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It’s twelve in the morning, a dark, quiet time when the dorms are silent, only a rustling of socked feet in the hallways as they pass his door. Kirishima is up late, doodling something stupid onto a piece of paper, trying his best to cram for the public law test in two days. He’s not naturally smart like Bakugou or Yaoyorozu, and every point he earns is so painstakingly worked towards it’s more a culmination of all his diligence than actual knowledge.
There’s a sudden knock at his door, though, that surprises him, startling him out of his stupor. Shuffling to the door, he peeks around the crack, and well, he sees a very dishevelled looking Bakugou on the edge of his door, one hand on the back of his neck, the other shoved deep into his pocket.
“Are you alright?” is Kirishima’s first sentence, because Bakugou looks like he’s seen better days, but then again he always does—his default mode seemed to be to convince everyone he was suffering to get people to lay off him. His mouth is creased in a terrible frown. “Do…” a poignant pause. Bakugou shifts on both feet; it’s such an incredible sight Kirishima feels like he’s secretly being recorded and this is all a terrible variety television episode. “Do you want to come in?”
Bakugou hesitates, then nods. Bakugou nods. Kirishima might die, except he doesn’t because he’s too busy making sure he’s awake by rudely pinching his neck. Astounded, absolutely blown away, his eyes wider than they’ve ever been, Kirishima steps aside to let the boy into his room. Bakugou fidgets in the middle of his bedroom, looking around at the walls in a terrible facade of fascination, as if he’d never been in there before, and after fifteen seconds, Kirishima says slowly, the way one would speak to a particularly dumb child, “you can sit down—on the bed—yeah.”
Bakugou drops down onto the bed, bouncing slightly, his joints locked so tight a tap might just snap them. Kirishima is beyond weirded out and licks his lips nervously. Maybe a quirk hit Bakugou and now he’s messed up in the head. Maybe Bakugou had been replaced by milder version of himself—a clone? A clone. It has to be a clone. Or aliens.
They stare at each other. Bakugou swallows nervously, then adopts a glare as though he’s forgotten he isn’t wearing it.
“Are you okay?” Kirishima asks. His voice is as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
“I want to,” Bakugou starts. His voice is hoarse. “Take my relationship with Deku to the next level.”
Kirishima raises a finger, opens his mouth, puts his finger down and snaps his mouth shut. He takes a deep breath, puts his hands on his hips, and turns in a circle. “I’m sorry, what relationship?”
He’s distinctly aware that Bakugou and Midoriya probably have about a +1 level of friendship, maybe that’s a little too generous, he’d probably drop it back down to a plus or minus 0.5, and even then it’s optimistic. They kind of tolerate each other now, but toleration is something more akin to dislike when it came from someone from Bakugou.
Swallowing thickly, Bakugou still manages to dredge up some semblance of antagonism from deep inside him, something that makes Kirishima feel slightly better. “That’s the part I’m working on,” he concedes roughly and Kirishima opens his mouth again.
In his mind, he’s saying something devastatingly witty, but what comes out is a painful choked laugh that runs away with him, then he ends up bodily wheezing—he might drop to his feet if he didn’t manage to lean on the side of his cupboard and drawing in deep, shuddering breaths. What unnerves him more than Bakugou asking him about this is the fact that the boy isn’t even trying to stop his laughing fit, which makes Kirishima sober up pretty fast.
“You want to be friends with Midoriya?” Kirishima asks, trying to clarify this one key idea. “The one you, you know, nearly beat to death on multiple occasions?”
“I did not do that,” Bakugou’s voice is petulant. Kirishima would laugh again, but he’s trying to get serious here. “Besides, he always got better.”
Ever wise and all-knowing, Kirishima does not point out the contradiction in that statement. Instead he asks, “why?”
It’s quite a pertinent question, but one that Kirishima thinks is not too hard to answer, because, well, ideally you’d know why you wanted to be friends with someone, even if it is only for the sake of being friends. But Bakugou squints his eyes, folds his arms across his chest and spits, “Because I hate him.”
Okay, Kirishima was not expecting that, and it looks like they have a very, very long way to go. He can almost see panicked text messages, because Bakugou is always honest over text, even if it means devastatingly so. Kirishima had once sent him a picture of himself, and all he’d gotten for the next hour were increasingly savage metaphors and comparisons about the new shade of his hair. “You want to be friends because you hate him? Dude, that’s some messed up logic.”
