Chapter Text
The sound reaches him before the force does, rising through the platform in a low metallic hum that sinks into the cracked tile beneath Bakugou’s boots and travels straight through his bones.
Pressure needles up his calves, deep enough to make his teeth press together, and the station lights flicker hard above him. Broken railings, hanging signs, and cracked platform doors jump in and out of shadow as the bulbs stutter overhead. When the lights steady, everything looks sharper under the sick white glare. Sparking wires spit over twisted metal. Dust drifts through the alarm’s scream. Somewhere deeper in the tunnel, the warped train frame groans against the track like it’s trying to fold in on itself.
Civilians huddle along the far wall with their hands clamped over their heads, trying to make themselves smaller while the underground shakes around them.
Bakugou knows explosions well enough to read them before they fully bloom. He knows the heat-shiver before ignition, the pressure pushing back against his palms, and the ugly pitch of rebar bending inside concrete. Whatever the villain has thrown into the station moves too smoothly to be force in any useful sense. It slides beneath the wreckage and through the air without giving him a clean impact to measure, and the quiet wrongness of it makes his right palm spark inside his glove.
Across the platform, the villain kneels with both hands pressed flat to the tile, pale light threading between his fingers and spreading into the cracks beneath him.
Bakugou marked him as a mid-range problem when the fight began, the kind of idiot who leans too hard on theatrical timing and forgets that stance matters once the smoke clears. He’s narrow under his coat, shoulders hunched, face half-hidden by a cracked mask, with no support gear Bakugou can see except the metal cuffs locked around his forearms.
Then the first pale pulse spreads from beneath his palms, and three sidekicks go down without anything touching them.
Now the rings travel across the platform again.
One slides beneath an overturned bench and drags it sideways with a scream of metal legs against tile. Another reaches a businessman crawling toward the stairwell, and his body twists mid-motion, shoulder striking the base of a pillar as his briefcase bursts open beside him.
Papers scatter through the dust and slap wetly against the cracked platform doors. Bakugou tracks the movement with a tight jaw, cutting his gaze from the blocked south exit to the emergency stairwell where Kirishima’s voice breaks through the comms in bursts of static, then to the tilted train car wedged half off its track with more civilians trapped inside.
His gaze finds Uraraka because it always does.
She cut left the moment the support column split, moving toward the little girl pinned behind a broken bench before Bakugou finished ordering the sidekicks to clear the south end. Dust clings to her sleeves and the curve of her cheek. One edge of her visor has cracked, leaving a thin line of reflected light across her face, but her voice stays low as she crouches near the child, one hand hovering over the twisted metal while the other angles gently toward the girl’s shaking fingers.
“Keep your hands close to your chest,” she says, steady enough that the child stops gulping for air and tries to listen.
“That’s it. I’m going to move this slowly, but you don’t crawl until I tell you.”
The girl nods too fast, tears cutting wet tracks through the gray dust on her face.
Bakugou sees Uraraka shift her knee to block the kid’s view of the blood smeared across the tile. He sees the tiny flex of her fingers before she reaches for the bench, the way she tests her balance, checks the angle, and thinks three steps past the fear in front of her.
She always does that. She puts her voice between panic and whoever is trapped inside it, as if she can make the next breath feel possible by sheer stubborn warmth. Civilians follow her because of it. Rookies stop shaking because of it. It’s worked on him once or twice, before he knows what to call it, which pisses him off more than he has time to deal with while the villain’s next pulse brightens under his hands.
The ring spreads toward her boots.
“Uraraka!”
She looks back.
The pale light passes beneath her, slides through the soles of her boots, and keeps going until it reaches the cracked column beside her. The station seems to hold around that single pulse. Her shoulders tighten as she waits for whatever the quirk means to do, and the child whimpers beneath the bench, but Uraraka keeps her hand steady in the air.
Then the light climbs the damaged column, and the ceiling above her splits open.
The crack tears through the beam with a grinding, splintering sound that drags screams out of the civilians along the wall. A slab of concrete breaks loose overhead, wide enough to crush Uraraka and the kid both, and Bakugou fires behind himself before thought can turn into a plan.
The recoil slams up his arm and launches him across the broken platform. Smoke flashes past his face. A hanging sign clips his shoulder hard enough to twist pain through his back, but he drives through it and lands beside her with his boots carving into the dust.
“Move with me,” he snaps, already raising his gauntlet.
Uraraka curls over the child.
A hot, vicious flare of fear hits Bakugou before anger swallows it whole. He shoves his gauntlet up and fires into the falling slab. The blast punches through concrete, breaking the weight apart before it can come down whole, and chunks rain across the platform in a violent scatter. Uraraka ducks lower over the girl.
A jagged piece spins toward the exposed side of her face where her visor has cracked, catching the overhead light along one sharp edge.
Bakugou reaches for her. His hand closes around her wrist, and he yanks her against him hard enough to feel the jolt go through both of them. The tear in his glove drags across his palm. He registers the split seam a fraction too late, feels the exposed skin beneath it, then the bare strip of Uraraka’s wrist where her sleeve has ripped open.
