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"What do you think?" she asks him in the middle of a sunny May day, wind blowing through her hair, picnic basket on her arm.
The dress she's wearing has flowers all over it - irises, he thinks, or maybe lilies - and it's quite pretty, really, clean and white and bright, just like the girl wearing it. Pretty is a foreign thing to Bakugou Katsuki, hard enough to think of, even harder to say, but that's what she is, the girl standing in front of him, smile wider than the sky, shining, somehow, like she's made of stardust, like she belongs somewhere not here, the earth too small, too dull to hold her.
"It's nice, I guess," he replies, scratching the back of his head – I’m not a girl, what would I know about fashion anyway, he doesn't say - and she grins that grin, the one that makes him feel like he's done something good, which is incredible, in and of itself; Bakugou Katsuki, fire in his bones, nitroglycerin running through his veins, a stick of dynamite, human weapon of mass destruction – doing something that doesn’t involve leaving things worse than they were before.
It's almost enough to make him laugh. Almost.
“Where do you think you’ll go?” she asks him as they walk home on a rainy day, third-years already, just barely legal adults, but jaded, worn, in the way of children who have been forced to grow up too quickly. Their shoulders bump underneath the umbrella.
“Dunno,” he shrugs. “You?”
She smiles wistfully, looking somewhere far away. “I was thinking of joining one of those on-demand agencies. The ones that go all over Japan. My parents are growing old, and I’ve got to save up quickly, so they don’t have to work too long.”
When Bakugou doesn’t say anything, she laughs, sheepish. “You must think it’s awfully boring, being a hero for a reason like that.”
“Nah,” he says. “I think you’re – it’s pretty amazing.”
She grasps his free hand then, the one that’s not holding the umbrella, and he jerks back, nearly shooting off sparks, but she holds on, tightly, firmly.
“Don’t just fucking do that!” he curses, heart still racing in his chest, but he doesn’t pull away, feeling the heat of her palm against his, so different from his own fire. This is a fragile warmth against his skin, soft and gentle in all the ways his explosions are rough and ferocious, fury compressed into light and heat. “I could have hurt you, dammit.”
She gives his hand a squeeze (I trust you, it says), and then, nervously: “What do you think about getting an apartment together?”
They end up in the middle of Kyoto together, hundreds of miles away from where home was, proud graduates of UA’s most anticipated class in a decade, each of them with a suitcase and a backpack’s worth of possessions.
Somehow, Bakugou finds himself outside of a furniture store with Uraraka, dressed in a thick coat, heavy scarf around his neck, shopping bags all along his arms. It’s a cold winter, snow drifts piled all along the streets, but despite the chill, Uraraka still manages to float along the pavement like she’s weightless, wonder-eyed, catching snowflakes in her open palms.
“You know,” he says, voice only a tiny bit petulant as he adjusts the bag on his right shoulder. “I’m pretty sure we don’t fucking need ten plates between the two of us.”
“Well,” Uraraka says, humming something underneath her breath. “You never know who’s going to visit.”
They finally make it to the apartment late that evening, wallets considerably emptied, but when the beds are made, the cupboards filled, the kotatsu set in the middle of the living room, kitchen smelling of something delicious, Bakugou looks around, chest bursting with something warm.
It isn’t much, but it’s his – theirs.
Uraraka ends up being right, when every Class 1-A member in a 30-mile radius shows up on Christmas eve, bearing everything from cold soba (Todoroki) to a giant frog beanbag (Tsuyu). Yaoyorouzu, ever the event planner, brings a large container filled with her favorite board games and spends the night producing party crackers, a constant, festive pop-pop-pop in the background.
They have to use all ten plates, and all eight glasses, and the dozen or so sets of silverware in their drawers, and even then, there isn’t enough to go around, some people eating cheerily off of paper towels.
Bakugou tries to duck out of the festivities several times before being dragged back in, first by Midoriya, then Uraraka, and finally Iida, who even now still hasn’t dropped his class president habits.
