Work Text:
Kyoka doesn’t have a death wish, but when she turns the corner and sees Bakugou standing like he’d just been socked in the stomach - slightly hunched over, one hand braced on the wall and the other gripping at his chest, panting shallowly - she can’t stop herself from asking, “Are you okay?” And then she winces, because she knows as well as the next person that Bakugou hates questions like that, that he tended to take them as a personal affront, a jab at his pride, and she’s really not looking forward to being yelled at by one of her best friends.
But Bakugou’s shoulders tense, and his head snaps up, and Kyoka’s mouth goes dry at the glazed look in his eyes. He’s not angry, that much is clear. He just looks… confused, like he doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know where he is. Sweat drips down his face. He blinks once, twice, but continues looking just as puzzled as before, and the words that drag themselves from his mouth are thick and slurred, nearly incoherent. “I… yeah, no, I’m fine, I…” His hands twitch. Kyoka watches with muted shock as they start to tremble. “Got a fuckin’ headache.”
Kyoka steps forward, reaching out to steady her classmate because he looks well and truly on his way to collapsing, but then she freezes when he lets out a pained hiss. “Bakugou?”
He screws his eyes shut tightly and shakes his head, says, “I’m fine, Ears, just -” He takes a sharp, gasping breath, and maybe it's just her imagination, but his knees seem to buckle just a little.
And then a lot.
And then he’s dropping to the floor, and the hand that’s on the wall drags down the rough concrete, and Kyoka’s pulse leaps into her throat and stays there, pounding, as she stares at the red streaks left behind. Kyoka snaps her eyes to Bakugou, still slumped on the ground. She knows first-aid - it's a required course - but there’s a big difference between splinting fake injuries on training dummies and dealing with the fact that one of your friends has just fainted in front of you.
“Bakugou?” And her voice is so small that she hardly even recognizes it. She stumbles forward, kneels down, and grabs his shoulder. Shakes it, hard. “Bakugou?” His skin is damp and tacky with sweat, but it's so cold at the same time, and his heart is thumping far harder than normal when she presses her fingers to it. “Ba -”
Bakugou jolts, smacks her hand away. “Quit fucking groping me,” he snaps, an obvious attempt at humor that falls flat when a full-body shudder ripples through him. “Shit, Ears, I’m fine. I just -”
“You just fainted,” Kyoka bites out, far sharper than she meant to, but she’s worried. “Stop moving. Stay still.” She checks his temperature. “It's not a fever. When did you start feeling sick?”
“Jesus, Ears, I just said that I’m fine, would you just… just -
His eyes roll back into his head, and he topples back. Kyoka catches him just before he can crack his skull open, and she lowers him to the ground with shaking hands, stares at his face, breaths coming shallow with the all-too-familiar feeling of mind-numbing panic.
“Bakugou?” she says, but it's weak, and there’s no way he’d be able to hear her, anyways. He hasn’t merely fainted this time. He’s passed out.
Kyoka tries to drag Bakugou onto her back, but his dead weight is more than she can handle even though he’s always been on the slimmer side - something about aerodynamics, that what he’d told her when she asked, during one of the rare moments when he was relaxed and open to questions, and she’d raised her eyebrows, said, like a bullet?, and he’d laughed so hard that he nearly fell off her bed - and anxiety gnaws at her stomach. She considers yelling for help, but that’d be useless. They’re so far away from the rest of the class right now that she could scream her throat bloody and no one would hear.
“Damnit, Bakugou,” Kyoka says, and her voice is thin and trembling. She props him up against the wall and zips up his jacket, all the way up to his chin. After a moment, she takes off her own jacket and layers it on top of him. She stands, forces herself to breathe deep, let it out.
She whispers, “I’ll be right back,” and it's useless because he can’t hear her, but it makes her feel better anyways.
When she was younger, too small for contact sports, she’d taken up track. It was out of boredom, really - this was before she started martial arts classes, before her parents decided that she needed to know how to defend herself - but she’d found herself genuinely enjoying it. It was natural to her, the rhythmic thumping of her feet on the pavement, the measured breathing, and the best thing about it was the fact that she didn’t have to be bigger or smarter than any of the other kids, didn’t have to outwit them or prove herself. She just had to be fast and impossible to keep still, and those were traits that she had been born with.
And so, like a fifty-yard dash, Kyoka takes off. She sprints down sidewalks and through alleyways, turns corners, lets the thoughts fade to background noise as her head fills with nothing more than concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She runs until her legs feel rubbery and her lungs start to burn, and her chest aches, and she really isn’t pacing herself at all. She runs and runs and runs, right up until she bursts out the doors and stumbles onto the concrete strip in front of Ground Beta.
