Chapter 22- The Day Before the Wedding (2)

The coats and bells were all neat and folded away, and in the greyish light of the late day Bakugou and Uraraka stood in the dusty treasury before the crown stand.

Bakugou pushed an empty jar away with one of his feet and turned to leave, his cape swaying about his shoulders as he went. He made his way to the door, making his distaste for the mess about him clear as he stepped over each pot with unnecessary force. Once he reached the lofty red-lacquer doors, he hesitated. Her footsteps, the hollow sound of the empty jars, had not followed him.

"What's wrong now?" he growled.

He turned to find her stood still, rooted to the very same spot that he had left her, and her gaze was frozen in a look like terror.

"It's nothing." She said, but her voice was still fragile, and her eyes remained fixed before her, on the old mirror that the Yaoyorozu girl had brought there.

"Lying again." He sighed. He trudged back over to her side.

Her face turned to him as he neared her. She shook her head and gave him a smile that was just a little too soft around the edges.

"And now?"

"Deku won't ask you, but he'll know."

She sighed, and the sound echoed in the emptiness around them.

"I used to think that I was good at lying, before I met you."

"You are," he said "just not to me."

"So it seems. Shall we go?"

He studied her face in silence. She had a look about her that she might crumble into a pile of mountain-pale dust at the slightest touch, and for a brief moment the ridiculous impulse came upon him to speak softly, so that his words would not shatter her but lightly ruffle her eyelashes.

He knew that the girl before him was sturdy as oak, and that it was foolish of him to expect the truth from her stiff, stubborn lips - and yet he could not bring himself to leave it alone. He told himself that it was his pride, that there was some self-serving instinct driving it.

"No," he sighed, "I don't think we shall."

"Why not?"
"Because," and a flash of inspiration hit him, and he felt quite pleased with his reasoning "even if everyone respects your sadness and leaves you alone, they'll see that it appeared when I was by your side, and they'll think that I caused it. And why should I take the fucking blame? If it's my fault I won't know it until you tell me, and if it ain't I refuse to bear the burden."

She glared at him, a flicker of that old fire inside shining through.

"And since when have you cared what others think?"

Never, he told himself, never. That was the way that it had always been. And yet he did seem to care when it came to her, and nothing made sense, and a quiet panic arose in him as she stared still.

But all of a sudden her gaze softened, and she gave him a sad smile again.

"Oh, it's Kirishima, isn't it?"

It wasn't. In that selfish interlude, the gentle redhead had never even crossed his mind. But he had no better answer to present, and the smile on those soft lips willed him to speak, so he gave a non-committal grunt.

"I'm not the one making a scene of it, though." He added.

"Oh, don't take that tone with me," she snapped, and he thought the sound suited her a bit better, and then thought that he was quite the most conceited bastard in the whole land to be judging her in such a moment "neither of us are covering ourselves in glory here."

"You might start by giving me half a bloody chance and telling me what the hell the problem is."

She bit her lips. He realised after, with a slight lurch, that he had been paying them an unusual attention.

"I don't think I want to tell you."

"Fuck, it must be really fucking bad if you won't spill."

"No, it's just embarrassing."

"More embarrassing than having a crush on broccoli boy?"

Her mouth hung open for a moment, scandalised, and she swatted at him in retribution.

"It is infinitely more embarrassing, because I feel no shame at all for my past love, unlike you, only for the way that I cling to it still. I would tell you that this is quite a different matter, but now I am not so sure."

"So tell me why."

"I don't know that I can."

"Why not?"

She looked down at her sleeves; those strange, foreign, wide Lasandunian sleeves that seemed to swallow up her calloused hands and bruised wrists. At the sight of the purple patches along her skin, disturbances in the sea of milky white that he himself had caused, a kind of alarm and upset jolted in his stomach.

"It is so many things." Her voice was small again "I don't know that I can say them all at once, and I don't want to keep the others waiting."

"We're already keeping the others waiting. And in any case, fuck 'em."

"Don't say that!"

"Why shouldn't I? I don't give a shit if they have to wait. You shouldn't either - aren't they your mates? Why would they mind waiting to see you cloudless for once? Clear your face and your throat and then we'll head back."

