My Hero Academia: Ruby and Emerald

Chapter 2: Younger Bakugou Katsuki POV

Katsuki hadn’t really been about to attack Deku… but when the older Deku snapped not to attack, it lit up some instinct in his chest that he didn’t recognize. It was… cold.

Like hell was he gonna let any version of Deku talk down to him, though. He regathered himself quickly, hoping his lapse hadn’t been noticed.

“HAAAH?” he shouted. “You think you can tell me what to do, you piece of shit? Even if you are a hero and this isn’t some dumbass cosplay, you’re probably so useless at it that you aren’t even ranked!”

Deku shrank back, holding his clenched hands to his chest. The older Deku smiled at him.

The older Katsuki snapped his eyes from where they had strayed, blazing with an anger that he was unused to seeing anywhere but the mirror. It actually looked stronger than it usually did in the mirror.

“Deku—” the older Katsuki started, voice growling.

“No, Kacchan,” the older Deku said, all fuckin’ smiles for no goddamn reason. Katsuki was right! There was no way shitty, quirkless Deku of all people could be a hero, much less a ranked one. He bet it was cosplay. But the older Deku just kept smiling, serene as shit, looking like he didn’t give a flying fuck. It pissed Katsuki off.

“Listen up, you fuckin’ dumbass,” the older version of Katsuki said suddenly, the fact that he was restraining himself betrayed by his posture. “That man there is a great hero, no matter what you think. If you say one more thing against him, I’ll kill you myself.”

The older Deku sighed. Katsuki narrowed his eyes.

“I didn’t think I’d get dumber with age. No matter what the hell is going on here, I’m pretty sure that if you killed me, then you would die too, idiot,” Katsuki snapped, baring his teeth.

“It’s really possible?” Deku whimpered. It took Katsuki a second to rewind the conversation and figure out what the hell Deku was crying about now. “It’s really possible for me to be a hero without a quirk?”

Deku looked up at his older self, and, true to fuckin’ character, his eyes were brimming with tears. Disgusting. Obviously the fact that his older self was a hero (that Katsuki’s own older self had said was great? What kind of drugs—) meant a whole lot more to him than it might to the average extra.

And this was the part where Deku’s older self inevitably spat some dumbass sappy line about how it was all due to his determination, or something else just as repulsive—

But the older Deku. Fucking. Hesitated.

“What the hell?” Old Katsuki interjected. He looked Old Deku up and down. “Don’t make that face, idiot.” He turned to look at Deku. His face was strangely not-angry.

Deku looked up at him like whatever he said next might physically kill him.

“Of course it’s possible for you to be a quirkless hero,” Old Katsuki said. Deku burst into loud, embarrassing crying, collapsing to his knees like he couldn’t stand the weight of the hero’s words. And, well, Deku had always followed Katsuki around like some kind of annoying
puppy. Maybe, because it was him but as a hero saying this, he couldn’t bear that weight.

“Holy shit,” Old Deku whispered, staring blankly into the middle distance. Old Katsuki recoiled from where he had been gazing (fondly? What—) down at Deku, raising an eyebrow at Old Deku.

“Did you just cuss?” he asked him, redundantly.

“Kacchan, we’re in the past.”

“We established this, yes.”

“No, listen—we’re in the past. Vanish’s quirk has been used on people before. None of them have ever shown up again. Obviously if anyone knew her quirk was time travel we would have been told about it, so I think it’s fair to reason that this is a type of multiple-continuum time travel that creates branch timelines as we change things, and the very act of time travel changes things, meaning we’re isolated from our original branch and stuck in this time indefinitely. Additionally, the first thing we came in contact with was our younger selves, meaning that her quirk probably latches onto a person's biological signature—perhaps a DNA reading element of some kind?—and uses that as an anchor as they travel through time. We were halfway across the island, after all, so it only makes sense—”

“Oi. Nerd. All that is fascinating, but I need you to get to the point,” Old Katsuki interjected, which Katsuki was thankful for because he couldn’t stand the nerd’s muttering. The only bright side it had (this time) was that Deku had stopped crying to try and follow Old Deku’s train of thought.

“Right! Sorry, Kacchan. Um. My point is, if we’re stuck in the past anyway, we might as well try to save the future,” Old Deku said. Old Katsuki narrowed his eyes.

“How exactly would we go about doing that?” he asked.

“Well, we know what went wrong, before. So what if we just… change things so that other things don’t go as wrong? Obviously we’re not far back enough to stop the true root cause, but… imagine the League without Toga. Imagine…” Old Deku trailed off, then fixed his gaze on the still-kneeling form of his younger self. “Imagine me without my scars.”

Deku looked up at his older self with confusion. “Scars?” he echoed. Their older counterparts made no move to indicate they had heard him. Old Katsuki tilted his head to the side in consideration. Katsuki himself didn’t even know what needed to be considered.

Obviously. It’s not like he had a way to see the fuckin’ future.

“Okay. I like the sound of that. What’s the first step, Deku?”

It was like some kind of invisible shift had come over Old Deku. There was something about his posture, maybe. He looked, suddenly, very confident and in control.

“The first step is contacting UA. There can’t exactly be two Midoriya Izuku’s and two Bakugou Katsuki’s, legally. Principal Nedzu should be able to help us with the legal side of things. We also need to call Tsukauchi-san and Toshinori. The three of them, together, plus us and our younger selves. We should be able to go from there to make a more concrete plan,” Old Deku nodded, decisively.

Old Katsuki grinned, a sharp and dangerous thing. He turned to look at Katsuki.

“So. When’s the next train to UA?”

To be continued...