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Blind Spot! (FIRST DATE!!!/FESTIVAL DATE!!!)

Kiribaku x reader SMAU A SMAU where the reader joins Bakugou's and Kirishima's agency as a sidekick!

Chapter 19 - Match made in hell!

Chapter 18

Chapter 20 (Wow, 20 already??)

Series master list!

Word count: 12,872

Tokyo looked the same, which felt like its own kind of strange.

The walk to long-term parking had been quiet in the particular way that came after too little sleep and too much of everything else. Kirishima trailed half a step behind, bag slung over one shoulder, eyes heavy but not quite closing. Bakugou led the way without needing to check for the car, keys already out, like some part of him had been counting down to this exact walk for the better part of a month. The Porsche was exactly where he'd left it—a little dustier, the windshield dotted with the residue of a month's worth of weather, but there—and something about the sight of it, ordinary and familiar and unmistakably his, made the whole trip finally feel like it was actually ending.

Nobody said much once you were all inside. Kirishima took the back seat without being asked, folding himself in with his bag between his feet, head tipping back against the headrest almost immediately. You sat up front, watching the airport thin out behind you as Bakugou pulled onto the highway, the city sliding into view in gray early light, block after block, like it hadn't noticed any of you had been gone a month at all.

You kept waiting to feel something when the skyline finally came into full view—the particular skyline you'd been picturing, some nights, when you couldn't sleep in the inn and needed something ordinary to hold onto instead of the wreckage. Relief, maybe. That was the feeling you'd expected. Instead, you just felt tired, in a way that sat somewhere deeper than your legs, deeper than a month of bad sleep could fully explain.

Nobody talked much for the rest of the drive. There didn't seem to be anything that needed saying yet.

They walked you up to your apartment anyways, even though it was three flights, even though none of you had slept. Nobody suggested otherwise. You didn't ask them to, and they didn't offer to skip it, and somewhere in that unspoken agreement was its own kind of answer.

Your apartment door stuck the way it always had—you'd forgotten that, somehow, in a month of remembering nearly everything else with painful clarity—and you had to put your shoulder into it before it finally gave. Then you just stood there, in the open doorway, instead of stepping through it right away.

Nobody moved to leave either.

Kirishima leaned against the doorframe like he had nowhere else in the world to be, arms loosely crossed, watching you with a softness that had nothing to do with how tired he looked. "Kinda weird," he said after a moment, glancing past you into the apartment. "Being back."

"Yeah." You looked past him into the apartment—dark, still, exactly as you'd left it—and then back at the two of them, still crowding your narrow hallway like neither one particularly wanted to be the one who said it was time to go.

"...Yeah."

"If you want us to hang around a little longer, we can."

"You two need sleep."

"So do you."

You huffed a quiet laugh.

He smiled, small and easy, then reached over to brush a piece of lint from your hairline, taking his time with it.

"We're close."

"I know."

"No, I mean it." His smile faded into something softer. "If something feels off... call. Doesn't matter what it is."

"I know."

Bakugou hadn't said anything yet. He'd been watching you the way he'd been watching you on and off since the airport—like he was still doing the math on letting you out of arm's reach, like the last few days hadn't quite been enough to convince some stubborn part of him that this was actually over. Then, slowly, he stepped in, closing the last of the distance between you, and cupped the side of your face in one hand, thumb brushing along your cheekbone, rough and careful all at once.

“...Oi.”

You stared into his eyes.

"You did good."

You blinked.

"Katsuki—"

"Don't."

His hand stayed where it was.

"You did what you were supposed to." His jaw tightened for a second. “You got us all out of there.”

Something in your chest tightened. “Yeah…”

“If your head starts running tonight..." He clicked his tongue, looking faintly annoyed with himself for having to say it out loud. "...call."

You leaned into his palm before you'd decided to, and he let you, thumb still moving slowly against your skin, and for a long moment none of you were in any hurry to be the one who finally said goodbye.

Kirishima bumped his shoulder gently against Bakugou's. "We should let her actually go inside."

"Yeah." Bakugou didn't move for another second anyway. Then he leaned in and pressed a kiss to your forehead, brief and certain, and stepped back like it cost him something to do it. "Lock the door," he said. "Actually lock it. Not the thing you do where you just close it."

"I lock my door, Katsuki."

"Sure you do."

You almost laughed. It came out smaller than you meant it to, but it came out, and it was enough to loosen something in all three of you at once, the tension of the last hour finally easing back a degree.

Kirishima pressed one more kiss to your temple on his way past, murmured something warm against your hair you didn't quite catch and didn't ask him to repeat, and then they were heading down the stairs, footsteps fading, and you were alone in your doorway watching them go, feeling the loss of them like a change in temperature.

The door clicked shut behind you. The lock slid into place. And then it was just you, the hallway light, and the particular silence of a home nobody had lived in for a month.

You stood there a second too long before you finally moved.

The apartment smelled faintly of dust and nothing else—no food gone bad, mail piled past the door, some dating back when a month had still seemed like an abstract number instead of something you'd actually have to survive one day at a time. You dropped your bag by the door, toed off your shoes, and stood in the entryway a while longer than you needed to, just looking at the place, waiting to feel like you'd arrived somewhere instead of simply stopped moving.

The agency phone was dead. Had been dead since somewhere over the ocean, the battery giving out sometime during the layover while you'd been too strung out on airport coffee and the tail end of adrenaline to notice or care. Your actual phone—the one that had spent the last month packed away at the bottom of a drawer here, waiting for a version of your life before you had left—was still exactly where you'd left it. You dug it out slowly, plugged it in, and set it face-down on the mattress without waiting for it to wake up. Whatever was on it would still be there in twenty minutes. It could wait a little longer.

You unpacked instead, because it felt like something to do with your hands, and because some part of you didn't want to sit still yet.

It was easier than you expected and harder than you wanted it to be—the two things sitting side by side without quite canceling each other out. Clothes went back into drawers, one at a time, familiar motions that asked nothing of you—clothes you'd probably never wear again, most of them, the ones that had spent the last month being Elena Cross's instead of yours, folded now with the same careful hands that had once packed them for a trip you hadn't known would turn into this. The inn's little lotion bottle, shoved into a side pocket out of habit somewhere along the way, went straight into the trash—and you stood over the bin a second longer than the task required, watching it land, before you made yourself turn away from it. Elena Cross's blazer, still creased from the suitcase, still smelled faintly of hotel laundry service instead of you. You didn't know what to do with it at all. So you hung it in the very back of the closet, behind everything else, and shut the door on it. You could decide what that meant some other time. You didn't have to decide tonight.

You made tea you didn't especially want and sat on the edge of the bed while it steeped, letting yourself breathe—really breathe, slow and unhurried—for what felt like the first time all day, with nobody close enough to notice whether you managed it or not.

The phone lit up behind you sometime later, screen flooding all at once with the low, insistent buzz of a month finally catching up—texts, missed calls, agency notifications, the ordinary debris of a life that had kept going without you in it. You watched the number climb for a moment before you picked it up, some small, tired part of you almost laughing at how normal all of it was. Group chats about nothing in particular. A dentist appointment reminder you'd clearly missed weeks ago. Someone three buildings over asking, with mounting exasperation across three separate texts, whether you still had their charger.

Kirishima had texted twice. Once right after they'd dropped you off—you ok? —and again twenty minutes later with no words at all, just a photo of him and Bakugou's shared living room looking exactly as cluttered as it had a month ago, captioned only "home sweet home, I guess.” You found yourself smiling despite everything and typed back, slowly: All good. Already miss having you two three feet away instead of a whole train ride, before you could think too hard about whether you meant it as a joke or something closer to the truth. Then you set the phone down on the nightstand, screen-up, the way you never used to sleep with it before all of this.

