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kacchako-week · 6 years

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Quiet Gratitude, part 2

Kacchako Week, Day Four: Stars This is Part Two. Here’s Part One. Part Three to come!

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Bakugou was acting weird.

Well, he was clearly trying to act normal, and for Bakugou, that was weird.

Usually, when he was stressed, his attitude was a steady devolution from dormant volcano to full-blown eruption, but this time he was shifting from 110% rage to an uncharacteristic forced calm and then back again like the emotion mechanics in his mind were playing a heated game of table tennis.

They hadn’t spoken that morning, since Uraraka had stumbled into the office on the late side of eight o'clock and Bakugou had been mid-argument with his purposefully antagonistic partner. Uraraka could only assume he was embarrassed by his momentary bout of weakness in falling asleep on her the night before, but even on the Bakugou scale, his attitude seemed like an overreaction.

She sat atop Hado’s desk, watching Bakugou and Polygraph from the corner of her eye as her partner read through the details of their assignment for the day.

“The convenience store on the corner of the nineteen block thinks they’ve got a recurring thief on their hands,” Hado said, stifling a yawn a she twirled a strand of blue hair around her finger. “They think if there are heroes in the area, it might stop. So we’re gonna go hang out—” She sat up suddenly, face breaking into a grin as she said, “I’ve just remembered! There’s a cat cafe over there! Ochako, we have to go! I’m actually allergic to cats but—”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘extra work’?”

Bakugou’s voice cut across the morning drone like a foghorn and nearly every head in the room snapped in his direction. But, being Bakugou, he either didn’t notice or didn’t care and continued to direct his fury at Polygraph, who leaned arrogantly against his desk as if he genuinely thought he could take Bakugou in a fight.

Or perhaps he just knew that, for all his bark, Bakugou wouldn’t actually do anything that would set him back a step on the hero track.

“This is our job you lazy shit,” Bakugou growled. “There’s nothing extra. It’s just what heroes do.”

But Polygraph, the taller of the two, sneered down his nose at Bakugou. “What would you know about being a hero?”

Uraraka was between them before Bakugou had a chance to respond. She stood, facing Polygraph, with her hands on her hips.

“Says the guy with no greater aspirations than being a high-ranking sidekick,” she snapped without really thinking about it, glaring up into his honey-colored eyes.

Those eyes, however, glinted, tipping upward with the smirk that flicked across his face.

“Ah, lovely little Uravity has some bite to her after all,” he said, and Uraraka wished they weren’t in the office so she could clock him in the face. “Shame that a little girl is your first and only defender.”

Uraraka’s hands shook in her anger, but it was Bakugou who spoke, his voice guttural but certain as he said, “She’d kick your ass without even having to try. I think the one who needs defending here is you.”

It was a bit like getting the wind knocked out of her lungs, having the entire force of Bakogou’s All Mightian confidence directed solely into her, and she didn’t turn to face him because that would mean she was questioning him, and honestly, she didn’t want to do anything to shake his faith.

Even if it made her heart do an uncomfortable little backflip.

But Polygraph wasn’t shaken either, fully believing that neither would make a move to hurt him here, and he reached over Uraraka’s shoulder to put his hand on Bakugou’s chest.

And Bakugou, surprisingly, let him.

Uraraka, sandwiched between the two boys, could only see bottom half of Polygraph’s face, and she wasn’t sure what to make of the way his smile faltered just slightly when his Quirk took effect.

“You genuinely believe that, huh?” he asked Bakugou, taking a step backward and searching both of their faces. “Interesting.”

Uraraka swallowed hard at that because, in spite of their shared animosity, Polygraph knew Bakugou quite well—fighting side-by-side with a person did that to you whether you wanted it or not. Using his Quirk on Bakugou was likely more for show than anything—I’m not afraid of you, it said—because anyone who knew Bakugou knew that he never made a declaration like that unless he believed it with every raging piece of his heart.

“Damn right,” Bakugou said, but it was more of a grumble than a growl, and she still refused to turn around and meet his eye. “That’s why she’s helping me on this ‘extra’ work while your lazy ass sits around here all day.”

