EXCUSE ME WHAT THERE ARE SEVEN CHAPTERS NOW?! I NEVER AGREED TO THIS WHYYYYYYYYYY-

at this point, i think it's clear i've lost all control of this story. splinter fics comin' outta my damn ears, EXTRA, UNPLANNED CHAPTERS tackin' themselves on willy-nilly to the central property, vaguely-alluded to events that demand ADDITIONAL splinter material...ala karkat, i'm ready to flip right the hell off this meteor.

*ahem* long story short, there's one more chapter than i originally intended, mostly because this chapter was getting too long, but also because i really just wanted to POST THIS JUNK ALREADY.

a couple things: you *will* need to read appendixes a & b (and 'sitting in a tree') to fully appreciate portions of this chapter.

also: yes, the wonder twins and ninja turtles (apparently) exist in this universe. although, perhaps their canon of campy feats is more autobiographical than comic fantasy? up to you, really.

ch5: the overriding imperative

Katsuki distinctively feels the deluge shaping itself into a dense, bubble prison around him, and starts ripping off superheated AP Shots to flash the liquid –probably water—into steam and fire himself the fuck away, because fuck these assholes and their apparent obsession with shitting all over his oxygen.

As Katsuki blasts himself free of his liquid cage, the garbled bark of a floating Freak resolves itself on the back end of a frantic command:

"—the cuffs, Mizu!" It doesn't take Ponytail-grade acuity to infer what Screamo Fuckass is hollering about (-freeing Bones), or to make the leap that 'Mizu' is Kiyo Mizu,* a low-level goon only on his radar at all for the recent spate of city water systems failures she's suspected of causing. She's a transformation type, a water-based shapeshifter –but an unremarkable one, according to the available specs. What she's doing here, then, is anyone's guess. The rest of this company of relative heavy hitters've been playing at so-called 'noble terrorism' for months –or years, in Malware's case, whose identity Uraraka's just revealed over the open line. Katsuki can make educated guesses about what role each of these other shits is meant to play, but unless the success of this operation somehow hinges on sabotaging the plumbing, he can only figure Mizu's here for reasons more personal than practical.

Murder Bubble either can't or doesn't try to hold her shape as he rockets himself in the Maven's general direction, setting himself up as deterrence to following the Freak's suicide order. Katsuki doesn't think there's any real chance Mizu could open the cuffs even if she were able to reach the Maven –though obviously that's not fucking happening— because the tech's encoded to respond only to him, and it's waterproof, besides. But depending on how specialized Mizu's abilities are and whether she's imaginative enough to think of it, he can't rule out the remote possibility that, in her current state, she might be capable of exerting sufficient pressure to crush the cuffs into useless scrap. He doesn't intend to let her close enough to put her ingenuity to the test.

Mizu doesn't go for the Maven, though, at least not right off the bat. Instead, she folds down into the heavy steam she herself is emanating, and disappears –mostly. The smoke's still sizzling directly off of her, so it's not hard to keep a rough vector on her location.

Under cover of noxious fog, Mizu attempts a series of actually clever sneak attacks, but she has no sense of follow-through, or movement economy, which as good as cancels out whatever small advantage she might've won for unpredictability. As a result, evasive maneuvers amount to little more than light cardio, and she doesn't even gain any ground for her efforts.

Uraraka and Jirou are rolling through the details of Malware's surrender and hand-off when the steam finally starts to clear, and he gets his first glimpse of the sloshing, gelatinous column Mizu's fashioned herself into, complete with a dozen or more thrashing, aquatic limbs, variously slapping or spearing or grabbing, all to virtually no effect. She's keeping him busy, but there's never a point in the ensuing scuffle where he determines she's a legitimate threat. She's too unpolished, too plainly inexperienced.

Katsuki lapses into playing defense to learn what he can about the properties and limitations of her quirk while he waits for Uraraka to get her ass back up here for the closing ceremonies. If Mizu makes an unexpected turn for the adept and deadly, he won't hesitate to steam her down to a fucking puddle, but with no concept how much of her he can safely vaporize without outright killing her, that's an emergency hatch he only intends to kick open as a last resort.

