Chapter Text
The banner had taken three attempts and a small class-wide argument about font choice, but by eight in the morning on festival day, Class 2-A's stall stood proudly at the end of the main courtyard row, hand-painted letters declaring CLASS 2-A: HERO-THEMED CREPES (SUPPORT COURSE APPROVED) in a shade of red that Renji had insisted was "combat-appropriate" and everyone else had just called "extremely Bakugo-coded," a comment that had made Izuku choke on his coffee hard enough to require actual assistance.
"It's a good color," Izuku said, for the fourth time, setting up the last of the fold-out tables. "It's festive."
"It's literally his hero costume's color palette, sensei," said Kaida, arranging little paper flags into a jar with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. "We know what we did."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Your ears are doing the thing."
"My ears are not doing a thing—"
"Sensei." Kaida did not even look up. "Lie-detector Quirk. You've had four months to learn not to try this with me."
Izuku gave up, went slightly pink, and busied himself with the crepe batter instead, which did not require him to maintain eye contact with a room full of extremely observant teenagers who had spent the better part of a year turning his personal life into their favorite ongoing group project.
By nine, the courtyard had filled with the noise of a hundred other stalls, music drifting over from the 1-B sound stage, the smell of yakisoba and sugar and hot batter thick in the morning air. Izuku manned the griddle with the particular intensity he brought to everything, sleeves rolled up, flour on one cheek, calling out orders to a rotating crew of students who took turns on register, toppings, and — Renji's self-appointed role — aggressively hyping up passing customers with the enthusiasm of a man who had found his true calling.
"Fresh crepes! Made by future pro heroes! Very safe, no property damage guaranteed—" Renji paused. "Usually."
"Renji."
"I'm building trust through honesty, sensei, it's a technique."
It was nearly eleven when the crowd near the front of the stall did something Izuku recognized immediately and dreaded on principle: a ripple, a hush, then a swell of excited whispering, the exact social physics of a pro hero just walked into view.
He knew who it was before he even looked up. He always did, by now — some small, well-worn part of him just recalibrated whenever Bakugo entered a space, like a compass finding north.
Bakugo was in civilian clothes, which for him meant a plain black shirt and the kind of scowl that read as approachable to absolutely no one except the people who actually knew him, holding a paper cup of festival lemonade like it had personally wronged him, cutting through the crowd toward the 2-A stall with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile.
"You're not on shift today," Izuku said, delighted despite himself, wiping batter off his hands with a dish towel.
"I'm aware. I'm off." Bakugo surveyed the stall, the banner, the crowd of students, with the flat, assessing look he gave everything, like he was quietly grading it. "Nedzu invited every agency in a ten-block radius to 'observe student community engagement.' I got roped in. Figured I'd rather watch you set something on fire than sit through the assembly hall speeches."
"I haven't set anything on fire."
"Yet." He glanced at the griddle. "You're using too much oil."
"I am not—"
"You are. It's gonna stick." Before Izuku could argue, Bakugo had rounded the table, grabbed an apron off the hook without asking — a spare one, hero-course novelty print, small red paw-print pattern that had absolutely not been designed with a nationally famous pro hero in mind — and tied it on with the brisk efficiency of a man who fully intended to fix a problem whether or not anyone had asked him to.
The entire stall went silent.
"Sensei," Kaida said slowly, phone already emerging from her apron pocket like a magician's card trick, "is Dynamight about to make crepes."
"I am not making crepes," Bakugo said, already reaching for the batter bowl. "I'm supervising the technique."
"That's the same thing, sir."
"It is not the same thing—"
It was, everyone agreed later, exactly the same thing.
What followed was, by unanimous class consensus, the best forty minutes of the entire festival.
Bakugo, once committed, did not do anything by half measures, which meant he approached crepe-folding with the exact grim focus he brought to villain containment, correcting Renji's technique with blunt, unsparing feedback ("You're folding it like you're mad at it. Gentler.") and getting into an actual, extended disagreement with a first-year named Chiyo about whether the strawberry-to-cream ratio was structurally sound.
"It's going to collapse," Bakugo said, watching her assemble one with open skepticism.
"It's not going to collapse, sir, I've made like forty of these—"
"That's not a real number of crepes, that's an exaggeration—"
"Sir, with respect, you've made one."
