thank you to bran ren 7 on the kacchako discord for helping me out of my funk a week or so back. i CANNOT THANK YOU ENOUGH.
ALSO, feel free to join in on the endless fun that is this chapter's Grammar Horror Scavenger Hunt! keep your eagle eyes peeled for the longest and most epic run-on sentence this side of charlie dickens, a frightful pair of coupled 'to's, and an entire sectionof uncomfortable tense squatting!
now, without further ado, enjoy this full chapter of bakugou being unabashedly amazed by uraraka!
The Registry cleaves apart with the many-timbred, blood-curdling roar of an eldritch fucking god, come to usher in the end of goddamn days.
There's no question who's responsible, or which of the three villains managed to survive the Maven's improvised hydrogen bomb: it's Fissure Freak, fucking obviously, being his best radical revolutionary self by going out in a senseless blaze of dumbfuck glory, and deciding to take the Registry down with him.
"Motherfucker!" Katsuki rages, further incensed when his bellowed curse is swallowed by the myriad clamorous convulsions of the imploding high-rise.
The toll on the city when –not 'if'— the building collapses is going to be catastrophic in the fucking extreme, though substantially fewer lives will be lost than if they hadn't taken all necessary precautions and fired up the evacuation alarm minutes prior –specifically because this mass-murdering fuckwad is here. Nevertheless, evacuations always take time and often give rise to pockets of pandemonium where forward progress stymies, and the path of destruction is going to be fucking massive, so it's incredibly unlikely everyone will make it clear of the fallout. Meaning there will be a human cost, a big one –and that's to say nothing of the monstrous infrastructural transformation the ward itself is about to undergo.
But Katsuki doesn't have time to consider the full, gruesome scope of the consequences of Fissure's insane, last-gasp action, because he's got more immediate concerns – the most pressing of which is getting to the terrorist prick, to peel his dying ass off whatever surface he's glommed on to and disrupt the effects of his quirk, and maybe, possibly prevent the total collapse Katsuki privately suspects it's already too late to stop.
Also, regardless of what else happens, he's got to get Uraraka out of here safe and sound, and trust that Eijirou and Earlobes are smart enough between the two of them to've accessed the city plans for the nearest building with a fortified basement and hustled their asses to safety, with their civilian charges in tow.
To these ends, Katsuki reaches out and sweeps Uraraka into a one-armed hold, fixing her at his left side with his forearm slung low and loose over her opposite hip, confident she'll read this as a prompt to cast off their gravity and prepare for takeoff. He braces himself for the coming queasiness and gingerly taps his receiver on with his free hand.
"Oi, Shitty Hair!" He calls.
Eijirou merrily –if breathlessly— responds, "You're a go for the Riot!" Then, to an audience that clearly doesn't include him, "C'mon…doing great, everybody! Let's kee…moving -you…an do it!"
"You better be headed for cover, fuckbrain –it's about to start raining Armageddon out there!" With so much noise coming from every quarter and his own hearing compromised, Katsuki can hardly make out Eijirou's reply.
"Shindou's branch office…few blocks aw…headed over now! Jack pulled…lueprints, and…looks like…mergency bunker! We'll check…when we're secure!" He hears enough to get the gist, and breathes out in hushed relief even as he realizes Uraraka still hasn't activated her quirk. An irked peek reveals his partner's…spaced out, and frozen in place.
"Watch your ass, and hurry the fuck up!" Katsuki distractedly snaps, as he arranges countermeasures for Uraraka's sudden, mystifying preoccupation with her hands by tucking the tip of his middle finger under his thumb and readying to strike. He positions his hand directly in her line of sight, affording her the opportunity to snap out of it on her own, but she's too engrossed to notice.
"We'll…careful!" Eijirou promises, a smile in his voice. Then, "You be caref…oo! Love ya', buddy~!" Rolling his eyes at this, merely the most recent example of Eijirou's always effusive outpourings of affection, Katsuki determines there's no more time to waste and lets his finger fly.
"Ow!" Uraraka squeals, batting defensively at his hand and scowl-pouting up at him, adorably affronted. Too overwhelmed by present circumstances to guard against the indignant, chipmunk puff of her cheeks, his mouth kicks up into a grin he immediately attempts to blunt with a furrowed brow.
Agitatedly tapping his comm back off, "Any goddamn day now, Uraraka!" He yells over the protracted shriek of folding metal.
For a tense bundle of seconds they really don't have to spare, Uraraka stares at him, searching for fuck-knows-what, 'til she evidently finds whatever the shit she's looking for and suddenly declares she 'knows what she has to do' with buoyant self-assurance. Katsuki believes her, and he's ready to follow her lead, but before he can work out what she might have up her sleeve, she curls into him and presses her lips to his cheek in an ambush for the fucking ages, short-circuiting the part of his brain responsible for critical thinking. So when she slaps her boots on and rockets for the ceiling, at first he's confused.
