Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

You have new messages in the group chat Mina’s Beautiful Buddies!

RIOT (4:53 PM):
are you guys ready for tonight??

tapemaster (4:54 PM):
did u pick a good movie this time

RIOT (4:56 PM):
I ALWAYS pick good movies!! they drive a helicopter into the ocean in this one!

RIOT (4:59 PM):
you guys think the movies I pick are good, right?

RIOT (5:11 PM):
Bakubro I just saw you check your phone and you didn’t answer

asshole (5:13 PM):
I’m working. I don’t have time to make you feel better.

Mina!!! (5:13 PM):
we r all gonna luv the movie kiri dnt worry!

RIOT (5:14 PM):
:) aww

Mina!!! (5:17 PM):
also bakugou dnt be mean

asshole (5:36 PM):
I was being honest. Learn the difference.

charging cable (5:38 PM):
Can anyone pick up an extra bottle of wine for 2nite? Im gonna need more than 1 to put up with the stick up bkg’s ass

Since graduating from UA, you and your friends have had one non-negotiable rule: no one misses movie night. It doesn't matter if you're sick, or busy, or if you have other plans. Cancel them. Movie night will come to you if you can't come to it. Not showing up is a crime of the highest degree.

And it’s one that you're about to commit.

The basement lab of the Might Riot Agency is empty this late, the soft hum of the computer banks and the sliding sounds of the 3D printer filling the silence you've been sitting in for almost ten minutes, typing and retyping a text message to Mina.

No excuse you settle on is good enough. They’re all so easily circumventable.

Not feeling up to walking the few blocks to her place? She’ll pick you up. Got locked inside the agency because you’re working after hours? Kiri will come open the doors for you. Got kidnapped by a villain? Your entire graduating class will save you, put the asshole in jail, do the paperwork, and then sit you down on the couch so you can spend time with them.

You want to tell her that you’re having a breakthrough at work that needs your attention because it’s the closest thing to the truth. After a month’s worth of overtime and late nights and way too many cups of burnt Bustelo, you’ve finished upgrading Kiri’s shoulder guards so they won’t fissure when he goes Unbreakable.

It hadn't been a problem until a month ago. He’d been fighting a villain with a quirk that turned the edges of his hands into tough, sharp-edged blades that cut through skin like paper. The small fractures in the left shoulder guard had made it easy for the villain to cleave it in two. Kiri was surprised, hardening his skin just a second too late, and the villain’s hand left a nasty gash in his shoulder that healed into a jagged pink scar.

You’re Might Riot’s head support tech. The heroes that own the agency are your jurisdiction. This should have been an issue you caught long before the shoulder guards failed. You’re here all the time—you can’t remember the last time you hung out with anyone outside your hero friend group, or even talked to someone new for more than five minutes about something not work-related. Your entire life is dedicated to making sure stuff like this doesn’t happen.

Your bruised pride is nothing compared to the wound in Kiri’s shoulder. If he'd been a second too late activating his quirk, if the villain had been any faster, you could have lost the man you've been in love with since you were a teenager.

The same man that, just a week or two ago, had started dating Mina.

You’re happy for them. You keep telling yourself this. But you need space before you can see them together. A little time for your emotions to settle so you won’t be lying when you tell Mina that you’re excited for her.

The text you type out is weak, but you hit send anyway and turn your attention back to the shoulder guard in front of you. It’s time for everything that comes after the part you love. The paperwork and the report for Bakugou and Kiri to keep on file and the blueprints you’ll have to draw up in case another tech needs to upgrade any of his supplementary guards. If you do it tonight, you can start on your next project tomorrow morning and get home before midnight.

The thought is appealing in a kind of soul-crushing way.

You shouldn’t be so driven to stay—you just like to get things done. The agency has always appreciated that. Kiri, at least, has always appreciated that. You think. You’ve been doing this job for so long now that you don’t really get validation from the top, because at the lab, you are the top.

Mina texts back rapid fire, first a long string of angry emojis, and then, dnt even think about it!! we can have it at ur place if u dnt wanna move when u get home. but if u leave me on read & dnt show up to mine im sending kiri to pick you up!!

You think of Kiri showing up at your door, looking at you and just knowing something is wrong. He always does. And he’d do anything he could to make you feel better, too, because he’s always been good like that.

Mina and Kiri deserve the happiness they’re no doubt finding together. They know a world that you never will, even as a support tech. The work you do is important, but you don’t have merchandise with your face on it sold in every store, or sponsorships with big-name companies, or the crippling fear that you might not make it home after a day of work. They're the ones that risk their lives to try to make the city a better place, and you just sit here and tool around with defective gear and get paid a salary you don't deserve because you're friends with the guy who started the agency.

or bakugou. & hell actually pick u up like off the ground, so ud better show. i do this out of love!!!

Well, maybe not friends.

You and Bakugou have a grudging understanding that you're in the same friend group, so you have to be civil to one another. You bicker, but it’s nothing like the blow-out arguments you used to have at UA that would echo from the dorm building’s common area to the rooms above. You weren’t even there that often, but when you were, you’d just be hanging out with Mina and he’d find you to pick a fight. Aizawa considered banning you at one point.

So you play nice. It's enough for Denki and Mina, enablers to each other’s bad behavior, to stop begging the two of you to kiss and make up. That annoys you almost as much as it does Bakugou.

His face might seem kissable from an aesthetic standpoint, because whatever created the universe is cruel and gives good looks to people that don’t deserve them, but he’s a sociopathic narcissist ninety percent of the time. Ninety-five, maybe.

Movie night is being held at Mina's place in the nice area of Musutafu, just a couple blocks from Might Riot. It’s at least ten times bigger than your cramped apartment in Kosai, just outside of the city, where you pay more for the view of the sea than the square-footage. Mina also keeps her fridge stocked. Like, big-boy stocked, with Hendricks and seventy-dollar Barolo and even a few corked bottles of Laphroaig for the nights Bakugou decides to drink. They'll have fun without you.

And now that they’re dating, you’re sure Mina will have a few six-packs of Kiri’s favorite tucked away, the awful, strawberry Mike’s Hard Lemonade that always makes your stomach hurt. At each movie night, he presents you with a chilled bottle like it’s a precious gift, face already flushed from the two or three that have destroyed his ridiculously low tolerance, sharp teeth flashing white when he smiles.

You need to get him out of your head. Movie night won’t help with that, but neither will sitting here for another few hours until you’re too tired to move. It’s time to go home.

In your work clothes, a slight grease stain on one of the sleeves from handling Kiri's gear, you hurry down the block past tall, sleek buildings that shoot up from the ground like spring flowers. Accounting firms and law practices and crisis management departments. This entire part of the district is dedicated to heroes and what they leave in their wake, and Bakugou and Kirishima's agency is housed in a building just like these but shorter, with tall glass doors that open soundlessly on their well-oiled hinges, windowed offices that look out over the bustling streets of Musutafu, and a front desk with a secretary that could do toothpaste ads.

The train is crowded—you should have been paying attention to the time. Going home during rush hour sucks. It’s impossible to find a seat, and you’re tired by the time you leave Might Riot. You stare out the train window, sandwiched between a man that smells like cigarettes and an old woman that deserves to sit down much more than the chattering students in the seats behind you, and you watch as the prismatic buildings in the hero district turn into shorter residential buildings, and then into grass and farmland and the kind of soft, rolling nature that leads to the seaside, the sunsetting sky a stained blood-orange rind overlooking it all.

It takes a good half-hour before the train reaches your station, out of the way of the city, just near the coast. Kirishima had warned you against moving out here because he wanted you close—it was safer, he told you, to live near heroes. You enjoyed the idea of him caring about your safety. Wanting you within arm’s reach.

But the crime rates in Musutafu are always rising, and you weren't sure you could feel safe in one of the apartment complexes that normal people live in. The ones in the less patrolled areas of the city, out of the way of the very heroes that want to protect you. Bakugou had said it was a good idea for you to move farther away, but you think was just being an asshole.

The doors open and you step out into the encroaching evening. The temperature has dropped severely since you got on the train. Probably a bad omen. Mina’s going to kill you for not showing.

The air always smells salty out here, but summer-day salty rather than Tokyo-fish-market salty. The kind you can taste on your lips after you swim in the ocean. You’ll be home soon, and that feels like a small victory.

You head up the two flights of steps to your floor, a little out of breath when you get there, and pull out your keys, flicking through them to find the one printed with the Dynamight colors. A gag gift from Mina, copied from the key she has to your apartment. You see the orange and black and you're so ready to get inside and sit down and just decompress. Figure out how to bottle your feelings in a permanent way.

Bakugou opens the door right as you put your key in the lock. He looks at you with that impassive anger he always has on his face, and he's frowning as if it's not weird at all that he's inside your apartment, without you, opening your door like he lives here. “You're late.”

“This is my apartment.” Maybe he's here to kill you. That would probably be the least surprising out of any possible options. “How the hell am I late?”

“It's movie night, dumbass.”

With slow, awful clarity, you realize what has happened. In the lull of your conversation—the quiet of Bakugou staring you down like you’ve done something wrong—you can hear Mina yelling, Denki replying something loud and shrill, Sero laughing so hard that it sounds painful.

“If you were gonna make us wait, you could’ve at least cleaned up before you got here.” He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms, his black tee stretching tight across his shoulders. Another reason you hate him: the fact that he can stay in such good shape and make it seem effortless. “The fuck is on your shirt?”

You look down at the grease on your sleeve—more than your sleeve, you notice much too late. It covers a good portion of the front of your shirt, too, probably from when you had to carry the heavy shoulder guards across your lab.

It's hard being friends with heroes. They’re always so damn perfect. Bakugou is here looking like a fucking carved statue in his tactically chosen, slightly-too-tight shirt and designer joggers and limited-edition All Might sneakers that Nike sent him personally—you know, because they only made ten pairs and you bothered Bakugou for weeks to get you on the exclusive list of recipients. He didn’t even try. And you’re here looking like a normal person coming from their normal job.

You pull at the soft fabric, which does nothing but get grease on your fingers. “I came from work.”

His eyes narrow, a crease forming in his brow. His classic, condescending scowl. “What were you doing there so late?”

For someone so smart, he can be so dense when thinking about others. If he ever even tries, which you're pretty damn sure he doesn't. “You've given me a bunch of projects this month, and there are other support techs that work at your agency that I have to keep on track, in case you forgot. Let me make it simple for you. Projects take time, and when I have too many projects—”

“I'm not a fucking idiot." His body is tensed in a way that lets you know that he’s dangerous, but that he won’t explode you into ash on your own apartment’s doorstep. Not because he knows mercy—he just doesn’t think you’re worth the sweat.

“Then don't ask me questions that make you sound like one.” You see frustration strike his features, and something delighted tears open inside you.

This is what you and him are good at. Riling each other up is a game that’s familiar and fun and sort of nauseating. Like riding a roller coaster you’ve been on a million times.

“You should just tell me if—”

“Woah, Bakugou, she hasn’t even sat down yet! Maybe the fighting can wait ‘til later, okay? We need to get our tech queen in the door first.” Kiri pulls his friend out of the doorframe, which looks like it takes genuine effort. Bakugou doesn’t back down easy.

Your mood changes the minute Kiri smiles at you, all sharp teeth and boyish good looks and genuine happiness that you’re here, even if it is your apartment that they crashed.

On reflex, you smile back. He’s so handsome and excited that it’s hard not to. This is why Red Riot is a fan favorite. That joy he brings to everyone. It feels like there’s ash in your throat.

Kiri ushers you inside and even if your friends dropped by unannounced, it’s nice to be in your own space. The apartment is small but open plan enough to feel cozy. During the day, the sun lights up every part of your living room and adjoining kitchen from the wide, three-panel window that faces the sea. Pictures hang on the walls, small photos of you and your friends next to bigger, framed posters of posed and perfect heroes.

Above your shoe rack, Miruko stands in the middle of a smoking ruin with a wicked smile on her face. It’s your favorite out of all the posters you own, and also the one worth the most money—her signature is a small series of loops in the lower right corner, courtesy of Mina, who met her at a work event.

Kiri hits the kitchen and comes back just a moment later, presses a cold bottle into your hand. A strawberry Mike’s Hard, the top already shucked off, and you nearly laugh at the predictability. He looks proud of himself. “I brought your favorite.”

You don’t have the heart to tell him that you only like them because they’re his favorite.

It was still kind of him to think of you. There are motions you go through—a smile and a thank you—that feel ingenuine. There will be a day in the future where he’ll find out that you hate these, and he’ll be disappointed in you for lying to him. You don’t have to think about it right now. You take your shoes off and put them next to a pair of black-and-red Crocs, which are placed neatly beside Mina’s sparkly pink flats.

This feels significant in a way you don't want it to. Like you know you're going to see those pairs of shoes together again and again and again after today. They match in such a strange, asynchronous way. Your mint-green Keds are dirtier than you remember them being the last time you’d really looked at them, and her flats are so clean.

“Hey.” Bakugou is the only person still in the entryway with you—you hadn’t even noticed Kiri heading back into the living room. He looks at the shoes as if trying to understand your fascination with them, and you feel your palms start to sweat. He’s perceptive and too smart for his own good. Another thing you hate him for. “Go sit down so we can start this shit. They wanted to wait for you for some reason.”

“The sequel!” Mina shouts from the living room.

When you walk in, everything is a mess.

This is the only room in your apartment that has furniture that isn’t thrifted because your friends decided that the original set-up you had wasn't up to their standards. The black felt couches (from Mina) form a square with the plasma-screen (from Denki, who presented it to you like it was nothing, even though you'd been looking for a new television and you knew how much this one cost). The large oak table in the square’s center (from Sero, who has surprisingly good taste in natural wood furniture) is already covered with stuff you’ll have to clean up later.

Open chip bags, colorful six-packs of canned craft IPAs, and two bottles of Denki's favorite chardonnay clutter the table’s surface. You can see Mina's pink hair over the back of the couch that faces the television, Denki laid out across the one on the left, Sero and his growing collection of empty beer cans taking up the one on the right.

They’re all so big, larger than life, and the little room they’ve crammed themselves into seems smaller than usual, even with the view of the sea stretching out behind them.

Kiri is sitting next to Mina, and you just know that the only seat that's going to be open for you is the one on the other side of him because Denki and Sero never learned how to fucking share.

Mina turns, and her eyes shine with excitement and the beginnings of tipsiness. “You won't understand the sequel if you don't see this one, and that would ruin next movie night. We’re planning the next three around this series.”

You give Mina a smile that you hope isn't shaky and you think she takes it, because she turns back towards Kirishima and starts talking to him about action movie tropes. Maybe you should just stand for the whole thing. That would be fine. It wouldn't be weird.

Sero snorts, contemplating the DVD in his hands. “Yeah, I'm sure you'd never be able to fill in the gaps between this awful action movie and the next one. It couldn't possibly be anything like every other movie we've ever watched together.”

A fuzzy throw pillow hits Sero dead on the jaw, and Mina, the culprit, points an accusatory finger at him. “You never know what details are gonna be important! This is why you didn't like the second John Wick.”

“Sero didn't like John Wick because they killed the dog,” Denki supplies. Your friends begin to argue in a way that feels so familiar, and you feel like you can’t be a part of this yet. It’s like you’ve forgotten how to talk to them.

Bakugou is still waiting on the outskirts of the group, and he gives you an impatient look. “You plan on standing here all fucking night?”

You don't tell him that this is, in fact, the plan. “You haven't sat down either. Don't act like I'm the weird one.”

He grunts, rolls his eyes. “I'm waiting for you to choose a spot so I don't have to sit next to you.”

“You're such a child, you know that?”

“And you always talk too damn loud during movies. Not my fault I don't want you yelling in my ear anytime something important happens.” His eyes dart between you and the spot on the couch next to Kirishima, and you have such a terrible feeling that he's going to ask you why you won't sit next to the person you always sit next to, and then you'll have to tell him the truth because he won't rest until he gets it. And he'll hold it over you forever, like the asshole he is.

When he mutters something rude and heads to the couch, it's almost a relief.

Kirishima turns towards you and smiles again, so unbothered, his bright red hair soft around his face tonight instead of styled into spikes. So happy to be sitting next to his girlfriend, surrounded by his friends, about to watch a movie that only he would pick out judging by the explosion on the DVD cover. Very manly. “Working late again? We can wait if you want to change. Or I can give you my hoodie.”

The hoodie he's wearing is his favorite color, and you know it’s got a little cartoon devil face on the front because you love when he wears it. He bought it years ago and it’s tight on him now, the lines of his defined chest so easy to follow through the threadbare material—but you’re not allowed to look anymore. It would still be warm from his skin, probably. Heat creeps up your neck. “That’s okay. There’s, uh—the grease is, um. I don’t want to ruin your sweater. I’m just going to go change.”

His brows draw together and his lips purse just slightly and his eyes are full of fucking compassion, and he’s going to ask you if you’re okay. You just know it.

“Good thing we’re having this movie night at your place, I guess,” Sero says, and you’re glad for the opportunity to look anywhere but at Kiri.

“How dare you?” Mina asks, but you can hear the edge of a smile in her voice. “Do you think my closet wouldn't be good enough for her? She'd look great in literally anything I own because she’s beautiful and I have taste. I can give you some tips, if you ever get tired of skinny jeans and band tees.”

Sero shakes his head. “You can comment on my closet when you come to terms with the fact that animal print went out of fashion decades ago.”

Denki has the biggest smile on his face. “If you guys fight, loser pays for my train ticket home. Sero, I’m sorry bro, but it might be on you. Mina’s scary.”

It’s this—the reason you can’t tell anyone about your feelings. The reason you have to stop thinking of Kiri like you have for the past eight years. Losing this dynamic, these people, would be devastating. Risking it all just to tell him how you feel would be stupid, and you’re not keen on making a fool of yourself any time soon.

You head to your room and change out your disgusting shirt for a comfortable, chunky-knit sweater, and you down half of your drink while standing in your tiny closet. The alcohol feels good in your system, the taste of strawberries thick on your tongue. You’ll make it through tonight. You just have to walk back out into the living room and pretend that everything’s okay.

So that’s exactly what you do.

You're not even going to attempt to sit next to Denki, who will flirt shamelessly as soon as the first bottle of chardonnay is finished—which you notice is close to happening—and when you try to clear away the cans next to Sero, he stops you. “Sorry, they have to stay up here. I'm seeing if I can out-drink my record from last month, and I don't want any of these guys,” he says, with a pointed look at Mina and Denki, “stealing the cans to undermine me.”

“Why would we even do that?” Denki asks, filling his wine glass—your wine glass, one he has taken from your cabinets—to the brim, one bottle down. “Besides, you won’t drink as much as you did last time because we both know I’ll have to hold back your hair while you throw up. And after that you’ll tell me all about how you wish you were an action movie love interest.”

Sero snorts. “Right.”

“It's okay, bro. You can tell everyone how you feel.” A lazy smile stretches across Denki's face. “Or should I tell them what you said about Jason Statham in that wetsuit—”

“No, you don't have to do that, and besides, what does it matter if he looks good—and you know what, dude? That's a low blow. He had to wear the wetsuit to go kill the megalodon, and the cameras just focused on his ass the whole time.” The tips of his ears glow red, as if everyone in the room hasn’t heard him drunkenly talk about how hot he thinks literally every single movie protagonist is.

With nowhere else to go, you gently sit down next to Bakugou, as far away as the edge of the couch will allow. He and Kiri take up a lot of space—you think about Kiri’s wide shoulders and then try to turn your entire brain off—so there's maybe an inch between you and Bakugou. He looks at you with the same kind of disgust that you feel for him, like he's about to kick you off the couch just so he doesn't have to be near you. “You'd better be quiet the whole time,” he hisses. “I don't want to hear one fucking word.”

You're not feeling up to engaging with everyone like usual, but pissing Bakugou off is practically a sport. Endorphins, and all that. “I'm going to talk so much. You won't even know what the characters' names are.”

Mina laughs, and you look over and you see that Kiri's arm is around her and there is bitter cold ice in your stomach. She’s smiling when she says, “Like he ever actually pays enough attention to know what their names are anyway.”

Bakugou makes an unimpressed noise. “Maybe if we picked a good movie for once, I would.”

“You won’t know if it’s good until we watch it,” Kiri protests. “C’mon, bro. How are they gonna get the helicopter into the ocean? Aren’t you excited to find out?”

“No.”

"Okay, before the boys start fighting, I’m going to play it," Sero says, waving the remote like a weapon.

As threatened, he presses play, and you all watch the beginning of the convoluted cop-based plot play out. The movie is actually pretty bad—but you’re more focused on the couple just a few feet away from you, and as the minutes tick by, you get more and more agitated.

Kiri whispers things to Mina, things reserved for her and not the rest of the group. At some point, they’ve intertwined hands in Mina’s lap, and you can feel your face going hot because you should not be noticing this. And it’s so small, but you see his thumb lightly caress the back of her hand and it gives you goosebumps and a feeling of dread so bad that it’s a physical force constricting your airway.

Bakugou stretches out his legs, and his thigh presses against yours and stays there.

You look up at him, but his attention doesn’t stray from the screen. This is on purpose. He would never touch you for any reason other than to piss you off. “Hey, asshole,” you whisper. When he doesn’t respond, you jostle him back, knocking your knee against what feels like a coiled fucking steel wire. What is the Hero Commission feeding these people?

“What?” He sounds annoyed, but when he looks at you, you can tell from your years of experience in the Bakugou-being-a-dick field that he’s amused. Something in the almost imperceptible curve of his lips. “Thought you were gonna talk the whole time.”

“I’m being nice tonight and giving you a break.” Something explodes on-screen and—the main character might have just died? Or he’s pretending to be dead? There’s a lot of fake blood. The Mike’s Hard is almost finished and you can’t remember when that happened.

He scoffs, shoves his leg further outwards. “That’s a fucking lie. You’re never nice.”

“I’m nice all the time.” You’re going to get pushed off the couch at this rate. “To people that deserve it.”

“Can you guys shut up?” Denki whisper-yells. “Or, like, take it to a different room to work out the tension? The picture on this plasma is gorgeous and I’m missing precious frames.”

“Fuck off, Dunce Face.”

“That’s disgusting,” you whisper-yell back at Denki, who has lost all interest in you and Bakugou, drunkenly focused on the television once again.

Bakugou pulls his leg away, finally allowing you to get reacquainted with your proper position on the couch. Quiet enough that no one else can hear, he tells you, “Watch the damn movie.”

You do try. As the movie's tension escalates and gets closer to its predictable ending, gunshots and explosions and yelling playing too loud over your speaker system (also from Denki, who believes that the best gifts are electronics and literally nothing else), you slowly realize you want this moment to end.

Without Bakugou bothering you, you’re once again hyper-focused on the people you shouldn’t even be near right now, and you try to stay focused on the screen, but—it’s hard. You hate yourself for not being able to control your own jealousy.

As promised, once the end of the movie creeps up, the protagonist is flying a helicopter with his best-friend-slash-partner and smoke billows from its engine. As they approach the sea, the protagonist tells his partner to jump out with the only parachute. There’s the mandatory push-back but the partner eventually jumps from the helicopter, and after a long close-up of the protagonist’s face, the helicopter goes down and hits the ocean.

Kiri claps as if the helicopter’s slow decline is a piece of performance art and Mina cheers loudly. Denki joins them with a noise that kind of sounds like the word ‘nice’ but elongated and slurred. Sero is asleep with a can of beer tipping dangerously in his hands. And usually you would join in and cheer for the collapsing helicopter and just kind of enjoy the stupid moment with your friends, but instead you feel alarmingly empty.

Is it always going to be like this from now on?

You need time. Next month could possibly be okay, but at this very moment? You feel like screaming. You don't want to be alone, but you've also never wanted to be alone more. The feeling is—alienating. It's like you want someone to ask if you're okay just so you can tell them to shut the fuck up.

“Heads up, nerd.” Bakugou is looking at you and he's close—really close, actually, and you need to invest in larger couches. You can smell his cologne, something Tom-Ford-level woodsy and expensive, and under that, sweet caramel. It reminds you of UA, when Bakugou would threaten to blow people up long before he got a handle on his anger. Not that he has much of a handle on it now. At least the death threats aren’t as frequent. “Movie's over.”

“Oh, damn." You hadn’t even realized. It must have been a short movie—but it’s dark outside, the moon fully risen above the sea-line. The stars are bright tonight, pinpoint constellations reflecting on the water below. Sometimes you get stuck in your head so deep that all you can focus on is your own thoughts, and they’re usually not good ones. “I must have zoned out. I’m a little tired.”

Mina stands up and stretches, an arm thrown exaggeratedly above her head. “You've been working hard all day! You should get some shut-eye. We've gotta get going before we miss the last train back, too.”

Everyone extricates themselves from the mess that has been made of your apartment, and you wince at the sound of empty cans hitting the floor from Sero's couch, his personal record either met or beaten. Denki hauls his friend across a shoulder and leads him towards the door, laughing when Sero tries to promise he's sober enough to walk by himself.

At the front door, Mina pulls you into a rib-cracking hug and then shows mercy, pulling back and smiling at you as innocent as possible. “This is what happens when you try to skip out on movie night. Don't do it again! You’ve learned the consequences.”

Her words are a threat, but they’re still endearing. It reminds you of who Mina will always be to you—not Kiri’s new girlfriend, but the closest friend you’ve had since high school. Someone to depend on. Someone you don’t want to disappoint. “I’ll never miss another. I swear on my Miruko poster.”

She snorts in the way that only cute girls can and follows Kiri to the door. The way he looks back at her is so caring, unguarded. Like she's his own personal sun. You're sure it's because he’s a little tipsy, but you still have to look away.

You couldn't imagine better friends. You love that Mina will force you to hang out with everyone because she doesn't want you to be alone. You love that everyone else would agree to take the train out to your place just to make sure you could keep up with monthly movie night, even if that meant heading back home cold and drunk.

You're so scared of how you're going to feel when everyone is gone.

They file out of the door, Mina and Kiri first, followed by a much shakier Denki and Sero, Bakugou herding them all in the right direction. You wait in the doorway to make sure no one falls down, and Bakugou lingers, watching your drunk friends stumble towards the stairs.

His face has lost its tension, the clenched jaw, the set brows—like he’s feeling the same thing you’re feeling right now. That sort of warm appreciation for their ridiculous, loving behavior. You don’t see him like this often. The single, overhanging light in the apartment’s outdoor hallway is an off-cast, buzzing yellow, and it makes his hair shimmer gold. It looks like it would be soft.

Fuck, you’re lonely. And the Mike’s Hard might be hitting harder than you thought it would. When was the last time you ate today?

He turns back to you and he’s Bakugou again, eyes focused and mouth tight. “Move.”

You step back as Bakugou lets himself back into your apartment, closing the front door behind him. You aren’t alone with him often, and you can feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up. “Is this… about work?”

“It's so fucking annoying watching you be an idiot.” His voice is too loud in the small entryway even though it's the quietest you've heard him speak in—ever, maybe, because nothing that Bakugou does is quiet. “You should just tell him.”

For a split second, you feel ashamed, like you did something bad and got caught hiding the evidence. It would be him that noticed you making a fool of yourself. He looks for this kind of stuff just to make you mad.

You take a deep breath, trying to approach calmness. Steady yourself a little. “This isn’t a conversation I want to have with you.”

He shakes his head, walks towards the kitchen, and you can do nothing but follow. The lights blink on, reflecting off the faux-granite countertops of the kitchen’s island and the counter next to the sink where you haphazardly stack appliances, your cupboards already stuffed full of kitchenware hero memorabilia that you seem to accrue without effort.

“We both know it won’t get better if you don’t do something.” He opens one of the overhead cupboards and starts poking around in it. “Just tell Ei how you feel and let him reject you so you can get over it. Then I won’t have to watch your stupid ass get sad every time he says something nice to you.”

The television is still on, and you watch the thirty-second loop of men yelling at each other above the DVD menu instead of responding. Somehow, the thought of rejection hurts more when it's spoken out loud.

Clinking onto the counter in front of you is your favorite mug, one you'd bought from 7/11 a few years ago on Valentine's Day. It made you laugh so hard that you'd sent a picture to the group chat—Kirishima's face surrounded by hearts, and on the back in the most romance-movie, Word-art font ever, It'd be a Riot if you'd be my Valentine! “I don’t want to—”

“Shut up.” He’s standing in front of you, and you blink up at him, not sure when he got so damn tall. Maybe you hadn’t noticed because you always try to keep him at least an arm’s length away from you. More, if you can help it. He nods towards the mug and you realize it’s full of water, three ice cubes rattling around the rim. “Drink.”

Quiet, you sit at one of the island’s yellow-painted barstools and do what he tells you. Your body seems to lose tension as the water gets into your system—you hadn't realized how dehydrated you'd been. You hadn't had the space in your head to think about anything but Kirishima since you'd gotten home. Sugar sits like a deadweight in your stomach.

“I can't tell him,” you concede, and you wouldn’t have said that if Kiri hadn’t placed that traitorous lemonade into your hands. You’re never drinking one again. “That wouldn't be fair.”

“Nothing’s fair.” He crosses his arms, shaking his head like you've just said something dumb. Which he probably thinks you have. “What are you gonna do instead? Look like a fucking kicked puppy every time he smiles at you? It makes me sick.”

You stare at Kiri's face on the cup, then look up at Bakugou—judging you. Like he has any right. “You make me sick.”

“That the best you could come up with?”

You can come up with a better insult, you just don't want to. Everything feels exhausting and it's because of Bakugou and the way he’s always messing around in stuff he should keep his pretty nose out of. Maybe you're not as good at hiding your feelings as you think you are. Maybe you need to work on the way you handle being sad. But that can wait for another time. “How about this: fuck you.”

“You’re not even trying.” The corner of his mouth lifts, and there’s an amused glint in his eyes. Like he's laughing at you. Like he thinks it's fucking hilarious to see you sad and frustrated and adrift in your own stupid apartment, drinking out of your stupid Red Riot Valentine's mug. The closest your lips are ever going to get to Kiri’s face.

You put the mug down on the counter too hard. “You treat your friends like dirt because you don’t understand how patient we have to be to put up with your shitty attitude.”

His grin is as sharp as a knife, and you hate that expression on his dumb fucking face. He's playing with you. “You’re an idiot if you think you make that list, because I don’t have weak friends.”

And you decide, in this moment, that you’re going to give him what he wants and hit where it hurts. You stand and the barstool scrapes audibly across the wood floor behind you. Adrenaline shoots through your veins, your skin tingling. “I'm not the one that’s so scared of depending on others and looking weak that I have the lowest team assist rate out of the entire hero top ten.”

His jaw clicks. The first spark of real frustration shows in his eyes. “You should shut your fucking mouth about things you don't understand.”

“Things I don’t understand? Fuck you,” and this time when you say it, it’s spiteful. “I put in as many hours as you do at the agency. I just don’t go out and blow shit up.”

“I’m out there being a fucking hero.” He leans closer and his voice is tight and angry and vicious, and it’s thrilling in a strange way that makes you breathless.

“I think you’re out there feeding your own ego. And you want to know what else I think?” You think things could have been different if you had a good quirk, or could fight, or could do something more productive than sit in a lab and work with chemicals and metals and other dirty shit that Bakugou will never have to deal with in his entire glamorous career. You don’t tell him this. “If you hadn’t been able to start your own agency so fast, the only person that would have taken you on as a sidekick is Midoriya.”

“Take that back.” There is a dangerous energy that builds between you, and the sense of intimidation that washes over you is full-bodied and terrifying. Almost automatically, like your body is realizing that fight or flight does actually have that second option, you back up and he follows, every bit Dynamight, the hero with a reputation of inspiring terror. Murderous intent in the set of his shoulders, in the confident tilt of his head, dominating advertising campaigns and online hero-most-likely-to-turn-villain fan debates.

Your back hits the wall next to the fridge and your skin is buzzing. You want to get him as mad as possible. You want him to not be able to hold back. That thought alarmingly makes something flip in your stomach. “I’m just telling you the truth. It’s not on me if you can’t handle it.”

“You wanna know what I think?” His voice is a threat and his breath is minty. He keeps Altoids on him at all times, the extra-strength ones, because he's insane on multiple levels.

“What?” you ask, and—fuck, it sounds like you’re just waiting for something to happen.

