Chapter Text
Mornings always began the same way. Not out of habit, but inevitability, like gravity pulling him down into it. The metallic whine of the espresso machine coiled up through the quiet like a scream held under water. The tamp-tamp-tamp of the grounds packed down like a ritual, like he was burying something with every press of his wrist. The scent of burnt beans clung to the back of his throat, ghosting through the fibres of his apron. Not sharp enough to be fresh, not old enough to forget. No matter how many times he soaked it, no matter how long he left it in vinegar or baking soda or under the punishing spray of the industrial sink, it stayed.
Katsuki Bakugou stood behind the counter in a half-lit café in a nowhere corner of Musutafu, staring at the lazy spiral of black coffee filling a glass pot, watching it pool and swirl like ink. The floor beneath his ugly non-slip shoes was cold concrete. The ceiling above was a patchwork of exposed beams and ventilation pipes that wheezed and sighed with the building's age. One of the flickering amber lights buzzed over the counter like a dying insect. It cast long shadows over the register, the mismatched mugs, the wire rack of day-old pastries no one ever bought because they'd been dogshit lately. The baker was in the hospital, or some shit, and their manager had been trying to fill in, hands full of flour and no clue what the hell she was doing. Bakugou didn’t ask. Didn’t care. Not his job. Not his problem.
He liked opening shifts. The stillness. The breath between night and morning. That fragile hush before the first customer stumbled in, eyes bleary, voice crusted with sleep, demanding caffeine like it was blood. He liked the hiss of steam when it hit the milk. Liked the weight of the portafilter in his hand, the violence of it, the control. Something he could command. Something that obeyed.
He shifted his jaw and felt the muscle tick. Twenty-seven years old and already tired. Not physically. Not really. It was deeper. Structural. Like his bones remembered something he didn’t want to. He ran a thumb along the chipped edge of the counter. His name tag caught the light. Bakugou K. Just that. No title. Not Senior Developer. Not Team Lead. Just a stripped-down version of himself, small and blunt and quiet, like the rest of him now.
He used to be sharp, dangerous. Something.
He could still see it. The old world. The one he’d bled for. A corporate penthouse in Tokyo fifty floors up, where the walls were clean and white like bone, where the air stank of ambition. The buzz of fluorescent lights never stopped. Neither did the clicking of keys nor the murmured strategy calls in corner offices. The entire place ran on caffeine and pressure, and Katsuki had thrived in it for a while. He was twenty-one when they hired him. Fresh out of university, suit pressed so hard you could’ve cut yourself on the creases. Eyes narrowed like crosshairs. When he walked through those revolving glass doors for the first time, his chest had swelled with the kind of pride that tasted like metal.
He’d made it. He’d said as much. Told anyone who asked and anyone who didn’t. “Five years. I’ll be running this fucking place.” His voice back then had a bite to it.
His mother screamed when the offer letter came. His father hugged him and cried. Even Deku, stupid Deku with his soft eyes and tireless optimism, had smiled like the sun breaking through clouds. “Kacchan,” he’d said, honest and annoying and proud, “I knew you’d do great.”
Katsuki had believed it. Of course, he had. He always believed in the violence of his own ambition.
And for a time, it was good. He threw himself into the work the way some men threw themselves into war; ruthless, hungry, brilliant. Fourteen-hour days, seven-day weeks, no breaks, no hesitation. He wrote code like it was scripture. His mind moved like fire. They noticed. The promotions came. His name started to circulate in the late-night Slack messages, the whispered meetings behind closed doors. “Bakugou's a monster,” they said. “Bakugou doesn’t sleep.” “Bakugou cleaned up the whole front-end in a night.” He felt like a myth in the making.
But myths were only pretty from a distance. Up close, they rotted.
The cracks started small. Unseen. Hairline fractures behind the eyes. Projects stacked one over the other until they blurred together, indistinguishable. Victories stopped feeling like anything. Just another ticket closed. Just another feature shipped. Just another “Thanks for the quick turnaround” in a thread he didn’t remember starting.
He stared at screens until the code looked like noise. The cursor blinked steadily. Sometimes he’d stare at it so long he thought he could hear it, like a pulse in a body already dead. Click. Click. Click. The managers loved his output. “Reliable.” “Efficient.” Never innovative. Never brilliant. They didn’t want ideas. They wanted meat that typed.
