Chapter 12 – The Second Night, The Tale of Ochako Uraraka's Ill-fated First Love

Ochako stared at the boy in front of her. His eyes travelled lazily to hers and stared back. There was a moment's pause and then, with a jolt, the princess leapt up and slapped him across the cheek. Katsuki Bakugou was sent floating up into the canopy of the bed by a puff of magic, and scowled furiously at her.

"What the fuck, cheeks? What was that for?"

"Oh I'm sorry," she said, without even pretending to mean it "was I meant to just accept that a stranger's turned up in my bed?"

"I'm not a stranger!"

"Yes, you are. You should be well aware, given that you've done your best to keep it that way."

Pressed against the fabric of the canopy, he grunted with annoyance. It was dark inside the cloth chamber of the bed, the lantern on her bedside table barely peeking in, and his his silver lion's mane appeared a deep, velvety purple.

"This is all just a dream anyway," he bit "what're you gettin' so fucking worked up about? It's bloody cold out and I just wanted to get warm. Let me the fuck down already."

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. Tiredness was heavy in her eyelids and her empty stomach clawed at her from inside.

"Drop your knife."

"Not a-fucking-gain!"

"Yes, again!" she snapped, pulling her hands from her face "Look, I'm really not in the mood right now. I could do without the dream gods putting you where you're not meant to be."

"Fuck you! You think I want to be here?"

"I don't either! Drop your knife!"

"No!"

They glared at each other. The princess dragged a hand through her hair with a groan.

"Ugh, fine." She conceded. "You can just stay there."

She rolled over and pulled the covers back over her, shifting to get comfortable as she squeezed her eyes shut. She lay there, trying to get to sleep, for five slow heartbeats, before being rudely shaken from her efforts by Bakugou.

"Oi," he said "Let me down. You can't just fuckin' snooze off without me."

She pulled the blanket tighter.

"I think you'll find that I can, actually."

Above her, her growled. She found the sound inexplicably silly.

"Fucking fine, I'll drop my knife again, then will you just let me down already?"

"That's exactly what I said in the first place." she countered, sitting up.

"Oh, fuck off."

She tucked back one of the canopy curtains to let in the light of the lantern, and the boy floating above her was suddenly washed with orange. He grunted and shielded his eyes from the light, slowly blinking before he could squint through the gloom at the princess again.

"So, are you going to stay there?" she asked.

"Oh, give me some bloody time."

He untied his curved scabbard and set it floating down to her. She caught it softly, returned its weight, and shoved it under her pillow.

"You do realise I can see exactly where you've hidden it, right?"

"Oh do be quiet." She sighed, pressing her fingertips together and letting the magic flow to gently let him down.

He landed with a soft thud, and the mattress under her bounced a little. With a frown, Bakugou pulled himself up to sit leaning against one of the bedposts opposite her. The curtain hung heavy against the fur on his cape.

"Fuck, what's eating you today?"

"Leave me alone, will you? I've had a bad day."

She tried to tug the covers closer around her but found that they were stuck where he was sat on top of them. She glared pointedly at him, and he grinned.

"Y'know, I don't think I will, actually. How exactly's your day been bad? My bird reckons it's gone perfectly well."

There was a malicious sarcasm to his words that Uraraka did not wish to entertain. The little familiarity now shared between them only seemed to make him bolder.

"I can't read your bird's mind." She said, hesitant to feed whatever nasty remark he had next.

"Well, I can. And it's had a great fucking time watching you lead on another chump and then getting dragged through a snowstorm."

"I'm well aware it was ill-advised to take it through the snowstorm, alright? But you can't always tell when they're coming, and I did my best to keep it safe. And as for Shindo, I think I was the one getting lead on, thank you very much."

Bakugou snickered.

"What kinda fucked-up logic is that?"

She flinched with indignation.

"When did I lead him on? I never said that I loved him, and I never remotely implied that I'd like to marry him. He's the one who suddenly declared his affections!"

