Chapter Text
“Okay, that’s it! I give up!” suddenly yelled Kaminari, his body jumping up from the sofa he was sharing with Kirishima and Sero out of the blue too - so much so, both of his friends, who had been focusing on the TV drama a portion of the class 1-A had been mooning over recently, also jump-startled together with him. “I’m ready to admit it! Yes, I am! I will admit it to anyone who questions me about it! I will admit it to them even! So seriously, please, please make this living hell end!!!”
“Err… Kaminari, are you feeling okay?” asked Ashido, a metaphorical question mark floating around her head as she pressed the pause button on the remote control.
“Has he still not recovered from the exams?” inquired Uraraka, head tilted slightly to the left as she directed her words to both Kirishima and Sero. Kaminari was still going on and on with his overdramatic soliloquy so it would be useless to try to speak with him at the moment.
“No, I’m pretty sure that has nothing to do with the exams…” sighed Kirishima, softly shaking his head in disapproval as he watched Kaminari walk back and forth in front of their sofa, all while wailing his sorrows. “It’s that …”
“Like, c’mon, how can you be so smart yet so dumb at the same time!? It’s not possible, is it? Are they doing it on purpose then? Is that it? Are they playing hard to get? Do they get a masochistic kick out of cockblocking themselves??? Ahhhhh, it’s driving me insane!!!”
“Yup, it’s definitely that …” collectively groaned the students spending their after-school free time in the communal area of the dorm.
A little bit over a month ago, Class 1-A had the unfortunate pleasure to discover that Bakugou and Todoroki are in love with each other. The big catch was… it seemed neither Bakugou nor Todoroki were aware of their own feelings. Painfully so. No amount of blatant flirting from Todoroki could make Bakugou’s heart swoon in a lovestruck frenzy and no amount of ambiguously seductive ploys from Bakugou could make Todoroki throw rationality aside and jump him. Their unrivalled denseness and emotional constipation were an S grade cockblock.
“Maybe watching a slow burn as a distraction wasn’t the wisest choice, ahaha…” awkwardly laughed Ashido as she stole a couple of glances at the halted image on the TV screen and her crazed classmate.
“This one has an expiration date, though,” noted Asui with a small sigh. “I can’t see Kaminari-chan’s misery over Bakugou-chan and Todoroki-chan ending any time soon.”
“Or maybe- UGHHHH!” Kaminari was still going hard with his one-sided whining when he suddenly keeled over, both his knees and hands noisily hitting the floor. Wheezing slightly, he slowly turned his head in Asui’s direction. “That was a low blow, Tsuyu-chan… Sniffle…”
“Kaminari, that is something that is up to Bakugou and Todoroki to sort out,” gently reproached Iida as he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “We are all but bystanders in the blossoming of their love story. Please be patient and let them take their own pace in advancing their relationship.”
“There’s been zero advancing for over a month now!” pointed out Kaminari, Kirishima, Sero, Ashido, Hagakure, Asui and Uraraka, all of them grieving over the matter in their own way. Kaminari was the only one who visibly sobbed at the lack of any development but Ashido had clicked her tongue in an unusual display of vexation and Hagakure’s invisible body all but deflated over the sofa.
“That’s not true,” denied Midoriya, a small smirk on his lips as he whipped out his cell phone from his pants’ pocket. He quickly unlocked the screen and dived deep into a folder inside a folder, inside another folder, inside one more folder, ad infinitum - it was the most secret stash that could ever be dug out from his, or anyone else’s, cell phone. “These last few weeks, their interactions at school have increased by 5.6%, at practical exercises by 6.9% and at the dorm a whopping 17.2%! And this doesn’t take into account when it’s just the two of them! A lot more could be happening behind closed doors or while they’re at the supplementary classes. So there has been some development, minimal as it might be. I’d say it will take them approximately 136 days, 7 hours, 23 minutes and 56 seconds to reach a point you’d call ‘slow but steady develop- Wait, why are you all backing away from me?”
