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Chapter Text

“That was mean, Kacchan! You scared me!”

A four-and-a-half-year-old Midoriya Izuku coughs as he waves away the cloud of smoke from the tiny explosion Katsuki had just set off to startle him.

“Don’t be such a baby, Deku!” the equally young blond counters, already creating several more, tiny bursts of sparks in his palms. “It’s not like I hurt yo-”

That was when the smoke cleared, and what he saw made Katsuki scream with sudden fright. “D-D-Deku! Y-your face! What happened to your face?!” he stammers, pointing a shaking finger at the jagged angles and hard lines that now sprawled across what had been a smooth, rosy baby-face - in every sense of the word - not five seconds earlier.

“Eh?” Confused, Izuku’s tiny hands reach up to rub his cheeks, and he squeals when his fingers touch not the smooth skin he was expecting, but something hard and unyielding that doesn’t even feel like a human face anymore. Just as he’s about to panic, he feels the hard angles underneath his fingers even out, and finds that he can once again pinch his own cheeks with no resistance.

Katsuki is still staring openly when Izuku lowers his hands, and both boys’ eyes go wide when said hands suddenly go completely rigid, fingers becoming sharp as knives and every inch of exposed skin gaining the consistency of hard, unyielding rock. It takes all of five seconds before Izuku cries out with joy, jumping up and down excitedly.

“Kacchan! Kacchan it’s my Quirk! I have a Quirk!”

Izuku had been worried during those months after Katsuki had gotten his Quirk, and he did not. The adults had all praised Katsuki and his Explosion Quirk, telling him that he was destined to be a great Hero one day, and the boy positively thrived under all of that attention. Izuku on the other hand, while happy for his friend, had withdrawn more and more into his shell with every new day that passed without his Quirk manifesting. He'd felt the distance between him and Katsuki steadily widening as the boy got further and further ahead of Izuku.

Katsuki had more friends, the teachers paid more attention to him, and with his Explosion he was already well on his way to reaching their mutual goal of becoming a Hero that would surpass All Might, while Izuku himself remained stagnant.

Ever so slowly, Katsuki’s teasing had begun to edge toward the malicious, becoming something close mocking. The boy would use his Quirk at every available opportunity, no longer just using it to show off or impress Izuku, but to make him feel outright inferior, even going so far as to call him worthless. Just a helpless 'Deku' who couldn't do anything on his own without Katsuki around. At the time, Izuku couldn’t help but dread what the boy would eventually do should their relationship continue to deteriorate in that vein.

Fortunately for him, he would never need to find out, as six months after Katsuki got his Explosion, Izuku had finally gotten his Hardening. While the doctor he and his mother had subsequently visited had been unsure of exactly how he had gotten a Quirk like Hardening, considering neither of his parents’ Quirks were remotely similar to it, Izuku frankly couldn't have given a flying toss at the time.

He had a Quirk! He could be a hero! Katsuki wouldn’t look down on him anymore, and the fact that his Hardening made him practically immune to the other boy’s Explosion was definitely the cherry on top of it all.

In spite of many little episodes of petulance and annoyance on Katsuki’s part over Izuku’s newfound, borderline invincibility during the weeks that followed, the duo nonetheless managed to grow close once more—closer than before, even—and eventually, Katsuki reluctantly acknowledged Izuku as an equal.

As his only equal, in fact.

Izuku may have never gotten to see just how bad Katsuki’s superiority complex could have gotten had he remained Quirkless, but those six months had been a real eye-opener on just how badly people could—and would—walk all over you if you let them.

Ten years had passed since then, and Izuku had very much taken that early life lesson to heart.

“Kacchan, you got a 'B'? On math?” Izuku questioned with false – and exaggerated, borderline gleeful – incredulity as he looked over the freshly graded test he’d just stolen from atop Katsuki’s desk. Katsuki was trying very hard to Explodokill him while he did so, but that was nothing a little Hardening couldn’t help.

“And look! Here I got an 'A'! 'A Plus', even!” he carried on unabashed, smiling even as another explosion engulfed his entire head. The other children in their class were watching the spectacle with an odd mixture of amusement and pants-wetting fear.

From a safe distance.

Out in the hallway.

“Remind me, Kacchan: do you like being in second place?”

“ASSHOOOOOLE!” Katsuki roared, attempting to snatch the paper back with one hand even as he continued trying to commit murder with the other.

“Bakugou, no using your Quirk in class,” the teacher drawled, not even bothering to look up from his newspaper. The reprimand was met with another loud screech as Katsuki gave up on explosions and went for simple strangulation instead, but the teacher didn't so much as bat an eye at this change of events. He was just happy Katsuki had switched to more mundane, less property damage-inducing means of violence.

“WHY. WON’T. YOU. DIE?!” Katsuki demanded as he shook Izuku back and forth by the neck while digging his fingers into the other boy’s windpipe, but it wasn't doing much beyond making him dizzy. It was very hard to strangle someone when they could selective harden the skin of their neck to the consistency of plate armor, after all.

Which Katsuki already knew, quite well in fact. He still tried, if for no other reason than that it made him feel better.

Eventually, once Izuku had finished his gloating and Katsuki had tired himself out, the pair headed home together, walking side by side like two regular teenagers who weren’t in the world’s most dysfunctional friendship. They had just been talking (or in Katsuki’s case: yelling) about UA’s entrance exam, when a nearby manhole cover soundlessly slid away and an amorphous green blob emerged from the sewers below.

“A medium size invisibility cloak!” The Sludge Villain cheerfully exclaimed when he spotted Izuku, and flung his disgusting body at him while the boy had still been stunned by the sudden appearance of an antropomorphic booger, covering him from head to toe in green sludge.

“Don’t worry,” the Villain cheerfully assured Izuku as he forced himself into the boy’s mouth and nostrils and down his throat, ignoring Katsuki’s cries of outrage. “It’ll only hurt for about forty seconds!” The Villain was just settling into his new body when a maw of razor-sharp, pointed teeth suddenly clamped shut like a bear trap and cut him in two.

“Eh? What’s this? A Hardening Quirk?” the Villain questioned when he felt the rest of the teen’s body going rigid. “You’re only making this harder on yourself, boy. You can’t hold your breath forev- wait what are you doing?!”

In spite of the near-invulnerability his amorphous body offered him, the Villain nevertheless felt a shiver go down his nonexistent spine when faced with Katsuki’s manic grin, bloodshot eyes and glowing palms.

“Get the fuck off him!” the teen demanded, and exploded the Villain, Izuku, as well as everything else in the surrounding area with a single, gigantic blast of hellfire.

When All Might eventually arrived on the scene, he was greeted by the sight of smoking bits of green sludge splattered all over the destroyed, burning street, and two teens sitting side by side in the epicenter of the devastation.

Izuku was coughing and retching to get the last bits of liquid Villain out of his esophagus and nose, while Katsuki helpfully patted (slammed) him on the back with the hand that wasn't burnt and bleeding after unleashing a far bigger explosion than he could safely handle.

“Alright, I have to ask,” Izuku grit out hoarsely as All Might tiptoed closer, “did you know that I wanted you to do that, or is blowing me up just your default response to everything?”

All Might physically cringed at the sheer loudness of the screech that came out of the angry blond. And he'd thought Present Mic was bad.

“I just saved your fucking life, you ungrateful bitch! I completely wrecked my hand for your dumb ass!”

That gave the boy pause. “You did?” He spat out one last, suspiciously dark green globule of phlegm, then got up from the ground to inspect Katsuki’s hand. Izuku gasped when he saw for himself the forming blisters and the trail of blood leaking out from where the skin had split.

“I’m sorry, Kacchan. I’ll fix you up when we get home,” he promised, then flashed his signature thousand-watt smile. “Thank you for saving me though! You’re my hero, Kacchan!”

The blond looked to the side with a hint of a blush on his cheeks, unable to bear the brightness. “Whatever, nerd. It’d be pretty fucking lame if you got killed by a giant booger before you even got into UA,” he muttered, resolutely not looking at Izuku. His eyes happened to land on All Might just then, and they quickly widened to the size of dinner plates.

All Might took that as his cue to announce himself.

“Hello there, boys!” he bellowed, and instantly the green-haired boy’s attention snapped to him as well.

“A-A-All Might?!” Izuku stammered, and even Katsuki seemed dumbstruck at the Number One Hero’s sudden appearance.

“It seems I owe you two an apology!” All Might continued. “I was chasing this Villain, but he managed to elude me within the complexity of the sewer system! I am terribly sorry for getting you both involved due to my error!” He promptly bowed at the waist at a perfect 90 degree angle, so that his upper body was parallel to the ground. Izuku immediately went into full fanboy-mode, an endless steam of words pouring from his lips as he tried to reassure All Might there was no harm done, tell him what an honor it was to meet him, and ask for his autograph all at the same time.

Katsuki managed to collect himself while Izuku by contrast proceeded to lose it entirely, and rolled his eyes in a vain attempt to cover up his own case of hero-worship. “Che. It’s fucking fine already. Like we’d let ourselves get killed by a heap of fucking snot,” Katsuki scoffed, kicking at one of the Villain’s scattered body parts. “I could kill a hundred more pricks like him, no problem.”

“Kacchan, you didn’t kill him,” Izuku admonished him as he fished his notebook out of his backpack for All Might to sign. “His body is an amorphous liquid, so he should still be alive... I think.”

Katsuki wanted to argue, but then Izuku started to fiddle with Katsuki’s own backpack and so he complained about that instead.

“Oi, the hell are you doing, Deku?! Don’t fucking touch my stuff!” He tried to shake the other boy off, but Izuku held on, and managed to extract one of Katsuki’s own notebooks with a triumphant cheer.

“Could you sign his, too?” he asked All Might, holding out both notebooks. “He’d beat himself up forever if I got one and he didn’t, but he’s too much of a Tsundere to ask.”

All Might cringed again when Katsuki’s volume exceeded the level of noise that would be considered acceptable among a community of Howler Monkeys, but dutifully signed both notebooks nonetheless.

Katsuki merely fumed. He really did want the autograph, so he couldn't yell at All Might, and Deku had proven himself thoroughly un-explodable, so he was left with no valid targets to direct his anger at...

At least, until his gaze caught on a yellow eyeball in the middle of a steadily growing pile of sludge, that was. Katsuki smiled, and the mound of sludge began to tremble like it had the consistency of jello.

The eyeball looked imploringly at All Might.

“...Please help?”

Chapter Text

The day of the UA entrance exam had come at last, and Izuku was quite literally – to Katsuki’s mounting annoyance – bouncing with excitement. He was so excited in fact, that he actually managed to trip over his own feet at one point, and Katsuki’s quick reflexes were the only reason he hadn’t cracked his skull open on the pavement.

Or, considering his Hardening, left an indent of his face in the ground.

Whatever. Katsuki helped him out anyway, because he was a fucking delightful and caring human being.

“Thank you, Kacchan!”

“Shut the fuck up and watch where you’re going, nerd! It’s just another shitty school, calm your fucking tits already!”

A delightful human being with just a bit of a potty mouth. So he wasn’t perfect; sue him.

By now, all the screaming and profanity had managed to scare the other UA hopefuls into giving the pair a wide berth, but neither of them could say they were really bothered by it. The entirety of their Middle School experience had been much the same, after all.

Katsuki grabbed Izuku firmly by the shoulder and proceeded to drag him along before he could embarrass himself (and by extension Katsuki) any further. “Come on, Deku. Let’s go in so we can get this shit started. I need to kill something.”

In the half-hour that followed, the duo had listened to Present Mic’s speech together, had each been assigned to a different testing area, and Izuku had managed to prevent Katsuki from murdering a student with glasses who had complained about Izuku’s muttering.

All in all, nothing too far outside expectations.

Izuku was just busying himself with some warm-up stretches when his eye landed on one of the other candidates. It was a fairly plain-looking boy, to be honest; he had a mop of straight, chin-length black hair, and while he was fairly tall for their age, he had nothing on the six-armed teenager who towered over everyone else in their group. He had red eyes, which Izuku couldn’t help but compare to Kacchan’s, even if his weren’t nearly as intensely focused as the blond’s. On the contrary: they were kind of watery, and he looked like he was seconds away from crying.

Or throwing up.

Possibly both.

He generally gave off the impression that he’d much rather be anywhere but here, what with the way he kept biting his lip, digging his fingers into his own arms, and occasionally throwing longing glances toward the exit.

Izuku could understand where the boy was coming from. He probably would have reacted much the same, once. A lifetime of dealing with his best friend’s explosive tendencies however, had basically left him numb to all forms of anxiety and stress. Izuku's running theory was that he had already used up his lifetime supply of any such emotions by the time he turned ten.

Plastering on a reassuring smile, Izuku began marching towards the anxious-looking boy with the goal of easing his nerves somewhat, only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

The smile froze on Izuku’s face.

Him again.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Glasses Boy asked him, stern frown in place. “Not only were you being disruptive during the introduction, but now you intend to bother the other participants? Are you trying to raise your own chances by sabotaging others? You should be ashamed of your-”

Izuku rounded on him. Well, his head did. The rest of his body remained angled toward the nervous boy (who was staring wide-eyed at them by now) while only his head whipped around in a rapid ninety-degree turn so he could meet Glasses Boy’s eyes. His neck actually cracked.

Some people winced.

Glasses Boy paled.

Because Izuku was not simply looking at him; oh no, he was using The Look. The same Look that had been cultivated over a lifetime of dealing with Kacchan, and eventually weaponized specifically for use in those situations where the angry blond was being especially insistent on making a nuisance out of himself. The Look had not failed him yet.

“I’m sorry, do you have a problem with me?” Izuku demanded, in that well-practiced tone of his where he remained perfectly polite while also striking fear in the hearts of mortal men with every single syllable that passed his lips. “That’s the second time you’ve singled me out today.”

Glasses Boy opened his mouth to retort, but Izuku powered right on through and didn't give him the chance to speak.

“You were talking about causing a disruption? I’d say people are looking pretty disrupted right about now, actually.” The taller teen looked around to confirm that, yes, everyone was indeed looking at them. He flushed.

“Which, incidentally, they wouldn’t have been if you would have just minded your own business,” Izuku concluded with a smile that appeared perfectly pleasant on a surface level, yet had some onlookers backing away or averting their eyes as some primal self-preservation instinct kicked in. It was a good place to wrap up their argument, as that was when Present Mic’s voice sounded from every nearby speaker, unceremoniously announcing the start of the exam. By the time Iida had managed to recover from his indignation, Izuku was already long gone, running a good ways ahead of the pack with one hand firmly wrapped around the nervous boy’s wrist.

He was more than a little miffed, not just because his intentions had been completely misread, but mostly because the pompous teen’s interruption had cost him the chance to offer the other boy some much-needed encouragement.

So he did the next best thing, instead.

“Come on!” Izuku exclaimed, looking back at the dumbstruck stranger he was dragging along behind him. “The exam’s already started, hurry up!”

The boy blinked in bewilderment for a second or two, but then his mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ as realization struck, and he started running in earnest. “R-right! Thanks!”

Izuku let go of him, and shot him one last smile over his shoulder before splitting off and heading in a different direction. “Good luck! You can do it!”

Even if he had to skip the pep talk, he’d at least managed to give the boy a bit of a head start. And if there was one good thing that had come out of the argument, it was that he and Glasses had provided enough distraction for the boy to momentarily forget about his own nervousness.

Izuku’s smile took on a dangerous edge when the first Three-pointer came into view. Hard lines and jagged edges took over his facial features, and his hands and arms became crude imitations of swords as he activated his Quirk.

Right now however, he had to focus on getting as many points as he could. Kacchan would never forgive him if he failed the exam, after all. And he’d be insufferable for weeks if he scored any higher than Izuku did.

Pointy, shark-like teeth were bared as Izuku’s smile turned into a fierce grin.

Forget about passing.

Izuku was going to win.

In a display of outright mayhem that would have made Katsuki proud, Izuku tore through every single robot in his path, leaving a trail of scrap metal behind everywhere he went. His hardened, sharpened arms sliced through metal plate, his kicks had enough power behind them to crush the robots’ armored heads, and once he even used his teeth to chew through some exposed cabling on a One-pointer, disabling it and earning him the point.

The exam was going better than expected, and Izuku had no doubt that he’d already racked up enough points to pass. Enough to pass, but probably not enough to beat Kacchan’s score. He’d need to find some more unfortunate robots to massacre if he wanted to be assured of his victory, but by now there weren’t all that many left. They were entering the final stage of the exam, as Present Mic’s announcement of ‘Just five more minutes, boys and girls!’ confirmed, and Izuku couldn’t help but feel some apprehension when he realized there was one particular obstacle that hadn’t made an appearance yet.

His apprehension proved not to be unwarranted when two buildings suddenly collapsed with a thunderous noise, and a massive, monstrous silhouette appeared within the resulting dust cloud.

The Zero-pointer.

Izuku knew there was no point in trying to fight it. He doubted he and Kacchan fighting together would be able to take that thing down, let alone by himself, and even if he somehow did manage to beat it, it still wouldn’t net him any points.

Running away it was, then. Maybe he’d get lucky and come across some less lethal robots along the way as he fled from the metal behemoth.

He turned his back on the Zero Pointer, intending to duck into a nearby alleyway, when a pained cry reached his ears.

He instantly stopped moving.

It was her.

Izuku remembered the girl clearly; she was the only person who had voluntarily come within a two-meter radius of a screaming Kacchan when they had been heading towards the school earlier today. She had even waved at them in passing, heedless of the death glares Katsuki was sending her way.

Izuku didn’t hesitate for even a second.

Anyone who was immune to Kacchan’s bitch fits was worth risking your life for.

“It’s you!” the girl exclaimed when Izuku ran up to her, hardening his arms and beginning to chip away at the rubble keeping her trapped. “The one from this morning - you were with the angry boy!”

“It’s Midoriya!” he replied, clearing away some more debris in the process, “Midoriya Izuku!” With a mighty heave, he tried to lift the metal beam that was keeping her leg pinned, but it proved too heavy for him alone. “Nice to – hnrgh - meet you!”

“Uraraka Ochako!” she introduced herself in turn, proving herself just as unflappable in the face of mortal danger as Izuku. “My Quirk lets me cancel gravity on objects I touch! Let me just-!” Wriggling her arm around, she eventually managed to reach the beam, and slapped her hand down against it.

The weight became negligible instantly, and before Izuku had the chance to adjust his strength, the beam was already sailing off toward the stratosphere.

“Good job!” Heedless of the newly created satellite that was now entering orbit, Izuku sank to his knees and allowed her to wrap her arms around his neck. “I’m going to pull you free now, just hang on!”

“Izuku-kun, look out!”

He hadn’t been fast enough. The Zero-pointer was upon them, and if the way it was groaning under its own titanic weight was any indication, that rapidly approaching fist was about to flatten them both into pancakes.

Nevertheless, running wasn’t even an option in Izuku’s mind, in spite of Uraraka yelling at him to do just that and leave her behind. He covered as much of her body as he could with his own, ignoring her protests, then hardened his skin to the maximum density his Quirk allowed and braced for impact.

“It’s Midoriya, right?”

Izuku looked up, coming face to face with the nervous boy from before. To his horror, the boy was standing directly in between Izuku and the incoming fist. “What are you doing here?!” Izuku screamed, only now starting to feel any real panic; he knew he couldn’t protect the boy and Uraraka both. “Get out of here!”

The boy ignored him, flashing a shaky smile instead. “You didn’t hesitate for even a second when you saw she was in trouble. That was really manly, dude!”

Izuku realized the boy was trembling where he stood, and it wasn’t difficult to see why: his arms were utterly wrecked, the skin on his hands torn to shreds and dripping blood onto the pavement, and everything from his wrists to his biceps was basically one big, nasty bruise.

Izuku’s pain tolerance, as Kacchan so aptly put it, was ‘completely batshit insane, seriously what the actual fuck is wrong with you?!’ but even he wouldn’t have been able to just shrug off that kind of punishment. He knew the robots weren’t capable of inflicting injuries like that, so Izuku had to wonder exactly what had caused them, then.

Had the boy done that to himself, perhaps? Some side-effect of his Quirk? If that was the case, it was no wonder he’d been nervous about taking the exam.

“Nah. If I run away now, forgot about being a hero, I wouldn’t even be able to call myself a man!” the boy proclaimed, puffing out his chest. He clenched his fist, and his face drew tight from the pain the movement caused him. “When that thing showed up, all I could think about was getting away from it!” the boy continued, drawing his fist back, as if he was winding up to throw a punch. “But you stayed! You’re way more of a hero than I am!”

“Is this really the time to be giving speeches?!” Izuku screeched, bordering on hysterics as the attack was moments away from connecting.

The boy ignored him completely, and glowing red lines spread out across the surface of his arm as he prepared to strike. “I’ll be sure to catch up to you, though! And I’m gonna start right now!”

Just before the robot could grind them all to paste, the boy unleashed his own attack, bellowing at the top of his lungs:

“SMASH!”

Hurricane-force winds buffeted Izuku’s hardened back in the wake of the boy’s attack, and it was all he could do to keep himself from getting blown away. The earth shook as the robot slowly keeled over, one of its arms completely destroyed, and the massive construct took an entire block down with it as it fell.

When it was over, it didn’t take Izuku long at all to finally free Uraraka, and with some help from her and her Quirk, managed to cradle the crying, trembling teen against his chest and lift him up with minimal jostling of his very much broken arm.

“You know,” Izuku started as the trio walked away from the devastation behind them. “You never told me your name.”

The boy sniffled a couple more times before he managed to get the words out. “Ki- Kirishima. Kirishima Eijirou.”

“Kirishima-kun. I feel obligated to point out that that was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do,” Izuku said, choosing to blatantly ignore the fact that he himself had fully intended to sit there and take the attack if it meant saving Uraraka, and acting like he wasn’t the world’s biggest hypocrite. Uraraka-san’s eyebrows were climbing up into her hairline from incredulity, but she gracefully decided not to call him out on it.

Kirishima grimaced at the admonishment.

“But...”

Hesitantly, the boy looked up from between tear-stained eyelashes.

He was met by a grin that eclipsed even the sun with its brightness, and for a moment, the pain wracking his body simply ceased to exist.

“You were really cool, Kirishima-kun! I think you’re an amazing hero already!”

For an instant, Kirishima’s heart seemed to stop. Then, an overwhelming rush of gratitude, relief and pride surged up inside of him, and Kirishima couldn’t help but respond with a blinding smile of his own, happy tears trailing down his cheeks.

He then promptly passed out, going limp in Izuku’s arms.

It was probably for the best, Izuku thought as Present Mic’s voice rang out across the exam site (“It’s aaaaalllll over!”), and a siren rang to signal the end of the test.

He may not have gotten enough points to beat Kacchan, but Izuku could honestly say it didn’t bother him. He looked down at the boy in his arms; broken arm, bloodied hands, tear-stained face and all.

He’d gotten to meet a pretty amazing person.

Chapter Text

The week following the reveal of their test scores had pretty much passed in one big, happy blur for Izuku.

A happy blur that was filled with indignant screeching from Kacchan, but the screeching just served to remind Izuku of the aforementioned test scores, so that added back up to ‘happy’ in the end.

Needless to say, Izuku had gotten plenty of practice with his Quirk since he continually failed to keep himself from grinning smugly, and Kacchan continually failed at not getting angry and trying to murder him.

The pair had watched the holographic projections of All Might announcing their results together in Izuku’s room. For once in his life, Katsuki had forced himself to be patient and had not opened his UA acceptance letter the exact second he got it, just so he would be able to see Izuku’s reaction in person when he would inevitably get ranked lower than Katsuki.

The look on Katsuki’s face when All Might brought up the concept of ‘Rescue Points’ had been priceless.

Katsuki very quickly wound up regretting his decision to be patient, and vowed right then and there to never make such an obvious and preventable mistake ever again.

In fourth place was Uraraka-san, with 30 Villain Points, and 35 Rescue Points. Kirishima-kun took third – with 12 Villain Points, and 55 Rescue Points for the incredible feat of heroics he pulled while protecting Uraraka and Izuku.

The top two however, now that was the part that had Katsuki grinding his teeth right down to the gums. In second place: Bakugou Katsuki, with a record-breaking 71 Villain Points... and a grand total of zero Rescue Points.

Katsuki’s jaw had yet to unclench ever since hearing that little tidbit. (Not even while he slept – Izuku had been impressed and just a tiny bit terrified to find that out.)

And finally, in first place, with the highest total score ever seen during the Entrance Exam, was Midoriya Izuku, having acquired fifty points in both categories, for a whopping total of one hundred. All Might had personally congratulated Izuku on beating the record that he himself had once set.

Katsuki had come dangerously close to having a coronary.

Still, time positively flew when your best friend was spending every waking moment trying to explode your face off, and before Izuku knew it he and Kacchan were standing in front of the door to classroom 1-A. As soon as they opened that door, they would quite literally be taking their first steps toward becoming professional Heroes.

“Are you ready, Kacchan?”

Katsuki held up one finger, signaling for Izuku to wait. With what appeared to be a truly titanic effort, Katsuki finally allowed the muscles in his jaw to relax, and schooled his face into an expression as close to neutral as it ever got with him. Then, he removed the mouth guard his mother had forced him to wear to prevent further damage to his teeth, and tossed it into a nearby trashcan. “Alright, now I’m ready.”

Izuku smiled brilliantly, and opened the door to the beginning of the rest of their lives.

“THE FUCK YOU SAY TO ME, FOUR-EYES?!”