She doesn’t even have to say anything. Later, it might be even funny, the way that Aizawa-sensei takes one look at her and then surges forward, but right now all she does is spin on her heel and start running back, re-tracing her path. She goes even faster than she did the first time, even though all the muscles in her body feel like they’re on fire, like they’re being stabbed with a thousand needles, and sweat is pouring off of her, and she doesn’t stop.
It's not a race, she knows this.
She still skids past the finish line a good ten seconds before the rest of them.
Bakugou looks worse than he did when she left him. She can barely even detect the rise and fall of his chest, and she falls to her knees, rips her jacket off of him, presses shaking fingers to his throat. His pulse flutters. Still breathing heavily, exhaustion clinging to her like a second skin, she pats him lightly on the cheek. “Bakugou,” she says. His lips are tinged with blue. She feels so useless that she wants to cry. She shouldn’t have left him. She should’ve sucked it up and carried him back. “Baku -”
When he shudders beneath her, she thinks for a moment that he’s about to wake up. He’ll probably laugh at her for being so worried, but it’ll be light-hearted and it wouldn’t hurt, as long as he was okay.
And then his body twitches again, and she realizes that he’s not getting better.
He’s getting worse.
Somebody grabs her shoulder and yanks her away just as Bakugou starts to seize.
She hits the ground hard, lands on her elbows, watches in horror as Aizawa rushes past her. He fumbles with Bakugou’s jacket, yanks the zipper down. Hands latch beneath Kyoka’s arms and drag her to her feet, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the scene in front of her even when a voice - Yaoyorozu’s - starts to whisper reassurances in her ear. Bakugou is convulsing, jerking so hard that it looks like it's all that Aizawa-sensei can do to turn him on his side.
Kyoka can’t stop watching.
There are voices behind her, and she realizes that if Yaoyorozu is here it means that the rest of the class has probably followed them, too, but she can’t move, can’t speak, can only lock her jaw and grit her teeth and stare with wide, blurry eyes as her classmate, her friend, has a fucking seizure in front of her.
Yaoyorozu’s breath hitches, and there are several shocked gasps as blood starts to drip down Bakugou’s chin, red as burning coals. He’s bitten his tongue. At Kyoka’s other side, Kaminari breathes out, “Oh, fuck,” which just about explains the situation perfectly. “What the Hell. Shit, Bakugou -”
Before he can say anything else, Todoroki and Midoriya turn the corner in front of them. Both boys are obviously panicked - Midoriya’s skin is pale even though he’s panting from the run, and Todoroki keeps clenching and unclenching his fists - and Midoriya swivels his head around. His eyes land on Bakugou, who now seems to be finally going still, and he stumbles to a stop beside Aizawa. Drops down. Hovers his hands above Bakugou’s body, like he’s afraid that touching him would just make everything worse.
Bakugou’s breathing evens out. He opens his eyes, and there’s a horrible choking noise as he tries to speak through a mouthful of blood. He coughs violently, body shaking, and now Midoriya does touch him, helps him sit up.
Aizawa sits back on his heels. Rakes his fingers through his hair. When he turns his head and looks at the rest of his class, the confusion is written clear across his face. “Okay,” he says, and he sounds lost, “I need someone to go get Recovery Girl. Bring back a stretcher.”
“I don’t need a damn stretcher,” Bakugou snaps, voice rough. “I can walk just fine.” He picks himself off of the ground gingerly, carefully, wavers on his feet. Nearly falls. Midoriya grabs him to keep him upright. Bakugou snarls at him, actually snarls at him, and rips his hand away. “Don’t touch me!”
Aizawa stands, gives his student a look that is thoroughly unimpressed. “Todoroki. Yaoyorozu.” Without taking his eyes off of Bakugou, he repeats, “Bring back a stretcher.”
“I TOLD YOU I DON’T NEED IT!” Bakugou yells, and wipes his arm across his mouth, streaking blood over his skin. His palm, the one that’d been braced against the wall when he fell the first time, when it was just him and Kyoka, is torn raw and red.
And it's that detail, of all things, that snaps Kyoka back to the present.
She takes a step forward, says, “Bakugou,” and manages not to jolt when the full weight of his glare lands on her. There’s something else in his expression, something bitter and hurt, and a realization hits her: he’s embarrassed.
And why wouldn’t he be? He doesn’t even like being asked if he’s okay, for fuck’s sake. This entire thing - the fainting, the seizure, the aftermath - must be Hell on Earth for him.
