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ms0milk · 6 months

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𝟏𝟐 | 𝐏𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫

ー✧ prince!bakugou x royal guard!reader

"You will spend summers in rainstorms and autumns in his orchards because you are Alderan and he will kill Takoban gods to get you there."

cw brief description of drowning and a claustrophobic struggle with the ocean. suggestions of suicidal intention and self harm. reader tries to fight the sea and your prince has horrible misunderstandings about it. bkg 🫱🏽‍🫲🏼 unethical rescue tactics pt 2, borrowed clothes, a fevered fireside confession in the bedroom you’ve been searching for 6.4k

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If Takoba is the edge of the world, Aldera is the center. You so starved for comfort, stand with your feet at the tip of the surf and tie your braids together.

You watch the sea at midnight and the winds coming off the water bite your scars before they chill your bones. Autumn at the edge of the world is miserable. Lakes freeze but the ocean is colder, and full of tides , like Todoroki said, which you’ve spent the day reading about. Unlike lakes and winter ice skating, the ocean has a taste. Salt and decay. It tastes unfathomably ancient. You watch its many maws foaming under the moonlight and seashells burn in frigid water when you step onto them.

In the view from Bakugou’s bedroom, you’ve lined your boots up neatly in the sand and stand watch beside them for a moment. You’re dressed to stop a midnight siege, in your white nightgown and padded habergeon, staring so small and far away from the warmth of his fireplace. You in a dark blue world, framed by his open window. Bakugou would have sipped his tea and rolled his eyes at his newly fucked up sleep schedule and how ridiculous you insist on looking in public if his cup wasn’t spilt on the rugs where he dropped it. If he hadn’t already ripped his door off its hinges in his sprint out of the castle.

You couldn’t sleep. You have no appetite and no mobility yet for sparring. Just books. Just Uraraka answering your questions about the sea while watching her men train. The ride with Todoroki yesterday was nice but it left your throat stiff and you are still in your kingdom’s service. Today in Takoba, tomorrow and forever behind your prince. Long before the blue gardens and scars, before the kitchen, before sticky crowds and white horses and cold hallways, something somewhere started to die.

You take another step into the swollen water, it rises with the moon, to confirm your suspicions and grimace when a crab scuttles over your foot. Another step and you’re up to your hem. It would all be easier if your heart was still a forest fire. When did that stop? When did the rain come? Up to your knees now. Seawater climbs your nightgown.

As it stands you’re no longer a dragon, just damp tinder. The black sea sways you side to side at the hips now so gently– keep walking, don’t look back. You will free yourself from doubt and you will fight a god to do it.

“Moon makes tides,” Uraraka yawned and slouched and stretched as you sat on your knees beside her in the pit.

“Can you swim in it?”

“In the ocean?” she squinted, “Yeah of course. But don’t tell me you want to swim in this weather?”

“I won’t.”

Shinsou could only pretend not to hear for so long from his spot beside you both this afternoon, “The moon makes tides, and tides make storms.”

Good. Up to your ribs now. Wear the rock there like an anchor.

In the cold water your body heat becomes that much more apparent and it’s lovely like home. Genuinely hot for a second. Your nightgown floats up around you and you sink quickly from chest to nose when the sand under your feet drops to freezing nothing. The sudden dip sends icy pain behind both eyes and the sensation of failing steeles every joint sickly sore. Walking through the ocean is like a fight, like driving a sword through someone solid, like braving a thunderstorm, but sinking into it is easier than sleeping.

You gasp and spit out the aftermath of losing your footing but you also fight too hard in anticipation of sinking and you’re suddenly in the open air up to your waist like a salmon leaping upstream. The weight of the nightgown settles you back down to your shoulders and it’s silent except for the sound of waves kissing the beach and one another. Whistling wind. You bob only some ten meters out from shore, just short of where Todoroki held you back for fear of drowning and something wild like greed blinks open a sleepy brown eye.

