Chapter 20 - Violence

When the girls clicked down to the kitchen for breakfast, they found that it was awash with the smell of fresh gruel, and that Bakugou and Kirishima were already monopolising the heat of the newly re-kindled fire. Two rolled futons leaned in a faraway corner, and the floor was spotlessly swept.

"Mornin'!" beamed Kirishima, swivelling to face them "We made porridge!"

"You mean I made porridge." Corrected Bakugou, not looking away from the fire.

Kirishima pouted, but did not give him the pleasure of seeing it. Standing up, he stretched and fetched a ladle.

"Who wants some?"

The girls thanked him playfully, and settled down with the bowls that he poured them. Uraraka, who had been looking forward to eating something since the early hours of the morning, stirred hers only once before spooning some straight into her mouth, and came to regret it instantly. The gruel, having just been in the pot, was burning hot, and she made a desperate noise as she struggled to swallow it, grabbing Yaoyorozu's sleeve for support.

Yaoyorozu and Ashido gave her an alarmed look, and Kirishima turned back from the fireplace to see what the matter was. She laughed nervously and fanned her tongue, bright red. Suddenly she was conscious of all of the eyes upon her.

"I should've waited a bit more." She coughed, patting her chest.

"I'll say!"

She pushed away from her stool and went to get a cup of water from the pump, asking the girls at the table if they wanted some as she went. After picking some simple mugs off of the drying board, she filled them, and wound her way back to the seats by way of the hearth, where Bakugou sat. She addressed an awkward greeting to him as she passed, and he grunted without looking her way.

So this was the way that things were to be. She did not know what she had expected, but it surely had not been this. She had thought, perhaps foolishly, that his kind words, and the star, and the twist of his mouth had meant something else.

Knowing that his back was turned to her, she stuck her tongue out at him, and sat back down at the table with a small huff of annoyance. Ashido noticed the impolite gesture and smiled knowingly, and the princess rolled her eyes to deny her silent accusations. Before the pink girl could pipe up with some cheeky remark, she hastily diverted the course of the upcoming conversation.

"What are the futons doing here?" she inquired, flicking her eyes to the rolled-up bed-things in the corner.

Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.

"We had a bit of a disagreement last night."

Ashido put down her bowl with a clatter.

"Eiji!"

"It wasn't my fault!"

"Whose fault was it, then?"

There was silence as their eyes turned to the broad back of the boy sat at the fireside. He felt the pressure of their gazes, and twisted his head just enough to set his ruby eyes on them and glare.

"Katsu-babe…"

"What?"

"Bro, don't be like that."

"Don't fucking give me that look, already. I wasn't the only one at fucking fault there."

Ashido used two rosy fingers to pinch her brow and leaned on the battered wood of the table, sighing.

"That's not what I was asking." She said.

Bakugou was still staring at her over his shoulder, and Kirishima was still stuck between them, hesitant, guilty. The first white sun's rays barely peeked through the windows of the near-subterranean walls, and a log on the fire hissed and popped. The gruel in Uraraka's mouth had turned salty. She swallowed.

"The issue right now," She said, cutting the silence, "is that if we leave the futons in here any longer, they'll soak up the smells of the kitchen, and it'll be a terrible waste of good linen."

Wordlessly, Bakugou sprang up, stalked over to the futons, hauled them over his shoulders, and disappeared up the kitchen steps. Kirishima and Ashido gave her heavy smiles, and she continued to eat her porridge.

"Hey, what happened?" ventured Ashido once Bakugou's footsteps were gone.

He bit his lip.

"He- uh, he said some things. It wasn't good."

"Like what?"

"Like, well-" his eyes flashed briefly to Uraraka "um, he didn't mean any of it." He blurted.

Ashido sighed into her porridge as the other two girls raised their eyebrows with intrigue.

"Really, that boy…"

Yaoyorozu, who had been eating her breakfast and charitably ignoring the goings-on of the groom-to-be's party for the last while, coughed politely into her fist and indicated to her now-empty bowl. She said that the porridge had been lovely, and asked what they had put in it to give it that grassy, herbal taste, and Kirishima gratefully took the opportunity to begin talking of cooking with Lasandunian ingredients.