She put her head in her hands, and she was once again engulfed by her wide sleeves. She fell into a crouch, rocking back and forth on her wooden clogs.

"Am I really so full of clouds?"

"You certainly bloody are now."

"Now that I am with you! Gods, that I have sunk so low to tell the things I have to a stranger."

"I'm not a stranger. I'm your fucking fiancé."

"Isn't that why I'm full of clouds?"

He clicked his tongue in involuntary irritation.

"Hey, remember I'm having to marry you too, dumbfuck! If you say you've sunk low then sure, whatever, but are you even going to try to stand tall again? Where's your pride?"

"I have my pride!" she cried out, and her hands slipped from her cheeks, and she stared at him from below "I have my pride, but I don't know what it means anymore! I don't know what pride is worth if it will not stop me from kissing strangers or crying to birds or telling my secrets to you! But it is there and it hurts me, it hurts me because it knows just as I do what I should be, and how far I have fallen."

There she went again, with her lofty language and dramatic ideas. She kept saying that she had fallen, but fallen from where? Fallen past what? He felt, without understanding a thing about it, that she must be wrong, and suddenly standing whilst she crouched felt wrong too, like he was looking down on her, and he knelt beside her to feel that they were on the same level again. He reached a hand out to swipe the hair from her face, and looked her clearly in her chestnut eyes.

"What do you think you should be?" He was careful with his phrasing. He did not want to ask it as though her words were already the truth.

"Beautiful," she said, and it took the wind out of him "and proud, and not so concerned with what Izuku will think of how I look in my wedding robes-" (the image from that morning was conjured in his mind) "because no love lingers between us anyway. I know that he is why I care so much, and I know that's my pride; I know that I'm clinging stupidly and pathetically, and I don't know why, and it irritates me that I think of it so often when I have so many greater problems about which to worry. But still- still I want all of the things that I can't have, and I want to be beautiful, but I want to stop wanting to be beautiful, I want to stop thinking of Izuku and love and frivolous things."

So think of me instead. He locked the words tight amongst his teeth and pulled his lips tight to prevent them from spilling out. He knew instinctively that they were ridiculous. But a hundred more unwise words built in his chest, and he did not know from where they sprang.

He knew, quite plainly, that she was not beautiful. By none of the measures of pulchritude that he had learned across his wide and lengthy travels could she be called so.

But her face, wide and pale like the moon, called out to him beyond his better judgement. He wanted to tell her that in Abrassa, that same moon that they saw each night was worshipped as a woman and a lady, considered the most beautiful of the eternal beings. The moon brought the night, and a respite from the heat, and a kindly glow that fended off the darkness. The moon created of everything it touched a sanctuary, purified the nightmares of those twisting beneath her silky beams. The moon was beautiful, and beloved by all.

For an instant he saw a goddess within her. He saw the moon in her face, and the darkness of the night in the depths of her eyes, and the scatter of stars in her freckles. He saw a woman who was fierce and proud and determined beyond all else to carve something worthy from the wreckage of her life.

But when he blinked, he found that the image was gone. Before him was a normal girl, meek and sensible and pretty enough in a plain sort of way. Still she stared out at him, her wide brown eyes boring into his, and he was compelled to speak.

"Didn't you tell me," he said, and his own voice rumbled in his chest against his knees as he crouched, and he felt how strange his position was "on the second night, that I was being stupid for clinging to my heartbreak? Didn't you say that one day our hearts would be whole again, whether by patience or by accident? Don't you trust your own words? Didn't you mean it?"

"I did!"

"Then bloody act like it!" He was comforted by how natural the words sounded in his voice. Finally, after so many thoughts that seemed intruders in his head, he felt himself again. "If you're not over him now, or not beautiful now, or fucking whatever, then work on it, for fuck's sake. As much as I hate the little green fucker, none of this is his fault, and you know you can do better than blame him or wallow in self-pity."

Her stare hardened.

"Oh, what do you know?" she spat, completely unconcerned by her usual manners "You're beautiful."

He almost choked. He had never been told so in his entire life.

"I bet that you always have been." Continued the princess, an ugly spite coursing through her words "I bet that you've never had to worry about the way that you look. I bet that you've never had to put any thought or work in at all. How can you understand what it means to me?"