You hardly have to move a limb to keep your head above water; the sea is free and gentle. You float easily here, where a lake wants to watch you fight. It’s part of the fun at home and in exchange you are safe in freshwater. Salt stings– saliva pools under your tongue to keep it from getting inside– but it also holds you up in the foam like two hands under the hip.

Is this what you were so afraid of? This is the god you planned on killing tonight?

Every day in this miserable place you have been beaten. You have fallen apart in some way, your hair is too messy, your new clothes don’t fit right. You lose Aldera with every step, heel toe– earrings that are no longer yours, heel toe– a weapon you can't return, heel toe and stand at attention– a brooch you’re too afraid to wear, to lose too, so you keep it under your pillow and wear silver seashells instead. Blue fire took the first victory in the forest and you salvaged your prince with your life thin in your teeth. Takoba took the second victory and strung you out in your nightgown for nobles to pick at like crows. A driftwood table took the third and Bakugou stole the fourth. The only time you have ever won here is when you decided to die. When you churn the water with your arms a pain echoes across your back not quite inside your scars.

Kirishima on the verge of tears, Shinsou above your operating table, Uraraka at your side, Todoroki holding you back from the edge of the world– your prince, wet to his knees– you have never, not once in your life have you ever failed. Their gazes make your throat hurt and you spit again into a tiny rolling wave that lifts itself over your chin and into your ears.

The goddess of the sea does not pity you.

She pulls you into her arms and laughs when you rub your freshwater eyes. She tossels your hair with silent waves you could never have seen coming. She reminds you of her strength. And Todoroki told you that you couldn’t possibly challenge her– eat your words sealace prince. Even just this once, witness me. You are a gem in the crown of Aldera, the left hand of the golden family. Takoba is no setback the sea is not your master, you are a chosen servant, not a mistake. It is so wonderful to be in the presence of a queen again and at night her water is soft and black.

The shore is farther than you remember when you finally glance back at the world. You bob like a peach, a frozen peach, and realize you can’t feel the cold anymore. Time to head back. Today was just a test anyway, to make sure you could put up your fight. Maybe sleep will come now that you’re starting to breathe heavy and now that your muscles ache again after days without real training. Ice creeps up the back of your neck from wet hair.

The goddess of the sea plays with you for a few more seconds and you can’t wait to come back in the warmth of the sun to lay on your back with her to whom you no longer need to prove yourself. The ocean pulls in its depths just as much as it pushes at the shore so you brace your eyes for discomfort and duck under the surface to kick a good length forward. It would have worked in a lake, at the center of the world.

When you resurface you are somehow farther than before and considerably shorter of breath. The cold starts to press on your lungs now that you’re truly using them. It’s okay, one more time. You kick once to let the goddess lift you up with her salt and breathe in the free air before diving under again but all you actually do is stir bubbles around you exactly where you started. If anything even farther. Your boots are too small to see now.

There are no storms, no raging waves, no rain, no thunder, hardly wind, what is putting up the fight? Whatever. You paddle above water, thankful for light clothes, and weary of the growing ache under your jaw– the start of a pulsing headache. More than anything you are finally excited for bed, but no matter how hard you push there seems to be a growing distance between you and safety.

Dread drops in your peachpit stomach and you start to feel long pretty fingers tickle your heels in black water. The ghost of the flame mage happy to drag you with him to the bottom of the sea. Irrational like a fear of the dark, but still there’s no more time for testing pride, you have to get back to shore. The little girl inside of you cowers when you take one more heavy breath and then release it to sink yourself as deep as the salt will let you. You can see the breaking point, all you need is to reach the seafloor and kick yourself to it.

As you drift down into the pitch black something so much better than sand or ghosts meets your feet. You connect with rock as your lungs begin to ache for air and kick with every well trained muscle your legs have, forward towards the shore. Faster than freshwater, you rocket to the surface and gasp excitedly, blink rapidly, and infinitely closer to white sand, and then immediately the goddess pulls you under again.

