you’re disarmingly funny, smart-mouthed when it counts but you’re dedicated to your craft and fiercely loyal to the people you care about. by all means, you’re the girl of his dreams, there’s not a day that goes by where you’re not the first thing on his mind after a gruelling patrol and meetings with the hero commission. 

katsuki seeks you out like a blossom winding up to find the sun, desperate to spend free time with you — dates that aren’t really dates in places hidden away from prying public eyes. late nights that lead to your legs tangled at the short end of his couch, your cheek smooshed into his chest and a hand low the small of your back. heaviness there that doesn’t seem burdensome, natural.

the two of you are too far into the comfort zone after such a short time, he doesn’t even pick up on the blaring warning signs. the dating app notifications that still pop up on your phone, the way your head dips when he leans in a little too close to kiss you. 

he doesn’t see it clearly enough, the dangerous thorns that wrap around you like the stems of a blood red rose. his friends know better, you’re the type of girl who drank the blood of her enemies and ate the bones of her past lovers, stripping them bare like a carcass lost in the wastelands. they know the map of bakugou’s being well, the subtle craving for attachment and endearment that lies behind walls of flesh, muscle and a hardened exterior made up of a bit of trauma with a dash of near death. for all his gruffness and grandeur, there is a human within katsuki bakugou. one who carnally craves the simple promise of forever with someone else. 

those friends who pledge a lifetime by katsuki’s side aren’t enough to satisfy his appetite and yearning inner-ego, they know that, but still — they look out for him. 

“oh, relationships? i don’t do those.” you’d laughed, then, waving a hand dismissively when mina corners you on the way into the dynamight agency. a favour. a good friend willing to ask what the other can’t. 

her shoulders had risen in anxiety, treading carefully as the pink haired pro prodded and pried. “then what about katsuki?”

“what about him?” you quipped, tone clipped, unwilling to fall open to her investigation. katsuki’s friends weren’t yours by any means — you were new, fresh meat in their eyes that had somehow withstood of concerned childhood classmates. “we’re not dating. just messing around?”

mina’s expression soured then. “does he know that?” 

“he should. he’s a grown man, i’m sure he knows what kind of relationship he can handle.” 

“a situationship.” 

“a friendship that comes with added benefits.” he recalls you supplying. quick to the punch and cold like ice.

katsuki stays long enough to hear mina give you the low down. katsuki bakugou doesn’t do casual, he doesn’t mess around — his heart only goes out to some and when it’s yours, you’re supposed to take care of it. mina gives you the chance to walk away, leave him be and you fail to take it. with that minacious sense of esurience you possess.

the first time you sleep together happens after your first fight. he wants something you can’t give him, permanence, the sturdiness that reminds one of an oak tree that’s grown proud and tall over time. katsuki wants something that lasts and his heart is set on you — someone who disappears into the rolling smoke and only exists for a split second, a momentary fraction of time like when the sun and moon meet for an eclipse. you’re evanescent, almost imaginary, fleeting like a nomad who never stays for too long.

he can’t have you. not in the way that he needs to feel stabilised. 

everything blows up, when you tell him that. sitting on the other side of the bed, wearing his clothes, comfortable in his penthouse where your shoes ( an impressive collection of sneakers to high heels ) are lined up by the door and you’ve got a favourite mug on the top shelf of his kitchen cabinets where only he can reach. there’s a piece of you everywhere in bakugou’s home but not a single piece you can part with long enough for him to call you his own. the fight is full of rage and pent up frustration and a hurt that’s nearly incurable — katsuki should have made you leave right then and there, emotions rising like hot air above cool. with tears building behind his red eyes that burn brightly with fury, but he can’t because you’re so intertwined with his life, it’d be like having a lung missing if you’d gone. 

