Chapter Text
Kaminari falls in love on the brink of death, when a baseball bat decapitates the head of the Crawler going for his jugular and reveals an angel through the spray of blood.
“The fuck are you doing out here if you can’t defend yourself?” the angel shouts.
“Um,” Kaminari starts, painfully aware that he’s splayed out on the ground with the Crawler’s still-twitching body only a few feet away, covered in blood and dirt from weeks of travelling on foot. Kaminari licks his lips. “I got lonely,” he admits. “My uh, my buddy went out looking for food one day and he…he didn’t come back.”
The angel raises one of his eyebrows and Kaminari stares at the sharp, shaved line that can’t be anything other than aesthetic. Nothing like the rugged, sewn-up scar on his cheek.
“How long?” Kaminari’s savior asks simply, swinging his bloodied bat onto his shoulder. A few beads fly off the end with the motion and land on Kaminari’s cheek like tears.
Kaminari could lie. Shinsou had always told him to. Insisted that in their fucked up world it was better to keep as many cards close to your chest as possible, but Kaminari has never been a good liar and Shinsou isn’t here and he’s running on little sleep, less food, and crashing adrenaline, so he says,
“Two years.”
Kaminari pretends his voice didn’t crack over the admission.
The angel doesn’t make a sympathetic face. Just hums and lets his eyes trail carefully over Kaminari. And he doesn’t know why this boy’s silent attention feels like rain in the desert but it does, so he sits quietly and lets himself be examined. To his left, the Crawler’s body finally stills.
“Any bites?” the angel finally asks, hand tensing over the grip of his bat.
Kaminari shakes his head. “None.”
“Prove it.”
Kaminari blinks up at the angel, watching the firm set of his mouth for any sign of a smirk or a smile. A psych!
“Strip,” he explains, nudging the end of his bat towards Kaminari’s face. “Or I fucking leave you out here. Those are your only two options. I’m not taking you fucking anywhere with me if you’re gonna keel over and rot the second I turn my back.”
Kaminari holds up his hands in surrender. “I get it, man. I do,” he says. “Just…give me a second. I’ve got layers.”
The angel lowers his bat, then crosses his arms expectantly.
Kaminari lets out a nervous breath, peering up and down the empty, overgrown residential street he’d been chased onto- cars covered in dust and grime, houses tall and quiet and full of broken windows or fire damage or both. Not a soul in sight besides the two of them and whoever the Crawler dead on the gravel used to be.
Kaminari reaches for the hem of his shirt and, one by one, begins to peel off his layers. The fabric clings uncomfortably to a wound on his stomach, the line long and thin and not at all bite-shaped. Other scabs flake off from his elbows and knees as he goes. Old, childish wounds that Kaminari always feels stupid for crying over. He’s seen worse. He’s had worse. There’s just something about a gentle scrape that could’ve come from a playground accident that aches more without a family to fret over it.
Kaminari moves the slowest when taking off his shoes, fingers hesitating over the laces in a way that they didn’t over his waistband. The angel must notice because he says,
“Nothing’s coming. And if something does, I’ll kill it.”
It strikes Kaminari like a punch to the gut that he trusts this man- this boy, hardly any older than Kaminari in spite of the way he seems to have his shit together- but he does.
Trust isn’t something he’s felt in a long time, but maybe that’s just what happens when someone saves your life and then watches you bare your body because they want to take you somewhere safe. It makes something squirm in Kaminari’s stomach, so he tells a joke to ward off the feeling.
“You like playing hero, huh?”
The angel scowls.
“Shut the fuck up. And get a move on already.”
“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying,” Kaminari appeases, stepping out of his socks and quickly showing off the unbitten, if not unblemished, skin of his feet, jumping quickly back into the safety of his tennis shoes.
“You’re clean,” the angel says and Kaminari already knew that but it’s still a relief to hear. It feels like a prayer.
You’re clean. You’re clean.
“C’mon.”
“Where are we going?” Kaminari asks, hastily shoving his arms through the sleeves of his jacket as he catches up with the angel. “And what’s your name? I can’t keep thinking of you as-”
The angel raises an eyebrow when Kaminari doesn’t finish, mouth curling up in the barest hint of a smirk. Like maybe, in a different life, he would have laughed at Kaminari’s slip up.
“Thinking of me as what?” he presses.
“Nothing,” Kaminari lies. “Ugly. Where are we going?”
The angel scoffs.
“You’re lucky I’m taking you anywhere with that attitude, Blondie.”
Kaminari smiles. This guy is so full of it. “You’re blond, too,” he points out, glad that the angel’s red eyes are scanning carefully over the street, giving Kaminari the opportunity to scan over his companion, instead. “And I do feel pretty lucky, actually. Like, jackpot lucky. Unless you’re planning to eat me.”
The angel paused his scanning to roll his eyes.
“You’re not, right?” Kaminari asks, walking backwards now to keep his companion and the rest of the quiet street in sight. Just in case something tried to sneak up on them from behind. “You seem too noble for cannibalism.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” the angel says.
Kaminari shrugs, smiling. “You saved my life. You can’t be too awful.”
“You’re gonna trip over a rock trying to watch my back,” the angel shoots back, mouth twisting into something between annoyance and gratitude, “so I guess I can take you back to my base. You can’t be too stupid.”
“I’m not!” Kaminari agrees. “Thanks, man. That’s super cool of-“
Kaminari’s heel catches on a loose piece of gravel and he falls on his ass in the middle of the road. Above him, the angel laughs and the sound is rough and gravelly and wonderful.
“Dumbass,” he says, swiping over his mouth like he could erase any trace of his humor, “I told you you’d fuckin’ trip.”
“Well,” Kaminari starts, swiping the loose pebbles from his palms before pointing both thumbs at himself, “that’s classic Kaminari. Pleased to meet ya.”
The angel rolls his eyes again, then offers out a bloodstained hand to lift Kaminari from the ground.
“Bakugou,” he says.
“Bakugou,” Kaminari repeats, holding tight to his hand. “You won’t regret this!”
Bakugou purses his lips, giving Kaminari a searing once over. “Yeah, I’m sure I won’t,” he says.
Kaminari chooses to ignore the gentle sarcasm in his tone.