"Yeah, but you didn't have to go on and suck face in response." Here, he mimed a gag, and the princess had to fight very hard against the urge to throw a pillow at him. She turned her eyes down to her hands on her lap, and felt the rush of warm blood to her cheeks.

"I know." She said, and her voice was low with shame. "It was stupid. And I knew that it was either magic or a lie, because when he proposed to me, he said that I wasn't even good enough to sleep with, and he didn't really love me, and I certainly didn't love him, but…"

"But what? Cut the shit."

She whipped back up to glare at him, and found that he was still surveilling her with that wide, leonine smirk.

"I'm lonely and fresh fallen out of love." She said, coldly "I expect you don't experience anything as human as that."

"I can outdo you even in that respect, cheeks. Your stupid fucking pash on cabbage-knight isn't impressing anyone."

"You don't understand" she cried, and it was caught between a whimper and reprimand "I loved him so much, and for so long. Even back when he was still in Capcana I used to write him long letters on pink parchment, and then when he…"

She trailed off, noticing that he was peering at her curiously, having dropped his usual glower. There was a spark of unfamiliar interest in his expression.

"What?"

She refused to be self-conscious about her feelings for Izuku. Not in front of him.

"You wrote the pink letters to fucking Deku? You?"

It was the princess' turn to gape at him.

"Deku?" She paused. No… It couldn't be "Wait, you're Kacchan?"

He flinched. He seemed to know the gravity of the nickname.

'Kacchan' had appeared in many of Midoriya's letters from Capcana, when he still sent them, and was invariably referenced in the context of some new, undeserved torment; 'today Kacchan destroyed my training sword', 'pushed me in the mud', 'told me I was useless and called me Deku'. He was a figure of violence and malice, the boy who had made life hell. And now he was sat on the bed, opposite her, looking for the first time like the uncomfortable, awkward teenager that he was.

"So what if I am? That's not what I was askin' about, cheeks."

"You can't just brush that kind of abuse to the side!"

"Why not? Times fucking change."

"He's my best friend! He would want-"

"Want you to pry into it behind his back? Yeah, right."

She bit her lip. Still, she would not forgive him so easily.

"Just tell me about the letters." Said Bakugou, and though it was still not polite, his tone had softened. It was clear to her at this point that there was something in it that she didn't fully understand, something that he wanted from her.

"Why would I?"

In the sandy light of the lantern, his eyes turned the colour of ripe apricots. Around him the covers rustled in soft waves as he curled his feet under him, cross-legged.

"Because you want to, don't you? You want to tell me about the whole goddamn affair, right from the very beginning. It doesn't matter who I am, or why I want to listen; all that matters is your heart is all jumbled and you just want to get the words out, but you haven't, because you couldn't, and now you can."

"Gods, it sounds so simple when you put it that way." She laughed.

"It is simple." The calmness in his voice was unnerving. "Just find one end of it and pull. The string will unravel as you go."

He toyed with the dragon teeth and beads around his neck. Uraraka marvelled at the docile, transformed character before her and wondered what his aim was.

"And what will you give me in return? Shall I just pour my heart out for a stranger and receive nothing in return?"

"Oi, I'm the one offering a service here."

"Forgive me if I find your magnanimity hard to believe. You have no real interest in me, do you?"

He flicked at a hanging piece of lion skin on his cloak.

"Not really, no."

In its own way, the harshness of response was soothing. Here was a suitor who did not want her love, and did not expect hers. A stranger to confide in.

"Will you tell me of your own heartbreak?" She stumbled without thinking.

"Abso-fucking-lutely not." He shot immediately.

She pouted.

"Oh, well, you won't hear a thing from me then."

He rolled his eyes.

"Fucking seriously?"

"Seriously. I want to know who could possibly love a mountain bird like you."

"Uh, the whole point is that they didn't, dumbass."

"It'll still make for a good story. I'm not asking for very much, you know."

