Chapter Text
“What the hell!”
Eijirou looks up. Kaminari, Sero, and Ashido got into a commiserating huddle the moment Aizawa started handing back their quizzes. The huddle had apparently migrated to Eijjirou’s desk, but he’d been too busy staring at his own results to notice.
“Damn, Kirishima,” Kaminari says before snatching the quiz out of his hands. “What happened to the dumbass squad sticking together?”
Eijirou feels his cheeks start to heat up. “I’m still pretty dumb, y’know.”
Ashido crowds up next to Kaminari. “No, no, you’re not allowed to say that,” she says, peering over his shoulder at Eijirou’s quiz. “This is average. We should get you a cake.”
“I’m so proud.” Kaminari wipes an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye. “My boy, all grown up.”
Sero grins at Eijirou and knocks his fist into his shoulder. “Seriously, man, congrats.”
Eijirou drops his forehead to the surface of his desk. For once, he wishes he still had bangs so he could hide his face. “You guys,” he whines. “It’s a B minus.”
“It’s a UA B minus,” Ashido points out.
Which, true, but still.
Kaminari drops into a squat in front of the desk, bringing his face level with Eijirou’s. There’s a serious look on his face. “Wise master,” he says solemnly, “teach me your ways.”
“I didn’t even—” Eijjirou groans. “Look, I just asked Bakugou for some help.”
Sero shrugs. “Yeah, but you asked Bakugou for help last semester, and look where that got you.”
Kaminari, on the other hand, whips around to send a pleading look to the opposite side of the room.
Bakugou sends him back a death glare.
Ashido blows a kiss.
The death glare intensifies.
Kaminari pivots on his heel back to Eijirou. “Anyway, yeah, tell me your secrets.”
Eijirou sits up and thinks about it. Last semester, he was kinda drowning. The schoolwork was harder, and there was so much more of it. He’s always been slow, but he could kinda bull through in middle school. With UA, it’s like there aren’t enough hours in the day to cram everything he needs to know in his brain. It was overwhelming. By the time he asked Bakugou for help, he didn’t really have any hope of catching up.
This time around, Bakugou slapped down a barebones semester-long study schedule, and said, “Dumbass, your brain’s a muscle too.” Then he left Eijirou to it. He barks at him to quit slacking off sometimes, and he answers Eijirou’s questions. But for the most part he let Eijirou figure it out on his own.
And it’s still really, really hard, but Eijirou feels like he kinda has a handle on it. He feels more in control, at least. It helped to watch the way Bakugou studied, and how he thought about reaching an answer. It also weirdly helped that it simply didn’t occur to Bakugou to try to tutor him this time. As if he assumed Eijirou wouldn’t need his help to do it.
“It’s like progressive overload,” Eijirou says. “Your brain’s a muscle, so you gotta train it like one. You start with easier stuff, and then you try something a little harder. And you just keep doing that? You don’t try to lift all the heaviest weights right at the start. You start with the basic light stuff first.”
“Oh my god,” Kaminari groans. “Don’t gym bro metaphor me, man.”
“I’m literally a musclehead,” Eijriou says.
Ashido laughs. “We really should’ve seen it coming. Step one, actually study.”
“I’m already failing step one,” Kaminari moans and thumps his head against the desk.
Sero pats Kaminari on the shoulder. “Aw, c’mon, it’s not that bad.”
“Are you doing step one?”
“Well, no…”
“We’re doomed,” Kaminari wails.
“Guys!” Eijirou says. “You’ve still got tons of time. Midterms aren’t even until next month.”
“Yeah! That’s plenty of time to start studying,” Ashido chirps with a grin. “Well, start tomorrow. Or next week.”
“Uh,” Eijirou says.
Ashido barrels on. “Anyway! Are you free on Tuesday? We’ve got some last minute no-shows for volleyball, and we could really use a fill. You and,” she turns to shout across the room, “Bakugou!”
“No,” Bakugou says.
“Volleyball!”
“Hell no.”
“What,” Ashido says, “you don’t want to absolutely wreck some losers?”
There’s a brief but very noticeable moment of hesitation before Bakugou’s next, much less forceful, “No?”
Ashido beams. “Great! Tuesday, five o’clock! Don’t be late!”
