this is the first chapter that draws reeeeeally heavily on the events of 'this moronic episode' and 'this dreadful spectacle,' so i'd definitely go check those out first if you haven't already, for MAXIMUM IMPACT.
also: this chapter is 98.9% making out.
enjoy~!
Katsuki sees red when Uraraka claims she 'needs' Deku, and not just because it touches a giant, throbbing nerve (although it absolutely fucking does, that she thinks she needs anyone other than the person who's actually here, literally supporting her), but also because she's already doing the damn thing, and doesn't need King Fucking Shit Idiot to pat her on the head and tell her she's doing a good job for her to find the strength to continue.
Disabusing dipshits of their chump-ass assumptions about Uraraka's 'comparatively limited' abilities and overall worthiness as a hero already commands an annoying and truly baffling amount of his time and attention; he shouldn't have to convince her, too, least of all while she's juggernauting a fucking building!
"You know good and goddamn well what you're capable of without Deku feeding you filler-ass platitudes and stating the blatantly fucking obvious. The only thing you 'need' from that shithole nerd is for him to do his job with some proper fuckin' urgency. The rest is up to you," he rumbles, liquid adrenaline pumping through his veins as he adds, "and me."
Katsuki flexes his fingers at her nape, indulging a wayward impulse without forethought or clear purpose. Subsequently, Uraraka shivers. He's too caught up beating back inappropriate follow-up impulses to deduce the otherwise obvious cause behind this effect, however, and mistakenly chalks her shudder up to the cold –which for him actually comes as a huge relief. Lashed by icy, high-altitude winds and still soaked from Mizu's initial attack, Katsuki's been freezing his balls off since they landed, but he's been reluctant to do anything about it with Uraraka seeming so sensitive to the slightest movement. Now that she's signaled she's cold, too, he can finally justify taking action to warm them both up.
Galvanized, Katsuki advances, improvising as usual, relying on his instincts to guide him. Somehow, this culminates in him pinning her against the nearest vertical surface (the casing of one of the Registry's legion of industrial fan units, he'll realize later), trying to remember how swallowing works.
"It's not 'obvious' to me that I can keep this up much longer! And it's not okay for you to decide what I do and don't need!" She's spitting mad, genuinely offended, and she's fucking glowing, restored to a healthy hue either from exertion or her own palpable fury. Either way, he's fucking mesmerized.
Katsuki doesn't have to manufacture his exasperation, though, starry-eyes be damned, "It is when your judgment goes to shit!" On the face of it, trying to argue she 'needs' Deku to talk her through this and in the next breath stressing that she needs emergency goddamn relief is self-contradictory horseshit. How the fuck did she imagine Deku was even going to get a hold of her emergency relief team if he refused to hang the hell up? Furthermore, "For fuck's sake, you succeeding isn't contingent on Deku's ass-poor excuse for a pep talk –you're floating a fuckmothering skyscraper! You turned the Registry into a giant fuckoff inflatable! How the hell is that not validation enough?" Fucking infuriating –and all the more so for how deeply the sentiment is rooted in the raw need to touch her, at this, the literal worst possible moment, when he should just be happy she's still conscious and lucid, not skeeving on her like a fucking degenerate—
"You're not listening-!" Uraraka charges, and she isn't wrong, but that doesn't prevent him from throwing the accusation immediately back in her face,
"Neither the fuck are you!" Given the right provocation, Uraraka can be quick to anger, but bringing her to her current level of pink-eared rage has historically taken real effort, even for him. Right now, though, every swing he takes –no matter how lacking in finesse—fucking lands. That's probably more to do with it being easier to concentrate her wrath than focus on the ludicrous agony she must be enduring, but Katsuki's sweet on the idea that his gloves-off, penetrating cruelty also holds a fractional claim to her heightened susceptibility. "What you think you need is objectively fucking wrong, and I could give a shit about Deku's irrelevant dumbfuck feelings!"
Distantly, through a haze of intense frustration, bitter acrimony, and odd arousal, it occurs to him he must've come over here intending (on some level) to set her down and get to solving their mutual hypothermia problem. Yet here he continues to stand, in the liminal space where Uraraka's personal bubble once existed, openly staring at her mouth.
There's a hard pause, when she realizes.
Then, Uraraka's knees give way, and he grabs for her –never-fucking-mind that her gravity's switched off—because his reflex response when Uraraka falls will always be to fucking catch her.
The atmosphere changes, thickens, as he pulls her legs around him and grips her tight.
He wants to kiss her.
He won't, because he's not a goddamn animal and is therefore capable of exercising basic fucking restraint; and because he's operating purely on concussion logic at the moment and doesn't fully trust on his own judgment; and above all else, because none of this is about what he wants.