Outside, Tokyo kept being Tokyo—traffic a few streets over, someone's television bleeding faintly through the wall, the ordinary hum of a city that had no idea what had happened to you three in Kyushu and wouldn't have cared even if it did.

You told yourself that was a good thing. Normal. Exactly what you'd wanted the whole ride home.

You believed it, mostly. Right up until you closed your eyes.

You knew you were asleep. You always knew, the way you know your own pulse—distant, useless, a clock ticking in a room you can't reach. It didn't matter. Your feet kept walking.

The white coat was ahead of you. Close enough now that you could see the fabric moving wrong, heavy as wet cloth, though the air was dry, catching light it shouldn't have been able to catch.

You turned the corner that should have opened into the east wing—three walls, the fourth open to daylight, the place where you'd found her watching you that afternoon—and found only more corridors. Same dust. Same bars of light. Same footsteps behind you now, too, though you hadn't heard anyone follow.

You walked faster. The corridor adjusted. You'd seen the blueprints and knew how the building folded together, but the dream didn't care about architecture. It cared about duration. It wanted you walking long enough to forget which direction you'd come from.

"You came."

Her voice didn't come from ahead of you. It came from inside your own mouth, your tongue shaping sounds you hadn't decided to make. You felt your throat move. Felt the vibration in your teeth.

"I knew if I gave you just enough," she said, and now it was behind your eyes, pressing against the optic nerve, "you'd follow it all the way down."

"Where are you?" Your voice belonged to you this time, but it came out folded—small, then too large, then small again, the way sound behaves in a throat that's no longer quite the right shape.

"Ninety-seven percent."

She was in the walls. In the dust motes. You could feel her attention on your skin, like sweat that wouldn't evaporate, like the moment before a burn registers. "Do you understand what that number means, Elena? Do you understand what you're becoming to me?"

"That's not my name."

"Open your mouth."

You tried not to. Your jaw unlocked anyway, the hinges wrong, too far back, the muscles remembering a configuration that predated human anatomy. You turned—you tried to turn—and she was already there, not standing in the corridor but replacing it, her face occupying the space where the wall had been, too large, the proportions ruined, her hand not lifting toward you but already inside, you realized, had been inside for several seconds while you were still looking for her, cold fingers sorting through the tissue behind your face like someone thumbing through a filing cabinet, finding the places that remembered fear and turning them up higher—

Do you honestly think I'd let something like that get away?

You woke with your hand clamped over your mouth, checking, but your fingers came away wet, and in the dark of your bedroom you could still feel the corridor extending behind you, patient, waiting for you to fall back in.

Your apartment held still around you—dark and unfamiliar in the specific way your own bedroom got at three in the morning after a month of sleeping somewhere else entirely. The shapes of your furniture were slightly wrong. The ceiling felt too far away. The quiet pressed in instead of settling. Your heart was going too fast. You lay there a while just breathing, counting slowly the way you'd taught yourself to, waiting for your body to catch up to the fact that you were safe, that the room was empty, that nobody was in it but you.

Nobody was in it but you.

That was supposed to be the reassuring part. It wasn't landing that way tonight. You'd gotten so used, over the last eight days, to the sound of the boys breathing on either side of you—Kirishima's slow and even, Bakugou's quieter and more careful, like even in sleep some small part of him stayed half on watch—that the absence of it felt like its own kind of wrong. A missing weight on the mattress. A silence with teeth in it, where there should have been two heartbeats close enough to reach out and touch.

You sat up slowly. Turned the lamp on, because the dark had started to feel like something with edges. The room looked exactly like your room—ordinary, yours, unchanged—and you still couldn't quite shake the sense that if you looked at the doorway too long, you'd find something standing there.

Your phone sat on the nightstand, screen dark, charged now, patient. You picked it up and set it back down twice before you finally let yourself unlock it—some old, stubborn instinct still arguing that it was the middle of the night, that they'd earned a full night's sleep after everything, that you could handle this yourself the way you'd handled things for years before either of them had existed in your life at all.

You thought about Kirishima's hand stilling on your knee at the airport. You don't have to carry it, though. Not by yourself.

You thought about Bakugou's thumb against your cheekbone in the doorway, only hours ago now, though it felt further than that. Call one of us. Doesn't matter when. Doesn't matter why.

Your thumb hovered over Kirishima's name for a moment. Then Bakugou's. Then—

You pressed call.

It rang twice. Barely.

"Hey." Kirishima's voice came through rough with sleep but immediate, with no hesitation in it anywhere, like some part of him had already been listening for exactly this. There was the soft rustle of him moving, a mattress shifting somewhere behind his voice, and then—muffled, but not muffled enough—Bakugou's voice, low and half-awake, asking who it was. Kirishima answered with just one word, her, like that single syllable explained everything. It did.

"Hey," you said back, and your voice came out smaller than you meant it to, thin around the edges in a way you couldn't smooth over fast enough before he heard it.

"You okay?" Already sitting up, by the sound of it—some shift in his voice that meant his eyes were open now, whatever sleep he'd had gone somewhere else entirely. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. I just—" You pressed the heel of your hand against your eye. "Bad dream. It's stupid. It's the middle of the night, you don't have to—"

"Don't."

Not harsh. Just firm.

"Don't do that."

You went quiet.

"Don't decide for us that we don't want to be here."

Your throat tightened.

There was movement on the other end of the line—the phone shifting, sheets moving—and then Bakugou's voice came through.

"What'd you dream?"

His voice was rough from sleep, but he was awake now. Fully.

You stared at the lamp across the room.

"...Sato."

The silence that followed wasn't empty.

It was the kind that meant they understood.

"The corridor," you said quietly. "I couldn't keep track of her. She was inside me…like inside my mouth. Her hands were cold, and she was...sorting through everything behind my face. It was really weird, and I don’t know, I just—" You swallowed. "...I woke up, and the apartment was just..." You looked around, the darkness swallowing the room.

Bakugou didn’t answer. You could picture him exactly—jaw tight, eyes narrowed at nothing in particular, the specific stillness he got when he was working hard not to let anger be the first thing out of his mouth, because he knew, somehow, that anger wasn't what you needed to hear right now.

"She's not there," he said finally, low and flat and absolute. "She's not in your apartment. She's not anywhere near you. You hear me?"

"I know that. Logically I know that." You pulled your knees up to your chest, phone pressed to your ear, the lamp still burning, throwing everything in the room into soft, ordinary yellow light that felt like it was at least trying to help. "It just doesn't always feel like it does, at three in the morning."

"Yeah." Something in his voice eased, just slightly, like that particular answer was one he understood better than he'd ever admit to out loud. "No. I know."

Kirishima's voice came back then, closer to the phone now, warm and steady in the way that always managed to loosen something in your chest even from this far away. "You want us to come over?"

You hesitated—the old reflex again, the one that still occasionally tried to convince you that wanting this was too much, too needy, an imposition dressed up as a crisis worth calling about—and then you thought, again, of Bakugou's hand against your cheek in the doorway hours ago, telling you plainly to call no matter what, no matter when. You let the reflex lose this time, on purpose.

"...Yeah," you admitted, quiet. "If that's okay."

"It's more than okay," Kirishima said, instantly, and you could already hear him moving—the soft thud of feet hitting the floor, fabric shifting. "Give us twenty minutes."

