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The forecast had said heavy rain, manageable winds. The forecast had been wrong by several very important degrees.
By the time Izuku got the last family into the shelter van, the rain wasn't falling so much as being thrown, sideways, like the sky had a grudge against the coastline. He turned to signal the all-clear to the evac coordinator and instead got a face full of salt spray and Kacchan's voice in his ear, half-eaten by static.
"—oad's out. Bridge is—" A crack of interference. "—not making it back tonight, Deku."
"What?" Izuku pressed two fingers to his earpiece like that would help. "Kacchan, say again—"
Nothing. Just wind.
He found Bakugo six minutes later at the old lighthouse keeper's station, the one structure on this stretch of coast still standing that wasn't currently underwater. Bakugo was dragging the door shut against the gale with one arm, scowling at his own dead comms unit like it had personally betrayed him.
"There's an actual ocean where the road used to be," Bakugo said, by way of greeting. "So unless you feel like swimming for it—"
"No. No, this is fine, this is smart, we should—" Izuku ducked in past him, and the door boomed shut, and suddenly the storm was a wall of noise instead of a thing happening to them.
Silence, comparatively. Just their own breathing, and rain hammering a roof that had clearly weathered worse than this before.
"Smart," Bakugo repeated, flat, wringing water out of his sleeve. "Say that again once the power's out."
The power went out four minutes later.
There was a battery lantern in a supply cabinet, thank god, and a shelf of moth-eaten blankets that smelled like dust and salt but were, crucially, dry. Izuku found both while Bakugo swore at a generator that wasn't going to turn over no matter how many times he threatened it.
"It's not going to work better if you glare at it," Izuku said.
"Everything works better if I glare at it. That's just true. That's a fact about the universe."
Izuku laughed — actually laughed, surprising himself, the first easy sound he'd made all night — and Bakugo looked over at him with something that wasn't quite annoyance.
Hadn't been annoyance, really, in years. Izuku had stopped being able to pretend otherwise sometime around age twenty-two, though he hadn't done much about it besides notice.
They set the lantern in the middle of the floor between two blankets and sat, because there wasn't much else to do at 11 p.m. with a typhoon parked directly overhead.
"Your arm's bleeding," Bakugo said.
Izuku glanced down. Shallow cut, forearm, courtesy of some flying debris he hadn't clocked as debris until it was already past him. "Oh — it's fine, it's just a scratch—"
"Give it here."
"Kacchan, it's really—"
"I will set it on fire if you make me ask twice."
Izuku gave him the arm.
Bakugo's hands, doing careful work, had always been a strange kind of contradiction — the same hands that could level a city block, moving with a precision that bordered on gentle when he actually let them.
He cleaned the cut with water from his canteen, wrapped it with the gauze from his belt kit, and didn't say anything the whole time, which was somehow louder than if he had.
"Thanks," Izuku said, when it was done.
"Don't get maimed. It's annoying to deal with." But he didn't let go of Izuku's wrist right away. A beat too long. Then he did, and reached for his own canteen, and drank like the last ten seconds hadn't happened.
Izuku decided not to mention it. He filed it away instead, the way he filed away everything about Kacchan — an ever-growing, carefully organized archive that he was, if he was honest with himself, never going to do anything useful with.
The wind screamed against the shutters for a while. They let it.
"You ever think," Izuku said eventually, chin on his knees, "that we spent so long trying to be the one who saved the other guy, we forgot we could just — sit somewhere. Like this."
Bakugo snorted. "That's the most Deku thing you've said all year, and it's September."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are. That's what makes it so annoying." But he was quiet a second, turning the lantern's little dial like he needed something to do with his hands. "It's not bad, though. Sitting somewhere."
"No," Izuku agreed. "It's not."
Rain kept up its assault on the roof. Somewhere out past the shutters, the sea was doing something enormous and violent, and in here it was just lantern-light and two damp blankets and the particular quality of quiet that exists between two people who've run out of things they're required to say to each other.
"Cold?" Bakugo asked, out of nowhere.
"A little."
He didn't offer his blanket, exactly. He just shifted his own an inch closer, until the edge of it overlapped Izuku's shoulder, and then he stayed very still and very deliberately looked at the lantern instead of at Izuku, which was somehow the most obvious thing he'd ever done.
Izuku looked at the side of his face for a second too long.
"What," Bakugo said, not looking over.
"Nothing." A pause. "You're warm."
