Katsuki has to stand there like everything is fine. He stands across from Inko Midoriya and watches her crying face as they lower her barely teenaged son into the ground. A silent Katsuki watches as dozens of white roses are gently tossed onto the top of the dark oak casket.

Twirling the yellow rose between his fingertips, Katsuki can’t force himself to toss it in with the rest. He doesn’t deserve to call the dead boy in the ground his friend never mind a close one. Instead he lets it fall to his feet and pulls away.

Mitsuki calls out to him stern and hushed but he keeps walking.

He keeps walking and he doesn’t stop.

-

He doesn’t feel any better by the wake. Held at the Midoriya household, only the house which is usually so bright and cheerful seems grey and dreary without Inko’s son.

Mitsuki is by her side the entire time, having already scolded Katsuki for his early departure he’s told to sit still and stay put while they manage the wake.

And he does so without much protest. Only having another hour left before he could flee from this house and never look-

-back at it again.

Katsuki overhears it from some awfully cold women who were apparently friends with inko, despite carelessly throwing around such information.

They were swapping gossip on what the crime scene reporters were chatting about.

Izuku’s blood and how thick it ran. How stubborn and reluctant it was to pull from the ground let alone the stain it left behind. It was black and cloying, and it had gushed from his broken skull like a fountain.

“Maybe he wasn’t so quirkless after all,”-

-one of the impudent women whisper to the other with thinly veiled disdain.

And how dare they call themselves friends of Inko’s. Katsuki feels himself boil over. Pushing off the chair and racing upstairs as if his breakfast was about to reach back up his throat.

Katsuki wanders blindly in his rage before he’s met with the dead boys bedroom door. Forehead pressed against the cool wood. Gripping the cold handle with clammy hands, knuckles white.

He can feel tiny sparks going off around the metal as he pushes it down.

Sweaty palms setting off his quirk.

He hasn’t been in this room since he was five.

-

Bakugo runs his finger along the row of notebooks. From one to twelve they’re all lined up on his bookshelf. With a sigh the teenage boy sits down on the desk chair.

Flicking open the notebook titled ‘No.1.’

Hardly reading through the first page before snapping it closed. It had been five year old Izuku waxing poetry about how awesome and cool Katsuki and his quirk was. How he’d probably be the best hero there was and Bakugo couldn’t-

-fucking do this. He couldn’t.

How can he fucking sit here like he had the right to rifle through Izuku’s things and mope around as if he deserves to mourn the other boy.

“I fucking don’t! I don’t- I can’t!”-

Katsuki yells launching the notebook across the room, it tumbles into an all might figurine and the pair tumble to the floor.

Bakugo for the first time in so, so long, is crying; much to his chagrin. Palm open and wet, Katsuki despises crying, he hated it on Deku and he hates-

-it more so now.

He can hardly remember the last time he had cried. Was it when he was a newborn? Pathetic and wriggling in his mothers arms. And he hates that he can’t even force these tears away, can’t blink them or wipe them free.

There’s just too many.

Something snapped in him so fiercely that it won’t let him forget, it won’t let him forgive. He’d been waiting for it to happen, but he’d been stone cold since he heard of the news. So empty and void of feeling. He’d been living on auto pilot.

But now the sobs wreak havoc on him as he curls in on himself on the floor in the middle of the deceased boys bedroom. Katsuki doesn’t flinch when Inko and Mitsuki burst through the door. Whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t this.

Mitsuki stands there in shock, staring at her son who’s never shown an ounce of compassion since he was hardly a toddler. She can’t bring herself to move.

Inko on the other hand flocks to the teenage boy with open arms, pulling him into them like you would an injured child.

He feels that way, like a coddled babe. He hasn’t felt tears on his cheeks in so long, hasn’t allowed them. Katsuki feels nothing but the loathing self hatred and guilt as he grips Inko back.

“A-Aunty-“ Katsuki wants to tell her that it’s all his fault.

Why she’d never feel the warmth of her own sons hug and that it’s all because of him. He’s the reason Inko’s smile will never reach her eyes, the reason for how empty and broken she will always feel.

Katsuki Bakugo put her brighter than life son six feet underground.

He dug the other boys grave with his bare hands and put him there with a cruel and careless sentence.

Yet here Inko Midoriya holds her sons killer to her chest. Patting down his hair with shaky hands.

“Shhh...it’s okay, it’s okay,” Inko soothes him, her own voice thick with tears. Her hand runs over his back soothingly and Bakugo just closes his red raw eyes to escape the horrible truth.

