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Katsuki wasn’t there when it started, so he doesn’t know when exactly it turned into a total trainwreck. Maybe when the gummy bears showed up. Or maybe when they decided it was a good idea to invite that freaking dumbass Todoroki (who, despite having an ice quirk, can barely even refill the ice trays properly, like goddammit wait for it to freeze through before flipping them you moron!) Or maybe it was just a trainwreck from the beginning and just grew into a bigger, louder trainwreck, one that practically forced Katsuki to get involved.
And boy, did Katsuki wish he could get uninvolved.
It’s been a hellishly hot summer day, which of course is great for his quirk. But like also the worst because quirk or not, being hot and sweaty is a gross-ass feeling. Still, the day so far has been pretty decent overall. He’d gotten a good night of sleep, classes went by quickly enough, he’d crushed it during hero training, and despite the intensely distracting heat, he had gotten a fair amount of studying done.
Then he made the mistake of going down to the kitchen for a drink.
The common room was empty since it was past dinner-time and it’s way too hot for anyone to want to be around other people. All of the lights are off except for the kitchen, which emits a warm yellowish glow. Katsuki assumes it’s just some rando who’s grabbing some water or something. Whoever it is better not be touching his sports drinks that he very clearly labelled and left in the refrigerator.
So, Katsuki walks into the kitchen and underneath the dim kitchen lights witnesses the horror of Todoroki shoving his hand into an ice cream machine (that Katsuki was pretty sure they did not own), while Yaoyorozu pours in an entire carton of cream, Uraraka standing on the opposite side of the counter sipping out of an actual coconut, and they’re all wearing these ridiculous newspaper hats, like the kind Katsuki remembers making in primary school during crafts time.
(His were always folded perfectly and lasted all day while Deku’s would always fall apart and the stupid crybaby would start crying because he was a freaking crybaby. )
Katsuki honest to god thinks he’s hallucinating for a moment, that he’s gone delirious from the summer heat after sitting in his room and reviewing disaster rescue protocols for too long. It’s quiet, except for the sound of the faint whirring from the ice cream machine and the lone standing fan rotating slowly in the common room. Three pairs of eyes watch Katsuki as his mind tries to make sense of the scene in front of him.
“Coconut?” Uraraka offers, breaking Katsuki out of his reverie.
“What the fuck are you fucks doing?”
“We were out of ice cream,” Yaoyorozu laments, setting down the carton of cream.
“So we decided to make our own!” Uraraka adds, slurping loudly from her coconut.
“That’s what you call making ice cream?” Katsuki gestures to Todoroki, who is still sitting cross-legged on top of the counter, right hand inside the machine.
“My hand’s clean,” Todoroki says, sounding somewhat offended like that’s the issue at hand (ha, hand ) here.
“The machine was taking too long so we decided to speed up the process with Todoroki-kun’s quirk,” Yaoyorozu continues to explain.
“Because you so desperately needed ice cream in the middle of the night,” Katsuki deadpans.
“It’s like, 8 o’clock.”
“Shut up.”
“Ice cream,” Yaoyorozu says defensively, “is high in fat and sugar. Which some of us need for our quirks. Also, it’s been over 27 degrees for the last four days, so a cold snack would be beneficial in keeping us cool and providing some simple carbohydrates during the extreme summer weather.”
In other words, Naive Rich Girl got roped into helping carry out this stupid plan, by Round Face no doubt, since Half and Half doesn’t possess the social skills to persuade anyone of anything. Katsuki would know, he’s been subjected to listening to the weirdo’s inane theories before.
“Okay, but do you know how to make ice cream?” Katsuki eyes the counter which looks like a candy shop exploded on top of it, bags of everything from sour candies to chocolate chips piled on top of each other. Also, he sees more coconut in the corner and where did they get those from??
“Sugar, cream, milk,” Yaoyorozu shrugs, “I have a PhD-level knowledge in chemistry, how hard could it be?”
And this is where Katsuki should just grab a cold sports drink from the fridge and head back to his room and let Aizawa-sensei deal with these morons. But… his eyes feel tired from reading and rereading notes and it is way cooler down on the ground floor than the fourth floor and if Katsuki’s being entirely honest, he still hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of this all being some sort of heat-induced hallucination.
“Did you want to help?” Todoroki asks.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because we’re friends,” Todoroki says with a disgusting amount of sincerity (damn his annoying persistence that Katsuki and he were friends, thinking Katsuki wanted to spend time with him, like gross, the Halfie spends too much time with Deku, Katsuki decides).
“No way!” Uraraka butts in before Katsuki can even tell Todoroki to die, “Bakugou doesn’t even like sweet stuff. He’ll just mess it up!”
Katsuki feels a pang of white-hot rage spike in his chest because they’re literally using convenience store coffee cream to make ice cream, Uraraka just poured in a splash of coconut juice and haphazardly threw in some gummy bears, he doesn’t want to know if that empty bottle of maple syrup was added in too, and Todoroki’s hand is still inside of the machine and somehow Katsuki would be the one to mess it up?
“Move,” Katsuki growls, marching over and slapping Todoroki’s arm so he takes his hand out. It’s only when Uraraka slaps a newspaper hat on top of his head and cheers something about welcoming him to the ShouMoKo Defence Squad (what are they even defending??) does he realize that he too has been roped into helping these chuckleheads make some ice cream, shouldn’t have thought so lowly of you Yaoyorozu, I now understand.
Unfortunately, his pride tells him it’s too late to back out now but he makes a mental note not to underestimate Round Face or her trash-talking again.
