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Bakugo Katsuki’s got a crush.
It’s a sentiment he chokes on, heart punching through his chest with every pump like he’s activating his quirk on the muscle. He doesn’t know what to do with this feeling, has never experienced anything like it before, has only recently come to terms with other grudges in his gut and storms battering in his blood.
So he does what he does best: wrap his hands around whatever it is and set his palms to explode.
---
Uraraka Ochako wonders at glares and fidgets at the feeling of being put under a microscope. She meets that red-hot gaze, tilts her head in confused acknowledgement, then slides her eyes back to the whiteboard to watch words that refuse to be understood.
It doesn’t do the trick.
When the teacher calls on him for a question, he answers without missing a beat, turning to face the front with the sort of disdain that suggests he’s been interrupted in the middle of something urgent.
And when noon comes, when Deku stands up and she follows after, she sees from the corner of her eye the way the blond’s frown deepens, that choleric squint chasing after her long past lunch.
Her heart beats itself into a corner and whispers possibilities into her ear.
---
Lingering gazes get longer. The uncooperative muscle between her ribs hurries forward in double-time, the constant staccato against her ribcage becoming harder and harder to hear over.
She’s not sure when the turn happens, but he sits beside her on the couch, and when their knees bump, she flinches away but wonders what it’d feel like to run her hands through his hair. The tightness in her chest makes her inch away, press herself into the arm of the seat, make herself small and pretend she doesn’t feel the intensity that pins her and keeps her there.
It’s distraction to a dangerous degree, and when they cross paths in the hallway, it detonates.
He steps to his left at the same time she steps to her right, and when she moves to the left, he steps right. Before they can do anymore of this, before her heart might fly out her throat at the way he’s looking at her–she opens her mouth,
And he beats her to it. “Whatever this is,” he waves a finger between them, jaw clenched and eyes hard. “It’s stupid.”
She nods, swallows, meets his eyes and doesn’t shake at the severity in them. “It is.”
“It needs to stop.”
“It does.”
“I’m gonna kiss you now.”
“Finally”–
---
The first kiss sets the precedent.
The first kiss sets them on fire.
---
Nothing about him is soft, he’s all edges and angles. He kisses her and every time she leaves with bruised lips, fingerprints around her wrist or her arms or her waist or her hips.
And eventually they dot along her ass, her thighs, her chest.
It’s meant to put the tension between them to rest–that’s their excuse for these recurring appointments, when he pulls her into empty rooms and tells her it’s not quite out of his system yet and she nods because it’s a constant simmer under her skin, too–but she kind of gets the feeling it’ll never end.
She kind of gets the feeling they could bring the dead back to life with the energy that spins between them.
---
What he means to do is smother the paltry flames licking at what other people would call coal, what he calls his heart. He hasn’t even pressed his mouth to hers, just hears her desperate, exasperated “finally,” before he realizes he’s fucked up.
This is not an ember, it’s a forest fire, and he’s not holding a garden hose, he’s steering a fuel tank.
He recognizes that it was too late a long time ago–probably sometime shortly after that first fight, and now it’s festered for two years and then some.
And like with anything else, he’s helpless to the satisfaction he gets watching shit burst into flames.
---
Now that it’s started, it won’t stop. At first, he promises himself to keep it contained. This will be a controlled fire, and when it works its way to the end of the field, it’ll have done what he needed it to do–that is, clean the whole place up, reset any of what used to be there, make new what’s old, so that he can build on top of it.
Of course, dynamite doesn’t make for prescribed fires. It’s patchwork, and he’s honestly not surprised to see that one of the surviving sections, still lush with life, is the one she sits on and grins up at him from.
---
One afternoon in the USJ, she tells him, “I have this idea about your quirk.”
Instinct elbows him in the gut, and he’s about to tell her he doesn’t want her opinion before she spins away on her heel anyways.
Later, when she’s pulling her hoodie over her head and leaving as soon as it’s over the way she always does and he always lets her, he asks, “What was your idea?”
Brown seems to burn amber with thrill, and she sits back onto the edge of his bed, fingers fluttering into shapes as she explains.
He can’t tear his eyes away.
---
Ochako doesn’t know what this is.
Not just what they are, but what this–the constant float in her stomach, the tunnel vision when he’s near, the sudden loss of words when he looks at her–is. It’s what she experienced with Deku, taken 10 steps forward and turned up to 20, and when she tries to stuff it away like she once did with her previous crush, she can’t. There’s no box it fits into.
It’s a first.
