this chapter is…very long. it...it just happened.
also, just to reiterate: i have a huge and largely inexplicable fondness for hatsume mei. she gives me bulma 'prolific genius' and hiruma 'for-love-of-the-game' and 'blackmail' vibes, which i *love.* so yes, there is absolutely a between-the-lines subplot explicating hatsume's benevolent choke-hold on the pro hero world happening in this fic. in case anyone was curious.
enjoy!
Katsuki floors the Maven in a fraction of the time it takes Uravity to hang the Freak in the air like the indignant centerpiece of a deranged mobile. Under regular circumstances, this would be the end of the fight, and make him lead on rounding up the anonymous chicken-shit tearing for the stairwell. It wouldn't normally matter how fast she bounces back, because he'd already be flipping her over, wedging his knee between her shoulder blades, and slapping her into Target Eyes' patented quirk-sealing, movement-inhibiting handcuffs ('Stiffies,' as she calls them, the very product that pink-haired demon recently duped him into endorsing in the shittiest commercial of all time). Instead, he has to spend a crucial second replenishing his oxygen reserves and regaining his disrupted sense of balance, and Maven takes full advantage of the opportunity to trundle herself sideways, out of immediate striking range. Her temporary breakaway is irritating, but he does note with satisfaction that she's having to catch her own breath, knocked out of her either by the hard shock of his instep to her chest or the whiplash impact of her body slamming flat against the floor.
He's on the attack again in no time, sliding into a scissor grab with his legs to pull her off-balance –except she's more nimble than her gangly, awkward-ass form suggests, and she cuts again to one side just before he can wrap her shins and fling her right back to earth. Before he's fully lost the momentum of his dive, he rolls back and tucks his knees to his chest, kicking up to a wide stance on the roll forward, and dropping to his knees to duck under the row of knuckles the Maven sends flying for the bridge of his nose. Katsuki angles his fall so he lands aslant of her, and aims a shovel hook up at the base of her ribs that strikes devastatingly true. He feels the intended break and give, sees the mad panic in her –shit, definitely glowing again—eyes as her lungs temporarily refuse to inflate. Again, he reminds himself, appreciating the irony of stealing the O2 Maven's breath away.
Sure he's broken a rib and knowing first-hand how much that shit hurts, he doesn't expect she'll be able to move for at least the next minute, let alone make an attack, so she nearly catches him out with the elbow she immediately brings down at the back of his head. The subtle displacement of air above him has him rolling instinctively into a somersault, and while he avoids the brunt of the attack, she gets in a glancing blow to his ear, which fucks his balance so hard he almost lays himself flat. He gives himself the space of a full heartbeat to process the pain and recover as much of his equilibrium as he can, but no more, because intel says all she needs is a couple seconds of uninterrupted focus to activate her quirk, and her bony, witch fingers are already curling in circles, and she's grinning like a shark around the blood inexplicably streaming out of her nose—
-and then the air is poison. Carbon monoxide, at a high-ass concentration, if the dizzy, stabbing headache rapidly coming on is anything to go by.
Katsuki knows this shit gets deadly fast, that he has precious little time to jam her up and neutralize her quirk before he spews or keels over or fucking both. He rushes her with one arm extended and his trademark, post-apocalyptic road warrior smile cranked clear up to Bloodbath, like he means to make with the pyrotechnics out of pure, suicidal desperation. It's a fake-out, of course; he's firing off jack shit 'til this crazy resilient bag of bones goes down, but he makes a show of bracing his arm with the opposite hand, as if to absorb the shotgun recoil of his quirk, while what he actually does is furtively unbuckle and slide out of his left grenadier with rote ease, so he can chuck it point-blank into her mysteriously still-bleeding face. Or that's where he thinks he aims, anyway –she seems to teleport impossibly out of the way, and as the bracer goes sailing harmlessly past, he realizes he's misjudged her actual spatial distance. Barely, but enough. Still, rewarding as it would've been to watch the Maven eat grenade and wipe the fuck out, even the missed potshot distracts her into giving him an opening.
Running a lightning-quick series of calculations to correct for his fucked visual acuity and depending on his instincts for the rest, he spears out a hand, snagging the nape of her neck and folding her abruptly down. As she bends irresistibly at the waist, his knee smashes up into her solar plexus, and he hears the breath leave her this time, in a choking, truncated cough. Somehow, after all this, the air is still fucking poison, and he unintentionally relaxes his grip in a lapse of blurry disorientation. Maven wastes no time rolling herself out of his clutch-hold, but in spite of some seriously labored breathing and a face now fucking covered in blood (which he wagers has to be the drawback of sustained or repeated use of her quirk), she doesn't retreat. She closes on him with a snarl, striking randomly and sluggishly, without technique, but then she doesn't need much when he's having to expend twice as much energy to see straight and keep on his ass-eating feet.
