Chapter 13: The tale of Katsuki Bakugou's First, Unrequited Love

"I like Eijiro. Or I liked him. Whatever. Are we done here?"

"Absolutely not!"

"Get off my fucking back!"

"You promised to tell me about your heartbreak! That extends quite a bit further than simply who it was."

He glowered at her.

"Besides," she added "did you not say that it would be easy? Don't you want to un-jumble everything, start pulling on one end of the thread?"

"That's just going to make everything fucking worse. Next time I like pouring salt in my own wounds, I'll let you know."

"But it's not. Actually, I feel lighter for having told you my own." She coaxed.

He pulled the mane around his neck tighter, trying to obscure the lower half of his face.

"It's going to take a bloody long time." He protested, somewhat weakly.

"We have until we fall asleep again. Just talk until your eyes close."

Bakugou sighed. For a moment his eyes, maroon in the dark, flicked up to search her face. Slowly, methodically, he began to pull apart the story of his first unrequited love.

XXX

Katsuki had always known that he was, in the scheme of things, destined for something greater. He'd never really bothered to question the conviction, especially when life kept proving him right.

Amongst all the boys from Ilium, that fortressed city near the Abrassan shore, he was the fastest, the cleverest, and (when he was young) the tallest. When they all set out for the half-day trek across the dunes to the sea, he was always the first to arrive at the beach, and always the first to return to the tall gates just before they closed.

He could dive the deepest beneath the green-glass waves, returning with his knife in his teeth and his scratched-up hands full to the third knuckle of oysters fresh-wrenched from their beds. He alone sat under the burning heat of the midday sun, on the rock the furthest from the beach. Just above the pond-still ocean, his feet brushing gently against the feathery fronds of seaweed, he was king of sand and stones and shellfish. The light caress of the sea breeze would tickle over his cheeks as he prised the shells open one by one and slipped their slimy insides between his teeth. They tasted of brine and copper and the whiplash tang of the sea, a cool respite from the burn of the desert.

Occasionally one shell was more nacreous than the others, glistening with swirling green and pink, and he would keep it even when he tossed the rest into the sea. When he reached the others boys on the shoreline and showed it to them, they would redden with jealousy, and Deku's eyes would shine almost as bright as the oyster shells themselves in admiration. Those pearly treasures from the ocean queen were his and his alone, a reward that no other Abrassan boy could claim. Who else could stand the seasalt sting of the water in his eyes? Who else could bear to sink past the writhing black corpses of poison corals?

He had had a pearl clutched in his hand the very evening that all of his troubles had started, and perhaps without its heady influence he would not have started down the path that he did. Cool and hard against his flushed skin, it exerted on him the dizzying pressure of his own grandiose expectations.

The city was as sun-baked and orange as the desert sand around it that night, buzzing with heat as dusk slowly spread her rosy fingers through it, and that white fruit of the sea glinted from his furled palm as he and the rest of the salt-frosted boys walked across the darkening square.

Old Man Priam, the elder of his district, sat on a stone pile and watched. Though his wisened face revealed nothing, Katsuki was sure that the cold gleam of the hastily concealed treasure had not escaped his bird-sharp eyes.

XXX

Uraraka peered at him, leaning on his square fist, with a mixture of confusion and horror.

"This isn't a story of heartbreak." She said, although her tone twisted it into a question.

"If you let me fucking get anywhere, you'd know it was. I gotta start at the beginning, ain't I?"

"Well, I'm not all that sure I want to listen anymore, anyhow."

"Fuck that. Why're you chickening out now? Can't bear the same treatment you gave me?"

"This business with Old Man Priam…"

His face twitched, but pressed as it was against his fist it was hard to discern what emotion was portrayed.

"It's not what you think." He spat. "It's just the start. It's the start of the whole fucking mess."

XXX

"Boys," said Old Man Priam, leaning on his cane "Tell me now, how long have you been taking the sandy trail to the sea?"

They cautiously walked over to him, spiteful but wary of his authority. His face was dark as leather, and wrinkled like the fish that they hung to dry in the sun, but his eyes were bright and searching, hinting at his true nature.

"Nine of each season." Replied Katsuki, refusing to meet his eye.

"And alone?"

"Seven of each season."

