The city hummed with the kind of quiet that heroes had learned not to trust.
It was an ordinary Tuesday, the sort of day where patrol felt more like a formality than a necessity. Petty theft on the east side, a drunk man arguing with a vending machine on Fifth, and a minor quirk disturbance near the train station that resolved itself before anyone could radio in. Nothing shook the ground.
It was supposed to stay that way.
Katsuki Bakugo landed on a rooftop with the practiced ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times. The wind hit his jacket, sending the fabric snapping behind him as he scanned the street below. ‘Boring.’
He clicked his tongue. A part of him hated days like this. It felt like the city was holding its breath, and Bakugo had never been good at waiting. He dropped off the ledge and touched down on the pavement just as two familiar figures rounded the corner.
"Dynamight." Best Jeanist gave him a single nod, the way the man did everything. Beside him, Edgeshot raised a hand in greeting. "Tch." Bakugo fell into step with them without being asked. "Didn't know you two were on this route."
"Patrol zones overlapped." Edgeshot said simply. "Lucky us..." Bakugo muttered, though he didn't move away. The three of them walked in a loose formation, three of Japan's top Pro Heroes sharing a sidewalk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For a moment, it almost felt routine.
Then suddenly, a scream started. A cluster of low-level villains, five or maybe six, spilled out from an alleyway ahead. Bakugo's palms sparked. Best Jeanist's denim threads were already unspooling from his collar, and Edgeshot rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck once.
"Split formation." Best Jeanist said calmly. "Dynamight, left flank!" "I know what I'm doing."
Best Jeanist tied two of the villains in the time it took Bakugo to blast a third into a wall. Edgeshot handled the fourth effortlessly, while the fifth scrambled to run and didn't get far. But the sixth... The sixth was quiet, too quiet, that Bakugo noticed it half a second too late.
The villain stood at the far edge of the street, both hands raised, palms pressed together like he was about to pray. Between them, a ring of pale light appeared, growing wider with every breath. There was something wrong with the light. It didn't cast shadows, nor did it illuminate anything. It just displaced the air around it. And it was aimed directly at Bakugo.
Best Jeanist's voice cracked through the noise like a whip. Bakugo spun on instinct but the ring was already expanding, rushing toward him in absolute silence. His eyes went wide. ‘What the—' The light swallowed him whole.
The smoke came from nowhere. It poured across the street in a single second, blinding all three heroes. The villain laughed. "Yes!" He pumped a fist into the air. "Gone! You're gone! You're completely—!"
The smoke began to clear. Best Jeanist moved through it first, threads already outstretched, reaching for where Bakugo had been standing. Edgeshot was right behind him, scanning.
They found him. Bakugo stood exactly where he'd been.
Not a scratch. Not a hair out of place. He was staring down at his own hands, then back up at the spot the light had hit him, the expression on his face somewhere between furious and deeply confused: ‘What the hell just happened…?’ It wasn't a question. It was written all over his face.
Best Jeanist and Edgeshot paused. They looked at Bakugo, then they looked at each other. Then they looked at Bakugo again. The villain's laughter had died completely. "W— what?" His voice came out small. "That's not— you were supposed to—! You should be gone by now!"
He kept ranting and didn't notice the smoke shifting behind him. He didn't notice the figure stepping out of it.
"Yeah." The voice was low, unhurried. Cold in the way that wasn't empty. "I'd like to know that too." Then the explosion came.
A single explosive burst that sent the villain twenty feet across the wall of a building. The smoke finished clearing. The figure stood in the middle of the street.
Male. Young with a hero suit that looked worn-in rather than brand new. He looked at the fallen villains. Then on the street. Then at the buildings around him. There was a faint wrinkle between his brows.
Best Jeanist recovered first. Edgeshot recovered second, slower, his head turning between the boy and Bakugo with the expression of someone doing math they didn't understand. Bakugo didn't recover. He just stared. Because he knew that explosion. It was his explosion.
The same chemical signature, the same concussive sharpness, the same smell of scorched glycerin that he'd spent twenty years smelling on his own hands. Except that the control was different and mixed with a different quirk he can’t point out. His jaw had gone tight unconsciously.
"Oi." The boy's eyes are directed at them.