When 'that boy' eventually returned, the people at the wide kitchen table noticed first that his footsteps down the stairs were far too many, as were his voices echoing in the corridor. When he emerged, he had a wide smirk on his face, and had too many heads and legs and bodies. They were the heads and limbs of Iida, Todoroki, and Midoriya, who flanked him cheerfully. They seemed as chipper as the early day could have given them cause to be, and smiled as they greeted the morning.

Last night's grievances had already been settled.

XXX

Once breakfast was had, sir Iida left to continue the knight's patrols, and the rest of them all sat about the knife-grooved table talking about the wedding. It was in only a day's time, and there was an awful lot to be done.

In the end, Yaoyorozu and Todoroki were dispatched to ask Tsuyu if she could act as officiating priestess, Kirishima went to see if Hanta Sero the tinker had returned from his trip, and if he could make a pair of wedding bells ("the goat things", as he so eloquently put it), and Ashido accompanied him to retrieve their things from the thatched house. Midoriya, Bakugou, and Uraraka were left with a list of things to do, and pondered them with frustration.

"We'll have to learn the wedding vows together, of course." Said the princess, trying and failing to meet her husband-to-be's eyes. Midoriya gave her a sympathetic look.

"Why?"

"Well, who else knows the Lasandunian wedding vows? I wouldn't want to subject Tsuyu to you, if I could avoid it."

He clicked his tongue.

"And I think that I can make your coat today, if we spend most of the day at it, with the thread that Yaoyorozu brought, although my fingers will surely hate me for it."

"And we learn the wedding vows at the same time?"

"What, are you saying that you can't do it?" she raised her eyebrows suggestively. "It's surely the simplest of the rules we've to follow."

He was sat leaning far back in his chair, and his cloak was folded over the back of it in such a way that his knife stuck sharply out from his hip. One arm was behind him, and the other was bent over his thigh.

"If there are this many rules, and neither of us want to be married, why bother?" he said.

These words incensed her. She stood, and the sound of her hands slamming the table commanded his attention. She held his carmine eyes.

"We are going to be married, no matter what." She spoke firmly "I have spent all the night thinking of it, and I cannot back away now. Even though I hate the thought of it, I have resolved to marry you, and I believe it is in the best interests of the both of us and of Lasandu."

"Oh?" Bakugou frowned sarcastically "And why's that?"

"Because then I will finally be Queen, and I will be able to write the laws of this land. I'll be able to write this accursed Suitor's Game out of the annals, and I might be able to actually change my motherland for the good of the people. I might finally be able to mend my home. And as to you, don't you think that a king, a king who has helped his impoverished citizens, is far more likely to be taken in by a knight's formation than a runaway and a near-murderer?"

She could see his jaw sway from side to side ever so slightly as he ground his teeth. He looked away.

"She's right, you know." Said Midoriya.

Bakugou clicked his tongue.

"I fucking know that, already. Let's just get the fuck on with it."

XXX

Of the many Lasandunian wedding traditions, the oldest, and the most well-respected, was the wearing by the bride and groom of matching coats as they stood before the gods. These were usually ordered a few months in advance, and woven by the finest craftsman in the village, so that all those that saw it paraded to and from the altar had no choice but to admire the care that had gone into the fine, soft details. Superstition dictated that the married couple must take the same number of steps in them before taking them off, lest terrible bad luck befall them, so it was often easy to spot a pair of newlyweds as they lurched from the temple, counting their steps and laden with the weight of gold and red weave and the responsibility of their newly-sanctified love.

Uraraka and Bakugou, of course, had no time for such things.

The princess had taken her fine royal robes up from the treasury, and was presently sat by her loom cutting a long length of thread and planning how she would make a matching set. Bakugou stood idly by the window, and Midoriya watched the pair of them from the wall.

"Right." Announced Uraraka, and she tied a knot at one end of the thread and stood "Katsuki, if you could stand here, please."

He twitched slightly at the mention of his first name. It was the first time, they realised separately as he walked over, that she had said it to him on its own, and the address fit strangely on him. He stood stiff before her, expectant.

"Uh, without your cloak, if you could."

He stared her down and slipped it from his shoulders. He held the lion skin out to her, flustering her as she took it to put down on her weaving stool. Without it, his whole silhouette was slimmer, and though he was no taller than he had been, the appearance of his muscles under his black top made his presence seem somehow more imposing.

