Chapter 18: Hard Truths
The silence in Katsuki’s apartment was absolute. It was a heavy, textured thing, thick with the ghosts of shouted words and the phantom scent of someone else’s shampoo. He’d been sitting on the edge of his couch for an hour, maybe two, staring at the blank screen of his television, seeing only the wounded look on Izuku’s face in the parking garage.
His phone buzzed for the tenth time. Not Izuku. A location pin, followed by a single line from Aizawa.
My office. Now.
It wasn’t a request. Katsuki’s thumb hovered over the screen. He could ignore it. He could turn the phone off, bury himself in the suffocating quiet, and maintain the miserable, strategic distance he’d created. That was the smart play.
With a snarl of frustration at his own inability to follow through, he stood up, grabbed his keys, and left.
The night air was cool, doing little to clear the static in his head. The drive to the agency was a blur of streetlights and taillights. He took the back entrance, bypassing the bright, bustling main floors where the night shift coordinated patrols. The upper administrative levels were quieter, hallways dimmed for evening.
Aizawa’s office door was slightly ajar, a slash of warm light cutting into the corridor. Katsuki pushed it open without knocking.
The room was as stark and functional as the man himself. A large, uncluttered desk dominated the space, its surface holding only a closed laptop, a stack of case files, and two steaming mugs. Maps and duty charts were pinned neatly to one wall. The single window offered a grid of city lights, a silent, sprawling testament to everything they were supposed to be protecting. The air smelled of strong, cheap coffee and old paper.
Aizawa was standing by the window, his back to the door. He didn’t turn. “Close the door.”
Katsuki kicked it shut with his heel. He remained just inside the threshold, a challenge in his posture. “What.”
Finally, Aizawa turned. His face was all sharp angles and shadow in the low light, his eyes flat and unimpressed. He moved to his desk, picked up one of the mugs, and held it out. An offering, or a test.
“Sit.”
“I don’t want your coffee.”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted it.” Aizawa’s voice was a low, gravelly monotone. He didn’t retract his hand. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week. You’re strung tighter than a tripwire. Sit. Down.”
The order, delivered with such weary authority, bypassed Katsuki’s defiance. He stomped forward, snatched the mug from Aizawa’s hand, and dropped into the chair opposite the desk. He didn’t drink. Just held the ceramic, feeling its heat sear his palms.
Aizawa took his own seat, took a slow sip from his mug, and fixed Katsuki with a stare that felt like a physical weight. It was the same look that had dissected his excuses in a classroom years ago. It saw everything.
“Running away,” Aizawa stated, the words dropping into the quiet room like stones. “Interesting strategy. Not one I’d have pegged for you.”
Katsuki’s jaw tightened. “It’s tactics. Removing a variable. He can’t trigger what isn’t there.”
“Mm.” Aizawa leaned back, the old chair creaking. “And how’s that working out? The variable seem removed to you? Or is it just festering in a parking garage six blocks from here?”
“He told you.”
“He didn’t have to. Kirishima saw you bolt. I saw your face when that villain described his ‘art.’ You looked like you were ready to blow a hole in the prison.” Aizawa set his mug down with a precise click. “So you opted to blow up the bridge between you and Midoriya instead. Cleaner. Less collateral damage. On paper.”
“It is cleaner,” Katsuki insisted, his voice rising. “You heard the freak! It’s a shared psychological trigger built on positive affect. The solution is to not have any positive affect! It’s simple!”
“It’s simple-minded.” Aizawa’s rebuttal was swift and cold. “You think you’re the first person a villain has tried to manipulate through your attachments? You think isolation is a new idea?” He leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his gaze unblinking. “Your self-sacrificing bullshit is going to get you both killed.”
Katsuki’s fists clenched around the mug. The coffee sloshed, threatening to spill. “I’m trying to save him from the worst possible—”
“You are giving the villain exactly what he wants!” Aizawa’s voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened, cutting through Katsuki’s protest. “He doesn’t need to activate some nightmare seed if you do his work for him. He wants you afraid. He wants you distrustful. He wants you to look at Midoriya and see a weapon pointed at your own mind. And you’re doing it. Beautifully.”