This is about Uraraka, who's probably in the worst pain of her life but toughing it out like a fucking champ to save a city packed with ungrateful trolls and asshole skeptics who are guaranteed to downplay her achievement here, or try to credit it to him somehow, or deny the structure was ever in danger of collapse and raise the question of whether or not she was actually holding the building up at all.
This is about supporting her in whatever way he can, keeping her awake, alert, and actively engaged. No way in hell he takes that to mean he's entitled to make a move –though he's pretty sure it obliges him to reciprocate, in the event she comes on to him, instead.
To that end, an invitation, enclosed in an unambiguous incitement: "Only one thing matters right now, Uraraka, and it's got fuck-all to do with Deku." It's the opening gambit in what he expects will be a fraught contest of incremental escalation and foregone conclusions –but Uraraka's got her own agenda.
Ferociously, "You're such an absolute prick!"
Katsuki swells with delighted pride and amazement. He's heard her swear plenty over the years (and she's actually pretty impressive once she gets going), so getting Uraraka to cuss isn't necessarily an accomplishment, but getting her to call him a 'prick' –and mean it—definitely fucking is.
A flashbang comeback is well the fuck on its way out of his mouth –until suddenly it isn't anymore; until suddenly Uraraka's suctioned to his fucking face and comebacks are no longer an option because he can't very well speak while his brain is fucking melting.
/-/
Katsuki barely registers she's kissing him before he feels her start to pull away, and the powerful déjà vu this triggers briefly fractures his sense of what's real. They've been here before: with her, kissing him out of the blue and immediately retreating; and him, pressing the advantage and urgently gathering her back to him because turnabout is fair fucking play.
Except, three years have passed and it's her in tremendous pain instead of him and she's more on the spectrum of flavors including bile than candy ('Sweetness' she is currently fucking not), and this time, when he refuses to let her go without giving at least as good as he's gotten, Uraraka doesn't balk. She commits, surprising him by straining to push herself closer even as he presses her flush against the fan, and angling her mouth to deepen the kiss, boldly demanding. Katsuki yields, no coaxing necessary, feeling pretty fucking confident at this point that he hasn't misconstrued another crafty attempt to mama bird him emergency medication; and she yields in turn, becoming pliable under the roaming ministrations of his hands, and releasing a shuddering sigh that condenses between them into an icy vapor.
And then they're well and truly making out, at the summit of this shattered-to-fuck husk of a tower, and it's…surreal, more than anything. They're as close as they possibly could be without removing any clothing –although, pin in that—and tongues are now very much in play, and unbelievably, when his hands find the generous curve of her ass, she rolls her hips against him like she's riding a wave and cinches her legs tight around his waist, and it's the hottest slice of what the fuck he's ever been served and it feels fucking amazing but it's also the reason he's having an existential fucking crisis –because the elaborate scaffolding of denial and suppression he built to keep her at arm's length is all falling away, leaving him exposed, cold with regret and self-loathing. Why had he been so bound and damn determined to put this shit off? They were always going to end up here, and he was an obstinate fuckhead for thinking he could will it otherwise.
"Bakugou," Uraraka breathes, a hushed bid for his attention that carves through his compunctions like a knife –and drives her inexplicably backward, away from him. Operating under the fevered assumption this is a maneuver, a coy withdrawal meant to lure, Katsuki lets himself be led, following her until the back of her head bumps against the fan behind her. The pound of his heart is deafening as he closes in, eager to resume hostilities, but a centimeter, a millimeter, the width of a fucking whisper away, Uraraka stays his advance. "Wait," she commands, uncharacteristically austere. Katsuki obeys, slamming to a halt with all the whiplash suddenness of a bird smacking into an unseen window pane. "Don't be mean to Deku."
Unknown to Uraraka, in this moment, under these specific conditions, he's primed to agree to just about motherfucking anything she might ask of him, without a second thought. But this pathological antagonism business he's got going on with Deku is written into his goddamn genetic code; any potential brats he might have will pass it on to potential brats of their own, and thus it will be borne on through the generations into eternity. Unless she means to fundamentally alter his DNA by way of overwriting every last one of his billion-sundry 'be mean to Deku' protocols, the stipulation's a non-starter.
Hence, "Bite me," he growls.
Incredibly, Uraraka wastes no time doing exactly that, shearing through the negative space separating them like the intangible fucking air it is to take his lower lip between her teeth.
Which, holy shit, what.
Then she rocks against him, again –holy shit— and he is not fucking ready for it, and his knees snap so taut they go out from under him, and they go sliding down the casing together in a fumbling heap, his metal knee pads striking concrete with a heavy, piercing 'clang!' that makes the slow, sharp throb of his head and left ear immeasurably worse.
