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They’re sparring, breathing hard while they push their limbs to aching, when Katsuki gets hit by a rock. It’s barely bigger than a pebble, but it’s enough to throw him off-balance because it came from above , and Deku has been facing him the entire time — they’re fighting grounded because Katsuki said so and Deku just flashed him a smile that said “You’re on.”
And for some reason, after the impact, he feels different in some way he can’t put his finger on. But what the fuck? How did Deku get a pebble through the air? Did he punch the ground hard enough to send rocks flying? But they’d be bigger pieces, wouldn’t they?
Next to him, he feels Deku pause while he thinks. Idiot.
"Keep fighting me, I hate you, you fucking green-haired moron," Katsuki growls through his teeth.
"I love you" comes out instead.
Green eyes meet red. For a moment, all is silent in the world: birds stop chirping, cars stop idling at stoplights, the bullet train stops running, conversations stop mid-sentence. Because Bakugou Katsuki did not do affection. And moreover, he did not do affection with Deku.
Then a loud yell punctured the quiet, which would've been more impactful if it wasn't the same three words. "I love you!"
He tries saying what he wanted to say before, with more "fuck"'s for added effect, and instead what comes out are little explosive "I love you"'s. After the third one, Deku starts running out of the training gym like his life depended on it.
Katsuki stops yelling while he runs after the tenth “I love you”, which frankly is an insult to his dignity because there's only so much sparking explosive palms can do without the backing of expletives and a voice at deafening levels of rage.
This is it, Katsuki swears to himself. This is how I die.
He's about to put his hands on his throat and blast off when a lick of fabric shoots out and he finds himself face-to-chest with his homeroom teacher, who heaves a deep, deep sigh.
"Problem child, what happened?"
"I got hit with this horrible quirk that is making me express affection I don't feel," he says, stepping back from Aizawa’s chest to glare at him. Or he tries to say, anyway, because what comes out again is "I love you," and it doesn't even sound upset.
No, to his horror, it sounds genuine.
Aizawa looks torn between melting into the ground and tearing his hair from his scalp. "I... see. That's... thank you, Bakugou?"
Man, Aizawa thinks. Of all the people to get hit with a quirk like this.
"Let's get you to Recovery Girl."
Katsuki’s mouth opens on instinct. "I love you."
Mother fucker, Katsuki thinks. Motherfucking quirk, motherfucking Deku, motherfucking goddamn sparring session that was actually going well, motherfucking — "Kirishima," Aizawa says, and because the universe has decided to crap all over Katsuki's day, it makes up its mind to add another beautiful, wonderful, fucking fantastic element to the schedule. "Bakugou got hit with a quirk and is under some distress" — the scowl he shot Aizawa even made Kirishima shiver — "and we're headed to Recovery Girl right now. Having you here could possibly help calm him down for the assessment.
Kirishima smiles his trademark shark-toothed, blinding grin, and Katsuki contemplates murder. Starts revising his hit list. Normally, Deku’s at the top, but he moves his teacher up from his nonexistent place on said list all the way to number one. He knows , the meddling bastard. And worst of all, it was another quirk that made him babble out his stupid fucking crush. At least he was able to just sleep that one off, because it happened in the middle of the night. But he can’t sleep off what he’d said, or the perfect little “O” on Aizawa’s face when he asked, “Should I get Kirishima?”
“Fuck, I wish. But then I’d just cling to him like a needy little bastard because I have the world’s biggest crush on the world’s kindest guy and he wouldn’t say anything about me bothering him because he’s too fucking good for me.”
Yeah. That wasn’t his proudest moment.
Back to the hit list: First, Aizawa. Next, the person who hit him with their quirk. Then, Deku.
Katsuki knows he can't look Kirishima in the eyes because they're just too fucking kind and Katsuki is going to crack like Deku's bones the first time he used One For All.
He'll say the truest "I love you" he can probably ever say, and there's no going back from that.
So he just sighs, hands still bound up, and keeps walking.
"The quirk has to do with his speech, so he won't be very talkative right now," Aizawa explains. Maybe he'll take his teacher off his hit list, Katsuki decides. He’s still on thin ice.
