Death Paradox 💥BAKUDEKU💥

THE HERMIT

THE HERMIT

✧༺✦✮✦༻✧

Katsuki

Chapter 12

Nothing could've destroyed him like that first time.

Not the first time he died—fuck, not even the second, when he lay in a pile of his own ashes, lungs full of decay and regret, body twitching helplessly as he clawed for a last breath that never came in that godforsaken mountain. Or even the first time he killed someone, that explosion with the League back in the earliest parallel hadn't phased him.

Hell, not even nearly killing the prince on the ice, when he'd lost control and hadn't blinked. None of it had ever come close, not to that night where he was kneeling in the dirt with Izuku's weight slumped in his arms, skin cooling by the second, feeling every shallow breath shudder through ribs too broken to hold him together. 

Where he had to hear that dying voice choke out the same thing, over and over, get the card, get the card, like that was what mattered. Like saving himself wasn't even a goddamn option. He remembered running away from him, leaving him alone on that bloodstained floor because he asked him to. And coming back to him still warm, still bleeding, but already gone.

And after months—months—of building something he never thought they'd have, something fragile and stupid and theirs, he thought there couldn't be anything worse than losing him like that.

He'd been wrong.

Because this? This slow, quiet, hollowing ache that came after this parallel?

It had been so much damn worse.

From the moment the heroes had marked Izuku missing, Katsuki had known better. It didn't matter that they hadn't found a body or found even a speck of blood, hadn't found anything in or around Jaku's west wing. That bullshit word missing had felt like a cruel joke—like it was a damn clerical error. Like somebody misplaced their keys. Like he might turn up in a hallway somewhere, bruised but breathing.

But Katsuki, he knew, Goddammit, he knew.

That tether between them, that gut-deep instinct that always told him where Deku was, what direction he'd gone, how close he was to cracking—just went deathly silent. Like a radio going dead mid-transmission. As if someone had cut the chain to an anchor and now it flowed weightlessly through the darkness. And it hadn't been the kind of silence that meant hiding.

Izuku was dead.

Gone.

There was no trace. No proof. Just a void where he used to breathe and the goddamn silence of it.

They said his ICU suite was empty when someone noticed the alarms had been blaring silently. Not cleared, not abandoned. Empty.

The Monitors were blown and the medical logs had been corrupted but the one thing they'd been able to pull off were readings from the vital chart before it all flatlined. It had been a flicker of heart activity that didn't seem to belong to a living person. Something residual. Something wrong.

And then they found the earring.

The dragon-tipped one.

He remembered just standing there, staring at it for so long he forgotten how to blink. Someone had been talking, probably All Might, maybe Aizawa, didn't matter. Their damn voices had been nothing more than static against the scream building in his skull.