Uraraka, on the other hand, can wrap this shit up with a single touch, which is why she's up for the hat trick. If Bubble's aqueous body is more or less beholden to the same physical rules as water (and it might not be, but he's got other ideas if that's the case), Uravity'll be able to give everyone a practical demonstration of what happens to water robbed of its gravity, and show Mizu how bubbles are fucking done.

Katsuki still clearly remembers his own lesson on the subject, and the strategically solitary future it fully fucking collapsed.

Unbidden, the memory of a too-bright, sucker punch smile: "You wanna partner up?" There's a…weepy quality to Uraraka's voice he doesn't understand until, "With me?"

In the nick of time—"Package received," sounds in his receiver, and snaps him out of whatever the hell idiot fucking stupor he's fallen into, just as Mizu cinches a fat tendril around both of his ankles and jerks him off his feet. He lets himself be hoisted upside-down and violently whipped across the office, using the torque of her throw and an effortless sequence of course-corrective blasts to alter his trajectory –utter fucking cakewalk next to the limits-of-human-endurance shit he and Uraraka pull for warm ups. "Uravity—" Jirou again, urgently, "Malware says we're dealing with a quartet, not a trio-!" Katsuki taps his earbud as he rounds an invisible curve and boomerangs back at Mizu, whose appearance is being rapidly, drastically reordered-

"Yeah, no shit," he barks over the line. Then, for the shittier Wonder Twin's ears only, a Ground Zero classic: "Heads up, fucker!" Katsuki charges in on an airborne dropkick that slides harmlessly through the now unmistakably human shape of the water, and dives at the floor into a backspin he twists out of –only to find himself staring into the newly fleshy, zits-aplenty face of a teenage mutant ninja brat in shitty knock-off Ground Zero cosplay.

Sick fuckin' luck, kid, he thinks blackly, disappointing any hopes Mizu might've entertained that she could shock him into fumbling the attack when he doesn't hesitate to clap an explosion directly into her face. He wouldn't waver anyway; it's not fucking in him. But there's added incentive to steaming up a smokescreen on the quick that layers itself into the mix, because the heavy metal crash of the emergency exit door being flung open means Uraraka's back, and that it's time to put this ass-handed operation to bed.

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In the time Uraraka's been gone, Katsuki's taken an elbow to the ear, endured prolonged exposure to carbon monoxide, and escaped an attempted drowning perpetrated by one of his own goddamn fans. His head is fucking pounding, which isn't helped by the ceaseless, background blare of the evacuation sirens, or the sporadic bitching of Fissure Fuckass. Consequently, he wouldn't describe his prevailing emotion as pleased.

Annoyed. What Katsuki is at this moment is annoyed.

Curiously, the foremost item on an ever-expanding list of aggravations encompasses none of his most recent physical traumas. In fact, the only item currently worth mentioning is Uraraka herself.

Uraraka, who's had such a smooth run she hasn't even broken a sweat; who ruins his bad match quirk reveal with her ass-pull of a 'lucky guess;' and who afterward laughs at his justifiable fucking outrage.

Uraraka, cool and focused and all business, like he should be but fucking isn't, because he's wet and miserable and she's warm as a goddamn ember and still reeks of sunshine –and how the shit is that even possible with all the smoke and blood in the air?

Fucking witchcraft is how.

"Weird girl." Katsuki grumbles, his overwhelming sensory awareness of her briefly eclipsing the urgency of this do-or-die moment –not that that's fucking new, just –as usual- irritating, inexcusable, and extremely dangerous. Like everything the fuck else about her. "Ready?" He checks, impatient to get this show on the road and Uraraka the fuck away from him.

But then, out of the blue: "Whiplash?" She wonders, which trips him up all over again, because he can't even remember the last time she asked about an upcoming move-set. Even in training, there's virtually no discussion about approach. They're usually moving way too fast to bother, and even when they're not, they've been at this for nearly three friggin' years: they've developed keen interpersonal instincts, and a considerable sense of synchrony in both judgment and purpose, so there's no need for hashing shit out. Fuck knows that wasn't the case when they first linked up –fucking everything was an endless, infuriating negotiation. But now –and maybe this was inevitable, given his own proclivities—their combat style is highly improvisational, and relies on each of them knowing the other well enough to read subtle, unspoken cues, and to chart and anticipate one another's strategies as they evolve over the course of a given confrontation.

