Chapter Text
It had been a trap.
Bakugo's ears were ringing. His insides felt like mush and someone had left his brain on vibrate.
Propping himself up on his elbows, grenadiers digging into the hard, concrete floor, he managed to lift his head up through the nausea and look around. The villain's layer was destroyed—the walls were crumbling, the ceiling was likewise in pieces, and a distinct smell of ozone lingered in the air. Groaning as he sat up, Bakugo's scrambled mind tried to quickly piece together the scattered shards of what the hell had just happened. It wasn't easy, his inner attentiveness diverting to other things, like how to make his heart stop pounding so loudly in the space between his ears, or how to realign the muscles of his body that felt like they didn't fit quite right across his bones.
Slumping on his knees, Bakugo spat dirt and ire from his lips. Explosions were his thing. To think that the shitty Villain Alliance thought they could use them against him was as much of a joke as it was infuriating. He was okay, luckily. There was a nasty gash in his thigh and small cuts and scrapes covered the exposed planes of his skin—but that seemed to be the worst of the damage. Nothing major was broken, and aside from the adrenaline pounding hot like tar through his veins, he could still move, still breath. That was a miracle in itself.
Except it wasn't a miracle. Someone had saved him.
"Fuck." Bakugo coughed, peering through the dusty air, searching the rubble.
Her pink helmet stuck out in the gloom like a lighthouse in a storm. Cursing, he fumbled to his feet and scrabbled over the chunks of broken architecture, hot emotions of anger and panic pricking in his chest. Questions—so many damn questions—bloomed in his mind like a bed of daisies:
Why had she been following him?
(Is she okay?)
What the hell was she thinking?!
(Please be okay.)
As he rolled heavy stones off of her body—so still, she was so still—Bakugo scanned her for injuries, the dust of concrete and panic stinging his eyes.
She seemed relatively unharmed; like him, cuts and scrapes and rips in her costume glinting with fresh, dirty blood. She was even awake, eyes open, gaze staring at something a thousand miles off in the distance through the cracked visor of her helmet. But her face—blank, and so pale, even the apples of her cheeks—spoke of something fractured deep, deep within.
Bakugo's alertness and awareness trickled back to him, growing like a weed. He tapped her cheek, mumbling her name. The smell in the air stung sharply in the back of his nose, a red flag in his mind of unseen danger. They weren't safe yet. Whatever kind of bomb those bastards of the Villain Alliance had manufactured... it had done something more than just explode. Concern tied a heavy knot in his stomach. He knew he had to work fast.
"Hey, Pink Cheeks." His voice ground in his throat, tongue tasting like dirt. "Fucking look at me, dammit!"
And she did. But Uraraka's eyes weren't seeing him. She hadn't heard a single word he had said, not in a way that mattered.
She was shell shocked. Perfect.
A small twinge of worry for her somewhere behind his heart, a slight fear that something somewhere was broken. He paused, hovering over her and considering what to do next. He couldn't wait around for her to regain herself, he knew that, so Bakugo worked his hands underneath her neck and knees. They needed to get the hell out of there. Scooping her up into his arms, Bakugo hoisted her up onto his grenadiers and gracelessly flopped her head up over his shoulder. Her breaths—short, shallow, and laced with a small whine—puffed against his neck.
Bakugo felt sick, and he wasn't sure if it was her pain or the atmosphere that was the cause. Standing on shaky legs, his feet shuffled into unsteady, stumbling steps, then settled into a limping trot as he left the room and the rubble behind. If Uraraka was uncomfortable as she bounced against him, she didn't say anything. The wrecked halls of the compound tunneled around him as he moved, his own mind far out-running him. Bakugo's eyes drifted down to her cracked visor. Uraraka was not the kind of person to stray too far from her team, not like him. She didn't go off on her own.
So why? Why had she been there? Where were the rest of their classmates? Before the blast, Bakugo had heard the ambient echoes of skirmish drifting through the walls, battles of U.A. against the weak underlings that the League of Villains had managed to dig up from the muck of society. Now, it was eerily quiet, only the sounds of his boots scraping over the floor.