"Fifteen," Bakugou corrected, his voice sounding further from the phone now, like he was pulling a shirt on one-handed. "Keep the lamp on. Text me when you hear us on the stairs so you're not caught off guard by the door."

"I will."

"And drink some water or something. You sound like you forgot how to talk."

"Katsuki."

"What. It helps." A pause, and when he spoke again, some of the gruffness in his voice had softened into something quieter—almost an apology, for not being close enough right now to just reach over and pull you in the way he had every other night for the last week. "We're coming. Just—stay on the line till we're moving, yeah? Don't hang up yet."

You closed your eyes, throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with fear anymore, and let yourself just listen to the sound of them getting ready on the other end of the line—Kirishima saying something about shoes, Bakugou telling him to grab his keys, the small, ordinary chaos of two people rearranging their entire night without a second's hesitation because you'd asked them to.

"Okay," you said quietly, mostly to yourself. "Okay."

You didn't hang up. Neither did they.

They made it in twelve minutes, not fifteen. You knew, because you'd been watching the clock on your phone without quite meaning to, some small anxious part of you needing the number even though the line had stayed open the entire time—Kirishima's voice occasionally cutting through with a stray comment about a red light, Bakugou grumbling once about the elevator being out of service. You heard them on the stairs before you heard the knock, familiar footsteps taking the last flight two at a time, and you had the door unlocked before either of them could even reach for it.

Kirishima looked at you for exactly one second before he was pulling you in, arms wrapping all the way around you like he needed the full contact of it to actually believe you were fine, chin dropping to rest against the top of your head. "Hey," he said again, softer this time, right into your hair. "You’re okay."

Bakugou came in behind him, kicking the door shut with his heel.

He didn't say anything at first.

He just stepped closer, one arm wrapping around both of you, his hand settling against your back. For a second, his forehead rested against your temple, and that was all.

No lecture.

No questions.

Just there.

"You didn't have to run, did you speed?" you mumbled, muffled, into Kirishima's shoulder.

“We didn’t speed.” Bakugou said flatly.

Kirishima looked over at him. "You absolutely sped.”

“Tch.”

You laughed, small and a little wet at the edges, and felt something in your chest finally unclench the rest of the way.

Your bed had never felt small before. It felt small now—the three of you trying to arrange yourselves across a mattress built for exactly one person who occasionally had company, not two very large men and someone determined not to end up hanging off the edge of it. There was a brief, mostly wordless negotiation of elbows and knees and whose leg went where, Kirishima ending up half behind you with an arm slung heavy over yours and Bakugou’s waist, Bakugou tucked along your front with his forehead nearly against yours, one leg thrown over both of yours like he was pinning you in place out of sheer principle.

"This is not a queen bed," Bakugou muttered, shifting to keep from sliding off the edge entirely, which only pressed him closer against you instead.

"It's a full."

"It's a lie, is what it is."

"You could go home," you offered, entirely unconvincing even to your own ears, and he huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh against your face and didn't move an inch.

"Not a chance."

For a while none of you said anything at all, just settled slowly into the shape of each other, the adrenaline of the last hour finally draining out of the room and leaving something quieter behind it. It was Kirishima, eventually, who broke the silence—his voice low and a little sleep-slurred, but thinking out loud in the specific way he did when an idea caught him and he wasn't quite ready to let it go yet.

"We should do something tomorrow," he said. "Not—not agency stuff. Not debriefs, not case stuff. Just us."

"Tomorrow," you repeated, tired enough that the word barely registered as an actual plan yet.

"Yeah. Like a date." You felt him shrug, easy about it, against your back, but his hand was already tracing idle patterns on your hip, too purposeful to be accidental. "We haven't actually had one. A real one. Not counting an inn room and a collapsed building."

"Low bar," Bakugou muttered, though there was no real argument in it—and then his mouth was against your shoulder, not quite a kiss, just breath and heat.

"I'm serious." Kirishima's hand tightened, pulling you back more firmly against him, feeling him smile when you didn't resist. "I want a version of tomorrow that isn't about any of what happened. Just food, and you, and him being insufferable about something dumb, and then the part where we come home and I get to watch him lose his mind when you wear something that isn't tactical gear."

The image hit you all at once—Bakugou's eyes dark, his hands everywhere on you and maybe even inside you. You felt your face go hot, a flutter of something nervous and electric settling low in your stomach. "You—" Your voice came out slightly strangled, and you had to stop, clear your throat, suddenly very hyper-aware of Kirishima's chest against your back and Bakugou's thigh on top of yours under the sheets. "You can't just say things like that when I'm trapped between you."

"Why not?" Kirishima sounded genuinely curious and also deeply pleased with himself.

"Because," you said it like it answered the question. “And did you plan all that in the last thirty seconds?”

"I plan fast."

"He does," Bakugou said, dry, but his hand was sliding up your waist now, thumb catching on the edge of your shirt, eyes barely open but steady on your face in that way that always felt like being pinned in place. "Don't let him pick the place, though. Last time it was some all-you-can-eat gimmick with a mascot. Took me three showers to get the glitter off."

"The mascot was great."

"The mascot tried to hug me."

"He liked you. You were blushing." You shifted back against Kirishima, just enough to feel him react, and caught the way Bakugou's gaze dropped to your mouth.

"I wasn't—" Bakugou stopped, jaw tight, and you watched him choose his next words with obvious effort. "I don't blush. My blood pressure spikes when I'm surrounded by incompetence."

"That's your story?"

"That's fact." But he was moving closer now, closing the small distance he'd left between you, and his next breath came out rougher than before. "Pick whatever place you want. Just make sure it has a back corner where I can get my hands on you without an audience."

Kirishima went still against your back, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped an octave, teasing but with an edge of something hungry underneath. "Getting ahead of yourself, Katsuki?"

"Someone has to," Bakugou muttered, though his fingers had found yours under the covers, tangling together, not letting go. "Since you two are apparently just going to dance around it forever."

You laughed again, quiet and real, but it caught when Kirishima's mouth brushed your pulse point, and Bakugou's eyes went darker watching it. "Okay," you said, your voice steadier than you felt. "Tomorrow. A real one. No case stuff, no phones, and apparently I'm wearing something nice."

"Finally," Bakugou said, settling back down like the matter was closed, though his thumb was still stroking the inside of your wrist. "Someone with sense."

"I still think the mascot was great," Kirishima mumbled, already halfway back into sleep, but his hand had migrated higher, possessive and warm.

"Go to bed, Eijiro."

"'M already in it." A pause, then, softer, against your ear: "Kinda the best part, actually."

You smiled into the dark, something settled and light sitting where the fear had been an hour ago, and you let your eyes finally close.

Kirishima's hand found yours over the blanket, thumb tracing slow, deliberate circles against your knuckles—less absent than he was pretending to be, his breath starting to even out against the back of your neck. "Better this way anyway," he said, his voice thick with sleep but still carrying that undercurrent of intention that had been there all night. "Can't have a nightmare about being alone if there's nowhere left for alone to fit."

"...That was actually kind of smooth," you murmured.

"I have my moments." He was nearly asleep already, but his hand tightened on yours like he was making sure you weren't going anywhere. "Gonna have more of them tomorrow. Fair warning."

"Terrifying."

"That's the idea."

Bakugou's hand found your hip under the blanket, settling there with a kind of claiming heaviness that made your breath hitch slightly, his breathing slowing to match Kirishima's a few minutes later, the two of them falling asleep almost in tandem the way they always seemed to—like something between them had synced up a long time ago and was now slowly, deliberately pulling you into the same orbit.