The eye contact he's making with you is an act of violence, unyielding and so focused that your stomach flips again, and—you’ve got butterflies. Fucked up, masochistic butterflies. You have no idea what’s happening but you kind of want him to touch you and you kind of want to throw up.

“I think you’re not dumb enough to have the death wish most people do when they say shit like that to me.” His voice is low, dead calm. “You’re still fucked up over Ei and you’re yelling at me instead of talking to him.”

The way your heart pounds in your chest makes it feel like you're about to die, or maybe ascend to another plane of reality, like the buzzing in your blood is going to shoot your consciousness straight out of your skin. And you don’t usually do this. Acknowledge your faults, especially to someone like him. But he’s right, surprisingly, and you wonder if the observation is his own or the product of years of therapy. “So?”

He stares down at you and you swear that just for a moment, his eyes dart to your lips. “Do you want to forget about him for a minute?”

It takes a second for the question to fully register, and after it does, you still have to play it back in your head. He can’t be offering what you think he’s offering. You’re just a messed-up person, and that’s why this kind of fight is getting you really fucking weirdly turned on.

But at the thought, at the sudden realization that this model-gorgeous man might have suggested something to you that you didn’t think you’d ever get, you nervously pull your lower lip between your teeth and his eyes follow the motion so intent, rapt, that fuck—he has to be feeling the same way you are.

And it’s Bakugou. The same guy who sent you your least favorite flowers on your birthday. Who has the worst taste in music and plays the classic rock shit he likes anytime he has the aux cord at one of Mina’s lavish parties because he knows you hate it. Who would barely register your existence if it wasn’t for the people you both love.

But forgetting sounds… nice. “Yeah. I do.”

That’s all he needs—his hands grip your waist and you’re pulled against him. His body is so fucking warm and toned in a way that you can feel through your clothes, and he tilts your head up with gentle fingers.

You don’t remember what it feels like to breathe. You’ve lost all the arrogance you had just a moment ago. You find yourself wanting this, in such a strange, desperate way.

He presses his lips to yours and kisses you slow and hot and soft, a sort of immediacy in the way his hands hold you close. His lips are like satin and the kiss deepens and you can taste mint on his tongue as it slides against yours. There’s something about how intense and fucking purposeful this kiss is that fills you with a sudden want. You run your hands up his back and dig your nails into the skin you find just above his shirt collar and things become violent.

You gasp when his hands find the undersides of your thighs and he lifts you up against the wall, pinning you there with his hips, fingers digging into you and blurring the line between pleasure and pain. The kiss is no longer slow—it’s fucking heated, teeth meeting teeth, messy in a way that makes you want him more.

A tremor runs across your skin when he does something with his tongue that you know took practice, and your hands are in his hair without you realizing how they got there. It’s as soft as you’d thought it would be. Softer. He groans against you when you curl your fist around the strands, tugging gentle and then not, because part of you wants it to hurt, and he bites your lip so hard you see stars.

His mouth moves to your neck, biting kisses into soft skin, and he's too many sharp teeth, too many angular edges, too much taut fucking muscle. One hand grips your thigh and the other is on your hip, slipping underneath your shirt.

You don’t think you’ve ever wanted anyone this fucking bad, and he makes it worse when his thumb runs across the thin material of your bra. You dig your nails into his defined shoulders and lightly trace the shell of his ear with the tip of your tongue and he full-body shudders, cursing softly against your neck.

He sucks a bruise into your throat in retaliation and your body goes numb. It’s going to be visible and you don’t even care, you just need more. He’s hard against you and moving his hips just right and you're going to go insane if you can't get your hands on his skin right fucking now.

“You've gotta tell me what you want.” His voice is all deep rough edges. He kisses the curve of your jaw once, twice—surprisingly sweet.

“You," you breathe, tugging at the hem of his shirt. "Now."

He pulls back, pupils blown so that the red of his eyes is almost engulfed, lips kiss-pink, so fucking turned on for you, and it's the hottest thing you've ever seen in your entire life. His eyes drag up the column of your throat, surveying the work he’s done there, and when he meets your eyes he looks satisfied with himself. “Say please.”

Fuck. Everything about him is wicked, his voice and his body and the way he just barely rocks his hips against yours and makes your back arch. And—god, you hate yourself—but there’s no hesitation in your half-broken response.

“Please.”

He shifts away from the wall and your arms wrap around his neck in surprise, but he has a stable hold on you—you forget how strong he is. You run a hand down his back just to feel the way the muscles move.

He sits you on the island’s counter, standing before you and taking his shirt off, and you can't think anymore as you watch the way his defined shoulders and his literal fucking awe-inspiring abs move as he throws it to the side. He’s… fuck, so out of your league. This has to be a fever dream or something equally terrible.

But he’s between your legs and pulling you as close to the edge of the counter as possible in movements so quick they’re hard to register, undoing the button on your jeans with deft fingers and then tugging on the sides.

You help, your only thoughts on getting your clothes off so Bakugou's touch can replace them, and when your jeans are on the floor, he drops down onto his knees and kisses a bruise into your inner thigh so fucking slow and careful that you know this is a mark you’re going to have for weeks, and you feel shockwaves, sparks, your breaths coming embarrassingly fast.

He gets closer to the apex of your thighs and you're astounded by the idea of Bakugou wanting to eat anyone out with how little he cares about other people, but that doesn't matter right now—you can’t wait another fucking minute to get him where you need him to be.

You thread a hand through his hair and pull, forcing him to look at you. Eyes half-lidded. His lips sensual in the way they’re parted, each breath hot against your skin. The way he looks at you is both sinful and divine.

Your hands keep slightly shaking no matter how hard you grip his hair, the edge of the counter. “Stop playing around and fuck me.”

It's the first time you've ever seen him surprised—maybe pleasantly, but his face is always so severe that you can’t tell. You don’t know his pleasant expressions like you know his unpleasant ones. “That an order?”

And you know exactly what to say to push him. “Yeah. Are you gonna follow it?”

He stands, looming over you, his eyes dangerous and dark and fucking gorgeous, and he kisses you once, chaste, and your heart is pounding and you can feel the words against your lips when he whispers, “I’m gonna make you so fucking sorry for trying to tell me what to do.”

You’ve never been more intimidated. It’s so fucking hot.

“This is coming off.” He pulls your sweater off in a single, smooth motion, and then he’s quiet. His eyes trail down your body and his hands move up your sides, and you need him to stop looking at you with this kind of reverent scrutiny and give you what you want.

You don't need to tell him this, though—he slides your underwear off with a thumb and then unbuttons his pants. You can see his dick straining against his boxers, and god, you can already tell that it’s bigger than you thought it would be—than you would allow yourself to imagine. Not that you do imagine. Or think about it. Fuck. He’s a handsome guy, it’s not a fucking crime to think about his dick.

He says your name, a question, and you realize he’s asking you something without asking. You don't know exactly what, but you're on birth control and you know Bakugou is probably the safest out of your entire friend group, and he’s being a good guy by making sure this is okay.

You don’t want him to be a good guy. You want him to fuck you until you can’t form a coherent thought. But he’s not going to do anything until you say it’s okay, so you tell him and his hands are on your thighs again, burning. Caramel. Smoke.

He pulls his dick out and you can feel it against you, thick and hot, and he grinds its length against your entrance, the friction so impossibly perfect that you bite your lip to muffle the groan it extracts from you.

“Don’t fucking do that,” he breathes. “I don’t want you to be quiet.”

His hand is in your hair and he's pulling your head back, drawing his tongue along the line of your jaw, and this time you let him hear the sound you make in its entirety.

He thrusts inside you without warning, careful, the most intense feeling of fullness giving you tremors, and the noise he makes as he bottoms out is explicit, pornographic. You're going to play it in your head for the rest of your life. He tips your head forward just enough to take the lobe of your ear between his teeth, biting down until it hurts, and the pain only adds to the sparks you’re feeling at every point of physical connection. “So fucking… shit.” He takes a shaky breath. “You drive me fucking insane sometimes.”

“I thought you said you were gonna make me sorry,” you say and it comes out as a whisper and you want him to stop saying things that make you shiver and start doing what he’s here to do.

He thrusts, slow at first, allowing you to adjust to the almost overwhelming feeling of him inside you. “I didn’t forget.”

He hooks his arms around your thighs and squeezes until it hurts as he pulls you closer, and you lean back on your elbows as he fucks you fast, absolutely no build up, a bruising pace that your body is eager to match. Every stroke hits almost perfectly, and you can feel yourself coming apart, splitting, melting. You didn’t expect to get so close so soon but it’s been a while, and watching his dick slide in and out of you with so much force is almost too much to handle.

Leaning forwards, he kisses you messy and wet and his strokes almost lose their rhythm, and you bite his tongue and he curses into your mouth. The sound of skin on skin echoes through the kitchen, through the whole apartment, and the noises he's forcing you to make are ones you could never be proud of—half-choked moans, nearly incoherent words.

He pulls your thighs further apart and pushes them forwards roughly, forcing you to accommodate him, and it's impossible how deep he gets. Fucking incomparable. He makes a low, desperate noise that you can practically feel rumble through your own body, and with every stroke pressure builds and you just need some help and you'll be able to come to a gorgeous completion.

Moving feels impossible and each thrust makes you more and more sensitive, your legs beginning to shake in his grip, and maybe that's what he wants—you at your absolute worst, strung-out and begging him to make you cum.

Your moans turn into please and I need and slow down, and he slows his pace just enough to lean forward without breaking you and whisper in your ear. “Bet Ei couldn't make you beg like this.”

Your breathing stutters out, shocked still. You don't want to think about him right now. You do not want to think about him. He would be so disappointed. You're so close to an orgasm and you don't need Bakugou fucking things up like he always does. Your voice is pathetically breathy when you say, “Shut the fuck up.”

He stops entirely, abruptly, and this is torture. You whine, missing the slick feeling of him fucking you mercilessly in a way that the you from an hour ago would be ashamed of. But he lives to piss you off.

This is not forgetting. This is not what he promised. It’s something more perverse.

He looks you dead in the eye, still close enough that you can smell the mint on his breath. “What, you think he could?”

This is so fucking embarrassing. You want him to keep moving, the throbbing between your legs almost painful, and he slides out so that his head is at your entrance. You try to move, to do anything to take the edge off, but he holds your hips still against the counter with a rough hand.

You can feel your face heating up. “Why would you even—can you not do this right now?”

“Tell me I'm the only one that can fuck you like this.” He moves his hand between your legs and with a careful, expert touch, makes you moan against your will. The way he looks at you is criminal, crimson eyes burning hot and dark. He’s enjoying this too fucking much. “Or I'll stop.”

“Please.” All you want is mercy. Death, at this point. Anything to give you the fucking release you need.

But he doesn't move—just watches your internal struggle, smug, pleased with himself. With the mess he's made.

You hate him so much. “You're the only one.”

He grabs your chin, jerking your face up, making sure you're looking right at him. His thumb runs over your bottom lip, slick from his fevered kisses. “The only one that can do what, angel?”

Your face is burning and you don’t know how to find and reclaim the air that has left your lungs and you cannot fucking believe that this is the same man that opened your door earlier. He won't let you break eye contact even though your heart is beating out of your chest. The hand still between your legs works slow, not enough to give you relief, and it makes your insides clench, your thighs flex. You need him so bad that you’re almost shaking. “The only one that can fuck me like this.”

His grin shows off sharp canines and you would hate the smug expression on his face if it didn't add to what you're already feeling. "Good girl."

This time he's careful, gets as deep as possible with each stroke and pulls back just enough to put a hand between your legs, finding the perfect spot and matching his own pace with his thumb. You make a sound more intimate than the ones before, and he kisses you as if he wants to get as close to the sound as possible, and your bodies fit together so well but it doesn't fucking matter because you're there, finally, holy shit, at that moment of coming apart and he changes pace and fucks you hard through your orgasm, even when you're oversensitive and begging him to slow down.

He doesn't. He pulls you as close, a strong arm wrapping around you to press your chest to his, and your hands are on his back and you dig your nails into the skin there and hope you draw blood. He pulls out and curses soft as he finishes, a sound that you wish you could bottle and keep in more than just memory. He lays his forehead on your shoulder, his sweat mixing with yours.

You share a few seconds of silence still pressed together, and your arms are shaking from the strain of keeping yourself upright. Your body aches and you can feel the bruises already blooming on your skin and you almost kind of like the way he’s still holding you, because it makes it feel like everything that just happened did in fact happen. But he decides to move again, his lips ghosting across your shoulder but not quite touching.

He takes a deep, faltering breath and lets go of you, and you forgot what it felt like to not be touching him. You’re cold without his body so close.

The awkwardness of the moment is sobering. It hits you like a wave.

You're wearing nothing but your bra and sitting on your kitchen counter, which is no doubt covered in a mix of fluids you don't want to even think about, and last man on earth that you'd ever sleep with is putting his dick away like nothing happened.

He pulls up his joggers and looks away from you, towards the window. When he turns, you can see the slight outline of a collection of scars on his hip, half-pitted circles and long, white lines. You’ve never seen them before—even in magazine shoots where more often than not, he’s shirtless, because hero mags know what sells. They must airbrush them out.

At this moment, they’re unmissable. The moonlight makes everything in the apartment paler, more lifeless, but it makes the scars shine like bone. “Go get cleaned up.”

You grab your clothes and leave the kitchen, suddenly self-conscious even though Bakugou still isn't looking at you.

In the bathroom, you spend a minute just taking in the ruin—mascara smudged, lips swollen, bruises already spreading on your neck. There are light pink marks on your thighs that you don't really understand until you realize that they’re small burns where Bakugou's fingers had dug into your skin, and maybe it's because you're still half blissed-out, but you like the way they look.

This thought reminds you to be disgusted with yourself.

You just fucked the guy you’ve hated since high school. Worse than that, you just fucked Kiri's best friend. If he finds out, he's going to see you so differently. It's not like you haven't had sex with other people before, but—this is different. Bakugou is too tightly connected to you both. It’s like a betrayal of trust. Like both Mina and Kiri should have been consulted beforehand for their express permission, signed and stamped and notarized.

You dress in silence, washing your face quickly and running your fingers through your messy hair, calming it enough to look presentable.

When you step back into the kitchen, Bakugou is dressed and has a bottle of Lysol spray in one hand and a paper towel in the other. He cleans the counter as you watch from the kitchen's entrance, too wrecked from what just happened to think of anything to say.

When he's done, he puts everything away neatly, and you wonder when he got so familiar with your apartment. How he knew where you kept your favorite mug, now in the sink. It had been in the kitchen the whole time. Watching.

You're going to have to throw it away. Put it somewhere you'll never see it again.

Bakugou walks over to you and you're not ready to have him in your space again so soon. The mug is still watching. You step back a little, and he raises a brow, stopping a few feet away from you. “We don't have to talk about it.”

Makes sense that he would say that. He probably feels as disgusted as you do. Maybe more.

“Yeah. That’s—fine.” You're not sure what you want to say, or what you want him to say. Nothing feels real. You're not sure if anything will feel real again. Bakugou can't feel much better. And—he had done this because you asked him to, kind of. Because you wanted to forget. And you did, for a while. “Thank you.”

There’s this weird expression on his face—like he’s uneasy, or nervous, and you don’t like him being something he’s not—but then he makes an annoyed noise that you’ve heard so many times before. “Don't thank me. Just stop being a dumbass and go back to normal. I didn't like you being so quiet tonight.”

“I thought you weren't a fan of my running commentary.”

“I'm not. But I'm used to it.” He stares at you for a long, tense moment, and you're not sure why you feel so frightened that things are going to be different now. Because it's just Bakugou. He's never been a concern to you before now. “Get over yourself, nerd.”

Like it’s that easy. “I will.”

“Whatever. I've gotta catch the last train back.” He walks past you towards the door, and he takes in the sight of you—a fucking mess, you’re sure—his eyes catching on the bruises forming on your neck. He casts his gaze down, checking his phone even though you can see he doesn't have any messages. “Later.”

And then he's gone, and the apartment is just as quiet as you knew it would be once everyone had left.

You stand for a minute or two, staring at the front door, just trying to understand. But your mind is still embarrassingly blank. You check your phone, expecting—you’re not sure. Something. Not that you think Bakugou would text you so soon, if at all.

There is one notification from twenty minutes ago. A text from Mina: one single, anxiety-inducing smiley face, smug in the silence that accompanies it.

Chapter Text

You have new messages in the group chat Mina’s Agents of Chaos!

Mina!!! (6:04 PM):
tonkatsu!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tapemaster (6:04 PM):
ok

charging cable (6:05 PM):
Ooooh I could go for tonkatsu. rn?

Mina!!! (6:05 PM):
asap!! i miss ur faces i got a table alrdy @ the one in mstfu w the cute cat mascot!!

RIOT (6:07 PM):
I’ll head over right after I’m done with this report! want to walk together bakubro?

asshole (6:10 PM):
I have more important things to do.

charging cable (6:11 PM):
I bet your just watching all might fan edits in your office

tapemaster (6:11 PM):
lmaooooooooo

asshole (6:11 PM):
Shut the fuck up dunce face

charging cable (6:13 PM):
Only if u make me ;)

charging cable (6:14 PM):
Or do u only have eyes for your support staff ;) ;)

asshole (6:21 PM):
I’m muting this chat.

The tonkatsu place is just a couple blocks from Might Riot, and you’ve spent more of your money there than you care to think about. It’s still relatively early by Musutafu standards—tourists don’t leave for the fashion or food districts of Tokyo until later in the evening—so on the walk you’re focused on not bumping into anyone in the crowds that bustle past, squeezing inside the boundaries of the wide sidewalks, billboard heroes watching from above on the side of sky-scraping offices, advertising convenience stores and different brands of energy drinks.

You kind of hate the way the heroes on the billboards look out over the city. Like they’re protecting it, when they’re not. Kamui Woods overlooks the street from the side of a law office, but you know that his patrol routes and the agency that he works for are miles from here. He probably doesn’t come by this side of town unless he has to, with the amount of fangirls roaming the neighborhood that would stop him for autographs and pictures.

The fall is finally starting to show its teeth, a chill in the air that bites at bare skin. The gingko trees will drop their leaves soon and your allergies will go wild, but it’s a small price to pay for a few days of beauty.

A familiar side street comes up and you turn onto it, cutting between buildings to get across the block faster. It takes you into more of a residential area, and the crowds thin to reveal a buttery light that spills out onto the street from behind the skyline, the sun making its descent for the day.

You spot the chalkboard sidewalk sign before you even get up the block, the tonkatsu place’s white-and-gray cat mascot drawn with a ball of yarn that unravels to spell out this week’s specials. You decided to come primarily because you haven’t eaten since morning, a cream-cheeseless bagel half taken out in four bites while you watched the sunrise through your sea-facing window.

It was healing, kind of. Peaceful. You need to get groceries.

The secondary reason is that Bakugou isn’t going to be there. It’s not like you’re avoiding him. You just don’t go into the breakroom when he’s there making tea and you take the stairs when you see him waiting for the elevator and you refuse to make eye contact when you’re both crossing the lobby in the morning. You’ve had to wear a turtleneck for nearly two weeks just to hide some of the bruises he put on your throat.

You can’t stop thinking about his hands. The soft kiss he laid on your jaw. It’s fucking awful.

It’s busier than you expected it would be, people standing out on the sidewalk waiting for a table, but you really should have known. Every restaurant in Musutafu is a tourist attraction by merit of location and nothing else. A place that visitors can post on their Instagrams to claim that they found the cutest little tonkatsu place in the Japanese suburbs. You push through the crowd of foreigners taking photos and the passing businessmen on their way home and the teenagers holding long-necked bottles of soda from the vending machine around the corner and enter the restaurant.

It’s warm inside. The smell of cooked rice hangs heavy in the air. It’s busy in here, too, but the conversations are all murmurs. It feels like a little pocket of the city that was created just to soothe.

This is what you needed after work. Today was dedicated to your new big project, a modification for Bakugou’s gauntlets that’ll allow him to better control the radius of his explosions. Manipulation of the collection and dispersal of the nitroglycerin he produces. Usually working on his projects is stressful, because Bakugou, who was never taught about delayed gratification, calls the lab literally six times a day if he doesn’t get his new gear by your projection date.

You’re trying to ensure that you get them to him on time so you don't have to hear him over the phone. Staticky and demanding. His voice is just… something you can’t think about right now.

The host greets you because you know the heroes, and therefore you’re a special customer, too. A lot of restaurants do this—keep a table open in case heroes drop by. It feels weird to be allowed that luxury. You’ve never saved a life.

He leads you through the arrangement of bistro tables to a slightly hidden alcove in the back, and Mina is the only one here, already sipping on a green drink in a martini glass. It has a pineapple garnish the color of her horns. She smiles so wide when she sees you that you know you walked straight into trouble, and the anxiety that the single-emoji text produced is back in full force.

She gestures across the table from her and you sit, nodding to the host in thanks, enjoying the way the padded seat sinks under your weight. You’ve been on your feet for—shit, maybe a few hours? More? Work is a blur of numbers and supply orders and Bakugou’s heavy gauntlets.

It’s crazy that he can just wear them casually. His arms flex in this specific way when he puts them on, fully tensed to prepare for their weight, and before movie night it didn’t—interest you. You’re not sure if you could keep your eyes from wandering now.

There are a lot of things like this. Changed by what happened. The last time he’d brought his gear to you after a bad fight, earlier in the summer when the sun was less forgiving, you’d noticed a light smattering of freckles on his shoulders and upper arms that you hadn’t before. And back then, it was just an observation. A piece of information to be filed away with everything else you’ve learned about him over the years.

Revisiting your memories of him has become dangerous. He’s painted in a different light. One you couldn’t have seen until his hands touched your skin, careful and then not.

“Are you still here with me? Or did your big brain not make it from work?”

“Sorry.” You need to not be this much of a mess. You need to stop thinking of all the details that are coming back to haunt you. “You know, sometimes I look at all the little parts in the gear I build and I wonder how I keep their names in my head when I constantly forget how to act like a human. It’s like I’m being replaced by building materials. I’m going to start talking in instruction manual lines soon.”

“You’re still in there, don’t worry. You just work way too hard and it means you don’t get to spend time with me,” Mina says with a careful, practiced pout that has no effect on you after so many years of use. “I’m honestly surprised half the agencies in the city aren’t sending you job offers. Or like, bribes.”

“Bribes sound flattering, but it would take way more than that to get me to leave Might Riot.” You shake your head, thinking of the horror stories you’ve heard—mostly while eavesdropping—from the other techs that worked a few different jobs before coming to the agency. “Best Jeanist makes his entire staff dress to the nines. All the time. I can’t imagine getting grease on a Balenciaga jacket.”

“I think he helps them with the clothes. Or maybe just pays for them himself? Kiri was telling me something about him the other day.” Mina smiles softly and you try not to think about the picture she’d posted yesterday afternoon, Kiri’s arm around her shoulders, both of them holding All Might-shaped popsicles that have the little blue M&Ms for eyes. “It is super weird though. Like, does he even talk to his support staff? Why do they have to look good?”

“Honestly, if he paid for my clothes, I wouldn’t care if I got ignored by him.” You think of Bakugou’s expensive closet and then the way the ends of his collar bones are just visible over the neckline of his usual plain black tees and—you didn’t think of him this often before. You’re almost sure. “Okay. Maybe they could tempt me if I got a fashion stipend. I guess I accept bribes now.”

“Whatever you do, don’t come to Ryuko’s. Don’t get me wrong—I love her, and I would love to be able to visit you at work, but we always get the messiest missions. The villain I took down a couple weeks ago with a slime quirk is still under my nails.” She shows you her perfectly manicured nails, painted a pink just a few shades lighter than her skin. “He exploded when his quirk deactivated. Not his body, just the slime. It smelled like the Ayase and it got on my costume—Ryuko sent it down to the techs to take care of in case there was any damage, which like, if my costume can handle my acid, I think it can take whatever that guy was. Still, I can’t even imagine the kind of stuff that Bakugou makes you do.”

There it is. The first slip of his name into conversation.

You’re surprised she didn’t offer to pay for the meal just to get you to cough up some information. The cat mascot draws people in before they have the chance to see the prices listed on the menu and make a quick escape. “He asks me to do regular projects. Nothing worse than Kiri’s asked me to do.”

That is a bold-faced lie, but you’re willing to do a lot you normally wouldn’t if it means you can stop talking about this.

Mina sips her drink and stays quiet, which you know is bad, because you don’t mind companionable silences with her, but she always fills any silence that there is to be had.

Instead, she gives you that smile—the one the emoji gave you from her text—and you’re set on edge immediately by the narrowing of her eyes. “Okay, I’m tired of waiting. Spill. I wanna know everything. Well, almost everything. Like, it happened, right? But please don’t tell me how it happened, because I don’t think I could continue living if I imagined Bakugou—”

“Mina.” You’re definitely going to order that drink. “There wasn’t anything that happened. No imagining. Please. I feel like it would traumatize the both of us.”

“Right.” She rolls her eyes. “You didn’t send me a good night text and I’m supposed to believe that it’s not because you were occupied with the same guy you were flirting with all night?”

That scatters your brain a little. “Excuse me?”

“You weren’t even in the door before the tension was practically choking me.” She takes a sip of her cocktail that’s probably too large to be categorized as a sip, and you realize that this isn’t her first drink of the night. “Denki wants to start a betting pool on when you guys’ll finally give in and hook up, but I told him that would be mean because it would be like going behind your back, so you’re welcome for that. But! I would have won because I knew it was going to happen soon. He just looks at you like, all the time.”

“That’s…” Everything sinks in very slow. Like it’s shifting through sap. The words stick together and expand on their own time. “He does what?”

“Hey, troublemakers. You start without me?” Denki pulls out the chair next to Mina and sits down with a wide grin and a suggestive curve of his eyebrows. God, you want to rip the expression off his face for choosing this moment to show up.

Mina finishes her drink. “No, we would never!”

Denki orders more for the table, including one for you, even though you make a show of protesting like you usually do because you don’t want Mina to know how much she’s rattled you.

Because he doesn’t do that—he doesn’t look at you. He glares. He curses the ground you walk on. He would prefer it if you could work in a different building so you wouldn’t sometimes run into each other in Might Riot’s breakroom while getting cups of extra-caffeinated tea, which infuriates you because he has a fancy K-Cup machine in his office that Kiri got him last year. Might Riot was ranked the third best hero agency in Tokyo, the front-page article from that day’s newspaper framed and displayed in the lobby, and Kiri got everyone gifts. Bakugou still grouses that they shouldn’t frame anything until they’re ranked first, but it makes Kiri happy so he lets it stay up.

Sero joins the table next, slumping into the seat and offering a tired smile. For someone that had an awful work ethic at UA, he really does put in a lot of time as a sidekick. “I ordered. Hope that’s cool.”

Around the arriving drinks, Mina tries to give Sero a hard time about not waiting for everyone, but he just shrugs and says, “I’m hungry.”

“So am I, but I’m polite, you jerk!”

Denki snorts. “Yeah, and you’re also already tipsy because you didn’t get food when you got here. Sero’s just thinking a step ahead. Don’t be jealous of the power his beautiful brain holds.”

Sero raises his glass to cheers Denki. “Nowhere near as powerful as yours.”

And things are okay for a little while—you talk with your friends like everything is normal. Like you don’t go home and lie in bed and stare at the clock on your side table and count the minutes as they pass and think of what you can’t have.

Your schedules are all over the place and that makes it hard to coordinate something that everyone can attend, so you try to appreciate it when you’re all together. You missed this over the past couple weeks. Seeing Sero’s wide smile, hearing Denki’s dumb jokes, and most of all, being able to talk to Mina openly. You don’t need to think about things between her and Kiri. You also don’t need to think about Bakugou’s teeth on your neck.

Shit, okay. You’re thinking about it.

You see a flash of red, and then you can hear Kiri’s exuberant greeting to the host over the restaurant’s chatter-filled hum. You’re preparing yourself to see him and Mina flirt over their bowls of tonkatsu, maybe feed each other in a Lady-and-the-Tramp-spaghetti-scene kind of way—

But then your heart fucking stops, because behind Kirishima, unmistakably, is the man that was not supposed to be here.

In the few, blissful moments before everything goes to shit, you notice he switched to his winter outfit—the one with those sleeves that hug his arms a little too tight. His shoulders fill out the costume so well, and how did you never notice that before?

Blood-red eyes snap to yours, hot with metallic anger.

Fuck. First, you feel fear. Pure, uncut terror because that anger is directed solely at you. But hidden badly underneath that fear is a shiver of something else, something like anticipation and excitement and dread all thrown together into a pot to boil. You immediately shift your gaze to Mina and pretend that you’re a part of her conversation. You can hear the shaky breath you take and you hope no one else does. You can still feel him staring, his eyes boring holes into you that will be there long after dinner is over.

Sero moves across to your side of the table, and you realize he’s freeing up the seat next to Mina so that Kiri can sit there, and that puts everything else you’re feeling on pause.

Because now there is a place that Kiri is supposed to be and a place that you are not.

And he sits and smiles at everyone, and he sees you and says hello and tells you he’s so glad you made it because you usually aren’t able to make dinner plans, and he looks at Mina afterwards and says, “Hey.”

It’s the smallest thing. Just a greeting. Just a word. He says it to you every day. But he has never said that word to you like he just has to Mina.

You’re so completely sure that he’s falling in love with her.

Someone clears their throat from beside you—and your attention turns towards Bakugou, who has taken the only available seat at the table by your side. You try not to look directly at him, but when you risk a glance, your eyes meet immediately because he’s just been looking at you this whole time. The attention makes you feel dizzy. Hot. You should probably get a glass of water to drink and another to pour over your head.

Denki turns to Mina and puts his fist over his heart in salute. “Your highness, can I order food now? Everyone’s here.”

“Oh my god, you’re so annoying,” Mina says, smacking at his arm. “But yeah, let’s go. I’m gonna get curry sauce on mine!”

“An excellent choice,” Kirishima says, beaming, as if Mina’s choice of katsudon topping has revolutionized his entire world. “But I think getting an egg on top is pretty cool, too. Maybe I’ll get two bowls. Dude," he starts, turning to Bakugou, "if you get two as well we can see who finishes them the fastest.”

“No.” Deadpan. Furious. God, you’re in for it.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” Kirishima says with a toothy smile, and the three of them head towards the counter to order.

You’re safe because Sero is here. You can’t be alone with Bakugou because Sero, your good friend, has your back. But he’s almost smirking at you because he knows something’s up, and you try to use a combination of brow and mouth movements to soundlessly tell him that if his ass leaves the seat, you will kill him at a later date and hide his body somewhere Mina will never have to see it.

“I’m going to grab a soda from the machine outside. I have to go on night patrol after this, so I can’t drink.” Which is a shitty excuse, because he literally has a half-finished cocktail on the table in front of him.

Bakugou grunts. Not in a good enough mood to even respond with words.

You mouth, No, and then, Sero, I swear to god.

With a wide smile, he’s gone, and it’s just you and Bakugou at the tiny table in the back of the tonkatsu place, too far away from your friends for you to call out to them for help.

It’s the heaviest silence you’ve ever experienced. The kind before a funeral, when no one has arrived yet and it’s just the family waiting for that terrible, inevitable moment when time has to start passing again.

“You got a fucking problem with me or something?”

Your drink tastes good. There’s notes of coconut in there. You wonder if they used Malibu. It’s also nice that you don’t have to respond while drinking.

“Hey, dumbass.” The words are so full of frustration that they come out snarled. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

And—you don’t want to give in, but there’s just something in his voice. Something genuine even in the aggression. Pleading, even though Bakugou never pleads. He just takes what he wants.

You look at him and he’s fuming. It makes no sense that you avoiding him for a week has pissed him off so much, which means he has to be angry because of what happened on movie night.

It’s not your fault if he’s angry about it—you both consented. He was a part of it as much as you were. Besides, you really don’t want to risk talking about it when you’re so close to everyone else because if they find out… you’re not sure. You’re worried this will cause a fracture that can’t be repaired. You don’t want to be the reason that things change.

“You forget how to fucking speak?” His lips pull back from his teeth slightly when he talks and it’s aggressive in a way that makes your stomach twist. He looks like he’d kill someone if they tried him right now.

