Age 18
Time behaves strangely during fights. Sometimes, his instincts take over until he's nothing but a moving body and the flash-bang of his explosions. The July Attacks require everything from him. His body is all muscle movement. Time surges around him in fits and starts.
Bakugou has been running on adrenaline for hours. The city is screaming around him. Clouds of smoke roll over the horizon like a wave, blanketing the city in ash. Everything registers in his periphery, unimportant compared to the here and the now, the villains immediately in front of him, the frenzied civilians behind him, and Deku, somewhere to the right and above, tearing through the air, bouncing off of skyscrapers like a rogue ping-pong ball.
And then everything slows, and Bakugou takes in the entire street.
There's a family to his left. Moonfish knifed through the daughter's leg, leaving her crumpled on the pavement, her face bone-white with shock. Her parents are pawing at her nearly severed leg. They're in shock, too.
Moonfish has his eyes set on them. His head jerks to the side to see the son frozen a few metres away, eyes focussed on the upturned meat of his sister's leg.
Deku is air-borne, chasing after a winged Nomu that's latched onto a limp hero.
And then Bakugou sees Shigaraki running in the opposite direction, just out of range of his explosions.
The girl with the bloody leg isn't crying, but her parents are. The father takes in great gulps of air, and the mother wails, her hands sliding uselessly through the pooling blood.
Moonfish is there. Watching them.
Deku is there, too, but he's not close enough to save the family. He's over a 100ft in the air, too far away to even register that the family is there.
He has a choice, he realises. This moment—it's a choice.
Shigaraki scuttles down the street, his back to Bakugou, clutching at a cellphone. If Bakugou can get to him, if he can personally bring down the man in the centre of this whole attack, drag his plans out of him through sheer force of will, then he'll have won. He can see it now—the other heroes' faces as they realise a student bested them; his classmates watching him from a distance; Shigaraki's face bloodied from his explosions, struggling as he's cuffed and lead away. Shigaraki is the biggest catch. Taking him down would be the biggest achievement.
Except—it wouldn't be a victory.
Bakugou wrenches his eyes away from Shigaraki, and runs, boots pounding against the asphalt. He doesn't stop until he's in front of the family, braced like a wall between them and Moonfish, head ducked low, a feral snarl on his lips.
Try and touch them, his eyes say. Try and hurt them again while I'm here—I dare you.
Deku is strong enough to handle Shigaraki. Bakugou trusts him to find the bastard later on and take him down.
It doesn't feel like a life-changing decision at the time—it was instinct more than conscious thought that had moved him—but Bakugou will look back on that moment, and feel ... something. It's something like pride. It's something like shame for that split second he saw Shigaraki and Moonfish and the trembling family, and considered abandoning them in order to peruse the bigger prey. It's something like a realisation.
It was like his body had already made the decision to put himself between a psychopath and those weaker than him, leaving the bigger victories to Deku. It had felt good, it had felt right, to plant himself in front of someone weaker and refuse to be moved.
This feeling, this compulsion—is this what has been fuelling Deku for years? Is this what Deku was feeling when they were four years old, and he had stood, trembling and snot-nosed, between some weak kid and Bakugou?
The thought will stay with him for days. It'll linger in the back of his mind when Bakugou wakes up in his hospital room two days later. Drugged and vaguely nauseated, he lays on his back, staring up at the tessellating ceiling, and thinking about the family's reaction after he'd taken out Moonfish. The mother reached out for him with bloodied hands. The son fell into his arms, clutching at his costume. The father looked like he'd be sick with the force of his relief.
It was uncomfortable. They were sweaty and panicked, and they smeared blood all down his arms, and the short moment between Moonfish's defeat and the family's delivery to the closest paramedic, all he could think about was that split moment that he stared at Shigaraki's retreating back and imagined chasing after him.
The thought had made him sick. It still does, days later.
But—Bakugou hadn't done that. He had choked on that one moment of indecision, and then turned and fought against Moonfish like a man possessed. He'd been ready to leave everything to take Shigaraki down, and then, moments later, he'd been prepared to die in front of the family of strangers. Two very different types of heroes. Which one is the real one?
What type of hero does he want to be?
He remembers the family hugging each other after Moonfish was knocked out, alive because of him. A hero that never loses. A hero that's always there. That's the kind of hero he wants to be. Even if it's not the kind of hero he's been for the past eighteen years of his life.
Age 21
As a pro hero, Bakugou is expected to do all kinds of crap that doesn't directly involve punching villains the face. There's more PR bullshit involved with being a hero than he had expected. Most of the time, it bugs the shit out of him, but maybe he can use it to his advantage.
The next time the usual lady from management comes to his office to talk to him, Bakugou doesn't scowl at her like he usually does. This time, he interrupts Miss Management before she can organise another unimportant meet and greet.
"What about talks?" Bakugou says.
Miss Management looks up from her tablet. "Talks? Like Q and As?"
Bakugou shakes his head. "Talks at schools. Or even PSAs. Advocating."
Other heroes are often roped into doing PSAs about looking both ways before crossing the street, or eating your veggies, or staying behind police barriers when villain fights break out. Those jobs always go to straight-laced heroes like Ingenium or Creati, or the eternally smiling, dependable heroes like Uravity, Red Riot, or Deku. Not to heroes like Bakugou.
"Advocacy," Miss Management repeats. He glares at her for sounding so disbelieving, but she's too busy pulling out her phone and writing up emails to notice. "That's perfect. Finally, we can show off your dependable side—don't look at me like that, I know you have a dependable side buried beneath all that animosity. The kids' network are running a series of PSAs about safe quirk usage. I can get you booked in for Tuesday—"
"No. Bullying." She looks up from her tablet. Bakugou looks her in the eye, arms crossed over his chest. "I want to talk to kids about bullying."
