Chapter Text
An alarming (see also: annoying) number of his classmates seem to be getting way too comfortable around Bakugou. This is, perhaps, his own fault, because he hasn’t been suplexing them off elevated surfaces as often whenever they casually touch him, and because he’s sort of half-remembering their names, or at least their Hero ones.
Like, at some point he stopped calling Pinky “Raccoon Eyes” and started calling her Pinky because it was easier, only for someone to tell him that Pinky’s her actual Hero name. He also shifted somewhere along the line to calling Earphone Girl just plain old Jack which was half her Hero name anyway.
Pinky comes at him in homeroom one morning, probably drawn over when she hears him mention her in conversation with Kirishima and Kaminari, her chin in her hands and her elbows on his desk. He scowls at her elbows and then moves his burning gaze up to her face, but she doesn’t flinch in the slightest.
“Bakugou,” she says emphatically, “you know I love it when I hear you say my Hero name. It’s, like, almost half respectful.”
“What,” he says flatly, distracted from pushing her off his desk by the way she’s coming out of left field with this.
“But it does make me wonder…” She taps her chin thoughtfully and narrows her black eyes at him. “Do you even know what my name is? Like, do you still not remember?”
Bakugou scoffs and leans back in his chair, relaxing a bit. He’s not sure where exactly he was expecting her to go with this conversation, but this is fine. “Fuck off. Does it matter?”
“He has no idea,” she says despairingly to Kaminari, who snickers. “A year in the same class and he doesn’t even know what my name is.”
Kirishima’s hand falls heavily on the back of Bakugou’s neck, gripping, and Bakugou stiffens, glaring at him. Kirishima is laughing.
“Don’t take it personally,” Kirishima tells her with a wide grin. When Bakugou growls, Kirishima’s hand loosens and slides down his back to rest between his shoulder blades, strangely gentle until he slaps Bakugou hard on the back. This is familiar contact. “I think it’s less self-centeredness and more like he’s just legitimately bad with names.”
“Fuck you!” Bakugou snaps, incensed. He shoves him away and the hand drops from his back, but Kirishima is still laughing.
“It’s true! You don’t know her name at all, dude!”
“I know what her fucking name is!” Bakugou says defensively.
“Well?” Pinky prompts. Her eyes are huge and blinking. “We’re waiting, Blasty.”
He stares at the three of them, affronted and red-faced, and he considers his options: 1.) Tell them to fuck off on pain of death, or 2.) Give in to expectations like some sort of schmuck and actually answer them. His heart says to go with the first option, but he knows if he does then these assholes will take that as confirmation that he really is just bad with names. To be fair, he is, but to admit as much is basically admitting to being forgetful, which is too close to being stupid. He won’t have these motherfuckers think he’s dumb.
“It’s...Mina,” Bakugou grits out. This, at least, he knows isn’t wrong. He does know her name is Mina.
He wishes he hadn’t said it, though, because she looks startled for a moment and then beams at him. “Aw, you know my given name! What about my family name?”
Bakugou simply glares at her. He says nothing, because he has no fucking clue.
She sighs, but she’s smiling. “It’s Ashido. Ashido Mina. You can call me Mina if you want, though!”
Bakugou jerks back, baffled. “What? No!”
“Oooh, or Mina-chan!”
Bakugou balks at her so hard he feels like his eyeballs might topple from his skull. She’s laughing, they’re all laughing at him, and it’s fucking infuriating but he can tell she fucking means it too. He can’t deal with this right now.
“Fuck off, I don’t know you like that!” he rages, and he swipes at all three of them with smoking, crackling palms to disperse them from his desk. They scatter, giggling, and he slumps low and fuming in his chair as Aizawa-sensei enters the classroom to shut them up.
(Hours later, in Quirk training, he’s paired up with Jirou. He does not recognize the name. Unimpressed, Aizawa points across the field to her, where she’s fidgeting with her freaky earlobes and talking to Yaoyorozu, and, after Bakugou waits for several seconds, seems to have completely forgotten why they’re even out here.
“Hey!” Bakugou barks, holding his arms wide like well? Are we doing this or what? “Jack!”
She looks around. She knows who he means, and Bakugou can tell she doesn’t even mind.)
Kirishima’s speakers are spitting out some, like, gentle twinkly ukulele shit. Bakugou tilts back against Kirishima’s bed frame and groans so long and increasingly loud that it turns into an agonized yell, which has Kirishima cackling and leaning across him to tap at his phone screen.
“Holy crap, just say ‘change the song,’ you melodramatic freak.”
The song changes to something that starts immediately with a shrieking guitar. Bakugou straightens up at once and says casually, “Get off me,” which makes Kirishima bark out a loud laugh and lean back out of his personal space to return to his homework.
Kirishima’s taste in music is eclectic, but not necessarily bad. Bakugou just prefers heavier stuff, especially when doing homework.
Bakugou hadn’t been surprised to find Kirishima at his door, calculus workbook in hand and a chagrined, hopeful smile on his face as he asked Bakugou to come over to his room. He is surprised, however, to find that he doesn’t spend the whole hour beating knowledge into Kirishima’s thick skull. Kirishima had missed something integral at some point in the lesson earlier that day, some step in finding the derivative of a function that had flown over his head, but within fifteen minutes of reviewing the notes he’d taken and Bakugou pointing out where he’d missed something and explaining how that worked into the process, Bakugou had seen the pieces connect together in Kirishima’s brain as Kirishima slumped over his workbook, laughing and sighing, “Oh thank God, it really is that easy. I didn’t even realize I was missing an entire step. Thanks, man.”
Kirishima isn’t stupid, even though Bakugou says he is all the time. He’s developed better study habits ever since Bakugou first started tutoring him semi-regularly, and his note-taking has improved with guidance from Yaoyorozu (who really hammered home the usefulness of highlighters and flashcards), and calculus isn’t even really one of his worst subjects. If given enough time to work out problems, he usually pulls through just fine with nothing lower than a B-plus. Time constraints are what kills him, though, and when working on math homework, his attention will drift after a while. That’s what Bakugou has to kick his ass about.