The princess was not a tall girl, and under his hard gaze, she felt it quite clearly. Her heart was beating in her neck. She coughed to clear her throat.

"Please try to stand still."

Without any more warning than that, she wrapped her arms around his chest, and Bakugou startled slightly before regaining his composure. She brought her hands around to meet just above his sternum, and knotted the other end of the thread where it finished curving around his torso. She then unwrapped it and folded it from the tops of her fingers to her elbows a few times.

"Chest:" She spoke quietly under her breath "two forearms and two hands." Then, raising her voice slightly "Could you hold your arm out, please?"

He complied. She stretched the thread between her hands and along his bicep to tie a knot at his wrist. She inspected the thread with its three knots, and then went back to measure his arm again.

"Your arms," she said "are really quite long."

"Yeah, fucking and?"

"And I'll have to spend a lot longer on your sleeves than I thought. It must be because you're tall." She made a fanning motion with one hand. "Now turn around so I can do the backs of your shoulders."

She measured from one deltoid to the other, marked off the knot, and then wrapped her arms around his lower waist. He jerked with surprise, much to Midoriya's amusement, and she withdrew sheepishly.

"Sorry," she said "but I'm all done now." She looked over the neat line of knots and tried to remember which one corresponded to each body part. The third and fourth ones were rather close together, and tangling in her mind. "Actually," she started "can I do your waist again?"

He grunted, and she took it for a yes. Once she had confirmed her measurement, she picked and frayed the knot to mark it out from the others.

"Two forearms." She remarked with surprise.

"What the hell does that mean?" Bakugou said, retrieving his lion-fur cloak "I don't know how fucking long your arms are."

At the wall, Midoriya tensed.

"Well, neither do I," replied Uraraka calmly "only, it strikes me that your waist is quite exceptionally small."

"And?"

"And nothing, really."

He rolled his eyes and stomped back over to the window. The day was cloudless and bright, and she supposed that he was looking out over the land that rushed away beneath them. Perhaps, if he squinted hard enough, he might even see a stripe of the desert far, far away and far, far beneath them, and a thin sliver of the wide blue sea near his home. She wondered if he missed it, and then caught herself. She had far better things to worry about.

Weaving was long work. For the sections of fabric that required a repeating pattern, the princess could float the loom's shuttle with her magic and send it flitting freely back and forth, and she used these periods of relative monotony to try and teach Bakugou his sections of the wedding vows. When a delicate emblem needed to be woven, she halted her magic and commanded total silence as she completed it by hand. In the in-between lengths of time, she called Bakugou up to make sure that the half-finished pieces hung on him properly, or quizzed him on his wedding vows. Midoriya played along cheerfully, and offered encouragements when things stopped running smoothly, but the atmosphere was hardly pleasant.

When it reached mid-day, and the two white suns touched each other in the sky, Midoriya peeled himself from the wall and tried (and failed) to stifle the rumbling of his stomach. Uraraka looked up.

"Oh, I'm sorry, are you hungry?"

"A little."

She stopped weaving and put a hand on her cheek in thought. Her own stomach, now that she was paying attention to it, was calling out for food too.

"Darn it," she said "since the others are gone, we don't have anything in right now."

"Should we go get some bread? We'll need some things for dinner tonight, anyway."

"That sounds sensible. Only, can you go without me? I don't know that I'll be able to finish if I leave for so long."

"If you'd really like."

She walked over, fished some coins out of her sleeves, and put them in his brown-gloved palm.

"Oh, and could you please get some still-husked grain if you find any? We'll need some for the wedding."

He smiled softly at her. She smiled back.

"Of course." He said "Well then, we'll be back soon."

Bakugou slinked over from the window to join him, and they started to descend the winding stairs. Uraraka watched them go with alarm.

"Wait!" she called, and they stopped "You're both going?"

"Well, yes."

"But then the coat…"

Midoriya looked meaningfully at her.

"Can I leave you two alone?"

