Archive of Our Own ^omega

‘When do you realise you’ve fallen in love with someone?’

Despite it being a terribly common cliche of a question, I find it would bring benefit to a rather generous number of people if the answer was obvious enough. We have all experienced, or at the very least been given the misconception of, variations of what infatuation feels like, which has helped in building what we each individually believe to be the right answer to that question. No, let me rephrase that. More often than not, people aren’t even completely sure of what the right answer might be themselves. I don't expect for anybody to share this ideology with me, but to be perfectly honest with you, the whole idea of falling in love is nothing more than an ignorant lie that we as humankind prefer to indulge ourselves in rather than in the truth of what lonely, yet cruel creatures we are. It is only when they are faced with the adversity of this single, subjective question that they begin to think for themselves what it truly means to love somebody. Is it like what we read about in fairytales; following the tale of a damsel in distress, her long, silky hair billowing behind her in the wind, waiting to be desired by some rich, blonde prince on a horse as she sings a silly song about her wishful thinking. Is it as we watch in over-dramatic TV shows and romantic comedies; where a stupidly excessive amount of ‘coincidences’ and events are required in order for feelings to develop, or in some cases, just a single glance. Or is it perhaps like adults are always telling us; that we aren’t even required to think about it or instigate it, and that some deity out there decides for us from the moment we are born who the right person will be and what the right time should be. Most of the time, we aren’t exactly given the liberty of shuffling through all of these options, especially if we are asked the question out of the blue, so we do what I suspect just about everybody else does. We come up with the most innocent, humble, and profound response we can think of. This usually ends with us describing this mere emotion labelled as ‘love’ in the most dramatic way possible. We talk about it like we know exactly how heavenly it is meant to feel, when I am quite sure it is not something any of us have truly experienced. I doubt this philosophy will sit well with most people, but should you choose to ignore it, believe it or accept it is none of my concern.

Some may say it’s - as the overrated saying goes - like sparks fly, that the realisation hits them like a truck all at once. They are suddenly rendered unable to think, probably because of how overwhelming it’s supposed to feel.

Some may feel the world melt away around them, and for a brief moment that seems to last for eternity, all they see is the person guilty of robbing them of all rationale. All noise would be blocked out, and the state of euphoria they are dragged into due to an overproduction of serotonin is enough to convince them that whatever they may have been looking for - be it love, sympathy or the simple need to be held -, they had found it at long last.

I couldn’t care less about whether you’ll view me as stuck-up or attention-seeking for what I am about to tell you next, but I find that people tend to live by the belief that the more words you can fit into describing what it feels like to ‘fall in love’ and the more metaphors that are involved in it, that apparently ends up being the scale to measure how deep your love can run. I cannot tell you if it is part of our human nature or if it is by popular opinion, but whether it be in a fairytale, a romcom, or in the words of your story-telling grandma, all of their ideas of being in love involve some fancy, grand explanation of something that is nothing more than a single emotion; all in order to romanticise this lie of a daydream.

Contrary to the pretty ideas that everybody else may have, I believe that falling in love is a weakness. it means you have lost. So forgive me if you had come here hoping to read another sappy paragraph about the question of if love truly exists out there and how we would know it, but I'll have to disappoint you. I do not believe in putting this emotion on a pedestal as if it is deserving of so much praise and worship merely because of how many forms it comes in and how strong these feelings can be sometimes. However, I do think it is extremely terrifying how many things we often mistake for it and how it must always involve openly putting yourself in a position to be hurt.

For something that comes with so many risks, I can hardly wrap my head around why it is always viewed in such a positive light. ‘Love’ is nothing more than a reaction stimulated by our brains in response to chemicals produced by our own bodies - not by somebody else. I doubt it would feel like something I’ve been searching for all my life and it certainly wouldn’t feel anything close to a fancy, spark-flying fireworks show. It is nothing more than a bodily response to the hormone known as oxytocin that causes our hearts to beat a little faster, our pupils to grow a little larger, and perhaps make time feel like it’s running a little slower. I don’t believe in its power to force your eyes to look at a single person nor in its ability to shake up someone’s entire world. In other terms, I do not believe in this whole idea of what everyone calls ‘falling in love’, let alone when I’m even supposed to realise it.

“Kyouka!” Mina cries out as she bursts into the classroom.

“Good morning to you too, Mina.”

“Well, I appreciate that but it’s been a terrible one so far!” her friend goes on, “I completely forgot Aizawa-sensei’s homework was due! Please, please, please let me copy yours just for today! It’ll be the last time, I swear!”

Jirou laughs, handing Mina her book, “That’s what you said last time, wasn’t it?”

“I’ll make this one up to you, I promise!” Mina blurts out before dashing over to her desk with her friend’s homework, “thanks a million, Kyouka!”

The purple-haired girl shakes her head with a fond smile on her face. She knows this probably isn’t going to be the last time she’ll have to lend her homework to Mina, not that she minds. She was always fun to be around, and Jirou has to admit that she had made more friends than she thought herself capable of mainly because of Mina’s help.

Just as she plugs her earphone jacks back into her phone, someone else walks through the door. Jirou casts a glance up to see Bakugo, the loud, blonde and seemingly always angry kid that just so unfortunately also happened to be her seatmate.

“The hell you looking at?” he growls at Jirou.

Used to his grumpy attitude, Jirou ignores him and continues scrolling through her phone.

Knowing Bakugo, there is a chance he would take Jirou’s ignorance as an offence and yell at her even more, so she is grateful that Aizawa walked in when he does, who gives the boy a stern look that suggests he didn’t have the energy to deal with his attitude so early in the morning. Unable to disobey, Bakugo grunts something under his breath and grudgingly drags his feet over to his desk with his hands in his blazer pockets.

Jirou turns her head to look at Mina at the back of the room, where she’s still frantically writing down answers into her notebook, Jirou’s own work open next to it.

She quickly faces back forward as Aizawa sighs loudly. Without so much as a greeting, he speaks up, “Ashido, I know you didn’t do your homework. Do it in the classroom after school.”

Jirou is about to turn around again to shoot her an apologetic smile when her teacher knocks his hand on her desk to get her attention.

“You too, Jirou.”

“H-huh? Why me?”

“That’s your book Ashido’s copying from, isn’t it?”

“Huh? B-but-”

“Okay, so now that that’s settled let’s begin.”

As Aizawa ignores her protests and commences with morning homeroom, Jirou wants so badly to sigh loudly and slump down in her seat, but that would’ve probably made Mina feel even more guilty than she already did. She had actually been planning to play her guitar when she got back to the dorms after classes, but she supposed now she would be stuck for a couple of hours explaining to Mina how to do the homework instead of letting her copy the answers.

“GAHH, I’m so sorry, Kyouka!” Mina groans as she moves into the seat beside her friend after school - specifically, Bakugo’s seat, “I’ll make sure this never happens again and I’ll make it up to you, I swear!”

Jirou chuckles nervously, not wanting Mina to feel like she was indebted to her, “Don’t worry about it, Mina. It’s not like I had anything to do after school, anyway.”

What a lie that was.

“Hey, Raccoon Eyes, get off my seat and go do your homework somewhere else.”

Both girls raise their heads to look at Bakugo, to which Mina sticks her tongue out at.

“I’ll do my homework wherever I want, Bakugo, now buzz off!”

Bakugo looks ready to set off an explosion right then and there in the class, but before he’s able to do anything, Kirishima puts his hand on his shoulder from behind.

“Did you forget already, Mina?” he laughs, “We were all supposed to hang out at the arcade after school today!”

Kaminari walks up to the group, yawning, “Yeah, but now we’re stuck here waiting for you until you’re done with the homework that was due this morning.”

Mina grins sheepishly, “Heh, sorry. I’ll finish up as quickly as I can so Kyouka can- Oh!” she gasps out loud all of a sudden, “you should come with us, Kyouka! I still do feel terrible about this morning so I’d love to treat you to a day out, even if it is just an hour or two at the local arcade.”

“H-huh? Oh, no, Mina, I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Jirou quickly says, “and like I said earlier, you don’t have to worry about it.”

Sero comes up from behind Kirishima and Bakugo, joining the conversation, “Hey, if that’s what you’re worried about, we’d all actually be thrilled to have you there!”

“Yeah dude!” Kirishima chimes in, “it’s super manly to take a break from school once in a while!”

“You totally should,” Kaminari agrees, “and if you came, maybe Bakugo would be in a better m-”

Kaminari is cut off with a heavy hit to the head from Bakugo.

“Will you shut up, dunce-face?!”

Jirou is smart enough to tell that whatever Kaminari was about to say, Bakugo didn’t sound too fond of the topic, and not wanting him to blow up something like he always threatened to, she quickly turns to her friend.

“A-anyway, Mina. Let’s get to doing that homework of yours.”

“Okay,” she drags out the last syllable, “but you will come, won’t you?”

Jirou pauses for a moment, glancing at Mina’s friends crowded around Bakugo’s table. Their expectant and inviting looks (except for Bakugo’s, who was busy staring daggers into Kaminari for his earlier comment) makes it even harder for her to turn down their offer.

She sighs, then smiles at all of them, “Yeah, sure, I’ll come.”

She supposed actually getting out of school and the dorms for once could do her some good.

“All right!” Kaminari enthusiastically cheers as the group exits the school building, the sky already beginning to turn orange, “we only have an hour thanks to Mina, but let’s head out!”

Jirou can’t remember the last time she’d gone to the arcade, let alone out with a group of friends. She wasn’t exactly as socially awkward as some of the people in class like Todoroki and Koda, but she’d never considered herself to be among the more socially active ones, either. As far as she can remember, she hadn’t spent a lot of her school life planning regular trips with her friends, most of the time simply choosing to be holed up in her room with her instruments and lyrics.

When it came to her classmates, she had a mad amount of respect for Mina and Kaminari, the people who never seemed to miss out on anything that involved getting together as a group, whether it was hangouts, study sessions, or even class meetings. Being the introvert she was, she’d always been the person to pass or skip out on whatever wasn’t compulsory.

“Denki!” Mina calls out to her friend the minute they enter the arcade with a confident grin on her face, “let’s compete in that racing game again! Loser pays for ice cream later!”

“Oh, you’re on!” Denki yells after her, running over to the game with her.

Jirou’s had her fair share of arcades despite not coming as often as most of her friends did, and out of all the games she’d had experience with playing on her own or on the terribly rare occasions that she did with her friends, none of them had ever been able to compare to one particular part of the arcade, always tucked into the corner of every building she’d visited, secluded in its own little section. She knows that the only reason this game is given its own little corner is because it isn’t the one most people search for first when they come in, mostly because it’s the type of machine you can find just about anywhere. But even so, Kyouka can never override the childish excitement she gets from them, so as their little group disperses to their own consoles and machines, she immediately turns into the aisle leading to the claw cranes.

It’s a simple one, but one of her core memories has always been the first time her parents had brought her to Harajuku with them to visit one of the music stores in the area, where she had also happened to lay eyes on her first claw machine on the same street. Her parents have yet to let her live it down as the only time she had ever had that same sparkle in her eyes as she did when she was first given a guitar.

She’s thankful that despite it being after-school hours, the arcade is only occupied by their little group, one or two kids with their parents, and another group of teenagers. She’s even more grateful that the claw crane section is empty, since it wouldn’t have been the first time if she’d had to nervously watch from the side as a group of kids compete for their turn on a machine she’d wanted to try.

She hasn’t had the chance to look at one properly in a while, so she takes her time walking past the large machines with bright lights and glass windows, stuffed toys and figures of All Might, animals and dolls strewn inside each one. She stops at one towards the end of the aisle, the winning prize displayed inside it reminding her of a certain someone.

That claw machine only offered one type of stuffed animal: an ash-blonde fluffy pomeranian. Jirou smiles in slight amusement.

That thing really does have a striking resemblance to Bakugo, she thinks.

Jirou reaches for her purse in her bag to see if she has enough for a few tries when she senses she has company. Whoever they were, they had leaned against the glass of the claw machine on the side Jirou had come in, blocking her way out. Looking up, Jirou notices it’s one of the other teenagers loitering around the place. He’s wearing a school uniform, so she assumes he’s either here after school or cutting cram classes with his friends.

“Oh, uh, you can have a go at the game if you want.” she awkwardly gestures towards the joystick panel, pulling her bag up her shoulder again, “I was just looking.”

“You’re from Yuuei, huh?” he asks, glancing at her uniform, “are you here alone?”

“I-I’m sorry?”

“If you are, then you can come join me and my friends. We’re just about to leave.”

Jirou realises what he’s trying to do and starts backing away, “Oh, no, I’m actually-”

“It’s stressful at Yuuei, isn’t it?” he says, pushing himself off the machine and walking towards her, “it doesn’t hurt to have fun once in a while.”

“Um, I appreciate that but I’m not going to be here for long.”

A smug smirk spreads across the boy’s face as Jirou realises she’d hit the wall at the end of the aisle, and had unintentionally trapped herself in.

“Come on, there’s no need to be shy now,” he continues to approach her, getting very close to invading her personal space now, “it’s not like we’re going to do anything weird.”

Jirou wishes she could defend herself with her Quirk by stabbing him in the eye like she always did with Kaminari and Mineta in class, but it was different this time. She’s out with her friends in public, and considering the fact that she isn’t used to dealing with situations like this, all she really wants is to be able to get out of it without causing a scene. After all, she doesn’t think the boy seems to have any ill intentions and is only being pushy. So she tries to make herself appear more intimidating than she feels.

It’s a boy, Kyouka, not a villain, she tells herself.

“Look, I appreciate your offer, but I really can’t-”

“Why not?” he presses on, “are you afraid you might get in trouble? Calm down, it’s not like we’re gonna make you do anything illegal.”

“It’s not that,” Jirou responds, “I just-”

“So?” he interrupts again, “it’s fine, isn’t it?”

Before Jirou can react, he grabs ahold of her wrist, beginning to pull her out of the aisle. Panicked but not wanting to call any attention to them, Jirou desperately tries to pry his hand off of her, but his hold is tight and firm. She’s about to stab his arm with one of her earphone jacks as a desperate last resort to free herself when a pair of hands much larger than hers pull them both apart, the person they belong to stepping in between Jirou and the boy.

“She obviously isn’t interested, bastard,” a low, all too familiar voice growls, his hand still holding onto Jirou’s wrist tightly as he faces the boy, “so do us both a favour and get lost.”

Bakugo’s a lot more well-built compared to the boy, so the stranger is taken aback and looks slightly intimidated at first, but after a short silence, he asks, “Who the hell are you supposed to be? Her boyfriend or something?”

“I said get lost, extra,” Bakugo says, raising his voice a little, “don’t you have anything better to do than harass girls from other schools?”

“W-what did you just call me?!” the boy retorts, taking Bakugo’s common nickname for strangers as a personal offence.

Before Bakugo has the time to respond, the boy grabs him by the collar of his school uniform and pulls him forward slightly, causing his hand to let go of Jirou’s wrist. The ash-blonde boy doesn’t flinch in the slightest, and it’s obvious he’s anything but scared, but Jirou sure is by now. She lightly tugs on Bakugo’s blazer and tries to get his attention.

“Bakugo,” she mutters with a sense of urgency in her voice, “let’s just go meet up with Mina and the rest. He isn’t worth it.”

“Whatever,” the boy huffs, pushing Bakugo away from him when he realises he isn’t intimidated by any of his threats. As he stalks off, he yells back at him, “your girlfriend’s ugly, anyway! Only reason I approached her was because she looked like a pushover and hooking up with a Yuuei student was definitely something I could brag about!”

Ouch, okay, that hurt, Jirou thinks, glaring at him as he joins back with his group before turning to look at her blonde classmate.

Now that she’s looking at him properly, it’s obvious that Bakugo is considering going after him, but Jirou tightly holding him back by the sleeve of his blazer seems to help him regain his composure and calm down.

After a minute, he lets out a ‘tch’ and yanks his arm away from her hand, walking out of the aisle.

“Can’t you even defend yourself against a wimp like him, huh, Ears?!” he grunts at Jirou, “I bet you could’ve taken him out in two seconds with your Quirk!”

“Oh, come on!” she yells back, as she trails behind him, “he didn’t seem that hostile at first, okay?!”

“He’s a guy, the hell are you talking about?! Why didn’t you attack him when he didn’t listen the first time?!”

“Well, unlike someone here,” she raises her eyebrow at him, “I actually think before punching someone in the face.”

He glares at her for a while before deciding continuing the argument is a waste of time and goes back to walking ahead of her.

“Where are the other extras?” he yells to no one in particular, “we’re going back to the dorms. That bastard totally killed the mood!”

“Hey, Bakugo, wait!” Jirou calls as she runs after him, a bit of an amused smile on her face.

“What?!” he yells impatiently, turning to face her.

“Thanks, by the way,” Jirou mumbles, “for helping me out back there.”

“Tch,” he scoffs, facing forward to continue walking, “whatever. It looked like I could’ve beat him in a fight, anyway.”

“Okay, so I hope you’ve all understood how training’s going to work today, because I’m not explaining it a second time,” Aizawa announces to the class, shooting a stern look in the direction of those who clearly weren’t paying attention - specifically Mina, Kaminari and Sero.

Jirou looks down at her feet and fiddles with her earphone jacks.

Another one-on-one battle, she thinks to herself. Jirou never had too much confidence in herself for training sessions like these because it wasn’t very often she’d do well in them, as much as she hated to admit it. Although her Quirk had never been something she felt the need to be ashamed of, she also couldn’t help pointing out to herself that she was probably considered one of the weaker opponents when it came to one-on-one battles. She just hoped she wouldn’t be teamed up with one of the more threatening opponents of the class - people like Midoriya, Todoroki, and-

“Bakugo,” Aizawa reads out from the list in his hand, “you’re paired with Jirou.”

Great.

Bakugo’s biggest problem, if he had any at all, seemed to be identifying who ‘Jirou’ was, so she taps him on his shoulder to get his attention.

He turns around with his usual scowl on his face and yells, “What do you want, Ears?!”

“I have a name,” she winces at his loud volume, “it’s Jirou.”

“Heh?! So I’m supposed to be fighting you?”

“Unfortunately, yeah.”

“What was that?!” Bakugo yells, “you looking down on me now?!”

“Okay, enough chit-chat,” Aizawa continues after announcing the rest of the pairs, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, “get on the bus and sit with your partners. We’re going to Ground Beta.”

Following Aizawa’s instructions, Jirou takes her seat next to Bakugo on the bus, already dreading the battle that was going to go down between them soon.

Once the bus had arrived at Ground Beta, Aizawa drills down the aim of the training. Victory would mean either immobilising their opponent or putting them in a position in which they were forced to surrender. Although Jirou didn’t think her chances of winning were pretty high, she didn't plan to go down without a fight, either. Knowing Bakugo, who always had high scores in both intelligence and sheer power, she knew she was going to need a smart, well-thought-out strategy if she wanted to beat him at her current skill level.

“Oi, Ears, you deaf or something?”

Speak of the devil.

“What is it, Bakugo?”

“Don’t give me that annoyed tone!” he demands, “didn’t you hear him?! It’s our turn to step into the training grounds, you extra!”

Feeling both taken aback and slightly embarrassed, Jirou quickly composes herself and trails after the blonde as he enters the large gates that separated them from the rest of Class 1-A and Ground Beta. Panicking a little about how she had barely formed a solid plan in her head, she takes a deep breath and decides the best thing she can do at the moment is to keep a levelhead and, well, at the very least, not panic.

As soon as their teacher gives the signal for the battle between them to begin, Bakugo propels himself toward her using his Quirk at full speed. He reacts faster than Jirou can think, as expected from one of the best combat students in the class.

“DIE!!” he yells out as Jirou - thankfully - ducks next to one of the makeshift buildings in the area just in time for his attack to barely miss her.

Reacting fast, Jirou plugs her earphone jacks into the ground and sends out a vibration in the direction Bakugo had attacked from.

Unfortunately for her, by then the ash-blonde had managed to propel himself behind her, ready to strike a second time. Although Jirou turns around at the sound of his explosions, she’s still unable to react fast enough. Before she can even process anything, she is met with a loud explosion that blasts her backwards at least a couple of metres.

“Doesn’t this battle seem terribly one-sided?” Kaminari asks, looking slightly concerned for Jirou as the class watches the battle from the large screen in the waiting area.

“Well, you know Bakugo likes to go all out, whoever his opponent is,” Sero sighs, “though, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to say that Jirou might come out with a minor injury or two.”

Refusing to accept defeat so easily, Jirou quickly pulls herself back on her feet to face her opponent, who is now grinning like he’d already won.

She is about to close the distance between them and rely on physical combat when she realises a part of the building Bakugo had chosen to position himself next to looked like it was about to collapse. The instability of it must have been caused by both the vibrations of her Quirk and that big explosion from Bakugo. The blonde, wanting nothing more than to fight, looks completely unaware of the danger he’s in just from standing there, and without so much as a second thought, Jirou is running at full speed back towards him.

“Bakugo, move!”

Acting on pure instinct afterwards, Jirou shoves the blonde out of harm’s way, who, too busy wondering why Ears was suddenly so alarmed, is pushed aside with ease. The look of confusion in his eyes contorts into horror as Jirou fails to dodge the hit in his place, several chunks of stone and cement that made up the top corner of the building crashing down and piling on top of her left leg.

The damage caused in the area was hardly large enough to require immediate repairs, but having Jirou stand directly underneath that collapse was definitely enough to have caused a serious injury.

Jirou loudly curses in reflex to the pain before her mind can even process the whole situation as the blare of a loud horn sounds throughout the training grounds, Aizawa’s voice following.

“Bakugo, listen closely!” it was clear he was doing his best as the teacher to remain calm, but there was no hiding the panic in his voice, “we’re getting Cementoss in, try and see if you can get Jirou out of there by moving aside some of the debris! I shouldn’t need to tell you this, but be careful!”

Aizawa hasn’t even finished giving his instructions before Bakugo is already running towards his classmate, who, desperately trying to keep from crying, is now mumbling a string of profanities under her breath. He tries to see if there’s anything he can do to get her out without causing her any more pain, but the only way he would be able to do so would be to blast the debris away, which was bound to bring about another large vibration, leading to another series of god-knows-what chaos.

So instead he drops to his knees beside the girl, afraid to even look her in the eye. He hated the idea of losing, but having to bear the responsibility of the guilt that came from someone taking a broken leg for you didn’t feel too great, either.

“Are you an idiot?! Who the hell throws themselves in front of a fucking landslide?!”

“Excuse me?” Jirou manages to choke out in an annoyed tone, “did you expect me to just stand there and continue formulating my strategy when there was a possibility you could’ve died?!”

“Stop talking!” Bakugo barks, then quickly adjusts his tone, “you’re being way too loud for someone with a crushed leg.”

“You know, for someone who just got saved you’ve still got a pretty sharp tongue,” she snaps, “just be grateful it was only my leg that took the fall for both of us, okay?!”

Cementoss arrives soon after, and once he removes enough of the debris to safely pull Jirou out from under it, Bakugo is instructed to accompany her back to the school building to see Recovery Girl while the rest of the class completed the training session. On any other occasion, Bakugo would’ve been furious about having his fight cut short to accompany a random extra to the infirmary, but this time he quietly obeys his teachers with no complaints.

Thanks to Recovery Girl, Jirou’s leg is bandaged up neatly and according to her, ‘not as bad as it could have been’. She is, however, given instructions that she absolutely can’t participate in hero training or any related activities until her leg has healed properly. With that, she leaves the room, where Jirou is now sitting on one of the infirmary’s beds with Bakugo at its edge, his back turned to her.

The both of them are quiet for a while, left to their own thoughts. The blonde hadn’t said a single thing since they returned to the school and he hadn’t moved an inch for a good while now. He hadn’t even bothered to change out of his hero costume and if Jirou isn’t so distracted by how uncomfortable and heavy the layers of bandages feel wrapped around her leg, she would’ve made a joke by now about how out of place he looked sitting on top of an infirmary bed with two large gauntlets strapped to himself. Feeling uncomfortable with his prolonged silence, Jirou reaches over and lightly smacks her hand over his lower arm.

“OW!” he yells, turning to glare at her as he snatches his arm away, “the hell was that for?!”

“I knew it,” she sighs, ignoring his question and picking up the antiseptic and spare bandages left on her bedside table, “you got injured, too, but didn’t care to say anything to Recovery Girl. That’s just so… you, Bakugo.”

“Shut up! I didn’t get injured!”

“Bakugo, I barely hit you and you made it clear that it hurt,” she states as she shakes the bottle in her hand, “come on, take off your gauntlets, will you?”

“Tch,” he scoffs, refusing to comply, “give me those. I can do it myself.”

“If there’s one thing I found out about you from being your seatmate, it’s that you’re right-handed. Oh, and would you look at that, it’s your right arm that’s injured,” she says sarcastically, “my point being, you can’t do it yourself, Bakugo. Take off your gauntlets.”

Bakugo glares at her for a few moments as if trying to come up with another smart comeback before eventually giving in, which is really just him aggressively scooching closer to Jirou and roughly yanking off his right gauntlet, revealing the swollen wound he somehow managed to strategically hide underneath. She suspects it was probably caused by the friction of his skin against the gravel flooring of Ground Beta when Jirou had pushed him away earlier.