No one spoke their mind, not really. You smiled, or you got marked “difficult.” You stayed late, or you were “not a team player.” You bled quietly. That was the rule.
Every morning on the train, he’d catch his reflection in the window. He'd been losing a little weight lately; no time to go to the gym with Kirishima. Skin too pale, shadows under his eyes like bruises, a stupid tie choking his throat. He’d stare and think, I’m going to die like this. Upright. Invisible. Chained to a desk, eulogized by Outlook.
He quit on a grim, wet, bastard of a Monday in March that seemed to have it out for him from the start, like the universe had circled the date on a little celestial calendar and scrawled across it in red pen: Make Katsuki’s life hell :)
The rain began halfway through his morning run. Not a gentle, poetic drizzle - the sideways, slapping kind of rain that hit like a grudge. It came on without warning, seeping through the mesh of his shoes and plastering his shirt to his spine in under a minute. The sky didn’t even bother pretending to lighten; it just rolled over gray and pissed all over the city while he dragged himself up the last hill, scowling into the wind, earbuds shorting out in his ears. By the time he got home, he felt like a drowned rat.
He stepped inside, peeling off soaked layers, half-blind from sweat and rain, and headed straight for his kitchen... only to find that his overpriced, stainless-steel, limited-edition espresso machine, which had previously functioned as a minor god in his morning routine, had decided to die overnight. The LED display blinked red, taunting him. A flicker. A hiss. Nothing. He jabbed buttons, cursed it out loud, tried to unplug and replug it with all the grace of a man on the verge of spiritual collapse. Nothing worked. No coffee that morning. No big deal. He'd get coffee from the stupidly expensive place near the station, even though their Americano tasted like ass.
Then the sock situation. Somehow, in the chaos of the weekend, which had involved an emergency server migration and two constantly pinging Slack channels, he’d forgotten laundry existed. He had worn his last clean pair during his run, and now they were waterlogged. In a moment of naked, teeth-gritting defeat, he shoved his bare feet into his dress shoes and left the apartment like a goddamn sociopath. Leather on skin. No barrier. Just him, his skin, and the echo of every poor decision he’d ever made squelching through Marunouchi like a walking resignation letter.
And that was all before eight-thirty.
By the time he dragged himself through the double glass doors, he was already halfway flayed. His clothes clung to him like wet paper, soaked from the thunder-pissing rain that had turned the streets into greasy rivers and his commute into punishment. Every footstep hit the polished office tile with a squelch, each one a moist accusation. His leather shoes suctioned and peeled from the floor with a humiliating shlipk… shlipk… shlipk, announcing his arrival like a man already defeated.
His umbrella had turned traitor three blocks from the station, its bent ribs flailing like broken fingers as the wind gutted it sideways. His hair stuck in chaotic wet spikes to his forehead, resisting every comb of his fingers. His button-down, a pale blue now darkened and translucent, adhered to his back like a second skin peeled from a corpse, cold and clinging and slick with sweat and rain and commuter rot.
Then the final fuck-you: his laptop bag strap snapped the moment he stepped into the lobby, flinging the contents in a slow-motion across the polished floor. A tide of charger cables, USB sticks, the ruined husk of a granola bar, and his notebook, pages warped, ink bled into sad blue veins, spread like a crime scene. The security guard didn’t even look up. No one offered to help. Just the low hum of elevator jazz and the scent of burnt coffee filtering from the café kiosk as he scrambled on hands and knees, wet knee-prints marking his path.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Again. And again. A relentless, insectile vibration of anxiety. Notifications stacked like a wall collapsing: Slack pings from people he didn’t like, calendar updates from meetings he didn’t care about, a LinkedIn message from a recruiter with the smile of a wolf. One message stood out: 9:45 am – Alignment Sync + OKR Refocus. His lip curled. The title alone made him want to find something sharp and bury it in his thigh just to get out of it.
Upstairs, the air conditioning was set to corporate cryogenic. His skin goosebumped instantly, the damp fabric of his shirt freezing to him in a fresh new hell of discomfort. The lights overhead buzzed in a migraine-registering pitch, not just bright but searing, strobing off the floor tiles like ice-white daggers. Everything smelled sterile, fake-lemon and toner and stale ambition.
He hadn’t even sat down yet, and already, someone had scheduled a six-thirty sync.
Tanaka.