God, your hands are shaking. This is really bad. He’s sort of yelling at you and you’re kind of turned on by it and you’re also terrified but the first part is more worrying than the second. “I can speak. I just don’t have anything good to say to you right now.”

He lets out a long breath, and you can feel how frustrated he is by the heat that radiates from him—from his hands, never a good sign. He can completely control when he produces explosions now, but you’re reminded of high school when his palms would crackle with miniature combustions, rage poorly concealed. “You said you were gonna get over yourself and now you’re even worse. The fuck happened?”

“You already know what fucking happened."

He sits with that for a few, long seconds. There’s a hardness that comes down behind his eyes like a curtain, and though his anger seems more subdued, it has not left his voice in the slightest. “You were okay with everything when your tongue was in my mouth, so what changed?”

“Keep your voice down,” you hiss. That image manifests in your head and for a moment you can almost taste the mint from the Altoids and feel his large hands on your waist. In your peripherals, you monitor your friends at the counter, waiting for them to turn around so you can cut this conversation off before it really begins. “I’m just worried. I don’t want to make things weird for everyone. I feel like enough stuff has already happened to change the dynamic, and—I don’t want to cause problems.”

“Just don’t tell them about it.” His leg bounces restlessly under the table. “Problem solved.”

You should have expected him to think about it like this. But it’s not that simple. If you don’t tell anyone, it still doesn’t mean you’re going to forget. He goes to work and saves people and gets to go feral and explode shit and you’re sitting at home thinking about his stupid fucking hands.

He makes a frustrated noise and leans forward, resting his arms on the table. He’s too big for this setting. Not just physically, but—it’s strange, seeing him outfitted as a hero in a restaurant that’s so traditional and small. “So you got worried over nothing. I still don’t get why you had to avoid me.”

“What, like there was an alternative?” And maybe this is too far for this conversation. Maybe you’re asking questions that are verging too much into emotional territory. “You want me to talk to you about stuff I’m worried about?”

He frowns at you. “I’m not gonna do a heart-to-heart, or whatever. But—if there’s a problem, just fucking tell me. Don’t make me guess. We’re… friends.”

“We’re… friends?” You are, but—he’s never said it before.

“You’re so fucking difficult,” he mutters, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples with two gentle fingers. It’s a challenge to dissect the emotions on Bakugou’s face when they all end up looking like they’re somewhere on the spectrum of mildly annoyed to fully enraged. “Just tell me I didn’t fuck anything up.”

The door to the restaurant opens, another party of excited tourists asking for the wait time for a table, and outside’s afternoon breeze slides through the small room like hot butter, ruffling Bakugou’s hair. Soft. You feel like you’ve only ever known his hard angles, the quick temper and the loud voice and the murderous intent.

It’s almost funny that he thinks he might have fucked things up. You’re the one that fucked things up by getting images of him stuck in your head and forgetting how to let them out.

If the circumstances hadn’t been right, if the stars hadn’t fucking aligned to put you in this specific situation with this specific person in this specific emotional state, you wouldn’t allow yourself to be vulnerable with him. “You didn’t. It’s me. I—overthought stuff.” You just want to crawl into a hole and stop having this whole conversation. “We can go back to being at each other’s throats now.”

He’s tired. It’s in the slope of his shoulders, the way he sits in his chair, still a powerful, intimidating force, but not like he is in the hero merch and the ads on television and the magazine shoots that Kiri forces him to do. He’s human. Like your friends. Like you. Working too much and not having a lot to go home to.

You’re starting to feel that your emptiness echoes his more closely than you might have imagined.

“It’s not a crime for you to feel shit.” He’s quiet again, like he’d been when the two of you were alone. It’s jarring to hear him like this out in public. Like it’s not Bakugou that you’re talking to. “Just stop getting stuck in your head about it and stop avoiding me. It’s annoying.”

Bakugou doesn’t do feelings. He’s brutally honest and inconsiderate and a fucking brat a lot of the time, but this—you almost understand what’s beneath his words. You think he does want you to be your normal self again, truly happy instead of going through the motions. Speaking whenever you feel like it instead of speaking when spoken to.

But he’s never wanted you to be happy before, and part of you wants to know what’s changed. Again, you’re asking questions you shouldn’t be, but you can’t help yourself. “It’s not like we’re super close. Why do you care this much?”

He adjusts his orange-palmed gloves and stretches out his fingers. He’s wearing his spare gauntlets today. Less polished. You have his regular ones in the lab. He should have come to ask you for them if he was going out on any kind of business with Kiri. These are for emergencies, worst case scenarios.

For a few seconds, he just stares at his hands, lacing and unlacing his fingers so carefully that the action feels like it’s not his. You think he’s done with the conversation, but he looks at you, face drawn as if he’s thinking about how to say something. Teaching himself the words before he speaks them.

You find that you want to know. You want him to tell you.

“Yo, Katsuki. We gotta go.” Kiri is standing across the table, and you hadn’t even noticed him walk over. You can usually hear him coming from a mile away when he’s in his hero costume. The heavy boots are a dead giveaway.

He’s serious in a way that can only mean something bad has happened, and you immediately look for everyone else—but they’re okay, Sero joining Mina and Denki at the counter where they must be waiting for their food. All safe.

He continues, that same serious look on his face that’s reserved only for dire situations. “A prison transport van just got torn apart.”

“That’s vague as fuck,” Bakugou mutters, but he’s still standing, ready for any kind of call to action. “You want me to guess which asshole did it?”

“I’ll fill you in on the way.” It’s always been easy to know what Kiri’s feeling because he’s so open. His emotions display fully on his honest face. He looks at you for the sharpest second and you see an apology in his eyes, and you know what he’s protecting you from.

He doesn’t want to say the name because he knows you’re still thinking about this villain—the one that gave him the scar currently hidden by his left shoulder guard.

“Sorry we have to skip out on dinner.” Kiri frowns and you hate it when he’s not happy. His face was made for smiling. Eyes perfect for expressing joy, even when he’s fighting. “Promise me you’ll come out again soon, though. Okay?”

So earnest. You can barely look at him. But you want to make him happy. “I’ll try my best.”

He shoots you a thumbs up and a smile that’s not as bright as his usual ones, but it’s still something. He turns to leave, and Bakugou only hesitates for a second before following him, and then they’re heading towards the door with purpose, too large for the low ceilings and tiny tables of the tonkatsu place. An extreme discordance, like they’re pictures cut out of a magazine and superimposed on a regular photograph.

Mina comes back and tells you to come to the counter so you can order, and you follow her and smile and do all the right things.

But you can’t stop thinking about what he was going to say. It’s just another thing about him that will haunt you in the moments when you’re alone.

Chapter Text

You have new messages from RIOT!

RIOT (8:06 PM):
hey! I know you don’t like to be surprised, so I wanted to let you know that Mina is on her way to yours

RIOT (8:07 PM):
she’s worried about you. I am too. I know you’ve been down lately

RIOT (8:09 PM):
you know we’re always here for you, right?

RIOT (8:12 PM):
this is what friends are for! tell us anything you need us to do and we’ll do it!

RIOT (8:19 PM):
do I need to come over there too?

tech support (8:20 PM):
I think I can only handle the overwhelming support from Mina rn, but I know you guys are there for me. Im sorry she felt she had to come all the way out here

tech support (8:21 PM):
I dont want to cause you guys any problems

RIOT (8:22 PM):
problems?? no. the last time we had some middle schoolers tour the agency, bakugou blew up a whole training ground and me and their teacher had to convince them that blowing things up isn't a solution for every situation. THAT’S a problem. you needing to talk out some stuff is not one of those

RIOT (8:22 PM):
it was a manly display though. the kids were really impressed

tech support (8:24 PM):
kiri. do not encourage him

She shows up with a twenty-four pack of White Claws and three boxes of fancy Valentine’s Day chocolate that you’re sure have been in her pantry since February. “Get it? Because I heart you.” She tries to draw the outline of a heart in the air and nearly drops the drinks.

You narrow your eyes. “Are the chocolates the ones with the gross fruit cream inside?”

“You insult me.” She displays the chocolate boxes like they’re treasured pieces of art. “Ganache. Marshmallow. Caramel.”

“Sea salt or regular?”

She scoffs dramatically. “Do I look like a woman without taste? Sea salt, obviously.”

“Give me those.” You grab the drinks and help Mina inside.

As much as you’re pleased to see her, you don’t know what you did wrong.

You’d been careful. When you see Kiri at work, you smile and wave at him and he always smiles back. When Mina texts you sixty times about a new show she’s watching, you respond with your usual low-energy enthusiasm and try to watch some episodes to understand what she’s talking about. These are the normal things you do. Mina is still worried enough to come to your apartment, uninvited, with snacks and drinks she knows you like.

Making herself at home, Mina immediately heads into the living room to settle on your couch. She throws on a background show, crime scene investigators and FBI agents milling around an unconvincing dead body.

You sit next to her and the both of you crack open your drinks, and you don’t want Mina to feel like you’re ungrateful—but you need to know. “What made you come visit?”

The grapefruit White Claw she’s holding has accents almost the same color as her hair, and she drags her thumb through the condensation on the can. “You texted me the other day and ended two messages in a row with a period. And when I sent you the little cowboy emoji this morning you didn’t send it back. I know work has been stressful for you, but those things aren’t about work stuff. You always text me like normal when you’re stressed about work stuff. So it has to be personal stuff that’s bothering you.”

You shouldn’t have underestimated Mina. She was the first person that wanted to be your friend at UA. She was the reason you got good grades in your worst subject (what kind of support tech needs to know hero history?) because she’d force you to attend study sessions where Bakugou basically tortured everyone to brain death. Up until all this, she was the one you called when you were sad. She knows you.

You need to tell her. But your throat is full of cotton.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up at the tonkatsu place, but those Midoriya Malibus hit like, super hard.” She takes your hand in hers and it’s warm and soft from the expensive lotus blossom lotion she uses, and you should be tense but all you can think about is how fucking dumb the name of that drink is. “Did Bakugou do something? You haven’t been the same since movie night, and Kiri texted him when we got to the station and he didn’t respond for like hours, and I know he’s an awful texter but I thought maybe something good finally happened, but you’ve been so withdrawn since then and now I’m worried that it was something bad, like maybe he yelled at you for a couple hours and then left or something—”

“Mina.” You squeeze her hand and take a sip of your drink because you’re going to need it. Raspberry. Not enough alcohol. So many questions are running through your head. “He didn’t do anything like that.”

“But he did something. Right?”

You’ve kind of lied to her before about this but now, in your apartment, on the couch she bought for you, the background noise of her favorite show buzzing in your ears, you feel like you can’t lie anymore. Admitting to your feelings about Kiri and what happened with Bakugou feels like admitting to accidentally rear-ending your friend’s car. Fucking painful, but necessary.

“Hey.” She tugs on your hand and you look at her and she’s serious, and Mina is almost never serious when she’s not in her hero costume. But the look on her face is the same one she gives when she’s determined to defeat an enemy. Pinky facing down her adversary. “You can tell me. I don’t care that we’ve all known him since UA. If he did something that made you uncomfortable, I’ll make sure he regrets it. I’ll get him fired from his own agency.”

This is not like her. She’s always worried for you when you’re not at your best, but this is different.

And it’s this that makes you realize you need to tell her. At least about Kiri. Because she’s been such an amazing friend to you, and you’ve been lying to her and hiding yourself away and making her worry. Your voice is strained when you speak, but once you start it’s like you can’t stop, the cork removed from your bottled secrets. “He was—being a good friend. For once. Making sure I was okay.”

Quietly, slowly, you explain the situation to Mina. The moment at UA when you saw Kiri perform in the sports festival and he smiled and declared that he would do his best and your heart decided that he was the one. The years of pining. Why you wanted to skip movie night. Feeling like you had to withdraw from the group a little because you can’t handle seeing them together, even though you want the best for them. Because you want the best for them. “I felt like if I told you about this, things would go badly. I don’t want to lose you guys. I don’t want to lose you.”

Mina is quiet the whole time. When you’re done, tired from the toll honesty takes on the body, she nods to herself. “Why didn’t you ever do anything about it? Tell him or something? Or tell me like years ago?”

“It didn’t feel like I was allowed to, I guess. I couldn’t tell him, because if it went badly, it might have made things awkward for all of us. I didn’t want to tell you because…” You really have to think about it for a second. But you know why. “I felt kind of insecure about it. I mean, he’s a hero. I’m just a support tech. I’m not on that level.”

“Don’t say that. You’re on the same level as all of us, but we’re just doing different things. Like, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about engineering, and you build hero gear for ten hours every day.” She looks at you with such conviction, and this is the person that could tell you weren’t feeling yourself because of a cowboy emoji and a couple periods. Her grace is something you don’t deserve, but it’s something you should have known she would give you, because she cares enough to notice these things. That kind of care doesn’t just get dropped because of stuff like this. “I knew something was up. I wish you would’ve told me, but I understand why you didn’t. I’m glad you’re not alone with those feelings anymore, though.”

Your thoughts drift to Bakugou, his careful hands and his unkind words and what he might have said to you at the tonkatsu place. “I wasn’t completely alone. At least, on movie night. Bakugou helped, I guess.”

She snorts. “I can’t even imagine what he said to you. I bet it was so awkward.”

“It… was.”

“For real,” she says, shaking her head, “you and Kiri are like, the only people he does anything for. Sometimes I wonder if he would even speak to me if he didn’t have to.”

And that—strikes you. Being put on the same level as Kiri when it comes to Bakugou. There’s a trust between them that you haven’t even attempted to form with him. “I think it was just a full moon. Or maybe he was paying off a blood-debt by being nice to me.”

“Are you kidding me? He literally sent you flowers on your birthday. Do you know how many times he’s sent me flowers?”

You do.

“None! He’s been nice to you at least twice.”

“He sent me a bouquet of tulips, which I’m super allergic to—seriously, I broke out in hives—with a card that said ‘Get Well Soon.’” When you got the flowers, something possessed you to put that card on your fridge, and it hung there for a long time until Bakugou came over for a movie night and asked you why you kept it. Your lack of an answer annoyed him. You threw it away the same night. “I don’t think it was out of the kindness of his heart.”

“He used to walk you to the train station when we’d go to the bar.”

Damn—you’d actually forgotten about those nights. There had been a short-lived series of hangouts that got you and your friends banned from the wine bar on the corner of Mina’s block because Denki got progressively louder with each glass. The owner’s patience ran out after enough nights of his renditions of “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes sung horrendously out of key.

That was years ago, and you’re surprised that you’d forgotten about it so easily, but it’s probably because those nights were focused on getting drunk and nothing else. It had only been a year or so since you’d all graduated from UA. You’re not sure your body can handle that kind of drinking anymore.

You have fragments—Sero giving Denki a piggy-back ride down the street at dusk, peals of Mina’s laughter filling the space between buildings. These were nights that were skippable in comparison to movie night, but Bakugou had been there a lot, even though he didn’t drink like the rest of you. He was like a chaperone. Just there to make sure you all didn’t die of stupidity on the way out of the bar.

“He walked everyone home,” you say, because it’s true. You’d all leave together, and your friends would slowly split from the group when their apartment buildings were reached until it was just you and Bakugou walking in silence. “The train station is on the way back to his place.”

She shakes her head. “If you didn’t come out, he’d leave way earlier than the rest of us.”

“I just don’t think he’d do something like that on purpose. It’s not—he doesn’t care enough.” Coincidences happen. It doesn’t mean anything. You repeat this in your head until you start to believe it.

Mina shrugs and grabs one of the heart-shaped boxes, peeling off the red plastic wrapping and sliding off the top. “Keep telling yourself that. Just let me know when you guys finally seal the deal. I’ve got money on the line.”

“I thought you said you told Denki not to take any bets.” You frown but still pick out a chocolate from the box. When you bite into it, it’s caramel. You remember Bakugou’s hands and almost choke.

“I could only hold out for so long.” She pops a chocolate in her mouth and continues to talk while chewing. “And also I told you about it, so it’s still technically not going behind your back.”

You can’t be mad at Mina—not for something as harmless as this. You enjoy the time you have with her because it’s precious. You watch police procedurals and eat almost all of the chocolate she brought and knock out half of the White Claws.

And you wonder what else you’ve forgotten. What details slipped through the cracks because they hadn’t been important to you then like they are now.

Chapter Text

You have new messages from charging cable!

charging cable (8:44 PM):
Were holding a surprise party for kiri and mina

charging cable (8:45 PM):
Im sure u already know but

charging cable (8:46 PM):
fwd from Mina!!!:
DENKI. ME & EI WERE WATCHING THE GINKGOS FALL & HE USED THE L WORD WHAT DO I DOOOOO

charging cable (8:46 PM):
Took them long enough lmao but i feel like we should celebrate their blooming romance

charging cable (8:47 PM):
Dont worry well hold a party for u and baku as well when u finally make out

charging cable (9:01 PM):
U didnt have 2 leave me on read i was kidding

charging cable (9:02 PM):
Ur the only other responsible one in the squad so lmk when we should go buy stuff

charging cable (9:04 PM):
And also can we use ur place bc mine is not clean. And sero wont come over to help me clean up even tho its his fault its like this

charging cable (9:04 PM):
Or u can bribe sero into helping me. Use that big agency ¥ ¥. The choice is urs techie… pick wisely

It’s late.

You didn’t bother to get up after sunset to close your curtains, and there’s a faint, pulsing light that casts the room in a cold blue glow. From where you lay on the couch, you’ve memorized all the cracks in the ceiling’s plaster. They run together whenever your vision blurs, and then things are okay again for a little bit and they become clear and distinct.

There’s the obvious thing that’s bothering you, and then there’s the little things.

You watched those text messages roll in, and you don’t blame Mina for not telling you first. Because she doesn’t want to hurt you—your feelings are important to her. But something twisted in your gut when you saw her call him Ei. So fucking casual, and intimate, and weird because even though he’s the friendliest guy on the planet, the only person that calls Kiri by his first name is Bakugou because he’s weird about shit like that. The rest of you gave him a nickname in high school and it just stuck.

You’re going to be calling him Kiri for the rest of your life. You’ll never get that level of intimacy that Mina so effortlessly waltzed into.

Sometimes you feel like you’re over it and then sometimes you get hit with things like this and you realize you’re not. Not entirely. This kind of thing declares finality, the removal of any sort of chance you could have had. Not like you thought you had a chance anyway, but it’s only been a month. And you know Mina—she’s easygoing, but she’s careful. She wouldn’t tell just anyone that she loved them so soon into a relationship.

That kind of admiration for one another, the careful, nuanced feelings that sprouted from childhood experiences and grew as they became the people they are now, is something you don’t share with him.

It could be funny that you and your best friend fell in love with the same person. But there’s a thought that lurks in the back of your mind. Can your feelings towards Kiri really be classified as love when compared to hers? Where do you draw the line between love and infatuation?

Besides all that, no matter what Mina told you, they’re heroes. And you’re support. It’s obvious that he would want to be with her. You’ve seen that divide between you and your friends before, and you’ve told yourself that it’s not as big as it seems. That you belong, and that you’ve earned your place at the reserved-for-heroes tonkatsu table.

But you haven’t. The cracks in the ceiling blur again.

It could be minutes or hours that pass, but eventually, there’s a knock at the door. Soft at first, and then louder, like the person outside is getting impatient. Probably because you haven’t moved since they started knocking.

It’s the middle of the fucking night. No one should be here.

But you shuffle towards the door, and the sigh that comes from you is rib-cracking. You check the peephole, not sure what to expect. It could be a murderer. It could be your landlord. Both are options you would like to avoid.

It’s neither. Standing in the cold, arms crossed and geared-up, is Bakugou.

And for some weird, fucked-up reason, you’re so thankful that he’s here that your emotions soak into the background and your only focus is to get him inside. To just have him around you.

The door creaks as it opens. The chill of the outside creeps in, finding your skin through your Might Riot brand sweatpants and long-sleeved top—not purchased by you, because you tend to avoid Dynamight merch, but given to the support staff when Kiri decided he wanted to partner with a boutique clothing store in Shinjuku to help publicize the agency. The X across your chest is the same as the one across his.

There is a long moment that passes, stretching out like taffy. His brows are drawn and he’s scowling, but not as much as usual. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“Dumbass,” he mutters. He shakes his head but his voice is softer than usual. Dulled. He pushes past you and walks into your apartment, and the sigh that leaves your lungs is one of relief, as if you’d been waiting for him this whole time and he finally made it.

You close your door and follow him. He’s going through your kitchen cabinets again.

When he looks at you, he’s frowning. Nothing like the normal scowl or the deep frowns he shoots your way daily. Something more delicate. He’s not wearing his mask, and you can see the fine lines on his forehead caused by years of aggressively furrowing his brow. They’re softened by the expression on his face. “Sit down.”

And you just do it. No fighting back. You sit at the counter and prop your head up on a hand and watch as he keeps moving around, and you realize very slowly that he’s grabbing food he needs to prepare a meal. He pulls out one of your pans from below the sink and turns on the electric stove plate, and quietly, he starts cooking. “Ei told me when we were on patrol.”

You nod. Of course he knows why you’re wrecked—you’re so predictable. “Mina calls him Ei, too.” Like their shoes next to each other in your entryway. Like the way he said hey to her at the tonkatsu place. These details are important and knife-sharp.

His focus is on chopping week-old scallions he pulled out of your fridge, but his shoulders tense at your words. The scallions sizzle when they hit the pan.

He’s very careful when he cooks. Every cut, every measurement, is precise. You’ve never really seen him like this—head down, quiet and almost calm. The way his eyes follow his movements is mesmerizing.

His gauntlets sit on the kitchen counter, taken off before he had to deal with the stove plate—probably a safe choice. You finished tweaking them a few days ago, their new functionality ready to be used.

Not that Bakugou is in the habit of limiting himself when he fights. He just can’t always be outside, and the Might Riot property damage numbers have gotten lower over the years, but they’re still high comparatively. Smaller explosions mean less bills.

You remember back at UA when the gauntlets were practically the size of his body. They’re so much smaller now, optimized for agility and free movement. All your suggestions that he’d taken without fighting you because he knows you’re good at your job.

“You need to buy more food.” More chopping. Ginger root this time. The sound of paper tearing with each slice. “Your fridge is pathetic.”

“I know.”

He sighs, and you understand his frustration. Neither of you are good at whatever is happening here.

He adds leftover noodles from a Tupperware you forgot you had to the pan and the aromatics of onion and olive oil and good cooking waft through the kitchen for the first time in months. You’re not an awful cook, but you have a bad habit of eating instant meals and frozen entrees. They require less energy after your full days.

Having someone do this for you—letting Bakugou do this for you—is unexpectedly pleasant.

The bowl of fried noodles he puts down in front of you looks like heaven. “Eat. And get some better shit for me to cook with next time.”

Your eyes shoot up to him and he immediately busies himself with preparing another bowl, but you see his jaw clench.

The concept of next time sits heavy with you. Bakugou is probably never going to cook for you again. But you wonder if he would want to. If he would come back. There’s no reason for you to want him to, but—it would be nice.

You both eat in silence, Bakugou leaning back against the kitchen counter where your hero-themed appliances are all piled up: a Pinky waffle iron, a Chargebolt electric kettle that’s going to look great next to the matching toaster when it’s finally back in stock, an unlicensed Cellophane blender that sent Sero into hysterics when he first saw it, his face superimposed on the lid. “Why do you buy all this?”

You shrug. “Some of it’s actually cool. Some I just buy because I like supporting my friends.”

He picks up the blender’s lid and considers Sero’s face. “This is just crap they mass produce for easy sales. Your money isn’t going into the pockets of anyone you know.”

“It’s more personal than that. There’s something about having them come here and seeing that I bought this stuff.” You realize that this isn’t the best way to show your friends that you care, but it’s hard to just give praise like it’s nothing. Those kinds of words aren’t in your lexicon. “I just—don’t know how else to tell them I support them.”

“None of my shit’s here, though.” His red eyes flick to your sweatshirt for only a second. “Don’t think I deserve your support?”

There’s no heat in the question, but no real curiosity either. It’s like a bait, soon to be followed by the switch. Another tactic. A challenge. Making you fight with him because he knows you like the easy bickering. You’re getting too good at understanding his intentions, and it feels weird that some of them are kind, if misguided.

“You already have a ton of people that support you.” Mainly teenage girls, drawn in by the way the pro hero magazines always focus on the hard planes of his body, the careful, sharp line of his jaw. Dangerous eyes that don’t seem so dangerous in the light of your kitchen. “I don’t think one more person buying a Dynamight keychain is going to help.”

He clicks his tongue, and you see a flash of teeth. Barely a grin. “I better see one on your keys next time you come to work.”

“Are you going to make it a dress code requirement?” You’ll take what he gives you—anything is better than crying on your couch. “That’s an unfair work standard. I’m going to have to file a complaint to Kiri.”

And just like that, the sadness comes back. All it took was his name. You bite the inside of your cheek and look down at your hands and try to not internally curse yourself out for being so easily affected.

You want to not feel like this but you don’t know how. That’s such a rudimentary way to understand emotion but you haven’t exactly nailed the basics yet, and maybe that’s a reflection on who you are as a person, but you’re trying your best.

He makes an annoyed noise and crosses the room, slow. Approaching a ticking bomb. “You done?”

You glare up at him, and you start to say something about him learning to be considerate, but he cuts you off.

“I’m talking about the food.”

Oh. Your bowl is empty—you hadn’t eaten a lot today. It barely took you a few minutes to consume everything he made for you.

Quietly and methodically, he hand-washes your bowl and everything he used to cook, setting it all out on top of a dish towel to dry. You should offer to help but you can’t—you just stare, watching the way the water runs across his careful fingers. When he’s done, he gestures towards the living room with a nod of his head. “Let’s go.”

You trail Bakugou silently, and for a second, you look out the window. The moon hangs low, as if its tether to space has loosened and it has inched closer to the world just to reflect on the sea, to paint all of Kosai silver.

“You can stare from the couch.” He’s beside you, and his voice is quiet. The moonlight paints him silver too, transforming the sharp slope of his nose into a knife between shadow and light. His hair glows, ash blonde turned to mercury.

The way he looks at you—you could mistake it for pity if you didn’t know him well enough. It’s not. It’s deeper, different. Something more gentle than pity and more pointed than kindness.

You’re beyond speaking at this point, so you nod, and that seems to please him.

The cabinet below the television is full of DVDs because you like to collect physical copies of movies that really resonate with you. Bakugou opens it and picks out a few cases, making a different, unimpressed face at each one. “Fuck, your taste in movies is almost as bad as—”

He cuts himself off, lips pursed. Half of the movies in that cabinet are ones that Kiri either recommended to you or brought to movie night, and there’s no possible way you can tell Bakugou that. Not without feeling like you’ll have to throw each carefully selected DVD away.

“You actually watch these?”

You sit on the couch where you’d been crying only a little while ago. “No. I just have the money to burn.”

He shakes his head. “Which one.”

“What?”

“Which movie.” The words are spoken slow, as if you’re having a hard time understanding him.

And you kind of are. He wants to put on a movie for you to watch before he leaves. That’s weirdly considerate. He must have taken a hit to the head in his last fight. “I don’t want anything with a good plot. Pick something with a gun on the cover. Or a squinting man with his arms crossed.”

“I have sunglasses. Not squinting.” He peers down at the DVD in his hands, like he’s really considering the conditions you’ve given him. “Arms are crossed, though. That good enough?”

He doesn’t play along like this often. You kind of laugh and it sounds strained, but it’s still something. “I guess it’ll have to do.”

You see which movie he picks when he puts the assorted cases back, and it’s a drama/action (not an action/drama, and this distinction is very important) from one of the first couple of movie nights you and your friends had. Right out of UA, when Bakugou and Kiri were staring their agency and you were working side gigs in the meantime, everyone else receiving job offers and sidekick positions that would lead them to the agencies where they work today. It feels so far away, but those memories with your friends are still vivid.

He sets up the movie and then stands there, the menu displaying on the screen behind him. He’s backlit, shadowed, and he’s looking at you and you’re looking at him and you’re not really sure what to do. This is the part where he leaves so you can feel sorry for yourself again.

Fuck. You’re going to be alone. Watching a movie that reminds you of a nicer time in your life. Maybe silence would be better, but you’re also pretty sure that when he’s gone, you’re not going to be able to move from the couch.

You hadn’t realized how much space Bakugou takes up—not just physically, but mentally. He can keep your mind off things you don’t want to think about because he’s an expert at pushing your buttons and he knows you love to do the same to him. Since he got to your apartment, you’ve felt… better.

Not okay. Not completely. There’s a wound inside of you that’s going to heal badly, and this is something you’ve known since the minute you realized, fully, that Kirishima will never love you like he does Mina.

And it’s selfish, but you don’t want Bakugou to leave. You want him to continue taking up that space to keep you afloat, and you don’t know what you’re going to do once he’s gone.

“You have to hit play to start the movie. Or actually grab the fucking remote.” He’s playing at impatience but not hitting the mark. Rubbing the back of his neck, he grunts, annoyed. “I don’t have all night.”

“You’re the one that’s just standing there. It’s fucking weird.”

“Play the damn thing and I’ll sit down, dumbass.” He crosses his arms and you swear his hands are shaking. No. Maybe it’s the light. “We’re watching it. I’m not changing the movie now. Your DVD player is confusing as fuck to deal with.”

There’s a kind of tension that suddenly floods out of your chest, replaced with something more chaotic and frightening. “You’re staying?”

“The last train left half an hour ago.” There is something that builds in the silence now. Where it was a calm quiet before, it’s now charged. Not with the kind of energy from the last time you’d been alone with Bakugou, but—something unexpected. Strangely heady.

You’ve never watched a movie alone with him, and even though you could watch a movie alone with any of your other friends like normal, the thought of watching one with him makes you feel dizzy.

“Or I could get someone to pick me up—”

“No.” You say it way too fucking fast and heat shoots up your face. Your ears burn like they never have before. “I mean—you can, uh, stay. Do you want something to change into? I mean, you’re just—your costume is a lot. Of angles, and stuff.”

He doesn’t look at you, but he shifts kind of aimlessly. You could mistake it for sheepishness if it was anyone but him. “That would be—yeah.”

It’s the excuse you need to get up off the couch and walk over to your bedroom, and you close the door behind you even though finding him some clothes won’t take long at all.

This is weird. Right? Your forehead touches the door and the white-painted wood is cool against your heated skin. His hands might not have been shaking, but yours are, and you have to take a few long, calming breaths before you can open your closet and find something that’ll fit him.

Hanging among your jackets is an old blue-and-white Christmas sweater that Sero gave you years ago for Secret Santa, way too big for you because he thinks things like that are funny, a ring of fuzzy snowflakes sewn around the neckline. You also dig out some sweatpants that Denki keeps at your place in case he needs to sleep off the alcohol, usually for the times where you, him, and Mina hang out and gossip. The worst hangovers come the day after, but you always feel like you learn something from those nights.

Clothes in hand, you turn back towards the door and you have to remind yourself that it’s just Bakugou out there. He’s tired just like you and he feels real human emotion under his aggressive façade and there are freckles on his shoulders.

These thoughts are supposed to be reassuring and they're not.

You have butterflies so unpleasant that they probably can’t be classified as butterflies. This is what dread feels like, you think—or anticipation. Both shifting back and forth together in your sternum. It’s harder to breathe than normal.

He’s waiting where you left him, still standing. He could have sat down like any other person would have, but he’s never understood normal human functions very well. You walk over and hand him the clothes, and his hands brush against yours and heat creeps into your face again.

This man fucked you on your kitchen counter. A brief touch shouldn’t be this much of an issue.

He heads into your room to change in the adjoining bathroom, and you sit. Knee pads and utility pouches clatter to the ground, audible through your thin walls. You try not to think about the clothes being peeled off his hard body, and—man, you fail.

When did you start thinking about him like this? You’ve always known that he’s unfairly handsome, but these kinds of feelings are on another level. They’re hard to decipher. They’re primarily about the physical aspect of his skin, and his chest when your hands had been on it, and—fuck. Fuck. But they’re also nuanced in a way you don’t like. You’re not just thinking about what already happened—you’re thinking about how nice it would be to touch him again. For him to want you to.

Your phone buzzes, and it’s way too late for anyone you know to be up, unless Mina’s typical Saturday night Criminal Minds binge lasted into the late hours of night. But when you pull it from your pocket and check your messages, there’s just one.