“You have a pretty questionable standard for what counts as being injured.” Jirou playfully comments as she places a cotton ball over the mouth of the antiseptic bottle and turns it over twice.

“You better not tell anyone about this, Ears,” Bakugo threatens as she dabs at his scratches. Jirou’s mostly just surprised to hear that his voice lacked the aggression it usually had to it.

“Huh, so you can speak at a normal tone if you wanted to,” she muses, lifting his arm with her hand to drape a section of bandages over it.

“Heh?! Who do you take me for, some loud, obnoxious idiot that never shuts up?!”

“Well,” Jirou purses her lips before continuing, “for the most part, yeah.”

“HAH?!” Bakugo yells, his aggressive tone returning as quickly as it had left, “watch it, Ears! You know I almost beat your ass in our fight earlier! I would’ve won if it weren’t for that stupid building falling apart!”

“And he’s back,” Jirou mumbles as she secures the bandages into place on the boy’s arm, “I know that, Bakugo. I could never win in a fight against you.”

“Whatever,” he lowers his arm when he feels Jirou’s hands leave, “are you done? We should probably head back to the dorms before Dunce-Face starts saying dumb shit about the two of us again.”

“Oh yeah, speaking of,” she smiles in curiosity, “what did he mean back then?”

“Back when?!”

The girl rolls her eyes, “I’m talking about that time Mina invited me to the arcade with you guys. He said something about how you’d be in a better moo-”

“The idiot was exaggerating it, okay?!” Bakugo quickly interrupts her, “I just said you were more tolerable and that you weren’t as much of an idiot as they all are.”

“Oh, how sweet of you.” Jirou replies drily, the hint of a teasing smirk gracing her features.

“The hell are you looking so full of yourself for?!” the blonde says back almost immediately as color rises to his face in embarrassment, “you’re still annoying as fuck, okay?! Don’t go blabbing to anyone that I’d wanna hang out with an extra like you!”

If it were anyone else that had said those words, Jirou would’ve probably taken it a lot more personally, but seeing as this was Bakugo; Bakugo who bestowed death upon just about everything that breathed within a five foot radius of him, Bakugo who was mostly nothing more than a hotheaded teenager whose default method of conversation was swear words and insults, she didn’t bother taking a single word of it seriously.

So she laughs. She takes his empty threats as a joke in the same way she finds most of the people in their class do within the first three months of knowing him. Bakugo, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to take it too well. Contrary to reality, he was long under the impression that apart from the idiots who he was unfortunate enough to call his friends, nobody was daring enough to laugh at his behaviour behind his back, much less to his face. He had chosen his words and structured them in a way that he was certain was going to make Ears stop talking, so seeing as how it had caused the complete opposite response he had been aiming for was a huge surprise to him. It also took him aback since it was the first time someone had taken his words in such a pure and transparent way. The persistent frown lines on his face and his narrowed eyes softened in the smallest way as her laughter showed no signs of stopping soon. Subconsciously, he lets his eyes rest on her as she does it to her heart’s content. Seeing it right in front of him like this, Bakugo is able to take his time noticing the little details about that singular action. He notes how the corners of her eyes crinkle because of how wide her grin spreads, observes how her earphone jacks rise up above her shoulders in sync with them as they shake from her laughter, and remembers the simple image of how bright she looks. He could’ve sworn the moment lasts longer than it should, and he hates himself for feeling as overwhelmed as he does by that. He tears his eyes away from her features to get rid of the weird fluttery, foreign feeling in his stomach.

“I’ll take that,” Jirou replies, laughter still threatening to spill from her lips, “despite your… creative choice of wording, that means a lot coming from you, I guess.”

“I swear if you say one word about this you’re dead,” he growls as he reattaches his gauntlets and pushes himself off of the bed, “let’s go back already. Do you need my help or anything to walk?”

“Pfft, what do you take me for? A child?” Jirou rolls her eyes as she tries to follow his actions, but then pauses to glance at her fractured, bandaged leg as it hangs off the edge of the bed.

“No, but I do take you for an injured person, you dipshit,” Bakugo sighs in exasperation, answering her rhetorical question as he hesitantly reaches his arm out towards Jirou, a wordless invitation to act as a human crutch. He looks away from her as if that small action is something he clearly isn’t accustomed to doing.

Though Jirou feels slightly embarrassed about having to lean against her loud, smart-mouthed classmate, she has to say she can tell he was being genuine in his offer, which was something she hardly had the privilege of seeing. She grabs his shoulder to support her body as she pushes herself off of the bed to stand on her right leg before gently setting her injured one to the ground.

“Is it okay if you-”

“You take too long, Ears!” he yells, “at this rate, we’re gonna take an hour just to walk back to the dorms!”

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Jirou replies, voice sounding the furthest thing from apologetic, “you know, you could just go ahead first, I can ask Recovery Girl for a pair of crutches or something la-”

“I ain’t waiting for that old hag to come back!” he interrupts her again.

“I just said you could go a-”

“Sit down.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have a goddamn hearing Quirk, you piece of shit! Is your leg not the only thing broken right now?! Sit down!”

Raising her eyebrow at the boy, she silently obeys his instructions and takes her seat back on the bed, legs hanging over the side. Without saying anything, Bakugo moves so that his back is facing her, then crouches down slightly.

“Get on, it’ll be faster this way.”

Jirou takes a moment to process what he wants her to do. When it hits her that he’s offering her a ride on his back, she smiles to herself in amusement, half grateful he can’t see her teasing expression. It’s so unlike Bakugo to do something like this. She figures it can only be the guilt that consumed him for indirectly being part of the reason she had injured herself.

“Huh, so you can be human.”

“Shut up and get on already, will you?! I don’t have all day!”

Smiling a bit to herself at how awkward he looks just to act like this, she does him the favour of wordlessly grabbing onto his shoulders and sliding off the bed. He catches hold of the back of each of her legs, taking extra care not to touch the area on her left that was heavily bandaged. He adjusts her position so that she can wrap her arms around his neck, then proceeds to get up and walk out of the infirmary.

Both of them didn’t make any conversation for a good half of the journey back to the dorms, but Jirou is the first to break the ice.

“You know, you’re actually kind of nice when you aren’t screaming at everything that breathes.”

“Heh?!” he retorts, “do you have a death wish now?!”

“You do know that you can’t keep carrying me around like this until my leg heals, right?” she goes on, ignoring him, “I’m probably gonna need you to help me back to Recovery Girl’s office tomorrow morning to get those crutches I meant to ask her for.”

“Hah?! You want me to go back to that cramped room?!”

“I would go alone if I could,” she chuckles lightly at his bratty behaviour before adding, “but no, you know what, it’s okay. I can get Momo to take me there this evening.”

Bakugo doesn’t respond after this, and the rest of the walk to the dorms and up to Jirou’s room where he drops her off ends in silence.

It isn’t until she’d completed some of her schoolwork that she clumsily hops one-legged over to her door, using her walls as support, wanting to get what she needs from Recovery Girl before dinner. However, when she opens her door, she finds just that leaning against the wall next to her room: a pair of crutches. There is no note left with them, or any hint of who might’ve left them there, but Jirou already has a pretty good idea. Going back over to her bed - which is much easier now thanks to the crutches - she picks up her phone and opens up a chat between her and Bakugo.

Jirou sighs, typing again when he shows no sign of responding.

It takes so long before Jirou receives a response that she almost assumes Bakugo had just left her on read.

The three pulsating dots disappear after that last message, which if anything, is an indication that Bakugo has stopped typing. Figuring that their conversation had ended, Jirou sets her phone back on her bedside table, about to head down to the common room for dinner when her phone rings from another notification.

“You’re staring.”

Jirou jerks up, clearly too distracted to notice her pink friend taking a seat beside her. Since she was currently physically unable to participate in hero activities, the best thing Aizawa could offer her during training periods was something he called ‘visual learning’, but was really just the role of a spectator for her classmates as they all worked on their individual Quirks at Gym Gamma.

“Huh? No, I’m not.”

“Who is it?” her friend ignores, looking around the room to try and figure out where Jirou’s eyes had been.

“Aren’t you supposed to be out there training, Mina?” Jirou pouts slightly, her voice salty. Though, Mina doesn’t seem to pay much mind to it.

“Come on, I’ve been shooting acid out of my fingers for the past forty-five minutes at least, I’m getting tired!” she groans, stretching her limbs, “and besides, you looked like you were about to die of boredom over here, so if anything, you’re very much welcome.”

Jirou chuckles at how bright Mina always seemed to be. She was always slightly envious of how just about anybody would automatically gravitate to her because of her outgoing, cheery personality. On the other hand, Jirou ran on a social battery that had a pretty short lifespan. She often recharged through the escapism of writing lyrics or playing around with the instruments in her room by herself.

“You still haven’t answered my question, by the way.”

Jirou scoffs, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mina. I wasn’t staring at-”

“Really? Because from what I could see, you sure weren’t being discreet about ogling our local smart-mouthed, charming blonde of a grenade over there.”

“I-I’m sorry, what?” Jirou laughs incredulously, feeling her face go unnaturally hot, “you mean Bakugo?! Do you hear yourself, Mina? Who’d want to gawk over him when we’re practically forced to hear him more than anyone else on a daily basis?”

“I don’t know, maybe you could answer that question.”

“Look, if I was looking in his direction, it probably isn’t what you’re thinking,” Jirou mumbles, letting her eyes drift towards the blonde, but then quickly pulls them away in case Mina takes it the wrong way again, “I was just trying to figure something out.”

“About him?” Mina cocks her head, shamelessly staring at Bakugo, who’s occupied yelling at Midoriya over something about being in his way, “I mean, when you get down to it, he’s really just a loud-mouthed teenage boy who’s unhealthily full of himself. It isn’t really all his fault, since I guess all that pride was built off of the base that he was already pretty powerful and talented to begin with.”

Jirou hums lightly, “Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s how we always saw him, right?”

“It’s how I still see him.”

“Okay, but could you imagine him doing something nice for someone?”

“Bakugo?” Mina frowns, “no way. there might be more to him than what meets the eye, but from what I can see on the outside he couldn’t really care less about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

“Yeah, but,” Jirou hesitates for a second, wondering if she could trust Mina to keep this private, “you see, yesterday when we were both sent to the infirmary, he… he carried me back to the dorms. On his back.”

“BAKUGO DID?!” Mina gasps, Jirou immediately regretting her decision and hurriedly shushing her before they attracted any unwanted attention, specifically from the blonde himself, “J-Jirou, are you sure you weren’t blurry from the medicine Recovery Girl gave you or something? Nothing about this sounds credible, you know that?”

“I- I know!” Jirou feels her face grow hot again, deciding to leave out the part about him bringing a pair of crutches back for her, “that’s exactly why I-”

“Ashido,” Aizawa drones at the pair, “I don’t remember you being exempt from hero activities like your friend is. And Jirou, not participating in training doesn’t mean you should be allowed to laze around as you please. Take this as an opportunity to observe your classmates so that you might have an advantage in one-on-one battles in the future and, well, prevent something like this from happening again.”

Aizawa’s eyes flicker down to Jirou’s bandaged leg at the emphasis of his words, who quickly gulps and gives Mina a shared look that they could pick up their conversation some other time. Not wanting to irritate their teacher any more, Mina swiftly gets up and jogs over to where she had previously been training, leaving Jirou to her own thoughts.

Instead of heeding her teacher’s advice and focusing on the new moves some of her classmates were developing, Jirou continues to let her attention drift towards Bakugo. Mina had been right in the sense that in the few months the class had known each other, Bakugo had always been dead last on Jirou’s mental list of ‘kind people’. He’d always struck her as someone who cared about nobody but himself, too fixated on his ideals of becoming the Number One Hero to give half a damn about anyone around him. Because of his intimidatingly unapproachable demeanour and Jirou’s life rule for not attracting trouble to herself, they had never really held a proper conversation with each other before the incident at the arcade, which was somehow also coincidentally followed by their battle at Ground Beta.

She suspects that the only reason she felt so warm about his unexpected act of kindness had to have been nothing more than how out of character it was for him. The surge of pride she had felt from the mere fact that Bakugo had done something for her he wasn’t likely to do for anyone else was because he wasn’t likely to do it for anyone else. Before she realises it, her eyes were hooked back to him like they were before her conversation with Mina. Aizawa, who stood close by, probably thought nothing more of it than her observing him and formulating a way to outsmart the boy in the future, but unbeknownst to him Jirou was doing everything she could to convince herself that the only reason she had started watching him a little closer was purely because she was amused by how nice he could be if only he wanted to. A barely audible sigh escapes her lips as he forcefully blasts his way through one of the concrete pillars set up by Cementoss.

He really was strong. Not just in terms of his Quirk but because of his overall physique to go with it. They’d been in the same class for months now, but as she sat there to properly observe him for the first time, Jirou suddenly felt the sinking realisation of just how great the gap between them in power was. Sure, there were some things that didn’t make it fair to compare them, like the capabilities of their respective Quirks and the fact that he was at least two heads taller than her, but she thinks that there must be something she can do to move up from where she currently feels so stuck.

“Alright, I think I’ve stood here watching you kids enough for today.” Aizawa announces to the class, which everyone has learned is just his way of dismissing the training session. Without even double-checking to see if everyone had heard him, he turns around and disappears out through the doors of the gymnasium.

Most of the class that had trained more than they felt comfortable with immediately began to file out into the locker rooms, striking conversation with each other. Bakugo, however, doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what Aizawa had said and is still propelling himself from one end of the room to the other with his Quirk. He lands just a few feet away from Midoriya, who seems to be working on moves of his own.

“THE HELL ARE YOU LOOKING AT, DAMN NERD?!”

“I-I didn’t say anything, Kacchan.” Midoriya quickly responds, an awkward smile on his face.

“WELL YOU SURE AS HELL LOOKED LIKE YOU WANTED TO!”

“Well, uh,” he stutters, as if trying to find something to say, “your new moves are pretty cool, Kacchan!”

“DAMN RIGHT THEY ARE! I’M GONNA CRUSH EVERYONE AND SURPASS ALL YOU EXTRAS BEFORE YOU KNOW IT!”

Jirou had just been getting up off the floor when she lets out a short, disbelieving laugh to herself at the sound of Bakugo’s childish declaration and Midoriya’s confused expression in response to it. Both boys turn their heads to face her as she quickly apologises for interrupting, immediately ceasing her laughter.

“WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING FOR, HUH, EARS?!” Bakugo yells at her, “WANT ME TO BREAK YOUR OTHER LEG TOO?!”

Used to his empty threats, Jirou rolls her eyes and playfully says back, “What, scared I’ll beat you once my left one heals?”

“YOU LITTLE-”

“Ah, Jirou!” Midoriya jogs over to where she stands with her crutches, “I never got to ask you how you were. I-I mean clearly you aren’t totally fine-” he gestures to her leg, “b-but will you be okay getting back? Is there anything you need help with? I know it must be pretty tough not being able to participate in hero training now. B-but you know, it’s not your fault! Aizawa-sensei said he’d look into the incident and get someone to check on the buildings the next time we have training there, so-”

“Quit your rambling, nerd,” Bakugo, who had finally stopped yelling, appears beside the pair, “if there was anything she needed, I’d know better than anyone else what to do.”

“Yeah, you might be right,” Midoriya agrees, “after all, you were there when the whole incident had happened and you even accompanied her to the infirmary. Jirou’s lucky you were there to help.”

“Yeah, I really was,” Jirou replies as she pulls a smile on her face, feeling slightly embarrassed at being the topic of conversation, “I would’ve been in a real pinch if he hadn’t helped me get this pair of-”

“HAVE YOU BOTH TALKED ENOUGH?!” Bakugo cuts in, quickly grabbing Jirou by her arm and pulling her aside, who almost trips over her broken foot.

“U-uh,” Midoriya stutters, confused at why Bakugo was suddenly so agitated, “well, I guess I’ll take my leave. See you around, Kacchan! And get well soon, Jirou!”

As soon as he’s out of earshot, Bakugo snarls at the girl next to him, “You stupid or something?! Don’t breathe a word about what happened yesterday!”

“God, Bakugo, you make it sound so scandalous,” Jirou rolls her eyes as she stabilises herself again. It was such a pain getting used to walking around with crutches.

“Well, maybe it is to me!” he hisses, “I don’t want you throwing around this story of how I helped you get your wooden sticks and have everyone labelling me as someone they can come to for help! I don’t have enough time on my hands to be helping out a bunch of other extras!”

“Oh? But you’re okay with helping me?” Jirou smirks playfully.

“Stop milking this situation, Ears! You wouldn’t be able to do anything without my help so watch it!”

“Bakugo.”

“Heh?! What now?!”

“I need your help.”

“Did you not hear a word I-”

Bakugo stops talking when he notices the suddenly serious look in Jirou’s eyes, the teasing glint from before gone. He lowers his voice and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his school training uniform.

“What is it?”

“I need you to help me train.”

“With that leg?”

“Well,” Jirou sighs at the reminder of her injury, “for now, with what I can manage until my leg gets better.”

“Why’d you come to me for help?”

“You’re one of the strongest people in our class when it comes down to raw strength, Bakugo,” Jirou states plainly, “plus, y-you’re kind of the only one I feel comfortable enough with to ask.”

Neither of them say anything for the next few moments that follow. Jirou looks up at Bakugo, who has a confused yet thoughtful look on his face, like he’s taken aback by what she had said but is seriously considering it nevertheless. She half expects him to yell at her for taking his kindness yesterday for granted and not to expect his help again, followed by a solid no, but then he responds.

“Tch. Yeah, whatever, but there’s not much we can do right now with your broken leg. Come up to the fourth floor where my room is later if you want. It’s the third room. I have the equipment that you’d need if you want to do something without involving your leg. Don’t expect much, though, the most you could really do as you are now would be to build arm strength.”

By the time Jirou has processed his agreement, the blonde is already walking over to the boys’ locker room.

“H-hey, Bakugo!” she calls out.

“WHAT IS IT NOW?!”

Before the words tumble out of her mouth, Jirou smiles to herself at how almost laughably familiar this situation is to that day in the arcade.

“Thank you for helping me. Midoriya was right when he said that I was lucky I had you, you know.”

Bakugo’s eyes widen for a millisecond, clearly not expecting such a sincere thank you from her, before his eyes narrow again. To Jirou, it may have looked as if he was giving her a look that said ‘you better show me this isn’t going to be a complete waste of my time’, or perhaps a reminder that he wouldn’t help her again for anything after this, but had she grasped hold of that fleeting moment and looked into it a little closer, she would’ve noticed how his pupils softened when he let his eyes adjust to the image of her thankful, grinning face, lighting up the same way it did when they were in the infirmary. It makes his stomach all fluttery again, and it makes him want to keep his eyes where they’re focused for just a little longer. If Bakugo hadn’t quickly broken their eye contact and continued walking out the gym, Jirou might’ve been able to see past the words she imagined his eyes were yelling at her to ‘not make a big deal out of it’ or ‘not tell a single soul’, and instead picked out the gentler, fonder tone behind them that said ‘you’re welcome’.

Jirou isn’t quite sure what to expect when she takes the elevator up to the fourth floor, let alone when she walks over to the boys’ end of the building. Half wondering if Bakugo had changed his mind on his offer and half trying to remind herself that even if he is a boy, going up to his room to train isn’t a big deal at all, she shakes her head as if clearing out unnecessary thoughts and knocks on his door.

Some shuffling around is heard on the other side before Bakugo opens it, leaning against the door frame in the black tank top and baggy pants he loves so much, staring down at Jirou like he’s already been expecting her for a while.

“Uh, hi.” she smiles nervously.

The blonde’s immediate response is to glare down at her as he gingerly states, “When I said to come up later, I didn’t think you’d show up this late.”

Jirou scoffs as she follow Bakugo into his room and closes the door behind her, leaning her crutches against them and collapsing into the beanbag at the end of his bed, letting out a relieved sigh.

“Well, it’s not like you really gave me an exact time. Not everyone has a super strict sleep schedule like you do.”

Bakugo’s gaze seesaws between her and the pair of crutches that are now propped up against his closed bedroom door.

“Does it hurt?”

“Huh?”

“Your leg, you idiot. Does it hurt?”

“Does it hurt?” Jirou repeats, a cheeky grin playing at her lips, “a chunk out of a building landed on top of it, Blasty, of course it hurts. Why, are you getting all worried n-”

“Forget I asked.” Bakugo huffs, turning his back to her to pick up one of the small weights out of the few that were neatly arranged in the corner of his room.

Clean freak. Jirou thinks to herself, not yet brave enough to say it out loud.

He walks back over to the beanbag and holds it out to her in his right hand.

“Try this one,” he tells her, “you should be able to hold this one up, at least.”

“Damn, Blasty,” Jirou places one hand over her heart, pretending to be offended as she reaches out to take the weight in his hand, “what sort of weakling do you take me for?”

As soon as Bakugo lets go of the weight for her to hold it, Jirou realises too late that she had clearly underestimated how heavy it was, but before she can adjust her strength, her arm is already plummeting downwards towards her broken leg. She gasps in shock and screws her eyes shut to brace for the impact it would cause to her injury, but just before it takes its landing, Bakugo hurriedly grabs hold of it again, his large hand engulfing Jirou’s smaller one. Though she is thankful for his quick reflexes, Jirou can’t help but notice the way he winces slightly the moment his right arm comes into contact with the chunk of iron. It’s only then that she lets her eyes trail to his lower arm, the one she had wrapped in bandages the previous day. Only now — they weren’t quite as neat and clean as she remembered them anymore.

“What’s wrong with you?!” Bakugo yells, snapping her attention back to his face momentarily, “you couldn’t even hold this?! You could’ve broken another bone!”

“Hey, B-”

“I’M NOT DONE YET, EARS! WILL YOU WATCH YOURSELF! HOW ARE YOU EVEN GETTING BY WITHOUT INJURING YOURSELF EVERYDAY WITH STRENGTH LIKE THAT?!”

Though mildly offended by that last statement he made, Jirou continues to call for his attention.

“Oi, Blasty,” she says firmly, “have you changed your bandages at all since yesterday?”

That gets him to shut up. Whether it’s because he’s confused by the sudden change in topic or if it’s because he knows he doesn’t have the answer she’s expecting, Jirou is thankful for the silence, allowing her to take the lead in the conversation.

“Oh my god,” she smiles slightly as she pulls the weight out of Bakugo’s hand and places it on the floor beside them. “and you were training for so long, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s hurting even more right now.”

“They never hurt to begin with! I’m fine! W-were you even listening to a word I was saying?!”

“Chill your ass out will you,” Jirou sighs as she takes a roll of bandages out of her pocket, along with a small bottle of ointment, “you’re lucky I’m even carrying these with me.”

Bakugo looks hesitant about it for a moment, but after a silent staring contest between them for a few seconds, he grumpily sits down in front of her and holds out his right arm.

Jirou begins unwrapping his old bandages to reveal skin that is now much more swollen than she remembers it being yesterday.

“Yikes, you’ve really gotta take care of yourself, Blasty, you could get an infection, you k-”

“WILL YOU JUST HURRY UP?!”

“Okay, your highness.”

“AND DON’T CALL ME THAT!”

Jirou doesn’t respond, and dedicates herself to lightly dabbing the ointment on his skin with her finger since she doesn’t have access to a cotton ball at the moment. She feels him tense up, probably at how his wound stung from the contact, and without thinking she raises her free hand to rest it against his left arm, rubbing into it hesitant, but gentle circular motions, feeling slightly afraid that he might start yelling at her again.

But he doesn’t. He flinches slightly when her hand comes in contact with his bare skin, and on any normal day he probably would have snapped at her to not touch him, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was already 7pm and he didn’t have the energy to do it, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that no one else was watching them. Maybe he doesn’t pull away because she’s already tending to him anyway, so what she did didn’t really matter. Whatever the reason is, he finds himself relaxing into her touch as a comfortable silence settles between them. He would never admit it, but he feels a greater loss than he should’ve when her hand withdraws to wrap the bandages around his arm, though, of course, he says nothing.

“Okay, all done,” Jirou sighs as she leans back into the beanbag and picks up the weight she had left beside it, holding it up clearly in front of Bakugo’s face, “see, I can handle this.”

“Tch,” he scoffs, shifting so that he’s leaning against his bedside, “don’t get all cocky. You would be back in that old hag’s office by now had I not saved your ass earlier.”

“Well, you’d probably be seeing her soon too had I not noticed your arm, either,” she cockily responds as she starts lifting the weight up and down in her right arm, “so we’re both even.”

Neither of them say anything for a while until the blonde speaks up.

“Why did you want my help to train all of a sudden?”

“Huh? I thought I already told you. I don’t really know anyone else in class who’s good at th-”

“Not why you asked me, dumbass. Why did you suddenly feel the need to physically train?”

“Well, for one,” she gestures towards her broken leg, “I wanna feel like I’m doing something to move forward while the rest of you are up and training everyday with two perfectly good legs. And two, the provisional licence exam is coming up soon, isn’t it? We’re gonna be up against so many other people from other schools that probably have way better Quirks. I’m gonna need to do something other than training my dumb ears if I want to pass.”