it’s not love, it shouldn’t be — but his heart feels anchored to you even if it’s holding you back. you let him say it, that he loves you so much it could kill him in his youthful age. he loves you while pushing into you deep, chest rising and falling in tune with yours, much like a habit you’ve picked up from one another. he loves you with your legs hiked high on his shoulders, at the weight of his shaft pressed up against your sensitive walls with his teeth and tongue marking you like you belong to him. the sex that night had felt like a confession, a love letter written in hickies and scratch marks — penned and signed into your body by rough-padded fingertips that find your clit between rolling waves of trusts, hips that hit yours like the turning tide hits the shore.  

in the moment, you reciprocated. sung his praises kike they were the lyrics to your favourite song, coated in wistfulness. howled his name, katsuki, at the moon whilst the stars bore witness to the union of your souls and your bodies. struck claw marks between the muscles in his back, leaving him with a scar. a heavily ironic reminder of your presence in his life — even if you left him physically, you’d still be there in the root of his heart and in every breath he’d take from then on. he couldn’t get rid of you, not that he wanted to, not even if he tried. in every sense of the word — mind, body and soul, katsuki had decided he belonged to you. willed you to understand through every stroke of his cock into you, every gentle kiss that deepened to share hungry moans, every caress over your battle wounds and fatal flaws… that he was yours, however you wanted. whatever that looked like. he would take it. 

in the morning, you were different — colder, sharper, as if the sinful hells from which your desire had risen from, had now  frozen over. like the heat and passion you’d shared were nothing but a mutually beneficial exchange. pleasure for pleasure, not to be mistaken for beating hearts coming together as one. in the morning, you’d tossed katsuki aside, smiling sweet, your lips pressed against his cheek, your clothes from the night before wrinkled against your love-bruised frame. “thank you,” he remembers you saying. “same time next week?” 

it’s a joke that lands as a sucker punch. worse than any hit he’s ever taken on the field. 

despite that, bakugou had never wanted you more. something he couldn’t keep. a hurricane in a glass jar that  he couldn’t contain. free as a bird that could fly away at a moment's notice — too dazed with desire and devotion to see the cruel limbo you were leaving him in. even then he’d have called you the girl of his dreams, perfect in every way except for your knack for avoidance. he should have walked away then. 

he should walk away now. as his tired, blood red eyes look to you with a rose tinted lens. watching you sleep soundly amongst sheets you’d complain cost more than a month’s rent and won’t let katsuki buy for your own apartment. still thinking that you’re perfect for him, that you fit right into his world where you’ve made him so intrinsically part of your own. thriving in this weird symbiotic relationship where you get your needs taken care of and he gets a taste of what it’s like to be longed for. as more than a hero. as less than dynamight. just katsuki. you’d taken a sledgehammer to the pro hero’s concrete shell and sent his shield packing, now he’s no longer to build up his walls without fear of shutting you out. 

friends with benefits, lovers but not quite — bakugou doesn’t care as long as he’s with you. he’d pick fights for you until he turned black and blue, rescue you from the competition because he knows it means having his way with you afterwards, let you call him your boyfriend high on life and liquor just to piss another man off. now you’re in his shirt, the warm charm of the sun spilling through his curtains to illuminate the soft slopes of your thighs and highlight every perfect imperfection on your skin. the scars you try to hide, the tiger stripes you sometimes let him love. 

you look softest when you’re asleep, like you wouldn’t dare destroy someone’s self worth and ability to love. you don’t look dangerous. 

he still doesn’t believe that you are.

“suki,” stretching high and wide like a little harmless — maybe even blameless — kitten lounging under the blessing of the afternoon sun. your voice calls to him — wafting through the aerosols that catch light under golden rays. they act as a smog, a performance of smoke and mirrors that hides your true intentions from the blonde. even if he were to wave his hand through the smoggy disguise, katsuki still wouldn’t be able to see your desires clearly. “my head hurts.” 

“yeah?” bakugou’s bare chest rises and falls with somewhat of a brusque titter, the sound curling inward like a wisp of smoke caught within his lungs —  cemented into their small branches of bronchi. it’s soft, barely noticeable, if you weren’t listening. almost as if he’s been trying to keep it a secret from you. as though his fondness were to scare you away. “want me to kiss it better?”

