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"Did you know your eyes are the same color as chocolate?" Mina said, an excited quiver to her voice. Uraraka rolled said eyes, because she was not in the mood to talk about the damned colors again.
While Mina went to the same middle school as Kirishima, they had apparently never touched before. You needed skin to skin contact in order to know if that person was your soulmate. So during a training exercise when the two touched hands by mistake, they both immediately stopped, garnering an angry "what are you doing?" from their partners. The whole exercise had come to a screeching halt as the two stared into each other's eyes. Uraraka remembered thinking it looked like a scene straight from a romcom.
"Your hair is so bright," she had said, amazed at the shocking hue.
"Yours is too," he replied, smiling and tucking a piece behind her ear.
From that moment on, Mina would not shut up about colors. Uraraka could understand, but it didn't help her feel any less jealous.
"I knew that my eyes are brown, since my parents told me. I guess I didn't know that chocolate is brown though."
"Yeah! And different kinds of chocolate are a little different. Your eyes are more like milk chocolate. But you've also got some caramel coloring in there! But around the edges it’s more like dark chocolate. And your cheeks are pink! Not as much as mine obviously. Oh, you probably didn't know, my skin is pink. Like, super pink."
It was hard to follow when she talked like this. Is caramel a color? How can eyes be different colors? Maybe it was like how Todoroki had two different colored eyes? She didn't know what colors they were, but she had noticed one day that they were slightly different shades of gray. Uraraka really couldn't relate to this conversation.
"I'm glad you're excited, but I've got a lot to do, so I’m going to head to my room. See you later, Mina-chan!" Uraraka said, as she gathered her things from the common room coffee table.
"Bye, Pink Cheeks!" she called. Uraraka tried not to get annoyed.
"Can you hand me my water bottle?" Kirishima called from the couch. Bakugou looked at the bottles drying on the counter. Momo had just washed everyone's bottles, murmuring about proper hygiene and what kind of animal doesn't wash their water bottle, what with all the bacteria.
"Which one is it?" he asked.
"The red one," Kirishima said. Bakugou looked at all the black and white bottles in front of him then frowned at Kirishima.
"Fucking really, Shitty Hair?"
"Shit, sorry, I forgot. Uhh, third from the right," he corrected. Bakugou picked it up and chucked it at him with zero regard for whether the hardening hero was ready to catch it.
"Hey, be careful, dude! You might dent it!"
"Only if you're not good enough to catch it," Bakugou retorted, venom dripping from his words.
He hated it when people brought up colors. It just reminded him of another way in which other people were ahead of him. Not that he gave a crap about this soulmate business, but he didn't like that others could do something he couldn't.
"Hey man, if you're so mad about the colors, all you gotta do is just touch everyone until you can see them!" Kirishima joked. Bakugou scoffed loudly and left him in the common room without another word.
Uraraka noticed, before anyone it seemed, that Bakugou was acting strangely. He seemed to be trying to... touch people? First he stood completely in Jirou's way, accused her of getting in his way, and then physically moved her. The girl had been confused but didn’t seem to think too much of it and moved on, but Uraraka didn’t.
She paid attention, following Bakugou with her eyes whenever they were in the same vicinity. She watched as the blonde put on a similar show with two other girls from 1B and even one from support.
While of course she thought it was odd, she knew better than to question Bakugou about it, especially in front of a lot of people. She didn't want anyone getting blown up, after all.
“This isn't fucking working,” he whispered to himself after faking accidental contact with four or five girls. People were going to think he was some sort of creep at this rate. With that in mind, Bakugou dropped the idea and sulked into the classroom, dropping his back pack onto the hard surface of his desk without any regard for how loud it was or who was around.
But having spent the morning trying to figure out who his soulmate was, the topic was still on his mind. He couldn’t help himself from looking around at the girls in his class.
It obviously wasn't Alien Freak because she had a soulmate already, and he had touched Ears earlier and nothing happened. He seriously doubted it was the goody two shoes Vice President or that frog chick that hung around with Deku.
He stopped suddenly, realizing how stupid this was. The odds of his soulmate being in his class were next to nothing. There were hundreds, thousands, of girls it could have been.
