It's Always Been You

A childhood au #kacchakothread that features #kacchako as kids, teenagers, and adults, and chronicles the challenges a friendship can face when a marriage has been arranged.

It'll sort of follow canon, but not really, you'll see...

Katsuki and Ochako had known each other for as long as they both could remember. Their mothers had apparently been in the same pregnancy class and after learning of the proximity in which the two families lived to one another, the women became close friends.

From the time they were born, the children were a constant presence in each other's life, and it was rare to find one without the other close behind. Their favorite pastime was to play pretend with Katsuki as a dragon and Ochako as a knight sent to vanquish him.

On more than occasion, one of their mothers would enter a room to find Katsuki petulantly laying on his tummy, Ochako perched victoriously on his back as she taunted the boy about pinning him and winning again.

They seemed to always be in a constant game of seeing who could scare the other more or flinging food across the table sneakily during meals.

But not all times were fun, as it was just as likely to see them squabbling and often settling their disagreements in wrestling matches.

The children were soon joined by another boy from their neighborhood, Izuku, whose family had moved into an apartment nearby when they were all still in diapers.

He followed the pair around devotedly and although Katsuki always preferred the company of Ochako alone, he begrudgingly accepted the green-haired boy into their group per Ochako’s insistence.

When Katsuki first manifested his explosion quirk just short of his fourth birthday, he was ecstatic. The ability to sweat nitroglycerin and ignite it at will to create explosions was a perfect combination of his parents’ quirks, or so he was told.

Though his still-developing brain couldn’t comprehend the extensive logistics of it, the praise and amazement of those around him clued the young boy in on all he needed to know.

He had been gifted with a powerful ability.

The first time Ochako experienced her quirk, she accidentally activated it on Katsuki after tackling him to the ground.

Her birthday had just passed and despite her parents’ warning that she might be experiencing changes, nothing could have prepared her for the toll zero gravity took on her small frame.

She threw up on her friend, crying wildly while her mother tried to calm her enough to figure out how to release her quirk. After hours of being held in his mother’s lap to avoid floating to the ceiling, Ochako finally learned the special combination to return his gravity.

Katsuki didn’t speak to her for a week afterwards.

It was the longest time the two had ever gone without seeing one another.

But a child’s mind is quick to forgive and forget and soon the two were back to their games, now with the added fun of quirks.

They had promised their parents that they would only use their abilities under supervision, but that didn’t stop the two from passing the time with Ochako floating objects around and Katsuki trying to shoot them out of the air when they thought the adults weren’t watching.

When the children started school the following year, it became apparent that Izuku would not be developing a quirk, which was actually quite unusual, as he was the only one in the small class of students who was quirkless.

Empowered by a smug sense of superiority and the encouragement of their classmates, Katsuki became cruel, a trait that Ochako didn’t particularly care for. Their once pure, steady attachment began to fracture as she saw her closest childhood friend become less recognizable.

She would have been sad, but okay, if he had just left her and Izuku alone and gone off with his new group of friends.

But that wasn’t the case.

All the other children, Izuku included, admired Katsuki and his flashy quirk. Ochako didn’t really understand what the big deal. What she did understand was that his superior ability made it so that he was the natural leader of the group.

Although she was unaware, she could have ruled by his side, if she wanted to, as there was no one that he admired as much as her. After all the times she had sent him floating into the air, he knew not to mess with the small brunette girl with cherub cheeks.

Still, Ochako felt the fissures in their friendship more than she understood them, as she now found herself constantly fighting against him and rarely was it playful like in days before.

He had taken to making Izuku’s life miserable for being different, and Ochako wouldn’t stand for it. She knew all of his tricks and more often than not could subdue him enough to allow Izuku the opportunity to run away.

Katsuki couldn’t grasp why she would choose the ‘sad loser’ over him, but she didn’t care.

She took it upon herself to act as the green-haired boy’s bodyguard, always on the lookout for Katsuki and his band of mindless followers.

Months passed by this way, with multiple attempted interventions from their parents to try and help the two friends find their way back to the intimacy they had once shared. Most of those attempts ended with Katsuki blowing something up and Ochako shedding angry tears.

Katsuki hated that she would choose someone so powerless over him, refusing to understand that helping others was one of the truest values the heroes he admired so much held.

He had already become obsessed with being the best and he knew that together, he and Ochako could be.

All the times the two spent playing with their quirks were all the proof he needed. But he couldn’t even get her to look at him these days unless he was taunting the green-haired boy, which only served to fuel his anger.

The situation came to a head when Ochako stayed late one day after school and wasn’t able to walk Izuku home like she normally did. She found him later on their route home, cornered and crying as Katsuki threatened to explode the other boy’s favorite All Might plushie.

Launching herself at the blonde, she tackled him to the ground, pinning him in place with every ounce of her strength as she glared at him, brown eyes meeting red ones.