A kind of fear gripped at her heart as she thought about it. She still did not really know that blond boy on the steps, and his original purpose – that grim, sickening affair – still hung heavy around him. But around her seizing cardiac chambers there were also a thousand fears that extended far beyond him, into her murky future. The fear that she would never become Queen, and never change the laws of Lasandu, and die in a ruined kingdom. The fear that when she joined the spirits of her parents, she would not make them proud, only disgusted and ashamed. The fear that after all of her wretched existence, the only legacy she would leave behind would be the sadnesses that she had caused her friends, and the horror of that haunting dream.

So she swallowed the screaming of her heart, and smiled a little too gallantly, and said that the others would be back soon in any case, and that it would be alright. Midoriya left quite unwillingly, and Bakugou and Uraraka were alone with the loom and the two wide windows.

She resumed her weaving.

"So," she said "do you remember the line that we had gotten to?"

"As the frost clasps the stone, and as the moonbeams kiss the dusk, so shall I hold thee."

"Good." She paused to focus on finishing the gold trim around a sleeve's edge "Before we go on, could you try this?"

He pulled off his cloak and held out his hand as she extracted the sleeve from the loom. He had to twist his arm to fit it through the heavy tunnel of disembodied fabric, and when it was finally on his shoulder it sat flatly, draping elegantly down to his wrists.

"Good," she murmured to herself "good. Could you just-?" She stepped forwards.

She reached out to tug the tapered end of the fabric slightly higher up, so that it touched the edges of his collarbone. Using two fingers, she increased the pressure to hold it there, and then leaned back to examine him. It fit well. The wide sleeves (traditional in Lasandu) accented his slim waist quite nicely, and obscured the wideness of his shoulders in an unobtrusive way.

She leaned back towards him, and removed her fingers to let the sleeve slip down, letting him catch it as it went. She realised, as his hand rushed to stop the fall, that they were awfully close; his breath was on her hair and the shadow of his chin fell over her. She stepped back quickly.

"That side's done, for now at least." She said "You can take it off if you'd like."

He grunted and pulled it off. After tugging on his lion-skin cloak (he did not do the straps, for he knew that he would need to untie them just as soon as they had been secured), he folded the finished sleeve and put it down on the bed, then loitered about at the window.

"What next?" he said, and his eyes followed the progress of her nimble fingers about the threads of the loom. His complexion had taken on a strangely reddish tinge, and she wondered vaguely whether it was something that she had done.

"Next, let's see… Oh, we're getting near the end, now. The last part needs a bit more movement."

He waited for her to go on, playing with the beads around his neck in impatience. Only once she had arranged all of the coloured threads in place and floated the shuttle, and it had begun its sweeping, back-and-forth, thunk-thunk-thunk journey once again, did she turn to him. By the pinch of his brow, she could tell that he did not like to wait for so long. Perhaps that was the reason for his roseate frustration.

"So, next," she started "you hold a cup of wine to my lips and make me drink from it, and say 'Behold, thou art consecrated unto me with this wine according to the laws of the Earth and Sky'."

She looked at him expectantly. He rolled his eyes, and recited back to her in a monotone growl.

"Behold, thou art consecrated unto me, with this wine, according to the rules of the Earth and Sky."

"The laws of the Earth and Sky." She corrected.

"Behold," he rolled his eyes again "thouartconsecrateduntome, withthiswine, according to the laws of the Earth and Sky."

"Yes, good." She turned away from him, unimpressed "Next…"

She sat thinking for a moment, and all of a sudden there were the beginnings of a blush forming across her cheeks, and she could not meet his eye. Discomfort bubbled in her stomach, disrupting the words as they spilled out. "Next, I'll say a piece, and then, um, give you three grains still in their husks. And, uh, you have to eat them."

Bakugou frowned at her. A spark of interest held in the twist of his mouth as he watched her stumble and redden. She hated the sight of it. She hated that she was already so full of fear, that she could not say the words elegantly.

"Yeah, and?" he said "What's the fucking deal? I can do it."

"No it's- it's not that it's just, um," she rubbed the back of her neck, trying urgently to dispel the red on her cheeks "there's a special way that you have to do it. You have to take my hand and then, sort of, uh, pick the seeds off the palm?"

"Alright."

"But you have to hold it with the opposite hand to the one that I extend to you, and have your thumb pointing straight inwards down my wrist."

He held his hand out and adjusted it as if he were shaking an invisible hand. He was doing it wrong, horribly wrong, and something about his narrowed eyes suggested that he was waiting to observe her reaction.