They hadn’t even made it halfway to their desks before Katsuki and Tenya Iida officially made each other’s acquaintance (Izuku was so glad he could finally stop calling him Glasses Boy), and promptly proceeded to mash each others respective Berserk Buttons with a sledgehammer.

The worst part was, neither of them had been looking to start any trouble on their first day of school and had actually resolved to keep their respective personalities in check. Unfortunately they were natural enemies in just about every respect and Izuku could already feel the massive, cumulative migraine that he would no doubt be suffering from by the end of the semester.

Iida, whose self-preservation instincts had clearly been thrown out at an early age and replaced by a pathological obsession with following the rules (as well as a propensity for exaggerated hand movements) was currently being held back from forcibly wrapping his spare tie around Katsuki’s neck (and possibly choking him with it) by the combined efforts of Uraraka-san and Kirishima-kun.

Izuku, already having a lifetime of experience with Katsuki’s tantrums, calmly lowered himself to the floor, attached himself to Katsuki’s leg like he was an overgrown koala, and turned his entire body to stone.

The old ‘Ball and Chain’-tactic, he called it. It was doubly effective against Kacchan, since the boy insisted on wearing pants that were a minimum of three sizes too big for him and excessive struggling would result in him flashing his All Might undies for all to see.

… Or alternatively, as had happened on one memorable occasion, just plain flashing everyone in the surrounding area.

That had been a very unfortunate day for Katsuki to run out of clean underwear and go commando.

“Good to see you again, Kirishima-kun!” Izuku chirped happily from his spot on the floor, ignoring the shouting match that was happening over his head. “I really like your new hairstyle!”

“Thanks, man!” Kirishima shouted back, trying to make himself heard over the cacophony of explosions and angry engine noises. He actually bobbed up and down, his mane of spiky red hair bouncing along when Iida continued making frantic chopping motions with the arm Kirishima was trying to restrain. “I’m so happy we’re all in the same class!”

“Congrats on getting first place in the exam, Izuku-kun!” Uraraka chimed in, smiling serenely even as she dangled from Iida’s left bicep, the much taller boy apparently not realizing she was there. “That was really impressive!”

“Thanks!” By now, Katsuki had taken to repeatedly bonking Izuku on the head in an attempt to make him let go, but was really only succeeding in hurting his own hand. Izuku could already see the tips of All Might’s bangs peeking out above the waistline of Katsuki’s trousers, so either he’d be coming to his senses soon, or he’d really be giving their terrified classmates something to look at.

“Alright, that’s enough,” a giant, yellow caterpillar suddenly announced. “Everyone quiet down.”

A rather scruffy-looking man emerged from the caterpillar, like a wingless butterfly with a bad case of insomnia. He produced a juice box from somewhere and calmly proceeded to drink it while maintaining eye-contact with Izuku, since they were the only ones at eye-height with each other. Izuku briefly wondered how it was possible for a homeless man to have made it past UA’s advanced security system. Then the man stood upright, letting his sleeping bag (oh, that made so much more sense) fall to the ground.

He was holding a UA gym uniform in his hand. “Change into these and meet me out on the field. We’re going to be starting the school year with a little test.”

Soon enough, both Katsuki and Izuku managed to adapt to UA's frantic pace.

Sure, the classes were a lot more challenging than the infantile crap they’d been forced to put up with back in middle school, and some of their teachers (looking at you, you dry-eyed, insomniac hobo) were completely off their tits insane, but Katsuki could honestly say he felt remarkably at home in this madhouse.

Aizawa’s little test had been his first chance to apply his Quirk in a practical manner, and Katsuki had grasped that opportunity with two sparking hands, intending to show all the other fuckers in class just who was boss. So what if he only got second place in the entrance exam? Deku was a worthy rival, and Katsuki could (grudgingly, after lots of yelling and exploding things) stomach a loss, so long as it was to him. That time however, he'd resolved to go all-out, and prove to every single one of these extras that he was top dog.

He ended up placing third.

The only reason nobody had died was because Deku at least had done worse than him. His Hardening Quirk, while pretty damn strong and useful in a fight, didn’t help him any when it came to doing side-jumps or pitching a baseball, and the only reason he had scraped by was because all of their training sessions over the past few months spent preparing for the entrance exam had left him in peak physical condition.

At least he ended up doing better than Grapehead though… and better than Kirishima, too. Katsuki had feared that the redhead would be expelled on the spot, and he knew Deku would not have taken the loss of his new friend well.

There would be crying, and muttering, and then Katsuki would have to comfort him and it would be awful. Fortunately, he was spared from that terrible fate when Aizawa announced it had all been a ‘logical ruse’ and declared he never planned to expel anyone to begin with.

Katsuki called bullshit. Aizawa had been dead serious with that threat, and the only reason he hadn’t followed through was because Shitty Hair, after a bunch of subpar results, surprised everyone by launching his baseball all the way to the other side of town with a ridiculously overpowered throw.

The boy’s arm had turned splotchy and purple immediately afterward, making Katsuki wonder just what the hell kind of messed up Quirk he had, but it had been enough to impress Aizawa and so he had been allowed to stay.

All Might had dragged the boy aside later that day for a private conversation, and Deku had watched the pair leave while wearing an oddly contemplative expression. Katsuki just knew that that was going to lead to trouble – that expression never boded well. The last time Izuku had looked at someone like that back in middle school, it had ended with the entire student body panicking, several teachers crying, and police cars parked on the school playground.

Katsuki didn't even have to wait all that long to be proven right. Trouble already managed to find them mere days after the Quirk Apprehension Test. The only unexpected part was that it hadn't been caused by Izuku, for once.

“Kacchan!”

Tides of swirling, black mist had enveloped the students soon after they stepped inside the USJ, and pretty much everyone was losing their collective shit amid the sudden chaos. Katsuki instantly went into a state of hyper-alertness, adrenaline coursing through his veins as he felt himself being sucked into the black void, and instinctively began to make his way toward Izuku. After all, as long as they were together, there was nothing they couldn’t handle. When he finally located him in the swirling torrent, Katsuki saw that Izuku had clamped on to Round Face and Four Eyes’ arms to prevent them from being separated. “Kacchan, please!” he cried out, straining against the tide. “Help him!”

Then all three of them sank into the darkness and disappeared, leaving Katsuki behind by himself. Katsuki tried very hard not to pay attention to the rapid pounding against his rib cage that started up once Izuku was taken beyond his reach. ‘Help him?’, Katsuki thought. ‘Help who?’

Then, a flash of bright red between the currents of shadow caught his eye. “Oh, god damn it,” he groaned out, already beginning to run-slash-wade through the inky substance toward Shitty Hair, who was currently being sucked through a portal to god-knows-where, completely alone and understandably terrified.

Katsuki dove forward head-first into the mist, managed to latch onto one of the heavy steel boots of Kirishima’s Hero Costume, and was pulled along for the ride.

They made a rather rough landing on the concrete floor of one of USJ’s many empty buildings and watched the portal close behind them.

“Bakugou?” Kirishima asked hesitantly as they got to their feet. There were still clear traces of his earlier panic on his face, but he at least seemed to have gotten a handle on himself again. “You... you came after me?”

“Deku asked me to,” he grit out, frowning at the absolutely disgusting, grateful look the other boy was giving him. Katsuki delighted in watching that happy expression twist into fear and confusion when he lifted his grenade bracer and pointed it at him.

“Die!”

The explosion would have missed Kirishima by a hair’s breadth even if he hadn’t flinched away, but it hit the villain who had tried sneaking up on them dead in the face and blasted him into the wall.

“Holy crap,” Kirishima muttered weakly, staring at the unconscious, still smoking villain. “Your reaction time is insane,” he commented, wide-eyed. “Thanks.”

Katsuki just grunted noncommittally, already marching on ahead. “Can you even fight with that shitty, arm-wrecking Quirk of yours?”

“Hey!” Kirishima squawked indignantly, “My Quirk isn’t shitty! I just... don’t have a great handle on it yet, is all.” He appeared somewhat uncomfortable, as if he wanted to elaborate, but quickly moved on. “Anyway, yeah, I can fight with it. I can throw a really mean punch, but only five times a day or so with each hand. More than that, and I start breaking bones.”

They came across a locked door, and Katsuki didn’t waste so much as a second before kicking it down. It made a thunderous noise as it hit the floor.

From inside the room they had just entered, a band of around thirty Villains stared at them. They smiled.

Katsuki smiled back.

“Ten punches a day, huh? That’s good.”

Kirishima swallowed thickly. Whether it was because of the Villains, or because of the look on Katsuki’s face, even he couldn’t have said.

“Leaves twenty for me.”

Chapter Text

There was a strange mixture of screaming (from Iida), muttering about the many laws of physics that had just been broken (Izuku), and a gleeful ‘wheee!’ (Uraraka) as the trio dropped out of a hole in the sky.

The Mist Villain’s portal spat them out a few meters above an open clearing somewhere in the USJ’s Forest Zone. The boys came to a rapid, rough landing in an awkward tangle of limbs (this time when he fell, Izuku did in fact leave an indent of his face in the ground) while Uraraka calmly and cheerfully floated down after them, rendered weightless by her own Quirk.

She landed with her feet on Iida’s behind, cutting off his screams of terror with a rather high-pitched yelp as certain sensitive bits were squished against Izuku’s hardened flesh.

“You two alright?” Uraraka asked as she hopped off her makeshift perch. Iida assured her that he was, in fact, just fine (albeit in an oddly tight voice), while Izuku pulled his head out of the ground and shook the dirt out of his hair.

The first thing he noticed were the twenty or so Villains staring at them from behind some bushes.

The second thing he noticed was that they all had guns - or, in one Villain’s case - gun barrels for fingers. “Huh,” he said, and hardened his entire body just in time to avoid becoming Swiss Cheese when said Villains unleashed a hail of bullets at them.

“So, any ideas?” he calmly asked the two people behind him who had taken to using him as a living shield. As he talked, one of the incoming bullets ricocheted off Izuku’s bare chest and managed to take out one of the shooter’s own allies. Noticing this, Uraraka ventured, “We could just stand here and wait for them all to shoot each other?”

“Sorry, but I’m afraid my Quirk isn’t going to hold up that long,” Izuku replied, actually sounding sad about that. “Iida-kun, any chance you can get close enough to knock them out?”

“Regrettably, my Quirk does not allow me to outrun bullets, Midoriya-san!” Iida shot down his suggestion. The much-taller boy had drawn in his shoulders and bent down in an awkward sort of half-crouch to allow Izuku’s body to fully shield his larger form.

“Shame.” Izuku let his gaze wander, and he brightened when he noticed an uprooted tree near the edge of the clearing. “Oh, that might work!” he exclaimed, not noticing how the pair behind him desperately shuffled along to stay out of the hail of bullets when he suddenly began to march.

“Uraraka-san, could you use your Quirk on that tree?” he asked, and she obliged, reaching out from behind her cover (namely Izuku) to swiftly tap her hand against the trunk before withdrawing it again, quick as a cat.

“Thanks!” he exclaimed, grinning cheerfully. He then proceeded to pick up the entire thing by its trunk like it weighed nothing (which it did) and raised it up like a makeshift club. He still had that happy look on his face when he turned to face the mob with his new weapon.

The mob by contrast wasn’t nearly as cheerful.

The beating that followed gave new meaning to the word ‘brutal’, and had Kacchan been present to witness it, doubtless he would have needed to wipe away a proud tear or two. Followed immediately by explosively insisting that “Hell no I wasn’t fucking crying, DIE!”

Standing atop a mound made of the broken bodies of his enemies, Izuku absently let the tree fall down on top of an unfortunate Villain’s foot. He ignored the resulting yelp. “I sure hope Kacchan and Kirishima-kun are alright,” he stated, somehow managing to sound pure and innocent even as he stepped on a crying man’s face while getting down from the pile of incapacitated Villains. “Let’s hurry and get back to the entrance!”

Iida was trying very hard not to make his trembling obvious. Unfortunately for him he was wearing a full suit of metal armor and it rattled rather loudly as he shivered. “R-right! We should go and assist the others!”

Uraraka had stars in her eyes and had to restrain herself from excitedly jumping up and down after witnessing such a spectacular display of violence. She made to follow after Izuku and Iida, but paused when she passed Deku’s tree-club. It was missing most of its bark by now and had several skull-shaped indentations along its length, but still appeared serviceable.

Nodding to herself, she reapplied her Quirk, and brought it along.

Aizawa had been a teacher at UA for many years now, and was therefore very much used to the absurdity that came with being surrounded by a bunch of hormonal teenagers with superpowers.

This, however? This was new.

“Wheee!” Uraraka cheered as she sailed weightlessly through the air, holding a -

Wait, was that a-?

Yes, Aizawa realized, feeling his eye twitch (and not due to Dry Eye for once), that was in fact a fully-grown oak tree being used as a club by a fifteen-year-old girl.

Uraraka undid her Quirk’s effects right as she swung the tree downward, and gravity seemed to be making up for lost time as it wrenched the tree from the air and reduced it to so much splinters and sawdust upon impact. All of the unfortunate Villains near Ground Zero were knocked onto their backside from the force and became covered from head to toe in sharp, pointy fragments of tree like bloody, screaming pincushions.

“Are you alright, Sensei?” Izuku asked, drawing Aizawa’s attention away from the wailing Villains (my eye! I've got a splinter in the eye, dammit!). He was more than a little relieved to find his student unharmed aside from some dirt in his hair and minor scratches all over his bare torso that looked suspiciously like they may have been bullet-inflicted, but even so, no matter how well the teen may have handled himself, he was still a student, and this was not a situation Midoriya should have been in in the first place.

“What are you two doing here?!” Aizawa barked, refusing to let himself be distracted by the sight of Uraraka  in the background now dual-wielding two large fragments of wood and using them to knock Villains’ teeth out. “You should be back at the entrance with Thirteen!”

“Don’t worry!” Izuku reassured him, moving to stand back-to-back with Aizawa and completely ignoring the man’s protests. “We already sent Iida to run back to school and get help!”

“That’s not the point! You’re students! You shouldn’t be-”

When Aizawa’s voice suddenly cut off mid-sentence, Izuku knew something had gone wrong. He knocked two over-eager Villains’ heads together, then absently whipped out his fist and beat in the nose of a third as he whirled around to face Aizawa. He barely even noticed when yet another glory-seeker tried to bash his skull in with an iron pipe, and the metal simply bent and wrapped around his head, instead.

“S-sensei?” Izuku stuttered out, eyes transfixed on the sight of his teacher’s head being ground into the dirt by a massive, hulking creature that had its brain protruding from its skull. There was a disturbing amount of blood running down Aizawa’s face, and he wasn’t moving.

“Good job, Noumu! You already downed Eraserhead!”

If not the content of the sentence, then the childish, gloating way in which it was said instantly managed to draw Izuku’s ire.

“Make sure he doesn’t get a ‘continue’,” the young man went on in that annoying, giddy tone of voice as he approached Izuku. “His Quirk’s a real pain to deal with.”

Izuku let his eyes wander over the lanky newcomer's body. He was dressed in all black except for the red sneakers on his feet, appeared to have an unhealthy obsession with collecting disembodied hands, and had a face that would have made a great ‘before’ picture in a moisturizer commercial.

He also had a huge, shit-eating grin that Izuku would have dearly liked to wipe off his face, permanently.

Oh, and he appeared to be the leader of the currently-invading Villain Alliance.

...He probably should have focused on that, first.

The Villain with the iron pipe, who had been trying to wrench his weapon loose from around Izuku’s head by pulling on it with both hands while pushing against Izuku’s back with one foot, squealed with fright when he saw his boss' red eyes glaring down at him. He accidentally let the pipe slip from between his fingers, tripped over his own feet in his panic, and managed to hit the back of his head when he fell down, thus knocking himself out.

It was kind of impressive, in a way.

“Shut up,” Shigaraki hissed as soon as Izuku opened his mouth to comment on his underling’s performance. He wasn’t grinning anymore. Izuku, by contrast, most definitely was. Clearly the man did not appreciate being made fun of by a teenager with a metal pipe sticking out of his head, however. “You know what? I’m just going to disintegrate you both and forget this ever happened,” Shigaraki decided, and lunged at Izuku with blinding speed.

Izuku just barely managed to duck out of the way of his grasping hand, and saw it pass by his face to wrap around the iron bar instead, which promptly rusted all the way through and broke apart.

Shigaraki didn’t let up, reaching out with his right hand next to try and grab Izuku’s face again, but that was where he miscalculated. Izuku had seen how his Quirk worked now, after all, and he was very good at coming up with counter strategies. He was also very, very pissed off after watching this smug, petty little manchild gloat over nearly killing his teacher.

And so, rather than try and dodge this time, Izuku clamped down on the assailing limb with a grip like a vice, watching those fingers wriggle impotently just a few inches away from his face. Then he hardened his hand, and snapped Shigaraki’s wrist like a twig.

Izuku found he rather enjoyed hearing the man scream.

“You damned brat!” Shigaraki cried, cradling his injured wrist. “You’ll pay for that! Noumu!”

The hulking creature perked up, both of its bulging eyes briefly rolling around in their sockets (along different trajectories, Izuku was somewhat disturbed to see) before locking onto Shigaraki.

“Forget about Eraserhead! This kid’s a fucking griefer! Kill-!”

Izuku smiled.

He reached out, grabbed a fistful of Shigaraki’s shirt, and tugged, bringing the man’s head down to meet his own hardened forehead at just the right angle to break his nose, knock out half of his teeth, and make him bite his own tongue, all at the same time.

Izuku had timed the attack perfectly: the Noumu had still heard Shigaraki’s order to leave Aizawa-Sensei be, but the command to kill Izuku had been cut off halfway through, much like the tip of Shigaraki’s tongue. The exact words uttered by Shigaraki in the wake of Izuku’s retaliation weren’t clear, but they sure sounded like things Kacchan would say, so Izuku was fairly certain the man was currently swearing up a storm.

“-oumu! -y a-n’t y-u do-’n a-y-th-ng?!” Shigaraki demanded furiously, blood and tooth fragments alike pouring from his mouth as he spoke. In response, the Noumu just tilted its head quizzically.

“You’ll have to speak up, I don’t think it can understand you,” Izuku informed him cheerfully, from less than two feet behind him. A rather high-pitched sound emerged from Shigaraki’s throat, and the man quickly whirled around and started backing away from Izuku.

There was an angelic smile on the boy’s face. “You know,” he started to say, as his entire body was slowly being overtaken by jagged spikes of lithified flesh, “you scared a lot of my friends today. You hurt my teacher really badly, too. Oh, and you tried to kill me,” he added as an afterthought. Izuku banged his fists together, causing some sparks to fly off. He drew back his lips and exposed two rows of pearly white teeth shaped like daggers. His green eyes appeared to be glowing with an unholy light.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurt you a little for that.”

Shigaraki whimpered.

 “Deku!”

“Kacchan!”

Never before in his life had Katsuki been so happy to hear that damned, childish nickname. He stormed ahead of Kirishima, ignoring the indignant squawk the boy gave upon being left behind, and made a beeline straight for Izuku. He passed Round Face on the way, who was carrying a weightless and heavily injured Aizawa on her back, but didn’t spare either of them more than a glance to make sure they didn’t require immediate assistance. When he finally reached Izuku, Katsuki spread out both arms to embrace him, only to abruptly freeze up as his brain caught up to his body's actions, leaving him rooted in place with his arms awkwardly up in the air.

Fortunately, Izuku took pity on him and salvaged the aborted attempt at a hug, wrapping his arms firmly around Katsuki’s torso.

Katsuki hesitantly patted him on the back.

“I’m so glad you two are alright,” Izuku murmured into the crook of his neck.

“I... Yeah. Me too, nerd,” Katsuki eventually managed to get out. Had Uraraka not had her arms full of unconscious teacher, she would have thrown them up in the air at the blatant display of social ineptitude. As it was, she had to settle for a much less satisfying eye-roll.

The two separated, and Katsuki finally took notice of several matters he really should have spotted in the first place. “Oi Deku, what the Hell?! You’re covered in blood! Are you-?!”

Izuku looked down at himself, then at Katsuki’s chest, and grimaced. “Oh, right... I forgot about that.” He smiled bashfully at Katsuki. “Sorry, Kacchan, I got your costume dirty.”

“Forget about my fucking costume! We need to get you to a medic!” Katsuki screeched, mind already going into overdrive as he recalled everything he had ever learned about First Aid and simultaneously calculated the fastest route to Recovery Girl’s office.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Izuku cheerfully cut him off. “None of it’s mine.”

Katsuki’s train of thought went right off the rails and crashed with a huge, fiery explosion.

“Um... actually?” Kirishima hesitantly piped up from behind Katsuki, “that does kind of worry me.”

Deciding he really didn’t want to deal with this right now, Katsuki mentally filed the matter away for revisiting at a later date, and focused on the second problem instead. “...Deku? Mind explaining what the Hell that is?”

He pointed at a massive, bird-beaked creature with muscles that could have made a bodybuilder weep with envy and its brain peeking out of its head. It sat on its haunches behind Izuku, panting like a dog, with its long tongue lolling out of its beak.

“Oh, that? That’s Noumu,” Izuku stated, as if that explained everything. He patted the creature on the shoulder. “He’s harmless, now.” As if to confirm his statement, the creature began to purr, leaning into Izuku’s touch.

“...Right,” Katsuki said, in a strangely hollow tone of voice. Rather than filing this event too away for later revisiting, he added it to his big, bulging mental filing cabinet labeled ‘Weird Deku Crap’ where he placed it under lock and key, never to be brought up again.

Some things just weren’t worth losing your sanity over by thinking about them too hard.

“Wait a minute,” Kirishima spoke up again as he inspected something lying on the ground, “why is there a pile of hamburger meat lying on the – oh my god is that a person?!”

‘Don’t think about it,’ Katsuki firmly repeated the mantra inside his head, ‘No matter how much you want to, just DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.’

Just then, the heavy metal doors at the entrance exploded off their hinges, and All Might’s massive silhouette appeared within the resulting dust cloud, backlit by the sunlight streaming in from outside like a furious, avenging angel.

His features were set in a grimace – jaw locked tight, teeth grinding together, and blue eyes burning bright with the promise of violent retribution for what the Villains had done to his students.

“It’s alright now,” All Might’s heavy voice echoed throughout the USJ, striking fear into the hearts of any remaining evildoers while simultaneously lifting the spirits of Class 1-A. “Why, you ask? Because I am-”

“Late again, asshole!”

“Kacchan! Be nice!”

Chapter Text

“Deku, you had to know there was no way they’d let you keep him.”

“But Kacchan, we bonded!”

Katsuki’s eye twitched. It was far from the first time it had happened today, and Katsuki was starting to worry his eye was going to get stuck like this if it went on for much longer.

He, Deku and Shitty Hair had the backseat of the bus all to themselves for the ride back to school. There was still plenty of room left for other people to sit, but aside from Round Face and Four-Eyes, everyone else had moved as far to the front as possible, and Katsuki was fairly certain that the only reason Iida hadn’t joined them was out of some obsessive compulsion to follow optimal seating arrangements.

Their fellow classmates’ apprehension may have had something to do with the way smoke was trailing up from where Bakugou had a death-grip on his seat cushion, but it was far more likely the result of Izuku still being covered in blood - and none of it his.

Izuku sniffled, and Katsuki struggled desperately to understand why Izuku sucking mucus up into his nose gave him the almost irresistible urge to jump on over to the police’s heavily armored paddy wagon and break the Noumu out of it just to make him stop. When Izuku followed it up by turning his big, green, watery puppy-dog eyes on Katsuki as well, and his stomach started doing these weird little flip flops in response, Katsuki seriously considered banging his head against a wall in an attempt to fix whatever the hell was clearly wrong with his brain.

“How in the hell were you even planning to take a seven-foot tall birdbrained monstrosity back to your apartment anyway?!” Katsuki demanded, desperately clamping on to this new train of thought in the naive hope that logic and common sense might be able to save him from his predicament.

In response, Izuku stubbornly crossed his arms over his bare (and bloody) chest and pouted, saying: “I’m sure my mom would be okay with it, as long as I promised to take care of him properly.”

Katsuki desperately wished he could refute that statement. Unfortunately, when he disregarded the many logistical, legal and ethical issues that came with bringing a mindless, potentially human, walking crime against nature into a small, two-bedroom apartment - he had to admit that knowing Midoriya-san, she totally would have been okay with it.

It was time to face facts: Katsuki was out of his depth here, and as much as it pained him to admit, he was going to need help on this one.

He turned to Kirishima, eyes wide and bloodshot enough to scare off any lesser man, but not Shitty Hair, who possessed just the right mixture of recklessness, pure-heartedness and naivete to enable him to spot the plea for help lurking behind Katsuki’s resting murder face.

The boy in question responded by flashing Bakugou a quick thumbs-up and a smile sporting an intensity Katsuki had only ever seen matched by Deku himself, before slinging a companionable arm around Deku’s shoulders and chattering away happily. It didn’t take long at all before Izuku’s stubborn pout almost unwillingly twisted into a smile, Kirishima’s seemingly bottomless well of pure positivity proving too great a force for even Deku to resist.

It was the single most disgusting thing Katsuki had ever seen. He quickly turned to face the window, electing to watch the scenery pass by rather than continue to observe Kirishima firmly beat him in the ‘comforting people’ department. He brutally stomped down the unwarranted emotions that threatened to well up as a result (he was not fucking jealous, alright?! Shut up), just like he refused to look at Round Face’s teasing (and far too knowing) smirk, and instead forced himself to contemplate the really important issues here:

Number one of which being that Fuckhands Mcgee had been swept away from right under their noses by his foggy accomplice while everyone was still distracted by All Might’s arrival on the scene.