Bakugou is bored. His homework is completed and he’s itching to do something. Maybe play Mortal Kombat. He doesn’t have to stay in here with Kirishima while Kirishima is busy, but he’s already settled into his comfortable presence and he doesn’t feel like leaving it just yet.
“You finished yet?” he says impatiently.
“I’m getting there,” Kirishima says, twirling his pencil between his fingers. His eyes don’t stray in Bakugou’s direction as he says it, which is a good sign. Bakugou wants to test him a little. Kirishima’s hair is down; Bakugou reaches over and grabs a lock of it between his forefinger and thumb and he tugs at it. Kirishima doesn’t respond.
“I’m bored,” Bakugou grouses, pulling Kirishima’s hair again, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough that Kirishima tilts his head in the direction of the tugging. “Take a break.”
He watches Kirishima carefully, ready to bash him over the head with his workbook if he takes the bait. But Kirishima only hums briefly and then says, “No, I have four more problems. I’m just gonna get through them and then I’ll be done.”
Good. But Bakugou is still bored. He listens to the music from the speakers, appreciating the chaotic drums and the heavy, melodic bassline. The singer has a rasping, punishing voice that Bakugou likes a lot, and the background vocals are brutal screams. It sounds like a riot grrrl band.
“Who is this?” he asks shortly, brief enough to not actually distract Kirishima.
“Ummm, 49 Dead,” Kirishima says without looking up. He gestures vaguely at his desk across the room, where his laptop is propped open. “Do you like it? I have an album over there if you want to put it in. You can unplug my phone from the speakers.”
For lack of anything better to do, Bakugou does so. He falls into Kirishima’s desk chair and examines the CD case after he inserts the disk and hits play.
The cover art is simple, just five rows of ten tombstones with the fiftieth one shattered at the head of a fresh plot of dirt. He pulls the little cover booklet from the case and unfolds it, begrudgingly approving of the aesthetic (and seriously digging the drums in this first song). He likes the first photo in the booklet, getting a look at the band. They’re all topless and uncensored but it doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be especially titillating. The singer is a heavyset butch woman, smudged with dirt and lounging in her own shallow grave smoking a cigarette. Her guitar is a Flying V propped between her legs. Sitting to the right of the singer with leather-clad legs dangling into the grave and leaning on a dirty shovel is a smaller woman with a Quirk that evidently gives her blue flames for hair. She has some dripping, Alice Cooper-style eye makeup cascading down her cheeks. To the singer’s left is a bald woman with jagged, uneven spikes erupting from her bare spine, digging her own grave. Behind the singer is a bespectacled, cold-eyed woman with bright red lipstick and weird earlobes like Jirou’s resting a severely high-heeled boot on top of the tombstone.
Sick, Bakugou considers idly, bored, flipping through the booklet. It’s one of those that actually has lyrics to the songs, so he occupies himself with that for the next ten minutes or so as Kirishima finishes up his homework. When Kirishima throws down his workbook and pencil with a triumphant whoop, they turn the music down but not off, keeping it for background noise, and Bakugou wrestles Kirishima for the position of player one when he boots up his console. He laughs in Kirishima’s face when he slams and pins him to the floor while 49 Dead screams about useless pretty boys.
Two hours of gaming passes in an aggressive, 8bit blur, and when Bakugou finally stands up to leave, he ejects the CD from Kirishima’s laptop and waves it at him. He says, “I’m borrowing this.”
“Oh! Sure, go ahead,” Kirishima says, his voice muffled in his shirt as he changes into his pajamas. “It’s not mine, though. I borrowed it from Jirou, so just drop it off with her when you’re done, I guess.”
Bakugou looks down at the CD in his hands and grimaces at it. It’s less appealing now that he knows he’ll have to interact with a classmate afterwards.
Kirishima easily reads his expression and he laughs. “Dude, what’s with that face? Jirou’s cool, we swap music all the time. I think you’d like her if you actually talked to her.”
Bakugou returns the CD to its case and levels a flat look at Kirishima. “I don’t like anybody.”
“You like me,” Kirishima says with a shit-eating grin that Bakugou wants to explode right off his face.
“I like you least of all,” Bakugou says acidly.
“Oh man, that is such a lie! Thanks for helping me with calculus, by the way. I was so worried at how badly I didn’t get it for a minute there.”
Bakugou grumbles, averting his eyes from Kirishima’s open, honest look of gratitude, and sees himself out for the night.
He has 49 Dead for about two weeks, listening to it on and off during his downtime or when he’s doing homework. He likes it. The fact that Kirishima had also borrowed it proves that Kirishima has some decent taste in music, despite the number of weird covers of pop hits stolen off of YouTube and anime opening theme songs he has cluttering his music library.
Bakugou forgets he has the album for a few days, then rediscovers it on his desk in his room when he’s cleaning, and he frowns at it hard. He’s ripped his favorite songs from it off of the CD and put them on his phone, so he doesn’t need it anymore, and if he doesn’t return it now, he’ll just forget about it again. He kind of just wants to give it back to Kirishima and have him return it, but Kirishima is out to dinner with his parents or something, so whatever. Bakugou has to text him and ask where Jirou’s room is, which Kirishima blessedly doesn’t comment on, just tells him the floor and room number.
Bakugou gets more and more annoyed with every passing second in the trek to her room. It’s only a floor below him, but he never did the stupid-ass dorm room showcase thing his classmates did when they first moved in, and since then he’s never had a reason to go to a girl’s room, so he’s only just now discovering that he has to go all the way to the first floor and cross the building and then go back up a separate elevator to get to the girls’ side of the third floor.
He can tell which room is Jirou’s even without looking at the number because it’s the one making the floor vibrate a little with frenzied drumming. Bakugou just stands at the door for a few moments, bemused, listening; he can hear music inside, too, slightly more muffled than the drums. Maybe she’s doing a drum cover or some shit? He pounds on the door hard, hearing how it’s probably drowned out by the noise within anyway.