Jirou decides to leave out the whole part about how she doesn’t even begin to feel strong enough in comparison to most of her classmates, but she does shock herself by sharing more than she thought she ever would have with Bakugo, of all people. He doesn’t respond after what she says, which she takes as a sign that perhaps she let herself get too comfortable with him and was better off just keeping quiet. At least five minutes pass by with the only movement in the room being her lifting the small weight up and down until Bakugo finally speaks again.

“Switch hands.”

Jirou does as she’s told and takes the weight from her right hand, repeating the same up and down motions with her left. The silence between them is starting to get increasingly heavy by the time he says something again.

“Your ears aren’t dumb.”

“Huh?”

“YOUR EARS AREN’T DUMB!” he yells, “PRETTY IRONIC HOW I’M TELLING YOU THIS WHEN YOU’RE ALWAYS HAVING TROUBLE HEARING THE THINGS I TELL YOU!”

“W-what’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, feeling her face heat up.

“It’s not like I need to spell it out for you,” he grunts in reply, placing his hands behind his head, “there’s a lot of shit most pro heroes can’t do that would be pretty damn easy for you.”

As Jirou tries to figure out what he means by that, as if reading her thoughts, the blonde explains further.

“Think about it. Literally no one would accomplish anything trying to sneak up on you because you pick up on every little noise. It’s creepy as fuck. You could literally listen in on any conversation you wanted. I don’t know why more people aren’t as worried about that as they should be.”

“O-oh,” Jirou mumbles as her cheeks turn crimson, “thanks. That’s really nice of you as Bakugo to say.”

“Heh?! What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on, you know,” she grins cockily as him, “all you ever do is yell about how you’re gonna become the number one hero and-”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, we’ve been over this already,” he groans, crossing his arms over his chest.

“-insult whoever so much as says your name,” Jirou goes on despite the harsh glare he gives her, “but. I like this side of you, too. Makes the stuff you tell me feel like they mean a lot more than they probably do.”

Bakugo scoffs, letting the silence settle between them again.

It’s Jirou who breaks it next.

“Oh, and by the way,” she smiles, pausing her movement for a second, “you’re also kind of a clean freak.”

“I’ve been lifting the same weight for a good week now, Blasty,” Jirou pouts on another one of the evenings she has now grown accustomed to spending in Bakugo’s room.

“Okay, and?”

“And,” she emphasises on the word with frustration as she points to one of them, “I’m obviously ready to move on to the bigger one over there!”

“Don’t just label them by size like that! You make them sound like a kid’s toy!” he snaps, “plus, I find your claims hard to believe since you almost dropped that one you’re holding now.”

“Will you leave me alone about that? I told you I was just caught off guard! So can I go pick up that one over there?”

Jirou gestures again at the weight that’s slightly larger than the one that’s currently in her right hand, glancing at Bakugo to check if he’s following her.

He doesn’t spare anything more than a brief glance toward it before shrugging his arms to show he couldn’t care less what she did and goes right back to looking at his phone, which - whatever it was - he clearly found more interesting.

Instead of going to pick it up right away, Jirou chooses to approach her explosive classmate, curious to see exactly what was holding his full attention. It surprises her, to say the least, to see him watching a video of a song cover. A drum cover to be specific.

“No way!” she gasps excitedly, startling Bakugo as he immediately shoves his phone away and yanks his earbuds out of his ears, “I never knew you were into drums, Bakugo!”

“The fuck are you doing?!” he growls, though her Quirk doesn’t leave the immediate quickened pace of his heart unnoticed, “didn’t you come here to train for yourself?! Stop bothering me!”

Ignoring his demands, she settles down on the floor and leans against his bed frame.

“Can you play?”

“Did you not hear me, Ears?! Go back to lifting your dumb weights!”

“Can you?”

“Does that even matter?! It’s not like you’re gonna get any stronger if you knew, would you?!”

Jirou plasters a cocky smirk across her face, “Oh, so you can’t?”

Hearing the way she emphasises the word ‘can’t’ ticks Bakugo off slightly. Jirou can tell from the way he glares sharply at her like she’d just said that Deku was better than him.

Oh, this is too easy, she thinks.

“I can,” he mumbles, turning away from her, “my mom made me take lessons for a while when I was a kid.”

“That’s so cool! How come you never told anybody?”

“Haven’t you got your answer already?! Quit asking questions and finish your training session before I kick you out!”

“Geez, okay, old man.” she groans, scooching across the room to pick up the weight she’d been eyeing over the past few days.

“And stop giving me all these dumb nicknames!”

“Okay, now that’s just rich coming from you.” she says, playfully sticking her tongue out at him.

Bakugo doesn’t respond, plugging his earbuds back into his ears and goes back to staring at his phone, clearly preferring the silence over holding an argument with her. The only thing that can be heard for a while is the steady breathing of both Bakugo and Jirou, and the occasional tapping of the blonde’s fingers on his phone screen.

“I don’t play anymore.” Bakugo mumbles, his back still turned to her. He says it in a surprisingly soft voice that Jirou thinks she would’ve probably missed had it not been for her hearing Quirk.

She looks up in surprise, switching the weight to her right hand as she processes what he said.

“Why not?” she asks, her voice equally as soft and gentle, in a polite type of curiosity.

He removes his earbuds from his ears and sets them down on his desk, sighing like he isn’t really ready for this conversation, but still replies, “It’s a waste of time.”

“A waste of time?” she repeats, cocking her head to the side, “what makes you think that?”

Bakugo chances a glance back at Jirou, who stares up at him from where she’s sitting on the floor. Her right arm is still lifting the weight at a steady speed, but her eyes, wide and curious, are giving him their full attention.

“Not like drumming is gonna help me become a better hero,” he scoffs, breaking their eye contact.

At this, Jirou sets the weight down, stretching her arms above her head before she replies, “So what? From the looks of it, you clearly enjoyed it.”

Bakugo lets out a soft ‘tch’, then coldly growls, “You done with your training yet? If you are then get out. I would’ve been asleep now if it weren’t for you.”

Jirou lets out a heavy sigh, picking up her crutches and getting up on her feet, carrying herself over to Bakugo’s door.

“You know,” she says, her back turned to him, “I happen to have a drum set in my room.”

“So?”

“I mean, I think it’d be pretty cool if I could hear you play someday,” she hesitates for a moment as she turns the doorknob, “it would be a lot of fun if we could jam together too.”

“I told you, it’s a waste of time.”

“So?” Jirou grins cockily, finally looking back at him, “it’d still be fun.”

She doesn’t wait for his reply before exiting and closing the door behind her.

For the next few days afterwards, Jirou doesn’t push or even mentions the topic of Bakugo’s interest in the drums again, but every time she leaves his room after their secret training sessions, she’d always give him a small look after that showed she was clearly thinking about it and, if anything, expecting him to take up her offer.

They had never interacted much outside of those times. Even if they were given the chance to, like whenever they were hanging out with their classmates in the common room or during classes in school, Jirou barely even acknowledged his existence.

“What’s up with Ears?” he asks one day when they’re in class waiting for Aizawa.

“Huh?” Kirishima looks up to follow Bakugo’s gaze on her, “what, you mean Jirou? What about her?”

Bakugo turns his eyes back to the open book on his desk, clicking his tongue, “What’s her whole deal with the music thing?”

“The music thing?” Kirishima pauses, “oh, you mean her hobby with it? Yeah! It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“I know!” Kaminari chimes in, “her room literally looks like a music store, it’s so cool!”

Bakugo raises an eyebrow at his friends, indicating that he clearly didn’t understand what they were saying.

“Bakugo wasn’t there when we had that competition for the Room King, remember?” Sero reminds them.

The blonde scoffs, remembering that activity some of the girls in the class had proposed the night they moved into the dorms, to which he had claimed was stupid and disappeared into his room to call it an early night. Flipping the pages of his textbook to look disinterested, he asks, “Why’d you compare it to some music store, dunce face?”

“She had a ton of different instruments in there!” he says, momentarily glancing behind them to make sure Jirou hadn’t heard him, “I’m pretty sure she knows how to play all of them too, it’s really cool!”

“Does she even have time to practice all of them with how much training we have?”

“That’s what makes it seem so impressive, huh?” Kirishima grins, leaning back in his chair, “either way, she looks like she enjoys it, so it shouldn’t really matter.”

“Why do you ask, huh, Blasty?” Mina smirks, raising her eyebrows at her blonde friend, “curious about Kyouka and her passions now, are we?”

“WILL YOU STOP READING THIS THE WRONG WAY, DAMN RACOON EYES?!” Bakugo yells, attracting the attention of a few people in the class, who quickly go back to what they’re doing, used to Bakugo’s random outbursts, “I’m not curious about it, I just think it’s kind of weird how she has the time for such a huge distraction.”

“Distraction?” Sero repeats thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t exactly call it that. It’s more like-”

“Like I said,” Kirishima cuts in, “it’s a hobby. She enjoys what she does and she’s able to pull off looking really cool from doing it. It’s pretty manly, isn’t it? It’s not like everything we do has to have a correlation to our whole career as heroes.”

“You can’t say it that way, Kirishima,” Kaminari jokes, “this is Bakugo we’re talking to, after all.”

Bakugo doesn’t bother listening to whatever his friends say after that, instead he lets his eyes flicker momentarily towards the purple-haired girl chatting nonchalantly with the extra with the ponytail and the invisible one - names that he’d never cared to remember. He only lets his eyes linger for a fraction of a second, knowing that there was a chance his friends might pick up on that singular action and make a bigger deal out of it than it really was – especially that damn Racoon Eyes. Despite his friends making it seem like it was such a simple thing to understand, Bakugo still couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that ‘doing something that didn’t play a part in achieving the goal you’d set for yourself since forever ago was okay’.

And that’s how he finds himself standing in front of Jirou’s dorm room that night, rethinking his decision to come here. Despite dropping her off the day he carried her back from the infirmary, he couldn’t a hundred percent remember where Jirou’s room was exactly, other than knowing it was on the third floor. Despite not having any leads as to which door hers was, it was easy enough to figure out by following the subtle strum of a bass playing from the room at the end of the girls’ side of the building.

Fuck it, he thinks to himself. It’d be pretty pathetic of him if he’d come all this way just to turn back, anyway. He knocks on the door twice before calling out, “Oi, Ears.”

The sound of the bass stops abruptly, and a few seconds pass before the door is pulled open a fraction as Jirou peeks her head out, eyes widening slightly when she realises who her visitor is. Bakugo half wonders if she’d been riding on the expectation that he’d show up at some point over the past few days.

“Your music is so damn loud.” he scoffs at her.

“You came.” Jirou breathes in a tone Bakugo can’t quite read, ignoring his comment. She sounds a little cocky, like she’s saying ‘I knew you’d come in the end anyway’, but at the same time there’s a hint of relief behind those words, like he’d been on her mind a lot more than he’d credited her for.

“Yeah, I did.” Bakugo responds, his eyes flickering down to her bandaged left leg. It had become a strange habit he’d adopted since that first night he’d agreed to let Jirou train in his room. She’d probably let her discomfort show by accident that night from the exhaustion of having walked like that for a full day the first time, but apart from that Jirou was good at hiding the pain of a broken leg. She’d always have at least one person asking her on a daily basis if her leg was okay, and every single time, she would brush their concern off by laughing and making a joke out of it, but Bakugo - being both her seatmate and the observant person he was - would notice her shift uncomfortably at times in class. He’d noticed her wince ever so slightly whenever one of her friends would lean into her without warning, and he’d picked up on the way she’d been excusing herself out of class more often than usual and coming back with new bandages.

He pulls his eyes away from her leg to look her in the eye, “I’m only here because I have no fucking idea how immersed in this whole thing you can be when we have such big goals to be working on.”

“What I think you mean to tell me is, “ Jirou chuckles as she dramatically swings the door open to let him in like an usher, “‘Thank you, Ears, for letting me play your drum set because I’ve been dying to do so for a very lo-’”

“What happened to your wooden sticks?” he cuts her off, realising she doesn’t have them on her once he sees her in full view.

“My what?” she gives him a strange look before the understanding shows on her face, “oh! You mean my crutches? I don’t need them anymore, see? I can walk just fine without them!”

Jirou walks backwards - the blonde notes that it’s with visible difficulty - until she falls back onto her bed, as if proving her point to Bakugo, who doesn’t take it quite well.

“You telling me that’s walking well?!” he snaps, walking through the doorway and closing her door, “don’t rush your recovery, you damn hypocrite! Always going on about me not taking care of my injuries then getting all reckless like this!”

“Oh, come on!” she groans, getting up again to walk over to the drum set she had set up in the corner of her room, “it was so annoying to walk with them around. And, anyway, my leg muscles aren’t even going to work if I just tell myself to take it easy for too long.”

Bakugo doesn’t say anything, nor is he planning to anytime soon, but Dunce Face was right. Her room really did look like a music store. Everywhere he looks, there’s a different kind of instrument from string, to wind and even percussion. It’s almost admirable how she manages to fit all of them in the small space Yuuei provided for them. He didn’t think much of what his friend had said that afternoon about how she probably knew how to play all of the instruments, passing it off as Kaminari lacking the common knowledge of anything that had to do with music, but looking at everything in her room now, he can’t deny that it was indeed impressive, though he’d never admit it out loud to her.

“So,” her voice brings his attention back to where she stands by the drum set, holding a pair of wooden drumsticks out to him, “come on. I want to see what you’ve got.”

Bakugo accepts the drumsticks, taking a seat in the stool placed behind the set as Jirou sits down on top of an amp beside it, glancing up at him expectantly. Though her face looks serious, Bakugo swears he catches a sparkle of childlike excitement in her eyes, wide and eager with nothing but pure innocence like seeing him play the drums is the best moment of her life.

He stares at the drumsticks in his hands. He can’t remember the last time he’d felt a pair of these in the flesh, let alone the last time he’d sat himself in front of a drum set to play simply because he wanted to. On top of all of that, he can’t remember the last time he’d had someone look at him with so much awe and admiration, in the same way Jirou is looking at him now, for something other than his Quirk. He takes a deep breath, rolling his wrists, trying to grasp whatever muscle memory he has from playing the drums as a child. Trying not to think too much about it, he lets the drumsticks dance across the drum set, playing a song he remembers so well only because he had spent a whole day trying to get it down during a period when he wasn’t completely obsessed with his goal to become Number One. He remembers being so proud of himself when he’d finally played it perfectly the first time, playing it over and over again for months afterwards because of how thrilling the success felt. Sitting at the drum set now, it’s so easy for him to fall into the ways his wrists would twist and turn from one component of the drum set to the other, skillfully hitting every beat with frightening precision, perhaps even a little harder than necessary. It’s like his hands have been itching to play the instrument for so long and are ecstatic to be holding the drumsticks and running them over a set again. He almost doesn’t realise it’s over when he hits the final note.

“T-that was perfect,” Jirou breathes before Bakugo has the chance to process that the song is over, “that was… that was so cool, Bakugo! Ugh, it almost makes me mad how you stopped playing! I’d play the drums everyday if I could play them like that!”

He turns to meet her eyes. They are filled with so much excitement, and they seem to glow even brighter than he remembers his being when he first played the same song. She looks like a child with way too much enthusiasm, reminding him a little bit of how he used to lighten up whenever All Might would show up on the news when he was a kid, feeling so proud watching someone do something they had only so far dreamed of doing. He feels his heart do a double take. Bakugo had thought that that strange, foreign, yet warm and homely sentiment he had started feeling lately only manifested in him whenever she smiled or laughed, for a reason he had yet to confirm, but right then he discovers that apparently it also happens when she looks at him with eyes full of wonder, too. He wants time to continue slowing down for a little longer, so he can pretend that he isn’t getting lost in them for as long as he really is, but he forces himself to pull away, hiding the subtle tinge of red on his cheeks with the back of his hand.

“It’s nothing much,” he mumbles as he sets the drumsticks down on top of the snare drum, “that was just a song I remembered really well.”

Jirou grins, her smile looking like an innocent request for an encore.

Bakugo scoffs like he’s annoyed, but picks up the drumsticks again to answer her when she keeps staring at him like that.

He has not felt like this in a long time.

“Okay, I’ve got another one.”

”Delightful.” Bakugo groans, looking the farthest thing from delighted.

“Favourite colour.”

“I was wrong for hoping you actually had a good one for a second,” he grunts, hesitating before he adds, “red.”

“Favourite class.”

“I don’t know, hero training?”

“I mean, I don’t think that counts. Like, actual school-related stuff, you know?”

“Why are we even playing this stupid game?”

“Mhm, because I’m bored and it’d feel weird if I spent a really long time training in your room and learn absolutely nothing about you.”

Bakugo scoffs and shifts his position in his chair so that his arms are crossed over its top rail, legs out on either side of the seat. Jirou is sitting leaning against the wall across from him. He doesn’t mention it to her, of course, but he’s surprised at how quickly she seems to be growing in terms of strength. And though he never really believed her, she’s also been telling him that she can probably walk around without bandages in the next two or three weeks. Unless she’s somehow manifested a healing Quirk, Bakugo suspects she’s rushing her recovery a little bit.

“So why are you the only one asking the questions then?”

Jirou’s eyes light up mischievously, scooching closer to the chair so that she’s now sitting directly underneath his gaze.

“Ohoho,” she smirks playfully, “are you curious about me now, Blasty?”

“You fucking wish,” he rolls his eyes, scoffing as he does so, “it just doesn’t make sense how I’m supposed to just answer all your childish questions if I’m not learning anything either.”

She pretends to contemplate his answer for a while, then says, “Okay. Ask me then.”

Bakugo doesn’t say anything right away. In fact, he pauses for quite a while, thinking to himself what he would possibly need to know about the girl sitting below him on the floor. He isn’t interested in knowing any of the answers to trifling questions like, ‘what’s your favourite animal?’ or ‘what’s your favourite song?’. It isn’t like he’s going to need any of that information, nor does he know what he’d even do with it if he did.

“What’s your Quirk’s weakness?” he asks.

Jirou blinks for a few moments, like she’s processing the question, then chuckles a little.

“Oh, leave it to Bakugo to always take whatever chance he gets to be one step ahead of competition,” she sighs dramatically, placing her unoccupied hand over her heart, pretending to be offended, “but, well, if you must know, I suppose it’s just weak in general.”

Bakugo raises an eyebrow at her, which tells her she needs to elaborate.

“Okay, no, not exactly weak, it’s not like I hate my Quirk or anything, don’t get me wrong. But you’ve gotta admit it’s not exactly suitable for combat. It isn’t flashy like yours or Midoriya’s that’s capable of taking out really big and strong villains, you know? Plus, once you’re actually aware of it it’s pretty easy to take me out. I hate to admit it but it’s more of a backup or rescue mission type of Quirk.”

Her classmate is quiet for a while, but he doesn’t look away from her. He stares at her with his eyes narrowed, hardly even blinking, like he’s thinking about her answer. If Jirou didn’t know any better, she’d probably be under the impression that Bakugo was going to start yelling at her any moment now. But knowing the strange, inconsiderate way he could act sometimes, she can’t really tell if he’s trying to come up with an answer or is just waiting for her to say something else. She decides on the latter when she starts getting embarrassed from his staring.

“Look, I didn’t want to make this about me, but you kind of asked, so-”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

“I- uh, excuse me?”

“What, do you need me to say it in French?!” he snaps, breaking their eye contact, “if anything should be your weakness, it should be your inability to listen to what people are saying when they talk to you!”

“Wait, no, but I-”

“SHUT UP, I’M TALKING!” he yells, to which Jirou quickly obeys, “did you not hear me the first time I said it? Your ears aren’t dumb, and they aren’t weak either. You could do a lot of shit with them if you were just smart enough to use that head of yours!”

“W-what? That’s not-” Jirou stutters, not really knowing how to respond, “I didn’t mean my Quirk was useless, I-”

“WILL YOU LISTEN?!” he yells, and this time Jirou puts her hands up in surrender to show she was going to stop talking, eyes wide at how seriously he was taking this, “I never said they- ...your ears aren’t- ...you know you could- ARGH!”

Jirou flinches slightly at his sudden yell of frustration, but before she can say anything again, Bakugo gets up from his chair and paces over to the balcony of his dorm room, throwing the doors open and stepping outside.

“Bakugo?” Jirou calls, starting to get a little concerned, “what are you-”

“Let’s go.”

“H-huh? Go where?”

“Ground Beta.”

“HAH?!” Jirou exclaims, “what, are you trying to get my other leg broken now?”

“The fuck? No, you blockhead. It’s just easier there to show you what your Quirk can do.”

“Um, okay, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but in any case, we can’t go. Since you clearly haven’t noticed, it’s past curfew.”

“WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP AND FOLLOW ME?!”

Before Jirou can retort with a comment of her own, she finds herself almost losing her shit when she sees Bakugo leap over his balcony railing with one hand, disappearing from her sight as he falls groundwards.

Panic surging through her body, she scrambles up, pain stinging through her left leg at the sudden movement. She hobbles as quickly as she can outside, leaning over the railing and praying with her whole soul that he’s okay, only to be met with his vermillion eyes staring up at her from the courtyard below, looking like he was expecting her to follow suit. She wonders how many times he’s done this for him to confidently throw himself off the fourth floor without batting an eye.

“Are you fucking insane?!” she whisper-shouts, which comes out surprisingly loud in the dead of the night, “you live on the freaking fourth floor, you damn well could have died!”

“It’s easier to sneak out this way! Going down the elevator is just going to attract someone’s attention!” he gruffly whispers back. He takes a quick glance around to see if anyone had heard him before turning back to Jirou on the balcony and gesturing for her to jump.

“Oh, fuck no!” Jirou hisses, backing away from the railing, “I have a broken leg, Blasty! I’m not jumping off a building for us to sneak into Ground Beta!”

Fuck, Bakugo thinks to himself. He’d forgotten about her broken leg.

“I’ll use the elevator,” Jirou sighs, knowing Bakugo wasn’t going to listen to her if she tried to get him to come back against his will, “but if we get caught you’re taking the blame.”

Jirou disappears back into Bakugo’s room and out of his sight. Left on his own for a while, he realises that he really is counting on the fact that they won’t get caught by anyone, because he hadn’t thought this through to the point of if it would come to him needing to explain why he was taking his classmate with a busted leg onto training grounds in the middle of the night. It would definitely look pretty fucking sketchy to anybody without any given context. To be perfectly honest, he isn’t too sure himself. He doesn’t exactly have a solid reason why he’s suddenly so badly driven to sneak out and risk getting in trouble just to prove to some extra he’s known for less than a year that her Quirk isn’t as weak as she perceives it to be. Like a lot of other things that involve her, he pushes it to the back of his mind, telling himself he can think about them later. For now, any logical reason he can come up with suffices. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the thrill he gets from sneaking out on a school night, and showing Jirou the capabilities of her Quirk is nothing but an excuse for that. Perhaps it’s even just the guilt that had left a shitty taste in his mouth since their fight at Ground Beta. If there was one thing Bakugo hated, it was definitely being in debt to someone. This act of him being strangely nice to her was nothing more than his own way of paying back Ears for shoving him out of harm’s way that one time.

“Okay, Blasty, I’m here,” Jirou snaps him out of his thoughts, lightly tapping his shoulder, “this better be worth it.”

Bakugo hums lowly in response, starting to walk towards the exit of the dormitory grounds, trusting that Jirou is following close behind. For a while, he knows she is even without looking back because he can hear the crunch of gravel beneath her shoes as she drags her feet behind him. He doesn’t say anything as they walk, and neither does she. However, as the minutes draw on, he picks up on the way her footsteps gradually fade away and slow down, like she’s getting farther away from him.

“Oi, Ears, are you still alive back there?” he asks, not bothering to turn around.

It isn’t until her footsteps, now sounding like they’re more forced than natural, are followed by a soft curse that he turns around to check on her. He finds her a lot farther behind him than he expects, leaning against the railing that draws the pathway towards Ground Beta on her right side so that most of her weight is shifted off her bandaged leg. Her right hand is grabbing onto the railing for support while the other is holding up her injury like it’s about to fall off. The way her eyes and teeth are tightly clenched gives Bakugo even more reason to believe that she is in a tremendous amount of pain.

“OI!” Bakugo yells as he quickly rushes over to her, all thoughts of being quiet thrown out the window in that instant, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?! WHAT’S UP WITH YOUR LEG NOW?!”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Jirou utters with a forced smile on her face, though it looks like it takes her a lot of effort just to form the words, “stop acting like I’m having a heart attack. My leg is fine, it just stings a little right now.”

“WILL YOU SHUT UP?!” Bakugo growls as he pulls her right arm over his shoulders and lowers her down to the ground as gently as he can manage so that she’s now sitting down with her back leaning against the railing.

He settles himself beside her, not saying anything else. For a few moments, they both sit in silence, side by side, leaning against the rusted metal railings of their school campus, the only sounds being the occasional crunch of gravel beneath the soles of Bakugo’s shoes whenever he shifts his feet and Jirou’s breathing as it gradually slows down and finally begins to sound less strained.

“You go on without me first,” she whispers once she catches her breath, just loud enough for him to catch, “I’ll meet you there when my leg stops burning.”

“What, you want me to leave you here?”

“This is the Yuuei campus, there’s a pretty low chance of me getting kidnapped, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she jokes, “and even if that somehow happens, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.”

“You have the nerve to tell me you can take care of yourself with that leg?”

