Mind of Mine || ʙᴀᴋᴜɢᴏ x ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ

chapter 46

Song: "All I Want" By Kodaline

[Listen to capture the mood of the chapter hehe]

...

The option to rewatch appears. And the video plays again, probably for the millionth time.

The drone in the vicinity shakes a little, but the quality is still clear, and the moments that happen next once again take his breath away. Bakugo can only close his eyes tightly as he hears your painful shout, his name tumbling out of your lips for what may have been the last time. A rogue tear escapes the corner of his eye as he roughly wipes it away, which only irritates the wounds that were barely healing. But he couldn't give a shit about his pain.

"Kacchan," Midoriya says softly as he enters the room quietly, the door shutting behind him, but Bakugo pays him no attention.

He watches the way your body lights up like a goddamn purple Christmas tree, and he knows what comes next. He knows Nine will be dead, not even bones will remain, and he also knows you will collapse.

Nobody can understand why he's torturing himself. That's how they see this. They think he's just hurting himself by rewatching your last moments over and over again. But how can they understand? How could they possibly fucking understand how fucking empty he feels right now? The part that made him whole is gone, leaving behind this hollow ache in his chest, and it's consuming him.

No, it's killing him is more like it.

"What have you figured out?" Midoriya was the only person Bakugo allowed in his room, now after everything that happened. He knows the green-haired boy is hurting as well, maybe not as bad as himself, but he's still hurting. After all, Midoriya blames himself. He had been there, perfectly capable of saving you if he hadn't frozen in shock. Bakugo can hear the way Midoriya screamed your name at the end, and he sees the look in your eyes— the look of a person who has given up.

Which only makes him angry.

How? How can you be possibly giving up, now more than ever? That's what he's been trying to fucking understand these last two weeks.  

"There was someone else."

"You think?" Midoriya takes a seat on the best, his shoulder touching Bakugo's. "We didn't see anybody, and even..." He can't even bring himself to say your name, "Even she didn't notice." He finishes softly, his fingers slightly messing with the white bandages that coated his arm.

"There is no other explanation." Bakugo pauses the video at a specific second, and slows down the speed of the video, having it play frame by frame. "See, right there." Midoriya leans in to take a closer look at the computer screen, trying to see what he's going on about. "She never hesitates, but right there, she pauses for a second. You see the way her body tenses? Something hit her."

Bakugo forwards the clip towards the end, where the camera zooms in to your collapsed form. "All that blood? She never gets hurt, we both know that. So where is this all coming from?" He zooms in to your neck, "Right there. She was fucking shot."

"By who?!" Midoriya gasps, raising a hand to touch the screen, almost wishing he could go back in time. He can see the spot where blood is just leaking, and he knows that Bakugo is right. Midoriya tries to run through those seconds again in his mind, he doesn't remember a bullet ever flying through. Could there have been someone else? If there was, they would've been off the island, but there are small islands surrounding Nabu Island, they could've been stationed there.

So many questions.

"You believe me right? Tell me I'm not going fucking crazy," Bakugo says, and it may sound like he was begging, but he needed someone to tell him that he wasn't imagining stuff. That he wasn't trying to find a nonexistent person to blame for your kidnapping.