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Bakugou looked up, the sun shining right onto his face as he felt the foot holding him in place on the ground, completely defeated.
“You think you’re hot shit, huh?” you said with an angry expression, using Borrow to take Bakugou’s quirk for as long as you touched him. “You don’t look so brave when you’re lying there helpless.”
But it was there, a few weeks after the beginning of the first year of school, that you had already won his cold heart without even trying to: it had been an accident right outside the main gates where he hit you pretty bad on the back with a book he had blown out of Deku’s backpack, and when he refused to apologized you took no time in reducing him to the ground. He wouldn’t give in though, but after you proved that you were able to use your quirk to leave him without one he was left speechless, both by the surprise and by your audacity; he had wanted to fight back, he did, but the look on your face made him stop.
“Tch, whatever, just get off of me so I can get to class safely,” he said with a hint of disdain hidden in his voice, and it had seemed like you were finally done with him when you finally stepped away, making his power come back. However, you stayed close enough to be able to grab his arm and push him back, making him fall on a big mud puddle that was so conveniently placed nearby. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hissed, but you turned around and walked towards the building, not paying any attention to his raging shouts.
He thought he hated you – the image of your satisfied face as you stared him from above was enough to send him into a fit of rage inside, but he was too proud to admit that he was still thinking about it. Trying his best to brush it off and act like nothing happened, he walked into the classroom every day to your smug smile directed at him, which prompted him to want to blow up the entire room.
During class trainings, he always went against you in one way or another, but his desire to get ‘revenge’ as he called it for what you had done to him got in the way, making him lose focus and actually lose a couple of times before he understood again that he needed a clear head for it. No one saw anything weird when he used all his might to bring you down or when he seemed to be angrier when you defeated him, but it secretly became a game for everyone else in the class to guess who’d win next. Katsuki on the other side was beyond mad; not even Deku had made him lose his mind like that, and he wasn’t really sure about how to react to your very obvious taunts.
You were driving him mad and you knew it… and you enjoyed it.
Yet whenever he tried to focus on defeating you and keeping you away from him, those thoughts were pushed away by the image of your smile, of the satisfied look on your face when you defeated him or the way you so openly mocked him to the point where it was truly hard to bare. There was more behind that and maybe Katsuki was aware of it but he preferred to ignore it instead of making those feelings, the ones that made his heart go crazy at the sole sight of you, grow bigger than anything else, but he still couldn’t deny he felt some sort of happiness when thinking of you.
He could’ve been imagining things when, one day, you suddenly acted nice once more to him, asking him for help with homework and even giving him some tips on how to win whenever he battled you as you shared some time alone at the library, but despite his greatest efforts to not fuck it up he managed to be aggressive towards you once more as you tried to explain the side effects of your quirk, effectively making you forget the kindness. “And how exactly does that help me? Do you really think I’m that fucking weak? I only let you win because I think you’re pathetic.”
Shock crossed your face before you got up and raised a hand as if to slap him, which made him get up as well and get into a defensive stance. It was then that your expression turned from angry to disappointed to sad, and it was his turn to be shocked when he saw your eyes getting teary.
“I fucking thought we could get along, you know?” you started, dropping your hand to the side and letting your body relax – by that time he wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to do, and only froze in place as you spoke. “I was stupid enough to try and act like you so you could like me the way I like you, but if you still think that I’m pathetic then there’s really no reason to continue with this. I’m sorry I made you waste your precious fucking time.”
Katsuki could feel the few students’ stares around you, and while under other circumstances he would’ve told them off he just couldn’t move beyond straightening his body and looking at you straight in the eye, feeling his heart turn into a hole that drained all of the previous better feelings. “(Y/N)…” he started, his frown growing deeper, but before he could add anything else you turned around and walked away, your perfume leaving a small trail that he was tempted to follow as you disappeared between the big bookshelves.
In his 16 years of life there was something Katsuki had never truly experienced – being treated like a jerk by someone he held dear and feeling like one. His eyes moved from the shelves to the table as he saw everyone around him go back to their activities, and he noticed you had left your books there. Putting a hand above them, he only sat back down with a now bored expression as he thought of different ways he could get them back to you.
He knew fully well that he’d have to act nice in order for you to trust him again and want to get closer, but he just didn’t know how; the one thing he did not know though was that he wasn’t one to back down from a challenge, and you had just presented him with something he’d most likely enjoy.
He wouldn’t lose his chance, even if it meant he’d have to put his whole into winning you back.