"He can't speak anymore?" Kirishima asks, and fuck, what is he doing sounding genuinely worried for Katsuki? Fuck, why does Katsuki always want to be talked about the way Kirishima talks about him? It's not like he's unfamiliar to Kirishima's care, but lately he's realized he wants to bask in it and let it roll over him like the heat on a good summer's day.
"I wouldn't say...exactly that," Aizawa says. "It's a unique situation."
“Unique situation, my ass,” Katsuki mutters, too low for Kirishima to hear the “I love you.”
He’s spared the mortification when Kirishima just hums, switching to thought. “So he can speak, it’s just different.”
“Is it a truth quirk?” Kirishima asks after a moment. To Katsuki or Aizawa, he’s not sure.
“If that’s a truth quirk, let’s just say Bakugou here would be a lot more loving than he let on.”
Recovery Girl meets them at the door, Aizawa having phoned her earlier to let her know they were coming. She fusses over Katsuki and does a couple of tests to make sure that there isn’t anything physically wrong with him — he knows his body, already knows what it feels like when it’s banged up, but he has to sit there silent anyway because he sure as hell isn’t going to start sputtering “I love you” like a broken fucking record.
He catches his teacher’s eye and some wayward desperation in Katsuki’s gaze must’ve tipped Aizawa off, because he quietly asks Kirishima to leave, now that Katsuki seems calm. Kirishima sends him one last worried look paired with a “Text me, bro!” that leaves his stomach in knots.
Stupid “bro”s. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He sighs, and thankfully the quirk hasn’t stolen that from him.
Recovery Girl gives him a once-over once she’s done with the tests. She probably sees his flushed cheeks — look, it’s not like she hasn’t seen him a mess over Kirishima before, but Katsuki still squirms a little under her searching gaze even if he doesn’t look away.
“You seem physically fine, at least, dear,” she says. “That’s quite rare for quirk incidents involving you.”
She may be the sweetest thing to hit the earth since Deku’s mom and Kirishima, but gods, did she have that stern, sassed tone down flat. Katsuki bristles without meaning to.
“That’s good,” Aizawa steps in. “It seems to be affecting his vocabulary, but I’m not completely sure if it extends to written communication. Bakugou, can you say ‘My name is Bakugou Katsuki’ for me?”
“I love you,” comes tumbling out of Katsuki’s mouth. He frowns; it’s not like he expected the quirk to be gone, but it’s still frustrating as all hell to be mouthing the right words — at least in his head — and not have them come out.
There’s the sting of being unable to follow instructions from an authority figure, buried somewhere in everything, and Katsuki’s stomach churns. Phantom pain from a time before the dorms.
Aizawa is oblivious to Katsuki’s inner turmoil. Recovery Girl quirks an eyebrow up.
“I can understand how this is unfortunate for you, Bakugou,” she says.
“I love you,” he grumbles out, nodding fervently to at least scrape together a real, fitting response to her question.
This sucked. Katsuki’s skin itches; he’s not a particularly communicative person, but fuck, at least he can somewhat control the things that leave his mouth these days. At least he can choose his own words. It feels like —
“Bakugou,” Aizawa says sharply, and oh, maybe the old geezer’s not as oblivious as Katsuki assumes. He’s tended to catch Katsuki off-guard, anyway, so he doesn’t know why surprise bubbles up to choke the panic starting to surface. “Try writing down the same sentence as earlier.”
He hands Katsuki a pen and paper, which he eagerly takes. He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath or that his hands are shaking until he sees his familiar chicken-scratch look almost illegible even to him, but at least it’s his. My name is Bakugou Katsuki.
He writes it again and again, just to know he can. Absolutely not to iron out the tremors that he can’t seem to dislodge from his hands.
My name is Bakugou Katsuki. My name is Bakugou Katsuki. My name is Bakugou Katsuki.
“It seems like the quirk is contained to your speech only, my dear. It seems benign otherwise. I recommend you wait it out with a trusted friend or two, someone who won’t push you to keep talking and who you can communicate with via a notepad.”
WAIT IT OUT?!?? he writes. Maybe it’s overkill, but he’s clinging to any scraps of personality he can get right now.
Recovery Girl sighs. “Unfortunately, yes.” To her credit, she ignores the charred patch of ground that suddenly appears next to Katsuki.
