Chapter Text
Hitoshi had moved into his new dorm weeks ago, but he still wasn’t used to the difference in noise compared to his old living area in general studies.
His old classmates tended to keep to themselves and even the louder friend groups couldn’t be heard past the first floor.
Trying to study at the 1-A dorms on the other hand was a little like trying to study while at an active WWE match and sitting in the ring itself. Because even though Hitoshi usually stayed in his room, the chaos somehow reached him anyway.
On a good day it was just people running or yelling outside his door or in the rooms adjacent to him, one of the culprits more often than not being the explosive pomeranian of a man threatening someone with murder over nothing.
Today was not one of the good days.
He was just in the middle of finally understanding the brutal math homework they had been assigned earlier in the week, basically feeling the answer crawling its way to the front of his mind, when his door slammed open without warning and practically scared his genius math revelation back into his brain folds.
He wasn’t usually easy to startle, not even through violent interruptions such as this one as he had gotten used to them back in one of his old foster homes where privacy had been unheard of. Maybe it was his worsening insomnia or the fact that he’d already drunk six cups of coffee with increasing amounts of espresso shots that got him more than a few worried glances from Izuku when he caught him in the kitchen earlier, but he hadn’t even noticed the commotion outside and subsequently threw his pencil like a dagger at a panicked Denki, who barely managed to dodge before it impaled itself in the wall.
“WHOA! JEEZ DUDE! What the hell did you do that for?” came as the indignant response from the blonde, who seemed weirdly sweaty and very out of breath.
“Who did you think I wa-”
“PIKACHUUUU!!!!! YOU ARE DEAD! WHERE DID YOU LITTLE PISS WEASEL HIDE NOW?!!”
“Oh no! Hide me!”
Finally having mentally caught up with the situation, Hitoshi just tilted his head. He paused.
“Hide you. Why?” he asked suspiciously.
Denki being chased by Bakugo was nothing unusual but the guy sounded more mad than one would like and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to become an accomplice to whatever crime the electric one had committed this time.
“What do you mean why?! Just hide me please!” He sounded desperate now.
“I’m not sure I want to be associated with whatever this is” came the bored drawl from the exhausted teen who, despite himself, actually started to be invested in the situation.
“Oh my god, please!”
“No.”
“I formally request sanctuary!”
The stomping footsteps and the sound of small explosions had now almost reached them and Denki looked like he was about to cry.
“Alright fine but hurry up.”
Never one to be able to resist those golden puppy dog eyes for long, he motioned for him to close the door before finally getting off the floor and unceremoniously shoving the guy in his closet, earning him a desperate thank you that quickly morphed into an indignant squeak at being manhandled like that.
And not a minute too soon, as his door was slammed open for the second time in the last five minutes; this time by a very angry looking Bakugo. You could basically see the steam coming off of him.
Schooling his features into one of mild annoyance Hitoshi addressed the blond with a very bored sounding “may i help you?”.
“WHERE DID YOU HIDE THAT STUPID SPARK PLUG, I KNOW HE WENT IN HERE?!!” came the answering bark.
“Who, Kaminari? He just asked to use my balcony to go to who knows where. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care. Why do you?” came the hastily prepared lie from the purple headed inhabitant of the room, hoping it sounded believable enough. He hadn’t expected Bakugo to have seen him come in here.
His constant blank stare seemed to work well enough for him to not be questioned about sincerity on most occasions, the only one being able to see through his bullshit being his dad. But that’s only because he married someone equally expression-less.
Luckily his classmate was too worked up to consider him lying and just yelled back: ”NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, EYEBAGS!”
With that he opened the balcony door with so much force it almost shattered and launched himself into the darkness, leaving behind a trail of smoke and the smell of sweat and anger.
These people are weird.
—---
Despite what a lot of people thought, Denki wasn’t stupid.
Yes, he struggled to focus and had a hard time reading long texts due to his dyslexia, but he was generally very intelligent.
With his quirk messing up his brain signals and their brutal training regimen, it was just rare to witness, since he didn’t have enough recovery time in between to regain his entire thinking faculties.
All this wasn’t to say he wasn’t a dumbass sometimes, one of his favorite activities was rage baiting Bakugo after all. The class had gotten used to the sight of him running for his life while being closely followed by yelling and explosions early on and didn't bat an eye at it anymore. They knew not to intervene as it would just gain them the wrath of the angry teen as well.
He hadn’t even intended to piss him off this time. He just asked the question everybody was thinking but too scared to say out loud.
And normally so was even him but it had been a long day of training and he had pushed himself too much causing him to short circuit for the first time in months.
Suffice to say that his brain wasn’t fully online again yet when he casually asked:
“Does Midoriya know you are in love with him or are you still too chicken to tell him?”
The result of that was a deadly quiet, interrupted only by the shocked gasps of Kirishima and Mina and a quiet “dude” from Sero.
Then all hell broke loose and Denki hightailed it out of there.
He had gotten worryingly good at evading Bakugo’s wrath at this point and managed to get a headstart.
He wasn’t sure why exactly but his body seemed to move on its own as he instinctively fled to the fifth floor, throwing open the last door with more force than intended only narrowly avoiding a pencil in the eyeball.
Which leads him to now, lying tangled up in flannels on the floor of Hitoshi’s closet.
While trying to calm down his breathing he slowly removed the fabric from around himself to get more comfortable in the cramped space but was suddenly hit by the smell of coffee, lavender and something uniquely Shinso all at once, getting a little dizzy.
His heart, which had previously slowed down to a more healthy rhythm, picked up its pace again and made him flush all over.
It wasn’t news to him that he found the guy attractive, but he was surprised by just how much he actually seemed to like him as he was sitting there, bathed in his scent and listening to him lie to protect him while Denki was trying to calm himself down again, this time for an entirely different reason.
He shifted in his seat when he felt something poke him in the lower back.
Holding back a muffled curse so as not to reveal himself he twisted almost unnaturally to see what it was, only to be met by a stack of different sized notebooks in varying conditions.
Huh. Why does he have these?
Just as he was reaching for the one lying on top, the door opened and revealed an even more exhausted looking Hitoshi glowering down at him like he had drunk the last of his coffee. He was opening his mouth, about to ask the obvious, when his eyes caught onto what Denki had in his hand and stopped short.
If the blonde hadn’t been looking at him so intently he would have missed the brief look of pure, unfiltered panic flitting through lilac irises.