“...Deku and his perfect Deku-ing…” mumbled Ashido, a shudder running down her spine as she protectively hugged her own body.
“M-Midoriya, have you ever considered therapy?” offered Sero, his back plastered against the sofa’s backrest so he could put as much distance between himself and Midoriya. “I hear that discussing past grievances with a professional can help you overcome present unhealthy vices.”
“Deku-kun, please never let Bakugou-kun touch your phone…” almost begged Uraraka, her palish face hidden behind her hands. The things Bakugou would surely do to Midoriya if he ever found out about the new way his childhood friend was stalking him were so horrifying it was already traumatising her imagination.
“Hold on!” gasped Kaminari out of the blue. He got up from the floor in the blink of an eye, his facial expression dead serious. “Midoriya, did you just say 136 days, 7 hours and blah blah blah?”
“Eh? Ah, yes. 136 days, 7 hours, 21 minutes and 34 seconds, taking into account the time that already passed by,” reiterated Midoriya after briefly checking the countdown on his phone’s screen a second time.
“7 hours…” mumbled Kaminari, eyes squinted just a little bit as he ingrained that precious information and steadily chopped it up into bite-sized pieces even an idiot like him could safely digest. He suddenly gasped, his face brightening up to that of a saint that had finally acquired enlightenment. “That means it’s going to happen at 2 AM… And there’s only one thing that could happen at such a late hour of the night! They are definitely going to- OUCH!”
“Why are you taking Midoriya’s Deku-ing so seriously!?” groaned Ashido as she gave a powerful chop to the top of Kaminari’s head. She released a tired sigh (which muffled Midoriya’s sobs of ‘please stop using my hero name like that…’) and sat back down on the sofa. “Geez, you two are way into TodoBaku… You’re worse than all fujoshis and fudanshis in the world combined! Control and behave yourselves or Bakugou will catch wind of all of this! The way he is, I’m dead sure he’d make sure our ship never sails until the day we all kick the bucket! I don’t want old, wrinkly TodoBaku, no sir! I want… Nnngh, I want mouth-watering abs rubbing against those gigantic knockers, hehehe…”
“Mina-chan, you’re drooling,” warned Asui with a small chuckle. She actually wanted to say that Ashido was starting to sound like Mineta but she didn’t have the heart to rain on her friend’s parade that hard at all. ………Mostly because she might or might not have had those exact same thoughts at one point or another…
And Asui wasn’t the only one.
After the previous stalking/surveillance mission, there was hardly any student in class 1-A that hadn’t fantasised about all the possibilities that Bakugou and Todoroki had ahead of them as a (yet to be) couple. Midoriya, Kaminari and Ashido were simply physically and verbally doing and saying what all of them wanted to do or were thinking but couldn’t follow through, for a myriad of reasons.
Class 1-A had turned into a bunch of ecstatic fangirls and fanboys secretly rooting for a Todoroki x Bakugou end game, whatever that actually meant.
Their biggest source of frustration and angst was, however, the very same thing that started it all.
“Oh! Welcome back, Bakugou! Todoroki!” greeted Kirishima as soon as he heard the clicking of the front door opening. He turned his head towards the entrance area at the speed of light, almost as if it was an ingrained habit. Which it was. The TV drama they had been fawning over the last few weeks was all but a ruse to keep their secret surveillance, well, a secret.
“You watching that crap again? Lame…” scoffed Bakugou as he sideways peeked in the small crowd’s direction. He stifled a big yawn while taking his shoes off and replacing them with his slippers.
“Is that TV drama really that good?” inquired Todoroki, also removing his outdoor shoes. He honestly couldn’t see the appeal of that endless romcom series so his question was well-intentioned, not sarcastic or ill-spirited at all like Bakugou’s remarks.
“It’s the best thing ever,” answered their classmates in near-perfect unison, clenched fists and a passionate glint in their eyes.