Turns out, it’s not actually rec volleyball. It’s some horrible bastardized version where everyone tries to projectile decapitate each other.
“Dodgeball,” Bakugou says.
“Actually, it’s dick-smash volleyball,” Ashido says with a frankly concerning amount of glee.
Eijirou hardens protectively.
“Hey!” Ashido shouts. “No jockstrapping!”
Eijirou grabs her by the shoulders and hisses, “You brought Bakugou to dick-smash volleyball.”
“Yeah—?”
“No, no, you brought King Explosion Murder Bakugou to dick-smash volleyball.”
“Hell yeah, you did,” Bakugou says with relish. His knuckles crack as he flexes his hands. Sparks flicker in his palms.
Kaminari whimpers and covers his crotch.
Ashido looks Eijirou in the eye, a smile slowly spreading over her face. “Oh, don’t worry. I know.”
“That’s it,” Kaminari moans as they waddle home. “My family line ends with me.”
Sero grimaces. “Good.”
“You’ll be fine,” Eijirou says dubiously.
Technically, the dick smashing was only supposed to happen to the other team, but well, collateral damage. After the other team managed to secure three points in a row, Bakugou’s expression took on a particular edge of mania. Then the precision part kinda fell to the wayside in favor of the more explosions part.
“Kirishima,” Sero says. “I love you, man. But you and your bulletproof dick really need to shut up.”
Ashido skips a little ahead of them, her arms swinging gleefully. “Okay, but we won.” She’d spent the entire match slipping and sliding around on her acid, dodging volleyballs flying at ungodly speeds, shouting insults to egg Bakugou on.
“At what cost though,” Kaminari says and throws a glare over his shoulder back at where Bakugou is strolling leisurely behind them. “Was it really worth it?”
Bakugou has his hands slung in his pockets. There’s an uptick to the corner of his mouth. “Victory,” he says, like he’s rolling the word around in his mouth.
Kaminari whirls on Ashido. “Okay, we are not inviting him again.”
“Pretty sure Bakugou’s permabanned after that thing with round four.”
Sero shudders. “My grandkids are gonna have bruises from round four.”
“Assuming you can even have them,” Kaminari says darkly.
“It’s a shame,” Ashido says, her head tilted. “We probably could’ve dominated the season.”
“Yeah, because everyone would just forfeit.”
“Exactly,” Ashido says dreamily.
“That’s not really in the spirit of dick-smash volleyball,” Sero points out.
“Winning is the spirit of dick-smash volleyball.”
The conversation devolves into a three-way bickering match over what is and isn’t the “spirit” of what Eijirou is pretty sure is the worst sport ever invented in the whole of human history. He lags back a little until he’s walking side by side with Bakugou.
The guy doesn’t look remotely regretful about Kaminari maybe not having future kids. He just has that same not-really smile on his face. It’s nothing like the challenging grin he puts on when he’s trying to goad someone into attacking him full force. He just looks satisfied, like he’s just had a really good meal. The cat that got the cream.
“Did you have fun?” Eijirou asks.
Bakugou shrugs. “It was alright.”
That’s the kind of thing Bakugou says when he wins a good spar. Also when he loses a good spar. Stuff he finds enjoyable. Which is loads of things. He bitches about it half the time, but he enjoys studying and going to the gym and training and thinking up batshit applications for his Quirk. It’s enjoyable to him because it’s satisfying. It’s satisfying because it pushes him that much closer to his goal.
None of that is fun because Bakugou doesn’t really do fun—doesn’t have room for it, isn’t interested in it. Except tonight apparently. Because Bakugou actually did seem to have an absolute blast making legal crotch shots in a no-holds-barred competition barely a step down from a death match. Man, they’re never playing dick-smash volleyball again.
The next leg day, Midoriya’s already working on quads by the time Eijirou gets there. His form’s still pretty shaky, but that’s to be expected. It’s only his second time doing this. With a little more time, the movement will look smoother and more confident, like one fluid integrated motion.
Eijirou can’t help but notice that Midoriya’s working with a weight higher than he seems comfortable with. He’s not getting the full range of motion he should. His form’s also going wonky. His back trying to compensate for what his legs aren’t quite able to do. He’s gonna have to talk to him about that.
