Chapter Text
After All Might retires, the incidence of both petty and criminal villainy increases, to the point where even those with provisional licenses are pulled into patrols to help the local police force keep the peace. Today, their objective is to bring in someone with an unregistered Quirk for questioning- it appears the League of Villains is recruiting heavily, this suspect is one of their targets.
Part school exercise, part hero internship, running down petty criminals is not glamorous hero work, but for Ochako it’s not a problem, or well it wasn’t a problem, except…they’ve chased this guy into a blind alley, and even though Ochako got here first, Bakugou is hot on her heels as the closest backup available, and he’s literally breathing down her neck with his characteristic impatience to just do something.
With half their second year gone, and only one more year left until their schooling at UA comes to a conclusion, they’re as close to pro-Heroes as they can be without carrying the actual license. Pro agencies are already paying close attention to their class and it’s likely that some of them might begin getting recruitment offers by their third year. It’s this thought that’s first and foremost on her mind. The second thought: Bakugou’s gotten a lot more takedowns than her, despite getting his provisional license later.
“You just going to stand there?” he growls, and without looking back, she knows he’s practically foaming at the mouth for want of something to hit.
“Hold on a second,” she bristles, when all she wants to do is to tell him to back-off. This is her collar and she needs it more than he does. “We don’t know even know what his Quirk is yet.”
Bakugou’s lip curls as he looks the perp over, evaluating and dismissing in an instant. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he says, so self-assured that Ochako can’t help but envy him. And it’s true, the villain they’re chasing looks about ready to soil himself in fear. They cornered him too easily.
Bakugou looks over at Ochako, brows knitted into a frown as if he can’t get quite why she’s hesitant and Ochako thinks that it’s almost like he’s disappointed somehow. But that can’t be right? Then, he rolls his shoulder in a loose shrug and his body tenses like his well of forbearance has dried up, like the timer on the countdown clock of his patience just hit zero.
He makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat. “I’m going if you’re not,” he snaps.
And Ochako knows that she has exactly five seconds to make her move. “This one is mine,” she says quickly as she can, shoving down her annoyance at the way he seems to steal the spotlight wherever he goes, however unintentional. He can’t help it, that’s just the way Bakugou is. It’s undeniable— he’s got a presence that draws the eye and a flashy Quirk too. Whereas Ochako feels like she sometimes gets lost in the sea of excellence that is UA.
She steps forward hastily and that’s when she makes A Very Big Mistake. If this were a graded exercise Aizawa would have given her negative points.
“I’m not going back to jail!” the criminal wails as she’s trying to get the Quirk suppression cuffs on him. In an unexpected burst of strength and speed, likely fueled by the not-going-back-to-jail type of desperation, he grabs her by the neck and slams her into the wall.
The back of her head bounces off the bricks, she feels her hair snag on the mortar. There’s a moment of disorientation as everything seems to tilt and shift, like she has stayed in the air a little too long and the imminent arrival of her lunch in reverse is about to happen.
Ochako hears Bakugou cursing and the crackle of a small explosion. Gritting her teeth, Ochako grabs at the villain’s wrist, all five finger pads make contact, and she’s about to send him into orbit when he flashes her a greasy yellow grin and throws her at Bakugou. And then everything goes black.
Something feels strangely off balance when she wakes up. Her head is hurting something fierce and her mouth feels like it had been stuffed with cotton.
Groaning, she sits up and comes face to face with Aizawa’s bloodshot, half-lidded eyes leaning in just a little bit too close into her bubble of personal space
“How are you feeling, Bakugou?” he asks in his usual exhausted monotone. “You were out for a while.”
“Bakugou—” Uraraka starts to ask but then stops when she realizes…her voice. It’s much deeper, much raspier, not even remotely close to her natural octave.
She jerks her hands up from where they’re resting on top of the thin scratchy white hospital sheets and flips them over. Large sweaty palms already coated with a chemical sheen of nitroglycerin. No pink pads in sight. Just in case that’s not enough to confirm her suspicions, she pats her face. The shape is all wrong. Her hair…
Lightheaded, her head feels fuzzy with panic and dread and her brain feels like it’s been tuned into a dead channel, nothing but scratchy static. She stumbles out of the hospital bed, long legs catching and tangling for a moment in the sheets. Her center of gravity is all wrong.
Aizawa tries to grab her shoulder but she slips away somehow, headed for the bathroom of the private hospital room.
