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The doorbell rings at 7:30am precisely.
Bakugou knows this because a) he’s in the hallway, tying his shoelaces as one does every morning at 7:30 sharp and b) because none of his friends wake up this early, not even on work days. It’s precisely why he makes a point of waking up this early and getting out of the house before they can call to say they’re on their way for breakfast—a fucking hassle, honestly, because without the promise of food, they won’t hesitate to sleep through their alarms, and then Bakugou has to call them and yell in their ears until he hears the water running and the toothbrush brushing. (Not that he does this for fun, but if these idiots get fired, it’s his apartment that they’ll crash, and Bakugou enjoys eating dinners in silence while catching up on Brooklyn 99, thank you very much.)
He grabs his backpack off the floor, heaving it over one shoulder as he swings the door open, only to reveal Camie sitting on his doorstep. (She’s actually sitting, legs crossed and arms completely buried in a backpack twice as thick as her, resurfacing a few moments later with a cup of ramen that she holds like it’s a prize) “Morning, Bakuboo!” she greets, as if there’s nothing unusual about her being on his doorstep at 7:32am. (Bakugou checks his phone again, just in case. Technology isn’t always right, so he checks the clock hanging in the hallway, too.)
Now, the last fucking word Bakugou would use to describe his speech is stuttering. Cross that, he wouldn’t use the word at all, because it’s not in his fucking vocabulary. So when he says, “What?!” he doesn’t stutter at all. In fact, he does the opposite of stutter—a word also missing from his vocabulary, but he makes a mental note to correct that.
“I’m going camping with you,” Camie says through a mouthful of noodles.
“You’re what now?”
“Is this what you’re like early in the morning? Cuz ngl, I would wake up early more often if stuttering Bakugou were to greet me.”
“I’m not fucking stuttering!” is the first thing that comes out of Bakugou’s mouth, because he prioritizes deconstructing misunderstandings. “Do you even know anything about camping?” is what slips away next, because the size of Camie’s backpack really says otherwise.
“I did some research,” Camie says, proudly patting the backpack by her side. It must weigh over 10 kilos—maybe Bakugou should accept Camie’s invite of going to the gym together if this is the sort of thing she casually carries around. “And I prepared for any situation—I have insect repellent, a first aid kit, flashlights, tuna cans, energy drinks, rope, fish bait-”
“We’re not going goddamn fishing!”
“But what if we get stranded and need to fend for ourselves?”
“We’re not boarding a ship that will crash on a deserted island, we’re going fucking camping,” Bakugou says, and as soon as the words leave his mouth and Camie’s lips pull into a wider-by-the-second grin, he realizes he lost. He lost whenever he said we instead of I and her eyes sparkled like that made her day. But really, the moment he actually lost was when she showed up on his doorstep (quite literally) with a bag twice as big as her.
Part of it is that Bakugou knows Camie had a shitty week. It’s not that she complains about it, because unlike Bakugou, whose coping mechanism is punching the boxing bag until his knuckles hurt, Camie bottles it in. The side effects include, but are not limited to: reduced use of emojis in their Line chat, turning down the girls’ movie night and calling Bakugou by his actual fucking name instead of Bakuboo . It’s so jarring that it might as well be a blaring alarm hanging around Camie’s neck and making her shoulders slump under its weight.
He sighs and bangs the front door shut, checking the lock twice before heading for the elevator. It takes a moment, but he hears Camie follow behind him, her steps light despite her heavy backpack as she joins him, slurping the last of the ramen.
“It’s so cool how we’re running away,” she says, watching him stuff her things in the truck and looking infinitely pleased with herself.
“We’re not running away,” Bakugou grumbles, but still lets her choose the music once they’re in the car. It’s not the usual Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Ariana Grande playlist ( the queen trio , as Camie calls them). It takes a minute for him to place the song, the familiar, melancholic tune of Viva la Vida softly trickling out of the speakers, and he steals a glance in Camie’s direction. She used to play Coldplay during exam season, when she was “stressed af and in dire need of Chirs Martin serenading me”. Bakugou is concerned™. (Yes, he might have spent too long laughing over memes with Camie. Emphasis on might .)
She hums like she’s entirely unconvinced, and turns the sound up. “It sounds more romantic this way, Bakuboo.”
Bakugou focuses back on the road, somewhat relaxing in his seat at the use of the familiar nickname. Camie is always comfortable, always a grounding presence—during missions when Bakugou itches to rush in, at work when he’s so fucking done with fonts and spacing and well-written reports, at home when she shows up with nothing but herself and wiggles into his kitchen as if it were hers, too—to the point where Bakugou forgot how to be her comfort.
He wonders if Camie even is aware of that.
The car ride is mostly silent, save for Camie singing along to the entirety of the Viva la Vida album and Bakugou chiming in for the choruses when she jabs at his thigh in protest. “We should go out for karaoke again!” she says in between Lovers in Japan and Yes, and Bakugou snorts a little as her last words turn into lyrics.
~~~
Bakugou’s been camping ever since he was a child and his father would take him to the woods, teaching him all about starting a fire and setting up the tent. Little Bakugou thought his dad was the coolest man alive—a part of adult Bakugou still thinks that, because none of the heroes he has worked with can make proper, rich, melt in your mouth marshmallow hot chocolate while holding a fussy little Bakugou in their arms.
There are things twenty years of camping teach you—spots to avoid, spots that get really bitchy after heavy rain, spots where the stars are absolutely breathtaking on clear nights and spots where the mosquitoes have a personal agenda to end humankind. The one he’s taking Camie to today is from the breathtaking stars category (and a little bit of the mosquito one, but you win some, you lose some), and he says as much when she asks if he’s kidnapping her (albeit he omits the latter detail).
“Oh wow, never pegged you for the dependable type, Bakuboo.”