“Jack!” he bellows, banging on the door so hard the entire shape of it rattles in the doorframe. He keeps at it for about thirty seconds, which is a testament to his increased patience, and is about to just leave the CD on the ground and walk away, when the drums stop and the accompanying music pauses, and he hears Jirou inside sigh and yell, “Come on, Hagakure, you can’t complain about the noise on a Saturday night when it’s not even seven o’ clo—”
The door swings open and Bakugou glares down his nose at Jirou’s disgruntled expression, which morphs into a look of surprise as she cranes her head back to look up at him.
“Uh, hey?” she says, bewildered. Bakugou holds up the CD instead of explaining himself, and Jirou’s shoulders relax. “Oh. Man, Kirishima’s got you making deliveries for him?”
“He fucking wishes,” Bakugou snaps, slapping the CD into her hand. “I borrowed it from him.”
He’s already turning away, slouching with his hands in his pockets, but Jirou says, “Wait, um,” and Bakugou pauses, cutting his eyes over to her. She’s twirling one of her jacks around her finger, something he’d think was a nervous tic if he could read her expression, which he can’t. “Did you like it? The band.”
They stand there for a moment, regarding each other guardedly, and Bakugou finally says, “Yeah, so what?”
“Nothing,” says Jirou, “just, y’know. Cool. I’m glad you liked it.” Bakugou narrows his eyes at her, suddenly suspicious that she’s making fun of him. He sits next to her in class, and she’s friends with Kaminari and that stupid gang, and exchanges music with Kirishima, so maybe she is making fun of him. She better not feel that comfortable with him. But then, suddenly, she clarifies: “It’s my mom’s old band, is all.”
This gives Bakugou pause. This information is mildly interesting, because he really does like the band and the music, but he’s loath to say anything like “For real?” or “What did she play?” because he doesn’t want to prolong this interaction any longer than it has already gone on, or give Jirou the impression that he actually gives a shit.
Before he can say anything—or not say anything—Jirou tugs out the booklet he’s already leafed through and shows him the first picture of the band, the one he liked with the frontwoman in the grave. Jirou taps her finger on the woman wearing glasses behind the tombstone and just says, “Bassist.”
Bakugou looks at it, still quietly approving of that whole aesthetic in general but sure as hell not going to just say so to Jirou’s face. Instead he just grunts, noncommittal but without scorn, which should be considered a fucking blessing to anyone with half a brain as far as he’s concerned. Thankfully, Jirou doesn’t seem to really want to keep talking to him either now that she’s gotten to subtly brag about her family or whatever, and she shuts the booklet before it can get weird that they’re both looking at a picture of her mom with her tits out.
“Later,” she says, stepping back and sliding her door shut.
“Yeah.”
(The back of Jirou’s neck is flushed red and her shoulders are hunched up near her ears. She’s frustrated and visibly embarrassed as she talks on the phone, turned away from Yaoyorozu, but Yaoyorozu can’t parse what it is from the conversation that’s making her feel that way.
“Nu,” she says for the fifth time. Her grandmother is on the other end of the phone call, she had told Yaoyorozu when her phone started buzzing and crawling across the bed, and her grandmother is apparently very fond of interrupting. “Nu, nu am jucat-o. Bunicuţă—no one at my school wants to listen to anyone play the accordion, Grandma.”
Yaoyorozu covers her mouth and tries to stifle her laughter as Jirou holds the phone far away from her ear with a loud sigh. Yaoyorozu can hear her grandmother’s loud, scolding voice come through. Jirou’s ears pick up every sound, though, from her grandmother’s yelling to Yaoyorozu’s badly aborted snort, so she twists her neck around to scowl at Yaoyorozu on the bed for laughing.
“Everything alright?” Yaoyorozu murmurs, folding her hands politely, apologetically, in her lap.
“She’s getting all pissy that I didn’t play the accordion she gave me for the culture festival,” Jirou mutters, rolling her eyes.
“You can play the accordion?” Yaoyorozu asks, fascinated. She looks around Jirou’s room, taking in all the visible instruments, but she only sees guitars, a keyboard, and her drum set. She’s only been in here a few times, because Jirou is strangely self-conscious about her dorm and her musical talent, so whenever she’s allowed inside, she tries not to seem overly interested in all the music stuff, lest Jirou clam up and shut her out in more than one way.
“A little, kind of,” Jirou says. She can tell Yaoyorozu is looking for sight of the thing, because she motions her over to her closet and opens the door. There are black instrument cases stacked inside, and in one corner, a large, ornate piano accordion. She smiles when Yaoyorozu goes “ooh!” and drops to a crouch to examine it. “She’s from Romania and my dad was super into, like, folk-punk when he was—yes, Bunicuţă, I’m still here. Chitară si tobe destul de bine. Da. Da! I—yes, I do still play it. All the time! Do you not believe me?”
Yaoyorozu looks up, amused, because Jirou is obviously lying. Her shoulders are hunched again and she’s holding her arms awkwardly like she’s trying to cross them despite having a hand occupied with her phone. Her cheeks are puffed out in a defensive pout.
“Acum?” Jirou says suddenly, eyes widening and darting from side to side. “You—right now? I can’t. Uh. Because...my friend Momo is playing it right now. Right, Yaomomo?” Yaoyorozu stares at her, and Jirou motions wildly at the accordion on the floor next to her. “Da, da, ea o ține acum.”
Jirou flails her hand at Yaoyorozu again, gritting her teeth impatiently, so Yaoyorozu grabs the accordion and gives it a graceless squeeze. It lets out an earsplitting, wheezing honk. They both stare at each other in the following silence, and Jirou finally sighs and says, “Vezi? ”
She gets off the phone at last five minutes later. Yaoyorozu likes listening to her strange hodgepodge of Japanese and Romanian. Yaoyorozu doesn’t speak Romanian, but she can tell that Jirou’s isn’t very good. Her accent is atrocious and her R’s don’t roll quite right, and when she gives up halfway through a sentence and returns to Japanese, Yaoyorozu can hear her grandmother berate her for it; Jirou rolls her eyes enormously in Yaoyorzu’s direction each time.