The words landed, each one a precise, devastating strike. Katsuki looked away, his eyes finding the city lights. They swam in his vision.
“The villain wins when you stop trusting each other,” Aizawa continued, relentless. “Is that what you want? To let him have that victory without firing a single shot? To make his ‘art’ a reality just because you’re too scared to face the possibility of it?”
“It’s not about being scared!” Katsuki exploded, slamming the mug down. Coffee splattered across Aizawa’s neat desk. “It’s about being responsible! If I’m the catalyst, then I remove myself from the equation! That’s what a real hero does! He minimizes the goddamn risk!”
“A real hero,” Aizawa said, looking pointedly at the spilled coffee, then back at Katsuki’s furious, panicked face, “understands that some risks are inherent. That trust isn’t a variable you can remove. It’s the foundation. You break that, and you’ve already lost more than any villain could take from you.”
He sighed, the sound weary and old. “You think you’re protecting him? You’re abandoning him. In the middle of a psychological siege, you’ve just left your partner alone on the wall. Because you decided you knew what was best. Because you decided his potential pain was worse than your own. That’s not tactics, Bakugou. That’s arrogance.”
The fight drained out of Katsuki as suddenly as it had flared. He sagged in the chair, staring at the dark pool spreading across the wood grain. Arrogance. The one charge he could never deflect. The idea that he alone could bear this, control this, fix it by sheer force of will.
“What am I supposed to do?” The question came out quiet, stripped of its usual bravado. It was just a raw, confused sound. “Just… go back? Pretend nothing’s wrong? Wait for the other shoe to drop because we had a good breakfast?”
“No,” Aizawa said. “You acknowledge the threat. You work around it. You communicate. You tell him, ‘This is a landmine. Let’s map it together.’ You don’t just wander off into the minefield alone and call it a strategic retreat.” He pushed a napkin from a drawer across the desk toward the spill. “The intelligence from Tartarus gave us a profile. The investigative teams are tearing the city apart for the vector. You have resources. You have a partner. Use them.”
Katsuki didn’t touch the napkin. He was quiet for a long time, the only sound the distant hum of the city through the glass. “He called me a coward.”
“He was right.”
Katsuki’s head snapped up.
Aizawa met his gaze, unwavering. “It was a coward’s move. Understandable, maybe. Even a little noble in your own messed-up head. But it was cowardice. You’re afraid of what that seed might show you. You’re afraid of what you might see in his eyes if it triggers. So you’d rather not see him at all.” He stood up, gathering the empty mugs. “The question is, what are you going to do about it now? Keep being afraid? Or are you going to be a hero and face it?”
He walked to a small sink in the corner, his back turned, dismissing him. The conversation was over. The verdict was delivered.
Katsuki looked from Aizawa’s back to the spilled coffee, to the city lights, to his own empty, trembling hands. The space between action and reaction felt vast again, but differently. Not a narrow ledge to be controlled, but a wide, open plain he had to cross. He couldn’t cross it alone.
He stood up, the chair scraping softly. He didn’t say goodbye. He just turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.
The hallway seemed less dim. The static in his head had condensed into a single, terrible, clear point of dread. Not dread of the seed, or the villain, or the potential horror.
Dread of the conversation he now had to have. Dread of facing the hurt he’d caused. Dread of being seen, truly seen, in his fear.
He pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over Izuku’s name. He took a breath that hitched in his chest, and typed.
Your place. We need to talk.
The three words glared back at him from the screen, accusatory and inadequate. We need to talk. What did that even mean? It was what people said before endings. Katsuki’s thumb jerked to the delete button, but he stopped. Aizawa’s voice echoed in his skull. Arrogance. Cowardice.
His phone vibrated again before he could move. A new message, this one from an unknown number, but the tone was unmistakably Aizawa.