In the midst of their violently tangled-together brawl, Katsuki notices peripherally what Maven can see directly: Uraraka, racing for the stairs, and the Freak, pinned in midair, furiously – if pointlessly—thrashing. Under a shitting minute, and Uraraka's already benched the trio's overpowered blowhard.
He makes no attempt to stifle the feral smug smearin' its way across his face as the Maven's washes out with naked disbelief.
"What—!" Is all Bones gets out before he takes advantage of her split-second preoccupation and delivers a blow that very definitely dislocates her left shoulder. The Maven screams, and the freaky-ass glow of her eyes finally dims, and holy shit he can breathe again.
As he sucks in great, greedy gulps of fresh air, he sets either of his hands at the wrist and elbow of the Maven's good arm, locking her shoulder joint and guiding her face-first into the ground with a gratifying, audible 'smack'. Uraraka reaches the stairwell as he's reaching for the cuffs in his pocket. She doesn't look back to flash him the usual winking-smile combo, but she does lift two fingers into a waggling, victorious 'V' as she disappears behind the door, clearly for his exclusive benefit. He rolls his eyes, because every damn time.
He's developed a stupid habit, too, of making the specific effort to look out for her kitsch routine, also every damn time.
"Toru!" Soapbox shouts from his mid-air perch. Ignoring him, Katsuki fixes one of the chrome bracelets to her right arm, and watches with a private scowl as a custom-fitting cone of ultra-thin metal sheeting emerges in a cascading spiral, wrapping from wrist to just below her elbow. Her body stiffens unnaturally as he stoops to give her the matching set, and he knows an overpowering rigor is working its way through her like an electrical current, that she'll be near fully immobilized in a matter of seconds. He knows this because it hasn't been long since Eijirou and Ashido ambushed him in his fucking sleep, taking their lives into their hands to clap him into these devil shackles and snap incriminating photos of Eijirou giving him a markered-on, Daruma* makeover, all to fulfill a Mei Hatsume mandate –'cause somehow he is the lesser of two evils between them. (Target Eyes blackmails him into an endorsement deal with the proofs, and escapes retribution by the same means, but a few weeks after the fact, Ashido shows up demanding to be fed, and Katsuki whips up a meal featuring a generous portion of ingredients rating in the hundreds of thousands of units on the Scoville index**, for her and Eijirou both. The subsequent screaming chaos about squares them, by his reckoning.)
Again, from above, "Unhand her! I will kill you, you vile-!"
Katsuki assumes there's more, but the rest of Fissure's speech is drowned out suddenly by the literal deluge that issues forth from the ceiling.
/-/
Apprehending the girl in the kigurumi turns out not to be the chore Ochako expects. The girl hasn't made it far –four or five flights max—so when she drops herself down the center of the stairwell, she's not even fully falling yet before she's swingin' herself over the railing and onto the landing, touching down practically nose-to-nose with the floppy, nub-horned face of a cartoon dragon. Kigu-girl's hands go up instantly.
"I yield." The flat, detached tone of her voice clashes weirdly with the breathless desperation of her attempted getaway. This dissonance momentarily flusters Ochako, but she moves to bind the girl all the same –cautiously, wary of the potential for sneak attacks. But the girl makes no further bids for freedom, and obeys Ochako's every instruction without question or hesitation.
It isn't 'til she's wrapping her quirk-dampening rope around the girl's stomach and tyin' it off at the wrists that she happens to catch a shift of light that hits kigu-girl's pear green skin just right –enough for her to glimpse what looks very much like lines of circuitry snakin' every which way across the landscape of the girl's face and neck, running into n' out of nodes the size of small freckles. Once she sees the fine markings, she wonders how she ever missed 'em.
Ochako steps back around to face her. "Could I just…?" She asks, fingers hoverin' at the trim of the be-dragoned hood. The girl nods, catchin' her meaning, and Ochako gently peels back the heavy fabric, revealing a loose, tangled bob several shades darker than her skin, against which the maze of pale circuitry hair is unmistakable. Ochako hazards an educated guess. "Y'know, it didn't make sense to me before, when we were told there was a team lookin' to take out the Registry, since whether or not the building's destroyed, the data's backed up on remote servers who-knows-where-else. After that speech back there, I wondered if y'all were maybe aiming more for a symbolic kinda destruction, but that's…not the case, is it? Are you…the one they call 'Malware?" The girl's unfocused gaze suddenly sharpens.