Bakugo halted, realization and a heavy choler hitting him like a ton of bricks.
Those weren't his boots.
Before Bakugo could slip back into fight-mode, Midoriya rounded the corner ahead of him, emerging from the shadows like a spark. The other boy twisted his head, looking both ways down the hallway. He froze when he saw them, frantic worry glinting in his wide, green eyes.
"Kacchan! Uraraka!" He rushed towards them with that uncanny, ridiculous speed of his. The girl in Bakugo's arms shifted at the voice of her friend, lifting her chin from his shoulder. Bakugo, despite his annoyed relief, instinctively flinched back. A sudden memory of something he had read about regarding hazardous catastrophes—what if whatever was in that bomb was contagious?
"Stay back, Deku!" He shouted. If his arms might have clutched Uraraka a little tighter, it wasn't his fault.
Midoriya skidded to a stop just as the last of Bakugo's strength slipped away. His knees gave out on him, and he tumbled to the floor as a frustrated growl tumbled from his lips, holding fast to Uraraka. She was starting to move, small fidgets and twitches as she finally regained herself. Her breaths came ragged and quick, small groans of pain escaping her clenched teeth. Eyelids feeling heavy, Bakugo looked up at Midoriya. The stupid look of confusion and worry on the other boy's face was pissing him off—but he knew he needed to explain what had happened if he wanted to get out. It was already hard to talk without Uraraka's weight pressing down on his chest.
"There was... a trap, in the last god damn room. Fucking bomb, I think. I don't know... feels like I got hit by a goddamn nuclear reactor."
His own words winded him, a sure sign that something was very wrong. Deku's mouth fell open, his eyes watering with an anxious possibility. But he broke himself out of his torpor and put a finger to his ear, speaking quickly to the people on the other end of the piece.
Bakugo looked down to Uraraka, seeing her face and those eyes looking up at him. Her gaze was clear now, and for all the numb stoicism his training and shock had managed to allow him thus far, he wasn't prepared for the shining, beckoning depths of her eyes. Uraraka wrapped her arms around Bakugo, the soft pads of her fingers ghosting over his back. Her face was pale and pinched, eyebrows drawn together and bottom lip tucked between her teeth. When she pressed her cheek to his shoulder, when the first tear rolled through the dirt and dust smudging her face, Bakugo couldn't tell if she was the one seeking comfort or doing the comforting.
He wanted to wipe that tear away. If his hands weren't already full of her, he might have.
She wasn't supposed to cry. She was so strong—why was she crying?
"After you went charging off by yourself," Midoriya started, capturing Bakugo's attention. "We figured out that Tomura Shigaraki wasn't here, that this whole thing was just a set up. Urara-Uravity went off to find you, to tell you that something wasn't right."
Midoriya's voice was shaking, but Bakugo wasn't fooled. Hot, rumbling rage blazed in his green eyes like a thunderstorm hanging on the horizon.
"We had every bomb deactivated," Midoroya seethed. "All of them, but one."
Suddenly it made sense, and Bakugo realized what an idiot he had been.
He had taken out his ear piece, because he didn't need somebody in his head telling him who to punch. If anybody was going to find Shigaraki in this damn maze of halls and rooms, it was going to be him. He had a score to settle, a vengeance that screamed from the marrow in his bones for the retribution of the indignity of being taken against his will. Having to be rescued, like a helpless damsel... and the price that was paid for it. The tunnel vision of Bakugo's battlelust had blinded him to anything else. He thought he had heard someone calling his name—possibly—maybe... but he'd ignored it, and he didn't have a good reason why.
He was being stupid and got burned. His jaw clenched, teeth groaning in their sockets.
If he had taken one more step into that room—if he had been any closer to that fucking bomb—if she hadn't yanked him back—
No, if he had just fucking stopped and listened, then this wouldn't have happened.
Instead, she got caught up in his massive mistake.
"If she's hurt in any way-" Midoriya trembled as he spoke, though it wasn't fear that made him shiver. His words were cut off by the distant stampede of approaching footsteps.
