Work Text:
The medal ceremony was over, but the feeling of cold iron against his wrists wasn’t.
It was a phantom weight, heavy and suffocating, a sensory echo that lingered long after the restraints had been physically removed. Bakugou Katsuki sat on the bench in the empty locker room, his head buried between his knees, staring at the gray concrete floor until the patterns blurred.
The gold medal was shoved deep in the bottom of his gym bag, buried under sweaty clothes where he didn’t have to look at it. It didn’t feel like a prize. It felt like a consolation token given to a dog that had finally stopped barking.
The air in the room was stale, smelling of old sweat and the distinct, ozone-sharp scent of his own quirk; burning sugar and nitroglycerin.
It was quiet. Too quiet. Most of the extras had cleared out immediately, eager to get to their families or the after-parties or whatever the hell people did when they hadn’t just been muzzled on national television like a rabid animal.
Bakugou wasn’t crying. Crying was for the weak. Crying was for Deku.
He was vibrating. It was a low-frequency tremor running through his muscles, a mix of pure, unadulterated rage and something slimier. Something that felt like the sludge from middle school coating his throat, choking him. They had looked at him—the pros, the audience, his own classmates—and they hadn’t seen a winner. They had seen a threat that needed to be contained. A villain in the making.
Click. Slam.
The sound of a locker shutting cracked through the silence like a gunshot.
Bakugou didn’t flinch, but his shoulders hiked up toward his ears. He snapped his head up, teeth already bared, a snarl rising in his throat. He was ready to bite the head off whoever was stupid enough to still be here.
It was Soy Sauce Face. Tape arms. Sero Hanta.
Sero was leaning against a row of lockers, his gym bag slung casually over one shoulder. He looked rough. His skin was paler than usual, his lips slightly blue-tinged; the lingering effects of being frozen solid by Todoroki earlier in the tournament. But he wasn’t looking at Bakugou with pity.
Pity would have earned him an explosion to the face.
He wasn’t looking at him with fear, either, which was what Bakugou had seen in the eyes of half the stadium staff when they unlocked the chains.
Sero was just looking at him. His expression was bored, maybe a little tired, like he was waiting for a bus.
“You done sulking?” Sero asked.
The audacity made Bakugou’s vision swim red. His hands popped, small, angry sparks dancing across his palms. “Die.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, are you coming to the class dinner or not? Kirishima is hysterical. He thinks you’ve ascended to a higher plane of anger and vanished into the ether.”
“I’m not going to your stupid dinner.”
“Okay.” Sero shrugged. It was an easy, loose motion, though he shivered slightly at the end of it. “I’ll tell them you’re busy plotting world domination or napping. Whichever sounds less likely to get the cops called.”
Bakugou glared, searching for the flinch. People always flinched. But Sero didn’t recoil. He just stood there, swaying slightly on his heels, unbothered by the walking explosive device in front of him.
“You look like shit,” Bakugou spat, needing to hurt something.
“Thanks. Getting frozen instantly tends to ruin the complexion. I’ve been shivering for three hours.” Sero rubbed his elbows, the tape dispensers clicking against the metal lockers. “At least you got to sweat. I’m still thawing out.”
It was a dig. It had to be a dig.
Bakugou narrowed his eyes, searching for the mockery, but Sero’s face was an open book written in a language Bakugou couldn’t be bothered to learn yet. There was no malice.
Sero had lost. Badly. Humiliatingly. And here he was, making jokes about hypothermia.
“Why are you still here?” Bakugou demanded, his voice hoarse.
“Waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“Because if I walked out alone, I’d have to talk to my parents about how I got my ass kicked in ten seconds flat,” Sero said, pushing off the locker. He adjusted his bag strap. “But if I walk out with the winner, even if he’s a snarling mess, the subject changes. They’ll ask about you instead of my humiliating defeat. Selfish reasons, really.”
He started walking toward the exit, not checking to see if Bakugou was following.
It was arrogant. It was annoying.
It was strangely grounding.
Sero wasn’t treating him like a victim. He wasn’t treating him like a monster. He was treating him like a distraction. It reduced the magnitude of Bakugou’s day from a tragedy to an inconvenience.