Aizawa doesn’t, and looks like he’s biting back a reprimand. Katsuki fights the urge to grin maniacally at his teacher.
Recovery Girl pats his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I know you have a good red-haired friend who can keep you company.”
Katsuki wants to explode himself. He knows he’s not known for subtlety, but if even Recovery Girl is noticing — well, he comforts himself, she’s a medical professional. She’s supposed to pick up on hints of situations with minor details. Satisfied, he turns to Aizawa, who had already stood to escort Katsuki out of the room.
“We’ll look through the quirk databases to see if there’s someone whose quirk matches this one and how long something like this might last,” Aizawa says. “In the meantime, I would recommend either following Recovery Girl’s suggestion or isolating yourself in your room, at least in the short-term. We can discuss longer-term solutions if it comes to that.”
“I would suggest keeping it from the more talkative classmates if you can,” he deadpans when they reach the dorms proper.
Visions of Pinky or Round Face figuring out his current situation and taunting him endlessly by provoking him until he had no choice but to spit out an “I love you” spring into his head. He shivers and nods.
Then Aizawa’s gone, and Katsuki makes a beeline for Deku’s room. Thankfully, the common room’s empty — 9 a.m. is still too early for most students to be awake during the weekend, and the few who could be roaming around soon are nowhere to be found — so he doesn’t have to deal with gasps at him willingly approaching Deku without a yell in his mouth.
“You owe me,” Katsuki says in an ideal world when he bangs on Deku’s door.
The world is not ideal. “I love you,” he says instead, and Deku drags him in like he’s some mongrel from off the streets.
“Kaachan?” Deku’s giggling.
He flips to a blank page on the notepad and writes in big, bold letters, with little explosions drawn around the sides, YOU OWE ME. THIS HAPPENED WHEN WE WERE SPARRING.
He doesn’t need to elaborate — everyone in their class knows Deku’s the person to go to for a walking encyclopedia of heroes, quirks and everything in between. He does, however, smack Deku upside the head with the notepad after he’s sure the nerd is done reading.
“Ow,” Deku pouts, and if he was Half-and-Half he might’ve started swooning and keeling over on the floor like some lovesick idiot. He was not Half-and-Half, however, and so Katsuki snarled at Deku, who just looked at him, eyes maliciously wide and innocent. “Why should I help you if you’re just going to terrorize me? Why don’t you ask Kirishima?”
Katsuki regrets every single moment he has spent in therapy and out of it making himself a better person and friend to Deku. He really, really does.
I DON’T NEED MY VOICE TO KILL YOU, SHITTY NERD, he writes, and shoves the page in Deku’s face. The sides of the notepad are starting to blacken and char while Katsuki absentmindedly considers the pros and cons of setting a room on fire.
Deku’s growing self-preservation instincts kick in by the time the notepad has been burnt to a crisp, which Katsuki suspects is largely because he doesn’t want his perfect, pristine All Might rug completely blackened and ruined.
“Kaachan, stop setting things on fire, of course I’ll help you! Please,” he says, and it comes out almost as a whimper. At least he looks embarrassed about it.
Katsuki grins. While Deku starts muttering to himself about quirks that affect speech and how to hack into UA’s quirk database, he shoots off a quick text to Kirishima to let him know he’s okay, since the other has been blowing up his phone.
shitty hair:
dude if u need anything just lmk we got u!!
idk wht’s going on but u kno im always here 2 listen
well ig if its messing up ur speech idk if i can listen but im here for u bro
the street cat aizawa says he doesnt give food 2 is roaming around the dorms!!!
bro… that cat is soooooo cute……he always rubs up against my legs when he finds some way to sneak inside
thats kinda manly of him… he doesnt hav fear…
anyway ill b in the common room soon!!!!! finishing up a mario kart session with denks :DDDD
u got this bro!!!
Katsuki:
Shitty Hair, you better be doing your math homework because I’m sure as hell not pulling an all-nighter to help you again. I’m doing okay. Like you saw earlier, it’s not a physical quirk beyond affecting my voice.
I can write just fine, but when I speak I get tripped up.
If you want to do anything for me, take care of your work, idiot.
He pauses and sighs, feeling bad for ending it on that note.
Thanks for the cat picture.