He huffed. For a moment he narrowed his eyes, sizing up his options. She pondered why the letters could possibly matter so much to him.

"Fucking fine."

Victory, however dubiously won. Uraraka leaned over, onto her knees, and reached her hand across the expanse of blanket. She held it open to him, offering, and he stared dumbly at it.

"Swear on it." She said.

He begrudgingly linked his hand with hers. The princess noted how warm and soft his palms were as she took a deep breath. Magic came tingling down from the crook of her neck to fizzle in her palms, lighting their skin the colour of fresh blossoms, and with a quiet pop the pact was sealed. He retracted his hand and she slinked back to her corner of the bed, propped up on a pillow.

"C'mon. Letters. Now." He coaxed.

With a watery smile, she curled up to hug her knees and began to lay out the story of her ill-fated first love.

XXX

It had grown so much bigger than she ever could have expected, far beyond what she had ever known before. It had sprouted from the smallest seed and quickly twisted its green branches up all the way to the sky, sickly sweet and heavy with fruit.

She hadn't known that it would become love then.

Of course, they were children at the time. More child than they were now, at least. It was a fleeting friendship formed in her month of training away from Lasandu, in a land that was so unfamiliar to her but felt so much like home when Izuku Midoriya was the one to guide her through it. He would take her by the hand and walk her through the trees, over fluffy meadows, into the clearing where they could play under the moon and stars.

Kindness came to him so naturally, so perfectly, that she could not help but be in awe of him. He faced everything with a relentless optimism that he left trailing behind him wherever he went.

He said he wanted to be a knight, a hero, and, well, wasn't that perfect? Even as they lay on the forest floor, his eyes would twinkle with admiration as he pointed out the constellations of the ancient heroes of Abrassa, and their clunky, ancient names – see Glaucus with his spear of stars and Polydamas and Hektor in their glowing chariots, see how Sarpedon nearly touched the moon. He said that one day he would catch those stars on a longbow's arrow, and bring back the moon in the crook of his elbow. She had wanted nothing more.

And he was soft, and gentle, and not afraid to cry. He had wept so profusely when she left that the sight of him was burned into her mind for its ridiculousness and compassion, and she had decided on the spot that she would write him letters from Lasandu for the rest of her life.

They wrote to each other for years, back and forth, their lives unfolding in parallel, held together only by that tiny, fragile link of papyrus and parchment. Eventually he made his way to the best Knight's formation in Capcana, and she congratulated him on thick pink parchment paper befitting of a princess. He told her of his insecurities, his hopes, his successes and his losses and she told him of hers, and they grew up apart but inextricably close.

At the end of her fifteenth summer, he stopped replying. She wasn't sure at first; it could have been an avalanche in the valley, perhaps, delaying the arrival of his letter, and he was probably getting awfully busy with his knight training after all. But the chill winds of Autumn came, and still his letter did not arrive. She could not understand it, so she wrote to him again. On her favourite thick pink paper, she used her best handwriting to ask what the matter was, and whether he was alright, and if she had done something to anger him.

She gave the letter to a falcon and waited, very patiently, for it to fly down the mountain, through the valley, over the great plains, past the thundering Quercus waterfalls and to the rolling hills on the border of Capcana. For all her patience, she received no reply. Autumn bled into winter, and though Uraraka spent many long hours staring into the silently falling snow, no Abrassan eagle flew back to her with the response. She bided her time through the cold and the dark of winter, still hoping, despite herself, that something would come, and when spring came and nothing had arrived she wrote to him again, for what she thought was the last time.

She thanked him for his friendship, and wished him the best, and attached as a parting gift a tiny tapestry of her own creation. It was no bigger than her palm, and in tones of deep blue and silvery white depicted the Abrassan heroes that were preserved in the stars. The foreign heroes were carried away in the claws of a falcon, and she never saw them again.

