Notes: Freaking finally. The scene that started all of this. I was only supposed to write this one, but then wrote the other three to set it up. And of course it just did it's own thing when it came time to write it. Smh I blame Bakugou. Is this a tradition in weddings? I've seen it happen in a few, but I swear they were just making up shit. If it isn't, then the Bakusquad is just sneaky. Also, Kirishima, this is a Kacchako fic. Why must you keep doing your thing? I swear shit just happened.


Dance Like Nobody's Watching


There were some traditions about weddings that made some sense and others that plain didn't. The father and bride(s) dance didn't make sense to him, but then, it wasn't like a guy had some specially designated dance with their mom for their wedding. Bakugou shuddered to think of that. There was no way in fucking hell that he would ever do something like that with his mom. He swore that he wouldn't even invite her to his wedding. She'd just be a hag like usual and ruin the whole thing.

Not that he was ever getting married, but still. The mental image was nightmare-inducing.

Throwing the bouquet and garter belt was outright dated and sad. All the desperate women would line up, so eager to get their hands on the bouquet, like it fucking meant anything. Half of them weren't going to get married. The garter belt was even worse. Men would line up, all awkward and buzzed, hoping to get a closer look under the bride's dress or something. It was gross. Bakugou couldn't imagine anything worse.

He had not danced at all and had mostly stayed sitting down at the table unless he went to get another drink or use the restroom. Others had come and go. Deku had eyed him curiously a few times when Bakugou was alone, but he'd just glared at the shit with a look that said, "Don't you fucking dare," and then Deku would turn away. He was fine. He didn't need to be surrounded by people like others all the time.

By the time the bouquet and garter belt were going to be thrown, Kirishima had joined him, as if to make sure that Bakugou didn't feel left out. He didn't - and he was half in mind to tell the spiky haired bastard to scram - but he said nothing about it instead. They were able to talk about things other than the wedding, which was a relief. He was starting to go mad and he didn't know what over.

As expected, all the girls lined up on the dancefloor, elbowing each other and shoving their way to get the best spot. Uraraka was up there, sandwiched between a very enthusiastic Ashido and some other girl that Bakugou didn't recognized. Her cheeks were a little pinker than normal, probably from the wine. She'd gone back for another at some point, getting the same kind he'd brought her.

"You all ready?" Yaoyorozu shouted with her back turned to them.

The girls screamed shrilly in response. Absolutely pathetic.

Yaoyorozu tossed the flowers up in the air behind her and all the girls jumped, but only one soared higher than the rest. Uraraka floated easily above the others, catching the bouquet as gently as one would a hand grenade, and then clutched it against her chest protectively. She laughed with abandon while all the other girls shouted at her for cheating, slowly spinning forward in the air as she curled her legs underneath her to keep her dress from showing anything inappropriate.

Bakugou stared at the scene and he couldn't help but think about how clever it was. Something so simple yet so sneaky. Any one of them could've probably snagged the flowers using their quirks somehow, especially Tsuyu, but only Uraraka had had the balls to do it. In fact, he hadn't seen anyone use their quirks at the wedding. It made the whole thing seem so boringly normal. It had been a long time since he'd seen any of them use their quirks for just fun, as they used to do so many times before the end of their hero training.

Seeing Uraraka hanging above the dancefloor, her laughter so strong that it moved her in the air like she was floating in water, hit Bakugou with the delicacy of one of All Might's punches in his prime and he felt as frozen as he had been the first time he'd seen his favorite hero in action fighting a villain. This time, it wasn't shock or awe. It felt uncomfortably like fear, something Bakugou told himself daily that he wasn't capable of feeling.

Tsuyu used her frog tongue to pull Uraraka back to the ground so that she could release her quirk safely. By then, most of the complaining girls had left, leaving their core group of friends. Yaoyorozu walked up to hug Uraraka; she'd changed into a dress that didn't have a trillion feet trailing after it so that it was easier for her to walk around and dance. The two girls chatted quietly with each other, all smiles, and then out of all people, Bakugou could have sworn that Yaoyorozu glanced at him. It was too quick though for him to tell or even react.

