Shiozaki couldn't sleep that night. She just lay on her bed like an empty shell, vaguely watching dark blue shadows pass over the ceiling. She wasn't even sleeping face-down like she normally did for comfort; she could feel her vines digging into her back underneath her, but she felt too numb to care.

What…in God's name…did that punk mean?! There was no way he thought she was joking. She never joked about such a thing and he knew it. If he wanted to say no, why didn't he just say it? Did he think she couldn't take it?

And…why did he say no? Even if she found it too conceited to think he was definitely into her, all her friends seemed to assume the same thing, so it wasn't just her. So what exactly did she do wrong that he'd respond like that?

She folded her arm over her face, covering her eyes.

It's totally me, isn't it?

Unbeknownst to her, just one building over amidst the sound of running water, Bakugo was standing alone, hunched over his bathroom sink, gripping the white ceramic with rattling fingers as water dripped in swathes from his face. Looking up, he gazed into his own weary eyes, and thought to himself:

It's all because of me.

"Woah, you look like hell."

Shiozaki turned to see Tokage looking concerned as they exited the classroom at the end of their morning classes, staring at her like she had just crawled out of some morbidly fascinating traffic accident.

"What…? Oh." She raised a hand to her face, feeling a noticeable depression beneath both her eyes. "It's nothing…I just couldn't sleep last night."

"How come?"

"…Don't worry about it."

She immediately knew she had taken too long to answer. Within seconds, Tokage was in her face, squinting like she was trying to find something in her eyes.

"C'mon, talk to me, girl."

"It's really nothing! Can we just go and eat?"

She turned down the corridor to go downstairs, but she barely made it a step before Tokage grabbed her by the wrist. In a desperate bid to get her friend to leave her alone before she lost it, she whirled around and yelled:

"I said I'm-"

"I SAID I'M FINE, NOW BEAT IT!"

The doors of the adjacent classroom burst open and Bakugo lunged out, his face flushed and his jaw twisted in a scowl that looked more hurt than angry. He wrenched himself from Sero's grip before storming off down the corridor.

Both the girls stared wordlessly after him for a second - then Tokage released her grip on Shiozaki with a sigh.

"What did he do?"

"…and then he told me to stop screwing around."

Shiozaki slumped forward onto the cafeteria table as she deflated. Her food remained untouched beside her, while Tokage munched quietly on the last of her fish fillet, staring across the table at her with a look of grim solemnity that would be appropriate for a funeral.

"Wow," she finally said after twenty minutes of letting Shiozaki air her grievances into continuous, unbroken silence. "So, uh…that's it?"

"Yes." Shiozaki didn't lift her head off the table. "We barely talked on the way back."

"How did he say it? Like…did it sound like he was joking, or trying to see what you'd say back, or-?"

"He sounded like he meant it."

"Ooh, that's bad. Did you text him?"

"How are you even supposed to respond to that…?"

Tokage's silence told Shiozaki that she didn't have the answer either. Another question that had been keeping her awake last night bubbled to the forefront of her mind, and she quickly let it out.

"All this time, I was so sure he liked me back…was I just seeing what I wanted to see?"

Tokage thought for a while - then said, "No way. We've all seen him around you. If he doesn't like you, I'm queen shit of fuck mountain."

"So…what? There's something holding him back? Is that it?"

"Let's not assume things. But if you really wanna find out…"

Tokage fell silent again. Shiozaki peered up at her, and saw her staring back with her gaze narrowed and her fingertips pressed together.

"You mind me telling one of the boys about this?"

Bakugo headed down to the common room that afternoon to find it empty, save for Kirishima who was sitting at a table. Bakugo stared at him. He wasn't texting anyone or doing homework or even playing around with his stupid dumbbells - he was just sitting there, bouncing his leg, as if he were expecting someone.

He suddenly turned and met Bakugo's gaze. At once, he got up and began to walk briskly towards him.

"Hey man," said Kirishima.

