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Katsuki and Ochako’s romance starts softly.
It starts when she sees him barking at Kaminari to leave her ‘ridiculously sugary, diabetes-inducing’ cereal alone. She sees him glare and bluster, before purposefully placing the bright yellow and orange cereal on the top most shelf, where all of his things were. Nobody touched that corner. Which meant nobody would touch her cereal.
“Why did you do that?” Ochako asks shyly, later, on the way to class.
Bakugo tchs and turns his head from her. A smile tugs at her cheeks.
“Do you secretly have a sweet tooth? I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
He takes the bait. Bakugo whirls and pins her with a glare. The red over his nose bridge makes it significantly less intimidating. Not that Bakugo is scary, not really. It makes Ochako think for a second that maybe he really does just like sweet food.
“Dammit, it’s your favourite isn’t it? Kaminari can get his own damn food.”
“Oh,” Ochako says. Her face is warm. She didn’t know he knew that. How long had he known that? How long had Bakugo been paying attention to her?
As if he can hear her thoughts, Bakugo stuffs his hands in his pockets and slouches past. He doesn’t say anything else about it, but she can see the tips of his ears are red. Like he’s embarrassed.
***
It begins softly.
Ochako catches him feeding a stray cat when the class is on the way back from a grocery store run. He’s half hidden in an alley, crouching over the creature with bits of jerky in his hand.
“Are you supposed to feed cats jerky?” she says, coming to kneel beside Bakugo.
He doesn’t flinch, but his jaw sort of clicks to the side. It’s the only tell that she’s startled him. She wonders how much control he’s had to have, growing up with a quirk where one wrong move or a jump scare could fire literal explosions from his palms. “I dunno, Round Face, you got any better ideas?”
Ochako doesn’t—she sort of hums and rests her chin in a hand. They both kneel there, the cat growing more and more bold in it’s acceptance of food. By the time all of the jerky is gone from Bakugo’s palm, the stray animal has grown confident enough to nudge its head under his palm.
“She likes you,” Ochako grins.
Bakugo snorts. “She thinks I like her.” His hand scratches confidently under the cat’s chin.
“Hmmm,” she teases, “And that would be the wrong impression, of course.”
He turns to Ochako. Their knees are almost touching. Vaguely, she realises he smells of peppermint and fresh deoderant. It’s nice. He smells nice. “I don’t like anyone.”
Her grin widens. “That’s a lie.”
“Of fucking course it’s not. Have you met me? Your precious boyfriend is my mortal enemy.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
Ochako nudged his knee. He was staring intently at the cat. “You don’t really think he’s your enemy, do you?”
“…No.”
“I know a few other people you like too.”
“Oh, do you now?”
Ochako didn’t say anything. She held the smile on her face close to her chest, like a secret.
***
“Oi, Cheeks,” Bakugo says. He’s scowling down at her from over the back of the couch.
Ochako flutters her eyes, sticky from sleep. Without her noticing, it had gotten dark. Bakugo hovers over her. All she can see is the glowing of his eyes. She’s never noticed before, but behind the scowling and deadly intensity, Bakugo is beautiful. Or maybe it’s because of that.
His hand touches her cheek. Her eyes flutter a little more. He’s warm—incredibly so. “Are you always this warm?” she murmurs, leaning into his palm. She can understand why the cat had leaned into him so incessently. He’s comfortable. “Maybe you’re getting sick.”
“Hah? Uraraka, something’s wrong with you.”
“Whaddya mean…” she trails off. She wants to keep looking at his face, but her eyes are so heavy. There’s an uncomfortable pressure coming from her skull pressing outwards, so she grabs Bakugo’s hand decidedly and puts it on her forehead, pressing it down as close to her skin as possible.
It lessens the throbbing, like a weighted blanket. God, she wishes she had a weighted blanket. Blinking her eyes slightly, she can somehow still see the incredulity on Bakugo’s face in the dim lighting.
“Where the hell are your friends? Shouldn’t they be taking care of you?”
“Whaddya mean?” Ochako slurs, “You’re my friend. Right, Bakugo?”
He pauses. She can hear him curse under his breath, before his hand disappears. She whines at the loss of pressure, before he pops his head back over the couch. “I’ll be right back,” he says it like a warning, “Don’t move.”
She couldn’t if she wanted to. Her limbs are heavy, heavy in a way that doesn’t compute in her tired brain. Ochako had an anti-gravity quirk, nothing was heavy for her.
Two minutes later, Bakugo has a glass of cold water and a handful of pills that are all disturbingly large. They look like the old nausea tablets she used to have to take before she had access to UA and it’s hero support branch. Her current tablets tasted sort of like orange flavoured throat lozenges.
The medicine Bakugo gave her did not. They scratch against her throat, making Ochako have to chug the glass of water quickly enough her head spins. Once done, she leans her head back against the arm of the couch with a groan.
Bakugo tsks loudly. His hand is back on her forehead, pressing into her the way she’d made him do earlier. He pulls up a blanket and practically tucks her in. The lumpy communal couch has never been more comfortable.
“Sing to me, Bakugo,” she tries to say.
She can’t tell, but she’s sure his face goes red. “Fuck off,” he whisper-yells, as if he can notice the way her eyelids keep dragging down. Ochako laughs, or at least tries to, before the pull of sleep takes her over.
When she wakes up, Bakguo is gone. Sato and Tsuyu are there, sitting on the edge of the couch with worried expressions on their faces.
“Are you okay?” Tsuyu asks, holding her hand.