He didn't need to finish, though. Bakugo didn't have the courage or shame to admit that he would blame himself, too. Guilt settled like a heavy blanket across his shoulders.
People in hazmat suites arrived like a swarm of silver-foil bees, crowding around Bakugo and Uraraka with careful curiosity. He was escorted out of the building, his arms still full with her quivering form. Too shaken to stand, Uraraka tightened her grip on Bakugo's shirt, pressed her mouth into his shoulder, and clung to him like a lifeline in a storm. He didn't mind. Carrying her was the least he could do—his burning arms were just going to have to deal with it. Midoriya followed at a nearly safe distance, his gaze numb and calculating where it rested on Uraraka's face.
Stepping outside, the cool air of late evening washed over Bakugo, kissing the exposed, heated parts of him with relief. Uraraka shivered against him, tight discomfort rolling through her. The red and blue strobe of police lights speared through his eyes, a myriad of camera flashes echoing the glare. Reporters crowded like trapped mice behind metal barricades, shouting all at once in a jumbled menagerie of words. They wanted the scoop on the raid, of course, the front page headliner on the promising hero class and their first official operation. Bakugo flinched away from the cameras, turning himself—and Uraraka—away from the views of their lenses.
Midoriya reluctantly joined the disorganized ranks of their other classmates, the small crowd of their peers watching him solemnly as if he were marching in a wake. He refused to take their pity, sneering his confidence and anger straight ahead into a small tent, wobbly and draped with plastic blue tarp. The flaps of the tarp closed behind him like a final curtain.
It seemed so much calmer inside the tent, where the police lights and press cameras didn't blare so brightly and the shouts of officers and reporters didn't ring so loudly. The sudden shift left a dissonance between Bakugo's heightened attention and the cloaking quiet. Only now, within the liminal space of coming down from his adrenaline high, did he feel the burn in his arms and back, hear his own ragged breathing scraping alongside Uraraka's.
Bakugo twisted his head toward her, his lips hovering above her visor, and spoke in a low voice. "I've gotta put you down now."
He hadn't been expecting a response, so when she nodded against his neck... well, "relieved" wasn't a strong enough word. But it would have to do.
Gently setting her down, Bakugo palmed his hand on her back, pressing his support and stability into her. Uraraka wobbled, her ankles rolling dangerously under her weight, but steadied herself against his shoulder. She had yet to speak a word, he realized, watching her remap the limbs of her body like a child. Uraraka looked about as sick as Bakugo felt, understandably. Her tears had stopped falling, and for all her fight and determination, she stood tall after a moment and squared her feet beneath her. Bakugo watched her face, watched the different shades of pain and nausea and dizziness paint her face for the slightest moment before disappearing behind a mask of nonchalance.
He wasn't buying it.
A mechanical clicking, sweeping and harrowing, buzzed into his ear like an angry fly. One of the hazmat crew stepped toward them, a gauge held in one hand and a thick silver wand in the other—a Geiger counter. The wand drifted closer, and as it did, the device creaked louder and faster. It was so loud, Bakugo frowned, their classmates outside could probably hear it. Uraraka flinched, the wand passing over her face and chest.
"Peaking at 80 rads," the crew guy said. The large, tinted shield of the hazmat suite's hood hid the person within. They looked like a tacky alien from an old movie. "Have the van prepped, we need to get these guys out of here."
"What's going on?" Bakugo asked, his voice croaking in his throat. "Where are you taking us?"
"A decontamination facility. It's not far from here," the alien said. "Then you'll be monitored for ARS."
They were showered in cold water there in the tent, scrubbed with stiff brushes through their clothes for what seemed like an absurd amount of time. The bristles burned across his skin, slicing into the dirty cuts and scrapes on his body. It was all so procedural and impersonal, letting the hazmat team manhandle them like animals or objects. Even when Uraraka hissed a pained wince, the aliens did nothing but resume scrubbing away. Whether it was his own selfish anger that spurred him to move or something else, Bakugo grabbed the brush, yanking it out of their hands and throwing it to the ground. They were done, he proclaimed, and the aliens didn't argue.