“... Oh,” Kyoka whispers, and Bakugou shouldn’t be able to hear it but he apparently does, because his lips draw back over his teeth and his eyes narrow and his hands curl into fists.
“Oh, fuck off, Ears,” he hisses. “I told you I was fine, damnit. There was no reason to turn this into a whole - a whole thing.”
There’s a flicker of movement as Yaoyorozu, spurred by some hidden signal, clears her throat. She and Todoroki haven’t left to go get the stretcher, despite Aizawa-sensei’s instructions. “Excuse me,” she says, unfailingly polite, “but maybe all of us should go back inside?” Her meaning is clear: we should give him some space.
“... Alright,” Aizawa says, and, just like that, they leave. Midoriya lingers for a moment, looking reluctant, but Yaoyorozu grabs his wrist and pulls him away with none of her usual gentleness.
The wind whistles through the buildings, the alleyways, as Kyoka stares at Bakugou, as Bakugou stares at Kyoka. Blood drips down from Bakugou’s lips, coats his chin in thick, grisly red. Kyoka should be the bigger person. Should step down first. Should take into account the fact that Bakugou is exhausted, that he’s hurt, that he probably needs medical attention. But she’s angry, too, because he made her worried and now he’s throwing it back in her face and -
She lunges forward and aims a punch at his eye. He dodges, obviously, and catches her arm and twists it behind her back, but it's the thought that counts. “The fuck was that for, Ears?”
Kyoka slams her elbow into his stomach and yanks away when his grip loosens. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” she snaps, voice hot with virtrol, and raises her fist again, threatening.
Bakugou’s face goes through several different expressions at once, finally settling on fury. It's fitting. At least now they both match. “It's not a big deal.”
But it is. It is a big deal. Kyoka doesn’t really know what happened, the events that led to Bakugou’s exhaustion and subsequent collapse, a fucking seizure, but - but -
“Fuck you,” Bakugou says. “I’m going to go sleep it off. And then we can forget all about this.” He starts to brush past her. Kyoka latches her fingers around his wrist before he can get too far. He struggles a little bit, but it's telling when he gives in all too easily, shooting her a tired, half-hearted glare. “Let go, Ears, I’m fine.”
Her grip tightens.
“Seriously, Ears.”
She doesn’t let go.
There’s a pause, a bated breath, both of them waiting for the other to back down. Then, almost-defeated, Bakugou says, “Look, I’m tired.” When she doesn’t waver, he groans and snaps, “Jirou fucking Kyoka.”
She finally drops her hand back to her side, and he spins around to look at her. Freezes. “Shit,” he says, and his voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. “Shit, I -”
Kyoka presses her lips together and glares down at the ground, crossing her arms over her chest. If there’s one thing that has always annoyed her about herself, it's the fact that she always cries if her emotions run high enough, if everything builds up all at once. It's fucking infuriating, and she hates it.
“... Jirou.” Bakugou’s voice is quiet and awkward, stumbling, like the hands of a blind man feeling out new territory.
Kyoka wipes furiously at her eyes. Every breath makes her throat burn, but she clamps a hand over her mouth and refuses to make a sound, refuses to say anything, refuses to look at Bakugou. Refuses to do anything but stand there, crying silently like a fucking scolded toddler, and she’s almost expecting Bakugou to laugh and walk away. He doesn’t. He blows out a sigh and puts a hand on her shoulder, leans down so that he can peer up at her from under her bangs. “Shit,” he says, “Did I really worry you that much?”
Kyoka nods miserably.
“... Huh.” Bakugou smiles thinly. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”
She bristles, shoves him away. “You idiot!” she says, hot and sharp, voice bordering on a shout. She’s always been told - by her parents, her teachers, her brother - that she loses her temper too quickly, and it's at times like this that she believes it. Bakugou is pissing her off in a way that people rarely ever get the chance to, and that fact pisses her off even more. “The Hell do you mean, first time? Everything you do worries me! Jackass!”
Bakugou at least has the decency to look a little wary. “That’s not what I -”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I -”
“Because I’m sick and tired of you acting like this -” and she gestures frantically to Bakugou’s entire body “- isn’t a big deal! And I’m not just talking about today! It's all the time with you, Bakugou, to the point where I’m surprised you haven’t been put on suicide watch. You’re always so Goddamn reckless! You need to open your fucking eyes and realize that you have people who care about you! I care about you! I care about you, and you make it seem like - like - like I’m being annoying by making sure that you’re okay!”