He smiles at him and gives him a thumbs up. He waits for Midoriya to finish his set before talking to him.
“Hey, I’m glad you could get started without me. You remembered everything I showed you?”
Midoriya smiles back. “I wrote it all down after we finished.” He picks up a notebook he’d set down by the machine and flips to a particular page.
He’d made a chart with all the exercises Eijirou set for him. It has the number of sets and reps noted down, and the weights Midoriya had been using. There’s also little notes scrawled in the margins on comments Eijirou made about form and some stuff from research Midoriya apparently did himself online.
Eijirou frowns.
The notebook also tracks every time Midoriya did this routine. Which was apparently every single day since Eijirou showed it to him. And judging by the weights Midoriya’s marking down, he hasn’t been taking it easy.
That’s normally okay. They all push themselves pretty hard. It’s impossible not to when you’re competing against everyone else to be the best. But Eijirou got a pretty good sense of Midoriya’s baseline during their last session, and the guy’s already going way beyond it. He’s not giving himself any time to recover. Yeah, Eijirou and Bakugou work out almost every day, but each muscle group gets targeted only about once or twice a week. Their legs get multiple days to recover. Midoriya’s not giving himself that time.
It all just sends a prickling uneasy feeling down his spine.
“You’ve been coming back here?”
“Yeah, after I’m done studying for the day.”
Eijirou nods for a moment before his brain catches up with him. He stares at Midoriya. The guy’s ranked fourth in the class, and it’s not because he’s some natural genius. Sometimes Eijirou wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and he can see light streaming from under Midoriya’s door.
“Wait,” he says. “I thought you worked out in the morning.”
Midoriya cocks his head at him. Then he gestures around them both, as if to say, I’m here right now, aren’t I? “I normally do Iida’s training in the morning except for today because I know you work on legs today.”
Eijirou flips a page to Midoriya’s notes on Iida’s training plan. It’s a lot of running. There’s some calisthenics mixed in. It’s a total training regimen in itself stacked on top of doing his already intense weight training. He feels another weird shiver run through him. When does this guy have time to sleep?
“You do all of this every day?”
Midoriya shrugs. “Yeah, if I can.”
That’s—so much. He kinda has no idea how Midoriya hasn’t just collapsed from exhaustion already. “For how long?”
Midoriya’s expression finally turns a little embarrassed. “I’m kinda behind. I didn’t really start training until less than a year before entrance exams.”
Eijirou’s about to say that a year’s not so far behind. He only started training seriously at about that time too. A year before entrance exams is when most people decide they’re going to seriously try for UA and start physically preparing. But then he’d been kinda going to that one gym above the restaurant since his short lived attempt at playing baseball at the start of middle school.
But he kinda gets the sense that Midoriya doesn’t mean something like that. He probably means he completely started from scratch that year.
That’s not uncommon either. Aoyama’s like that. So is Mineta. But no one is pushing themself like Midoriya is.
The only one of them who goes as hard as Midoriya is Bakugou. Except Bakugou is a ruthless stickler about resting throughout his training. And he’s been ramping up the intensity and complexity of his regimen since at least early middle school. Their only classmates who’ve been doing serious training as long as he has is Todoroki, Yaomomo, and Iida, who all came from rich families with personal dojos and fancy private trainers.
No one is trying to do what Midoriya’s trying to do with less than a year and a half of training.
“What were you doing before you started focusing on your legs?” Eijirou asks faintly.
Midoriya flips to another page. This regimen calls for seven hours a day of training on top of school. It left him time for only four hours of sleep. And once again, no rest days.
“You can’t keep this up,” Eijirou says.
Midoriya looks at him. His mouth is twisted into an odd smile. “I can’t afford to stop.”
“But you—“ he trails off.
He doesn’t know Midoriya’s situation. He doesn’t know what causes him to get up every day, destroy himself, and then keep going. It’s not only a desire to be a Hero, that’s for sure. They all want to be Heroes. None of them quite the same way Midoriya does, however.
“You don’t have to stop,” Eijirou says. “But maybe just—slow down?”
Midoriya keeps smiling at him. “I’ll think about it,” he says, not even bothering to pretend he’s not lying.
“C’mon, man.”
“Kirishima, I really appreciate it. But I need to catch up. I’ve wasted so much time.”