"Obviously." He grates, freshly annoyed that he doesn't know what this uncharacteristic slip means, only that her hand is definitely tipping.

"Ready." Uraraka affirms, as the poorly-understood force tethering him to the ground comes undone.

Finally, ignoring the mild nausea her quirk routinely causes and the traditional flip-kicking chest pain she provokes by the nothing fucking act of touching him, Katsuki remembers they're here to do their motherfucking jobs, and forcibly turns his attention back to the teenager whose day they're about to ruin.

\-\

The steam, unsurprisingly, is an excellent spur-of-the-moment obstruction: because of it, Mizu fails to reach the Maven, even with the extra few seconds she gains while he's busy pulling his head out of his own ass. She gets close, but she's still wearing her fleshy veneer, so she has to grope her way blindly through the choking fog, wasting precious time. It occurs to him she might've hit some kind of endurance or time limit, temporarily preventing her from going liquid, and makes a note to check the strength of his impending stun shot.

Then, Katsuki tosses back a modest explosion that sends Uraraka and himself absolutely fucking tearing through the intervening space; he's hitting the close-quarters insta-stop before Mizu even fully processes they're coming –which is arguably the central conceit of the maneuver. He's personally more partial to the flanking punishment portion of the program, but finishing the move before their target has any real chance to react is always the goal. And 'finishing' in this case requires only that Uraraka get her catspaw fingers on Mizu, because liquid or solid, the kid's quirk amounts to dick and shit in zero G.

Katsuki back handsprings off Uraraka's shoulders as he releases her into a forward tumble, and cracks off two controlled bursts, one to arc him upward, and another to flip him back down, behind Mizu. There's a sudden, translucent quality to her skin that probably means she's re-liquefying –wisely, since all she's got time enough to choose between is embracing her inner-fucking-space bubble or taking a brain-rattling stun grenade to the back of the head. Although it's also possible Mizu has no idea what Uraraka's quirk can do to her, and thinks she's choosing fight or flight instead—

–what in fuck? With all the other shit he's keeping track of, it takes a tick to register, but whatever the hell's making the air taste electric, and acrid, triggers the memory of that one time Denki nearly murdered their entire graduating class at the beach, when the dumbshit had a sneezing fit in the ocean and almost flash-fried the lot of them. It's the stink of sharper-than-usual ozone, of an electrochemical reaction he isn't generating.

A gut-dropping hunch draws Katsuki's incredulous gaze to the Maven, and sure the fuck enough, her eyes are dimly glowing, and her nose is pouring like a motherfucking faucet. A single finger, attached to the uncuffed but dislocated arm, is barely fucking twirling.

He knows exactly what she's doing.

The given ingredients make it impossible for Bones to be doing anything other than decomposing Mizu, because –just like he fucking wanted—Mizu's phasing back into water, and water is made of bonded hydrogen and oxygen molecules, and the process of splitting those molecules into discrete atoms creates an electrical charge that smells unmistakably like that same process happening in reverse, as it had when Denki accidentally did his level fucking best to electrocute all his sea-bound classmates. If Katsuki's remembering his organic chemistry correctly (and spoiler alert: of course he fucking is), the primary real world application for this process is to produce the infinitely fucking combustible: hydrogen gas.

It's too late to put the pin back in the grenade, so to speak; his fist's already fucking exploding. The detonation is happening, and it's going to be fucking cataclysmic –and for the third time in his life since an insane person fell out of the sky and saved him with a dumpster from a pair of would-be assassins, time compresses and seems to slow.

In the fractured flash of a familiar nightmare, he sees Uraraka, limp and pale and fucking lifeless, silent and still and gone—

"Unfortunately, we believe it's unlikely she'll ever reawaken—"

Fuck no. Never again. An entire universe of meaningless minutia instantly evaporates in the face of the overriding imperative to get Uraraka to safety, now, by any means possible, and his body fucking moves—

A millisecond after his fist discharges, the hand still out-flung behind him fires to send him flying through Mizu as she invisibly unravels and begins to explode –fucking spectacularly. Uraraka's there, just on the other side, fingers extended for bubbling and already partially sunk into aqueous flesh when Katsuki crashes into her. Never more glad of his broken-stat reflexes, he opens a hole in the floor, rockets them both through it, then grabs Uraraka, locking her against him with one arm cinched around her waist and the other clamping either side of her head between his chest and hand to mitigate the potential for sonic damage –all in half a damn blink.