A year passed, and she tried her best to forget him. The castle was always full of people, of merchants and servants and dignitaries, and it was quite easy to get lost in it all if she tried hard enough. But she was surrounded by adults. There were never any children her age with which to play, or to whom she could relate. Her world and her relationships shrank down to her parents and the few servants that liked to have her around to chat as they went about their work, and she was happy enough, because it was warm inside the castle, and there was always a new passageway or hidden hall to discover.

XXX

"And what's this got to do with the letters?" interrupted Bakugou, who looked to be bored out of his skull. "Don't abuse my generosity."

"I'm getting there," scolded the princess, stirred from the trance of her story-telling "the most important one has yet to come, and I haven't even fallen in love yet that this point."

He clicked his tongue.

"Just get the fuck on with it, then."

XXX

Her parents had always liked to keep her away from the serious business of running the kingdom, but by the end of the summer (two years ago, now) it had become inescapably clear that something was going horribly wrong. They had offended a foreign mage by the name of Shigaraki, and he had set upon them a plague-curse that was slowly strangling the roots of the realm.

It hadn't really sunk in at that time just how devastating and absolute it would become; it was still making its way up from the valley during autumn, and it was only at the beginning of winter that it really began to take hold in Lasandu City. First the baker's family, then the shoe-shiners and the leatherworkers, and then the whole of the blacksmith's guild. The adults were dying. Their greying bodies piled up in the graveyards at the bottom of the city, and those that could not be buried were simply rolled down the mountain side, into the hidden crevasses. Crowds of children stumbled about together, bleary-eyed and shaken, afraid and unloved.

All that time, her parents had continued to carry out their duties with an unwavering, stoic smile. They handed out bowls of soup in the courtyard and arranged quarantines and sent children to their relatives in safer lands, always calm and smiling. And still the plague-curse advanced upon them. Within a week a scullery maid had died at her wash station, and her companions never returned to their posts (they died, she found out later, huddled together at home). The head chef excused himself from preparations one night to cough up his lungs, and died on the spot, and the chief financial adviser (whom she did not like very much, as he had always looked at her unkindly) was found in a pool of his own blood outside the castle gates.

But Uraraka was a child, and she lived on.

"Ma," she had sobbed, on the first evening that she had ever been truly alone with her parents in the castle "how can we know that you're safe? How can we stop you from catching it?"

Her mother, propped up in her grand wide bed beside her father, had kissed her on the forehead, as she always did before she went to sleep, and said "Hush now, poppet, we're not going anywhere."

And she had been right. The pair of them had laid in bed, wasting away, until they were stone cold and stiff.

The plague curse took them over slowly. It started with the lungs, with a dry, rattling cough that wracked them with shudders, then moved to their muscles, preventing them from moving, holding them heavy in their bed. Their lips and eyelids froze stiff in place, hauntingly dry, and their skin jaundiced, waxy as sap. They did nothing but stare and breath.

One morning the princess awoke to find that their hearts had stopped beating in the night, and her heart ached, because she had not been able to wish them goodbye. She recited a halting and broken prayer over their grey corpses, empty objects that had once held souls, and she knew that her life would never be the same again. She knew what she must do. She grabbed each of them in turn and dragged them, slowly, down the stone-cold steps and through the snaking corridors, her arms screaming with fatigue, to the catacombs beneath the castle. They were buried neatly besides their parents, and she was the only one there to witness the dirt cover their glassy eyes.

The princess stared emptily at freshly-turned earth, and felt abstractedly how alone she was. It was as though a thick cloud had settled in her head, soaking up her tears, and through it she could see nothing but the vast, monotonous stretch of time ahead that led to her death. For a few hours she stumbled through the castle, dazed, afraid to sit down for the fear that she might never will herself to get up again.

That night, in a fit of self-pity and desperation, she dug out her dusty pink parchment and scribbled a cry for help.

