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The apartment smelled like garlic and slightly too much of it, which was how Izuku knew Bakugo was the one cooking tonight before he'd even gotten his shoes off.
"I can hear you judging the smoke alarm from here," Bakugo called from the kitchen. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking it. Same thing." A pan clattered. A muttered curse followed it, low and habitual, more punctuation than actual anger. "The stir-fry's fine. It's supposed to look like that."
Izuku hung his jacket by the door — their door, their hooks, four years of the same key ring — and came around the corner to find the kitchen in its usual state of barely-controlled disaster: three pans going, a cutting board balanced precariously on top of the recycling bin because the counter was somehow already full, and Bakugo standing in the middle of it all in an old UA hoodie with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, radiating the specific, focused aggression he brought to absolutely everything, including dinner.
"It's supposed to be that color?" Izuku asked, peering into the pan.
"It's char. It's a technique."
"It's burnt."
"It's char, Deku, there's a difference, and if you say one more word about it you're doing dishes for a month."
Izuku raised both hands in surrender, grinning, and dropped a kiss to the side of Bakugo's jaw on his way past to grab plates — quick, unthinking, the kind of gesture that had taken years to stop feeling like a small miracle every single time and had, somewhere along the way, become just a thing his body did now, an established fact of the day, like turning on a light switch.
Bakugo's shoulders relaxed a fraction. He didn't say anything about it. He never really did anymore, which Izuku had come to understand was its own kind of statement.
They ate on the couch, because the kitchen table had become, over the years, a permanent filing system for mail neither of them wanted to deal with, and because over 20 years of knowing each other had established beyond argument that neither of them cared about proper dining etiquette when there was a rerun of some cooking competition show playing in the background that they'd both seen twice already and were watching anyway.
"This is objectively good," Izuku said, around a mouthful of the not-actually-burnt stir-fry. "You've gotten better."
"I was always good."
"You once set the rice cooker on fire."
"That was one time, and it was a defective—"
"You made it explode, Kacchan."
"I made it dramatic. There's a difference." But he was fighting a smile, badly, and gave up on it a second later, which was maybe Izuku's favorite thing that had happened to Bakugo's face over the last decade — how much less effort it took now, the smiling.
How it didn't have to fight its way past anything to get there anymore.
They fell into the kind of comfortable quiet that didn't used to exist between them, back at UA, when every silence had felt like it was waiting for someone to fill it with a challenge. This kind was different. This kind had furniture in it.
"Laundry's still in the dryer," Bakugo said eventually, not looking away from the TV.
"I'll get it."
"I'll help. Don't want you finding my socks again and starting a whole thing about it."
"I found one sock. In the wrong drawer. Once."
"You made a chart, Izuku."
"It was a labeling system!"
"It was a chart."
Folding laundry turned, as it usually did, into something closer to a competitive event, Bakugo insisting his method of folding towels into thirds was objectively correct and Izuku's habit of rolling them a personal offense against basic organizational principles, both of them talking over the same rerun still going in the other room, a pile of warm clothes slowly disappearing between them into something resembling order.
"You've got a hole in this one," Izuku said, holding up a worn gray shirt — an old one, soft with age, a UA gym logo half-faded off the front of it.
"That's from third year." Bakugo took it from him, turned it over once like he was checking something, then set it aside instead of adding it to the donate pile they'd half-heartedly started an hour ago. "Not throwing it out."
"I didn't say to throw it out."
"You were thinking it."
"I really wasn't, this time." Izuku watched him fold it — carefully, more carefully than the actual state of the shirt warranted — and something in his chest did the thing it still did sometimes, all these years in, a kind of quiet, disbelieving warmth that hadn't worn off with familiarity the way he'd once assumed it eventually would. "You keep more of that stuff than you let on."
"Shut up."
"I'm not making fun of you."
"I know." Bakugo set the shirt on top of the rest, definitively not-donated, and didn't look up right away. "It's just — " A pause, the kind he used to fill with something sharper, back when vulnerability had felt to him like a door left open on purpose. "We fought so hard to get anywhere back then. Every single thing was a fight. This—" a gesture, vague, encompassing the laundry, the couch, the burnt-not-burnt dinner, the whole quiet apartment around them, "—doesn't feel like it should've been this easy to end up with. That's all."
Izuku sat with that for a second, laundry forgotten in his lap.
"Maybe that's the reward," he said finally. "For all the fighting. That eventually you get to stop."
Bakugo looked at him for a long moment the same look, Izuku thought, that he'd been getting better and better at not hiding, the one that used to only exist in half-seconds during viral hospital footage or terrace confessions or moments too charged for either of them to properly examine at the time. Now it just showed up on a Tuesday. Over towels.
"Yeah," Bakugo said, quiet. "Maybe."
He leaned over the laundry basket and kissed him nothing dramatic and Izuku kissed him back with the particular ease of someone who'd stopped being surprised by his own happiness a long time ago, and had decided, somewhere in there, to just enjoy it instead.
Later, dishes done, laundry actually put away for once, they ended up back on the couch with the lights low and the TV murmuring something neither of them was really watching anymore. Izuku had his head in Bakugo's lap; Bakugo had one hand carding slowly through his hair, absent, unthinking, the kind of touch that had stopped needing a reason to happen years ago.
"Same time tomorrow?" Izuku asked, half-asleep already, smiling up at him.
"Same time tomorrow," Bakugo agreed. "Assuming no one levels a city block overnight."
"Optimistic of you."
"I contain multitudes."
Izuku laughed, quiet, and closed his eyes, and Bakugo kept his hand moving through his hair long after the show ended and the apartment had gone mostly dark, entirely unbothered by the ordinariness of it — the two of them, off the clock, no one watching, nothing to prove to anyone, just a Tuesday they got to have.