“Oh, you wound me,” Jiro laughs, her tone still playful and failing to pick up on the growing aggression and anger in Bakugo’s, “my leg’s fine, trust me, I’ll meet you there. Go on ahead.”

“Stop fucking lying around me.”

“I’m not lying, Blasty,” she breathes, her head tilting to look at him, “I’m not some heartless person who’d leave you waiting for me at G-”

“THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEAN, EARS!” he yells, cutting her off, “YOU FUCKING LIED TO ME!”

His tone sends Jirou into dead silence. She can’t quite identify the emotion behind it. There’s anger - definitely -, more than anything else, and there’s frustration. But in a much smaller fraction, Jirou thinks she senses a little bit of pain mixed with all that vexation.

“You told me you didn’t need the damn wooden sticks anymore,” he snaps, his voice a lot softer than it was two seconds ago, though Jirou can tell he’s still upset, “you kept saying you were fine.”

Jirou wants to tell him that she is, but then the understanding hits her all at once. The only reason he’s upset is because she looked like she was pretending her injury was healing quickly, when in reality, she’d admittedly been rushing the entire process by a couple weeks. She’d gotten rid of her crutches after less than a month despite Recovery Girl telling her she was advised to use them for at least the first five weeks after her injury. She’d been lying to and telling herself that she had a quick immune system and that this was necessary if she wanted to get back to hero training as soon as possible. She felt inferior watching all of her classmates making so much progress day by day when all she could do was hole up in her blonde classmate’s room for two hours - tops - lifting weights. She didn’t feel like she was moving at all, but if she was going to pass the provisional licence exam that was coming in less than two months, she needed to work harder. She needed to move faster. She needed her damn leg to work again. So of course she had to pretend. She half hated herself a little bit for it too. But why was Bakugo so frazzled about it?

“W-well, I mean, yeah,” Jirou replies when he doesn’t say anything else for a good ten seconds, “but you don’t have to get so worked up about it. It’s my leg, so-”

“Oh, fuck you, Ears,” Bakugo snaps, fisting his hair in his hands, “you don’t- you don’t fucking get it, do you?”

“No, I get it, you’re mad because I-”

“Your leg was busted in the first place because of me,” he says, face turned away from her so that she can’t see his expression, “the only reason you can’t participate in training right now is because I had to go and shake up that building, which your dumbass threw yourself directly under. It was my goddamn fault. And you made it pretty damn obvious just how painful it was. You can’t just throw yourself underneath a collapsing building and swear out loud like you’re in a crazy amount of pain, and then you disregard it to look at my own injury the first chance you get. You toss aside your wooden sticks way earlier than you’re supposed to, claiming you’re okay without them. But then next thing I know you’re standing here, not even being able to walk properly, looking like you’re experiencing that pain all over again. SO WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WHEN I SEE YOU LIKE THAT, EARS?! HUH?! I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS BULLSHIT SO I COULD SEE YOU PRETEND LIKE YOU’RE OKAY WHEN YOU’RE CLEARLY NOT! AND THEN YOU TELL ME TO GO ON AHEAD LIKE THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME?! FUCK YOU! I DON’T FUCKING KNOW WHAT I SHOUL-”

Bakugo would’ve continued yelling, he probably would’ve continued raising his voice to its breaking point or until everyone in the entire school woke up - whichever came first - but he doesn’t get the chance to, because of the two arms that suddenly wrap themselves around his head and pull him towards the girl they belonged to. Jirou’s arms are small, he could’ve broken out of her hold any time he wanted, but something about the way she held him made him want to lean into her touch even more. She’d pulled him towards her so forcefully, it was like he could sense her desperation for wanting him to just shut up for a second. But it’s also gentle, almost frighteningly so. She holds him like he’s the most vulnerable and fragile thing in the world right now, and while Bakugo would’ve purely hated having anybody address him with either of those two words, he somehow doesn’t mind forgetting that he does when he’s with her. The larger, egotistical part of himself hates the way she touches him as if he’s so breakable. It’s suffocating. But there’s also the small - yet growing - part of him; the part that always seems to be there and grows even harder to ignore whenever she’s around that feels relieved. He’s relaxing into the space between her shoulder and her jawline before he says anything else.

“Do you take me for some fucking idiot?” Bakugo whispers, “Someone who just wouldn’t notice that you were in pain?”

“I don’t.” she whispers back.

“It’s not like I was born without a heart, what the fuck do you think I felt when you got hurt in my place?”

Jirou doesn’t respond immediately. With his face buried in the crevice between her neck and collarbone, Bakugo is unable to see her face, so he can’t really tell if she’s expecting him to continue or if she’s just having trouble answering his question.

“Well, for starters, I never thought that I ‘got hurt in your place’, or whatever you want to call it.” Jirou says, loosening her hold on Bakugo once she realises he’s a little calmer now. She had mostly reached out to grab him because she knew that if he had kept up all that yelling, they were going to get caught by someone in the dorms, or worse, a teacher. But another part of her did it because he looked like he really needed it.

“Don’t make it sound like you were destined to get hurt or anything, the world doesn’t revolve around you that much,” she laughs softly, before her tone turns serious again, “but, look, it wasn’t your fault, okay? I just decided I wanted to save your ass, that’s all.”

“I didn’t need your saving.” he rudely snaps back.

“Right, of course you don’t.” Jirou laughs again, her left hand unconsciously starting to playfully ruffle his ashen locks. For a boy who was always so loud and had such a sharp tongue, his hair is surprisingly soft.

“Bottom line is, you don’t really have any right in taking responsibility and blaming yourself over the choices I make. Yeah, I won’t deny it feels pretty shitty dragging around a broken leg like some kind of dead weight, but I don’t regret savin- I mean,” she smiles a little as she rephrases her sentence, “shoving you out of the way.”

It’s an awkward hug. If Bakugo had been given the chance to describe the position she held him in, he’d probably call it ‘uncomfortable’. Even though they’re both sitting down, he’s still at least a full head taller than her, so having to forcefully bend down when she tugged on his head to make up for their huge height difference was the farthest thing from a comfortable position. On top of that, Bakugo was never one for physical affection. Whenever Kaminari or Ashido would try to pounce on him on days they were feeling extra hyper, he’d avoid them like the plague and threaten to murder them if they so much as placed a finger on him, no matter what mood he was in.

“Okay, but in all seriousness, though, I’m sorry you felt like that for so long,” Jirou continues, “I’ll use my ‘dumb wooden sticks’ starting tomorrow again, okay?”

“Yeah, you’d be pretty fucking stupid not to after what just happened.”

“It’s not like something like this happens everyday,” she mumbles back, a small pout settling on her lips, “I’m just doing this because I feel bad that you were carrying this guilt all on your own for so long.”

That’s a fat lie. Even if all she’s doing is sitting down, Jirou’s leg stings like hell. She’d only grown used to hiding the pain, not tolerating it. On top of that, it wasn’t easy for her to reach up using nothing but her upper body strength just to hold Bakugo as close to her as he was now, the gravel road was uncomfortable to sit on, and her heart was beating so quickly worrying about whether all of his inconsiderate screaming had woken anyone up. Her earphone jacks were picking up on every little sound, it was so overwhelming that it threatened to send her Quirk into overdrive especially as it was happening at the same time she was trying to come up with a believable excuse for if they eventually got caught by a teacher, but for whatever reason, sitting there in the dead of the night, holding her blonde classmate like he’d disappear if she let go somehow seemed to make up for everything else.

“I don’t need your pity,” Bakugo whispers back, though it lacked the usual hostility that was usually present in his voice, “so just shut up and fucking… take care of yourself.”

“As you wish, your majesty.”

“And stop calling me that!”

“Oh, great, you’re back to normal,” Jirou jokes, releasing his head and shifting so that she’s leaning against the railing again, wincing slightly as her left leg drags itself into position, “we probably would’ve gotten caught if you kept up all that screaming.”

“Tch,” Bakugo scoffs, copying her actions, both of them returning to sitting side by side, facing the road, “it’s fucking one in the morning, no one’s coming. The damn insects out here are louder than I ever was.”

“Really? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them flat out died from all that noise.”

“You wanna be next, huh, Ears?!”

Jirou laughs again, and in the instant before her eyes close to make way for her widening smile, Bakugo catches the glint in their onyx that gives away how much life resides in them in that one second.

“The hell’s so funny to you now?”

“Nothing,” she grins, turning to look at him in the way a child would look at their first friend, “I just find it kind of amusing how you’re yelling at me one minute about how guilty you felt about my injury and then threatening to kill me the next.”

“You’re one to talk,” he says back, “grabbing your leg like it’s about to fall off one second and then telling me you’re fine like I’d believe that shit.”

Jirou smiles in response, offering no response as her head rests against the railing once more. A strong wind loudly whistles its way past them, making several strands of her hair incredibly uncooperative to her as they attack every inch of her face, but she seems to be enjoying it regardless. She closes her eyes and tilts her head upwards, sighing as the wind tickles the branches of nearby trees. She’s so accustomed to spending most of her nights in her room writing lyrics for songs she never planned to show anyone, or just playing one of the countless instruments that she owns. She’d been so used to that routine of hers that she’d almost forgotten how nice it would feel whenever she’d climb on top of her roof in middle school while her parents were fast asleep just to take in the fresh night air that always welcomed her up there. Too absorbed in reliving the nostalgia of her younger days, she is oblivious to the way Bakugo stares at her. The boy probably isn’t even aware of it himself, but for an instant he looks at her like she’s the prettiest thing in the world.

“We aren’t going to Ground Beta anymore, right?” Jirou asks, her eyes still closed.

“Not a fucking chance,” Bakugo scoffs as he reluctantly looks away, “you can’t even walk.”

“Mhm, well, in that case I might need you to help me grab my crutches from my room.”

“That’s a waste of time.”

“Ah, but alas,” she sighs dramatically, “neither of us are Momo so we don’t exactly have a creation Quirk on our hands at the moment.”

She hears the crunch of gravel, a sign that Bakugo is standing up. She opens one eye to look at him with a cocky grin on her face, expecting him to take off to fetch her ‘the dumb wooden sticks’ with an annoyed grunt. What surprises her is that instead of doing just that, he stretches his arms before crouching down, facing his back to her.

“So get on, then, if you’re done talking.”

Jirou grins at the familiarity of the situation, grabbing hold of his shoulders and wrapping her arms around his neck as he hooks his arms under her legs on either side of him, standing up and walking back towards the dorm gates like this is something he’s used to doing. The only sources of sound at this time of the night are the dragging of the soles of Bakugo’s shoes against the gravel road and the occasional stridulation of a cricket lurking somewhere nearby. It’s amusing to Jirou how safe she feels being carried on his back despite it being only the second time he’d done it for her - though she thinks she’d definitely be pushing her luck if she was hoping for it to happen a third time.

“Why’d you lie about your leg, anyway?” Bakugo asks as they approach the dorm grounds, “what were you even gonna get out of it?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she replies, “we’re students in the most prestigious hero department in Japan. Whether I get injured or not, people are gonna continue moving forward. I can’t afford to be stuck here in the same place waiting for a broken bone to heal. Do you have any idea how long that takes?”

Bakugo sighs loudly before he responds, “You might not take this seriously coming from me, but you’ve got no fucking reason to rush everything. How the hell are you supposed to save people and be someone extras can rely on if you aren’t even looking out for your own damn self?”

Though it’s accompanied by a rather unnecessary amount of swear words, his answer surprises Jirou. Maybe it hadn’t been a direct piece of encouragement, but she feels a little more at ease thinking that he thought of her worries significant enough to provide his own kind of reassurance for. She doesn't say anything back, but the way her arms tighten slightly around him let him know that she’s grateful for what he said, which to be honest he’s slightly relieved about, because he sure as hell isn’t used to saying these kinds of things to anybody at all. The two of them relish once more in the chirping of the crickets jumping closer to them and then farther away again and the comfortable silence that settles between them. It isn’t until the pair makes it into the elevator and are going up does either of them say anything else.

“Loud noises.” Jirou mumbles as the elevator sounds a tinny ding to announce their arrival to the third floor, where Jirou’s room is.

“Heh? Loud noises? What about them?” Bakugo asks, having no idea where she had brought the topic out from as he steps out of the elevator and makes a turn to the girls’ side of the dorms.

“My weakness,” she responds, “since you asked. It’s the only major one I can think of right now.”

Bakugo turns her doorknob as silently as he can, though that doesn’t quite stop it from making a creaking noise that echoes more than it should in the dead silence of the building. Praying nobody on the third floor is a light sleeper, he pushes the door open, his arm quickly returning to support Jirou before she slides off his back.

“Oh, that. Uh, loud noises like what?”

His voice is soft, unnaturally so, probably to keep Jirou’s neighbours from waking up.

“Well, you know… anything sudden and… noisy, for lack of better wording. Sounds that have high frequency. Bombs. Explosions. Stuff like that.”

“Explosions, huh?” Bakugo considers, sliding her off his back onto her bed before turning around to face her, “what, like me?”

Jirou contemplates his words for a few moments, humming softly in thought. She can tell he’s half joking, and she considers responding with a snarky comment of her own, but eventually decides against it before she looks up to meet the vermillion in his eyes.

“Yeah, Bakugo. Like you.”

“Jirou? You’re back on your crutches again,” Momo comments the next day at school as her friend walks in, “did something happen?”

“Oh, this?” Jirou laughs awkwardly, a sheepish smile on her face, “don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. I just tripped over yesterday and twisted my leg a little, but I’m sure it’ll be back to normal in no time!”

Bakugo scoffs to himself at her words from his seat at the end of the classroom, looking away after hearing her answer. He isn’t interested in the concerns her friends are starting to address her with over a situation she manages to lie about so easily. He half wonders how long she used to keep that up about the discomfort in her leg.

“Awhh, but it’s such a pity that this happened now, isn’t it?” Hagakure groans, as Jirou settles down into her seat beside Bakugo, who is now able to unwillingly hear their whole conversation.

“Is it?” Jirou asks, her head tilting to the side in question, “why? Is something happening soon?”

“Isn’t your birthday this weekend, Kyouka?”

For some reason, this information catches Bakugo’s attention, though he’s smart enough to make sure it doesn’t show on his face.

“My… birthday?” Jirou repeats, clearly having forgotten about it herself. With everything that had been happening lately, she hadn’t been aware of how quickly time had passed, “oh. I guess it is, huh?”

As her friends start fussing over and making plans for what they should do over the weekend, Jirou’s so busy trying to convince them that they don’t have to make such a big deal out of it that she fails to notice the way Bakugo’s eyes occasionally flick up for just a second to look at her, before turning away immediately to stare anywhere else. Had anyone spared a moment’s glance towards him, they would’ve thought nothing more of it than Bakugo being Bakugo, sitting there like he didn’t want anything to have to do with anyone with an exaggerated frown on his face. But if they were to observe him a little more closely, it was quite obvious that the boy had something on his mind, though it didn’t look like he was planning on sharing it with anybody.

“Hey, Bakubro!” Kirishima, being part of the majority that doesn’t notice, greets his friend cheerfully as he, Kaminari and Sero surround his desk, “do you have anything to do after school today?”

“You probably don’t, right?” Kaminari snickers, “everyday you just head back to the dorms to do your homework like a nerd.”

Usually, Bakugo would’ve already been yelling at his friends to stop bothering him and to get out of his personal space by now, but even as Kaminari adds that last comment on Bakugo’s daily routine, he hadn’t even so much as glanced in their direction. It didn’t look as if he was deliberately ignoring them, either. If anything, it was like he wasn’t even listening to anything they were saying to begin with.

“Uh,” Sero exchanges a confused glance with Kirishima and Kaminari, all of them picking up on their friend’s odd behaviour, “a-anyway, we wanted to do some extra combat training after school and it’d be a big help if you could join us.”

“Yeah, what he said,” Kirishima adds, giving Bakugo a strange look when he still fails to acknowledge them, “I’ve been working on the endurance of my hardening so I wanna train by-”

“Can’t,” Bakugo says without so much as sparing them a glance, “I got something to do.”

Before his friends can protest or question him further, the blonde gets up from his seat. As his friends flinch a little at how suddenly he had moved again, Bakugo takes advantage of their instant of confusion to slip out from the small circle they had formed around his desk and stalks out of the classroom with his hands in his pockets. The three boys he leaves behind exchange concerned looks with each other, silently asking each other if any of them knew what on earth was going on with their short-tempered classmate today. It wasn’t like him to skip out on training, of all things. And even on occasions when he would skip them, it’d usually be because of something he couldn’t get out of, and at the very least he would’ve taken out his frustration on anyone who happened to be within two metres of him.

“Hey, what’s up with him?” Kaminari whispers, almost like he was convinced they were being filmed for some kind of sick joke, “I’m not the only one who noticed that, right?”

“No, it’s… not just you,” Kirishima offers thoughtfully, “he seems… distracted by something.”

“But Bakugo?” Sero adds, “distracted by something enough to disregard training? This is Mr. I’m-going-to-surpass-all-of-you-extras-and-become-Number-One we’re talking about.”

“Eh, no point worrying about it,” Kirishima turns to head back to his desk, adding,“it’s weird, but we all know that Bakugo’s manly enough to handle his own problems. Since he isn’t even yelling at anyone I bet it’s probably something really small like not getting enough sleep last night.”

Sero and Kaminari seem reluctant to accept Kirishima’s unconvincing answer, but they’re a lot less willing to pester Bakugo himself for the truth and risk being his next reason to blow up the class, so they exchange a defeated look with each other before following the redhead to return to their seats.

“We should go Saturday night,” Momo suggests to her friends, “I know the actual day is on Sunday, but considering we’ll be out late we’d probably be better off doing it when it isn’t a school night.”

“Leave it to Momo to always be the responsible friend,” Mina grins as she gives her a thumbs-up, “Saturday it is.”

“You alright with Saturday night, Jirou?” Hagakure asks, as the three of them turn their heads to her.

“Yeah, it should be fine. Saturday n-“

Jirou pauses right before the word ‘night’ leaves her lips, suddenly remembering that on any other normal one, she’d be with Bakugo. And then she looks up at her friends’ expectant and eager faces, which tells her that they were clearly excited about being able to go out and relax after so long.

“Jirou?” Momo calls, snapping the girl out of her thoughts, “are you feeling alright?”

Jirou quickly nods and gives her friends a smile to reassure them.

“Yeah, no, sorry,” she laughs, “I was just thinking about something. Sure, Saturday night’s… just fine.”

At her confirmation, her friends excitedly start making plans for what they want to do. Jirou tunes out the noise, trying to tell herself that one night out of fun wouldn’t be a problem. Her explosive friend might even appreciate a night where he could sleep at his usual eight o’clock bedtime. She pulls out her phone when she notices him walking back in the classroom.

Jirou stares at her phone screen in disbelief, glancing at Bakugo, now back to sitting next to her at his desk.

Did he just say no? she thinks as he completely ignores her.

She reaches over to tap him on the shoulder and ask ‘what gives?’ but that’s when Aizawa enters the class, his presence managing to silence the entire class and send them back to their seats without saying a single word. Although Jirou knows texting in class is against the rules, she still wanted to make her point clear to Bakugo, so she props her textbook up on her desk and tries to hide her phone as best she can.

Jirou gives him another disbelieving glance, who doesn’t even bother looking up from his phone. He holds it in such an effortless way underneath his desk and behind his large hands that even Aizawa hasn’t seemed to suspect anything, which Jirou thinks is pretty impressive considering how tough it’s getting typing while holding her textbook up at the same time.

Jirou doesn’t respond to his message, but she turns her head to look at him once again. He was so difficult to read sometimes. She can’t quite tell if he had meant to be hostile from his words or not, but she can’t help feeling grateful either way for his willingness to help, even if he was just doing it under the pretence that she ‘wouldn’t think she could dip when she wanted to’. From the way he slips his phone back in his pocket the moment he realises she had stopped typing, she figures that it probably meant nothing much to him, but the idea that he didn’t mind waiting up for her made her feel oddly happy and warm on the inside.

“Jirou,” Aizawa calls, snapping her attention back to the front of the class in a panic, “correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember telling any of you that Bakugo would be something you had to study for the exam.”

Jirou’s face grows red as scattered giggles are heard throughout the class. She can feel Bakugo’s eyes on her as he gives her a sideways glance.

“I-it’s not like that, Sensei!” she stutters, “I-I am focusing, it’s just something I thought I saw.”

Aizawa raises an eyebrow at her answer, clearly unconvinced, but he turns his attention back to the rest of the class. Jirou is just about to let out a relieved sigh, thinking he had let it slide, but then he coolly adds, “I don’t know what you ‘thought you saw’ but please put your phone away. You aren’t quite as subtle as you think you might be.”

Feeling the temperature rise to her face again, Jirou quickly apologises and stuffs her phone back into her bag as Aizawa spares no time in moving on with his lecture.

When Aizawa has his back turned to the class, Jirou gives Bakugo a sharp glare. It wasn’t as if he had really done anything to get her in trouble, but she was annoyed that she was the only one who had to sit through the embarrassment of being caught texting in class when he had played a big role in it too. She doesn’t expect him to even acknowledge her when she turns her head to look at him, so it comes as a surprise when she sees his eyes are already trained on her, a cocky grin on his face. She can’t tell if he’s just acting smug about not getting caught, or if it’s about the fact that she was reprimanded in front of everyone for staring at him. For what it’s worth, it may as well be because of both. It pisses Jirou off, but it’s also when she realises that it’s the first time she’s actually seen him smile at her. It’s arrogant. It’s egotistical. And he’s looking at her like he’s so much smarter and better than her - which, she has to admit is probably true in this case. On a side note, though, she can’t help thinking that as shit-eating a grin he has plastered on his face, having something other than his usual scowl on it looked good on him.

She even almost smiles back.

Almost.

She’s glad she quickly decides against it, though, because his attitude that evening since she showed up at his room was so much cockier than usual.

“For fuck’s sake-” she pauses to harshly point one of her earphone jacks in his direction, “will you leave it alone already?!”

Bakugo says nothing back but only grins smugly in return, clearly unintimidated by her little trick of threatening to jab someone with her Quirk whenever they talked about something she didn’t want to discuss.

Jirou glares back for a while, but when she starts feeling herself starting to crack under his staring, she grabs the pillow on his bed and throws it at him before saying, “Wipe that stupid smile off your face, Blasty! I wasn’t even looking at you for the reason everyone thinks, okay?!”

He catches the pillow and bends down so that he’s at eye-level from where she’s sitting on the edge of his bed, that annoying grin still on his face.

“Oh, yeah? Then why were you looking at me, then?”

“Aren’t you smart enough to figure that out yourself?! I was mad because you were being difficult about me cancelling training,” she lies, breaking their eye contact when she feels her face heating up at how close he is, “I was glaring, okay? Not staring. Glaring.”

Jirou had only let herself linger on it for a moment when it struck her in class, but now that she didn’t have to worry about her teacher picking up on every little thing she did, the little rarity of Bakugo Katsuki smiling at her found its way to her head again. Over the past five weeks that Jirou had spent her evenings in his room, they’d never ventured outside of small talk regarding training, school, and occasionally Jirou’s gibes when it came to holding conversation with each other, of course with the exception of the night before when they snuck out to go to Ground Beta. There had even been days when Bakugo looked way too tired to talk and they didn’t bother exchanging more than five words between each other. For the longest time, Jirou felt she was like some stray kitten that had just so happened to get attached to Bakugo, who on the other hand was never given a choice other than to look after it. There was an invisible line drawn between them that neither Bakugo nor Jirou had ever given any thought to crossing at all. To be frank, apart from Jirou’s occasional teasing and the rare backhanded compliments from the blonde, she had to admit that speaking to him was awkward sometimes. This was the first time they’d had a conversation that felt so lighthearted and casual. As if they were on equal ground. It made Jirou feel like Bakugo considered her closer to an actual friend instead of some random stray cat. At least, being able to see Bakugo smile and act as boyish as he did now did feel like something only his friends had the privilege of seeing. It did bother her slightly, on another note, how often she would catch herself daydreaming about it.

“Why are you even going out on Saturday night, anyway?” the blonde asks as he straightens up and leans against his desk table, pretending like he hadn’t overheard her conversation with her friends, “I never really took you for the type to stay out past curfew to have fun.”

“Please, I wouldn't even dream of staying out past curfew with Aizawa-sensei as our teacher,” she states, “my friends just wanted to go out for a bit to celebrate my birthday. It honestly wasn’t necessary, but it’s sweet how much they were looking forward to it.”

“Your birthday’s on Saturday?” he asks, hoping he sounded disinterested to her.

“Well, technically it’s on Sunday, but unfortunately, that’s also a school night. Not that the date really matters, though. I’m thankful they’re even doing all of this for me.”

Bakugo hums in acknowledgement before jokingly stating, “Too bad the last person you’ll see before your actual birthday will be me, huh?”

“Huh?” Jirou takes some time to process what he had meant before quickly responding, “oh! What? No, it’s not a big deal! I mean, it’s not like, well, it’s not like I hate the idea of it or anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, hoping the scowl on his face is enough to convince her - and maybe himself - that he didn’t really care about how she answered that question.

“I mean you are pretty loud and have an ego so big it’s probably unhealthy, but it’s still fun hanging out with you.”