You lay there longer than either of them did, listening to the two heartbeats you'd been missing hours earlier, the quiet of your apartment finally sitting right instead of wrong. Kirishima's hand had gone slack in yours, but his arm was still draped over your waist, and Bakugou's thumb was tracing idle, unconscious patterns against your hip bone that sent small shivers up your spine even as he slept.

The last thing you remembered thinking, right before sleep finally pulled you under too, was that the bed wasn't too small at all—it was exactly the right size for three people who were definitely, finally, going to do something about this tomorrow.

///

Morning came late and lazy—sunlight cutting through the blinds in slow stripes across a bed that still felt too crowded and somehow exactly right, and by the time the three of you had finally managed to peel apart and function like actual people again, it was well past noon. The boys headed back to their own place not long after, trading a lingering goodbye at your door for the promise of getting ready and coming back for you once they were—Kirishima's parting don't overthink it; you'll look great doing absolutely nothing to stop you from overthinking it the second the door clicked shut behind them.

You stood in front of your closet for longer than the decision probably warranted, considering and discarding options one at a time with a kind of focus you hadn't managed for anything in days. Not fancy—Kirishima had made that much clear the night before in the specific tone that meant date, not a night out to be photographed for some agency gala. But not nothing either. You wanted to feel like you'd actually tried, and tonight, for the first time in a month, trying didn't feel like a burden.

You landed, eventually, on your best outfit—nothing elaborate, nothing that screamed effort, just something that let the warm breeze kick in when you moved, nicer than anything you'd reached for in weeks, the kind of thing that made you feel like yourself again instead of Elena Cross or a survivor or anything else you'd been wearing lately even just for one afternoon. You left your hair the way it wanted to be, added the smallest amount of effort to everything else, and stood in front of the mirror a moment longer than necessary, something unfamiliar and pleasant settling into place. It had been a while since getting ready had felt like this—like looking forward to something instead of preparing for it.

A knock came right on time, and by the time you'd crossed the apartment to answer it, your heart was doing something a little embarrassing.

You pulled the door open, and whatever reaction you'd braced for got interrupted almost immediately by the sight of them—Kirishima in a simple button-down left open at the collar, sleeves pushed up, looking effortlessly put together in the specific way that always seemed a little unfair given how little thought he claimed to put into it; Bakugou beside him, dark and simple and somehow managing to make plain clothes look deliberate just by wearing them, sleeves rolled to the forearm, hair still damp from a shower.

"Okay," Kirishima said, dragging the word out, his jaw actually going a little slack as he took you in. Whatever he'd been about to say dropped away entirely, replaced by this wide, almost awestruck grin. "Wow. You—" He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, and started over. "You look incredible. Seriously, you're gonna have me distracted all day."

Bakugou hadn't said anything yet, which somehow felt louder than if he'd been shouting. His gaze moved over you slow and deliberate, completely unbothered by the fact that you could clearly see him doing it, something warm and a little dazed slipping through the usual flat composure. He cleared his throat. "Yeah," he said finally, his voice rougher than usual.

"That's the whole review?" you asked, half joking.

"Give me a minute, shit. You broke something." His mouth curved, not quite a smirk, something almost embarrassed underneath it, and he stepped in closer than strictly necessary to press a kiss to the corner of your mouth—brief, but his hand found your waist and stayed there a second longer. When he pulled back, he wasn't quite meeting your eyes. "Didn't account for you looking like that before we'd even left the building. This is gonna be a long day."

You grinned, closing and locking the door behind you. You took in the two of them properly—the effort neither would fully admit to and the fact that they'd clearly gone back and forth on more than they'd let on. "You two clean up well."

"We clean up well every day," Kirishima said, closing the distance to bump his shoulder against yours as you guys walked, his arm brushing yours in a way that felt deliberate. "This is just us cleaning up slightly more deliberately." He leaned in, dropping his voice. "Though I gotta say, you're making me wanna skip the whole thing and just hang out here instead."

Bakugou took the stairs ahead, glancing back every few steps to make sure you were following, his hand hovering near the railing like he was fighting the urge to reach for yours.

By the time you reached the car, the afternoon had finally, properly begun—sunlight cutting through the parking structure, Kirishima already sliding into the back seat with his knee pressed up against the side of your seat.

"Lunch first," he said, catching your eye in the rearview with that unfairly bright smile, "and then I've got a surprise for after."

"What surprise?"

"That's the part where I don't tell you." He grinned wider at your reflection. "There's a festival tonight. Asagaya. Lanterns, food stalls, the whole thing. Figured we'd eat first, walk it off, and catch it once it gets dark."

"You planned an entire day."

"I plan fast. We've established this."

Bakugou pulled out of the lot without comment, though the corner of his mouth had curved just slightly, like the idea suited him more than he was willing to admit out loud.

Bakugou's pick turned out to be a small yakiniku place tucked down a side street you'd never have found on your own—no sign out front beyond a faded noren curtain, the kind of place that clearly ran on regulars and word of mouth rather than foot traffic. The smell of char and smoke hit you the second the door slid open; low lighting and the quiet hum of a room that didn't need to try very hard to feel warm.

"This is so fancy," you said, sliding into the booth across from Kirishima while Bakugou settled in beside you like it had already been decided he would.

"It's good food. That's it. That's the whole criteria." He picked up the little grill remote like he'd used it a hundred times, which, you suspected, he had. "Just meat."

"Romantic," Kirishima said, deadpan, and Bakugou flicked a napkin at him without even looking up from the menu.

Kirishima's own menu, meanwhile, had slowly turned into something closer to a battle plan—eyes moving down the page with the focus of a man making a very serious decision, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.

"...Got it," Kirishima said finally.

"Yeah?" you asked.

"I'm gonna need a lot."

"That's not an answer."

"It is if I order enough of it."

The server came over, and Kirishima started without another thought.

"Could we get the tongue, two orders of kalbi, harami, skirt steak, pork belly—"

"Drop the tongue," Bakugou said.

Kirishima stopped. "What?"

"You didn't like it."

"I said I'd try it again."

"You said that last time."

"Because maybe I'll like it this time."

Bakugou looked at the server. "Don't."

"C'mon."

“You made a face last time."

“That was my normal face.”

You watched the two of them argue it out with the easy, practiced rhythm of people who'd had this exact fight plenty of times and would happily have it again, something warm settling low in your chest at simply getting to watch it unfold instead of being the one keeping the peace between them. When the server finally left with an order that was, in the end, most of the left side of the menu, Kirishima turned back to you, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

"See, now you get to try everything. You're welcome." He winked.

"That was for you."

“It was for both of us. I'm feeling generous tonight." He reached across the table, fingers deliberately brushing against yours as he toyed with the paper wrapper on your straw. His eyes roamed over you with unmistakable hunger that had nothing to do with the food. "Also—you look devastatingly pretty today. Has anyone mentioned that yet?"

"You said it an hour ago."

"I'm saying it again because it's still true." He propped his chin on his hand, his grin turning predatory as he watched you like you were the main course. "Katsuki. Back me up here."

Bakugou glanced over, his gaze doing a slow, possessive sweep from your face down and back up again. "Already told her that," he said. "But I don't mind saying it again if it makes her flustered." His tongue swept across his bottom lip.

"I could keep her flustered all night," Kirishima teased, a playful glint in his eye as warmth spread across your face.

"You can also shut up and pass the tongs before I burn your tongue instead."

