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Thunder wakes Katsuki from a dead sleep, and he couldn’t be more pissed off about it.
He’s not even afraid of storms, but the loud bang shaking his entire apartment was enough to make him think that they were under attack by someone with a quirk similar to his own, and like hell is he going to let some shitty copycat extra move in on him.
But it’s just a stupid storm, the kind where the rain roars outside of the window and makes him wonder if he’ll wake again later to water dribbling down onto his head.
If only there could be a second time, that is.
Katsuki lays in bed on his back with his eyes closed as he wills himself to go back to sleep, but his heart still patters in his chest from being startled, and every time he thinks he might ease into it, another strike reminds him that once he’s up, he’s up.
This is bullshit.
Shouto always sleeps like a fuckin’ baby when the weather sucks. You’d think some giant storm god rocked him to sleep with how peaceful he gets, but then again, Shouto can sleep through just about anything.
Storms, car rides, lectures, press conferences, it doesn’t matter. He and his little snot bubble are legendary, and it pisses him off.
If he was half the bastard he used to be, he might go slam a few pot lids together outside of his door just to make things even, but then Shouto would be cranky, and the only thing worse than being woken up by a stupid storm is a cranky Todoroki.
Katsuki gets up anyway.
No, no, he’s not going to bother his roommate. He’s not an idiot, but if he’s going to be awake all night anyway, staying in bed and kicking his sheets around isn’t going to make him feel better. If anything, it’d only piss him off more.
He grabs a pair of sweatpants off the back of a chair and slips them on with a one, two hop that isn’t nearly as graceful as he prides himself to be, and he sloughs off into the apartment to find something better to do with his time.
The kitchen makes the most sense.
It’s fuck all in the morning, which makes it snack’o’clock for him, and if he’s going to miss his precious sleep, he’s at least not going to be late for that.
But what to eat…
He’s kind of in the mood for some cake.
And he could totally bake a cake right now.
A cake would be awesome.
But that’s a fuck ton of cleanup he isn’t about to take on in the dark or in the morning, and he’s heard bad things about baking during a storm.
Hm.
He scratches his head and stands there on the fake wood paneling and thinks about the cake that cannot be, and he almost does some loser shit like snap his fingers when he comes up with a plan B.
Mug cakes are a thing.
That’s one dish minus the spoon, and if he fucks it up because of the weather, it’s just a mug cake. No big deal.
He’s kind of a genius for this.
He pulls out his phone to find a recipe, but with a long, frustrated exhale he sees that both the wifi and the cell towers are down.
Perfect.
Fucking perfect.
They’ve got the kind of technology that can beam heroes across the battlefield around like pinball machine marble, but he’s still a victim of stupid shit like no signal.
It’s just a mug cake.
How hard can it be?
So Katsuki, as he has always done for most of his life, sucks it up and figures shit out. He doesn’t need an instruction manual. He’s one of the top ten heroes in the world, and his intelligence marker is pretty damn high compared to the other losers he graduated with, and even if he didn’t have a big ass chart with his name on it, he’d still be the smartest person in this apartment. In this building actually.
The fact that none of their neighbors can figure out how the recycling system works blows his mind. Food waste in red. Plastic in blue. Glass in green. Non recyclables in yellow. And for god’s sake take the caps off the soda bottles before you stick them in.
A gerbil could get that right.
Idiots.
Katsuki grumbles to himself as he gathers everything he needs to make a cake.
First thing’s first, it probably needs flour. He’s not sure how much, but he pours what looks to be the right amount into one of their coffee mugs until his finely tuned instincts tell him he’s got it right.
Mug cakes are usually chocolate, so he mixes in some cocoa powder, and then he adds a little sugar because on its own cocoa powder tastes like shit and cakes are supposed to be sweet.
This is so easy a baby could do it.
He adds a little salt because you can’t have something sweet without it (just look at him), and then a little baking soda because it feels right.
Probably.
So that’s the dry ingredients.
It needs a binder, so he cracks an egg into the cup, and cakes need fat, so a little oil, and then he decides it’s not wet enough so he pours in a little milk on top of that, and mixes until what he ends up with looks like a coffee cup full of mud.
Perfect.
Probably.
Whatever, it’ll work out. He’s got this in the bag.
And now he just has to cook it.
Somehow.
Fuck.
Well, obviously a mug cake goes into the microwave. He knows that much, but for how long? A recipe would have been pretty damn nice right about now, but that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?
A minute feels wrong.
Five feels like an explosion.
He stands there for a solid thirty seconds thinking of every food he’s ever nuked in this piece of garbage and decides that two and a half is probably good enough. If it catches on fire, he’ll know better next time. If it comes out mushy, he’ll just stick it back in.
Problem solved.
The sound of the microwave opening and closing is loud enough to make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but if the thunder can’t even get Shouto out of bed, this certainly won’t.
This is nothing.
Even the whirring of the motor as it spins his mug around can barely be heard over the sound of the rain beating down on the building outside, so Katsuki waits, his eyes locked onto the backlit door while his own brilliance manifests before him.