Bakugo pauses, the frown on his face disappearing for a moment. He meets her eyes in a sideways glance. She stares back at him, eyes wide and innocent and a little confused as to why he had even asked, as if the answer was obvious. He could never wrap his head around how her smart-mouthed, sassy and at the same time timid attitude could be switched out for this serious, earnest one so quickly, and especially when he least expected it.

“T-that’s disgusting,” he snaps, blinking to break their eye contact as he turns his head away, “how can you say such cheesy shit like that with a straight face? Besides, I’m not hanging out with you, Ears, we’re training.”

Jirou grins, laughing softly.

“Well, training or whatever, it’s still pretty fun.”

“I don’t think it’s fun,” Bakugo snaps.

“You were smiling just now, though.”

“The hell? No, I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were, though.”

“WILL YOU SHUT UP AND STOP BOTHERING ME?! AREN’T YOU HERE TO TRAIN?!”

“It’s called multitasking, genius.”

“Well, here’s an idea! How about you do me a favour and just do one of those things?!”

Jirou snickered.

“Aw, if you wanted me to bother you so bad, you could’ve just asked.”

“I’M ASKING YOU TO TRAIN, DAMN EARS!”

“Geez, okay, old man. Stop yelling before the whole floor wakes up.”

Bakugo grunts in response and turns his back to her to sit down at his desk, busying himself with his phone to avoid talking to her.

Jirou smiles, feeling a little victorious at getting to have the last word. She doesn’t quite think she’s completely crossed it yet, but she has a feeling she’s standing on that invisible line now.

Kyouka loved her friends, she really did. She was beyond grateful that they cared about her enough to give up time on a Saturday night just to celebrate the day she turned nothing more than a year older. She would have no trouble admitting that she had had fun with them in the city before they decided to return to Yuuei a bit before curfew. Unfortunately, Jirou also ran on a social battery with an incredibly short lifespan, and as the girls were now sitting in a taxi back to the school it was dangerously close to completely dying. She takes a deep breath as she subtly shifts in her seat next to Momo, already starting to feel the discomfort in her left leg.

Oh, would it feel like heaven to get a change of bandages right then.

Once they finally make it back into the dorm building, she thanks her friends for spending the night with her before they all return to their rooms, the exhaustion beginning to sink in from being out after so long. Jirou is still awake enough to remember that her hotheaded blonde classmate is probably still awake and expecting her to show up, but she’s also smart enough to know that since Mina lived on the same floor as him, there isn’t a chance that she could go up there right away without her gossip-loving friend taking notice and getting the wrong idea.

And so by the time Jirou has changed out of her old bandages and deems it safe enough to head up to the fourth floor without getting caught, the clock sitting on her desk tells her that it’s nearly eleven’o’clock.

She half-considers deciding for herself that the blonde had gone to bed by now and hence, so could she.

“Geez, about time,” Bakugo grunts when he throws his door open for her, “I thought you’d died.”

Jirou only nods in reply, not having any of the energy to give him a smart comeback like she usually did. Bakugo raises his eyebrow at her odd behaviour as she walks past him into his room.

“Oi,” he calls as he shuts his door, “the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired, Bakugo.” she says, sitting herself down on his bed, back slouched and eyes half-lidded.

“Yeah, no shit,” her classmate scoffs as he rolls his eyes, “what’d you even do out there? Did Racoon Eyes make you run a marathon as celebration or something?”

“No, of course not. We just went exploring around the city.” she replies as she laughs a little at his guess.

She opens her tired eyes for a moment when she feels Bakugo’s duvet cover sink further, a sign that he had taken a seat next to her. She tilts her head to look at him, expression sceptical.

“Aren’t I here to train?”

Bakugo responds with a sharp glare in her direction, like he was mad that she’d brought it up.

“Didn’t you just say you were tired?” he asks, “who the hell’s gonna want to watch you try to lift a weight when you don’t even look like you’ve got it in you to pick up a book?”

“Huh,” Jirou chuckles softly as she faces forward again, “so I came up here for no reason?”

“DON’T MAKE IT SOUND LIKE I’M WASTING YOUR TIME HERE!” Bakugo yells at her, “IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU, I’D-”

“It was so fun,” Jirou says, and though as she says this her voice is significantly softer than his, Bakugo shuts up right away when she starts speaking, “tiring, yeah, but fun.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he mumbles back, lying down with his hands behind his head, “so? What did you see in the city?”

“There was this sweet shop that opened there,” she recalls, lifting her bandaged leg up on Bakugo’s bed so that she can lean against its headboard, “I don’t think it was there the last time I took a trip down there, so I guess it’s a pretty new business.”

“Sounds lame,” Bakugo comments, but then tilts his head so that he can look at her, “what kind of sweets?”

“They had a lot of chocolate, now that I think about it. I couldn’t try all of them, of course, but the ones I did try were so good,” she goes on, “they had chocolate-flavoured stuff, too, but I’m not a big fan of that. Does that make sense?”

“No.”

“They had crepes too, you know. They were almost too pretty to eat, but I did take a ton of pictures. I thought they sold well just because of the presentation, but they were actually really good to eat too.”

“Was it hard getting around?”

“Well, there were a lot of people because it is the weekend, so I gotta admit it was pretty tough walking around with crutches,” Jirou whines, “I bet I could’ve walked faster if my dumb leg would just heal already.”

“Well, if you’ve been using the sticks like you’re supposed to, you should be able to walk without them next week.”

“That fast?” Jirou’s head lifts from the headboard to look at the blonde, “time really flies, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bakugo responds, his eyes never leaving her, “it does.”

Jirou continues retelling the stories of everything she’d done with her friends just a few hours ago, Bakugo giving his opinion and prompting questions every once in a while.

She talks to him about how they had visited a music store huddled in one of the quieter parts of the city. She tells him she had noticed a guitar that her hands were itching to try but that she decided to wait until she saved up enough to get it someday.

Bakugo tells her that she doesn’t need a new guitar and that even if she could afford it, she wouldn’t have any space for it in her room.

Jirou tells him she could always move the drum set back to her parents’ since she hardly used it.

He tells her it’s a stupid idea.

She recalls all the details about someone stopping Momo on the street, asking to get a photo with her, probably because they’d seen her on that commercial with Mt. Lady and Kendo. She laughs about how Mina had initially thought they were trying to hit on her and threatened to dissolve their arm, which had quite literally put them off talking to any girl ever again.

He tells her that he isn’t afraid of Raccoon Eyes and could probably beat her in a fight.

She tells him that isn’t the point.

The minute hand of the clock doesn’t stop moving for them, and time continues to pass further and further into the hour. Both Bakugo and Jirou always find themselves silently wishing for it to stop whenever they are in each other’s presence, something neither of them are brave enough to admit.

“O-oi, Ears.” Bakugo mumbles as she starts telling him about how Hagakure was yelling at a stranger for bumping into her and not realising.

“Mhm?” Jirou hums as she pauses her story, “sorry, it is getting pretty late, huh?”

“No, uh, that’s not it.” Bakugo says, his voice unnaturally soft now, an expression on his face that Jirou can’t quite read. He’s resting his right arm over his eyes, and her Quirk automatically picks up on the way his heart starts beating slightly faster than it was before.

“What is it?” she asks gently, a little unnerved at how transparent he looked.

“My drawer,” he whispers, “open it.”

Confused, but able to identify the sincerity in his words regardless, Jirou pushes herself off of Bakugo’s bed, and with some difficulty, carries herself over to his desk. It was still a huge nuisance getting around with her crutches even after a few months of using them, which had been a fraction of the reason she had stopped using them the first time, but the boy had been so sincere in his request for her to do such a simple thing that she decides the trouble is worth it.

She pulls open his desk drawer.

Jirou suspects that Bakugo would usually use it to store his school textbooks, seeing as how they were all neatly stacked up against each other, by order of size. He really was organised, or - as Jirou loved to call him - a clean freak. However, one thing stood out from all of those schoolbooks. It looked like it’d only been placed there recently, mainly because of how out of place it looked, so Jirou assumes that it was what Bakugo had wanted her to see. She thinks she’s seen it somewhere before.

It’s a stuffed animal. To be more specific, it’s an ash-blonde fluffy pomeranian.

That thing really does have a striking resemblance to Bakugo, is Jirou’s first thought before it hits her why the dog looks so familiar.

“This is-”

“It’s yours,” Bakugo cuts in. He says it quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid, and the unnecessary roughness of his voice gives away how embarrassed he is, “I just saw you staring at it that day in the arcade, okay?!”

Jirou picks up the stuffed animal, holding it up in front of her like a child that had just unwrapped their first present on Christmas Day. Now that she’s looking at it up close, it’s even more obvious that the animal really did have a striking resemblance to her explosive classmate. Not only did its fur match the colour of his hair, two lines were sewn above its eyes to represent eyebrows, bent in a broken V-shape to recreate a scowling, irritable expression, similar to the frown Bakugo always wore. What catches her attention most are its eyes. They’re a deep red, a shade so dark and yet at the same time stand out so much. Vermillion, to be exact. They’re a perfect match for the boy laying down on the bed behind her, who starts growing uncomfortable from her silence.

“I don’t know how this gift thing works, okay?!” he yells, “I know you like music and all, but it’s not like I could’ve gotten you a new instrument, right?! And anyway, even if I co-”

“You won it from that machine?” Jirou asks, her back still turned to him, eyes refusing to tear away from the dog in her hands.

“Heh? Yeah, I did,” he replies, “so what? It isn’t that hard if you know how they actually work.”

“I love it,” she mutters, hugging the stuffed animal to her chest, “I really liked this one.”

“W-whatever! I don’t even know why you stared at this one out of all the other toys!” he comments, sitting up to look at her again, “its fur is so plain and its expression looks annoying and the red eyes look really tacky and ugly!”

“It’s the same colour as your eyes.” Jirou whispers.

“Heh?!”

“It’s the same colour as your eyes,” she repeats, turning around to face him, “it’s not ugly. A little intimidating maybe, but I still think it’s beautiful.”

Bakugo is thankful that Jirou seems to be way too tired to process both the depth of her words and how heated his cheeks are in response to her last two words. He clearly hadn’t expected her to reply the way she did - and there was a good chance she was probably referring to the dog and not him -, but still not wanting her to pick up anything from his silence, he forces out the best thing he can manage at the moment.

“It’s- it’s not- I’m-” Bakugo stutters, “that’s disgusting, shut up.”

There it was again. That funny feeling Bakugo got in his stomach whenever she said or did something that was so out of character from the smart-mouthed, socially awkward girl he was so accustomed to looking at her as. And like all the other times, he chooses to push it back to the farthest part of his brain, telling himself he would worry about it when he had to. The only thing he’d properly established about it was that it made him feel weak. Vulnerable, for want of better wording. And he didn’t like that. He didn’t like how she made him feel, because of how foreign and unlike him it felt. He didn’t like thinking of himself in a position that subconsciously placed something - or someone - else first before his goal to reach the top. Being weak was the last thing he came to Yuuei for in the first place, and if he was going to surpass everyone - especially Deku - he needed to get his head straight and be anything but everything she made him feel. But for whatever reason, despite the part of himself that was yelling, screaming at him to push out any obstacles or distractions that this tiny girl with a broken leg was sure to bring him, another softer, less self-centered part of himself was telling him that it was okay, that at least with her, he could be like an open wound, and that he could continue lying to himself and the rest of the world that not every little thing she did, every one of his comments that she’d respond to with another smart one of her own was capable of messing up his whole perception of things as he knew it, and that stupid little grin she effortlessly plastered on her face brought out a part of him he was afraid to admit to having and, if even by a small spectrum, coloured his world a little brighter.

He forces his eyes away from Jirou, the back of his hand hiding the colour that he can tell is quickly rising to his face. He turns his attention to the digital clock sitting at the corner of his desk, which feels a lot easier to look at compared to the onyx in her eyes.

“Thanks, Bakugo,” he hears her say as he watches the numbers on the clock’s display screen change from 23:59 to 00:00, telling him it was now officially the first day of August, “I bet I say this way too often for your liking, huh?”

“Yeah, whatever,” he scoffs, “happy birthday, Ears.”

“Here’s an idea: how about you pause for a second and just tell me exactly why you’re here?”

“Because I’m tired of training you every night,” Bakugo glares at the girl sitting on the floor next to the drum set he was currently playing, “this is the least you could do.”

Jirou frowns at the way his drumsticks - actually, hers to be specific - aggressively abuse the instrument, hugging the stuffed pomeranian she’d recently been gifted to her chest.

“For the record, you haven’t been ‘training me’ all week! And are you trying to break my drum set?” she asks as she raises two of her fingers to do air quotes, “what’s gotten you so stressed lately?”

After what had happened in Bakugo’s room Saturday night last week, Jirou had started thinking to herself for a while that she and the blonde had reached a point where they could mutually consider each other as ‘friends’. She’d started thinking that maybe Bakugo wasn’t as difficult to read and understand as she had initially thought, and a part of her had even begun looking forward to seeing him every evening. But it seemed that as soon as she’d started thinking that, she’d also begun to see a lot less of Bakugo afterwards. It had almost been a week since Jirou had last gone up to his dorm room, solely because of the fact that the blonde was continuously blowing her off every day since to do who-knows-what. Whenever she’d try to pester him for details or at least tell her what he was so busy with, he’d just claim that it wasn’t any of her business (which, she had to admit, he had a point in, but still) and ignore the rest of her texts. Which is why she was now at a complete loss as to why he showed up at her door this Friday evening, mumbling something about ‘wanting to play the drums’ before inviting himself in to do just that.

“I’m not stressed,” he insists as he continues mercilessly pounding on the instrument.

“Mm hm,” Jirou agrees sarcastically, “and my left leg is the most functional part of my body right now.”

Bakugo stops hitting on the drums to look at her, his eyes momentarily glancing down at her bandaged leg before he raises them to face her.

“What the hell happened to your wooden sticks, anyway? You came into class today without them. You faking your recovery again?”

“Um, okay, first of all, rude. And second, I’ll have you know I went to see Recovery Girl yesterday,” Jirou says, looking unnecessarily proud of herself, “she told me I could stop using them if I wanted since my foot is practically good as new now, and as long as I don’t strain it too much and be careful about my surroundings, the bandages can come off my leg in a couple days, too. Of course, you would’ve known this by yesterday if you haven’t been ghosting me so much this week.”

“Huh,” Bakugo mutters, turning his attention back to the drums and ignoring that last line she threw in, “well, good for you, then.”

“Well, don’t avoid the topic, Blasty,” she calls, raising her voice so that it could overpower the drums he was beating down on again, “what’s up with you lately? You stressed or something?”

“I’m not,” he insists again, his hands refusing to leave the instrument alone, “I just wanted to play.”

He internally cringes at the bitter taste his lies leave in his mouth. But even so he couldn’t tell her. The only reason he’d been deliberately distancing himself for the past week was because he was finally beginning to put together the pieces between his childhood friend and the former Number One Hero. If his suspicions about the connection between Deku’s Quirk and All Might were true, there was no way he could risk talking to anybody about it. As much as he’d been telling himself that his reason for ignoring Ears was because he’d been stressed out with all of his unanswered questions, the part of himself that he wasn’t ready to accept just yet knew that it was actually because she would’ve picked up on the fact that something was definitely on his mind, without a doubt. He also knew that her stubborn ass would not leave him alone until he gave her an acceptable answer, and most of all he knew he wouldn’t be able to lie to her for long if she demanded the truth. So instead of telling her anything at all, he pays her a visit in her dorm room, throwing away a little bit of his pride under the pretence of wanting to play the instrument he had claimed to have hated a few weeks ago. He ignores her questions despite being aware of how inconsiderate and entitled they make him look, doing his best to drown out her voice with the sounds of the drums, which was at this point his most reasonable excuse to hang out with her again.

“Bakugo.”

The firm tone of her voice causes him to go slightly rigid. He hadn’t expected her to ever use that tone with him. Like she was annoyed. Had it been anyone else, his eye would be twitching in anger right now, ready to start yelling all the curses he knew in their direction, but now, he stops playing immediately, retracting both his hands from the drum set.

“You’ve been ignoring me all week,” Jirou mutters. She still sounded angry but there was pain evident behind that anger, and for some reason that was what bothered Bakugo most, “and then all of a sudden you barge into my room and expect me to shut up and not ask you anything? What the hell do you take me for?”

“I-”

“Oh, don’t give me another one of your excuses, Bakugo,” she scoffs, “I know I have a broken leg and even if I didn’t I’d still be nowhere close to matching your level of skill, but do you really think that gives you any right to do whatever you want when it comes to me?”

“Fuck, no, Ears, that’s not-”

“You can be a complete piece of shit, you know that?” she states, looking down at the floor, “you’re rude and you’re loud and you’re full of yourself.”

If anyone else had said something along the same lines as this to him, he would’ve already started a fight with them by now. But it was different with Ears. Everything was.

“I thought it was sweet how you could still be nice sometimes, though,” she continues, turning to look elsewhere as she starts feeling a little embarrassed at her words, “maybe not to everyone, but you were nice to me, at least, in your own strange way. You were willing to have me over in your room a few nights a week for something that hardly even benefitted you. You’d encourage me in the most backhanded ways and personally, I always thought that was hilarious. You’d let me talk about the things I love and hate for as long as I wanted just because you could tell they excited me.”

Jirou pauses to look up at him.

“I don’t expect you to be able to tell me everything about you, but you can’t expect me to just shut up and take that not-nice attitude of yours in my own dorm room when I don’t even know a little bit about what’s causing it. It doesn’t hurt to just talk sometimes, y’know.”

Bakugo gulps, eyes wide as he stares at her. He had come to the third floor thinking he was prepared for whatever Ears might say in order to get him to talk. What he hadn’t expected was that she would ditch that snappy and sassy attitude she’d always have about his bratty behaviour to switch it out for this honest, transparent and oh-so-fragile one. He didn’t even think his actions would’ve been this much of a deal for her, figuring she would just brush it off as the sort of person he was: rude, loud and full of himself, like she’d said. Well, now he realises he’d figured wrong. They stare at each other for a few seconds, Bakugo trying to figure out what to say (because what could one possibly say to that?) and Jirou looking back at him like she’s expecting an answer.

“Whatever,” Jirou sighs when she starts thinking he isn’t going to respond, grabbing her bed frame for support as she pulls herself up from the ground, “you can keep on playing the drums if you want to. I can sleep in the common room if you’re gonna stay really late.”

She makes her way to the door, the stuffed pomeranian still in her arms. Bakugo clenches his teeth, urging himself to say something. Anything. If he kept on staying silent she’d walk out the door and that was definitely going to leave a shitty taste in his mouth — he knew that much.

“Next Wednesday.” are the words that end up tumbling out. They’re soft, almost barely audible, but without him physically abusing the drum set, the room is quiet enough for Jirou to pick them up easily. He can tell because she stops walking towards the door as soon as the words leave his mouth, her back turned to him.

“You’ve already trained enough in my room, Ears,” Bakugo goes on when he realises speaking again seemed to work, “and your bandages come off in a couple days, right? I think you’re capable of hand-to-hand combat now.”

“With you?” Jirou asks. Her tone is testing, like her acceptance of that invitation depended on his answer.

“Yeah,” he replies, without hesitation, “you’re… you’re strong.”

She tenses up slightly at his response, like those words were the last thing she expected to come out of his mouth. It was the first time he’d given her a straight compliment, one that wasn’t so backhanded.

“And, uh,” the blonde continues, clumsily climbing out from behind the drum set as quickly as he can, “don’t sleep in the common room. I’ll- I’ll get out of here.”

“N-no, it’s okay,” she finally speaks, turning around to face him again, “you can, uh, stay.”

Now it’s Bakugo’s turn to stop moving, staring at her like she was a ticking time bomb, looking a little scared that if he said the slightest wrong thing, she’d blow up again.

“Oh- uh-”

“Next Wednesday, right?” she quickly cuts in, feeling embarrassed enough from what she’d just said, “let’s do Gym Gamma, after our usual classes.”

“Y-yeah, let’s do that,” he agrees, feeling a little embarrassed himself, pausing for a moment before saying, “I-I can keep playing the drums. If you don’t, uh, mind.”

“Y-yeah, you do that.”

“Right,” he mumbles, awkwardly moving back to his previous position, “I’ll do that.”

God, he hated how he felt around her.

“You’re too slow, Ears!” Bakugo yells at the girl as he easily dodges another punch she throws at him.

“I haven’t been using my legs like this for months, okay?!” she retorts as she attempts to close the distance between them again.

“That’s not the point!” he snaps, grabbing her wrist and kicking her legs out of balance before she can react, successfully knocking her to the ground. He bends over to look at her.

“You’re too easy to read. If I was using my Quirk you’d be dead by now.”

Bakugo releases her wrist and walks over to where they had left their things to grab his bottle of water, unscrewing the cap as he picks it up.

“The provisional licence exam is next week, Bakugo,” he hears her groan in frustration from behind him as he raises the bottle to his lips, “next. Week. I’ve been slacking off so much. I’ll never catch up to everyone.”

“You had a broken leg,” Bakugo states, “I’d hardly call that ‘slacking off’.”

“Let’s go again.” Jirou demands, the loud shuffling of the training mats telling the blonde that she was back on her feet.

“No, take a fucking break, will you?” he answers, gulping down some water before adding, “you’ll just hurt your leg again if you keep going nonstop.”

“I can’t afford to take a break, Bakugo,” she groans, grabbing his arm and turning him around so that he’s looking at her, “I know I’m being really selfish right now, but please. Just a little longer.”

Bakugo looks down to meet her pleading eyes. He can tell she’s frustrated - but really, who wouldn’t be? - and he also knows that if it had been him in her place there was no chance he would take his own advice either.

“Okay, fine,” he sighs, knowing full well she wouldn’t let him refuse anyway, “but for real, just a little longer, okay?”

Jirou nods, and though Bakugo knows he can’t count on her keeping to that agreement, he gets into position again.

“Alright, then. Whenever you’re ready.”

Before he even completes his sentence, Jirou lunges forward towards him, aiming for his side. Thanks to his quick reflexes, Bakugo manages to dodge, but almost as if she’d already expected it, she swerves her arm to match his movements. She thinks she catches the corners of his mouth twitch upwards slightly, like he’s a little amused at her quick thinking, though she doesn’t have much time to ponder on it before he grabs hold of her wrist again, forcing it away. Snapping back to the task at hand, she regains her focus and before he can kick her legs off the floor again, she raises her left leg, swinging it towards his shoulder. It forces the blonde to turn his attention towards dodging it instead, a small tch leaving his mouth as he lets go of her wrist to avoid it.

“Well, you’re motivated all of a sudden.” he says, as he creates a little bit of distance between them, though his tone suggests he’s more entertained than annoyed.

“Please, I haven’t even landed a hit on you yet,” she laughs, assuming a defensive position, “what, you scared or something now?”

As if that single statement had fueled his fighting spirit even more, he dives forwards, shortening the distance between them, reaching for both her wrists. Jirou ducks just in time, not expecting him to lunge towards her so suddenly. She’s grateful for a second how her small size had made moving out of his way a lot easier, then quickly responds by grabbing hold of his left wrist as he’s caught up in regaining his balance, taking advantage of that moment to pull him off his feet and to the ground. She doesn’t let go of his wrist and keeps her right foot pinned on his legs so he can’t move.

“Can we take it up a level?” she asks as they both catch their breaths, the slightest hint of a smile on her lips, like she’s challenging him, “use our Quirks now or something.”

Bakugo smirks back, small explosions beginning to form in his free hand.

“Now we’re fucking talking.”

Jirou smiles like she has him exactly where she wants him. She had taken that brief moment of conversation to plug her earphone jacks into the ground while Bakugo was distracted, so that she now has the opportunity to send out a large vibration to throw him off before he can try anything with his Quirk.

Taken by surprise, the blonde reflexively winces and pulls his hand out of her grasp to cover his ears. Jirou takes the opportunity to attempt another kick to his shoulder, hoping to land at least one hit on him. Unfortunately, Bakugo was a lot more skilled at hand-to-hand combat than she gave him credit for. While he’s still regaining his composure from the after effects of the vibration, he manages to catch her right leg in his hand. She yelps in surprise as she inevitably loses her balance and feels her back hit the training mats. The impact isn’t hard enough to break any of her bones, but it’s enough to knock out some of the air in her. Before she even has time to take another breath, Bakugo - in that short time span - manages to position himself above her, pinning both her arms above her head with his left hand and trapping her legs between his own.

He raises his right hand, explosions popping out of them, like they’re excited to be working in a fight again. A triumphant smirk is scrawled across his face, looking more ready than anything to land that fiery, explosive hit on her. Jirou is already very aware that this fight was a loss for her, so she shuts her eyes, mentally preparing herself for the impact of one of Bakugo’s attacks. She’s never experienced one of those firsthand, but she has watched him train, and if there was one thing she picked up about them from that, it was that they packed a whole lot of power. She’s smart enough to know that it would hurt before it even hits her.

Only it doesn’t.

She keeps her eyes shut for a while as she waits for it, fully expecting it to land on either her face, her head, or maybe even her neck. She starts wondering after a bit why Bakugo was taking so long to charge up his Quirk, but she only opens her eyes when she feels his grip on both her wrists and legs loosen.