Nobody had bothered paying much attention to the leader of the Villain Alliance after Deku was through with him, partly because the man appeared to be thoroughly incapacitated, but mostly because looking directly at him for an extended period of time while he was in… that state… was horribly disturbing and not for the faint of heart.

The Villains had come to USJ with the explicit goal of killing All Might and ending the era of the Symbol of Peace, and worst of all, might have even succeeded if it wasn’t for Izuku’s impromptu decision to remodel Shigaraki’s entire skeletal structure before going all Dog Whisperer on his pet monster.

If they were willing to go that far to kill All Might, then one little setback wasn’t going to make them give up. And next time, simply siccing a pissed off Izuku on them probably wasn't going to be enough to stop them.

By the time that happened, Katsuki would have to be stronger. A lot stronger.

He wasn’t about to lose his most precious person.

Fortunately, the rest of the school week went by without much fanfare, and a sense of relative normalcy soon returned to Class 1-A. Since Izuku had reverted to his usual, sunny disposition after the events at USJ – and showed no immediate signs of planning to commit any more crimes against humanity – by Friday people felt confident enough to approach and engage him in conversation again.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was Kaminari who regained his courage first. The boy had seemed like the type to make friends easily, appearing confident and happy-go-lucky on the surface, but when he joined Izuku and his friends at their table during lunch period, Izuku quickly realized that for all that Kaminari could (and would) talk any of their classmates’ ears off, he wasn’t particularly close to any of them.

It was a real relief then, to see him and Kirishima hitting it off almost right away.

Any nervousness Kaminari might have initially felt sitting down at the same table as the Terrible Two - as their classmates now referred to Izuku and Katsuki when they were out of hearing range – had quickly been dispelled by Kirishima excitedly dragging him into the conversation, joking around good-naturedly and gushing over the flashiness of Kaminari's Quirk.

Izuku of course had quickly latched on to that topic, asking for as many details as he could without seeming (too) rude, and offering suggestions on how Kaminari might improve, before his habit of muttering uncontrollably kicked in again and Uraraka and Kirishima had to explain to a baffled Kaminari that this was a regular occurrence.

Seeing Izuku’s dorky side had been the final push Kaminari needed to fully come out of his shell, and soon enough he was animatedly discussing everything from video games to his favorite bands with Kirishima, playfully flirting with (and brutally being shot down by) Uraraka, and even daringly teasing Kacchan at one point. Izuku was happy to observe that the smile Kaminari wore was already starting to look a lot more genuine.

Kacchan must have liked him too, since he had promoted Kaminari from ‘Dunceface’ to ‘Sparkplug’. Immediately after christening him with said new nickname, Katsuki had dived right back into his ongoing argument with Iida over his ‘blatant disregard for the school dress code’ and tried to bite the other teen’s hand when Iida once again valiantly attempted to force one of his spare ties around Katsuki’s neck.

Izuku thought it was nice to see his friends all getting along so well.

The pair's arguing was uncharacteristically subdued, and noticeably lacking in both explosions and frantic air chopping motions since Izuku had asked them to keep it down upon realizing that all the commotion was making Kaminari anxious.

A polite request and angelic smile had been all the convincing Iida needed.

Kacchan on the other hand, had to be strong-armed into agreeing by Izuku threatening to wrestle him to the floor and proceeding to sit on him for the rest of their lunch period with his Quirk turned up to maximum skin density.

“Young Kirishima?”

A sudden silence fell over their table when the six teenagers noticed All Might’s large shadow looming over them. It was really quite astounding how well an incredibly muscular, seven foot tall man with enough power to destroy the entire building in his pinky alone could pull off the 'shy little schoolgirl' look with how he was sheepishly scratching the back of his head with one hand, while fiddling with his comically small lunchbox with the other.

“Pardon me for interrupting, but might I speak with you for a moment?”

Fortunately for him, Kirishima wasn’t fazed by his momentary awkwardness. “Sure!” he agreed happily, hurrying to gather up his things before excusing himself.

“Those two have been talking to each other in private a lot, haven’t they?” Kaminari mused aloud once the pair had exited the cafeteria. Turning to Uraraka, he asked: “What do you think? They doing some kinda extracurricular training or is this one of those forbidden student-teacher relationship things?”

Iida promptly proceeded to choke on thin air. Katsuki immediately took advantage of this momentary distraction by finally setting Iida's spare tie on fire.

“Well, their Quirks are pretty similar,” Uraraka reasoned, not at all ruffled by either the potential scandal or her friend nearly choking to death in the background. “Maybe All Might is teaching Kirishima-kun how to control his better, so he stops hurting himself with it?”

Kaminari was just about to agree with that assessment, when the sound of Katsuki raising his voice for the first time since Izuku’s ultimatum drew their attention away.

“Deku? Where the hell are you going?”

Only then did the other three realize Izuku had managed to sneak halfway across the cafeteria without any of them noticing. He smiled sheepishly upon being called out. “Oh, just stretching my legs,” he responded airily. “Nothing to worry about. Go back to arguing,” he suggested, making a shooing motion at Katsuki and Iida.

“You’re going after Shitty Hair and All Might, aren’t you?”

“…No?”

Katsuki’s eye twitched again. “Deku, I swear to god if you do something that gets this school shut down before we graduate-!”

“I would never-!”

“Seventh. Grade,” Katsuki ground out before Izuku could even finish his sentence.

 “…To be fair, that wasn’t entirely my fault.”

Uraraka, Iida and Kaminari swiveled their heads back and forth between the two like they were following a tennis match.

“Look, it’ll be fine, I promise!” Izuku insisted, holding his hands up placatingly. “I’ll be back before you know it!” With that, he dashed out of the cafeteria, and Katsuki dropped back down into his seat with a huff.

They all stared at the surly blond. “So…” Kaminari eventually ventured, “On a scale of one to ten, how worried should we be about having to find a new Hero School?”

“…The Sports Festival is coming up, my boy, and this is your chance to show to the world that ‘I am here!” A much more skeletal-looking All Might declared, putting his hands on a nervous yet excited Eijirou’s shoulders.

“The eyes of the entire nation will be on you, so it will the perfect time for you to-!”

“Excuse me!”

Never in his life had All Might re-inflated to his Hero Form quite that rapidly. “Young- *cough* Midoriya!” he stammered out, seeing Izuku standing in the now-open doorway that All Might was fairly certain he’d locked when they entered. He desperately tried to wave away the very conspicuous cloud of steam that had developed during his emergency transformation.

“We were sort of in the middle of something,” All Might began to protest, only to nearly have a heart attack when Izuku smoothly cut in with: “Oh, you don’t have to do that, All Might. I already know what your other form looks like.”

“Um,” Kirishima said, helpfully, as his mentor froze up like a deer in headlights and Izuku’s rapid-fire mumbling only picked up in earnest.

“It wasn’t that hard to make the connection, honestly. I mean, whenever you’re not busy teaching a class, there’s usually a strange man sitting in the teacher’s lounge who’s always wearing the same suit as you, is the same height, and has the exact same hair and eye color,” Izuku glibly went on, heedless of how All Might’s complexion was turning paler with every other word that passed his lips.

“Oh, and since you’re always talking to Kirishima-kun in private and he has a Quirk that’s a lot like yours but that he can’t control very well, I’m kind of assuming he got it from you? Like, I’m not sure if he’s your secret lovechild or if you somehow gave him your Quirk, but- All Might? Are you alright?” Izuku asked innocently, even doing the whole ‘concerned head tilt’, like he wasn’t the reason All Might’s heart rate was currently exceeding one hundred and fifty beats per minute.

All Might opened his mouth. A faint, croaking sound emerged. He closed it again, swallowed heavily, took a deep breath, then gave it another shot. “I think,” he began, in an oddly high tone of voice, “That I need to sit down for a moment.”

All Might remained standing.

“Um,” Kirishima tried again, gaping like a fish caught on dry land.

Very slowly, All Might finally began to move. Then he suddenly moved a whole lot faster when gravity got hold of him, and he keeled over to his left, hitting the ground with such a tremendous thud that it left the floor shaking ominously for several seconds afterward.

The two teens stared at the 255 kilos worth of unconscious Hero now lying on the ground. Then, almost imperceptibly quiet at first, but steadily growing louder, a sound reminiscent of a balloon deflating resounded throughout the room, and steam rose up from All Might’s body as those same 255 kilos almost magically wasted away to a measly 60 right before their eyes.

Izuku turned to Kirishima.

“...Was it something I said?”

Chapter Text

“I must say this is all rather overwhelming, Young Midoriya,” All Might, or Yagi Toshinori as he usually went by in his ‘deflated’ form, admitted. He shakily took a sip from the cup of soothing, herbal tea Kirishima-kun had been kind enough to prepare for him.  “As you are no doubt aware, it would cause quite a stir should it become publicly known that the Symbol of Peace is weakening.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that!” Izuku agreed easily as he helpfully repositioned a carpet so it covered the hole in the floor All Might had made when he fainted. “I wasn’t about to go spreading it around.”

“I am very glad to hear that,” All Might sighed in relief, feeling his heartrate settle down a little. He took another sip of his tea.

“But I do think it would be good for you to confide in Kacchan about all this, Kirishima-kun,” Izuku cheerfully went on, oblivious to the sight of All Might spraying hot tea all over himself and the couch in response.

“Bakugou? Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Kirishima didn’t even look away from Izuku as he grabbed a wad of paper tissues and held them out to a sputtering All Might. “I mean, I think he’s a great guy and all, but we really don’t know each other all that well yet.” He scratched the back of his head regretfully. “It’s too important a secret to just go around telling people.”

“Kacchan could help you though. Back when we were training to get into UA, he’s the one who made all of our exercise schedules.” Izuku didn’t feel the need to disclose that Katsuki had only done so because Izuku’s idea of ‘training’ was to keep working out until he dropped, and Katsuki had been getting tired of finding him unconscious in strange places and having to carry him home.

In hindsight, it was a miracle he’d never been robbed or gotten himself kidnapped.

“I never would have gotten as good at using my Quirk if it wasn’t for him,” Izuku admitted with a fond smile. “Kacchan’s kind of amazing, you know.”

Kirishima already knew that Bakugou was amazing. After all, he’d gotten second place in the entrance exam, fearlessly faced down a horde of Villains at USJ and taken down twice as many as Kirishima himself had, and had managed to remain best friends with Izuku for most of his life without going insane.

“And he actually cares about you quite a bit, Kirishima-kun,” Izuku carried on. Kirishima’s eyes widened in disbelief. “He’s not good at showing it, but he really enjoys spending time with you. I do too, at that.”

Eijirou suddenly took a very keen interest in the way his knees looked, and Izuku graciously decided not to point out that his face had turned the same shade of red as his hair.

“I honestly think the two of you could become great friends. I’d hate to see all this secrecy get in the way of that.” Having said his piece, Izuku got back to his feet and headed for the door. “I’m not asking you to tell him right away, just… keep it in mind, alright?”

Katsuki was restless.

Ever since Deku had followed All Might and Shitty Hair out of the cafeteria, he and Kirishima had suddenly started spending a lot more time together—Alone.

They would start whispering to each other whenever Katsuki was just out of hearing range, then act like there was nothing going on when he approached, and quickly change the subject to something inane in the hopes of distracting him. The more it happened, the harder it became to ignore the guilty looks both of them sent Katsuki’s way when they thought he couldn’t see them.

Katsuki was certain that there was a completely reasonable, rational explanation for this behavior.

Namely that those two fuckasses had decided to hook up behind his back, and were now too damn chickenshit to come clean to him about it.

He’d even tried confronting Deku, and asked him outright what all the cloak-and-dagger, sneaking around bullshit was about, but he’d just looked at him all sad, saying: “Please don’t ask me that, Kacchan. You know I could never lie to you, but… It’s not for me to say,” which was really all but a confession now, wasn’t it?

Katsuki was furious. Or at least, he wanted to be.

…He felt that he should be.

Problem was, getting angry at Deku never worked out in his favor. Barring his own parents, there was nobody on the planet more experienced at dealing with an irate Katsuki than Izuku was, and somehow, trying to take out his frustrations on his best friend always ended up backfiring on him in ways that that would leave Katsuki questioning exactly what kind of ass-backwards logic Izuku had utilized against him to attain said result.

He couldn’t get angry at himself either, since that would A) Be counterproductive, and B) Imply that Katsuki had done something wrong. Like being too much of a goddamn pussy to ask Izuku out before someone else did and—no, he did NOT want to ask Izuku out, that was ridiculous, just like he still wasn’t even a tiny little bit jealous and SHUT UP.

That left him with but one valid target to direct his anger at, Katsuki realized, unaware of the fact that the rapid changes in facial expression caused by his internal turmoil were making him appear particularly unhinged to his classmates, and that most of them had backed far away from his corner of the training room by now.

“Dude, what did that dummy Villain ever do to you?” Kirishima chuckled, haplessly approaching a very explodey Katsuki from behind, like an adorable, clueless puppy running head-first into a death trap. Yaoyoruzu and Mineta desperately tried to catch Kirishima’s attention and warn him of the danger, but the boy clearly mistook their frantic gesturing for a greeting and cheerfully waved back at them, rather than running for the hills like they had intended.

The pair hung their heads in defeat and turned away, unable to bring themselves to watch as the blond demon-child splattered their classmate’s blood all over the walls.

“Ki-ri-shi-ma…” Bakugou growled out lowly from the back of his throat, sounding as if every single syllable was causing him physical pain.

“Damn, it’s completely wrecked!” Kirishima actually sounded impressed by that, instead of fearing for his life and running away screaming, like a normal person. “Don’t they make these to be especially resistant to Quirks? You’re crazy strong, man!” he complimented Katsuki, beaming with happiness.

Another thing Katsuki hated was how much of a fucking chore it was to be angry at Kirishima.

“Why are you here, Hair-For-Brains?” Katsuki demanded, tiny explosions going off in his palms as his desire to remain angry warred with his desire to start bragging.

“I wanted to ask you to spar!” Kirishima exclaimed, grinning widely.

Neither of them paid any attention to Yaoyorozu and Mineta letting out identical, tiny squeaks of horror in the background.

The explosions stopped. Complete silence reigned in the training room as everyone dropped whatever they were doing in order to take one last, good look at their classmate before he became mangled beyond recognition.

They were probably going to have to do a closed-casket funeral.

Slowly, Katsuki turned around to face Kirishima. There were several more screams from the peanut gallery as Katsuki returned Kirishima’s smile with one of his own… if you could even call that thing on his face a smile, at least. “Fine,” Katsuki acquiesced happily, eyeing the boy in front of him like a really big cat would a mouse that was voluntarily walking right into its jaws. “Why don’t I spar with you ‘till you’re a puddle of blood, then?!”

“Ooh, I’ll take you up on that!” Kirishima replied gratefully, underestimating just how literal Katsuki was being. “Midoriya told me about how much you helped him out with his training, so I’m kinda hoping some of your skill might rub off on me, ya know? God knows I need all the help I can get when it comes to controlling my Quirk,” he chuckled self-deprecatingly, scratching the back of his head bashfully.

“…Deku said that?”

“Yeah, man! He’s always saying how great you are! I’m kinda jealous, to be honest,” Kirishima confessed, and the hairs at the back of Katsuki’s neck stood upright when he mentally braced for what Kirishima might say next.

Was this it? Was this where Kirishima finally admitted he and Deku were going out? Had Katsuki—like an absolute idiot—really been stupid enough to let his chance pass by?

“When I see how much you two obviously care about each other, it kinda makes me wish I had someone like that too, you know?” Kirishima admitted softly, his smile from before a lot more subdued now.

Well then. That confirmed something, alright.

Namely that Katsuki really was an absolute idiot.

“Ugh, that was so lame of me!” Kirishima tried to laugh it off when Katsuki didn’t say anything. “Sorry dude, I didn’t mean to get so real all of a sudden. We were gonna spar, right? Bakugou?”

Katsuki opened his mouth. Closed it again. Brought his hands up to do who-even-knows-what, before finally ruffling his own hair in an impressively angry manner and snarling out a curse. Kirishima blinked in bewilderment.

“Fucking… just… Forget about sparring for now!” Katsuki eventually snapped once he got himself back under control, hoping his face wasn’t as red as it felt. He snatched Kirishima’s wrist and forcefully dragged him over to another training dummy—one that hadn’t been reduced to a flaming pile of rubble by an overly paranoid, emotionally constipated idiot.

If his feelings had a face, Katsuki would punch it.

“Show me how you throw a punch with that shitty-ass Quirk of yours first, so I can see where you’re fucking it up!”

Kirishima whooped—actually freaking whooped, fist in the air and everything—when Katsuki inadvertently wound up offering his services as a personal trainer, and instantly submitted to his demands without a second thought.

As Kirishima went ham on the dummy and Katsuki continued barking orders at him, he swore to himself that he would man up and do what he really should have done ages ago. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a pathetic coward, he wouldn’t have gotten stuck baby-sitting this idiot out of guilt for planning to Explodo-kill him.

Katsuki’s eye started twitching again when Kirishima shot a blindingly bright, disgustingly grateful grin his way after he corrected the other boy’s stance.

Ugh. He made someone happy.

Fucking gross.

Everything was fine. Katsuki could do this. After all, what was the worst thing that could happen?

He could permanently ruin the one interpersonal relationship he had that he actually gave a shit about, that’s what.

…On second thought, maybe he couldn’t do this.

“Kacchan? Are you alright?”

“I’m fucking fine!” he reflexively snapped back, then cringed when he realized that it probably wasn’t a very good idea to yell at the person you were trying to confess to. “Fuck. Just… just gimme a minute here,” he muttered gruffly, scratching the back of his neck.

“Okay, Kacchan,” Izuku agreed serenely, and went back to watching the other students pour out of the school building as they went home for the day.

“I… I uh… Look, I just wanted you to know that... Argh fuck, why is this so damn hard?!” he stammered, unable to meet Izuku’s eyes and staring firmly at his shoes, instead. That was the point where he realized that ‘shy, stammering schoolgirl in love’ was not the kind of image that fit his mental picture of the Overkill Hero:‘King of Explodokills’, and so he quickly decided to treat this dilemma in much the same way Katsuki solved all his other problems.

By charging in head-first and blowing up everything that might get in his way.

“aaaaAAARGH FUCK IT!” he snarled, drawing Izuku’s gaze back to him. “Deku, I’m in lov-!“

“Bakugou!”

“Oh hi, Kirishima-kun!” Deku greeted happily, while Katsuki choked on his own tongue and tried to recover from the miniature heart attack he had just sustained.

“Not—not the time, Shitty Hair!” he gasped, clutching at his chest.

“I’m sorry man, but I have to get this out now, before I lose my nerve!” Kirishima stubbornly went on, his expression more intense than Katsuki had ever seen it. “I’ve been psyching myself up all day to tell you!”

Something like dread trickled down Katsuki’s spine. “Tell me what, Shitty Hair?” he asked cautiously, eyeing Kirishima like one would a rabid animal poised to attack. There was no way, right? Kirishima wasn’t about to try confessing his feelings to Katsuki, was he? Not now, of all times?!

“My confession!” Kirishima cried out, painfully earnest, and Katsuki felt the large vein in his head that would one day burst under the pressure and kill him start to throb.

“You have got to be fucking shitting me!”

“I can’t just stay quiet about this anymore! You deserve to know!”

“No I don’t! I don’t deserve to know anything! Now get lost!”

“Kacchan, don’t be mean! You should at least hear him out!”

Katsuki screamed, and just barely managed to reign in the urge to start pulling out his own hair in frustration. The Vein was steadily growing bigger.

“Fine!” he snapped, suddenly wondering what the earliest age was where someone had been prescribed blood pressure medication. “Just get this shit over with!”

He looked expectantly (murderously) at Kirishima, who deflated a little under the intense scrutiny (bloodlust) he was now subjected to.

“I know I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he started, holding his clenched fists at his sides. “But it’s not fair of me to go asking for your help without telling you the truth!”

Here it comes, thought Katsuki, closing his eyes in exasperation. Probably best to let him down gently, in case Karma decided to be a giant bitch, like usual.

“I wasn’t born with my Quirk… I got it from All Might!”

“Look, Shitty Hair, I don’t like you that way, so—wait, what?”

“So, Shitty Hair is like—what? The fucking Chosen One or some shit?” Katsuki asked about thirty minutes later, as he and Izuku waited for their train to arrive.

“Basically, yeah,” Izuku said softly, with a faraway look in his eyes as he stared at the other commuters bustling about the train station.

“That’s some bullshit, right there.”

“It kind of is,” Izuku agreed, “it’s far too much responsibility to heap onto a single person—let alone someone our age.”

Katsuki sighed heavily. “Now I basically have to fucking help him, don’t I?”

“We both will.” There was a sharpness in Izuku’s gaze when Katsuki met his eyes. “You haven’t seen All Might’s True Form yet, but I have. I saw what the burden of being the Symbol of Peace does to a person. I won’t let that happen to Kirishima-kun,” Izuku swore, and Katsuki could have sworn the green of his irises was glowing just then, staring right through him like an X-ray and laying bare all of his secrets.

Katsuki’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, swallowing automatically in response to the sudden dryness in his throat. No matter how many times he saw it, having that intense focus directed at him never failed to give him goosebumps.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, that intensity once more vanished underneath a disarming smile, and Katsuki felt he could breathe again. “So what were you about to tell me earlier, Kacchan?”

It took Katsuki a few seconds to shake himself out of his stupor and remember how to form words. “I… That was… Ah, forget it,” he finally sighed, too exhausted to make a second attempt at confessing how he felt. “It’s not important,” he muttered, letting his head fall back against the plastic ridge at the back of his seat.

“Oh, so you weren’t about to ask me out?” Izuku asked, the very picture of innocence as Katsuki flinched so harshly he almost fell out of his seat.

“Haaah?! Th-the fuck made you think that?!” he sputtered, trying his hardest to make it look as if he was halfway to the floor by choice, instead of due to a Deku-related freak-out. 

“Well, it’s just that if you had, I definitely would have said yes,” Izuku confessed blithely, pretending not to hear the strangled sound that clawed its way out of Katsuki’s throat. “Oh well. Too bad,” he shrugged, getting to his feet and heading toward the train that was now arriving.

“Wait—fuck! Deku, get back here! I didn’t mea—mmf!”

“I know what you meant, Kacchan,” Izuku murmured against his lips, a mischievous glint in his eyes as their noses brushed together. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Katsuki was left staring wide-eyed at Izuku’s retreating back, bringing up his trembling fingers to rub against the corner of his mouth, where Izuku had just kissed him. The spot felt like it was on fire.

The train doors closed right as Izuku got on, and he turned around to cheerfully wave goodbye at Katsuki as the train glided out of the station. Katsuki was physically incapable of doing anything but stare, remaining frozen in place until long after Izuku and the train had already disappeared into the distance. 

“Fuck,” Katsuki said to the empty air after entirely too much time had passed.

“…That was my train.”

Chapter Text

It was a beautiful spring day: the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and Izuku had just finished giving half of his friends a spontaneous heart attack.

“Aww, I’m really happy for you two!” Uraraka crooned, taking the news that he and Katsuki were now in a relationship with rather more grace than certain other members of their group.

Katsuki had long since made peace with the fact that Izuku was liable to randomly blurt it out at some point without prior warning, and so rather than getting angry or embarrassed, he simply laughed when Iida and Eijirou immediately choked on their energy bar and sports drink, respectively.

“Also, Kaminari now owes me two thousand Yen,” Uraraka went on, with an even bigger smile than before, while the blond in question sighed in defeat.

“And I figured it was a pretty safe bet too,” he muttered demurely as he forked over the money to Uraraka. “I was sure it would take Bakugou at least until after the Sports Festival was over to work up the courage to ask Midoriya out.”

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY, YOU FUCKING OFF-BRAND PIKACHU?!”

“You know, I’m honestly not sure which of them deserves the other one more,” Kaminari mused aloud, not even slightly fearing for his life when a serenely smiling, partially lithified Izuku grabbed a practically-foaming-at-the-mouth Katsuki by the back of his sports uniform to prevent him from killing his fellow blond.

“Wait, when did this happen?!” Eijirou cried out in dismay, as he executed a perfect Heimlich maneuver on Iida. “I’ve been with you guys practically all the time these past few weeks, and I had no idea!”

“Oh, we already got together about two weeks ago,” Izuku informed him breezily. “Right after you confessed to Kacchan, Kirishima-kun.” He said this at the exact same moment Kaminari had tried taking a sip from his water bottle, and the boy promptly did a spit-take all over Uraraka’s face.

“You’ve been together all this time? Man, I feel like such a shitty friend for not even noticing!” Eijirou gave Iida a particularly firm squeeze around his midsection, and the boy finally spit out the piece of partially-chewed energy bar that had gotten lodged in his windpipe.

Eijirou put a very grateful-looking Iida back down, and approached Izuku and Katsuki, sheepishly scratching the back of his head. “I’m happy for you guys, really! It’s just…”

“What is it, Kirishima-kun?” Izuku asked seriously, letting go of Katsuki, whose anger had been quelled by the sight of Kaminari desperately clamping onto one of Shouji’s six arms to keep himself from floating off into the stratosphere, even as a vaguely demonic-looking, dripping wet Uraraka stalked closer to him to come finish the job.

“I um… I just… Ah, forget it, it’s embarrassing!” Eijirou chuckled bashfully, wildly waving his hands at the pair.

“Fucking spit it out, Shitty Hair!” Katsuki commanded, grinning gleefully as he watched Kaminari plead for his life with Uraraka.

