Chapter Text
Somewhere in a cafe:
“Hi. Are you Katsuki?” Deku said, perking up in the timber chair that fit the rustic aesthetic of the cafe, baritone jazz drifting out of the speakers overhead and mingling with the scent of freshly brewed coffee and old wood.
“Yeah. Bakugou Katsuki. Thanks, man. Stochastic processes are killing me.” He said with a chuckle he hoped came across as amiable.
“No problem. Do you have your previous graded papers?” Deku said, leaning over on his crossed arms and turning his head to imitate Katsuki’s perspective of the table, their heads more or less adjacent.
“This is last week’s quiz.” Katsuki supplied, the bag to his left revealing a four-page packet with a 34 on it. Katsuki had to stop himself from visibly cringing as he placed it on the table, noticing the subtle widening of his tutor’s eyes.
Deku’s hand stretched out and almost sheepishly slid the paper closer to himself as if to allow for Katsuki to stop him. He weaved through each paper.
“We can go through each question one by one. Is that good?” Deku said, looking up to make direct eye contact.
“Yeah.” Katsuki said. His palms were sweaty. He almost wanted to peel away when Deku looked at him. It was discomfiting; his eyes were too whole, almost.
“Here you’re only calculating the square of the one-step transition probability,” He said, pointing, “why?”
“Well, I thought there were just two steps.”
“That’s a common misconception, but it’s not quite correct. Since we’re dealing with an irreducible and aperiodic Markov chain, you need to account for the sum of the probabilities from all possible paths from state 1 to state 3 in two steps, including paths going through state 2 and state 4 as well, so then the transition matrix would look-”
The rest of the tutoring session went on like that, with Katsuki’s palms getting increasingly sweatier and his head increasingly more likely of taking a direct path to dropping out of the living world. After forty minutes, Deku had noticed that Katsuki’s responses were getting softer and less confident. Pulling back from the paper, Deku looked at Katsuki in concern and said, “We can end here for today, if you want.”
Katsuki looked conflicted. He knew he was supposed to be trying to improve, but each time Deku explained things after he answered incorrectly, things felt more hopeless and he got more annoyed with himself. He was worried his voice would break if he said anything, so Katsuki just nodded, looking down at his pencil.
“Wait here.” Deku said, his hand using the back of Katsuki’s chair as leverage as he passed.
Katsuki looked at the proof of their tutoring session—formulas in what was Deku’s sharp, assured handwriting and Katsuki’s bold, meandering letters and numbers as he redid each problem. He would admit things were much clearer, but he was only catching up, never mind what they were learning now and would be moving on to learn later, soon. Gosh, he was so pathetic to have let things get like this. What would his parents say?
A freckled hand set down a cup in front of him.
“I got you a hot chocolate,” Deku said, teeth showing in his smile, “and we can split the chocolate croissant.”
Katsuki was taken aback at the oddly nice gesture, taking the drink and half-croissant with a customary “Thanks.”
“Are you getting paid to tutor me?” He hadn’t stopped himself from asking.
Deku looked surprised mid-sip into his hot milk, “No?”
“Why did you get me this? I’m not going to owe you sweets in the future, for the record.”
Deku laughed. “So suspicious. You don’t have to repay me, though. Even if I wouldn’t mind receiving sweets in the future, for the record.”
Katsuki narrowed his eyes then scoffed into his hot chocolate.
As Deku took his last bite of his croissant, he jotted down his number on the wrapper and slid it over to Katsuki. “Text me your schedule. When do you want to meet again?”
“Why don’t you text me your schedule and let me know?” Katsuki said, personally affronted by his show of initiative.
Deku levelled him with a look before saying, “Monday at 11:00 AM, then?”
“No, I have Political Science.”
He raised his eyebrow.
“I’ll let you know.” Katsuki said, begrudgingly.
“Great. See you.” Deku said before rushing out of the cafe.
“What a weirdo.” Katsuki mumbled to himself, smiling into his tasty hot chocolate.