Hey guys! I'm gonna be out of town this week and idk if I'll have the chance later, so I decided to post this early rather than late. We should be back to our regular Wednesday updates next week.
Suzume is a practical girl. She has to be. She showed off a little against Yaoyorozu, flipping around and dancing, but Shihai requires a different approach.
She stops at the edge of the ring and takes off her black sneakers, leaving her in pale pink socks. Shihai won't be able to merge with those. Now the only problems she'll face are her hair, her eyes, and the shadows themselves.
And her grappling gun.
"Ready?" Midnight lifts her whip. Suzume grips her gun.
"GO!"
Suzume shoots. The line goes just over Shihai's shoulder, an inch away from his cheek. It embeds itself in the wall of the stadium, outside the ring. He looks towards it, startled, and Suzume uses his distraction to whip forwards with the gun and kick him hard in the chest, driving towards the edge of the ring.
"Shit!" he swears and grabs the line, his body vanishing into the black cord and the handle.
Suzume tries not to grin and lets go. She lands on her feet, a yard or so away from the boundary line, and Shihai and her gun go flying out of bounds and into the wall.
It's over in less than a minute. Compared to the last two battles, it's incredibly tame, maybe even boring for the onlookers. It takes Midnight a second of gaping before she lifts her whip again.
"Yusada wins?"
Shihai disentangles himself from her gun, looking stunned.
"You tricked me!" He accuses, when she gets near enough to hear him.
Suzume lifts a shoulder.
"I guessed you would try to merge with whatever I was wearing or using if you could, to give you an advantage. It was either that or we fight hand to hand. I don't cast the kind of shadows that Shoji does, I'm too small for that. I had to make up for it somehow, right?"
She tugs the hook of her gun free and looks it over, to make sure it didn't take damage when it hit the wall with Shihai still merged with it.
"That was humiliating," Shihai runs his fingers through his hair.
Suzume shrugs, not really caring.
"We're both at a disadvantage somewhere like that stage. I just worked with what I had. If you wanna try again, we'll have to do it in our free time."
Shihai blinks at her. "You want to fight me again?"
Suzume pauses, looking up from the gun into his eyes, just as dark as hers.
"Well, sure. Your quirk would be seriously dangerous, somewhere with more shadows and places to hide. Like that industrial part of the entrance exams race. There's a reason you almost beat me there."
"Oh," he looks startled.
"If you want," she adds, and leaves him there. Once she's retrieved her shoes she passes Tokoyami on his way out to fight Shinsou, and goes to find her gloves.
On one hand, she hopes Tokoyami wins. He's a nice enough person, even if he and she haven't talked much.
On the other hand, she hopes Shinsou wins too. She'd always had a soft spot for him before, and living here as someone whose whole family is made up of 'villainous' quirks has only increased that fondness. Or maybe just kept it level. At the end of the day, he was exactly like most of her pears. Utterly reliant on his quirk.
So all his complaints about losing the entrance exam-
Well.
They don't sit right with her.
He should have trained more. They all should have trained more.
Even Bakugou's punches are more showy than they are effective.
Suzume only climbs high enough into the stands to see the next few matches, sitting between a pair of pros who don't seem to recognize her right off. In fairness to them, she's not a very unique person, appearance wise.
She doesn't know who's the most surprised when Shinsou manages to brainwash Dark Shadow and sic him on Tokoyami. Everyone in the stands, or Tokoyami himself.
Suzume gapes while Tokoyami is forced out of bounds by his own quirk.
Okay. So Shinsou is a little scarier than I thought he was. Holy shit.
"Man, what an incredible quirk," one of the pros next to her muttered to his partner. "Did they really put this kid in Gen Ed?"
"Sometimes I wonder about UA. I mean, think about how useful that quirk would be for taking people in peacefully."
"Seriously. I'm almost jealous."
"If they ever get around to putting him in the hero course, I hope he'll do his work study with me."
She tunes out the rest of their chatter while they draw up the next bracket on the big screen. Todoroki vs Shinsou, and Suzume vs Bakugou.
Curious.
Maybe Nezu isn't as much of an interfering little bear-rat-thing as she initially thought.
Or maybe he just wants to see if she and Todoroki can keep their mouths shut for the entire match.
Not that that would be hard, she'd gone her entire first day without speaking to anyone at all. She could absolutely avoid speaking to Shinsou. And Todoroki was standoffish too, when he wasn't challenging people to silly contests.