"Yeah, well." Bakugo's jaw did something complicated. "Explosions. Body heat. Science."
"Mm-hm."
"Shut up."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking something. I can hear you thinking. It's like a kettle."
Izuku smiled down at his knees so Bakugo wouldn't see the whole shape of it. Outside, the storm hit a new pitch, rattling the shutters hard enough that the lantern flickered, and without seeming to decide to, Izuku found his shoulder had drifted the rest of the way into Bakugo's, and neither of them moved away.
"This is a stupid place to almost die," Bakugo said, apropos of nothing, staring at the shutters.
"We're not going to die. It's a lighthouse station. It's been here since before quirks."
"I didn't say I was worried. I said it'd be stupid." A beat. "Would've been worse ways to go, though. Probably. If you're ranking them."
"Kacchan."
"What."
"Are you being sentimental right now?"
"I will throw you into the ocean."
"There's an ocean six feet from the door, so, respect the follow-through, but I don't think you will."
Bakugo didn't answer that. He also didn't move his shoulder.
Somewhere close to 2 a.m., the wind finally started to drop from a scream to something more like a long, tired argument.
Izuku had gone quiet, and when Bakugo glanced over he found him half-asleep sitting up, head tipping slowly toward Bakugo's shoulder like gravity had made an executive decision his pride hadn't caught up to yet.
Bakugo could've woken him. Should have, probably, if he wanted to keep pretending this was all just proximity and body heat and science.
He didn't.
He sat very still instead, watching the lantern light move on the ceiling, and let Izuku's head find its way to his shoulder, and let his own arm end up loosely around him somewhere in the process without ever really deciding to put it there.
Outside, the storm kept losing its nerve, minute by minute. Inside, it was warm, and quiet, and Bakugo Katsuki — who had spent the better part of two decades being furiously, aggressively certain about everything — found he had absolutely no idea what to do with how much he did not want this particular night to end.
"You're staring," Izuku mumbled, not fully awake, eyes still closed.
"I'm not."
"You are. I can feel it. It's like a kettle."
"...Go back to sleep, Deku."
A small, sleepy huff of a laugh against his shoulder. "Bossy."
"You have no idea."
Izuku's hand found his in the dark, loose and half-conscious, fingers curling in without any real weight behind it — the kind of thing a person does when they trust the room they're in completely. Bakugo looked down at their hands for a long moment.
Then he laced his fingers through, just enough, and said nothing, and let the storm have the rest of the night to itself.
Izuku woke up to grey light coming through the shutter slats and the specific, disoriented realization that he was still holding Bakugo's hand.
Not still — that made it sound accidental, ongoing. This felt more deliberate than that. Bakugo was awake, had clearly been awake for a while, sitting with his back against the wall and his eyes on the door like he was working out exactly how to handle the next ten minutes of his life.
"Storm broke around five," Bakugo said, before Izuku could say anything. Not looking at him yet. "Comms are back up. Rescue's twenty minutes out."
"Oh." Izuku sat up carefully, and their hands stayed where they were a beat longer than logistics required before he made himself let go. "That's — good. That's good news."
"Yeah."
Neither of them moved to stand.
"Kacchan—"
"If you're about to analyze it," Bakugo said, "don't."
"I wasn't going to analyze it." A pause. "I was going to say I'm glad the road washed out."
That got Bakugo to actually look at him — sharp, surprised, caught somewhere between offended and something much softer that he clearly hadn't planned on anyone seeing this early in the morning.
"That's a genuinely deranged thing to be glad about, Deku."
"Probably." Izuku didn't take it back. "I'm still glad."
Bakugo stared at him a second longer. Then, instead of the retort Izuku was braced for, he reached over, tucked one knuckle under Izuku's chin, and kissed him — quick, and a little rough at the edges the way everything about Bakugo was, but not careless. Not something thrown. Something he'd clearly been sitting on, deciding about, for several hours in the dark.
He pulled back before Izuku had fully caught up to what was happening.
"Don't make it weird," Bakugo said, already reaching for his jacket, ears red, refusing to look smug about it and failing.
"I wasn't going to," Izuku said, dazed, grinning. "I was going to say we should do the stakeout thing again sometime. Minus the typhoon."
"Absolutely not."
"You're smiling."
"I am not—"
Outside, an engine cut through the last of the wind — rescue, right on schedule — and Bakugo hauled the door open to grey morning and a coastline still dripping from the night before, and didn't let go of Izuku's hand on the way out