It was, despite the tension brewing between the three of you, a unhurried lunch you hadn't let yourself want out loud until Kirishima had said it first the night before, half-asleep and certain. Bakugou manned the grill with the same unbothered competence he brought to everything, occasionally reaching over to fix a piece Kirishima had inevitably flipped too early, Bakugou’s free hand finding your knee under the table at some point and simply staying there, thumb moving in slow, absent circles that had nothing urgent behind them and everything warm. Kirishima kept up a steady stream of commentary on everything from the marbling on the beef to a couple two tables over who kept losing pieces off the grill, leaning into your space every few minutes like he couldn't quite help himself.

Somewhere between the first round of meat and the second, your shoulders finally came all the way down from wherever they'd been sitting since Kyushu.

"This is good," you said after a while. "This is really good."

Bakugou looked over.

For a second, something in his expression softened before he looked back at the grill.

"Told you," he said. "It's just meat."

You smiled. "That's not what I meant."

"I know." His hand stayed where it'd been on your knee, thumb brushing across it once before going still again.

Kirishima reached over and stole a piece off your plate without asking, grinning when you swatted at his hand and missed, and then leaned in close enough that his next words landed just for you, low under the noise of the grill. "For the record," he said, "I've been wanting to take you out properly since that solo mission you did—the one where you came back with your arm all torn up and tried to tell us it was nothing."

You blinked, caught off guard by how specific it was. "That was like what, two or three months ago?"

"I know." He rubbed the back of his neck, a little sheepishness creeping into the grin now. "You walked into the agency like it was fine, all casual about it, and you had this gash down your forearm you hadn't even properly cleaned yet, and I just—" He shrugged, like the memory still didn't fully make sense to him even now. "Something about it flipped a switch. I wanted to patch you up and also never let you go on a mission alone again, and somewhere in there I realized what I actually wanted was just to take you out. Properly. Where nothing was bleeding."

"That's a very specific origin story."

"I have a good memory for the important stuff." His eyes were warm, steady on you in a way that had nothing playful left in it for a moment. "Katsuki was worse about it than I was, actually."

"I'm flipping the meat," Bakugou said flatly, which was not a denial, and you laughed, warm and unguarded, leaning back into the booth between the two of them and feeling, for the first time in longer than you could easily count, like nothing about this moment needed to be survived. It just needed to be enjoyed.

You looked between the two of them—Bakugou already reaching to flip the next batch on the grill like it was the most natural thing in the world, hand still resting warm against your knee; Kirishima still grinning around a mouthful of stolen beef, eyes soft on you in the low light—and felt something settle all the way down, warm and uncomplicated and entirely yours.

///

By the time you finally spilled back out onto the street, stomachs full and unhurried, the afternoon had softened into that particular gold that only showed up a few hours before sunset—warm and slanted and forgiving of everything it touched, turning even the ordinary storefronts and parked bicycles along the sidewalk into something worth looking at twice. You had a couple of hours to kill before the festival properly got going, and none of you seemed in any rush to fill them.

Kirishima walked half a step ahead with his hands in his pockets, pausing every so often to peer into shop windows he had no actual intention of entering, narrating his opinions on things neither of you had asked about—a display of ceramic teapots he found weirdly intimidating, a secondhand bookstore he swore he'd come back to one day, for real this time. Bakugou walked close beside you, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, quieter than Kirishima but no less present, his hand finding yours somewhere along the third block without either of you commenting on it, like it was simply where his hand belonged now.

You stopped twice for drinks you didn't especially need—an iced something from a vending machine that Kirishima insisted was life-changing and turned out to be perfectly ordinary, and later a proper shaved ice from a stand with a hand-painted sign, which you all shared, standing in the shade of an awning.

"Melon was a mistake," Bakugou said, watching Kirishima work through the cup with visible regret.

"Melon is never a mistake."

"You've made that face three times."

"That's my thinking face."

"That's your regret face."

You laughed around your own spoon, watching the two of them bicker with no real heat behind it, the afternoon unspooling slow and easy in a way that made the last month feel, for the first time, like something that had actually ended instead of something that might still be happening somewhere just out of sight.

It was a little past four by the time the crowd around you started to thicken, foot traffic funneling naturally toward the mouth of a long, covered arcade up ahead. You felt the shift before you actually saw it—the air cooling under the roofline, the noise changing texture, and the crowd compressing gently into something with a shared direction and purpose. Then you stepped properly under the arcade, and the whole street opened up above you into color, and you stopped walking entirely for a second, just to look.

The papier-mâché figures hung from the ceiling in an unbroken procession as far as you could see in either direction—some of them clearly decades old in style, traditional folk shapes with careful, hand-painted faces gone soft at the edges with age; others unmistakably modern cartoon characters rendered in loving, careful detail by people who'd clearly spent weeks getting the proportions exactly right. Between them hung kusudama ornaments, round and elaborate, trailing long ribbons of colored paper that caught whatever breeze made it under the arcade roof and drifted, slow, almost like something breathing.

"Okay," you said, tipping your head all the way back, throat a little tight with how much bigger it all was than you'd pictured. "This is not what I expected."

"Right?" Kirishima had already stopped beside you, staring straight up with the open, delighted expression of someone who'd clearly done this before and still hadn't gotten used to it. "Wait till it gets dark. The lighting changes everything. It's, like, a whole different festival."

"We have that long?"

"We have exactly that long," Bakugou said, checking nothing, one hand settling warm at the small of your back to guide you gently forward again. "That's the plan. Walk it slow now while there's still light to see the details. Eat again in a bit. Stay till they light it up properly."

"You really did plan this whole thing."

"Told you I would."

You let yourself be steered, unhurried, weaving slowly through the thickening crowd, with Kirishima's hand finding yours somewhere in the shuffle of bodies and Bakugou close on your other side, his gaze flicking constantly and almost unconsciously across the crowd around you even here, even now—some old habit that clearly hadn't clocked out for the evening, no matter how much he'd tried to leave it at the door of the yakiniku place. You didn't mind it tonight. It felt less like vigilance and more like another way of holding on, quieter than his hand but no less there.

You moved slowly through the first stretch of stalls, in no hurry at all, stopping wherever something caught your eye long enough to actually look at it instead of just passing by. A woman selling small hand-painted fans, each one different, took nearly ten minutes of your attention while she explained the significance of the crane pattern on the one you were looking at—a wish for long life, she said, folding it closed and pressing it into your hands like something worth protecting.

Kirishima bought a paper All Might mask from the stall next to it purely because he liked how it looked, put it on immediately, and spent the next several minutes doing an increasingly dramatic All Might impression until Bakugou pinched the bridge of his nose. "One more 'I am here' and I'm blowing that thing up."

The stalls came thicker and closer together as you went, packed shoulder to shoulder down both sides of the arcade street—grilled corn glistening with butter under the string lights just starting to flicker on overhead; taiyaki fresh enough that you could see steam curling off the fish-shaped batter the second the vendor cracked one open; and a woman two stalls down doing something fast and complicated with a ladle of batter that turned, almost impossibly, into a perfect round of okonomiyaki in under two minutes flat, flipping it once with a flourish that drew a small cluster of onlookers just to watch her do it. You stood and watched for a while too, unbothered by being in no rush, Kirishima leaning his chin on your shoulder from behind to watch along with you.

Kirishima bought one of nearly every food item you passed after that, more or less exactly the way he had at lunch, handing you half of whatever he got before you'd even had the chance to ask for a bite. Bakugou made a running show of complaining about the crowd and the noise and the heat while somehow, without ever seeming to try, steering you both toward the best-smelling stall on every single block.