"Momo!" Jirou called as she dragged a chair out into the middle of the dancefloor. "Your throne awaits!"

Oh gods, it was that damn garter belt thing. Bakugou could've sworn that nearly every guy rushed up there to get a closer look. Kaminari about tripped over a chair.

Only Kirishima stood up slowly and cast a glance at Bakugou, but Bakugou shook his head and said, "I'm close enough that I'm too close," which was true. Sero and Kaminari had picked a table close to the dancefloor. He would've liked the one in the corner of the room. The line of guys would luckily block his sight. Kirishima shrugged his shoulders and made his way to join up to the guys.

The music was cheesy and the cheers from the guys was enough to turn his stomach. If the girls had been bad, the guys were way worse. They were ribbing each other and grinning like idiots.

"Not your cup of tea?"

Bakugou whipped his head around to see Uraraka standing there, smiling down at him. She was holding the bouquet in front of her like an innocent flower girl. He scoffed, trying to put the image of her floating in the air out of his head. Nothing innocent about that one. "Oh yeah, I really like watching a woman get felt up."

"More into action, huh?" Uraraka countered with a faint smirk.

His ears turned red and he opened his mouth to protest, but nothing came out. All he could do in the end was scowl and fold his arms across his chest.

Giggling a little, Uraraka said, "I-" but she never got to finish because a wave of excitement suddenly came from the guys and Bakugou turned to shout at them to shut up-

Only to get hit in the face with the garter belt.

"Damnit, Bakugou!"

"Oh, Kacchan caught it? I thought he didn't come up."

"I can't believe it flew right over us and hit him. It fell right in his lap!"

"Lucky bastard."

"It's fate!" That one was Kirishima, who came stumbling back to the table and threw his arms around Bakugou's neck, nearly knocking him out of his chair. It took a lot of fighting and yelling and shoving, but he managed to peel the other boy off him and kicked him aside. All it did was make Kirishima laugh harder. "You beautiful son of a bitch. It was meant to be."

Bakugou brushed himself off and straightened his suit jacket. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. I don't want it." He held the garter belt between two fingers with thinly veiled disgust. "You can have it."

"No take backs," Kirishima said, shaking his head. "You caught it. You get to do the honors."

"The what?" Bakugou dropped the thing on the table. "What are you talking about, Hair for Brains? I'm not doing any wedding shit."

The biggest shit-eating grin that Bakugou had ever seen spread across Kirishima's face. "You mean you don't want to dance with Uraraka? It's tradition! And it wouldn't be manly to turn her down like that."

Slowly, Bakugou turned from Kirishima's stupid mug to look over at Uraraka, who had gone completely silent the second the garter belt smacked him in the face. Her face and neck were flushed and she gripped the bouquet so tightly that her knuckles were white. He knew for a fact that if she were to let go of the flowers, they would float in the air, but she seemed too flabbergasted or horrified to release her quirk.

"What?" He tried to get more words out of his mouth - he really did - but his brain wasn't working. He knew that he wasn't drunk. He wasn't even pleasantly buzzed. So why was this an issue? He stared her down. "Is it true?"

Uraraka licked her lips - and fuck, he really wished she hadn't done that. "I-I don't know. Maybe?"

"It's totally true," Ashida put in cheerfully as she popped up from behind Kirishima like a pink weed.

Bakugou's eyes went to his so-called friends and then back to Uraraka. No way. He was not going to do some stupid dance at some stupid wedding. He shouldn't even have come. He shouldn't have stayed. Why hadn't he left? He had so many better things to do. Why wasn't he leaving now? Why wasn't he outright saying no?