Any of the flustering that had come upon him at her previous words was gone. He could feel the anger rise inside him, coiling in his gut as he crouched. He remained hunched and small as he shouted back at her.

"Oh, you can fuck right off with that!" he barked "How the fuck do you know? I've never known either! Boys in Abrassa don't get to know whether they're beautiful or not, only if they're strong or worthy. And even if I was, what does it matter? What does it fucking matter that I was beautiful, because I'm still here now and it's still not my bloody fault. You say it like I'm the reason you're stuck, but not everything is someone's fault. Sometimes you're dealt a bad hand and you just have to fucking deal with it."

He had lost sight of her face in the course of his rage. Now that it came back to him, he saw that she was red, and looked quite ashamed of herself. She bit her lip and ran a hand through her hair, using the movement to break eye contact.

"I'm sorry." She conceded with a sigh. "You're right."

"Tch. When am I not?"

After rolling her eyes at him, she continued.

"I admit that you're right in this one, specific circumstance. But how am I to work on this, exactly? I freeze up at my own reflection, and Izuku's presence poisons me slowly."

"Ignore 'em. Don't look in the mirror, or see the girl on the other side as someone other than you. Hell, cover it up for all I care; I don't need one. And as for broccoli boy, you've needed some distance from him for a good long while."

"How does one create distance? I love him as a friend, and I'm not prepared to be as horribly mannered as you are."

On instinct he began to protest, but backed down immediately. He could recognise that he did not exactly have the comportment of a gentleman. He didn't want one, anyway.

"Right now you still treat him like he's the end of the bloody world. And frankly, that pisses me off-" It pissed him off just like her knots around the bells earlier had pissed him off: without his knowing why. He realised that he had unknowingly said something dangerous, and hurried on. "because the little green freak doesn't fucking deserve it. Call on him like a normal person, for once, leave him alone as often as you can."

"Won't he notice that I'm avoiding him?"

He twisted his lips. He couldn't believe that they were caught up on such a petty detail.

"And?"

"I don't want to hurt him like that!"

He resisted telling her that he, quite honestly, did.

"Then tell him you're busy! You are busy! You're getting married tomorrow, god'ssakes."

She pulled a face at him, mischief returning.

"Yes," she said "to you."

He had to hold back the smile that pulled across his lips at the sight of her cheerful again. He did a lot of holding back when he was around her, and he found that it was unlike him. In that particular instant, he told himself that he was just happy to stop arguing.

"Oi, you're not exactly a prime specimen either, moon face."

"I know- wait, moon face?"

Had he really said that aloud? He had only meant to be lightly ribbing and perhaps a little facetious, not to let the inner workings of his mind out. The more time he spent with her, the more he felt the need to tightly regulate his words and expressions. She made him feel like he was losing control.

"I'll keep making up stupid nicknames for you until you give up on cabbage knight." He explained with both of his eyebrows raised, and a faint (and false) look of amusement.

"That's not fair! And how will you know, anyway?"

"If you make it as obvious as you did when you were crushing on him, I'll have no problem at all."

She glared at him in mock outrage. The pink of her cheeks had returned.

"Oh, I've had quite enough of your council now, thank you very much." She said "Let's just get back to the others."

"Hey, you might consider some bloody gratitude, given that I've solved your problems again, for free."

He stood, and began dusting off his cape. She looked up at him from her crouching position beneath, watching, and once he was done he was surprised to find that she had extended her hand up above her, reaching out to him. He looked warily at it, unsure of what she wanted. She blinked expectantly, waving her palm a bit. At last it hit him, and he pulled her up.

He noted the strange swing of her body, as all of its weight was put behind his hands, and the billow of her hair as she came up. She smelled of orange flower oil. She flashed him a small smile as she spoke to him, and he couldn't help but focus on the pink of her lips as they parted and touched to form words.

"You're right," she laughed "thank-you."

XXX

Katsuki Bakugou knew that he was not one for physical contact. Not very much, at least. Not usually. He did not mind it, neither did he wish for it. It was an unnecessary, an indifferent, an extra; somebody else's joy. He had only ever craved it in the nadirs of his first, terrible, all-consuming love, and now that he was outside of it he saw the desire once more as ridiculous.