Polygraph looked like this was news to him, dark eyebrows arching upward into his too-long bangs. “How’d you get dragged into that?”

Uraraka, still a bit high on Bakugou’s confidence, didn’t have an answer for him. Not a real one, at least. Bakugou had showed up needing help and she’d given it to him. Simple.

But maybe Bakugou was really getting to her, because she tilted her head to the side, smiled at Polygraph, and said, “That’s just what heroes do.”

She finally turned, leaving Polygraph to think about that while she met Bakugou’s eye.

Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t what she saw.

Bakugou looked like he’d been walloped by an oncoming train—mouth open and eyes wide and some…something there that she couldn’t quite place. An intensity that maybe he wasn’t even sure what to do with.

She gave him questioning look, but knew better than to actually ask, though when she made to walk by him back to Hado, his voice stopped her.

“I don’t need you to stand up for me,” he said under his breath as Polygraph went back to lounge at his desk.

It stung, though there wasn’t much edge to it because it was Bakugou and somewhere in the back of her mind she’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he’d first showed up at her door.

“I know,” she said, and she did. “I didn't—I wasn’t trying to help.”

Bakugou crossed his arms over his chest, standing as close as he could to her without actually touching her—and Uraraka could only guess what that looked like to everyone else in the room.

“Then what were you doing?”

“Polygraph is a jerk,” she said. Not a lie, but also not the whole truth. “You’re not the only one who wants to yell at him.”

Bakugou looked unconvinced, and Uraraka found herself needing to say more, to explain herself out of the hole she was digging.

“And he was wrong—what he said about you not knowing anything about being a hero. And it…it made me mad, okay?”

That hit-by-a-train look flashed across his face again, but he shook it quickly away and opted for his signature “tch” instead of an answer.

Knowing that was the end of it (at least for the moment), Uraraka went back to her desk, across from Hado’s, and tried to pretend that half the eyes in the room didn’t follow her there.

“Going to bat for Bakugou, huh?” Hado asked in the innocent way she asked all questions, putting a finger to her cheek in a gesture she’d picked up from Tsuyu once upon a time. “That’s new, isn’t it?”

Uraraka shrugged, trying not to think about the way he’d fallen asleep on her the night before. “We’re friends,” she said, and the truth of that statement clanged in her head like bell. “Polygraph doesn’t just get to say stuff like that.”

“Friends? Really? Since when?”

“Recently. I don’t know.” She wasn’t sure why her face was suddenly getting hot.

Hado leaned across the desk conspiratorially, an impish grin on her face as she whispered. “We are so going to that cat cafe, and you are going to spill.”

Before Uraraka could piece together all the implications of that, Hado grabbed her arm and dragged her off to the changing rooms, where their hero suits awaited them.

—

“We’ve been working on an optional case together,” Uraraka said. She sat on a cushion on the floor, across a low table form Hado, who was leaning toward her with her chin in her hands like Uraraka was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. Hado had pushed her tea to the side, forgotten, while Uraraka tried to hide behind her own cup and focus on the cat that was currently making its home in her lap.

There was nothing wrong with what she and Bakugou were doing, and Uraraka wasn’t sure why she was so hesitant to tell anyone about it. Perhaps it was like telling Bakugou you wanted to help him—something was ruined in the utterance.

“Why are you acting all shy?”

“Huh?”

“You’re leaving something out!” Hado pouted.

Before Uraraka could come up with anything to say, a girl at the next table over—early teens by the look of her—leaned over to Uraraka with a gasp.

“You—you’re Uravity!”

She was still getting used to people recognizing her in public, and Uraraka started to smile awkwardly before a magazine waved in her face.

“There’s a feature of you in Heroes Weekly!” The girl said, her friends nodding enthusiastically around her. “They say you’re dating Bakugou Katsuki! Is it true? Is he dreamy? He looks like he’d be dreamy.”

The girl sighed as her friends chimed in with things like “I bet he’s a good kisser” and “he’s so big and strong” and “everybody likes a bad boy.”