If you can figure this out without activating the trigger consider it hero license officially reinstated.
Katsuki stared. The “hero license” was their old classroom code, a joke from their first year. It meant trust. It meant you were cleared for the hard, unsupervised work. Aizawa wasn’t just giving him permission. He was throwing the entire problem back in his lap and calling it a test. The weight of it was terrifying. He shoved the phone in his pocket and headed for his car.
The drive across the city was a war. The steering wheel was a poor substitute for something he could actually blast. Every stoplight was an eternity. His mind replayed the villain’s words on a jagged loop. A duet. The worst possible thing. What was Izuku’s worst possible thing? His own fears were a familiar, grimy room: being weak, being a liability, being the cause of ruin. But Izuku’s? Failure, maybe. Powerlessness. Letting someone down.
Letting him down.
“Damn it,” he muttered, hitting the wheel. This was the trap. Not some future horror, but this constant, grinding analysis, picking apart every feeling before he could even have it. He was trying to defuse a bomb by studying the blueprints while standing on the pressure plate. The city lights streaked past, blurring into toxic halos.
He parallel parked a block from Izuku’s apartment building, his hands stiff on the wheel. The engine ticked as it cooled. This was it. Walking in there meant admitting Aizawa was right. It meant facing the hurt he’d put on Izuku’s face. It meant looking at him and knowing there was a live wire strung between them, waiting for a moment of pure, unguarded peace to electrocute them both.
Could they even do that? Talk without touching that wire? Every conversation would be a negotiation now, a careful dance around the invisible minefield. How could anything real survive that?
He got out of the car, the night air cold in his lungs. The walk to the building’s entrance felt longer than the drive. His boots on the pavement were too loud. He buzzed the apartment number, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.
No voice came through the intercom. Just a long, silent pause that made his stomach drop. Then, a sharp buzz as the lock released.
The elevator ride up was worse. A small, mirrored box. He looked terrible, shadows under his eyes, his hair somehow looking more aggressive than usual. He looked like a threat. He felt like one. The doors slid open onto a quiet hallway. Izuku’s door was at the end, slightly ajar.
Pushing it open felt like crossing a border. The apartment was warm, lit by a single floor lamp, and smelled faintly of green tea. Izuku stood by the window, silhouetted against the night skyline. He wasn’t in his hero gear, just a faded t-shirt and sweatpants. He didn’t turn around.
“You came,” Izuku said. His voice was flat, drained of its usual warmth.
“You left the door open.” Katsuki stepped inside, letting the door click shut behind him. The sound sealed them in.
“I figured you’d just explode it if I didn’t.” Izuku finally turned. His face was calm, too calm, the kind of careful neutrality he used on civilians during a crisis. It was all wrong. “So. Talk.”
The word hung there. We need to talk. Now he had to do it. Katsuki shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them still. “What I did… in the garage. It was…”
“It was what, Kacchan?” Izuku prompted, and the old childhood name sounded like a challenge now.
“It was wrong.” The admission scraped out of him. “Aizawa reamed me for it. Said it was cowardly. Arrogant. He was right.”
Izuku’s mask cracked for a second, surprise flashing in his eyes before the shutters came down again. “Okay. So you were a coward. What does that change?”
“It changes what I do next,” Katsuki said, forcing the words. “Running away is playing his game. Isolating you… that’s letting him win. I get that now.”
“Do you?” Izuku took a step forward, his own hands clenched at his sides. “Because it didn’t feel tactical, Kacchan. It felt like you took one look at the mess we’re in and decided I was part of the problem. That this was too dangerous for you.” He gestured vaguely between them.
“It is dangerous!” Katsuki’s control slipped, his voice rising. “That’s the whole fucking point! He weaponized it! He looked at us and saw a vulnerability and he built a weapon out of it! How am I supposed to just ignore that?”
“You don’t ignore it!” Izuku shot back, his own frustration boiling over. “You face it together! You don’t get to make unilateral decisions about my safety! You don’t get to decide that hurting me now is better than some hypothetical hurt later! That’s not your choice!”