The war criminal of middle management. A man who'd mastered the dark art of saying nothing with so many syllables it created the illusion of strategy. Now here Katsuki sat, spine stiff, thighs aching, a headache blooming behind his eyes like mould, in a glass-walled conference room that felt like a pressure cooker built by Ikea. His chair gave an incessant rubbery skeeek whenever he shifted, each tiny movement punished with an acoustic whimper.
The sun was low now, throwing dirty gold light through the west-facing windows, bleaching the whiteboard behind Tanaka into an overexposed smear. The air was stagnant, too still, the vents pumping in freeze-dried oxygen that tasted faintly of plastic and printer fume. His fists curled beneath the conference table, nails digging crescent moons into his palms.
Tanaka kept talking.
“…holistic restructuring,” he intoned with the solemnity of a priest performing last rites. “Team-wide scalability. Long-term cultural realignment.” His hands made meaningless arcs in the air, slicing through empty phrases with surgical precision. His teeth were too white. His PowerPoint, projected behind him, was a migraine: gradients, bullet points, corporate clipart smiling through charts of despair.
Katsuki blinked slowly. Pain built behind his right eye in rhythmic pulses, each syllable from Tanaka’s mouth syncing with the throb. Restructuring. Pulse. Realignment. Pulse. Agile ecosystem. Fucking pulse.
He counted ceiling tiles to keep himself from imagining what Tanaka’s voice would sound like gurgling on broken teeth. One tile. Two. Thirteen. Thirty-four. He fixated on a water stain above the fire sprinkler, brown and shaped like a ragged continent. He wondered if the ceiling would collapse if he stared hard enough. If he could will it to give out. If he could climb onto the table and rip out one of those fluorescent tubes and use it like a club.
Someone laughed. High, fake, teeth too many. The woman from HR. Katsuki didn't even look to see which one. They were interchangeable now. All avatars of the same uncanny professionalism, manicured and vacant. He flexed his hands slowly, releasing and curling them again under the table, skin dry and cracking at the knuckles from the office soap.
Tanaka was winding up into his climax now, “...cross-functional integration touchpoints,” his cadence rising, chest puffed out like he’d said something profound instead of regurgitating buzzword soup. His face was the colour of boiled chicken. A single bead of sweat ran from his temple to his cheek and hung there, glinting.
Katsuki stared at it like a sniper lining up a shot.
And still, the PowerPoint ticked forward. And still, the room vibrated with stale, over-rehearsed synergy. And still, no one said anything real.
Katsuki's head throbbed harder. The water stain above him looked like it was bleeding now. He let his eyes unfocus, let his jaw slacken slightly, let his mind drift to what it would feel like to scream from the gut, just to watch the perfect facade of this room crack open like porcelain under a hammer. Not words. Just a primal, animal howl.
“Bakugou-kun,” Tanaka said eventually, voice smooth as oil, “about your last feature submission. The one you pushed Friday night. We’ll need you to refactor that. Committee feedback.”
Katsuki didn’t move at first. His hands twitched once. “It works.”
“Well, yes, technically,” Tanaka said, giving him a thin, meaningless smile. “But it doesn’t align with the larger strategic vision.”
“The code is clean,” Katsuki said. Flat. Dangerous. “It solves the bug. It passed all the tests.”
“True. But it’s not about just solving problems, Bakugou-kun. It’s about process. About being flexible.”
“You mean obedient.”
Tanaka blinked. Just once. “Now, now. Let’s keep this constructive.”
Katsuki smiled. Or bared his teeth. “Construct this: I fix your messes every week. I patch your broken legacy code. I ship stable builds. And you want to talk to me about vision?”
The air shifted. Tension bloomed. Coworkers hunched further over their laptops. No one made eye contact.
“You’re young,” Tanaka said gently, like a knife sliding between ribs. “You’ll understand eventually.”
That did it. Katsuki stood so fast his chair scraped back with a shriek. His palms hit the table.
“Don’t talk down to me. I’ve eaten more shit in this company than you bastards could choke down in a lifetime. I’ve walked through hell just to fix your mistakes. I’ve babysat every incompetent motherfucker on this team, pulled your sorry ass out of the fire so many goddamn times I should be charging hazard pay. And you fucking sit there with your discount TED Talk vocabulary and tell me to ‘adjust’?”
“Bakugou—” Tanaka tried, voice brittle.
“I’M DONE ADJUSTING.”