Eijirou groaned, face quickly going red as he realized his friends weren’t about to let this go. “I… Well, after how much you guys have been helping me out with my Quirk and all, and with us hanging out so often, I kinda… started thinking of you two as like, some sort of older-brother figures?” he admitted, eyes firmly glued to the ground as if he was pleading with it to swallow him up right about now.

“Aww, Kirishima-kun! That’s so nice!” Izuku gushed, and even Katsuki must have been affected at least a little, since the constipated expression on his face implied that he was having a Feeling and was not happy about it.

“…So the two of you going out sorta feels like borderline incest, now,” Eijirou finished, and Katsuki’s Feeling very quickly transformed into a much more familiar and manageable Rage.

“What the actual fuck, Shitty Hair?! That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever-!”

“Kacchan, no!” Izuku cut in urgently, a very serious expression on his face. “This is bad! Our children could have serious illnesses!”

Katsuki’s gaze snapped over to Izuku, something akin to betrayal etched upon his features. “But we’re not-! We can’t even-! Why the hell are you-?!” he sputtered out, brain short-circuiting as it tried to process the many, many, logic errors Izuku’s words had generated, not the least of which being ‘We’re not actually related!’, as well as ‘We’re both guys, we can’t even have kids!’, and perhaps most pressing of all, ‘We’ve only been going out for two weeks, why the hell are you already thinking about having kids?!’”

“You beautiful little troll,” Uraraka sighed fondly when she saw Katsuki’s brain just about leaking out of his ears, right before she continued to climb a petrified Shouji like he was a tree as she made her way up toward Kaminari.

“Do they have to be your brothers?!” said blond asked loudly, even as he looked down at the murderous brunette below him who was getting worryingly close to his position. “Can’t they just be your gay dads, instead?!”

Eijirou looked dumbstruck by the novelty of this suggestion. “Hey, that could work!” he called out happily, wincing when Katsuki rounded on him so forcefully his neck actually cracked.

“THE FUCK IT CAN!” Katsuki cried out, apparently happy to have something much more straightforward than Izuku’s convoluted mess of backwards logic to be angry about.

“Kacchan!” Izuku cut in sternly, frowning at him. “…Don’t swear in front of our son.”

Katsuki’s answering scream could be heard all the way up in the announcer’s box, and Present Mic actually winced when he heard it. “What the hell is wrong with your class?!” he asked Aizawa, his voice echoing throughout the entire stadium as he asked the question that the other participants and audience members alike—both those physically present, as well as those watching the live broadcast from the safety of their homes—had been asking themselves as they watched the group interact with each other.

“Don’t look at me,” Aizawa’s monotone drawl crackled from the stadium speakers. “They were already like that when I got them.”

“Well, let’s wrap up the pre-show entertainment and move on to the main event, ladies and gentlemen!” Present Mic went on, partly wishing that they had put a microphone down there so they could hear what the children were saying, but realizing it was probably for the best that they didn’t know. He could have sworn he heard the angry blond kid ranting about wanting a divorce, and that just made no sense at all.

“Let the Sports Festival, BEGIN!”

Izuku and his friends wasted no time in dashing across the starting line as soon as Present Mic announced the start of the Obstacle Race. There was quite a bit of initial confusion when the participants frantically charged into the narrow tunnel and were immediately squished together like canned sardines.

Katsuki made it through just fine by blasting himself up and over the press of bodies, and Uraraka didn’t find herself all that inconvenienced either, since she simply used her own Quirk to render herself weightless, and happily bounced back and forth between the ceiling and some very confused people’s heads until she too cleared the tunnel, right on Katsuki’s heels. Iida wasn’t far behind them—his speed allowed him to clear the tunnel before the critical mass of people required to fully clog the passageway had arrived, and he too quickly took up position near the head of the pack.

The rest of their little group however, was stuck slogging the distance on foot and at a normal human being's speed, and by the time Izuku arrived on the other side with Kaminari and Eijirou in tow, they were faced with three giant ice sculptures that had at one point been some very threatening Zero-Pointer robots.

“Holy crap, did Todoroki do that?!” Kaminari asked, very much in awe at the sight.

“It’s actually kind of pretty, in a way,” Izuku offered his own perspective on the issue, admiring the way the sun reflected off of the crystalline formations of ice that now adorned the robots.

“Does anyone else hear creaking?” Eijirou asked, rather urgently, just as one of the robots started to tilt forward. “Holy crap! Midoriya, watch out!”

“Hmm?” Izuku wrenched his attention away from the pretty lights and turned back around to face Eijirou. “Did you say something, Kirishima-ku-?”

Izuku never got to finish his sentence, as that was when approximately three and a half tons worth of frozen robot fell down on top of him with a horrible cacophony of crunching metal.

“MIDORIYA!” both boys cried out in horror, and their other friends all whirled around to see what had just occurred behind them. Iida instantly made to run back and help, but was stopped by Katsuki putting a hand on his shoulder and firmly shaking his head. When Iida began to sputter in affront, the blond simply held up three fingers, and calmly began counting down.

Most of the other participants had forgotten about the race entirely after watching a fellow student seemingly get crushed to death, and simply watched, frozen in terror and disbelief, at the pile of frozen scrap metal that covered his body.

Then, there were several odd, clanging noises in quick succession, and right as Katsuki lowered his third finger, a human arm burst out from the topmost metal plate—like a zombie rising from the grave in a B-list Horror movie—and Izuku’s fluffy green head poked out from the pile of scrap metal.

“Goodness, someone could have really gotten hurt by that!”

Katsuki snorted, Izuku’s friends all let out some intensely relieved sighs, and the gathered onlookers collectively questioned whether any of this was actually happening, or if they all found themselves in some sort of bizarre, shared hallucination.

Huffing out a laugh and shaking his head fondly at Izuku’s antics, Katsuki turned around and prepared to catch up to Todoroki, only to freeze when the clanging noises suddenly started up again.

With something very much like terror thrumming through his veins, Katsuki watched as a second person’s arm burst from the wreckage.

“If that hadn’t been me, someone could have died!” a silver-haired boy proclaimed angrily as he tore himself free. “Eh?” The boy in question said when he found himself the subject of everyone’s attention. “I got something on my face, or what?” Then his eyes landed on Izuku.

“Hi!” Izuku greeted cheerfully, looking rather like a broccoli plant with just his head sticking out of the wreckage, and seeming perfectly content with that.

"Dear god there’s two of them,’ Katsuki realized with abject horror. He didn’t even think to shake Iida off of him when he suddenly clamped onto Katsuki’s arm with a strength born of pure desperation, clearly having come to the same conclusion.

“Uh… Hey there,” Tetsutetsu awkwardly returned Izuku's greeting. “You alright? Do you need help getting out?”

“No, I’m good!” Izuku replied, still looking perfectly happy where he was, and making no move to free himself.

Tetsutetsu apparently had no response to that. Somewhat helplessly, he turned to Eijirou, who just so happened to be standing closest to Izuku. “Is… is he really alright? Maybe he’s concussed or something…?”

Katsuki deflated from sheer relief when something easy-to-understand and patently sensible came out of the boy’s mouth, and his doomsday visions of a ruined, empty wasteland where there used to be Japan quickly faded to the back of his mind. The very next thing he did was explosively remove Iida from his person, and then quickly started sprinting at top speed, yelling at a now very distant Todoroki to “Get the fuck back here, Scarface!”

“Kacchan! You can’t call people that!” Izuku admonished, suddenly exploding out of the robot in a shower of metal bits and carelessly bowling over the stunned onlookers obstructing his path as he went to hunt down his insensitive boyfriend.

“What just-? How did he even-?” Tetsutetsu asked nobody in particular as he watched Izuku dash off into the distance.

“Do yourself a favor,” Kaminari drawled tiredly as he too resumed the race, “and try not to think about it.”

Eijirou merely patted a very confused Tetsutetsu on the shoulder, offered him a firm nod, a smile, and a thumbs-up, and then just left him there as he went to catch up to his friends.

“…No, seriously, what just happened?”

Of course, considering the massive, massive lead he had gotten at the very start of the race, it came as no surprise when Todoroki finished first, and the boy stoically tied his headband—worth a staggering, and frankly just plain ridiculous Ten Million Points—around his head.

Katsuki had come in in second place, crossing the finish line less than a minute after Todoroki had, which was actually quite impressive when you considered just how much distance there had been between them at one point.

There was very little that could stand in a motivated Katsuki’s way, after all, and there was very little that could motivate him to run for his life as well as the sight of his own boyfriend chasing after him with a disapproving look on his face.

Half-dead from overexertion, Katsuki shivered at the memory of Izuku jumping straight down into the ravine during the tightrope section of the race—thereby effectively skipping the actual tightrope portion—and climbing back up the cliff face on the other side like a demon clawing its way out of the fiery pits of Hell itself.

Then, apparently determined to make the designers of every obstacle in the race cry, he’d powered straight through the center of the minefield with his Quirk at maximum skin density, not caring that he set off every single mine along the way, and just kept on relentlessly chasing after Katsuki, Terminator-style.

Fortunately for him, Izuku deemed that Katsuki had suffered enough for his rude comment at Todoroki, and simply crouched down and ruffled Katsuki’s hair where he’d collapsed in a panting heap immediately after crossing the finish line.

Uraraka and Iida arrived not too long after, both of them finishing in the top ten, while Eijirou and Kaminari were a bit further behind, but still comfortably ahead of the cutoff point for the next event.

And speaking of the next event…

“How should we team up?” Izuku wondered, looking at the faces of the other five. “All six of us can’t be on the same team, after all.”

“Actually, Midoriya-san,” Iida piped up, raising his hand like he was in class, “Please do not take this the wrong way, but I would rather not be on the same team as you or Bakugou.”

Eijirou and Kaminari gaped at him as if Iida had just announced that he was actually, secretly a girl with 20/20 vision and delinquent tendencies.

“The two of you are among the strongest people in our class. If I am to win this event, I wish to do so under my own power,” Iida explained, eyes gleaming with determination. “So, as your friend and rival, I hereby extend my challenge to you both!” he proclaimed grandly, puffing out his chest.

Izuku eyed him with intense admiration. “That’s so cool of you, Iida-kun!” he gushed happily. “It sounds like a great idea; all of us giving it our all and pushing each other to our limits and beyond! There’s no doubt we’ll grow stronger, and become better heroes because of it!”

Iida was blushing shamelessly, almost moved to the point of tears when Izuku grasped the very essence of what he had intended to do so easily and put it into words better than he himself could have. “Yes! That is exactly what I-!”

“Or we could team up, and pound all the other teams into the dirt!” Izuku went on, in that same cheerful, inspirational tone.

“I’m in!” Uraraka and Katsuki immediately chorused, both of them sporting some very intimidating grins, while Iida actually did burst into tears, but for an entirely different reason from before.

Eijirou and Kaminari, both coming to the realization that there was but a single spot left on the Monster Team, immediately started fighting each other for it.

“We need one more,” Uraraka calmly pointed out, completely disregarding the brawl happening behind her. “Who else would be good to have on our team?”

“Oh, I know!” Izuku piped up, blindly reaching out behind him and clamping his hand around a passing Sero’s arm, who instantly let out a shriek.

“Sero-kun! Would you like to join us?” Izuku asked, smiling encouragingly at the boy.

“Um,” Sero said, quickly breaking out in a cold sweat when he saw Uraraka and Bakugou standing behind Izuku, both of them staring at him with glowing, demonic eyes and slasher smiles. “Actually, I think I’d rather…”

“Glad to hear it!”

Apparently not being given a choice in the matter, Sero found himself getting dragged along by Izuku, and the boy threw a pleading, wide-eyed look at the rest of his classmates, who already seemed to be working their way through the five stages of grief as they watched him get dragged off toward his untimely demise.

‘Help me!’ he mouthed out desperately, only for the rest of the class to suddenly find themselves very busy looking anywhere but at him.

“TRAITORS!”

“Aw man,” Eijirou muttered when he watched them leave, releasing the chokehold he had on Kaminari. “Now what?”

“What do you mean, now what?” Kaminari asked, voice slightly hoarse.

“Now we’re both screwed, that’s what.”

Chapter Text

The stench of fear hung thick in the air as the countdown to the start of the Cavalry Battle begun.

Todoroki Shouto frowned sternly at his opponents from atop his ‘steed’, which consisted of Iida, Ashido, and Tokoyami. He was listing rather noticeably toward his left side, due to Tokoyami being a fair amount shorter than Ashido, but nevertheless managed to appear quite intimidating.

He bore his ten-million-point headband stoically, fully aware of the fact that as the highest-value target, the majority of the other participants were bound to target his team first. He was fully prepared to do whatever it took (short of using his fire) to attain victory, in spite of the odds being decisively stacked against him.

He was therefore a little insulted, but mostly just very confused, when everyone wasn’t looking at his, but at Bakugou’s team, instead.

On the other side of the arena, Izuku was humming happily to himself, apparently not noticing the thirty-something stares of the other participants that were being directed at him and his team. Uraraka and Katsuki on the other hand, most definitely had noticed, and were basking in the attention and adding just a tiny bit of fuel to the fire by either smiling unnervingly at people until they looked away, or cackling maniacally like an evil overlord seated atop his nightmare steed, respectively.

Sero just seemed confused about whether he was safer by being on the crazy people’s side and therefore presumably not one of their targets, or if he was actually in far greater danger than anyone due to the close proximity.

And as for Kirishima’s team…

“Oh holy shit we are so screwed,” Kaminari whimpered, watching Bakugou’s face—which was already sufficiently terrifying in its default state—being broadcast on every single one of the stadium’s massive screens in High Definition, so that the participants were effectively surrounded on all sides by a demonic vision of gigantic, disembodied blond heads that were clearly out for their blood.

“We are so, so screwed.”

“Dude, chill!” Eijirou admonished his teammate, reaching down to give him a gentle whap on the head. “Stop freaking out before we’ve even started! Now, are you sure one of you doesn’t wanna be the rider instead of me?” he asked the two girls on his team, for the third time in the past five minutes. “Not that I think you aren’t strong, but I’ve gotta be heavy, right?”

“I know I’ve said it before, but you really need to stop worrying, Kirishima-san,” Yaoyoruzu gently lectured him, patting his right leg. “Between the three of us, we can hold your weight just fine.”

“Besides, this will be an excellent opportunity to test out my new babies!” Hatsume Mei, the head of their ‘horse’, chimed in. She was covered from head to toe in body armor to the point where she would not have looked out of place in the movie Robocop.

“Well, if you’re sure it’s not a bother…” Eijirou muttered sheepishly, still feeling less than convinced. Could it really be considered manly to sit on your ass while having two girls carry said ass around for you? Eijirou didn’t think so. On the other hand, believing in your teammates and helping them break gender stereotypes probably could be considered manly…

“Ow!” he whined when Yaoyorozu halfheartedly slapped his thigh.

“You’re doing it again, Kirishima-san,” she frowned at him.

“…I’ll try to stop.”

“Be sure that you do.”

“Your fifteen minutes are up!” Midnight’s voice echoed across the pitch. “If you haven’t finished forming your team by now, then too bad!”

“We are so, so, so screwed,” Kaminari repeated yet again, voice only increasing in pitch with every new repetition. Two human hands and one artificial facsimile of one that was mounted on an extendable metal pole swiftly whacked him on the head, cutting off his rant.

“Everybody remembers the plan?” Yaoyoruzu asked, tossing the hand-on-a-stick she’d just Created to the side.

“Yeah!” Eijirou quickly responded, in tune with Kaminari and Hatsume. He just hoped The Plan would actually end up amounting to something when up against his two best friends-slash-training buddies-slash-gay dads.

“Cavalry Battle, START!”

“Alright, here we go!” Eijirou cheered, doing his best to rouse team morale. “Focus on defense first! We just have to be fighting fit for those last few seconds, everything else doesn’t matter!”

“Right!” The rest of his team chorused, all of them smiling back at him encouragingly before putting on their game faces.

They could do this, Eijirou realized. Even if their team had been put together rather hastily and haphazardly, he had three smart, incredibly capable people under him (literally), and as long as Eijirou did his best not to let them down, everything would turn out fine.

With that faint, nascent feeling of hope burgeoning in their chests, the foursome prepared to leap into battle… and promptly froze up in terror when the sounds of half-mad, demonic cackling and explosions suddenly sounded from overhead.

Very slowly, all four of them looked up, and quickly paled at what they saw there. Kaminari actually whimpered.

“…Okay, so maybe we are screwed.”

“Class 1-A’s Bakugou Katsuki has abandoned his horse and taken to the skies! What a shocking turn of events, ladies and gentlemen! I can’t help but question whether this is even allowed, though?!” Present Mic’s voice echoed throughout the stadium.

“He’s still technically attached to his horse with Sero-kun’s tape, so it's fine!” Midnight’s cheerful voice replied.

“Aren’t you being a little too casual with your interpretation of the rules there, miss referee?!”

“Don’t make me come up there, Yamada-kun~!” Midnight singsonged back, followed immediately by the cracking sound of a whip hitting an open palm echoing out through the stadium speakers.

Class 1-B’s Monoma Neito chuckled grandly to himself, sweeping his arm out to gesture at the airborne Katsuki. “How audacious of you, members of Class 1-A! Already resorting to borderline cheating within the first few seconds of the battle!” he proclaimed mockingly. “Is this how the ‘superior’ Hero Class is supposed to act?”

“Monoma-san, you may want to focus your attention on the battle,” his teammate, Shiozaki Ibara, warned politely.

“Haah? What’s the matter, Shiozaki-san? You shouldn’t let that uncouth brute intimidate you like th-!”

“DIEEEE!”

Whatever else Monoma had been about to say was promptly cut off by the massive explosion that knocked him off his horse and sent him crashing face-first into the ground.

“AAAHAHAHA! EAT SHIT, YOU CREEPY-FACED FUCK!” Katsuki cackled madly, already blasting himself back the way he’d come, clutching Monoma’s headband in one hand and growing increasingly fond of how maneuverable Uraraka’s Quirk made him when he was in mid-air.

“Oh my goodness, he killed Monoma-kun!” Kendo Itsuka gasped, watching her fallen team captain’s legs and hindquarters sticking out of the ground. The rest of him was buried firmly beneath the earth.

“It seems we have no other choice,” Shiozaki concluded sadly, her head bowed respectfully. “We shall have to pay our dearly departed Captain the proper respects, and move on without him. I am sure it is what he would have wanted.” She used her Quirk to form a funeral wreath out of thorns, and deposited it around Monoma’s protruding buttocks with a single long, snaking vine, hands clasped in prayer. She decidedly ignored the twitch his lower body made when the thorns stung him in this rather sensitive area.

“You shall be dearly missed, Monoma-kun,” Kendo added, using her own Quirk to enlarge her hands and shovel up a large amount of dirt.

“Wait a minute,” some panicked, muffled utterings emerged from underground. “You do realize I’m not actually dead, rig-MMF!”

Kendo deposited the mound of dirt directly on top of Monoma, and joined Shiozaki in prayer.

“Amen.”

“So wait,” Sero piped up, watching the impromptu funeral scene from afar as he and Uraraka tried to keep up with Izuku’s mad charge forward. “Did you just want me on your team so I could be Bakugou’s human tape dispenser?”

“You could also think of yourself as Kacchan’s handler if you prefer, Sero-kun!” Izuku informed him happily, right as he rammed his rock-hard body straight through another team and scattered its four members in every direction like screaming, humanoid bowling pins.

“And be responsible for that?!” Sero cried out, pointing at the airborne demon-child wreaking havoc all across the arena. “No thanks; I’ll stick with human tape dispenser.”

“Bakugou-kun!” Uraraka called out to their soaring team captain, “Three hundred points, ten o’clock!”

“Got it! DIE, FUCKERS! AAHAHAHA!”

Uraraka sighed contentedly as she watched Bakugou plummet from the sky and explosively divebomb Team Tsuyu-chan. “This is the best day ever,” she proclaimed, as the flames of the cataclysmic fireball that had just engulfed Shoji, Mineta and Tsuyu-chan were reflected in her eyes.

Sero shuddered and prayed for the madness to end soon.

Freshly returned from his looting-and-pillaging-spree, Katsuki plopped back down on his ‘horse’ with a victorious cry. “That’s most of the other team’s headbands!” he said, accepting the ones Izuku had taken from other teams while he himself was airborne, and slung them around his neck. “Let’s finish it off by getting Scarface’s-!”

Izuku’s head abruptly whipped around almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and he stared deep into Katsuki’s soul with glowing, green eyes.

“…Icy-Hot’s headband!” Katsuki quickly corrected himself, only allowing himself to unclench when Izuku’s smile returned and he looked ahead of himself once more.

“Right!” Izuku and Uraraka cheered, while Katsuki and Sero were still too busy shivering in fright to open their mouths.

The foursome changed direction, directly targeting team Todoroki for a final, direct assault. As they approached however, a blur of red hair in the periphery drew Izuku’s notice, and he gasped in sudden realization, his ever-present smile slipping off his face.

“So that’s how it is…” he muttered to himself, drawing Katsuki attention.

“The hell are you muttering about, Deku?” he asked, startling a bit when Izuku looked back at him with that familiar sharpness in his gaze, and a much less exuberant, but no less genuine smile on his face.

“Looks like we’re about to lose, Kacchan,” he said, surprising Sero and Uraraka with how calm and serious his voice sounded. “Are you okay with that?”

“Haah?! The hell are you talking abou-?” He cut himself off with a low hiss when he saw for himself what Izuku meant. “Shitty Hair, you sneaky bitch!” he swore, yet couldn’t help himself from grinning fiercely. “Like Hell I’m fine with that!” he roared, abruptly leaning forward until he and Izuku were practically rubbing cheeks. “If Shitty Hair wants the win, I’m gonna make him work for it, dammit! Who the hell would want a half-assed victory anyway?!”

The pair stared at each other, identical grins on their faces, and leapt into the fray, determined to give it all they had, right to the very end.

“Crap, they’re coming!” Eijirou swore when he noticed Team Bakugou charging in his direction. Quickly glancing at the clock and seeing that there were only forty seconds left, Eijirou realized that there would be no time to make a second attempt—they had to do it now.

“Yaoyorozu, are you almost done?!”

“Five more seconds!” she called back, as a large bundle of thick cloth sprung forth from her abdomen.

“Okay! Kaminari, get ready! Hatsume, GO!”

“Muahahaha!” Hatsume cackled loudly in response, hitting every single button on her armor’s control pad simultaneously. “Go, my babies! Rocket OVERBOOST!”

“CraaaaaaaAAAAP!” Kaminari yelled, only getting more and more frantic when the hoverboots he and Yaoyorozu were wearing suddenly let loose massive jets of blue flame directly behind them, sending the entire team literally rocketing towards Team Todoroki at absurd speed.

“It’s done!” Yaoyorozu called out, voice slightly wobbly from the instinctive fear of crashing while traveling at over one hundred kilometers per hour without any sort of safety equipment whatsoever. Nevertheless, she dutifully cast out the sheet of insulating fabric she'd just Created like it was a net, and Eijirou quickly helped her pull it properly over himself and Hatsume as well.

“Kami, NOW!”

“If I don’t survive this, I swear to god I’m coming back to haunt you all!” he complained, even as arcs of electricity began to spark between his body and the ground. “Indiscriminate Discharge!”

True to the name of the technique, it wasn’t just Team Todoroki, but everyone within the immediate area who got a face-full of Kaminari’s electricity.

Eijirou honestly felt bad for the teams who had gotten caught in the crossfire—they had already lost both their headbands and—if the looks on their faces were anything to go by—their collective will to live after their individual encounters with Team Bakugou, and most of them didn’t even bother getting back up after the electricity made their legs give out. If anything, they seemed happy to finally have a decent excuse to lie down on the ground and curl up into the fetal position.

The only one who stubbornly refused to go down was Iida.

Clenching his teeth from the effort it took, he singlehandedly held Todoroki up on shaking legs, even as Ashido and Tokoyami beside him scrambled back to their feet and hurried to reform their horse.

“You’re looking really manly right now, Iida,” Eijirou couldn’t help but compliment him, mouth unwillingly stretching into a grin. He felt so damn lucky and honored to be able to count someone like that among his friends. “But even so…”

“I’M GONNA WIN!” he roared, just as they finally made it within melee range of Todoroki’s team, and Hatsume hurriedly planted her armored boots on the ground to slow them down, digging deep trenches into the ground as they skidded to a halt right in front of Todoroki and his team.

Eijirou reached out for Todoroki’s headband, which his classmates had managed to successfully defend throughout the entire duration of the battle so far, and got a full dose of Todoroki’s laser-focused, hyper-intense gaze directed at him.

“Don’t underestimate me…” the boy warned with a frown, his internal temperature having lowered so rapidly his breath had become visible.

“Crap!” Eijirou swore, aborting his attack just in time to prevent his arm from becoming trapped within the wall of ice that had sprung up between himself and Todoroki. A quick glance to the side revealed that they had less than ten seconds to go at this point.

His teammates were counting on him—he couldn’t fail; not here!

“Don’t underestimate me, either!” he roared back, clenching his fist and feeling the tremendous power of One For All answering his call, rushing through his arm like electricity. All the muscles in his right arm bulged up to easily twice their normal size, the sheer power almost overwhelming him. As long as he kept it below ten percent though, it wouldn’t completely wreck his arm—he could do this!

“SMASH!”

With a single punch, Eijirou drove his fist straight through the ten-centimeter-thick ice layer. He couldn’t see Todoroki’s face clearly through the barrier, but he could imagine the shock and anger well enough when he felt his fingers snag on the Ten Million Points-headband.