"Y-you don't have to!" Uraraka burst, like a balloon that had been pricked with a needle, waving the flowers so hard that petals fell off and floated into the air. So he'd been right about her quirk. She jerked her eyes away from him and let out a nervous laugh. "It's okay, seriously. You don't have to dance with me if you don't want to. You're right. It's a stupid tradition and I can't dance, so, I mean, you don't..."

Bakugou narrowed his eyes at her. "I'm gonna dance with you."

Uraraka practically jumped. "Huh?"

"These assholes just better not crowd us," Bakugou continued as he stood up, "and don't step on my toes. These are expensive shoes."

It looked like Uraraka might faint. "Eh?"

Without any further preamble, Bakugou took a huge leap and reached out the half meter between them to grab her wrist. She held out the flowers with the other for Ashido to take, but because she never bothered to look away from him, she let go before Ashido could grab them and they began to float to the ceiling. As he tugged her out onto the dancefloor, almost certain that he was having a heart attack, he leaned down to murmur, "Your might want to do something about your quirk."

"Oh, right!" Uraraka brought her hand to the one that one that Bakugou had a hold of and pressed her fingertips together. "Release."

There was something very pleasing about hearing Kirishima yelp in surprise when the bouquet landed on his head and flowers went everywhere.

Bakugou got Uraraka in a simple stance, putting one of her hands on his shoulder and taking the other in one of his while he placed his other on her hip. They weren't terribly close, enough space so that one of the lights on the dancefloor shone between their bodies, but she felt closer than ever before. Surely they'd been closer while on a mission, but never in this context.

Up until then, he had forced everything out his head, but now that they were here on the dancefloor, just the two of them, with a soft light glowing down on them and everyone around them, it all came rushing back. The rough feeling of the pads on her fingertips, the surprisingly tough feel of her palms. They weren't scarred like his, but they weren't soft, and he remembered that she did a lot of hand-to-hand combat training to make up for her non-combative quirk. She smelled like peaches. Of course she did. And she was warm, very much so, like there was a fire raging inside of her body almost as hot as his.

"I wasn't lying," Uraraka told him quietly. "I don't know how to dance."

"It doesn't matter," Bakugou replied tersely, because it was the only way he could manage to talk right now. "Just follow my lead and don't think too much."

Uraraka tilted her head, a hint of a teasing smile on her face. "You know how to dance?"

Bakugou huffed and jerked his eyes away from her to glower at a wall. "My hag of a mother forced me to take some lessons. They were fucking terrible."

When the song came on, Uraraka tensed in his hands, but he squeezed hers, telling her to relax, and she did. He took the first step and, just as he'd told her, she followed.

He was dancing with her. He was dancing with Uraraka. What the fuck was he doing? Why had he agreed to this? He had sworn that he would not participate in any wedding bullshit under any circumstances. So why had he caved so fucking quickly to this? It wasn't like she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. She wasn't the strongest or most kickass. She wasn't the smartest or the bravest. There were a lot of things he told himself that she wasn't.

And maybe she really wasn't, but to him, sometimes, she was and it was more than he could say about nearly everyone that he knew.

She was beautiful, kind of like the sun when it first crested over the horizon in the morning. She was badass too, the kind of hero that would jump ten stories into a burning building to save a child in the middle of a battle. She was smart enough to read him mid-fight with a villain and know what to do. And she was brave enough to meet him head on every single time.

She might still blush and panic if she actually made an innuendo on accident and she was definitely still stingy. She snorted sometimes when she laughed. She made dumb mistakes that infuriated him because he knew that she was so much better and wasn't on his level and said things that made him roll his eyes. She was so damn carefree and positive sometimes that he wanted to grab her by the arms and shake it out of her system.

How can you smile at a time like this? he wanted to scream at her at times.

But he never did. Because it was the smile All Might used to give that had made Bakugou want to touch the sky with his dreams of outdoing the number one hero. Because it was her smile in the face of everything that he usually met with a scowl. Because her smile was something he could count on. When she smiled, he knew that she wasn't going to give up and that was what made them heroes.