=TBC bc this is helping me edit lmao=

Katsuki tries to muffle his suffering by entirely throwing himself into his intense training. Hell, he was so caught up in building core strength and stamina that he’d cleared every last piece of scrap metal, discarded junk and dumped trash on Takoba Municipal Beach.

His joints ached and his skin felt too tight. The growing pains didn’t stop there and no hot or cold bath would help sooth the pain. But Katsuki didn’t feel it, too numb to everything except the turmoil inside him. The grief kept at arms length by the burning of his joints that-

-was felt more so as relief than hurt.

Bakugo shut everyone out after the last time he’d openly been vulnerable. The aspiring number one hero didn’t need to rely on anyone else. Without much thought to it, Katsuki had kept silent. Since the wake he hadn’t uttered a single word.

The words could never form and his tongue wouldn’t cooperate. Unwittingly Bakugo had been rendered mute from the loss.

Many a night Bakugo Katsuki considered his plans on becoming a pro hero. A thousand thoughts a day assured him that this was something he didn’t deserve to do.

How could he after he’d forced someone to think that killing themselves was the only path forward. There’s not a day that goes by where Katsuki doesn’t think about changing the past.

Late at night when he’s left alone with his thoughts for company, he thinks about it.

Again and again he thinks of that moment those words left his mouth. How he wishes he could punch them down the cruel boys throat.

Thoughts of his own desperate escape from his tormenting thoughts invade his mind. His own corpse cooling in the very same place Izukus had.

But then his hard to die ego rises back up to strike at his own thoughts. How dare he give up, not when he carries Izukus memory with him in everything he does.

His death a curveball which taught the explosive boy something entirely too important entirely too late.

Katsuki doesn’t sleep at night. At night he stays up in quiet desperation, reading over each journal Inko had passed on to him. Each one a different snapshot and a different memory. Pages filled with passion, some burnt, some water damaged and even small tear stains left behind.

The aching boy could practically smell the other through each worn page.

Katsuki will treasure those books more than any limited edition All Might figurine. The next year is the most difficult Katsuki Bakugo will have to live through. He knows it more than anyone.

~/~

It’s difficult at UA. The memory of Izuku pulls at him down every hallway he walks. His silence is something he doesn’t break, not even once. It’s hardly by choice, the trauma of it all indefinitely sent Katsuki into a state of guilt ridden selective mutism.

By now, Katsuki had read twelve of Izukus thirteen notebooks, each one weighing down on him more than the last.
Now, nearing the end of his first week at UA, Bakugo had #.13 clasped under his arm securely as he headed straight to class 1-A. It was a comforting presence for him.

He’d managed fade into the background of the class so far, he’d hoped to keep it up for the entire year. His quirk was impressively flashy but his quiet and prickly demeanour made him a little easier to forget. Only a certain obnoxiously outgoing red head hadn’t gotten the memo.

He flounced over to his desk one morning. Razor sharp teeth set in a friendly smile. Bakugos half lidded and unseeing eyes didn’t even waver.

“Hi, I’m Eijirou Kirishima, I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself before!”-

-The strangely genuine boy introduced himself, hand thrust forward in greeting. He scratches the back of his head awkwardly when Katsuki glances over him before looking away out of the window dismissively.

“I- I hope we can get along, Bakubro!”-

-Kirishima tries again only to fall on deaf ears. With the tips of his ears the colour of his hair, the boy turns to leave. He’s stopped a few feet away when something small hits him between the shoulder blades. Eijirou turns to look back at the quiet blonde in stunned confusion.

The annoyed boys red eyes flick down to a fall of paper, a silent order passing between the two.

A bewildered Kiri bends to unfold the ball of paper. On it in biro is near black penmanship.

‘I’m mute, hair for brains.’

Eijirou instantly perks up at the revelation. Feeling a thousand suns better that someone so manly hadn’t brushed him off so coldly.

“It’s cool bro, with such a loud quirk I’d never expect you to be mute! Hey wait- is it like a drawback for your quirk?!”

Hair for brains continues monologuing until the bell of home room trills and the grubby yellow sleeping bag unzips from behind the desk at the from.

Bakugou considers the startled red head and decides that he could do much worse. Like that annoying Pikachu cosplayer.

Bakugo relaxes into a routine very quickly. Finding peace beach side every morning on his usual jog. Or listening to shitty hair narrate every little thing in his life. By extension Mina would join in the noise. Then Sero and then Dunce face.

It was hell.

But it wasn’t. Because Katsuki felt more alive than he ever had before UA.

Of course thoughts of Izuku never left him. Nor did he want them to. But some of the louder more frightening thoughts dulled down to a static white noise when he had things to occupy his time.

For the first time in what felt like a long time. Katsuki could finally look to the future with an eager fiery passion.

=TBC=