“Bakugou-kun!” his voice booms across the room, and Bakugou shoots a poisonous look at Jirou, who grins back. “It is your duty as a member of this class to participate in these festivities!” And then Kaminari and Kirishima (those shits) are pushing him into the huddle around the kotatsu, where everyone’s singing along shittily to some Christmas carol, passing cards around the table, laughing, generally causing a ruckus.
Bakugou feels like he’s five years old again, but, with a look at Uraraka’s smiling face across the table, he decides that maybe being five years old isn’t quite so bad.
Uraraka doesn’t get another break until Golden Week.
In the months of January through April, Bakugou sees her in the apartment a grand total of eight times, a net sum of what must be barely 48 hours, but in those months, they’ve established a ritual for when she comes home, usually stumbling through the door at two or three in the morning. Bakugou’s always still up then, pot of miso soup on the stove, boxes of mochi stowed away in the fridge.
They sit down together underneath the kotatsu and look out the window of their apartment, the big one that opens out to the balcony, and Uraraka tells him what she’s been up to, arms waving expressively, eyes sparkling, voice rising and falling in excitement or despair. And when she’s done, they sit looking at the stars (one of her favorite things, he knows, not that he’d tell her he still remembers) until she falls asleep.
He tells her then, the things he never says when she’s awake, about how he wants nothing more in the world than for her to stay, then for the apartment to not be empty when he gets out of bed for work in the morning, about how he wants every night to be like these nights, hands tangled underneath the blankets, the two of them before a sky vaster than either of them could even imagine, a slow, complicated dance in the undercurrents of their words. But he also knows how much her parents mean to her, what she is doing this all for, and that it would only be cruelty to make her choose between him and her dreams.
She’s always gone by the time he wakes up.
“I’m scared,” she says, voice muffled and tinny through the receiver, but he can hear it trembling all the same. “It’s an SS villain, and I know that I’ve got my team with me, but I’ve seen the things he does, I’ve seen what he’s capable of, it’s enough to make half of us retch, it’s just – I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can,” Bakugou replies without missing a beat. The apartment feels strangely empty around him, filled with the sound of her voice, but not with her presence; the contradiction only makes the hollow inside his chest grow a fraction wider. “You’ve never failed a mission before now, and there’s a reason – you’re fucking strong. Strong, and smart, and you’re going to kick that villain’s ass.”
He hears her laugh on the other end and his chest contracts, just a little bit, spirit lifting; it’s always like this when she leaves – she takes pieces of him when she goes and every time she calls, she gives one back, transformed into something joyful, something indescribably more than it was before.
“Thank you,” she says, and Bakugou’s heart skips a beat – it always does, when she thanks him; he’s never gotten used to it, someone like her, thanking someone like him. He doesn’t think he ever will. “Good night, Katsuki.”
“Good night,” he replies (I miss you, he thinks), and hangs up.
A letter arrives the next evening, slipped under the door, wax-sealed and blindingly white, and Bakugou peels it open with trembling fingers.
The morning sun finds him clutching a fistful of ash, black dust staining his fingers.
She was a pretty thing, gentle, kind, good.
These are the words that Bakugou hears, over and over, at her funeral service, and he wants to scream, wants to rush up there to the pulpit, seize the mic, yell until his lungs are empty, his mouth is hoarse, because to him, she was not – could not be – defined by simple words, such trivial, limited things.
He wants to tell them about the way her nose scrunched up when she laughed, or the way her ears went pink when she lied, or the way she chewed on her lower lip when she was deep in thought. He wants to tell them about how gentle her fingers could be, how ticklish she was on the underside of her foot, how she could look anyone, anyone, in the eyes with enough compassion to make them believe that they could be better, could be greater than who they had always been. That somewhere, they could be good.