“mhm…” more of you emerges from cotton hills and stiff peaks of linens — a hand rubbing through the crust corned at your eyes and lips. “god it kills, what even happened last night?”

even then, despite the sleep caked into your skin and the lines carved out by creases in the sheets struck against your cheeks, disregarding the bitterness to your morning breath and the drool staining the fabric of his your sleep shirt — you’re still the most beautiful person in the world to katsuki bakugou. with all your flaws and icks and green flags he can’t help the uptick in his pulse and the pull of gravity that lures him into smiling almost school-girlishly at the sight of you rubbing the ache from your forehead, lost in the waves of his bed spread.

you’re perfect even if you don’t know it — some kind of lawless and flawless being that could do no wrong in the jewelled eyes of the beholder. 

“party. didn’t invite me so i don’t know what you had.”

“it was a party, am i not supposed to drink?” a cheshire grin blooms amongst your features and compliments the mirthy spark to your sleepy stare as you reply bluntly. if there was any inclination as to how deeply katsuki feels for you, it would be the way his focus flits away from your eye contact and the manner in which rich red blood pools underneath the surface of his cheeks. a blush that catches sunlight and spreads like a flame over oil slick, creeping down to the back of katsuki’s neck.

he rubs at it — akin to how one would smooth over a scab they’re not trying to pick in fear of making it bleed —  as he speaks. intent and careful. “responsibly, sure,” he’s already reaching to pull the covers back and welcome you to the land of the living. you hide, pouting like you’ve been scolded. “you were so shitfaced last night, ‘m surprised you even managed to call me to come pick you up.” 

you don’t like that. the tenderness that sits between curse words and stretching through the comfortable atmosphere of the late morning. to you, katsuki is scary in the kind of way that reminds you of the buzz you feel after watching a horror movie — electric and alive, all fried nerve endings and an impending sense of doom tickling your chest. maybe it’s because he’s so handsome. in the way that causes trouble with the old ladies on floor thirty four of the apartment building or gets the girls tripping over their kitten heels at the agency. maybe it’s because he leans into this natural duty to protect or nurse strays like you back to health. 

genuine fear easily takes residence in your being when bakugou cares for you in the ways you feel you don’t deserve. it’s small, fleeting — almost like the subtle beat of a butterfly's wings or the tickle of your own hair at the nape of your neck. 

katsuki isn’t someone to be afraid of. he’s not some kind of predator lurking in the dark waiting to turn you into a chunk of meat. his affections lap at you in the same way ocean blue does at a sandy shoreline, in soft waves with bubbling white at the owl waiting to be absorbed into porous substrate. he waits, oh, he waits for you to accept all of him as though he were always meant to be yours. 

that’s what frightens you, his gentle dedication. his tired eyes that crystallise when you walk into a room. his heart tattooed in fading ink on his sleeve, waiting for you to take a knife and pierce it with all that you’ve got. 

the thought of accepting his love and returning it had your stomach turning. not because you resent the idea, but because you find yourself warming to it like a steel kettle on a hot stove or a freshly potted sapling winding towards the light in order to grow. it’s as frightening coming face to face with an animal that sees you as nothing more than prey. like a hare standing against a wolf where the odds are hardly in its favour. 

“it’s too early on in the day for you to parent me katsuki and you sound like my dad,” you bite like a snake that has venom poised behind its teeth, regarding the blonde with devious merriment. “bet you like that though, gets you all riled up telling me what to do. acting like my dad. do you want to be? my daddy, katsuki?”

your banter is usually like this, the kind where the dialect crawls underneath his skin through an open wound and spreads uncomfortably in the form of a viral infection. it sticks meagerly to katsuki’s ego in a similar fashion to a postage stamp placed down wrong — where you can’t pick it up by the corner and peel it back, unable to reposition it correctly. in the moment, you’re funny — light on your feet and quick with quips that come easy and aren’t supposed to mean anything aside from serving the purpose of laughter. except, when the coals cool and the time passes you leave a sting that creeps up on the victim, dead before they even know it. straight faced by the time the day is over.