Sure you found the breaking point, sure your toes tease the start of the shore you want to reach so badly, but that’s what waves do here. Break.

Something so silent couldn’t possibly be this powerful, but your head is forced back under as your hips are pulled back out and you tumble head over knees, mouth filled suddenly with salt and sand in the darkness. Resurfacing is no fun task, choking. You’re thankful it’s easy to float in the ocean but saltwater dries out your mouth as you retch it back out from your throat into the foam and then there’s another break over your head to remind you that humans should stay far away from god.

You’ll die just thirty meters from the shore. Salt blinds you. Water deep in one ear keeps you just dizzy enough to let this sea carry you out once again, and shouting isn’t an option. Shouting or gasping, you have to pick one. Ache has turned to paralysis; muscles so beaten and a heart beating so fast you’re already at the last limit reached by your master, training to failure. Striking and swinging until you can no longer hold your weapon. Hours of training reduced to fifteen minutes at sea.

The bruises of your shoulder protest every paddle you force out of them and go much stiffer much faster than the rest of you. In a way, the mage is drowning you. In every way the sea is much more claustrophobic than a war room.

The moon watches you heaving for air stuck between beating waves and being swept back out to sea. She doesn’t do anything. You are pulled under again. The rocks beneath you scratch your soft skin this time and your instinct is to flinch which fills your nose with water and drowning is certainly not as peaceful as poetry makes it out to be.

Of course it ends like this. A soggy creature fighting gods alone.

Of course he’s watching you, his Captain, being stolen by the sea.

You surface forcefully with a grip on your scruff and while your body remembers how to breathe, magic every furious color of the rainbow arcs above your head. The water recoils for a moment around you in the force of his impact. Bakugou erupts from the sky as he always does into the tragedy of your life in Takoba and you have no control over your searing gaze when it turns to him above you, framed by sparks and stars. Halo from the moon.

You both fall back into the water but not so helplessly as a moment ago. Your prince hooks and arm across your chest, pressing your back to his front and with so much more strength than you could ever muster, rips his way through the water in half of a backstroke. Half of him focused on keeping you afloat and only half of him conquering the sea. His legs create their own current. He holds you and you’re sure you’re breathing loudly enough into his collar to hurt his ears.

You are an excellent swimmer. Weak children, drunk diplomats, tests from your master; you have dragged your fair share of victims out of rivers and as the victim yourself you know better than to struggle or panic in your prince’s grip as he drags you from the goddess, but you can’t help how your fingers scratch at his translucent tunic. Cling to the warmth of his bicep.

In twenty seconds he has reached the break. Strength like a war criminal, like a godslayer. He turns in the water, times it to match the swell of a wave for height, and pulls you chest to chest with a guiding hand on the side of your head to fold you into him. The sea drops you and you know what comes next. Bakugou anticipates your struggle, or a drowned man’s panic, any logical thing and wraps another arm around you tight as he pulls you both under, but you don’t fight a single second and neither do you breathe.

He knows the sea so much better. If you weren’t unraveling like a common soldier you would have realized too, just how much calmer the water is underneath its surface. Even with ears full of sand you can hear the wave crash above you but there is no pull underwater. The roll of the goddess back out to sea twirls through your hair but nothing else. She lets your prince push up to the surface and doesn’t stop you from catching your breath inside the crook of his neck. Eleven seconds to beat the break. What does he even need a captain for?

This time when the tide drops, you don’t quite drop with it. Knees in the sand. Back on solid ground you realize how hard a body can shake and then water is beating you down again from behind, and a warm hand has you by the back of the haubergeon to keep you from slipping out to sea or laying flat down to sleep in the surf.

Both hardly walking, and you more-than-half carried, you and your prince stagger over seashells like glass back to the spot where your boots rest like nothing bad has ever happened at all, chased the whole time by a disappointed tide. You collapse the second he lets you. You, useless with cold and vomiting seafoam.