Bakugou stood up. The phantom chains felt a fraction lighter, the invisible muzzle loosening just enough to breathe. He grabbed his bag, swung it over his shoulder, and stomped after him.
“Walk faster, Elbows. You’re slow.”
“You’re just fast, Blasty.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Okay then,” Sero drawled, pushing the door open and holding it for a split second. Not enough to be polite, just enough so it didn’t hit Bakugou in the face. “We’ll go with Sparky.”
That nickname earned Sero a scorch mark on his sleeve, but it didn’t earn him a broken nose. That was the first shift.
The months that followed were a blur of training, exams, and the relentless grind of hero coursework. The dynamic between them didn’t change overnight; there was no cinematic montage of friendship. It was more like the slow, steady erosion of a cliff face by a persistent tide.
Bakugou yelled. That was a constant. He yelled about grades, he yelled about bad posture during sparring, he yelled about the cafeteria running out of the good spicy curry.
The “Bakusquad” (a name Bakugou loathed but couldn’t seem to incinerate out of existence) had developed different coping mechanisms.
Kirishima met the yelling with unshakeable brightness, like a rock breaking a wave. Kaminari met it with whining and exaggerated tears. Mina met it with teasing pokes.
Sero met it with silence.
Not an ignored silence, or a fearful one. A companionable one. He was the background noise that didn’t grate.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in the classroom, weeks before the summer training camp. The humidity was climbing, sticking shirts to backs, and the setting sun was cutting sharp, orange geometric shapes across the desks. Bakugou was “tutoring,” which was really just him aggressively correcting math homework while threatening bodily harm for incorrect integers.
“You carried the one, you absolute dumbass!” Bakugou slammed his mechanical pencil down on Kaminari’s notebook so hard the lead snapped. “How many times do I have to explain the concept of basic addition to your fried brain?”
“It’s not addition, it’s calculus!” Kaminari wailed, clutching his head like he was in physical pain. “The numbers are moving, Kacchan! They’re mocking me!”
“It’s logic! Which you don’t have!”
“Be nice, Blasty,” Mina chirped from the next desk, not looking up from her phone.
“Shut up, Raccoon Eyes, or I’ll melt your phone!”
Sero was sitting backwards in the chair in front of Bakugou’s desk, his legs straddling the backrest, chin resting on his arms. He was balancing a yellow pencil on his nose, staring cross-eyed at it. He hadn’t said a word in twenty minutes.
Bakugou turned his glare on him, needing a new target. “And you! Are you even working? Or are you just sitting there looking stupid to lower the class average?”
Sero blew a sharp puff of air upward, dislodging the pencil. He caught it out of the air before it hit the floor with a casual flick of his wrist. “I finished that sheet ten minutes ago.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “Bullshit.”
He snatched the paper from Sero’s desk, nearly tearing the corner. He scanned it, red pen poised to strike like a viper, desperate to find a mistake. He wanted to find a misplaced decimal, a wrong variable, a forgotten negative sign; anything to prove that this lanky, grinning extra was just as incompetent as the rest of them.
The page was clean.
The handwriting was atrocious—a sloppy, sprawling scrawl that looked like a spider had dipped its legs in ink and danced across the page—but the math was rock solid. Every equation was balanced. Every derivative was correct.
Bakugou stared at the paper, then at Sero. Sero just blinked back, unimpressed.
Bakugou slammed the paper back down on the desk. “Sloppy work. Your graphs look like shit. Use a ruler next time.”
“But they’re right,” Sero said, a slow, lazy grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Being right doesn’t matter if it looks like a chicken scratched it out while having a grand mal seizure!”
“You’re just mad I didn’t need your help,” Sero teased, tilting his head.
“I’m not mad! I’m relieved! Less time wasted on your empty skull means I don’t have to explain simple physics to a tape dispenser!”
Sero laughed. It was a dry, wheezing sound, like crinkling paper or dried leaves. “Sure, Bakugou. Whatever helps you sleep. Hey, can I borrow your eraser? Mine decided to commit suicide and jumped off the desk earlier.”