“don’t be like that.” he leans over you, wafting notes of clean pine and smoked applewood, sparking your senses awake, and pushes the side of your head playfully. his touch slides down, careful as it goes, before bakugou cups your cheeks and squishes them twice.“bein’ fuckin’ mean.” 

“sorry daddy.” you grin the same as before. with the air of someone who knows exactly who they are and what they’re doing. you’re a woman who’s made a vexatious habit out of reading people — katsuki is one of them — scouring their worn, aging pages for something that makes them tick. 

by now he’s caught on the game that you play, toying with the knotted mess of his feelings like a feline with her bawl of carmine coloured yarn. the iniquitous version of the red string of fate. he returns to his seat at the edge of the bed,  turning away before you catch the fall in his face. as though the manner in which icarus flew too close to the sun — only to be scorned —  could be captured in his expression, like an artist who carves his wages through stone.

“oh shut up,” bakugou pushes again, no weight behind his hand. controlled because he’s not a man with a temper. the kind you run to when he spends a weekend out of town. “‘m not fuckin’ you ‘n i gotta go to work.” 

“that’s never stopped you before.” you purr, never quite having learned how to be subtle.

hero galas and award-show after parties run rampant through katsuki’s mind — the memories without picture frames because you never stay long enough to keep. alcohol bleeds into the ink, leaving them splotchy where he’d remember the happenings if he were sober. lipstip smudge kiss that taste of plasticky makeup and the bitter pop of champagne 

undeterred by your little mind games and the puzzles you make of the pro hero’s patience — he glances over at you, just for a moment. registers the presence of you helpless in his bed and then suppresses a fond smile, poking his tongue into his cheek. “you’re hungover, that’ll stop me. told you, i care about you.” 

there’s a twang to katsuki’s voice that has always warmed you sweetly. much like honey and buttermilk simmering on a stove. years of drawling and pulling along the vowels braided between their intimidating consonant peers. unhurried and rough around the edges. the way he softly answers you despite the wrath and envy that hides behind the snakelike bite of your words when you speak — he tries not to be loud, in fear his speech may be taken as a curse. the last thing katsuki wants is to scare you away, especially when you make a habit of escaping from his hold like a bird from a net or a gazelle from a hunter. 

you turn silent –  in a manner similar to the creep of the quiet night that sneaks up on her friend, the day – shifting upright and bringing the duvet with you. “don’t need you to,” your fingers curl in the blankets until crescent moons form in your palms through the thinness. you don’t snap, that is what terrifies katsuki more. “and that doesn’t mean you have to baby me.” it’s a childish retort that you add on, one that lands in the pocket of silence beginning to brew at the center of the room. sour like the punch of a lemon when you sip on something citrus. “i’m an adult, we can fuck if i wanna.” 

“but i don’t,” he feels far away when he responds, carefully unveiling his truth to you at a safe distance, to avoid the splinters of your shattering morning. “even if you’re nicer to me when you’re fucked up.” 

a rare joke from him turns you into the cheshire cat.

“you think i’m mean sober. so you prefer me subdued.” you ask, a taunting tone intertwined with the cadence of a person who seeks only to get a rise out of their victim. you pass his

the blonde whips round to face you, not to yell or to “listen. you were drinkin’, i wasn’t there to look out for you and there could have been anythin’ in your system. i was worried about you.” something churns in his stomach and ties his intensities together in some kind of fatal knot guided by a sick sense of anxiety.  it’s the same kind of feeling you. katsuki sighs, shoulders falling as though the strings that master them have been released.  “i don’t wanna argue.”