From Kiri.

hey, are you okay??? katsuki said he had to leave patrol early for an emergency and I checked his phone’s location because I got worried about him and saw he’s at your place

Bakugou likes to do all the work he can at Might Riot. He doesn’t shrug off responsibility just because he co-owns an agency. He does patrol shifts because he wants to set a good example for the sidekicks that work for him.

do you guys need me to stop by? I can get someone to cover the shift, I really don’t mind!

He left his shift early. You think of those knife-sharp details. Those things that feel important for reasons you don’t want to place. You force yourself to exist in the liminality, in the space between realization and ignorance.

The text in response is short. I’m okay! don’t worry! You should probably give Kirishima more context. In case he gets ideas about why Bakugou is here.

But you don’t. He’s missing patrol.

He walks out of your room, pulling at the neckline of the Christmas sweater, which is the tackiest thing he’s ever worn. You’re sure of this. He won’t wear jeans unless they cost upwards of ten-thousand yen. The sweater pulls too tightly across his shoulders, the snowflakes stretching out into warped imitations of what they used to be. “This is itchy as hell. Didn’t you have anything—”

“Did you leave patrol early to come here?”

His eyes snap to yours and he stops tugging at the sweater. His face is unreadable but his silence isn’t. He lets the question sit in the air like he needs the time to think of an answer. “Already told you I came after I heard the news.”

“You never miss your shifts.” He hasn’t missed a day of work since he opened the agency. He doesn’t take time off. His work ethic is as insane as he is. And he’s here in your apartment.

He shrugs, the movement approaching the kind of casual confidence you're used to seeing from him but not quite getting there. “I know Eijirou can handle it. You gonna quiz me on more shit that doesn’t matter, or are we gonna watch this movie?”

You don’t believe it’s that simple. That easy. “We can watch the movie.”

“Good.”

You’re in that predicament again where neither of you knows what to do, and the same charge builds, a loaded gun. Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber. Something has to happen.

“I’m fucking tired of this. Just—move over.” He stalks across the room and the couch is massive, but you move over anyway and he still sits too close to you and your heart is hammering in your chest.

He starts the movie and doesn’t look at you, but he puts an arm across the back of the couch and you are in arm-span range, mostly because his arms are fucking big. He’s not wearing cologne tonight. All you can smell is that burnt-sugar caramel, much stronger than usual.

And neither of you speak about it because you can’t. Because any kind of acknowledgement, any sort of indication that either of you is fully aware of what is going on, would break this kind of space you’ve built, as awful and strained as it is.

But it only takes the slightest shift and you’re sitting against his side, and… fuck. You never realized how important it is to be touched.

His warmth is intoxicating, and you know you should stop what you’re doing and maybe sit across the room from him and also never look at him again, but it’s hard not to sink into his side. You lay your head on his shoulder, placing yourself into the crook of his arm, and you can hear his heartbeat. As quick as yours, fleet-footed and telling.

You hadn’t even realized the movie started, but the same bad actors are reciting their cliché lines and the screen is a little blurry, like the cracks in the ceiling earlier.

His arm leaves the back of the couch to wrap around your shoulders, and you can tell he’s still not looking at you—his entire body feels stiff, coiled steel cable pulled taught. You feel that same tension in your back, your awkwardly placed arms.

Both of you are waiting for the other person to acknowledge that this is okay through more than a hesitant touch.

The thought of speaking about it makes you feel so anxious that you get kind of dizzy, and your brain is going to ruin this fucking moment if you let it, so instead of falling into overthinking like you normally do, you let your body destress, limb by limb.

You untense your neck and your head finds an extremely comfortable spot right against the snowflakes, and you curl your body into his, turning towards him, carefully and slowly moving a hand to rest against his side. You’re not yet bold enough to put it on his chest because that would mean you were doing it on purpose and not just because it feels nice. These are separate things even though they sound the same.

He exhales, slow, and quietly does the same—tries his best, you think, to be languid. To melt into you where you melt into him. His cheek brushes against the top of your head and your heart fucking jumps at the contact.

You let yourself enjoy this. Just for now. A secret moment to keep despite the circumstances.

The movie plays out, the main character learning how to shoot a gun and how to be good at it in an unrealistic amount of time. The villain swearing vengeance for—something from the beginning of the movie that you didn’t catch and have forgotten since the last time you watched it.

You’re not sure what Bakugou wants from you, and honestly, you’re not sure what you want from him. After the last movie night, you’d been convinced that you wouldn’t speak to him about what you’d done. That you wouldn’t think about it again.

But he hasn’t left your head since and now you’ve got his arm around you and you’re listening to his heartbeat and his slow breaths and you’re soaking in the warmth being generated from his hands and you feel fucking happy for once. Which is so strange, because it really puts into perspective how unhappy you’ve been.

Yearning after someone you can’t have. Coming home to nothing.

And you worry, kind of, that you might be assuaging your feelings for Kirishima with Bakugou’s presence, but the two feel separate. You still know where your longing for Kiri lies in your heart, and it’s far away from what you’re feeling now. Something small. Not hopeful, but—pleased to just have this.

“You can do better.”

After so much time in silence, his voice feels too loud, and you jump like he’s done something to scare you.

“Ei’s a good guy. But you should find someone who can be there when you need them.” His voice is strained, the words all strung together a little too purposefully. Like he’s been thinking about how exactly he’s wanted to say this for too long before saying it.

“Someone better than Japan’s manly sweetheart?” God, you sound so fucking nervous. Because you are. “That’s a high standard to put on other people.”

“I’m serious. He’s a hero. You shouldn’t—there’s no good part to that.” His voice is kind of hollow and you suddenly don’t like where this is going at all. “You know the shit we have to deal with. There’s a lot of risk. A lot of time he would’ve had to spend away from you. It doesn’t fucking stop.”

There are no expectations for this. For what’s happening between you. But he loops himself into a group of people he doesn’t think you should be able to touch and that fucking stings, because you were enjoying it. The unspoken connection.

You pull away from him and sit at the edge of the couch, and you’ve watched this movie enough times to know that the ending is coming up, following a touching moment between the two main characters that learn to see each other as brothers. Sappy stuff that Kiri likes. That you like, too.

“I should probably sleep. It’s late.” You check your phone and it’s way past the time you normally go to bed. You stayed up for nothing. Not that you were expecting anything from him. But—you also weren’t expecting to be rejected and embraced in the same moment. To be reminded of the gap between you and him. “I have some pillows and an extra comforter if you want to sleep on the couch.”

“That’s fine.” He bounces his leg restlessly and doesn’t look at you when he speaks.

You step into your bathroom, around his discarded hero outfit, and start getting ready for bed because you're vibrating with too many emotions to head back out there right now and he can fucking wait. If it was possible for you to destroy the ballistic weave of his costume with your bare hands, you’d consider it, but you can’t, and you know that because you designed this type of weave just for him.

You hate that he’s implying you can’t understand someone because you’re not a hero. Because you do understand.

As if you don’t work in the same field. As if you don’t know what the long hours at the agency are like. Mina had been right when she said you put in the same kind of time, because you do. Your life isn’t on the line, but you also don’t have that much of a life to lose—everything is devoted to helping the heroes do what they do best.

And you’re not allowed to even get close to their fucking echelon.

It’s dumb, but you get mad because Bakugou always does this. Ruins everything. Pretends to help and then throws it in your face. And instead of grabbing the spare comforter, you walk back into the living room’s doorway and just stand, simmering, your fingernails digging crescent-moon impressions into your palm. The pain doesn’t cut through the frustration you feel.

You look at him and set your jaw and you try not to think too hard about what you’re about to say because you’d stop yourself on instinct. “Am I not good enough? Is that it?”

His brows raise, and he looks—concerned, maybe. If he’s even capable of being concerned.

That just adds fuel to the growing flame underneath your skin. “I do everything for you. Fucking everything. And I feel stupid for doing that because it’s like I’m dedicating my life to people that barely think about me. You care for me as my friends, but as my associates? As people I devote hours of my fucking life to? There’s nothing. I get nothing back. Just because I don’t have a flashy quirk doesn’t mean I’m useless. I’d love to see how Might Riot would have ranked top three without the things I’ve done for you.”

There is an insuppressible tremor in your hands and you can feel tears burning in your eyes and you know you probably look unhinged right now, but there’s no way to hinge back. You just want to feel like you’ve earned something with your work instead of getting everything because of your friends.

You graduated in the 98th percentile for UA’s support course and you got your job because an angry kid decided he wanted you to work for him and him alone. He chose this life for you and now he can’t even acknowledge that you deserve recognition for it. That you deserve to be on the same level as everyone else.

“I just want it to be enough.” You sound pathetic, but you can’t stop. “It should be enough.”

Bakugou stares at you with an unobstructable focus that you want to hate so bad, but it just makes you feel like you’re going to crumble. You close your eyes and press your thumb and forefinger against your eyelids, physically pushing back your anger. Your frustration, both with him and yourself. Veins and tiny capillaries pulse against your fingers, a headache threatening to surface. Everything is empty and you let it get that way, but he let it get that way too. Let you collapse in on yourself just to meet his standards.

Gentle fingers wrap around your wrist and pull your hand away from your face, and Bakugou is looking down at you. You hadn’t heard him walk over, his boots forgotten on your bathroom floor. He holds your wrist firm but gentle, and you could tug it away from him whenever you want to. You’re sure of this. But you don’t.

You wish he knew what to say to you because he obviously doesn’t. He just stares, and you can see the gears turning in his head, and it’s so fucking awful that it’s this hard for him to tell you that you’ve done a good job. That you’re good enough.

Instead of speaking, he opens your bedroom door and tugs you behind him by the wrist, and you follow him to your bed.

If he thinks he can fix everything with sex, he’s wrong, and you do pull your wrist out of his grasp then, trying to comprehend the depth of his emotional stuntedness if he thinks that this is the best course of action. “I don’t want to—”

“Lie down.” He pulls back the covers and stares at you expectantly.

No heat. No implications of anything physical. Just a plain, quiet request.

You’re tired. So, so tired. Being angry takes up so much energy and the way he’s looking at you makes you decide to just do it. You don’t want to give in to him, but you suddenly want to sleep for as many hours as it takes to feel human again. You approach him and he watches as you get into bed, your body sliding between the covers. It feels nice to finally lie down.

It feels even nicer when Bakugou lies down next to you, pulling your back to his chest and holding you close with a gentle arm around your waist.

You’d pay money to know what’s going on between you. You’d fight God. Whatever it would take. But Bakugou makes it hard, and you make it hard too because you’re scared that asking him about it might ruin the moment. Might make him leave as fast as possible and walk home just so he won’t have to give you an answer.

His breath is soft against your hair, and you can’t remember the last time you’d slept next to someone. It’s been a while. You just—stopped looking at some point. Because you’d been waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen.

His legs mesh against yours and you’re flush against him and it should be just physical because that’s all that the strange connection between the two of you has been, but—

You like this. You like it a lot. And you like that it’s him. You want it to be Bakugou sleeping next to you.

This revelation is too entirely frightening, and you let out a slow, tense breath because you kind of feel like crying, but not even because you’re mourning so many things at once. You just don’t know what the fuck is going on.

“I'll never get how you can be so sad all the damn time.” His voice is low, right next to your ear, and it makes things worse, because it almost sounds like he’s trying to be reassuring. When you don’t respond, he moves the arm that’s holding you upwards and finds your hand, intertwines your fingers, and the touch makes you shiver. Makes the tightness in your throat worse. “Go to sleep.”

And as his breathing evens out, yours does too. You calm your panic and just decide, again, to appreciate what you’re given. Pull his hand to your chest. Soak in his warmth. Memorize the way he feels against you.

You want, so badly, to ask for more.

Chapter Text

You have new messages from Mina!!!!

Mina!!! (6:42 AM):
DID U

Mina!!! (6:42 AM):
SLEEP WITH

Mina!!! (6:42 AM):
KATSUKI

Mina!!! (6:43 AM):
MOTHERFUCKING

Mina!!! (6:43 AM):
BAKUGOU

Mina!!! (6:43 AM):
???????????????

Mina!!! (6:45 AM):
I KNOW HES AT UR PLACE RN

Mina!!! (6:50 AM):
ANSWER ME I DNT CARE IF UR ASLEEP

Mina!!! (6:56 AM):
omg r u still… busy???? EWWW TXT ME BACK ASAP

When you wake up, you’re warm in the kindest of ways. It’s the warmth of the tonkatsu place. Of baked bread pulled fresh from the oven, torn apart and shared amongst friends. Of Bakugou’s arm around you, making you feel safer than you have in a very long time.

And then you sit up, shocked. Alone.

The first thing you feel is shame. Not shame about what you did, but—what you felt. Because he’s not here. He must have left at some point while you were asleep.

If the roles were reversed, you’re not sure you’d be able to leave until you saw his eyes flutter open. Until he spoke the first words of his day to you. Because apparently that matters to you now—being seen and spoken to by him.

But he’s never going to be the person you wake up to.

He doesn’t have those kinds of feelings for you, and he also doesn’t operate like that. Like regular people do. Hero work is the only thing he’s ever really cared about and it shows. He doesn’t form connections with people unless they’re forced upon him, and the last thing you want to do is force anything.

You think he likes your friend group. You’re positive that he would be worse off if he didn’t have the people around him that he does. But you’ve never seen him as the kind of person that could love someone more than he loves himself.

It’s suddenly too hot under your comforter. You need to move to dispel the shiver on your skin, so you get up and head to the bedroom’s single window. It takes a little bit of effort, but you’re able to pry it open and lean out into the morning, forearms propped up on the windowsill, hands just far enough out of the frame to be caressed by the breeze. Your landlord hasn’t replaced any of the missing window screens in the complex, and you know there’s more than yours missing—but this might be the one time that you’re thankful for his laziness.

The building across from yours has rows of its own little windows, some screenless, some housing AC units that jut out of the gray stucco wall like uneven teeth. The smell of salt and sand blows in from the distant sea, almost a physical caress against your skin. You can hear traffic from the main road a few blocks away, the chirp of birds making their morning rounds, the muted sound of the TVs playing in the box window of the used electronics store across the street.

There’s not a lot of people out yet—it’s still too early. But everyone you see meandering down your block has their own sunrise destination. The place they’re willing to get up this early to be. Every window in the building opposite yours is tied to its own person with their own life.

There are so many other, kinder people you could meet and be interested in, but you just love to sabotage yourself. You need to cut this off before it begins growing inside you. Stunt the feelings before they bloom.

You can’t go through this again. Not with him.

You’ve been calling Bakugou your enemy for years. Even though he’s not really an enemy—he’s just an asshole that was badly socialized as a child. Couldn’t you be attracted to someone that knows how to express their emotions in a healthy way? Someone less like you? Not Kiri, but Kiri-adjacent?

Or maybe that’s what’s appealing about Bakugou. Even though they’re best friends, he and Kiri are so unalike. It’s like the principle of opposites attracting. But you’re also Kiri’s opposite, and that meant nothing to any universal principle.

You understand Bakugou on a lot of levels because of your similarity. You know his anger well. You’ve seen him deal with it and get it to a manageable level and you’ve followed the same path, on a much smaller scale, to keeping your own boiling emotions in check.

It’s another reason the two of you shouldn’t—do anything. Be together at any capacity. Because you’re not good at anything except getting on each other’s nerves. Because you know each other’s faults so deeply that there’s no real way to unknow them.

A noise draws your eyes towards your bathroom door—the shower turning on. Water rushing through the old pipes in the wall behind you.

He’s here, still. In your shower.

Somehow, this makes things worse. Because now you have to look at him after you’ve shared such an intimate moment and pretend everything is normal and you’re honestly not sure if you can do it.

There is a clearly discernible before and after to this situation. Fragments of past and future and a threshold between them. Bakugou leading you to the bed and you getting in. You’ve crossed that boundary, that point of no return, falling into the after of things without even thinking about the consequences.

You don’t know how you could have been so stupid when you’re supposed to be smart. It’s literally your job. You’re basically an engineer, for fuck’s sake.

A few minutes pass before the water stops, and you can hear your heartbeat in the silence that settles in the absence of the groaning pipes. The sun has fully risen, but its rays are still that early-gold that comes with the first couple hours of the day, and when you look towards the door, heart in your throat, the light makes everything feel still and ethereal. Like a photograph, a paused moment you’re not quite present in.

You listen. There are bottles of product being moved around. The tap turning on and off. Something clattering to the floor and Bakugou swearing just loud enough for you to hear, confirming that it is indeed him in your bathroom, as if there was a chance that a random person let themselves in during the night just to take a shower. He probably used your soap and that thought gives you goosebumps you didn’t want.

The door opens and he steps out, towel-drying his hair. His skin is slightly flushed from the hot water and he’s wearing Denki’s sweatpants and—fuck, he looks good, but he also looks so fucking normal. Like any other guy in his mid-twenties that works out obsessively and knows about the concept of personal grooming. Just stepping into adulthood even though the world expected you both to do that when you were eighteen.

Neither of you really have a good grasp on your lives as human beings but he’s the number six hero in Japan and you’re the one that makes the gear he uses to protect the country.

In this moment, you’re entirely sure that he could understand your traumas better than anyone else. If you could talk to him about your fears and your insecurities, he would know them as his own. Know you. And isn’t that what you want—to be known?

You don’t like thinking about this. It makes you feel like you want to talk to him for hours when you should be focused on immediately kicking him out of your apartment.

“Took you long enough to wake up,” he says, as if this situation isn’t weird as fuck. He’s even more handsome than usual and you think it has something to do with the way he’s looking at you. It’s not a smile that’s on his face, but it’s not a frown either. It’s careful and not as sharp as you’re used to him being.

“It’s called beauty sleep. Maybe you should try it.” You aren’t as sharp as you typically are either. There’s a warmth in your voice that you can’t seem to quiet.

He puts the towel down on the bathroom’s vanity and walks across the room until he’s right next to you, hovering just far enough away that you don’t feel crowded. You look up at him and you can smell your soap on his skin, the six-hundred-yen body wash you get from the convenience store because you’re too cheap to invest in nice bath products. Clean like linen. In his eyes is a question, but what comes out of his mouth is a softly spoken demand. “Move over.”

And you do—make room for him, shuffling closer to the side of the window so he can stand next to you, lean on the windowsill and let his arm brush against yours. An easy intimacy.

You both watch the movement on the street below. A family bikes past, the children trailing their parents like a line of ducks. Young businesswomen in stylish suits walk in the opposite direction, towards the train station, talking and laughing so loud that their words echo off the buildings, traveling right up to the clear sky.

“Told you it’d be a good idea for you to move out here.” He nudges you slightly, and you can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not, but you lean into the touch. He’s like a sun, generating his own kind of heat, and it’s the perfect protection against the cool breeze of a fall morning.

You wish you weren’t still wearing your sweatshirt—you want to feel his skin on yours. Soak in his warmth directly. “I thought you said that just to be a dick.”

He huffs out a breath and it’s almost a laugh. Something close. “I did.”

Silence stretches out long enough that you wonder if you need to head back inside—end this moment so you can continue your life. The thought of work looms in your mind and you don’t want to consider getting dressed and taking the train into town. You just want to stay here, watching the world unfold around you without you having to take part.

Bakugou breaks the silence before you can make a decision. “I grew up near here.”

It’s probably the most personal thing he’s ever told you, and it’s—surprising. You look at him and he’s got that expression on his face that he had on movie night, when he’d watched everyone walk down the outdoor hall to the stairs. You can’t exactly place it because you don’t know this side of him well enough, but it’s undeniably gentle. The breeze tousles his drying hair, and this could be a different man in front of you than the one you’ve known for a good part of your life.

But it’s not, and you want to know more. “In Kosai?”

“Closer to the city. But this reminds me of it. The sea, and shit.” He taps his fingers on the windowsill, restless. “It’s safer here. Doesn’t matter if Raccoon Eyes or fuckin’ whoever wants to drop in on you unexpected. Musutafu is a shitty place for—”

He stops but you know what he was going to say. People like you, that can’t defend yourself. That aren’t heroes. That aren’t on the same level as him and Mina and Kiri. “I get it.”

Bakugou sighs and pulls away from the window, and you never should have said anything because you weren’t ready for this moment to end. But if he’s going to be an asshole about things, maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it’ll be easier.

He turns to fully face you, and he’s frowning in that tired way that you’ve seen more and more over the past few weeks. “I’m not gonna say this twice, so you’d better fucking listen. What you said last night? The shit about the agency? You’re right. There’s no way in hell we would’ve ranked that fast without you. I don’t know how to tell you that you’re doing enough, but you are.”

“You can just say it.” You don’t know why it’s so difficult for him to do decent things like every other fucking human being on the planet does, and you don’t know why it’s fallen to you to show him how. “It’s not hard.”

“Fine. You’re doing enough.”

The brief spike of anger you had is gone, but you clench your jaw to keep from letting that show. You’ve wanted to hear him—or anyone—say those words for so long, and this is not how you wanted to hear them said. They feel hollow.

Or maybe you’re just realizing that this kind of validation isn’t enough. You thought you’d be uplifted, but you feel kind of empty instead. Because it’s just a handful of words. A single sentence to sum up all the work you’ve done.

There has to be more to what you’ve worked for. To life.

“Hey,” he says, and you can tell you’ve failed to keep up the pretense of anger in the way that his voice softens. “I don’t say shit that I don’t mean. You’re doing a good job.”

Okay—maybe you still want the validation to an extent, because that succeeds in making your heart stutter in its rhythm. But you still feel like you’ve had a realization you can’t just throw a sheet over and ignore.

There’s a limit to how much you can feel intensely without getting exhausted, and you’ve reached that breaking point already. You passed it last night when you told him you wanted to be enough. You passed it when he held you close to him and told you to go to sleep. There are indelible marks left on your heart by the realization that you wanted to ask for more and you wanted him to be the one that gave it to you.

When you stay quiet, he frowns—just the slightest downward turn to his lips. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Your throat is dry. Why does he have to make you say it? Can’t he just understand? Figure out what’s on your mind like he always does?

And maybe he sees your frustration. Knows it well enough to realize that you’re bad at this.

He steps forward and you allow him to enter your space, turning from the window and waiting. He looks down at you with unreadable intent. And—carefully—he lifts a hand to your face and brushes his thumb across your chin. “Tell me.”

There are a million thoughts running through your head but the most prevalent is this: there was no possible reality you saw where you and Bakugou would ever be doing anything like this, but now that you realize how kind he can be, how careful he is with his intentions, how fucking quietly he can cook you a meal and ask for nothing in return, you want it.

Because there is more to life than what you’ve been doing, and you think it could be this.

You want to tell him this. Every word. Instead, you say, “Your hands are warm.”

“Yeah?” Barely a whisper.

You take his hand, perched awkwardly in the space between you, and lift it to your face, putting his palm against your cheek. He just watches. Eyebrows slightly drawn, like he’s worried about something. Even though he shouldn’t be worried about anything. Not with what’s happening here.

“Yeah.” You press a gentle kiss to his palm and the smell of burnt sugar is strong because his hands are clammy, anxious, and the nitroglycerin is harmless without a conductor but it makes your lips tingle just a little bit, like a low-resonance buzz.

You pull your lower lip between your teeth without thinking because you’re nervous as fuck with him looking at you like this. Like you’re something to be looked at. Appreciated. A slight sweetness spreads across your tongue and that surprises you.

You’d expected sulfur, smoke—because you always expect the worst of him. And he keeps showing you, in these small, quiet ways, that you shouldn’t.

His apprehension is palpable. There’s so much he’s communicating with just the look on his face and the hesitation before he speaks again. When he breathes out, you can hear how unsteady he is. “You should—fuck.” He shakes his head. “Can you—just. Fuck.”

“It’s okay.” You try to communicate through those words that you understand. That you’ll wait for what he has to say, no matter how many tries it takes.

“My name.” He rubs his temple with his free hand, jaw tight, and when he looks at you there is color high on his cheeks and his ears are red and you’re the one that made him this way. “I want you to—you know.”

No one uses his first name. He’s got a whole-ass complex about this. Like he wants to be the entire world’s superior. Mina tried for weeks, but the resulting fallout was just annoying enough that she gave up. Kiri does sometimes, but that’s been a labor of love, years spent breaking down Bakugou’s walls and building mutual respect.

You’ve been given something that no one else has. Permission. “You want me to say it?”

“Yeah,” he says, staring at the point of connection between his hand and your face. “Now, or… whenever. I don’t give a shit.”

But he obviously does. He can barely make eye contact with you. Your blood is singing because for some reason, this feels like the most intense thing you’ve ever had to do in your life.

Just say one word. Just his name.

“Katsuki.”

He hums, deep in his chest, the closest thing you’ve heard him express to contentment, and caresses your cheek with his calloused thumb.

This feels like something you don’t deserve. You haven’t—nothing you’ve done has ever been good enough for you to be allowed this. Him. Not that you have him, but—you have this moment. It can’t be taken away from you now that it’s happened.

Again, you say his name. A question this time.

“What?” He says this gently.

You want to ask him to kiss you. You want to ask him to call the agency to say he’s not coming in and stay in your bed all day, to let you run your fingers across the high angles of his cheekbones, the curve of his slanted lips, the planes of his chest, over and over until you could draw him from memory. Recall every detail. Identify him by touch alone.

But all you say is, “Please.”

And he understands.

It’s so much sweeter than last time. His lips are soft against yours, charged heat replaced with something more forgiving. He has one hand in your hair and the other holding your face just how he wants it, and you don’t think you’ve ever known a touch so careful and so firm at the same time.

You slide your hands up his chest and you can feel him shiver, and his heartbeat is beneath your fingers, just as frantic as last night.

You want—more. All he’s willing to give. You pull his lower lip between your teeth and his hands tighten their hold on you, and he deepens the kiss, his tongue sweeping across yours. He can probably taste the same sweetness you did.

Without preamble, he pulls you towards the bed, and his lips only leave yours so he can sit and pull you on top of him, your legs straddling his waist. The warm skin of his broad shoulders is under your hands, and you let yourself run them across his body, tracing every muscle and curve you can reach, ghosting across the scars on his hip, the touch daring and purposeful in a way it couldn’t be the last time the two of you were this close.

He kisses the side of your mouth, your cheek, the underside of your jaw, and you remember the first time he kissed you this way—entirely unexpected and something you never thought you would want replicated so badly. His hands run up your lower back, your shoulders, tangling in your hair and pulling you back to him and you kiss him until you can’t fucking breathe, until there’s a slight ringing noise in your head and you have to wonder if you’re actually going to pass out just from this.

He pulls back and that noise, it turns out, is not in your head. With some effort, he takes his phone out of his pocket and looks at who’s calling, then silences it.

“Do you need to—”

“Not important.” He tosses the phone behind him and looks up at you and you feel so powerful like this. You like being able to feel his muscled thighs beneath you, watch the rise and fall of his chest, see the way his eyes shine in the sunlight streaming in through the window.

Your noses brush. Your foreheads just barely touch.

He tilts his head up to kiss you and you draw back just enough to be out of his reach, and when he breathes out, it’s so pained that it sounds like a growl. “Fucking—come here.”

You’re too bold this morning. In both your touch and your words. “Or what?”

His eyes go dark and his hands slide up your thighs, gripping hard enough to bruise. And you want that. You want to have proof that he’s been here long after he leaves. He kisses your chin, gentle, but the look he gives you betrays something more threatening. “I’ll fuck you until you'll never ask me a dumb question like that again.”

You don’t mean to make a noise but you do, the sound needy and breathless. The shit this guy can say when he can’t even ask you outright to call him by his first name is fucking astounding. But he says it like a promise—and it’s one you want him to keep, because with those words spoken you can suddenly feel every inch of his body pressed against yours and it’s not enough. “Then do it.” And just because you can, you add, “Please, Katsuki?”

His hands grab your waist too hard and you yelp as he flips you, your back hitting the bed hard. He pulls you right to the edge so he can stand, leaning over you, your legs wrapped around him because you were afraid he was going to fucking drop you when he started moving so quickly. His teeth are on your neck and they make a path downwards over your collarbone to the hem of your shirt. He’s rough enough to leave marks and your back arches, settling you flush against him.

He grabs your ass, pulling your hips up to meet his, and he’s hard and also definitely not wearing anything underneath the sweats and when you try to pull him closer by their waistband, he grabs your hand and holds it against the mattress above your head. He kisses you again, and you can feel the smug smile against your lips—pleased with himself and what he’s done to you.

Reduced you to nothing in an instant when you’d felt so powerful before.

His hand is so fucking big, and you hadn’t realized that before and you also hadn’t realized how hot that would be to you. The brief thought of it around your throat makes you involuntarily tighten your legs around him, and he groans into your mouth. Just to be spiteful, you roll your hips, grinding against every hard fucking inch of him.

He stops kissing you to give you a look that you think is meant to be threatening, but it’s carved into something different by the pure desire in his eyes. “You’re so impatient.”

Still partially unrestrained, you grab the hand he has on your ass and wrench it up, between your bodies, towards your face. “I just like to get what I want.”

You put his thumb between your lips with the sole intent of driving him to the edge. You close your lips and pull it out slow, flicking your tongue over his fingertip and tasting that same sweetness from before, and his face practically goes slack, eyes hooded.

“Shit. I…” He trails off, and you love how ungrounded he sounds. He shakes his head slowly and his eyes don’t leave your mouth for a long moment. “I want to fucking ruin you.”

His voice is dangerous and you don’t think you can breathe because he said that with a single-minded intensity you’ve only ever seen him have for his work.

He pulls your other hand above your head and you’re fully restrained now, both of your wrists snug in his grip. You’re more okay with this than you should be, but you’re okay with a lot of things right now. He could ask to spit in your mouth and you would say yes.

As long as it meant the tension building in your body could be released. You want him to ruin you, and that’s so awful, but you’ve found yourself needing him in so many ways and this just happens to be the most important one.

His lips find a sensitive spot between your jaw and neck and he rolls the skin there between his teeth until it’s painful. This is not a mark you’ll be able to hide with just a turtleneck and you think he knows it. He kisses the bruise he’s created when he’s had enough, his breath fanning against your neck and giving you chills. “No one else will even look at you when I’m done. Gonna make sure they know you’re all fucking mine.”

You feel your stomach twist at his words and it could just be because you’re fucking embarrassingly turned on right now, but the thought of being his is on another level entirely. You know he probably didn’t think much about it when he spoke because chances are he’s talking with his dick, but you’re an idiot, so as a challenge and also an almost genuine question, you ask, “Yeah?”

“I’ll put anyone that says otherwise in the ground.” Finally, fucking finally, he lets go of your wrists and slides a finger into the waistband of your joggers, pulling them down slowly. He props himself up above you with an arm and scrapes his teeth against the shell of your ear, and his hand is between your legs exactly where you want it. When he speaks, it’s only a whisper. “God… so fucking perfect. Ready for me before I’ve even done anything.”

You blush harder than you knew you could and you’re so fucking glad he can’t see it, but you’re positive he can feel the heat coming from your face where his cheek just brushes yours. You wish you could say literally anything in response because he’s definitely been doing something that got you like this, but he slides two fingers inside you and you’re so wet that there’s barely any resistance at all. It’s so sudden that you curse, back arching even more, and that makes the angle of his fingers just deep enough to feel good.

He curls his fingers, hitting the right spot almost immediately, and how the fuck did he get so good at this? His thumb rubs slow circles into where you’re most sensitive and you make a helpless noise, and his resulting growl is fucking primal. “No one else gets to see you like this. No one else gets to fucking touch you like this. Got that?”

The moan this elicits from you was supposed to be a yes but it sounded more like his name, and you’re blushing but it doesn’t fucking matter anymore. You want him and he knows it, and he starts moving his thumb faster, curling his fingers in a rhythm that has your entire body tensing.

“Tell me you’re mine, angel.” He nips at your jaw and moves so his lips hover just over yours, denying you a kiss just like you denied him one earlier. “And maybe I’ll consider giving you what you want.”

At the worst possible time, his phone rings again, and he makes a deep, annoyed noise in his chest. You can feel the vibrations where your bodies touch. He pulls his hand from between your legs and just kind of releases you—there’s a boneless quality to the after-effects of being held down so completely by him.