What she was worried about, was if she could beat Bakugou, and after their probably Todoroki. The rest of her matches had been relatively straight forwards, but those two were going to be a major problem.
Why couldn't Shinsou fight Bakugou? He'd win even faster than he did against Kaminari…
She got up to leave again while Todoroki and Shinsou went at it. She didn't expect it to be a very long match. She thought it would be like Sero's.
Then the roaring started.
Suzume stopped halfway down the stairs and spun to jog back up. She grabbed the railing and leaned over, gaping out at the arena.
Half of it is covered in yet another massive wall of ice, but part of it is already melted. Shinsou stands in the middle of a puddle of water, rubbing a hand that looks red from cold.
Todoroki stands out of bounds, his left hand still covered in faint flames.
Midnight looks utterly flabbergasted.
"S-Shinsou wins!" She waves her wip frantically. "My, isn't this year full of upsets?! What incredibly resourceful students!"
"What the fuck is happening?"
How in the hell did he get Todoroki of all people to talk to him?
The stages shake with fierce screaming, shock rolling through the observers and praise for Shinsou. Seriously, putting him in general studies was one of the dumbest moves that could have ever been made.
In the midst of the crowd of spectators, a small pillar of fire erupts across the stadium from her.
Endeavor.
Oh he's mad.
Suzume cover's her mouth with her hand, a startled laugh starting to bubble up from her throat.
Oh god.
Endeavor looks fit to burn the entire place to the ground, and Suzume is struggling not to scream with laughter.
She feels bad for the shell shocked Todoroki, honest she does, but seeing someone with a quirk like that get so far?
It's incredible.
She knows that this is one of the most televised events in the country, and there's plenty of people out there with 'villainous' quirks that have to be going ape shit over Shinsou. If he was a few years younger she knows that Kaname would have switched his favorite hero from Crimson Riot to Shinsou in a heart beat.
Representation matters, after all, and Shinsou, a no name kid with a subtle quirk, taking down the son of fucking Endeavor?
It's going to make the news for sure.
Midnight says something about cleaning up the excess ice, and she takes that as her cue to go back where she was going in the first place.
She shakes off the awe that came from seeing Shinsou standing in the ring and Todoroki outside of it.
She has her own fight.
She's trotting towards the arena when a flash of violet comes around the corner and pauses.
Shinsou stands in the corridor, his drooping eye on her.
Wish I have purple eyes.
"Oh, it's you," he stops, his hands in his pockets. "You're fighting that explosion kid. Yusada, right?"
She pauses, debates how to answer, and then nods.
His mouth twists into a facsimile of a smile.
"Scared to answer me? Do you think I'll brainwash you before your match?"
Suzume pauses, then reaches into her pocket and fishes out her phone. She enters Shinsou's name, and hands it over to him with an obvious request.
"My number?" he asks, surprised.
She nods. He shrugs, and enters it in. When she texts him he pulls his own phone out and reads it aloud.
" 'I'm not afraid of you. But I know you'd have an easier time taking first place if you weren't fighting me instead of Bakugou. He can't keep his mouth shut if his life depended on it'. Isn't that kind of rude to say about your own classmate?"
She taps out her response.
" 'Even if it is rude, it's still true'. Huh. So you're just gonna text me until after our match."
" 'Yeah. Seems safer that way. Once we're done we can talk if you want, but right now I think you and I are-' " He paused. " 'far too much alike' ? What do you mean?"
He narrows his eyes at her.
Suzume answers immediately.
" 'You and I aren't just fighting whoever is in the ring with us. Both of us are-' oh. 'Both of us are fighting the entire world'."
Whatever he was expecting her to say, that clearly isn't it.
He looks shocked by the comparison.
Suzume shrugs. What else is she supposed to say? He may not be quirkless, and he'll never know exactly how that feels, and she has the same feelings towards his reliance on his quirk and clear lack of real training that she does for all of her classmates who are the same.
But.
She's also the daughter of a man with venom in his teeth, and a woman with claws that can rend and rot.
She's seen her brothers grow up in the shadow of poison.
She's watched Kaname fight just as hard to overcome quirk prejudices as she has.
She knows the struggle that Shinsou faces, especially with a mental quirk on top of the 'villainous' attributes.
The sound of stomping footsteps comes from behind her, and Suzume turns to find that Bakugou has kept his newly formed habit of eavesdropping.
His lips are curled in a vicious glower.
"You're wrong," Bakugou snaps, shouldering past both of them. He stares straight at Shinsou, then at her with burning red eyes. "The world might be watching, but whichever one of you is in the ring, the only person you're fighting in there is me, got it?!"
