Chapter Text
Bakugou Mitsuki doesn’t speak to him the entire ride home.
Personally, if Katsuki had a fifteen-year-old son who was just eaten and held hostage by a slime creature, he’d at least have the decency to make small talk with the kid after. Not even an ‘are you okay’ or concerned glance? A ‘how was school’ even? All he gets, as they’re pulling up to a nice, two-storey house with a white picket fence, is a stern stare from beady red eyes in the rearview mirror.
Katsuki supposed that was meant to be a warning of some sort. The way Kacchan’s body reacted, sweat gathering in his palms and throat tightening, spelled as much.
Fifteen minutes later, when Katsuki is made to kneel in front of the TV, head down as Bakugou Mitsuki shouts, he wonders why Kacchan’s instincts hadn’t had the decency to make him bolt for it the second the car door opened.
“Wasting all those people’s time! On your weakness! Embarrassing the family!” Bakugou Mitsuki is squealing like a pig over a fire. It’s a wonder Kacchan’s ears worked with the way she only seemed to increase in volume with each passing second. And it’d been a lot of seconds. Katsuki would know, he’d been counting down, trying not to lose his temper, from six-thousand since this all started. Now he’s at two-hundred-and-thirty-three and the blonde woman can undoubtedly be heard from here to New York. “What’s the point of having a strong quirk if you’re going to let yourself be beaten on by low level street rats like that?! Look at you! You’re disgusting, dripping that green shit all over my carpets!”
Uncomfortable, still soaked in that very green shit, and having lost count somewhere in her words, Katsuki is beyond peeved. Not for the first time since this all started, he ignored Kacchan’s kneejerk reactions of bowing his head and biting his tongue to snap back. “You could always just let me go shower,” he pointed out, irritably.
“Are you raising your voice at your mother?!” Bakugou Mitsuki shouted.
Kacchan’s mouth is incredibly dry. So much so that Katuki’s words taste like sandpaper, scraping against the heavy tongue he has to force to form the words, “Look, I don’t know what kind of mood–”
Given the atmosphere, the slap felt a long time coming. Yet, even after watching the hand raise, even with his entire body tensing up– Katsuki had been wholly unprepared for it.
From the moment they made eye contact in the crowd, over the shoulder of the EMS and the lingering bystanders, Kacchans’ been prepping him for this. Somewhere in the fear rushing through him and the discomfort in his every moment the longer he stayed near the woman, there was some sort of notion that this was coming. As much as he’d wanted to escape the conversation sooner, it’d been so hard to get his legs to cooperate and help him escape. In a malformed sort of way, the original character’s instincts had been shielding him from this so far, keeping his head bowed and his lips pressed tight together, mouth refusing to cooperate with anything he wanted to say.
If he’d been able to speak more freely and do as he pleased, he wondered how much sooner this little chat would’ve devolved to violence. Brushing his fingers against his cheek, Katsuki felt the consequences of barrelling past the fight-or-flight response Kacchan was trying to force onto him.
In his real world, his parents weren't saints. When he was a kid, he’d been hit with anything from a wooden spoon to a sandal for misbehaving. But it’d been a long time since he’d left that old house, escaping away to his hard-earned ticket to that prestigious boarding school, and it’d been a long time since someone had raised a hand against him in such a way.
Kacchan probably couldn’t say the same, Katsuki comes to slowly realize, feeling the heat of his cheek against his palm. He’d flinched involuntarily the second the hand raised, but once it landed, he hadn’t been able to get his hands to so much as twitch beyond the long, slow movement of feeling against the reddening cheek. As though his whole body was going against him, he was stuck still, frozen, staring down at the ground as Bakugou Mitsuki continued.
In his room, later– after he’s been slapped around a bit more and yelled at for half an hour longer– the system tentatively speaks. Almost apologetic. If a vesselless, omnipotent being was even capable of feeling sorry.
[You have seven days to rest. The next story arc–]
This wasn’t in the original story, Katsuki pointed out, sourly. Toweling his hair, he plopped down at the vanity in his rather plain room. Outside of a few Pro Hero Posters, including a shockingly huge one of All Might, the design was plain white all over. Orderly and organized. Picturesque for a gifted teen like Kacchan.
Staring into the mirror, at purple blossoming on his cheek, Katsuki feels anything but that.
The system takes a second to respond. Almost a hesitation. [Unraveling secret scenarios is part of the [you can up] system–]
Cool. Where are my points then? Katsuki is quick to spat back, not in the mood for the system's usual B.S. All he wanted now was a long nap to avoid any thought of this hellish scenario he’d found himself in. Of all the insane moments of the day– choking to death on ramen and then nearly dying for a second time to a Jell-O freak, waking up with nuclear bombs in the palms of his hands– this had been what put him off the most. Being transported into a borderline hentai, he could handle, but being a victim of child abuse? Again?
Katsuki had worked his ass off to get out of that house. Spent nights slaving away at academic books and skipped out on friendships for all of his formative years to get into that damned academy. And all for what? To end up back where he started?