His fingers touch skin, and the station slips sideways.
The platform, the alarm, the heat under his palms, and the familiar drag of his gauntlets vanish in one soundless wrench that pulls through him like something has hooked the center of his pulse. He stays conscious for all of it. The world folds while he’s awake inside it, every sensation stretching thin, twisting, and snapping back into place where it doesn’t belong.
His knees bend under him, and the floor sits at the wrong distance. His balance tips before he can correct it, too light through the shoulders, too narrow through the ribs, with his weight gathered differently over his hips. His hands fly out for the familiar heaviness of his gauntlets and find slimmer wrists, smaller gloves, fingers that respond too delicately to the panic ripping through his muscles.
His stomach lurches so hard his mouth floods.
He tries to breathe and feels the air pull through ribs that expand wrong. Dust-damp hair sticks to his mouth. He jerks his head, and more of it drags across his cheek, catching at his jaw when he turns.
He looks down because the first rule of any disaster is to identify the body still standing in it, and the sight waiting beneath him drives the world colder: pink-and-black gloves, a torn sleeve, and a strip of exposed wrist marked by a faint gold warmth beneath the skin.
Bakugou flexes the borrowed fingers in front of him, and they obey with a delicacy that makes his skin crawl. The movement is his command, but the hand is wrong, the wrist too slim, the glove too snug across knuckles that don’t know the shape of his explosions.
He searches for the heat that should gather in his palm, for the sweat-spark, for the answering pressure that has always lived under his skin like breath and temper. Instead, a strange humming quiet waits beneath his fingertips, another power with its own rules while his pulse slams against a body that doesn’t know how to hold it.
He lifts his eyes and finds his own body in front of him.
His mind takes too long to understand what his eyes are showing him. Soot cuts across his cheekbone. Blood dries at the side of his neck. His gauntlets hang heavy on his arms, smoke curling from the vents, and his red eyes are blown wide with confusion that has no place on his face.
His shoulders rise with a quick, shallow breath as Uraraka looks down at his hands like she can feel the violence waiting there and has no idea how to keep it from breaking loose.
Her gaze snaps up.
Bakugou stares at himself staring back, and the truth lands through the shock with slow, brutal certainty. Uraraka is inside his body, and he is inside hers.
The child sobs under the bench, and the sound reaches him through the rush of blood in his ears. Bakugou tries to step forward, but Uraraka’s legs answer with a shorter stride than he expects, and the nausea swings with the movement. He catches himself against the broken edge of the bench with a hand that should belong to her.
The metal under his palm feels too clear, every vibration traveling up through her fingers.
Across from him, Uraraka lifts his hands as if she means to look at them. Sparks snap across his palms, and she flinches as her fingers start to curl inward.
Bakugou lunges, catching her wrists before her hands can close, his fingers clamping around the rough edges of his own gauntlets. The absurdity of it nearly makes him snarl. He’s holding himself still with Uraraka’s hands, looking up into his own face while the quirk heat in his palms crackles under her panic.
“Keep them open,” he says.
The voice that comes out of him is Uraraka’s.
It stops him cold.
His command comes through her throat, shaped by her mouth, roughened by dust but still unmistakably hers. The sound scrapes across his nerves because it carries his urgency without his weight behind it. Uraraka’s eyes widen in his face, and Bakugou knows she’s heard it too, the wrong voice, the wrong body, the impossible proof of what has happened landing between them while concrete continues to fall.
“Bakugou,” she says.
His name comes out in his own voice, stripped raw by her fear.
The sound cuts straight under his ribs, and his borrowed fingers tighten around his own gauntlets before he forces them steady. Uraraka swallows, his throat shifting with the movement, and her eyes drop back to the sparks crawling across his palms.
“They’re burning,” she says.
“They’re supposed to.”
“They feel like they’re going to go off.”
“They will if you keep clenching.”
“I’m trying not to—”
“Then stop fighting me and listen.”
Irritation flashes through his eyes on her face, sharp enough to cut through the panic, and Bakugou can work with that.
He watches her force his fingers open one by one, his palms sparking in the narrow space between them. She breathes through his nose, shoulders still too high, weight set wrong over his boots, but she stays upright.
The villain laughs from the far end of the platform, and Bakugou turns his head.
The bastard has backed toward the service tunnel, one glowing hand trailing over the wall, his expression bright with satisfaction. He looks from Bakugou to Uraraka and back again, like he’s watching something rare crawl out of a trap.
“So it found you,” he says, voice nearly swallowed by the alarm.
Bakugou’s borrowed lip curls.
The villain’s smile widens. “Most exchanges collapse before both sides wake up inside them.”
The words land, but Bakugou doesn’t have room to sort them yet. The child is still trapped, Uraraka is still wearing his body, and the villain is still standing.