“Buy your own damn supplies!”
But Bakugou grabbed his block eraser and threw it at Sero’s face.
It wasn’t a toss. It was a projectile. It was a fastball meant to sting, to startle, to provoke a reaction.
But Sero didn’t even sit up. He just raised a hand, caught the eraser inches from his nose without blinking, and lowered it to the desk. His eyes never left Bakugou’s face.
“Thanks,” Sero said.
Bakugou felt a weird itch under his skin, a prickly sensation that had nothing to do with his quirk. He looked away, focusing back on Kaminari’s disastrous equation to hide the confusion. “Whatever. Just don’t break it.”
Sero Hanta didn’t flinch. That was the thing that struck Bakugou.
Bakugou was a bomb, ticking and exploding in random intervals to keep people at a distance. Everyone else either ran for cover or tried to pour water on the fuse.
Sero was different.
Sero was the guy who learned to tell time by the ticking. He didn’t try to defuse the bomb. He just sat next to it, got comfortable, and read a comic book until the smoke cleared.
The quiet, sun-drenched afternoons in the classroom dissolved into smoke and blue fire. Then came the forest. The gas. The suffocating fear that tasted like iron in the back of his throat.
And the snatching.
Bakugou didn’t remember the pain so much as he remembered the compression. He remembered the terrifying, metaphysical horror of being reduced. Of being made small, insignificant, a pocket-sized prize trapped in a cold blue marble. He remembered the villain’s hand on his neck, warm and mocking, and the warp gate swallowing him whole.
But in the split second before the dark took him, before the world twisted into a vortex of purple and black, he saw them.
He saw Deku’s broken body, throwing himself at the air. He saw Todoroki’s ice, desperate and sharp, missing by inches.
And he saw Sero.
Sero had been too far away to reach him. He was pinned down near the treeline, his tape shooting out in desperate, jagged arcs to immobilize a villain. But he had turned. He had seen Bakugou being taken.
And for the first time, the mask was gone. The bored detachment, the lazy grin, the half-lidded “whatever” attitude—it was all wiped clean.
In its place was horror. Absolute, pale-faced horror. Sero’s mouth was open in a scream Bakugou couldn’t hear, his eyes wide and panicked, reaching out with a hand that couldn’t span the distance.
Then the portal closed.
The connection was severed.
And Bakugou was alone in a bar full of monsters who told him he belonged with them.
They talked about his anger. They talked about the Sports Festival. See how they chained you? Shigaraki rasped, his voice dry as dust. See how they treat you? Like a rabid dog. Like a monster. Like us.
Bakugou sat in that chair, restrained again, the familiar cold of metal biting into his skin. He listened to their pitch. He listened to them try to twist his ambition into villainy.
They’re afraid of you, the lizard one hissed. They look at you with fear.
Bakugou stared at the severed hand clutching Shigaraki’s face.
”You done sulking?”
The memory surfaced unbidden. It wasn’t the cheering crowds or the terrified teachers he thought of.
It was the locker room. It was Sero Hanta leaning against the lockers, shivering, looking him dead in the eye without an ounce of fear.
I am not one of you, Bakugou thought, the conviction hardening like steel in his spine. My friends don’t look at me like I’m a monster. They look at me like I’m an asshole who needs to walk faster.
The rescue was a blur of explosions, All Might’s voice booming like thunder, and the terrifying crumbling of a city. Then, the retirement of the Symbol of Peace.
The guilt was a heavy, wet blanket that Bakugou couldn’t shake off, no matter how hard he scrubbed his skin in the shower. He had ended All Might. He had been too weak. He had been the pebble that started the avalanche.
When he finally got back to the hospital, and eventually to his house, the police debriefings were endless. He felt hollowed out. Scraped empty.
He didn’t check his phone for three days. He couldn't bear the thought of the pity, the questions, the frantic noise.
When he finally turned it on, it nearly vibrated off the table.
[Shitty Hair] Hey bro
[Shitty Hair] We’re so glad ure okay
[Shitty Hair] Please answer when u can!!
[Shitty Hair] Man seriously just one emoji so i know ur alive
[Dunce Face] DUDE are u okay
[Dunce Face] did they hurt you???