And when she does, she isn’t expecting to be met with the explosive blonde who looked so full of malicious intent just a few seconds ago now wearing such a defeated and conflicted expression on his face. He’s still on top of her, but his eyes look a little scared and the hand that had been popping with explosions up until just now is now trembling, the smoky trace of dynamite trailing from it the only evidence of his will to fight. His eyes are facing her, but it doesn’t feel like he’s looking at her.

“Hey, uh, Bakugo,” Jirou calls, a little concerned, “are you okay? You were about to land that hit, right?”

He was. He really was. But the second he had taken in the sight of her closing her eyes to brace herself for the pain he was about to cause, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Uh, no,” he lies, that conflicted look still not leaving his face as he slides off of her, “it’s just training.”

“Hey,” she chides, sitting up on the floor to look at him, “what gives? You’d hit anyone, training or not. I know you would.”

She’s right. He would.

But instead of admitting that, he scoffs and says, “The fuck are you complaining for? It’s not like you wanted to be on the receiving end of that, anyway.”

“What does that even matter?!” she says, tone slightly frustrated now, “news flash, Bakugo. Nobody wants to get hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a part of training.”

“Think about it, Ears,” he responds, matching her tone, “if I had actually hit you with that you would be back in that old hag’s office by now.”

“You-”

Jirou stops mid-sentence and pauses, like something had just clicked in her head.

“You’re looking down on me.”

Bakugo freezes in place, suddenly feeling like someone had just thrown a brick at his chest.

“The hell? No, Ears, that isn’t-”

“Then why didn’t you throw that hit?!” she demands.

Yeah, he thinks to himself, why didn’t he?

He can't bring himself to look Jirou in the eye, though he doesn’t need to to be able to tell that she’s staring daggers into him, waiting for his answer. Deep down, he thinks he’s somewhat skimmed the surface of it. Unfortunately, it’s also something he isn’t quite ready to come to terms with yet.

There was no way in hell he was going to let the words ‘because it was you’ leave his mouth.

“Stop acting like a spoiled brat,” he snaps instead, getting up and walking away, “the fuck you want me to do? Go back just to explode your face?”

Jirou storms after him, roughly grabbing his arm and forcibly turning him around to face her..

“Yes!” she replies, like it’s supposed to be obvious to him, “I didn’t agree to spar with you just for you to pity me!”

Bakugo hated the word she used. Pity. It was true that he didn’t have a very clear idea as to exactly why he had been so afraid of throwing a single hit just because it was Ears, but if there was one thing he did know, it was that of all the things he’d begun feeling around her since the first time she’d laughed at him in that infirmary even with her left leg broken and bandaged, Katsuki had never pitied her. Sadly, another thing he knew was that there wasn’t a single way to tell her that without giving her the idea one way or another that she meant something to him. It’s infuriating. Not because he found her annoying or bratty like he’d said but because he can’t help imagining just how pathetic he must look right now standing here like he’s only just realising that she does mean something to him. It was even almost terrifying how after all these months of telling himself that spending five more minutes and then five more minutes again with her everyday was going to do absolutely nothing to stand in his way of being the Number One Hero, seeing her look like she’s desperately trying to hold a fat amount of tears behind that cold expression of hers is more than enough for him to think that that goal he’d been pursuing all his life suddenly wasn’t the most important thing in the world to him anymore.

“I never said I was pitying you, Ears!” is what comes out instead, “will you stop making such a big deal over this?!”

“Why didn’t you throw that last hit?!” Jirou repeats, their faces inches away from each other, “what, did you think I couldn’t take it?!”

“If I said yes, would you fucking leave me alone?!”

“I’m not as fragile as you think I am, Bakugo,” she scoffs, “I’m a hero-in-training. Just like Kirishima. Just like Midoriya. Just like you. Just because I don’t have a Quirk as flashy as you guys doesn’t mean you have the liberty of just taking it easy when I’m your training partner!”

“For fuck’s sake, Ears!” he yells as he tries to turn his back to her again, “I gave you one more match like you asked for, what more do you want from me?!”

“I want you to put your all into this!” she shouts at him, grabbing his wrist firmly to keep him in place, “I came here ready to fight with all I had and if there’s any way you think I’m going to stand for you doing this half-assed and thinking you don’t need your full power to win then you’d be wrong!”

“Who the fuck are you to tell me whether I’m doing my best or not?” he growls, looming over her in an attempt to scare her into backing off, “and let’s face it. I wouldn’t even be wasting my time here if you hadn’t asked me to train you because you were feeling insecure over your dumb ears in the first place!”

Bakugo regrets those words the second they leave his mouth. Jirou didn’t seem intimidated in the slightest by how much larger he was compared to her, but that last statement was enough for her to let go of him and back away, her vexing expression now replaced with one that doesn’t mask how scared and hurt she is anymore.

“I- fuck,” he mutters to himself when he realises what he’d said, “Ears, that’s not-”

“No, that’s okay,” she cuts in quickly as she starts walking over to where her things are, “you’re right. I’m sorry for approaching you in the first place.”

Struggling to find the right words to respond with, Bakugo watches as she gathers up her belongings, back turned to him.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks to himself, what have I just done?

“Oi, Ears-”

“You don’t have to worry about, um, ‘training me’ anymore, if that’s what you want to call it,” she glances back, giving him a smile that he thinks looks way too forced, “thanks for everything, Bakugo.”

Bakugo urges himself to say something. The part of himself that didn’t care about being the Number One Hero anymore was practically begging him to throw aside his pride and apologise before she walked out the door. He knew that if he let her go now there was a good chance she was never going to speak to him again. He watches as Jirou places her hand against the door, pushing it open a fraction before pausing to look back at him for a brief moment. It’s almost like she’s waiting for him to stop her, to childishly argue back, or even to let out a ‘tch’ like he usually did whenever she thanked him as a sign that nothing had changed between them. Something. Anything.

Say something, you asshole, her eyes were yelling, I don’t want to leave, goddamnit.

Bakugo stares back.

It had been that incident at Ground Beta, that time when she’d shoved him out of the way and gotten her leg injured. That single, stupid little catalyst of an event that involuntarily caused him to get roped into all the gibes she’d now often throw his way, to saying yes on giving up his early nights to spend them with her instead, the reason why they were even having this dumb fight in the first place. As all of this dawns on him, Bakugo can’t help thinking to himself, ‘what if’? What if he’d just left her at the infirmary so that he could return to hero training after she hurt herself? Let her find her way back to the dorms on her own or something? What if he’d just said no when she asked for his help to train? It wasn’t as if he was in any way obliged to comply from the start.

If he’d done all that he wouldn’t have found himself walking all the way back to campus for a pair of crutches that weren’t even meant for him, nor would he have stayed up past his usual bedtime every night just because he knew she wasn’t satisfied with her training yet. He wouldn’t have blown his allowances on a dumb arcade game just to win a stuffed animal that was probably a lot cheaper than the machine cost him, all because he noticed her staring at it one time. Most of all, he definitely wouldn’t have found himself here, feeling like one hell of an asshole just because she looked at him like he was one.

Bakugo forces himself to break contact with her eyes, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to say his next words if he was looking right into them. Maybe this was for the best. With her out of his life, maybe he would be able to get himself back on track and spend more time on his goal instead of five more minutes of a distraction.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. The words taste like carpet in his mouth. They’re repulsive and they feel wrong, “see you around, Ears.”

He thinks he catches her lips tremble and a tear run down the length of her face before she walks out the door, but he doesn’t dare look up to see if he’s right. The next second he does, she’s already gone.

It had been five days since he and Jirou had last spoken, and Bakugo still couldn’t rid himself of the gaping, empty feeling in his stomach that had appeared the second she left his sight at Gym Gamma. That was a big problem in his case, because he really had been counting on it to go away before the provisional licence exam the next day. Even if a provisional licence wasn’t as big a deal as a pro licence, it was still something he absolutely couldn’t mess up. Everyone in 1-A perceived him as nothing less than the top of the class, someone they could hardly dream of competing with. There was no way he could allow himself to settle for anything short of the unspoken expectations they held for him. On top of the murky feelings that had risen because of Jirou, the growing guilt that had been suffocating him for so long about ending All Might’s career did nothing to ease the tension he was feeling.

“Kacchan.” a voice calls, snapping Bakugo out of his thoughts.

He turns around in his seat in response to that annoyingly familiar nickname given to him by Deku, who is holding a stack of papers out towards the blonde. Bakugo raises an eyebrow in question.

“Um,” Deku’s eyes flicker down at the papers for a second when he realises Bakugo is spacing out, “the extra copies.”

Bakugo scoffs, snatching them out of the boy’s hand.

Deku was the last person he wanted catching on to his mixed feelings, seeing as how he was yet another problem. From the seemingly nonsensical phrases his childhood friend had said to him ever since he found out about Deku’s Quirk, Bakugo was almost certain that whatever ‘borrowed power’ he was talking about, it had come from All Might. It wasn’t simply based on nothing but Bakugo’s wild guesses. Deku’s Quirk had manifested far too conveniently for it to be a mere coincidence, and while Bakugo was certainly a hothead, he definitely wasn’t an idiot. The times when Deku would regularly visit All Might’s office and the moment he’d burst into tears at Kamino didn’t pass by unnoticed by the blonde. Bakugo still had so many questions, but he wasn’t going to get any answers unless he confronted Deku about them first, which he had yet found the right timing to.

He lets out a heavy sigh through his nose. To be quite frank, he wanted to breathe.

Before he realises it, he’s stolen a sideways glance at his seatmate.

Like the pain in her leg, Jirou was good at hiding her sadness. Unless she’d opened up to someone about what had happened between her and Bakugo, she was fooling everyone with the front she was putting up - and that included the blonde himself. She’d come back to training last week as strong as ever, and though her pride disallowed her from admitting it to herself, she was only as mobile and flexible as she was now because of Bakugo’s help. Although the last thing she said to him were words of thanks, it didn’t help settle the bitter feeling that lingered between both of them, which was always difficult to ignore because of how they spent more than half their days sitting next to each other in class.

“Alright, class,” Aizawa drones, sounding like he couldn’t be more bored, “I know most of you are already well aware, but as it says on the forms I’ve just handed out, the provisional licence exam takes place tomorrow at Takoba National Stadium. Don’t be disappointed if you fail, I guess. That’s as much as I have to say.”

Bakugo notices how Jirou seems to tense up slightly at the mention of the exam.

He did suppose she had every reason to be nervous. After all, for over half the time when the class had been developing their own special moves and mastering them, all she’d been able to do was literally sit and watch. Although they weren’t speaking at the moment, he knew that she’d been training twice as hard as everyone else in the one week she was allowed back into hero training. It was in the way she would overexert herself during the regular school training hours, sometimes to the point where her ears would draw blood. It was in the way Bakugo would notice when she hardly spent time in the common room with her friends after school, overhearing some of them say she was doing extra training by herself. Most of all, it was in the way Bakugo would wake up earlier than his classmates every morning, most days finding Jirou asleep on the common room couch in her hero costume, too tired to make it back up to her own room. On those days, Bakugo would notice new bruises, cuts and scuff marks littering her body in areas that were exposed when her sleeves or cuffs rode up, ones she hid well when she was awake.

The blonde forces his attention back to their teacher, trying to convince himself that in the end, it shouldn’t even matter to him what she did to pass the exam, more or less how much she got hurt because of it. They weren’t even, well… friends anymore. The only thing he should be focusing on was passing the test himself.

No matter what the test was going to be about, he was determined to come out on top like he always did. He repeats that to himself over and over again in his head, trying not to focus on the ugliness that bubbled in his chest because Jirou didn’t look back like she used to.

As soon as the screen lights up, ninety-nine of the hundred people who had just participated in the second round of the test scans the list for their own name.

Jirou looks for Bakugo’s.

She isn’t even sure why she does. She’s pretty sure he had passed either way. She tries to drown out the occasional gasps of ‘I passed!’ and ‘I see my name!’ around her, telling herself she could worry about her own result once she knew his. He may have never talked about it much with her, but it was more obvious than anything how important it was to him. Jirou wasn’t an idiot. She knew he was putting off the strict schedule he set for himself and giving her his own time just so she could train. They weren’t even speaking to each other anymore, but thinking that he might have failed because of all of his lost time bugged her more than her own results. She just had to see his name up there first.

Only she couldn’t.

Her eyes dart again and again from the start of the row of B names all the way to where the C names began. No matter how many times she looked, there was no ‘Bakugo’. She scans it multiple times before it slowly dawns on her that his name isn’t up there.

No. No, no, no. That can't be right, she argues.

Feeling panic rising in her, she tries looking for ‘Katsuki’ among the K names as a desperate attempt.

No luck.

Where was his name? It had to be up there. It had to be up there somewhere.

“Kyouka!” Hagakure calls out to her friend, slinging an arm around her, “why do you look so panicked?”

“Um- I-”

“Calm down, Jirou,” Momo giggles, placing a hand on her shoulder and pointing to the screen, “you passed. Look, your name’s up there.”

“You probably just had a bit of trouble spotting it,” Hagakure laughs, squeezing Jirou into a sideways hug, “but it’s up there, look carefully.”

“We all passed,” Momo sighs, “I’m so relieved.”

Her friends’ voices feel like nothing more than background noise to Jirou as she continues to frantically dart her eyes from one end of the board to the other, now trying to convince herself that Bakugo’s name had accidentally been misplaced out of alphabetical order somehow.

“Kyouka, where are you looking?” Hagakure asks, shaking her friend lightly, “the J names are over there.”

Jirou tears her eyes away from the screen, desperately looking for Bakugo amongst the crowd. Surely he had spotted his name by now. She’d know he had once she saw the smug, cocky expression that he always had no shame in displaying whenever he achieved something. That ought to be more than enough reassurance for her.

Despite there being so many people crowding around them, standing on their tiptoes and craning their necks to look at the screen, Jirou finds him almost immediately.

For the first time in six days since their fight, she throws aside a fraction of her pride and gives in to the shock of ash-blonde hair and bright red vermillion eyes of his that were always so demanding of attention. She didn’t care whether he looked arrogant as shit or if he wore a nonchalant, uncaring expression that showed he was already expecting a positive result, she just needed to know he had passed.

She squints in his direction, where he’s standing with Kirishima and Kaminari. The two of them are clapping each other on the back with wide grins on their faces, a sign that told Jirou they had gotten their licence with no problem. She leans forward, trying to get a better look at Bakugo’s face, who was still facing the screen. Had he not found his name yet? Jirou silently, selfishly begs him to hurry up and spot it already.

He looks like he’s standing on a thin line between frustration and denial. Even from a fair distance away, it’s obvious that his eyes are scanning the screen just as furiously as Jirou’s were a little earlier ago.

Would you wipe that look off your stupid face already? she pleads to him in her head, stop looking so scared.

Jirou’s friends had stopped trying to get her attention by now, following her gaze to stare at their blonde classmate.

“Hey, what’s up with Bakugo?” Hagakure asks.

“He does look slightly on edge,” Momo comments, “but then again, isn’t he usually like that?”

No, Jirou thinks to herself, no, he isn’t.

Usually, Bakugo would be yelling at Kaminari, who was now shaking him back and forth trying to get his attention. He would usually be hitting Kirishima over the back of his head for congratulating him on passing, responding with something along the lines of “DID YOU EXPECT ME TO FAIL, HUH, SHITTY HAIR?!”. If anything else he would usually be screaming at Midoriya to let him know that he had passed and spout something else about surpassing him.

Nothing about the Bakugo who was still staring so intently at the screen as if his life depended on it while wearing such a disbelieving, almost defeated expression on his face was usual.

For a split second, Kyouka wants to forget that they aren’t on speaking terms. She wants to rush over to him and tell him to snap out of it and offer to help him look for his name.

Kirishima is the next one to notice how on-edge his friend is.

“Hey, Bakubro, you doing okay?”

As soon as the redhead starts speaking, Jirou recalls the memory of the first night she showed up at Bakugo’s door. She remembers how difficult it was just to clumsily carry herself all the way to the third room with only one working leg, having Bakugo yell at her just because the load of the weight had taken her by surprise and she’d almost dropped it on her foot. She also remembers what he had said to her after she’d called her ears ‘dumb’.

“Think about it. Literally no one would accomplish anything trying to sneak up on you because you pick up on every little noise. It’s creepy as fuck. You could literally listen in on any conversation you wanted. I don’t know why more people aren’t as worried about that as they should be.”

When he’d said those words to her, she was admittedly more focused on the fact that she’d just received a compliment from the Bakugo Katsuki instead of considering if what he’d said was actually true. But he was right. While her friends were craning their necks, trying to figure out what the blonde and his friend were saying by reading their expressions, Jirou could hear them loud and clear, almost like they were speaking into a microphone connected to her ears.

“Where’s my name, damnit?!” Bakugo growls, ignoring Kirishima’s question.

Almost like a desperate plea to the gods, Jirou’s eyes flicker back to the screen again, like she was silently offering to help Bakugo look for his name that they were both sure was supposed to be up there with everyone else’s. She scans the names she denies to herself that she’d already gone over more times than necessary. She goes over the long list of over sixty names, refusing to accept the truth for as long as she can.

“No way,” she hears Kaminari say softly, “Bakugo… failed?”

She’d probably been aware of that from the point that she was having trouble spotting his name, but hearing it being verbalised by someone made it feel all the more real, and only then had it begun to helplessly sink in that there was nothing to be gained from staring at the screen if what she wanted was to see Bakugo’s name.

Bakugo had failed the entrance exam, and she was pretty sure that if there was anybody to blame, it was her.

What on earth was she thinking? Shamelessly approaching him and taking advantage of what little guilt he might’ve held over the incident at Ground Beta just so she could improve herself? And that probably wasn’t even the worst part. She’d allowed herself to get so caught up in the way she felt when she was around him that she just grew so oblivious to the fact that Bakugo barely had any time to train for himself. To top it all off, she’d yelled at him during their last training session, acting like some spoiled brat just like he said she was, all because he didn’t throw one punch. Despite standing in between two of her friends - as well as the rest of the class who had no idea of their little friendship going on over the past few months -, Jirou hardly had anything else on her mind other than wanting to rush over to her loud, rude and abrasive classmate; the one she swore on her first day at Yuuei that she wanted nothing to do with, take him to see whoever was in charge of issuing the licences and demand he get one for himself, as childish and immature that would make her look.

“Jirou,” Momo calls, her tone concerned, “what are you thinking about? Are you feeling alright?”

“Huh?” Jirou mutters softly, suddenly being aware of the people around her again.

“Did you hear the announcement?” Hagakure asks, tugging on both girls’ arms, “they called for those who passed to gather in the hall to get their licence.”

As she is swept up by her friends and the flow of the majority of the crowd, Jirou chances a glance back at Bakugo, who is still staring up at the screen. There are a mix of emotions written on his face, but that doesn’t make them hard to read. He looks angry, disappointed, and most of all, ashamed. To be fair, she didn’t feel so different herself. Jirou watches as Kaminari, Kirishima and Sero give each other reluctant and concerned looks for the blonde before telling him that they’d meet him at the entrance and awkwardly walk towards the direction of the venue hall without him.

For a fleeting moment, Jirou can’t help but think that maybe if she had failed too, Bakugo wouldn’t have to be standing there alone.

Bakugo’s eyes refuse to break contact with the large projected screen that now starts to flicker off as people start to disperse. Perhaps it’s because a part of him knew that if he decided to look away, it would only represent him accepting that he simply hadn’t passed the exam. In short, he had failed. That, and Bakugo would’ve much rather continued to stare at a list that his name wasn’t on than meet the pitying looks he could feel the extras in his class sending his way. A sick part of him was wondering if perhaps anyone else had failed along with him. Perhaps someone like Deku, or Icy Hot. Hell, even Dunce Face. But none of that was enough incentive to drag his eyes off of the now cemented wall where the results were displayed just a moment ago.

And Ears. He wonders if she’d passed. He wonders if she was aware of the fact that he hadn’t. He wonders if her Quirk had easily picked out just how hard he was trying to keep his panicked breathing underway. Then again, he feels his heart twist at the thought, there’s a good chance she couldn’t be less bothered to worry about him.

“Uraraka! Iida!” the voice that Bakugo had grown up hearing almost everyday rings in his ears like some kind of sick, mocking announcement from the universe, “we all passed! What a relief!”

His hand unconsciously balls into a fist at his side. Even Deku had passed. The same Deku who in his memory had always been nothing but running behind him. He was supposedly still the same Deku who he had always insisted was underneath him, so why was he running off with that stupid grin on his face after passing a test that Bakugo had failed?

Even as the tired-looking host of the exam starts making an announcement for those who had failed about being able to retake the test, the blonde’s mind refuses to forget that fact.

Bakugo had probably known Deku long before they had even developed the ability to remember as children, and no matter what it was, be it a game of tag, the recognition of others, even down to the entrance exam into the most prestigious hero academy in Japan, Bakugo had no memory of being anything other than faster, better, and further.

Until, like he was suddenly trapped in a nightmare, their first day at Yuuei, when Aizawa had subjected the entire class to that dumb little skills’ test, the one he said came with the risk of being expelled. Every single day after the second Deku had thrown that ball up through the sky with the support of a Quirk that Katsuki had never been aware of, he was suddenly moving forward at such an alarming rate that before Bakugo knew it, he was the one struggling to catch up.

Deku looked absolutely ridiculous wielding that super-strength of a Quirk. In his sixteen-year-old body, he used it with the same carelessness and unfamiliarity as a four-year-old would. It always resulted in his arms getting bloodied and bruised, and he would always have that disgusting look of determination on his face like that was supposed to make him any better at controlling his Quirk. So why was he in front all of a sudden? It didn’t make sense to Bakugo. Hardly anything did lately. From Deku’s acceptance into Yuuei, him getting kidnapped by the League and needing to be rescued, and up to every tiny little thing a particular extra - with a love for the guitar (and an old added interest to messing with him, it seemed) - made him feel, he didn’t understand any of it. Bakugo hated that. He hated that for the longest time, he’d have the perfect solution for anything. He’d never make a mistake in judgement, he’d always know what was going on and how to fix it, and he most certainly had been someone that stood in front of others just because he could. Most of all, for so long, he’d been first.

Where had that Bakugo gone?

“Deku,” Bakugo mumbles as he passes him in the common rooms back at the dorms. Him talking to Midoriya was definitely an unusual sight, but considering the fact that everyone else was busy celebrating getting their provisional hero licences - apart from Icy Hot, who had disappeared into his room -, nobody paid them any mind. He’s sure Deku can hear him, even if mumbling wasn’t a very Bakugo thing in the first place. Since they were kids, he always looked on edge whenever the blonde was around, so Katsuki found it pretty hard to imagine that what he said would go by unnoticed.

“Come outside later.”

It’s well past curfew by the time Deku is hesitantly following behind Bakugo, having absolutely zero idea where they were headed this late at night.

So much for old times, Bakugo thinks to himself, if Ears were here--

Katsuki internally hits himself over the head. No, the fact that she wasn’t was for the best. He’d already established that long ago.

“Kacchan!” Deku calls out, snapping him out of his daze, “how far away are you trying to go? W-we really shouldn’t be outside this late, either.”

The blonde can’t bring himself to answer. He isn’t even sure what he’s doing in the first place. He hadn’t even really figured out where he was going or where to start or what he was even going to gain from saying everything that had been on his mind. Even now, with the boy from his childhood walking behind him, he can almost feel the sympathetic and pitying look he was giving him, probably thinking about how sad and depressed he might’ve been feeling after failing the provisional licence test. Bakugo scoffs at the thought; as if that would be enough for him to drag Deku outside like some kind of entitled brat.

He stops walking when he notices where his feet had taken the both of them.

“This is…” Deku mumbles, voice uncertain, “Ground Beta.”

Bakugo ignores the lump in his throat, finally opening his mouth to speak.

“Yeah. This is where I fought you for the very first time in combat training,” he recalls, half in response to Deku and half to himself, the taste of the words still bitter to roll off his tongue, “and lost.”

Bakugo’s back is turned to him, but despite that, he didn’t need a response from Deku to know he was still there, listening in silence.

“You were nothing but a Quirkless, weak, little bitch,” he goes on, “but by some miracle you got accepted into Yuuei, and by some even larger miracle your Quirk manifested out of nowhere, am I right?”

Deku swallows at the mention of his Quirk. He was already beginning to get a pretty good idea of what Bakugo had called him out here to talk about, but that didn’t mean he was quite ready for that conversation yet.

“Ever since that attack from the sludge villian- no,” Bakugo pauses at the bitter memory, “ever since All Might came to town, you’ve been spewing all of this incomprehensible and senseless shit about your Quirk, all while wearing that fucking annoying self-satisfied grin as you kept growing more and more.

“And you’ve even got your provisional licence while I failed? The fuck is up with that?!”

Deku finally opens his mouth in protest to Bakugo’s last statement. It seemed to be the only thing he could find the right words to counter.

“N-no, Kacchan, I earned that by demonstrating my abi-”

“WILL YOU JUST SHUT THE HELL UP AND LISTEN?!” the blonde yells, earning a quick apology from Deku.

“It pissed me off! Everything about it disgusted me! But I finally put the pieces together on what your whole blabbing of your ‘borrowed power’ really meant, and it’s been on my mind for a hell of a long time now.”