“..I’m busting my ass off taking the supplementary classes only to come back to a bunch of useless nobodies wasting their free time doing fuck all… Drop dead already…” grumbled Bakugou under his breath, sluggishly walking towards the nearby elevator together with Todoroki. He stabbed his index finger in the elevator’s button two times and then started loosening the scarf around his neck. Yes. That scarf, to the delight of the secretive onlookers. By the time the elevator’s doors were opening, he was already slipping it off of his shoulders, one more big yawn escaping from his lips.
“The short nap on the way back wasn’t enough?” asked Todoroki, seemingly worried with Bakugou, the way he lowered his head until their foreheads were touching. “I don’t think you have a fever.”
“Thanks to a certain useless half-and-half bastard, I had to do double the work wrecking Gang Orca’s minions,” scoffed Bakugou, slipping into the elevator as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened - the previous proximity between his and Todoroki’s faces and the nearly overheating Uraraka would have liked to disagree but the late-night daily show was yet to be over. Or, at the very least, so the onlookers hoped.
“Sorry”, expressionlessly apologised Todoroki, yet again positioning himself right next to Bakugou inside of the elevator. “I was-”
“Yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna hear any more excuses,” groaned Bakugou with an annoyed roll of his eyes. He leaned a bit forward to press the button to their respective floors and then retreated to his previous position… not!
Just as the elevator’s doors were closing, Bakugou’s head ever so softly dropped sideways on top of Todoroki’s shoulder multiple times. It was hard to tell if he was trying to hit Todoroki as a sleepish display of anger or if he was doing a revolutionary tsundere take on leaning over someone’s shoulder.
“Haa… My crops have been watered for today yet I still find myself craving for more…” sighed Ashido, picking up the remote control to turn off the TV. There was no longer any reason for them to keep the TV drama on, after all.
“136 days to go, huh…” mumbled Kaminari as he dropped his body back to the sofa. He remained silent for a couple of seconds and then suddenly started screeching his lungs out, hands on his head to yank at his blonde locks. “I’ll have gone crazy by then! I can’t take it anymore! I’m getting blue balled in their stead and that’s definitely not a good sign!”
“There’s nothing we can do, though,” said Kirishima, patting the top of Kaminari’s head a couple of times to somehow soothe him and prevent him from trying to rip his hair off. His gaze slowly fluttered to Midoriya. “...There isn’t, right?”
“Err… I don’t think us butting in would be a good idea, like Ashido-san said…” confessed Midoriya, his shoulders slumping down in disappointment. He quickly stored the freshly recorded video in his plus ultra (and very much illegal) secret folder. Later, he’d save a safety copy in his laptop and external hard drive. His next words softly trailed off as he stared at the countdown slowly ticking away. “However………”
“However!?” All of them repeated, quickly inching closer to Midoriya like metal chunks attracted by a super magnet. Kirishima and Kaminari even almost ran over each other in their rush to reach Bakugou’s number one expert. They all hungrily awaited for Midoriya Izuku’s wisdom, for a small respite in the seemingly endless battle for the unachievable TodoBaku paradise.
“Ah, no, it’s just, the other day I was staring at the countdown and thinking to myself, before our secret surveillance mission, was the countdown already like this or did it lower?” explained Midoriya in a bit of a fluster, arms flailing around over the cell phone on top of his lap. “I doubt we directly influenced them in any shape or form but maybe, indirectly speaking, the extra time we gave them shortened the distance between them, together with the time it will take them to be something more than they currently are so, with that possibility in mind, I was wondering if maybe doing more of that indirect leading would perhaps chip away at the countdown and speedrun them into… something?”
“Midoriya, you… ARE A FREAKING GENIUS!!” yelped Kaminari out of the blue, grabbing Midoriya by the shoulders before he tightly hugged him. “That’s it! That’s gotta be the solution to all of our problems! She’s the key for a successful TodoBaku romance!”
“She…?” repeated Sero and Kirishima at the same time, exchanging a glance with one another that seemed to silently spell ‘did Kaminari’s brain finally break for good?’
