Chapter Text
This is for the Boku no AU Bang, where I was partnered with two awesome artists! They are both beyond compare and I am so thankful to have gotten to work with them and their pieces just blow my mind completely! Thank you so much for partnering with me! (Please scroll sideways to see the full wonder of their pieces)
The cover for this story is by the incredible Tabbizx!
While this map is courtesy of the amazing HF!
The trees were murmuring in soft voices overhead, their language’s fluttering syllables passed along by the rustle of their leaves in the wind. It was a mild night, not too much on the danger side even during the day, and their campsite has a view of the stars through the clearing’s canopy. Bakugo lay with his head pillowed on his arms, staring between the swaying branches and waiting for Deku to stop chattering about his mushroom find already.
“It’s been half an hour, they’re just some glowing rotten shit from inside a hollow tree. We’ve seen a million more special ingredients, are you going to drag us off course for every single one?” he asked, interrupting Deku’s excited scribbling in his notebook. How a scholar like Deku ended up being the one to be sent on such an important quest was beyond him, but who was he to question the prophecy.
“It means we’re getting close to the Barrenfold! And those spores might just save your life in the future.” Deku didn’t pause in his work, quill scratching neat, almost illegible lines on the scroll spread across his knee, and as was becoming a habit of his, ignoring Bakugo’s insults in favor of cheerfully launching into an explanation. “When there’s more of them, we’ll be able to travel in the dark too without losing the trail, and maybe we’ll see a scatterspark, they should be mating during this time of the year and their young can grow to almost two dozen feet— “
Bakugo tuned out the meaningless babbling and sighed as he turned on his side and propped his head up. They were a motley crew if nothing else, a scribe totally out of his depth, a mage who’s stomach turned from her own spells, and a dragon who was too trusting to be let out of sight. Speaking of, next to him Kirishima slowly stirred the soup serving as the night’s dinner in the small cauldron Ochako used to brew her battle potions, but his color was more pallid than Bakugo remembered from that morning. He’d started the fire earlier while he’d still had his flamebreath and it might have been the last straw.
“You getting scalesick on me, pepper breath? Awful quiet with just Deku yammering.”
Kirishima remained absorbed in his stirring until Bakugo finally clapped him on the shoulder. Taking the belated reaction to his insult as confirmation, Bakugo grunted before making up his mind.
Pulling himself to his feet languidly, Bakugo brushed off his furs and headed for the edge of the camp to make some rounds. There was no chance in scorching hell that he was letting anything get near them while their best defense was barely conscious and bone tired.
Moving silently amidst the underbrush, Bakugo’s soft boots left not a twig broken in his path or a footprint to track him by. He might be from the sky people but in the mountain forests it always behooved you to tread lightly, lest any brigands decide to follow someone up the slopes. There were some secrets given away by a person’s face or tongue, and others by their feet.
A faint sound of hooves hitting the earth echoed through the close-knit trees, coming closer with each second until Bakugo’s shout back towards the campsite was uncalled for. Sprinting for the nearest tree, he grabbed a branch and swung himself up until he could jump to the next. If this bastard had a horse then he’d just need to get to the higher ground instead, nothing worked better against someone dumb enough to ride a horse instead of a dragon than just tackling them off of it.
Ignoring the faint calls of alarm coming from the others at the camp, he crouched down on a bough and waited, ears pricked towards the hoofbeats coming ever closer. By now, he could see a faint shape moving at a stately trot through the woods ahead, meandering along the path they had taken just hours earlier. He’d thought it was the distance, but as the shape gained definition he saw that the figure wore a dark cloak with the hood pulled up. What pompous asshole pulled their cloak up at night, just to screw up their periphery in the dark even more?
Bakugo didn’t bother to wait around any longer, rather as soon as the rider came close enough, he sprang from his perch, falling hard and fast until he slammed into the figure with enough force to send them tumbling into the prickly bushes on the side of the road. The rider was ganglier than he’d expected of a robber or highwayman, and the fabric he grabbed in case the struggling figure planned to run felt soft and fine under his fingers. They ended up tangled in the rider’s long cloak, Bakugo’s arms scratched and bloody from the barbs of the bush but by the time Deku and Ochako appeared out of the gloom with a torch held aloft, Bakugo had pinned the figure’s arms and legs beneath him.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded, shaking the man by the wrists. When the rider turned his head to the side to answer, his hood, caught on the thorns, fell off to reveal a scar spreading in a dark stain across his face and one sharp blue eye caught Bakugo’s own.
“I’m a traveler, I’m traveling.” The raspy voice seemed odd coming from one who was the same age as him, but Bakugo was more concerned with that half-assed reply.
“That’s not a blasted answer, dammit!”
He shook the man again, only pausing when Kirishima joined them as well to point out, “It’s not illegal to use the same roads as we do. And he’s rather outnumbered, that’s not very sporting of us.”