“Hatsume!”

“Reverse thrusters, full power!”

Suddenly getting flung in the opposite direction from before at an equally absurd speed gave him a strong sensation of vertigo, but that didn’t even compare to the rush of euphoria that thrummed through his veins when he saw the long series of numbers printed on the headband he now held.

“Don’t get cocky, Kirishima!”

That euphoric feeling quickly changed to blind panic when Eijirou spotted Bakugou coming straight at him and his team, arms stretched out behind him as he launched himself at them with consecutive explosions.

“It’s not over yet!”

“Aw, crap!” he repeated, quickly winding up to knock Bakugou to the side with a Quirk-enhanced backhand with his other arm. He whipped the arm out as soon as Bakugou was within range and created a huge gust of wind with his Quirk’s overwhelming force, yet felt his stomach drop to his knees when Bakugou simply blasted himself up and over it, and triumphantly ripped the headband out of Eijirou’s hand.

“No!” he yelled out, reaching out to grab it back before-!

“Time’s up!” Midnight’s voice rang out, accompanied by the sound of the match-ending buzzer.

“…Dammit!” Eijirou ground out under his breath, unable to prevent his voice from cracking. He had failed. And it wasn’t just himself he had failed either, he had let his entire team and All Might down as well. Gritting his teeth, he tried to fight back against the burning sensation in his eyes, hating it when tears threatened to well up nonetheless.

“Kirishima-san…”

“I’m sorry!” he choked out, finding himself unable to meet Yaoyorozu’s gaze. “I’m so, so sorry I let you down…”

“Um, Kacchan? I don’t know how to tell you this, but ah…”

Despite himself, Eijirou couldn’t help but look up at Midoriya, seeing him smiling bashfully at Bakugou… while holding the severed end of Sero’s tape in one hand. Right next to Eijirou, Yaoyorozu made a few very blatant snipping motions with the pair of scissors she had Created approximately five seconds ago, smiling warmly at him.

“Wait… does that mean…?”

“Team Bakugou!” Midnight’s Voice rang out again, “You acquired the headband after your rider had already been separated from the horse! Therefore, the ten million points go to Team Kirishima!”

Bakugou, who had been sitting on the ground while repeatedly looking back and forth between the Ten Million Points headband and the now-severed tape wrapped around his midsection in disbelief, went disturbingly still upon hearing Midnight’s announcement, and Eijirou couldn’t help but fear that he would actually, literally explode when his entire face slowly reddened to the same shade as Eijirou’s own hair.

“The winners of the Cavalry Battle are Team Kirishima!” Midnight called out, having to raise her voice (even with the loudspeakers) to be audible over the sound of Bakugou swearing up a storm and presumably causing a two-minute long ‘bleep’ to sound from every TV in the country as his profanity was censored from the livestream.

“We did it…” Eijirou muttered disbelievingly to himself as he stared at his own face on the stadium screens, right next to a giant, golden number ‘1’. Immediately below him in the rankings were the teams Bakugou, Todoroki, and Tetsutetsu. They also just so happened to be the only four teams that had any points left at all. “We actually did it!”

He jumped down from his ‘horse’, screaming his throat raw from happiness and excitement as he gathered all three of his teammates up in his arms, channeling just the slightest amount of power from One For All to lift them all up from the ground simultaneously.

It would only be much later that he would consciously realize that that had been his first time successfully controlling his Quirk’s output.

“Remember how I called you crazy and thought you were a coward when you suggested I use my Quirk to bury us underground for the entire duration of the Cavalry battle?” Honenuki Juzo calmly asked his team captain as the foursome re-emerged from their subterranean refuge.

“I do,” Tetsutetsu answered, looking up at the scoreboard and seeing his name in fourth place.

Juzo glanced around the arena with hollow eyes, seeing Eijirou singlehandedly lift his entire team (Hatsume’s body armor included) off the ground before happily whirling them around in circles, Iida and Ashido thanking Tokoyami for snatching Eijirou’s original headband at the last second with Dark Shadow, and the countless smoking bodies and broken spirits that littered the battlefield in the wake of Team Bakugou’s rampage.

“…Remind me to never doubt you again.”

Chapter Text

“I like this kid,” Shigaraki decided, as the non-stop *bleeeeeep* that had been sounding from the TV passed the two-minute mark, and Katsuki still showed no signs of slowing down. After his team had been awarded second place, Katsuki had started swearing until he was literally blue in the face, and Shigaraki was honestly impressed by how he was still managing to come up with never-before heard (or lipread) permutations of the word ‘fuck’.

“Indeed,” Kurogiri agreed, “the boy’s behavior is most unfitting of a Hero. His rudeness and excessive use of violence during the Cavalry Battle prove that he would be ideal as a new recruit.”

“That gravity girl isn’t bad either. The redhead, though…” Shigaraki growled, as Eijirou’s face was displayed on-screen, next to a golden number one. “He pisses me off!” Shigaraki screeched. “His Quirk reminds me of All Might’s! I wanna kill him-OW!”

“Do not become too excited, Shigaraki Toumura,” Kurogiri cautioned. “Your wounds are still healing. And you have rather a lot of them…”

“Oh, really?!” Shigaraki snarked, letting his eyes wander over the expanse of his body, in lieu of making an actual hand movement. He had to do this because his… well, everything, really, was covered in plaster, and he currently looked rather like a cross between an Egyptian mummy and the Michelin Man. “I hadn’t noticed!”

“…Sarcasm is unbecoming of you,” Kurogiri informed him primly, and had Shigaraki been capable of using his arms, he would have made a valiant attempt at disintegrating Kurogiri’s spiffy little bartender outfit.

“But he’s not the one I hate most,” Shigaraki went on, grinding his teeth at what he saw on the screen. “Before I do anything else, I’m gonna murder that fucking griefer!” he spat, only to regret it when one of his many stitches subsequently popped open.

“You have only yourself to blame for what happened,” Kurogiri admonished, somehow managing to twist his foggy yellow eyes into a shape that indicated he was frowning. “Had you not been so careless with the Noumu, that boy would never have—!”

“AAAAAH!” Several more stitches gave out when Toumura desperately tried, and failed, to crawl away from the TV.

“Shigaraki Toumura! Whatever is the matter?!” Kurogiri cried out, whirling around to face him.

“HE LOOKED AT ME!” Shigaraki screeched, pointing a shaking finger at the TV.  On the screen, all that was visible was a serenely smiling Izuku, who now appeared to be doing his best to mollify Katsuki with a shoulder pat. Not mollified in the slightest, Katsuki snapped at his hand, and very quickly regretted it when he nearly shattered his teeth on Izuku’s rock-hard skin.

“…Noooo,” Kurogiri explained, speaking very slowly and clearly, “that is a TV. That means we can see him, but he cannot see us.”

“I KNOW HOW A TV WORKS, KUROGIRI!” Shigaraki snapped. “I… I guess I must have imagined it,” he murmured. Kurogiri hummed dubiously, arching one smoky eye at him. “Oh, shut up.”

It remained quiet for a few more minutes as the pair went back to watching the broadcast. The more time passed however, the more Shigaraki started to squirm in place, until eventually…

“Kurogiri… I have to pee.”

Kurogiri sighed. “Again?”

“Yes, again, you foggy little prick! I’ve been gulping down liquids all day, since I can’t eat solid food without any freaking teeth! What the hell did you expect?!”

“…Very well, then.” Kurogiri did not groan. He was far too dignified to do so, after all. He certainly didn’t shudder in disgust either, when he concentrated on the, ah… coordinates, where he would be activating his Quirk.

“Hurry uuuup,” Shigaraki whined, and Kurogiri sighed again. He was a faithful servant. This too, was but another of the tasks expected of him, Kurogiri told himself, no matter how unpleasant.

Resolutely ignoring the drawn-out sigh of relief Shigaraki let out once he opened the portal, Kurogiri closed his eyes, and thought of Sensei.

“Your name is Tetsutetsu… Tetsu… Tetsu?”

Izuku directed his question at the silver-haired boy who had ended up being his opponent for his first match in the Sport Festival’s Battle Tournament.

“Yeah, man! Nice to meet you!” Tetsutetsu answered enthusiastically. “Let’s both do our best!” He flashed him a thumbs-up and a grin, and Izuku couldn’t help but smile back at him. He seemed nice.

Then, without allowing his smile to diminish in any way, Izuku said: “I’m really very sorry, but I don't think I can call you that. I’m just going to call you ‘Shitetsu’ instead,” he decided.

To his credit, Tetsutetsu managed to take the impromptu name-change in stride. “’Shitetsu’? Oh, like ‘Death Metal’? That’s cool!” he responded, putting his hands on his hips and puffing out his chest. “I like it!”

“…Sure, ‘Death Metal’, that’s what I meant,” agreed Izuku, who had totally just meant to call him ‘Tetsu-Four’ for simplicity's sake. “Let’s both give it our all, Shitetsu-kun!”

“You know, I’ve gotta say,” Shitetsu started, “you and your buddies kinda spooked me during the first two rounds, but meeting you face-to-face like this? You seem like a pretty swell guy, Midoriya!” Slamming two metal fists together in a shower of sparks, Shitetsu directed a hearty grin Izuku’s way.  “Alright, I’ve decided! No matter who wins, there’ll be no hard feelings! So come at me with all you’ve got!”

Izuku tilted his head as he considered this. “…Okay!” he agreed happily, and promptly crushed the arena floor underfoot when he launched himself at Shitetsu like a green-eyed facehugger covered in stony skin.

The fight, in its entirety, had lasted exactly twenty-two seconds. Waiting for Cementoss to repair the arena in preparation for the next match however, looked like it was going to take quite a bit longer than that.

Eijirou was directing his sternest frown at Izuku (which couldn’t have been less threatening if it had come from an actual puppy) and Izuku appeared bashful and mildly embarrassed because of it. “I overdid it a bit, didn’t I?” he asked, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck. “Oops?”

“Dude, Shitetsu has no memory of that entire fight, you hit him so hard! I mean, it was just twenty-two seconds, but still!” Eijirou insisted, and Kaminari put a calming hand on his shoulder, saying: “It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t remember, honestly. He didn’t come out of that looking too good.”

“It was a great fight, Deku-kun!” Uraraka chimed in. “I think I actually heard the metal on his face crack when you kicked him!” she remarked cheerfully. “Will you teach me that move sometime?”

“It did crack, and sure!” Izuku replied, not paying any attention to how Iida was putting an extra seat in between Izuku, Uraraka and himself.

“Kirishima-kun,” Iida spoke up from what he saw as a reasonably safe distance, “I believe it is time we went down to our own waiting rooms. The next match will be starting momentarily, and it will be our turn to fight immediately afterwards.”

“Oh right, Sero’s up isn’t he?” Eijirou asked, turning around to peer down at the arena. “Think he’s got any chance of beating Todoroki?”

Katsuki, who had been uncharacteristically quiet up until then, threw his head back and cackled.

“I’m sure Sero-kun will give it his all!” Izuku cheerfully piped up from next to him. “He’s really fast and accurate with his Quirk, and it’s incredibly versatile, too!”

“Really?” Eijirou asked, eyebrows raised. “You actually think he’s got a shot at winning?”

Izuku smiled even wider, regarded Eijirou with an expression so full of warmth it could have made even Aizawa crack a smile, and said: “None whatsoever.”

Hanta was about five seconds away from hyperventilating. As if it wasn’t enough that he had to fight Todoroki of all people in the very first round of the tournament, with pretty much the entirety of Japan watching, he had to fight Todoroki while he was pissed.

Or at least, Hanta thought he was pissed. Todoroki hadn’t marched onto Cementoss’ platform wearing his usual look of cool indifference, but with a steely gaze in his heterochromatic eyes, clenched fists, and a rigid posture, instead.

Hanta wasn’t sure what could have happened in the short break between the Cavalry Battle and the Battle Tournament to bring about such a shift in demeanor, but he dearly wished that whatever it was hadn’t happened now.

“Battle tournament: first round, second match: Sero Hanta versus Todoroki Shouto!” Midnight’s voice rang out across the stadium, and Hanta swallowed thickly.

Like hell he was just going to roll over and give in. He had just survived being on a team with the three craziest and most dangerous people in his entire class! Even if he didn’t win, Hanta was going to show the crowd what he was made of, dammit!

“Begin!”

He could do this, Hanta told himself. He tightened his fists as he prepared to launch his tape. He could-!

“Sero-kun, don’t mind!” Izuku and Uraraka cheered, leading the rest of the crowd as they collectively chanted the phrase over and over again. Katsuki had fallen out of his seat from laughing too hard.

In the arena below, Sero, who was covered from his toes up to his neck in glacier, shivered uncontrollably as a regretful-looking Todoroki thawed him out. Sero would have been crying, if only he hadn’t been worried that the intense cold would freeze even his tears solid.

“Oh man, talk about overkill,” Kaminari uttered, in awe of the massive formation of ice that now loomed over half the stadium. “You do realize that any of us could end up fighting that in the coming rounds, right? How is this not freaking you guys out?!" he asked Izuku, Katsuki and Uraraka, all three of whom were looking varying shades of apathetic toward the display of overwhelming force.

Izuku stopped chanting long enough for him to tilt his head questioningly at Kaminari. “Why would it be freaking us out?” he asked, seeming genuinely confused.

Kaminari stared at him with wide eyes. “…God, that’s terrifying,” he muttered, and Izuku shot him a placating smile before he went back to chanting.

Before he could really get back into it however, Katsuki pulled himself back together and softly elbowed Izuku in the side to draw his attention. “Deku…” he started, and Uraraka and Kaminari couldn’t help but listen in as well when they registered the serious tone Katsuki had adopted. “There's something I've gotta tell you.”

“What is it, Kacchan?”

Katsuki glared at the ground while he thought about how to best deliver his news, and eventually directed a warning scowl at Izuku. “Promise me you’re not gonna freak the hell out, first.”

Izuku frowned. “When have I ever-?” Katsuki opened his mouth to reply, only for Izuku to cut him off with: “And don’t say ‘seventh grade’; you don’t get to keep using that.”

“Hell yes I fucking do!” Katsuki snapped back, voice quickly rising above the chorus of ‘don’t mind!’ that was still resounding throughout the stadium. Sero had been defrosted down to waist-level by now, and finally deemed it safe enough to start crying. “That shit doesn’t expire, Deku!”

“You always make such a big deal out of it!” Izuku protested, “it wasn’t even that bad!”

“You set a teacher on fire!”

“His Quirk made him flame-retardant!" an indignant Izuku shot back. "Besides, that part was an accident!"

“HOW THE HELL DOES THAT MAKE IT OKAY?!” Katsuki screeched back at him. Izuku crossed his arms and pouted. Uraraka and Kaminari looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to enjoying the spectacle.

“Fine,” Izuku mumbled contrarily. “I promise. Now what did you want to tell me?”

Katsuki huffed out a breath. He considered Izuku for a moment longer, decided he looked calm and sincere enough about honoring his promise, and launched into an abbreviated retelling of the conversation between Eijirou and Todoroki he'd happened to overhear earlier.

The further Katsuki got into his account of what he had heard about Endeavor, the more Izuku’s perpetually cheerful expression smoothed out into something blank and carefully neutral. Other than a barely-perceptible twitch of his fingers when the words ‘Quirk Marriage’ and ‘boiling water’ were dropped, Izuku didn’t give any reaction to Katsuki’s tale whatsoever.

It was only when Katsuki was finished that he plastered his usual happy expression back on like nothing had happened, but there was nothing reassuring about it. If anything, the opposite was true, and both Kaminari and Uraraka looked to Katsuki with worry in their eyes when Izuku suddenly stood up.

“Where do you think you’re going, Deku?” he demanded, hand snapping out to clamp shut around Izuku’s wrist.

“Oh, just going for a walk,” he answered in a deceptively light tone. “There’s lots of pro heroes wandering around the stadium, after all. I think I’ll go ask some of them for autographs!”

“Are we going to need alibis for this?” Kaminari whispered to Uraraka, who thought about it for a moment, then nodded decisively.

“Deku…” Katsuki growled out in warning, and Izuku’s smile tightened noticeably.

“Don’t worry, Kacchan! I’m not going to do anything bad!” he assured. His reassurance sort of fell flat however, when he followed it up with: “There’s far too many witnesses around, after all.”

“Deku, stop.” Katsuki’s words came out sounding like an order, and the surprising part was that Izuku actually listened. He no longer tried to pull free of Katsuki’s grip, and his smile slid off his face all at once.

“Are you telling me to let this go, Kacchan?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper and laced with something that could have either been disappointment, barely-restrained anger, or bitter resignation.

“Hell no I’m not telling you to let that flaming bag of dicks go!” Katsuki barked, surprising Uraraka and Kaminari. “I’m telling you to let me handle it, since you’re too goddamn emotional to think straight right now, and you’re going to do something fucking stupid!”

At that, Izuku’s eyes lit up again. “...You have a plan?”

“The hell do you take me for?” Katsuki questioned, with a wolfish grin spreading across his features. A wolfish grin that was soon mirrored by Izuku and, if possible, looked even more disturbing on his face what with all the pointy, shark-like teeth that were bared when he pulled his lips back.

“Alright,” Izuku chuckled, dropping back down into his seat to lean against Katsuki’s side. “I’ll leave it to you then, Kacchan.” Katsuki slung one arm over Izuku’s shoulders, and together the pair sat back to watch the upcoming fight, just as Iida and Eijirou walked up onto the raised platform together.

“Soooo,” Kaminari began, leaning in closer to Uraraka to whisper into her ear. “Why is that, even though I feel like we just dodged a bullet, I’m actually more terrified now than I was earlier?”

Chapter Text

“You seem distracted, Kirishima-kun.”

Iida’s words brought Eijirou back into the present, and it was as if an invisible bubble around him had popped when the roar of the crowd suddenly returned in full force. Eijirou scratched the back of his head and shot Iida a bashful grin. “I’m sorry, man! I kinda got lost in my own head for a second there.”

“You have been acting out of sorts ever since the break between the second and third events, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Iida commented, a mild frown marring his brow. “If something is bothering you, I do hope that you know I am always willing to listen, whatever it may be.”

Even when they were about to fight each other in a televised event that was being broadcast all over Japan—not to mention would be instrumental in their making an impression on Hero agencies for their internships—it seemed that Iida still put his friends’ well-being first. The rush of warmth and fondness toward Iida that welled up in Eijirou’s chest in that moment shot right up to his cheeks, and he didn’t even bother to hide his blush as he grinned toothily at Iida. “Come on, man!” he pretended to admonish him. “We’re supposed to be beating the crap out of each other here! You can’t say stuff like that—you’ll make me feel bad!”

Iida drew in a sharp breath, and stood up ramrod-straight. “I had not considered that!” he lamented, and promptly doubled over in a perfect, ninety-degree bow. “I apologize, Kirishima-kun! I had no intention of undermining your performance in any way! Please forget my earlier words!”

Eijirou clutched his stomach as he struggled not to laugh. “You really are a great friend, Iida,” he said with absolute sincerity as he brought up his fists. “And that’s exactly why you deserve nothing less than my full attention!” His muscles briefly bulged up as he allowed just the slightest spark of One For All to roar throughout his body. “I promise I’ll tell you everything later, but right now, this is all about us! So let’s make sure we both leave an impression!"

Iida was briefly stunned by the sudden return of Eijirou’s enthusiasm, but then he smiled back. “I will hold you to that, Kirishima-kun. Now then,” he started, as he got into a combat stance as well, the engines in his legs revving up. “I expect nothing less than your best!”

“Ah, the friendship between two young men!” Midnight cheered from her little raised podium, practically jumping up and down with excitement. “Now without further ado, Battle Tournament: first round, third match—Kirishima Eijirou versus Iida Tenya, BEGIN!”

No sooner had Midnight called for the start of the match, or Iida had already gotten up inside his guard with incredible speed, one leg whipping out to slam into Eijirou and knock him clean out of bounds.

Not two weeks ago, that move would have decided the match right then and there. However, Eijirou had been training his Quirk against both Bakugou, who was almost as fast as Iida but a hundred times more agile, as well as Midoriya, who seemed all but indestructible and didn’t falter even when Eijirou’s tenuous control over his Quirk slipped and he accidentally used too much force.

Iida’s eyes widened when Eijirou didn’t just block his kick with his forearm, but grabbed onto his ankle with his free hand and proceeded to whirl him around overhead in a circle by using his Quirk's superhuman strength. Eijirou still wasn’t anywhere near mastering One For All, but Midoriya had thoroughly disabused him of the notion that it was too dangerous for him to use it on other people. With both the self-confidence and skill his friends’ training sessions had instilled in him, Eijirou channeled no more than two percent of his Quirk into his hand so as to avoid hurting Iida’s ankle, and siphoned the remaining eight percent into the muscles of his arm, putting all that power to good use by flinging Iida toward the edge of the arena as hard as he could.

Even if he still lacked the fine control needed to keep his Quirk's total output under ten percent, he could at least utilize the excess power in a way that didn’t hurt other people.

Iida flew straight toward the edge, but just before he was about to go over the white line and be disqualified, there was a cry of “Recipro Burst!” and a flash of blue flames emerging from his Engine’s exhaust pipes, and he reversed direction in midair, shooting right back toward Eijirou.

“Holy crap! That was so cool!” Eijirou gushed happily, unable to stop the laughter bubbling forth. He didn’t get the chance to say more, since Iida closed in again almost right away, and bombarded him with a barrage of high-speed punches and kicks. Still Eijirou didn’t stop smiling, and even Iida looked like he was struggling to maintain his serious expression.

Eijirou’s body still couldn’t handle even a measly ten percent of One For All for extended periods, but as long as he kept moving the power around between different body parts instead of keeping it all focused in his arms, he could keep fighting a hell of a lot longer than his previous ‘ten punches a day’-method had allowed for.

Recovery Girl had been pleased too, not finding him in her office anymore on an almost daily basis with swollen, all-but-purple arms by the time school let out.

It felt like so much longer to Eijirou himself, but after just over ten seconds of high-speed combat, the sound of Iida’s engines stalling reached his ears, and Iida fell back, grey smoke trailing from the back of his legs.

“I did not think… that you would improve so much in such a short time, Kirishima-kun,” Iida complimented him, breathing heavily. “It may be presumptuous of me to say so, but as your friend, I am truly proud of your progress.” He finally allowed his own, approving smile to break through, and Eijirou groaned aloud, hiding his face behind his hands.

“Duuuude!” he whined without looking at Iida, “Stop embarrassing me on camera like that!”

Iida laughed , and Eijirou peeked one eye out from between his fingers before chuckling as well.

“Miss Referee? I cannot continue—I concede the match to Kirishima-kun.”

“Roger that!” Midnight flashed Iida a thumbs-up, then called out to the rest of the stadium: “Kirishima-kun WINS!”

“You were both great!” Midoriya said with a radiant smile as soon as Eijirou and Iida returned to their seats. “You’ve gotten a lot better at using your Quirk, Kirishima-kun! And I had no idea you were so good at hand-to-hand, Iida-kun!”

“For a nerd, you've got a damned good kick on you, Four-Eyes,” Bakugou grudgingly admitted, which was basically the Katsuki-equivalent of high praise. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“We should totally spar again sometime, Iida-kun!” Uraraka voluntold him. “If I’d known you were that good, I wouldn’t have needed to hold back last time!”

Iida’s smile promptly slid off his face, and all of his blood drained away along with it.

Eijirou chuckled as he dropped down into his seat next to Kaminari, then frowned when he noticed how quiet the other boy was being. “Dude, you okay?” Very slowly, and without removing his arms from where he’d wrapped them around himself in a self-hug, Kaminari turned to look at him.

“So, funny story,” he began, making a vaguely deranged expression. “You know how Todoroki basically spilled his guts to you earlier? Well, as it happens, Bakugou was actually looking for you just then, and he happened to overhear.”

Eijirou frowned. “So, what, he just… told you all? I mean, I wasn't planning on staying quiet and doing nothing, but to go around repeating a personal conversation like that is just not cool, man.” Then Eijirou realized the implications. “Wait… if Bakugou knows, then does Midoriya also-?”

Kaminari responded by nodding frantically. Eijirou went pale-faced almost as fast as Iida had. “…And Endeavor’s still alive?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“That’s the thing,” Kaminari whispered, letting out a high-pitched little laugh. “Bakugou stopped Midoriya from doing… whatever it was he was gonna do—he said something about ‘too many witnesses’, by the way, what does that mean?! And then Bakugou said… he said…” Kaminari swallowed thickly. “He said he had a plan.”

The two of them stared at each other with wide eyes as Eijirou went into Panic Mode. “Wha-what do we do?” Eijirou stuttered, and Kaminari reached out to place firm hands on Eijirou’s shoulders. “We keep our heads down, stay out of the crazy people’s way, and make sure we have alibis. That means no bathroom breaks—we have to be clearly visible and clearly innocent at all times,” Kaminari insisted.

“…Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit paranoid?”

“Dude, if anything, I’m not being paranoid enough."

“And that concludes the fourth match!” Midnight’s voice suddenly rang out again, to the sound of thunderous applause. “Next match, Yaoyorozu Momo versus Honenuki Juuzo! Please step into the arena, you two!”

“Wait, what?!” Eijirou exclaimed, jumping to his feet and leaning over the railing to try and catch a glimpse of whoever had just stepped out of the arena. “It’s already over? I didn’t even see the fight! Iida, did you see?”