"I'm not in the mood to spar," Bakugo growled, making a wide step around him. "Go and find Sparky or-"

He was prevented from finishing the rest of his sentence, for all the wind was suddenly knocked out of him. White stars burst into existence in front of his eyes, clouding his vision as Kirishima's fist sank deep into his gut.

"Ugh!" He keeled over, clutching his stomach. "Fuck…! What the-?!"

He glared up at Kirishima, who shot back with a scowl of utter contempt.

"I heard from Tokage," Kirishima said in a rattling voice. "What you said to Shiozaki. Did you seriously tell her that? What kinda man are you?!"

Bakugo leapt up explosively from the floor, letting him know exactly what kind of man he was with a heavy uppercut to the jaw.

"Don't run your mouth when you don't know shit!" Bakugo roared as Kirishima slammed into the wall behind him.

"Then make me know!" Kirishima leapt back with a wide swing, slamming his fist into the side of Bakugo's face.

Bakugo staggered back, clutching his face and yelling. At the sight of Kirishima rushing in for another punch, Bakugo lunged at him, seized him by the collar, and delivered a crunching headbutt to his forehead.

They both reeled from the impact, taking a second to recover - though Bakugo's fingers still remained curled tight around Kirishima's collar. Once they finally had enough of their wits about them to string together a coherent sentence, they resumed glaring at each other, neither moving a muscle.

"Well?" Kirishima yelled. "You gonna explain yourself? Or do I need to smack a bit more empathy into you?!"

"That snake girl who's always hanging around her put you up to this, didn't she?! What's it fucking matter if I don't wanna accept her confession?!"

"So you don't love her?"

"I do!"

"Then what gives?!"

"I don't love her enough!"

An echoing silence followed, neither of the boys moving as Bakugo glared at his best friend with heavy breaths falling from his mouth. One look at Kirishima's confused stare told him he didn't get what he was saying. Idiot. But Bakugo didn't want to explain it - how was he supposed to?

Becoming the greatest hero was the one thing in his life he cared about more than anything else. He would devote anything to that dream. There was nothing he wouldn't give up to make it happen. He couldn't live without realising his goals.

So if one day, he found that he had to choose between his dream, and the girl who broke down his walls like no other…there was no question. He'd seal those walls back up forever.

He was by no means paranoid. He knew there was no immediate threat to his ambition, and until then, he could be together with her all he wanted - but that wasn't the problem.

If he could get top scores in a test riddled with errors…then he didn't actually do well.

If he beat Todoroki because the latter refused to fight back…then he didn't really prove his strength.

So the fact that he so readily had an answer to this theoretical dilemma…didn't that mean his love for her was weak?

So how could he lie to her face and tell her he loved her back?

Bakugo lowered his gaze to the floor. The strength in his fingers began to fade, and he released Kirishima, his hands falling limp to his sides.

"…I'm not right for her. She deserves someone who actually gives enough of a fuck to put her above themselves."

There was a brief silence.

"…Dude."

Bakugo felt Kirishima's hand press down on his shoulder. His grip was firm, conveying a vague feeling of urging.

"At least tell her why, man," he said.

Bakugo shrugged his hand off forcefully.

"The hell I will."

"Why not?"

His gaze snapped back to Kirishima.

"Because it's a goddamn stupid reason? Would you accept being told that shit if you were her?"

"Doesn't seem so stupid if it takes all the fight outta you." Kirishima looked his deflated form up and down. "Tokage said Shiozaki lost sleep over not knowing why you said that, you know?"

Bakugo felt like he had swallowed something sickening. He could tell it showed on his face.

"Yeah," said Kirishima. "So you gonna tell her or what?"

Bakugo's throat didn't seem to work anymore. But he didn't need to say anything; Kirishima seemed to know his answer.

"Think it all over before you say it, don't screw it up even harder," Kirishima went on. "Best if you write down your thoughts and see how it comes across. Treat it like you're writing a letter to her."

