K.BAKUGO X READER (Cover art by me)
In a life where I'd be safe in one moment and on the brink of death in another, I realized that he was the only force that could ground me. Of all the people in the world. My volatile co-worker. My menacing rival...
(A/N: spoiler warning for MHA manga chapter 364. This is technically the final chapter to the story, but the epilogue will provide further context and scenes to the conclusion 💕 Reading the epilogue is not required but highly recommended 😉 )
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part twenty-seven
━━━━ ⟡ ━━━━
In the way that tree limbs stretch and tangle overhead, mesmerizing and far beyond my reach, I still struggled to grasp the nature of my life's experience. To see where my memories stemmed from, where they intertwined. I could spend hours staring into that sparkling canopy of my past, wondering, what if?
We each live and experience a single life; one path of a river, in one direction, down one way. Yet, I'd managed to swim both upstream and back through many branching paths. So many at the time, I feared I'd never make it back to where I started. The darkness underneath the current was a daunting place. Were it not for the small scraps of light in my life, I wasn't sure I'd have been able to surface again.
Sure, I found my way back somehow, at the cost of dreaming a hundred nightmares and experiencing one of my own in the flesh. Paired with nearly losing my legs and my fingers in the process, and then having to stitch them all back, and – you know what? Maybe the rest isn't worth mentioning.
My small bit of suffering could never amount to the lives that were lost. The mountain soldiers who fought bravely and valiantly to the end; the heroes who fulfilled their final and greatest duty; the lab members who'd fallen victim, either while trying to escape or as hostages during the break in; the villains who died in Bakugo's brutal explosions; all individuals with their own rivers of memories, cut short without resolution, just leaking endlessly into the ocean where all currents eventually join.
They didn't find the leader behind it all in the aftermath. The eye-patched man was missing for a while. Even in his absence, he still managed to bury his way into my mind at night. His words stuck with me. In my cold, empty bed sheets, his raspy voice chased my thoughts in circles.
Everyone wants something... It's why we're alive.
I had a lot of time to think about that. Eventually, after enough excavating, they found his body frozen in the ice. He'd have a lot of time to think about that too.
The situation was kept mostly under wraps. Releasing that the 'start-of-the-end-of-the-world' had been a hair away from happening would be too much for the public's own wellbeing. The safety commission labelled the whole event as a 'villain dispute' and went on with their day. The remaining lab infrastructure was turned into a government research facility, in conjunction with the military. They disbanded bio scans entirely and deleted all the remaining data because God forbid another villain group attempted the same plan and succeeded. Ugh... I didn't want to consider that... Anyway, there were plans put in place to help reforest the regions that had been destroyed in the fallout. Mostly hero volunteers were delegated. Midoriya was first on the list, the saint he is. I signed up too.