The words cracked off the glass walls like thunder, sent someone flinching near the door. Katsuki’s badge came off his lanyard in one feral rip, his hand moving too fast, too hard, plastic flying and smacking the table hard enough to make pens jump. It spun once, then lay there: limp, cheap, like a carcass.
Silence. Katsuki stood taller. His eyes locked on Tanaka’s mug. That smug, pristine white ceramic with its Helvetica lie: THINK BIG. It made his teeth itch. Made something mean uncoil in his spine.
He grabbed it. And launched it.
The sound it made against the wall was catastrophic. Ceramic exploded on impact, shrapnel scattering, coffee erupting in a wild, steaming arc that sprayed up the wall like arterial spray, right over the company’s polished, embossed logo. A brown, dripping blotch of fuck-you that ran down the glass like it was bleeding shit.
Someone gasped. Someone hissed his name like a warning.
He didn’t even look back.
“Shove your synergy up your fucking ass,” Katsuki said, voice iron-flat, vibrating with fury barely held in check. “I quit.”
And then he walked out. Wet shoes squeaking, every step echoing like gunfire in that sterile mausoleum of a boardroom, and not one person brave enough to stop him. The elevator waited like a coffin with open doors. His reflection caught in the chrome walls. Red eyes wild, mouth twisted, skin flushed with rage or relief or both.
“Finally,” he muttered, then laughed. A raw sound. It didn’t stop for a long time.
HR called, of course. He answered, hung up, and blocked the number. They sent a bill for the mug. He paid it.
For a week, he felt like a legend. Then, unemployed.
Kirishima’s apartment was small. Not in the cozy, overpriced real estate way. It wasn't “intimate,” not “charming,” not “urban minimalism.” It was bare. Stark. The bones of a life with the meat scraped off. A two-bedroom shoebox off a cracked side street in Musutafu, just far enough from anything worth bragging about. And everything in it had lived another life before this one. The sagging couch with a cigarette burn in the armrest. The kitchen counter warped near the sink, like it had once been set on fire and forgotten. A fan blade hung crooked from the ceiling, circling half a degree off. There was a poster half-peeled above the TV, a print of The Thing, curling at the edges, adhesive long since surrendered. The carpet in the hallway had a stain, dark and wine-coloured, spreading like a slow bruise into the fibres. Bakugou didn't want to ask about it, didn't even want to know.
Katsuki Bakugou stood in the centre of it all, a cardboard box balanced on one hip, and exhaled through his teeth. The air was thick. Stale. Stunk like wet socks and dust and the ghost of last week’s curry.
“This place smells like a goddamn locker room,” he muttered, nose wrinkling.
From the kitchen doorway, Kirishima leaned against the frame like he’d been waiting for that line. Grinning, lazy, a can of Strong Zero sweating in his fist.
“Welcome home, man.”
“Fuck off.”
He kicked the door shut with his heel, the box thunking down onto the table. A spindly-legged excuse, mismatched chairs huddled around it like they were ashamed to be seen there. Kirishima pressed the cold can to the back of his neck, and smirked as Bakugou peeled back the flaps of the box like it had wronged him personally.
“You really live like this,” Bakugou said, flat, deadpan. “Like, on purpose.”
“Yup.”
“OT's make good money. You make enough to live downtown. Get a real place. Furniture that wasn’t fished out of somebody’s bulk trash night.”
Kirishima pushed off the doorframe with his shoulder and crossed the room with the slow, unbothered ease of a man who had won all his internal wars and chosen peace... or at least a beer and no pants after 6 p.m. He dropped onto the couch with a grunt, sending up a puff of stale cushion-smell into the air.
“Eh,” he said, cracking his neck, “I like it here.”
“You like it.”
“It’s fine. Rent’s cheap. It’s close to the clinic. And anyway, I’m not trying to impress anybody.”
Bakugou shot him a look like he wanted to impress a punch into his jaw. He stalked over to the kitchenette, opened a cupboard, and stared into the barren wasteland of mismatched mugs and two chipped plates. Bakugou opened the cutlery drawer. Three chopsticks and a spork rattled around inside.
“This is fucking depressing,” he said.
Kirishima let his head fall back over the armrest and looked at him upside down, smile turning crooked.
“You gonna redecorate, Bakubro?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
A silence stretched, not quite uncomfortable, but tight, the kind of silence that came from years of knowing each other too well. Bakugou picked up one of the mugs, frowned at the fading All Might decal, and put it back down harder than he needed to, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.