Somewhere past the halfway point, you slowed near a small booth selling little wooden tags and thin brushes, a hand-lettered sign explaining that visitors could write a wish and tie it to the bamboo set up near the far end of the arcade shopping street—a smaller, quieter echo of the giant decorations swaying overhead, the same impulse scaled down to something you could hold in one hand.

"We should do one," Kirishima said, already reaching for his wallet before you'd finished reading the whole sign.

"It's a kid thing, probably." You said, looking at the wooden tag.

"It's an everyone thing. Come on." He was already handing over coins, collecting three tags and three brushes, passing them out as if this had been the plan the entire time, which, given how quickly he'd spotted the booth, you suspected it probably had been.

You turned the little wooden plaque over in your hands for a moment, brush hovering just above the blank surface. It was strange how something so small could make you stop and think. Beside you, Kirishima had already started writing, grinning to himself as the brush moved steadily across the wood, tongue caught between his teeth in quiet concentration.

Bakugou, on the other hand, took his time. His brows were drawn together, jaw set, one hand cupped around the plaque as though instinct alone had decided no one else was allowed to see it yet. The second your eyes drifted in his direction, he angled it farther away.

"Don't."

You looked back down at your own. "I wasn't looking."

"Bullshit," he said, making you laugh, looking away properly this time, finishing your own slowly. A wish so small, something you didn't say out loud even to yourself; just let the brush carry it down onto the wood in careful strokes—the three of you walking together to the bamboo near the far end of the arcade street, tying them on gently among hundreds of others, a whole quiet forest of wishes rustling overhead in a breeze you could barely feel against your skin.

"You're never gonna tell me what you wrote?" you asked

"No."

"Not even a hint?"

Bakugou glanced at you.

"You'll figure it out."

"That's not a hint."

"Didn't say it was."

Before you could argue, he reached for your hand as well as Kirishima’s hand, lacing your fingers together and giving a small tug toward the flow of people moving down the street.

By the time the sky properly started to dim, the arcade had transformed exactly the way Kirishima had promised it would. Strings of lantern light flickered on overhead, one section at a time, throwing everything into warm gold instead of the flatter daylight from before, the papier-mâché figures catching the new light and seeming, somehow, to come alive with it—shadows moving slow and gentle across painted faces every time the decorations swayed. The crowd had thickened further by then, but it didn't feel crowded so much as full, warm bodies and warm light and the noise of a hundred conversations blending together into something closer to music than chaos.

You ended up somewhere near the middle of the arcade again, having looped back without quite meaning to, standing beneath a particularly enormous decoration—some folk hero from a story you didn't know, sword raised high, expression fierce and a little goofy under careful brushwork—while Kirishima tried and failed, twice, to win a small stuffed chibi hero at a ring-toss stall a few feet away. Bakugou stood beside you, providing a steady stream of unhelpful commentary from the sidelines the entire time.

Kirishima had somehow convinced himself the chibi Deku was absolutely worth winning.

After the fourth missed ring, Bakugou sighed.

"You suck at this."

"I do not."

"You're proving it."

"Watch this one." The ring bounced cleanly off the peg.

Bakugou didn't even blink. “Mhm?”

The argument carried on without missing a beat, familiar enough that neither of them seemed to think twice about it. You found yourself laughing anyway, the sound disappearing into the chatter of the festival. When Kirishima finally won on his last ring, the crowd's small groan of collective disappointment giving way to his loud, delighted whoop, the vendor handed over the prize—a small, round-faced chibi plushy with a shock of green hair and comically huge eyes, unmistakable even shrunk down and stitched crookedly.

Bakugou went very still.

"Absolutely not."

"What?" Kirishima was already turning it over in his hands, delighted. "It's so soft, look—"

"That's Deku.”

Kirishima blinked. "Okay?"

Bakugou looked genuinely offended that he had to explain this. "You cannot give our girlfriend a Deku plush."

The word landed and just sort of sat there in the space between the three of you, and for a second nobody moved.

"...Girlfriend?" you said, slowly, the plush momentarily forgotten in your hands as your face heated up.

Kirishima's expression changed first. The teasing smile fading as his eyes flicked toward Bakugou like he was making sure he’d heard right. "Katsuki..."

Bakugou looked away almost immediately. "What?" His voice was gruffer than usual, but there was something almost uncertain underneath it.

Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly looking a lot less like he had been joking around a second ago.

"Nothing," he said, though the small smile that appeared gave him away. "Just... didn't expect you to be the one to say it first."

"Someone had to."

"Yeah, I know."

Kirishima looked back at you, and some of the warmth in his expression turned nervous.

"We haven't actually talked about it," he admitted. "Not really. Not with all three of us here."

Bakugou was quiet for a moment.

Then, more softly: "Should've."

Nobody moved for a second.

The ring-toss vendor called out to the next person in line, cheerful and unaware, and the noise of the festival kept going around you exactly the way it had before.

But the three of you were suddenly standing in a quieter little space inside all of it.

"Can we..." You stopped, trying to figure out how to say it without making it sound bigger than it already felt. "Can we go somewhere for a minute?"

Kirishima nodded immediately. "Yeah."

He reached for your free hand carefully, like he was giving you the choice to take it.

Bakugou didn't say anything, but he stepped in beside you, close enough that you didn't have to ask if he was coming.

The walk away from the festival wound through quieter streets, the noise thinning out behind you into something more like an afterglow than a sound. Nobody spoke. You weren't sure what you would have said yet, and something in the silence between the three of you suggested they weren't either—not an awkward quiet, just a full one, everyone gathering themselves toward something none of you had said out loud before tonight.

You found a small neighborhood park a few blocks on, tucked between two buildings—nothing much, just a few benches, a single streetlamp, and a strip of grass gone soft and dark under the early-evening sky. Kirishima led you to the bench without asking, and you sat down between them; the Deku plush sat loosely in your lap, forgotten again.

The streetlamp flickered once overhead before settling into a steady, low hum, throwing everything nearby into a small, private pool of yellow light, the rest of the park sinking into shadow beyond it.

Kirishima was the one who finally broke the quiet. He didn't do it right away—you noticed that, the way he sat with his elbows braced on his knees for a long moment first, gaze fixed somewhere on his own hands like they might offer him the right opening line if he looked long enough. When he finally spoke, it came out slow and tentative in a way you almost never heard from him.

"Okay," he said. Then nothing. His jaw worked once, like he was testing the shape of the next part before committing to it out loud. "Okay, so..."

Bakugou glanced over at him, one eyebrow lifting slowly in the low light. "You gonna start, or are you just gonna keep saying okay?"

"Shut up, I'm trying to figure out how to say it." Kirishima didn't look up, still working it out loud more for himself than for either of you, his thumb tracing an absent line along the seam of his own jeans. "Katsuki and I..." He stopped there. A full breath passed, slow and audible, before he tried again. "We've liked each other for a while."

You didn't say anything right away. Something in your chest had gone very still and very careful all at once, bracing without quite knowing what it was bracing for, and you found yourself watching the streetlamp's small circle of light instead of either of their faces, giving the words a second to actually land before you let yourself react to them.

"How long is a while?"

Kirishima looked, for just a moment, genuinely embarrassed—color rising slowly up the back of his neck, an expression you'd rarely seen on him and never over something this quiet.

"Like... a year and a half? Something like that."

The number sat there in the air between the three of you for a beat longer than it needed to.