“Why?!” Your prince chokes, similarly out of breath beside you, hunched over his knees from the effort of winning your war. You can feel the glare. You are warmed by it and then entirely numb again, in a terrible turn of events, to even his attention. The very last ember dies without smoke.

Bakugou, even in a temper tantrum, has never looked quite so disheveled. He’s been wet before, and pushed his hair back with big hands and caught his breath through his teeth just like this, but he’s never looked at you with such confusion. His eyebrows don’t sit right. Without a scowl his whole thing really falls apart, huh?

“Answer me, Eyes!”

You wheeze instead of speaking when you try to use your voice for the first time and spit out the last of the salt that comes up with it. He doesn’t move, catching his breath across the sand at midnight. Your prince really is so pretty and something inside is eating you alive to the beat of the wash of waves. He is a star and you are the bloody little creature beneath him always, not chosen at all.

You sit yourself up. Bakugou is beautiful. Broad chest and shoulders trained for his magic and a wet tunic that clings to every lovely shape, just a few feet too far away to touch. Unmarred face and shaggy hair. His eyes. His jaw slopes sharp, sharper still in the moonlight and dripping with water, up towards his hungry red eyes that eat everything they’ve e–

“Wake up!” He barks.

He’s not eating you. He brings back your focus and when you hold his stare this time it’s so obvious he’s not confused, or angry, not exhausted or embarrassed or exasperated. He’s six and he’s holding your hands in a velvet carriage, terrified.

Oh boy. You guess self-control died with your heart, because your shoulders start to shake in a chuckle. Bakugou stares. Any fold of his brows melts immediately at the sound of your soft laughter but he hardens again when he speaks.

“What about this is funny?!” and pulls himself up to his knees as you lower yourself to clamshells, not-quite-laughing but not fighting the smile either. This is exhausting. “You just tried to kill yourself!”

This makes you snort, which is ugly, and shuts your prince up entirely. One laugh like a lie and then another and you curl in on yourself, shivering arms folded above your head and forehead pressed flat to the sand. Something like an apology. You are redundant, not suicidal.

If it were a real apology you would wait until he spoke again to raise your head like Todoroki in the stables, but that’s not what you’re doing at all. You ache from the inside. Burn in fact. You chuckle again and spit salt one last time when you sit up, then grab for your shoes with muscle memory instead of feeling since the cold has stolen that from you too. Bakugou is staring again– it is irritating, you should do it less.

The ocean makes a lovely noise when you are not drowning in it. It’s much quieter and sounds a bit like laundry sliding over itself. Or apples tumbling into a basket. You are the first to your feet, clumsily, and you are not so delirious that you forget you need proximity to a fire. Anyone else might not be able to stand through this adrenaline trembling but how many apprentices have come so close to death so many times as you?

“Oi,” Bakugou growls, confused again by the wrong emotion for just long enough to let you escape.

The hill between the castle and the sea is overgrown with dune grasses tall enough to tickle your hips and that is what you decide to climb. Empty stomach, ruined shoulder, shaking legs, deep dead eyes.

Your clothes cling to you. They make you small. He can hardly breathe in the cold as he rushes to catch up, dripping what he's sure are icicles, and you look as if you could hardly stay conscious in it. Does your face feel as red as it looks? Friction or fever? “Captain!” And it’s obvious Bakugou can’t decide on his volume, but bulldozes after you nonetheless husky with exertion, “fuckin wait–”

There are sandy paths beaten into this seaside hill, small like children made them on their happy little way to swim. Bakugou makes quick work of it. You hike. You put all your effort into staying on two feet through a chill you could hardly ever imagine. Heat pounds in your temples, cruelly imitating Alderan fire when really it’s something poisoned like liquor.

“Please don’t follow me sir,” you call over the wind when the prince gets a few steps too close to catching up and he makes a sound almost like words, like words you shot dead in his throat. You know that sound because you have been shot at the same exact angle. Deadly isn’t it? He falls back.