But he didn’t leave. Didn’t slam the box down or storm out in that loud, predictable way he used to. Just walked, slow and heavy, started unloading his set of mugs one by one. Fancy. Expensive. He bought them with one of his first Adult paychecks. He set each one down like it mattered, like if he just lined them up right, something might click back into place. Now they just looked sterile, overdesigned. Like props in a commercial for a life that had never really fit. He glanced sideways at the All Might mug again, with its cracked handle, half-faded decal, cheap glaze gone dull from a hundred too-hot wash cycles.
It grinned at him from the shelf like Toshinori knew something he didn’t.
Kirishima watched him for a second, then cracked the tab open. The can hissed, loud in the silence. Katsuki didn’t look up.
They were splitting the rent now. Kirishima had offered his spare room immediately after the blow-up at the office. No hesitation, no pity in his voice, just a blunt “Place is yours if you want it.” And Katsuki hadn’t said no. Not right away. But he hadn’t said yes either. It took him three weeks of calculating rent on an income of fuck-all and pride that refused to budge. He remembered the look the leasing agent had given him at the last apartment tour, when he thought of downsizing instead. Thin smile. Raised eyebrow. “Employment status?” He'd replied with “Freelancing. Tech contracts.” Not a lie, not exactly. There had been one debugging job for a mobile game no one would play sober. Payment had come via a prepaid Visa card.
Now, he was here.
Box two sat in his new room. Smaller than a prison cell. No view. The window faced a concrete wall so close he could’ve spit on it. The walls were off-white with fingerprints and nail holes. The bed frame creaked. He sat on the edge, a tangle of ethernet cable in his hands, and stared at the wall like it might speak.
“God,” he muttered, not quite under his breath. “I’m such a fucking loser.”
There was no one to argue. Only the distant sound of the microwave humming to life, Kirishima nuking something that probably shouldn’t be microwaved. The scent of reheated karaage drifted down the hall like an accusation.
Still. It was quieter than his old place. No skyline. No air purifier humming in the corner. No chrome desk with cable management trays. No forty-thousand-yen desk chair with lumbar support. No ghost of success breathing down his neck, asking what the fuck happened to the man who swore he'd own the building by thirty.
And the silence here wasn’t screaming. Not yet. The walls weren’t sterile. Just old.
He didn’t want to die anymore.
That had been the legacy of the job: the slow erosion of meaning. Just waking up every day thinking what if I just… stopped. Not suicide, maybe just inertia. He’d spend hours at his desk fantasizing about taking a wrong train, stepping off the map, vanishing. Not with drama, not in pain, just gone. The day he’d quit, that thought had loosened its claws. It hadn’t left, but it stopped biting. Now there was a new poison dripping in: directionlessness.
Some days, he didn’t move until noon. Others, he was up at four a.m., bleaching the sink like it insulted him. The inconsistency was its own kind of madness. He made to-do lists:
- Update resume
- Research UX bootcamps
- Figure out if you can live on 9k yen/month
- Learn something new
- Touch grass
He hiked with Izuku sometimes. They didn’t talk much about it. Just met at the station, bought cheap onigiri and water, and headed into the woods. Izuku talked about trees, the chemical conversation of pines, and how moss always grows on the north side of trees. The kind of bullshit you’d hear on a science podcast. Katsuki grunted. Bitched. Called him a nerd. But he always came back. They shared water bottles. Argued about trail maps.
“You ever think about going back to school?” Izuku asked one day, halfway up a ridge trail. “Not because you have to. Just... to reset.”
Katsuki barked a laugh. “Reset what? My fucking brain?”
Izuku shrugged. “You could try something new. Why not?”
Because his brain was broken, maybe. Because every job listing looked like a trap in disguise. Because he couldn’t bear the idea of sitting under another flickering fluorescent bulb while someone explained “sprints” and “agile methodology” in that voice. The fake voice. The voice that meant nothing and scraped like sandpaper across his teeth.
He started going to cafés. Not because he liked them. The music was always too smooth, too curated. The smell of cinnamon felt fake, like an air freshener trying to pass for warmth. Everyone talked in hushed voices, like they were performatively quiet. Baristas smiled like it was policy. Couples leaned in close over croissants that cost more than a decent lunch, and the people with laptops mostly just scrolled, headphones in, occasionally pausing to type like they were trying to look busy for someone watching. It all felt staged. Like a set piece for a life he didn’t believe in.