“It takes one slice across the throat to get any of us, so why take chances?” Bakugo’s adrenalin started to subside and he reluctantly loosened his grip on the man. “Now, who are you? Answer properly this time!”
“A traveler,” Bakugo growled at the repetition until the man amended, “Shouto.”
“That sounds a lot like a first name, what’s the rest of it?”
“Just Shouto, no more.” Shouto pushed to stand up with surprising strength, forcing Bakugo to straighten up as well, and looked around at the others with an unflinching stare. “You’re a dragon.”
Kirishima smiled sheepishly at the straightforward comment, his hands rubbing at the base of his horns.
“Hard to miss. What brings you into this part of the Wandering Forest?” Bakugo continued his line of questioning without missing a beat. Some nosy peasant wasn’t going to derail his interrogation, although now that Ochako’s torch lit the rest of Shouto’s clothes he wasn’t so sure he was a peasant. The blue doublet, though covered in tears and now mud, was still sewn through with gold thread, and the leather gloves covering Shouto’s hands were a midnight black hard to come by in a mere village market.
“Traveling.” Shouto smiled just slightly when Bakugo scowled at his continued reticence. “And wandering. I have no destination, only a journey. You?”
“We’ve got both.” Deku volunteered before Bakugo could warn him to keep his mouth shut. “A prophecy sent us to these woods to find the next piece of the quest.”
“Do you have anything to eat?” Ochako asked, keeping an eye on Kirishima’s stew through the trees. It would be laughable if they ended up burning it while dealing with this reclusive stranger, who was even now shaking his head. The horse standing nearby had one small knapsack on it, which yielded nothing more than a bedroll and a few extra undergarments, but not a single scrap of food.
“So you were planning to just wander around until you could foist yourself off on the first group of people that had something?” he asked over his shoulder, grabbing for the horse’s reigns in case it decided to make a break for it. It stood there, tail flicking and about as set on escaping as its currently idling master was.
“I didn’t plan to eat until I’d found some game to hunt,” Shouto said, shrugging in the face of Bakugo’s glare.
“With no bow? No snares?”
“How about we just eat?” Deku cut in before Bakugo could keep pointing out the obvious idiocy of their unwanted, at least from his part, guest. “There’s plenty and after that horrible way of greeting you, I think we owe it, do we not?”
Turning away from Deku’s pointed politeness aimed at him, Bakugo started off back towards their camp, taking the horse and its bag with him. He busied himself tying it to a tree with firm, sturdy knots while the others trickled into the clearing back to their merry conversation and seating Shouto between Ochako and Kirishima as they ladled the portions out.
In the firelight Shouto’s hair went from pale to stark white, bleaching away any shadows the forest’s shadows might have given it. Just one more strange detail to the myriad of red flags Bakugo had decided the rest were all too trusting, or just stupid, to pick up on.
“You came from the desert?” Ochako asked as he settled down on her other side, eyeing Shouto while he slurped the noodles from his bowl with the straightest face Bakugo had ever seen despite the steam still rising from it in thick waves. Kirishima blew on his own portion in loud bursts, taking small scalding sips in between to test whether it had cooled enough or not.
Shouto nodded, finishing another mouthful before answering in the sparse manner Bakugo was fast beginning to recognize as his annoying trademark.
“I left a few days ago.”
“So then you know the area a little?” Deku asked hopefully, too eagerly in Bakugo’s opinion. They didn’t need to advertise their temporary loss of direction, the prophecy was enough of a guide without some mysterious nobody leading them around in circles.
Shouto slowly shook his head, scar catching the light as he turned, and took another sip of the soup.
“Don’t you want to take off your gloves?” Ochako asked, working slowly on her own bowl.
“My hands are cold,” said Shouto.
Bakugo snorted into his noodles, wondering how a pansy who couldn’t take the cold of a chill spring night had made it even a few days in the wild. His white fur cloak was enough of a covering despite his chest remaining largely bare. There was far colder weather up in the mountains and after so long spent enduring the harsh winds, the plains’ offering of a brisk breeze didn’t even register anymore.
“What is this prophecy you were sent to fulfill?” Shouto asked after they’d finished off dinner and had begun to make their spots around the embers of the fire. His bedroll looked rather scuffed but just like his clothes was made of a material fine enough to be worth quite a heavy coin or two. Bakugo lay on top of his cloak and stared up at the sky through the leaves, determined not to give any more information away.
“It’s cryptic as all hell and not something you need to know about,” he spat, turning his back to the banked fire.
“It really is cryptic,” Deku laughed awkwardly, “We can’t leave the forest until we find what we’re searching for. And that search must be done so we find it ‘from above and without wanting it’ so it’s a rather difficult business.”
Shouto didn’t question further and Bakugo was doubly glad for that, it left the subject alone and kept him from his suddenly disquieting thoughts as he slipped into an unsound sleep.