Bakugo frowned.

"No way in hell you just said that," he said. "Snake girl's idea, too?"

"Uhh…"

"Forget it. She's right." He turned to go back to his room. "I'll do it."

Halfway down the lobby, he stopped and looked back at his friend.

"Thanks," he muttered.

Kirishima gave him a grim nod of acknowledgement.

"You got this, man. And, uh, sorry about that sucker punch - what you said just got me so mad. I still say you're crazy for letting her go; any other girl would've decked you for saying that."

Despite himself, the briefest of smirks formed on Bakugo's face. He rubbed the sore spot on his face gingerly as he turned away.

"…so it would be fucked up for me to say I love you. Even if you do mean something to me. You can think I'm scum for that, and you'd be right. But I still stand by everything I said. I'm sorry."

Bakugo tore the page from his notebook and held it up to the dim light of his desk lamp. The page was briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning outside his window, breaking through the black night. He didn't know how long he'd been working on this already, or even noticed when the rain had started crashing violently against his window. He just read his words once, twice, thrice over…

Damn it, no - it sounded like he was fishing for pity. What fucking right did he have to sound like this?

He violently scratched out half of the lines he'd penned, swept half a dozen balls of crushed paper from his desk to the floor, and resumed his endeavour.

Shiozaki lay on her bed, staring at a sheet of paper on her pillow which had only four or five lines that survived being purged by straight dashes of ink. The pen clutched in her hand was growing damp from disuse. She inwardly marvelled at how difficult it was for her to say anything when she had so much to say - she wouldn't even have dared to do this if Tokage hadn't suggested it…

Thunder rolled outside her balcony. It sounded like explosions.

She was tired of just wondering and not getting answers.

"…but I'm not trying to sound desperate. If you meant it when you said no, I'll accept it and pray we can still be friends. But my friends seem to think you were lying when you said what you said. I just want to know if it's true."

Bakugo gripped his pen so tightly it threatened to splinter.

"I don't have to explain this further. I can't. That's just how I view love, like I view everything else. I'd be fucking disgusted with myself if I were to keep lying to you."

Shiozaki's writing soon hastened into a haphazard scrawl.

"I know it's not my religious beliefs. You've always been okay with that. It can't be that I'm not powerful enough for your acknowledgement. That's the reason you came to talk to me in the first place, isn't it? Did something change? I just want to know…is it because of me?"

"It's got nothing to do with you."

"Was everything we did a waste of time?"

"Don't waste your time on me."

"Even if the answer's still no, I want to say I…"

"I wish so damn badly I could say I…"

Bakugo could not bring himself to write those last two words. He slammed his pen down with such force that it spun off his desk and clattered into a corner of his room. He wrung his hands until his fingers were sore, pressed his palms against his feverishly searing forehead…

Fuck it.

He got up from his seat, kicking his chair back such that it crashed into his bed. Crossing the room to his closet in two strides, he tore out a jacket, and pulled on his hood.

Not once in his life had he solved a problem by skirting around it like a coward.

A tired sigh left Shiozaki's lips as she sank her head into her mattress, her cold eyelids falling like lead over her eyes. It was so tempting to sleep…served her right for staying awake so long the night before. But she didn't want to forget what was in her mind now…there was so much she still needed to say…

Clack.

And now the rain was getting louder. It sounded less like raindrops and more like something solid.

Clack.

She opened her eyes.

Clack.

Half-leaping from her bed, she spun aside, and spotted the small pebble rolling around her drenched balcony. Then someone called from below.

"Oi! Angel!"

That voice - sounding so distant, nearly smothered, muffled, drowned out by the downpour - was still enough to send a shockwave through Shiozaki's heart.

She leapt over to her desk, grabbed a plastic folder, and threw on some slippers, her toenails catching painfully in a few frayed threads. Throwing open her balcony doors, she dashed out into the rain before the sound of them slamming into the walls reached her ears. Slipping on the floor, she nearly careened into the edge of her balcony, and caught herself on the railing as she bent over the edge.