Uraraka's back on the offensive before he even has a chance to settle into a comfortable kneeling position, leaning over him –she's slipped upward and askew somewhat in the spill—to claim another kiss with none of the exploratory tentativeness of the first. This kiss is decidedly fucking angry, and rough, like she's determined to make him submit. (That isn't going to happen, obviously, but Katsuki's feeling generous enough to at least indulge the attempt.) She's got his head tipped so far back it's practically perpendicular to the rest of his body, and she's everywhere, brazenly leveraging her (temporary) height advantage and sweeping low for an open-mouthed kiss; breaking away to tease and prompt chase; veering left to press her lips heatedly to his jawline; finishing with her teeth, tugging at the lobe of his ear just enough to hurt.
A guttural sound scrapes out of him, abrasive and unexpected, and provokes a direct counterattack. The hand he's got skimming up the length of her spine leaps the final distance to tangle in her hair, possessively tight, and drags her head back to bare the line of her throat to him. And then he bites down, hard, where the slope of her jaw meets the tender flesh of her neck. Her skin tastes like sweat and ash, and the protruding pink collar of her uniform is jutting awkwardly into his cheekbone, and for a hot minute he's convinced it's too much, too far, that he's overstepped some crucial boundary and hurt her, but it's all fucking worth it when she makes this…liquid noise around the shape of his name, and sinks herself –firmly—into his lap.
The next thing he knows, she's kissing him again and they're tumbling sideways and there's no adequate goddamn language to express how phenomenally fucking good it feels to lay her flat and press her into the concrete and trace his tongue over the shell of her ear while she writhes beneath him, and shit but this is spinning out of control, fast, and he's got zero fucking wherewithal to pump the brakes –until Uraraka's entire body tenses, and a poorly-stifled sob escapes her as her arms slide off his shoulders and flop boneless to the ground on either side of her.
Katsuki freezes, jerks back, beginning to push up, off of her, already berating himself for getting so caught up that he stopped accounting for the strain of the building she's carrying—
"Don't stop," she pleads, breathless, "please."
Katsuki considers her carefully, ignoring the powerful effect Uraraka begging him to kiss her has on his ego and focusing instead on the size of her pupils, her level of alertness, the color of her skin, and the specific speed and rhythm of her heart beating against his chest. He swallows past the ugly thickness in his throat, the insistent, sick terror that she's sustaining real, lasting damage, and gently lowers himself onto his elbows on top of her, keeping most of his weight concentrated in his forearms so as not to inhibit her breathing.
He dusts a kiss across her temple, her forehead, the tip of her nose, a reassurance meant as much for her as for himself. She watches him, inscrutable.
Narrowing his eyes, "What," he scowls, instantly on the defensive.
"Will…could you…?" Uraraka trails off, leaving the question open.
"Out with it already, or no, I fucking couldn't."
"T-take off your mask," she finishes with shaky confidence. Smirking, ego now reaching cosmic proportions, he lifts one hand to fulfill her request, feeling the kohl around his eyes smear as he does so.
Uraraka blinks up at him, brow knitting as her mouth folds into a familiar pout.
"You're so…" she begins, and his smirk widens into a grin in anticipation of the coming insult, "pretty." Katsuki's neck and face feel suddenly much like his hands do in that split-second before combustion happens, but he doesn't get the opportunity to be embarrassed or mortally outraged, because she follows this sledgehammer-to-the-fucking-skull of a compliment up with a wincing gasp, clearly in anguish.
He shimmies his arms closer to her body, cups his hands over her mochi-round cheeks, and leans his forehead against hers.
"Steady, Angel Face," he tells her.
Uraraka shakes her head, and with tears in her eyes: "It's too much…please, it's too much."
/-/
Six years ago, Present Mic, together with an entire stadium full of blind fuckmunch chauvinists, booed him for fighting her seriously. Subsequently, she tried to murder him with the stadium –on the damn sly. A little over two years ago, the team of pros coordinating rescue efforts after the Sumida Bridge collapse tried to sideline her, certain they knew her limits and wanting to use her as sparingly as possible in order to avoid maxing her out and 'rendering her useless.' She spent the next several hours lifting not just people, but entire fleets of vehicles, even fallen sections of the bridge, out of the river below, saving more lives that day by herself than the rest of the assembled first responders, combined.
And last year…last year, he watched from her bedside as she lay dying, and he resigned himself to the certainty that she would. He committed himself to the bleak inevitability of a future without her, and to nightmarish visions of the bloody vengeance he'd be compelled to exact on her behalf. Yet here she still is, alive and well (relatively speaking).