“You’re already the top of the class.”
Midoriya shakes his head. He looks down at his hand, and closes it into a fist. “I’ve only got one shot. I can’t waste this chance.”
He’s got a glint in his eye. It’s like he’s not even looking at Eijirou. He’s focusing on something else on the horizon. Looking ahead at all the stuff he still wants to do. Midoriya, he’s starting to realize, is kind of terrifying.
“You’re going to waste it anyway if you don’t ease off,” Eijirou says.
“I know. I learned my lesson. I’m being careful.”
This is Midoriya’s idea of being careful.
“I—” Eijirou waves his hands helplessly. He doesn’t even know what he can say here. He gets the feeling that nothing he could come up with would actually get through to the guy.
Just because Eijirou did pretty well on one math quiz, he’s still got a long way to go before he has a hope of doing well on the midterm. As much as he bonded with Ashido, Sero, and Kaminari over the summer, he really doesn’t want to be stuck doing remedial classes again.
Bakugou’s been studying with him more often than not because as he once loudly declared, Eijirou isn’t nearly as annoying as he could be. It’s kind of touching. He gets the sense that even Bakugou feels lonely sometimes.
An eraser thwocks into Eijirou’s forehead before landing onto his paper in front of him. “Jeez, ow,” he says. “What was that for?”
Bakugou’s looking at the stinging red mark the eraser had left. He’d thrown it full force. It hurts like a bitch.
“Dude.”
Bakugou looks away from his forehead and focuses back on him. “You asked for an eraser.”
Eijirou scowls. “I didn’t ask you to chuck it at my head.” Honestly, they never should’ve invited Bakugou to dick-smash volleyball.
“Hmm.”
Bakugou turns back to his own textbook.
“Hey.”
Eijirou throws the eraser back at him.
Bakugou catches it because of course he does. Him and his stupidly good reflexes. He flicks it back at Eijirou’s head.
Eijirou has to harden his cheek before it hits him. It thuds harmlessly just next to his nose before he catches it in the palm of his hand. For a moment, he thinks about starting an eraser war with Bakugou. Then he thinks about Bakugou playing dick-smash volleyball and all the breakable items in this room. Eijirou decides to just erase the wrong answer he wrote in his notes.
When he passes the eraser back to Bakugou the normal way, the guy actually looks a bit disappointed. Eijirou snorts.
Bakugou’s working on an assigned reading in their literature textbook. Eijirou had read it earlier today. It was a story about a man selfishly pursuing his own interests and lying to a trusted friend. Even though the man got what he wanted in the end, he could never enjoy it because the betrayal would forever haunt him.
Bakugou’s scowling by the time he reaches the end of the excerpt. He scribbles out some answers to the study questions.
Eijirou looks back at his own work and realizes he’d screwed up in another place. “Can I—” The eraser comes flying at his head again. Eijirou gets his hand up in time and lets it smack into his unhardened palm. It stings a little. “Thanks.”
Bakugou grunts. “You’re getting better at that.”
Eijirou blinks at him. The compliment flushes through him in one big rush.
He had been working on controlling when and where he hardens in response to impacts. He’s also picked up a lot of small bruises and scrapes in the process. He hadn’t realized how much he just kinda bumps into stuff with his Quirk. To his embarrassment, he’s learning that actually he’s pretty clumsy. It’d felt like a lot of backwards progress.
“Oh,” he says. “Thanks.”
Bakugou nods curtly then turns back to his work.
Eijirou watches him be a good diligent student for a while. Then he turns back to his own assignments. He’s actually gotten pretty ahead on stuff ever since he studied while Uraraka trained that one time. They’ve met up every so often to keep it up, and it’s been doing them both good. Eijirou finishes his history assignment, then checks back in on Bakugou.
He’s still hunched over his work, his brows furrowed. He’s a lot slower than Eijirou is, but he’s more rigorous. He channels the same furious intensity to studying as he does working out.
The single-minded obsession of it pours out of every molecule of him. He’s either lifting, or he’s doing plyometrics, or he’s stretching, or he’s on cardio, or he’s eating protein, or he’s taking in liters of electrolyte water, or he’s flopping into bed at 8:30 PM to ensure he has the rest to take on the next day. Even when he’s just standing still, there’s a scowl of concentration on his face as he thinks about his performance, adjustments, tactics. The rest of the time, he’s studying.