They loaded into a van, empty and isolated from the driver's in the front. Two hard plastic benches lined the insolated, perforated walls of the van. It looked like a prisoner transporter, Bakugo thought. It probably was, meant for Shigaraki's capture. Instead, it carried two sick teenagers. There was a joke in there somewhere. Not a good one, but a joke nonetheless.
Bakugo and Uraraka sat across from each other, and for the first time since shaking himself awake coughing and wheezing after the explosion, it was quiet, and they were alone.
Water dripped from her hair and face. Her helmet rested in her lap, arms wrapped around the thing tightly. She was still pale, he noticed—even those cheeks that he always gave her crap for seemed sallow and thin. He was staring at her now, and he knew it, but she was just so... small, hunched there before him. Not fragile, never fragile, but still delicate in that moment, shivering like a wet kitten. Uraraka was just a girl, a headstrong and kind-to-a-fault one, but still a girl who had rushed into the jaws of destruction for him. That alone took a type of selfless grit he wasn't sure he would ever have.
Now she was crumbling. She was trying so hard to be strong, and he could commend her for that. But she was trapped in her mind with her thoughts and pain, doing more damage to herself than any bomb could.
A bomb that shouldn't have gone off in the first place.
Bakugo couldn't just sit there. He was never good with inaction, and even less so with passive-aggressive guilt. When he stood from his seat, when he shuffled across the narrow aisle and plopped down beside her, she looked up at him forlornly and tore another piece of his resolve to shreds.
His wet thigh squished against hers, the chill of her damp suit seeping through the thick cotton of his pants. Damn, she was freezing.
Wiggling his hand out of his grenadier, Bakugo draped his arm across her shoulders. For once, he was thankful to have the internal body temperature of a volcano.
She stiffened beneath him, a small, shaky sigh huffing past her lips as a bit of the cold burned away. He could feel the moment she relaxed, if only a little, settling with a little less misery on her chin. She tilted her face up to him, meeting his eyes and truly seeing him for the first time. Her brown eyes sparkled, she was so close to him that he could count the fibers of her irises. The smell of her damp hair wafted to his nostrils—sweet, like mountain air, even after everything.
Her lips parted, but no words came. For a moment, they lingered in that space of kinetic potential, nothing but the rumbling of the van and all the things they couldn't say filling the gap between them.
Her face tensed, eyebrows pinching together. Small, almost unnoticeable tears glistened quietly in her eyes—her chin dipped to her chest before she would let him see them fall. Bakugo thought that was all he was going to get from her, until she shifted closer to him, pressing her hip against his and leaning into the crook of his chest. Settling her head onto his shoulder, she huffed a content breath. His hand drifted down to her forearm, his thumb rubbing comforting circles into her costume.
He didn't feel any better, though—he didn't deserve her trust, her faith, or her amnesty. But this was helping, somehow. Her shivering quieted to tremoring, and then to occasional twitches.
He'd never been close to her like this, in this strange, almost intimate moment lingering between the comfort of his desires that he had denied and a new, selfless urge to protect.
Turning his head towards her, Bakugo's lips brushed her hair and he closed his eyes. This was good, this was helping. It didn't change the fact that they were only in this situation because of him.
The rare tenderness didn't last long. They arrived at the facility, though really, it was just a hospital with a containment wing. The Infectious Disease Unit, normally meant to contain small pox or diphtheria or giardia, would serve as their fortress of solitude and isolation until they either got better or they... well, until they got better.
The same silver-foil-alien-bees walked them through the long halls of the hospital. They passed through a secured checkpoint, a sterilization chamber, and another secured checkpoint. It would have been neat if the pomp and circumstance of it all wasn't so ridiculous.
The isolation ward was small, a set of observation rooms occupied by little more than a twin bed and a small bathroom from what Bakugo could see as they walked by. Finally, the last stop was the decontamination unit, nearly bare of anything except a couple changing rooms and a line of showers. It reminded Bakugo of the locker rooms back at school. This one, however, smelled like disinfectant and hydrogen peroxide rather than teenage cologne and musty boy-sweat.