[Raccoon Eyes] blasty!!! text me when you see this pls
[Deku] How are you, Kacchan?
[Deku] I’m sorry
[Deku] Will you go to class tomorrow??
Bakugou scrolled through them, his thumb hovering over the screen, feeling nothing but exhaustion. They were too loud. Even in text, they were screaming.
And then, buried under the mountain of panic, there was one from Sero. Sent two days ago at 2:49 AM.
[Soy Sauce Face] It’s quiet here. Glad you’re not dead.
Bakugou stared at the screen.
No questions. No demand for a reply. No hysterical probing into his trauma. Just a statement of fact from the guy who knew how to sit in the silence.
It was so underwhelming. It was so perfect.
He didn’t reply. But he didn’t delete it, either.
Height Alliance. The dorms.
The teachers called it a sanctuary. They used words like “community” and “safety,” their voices pitched high with forced optimism. But to Bakugou, it felt like a high-end containment facility. It smelled of wet paint, industrial cleaner, and the distinct, sterile scent of a fresh start that nobody actually wanted.
Bakugou knew the truth. It wasn’t just to keep the students safe from the villains. It was to keep an eye on the boy who attracted disaster like a lightning rod.
The first night was suffocating.
His room was too big and too empty. The air conditioning unit hummed with a rattling, mechanical rhythm that grated against his nerves. The silence of the hallway wasn’t peaceful; it was heavy. It pressed against his eardrums, filling the space where the explosions and the screaming used to be. Every creak of the settling building sounded like footsteps. Every shadow looked like a warping portal.
By 2:00 AM, Bakugou accepted that sleep was a lost cause. His skin felt too tight for his body. He needed water. He needed to prove he wasn’t chained to the bed.
He stalked out of his room, the wooden floorboards biting cold against his bare feet. The hallway was a long throat of darkness, swallowed by the night. He kept his hands unclenched by sheer force of will, listening to his own shallow breathing.
He reached the common room and froze.
Someone was already there.
The room was bathed in the bruised, flickering blue light of the massive television. Sero was slumped on the sofa, sinking so deep into the cushions he looked like part of the upholstery. The volume was muted, but the screen was chaotic—a high-speed racing game where the landscape whipped by in neon blurs.
Sero looked wrecked. His hair was a disheveled bird’s nest, and he was wearing a t-shirt that had seen the inside of a washing machine too many times. He was playing with a robotic, glazed-over persistence, his long fingers flying over the controller while his eyes stared blankly at the road ahead.
Bakugou hesitated in the doorway, half-hidden by the shadows. He debated turning around. He didn’t have the energy for small talk. He didn’t have the energy to explain why he was haunting the halls like a ghost.
Sero turned his head. He didn’t jump. He didn’t flinch. He just looked at Bakugou with half-lidded, dark eyes.
“Yo,” Sero croaked.
“What are you doing?” Bakugou asked. His voice came out like gravel, rough and cracked. He stepped fully into the room, keeping a defensive distance, waiting for the pity or the fear to appear on Sero’s face.
“Insomnia,” Sero said simply, turning back to the screen as his car drifted around a pixelated corner. “Brain won’t shut up. Kept replaying the exams. You?”
“Thirsty.”
“Water’s in the fridge. Glasses are in the cupboard to the left of the sink. I think Yaomomo organized them by height.”
Bakugou grunted, went to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it in one long, desperate gulp, the cold liquid shocking his system.
He should go back to bed. He should leave.
Instead, drawn by a gravity he couldn’t name, he walked over to the sofa. He sat on the absolute opposite end, leaving two cushions of demilitarized zone between them.
Sero didn’t pause the game. He didn't ask if Bakugou was okay. “You want next round?”
“No. Watching you lose is entertaining enough.”
“I’m in first place.”
“For now. You’re taking the curves too wide.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” Sero murmured, but there was no heat in it.
They sat in silence for a long time. The only light came from the screen, shifting colors across Sero’s face; electric blue, warning red, toxic green.