Eijirou’s never met anyone like him. Someone so indomitable in body and mind. Even Crimson Riot doubted sometimes. Bakugou never seems like he does.
Still, even Bakugou could use more breaks.
Eijirou picks up the eraser, looks to see whether Bakugou’s noticed anything, then flings it at him.
He doesn’t actually expect it to nail the guy on the side of his head.
There’s a moment of dead silence when Bakugou slowly raises his head to stare at Eijirou. The eraser thuds softly to the ground.
They make eye contact.
Eijirou dives out the window.
They’re only on the second floor, but he hardens for impact with the ground anyway. He hears the crack of an explosion behind him as Bakugou also launches himself out the window. Eijirou scrambles out of the bushes and starts sprinting across the quad.
He’s not fast. He’s never been fast, but holy shit, is he gonna try anyway. Eijirou actually makes it almost across the quad before he hears, “Die!” right on top of him. It’s just enough time for him to harden his back before Bakugou crashes into him.
It knocks them both to the ground. And that’s a good enough excuse as any for a good ol’ fashioned tussle. Neither of them can use their Quirks that much. In another life, Eijirou could’ve made a pretty good wrestler. Bakugou would do well at judo. They’re surprisingly evenly matched on the floor.
At one point, Eijirou manages to get on top and grind Bakugou’s face into the ground. Then Bakugou does something with his legs and his weight that tips Eijirou over entirely, and then it’s his nose in the dirt.
Bakugou pins his arms down, leans forward, and hisses in his ear, “Yield, motherfucker.”
He left Eijirou’s legs free though, so he twists, dislodging Bakugou. Eijirou never gets all that close to actually pinning Bakugou, but Bakugou can never keep him down long enough for it to matter. Eventually, they’re just left vaguely scrabbling at each other on the quad, covered in dirt and sweat.
Eijirou rolls away first, flopping onto his back. Bakugou takes the opportunity to dive on top of him, knocking the wind out of him.
“Agh,” Eijirou wheezes.
Bakugou leans back, his knees pinning Eijirou’s arms down. He grins down at Eijirou. “I win.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eijirou says. “Get off.”
Bakugou milks his victory for a couple moments longer because he’s an asshole. Then he rolls over and lays on his back next to Eijirou.
For a moment, they just lie there, catching their breaths.
They’d been studying long enough that night had started to fall without them noticing. Everyone’s probably gone to the cafeteria to eat dinner.
The sky is a pale orange. A cool breeze blows across the quad. If they weren’t in the city, if they were out in the countryside where Eijirou’s grandparents live, they’d be able to see the stars by now. As it is, it’s just the city lights on the horizon. And the moon.
He glances over at Bakugou. The guy is looking up at the sky with the same expression that he looks at classic literature. Brow furrowed, but not angry. Not really.
Eventually, Bakugou sits up and grumbles about getting some food. Eijirou follows him.
Yaomomo is complaining about the assigned reading the next day. Apparently, she’s read the entire novel before, and the excerpt didn’t do it justice. According to her, it’s not about the irredeemable actions of one egotistical man. It’s about isolation. It’s about being caught in the middle of changing times, when even value systems become uncertain. It’s about being neither of the future nor of the past, but rather being stuck in the fleeting unstable present.
Aizawa looks like he wants to have a go at day drinking. Ashido and Kaminari are hurriedly copying Yaomomo’s comments into their empty study sheets.
Bakugou frowns and stares at a blank spot on the chalkboard. Midoriya is looking over at him, as he always seems to do.
Eijirou realizes that he’s starting to dread leg days a little bit.
He’s kinda stuck, he thinks. He promised he’d help Midoriya out, and he is! He’s helping the guy improve his form, and be more careful about certain stuff. But he also can’t help but feel a little uneasy every time he watches Midoriya work out. Still, he’s gonna do his best anyway.
He comes in to find Midoriya at the squat rack, instead of the Smith machine. Bakugou had apparently wrapped up with his routine there. Eijirou hasn’t seen him. Once again, Midoriya’s working with a weight that’s a little too high. His balance is tipping back a little bit when he comes up. He looks unsteady on his feet.