One of the bees that called themselves a 'doctor' quickly gave them the low-down; they needed to take another shower, a proper one this time. Their gear and garments were to be collected in trash bags. Afterwards, they would be observed for 24-hours, separately. If neither of them showed any sign of Acute Radiation Syndrome, or radiation poisoning, then they would be allowed to go home. Their costumes, unfortunately, would have to be burned. The school would make sure they got new ones in a timely manner.
Being in that decontamination unit made the situation starkly real. Uraraka and Bakugo had gotten through by the skin of their teeth—and they weren't out of the woods yet. Something acidic and unsettling sank through Bakugo's gut, knowing that there was another, very possible reality in which he had left that compound in a bag. Uraraka, too.
The bees left, finally, to set up the observation rooms and give them both a semblance of privacy. Bakugo stared at the three showers; no curtains, separated by steel walls, and only a cracked, dry bar of soap sitting sadly in a small caddy in each one. Plastic trash bags sat out on a bench leaning against the far wall, and a pair of scrubs for each of them waited in the changing rooms.
When he had woken up that same morning, this wasn't at all how he thought the day was going to end: hurting and aching, scrubbing danger and death and sickness off of his skin, trapped like a lab rat, and alone with the girl who had saved his life.
Blowing resignation from his teeth, he took a step toward the showers, already shrugging out of his grenadiers—but then a tug on his shirt urged him to stop, a gentle touch beckoning him to wait. Uraraka loosely clutched the fabric, her posture closed and submissive—small. She didn't look at him, though he could see her intentions in her eyes; a cry for help, if only to get her through these next steps.
His heart squeezed in his chest, uncertainty and—no, not fear, but trepidation a vice on his ribs. Was he capable of being the person she needed? He wasn't sure, but he had to try. He turned to her, feeling the lightness of her fingers trace over his abdomen as he did. Huffing a sigh through his nose, Bakugo took her hand.
"Come on, Uraraka." He tugged gently, and she stepped into him. "Let's get this over with."
He lead her to the showers, the small click clack of her boots echoing from the tile walls. She stopped by the bench while Bakugo wandered to a shower and cranked the faucet. The showerhead hissed for a moment, then burst with water. Within a few moments, a steady and building cloud of steam crawled up the walls and fanned across the ceiling. They would have to undress, he knew, and somehow maneuver around their own dignities when they did.
Uraraka sat with the jagged motions of a robot next to the plastic bags. She sat motionless for a while, her gaze lost in the pale tiles around her and the darkness of inevitabilities and possibilities. Her shoulders quivered, fingers white as she clutched her helmet. She couldn't last much longer. She was breaking down, and fast.
He couldn't blame her for being scared. This place, though not intentionally imposing, held a heartless despair that ate away at her already fragile resolve. He could feel it too, something lurking between now and whatever came next, feeding on the exhaustion hanging from his skull and the nausea in his stomach that whispered of something more than over-exertion. He would deal with his own trauma in his own way at a later time—probably.
But seeing her like this, hanging on to her strength and honor by her fingertips, was hurting more. She was trying so hard not to fall apart, to not be the fragile girl that he already knew she wasn't.
This was his fault. He had done this to her. They were here because of him.
He needed to do something. But he knew that nothing he did would ever be enough to make up for what had happened. Not in a million years.
He knelt before her, dropping into her gaze. The full brunt of her brimming panic smacked him like a slap to the face. Bakugo reached for her, gently laying his gloved hands over hers. She flinched, but still, her tears didn't fall.
Delicately, he pried the helmet from her grasp and placed it on the floor.
"We need to get our gear off, okay Pink Cheeks?" Bakugo said. Behind the gentle tone he'd been trying to muster, a rough, scraping growl threaded into his voice.
She blinked at him, then nodded, then began fingering off her gloves.