Katsuki pops the top lid off to get a better look at what he’s dealing with and it’s the pinkest shit he’s ever seen and he’s friends classmates with Ashido. There are decapitated gummy bears floating around along with some tiny marshmallows, bits of chocolate, and some other unidentifiable chunks. The smell is so sweet it’s almost offensive. It’s a slimy, garishly pink mess of sugar and candy and Katsuki feels like he’s getting cavities just looking at it.
Well, it’s not like Katsuki has to eat it. Nope, he’s just here to assert his dominance as someone more competent in the kitchen than these three combined and then he’ll be on his way, back to the sensible tranquillity of his room.
Katsuki doesn’t know what they’ve already added in (and is frankly too afraid to ask when he sees the empty bottles of pink lemonade next to a pile of banana peels and canned peaches) but he can tell the concoction needs to be thicker and mixed better. He grabs some heavy cream from the refrigerator and adjusts the settings on the ice cream machine and gets to work, ignoring the sounds of the others slurping from their coconuts.
(Although he does accept a coconut for himself, because coconut .)
Eventually, Katsuki ends up with something that sorta resembles ice cream.
“You freaks aren’t actually gonna eat that right?” Katsuki asks as the three of them crowd around him to get a better look, peering over his shoulder and pressing against his arms like a bunch of damn koalas.
“You’re the one who made it,” Uraraka points out.
“No, I turned the disaster you people created into less of a disaster.”
“Your problem-solving skills are quite exceptional,” Todoroki nods, “Especially for someone so destructive.”
Katsuki swings a fist at Todoroki. Infuriatingly, he dodges, hopping his ass back up onto the counter because Todoroki has zero respect for kitchen spaces. Even more infuriating, he manages to keep the stupid newspaper hat sitting on his head perfectly. Katsuki also still has a newspaper hat on his head because he was too tired to care anymore.
(Not because he felt bad that Ponytail kept diligently making him more each time he destroyed them or threw them off.)
“It doesn’t look that bad,” Uraraka comments.
It does look that bad though, Round Face has clearly gone delusional from the heat.
“Let’s try some!” Yaoyorozu smiles, grabbing some spoons from the drawer. Todoroki, the absolute savage, just scoops some up with the spatula lying on the counter and shovels it into his mouth.
“I hope you choke,” Katsuki says. Todoroki, sadly, does not choke.
Before Todoroki can give his verdict (not that Katsuki cares about his opinion), he hears a cry from behind.
“Ice cream!” Katsuki whips his head to see Raccoon Eyes standing a few meters away, grinning excitedly like she’s a kid in an ice cream parlour for the first time.
“What are you doing here?” Katsuki groans. Great, more pink.
“I heard a bunch of noise so I came to investigate!” Ashido explains, bouncing over to the counter, practically vibrating. “Oh, it looks pretty!”
“Mm!” Uraraka makes a happy sound as she tries a spoonful herself, “It’s good!” It’s all sugar and Round Face is a sweets addict so Katsuki isn’t that surprised by her reaction.
“Enjoy your cavities,” Katsuki grumbles.
“Aren’t you going to try some?” Yaoyorozu asks, licking some ice cream off of her spoonful.
“I’d rather die,” Katsuki says succinctly.
Todoroki, because he’s actually evil and the pretty-boy airhead thing is all an act, shoves the spatula (that was just in his mouth, fucking disgusting) right into Katsuki’s mouth and he’s forced to try the horrid-looking ice cream.
“OMG, indirect kiss!” Raccoon Eyes gasps, her hands cupping her cheeks like she just witnessed some scandalous gossip and not Todoroki trying to murder Katsuki via cold dessert on a rubber baking spatula.
Katsuki can’t even direct his attention to her because he is forced to swallow the ice cream and it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted, the sugar assaulting his taste buds. But...it’s not the worst thing he’s ever tasted, he supposes. It’s sugary and fruity but the iciness is refreshing and nice. Well, obviously it’s not that awful since he stepped up and fixed it. Who knows what kind of mess those three would have ended up with.
Ashido tries some too and calls Kirishima, Kaminari, and Sero to come down for some to which somehow turns into nearly half the class squishing around the counter space, trying ice cream and being loud and obnoxious as ever. It’s way too hot for this and the ice cream wasn’t even that good but for some reason, Katsuki doesn’t leave. He grabs his coconut and sips the sweet juice, leaning against the counter (next to Todoroki’s right side because it seriously is way too hot with all these people here and if Katsuki has to be in Todoroki’s presence he might as well gain something from it) and bickers with his friends classmates and yells about the mess that Uraraka, Yaoyorozu, and Todoroki have made in the kitchen, swearing that he’s not cleaning any of it up.
(And if he does end up helping clean the counters down after all the extras have trickled away, it’s only because he doesn’t trust those three to sanitize everything properly, okay?)
Finally, Katsuki can go back to his room and get some rest. He doesn’t even bother to say goodbye to the other three, just grabs his sports drink from the fridge and leaves.
And as he heads to the elevators he supposes it wasn’t that bad of a time; Round Face can be a fairly decent banter partner, Pony Tail doesn’t say stuff to piss Katsuki off and is generally not that aggravating of a human being, and Half and Half…is a convenient A/C system at least. They’re not the worst people to be around, he supposes.
The last thing Katsuki hears before the elevator doors close is Uraraka joyfully cheering, “Another success for the ShouMoKo Defence Squad!” Whatever the fuck that means.