“Well?” Yaoyorozu prompts when Jirou finally hangs up and flops face down onto her bed with an exhausted sigh.
Jirou turns her head just enough to give her a deadpan look with a single eye. “She says you can’t play the accordion very well.”
Yaoyorozu crosses her arms, affronted, and looks away. “Well.”
“Don’t get offended. She’s rude.” Jirou sits up and rubs the back of her neck, suddenly embarrassed. “I told her, um. I told her I was teaching you, to get her off my back.”
“Really?” Yaoyorozu laughs.
“I was lying, obviously,” Jirou mutters. “But I could teach you, if you wanted. It’s kind of a weird instrument, but she actually lives in Japan, so if she ever decides to visit me here she will absolutely call my bluff.” The both look over at the open closet door, at the accordion on the floor. Jirou says, “You already play the piano. You would be good at it.”
“An unconventional music lesson, I suppose,” Yaoyorozu says thoughtfully, picking up her pencil again and ducking her head close to her notebook. She’s not sure why this is making her blush. Jirou taught Hagakure how to play the guitar, after all. But Hagakure had begged, and even though Jirou had enjoyed doing it, she had resisted at first. The fact that she’s extending the offer to Yaoyorozu first is...touching.
“Literature first, though,” she continues, clearing her throat. “I know you’re not finished with your essay yet.”
She smiles when Jirou groans and flops back down face-first.)
“Do you spar with anybody other than me and Midoriya?” Kirishima asks one day, peeling his soaked-through shirt off in the kitchen and wiping his face with it. It’s cold and gross but better than having his post-sparring sweat dry sticky on his skin. “Like, outside of class training.”
Across from him, Bakugou is already kicking the refrigerator door shut and throwing sandwich ingredients onto the counter, wasting no time. Kirishima spies eggs among them so he turns on the stovetop for him but otherwise stays out of his way.
“Half-n-Half, sometimes, if I’m feeling generous,” Bakugou says shortly, clanging a pan onto the glowing burner and cutting into a tomato with an angry, efficient fervor. “And the guy with the arms.”
“His name is Shouji and you know it.”
“Dude packs a wallop,” Bakugou says, ignoring him. “Pretty sure he was, like, in a gang before U.A., so our fighting styles are a good match.”
Kirishima makes a vaguely interested noise while guzzling from his water bottle. He ducks into the fridge to grab a yogurt cup and offers a second one to Bakugou, who shakes his head and goes back to sandwich-making.
There’s a long pause, and then Bakugou says, “I sparred with Gravity Girl the other day. No Quirks, just fighting.”
Kirishima chokes a little on yogurt in his excitement. “No way! You sparred with Uraraka?”
“Fucking keep it down!” Bakugou hisses.
“That’s cool, though!” Kirishima smiles. “How did it go?”
Bakugou is extra grumpy now. “Kicked her ass, obviously. But she wasn’t...bad, or whatever.”
“Oh yeah?” Kirishima tries to keep his voice normal, but he likes Uraraka, and he really likes Bakugou, so knowing Bakugou, it’s really nice to know that he’s been interacting in damn near casual ways with classmates that aren’t Kirishima. It speaks a lot of Bakugou’s growth as a person.
Bakugou cracks two eggs into the pan and then returns to the cutting board to chop lettuce. “Her field training was with Gunhead. Learned fighting from him.”
“Gunhead’s brutal, too.”
“But she learned in a formal setting and hasn’t been in many real fights, so her shit’s stunted against a street fighting style. She doesn’t stand a chance against someone who really comes at her swinging, much less me. The shit Gunhead teaches is legit, though.”
Kirishima can’t help but grin, because he had spotted the ugly bruise mottling Bakugou’s ribs on his left side when they sparred earlier. Kirishima hadn’t given that one to him. “So she landed a nasty hit or two on you, huh?”
Glaring, Bakugou slams the knife down on the counter with a loud bang and snaps, “Do you want this fucking sandwich or not?”
The threat is very real, so Kirishima backs off contritely and says, “Yes, sorry.” He hides his smile behind his hand as Bakugou continues making the two pissiest sandwiches in the world.
This is a precarious routine that Bakugou has kept up with for nearly four months and that Kirishima tries not to draw undue attention to, if he can help it, for fear of Bakugou stopping: every time that Kirishima and Bakugou spar together outside of class, when they finish and make their way back to Heights Alliance, Bakugou will prepare two small, usually high-protein post-workout meals. One for himself, and one for Kirishima.
Bakugou didn’t just suddenly up and do this incredibly charming, domestic thing out of the blue one day from the goodness of his heart. It happened organically, in a flurry of impatient curses and shoves, when Kirishima ravenously grabbed some cup ramen following a particularly grueling but satisfying sparring match with Bakugou.
“The fuck is that?” Bakugou had asked. He had crackers in his mouth and was picking through a tub of mixed fruit. It was cute, and at odds with his deeply judgmental gaze.
“Um, food?”
“You’re gonna eat that after a workout?” Bakugou said scornfully, spraying crumbs inelegantly. “Nice hero diet, shithead. Put that away and make a sandwich or something.”
Kirishima had laughed but did what he said, replacing his ramen in the pantry and turning to the fridge. He rifled through it and pulled things at random, not caring so much what he got into his stomach in the long run so long as he got something in there. Bakugou, however, apparently cared a lot, because he watched in outraged silence for about two minutes while Kirishima piled whatever the hell he found onto a slice of white bread before snapping:
“What is even going on with your sandwich, Shitty Hair?!”