Deku braces himself for whatever his childhood friend is about to say next, already expecting the very worst. He’d never pegged Bakugo as the type to be embarrassingly, and almost painfully, far off from the truth, like Todoroki had been. Despite what most would think from watching him the first time, Bakugo was more than just a loud-mouthed, arrogant teenage boy. He was smart, observant, and most of all he knew Deku better than anybody else at Yuuei. If anybody was going to figure out his secret first there shouldn’t have been any surprise that it was Kacchan.

“Your power,” Bakugo pauses to look at Deku, like he’s a little scared to verbalise it, “you got it from All Might. Didn’t you?”

Izuku doesn’t respond. He can’t find it in himself to do so nor does he know how to. He knows that Bakugo knew he was right so there wasn’t any point in trying to deny it, either. The blonde wouldn’t have called him out here for something he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of.

Looking like he hadn’t even expected a reply either way, Bakugo opens his mouth again.

“The both of us. We both looked up to All Might more than anybody,” he stated, turning so that he was now fully facing Midoriya, “we both aspired to be like him so badly, you remember that?

“To me, you were nothing but a pebble scattered among others on a nameless sidewalk,” Bakugo mumbled, “but then before I knew it, you were acknowledged by the person I looked up to most in my life.”

For the most part of their conversation, Izuku had given Bakugo his full attention, but now, his eyes were trained hard on the floor. He didn’t know how to look his childhood friend in the eye with him talking about his greatest secret as if he were reading it off of a narrative.

“And that’s why,” he continues, completely ignoring how uncomfortable Deku looked, “you’re gonna fight me. Right here, right now.”

Deku snaps up to look at him in shock and horror.

“What?! Why?!” he blurts, eyes wide with fear, “w-wait a minute, Kacchan! How did it come to this all of a sudden?! We really shouldn’t, okay, it’s bad enough that we’re out here in the first place!”

Midoriya is met with nothing but a blank stare from Bakugo at his nervous rambling as he goes on.

“But well, if you really did want to fight, we should just do it during, um, free practice or something! We could borrow a training room and-”

“Don’t you get it?” Katsuki scoffs at him, “we aren’t gonna be able to fight seriously then because they’ll just stop us.”

Izuku stares back at him, losing his train of thought and not knowing what else to say.

“I want to confirm just what was so great about you that All Might chose you,” the blonde remarks, looking the most serious he’d been all night, before his face contorts into a harsh scowl, “if your aspirations were so much greater than mine, does this mean that all of my aspirations have been wrong this whole time?!”

Bakugo knows that he’s being childish at this point. He was being immature the minute he decided to drag Deku out in the middle of the night past curfew to make him listen to his petty grudges. It was ridiculous of him to demand a fight that he wasn’t even sure what he was going to get out of even if he’d emerged victorious. He knew that they were likely going to be caught and god-knows what Aizawa would do when he found out.

Bakugo knew all of these things, but even as they ran through his mind at his last statement, he still found himself getting ready to launch himself headfirst at Deku. It didn’t matter to him if it was wrong at this point, because for someone who was always so level-headed and collected about unpredicted situations, for once, he had no idea what else to do.

A week ago, he had Ears. He had the comfort of her arrival to his dorm room every night and the distraction of the drum set in hers. He had her annoying jibes, the ones that at some point he would be unable to counter even though all she really loved to bring things back to was how short-tempered, opinionated and noisy he was for a person.

But that was a week ago. He didn’t have her tonight.

“If you don’t want to get hurt then you’d better put up a fight.” Bakugo says as he stretches his arm.

“H-hold on a minute!” Deku falters, “get a hold of yourself, Kacchan! We-”

Without even giving him a chance to finish, Bakugo, hands fueled and carrying the scent of dynamite, lunges forwards.

“Kacchan, calm down!” Deku yells to the best of his ability as he dodges explosion after explosion, having no intention to fight his childhood friend under these circumstances, “do we really have to fight?!”

Bakugo, of course, ignores his pleas, sending another blast in his direction as Deku narrowly avoids one after the other, neither of them having any time to even think in between. For what feels like forever, Ground Beta shakes and trembles under nothing but the calamity of Katsuki’s Quirk and - though barely audible - Izuku’s desperate yells trying to get a hold of Bakugo over the noise he’s making. They had gone on with this pattern for a good few minutes before Katsuki finally yelled something back.

“DON’T RUN AWAY, DAMNIT!” he roars, clearly having no concern over the poor sleepers on campus, “FIGHT ME ALREADY!”

Having no interest in giving him any time to dodge again, Bakugo takes advantage of Deku’s distraction in that moment to propel himself towards him at full speed. Upon realising he’s too late to simply move out of the way like he’d been doing so far, Izuku instinctively jumps back just enough to swing his right leg at Bakugo, one which the blonde surprisingly manages to narrowly avoid.

In his haste to dodge Deku’s kick, Bakugo fails to regain his balance and curses out loud as his back meets the rough gravel of Ground Beta.

The two of them allow the chaos around them to settle, taking advantage of the break in their back-and-forth pattern to catch their breaths.

“A-are,” Midoriya pants, slowly making his way to the blonde, hand extended, “are you alri-”

“DON’T YOU GO WORRYING ABOUT ME!” Katsuki yells, slapping his hand away, “FIGHT ME ALREADY, DAMNIT! WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM?!”

Deku goes back a few steps, afraid that Bakugo might start attacking again and mumbles something in between an apology and an explanation.

“WHY?!” Bakugo yells, sending his friend quiet, “just why?! How did I end up chasing the back of an extra who was always trailing behind me?!”

“Kacchan-”

“Why did a Quirkless loser like you have to go and get stronger and even get recognised by All Might?! Even though I was getting stronger too?! So just why,” his voice cracks at that last word, “WHY THE HELL DID I BECOME THE REASON FOR ALL MIGHT’S END?!”

Bakugo’s voice is shaking so much. It sounds like he’d been trying to keep it from trembling for so long that it had ended up overflowing into the mess he felt like now. All of the confidence and pride that he was always exuding as Bakugo Katsuki was suddenly nowhere to be seen, the only thing left behind now was a scared, shivering and ever so lonely teenage boy.

“If only I’d been stronger,” he coughs, “if only I hadn’t been kidnapped by the villains, then none of this would’ve even happened in the first place! First it was Ears and then now All Might?! Why the hell are people always getting hurt in my place?!”

While Izuku could do nothing but stare at his friend, at a complete loss for words, Bakugo masks the tears pricking at his eyes by wiping the dirt off of his face with the back of his hand.

“I tried to keep All Might a secret, okay?!” he yells, not once looking Deku in the eye, “I couldn’t even tell anybody about this! But even though I tried not to think about it, as much as I tried to fill myself with meaningless distractions, I knew that the slightest accident would just make everything flood out!

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL I’M SUPPOSED TO DO!”

Bakugo hates the way Deku is looking at him. He looked at him as if he was all the things Bakugo never wanted to be. Izuku looked at him like he was pitiful, like he was wounded, like he was weak. He hated that for someone who had wanted nothing more than to be strong all his life, the Quirkless kid from his neighbourhood who he never wanted anything to do with was now staring at him like he was anything but. His throat ached from all of that screaming. His palms were shaking from the overuse of his Quirk, but he couldn’t have been bothered to think about all of that beneath the way he felt like he was disappearing from the inside over everything that had happened since he’d seen that pathetic view of Deku rushing forward in tears, uselessly clawing at the sludge villain’s Quirk, that annoying look in his eye as he claimed that Katsuki ‘looked like he was asking for help’.

Midoriya can’t tell exactly what was going through Bakugo’s head. He never could, really. Despite him always being so transparent about the fact that he was going to surpass everyone including All Might in order to become number one, his intentions and thoughts otherwise were never easy to bring to light, let alone read. All Deku really knew how to do was trail along behind him, chasing and chasing until Kacchan would push him away, and then get up and chase again. He can’t even truly empathise with Bakugo now, but watching him practically destroy himself over something that nobody but the Deku he’d known all his life could understand right then, he can’t think of anything else to do but get up again, and assume a fighting stance.

Yes, he still believed that there was no point to this fight. It was both completely meaningless whether he won or lost and it was definitely a call for trouble if they kept this up any longer. But after hearing all of Kacchan’s pent-up feelings, despite not understanding him one hundred percent, he still knew that the best thing he could do for him was put up a fair fight. Perhaps Bakugo had started the fight purely to let out the emotions that he knew nothing else to do with, but Deku decided that if he was serious about this, then he was going to be too.

“I have no intention of becoming your punching bag in this fight, Kacchan!” he calls out over the noise of Bakugo blasting himself towards him once again.

And so resumes the unhealthy pattern of Bakugo relentlessly attacking, Izuku desperately trying to do the same but being caught up enough with the task of narrowly avoiding one explosion after the other. Contrary to how he saw himself right then, Bakugo was strong. He was smart. And both of those aspects coupled with a Quirk as powerful as Explosion, he was damn near unstoppable.

Coughing as Bakugo successfully manages to corner him against a metal railing and fling him halfway across the training grounds, he looks up at him.

“I’m stating nothing but the obvious right now,” he grins, eyebrows knitted together in determination, “but you’ve really gotten stronger.”

He’s barely finished his sentence before Bakugo is launching himself at him again, palms red and heated and definitely with a promise to be swollen the next day.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT?!” the blonde hollers, blowing up the spot where Midoriya had landed just a second ago, “YOU SCHEMING ANOTHER ONE OF YOUR TRICKS AS USUAL?!”

Izuku pulls himself up on his feet again and wastes no time in running back towards his opponent.

“I ALWAYS FUCKING HATED THAT ABOUT YOU, YOU KNOW!” Katsuki yells, his attacks getting sloppier and less accurate with every time he launched them again, hardly even giving himself time to breathe, “I CAN NEVER TELL WHAT’S EVEN GOING THROUGH THAT HEAD OF YOURS!”

He lets out another loud explosion, sending Deku flying backwards without giving him a chance to get within two metres from him.

“NO MATTER HOW MUCH I’D BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF YOU, YOU’D ALWAYS JUST FUCKING GET BACK UP AND COME AFTER ME AGAIN!” he shouts, voice becoming hoarse at this point, “WHEN ALL YOU WERE WAS JUST SOME QUIRKLESS LOSER WHO NEVER HAD A DAMN THING!”

He finally pauses again, waiting for the smoke to clear to say his next words to his face.

“It’s your goddamn attitude,” he breathes, “that I can’t fucking stand.”

Midoriya pulls himself to his feet again. Ever since they were kids up until now he’d lost count of how many times he’d had to do that purely because of Bakugo.

“You’re right, Kacchan,” he states plainly. There isn’t any hostility and there’s no sarcasm in the way he says it, but it’s firm, “I did have nothing. I had nothing in the same way that you seemed to have so much that it was blinding. And it’s precisely because of all you had in comparison to me that I’ve always been trying to catch up to you!”

Izuku doesn’t give Katsuki the liberty of hearing the end of his statement before he already starts running towards him with all his might, charging up One For All, completely unaffected by every single time the blonde had pushed him away using nothing but sheer power.

Taken aback by his sudden approach and his drastic increase in speed, Bakugo barely has time to ignite the sweat on his palms to return another direct hit, the impact from his own explosion sending him stumbling back a few steps.

By the time he regains his balance, the smoke has already cleared and Deku is running towards him once again, shouting, “IS THAT ALL YOU’VE GOT?!”

“THE FUCK YOU JUST SAY TO ME?!” Katsuki roars, notably ticked off, bracing himself for the attack Deku was already in position to deliver.

His hand charged with One For All matches the intensity of Bakugo’s ignited palm, and, swinging his left fist in the direction of the boy he had been aiming to catch up to all his life, for the first time that night, he lands a hit on him.

“I’M NOT FUCKING LOSING TO YOU!” Bakugo yells, grabbing a hold of Deku’s arm to drag him down with the impact while his other hand crackles menacingly, a sign that Izuku had learned to read since they were kids that yet another explosion was coming. And this time - having been caught in between Kacchan’s tight grasp and the effect of One For All - there was no dodging it.

Less than two kilometres away, in the safety of her dorm room where nothing but the gentle strum of a bass could be heard, Jirou thinks she picks up a faint tremor that could’ve only come from a certain hotheaded boy she knew.

“I win,” Bakugo breathes deep in between each word, struggling to catch his breath in the rough position he held Deku against the ground, one hand still tight on his arm and the firm on his jaw, “even with All Might’s power, you still lost to me.”

Izuku was having enough trouble breathing with the way Kacchan was handling him, let alone able to form a coherent reply.

“Come on. Why the fuck did you lose?”

“I think that’s enough, you two.”

Both boys, with visible struggle, turn their heads to meet their company. They hardly seem surprised. With all the noise they were making and all the damage they had caused, someone was bound to come stop them at some point. Izuku can’t help imagining it being Aizawa to discover them first, dragging them by the ears back to campus to reprimand them more about how they had just repaired Ground Beta after Jirou’s-broken-leg-incident after drilling into them their failure to be responsible as both students and heroes-in-training.

But it hadn’t been Aizawa that had come to put a stop to their childish squabble.

“All Might…” Midoriya mumbles, finally being able to speak as Kacchan loosens his hold on him.

The former Number One Hero waits for the boys to disentangle themselves and catch the last of their breaths before he speaks again.

“I’m sorry.” is all that comes out.

“Why him?” Bakugo demands, ignoring his apology, “if it was because you saw something in him from that time with the sludge villain, what the hell was it?”

“Young Bakugo, what you must understand is that despite being completely powerless, he had the makings of a true hero,” All Might replies instantly, “I felt that it was my responsibility to help him stand in the arena, instead of you who had long already been in it.”

“Long already been standing in it?!” Bakugo repeats All Might’s words back to him, like they were the last thing he wanted to hear at that moment, “you say it like I was strong. I was weak, you know. It’s precisely because of that that now you’re-”

“This isn’t your fault,” All Might cuts in firmly, “my end was going to come eventually. You are strong, Young Bakugo. I’d merely focused far too much on that strength that I’d ignored the burden you’ve had to bear.”

Katsuki clenches his teeth together tightly to keep himself from shaking as the only person he’d ever looked up to in his life reaches over to wrap him in a one-armed embrace.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, “before a hero-in-training, you are also just a boy.”

By the time All Might had finished explaining to Bakugo about the power he and Deku shared and the three of them had headed back to the dorms, Aizawa was already wide awake and ready to lecture them to no end about how absolutely ridiculous it was that they had the energy to fight each other the night the provisional licence exam had ended. He looked livid enough to expel them from Yuuei on the spot, but thanks to All Might’s intervention, they got off with nothing more than a few days’ of house arrest, cleaning duties, and a demand for a written apology.

It isn’t until Bakugo gets in the elevator alone as it takes him up to the fourth floor that the exhaustion from the fight finally begins to sink in. He clicks his tongue in annoyance thinking about how late it must’ve been already, wondering to himself if Ears had probably blown up his phone again-

Oh, he remembers, nevermind.

The elevator lets out a ding to signal his arrival to his floor, and as he steps out he is immediately hit with the only source of noise in the entire building: the all-too-familiar strum of a bass. It’s soft enough that whoever’s asleep wouldn’t be bothered by it, but still loud enough that it somehow manages to reach Bakugo who’s standing a whole floor above her room. Considering the time, it makes him wonder how long she’d been up practising or writing a song or whatever she always seemed to be so absorbed in holed up in her bedroom.

He wonders why he even cared. He wouldn’t have given the noise a second thought had they never exchanged more than five words between each other. None of this would’ve happened had they not been paired up that one time that she had to go and get her left leg broken, causing him to get sucked into her ambitious ideas and silly requests solely because he was unfortunate enough to be her partner that day. What if Aizawa had just chosen a different pair that day? Maybe they wouldn’t have caused as much damage and the building would’ve never collapsed in the first place. What if he’d just forgotten about walking all the way back to the infirmary to get her a pair of crutches? Perhaps that had been what gave her the idea that he could be helpful in her training. What if he’d just let her call her ears dumb instead of opting to sneak out to Ground Beta in the middle of the night? As far as he remembered, that event was what made her cling to him just a little bit more.

Loud noises, her voice rings from the corner drawer of his mind in memory of that particular night.

By the time he realises it, he’s already turned around and is running back towards the elevator.

Heh? Loud noises? What about them?

He punches in the button to take him to the third floor before the doors have even closed shut.

My weakness, she had admitted awkwardly, since you asked. It’s the only major one I can think of right now.

Yeah. Maybe all of these shitty, indecipherable feelings he was having lately had started because of that one incident at Ground Beta. Maybe he was going to regret showing her just how vulnerable he was capable of being when he woke up the next morning, and maybe he was going to be dwelling on all of these ‘what-ifs’ for a hell of a long time.

Oh, that. Uh, loud noises like what?

Bakugo decides, that at least for now, the ‘what-ifs’ didn’t have to hold any real substance. Despite how hard he was always trying to keep them in his subconscious, all of them held absolutely zero significance when all he genuinely wanted was to hear her tease him about how much he yelled at everybody, listen to her talk about trifling matters like how she loved chocolate but hated chocolate-flavoured things, and be the reason she had that stupidly wide grin of hers on her face; the one that made her eyes sparkle and made her look like she was downright glowing no matter how late it was.

As soon as the elevator doors open again, Katsuki is already rushing out and turning into the girls’ side of the dorms.

Well, you know, anything sudden and noisy, for lack of better wording. Sounds that have high frequency. Bombs. Explosions. Stuff like that.

He wanted to know everything about her, from her passions and her dreams up to every last answer to questions Bakugo had previously passed off as insignificant such as “what’s your favourite animal?” and “what’s your favourite song?”. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t need any of that knowledge to become a pro hero, nothing did right now. If it meant he could see her, hear her, be with her for just a little more time, what did her greatest weakness or lost time even matter anymore?

He’s out of breath by the time he reaches her door, but he still manages to raise his arm to knock twice with the back of his hand.

Explosions, huh? What, like me?

The music stops abruptly, and for a while Bakugo is afraid that she might have chosen to ignore it and go back to playing, but half a minute later, the door opens and the face he’d missed so much peeks out.

“Hey, Hagakure? I’m so sorry, was it too lo-” she trails off and pauses when she realises who her visitor is.

“Bakugo?”

Yeah, Bakugo. Like you.

I could never be a weakness to you, Ears, he had remembered thinking that night, taking in every inch of her features like her presence itself was such a fragile thing, like she could disappear if she wanted to and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, like you love to repeat over and over again, I’m rude. I’m full of myself. And I yell at everything. But it was you. It was always you. You’ll never know because you’d always choose to know my favourite animal over the limitations of my Quirk, but you became my own weakness. You’ve somehow also become my greatest strength, and because of that paradox, just about everything you are to me has also become my greatest fear.

Bakugo looks down as he feels his vision get blurry, ignoring the way his voice shakes when he opens his mouth to speak.

“Your music is so damn loud.”

The first thing that washes over Jirou as soon as she sees his face again is guilt, her mind immediately thinking about how he had failed the provisional licence exam indirectly because of her and every cell in her body starts screaming at her to apologise right away. She also wonders what he was even doing at her door so late, but that’s before she finally takes note of the bruises and burn marks all over his face and the way his hands are trembling from the exposure of his fresh skin to the air, and in a heartbeat, that becomes her priority.

“B-Bakugo, you-” she starts, not entirely sure what to say first, “w-what happened to you?! Did you get into a fight?! Oh my gosh, um, okay, first aid kit. I think I might have one…”

Kyouka continues to mumble out the rest of her thoughts as she turns around to search for her first aid kit, but she immediately goes silent and stops moving the moment she feels Bakugo’s forehead underneath his mess of blonde hair fall against her shoulder, everything about that action showing a part of the blonde she hardly ever saw; he was exhausted.

Colour rises to her face almost right away at the contact and she feels her entire body go rigid from shock. She even thanks the heavens for a moment that her back is turned to him so he can’t see the face she’s making right now. She’d deny it if asked, but his touch sent goosebumps blossoming across her skin, and it felt like her breath had flat out been stolen from her lungs, but she hopes for the love of God that he hasn’t picked up on any of that.

Even now, she is reminded of how much she hated the way she had allowed herself to become so sensitive in the presence of this loud, disrespectful, egotistical classmate of hers. That simple action of his is more than enough to make her want to discard all of her rationale and logic that was messed up enough as it was. It’s gentle, the way he leans on her. He doesn’t seem to have any ill intentions and she notices how he gives her the space to move away if she wants to. He isn’t forceful and he isn’t begging. If anything at all, he’s only tired. She could’ve easily shrugged him off of her, or rejected his touch any way she wanted to, but the part of her that cared about him so much - the part she was so desperately trying to ignore every single day - held her in place, unmoving. The only thing that kept her from turning around to look at him again at that point was her pride.

“Um,” she clears her throat, trying her best to calm the pounding of her heart against her chest, “hey, Blasty, it’s gonna cause an infection if you leave th-”

“I- fuck, Ears, just hear me out.” he finally speaks in a whisper. He’s close enough to her that that was all she really needed to hear him loud and clear. His voice is so much softer in comparison to hers, which was already a rare enough occurrence, but it had been the usage of that stupid nickname he’d always use instead of her real one that made her lose her train of thought.

“All my life I’d always focused on nothing short of surpassing All Might and becoming the Number One Hero. I hadn’t even realised how hard I had attached and defined myself by that singular goal that I was refusing to look anywhere else,” he says the next words slowly, like they feel strange and foreign coming out from his mouth because they weren’t something he was used to saying, “but then you came along. You came along without intending to, but you- fuck, you- you don’t even understand, Ears, okay?! You don’t realise how much you invaded my whole world like some kind of… like some kind of parasite and-“

“Excuse me?”

“Fuck, no! That’s not what I meant!” he yells in frustration. Jirou thinks it’s cute how his head childishly refuses to leave her shoulder even as he curses out loud, but he’d probably yell at her again if she said that out loud.

“Look,” he goes back to a whisper, “my point is, I know I yell at you for it, but you aren’t far off whenever you tell me how stuck-up and self-centred I am. It’s precisely because of that that it’s so fucking frustrating trying to understand everything about you and having no one in this place to talk about it with. You probably don’t even have any idea how scary and hard it is standing here right now telling you all of this. It’s painful - the undeniable fact that I have no idea what I should do or what I can do and how I can’t help thinking if it would go away if things had just played out a little differently. What if I’d never stayed with you at that hag’s infirmary? What if I’d never invited you up to my room to train? What if I’d just pushed you out of my life and went on with the rest of my days at Yuuei working towards the goal I came here to accomplish? I’ve thought about enough of these questions to make anyone listening to my thoughts sick! Well, I never went through with any of those what-ifs, Ears, okay?! I didn’t have the fucking chance to!”

Bakugo pauses, half to breath again and half to let Jirou process everything he’s saying. It’s hard enough getting his point across without raising his voice too much like he usually would, but with the volume of that last statement he starts getting a little worried about whether Invisible Girl next door was now wide awake and shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Every time I’d even start to consider choosing any of those what-ifs, you’d always do something that made me believe it was okay to choose something else, that I could just choose the next what-if and- fuck, I- I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. But that’s how we ended up here, right?” he lets out a soft chuckle, like he’s laughing about how pathetic he must look to Jirou, “it hurts, though. It hurts how weak it makes me feel and it hurts that I have no idea where to go from here because I didn’t choose any of those what-ifs.”

Katsuki wishes he could tell what Ears is thinking right now. She hadn’t moved since he’d leaned his head on her shoulder out of pure instinct simply to keep her from walking away again, but it was beginning to get admittedly nerve-wracking not being able to read her expression.

“But it’s funny, you know,” he admits, “it hurts like hell right now, but it was because I didn’t choose to leave the infirmary that my arm didn’t get infected after that incident at Ground Beta. It was because I let you into my room that I had a reason to keep all of those small, light weights that I hardly even used anymore. It was because I chose to put aside my goal to become Number One every so often that I had someone who found me absolutely hilarious no matter how much I threatened to kill them, and someone who let me use their drum set as much as I wanted even though it was such a fucking loud instrument.”

Bakugo may have been nervous about not being able to see her expression, but Kyouka was definitely relieved he couldn’t the moment those words left his mouth. Her cheeks have dusted themselves pink and a small smile tugs at her lips at the way his words come out in such a soft and gentle tone that she would’ve never believed could come from the blonde, hotheaded boy she knew.

“I know it’s selfish of me to say this. Hell, it’s selfish for me to even be here right now. But,” he breathes in, “bottom line is, I spent so long dwelling on all of those stupid ‘what-ifs’ I ignored that I completely forgot about everything I had gained from doing just that.

“And, goddamnit, Ears. I want all of those things back. Every fucking last one of them.”

It’s quiet for a long time. It’s quiet for long enough that the dorm building was able to take its time transitioning to its previous state of dead silence. The only thing that gives away the two people who are still awake is the plain fact that they were standing in the middle of the hallway, Bakugo’s head relaxing into the support that Jirou’s shoulder offered, illuminated by the dim night lamp the girl had turned on in her room. He wonders if her silence is a sign that she was upset, and for a moment he considers apologising and just letting her go back into her room and forgetting this ever happened.