But the silence in the apartment was worse. So Kirishima dragged him out.
One Tuesday, they ended up at a corner café, the kind with too many plants, a busted floorboard near the register, and bookshelves full of novels with broken spines. Katsuki nursed a bitter espresso like it had insulted his mother. Kirishima scrolled his phone.
“You should do something with your hands,” Kirishima said, casual.
“I do,” Katsuki said. “I jerk off.”
Kirishima didn’t flinch. “You know what I mean. You’re twitchy. You like machines. Systems. Fixing shit.”
“I liked solving problems,” Katsuki muttered. “Not untangling spaghetti code written by some bootcamp dropout.”
Kirishima sipped his drink, eyes scanning the chalkboard menu, peering at the baked good case. “Ever thought about culinary school? You’re a good cook. Maybe you'd be good at baking, too.”
“What am I, a French maid?”
“C’mon, man.”
“You want me baking soufflés for rich women in Ginza?”
Kirishima grinned. “You look good in an apron. Maybe they'll let you wear one of those fancy chef hats.”
Katsuki flipped him off. “Kill yourself.”
A beat. Kirishima leaned back, eyes narrowing just slightly.
“Ever thought about working somewhere like this?”
Katsuki blinked. “A café?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d rather staple my dick to a ceiling fan.”
“That specific?”
“I just—fuck, no. Taking orders? Wearing a nametag? Pretending I care if someone wants two pumps of fucking hazelnut? Fuck that shit.”
Kirishima didn’t argue. Just let the silence do its job. Then said, “But you’d make good coffee.”
Katsuki didn’t answer. But he also didn’t argue.
Kirishima got up to grab a refill. Katsuki stared out the window, chewing his thumbnail, half-tuned out, until a voice cleared behind him.
“Excuse me. Bakugou Katsuki?”
He turned. A woman stood near the counter, clipboard tucked against her chest, wrapped in a slouchy knit sweater and a long skirt that looked warm but not particularly fashionable. Late thirties, maybe. She had the flat, practiced smile of someone who’d worked too many holiday rushes and dealt with too many “actually I ordered oat milk” types.
“Thanks for coming in,” she said, voice pleasant, no-nonsense. “We got your resume.”
He stared. “...My what?”
“Your friend said you were interested in the barista position. Tech background, right? We like people who can think on their feet.”
He turned, slowly, toward the register.
Kirishima was there, waving like he hadn’t just detonated Katsuki’s morning with a single reckless act of optimism. “Surprise!”
Katsuki’s voice dropped. “What the hell did you do?”
“Relax,” Kirishima said, unbothered. “Just sent your resume in. You left your laptop open. It was right there. I didn’t make anything up.”
“You absolutely made something up.”
“I said you’re good under pressure. That’s not a lie.”
“I have a Nespresso machine, Kirishima. That’s the extent of my qualifications.”
The manager cleared her throat, politely. “If you want to come in for a trial shift on Thursday, we can get you on the schedule. No pressure. It’s paid.”
Katsuki looked at her. Then back at Kirishima. His jaw flexed. He could feel a hundred responses lining up, each one more furious than the last. He could already picture how stupid he’d look in an apron. How quickly he’d end up telling some finance asshole that their cortado wasn’t that deep.
And yet.
“Fine,” he muttered. “But if one old lady complains about latte art, I’m walking.”
The manager’s smile shifted, just slightly. “Fair enough.”
By now, he knew the rhythm.
Not just the mechanics (he had those down cold), but the undercurrent beneath them, the quiet logic that tied each motion to the next. There was a pattern if you listened. Milk hissed when it hit the sweet spot, a subtle shift in tone before it frothed right. Espresso pulled in tight amber ribbons that cut off clean, no sputter, no drip. He didn’t count the seconds anymore. Didn’t need to. His hands moved on their own: purge the wand, spin the pitcher, tap the shot glass just hard enough to settle the crema, slide the lid on without a sound.
It was October. Week four of his new job. Still no disasters. No broken glass, no angry reviews, no customers threatening to call corporate because he forgot the fucking soy milk. Just clean, steady work. He liked that. Liked the weight of doing something well, even if it wasn’t the thing people expected. Liked the pressure of a slammed morning rush and the satisfaction of keeping pace, of running ahead of the swell before it broke. There was clarity in it. A sense of rightness. Tasks had edges. Rules made sense. Finish one, move to the next. No drama. No second-guessing.