Bakugou raises Uraraka’s hand on instinct, palm aimed straight at him, and the body answers the command. His borrowed arm lifts, fingers spread, focus narrowing down the line of his hand as if power should gather there simply because he demands it.
The motion is right enough to make the wrongness worse. Heat should pool under his palm. Sweat should spark. Recoil should wait in his shoulder like a promise. Instead, the space in front of him stays empty while his own quirk burns across the platform in Uraraka’s shaking grip.
The absence punches through him harder than the nausea.
Even injured, dizzy, or half-buried under rubble, his body has always known how to turn pressure into force. He shapes it, aims it, and survives because the blast answers when he calls. Now the weapon he reaches for stands outside him, strapped to another person’s panic, and the hand he has lifted against the villain belongs to a quirk he doesn’t understand.
For the first time in years, Bakugou’s palm is empty.
His borrowed stomach rolls again, and he swallows against it, tasting concrete dust on her tongue.
Uraraka sees the shift in him before he can bury it. Even wearing his body, even with his palms sparking and his weight sitting wrong under her, she catches the moment his balance changes. Her attention moves the way it always does, quick and careful toward pain that isn’t hers.
“Can you stand?” she asks.
Bakugou glares at her with her own face and hates how ridiculous it feels.
“Worry about my hands before you blow a hole through the kid.”
Her jaw tightens, and the expression lands strangely on his features, too soft in the mouth and too stubborn in the eyes.
“Then tell me what to do.”
The ceiling groans above them.
A fresh shudder runs through the platform, shaking dust from the cracked beam overhead. The child whimpers beneath the bench, and beyond her, one of the trapped adults inside the train car groans. Bakugou looks from the civilians to the villain, then back to his own hands in Uraraka’s careful grip.
He can’t fix the switch first, and that is the part that makes his anger turn cold.
He wants to tear the quirk apart. He wants his body back. He wants the villain’s face under his boot and Uraraka out of the center of whatever sick thing he’s triggered between them. The kid is still under the bench, the train car is still full of civilians, and Uraraka is standing in his body with a quirk that punishes panic.
So he forces the world down to instructions.
“Hands loose,” he says. “Wrists firm. Don’t lock my elbows unless you want to tear something. Recoil hits shoulder and back first, so bend your knees before you fire. My right gauntlet’s half-loaded, which means if you use that side, angle your stance or you’ll throw yourself into a wall.”
Uraraka listens without blinking.
She sets his boots wider against the cracked tile, lowers his center of gravity, and forces his palms open even though sparks snap across them again. The stance is still wrong, too even through the feet and too careful through the shoulders, but it’s close enough that Bakugou’s chest tightens with something he doesn’t have room to name.
She’s scared, and she’s listening anyway.
A flush rises under the soot on his cheeks.
“Everything is right there,” she says, breath catching around the admission.
“Your pulse, your palms, your shoulders. It feels like every muscle is waiting for a fight.”
The words hit somewhere he refuses to touch while the station is still collapsing.
He turns back toward the child and presses Uraraka’s hand against the bent metal trapping her. “Besides making contact, how does yours work?”
Her focus snaps back into place. “Five fingertips. All of them need contact.”
“I got that much.”
“You’re going to feel the weight answer. Don’t shove at it. If you push, you’ll make yourself sick faster.”
“I’m already sick.”
“That’s because you moved like my body was yours.”
He looks up sharply.
She holds his gaze through his own eyes, fear still there but steadier now.
“You can’t force it like your quirk. Mine listens better when you stop fighting the thing you’re touching.”
Bakugou stares at her longer than he should, until the child cries again, small and exhausted, and whatever has opened between them snaps back into the shape of the rescue.
“Fine,” he says, lowering himself beside the bench with more care than pride wants to allow. “Talk me through it.”
Uraraka steps closer, keeping his sparking palms turned away from the child.
Bakugou places all five of her fingertips against the twisted metal.
The sensation creeps through him slowly.
His quirk comes with heat and bite, with sweat and spark and the clean violence of release. Uraraka’s quirk feels like the world loosening under his hand. The metal doesn’t become light so much as uncertain, its weight slipping in layers through his fingers until his stomach rolls hard enough to blur the lights at the edge of his vision. He clenches his jaw, and the bench lurches.
“Easy,” Uraraka says. “You’re chasing it.”
Bakugou wants to snap at her, but she’s right, and that makes him angrier than the nausea. He forces his shoulders down. Uraraka’s shoulders. The thought nearly throws him again, but her voice reaches him before he can lose the thread.
“Let the contact stay steady. The weight will move if you guide it.”
He pulls in a slow breath through her nose.
Concrete dust, burned wiring, the copper edge of blood, and beneath it all the strange closeness of his own smoke coming from the body beside him. He keeps his fingers against the metal and stops trying to make it obey like an explosion.
The weight gives.
The bench rises with an ugly scrape of metal, and the child gasps beneath it, curling tighter before she realizes the pressure has lifted. Bakugou takes it too high at first. Nausea surges so violently his mouth floods, and he drags the bench down a few inches, breath hard through his teeth, guiding it sideways while his borrowed fingers tremble with the strain.