Bakugo was standing below on the flooded pavement, wearing a hood that was completely soaked through, clutching several pebbles in his pale hands. He breathed heavily as he peered up at her, squinting through the relentless rain pelting down on his eyes.

"Oi! Get me up there!" he yelled. "I got something to tell you!"

"Oh my goodness!"

Shiozaki immediately wrapped her vines around the railing to hoist herself down to the pavement, raising her folder over her head. As she landed in front of Bakugo her feet splashed into the water, soaking both of them further. She immediately dug her vines into the ground and grew a sort of netted arch over the both of them, creating as watertight of a shelter as she could.

"What on earth are you doing out here? It's a flood!" Shiozaki exclaimed as she threw her folder aside. "Couldn't you have called?"

"C'mon, I'm not a complete asshole; I know there's some things you gotta say in person."

"What are you - oh." Shiozaki's face fell. "This is about…that?"

Bakugo nodded.

Shiozaki averted her gaze from his. She gripped her own arm and began to fidget, feeling significantly colder as the rain began to seep slowly through her arch and splash down on her. She began shivering.

"My classmates are probably still doing homework in the common room, you know?" she said. "You could've knocked."

"Yeah, well, I'd rather not have all your pals watching when you punch me in the face."

Shiozaki looked back at him, frowning cautiously. "What do you mean?"

Bakugo took a deep breath, and looked her dead in the eye.

When the last of the words left his lips, Bakugo found them feeling exceedingly dry. That was despite the rain still finding its way through the canopy of vines and running down his face. He'd said everything he wanted to, explained his reasoning the best he could. He only refrained from saying that sacred phrase, those three words that marked all the narrative peaks in Ashido's favourite novels and movies, because he knew they weren't true.

Shiozaki had remained silent throughout everything he'd said. She had also stopped shivering a while ago. Now she looked more like she had been turned to stone; her pale hands, clenched into fists, hung by her sides, and her rigid frown looked like it had been carved on. Bakugo couldn't make out the rest of her face; her head was bowed low, her eyes veiled by her vines as they hung low, heavy with water that continued to seep from the tips of her vines onto the ground.

"Katsuki, you…"

Her voice sounded as though her airway had been frozen rigid. She began trembling again, though Bakugo felt as if heat was radiating off of her. Her frown slowly twisted into a heavy-set scowl, and she kept her head bowed low, flinging an arm up to wipe her eyes.

"You…oh my God. Just…"

'Just go', right? 'Just get out of my sight?' Bakugo didn't blame her for thinking those things. He just dropped his gaze to the pavement, watching the raindrops crash down between them before they vanished into the flood, resigning himself to Shiozaki's inevitable words of condemnation.

"…Just how vain do you think I am?!"

Bakugo looked back in surprise. The only thing he saw was a glimpse of Shiozaki's furious gaze, before he was engulfed by a strangling coil of vines that shoved him forcefully to the ground.

"Argh-!"

Icy water splashed over his legs as he slammed into the pavement. Before the pain had even registered, Bakugo felt a pair of freezing cold hands seize him in a death grip, then there was a second splash as Shiozaki's knees dropped to the ground, and she pulled him in to glare at him, hot breaths seeping through her clenched teeth, cold raindrops falling from her vines onto his face.

"What makes you think I need to be the most important thing to you?!" she screamed, her voice strained and cracked. "The reason I fell for you in the first place was because you never treated me like I was weak or fragile! And now you're saying you were afraid I'd always feel like second best?! Get real, damn you!"

It was hearing her speak like that which finally made Bakugo realise just how spectacularly he'd messed up. He couldn't even think of anything to say; there was no sequence of words in any language that could defend the presumptuous idiocy that he believed to be a courtesy.