“me either,” you quip, sensing the defeat. “my head really hurts, kats.”

he softens as you drop the topic. a change in tactics to keep him on his toes, interested in playing the game of chess you’ve laid out for the two of you. his pieces have been stolen, barely anything left on the board since you so eagerly take and take from him. “i know baby,” katsuki supplies in that sugary simple syrup manner that would have any girl twist her ankle in order to get a chance with him. “just, lemme get you some orange juice for your hangover, kay?”

“with bits in it? bleck. you know i don’t like orange juice.” he does. of course katsuki bakugou knows that you hate orange juice with the little floating pieces of fruit flesh and that you prefer the kind of squash you dilate with running water over anything else. he knows that you hate to eat breakfast in the morning because you’re never too hungry, but if he were to cook something up you’d eat it with the same appetite as a grown man. katsuki knows you like the sun burning up high, would know the familiar company of a summer’s day and a clear blue sky — in a way that’s complimentary, two souls tangled by a fine rouge thread, knotted with no loose ends.  

except he finds you tugging at them as though you’re a bird caught in a net — fighting ferociously until you’re too fatigued to taste it. freedom. as though you’re frightened of the calm katsuki could offer you. he dwells on the thought, standing too still amongst a hurricane — biting fear cool against his skin because he’s not entirely sure what he’ll do when he loses your presence beside him simply because you’re not ready for something greater.

his eyes drag away from you, polarised to the wall like a magnet that attracts. “well it’s either that or tomato juice, pick your poison,” katsuki supplies, listening for your tantrum amongst cotton sheets. you settle on the bright, more-fruity counterpart ( because you’ve argued about this before at 3AM whilst he’s been in indonesia for a mission and you've been stuck here — using your spare key to get into his apartment when you’d missed him. tomato, despite its many seeds, isn’t a fruit in your eyes ) and the blonde hauls himself up from the edge of the bed to find his juicer in the kitchen. “that’s what i thought, brat.”

katsuki never leaves you without saying goodbye. a text after patrol to let you know that he’s safe, a kiss on the forehead when he moves from one room to the next, a perfectly wrapped morsel of his soul packed up into a brief, flickering moment all for you. something to keep when the regular rhythm of your body starts to fall out of tune without him, no matter how long or short the time spent apart is — katsuki always gives you something. 

but this morning he leaves the bedroom with his lips pressed into a thin line and the hard set expression of a man who’s worked so much for too little in return — breaking a sweat to undo crossed wires as though there’s a time bomb ticking relentlessly between you that requires a special agent’s touch to figure you out. katsuki isn’t a spy, he isn’t a mind reader and yes, he’s super-human… but in his line of work there are just some people you can never seem to save. maybe you’re one of them and maybe that’s why he feels as though he might need to give up.

you draw your knees to your chest underneath the sheets in order to add pressure to the panic building within — he doesn’t shut you out in the manner that you do with him. katsuki always comes back to pull you out of your own mess as though you’re a wounded animal in need of tending. he’s good like that. he cares about you like that. 

you’re a blender, an emotional one at that, you come with razor sharp, silvering blades that constantly whir like a looming threat. get too close and you’ll lose a piece of yourself, bleed out on cold concrete like a saviour who tried entirely too hard to save someone who didn’t want it. what seems right to him, when it comes to you, is a means to his own demise and death – in this tale, katsuki is a wolf licking crimson blood from a blade poised to kill him, worsening his own wounds inflicted by his own desire for you.

a mere twenty paces away, you listen to him clatter about in the kitchen – juicing fresh fruit for you. from scratch. just to help you feel better. It's a luxury you know that you don’t deserve, a tragedy that you know he’ll play line by line if it means being with you. for a while, you thought yourself invincible, taking advantage of the weakness of men who have hurt you before. yet, katsuki is kind, he warms you, treats you as though you’re flawless to the point where you feel as though you are a physical lie. an apple dealt to adam instead of eve, rotted on the inside and ripe on the out.

bakugou waltzes back into the bedroom not even ten minutes later, freshly squeezed orange juice and two pills in hand to ease away the pain you know doesn’t compare to what lives between each intercostal space protecting his heart and lungs. he says nothing. you say nothing. the room feels like a trap, latent hostility building between the four walls as if it had cemented them together itself.

you inhale, like you’re taking a drag of a cigarette. you don’t want the smoke to clear – you’ll see the heartache in his eyes clearer then.