The girl crawls free on shaking elbows, her little hands scraping over the tile.
Uraraka crouches in Bakugou’s body, careful with every inch of movement, his palms open and angled away.
“Come here,” she says, and somehow she makes his voice gentle enough for the child to listen. “I’ve got you.”
The girl stares at Dynamight’s face and starts crying harder.
Uraraka freezes, and Bakugou sees the panic flash through his own eyes.
He swallows against the nausea and lowers the bench into the empty track with a rough metallic crash. “She’s scared because the station’s falling apart. Use my voice like you mean it.”
Something in Uraraka’s expression shifts.
She looks back at the child, lowering his body a little so she won’t loom over her.
“You did good. Hold onto my neck. I’ll get you to the stairs.”
The girl hesitates, then crawls into her arms.
Watching Uraraka hold a child with his hands does something strange to him. His arms, his gauntlets, his blood drying at the collar of his suit, all of it moves with a gentleness that belongs to her. She adjusts his strength carefully, as if afraid one wrong grip could hurt the girl, and Bakugou has to look away because seeing his own body made careful by her tenderness feels too much like being seen from the inside.
The villain’s next pulse flashes across the platform.
Bakugou catches the light in a broken panel near his boot and sees the ripple bend toward them before the floor itself begins to tremble. Uraraka turns with his body, the child held tight against his chest, but the gauntlet drags slower than she expects and throws her timing off.
Bakugou moves on instinct, forgetting the shorter reach of Uraraka’s arm until her hand comes up and fails to clear the angle he wants.
The ripple strikes the dust between them and lifts every loose piece of concrete in its path. A jagged chunk jerks free above the child’s back, and Bakugou drives Uraraka’s hand up, pressing her palm flat against the falling concrete before it can drop. The weight answers through his borrowed fingers in a sickening rush that makes nausea flare white behind his eyes.
Across from him, Uraraka shifts his body to shield the girl, palm turning toward the incoming wave, and Bakugou sees the mistake in the set of his own arm before she fires.
His wrist sits too high. His elbow has started to lock. If she blasts from that angle, the recoil will climb straight through his shoulder and tear into the bruise the falling sign already left behind.
“Tighten your arm,” he says, keeping Uraraka’s fingertips sealed to the concrete while his stomach tries to turn itself inside out.
“Let the gauntlet take the force before your arm does.”
Uraraka adjusts immediately. His shoulder drops, his boots dig harder into the cracked tile, and his palm opens with sparks crawling bright and restless over his skin.
“Now?” she asks, his voice rough around the edge of her fear.
Bakugou tracks the ripple, the child tucked against his chest, the concrete trembling under Uraraka’s hand, and the civilians still trapped near the train doors. The whole station has become a calculation with too many lives inside it.
“Fire!”
The blast tears from his palm in a rough orange bloom, and Uraraka grunts as the recoil slams up his arm. She has bent his knees the way he told her, so the force drives down through his stance instead of throwing her backward.
The ripple buckles away from them, shredding across the platform edge and knocking the villain off-balance for the first time.
The blast gives Bakugou just enough room to move the floating concrete away from the child. He shifts it too quickly, and the broken edge scrapes across Uraraka’s forearm as it passes.
Pain cuts through his borrowed skin, and across from him, Uraraka sucks in a breath through his teeth.
Bakugou’s head snaps toward her.
The concrete hasn’t touched his body. No debris has reached her. His gauntlets are still angled away from the child, and Uraraka hasn’t misfired. Still, Bakugou watches his own right forearm jerk as if the cut has opened there first. Blood seeps through the torn sleeve of his suit in the same place where Uraraka’s skin burns under his hand.
Uraraka stares down at the line of red on Bakugou’s arm with his eyes.
Bakugou feels the sting on her body and sees the wound answer on his.
The villain’s laughter slips through the smoke, softer now, almost pleased. “There,” he says. “That’s what it wanted.”
The station noise seems to press inward around the words. Bakugou keeps the concrete floating because the child is still too close, but his focus narrows on the matching wounds, the gold warmth pulsing beneath Uraraka’s torn sleeve, and the way the villain’s attention sharpens the instant blood appears on both bodies.
The swap was only the first part. The quirk found something deeper than skin and dragged it into the open, putting Bakugou in Uraraka’s body and Uraraka in his, then tying the damage between them until the distance across the platform means nothing. The cut burns in one body and opens in the other. Pain crosses the space faster than sound. Whatever the villain has triggered, it didn’t make a connection from nothing. It found one already there and forced it to carry weight.
The villain lifts one glowing hand toward the tilted train car.
“Strong bonds make clean conduits,” he calls. “Break one side, and the other follows.”
Bakugou understands enough for his blood to go cold.