Then, as comprehension slowly dawns, his ability to parse reality switches fully the fuck off, because there is no way in hell Uraraka actually means to float a motherfucking skyscraper—
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Katsuki has no frame of reference for how many thousands –or tens of thousands— of tons of building they've got above them. He is positive, however, that it's assloads more than Uraraka's current weight limit, which sits somewhere in the mid-to-upper hundreds of tons – or a couple thousand tons at an outlying, absolute maximum.
And that maximum was hard-fucking-won, to boot: the result of years of intensive, near-constant training and the anomalous, limit-breaking bridge collapse.
At the tentative beginning of their partnership, Uraraka was already months into an experimental program of keeping herself afloat all day (and night, while she slept), every day. (Also all day, every day, whether she was on patrol or filling out paperwork at the office or getting hammered under his kotatsu* with some ever-shifting configuration of their mutual idiots, she picked up the irritating habit of floating basically anything not fucking nailed down –including, periodically, every non-furniture item in his apartment. On more than one occasion, he returned to his revolving fucking door of a home to find a pile of lush assholes sprawled out on his living room floor in professional goddamn disarray, and his entire wardrobe adhered to the ceiling of his room.) She kept this exercise up for over a year, until she could use her quirk on herself for any length of time without getting sick or feeling taxed in the slightest.
Acclimatizing herself to her quirk's biggest and longest-lived drawback was obviously her primary objective, so this accomplishment alone was significant and worth celebrating. But Uraraka achieved considerably more in the course of her self-imposed training than she anticipated: to start, by virtue of going about her daily life in zero-g, she developed a proficiency for weightless, three-dimensional maneuvering that proved invaluable in the establishment of their joint combat style. By the close of her experiment, high-speed, sans-gravity acrobatics came to her every bit as comfortably and naturally as standing or walking upright under Earth-normal gravitational conditions.
Also, unquestionably as a result of her aforementioned habit of compulsively floating gym equipment and home appliances and the contents of other people's closets all the livelong goddamn day, Uraraka worked out how to adjust the pull of gravity on a given target incrementally instead of all at once, at a precision rate of her choosing. This technique, she later revealed, was one she'd been fruitlessly struggling to unlock since their sophomore year at U.A., though she'd exhausted every method she could think of to crack it and had all but given up hope that it was even possible. Turns out all she needed was the fortitude to endure a hellish, year-long stint of 24/7, gut-ravaging, perpetually nauseous discomfort, and the willingness to make it worse still by tapping off the gravity of and dicking around with anything and freaking everything she could lay her grubby little mitts on.
Technical gains aside, though, Uraraka also dramatically increased her weight limit. More than dramatically, even. Not long after she returned to the earth, so to speak, she commissioned his rocket transport services for an undisclosed 'beach emergency,' and he flew them to the scene to watch her lift a beached, adult blue whale back into the sea –and those fuckers top out at, what, a hundred-fifty tons? Two hundred? Last he knew—before that afternoon, anyway— Uraraka's max was half that.
And she'd only grown stronger since; hell, following that rush hour bridge collapse from a few years back, she'd reached a new threshold of around six hundred tons (which, for the record, is batshit), where Katsuki thought she'd plateaued until earlier this year, when he witnessed her hauling restaurants and shopfronts, four or five at a time, up from the depths of the huge fuck-off canyon Fissure Freak installed in downtown Hosu. Only then did it occur to him she must've crossed that threshold ages ago, and that she likely never plateaued at all.
The takeaway, ultimately, is that when a situation demands the inconceivable, Uraraka invariably rises to the occasion and fucking delivers, often in patent defiance of both expectation and long odds. In this way, she has consistently reinforced what he's known since they were fifteen and she stepped into the festival arena and tried to murder him for sport: that underestimating her abilities is for chumps and shitheads.
And yet, confident as he is that he knows good and goddamn well how much she's capable of, here he stands, in out-and-out fucking amazementof this thing she's doing. Clearly, he was not aware she was capable of this.
Although in his defense, that's only because thisshit is fifteen million kinds of not fucking possible.
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Uraraka hits the ceiling with a flash of hot pink and the impassioned, rallying cry of a seasoned yakuza enforcer –"OOORRRRRAAAAAAA!"— as micro-fractures spider along the walls of whatever the hell floor they're on, and the glass of the windows and the conference room at their back ominously clinks and crunches, threatening to succumb to the immense pressure and explode outward in a deadly spray of jagged shards.