“are we okay?” you ask with the uneasy focus of someone who feels like her world is out to get her – drown her in the emotional turmoil she’s built. a swig of orange juice and bitter paracetamol clings to the insides of your teeth, causing a similar discomfort to that in the atmosphere. “i feel like… things have been really weird. with you. with me.”  

“no ‘m not. you’re being weird.” he delivers the line with a sharp intensity you’re completely unfamiliar with – like he’s taken on the same skillset, the same precise aim of an adroit sniper, and gone straight for your heart – forcing himself to speak over the blockage in his throat that keeps him from spilling emotions like an oil slick on clean water. 

a wound to the body can easily heal, but one to the heart that keeps pumping, can last a lifetime. you don’t scream out in agony, a wounded soldier on a battlefield – no – you quickly build a defensive shield and strike a strategic attack, because your ego broils brightly underneath the surface of your skin and never settles enough to let your temper just be.  

this time round, you scoff in braggart disbelief. as if you hadn’t expected this, the rain on your make believe parade.  “woah okay, childish.” 

observant as ever, katsuki does not miss the way you roll your eyes over the glass – the spread of your lips seeping into your cheeks as they take the form of a grim lour. something akin to kindling, a match-stick ready to set light to a bomb. this morning you’d promised not to argue, and yet, one catches in the wind that changes course. imminent and ready to detonate this faux relationship you’ve built.

“oh, like you’re not.” the blonde snaps back, sarcasm snaked between syllables. 

“alright then, what’s that supposed to mean, katsuki?”

“you just — ‘m just…” bakugou grapples for a sensible sentence, something to explain away the clouds in his mind that came with you. he hates to admit it, how you unhappiness came into his world soon after you did, bringing with you bouquets of bewilderment and nights where too many things were left unsaid.  “it’s okay for you to tease me and not the other way around?” 

it’s unclear why that sets you off, perhaps its how accusatory bakugou sounds. when he says it like that – calls you out on how hypocritical you can be, your temper flares like a streak of red in the dead of night. a cry for help to anyone watching, to katsuki not to give up on you before you’ve properly started.

“you’re not kidding around though, it’s not funny,” spitting venomously, you let your response rain down on him like acid rain, searing through the thick and guarded armor he thought he had built strong all these years. “you keep calling me mean when that’s how i’ve always been, firey just how you like it. you treat me like i’m made of glass, like you’ve gone soft and keep looking at me like i’m gonna burst into flames!” it keeps going, this gruesome splurge of awful words used to cut at him, and you can’t stop it because you see it working. the manner in which this big, mountainous and explosive man, shrinks away from you as though it burns to be near. “like me, being here is setting you off. almost as though you don’t want me here. and if you don’t, that’s fine, i’ll go. but in the future don’t bring me over if you’re gonna act all avoidant and shit.”

katsuki sits up now, alert, as if his burns have been doused with cold water. his carmine eyes, devoid of the same cruelty you treat him with, are electrified with everything he doesn’t say. loaded with all the ways you’ve hurt him. tears that refuse to fall. “what? was i supposed to leave you there drunk with that fuckin’ asshole? the one you keep fucking when ‘m not around to give you the attention you crave.” the blonde throws a thumb your way, inculpatory. “you don’t get to do that, call me like ‘m some shitty lapdog. then c-call me that fuckin’ name and then act like it’s weird that i want to take care of you.” 

“call you, what, katsuki?”

“course you don’t remember,” bakugou grumbles incredulously, standing from the bed in the same manner someone would flee from the scene of a crime. like he needs to get away from it all. from you. from the jail cell that is your fucked up relationship. “‘m not saying shit. got patrol so ‘m headin’ out.” 

the blonde excuses himself weakly and reaches for his hero costume as a shield.

because maybe, right now, he needs to be dynamight instead of katsuki. he needs to be a hero to save himself.