On one rep, he drops into his squat, then tries to stand back up. The bar wobbles, and Midoriya arches his back a little to try to compensate. The bar shifts behind his center of gravity, and he starts to tip backwards. Shit. Eijirou takes a large step forward, but he’s across the room. Midoriya’s gonna fall. He’s gonna drop the bar. Shit. Shit.
Bakugou steps up, Eijirou hadn’t even seen him, but he must’ve been there watching. He slides his hands under the bar. It stops Midoriya’s backwards momentum, relieves the weight enough for him to bring the bar forward and rack it.
There’s a pause where Midoriya stares ahead of him at the mirror reflecting Bakugou standing right behind him, looking pissed. Bakugou’s hand flexes on the bar before letting go. He takes a step back, out of Midoriya’s space.
“You fucking moron, what the fuck do you think you’re doing.”
Midoriya’s face is flushed red with—mortification, maybe. Also exertion. Possibly frustration.
Eijirou steps forward. “Hey, man, hey, it’s my fault. I was showing him the ropes and—”
Bakugou crosses his arms and sends him a hard look. “You set this weight for him?”
“Uhh, no?”
Bakugou jerks his head into a stiff nod. As if he already knew that.
Midoriya frowns. “Hey, don’t take it out on Kirishima. I’ve been adding weight.” He stares Bakugou down. “I can handle it.”
“I don’t give two shits what you think you can handle. You clearly have no goddamn clue how to respect your own fucking limits—”
“I know what—”
“You don’t,” Bakugou snaps. There’s a glint of something dangerous in his eye. “Every single time you get into a goddamn fight, you show just how much you don’t.”
Midoriya’s shifts his weight onto his heels, like he’s trying to settle himself down. “I know them now.”
“You know not to wreck yourself with your Quirk. That’s not the same as knowing your goddamn limits.” Bakugou pivots on his heel and paces away from the squat rack in brisk, angry strides before stalking back. His shoulders are hunched. There’s little pops from the sparks crackling around his hands. “If you think being a reckless moron is what it takes to be Number One, I should just let you smash yourself to pieces, and be done with it. You clearly can’t handle this shit.”
Midoriya opens his mouth to respond, and then stops. He closes it. He tilts his head a little. “But you don’t want me to do that.”
“It’s not a fair fucking fight if you flame out through sheer idiocy, dipshit,” Bakugou snarls.
There’s a long silence when Midoriya blankly stares at Bakugou. Then he tips his head back and barks out a laugh. He scrubs a hand through his hair and studies Bakugou. “You’re right,” he says with a weird smile on his face. “It wouldn’t be fair, huh?”
“Yeah, so don’t fuck it up.” Bakugou reaches around to grab Eijirou by the back of his collar. He drags him forward and shakes him. “Quit blowing Kirishima off. He’s smarter than you.”
Eijirou stares at him. “Dude, I’m really not—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Bakugou shakes him again, a little rougher this time. “You’re a goddamn natural. It pisses me off.” He drops Eijirou, causing him to fall to the floor with a clumsy fwump. Then he stomps off to finish his workout.
Midoriya watches him leave with a bemused expression on his face. Then he leans over to peer down at Eijirou on the floor. “Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” Eijirou says back. He clambers to his feet. This time, he’d managed to harden only his shins, but didn’t think to protect his tailbone. It stings like hell. But he is getting better. “So uhh, do you wanna get started?”
Later that afternoon, Eijirou finds Bakugou at the water faucets next to the track.
He’d gotten into a bickering screaming argument with Iida that had somehow resulted in them both running full tilt around the track, Bakugou shouting insults at Iida, Iida scolding him at a more restrained but just as booming volume. Eijirou had been on classroom clean-up duty then with Koda. He could hear them from all the way inside the school building. Honestly, he has no clue how either of them had the lung capacity to yell like that while running at a dead sprint.
But he knew he’d be able to find Bakugou cooling off under the outdoor water faucets after they wrapped up whatever that argument was. The guy overheats like crazy, and they’d been screwing around at the hottest part of the day.
So Eijirou rounds the corner to the sight of Bakugou with the faucet running, his head dunked under the cool stream of water. The guy raises his head when he hears Eijirou walk up. His hands hold onto the edges of the metal basin.