The truth of it was a physical blow. Katsuki looked away, breathing hard. The apartment felt too small, the air too thin. “What’s your worst possible thing, Izuku?”
The question dropped like a stone. The use of his real name, not ‘Deku,’ made Izuku flinch.
“What?”
“The villain. He said the seed finds the worst possible thing. For me… I know what mine is.” Katsuki’s throat was tight. “It’s being the reason everything goes to hell. It’s my hands causing the damage. So what’s yours? If we’re gonna map this minefield, I need to know.”
Izuku stared at him, the neutral mask gone, replaced by a raw, vulnerable exhaustion. He sank onto the arm of his couch, looking suddenly younger. “It’s being too late,” he said quietly, staring at his own hands. “It’s standing there, powerless, with all this strength, and watching someone… watching you…” He couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
The silence that followed was different. It wasn’t empty. It was full of the awful, shared understanding of the traps laid in their own minds. The villain hadn’t planted foreign ideas. He’d just armed the insecurities already there.
“We can’t live like this,” Katsuki said, his voice low. “Walking on eggshells around our own… whatever this is.” He couldn’t name it. Not yet. “But we can’t run from it either. Aizawa called it a test. To figure it out.”
Izuku looked up, meeting his eyes. The anger had bled away, leaving something more resilient and terribly sad. “So what’s the plan, then? We just… stop?”
“No.” The word was immediate, certain. It surprised both of them. “We’re smarter than that. We find the vector. We dismantle the trigger. And until we do…” He struggled, the next words fighting him. “We just keep our eyes open. We don’t pretend the danger isn’t there. We acknowledge the wire.”
He took a step closer, stopping a few feet away, a safe but deliberate distance. “And we don’t let him scare us away from the wall.”
Izuku searched his face, looking for the lie, the hesitation. He must have seen only the stubborn, terrified resolve. He gave a slow, shaky nod. “Okay.”
It wasn’t a solution. It was a ceasefire. A pact to stand back-to-back in the middle of the siege, watching both for enemies outside and the poison within. It was the most fragile thing they’d ever built.
Katsuki’s phone buzzed in his pocket, a jarring intrusion. He pulled it out. An alert from the agency investigative team. His eyes scanned the text, his blood going cold.
Subject located. Former concierge, Kenji Haga. Apprehended 23:17. Requesting immediate hero escort for transport from Tanuma Precinct. Asset is agitated, repeating: ‘It’s too late for the sunset. The sunset triggers it.’
He showed the screen to Izuku. Their eyes met, a jolt of shared dread passing between them.
The vector was in custody. And he’d just given them a clue.
‘The sunset triggers it.’
The words on the screen seemed to pulse. The sunset triggers it.
“What does that mean?” Izuku breathed, already moving, snatching his capture weapon from a hook by the door. “Is it a timer? A specific sunset?”
“Who the hell knows.” Katsuki’s mind was racing, scrambling over their recent interactions. Had they ever even watched a sunset together? It seemed too sentimental, too deliberate. Then it clicked. “The balcony. Your building’s west-facing. Last Thursday.”
Izuku froze, one arm through his gear. Last Thursday. They’d ended a brutal joint patrol, too tired for words, and had stood on his balcony drinking water. The sky had bled orange and purple over the city’s skyline. They hadn’t touched. Had barely spoken. It had just been… quiet. A mutual, exhausted peace.
That was the soil. That was the moment.
“It’s not a timer,” Katsuki said, the realization cold and slick in his gut. “It’s a condition. A specific, shared, positive affective state. He’s not waiting for a date. He’s waiting for the recreation.”
“So if we’re together, watching a sunset…” Izuku’s face paled.
“The seed activates. Yeah.” Katsuki shoved his phone back in his pocket. “We need to talk to that concierge. Now.”