They both gape at him. A few sparks crackle off of his palm, and he storms down the hallway, leaving the smell of burnt sugar behind him.
Not for the first time today does Suzume wonder what the fuck is happening with him.
"Wow," Shinsou watches him go. "I guess he's mad he'll only get to fight one of his rivals."
Startled, Suzume's head snaps to him. "Wait, what?"
Shinsou doesn't laugh at her slip up, or take advantage of it either. Instead he gives her an odd look.
"It's been pretty obvious the whole competition. He's determined to beat Midoriya, Todoroki, and you."
"That's not-"
"They might come after us, too."
"Why would they do that? I mean, we've got over 500 points, but they have no reason to target us in particular."
"Not us. You."
Her?
Suzume tugs at her gloves, staring after Bakugou.
"Goddamn it," she swears.
"I don't have time for these stupid wars and rivalries!" she groans. Bakugou pauses, and she can see his head tilt. Listening to her still. "I just want to be a hero."
Shinsou eyes her. "Even so. When you do get there, don't you want to be the best hero you can be?"
Suzume sucks in sharply.
When.
"I-"
All the air leaves her lungs.
Without her say so, her arms go limp at her sides and the world grows far away. She can't move her eyes to look at Shinsou, but she feels it when he pushes her shoulder.
"Sorry about that. I really wasn't planning on using my quirk on you outside the competition. But if you keep this up, we'll never progress. Now… Stop panicking. Go win already."
The words echo in her mind and her legs carry her forwards. Towards the light. Towards Bakugou.
Towards her fight.
Shinsou's quirk can't actually change her state of mind, but his words do enough that when the brainwashing breaks and she stands in the ring again, she's calm.
Or, not calm.
Pretty pissed at Shinsou for dragging the trained control she had over her body from her, but it's not the same bewildering swirl of emotions that had clogged her moments ago. She'll get her revenge later.
Bakugou saw her as some kind of rival?
The crowd seems further away than it did in her last two fights. They're watching her, waiting, but all her focus is on Bakugou.
She grips her sansetsukon firmly.
The spark is back in her chest, and this time she doesn't beat it away as viciously. She lets it sit between her lungs, flickering and warm.
Midnight calls them to a start.
With an eruption of sparks and smoke, Bakugou crosses the distance between them in an instant, throwing a hard right hook at her, open palmed and burning with nitroglycerin.
Suzume hooks his wrist in the joint of two segments and flips him over her hip. He blasts back at her before she can throw him out of bounds.
He twists and blasts at her face, forcing her to back off or risk getting her nose burnt off. As it stands, her bangs are smoking when she lands and takes off again, orbiting clockwise around the arena.
He chases her around it, swinging at her hard. Each explosion is a little bit bigger than the other, but she dances away from each one and spins past until she's behind him again. They repeat the dance over and over.
Suzume beats her weapon against his shoulders with each pass. It doesn't do much, but long term it will wear on his body and distract him.
The ground tears asunder beneath the force of his blows.
He's trying to mess up my footwork. She realizes, If Ichigo hadn't spent forever and a half making sure I wouldn't fall even in an earthquake, it would be a good strategy. As it is, it's still inconvenient.
Suzume lands a hard blow to his ribs from behind and bounces over his shoulder when he twists to try to blast her head off. She's sweating now from the heat from the blasts and her own movements.
Someone in the crowd starts booing.
Suzume expects it to be aimed at her.
Instead.
It's Bakugou.
"Hey! What kind of hero candidate are you, throwing such huge attacks at a little quirkless girl like that?" Suzume's cheek twitches and her temper flares. "Just knock her out of bounds if you're so strong! Toying with people is just plain wrong! Boo!"
The voice carries far enough that others join in.
What a vicious boy!
That poor girl, she shouldn't even be out there!
What were they thinking, letting someone so cruel attack a defenseless little quirkless girl like that? She's half his size!
She's not half his size!
She comes up to his shoulder, damn it.
Suzume ducks a blow from Bakugou, and aims her elbow at his ribs. Instead he brings his free hand down to his belly, level with her face, and blasts her away. The first solid hit either of them have landed the entire match.
She flies away, blood trickling from a cut on her cheek and burns hissing along her shoulder. With a twist of her weight she flips in the air, toes going skywards and over, and lands on her feet.
Aizawa snatches the mic from Mic, and silences the crowd in a single, sharp sentence.
"Who just said that he's toying with her?"