The bastard isn’t guessing anymore. The matching cut has proved the echo holds, and now he’s looking at them like he’s found the easiest way to make one wound count twice. If he kills the body Bakugou stands in, Bakugou’s own body will follow. If he kills Bakugou’s body while Uraraka is trapped inside it, the bond will drag her down with him. The quirk has made a loop of them, and the villain has just learned how to pull it tight.
Uraraka tightens her hold on the child. “Bakugou.”
His name comes out of his own mouth with too much fear in it.
“I know,” he says.
The child shifts against her chest, and Uraraka’s argument dies before it reaches his throat. Even in his body, Bakugou knows that look. She hates that he’s right, and she hates more that the trapped civilians still have to come first.
The villain’s pulse gathers along the floor again, brighter this time, crawling toward the tilted train car where the last civilians are trying to drag themselves clear. He has stopped playing with the switch. The matching cut gave him his answer, and now he wants to find out how much damage the bond can carry before both sides break.
Bakugou sets the concrete down in the tracks and swallows back another wave of nausea. Uraraka’s body has started to sweat under the suit, heat gathering at the back of his neck and beneath the torn sleeve. Her heartbeat moves fast and steady in his chest, too close to the surface compared to the heavy pound he’s used to, and the cut on her forearm burns in rhythm with the matching line now open on his real body across the platform.
Everything about the station feels different inside her body, but he doesn’t have time to resent it anymore. The danger sits at a changed height. Every step needs a shorter stride, every use of her quirk demands steadier breathing, and every floating slab threatens to turn her stomach against him.
He’s already felt enough to understand the cost she swallows every time she saves too much. The rest can wait until the building stops trying to kill them.
Uraraka tries to roll his shoulder and immediately thinks better of it, his mouth tightening around pain she has no practice hiding in his body.
“Whew,” she says, breathless and annoyed in a way that sounds painfully like her despite coming out of his throat.
“I knew your quirk was destructive, but your back feels like it got hit by a truck.”
“Then don’t lift it wrong.”
“I’m not. Your body apparently still feels every bad decision you’ve ever made.”
“Tch. Worry about the kid.”
“I am.” She adjusts her hold around the girl with careful strength, keeping his palms turned away from the child’s back. “I can do both.”
The answer sits between them, too steady to argue with.
Then her brows pull together. “Bakugou.”
His name cuts through the alarm, through the dust, through the wrongness of their switched voices, and Bakugou goes still because she hasn’t said it like an accident. She said it because the pain in his body startled her badly enough to reach for the name underneath the one she usually uses.
The realization catches up with her on her next breath.
A flush rises beneath the grime on his cheeks, terrible to witness on his own face and worse because he knows exactly why it’s there. The child clings to her neck, unaware of the sudden tightness between them. Beneath Uraraka’s torn sleeve, the gold warmth pulses against Bakugou’s borrowed skin as if the quirk heard the name too.
Uraraka swallows. “Sorry.”
“Don’t say that with my voice.”
Her mouth twitches, and the laugh she tries to swallow comes out rough through his throat.
The child lifts her head, eyes moving between them. “Are you two fighting?”
“Yes,” Bakugou says.
Uraraka’s answer comes at the same time, softer but firm.
“We’re just making sure we can hear each other, that’s all. Now we’re going to get you out of here.”
The girl blinks.
Uraraka tucks her closer with his arms, and the practical shift pulls the moment back into motion. Bakugou moves first because standing still inside Uraraka’s body makes every wrong sensation louder. He keeps his steps shorter than usual, adjusting to the different stride, and Uraraka matches him while carrying the child.
They move toward the emergency stairwell where Kirishima’s silhouette flashes red through smoke and dust.
A support beam hangs low across their path, too large for Bakugou to float safely without making himself useless, too close to civilians for Uraraka to blast apart with his quirk at full force.
He lifts Uraraka’s hand toward it.
“It’s too big for an easy float,” she warns. “You’ll get sick fast.”
“Yeah, no shit. It’s already turning my stomach inside out.”
A breath of laughter moves through his own chest across from him, and Bakugou almost hates how much steadier it makes the air feel.
He touches the beam with all five fingertips and lets the weight loosen.
The nausea hits deeper this time, turning his stomach inside out and smearing the lights at the edge of his vision. The beam lifts an inch, then another, and his breath snags on a gag he forces down with his jaw locked so tightly her temples ache.
“Adjust your shoulder,” Uraraka says.
He almost snaps, but she isn’t correcting him like a bystander. She’s watching the way the beam trembles under his hand and tracking the tension in Uraraka’s body better than he can from inside it.
“What about it?”
“You’re bracing like you’re about to blast. My quirk doesn’t need you to hit anything.” She shifts closer with his body, the child still secure against his chest.
“Let your shoulder drop before your stomach decides to revolt.”
Bakugou hates that she’s right.
He lowers it, and the release smooths by a fraction. The beam stops wobbling.
Uraraka turns toward the stairwell. “Kirishima!”
Through the smoke, Kirishima’s head snaps up. He takes one look at Dynamight cradling a child too carefully, then at Uravity with one hand pressed to a floating beam and her other arm cut open, and confusion tears straight across his face.