Bakugou snarls at him, rolls his eyes—this look by now seems patented—and flops back onto his bed. “I don’t fucking know why I hate him,” Bakugou tells the ceiling, which judging from his roving eyes seems to be very interesting. “I want to know why.”
Kirishima gnaws on his bottom lip, then decides to gloss over the potential reasons for Bakugou’s frankly irrational fear of failure and weakness that has rapidly become common knowledge to the entire grade in favour for patting him on the shoulder. The bed sinks beneath his weight. “Listen,” he says, voice quiet. “You’re not a bad dude.”
Bakugou looks up from the bed and glares at him.
“I mean it!” Kirishima laughs, folding his arms across his chest and grinning. “You’re a decent enough guy, if you’d stop being an irrational emotional asshole. Why do you dislike Midoriya? It’s obvious, isn’t it? He reminds you of yourself.”
Bakugou raises an eyebrow, puts a finger to his lips, then says very pointedly, “fuck off.”
Kirishima sighs. “Dude, accept it.”
“Um,” a pause, in which Bakugou sends him the dirtiest look he’s ever seen. “No.” Somehow the lack of a cuss word there makes it more obvious he’s trying to be cutting.
A muscle twitches in Kirishima’s jaw, then he says, “you guys have the same dreams, the same idol, the same wish, the same — you know, I could go on, but it’d just get repetitive. So this is what you’ll do, Bakugou. Tomorrow, you’re going to walk into class — yes, walk, not saunter in as though you’ve murdered sixty people that morning just walking on campus — you’re going to walk past Midoriya and sit properly in your chair, not that awful slouching, and you’re going to tell him good morning. And you’re going to do that every day until it’s routine. That’s facing your problem head on! Like a man!”
Bakugou opens his mouth, then closes it. “That’s too fucking long,” he says, his bottom lip jutting out in what could be a pout but at this point Kirishima is so sure this is some study-induced hallucination and he’s imagining what Bakugou would look like if he’s slightly apologetic about his actions.
“Friendship takes time, Bakugou, and you’ve a lot to make up for y’know,” he rubs the back of his head and sighs. “Just try it.”
=
Although it’s soul-draining and seems to suck the life out of him, Bakugou walks in the next morning without slouching, yelling, or slamming the door open. His feet shuffle quietly on the floor, walking past an attentive Iida—who is looking like someone just bitchslapped him in the face.
“Good morning,” Iida says, still looking like someone just told him that the moon landing had been faked—which everyone who wasn’t an idiot knew was true, and that the astronaut had been one of the only people alive with a quirk that allowed them to control lightspeed. God, people these days were so uneducated it kind of hurt Bakugou, but he digresses.
Normally, Bakugou would ignore him, but Kirishima is raising an eyebrow and mouthing niceness makes friends, which is such a dumb, cheesy line Bakugou thinks he got it off some awful gift card, but given that Kirishima was kind of like a walking gift card, he didn’t know what else to say. He dredges up a grunt of acknowledgement from within him and Iida actually sputters, his glasses sliding off his face. He doesn’t bother to fix them, head instead moving to track Bakugou’s progression down the aisle.
If being a slightly less aggressive version of himself meant everyone looked like they’d just gotten a taser to their face forever, he might do it more often. He strolls past Iida and through the desks, before sitting quietly in the seat in front of Deku, pulling back his chair without scraping it on the ground instead of his usual smacking.
The stunned silence in the classroom sits on his shoulders. Turning to look at Deku, who is staring at him, eyes wide and skin flushed, his lips shiny from where he keeps nervously licking them. He fidgets with a pencil, then rubs his ears—his nervous tick, Bakugou notes with a semi-smile, albeit one that never made it to his face. He smiled on the inside, and the inside is where all awful, mushy sentiments need to be confined to.
Now that he’s here, though, the prospect of saying good morning to the whiny child has his words dying in his throat. God, it’s so annoying, and kind of pointless too, really, this was just like the bullshit his father used to make up to get him to make his bed in the morning, all this crap about first achievements and motivations.
Struggling to discover the true meaning of language, he manages to drag up a, “good morning,” which is spit so vehemently he might as well have said i fucking hope you and your mother die in a volcano. Deku’s eyes widen. Bakugou decides his tone alone wasn’t enough, and settles to peg on an “asshole,” for good measure at the end of his sentence. Then he repeats it again for emphasis, in case Deku’s slow brain missed it. “Good morning to you, asshole.”
