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Katsuki slammed open the door and immediately walked over to the kitchen cupboard. He started pulling out pasta while Deku slumped in after him and flopped down in a chair. He pulled off his shoes and tugged at a scrap of his burnt costume.
"Are you sure you don't want to shower first?" he asked Kacchan wearily.
"Hungry" was the entirety of Bakugou's reply. He filled a pot full of water, set it to boil, and started chopping vegetables. Deku looked him over, enjoying the sight of Kacchan focused on a task. His eyes lingered on the holes in his costume, the missing knee-pad, the light burn on one of his shoulders. Bakugou had looked himself over and deemed his injuries unimportant. There were too many others wounded far more critically than them, and they'd spent hours rescuing trapped civilians even after dealing with the threat. Katsuki threw the pasta into the pot along with the vegetables and leaned over the counter. Deku couldn't see, but he knew he was wringing his hands. It hadn't been a good day. Too many mistakes, too much lost. He looked around for some way to occupy Kacchan, keep him from mulling it over too long.
"Do you mind making some okonomiyaki?"
Kacchan glared at him. "Do I look like your fucking butler?"
He held the look for a second before reaching for the pans.
Deku watched him carefully while he took out the ingredients and started mechanically chopping, pouring, and stirring. They hadn't been far into their pro-hero career when Deku realized that collateral damage bothered Bakugou a lot more than it bothered him. He saw it as a personal failure, thought about it, worried over it for weeks with barely any external signs, so much that it impacted his performance in the field. It had taken Deku a long time to learn that there wasn't really anything he could do about it. Any direct confrontation and Kacchan would bark out a denial, and sometimes he was so convincing that Deku thought he might have been imagining the problem in the first place. But the guilt was always there, just below the surface.
Watching him work was almost hypnotic, corded arms moving faster than Deku could follow, knives flashing, the constant thud on the cutting board providing a percussion accompaniment to the sound of boiling water and sizzling oil. The music usually came after a battle, moreso after a bad day. Before long, Deku's eyelids began to droop. He drifted off on the table, head filled with strong hands turned to gentle tasks. Swords to plowshares.
"Hey. Loser. Wake up."
Plates clattered onto the tabletop. Deku looked up to find Kacchan staring at him with mild irritation.
"Well? Are you gonna eat or what?"
Deku tried to blink the sleep away, eyes focusing on Kacchan's damaged clothes.
"You never took off your costume."
"Neither did you, dumbfuck."
He was right. Deku hadn't even bothered to change before falling asleep on the table. He blearily sat up, still dazed from his short nap, and noticed the dishes in front of him. Hōtō and okonomiyaki. Hiroshima style, just how he liked it. He kept his face carefully neutral as he took a bite. Perfect, but it was always perfect. Kacchan ate his soup, watching Deku through his ragged mask, the flairs at the back singed almost beyond recognition. Deku knew he was waiting for the beaming smile, the comments about how great his cooking was, but they didn't come. He slowly ate his meal and savored every bite, all the while looking downward at his food like an animal losing a dominance contest. It had taken him a long time to learn how to act during Kacchan's worst moods.
He wanted to praise him, he wanted to tell him how good the food was and how much he appreciated him, how none of this was his fault. The urge was always there, but he held back because he knew it wouldn't help, that Kacchan didn't want to hear a word of it. He ate until the plate was clean and as he walked it to the sink he uttered a simple "thank you." He didn't need to look at Bakugou to see him relax, muscles untensing fractionally, because he'd seen it so many times before that he could recreate the image in his mind's eye. He washed his plate and saw the drop of Katsuki's shoulders, the tiniest breath escaping him, the tendons of his hands and arms fading slightly back into the skin, his entire demeanor changing with the faintest movements, almost imperceptible to anyone who hadn't spent a lifetime watching his every move.
Deku started towards the door of his bedroom, stopping and turning back for a second to say, "come to bed?"
There was a tense moment where he waited for the reaction to his second request in one night, before Kacchan stood up and started untying his mask.
"Let's go get undressed."