Chapter Text
So, that is why, after a long day of training, Katsuki found himself inside his room, frozen, with his face flushed and a strangled noise pushing its way out of his mouth. What had caused this was the contents of the day’s exercises: a bracket style tournament with just Class 1-A, for some good fun and practice. Their teacher, Aizawa, scribbled the bracket onto a piece of paper he dug out of his cloak. He tacked it to the board he rolled outside to the training field with the class, and left it for a few minutes for everyone to see who they would be sparring with that afternoon.
Bakugou immediately started to dread the matches. He was confident enough in his odds of beating Ida, who was a bit too noble to resort to the type of scrappy brawling that Katsuki was used to. Unfortunately for him, he was also confident in Deku’s ability to defeat Yaoyorozu. Which meant the next round would be the two against each other. And then one of them would be out. A past version of himself would have been fired up and taken pleasure in the idea of being able to destroy Deku in a one-to-one fight, but he was different now. Unsure of himself, in the back of mind, although no one could tell.
The results were somewhat predictable, and since the matches were randomly pulled together (Aizawa claimed), many were not equally matched.
Katsuki had no strategy going into the match, his head was too muddled—he was screwed.
He lost, as he expected.
None of the fights that happened that day were serious, and everyone just used them as a way to train and laughed off the results afterward, with how unfair some of the pairings were. When the tournament was done, most of Class 1-A sat on the train field and debriefed with each other, talking out their fights and how they could improve, or just drinking water and joking around. Katsuki slipped away as soon as he could.
⛉ ⛉ ⛉
His vision was blurred and unfocused to the ground.
He could viscerally feel Izuku’s hands on his body. There had been one part of the fight where they had been close enough that Bakugou had given up their normal back-and-forth of long-range attacks in favor of darting in and pushing Deku to the ground. The two had grappled with each other on the sandy earth, Deku scrabbling for a hold to flip Katsuki over, and Katsuki desperately trying to use his weight advantage to overpower the other. The cheers and jeers from their classmates gathered around them fueled the spirit of the event.
The sun glinting off of Deku’s eyes was mesmerizing. Katsuki was distracted for a single moment and his limbs relaxed, and Deku immediately took the opportunity to flick two fingers up at Katsuki, flinging his body with a blast like he was a ragdoll. Katsuki remembered his mouth tasting like a battery, seeing the blindingly bright blue sky—and then his vision went black.
Deku had won, defeating his opponent in both ways that Aizawa had laid out. Bakugou had been incapacitated and thrown outside of the bounds of the ring.
Katsuki couldn't lose the image of Deku’s dusty face, twisted into an expression of pure determination. His jaw had been clenched and the sun had most likely been blinding him and all he would’ve been able to see was Katsuki’s body as a silhouette above him.
Katsuki could feel heat spreading across his face, and he pressed a hand to his cheek. He scowled, turning away from the door and stomping into his room.
He needed to take a cold shower. Well—except he hated cold showers because of how warm his body ran naturally, it felt like being frozen by one of Todoroki’s ice blasts to him. He shivered. Even he wasn't cruel enough to subject himself to that. He grabbed his clean towel off his bed, slipped on his flip flops by the door, and trudged down to the dorm’s communal bathrooms. A moderately room temperature shower would suffice. Maybe a lukewarm one. Maybe he would just take a hot-as-shit shower like he always did, he decided, and sighed.