Shiozaki seemed to take his silence as an admission of guilt. Bowing her head, she forced out a mirthless laugh.

"I see. Well, I suppose it's a sign from God. If that's how you truly see me…"

She let go of Bakugo, shoving him slightly away from her as if by reflex. As she stood up, she wiped the rain (was it rain?) from her face, and turned to leave, drawing a shaky, high-pitched breath as she walked out into the rain.

Bakugo instantly leapt to his feet. Sprinting off after her, ignoring the freezing rain pelting down on him, he reached out and grabbed her wrist.

"No! What the fuck - wait! I love you!"

The words came so easily from his mouth that he couldn't believe he found them so damn hard to say before. Now, standing here under the pouring rain, his heart hammering against his chest as Shiozaki stared back at him, he forgot every grievance, every misgiving he'd ever had as he waited in breathless anticipation for her response.

And then, by some miracle, the pain and anger faded from Shiozaki's eyes, and she smiled with relief at him.

"So I wasn't wrong…I'm so glad. I don't need you to compare me to anything else. That's good enough for me."

Bakugo looked away, gritting his teeth. Even if she said that…it wasn't good enough for him. Love, victory, praise, accomplishments, nothing was truly pure to him unless it was absolute.

"That's…that's just not how I see things, dammit…!" he cursed.

He was suddenly enveloped by warmth, a warmth that warded away the cold of the rain and the pain in his chest, as Shiozaki embraced him, curling her arms tight around him and putting her face on his chest like she never wanted to let go.

"Well…don't take this the wrong way, but you see things terribly wrong, Katsuki. You have your gods, and I have mine. I know what it means to be devoted, to care about a lot of things but ultimately place one thing above all else…but I don't think that means we care any less about the rest of it all."

She peered up at him. Tears were streaming down her face again, leaving clear streaks distinct from the rain, but there was no hint of sadness in those tears.

"So it's okay. I'll take your best and your worst, your laughter and your tears, the times you treat me like queen of the world and the times you need to put your dreams above all else. I'll take it all."

She then averted her gaze for half a second. Bakugo felt her fingers shift on his back, and she took a deep breath, as if readying herself for something, then looked back at him with the purest smile he'd ever seen on her.

"I love you, too."

It was like something in Bakugo just cracked. Something that had always been there, but he had refused to acknowledge until now. But as it shattered, a searing energy coursed through him, rushing into his head and hands, seemingly moving them for him as he gently grasped the sides of Shiozaki's face and pulled himself closer.

That same force seemed to possess Shiozaki; she reached up to meet his kiss, and once their lips touched, time went still. Neither of them cared anymore about the freezing rain, being wreathed in the warmth of their shared embrace. Neither of them cared about the fact that they were doing this out in the open, and that one of their friends might just see them; only the taste of their love was real.

And when their lips finally parted, they stood there in silence together for a moment, as if in an invisible piece of the world closed off against the crashing rain and rolling thunder. The only things that yet moved in their little slice of heaven were the faint, mingling scents of burning sugar and lemongrass in the damp air between them.

It was Shiozaki who finally spoke, once time seemed to resume.

"I promise you that your love for me is enough," she said. "Will you promise not to presume on my part like that again?"

"Yeah, I - no. No promises. I can be quite the idiot."

Shiozaki laughed quietly. "I suppose I knew what I signed up for."

"Sorry. I'm doing my best."

"As am I."

Still gazing at him like he was the most beautiful thing in the world, she ran her fingers gently through his soaked hair, as rain continued to rush down her tear-streaked face.

"I'll let you clean up first. Come in, Katsuki."

As the storm began to subside, the echoing barrage of rain against the windows was slowly reduced to a soft rhythm, accompanied by the occasional distant thunder like two hearts beating in synchrony. Lying half-asleep in a bed that wasn't his, Bakugo gazed silently at the girl in his arms, who had long since drifted off into some unknowable dream - as her vines twirled and danced like ethereal wisps in the dark.

