Chapter Text
Eijirou heard a door shutting loud enough to get rid of the last of his grogginess as he stepped out of his bathroom. He stood, blinking, before going to the door of his dorm room and opening it up. Was someone upset about something? Or maybe there was some sort of wake up call?
He poked his head out, but, looking up and down the hall, didn’t see anyone but Bakugou. His classmate was headed towards the stairs, hands in his pockets, bag slung over his shoulder, already in uniform. Eijirou considered calling out to him but decided against it. He wore only a towel around the waist, after all, and if Bakugou was headed out already, Eijirou would undoubtedly be late if he dawdled.
But when he got back into his room, he noticed that he had plenty of time, actually. Bakugou was just early. Laughing a little, Eijirou said, “I wonder if he remembers he’s not actually at home so he doesn’t have to get a train to school!”
Then he realized that Bakugou making a mistake like that would, most likely, put him in a bad mood all day. Eijirou groaned, flopped onto his bed and lay there for a while. Just when it seemed like Bakugou was getting friendlier, too!
Eijirou paused outside Bakugou’s door. He hadn’t heard anything all morning and was worried the other teen had slept through his alarm.
Shouji, who waited down the hall, called to him, “He’s not there. I already checked.”
“Bakugou sure gets up early in the morning,” Eijirou said. “I wonder what he’s doing….” He frowned a bit at the closed door but walked away to join Shouji.
“He’s not the first to class, though,” his classmate said, “Isn’t that always Iida?”
Eijirou nodded. They both got to the stairs at the same time. Eijirou grinned, waving to Sero who was coming down from the fifth floor. “Hey man!”
“Hey guys,” Sero grinned. “You’re pretty chipper this morning, Kirishima.” He hurried down the steps to join them, walking behind a few paces. “Have you already adjusted to Bakugou’s morning shouting?”
“Eh?” Eijirou blinked. “I didn’t hear him at all this morning.”
“What?” Sero asked.
“Really?” Shouji also asked.
“Yeah! I mean, if I’m awake I hear the door slam or him shouting, but otherwise I guess I sleep right through it.” Eijirou laughed. “It’s kind of the same in class? I can sleep through him shouting then if I’m tired already.”
Shouji’s shoulder’s slumped. “Bakugou’s been waking me up every day this week with his shouting. He’s like my own personal alarm clock… that goes off every five minutes two hours early, screaming fuck over and over.”
Eijirou winced. He’d heard some of that before, when he got up early to do a little homework or a workout before class.
“I’m just glad I don’t share a wall with him,” Sero said. “Otherwise, I’d probably end up like Todoroki.”
“What’s up with Todoroki?” Eijirou asked.
“I found him out on the veranda debating pulling his mattress out there to sleep. Seriously, I can’t believe they didn’t soundproof at least Bakugou’s room.” Sero complained.
“Where does he even go so early in the morning?” Shouji asked. “There’s no reason to get up that early. We’re five minutes away from the school.”
“He probably has early morning training he does,” Eijirou said, thinking of the lithe muscle that Bakugou sported. “Doesn’t Midoriya go running in the morning too? Those two really are something!”
Sero says something about ‘tryhards’ under his breath but he has a thoughtful expression. Shouji does too. Eijirou’s thinking about Midoriya and Bakugou going for a run in the morning together and kind of wants to laugh at such a wild idea. There’s no way that they're training together even if they’ve gotten slightly less confrontational- they still view each other as absolute rivals, after all.
Shouji switches the conversation to homework as they reach the bottom floor. Eijirou answers him, putting the thoughts of Bakugou out of his mind entirely.
Sometimes, when Eijirou comes downstairs in the morning early enough that he can see Iida in the communal dining area having breakfast, he can smell coffee in the air. Iida isn’t ever drinking any, though. He’s eating breakfast and usually pouring over some book or another. This happens a couple of times before he finally asks about it.
Iida looks up from his book, blinking for a moment and then explains. “It’s Bakugou,” he adjusts his glasses. “He makes a thermos full in the mornings before he goes to class.”