Just for a moment Bakugou stops and watches, filled with something neither of you have the words for yet. Recovering just as quickly as you are succumbing to exhaustion.

Wait, he stares. Just– “Y/n.”

Wrapped in white, you are framed by rolling seagrass in the moonlight. You finally stop climbing and turn. You like a half-drowned painting. In a furred cape you might be a queen. From your spot smiling sadly at the edge of the world, your nose has started to bleed.

“Give me an order.”

Six and shaking in his hands. Eleven soaked in a fruit filled hallway, always working and fond of libraries. Sense of humor that doubles over his queen. Often covered in blood, staring too earnestly right now for him to remember that anger might fix this. Bakugou doesn’t breathe.

You turn back towards the castle alone and for the very last time, your body keeps the tears at bay. On a hill of swaying green grass and bright in the moonlight, your prince, frozen, looks so much like his mother you should kill him for it.

You always thought you were hiding from him on duty, only slightly more stealthy than a dragon. It got better when Jeanist stopped training you in chainmail, but your excitement at every small job bounced off the walls of his castle so obviously. Squirrel duty? You helped a hundred bastards back outside without pause. Sent up to swept bookshelves under the Great Oak and you're the only person he’s ever seen hum to themself so high in the air. Stable duty? Stable master more like. Seven and stacking stools to reach the saddles before Jeanist set you back on the ground by your scruff like his kitten. Bakugou can’t remember what went first, your heartbeat or his hearing.

The very first time you snuck up on him was in August under a plum tree, nine years old. He slept beside his book in the shade on a perfect day, perfectly alone and free of tutoring for the afternoon. Maybe because you were barefoot, but somehow even out of breath, the only thing that gave you away was your voice.

“Careful Highness.” He shot awake with that and figured for a moment that you were a dream while his eyes adjusted to the light through the leaves behind you– panting above him and holding tight to a plum. Like premonition your other hand lurched to catch another as it fell toward him, “they’re ready for harvest.”

Bakugou sat up. Off at an impossible distance for you to have run to catch plums, Jeanist stood beside a hanging line of red uniforms waving a beckoning hand.

“Laundry calls,” you whispered. As the little prince turned stupidly back to you above him, you set both plums on the grass beside his book and bowed.

Wait.

“Maybe a nap in the vineyard? Grapes won't bruise.”

Wait, I know you.

He watched you bow one last time and jog out of the shade back to Jeanist and Alderan laundry, just as he watches you stumble now in the dark, towards the faraway lights of a castle without the fire you need.

Wait!

“Y/n!” Bakugou bursts over the ridge and back onto marble pavement, what the fuck is he gonna do– your name won’t work twice, he’s wasted too much time. “Captain!”

You pay him no mind drifting away with your back still turned and with even less coordination than when you dragged yourself from the sea. You are deteriorating– fuck, fuck it. Bakugou, brimming with something to the left of anger, charges. If you hear him coming you do nothing to stop him. Not as he closes your distance with eight good strides and slings you over his shoulder.

"I–!" you jerk to strike instinctively, “Put me down!”

Good, you can shout. He still has time, you’re still alive. He’ll apologize for touching you later, for hesitating and staring, he will say everything he set aside in anger when you are not trying to kill yourself.

“Put me down,” you hiss like you know you’re one of three people that can make his skin prickle with threat.

“Not a chance.”

You grip the back of his tunic, clinging so wet to his body that you grab equal parts flesh and he turns away from your path to the glowing front gates all those hundreds of meters away, to kick in a door on an insignificant corner of an insignificant annex in the shadows of the castle that is only unlocked because it’s the same one he flew from, instead of his window, when he was trying not to startle you with his magic and into the sea.