Given the look on Deku’s face is akin to the one he wore when a flash grenade went off in his hands unexpectedly—because the only two people that could ever happen to is Kaminari or him, really—Bakugou decides his work is done.
He’s nodding in satisfaction at the floor, feeling very proud of himself, when there’s a gentle touch of long fingers on his shoulder, the hesitance giving away immediately who the owner of the hand was, and so Bakugou does not bodily flip them over the table and demand answers.
Instead, he turns around and raises an interested eyebrow, eyes narrowing. But what he’s greeted with is Deku looking so similar to a beetroot it would’ve been laughable if Bakugou didn’t feel, for once in his entire goddamned life, so nervous he thought the frantic beat of his heart would break his ribs. Fuck, he actually cared what this nerd had to say, holy shit, Bakugou wanted to ascend to the astral plane if it meant this would end.
“G-good morning, Kacchan,” says Deku, his voice twice his normal pitch. His hands are shaking, and he looks scared, or nervous. Or maybe stupidly happy. His mouth was kind of stretching into a smile, then Bakugou nods, self-satisfied, and it really does bloom into a gentle smile and his eyes crinkle. It occurs to him in a flurry of emotion that feels more like punches on his weak, delicate heart, that this expression—blushing cheeks bringing out the prominence of his freckles, green eyes twinkling, who the fuck just twinkles—is a much better look on Deku than the flush he got from being ridiculed.
Bakugou can’t find a reply to the innocence of Deku’s greeting, so he swallows thickly and turns away. “Yeah,” he mumbles, biting his lip, and looks up in time to see Kirishima’s smugass face. It occurs to him that if this works, he’d never live it down with the guy, but Deku’s smile lingers in his mind—a smile, for once, that didn’t make him want to punch it, truly revolutionary—and he figures it doesn’t take that much effort to say good morning. But just that, of course. Bakugou wouldn’t go too far as to tell him good afternoon—or god forbid, good night, like some cliche romantic comedy—actually any of that ridiculous bullshit is scrapped. No, Bakugou had dignity. He respected himself. A greeting in the morning is enough to establish a cordial atmosphere, which is all Bakugou wants from Deku. It’s not like he lives off his praise or anything, not at all.
=
Two months later, Katsuki leans in the doorway of Izuku’s room. He’s laughing as Izuku throws socks at him, barking, “there’s a test tomorrow, out! Out! I’m determined to beat you this time, Kacchan.”
He laughs again. “God, you’re so nerdy. You actually care about rankings, that’s so fucking lame.”
Izuku giggles. The smile splits his face in two, his mouth almost heart-shaped. “Fine, fine,” Bakugou waves his hand, laughs once more—a short, harsh sound, he still hasn’t quite figured out how to laugh as sweetly as Izuku—and says, “good night.”
Izuku stiffens, then his body goes lax and he leans against his cupboard door, the tips of his ears turning pink. “Good night, Katsuki.”
The use of his full name throws him off a bit, but it feels—oddly pleasant, like a warm thrumming in his chest, the beat of fragile wings. He blinks in astonishment at Izuku, words failing, and spins around abruptly. Katsuki. It feels adult, mature, not stupidly cute, and for some reason brings with it a feeling of something entirely new. The back of his neck feels hot as he troops away from Izuku, waving goodnight with his hand, before disappearing down the stairs and pressing his forehead against the cool concrete.
Good night, Katsuki.
He finds himself smiling, and is promptly so disgusted with himself he forces himself to run one point six kilometres at nine at night wearing flip flops and baggy sweatpants that aren’t running material, because he’s a masochist and he hates himself. And the world, and Deku’s stupid smile and small hands and wicked grin. When he’s done, he looks up at the sky—dark blue, the clouds orange from the ambient light, and finds he’s still smiling. Fuck, he thinks. Fuck.
He decides to seek out Kirishima to spar with him, because it’s not like he can hurt the bastard anyway, and it’s all his fault that Katsuki is here, saying good night with what might be affection, all because two months and what, three days ago, he’d told him say good morning to him, Bakugou-kun.
But he finds, as he steps into the house, he’s not actually that mad.