“Bakugou?” he shouts, already moving toward them.
Uraraka flinches in Bakugou’s body, and his palm sparks near the child’s back.
Bakugou keeps the beam floating, sweat running down the back of Uraraka’s neck, her fingers trembling against the metal.
“Take the girl, shitty hair.”
Kirishima’s eyes jump between them. Whatever he sees in Bakugou’s voice coming out of Uraraka’s mouth, it is enough to make him stop trying to solve the impossible and lunge forward.
Uraraka ducks under the floating beam with the child tucked against his chest. Bakugou holds the weight up while the world rolls behind his eyes, every muscle in Uraraka’s body threatening to fold around the nausea.
He keeps the beam steady because the child is passing underneath it, because Uraraka is carrying her with his hands, because the villain is still behind them, and because letting the weight drop isn’t an option his body gets to vote on.
Kirishima reaches them and takes the girl carefully, one arm wrapping around her back while his eyes stay on Bakugou’s face.
Uraraka lifts Bakugou’s hand in a quick little wave, the kind of bright, automatic reassurance she gives civilians and classmates before throwing herself back into danger. On Bakugou’s body, with his gauntlet smoking and his face smeared with blood, it makes Kirishima freeze with the child in his arms.
“Uh,” Kirishima says carefully. “Hey, Bakugou?”
A spark pops from Uraraka’s raised palm.
“Ah!” she yelps, jerking his hand away from the child.
Bakugou drops the beam into the tracks as soon as Kirishima clears it. The impact shakes the platform, and nausea rolls through him hard enough to bend his spine. One hand presses against Uraraka’s stomach while he forces air through her nose and refuses, on principle, to throw up in the middle of a fight.
Uraraka is beside him immediately.
She reaches for him, then stops with her hand hovering inches from his arm when both of them see the torn glove, the exposed skin, and the shimmer of pale warmth gathering before contact even happens.
The space between her fingers and his sleeve feels louder than the alarm.
Bakugou hates that he notices the absence of touch.
“Can you keep going?” she asks.
“Obviously,” he says, because his mouth still knows what to do even when it belongs to her. He swallows hard and glares at the floor until the lights stop smearing.
“Your quirk is a nightmare.”
Her expression softens on his face, but the softness comes with a sharp edge this time.
“Your recoil isn’t exactly relaxing either.”
“I know what my recoil feels like.”
“You know what it feels like when you expect it,” she says, shifting his injured shoulder carefully when the pain tightens his mouth. “It’s different when it hits before you’re ready.”
Bakugou looks up at her.
That is new enough to land. She isn’t repeating what he already knows about his body. She is telling him what fear does to it when the blast belongs to someone who has never been built around recoil. She is telling him, in the middle of a collapsing station, that his body scared her and she used it anyway.
Behind her, Kirishima guides the child toward the stairwell, still glancing back like he wants ten answers and has chosen survival instead. The villain has moved again, keeping distance, one glowing hand trailing along the wall as if he’s drawing a line through the station itself.
Bakugou straightens, though the motion makes Uraraka’s vision swim.
“We need to switch back,” she says.
He looks down at the exposed strip of skin at his borrowed wrist, where the gold warmth pulses beneath the torn edge of her glove. Across from him, the matching mark burns under his own split glove, bright enough that Uraraka’s borrowed hand flexes around it without thinking.
They were thrown into each other once by accident, then taught each other enough to survive the wrong bodies, but the villain turned that survival into a weakness the moment the cut echoed between them. Touch started this, and touch is the only way back.
The villain laughs from the other end of the platform, and the sound drags Bakugou’s anger into a clean line again.
“I wouldn’t rush,” the villain calls. “If one side rejects the return, the bond tears through the first to lose hold.”
Bakugou turns toward him slowly enough that the nausea doesn’t win.
The villain’s eyes flick between them. “The body is only the surface. I only need one of you to stop breathing.”
Uraraka’s shoulders stiffen in Bakugou’s body.
Bakugou feels the fear move through her posture, but there’s something fierce inside it, something protective that looks strange on his frame and somehow fits anyway. The villain lifts both glowing hands, and pale lines spread along the floor, stretching beneath debris, under the rails, and toward every civilian still groaning near the train.
The worst of it gathers over the side of the station where Uraraka’s body stands.
Bakugou sees the pattern with a cold twist in his borrowed stomach. The villain has stopped aiming at bodies as separate things. He has figured out that killing either one will finish both.
“Everyone down!” Bakugou shouts in Uraraka’s voice.
The ripple moves without sound, lifting loose debris from the floor in a shivering wave before everything drops.
Bakugou reaches up and catches the largest slab with Uraraka’s fingertips while Uraraka drives his body forward, planting his boots into the tile before she fires low across the platform. The blast knocks smaller debris into the tracks, and the recoil slams through her at the same time nausea rips through him.