:)
Deku has a shit-eating grin on his face when Katsuki looks up from his phone to ask his classmate how his stalker work is going. “So how’s Kirishima?”
He is never taking for granted his ability to yell “Shut the fuck up” again. Katsuki grabs a piece of notebook paper hanging out on the floor and writes, How’s Todoroki?
Katsuki’s glorious, glorious reward is Deku flushing like a tomato and stuttering out some unintelligible string of sounds. Take that, nerd. Fighting fire with fire, he thinks.
Once he recovers and his cheeks have course-corrected to a relatively normal-looking pink, Deku clears his throat.
“Anyway,” he starts. “I did find a lead. I don’t think it’s a UA student because I didn’t see anything in the quirk database, and because the arena we were training in was open-air, obviously that opens it up to a wider range of suspects…”
He lets Deku’s voice roll over him like water from a showerhead. He’s not paying attention to the context, he just wants to know who the hell did this to him, what the full extent of their power is, if they can remove it and where the fuck to find them. He’ll pick up the key words.
For the moment, instead, his thoughts wander to Kirishima.
Initially, Katsuki thought him thinking about Kirishima more frequently was a Pavlovian response. Like… if Kirishima constantly occupied his personal space and therefore his thoughts, Katsuki’s thoughts would obviously direct themselves toward Kirishima when the other started to gravitate toward him. Someone mentioned Kirishima’s name? He saw a flash of red hair?
Then he’d be thinking about his best friend. Thinking about how grounding it felt to have Kirishima’s arm casually wrapped around his shoulder, or how his teeth always seemed sharper when he was really smiling, the kind that made his eyes shut and his face turn in on itself. Thinking about how Kirishima, for his occasional cluelessness at school, had a second sense for social cues that he didn’t and a kindness that was never impatient. How his red eyes showed every emotion he felt, heart pinned permanently to his gaze and how sometimes, Katsuki had to look away because it was all too much , being hit with the full force of the redhead’s emotions.
He’d never had friends beyond his weird fragmented relationship with Deku, let alone a crush, before UA, so how was he going to know that thinking about someone and having them close to you to the point of kissing wasn’t the usual reaction to said person constantly in your space?
Surprisingly, it had been Deku who explained it to him, after Katsuki had barged into his room at the asscrack of dawn after a dream where he actually did kiss Kirishima, something foreign flaring in his chest.
“Kaachan,” he’d said, not without an undue amount of glee. “You have a crush.”
Speaking of Deku — Katsuki tunes back into the explanation to find that Deku still, unsurprisingly, hasn’t gotten to his point.
“... and either way, I wasn’t sure if I should try and hack into the police database, because I feel like this isn’t a quirk that would necessarily get someone arrested, so I didn’t. But,” and Deku puffs himself up, looking particularly proud, “I dug around on some forums and found a couple of people in the area talking about the exact same thing you’re going through. They called it the Lovesong quirk, after this English song that has the words ‘Whatever words I say I will always love you.’ And the posts are pretty new too!”
The smoke starting to swirl through the room had the desired effect of making Deku speak faster.
“Anyway, the point is that I think the person is a student at an elementary school nearby, so the quirk shouldn’t be super strong, and both these posts say it wore off pretty soon, within a few hours.”
Katsuki checks the clock; it’s been about two hours since he was saddled with the burden of looking like he has feelings outside of rage, triumph, annoyance and a crush on his best friend.
“That’s a dumb quirk name and you took fifteen minutes to get to the point,” he growls, experimentally.
Nope. “I love you” comes out and it isn’t half as menacing as Katsuki’s intended point. Deku at least has grasped the gravity of the situation and has choked back any giggles before they start.
“Since it’s Saturday, we could try and scope out the elementary school? In case she showed up for optional classes today,” Deku suggests, and Katsuki’s already standing up as soon as he hears “try and scope.”
“Well, I guess I didn’t have to ask twice.”
Katsuki stuffs his pen in his pocket and grabs the paper he’d written the How’s Todoroki? on — rest in peace, notepad, you served your purpose of intimidating the fuck out of Deku — and stalks out of the room, knowing Deku will follow. If anyone saw them coming out of Deku’s room, at least Katsuki knew he looked angry enough that people would assume they were just going to spar like usual.