If it did have to be one of the girl's in the class though, he found himself thinking he'd like it to be Round Face. He looked over at her only to see her already glancing in his direction. His eyes darted away and he quickly expelled that thought from his mind. There was no way that the universe would work out in such a perfect way.
As she left the training rooms, the light breeze hitting her sweat soaked skin and cooling her down wonderfully, she saw him walking from Ground Beta. Without even thinking, she waited for him, waving to get his attention.
“Bakugou-kun!”
"What the hell do you want, Round Face?"
"Well, hello to you too!" He scoffed and looked away.
"Aren't you going to do it with me too?" she asked. He turned to glance at her questioningly.
"Do what?"
"Touch me! It took me a minute to figure out what you were doing, but you were trying to find your soulmate, right?"
He looked away from her inquisitive eyes, a dusting of pink crossing his cheeks as he shoved his hands in his pockets. She wanted to giggle, but she stopped herself, knowing he likely wouldn’t react favorably to being laughed at.
"Tch. I don't care about soulmates, I just wanna see the stupid colors Kirishima keeps blabbering about."
"I can relate. Mina won't shut up about my brown hair and brown eyes and pink cheeks, and apparently I look cute in orange. I didn’t even know I owned any orange clothing. It's so annoying."
He looked surprised, but maintained some of that annoyed scowl he was famous for.
"Right. Exactly. Pink cheeks, huh?" He didn’t know what pink looked like, but he knew it was typically associated with being all soft and girly. It made sense for her. She just shrugged.
"I guess so." She stopped walking abruptly and he turned to look at her, eyebrow raised. She stuck out her hand. "Might as well eliminate another candidate?"
He simply stared at her hand for a moment, seeming to be thinking hard about something. Why wasn't he doing it? She realized after a moment she was holding her breath. At his continued silence, she started to falter, furrowing her brows and dropping her hand a bit.
"It ain't you," he mumbled, leaving her hanging and walking off in a hurry. Her arm landed limply at her side as she watched him go.
How could he be so sure?
He wondered if she thought he wouldn't notice. That she was trying to touch him.
So he avoided her at all costs. For days he sidestepped, rushed past, and ignored her, hoping she would get the hint and leave him alone. It seemed to work at first, as he had a moment of reprieve for a time.That is, until the weekend struck.
The wind hit his face as his feet carried him farther. He had only meant to go on a quick jog, but his mind ran along with his feet and he had lost track of time. Bakugou found himself so far away from campus that he could hear the sounds of the ocean.
Well, he had come this far. Completing the rest of the journey to the shore, he slipped off his shoes so he could feel the sand between his toes.
He wondered if Uraraka liked coming to the beach.
A sound came from behind, and Bakugou’s ear perked up. Whoever was behind him was getting closer, and he wasn’t fond of being close.
In one motion, he catapulted himself forward, away from the potential assailant, and spun in the air to face them. His hands raised and primed to use his quirk if necessary, he searched his mind to remember whether he had his provisional license on his person.
But that thought was cut short as he was met with the familiar, shiny eyes and broad smile of his classmate, the object of many of his thoughts these days.
"What the hell, Cheeks? Did you fucking follow me?!"
"Why are you avoiding me?" she said, stomping over to stand mere inches away.
"You keep on fucking trying to touch me!"
"Yeah! Because I want to know!" she yelled. She hardly ever raised her voice, and Bakugou almost found it amusing, until he remembered that he was supposed to be pissed off.
"What makes you think it's us? It could be anyone." She visibly softened.
"I think it is... because I want it to be." He froze.
Uraraka... wanted to be his soulmate?
“And just so you don’t think I’m creepy, I didn’t quite follow… I just thought you’d be here, so I came.”
“Why?” He was too shell shocked to string together more than one word.
“Well, you come here when you’re stressed.”
One blink. Two blinks. Three blinks. After the long pause, he still didn’t quite know what to say. He never really made a conscious effort to get himself to the beach with the intention of destressing, but now that he thought about it, it was usually the times when he had something weighing on his mind that he found himself standing ankle deep in the waves.
“How did you even know that?”