Without really thinking about it, Bakugo pulled his own glove off with his teeth. Light touches, like starlight falling through a window in the night, his hands wandered down behind her knees, finding the zipper pull on her boots. They slid off of her legs without struggle, the pastel pink now smudged and dirty with dust and grime. Her socks—printed with little cartoon images of mochi... cute—came off next. Her small toes tapped lightly against the floor, curling against the stone tiles.
He deftly undid the belt around her waist next, letting it clink unceremoniously on top of her boots. Uraraka had managed to get both of her gloves and one of her gauntlets off, but her hands were shaking, her fingers fumbling clumsily at the other one. He brushed her hand aside, holding her wrist up firmly to unclasp the thing and toss those and her gloves to the pile on the floor.
Maybe, just maybe, he could feel the faint pulse of her heart beneath his fingers. Only in the the faintest recollection of his dreams had he ever touched her like this.
His hands moved up slowly towards her face. She didn't seem to mind or care as his fingers curled around her neck. As he worked to unclasped the collar meant to protect her spine, she stared at him, something abysmal and almost-true shining from the depths of her eyes. Her tears—fuck, her tears—haloed her gaze like a frame of exploding stars that would collapse any moment. The collar came undone with a soft click, and it was added to the pile. She was left only in her torn spandex suit, trembling and starting to whimper. The small sounds, soft and yet bouncing on the hard tile walls, each a small spear that pierced his waning fortitude.
Bakugo stood, holding his hands out to her. She took them, and he pulled her to her feet.
"Okay, great. You're doing great. Now come on." His words sounded silly to him, but Uraraka wasn't laughing.
With a gentle nudge, Bakugo ushered her under the shower, into the steam where she could feel true warmth. She let go of his hand, inhaling sharply as the water cascaded over her. Closing her eyes, Uraraka stepped into the stream, letting the water fall through her dirty brown hair. Bakugo watched her, watched as her suit clung just a little tighter to her body, watched as small trickles of rusty-red and ashy-brown drained down her ankles, dripping from scrapes and cuts opened up once more.
Bakugo stared at the grit, watching it swirl around the drain. He had made her bleed. It felt like an unforgivable sin.
A crack splintered through the numb mask he had been so careful to maintain, for her sake and his own. Hot ire, a biting ache that choked in his throat and pulled through the muscles in his heart—something threatened to tear, and Bakugo knew that he would never really forgive himself for what he had done to her.
But he wasn't willing or prepared to deal with that right now. She couldn't see him breaking down, not now.
Spinning away from her, Bakugo sat down on the bench and began unlacing his boots.
Steam had already begun to hang thick in the air by the time he had removed his affects and stuffed both his and Uraraka's gear into trash bags. The rising heat and lingering moisture expanded in Bakugo's lungs, loosening the pent up tightness and he could finally breathe. The new lightness, though, didn't ease the churning in his stomach, or dull the razor blades in his brain. He felt like he was sleepwalking as he shambled toward his own shower, his mind fogged with exhaustion and limbs heavy as wet send.
"Bakugo."
Her voice was so small, cutting through the cacophony of the shower. He almost hadn't heard her.
He could hardly recognize her voice—strained, unsteady, solid with the memory of her passed out on the floor of the arena before him and still trying to win. Bakugo didn't want to look at her, didn't want to see her hurt or her disappointment or her resentment.
Did she blame him? Did she hate him now, too? Bakugo was used to the sidelong sneers and stiff upper-lips of people who thought less than ideally of him, and for all his devil-may-care attitude, he really didn't give a damn about the opinions of others.
But her... if she never spoke to him again, never smiled at him when she caught him staring at her...
His eyes drifted to her, naturally drawn like a magnet to iron despite his best efforts. Water trickled down Uraraka's face, small rivulets that flowed from her hair and across her cheeks. One look at her tight, desperate, happy smile, and Bakugo knew that her forgiveness would be so much worse.
"We... we almost died," she whispered. Her hands trembled, fingers picking at the waist of her suit. Strands of her hair clung to her forehead and lips. "I... you... almost didn't make it... I was so scared..."