He doesn’t notice a certain redhead’s eyes catching the scene and drooping down into his coffee cup, or the sudden surge of noise after when Pinky and Soy Sauce Face come to comfort him.
It doesn’t take long for Katsuki to burn a hole in the one wire-fence area surrounding the campus while Deku makes quick work of the camera by shifting it just a shade to the right while Katsuki works. The school is a seven-minute walk away, and Deku keeps his babbling underneath his breath instead of directed at Katsuki.
He hopes this quirk fades soon, because this is probably the most time he’s willingly spent with Deku since they’ve been in diapers and he feels the familiar biting annoyance he always does at just being at the other’s presence.
But he has to admit that it’s shifted from just annoyance to a reluctant, earned admiration. He’s not stupid; he knows that the other is smart, otherwise he and his Icy-Hot soon-to-be-boyfriend (he’s also not blind, he sees the looks Todoroki shoots Midoriya at their internship and has mimed throwing up several times at the sight) wouldn’t be in the top 3 with him. And while Katsuki doesn’t know if the anger he feels at Deku being All Might’s chosen successor will ever disappear, he’s trying to work with it. Fucking anger management with Aizawa, actually fucking working. And the sparring with Deku helps, too — finally they can speak in a language Katsuki’s actually comfortable with.
He hates it, sometimes, how he feels like he’s distancing himself from who he used to be. He hasn’t decided if he likes this new Katsuki yet.
“Kaachan,” Deku murmurs beside him, knocking him out of thought. His first reaction is to blow up, palms alight and another angry “I love you” spat out, which he immediately regrets when he sees the tiny red-haired kid next to them. She’s shaking and tears are welling up in her eyes.
“Apologize,” he hisses underneath his breath to Katsuki, before realizing with an apologetic grin after Katsuki shoots him a perfected murderous glare that Katsuki clearly can’t do that right now.
“My friend is sorry,” Deku settles for. Katsuki tries to put a smile that would rival Kirishima’s on his face while he nods; it’s a strange feeling, like putting on one of Pinky’s pore-whatever-the-fuck face masks.
He can’t tell if the girl feels better or worse, because she’s still worrying her lip, the tears in her eyes now taking up real estate on her face. Fuck, this is the hardest part of hero work for him, the comforting.
The nerd, at least, has taken that matter into his own hands. He’s rubbing her back while she hiccups.
“We didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.
It takes a few moments before the girl manages to squeak out something that isn’t garbled by tears.
“Are you police? D’you need to arrest me?” she asks, hands clenched into tiny fists.
Something about it reminds Katsuki of Kirishima — the outpouring of emotion, the attempt to stay steadfast in the middle of it.
He feels his petrified stone heart crack open a little. Deku catches the moment where his face changes, apparently, and the anger still hanging onto his smile melts off.
“No! No, of course not,” Deku says immediately, puts his hands up with a winning grin. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
“I didn’t,” she nods rapidly, eyes filling up again. Every bob of her head brings another bit of liquid down. “I really didn’t! I was climbing a tree and I picked up a pebble and threw it because I thought I was really tall and I wanted to see how tall the pebble could go if I threw it, because my moms started letting me go to strength training and I felt really powerful.”
Katsuki thinks back to the trees surrounding the UA campus, tries to remember just how tall they are. If he had to guess, probably five or six Kirishimas stacked on top of each other — so about 30, 36 feet?
He whistles, impressed. Then he remembers the piece of paper stuffed into his back pocket from the pen jabbing his thigh, and takes it out.
That throw was pretty good, kid, he writes, and she lights up, most traces of sadness and guilt wiped off her face. Kids were funny. Do you know how long your quirk usually lasts?
She frowns. “When I first started using it, people said after ten minutes. I think.”
“How long ago was that?” Deku asks.
“Maybe six years ago? My moms say my quirk manifested when I was about to turn four.”
The Deku Muttering Machine boots up again. Katsuki catches bits like “If the posts were from a few months ago…that was a couple hours…” and “The quirk might be growing in power exponentially…no, that doesn’t make sense, think, God, I wish Shouto was…”
Yeah, he had to clock out after Deku brought Icy-Hot into the mix.