Eijirou tosses a bottle of Pocari Sweat at him. Bakugou grabs it out of the air, unscrews the cap, and drains it in one large gulp. Water drips down his face. His hair’s flattened close to his head, making his ears stick out. He looks a bit like a drowned cat.
The faucet’s still running. Eijirou steps up to the basin to turn it off, grumbling at Bakugou about wasting water. The guy just shrugs and knocks Eijirou on the head with the empty bottle. Then he sits on the ground, leaning his back against the side of the water basin. His face is blotchy red from the heat and sun.
Eijirou sits down next to him and pulls another Pocari Sweat out of his bag. He’d made a stop at the vending machine after he finished his clean-up shift.
Bakugou grunts and takes it. He doesn’t drink it as fast as he did the first one, just takes a couple smaller swigs before screwing the cap back on. He holds the neck of the bottle loosely in his hands. “It’s fucking hot,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Even though they’re sitting in the shadow cast by the eaves of the school building, the air is still oppressively muggy. He’d managed to work up a sweat in just the short walk rounding the side of the building to the faucets.
“So a goddamn natural, huh?”
Bakugou scowls. “Fucking annoying.”
Eijirou leans forward with a grin. “You can’t take it back. I heard you loud and clear.”
“Why would I take it back,” Bakugou says.
Eijirou laughs. “Dude, I haven’t done anything special since I got here.”
“Sometimes you beat me in spars.” As if that’s definitive proof. The guy says it with all the casual arrogance of the absolute best. Because Midoriya may be up there, but Bakugou’s right there with him. “You almost got me that last fight with a technique you never even practiced.”
“Uh, sure, okay.”
Bakugou gives him a look, like he thinks Eijirou’s being a moron, even as the guy apparently seems to be trying to tell him that he’s not one. “Just don’t overthink shit. You’re better when you’re not in your head.” Then he stands up and downs the rest of his Pocari Sweat. “It’s too hot. I’m getting out of here.”
Eijirou stands and follows him with vague plans about cooling off and maybe doing some homework. Even though he’d showered earlier today, it’s so hot he already wants to have another. And being in the dorms means he doesn’t have to worry about running up the water bill for his mom.
They make their way back together. There’s not really much to say, and Bakugou doesn’t ask about how the rest of the workout with Midoriya went. It’d gone well.
They get back to the dorms. Eijirou splits off towards the showers. Behind him, Bakugou says, “Do you have tape?”
Eijirou looks back over his shoulder. “Uh, yeah. But I thought you just got a new roll.”
Bakugou’s expression darkens. “I did.”
Oh, that’s what that whole argument with Iida was about, huh. The guy goes through a ton of tape. He’s got crazy shin splints.
Eijirou tosses his dorm key to Bakugou. “It’s in my desk drawer.”
“Got it.”
Eijirou grabs some extra clothes he keeps in his shoe locker and hits the showers. After he’s done, he finds Bakugou in the common room with the legs of his track pants rolled up. Tokoyami and Jirou are hanging out on a couch on the far side of the room, apparently having a tense discussion about a kind of music Eijirou’s never heard of. He waves at them.
Bakugou’s still working on taping, so Eijirou just gets his keys from him, gets some stuff from his room, and comes back. He plops his foam roller on the couch next to Bakugou. The guy likes to roll out his IT bands after he runs. Then Eijirou stretches out on the same couch Bakugou is sitting on and starts their assigned chemistry reading.
Eventually, Bakugou finishes taping up and chucks the roll back at Eijirou. He lets it smack against his torso without hardening his chest, and feels a little bit proud of that. Bakugou gets on the floor, jams the foam roller under his thigh, and starts sliding back and forth.
Eijirou peers over his textbook at him. “You’re working on your 1RMs tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Need a spot?”
Bakugou frowns up at him. “What, you’re not available?”
“Dude, I’m asking if you want me to spot you.”
“Who the fuck else would I ask.”
Eijirou blinks. For a moment, he thinks about meals in Tupperware containers and massage balls and endurance training and grocery shopping at 10 PM. Stuff that anyone could do on their own if they wanted to.
“No clue,” he says. “I’ll meet you after I finish my warm-up.”
Bakugou nods and knocks the knuckles of his hand against Eijirou’s knee.