He also knew that Ochaco Uraraka one for physical contact. She was a habitually, ludicrously lonely girl, weak for the slightest brush of fabric if she could only overcome her equally habitual and ludicrous guilt.

He knew this – and yet he still found himself surprised to be holding her hand.

When he had pulled her up in the treasury, she had simply not let go of him. She had smiled and spoke as though there were no question about it at all, and he had let himself be swept along because he had never seen her selfishness in the daylight before.

When he had seen her beg, and weep, and cling to him like a tree's roots to the rock, it was always in the night-time, and always under the mesmerism of sleep-haze. Once the sun struck her flesh he had seen her turn stiff, and all of her emotion showed as though she had never wanted it to escape her.

Perhaps he had thought that he would only see her soften in the darkness under the stars, and that he would be the only one to see it. Perhaps that was why he was now struck by the entwinement of their fingers and the graze of her calloused fingertips against his knuckles. It was quite unlike her, but it was also quite unlike him.

He allowed it because he had no reason not to, and yet he still felt that she was somehow taking advantage of him. It both irritated and relieved him to think that he had become such a non-threatening figure to her that she dared such contact, and the contradicting emotions swirled around each other in his head, occupying him enough that he did nothing to break away.

They passed through the winding corridors and cold halls in silence, side by side, their paces slow and even. Alongside them the stained glass and grey stone swept past, and the coloured refractions of mountain light washed over them in crystalline waves. The path seemed longer than he had known it before. Every second he was aware of her wintry touch and the glaze of sweat on his palms, of the long delays between her awkward little grins. He felt the rise and fall of his chest with every breath and the thumping of her pulse against his.

They wound around a sharp corner, past the hall of stars, and into a corridor lined with colourful lacquered doors. He watched the chromas change out of the corners of his peripheral vision, trying to distract himself, and suddenly his hand was empty again. Uraraka had pulled her hand from his and turned away from him.

"Oh, Shouto." She said, and at that moment he noticed the half-scarred boy across the way from them. He scolded himself internally for not having noticed; his two-toned hair must have blended into the vibrant woodwork.

The sickly boy looked them over. His eyes moved slowly and with purpose, unrushed, wandering between them from their hands to their faces. His visage evinced no reaction. At last, he spoke, and he was laconic as usual.

"There you are." He said.

Bakugou scowled. Just like Deku, there was something about this boy that raised his hackles. He had the same look of self-satisfaction, only slightly gaunter.

"You're here too." He spat "And none of us are where we're meant to be. Let's get bloody moving."

Todoroki's face remained blank, but Uraraka glowered at him.

"We know that perfectly well. He kindly came to look for us, so there's no need to be rude."

He clicked his tongue. All of her previous softness was gone.

"We goin' or not?"

She huffed and nodded her head. She fell in beside Todoroki as they walked, whilst Bakugou carved on ahead, and soon they were at the grand doors of the banquet hall. He did not hold the doors open for them when he entered first.

The hall greeted him with a crowd of faces that he barely recognised. The pointy-faced girl with the strange earlobes leaned in a corner, tuning a Stavilarish instrument, a floating set of robes danced alongside the upholsterer with the flaxen hair, and the thick-lipped bakerboy stood talking to the blue knight. He had seen all of those faces before but, he was loath to admit, found them hard to distinguish from this high angle. He knew them from far beneath, from the viewpoint of a bird.

He scanned the hall until he found the outcrop of red and pink hair that marked his friends, and stomped his way over, paying no mind to the people he shoved to the side in the process. They greeted him with amused smiles, and continued with their light chatter whilst he sat beside them.

They talked and laughed of how strange it was that Bakugou was to be the first married of all of them, and how differently their plans had worked out, and he nodded along disinterestedly, watching the people mill about him.

He was slightly bored. Every thought turned back to his imminent marriage, though he tried to strangle them back. He could not help but think of the few Abrassan weddings that he had attended when he was young, and how he had thought that he would never have one of his own.

Old Man Priam had tried to plan one for him, of course. It was not unusual to be married young in Abrassa, the only limit being that you had to prove yourself honourable in some way beforehand. He had spent so much time deflecting this offer that he now could not really remember the details. There had been some equally unwilling girl, whom his parents did not care for, and a surprise party that he had learned of beforehand and subsequently avoided. He had said that he would think of marriage when he had become a knight – he felt at least a little victory in the fact he had managed to instead become a king.