Eventually, said machine spits out an answer: “So it seems like based on the way that your quirk has grown, it will wear off on Kaachan by the end of the day!”
Katsuki’s hit by a rush of emotions — it’s been a long fucking day and guess what, it’s barely noon — but the one that’s most dominant, surprisingly, is gratitude. All he has to do for the rest of the day is stay in his room and nothing bad will happen. It’s a genius fucking plan if he says so himself.
“I’m so sorry,” the girl says, bowing to him as he and Deku start to make their exit. “Forgive me!”
In first year, Katsuki would’ve scoffed at her and pushed her away. After all, what did her feelings matter when her actions slowed him down and made him a laughingstock?
But he wasn’t in first year anymore. Fuck, he had grown.
You’re alright. Keep practicing.
Katsuki pointedly ignores the way Deku’s mouth falls open while he blinks like a dust storm ran into his eyes while he leads them back to campus, signature smirk on his face. Who’s the leader now, dipshit?
Operation Stay Silent and Refuse to Talk All Damn Day lasts the whole blissful seven minutes back to the dorms.
It lasts as he and Deku slip back in the way they came, no disapproving teachers in sight.
It lasts right until he and Deku enter the fucking common room. Which happens to be filled to the fucking walls with all his fucking classmates. His extras — fine, his friends — are crowded in front of the TV, apparently continuing the Mario Kart match Kirishima had texted about earlier. Ponytail and Ears are making heart eyes at each other over cups of tea. Even Half-and-Half is having what looks to be a real conversation with Round Face and the rest of Deku’s friend group, while Rock Face and Bird Boy are petting the street cat that Katsuki knows the lot of the soft-hearted morons are too nice to kick out until Aizawa forces them to.
Katsuki is this close to ramming his head into the nearest hard, non-sentient thing. Seriously, it’s a nice day, the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and all that movie bullshit, what the fuck are they all doing inside hanging out and not training or some shit? At least they could be working on homework or something, they had a math test coming up that he knows at least one other person in the so-called Bakusquad outside of Kirishima will come groveling to him for help with.
“Do you need anything, Kaachan?” Deku whispers while waving to the rest of the class. Fuck, Katsuki realizes they should’ve made themselves look scratched up like they normally would be after sparring, because now everyone’s giving them weird looks. Even the Mario Kart players pop up like Whack-a-Moles to see what’s happening. Half-and-Half’s blank face looks even more blank.
“Let’s just fucking go,” he tries to mouth, but enough voice leaks through.
“I love you,” he says to Deku, in the common room that’s gone completely silent just in time to witness one of the top 10 most embarrassing, mortifying, horrible, terrible moments in Katsuki’s life.
He swears he can hear everybody’s individual blinks, they’re that fucking loud.
Then a rustle of motion, and he’s almost positive he sees Kirishima leave the room like Katsuki had lit his pants on fire, and his heart is in his throat because of that — he can take everyone else, whatever, they’re all fucking extras anyway, but — he can’t confirm if it really is Kirishima, because everyone is suddenly moving toward them and he can’t see anything in between the multi-colored mob.
Four-Eyes is the first one to reach them both. He claps a hand on Deku’s shoulder and grins — grins! — at Katsuki.
“I must say, this is a surprise to me! But you two have been spending so much time together and it’s clear that you have worked hard on repairing your relationship, Bakugou! You two make such a powerful hero couple.”
Hero. Couple?
Beside him, Katsuki can hear the telltale sound of Deku trying to suppress giggles.
And three. Two. One.
The loudest fucking belly laugh he’s ever heard from Deku rips its way out. Deku’s face is the shade of Kirishima’s hair right after a fresh application of hair dye and he’s clenching his stomach, holding on for dear life.
“Hero… couple…”
He elbows Deku because he’s got his senses back and he sure as hell isn’t going to say “I love you” again.
And he makes eye contact with the nerd for a split second, but it’s long enough for him to catch the signature glint in his eyes when Deku has a plan.
No, fuck this, he’s walking to his room to see if Kirishima’s in his, Katsuki decides, starting to march through the group of his classmates. Everyone’s crowding their space and he doesn’t fucking —
“Darling, sweetheart, Kaachan, baby—”
“I love you,” he yells at the top of his lungs, turning back toward Deku with hands already heating up. He is going to strangle Deku.