"Can you tell me where exactly I am?" He turned back to survey the street again, arms crossing slowly over his chest. "I know this place. I know this city. But something's different, and I can't pin it down." He muttered the last part more to himself than to them, scanning windows and signs and the skyline like he was solving a problem.
Best Jeanist stepped forward because of the three of them, he was the one people didn't instinctively back away from.
"This is Musutafu," he said, keeping his voice even. "Eastern district. You're not far from the central ward." He tilted his head slightly. "I don't believe we've met. Who are you? And how exactly did you come out of that smoke?" The boy's jaw set. His arms tightened.
"That's what I'd like to know." There was frustration under it. "One second I'm in the middle of something, and then there's a blinding flash, and I'm here." His gaze dropped to the spot where the villain had been standing, then back up. "I didn't jump here. I didn't warp. It just…" he stopped himself, exhaling once through his nose. "It just happened."
A beat of silence stretched across the ruined street.
Edgeshot spoke, his voice careful. "...That villain's quirk." He looked at Best Jeanist. "You don't think it was a teleport." Best Jeanist's eyes hadn't moved from the boy. "…No." he said quietly. "I don't."
He was still staring at the kid, at the fading smoke curling off his palms, the exact same fading smoke that curled off his own after a blast, and something cold and wordless was settling at the bottom of his chest.
The boy turned and met his eyes.
And for just a moment, neither of them moved. The silence that followed lasted exactly three seconds. Then the boy squinted. Like he was staring at something that didn't quite add up, tilting his head to the side.
"...No way." His voice had lost its edge. Just for a moment.
"Is that you, pops?" He blinked once. Then again. "Oh— no, wait." He leaned forward slightly, studying Bakugo's face with the kind of shameless inspection that made most people uncomfortable. "You're looking younger. But you didn't exactly change, just... a little bit younger...?" The last part came out almost to himself, like he was working through it in real time.
The three Pro Heroes stared at him. Bakugo's left eye twitched. He didn't know whether to space out completely or explode on the spot. "HAH?!" The decision is concluded. "The hell do you mean by that, you little brat?!"
The boy straightened up, arms crossing again, his expression shifting back into something guarded and faintly defensive, which Edgeshot noted was an expression he had seen on Bakugo approximately four hundred times.
Edgeshot stepped in and looked at the boy with measured calm. "What's your name, young man?"
A pause. The boy looked at the three of them. "Me?" he said. The confidence in it was immediate, unhesitating, bone-deep.
"Kyouichi. Kyouichi Bakugo."
Edgeshot goes very still. Best Jeanist did not visibly react, because Best Jeanist had spent thirty years perfecting the art of not visibly reacting. But his eyes moved, just once, from the boy to Bakugo, and back again. Bakugo said absolutely nothing. Which, for Bakugo, was somehow louder than the explosion had been.
The villain situation had been secured, and the street was mostly cleared. Someone had propped a traffic cone next to the scorch marks on the pavement.
The four of them stood, or in Best Jeanist's case, sat on a salvaged crate in a loose cluster near the alley's mouth while they waited for backup to arrive. Kyouichi had already explained himself, after some aggressive back-and-forth that involved a lot of pointing and at least one moment where both he and Bakugo reached the exact same volume voice at the exact same time, and then both went silent in mutual irritation.
He was from the future. The light hadn't been a weapon, or not exactly. The villain's quirk was some kind of uncontrolled temporal displacement, and Kyouichi had been caught in the middle of it. Which meant somewhere, in a future none of them had reached yet, a teenage boy had simply vanished out of the middle of whatever he'd been doing.
"And that," Best Jeanist said, setting down the logic of it with the same precision he used for everything, "is why we need to approach this carefully. Reversing a temporal displacement without understanding the mechanism could—"
"And why should I?!" Both Edgeshot and Best Jeanist paused and looked at the two not far away.
"There's nothing that benefits me!" "OH, COME ON, YOU LITTLE—" Bakugo stepped forward. "You're going to tell me what you were doing, and you're going to tell me right now, and on top of that, you're going to tell me your mother's name!"
Kyouichi's face did something complicated. The defensiveness sharpened into something personally offended. "Why should I?!" he shot back. "You can't even confess your feelings properly to someone you like, and now you're standing here asking for my mother's name?!"