Iida jumped upon being addressed, before pulling himself back together and swallowing nervously. “I—no, I did not. I’m afraid I was...” he threw Uraraka a furtive, sidelong glance, and looked away again when she bared her teeth at him in a grin. “…Distracted,” he finished, in a noticeably high tone of voice.

“Don’t worry! We’ll see whoever won in the next round,” Midoriya piped up. “I’m sure we didn’t miss anything important,” he proclaimed, and Eijirou couldn’t help but narrow his eyes in suspicion. Midoriya never missed anything. Bakugou had clearly had the same thought if the expression on his face was anything to go by, but he just shrugged and got to his feet.

“I’m up after Ponytail Girl, so I’m going to my waiting room.” He turned to face Kaminari and Eijirou. “You idiots are on Deku-watching duty. Don’t let him get any more ideas,” he ordered gruffly, and left without another word.

Eijirou and Kaminari looked at each other again, and then at Midoriya, who smiled in a perfectly innocent manner.

Kaminari shuddered.

To Katsuki, it felt like he had barely even set foot inside his waiting room before Midnight already called the match in Skullface’s favor. He couldn’t say he was surprised by the result; Ponytail had a good head on her shoulders along with the most versatile Quirk Katsuki had ever seen, but she didn’t have the self-confidence or the cool headedness she needed to make a good fighter or Hero yet.

Either she’d learn from the loss and shore up those weaknesses, or she should start looking for a different career. Katsuki couldn’t say he cared either way, but he had to admit that it would be a waste if she ended up dropping out.

Right now though, he had his own match to focus on. He stepped out of the tunnel and into the light, the roar of the crowd sending adrenaline coursing through his veins and twisting his expression into an eager, lethal grin.

“Match six: Bakugou Katsuki versus Hatsume Mei!” Midnight announced as Katsuki walked up onto the platform. When he saw his opponent for himself, however, his grin slid right off his face.

“BEGIN!”

The only part of Fluffy Hair that was still recognizable was, as it happened, her fluffy pink hair. Everything else was covered in the same body armor she had worn during the Cavalry Battle, except that now it came with the addition of a helmet.

A helmet that included a gleaming, metal faceplate in the shape of a skull, complete with glowing red eyes.

Hatsume lifted her arm, and pointed at Katsuki with a single finger of her gauntleted hand. “Bakugou Katsuki,” she said in a freakishly low, robotic tone of voice. Clearly, the faceplate came with a built-in voice modulator as well. “Prepare to be terminated.”

Katsuki stared at her for a full five seconds.

Then he exploded.

“ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?!”

Izuku and his friends all covered their eyes against the gust of burning hot wind that buffeted them in the wake of Katsuki’s premature detonation.

“Holy crap, hasn’t he ever heard of holding back?!” Kaminari yelled over the keening winds.

“No,” Izuku answered simply. “He also has this weird hang-up about The Terminator—everything that reminds him of that movie just freaks him out for some reason.”

All four of his friends stared at him with the flattest expressions they could manage.

“What?” Izuku asked innocently.

“…You know, sometimes it’s really hard to tell if you’re actually that clueless, or if you’re just screwing with us,” Kaminari said, vocalizing what the other three had all been thinking.

“STAND STILL SO I CAN KILL YOU, DAMMIT!”

“Oh man, he’s really loud when he wants to be,” Eijirou commented, watching as Hatsume led Katsuki on a merry chase around the arena with her rocket-powered boots and jetpack. “Wait a minute, does she have a rocket launcher with her?!”

“Aww, we were allowed to bring stuff like that? How come no one told us?” Uraraka lamented. “My parents own a construction company, you know? There’s so many things I could have used here!”

It was a close thing, but Iida’s love for The Rules in all their forms nonetheless won out over the almost paralyzing fear he felt when he imagined Uraraka in possession of her own private arsenal. “Support Course students were allowed to bring any equipment that they had designed and manufactured on their own. As for us Heroics Course students, we were required to ask special, written permission beforehand to bring anything more than our Sports Uniforms, and those requests are typically only granted when the equipment in question is absolutely vital to the functioning of our Quirks,” he explained.

“Oh, I see. It’s still a shame, though—there’s a lot I could have done with a few sticks of dynamite.”

“Don’t worry!” Izuku piped up, not even looking away from her as down in the arena, a sixteen-year-old mad scientist-slash-inventor fired an actual, functioning rocket at his boyfriend.  The entire stadium shuddered as it went off. “Maybe once the Sports Festival is over, you could ask Aizawa-sensei if you can use any of that equipment for training!” he encouraged her.

“THAT’S IT! YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD, ASSHOLE!”

Izuku’s smile widened. “Kacchan sounds like he’s having fun!”

“He does, doesn’t he?” Eijirou joined in, laughing heartily. “He’ll probably sleep well tonight!”

Iida and Kaminari looked at each other and wondered at what point they had become the only sane people among their group of friends.

The stadium trembled on its foundations one final time as Katsuki unleashed an explosion so large it dwarfed all others before it, and then all was quiet.

When the smoke cleared, Hatsume was just barely visible, half-embedded within the wall as she was, while her armor sparked and crackled. Shakily, she raised one grasping hand toward the victorious Katsuki, and said: “I’ll... be back...” Then the red glow in her eyes faded as the electronics in her suit finally fizzled out, and she fell limp, still stuck halfway inside the wall.

“Winner: Bakugou Katsuki!”

At this point, Denki just wanted to go home.

Over the course of this one day, he had seen a friend seemingly get crushed to death by a giant robot, participated in what had to have been the single most violent and traumatizing Cavalry Battle in history, inadvertently become an accessory to whatever crime against humanity Bakugou and Midoriya were planning to commit against Endeavor, and to top it all off, his opponent for the Battle Tournament was her.

“Don’t hold back just because I’m a girl, Kaminari-kun!” Uraraka advised him as she loosened up her shoulder muscles. “I know I won’t!”

Denki sucked his teeth. “Is there any chance I could forfeit before the match?” he asked Midnight, who responded with a cheery “Nope!”

He sighed. “Alright. Fine. Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered in defeat. He cracked his neck, squared his shoulders, and discharged a minor burst of electricity between his fingers to warm up his Quirk. “Hey, Uraraka? If I don’t survive this, please tell my parents I love them.”

“Okay!”

“Don’t just agree so easily!” he wailed dramatically, yet couldn’t help but let out a chuckle when Uraraka laughed in a good-natured manner. Theatrics aside, he knew she wouldn't hurt him. In spite of how she acted, Uraraka was probably the one who best understood the concept of proportional use of force out of all six of them. Especially where her friends were concerned.

Even now, Denki still couldn't really believe he was one of them. Uraraka, Iida, Bakugou, Midoriya, and Kirishima in particular... they'd all accepted him into their midst so easily. He had friends who liked him for who he was; friends he could just... be himself around. Denki couldn't have stopped himself from smiling if he'd tried.

“Seventh match: Kaminari Denki versus Uraraka Ochako, BEGIN!”

“Here goes!” Denki shouted with renewed determination, as crackling arcs of electricity discharged from his body in every direction. If he let Uraraka get close, the match would be over, simple as that. When it came to hand-to-hand combat, she was a force of nature second only to Bakugou, and she’d been catching up even to him as the school year progressed.

His only chance would be to take her out at the very start.

“Indiscriminate Discharge: 1,300,000 Volts!”

He let loose everything he had, and a blinding yellow maelstrom of pure energy took up his entire field of vision as his Quirk tore across the concrete platform. He tried to look for Uraraka amid the chaos, but between all the flashing lights and the fact that his head felt like it was being stuffed with wads of cotton as his brain overloaded, he wasn’t having much luck.

It was only right before his Quirk finally fizzled out and his brain went into Power Savings Mode that he caught a glimpse of her—floating weightlessly high up in the air and well out of range of his attack. ‘…Oh crap’, he thought, right before he felt his lips stretch into a dopey grin, even as his hands automatically conformed themselves into a double thumbs-up configuration.

Uraraka daintily touched down in front of him, and closed the remaining distance with three easy strides. She then put her hand on his shoulder, canceled his gravity, and smiled at him.

“…Whey?” he asked, feeling himself drool a little bit.

“Whey,” Uraraka affirmed, and launched him right off the platform with an open-palm strike to the chest.

At least she was nice enough to undo her Quirk's effect before he could sail face-first into the wall.

The last match of the first round ended with Tokoyami narrowly eking out a win over Ashido, although his victory had come at the cost of losing more than a few feathers to her acid.

And a good chunk of his clothes.

The audience members had not come here expecting to see washboard abs on a bird, yet there they were.

“Holy shit, he’s ripped,” Eijirou commented, as Ashido lent a stoic yet clearly embarrassed Tokoyami the jacket of her own uniform to cover up with.

“Wha-? Wha’s happening?” Kaminari muttered as his brain slowly rebooted. “What’d I miss?” He blearily eyed the rest of the group. “…Wait, how’d I get back here?”

“Uraraka carried you up,” Eijirou informed him with a toothy grin, turning away from the sight of Tokoyami’s abs to fish his phone out of his pocket. “She didn’t even need her Quirk, it was really manly!” He then shoved his phone in Kaminari’s face. “You, not so much.”

On the screen, there was a picture of Kaminari being carried bridal-style by a grinning Uraraka. You could just make out the tip of Katsuki’s index finger from where he’d been pointing and laughing at them. Kaminari was flashing him a thumbs-up.

The Kaminari of the present on the other hand, launched himself out of his seat and at Eijirou as he desperately tried to wrestle the phone away from him so as to erase the evidence.

“Oh look!” Izuku exclaimed, as the yellow-and-red ball of violence rolled past his seat. “They’re announcing the next matchups!”

The group’s eyes instantly became glued to the screen as the winners from Round 1 were placed into new, randomized match-ups. Like in the previous round, Izuku’s face popped up first, followed immediately by a picture of a sandy blond-haired boy with no lips.

“Huh. Looks like you’ve got Skullface next,” Katsuki commented disinterestedly. “And I’ve got…” He cut himself off with a sharp inhale when Uraraka’s face appeared next to his own.

“Aww, look at how happy they both are!” Eijirou piped up from where he lay on the ground with Kaminari on top of him as Katsuki and Uraraka bared their teeth at each other. “Oh, that’s me!” he exclaimed, when his own face showed up next, right beside that of—

Eijirou abruptly fell quiet, and Izuku frowned at the screen. “Todoroki-kun...” he muttered to himself, glancing down at Eijirou. Unnoticed by everyone except Katsuki, the corner of Izuku's mouth turned downward just a bit.

...This complicated things.

Chapter Text

This wasn’t how he had wanted the next round to go.

Todoroki was too strong; even when he insisted on using only half of his power in order to spite his father, Kirishima-kun still had next to no chance of beating him in a fair fight. Not yet, at least. Ten percent of One For All was not enough to trump the overwhelming power of Todoroki’s ice. His earlier fight with Sero had proven that much.

The only way for Kirishima to win was to push One For All to a higher percentage than what his body could handle, but he wasn’t that reckless.

If the stakes were higher, maybe; but for a friendly bout in the Sports Festival? No way. Certainly not when there was a very real possibility of him losing control of his Quirk and inflicting lethal damage with it.

While he wanted for Kirishima-kun to move on to the next round, at the same time he would also hate to see Todoroki continue down his current path of self-sabotage. He might have attained both goals if the match-ups hadn’t been what they were, but for all his observational skill, even he couldn’t predict what a randomly-reshuffled tournament roster would end up looking like.

It left something of a bitter taste in his mouth in this case, but he couldn’t always make things go the way he wanted them to. He’d just have to believe in Kirishima-kun and hope for the best. Unless…

What if... What if he were to…?

No.

He wasn’t going to manipulate his classmates like that, and certainly not his friends. Not even when it was for the right reasons.

It was a very dangerous thing, believing that those kinds of tactics were valid, so long as it was for the supposed ‘greater good’.

He wasn’t going to be like that. He had sworn he wouldn’t become like his—

“Are both combatants ready?!”

Izuku was pulled from his train of thought by the sound of Midnight’s voice, and he snapped his gaze back up from where he’d been staring at the arena floor. He blinked as he shifted his focus back to the here and now, taking in the cheers of the crowd and the sight of his opponent looking at him with curiosity—and more than a little wariness—in his eyes.

Honenuki Juzou. That was his name, Izuku recalled. He had a Softening Quirk—Honenuki had used it to hide his team underground for the duration of the Cavalry Battle and earned them a bloodless victory in doing so. It was the polar opposite of his own Quirk; a perfect counter. Izuku would have to be wary. After all, Kacchan would be mad at him if he, too, didn’t give it his all.

“I’m ready!” he called out to Midnight, grin automatically slipping back into place as he faced his opponent. “Let’s make this a fair fight, Honenuki-kun!”

“Not that I’m not digging this whole ‘getting glared at in total silence for five minutes straight’-thing,” Eijirou lied, in truth feeling rather discomfited by the whole ‘getting glared at in total silence for five minutes straight’-thing, “…but I really wish you’d tell me why you dragged me off here all of a sudden. You're kind of starting to freak me out.”

Bakugou, who had been glaring at him in total silence for five minutes straight now, clicked his tongue and finally looked away, baring his teeth at the wall beside them as if he was about to savage it for committing some unspeakable crime against one of his long-dead ancestors.

“Seriously, is everything okay?” Eijirou asked, getting worried. He’d never seen Bakugou acting so hesitant before. “Did I do something wrong, or—Ow!” Eijirou blinked rapidly, gaping at Bakugou in affront. “You punched me!” he cried out, rubbing his sore shoulder. “Why?!”

“I’m sorry.”

Eijirou's eyes widened even further. “For… for punching me?” he wondered aloud, and—oh, there came the glare again.

“No, not for punching you, dipshit!” Bakugou sneered. ‘Why not?!’ Eijirou wanted to demand, only to be distracted by the sight of Bakugou looking at the floor and bashfully rubbing the back of his neck. Was he… was Bakugou blushing?!

“I meant…” he muttered, still not facing Eijirou, “…I meant for earlier. The thing with Icy-Hot. I shouldn’t have blabbed about your shit to the other morons like that.”

“Oh.” Eijirou blinked again. “Well, no. You shouldn’t have,” he agreed. They were both quiet for a bit. Bakugou still didn’t look back up. “…So, why did you?”

“Deku.” Bakugou said it as if that explained everything. Which, okay, yeah, it probably did, but still. Bakugou rolled his rolled his eyes at Eijirou’s wordless request for elaboration, saying: “You know what he’s like. Somehow, he was gonna find out about that shit anyway, so I wanted him to hear it from me. At least then I could stop him from doing something stupid.”

“Like scaring the absolute crap out of Endeavor and then getting in trouble for it?” Eijirou guessed, shooting a wry grin at Bakugou.

Bakugou’s eyebrows rose, then went back down as his eyes narrowed. “…I thought you and Pikachu were worried he was gonna kill him or some shit.”

“No way!” Eijirou laughed, waving away Bakugou’s objection. “Kami was just being dramatic. We know Midoriya would never kill anyone.” Almost flippantly, he added: “I mean, Midoriya’s not even half as crazy as he makes people think he is.”

For a fraction of a second, Bakugou looked stunned, his pupils going wide, but the shocked expression disappeared again before it had even fully formed, leaving Eijirou to wonder if he had imagined it. Instead, Bakugou bared his teeth in a savage grin. “Noticed that, huh? Maybe it’s time I stopped calling you Hair-for-Brains,” he said, something like approval lacing his tone.

“Hey, I might not be as smart as you two or Iida, but I'd like to think I know my own buddies pretty well, at least,” Eijirou shot back, baring his own teeth in a (far less threatening) smirk. “And you could just call me Eijirou, you know,” he suggested, doing his best to sound casual about it.

“Don’t go pushing your luck, Shitty Hair,” Bakugou mercilessly shot him down, and he groaned aloud in disappointment. Then, Bakugou’s eyes softened and he looked to the side again, running a hand through his blond spikes in a gesture that seemed almost nervous. “So, are we… y’know… are we good?” he grumbled, not meeting Eijirou’s eyes.

That posture, combined with the rapid, continuous switches between anger and vulnerability… Eijirou’s mouth fell open in realization. “Holy crap,” he uttered, “Midoriya was right—you totally are a Tsundere!” he blurted out, only to regret it when Bakugou punched him again.

“Ow!” he squawked, rubbing his poor, abused left pectoral. He hit the fuming Bakugou with his best iteration of puppy-dog eyes yet. “You know, I think this might be the worst apology ever,” he complained before pouting.

Bakugou’s eye twitched. Eijirou was starting to understand why Midoriya did this sort of thing all the time. He laughed aloud, then backed away with hurried steps to avoid Bakugou’s retaliatory strikes upon realizing he was being messed with. “Dude, I’m kidding!” he chuckled, holding his arms in front of his face.

Only when the hail of fists finally stopped did he dare lower them again. “Of course we’re good,” he assured Bakugou, as soon as the threat of further violence had passed. “I don’t think I could stay mad at you if I tried,” he admitted, pretending not to notice the way Bakugou’s shoulders stiffened. “Just talk to me first next time something like this happens. Okay?”

“…Fine,” Bakugou eventually allowed. Together, they starting heading back to their seats to watch Midoriya’s match. Bakugou stayed rather subdued along the way, however.

“…You wanna hug it out?” Eijirou tried, only to wince when Bakugou exploded on him.

“FUCK NO!” he screamed. “Why the hell would I wanna-?! Wait, what are you-?! Kirishima, if you touch me, I swear to god-!”

“Aww, you called me by my name!” Eijirou cheered. “I always knew you had it in you!” He didn’t stop laughing even when Bakugou crash-tackled him to the ground and began a minor brawl right then and there.

Needless to say, by the time they finally made it back to their seats, Iida was deeply disappointed in the both of them.

Juzou honestly wanted to be anywhere but here right now.

After seeing the devastation Midoriya and the rest of his team had caused during the Cavalry Battle, not to mention what had happened to poor Shitetsu during his own bout against Class 1-A’s green-haired demon-child, Juzou had planned to just forfeit the match and avoid the risk of being buried alive, sustaining a minor concussion, or worse.

Unfortunately for him however, he was now the last member of his own class to still be in the running, and the rest of 1-B wouldn’t let him just give up like that. It was a pride thing, apparently.

“Let’s make this a fair fight, Honenuki-kun!” his deceptively innocent-looking opponent called out. Then he grinned and bared a mouthful of pearly whites shaped like tiny, gleaming daggers at him.

“…Right,” Juzou croaked out, about two octaves higher than his normal tone of voice. With a mix of desperation and longing in his eyes, he looked up at the stands where his classmates were seated. He opened his mouth, and—

“Go, Honenuki!”

“You show that kid who’s boss!”

“1-B PRIDE, YEAH!”

“Revenge for Monoma and Shitetsu!”

Juzou crumpled where he stood, arms dropping to hang by his sides. After that tremendous outpouring of support, there was no way he could let his class down. He was gonna have to fight, and fight to win, too.

Those absolute bastards.

“Your classmates are really rooting for you huh, Honenuki-kun?” Midoriya happily remarked. “You guys in Class B must be a really tight-knit group!”

“Yeah… I guess we are,” Juzou grumbled under his breath, glaring up at the pack of traitors in question who had just served him up as a sacrificial offering. He then shifted his gaze to 1-A’s area, finding them to be much more subdued by comparison. “Your class doesn’t seem to be cheering for you, though,” he pointed out. In fact, they seemed kind of… worried?

Wait, were they… were they looking at him? Was that pity he saw in their eyes?! Was 1-A scared for his well-being?!

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Midoriya advised serenely.

Juzou was very much worrying about it. In fact, he had already gone past ‘worried’ and was now steadily edging into what could only be described as ‘blind panic’.

On second thought, to hell with his classmates—Juzou wanted to live.

“Miss Midnight?!” he called out in a hurry, “I'd like to-!”

“BEGIN!”

“Wait, what?” The sound of concrete being crushed underfoot reached Juzou’s ears as a tiny green devil covered in stony skin barreled across the arena. “Eek!”

Juzou backed up until the boundary line was right at his heels. Like a bloodhound smelling fear, or perhaps more akin to a shark smelling blood, Midoriya homed in on his prey which, unfortunately, happened to be him.

He could have escaped, of course. All Juzou had to do was take just one more step backward, and it would be over, and he would be safe.

But…

Giving up, just like that? Not even trying to fight, just because some kid—who was almost a full head shorter than him—happened to have a creepy set of chompers on him? Juzou had a set of those, too. Hell, Juzou didn’t even have lips.

God dammit, what was he even doing?! He was going to be a Hero! No way was he tainting his first appearance on public TV with the image of him running away like a coward!

Gritting his teeth, Juzou snarled: “Not another step, Midoriya!” and stomped down on the arena floor as he activated his Quirk. A streak of concrete directly ahead of him was turned to quicksand as his Softening took effect, and Midoriya let out a surprised little “Oh!” as his feet sank into the ground, followed almost immediately by the rest of him.

Breathing heavily, Juzou waited for the seemingly-invincible boy to re-emerge from the greyish puddle of sludge he had disappeared into, large beads of sweat dripping down his brow as he did. As the seconds ticked by however, it became apparent that Midoriya wasn’t getting back up. Once the forty-second mark had passed, Juzou was starting to get genuinely worried for his opponent.

“Oi, Midnight-sensei! He’s not coming back up!” he cried out. “Call the match already!”

Midnight merely shook her head, however. “The match is still in progress, Honenuki-kun.”

“What?! No, we have to stop; he could be choking down there for all we know! We can’t just-!” Juzou’s next words died on his nonexistent lips, and Midnight regarded him with something like pity. Very slowly and with little jerks and gasps, Juzou tilted his head downward to look at the craggy, stone-like hand sticking out of the ground.

The very same hand that was now wrapped around his ankle in a grip like unbending steel. Juzou drew in a sharp breath as he saw those same, glowing green eyes from earlier staring up at him from within a dark crevice in the arena floor. They were followed by the appearance of a Cheshire-grin crescent filled with two rows of too-sharp teeth.

His earlier analogy hadn’t been correct, Juzou realized. Midoriya wasn’t like a shark at all.

With those intense green eyes that appeared to glow when the sun hit them just right, coupled with the gleaming of teeth that were too long and sharp to be human, he was far more similar to those nightmarish creatures that lived in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean.

What were those called again? The ones who used that little light on their heads to lure in unsuspecting prey and then eat them alive?

Oh, right:

Anglerfish.

The hand yanked on his leg, and Juzou screamed in terror as he was dragged down into the cold, dark abyss below; the tail-end of his high-pitched cries continuing to echo throughout the silent arena for long after he had already disappeared from sight.

“Winner: Midoriya-kun!” Midnight announced into the eerie quiet.

Nobody clapped.

Katsuki however, cackled.

Chapter Text

“And now for a match we’ve all been looking forward to, ladies and gents!”

For all Present Mic’s enthusiasm, the audience members did not seem to agree with his assessment.

In fact, judging by how the first five rows had voluntarily evacuated and the spectators were now all but sitting in each other’s laps, as far away from the arena as was humanly possible without leaving the stadium altogether, saying that they were dreading it appeared to be rather more accurate.

“Second round, match two!” Midnight called out, not about to let herself to be bothered by the audience’s apprehension, “Uraraka Ochako!”

With a spring in her step and an eager grin on her lips, Uraraka emerged from the tunnel that led out to the arena proper. There was some hesitant clapping from the audience, which lasted right up until Uraraka directed a radiant smile up into the stands combined with a ‘V for victory’-sign, at which point some much more spontaneous cheers began to ring out.

“Versus: Bakugou Katsuki!”

The clapping cut right off again with a sound not at all dissimilar to a record scratch.

The audience watched with bated breath as Katsuki came stalking into the arena, his hands buried deep into his pockets. Every one of his footfalls echoed throughout the silent stadium as he marched—a fact that did not escape Katsuki’s notice.

Upon coming to a standstill opposite Uraraka, he looked up and directed a venomous sneer up into the stands, as if willing the audience members to start applauding for him too with nothing but the sheer, unrelenting power of rage.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

“Dude, you’re scaring everyone!” Eijirou’s voice rang out from 1-A’s section. “Stop making that face!”

“You should try smiling instead, Kacchan!” came Izuku’s encouraging voice, right on the heels of Eijirou’s admonishment. “A Hero should always smile, after all!”

The glimmer that appeared in Uraraka’s eyes just then made it clear that she knew that Izuku knew exactly what he was doing.

Katsuki on the other hand, while erudite in all matters Deku-related and therefore perfectly aware that he was somehow being set up, unfortunately lacked the self-awareness necessary to see just how this piece of advice would end up backfiring on him.

Therefore, after waging a short but vicious internal war with himself, Katsuki began to rearrange his facial features into a rarely-if-ever-used configuration, and Uraraka had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep herself from either laughing or screaming hysterically at what she saw.

To be fair, it did meet the minimum, technical requirements for a smile: Katsuki’s lips were pulled back, his teeth were exposed… and yet, the sheer wrongness of seeing that expression—on that face—mixed with the fact that actively maintaining it appeared to be causing Katsuki physical pain sort of caused it to have the exact opposite effect of what had been intended.

Somewhere up in the stands, a child began to cry.

Katsuki's ‘smile’ became even more strained than it already was.

A man subsequently squealed in fright.

Kaminari laughed.

Katsuki vowed bloody vengeance.

“…Well, with that out of the way!” Midnight addressed the audience again, once she had managed to find her voice, “let’s get this match started!”

“…Also, Bakugou-kun?" she asked, holding a hand over her microphone. "Please don’t ever do that again." Katsuki scoffed and returned to his default murder face, which she chose to take as tacit agreement.

“BEGIN!”