It's happening – the walls are buckling, the ceiling's about to cave, and he and Uraraka are seconds away from turning a page and starting a new chapter as the world's flattest pro heroes. Katsuki could grab her and torpedo them out the same way they broke in earlier; he figures they should have at least enough time to clear the closest window before they're crushed and buried under a mountain of rubble; but, as he realizes in slow, mind-snapping astonishment that Uraraka has just activated her quirk on the Registry itself, pure, adrenaline-soaked insanity has him gritting his teeth excitedly and obstinately rooting himself to the spot, though every fiber of his being frantically exhorts him to cut his losses and fucking run.
Katsuki knows in his bones this is a thing that cannot be done –by Uraraka or Deku or motherfucking anyone. Nevertheless, for reasons lacking any actual fucking reason, he concludes he has to see how this plays out, and recklessly wagers both their lives on the –legitimately crazy and by all appearances outright fucking suicidal—gamble that Uraraka just might be able to pull off the impossible, after all.
It's the stupidest, most ass-headed fucking decision he's ever fucking made, and it's looking more certain by the goddamn second that it's the lastfucking decision he's ever going to make, because the wall fronting the stairwell is cracking open like an egg and ponderously shuddering apart before his very eyes, and he suddenly has a narrow but unobstructed view of the night sky, blanketed by dark clouds, and he is about to fucking die, yet somehow –he's betting on account of the head trauma— all he can do is grin like a fucking maniac and stare, transfixed, as the bestdecision he's ever made screams herself hoarse and pushes up against the ceiling so hard she's fully shaking and pours her unconditional fucking everything into becoming the fulcrum point for one of the tallest goddamn buildings in the country.
In light of his imminent pulverization, Katsuki permits the private admission that this is the hottest shit he's ever fucking seen.
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Normally, Uraraka's is an all-or-nothing kind of quirk, so the matter of whether or not she can float the Registry should've been settled the instant she touched it. Except, Katsuki assumes, in this case she's probably focusing on 'feeling out,' isolating, and stripping the gravity away from only as much of the upper part of the structure as she absolutely needs to to keep the whole thing upright –a substantially slower and more tedious process, and right now obviously a colossal fucking struggle.
He's watched her do this with liquids countless times: submerge her fingertips, determine purely 'by feel' how much she wants to lift out, and then withdraw with a pristine, anti-gravity bubble that's as big or as little as she requires. He has to believe the same, confounding principle that allows her to sequester fluids in specific, measured densities is also operating here, albeit on an infinitely larger and definitively solid target.
Katsuki's got no idea how long this is supposed to take – with the wet stuff she's never needed more than a couple seconds, but it's already been a handful of seconds since she made contact and she's still stuck to the ceiling and they are officially out of time—
"Bakugou!" She cries out, and he doesn't think, he just moves –practically fucking teleports to her, and hooks her by the waist as she finally pulls her arms away from the ceiling, limply flings them around his metal collar, and slumps into him, head tucked clumsily under his chin. "Fissure!" Katsuki hears the command through the flash of heat she inadvertently sets off when she breathes the name against his neck, and follows unhesitatingly where she bids, steering them over and up through their improvised entry port and plotting a course for the designated Registry-toppling ass clown some five floors above.
As they go, he can feel Uraraka's fingers isometrically tensing against the back of his neck, and knows she's manually adjusting the pull of gravity to fix the building in place, likely to keep any broken, disconnected chunks from floating off into space.
It takes him another long, dubious moment to connect this understanding to the bigger picture implication that Uraraka can't fix jack shit in place unless her quirk's taken effect and she's got the thing completely under her control.
Which means…she did it.
Uraraka performed a feat equal in sheer fucking absurdity to All Might in his heyday, decking a fucking cyclone and instantly dissipating the storm, and she did it so unceremoniously and anticlimactically that he motherfucking missed it? What in the actual fuck!
Awe and pride permeate the fugue state he's half slipped into, and Katsuki's heart catches in his throat as he lands them back on the twenty-third floor –which is wrecked and burned to total shit— and she goes slack. Swiftly gathering her against him, Katsuki scoops her up and bars an arm under her ass to hold her aloft, bracing a hand at her spine to keep her from sliding out of his grasp and puddling onto the floor.
"The hell've they been feeding you, Cheeks?" He growls into her hair, meaning to convey how utterly fucking dumbfounded he is by what she's done, but fine with the spent 'mouuu' she unhappily exhales over his shoulder when she instead takes it as a jab at her weight –which she only barely has at the moment anyway.
Smirking to himself, Katsuki casts his gaze out over the landscape of melted, mutilated cubicles, searching for the Freak –who's probably still alive, considering the building's still shattering to pieces all around them. There's apparently no longer any danger of any part of the framework collapsing, but the loud-ass shake-and-break continues unabated, and he could definitely fucking stand for that to not be happening anymore.