Ochako nods blearily. Her head is killing her. Sato hands her a bowl of soup. “I didn’t know what he meant when he said he needed emergency soup, but you must be feeling pretty lousy, Uraraka,” he says, thick eyebrows slanted in concern.
Tsuyu keeps holding her hand. The soup is delicious—Ochako wants to tell Sato that, but the second the bottom of the bowl is visible, her eyelids start drooping all over again. “We’ll let you rest,” Tsuyu says.
Ochako nods again, snuggling deeper into the couch with her hands balled into the blanket placed over her.
It’s only later, when she wakes up again feeling decidedly more lucid, that she realises it’s not a blanket at all. It’s a black hoodie. It smells like peppermint.
***
Bakugo and Ohako get partnered up for a theoretical combat assignment. It involves public speaking and a presentation, where they spend an entire class-allocated hour bickering over whether to use slideshow effects.
It’s not until Bakugo rocks up to Ochako’s dorm room that same afternoon that they get anything done. He sits in her room with his back against her bed and he suits it—he suits how her room somehow softens him. He suits how the sun filters through her window to make his eyes look carmine instead of murderous. He suits picking at the pompoms attached by a threadbare string on her light pink blanket.
“This is horrible quality,” he complains in a rare moment of distractedness while she finishes an equation. She remembers, she will always remember this, because they had lucked out on their partnership assignment, what with the theory behind combining each other’s quirks, and Bakugo had been gloating about it all day. It was rare for him to be so distracted with this type of topic.
She’d never tell him but—he reminded her a lot of Midoriya like that. “I know,” Ochako says, erasing at a mistake.
“If you know, then why did you buy it?”
“I didn’t. I made it.”
Bakugo goes silent. She doesn’t know if it’s the idea she can crochet that’s shocking, or the fact that she’s bad at it. There’s plenty of lumps and loose threads, and Ochako has worried enough at the material that there are uneven holes everywhere. It’s a comfort item, one that has weathered plenty of storms during their time at U.A.
“You got that question wrong.”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yeah, Cheeks, you did—my quirk isn’t that precise, if we did that I would fling you across the building.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“Hah? Why the hell would that be the point—you still need to be intact by the end!”
“Well, this is just theory isn’t it? Maybe our theory is that I wouldn’t be intact by the end.”
“Cheeks. Why—what… No. If we’re doing this, it’s gonna be an awesome as hell combo move that we’re going to start practicing the second you stop using that super-brain of yours to get equations wrong.”
“Was…was that an insult? Or a compliment?”
“The equation’s right, isn’t it?”
“But I thought it ‘wasn’t the point’, hm? You’re awfully fickle, Bakugo.”
“Fickle! Sorry I don’t want you to die.”
“Theoretically.”
“What?”
“Theoretically, you don’t want me to die.”
“…Don’t be stupid, Cheeks.”
***
By the time winter comes around, it’s not soft anymore. They’re practicing their new combo moves—“Theoretical, my ass,”—with a bang, with the occasional vomit—“It’s natural, Bakugo, you’ll get used to it,”— and with the hard panes of his body pistoning her across the training grounds.
Aizawa watches silently, aware that they are too old to save from any mistakes, but knowing they are too young for him not to hover anyway. There’s not much he could do if they messed up. They all trust in their training, in the fact that there will be no Aizawa fail-safe when they graduate later that year.
Bakugo has a glint in his eyes, one that Ochako can’t distinguish between adrenaline and glee. He holds her elbows and squeezes her waist and is suddenly comfortable with his hands gliding down her suit and—and—it’s scandalous! Aizawa is there! Her heart is in her throat, and it feels nothing like her quirk. It feels nothing like the speed she reaches across Bakugo’s back.
They start calling the move ‘whiplash’—appropriately named after what landed them both in the infirmary after testing it out for the first time. When the move is complete, Aizawa gathers a mini-exhibition together of the other classes and teachers, and Bakugo preens at the end, their chests heaving with the exhiliration and his smile so wide.
His palm is braced confidently at the small of her back. As if it’s natural to be there.
Ochako suddenly can’t catch her breath.
***
One day, there’s sunflowers sitting on her desk, in a pretty glass vase that she doesn’t own. No one says anything when they visit her room, even when the flowers are still fresh, never wilting because they get replaced over and over. Ochako doesn’t know where they’re from—she doesn’t.
Midoriya gives her a look she can see out of the corner of her eye. Like he recognises the vase. Like he knows the signature cut of the stems. He never says anything. She almost wishes he said something.
Bakugo, whenever he comes to her room, it now standard, normal, everyday, for him to stop by with a textbook she left behind, or a question he needs answered, or an idea they want brainstormed, scrutinises the flowers every time.
She never sees him fuss over them. So, it must’nt be him. It can’t be Bakugo. He uses her ugly, crochet blanket as if it’s his whenever he comes over, and berates her for thinking chocolate tastes better if it hasn’t been refridgerated. He flicks her hair out of her face and kicks her legs out of his way, takes up her space like it’s his, starts her holding her hand like it’s his.
But she lets him though. She lets him. And so the flowers change every couple of days. She starts wearing the hoodie she never gave back that time she was sick.
***
Ochako kisses him softly. Her fairy lights in her room illuminate the tender creasing of his brows, the way he leans down to chase her lips. Her crochet blanket lies across their laps, his hand clasping hers firmly underneath it.
“It’s about damn time, Cheeks.”
She flushes. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know how hard I’ve been crushing on you?”
So then maybe it wasn’t a soft start after all.