"Izuku,

(and the ink was smudged here, from the swiftness of her quill)

My parents are dead. All the adults are dead, and I am left with all the kingdom in my hands. I don't know what to do. Please help me. I am sure that you must be a knight, a hero, by now. Please, please help me.

-Ochaco"

The falcon carried it into the night, and she sank into a fitful sleep. She was not really expecting anything in return. The next week was spent counting all of her possessions, determining what was important and what could be sold, and wandering about the city asking the other clueless children what they thought should be done. The memory of the letter was supressed with embarrassment.

On the eighth day, she was surprised to find that her falcon had not returned empty-handed. In its claws it held a single scrap of fabric, midnight blue and shimmering. Hektor and Polydamas gazed up at her from the tapestry of stars.

And as answers went, it was as uncertain as it could have been. She thought to herself, miserably thumbing the silver weave, that he had left her to her own devices, and wanted nothing to do with her. The rejection stung far more than simply being ignored.

A month passed, and the princess was busy with rounding up groups of children to stay together in larger buildings and distributing the gains found in empty, adult-less houses. A few collectives formed here and there around a particularly competent elder sibling, and there was the occasional fight between the unsupervised youngsters who now went unpunished for petty thefts, and as the last of autumn melted away they sent as many children as they could down the valley to greener land.

One day, the first of winter's overnight freeze, she was stood in the main square trying to quell an argument when her attention was caught by the sound of running feet in foreign leather boots. It was then that she saw him.

Izuku Midoriya emerged onto the square, breathless and shining, accompanied by a mixed band of travellers. He had a hopeful smile upon his face, one that she had not seen in person in years, and without thinking she ran across the icy stone to meet him. She fell happily into his arms, and he wrapped them tight around her. He had come with the moon in the crook of his elbow.

When she pulled away, she was amazed by the boy stood before her. He had changed startlingly since childhood, but not in a manner that was unwelcome. He was taller, certainly, and his shoulders were broad and muscular, carried with a self-assurance that he did not have before. His jaw fell somewhere between sharp and round, and when he spoke she could see the cords in his neck move.

"Did you get my message?" he asked, his usual shyness returning.

She nodded yes, unable to hold back an incredulous smile.

"I hoped that if I could not be your hero, you could have had some of your own creation."

And with those words, in a single heartbeat, she fell madly, terribly in love with him.

XXX

"Great." Said Bakugou "How'd you get to be so fucking miserable, then?"

Uraraka lay down and rolled onto her stomach, kicking her legs playfully behind her.

"Oh, there's more. Don't you worry."

XXX

Midoriya had brought into her world not only an unwavering faithfulness and essential support, but also an expansion of her social circles. It was through him that she came to know the Quercan knight Iida, and the mysterious Onirian travellers Yaoyorozu and Todoroki. Together, they overcame the trials that were thrown their way, and set about rebuilding Lasandu City until it was safe once more.

She delighted in weaving them scarves against the cold of their first harsh winters away from home, showing them the traditional Lasandunian way of life, and helping them to settle in, and in return they became some of her firmest friends. They had relied on her, and she on them, but Midoriya had always been special.

She was sickeningly sweet on him. In the night time the moon must have filled her head with sugar and kindling, for whenever she spoke to him something dangerously caring would slip off her tongue, and her cheeks burned hot and red. If you had turned her on her side, honey would have come pouring out of her ears, so docile she became.

And she had really thought that she'd had a chance then. That it could be fate. That maybe (maybe) he loved her back, and they could marry, and one day Lasandu would prosper under their rule.

His hands were so warm when they wrapped around hers, and he touched her in a way that was casual but soft. He would let her play with his curly green hair, and blush when she counted his freckles. He said that she had grown beautiful too, and the compliment had buzzed around her head for weeks on end.

Perhaps that was why it hurt so much, perhaps it was his gentleness that had pushed her so far. To know that he had given her so many kindnesses in the same way that he would freely hand them out to others, and that she was not special in that way to him at all - it tasted bitter, bitter, bitter.