He locates Fissure on his first pass of the room, illuminated beneath a window –where he'd likely been thrown by the blast—by a shaft of silver moonlight. Fissure's alone on a sloping island of broken glass and crumbling foundation, pinned there from the waist down by thick slab of fallen ceiling.
Even before Katsuki draws up beside the Freak, he can plainly tell the guy's a goner. In fact, by the time he carefully kneels in the wreckage near Fissure's outstretched arms, laid out in front of him with his palms flattened to the floor, Katsuki can see the Freak's previously well-defined features are now all but unrecognizable, burned away to expose layers of seared muscle and bone. It's a gruesome sight, but one which underscores Fissure's fanatical resolve to destroy the Registry at any cost, that he would devote however little of his life is left to symbolically toppling the institution he so detests by literally dragging down its brick and mortar façade.
If nothing else, Katsuki can respect Fissure's strength of will.
Stabilizing Uraraka against him –an easy enough task with her absent most of her natural weight, Katsuki reaches down and flips Fissure's hands over where they're pressed to the ground. Pretty much as Katsuki expects, Fissure offers no resistance, and makes no attempt to turn his hands around again. He just lies there, staring at nothing and wheezing softly as the building-wide convulsions gradually sputter out, and then seconds later he too releases a long, shuddering breath, and quiets.
Fuckin' waste, Katsuki mentally snarls, frustrated and pissed off by the fucking senselessness of it all.
"Is he…gone?" Comes the small, sad hail from his shoulder.
"We're hittin' the roof; it'll be safer there." Katsuki responds, blatantly sidestepping the question. Feeling suddenly tired, "Let's get outta here." He stands, detonates what remains of the window –because at this point, what does a little extra damage even fucking matter?— and leans his head out the resulting hole to visually gauge how far up they're headed, roughly speaking. Then, knowing he can't count on Uraraka to hang on tight for take-off, Katsuki hoists her up and belts an arm across her back to hold her fast –bringing them unintentionally face to face, and forcing him to revisit his earlier, unscripted, almost-capitulation to an urge he's been vainly holding under water and attempting to drown out for three fucking years.
Her hair's a mess and her cheeks are scuffed –probably from their wipe-out earlier— and the dark, sunken grooves under her eyes make her look haggard and burned out and fucking anemic, and what with her already ashen, ghostly pallor (further evidence, no doubt, of the unimaginable, punishing strain she must be under), the moonlight isn't doing her any favors, and in spite of it all she's fucking perfect and he wants: to hold her goddamn hand; to buy her pointless flowers and take her to the fucking movies; to continue shit-canning blowhard villains by her side; to pin her against the wall, or the floor, or the motherfucking ceiling, and finish what he's been not-so-secretly cursing her for having started three years ago when she dropped out of the sky and kissed him and upended his whole fucking life.
He wants her, categorically.
Naturally, this bombshell drops at precisely the most inconvenient possible time, when the stench of death and singed hair hangs heavy in the air between them, and while Uraraka's got her hands full holding up the vault of the motherfucking sky.
Before anything else, he's got to get Uraraka away from this scorched hell and Deku on the line to help him put together a fucking exit strategy.
Later, he and Uraraka can sort out what a shit-guzzling, time-squandering fucklord he's been, and then maybe pick up where they left off when Eijirou horned the fuck in on Katsuki's attempted post-concussion impropriety.
Because if they've got anything now, it's time –time Uraraka bought for them, with a stunt he'll be giddily rubbing in the face of every fuck-headed Uravity skeptic from here to fucking eternity.
*kotatsu- a low table covered by a futon or huge-ass comforter, and underneath which hides an electric heater of some variety. if you've watched basically *any* modern anime, you've definitely seen one.
**yakuza- i didn't actually 'star' this one in the body of the fic, because i figure probably everyone knows who/what the yakuza are, but juuuuust in case: essentially, the yakuza are the japanese mafia, although there's plenty to distinguish the yakuza from other organized crime syndicates around the world. they're often associated with a particular 'gangster' vernacular which is positively *rife* with 'korrrrrra!s' and 'orrrrrra!s.' i fucking love it.
other notes:
-just so we're clear: when i say 'tons' in this fic, i'm talking 'metric' tons, since that's the measure they'd be using in japan. 15,000 metric tons=15 million kgs, which is roughly 33 million pounds. uraraka is a BOSS.
-the bridge collapse vaguely referenced in this chapter is the same one barely mentioned in chapter three of 'this dreadful spectacle.'
-this chapter is a cross-section of about 15-20 seconds, max.
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[next chapter: nerd frequencies, exit strategies, and the long-promised motivational screaming!]