Chapter Text
When Bakugou walks into class in the morning, the first thing he does after sitting down at his desk is look Shouta in the eye and say, deadly serious, “Today is going to be the worst fucking day of my entire life.”
And, yeah.
That’s the first sign that something is wrong.
Before Shouta can ask the kid why today is going to be the worst fucking day of his entire life, his direction is drawn towards breaking up a budding fight between Kaminari and Jirou. By the time he’s able to look back over at Bakugou, the kid is turned around in his seat, seemingly engrossed in a lengthy conversation with Midoriya.
Which is the second sign that something is wrong.
Shouta watches, transfixed, as Bakugou gestures wildly in a way that Shouta has never seen him do. From where he’s standing, Shouta can’t exactly hear what Bakugou is saying, but the words are spilling from his mouth so quickly that it feels like he’s standing in the path of a machine gun. And he’s not even the one that Bakugou is talking to. Midoriya, though, seems to be taking it in stride - seems to be keeping up, even - and the two of them talk back and forth like little kids at a daycare, not really talking to each other, more like they’re talking at each other.
It'd be fascinating to witness, really, if it weren’t so strange.
Looking around, Shouta realizes that he’s not the only one who has noticed Bakugou’s abnormal behavior. Half of the class is watching the interaction with thinly-concealed amusement, while the other half is watching it with wary expressions, like they expect it to blow up in their faces at any moment.
Shouta checks his watch - seven-ten on the dot - and clears his throat. He says, pointedly, “Excuse me,” and raises an eyebrow when Bakugou jolts as if he’s just been shocked, whirling back around in his seat and facing Shouta with an uncharacteristically embarrassed look on his face. Leaning forward, Shouta asks, “Are you feeling alright?”
“Ah, great,” Bakugou responds, no hesitation. “Now I’ve made you worried.”
And then he clamps both hands over his mouth and slouches in his chair, glaring so intently at his desk that Shouta thinks that it might just burst into flames. Bakugou himself looks like he might burst into flames as well, with how red his face is burning.
“What he meant to say, Aizawa-sensei,” Midoriya starts, casting a nervous glance at Bakugou, “is that, yes, he’s feeling alright.”
Bakugou gives a short, sharp nod and somehow manages to slump down even further. At this rate, he’ll end up sitting on the floor. Not to say that that wouldn’t be an amusing sight, but, still. Shouta frowns, running through a list of things that could be causing this behavior as he asks, “Are you sure?”
Bakugou’s flush gets even deeper, and he nods again.
Shouta hesitates. The kid obviously isn’t telling the truth, but he has a class to teach. He makes a mental note to bring it up later and turns to face the rest of his students, clearing his throat to get their attention.
“We’re doing a training exercise today,” he announces, waiting for the mixed cheers and complaints to die down before he says, “I’ll be splitting everyone into teams of two. And, before you ask, I’ve already decided who’s going to be on the teams, so don’t bother arguing.”
This is met with mostly groans, but there’s surprisingly no response whatsoever from Bakugou. Shouta finds that he can’t keep himself from looking over at the kid as he gives out directions, laying out rules and goals. After he answers the last question - no, Kaminari, you cannot switch teams, weren’t you just listening? - he says, “Alright, go get dressed. Meet me on Ground Beta.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, “Bakugou, I’d like to talk to you.”
Normally, Bakugou would say something in response, something about how it was unfair that he was the only one who had to stay behind. Now, though, he just remains seated as his classmates file out of the door, several of them looking worriedly over their shoulders at their friend.
Once everyone else is gone, Shouta sits down at the desk beside Bakugou, turns the chair to face him, and asks, “Is something wrong?”
Bakugou folds his arms across his desk and buries his face in them. He doesn’t speak, but his meaning is clear - leave me alone.
Shouta sighs. “If something’s bothering you, I’d like to help. Are you tired? Did you get enough sleep?”
Several months ago, Shouta probably would’ve let the subject drop.
But this isn’t several months ago, and he can’t quite bring himself to ignore the fact that there is clearly something wrong with his student.
When Bakugou doesn’t answer, Shouta sighs, again. “Bakugou, kid, c’mon. Talk to me.”
“I’m fine,” Bakugou says, voice muffled. “I’m fine, Sensei. I’m just… tired.”
“Tired,” Shouta echoes. “Is that all?”
Bakugou lifts his head from his desk, and, without meeting Shouta’s eyes, says, “Yeah.” He says, “I’m just - yeah. Tired.” He glances at Shouta and then looks away just as quickly, but not before Shouta notices that the kid has been gnawing at his lip, that there’s a bloody red gash in it that wasn’t there before. “Can I go now?”