He curses softly and grabs his phone from behind your head. You don’t want him to leave the space you’ve cleaved out together because it’s so nice with him there, but he pulls away just enough that the moment is gone, even though he’s still in arm’s reach. Your body is telling you to be mad at him for stopping so fucking fast, but you know, logically, that any phone call he gets could be important and potentially life-or-death.

You sit up, pulling the waistband of your joggers back over your hips because you suddenly feel self-conscious in front of him, nervous in the wake of everything he just did—everything he said, because fuck, you never would’ve thought he’d be the kind of guy that would talk like that and you never realized how much you were into it—and watch him look down at his phone and frown.

“Shit. Ei texted, and—I have to take this.” He looks at the bedroom door and then at you, and he’s clearly conflicted about something, and the phone just keeps fucking ringing. But he obviously makes a decision because he tilts your head up with a finger under your chin and kisses you again.

It’s different. Not the product of an emotionally charged moment. Just—a kiss. There is something entirely too significant in his gentle touch. The careful movement of his lips against yours. The heavy look he gives you when he pulls back.

“Don’t move,” he murmurs.

You nod and he walks away, his sudden absence leaving so much cold space behind that you get goosebumps. He answers the phone as he leaves the bedroom, and before he closes the door behind him, you hear him say, “You’ve got ten fucking seconds to convince me not to hang up.”

When you’re alone, you let out a breath and decompress.

He can’t—speak to you like that. Not if he doesn’t mean it. It’s not fair. You want to be angry at him for it but you’re still dizzy from everything, and you’re so on edge from being brought to a point that high and then abruptly dropped that rational thinking is almost impossible.

There’s already a list of things your brain cycles through when you have a quiet moment, and all of them are things Bakugou has done to you and now everything he just said will be added to that list. Every time he claimed you as his.

His voice is muffled through the door. Obviously Kiri was able to keep him on the line. And you think of the texts last night—Kiri knows that Bakugou was here and probably that he’s still here, and that means Mina does too and this is all spiraling into something you don’t know if you can control.

You’re a tech person. You need specifics. Instructions to follow. A clear-cut path to a finish line you’ve already envisioned. People are so much more complicated than the intricate things you create.

He walks back into the room and sighs, serious, like he’s about to announce that somebody died. “I’ve gotta get back. We’re still dealing with that fucking Blade wannabe and I forgot we had a briefing this morning with all the sidekicks.”

The fact that the villain that scarred Kiri is still free doesn’t bother you as much as the fact that you’ve caused Bakugou to miss more things at work than he has since… ever. It’s a fucked up sense of priorities, but he’s never missed a briefing. Or a press conference. Even when he came down with the flu one year, he took a shit-ton of cold medicine and put on a mask and came into the agency to help Kiri set mission parameters and organize patrols.

“Damn, I’m—um.” You swallow your apology because you’ve never apologized to this man and for some reason, it’s fucking hard to get the words out of your mouth.

He shakes his head. “It’s on me. There’s shit I have to take care of every day and that’s not gonna stop.”

And that—it could just be an observation. But it’s like he said last night. Heroes have a job that’s unforgiving to them and everyone around them. He aims the words at you like he’s telling you this. Letting you know that this is just what he does. His work is always going to be the most important thing in his life.

You understand. You know that the work he does is self-sacrificing, even if his motives are sometimes selfish. Nothing is ever going to be right for the two of you. “I know. Go take care of things.”

He nods and heads into the bathroom and you can hear the material of his costume shift and his heavy boots hit the floor as he changes, and he’s going to go back to Musutafu like that. For some reason, the image of pro-hero Dynamight standing on the train and holding the ceiling rail for balance, surrounded by gossiping high-schoolers and regular office workers, is funny to you. You want to laugh but you’re positive it would piss him off if he knew what you were laughing about.

He walks back out and his costume is alien in the setting of your bedroom. He’s suddenly someone that doesn’t belong here. The space is too normal for him, because he’s no longer the man that told you he wanted you to be his. “I’ll grab some groceries so your dumb ass doesn’t starve.”

You’re perfectly capable of getting food yourself. And you do actually have food in your fridge, it’s just not up to his standards. But you leave that option open. You want him to have an excuse to come back. “You better buy the good stuff. I want wagyu.”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re lucky I’m buying you anything at all.”

“Come on,” you say, and the teasing brings back a normalcy that you were afraid wouldn’t return. “You make way more than me. Whatever happened to trickle-down economics? You’re holding out on me, Bakugou.”

And—you think you should have called him Katsuki. Or at least, maybe he wanted you to. Because the look he gives you is kind of strained, and if he expressed emotion like a normal person, it might be something close to his face falling. You wish you could take back everything you’ve ever said in your life just to make him not look like that.

He clears his throat and he’s himself again, but the version that won’t share his umbrella with you when it’s raining. Not the person that cooked for you last night. “I’ll see you around.”

And he leaves the room, the sound of your front door closing behind him just a few seconds later, filling the apartment with the same sense of finality as a book closing once completely read.

After you’ve been alone for five minutes—or maybe less, but time feels like treacle, thick and cloying—you collapse back onto the bed. Things are so unnecessarily fucking complicated. Everything could be solved if he just told you what he wanted.

You need to get ready for work. Technically, you should be getting there right about now. No one really monitors your comings and goings because you almost always leave super late, but still. If you both show up late this morning—it might get noticed. It’s Sunday, and the only people that are going to be at the agency are the pro-heroes, sidekicks, and you, but that’s enough for words to travel. And you’re not sure if you should let that happen because you don’t even know what to think yourself.

He said he was going to bring you groceries.

Would it be so bad to just give in? Let things progress at his pace? Call him Katsuki like no one else is allowed to with no indication of what that actually means for your relationship?

Shit. Do not bring that word into this.

You get off the bed and head into the bathroom, and you can still smell your soap in the air from the shower he took. You look in the mirror and you literally have no idea how he was able to look at you like he did—like you were something so precious. You have bedhead and you definitely weren’t focused when you were washing your face last night because there’s slight smudges of makeup beneath your eyes and you’re just—you.

Exhausted and so fucking regular compared to the heroes that are constants in your life.

It doesn’t take long to get ready because there’s a frantic energy burrowed into your skin. The moments that you spend making yourself look nice are done on autopilot, spent deep in thought. You wonder if you’ll see him at work today. If he’ll even want to see you. Will he stay in the breakroom when you come in for tea, steam curling from the cup already between his hands, and listen to you speak like he normally does?

You like those moments. It’s not something you’ve thought about often, but he seems more patient when you’re not entirely focused on him. Boiling water and pulling out the tea boxes from the breakroom cupboards and vaguely filling him in on the projects you’re working on. You talk and he listens and it’s nice. You never realized just how nice.

You think about what he asked. Using his name. You can’t even bring yourself to think it—there’s a stoppage in your brain because you’re scared to move forward, but you're already too far down this path to really turn back.

It’s a big thing for him to ask you to do that. But it could be a big thing because even with everything that’s happened, he just wants to be close to somebody—anybody willing to deal with his annoying attitude—or it could be a massive thing because he wants something more with you, specifically.

The possibilities fluctuate in your head as you tug on your ankle boots and your high-collared, Red Riot bomber jacket from the discount clothing store, a muted red with Kiri’s costume’s insignia large across the back, and—is it weird for you to wear this? Would he not like that?

Jesus. This is so fucking dumb. You dress for yourself. You need to stop overthinking things and get to work.

The walk to the train station is cold, and now that the ginkgos have shed their leaves, the slow decline into winter has begun. You’re going to have to buy new gloves. Your pair from last year is threadbare and you’re also pretty sure Denki borrowed them and never gave them back. The cherry blossom trees that dot the corners of each block are barren right now, and you’re excited for spring, when they’ll bloom and their delicate pink petals will coat the sidewalks like snow, the days turning balmy and the evenings the kind of cool that requires a cardigan at most.

Perfect weather to watch the sunset over the sea. The way the water ripples and turns gut-blood red before everything fades to pitch. It’s violent and calming at the same time. You try not to let it remind you of Bakugou but so much does now that you’re thinking of his face regularly, anxiety rising and falling each time you picture his perfect body, his careful hands, the honeyed kiss he gave you when you said please.

This cycle continues as you wait at the station, as your train arrives and you step into its crowded confines, as the shining buildings of Musutafu come into view. You don’t even care that you don’t get a seat—you’re too restless to just sit and be calm.

The train slows as it reaches the Musutafu station and you’re nervous in a way you haven’t been since high school. Since—fuck, since your crush on Kiri smacked you in the face and decided to stick around for years.

You haven’t thought of Kiri since yesterday. Not really. Not in the sense that you normally do. And now—you don’t feel that same kind of pull towards him that you have for so long and it’s entirely unsettling.

Each block you take towards Might Riot has you going back and forth between what you want to do. Maybe you could ask him about it. About the things between you. Not at work, but—after? Ask him to come home with you? He said he was going to bring you food, but he didn’t specify a time.

That would be humiliating, though. Because what if he doesn’t want to?

He said he’d see you around. Not that he’d see you soon. It’s just a phrase that you probably shouldn’t read into, but you’re still thinking about it.

You turn onto the agency’s street and you can see its pretty façade from here, all sleek glass and metal edges, and it’s comforting, in a way. It’s quiet on the street this early—you can just hear background jazz music playing from outdoor speakers of the coffee shop down the block, but that’s it. A calm energy spreads itself across morning, butter on toast. Everything feels kind of normal if you don’t look at it too hard.

No matter what happens, you’ll stay here. Might Riot will always be the place where you want to be—it doesn’t matter where you stand with Bakugou. You might’ve realized that the validation of doing a good job isn’t everything you want, but it’s something, at least. A quiet pleasure that will keep you going. A familiar thing in a sea of the unfamiliar.

And then that sense of comfort, in an instant, is destroyed.

It takes a moment to register, but you hear glass shattering, and you look around for where the sound could possibly be coming from because it’s so damn loud, and suddenly shards the size of cars are raining down on the sidewalk just a couple dozen feet in front of you, and it’s the glass of the Might Riot building that’s shattering. Splintering on concrete and spilling into the air, the wide street, shimmering in the sun like rain drops.

The block shakes and you’re forced back by the shockwaves of an explosion, your body hitting pavement hard and skidding, tearing up your palms as you grasp for any kind of leverage. The breath is knocked out of you and you watch the buildings on either side of the agency rippling with the explosion’s force even though you can’t hear it—there is only a sick silence when everything was so loud a moment ago. A piercing ring stars low in your head and grows, tidal, hurting your ears so bad that you have to cover them.

Sound shoots back without warning and there’s—screaming. Car alarms. The coffee shop’s chaotic jazz music. Someone’s name being yelled, over and over and over.

You want to move but you can’t seem to feel your body like you usually can and you’re still, frozen in place and time as the building you have spent the most important years of your life inside of shudders, creaks terribly, and collapses in on itself.

Chapter Text

Archived messages: Mina’s Wonderful Warriors!

Mina!!! (4:50 PM):
alrite its almost quittin time, whos coming to the wine bar w me

charging cable (4:52 PM):
Ill take 1 for the team and volunteer… dont cry for me, friends. Its been an honor to serve w you all

tapemaster (5:01 PM):
cant make it bc of patrol. pour one out for me broskis

asshole (5:22 PM):
I have shit I already paid for at home.

tech support (5:26 PM):
i may be a little late but i’ll definitely swing by!

RIOT (5:30 PM):
I’ll bring myself and bakubro!!!

asshole (5:31 PM):
Fine.

You were pretty sure you were going to throw up when you got home. You couldn't really remember how many glasses of wine you'd had, but it was certainly more than usual, and you also matched Denki when he ordered shots, which was not a good idea because he ordered in bulk and you were almost positive that his quirk helped him metabolize alcohol.

Kiri had egged the both of you on, and after you took the third shot, he clapped you on the back and he was so uplifting and strong. You were sad when you reached his apartment building on the walk back. He was the last stop before the train station, and he gave Bakugou, the only other person left on the journey home, an aggressively tight hug before he did the same to you. Your face was incredibly hot when your cheek touched his, and you hoped he blamed it on the alcohol, because you absolutely would.

When it was just you and Bakugou walking, you were both silent.

He didn’t really want to talk to you, and you didn’t blame him because you didn’t want to talk to him either. There was a way you got under his skin without even trying, and you didn’t know if that contributed to him making it his life's goal to annoy you whenever possible, but you’d given in—when he said shitty stuff to you, you said shittier stuff back, and that seemed to keep him in check.

He'd had a couple of drinks that night too, which was out of the norm for him, but it was that dumb, expensive whiskey he liked with the name that you couldn’t seem to put together in your brain because of the sheer amount of vowels in it. Pretentious as hell.

He was still miles more sober than you were, and that was always a nice constant on the walks home. At least you knew you weren't going to end up hurt because you got shit-faced and decided to pick a fight with a passing car.

There were people out on the street because it was the regular working weekend, and you’d forgotten this fact until that moment. You ended up going into the agency almost every day, even when it wasn't required of you, because you enjoyed it. And there was really nothing better to do. Losing track of the days was easy. Expected.

Your entire focus was on not running into anyone walking by. Your feet decided that they wanted to take you in a different direction than your brain. It was the shots. You knew it. You were going to kill Denki later if you remembered this.

You realized too late that you were about to careen into Bakugou and you tried to stop it even though things were syrupy in your head, and you thought you were doing a good job of course correcting until you full-body listed into his side.

He stopped and looked at you and he was pissed. You’d never touched him and he was probably worried that his skin was going to slough off where your arm had brushed his, even though it was getting cold at night and you were both wearing jackets. Inter-jacket skin melting. You could make something that did that. You wanted to remember that because it might've been the best idea you’d had for original gear in a while.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he asked, and you stopped thinking about jackets and—something? Melting something?

You realized you’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and you were just looking at his arm where you fell against it. “Do you think if you gave the lab more money I could make like a… melting thing? A jacket. Shit, I had it.”

“Your department gets half our funding already, so no. And also I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” He started walking again and when you didn’t follow immediately, he stopped and said, “Hurry up, dumbass.”

But you still felt kind of shaky on your feet and you just looked at him and you did feel kind of like a dumbass, but if you told him that he'd be smug, so you tried to tell him the opposite to trick him. “I’m smart.”

His face changed, and he laughed, just once, clipped, kind of mean, and—holy shit, you’d never seen him laugh before. Like, never. In your life. You were dying or something. Or you died at the bar of alcohol poisoning and this was the afterlife.

You weren't sure if spending the time after you’d died with Bakugou was a good thing or a bad thing, but you liked his laugh a lot more than you thought you would.

“You smart enough to keep walking?”

And you wanted to say that you were, but instead you said, “I think I’m gonna fall over.”

He shook his head but didn’t leave you to fend for yourself, which felt like it would be a Bakugou move. When he walked back over, he grabbed your arm a little rough—the second time, you logged, that you and he had touched—and looped it through his.

He kept you upright well enough to lead you through the twisting backstreets of Musutafu to the train station. They were poorly lit for a rich district, the metropolis becoming strips of miniature townhouses and quiet, dark apartment buildings and side streets that you wouldn’t dare walk down alone, but you were safe because you were with him.

It felt kind of like you were melting into his side. You liked the warmth he gave off, and your body accepted it hungrily in the cold evening. He didn’t seem to mind that you were pressed so close to him—or he wasn't saying anything about it, which was probably the case. You wondered if he’d say something rude to you if you weren’t so gone from the shots. It probably wasn't as fun to pick on you if you couldn’t pick on him right back.

The train station was lit with floodlights, bright enough that you had to squint to stop your head from pounding. Or—no, it was already pounding. The headache arrived in waves and you knew it was going to follow you into sleep even then, thirty or so minutes from your warm bed in Kosai.

You could see the overnight attendant in the little ticket booth on the other side of the tracks, his feet up on his desk, a small TV playing a late-night drama in front of him. You’d be okay from there. Safe.

At some point, Bakugou had led you underneath one of those little glass overhangs that keeps commuters dry, and the moments between arriving at the station and getting there were blank. It was drizzling, the night suddenly foggy. The floodlights above the station became halos, stretching out into the night and illuminating the path of each pinprick raindrop.

It was pretty in that late-night city kind of way. Not natural beauty, but an etherealness enhanced by the man-made parts. Like a neon sign in a shop window painting the nighttime street below it in unnatural, saturated colors.

You were still holding onto Bakugou’s arm and you wondered if he couldn’t let go of you because you were doing something that wasn't letting him, but you checked in with your body and you were just languid. He could leave. And you told him that, and realized you sounded extremely rude, so you tacked on, “If you want.”

“I couldn’t even trust you to walk here by yourself. If I leave, you’re gonna end up falling on the tracks.”

He didn’t do this often—wait with you. He usually made sure you got to the train station and then left. When you looked up at him, he was already looking down at you. “I’m telling Mina that you’re secretly a good person because you do stuff like this.”

“You think I care if you get flattened by the train ‘cause you can’t hold your fucking liquor? Don’t flatter yourself, dumbass. Go ahead. I’m just waiting for the rain to stop.”

Rain like that didn’t just stop, especially not that late at night. It was only going to get worse. It was a universal rule that you’d never seen unfollowed.

“I didn’t say you are a good person. Don’t flatter yourself, you narcissist.” You laughed because you thought the way you said that was kind of funny. He was a narcissist. You looked back up at him and he was so serious and that was funny too. “Fuckin’… always talking about being number one. You’re the number one dickhead. Congrats on topping the ranks. Get well soon.”

“The fuck am I getting well from?” he asked, and his breath was Altoid-minty.

You should've probably asked him for one because it tasted like something died in your mouth, but you were committed to pestering him. “Your head being up your own ass.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re so fucking dumb.”

“That’s mean.” You frowned and leaned closer and—oh, he smelled nice. Strange for someone that made himself as unappealing as possible in literally every single other way. “You’ve gotta learn how to play nice.”

“Playing nice is for nerds. Like you.”

“Aww.” You smiled and it was toothy and just the right amount of smug to piss him off. “You think I’m nice?”

He exhaled sharply and his jaw was tight and you had succeeded, again, in getting under his skin. The victory of the night, because you lost so badly to Denki in the shot-for-shot challenge. “That’s not what I fucking said.”

You fell back into silence with a smile on your face, happy with your achievement, and you let yourself feel warm. Because he was warm. And then you realized that your arm was still hooked through his and you wanted to ask if you should remove it, but you heard yourself say, “You’re really warm.”

Your brain must have shorted the fuck out because there was no possible way you just said that, and if you did, Bakugou was going to fucking kill you for it because it was weird and kind of out of nowhere and he didn’t like people to just say things like that to him.

But instead of telling you how slow he was going to draw out your death and the manner in which he’d kill you, he said, “Shit, you’re shivering. Why didn’t you bring a better jacket?”

He was right—you were trembling, and no amount of pressing against his side was helping. “How was I supposed to know it was gonna be cold?”

“Because it’s fucking winter, idiot.” He shook his head and pulled his arm out of your hold because he probably wanted you to learn your lesson or some shit.

But a second passed of you wrapping your arms around yourself and squinting at the TV in the ticket booth, trying to figure out what drama the attendant was watching, before a jacket was placed on your shoulders, its soft muslin interior still warm from—oh.

He stood in front of you and blocked your view of the television even though you were pretty sure you would've been able to tell which show it was if you could just stare at it for a few more seconds. You could smell his stupid expensive cologne that you kind of suspected he used to hide the lingering scent of burnt sugar from his quirk, and you couldn’t tell if it was coming from him or the brown leather jacket that was way too big on you, its hem falling to your mid-thigh. You wondered how ridiculous you looked and also why he was looking at you like you weren't ridiculous.

He adjusted the lapels of his jacket so that it was resting comfortably around you, enveloping you in the warmth you’d been missing, and you thought, if you were to remember this moment, it would be significant to you somewhere down the line.

“Thank you,” you whispered. You were drunk, so the thanks didn’t count. You’d never thank him again because he wouldn’t do anything like this again, and that was okay. It was just this once.

His hands were still holding onto the edges of the jacket and he tugged on them gently like he didn’t know what to do with himself. “Just bring a better jacket next time. I don’t have an unlimited supply for you.”

The train pulled in abruptly, the sound of its screeching breaks piercing the night. It disrupted the air, the force of its arrival pushing him infinitesimally closer. His hands were still holding the jacket, creating a physical link between you.

Through the chaos, you looked up at him and everything around him was smeared like a finger dragged through wet paint, colors running together, the train still moving too fast. His hair was disheveled and his red eyes were cast in slight shadow, the color of the shiraz at the wine bar that the sommelier described as sultry, and he was so solid and present even in the blurriness of everything around him.

If he kissed you, would you be able to taste the mint on his tongue?

That thought pulled you out of whatever state you were in, not launching you into sobriety but certainly getting you close. You stepped back and his hands dropped and you stared at his feet and tried not to consider whatever the fuck that was.

The train came to a stop and the doors hissed open, and the robotic voice announced the name of the Musutafu station and the one coming next. You needed to get on. Your feet didn’t want to move.

Bakugou looked like everything was fine, like the cold and the rain couldn’t touch him even though the black t-shirt he was wearing was in no way protecting him from the elements—without his jacket, because he'd put it on your shoulders like it was nothing, practically shooting you into the next tax bracket the second it touched your skin. You’d give it back. He almost definitely didn’t notice whatever you'd felt just now and—that was good. You kept standing there and he raised a brow. “You spending the night or something?”

“What?” You asked the question too fast. You didn’t entirely understand what he was implying. Your brain was a mess inside your skull. The voice from the train spoke again, muted under the sound of rainfall.

“The train’s gonna leave without you if you just fuckin’ stand here. Are you sleeping at the station?”

“Oh,” you breathed, and he was right. You should've been getting on the train.

The warning bell played over the tinny train speakers and Bakugou reached out behind him, putting his hand in front of the door before it could close. “Get on.”

You shuffled onto the empty train and sat heavily in one of the plastic seats opposite him, and you waved kind of weakly and you didn’t know exactly why you decided to do something so awkward, but you didn’t want to just do nothing.

He didn’t wave back. “Text me when you get home.” The doors closed and your eyes didn’t leave his until the train started moving.

Trying not to fall asleep was the easy part, which was surprising, because there'd been nights when you’d almost missed your stop because you couldn’t keep your eyes open. Getting your brain to stop spilling thoughts into your head was harder.

The stars got brighter the farther away from Musutafu you were, and you watched them blink in and out and wondered why the fuck you asked yourself that question about Bakugou.

No one had been that close to you in a while. Not like that. The last person you’d been seeing stopped texting you a couple months ago because you wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Kiri, and you hadn’t really been talking to anyone since. You were just lonely, and you shouldn’t have had that thought about him because first of all, he was a dick, and second of all, if he ever found out he would be unbearably smug.

You assured yourself that it meant nothing as the train arrived at your stop, and you stepped out into the streets of Kosai, half-stumbling home, your keys held carefully in between your fingers like Mina had taught you. But it was a quiet town, and you made it to your building safe in no time. Or parts of the walk were blacked out, you weren't sure which.

Home was calm in a way that filled you with such satisfaction. It was good to be back, even though you adored the time you spent with your friends. You pulled out your phone and sent Mina a good-night-slash-I-got-home text, and you knew the sleep you were about to get was going to be real fucking good.

You only remembered that Bakugou told you to text him when you took off his jacket and threw it onto one of the couches, and you pulled out your phone again, swiping away the notification for Mina’s text with what looked like a million different heart emojis.

got back okya.
oky*
okyy*
fuck

His response was fast even though he was usually the slowest to respond to texts out of everyone you knew.

Good. Enjoy the hangover.

You narrowed your eyes at your phone, and another message came in not a second later.

Get well soon.

What a fucking dick.

You didn’t even make it to the bedroom—you just laid on the couch and sank into it, pulling his jacket over you. It was still so warm even though he hadn’t worn it for an hour or so, and it made you feel whole in a way you didn’t understand because you were drunk and also too fucking tired to think about it.

The next morning, you’d wake up and know exactly whose jacket this was, and you’d fold it up and pretend to be disgusted—even though, not remembering how you ended up with it in your possession, your body would retain enough of the memory to feel warm when you ran your fingers across the leather, traced the edge of the low-cut collar.

But that night, you fell asleep easily, basking in the moonlight and that feeling of wholeness. At peace, for once.

Chapter Text

You missed a call from Mina!!! at 8:47 AM!

You missed a call from RIOT at 8:49 AM!

You missed a call from asshole at 8:55 AM!

You missed a call from asshole at 8:56 AM!

You missed a call from asshole at 8:57 AM!

You missed a call from asshole at 9:44 AM!

You have (5) new voicemails!

Everything hurts. This is strange, considering the fact that the last thing you remember before this moment is going to bed, a warm hand entwined with yours.

And then it all comes back in flashes. The glass shattering on the road. The shockwaves. Might Riot crumbling, the tearing sound of steel being wrenched apart and the resounding crash when multiple tons of concrete and metal smashed into the road, destroying—everything.

It’s dark, but it couldn’t be night already. You couldn’t have been unconscious that long. You cough and there’s dust in your lungs. Your right leg aches terribly and you can feel something crusted across your neck. Most likely blood.

The first step is to check for a head injury. You remember this from mandatory field training. You check your scalp for open wounds or bruises and find nothing, but there’s a fogginess that hangs around your senses that makes you worry you might have a concussion.

You shift slightly and a shooting pain slices through your entire right side, coming from that aching spot in your leg. Your hand goes to the pain and you find a long shard of glass sticking out of your thigh and you have no idea how deep the wound is and no idea how much blood you’ve already lost and also there’s a massive piece of glass in your fucking leg.

You remember training. Support courses about emergency procedure. Don’t panic. Don’t try to be a hero. Don’t remove any sharp objects that have penetrated you beyond skin-level because you could nick an important vein and bleed out in seconds.

It’s sticking out of the outer part of your thigh. You try to remember the major arteries in the right leg—femoral and saphenous, their names are easy to recall—but you can’t remember exactly where they are because you’ve long since forgotten a ton of the material you used to study meticulously at UA. Your job doesn’t require medical knowledge. You don’t brush up because you’ve never needed to.

There’s a light in the darkness—dim, but close. Your eyes are slowly adjusting, and you realize you can’t see anything because you’re under a section of Might Riot’s exterior wall, the frame of a shattered window right above you, covered in other rubble.

There was a room connected to this window at one point. An office, probably, and a desk with computer on it that had files somebody created and organized, fake potted plants and framed pictures of loved ones and inspirational hero posters.

Fuck. Get your head on right. This is important—the life of whoever might have been in that office matters to you in a way you didn’t think it would because you’re so removed from the rest of the agency—but you need to help yourself right now.

You begin to crawl towards the light, the fragments of Might Riot closing in around you the closer you get. Gingerly, your hand goes to your leg and your fingers are gloved in hot, slick blood too quickly. You’re going to pass out if you don’t get out of here.

And if you don’t get out of here, you’re going to die.

Tears blur your vision and your face feels hot and you keep dragging yourself across the ground, under the angled wall, towards sunlight. You’re not going to fucking cry. Your body might be screaming and your lungs might feel tight in the enclosed space but you’re not going to let yourself break yet.

You’re going to get out of this and you’re going to see your friends again and you’re going to watch the sunset on the beach when spring comes.

You grab anything you can in the dark, fissures in the pavement, larger bits of concrete, pieces of cooling metal—anything you can use to pull yourself closer to the sunlight. You’re positive you’re leaving a trail of blood behind you, but it’s dark in the rubble. You don’t have to look at it.

And you’re nearly there. You can make out shapes past your prison’s threshold, bits of steel and exterior siding and cracked, marble-tiled flooring from the office levels scattered across the ground—and there’s a choking smell that suddenly hits you, and you nearly retch with how potent it is.

You can taste metal in the back of your throat and smell melting rubber, and that means there’s polyisobutene burning away in the air, and that means packed, planted explosives. A bomb that somehow detonated in the building.

The building that Bakugou and Kiri should have been inside after the sidekick briefing, and Bakugou left earlier than you so that means he got here first.

Adrenaline dulls the pain pulsing through your leg and you find yourself moving faster, body dragging across the street below you, shards of glass scraping up the palms of your already tender hands. You reach the opening—and fuck, it’s just barely big enough for you to fit through.

Arms first, you squirm your way out through gap, and it’s claustrophobic and your lungs squeeze but you get your upper body outside and then pull your legs through as careful as possible. The shard of glass splinters, just too long to slip through the rubble’s opening untouched, and it drives a little deeper into muscle but you can fucking breathe.

Once you’re grounded, you take in your surroundings. It’s logical that a building collapse is going to cause devastation but seeing it up close is—haunting.

Nothing is untouched by destruction.

The buildings that are still standing are windowless, open-faced, and you can see into the ruined offices like you’re looking into rows and columns of stacked dioramas. The street is covered in glass and rubble and long beams of reinforced metal from the agency’s support frame. You can’t even see the tarmac.

You have to keep moving. Everything here has already happened, and you can’t go back and change it. It’s like that moment in your bedroom where everything was still and quiet and untouchable. A photograph. A dead moment that can no longer be interacted with.

But you can still make it out of this. Check injuries first, then evacuate. Standard procedure.

Your head is aching but you’re not super dizzy yet, and you hope that bodes well for your potential concussion. The leg wound isn’t as bad as you thought it was, but it still oozes blood, covering your jeans, and you need to staunch the bleeding. You might not remember where your fucking arteries are, but you know how to make a tourniquet.

The Red Riot jacket is so old that after you take it off, it’s almost too easy to rip the tartan lining’s fabric, tearing a strip of threadbare cotton from the red-and-black husk. You wrap it around your upper thigh a few times and tie it off tight. Time to get the fuck out of here.

You grab the top of the siding that you were trapped under and pull yourself up, and everything hurts and your head swims a little but you’re going to start walking.

Another explosion rocks the entire street, and you stumble, holding the siding for balance so tight that your hands hurt with the effort.

It’s coming from down the block, behind you, in the direction from which you came to work. Nothing like—the explosions you’re more used to. It's something bigger, more terrible, and you need to not be moving towards it, but there’s no alternative. You’re still in front of where the agency used to stand, but your path forward has been cut off by brick and stone, empty mangled cars, and that burning smell of rubber that threatens to make you sick. The rubble is spread so far into the street and you wouldn’t think it would do that—expand outwards even when you’d seen it collapsing in.

You remember, vaguely, the building blueprints tacked up on the lab's wall, the specs at the bottom of each grid-mapped floor. Two metric tons of steel per thousand square feet. All of it, now, cleaved and broken and scattered from the fall. The chances that you were going to make it out of the collapse alive were so fucking slim. You can’t ruin the luck you’ve been given by not moving.

You stumble down the road, and you’re not exactly looking for it, but thank fuck you don’t see any blood. Anyone that got hurt, trapped like you. The offices that line the street are empty, and as they turn into residential buildings further down the block, restaurants and closet-sized ramen places and little convenience stores, you still see no one.

But there had been people there when the building fell. You remember the voices. The screaming. You must have been knocked out for long enough that everyone else on the street got away. Hopefully to safety.

The end of the block approaches and it forks into two roads, one that leads further into the city and one that leads to the train station. You’ll head towards the station. You’re almost entirely sure that the second explosion came from deeper into Musutafu, and you might be able to turn that corner and escape and get on the train to anywhere you can find help.

You can’t believe that anyone was able to do something like this in the hero district of Musutafu—it’s unheard of. Two explosions. Is another agency downed? There wasn’t a shudder after this last one, and you fucking pray that Might Riot is the city’s only casualty.

You still don’t understand how it’s gone, because Bakugou is so careful with the security personnel he hires. But it’s Sunday, so there’s a skeleton crew, and—

It’s Sunday.

Everyone in the legal department and the business offices and the HR phonebanks of Might Riot has Sunday off. Only idiots willing to work their hands to the bone go in today—only you and the heroes.

If you’d been at work on time—if you’d gone in today like usual—it would be over. Your life. The lab is below ground level and you’d either be dead or trapped in a mix of metal and concrete that you wouldn’t have been lucky enough to escape.

And someone planned for that to happen, even if you weren’t a target to them.

Your leg is going numb and that makes moving harder. You stumble up to the vacant 7/11 on the corner, a neon sign that advertises Deku-partnered energy drinks flashing green fluorescence onto the sidewalk. You follow the curve of the block and you’re finally on the street that will lead you one step closer to safety.