Bakugo opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked, briefly, genuinely stumped by a sixteen-year-old's logic, which delighted the entire stall so thoroughly that Kaida had to physically sit down on an overturned crate to recover.
"Fine," Bakugo said finally, with the air of a man conceding a much larger point than he wanted to admit. "Make your crepe."
The crepe, notably, did not collapse. Bakugo ate a piece of it without comment, which every single student present understood to be the highest form of praise he was constitutionally capable of giving, and Chiyo looked so thrilled about it that Izuku had to turn away for a second to keep from grinning too obviously at the whole scene.
Somewhere in the background, the "Sensei's Boyfriend Watch" group chat — which Izuku was still not technically supposed to know existed, and absolutely did — had, according to the sheer volume of notification buzzing coming from four different phones simultaneously, reached a fever pitch.
"You're really good with them," Izuku said quietly, during a lull, watching Bakugo argue good-naturedly with two more students about topping proportions.
"They're annoying," Bakugo said, without any real heat behind it, wiping batter off one hand. "Little know-it-alls. All of 'em."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it." A pause, eyes still on the stall, on Renji's increasingly theatrical sales pitches, on Kaida narrating the whole scene into her phone with visible relish. "They remind me of us, a little. Annoying, stubborn, convinced they know everything." Something in his voice went a shade softer. "Guess I've got a soft spot for annoying stubborn idiots who think they know everything. Had one particular case study, growing up."
Izuku bumped his shoulder against him. "Was that supposed to be about me?"
"Figure it out yourself, Sensei."
By early evening, the crowds had thinned, the stall's batter reserves finally exhausted, and the two of them ended up sitting on the low wall behind the courtyard with the last, slightly lopsided crepe between them — Chiyo's structurally dubious masterpiece, saved specially, delivered with great ceremony by Renji "as thanks for quality control services rendered, sir" — the festival lights just starting to flicker on against the dimming sky.
"Today was good," Izuku said, leaning into Bakugo's side, tired in the specific, satisfied way that came from an entire day spent on his feet doing something that actually mattered to him.
"Today was chaos. You had flour in your hair for six hours."
"I noticed. Eventually."
"I didn't tell you because it was funny." Bakugo reached over anyway, now, brushing a last stray streak of it out of his hair with more gentleness than the gesture strictly required. "You're good at this, you know. The teaching thing. Watching you with them all day — they'd walk into traffic for you. All nineteen of them."
"They'd walk into traffic to embarrass me in front of you, specifically," Izuku said, laughing. "There's a group chat. I've seen it. I wasn't supposed to, but I have."
"'Sensei's Boyfriend Watch'?"
Izuku sat up. "you know about it? Oh right you were there when Kaida told me about it.”
"Kaida added me two weeks ago. Said, and I quote, 'for content purposes.'" Bakugo did not look remotely apologetic about this information. "It's a good group chat. Renji's crepe commentary today was A-plus material."
"You've been in my students' group chat for two weeks and didn't tell me—"
"You've been letting them run an entire surveillance operation on our relationship for a year and didn't tell me," Bakugo shot back, entirely unbothered. "We're even."
Izuku opened his mouth to argue, found he genuinely couldn't, and settled instead for leaning back into his shoulder, watching the last of the festival lights flicker on across the courtyard, the distant sound of Renji still hawking nonexistent crepes to a stall that had long since sold out, Kaida's laughter carrying faint over the noise.
"For what it's worth," Bakugo said, quieter now, the courtyard mostly theirs, "I wouldn't mind doing this again next year. The stall. All of it."
"Even the flour?"
"Especially the flour." He pressed a kiss to the top of Izuku's head, unbothered by the fact that half the courtyard could probably still see them if they looked. "Someone's gotta keep an eye on your crepe technique."
"You lost an argument to a student today."
"I let her win. Strategic retreat."
"Sure, Kacchan."
Somewhere behind them, a phone shutter went off — Kaida, unrepentant as ever, already typing furiously into a group chat that now, apparently, included both of them — and neither Izuku nor Bakugo bothered to look over, too settled into the quiet, festival-lit end of an unreasonably good day to care even a little.