Shouta stares at him, studying him. Now that he’s closer, he can see that there are scrapes up and down Bakugou’s arms, like he’d fallen and skidded across a sidewalk, and that, combined with the boy’s almost skittish manner, makes him want to say, No. He wants to say, Sit this one out.
But, knowing Bakugou, that’d just make everything worse.
Shouta drags a hand down his face, groans. He can already feel a headache coming on, and the day’s just started. Fucking ridiculous. “Yeah,” he says. “Go get changed.”
Bakugou is out of his seat in an instant, hurrying out of the classroom like he wants to get away before Shouta has a chance to change his mind, the door gaping open behind him like the mouth of an open beast as his footsteps fade rapidly down the hall.
With a sigh, Shouta follows.
It's a basic exercise, a classic. It's a rescue situation, with two teams competing against each other at a time to secure the most hostage dolls before the clock runs down to zero - it's something that the class has done before, something that they’re used to.
So it's strange, really, that it's not going well at all.
Shut in the control room with the rest of his students, Shouta can only watch with mounting frustration as a hostage doll is shredded to pieces during a fight between Bakugou and Kirishima. Those two work great as a team, but when pitted against each other they tend to go overboard, and Shouta curses the fact that he didn’t remember that sooner.
“This is not going well,” Yaoyorozu points out.
“No,” Shouta says. “It isn’t.”
The wide array of screens covering the wall gives him various points of view of the battle, and he winces as he watches Bakugou deck Kirishima in the face - Kirishima’s Quirk is activated, and he knows that Bakugou’s knuckles are going to be a bloody mess by the time this is over.
Shouta swipes a screen, panning over to the second fight. It's just as much of a disaster as the one between Kirishima and Bakugou, but it's on the opposite side of the spectrum in the fact that neither Todoroki nor Uraraka are actually fighting. They seem to be having a conversation, a hostage doll leaning forgotten against the wall as they talk to one another.
“Wow,” Ashido says, squeezing past Shouta to peer up at the screens. “They are not good at this.” She sounds almost awestruck, like she’s impressed by how not good her classmates are. “At all.”
“Thank you for that commentary, Ashido,” Shouta says. He switches back to the first battle, groaning when he sees that Bakugou and Kirishima are no longer physically fighting. They’re shouting at each other, Bakugou waving his hands in wide, sporadic gestures. “Great.”
“Is it just me, or is Katsuki acting strangely?” Sero asks.
Shouta turns away from the monitors to look at him. “How so?”
Sero glances over from where he’s laying on the ground with his feet kicked up on the wall. “Well, he’s just… off, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it.” He hauls himself into a sitting position, looks around the room, and calls, “Hey, Izuku!”
“Yeah?” Midoriya halts his conversation with Iida to look at Sero. “What is it?”
“Isn’t Katsuki acting weirdly?”
“I mean…” Midoriya looks between Shouta and Sero, then at the screens behind Shouta. “He was certainly talkative this morning. He -” His eyes go wide, fixed on the monitors. “Oh, no.”
Shouta spins back around just in time to see the screen fill with static, one by one, and then go black.
A tremor rocks the earth.
“Goddamnit,” Shouta mutters, and then he’s moving before he can think about what he’s doing, sprinting up the stairs and throwing open the door. He makes a beeline for the building he’d assigned Bakugou’s groups to, and, as he runs towards it, the entire structure seems to shudder.
He’s debating on whether or not he’ll be crushed to death if he goes inside when there’s the shatter of glass overhead. He looks up automatically, only to jump back as Kirishima crashes into the ground, leaving a good-sized crater where he’d landed. He’s holding on tight to Bakugou, who’s hissing and thrashing like an angry cat, covered in nicks and scratches where Kirishima’s hardened skin had cut into him.
Kirishima slowly gets to his feet, letting go of Bakugou, then seems to notice Shouta for the first time. “Oh,” he says. “Sensei.”
“What -” Shouta shakes his head. “Where are Uraraka and Todoroki?”
“They -”
“They went out through the back,” Bakugou snaps, inspecting a particularly deep slash on his shoulder. “Uraraka used her Quirk to float both of them down. Should be here in a moment.”
As if on cue, Uraraka and Todoroki jog around the corner of the settling building, still somehow holding a conversation despite how they’d both been nearly pulverized by whatever the fuck just happened.
Shouta closes his eyes for a count of ten, then, opening them, herds his students away from the danger zone. Once they’re safely out of range of any falling debris - it must’ve been just that floor that collapsed, because the rest of the building, aside from the way it shuddered before, looks fine - he asks, “What was that?”
He can see Bakugou’s hackles rise. “The fuck are you looking at me for?” the kid asks, incredulous. There’s blood smeared across the bridge of his nose, and there’s an outline of clear skin around his eyes where his mask had been. The rest of his face is gray with concrete dust. “I didn’t do shit! All I was trying to do was get the fucking job done, but, no, this bastard -” and he stabs a finger at Kirishima, accusatory “- has to make everything difficult!”