“katsuki,” you growl to make him stay. “call you, what? say it. it’s on the tip of your tongue.”

the look he gives you is wounded and pleading. the kind only a dying animal could give whilst begging to be put out of its misery — whatever katsuki says now will be blood on your hands, his organs violently spilling into your grip since you’re the only person in his life with enough strength to rip his heart out from behind the doors to his psyche. “your boyfriend. you called me your boyfriend last night and i picked you up and i liked it.” katsuki admits from across the room, at a safe distance from you because confessing feelings to you is akin to stepping on a land mine.

he’s been fighting an internal war since figuring out that he feels for you outside of fucking, wishing like a wistful child on every lucky star that perhaps, you would be able to wave your white flag and admit the same. beyond your own facade, you could maybe trade your heart for his like you would for a trading card. if you’d wanted him the way he wanted you, you’d push your pride away just enough to let yourself believe you could love someone outside of yourself.

 “i liked that you sat in my backseat, on the verge of throwing up and called me your boyfriend…” he supplies in the same way a child would when they make an attempt to be part of adult conversation — rushed in the sense that syllables land awkwardly and vowels tack themselves to the underneath of his tongue it moves around in his mouth, like there’s too much to say to you and not enough time for telling you. “i feel sick just sayin’ i liked that you let me hold your hair back when you did eventually puke your fuckin’ guts out, ‘nd let me shower you ‘nd change your clothes. let me hold you without making it weird, like we’re not supposed to do that shit just because all we do is have sex!”

with every inch he gives, you take, and the consequences nearly choke katsuki bakugou slowly to an unfair death. “i know you won’t ever let me do it again, now that you’re sober, ‘cause that’s not what you want and it’s not what we agreed to. you don’t like lookin’ like you need someone.”

“but i liked it,” bakugou rasps, vocal chords strained like an out of tune guitar — the notes wail into the tense, thickened air. “even if it was only for one fuckin’ night. when you were mine, for just one night. i liked being your boyfriend.” 

he liked being wrapped around your finger, even if it were a noose. 

“but you’re not,” the words of your retort are entirely too harsh and brittle, and they slip out like fine sand through fingertips before you have a chance to stop them. “you’re not my boyfriend.”

“exactly.”

“so what do we do?”

for the first time that morning. you sound scared — reality dawning on you as though you’ve woken up to nothing after dreaming about everything you could have ever wanted.

“dunno, do whatever you want,” he’s so tired of going back and forth. if he knew from the very day your eyes first met – in a similar fashion to two worlds colliding, colours mixing, flowers blooming – that this is what you’d wanted, he would have stayed far away. “you can stay. you know where your things are ‘nd i left you breakfast. in the fridge. bottom shelf where you can reach it.” 

“katsuki, i–” 

he shakes his head, the weight of him in your mind and head and in this very room lifting – as though he were never there. you seal your lips. your true feelings are a sullen, oppressive secret behind your teeth.

katsuki bakugou is stubborn. he always has been. to a fault. “i really gotta go, kay?”

you sink into the sheets, “okay… i’ll call you?” 

the pit in the stomach tells you he’ll wait for your call, you know he will. he’s always been self destructive like that. you’re like a ticking time bomb in the centre of his bed, where he’s supposed to feel safest — just waiting to explode and send shards of shrapnel shaped like daggers directly into his scarred heart and  he’s got no sense of danger. no telling of when you’re going to go off and decimate him. 

“be safe.” you add.

“i will be. i–” katsuki looks back, his tongue pushed to form the shape of love that he quickly abandons as if the weight isn’t crushing his heart in his chest. “… just don’t go anywhere? we’ll talk about this later.”

you nod silently as he leaves. afraid. 

you never do talk. 

you never do stay. 

because he’s certainly not your boyfriend and you’re not his girlfriend either. 

there’s no obligation in that anyway.

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