Dead silence. "OH, HELL NO— I'M NOT TELLING YOU ANYTHING—"
Best Jeanist reached into a pocket that had no business containing a small liquid container. He poured himself tea, and he took a sip. He looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man who had survived worse and would survive this too.
Edgeshot stood with his arms crossed, watching the two of them go at it with the face of someone sitting in traffic — not angry, exactly. Just waiting for something.
The bickering was structurally identical to every argument he had ever watched Bakugo have. Except now there were two of them. And they were doing it to each other. Which meant neither of them was going to back down.
Reinforcements had come and gone. Statements were taken, the villain was processed, and two very patient pro heroes from the investigation unit had spent forty-five minutes interviewing Kyouichi, who answered every question with the precision of someone who had thought very carefully about what to reveal and not. For the record, he was good at it.
The investigation unit left with more questions than answers, a file they'd apparently be sending up several pay grades, and the collective energy of people who needed a very long sit-down.
Which left the four of them.
Best Jeanist straightened the cuffs of his jacket once, with the deliberate care of a man about to say something he had already fully decided on. "Bakugo," he said. "You should take the kid." Bakugo's head snapped toward him.
"HA?!" he said. "WHY ME?!"
"Yeah," Kyouichi said, at exactly the same time, in almost exactly the same tone. His expression flickered with brief, intense displeasure "Why him, specifically? I'd rather just go to a hotel."
"HA?!" Bakugo repeated, this time at Kyouichi. "You're not staying at a hotel, you're a kid—" "I'm sixteen, I can handle a hotel—" "You don't even have currency from this time period—" "Details—" "THAT'S NOT A DETAIL; THAT'S A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM—"
Best Jeanist looked at Edgeshot with the patient, an unblinking expression of a man who had raised a sidekick once and understood certain things about responsibility. Edgeshot looked back at him.
Then he looked at the two Bakugos, who were now arguing about hotel reward points with a combined intensity that was genuinely impressive.
"...You planned this." Edgeshot said quietly. "I considered the options," Best Jeanist replied, "and selected the most logical one."
"You just didn't want to deal with them." "I didn't say that... Bakugo is the most appropriate guardian for the boy..." Best Jeanist said, with great composure. "Given the circumstances."
"Uh huh." Edgeshot just nods now without much care to what Best Jeanist is saying. "It is a practical decision."
"Sure." "...Also, I have a meeting at nine." Headshot pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. On the other side, the argument about hotel points had evolved into an argument about who would win in a fight.
That evening, on the same day, the apartment Bakugo was staying in was on the fourteenth floor. It was clean in the way that suggested the person who lived there had a system and adhered to it with the same energy they applied to everything else. Shoes lined up at the entrance with military precision. The kind of place that looked like it had never had a guest and wasn't entirely sure what to do with one now.
Kyouichi stepped inside, looked around once, and said "hm". Bakugo, behind him, was already regretting every decision that had led to this moment. "Shoes off." he said flatly.
Kyouichi had already taken them off. He set them beside Bakugo's with the automatic ease of someone who didn't have to think about it, and the sight of it— two pairs of shoes, same energy, slightly different sizes— made something in Bakugo's chest do something he immediately refused to acknowledge.
"Guest room's there." He pointed. "Don't touch anything in my room. Don't go through the kitchen without asking. And—" "Do you still keep the extra blankets in the left cabinet above the washing machine?" Kyouichi asked, already walking toward the hallway. Bakugo stared at his back.
"...Yeah." he said, slowly. "Cool." Kyouichi disappeared around the corner. Bakugo stood in his own entryway for a moment.
The chaos started approximately eleven minutes later. It began, technically, with the television remote.
Bakugo had it. Kyouichi wanted it. Neither of them was willing to negotiate, and the argument that followed covered the remote, the channel, the volume, the structural integrity of the couch cushions, and at one point, briefly devolved into a debate about whether pro wrestling was a legitimate sport that neither of them had started intentionally, but both of them committed to completely.
At some point, Kyouichi picked up a decorative pillow and threw it. Bakugo caught it without looking up. Kyouichi threw the other one. Bakugo caught that one too.
"Do that again," Bakugo said, still not looking up, "and I'm taking the blankets back."
Kyouichi threw himself onto the opposite end of the couch instead, sprawling out with the aggressive ease of someone who had decided to take up exactly as much space as possible.
Dinner was a war and a peace happening simultaneously.
