Victor | Katsuki Bakugou x Male reader

Chapter 24

We real close to the end now. I have started writing the first chapter for the second book, but I'm gonna be pretty busy over the next 3 weeks cos I have my external exams. So it's coming along pretty slowly lol.

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(M/N) spat the berries from his mouth, wiping his tongue with the end of his shirt to make sure no juice remained. Katsuki pulled him to the lake and they both flushed their mouths with water and then collapsed to the ground.

"You didn't swallow any?" (M/N) asked him.

Katsuki shook his head. "You?"

"Guess I'd be dead by now if I did," (M/N) said. He could see Katsuki's lips moving in reply, but he couldn't hear anything over the roar of the crowd in the Capitol that they were playing over the speakers.

The hovercraft materialised overhead and two ladders dropped. (M/N) helped Katsuki onto the ladder and the two climbed up. The minute the door closed behind them, Katsuki slumped to the floor, unconscious. He had lost a lot of blood.

Doctors appeared in sterile white outfits with masks and gloves, prepped for action. They put Katsuki on a silver table, attaching tubes and wires to the boy, and for a moment (M/N) forgot they were out of the Games, instead seeing the doctors as just one more threat, one more pack of mutts designed to kill him.

Petrified, (M/N) lunged for the blonde, but he was caught and thrust back into another room, a glass door sealed between the two. He pounded on the glass, shouting as loudly as he could. Everyone ignored him except for a Capitol flight attendant who appeared behind him and offered him a beverage.

(M/N) slumped down on the floor, his face against the door, staring uncomprehendingly at the crystal glass in his hand. Ice cold, filled with orange juice, a straw with a little umbrella. How wrong it looked in his bloody, filthy hand. His mouth watered at the liquid, but he placed it carefully on the floor, not trusting anything so clean and pretty.

Through the glass, (M/N) could see the doctors working on Katsuki, their brows creased in concentration. He could see the flow of liquids, pumping through the tubes, and watched a wall of dials and lights that meant nothing to him. He wasn't sure, but he thought the blonde's heart stopped twice.

It was like (M/N) was home again, when they brought in a hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labour, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia, and his mother and Eri, they would have that same look on their faces.

(M/N) wanted to run away into the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient was long gone, like he always did. But he was held there by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often he'd seen them spread out around the kitchen table and wondered why they wouldn't leave, why they'd stay and watch.

But now he knew. It was because they had no choice. (M/N) had no choice.

(M/N) was startled when he caught someone staring at him from only a few centimetres away, and then he realised it was his own reflection in the glass. Wild eyes, hollowed cheeks, his hair tangled. Rabid. Feral. Mad. No wonder everyone is keeping a safe distance from me...

The next thing (M/N) knew they'd landed back on the roof of the Training Centre and they were taking Katsuki while leaving him behind the door. (M/N) started hurling himself against the glass, yelling, and for a split second he thought he caught a glimpse of Emi's pink hair when a needle was jabbed into him from behind.

~

(M/N) slowly opened his eyes, the soft yellow light from the ceiling illuminating the area just enough for him to see that he was in a room containing only the bed he was lying on. No doors or windows visible.