There she stands, under the washed out dingy light of the bad fluorescents, wearing a face that isn’t her own. She puts a hand on her face, just to touch, to make sure that she’s still anchored to reality, and then she pats her chest, now flat and sort of sturdy feeling, with all the corded muscles that she can feel under the generic floral patterned hospital gown.
If she’s in Bakugou’s body, then Bakugou...with a rising sense of horror, she dashes out of the hospital room before realizing that she doesn’t even know where Bakugou would be...that is until she hears a shout down the hall.
Feet moving against her own will like a horror show, she finds herself conveyor belting slowly to the room at the end of the hall where all the screaming is coming from.
What she finds is actually worse than what her brain conjures. It’s her body, thrashing around wildly, floating an inch above the hospital cot like a scene from The Exorcist. “Get the fuck offa me!” he yells, pulling at the restraints and the wrist straps, clenching and unclenching fists in reflex like he could blow right of there.
They had to restrain her...or Bakugou in her body, and now it’s clear who is in her body, she’d recognize his particular brand of filthy foul mouthed invective anywhere, after having listened to it for oh, nearly two years straight.
He catches her peeking in, and that if anything, makes him thrash even harder.
“YOU!” he roars at an ear-piercing octave, decibels louder than she thought she could manage through her vocal chords. “Gimme back my body!”
Cringing a little—I can’t possibly sound like that, is the first thought that crosses her mind when he fixes wild eyes on her, nearly bloodshot with murderous rage.
It’s at this point that a nurse injects some sort of sedative into the side of his neck, and like he’d been clocked on the back of the head with a brick, his eyes roll up and then he goes alarmingly limp, settling with a soft thump onto the hospital gurney.
“Geez,” complains one of the nurses, “what’s with this girl? She’s got monster strength!”
Ochako’s legs start to wobble a little at the knees. At least no one else is running amok in her body, doing god knows what...just Bakugou.
Just Bakugou...as if that is a comforting thought, but she’ll take what she can get at the moment and then figure out the rest when she feels less like having to breathe into a paper bag for a while. And it’s then that she notices Aizawa standing next to her. She sees the gears click into place in his head, eyes flickering between her and Bakugou-in-her-body.
“You’re not Bakugou, are you?” he says not missing a thing, hackles raised. “What have you done with my student?”
“A funny thing happened, Aizawa-sensei,” she says weakly. “I think we ran into someone with a body-switching Quirk.”
Displeasure doesn’t even begin to describe the look that crosses Aizawa’s face. “Tell me everything,” he commands.
“This,” says Recovery Girl, smacking both Ochako and Bakugou on their heads with her syringe cane, “is NOT something I can heal!” She looks disgruntled as though they have deliberately come and wasted her precious time when she has better things to do. Like sleeping. By the time they give their statements to Detective Tsukauchi and get back to UA, it’s already very late.
“You realize, as per school policy, we would need to contact your parents,” Aizawa says as he accompanies them back to their dorm after their debriefing. It’s standard procedure nowadays for things that Recovery Girl can’t heal. Aizawa’s surprisingly nonchalant about everything...he had probably seen it all in his career of teaching super-powered teens how to become heroes.
If he’s a little worried about the League of Villains allegedly attempting to recruit someone who has a body or mind-swapping Quirk, it doesn’t show. As for Ochako, it gives her a deep chill in her stomach at the thought of what havoc someone like that might wreak.
“Whatever,” Bakugou opines. Coming from her mouth, it sounds petulant. “Do what you gotta do.”
Ochako dreads the thought of making her parents worry when they have so much on their plates...but knows better than to beg Aizawa to abandon school policy.
Ever pragmatic, Aizawa plows on. “This is a sensitive situation since you’ve traded bodies of opposing gender, but I trust the two of you to...handle yourselves appropriately, as the pro-heroes you will eventually become. In Aizawa-speak: please don’t make me file any Title 121 harassment charges on either of you.
Her face burns and Bakugou for once is blessedly silent with no snarky comeback. Maybe his face is burning too, though Ochako can’t really tell, too busy looking at anything except him.
Neither of them have even changed out of their respective hero outfits. That’s a whole other thing...and a bridge that that Ochako is going to cross only when she can’t postpone it any longer. Someone is going to have to drag her across that bridge, kicking and screaming. Hygiene probably. It’s a foregone conclusion that boys are smelly when they sweat, and Bakugou probably sweats more than most due to his quirk. Ochako tries to discreetly take a sniff test and finds that the world is an unjust place—Bakugou smells as nice sweaty as when he’s not sweaty—a little like caramel and something dark and smoky-sweet, like her dad’s malt-whiskey that he brings out only on special occasions. All of a sudden everything that she had been trying to ignore hits her like a hot punch to the gut.
