Work Text:
Bakugou is not a fucking lightweight - Camie is just Satan’s better looking spawn who can drink any man thrice her size under the table. It’s funny when she ropes the guys ogling her into buying the drinks and then smashes their egos to pieces by making them walk home with an incoming hangover and an empty bank account.
It’s not so funny when she challenges him.
To his credit, he puts up enough of a fight that by the time they walk out of the bar, Camie is tipsy, cheeks rosy from the alcohol and the chilly April night air. Bakugou isn’t entirely sure why he’s swinging a half-full bottle of tequila by his side, neither can he pinpoint why he ever thought this might be a good idea to begin with, but the fact of the matter is that he stumbles through the mostly empty streets way past his usual bedtime with Camie in tow and she’s laughing, laughing, laughing.
“I can’t believe,” she wheezes, breath coming short in between the spurts of laughter that have her face reddening, “that you actually for realsies had a crisis over why it’s humans and not humen .”
“It was a fucking serious dilemma,” Bakugou grunts. “And for your information, it’s because human comes from a latin root, whereas man comes from a german one.”
“Nerd,” she grins, and Bakugou throws the bottle of tequila at her. He shouldn’t really be surprised by the ease with which she catches it, nor by the hungry gulp she takes from it (except he is, and he kinda wishes he had her tolerance). Annoyed, Bakugou steals back the bottle and takes a long, ostentative sip.
“Some of us worry about things other than fucking memes,” he says as he wipes his mouth.
Camie rolls her eyes unimpressed. “You’re jelly that you don’t get my jokes.”
“I’m not envious of your terrible sense of humor.”
“My sense of humor is deffo not terrible,” she gasps, jabbing him in the ribs with her perfectly manicured nails.
“Sorry, did I say terrible? I meant fucking atrocious,” Bakugou smirks at her (cute) pout and takes another sip.
Being tipsy with Camie translates to meaningless conversation - a waste of time, as Bakugou would normally deem it. Yet somehow, in the empty streets bathed in pools of yellow light and with their voices echoing against the starless sky, the conversation fills him up.Bakugou sinks into it without much thought.
It’s probably the booze.
***
“If you hadn’t become a hero, what would you have done?”
Bakugou glances at Camie from the corner of his eye, but she’s not looking at him. Instead, her eyes are trained on the moon peeking from behind a cloud and her hands are aimlessly picking at blades of grass, fingers threading through the daffodils growing here and there.
He leans back against the hill they’re resting on and crosses his arms behind his neck. It’s chilly with Camie wearing his jacket, so he can only manage a sparkle in his fist. If he weren’t a hero…
“A chef,” he says and waits for Camie to laugh. It doesn’t come. “I would have opened my own restaurant,” he continues tentatively. “Tried out my own recipes and all that shit.”
“Extra spicy?” Camie asks, a corner of her mouth turned upwards in a half-smile even as she keeps looking up.
“Obviously.”
She lays down next to him, her warmth familiar and grounding. “I would have been an interior designer. It’s mad lit, what with my quirk and all,” she muses. Her face lights up with the thought, and Bakugou wonders if she ever regrets this life of constant danger and uncertainty, of constant awareness and little time.
He doesn’t ask.
In many ways, tonight is an exception - Bakugou only feels weightless when he’s slightly drunk and wandering the streets purposelessly, despite his hero name. He’s not even sure why he went with Ground Zero anymore - Camie just called him that once, and it stuck. Maybe it’s like that with everything that stayed with him - it happened by chance and Bakugou took it for granted.
He glances at Camie by his side, hair spilled onto the grass covered in morning dew and chocolate eyes filled with the moon and wonders if he’s taking her for granted.
***
Nighttime window shopping is weird, to say the least. Bakugou has probably seen weirder shit though, so he rolls with it -the now almost empty tequila bottle he’s still carrying helps.
“Bakubae, check this out,” Camie singsongs, pointing at a yellow purse on display. “Totally lit, fits my colour scheme and all,” she proudly declares.
Bakugou checks the price tag and adds, “Also totally above your budget. Who in their right mind would waste three fucking thousand dollars on a bag?!”
