Chapter Text
It happens when they’re coming back from their final remedial class, when Shouto’s provisional licence is still pristine, never used. It’s not obvious at the time – it takes a while before Shouto realises that that’s when it happens – but later, when he thinks back, he wonders if it was some kind of sign. It was a life-changing day, even before then. But maybe – maybe more so after.
All Might is driving them back when they see a commotion. There’s water pouring down the streets and people running and screaming. Next to him in the back seat, Bakugou sits up straighter with a savage grin.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s test these fucking things out.”
Shouto doesn’t get what he means at first – he thinks about it later and decides that Bakugou was talking about the licences – but he’s had a lot of practice at not really listening to what Bakugou says, and he’s focused on what’s happening outside, anyway. It’s clear: villains are attacking and there are no heroes in sight. There’s only one appropriate response to that.
He gets out of the car.
It’s a relatively straightforward operation in the end, far easier than some of the mock battles he’s been involved in with his classmates. It mostly helps that he has Bakugou on his side, although occasionally Bakugou’s determination to solve the problem entirely by himself gets in the way. Later, he thinks that it was probably the apparent incompetence of the villains that lulled him into a false sense of security. And his own inexperience, perhaps. When he came to UA, he thought that he already knew more than any high school could teach him about tactics, strategy, technique. He’s since learned that he was very, very wrong – and he’s learned that there are a lot of other things that he didn’t even realise he wanted to know – and it’s become important to him to work on remembering that, to analyse his actions with the assumption that he could have done better. So, yes, maybe inexperience had a hand in it. He knows, at least, that in future he’ll be more careful when approaching an apparently helpless opponent whose quirk he hasn’t yet seen demonstrated.
The villain, half frozen in ice, teeth chattering, glares at him. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with regular features. He looks like he could be anyone. But he isn’t anyone. He’s someone who tried to hurt innocent people. And now he can’t do that any more.
“I—” Shouto starts, and then the villain raises a palm to his mouth like he’s about to blow a kiss, the way Shouto’s seen Ashido do to her friends sometimes in class. There’s no kiss, though. Instead, there’s a faint orange cloud, an odd smell, straight into Shouto’s face. Shouto catches his breath, and something clicks in his throat. He turns away, coughing. It feels briefly as though there’s something coating his tongue. Then the feeling goes away.
“Hey, dumbass,” says Bakugou, passing by him and flicking him in the forehead. “The bad guys are this way.”
That’s all it is. That’s everything.
That’s everything.
****
Aizawa is maybe kind of mad at them for stopping an attack when their licences were less than an hour old. Maybe. Shouto isn’t very good at judging emotions with some people – actually, maybe most people, but Aizawa is particularly bad. He always seems tired and subdued, there’s not a lot of variability there to work with. Not like Midoriya. It’s one of the things Shouto really likes about Midoriya, that it’s easy to tell when he’s feeling something, although Shouto still doesn’t always get it quite right. Aizawa is more like Bakugou, in the sense of mostly projecting a similar small range of emotions all the time. Shouto’s figured out that Bakugou isn’t always in a murderous rage, and he’s figured out that Aizawa isn’t always indifferent to what’s going on around him, but it still isn’t easy to tell what else is going on with them. Mostly, Shouto doesn’t try, especially with Bakugou. Even though they’re friends now, he thinks they’re probably not the kind of friends who talk to each other about how they’re feeling anyway. In any case, Bakugou just scowls at Aizawa and Shouto argues that once you have your licence you’re permitted to carry out hero work – that that’s the whole point of having the licences in the first place – and Aizawa sighs and tells them to get back to the dorms.
As it turns out, their classmates watched the battle on the news, and they’re excited and proud, gathering around Bakugou and Shouto, telling them how cool it all was. Shouto’s still thinking about the various flaws he’s identified in their battle tactics, and when Midoriya tells him how impressive it was, he explains them so that Midoriya will understand that they really didn’t do that well, considering.
“Shut the fuck up, Icy Hot,” Bakugou growls. “I was fucking awesome.”
Shouto’s just explained several ways in which Bakugou’s tactics were deficient, mostly centring on a lack of teamwork, but now he thinks – oh, that was probably a mis-step. If he’d thought about it, he would have realised that criticising a classmate’s performance in front of all his other class-mates is probably not the right thing to do. But he wasn’t thinking about how Bakugou felt, just about how they could potentially improve. And now, because Bakugou’s so difficult to read, he doesn’t know if he’s upset him or not.