"Before me." The words came out smaller than you meant them to, quieter, edged with something you didn't have a name for yet—not hurt exactly, just the strange vertigo of learning the ground under you had a shape you hadn't known about.

Kirishima looked up immediately, like he couldn't stand to let that sit unanswered even a second longer than it already had. "Yeah. Before you." He hesitated, visibly reaching for the next part of it, hands opening and closing once against his knees. "But not—" He stopped again, frustrated with himself now, dragging a hand back through his hair hard enough to mess it further. "That's coming out wrong. Give me a second."

Bakugou looked away, out toward the dark edge of the grass where the streetlamp's light gave up entirely. "You're making it sound worse."

"I'm aware."

"Then stop."

"I'm trying."

You felt the tiny laugh slip out of you before you'd decided to let it, involuntarily, and some of the tension coiled tight in the small pool of lamplight finally broke—not gone, just loosened enough that you could all breathe around it a little easier.

Kirishima's mouth curved faintly at the sound of it, just for a second, before he looked back down at his hands again, more settled this time. "We just never said anything." A pause. "That's the stupid part."

"You never said anything?" you asked, gentler now, giving him the room to actually answer.

"Neither did he."

Bakugou scoffed, arms crossing loosely over his chest, though there wasn't much real defensiveness behind it. "Don't make it sound like I was the problem."

"You were absolutely part of the problem."

"I was waiting for you to stop overthinking."

"You were also overthinking."

A beat passed between them, weighted, a little sheepish, the two of them trading a look that had clearly been rehearsed in some other form a hundred times before tonight, just never out loud, never in front of you.

"...Yeah," Bakugou admitted finally, quiet, like the admission cost him something small but real.

Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck, working the rest of it out slowly, like he was still finding the shape of it even now, even after a year and a half of carrying it silently. "We kept finding reasons not to call it something more. Work. The agency. Living together. Everything would get complicated if we said it out loud, so we just... didn't."

"It was already complicated," Bakugou muttered, not quite meeting anyone's eyes.

"Yeah." Kirishima let out a slow breath. "But saying it out loud made it real. And real felt like something we could break."

You sat in between them for a while, nobody rushing to fill the space it left behind. The streetlamp hummed faintly and steadily above you. Somewhere behind you, blocks away now, the last thin thread of festival noise carried on the air and then faded again, and the cicada in the grass had gone quiet at some point without you noticing.

Then Bakugou spoke, low, without warning, into the settled quiet.

"There was a kiss."

Kirishima went very still beside you—not dramatic, just a sudden absence of the small fidgeting motions he'd been making with his hands a second earlier, like his whole body had paused to listen.

You looked over slowly, throat tightening before you'd even fully processed the words. "What?"

"During the Apex explosion." Bakugou's voice had gone quieter than you'd ever heard it, stripped down to something almost unrecognizable. "We never talked about it after."

"Why?"

Neither of them answered right away. The silence stretched long enough that you almost took the question back, almost told them they didn't have to answer it tonight, on this bench, after everything else already sitting heavy in the air between you. Then Kirishima let out a slow breath and finally spoke.

"Because if we talked about it, then it meant it wasn't just something that happened." He looked down at his own hands again, jaw tight, working through each word like it cost him something to find it. "When you told me he didn't remember—" He stopped there completely, looking away toward the dark grass instead of at either of you. His shoulders had drawn in, small, like he was bracing against the memory itself. "I thought I was going to lose him." His voice dropped lower still, barely holding together at the edges.

Bakugou shifted on the bench, turning his whole body toward the two of you now, and found both your hand and Kirishima's without needing to look down for either of them—just reached, certain, like his hands already knew exactly where you both were.

"I don't remember that time," he said, slow and deliberate. "But both of you do. That's the thing nobody talks about." He paused, jaw working once before he continued. "I don't have the missing part to grieve, because I don't remember it being gone. You two do. You both had to sit with that—watching me be someone I wasn't, not knowing if I was coming back. I got it back in under a minute." His grip tightened, just slightly, around both your hands. "You lived with losing me for however long that minute felt like. And then neither of you said anything, because you both thought you had to carry it alone so the other one wouldn't have to."

"That's what I do," Kirishima said, and the words came out small in a way that didn't suit him at all, small in a way that made something in your chest ache to hear.

"Yeah." Bakugou's voice softened further, something almost unbearably gentle underneath the usual gravel of it, worn smooth by the last few minutes. "Same as her. Not wanting to hand off the hard stuff." He shook his head slowly. "You're both terrible at it. Match made in hell."

You laughed at that, wet and unsteady, the sound catching somewhere in your throat halfway through, and wiped at your eyes before either of them could see — though of course they both did anyway, and neither one looked away, and neither one made you feel small for it.

Bakugou let the silence sit a while longer after that, long enough that you started to think he might not say anything else. When he finally did, his voice was low again, eyes fixed somewhere past the thin reach of the lamplight, into the dark where the grass gave way to nothing you could see.

"When you showed up in our lives." His jaw flexed once at the memory of it, muscles working tight along the line of it. "Everything got worse."

Kirishima snorted quietly beside you, some of his usual ease creeping back in for just a second. "Shut up."

Bakugou didn't even glance at him. "Not because of you." His eyes flicked to yours, just for half a second, before settling back into the dark. "Because now there was — you. On top of everything we'd already been pretending wasn't there." He exhaled hard through his nose, the sound almost frustrated, though not at you. "Didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do with that."

He rubbed the back of his neck, slow, looking almost irritated at the memory of his own confusion, like some part of him was still annoyed at himself for taking this long to get here.

"Didn't know if wanting you meant what I had with him wasn't real. Or if wanting both of you at once just made me—" He clicked his tongue, visibly searching for the word, jaw working through several false starts before he finally landed on one. "Selfish."

His shoulders lifted in a small, tired shrug, more exhausted than defensive.

"Felt like there wasn't supposed to be room for both."

You let that settle a moment before you answered, wanting to get it right, wanting him to actually hear it instead of just receiving it. "That's not how that works," you said, quiet but certain, holding his gaze even though he still wasn't quite holding yours. "Wanting more than one person doesn't mean either one matters less."

"Yeah." His thumb dragged once, slow, deliberate, across your knuckles. "Know that now." A beat, longer this time. "Didn't then." He looked away again, toward the dark grass, like it was easier to say the rest of it to the shadows than to either of your faces. "Should've talked to him instead of getting stuck in my own head. Could've saved us both a lot of bullshit."

Kirishima let out a quiet laugh through his nose, some warmth finally creeping back into it. "Yeah. We both sucked at that."

Bakugou shot him a look, though there wasn't any real heat left in it now. "You sucked worse."

"Probably," Kirishima admitted easily, smiling despite himself. Then he looked back at you, the smile softening into something quieter, something that asked a question without actually asking it. "We're talking now, though. Guess that's worth something."

"It is," you said softly, meaning it more than the two small words could really carry.

Your fingers tightened around Bakugou's without you deciding to do it, some instinct in your hand moving faster than the rest of you could catch up to.

"I just—" You looked between the two of them, throat tight, the next part harder to get out than you expected. "I don't want me showing up to end up costing you this."

Neither of them said anything right away, so you kept going, the words spilling out faster now, like once you'd started, you couldn't quite stop yourself from finishing.

"Whatever's happening between you two—it's been there longer than I've been around. If you need to figure that out first, if that's what you actually want—" You swallowed hard, throat working around the rest of it. "I can wait. I mean that. I can—"

"No."

Bakugou cut you off before you could finish, fast, certain, with no hesitation in it at all.