The old man ran a hand thoughtfully through the wisps of his ash-grey beard. His fingers were stippled with scars and weighed down with rings, rewards from his feats in battle long ago. Behind him, Katsuki sensed that Deku was counting each one and trying to determine exactly which wars he had fought in. He himself did not bother. It was enough, he thought, that Old Man Priam had won. Only winners lived to sit on old city squares and pick at the boys that would succeed them.

"So you are all thirteen summers old." He concluded "Well well, what a fine thing that there are so many of you boys to carry on our old traditions. The spirit of Ilium is only as young as the men who light its fires."

Katsuki grunted in response. He knew that with each slow, deliberate word he listened to he was falling further into the old man's hands. What did he want, this hero of old?

"Ah, but none of you are men yet, now are you?" said the elder, and his hollow eyes smiled in the caves where they hid.

The boy clutched at the pearl in his hands. Old Man Priam continued, though he wished that he would not.

"None of you have killed before." He said, and it was not a question, but a calm, solemn observation.

"I've killed fish before. I eat the oysters live from their shells. I cut and hang the octopus to dry." Retorted Katsuki, though he knew already how foolish the words were.

"So, none of you have killed before. None of you are men. Isn't that a shame? Such a thing, in this ancient city beloved by Lady Moon and Father Night? Do you think the boys of Mycenae have dawdled so, that the boys of Pylos have not yet soaked their hands in blood?"

They shook their heads. He was ashamed to do so, in front of his peers, and felt his ears burn in the cold of the descending night.

"Hurry on home now, and tell your parents that Elder Priam asks a favour. Ask your mother to give you three days' food and drink, and your father to give you a blanket. Tell him that we are to go on a hunt, and he shall know what to give you."

The boys nodded. The dusk had fallen around them, and in the feeble light the hair on their bowing heads shimmered and rippled with movement.

"We shall meet at the town gates in three days' time at high tide. Begone now, the lot of you, and do not reappear before me until the time that I have asked."

They complied. Katsuki led the troupe across the square, walking just a little faster than usual, and entered the maze of streets that would take them home. At his side, Deku had begun mumbling to himself that he could not know when the tide was high if he was still in Ilium, and that his absent father could not give him a blanket, and that he was not sure he wanted to go hunting at all. Katsuki scoffed, and shoved him into a yellow stone wall. He did not have time for losers.

On the day of the hunt, he was the only one to arrive at the town gates on time. Old Man Priam addressed a calculating, withdrawn smile at him as he trotted over the stone, a blanket on his back and a spear in his hand, and the golden rings on his sinuous fingers glinted in the morning sun.

Katsuki's heart swelled with pride. He had known it, instinctively, that he would be the only one to know when the high tide was. He felt the swell and the ebb of the oceans within him, heard the slap of the waves in his every heartbeat. His bones were made of salt-rock, and his hair was made of sand.

"How did you know that it would be high tide?" asked Old Man Priam, pulling at his short grey beard in thought. His eyes seemed not to look at Katsuki, but right through him.

"I felt it, sir."

"How, boy?"

"I felt it in my blood, sir."

The elder turned his eyes slowly away, twisting them upwards to the heavens. The pale blue meadows of sky extended, weightless, above them, devoid of birds or blemishes in which to tell omens. The leather of his face wrinkled in a peculiar way, and Katsuki thought he might be smiling.

"So the Ocean Sisters have chosen you as their own, have they?"

He grunted in affirmation.

"How very strange," he said "How very strange indeed. There is greatness in you yet, young man; the soul of Ilium herself has decreed it."

At that moment, the sprouting green eyesore commonly known as Deku appeared across the wide entrance road. He was followed by a breathless pack of friends, the sight of whom annoyed him to no end. Though he had been silently overjoyed at his elder's proclamation, the feeling did not last in the presence of the other boys.

"Ah, there you are." Said the old man to the arriving boys, and he twisted his spear in his hands. "Come now, let us set off."

Though it was still the early morning, and the watch-guards at the gates were still bleary-eyed and disdainful, the desert sand was warm beneath their feet as they stepped out. An endless expanse of yellow powder spread before them.

Old Man Priam turned sharply to the crowd of boys behind him.