Bakugou found himself watching Sero’s hands. They were interesting hands. The tape dispensers at his elbows were bulky, modifying the way his sleeves bunched up, but his fingers were long, calloused, and surprisingly dexterous. They moved with a fluid grace that contradicted his slumped, lazy posture.
The silence stretched, but for the first time in weeks, it didn't feel threatening. It felt... shared.
“They said I was a flight risk,” Bakugou said.
The words tumbled out before he could check them. He hadn’t told anyone that. Not his parents, not the teachers, not the police. It was a poison he’d been holding under his tongue.
Sero hit the pause button. The screen froze on a blurred image of a car mid-crash. The sudden lack of motion made the room feel smaller. Sero turned his head, resting his cheek on the back of the sofa to look at Bakugou.
“Who?” Sero asked. “The police?”
“The teachers. The board. Whatever.” Bakugou pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around his shins. It was a defensive curl, protecting his vitals. “I heard them talking. They think I’m going to run off. They think... they think I might join the League because they offered me a spot.”
Sero blinked slowly. “That’s stupid.”
Bakugou bristled, his head snapping up. “Is it? I’m angry. I’m violent. I destroyed a building in the first week of school. I scream ‘die’ when I brush my teeth. I look like them, Sero.”
“You’re also the guy who yells at us for not separating our recyclables correctly,” Sero pointed out, his voice infuriatingly level.
“Hah?”
“Seriously. You went on a ten-minute rant because Mina put a plastic bottle in the paper bin. Villains don't care about the carbon footprint, Bakugou.” Sero shifted, counting off on his fingers. “You tutor Kaminari even though it raises your blood pressure to stroke levels. You go to bed at 8:00 PM to maximize muscle recovery. And you want to be the Number One Hero more than you want to breathe.”
Bakugou stared at the frozen TV screen, his throat tight. “I ended All Might.”
The silence that followed was heavy. It was a physical weight, pressing down on the sofa, threatening to crack the floorboards.
“All Might ended All Might,” Sero said softly.
Bakugou didn’t look at him. He couldn’t.
“He made a choice,” Sero continued, his voice steady, a calm frequency cutting through the static in Bakugou's head. “He chose you. That’s not on you, man. That’s on him being a hero. If roles were reversed, you would have done the exact same thing for any of us.”
“It feels like it’s on me. It feels like I’m carrying his ashes.”
“I know.” Sero shifted, stretching his legs out until his joints popped. “But feelings aren’t facts. You taught me that. Back when I was freaking out about the written exams and thought I was gonna fail out.”
Bakugou frowned, confusion warring with the grief. “I never said that.”
“You said, ‘Stop crying about being stupid and just read the damn book, facts don’t care about your tears.’ Close enough.”
Bakugou let out a huff. It was a sharp, jagged sound, but it was almost a laugh. “I hate you.”
“I know,” Sero said easily. He held out the controller. It was an offering. A truce. “You want to drive? Or are you scared I’ll beat you?”
Bakugou looked at the controller. Then he looked at Sero. Sero wasn’t looking at him with pity. He was just a guy on a couch at 2:00 AM, offering a distraction.
Bakugou snatched the controller. “I’m going to crush your high score so bad your ancestors feel it.”
“Good luck, Blasty.”
They played until the sun started to bleach the sky gray, turning the blue light of the TV pale. They didn’t talk about the kidnapping again. They didn’t talk about the guilt or the fear or the cages they were living in.
But when Bakugou finally went back to his room, the silence didn’t feel quite so loud. He slept for three hours, and for the first time since the forest, he didn’t dream.
He didn’t really expect for it to become a thing. The 2:00 AM club.
Sometimes Bakugou would come down and find Sero reading manga, looking like a tangled pretzel on the armchair. Sometimes Sero would find Bakugou aggressively scrubbing the kitchen counters because the energy in his veins wouldn’t let him sit still.
They didn’t always talk. They just existed in the same space, tethering each other to the ground while the rest of the world slept. They were two satellites that had found a stable orbit around one another, comfortable in the gravity.
It was late October when the physical boundary finally broke.
They were in the common room, ostensibly studying. The rest of the dorm was dead silent, everyone else having long since retreated to their beds.