And since it refuses to be put in a box and dropped into a corner to collect dust until she can dispose of it properly, she doesn’t know what to do with it, suspects she may be diving straight into a mess if she doesn’t put a stop to it soon. But it’s becoming very, very hard to pull herself out of it all, especially as inch by inch, he gives her more until four months down the line, she finds herself fully welcomed into the afterward–
which is his unexpected pliancy, when his growls are softer and the corners smoother, when he answers her questions against her skin, when he kisses her just to kiss her.
---
The carnal part of it falls to the wayside, sweaty nights somehow turning into slow nights that somehow turn into simple nights of just spouting ideas back and forth, quiet, smug laughter–his–at the sillier, stupider suggestions and surprised, excited gasps–hers–at anything particularly clever.
She turns onto her side one night to plead with him, “c’mon, Bakugo!” mirth creasing the corners of her mouth. But when she sees the depth in his gaze, all she can say is “oh,” smile slipping away while she searches that softness in his face.
“What?”
Like her words have feet and they’re tiptoeing across hardwood, she says, “I… I really like you.”
He chuckles and climbs over her, says with his mouth crooked and teeth sharp, “I really like you, too.”
As it turns out, tonight is one of those slow nights.
---
It’s a paired quirk training exercise. Aizawa points a finger at her, then crosses over everybody to point at him, and when they step forward, she wonders if the perfect opportunity to try out that long list of silly ideas is really, actually, presenting itself so easily.
(More than anything though, she wonders if acting natural is currently as unnatural for him as it is for her.)
But when she tries something new, tries applying her quirk to the liquid in his gauntlets and watches when he makes bullets out of sweat and times an explosion so that it looks delayed, acts delayed, when really it’s just her quirk, she marvels at how natural they really are.
And when he unleashes ribbons of perspiration into the air, they watch the arcs sail up resistance-less–like they’d fly for infinity given the permission–before going off like pyrotechnics.
“We’re doing it again, Cheeks,” he says, hand clenching as he stares at it like the sky’s just broken open and angels are singing to him. Then he stares at her like she might be the singing angel.
(Later, when she really is singing, he kisses up her throat, stopping at her ear to grin with his teeth against it and murmur about a different kind of paired exercise, “We’re doing it again, Cheeks.”)
---
On a simple night, she tells him, “You can call me Ochako.”
He threads his fingers through her hair, tilts her head back so that he’s staring lava and sparks down at her and says without any qualms, “You can call me whatever you want”–an ungentle tug to her bangs, she expects nothing less from him–“s’long as you’re mine.”
Serenity is a chaste kiss to the corner of her mouth, paints a smile on her face and spills laughter at his grimace when she says, “Kacchan.”
---
Katsuki finds that her name falls off his tongue the way hot oil spits: eagerly, frequently, aims to burn. She’s mine, he might as well yell. Mine. Mine. Mine!
And when she wraps herself around his arm, beams up at him, that voice quiets for a second.
Then it bursts back onto the scene, louder than ever.
---
Some nights aren’t simple or slow or sweaty. Some nights are miserable, because there are rules to these kinds of things.
Those nights, she tells him no and stalks off to her room, misses his frown or the way his face draws tight in irritation by the slightest of millimeters, reads her offer letter over and over and feels upset that she can’t feel anything but dread. And she finds Tsuyu and tells her that she’s received an offer from Miruko, can you believe it?! Miruko!! And Tsu responds with ‘course I can, you’re you!
And Ochako hopes her friend’s excitement will rub off on her, but there’s only one person she really wants to tell, and she can’t because she doesn’t know where they’re going and it might kill her to find out this way. She wonders if this thing with him is heading nowhere and scolds herself for letting this mess get so out of hand, for letting Katsuki become more than just a boy, for having this be the one time–the first time–when just asking seems terrifying.
So she lays awake in bed and stays upset at the whole thing. But when sleep finally slips its hands over her eyes, she wakes up in the mornings and isn’t angry anymore. She thinks she can keep going until this implodes all on its own.
That’s what she’ll do, she thinks. She’ll let this star blow up, then shrink into itself, nothing but a tiny white dwarf left in the aftermath.
---
Katsuki likes having her within arm’s reach, likes that it’s her and that he doesn’t have to share.
So when she starts dodging him, he pins her to the wall in the hallway on an empty day and snaps. “You’re avoiding me.”
Her eyes don’t meet his. “There’s a lot of… stuff. A lot of stuff going on!” There’s a beat, and honesty pries her lips apart. “In my head. There’s a lot going on in my head.”
“Then tell me.”
“It’s... complicated?”
“I said tell me.”
“Did you get an offer?”
“‘Course, what the hell do you take me for?”
