BnHA is the tits, y'all.
ch1: universe of magnitude
What Katsuki feels when the girl with the weird-ass name and come-n'-go accent fucking drops and can't dig deep enough to drag herself back to her feet: cheated. Robbed.
Uraraka Ochako –a name he only bothers to learn because she's his quarter finals opponent—spends their entire match stirring up some top-shelf suspense, aggressively pressing the attack, keeping his smokescreen dense and his focus low, improvising one teeth-clenching gambit after the next, and putting his much-lauded, freak-quick reflexes to fucking task, all while capitalizing on the destruction she provokes him to wreak, floating shit all over the damn arena toward what he later figures has to have been a genuine intent to collapse his skull in a furious hail of ring debris.
It's a good –and balls-to-the-wall fucking crazy— plan, and whether it's of Deku's design or not, Uraraka's execution is flawless. Which is why, as he's coolly raising his hand to fire off a burst he knows is going to actually hurt, he can't wait to see what else she'll throw at him.
The force of the explosion -easily the biggest he's ever generated—kicks back like a motherfucker, flings Uraraka clear across the arena, and downgrades her meteoric barrage to a shower of harmless pebbles.
Katsuki makes a casual appraisal of the damage he's sustained when his hand picks up a brief, irrepressible tremor. The upper layer of skin on his palm has been finely seared away, and it burns, back like it used to when his quirk first manifested and he had no concept of limits or self-control.
It's fucking exhilarating.
Through the clearing smoke, he watches Uraraka pull herself together, clearly overwrought and worse for the wear yet neither down nor out –and in an instant, she's whipping around and rushing him like a mad bull, head lowered and gaze twisted with rage and resolve-
-and every bit as suddenly, she just…crumbles, like the still falling bits of dust and rock from his last-second, full-bore detonation. It happens in one, fluid motion; she doesn't even have the energy to throw out her arms and stop herself from crashing face first into the ground. Katsuki sees her struggling, straining with everything she's got, just to pick herself up again, just to continue, and he sinks back into a defensive posture in acknowledgment.
But Uraraka never makes it back up.
And he's left stunned, wondering what in fuck the point of all that damn build-up was if she was ultimately going to deny him his hard-won pay-off.
The restlessness, the frustration of this hollow, unearned victory gnaws at him –especially when he learns Deku'd had no hand in crafting that reckless-ass strategy of hers, after all.
His aftermath outrage is a universe of magnitude greater following his subsequent match with Todoroki, who has some kind of mental fucking break and checks right the fuck out of the fight midway fucking through it, but Uraraka's inability to finish the round definitely compounds the aggregate intensity of his fury.
At no point prior to their match did Katsuki have reason to conclude Uraraka Ochako might be a wilting flower. She'd gotten into the same elite school he had –into the same course, even; and on their first full day of classes, he'd watched her chuck a baseball into fucking orbit. And during the tournament, she hadn't given him time to underestimate her –hell, he only barely had space enough to react the dozen or so times she melted suddenly out of smoke-thick air beside or behind him, floaty-fucking-fingers first.
He doesn't credit his win to inevitability, or to the indisputable difference in their combat abilities. He credits his win to paying attention, and to not assuming she wasn't savvy enough to steal his victory right the fuck from under him if he'd let his guard down for even a half a fist-fucking second.
And every one of these harebrained, bleeding-heart chuckle-fucks breaks his balls for 'daring' to go at her seriously, which makes zero shitting sense because –were they even fucking watching the fight? Angel Face tried to literally fucking crush him. Asses for brains, every one of them.
Somehow, beyond his fucking ken, for years afterward, Uraraka manages to retain this reputation for being fiber-glass fucking frail, in spite of the many, many times she proves otherwise –in public, and frequently on national, shit-dicking television.
Katsuki supposes he can kind of get where the villains they face are coming from: she's young and puny and even if they know intellectually she's dangerous, who the fuck ever expects sunshine and rainbows to up and absolutely wreck their shit?
Fucking no one, apparently. Not even after she helps take down one of the most insidious and far-reaching criminal organizations of their era. Not after she graduates with honors from U.A. and is handpicked to sidekick for one of the top heroes in the industry, alongside Bird Boy and Todoroki. And certainly not after she and a handful of other 1-A alum –himself included—pool resources to start their own, high-profile, greatly sought-after agency, comprised of a number of their peers and juniors from both hero courses.
He can't pretend he doesn't enjoy it from time to time; he'll find himself grinning occasionally when their foes underestimate her, unexpectedly giddy, because he knows he'll get a kick out of the looks on the faces of these two-bit shits when Uraraka fucking destroys them.
Still, apart from Eraserhead, Frogger, that shitty-ass nerd –fucking Deku—and he, himself, even their peers and contemporaries routinely underrate her abilities, and she continues to fly under the radar, again and again and again.
…until she pulls an All Might and deadlifts a motherfucking skyscraper.
[next chapter: jirou Knows, kirishima and uraraka don't, and bakugou is bad at subtlety.]