“Oh come on, Bakugou, you’re not so hard to figure out. Every time you come back to the dorm saying you’ve gone to the beach it’s been when you’re especially stressed out about something. I just put two and two together.”
“It’s not like I fucking advertise my every emotion, how the fuck are you supposed to know when I’m stressed?”
She cocked her head to the side, a genuine look of confusion across her features. “Doesn’t everyone know when you’re stressed? You’ve got this way about you.”
Now it was his turn to furrow his brows at her, his perplexed expression urging her to continue.
“You know, you still yell but it sounds a little forced, like you’ve got better things to do than yell at the ‘extras.’ And you get this real specific wrinkle between your brows. Oh, and you space out a lot more, that’s really how I can tell. You also-”
“Well aren’t you Miss Fucking Observant.” He spun away from her, hands shoved deep into his pockets, and abandoned her and his shoes to head to the water. If she kept telling him everything she noticed about him, kept showing him just how much attention she paid, he would want to kiss her even more than he already did.
It wasn’t long, barely even a couple seconds, before Uraraka was shedding her shoes and socks and following on his heels. He knew he wasn’t going to get rid of her, but he at least needed to stop looking into her sparkling eyes. He couldn’t see their color, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see the way they shined a bit more when they were looking at him, but maybe he was imagining it.
“Is it a bad thing that I notice things like that?” Her tone was playful, and the small smile on his face seemed to have forgotten what mood he was supposed to be in.
“No,” he said simply, looking out onto the water as his feet finally reached moist sand.
It was silent for a long while as they both looked out onto the now setting sun. Different shades of gray swirled around the sky and changed ever so slightly as the sun sank lower and lower. He had heard plenty of times how beautiful a sunset could be in color, and he found himself wanting to see it more than ever in this moment. But something was still holding him back.
If he found out it wasn’t her, what would he do from there?
What if he never found her? What if he was stuck in black and white for the rest of his existence, unable to share full access to the world's beauty with someone? He would never admit it to anyone, but he was terrified of never finding his soulmate, of spending his life and celebrating his achievements alone. What good was reaching your goals if there was no one he gave a damn about around to see it? But perhaps what he was really worried about, something he hadn’t even admitted to himself yet, was not necessarily that he wouldn’t find the woman, but that it wouldn’t be Uraraka.
“I want it to be you.”
Her whispered words were so quiet that it didn’t even seem as though he was meant to hear them. He stole a glance to see her eyes trained on the horizon, her expression almost desperate, maybe desperate to see the colors in the sky before her, maybe desperate to know what her future would hold. Her expression caused him to take a heavy breath in, and her eyes met his.
"Fuck. Now it's even harder," he whispered.
"What do you mean?"
"Now if we aren't it, we'll both be crushed."
Her eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead, surprised at his admission, but the look didn’t last long. Her brows relaxed, and though he could tell she was charged with nerves, a small smile still found its place on her lips.
"I'd like to think that the universe knows what it's doing." She raised her hand as she spoke, the expectation clear.
He had no such faith in the universe. Things never worked out. But despite himself, he sighed and moved his hand until he stopped, fingers suspended a few centimeters away from her skin. He couldn't bring himself to do it, but she clearly didn’t want to waste anymore time. Her hand jumped forward.
Brown eyes. Brown hair. Pink cheeks.
But it wasn't that simple. Uraraka’s eyes were a kaleidoscope of brown hues. He didn't have names for the colors he saw, but he knew that they were beautiful. That she was beautiful. He saw they were starting to get glossy, and a tear fell to her cheek. Her pink cheek.
He swept his thumb across her cheek to banish the tear, and smiled as he held her face.
"Your eyes are the same color as your shirt," she pointed out.
He looked down at his shirt to see what it looked like. "They're so bright," she marveled. "What color is that?"
"I think it's red," he replied. He moved his other hand to her face, cradling it in his grasp.
"Red is beautiful," she whispered.
In unison, they closed the distance between them. Their lips brushed each others’ softly. A jolt of electricity ran down his spine, and he knew that she was it. She was the one he had told himself he didn't need for so long. But what the hell had he known. He knew better now.
"I knew it was you," she whispered breathlessly.
"I hoped it was you," he replied.