It's bullshit that anyone –himself included—dares to doubt her in the first place, but the fact remains: Uraraka thrives, and has always thrived when people underestimate her. Proving extras wrong about counting her out is her goddamn raison d'etre.
It's why he's respected her from the get-go. It's what made him reorder his whole frigging existence to make space for her to fit. It's why he's nutballs fucking crazy about her, why he maybe always has been, and it's why he trusts her to persevere now, even if she refuses to trust as much herself.
It's also why, when Uraraka insists this is 'too much,' implicitly admitting defeat, he dips his mouth to her ear and challenges, "Drop it, then."
That does it: she stiffens, and in a deeply wounded voice, "W-what?" He pulls back, wipes through the new tears with his thumbs, purposefully holds her gaze.
"If it's 'too much,' then drop it. You said yourself you wanted to." For the longest time, Uraraka's expression reflects shock and betrayal in equal measure.
Fight me if you gotta, dammit, Katsuki wills, just keep fucking fighting.
Gradually, her face hardens with spiteful resolve, and it gives him the goddamn palpitations to behold.
"I…can do this," she asserts through clenched teeth.
"I'll help you out," he continues, heedless of her weak sauce conviction, "I'll press your fingers together, and you can drop the Registry before this shit fucking kills you. Problem solved." With great effort and much grimacing, she manages to lift her head a few precious centimeters off the ground, and that button nose of hers scrunches with adorable indignation as she draws up so close her lips ghost over his.
Uraraka repeats, "I can do this." Katsuki's face splits wide into a haughty smile, and he nudges forward for another brief, searing kiss.
"Yeah, no shit," he replies, also repeating himself, albeit from earlier in the evening. "Really shouldn't have taken you all damn night to realize, but way to finally catch the fuck up." She huffs, disapproving. "Idiot," he adds, fondly.
She looks like she might be about to clap back, but she spasms before she can, biting her lip to hold in a cry and screwing her eyes shut tight, and all Katsuki can think about is what in fuck could possibly be keeping Deku, and how badly he wants to shovel that green shit's face into the dirt for lolly-gagging.
"Oi, Uraraka," he says, "look at me." Her only response is to whimper pitifully. He taps lightly at her cheeks, and slides his knees up under him so he's less lying on top of her and more loosely straddling her. Anything he can think of to ease the load, so to speak. "Uraraka," he tries again, and desperation sets in when she starts actively, uncontrollably crying.
"Please…" She wails, and Katsuki doesn't know what specifically she's asking for –for relief, for the pain to end, for him to do something— but ultimately, he's powerless here. There's little he can do, except be here, suffering alongside her, refusing to let her give up on herself.
Although, while he's being insufferably fucking schmaltzy anyway, why not try making an ass of himself, and seeing what that wins him?
"Ochako," he grates, his voice hoarse and unrecognizable and his heart thudding so fast and so hard he thinks he may actually be having a cardiac fucking episode, "I lo—"
The sky cracks open for the second time tonight, cutting across whatever horrifying sentiment he may or may not have been about to share. Katsuki rolls to his knees beside Uraraka, both arms extended in readiness. Unfortunately, thanks to all that gratuitous fucking head trauma, the swiftness of the maneuver unbalances him, and he spends a dizzying several seconds struggling not to tip right the hell over again.
That's probably why it takes him so long to resolve what he's seeing –which is the air, shattering like glass overhead, ten, maybe fifteen meters up, and –two, three, four—individuals free-falling out of an invisible chasm.
"The fuck—?"
wanna know something super stupid? the thing i'm most worried about in this chapter is whether or not 'weak sauce' should be one word or two.
other notes:
-you may have noticed this ends in a REALLY SHITTY PLACE. like, probably the worst, most shitty place it possibly could have...? and that, dear reader, is because there's...*deep sigh* going to be an eleventh chapter. it won't be like, a *full* chapter, more a short, one-scene omake, 500-ish words MAX, but it will resolve the final plot threads i've left hanging here, and round things out a bit more so it doesn't feel quite so abrupt and leaves us in a better place for the Epilogue Porn i'm planning (see my tumblr for a sneak peek of said prons). ANYWHO. omake chapter should be out sooner rather than later due to its projected length and the fact that i've already got some of it written.
-also: due to my oft-mentioned lack of self-control, i have become inadvertently obsessed with another kacchako fic idea of the Bodyguard AU variety, and will begin working to bring that insane vision to life in short order, as well. stay tuned for shenanigans.
-and: i'm...doing the twitters now? ([ATSIGN]IBafflegab)
-bye for now I LOVE YOU ALL THANK YOU SO MUCH AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
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[last chapter: jirou wins the pool.]