"We'll be walking until sundown." He said "You are to follow me the entire way. If you fall behind, you will be left for the vultures."

He walked, and they followed. He skirted around the fortressed walls of Ilium (longer, remarked Katsuki, than he had thought they were), in the deep shadow of the towers within. When they had reached the back of the city, they were surprised to find that he simply ploughed on, straight and blind, into the featureless wastes of the Abrassan desert.

They were not walking to the sea, that much Katsuki knew, and the further they walked the hotter the wind and the quieter the plains. The second, burning red sun rose low in the blue above, heaving its celestial weight upon them, and the ground beneath them radiated with the fires of hell. Sweat poured off his tanned skin, drying his mouth out and making the others boys avoid him. He payed them no mind; the only thing that he could think of then was walking onwards.

On and on and on they walked, through hunger and thirst and heat and sweat. And still the suns beat down on them, and they cursed the gods for giving them skin to feel, for putting them through fire to harden them as though they were clay in a potter's oven. The suns seemed never to drop, and with every breath the shining new metal in their hands boiled with their heat and pain.

Katsuki wondered whether all the world outside of Ilium was like this. Where did the rivers come from, if not from the land far from the sea? Where did the wood come from? The jewels? The horn? Ilium was surrounded by nothingness, by hell on earth, by the things that he saw in his dreams at night.

But slowly, agonisingly slowly, the suns did set. And beyond the horizon, creeping and waving in the heat, an aureole of heavenly green appeared. By nightfall they had reached the border of the hills and forest lands, and the boys collapsed into sweaty heaps, as liquid as though they had returned to a primordial state before living.

Old Man Priam told them that they had endured the worst of it, and that they would go hunting tomorrow, and allowed them to sit on their blankets and eat. This they were all too happy to do (except for snivelling, fatherless Deku, who had to share with another unlucky boy for his), and they tore into their rations as a pack of starved foxes, snapping and ripping until their jaws squeaked. They fell asleep under a quilt of stars and awoke, in the early morning, to the twitter of the birds of the forest.

The forest, now that it could clearly be seen in the daylight, was fascinating to Katsuki. He had never seen so much greenery, so much life, in one place. The trees had hanging leaves like seaweed fronds, their branches straight and forked like coral, and the earth (the earth, what a strange sensation!) was brown and soft under his sandals.

Old Man Priam instructed them all to pick up their spears and knives, drawing his attention away from that border of paradise.

"This is the forest on the border of Capcana. It is where all the life in this kingdom trickles down from." He said "It is full of animals; animals that you have never seen before."

Deku went wide-eyed with wonder. He hated the sight.

"The only thing that separates you boys from the beasts within this forest, and from manhood, is that you have not yet killed. Man is superior to beast not because he is intelligent, or kind, but because he can kill faster, and that is what I expect you boys to do. Now come, each of you must draw blood today, and hunting is long work."

Hunting was the longest work of Katsuki's life. The forest was humid and the ground was steep and the mud was wet and clung to him all day long. He was surrounded by foreign sounds that gurgled from nowhere and whispered as he moved. His feet were caught in bramble-thorns and all the time he felt the touch of green and green and green again, inescapable, tickling his shoulders or tracing his neck. Everywhere he felt eyes upon him.

The kill itself was fast. Achingly fast, too fast perhaps.

The boar had come hurtling towards him across the clearing, tusks down and a blur of bristle, and it was all that he could think to do to bring his spear down as it came at him. The resistance of tight muscle and bone and pliant skin was new under his blade, a strangely soft sensation as blood came pouring. There was a slight crunch and then a terrible, pained wheezing as the boar squealed and struggled, pinned to the ground. Katsuki, knocked over, the dying animal on his lap, watched the red pour on his hands and his clothes and felt the scratch of its feet at the ground. He felt the eyes of the other boys upon him, the pressure of Old Man Priam's gold rings, and without looking away he pulled the knife from his belt.

Artlessly, savagely, he plunged the blade into the boar's eyes.

It slackened and he curled in upon it, the gravity of his actions only just sinking in. It smelt of pig and sweat and blood. His hands were a mess of gore, deeper red than he had ever imagined it, mud, and the greyish jelly of what had once been eyeball. His hair was stuck slick to his forehead and he was breathing hard, and all around him the boys were rushing with admiration and delight. He hated it.