Outside, a typhoon was skirting the coast. It was raining; a hard, driving, relentless rain that lashed against the reinforced windows like handfuls of gravel. The power flickered occasionally, making the shadows in the room jump and stretch.
Bakugou was sitting on the floor, surrounded by a fortress of textbooks and scattered notes. He was vibrating with tension, his shoulders hiked up to his ears as he glared at a quirk theory diagram.
Sero was on the couch behind him, hanging upside down with his knees hooked over the backrest, his head dangling near Bakugou’s shoulder. Blood rushed to his face, but he looked perfectly content to let gravity do its worst.
“Hey,” Sero said, his voice slightly distorted by his position.
“What.”
“What’s the answer to number four?”
“Read the text, tape-face. I’m not your cheat sheet.”
“I did. It’s boring. It’s just legal jargon about quirk usage limits in public spaces.” Sero sighed, a long exhale that ruffled the hair on the back of Bakugou’s neck. Then, he reached out.
His hand, warm and dry, landed on Bakugou’s shoulder. He didn’t slap it or grab it; he just rested his fingers there, right over the trapezius muscle. “You’re tense.”
Bakugou froze. His pen hovered over the paper.
Usually, people didn’t touch him. Kirishima did, sometimes, a manly slap on the back or an arm thrown around his shoulders, but Bakugou usually shrugged it off with a growl and a threat.
This was different. Sero wasn’t jostling him. Sero’s finger was lingering, heavy and intentional.
“Get off,” Bakugou muttered, but there was no heat in it. It was a reflex, not a command.
“Seriously. You’re like a rock. Do you ever relax, or do you just vibrate at different frequencies of stress?” Sero started to knead the muscle with his thumb, digging into a knot of tension that felt like iron wire.
Bakugou’s brain short-circuited.
It felt... good. It felt shockingly, terrifyingly good. The sensation traveled down his spine, loosening the tight coil in his gut. He leaned back into the touch a fraction of an inch before he could stop himself.
“I relax,” Bakugou lied.
“Liar. You sleep in a combat stance.” Sero sat up properly, sliding off the couch to sit on the floor directly behind Bakugou. “Move your hair.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“Shut up. I’m helping you. Consider it repayment for the math help.”
Sero’s hands settled on both of Bakugou’s shoulders. He started to massage in earnest, his long, strong fingers digging into the layers of armor Bakugou had been carrying since the Sports Festival. He found every knot, every tight cord of muscle, and worked them with a patience Bakugou didn’t possess.
Bakugou’s head dropped forward. His eyes fluttered shut. A noise escaped his throat—a low, rumbling groan that had nothing to do with anger.
“See?” Sero said softly, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating against Bakugou’s back. “You’re a mess.”
“You’re annoying,” Bakugou murmured, his voice thick.
“I’m a saint. I should be charging you hourly rates for this.”
Sero worked his way down Bakugou’s spine. It was intimate. Too intimate. Bakugou knew he should stop this. He was the guy who blasted people away. He was the guy who built walls of explosions and insults to keep the world out.
But Sero wasn’t the world. Sero was the refrigerator hum in a quiet kitchen. Sero was the guy who saw the muzzle and didn’t look away.
Bakugou tilted his head back, resting it against Sero’s chest.
Sero stilled. His hands stopped moving, resting flat against Bakugou’s ribs.
“Katsuki,” Sero said.
It was the first time he’d used his given name. It didn’t sound like a taunt. It didn’t sound like a challenge. It sounded right. It sounded like a key turning in a lock.
Bakugou opened his eyes. He was looking up at the ceiling, feeling the steady rise and fall of Sero’s breathing against his back. The rain hammered against the glass, but in here, the air was still.
“What?” Bakugou whispered.
“You okay?”
Bakugou shifted, turning his body so he could look at Sero properly. Their faces were inches apart. The blue light from the storm outside cast deep shadows over Sero’s face, but his eyes were dark and searching.
“I’m fine,” Bakugou breathed.
Sero didn’t move away. He didn’t make a joke. He didn’t pull back into the safety of irony. He just leaned down.