“I don’t want to be a boy!” she says turning watery eyes towards Aizawa. Her now, very low, very boyish voice cracks with strain.
“Oh, you think this is any better for me?!” Bakugou yells, waving an angry hand down his body.
Rounding on her like an aggressive dog about to bite, Bakugou grabs her by the collar. “This is all your fault.” Bakugou says getting right up in her face, at least as much as height allows. She’s mildly surprised that he had kept it together thus far but he wasn’t really known for his exceptional self-control over his own temper.
It makes her own temper spark and rise to the surface. Her palms crackle a warning and Ochako curls her hands into fists and pushes his him away. “You think I don’t know that?” she asks, burning with the humiliation of rehashing a mistake that not only affects her but a fellow classmate, in front of a teacher, no less. “You got caught too, so what are you yelling at me for?” In fact, she should be just as angry, considering how he’s supposed to be her back up. He’s so strong, just how the hell did they end up like this? Neither of them can remember how the Quirk was activated which is unbelievably frustrating.
Before he can say anything and escalate the argument further, Aizawa cuts in. “I’m sure you both made mistakes,” he said fixing them with a stern glare followed by his patented sigh of Deep Disappointment. “Think of this as a lesson and a learning experience. You’ll get your bodies back eventually, It’s a promise. For now, just bear with it and make the most out of this experience. And try not to fight.”
Bakugou crooks his hand into claws as though he’s about to pop off an explosion, as though he had momentarily forgotten and when nothing comes forth, his lip lifts in a snarl. He lets out a hiss of air between his teeth, a yell that he must have ruthlessly crushed.
“Look,” she says trying to be diplomatic, hand on Bakugou’s shoulder, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry okay? I...I know I’m the one to blame. I wasn’t able to secure the suspect. We can fix this together...and go back to normal.”
“Don’t touch me,” he spits, smacking her hand off. When he looks up at her, her internal geiger counter of Baku-rage aura goes off the charts. She hasn’t seen him this enraged since their first year. “I’m going to find that body swap asshole and I’m going to fucking bury him. Stay out of my way.” With that, he stomps up the front steps of their dorm and slams the heavy door behind him.
Ochako almost buries her head in her now sweet-smelling palms until she remembers it’s probably not good to get nitroglycerin on her face.
Bakugou has so consumed her attention that she has almost forgotten Aizawa is still there, doing his best impression of a lukewarm corpse.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” he says, neither judging nor overly sympathetic, just stating the facts in that fatigued drawling monotone, as though he’s so tired, he can’t really be bothered to enunciate. “How you deal with the mistakes you’ve made is what will define you as a hero. Even heroes aren’t perfect.”
Ochako nods slowly and tries to look on the bright side—Bakugou is one of the strongest in their class. She stares at her hands pensively. Wouldn’t she want to experience that strength, for a little bit? She can even fight with Deku on even footing now.
“Don’t worry,” Aizawa says, taking her lack of response for anxiety. “We’ll either find the villain responsible or find another way to switch you back.”
Ochako takes a deep breath. Somehow, hearing Aizawa’s solid assurances makes her feel a little better, even though she suspects that he might be lying to her just a bit. One thing is for sure—UA always takes care of their own and she knows that Aizawa would go above and beyond, Plus Ultra style for them. She’s seen him do it before.
Thank god for the late hour, Ochako thinks as she trudges past the empty common room. She’d hate to have to explain why she’s wearing Bakugou’s body like a meat coat at this hour in the night. Especially since all she wants to do is fall into her bed and sleep this day off like a bad nightmare. Hey maybe she’ll even wake up in her own body.
The knocking on her door is loud and insistent. Ochako’s eyes peel open as she stares bleary eyed at her bedside clock. The red digital numbers read 5:45 am, an ungodly hour to be alive much less conscious.
The knocking escalates in frequency and strength.
“Ok, ok, I’m coming,” she manages to yell, voice a raspy mess, sounding more like Bakugou than ever. So much for her hopes of this strange Quirk wearing off overnight.
Ochako throws the door open only to find Bakugou-in-her-body standing on the other side. She blinks, of course it’s Bakugou, who else would it be? Her sleeping brain hadn’t caught up to her body yet, like she’s still ghost in the shell so to speak.