Nobody says anything after she finishes her rant, the words echoing off the buildings around them, and now Kyoka is crying again, harder than before, so hard that she can’t even muffle the sounds. She buries her face in her hands so that she doesn’t have to see Bakugou’s expression. She doesn’t want to see it. She doesn’t want to see anything. She just wants to close her eyes and wake up ten years ago when her biggest concern was what dress she should wear to her elementary school talent show.
Footsteps approach. They stop in front of her. She doesn’t look up, irrationally convinced that to do so would be met with a bloody nose, or, at the very least, a black eye. As far as she knows, yelling at someone like Bakugou never ends well.
So she’s completely caught off guard when he just yanks her into a hug. She freezes. Her face is burning, but she tentatively wraps her arms around his waist and squeezes back. It's tentative and hesitant and completely awkward, but it's an actual hug, and she honestly can’t tell which of them needed it more. Once she stops crying enough that the only sign of her tears is a bout of hiccuping breaths that refuses to go away, Bakugou pulls back, stares at her. “Okay,” he says, and there’s something almost unbelievably fragile in his voice, “do you feel better?”
Kyoka tries for a smile. “I’m not the one who had a seizure, Bakugou.”
Bakugou flushes red, all the way up to his ears. Huh. Kyoka wasn’t even aware that that was something he could do. “Right,” he says, and he suddenly seems very interested in the sky, the ground, a bug crawling by his shoe, everything except Kyoka. “That.”
“Yeah.” Kyoka crosses her arms. “That.”
Bakugou resolutely avoids even looking in her direction.
Kyoka sighs. “Look, Bakugou, I want to help. That’s literally all I’m trying to do, so get it through your thick skull that not everyone has to have ulterior motives, okay?”
Bakugou gnaws at his lower lip, then grimaces, presumably at the taste of blood. He wipes his palms on the front of his pants. His eyes flick over to Kyoka, then dart away twice as fast.
“... So,” he says. Stops. Looks down at his hands, curls his fingers. “You know the training exercise, right?”
She does. It's why she’d been looking for Bakugou in the first place.
Aizawa-sensei had been running the entire class through a series of drills to test their Quirks’ strengths, and Bakugou had gone all out, most likely because some stupid dare that Kaminari or Kirishima had put him up to.
Kyoka was one of the first ones to notice that Bakugou disappeared after his turn was over, but when she’d mentioned it to Aizawa, he’d just shrugged it off and said that Bakugou was probably running around Ground Beta, blowing off steam and excess energy.
Not in those exact words, but close enough, and Kyoka hates, now, how easily she accepted that explanation, but it had sounded logical at the time, had sounded like something that Bakugou would do, and the idea was bolstered by the fact that explosions could be heard coming from far within the model city if one was listening closely.
Only when it was time to go inside and change back into their school uniforms had Aizawa-sensei frowned. He’d told Kyoka to find Bakugou, to tell him that it was time to head back to class - when Kyoka had protested, asking why she had to be the one to do it when there were plenty of other suitable candidates, all Aizawa had done was give her that infuriatingly deadpan look that seemed to be his one and only signature move.
And so Kyoka had sighed and walked into the training grounds, calling out Bakugou’s name.
She hadn’t expected him to answer, so it really wasn’t much of a surprise when her shouts were met with silence, but the further she went without hearing any sound at all, the more worried she became. Bakugou wasn’t the type to hide himself away. He was the type to go in, guns blazing, in a flurry of fireworks and sparks.
And it was at that point, when she was well and truly on edge, that she had found Bakugou.
“Mhm,” Kyoka hums, nodding warily. Where is he going with this? What could a harmless diagnostic test have to do with the absolute shitshow Bakugou had gotten himself into?
For all she knows, he’s just stalling.
Bakugou opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again and snaps at her, “Look, you can’t tell anyone this, okay? I’m only telling you because I know you won’t leave me alone unless I do.”
“Noted.”
Bakugou huffs and looks away. His voice is halting, stilted, when he says, “It's my Quirk.”
Kyoka blinks. “To have seizures?”
“What the Hell, Ears. You’re supposed to be smart.”
Kyoka frowns, unsure of what to do with such a backhanded compliment. “Well maybe you should just tell me what’s going on instead of being all cryptic about it, Bakugou.”
Bakugou stares at her for a long, long moment, in which becomes sure that she has overstepped, that she’s going to be blasted to Mars and back because she couldn’t rein in her tongue for one fucking second, but then Bakugou snorts and shakes his head, mutters something under his breath that she can’t quite catch. She doesn’t bother asking him to repeat it again, just prompts, “Well?”