It wasn’t a movie kiss. There were no fireworks. The rain didn’t suddenly stop. Sero just pressed his lips to Bakugou’s forehead. A dry, chaste press of warmth right between his eyebrows, soothing the crease that was always there.
Bakugou stopped breathing. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Sero pulled back slightly, his eyes widening just a fraction. “Sorry. Misread the—”
Their mouths clashed. It was clumsy. It was desperate. Bakugou was aggressive, leading with teeth and pent-up adrenaline, trying to devour the moment before it could disappear. But Sero met him with that same maddening, steady calm.
Sero’s hand came up to cup the back of Bakugou’s neck, his thumb stroking the sensitive skin there, grounding him. He didn’t fight for dominance; he just held him.
Bakugou softened. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a terrifying, liquid heat. He let out a shaky breath against Sero’s mouth and tilted his head, deepening the kiss. It tasted like coffee and mint gum. It felt like safety.
When they broke apart, the only sound was the rain and their ragged breathing. Bakugou was flushed, his lips swollen, his mind spinning. Sero looked a little dazed, his usual grin replaced by something softer, something openly vulnerable.
“Okay,” Sero breathed, his voice cracking slightly.
“Okay,” Bakugou repeated.
He smoothed his shirt, trying to regain some semblance of dignity, trying to pull the scattered pieces of his armor back together. But his hands were shaking.
“Don’t think this means you can slack off on training tomorrow,” Bakugou said, though the threat lacked any real bite.
Sero laughed, low and rich. He rested his forehead against Bakugou’s shoulder, hiding his face, his body shaking with the mirth. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Sparky.”
And true to his word, Sero was at training the next morning. True to his nature, Bakugou didn’t say a word about the night before.
Defining “it” was harder than doing it, anyway.
They didn’t sit down and have a heartfelt conversation about feelings or labels. There was no “will you go out with me” moment. Instead, the intimacy of that stormy night just bled into the daylight, quiet and undeniable.
Sero started sitting closer to him at lunch, invading his personal bubble until their shoulders brushed. Their knees would knock together under the cafeteria table, a secret conversation happening beneath the noise of the class. Bakugou stopped threatening to kill Sero every time he made a bad joke.
It wasn’t a loud romance. It was just a new law of physics: where Bakugou was, Sero was usually in orbit nearby.
It was a biting cold morning in November when the L-word finally happened.
They were sparring in Gym Gamma. Cementoss had created a brutalist labyrinth of pillars and shifting platforms. It was a capture-the-flag scenario, high stakes and high speed.
Bakugou was moving like a man possessed, using his explosions to ricochet off the walls in jagged, unpredictable angles. He was a blur of orange and black heat. He knew Sero was somewhere above him, swinging through the concrete rafters like a spider.
“Too slow!” Bakugou yelled, blasting a concrete pillar to dust just as Sero landed on it.
Sero leaped off the crumbling structure, shooting a line of tape to catch a higher beam, swinging in a wide arc. “You’re just loud! I can hear you coming from a mile away, Sparky!”
“That’s the point! Fear is a weapon!”
Bakugou launched himself upward, a precise explosion propelling him to intercept Sero’s swing. He grabbed Sero’s ankle mid-air, blasted a correction shot with his free hand to change their trajectory, and slammed them both down onto a raised platform.
It wasn’t a gentle landing—Bakugou took the brunt of the impact with his boots, absorbing the shock through his knees—but he ended up straddling Sero, pinning his wrists to the cold concrete before Sero could fire off another strip of tape.
“Got you,” Bakugou panted, sweat dripping from his nose onto Sero’s cheek. “I win.”
Sero was breathing hard, his chest heaving against Bakugou’s thighs. His helmet was knocked crooked, revealing messy black hair. He looked up at Bakugou, blinking away the dust, and then he grinned.
That stupid, easy, maddening grin.
“Yeah,” Sero wheezed, entirely unbothered by the fact that he had just been tackled out of the air. “You got me.”
Bakugou looked down at him. The adrenaline was screaming in his veins, his blood singing with the fight. He felt powerful, not in the scary, uncontrollable way that haunted him, but in the capable way.