For a second even she and Bakugou pause, both of them breathing hard. They dare not take their eyes away from each other.
Aizawa goes on. "Are you a pro? Or just shooting your mouth off? Either way, do us all a favor and get out of here. Bakugou clearly recognizes the strength of his opponent. This isn't their first fight against each other. That's why he's doing everything he can to win, and why Yusada is doing the exact same. They both refuse to pull their punches, out of respect for the other."
He's right, Suzume realizes with surprise.
The only person you're fighting in there is me, got it?!
Got it, she thinks. Sorry for making you wait, Bakugou.
The sansetsukon blurs in her grasp, spinning just as surely and elegantly as she. Each swing rings true, and they're reaching the point where it's a battle of stamina and wills.
Bakugou is brash and stubborn, it's true. But his is a pride born of praise, and divine luck.
Her gritted teeth tenacity was carved into her by every cruel word ever hurled against her skin, including his.
His quirk is powerful, and his natural aptitude is insane. But it wears on his body, and he's already used it more today than he usually ever has.
Suzume has trained herself to keep standing, through burns and cuts and pain. On top of that, her last two fights were barely a challenge. Compared to Bakugou, she's still fresh as a goddamn daisy. No matter that the more he sweats the stronger his blasts become, his body can only take so much.
Explosions blast and heat glows around them in arcs of gold and orange.
"Stop dancing around!" Bakugou roars. He blasts off the ground and tries to flip over her head, but it gives Suzume the opportunity to twirl on the balls of her feet and swing, the sansetsukon lashing against his cheek with steel heated from his own quirk. One of the links is decorated by charring.
A red burn appears across his face, under his right eye.
"Hypocrite. You're flying around just as much as I am!"
Actually, if she thinks too much about it, he's moving a bit like her too. More than before he's taking advantage of the recoil from his quirk and spinning with it to line up his next attack.
Suzume has trained, less formally, with segmented swords and urumi as well as her sansetsukon and traditional nunchucks. She's familiar with taking advantage of centrifugal force.
And that's exactly what Bakugou has started doing.
He doesn't have her footwork or her grace, but they're circling each other like wolves.
Or maybe tops is a better comparison.
As the smoke gathers Suzume uses it to her advantage. She doesn't need to see to fight, Ichigo and Ryuhei made sure of that, although it certainly helps. She can hear, smell, and feel where her target is. The heat that radiates off of Bakugou only makes it easier, and she gets a few good hit-n-run blows in before he picks up on her new strategy.
Bakugou throws both of his hands in front of him and blasts at her. Suzume jumps back, dodging and barely avoiding the out of bounds line. The smoke in between them starts to settle, but Bakugou hasn't landed.
"Come on already, Suzume!"
She's so thrown off by the fact that he used her name that at first she doesn't realize what he's doing.
An explosion sends him spinning. Then another, and another, and he comes shooting at her in a twisting blast of force.
Horror crosses her face.
She remembers enough to know that he'd used that against Todoroki originally, against one of his giant ice shields and fuck is he actually trying to kill her?
Suzume doesn't have time to panic, she only has one choice.
She runs dead at him. She'll only have one shot.
She snaps her staff into existence, and lifts it like she's going to try to drive the butt into Bakugou's face while he spins at her like a terrible screw. At the very last second, she slams it into debris on the ground and vaults up.
She skimms over his outstretched arm, half-hidden by the dust and smoke, and draws her gun as she lets her staff go flying.
She shoots, the hook embeds itself into the ground and Bakugou releases a massive blast of fire and force where she had been standing second before. The force slams into her, whipping her hair clear out of it's tie and threatening to untether entirely.
The gun whines in her hand, and Bakugou hovers, caught between the force of his own explosions before and behind him.
The blast clears, and she can't see his face but she hears the startled confusion.
His head snaps over, where her hook is clinging valiantly to the ground. The explosive force ebbs enough that the gun can wrench for forwards again, screaming towards his back.
Suzume rears her fist back and punches Bakugou in the back of his head as hard as she can manage.
He stumbles forwards, but manages to twist around and swing.
There's nothing she can do but lift her hand and try to protect her face.
She hears the explosion, and the familiar crack of bone, and then she's flying.
Grass bites into her shoulders and she skips across the ground twice before she gets her feet up under her, just in time to hit the wall of the stadium with her back.
The wall of the stadium.
She's out of bounds.
Her heart sinks.
The smoke slowly clears in silence, and Suzume sees what had made everyone else quiet in face of an end to the match.