Old Man Priam picked the limp carcass from his lap and hauled it over his shoulder. There was a sparkle to his eye.

"Katsuki Bakugou, you are the first among your peers to become a man. Feel the exhilaration of it, the thrill of the thing."

He did not. He felt the slime and the wet of it, the cold of the mud and the heat of the life that he had taken away, and he felt dirty. The stench clawed at his nostrils, choking, and that young dead boar seemed still to stare through her one dead eye at him, her glistening feet hanging and dead, dead, dead.

Was this what it was to be a man? To be besmirched and unclean? To be ruthless above all else? His heart hammered in his chest. He hated it.

The other boys soon found their kills in pheasants or snakes or squirrels, but none of them ever grew as blood-stained as Katsuki had. By sundown Deku had not come close to killing a single thing, and he quivered with distress as his elder forced him to twist the neck of a nightingale, then burst into tears. At this Old Man Priam scolded him unsparingly, and told him that men and heroes did not cry, and Katsuki felt the rebuke burn in his own mind.

Men killed and got dirty and did not cry. He hated it.

Old Man Priam turned to him with pride.

"Why are you not like young Bakugou here? He is the only man among you; he is the only one who killed a boar in full sprint. The rest of you have merely had a taste of what it takes to become a hero."

He hated it. But he longed to be a hero so he thought, for now, that he would ignore it.

When they returned Deku was sent off to Capcana to train, and Katsuki threw himself into the cool embrace of the sea to become clean again. Even when his own training held him away, he would find time to run to the beach and plunge into the salty kiss of the waves. The boys began to grow taller, and grow apart, and he had a vague awareness of the feelings that were stirred in others by the pretty girls who carried water and danced in the square.

That winter (still hot, but less dry), Deku returned from Capcana. He still wept, this time for a girl that he had left behind, and Katsuki found the sight appalling. Men did not cry, and they certainly did not cry for girls. But despite this, he found with frustration, Deku had begun to shape into a hero.

Whilst Katsuki dirtied his hands to help Old Man Priam kill the stray cats of the city, Deku saved small children from drowning or ran errands for old ladies. Infuriatingly, his magic had manifested all at once, and was as mysterious as it was powerful, yet he only ever put it to use where he would not harm anyone. How had he dared advance without sullying his hands? Katsuki hated him just as he hated being a man.

He was peaceful, given the circumstances, for longer than he might have been. He limited himself to pushing Deku off of high staircases or throwing his training equipment down the well, the occasional verbal abuse. That changed after the desert wraith.

Desert wraiths should not have existed. They were meant to be merely creatures of bedtime fantasy, fabricated by parents to prevent their children from wandering in the dark. So why, that night, after all of the nights that he had thought he was safe, had that thing of nightmares come for him? In the darkness it took him by surprise and swallowed him whole.

It was a green-grey entity of oil and wax, sticking to his skin, coiling through his throat, choking him of air. He had tried to fight it but it enveloped him, his arms stuck in the tangle and the pulse of the sludge. He had thought that he was going to die.

But then Deku, fucking Deku, had swooped in and blown it away with a punch so forceful that it knocked what air was still in his lungs clean away. Deku blubbered and mumbled and gasped in joy that Kacchan, thrown on the stone street and gulping for air, was not dead. Faced by the pity of the smaller boy, he wished, for a moment, that he were.

Time passed and the boys grew. In the autumn two years ago, he ran away.

XXX

"That's rather an extreme measure to take." Said Uraraka.

"It seemed like the best thing to do at the time. If I'd known what to do with my emotions I probably could have found a better way to deal with it, but by then I hadn't expressed anything but anger for a few years."

"Was it anger, or jealousy?"

"Fuck off." He snapped.

The princess frowned at him.

"Well, that's not very nice considering that I've been politely entertaining your story of what is distinctly not yet heartbreak for all this time, and I've not said a word about you ripping up the letters that I should have received either."

"Yeah, well, just be glad you know about the letters at all."

"You should be glad that you know about the letters. Now you know what they contained, though it was nothing royal or important at all."

"Except the last one."

"Except the last one, yes."

