A/n: This story will be told in three parts and chronicle the mostly PG-13 angsty drama of a love triangle. The love triangle is probably not what you're thinking it is. The story was partly inspired by one of my favorite manga, Katakoi Triangle, and if you've read it you may understand why once you've finished at least one chapter. Please enjoy.
It was during the sports festival that Bakugo Katsuki reached the peak of his lifelong crisis of sexuality.
After all, it'd already taken him fourteen fucking years to accept the weird feelings he got around Midoria Izuku. It hit him halfway through their last year of middle school: that sense of unease, the embarrassment he felt when the other boy showed him kindness, that was a crush. He had a crush on Midoriya fucking Deku, for shit's sake.
Which definitely meant he was gay.
Katsuki found this utterly unacceptable. I'm going to UA, he told himself all year, sneering at the boy who'd been making his heart twist for ten years. I'm going to the one school that Quirkless nerd could never get into and become the world's greatest hero and leave this whole shitty town in the dust.
That was not, in fact, how things went down, and Katsuki was forced to spend every single day in the same class as the not-so-Quirkless nerd who turned out to have a Quirk that made Katsuki entirely uncomfortable in his jeans. (He wore loose, baggy pants for A Reason.)
Okay, fine, he spat at himself in the bathroom mirror one morning, the week after that fucking nerd beat him in the anti-personnel assignment. He'd spent the entire weekend reliving the way Deku'd thrown him, just totally laid him the fuck out, and his heart jumped into his throat every time. I get it, God or fate or whatever punk is reckoning with me. I'm gay. I get it.
After all, he'd never given girls or women a second thought. Like the gravure models in the magazines some of his middle school classmates snickered over behind the school storage room. The soft curves of the models in the photos did nothing for him – but strength? That made his heart race. Photos of shirtless heroes in Men's Fitness, shitty YouTube videos with titles like "Eight Weeks to Endeavor's Shoulders" – fuck, even the formless metaphorical strength Deku showed in the face of danger.
Bravery, he reminded himself. Deku's internal strength was properly called bravery.
The point, anyway, was that when he couldn't tell the difference between wanting to be like Deku or being with Deku. Shit, I have to be gay.
But a year after the thought first occurred to him, weeks after he'd resigned himself to lifelong celibacy because he'd rather die than try to make a move on fucking Deku and he'd probably never feel quite the same way about anyone else, his life was upended again.
He was matched against one of his female classmates in one of the later rounds of the sports festival, at which point the guys in his class started giving him shit. Go easy on her, a couple of the boys told him. What kind of guy goes all-out against a girl?
Fucking amateurs, Katsuki thought. Once you get into UA, you're not boys and girls anymore. You're heroes in training.
And he was matched against one of the classmates he least wanted to fight.
To an outsider, it looked like a totally lopsided fight, and it was true that Katsuki's Quirk had a lot more combat power than Uraraka's. But he'd been in a fight with her before, during the same class assignment that gave him uncomfortable dreams about getting thrown around by Deku for weeks, and he knew that what made Uraraka Ochako formidable wasn't her Quirk. It was her cleverness, the innovative way she used her Quirk, and the lengths she'd go to in order to obtain what she wanted.
She's like Deku that way, Katsuke thought on his way into the arena. And we all see how that turned out. Fucking Deku.
Uraraka didn't disappoint him, either: he could feel her murderous intent from the other end of the field. But he also saw a layer of fear that disappointed him. "If you're gonna back down, do it now," he told her. If she's just gonna bitch out and cower under a rock or something, may as well just let her quit now. "Cuz crying uncle later won't cut it."
Her face showed no flash of relief or added tension. Instead, as soon as the announcer called the start, she charged straight at him.
"Backing down's not an option here!" she snarled, her eyes filled with the same determination Katsuki saw in Deku's eyes, the same determination that reflected back from his bathroom mirror at home.
And she never backed down. Not once.
Not when he created an explosion directly in her face. Not when he knocked her halfway across the arena, or when the crowd started jeering that he was fighting her too harshly. Her response to his defensive blows were snarling replies he'd expect out of someone more like himself than the person his classmates described as a "delicate, sweet girl."
And in the end, as he stood in the wreckage of her attack while watching her collapse, he felt a strange mix of confusion and relief. If there was more in this environment to work with, I might've been crushed, he thought. As a pair of robots hauled her off to Recovery Girl, he felt his suspicions confirmed. I was right. She's fucking just like Deku, the lengths they'd go to. Passing out or crushing themselves. He probably told her exactly what she had to do.
He accused Deku of just as much, but the other boy just stared at him. "Uraraka came up with everything, just to beat you. So if it really was a lot of trouble for you, that was Uraraka messing with you."
And Katsuki's fucking traitor of a heart twisted in his chest.
He froze in the middle of the hallway. What the fuck? Seeming satisfied, Deku turned and scampered off, leaving Katsuki blinking like an idiot in the corridor as he wondered about the feelings Uraraka left him entangled in. The sensation wasn't even a little unfamiliar – he'd been feeling it almost his whole fucking life – but he'd only ever felt that way about the clueless nerd who'd dropped the fucking bomb and escaped.
Must be a mistake. She's a girl.
That was what pissed him off so much when Kaminari smirked at him after his match. "Nice job blowing up that frail little girl."
There was nothing he could possibly have retorted without revealing some sort of feelings he couldn't parse himself, so instead Katsuki grunted in the other boy's direction and threw himself into a chair. "Nothing frail about her," he muttered.
He was certain it was a mistake, that it was a one-time thing that would never cross his mind again. But like a fucking Pavlovian dog, his traitor-ass body quickly conditioned itself to Uraraka's presence, twisting his heart (among other things) when he saw her. When she passed him in the halls, he heard a phantom of her declaration to never back down. As she performed drills in class, he remembered how she'd appeared like a phantom at his back. When he caught flashes of her hardheaded, aggressive side she kept hidden so well, he couldn't help thinking of the way she'd glared at him with the promise of murder in her eyes.
And when he saw her with shitty Deku, grabbing his sleeve or smiling at him or standing half a step too close, Katsuki turned into a raging mess.
What made his rage even worse was being unable to tell whether he was angry that she was too close to the guy he liked or whether he wanted her to get that close to him.
Sometimes, he took his rage out on Kirishima. (Who, for all intents and purposes, was nice and safe; Kirishima was a nice guy, but he lacked whatever special something made Deku so appealing.) Sometimes he took it out on random trash cans he saw on the street, or barked at randos passing by. But he usually took it out on himself. His writhing feelings for Deku hadn't faded, so what was this about Uraraka, anyway?
He punched his bedroom wall. I don't know who I am anymore.
A/n: Okay, friends, the time has come to round out the other two points of the love triangle. Let me know what you think in the reviews and tell me if you'd rather see Ochako or Deku in chapter 2.