Never had Katsuki been this relieved about getting to murder someone.

“You ready, Round Face?” he asked, cracking both knuckles. “I’m not about to go easy on you.” He had plenty of frustration to work off, after all.

“I never expected you to,” Uraraka countered easily, settling into an open-handed grappler’s stance. “If anything, I’d be insulted if you did, Bakugou-kun.”

Katsuki was pretty sure his current expression wasn't about to garner much confidence from the audience either, but he couldn’t say he cared; not with Uraraka mirroring the same sort of lethal grin right back at him. Multiple, tiny blasts went off in his palm, popping like firecrackers. This was gonna be fun.

He bent low, sticking both arms out behind himself as he tensed his muscles, his entire body coiling like a spring. “Heh… Good.”

BANG!

Massive, twin explosions went off at his back and launched him towards Uraraka at such speed that everything save for Uraraka herself was reduced to a blur in Katsuki’s periphery.

Lightning-quick, Uraraka braced herself for the impact, the pads of her fingers starting to glow pink. Katsuki realized that must have been planning to tag him once he was within range of her, and would then send him flying straight out of bounds with his continued momentum once gravity stopped affecting him.

Well. She was gonna have to do better than that.

Bang!

Another blast—a smaller one this time—angled just a bit upward gave Katsuki enough downward push for the soles of his boots to go skidding along the concrete floor, and he crouched as low as he could, using his free hand to unleash another explosion straight at Uraraka’s center-of-mass from below. She sidestepped the blast faster than Katsuki had expected her to, getting hit by only shrapnel, then made a swipe for him and missed by a hair when he blasted off again.

Using a series of consecutive explosions to weave his way past her reaching arm, Katsuki ended up facing her back, and planted both hands on the ground even as he twisted his entire body around, transferring his momentum into a vicious leg sweep.

She jumped out of reach, launching herself much farther and faster than was humanly possible—weightless, Katsuki realized—then dropped like a rock as she cancelled her Quirk right at the apex of her jump. She landed into a roll, and Katsuki wasn’t about to give her the time to get back to her feet.

Just as she came to a stop, Katsuki was there to greet her, the light of an imminent explosion already radiating outward from his palm. With a sharp exhale she dodged again, but she wasn't quite as successful this time, and acquired a freshly-singed uniform jacket for her troubles.

It went on and on like that: Uraraka backing away, ducking and weaving to the best of her ability as Katsuki wore her down and tore apart the arena floor with blast after blast after blast.

Until finally, she couldn’t back up any further.

“What’s wrong, Round Face?” Katsuki demanded, striding ever closer to the corner of the arena where Uraraka had been boxed in. She was bleeding, her clothing torn and burnt in several places, and her shoulders heaved with every breath she took. Even so, she didn’t look like she was about to give up.

On the contrary.

“Don’t tell me that’s all you’ve got?” he asked, even as he searched for any sign of an incoming counterattack. She was up to something—he knew she was—but what?!

All of his instincts screamed ‘danger!’ at him when he saw the corner of Uraraka’s mouth tilt upward. “Well,” she breathed out, wiping away the trail of blood from when she’d bit her lip earlier. “…What do you think?”

She tented her fingers in a familiar gesture.

Katsuki’s eyes widened, and he looked up just in time to see the mass of floating rubble that was about to come down on his head.

“Release.”

“Oh, shi-!”

He didn’t even have the time to swear properly. Katsuki stuck his hand straight up in the air, built up power for an explosion far bigger than what he could safely handle, and gritted his teeth when the recoil from the supersized blast reverberated throughout his bones as it tore apart the rubble overhead.

“Did you think that was gonna stop me?!” he bellowed in the wake of his attack, chest heaving. His arm hung limp by his side, trembling. “You’re gonna have to try harder than-FUCK!”

Katsuki managed to duck just in time for a solid block of cement the size of a freaking watermelon to go sailing over his head.

Uraraka, grinning wickedly and surrounded by large chunks of rubble on all sides, picked another one up off the ground as if it weighed nothing, and wound up like a pitcher getting ready to throw. “…When did I say I was done? I’m just getting started.” She smiled sweetly at him. “Thanks for all the ammo, Bakugou-kun!”

Katsuki, curled up into a ball on the floor, felt his jaw drop. Oh, that son of a…

“BITCH!” he screamed, only vocalizing that last part when he became forced to either move or let his face get smashed in by a piece of rock-turned-projectile. Uraraka laughed, then happily continued her bombardment of him, destroying ever-more sections of the arena with each new stony missile that impacted against the floor.

Katsuki was fairly certain the media had needed to mute their livestreams of the event again by now, seeing how he made sure that each and every one of his ever-more-elaborate dodges was punctuated by an ever-more-elaborate piece of profanity.

Both the acrobatics- and the crassness-factor kept on going up as successful dodges became more and more difficult to pull off until finally, it all culminated with Uraraka lobbing what appeared to be a solid fucking quarter of the entire goddamn arena at him.

That was the point where it all boiled over.

Katsuki took a deep breath, held both arms stretched out in front of him as he built up an explosion with all the power and intensity of a miniature sun, and bellowed at the top of his lungs: “CUN-!”

“KACCHAN!”

BOOM!

With a hail of burning rubble raining down all around him, Katsuki shook the dust out of his hair and yelled: “Shut up, Deku!” at his scandalized boyfriend sitting up in the stands.

“That better not have been directed at me, Bakugou-kun!”

Katsuki reacted just in time to see a fiercely grinning Uraraka come charging out of the dust cloud left in the wake of his latest explosion, and was forced to switch to hand-to-hand, seeing as he couldn’t possibly maneuver amid the field of jagged rock fragments the arena had been reduced to. Not without falling flat on his ass, that was.

He batted her hands away to the best of his ability, targeting her wrists and forearms as much as possible to keep her from using her Quirk on him. “When the fuck did you get so fast?!” Katsuki demanded, struggling to keep Uraraka at bay, especially with the way his joints were aching after all those heavy-duty blasts.

“Kirishima-kun isn’t the only one who’s been taking pointers from the way you fight, you know?” she gasped out, sweat dripping down her brow. She really wasn’t letting up. She was in this to win, every bit as much as he was.

If he wasn’t careful, she just might.

Katsuki bared his teeth. Uraraka was an opponent worth beating.

“Then again…” she went on, now panting in earnest, “…it’s not like I didn’t come up with a few tricks of my own.”

From the edge of his vision, Katsuki saw her foot jerk, and for a single, horrified instant he actually believed she was going to kick him in the balls what the fuck—but then he saw the chunk of stone she’d launched up at him.

When had she used her Quirk on it?!

Katsuki didn’t have time to contemplate the issue, as the fist-sized chunk of rock that slammed home into his stomach forced him to direct his focus on breathing first and foremost.

Even as he stood wheezing for air, Uraraka showed no mercy. She sprung on him, both arms reaching to grab him wherever she could get at, but even when he was so winded he had black spots dancing in his vision, Katsuki was still that fraction of a second faster.

He clamped onto her wrists, Uraraka gritting her teeth in frustration, then threw his arms out to the sides just as she managed to twist free of his grip, leaving them both completely open to attack.

Difference was, Uraraka was still off-balance, whereas Katsuki had both feet planted firmly on the ground. It was gonna be now or never.

Katsuki shot forward, not with the aid of his Quirk this time but pure, explosive strength, and shoulder-checked Uraraka right in the center of her chest. He heard her cry out, both of them going down, him falling on top of her, but still she remained undaunted.

Katsuki felt both her hands grabbing onto his shoulders, a sensation of weightlessness coming over him almost immediately, and Uraraka let out a triumphant snarl from underneath him, already pushing as hard as she could to launch him up and out of bounds—

Only to find that she couldn’t.

On pure instinct alone, Katsuki clamped his thighs around Uraraka’s waist like a vice, using her own bodyweight as an anchor to keep himself grounded.

“…I win,” he declared. Uraraka, struggling for breath and face matted with streaks of dirt, looked up at the open palm Katsuki had pointed directly at her face, the light of a building explosion glimmering in her eyes.

After a moment of absolute silence wherein not even the audience members dared to stir, Uraraka sighed deeply and released her grip on Katsuki’s shoulders.

“…Release,” she muttered hoarsely, letting her arms fall to the rubble-strewn ground. Katsuki felt his weight return to him, but didn’t lower his sparking palm just yet.

“Uraraka-kun, do you concede?” Midnight asked, her voice ringing all throughout the silent arena.

Uraraka met Katsuki’s eyes, making no move to try and free herself. She gritted her teeth, then smiled wryly at him. She must have really hated losing.

Katsuki could empathize.

“…I do.”

Midnight nodded, then raised one arm and announced: “Uraraku-kun has conceded! Therefore, Bakugou Katsuki WINS!”

“I really wanted to beat you, you know,” Uraraka admitted as she looked up at the sky, her voice coming out hoarse.

Katsuki lowered his arm at last and started clambering off of her. “I noticed,” he drawled. “A couple times there, you almost did.” He held out a hand to pull her to her feet, which Uraraka accepted.

“I know that, Bakugou-kun,” she said smilingly. “That’s what makes this so frustrating.”

Katsuki couldn’t stop himself from huffing out a laugh. “You’re not half-bad, Round Face,” he admitted. “You put up a good fight.”

“Again; I didn’t need you to tell me that,” she repeated, a challenging yet playful glint in her eyes. “Also…” she pressed her knuckles up against his chest in a not-quite-punch. “…It’s Uraraka. Try and remember it this time.”

Katsuki barked out a laugh. “…Fine. Now let’s get your ass to Recovery Girl; you look like hammered shit.”

Uraraka looped her arm around his neck as she hit him with a full-on, radiant grin. “Get fucked, Bakugou-kun.”

Maybe Katsuki was getting this ‘smiling’ thing down after all. If the approving cheers resounding from all around them were anything to go by, the audience seemed to think so at least.

This was it. As soon as Cementoss-sensei was finished repairing the podium, it would be his turn.

Eijirou swallowed thickly. It felt as if his shoes were filled with lead as he trudged his way through the tunnel leading to the arena. With every step he took, his anxiety only redoubled.

He still didn’t know what he was going to do.

What even was the right thing to do in a situation like this? He was All Might’s successor, first and foremost. He was supposed to be the next Symbol of Peace. Winning the Sports’ Festival; making a name for himself, that should have been his number one goal, shouldn’t it?

And yet…

Just… forgetting about Todoroki altogether? Blowing right past him like he was just another obstacle in his path?

No way. No way in hell. That wasn’t the type of Hero Eijirou was going to become.

But then, what was the alternative, here? Just give up on fighting—on winning—altogether, and try to talk Todoroki through his issues right then and there in the arena? Of course not! This wasn’t some crappy anime! That kinda stuff didn’t work in real life!

But then what was he supposed to do?!

Eijirou ran his fingers through his hair, and ruffled his spikes almost frantically out of sheer, helpless frustration.

“I think you should just do whatever you want, honestly."

Eijirou wished he could have said that he didn’t scream like a little girl when he suddenly heard a voice coming from about five feet behind him in a dark tunnel… but that was pretty much exactly what happened.

“What the hell?!” he cried out, sustaining about five minor heart attacks in the span of half a second as he whirled around in place. “Midoriya, why?! How long have you been standing there?!”

Blinking innocently, Midoriya sent him a placating smile. “I only just got here. You looked pretty nervous when you left for your waiting room, so I thought I’d come see if you wanted someone to talk to before your match started.”

Eijirou sighed, feeling his heart rate return to normal levels. “Sure, I guess…” he muttered, scuffing the steel toe of his boot against the ground. “What did you mean, I should just do what I want?”

Midoriya’s smile softened, becoming more subdued; serious, almost. It looked a lot more genuine than the kind he usually wore.

“Well, if I know you at all, Kirishima-kun,” he started, “then I’m guessing that right now, you’re worrying about how not to let anyone down. How you can make it past this match without disappointing All Might or leaving Todoroki to his fate.”

His eyes were locked tight onto Eijirou’s own, and it took everything Eijirou had not to flinch away from that gaze. It was making him feel… exposed. As if that one look was all Midoriya needed to see right through him.

“You’re worrying about everyone’s stakes in this match except your own,” Midoriya went on. “But that’s not right.” He shook his head, finally breaking eye-contact. “This match is about you and Todoroki-kun; no one else. It’s not about All Might, and it sure as hell isn’t about Endeavor either.”

Eijirou’s mouth fell open. He wasn’t sure if that was because Midoriya had just read him perfectly, or because he’d used the word ‘hell’, as low on the sliding scale of profanity as it was. “…Okay seriously, are you a mind-reader now, or what?”

Midoriya chuckled, somewhat awkwardly scratching at the back of his head. “Of course I'm not. I don’t need to be—it was pretty obvious what you were thinking about.”

Eijirou knew that he wasn’t the greatest secret-keeper, but he highly doubted he’d been that transparent.

At least, not to anyone else.

“…Then what do you think I should do?” he asked, but Midoriya shook his head firmly.

“What I think doesn’t matter either, Kirishima-kun. The question you should be asking is what you want to do."

…That was a good question. What did he want to do?

Eijirou gritted his teeth. “I…” He took a deep breath. “Actually… I kind of want to punch Todoroki in the face right now,” he admitted.

Midoriya burst into surprised laughter, the sound spilling past his lips seemingly without his permission, and Eijirou wasn’t sure which of them was the most thrown off by it.

“What… what makes you say that?” Midoriya questioned, doing his best to stifle his chuckles behind his fist. There were still glimmers of amusement dancing in his eyes, and for the first time, Eijirou felt like he was seeing the real Midoriya. The Midoriya only Bakugou ever got to see.

Somehow, that thought bolstered his resolve.

“Because he’s being an idiot!” Eijirou cried out. “He’s not gonna use ‘his father’s’ Quirk?! That’s crap! He’s—he’s freaking sabotaging himself just to try and piss off his dad!” he ranted, only growing more impassioned as he picked up steam. “He’s so freaking strong already, but he’s just half-assing everything! The rest of us are doing all we can to stand out, but he’s got so much more going for him, and he just throws it all away and still believes he’s better than us!”

Breathing heavily, Eijirou clenched his fingers into tight fists. “…He’s kinda pissing me off, to be honest,” he told Midoriya.

Midoriya smiled again. Eijirou was pretty sure he could see approval in his eyes. “Then you should be sure to tell him that.”

His heart was pounding madly inside his chest and his palms were slick with sweat, but now—now Eijirou felt that he could step out into that arena with a smile. The kind of smile that befit a Hero.

“I will,” he promised. Behind him, Eijirou could hear Midnight asking the contestants to enter the arena. “I’ll beat some sense into him. After all, that’s just what a man’s gotta do for a pal sometimes, right?”

Midoriya’s lips contorted in a way that made Eijirou think he was trying very hard not to laugh at him. “Sure,” he managed to get out. “That sounds like as valid a course of action as any.”

Eijirou pretended to glare at him. “…You’re actually kind of a brat, you know that?”

“Well, Kacchan sure seems to think so, but I feel like he’s not in any position to judge,” Midoriya replied glibly, slipping back into his usual happy-go-lucky persona. It didn’t quite hold up when Eijirou reached out, put him in a headlock, and forcibly ruffled his hair.

Eijirou was pretty sure people wouldn’t be all that afraid of him anymore if they’d seen the way Midoriya had flailed around as he was trying to free himself. He laughed when Midoriya pouted at him upon finally being released.

He was ready now.

“Thanks, buddy,” he murmured to Midoriya, then squared his shoulders, and walked out into the arena with his head held high.

Chapter Text

“I swear I only looked away from him for like two seconds!” Kaminari wailed, cowering behind Iida’s broad back as a more-irate-than-usual Katsuki tried to drag him out from his hiding place by his hair. “Dude’s a freaking ninja!”

“I CAN’T EVEN LEAVE HIM WITH YOU ASSHOLES FOR TEN MINUTES!” Katsuki screeched, trying his hardest to make it past Iida who, frustratingly enough, turned out to be built like the world’s nerdiest brick shithouse.

“This behavior is most unbecoming of a Hero-in-training, Bakugou-kun!” Iida admonished him, refusing to budge so much as an inch. “I must insist that you cease these violent acts immediately!”

“HOW THE HELL ARE YOU THIS FUCKING STRONG?!” Katsuki complained, ignoring Iida’s words in favor of making repeated swipes at the cowering Kaminari behind him. “DUNCEFACE GET THE HELL OUT HERE ALREADY SO I CAN KILL YOU!”

“I’m sorry!” Kaminari whimpered, curling up into a ball even further. “Please don’t hurt me! I’m sorry!”

“Kacchan, what did I tell you about making our friends cry?”

All three teens halted mid-violence when they registered the sound of Izuku’s voice. Then Katsuki whirled around in place and tore himself free of Iida’s hold, only to find Izuku back in his seat as if he’d never left it in the first place. He sat there, doe-eyed and with a questioning frown marring his brow, looking for all intents and purposes the very picture of innocence as he observed his brawling friends.

Katsuki grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of his seat, relentlessly shaking him back and forth. “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

“I didn’t do anything!” Izuku swore, not seeming the least bit bothered by the rough treatment. “I just went to talk to Kirishima-kun!”

“BULLSHIT!”

“I’m serious!” Izuku insisted. “I just gave him a bit of a pep-talk, that’s all! I promise!”

Katsuki stopped manhandling his boyfriend and leaned in closer, one dubious eyebrow arched so high it was in danger of leaping right off his face as he peered into Izuku’s eyes. “…You really didn’t do anything else?” Izuku smiled and shook his head. “No blackmail?”

“Nope.”

“Homemade explosives?”

“Nu-uh.”

“…Anyone get set on fire?”

“Not even a little bit!” Izuku announced happily.

“Huh.” Katsuki narrowed his eyes suspiciously. In the background, Midnight was just announcing the start of the next match. “Just a pep-talk? You really didn’t do anything else?”

Izuku grinned. “Really. Just a pep-talk.”

A calamitous noise reverberated all throughout the stadium as Kirishima, after crossing the length of the arena in a single, superpowered leap, Smashed right through the wall of ice Todoroki had erected to punch him square in the face.

Katsuki stared at Izuku.

“…See?”

“What’s wrong? I thought you said could win using just your ice?”

Eijirou stood tall amid countless scattered fragments of ice both large and small; frozen mist wafting from them to slowly enshroud the entire arena floor. On the other side of the platform from him and barely a meter removed from the white boundary line at his back, Todoroki was down on his hands and knees, staring back at Eijirou with disbelief written all over his face as blood dripped from his nose, which now had a noticeable bend to it.

He might just have broken it with that punch, Eijirou realized with a twinge of guilt. He’d certainly hit him hard enough. “Well, what are you waiting for? Get up already,” he demanded, squashing down any hesitation he might have felt as he assumed a boxer’s stance. “Don’t tell me a single punch is enough to take you out, after talking big the way you did."

Todoroki’s openly stunned expression quickly closed itself off again, and he got back to his feet sporting something much more like a grimace. “I told you not to look down on me,” he practically growled out as a sheet of ice began to spread out along the ground at his feet.

“I’m not looking down on you,” Eijirou denied. His arms bulked up to twice their size again as he channeled One For All throughout his limbs. “You’re the one who’s looking on me—hell, on everyone.”

From the way his brow furrowed even further, Eijirou could tell that Todoroki wasn’t getting what he was trying to say. He tightened his jaw, then sighed and deflated a bit. “Just look up there,” he said, tilting his head up at 1-A and 1-B’s section of the stands. Their classmates were cheering them both on animatedly, and Eijirou noted that while Bakugou was already back in his seat by now, Uraraka hadn’t made it back yet.

“Every single one of them gave it all they had here today,” Eijirou explained, growing impassioned as he spoke. “They all pushed themselves and their Quirks to their limits to make it as far in as they possibly could in the competition.” He met Todoroki’s gaze again, and this time his own expression soured. “…And here you are, a guy who got in on recommendations, has this insanely amazing Quirk, and has pretty much everything going for him, and you go and challenge me out of nowhere all while refusing to actually fight me seriously?!” He gritted his teeth. “Bakugou might have an attitude problem of his own, but at least he’d never insult his opponent by taking them on half-assed the way you do!”

Todoroki’s features twisted, and Eijirou couldn’t help but consider that maybe he wasn’t handling this whole thing as well as he ought to be, if the first display of genuine emotion he managed to get out of Todoroki was one of seething anger.

“How I use my Quirk has nothing to do with you,” the other teen gritted out icily—in a rather literal manner at that, seeing how patches of frost were steadily creeping along his skin on the right side of his body.

“No, Eijirou agreed, “you’re right. It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s all about your dad, isn’t it?” Todoroki had begun to clench his fists so hard they were shaking, but Eijirou wasn’t finished. “Hell, even when you challenged me you didn’t do it to fight me. You did it so could fight a stand-in for All-Might, just because we have similar-looking Quirks.” He looked Todoroki dead in the eye. “For a guy who says he wants to be nothing like his dad, you sure are doing a great job following the path he laid out for you.”

A gigantic swell of frost erupted from around Todoroki with no warning; a barrage of crystalline, hexagonal pillars of ice materializing in seconds and rocketing toward Eijirou, and he braced himself as well as he could before Smashing himself a path through the onslaught. The pillar he targeted disintegrated so violently from the force of his punch that it blasted apart the others near it as well, allowing Eijirou to just barely weather the attack. Which wasn’t to say that he’d come away unharmed, however.

Now covered in weeping scratches left by shrapnel-like fragments of ice, Eijirou huffed out a breath, wincing a bit as he did. “I deserved that,” he admitted, flashing Todoroki a wry grin. “But at least you’re actually looking at me now.”

“You… are you actually trying to piss me off?” Todoroki grumbled out, looking like he was stuck halfway between anger and incomprehension. After unleashing an ice attack on that scale, his hands already had a slight tremor to them from the shivers he was trying to suppress, Eijirou noted.

“No. I just wanted to get you out of your own head,” Eijirou admitted. Glowing streaks of red light briefly appeared sprawled all over his left arm, and with an almost casual sideswipe he whipped out his arm and blasted the remnants of Todoroki’s glacier off the platform. “…But mostly I’m trying to figure out if you’re even serious about becoming a Hero at all.”

Eijirou bent his knees and ripped off his tattered jacket as he got ready to go on the offensive, leaving him bare-chested. Judging by the high-pitched squeal she let out, Midnight approved. “Do you actually want to save people, or are you just here to screw around and piss off your dad?” he asked. “One way or another, you’re gonna show me, 'cuz there’s no way in hell I’m letting a guy who's not even trying make it past me!”

With that promise fresh off his lips, he charged at Todoroki with another superpowered leap and bulldozed straight through the thick wall of ice the other teen erected to try and stop him. He ignored the biting cold and the steadily increasing soreness from using One For All so often in one day, and swung at him as hard as he safely could, just barely clipping Todoroki in the shoulder when he sidestepped his attack at the last second.

Another blast of frost came at him, from too close-by for Eijirou to dodge or deflect, and suddenly his right arm and leg were both fully encased in a solid block of ice. He gritted his teeth, stubbornness and determination fueling his drive to break free, and he channeled his inner Izuku in order to shatter the block of ice by flexing his muscles, even if it came at the cost of losing a layer of skin.

Eijirou’s face immediately scrunched up when the resulting pain hit him, and he half-succeeded at suppressing the high-pitched whimper that wanted to claw its way out of his throat.

“OUCH! THAT ONE LOOKED LIKE IT HURT, FOLKS!” Present Mic’s voice resounded through the arena. “CLASS 1-A’S KIRISHIMA REFUSES TO LET HIMSELF BE SLOWED DOWN, BUT AT WHAT COST?!”

Todoroki briefly faltered when he saw Eijirou desperately trying to keep up a tough front in the wake of his self-inflicted injury. “Hey, are you-?”

“I’m fine!” Eijirou squeaked out, in far too high-pitched a voice even to his own ears. His right eye twitched uncontrollably as he fought to keep himself from tearing up. “It barely even hurts!” he lied, more in an attempt to convince himself of that than anyone else.

Damn you, Inner Izuku!

Up in the stands, Outer Izuku stalwartly kept up his usual, happy-go-lucky expression and categorically refused to acknowledge the multiple accusing stares that were coming from his friends beside him.

Eventually, Eijirou succeeded in shaking off the pain and brought up his fists again. Taking that as a sign that he was okay to keep going, Todoroki narrowed his eyes and slammed his right foot down to continue his glacial offensive. Eijirou wove in between the first two ice formations that came rushing up at him, and hastily whipped out a clumsy backhanded strike to shatter the third before it could envelop him from behind.

“It would have been a lot easier to destroy that last one with a kick,” Todoroki pointed out, and Eijirou failed to hide a wince. “Instead you twisted yourself into an awkward knot so you’d be able to use your fists.” Todoroki breathed out a cloud of freezing mist as more icicles sprouted up from around his feet. “…You don’t have as much control when you’re using your Quirk with your legs, do you?”

Unfortunately for Eijirou, he was right, and Todoroki didn’t wait long to test his theory.

Todoroki extended both his arms forward, and two more massive formations ice erupted from the ground in the directions he was pointing, enclosing Eijirou in a frosty corridor where the only remaining exit led straight out of bounds. When he followed it up by clapping his hands together, the walls of ice abruptly closed in on Eijirou, and he was left with no choice but to push them back with both hands and the power of One For All to keep himself from being crushed.

“…If that's the case, then all I have to do is put you in a position where you can’t use your arms.”