"Um, no, not like that." She faltered "Can I- can I come over and show you?"

He snorted. She bit her lip and walked over to him, the clicks of her clogs muffled by the carpet beneath them. Without looking up at him, she took his outstretched hands and wrapped her fingers about his wrist, placing her thumb where the blue veins showed through his skin and pointing it straight up his arm. His skin was warm. Her hands were cold.

"Like this, you see?" she mumbled, and she could barely hear the words out of her own lips as she turned her face away. She let go of him quickly, elastically, as though his skin was burning hot.

Just as she turned, he grabbed her wrist.

She inhaled sharply and whipped around, her hair flying about her cheeks, as he pressed his thumb deep on the ridge of her tendons. It was the same firm grip as that first night, with her back pressed against the bed and his knife glinting in the violet moonlight.

"Like this?" he said, and his eyes smiled.

"Yes." She looked away again. She could not bear his gaze. "Please let go."

He relinquished his grip. He looked down on her, and she could not recognise his face. His eyes still smirked at her, but his eyebrows crouched in anger and his lips were pulled thin. His rosy tint was gone.

"You're awful jumpy for someone who insisted we'd get married this morning." He said, and his tone was flat; half-bored, half-indignant. "Where's your confidence gone?"

"Don't talk to me of confidence! It is in you that I have none, not myself."

"Confidence of what?"

She took a step back. He bristled.

"What, so you're fucking scared of me now?" he snapped at her.

"Yes!" she bit back "Why should I not be? When I was full of rage, you wanted to hear it all, you pushed me further, but fear? Is that too pathetic for you? Do you look down on me for the emotions that you yourself have caused?"

"The anger made sense!" He said "But this doesn't. It doesn't make sense to me."

"It should! Because this fear comes from rage, a rage that every woman cradles, and you must be blind not to have seen it."

His glare lost its malice, and he stared at her in confusion.

"Every girl carries this anger with her!" Cried Uraraka "Anger at how fear has been forced upon us, at how men and boys may stir it within us as simply as they live and breathe! I am sure that Mina does, too, if only you'll ask her. She won't like to talk about it but she knows it, deep inside. We all do, from the first moment that we are young and an old man looks at our chests just a little too long or an uncle's hand comes to rest at our backside or a boy shouts something lecherous at us as we walk down a street. Constantly. It's a threat of violence, can't you see?" It was both a plea and a rebuke "Can't you see? We live every day with that threat, that fear, and the anger that we cannot change it."

"I'm not a threat." He struggled to get the words in as her pace quickened.

She ran a hand through her hair, exasperated, and shouted from across the void that she had created between them.

"But Monoma was! And Mineta was! And so many boys, so many men, have been! The chief financial advisor used to lick his lips when I passed, and you would be sick to hear the things that Mineta said he wanted from me.

"When the adults died, and the children were left to fend for themselves, boys our age, boys from this very city, boys like you, did unspeakable things to girls who lived alone. Every girl lives with the memories of their tears and blood and bruises, prays that it will not happen to them.

"And this marriage – gods, this farce of a marriage! – it carries the same threat. You must know it. You wield that invisible threat, hold it in your hands though you do not know it; a kind of violence that is given blessings by marriage."

His face twisted in horror. He started to protest but she cut him off.

"How can you not see it? What a blessing, a privilege you have not to constantly think of it! Think of it now! Think of all the things that you have done to me: pressed me against a bed, pushed me to the floor, gripped my wrists so that I may no longer use them. Every time, I was full of the fear that you would take something from me by force, that you might violate me and I would not be able fight it.

"And if I marry you, the law dictates that I won't be able to fight it, and that thought fills me with dread. For as long as tradition has lived a girl's virtue is given away with her hand in marriage, and it is with that expectation that I am burdened. Even in the wedding vows, as I am supposed to profess my love to you, those words and anticipations are forced out of my mouth."

"What words?" broke Bakugou "What do I force from you?"

"The grains in their husks. They represent my maidenhood, and you grip my wrist and take them. I drink of your wine like blood. Can't you see?"