Scowling at his– Kacchan’s– face in the mirror, he continued balefully, If Kacchan getting slapped around by his mom every evening counts as a secret scenario, I just got beaten enough to earn at least a few, right?
This time, the second the system takes to respond feels a lot more judgemental. [Five points have been added to your account. You are now at 195–]
Hold up– when did I drop in points? If Katsuki was doing the math right, and, of course, he was, the System was cheating him out of fifty points! As though it wasn’t enough to watch him get slapped around by his new mother figure, the System went ahead and tried to pull a fast one on him. As if the pain would be enough to distract him from how much he was owed. Pay up or I’ll– I’ll–
Honestly, it was almost a good thing the System interrupted then. Katsuki wasn’t exactly sure how one was meant to go about threatening a being without a physical form to attack. At the System’s next statement, he became much more inspired and driven to find a way.
[Midoriya Izuku’s coolness suffered in our last segment–]
%#$^$@*#
That little asshole couldn’t even give him a break when he was unconscious?! Did Katsuki’s sacrifice mean nothing to him?! What had he even been suffocating and held captive for if the idiot was going to just turn around and muck it all up immediately after?!
What the fuck did he even do to lose fifty points?! All that effort to save him some face, and the nerd somehow managed to mess it all up the second he was distracted. Burying his face in his hands, Katsuki’s mind flooded with images of a green-haired loser on his knees, sobbing and begging for All Might’s autograph while he was going through a psychological warzone against his mom. Fuck this MC, slowly but surely he was beginning to understand why Kacchan had such a huge vendetta against him. Dealing with that simpering murmuring all day just to go home and get beat around, Katsuki too would probably start speaking in ‘grunt grunt growls’ if everything kept up at this rate.
[Public Indecency.]
His face is a fucking public indecency.
Midoriya Izuku was actually quite adorable, no matter what angle you looked at it. With his baby fat and big green eyes, it was hard to look at him and feel anything but the way one would feel when looking at a soaked dog, shivering out in the rain. It was a testament to how angry Katsuki was with him that right now he felt as though he would very happily slam the door on that pitiful pup. (Though, only for like five minutes at most, he wasn’t inhumane, just needing to prove a point).
[Your next chance to gain points will begin with the next story arc, the Entrance Exam, in seven days. Until then, rest.]
Rest and Entrance Exam didn’t belong in the same sentence.
Immediately lurching up, Katsuki’s jaw dropped, mind racing with immediate concern. Seven days wasn’t nearly enough. Not when this Entrance Exam was practically Midoriya Izuku’s villain origin story in the original novel. His failure here to do anything during the exam kickstarted his downward spiral. In seven days, if nothing changed and the protagonist skipped into the exam with too high hopes the way he had in the original, he’d humiliate himself.
Distracted by recovering from being suffocated by a glorified slime tutorial, Katsuki didn’t get the chance to check on one of the most vital points of the Slime Villain Arc. After watching him beat the villain to a pulp and protect his classmate, All Might had deemed Kacchan as the ideal heir of his power. Following the attack, he initiated the passing of One For All, birthing the Symbol of Victory right before the Entrance Exam Arc. The amount of aura Kacchan had gained as lightning bolts danced around his body had been so jaw-dropping that Katsuki spent the whole night staring at it back in his original world.
If Kacchan was here now though, in his room with his face still throbbing, that meant the quirk had to have gone to someone else by now, right? With moonshine peeking in through the curtains, it was far past the sundown Kacchan had gained One For All in the original at this point.
But if that were the case, how had Izuku lost fifty points rather than gaining any.
With a sinking heart, Katsuki prodded, Deku has One For All now, right?
[...the System advises you rest–]
%#$^$@*#
[]
When Kacchan inherited All Might’s quirk following the Slime Villain attack, there hadn’t been a learning curve. Prodegic, the blonde got with the program quickly, insurmountable power fitting in the palms of his hands naturally as though it was always meant to be there.
In that way, it does kind of make sense that Midoriya Izuku, all lanky limbs and quirklessness, would see different results.
Despite the System’s insistence that he rest, Katsuki didn’t even think that was possible. Both because of the stress of coming up with a way to halt the train of events that would end up with him cut into a million pieces, and also because Bakugou Mitsuki walked through the house like a shark in search of blood. Any time he spent time outside of his room, it was to the utmost displeasure of his mother.
Bakugou Masaru, Kacchan’s father who had never made an appearance in the original run, wasn’t much help either. Outside of a tired yawn or a grunt of listen to your mother, the brunette hardly reacted when he entered the room. Not even bothering to lift his gaze from the TV screen, he ignored where his son and wife were going at it like a proper deadbeat. When Katsuki left that morning, the only thing the man offered up around a yawn, was a request to pick up some eggs on his way back home that evening.
Now, with eggs cradled in one arm and his phone zoomed in all the way in his other hand, Katsuki spied on where Midoriya Izuku fell on his face on his sixth shaky pushup.
Tilting his phone screen, he caught All Might’s grimace as he stared down at the green-haired boy.
Fuck. How the hell was Midoriya Izuku supposed to be chosen as the next heir for All For One when the current Symbol of Peace was giving him looks like that?!