“Anyway, fuck all of you, I’m going to bed,” Bakugou says, and stalks off. That leaves Shouto in the middle of the circle, with all the attention focused on him. He’s used to being focused on, but at the same time, he doesn’t really enjoy it. He wishes Bakugou hadn’t left. But he understands why – he feels tired himself, much more so than usual at this time in the evening.
Perhaps he’ll go to bed, too.
****
That night, Shouto finds it difficult to sleep, even though he’s so tired. There’s an odd kind of tingling feeling just under his skin, and his thoughts go round and round in his head. Some of it’s just the usual come-down after a fight – going over what happened again and again, looking for mistakes, ways to improve, things that worked well. But it’s worse than usual, worse even than after Kamino, which is strange given that the actual fight itself was relatively straightforward. He wonders if it would be easier if he could talk about it with someone. Midoriya told him once that he found it useful to talk just to stop things from getting tangled up in his head. But it’s the middle of the night, and Shouto doesn’t want to wake anyone up. Even if it wasn’t the middle of the night, he’s not sure who he would talk to. He doesn’t think any of his friends would be very interested. In any case, his thoughts are unusually muddled. He thinks even if he did have anyone to talk to, he wouldn’t be able to explain very well.
Eventually, he does sleep, but when he wakes up it’s still early, the light filtering through the gaps in his blinds the silvery-grey of pre-dawn. Shouto feels unpleasantly warm, and he doesn’t try to get back to sleep, but struggles out of bed and gets up to shower. He barely makes it upright before almost falling down, though, his vision greying out for a second in a particularly intense head-rush. He probably should have eaten more before going to bed last night.
After his shower, he stands on his balcony to watch the sun come up. He’s lucky enough to have a room on the top floor of the dorms, facing east, and since winter crept up on them he’s been up early enough to catch the sunrise a few times. Sometimes he thinks it would be nice to tell someone about this, too – about how beautiful it is, with the sky deep blue and orange and white and every colour in between. But of course everyone already knows what the sunrise looks like.
Down below, movement catches his eye. It’s a person, exiting the dorms and heading off on the jogging trail. Bakugou.
He watches him until he disappears into the shadows under the trees. Then he raises his eyes to look at the sky again.
****
That day, it’s hard to concentrate in class. Shouto feels too warm, and it’s such an unfamiliar feeling that it keeps distracting him. Normally his quirk regulates his body temperature without him having to think about it at all, the same way he doesn’t think about breathing or his heart beating. But today it just seems – off. He takes off his blazer and consciously cools down his right side, and that helps a little, but he’s still sweating, and his thoughts are moving much slower than usual.
It’s almost certainly because he didn’t sleep well. Normally when he has sleeping problems, it’s because of nightmares that leaving him feeling nauseated well into the next day. He knows how to handle that – don’t eat breakfast, focus on schoolwork, don’t think, don’t think – but this is different. There’s no nausea now, just the strange warmth and the sluggish thoughts. It’s unusual. He wonders if he’s getting sick.
“Todoroki, are you getting sick?” Midoriya asks him at lunch, and he decides that that must be it, then. Midoriya’s very perceptive.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”
Uraraka puts her hand on his forehead. “You don’t feel warm,” she says. “Well, your left side does, but – it’s supposed to, right?” Then she shakes her head. “Actually, I’m not sure how warm you’re supposed to be.”
Shouto nods. He remembers that being a problem the few times he got sick as a small child, that the thermometers had wildly varying readings depending on which side of his mouth they were on, and even the nurse that his mother called once wasn’t really sure what his baseline temperature ought to be. But it’s been so long since he’s had any kind of fever, he’s never really worried about it.
“I feel OK,” he says. “Just tired.”
“You should go to see the nurse!” announces Iida. “It’s important to take care of your health!”
“No, I’m fine,” Shouto says. He’s starting to regret telling Midoriya that he might be sick. He didn’t realise they would all worry like this.
“Well, take it easy in hero training later, anyway,” Midoriya says, with a smile that looks like he’s not completely happy. Shouto decides he’s probably worried. It makes sense, given the context.
“Yeah,” Shouto says, and that makes Midoriya look a little less probably-worried. That’s good. It’s really nothing to be concerned about.
****
That day, hero basic training is focused on quirkless hand-to-hand techniques. It’s unusual – a great deal of their training is concerned with the most effective use of their quirks – but as Aizawa explains, there may be times when they have to fight without them, if they’ve been dosed with quirk suppressants or if there’s a villain with a quirk-erasing power like Aizawa. Not to mention, for those of them with quirks that work best from a distance – like Shouto – it’s important to learn how to fight in close quarters as well.