Bakugo cooked. He hadn't asked, hadn't offered, had simply stood up at some point and moved to the kitchen with the energy of someone who needed to do something with their hands. Kyouichi appeared in the kitchen doorway about four minutes in, watched for thirty seconds, then, without a word, opened the second drawer from the left and pulled out the spare chopsticks.
"Those are the spares." Bakugo said. "I know." Kyouichi said and hopped up to sit on the counter. "Get off the counter." Kyouichi got off the counter and leaned against it instead.
He didn't offer to help. Bakugo didn't ask. But he also didn't kick him out, and Kyouichi seemed to understand the difference.
They ate at the table. Spicy, aggressively spicy, the kind that most people would need water for. Bakugo had set a glass out of habit, then looked at Kyouichi, and did not say anything. Kyouichi ate without reaching for the water once.
The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable. That was the strange part. "This is good," Kyouichi said, after a while. "Obviously," Bakugo said. "You add more chili than you used to." Kyouichi said, and then the brief pause. Bakugo didn't push that one either.
"The hero unit." Bakugo said instead, nodding at the wear pattern on Kyouichi's suit. "You're already active?" "Provisional." Kyouichi turned his attention back to his bowl. "Internship. Top placement."
"Good." Bakugo said, this time with the tone of someone who had already assumed this and was simply confirming. Something at the corner of Kyouichi's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Almost.
Bakugo dropped onto the couch and looked at the ceiling. Kyouichi was on the floor with his back against the couch. "Your quirk control." Bakugo said. Not a question exactly.
Kyouichi glanced down like he was considering how to answer. Then something loosened in his expression, and he laughed. It was a real laugh, short and quiet, the kind that comes with a specific memory attached to it. "What." Bakugo said.
"Nothing, it's just—" Kyouichi shook his head, still smiling faintly at some private joke. "The first time I really overloaded it, I took out an entire wall of the training gym. A load-bearing wall." He stretched his arms above his head. "You, pops, made me rebuild it by hand. Like, manually, with actual bricks."
"Heh." Bakugo smirked automatically. "That's what you get for being a brat."
"That's exactly what mama said." Kyouichi replied and laughed again, softer. Bakugo ignored that, part of his brain was actively refusing to believe.
"After that, though," Kyouichi continued, studying his own hand with the same critical focus Bakugo used on his own, "I started treating it differently. Stopped thinking about output. Started thinking about compression. What you can hold before you release, and whether the release serves the moment or just serves you."
Bakugo was quiet for a moment. "...That's not a bad way to put it." he said. "Yeah..." Kyouichi closed his fingers loosely. "Took me a while." Then, silence starts to settle in...
"Oh—" Kyouichi sat up straight suddenly, like something had occurred to him. He twisted around to face Bakugo, energy shifting completely into something brighter and immediate. "I keep meaning to say. Mama is really beautiful."
Bakugo blinked. “What.” The conversation had moved faster than he'd tracked it.
"Like really, really beautiful." Kyouichi said this with the absolute conviction of someone stating an objective and non-negotiable fact about the universe. "You want to see her? Wait—" he was already patting his pockets, "—I had my phone on me when I got teleported here, I think it made it through, just give me a—"
"No. You don't have to—" Bakugo started. But Kyouichi was already up, already heading toward the guest room where his jacket had been tossed.
Bakugo stayed on the couch. He exhaled once, then stared at the wall. “Mama is really beautiful.” The words stuck. "Tch." His jaw tightened. It wasn’t like he’d never noticed that this Kyouichi was his son or something. He just didn’t say anything.
Silence dragged. His fingers twitched against his palm. He had thought about it before. If he ever had kids... if that kind of future was even real— he would’ve wanted it to be you. Tch. The thought came out wrong. Too honest.
Because you—no. He cut it off.
“You can't even confess your feelings to someone you like.”
The words came back, loud and annoying. "Tch." It wasn’t that he couldn’t. If he wanted to, he would’ve done it already.
That sat heavier than it should’ve. Bakugo exhaled through his nose, irritation creeping in. Fighting villains is easier. He’d thrown himself into explosions without thinking twice before, and saying five words to you still felt like running straight into a wall.
Footsteps in the hallway.
Kyouichi came back with his phone, already pulling up the photo with the easy confidence of someone about to prove a point they'd already won. "Here." He held it out. "See?" Bakugo took the phone. He looked at the screen, and his brain went completely, utterly, offline.