Reaching out, he caught one vine with his finger, and the tendril coiled around his hand seemingly on its own will. Bakugo thought back to that scene months ago when he first challenged her to that battle, and then all their encounters since then, and a small part of him marvelled at how he had manage to peer so deep into another's soul, more than anyone else in his life…and let that one other peer so deep into his own…

Bringing himself closer to her, he closed his eyes and thought about how damn lucky he was, and he tasted in the air that familiar aroma of lemongrass as sleep finally claimed him.

Forest Fire - A My Hero Academia Romance Fanfiction

~FIN~

╚═══*.·:·. ･:･:*═══╝

Yeah.

That's right.

I'm still here.

Unfortunately, that's not gonna last. You can take this chapter as my closing act before the curtain of authorship falls on me, or rather on this one name of mine. More on that later.

First of all: If you're new here, I hope you enjoyed this story from start to finish. And if you've been here since the start, I hope you enjoyed the ride, and found this finale to be a satisfying one. After six whole years of writing this story on and off, I'm pleased to finally present it to you here as a whole.

Well…not entirely as a whole. I had intended for this story to go a whole lot further. I was going to go through each of the manga's arcs after where I'd left off, through the lens of the two leads now being in a relationship. I had a finale further on planned that builds off of Bakugo's dilemma in this chapter, based on the ending of 我的少女時代。I even had half-baked ideas for a 'next generations' sequel that focused on both superhero adventures and teen drama, with Bakugo's daughter and Kirishima's son suffering a violent rift in their friendship, Midoriya's son struggling to live up to his father's name, Todoroki's son feeling distant from his overprotective father who's just trying to not repeat his own father's mistakes, and so on. I even wanted to fly straight off the rails and do a romance between Kaminari and Jiro's punk-rock aesthetic son and a daughter-clone-Nomu-homunculus of Shigaraki born in a lab, and have the main antagonist be Camie Utsushimi's sister who grieves her death and is taking her anger out on a world that she holds responsible for that tragedy…all these cheesy shonen things.

Unfortunately, this is where I must close off. I swore I'd finish this fic by last year actually, so I'm running late on that promise. I'm ending this here because I want to devote myself to creating my original shonen-inspired comic if I want to ever get it out into the world within the next few years. I truly want to make something great, and I need every bit of time and effort I can devote to it, because I don't intend to settle for anything less than the vision I have in my mind. I guess I sometimes feel like Bakugo in that regard. No wonder I spent most of my teenage years writing about this asshole.

Anyway, the point is, if anyone would like to adopt these story concepts, feel free to show the fandom your own spin on them, because I won't be coming back for a long time - if ever - but I loved interacting with each and every one of you and hearing your thoughts on my writing. If it weren't for you all, I would not have the confidence to look at my friends and tell them with a straight face that I'm going to try and make the next Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist. Even if that sort of story is very far removed from a blindly spun-together rarepair fanfiction, and also infinitely more well-crafted, nuanced, thought-out, and meaningful - that's what I want my magnum opus to be, and I only dare to try and craft it because of all of you. So I say with all my heart - thank you.

Lastly, the title of this final chapter is a line from That Feeling by We the Kings. It's one of my personal favourite songs, and I found it to be the perfect fit for this finale. It only feels right to honour one of my favourite works of art by bookending this labour of love with its very same title.

Here are some other titles I found fitting for the finale, all from other songs I love:

What's the Worst Thing I Could Say? (My Chemical Romance - Helena)

So Long and Goodnight…So Long, Not Goodnight (My Chemical Romance - Helena)

Unchain the Rain (Altaria)

Check Yes, Juliet (We the Kings)

Romeo and Cinderella (Hanatan)

Are You Scared to Death to Live? (Green Day - Still Breathing)

Kiss Me Like the World is Ending (Avril Lavigne)

And so, for the last time…thanks for reading, and I love you. 3

✧✦ RedFlowerInk ✦✧