“I asked you if you were feeling alright,” Kirishima says. “That’s literally all I did.”
“And I told you that I’m fine! It's not my fault that you didn’t believe me!”
“Well, you didn’t look fine!”
“Then stop fucking looking!” Bakugou rakes both bloody-knuckled hands through his hair and paces in a tight circle, muttering under his breath about how Kirishima shouldn’t even bother asking questions if he was immediately going to disagree with the answer.
Shouta waits for him to stop seething, then says, “I’m taking you to Recovery Girl.”
Bakugou’s head snaps up. He says, loudly, “No.” He crosses his arms and shakes his head, eyes narrowed. “I’m not even hurt.”
“Yes,” Kirishima says, gesturing to Bakugou’s entire body. “You kinda are.”
“Shut up!” Bakugou snaps. He’s defensive, all but bristling with spikes, and it's concerning because Shouta hasn’t seen him act like this in a while. “I don’t need your help! I don’t need anyone’s help! Just leave me alone!”
And, with that, he storms away.
After he gets an explanation as to what caused the building to collapse, Shouta sets out to track down Bakugou. You’d think it’d be easy, but, no. Apparently not. The kid can be scarily quiet when he wants to be, and Shouta is about to give up and scale a building to get a higher vantage point when he hears a voice say, softly, “Fuck.”
Ah, Shouta thinks, amused despite himself. There he is.
“Fuck,” Bakugou says again, and this time the curse is accompanied by a thud, like he’s just kicked a wall. Shouta creeps toward the sound of his voice, feeling that any sudden movements would just cause Bakugou to flee like a startled deer.
He opens his mouth to say Bakugou’s name, then freezes when Bakugou says, bitterly, “Useless.”
Ah. He’s still angry, then.
Shouta leans back against the wall and waits. He knows from experience that interrupting someone while they were in the middle of ranting was a good way to get a broken nose, and, while Bakugou would never be able to achieve such a feat against him, he doesn’t want to have to deal with any attempts to do so.
He can hear Bakugou walking back and forth, boots scraping against the pavement. “Useless,” he repeats, like he’s trying the word out. “Fucking useless.” And Shouta only has time to think, Wow, he must be actually pissed at Kirishima, before the kid says, “She’s fucking right. She’s always been right! You’re a worthless, stupid fuck-up, and you can’t do anything properly, you’re a monster and everyone fucking hates you. God-fucking-damnit, this stupid fucking Quirk!” There’s the familiar crackle of Bakugou’s explosions, and then the kid lets out a muted, wordless snarl of anger. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
His voice breaks, and that snaps Shouta out of his shock. He moves forward, hesitates, and then steps around the corner. “Bakugou?”
… To say that Bakugou freezes would be an understatement. He goes so still that he looks like he’s carved of stone, not even breathing as he stares at Shouta, wide-eyed. The only thing about him that moves is the blood dripping steadily from the cut across his nose.
“Bakugou,” Shouta says again. “It's alright. Everything is -”
Bakugou whispers, “I’m sorry,” and Shouta’s jaw slams shut so fast that he almost bites his tongue. “I’m sorry that I - nobody wants me, I’m sorry. I’m useless, why would anyone want me, I’m going to hurt you, you’re going to hurt me, and - and - fuck, I’m so selfish, I deserve it, I ruin everything, what is wrong with me?” He’s taking these awful, ragged-sounding breaths, and it's like the words are being yanked from his mouth, unwilling. He’s staring at Shouta with eyes hollowed out by fear, and he’s shaking as he says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know - I don’t -”
“Bakugou,” Shouta says, at a loss for words. After all that Bakugou has been through since the start of the school year, the fear in the kid’s voice shouldn’t surprise him, but he’s still caught off guard. Swallowing, he tries to think of what he could possibly say to make this situation better, but he comes up blank. Because Bakugou looks like he’s afraid of him, of the things he might say, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that.
Bakugou takes a step back, stumbling, and Shouta jolts forward on instinct, reaching out to steady him.
He knows the moment that he moves that he’s made the wrong choice, because Bakugou’s reaction is instantaneous - the second that Shouta reaches for him, Bakugou bolts.
It's predictable, almost, and he watches as the kid runs past him, faster than Shouta’s ever seen him move, and he knows that he could easily grab onto him, stop him and hold him down and cart him off to Recovery Girl like a prisoner of war, but he thinks of the pure, unfiltered fear in Bakugou’s eyes and finds that he can’t move. He can’t bring himself to scare Bakugou any more than he already has.
And so he stays still, held immobile by a force he cannot name, and watches as his student disappears from sight.