Uraraka rolled over. The bed creaked slightly.

"It was the beginning of my grief and my love." She said, lifting a hand at staring at it. "But you know that already. What I do not know is the story of yours."

"I'm getting there."

"You said that last time."

"I said, I'm fucking getting there, cheeks. Don't get impatient."

XXX

He spent a time wandering from place to place, living off what he found, skirting between the burning sands and the paradise of the forests. He was always hungry. Birds and snakes were simply meat with eyes to him, and he pulled them quickly and easily from their perches in the trees and the mortal plane.

On his last day in Abrassa, he saw a lion. Grey with age and thin with starvation, it roared feebly at him from the edge of the forest. It was bled of gold but for its teeth, and those too were all full of holes. They met each other's gaze and there was an understanding there, that the silver lion could go on no longer, that it would submit itself to him.

He did not even really remember killing it. Only, a day later, making the long walk to Capcana wearing its fine silver skin.

He was full of hate. It was all that kept him going. Hate and hunger, boiling in his stomach.

Perhaps a week after stumbling through the fog and over the bland, wet fells of moss and spongy grass, Katsuki arrived in the bustling Capcana town of Brassen-Thwaite-Water.

Roosting gently by the Derwent river, the quaint municipality was not walled off like those in Abrassa, but rather sprawled indolently across both the flat and the steep. The houses had roofs of thatch and walls of white plaster and beam, and from each brick-pile chimney trails of blue smoke wound into the Autumn sky. There was the smell of baking and fallen leaves on the ground and iron from a distant clanging blacksmith as he wandered the winding streets, searching though he did not know what for. His head turned to look at a boy selling pork pies just a little too long, and suddenly he had walked into somebody.

A girl his age, with skin as pink as peaches and irises as black as coal raised her eyebrows at him as he turned around. Her hair was short and curled, with scraggling yellow horns at her forehead, and at present she rubbed at the keratinous offshoots in pain.

"Owwww, watch it, mate." She said.

"Fuck off." He replied curtly.

She placed her hands on her hips and firmly blocked his path.

"Now just what did you say to me?"

"I said fuck off, whore."

XXX

The princess gasped.

"You actually said that to her?"

"Yeah."

"And she didn't immediately slap you for it? I can't understand how she came to be your friend from a meeting like that."

"For a start, cheeks, she did slap me. She didn't have time to also melt my face off, though, because that's when Eijiro stepped in and tried to do it for her."

Uraraka frowned and put up a hand, questioning.

"Hold on, where did Kirishima come from in all this?"

"He was out shopping with her; you know, them being friends already and all. It's a strange thought, but he still had black hair then. Anyway, I had called his friend a slag right in front of him so he did the logical dragon thing and breathed an enormous column of fucking dragon fire. That got me to pay attention."

"So, he's a dragon-child?"

"Fucking obviously. Are you even listening to me?"

"I am!"

"Then shut up."

He wrapped his cloak a little tighter.

"Recap: I bump into Mina, call her a slag, she slaps me, Eijiro nearly burns my fucking face off. Got it?"

"Got it. What happened next?"

XXX

Kirishima's burst of flames had very effectively caught Katsuki's attention. What he had forgotten to take into account, apparently, is that it would additionally capture the attention of everyone else on the bustling street. The street in Capcana, where Stavilar dragon-children were banned by royal decree.

He directed a wobbly, shark-toothed grimace at Ashido.

"Uh… I didn't really-"

"RUN!" she yelled, cutting him off.

She grabbed Katsuki by his cloak and dragged him along as they started in a mad dash through the market stalls and around the leaning houses. Adrenaline rushed in his ears as he fell into pace behind her and her friend, though he could not quite place why. In the frenzy of the escape, he almost forgot that he hardly knew them.

When they had run themselves to a secluded tavern on the edge of the town, and were quite sure that they were no longer pursued, the trio stopped to catch their breath.

"And you!" said the pink girl, still breathing deep, as she caught Katsuki by his furs again "I'm not [she paused to wheeze] done with you by any means. What's wrong with you, going around calling me a whore? That sort of thing's really not on."

"Yeah," chimed Kirishima "super un-manly."