“Bakugou drinks coffee?” Eijirou said with surprise, poking his head out of the fridge where he was digging around for those boiled eggs he knew still had to be in there. The news about Bakugou is curious and new, though. They’ve been all living in the same dorm for almost a month and he missed that? How? “I’ve never seen him drink coffee.”
“Presumably he drinks it before class begins and stows the thermos in his bag during the day,” Iida said. “As I have never seen him in possession of the thermos or drinking from one before.”
“Well, he does head to the school early,” Eijirou admitted. Iida nodded to this. “I can see him taking a sport drink or even just ice water to drink for a workout, but coffee?”
“I can only tell you what I saw. I have not asked him about it since the first time, where he told me to… well you know how he is.” Iida ended with a mutter.
Eijirou nodded. He did know how Bakugou was. Except apparently he didn’t. He tells himself to ask Bakugou about it but, when class starts for the day and he finally meets up with his friend, Eijirou’s forgotten about it
Somebody has bitten Bakugou.
Eijirou notices the faint red mark when their changing for gym. He’s turning to Bakugou, a grin on his face and a joke half spoken when it splutters into nothing as he sees what is definitely teeth marks on skin.
Bakugou, of course, notices first that he stopped mid sentence and glares at Eijirou. “What?” He snapped, doing up the front of his pants. He sees where Eijirou is looking, eyes tracking the red head’s gaze to his own shoulder and then, to Eijirou’s surprise, Bakugou blushes. “That little fuckhead,” he snarls to himself.
Then his angry, heated gaze is on Eijirou, who immediately tries to laugh and displace Bakugou’s anger with a dismissive hand wave.
“Fuck off, hair-for-brains,” Bakugou sneers. He tugged his shirt quickly over his head, “Or I’ll give you something that hurts fucking worse than this, you hear me?” He threatens, holding his hand out, palm up. It’s been weeks since Bakugou has openly threatened Eijirou and the others notice, looking up and over at them.
“Yeah, yeah,” Eijirou says, still stunned. He laughs again, “Sure, sure.” He sounds like an idiot, like Denki with his brain fried but really he can’t think of any response at all.
Bakugou slams his locker shut so hard that Tokoyami’s next to it bangs shut in sympathy. The explosive blond gives exactly zero shits and stomps out of the room, leaving a strange hole of silence behind.
“The hell was that about?” Sero asked, “Did someone shove a stick up his ass even farther than usual this morning?” Eijirou hears Todoroki snort in amusement. He has taken great pleasure in any little thing that annoys Bakugou recently because of the unspoken-but-very-loud-dorm-floor-war going on between him and the blond.
“Somebody bit him,” Eijirou said, blinking. “On the shoulder.”
A pause and then Midoriya whispered in shock, “Someone bit Kacchan?”
“On the shoulder?” Sero repeats.
“And he hasn’t been arrested for murder?” Todoroki again. Eijirou glances to him. He’s got shadows under his eyes. He’s the least adjusted out of all of them to the whole dorm situation, which Eijirou finds a little weird considering the fact that everyone kind of knows at this point his dad is a raging asshole on levels even beyond Bakugou on a bad day, so shouldn’t he be glad to be away from the man?
“Todoroki,” Midoriya said, soft and reproachful. Todoroki at least has the decency to look guilty and turn away.
“Maybe,” Denki said loudly, to disperse the even more awkward silence that comes after that, “he wanted to be bitten.”
It is, of course, Mineta who says what they’re all thinking, sounding both gleeful and mournful at once. “Bakugou has a girlfriend?!” Which would make him the first, out of them all.
Nobody can quite believe it but….
Nobody can think of any other good reason why he’d be bitten on the shoulder like that.
Of course, the next time that most of them are in the common room, Eijirou notices, again, that Bakugou is conspicuously absent. He’s handing over the bowl of popcorn that Iida asked him to pass when he does a slow pan of the room and finally asks, “Hey, has anyone seen Bakugou since… shit, the end of class? Was he even here for dinner?”