Uraraka opened and closed her mouth wordlessly, snatching the magazine from the girl’s hand and flipping through it. There was a full-body shot of her and Bakugou standing outside Ryukyu’s office—he had his hand on her arm and Uraraka knew that he’d been in the process of dragging her out of the building in his haste to get to work, but the picture made it seem softer, almost affectionate, and Uraraka’s heart did another backflip. Smaller pictures littered the page—Bakugou at her apartment building, both of them at her apartment building, Bakugou carrying takeout into her apartment building. There was even one of Bakugou standing outside the door with her key in his hand, taken from several doors down—he was in his sweats and his glasses were perched atop his head and just looked…at home.

Shit.

Uraraka never thought twice able what the other neighbors would think. Mrs. Takahashi was too kind to invade Uraraka’s privacy on this level, but that didn’t mean the others wouldn’t do it. Heroes Weekly was a gossip magazine that was known to give good money for juicy pictures of heroes.

Hado squealed. “I knew it! I knew there was something you weren’t telling me! Oh my god, Ochako! You’ve been holding out on me!”

“Was it supposed to be a secret?” one of the teen girls asked. “Secret relationships are so romantic. Ugh, I wish someone would look at me like Bakugou’s looking at you in that picture!”

The rational part of Uraraka’s brain wanted to counter with ‘Impatiently?’ But she’d never been good at dealing with embarrassing, personal situations, and so all that came out of her mouth was an ever-eloquent “Uh…”

“You should’ve seen her this morning!” Hado gushed, scooting so she was closer to the other girls’ table. Half the cafe was watching them now, and Uraraka’s face was so hot she was beginning to worry about her own well-being as Hado retold the incident with Polygraph, making it seem much more girlfriend-jumping-in-to-defend-boyfriend than what it actually was.

Just a friend sticking up for another, even though that friend didn’t need her help.

Even though that friend had spent more time at her place than his own the past week.

But that was just Bakugou being Bakugou—dedicating himself to a thing with an almost unreasonable intensity. Once they finished what they were working on, things between them would go back to the way they were before.

And that was fine.

Wasn’t it?

Uraraka couldn’t, wouldn’t, go down that road. Because that road ended in the same place as the one she took with Deku did—dead center of Nowhere with nothing to show for it but a bruised heart and a wounded ego.

And a friendship that had survived only by the sheer force of will of both of them.

Whatever this was with Bakugou, it wasn’t strong enough to make it through something like that.

“Earth to Ochako!” Hado sang, tapping Uraraka on the forehead. “How’s life on planet Bakugou?”

“Wahh…”

“It’s okay if you want to pretend nothing is going on to keep up the whole ‘secret relationship’ vibe,” said the girl who’d started this whole conversation. “I’d want a guy like that all to myself too.”

“A guy like what?” Uraraka heard herself ask, voice too high-pitched for her liking and her mouth utterly out of sync with her brain, which was so far into MISSION ABORT that she thought it might’ve shut itself down entirely.

The girl flipped the magazine page over to another two page spread. On the left side was Uraraka, in full hero gear, holding a transport truck above her head in an action shot that looked, well, epic. The right side showed Bakugou, also in full gear (save one grenadier, surely used and discarded), hot off a fight as he leaned against the side of a building and, like an accident, looked over his shoulder into the camera. His eyes had that spark they got after kicking villain butt and his arms were bulging, veins popping out as they did when he pushed his Quirk too far. Frozen like that, he looked good. Attractive, even, if Uraraka would allow herself to be so bold.

But a photo couldn’t capture the Baku Rage Aura, or the manic laughter that definitely accompanied that wicked smile he gave the camera. It didn’t capture the way his arms were undoubtedly twitching in pain, fingers curling and uncurling as he waited for it subside with frustrated impatience.

It captured his confidence, but not the desperate purpose with which he wielded it.

How YOU Can Get the Bakugou Smoulder! A headline, fittingly in orange, sat on the page next to his eyes, and a less-flustered Uraraka would’ve laughed. As if he ever would intentionally look like that.