“Of course Kaachan would show love angrily,” Pikachu murmurs.
Soy Sauce Face laughs. “That’s our Bakugou.”
“What did you say, Dunce Face?” he would’ve said in a world where things were right .
Instead, another “I love you” comes out.
“Whoa, dude, I didn’t know you loved me like that — I’m bi, but I’m not poly,” he says, hands up.
“Shut the fuck up!” he yells. “I love you,” everyone else hears.
“Cheating on me so soon, babe? Honey, I’m devastated,” Deku says, sticking out his bottom lip for maximum pitiful effect, and the bastard has the fucking nerve to bat his goddamn eyelashes at Katsuki while clutching his chest like he’s a fucking grandma whose pearls got snatched from around her neck.
The floor around them turns a beautiful, beautiful charred black. Shreds of the paper Katsuki realizes he could’ve used to communicate like a regular fucking person flit downward from his palms, now ashes.
“I love you,” he yells so loud that everyone has to cover their ears. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!” Katsuki punctuates the last one with a hand aflame thrown at Deku that he easily blocks. (“You are the scum of the earth and I wish I never made any effort to re-befriend you, you shitty damn nerd, shut your fucking pouty mouth right this fucking second or I will ruin every second of your miserable All Might room!”)
After his outburst, he’s panting. He can feel anger pulsing through every part of his body. Gods, he hates this. When he clenches his hands into fists by his sides, the class realizes that he’s trying not to go on the offensive anymore and takes their hands away from their ears, stepping away from Deku and Katsuki.
And then: “Oh my god, that’s the quirk that Kirishima mentioned you got hit with,” Soy Sauce Face exclaims.
“Oh man, that’s fucking — you? And that quirk?”
The realization leaves Sparky doubled over cackling.
“I love you,” he scowls. (“Yeah, I know, shut the fuck up.”)
Kirishima had gone somewhere, Katsuki gets to confirm, because he appears in the doorway to the common room just then, eyes suspiciously bright and red-rimmed.
“Guys, please,” and Katsuki has never seen Kirishima look this defeated. Not even when he’s told Katsuki about his nightmares and failing to save Sir Nighteye and failing to step in front of his middle school classmates and failing, and failing, and failing. That look of resignation should never be on Kirishima’s face.
He feels something twist inside him. He can’t take seeing Kirishima like this, looking like he’s forgotten what hope is.
“I can’t —” and Kirishima can’t finish the sentence, and Katsuki feels so lost. What can’t Shitty Hair do? Gods, he hates not being able to fucking ask his best friend what’s wrong. But whatever it is, the entire common room — especially the other members of the so-called Bakusquad — looks instantly remorseful. Kaminari and Sero drop onto their knees and start groveling in front of Kirishima, stealing a line from an English movie they’d watched in class the other day.
“We are worms, worthless worms!”
“We didn’t mean to, Kiri, I swear! I’m sorry for breaking bro code!”
That gets a hint of a smile to flash across Kirishima’s face, and suddenly Katsuki feels time start to move again.
And Deku is back to his awkward, flushing self, like the past three years of character development never happened.
“We’re not dating and we never were, Kirishima, I’m so sorry,” he apologizes, sounding also like he wants to cry.
“Man, that’s awkward,” Kirishima says, laughing, pushing a hand back through his hair. But he looks — angry? Katsuki is almost certain he sees Kirishima’s eyes flash black with rage for a second. He’s then distracted by the fact that Kirishima’s hair is down, not spiked, and his breath suddenly catches in his throat because he’s thinking about how fucking soft Kirishima’s hair is when it’s not in those godawful horns, but he doesn’t actually hate the horns, because —
“Well, I think we should give Kaachan his space,” Deku says hurriedly, cutting off Katsuki’s admiration spiral (not him starting to sound like the nerd, fuck) and pushing him headfirst into Kirishima’s chest, right outside the doorway to the common room.
“You’ll thank me later,” Deku whispers before he shuts the door.
Little shit.
Katsuki’s phone buzzes when he steps away from Kirishima’s chest, face feeling hotter than he’s ever felt his hands go.
shitty hair
r u ok?