It’s a Friday night, the newly designated Class Movie Bonding Night, and tonight the girls got to choose the double feature. The first film, a classic called Zootopia, hasn’t started yet as most of them are still adjusting seating and cushions and blankets and whatnot.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Midoriya who joins him in looking around with a troubled little frown. He’s wedged himself between Uraraka and Tokoyami, who almost didn’t join them himself, and he’s so short that he shifts onto his knees to look around. “I haven’t seen him at all. Has anyone-”
“Oh!” Shouji cuts in, “I saw him leave his room earlier. Before dinner. He was in regular clothes? It looked like he was headed out somewhere.” He gives a nervous smile, “I didn’t ask, though.”
Eijirou frowns. “Weird. He did know about movie night, right? We told him, right, Denki?”
Denki rolls his eyes, “He told us to fuck off and enjoy our fucking loser party without him, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” Eijirou rubs his chin. “He’s been… weird lately. Off or something.”
“What do you mean?” Sero asks, “Hasn’t he been his usual shouty and raging self?”
“Oh ho ho!” Mineta cried, leaping to his feet, “He must have a hot date with his super secret girlfriend!”
“Whaaaa?!” The chorus is distinctly feminine. Uraraka, Ashida and others gape first at Mineta, then at each other, and then, unsurprisingly to Eijirou. “Bakugou has a girlfriend!? Who is it!?”
“I don’t know!” Eijirou quickly exclaimed. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it. We’re not even sure if he has got one. All we saw was the bite on his shoulder….” That is the Wrong Thing To Say, it turns out, because he is bombarded with all sorts of questions.
Very quickly, the pre-movie set up becomes a Discuss Bakugou’s Odd Behavior conversation that is, apparently, so interesting that even Iida doesn’t reprimand them for gossiping about a classmate. In the discussion, it comes out that Bakugou doesn’t just leave for school early, he comes back to his room late. Sometimes, he doesn’t come back for dinner at all, but he never makes himself anything- as though he’s already eaten. There have been times when one of the others caught him in the laundry room, sitting on a dryer with his phone in his lap and a weird almost-smile on his face.
Iida mentions the coffee Bakugou makes but doesn’t drink. Shouji mentions the Nice Clothing- as far as baggy pants and a tee can be considered ‘nice’- that he’s seen Bakugou leave in. Denki reminds people of the times that Bakugou doesn’t eat lunch with either of them but also with no one else in class.
It’s Midoriya who comes out with the weirdest thing, though. “I thought I saw him talking to some general education students a week or two ago,” he says, not looking at anyone, his chin in his hand, his brows furrowed in thought. Any quieter and he’d be mumbling. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, I mean, I didn’t see his face just the back of him so it might not have been him. But the uniform was right and so was his way of wearing it. I don’t know what they were talking about but it was a boy and a girl and they were only talking. He wasn’t shouting or swearing or anything.”
Midoriya looks up, “Just before I had to go, I saw one of them hand over a packet of paper and bow to him. What could that possibly mean?”
No one knows, but everyone has a guess.
The chatter goes on for another twenty minutes before it’s Decided that Yes, Bakugou has a girlfriend and Yes, she must obviously be in the General Department of Yuuei.
Once this is agreed upon by most of the group, the movie can finally start. Eijirou sits back, enjoys the film, the whole evening, until Denki leans over and says, “So… We have to find out what kind of girl can tolerate Bakugou, right? As his friends, we have to know.”
Eijirou winces, knowing that if Bakugou catches them spying on them, they’ll have bloody eardrums by the end of it, but nods. They do kind of have to know. Or at least, they really, really want to know.
They just won't let themselves be caught. It’s as simple as that.
(It’s not so simple at all.)
Following Bakugou lasts only three days.
Saturday is easy because he spends most of his time training or doing homework in his room. Sunday he doesn’t even get up until after noon and actually plays games in the common room for a couple of hours before he vanishes. He’s gone before Eijirou or anyone else can notice, one minute there, the next like he just walked out the front door or something.