Katsuki stared at them. Un-manly? His world was spinning. What had he spent all that time training for, if not to become a man? Had he not hunted and fought and clawed his way to the top? How could he not be a man? How could a mere woman and boy tell him that he was not?

And just as his metaphorical world span, so did the one before his eyes. The pair of figures before him were turning blurry, and his feet felt unstable on the stone. He remembered that he had been running hard for quite a while, and also that he had not really eaten anything for a few days. He tried desperately to cling on to consciousness, to see this particular embarrassment through, but his eyesight began to slip away with his balance, and he soon fainted into Ashido's open arms.

He awoke on a soft bed under a low-beamed ceiling, disoriented and sweaty. Adding to his sense of confusion, he found that he was being watched by both Ashido and Kirishima, and that the latter's hair had changed from black to blistering red (he found out later that this metamorphosis had supposedly been undertaken as a disguise). For a moment he simply frowned at them.

"You can't get away that easily." Said the girl "We're going to have to talk about what you did whether you've eaten or not."

"Oh, yeah." Added the boy, as though he had just remembered something, and he pulled out a dry roll of bread. "You can have this if you'd like."

Katsuki swatted the food away with a snarl. He did not accept offerings from strangers.

"I'm not here to play nice."

"Then what are you here to do?"

Understanding glinted in Ashido's deep, black eyes. She knew that he was stranded and unsure, and she was angry that she had to be the one to face him. By contrast, the boy at her side seemed hardly to have grasped any of the underlying tension of the exchange.

"None of your business." Quipped Katsuki.

"I'm afraid it is, blondie. You've just involved yourself in the first dragon sighting in Capcana since King Kentmere the Sour, and if you carry on wandering about like you did then you're going to end up hanging by yer neck in the square before long."

" 'S not my fucking fault."

"Dude," cut in Kirishima "yes it is. You called Mina something gross in the middle of the street! That's not normal behaviour."

Katsuki's brain squirmed in his skull. Was it not normal behaviour? How could he have known? All the boys and men around him had spoken of women in far harsher terms, and Elder Priam had always said that they needed to be put in their place. What had he done wrong? He had only been following the others around him.

"So, what are you going to do, blondie?"

"None of your fucking business." He snapped.

"Listen, and I'm only going to say this once, alright?" said Ashido calmly "We're getting out of here tonight. We're leaving for the Great Plains. And if you apologise then maybe, maybe, we'll let you come along so you don't end up as crow-feed."

Again, in the very depths of those deep, deep, coal-and-buttercup eyes, shone a disquieting spark of perception. Yellow and black, like the down of a bumblebee, like the autumn leaves on the rimed earth, they saw into the gorge of his heart and did not look away. It was the foreign, terrifying look of pity, of compassion that he could not hope to understand, unseen since that night with the slime and the wraith and-

"I'm sorry."

The whisper picked its way between his lips before he could stop it, smooth as quicksilver, and the sound of it shocked him. All that he had ever known, all that he had ever been, was gone, and in that blank white room, faced by two complete strangers, the gulf of the unknown yawned chillingly. The flame of hate had blown out and there was nothing, nothing left.

And even to this day, he could not completely comprehend the stone-skip steps that had played over the pond in Ashido's mind and compelled her to offer her help (he did not deserve it; he still felt it when he could not sleep), but he knew that it was his making. Unquestionably, without her, without following them on their never-ceasing journey, he would still be wild and cruel and deeply, deeply unhappy.

So they travelled together across the plains, through the forests, past the lakes, picking odd jobs and trying their hands at whatever they next saw fit, and by nights at the campfire and days in the rain they slowly became friends. Their amity came about haltingly, as though they were pulling teeth: after swells of pain and grief the blood dried over in a scar that touched them all. Three children alone in the world, bound to the time before death only by each other.

One night in summer, on a hill covered in tall dry grass that tickled at their sides, they lay down and watched the stars, and Katsuki felt his heart stop. A terrible thought immobilised him as he watched Kirishima laugh in the dappled light, and his face was on fire, and his stomach was full of wasps – he was in love.

It was both an ecstatic release and a crushing hurt.

Love.

It all made so much sense now.