"Affirmative." Ochako takes this in. The most elusive and prolific cyber-criminal of the decade is here –here, in person, to wipe the Quirk Registry. Among her many hacking talents, it's generally believed Malware's quirk is 'electronic erasure' –the ability to extract digital data from its source code and purge it, wholesale, from every electronic 'space' in which it exists. If she can get to it, supposedly, she can completely delete it. Which must mean the source code for the Registry's archives is inaccessible anywhere but onsite. "I would like the record to reflect my full cooperation." She continues, in corporate cadence. Ochako nods automatically, still deep in thought. She can't help but wonder about this solemn-faced girl, about what unhappy history might've motivated her to ditch the safety of wherever she's kept herself squirreled away all these years, a location or series of locations the country's top minds –and quirks—have consistently failed to discover.
"It will." Then, thoughtfully, "You must feel pretty strongly about this, huh? Takin' out the Registry, I mean." Malware looks her directly in the eyes, and behind the already familiar indifference Ochako thinks she sees sadness, n' maybe anger, or determination.
"It is objectively unethical and amoral." Is all she says, but with more conviction than anything else she's said so far. Ochako sets a hand on the girl's shoulder and walks her the short distance to the railing in silence.
"I agree." She eventually confesses. Malware blinks once, slowly, skeptically. "And I think a few of my friends do, too." She taps her comm, the little earbud all that remains of her grievously expensive headgear. "Riot? Jack? Got a sec?"
"Copy," and "What's up?" Sound in her ear simultaneously, from Jirou and Kirishima respectively.
"Unknown target identified: call-sign, 'Malware' in custody."
"Woah, what!" Kirishima exclaims.
"She voluntarily surrendered herself, and I'm lookin' to get her evacuated so I can head back up to help Ground Zero with the Maven."
Dependably, Jirou anticipates the comin' request, "What floor are you on? We're on the twelfth." Ochako glances around the stairwell, and spies a black, stenciled-on '19' in the low lighting by the door.
"Nineteenth. I'm in the stairwell –interested in a drop-off?"
"Sure thing. Red, you head up to sixteen –looks like another pair of custodians there. Uravity, I'll signal you when I'm in the stairwell."
"Great, thanks!" She cheerfully returns, reachin' up to switch her comm back to receiver-only mode. In the restored silence of the otherwise vast, dim space, "I think we both know Fissure Freak came here for a reason, too –that he meant to bring this place down after you did your part." Ochako doesn't try to hide her consternation. "There's nothing noble about the city-wide devastation that would've caused. About the scores of innocent people who'd be hurt or killed." She presses her fingers to Malware's forehead, lifts away her gravity, and musters a faint smile. "Lucky for you, we're not gonna let that happen." Ochako takes the girl by the wrists, gently leads her up and over the railing, holds her at a still hover in the yawning expanse below her. Malware's eyes widen, but Ochako reassures the girl she means no harm. Gradually, Malware relaxes. "It may take some time before the authorities'll let me, but I'll come see you when I can, and we can talk alternatives. Maybe even with one or two o' those like-minded friends I mentioned. If you're up for that?" Deadpan features come alive with incredulity.
"A hollow promise…" The girl hedges, but Ochako hears it, the dull edge of hopeful expectation.
"A promise all the same." A distinctive, metallic creak echoes up at them, the sound of a door opening. "But when I do follow through, I hope you'll work with us on figuring up some fixes."
Ochako's receiver activates,
"Here." Jirou says, right after Malware asks, "Why?" A bright beam of light flashes up at 'em once, twice, to indicate where Jirou's waiting.
"'Cause if there're people out there so sure we're on the wrong track they're willin' to wreck a whole city to make the point, maybe it's time we at least explore our options." She releases Malware's hands and settles her palms on either of the girl's large shoulders. Then, peerin' into the semi-dark to gauge the distance to Jirou, she pushes down with carefully measured force. "I'll see you again soon." She smiles again and waves, and amazingly, from her midsection, the girl raises one felt paw and waves back.
It's not much, but it feels like a great start, and heartens her as she listens for Jirou to confirm Malware's safe landing.
After a few seconds, "Package received." She's about to say her thanks when Jirou speaks up again, urgently. "Uravity –Malware says we're dealing with a quartet, not a trio—!" Ochako's already torpedoing herself up the central shaft of the stairwell when Bakugou's breathless, eternally agitated voice rips right across the transmission,
"Yeah, no shit."