“That’s not the half of it,” Uraraka’s mouth said in what was decidedly her biggest mistake yet, but it wasn’t until the three younger girls actually picked up their teacups and crowded around her table that she realized the implications of her statement. “Wait, I mean—”

“What’s the other half?” one of them asked, leaning across the table enough that she and Hado were likely to literally butt heads any second.

“W-well,” she started. There was no determinable way out at this point. It was more a matter of damage control. Because to say that she and Bakugou were not dating would only fuel their fantasy fire. “He…You can't….you can’t get a person in a picture, you know? This, uh, 'smoulder’ isn’t really….like…intentional. It’s not something anyone could really imitate. Because it’s…he’s not…trying,” she was totally flubbing it, but Bakugou would be so pissed that he’d been boiled down to something so basic that she felt the need to speak up for him as best as she could. “He’s intense. Like, he would blow himself up to make himself stronger kind of intense. And he’s got this drive to be the best and you can see it in everything he does. I mean, the guy drinks his coffee like it’s some kind of competition. And he somehow always believes that he’s going to win and he’ll push himself to breaking point to do it if he has to. He looks at the people around him like he expects the same intensity from them and that’s what this look is. It’s his way of saying 'you better bring it like I do.’ And you want to, when you’re around him.”

When she stopped babbling like Deku in the middle of a mumbling rant, Uraraka made an effort to look up at the others, and all four of them were staring at her with mirroring grins blooming across their faces.

“You’re in so deep, sister-friend.” This, from Hado, who was smiling like a lovestruck fool herself.

“What? No I just….know him, is all—”

“Right,” one of the younger girls said. “If you could see your face right now you wouldn’t be so in denial.”

A small, Bakugou-infected part of her wanted to tell them all to fuck off, but that would absolutely just spawn a whole new set of problems that Uraraka was not ready to handle, so she just buried her face in the cat in her lap and groaned.

There was a comforting hand on her back and a voice that said, “It’s okay. Nothing wrong with admitting it.”

But Uraraka stayed doubled over, because she knew from experience that there were several things that could go wrong with admitting it—not that there was anything to admit in the first place.

Right?

—

Her face, she thought, was probably stained permanently red, but there was nothing for it but to power through. If anyone asked, maybe she could convince them that it was sunburn.

Bakugou, however, seemed totally oblivious as he marched up to her when she and Hado returned, late, from patrol and demanded her apartment key.

“Ah…maybe that’s not—”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what any half-wit with with no life has to say. Give me your damn key so we can catch this villain.”

He was in her face and she could feel his breath against her skin and her heart stuttered.

But she would swallow whatever it was she was feeling until she choked before she brought it up to him, so she just winced and handed him the key, cursing herself for allowing these stupid emotions to get in the way of her hero work again.

—

“Oy, Uraraka.”

They’d pointedly avoided the Mt. Lady-sized elephant in the room all night, focusing on the surveillance footage with a manic sort of energy, so Bakugou’s voice, spoken around his chopsticks as they took a short break to eat, caused Uraraka’s heart to make a beeline for her throat.

“Y-yes?” she coughed, noodles going down the wrong pipe.

He had an odd look on his face. He’d taken off his glasses to give his eyes a break and his free hand pinched the bridge of his nose like he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying.

“What’s tsundere?”

“Sorry?”

“The word, shit-wit. What’s it mean?”

Somehow, that wasn’t anywhere close to anything she’d been expecting, and her brain supplied the answer automatically (as this was obviously more important than when she’d needed coherent thought in the cafe). “It’s a word for a manga character—someone who starts off cold and standoffish and eventually warms up and starts to care about others.”

“Oh.”

“Why?”

She could’ve sworn the tips of his ears turned pink and he didn’t look at her when he said, “This bullshit dating stuff that the tabloids are so hung up on….Kirishima said it made me….that.”

Uraraka snorted, and then giggled, and then she couldn’t contain it anymore and she was laughing.

“Oy, what the fuck?”

“You—” she gasped, unable to breath properly around the sheer hilarity of 'tsundere Bakugou Katsuki’. “That—oh….oh my god!”