(He might, if he had been a little more considerate, also have thought of his parents, and how surprised they would be if they heard where he was now and who he was betrothed to. They had not heard from him for many years now, and did not know what had become of him. He too did not know what had become of them, but cared very little.)

He sat there, mulling over the memories of the desert and the heat and the wine and the bride's tears for quite some time, until he noticed Uraraka slipping away. He wondered if he was the only one to notice it. Everyone else was far too busy decorating and organising to see the way that she drew closer to the door, nervously smiling as she passed from one group to the other. Had anyone else noticed the shuffle of her feet to dampen the noise of her steps, her hunch as if to shrink away? Had anybody else noticed her hands tugging nervously at her sleeves, the biting of her lips between sentences? He watched her ungraceful meanderings for a moment longer, and suddenly he could see her no more.

For a reason beyond his understanding this put him at unease. Something about her uncomfortable, shifting gaze before she had disappeared, something about the rest of the hall continuing its rhythmic work, felt wrong to him. He stood, ignoring his friends' surprise, and tried to see over the crowd, but he still could not find her.

A feeling beyond his comprehension welled in his heart, and before he had realised it he was pushing his way to the doors. He yanked them open and ran out into the empty corridor, feeling its terrible empty echo reverberate inside his bones. Where was she? He heard the flutter of fabric around a corner to his left, barely audible over the babble of the hall, and dashed after it. In the gloom the pattern on the running carpets coiled like snakes beneath him, and his breaths were stuck with dust.

He came to a halt and squinted through the dark, trying to stifle the heaving of his chest. Through the rise and fall of his chest and the bubble rising in his throat, his eyes whipped around, searching for which of the passages at the star-shaped junction she had taken. He saw the indistinct outlines of her usual long robes at the end of the fourth way, and made to walk after her, but before he could take the first of those many steps, someone grabbed him and slammed him against the wall.

He looked up. This, already, caught him off guard. He was not used to looking up at people, and he was not used to being grabbed unawares. He was especially unused to these things from a girl.

The girl whom he presently looked up at, and who had grabbed him unawares, was Momo Yaoyorozu. She wore an ugly snarl as she faced him, and he immediately scowled back at her.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" he barked. She shushed him furiously.

"The same thing as you:" she whispered, but her voice was harsh "chasing after Ochaco. The only difference is that I have good reason."

He yanked his arm away from her. She was stronger than he had thought.

"According to who, exactly?"

"According to anybody with an ounce of sense, yourself excluded. I'm following her because she is my friend, and has been for two years now, and because if she is troubled I want her to tell me. Why are you following her?"

He did not know. Worry, probably. He did not know why he worried.

"She's going to be my wife."

"And I wish that she were not. You have no reason to be here. You are not what she needs in hours such as these."

"For your fucking information, miss high-and-mighty, I have been before."

Yaoyorozu raised her hand as if to strike him, but never brought it down. Her lips were pulled strangely at the corners, and she looked close to tears.

"Anyone could be!" she cried, and it was the first time her voice came above a reprimanding whisper "She would fall into the arms of any boy who holds them out long enough!"

The words cut right through him.

He had seen it. He had seen her kiss a boy for nothing more than a few nice words and hold hands with another only because he was weak. Perhaps he had known it all along – that it was not through any special attribute of his that she had cried to him in the night, that she would have told her secrets to anyone who had cared to ask. He was nothing exceptional to her. The idea writhed on his tongue, bitter, bitter, bitter.

"Do you have any idea what that feels like?" continued Yaoyorozu, her voice hoarse. The water still rolled at the peripheries of her eyes. "That she would sooner tell her woes to a stranger like you than to me? I want to ask, I want to hear, but no matter what she gives me that smile, that smile as though I am the one who will break from it! And now the same with her wedding! Her own wedding – the day that was supposed to be her happiest on this earth, the day that I was supposed to look on at in joy – inspires her stoicism and practicality, and she creates around herself walls of Lasandunian ice that I cannot possibly tear down."

"But you still followed her."

"You did too."

They stared at each other. She breathed deep, steadying herself, and when she looked back down on him the border of salt around her eyes was gone. He wondered when she had lowered her hands.

