Chapter Text
The first clue, if anyone in Class 2-A had been keeping an actual list, was the thermos.
It showed up on Izuku's desk every morning like clockwork, plain steel, no logo, always still warm by the time first period started, and Izuku always got a very specific look on his face when he opened it — soft, a little dazed, like whoever had made the coffee inside had also somehow packed a compliment in with it.
"Sensei," said Kaida, a sharp-eyed second-year with a Quirk for detecting lies and absolutely no restraint about using it conversationally, "who makes your coffee."
"I make my own coffee," Izuku said, too quickly, capping the thermos.
"That's a lie."
"Kaida—"
"It's my Quirk, sensei, I can't just turn it off because it's inconvenient for you."
The rest of the class, sensing blood in the water, had abandoned all pretense of doing the morning warm-up stretches.
Izuku cleared his throat, went faintly pink, and announced that they were starting today's lesson early, actually, right now, this instant — a tactic that had worked exactly zero times previously and did not work this time either.
"It's the hero thing, isn't it," said Renji, from the back. "The one whose merch you have. The exploding guy."
"I don't have merch—"
"Sensei. You have a keychain."
"Everyone has that keychain, it was a promotional item at the—"
"You have four of them," said Kaida. "On different bags. I've counted."
Izuku opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened the thermos again like it might offer him tactical support. It did not.
"We're doing quirk theory today," he said, with the particular firmness of a man conceding absolutely nothing while also clearly losing. "Open your textbooks."
The class, as one, did not open their textbooks. They exchanged a look instead — the specific, coordinated look of nineteen teenagers who had just silently agreed to solve a mystery by any means necessary — and Izuku, watching it happen in real time, felt the exact dread of a man who has taught these particular children long enough to know precisely how bad this was about to get for him.
He found out how bad two periods later, when the door to his classroom opened without a knock and Dynamight walked in wearing his full hero costume like he owned the building, which, functionally, given his agency's ongoing partnership with UA, he sort of did.
"Guest lecture," Bakugo said, by way of explanation, to a room that had gone instantly, electrically silent. "Nedzu's idea. Don't look so thrilled."
Nobody in Class 2-A managed to look anything but thrilled.
Nineteen hero students sat up ramrod straight, several visibly vibrating, one girl in the front row already had her phone out under the desk with the barely-contained energy of someone about to commit several forms of academic misconduct in pursuit of a good photo.
Izuku, for his part, had gone the color of a fire hydrant.
"You didn't tell me you were coming today," he said, which was possibly the least useful thing he could have said in front of an audience.
"Wasn't my idea. Take it up with the rodent." Bakugo dropped a bag onto the corner of Izuku's desk, entirely unceremonious. "You forgot your lunch. Again."
The room did not breathe.
"...Thank you," Izuku managed.
"Don't skip it this time. You get weird when your blood sugar's low."
"I don't get weird—"
"You called a training dummy 'buddy' last week. Out loud. To its face."
"That was one time—"
Somewhere in the back row, Renji made a small, strangled noise like a kettle reaching boil, and the front-row girl's phone camera made an entirely unsubtle shutter sound that she did not even pretend to apologize for.
Bakugo turned his head, slow, and surveyed the class — nineteen professional hero students in training, every single one of them radiating the specific energy of people who had just witnessed a nature documentary reveal itself to be a soap opera — with the flat, unimpressed stare that had, according to several interviews, personally terrified at least three separate villain organizations.
It did not terrify Class 2-A even slightly. If anything, it made things worse.
"Sensei," Kaida said, delighted, entirely without shame, "is that who's been making your coffee?"
"Everyone open your textbooks," Izuku said, in the strangled voice of a man whose entire life had just publicly imploded in the space of ninety seconds. "We are doing quirk theory right now."
"You brought him lunch," said the front-row girl, to Bakugo, awestruck, phone still recording. "Do you always bring him lunch?"
"He forgets to eat," Bakugo said, like this was an obvious and reasonable thing to announce to a room full of sixteen-year-olds. "Someone has to."
"That's so—" Renji started.
"If the next word out of your mouth is 'cute,'" Bakugo said, without even looking at him, "I will personally make sure your next training exercise is against me."
Renji, wisely, did not finish the sentence out loud. He mouthed it anyway, directly at Kaida, who nodded in solemn agreement.
The guest lecture itself went, against every possible prediction, fine — Bakugo was, infuriatingly, a genuinely good teacher when he wanted to be, sharp and clear about combat theory in a way that had even the back row actually taking notes for once, and Izuku spent most of the forty minutes trying to look like a normal, professional colleague and mostly failing, because Bakugo kept catching his eye across the room at moments that felt suspiciously deliberate, and every single time, Izuku's whole face did something involuntary and humiliating.
By the end of the period, there was a group chat. Izuku knew there was a group chat because Kaida's phone would not stop buzzing, and because several students had started making unsubtle hand gestures at each other that he was fairly sure constituted some kind of code.
"Everyone out," Izuku said, when the bell rang, with the weary tone of a man accepting his fate. "Go to lunch. Please. I'm begging you."
They went, eventually, in a slow, reluctant clump, several of them looking back over their shoulders with undisguised interest right up until Izuku physically closed the door on them.
The silence that followed was, blessedly, just the two of them.
"You didn't have to bring the lunch bag over in front of the entire class," Izuku said, dropping into his desk chair, face still warm.
"You forgot it three times this week." Bakugo leaned against the desk beside him, arms crossed, entirely unbothered by the chaos he'd just personally caused. "Someone's gotta keep you alive. Apparently that's my whole job now."
"You could've just texted me you were coming."
"And miss that? No chance." A ghost of a smirk. "Your whole class already knew, by the way. Before I even said a word."
"I'm aware," Izuku said, burying his face in one hand. "I'm extremely aware. Kaida's Quirk detects lies. I've been losing this battle since September."
"Should've told them the truth in September, then."
"And have them treat me like this every single day instead of just—" Izuku gestured vaguely at the door, beyond which muffled, gleeful chattering was still audible. "This. Occasionally."
"Nah," Bakugo said, and there was real fondness in it, the kind he still mostly saved for moments with no audience, which made it land harder now that there so recently had been one. "This is better. They like you a stupid amount, you know that? All that noise back there — that's just them being happy for you. Badly. Loudly. But happy."
Izuku looked up at him. "You're not usually this insightful about teenagers."
"I'm not being insightful. I'm agreeing with the lie-detector kid. She's annoyingly correct about things." He reached down and flicked open the lunch bag, checking the contents like a man conducting a formal audit. "Eat your food, Sensei."
"I have a name."
"I know. I like the other one better right now." He straightened up to go, and paused just long enough to drop a quick, easy kiss to the top of Izuku's head — nothing dramatic, nothing performed, exactly the kind of gesture that had gotten them into this entire situation in the first place — before heading for the door. "Try not to forget lunch tomorrow. I'm not driving across the city again."
"You love driving across the city for me."
"Don't tell anyone."
The door shut behind him. Approximately four seconds later, it opened again, just a crack, and Kaida's face appeared in the gap, entirely unrepentant.
"Sensei," she said, gravely, "we have a group chat now. It's called 'Sensei's Boyfriend Watch.' You're not allowed to see it."
"Kaida—"
"Bye, Sensei!"
The door shut again. Izuku put his head down on the desk, laughed until his shoulders shook, and opened the lunch bag anyway, because Bakugo had, as always, been right — annoyingly, thoroughly right — about all of it.