Shouto’s not unhappy about the exercise. Even once he puts his hero costume on with its external temperature regulators, he’s still feeling too warm, and although he’s not sure he’s going to be in the best shape for hand-to-hand combat, he’s much more concerned about how his quirk might behave if he does have a fever. Not using it seems like the best idea right now. He sees Midoriya watching him from across the gym. Take it easy, Midoriya mouths. He nods and steps up for his first match. He’s paired with Sero, and he drops into a fighting stance. He feels a little light-headed, but still, his father’s training has ensured that he’s one of the best close-combat fighters in the class, so he’s not overly concerned.
Sero lunges and Shouto blocks easily. Sero’s not bad, but he tends to telegraph his moves, and Shouto watches to see where the next one’s coming from. He sees at – a right hook, well-aimed but clearly telegraphed – and moves to block.
And misses.
Sero’s fist smashes into his cheek and he staggers back, pain blooming across his face. He – didn’t block. His hand is even still raised to block but somehow he – just failed to actually calculate the path of Sero’s punch correctly. How did that happen?
He doesn’t have time to figure it out, though, because Sero’s pressing his advantage, throwing another punch. Shouto does manage to block this one, but it’s difficult, like his limbs are weighted down, and his thoughts can’t seem to quite keep pace with Sero’s moves. Has he got a lot faster since last time Shouto saw him fight? When would that have happened? He blocks again, misses again, and Sero’s fist catches him in the gut.
You should be fighting back, his brain informs him. Why are you just taking it?
Right. Right. He sucks in a breath, refusing to allow Sero’s punch to slow him down, and throws one of his own. Even as he’s watching his hand move through the air, it’s clear that something’s not right. It’s so – sloppy, and Sero easily ducks and responds with an uppercut to the jaw that Shouto watches and watches himself watching and fails entirely to either evade or block.
Sero sweeps his legs from under him and Shouto’s lying on the floor, staring up at the gym ceiling, wondering what just happened.
What a pathetic display, his old man’s voice says in his mind. Shouto’s had a lot of practice ignoring that, though. He’s also had a lot of practice at hand-to-hand combat, and yet--
And yet.
“Whoa,” says Sero’s voice somewhere above him. “I KO’d Todoroki.” Then his face appears over Shouto’s, a hand reaching out. “You OK, bro?”
He’s reaching for the hand when another hand slaps it out of the way and then grabs his wrist, not so much helping him up as dragging him to his feet.
“The fuck was that, Half and Half?” Bakugou snarls at him. “You’d better put out some more fucking effort against me, got it?”
“Sorry,” Shouto says. He does feel sorry – he should have done better. “Sorry, Sero.”
“Oh man, it feels so great when you beat someone and then they apologise to you for not winning,” Sero says, but he grins and slaps Shouto on the back, so Shouto thinks he’s not really upset.
“Hey! Eyes over here,” yells Bakugou. He’s already got his hands up, waiting for Shouto, and Shouto thinks that given his performance against Sero, he’s likely to lose. Even if he was on top form, he’d have an even chance of losing against Bakugou. Still, he puts his hands up and circles, waiting to see what Bakugou will do.
What Bakugou does: punches Shouto in the face.
What Shouto does: completely fails to block.
What Shouto feels: a jolt of pain and a kind of strange coolness that radiates out from where Bakugou’s fist made contact. For a second or two, he feels – a little better, a little more clear-headed despite the ache in his cheekbone.
Then Bakugou punches him again, and Shouto thinks maybe he should be thinking more about blocking and less about how weird it is that getting hit in the face is making him feel good.
Apparently, Bakugou feels the same, because he stops punching and advances on Shouto, grabs his face and starts yelling at him. He’s saying something about not taking this fucking seriously and fucking fight me you asshole and various similar Bakugou things, but Shouto’s not really listening because he’s too busy thinking about how good Bakugou’s hand feels on his face, even with how he seems to be trying to crush his jaw from the force of his grip alone, and how for the first time since this morning – maybe even since yesterday evening – he doesn’t feel like his skin is itching all over.
“Hey! Break it up.”
It’s Aizawa, wrenching Bakugou away from Shouto with a heavy sigh. “You’re supposed to be fighting, not whatever that was,” he says.
Shouto blinks. Bakugou’s glaring at Aizawa. “Tell that asshole, not me,” he says. “He’s the one who wasn’t even trying.”
Aizawa turns to him. For the first time, Shouto sees that some of their other classmates are hovering. Midoriya is there. He looks worried.
“Sensei, Todoroki’s not feeling well,” Midoriya says before he can answer.