“A Chanel bag,” Camie corrects him nonplussed. “Worth my health insurance, dude.” Bakugou raises a dubious brow and Camie flutters her eyelids sweetly - it can only mean trouble. “You’d totes pay for me if I was on my deathbed, wouldn’t you, Bakuboo?”
He’s not drunk enough for this, so Bakugou just walks off ahead, keeping his steps slow until he hears Camie’s heels catching up to him and her booing him (“You’re such a meanie!”).
***
“It was dark and humid. I still remember it all.”
So does Bakugou. He doubts anyone could forget.
He doesn’t want to pry, not when Camie’s got such a pained look on her face, like every word she pulls out breaks something inside. But sometimes, things need to be shattered to pieces in order to be rebuilt, so Bakugou asks, “Did they keep you in the bar, too?”
She shakes her head, one hand stirring the bottle rhythmically. “Storage room. Drew my blood every day or so. ‘M not exactly sure - I kinda lost track of time after a while, what with the lack of windows and company.”
“Believe me, their company wasn’t exactly worthwhile,” Bakugou seethes and Camie gives him a ghost of a smile. He fucking hates it. “But we’re here now.” It’s a shitty thing to say - Bakugou knows they’re out because they were saved. He knows both of them still wake up slick with sweat, vivid images of their time in captivity etched forever into their memories.
There’s no forgetting or moving on. There’s just living.
“Yknow,” Camie drawls out, in search for words, “the scariest thing ‘bout it is that you keep wondering when it’ll happen again.”
Fear is a word that shouldn’t be in a hero’s vocabulary - that was a firm conviction Bakugou’s had for years before joining UA. He dove deeper than anyone else to get rid of his fear of drowning, played with fire so he’d be fine with being burned, watched horror movies home alone. And yet, at 22, he still feels his stomach churn uncomfortably when Deku is smashed against a wall or when Ponytail’s plan proves to have an unaccounted for gap.
Bakugou whispers, “I know.”
Camie finally turns to look at him, and her smile isn’t shallow. “It’s sorta reassuring, being here with you like this.”
Bakugou supposes she has a point.
***
A bottle of tequila should drive two people either to the hospital or to their beds.
It drives Bakugou and Camie to conspiratorial theories.
“You’re one of them .”
“There’s not enough fucking evidence,” Bakugou says and Camie rolls her eyes. “Think about it, did you actually see goddamned footage of the Lochness monster?”
“You don’t need footage to believe,” she singsongs and Bakugou stops himself short of slapping his forehead.
“Then do you believe in Yeti too?”
“Oh no, he’s a fake.”
“Area 51?”
“Totes real.”
She looks so serious that Bakugou can’t help but groan. “You’re nuts, woman.”
“You wouldn’t hang out with me otherwise, would ya?” Her wink is nothing if not bad news, but this is the sort of bad news Bakugou has come to found tolerable, so he indulges what announces itself to be a 30 minute debate over legends and monsters.
***
“Chocolate.”
“Of fuck to the no,” Bakugou says, startling the poor employee of the nonstop McDonalds. “Two scopes of vanilla ice cream,” he orders instead, earning a jab from Camie’s elbow. “Don’t listen to her shit taste.” Another elbow.
“You’re obvs drunk bro, chocolate is way better.”
They bicker over it until the manager kicks them out, and then some more.
***
Bakugou isn’t entirely sure how this night started, except for Camie asking him out for drinks and him giving in because the thought of returning to his fucking small and empty apartment wasn’t all that appealing, but he’s pretty sure he isn’t wasted enough to imagine it ending with kissing her.
Camie tastes like tequila and chocolate, because the bitch found an ice-cream parlour open in the wee hours of the morning and they were fresh out of vanilla - Bakugou finds he doesn’t mind the taste enough to break off the kiss. Her lips are hot and move with urgency against his own, and she’s competitive in a way Bakugou finds both irritating and lowkey attractive.
The eternal paradox of Camie Utsushimi.
“I was right,” she breathes into his mouth, and he grunts, pulling away to give her a questioning look. “You’re totes hot when you shut up.”
He rolls his eyes. “You always tell me I’m fucking hot.”
Camie tilts her head and smirks slowly. Bakugou spends the time left until her cab arrives kissing the grin off her face and failing. It’s not a terrible thing to fail at.