Eijirou could only stare, wide-eyed, as Todoroki did the absolute last thing he would have expected and covered the already frost-speckled right side of his body in a solid, two-inch-thick layer of ice. He angled himself toward Eijirou so the improvised frost armor was facing him, and turned the floor into a skating rink while he was at it.

“You’re the one who wanted me to fight you seriously,” Todoroki grunted out as Eijirou struggled against the weight of the two glaciers pressing down on him, his voice coming out oddly distorted by the gelid helmet that hid half of his face. “Don’t blame me for this.” With a sharp, whip-like crack, another starburst-looking formation of ice bloomed into existence at Todoroki’s back and sent him skittering forward at breakneck speed, chips of ice spraying every which way as he went.

Eijirou had all of three seconds in which to panic as he saw Todoroki barreling toward him like some heavily armored Frost Knight plucked straight out of a fantasy novel, then realized there really was only thing he could possibly do in this situation. He gritted his teeth and grimaced.

....God was it ever going to suck, though.

He bent his knees and dug his fingers into the ice at his sides, channeling ten percent of One For All into his legs, then made a full-body lurch as he launched himself straight up into the air with pure explosive strength. There was a cacophony of grinding and crunching noises from below him when the two icebergs crashed into one another with Eijirou no longer there to hold them back, and subsequently caused Todoroki to become pinned in place by his own trap. When he reached the apex of his jump, the pain in his legs registered just when Eijirou had dared to hope that maybe he’d managed to control his output, and grimaced when he felt the by-now familiar soreness of multiple simultaneous muscle tears.

He wasn’t going to be able to move around much once he hit the ground again. If he was going to win this one, it was going to have to be now.

As he began to fall again, he spotted Todoroki moving around in the crevasse between the two icebergs. The teen was desperately trying to free himself, but his own ice was pinning him down from all sides, not to mention that the intense cold he’d been subjected to throughout the fight had turned much of his skin a frankly disturbing shade of blue by this point.

Eijirou scrunched up his face, briefly struck by indecision upon seeing his opponent that helpless, but then squashed those feelings down and wound up for a knock-out punch. Tendrils of red energy crackled around his arm as Eijirou picked up speed, and he felt his heartbeat pounding in his throat as he concentrated on keeping his output at a level where the resulting blow would be decisive but still very much nonlethal, then sucked in a breath before screaming at the top of his lungs, “CALIFORNIA SMASH!”

As if in slow-motion, he saw Todoroki give up on trying to break free from the ice, and look straight up at Eijirou, instead. He was so cold he’d even stopped shivering, and his movements were slow and lethargic.

His lips were parted, his eyes gone glassy and unfocused. He looked only seconds away from keeling over all on his own, even without Eijirou doing anything else.

And yet…

There, in those very last seconds before impact, Todoroki’s expression suddenly sharpened again, and his lips pulled back to bare his teeth in a desperate, furious snarl, even as the left sleeve of his jacket blackened and smoldered.

Eijirou had instants to react.“DETROIT SMASH!” he called out in a panic at the last possible moment, aborting his intended technique in favor of one that would let him disperse the stream of hellfire that came rushing up from below. The platform was buffeted by an explosion of steam and gale-force winds, and Eijirou himself couldn’t make anything out amid the chaos as he was flung through the air like a ragdoll in the wake of his and Todoroki’s clash.

Soon enough, his back hit unforgiving concrete, and stars flashed in front of his eyes when he banged his head as well. Even though his vision spun like mad and the wind had been thoroughly knocked out of him, Eijirou still scrambled to get back to his feet, desperately whirling around in place before locking onto the orange glow of the conflagration Todoroki had summoned.

“I… I do want to be a Hero!” Surrounded by flames and rapidly-melting ice, Todoroki cried out to him in a hoarse voice. “More than anything!”

Todoroki’s eyes were wide and tear-filled and more than a little manic, but at the same time there was something borderline-ecstatic to be found within his expression; something that told Eijirou that for the first time in god knows how long, Todoroki was free of the shackles that bound him.

“Yeah,” Eijirou acknowledged, taking one step in Todoroki's direction and nearly having his knees buckle out from under him when his damaged muscles refused to bear his weight. He hissed at the stinging pain that shot up his leg, yet nevertheless felt his lips curling into a smirk. “That’s what I figured too, dude!” He sucked in a breath, doing his best to keep standing on increasingly shaky legs. “You just needed a little push to figure it out for yourself!” Eijirou laughed, staggering backwards and stumbling a little before he caught himself again. The backlash from that last stunt he'd pulled was definitely catching up to him, now.

Todoroki gasped softly when he saw the state Eijirou was in and, seemingly in spite of himself, reached out with one arm, as if he meant to steady him.

“To hell with your dad,” Eijirou muttered, starting to slur his words as his vision grew unsteady. “You’re… you’re gonna make an amazing Hero all on your own. I’m… I’m sure of it, man.” Everything faded out of focus, and the only thing Eijirou could still vaguely make out was the blue-and-white blur that came dashing over to him as the ground rushed up to meet him.

He’d been expecting a much harder thump, a dazed Eijirou thought to himself when he landed on something with quite a bit more give to it than he was pretty sure concrete was supposed to have.

He blinked repeatedly as the red-and-white smudge hanging overhead slowly resolved itself into a worried-looking Todoroki’s face, and then grinned wide. “Heeeeey, you caught me!” he slurred out happily when he realized that Todoroki had both hands on his shoulders, and that the surprisingly soft thing he was lying sprawled out over was actually his classmate's lower half.

“See? I knew you were a good dude,” Eijirou proclaimed, reaching up to give Todoroki a pat on the cheek.

Todoroki looked at him as if he’d just been violated in a way that exceeded his ability to put into words.

Eijirou went limp as the last of his energy left him, his head lolling to the side so that it rested against Todoroki’s chest. “Holy crap,” he mumbled against the other boy’s right pectoral muscle, his voice coming out muffled. “You really are freaking shredded, aren't you?”

Even had Todoroki been able to formulate an answer, Eijirou would not have heard it, as that was the exact moment wherein he finally clocked out completely.

Silence reigned throughout the arena for an uncomfortably long period of time as the audience members held their breath, and Todoroki was preoccupied with suffering through no less than three separate existential crises at once.

Eventually, the sound of Present Mic awkwardly clearing his throat crackled from the stadium speakers. “Ah-hem. The ah, the excitement seems to have been too much for our dear miss referee to handle this time, so I’ll just be making the announcement myself!” Mic tactfully supplied, causing the audience members to all look at where Midnight had fallen off her little perch to lie flat on the ground with stars in her eyes and blood trickling from her nose.

Oblivious to her having become the center of attention, her legs gave a few happy little twitches as the audience members continued to stare at her with judgment in their eyes.

“TODOROKI-KUN WIIIIIIINS!”

Chapter Text

Eijirou opened his eyes to the stark white ceiling of the stadium’s on-site infirmary. He lay there for a moment, blinking repeatedly as he tried to get his eyes to focus, and attempted to recall the events leading up to his most recent loss of consciousness.

He remembered there being ice, for one thing.

Lots and lots of ice. And he was pretty sure… fire, too, at one point? Somewhere near the end of the match? Yeah, that sounded about right, Eijirou decided. As far he could remember though, none of Todoroki’s attacks had actually done any major damage to him, so how had he landed himself in here? Had he pushed past his limits with his Quirk again?

Experimentally, he tried flexing his legs and—yep that was definitely a familiar sort of searing pain alright.

Eijirou groaned. “I overdid it again,” he whined up at the ceiling, squeezing his eyes closed and throwing his head back into his pillow in his frustration. With a deep sigh, he opened his eyes again, and screeched like a particularly excitable banshee when he saw Recovery Girl’s face floating overhead, about five inches away from his own, staring deep into his soul with wizened, judging eyes.

“You can certainly say that again boy,” she huffed out. “Just when I was starting to believe you might have learned your lesson with abusing that self-destructive Quirk of yours, too! By rights I should be bashing yours and Toshinori’s skulls together until I managed to shake some sense loose, but I fear I’d only be wasting energy and precious braincells.”

Eijirou swallowed. “I… I’m sorry?” he tried, as he simultaneously attempted to make himself sink through the little cot he was laid out on in hopes of putting some distance between himself and Recovery Girl. She might have been a little old lady who had to stand on an even tinier stepladder just to peek out over his bedside, but that didn't make her any less capable of scaring the living crap out of him better than any Villain ever could.

“Are you asking me or telling me, boy?” Recovery Girl demanded, narrowing her eyes at him and subconsciously making Eijirou draw his shoulders all the way up to his ears.

He was pretty sure his lip quivered for the second or two it took for him to remember how to speak.

“…I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “I’m honestly just really, really scared right now.”

Recovery Girl hummed loudly and nodded to herself in satisfaction. “Good. That, at least, is the correct response to have,” she grumbled out, and hopped off her little perch to go rummaging around in one of her many supply closets.

Eijirou let out a shuddering exhale.

“I was able to fix most of the damage you did to yourself with your boneheaded attempts at showboating for the Hero agencies, but I don’t want you putting any weight on those legs for at least another hour or two. As for your arms, those weren’t in all that bad a state comparatively, so whatever training you’ve been doing appears to be paying off.” Recovery Girl said all this without looking at him or even pausing in her work, so Eijirou had to assume that she was actually pretty angry with him this time.

“You sustained a minor concussion as well thanks to that nasty fall, but so long as you aren't feeling any lingering dizziness or disorientation, that shouldn’t be anything to worry about.” She poked her head out of her cupboard for just a second, raising an eyebrow at him. “Well, are you?”

“A-ah, no!” Eijirou stammered out. “Other than some pain in my legs when I try moving them, I’m completely fine!” As soon as he said so, Recovery Girl went right back to her rummaging, and Eijirou slowly sat himself upright on the cot, his movements hesitant and uncertain.

“I… I wasn’t just trying to show off, you know.” As soon as he said it, Eijirou half-wished he could take it back, but Recovery Girl had already stopped whatever she was doing to listen to him, so he might as well get the rest of it out. “I’m not gonna say that I wasn’t thinking about getting scouted, but that’s not why I went as far as I did. I…” he paused for a second, unsure of how to pour his thoughts into a sentence.

“…I was just trying to help out a classmate who looked like he needed it,” Eijirou finally settled on. “That’s all.”

Silence hung over the infirmary for a short while, but then Recovery Girl let out a deep, weary sigh. When she turned to face him again, she suddenly looked much less scary, and a whole lot older all at once. “You have a good heart, Kirishima-kun,” she said in a soft, tired voice. “But a Hero has to know when to listen to his head, as well. Otherwise, they won’t be staying Heroes for very long, believe you me.”

She walked back over to him and placed a glass of water and a single tablet on the little raised table at his bedside. “A painkiller, for your legs,” she informed him. “You can go as soon as you finish drinking that; your friend is waiting out in the hallway to help you get back up to the stands.”

Grabbing hold of the glass, Eijirou lifted it to his lips while leaving the tablet where it was. “Thank you, but I think I'm gonna pass on the painkiller,” he said before downing the whole thing in three giant gulps. He set it back down and sighed in contentment, already feeling much better after getting a chance to rehydrate. “It’s my own fault I hurt my legs again; I should own up to that.”

Recovery Girl’s lips thinned. “I’m not sure I’m happy about you disregarding your physician’s advice, but I suppose the sentiment is admirable enough," she allowed.

Eijirou smiled at her, feeling relieved that he seemed to be back in her good books again.

“But I mean it, Kirishima-kun,” she went on. “Good cause or no, you must stop this sort of self-destructive behavior. I’m aware that with Toshinori as your mentor, that will not be an easy mindset to disabuse yourself of, but it is imperative that you do, do you hear me? I’ll let this particular instance slide, but if this sort of thing keeps happening, then I will not be using my Quirk to heal you again. I refuse to continue enabling this.”

Lowering his gaze to the floor, Eijirou let her works sink in, and then nodded. “I understand,” he said, and meant it.

“Good,” Recovery Girl stated decisively, tapping her cane against the floor. “Well, off with you, then! It is high time that you went to observe the rest of the competition. Your friend has been kept waiting long enough.” She turned to face the door and loudly called out, “Uraraka-kun! You can come in now, dear!”

The door swung open, and Uraraka peeked her head into the room, her face lighting up when she spotted Eijirou. “Kirishima-kun! It's good to see you still in one piece!” she greeted. “I watched your fight through the monitor in my waiting room. Izuku-kun’s clearly rubbed off on you, but being that reckless only works when you have a Quirk that can make you invulnerable at will, you know.”

Eijirou chuckled weakly, awkwardly rubbing the back of his head. “Yeah, I ah… kinda found that out for myself already,” he admitted as she walked up to his bedside.

Uraraka grinned. “So,” she started to say, swaying back and forth on her feet. “You want a piggyback ride back up to the stands, or would you rather go for the bridal carry like Kaminari-kun did?”

They ended up settling on a compromise that allowed Eijirou to hold on to at least some of his masculine pride.

“So enough about me for a bit; are you doing okay?” he asked Uraraka, continuing to ‘walk’ even though his feet never actually touched the ground with her Zero Gravity Quirk keeping him afloat as they traversed the sprawling maze of hallways beneath the stadium. “I noticed you hadn’t made it back to the stands yet during my match with Todoroki.”

Her grip on his hand tightened for a bit, and she answered his question with a wry smile. “…I actually called my parents, right after my match. Cried for a bit while I was on the phone with them,” she admitted. “I’m fine now, but…” Eijirou gave her a squeeze back when she stalled, encouraging her to keep going. She sighed deeply, letting her shoulders droop somewhat miserably. “…I just really, really wanted that win, you know?”

Eijirou huffed out a breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I get it. I'm not entirely happy with how my match turned out, either. I feel like I let a couple people down." All Might most of all. What kind of successor was he, if he couldn't even make it past the second round of the tournament? "You were totally amazing, tough!” he piped up, raising his voice a bit as he got some of his excitement back. “I mean, you actually fought Bakugou of all people head-on, woman-to-man, and held your own in close quarters! It was unreal! The guy’s just so insanely talented that it’s plain unfair!”

Uraraka let out laugh, then sobered up again as she said, “…It’s kind of annoying how good he is at everything, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” Eijirou agreed, with a furrow in his brow. They stared at each other for a bit, then broke out in identical grins right as they exited the tunnel and emerged from the labyrinthine network of hallways.

“Hey, look who it is!”

Eijirou found Sero hanging over the back of his seat, waving at the two of them as they walked up to rejoin their class. Ashido, sitting beside him, turned around as well when he called out to them, and instantly broke out in a very discomfiting smirk.

“Well, well, well! Holding hands with a pretty girl right as you come back from the dead? Literally walking on air, no less,” Sero pointed out, his own lips stretching out into a shit-eating grin that sent tingles of dread running down Eijirou’s spine. “You’re on fire today, aren’t you?”

“Dude, she’s just making me float since I’m not allowed to put any weight on my legs yet!” Eijirou immediately defended himself, feeling the back of his neck heating up.

“Speaking of things that are on fire,” Ashido cut right in, waggling her eyebrows at him. “Already making your move on Raka-chan so soon after feeling up Todoroki while you were both half-naked and in full view of the entirety of Japan? You little manwhore, you! I never knew you had it in you!”

Sitting in the row below Ashido and Sero, Tokoyami choked on thin air and had to have Ojiro pat him on the back to free up his airway again.

Speaking of things that were on fire, Eijirou’s cheeks were now very much on that list, as well. “Wha—what are you even talking about?!” he demanded, looking around at the faces of his other classmates. Their expressions ranged from amusement to pity and, in some cases, outright pointing and laughing. “I didn’t feel up Todoroki!” In his desperation, he sought out his classmate’s signature red-and-white mop of hair, and locked eyes with him. “…Did I?” he muttered out, feeling significantly less confident in his own innocence all of a sudden.

Todoroki stared back, his normally-placid features working their way through an impressive assortment of emotions in the span of about five seconds, before he very obviously looked off to the side to avoid further eye contact. Eijirou felt his stomach plummeting down to his knees. He swallowed thickly, and mustered his courage before daring to look at Ashido and Sero again.

They already had their phones held out to him; grainy, zoomed-in video evidence of him patting Todoroki’s cheek before going on to talk directly to his classmate’s pectoral muscles flashing on their screens. The increasingly-wicked grins they sported as Eijirou’s own expression turned to one of horror could have given even Bakugou’s Murder Face a run for its money.

Eijirou took a deep, cleansing breath when the videos stopped. “Uraraka-san? Could you do me a huge favor?” he asked, sporting a very calm demeanor that made him seem in full control of himself in spite of everything that had just happened.

“Sure thing!” she replied happily, the raw joy she was radiating indicating that she was finding a deep and personally fulfilling sort of enjoyment in their current predicament. “What do you need?”

“Could you launch me up into the stratosphere or, failing that, give me a little boost over to where Sero and Ashido are?"

Thoughtfully, she tapped a finger against her lips as she considered this. “Well, Aizawa-sensei banned me from putting any more artificial satellites into orbit, but I could definitely do the second one.”

He flashed her a polite and pleasant smile. “Thanks! You’re the best!” he said, and hopped up off the ground, placing the soles of his shoes against her waiting hands as he floated in place for a moment or two.

“Don’t even mention it!” she shot back just as pleasantly, and then launched him straight toward the pair of cackling knuckleheads like he was a crimson-tipped ballistic missile.

Screams promptly resounded throughout the entire arena from within 1-A’s section of the stands, and Uraraka cheerfully skipped her way back down to her own seat, filled with the satisfaction of a job well done.

“So, did I miss anything?” a slightly-roughed up Eijirou asked several violent minutes later as he slung his arms around Midoriya and Bakugou’s shoulders from behind, using his friends' bodies as physical anchors to keep from drifting off into space while Uraraka’s Quirk remained active.

“Well, you missed the last match of the second round, but to be honest, so did we,” Midoriya stated. He was frowning a little as he spoke, which had alarm bells going off in Eijirou’s head.

“Four-Eyes got called away right before the fight started,” Bakugou grunted out, prying Eijirou’s hand loose from around his shoulder before abruptly yanking him over the back of the seat next to him and plopping him down in it in one swift movement. As soon as Eijirou’s butt hit the plastic, Uraraka’s Zero Gravity was cancelled, and he was left flailing around a little when he suddenly had to choose between supporting his own weight again or sinking into a boneless puddle on the stadium floor.

“Why?” he asked as soon as he caught himself, leaning rather heavily into Bakugou’s personal space to address Midoriya and Uraraka, too. Bakugou growled in irritation, but didn’t actually bat him away, which only made Eijirou worry more. “And why isn’t Kami here, either?”

“…It sounded like Iida’s older brother had a run-in with a Villain that went south,” Midoriya explained. “I don’t know how serious his injuries are, but they were bad enough at least that he needed to be hospitalized. Kaminari-kun decided to go with Iida to Hosu General, since he didn’t want him to be alone.”

“But Iida’s older brother is Ingenium, isn’t he?” Eijirou remembered. “He’s an experienced, well-known Hero; his attacker must have been one hell of a bigshot Villain if they managed to get the best of him.”

“Or just one who got a lucky hit in,” Uraraka offered. She smiled encouragingly. “For all we know, he's just gonna need a simple stitching-up,” she suggested hopefully. “There’s no point in getting all gloomy so long as we don’t know any more.”

Eijirou hummed in acknowledgement and slowly let himself slink back down into his seat. “Yeah… I guess you’re right,” he muttered, seeing the logic in her words, yet still finding himself unable to dispel his lingering worries.

Just as he threatened to get lost inside his own head however, a sudden thought struck him, and he sat bolt upright again, spine snapping taut as his eyes widened dramatically. On his right, his three friends all stared at him with their eyebrows raised, and Eijirou paled drastically as the implications of Kaminari and Iida’s absence fully sunk in.

If both of them were gone at the same time, then… going by the established order of succession…

Did that make him the group's designated voice of reason now?

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and with robotic movements, Eijirou pulled it out to read the text message he’d just received.

From: Kaminari (15:38 PM)

> I’m sorry

Eijirou's stomach filled with lead and he gulped audibly. The phone buzzed again in his hand.

From: Kaminari (15:39 PM)

> ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Eijirou clenched the phone so tightly its screen nearly shattered to pieces between his fingers.

“Traitooooor!” he screamed from the very top of his lungs to the merciless skies above, which was rather underwhelming and less dramatic than he’d hoped for, considering the roar of the crowd drowned most of it out and the ‘merciless skies’ were a rather pleasant shade of cloudless blue on that particular afternoon.

His friends all regarded his emotional outburst with varying levels of confusion.

“What the fuck are you screaming about, Shitty Hair?” Bakugou demanded, leaning away from him as though he believed whatever had triggered Eijirou’s outburst to be contagious.

Eijirou deflated into a sad-looking, hunched-over posture as the full weight of his newfound responsibility fell down upon his shoulders, and let his arms hang limply by his sides in defeat. “It’s nothing,” he mumbled forlornly. “I’m just discovering an all-new appreciation for Iida and Kaminari's ability to put up with the rest of us.”

To his surprise, Bakugou actually grinned at that. “Sucks being the reasonable one, doesn’t it?” he asked.

Eijirou’s mouth dropped open a little. “Is… is there any chance you could help keep the other two…?” he began to ask, a tiny spark of hope daring to blossom within his chest. Bakugou, without so much as a hint of mercy, barked out a laugh and told him to eat shit.

Eijirou had to try very hard not to cry manly tears after the twofold betrayal he’d just fallen victim to.

“Oh, looks like the break’s over,” Uraraka spoke up, pointing at one of the giant screens that were mounted all around the arena. “They’re about to announce the third-round matchups!”

Instantly, Bakugou's amused grin slid off his face and he turned to look at the reveal of the Final Four. Eijirou noticed the way his hands tightened into fists when the semi-finalists’ pictures randomly began flashing back and forth between the four available slots.

Why was he acting so nervous? Bakugou didn’t seem like the type to favor any particular matchup for himself. No, he was definitely the kind of guy who’d bulldoze himself a path through whatever challenges life threw at him, Eijirou knew. It had to be something else, then. Something to do with that dreaded, 'capital P'-Plan of his for dealing with Endeavor, maybe?

Eijirou failed to suppress a shudder at the thought alone.

Bakugou’s own face was the first to appear amid the lineup, popping up within one of the slots for the first bracket, followed by Todoroki’s getting placed within the second, ensuring that they wouldn’t be fighting each other in this round. Bakugou’s posture grew more tense, still, at that, which lasted right up until Midoriya’s face finally appeared as well—matched up against Todoroki and not him. All at once, the tension bled right out of him, and he let his head tip back to rest against the back of his seat without even looking at who his own opponent was going to be.

“…You don't want to fight Midoriya,” Eijirou realized, narrowing his eyes at Bakugou curiously. “At, least not yet.” Bakugou kept his expression carefully neutral as he observed Eijirou through half-lidded eyes. “Whatever you’re planning on doing about Endeavor, both of you have to reach the final round for it work, don’t you?” Eijirou deduced, half-expecting that he wouldn’t be getting any response out of Bakugou, and half-convinced that not getting one was the safer alternative here as that at least would leave him with some plausible deniability for when calamity struck.

To his surprise however, Bakugou actually deigned to answer him.

“…I promised Deku I had this shit handled,” he grunted out, talking in a slow and disconcertingly subdued tone. “You think I’d let dumb fucking luck decide whether it worked out or not? Hell no,” he denied, sneering at Eijirou. “I could have pulled it off no matter what the matchups ended up looking like,” he boasted, absolute certainty backing his words. “Me and Deku both making it to the finale just makes it a whole lot easier to draw the attention we'll need.” Abruptly, he jerked forward, shooting up from his slouch as he got to his feet.

“Now stop your pansy-ass worrying already,” he commanded brusquely. “When I do something, I do it right, dammit. No one’s even gonna realize until it’s too late to do anything about it.” He reared up to his full height as he shifted his attention from Eijirou to Midoriya. “My way doesn’t end with fucking police sirens, because I’m not a useless Deku,” he stated imperiously, with just a hint of a smirk playing on his lips.

Midoriya’s own, ever-present smile gained a sharper edge to it, and Eijirou had to swallow thickly. “You’re right,” Midoriya agreed easily—too easily—as his eyes glimmered mischievously. “You’re definitely better at this sort of thing than I am, Kacchan.”

Just the slightest, teensiest hint of uncertainty slipped into Bakugou’s expression.

“Anyway, you might wanna go down to your waiting room,” Midoriya went right on. “Your match is gonna start soon, and you shouldn’t have to rush there at the last minute.” He tilted his head and grinned, baring a mouthful of dagger-like teeth. “You wouldn’t want to have to fight your opponent while you’re already out of breath, do you? He’s pretty good, after all. With a Quirk like his, he might even get the better of you if you're not careful.”

Midoriya had known all along who the mystery  contestant was! Eijirou knew it! But then… why had he gone through the trouble of keeping it a secret this whole time? Whoever this guy was, he'd finished his own match against Tokoyami in record time, despite Tokoyami being an absolute powerhouse in his own right! Just what was Midoriya playing at, keeping this guy's identity and abilities hidden from his friends, and from Bakugou in particular?

While his mind reeled with the implications, Bakugou simply huffed, trying his best to look unimpressed. “Whatever. Just make sure you don’t go losing to Icy-Hot; we can meet in the finals just as soon as I'm done kicking this extra's ass to the curb.” Then, finally, Bakugou turned around again to watch the announcement screen, and Eijirou followed his gaze. Both of them frowned when the identity of the tournament's dark horse was revealed at long last.

Blinking in consternation, Bakugou turned back to Midoriya, and asked, “…Wait, who the fuck is Shinsou Hitoshi?”