Anger and desperation scraped immiscibly past each other in her final croak. She stared at him, run out of words, exhausted from raising her voice, and silently pleaded for his response. She did not even know what she wanted him to say, or what he could. She had never spoken those thoughts aloud (she feared Midoriya's faithful pity, and Momo already knew; every girl already knew), and they hung strangely in the air between them.

Bakugou's visage pinched tight, as though he was concentrating very hard, or in great pain. He looked at the ground.

"I'm sorry." he said "I'm sorry that you went through that and I'm sorry that I made you scared."

The blue bruises on her wrists peeked out of her wide sleeves. She could feel his eyes on them, trailing, and she wished that they would vanish, that she could vanish from his sight and the sights of all men, for an instant.

"But I won't- I'll never hurt you." He insisted, and their gazes met, and there was the softness of compromise in them "I promise I'll never hurt you, and I'd never force you to do something like that. I never would."

"How can I trust you? I want to, I want to, but how?"
"I'll swear on it."

"What can you swear by that is grave enough to save me?"

He looked down at himself for a moment, as if he could peer through the bones of his sternum and into his own heart. His hands clenched at his sides.

"I'll swear," he said, and he reached a hand out to her, "that if I ever raise a hand to hurt you, I shall lose it along with my jambiya."

She bit her lip.

"It's important to you, is it, this jambiya?"

"Yes."

She knew on instinct that it was the truth. Perhaps, the thought ran on, it was a kind of trust that she had in him, a sign that she had already wanted him to reach his hand out. Something like hope stirred in her heart.

She made her way across the expanse of bare carpet, and steadily took his hand in hers. His fingers were still warm. Energy trickled down from the bones behind her ears, buzzing, and she felt the foreign numbness of Bakugou's magic mix with it in her palms. His energy was strange, unfamiliar, spreading through her veins like a wave of calm. She breathed deep. They glowed honey orange, and the hiss of steam sounded briefly around them before there came the usual bright 'pop' of a sealed pact.

She disentangled her digits and dared to flash a little smile at him. He didn't quite smile back, but his look was less severe.

"You feelin' better now?" he said. She wondered whether she was imagining the anticipation in his face.

"Yes, actually."

He flicked at the silver lion tail on his cloak and looked away. His voice was soft.

"Hey, you won't hurt me either, right?"

She blinked, and realised, at break-neck speed, that she had been quite selfish, and that maybe, after all of her kicking and punching, he had reason to worry just as she had. They were just the same. They were both too young to be married.

"No, of course not." She said.

"Fuckin' good. Not that you could, obviously. I'm way fucking stronger." He concluded calmly. She rolled her eyes.

He motioned his head towards the loom in a swift nod.

"Let's get back to preparing for the wedding."

There was not much of the vows left to learn, and Bakugou quickly picked it up as the daylight pulled across the sky. The princess managed the occasional smile as she pieced together his fine red wedding coat, and they recited empty lines of faithfulness to each other in perfect ease as it all came together. By the time that her fingers were beginning to peel (and he watched this with some alarm, wishing but not daring to stop her), Midoriya had returned with the food, and they tumbled downstairs without trying to escape each other.

XXX

They all dined in the kitchen that night. Without the eyes of the fine wood and stone watching them, the words flowed more freely. The gentle, rhythmic drip of the water pump grounded them to the subterranean stone, reminding them that they were not re-enacting the scenes of the past. It had been Bakugou's suggestion, and though he pretended that it did not matter to him, his insistence was impossible to miss. To the children who had endured that last Lasandunian winter, it had turned out to matter quite a lot.

Todoroki ate his stew without complaint, and listened to Kirishima, in the seat nearest the fire, chat excitedly about his travails in securing a pair of matching wedding bells from the tinker. Ashido and Yaoyorozu laughed at the appropriate intervals, whilst Iida, Midoriya and the princess discussed the matter of the city guard and arranged the finer logistics of the wedding. Bakugou listened silently, throwing in the odd snide remark only to get instantly rebutted by his pink travelling companion. It was a lovely, lively affair.

There was still a lot to be done, but with a belly full of stew such problems seemed all of a sudden quite distant.

In the early night, in their separate rooms, Uraraka and Bakugou sank into their beds and felt their eyes close quite naturally. Lady moon watched from on high, smiling, as they fell into dreamless sleep.