“Wh—” Kirishima faltered and spread his hands wide like what do you want from me? “It’s a sandwich, dude, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“It’s a catastrophe on bread is what it is, fucking—throw that shit away before I blow it up. Move. Give me your plate.”
It just kind of progressed from there, with Bakugou criticizing Kirishima’s post-workout food choices and foisting his own superior creations onto him. Kirishima likes it, less for the actual food (although Bakugou is a damn good cook) and more for how it’s like a distant cousin to kindness from Bakugou, the fact that he makes food for him. Kirishima likes to watch him do it, likes to see him focus on it, because even though Bakugou does everything aggressively, he can only chop an avocado so angrily. It’s fascinating, and the surge of...well, privilege, if he’s being honest, and domesticity that Kirishima feels in his heart whenever Bakugou sets a plate down in front of him—roughly or not—and then sits down with him, well…
Well. That’s unrelated.
Kirishima waits until they’re both nearly finished eating before he loops back around to his reason for starting this conversation.
“I’m not going to be here on Wednesday, is why I asked about sparring,” he tells him. “Maybe Thursday, too, but hopefully only Wednesday. Fatgum and Tamaki-senpai have a mission and want me there.”
He sees Bakugou tense a little and stop chewing, looking up from where he’s been scrolling idly on his phone. He can see for just a split second on Bakugou’s face, before he schools his expression, that he’s remembering Kirishima’s last mission. Kirishima smiles at him, just a bit, a little grim and a little tight to let him know that he also hasn’t forgotten. But he’s been assured that this mission isn’t as big as that, so even though he’s a little nervous, he trusts Fatgum and Tamaki.
And anyway, he’s ready for anything this time around.
Eventually Bakugou crams the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, drops his gaze back to his phone and says, muffled, “Better fuckin’ win.”
Kirishima knows he’s saying be careful and he grins, even though Bakugou’s not looking. “How could I lose? I’ll be thinking of you the whole time.”
He laughs, loud and boisterous, when Bakugou chokes on his food.
“Anyway,” he continues, before Bakugou can demand to know what the hell he means by that, “I know you like to spar on Wednesdays, so would you maybe wanna train with Jirou and Mina-chan while I’m gone?”
Bakugou is visibly caught off guard by this. “What the fuck?”
“They both want more hand-to-hand combat training with someone like you,” Kirishima explains. “I spar with Mina all the time, and Jirou’s gotten way stronger with Yaoyorozu. I let her clock me in the face just to see—”
“You’re such a freak, what the hell—”
“They didn’t, like, ask me to ask you or anything,” Kirishima goes on, standing and grabbing their empty plates to take to the sink. “Jirou will probably be mad if she finds out I did. But I know they want to ask you, they just don’t know how to go about it.”
Bakugou splutters, “Wow, fuckin’—didn’t know I was the prettiest girl at the fucking prom—”
“Well, I could’ve told you that you were, dude!”
“Shut up!” Bakugou stands abruptly, his chair clattering behind him, and stalks towards the elevators.
“Will you think about it, though?” Kirishima calls after him, shouting over the running water in the sink. Bakugou doesn’t respond, but Kirishima hopes he’ll take the suggestion up.
***
He did. Or he will. Or whatever.
Wednesday is weird with Kirishima gone. Weirder, somehow, than it had been when he and Deku and two more people and Aizawa had been absent from class all at once for that yakuza raid that Kirishima never actually talks about much. It’s not as quiet in class as it had been that time, but it’s quiet enough to be noticeable. Kirishima, Kaminari, Sero, and Ashido together could bring a building crashing down from sheer irritating noise, but without Kirishima it’s a little more subdued. The other three are still loud, but it’s observably different.
Bakugou doesn’t check the news. He wants to, but he reigns the urge in. If Fatgum made the news during the school day, he’d probably hear about it without checking himself anyway. Deku sits right behind him, after all, and he doesn’t have to really talk to the little nerd to know he’s thinking about it too.
And he does know Deku is thinking about it, because when Present Mic shuts the classroom door behind him and everybody starts gathering their shit to head to the locker rooms, he hears him go, “Hey Kacchan, did you take notes for Kirishima-kun?”
“What? Fuck no,” Bakugou snaps over his shoulder, shoving his things into his bag and standing up. He frowns down at Deku. “Who do you think I am?”
“I was just wondering.” Deku stands up, his things already collected and put away except for a few sheets of notebook paper in his hands. “I took notes for him just in case you didn’t. He’s not great at English.”
“Yeah, no shit, that’s a nice way of putting it,” Bakugou snorts, eyeing the notes in Deku’s hands suspiciously.
“So, um, would you want to give these to him?” Deku brandishes them a little wildly. “Since you’ll probably see him before I do when he gets back tonight. Or tomorrow? I don’t know if he’ll come straight back here, or if maybe he’ll be at the hospital, I haven’t seen anything on the news but I just—”
“Deku,” Bakugou interrupts sharply, glaring at him, “shut up. Stop worrying so much. Have some fucking faith in him.”
“I do.” Deku is staring at him, ugh , with those massive fucking eyes shining with god knows what over-the-top feel-good emotion. His scarred, crooked hand crinkles the notes a bit when he clutches them tighter. “I do. Sorry. I know he’ll be fine. I just…”
“Worry,” Bakugou mutters, snatching the notes from him and putting them in his bag. “Yeah, I know, it’s all you ever do.”
He doesn’t say he’ll give the notes to Kirishima, but he’s obviously going to since he took them. He ignores Deku’s relieved thanks and bats his hand away when he grips his sleeve like he used to when they were little. He’s nobody’s fucking errand boy, least of all Deku’s, but the only thing keeping Kirishima’s grades just short of abysmal are regular study sessions with Bakugou and fastidious note-taking. Kirishima knows missing class today will set him back. He’s just lucky to have someone as god damn charitable as Deku for a friend who would take notes for him.