Bakugou, on the other hand looks perfectly awake, wearing an irritated and almost furtive expression on her face. His face. Whatever. It’s really too early to be dealing with this. He’s in his own clothes, practically swimming in the baggy black shirt and sweatpants.
“Whuh,” Uraraka manages to huff out before he shoves her back into her room and kicks the door closed behind them.
“I need—” he starts and then stops abruptly when his eyes go wide as they land on her, “what are you wearing?”
Blinking the sleep out of her eyes, she looks down at the ratty old t-shirt, which used to be the loosest and most comfortable thing she owned, having gone through a million washes so that the cotton is now buttery soft. On Bakugou’s body it fits like a muscle tee, like she’s about to pop out of it at any given moment if she so much as flexed the wrong way. The sweat pants are even worse, designed as they were for a teenage girl of short stature. The bottom pant legs went halfway up the calf of her new body and it was lucky that Bakugou had narrow hips, otherwise she didn’t know what she would have done.
“They’re my pajamas,” she says a touch defensively. The whole sleepwear ensemble is admittedly, not a good look so she snatches a throw blanket off her bed to wrap around herself.
“Yeah, about that. I need clothes,” he says.
“Oh. Right.” She had actually kind of thought about it last night, but what with everything that had happened, she didn’t want to go up to Bakugou’s room to ask and possibly risk getting murdered.
Turning, she walks over to the closet where a school uniform hangs nicely pressed. The whole time, Bakugou is standing there, only a few steps into her room, looking decidedly...twitchy.
“Here,” she says handing him the uniform on a hanger which he snatches out of her hand. Like a robot on autopilot, she walks over to her drawers and pulls out a bra and underwear. They’re perfectly utilitarian, nude colored so it won’t show under the white uniform shirt, and there’s nothing at all risque about them, but she feels like the heat in the room has been turned up a notch.
The awkwardness is real. She can’t even look at him as she puts her underthings on the bed without saying a word and both of them, she senses are desperately trying to avoid direct eye contact. Like matter and antimatter, if their eyes connect, Ochako feels like the world as they know it might be blown to smithereens.
“That should be everything you’ll need,” she says, clearing her throat awkwardly. “Did you bring anything for me?” Some items of clothing hit her in the chest.
She stands there awkwardly, clutching a wadded up bunch of boy’s clothes until Bakugou barks, “Do you mind?” She chances a glance downward and if she’s not mistaken, his cheeks are pink. Well pinker than normal, anyway.
“Pfft!” She tries and fails to stifle a laugh. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen anyway!” This situation is so ridiculous that a bubble of hysteria is rising in her chest. Who would have thought that Bakugou was such a maiden?
The look he gives her is nothing short of murderous. “Would you just go somewhere else!? This is weird enough without you watching me.”
“Okay, okay!” Ochako says holding up her hands in a placating manner. “I’ll just go change in the bathroom.”
It’s not exactly comfy to change in the dorm’s ensuite bathroom but she manages to wriggle out of her too-tight clothes like a snake shedding skin. Now that she has a chance to actually look...it’s like she can’t really help it. Bakugou is by no means the biggest boy in class, or the tallest. But he’s built like a brick wall—in other words, solid. Really, it’s unfair how ripped he is. Even his muscles have muscles. Uraraka spends a little time just staring at her new body in the mirror, eyes coasting over strong arms, bulky muscled shoulders and the many hard flat lines of his chest and stomach that all just seem to point downward. She absently pats her chest before remembering that he might be doing the same thing. Her hand draws away with a guilty start, grateful that no one is there to see her face turn cherry red.
Ochako quickly puts on the boy’s school uniform, finishing the tie in the mirror. Then she splashes some water on her face and tries in vain to tame the hair before giving it up as a lost cause. No matter how much she tries to smooth it down, it just bounces back up to its usual shape, rigid and stubborn, sort of like its natural owner. Taking in the neutral expression reflected from the mirror, she thinks that Bakugou gets a bad rap for being grumpy when really he just has a resting bitch face.
She runs her fingers over the square jaw and pokes at the crest of his cheekbones. Everything about him is sharp angles and harsh lines. She tries out a few silly expressions on Bakugou’s face, trying to not to laugh. Just for kicks, she tries a smile. It gives her pause.
Huh, who would have thought that Bakugou has such a nice smile? Well...nice isn’t the operative word, but it’s appealing. He looks almost...no he is handsome. There’s no denying that objective fact. But there’s something not quite right to it, not least of which she has never seen Bakugou grinning without the eerie manic edge of poorly concealed battlelust. The expression looks all wrong on his face—too bright and sunny— too Ochako.