Aizawa frowns. “Is that true?”
“I—” Is it true? It was true, it was definitely true before. But now – now Shouto feels a lot better. Maybe he just needed to get punched a lot to feel better. That’s a little strange, though, if true. “I’m feeling better now.”
“Sure?” Aizawa says.
Shouto nods.
“Well, if you start to feel ill again, tell me,” Aizawa says. “You know fighting when you’re sick is against the rules.”
Shouto nods again, and Aizawa steps back. He doesn’t leave, though, but watches Shouto and Bakugou as they drop into their fighting stances again. Bakugou leads with a feint to the left followed by a right hook, and Shouto easily blocks.
He does lose, in the end. But Bakugou doesn’t seem mad about it.
****
That night, Shouto can’t sleep again.
It’s the same problem as the night before, the weird tingling itch that won’t go away, the feeling of being uncomfortably warm, the thoughts that move in strange directions, round and round, nothing resolving itself. He dozes on and off, but when he’s half asleep his thoughts seem to grow and stretch, turning from nagging concerns into shadowy creatures that lunge at him until he wakes, heart pounding, sweat standing out on his forehead and the back of his neck. Even when he’s awake, though, things start to seem a little dream-like, with the shadows in the corners of his room merging with the shadows in his mind until he’s not even sure, he’s not sure if he’s awake or asleep.
He decides that he’s definitely awake when he notices that his breath is clouding in front of his face, though. He sits up in bed and looks down to find that his right arm is covered in tiny ice crystals, and when he reaches up to touch his face, he finds they’re there as well, crusting his eyelashes, his hair. The air in the room must be very cold for his breath to be condensing the way it is. It still feels too warm to him, though.
This is a problem. He tries to remember how his quirk reacted when he was sick as a kid. The ice isn’t so bad, but if his fire starts activating without him controlling it, that could cause some real problems. The furnishings in his room are heavily fireproofed, but that doesn’t mean they can stand up to the kind of fire his quirk can produce.
He gets up. It’s probably not really safe for him to be sleeping right now. And anyway, it’s unpleasant. Being asleep is painful and frightening. Being awake is – just painful. It’s almost dawn, anyway.
He goes down to the common room. He misses a step in the dark and almost falls down the stairs, ending up clinging to the handrail, head spinning in slow, lazy circles. So, he’s definitely sick. He should drink some water. Once it’s daytime, he’ll call Fuyumi and ask if she remembers what they used to do when he was sick as a kid. He should try to find something that brings fevers down, too. Paracetamol, he remembers from first aid classes. He’ll find some paracetamol.
He rummages in the cupboards in the kitchen, looking for the first aid kit, but all he finds is pans and various food items. He definitely needs the paracetamol, though, so he starts taking the food out, packet by packet, trying to find where the kit is. They haven’t used it for a while – he’s not sure they’ve ever used it – so it’s probably buried pretty far back.
He’s deep in the cupboard, fumbling to put a box of seaweed on the counter without pulling his head out, when someone grabs his hand.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?”
He pauses, head still fully inside the cupboard. Bakugou. His hand feels incredibly cool on Shouto’s, and Shouto thinks he must really have a high fever, because he knows that Bakugou’s body temperature tends to run warm.
“Halfie,” Bakugou says without letting go of his hand. “It’s six a.m. Why are you touching my fucking food?”
Shouto knows that the appropriate thing to do now is to pull his head out of the cupboard, stand up, and explain to Bakugou that he’s looking for the first aid kit. He also knows that if he does that, Bakugou will most likely let go of his hand. And – he doesn’t want that. He can’t really explain it, even to himself. He’s not – a person who likes to be touched. He’s not a person that other people touch. Even Fuyumi only hugs him occasionally. But his entire consciousness right now is focused on Bakugou’s hand, Bakugou’s hand on his hand, what a – relief it is. It feels like the coolness is spreading down his arm and into his body, into his brain, washing away the tingling itch, rearranging his thoughts into patterns that are less tangled, less ugly.
“I’m looking for the first aid kit,” he says, without taking his head out of the cupboard.
“The fuck?” says Bakugou, and lets go of his hand.
Shouto feels – disappointed. He sits back, looking up at Bakugou. The lights are off, but the sky outside’s getting lighter, and he can see Bakugou’s face, looking at him like he’d like to punch him in the face again. And Shouto – thinks he might like that, too. Not the punch, so much, but Bakugou touching him, even if it’s violent. And he thinks – maybe that means there’s something wrong with him.