Speaking of charity for Kirishima’s sake… He watches Jirou and Ashido during training hour, when everyone gets paired up at random for ten minutes of fighting with Quirks and ten without before switching partners. Not to the point of being distracted, he focuses on his own shit, but in the snippets of rest when his partners are laid low or tap out. Jirou and Ashido are actually paired with each other for the first matches; they’re both effective long-range combatants and struggle to take each other down in the first match. In Quirk fighting, Jirou finally wins by taking advantage of an opening and lashing Ashido’s legs together with her jacks and slamming her to the ground. In Quirkless fighting, Ashido knocks the wind out of Jirou with a sudden low rush of gut punches and knocks her flat on her back in less than fifteen seconds.
Bakugou didn’t pay enough attention to any of his classmates when he first started at U.A. so he has nothing to compare to, but he thinks the two of them look stronger than he figured they were, their musculature promising. He’s never really wanted to take stock of girls physically, for reasons he doesn’t care to examine too closely, but he looks at them this time and comes only to the conclusion that he could definitely knock them down with ease, but they’d spring right back up to keep coming at him if they fought.
The next match has Jirou partnered with Hagakure (both wins go to Jirou) and Ashido with Sero (both wins go to Ashido). The third match is between Jirou and Twinkle Fucker (both wins go to Jirou) and between Ashido and Tokoyami (Quirk-on-Quirk, Tokoyami wins; Quirkless, Ashido has him pinned in two minutes).
None of it is especially impressive, but Bakugou watches anyway, and when it’s time to head to the locker rooms to change for Hero Training, Bakugou decides: fuck it.
“Jack!” he shouts over to them, where Jirou is slouched over a little, wincing and rubbing her sternum while Ashido rubs her back with an apologetic smile. “Pinky!”
He goes over to them, hands in his pockets and narrowing his eyes critically. Jirou straightens up, wary, while Ashido waves cheerfully at his approach.
Neither of them say anything, though, so he takes a second to mull it over last minute, then says, “Spar with me after school.”
“What,” Jirou says blankly, at the same time that Ashido gasps, “Really?”
Bakugou scowls, irritated by both reactions, although there probably isn’t a reaction that wouldn’t annoy him. “Kirishima said you wanted to and that you wouldn’t stop pussyfooting around it, so, fucking...whatever. You in or not?”
“Fucking narc, Kirishima,” Jirou mutters, looking away.
“Yes, we want to spar with you, hell yes!” Pinky whoops, grabbing him by the shoulders. He knocks her arms away, but her enthusiasm isn’t curbed in the slightest.
“You’re going to get your asses handed to you,” he says bluntly. “I don’t hold back, ever, even if you’re outmatched.”
At this, Jirou meets his gaze sharply. “I wouldn’t fight you if you did.”
At that, Bakugou can’t help but grin viciously. That’s the shit he likes to hear. Ashido wraps her arms around Jirou and leans on her heavily, hooking her chin on her shoulder, and grins right back.
***
Sparring with Bakugou is just as brutal as Jirou expected it would be. It’s painful and he doesn’t like to take breathers and he doesn’t help either of them to their feet when he takes them down. There’s very little satisfaction in the activity as well, because he’s still an asshole who just yells a lot for most of it. He’s angry when they stay on their feet and dodge what he throws at them and he’s angry when he knocks them down. But Jirou figured that would be the case a long time ago from watching him interact with Midoriya, before and after he chilled the fuck out a bit when it came to him. He never believed people could do better, but he still thought that they should.
It isn’t a great time, sparring with him, but she’s wanted to do it ever since the Sports Festival. Ever since Aizawa shamed the booing crowd during Uraraka’s match against Bakugou, because Jirou had also felt shamed. She had also felt some disgust watching the match, at how Bakugou hadn’t held back in fighting Uraraka. She knows it wasn’t fair to Uraraka to feel that way, because Bakugou was right: she wasn’t frail. And neither is Jirou, and she wants to be on this side of a fight with Bakugou because she can take it.
With Quirks, it’s difficult, which visibly frustrates him because he’s still used to winning easily and winning often. Bakugou has scratches on his face from barely-dodged stabs from her jacks and welts on his arms from where they’ve wrapped around him or whipped him. On Jirou, everywhere with exposed skin stings with blisters, and the smell of burnt hair—hers and Ashido’s—has been stinking up the gym since they started, and it’s been nearly two hours.
Without Quirks, Jirou mostly gets her ass kicked, which doesn’t surprise her. She’s much smaller than Bakugou, in height and bulk, and even though she’s way stronger than she was when they first started at UA, she’s still no match for him in hand-to-hand combat. It’s not that she’s not good, because she knows she is—it’s just that Bakugou’s great. Better. Jirou’s reflexes are the only thing keeping this from being a complete and total embarrassment. She wishes she had gone first instead of Ashido, because Ashido actually held her own pretty decently against Bakugou when sparring Quirkless, and now Jirou feels especially inadequate.
“That all you got, Jack?” Bakugou barks, standing over her and glaring down at her, where she lies flat on her back with fiercely aching shoulders and not enough air in her lungs. “Walk it off.”
She’s too winded to put as much venom in her returning glare, so it ends up as more of a grimace. “Just—give me a minute. God.”
From the sidelines, Ashido sticks her fingers in her mouth and whistles, piercing and loud. “You did way better that time, Kyouka-chan! You got this!”
“Hardly better,” Bakugou disagrees, sneering.
But still. Better. Even he says so.
Ashido applauds encouragingly. “One more round! You can do it! Bust his lip again!”
Jirou can’t help but laugh, even though it hurts her stomach. She closes her eyes and waves her arm, holding up two fingers. “Two more rounds. Then I’m done.”
“Fucking weak,” Bakugou scoffs. But before Jirou lets her arm flop back down to the mat, she feels his hand grasp her just short of her elbow, their forearms parallel, and Bakugou pulls her gracelessly to her feet, surprising her and jarring her sore shoulder.
“Ugh,” she winces, distantly thrown because Bakugou, as a rule, does not help people back to their feet when he knocks them down.
