A Means to an End | Katsuki Bakugou x Male Reader

Chapter 12

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Today I might lose both of them.

(M/N) tried to imagine a world where both Shoto's and Katsuki's voices had ceased. Hands stilled. Eyes unblinking. He was standing over their bodies, having a last look, leaving the room where they laid. But when he opened the door to step out into the world, there was only a tremendous void. A pale grey nothingness that was all his future held.

"Do you want me to have them sedate you until it's over?" Shota asked. He wasn't joking. This man had spent his adult life at the bottom of the bottle, trying to anaesthetize himself against the Capitol's crimes.

"No," (M/N) said. "I want to go to the Capitol. I want to be part of the rescue mission."

"They're gone," Shota said.

"How long ago did they leave? I could catch up. I could-" What? What could he do?

Shota shook his head. "It'll never happen. You're too valuable and too vulnerable. There was talk of sending you to another district to divert the Capitol's attention while the rescue takes place. But no one felt you could handle it."

"Please, Shota!" (M/N) was begging now. "I have to do something. I can't just sit here waiting to hear if they died. There must be something I can do!"

"All right. Let me talk to Kan. You stay put." But (M/N) couldn't. Shota's footsteps were still echoing in the outer hall when (M/N) fumbled his way through the slit in the dividing curtain to find Denki sprawled out on his stomach, his hands twisted in his pillowcase. Although it was cowardly - cruel even - to rouse him from the shadowy, muted drug land to stark reality, (M/N) went ahead and did it because he couldn't stand to face this by himself.

As he explained the situation, Denki's initial agitation mysteriously disappeared. "Don't you see, (M/N), this will decide things. One way or the other. By the end of the day, they'll either be dead or with us. It's... It's more than we could hope for!"

Well, that was a sunny view of their situation. And yet there was something calming about the idea that this torment would come to an end.

The curtain yanked back and there was Shota. He had a job for them, if they could pull it together. They still needed post-bombing footage of 13. "If we can get it in the next few hours, Tenya can air it leading up to the rescue, and maybe keep the Capitol's attention elsewhere."

"Yes, a distraction," Denki said. "A decoy of sorts."

"What we really need is something so riveting that even President Nezu won't be able to tear himself away. Got anything like that?" Shota asked.

Having a job that might help the mission snapped (M/N) into focus. While he knocked down breakfast and got prepped, he tried to think of what he might say. President Nezu must have been wondering how that blood-splattered floor and his roses were affecting (M/N). If he wanted (M/N) broken, then (M/N) would have to be whole. But he didn't think he would convince the president of anything by shouting a couple of defiant lines at the camera. Besides, that wouldn't buy the rescue team any time. Outbursts were short. It was stories that took time.

(M/N) didn't know if it would work, but when the television crew was all assembled above ground, he asked Ryuko if she could start by asking him about Katsuki. He took a seat on the fallen marble pillar where he had his breakdown, waited for the red light and Ryuko's question.

"How did you meet Katsuki?"

And then he did the thing that Shota had wanted since his first interview. To open up. "When I first met Katsuki, I was eleven years old, and I was almost dead." He talked about that awful day when he tried to sell the baby clothes in the rain, how Katsuki took a beating to bring (M/N) the loaves of bread that saved his life. "We had never even spoken. The first time I talked to Katsuki wasn't until a few years later, even then it was only a couple of words. It wasn't until we were on the train to the Games that we really began to talk to each other."