How could he not have fallen? Kirishima had eyes like jacinth and cinnabar and cherries in liquor and hornet's jackets. He had a scar across one eyebrow that charmingly caressed the smooth white of his forehead, and a smile that always reached up to his eyes. What a smile! His triangular teeth were those of a shark, ancient and godly and king of the sea which he missed so dearly. The dragon-boy regularly lost and re-grew them (a stress response in his kind; or so he said), and Katsuki would keep the fallen prizes of pearly enamel on a string about his neck, so that some piece of him was always close to his heart.

All the parts that made him up were perfect: his uneven shoulders, his slanting jaw, the arch of his calves. He would playfully, casually reach out a well-defined arm to pat Katsuki on the back, and for an instant he could take in the pinch of the muscles on his back.

But beyond that, beyond his asymmetrical handsomeness and beautiful laugh, it was Kirishima's words that lured him into love. For so long 'manliness' had been cruelty and distress, but that summer-red boy turned the word so easily into something soft and kind and manageable. 'Manly' was courageousness, and knowing your limits, and helping even when there was no need. 'Manly' was Mina keeping a campfire alive or Katsuki cooking extra portions or a rabbit slipping away from their traps. Kirishima's 'manly' was genuine and adoring and without judgement. He built Katsuki up and allowed him still to be who he had always been, but he also constantly pushed him to be the best that he could, stopped him from slipping into old bad habits.

Kirishima made Katsuki want to be better than he was, more than he had been. Love and respect and friendship grew tangled and suffocating, paralysing, heavy in his limbs.

He loved Kirishima, and it felt so natural, so breath-taking and wonderful, but the emotion was also tinged with shame. Though he had worked so hard and for so long to outgrow his past self, he was still unable to see loving a boy as anything other than queer, than wrong. He ached to hold his hand and run his fingers through his hair, but each time the thought came to him it was followed by heavy, bitter guilt, and the memory of Old Man Priam scolding Deku, and the curious and scandalised eyes of the adults around him. Sometimes, he disgusted himself.

He stopped bathing with Kirishima, because it made him feel dirty (and he turned bright red besides), and snarled at him if he got too physically affectionate. But still the love remained rooted in his soul, pulsing, crying to break free. It swelled and filled his chest and echoed in his ears.

His head was not full of honey, but ash. It fogged his vision and clouded his mind, and all he could see was Kirishima's ruby hair and garnet eyes and intoxicating smile, and all he could think of was the way that their limbs might fit perfectly with one another and what his teeth might be like against his tongue.

And he still did, occasionally, though the images did not have as much power over him as they once had. The idea that he loved Kirishima became curiously unreachable and blander with each passing moment. He was not sure now that he could reach out and find a hand to hold.

XXX

"Why not?" asked the princess.

"I just… dunno if I still love him."

"Why not?"

"Because he loves Mina."

"Oh."

He ran a hand through his hair in frustration.

"One day when we were climbing up this accursed fucking mountain, she slipped and he caught her, and suddenly I knew. I saw it in his eyes. I saw me. I saw all the things that I had been in love and it was fucking crushing."

"It hurts, doesn't it?"

He sighed into the night air.

"Way to state the fucking obvious."

"No it's- it's weird because it hurts so much but it also doesn't hurt at all. It's kind of numb. You've loved him for so long that it's become a big part of you, and you don't feel the pain of longing anymore but it's still strange that such an essential piece of you is gone, something that defined you so much for so long is now dead. And admitting that it's dead is hard, it's really hard because that's like admitting that your hopes – you must have hoped – that he was the one, really the one, were never going to come true. It's like acknowledging that you were doomed from the start."

"Speak for your bloody self."

"Yes," said the princess, "I suppose I am."

A pink pop of scintillating magic briefly lit up their little chamber between the bed-curtains. Their promise had been fulfilled.

"So you've told me about your heartbreak." She mused "And you've told the truth, too."

" 'Course I told the fucking truth, what do you take me for?"

She cocked her head bouncily over her shoulder.

"Truth be told, I am not sure what to take you for, Katsuki Bakugou."

He sneered at her. She persisted.

"If you like boys, then why would you travel all this way to try and marry a girl?"

"I'm not here to fucking marry you."

"Again with that." She chuckled "Don't you see that it really doesn't explain anything? What are you here for? What is it that you want in life?"