She doesn’t get to dwell on it because he’s quickly slapping her elbows, pushy and annoying. “Come on, put ‘em up, two more rounds, let’s go.”
She clenches her fists and raises them, her jaw set, and she smirks when she sees Bakugou wipe at a fresh trickle of blood from his split lip.
Two rounds, thirty minutes, several more bruises, and a very nearly dislocated shoulder later, the three of them are back at Heights Alliance. Bakugou doesn’t disappear off to his dorm immediately like Jirou expects him to, instead goes about making food for himself in the kitchen, but it’s clear that their interactions with him for the day have come to a definitive end.
Jirou and Ashido desperately need showers and a meal, but at the moment they don’t have the energy to do anything but collapse at the nearest table in the common room and stare at their phones. A few others are in the common room, where the television is displaying the news at a quiet volume. Kaminari is in there, sprawled on the couch closest to the screen and absorbed in his phone instead of the news, but Jirou sees him glance over at it anxiously several times. She knows why, because Ashido has kind of been doing the same thing, repeatedly checking the news for any mention of Fatgum’s agency. But no news is good news, right?
“I hope Kirishima finishes his mission soon,” Ashido says, as if on cue. To her credit, despite her compulsive news-checking, she doesn’t sound worried at all. She leans on the table, her phone stretched out in front of her and her other arm looped lazily up over her head as she heaves an exhausted sigh. “I want him to see all the pictures I put on Instagram of us with Bakugou!”
“Oh my God,” Bakugou snaps, evidently not as tuned out to their existence as Jirou thought.
“Why is sparring with Bakugou Instagram-worthy?” Jirou asks doubtfully.
“Hellooo?” Ashido waves her phone in the air like Jirou is being purposefully dense. “I’ve been wanting to train with Bakugou for, like, a million years. Hey, Bakugou!”
“What.”
“Can we do that again sometime?” Ashido asks. “Sparring with you hurts, but it’s good! You’re not a great teacher but I can get so much better just from going against you.”
“Fuck you, I’m the best teacher!” Bakugou says hotly. “I just wasn’t teaching you today, only kicking your ass.”
“So...yeah, we can spar again?” Jirou prompts, grateful that Ashido had been the one to ask first.
Bakugou regards them both thunderously for a long moment, then returns to his food with a muttered, “Tch, fuckin’ whatever.”
He’s deaf to any further conversation Ashido tries to engage him in, which Jirou is thankful for. She’s not like Ashido and Kaminari and Sero, and especially not like Kirishima—she can only handle Bakugou in small doses, and today’s dose was bigger than any she’s had before. And anyway, Bakugou is focused on making a sandwich or whatever but mostly seems to be running on autopilot. He always makes food right after he works out, and he does it for Kirishima too, which they’ve all noticed with some interest. Kaminari commented on it a while ago and nearly lost his eyebrows for his trouble.
There’s a clatter from the counter but Jirou doesn’t look up. It’s not until she hears Bakugou say, “Are you gonna fucking eat or wh—” and then cut himself off with a weird gurgling noise that she looks over. He’s staring at two sandwiches on plates that he’d set on the counter, an expression of furious disbelief on his face like he can’t believe the audacity those two sandwiches have to exist there. There’s a third one already half-eaten in his hand.
“Eat what?” Ashido says, distracted, but when she looks away from her phone and over to the counter, she springs from her chair. “What! Bakugou! Did you make us sandwiches?!”
“Absolutely fucking not!” Bakugou shouts, drawing stares from their classmates in the common room. He snatches both plates back. “What the fuck!”
“Wait, where are you—hey, come on!” Ashido wails as Bakugou storms over to the trash can. “Don’t! We’ll eat them!”
Bakugou stomps on the trash can pedal and dumps the sandwiches into the garbage. He throws the plates into the sink and marches to the elevators, cursing with his shoulders hunched to his ears, while Ashido runs over to the garbage to stare into it sadly. It is, without a doubt, the funniest example of autopilot and muscle memory Jirou has ever seen.
“Do you think I could…?” Ashido begins.
“Do not eat a sandwich out of the trash, Mina,” Jirou sighs, smiling just a little, and gets up to make something herself.
(It’s well after midnight when Kirishima comes back.
Bakugou, on principle, didn’t stay up waiting. The sleep he forced himself into, however, is traitorously light. The walls aren’t that thin, but the click of Kirishima’s door shutting is still enough to jolt Bakugou awake. He lies there in bed for a long moment, frozen and listening hard, then hears quiet movement next door. Bakugou grits his teeth and glares holes in the ceiling, annoyed at the loosening knot in his stomach—annoyed that there’s been a knot in there at all.
He thinks about going back to sleep, but he doubts he’ll be able to do it for a while. His heart is hammering too quickly. Stupid. So after a few seconds of deliberation, he gets out of bed, slides on a pair of sweatpants, and slips into the hallway. He raps on Kirishima’s door and leans against the doorframe, waiting, a perfect construct of nonchalance.
It’s hard to keep that particular countenance up when Kirishima answers the door. The first thing Bakugou sees is his vast expanse of bare chest covered in blood and bone fragments. Bakugou furrows his brow, biting his tongue, only slightly relieved when he sees that the blood isn’t Kirishima’s, and that it’s dry and browning. The tiny chunks of solid mass dried to Kirishima’s skin are sharp and strange. He moves his eyes to Kirishima’s face and meets his gaze; Kirishima’s eyes are bright, a surprised smile making them crinkle at the corners.
“Hey,” Kirishima whispers, even though he doesn’t really have to keep it down because his only other neighbor is Shouji, who sleeps like the dead. “I didn’t think you’d be awake.”
“You woke me up.”
“Sorry,” says Kirishima, moving aside and holding the door open for Bakugou. An invite. “I tried to be quiet.”