Neither of them has room to stop. He drags weight out of one falling piece after another, and she cuts openings through the collapse with controlled bursts that grow cleaner each time she trusts his stance.
The rhythm doesn’t become easy, but it becomes possible.
She stops trying to make his quirk gentle and starts making it precise. He stops treating her quirk like a blast without heat and starts letting the weight loosen before he guides it. Each correction they’ve already given each other turns into motion now: her wrist lower before firing, his shoulder dropped before lifting, her borrowed stance braced against recoil, his borrowed fingers steady on falling debris.
A beam drops near the train doors.
“Left side!” Uraraka calls.
Bakugou is already moving. “Clear the path!”
She fires before he finishes, and the blast cuts debris away from him cleanly enough that the heat rolls past his shoulder without touching him. At the same instant, his hand finds the next slab and takes the weight from it. The certainty passes between them without a word.
The villain meant to turn their bodies into traps, but he underestimated how much combat lives below speech, in the angle of a shoulder, in the pull of a breath, in the trust that lets one hero move before the other finishes deciding.
Bakugou reads opponents for weakness, exits, angles, and tells. Somewhere along the way, he learned Uraraka with the same precision and pretended it was strategy because that was easier than admitting his attention went to her first.
The station keeps collapsing around them, but the space between them sharpens into something brutally efficient. Uraraka clears his path with a blast that tears tile from the platform edge, and Bakugou uses the opening to release the weight from the last slab pinning a civilian near the train doors. The man drags himself free with a broken cry. Kirishima lunges through the smoke, catches him under the arms, and hauls him toward the stairs.
The rescue succeeds, and the villain’s satisfaction cracks with it.
His gaze jumps from the empty space where the civilian was trapped to the rail panel half-buried near the service tunnel. Then it moves to Bakugou and Uraraka, to the borrowed bodies, the matching wounds, the rhythm he hasn’t managed to break. For the first time since the quirk took hold, he steps back.
Bakugou feels Uraraka notice the same opening.
He smiles with her mouth.
He lifts her hand, the torn glove slipping lower as the pale warmth circles the place where the quirk marked their first contact.
“We switch back. Then we end this.”
Her gaze drops to their hands, then rises to meet his.
The station noise crowds close around the choice. Alarms shriek overhead. Pipes hiss steam into the platform. Somewhere above them, Kirishima shouts for medics. The villain’s quirk pulses in the floor, waiting for hesitation to turn into weakness.
Uraraka steps closer in his body, careful with every inch because now they both know exactly what contact means. The first time was instinct, but this time, when she lifts Bakugou’s hand between them, palm open and sparking faintly, it is a choice.
“Bare skin worked before,” she says.
Her voice is steady, but his throat gives away the tension underneath. He hears it and hates how badly he wants to see what her real face would look like saying it.
Bakugou tugs the torn edge of Uraraka’s glove loose with his teeth, exposing the inside of her hand. The gesture is awkward in her body. The intimacy of it hits him the moment her eyes follow the movement, and heat climbs up his neck before he remembers he’s wearing her skin.
Then his own face flushes under her control, and the embarrassment turns worse because he is watching his own mouth soften around a reaction he caused.
He spits the fabric free and scowls.
“Tch. Don’t make that face with my… face.”
The words land between them hot and ridiculous. Bakugou feels his borrowed pulse kick beneath the skin of Uraraka’s palm, right where his thumb has settled. Uraraka’s eyes widen in his face, and this time she looks away before he does.
The warmth beneath their skin brightens.
Bakugou swallows, furious with himself for noticing the shape of her hand in his, angrier that the quirk makes every point of contact feel charged before it even happens.
He closes his borrowed fingers around her palm.
The moment their bare skin meets, the station folds around the contact and drags him back through the center of the bond.
This time Bakugou feels the exchange.
It pulls through him like being dragged through his own pulse. Heat, nausea, weight, recoil, breath, fear, all of it crosses in a bright, disorienting rush. For one impossible instant, he is aware of both bodies: Uraraka’s smaller balance and his heavier stance, her nausea and his pain, her heart fluttering fast and his palms sparking with relief.
Then his body comes back around him.
Weight slams into his bones. His boots bite into the tile. His back screams from the earlier hit, and his gauntlets drag heavy at his arms, exactly where they belong. He sucks in a smoky breath that fills his lungs correctly, deep and harsh, and power rolls under his palms with such familiar violence that he almost laughs.
Uraraka stumbles in front of him, back in her own body.
He catches her before she can hit the ground, his glove closing around her elbow with fabric safely between them. She bends forward, one hand pressed to her stomach, hair falling across her face as the nausea returns to the body it belongs to. Dust clings to the sweat at her temple. When she looks up, her eyes are hers again, wide and dark and bright with the shock of being back inside herself.
“You good?” he asks.
Her mouth softens around a breathless smile. “Y-yeah, I’m okay. Let’s get—oh!”
The villain bolts for the service tunnel.
Uraraka’s smile vanishes.