You will spend summers in rainstorms and autumns in his orchards because you are Alderan and he will kill Takoban gods to get you there. Your nails on his back begin to burn with your silence and it’s haunting not only because you weigh less to him than a phantom, but because the smell of the sea follows you inside when there is no one else left to close the door. Immediately it is warmer without the wind but he will not slow until he finds fire, because you are gripping him instead of screaming again– because you are freezing to death and he will not let you win under new circumstances after he worked so hard to save you from the first.

This part of the castle is his, below the kitchens, the deep white underbelly in the cliff over the sea where no one will find him except cooks and staff who keep his secret and the queen who kindly ordered these quarters before she lost her mind. There is no difference of weight or warmth when he sets you down without a fight in front of the only red door in the hall. You aren’t a ghost. Even if you aren’t convincing. He throws the door open.

You would win in a contest but Bakugou too can make a steady fire. It’s still chirping bright in his fireplace when he crowds you inside of his quarters. Wood and furs. The smell of bread, everything so unlike Takoba. Small. Hard surfaces cushioned or covered in anticipation of winter, with red and gold and wool, forest tapestries from home– and it is a small victory that you take another step, then another, deeper inside without hint or suggestion.

“where are we?”

“You need to change,” Bakugou dismisses when you’re far enough inside to close the door, and pulls open a cherry chest of drawers at the foot of his bed. It’s draped in pelts and pillows. Faded herbs hang in bundles above you.

“have clothes in my room.”

“Didn’t ask.” When he looks over his shoulder, you are wobbling towards the fire like a starving woman, with two hands reaching subtly from your side. Good, shut up and warm up. Bakugou rifles through his options one more time and grimaces, raising his own black Alderan riding tunic aloft; it’s the only thing that’s going to be long enough to cover all of you.

He’ll sort out this shitshow step by step– dry you off, shout scream scold, get you warm, shout some more– a good Alderan lecture, and then tie you to him if he must since you obviously can’t be trusted alone. Walking into the sea when you thought everyone was sleeping. And for what? He grinds his teeth and grips the sids of his dresser with the realization that he’s probably not going to sleep again tonight. He’d kill you if that wasn’t what you so obviously wanted.

“Alright asshole, get ch–” Bakugou chokes when he turns back to you, sitting politely fireside with a dagger materialized in your good hand, blade pressed flat to your collar. He jumps, black tunic flying and shouts indiscernibly in a lunge for the weapon.

Not fast enough because by the time he makes one step, you’ve driven the blade down your chest and clear through your shirt. It falls open and your bare ribs seize in goosebumps this close to the fire, “told you I’m not trying to kill myself.”

“Drop it!” He wails, as if to a dog.

Oh how you will haunt him until the end of time. A month with you, just some soldier from his castle– a prodigal apprentice in a kingdom of geniuses– an impersonable, silent, invisible guard, who should cause harm only when necessary and appear only in danger– a woman who does this job to a tee, and still somehow steals his attention to any corner of the room she conceals herself in– just a month and you have beguiled him. Reaping grim satisfaction from watching you wreak havoc in this place he loathes.

You sit in front of his fire in his secret room, half bare now that you’ve decided to cut your clothes off of yourself, and entirely bare when you run the lip of the dagger across your shoulder to catch the fabric and then rough straight down the other side. You are pink from heat and staring through him entirely unfocused, all chaotic braids and parted lips. There’s a dry track of blood smeared under your nose and he shudders to think what part of his back it was wiped on while he was carrying you away. The fingertips of your scar peek into free air. Bakugou can’t spin around fast enough, howling in anger.

You sound like you’re smiling again mournfully like last time, “following orders, sir.”

“Don’t call me that!” He roars and shoves the black tunic behind his back towards you. This room is small, maybe five paces wide, and so he sits as far as he can from you on the floor beside his bed, still within arms reach. Back turned.

What the fuck is so funny? This isn’t a headache this is sustained torture. Bakugou’s own wet clothes cling to him in dry patches of salt and stick and grit that he’s desperate to bathe away just as soon as you are tethered to another magician. In another kingdom. You breathe heavily behind him in a mismatch between effort and task and then a sopping thud reminds Bakugou that you are stripping to nothing behind him and piling your rags onto his fine rugs.