He’s the best at being up at night, and the whole world should know it.
With a ding, the microwave stops, and he opens the door to a steaming mug of chocolate cake that pops slightly at the surface.
He gives it a minute before reaching in, gasps when his fingers burn on the handle, and then he sucks out the pain while the steam seemingly mocks him from the inside.
Kiss my ass, mug cake, you’re going down.
This is it. His midnight cake is ready, and then once he eats it, he can maybe go back to bed and hope the storm lets up long enough to let him get a few hours of sleep in.
He grabs a spoon from one of the drawers and stabs it in, breaking through a spongey, almost foam-like layer of chocolate down into the rest of the cake below. It doesn’t seem raw, which bodes well, so he removes a scoop for the first bite.
It burns his tongue, scorching and merciless, and he pants out and hisses unceremoniously to try to cool it down before he loses all of his taste buds.
The flavor that follows could only be likened to dog shit.
With a disgusted blegh he lets the mixture fall out of his mouth into the sink, and he spits over it to get rid of the aftertaste.
Well that was fucking pointless.
“What are you doing?”
Katsuki startles and turns around to see Shouto standing there only a few steps away in his pretty boy, fancy pants, perfectly pressed pajamas tailored to his ankles but still hanging over his wrists. All he’s missing is a long sleeping cap and a mimimi speech bubble to put the icing on the cake.
Loser.
“What are you doing up?”
“I smelled cake,” Shouto says.
Unbelievable.
They’ve got a fifty piece orchestra going on outside, and the little bastard only stirred from his precious beddy-bye time because he smelled cake.
Of course he did.
“Well it’s no fuckin’ cake, I’ll tell you that.”
Shouto approaches him with a confused frown, and Katsuki passes him the spoon to try it himself.
“Don’t burn yourself,” he says. “It’s hot.”
“That would be impossible.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he grumbles.
“But thank you for being so considerate of my well-being,” Shouto says, and Katsuki scowls and slides the mug away from him, revoking his permission to try his mug cake.
Shouto reaches over him in a way that reminds him that yes, he is the youngest of his siblings, and scoops out a heaping pile of brown solidified sludge.
Katsuki doesn’t have to explain exactly what it looks like, and based on the three consecutive blinks from Shouto, he doesn’t either.
Shouto looks at him, holding eye contact while he blows the steam off of it.
“You’re not funny.”
“I don’t want to burn my tongue.”
“Fuck off.”
Shouto’s mouth twitches, giving away his amusement behind his mask of sleep-heavy eyes and pillow mussed hair, and it’s almost cute if he doesn’t think about it too much.
If he thinks about it too much, if becomes something he has to think about, and fuck him for rolling out of bed for cake.
Who does he think he is?
Shouto somehow stuffs the entire bite in his moutth without covering his lips in chocolate and crumbs, and Katsuki makes a note to never offer him a bite of something that actually tastes good if he wants to keep any of it for himself.
Good news. This doesn’t.
He frowns and shakes his head.
“Well?”
“This doesn’t taste like cake.”
“Yeah, I said it didn’t,” he says. “Tastes like shit, doesn’t it.”
Shouto nods and sticks the spoon back into the mug, resigned to not have any more. “What did you do to it?”
“Now why do you think I did something to it,” he says, annoyed. “I followed the instructions, didn’t I?”
“Did you?” Shouto says. “What did they say?”
“I dunno, I didn’t look them up,” he says, and Shouto looks at him. “The phones are down.”
He nods in understanding. “I see.”
“So that was a fucking waste,” he says. “Can’t a guy just get up out of bed and eat a little cake when he wants to?”
“I share the sentiment.”
He exhales and leans back against the counter and folds his arms across his chest. “Well now what?”
Thunder rolls again, and both of them look towards the window in time to see the bright flash.
“Has it been storming long?”
“All fucking night.”
“Hmm.”
Katsuki sucks his teeth. “Lucky.”
Shouto looks at him, surprised, but he thankfully doesn’t try to make him say he can’t sleep when it’s that goddamned noisy out or that he’s jealous that he can.
“We have other mugs,” Shouto says.
“Yeah.”
“Would you like to try again?”
Katsuki’s eyebrows raise. “It’s probably gonna suck again.”
“If you would rather try to go back to sleep instead, that’s fine with me, but I’ve decided that I would like to have some cake before bed.”
“You’ve decided.”
“Yes.”
Baby.
Katsuki takes a deep breath and stands up with a light shrug of his shoulders. “Well, fuck it. If we’re up, we’re up.”
“I think it needed more sugar.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“I’m positive it did.”
Katsuki grumbles to himself as he retrieves three more mugs from the cabinet. With Shouto getting involved, there’s no way he’s getting it right on the second try.
It’s not the worst way they’ve ever spent a night together.
All those other losers can’t even imagine.
Heh.
Shouto looks so fucking goofy when he eats something that doesn’t taste good, and it takes five more tries before they finally find one worth fighting over a spoon for.
And just like that, Katsuki can’t remember what he was so pissed off about.
At some point it stops raining.