This close, where he has to tilt his head up just the slightest bit to meet Kirishima’s eyes, he sees proof that his best friend was crying, his eyes still glassy.
Still. He’s beautiful and Katsuki has to take a moment to regulate his breathing, passing it off as calming down from earlier.
But it’s all overwhelming him at once. Stupid Hair-for-Brains, asking if Katsuki was okay when he clearly wasn’t. Always putting other people first. It makes his heart stick in his throat. He knows that Kirishima can do better. He wants Kirishima to be surrounded by people who are vocal about their love for him all the time, for fuck’s sake, not emotionally stunted people who are just starting to grow out of emotional elementary school at the ripe old age of 17.
And looking at Kirishima like this, his fucking magnificent beast of a best friend looking unsure, denting his bottom lip so hard it’s starting to bleed, Katsuki can’t take it anymore.
“I love you,” he says, and he hopes it sounds like he means it.
He doesn’t miss the gasp shuddering out of Kirishima at the confession. He also doesn’t miss how Kirishima takes another step away from him, clenches his fists, phone falling to the ground.
“Kats—fuck, Bakugou, dude, I, I’m so sorry, I know that you have this quirk or whatever, and you’re stuck saying that to me, but,” he says in almost a whisper.
Say my name, Katsuki thinks. Say it again, don’t dance around it, please, please.
“I just — I don’t think I can be around you like this, not with this quirk,” Kirishima finishes, so quietly that Katsuki has to strain to hear him.
“I love you,” Katsuki says again, insistently, only to have Kirishima’s eyes well up again accompanied by the flickers of rage Katsuki had seen earlier. They scream hurt.
“Bakugou.”
“I love you,” Katsuki says, and it feels like the first time he’s said those words even though he’s said them some thirty-odd times every day. Because he’s going to challenge any doubt that Kirishima has about how Katsuki feels about him, even if it’s not the way he wanted to confess, even if he’s confessing without a plan. Because Katsuki knows two things: He's going to be the Number One Hero and Kirishima is the greatest person alive.
“I love you,” he insists, jabbing a finger to Kirishima’s chest and refusing to make eye contact. “I love you,” he whispers, tilting his face up defiantly until he can feel Kirishima’s eyelashes on his own, his best friend’s breath coming out in short puffs. Until it’s not a mistake.
“I love you,” he says one more time, but he doesn’t finish because there are lips on his, chapped and warm and soft, and one hand carding through his hair with another gripping his lower back like he’s something precious. Katsuki pushes himself closer, kisses Kirishima with all the force of the “I love you”’s he’s given to all the wrong people today, winds his hands through that not-shitty hair.
“Katsuki,” Kirishima breathes against his lips. “Can I call you Katsuki?”
He nods, eyes still closed.
“I love you,” Katsuki says again, like a prayer. Like he’s never going to be able to stop saying thank you to whatever gods exist that made sure Kirishima liked him back. Possibly even loved him. He isn’t too fixated on the details anymore, especially not when he has the guy he’s been pitifully pining after for some indefinite amount of time is in his arms, calling him by his first name.
He can’t wait to call Kirishima Eijirou.
“Man, this might be the best day of my life,” Eijirou says, shark-toothed grin against Katsuki’s mouth stretched so wide it hurts. “I can’t believe I thought you were dating Deku. Those ten minutes were headed for the worst ten minutes of my life, Kats.”
Katsuki pouts, because he doesn’t want to be thinking about Deku right now, not at all, and he sure as hell doesn’t want Eijirou thinking about Deku right now, either.
When Eijirou runs his teeth across his bottom lip to take away the pout, Katsuki finds neither of them have to worry about those thoughts. Not anymore.
“And for the record,” Eijirou whispers after they pull away, lips still tingling, “I love you too.”
THANK YOU, Deku finds on a paper slipped under the door when the same ploy happens to him later that week with him and Todoroki.
“Man. So this is how it feels,” Deku sighs.
Katsuki laughs so, so hard when Deku and Half-and-Half walk into the common room the next day, holding hands and matching the color of Todoroki’s scar. But all that laughter flies away and he turns the same color when Eijirou kisses him on the cheek.
“So, about that carpet,” Aizawa drawls, waking into the common room.