Monday, though, Monday they get caught right away.
It’s because Bakugou gets up hellishly early in the morning. Eijirou sets his alarm to get up at the same time but can only barely drag himself through getting ready by the time Bakugou’s door opens. Cursing, he stumbles to his own and swings it open.
Bakugou glances over his shoulder at him, wearing a sleeveless top and shorts. Eijirou, for a long second, thinks that they’ve all been really, really stupidly wrong because clearly he just gets up early in the morning to go work out but then his eyes catch it.
There’s a dark bruise on Bakugou’s arm, right near the shoulder, right next to where the mostly healed bite mark is. It, too, looks like a bite, albeit a much more intense one. They stare at each other for a while before Bakugou flat out flips him off, shoves an earbud into his ear, and stalks off towards the stairs.
Eijirou stares after him before looking down at himself and realizing that he’s half dressed in his school uniform. “Fuck it,” he muttered and went back to bed.
He wakes up late the second time, Shouji knocking on his door, and it’s only because he’s half dressed from his four am wake up that he manages to get to class on time at all.
As he’s rushing up the hallway, he sees Bakugou slip in the doorway just ahead of him, which just… boggles his mind. He knows he saw Bakugou up way early. What does he do after his workout? Come back and nap? Why is he just barely making it to class on time?
Denki hisses, “So? Where’d he go?” as Eijirou takes his seat but he just shrugs and sighs.
“I fell asleep.” He muttered, “I mean, I saw him in workout clothes but it was four am, dude. I couldn’t do it.”
“Such weakness,” Denki mutters and punches him lightly in the arm. Eijirou rubs the spot and frowns. “I could’ve done it.”
“Then why don’t you?” He snaps back, feeling unusually grumpy. Messing with his sleeping pattern and being way too wrapped up in Bakugou’s mysteries can do that to a person.
“Because he’d notice me in an instant and blow my head off,” Denki said. “Plus I don’t want to catch him macking on some girl!”
They jump when Bakugou’s feet land heavily on his desk right next to them. Eijirou meets his eyes, smiles nervously and then glances to Denki.
Iida rescues them from awkward conversation by coming over and hassling Bakugou about his feet on the desk. It’s a familiar sort of sound; Iida scolds, Bakugou insults, everything as normal. Then it abruptly changes when Iida decides to remind Bakugou that they are supposed to also remain in their dorms over night, every night and that Bakugou should not stay the night elsewhere like he did on Friday.
Bakugou is staring up at Iida, his ears a faint red, his face contorted into some sort of weird, angry but smug expression as Iida insists that he follow the rules of living in the dorm with at least some consistency. Even if he can’t show respect for their classroom equipment; the rules of the school are something Bakugou should be familiar with!
Silence stretches out around Iida like a tide. People turn, as if, like Eijirou, they are just now realizing that Bakugou spent the night elsewhere on Friday. He’d been there all Saturday and most of Sunday so no one had even noticed but-
“Fine,” Bakugou says, smugness winning out. His eyes glint like he’s won, somehow, “I’ll make sure to stay at the dorm from here on out, Glasses. Now fuck off.”
Iida does, but only really because the door opens for Aizawa. Bakugou takes his feet off the desk, but that smug expression doesn’t quite fade from his face for the rest of the day.
“I vote we don’t stalk him,” Denki whispers before lunch. “If someone else wants to know, let them do it. But we can wait, right Eijirou?”
“Right,” he agrees. Bakugou doesn’t eat lunch with them and they don’t even consider pestering him about where he went.
(Mineta does, though. He gets punted across the room for his questions and no one else asks anything.)
Bakugou displays a few more marks on his back and shoulders during the week. The others notice, stare a little, but when he catches them looking he just gets that smug look again.
I’m winning, that look says. Winning what, Eijirou’s not sure. He has a feeling, though, they’ll find out pretty soon.