Bakugou lays on the ground, unmoving save the rise and fall of his chest.
Midnight looks between them, and then up at Cementoss.
"Well…Yusada is out of bounds, but Bakugou is unconscious. What do you think?" she asks, looking up at her coworker.
He crosses his arms and looks out over them.
"From what I saw, Bakugou collapsed right after his last attack. Before Yusada landed on the ground. So Bakugou was knocked out before she went out of bounds. I'd say… Yusada won."
Suzume gaps at him.
"I… what?"
Midnight accepts his answer, and repeats it louder for the rest of the crowd.
If she thought that the audience exploded for Todoroki and Shinsou, it's nothing compared to the eruption that sounds around them now. Disbelief, shock, and encouragement all meld into a cacophony of sound.
Suzume picks her way over to the stage and climbs back up. She's missing the shoulder of her jacket, and her cheek is starting to throb from the burn and cut. There's other, smaller burns all over and she's bruised where she hit the ground.
She's in better shape than Bakugou.
By the time she gets back to Midnight's side, both of them standing over him, he's barely regained consciousness. He sits, slowly, looking pale and sick.
Suzume doesn't bother to offer him a hand up.
For the second time since their match started, a voice in the crowd breaks through. Somehow, it sounds like the same man as before.
"Cheater!"
Suzume's head snaps up, towards the source of the voice.
"There's no way someone without a quirk won that fight fairly! She had to have cheated!"
"Well wait, people with weak quirks could have used a strategy against his explosions, even if their quirk wasn't good for fighting," someone else breaks in.
"Someone with a quirk!" someone else cuts in. "She doesn't have any quirk at all."
"Yeah he's right!"
"Hey, wait, you don't know-"
"Quirkless people always cheat, it's the only way they know how to win. They're less evolved, it's not their fault."
"She must have cheated, she-"
Suzume's temper snaps and she grabs Midnights arm and pulls it down so she can speak in the microphone, her dark eyes blazing with fury. She stares straight at the man who started this whole thing, the one who called her unevolved.
"Why don't you come down here and prove it!" she spits, furious.
Midnight, her cheeks flushing with an anger that startles Suzume, lifts the microphone. Suzume expects Midnight to scold her. Nearly every other teacher she's ever had would have. They had.
Hell, half the time they were the ones accusing her of cheating, to the point that she got used to taking tests alone or separate from the rest of the class.
Instead, Midnight turns her gaze out to the crowd.
"That's enough," she bites, in a tone that Suzume has never heard from her normally excited, bright eyed teacher. "Yusada fought with everything she had, just like everyone else in this tournament. It's an insult not just to her, but to every other student in the school to imply that they would throw the fight for any reason, let alone one as superficial as someone's quirk status."
Mic and Aizawa appear, out of the announcers box and instead on the stairs in the crowd, and forcibly collect the troublemakers.
Suzume watches, stunned, as they're dragged out wrapped in Aizawa's gray capture weapon.
Midnight nudges her gently.
With the mic pointed away from her mouth, she turns a small smile at Yusada, and the equally stunned Bakugou. She doesn't know if it's the concussion she definitely gave him, or the crowds reaction and sudden dime-turn to his side, that throws him off to the point of slack jawed silence.
"You kids go see Recovery Girl. We'll clean up out here."
"R-right," Suzume said.
She went and gathered her staff, and walked towards the nurses station. Bakugou beats her there, and Midoriya was laid up, unconscious behind one of the two curtains that offer some measure of privacy. Recovery girl motions the both of them behind the other. Neither of them are as badly hurt as he is, neither of them will need surgery.
Suzume sits on a spinny stool while Bakugou sits cross legged on the cot. Together, they wait.
Bakugou is staring down at his lap, where one hand trembled with rage, or injured pride, or whatever else is going on inside that stubborn brain of his.
Suzume wishes she could tug at her glove, or twist her scrunchie around on her wrist. Anything for something to do with her hands..
"Is your hand okay?" Suzume asks at last, motioning to Bakugou's hand. His ring and pinky fingers are pointing sideways, and it's starting to swell. There's a bruise on the back where the broken bones have caused the blood to congeal.
"It's fine!" Bakugou snaps at her. There's tension in every line of his body.
Suzume lets out a sigh.
She doesn't have it in her to keep fighting his stupid pride right now.
The freedom of fighting him, of focusing only on Bakugou, is gone. The spark in her chest has vanished with the vitriol from the crowd that had turned on her in an instant.
She shouldn't be surprised.