Bakugou steps inside and Kirishima shuts the door. He hasn’t turned on any lights other than his salt lamp, bathing a fourth of the room in dull orange light and leaving most in shadow. It’s harder to see the blood on him in the low light. He’s shed his head and shoulder dressings and his arm coverings, and his obnoxious Red Riot belt is undone and hanging from his pants. Bakugou had obviously interrupted him getting undressed, hopefully in preparation for a shower—Bakugou can’t really see the blood on his chest anymore, but he’s half-convinced he can smell it now.
“You won?” Bakugou finally says, intelligently.
“Yeah. We won,” Kirishima laughs, quiet but breathless, a sense of buzzing energy to it. He turns away and yanks his belt from his pants. The sharp hiss of it in the dark weirds Bakugou out, but he can’t focus on it for long because Kirishima turns back to him, clenching his fists. “God, it just—it feels so good to finally fucking win, you know?”
Bakugou stares at him, wary, and says, “You’ve won before. Your first run with Fatgum, and the raid after that.”
“I mean a real win, dude!” Kirishima says, coming forward to grab Bakugou’s forearms. Bakugou lets him do it, bewildered. “We got Eri-chan out of there on that raid, yeah, but we had so many casualties! Togata lost his Quirk, Aizawa-sensei was stabbed, I fucking broke when I should’ve been Unbreakable and Nighteye was killed, and the only thing that kept Midoriya from committing suicide a hundred times over was Eri’s Quirk—it was a mess from start to finish. I did better this time. It wasn’t as intense, but nobody got hurt on our side! I’m fucking wired, man!”
Bakugou can feel it in Kirishima’s hands, leftover adrenaline thrumming through his system and making him shake. Bakugou never knew that about Kirishima’s last mission with Fatgum, about him breaking or about Deku. Kirishima never talks about that mission if he can help it, which is how Bakugou knows it’s weighed heavily on him, because Kirishima is an otherwise embarrassingly open book. Two things had kept Bakugou from asking Kirishima about what happened: his own wounded pride at being left behind because he hadn’t gotten his license, and the fact that he had no idea how to handle whatever it was that fucked with Kirishima’s head about it.
He’s long since accepted that yes, Kirishima is officially his friend. A real friend, not a faceless crony like the ones he had in droves in middle school. Kirishima not only likes Bakugou, he cares about him, and, loathe as he was to admit it at the time, Bakugou likes and cares about Kirishima in turn. It’s a lot of give and take, even though most of the time Bakugou doesn’t know what exactly Kirishima is taking, and in the aftermath of the yakuza raid, Bakugou hadn’t known what to give to make Kirishima feel better. It helped—or rather didn’t help at all—that Kirishima had done a disturbingly good job at pretending he wasn’t as fucked up about it as he really was, so Bakugou had been able to let himself think he didn’t have to give much of anything after all.
He should ask about it sometime, probably. Not tonight, though. Instead, he twists his wrists a bit to grip Kirishima’s arms in return to steer him closer to the light from his salt lamp, looking at the mess on his chest again.
“You have blood all over you,” he points out, because he thinks Kirishima might legitimately not realize it.
“What?” Kirishima says, confirming it. He looks down at himself, and Bakugou lets go of him to turn on his real desk lamp, lighting up the room properly. “Oh. Oh.”
He looks slightly nauseated, so Bakugou turns the light back off. He doesn’t push Kirishima away when he grabs him again.
“It’s—it’s not my blood,” he says after a minute, his voice making a weak attempt at sounding reassuring, like he thinks Bakugou is worried.
“I know it’s not yours,” Bakugou snaps, without much heat. “Whose is it? There’s bone and shit in it.”
“I don’t know his name,” Kirishima groans, screwing his eyes shut tight, but Bakugou isn’t too concerned by that face. It’s not an “I’m about to start crying” grimace, it’s a “fucking NASTY” grimace. He leans forward to drop his forehead on Bakugou’s collarbone, squeezing his arms tight; Bakugou stiffens but doesn’t move away. “He panicked when I cornered him. I didn’t even fight him, I went Unbreakable and he, uh, threw a lot of punches. His hands were pulp by the time he was arrested.”
“Sick.” The mental image is gruesome but a little funny to Bakugou, but he knows Kirishima is too kind-hearted to find someone, even a villain, pulverizing their own hands into unrecognizable stumps against his own body especially amusing. “You smell like blood. Take a shower.”
“I was about to before you came in,” Kirishima says, laughing as he straightens up from leaning against Bakugou. His palms skate down Bakugou’s arms, down to his wrists, like he wants to take his hands, and for an absolutely insane moment Bakugou has the question Were you thinking of me when you won? at the tip of his tongue. The thought is unbidden, and Bakugou is suddenly horribly aware of the charged atmosphere, the low light, Kirishima’s hands on his skin. I’m fucking wired, man!
He’s about to pull away, to put a respectable distance between them, to find some air where he can breathe, when Kirishima’s hand comes up and settles on Bakugou’s face. All the air in Bakugou’s lungs vanishes, sending his head spinning. Kirishima’s thumb prods at his lower lip, where it’s tender and scabbed.
“Whoa, what happened here?” he asks, his other fingers brushing the butterfly stitches on one of the deeper scratches left by Jirou’s earphones. “You get in a fight?”
It feels like it takes an eternity for Bakugou to find his voice again. He can feel his entire face burning, certain that it’s scorching Kirishima’s hand, as he wheezes, “Sparred. With Jack and Pinky.”
“Oh, nice!” Kirishima presses on his split lip. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” Bakugou says, frozen in place, and when the pad of Kirishima’s thumb presses down again, he hisses in discomfort. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Kirishima says, letting his hand fall slowly. “I need a shower.”
“Yeah you do,” Bakugou mutters, feeling weirdly raw and exposed. He backs up towards Kirishima’s door, watching him move around to collect his shower items. “Don’t even think about skipping tomorrow just because it’s 2 am now.”
“Haha. I won’t. G’night, Bakugou.”
“Night.” He flees, but he’ll never call it fleeing.)