“What will it take for you to leave Izu alone?!” she screamed, furious in a way that she couldn’t quite describe or even really comprehend.

“Train with me! Be my partner!” he boomed, volume matching hers.

“If I do, you promise you won’t bother him?”

An agreement was made, shook upon as if the two children could understand the depth that the word partnership entailed. They agreed on the walk home that they were going to be heroes. Ochako wanted to provide security for her family. Katsuki wanted to prove he was the strongest.

The young girl suggested they should ask their parents for advice, since they weren’t quite sure how to begin to make this happen. Her new partner reluctantly agreed, hesitant even then to ask for help.

So began the next chapter in their relationship.

For Katsuki, he took to ignoring Izuku completely. In fact, most others in the class, even his so-called friends, drifted away. The only things that mattered were himself and Ochako.

He demanded all of her time and attention, which she gave, happy to know that he’d have no energy to spend harassing others. They spent all of their time trying to figure out what it meant to be a hero.

That wasn’t to say that their friendship returned to the sweet simplicity it had once embodied. In his time without Ochako, Katsuki had grown arrogant and brash.

He couldn't really express it in words at the time, but his parents gently suggested to him that maybe he felt jealous at the attention that she continued to give Izuku. The adults called him ‘possessive,’ which he didn’t understand.

What he did understand was that he didn’t want Ochako to have anyone in her life who was more important than him. It infuriated him that any free time she did have was still spent with the good-for-nothing, quirkless boy.

Katsuki often lashed out at her when she would arrive at his house after spending time with her other friend, but Ochako would just roll her eyes and ignore him until he calmed down.

Her kind temperament helped soften him a bit just by being in her proximity, but the traits he had learned over the course of several months would take years to temper fully.

It was a task too great for someone as young as Ochako, but she soon learned a perfect imitation of the stern look her mother gave her when she was in trouble and found it worked just as effectively when Katsuki was misbehaving or acting out.

It also helped when their parents signed the two children up for judo classes, as the sessions helped to start teaching Katsuki the meaning of control.

Although Ochako had told her parents emphatically that she wanted to be a rescue hero, all the adults had agreed that it would be important for her to learn how to defend herself.

Up until that point she had been able to make a little time to play with Izuku, but Ochako soon became enraptured by the new skills she was learning. She was just as likely as Katsuki to want to practice every day after school that wasn’t already spent in the dojo.

The young girl didn’t have the same natural aptitude for the martial art as Katsuki, but it didn’t stop her from trying her hardest to take him down.

Though it was usually him knocking her to the ground, she found that there was always a hand extended to help her back up, even if he did refuse to make eye contact with her in the process or acknowledge her thanks.

Katsuki felt himself thriving under the added guidance and his parents applauded the way he threw himself so fully into learning. He glowed under their praise and that of the sensei who raved about the young boy’s affinity for the techniques they were learning.

It also gave him a twisted sense of pleasure that Ochako hardly ever spoke with their former friend anymore, so consumed she was by talking about what they had learned and practicing with him in every moment they could spare.

After two years of judo and training the small muscles of their bodies, it was decided that a quirk instructor would be hired to begin teaching the children in learning not only how to best control their quirk, but also how to make it even stronger.

The Urarakas were unsure as to whether they could afford the exclusive, highly sought after woman that the Bakugos had found, but soon realized it was a small price to pay if it meant their daughter would no longer become physically ill by the overuse of their quirk.

The added training meant there was now no free time in the day. Any time that the children weren’t in classes was spent in the company of one another as they were chauffeured to various lessons every evening of the week, with weekends being consumed by supervised practice.

Ochako felt badly at ignoring all the rest of her friends, Izuku especially, but the rush that she got from lifting heavier and heavier objects or taking down much larger opponents was unmatched by anything she had experienced thus far.

She told herself that she was only doing what was necessary to fulfill her promise to provide for her parents, though the adults had reassured her countless times that it wasn’t her responsibility.

And, despite his generally prickly manner, Ochako truly enjoyed spending time with Katsuki. When others weren’t around he could be quite gentle and he always offered gruff words of encouragement in the times she was feeling down.

Whenever there was ever a skill or technique that she wasn’t able to master under the guidance of their sensei, she knew she could count on him to spend extra hours with her to practice more.

If she had told any of their classmates about this other side of Katsuki, they probably would have laughed in her face. But she didn’t need them to understand. Truthfully, it was nice to see a part of the boy that was reserved only for her.

Katsuki didn’t like that he was apparently weak to the whims of the tiny, round-faced girl, but it was a small price to pay to be in her orbit. She radiated light, but the soft, gentle kind that could be seen when gazing up at the moon hung in the night sky.

Her presence was comforting to him, even if he couldn’t put it into words, and he never wanted to be apart from her. She had become his best friend and he hoped it would stay that way for the rest of their lives.

- End of Part 1 of 6 -