Then Bakugou shakes his head, grabs his hand, and pulls him to his feet. Shouto curls his fingers round Bakugou’s, and Bakugou makes a strangled noise and wrenches his hand away.
“Get off me, asshole,” he says, and Shouto feels – that disappointment again, he feels sick with it.
“It’s fucking there,” Bakugou snarls at him, pointing the first aid kit, sitting on the dedicated bracket on the wall just like it has since they moved into the dorms. Shouto stares at it. Then he stares at Bakugou.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”
Bakugou’s eyes are wide. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he says.
But he leaves before Shouto can answer.
****
Shouto wonders about it, though. He wonders about it all morning, when he’s supposed to be concentrating. What is wrong with him? Not so much the fever, whatever the illness was – after Bakugou leaves he realises he feels a lot better, so that’s not a problem any more. But – his thoughts. When he was imagining Bakugou punching him and thinking it might be good. When Bakugou did punch him during hero basic training and even though it hurt a lot, it felt good, too. Does Shouto like it when people hit him? He doesn’t think he’s ever liked it before. It’s just – a thing that happens, like people pushing past him to get on the subway, or like having his stance corrected. Aside from the painful aspect of it, it’s a neutral thing, not good or bad, just – a thing that happens. But then yesterday--
It didn’t feel good when Sero hit him. That was only just before Bakugou hit him, so it’s unlikely that the difference is to do with a development over time. On the other hand, Bakugou has definitely hit him before, and it didn’t feel good those times. And – he doesn’t understand why it would feel good when Bakugou does it and not when Sero does it. Unless – he’s attracted to Bakugou? Bakugou is certainly physically very attractive. And they are friends. He’s not sure if that’s how being attracted to someone works, though. He’s never bothered to find out very much about it, but he’s never heard anything about wanting the object of your affections to punch you in the face.
Actually, he thinks he might still be a little sick, after all.
“Midoriya,” he says when they’re walking back from lunch. “How do you know if you’re attracted to someone?”
“Oh! Well, I--” Midoriya says, then starts stuttering. “That is – I’m not – I haven’t – I’m not really an expert--”
Shouto waits. Sometimes when Midoriya gets like this, he eventually gets to the point. Other times, he just keeps on stuttering. Shouto’s still not sure how to tell the difference from the outset, so he usually just waits to see which one it will be.
“Are you – is there someone you’re – attracted to?” Midoriya asks at last.
“I don’t know,” Shouto says. “I don’t know what it feels like.”
“Oh.” Midoriya stops stuttering and smiles. “Well – I guess it’s probably a little different for different people, but – you think about that person a lot and you get a kind of – fluttery feeling when you see them, and you want to spend a lot of time with them, and thinking about them makes you smile. That kind of thing.” He looks up at Shouto. “So – do you think you’re attracted to someone?”
Shouto considers. He does think about Bakugou fairly often, which makes sense as they’re friends and until recently they spent a lot of time together at the remedial classes. He doesn’t think he gets a fluttery feeling, and thinking about Bakugou definitely doesn’t make him smile. Midoriya didn’t say anything about wanting the person to punch you in the face.
“No,” he says. “Probably not, then.”
Midoriya looks a little disappointed, which is unexpected. Shouto didn’t want to disappoint him. He’s not sure what he did to make that happen, though.
A moment later, though, Uraraka calls out to them and Midoriya’s all smiles again, so it probably wasn’t really a big deal.
****
That afternoon, the itch under Shouto’s skin comes back. By the time class is over, he feels – really hot. His thoughts are muddy, like his brain is filled with silty water, and all he can really think it I don’t want to feel like this any more.
No, that’s not right. He’s thinking something else, too. He’s thinking about Bakugou, how Bakugou punched him and it made him feel better. He’s in his room, trying to search what does it mean if I like being punched on his phone, but the backlight’s giving him a headache and his thoughts just keep circling around the same thing. He feels terrible. Yesterday, when he felt terrible, Bakugou punched him and he felt better. Therefore, Bakugou punching him makes him feel good. Therefore, he should get Bakugou to punch him again.
On some level, he’s kind of aware that his thought process doesn’t really make a lot of sense. On all the other levels, he just wants the itching and the heat and the sweat and the sluggish thoughts to go away.
He goes downstairs.
Bakugou is sitting with his friends in the corner of the common room, scrolling through his phone. He looks up when Shouto comes to stand next to him.
“The fuck do you want?”
“I want you to fight me,” Shouto says.
“Whoa,” says Kirishima. “That’s pretty intense, dude.”
Bakugou scowls up at him. Then he grins.
“You’re on,” he says.