/-/
Ochako throws open the emergency exit with her heart in throat –how could she've forgotten the Shuffling Someone from the floor above?—n' takes the scene in all at once: Fissure, still flailing helplessly where she left him; the Maven, frozen in an eerie contortion on the floor near a corner office; and Bakugou, twistin' up from a dropkick like a demented top n' lungin' forward to clap his hands point-blank into the face of the fourth n' final member of this motley crew, which sets off a concentrated explosion that appears to dissolve the other person's entire head, and for one awful, reeling moment, Ochako thinks she just witnessed Bakugou brutally murdering his opponent.
But then he sees her, and instead of the guilty shock she'd expect of a hero caught in the commission of a heinous crime, he grins like a demon and rockets toward her through the incredibly thick cloud of sizzly smoke produced by his attack. By the time he breaks to a heel-diggin' halt in front of her, she's already put her sick suspicion to bed and shifted her focus to the tower of –wet!—Bakugou currently dominating her field of vision.
It clicks in an instant: the damp office wreckage close by, her freshly soaked partner, that reckless-seemin' headshot and unusual amount o' boiling steam –the sum of the parts is obvious.
Bakugou holds his hand out for her and rumbles, "Took you long enough," though there's no real reproach in it. She presses down hard on the shakin' relief she feels to see him safe, if definitely not unscathed, and takes his hand without a second thought. With the gentle tug of his fingers against her wrist, he leads her forward and steps around behind her at the same time, endin' in a front-to-back configuration that makes her feel immediately like she's about to hit her weight limit, though she knows for a fact she's nowhere near it. "Wanna guess what this asshole's made of?" There's something gruffly giddy about the question, but she's too distracted by the way his breath ghosts over the shell of her ear to wonder why.
"Water?" She answers faintly, feelin' parched and wishin' she had some for herself. When he doesn't respond, she chances a backward glance and finds him arrested by a dubious outrage.
"What the shit. You're psychic now?" Despite the circumstances, she can't help the puffed snort of laughter that wins free at his stony, brow-twitchin' glower, 'cause it's the same, apoplectic pomeranian schtick he pulls anytime she wears Deku merch in his presence. As she watches, the expression morphs into an angry pout, which she absolutely means to tease him about later, since Bakugou'll for sure enjoy hearin' he's capable of bein' cute.
"Lucky guess." Ochako smiles softly and draws in a deep, calming breath. The moment of levity helps dispel some of the odd tension in the air, and restores her focus. She has only a vague awareness of the warm hand he lays flat between her ribs, high on her stomach, to hold her in place against him, laser focused as she now is on makin' out the not headless figure steppin' slow n' stilted toward the prone Maven through the lingering fog. And the low, gravel 'Weird girl' Bakugou murmurs into her hair barely registers at all, bein' that she's so focused on working out which among their inventory of combos he's lookin' to open with from this position. Her level of pure focus at this moment is the stuff of legends.
Finally, "Ready?" He checks. Ochako answers with a question of her own,
"Whiplash?" A beat of silence, followed by a nettled,
"Obviously." She curls her fingers into a loose fist to float herself, then returns her hand to Bakugou's forearm (which she's only just realizing is missing its grenadier) to lift him off, too. Then, finally able to see well enough into the diminishing haze to make out the actual form of the mysterious fourth member, coughin' quietly into her elbow and perilously close to touching the Maven for who-knows-what purpose, Ochako tightens her grip on his arm and nods.
"Ready."
*Daruma - https(colon) wiki/Daruma_doll; aizawa has a hilarious, druken encounter with a daruma doll in the third light novel.
**Scovilles - the unit of measurement for the pungency/spiciness of food based on its 'capsaicin concentration.'
***'weird girl' - most def cribbed from what i now consider seminal kacchako: the lovely miss_chunks' 'don't ask, don't tell'
/-/
fyi: the next chapter is pure, unadulterated kacchako. i love action and emotional/situational context, my good chums, so there's inevitably an assload of both in whatever i write, but please allow me to reassure you, i'm only actually here in the first place for the shipping. I HAFF NOT FORGOT THE SHIPPING.
and: after extensive thought, i did decide to go with 'Ground Zero' for bakugou's hero name. i kept thinking i could avoid it (that's how his 'Mad Bomber' nickname came about it, in an effort not to have to mention his call sign), but eventually it felt silly to keep trying.
lastly: malware's quirk has been hacker/tech-based since the conception of this fic. la brava's quirk reveal from this week's release was just a happy coincidence. :) and to be fair, i don't think la brava's quirk has anything to do with erasing anything.
/-/
[next chapter: things go to shit hilariously fast, uraraka wears bakugou like a seatbelt, and motivational screaming ensues.]