life, he wished his quirk didn't tell him what was true or not.

Naomasa didn't want to believe what happened was true.

He left Kuroda alone in the interrogation room. Another person handled the rest of the case, and the man was quickly placed under official arrest and handed over to a different department.

Naomasa was left to do the dirty work.

The next day would be a painful one, as Bakugo Katsuki, the Tenth Holder of OFA and Number One Hero, answered the front door.

Naomasa Tsukauchi's day couldn't get worse, as he had to look the last living member of the most well known class A to graduate from yuuei in the eyes, and tell him that each and every death of his former classmates was because of one man and his quirk.