It was the first job where being fast wasn’t seen as aggressive. Where being sharp wasn’t rude. Where no one told him to smile more. He didn’t have to charm anyone. Didn’t have to soften the edges. If he kept the bar clean, the shots tight, and the register accurate, that was enough. He didn’t talk much. Didn’t fake the customer service voice. Didn’t flirt back when some twenty-year-old tried to make a joke about "extra foam." But his station stayed spotless. The grinder never clogged. He caught mistakes before they happened. And when the blender screamed and three mobile orders printed at once and the air smelled like stress and cinnamon syrup, he didn’t flinch.
He worked. He moved. He hit his marks.
And it felt good. It felt good to be good at something, even if it wasn’t what anyone thought he’d be doing at twenty-seven. Even if it meant he was making barely enough to cover rent and protein powder. Even if he was technically just a barista, technically just clocking in and out, technically nothing to brag about. He was sharp here. Reliable. Essential, in the way a well-oiled machine was essential. And that meant something, even if it was small. Even if no one noticed but him.
After week one, Shinoda stopped assigning him register.
“Just stick to bar,” she said, quiet and clipped, after the Oat Milk Incident. “You’re… not a people person.”
He didn’t look up from wiping down the steam wand. “Good.”
Said Oat Milk Incident began at 7:42 a.m. on his third shift, the shop already packed. The bell above the door had been ringing like a smoke alarm. The line was out the door. Shinoda was elbows-deep in a broken grinder, speaking softly to it like she was trying to coax a dying animal through its final moments.
Bakugou was on register. For the first and last time.
He was already in a mood. The point-of-sale system was slow. The touchscreen kept freezing. The coin tray stuck when opened and snapped when shut. Someone had left half a muffin in the tip jar. A child was crying in the back. And the man in front of him had been frozen mid-order for two full minutes, lips pursed, eyes scanning back and forth like the answer was hidden in fine print.
He leaned in, arms crossed over his chest, expression sharp enough to cut bone.
“It’s a coffee shop,” he said flatly. “Not an exam.”
The man startled. “Um… what do you recommend if I don’t like coffee?”
Bakugou stared. Deadpan. Something inside him curled up and died.
“…Water.”
Shinoda appeared behind him like a summoned spirit, smile brittle, eyes bright with warning.
“Or tea,” she said. “We have great tea. Herbal, green, black. And smoothies,” she added, too cheerfully.
Bakugou didn’t move. “I’m not recommending smoothies.”
“I'll take a green tea," the man said, smiling nervously.
Bakugou muttered something under his breath and jabbed the order into the register with unnecessary force.
Then came the oat milk woman. Late twenties. Expensive leggings. Immaculate ponytail. Phone tucked between ear and shoulder. Oversized tote bag bumping into the pastry case. She stepped up to the counter without breaking the rhythm of her call, not even a glance in his direction.
“I’ll do a triple shot, half-caf cappuccino, sub oat milk, not soy,” she said, fast. “Unless the oat is the boxed kind. I’ll only do barista blend. If it’s boxed, then fine, soy, but steam it to 120, not 140. It ruins the protein. And no cinnamon this time, I swear, if I get cinnamon again I’ll have to go to urgent care.”
Bakugou blinked. She kept going.
“And make sure the second shot is decaf, not the first, because I can tell, and don’t over-aerate the milk. I want microfoam, not bubbles. Microfoam. And in a to-go cup, but no lid. Lids ruin the crema.”
He stared at her. Then down at the screen. Then back at her.
There was a moment where it looked like he might say nothing at all. He tapped the screen once. Then again. Then paused, shoulders rising slightly as he inhaled through his nose, like he was counting to ten under threat of death.
“You want soy milk,” he said.
She blinked. “No, oat.”
“You said oat unless it’s boxed. It’s boxed.”
“Wait, do you mean like… boxed boxed? Or boxed but it’s the barista blend?”
“It’s not the barista blend.”
“Then oat.”
He stared. “It is the boxed one.”
“Oh. Then soy.”
He tapped the screen again, louder this time. A customer in line flinched.
She gave a polite smile. “Can you steam it to 120?”
“No.”
“…Why not?”