She gave him that same smile now and his gut twisted. He took a subtle breath when she laid her head against his chest and he pulled her closer, propping his chin on top of her head carefully so he didn't mess up her hair.

Quite a few camera flashes went off in the crowd, someone whistled, and Kirishima shouted, "This is the cutest shit I have ever seen!"

"Shut up and die!" Bakugou snapped at them. "We're trying to dance and this is her favorite song!"

Uraraka jerked her head back and gave him a baffled look. "How did you know that?"

"I-" Bakugou snapped his mouth shut so quickly that his teeth clacked. He looked down at the ground, studying the mosaic tiles hard. "You listen to it on repeat while you work out in the gym at the agency." With a strength that he'd built up by insulting people right in their faces and not backing down, he looked her in the eyes. "Your headphones are way too loud, Angel Face."

There was a seemingly permanent blush on Uraraka's face, the pink circles on her cheeks standing out vividly, but she didn't look away. "So we're back to that one, huh?"

Bakugou smirked. "I guess we are. Gonna do anything about it?"

"Hm, I could kick your ass."

"I don't think so." Bakugou flicked his eyes up and down her body. "Not in that dress at least."

She tightened her grip on his hand and he squeezed her hip in response. "Guess I'll have to take it off then."

And he had known that she was going to fire back with something, no matter how embarrassed she was, but it still threw him off balance and he practically hissed at her, "That a threat, Uraraka?"

"Threats are pointless," she responded without missing a beat or looking away from the heat in his red eyes.

Bakugou let out a "tch", but then he kind of laughed right after. Gods she was so fiesty. "Come here, you idiot." For once, there wasn't a single hint of aggression in those words. She beamed and leaned her head back against him. He dropped her hand so that he could slide his arms around her and pull her closer as the song came to an end and another slow song came up. She felt solid in his arms, as solid as the goals he held in his mind.

More people came onto the dance floor and Bakugou was so wrapped up in the feel of Uraraka still swaying against him that his gaze even bounced right over a blushing Deku talking to Todoroki. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, smelling the peach spray again.

"Hey," Kaminari suddenly jumped in, "do you think-?"

"Back off, Buzz Brain," Bakugou interrupted without opening his eyes, surprisingly with not that much heat in his voice. Something about Uraraka being right here doused his normal ready to blaze fire and he didn't mind. It was kind of like being able to breathe without something restraining his chest. "This dance is mine."

"Okay, well-"

"Next one too and the one after that."

Kirishima appeared before Kaminari could do anymore damage to his cause, steering the blonde away and calling out, "Have fun, kids!" Now that was a great fucking guy. "Remember to practice safe sex later!" Never mind, he was the fucking worst.

Still, Uraraka laughed against his chest, her hot breath warming up his shirt and skin underneath it. "Think you've got a monopoly on me already?"

"You wanna dance with someone else?" Bakugou demanded, looking down at her.

Uraraka looked up at him and her eyes were so fucking bright. "I'm here, aren't I, you dummy?"

Yeah, he thought, his heart slowing down despite everything. Yeah, she was here. And he was here. Both of them swaying alone together in a crowd of people at some stupid ass wedding. He couldn't believe that he'd come after all that he'd done to avoid it. But some people just couldn't be ignored. He could live with that. Maybe weddings weren't so bad if they involved free food, free alcohol, and Uraraka Ochako. At least this one.


Thanks everyone for reading!

Someone needs to give Kaminari a hug. Ex-girlfriend got married AND he got denied? Poor boy. (Ever since that episode in season 1 where he tried to ask Uraraka out for lunch and she just straight up blanked out and ran to Izuku, I've got this amusing mental picture that he tries to ask her out like once a year whenever she's single and it gets side-lined EVERY SINGLE TIME. Oh, I should write that...)