“You’re a fucking nightmare.”

“you’ll be free of me in a moment.”

And it dawns on him, seasick irony, that there isn’t a person alive in this kingdom but him who could stop you from doing a single thing.

“If you think I’m letting you out of my sight you’re concussed.”

You pause your fiddling behind him for a second before resuming and you’re close enough that he can still hear your less than methodic pulling and ripping. A huff here and there. In the seconds it takes you to speak again your voice is still laced with the amusement that makes his skin crawl, “third time I’ve told you I’m not trying to kill myself.”

“Save it– just hurry up.”

“was just saying a prayer.”

“Save. It. An excuse that fulla holes wouldn’t even work on Kirishima the naif.”

“because nothing gets past the Champion.”

Bakugou erupts, out of unwounded fists to clench, and jerks around with every intention of barking at you. He’s not sure what he pictured before turning and he’s not sure where his voice went, but you are sat beside his fire draped in his black tunic with an expression he can hardly find the words for.

What is it in the way your shoulders hang? Exhaustion? The way your chin tips or your eyes flutter? Hunger? You watch him like you’ll eat him alive, like your life is the least of his concerns. The laces at your collar drape limp over your fingers from where you gave up their tying and so the shirt hangs loose and open, and much much too big. Bakugou has never thought of the shape your sternum makes between your breasts or what color the fine hair on your thighs might be. He knows the answers now because you’ve given up on posture like a selkie out of water and everything so unlike his Captain– because something inside of you is slipping.

“don’t bother the Champion with this,” your voice is still draconian. Even as your body fails, your eyes are still dark and infinite and possessive beside the glow of his fireplace and under a window that looks out over black water, “or Lady Mina, or your Lords. Don’t worry them with me.”

Bakugou mirrors you unconsciously in the way he sits close enough to touch. Why do you say that? You keep saying it, ‘Lady Mina,’ all month the same thing. Sir Sero, like he’s not a soldier in Jeanist’s rear guard. Like Mina and Denki didn’t grow up in the castle with you all to learn magic fifteen years ago.

“They’re not,” he admits because something about you unraveling by the sea sucks the malice like marrow from his bones. Maybe something inside of him is slipping too.

The pair of you slouch on the soft rugs from home and sticky with foreign salt, looking. Your next smile seems to take every ounce of strength, “what?”

“They’re not lords.”

And in a rush, such horror ignites in the eaves of this tiny room like an Alderan dollhouse. It is a grease fire film of oil on water. He is the match. You drop your head to your shoulder and start to laugh like Bakugou isn’t watching the life evaporate from the top of your head and out his window in the heat that pinks your cheeks and blotches your chest. You laugh like you have life to spare, “course they’re not.”

You manage enough coordination to hold the chest of his tunic closed with one hand as you rise, still giggling bitter, nothing like the bells you rang for Todoroki.

“Stop–” Bakugou reaches for you as you walk past him towards the door but stops short of touching even the air.

“dream something sweet Highness, I won’t interrupt again.”

“Oi, wait–” He gathers himself awkwardly barefoot and still dripping seawater, to catch the door before you pull it open. You bow your head and reach for the knob at the same time as he manages to slam his palm and weight against it in case you decide you have enough life left to fight.

“Told you, you’re not leaving my sight.”

Maybe staring isn’t so much a habit as it is a system to keep you from collapsing under the weight of Alderan sun. You who watch the world carefully so that when you attack it is silent and succinct. As long as you’re only looking, just watching carefully, the world will never be in danger of you spilling the secrets obvious only to you, and your kingdom won’t have to acknowledge the war crimes it takes to teach a kid how to kill.

Bakugou looms above you and rests against his door on a forearm. You raise your head like it’s lead to look at him. Your mouth even opens to speak but then something like fire punches to life in the blacks of your eyes.