She sighs, and looks down at her hands, already coated with the ever- present beads of nitroglycerin seeping from the pores of her hand, then she turns away from the mirror and taps on the door softly. “Are you done yet?”
There’s some muffled cursing on the other end and a long pause. “Yes,” he says aggressively, and if it wasn’t Bakugou, she could have sworn she heard a tiny hint of doubt in his voice.
The first thing she spots is the bra, untouched at the foot of her bed. “You didn’t—” she points to it, almost unable to get the words out, “that’s not optional!” she finishes.
“It’s optional now,” he mutters, not meeting her eyes.
“Look,” she says picking up the bra and handing it out to him, “you’re going to want this on, for...support.”
There’s a moment of silence as she waits for him to digest this little tidbit. While she isn’t like Momo or Hatsume Mei, Ochako is not exactly flat-chested. Obviously. If he hadn’t noticed before, there’s no way he can miss it now while in temporary residence in her body.
The look on Bakugou’s face is a little desperate as he bares his teeth like a cornered animal. “How the fuck do you get it on then?”
Oh. OH. “C’mon Bakugou, don’t you know your way around a girl’s bra?” Just where she gets this boldness from is a mystery. Teasing Bakugou is like playing hot potato with a live grenade.
He gives her a narrow eyed gaze and then rolls his eyes snorting. It sounds super unladylike. “Yeah, I only know how to take them off.”
Choking, she looks over at him with wide eyes. Is he joking with her? “Really?” she says before she can stop herself.
The divot between his brows gets even deeper and Ochako is afraid her expression might stick like that. “Of course not! When would I even have the time? You gonna help me or not?”
Guessing correctly that it would set him off, she smothers a laugh again. Figures...everything at UA is Plus Ultra, except their romantic lives. Hers, case in point, had failed to even launch. Quickly, lest he lose patience, she shows him how to work her bra—it’s the kind that opens at the front so his bafflement is understandable. The hidden clasp isn’t exactly user-friendly but she likes it solely for the reason that she’s always missing the hook and eye closure for bras that close in the back.
Also, it had been on sale, so she had snagged it up, even though Mina told her she was being ‘boring’. Not everyone likes neon pink zebra print!
Turning, she gives Bakugou a moment of privacy to put it on and only turns back around once the sounds of cursing and rustling clothing have stopped.
“I’m sorry but you can’t go to class looking like that!” She twists her fingers anxiously as she looks him over. A few buttons are open at the top and he hadn’t even bothered with a tie.
Okay, maybe telling him that ‘he can’t’ is the wrong phrasing because immediately, in true Bakugou fashion, he bristles, going from zero to aggression on the Baku-rage hostility scale. “I’ll go to class looking however I want!”
“You can’t leave your shirt unbuttoned,” Ochako says, feeling slightly scandalized at how much cleavage he is unknowingly showing. “Where are your…er my tights?”
“I don’t know! How should I know how to dress you?!” he explodes out of frustration. Still, despite his heated grumblings, he does as asked anyway, tugging at the collar of the uniform after buttoning up all the way to the neck and then hopping on one foot awkwardly while he tries to pull the tights on to limited success.
“Pfft!” Ochako giggles, unable to help herself as she sits on her bed watching him struggle. It’s kind of entertaining.
He sends her a killing glare after finally managing the tights under the skirt. “Shaddup. It’s done, so don’t complain anymore!”
“Wait one more thing!” She waves the tie at him.
“What now?!” he asks, giving her a wary and weary look like he’s 100% fed up with this entire day and it hasn’t even officially begun yet.
She throws her red tie at him which he manages to catch reflexively, staring at it for a second in his hand, fist clenching convulsively like he’d like nothing more than to blow it up.
“No way, I’m fucking done,” he says before tossing it right back at her. The red cloth just flutters halfway towards Ochako before floating to the ceiling like a limp, stringy balloon.
“That’s part of the uniform,” she says, face falling in dismay, snatching it from the ceiling with a little hop. “Besides, we have a grade A pervert in class and I don’t want him to look down my shirt.” Those school collars have a gap after all and Mineta is nothing, if not a persistent little creep.
He mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, ‘I’m gonna kill him if he tries.’
“Please?” she pleads as a last ditch effort as she hands him the tie.
He lets her hand hang. “I don’t like wearing tight things.”
“Could have fooled me,” slips out of her mouth, thoughtlessly. And wow, what happened to her brain to mouth filter?