But as you fully turn the corner, you see movement. A man you don’t recognize running down the block, and he looks disheveled and he’s definitely not wearing a hero costume—and you have to hide.

You think of what you were taught in school—to run when something like this happens, when there is an unknown, potentially dangerous variable—and you wish you could but it’s impossible. You’ll almost definitely pass out from pain if the exacerbated blood loss doesn’t get you first.

You step back and slip into the 7/11, and it’s dark, like the person that opened this morning was just stepping out for a smoke, fully intending to return and flick the lights back on and work the rest of their shift.

There are a few rows of shelves stocked full of canned soup and instant meals and other junk foods. Refrigerators flank the back wall, the hum of their fans and overworked compressors filling the store like static, the dim blue light from their cases illuminating cans of instant coffee and milk tea and rows upon rows of that shitty Deku energy drink. The counter to your right has a plexiglass divider between it and the rest of the store, and that’s something. It’s not like it’ll do anything to protect you against a villain, but you need to sit down. Your legs are shaky and you’re overexerted from just walking a single block. Having that extra layer between you and whoever is coming your way feels smart.

The far end of the counter curves into a little door, the plexiglass ending right just before it. You could easily jump the door if you weren’t so impaired—but you try opening it and some universal entity must be taking pity on you because it isn’t locked. You slide your tired body into the enclosed space and sit, heavy, on the cold gray tile, leaning back against the shelves underneath the register.

There could be a weapon here. The thought gives you enough energy for you to turn, hands running across each shelf. You find nothing but a hundred or so yen in loose change, a cheap felt cloth that smells like Windex, and a half-eaten bag of chocolate mushrooms.

You take the bag and relax again, trying to stifle the ache of your injury, slowly turning into a stinging pain. There’s just enough room for you to stretch out your legs in front of you, and you try to see if this helps. It gets better and worse in waves.

There’s only five mushrooms left in the bag and you eat two but you taste copper instead of chocolate. Metal painting your tongue, phenolic and bitter. There’s nothing else behind the counter except the typical convenience store display of cigarette cartons and rolling papers on top of a rack of the paper merchandise, mainly hero-centric calendars and magazines.

A tabloid catches your eye with a fantastical headline speculating on Pro-Hero Hawks’s body count. You wonder if it means villains killed or people he’s slept with. But—behind that, you see black hair and the curve of a jaw that’s familiar to you. You reach forward and push the tabloid aside, and Sero’s face stares out at you. The sight of him, even an image printed on a piece of paper, makes you feel a little more calm.

Your friends are out there looking for you.

The photoshoot he did for this was a while ago—last year, because the 7/11 is still selling this year’s calendars in November, apparently. You remember Denki giving Sero a hard time because he put his model face on for the shoot, a sort of pout, his brows arching together artfully. He looks good, but it was so fucking funny when Denki kept making that face, exaggerated to the point where he looked like he was in pain, every time Sero arrived at a group hang-out.

That was a year ago. Almost exactly, you’re pretty sure. Things change so fast. It’s cruel that everyone has to live in this world and not know what’s coming next. There’s so much blind trust in everyday actions.

You miss your friends so acutely that it resonates with the pain wracking your body, and you know it’s not likely that they’ll find you. Not soon, anyway—your phone isn’t in your back pocket where it had been before everything went to shit, and they might not even know that you were so close when the building collapsed. They’re probably looking for the guy that did this—

And you realize suddenly that if the bomb was detonated from outside the agency, which it surely must have been, the detonator would have had to be close. The walls of almost all hero agencies have internal steel plating. Mostly for structural reasons, but also in part to block any signals that aren’t broadcasted or received directly by the agency’s encrypted network. It’s why you can never get more than one bar on your phone when you’re in the lab.

The bell above the door rings and the sound cuts into the silence like hot metal through ice. You’d been distracted by the pain—by the fucking chocolate mushrooms—and you hadn’t been thinking about the man you saw because there’s so much going on. If he’s still in this area, which you’re guessing from your knowledge of emergency procedure is cordoned off, there’s a good chance he’s the person that pulled the detonator’s trigger. Because no one else is here but you and him.

You’re alone with a man that destroyed a hero agency.

There are frantic footsteps, things being pushed off shelves. Heavy breathing. Maybe yours—you clamp a hand over your nose and mouth and try to breathe as quietly as possible, but you’re shaking and you can’t believe that one of the last things you’re ever going to see is Sero’s model face and you want to see Bakugou again before you die so fucking bad because you’ve been an idiot, and none of this shit fucking matters because you wasted your time.

Time isn’t something heroes are allowed. It’s not something the people around them are freely given. Heroes belong to the people and that means that the time they have to themselves is precious. And you wasted the hours you had with him because you’re a fucking coward.

Glass crunches underfoot, and you hear quiet cursing. Something smacks against the plexiglass above your head and you recede into yourself, willing your body to be smaller, to make less noise, to stop existing on this plane at all. He’s silent for a moment and that’s more frightening than if he kept making noise. You can picture him standing directly behind you across the counter, forehead flat against the plexiglass, checking to see if you’re there.

Or maybe he’s quiet because he’s already seen you.

He moves again and you let out a quiet, shaky breath, and you can hear his steps get closer to the side door, still unlocked. Not that it would do anything if it was. Your fate is unavoidable now.

In the split second before you see the face of the man that’s going to kill you, you wonder if you should have written something down. Left—anything. An apology. A final, uplifting message. Something for Mina.

Oh, god. Mina. She’ll never get over this.

This is the thought that finally breaks through your adrenaline-fueled clear head and pierces your heart. Things blur. The cracks in the ceiling of your apartment. A faded memory, one that you can’t quite place, Bakugou’s face the only clear thing against a smeared metal backdrop. A realization you had that you’ve since forgotten. You wish you could remember but you’re paralyzed, body and mind.

He steps into view, standing over the counter door, and he’s less rugged than he’d seemed from far away. More baby-faced. He sees you and his eyes go wide and he asks, “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell am I?” You sound unhinged a little, but what kind of killer has the nerve to question you before they take you out? “Who the fuck are you?”

He doesn’t answer—his eyes are frantic, going from your face to your bleeding leg to the tourniquet tied above the wound. “Why were you here?”

These fucking questions, holy shit. “I work here, asshole. Not—not at 7/11. At—”

Your throat tightens and you can’t quite say the agency’s name but the look on his face tells you he knows.

He jumps the counter, and you have nothing to defend yourself with except your fists and the bag of chocolate mushrooms. You hold up the shiny silver bag like it’s a shield and hope you don’t have to look at him when he finishes things. You’d rather be looking at Sero’s model face. At the cracked-tile flooring. At fucking nothing.

But he doesn’t attack you—he sits closer to the door, far enough away that he’s not a threat, back against the counter like yours is. He stops moving and watches your leg bleed. “No one was supposed to be there.”

So it was him. This fucking kid in an oversized puffy jacket and a collared polo that hangs off his skinny body in awkward angles. He took out a whole hero agency.

“Heroes don’t work nine-to-fives, dickhead. There were people in that building.” Don’t think about it. Don’t think about the receptionist with the kind smile that would tell you the latest gossip about the hot guys in legal. Don’t think about the secondary engineer that looked at your blueprints like you were a god. Don’t think about the sidekick that you made a personalized utility belt for and that she loved it so much she sent you a handwritten thank you letter.

How many of them were there today?

“No, I watched. I made sure. I didn’t wanna do it if we were gonna hurt people.” He’s fucking crying. Like real crying, not whatever you’d been doing, and tears roll down his cheeks fast and silent. He stares, still, at your wound. “They all left and I pulled the fire alarm when they were gone. There was no one there. Why didn’t you leave?”

“You don’t get to ask any more fucking questions.” You feel kind of dizzy and you hate the way this kid is looking at your injury. You blindly reach behind you and find the cloth you’d felt on the counter’s shelf earlier and pull it to your leg, covering the wound and applying pressure. The pain wakes you up. Everything in the room is in focus again. “You said ‘we’.”

“Me and my dad.” He offers nothing more than this, but things are starting to make sense.

“A hero agency just… fucking gone.” Whether it was him or his dad or his dumbass third cousin, it doesn’t matter—this kid knows things and he’s going to tell them to you. “How did you even manage it?”

“My class took a field trip there and I left my bag behind, with the—the thing.” He’s silent for a second, like he’s collecting himself. “And Red Riot told us about the training on Sundays.”

You’d completely forgotten.

Something loosens in your chest, an extremely small relief. The group trainings are so inconsequential to you. Everyone heads to the larger training grounds that UA lets pro-heroes use when classes aren’t in session. The only disruption to your Sundays is that Bakugou isn’t in the breakroom for your whole shift, and you never realized how much his absence in those moments actually was a disruption. You like it when he’s there.

And he’s alive. Kiri is alive. Everyone—god, hopefully everyone—is safe.

But the place that felt like home is gone forever. They could recreate the building inch for inch and it still wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t have the elephant-shaped watermark on the ceiling tile above the lab’s door, or the weird smell of melting plastic anytime someone used the breakroom toaster, or the framed front page of the local newspaper from the day Might Riot acquired its third-place ranking.

“I told Dad and he—” The kid cuts off and his lips twist and this inspires a new wave of tears. You can barely make it out when he says, “He’s gonna be so mad at me.”

“Your dad’s gonna be mad?” Your words make his eyes shoot to yours and he looks so broken, and he doesn’t get to feel like that. You’re the one that gets to feel like that.

He shakes his head and tears splatter on his coat. “Not Dad. Red Riot. He’s—he won’t ever forgive me.” And the kid is still half-sobbing, but he pulls a set of keys on a lanyard out of his pocket and you can see a little metal figurine attached to them. It must be something off-brand, because you follow your friends’ merch drops like an insane fan does and you don’t recognize it. A tiny Kiri giving a thumbs up, smiling, his teeth painted white that doesn’t exactly stay in the lines of his mouth.

Careful little brush strokes and not enough layers of acrylic paint for the color to be solid. It’s hand painted.

“He said he liked my keychain.” His face twists and he has to take a few deep, shaking breaths before he can continue speaking. “I told him I was gonna make him one too and we could be matching.”

It suddenly clicks that this kid left his bag of explosives there on a class field trip, and the only one you remember coming through Might Riot is the one Kiri told you about weeks ago. Bakugou blew up something in front of the students. The kids. “How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

God.

You’re not sure what to say to that. You feel cold all over.

He sniffles and you realize he’s got on a school uniform underneath his massive jacket, an insignia on the breast of the polo. “Dad said it wouldn’t do anything big. It was supposed to be really small.”

A twelve-year-old and his dad blew up one of your favorite places in the entire world and you’re bleeding out on the floor of a 7/11, and you find, even now, that you can’t be angry. This child isn’t the mastermind in this situation. He’s been—manipulated. By someone he trusts. Someone more dangerous that you don’t have eyes on. “Where’s your dad now?”

The kid goes quiet, pulling his knees to his chest. He looks so young.

And of course he does, because he’s twelve, but he’s so fucking young. Like you were. Like Bakugou was. Your friends fighting battles that weren’t their own years before they became pro-heroes. You were all his age when the League of Villains was still operating, when you first found out what terror felt like.

You’ve felt the fear that this kid is feeling. You know it much too well. And you wish there didn’t have to be more kids out there like him, like you and your friends, that lose their innocence in these same, terrible ways.

“I think—I saw Dynamight grab him. I don’t—I don’t know what he did after that.”

Okay. Bakugou—he’s okay.

He’s alive and you were aware of that because he almost always leads group training so he couldn’t have been in the building but—he’s okay.

“I don’t know what happened but I know Dad hurt Red Riot on accident and they were looking for him and I just wanted to help.” His voice breaks and he speaks too quickly, words tripping over themselves. “He said they would stop if I helped and that it would send a message or something. Mom won’t stop crying and I had to do something, but I didn’t know that it would be that bad because the tutorial we found online said it would only be a small explosion and I don’t know how we messed it up. It wasn’t supposed to—to fall.”

The shoulder guard. The scar. The villain with the blade quirk. You can’t even remember why they were trying to take him in, but you know that he fought Kiri tooth and nail. Nothing about that was accidental. And now, his son is in front of you. Overly eager to please the people he loves and fearing their disappointment if he fails. If he fucks up.

He reminds you of yourself.

If things were different, he could be at UA next year, studying the same things you were. He could be learning about the femoral artery and emergency procedure and how to use polyisobutane in the correct amounts. That’s why the smell of burning rubber was so strong. Sickening. His father messed with the measurements on purpose, because there was never going to be a small explosion inside a hero agency like Might Riot. He created a bomb that was too siliconic to not cause mass destruction, and he made his son plant it and told him that everything was going to be okay.

“When I called the Hero Commission to try to tell them they just tried to get me to turn him in. No one I called would listen. He just gets angry sometimes, and—and…” He starts crying again, his face red and splotchy. “It’s not his fault. He doesn’t like heroes. And he just—sometimes he can’t control the stuff he does when he gets mad. It’s not—he’s been working on it for a really long time and he’s better now, but he just—it’s not his fault.”

He puts his head against his knees and wraps his arms around his legs and shakes. And you shouldn’t be forced to fucking do this because you’re in so much pain, but you shift your body along the edge of the counter until you’re sitting by the kid’s side, trying to ignore the burning in your leg. In your sore muscles, beginning to cramp in the void left by the end of your adrenaline rush. You put your arm around him, tentative—but you know he won’t hurt you. This is a kid that has tasted violence too soon and learned the bitter taste of its repercussions.

He leans against you, his face turned into your shoulder, heaving his breaths the way that only children do when they cry. His tears form large damp spots on your cheap shirt. You miss your jacket. You open the bag of chocolate mushrooms and hold it out to him, and after a moment he reaches in and grabs the three that are left. He eats them between noisy sobs.

You lean your head back against the counter and just sort of… drift. Your head is swimming. Your vision blurs at the edges and there are spots forming in front of your eyes, black and white and glowing. You stare at Sero’s face on the magazine cover and watch it blink in and out of existence.

He calms down after a few minutes, and when he’s finally silent, his sniffles subsiding almost entirely, you know you’ve done all that you can. This isn’t your job. And this kid deserves better than you to help him.

“I’ve gotta go, I think.” Your voice sounds faint, but it could just be from the ringing in your ears, growing louder in the quiet. “I need—help.”

He pulls away from you and scrubs his blotchy face with the sleeve of his jacket. When he’s gathered the courage to look at you, his lips are trembling. “I’m sorry.”

His apology shouldn’t matter to you at all because no one can apologize for everything that’s happened, but you want to accept it. You want this kid to be able to move past this one day. He’s going to file away this entire experience into little boxes in his head, and years from now he’ll unpack them as trauma and maybe if you tell him you forgive him, it’ll be easier for him to move on.

Even though he helped destroy the place where you’d been your happiest. Where you spent hours with your friends. Where you used to get tea and Bakugou would lean against the breakroom table and listen to you talk, and you know without a doubt why he didn’t stay in his office and use the machine Kiri bought him. You should have known it long before now.

There are so many things that you should have known and that you should be doing and that you should have already done, and all you want is to be sitting at the table in the tonkatsu place, the heavy smell of cooked rice in the air, surrounded by your friends. Watching them bicker and laugh and tell dumb jokes.

“Everything is gonna be—fine. It’ll be okay. None of this was your fault.” You stand, holding the counter for support, and you sway when you’re on your feet. The cloth you were holding over the wound falls away and—what’s underneath it isn’t good. “Go home.”

You know that there’s nothing you could say to the Hero Commission to stop this kid from being punished in some way. The agency is gone. The street is fucking gone. You don’t remember the sound of the explosion but you remember the sound right after, air being sucked back into the vacuum created by the blast, and then the chaos that followed. The car alarms, the screaming.

Had he been close enough to hear it too?

You’re only a support tech, so your word doesn’t count for much, but you’re going to do everything you fucking can to make sure this kid doesn’t have to pay for someone else’s actions.

You limp out from behind the counter and you’re at the door when he clears his throat. You’re so tired, but you turn. Look back into the 7/11. Try to ignore your bloody footprints on the tile behind you.

“Thank you.” He’s just peeking out from behind the plexiglass, messy black hair and red puffy eyes and his hands gripping the counter’s edge, his nails bitten to the quick.

This isn’t your job. One of the most important rules you ever learned in the support course is that you shouldn’t try to be a hero. Literally rule number one. Heroes have that title for a reason. There’s a headache forming deep at the base of your skull and the pressure you feel when you blink lets you know just how bad it’s about to be. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything. Just—go home and see your mom.”

And you leave him with the empty bag of chocolate mushrooms and Sero’s calendar and your trail of bloody footprints, the bell above the door announcing your exit to the entire, empty street.

You’ve never seen Musutafu this quiet. It’s a ghost town. There should be fucking tumbleweeds rolling through the streets. You can’t waste time going to the station. You need to head further into town, where the heroes probably are. They can help. Bakugou will be there, you hope. Maybe if you tell him about the kid, he can help with that, too.

Shit. You didn’t even get his name. You’re not sure if that matters, but you almost want to reenter the 7/11 and ask.

You’re in too much pain to double back, though. The way your body feels weighted down does not bode well for you, and you slowly make your way across the next long block, sticking to the sidewalk even though there are no cars on the road. A billboard on the side of an office across the street boasts a fifty-foot tall Lemillion, standing with his fists on his hips and his cape fluttering in an unseen breeze.

The one thing you can commend your friends on, even if they’ll sell out for easy-sale merch and calendar shoots, is that they never do any fucking billboards.

A side street comes up, narrow and alley-like, and it’s the one you usually take to cut the block to get to the tonkatsu place from Might Riot in half the time. The tall buildings either side of it block out most light, but the tight space means you can careen back and forth and have a wall to lean against at all times. You pass abandoned bicycles and milk crates and strewn fast-food wrappers that drift gently down the alley as if they too have somewhere they need to be. The wind-tunnel-effect breeze pushes you forward alongside the wrappers, and you think you’re moving fast but it also feels like it takes an eternity to reach the other side of the block.

When you step out into the street on the other side, there’s sound, suddenly. Overlapping voices and someone shouting over an intercom and the undeniable hum of people. It feels like your vision isn’t moving with your eyes, images overlapping instead of showing up smooth, but you look to your left and there’s a small crowd of people spread across the wide street.

The main road has been blockaded, and on the close side of the metal guardrails, there are ambulances and cop cars and people being treated by attendants with healing quirks and EMTs with thick rolls of bandages. Some heroes are walking around, checking on people, easily identifiable by their costumes.

You need to get there. To have them look at your leg. Your aching head. To let you lie down and sleep for days, maybe, if that won’t kill you.

The glass in your leg is screaming by the time you make it to the crowd, and people look at you and just—step away. Shocked, eyes wide. You probably look like death. You remember the crusted blood on your neck and vaguely wonder how much of it covers your body at this point.

There’s a man in a hero costume standing by an ambulance and you recognize him—definitely a sidekick that works at Might Riot, though one you haven’t worked with personally. You need to get to him and tell him that you need medical assistance because you think the first person you need to talk to is someone you can trust rather than a random EMT, and—you hear something.

Sound cuts in and out between the ringing in your ears but you hear a voice and you’ll fucking collapse if it’s just your brain playing tricks on you. Because you recognize it and there is a pain so sweet in your chest that it feels like you’re dying.

You push further into the crowd, the space between people narrowing the closer you get to the guardrails, but you can see through the stream of civilians and heroes and cops and you didn’t make up the voice in your head.

It’s him.

His body is coiled with murderous intent and you can hear him yelling from this far away, Kiri standing close but outside of punching range. Mina’s there, too, even though she works on the other side of town, and—you’re like a block from her apartment, you realize. She probably just came down to help if she wasn’t called here from Ryuko’s agency.

You’re close enough now to make out words, and Bakugou is loud when he’s angry. “I’m faster than any of those fucking clowns that are out there—”

“I want you to be able to go out there as bad as you do, bro. But we can’t risk another building going down if you set off another bomb.” Kiri’s voice is more quiet but his words are firm enough that they carry, or maybe you’re just so hyper-focused on the point where they’re standing that the sound of their voices is being broadcasted to you through some principle of nature you’ve never read about.

Mina obviously doesn’t want to get in between the two of them but she says something that you don’t quite catch to Bakugou, her face soft. She’s being kind and you can tell in the way her hand reaches out towards him like she wants to reassure him.

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down,” he snarls, seething. You haven’t seen him this angry since high school. “I get to decide how fucking calm I am.”

You’re so close now to the blockade. The crowd parts around you like water around oil.

The guardrail is an insurmountable object in your current state. You put your hand on it and the metal is cold, sharp, ripping your brain away from the edge of total fogginess. You forgot it was winter.

“Ma’am?”

You turn, slow, and there’s a man standing in front of the blockade. Not a hero. No costume. A police officer, keeping the peace. Trying to make sure the crowd doesn’t get out of hand.

“We’re going to get you to an ambulance, okay?” He speaks slowly, like you’re a lost animal he might scare, and you don’t like being addressed like that even though he’s offering help. “Let’s step over this way.”

You shake your head. “I have to talk to him.” There are more words that should have gone into that sentence but you couldn’t find them in time.

“The heroes are doing their jobs,” he says, like you don’t fucking know that already. “We’ll let them do what they have to and get you healed up in the meantime.”

“Don’t speak to me like I’m a fucking idiot.” You shouldn’t piss this guy off because he’s the one that, in a perfect world, would move the guardrail for you, but he doesn’t seem to be budging. You’re getting desperate. “Just—please let me in. I know them.”

It’s so plainly obvious that he doesn’t believe you, and he knows you’re delirious but he also probably thinks you’re a starstruck fan and you hate being a support tech for this reason alone. You have an ID card for your position as head support tech at Might Riot and copies of all your hero support certifications in your wallet, but you also have no fucking idea where that is. Lost with your phone. Probably still in your jacket pocket, destroyed and abandoned in the ruins of the agency. You hadn’t had time to think back there, to make a plan beyond moving.

“It’s okay, ma’am. You’re going to get help.” The cop puts a hand on your shoulder and he’s still probably trying to help but he’s also not allowed to just fucking touch you out of nowhere.

You slap his hand away and move back and he follows slightly and this is going to get you nowhere. Bakugou and Kiri are still deep in conversation. They’re so close, maybe twenty feet away from you, but that also feels like miles more than it really is because you’re not right next to them.

You want him to turn and look at you. To just know that you’re there. You want to call him by his name but your voice is too small in your throat.

The cop is frustrated now, enough so that he’s speaking into the radio on his chest and losing the apprehension in his approach. He’s gone from friendly to cold in only a moment. He probably thinks he’s doing you a service, and if you weren’t so tired you would deck him in the jaw.

But all you have is your anger, and you’re at a breaking point where this dumb obstacle in the fucking long list of things you’ve overcome to get here might be the reason you can’t get to your friends to let them know you’re okay. “Look. I know you have a job to do, and I’m sure you’re gonna get a raise this year and a commendation or whatever for doing crowd control work like this, but I am not the person to fuck with right now. I just crawled out of a collapsed fucking building to get to these people. If that tells you anything about me, you’ll know that I mean it when I say that if you succeed in getting me into an ambulance and carting me off, I will use every single fucking inch of influence I have to put your career in the fucking ground. Is that clear?”

You got loud at some point but you don’t exactly know when, and there is a silence that rings after you’re done talking. You think it’s the ringing in your ears for only a moment before you realize that it’s just the absence of background noise. He isn’t yelling anymore. You hear Mina shout something and you turn towards your friends as quick as your concussion will allow without knocking you out instantly.

Your eyes meet his, locking like puzzle pieces cut with care to fit together perfectly, and he looks so relieved and he’s saying something so quietly that you can’t hear it and you think it might be your name.

He’s moving faster than you could right now, and every ounce of tension that had been trapped under his skin when you first saw him is gone. It takes a moment to sink in that he was worried about you.

Not the villain. Not the agency. You.

You wish you could hop the stupid guardrail and get to him but he’s walking with purpose, and you feel bad for yelling at that cop and you’re definitely going to send him flowers and an apology note as soon as you’re able to, but that’s background like everything else.

He gets to you so fast and you’re kind of in and out of fully-realized consciousness, but you’re going to try your best to be present for this because there’s so much you have to tell him. He lifts the guardrail like it’s nothing and tosses it aside and without hesitation, he gathers you up in his arms and holds you just tight enough that it doesn’t hurt, and you’re finally safe.

You’re finally home.

He rests his cheek against the top of your head and his arms are holding you so close and there’s a hand in your hair, shaking slightly. It’s okay because your hands are shaking too. You wrap your arms around his waist and lean into him and it’s this—this kind, loving embrace—that finally breaks you. You close your eyes tight but tears burn behind your eyelids and the relief you feel inflates your chest until it feels like it’s on the verge of bursting.

“Where the fuck have you been?” His voice is raw. He’s been yelling. Fighting. You don’t know how long you were out, but he was conscious for every second of it, waiting. Not knowing whether you were alive or dead.

Tears fall despite your best efforts, and you listen to his heartbeat, heavy and fast. “I was at 7/11.”

He kind of laughs at that, an exhale that could be mistaken for something else. It ruffles your hair and you grip the back of his costume’s thick shirt and he tightens his hold on you like there’s a chance he could lose you again. “I should’ve been out there looking for you. I tried, but we had to let the bomb squad do a sweep of the whole block and Ei wouldn’t let me fucking leave, and—”

“Katsuki.” You didn’t know you were going to say his name but you did and it feels good. Like you’re saying it because you feel like you can, not just like you’re allowed. Different in the most minute way.

You pull back and he lets you, but his arms are around your waist still, hesitant to let you go too far. You look up at him and he’s waiting for what you have to say, his face reverent. It reminds you of something.

You remember, almost. Flashes. The train behind him as he stood in front of you at the Musutafu station, tugging his jacket onto your shoulders, his hands so careful, and you wondered what kissing him would taste like. You wouldn’t let yourself think about it at the time, but in revisiting this memory, you realize that even then you thought he was beautiful in a terrible, violent way.

Now, with the way you want to say his name and the fear you saw in his eyes just a second before the relief hit and the fact that you’re not sure you want to go home if you’re not going with him—it’s more.

There’s too much you want to tell him, and for the first time, you feel like you can. You’re not worried that he won’t understand. But your head hurts and you can’t find the way to form those complicated sentences into speech, so you just stare up at him and smile a little and say, “Hi.”

He smiles back and it’s small and tired and it doesn’t really fit his face right. But you can tell he’s trying. “Hey.” Soft. So much in that word. Just one word. Those knife-sharp details. The way Kiri said the same word to Mina at the tonkatsu place, and—

Oh.

This is what it feels like to have someone look at you like you’re the sun.

And there are so many people around you and you’re covered in blood and soot and your head fucking aches, but you grab the front of his shirt, unable to meet him at his level like you normally would because your leg wound won’t let you, and pull him down towards you. When you kiss him you see stars.

His hand cups your face gently, and it’s still warm like it was this morning—this fucking morning, which feels like days ago now. He kisses you back so slow, like you two actually have the time to spend here in this moment. Like there aren’t a million things that are more important than this.

Making sure you don’t die is probably your top priority, but this is a very close, competitive second.

You stop kissing him because the stars in your vision are getting brighter and they’re still there when you open your eyes. He caresses your cheek with his thumb and it makes you shiver, and you’re cold in ways you shouldn’t be. You’re still gripping onto the shirt of his hero costume and it starts to become more for balance. “I think I’m gonna pass out?”

His eyes go wide and he’s suddenly back in the regular passage of time like you are, and it’s like he’s just noticing the blood and the exhaustion and the tourniquet even though you’re positive these are things he logged upon seeing you because he’s too fucking smart and he’s good at his job and you like him, like, a lot. Like a whole lot.

And it makes you kind of want to cry but in the good, cathartic way, like you can finally put down everything you’ve been carrying because someone else is there to help you with the burdens you’ve decided to shoulder.

“I’m gonna lift you up. That okay?” His voice comes through hazy and this should worry you more, but you’re tired.

You nod and you don’t remember exactly how but you end up in his arms. Each step jostles your leg but you don’t feel the pain so acutely anymore.

You think this is what poets talk about. You’ve never liked poetry, but you read a couple lines from a book you found in Bakugou’s—Katsuki’s—office once before he saw you reading it and snatched it away from you, and sometimes you can feel emotion so deeply that it can’t be summed up with something straightforward.

There is an intimacy in the spaces between words. Katsuki’s hands when he cooks and the way he watches himself work. His soft breathing as he held you last night and the careful way he laced your fingers together. This morning at the window, sun rising, salt in the air, and the gentle way his arm brushed against yours.

It’s taken much too long, but you think you’re learning to love the quiet.

Chapter Text

Voicemail from Mina!!! (8:47 AM):

You need to call me. I don’t—Might Riot just went down. The whole building. I heard it all the way from my apartment. Like, it just exploded. My windows shook. Kiri’s devastated and Bakugou’s scary right now and I’m talking like when he was still a competitive asshole scary. None of us know where you are and we’re all really worried so please get back to me. Please, please, please call me as soon as possible. I love you and—promise me you’ll be okay. Okay?

Voicemail from RIOT (8:49 AM):

I don’t know if you’re gonna get this message but we’re coming to find you as soon as we can. You’ve always been one of the strongest out of all of us and I know you’re gonna keep making us all proud. You are. I know this is easier said than done, but… try not to worry. Hang in there for me.

Voicemail from asshole (8:55 AM):

Pick up your fucking phone.

Voicemail from asshole (8:57 AM):

Do you want me to say please? Fucking answer.

Voicemail from asshole (9:44 AM):

I couldn’t—they won’t let me come find you. I can’t—I don’t know how to—god fucking damn it. You’re… fuck, I’m not saying this right. If you’re hurt, I’m gonna be pissed. I already bought the wagyu on the way to work and I don’t want it to go bad, so you’d better be in fucking pristine condition when I find you. Just—call me back if you get this. Please.

You wake up slowly in that painful, groggy way that only people that suffer from sleep deprivation are unfortunate enough to know. You can see the sky, and that feels odd, because the last time you woke up you couldn’t.

It’s night. Foggy clouds run in strips across the sky’s dark expanse, obscuring the stars, but you probably wouldn’t see them anyway if the clouds weren’t there. The hazy film of light pollution that settles over major cities glows into the black night and turns it gray.

So you’re in the city. Looking out of a window that’s large and unfamiliar. Laying in a bed that isn’t yours.

You sit up, an ache in your muscles that lets you know the next few days aren’t going to be pleasant. The window you’re looking out of is wide, taking up almost the entirety of the wall it sits in, a weak light filtering through and illuminating your surroundings. The room is on the smaller side, but it uses its space well. There’s just enough furniture to make it look like someone lives here. A side table with a simple lamp. A set of dark, minimalistic drawers. A patterned armchair that looks like it was pulled right out of the pages of an interior design magazine. And bookcases—so many bookcases that they take up almost all the wall space, each full of rows of cracked spines and hardback giants.

And then there’s the small hints of personality in the midst of everything else. An All Might bobble-head on the top shelf of the bookcase by the window. A framed and signed poster of Miruko on the far wall that’s almost identical to the one that hangs above your shoe rack. A pair of discarded boots sitting between the two doors in the wall opposite the window.

You keep waking up in unfamiliar places, and though this should scare you, you know exactly where you are. You’re just not sure how you’re not dead.

Or maybe you are, and this—this is something like recompense for everything.

You pull back the covers and you’re clean. Not covered in blood like you’d been the last time you were conscious. You’re in a massive, black band tee that fits you more like a dress, featuring the name of a metal group that Jirou got Denki into briefly when you all were at UA. If you think about it hard enough you can still hear the echoing scream of the lead singer over a heavy, snapping bass line.

Your legs are bare. You pull up the hem of the shirt and note that you’re wearing pink work-out shorts that are definitely not yours because you haven’t properly worked out at a gym in years, and there is a shiny, moon-white scar on the outside of your right thigh. You run a finger across it and shiver. New skin. Scar tissue. The glass shard must have been bigger than you remember, because the scar runs a good five inches in length, and you just look at it for a while, considering the fact that today’s events will forever be marked on your body.

You’re alive. This much you’re sure of now. But you don’t know how you’re ever going to forget the sound the agency made when it fell. That terrible creaking, like a door being opened slowly but magnified a hundred times over.