And then Jirou laughs. It starts soft at first, like she was desperately trying to hold it in, but it doesn’t take long for her composure to break and her laughter fills the silent building with life once more. She knows she probably isn’t in a position to be making light out of any of this considering how open and honest Bakugo had just been to her, but she can’t help it. In her experience, whenever it came to Bakugo, she never could. Over the past week in which they hadn’t exchanged a single glance with each other, she’d undeniably missed the way he would yell at and criticise just about everything around him, so watching him knock on her door in the middle of the night to present her this side of him that could be so earnest and innocent had become the funniest thing in the world to her right then in the way that it had still managed to lift a huge weight off of her. It was so unlike him and disgustingly cheesy and she loved the idea that she could hold this over his head forever. In the awkward position they were in, the blonde’s head still on her shoulder and his mess of blonde hair tickling her neck, she laughs. She laughs until her breath runs out, and laughs until the next one runs out again.

Bakugo on the other hand, has half a mind to ask her just what exactly she’s finding so funny. He wants to go back to being the rude, vulgar person he usually was around everyone else and tell her to shut up before he blows her out of the building. But as he keeps his gaze on the ground, he is unable to resist the small smile and the fond look that sneaks their way into his expression. He knows letting her see that would just give her another reason to laugh even harder, so he supposes he could grant her the absence of his words just this once. After all, he’s far too tired to use his voice again, even if it means letting the incredibly inappropriate timing of her laughter slide. But he thinks it’s fine.

The silence was never what he’d missed, anyway.

It had been exactly three weeks since the night of Bakugo and Midoriya’s fight at Ground Beta. Their period of house arrest had long been forgotten and they had gone back to attending regular lessons like usual. Hero training was just as intense as it had always been, with the class now working on their own signature moves, but with the full recovery of Jirou’s fracture and the end of the provisional licence exam, there was a sort of unspoken consensus between them that she didn’t have any reason to see him every night like she’d used to, which also meant that they hadn’t been able to interact as much as they had before. Jirou would occasionally throw a gibe towards Bakugo during classes and would sometimes hang out with his group of friends, and every so often, the blonde would join in on what she was watching with her friends in the common room to offer a sarcastic comment or two and had even helped out as drummer for the school festival when she’d asked, but as much as the two were getting of each other, both of them had far too large of an ego to be the first to admit that it didn’t feel enough.

There was no notable tension between them over the fight that nobody knew about, but it was more so a lingering reminder that neither of them had addressed - let alone found closure to - what had happened between them three weeks ago in the hallway on the third floor at 2’o’clock in the morning. It was the same kind of annoying dissatisfaction that came from trying to remember the name of a TV show you watched eight years ago. It wasn’t as if it particularly affected you in anything you were supposed to do, but it was regardless a pretty uncomfortable feeling and definitely not one that could be easily forgotten.

Even when they had time to talk alone over text - Jirou had made an incredibly big deal out of it when she’d found out he’d finally saved her number - or when they would stay a little later than the rest of the band to practice in the days leading up to the school festival, the two of them would either be far too absorbed in their own conversation to bring it up, or in most cases, be pretending well enough to look like they’d forgotten about it.

And now, as Kyouka sat waiting for her group’s turn to step into the training grounds for the day’s hero training exercise, the school festival had been over for a few days by then, giving her and the hotheaded blonde whose company she had grown to appreciate even less time with each other.

“Okay, Kyouka, spit it out. What on earth is going on between you and Bakugo?” Mina asks in her straightforward, no-beating-around-the-bush tone, plopping down next to her.

“Me and who now?!” Jirou splutters as her hands startle up from where they were clenched together at her knees, as if that would have done anything to hide her embarrassment at the sudden question.

“No, Kyouka, you do not get to go all clueless on me right now,” her friend remarks, hands crossed in a half-serious, half-teasing way, “I bet you two think you deserve a medal for hiding it under the pretence of group hangouts and joint band practice but trust me, almost everyone in our class can tell that something happened between you two.”

“W-we just started becoming friends after the school fes-”

“Kyouka, things have been fishy ever since you broke your leg at Ground Beta,” Mina cuts in, like she had already been expecting this reasoning from Jirou, “don’t think I forgot that time you told me he carried you back to the dorms on his back.”

Jirou internally curses at herself for forgetting how good Mina’s memory was whenever it came to anything that had to do with the internal affairs of their classmates. She knew better than to lie any more, so like always, she gave in.

“Okay, so maybe we had started hanging out a little more after that incident,” she shyly admits, too embarrassed to look Mina in the eye as she said it, “but that doesn’t mean what we had was anything more than platonic, though.”

“Mhm,” Mina hums, dragging out the last letter as she considers Jirou’s answer, “but was it, though?”

Jirou thinks she catches a hint of mischief in her friend’s words, like she’s simply trying to coax the truth out of her for fun, but with Mina, there was always a much larger piece of her that’d overpower the hopeless gossip-lover in her, filled with nothing but pure concern and worry for the people she cared about.

“I don’t know,” she confesses, hanging her head in her hands, “I- I think it was?”

“You think it was?” Mina repeats, like she was confirming the words she didn’t quite understand.

“Yeah,” she sighs, “I wonder if it was.”

Confused as she is, Mina is smart enough to tell that whatever had occurred between her friend and the loud blonde in their class, it wasn’t so simple that Kyouka could hope to figure it out herself. So she waits. She waits for Jirou to collect her thoughts and waits until she is able to tell her more.

“Remember that night he and Deku got into a fight and had to go under house arrest?” she says, eyes forward and unfocused in reminiscence.

Mina hums to show she does, giving Jirou her full, undivided attention.

“Well, we- we weren’t really talking at the time because of a really small and petty matter, but after his battle with Deku he came to my room.”

Mina can’t help the way her eyes widen and light up at this unexpected development. She wants to squeal and gush about how cute that is, but then she sees Kyouka still has more to say.

“He might’ve been too tired to think properly at the time, since neither of us has mentioned it since but,” Jirou pauses, trying to avoid using words that would make her seem a little too in her head, “he basically told me that he wanted to hang out again.”

Jirou blushes as the last sentence leaves her lips, pulling her knees closer to her chest and hiding her face in the space between.

It’s quiet between them for a while, but it doesn’t take long for Mina to laugh out loud at how flustered her friend is over discussing the idea of love. Kyouka snaps her head back up to look at her, trying to figure out what her laughter is supposed to mean.

“Kyouka,” she gasps out in between giggles, “you’re telling me that Bakugo - freaking Bakugo, might I repeat - comes all the way to your rom in the middle of the night to straight up tell you that he wants you back in his life and you still can’t tell if what he feels is platonic?”

“I- I mean, if someone else was mad at me, I’d probably do the s-”

“Okay, see that’s where you’re wrong,” Mina smiles, the last of her laughter already out, “yeah, maybe you would. Maybe most people would. But this isn’t Momo, who’s way too nice for her own good. She probably would. And this isn’t Denki, who would never want to be on anybody’s bad side. He would. This is Bakugo; Bakugo who doesn’t give two shits about who he pisses off or who he makes his enemy. He wouldn’t. But he did, Kyouka. For you. If that isn’t enough of an indication that he clearly wants more than friendship out of you then I don’t know what is.”

Jirou doesn’t say anything for a while, so Mina says something again at an attempt to lighten the mood.

“I almost feel sorry for him that you didn’t make a move on him right then and there. Dude probably thinks you’re scared of him now or something.”

“What? No way.” Jirou laughs a little at that, opting to look for said blonde among everyone else in Class 1-A. He isn’t hard to spot, what with how loud he always is and how much his hero costume stands out, but she thinks there’s an odd sense of relief when he enters her line of sight. She ignores it, though.

“You like him, huh?”

Her friend’s words make her painfully aware of what she’s doing as she quickly turns to face Mina again.

“What?!” she blushes, “no, I don’t!”

Mina looks at her friend, then looks at Bakugo, and looks back at Kyouka again. She does this a few times and then settles for watching the large screen that is now displaying the ongoing battle between Ojiro and Koda. Kyouka does the same. They watch the screen for a while, though their minds aren’t actually following the fight.

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I know.”

Mina smiles like she’d just won a victory.

“But like you said, Mina,” Jirou mumbles, eyes still on the screen, “this is Bakugo. The I’m-going-to-surpass-everyone-including-All-Might-and-be-at-the-top Bakugo. That part of him isn’t going to change just because I’m here now. Even if by some miracle he would want this to progress anything past platonic, I’m not even sure I’ll be able to give him what he needs to get where he wants and I’m afraid I’ll end up holding him back.”

“Well,” Mina considers, “is it going to make you feel like you failed him if you can’t give him everything he needs?”

“It might.” she admits.

Mina finally tears her eyes away from the screen to face Jirou again, who, despite feeling her pink-haired friend’s gaze on her, still chooses to watch as Ojiro manages to swing in through the window of a building to escape the swarm of bees Koda had sent his way.

“Well, you know I’m not one to sugarcoat things, so I’m gonna be honest with you, Kyouka,” she says, “you’re expecting yourself to go into this knowing exactly what to do and how to do it perfectly so that you’ll never disappoint Bakugo. But here’s the thing; you are going to fail him. And he’s going to fail you. You guys are going to fail each other.”

At her words, Jirou turns to face her, looking appalled and slightly offended at how blatant she was being.

“But so what?” Mina grins, a little glad that she’s gotten her attention, “that’s what falling in love is, Kyouka, it isn’t happily-ever-after. Contrary to popular belief, those two aren’t the same things at all.”

A loud buzzer sounds, signalling the end of the battle with Ojiro’s victory.

“Ashido! Shoji!” Aizawa calls out, “you’re next!”

“You said you were afraid you’d end up holding him back, right?” Mina recalls as she stands up and dusts off her costume, “News flash, Kyouka. Everyone’s afraid of falling short of expectations. But you know what I think? I think that for Bakugo, having you want to fail him and let him fail you despite it being extremely likely it’ll happen more often than not because of his big, ambitious aspirations would probably already mean a great deal to him. I’ve seen the way he watches you, you know. Maybe it had been nothing more than plain curiosity at the type of person you were a couple months ago, but nowadays he looks at you like falling in love is the best choice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jirou asks, tilting her head to the side.

“Kyouka, come on,” Mina laughs, playfully rolling her eyes at her friend like it was the simplest and most painfully obvious thing in the world before walking off towards the training grounds, “like we’ve been saying, this is Bakugo. I’m pretty damn sure he doesn’t even care about a happily-ever-after.”

“Oi, Ears, what happened?!” Bakugo yells, having zero concern for social consideration as he practically slams the door to the infirmary open.

Jirou startles in shock when he bursts in, immediately spinning around with wide eyes from where she stood at the end of the room by the window.

“You scared the shit out of me!” she whisper-screams at him, “can’t you enter the room like a normal person?!”

“Why the fuck are you scared?!” he argues back, still refusing to use his inside voice, “you texted me out of nowhere to meet you in the infirmary! What the fuck are you standing up looking perfectly fine for?!”

“Wow, okay, rude,” Jirou scoffs, “I didn’t call you here because I was injured or anything, Blasty. I just wanted to talk.”

“Heh?! In here?! Why?! It’s cramped and smells like an old lady in here!”

“Okay, that’s enough out of you,” she hurriedly shushes him before he can say anything more offensive, “but to answer your question, don’t you think there’s a reason I called you here of all places?”

Bakugo gives her a blank stare before blurting out a “Heh?!”

“Right,” Jirou makes a noise somewhere in between a groan and a sigh, “of course you wouldn’t. Let me rephrase that. Do you remember the last time you were here?”

He gives her a look that tells her he’s thinking hard about her question, but his expression also gives away how strange he’s finding her behaviour.

“No,” he says after a while, “I don’t get inju-”

“Oh my god, you are insufferable,” Jirou fumes, finally losing her patience, “can you read the room?!”

“The fuck are you on about?!” the blonde snaps back, “you asked me, and I answered! What the hell do you want from me, Ears?!”

“You-” she looks ready to tear her own hair out at this point, “how could you not catch my drift up until now?! Are you an idiot?!”

“Oh, that’s rich coming from you! It’s almost dark outside, you know?! I hope you know it’s a long walk back to the dorm building!”

“Like you would know!” Jirou retorts, “since you so confidently claimed that you can’t even remember the last time you were in here!”

“That’s because I had to carry your crippled self back there when you-” Bakugo stops his yelling abruptly as the realisation sinks in.

“Oh,” he mumbles as his ears turn pink, “oh.”

The two spend a few moments after that doing nothing but staring at each other. Jirou feels her face grow hot at how badly this had spiralled out of her expectations, but she hides the colour rising to it by pretending to look down and pinching the bridge of her nose in exasperation. Bakugo, on the other hand, who isn’t exactly in a position to feign frustration, tries to hide his blush with the back of his hand, looking anywhere but at Jirou.

“So? What did you want to talk about?” he asks, voice quiet at last.

“Take a guess,” she suggests as she looks up, “a real one this time.”

The blonde lowers his hand to shift his gaze to her. The way his eyes narrow at her are the only indication that he’s thinking hard about his answer.

It’s quiet for a while.

“Did what I say the other night freak you out?” he asks softly, breaking their eye contact as the words leave his lips to stare at the ground.

For a moment, she can’t do anything but stare at him, wide-eyed. When she’d told him to take a guess, she had fully expected a half-assed answer close to something like “did you hurt your head this time?” or maybe even a cold remark that he needn’t humour her by having to guess in the first place. So when this tumbles out from his mouth, she feels her stomach drop a little bit.

It’s so guilty, the way he asks the question. He says it in the same tone a child would ask an angry parent who had just yelled at them for the first time if they needed help with something. If Jirou had thought anything he’d ever said before was unlike Bakugo, none of them compared to the way he sounded now. Behind all of that pain and guilt and all the other synonyms there were for those emotions, there is a tight strain in the way he says it like he wants nothing more right then than to crawl into a hole and die. Jirou used to think it was maddening how Bakugo never seemed to be able to get a point across without raising his voice or being vulgar with his words, but having just seen this openly broken side of him firsthand, she knew she hated it.

He really did have no idea.

“Yeah, that- that was nothing, okay?” Bakugo quickly speaks again, taking Jirou’s silence as a sign that he was right, “you don’t have to take any of that too seriously. I really was so out of my head that night. But, I mean, considering that, I guess I do get why you’d be mad that I didn’t remember it when you called me here. It’s just that it’s already been three weeks, y’know, and-”

“Hey, Bakugo.”

“No, we don’t have to talk about this, okay? Let’s just-”

“Bakugo-”

“If you could just do me a favour and try to forget what I said that night-”

“Fall in love with me.”

He finally stops talking.

Jirou grins at him, trying to ignore the colour quickly returning to her cheeks. She starts biting her lip when he doesn't answer immediately, her earphone jacks giving away her shyness by slightly recoiling back behind her ears. Looking away as she awaits his response, she allows her eyes to wander anywhere but him. As the gravity of her words begin to sink in, she feels her cheeks grow warm and starts to hear the pounding of her heart grow louder. She hopes it isn’t as loud as her ears make it seem. Though her back is facing the squared, glass window of the infirmary, she can still tell that dusk is almost over. The blonde hadn’t been completely wrong when he’d said that it would be dark soon earlier. In the time that the two of them had been standing there in silence, the smooth, white sheets laid atop each of the infirmary beds that had previously reflected the warm golden glow of the setting sun had begun to fade into a pale blue as they welcomed the evening glow of the moon. It is a reminder to Jirou that tells her their classmates might be getting ready for dinner right about now, as well as a cue that Recovery Girl would be back to lock up soon and most likely shoo them back to the dorm building, especially since neither of them were in actual need of medical assistance. It isn’t until the silence prevails for longer than Jirou feels comfortable with that she musters up the courage to meet vermillion once again, and, in fact, just in time for Bakugo’s response.

“H-hu- what did you- f-fall in- w-what the fuck are you- have you- w-why would you say that?” he stumbles until he finally sputters out that last sentence.

When he realises she’s looking at him, he immediately tears his eyes away, that action and what he says afterwards making Jirou very reminiscent of one particular evening during a time where she had a cast in her left leg.

“That’s disgusting, shut up.”

The girl cocks her head at him with her eyebrows raised, like she’s processing his answer. She gives him an amused look that says, “really? You had me waiting in anticipation for your response only to hear that?”. And then she laughs. She laughs in the same way she has always done whenever Bakugo shows any sign of fluster or embarrassment. The way she laughs now also sort of sounds like she is almost embarrassed with herself for being so nervous about how he would respond to her earlier statement. Katsuki also recognises it as the same sort of laugh he’d heard the day they’d first found themselves in the infirmary together, and he is altogether struck with the understanding of why Ears had chosen to talk in this office of all places.

It’s obnoxious, full of amusement, but most of all, her laughter gives away how safe she has always felt in his presence. It had only been a few months since then, and yet something about standing in this room as it is occupied by nobody else but Bakugo and Jirou and Jirou’s laughter feels strangely like home. It has already been a few months since then, but he is still dazedly drawn to the little habits she has that come with this action. He believes he will never admit these things out loud, but he thinks the crinkles that form at the corners of her eyes from grinning too hard suit her. He loves the way her earphone jacks copy the motion of her shoulders as she hopelessly tries to keep her laughter under control. He appreciates how he is able to watch her until the hilarity of the person he is around her dies down. He wishes he can capture this moment and encase it forever, this image of her laughing like she has all the time in the world, the way the light of the moon shines against the purple in her hair, and the way she dabs at the corners of her eyes with the cuff of her school blazer.

The day Jirou had come in with a fractured leg and Bakugo with a wounded shoulder, he had looked away, fearful about what noticing these insignificant features of hers meant and why they even had an effect on him at all. His memory of it is fuzzy, but he’s sure he had also rudely spat out something along the lines of telling Jirou to stop laughing and shut up. But now, Bakugo leans against the wall next to the infirmary’s door, wearing a fake scowl on his face as he waits for her to finish her laughing fit. Even as he scoffs at how hilarious she found his brief moment of discomposure and mutters a threat about leaving if she didn’t stop soon - one that he knows better than anyone is dead empty, he chooses to not search for another meaningless reason to take his eyes off of her a second time.

He watches her for a while, and then Bakugo pushes himself off of the wall to walk over to her. He walks the length of that tiny room known as Recovery Girl’s office to the window at the very end of it, where Jirou is still laughing so hard she hasn’t even noticed him until he is standing right in front of her. The vermillion in his eyes have taken on a little softness, and to be quite honest, they also appear a little scared. Whatever light that the setting sun had managed to sneak in through the filter of the small, squared window is long gone by now. It is far too late for the sun to still be up but still too early for the moon to fully rise, and since neither of them had bothered to turn on the bright white lights of the infirmary since they’d come in, they are now left engulfed in nothing but the darkness of the office and the dim glow from the streetlights paving the walkways of Yuuei’s campus. This should’ve served as a second sharp reminder that they had been there for a lot longer than either of them had accounted for, and that their classmates were probably all about to have dinner and had probably noticed their absence by now, but they both pretend not to notice it. Kyouka slowly lets her laughter die down when she meets his eyes, choosing instead to listen to whatever Bakugo looks like he wants to say. There is so much he wants to. He wants to tell her to fall in love with him in the same way she told him to fall in love with her. He wants to tell her that he knows nothing about falling in love at all but that it also doesn’t sound half bad to do by her side. There is so much that Bakugo wishes to express but does not know how to.

He raises his hand to tuck the strands of hair that frame her face behind her ear.

And then he kisses her.

It’s hesitant at first. Slow, unsure, and all of the other adjectives that nobody else would think to describe Bakugo with. When Jirou first realises what he’s trying to do, she nervously tilts her head sideways, a little to encourage him and a little to help herself feel like she actually knows what she’s doing. Bakugo moves his right hand to cup the back of her neck, the other firmly staying in the pocket of his pants like he’s giving her the opportunity to pull away whenever she wants. The corner of her lips lift into a tiny smile against Bakugo’s as they meet each other in the middle. She stands up on her tiptoes to make up for their height difference, both her hands pulling on his navel like they aren’t close enough yet. Like all first kisses are, theirs is messy. It’s uncoordinated. It’s tentative. It doesn’t feel like any sparks are flying and it doesn’t feel like the world around them is melting away. But as Katsuki’s hold against her neck tightens ever so slightly like she’s the only thing his hand is made for, Kyouka thinks it’s enough. She even thinks it’s more than that.

She thinks it’s everything.

They pull back after a moment, immediately letting go of each other as pink dusts both of their faces in embarrassment. The moon has risen high enough for its rays to be able to infiltrate the infirmary and lazily stretch across the white bedsheets and the concrete ground. Jirou is the first to break the silence.

“Your face is red.” she teases.

“Shut up,” Bakugo mumbles back, turning around so that she can’t see his expression anymore, “like you’re in any position to talk.”

They’re standing there in silence for a long time. They continue staying in silence even when Recovery Girl finally returns and practically throws them out of the infirmary, giving them a lecture about how they shouldn’t be treating her office as a meeting spot. Jirou thinks she’s just afraid that now whenever Bakugo calls one of his classmates out at night it’s a sign that he means to fight them. It isn’t until they’re walking along the path that leads back to the 1-A dorm building that either of them break that silence.

“I told you it was a long walk back.” Bakugo mutters in the same petty tone of a child that won his first bet.

When they were in the infirmary, the dull light of the moon was the only thing providing them with the ability to see each other, and so they had allowed their eyes to adjust to that darkness. The bright, fluorescent yellow glares of the campus’ streetlights that greeted them outside were bright enough to be a poor replica of the evening sun so that anyone walking along the pathways would still have a clear image of their surroundings. To a certain extent, they did provide some sort of solace for anyone who might’ve been afraid of the dark, but Jirou thinks it feels pitiful how it mercilessly drowns out whatever light tonight’s half moon is trying to offer the world in the sun’s place.

“Congratulations?” she says back sarcastically, “and what, do you want a medal for that, too?”

“Can you just go by one hour without using every opportunity to compare me to a whiny, spoiled brat?!”

She smiles back with her tongue sticking out at him, but she doesn’t say anything else. The silence between them resumes until they pass through the arc of the dorm buildings that reads ‘U.A. Alliance’. The noisy chatter and the faint clinking of silverware against porcelain can be heard even from outside. They must have left one of the windows open because the tempting smell of warm, freshly cooked food that had wafted its way out to them suggested that Sato was the one in charge of cooking today.

Kyouka skips ahead of Bakugo in excitement to join their classmates. He thinks there’s something so endearing in the way she gets excited over and over again for the smallest things like that excitement would never run out. For a brief moment, he falls back into the same habit he had a month ago of glancing at her left leg even though he knows she’s perfectly fine now. He can’t help it as he remembers this path as the same one they had walked on seemingly such a long time ago that night they had sneaked out to go to Ground Beta.

“What is your favourite colour?”

It’s so soft that even Jirou’s Quirk has trouble confirming exactly what he’d said. It’s a closer stretch to say he’d mouthed the words instead of whispered them.

“Huh?”

“Your favourite colour,” he repeats, in a much louder and annoyed tone this time, hoping it masks the embarrassment he feels from asking such a childish question.

“What?” Jirou looks like she’s suppressing another laugh, leaning forward to try and catch the blonde’s expression under the darkness of the doorway, where no lights had been installed, “like, right now?”

“Forget it, then!” Bakugo pauses at the steps up to the main door to yell at her, “just hurry up and get back inside! And don’t even think about sitting near me at that table!”

Jirou suppresses a smile as she raises an eyebrow at him. She’s used to his habit of insulting whatever is nearest to him when things don’t go his way, but she still finds it amusing every once in a while. She pushes one side of the dorm building’s heavy double doors open, looking back to grin at Bakugo.

“I won’t,” she promises, then adds before shutting the door in the blonde’s face, “and it’s purple, by the way.”

Bakugo stands outside on the empty doorstep for a moment, eye twitching slightly in annoyance at her audacity to leave him outside and about how unsurprising her answer is.

When do we realise we’ve fallen in love with someone?

It’s a stupidly cliche question to ask somebody in the same tone as one would ask their seatmate what the answer to Question 7 was. We ask it like people are able to come up with an answer on the spot by using some kind of formula even when we ourselves are very much aware that it isn’t as simple as choosing A or B. And unlike the answers to an academic test, there isn’t any merit in knowing when we realise we’ve become absolutely smitten with someone.

Because here’s a little spoiler when it comes to being in love : you don’t have the slightest bit of control over it. It’s scary. It’s messy. I won’t deny that it can even be pretty ugly.

It’s ridiculous to question when we’ve fallen in love with someone, and when it really comes down to it it’s hardly something even worth pondering. But that doesn’t make it wrong to want to fall in love. It doesn’t make it stupid to know how we’ve fallen in love and there most certainly isn’t any shame in admitting who we fall in love with.

So let it be uncontrollable. Let it be terrifying. And let it be as hideous as love gets. It’s that simple. I am in no way obliged to give you a pretty-worded answer or a two–page long essay on my views of being in love with somebody.

I see no need to place the idea of falling in love on such a high pedestal as if it’s something as rare as a perfect fairytale happily-ever-after. Because admit it, we’re all falling in love with someone one way or another every other day, aren’t we?

I’d even say it’s more common than not knowing the answer to Question 7.

Purple. Katsuki repeats to himself as he pushes the door open after her. He thinks he’ll remember that.