XXX

"You should've gone for it."

Uraraka toyed with the pillow in her hands.

"And why do you think that?"

"Because, for a time at least, he liked you back."

The princess' wide brown eyes, which had previously been roaming the intricate weave of the canopy above her, snapped back to the boy in front of her. She stared with a crackling intensity.

"When?"

"When we were still in the Knight's formation. Kids, I guess."

"But he stopped sending me letters. He cut off so swiftly, so easily."

"No, he didn't."

She shuffled a little closer to him, and Bakugou leaned as far back against the bedpost as he possibly could, as if retreating.

"What?" she pressed.

"He never stopped writing you letters."

"What?"

"Don't play fucking dumb. He never stopped writing you the fucking letters. They just didn't arrive. He didn't know, and he was bloody confused when you started replying late. 'Course, you kept your words just vague enough that he never twigged what was going on. Fuck, cheeks, couldn't you have just asked him why he stopped writing?"

She chewed her lip and brought a hand to her mouth, thinking. Her look turned faraway.

"Why are you telling me this?" she said, slowly "How do you know all this?"

He sat still, but his eyes and hands shifted inelegantly as if he did not know where to place them. A heavy sigh escaped from his lips.

"Because I was the one who prevented his letters from reaching you."

She let out a minute gasp. Betrayal and hurt played plainly across her delicate features.

"I sneaked into the bird cages at night and burned up his parchments, then sent your falcons away. It was easy, really. Deku's always been too fucking trusting."

"But why? Why would you do such a thing?"

"That's not for you to know."

"Why did you care about my letters so much? Why would you torment a stranger?"

"I said," he growled, and his anger manifested in the red glow of magic on his palms "that's not for you to fucking know."

Uraraka stared hopelessly at him.

"Will I never know?"

"Not tonight, round face."

And she remembered, faced by his cold glare, that she might never see him again. Tomorrow she might find his corpse, all chewed up and picked at by the spirits, and the secret of her love for Izuku would be buried in his lips. The boy sat on her bed was already either dead, or her husband, and neither thought fit pleasantly in her mind. She wanted to know, desperately, why he was there, why he had done the things he had, and she supposed, then, that she wanted him to live on. But she did not want him as her husband.

"It's still not too late to tell him." Said Bakugou, breaking the silence. "You could end this whole farce. We could be done with it."

She smiled at him as though he had not been the one to devastate her seconds ago.

"Oh, it's far too late now."

He quirked an eyebrow.

"He has seen me at my worst now. He knows what I have done. And I knew it, I think, when I saw the pain on his face, that he could never love me again." She played with her hair, that awful smile never disappearing. "And how can I blame him, really? I thought the same of Shindo. He said that he shared in my shame but I didn't feel sympathy, I felt disgust. It is a miracle that Izuku can bring himself to pity me at all, and a clear sign that he deserves far better."

Bakugou leaned over, and Uraraka, propped up on her elbows with her face on her hands, peered up at him.

"Just what the fuck did you do?"

"That's not for you to know." She replied, grinning knowingly.

He narrowed his eyes, unimpressed.

"If I make it out of this alive, which I fucking will, I'm going to find out one way or another."

"Oh yes, but not tonight, suitor dear."

"Will you tell me tomorrow night?"

She rubbed her chin smugly.

"Hm, I suppose it's alright to tell my secrets to dead men."

"I'm not going to fucking die!"

"I'm sure that's what Monoma thought."

"I'm not like Monoma."

"Well then, live 'til tomorrow and we'll see."

She reached out to playfully tug at his cloak, spread out beneath him, and was surprised to find that it was soft and smooth beneath her fingers. She had just turned to eye the lion fur around his neck when he yanked it out from under her with a scowl. The movement made his beads and dragon teeth tinkle in the quiet.

She used her elbows to push herself up and sit.

"Now," she said, "you still have your half of the pact to honour."

Bakugou snarled at her and then carefully began to speak.