They moved in a synchronized rush, the earlier confrontation buried under professional urgency. Izuku locked his apartment. They jogged down the hall toward the elevator, the sterile light overhead casting sharp shadows. The silence between them was no longer charged with anger, but with a dreadful, focused anticipation. The minefield was now mapped with a single, glaring landmark: the setting sun.
Katsuki stabbed the elevator button. The mechanism whirred slowly, too slowly. He could feel the seconds slipping away, each one a grain of sand in an hourglass tilted toward twilight.
As the elevator doors finally slid open, Katsuki’s hand shot out, catching Izuku’s arm before he could step inside. The touch was firm, halting. Izuku turned, questions in his eyes.
“Wait.”
Katsuki’s gaze was fixed on the brushed metal of the elevator doors, not on him. His voice was low, strained, but clear in the empty hallway. “What you said. In the garage. That I thought you were part of the problem.”
Izuku stayed very still.
Katsuki’s jaw worked. He forced his eyes up, meeting Izuku’s. The admission was ripped from him, raw and simple. “It’s not you who I think is the problem… It never is.”
He was referring back to the accusation, dismantling it. The problem was the villain, the seeds, the traps in their own minds. The problem was his own fear. Never Izuku.
Izuku’s breath hitched. The rigid, wounded line of his shoulders softened, just a fraction. He gave a single, sharp nod. No smile. No forgiveness. Just acknowledgement.
It was enough.
They stepped into the elevator. The descent was quiet, but the space between them had changed again. The wire was still there, strung taut and deadly, but they were both looking at it now. They weren’t pretending it was a decoration.
The garage was cool and dim. They swung into Katsuki’s car, the engine roaring to life with a vibration that matched his nerves. He pulled into the late-night traffic, weaving with aggressive precision toward the Tanuma Precinct.
“Sunset tomorrow is at 6:47 PM,” Izuku said, staring at his phone screen, the blue light washing over his freckles. “Seventeen hours from now.”
“Then we have seventeen hours to get answers,” Katsuki growled, taking a corner too fast. “This guy Haga. He’s the key. He delivered the seeds. He might know how to pull them out.”
“Or he’s just another piece of the installation,” Izuku murmured, his analyst’s mind turning. “A component placed to deliver that exact clue. ‘The sunset triggers it.’ It feels like he was meant to be caught.”
“Don’t care.” Katsuki’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “If he’s got a shred of info in his head, we’re getting it. Before 6:47.”
The precinct house was a buzz of subdued activity. An officer led them through a warren of desks to a reinforced interview room in the back. Kenji Haga sat at a small table, a man in his late forties with the worn, neat appearance of a service worker. He wasn’t restrained, but he was vibrating with a jittery, frantic energy, his eyes darting around the room as if watching invisible insects.
He looked up as they entered. His gaze locked on Izuku, then Katsuki, and a terrible, relieved smile broke across his face.
“You’re here,” Haga whispered. “Good. He said you’d come. He said you’d need to know.”
Katsuki took the seat opposite, leaning forward, his presence dominating the small space. “What needs to be triggered, Haga? And how do we stop it?”
“Stop it?” Haga let out a wet, shaky laugh. “You don’t stop a sunset. You don’t stop a tide. It’s a beautiful mechanism. Perfect.” His fingers traced frantic, invisible patterns on the table. “I just set the stage. The lovely building, the west-facing view. I made sure your paths crossed in the lobby at the right times, that you felt safe, at home. Good concierge work.”
“The seeds,” Izuku said, his voice calm but firm. “How were they delivered?”
“A handshake for you, sir. You have a very firm, trusting grip.” Haga’s eyes flicked to Izuku’s hand. “And for Dynamight, a brushed shoulder as I passed with a laundry cart in the garage. He never even looked at me. Perfect. He requires a more… indirect approach.”
Katsuki remembered it. A vague presence, the scent of detergent. A non-event.
“The removal process,” Katsuki demanded, his voice a low threat. “How is it undone?”