"Uraraka..." Her name felt like a swear word as it fell from his tongue—a name that he had no right to call her after what had happened. He had no right to stand before her and dare to hope that she might speak the words that would ease his guilt.
"I... I don't know... mmhhh..." She choked back a sob, sniffed, and somehow managed to huff a small laugh. "I don't know... what I would have done... if I had lost you..."
The steam shrouded her form in wisps of ethereal grace, and for a single heart beat, Bakugo believed that she might have been a ghost—that she was still buried under the rubble back at the compound, broken and bruised and growing cold. This girl was nothing more than a phantom he'd brought with him, too ignorant and stubborn to face the reality that he had failed her-
No, she had to be real—had to be alive-
He couldn't live with himself if she was-
His feet carried him to her, a sharp panic digging from his heels. Hot water washed over his head and shoulders, stinging in the cuts and scrapes on his skin, burning across his back. He didn't care about that, only that when he wrapped his arms around Uraraka, she was there, shaking and sobbing, but she was there and she was alive. She was with him, and she didn't regret saving his life. What little grasp Bakugo had on his resilience slipped, and he fell over the edge, into the abyss of his dread.
Uraraka fell with him. She bawled into his chest, the desperate touch of her fingers grasping at his shirt pulling him closer. She was shaking—at least, he was pretty sure it was her—and so he gently eased her to the tile floor of the shower. She collapsed in his lap, clinging to him just like she had as he had carried her from the ruined room. His blood, diluted and discolored, dripped from the edge of his frame, mixing with the lingering remnants of Uraraka's own. She pressed herself into him, or he squeezed her tighter, anything to keep her from disappearing into the steam.
"It's gonna be okay," he breathed into her ear. "I'm sorry." Those words tumbled from his mouth ad nauseam, barely audible under the roar of the shower echoing in the din off of the sterile tiled walls. His heart hammered against hers, impossibly loud in his ears as they clung to each other.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Heroes didn't do this, didn't jeopardize their missions or endanger the people who were only trying to help. Some hero. Something hot and corrosive churned beneath his ribs, a seering tightness that coiled like a rusty spring of barbed-wire.
Bakugo wanted to scream—wanted Uraraka to scream, to yell and punch and kick and berate him for the massive fuck-up that had nearly taken her life. But when she straightened in his lap, lifting her head to look him in the eye, she smiled and those soft pads on her fingers touched his cheek.
"I'm so glad..." Uraraka beamed into him, and for all the harrowing cataclysms he'd witnessed till that moment, he may have forgotten how to breathe. "That you're alive, Bakugo."
Her words were kind—that didn't dull the blade of the knife that speared through his heart. He couldn't look at her, couldn't allow himself to believe that she would really be so forgiving after everything. His chin dipped to his chest, that tightness moving up into his throat and smashing into the back of his teeth. He felt her forehead press against his, her hand cradling the back of his head. She laughed again, falling into his shoulder where she pressed into the crook of his neck.
Call it weakness, call it desperation, but maybe Bakugo just wanted to allow himself a small comfort when he pressed his face to her wet hair, when he swallowed past the steel wool in this throat and huffed a sigh drenched with ache.
Uraraka matched his sigh, her lips ghosting against the curve of his jaw as she continued to cry and laugh out her woes. Neither of them could pretend to be strong any longer.
It was here, under the hot water of the shower in the decontamination unit, where Bakugo and Uraraka started to unravel, guilt and sorrow washed from their bodies along with the hazardous materials that had almost killed them. Here, where something shifted in Bakugo, the ending of one epoch and the start of another. There was so much farther to go, so much more to learn—about being a hero, and about himself.
But for now, he just wanted to sit with his misery and what little comfort he could squeeze from the girl in his arms. Bakugo closed his eyes, feeling the hot water trickle over his body and wash his dark feelings away in the sanctuary of her presence. Uraraka grinned into his neck, a potent relief pulsing from her heart, through her skin and into his blood. The color had returned to her cheeks, and if Bakugo could have picked a color that meant hope...
It wasn't much, but it was enough. They were alive, both of them. That was all they could ever ask for.