With care, you get to your feet and you only shake a little when you let go of the bed, standing by yourself with no support. You’re exhausted. Even more so than when you used to pull sequential all-nighters to study for tests. But you’re standing, somehow healed. Above that, you’re safe. You can fight past a little fatigue if that’s the cost of everything else.

You walk to the window slowly, treated to a view that lets you know you’re high up. Not sky scraping level, but elevated enough to overlook a lot of the shorter buildings in this area of town. Definitely Musutafu. You’ve traveled the entire district multiple times over because Mina likes to drag you around on shopping trips, and you know that you’re across town from the agency. The place where the agency used to be.

The view makes you feel kind of nauseous with that thought in your head, so you make your way across the room towards the doors and look at the discarded boots of his hero costume.

His. Katsuki’s.

There’s a divide in him, and you use it to categorize and sort his actions. Two different files in which you store information. There’s the shitty stuff he says and does, his aggression and his faulted perfectionism and his god complex, and you file that under Bakugou, the person you’ve known since high school. And then there’s Katsuki, the person you’ve come to know both slowly and too fast over the course of the past week. Kind, in a way. Maybe that word is a little strong. If not kind, then caring. He just pairs any expression of this care with enough aggression that it can often be overlooked.

But they’re two halves of the same person. He’s all himself, rough edges and careful hands, and you like that. You don’t want him to be any different. He’s frustrating and emotionally underdeveloped and terrible at communicating, but all those things make him human.

No human can achieve perfection. You know this better than a lot of people, because you’ve been trying to be perfect your entire life. But he has achieved a kind of perfection that’s just right for you, the flaws adding to the whole.

You open the closest door, and it’s a small, adjoining bathroom with an entire row of shelves dedicated to plush towels and different expensive conditioners and soaps and a near-empty bottle of his cologne—and you close it. You’re not ready to confront the fact that Katsuki takes care of himself better than you do. That honestly makes you feel like you’ve failed at something. Maybe you should stop being so cheap and buy yourself a nice shampoo. You deserve it after today.

When you open the second door, you can immediately smell something cooking, the air fragrant with ginger and something earthier. Your bodily needs kick in again to let you know that you have to eat as soon as possible.

You walk down a narrow hallway with two other off-shooting doors, and at its end, the apartment opens up into a large room. It reminds you of your place, that kind of studioish kitchen-slash-dining-room-slash-living-room that meant the developer didn’t have to spend the money to put in any extra walls. It’s also smaller than you thought it would be.

Not small. Definitely bigger than your apartment. But not extravagant, either. He’s never let anyone in your friend group come to his apartment before—at least, not that you know of, because you think it would be weird if Kiri hadn’t been here—and for some reason, that made you expect opulence and sleek, thousand-dollar pieces of furniture. A penthouse apartment that had windows at every corner so he could watch over the city like some kind of comic-book superhero, because he’s egotistical enough for that to be something you could totally see him doing.

But it’s like the bedroom. Minimal furnishings, a nice black couch and dark wood coffee table sitting across from more bookcases and a television smaller than the one Denki bought you. Behind that, another set of wide windows revealing the city’s shadowed skyline. On the other side of the room, a small group of dining room chairs circle a table that you’re almost positive Sero picked out—it’s like a slice that’s been cut out of a large tree trunk, the edges flared and bark-covered and the top a swirling mass of growth rings. A memorialization of its death. This is how old I was before I got cut down to make a table.

You probably shouldn’t be so critical about things. The table is pretty. This is why the other support techs don’t invite you out for drinks.

The rest of the room is dark rugs and tasteful artwork and wall shelves that are covered in little decorative All Might memorabilia and, surprise, more books. More than you’ve probably owned in your life, if you’re not counting textbooks and manuals. It’s an extremely tailored space, but it doesn’t feel like it’s putting on a performance. It feels lived in and worn even though it could probably be pictured for display photos and put on the apartment complex’s website to entice potential renters or buyers.

Probably buyers. If you can afford to live here, you’re not renting.

Farthest from the hallway behind you is the kitchen, and you see Katsuki and your heart jumps in the way it did when he saw you standing behind the guardrail, covered in blood and shaking, your name on his lips.

He has a pot on the stovetop that he’s filling with chopped vegetables you can’t quite identify from here, but whatever he’s making smells divine. You really hope he made enough for two but you’re going to have to get closer to him if you want to find out.

And you hesitate—you’re a little self-conscious because you feel so underdressed. Even though you’re covered enough to be decent, it feels too informal for your first time in his apartment. You feel like you should be in something business-casual, despite the fact you almost died. Whoever dressed you could have at least put you in a collared shirt for the occasion.

It helps that he’s more focused on the food than you. You walk towards the kitchen and get used to the feel of your body again, the way your leg has to take your own weight when you step forward with it. There’s a small pain, just a tiny aching echo of what was there before, but it’s something you can easily ignore if you try.

The kitchen is sunken into the apartment’s back wall, a box-shaped alcove lined with solid black counters that you’re positive are made of real, cold marble. It’s obvious that this is the room that gets the most use. There are signs of human life like the poster and the bobble-head in his room. His fridge is a two-door giant with a freezer drawer and a few magnets—one depicting Tokyo Tower, one Dynamight magnet, because of course he would buy his own merchandise, and one white square bearing the words, If you talk to me before I have my coffee, I WILL bark at you like the dog I am. It was a gift Mina got him for his twenty-second birthday because she thought it was the funniest and most accurate thing she’d ever seen. You can’t believe he still has it.

There’s a careful organization to the things that line the countertops: a wood block knife holder with some impressively shiny steel handles sticking out of it, a revolving spice rack, and next to that, the Chargebolt toaster that’s been sold out everywhere for months. You know he’s on the list of people that gets sent free hero shit all the time and you want him to somehow get you on that list. Again, that requires talking. Saying something. You find that the only thing you can do right now is watch.

You can better identify what he’s cooking as you get closer. Spring onions and ginger and miso broth all mixed into a pot and simmering.

Last night, when he implied that he was going to cook for you again, you never would have expected it to be so soon. You honestly hadn’t expected it to happen at all. But once again, you’re watching his precise movements and he’s relaxed and focused on doing something he enjoys—or, at least, that he’s good at.

You lean against the corner of the wall where the living room opens up into the kitchen and you feel some of the pain subside as weight shifts off of your leg. He keeps cooking, concentrated, and that means you’re going to have to be the one that says something. Hesitant, you ask, “Do you want any help?”

He spares you a quick sideways glance before continuing his concentrated work. “Go sit down. I don’t want you to strain yourself.”

“I can—”

“I wasn’t asking. Shuzenji said you should be off your feet as much as possible.” His eyes flick towards you again, just for a second. “Do I need to carry you to the couch?”

You remember, vaguely, the way it felt to be carried by him before passing out and your face heats a little—it had been nice, which is an insane notion because you were literally close to death at the time. It also made you feel like a weak link.

But you survived, and that makes you so much stronger than you’d thought you were. It’s so jarring to learn something new about yourself even though you’re the one living your life. It feels like you should know everything already. The knowledge should come with the body.

Then your mind backtracks, reminding you of his words before you got distracted. The name Shuzenji rings so many bells. You frown, confused. “Recovery Girl? Didn’t she retire like… right after we graduated?”

“I did a couple training sessions at UA with the kids, so Aizawa owed me a favor. I don’t understand why she loves him so much, but he got her to come out.” He stirs the soup a little. Picks up a little bottle next to the stove and adds something to the pot that looks like rice vinegar. “The guy in the ambulance said it’d take about a month for you to heal up. Maybe longer. There was a lot of—damage.”

The way he sounds—still so worried, even though you’re right here with him—hits you in an unexpected way. Two cars that got too close on a freeway. Tangled metal. You try to play it off by saying, “I got the pro-hero treatment because you were going to miss me too bad while I was in the hospital?”

Bok choy goes into the pot, a knife scraped careful over a wooden cutting board to make sure none of the delicate leaves miss their target. “That a problem?”

No, it isn’t. Not at all. Because even in the few hours—or, god, what felt like hours—you’d spent escaping the ruins of Might Riot and finding your way back to safety, you’d missed him so fucking badly. There was almost nothing you wouldn’t have done just to see him. To hear him talk. “Thank you.”

“I just made a phone call. Don’t thank me for shit that doesn’t matter.” He turns to you then, and you’re reminded of yourself at the 7/11, facing the kid peeking above the counter. Katsuki hadn’t been the one to pull the glass from your leg, to heal the gaping wound and the concussion, but he’d done everything in his power to make sure someone else could. To make sure you’d be okay.

You hadn’t done much for the kid in that moment and he still thanked you anyway. You want Katsuki to know that what he’s done means something, but you’re not sure how to communicate that. “It matters. To me, at least. I’m alive, which is… pretty cool.”

God, that sounded so fucking dismissive. Your brain is like a sieve, words slipping through gaps before you can filter and refine them into something better. You can’t tell if it’s from the exhaustion or if there are still some side-effects left over from the concussion.

He considers you for a moment, taking in what you’re sure is the mess of your appearance, his eyes catching on your scar only briefly. “I wasn’t joking about carrying you if you don’t go sit.”

“Fine,” you say. “But don’t take too long.”

“You telling me what to do?” One corner of his lips curves upwards and it does so much to make him look like an asshole.

Just that look gets you to a point where you want to match his energy, because it always does. Even before whatever’s happening between you started. It’s why he’s so good at getting you riled up. You always want to say something that’ll wipe the expression off his face. “I thought that was obvious. Or do you need me to make it more simple for you?”

He grins, does that little exhale-laugh that you’ve heard a whole three times in the past couple of days and that you want to hear so many more times. “I love it when you talk back to me like that.”

Your face burns so hot so quickly that you feel a little faint. What the fuck? If his plan was to stop you in your fucking tracks, he’s done an excellent job. It’s not fair for him to say something that damaging to someone that just survived a near-death experience. What do you even say in response to that?

But it runs through your head like a mantra. “I, um.” Love it when you talk back to me like that. Shit. You wish you knew how to stop blushing. “I’m going to go sit down.”

He’s pleased with himself, and you can see it in the way his slight smile turns into something more subdued but still arrogant as he returns to his cooking. It should be illegal for him to talk ever again.

You feel like you might actually explode, so you head towards the couch and sit down in it, and—man. Again. Rich people and their fucking soft-ass couches. It cradles your body in a way your pieces of furniture, even the nicer ones charitably given to you by your friends, can’t do because they’re not stuffed with whatever goose-down, cloud-filling shit that’s in these cushions.

While you wait, you squint at his bookcases to try to see if you recognize any titles. There are tons of books on hero history, paperbacks you’ve seen at corner stores and street stalls with catchy titles and bad plots, and a lot of perfect-condition manga box sets. You can’t believe he has the gall to call other people nerds when he has a collection of some of the nerdiest books possible proudly displayed in his living room.

Maybe that’s another reason he doesn’t let people come to his apartment. You feel like it would be too intimate for him to let people see evidence of his interests that aren’t working himself to death and blowing up bad guys.

Before long, he joins you on the couch, sitting just close enough that your legs barely touch, and hands you a bowl of soup and a spoon. “Don’t spill any.”

You accept the bowl, but you also realize that he doesn’t have a second one and you’re kind of intimidated by the thought of eating alone. “Didn’t you make any for yourself?”

He shakes his head. “I already ate with Ei while you were knocked out.”

Kiri had been here. You wonder what he’s even feeling right now. What Katsuki’s feeling. You worked in that agency for years and so did they, but they’re the ones that opened it. The youngest heroes to open an agency besides Hawks and Midoriya. And all their hard work is rubble on Musutafu’s main street. “Is he okay?”

He frowns a little, sort of resigned. “He’ll be fine.”

And when he says that, he sounds—you can’t say jealous. Because that would be ridiculous. But you’re also not really sure what else to call it.

The soup is warm between your hands and he made it just for you. It smells fucking fantastic because it’s one of those kinds of soups that are made specifically for people to feel better when they’re ill. Kiri isn’t the one that made you this food. You’re not sitting in Kiri’s apartment, on his couch, so close that you can feel the heat coming from his body.

“Do you think… I’m not over him?” Nothing feels as consequential as what happened today. Asking this question feels almost childish in comparison. But you’re tired of waiting for him to tell you what he’s thinking.

It’s still awkward to ask him something so personal, but there’s a wall that’s been lifted from your interactions. Like a layer has been peeled back, getting you one step closer to complete, total honesty with him.

He makes a noncommittal noise. “Your food’s gonna get cold.”

“Katsuki.”

It’s like he snaps to attention every time you say his name. Like he’s not used to hearing it. You wonder when the last time he spoke to his family was. He looks at the bowl of soup for a minute, ruminates on the question. “It’s fine if you’re not.”

“That’s a non-answer.”

“Eat the fucking soup,” he bites out, and then he frowns deeper and his voice softens. “And I’ll say more.”

You start eating, and there are many things you could envy him for, but his ability to make food that blows your mind out of your skull has just hit the top of the list. Without the scant pickings of your fridge, he’s made a meal that hits a spot in your soul that other food can’t seem to find. When he doesn’t continue, you look at him, holding the soup spoon still like a threat, and he sighs.

“I don’t want to make things difficult. For you or for me. I already fucked up when I took things too far on movie night. But I just wanted—shit, I don’t know.” He runs a hand down his face, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Putting distance between the two of you. “I’m not an idiot. Everyone else is ignorant because they never learned to open their eyes and pay attention to the important shit, but since I’ve known you, it’s been obvious that you wanted to be with Ei.”

You’re losing your appetite at a rapid pace, and your stomach twists and it feels like you’re about to be broken up with even though you’re not together in any sense of the word beyond being in the same room. It’s that sticky apprehension that doesn’t leave the upper parts of the chest. You put the soup down on the coffee table because the smell is starting to make you feel sick.

“When we talked about it at the tonkatsu shop and you said things would be weird for everyone if they found out, I understood. I got how you felt about everything.” He considers his next words for a long moment. “I don’t want to be a replacement. Or a fucking stand-in, or something. And I don’t want to take advantage of you if you’re still thinking about him.”

How could he possibly think that anything you’d done with him had been with anyone else in mind? Even that first time you’d slept together, you hadn’t been the one thinking about Kiri—it was Katsuki that brought him up. You don’t even want to consider what his thought process must have been in that moment, because you had been mortified, and even now, you still kind of feel that second-hand embarrassment if you put too much thought into it. He said his best friend’s name during sex and that’s—kind of fucked, even if it was because he was jealous.

There’s a picture he obviously has about your thoughts on everything that’s happened, and you’re worried that it’s wrong. “How did you think I felt about everything?”

You watch him and the city keeps thriving outside the window in front of you and so many other lives are moving forwards at the same pace as yours, but this feels like the most important moment in the world. Maybe that’s narcissistic. Maybe you’re too much like him.

“It was like you thought everything would be fucked beyond repair if we did anything else. Even if we talked. I didn’t see you at work for two fucking weeks. I just wanted things to be back to normal. And I shouldn’t have gone to your apartment yesterday, but I knew you’d take the shit between Ei and Mina hard, and you were just gonna sit around and be sad and not take care of yourself if I didn’t do anything.” There is a clear tension in the curve of his shoulders. He seems genuinely exasperated with himself. “But I just kept pushing it because I’m an idiot sometimes.”

“Why?” God, you need to stop talking. That was maybe the longest you’ve ever heard him speak outside of an agency briefing or an impassioned rant about his thoughts on the hero-industrial complex, and asking for more feels cruel. But you keep going. “I want to know why you pushed it.”

Why he kissed you. Why he held you the way real people hold each other. Why he looked at you like you were everything.

“You’re so frustrating,” he mutters. You think the words are supposed to sound angry but there’s heat high on his cheekbones and you get that uneasy feeling from him that you realize, finally, is nervousness. He puts on such a good front that you’d assumed he never got anxious about anything. You can hear it in his voice when he speaks again. “I wanted more.”

You think of the night you fell asleep in his arms, the way his hand held yours, the stifling feeling of wanting more from him but being too afraid to ask. You’ve wanted more since the first time he kissed you, and it was something you couldn’t admit to yourself because you were afraid of that feeling. He’s so fucking gorgeous, and he’s rich, and he's a top ten pro-hero and you could name five people off the top of your head at the agency, much more interesting and attractive than you, that would give up a limb—multiple limbs—just to sleep with him once.

If he learned how to be a little less belligerent, he could have anyone he wants. He could be with someone that’s successful and powerful like him.

But you’re successful. You’re powerful, in a way. Maybe it’s not outlandish to think that this is okay. Maybe the gap between the two of you, hero and support, can be bridged because you’re both doing the same things in different ways.

He has the whole country fawning over him and you have a dedicated team of underlings that read your blueprints and build notes like they’re sacred texts.

He’s looking at you now. Still nervous. Still probably thinking that you only wanted him as a replacement. “You know I don’t like you quiet.”

And you don’t want to be quiet. You want to say what’s on your mind, but you also want to touch him. You stand carefully, and bolder than usual, you put a hand on a shoulder and push him so he's sitting back against the couch. “Help me with this,” you tell him.

Slowly, with Katsuki holding you steady and watching you with such rapt attention, you’re able to lower yourself on top of him, straddling his hips like you had been this morning, but not for—what had happened then. You just want to be as close as possible. You want to melt into his skin and stay there and never have to leave.

You think he knows this by the way he doesn’t say anything. He just runs his hands up your legs, the brief skin-on-skin contact something that makes you feel like crying, and settles them on your hips.

Your leg twinges and you flinch as the tender skin of your scar stretches out to its limit, and his eyes go a little wide. “Let me—”

“No. I have things to say.” When you’re settled on top of him, your hands on his chest to hold you steady, you look down at him and god, the fact that he’ll just let you do this is crazy to you. “I didn’t do anything with you because I wanted to be with another person. I was definitely hurting because of someone else, but it wasn’t like I was keeping you around because I thought you would be a good alternative. I don’t think of anyone else when we’re together.” Your hands are shaking again and you can hear the ringing in your ears that feels like a constant after today. “I only think of you.”

There’s such a serious expression on his face, and—you don’t know if he believes you.

You’re not sure if he can. Because you also know that this has been the biggest switch-up in history, but it feels right. It feels good to be with him for him. “I mean it.”

“I know,” he says, somber. His hands are a careful weight on your hips and you can feel his fingers drum against your side. Nervous energy. “You can do better.”

You wonder how Katsuki really views himself if he thinks that’s true. If he can’t see the good in the things he does. Because he’s always been kind of a dick, but—you think, if you look back, there are a lot of things he did that you didn’t realize were done out of care and careful thought.

Something hits you suddenly, the memories dredged up by yesterday’s events being pulled to the forefront of your mind. “You got me flowers for my birthday.”

“I got you tulips,” he says, like he’s correcting you.

“And?”

“You’re allergic.” He sighs. “It was dumb, now that I’m looking back, and—”

“I can’t believe you even know that off the top of your head. Mina doesn’t even know that. She just assumes I’m allergic to everything.”

“You shouldn’t be impressed because I did something to piss you off.”

“Look—the flowers don’t matter. But the card.” Get well soon. Hanging on your fridge for a month and you didn’t even know how significant those words were. “Maybe I’m reading too much into it and I don’t even know if you remember, but there was a night after we went to that bar Mina liked—”

“I remember.” His words create a resounding silence. One thumb swipes across your side, careful, and even though the touch is diluted by the shirt, it still makes you shiver. “Because I’m not a dumbass that thinks drinking with irresponsible people is a good idea.”

“You’re such an asshole,” you say, but you can’t sound like you mean it because you don’t.

He hums in assent, almost, and you don’t know when this moment got so quiet. Espresso-level concentrated. He’s really beautiful from this angle, and any angle at all, really, but you like the way he looks at you when you’re above him. Still arrogant, but also kind of in awe of you. “You got a point?”

“Why did you send it?”

He’s back to not looking at you. He’s quiet for long enough that you’re assuming he’s either not going to answer or finding the right words is going to take too long.

What happened at the station was years ago. It feels like a full lifetime behind everything that has happened since. And you don’t know how he felt between then and now, but—you’d been under the impression that you were blood-sworn enemies that couldn’t do anything except fight. “Did you like me?”

His brows furrow, a little incredulous. “What kind of fourth-grade shit is that?”

“I thought you hated me,” you blurt out, and it sounds so juvenile now that you say it, because Katuski’s right—this is stuff that kids hash out. You’re both adults, kind of. You’re both trying. But you also can’t stop now that you’ve started. “It felt like we were only friends because we were forced to be. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with me for a really long time.”

That stops him. His face softens and he quiets.

You thought you’d hated him, too. You got so bad at noticing things about yourself and other people somewhere in your life and you can’t pinpoint exactly when. “Even up until recently. And when everything happened, I wasn’t sure if you actually liked me or if you were just pitying me because of everything with Kiri. I didn’t know if it was fun for you to make me think that—maybe there was something there. Or if you didn’t even know you were doing it.”

His hands squeeze your hips lightly. He looks at you for a moment, serious, and you would give anything to know what he’s thinking right now. He’s so open with you in his body language, a subtle change over the course of the past month that you hadn’t noticed until now. Like once he touched you, once you became more than just friends, he couldn’t hide what he was feeling from you. It fucking sucks that you’re so bad at reading it. There’s a look in his eyes that you would give up years of your life to interpret.

Softly, he murmurs, “I don’t hate you.”

It’s really fucked up that those words are making you feel like this—like you finally know where you belong. Like you’re beginning to understand your life and where you want it to go.

You feel a contentment that seems to only be reserved for him, an emotion outside of your regular range. It makes your heart beat a little too fast. It makes you feel detached from your body in the best of ways. It makes you want to drown in him. “I don’t hate you either.”

He brings a hand to your face and tilts your chin downwards, and your lips are so, so close. “Is that all you were worried about? Because if we're done, I want to tell you how much I liked it when you cursed out that cop.”

The ending of that sentence makes shame hit you like a truck. “Oh, fuck.” You pull back and put a hand over your mouth. You’re an awful person. “I feel so bad about that. I’m going to be on the Musutafu police’s shitlist forever now. He was just doing his job.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, but you can tell he’s amused. His hand slides to the back of your neck and he pulls you back to him, close enough again that his voice sounds like it’s coming from everywhere at once. “He wasn’t listening to you and you put him in his place. And it was so fucking hot.”

Your eyebrows shoot up and your mind just kind of blanks. He’s being so—direct. “It was?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he presses a kiss to your cheek, right beside your mouth. Doing his best to frustrate you. He looks up at you and he’s all trouble, and you can feel your heart quicken its pace in response. “I love it when you don’t hold back.”

Another thing he has told you he loves about the things you do and you don’t know how you’re not going to be thinking about his words every day for the rest of your life. He looks at your lips and you want to kiss him so fucking bad, but he’s validating your anger issues and that’s probably not good, but you want him to tell you more. “What else?”

His attention doesn’t stray from your lips, but he makes a questioning noise, like he doesn’t entirely understand what you’re asking of him.

“What else do you love about me?”

You realize how that sounded a second too late, and his eyes go to yours slowly but you can’t move because you’re fucking paralyzed all of a sudden and you think, right now, if you died it would be okay. Even if it annoyed Recovery Girl that she had to come out of retirement for a day to save your life only to have you die a few hours later.

And when you don’t move, he must see that you know you fucked up, because there's a dangerous gleam in his eye and you’re kind of scared for your life. He leans forward and kisses the side of your neck, your jawline, again, as if it’s his favorite place to be soft with you, and then he whispers, “I love it when you get embarrassed like this. It’s even better when I’m the one that did it.”

You make a noise that you think is supposed to be—something. You’re trying to tell him anything possible but you can’t feel your vocal chords.

The hand on the back of your neck travels higher, fingers threading through your hair. “You’re so mouthy with me, and I love the way you sound when you’re saying some shit that would get anyone else killed on the spot. Like you’re daring me to do something because you think I won’t.”

Heat blooms under your skin and your hands curl around the soft material of his shirt, and you have more control of your body now but all you can manage to say is, “Oh?”

His grin is all sharp teeth and bad intention and he pulls your face to his and against your lips, he murmurs, “I love it when you say my name.” He kisses you once, soft and slow, and his hand is tight enough on your hip to leave imprints. “Makes me want to fuck you until it’s the only thing you know how to say.”

You can hear how shaky your breath is and god fucking damn, that’s suddenly the only thing you want. You shift closer because you need him to be pressed up against you right fucking now, but pain shoots through your leg and you flinch hard again, your thigh shaking a little under the strain of being stretched like this. “That sounds—god, really fucking good, but I don’t think I could handle that right now.”

It’s like he tunes back into the real world a second after you do, too caught up in the extremely heady and intimate space you’d found with him, and he looks down at the scar and you don’t want him to look at it, you realize. It makes you feel weirdly vulnerable and you put a hand on top of it as if that’s going to stop anything, but at least it’s partially covered.

“Shit, okay.” His hand leaves your hip and covers yours, and that makes things worse almost because you don’t want him to touch it either. “You want me to take you to bed?”

“Katsuki.”

“Just to lie down.”

You nod, and you let him pick you up, and man, you’ve got to wonder about the strength of his obliques if he can just stand up and lift you at the same time without you helping at all, but that thought is not allowed in your head right now, because if you start anything you’re ninety-nine percent sure you’d be in too much pain to wake up tomorrow. Maybe ninety-five percent. It wouldn’t be worth it, right?

Fuck. You need to learn patience.

He takes you back to his bedroom and lays you down on the bed so carefully, still between your legs, leaning over you for just long enough to kiss you chastely. You were with him exactly like this just this morning and you wonder what you did that was so good in a past life that you’re getting to experience moments like these more than once.

The kiss is almost too gentle and you’re no longer in a position where your leg is strained and fuck learning patience. You do the bad thing and bite his bottom lip and he groans into your mouth, surprised and gorgeously explicit. He pulls back and his eyes are dark but that could just be the darkness of the night outside making him look like this. Like he's wrecked by you.

You don’t think it is. You think you’re making excuses to explain away how much he wants you because you’re scared.

“Fuck, angel.” He exhales and it’s so controlled that you have to wonder exactly how much he’s holding himself back. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

You want to stop, but you’ve never seen him try to control himself this intensely and something about it is fascinating. Pro-Hero Dynamight once punched a reporter for saying that Kiri was lucky to get to work with him, and here’s the same man almost shaking trying to keep himself in check. There’s a give and take of power here that you’re so fucking into because as much as you love to do this to him, you know that if he broke, he’d take back every inch of authority you exerted over him by force and he’d enjoy every second of it. “I thought you said you loved it when I do stuff like this.”

“Doesn’t mean I want you to torture me. I could fucking… god.” He lets out another careful breath and kisses you again, soft, too fleeting for you to do anything to influence the situation. “I’m gonna—I need to wait. I want to do things right.”

The way he says that makes it sound like he’s saying the words to both you and himself, and you didn’t expect that to mean so much to you—him saying he wants to do things right. Like he actually wants to follow the societal conventions of what two people do when they’re building some kind of relationship, and that means that he could want something more permanent with you. Maybe.

He leaves you on the bed and you think he hates the loss of contact as much as you do, because he still looks at you like he wants you. Maybe more with the distance he’s created. “There’s, uh, some extra stuff that hasn’t been used in the bathroom if you want to get ready for bed. Below the sink.”

It’s strange, the way jealousy shoots through your ribs even though there’s nothing to be jealous of. He’s a guy. He probably has overnight guests every now and again. He obviously has experience, judging by the way he had you at the edge so damn fast this morning—okay, no. You’re trying to stop thinking about it.

He narrows his eyes and it’s like he knows what you so suddenly felt, because he says, “It’s for my mom. She drops in a lot without telling me she’s coming.”

It’s oddly sweet that he keeps extra things for his mom, even though it’s obvious her actions frustrate him. You’re also terrified of the thought of his mother, because she raised such an angry control freak that you’re sure she must be somewhere in the same vein. “I’ll buy you some stuff to replace what I use.”

“Don’t. If she wants to visit without telling me, it’s not my fault if I don’t have a fucking toothbrush for her. I’m gonna go clean up, but—I’ll be back.” He says that last part like a question. Like he’s asking permission, almost. Like he’d sleep on the couch if you wanted him to, but you can’t see a reason you would ever want that, even though that couch is unspeakably soft.

“I’ll see you soon,” you say. It seems like enough of a definitive answer.

When you head into the bathroom, you take a look at yourself in the mirror and just pause. You can tell you’re tired, but you don’t look like an entire wreck. Recovery Girl must have really worked some magic on you. For some reason you’d expected more evidence. As if the scar on your thigh isn’t enough. You expected to be irreparably changed and instead you’re still the same person. It almost feels wrong.

You find the extra stuff underneath the sink, a nice little wicker basket of soap and hand towels and an array of other things that would be useful if you wanted to do a full nighttime skin-and-hair routine, which you think confirms your suspicions about his mom in a lot of ways. But you’re not as dedicated to self-care right now as you usually are—you do everything you need to in order to not feel gross and walk back to the bed.

You sit down where you woke up, prop yourself up against the pillows, and look out at the sky. You’d always liked the view in Kosai because you could see the stars better. Here, they’re like tiny pinpricks of light that fade into the city’s glow. They’re different from what you’re used to, but you realize that they’re no less beautiful. You’re looking at the same stars as always, just from a different place.

You hope Mina’s okay. You wish you had your phone. You’re almost entirely sure that you’re wearing her shorts, because anything Katsuki has in his closet isn’t going to fit you properly, and that means she must have been there when you were passed out, while you were healing.

Tomorrow. You’ll go to her place tomorrow and she’ll tell you how worried she was about you and you’ll pretend to be offended by the fact that she didn’t think you were going to crawl out of the wreckage alive.

Katsuki comes back in and you look at him, give him a smile your instincts tell you to suppress. A force of habit. You want to try to get rid of that instinct. You want him to see the way he makes you feel.

He grabs some clothes and takes the time to get ready to sleep next to you, in his bed, in his apartment, and it’s so domestic. These are just everyday actions. He probably does the skincare routine that Might Riot’s PR team tells him to do and looks at himself in the mirror you looked at yourself in and lies down in this bed every night, and right now you’re a part of that. It should feel more like you’re intruding, but it doesn’t.

When he finally joins you, he sits against the headboard and pulls you back against his chest and it’s so easy. So normal even though it’s not. You can feel the heat of his skin through the band shirt that you’re positive belongs to him and you like being in his clothes. You like being his.

He slides an arm behind you and wraps it around your side, his long, delicate fingers playing with the shirt’s hem. He has artist’s hands—that’s the only way you know how to explain it. They look like all they’re made to do is create. It’s so ironic that they can cause such destruction.

His fingers brush your thigh and the scar is uncovered and you get that jolt of self-consciousness that runs through you again, and before you can stop yourself you say, “Please don’t.” You put your hand over his. “Touch it, I mean.”

He stills. “Does it hurt?”

“No. I just don’t like—looking at it.” Thinking about it. Thinking about bleeding out in the 7/11. Thinking about the way the glass felt when it splintered into muscle as you wrenched your legs through the gap in the agency’s rubble.

“I’ve got one too.” His voice is right in your ear, and you can hear each syllable against your back as they thrum from his chest.

You look back towards him and he pulls down the side of his sweats just enough to reveal the scar you’d noticed on movie night, pitted half-circles and long swathes of bone-white against his skin.

You knew it was there, but now that he’s showing you, it’s kind of different. It feels like vulnerability. “How did it happen?”

“I was reckless when I trained at UA. I tested the limits of my quirk a lot. I fucked up bad and ended up hurting myself.” He shrugs, pulls the waistband back up, and he wraps that arm around you, too, holding you complete and still in an embrace.

You reach back and run your hand across one strong bicep. His arms are something he pays a lot of attention to. The force of his explosions causes a lot of stress on the triceps and trapezius muscles. You tried to design something a couple years back to help lessen the strain, but he insisted that it’s easier to fight if they’re not hindered by anything, which is a lie. He’s just vain. If he’s not careful he could dislocate a shoulder—but he’s always careful.

You can see him as a child, not yet ready to wield the same power that led to Dynamight climbing the pro-hero ranks at an alarming speed. “Is it weird to have that reminder?”

“No.” He kisses your shoulder and you nearly melt, because the action felt so unconscious and normal and you’re intimidated by this kind of careful affection as much as you are the nonchalance with which he gives it to you. “It’s not a reminder. Just a scar.”