Haga’s manic energy faltered. He looked confused, then fearful. “Undone? There is no undone. The art is permanent. The trigger, once activated, rewrites the neural pathway. The happy memory becomes the fear. It doesn’t go away. It… transforms.” He leaned in, conspiratorial. “He wants you to know that. He said that’s the final layer. You go into the sunset knowing there’s no way back. The dread is part of the piece.”
The air left the room. No way back. The horror wasn’t just a temporary vision; it was a permanent stain over a real, precious moment. Their quiet on the balcony would be forever poisoned.
Izuku’s hand on the table curled into a fist. “Then we don’t trigger it. We avoid the condition.”
“But you want to trigger it!” Haga insisted, his eyes widening. “Don’t you see? You’ll never know peace otherwise. Every quiet moment will be a question. Every sunset will be a threat. The art lives in your anticipation. The only way to resolve it is to experience it. To see the worst possible thing. Then you’ll know.” He nodded, as if this was profound wisdom. “He’s really quite a genius.”
Katsuki stood up so fast his chair shrieked against the floor. He wanted to blast this pathetic, brainwashed man into the wall. He wanted to scream. The villain’s design was perverse and absolute. They were trapped in a paradox: avoid the trigger and live in perpetual dread, or face it and permanently corrupt a piece of their lives.
“We’re done here,” Katsuki snarled.
Izuku followed him out, his face ashen. In the hallway, under the fluorescent lights, the reality felt heavier.
“Seventeen hours,” Izuku said quietly.
“We’re not doing it,” Katsuki stated, a finality in his tone. “We’ll find another way. There’s always another way.”
But the look Izuku gave him was haunted, full of a terrible calculus. “Is there? He engineered this. He’s a specialist in the mind. If the seed’s architecture is as he described, it’s woven into the memory itself. Removing it might be impossible.”
“So what?” Katsuki shot back, though the same hopeless logic was echoing in his own skull. “We just give up and schedule our own mental demolition?”
“I don’t know!” Izuku’s composure finally cracked, his voice rising in the empty corridor. “I don’t know, Kacchan! All I know is we can’t live like this either, looking over our shoulders at the sky!”
A uniformed officer approached cautiously. “Heroes? The suspect is asking for you again. He says he forgot something.”
They exchanged a glance and walked back in. Haga was now perfectly still, his earlier frenzy gone. He looked at them with a strange, empty clarity.
“He had a message,” Haga said, his voice flat. “For the finale. He said to tell you: ‘It’s not about the worst thing you can imagine. It’s about the worst thing you can believe.’” He blinked slowly. “He said you’d understand the difference.”
The difference between imagination and belief. A nightmare you shake off, and a truth that rewrites your world.
Katsuki understood. So did Izuku. The seed wouldn’t show them monsters. It would show them a truth so perfectly tailored, so insidiously plausible, that they would accept it. It would feel real.
They left the precinct in a hollow silence. The city lights glittered, indifferent. The night was deep now, but morning would come, and then the slow, inevitable march toward 6:47 PM.
“Where do we go?” Izuku asked, his voice soft beside him in the car.
Katsuki stared at the road ahead, the taillights bleeding streaks of red. His mind, usually a battleground of explosive plans, was a still, dark pool. They couldn’t run. They couldn’t hide. They couldn’t disarm it.
There was only one terrible option left.
“We control it,” Katsuki said, the words tasting like ash and resolve. “We don’t wait for it to ambush us. We choose the time. We choose the place. We go into it with our eyes open.”
“You mean we trigger it on purpose.” Izuku’s statement hung in the air.
“Yeah.” Katsuki glanced over, his red eyes catching the ambient light. “We face his ‘art’ head-on. And we do it together. Before the sunset he’s watching for.”
He turned the car, not toward either of their homes, but toward the agency. They needed a controlled environment. Medical staff on standby. Restraints, maybe.
They needed to voluntarily walk into the heart of the nightmare, to protect the fragile, quiet moments that might still be saved.
The car accelerated, carving through the night.