“What the fuck?”
“Gotta say, I swooned,” Camie says, dramatic eyelash fluttering and gasps—for good measure. “My heart went doki-doki and all that jazz.”
“Well, keep it in your pants cause we’ve arrived.”
Camie, to everyone’s surprise (that being, Bakugou and the chirping birds), doesn’t gush about the view. She just unstraps her belt and steps out of the car, looking around the little clearing and over at the lake smeared with the colors of the sky at sunset—a gorgeous mess of blues, pinks and purples that looks like the clouds Camie’s illusions disappear into. Maybe breathtaking was too literal of a description, because Camie stays frozen in place, drinking in the view for a long time, until the tent Bakugou is setting up cuts into her line of sight and snaps her out of it.
To everyone’s surprise part two, Camie is actually decent at setting up a tent and starting a fire. “I did my research, fam.” She winks when Bakugou stares at her for a moment too long, and holds out a skewer, pointing to the bag of marshmallows in front of them.
It’s nice, this quiet space where they can pretend the world isn’t suffocating for just a little bit. The stars appear one by one and twinkle in the lake, and the wind makes the first fallen leaves of this autumn dance around over the water. It’s just them, and maybe at the end of the day, that’s all they have.
The fire dwindles as their tea mugs cool down, and Bakugou throws in another log just as Camie lets herself fall onto the blanket, hand fisted in Bakugou’s hoodie to drag him down with her. The log ends up somewhere next to the fire instead, and Bakugou grunts as his back hits the ground because what the fuck-
“Do you ever stop and think about how the narrative of each person’s life is kind of romantic?” Camie muses, and Bakugou shuts up. “Like after a few years have passed, you can look back and find symbolism in the way your life panned out and realize why certain things happened a certain way.”
Bakugou sighs, peeling away Camie’s hand from his shirt. He doesn’t let her go. She turns around, nose buried in the blanket, owlishly looking at their hands, then at him.
“You’ve been thinking a lot about this, haven’t you?” Bakugou asks.
“Kinda?” she shrugs, pulling the blanket along. “Like I tripped on the stairs last month and bumped into you, but making us both fall to the ground kinda saved our butts from that villain that flew in through the window—I still don’t get how that happened, btw.” Bakugou huffs, and she smiles along. “And we met cuz we both failed an exam, ended up under the same agency years later, and our first case involved saving those kids we played with back in high school. It’s all coming full circle, like it’s a movie or something.”
“That makes it sound like we’re going to die soon or something.”
“Maybe,” Camie shrugs again, and this time, when she pulls the blanket along, it’s less of an accident and more so a protective gesture. It hurts because the truth is, in their line of work, maybe is the right answer, and all Bakugou can do is squeeze her hand and wait for Camie to come out of her cocoon of warmth and safety.
When she eventually does, she smiles the first real smile Bakugou saw from her today, that dopey pull of lips that has always made him feel comfortable. “Thx for letting me tag along.”
“Mhm.”
“That didn’t sound too pleased,” she laughs, and Camie has always been most truthful when the moon is out, like night strips away this layer of joyful extroversion and fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude, leaving behind the rawest version of herself. And Bakugou’s fucked, because she’s crashed on his couch one too many times, and he ended up getting patched up at her place after a particularly nasty fight, and they’ve had movie nights enough times for him to know he’s embarrassingly weak for this Camie. (Kirishima says there’s nothing embarrassing about having feelings, but then Kirishima also thinks the milk goes in before the cereal, so his words are to be taken with a grain of salt at best.)
Still, Bakugou looks at her and says, “You’ve had a shit week, haven’t you?” and feels this urge to hug her when Camie winces.
“A shit few weeks, actually,” she says, and her laughter is hollow now. “I don’t even have a good reason for it.”
“You don’t have to,” Bakugou says, because he knows that feeling, of always forgetting something, of needing to do something now , of having to rush somewhere, never knowing where, but always going at full speed. “Sometimes it’s just a fucking mess.”
“Tell me about it,” Camie sighs, melting into the blanket and squeezing his hand back. “I kept telling myself I needed to get through one more report and I’d feel better, but I still feel kinda, idk, lost? A pipe is leaking at home, too, but I don’t feel like dealing with it. And tbh I think I’ve been having instant ramen for lunch five days in a row just cause I cba to get up and cook, so.”
“You should’ve fucking told me, I can cook, you know?”
Camie laughs, a full sound (not amusement, but something genuine; her sort of thank you , and Bakugou’s known her for long enough to read between the lines). “That’s sweet, Bakuboo.”
“You’ll never fucking stop calling me that, will you?”
“Bakubae?” Camie offers, laughing when Bakugou lets go of her hand and rolls her over into the grass, laughing even more when he ends up hovering over her, breath fanning her cheeks.
He’s seen Camie in pajamas and unruly hair, and in gowns and perfectly styled buns, but somehow, this is still more special. She looks up at him, chest still heaving with laughter, and Bakugou thinks he wants to make her laugh all the time, wants to remind her that it’s fine if she’s not fine, and that things get better, and thinks that maybe that’s the L-word.
“Y’know,” Camie says, still a bit short of breath, still breathtaking, “this is where you’re supposed to kiss me.”
And then, because this is Camie, she only waits for him to grumble, “I don’t fucking need you telling me what to-” before she’s curling her fingers around the lapels of his hoodie and pulling him down the rest of the way.
“What do you wanna eat once we’re home?” Bakugou asks when they part, and Camie laughs into his mouth, something about how he shouldn’t make shopping lists in his head while kissing her. So Bakugou kisses her until neither of them can think about shopping lists anymore, until Camie rolls them over so she’s cuddled into his side, and Bakugou thinks that maybe things do come full circle, including his stupid high school crush on one Utsushimi Camie.