She isn't surprised, not really. She's more surprised that her teachers stepped in for her.
How sad is that?
Recovery Girl appears, with a hand splint.
"You'll need to wear this for a few days. I can't heal everything all at once. You're much too tapped out for that," she says to Bakugou, all business. "I'm going to numb your hand so your quirk doesn't activate when I set the bone."
Suzume watches curiously as she presses a thin needle into Bakugou's hand.
"Tell me when you stop feeling your fingertips. Now, Yusada! Let's see yours!"
Suzume hands her hand over. The leather glove is roasted right off, and the wraps underneath it burned and curled away her already scarred and calloused hands. The force of the explosion has embedded burnt fibers in her skin in places.
It's sad. Those gloves were gifts from Kai, but she needed new ones anyhow. The fingertips had been worn so smooth by work that they weren't much help for gripping anymore.
She feels silly for being so attached to things like that.
Ryuhei's staff. Kai's gloves.
She hates being sentimental.
Suzume doesn't wince when Recovery girl takes out tweezers and starts pulling burnt fabric out of her own burnt skin. Fabric, dirt, and pieces of stone all come out of her skin and get dropped into a little tray.
"It hurts less if you don't watch," she says kindly.
"It doesn't hurt that much anyways," Suzume shakes her head. "It will in the morning, but right now I don't feel a lot."
"This isn't the first time you've been burned."
"Not even close."
Suzume sheds her ruined jacket.
Her shoulder still bears the fading red mark of Tekito's handprint. Her arms tell a tale of long days spent fighting and climbing, both buildings and the metaphorical ranks. Most of them are faded and silver with age. She hasn't taken a proper hit in years, and she doesn't scar easily.
"If you could…" she starts, ignoring the way Bakugou's red eyes grow wide at the sight of a lichtenberg figure skating across her collarbone, courtesy of Tesla ten years past. He's in jail these days. The scar is faded pink, but still visible in the light.
"If I could?" Recovery Girl prompts.
"If you could, only heal what's absolutely necessary? I still have one more fight, and I need to have enough energy to finish it."
Recovery Girl tsks at her. "I won't use up all of your stamina, don't you worry. You kids this year are so stubborn," she chides. "Counting you, there's going to be four kids with scars on their hands. Is your class cursed?"
Suzume cracks a smile.
"Maybe."
Recovery Girl kisses Suzume's cheek, and the worst of the distant aches fade away. The burns on her face ease, and the swelling on her hand goes down.
"Hey, old lady, I can't feel my hand," Bakugou grumbles, waving it at her.
Recovery Girl turns her attention away from Suzume to take Bakugou's hand in hers.
"Wanna squeeze my hand?" Suzume asks lightly, offering him a tired smile. She knows what comes next.
Bakugou turns his gaze to her with a teeth-baring scowl. "No!"
While he looks at her, Recovery Girl sets the bone with a crunch.
He twitches, going pale at the sound, and even Suzume makes a face. It's not a sound she'll ever get used to.
"No lie, when I heard a bone break I thought for sure it was mine."
"You're lucky it wasn't. I can't imagine you'd enjoy fighting with a broken hand," Recovery Girl kisses a grimacing Bakugou's cheek and hops off of the cot.
"I'll be back in a moment with a new jacket for you, Yusada. Bakugou, stay here. You'll sleep for an hour at least."
"Whatever," Bakugoug grumbles, his eyelids already drooping. Suzume isn't sure he should be sleeping with his definite concussion, but Recovery Girl knows best in this case.
Suzume nods towards the old woman. She shuts the door behind her, leaving the pair of them alone with an unconscious Midoriya.
"So…" she drawls, "Are we on a first name basis now, Katsuki?"
His cheek twitches and his whole face turns red.
"That didn't mean anything! Don't get so cocky, wasp girl!"
Suzume can't help it. She's too tired not to giggle at his over the top eruption of anger over their names of all things.
"Sorry, puppy," she lies.
He sways in his seat, his energy only sapped further by his eruption. With all the dignity of a disgruntled bear, he lays down on the cot.
Suzume stands up. She should go get ready to fight Shinsou.
Before she leaves, she pauses and turns back to him.
"Yo, Bakugou."
He grunts, and turns narrowed eyes at her.
Suzume hesitates at the cusp of the room.
"Thanks," she says finally. "For taking me seriously."
Bakugou scoffs at her and rolls over, so his back is to her.
"Whatever. You better not lose to that mind jack off."
"Don't worry. I won't."