Just a scar. Maybe—in time, after you’ve sorted through the emotions that this entire experience has forced upon you—you’ll think of yours as the same. You sink into his embrace with this thought, sitting in your shared scars and watching the needle-point stars fade in and out of the hazy night.

You flatten your hand against his arm, and his skin is so beautifully warm. It always is. “I like you a lot.”

He laughs, just once, and you can understand his amusement because you really have just sounded like a kid trying to talk to their middle-school crush all night, but he kisses your shoulder again and says, “Good.” A pause. “Say it again.”

You do what he asks.

And like everything else with him, it’s easy to watch the night sky and feel so whole. For the first time, you're sure that the feeling is still going to be there when you wake up with him beside you, knowing that everything has been worth it just for this.

Chapter Text

You have new messages in the group chat Mina’s Boys and Beautiful Woman!

Mina!!! (4:24 PM):
i dnt think movie night is gnna work this month :(

tapemaster (4:26 PM):
yea i got double patrol n then im gonna pass tf out

charging cable (4:31 PM):
Ive got paperwork up the ass rn

Mina!!! (4:32 PM):
ewww but same :( :(

RIOT (4:59 PM):
I’m helping with the construction stuff so I don’t think I could have made it anyway but I miss you guys!! We can watch two movies at the next one

asshole (5:26 PM):
No.

charging cable (5:27 PM):
Yeah we wouldnt want 2 be up past baku’s bed time

tapemaster (5:27 PM):
lmao fuckin old man bakugou over here

asshole (5:36 PM):
Fuck you. I’m not showing up if you’re going to talk shit like this.

charging cable (5:38 PM):
Oh I think I know how to make u show up ;)

charging cable (5:38 PM):
We should have the next movie night @ techie’s

Mina!!! (5:41 PM):
that sounds gr8!!!! im excited 2 all get together again!!!

tech support (5:44 PM):
do I get a say in this?

charging cable (5:45 PM):
No

Mina!!! (5:45 PM):
no!!

tapemaster (5:45 PM):
lol no

RIOT (5:46 PM):
I’m sorry, I wish I could stop them

asshole (5:57 PM):
We can have it at my place. But if any of you make a mess, you’re not welcome back.

Mina!!! (5:57 PM):
dfjsldfjlkjfldsjfd

Mina!!! (5:58 PM):
WHAT

Mina!!! (5:58 PM):
OMFG

Mina!!! (5:58 PM):
U CANT TAKE THIS BACK WERE HAVING IT AT URS OMGGGG

RIOT (5:59 PM):
Nice! I’ll bring some extra chairs just in case

charging cable (6:00 PM):
So were all good for this? Everyone’s gonna show?? What if he tries to kill us

Mina!!! (6:02 PM):
im going!!!!! nothings gonna keep me out of that apartment now

tech support (6:03 PM):
can’t wait to see you guys!

charging cable (6:05 PM):
If u and baku start making out AGAIN you will owe me real money for having to see it

asshole (6:19 PM):
You’re uninvited.

The process of rebuilding is hard.

With movie night cancelled, there’s a long string of days that are identical to each other, staying home and not talking to anyone beyond a couple of text messages and the occasional phone call. Things didn’t play out exactly how you thought they would when everything was said and done.

The morning after the most fraught day of your life, when Katsuki woke up and pulled you close, you told him about the 7/11, about the kid with the hand-painted Red Riot keychain, about the fact that he somehow convinced his father to detonate the bomb on a day when almost no one was working. That he’d waited for the heroes to leave for training, pulled the fire alarm for everyone else. His father wouldn’t have told him to do that. No sociopath cares like that. The kid saved lives, even if he was manipulated into causing destruction.

You went to the right people—the people that claim they want the best for the citizens of Japan. The Hero Commission took the information without a word. They’d been more focused on publicity. On what it looked like that a hero agency run by two prominent heroes, including one in the top ten, was infiltrated and destroyed. Their only goal was to repair the image of heroes that they’d perpetuated and upheld for decades.

There were twenty-three people wounded when the agency fell, but not one death. This is a fact you keep repeating to yourself.

They started rebuilding the agency immediately. Showing a unified front, heroes working with construction companies to speed up the process. An advertising campaign and the building of a monument all at once. Katsuki and Kiri working until their hands bled because they didn’t know how to stop.

You’ll still have a job to go back to, which you’re extremely thankful for, but the agency’s collapse left something empty within you. A week or so after everything happened, you were walking back to the station from Mina’s place and you looked down the main street, where the agency once stood, just out of curiosity. It was a regular weekday. Crowds of people walking past like nothing happened. The rubble and metal and ash cleaned off the street as if it had never been there.

It made you angry. Angry that there wasn’t more you could do. Angry that the 7/11 was still open with an attendant behind the counter. Angry that you bled on these very streets and someone power-washed it off the pavement because it was a reminder of the wreckage.

You thought you’d be able to work through it with Katsuki’s help. You thought you’d be able to be there for him when his anger got the best of him as well. Because you know how he feels, to an extent. You know what he needs when he’s at his end and he knows the same for you.

But then the pictures dropped, and the headlines got crazier with each concurrent news outlet. His hand on your face as you kissed him. Dynamight Distracted? and Crazy Fan Does What We All Wish We Could and Hottest Hero’s Secret Girlfriend Tired of Being a Secret and a bunch of other shit you stopped reading after that.

You got a new phone when Mina had a morning off so she could add you to her phone plan, and you quickly found out that Twitter was going fucking insane. You could only read so many tweets about Katsuki being taken off the market or people feeling bad for him because a delirious survivor forced herself on him before you had to close and delete the app. Mina told you that his fans are just going a little wild because it’s the first piece of evidence they’ve gotten that Katsuki has the capability to kiss like a human being, and you laughed but there was still a weight in your stomach.

People don’t recognize you because of him. His hand blocked out your face in the photo. You know how lucky you are that no one got a good shot of you but it’s still embarrassing reading all the shit online. More so for him, and you almost wish you could take it back. Because he doesn’t like regular attention in the first place unless it’s about how good he is as a hero, and this definitely does not fall into that category.

Katsuki was pissed the minute he saw the first headline, but not at you. He told you this directly. Promised that you had done nothing wrong even though you had. You listened to him talk about how much he hates reporters and the media at large and then the PR team called, Katsuki and Kiri’s publicity agent still working even with the building down. She told you that you couldn’t be seen with him for a while.

It’s all about image. All about building a story around a person, constructing a narrative, and making other people believe it. Katsuki’s merch sells extremely well because he’s a fan favorite for his looks and his attitude, and the fact that he’s single had always been something that magazines and newspapers capitalized on to sell stories.

Maybe later, she said. Not while we’re rebuilding. Because a PR person gets to decide what your fucking life’s like now.

And you know this is what you signed up for. This is half the battle: the public of Japan and their concept of Katsuki as Dynamight. But you didn’t think it would be an issue so soon. You wanted just one more day to spend with him before you had to go back to your apartment alone.

In the weeks that followed, you found yourself getting used to the quiet. You watched the sunset while sitting on the beach, sand soft and cold against your legs, the evening breeze giving you chills. Sometimes on these nights, you’d talk to him on the phone until the sun dipped below the horizon and everything faded out to black sky and gleaming stars.

He tries to call as often as possible, because now things are—easier, maybe, but that doesn’t feel like the right word. You’re at a point where talking to one another openly feels allowed. You were never afraid to be rough in the way you spoke to him, but you realized you had been terrified of the opposite.

And now that it feels like that wall has been broken down, you talk to him for hours about nearly anything. Ideas for gear you’re writing down for when you get back to work and what you think about the new show Mina’s making you watch and how much you miss seeing everyone. And you listen to him when he talks to you about rebuilding and his thoughts on the Hero Commission—none of them good, even though they’re the ones paying him—and tiny details about fights long-past, mostly between All Might and the array of villains he took out in his time. The hours he spent playing and replaying shaky cell-phone footage of each battle in his dorm room at UA.

But there’s so much he has to do. So much everyone has to do. There are spans of days where you don’t hear from him. After the building fell, crime rates across Tokyo shot up because heroes were suddenly humanized. Fallible. Another thing Katsuki’s PR agent told you over the phone, trying to nail home why you couldn’t be seen entering his building.

It could be dangerous. It could make things worse. You don’t want to make it harder for him, do you? Fucking asshole. If you were in charge of firing people, you’d have no hesitations, no matter how good she is at her job.

There’s only so much you can do from home. You go and see Mina at least twice a week, and even when she’s at home, she’s making calls and working on files she needs to get to Ryuko because she neglected them while she was at work doing other important things. You keep her company but you know she’s beyond stressed.

You never realized how busy everyone really was until you were no longer busy. You don’t put in those long hours anymore. Your sleep schedule has gotten slightly back on track. You have free time and you don’t know what to do with it because it’s something you’re so utterly unfamiliar with.

You don’t tell Katsuki this, but you buy some groceries and try to make a couple recipes you think he’d like. A few years back, the two of you and Kiri had been passing by a ramen shop hosting an eating contest: four bowls of spicy noodles in under an hour, and if you can stand the heat, you eat free for the next six months. Kiri was sick when he got home, and Katsuki went back to that ramen place an ungodly amount of times. You went with him sometimes when other people tagged along. You know what he likes. You still can’t make dishes like the ones they served there, but you’re getting progressively better.

You’d asked about all the books in his apartment before you left and he said he liked to read, as if the sheer number of bookcases didn’t make that extremely obvious. He’s the least eloquent person you know but he owns a fucking library. He picked out a book for you and you took it home and it was a collection of verses by a poet you’d never heard of. You’re still not well acquainted with poetry and a lot of it was lost on you, but you remembered your swirling thoughts on the day you’d almost died and you read the whole thing front-to-back.

Two months pass like this. Two movie nights skipped. Fleeting messages in the group chat. A selfie Denki sends to you with Sero asleep in the background, head on his desk. Texts from Kiri every now and again making sure you’re healing up okay. Constant communication with Mina and Katsuki, but—it’s not the same. You don’t want to bother Mina too much when she’s stressed like this, and you want to be able to see Katsuki whenever, any day, fuck image.

But you know how important his job is to him and how close he has to adhere to the PR team’s guidelines, so you wait.

“I miss you,” he says one night. You’re leaning out of your window again and you nearly drop your phone down the building’s side with the way the shock of that statement hits you.

You don’t talk about things like this when he calls you. You think that he doesn’t want to rush into things, but you’re almost certain he isn’t going to be looking anywhere else. You’re not sure what it all means but you’re trying to become okay with it.

Even still, you don’t say it back. You’re scared of how unstable everything feels.

You think everyone assumes that you kissed him in a delirious state. That you were just happy to be alive. When the picture dropped, Denki texted you seven times in a row, ‘Bakugou’ misspelled in various ways, each followed by a long stretch of question marks.

Mina is so tired of him. She keeps saying he needs to “seal the deal,” which she’ll never elaborate on for you to understand the specifics of, but she’s happy enough for you. She only knows vague details about the night he spent at your apartment and you told her about the phone calls, but that’s more than anyone else.

You’re sitting in her living room—her den, as she makes you call it, because this apartment is fucking huge and there’s another, smaller living room just down the hall—on a clear Thursday that she took off just to rest. She’s cheery, but kind of tired, even though she hides it well. You’ve just seen her at full battery so often that you can detect the minute differences when she’s drained.

You have an Uravity mug in your hands, pink and round, and you watch the coffee inside swirl from when you’d stirred in sugar. “Do you think if I asked nicely, Kiri would buy me a new 3D printer? The one we had in the lab was used and the switches always jammed. And sometimes it would just turn off if I was printing something overnight. I want one new new.”

Mina also has a cup of coffee, oat milk in hers. She’s been trying to read the article in the magazine open on the table in front of her for the past five minutes, but keeps nodding off, one arm propping up her head, and you know she won’t take a nap unless physically forced. “Honestly, yeah. The Hero Commission went way overbudget for rebuilding. I think they want the new agency to be as flashy as possible, because… well, duh. They’re paying for it and they want to look good. I’m sure a 3D printer would be nothing.”

You tell her how much the newer models cost and she looks personally offended.

You’ve been thinking a lot about what the new lab is going to be like. You know the old one is irreplaceable, but you’re trying to let yourself get excited about working again without feeling guilt and anger and frustration over—everything.

You have the solace of knowing that only the kid’s father was charged and incarcerated, but you talked to his mother over the phone a few days ago after getting her number from the Yellow Pages—online, but fuck, you can’t even believe they still exist—and the Hero Commission hasn’t offered them any kind of alternative income or government-provided child support. She has two other children, younger than the kid you met.

Twelve, six, and four. All even numbers.

Every morning, you try to call the people that deal with social services at the Hero Commission, and every single fucking morning, you’re put on hold or passed around from department to department until you know they’re not going to let you talk to anyone important.

The kid had been right. No one listens. It’s so fucked.

But you can’t keep living with only the negative. Without work, a constant and fulfilling distraction, you could crumble. Everything is so hard to come to terms with. The Hero Commission’s inadequacy. The fact that you’re still alive. That it’s not something to be guilty about. No one even died—it’s almost like you’re guilty you made it when the agency didn’t. As if you could’ve stopped it from being destroyed. You run your fingers over the place where the reminder is hidden underneath your jeans and you hear just a scar and try to believe it.

“Are you okay?” Mina startles you out of your thoughts. Her face is drawn and she’s worried, and you hate that you’re adding more stress onto her plate when she’s already dealing with so much.

You have to consider the question. There’s so much you should be thankful for. You’re alive. Your friends are alive. The world will keep turning and days will keep passing and you will see an indeterminate amount more of them. And you’ll live with everything, every day, that you have seen and done. “I just wish it felt like I was in control of my own life. I think—there are things I want that I’m afraid to ask for. And I don’t know if that’s because I should be afraid or if it’s because I’m a mess.”

“You’re not a mess. But I get that,” she says, and you know, just like any other hero with any kind of presence, that she really does. “We just have to do things that make us happy whenever we can. Even if they’re small. Sometimes you just have to risk something and ask, you know?”

You know.

Later that same evening, you’re in your kitchen on the phone with Katsuki and you ask, “Are you happy?”

“What do you mean?” He sounds vaguely defensive, like if it wasn’t you on the phone he would’ve disregarded the question entirely.

There’s so much that you mean. So much that you could try to tell him about how you’re feeling and about how you want him to feel about you, but you don’t. Not because you can’t, this time—you just don’t want to tell him these secret, intimate things over the phone. You want to see him. “I miss you.”

He’s silent for a moment. When he’d said this to you and you hadn’t responded in kind, he hadn’t seemed angry. Your conversation moved on without a hitch. He understands that things like these aren’t easy for you to say because they’re not easy for him either.

But you think he’d been waiting for something like this. For an admission.

“Come over.”

“Like—now? But I thought—”

“I don’t give a shit anymore. I never did. My job isn’t being a fucking poster child for the Hero Commission. I just wanted to make things easier for Ei.” You can hear the breath he takes over the phone, that pause when he has to think about what to say next. He never hesitates when he talks because he’s entirely too self-assured, but it’s these careful, quiet moments that seem to perplex him. He’s learning their nuances at the same pace as you. “But I’m tired of waiting.”

“So impatient,” you say, but you’re smiling. You think he can hear it.

“I learned it from you."

You make it to the station just as the last train of the night is pulling in, and you slip through the doors as the warning bells ring, the last call for everyone heading into Musutafu much too close to midnight. The train is almost entirely empty apart from a few lingering college kids that are probably heading into town to bar hop, already drunk from wherever they were before this, and you tune in and out of their slurred conversation as you watch the blur of everything outside the window.

You’ve taken this train into town so many times. You’ve probably spent hours on it. Each trip has been the same. A forwards and back, a journey to an inconsequential destination.

This time, you feel breathless. The train isn’t going fast enough. The moon-painted waves of the sea stay with you much too long, like they’re pulling you back to them with the tide, slowing the train, calling you back to Kosai because you belong there.

And you used to feel like you did. Not just because it’s a nice, quiet town, but—because it wasn’t close to where the heroes lived. You separated yourself out from them so often that it felt like instinct. The divide was all you could look at. But, like Katsuki, you’re tired of it. You want to bridge it. You’re moving forward because you want to do what Mina said and find the little things in life that make you happy and you don’t care anymore what anyone tells you that you have to do, what any fucking PR agent says—you’re going to claw something out of this life that you can be proud of.

Your phone buzzes. A text from Katsuki illuminates the screen. Excitement and apprehension sit in your ribs, overfilled and on the verge of bursting, reminding you of who you’re about to see. About to touch. You’ve missed every part of him. His voice will always be enough, but you’re selfish. Like him, you want more.

Are you close?

You’re about five minutes from the station now, buildings cropping up around the train and making the night feel darker, and you send back an affirmative and your hands are shaking.

When the doors slide open, letting in the bitter cold of winter that the train’s battered heating system hadn’t been doing a good job of keeping out anyway, you step out into the night and you start to walk towards the stairs leading to the street below but you are stopped still.

He’s here. In the flesh. Cheeks red from the cold. Wearing the jacket he’d given you that night so long ago at this very station. His hands are deep in his pockets and his breath is a stream of fog in front of him. He sees you but doesn’t move.

You approach, slow. This reunion is different from the one after the agency fell. More quiet. You reach for his hand and he gives it to you and it’s warm, always, and you think you never want to touch anyone’s skin that isn’t this warm again. That isn’t his.

“Kept me waiting long enough.” His voice is rough in the cold. You wonder exactly how long he’s been standing here.

You curl your fingers around his, firm, tight, because you don’t want to let go. “I’m teaching you how to be patient.”

“Yeah.”

You walk through the streets of Musutafu with him, hand in hand, and you think this will probably be on a newspaper’s front page tomorrow. You think you might have just helped ruin the current image of Dynamight and his PR agent will call you in the morning just to tell you what an idiot you are. And you don’t fucking care.

“You’re getting more sleep.” His voice is loud in the emptiness of the street.

It’s such an odd observation. You’re not exactly sure what to say to that. “I am?”

He looks at you sideways, the way he always does when he’s about to say something slick. “You don’t have those massive fucking bags under your eyes like you normally do.”

“The eyebags are part of my charm,” you tell him. And then you tack on, “Asshole.” But you don’t mean it.

When you get to his building, trekking through the lobby that looks like it was pulled out of a baroque painting, more of what you expected from Katsuki’s place—dramatic, luxurious—you’re almost vibrating. It’s like you couldn’t look at him the entire walk here.

It’s not that you can’t reconcile the man you’ve been speaking on the phone to with the man you’re holding hands with—it’s the opposite. You’re too hyper-aware that this is Katsuki. This is the man that told you that he missed you in a very brief, unexpected moment of vulnerability, and you feel like your relationship with him has progressed so far at a distance that up close, everything is about to catch up too fast. All at once. An elastic band pulled to its limit and then released, snapping forward at a terrible speed.

He’d normally comment on your silence, but he seems to be feeling the same thing as you. He’s nervous, hands clammy against yours in that kind of endearing way you’ve come to really like, and his posture is stiff, like he’s holding a tension within himself and he’s unable to let it out.

In the little elevator, its mirrored walls creating innumerable reflections of you and Katsuki and the place where your hands are linked, things are so quiet that every noise is magnified. He presses the button for his floor and as the pulleys begin to work, the lights above the door blinking slowly upward, you finally look at him head on.

His face is shadowed in the dim, overhead light. When he looks back at you, it’s clear that he’s tired. You might have gotten your sleep schedule back on track, but he’s been doing the opposite. The long hours have become too long.

You stare at each other until the doors slide open, and before he can pull you out into the hallway, you say, “I can help. Let me do something.”

“You don’t need to do anything. The agency’s almost done. Just come back to work and it’ll be enough.” His hand tightens around yours.

You know you don’t need to do anything. There are experts working to express-build the new and improved Might Riot. They have the manpower, the money, the plans. But surely there’s something you can do. For him. “Tell me what you need, Katsuki. I’ll do it.”

That pause. Hesitance in the way he nervously licks his lips before speaking. “I need you to rest. Actually take it easy for once.”

“I don’t like taking it easy.”

“You’re so stubborn.” He pulls you a little closer to his side, but there’s still room between you. Inches that feel like miles.

You want to say something light, diffuse the situation, but you don’t. Can’t. “I just want to help.”

“I know, angel.”

His apartment is the same as it was the last time you were here. You don’t know what you’d been expecting—it’s the same feeling as after the agency fell, when you thought yourself to be irreparably different. So much time has gone by that you were expecting a new place inside these walls. As if years had passed instead of months, and he’d experienced so many things without you that it changed his entire way of being.

But it hasn’t changed. He hasn’t.

Another thing you'd been expecting was something immediately physical when you got here. A movie-style, pent up passion that had to break the minute you crossed the threshold of his apartment.

Instead, he asks if you want anything and you ask if you can make tea and he shows you where he keeps his teabags and sugar and kettle. He has a wonderful selection to choose from, rich earl greys and royal Darjeelings and three different types of sencha.

You put the kettle on and he hands you two mugs, one regular, white ceramic, the other an exact copy of your favorite mug from home, the Red Riot one with the hearts. He must have bought one last Valentine’s Day as well. The thought warms your heart in a way you’re not quite familiar with. You start preparing the cups, pulling triangular bags of tea out of their little boxes.

He stands behind you, settles one hand on your hip and the other on the counter in front of you. Watches you work from over your shoulder. You’re caged but there’s no heat to it—it’s just physical contact. The reassurance that you’re both here, together in this moment.

You think he might have wanted this too. Something more intimate than just sex. The same kind of feeling when you talk over the phone but transposed into a setting where you’re allowed to touch.

You try to be as careful as he normally is but you’re not as steady, a tremor in your hands causing a thin stream of sugar to fall from the teaspoon you’re holding, and you say, “Sorry,” like it’s an easy thing to tell him. And then once that word is out of your mouth, it’s impossible not to say more. “I shouldn’t have kissed you in front of all those people. I’m sorry. I really—I fucked up.”

The kid looking up at you from the cracked tile floor of the 7/11. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. They’re just words.

“You’ve never fucked anything up,” he says, his voice quiet. “Ever.”

“I have. I’m a human being. I do stupid stuff like that all the time and I’ll probably do more.” You don’t know exactly what you’re trying to tell him. You think you might have fucked up again by coming here and a deep part of you, buried under the satisfaction you have from just him touching you, is worried about what tomorrow will bring. “I’ve just caused so many problems already and I don’t know if I’m worth the effort.”

Not from a hero. Not from someone as high up as him. Not from someone like Katsuki.

“You need to stop saying shit like that. I don’t want to hear it again.” The hand on your hip slips under your shirt, just slightly. Just enough for his skin to graze yours. Just enough. “You’re worth all of it.”

The weight of his words makes you want to cry. The water finishes boiling and you pour the cups, and steam rises to touch your face. His as well. A mutual caress. How can he say things like that when you’re on such unstable ground with him? When you don’t know what he wants from you? You watch the water darken. “Sugar?”

“No.”

“You—you confuse me sometimes. All the time.”

“It tastes like shit when it’s too sweet. I don’t see how that’s confusing.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

He hums, noncommittal, and presses a kiss to your shoulder. His second favorite place to be soft. Jaw and shoulder. The angles that some would think too sharp to touch. “I have something for you.”

When the tea is made, a mug in each of your hands, you follow him to his couch and he grabs a piece of paper from the coffee table, words and numbers haphazardly scribbled across it in blue pen.

There is a charge in the atmosphere that surrounds the two of you, quiet and not. Buzzing slightly. Sweet in the muted way honey is sweet. You watch him as he looks at the piece of paper and then at you.

“These are the numbers of the people at social services that take care of hero reparations. The actual people that give out the cash. They’re not gonna give you any trouble. I made sure.” He hands out the paper to you and you take it, quiet. Humbled. “But I figured you’d want to be the one to see that the kid’s family gets what they need.”

It's so—thoughtful. He’s been so busy. He takes the time to talk to you on the phone for hours when he can and you know he’s probably lost sleep because of it, and even then, in his own time, he went out of his way to do this for you. You wonder how long it took to get these numbers. How many people he had to intimidate. You wonder if the Hero Commission will punish him for this.

The fact that he’s letting you do it, too—tell the people in the right places that they need to do their fucking jobs—means so much. And you think he knows this. You think he knows you better than anyone.

He does these things for you without asking. Without having to be asked. He never crosses a boundary because he knows where you’ve drawn them. And it’s more than just the phone numbers—it’s the meals he made for you and the patrol shift he skipped just to make sure you were okay and the way he waited for you to tell him you missed him. The way he held you at your worst, shaking and blood-covered and unable to stop yourself from crying. The way he looked at you after. The way you think he’s always looked at you. Like you’re worth it. Worth all of it, just like he told you.

You stare at the paper for a long moment. You read each carefully printed name. Memorize every curve of every letter. Then you look at him, so close, so perfect, and there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him. Fucking nothing. Not when he does these things for you so selflessly.

When your voice comes back to you, it’s hoarse. Quiet. “I love you.”

He rests a hand on your thigh and just looks at the point of contact, and because he’s not good with words, he reaches out and kisses you and you kiss back, soft, unhurried, and he lifts you again like he did the last time you were here and takes you to his bed and strips you bare. Touches places no one has ever thought to—the inside of your forearms, the backs of your knees, the valley between your breasts, all with a careful reverence.

“I’m gonna do this right,” he tells you, and it could be about this moment or it could be about everything.

He lowers himself to his knees and pulls you close to the edge of the bed and kisses the inside of your thigh, but not like the last time he did, when he bruised it so bad that there’s still a faded purple stain beneath the delicate skin. He makes you wait for him to touch you, and when he does, his tongue moving against you slow and perfect, you say his name and he makes you finish without even using his fingers.

He takes his clothes off quick and concise, and when he kisses you again you can taste yourself on his tongue and you like that there’s evidence that he has taken care of you. And you want to take care of him.

You get him to sit against the headboard and you lower yourself into his lap, taking his full length, grinding your hips and replicating movements that make him groan into your neck, his lips pressing careful kisses against the skin there, and you think it means something that he isn’t marking you up like he did last time. He knows he doesn’t have to.

Every movement is so precise and sensitive and deep that you think you could finish just from this, even though it almost always takes more. Your nerve endings are all open, buzzing, turning each touch from him into a series of shockwaves that build your cresting pleasure.

His hands grab your hips and he takes back control, moving you just how he needs and getting impossibly deeper, and you’re on the edge when he tells you between hot breaths, “I want to cum inside you.”

You fist a hand in his hair and pull and he tightens his grip on your hips until it’s painful and this gets you so fucking close that you feel static in your face, in your fingertips, running up across your chest. “Then fucking do it.”

Your movements become frantic, his hands losing their grip and their rhythm but the sudden speed pushes you over the edge and you finish a moment before he does. He lets out the softest fucking noise before moving his hands to your back and pulling you to him so completely, flush together, his head in the crook of your shoulder as aftershocks shudder through him. You’re trembling with the effort of staying upright. His hand is on your scar that’s just a scar and he kisses the side of your jaw with such purpose and care that you never want anyone else to kiss you again. You want this to be it. You want it to be him.

“I fucking—god.” His voice is weaker than normal and you love it. The way he sounds after something that intimate and whole. The way you’ve cracked him open like he has opened you. You feel like you were made for this and he was too and now both of you have found your purpose and there’s nothing else you could ask for. Nothing else you need. “I love you so fucking much.”

It’s not what you expected from him—but none of this has been. He says it again, and you wrap your arms around his shoulders and kiss the crown of his head. It’s only then you realize that you haven’t let yourself breathe easy for months.

Rebuilding becomes easier after this.

The agency’s construction is completed and your days of doing nothing will soon come to an end. You call the right numbers and speak to the right people and they don’t sound happy, but they set up an account for the kid’s family that pays more than a living rate.

Things settle down to something more normal, except nothing is normal. Everything has changed. There are pictures of you and Katsuki walking back to his apartment together that flood the internet and you don’t care and neither does he. His PR agent is pissed, but she begins to work on a new narrative that makes room for you.

You’re at Katsuki’s apartment when the pictures go viral, watching a show that you started with him a few days before, sitting between his legs with his arms wrapped around your waist, your back to his chest. You’ve figured out that this is his favorite thing to do with you. He likes to hold you. To feel like a protector but also to have you close, you think. He doesn’t want to share.

Denki immediately texts you, because he’s much too tuned in to social media, Okay so i guess ur dating now congrats. Can u make him not be a d-bag all the time or smth??

You show Katsuki the message, laughing, and then you say, “Well, we’re not—dating, I guess.”

He goes stiff. You can feel his breathing stop. “The hell does that mean?”

Your heart is beating fucking fast. You don’t talk about serious, relationship things, but maybe you should have because the way he responded kind of terrifies you. “Are we?”

He makes a kind of affronted noise in his chest and it echoes against where your bodies line up. “Are you—you’re not fucking serious, right? We’ve been dating for months.”

Your head kind of blanks at that. You don’t understand. This doesn’t make any kind of sense and you think maybe you needed to talk to him about this sooner than now. You try to shift forwards out of his grip to look at him but he tightens his hold on you. You’re forced to stare at the TV. You want to have this conversation face to face. “Since fucking when?”

“Since I told you that you’re mine.” He says this as if it’s an obvious thing, as if the rest of the world thinks in the same backwards way that he does, and you can’t fucking believe that he thought saying that was enough. “What else could I have meant?”

“I thought it was just something you were saying in the moment. I don’t know.” You haven’t forgotten the way he told you that you were his. The marks he’d put on your skin with just his teeth to prove this to you. “I assumed it was like—pillow talk.”

“Pillow talk. The mental gymnastics you have to pull to come up with some of this shit.” He sighs, exasperated, but kisses the curve of your ear. “I’m not gonna do things like this with anyone else.”

You let this information sink in. Savor it like wine. Lean back against him and enjoy the way he responds, his hands splaying across your stomach, his large thighs boxing in yours just a little closer. You feel so fully contained, but not in a way that suffocates. You know he wants you to have your freedoms. “Good. I’m not either.”

When everything becomes calm and Mina texts the group chat to set up a movie night at Katsuki’s apartment because he said it was allowed, a detail she will not let anyone forget, you’re only a little worried about how things will change.

But everyone arrives and you’re already there and no one bats an eye, and Mina still squeals when she sees you like always and pulls you into a hug that could break your back if she’s not careful, and Kiri has two movies with him even though he promises that you all only have to watch one.

You watch both. Everyone is happy to be back together. Even Katsuki, you think, but he expresses this in smaller ways. He does that almost-smile more. He doesn’t blow up when Denki makes fun of the Chargebolt toaster in his kitchen and he actually pays enough attention to the movies to join in on your conversations after about the best and worst parts.

He’s always close to you. During the movie, he has his arm along the back of the couch, across your shoulders, behind your back to hold you against his side. Whatever he feels like in the moment. After both movies are over and it’s much too late for all of you to be up, you’re in the kitchen with cocktails that Mina has made—bad recreations of the Midoriya Malibus from the tonkatsu place—and his hand rests on your back, gentle, like he always has to be touching you. Always has to make sure you’re there.

Nothing has changed but everything is different. When everyone leaves and filters out into the hall and you say goodbye and stay in the apartment—something you can tell Denki wants to comment on but doesn’t—you realize that this is okay. You didn’t fuck everything up. You’re just living. You feel so good and whole that you’re not sure what to do with yourself.

You turn to Katsuki and say, “I’m proud of you.”

He looks at you strangely. “For what?”

“Letting everyone come here. I feel like you’ve kept people out for too long.”

Because he has. He just doesn’t communicate. Doesn’t reach out. Doesn’t talk. But he’s trying.

“They’re fucking annoying. That’s why it’s taken so long for me to invite them over." He pulls you into a hug and rests his head on top of yours, and you allow yourself to sink into this easy, familiar intimacy. This quiet. “We can have it here next month, though. I like not having to walk home.”

“Me too.”

And you say that because you are home. It’s here. It’s him. What you have with Katsuki is something hard earned and not easily lost. It’s what you’ve wanted on top of everything. Someone to call your own and someone to claim you.

Even if that goes unsaid—even if it’s only communicated in the quiet—that’s okay. You know he understands.