Her back bumped the ceiling and she realized she’d activated her Quirk in her mirth, the relief of finally actually laughing at the whole situation too much for her for contain herself.

“Shut up,” he grumbled, but even through the tears that leaked from her eyes she could see that he was fighting a smile.

And maybe there wasn’t anything there between them, other than friendship. Maybe she’d been too honed in on what everyone else was saying to think about how she felt.

“Let’s get some air,” he said, standing and grabbing her ankle to drag her like a balloon out of her apartment.

In the stairwell, she finally composed herself enough to release her Quirk and land, barefoot, beside him. But for once, it didn’t bother her and she just followed him up to the roof of the building.

It was chilly, the late September air at last letting go of the oppressive heat of summer, but something like a buzz flowed through Uraraka’s veins and warmed her in a way she couldn’t quite comprehend.

They reached the roof, a flat expanse of concrete contained by a metal railing, and Bakugou went straight to the edge, gripping the rail in his hands like some sort of anchor.

“You okay?” Uraraka asked, his seriousness sobering. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you…I just—”

“It’s not that.”

His voice was rough, like fresh sandpaper on raw wood, and Uraraka couldn’t help but wonder what the magazine writers would have to say about that. But somehow, she didn’t think they’d ever get it right.

There was just too much to Bakugou, too much depth that he refused to expose.

So much more than smoulder.

She walked up next to him, hesitant because she wasn’t sure if he wanted her so close or not. Leaning on the railing, forearms pressing into the cold iron, Uraraka looked up at the sky and Bakugou, beside her, did the same.

The stars were faint beyond the city lights, but they were there as surely as Bakugou was, and Uraraka smiled.

“What?”

She turned to find him looking at her instead of the sky, and Uraraka swallowed hard under the intensity of his gaze.

“N-nothing.”

“Right.”

How could she explain to him that, when he looked at her, he made her feel like the only person in the universe? How could she explain that his confidence in her, the way he’d threatened Polygraph with her strength, made her want to jump out of her skin and made her so content to be herself all at once?

“Well…thank you, I guess,” she said. Which wasn’t really what she wanted to say, but wasn’t inaccurate either.

“For?”

“For today. For Polygraph. And for not being weird about…you know.”

He looked on the verge of saying something, but shook himself, maybe changed his mind, and simply shrugged in a way that was all at once so un-Bakugou and so completely him that it made her dizzy, reckoning the two.

“It’ll get worse,” he said, after a long moment of silence, and when Uraraka looked at him, his gaze was skyward again.

“Hmm?”

“What everyone says.” The tips of his ears were red again in the moonlight and he was suddenly so completely endearing that Uraraka could’ve hugged him on the spot. “It won’t stop, not right away. So we’re going to have to deal with…you know. Because none of them are actually going to listen to us.”

“It’ll blow over eventually,” Uraraka said, with more surety than she actually felt. “Besides, it’s not the worst thing that could happen.”

He turned to her then, eyebrows raised and his face looked…well…a little vulnerable. Like he hadn’t been expecting her to say something like that and maybe it shook him more than she’d intended.

She laughed, a little breathlessly, and worked up the courage to put her hand on top of his on the railing. He didn’t flinch away, though his eyes widened a bit when the rough pads of her fingers grazed his taut knuckles.

“I mean, they could’ve thought I was dating Polygraph,” she teased, hoping her voice sounded less shaky than it felt. “Gross.”

If he appreciated her joke, he didn’t show it, and the two stood in silence, the vast plane of the sky serving as a distraction for both of them.

Finally, with a hint of a smile in his tone that made Uraraka’s heart do its third award-winning backflip of the day, Bakugou said, “Or they could’ve thought I was dating Polygraph.”

Her laugh echoed against the cosmos, like the galaxy itself enjoyed the rare, self-deprecating joke, and Uraraka bit her lip, because in that moment, standing beside Bakugou, she knew.

This wasn’t anything like what had happened with Deku.

This was worse.

And somehow infinitely better all the same.

#day 4

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