“Hatsume~!” cheerfully announced Kaminari with a sing-song voice, a huge grin on his lips as he released the nearly suffocating Midoriya. “Hatsume and her babies are the almighty saviours we have been looking for!”
“Kaminari, let’s all calm down before something bad happens, like it did last time,” interrupted Iida. He didn’t enjoy being a wet blanket when it came to this sensitive topic but he was the class president, he had the duty to prevent a trainwreck in the making. He cleared his throat and proceeded, “Hatsume-san and her inventions can certainly be useful 4 times out of 10. However, her inventions haven’t been made with the intention of being used for matchmaking. Even if she is a genius creator, she certainly can’t have something that will help us out at hand this time.”
-.-
“I have the perfect baby for you guys!!” exclaimed Hatsume as soon as Midoriya and Kaminari finished their roundabout, at times a bit messy and confusing, explanation on what was going on.
“You do!?” howled the students from class 1-A. They were already expecting a positive answer but not such an instant one.
Even though it was already well past dinner time, Kaminari and Ashido, hyped up with the sudden realisation, forced their friends into coming to the Development Studio, all in hope that Hatsume Mei was still around tinkering with her inventions. Fortunately for them, yes, she was indeed still there. Kaminari immediately started vomiting words out, with Midoriya backing him up to make sense of all of it.
“You want something to help them confess, right~?” said Hatsume, turning her back to the heroes-in-training to go search around for something in a huge pile of machinery and other metallic appliances. Clinks and clanks echoed through the spacious studio until Hatsume resurfaced from the metal mountain once again, a sealed glass flask in one of her hands. She slapped a white label on the glass and quickly scribbled something on it with a black marker. She then leisurely threw it in the students’ direction. “There you go~”
“O-Ohh…!” Kaminari awkwardly caught the glass flask as it was descending towards the floor. From the distance, the flask had seemed to be empty but its weight told Kaminari a different story. Upon close inspection, the flask was nearly completely filled with a clear, transparent liquid. And the words written in the freshly applied label nearly made his eyes pop out of their sockets. “A truth serum!?”
“It’s not actually the OG thing but if you use it wisely, it can bring the exact same results with little to no side effects,” explained Hatsume, a handful of metal plaques already on her hands so she could continue working on the baby she had been focusing on until the unexpected visitors came. “Just mix it with some fruit juice and give it to them. It’ll put them blurting out all sorts of things for sure.”
“When you say little to no side effects… we’re talking about what kind of side effects, specifically?” inquired Iida, his gut already telling him that they should empty that flask in the nearest sink rather than secretly feed it to their classmates.
“Hmm… A bit of a headache, some nausea, nothing that will kill them,” said Hatsume after giving that question some thought.
“I-I see,” acknowledged Iida while adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Those side effects didn’t seem that bad, indeed. Then why did he still have such a bad feeling about all of this? …Well, it was probably just the bad experiences he has had to date with Hatsume and her babies… right?
“Wow, I didn’t know truth serum was an actual thing,” confessed Hagakure, her invisible body perched over Kaminari’s shoulder to take a peek at the glass flask and the mystic concoction inside of it. “I thought it was just a prop to get characters to confess in detective or spy movies and the like.”
“Anything is possible when it comes to science, I guess,” pointed out Uraraka, also quizzically staring at the flask. A product like this surely would be extremely useful when it came to villains and getting them to confess important information regarding their plans - so why was that serum buried in a pile of creations and not getting awarded some sort of prize, she wondered.
“Alright then! We’ve got our secret ingredient, let’s go back to the dorm and bait those two into an early relationship!” cheered Kaminari, glass flask held high over their heads to showcase their saviour to the entire world. “The era of TodoBaku is finally upon us!”
“Yeah!!!” cheered the rest of the students, happily following after Kaminari like in a religious procession.
Unbeknown to them, they were celebrating the last few moments of tranquillity before all hell broke loose.