“Should we… talk?”
“About what.”
“About what we’re gonna be after this. After the ceremony.”
“Graduates. Heroes. Sidekicks. The hell is there to talk about.”
“You and me, though. Are we still going to… hangout?”
He takes a pause this time. “Where’re you gonna be?”
“Tokyo.”
Relief sinks his shoulders, and like a seesaw, her heart soars up in turn. “The building I got a place in has another unit across the hall for rent.”
“...Okay!”
“Was that so fucking complicated?”
“Shush, you.”
---
The first morning, they step out at the same time. She waves a hand at him. He squints at her. They take the elevator down.
When they take the same train, walk the same route, pull up at the same building, they laugh. Well, she does. He does something with his mouth that might be a smile before setting it back into that familiar glower.
And when he tells her to stay the night and she does–she stays the night, stays the day, stays the mornings and the midnight snacks and the action-movie marathons and the deciding what to do for dinner or fighting about leaving the toilet seat up–for three months, she breaks her lease on the room she’s barely even breathed in and has no trouble floating her unopened boxes across the hall.
---
Ochako gets a lot of attention. A lot. It could possibly be flattering if it weren’t so absolutely embarrassing.
The first time it happens, her words lose themselves, trampolining across and under and between each other, fall between the staff fridge and water boiler and vending machines, face red as a stop sign. Every time after that, she grows more and more used to turning people away gently.
But the first time Katsuki also happens to be in the room, also happens to be waiting for the pot to fill up, it’s the first time her eyes flicker to the somebody else in the room before she opens her mouth to drop the customary bomb.
“Oh!” They say before she can get a word out, scrambling back so fast that anything she could say at this point would have to travel too far a distance, “Nevermind,” then–to the blond minding his own business as he pours himself a mug–with feeling, “Nevermind!” Before swirling out of the room with fervor.
And once Katsuki lifts the mug to his mouth, he peers over the rim at her with bright eyes that never hide anything, and sneers into that first sip.
---
When she taps ten fingers against skyscrapers and lifts them as she sweeps through the air, over their heads, drops the buildings away from evildoers with a practiced grace, he stares.
And when Kirishima grins at him, hands on his hips like he’s the one skating through the sky and dropping mountains on morons,
Katsuki says–disgusted and frustrated and annoyed–on a breathless exhale,
“I think I’m in love.”
“First time for everything,” Kirishima ribs, sends a rock solid thump against his back, then takes off like his best friend isn’t experiencing a mind-melting existential crisis.
---
This is what they signed up for, she reminds herself as she waits by white sheets and wrappings, eyes pinned to the drip but not really seeing. She’s slept in plastic waiting room seats, laid across them with her hands over her heart like a corpse, slept sitting up against his hospital bed, slept only to be woken by nurses, woken by colleagues, woken by texts from friends.
But when she’s woken by the way his hands card gently through the hair on the crown of her head, she smiles sleepily up at him and says, “I love you.”
He snorts. “I loved you a long fuckin’ time ago, Cheeks.”
---
“Marry me.”
Her laughter could fill the entire building, and the people in it would be blessed for it. “Y’know you’ve never even asked me to be your girlfriend?”
A huff, a roll of his eyes, a pinch to her cheek. “Be my girlfriend.”
“Okay,” she smiles softly, twisting onto her front, onto him, and propping her head up in her palms.
Skin to skin, he knows he could do this forever, slide hands over the curve of her, kiss contentment into her mouth, across her shoulders. “Okay?”
“Mhm.”
A pause. “Alright.” Another pause, then he takes her hand, brushes over the pad of each finger, stops his thumb on her ring finger and slides to the base of it before looking her in the eye. “Alright, now that that’s out of the way–
–Marry me.”
---
Ochako stands in front of him, a vision in white, angel-faced and ecstatic and his.
Then, in the middle of all the mind-numbing formalities and processions and traditions, just as he pulls away from the kiss, they’re interrupted by egos too big for their britches to recognize who’s officiating, who’s sitting in the audience, who’s making up the damn wedding party.
They’re in their own world while villains thunder useless threats and both their parents look unamused at the disturbance, while Midoriya and Todoroki and Tsuyu and Kirishima and the entire Golden Year roll up their sleeves or tear off their skirts so their costumes reveal themselves, while she holds him an inch from her, nose to nose, and meets his gaze with something conspiratorial swirling in hers.
“Let’s blow this pop stand,” she breathes, smiling just for him.
And as they drift up and as his palms pop, he thinks: he’ll meet her in this life and the next and every life after that, because this?
This is the kind of shit fireworks are made of.