The word pretty was foreign to Bakugou once, and over time, he learned what it was, when to use it, how to use it. And then good, and then the next one he learned after that, he thinks, must be gentle, like the way her hand felt against his, warmth that was shared and nurturing instead of furious and destructive. But now, sitting in the pews with the knowledge that the world is not kind to gentle things, the casket sitting in front of him being the first piece of evidence on a long list he has compiled, he has not learned the words to her memory justice.
He never thought he’d have to use them this soon.
When Bakugou gets back to the apartment, he sits down underneath the kotatsu with a pen and paper and tries to write.
The paper ends up in the trash can a few hours later, a silhouette of a girl in desperate, hurried lines, letters unreadable, ink blooms all across the page.
His phone is ringing off-the-hook for the next day, and in a fit of pique, he disconnects it entirely, but the silence, once familiar, even welcome, is now oppressive.
He doesn’t even make it an hour before he reconnects it.
He visits her killer in person a few months later, brought down by an agency in Hokkaido.
He knows how crazy he must look, sporting a 5 o’clock shadow, eyes red from sleep deprivation, hair wild and uncut, dressed in a coat that hasn’t been washed for at least a few weeks.
“I’ll do anything,” he says, desperation bleeding into his voice. “Just give her back. Please.”
The villain stares back at him, eyes level. “Everyone can kill,” he says, voice tinged with almost genuine regret. “But no one can bring someone back to life. I killed her, kiddo. She’s gone.”
“I’ll do anything,” Bakugou says again, voice rising hysterically. “Anything! Was it money? Was that why? I can give you money, please, just –“
The prison guards carry him off then, kicking and cursing and screaming.
When the villain is sentenced to the death penalty a month later, Bakugou feels nothing.
The ten plates in the top cabinet taunt him.
He wants to smash them. He wants to hear them crack on the tile, wants them to shatter into pieces, and maybe, maybe then he’ll feel something.
Maybe if he destroys them, he can go back to the time before, when he didn’t know he was missing something, when he thought he was whole, when he was content as Bakugou Katsuki, a stick of dynamite lit from both ends, fear-inspiring, people tiptoe-ing around him because he was always on the brink of exploding.
But this was before she’d come and shown him that there was something more, that even if he had fire in his bones and ashes for a heart he had no excuse. That there were flames that did not destroy, that there was warmth that did not burn. That Bakugou Katsuki could be someone better, someone more, someone good.
Forgetting this would mean forgetting her, her, the girl whose eyes shined with stardust, the girl that danced in the winter chill like gravity didn’t apply to her, the girl in the iris-patterned dress who taught him, in this ugly world, what beauty was.
He leaves the plates be.
The phone rings, somewhere in the middle of December, and it takes Bakugou several moments to register what the sound is.
“Hello?” he answers.
“Um,” the voice on the other end begins. It’s a girl. Yaoyorozu. “Well, we were wondering if it was okay to use your place for Christmas again this year. I mean, you don’t have to – we understand, if you can’t, but – “
“Sure,” he replies, eyeing the ten plates stacked up neatly in the top cabinet. They’ve been there since April, collecting dust; after all, he’s not the one who got visitors.
Maybe it’s time to use them again.
“It’s fine.”
Bakugou bundles himself in his winter coat and makes his way out of the house, bouquet of irises tucked underneath his arm. He looks down at the scrap of paper on his hands, the handwriting shaky, parts of it unreadable, warped by tears. It’s from the funeral, months ago, but he’d never been able to make himself go to the location written on it until now.
It takes him a while, but he finally finds it, the tombstone, white and heavy, marble, probably, inscription too solemn and impersonal to be fitting. She probably wouldn't like it. His mouth quirks up at the thought, and he lays the flowers down on the ground in front of it, along with a box of mochi. The stars are shining above him, and he can name a good number of them, the product of spring nights spent underneath the kotatsu, fingers tangled, shoulders bumping, watching her and the way her eyes shone when she looked at the night sky, their own quiet kind of love. He takes a shaky breath.
“Hey.”