"Why are you here?" she said again, but there was something more to it now. Something like what did he want from Ochaco, what was he aiming for?

"I've made an oath not to hurt her." He said. He knew that it was not an answer.

"Do you think that by helping her she will owe you something?"

"What? No."

"Do you think that this will absolve you of trying to slit her throat?"

He bit his lip and glared. He could not say anything to this girl that would exculpate him; silence was far nobler than any of the words boiling in his throat.

"I will follow her." Yaoyorozu said, and she leaned back from him, already turning away. "I don't care if you follow me, so long as you stay away. If you dare go near us I shall do far worse things to you than any butcher's boy."

He followed her at a distance.

The idea of turning back now was too infuriating, too humiliating, to bear carrying through. Not that the current turn of events was not humiliating in its own way – he never thought that he would endure hiding away behind an alcove as he did now, and he strained to hear the two girls' voices. They were at the back of the castle, where the ceilings were high and cavernous, and the echo's manifold voices lodged in the stone.

He heard the rustle of fabric, and assumed that it was a hug.

"You were going to head to the crypts, weren't you?"

The black-haired girl's voice was low and soft. He wondered whether she whispered only to spite him as he listened on. He could not hear the princess' reply.

"Why all alone?" she continued "I would have come with you. I will."

"I didn't want you to see me hesitate. I still haven't been able to go down."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, I don't know. I don't think that I am afraid, only-"

The shifting of feet and a long sigh.

"Oh, Ochaco…"

"I keep thinking of my mother's spirit, when she came to me and told me of this game. I keep seeing her face, all pale and waxy, and her dead eyes, her eyes so dead, and they stared like she couldn't bear the sight of me. She told me I was to be married. Even though I know that it was not her soul, that it was the spirits of the game, I see her face, and I feel as though I have brought shame upon her."

"My love, how could she be ashamed of you? I am proud of all that you have done, for what you have committed to do. You are to be married now of your own choice. Though I hate the thought of it, you have taken it into your hands; it is yours to fulfil now."

Uraraka broke away. Her back was turned to him, and all that he could see of her was the edge of her arms and her wide woven sleeves. Over her shoulder Yaoyorozu looked past her, straight at Bakugou in his hiding spot, and he felt his blood chill.

"Why do you hate the thought of it?" said the princess, her voice meek.

"Because I want to see you happy, my dear, and-" she looked at her small friend's face then back to the boy in the alcove "and because I am worried."

"Why are you worried?"

"Because of my dream on new year's night. Dreamer's night." Again her eyes flicked back between her interlocutor and her silent listener "I saw your wedding. I saw that loathsome Bakugou boy," (he had to fight every instinct to swear loudly at her) "and you, at the altar, and Tsuyu there to bless you. I saw blood, Ochaco – I saw you bleed and a look of shock upon your face – and worst of all, I felt a relief about it. I cannot escape the memory, and it disgusts me every time."

Her tears were back again, but this time they spilled freely, dripping from her high cheekbones down to her collar. The princess pulled at her sleeves and drew her into a hug. Her head was buried in the taller girl's collarbone, and Bakugou could barely hear her.

"I know that you love me," she said "I know that you would only be relieved to see me safe. I know that you worry, but I am sure, I am sure things will be alright. We will be alright."

Yaoyorozu, nestled in her neck, gently shook her head.

A/N: I must once again deeply apologise, for I know that I will almost certainly have to delay the next chapter, and perhaps the one after that. You will already be familiar with my erratic work schedule, and the temporary relief that I thought I would be afforded, but unfortunately I still do not have time to simply sit and write. I want to write to the best of my ability, and I don't want to compromise the length of my chapters, so I will try to post whenever I can. In the mean time, I would certainly love to hear what you think of this chapter's developments, or hear your theories as to what will happen on the day of the wedding!

You may notice that I tend to reuse sentences or phrases throughout my work (e.g. "bitter, bitter, bitter" was used in chapter 12). This is inspired by ancient works by poets such as Homer (485-425BC), who would often reuse language for rhythmic purposes and to create the idea of a repeated theme. I personally really like it, as it is an easy way to tie pieces together and create an older, more "fairytale-like" feeling, but I'm sure many writers would deeply disapprove. What do you think?