And Sero...
Sero wasn’t fighting the hold. He wasn’t afraid. He was just looking up at Bakugou like he was the sun, blinding, dangerous, and the only thing worth looking at.
“You’re an idiot,” Bakugou said, his voice rough.
“And you’re heavy.”
“I’ll blow your face off.”
“Do it.”
Bakugou hesitated. The rage that usually fueled him wasn’t there to protect him. Instead, there was a terrifying swelling in his chest, a rapid expansion that felt like an explosion in slow motion.
“I love you,” Bakugou blurted out.
The words hung in the dusty, ozone-scented air of the gym.
Bakugou’s eyes went wide. He hadn’t meant to say it. He hadn’t even thought it, not explicitly. It had just bypassed his brain, traveled up his throat, and jumped out of his mouth alongside the adrenaline.
Sero blinked. Once. Twice. The grin faded, replaced by pure, slack-jawed shock.
“What?” Sero squeaked, his voice cracking.
Bakugou’s face went nuclear red. The heat started at his neck and consumed him instantly. He scrambled off Sero as if he were on fire, standing up and turning his back on the scene of the crime.
“Nothing! Forget it! I said I loathe you! I said—I said I’ll shove you!”
“Katsuki.”
“Shut up! We’re done! Exercise over! Cementoss, I’m done!”
He felt a hand on his wrist. Not tape. Just a warm, solid hand. Sero spun him around.
Sero was beaming. It was blinding. It was brighter than any explosion Bakugou had ever created. “You said it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You totally did. I heard it. The concrete heard it.” Sero stepped closer, invading Bakugou’s personal space, ignoring the smoke still drifting from Bakugou’s gauntlets. “Say it again.”
“Die.”
“Say it again and I’ll buy you the spicy ramen from that place downtown. The really expensive one. With the extra pork.”
Bakugou glared at him. He looked at Sero’s stupid elbows and his crooked helmet and his stupid kindness that had somehow managed to crack the concrete fortress Bakugou had built around himself.
He realized, with a sinking feeling that didn’t really bother him, that he wasn’t going to win this fight.
“I love you,” Bakugou gritted out, spitting the words like they were a confession to a felony. “You tape-dispensing moron.”
Sero laughed, a loud, joyous sound that echoed off the gym walls. He pulled Bakugou in, ignoring the sweat and the grime and the fact that they were in the middle of class. He hugged him tight, lifting Bakugou slightly off the ground.
“I love you too, Blasty,” Sero whispered into his hair. “Even if you are incredibly high maintenance.”
Bakugou didn’t push him away. He let his arms come up, wrapping around Sero’s back, his fingers curling into the fabric of his hero costume, holding on for dear life.
The war was coming.
They could feel it on the horizon, a storm gathering strength in the shadows of the city. The innocence of their first year was fracturing, peeling away like old paint to reveal the rot underneath. The news grew darker. The patrols grew longer. The look in their teachers’ eyes grew harder.
But inside the dorms, in the quiet moments between training and terror, there was a constant.
The world looked at Bakugou Katsuki and saw a grenade with the pin pulled out. They saw ambition that burned hot enough to scald. They saw a boy who had been chained, humiliated, and kidnapped, and had decided to bite the hand that held the leash.
The world looked at Sero Hanta and saw a background character. They saw the plain face, the utilitarian quirk, the guy who was just happy to be along for the ride. They saw the steady hum of a machine that worked so well you forgot it was running.
To the outside observer, they were a mismatch. A predator and prey. A supernova and a void.
They made no sense on paper.
But at 2:00 AM, in the center of the common room, none of that mattered.
As Sero leaned back, dangerously balancing his chair on two legs while reading a comic, and Bakugou scolded him about safety while secretly sliding a fresh cup of tea onto the table within his reach, they made all the sense in the world.
Bakugou was the engine, and Sero was the coolant.
Bakugou was the flight, and Sero was the tether.
And as the world outside prepared to burn, they found their balance in the quiet, unspoken agreement that no matter what happened next, they wouldn’t have to face it alone.
And to them, that was everything.