💥 || “don’t think I’m enjoying this, freak..”

Katsuki Bakugo is 19 years old, and he has never been the type of person to obsess over someone just because he liked them. Love, as far as he was concerned, was dumb. Boring. A waste of time that soft, sappy losers wasted energy on while the rest of the world kept moving. He never understood why people went crazy over it—why they got quiet and stupid and flushed and started acting like their entire brain had been rewired overnight.

He hated Valentine’s Day. Hated the stupid pink decorations that somehow still ended up in the dorm common room no matter how many times he threatened to blow them up. Hated proms, dances, any event that required him to stand around in formal clothes while people whispered and giggled and pretended the night meant something.

He especially hated the way Izuku would ramble on for hours about working up the courage to ask Uraraka out, and he really hated the blind dates Kirishima kept trying to force him into like some kind of self-appointed matchmaking idiot.

He hated all of it.

And for years, the explanation he gave everyone—including himself—was the same:

“Love is a thing for sappy losers. My eyes are on being number one and that’s it.”

That had been his mindset for as long as he could remember. Clear. Clean. Uncomplicated.

Until you.

You—the “dumb extra who couldn’t do anything right,” or so Bakugo liked to call you whenever he needed to put some distance between the two of you. You, the newest transfer into Class 1-A, who’d only been here for about four months. You, who somehow managed to make the blonde boy’s heart hammer against his ribs even when he refused to admit it out loud.

He didn’t know how it happened. It just did.

The first time he ever properly got close to you was during a training exercise that went sideways. A cluster of massive rocks came crashing down toward him after a poorly timed explosion, and you—without thinking, without hesitating—threw yourself in the way. You shoved him clear. The two of you hit the ground hard. His face landed squarely against your chest. For a split second the world went quiet except for the sound of your heartbeat under his ear and the sharp, startled inhale you took.

He scrambled up like he’d been burned. Barked something rude. Called you an idiot for getting in the way. But something had already shifted.

After that, he got weird.

He would admit it to himself in the dark of his room at night, staring at the ceiling: yeah. He fell for you. Maybe a little too hard.

By the second month, he was already deep into territory he didn’t have a name for. He became a kind of secret admirer without ever deciding to be one. He started doing small, pointed things. He’d shove a protein bar into your hands between classes with a scowl and a muttered, “You look too weak. Train more, dumbass.” He’d appear at your side during joint training with a water bottle he “just happened” to have an extra of.

He’d correct your form with more patience than he ever showed anyone else, even while insulting every single thing about your stance.

He knew your scent. Could describe it in perfect, ridiculous detail even though he had never been that close for long. Warm skin and whatever detergent you used, something clean and faintly sweet that clung to the air after you passed him in the hallway. He hated that he noticed. Hated that he liked noticing.

Laundry day became a problem.

He started “helping” with the dorm laundry rotation more often than anyone expected. Claimed it was because everyone else was too slow and too careless. In reality, he was carefully, quietly lifting a few of your shirts when no one was looking.

Sometimes they weren’t even close to his size. Sometimes they were. He kept them folded at the bottom of his drawer anyway, like some kind of evidence he couldn’t bring himself to throw away. Once or twice, his fingers brushed against something softer—underwear—and he froze, face burning, before shoving those into the same drawer with a vicious, muttered curse at himself.

He did all of this and still had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do about it.

He had never felt this way about anyone before. The idea of just walking up to you and asking you out the normal way made something in his chest twist with pure, stubborn refusal. He wasn’t going to look like a loser. He wasn’t going to stand there tripping over his own words like Deku. He wasn’t going to do this the soft, ordinary way.

So he did something he hated.

He asked his best friend for help.

And when even that didn’t feel like enough, he opened a private browser tab at three in the morning and typed, with pure self-loathing:

“how to talk to the person you’ve been crushing on and stealing clothes from and ask them on a date without sounding like a loser.”

Google did not have the answers he wanted. The search results only made him feel more like a virgin than he already was. He closed the tab, dropped his phone face-down on the mattress, and stared at the ceiling again, jaw tight, heart still racing for reasons that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with you.

He was in deep. And for the first time in his life, Katsuki Bakugo had no idea how to fight his way out.