One eyebrow arches in momentary surprise, he gives her an intensely narrow-eyed look. On Ochako’s own face, if she didn’t know any better, she would say that he looks...bewildered.
“It’s your tank tops...the black ones…you know…” she flaps her hands helplessly, trying to stem the flow of words coming out of her mouth…”they look snug…so just wear the damn tie!” Oh god, is her face red? She feels like she’s on fire. Her palms are practically dripping with nitroglycerin sweat and she can definitely now understand Bakugou’s need to blow stuff up just to let some steam off.
A crushing silence descends upon them, and Ochako thinks that this is what it must feel like to sink to bottom of the ocean.
“Fine!” he finally growls, snatching the tie out of her hands and turning around.
A few moments pass before Ochako comes to three realizations.
One- Bakugou is hopeless with ties- the mystery of why he never wears them to begin with has been solved. Two - if left to his own devices, he’d end up with a tie/ascot like Deku. Three- she can’t let that happen because she’s too young and beautiful to die from secondhand embarrassment.
“Bakugou, how long does it actually take you to tie a tie?” she asks trying to keep the mirth out of her voice.
“If you’re gonna complain then you do it!” he snarls.
“Fine, fine, c’mere,” she says, trying not to laugh at how easy it is to play him. Unlike normal people, offering help to Bakugou is a surefire way to set him off.
“Wipe that look off your face,” he mutters looking to the side as she’s tying his tie. “You’re making me look like an idiot.”
Ochako smiles down at him while tying an expert Windsor knot. “What look?” Also, this is his face, so if he thinks he looks like an idiot...well, that really shouldn’t be her fault right? She doesn’t have the guts to say this to him...mostly because he’s eventually going to get his body back, and she’d still like to live.
He stares at her hard, eyebrow twitching. “Forget it,” he mutters.
Finishing the tie, she then steps back. There’s a moment of discombobulation, watching Bakugou watch her from her own body. “This is really weird.”
He scoffs. “No, shit, what gave it away?”
“You know, out of all the boys in our class, if I had to swap, I would have wanted it to be you.” That brain to mouth filter would have been nice about five seconds ago.
There’s a tiny flare of surprise in his eyes and Ochako hastens to explain. “I mean...you’re one of the strongest! Ever since our first Sports Festival, I always thought, just once, I’d like to experience what all that strength feels like.” If anything, that sounds even worse, unintentional innuendo aside, it sounds like she had been dwelling on him since their first Sports Festival when it’s totally not the case.
That flare of surprise in his eyes melts into something else that she can’t quite read. Bakugou goes to cross his arms over his chest, immediately thinks better of it, and then tries to shove his hands in his pockets. His hands flail around his skirt for a moment before realizing they don’t have pockets and then settle at his sides with an irritated twitch. “Hmph...so, you’ve always wanted my body.”
For the second time in the morning, Ochako nearly chokes to death on her own surprise. And then her alarm clock goes off. Saved! Ochako has never felt so grateful for that obnoxious alarm.
“Uh, we should go,” she says quickly, ushering him out of her room.
“You’re weird,” Bakugou pronounces, as they make their way down the hallway of the dorm, like he’s the authority on all things weird and he knows weird when he sees it.
As they round the corner, they just so happen to run into Todoroki, waiting for the elevator...another freakish early bird like Bakugou.
His duotone eyebrows rise into his hairline about a half a millimeter or so, which on Todoroki is an expression of profound surprise. He opens his mouth, presumably to greet them with something like ‘good morning’ because he isn’t a total savage, when Bakugou beats him to the punch.
“The hell are you looking at?” It’s a standard Bakugou greeting, complete with deep scowl. Admittedly, it looks nominally less intimidating on Ochako’s face which isn’t made for scowling, unlike Bakugou, whose resting bitch face can make kids burst into tears with one casual look.
Todoroki’s eyes flicker from Ochako to Bakugou, and then the girls’ side of dorm where they just came from and she can literally see him putting two and two together…which would normally add up to four in any normal situation, but in their case, two and two add up to five or some imaginary number that doesn't exist in reality.
“This isn’t what it looks like!” Ochaco says waving her hands frantically in front of her. The truth is, nothing she can say would sound innocent and context is everything.
There’s a moment of excruciating silence. “That’s none of my concern,” Todoroki says cooly. Then he turns around and walks down the stairwell.
They watch him go for a moment, and then with a cheery ding, the elevator finally gets to their floor.