His look slackened, serious again. His paprika eyes seemed to burn at the edges.

"You don't wanna know, princess."

"Don't I?"

"You shouldn't."

She looked at her hands, noticing the shine of her nails in the maple-orange light.

"Will I ever know?"

"Not tonight, cheeks."

The pads of her fingers were still calloused and thick, and her smallest fingers both curved slightly outwards. She wondered when they would once again be the soft, graceful digits of a princess, and twisted them through her floaty brown hair. She yawned. Tiredness made her irritable.

" 'Not tonight' you say, it's always 'not tonight'." Said Uraraka, without looking at him "Is that what you told yourself when you turned afraid of your red-headed Kirishima?"

"I wasn't fucking afraid!"

"Weren't you afraid of his rejection? Afraid that you might never love anyone but him?"

Bakugou threw up his hands and pointed at her accusatorily.

"Fuckin' alright; that's not fear, that's a perfectly fucking logical assessment of the situation."

"I really don't see how it is."

"Listen, how do I know, or you know, for that matter, that I'm ever gonna love again? Your thinking is based off of a stupid bloody assumption."

"Well, isn't yours?"

He dropped his gesticulating hands to frown at her.

"Hah?"

"You assume that the natural state of man is to be out of love, or unloved, or some such similar thing."

He scoffed.

"And what else would it be, princess?"

"I don't know. Nothing as bleak as you think, I'm sure. Because although you may not believe it, it is the nature of men to love and be loved through lenses both mundane and wonderful. It is what makes us human." Here, she placed a hand on her chest, determined "We're born with ten thousand hearts, all ready to be given, each as worthy as the others. So you have given Kirishima one of them, or ten, or one hundred, and they are gone forever now. But you have many more to give, as many as you wish, and giving more will not make the first any less precious."

"But I don't want to give my heart out."

"Ah, because it hurts? Because you are afraid after all?"

He growled. It was a delightfully ridiculous noise, and quite unthreatening.

"I don't need love to feel fulfilled." He spat.

"I never said that it was romantic love."

His gaze went glassy, as if he was having trouble processing her words.

"All I mean is that one day our hearts will be whole again, whether by patience or by accident. There's more to this life for us, beyond those sunshine boys who broke our hearts, and I do wish that you would stop acting as though you were more noble than me for being so endlessly nihilistic."

Bakugou stirred from his silence with a roar, unfolding his broad shoulders to point a glowing red palm at her.

"I am not the fucking same as you."

"Thank the gods." She laughed.

She could sense that she would not be reacting half as calmly if she had any sense left in her, and that her fatigue had drained her of all of the essential instincts for self-preservation. She watched the bloodshot luminescence of his magic slowly die, laughing faintly at the simmering frustration on his face.

"What's that supposed to fucking mean?"

"Not tonight." She replied, still stifling a giggle. Gods, how long had she been awake already, talking of failed romances? She saw no merits in continuing to argue with this childish stranger, and her face ached with sleepiness. It was all so absurd.

Her wide, brown eyes looked up into his, and were met once again with that illegible expression, those thin-pressed lips.

"You should go to sleep." He murmured.

"What?"

"I said, you should go to fucking sleep. I don't want to deal with you going loopy as a freshwater eel."

"Is that all?"

His mouth twitched. Irritation?

"Yes. Go the fuck to sleep. I want out already. I had it bad enough telling you about my heartbreak in exchange for the letters, but getting lectured is just about the last bloody straw."

"Alright, but only if you won't attack me in my sleep."

"You have my fucking knife."

She patted the pillow behind her, and found the sharp contours of the jambiya.

"Fair point."

She turned away from him to pull the curtains of the bed closed. The lantern light was obscured by the draperies, and he became a shimmering outline of blond hair and beads in the dark.

"I have nothing more to say to you." She said with a yawn. "Goodnight, Bakugou."

Blindly pulling at the covers in the dark, she settled beneath the blankets. She curled her legs to her chest, and felt the pressure of Bakugou's knee brush her shin. The jambiya was hard under her soft pillow, a reminder of what had transpired, as the sitting boy's silhouette grew hazy and sleep tickled her eyelids closed.

"Goodnight, princess."

She did not hear it.