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Bakugou does this thing that makes Shouto go a little weak in the knees.
It starts with a little look aside, a tiny glance out the corner of his eye, meeting Shouto’s eyes just long enough that Shouto begins to think it wasn’t accidental. Then he breaks the contact, blinking and ignoring Shouto altogether.
But his shoulders are tense, Shouto imagines, tension thrumming and humming and so palpable Shouto can feel it from his position two seats behind.
Or maybe that’s Shouto projecting. Class gets a little harder to focus on after that.
Between classes they get short five minute respites; during which, if the next teacher is yet to arrive, a small amount of chaos usually erupts. Bakugou’s group of friends - teasingly dubbed the Bakusquad - typically hound Bakugou immediately, if not otherwise distracted by a more pressing social commitment.
Surrounded thus, Bakugou’s warm blood-red eyes meet his through the press of shoulders head-on.
And then he blinks.
Slowly.
A gentle wave of long blonde lashes.
Just once.
Before the spell is broken, once again, and Bakugou returns his attention to his posse of insistent friends, loud and boisterous.
And Shouto is left feeling like he’s been rammed in the chest by a bus.
After the rest of the classes of the day, Bakugou sometimes repeats this, a few more times, or sometimes not at all.
At the end of the day, the class typically returns to the dormitories, and showers are had and one of the competent cooks on rotation prepare dinner for the ravenous horde of teenagers.
Whenever said cook isn’t Bakugou, Shouto goes knocking on his door downstairs. Depending on how antsy he’s gotten, that door is occasionally his balcony door instead of the front door. With a disgruntled grumble and a fluffy towel about his shoulders, Bakugou lets him in every time without exception, glaring and tapping his foot as though waiting for an explanation.
Shouto knows, though, exactly what he’s waiting for.
He grabs him by his smooth cheeks, (or his powerful shoulders, or his slender waist, or the flare of his hips, or the curve of his ass, depending on how frisky Shouto is feeling and how much time they have left till dinner is ready) and begins lavishing Bakugou’s willing lips, face, hands, neck with sweet kisses.
And Bakugou sighs, sighs like he’s tired, but Shouto knows- because Bakugou presses himself closer, turns himself this way and that, letting Shouto shower more and more of his skin with kisses.
He gently brushes Bakugou’s thin brows, so neat and groomed he wonders daily how it can be that Bakugou is not in the habit of combing them. He pushes back Bakugou’s heavy fringe, rubs his palm over the rarely-seen expanse of skin that makes up Bakugou’s forehead.
And in both those actions, Bakugou pushes his head against Shouto’s hands - a pressure just barely perceptible - and lets his severe eyes flutter shut, trusting.
“Do as you will unto me.”
No, they squint shut, deliberate.
“Do this to me, that is my will.”
And Shouto has his breath taken from him by this, every single time without exception. Every single time, he is overwhelmed, and he gasps, pulling the shorter boy against his chest, feeling his warmth and fresh-cleanliness, the power coiled and calm within his lithe frame.
Danger and teeth and claws and natural predatory instinct as sharp as a knife, curled up at peace, gentle and small in his arms.
It makes Shouto a little weak in the knees, this thing that Bakugou does.
So Bakugou, in his consideration, gently guides Shouto to sit upon his bed. He allows Shouto to lean against his pillows, catch his stolen breath back from Bakugou’s soft lips.
(This bed where they’ve tried, abortively and on multiple occasions, to make love. They’re not ready, not yet, but they’re young and they’re patient; they have each other for now, for forever.)
Bakugou usually ends up in his lap, an insistent but welcome weight on his thighs. Beyond the kisses, his clever little tongue laps, tickles, Shouto’s fingers and palms whenever he brings them close to Bakugou’s face. His hands are covered, usually, at the end of their times together, by a light sheen of Bakugou’s saliva. It should be gross, but all Shouto can think is that he never wants to wash his hands again.
(Bakugou always forces him to, in the end, wrinkling his upturned nose as though he wasn’t the one who soiled Shouto’s hands to begin with.)
Bakugou curls up tight, there against Shouto’s chest, and his head invariably finds its way underneath Shouto’s chin. There he pushes - rubs , really - up, forcing Shouto to lay his head back, insisting upon his relaxation.
“You spend so much of your time trying to put others at ease,” Bakugou had told him once, and at the time, derisively, “no wonder you’re so tired all the time.”
And then Bakugou simply lays there, a dead weight, his ear pressed against Shouto’s sternum.
And Shouto has learnt, a long time ago, that Bakugou’s hair sticks up like that, untameable, because of how ridiculously soft and light it is. Treading his fingers through those golden strands is like weaving his senses through a cloud, warm like rays of sunlight.
His shirts are all soft cotton, his pants all loose track pants. “Keeps sweat off me,” he’d said, when Shouto idly inquired, “fewer exploding hazards.”
Shouto doesn’t really care, one way or another. Whether it is his comfortably smooth clothes or his warm skin, he runs his fingers over them, back and forth and back and forth, all his aches and stresses and pains slowly flowing from his mind.
At some point, eventually, a quiet, tentative thing slips past Bakugou’s lips, strange to those who would have only known him for his loud and abusive tongue.
“I love you.”
Shouto knows that Bakugou can tell, the way his heart races every time he says those words, with his ear pressed gently over his heart. Can hear the way he swallows, hear his jaw work as his eyes mist and he stares, unthinking, mind blanking at the ceiling.
“I know,” is all Shouto manages, at length, his mind running circles, his heart overrun.
But Bakugou, he feels, smiles all the same, lips curving against Shouto’s shirt, gentle and accepting, unassuming and open-hearted in a way that Shouto wishes dearly more people recognised.
“I love you,” Bakugou says, whispers quietly into that little sacred space between them, “I love you, Shouto.”
“I know, I know,” Shouto forces himself to listen, to drown himself in the sentiment, the bare affection, until it is all he feels. Lets himself be loved, unequivocally, and tenderly.
Then when it is time for them to part, he eases Bakugou off himself, and doesn’t begrudge the way the other clutches still at his clothes. He eases Bakugou’s fringe off his forehead, indulges himself in the silent sigh, the squint of sharp eyes, the affectionate nudging of the head into his hand.
He smooths a hand over sunbeam hair, and lays a kiss upon his brow, before he allows the fringe to settle back over it, “Thank you.”
“Thank you, kitten.”