Katsuki can feel his eardrums rupturing as the force of the blast wave knocks into them, propelling them even faster. Disoriented by the vestibular trauma, he almost doesn't react fast enough to punch through the next floor before they splatter against it –let alone the two floors below that. At some point in the unfolding chaos, Uraraka's hip and boot rockets kick on automatically to help stabilize them, which successfully pulls them off their current collision course with a fifth floor, but also has them briefly spiraling across the darkened office like a shit-faced fucking cruise missile and gracelessly wiping out in a tangled, painful heap of limbs near this floor's glass-walled conference room.

Vaguely, he's aware they've utterly fucking annihilated a water cooler, but it's hard to muster even a passing fuck about it –or anyof the bankrupting destruction they've just wrought— because Uraraka's safely ensconced in his arms, warm and breathing and alive.

Katsuki steeps in haughty triumph as the world fades to black.

*'Kiyo Mizu' – literally 'Pure/Clear Water,' as in the beautiful 'Kiyomizu-dera,' a gorgeous UNESCO world heritage site in kyoto. [en (period) wikipedia (period) org / wiki / Kiyomizu-dera] -remove spaces and change '(period)' to '.' this is the only way this dang site would let me include the url.

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so...things actually took a minute before they 'went to shit:' two supplementary material fics spun out of this *one chapter,* and then the fourth villain got more screen time than i intended, buuuuut technically speaking, once we got back to where chapter four left off, things DID go to shit preeeeeeetty f*ckin' quick. it's all about perspective, is what i'm saying. i'm grasping at straws for justification, is what i'm saying. I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS HAPPENED EITHER, IS WHAT I'M SAYING.

in any event, even though most of the first part of this chapter is heavy on the ground zero action, at this stage in the continuing saga of Bakugou's Adventures in Head Trauma, he basically never stops playing six degrees of uraraka anyway, so hopefully that was enough to tide you over 'til uraraka actually showed back up and bakugou's higher order functions shut the hell off in favor of 'holy fuck she's so soft and warm and smart this is BULLSHIT.'

and: 'In the fractured flash of a familiar nightmare...' -yes, there's a fic in the offing that'll drop us headfirst into this angst-ridden incident, and give us some much-needed insight into *why,* when bakugou and uraraka are -three years into their partnership- obviously hot for each other, they haven't hooked up yet.

ALSO. part of the reason this chapter took SO LONG to finish (apart from the distracting, accidental appendices and my general slowness) is RESEARCH. specifically, SCIENCE RESEARCH. i ended up doing a butt-freaking-ton of digging into things like electrolysis of water (the process mentioned above used primarily in the production of hydrogen gas), hydrogen explosions (i'm definitely on some kinda government list now), and all the various potential chemical Events i might make happen with the atomic ingredients at hand. it was actually super interesting, but i went down some pretty intense rabbit holes and got lost there for a while...

a particularly fun reference video i ended up watching a handful of times: [youtube (period) com / watch?v=qOTgeeTB_kA]

ALSOALSO (last thing, i promise): drizzydoodles was 1,000,000% my muse for this chapter. i *love* the way she draws kacchako, because HOLYF*CKINGYASQUEEN she's goodsogood, but in particular the last page of her recent 12-pg comic was EXCELLENT visual reference for how bakuturd and the lovely'raka *fit together* when compelled to surprise!smash into one another. check this amazing sh*t out, if you haven't already: [drizzydoodles (period) tumblr (period) com / post / 174154509146 / more-drizzy-what-the-hell-compelled-you-to]

thanks for waiting, y'all~

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[next chapter: uraraka refuses to cry, one villain's less dead than they probably should be, and motivational screaming ensues. for real this time. maybe. hopefully?]