All traces of humor disappear from Bakugou’s face. He scowls at her, then says, “It's nitroglycerin.” He shifts on his feet, tucks his hands into his pockets, pointedly doesn’t meet her eyes. “My Quirk. It's more complicated than that, but that’s the basic explanation. I sweat nitroglycerin and that’s what makes shit go boom.”
“... Boom,” Kyoka repeats drily.
“Is there an echo in here?”
“I’m still not seeing what any of this has to do with you giving me and half the class a heart attack.”
“Can you please shut up?”
Kyoka shuts up, if only because he asked her nicely.
Bakugou continues, “Anyways, have you ever heard of a nitroglycerin overdose?” Without waiting for her to answer, he launches into an almost-ramble that reminds her inexplicably of Midoriya, like he’s trying to get the words out as fast as he can so that he can walk away and forget that he ever said them at all. “Your blood pressure drops. You get cold. Your vision gets blurry, and you get a really bad headache, and, if it's serious enough, you pass out, or have a seizure. Or, if you’re a lucky bastard like me, you get to have both.”
“But doesn’t your body, like, have safeguards?” Kyoka asks, then winces. That question sounded so insensitive.
Thankfully, Bakugou doesn’t seem to notice. He nods in a way that’s almost distracted and says, “Yeah, I guess. But if I overuse my Quirk or something, it has… adverse effects for a little bit. Happens if I get drunk, too. Or sedated. The seizures are rare, though. Wasn’t expecting it to happen.” His expression slowly turns horrified. “Do you think Aizawa is going to call my mom?”
“I mean -” Kyoka grapples with her words, trying to find something that won’t upset him further but also isn’t just an outright lie. “You did have a seizure, Bakugou. You almost bit through your tongue. Look, it's still bleeding.”
“Fuck you, no it's not.”
Kyoka stands her ground. “Bakugou, there is literally blood flying from your mouth when you speak. You’re still bleeding.”
Bakugou presses a hand to his lips, pulls it back, glares at the red glistening on his fingers like it has personally offended him. “Goddamnit,” he snarls, and, true to Kyoka’s word, more blood flecks his chin. “You know what? I don’t even care. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.” With that, he starts to walk away.
Kyoka follows him, equal parts amused and cautious.
If she’s being honest, she doesn’t understand Bakugou. Probably nobody understands Bakugou, except maybe Midoriya, and that’s because the two of them have known each other practically since birth, because Bakugou is fucking complicated in a way that almost seems intentional, like he doesn’t want anyone to get too close to him. For all that Kyoka has learned about her classmates, it is Bakugou who stubbornly remains shrouded in mystery.
And this?
What was this but a case in point?
There were some aspects of Bakugou that Kyoka related to - the flares of anger, the sudden irritability, the defensiveness about things she believed in - but, for the most part, they weren’t alike enough for her to really see things the way he did, for her to help at times like these.
The difference, she thinks, lies in the fact that he refused to admit that he had people who actually liked being around him.
They were admittedly few and far between, but the fact remains that he did have friends who cared about his well being, who stayed at his side not out of a sense of obligation but because they wanted to, because they genuinely enjoyed his presence. Kyoka genuinely enjoys his presence. He’s loud and he’s brash and he’s blunt, but there are times when his voice goes soft and his face goes calm and his hands turn gentle where they’re brushing Ashido’s hair or painting Yaoyorozu’s nails or fixing the collar of Kaminari’s shirt, and it's in those moments that his guard goes down and he lets himself joke and laugh, lets himself be more a teenager and less someone dead-set on being the best.
“... Jirou,” Bakugou says, and Kyoka realizes that he’s stopped walking, realizes that she’d been so deep in her thoughts that she hadn’t even noticed when they reached the fourth floor.
Kyoka blinks, raises her eyebrows. “What?”
Bakugou stares down at the ground. “It was nice of you,” he says, slowly, carefully. “To, y’know. Help me. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did,” Kyoka says. And, with that, she nods towards his door. “Go get washed up, okay?. Get some sleep.”
She turns to leave, to head back to the elevator. She’s sure that Aizawa-sensei won’t give Bakugou grief for missing the rest of class, so long as he made sure to go to Recovery Girl afterwards, but the same leniency probably won’t be extended to her. Before she can press the down button, though, Bakugou’s voice stops her.
“Thanks, Jirou.”
“No problem,” Kyoka says. Bakugou can’t see her, but she smiles anyway. “What else are friends for?”