It was you. Slightly older.
You were laughing at something just outside the frame. The same face he knew, just… steadier. Like you belonged there. Bakugo’s grip tightened, just a little. Like he didn’t already know you looked like that.
"SEE," Kyouichi said, "she is really beautiful. I told you." Bakugo said nothing. He was holding the phone too carefully, like it might disappear if he didn’t.
"Pops." Kyouichi leaned in slightly. "You okay? You look like you short-circuited."
"...Pops." "Shut up." Bakugo muttered, low. His voice came out rough. He handed the phone back without looking.
Kyouichi took it, glanced at the screen again, and smiled. Bakugo stared ahead, unmoving. Because if that was real, if that future existed, then somewhere down the line… he didn’t screw it up. The thought sat heavy in his chest, quiet and unfamiliar. He pressed the heel of his palm once against his sternum. Tch.
“…Lucky bastard.” He muttered to himself, but he didn't know who he was mentioning.
Here's the thing about Kyouichi Bakugo: he's not someone who hates surprises, but he just doesn't particularly enjoy them either. There's a difference.
So, getting yanked out of his timeline by some villain's malfunctioning quirk and dropped into the past? Frustrating. His first thought, very sincerely, was “why me, specifically.” Out of everyone. Why.
But then he saw his pops standing in the smoke, looking younger and confused and already irritated, and Kyouichi thought— okay. ‘This is manageable. He knows this person.’ This is the least of his problems.
It started on one of those in-between days. The pro heroes working on getting him back were still doing their thing, so in the meantime, Kyouichi had been wandering the city with Bakugo. Patrol. Errands. Whatever you call it.
It was fine. Normal, even, in the specific way that being around his pops was always normal. And then they turned a corner. And there you were.
Standing on the street, talking to a couple of civilians, completely unaware. Looking exactly like you always did, whether it’s from the past or in the future. Kyouichi didn't think. He just moved.
He was already halfway across the street before Bakugo could process what was happening. Already raising a hand. Already opening his mouth to say— well. Several things. Starting with the most important one, which was, “Hey, you're my mother.”
A hand clamped over his mouth from behind. Firm and immediate. Bakugo's voice came low and very close to his ear.
Kyouichi's eyes slid sideways. His pops were standing directly behind him, hand still covering the lower half of his face, expression doing something complicated that he was clearly trying to make look like nothing.
And you— you were smiling at them. Warm and easy, a little curious, completely oblivious to the very strange thing happening two feet in front of you. You said something, a greeting probably, some normal thing, and Bakugo responded in a voice that was approximately too controlled to be natural.
Kyouichi stood very still.
He looked at you. Then he looked at his pops' expression— the jaw set too tight, the way he wasn't quite meeting your eyes, the very specific and painful kind of casual that isn't casual at all.
So that's where they were.
He'd always known the story, kids know things about their parents, that there was a before and that it didn't start easy, that his pops had apparently taken his time getting there. But knowing a story and seeing it personally are two completely different things.
And standing here, watching the Bakugo Katsuki, a man who has exploded his way through more villain fights than Kyouichi can count, who has never retreated from anything in his life— hold a conversation with you like he was defusing a bomb he'd personally built and didn't know how to disarm it.
Kyouichi had one singular thought. ‘Pops. You coward.’
Because this man, his father, who had lectured him about hesitation being the enemy, about knowing what you want and going for it, about never leaving things half-finished.
Was standing here doing exactly none of that.
You smiled again before you left. A real one, the kind Kyouichi had grown up seeing at the breakfast table and across living rooms for his entire life, and it landed on his pops like it always had. You said goodbye and walked away.
The hand dropped from Kyouichi's mouth. Silence.
"...Pops." "Don't." "I'm just—" "Don't."
Kyouichi looked at his father's profile. The eyes were tracking the direction you'd gone for exactly one second too long before snapping forward again.
Kyouichi said nothing. He was generous like that sometimes. 'Coward.’ he thought again, and this time it came with something almost like affection. You absolute coward. And you had the nerve to make me rebuild a wall with my own hands
Inspired by the fanfiction written by @r4inerr
Part 1: Kyouichi Bakugo, Part 2: Kyouichi Bakugo