It’s not a blink this time, it’s a stutter at first– and your face is so flushed that it almost looks like you’re glowing– before something you see feeds the kindling to roaring. For a blessed second you aren’t smiling. You stare so deeply into your prince he can’t look away for long enough to realize that you’re reaching for him.

Why? Why are you leaning closer?

The first heat pools at the hinge of his jaw and then scalding follows. Why are your hands so hot? You pinch his earlobe between thumb and pinky and let your fingers graze over the ridges of ear just so gently that sparks itch where sweat prickles at his neck.

It’s still for a second before chills, agonizing, erupt up his spine, bone by bone as he realizes– as your prince’s face drops and his own hand jumps to reach his ears and what’s no longer there. His right hand grasps at Alderan gold, a tiny sun. His left only cups yours, so much smaller– and the ghost of your earring lost somewhere deep at sea. Six and bleeding in his hands, all grown up and at his mercy.

“I hate you.” You smile in anguish.

You don’t bother pulling your hand from his, only rest your head against the door and let your heavy eyes finally close. Nothing to hold back the freshwater tears now.

Bakugou almost isn’t fast enough in his shock to catch you when you begin to slide down the wall in collapse, “Y– shit– Y/n!” One hand pulls up on your own and the other reaches around your back to try and bring you into him instead of hard against the wooden floor like he’s still a prince and not just a man whose heart won’t stop racing.

“Y/n? Y/n,” he shuffles you in his lap where you landed, and breathes the shapes he hopes make the sound of your name as he searches, distracted. You are limp in his arms and entirely too warm to have been freezing to death a few minutes ago. Lips parted and rolling like you’re trying to speak. Running to safety with you on his shoulder, the seachill must have hidden your fever from him. He cradles your head to check for blood and holds your cheek when his fingers come out dry from your hair, "c'mon, Captain."

“majesty..”

Your heartbreaking laughter still bubbles up in quiet sobs and incoherence murmured through abandoned ego, “..m sorry,” when you manage to see through the tears for a moment before falling unconscious again. Every apology laced always with “mitsuki.” You must have been holding it back. You must have been keeping the fever at bay by sheer force of will because now on the floor against him, your body is so hot it’s making his chest clammy. Sweat has soaked into the nooks of your black tunic and pools in salt licks between your breasts. Fuck Alderan fire.

Your prince gathers your shoulders and chest, your waist hips and exhaustion, into a bundle in his arms and pulls himself up with his doorknob because he will not let you drown, he will not let you freeze, and you will not win by setting yourself on fire. As he rises, blood leaks again from your nose. Tears fall aimlessly against his heart split to six like a pomegranate. When Bakugou is king there will be no child soldiers.

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tagged angels ✧.* @nnubee @nonomesupposedto @zombiewarprincess @kotarousproperty @strawberry-mentos69 @sveetnn @lunrai @km7474 @arayoflia @cathwritestragediesnotsins @idimmadontgiveashit @kooromin @k1tk4tkatsuki @litiri @kiwibao @sarcasticlittlebook @condy-wants-a-cookie @mysticalfridge @falling4fandoms @katanaski @romiinlove @cherripunch26 @acid-rain27 @bakugouswh0r3 @zukowantshishonourback @ultracrii @chandiewashere @screechingdreameater @mecuryxmoonstone @onlysarcasm @ilovemushroomss @when-you-are-just-done @levisbae2 @flyhighinthesky @1astr0id1 @thebluespacecow @mizzfizz @butterscotch-ripple-icecream @phoenix-draws77 @ltadoriyuujl

#told you ch 12 was steamy #insofar as its hot and wet #can you tell im the eldest daughter?#a hymn to black water #bakugou x reader #bakugo x reader #fantasy bakugou #fantasy bakugo #bnha x reader #mha x reader #bnha fantasy au #mha fantasy au #bakugou fantasy au #bakugo fantasy au

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