“Because I’m not a lab instrument. It’s hot, or it’s not.”
That was the line. Shinoda dropped her wrench and launched herself from behind the grinder like a bullet, hand locking onto his arm.
“Bakugou,” she said sharply. “Bar.”
“I didn’t even say anything—”
“Bakugou!”
“She wants me to measure milk like I’m a—”
“Go.”
He muttered something about coffee being wasted on the privileged and stomped off, apron swinging behind him. Shinoda gave the oat milk woman a smile that looked like it had been stitched onto her face with dental floss and finished the order herself.
But he knew Shinoda liked him. Respected him, maybe. He was fast. Consistent. Came in early. Left late. Made fewer mistakes than anyone else. He should’ve felt proud. He didn’t.
Every shift was a slow bleed. He wasn’t dying. He just wasn’t living either. He was coping. Grinding through hours like a punishment. Filling space. Waiting for something to happen.
But there were good moments. Friday drinks with the old crew. Kirishima and Sero laughing so hard they cried. Mina stealing fries off his plate.
He was sleeping better. Most nights.
Izuku still texted about his work as a teacher sometimes. Memes. Updates.
Deku [19:12]: today we played dodgeball in class and someone launched a ball so hard it broke the fire alarm casing 😭
Deku [19:13]: i swear it wasn’t me this time lol
Kacchan [19:15]: What the hell are you teaching those gremlins, artillery??
Kacchan [19:15]: Also don’t lie, you absolutely egged them on
Kacchan [19:15]: Bet you clapped, nerd
Deku [19:19]: they’re just spirited!! future heroes!!
Deku [19:34]: oh um, just an update. sensei's not doing well today. he asked about you
Deku [19:36]: he’d really like to see you.
Deku [19:37]: i know it’s hard, but you were important to him. you still are
Bakugou would stare at the screen until the letters blurred. Then he'd lock his phone and throw it under his pillow.
He hadn’t seen Yagi Toshinori in almost a year.
The man had been a mentor, not just to Izuku, but to him, too. A teacher who saw something in them when they were young and wild and trying too hard to be strong. He used to pull Katsuki aside after class and talk to him like an adult. Told him he was more than his temper. That power wasn’t just about winning.
And now Yagi was sick. Weak. The thought of seeing him like that twisted something inside Bakugou’s gut. He knew he was being a coward. Knew it made him a selfish piece of shit. But every time he tried to imagine walking into that hospital room, it felt like staring down a cliff with no bottom. He felt like he hadn’t earned it. Toshinori had believed in him. Thought he’d become something great. And look at him now. Barely functioning, scrubbing dried milk off steel with cracked knuckles and a sunburn. He wanted to be better. Fuck, he wanted it so bad his teeth ached.
Some mornings, he’d wake up with that fire under his skin again. He’d start researching classes; maybe electrical engineering, maybe culinary school after all. He’d make lists, budgets, plans. He’d work himself raw at the café just to feel like he was moving forward.
And then the wave would crash. He’d sink again. Self-doubt loud in his head. What the fuck are you even doing, Bakugou? Making latte art? Is this what all your talent amounted to?
On one weekend hike with Izuku, they stopped at a ridge overlooking the lake. Cicadas screaming. Sweat dripping from their necks even in the autumn chill. Katsuki dropped onto a sun-warmed rock, panting.
“Izuku,” he said, voice gravel. “You ever feel like you fucked up so bad you can’t even start fixing it?”
Izuku looked at him, serious in a way that made Katsuki hate him.
“Yeah,” he said. “A lot. But every time I think that, I ask myself what you'd say if I gave up.”
Katsuki rolled his eyes. “I’d say you’re a dumbass.”
“Exactly.”
That night, Izuku sent another message.
Deku [22:43]: sensei's in the hospital again. let me know if you want to come.
Katsuki stared at it. Typed yeah, deleted it. Typed I can’t, deleted that too.
He ended up cleaning the whole kitchen at 2 a.m. instead. Top to fucking bottom. Pulled out the fridge. Scrubbed behind the trash can. Didn’t stop until the floor gleamed and his knees ached.
In the mirror, he looked like a ghost. Pale, tired, empty-eyed. He mumbled, “What the fuck are you doing,” and turned off the light.
The café opened in four hours. And he’d be there. Making drinks. Cleaning machines. Pretending like something was building.
Even if it wasn’t. Not yet.