Bakugou’s palm ignites.
They move together before the bastard makes it three steps. Fabric brushes fabric as Uraraka steps into his left side, close enough to avoid another accidental skin contact and close enough for him to feel the heat of her through the torn edges of both their suits. Her hand lifts toward the debris scattered across the villain’s path, and Bakugou adjusts before she speaks because he already knows what she wants.
“Take the floor out from under him,” she says.
He fires low.
The blast cracks the tile ahead of the villain and forces him to jump back. Uraraka slaps all five fingers against a fallen rail panel and releases its weight, sending it drifting up across the service tunnel entrance.
The villain skids, trapped between the floating barrier and Bakugou’s next blast, but pale light gathers in his hands before either of them can close the distance.
Bakugou feels Uraraka shift beside him, ready to intercept if the quirk pulses again. The villain’s eyes flick toward her injured forearm, then to the matching cut darkening Bakugou’s suit, and the choice on his face turns Bakugou’s vision white around the edges.
He’s going to aim for her because one hit will count twice.
Bakugou steps in front of her before the villain’s hand fully lifts.
Uraraka’s fingers close around the back of his torn sleeve, gripping fabric only. Safe, but fierce enough to feel like a promise.
“Drop it,” he says.
Uraraka releases the rail panel, and Bakugou fires as the weight returns to it. His explosion catches the falling metal mid-drop and drives it forward with the force of a door blown off its hinges.
The panel slams into the villain and crushes him back against the tiled wall hard enough to crack it. Pale light bursts under his palms, sputters once, and gutters as his hands hit the ground.
Bakugou is already moving through the smoke.
He crosses the distance in three strides with heat still rolling off his palm and plants one boot against the villain’s chest before he can lift his head. The rail panel clatters beside them. Dust rolls over the platform. Behind him, Uraraka exhales hard enough that he hears it through the ringing in his ears.
“Try another ripple,” Bakugou says, voice low, “and I’ll swap your body with the pavement.”
The villain coughs, eyes darting past him toward Uraraka.
Bakugou presses his boot down until the bastard’s attention snaps back where it belongs.
“Oi. Look at me when I’m threatening you.”
Bakugou keeps him pinned until police boots pound down the platform stairs.
The first suppression cuff snaps around the villain’s wrist, and the pale light under his skin gutters, thinning from his veins until only the emergency lights flash over the cracked tile. The second cuff locks into place. Debris that was trembling around the platform drops the last inch to the floor, and the strange pressure in the tile finally goes quiet.
Bakugou expects the warmth in his hand to die with it.
The gold mark beneath his torn glove pulses once, slow and deep, and Uraraka’s hand twitches at her side in the same instant. She stands three paces behind him with one hand braced against a cracked pillar, her face pale from quirk sickness, and the synchronized reaction hits him harder than the medic’s scanner chirping to life.
The villain sees it too.
Even cuffed and bleeding, he smiles like the best part of the trap survived him.
Bakugou steps closer until his boot presses against the center of the bastard’s chest again.
“The hell are you laughing at?”
The villain’s eyes flick to Uraraka, then back to him.
“Suppression may stop my output, but it doesn’t undo what answered.”
Bakugou’s palm sparks.
Uraraka pushes away from the pillar too quickly. Color drains from her face, and before Bakugou thinks better of it, he reaches back and catches her hand. His glove closes around the covered side of her fingers, his thumb avoiding the torn place where skin shows.
Her fingers curl around his before she seems to realize she has done it, and the warmth under his glove answers with a pulse that moves up his arm and settles under his ribs. Bakugou looks at her. She is already looking at him, breath caught, eyes wide with the same stunned recognition he feels burning through his hand.
The villain’s quirk has gone quiet around everyone else, but the line it found between them is still alive under the skin, still moving each time their hands hold on.
The officer hauls the villain upright.
“You can cage a quirk,” the villain rasps, grinning through blood. “You can’t cage the bond that fed it.”
Bakugou’s hand shoots out before the officer can drag him away, catching the front of the villain’s coat with enough force to choke the next laugh in his throat.
Uraraka’s fingers tighten around his hand.
“Bakugou.”
Her voice is strained but steady, and that steadiness reaches him faster than the officer’s warning. Bakugou keeps his grip on the villain’s coat for one more breath, close enough to see the satisfaction twitching at the corner of the bastard’s mouth.
Then he lets go.
The pulse moved through the whole station. It twisted strangers, knocked sidekicks off balance, and dragged civilians sideways, but it only opened fully for him and Uraraka. The quirk needed something already there: some line under every argument, every fight, every glance he buried before it could turn into a thought.
The scanner in the medic’s hand chirps again.
She looks from Bakugou to Uraraka, then down at the device, her expression tightening into careful concern.
“Neither of you move too far apart until we understand why the resonance is still cycling.”
Bakugou’s jaw locks.
Uraraka’s fingers remain curled around his.
The villain laughs once from the stairs before the police shove him upward.
“Told you. It found you.”