"Don't." His grip tightened around your hand, just enough for you to feel it clearly. He turned to hold your eyes properly now, steady, refusing to let you look away from it. "That's not what this is. We're not picking one or the other." His jaw worked once more before he continued, the words coming slower, more deliberate. "We want both. Been wanting both. We just took way too damn long to admit it, to each other and to you."

Kirishima nodded slowly; something settled, finally coming over his whole face, like a weight had shifted somewhere underneath it. "Yeah." He smiled, small and a little sheepish. "I don't want to have to cut this into pieces just because it's complicated. I want all of it. All three of us, together, not divided up into smaller versions that fit easier."

He looked at Bakugou for a long second, something unguarded passing quietly between them—years of careful distance finally setting itself down—before he looked back at you. "I love him."

The words came easily this time.

"And I..." He laughed quietly at himself. "Every day I'm with you, I feel like I'm falling more and more for you, too." His shoulders lifted in a helpless little shrug. "Turns out those things don't fight each other as much as I thought they would."

You sat with that for a moment, the weight of it settling somewhere warm and unfamiliar in your chest. "I trust you two more than anyone I've ever known," you said finally, quiet, the words coming slower than you meant them to, like they mattered too much to rush. "That's not something I say easily. After everything—Apex, Sato, being your sidekick, all of it—you're the two people I know I can hand the hard things to and not have them dropped. I don't know how to explain what that's worth to me except to say I don't want to spend one more day not saying it."

Kirishima's breath caught audibly. Bakugou didn't say anything at all, but his hand tightened around yours, and something in his face went unguarded in a way you'd rarely seen outside of Kyushu.

"So," Kirishima said, voice rough, "are we doing this? All three of us. For real. Not a thing we back into without saying it—an actual, real thing."

"Yeah," you said, and it came out steadier than you expected, certain in a way that surprised even you. "I want that. I want all of it."

Bakugou moved first. His hand came up from your lap to cradle your jaw, thumb brushing slow and deliberate against your cheekbone, like he was mapping the territory he was about to claim. His eyes held yours—sharp, red, unwavering—and then he tilted your face toward his and closed the distance.

The kiss wasn't gentle. It was a slow burn, deep and unhurried, his mouth moving against yours like he had all the time in the world and planned to take every second of it. His fingers slid into your hair, gripping just tight enough to send a shiver down your spine, and when he finally pulled back, his lips dragged against yours like he couldn't quite bare to break the connection completely. His forehead rested against yours for a moment, breath warm and shared between you, before he let go.

You were still dizzy from it when Kirishima's hand found your face, turning you toward him. His thumb traced your lower lip, still swollen from Bakugou's mouth, and something in his expression—soft and reverent and wanting—made your chest ache.

"Is this okay?" he murmured, even though he already knew the answer.

You nodded, and he kissed you like you were something precious, something he'd waited years to touch. His mouth was softer than Bakugou's, exploring rather than claiming, but there was heat beneath it—restraint straining at its edges. His hand slid to the back of your neck, pulling you closer, and he deepened the kiss by degrees, teasing until you were breathless and clinging to his shirt. When he finally drew back, his eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, and he kept his hand against the back of your throat, feeling your pulse hammer there.

Then Kirishima turned to Bakugou, and the air between them shifted—charged, heavy with history. He didn't ask out loud this time, but the question hung there anyway: Can I?

Bakugou answered by putting his hand on your thigh, closing the distance himself in front of you, his other hand coming up to grip Kirishima's jaw with the same possessiveness he'd shown you. Their kiss was different—rougher, edged with frustration and relief and a year and a half of almost. Bakugou bit at Kirishima's lower lip, and Kirishima made a sound in his throat that went straight to your core, his hand fisting in Bakugou's shirt to pull him impossibly closer. They broke apart slowly, foreheads pressed together, sharing breath, and Bakugou's thumb swept across Kirishima's mouth like he was marking what was finally his.

"Well," Bakugou said, his voice rougher than before, "that took long enough."

"You're telling me," Kirishima breathed, still grinning, still wrecked. He stood up and reached out and hauled you both in at once, one arm locking around each of your waists, pulling until all three of you were pressed close, thighs touching, chests rising and falling in sync. His mouth found your temple, then Bakugou's, pressing lingering kisses there before resting his forehead in the small space between you both.

You could feel Bakugou's hand settle low on your hip, fingers curling just beneath the waistband of your bottoms, while his other arm reached past you to grip Kirishima's shoulder, anchoring all three of you together. You let your head fall back against Kirishima's shoulder, turning just enough to press your face into the warm curve of his neck, breathing him in—sweat and something uniquely him.

"Finally," you whispered, and felt rather than heard Bakugou's hum of agreement against your shoulder, where he'd dropped his head.

You were still standing there wrapped up in each other, none of you in any hurry to be the one who let go first, when the sky beyond the park's single streetlamp lit up sudden and bright, a sharp crack of sound following half a second behind it—the first of the night's fireworks, somewhere back over the festival grounds, close enough that all three of you jumped at once, becoming a tangle of startled limbs and someone's elbow catching someone else's ribs.

"Man—" Kirishima yelped, nearly losing his footing entirely, one hand flying out to grab Bakugou's arm for balance.

Bakugou had gone rigid for half a second, every old instinct snapping fully awake before his brain caught up with what it actually was, and then he let out a short, disbelieving huff of a laugh, mostly at himself. "It's fireworks. It's just fireworks."

"You jumped too!"

“I did not jump.”

You were laughing before either of them finished arguing about it, doubled over slightly with your hand pressed to your own chest where your heart was still going too fast, the sound of it pulling both of them in with you until none of you could really talk over the laughing enough to keep bickering properly. Another burst of color bloomed overhead, gold and pale blue this time, and none of you jumped at that one, already recovering, already leaning back into each other instead of away.

"Okay," Kirishima said, breathless. "Okay, that was—we should probably sit back down before one of us actually falls over."

"Good idea," Bakugou muttered, already tugging you both gently back toward the bench, though the amusement hadn't left his voice at all.

You guys sat down, you between them, tangled on that bench long after the festival sounds faded, trading slow, lazy kisses between the three of you—Bakugou claiming your mouth while Kirishima mapped the line of your throat with his lips, then switching. then meeting in the middle as you watched them kiss, their hands never still, always touching, always reaffirming.

At some point you turned your head around to find that Bakugou's arm had slung along the back of the bench behind you, and when Kirishima leaned in to kiss him over your shoulder, Bakugou's hand tightened where it gripped the wood—his forearm going taut, the muscles standing out stark in the string lights. Kirishima's fingers found his there without looking, lacing through, and for a second you just watched the two of them like that: mouths slow together, hands bulging where they held on behind you like it was nothing.

You must have laughed, because they both broke away at once. "What," Bakugou muttered, not even bothering to sound annoyed.

"Nothing," you said, the words coming out breathier than you intended. "You two are just hot as fuck."

The air shifted—imperceptible but immediate. Bakugou's eyes dropped to your throat, darkening, and then his mouth was there, hot and open against the pulse point in your neck, sucking slow and deliberate like he was marking territory. At the same time, Kirishima's hand cupped your jaw, turning your face toward him, and then his teeth closed on your cheek—not hard enough to hurt, but firm, possessive, a shock of sensation that made your breath hitch in your throat.

Heat flooded your face instantly, burning down your neck and chest, your skin suddenly too tight, too sensitive. You felt dizzy with it, the warmth pooling everywhere they touched and everywhere they didn't, your heart hammering so hard you were certain they could hear it. Your fingers found the front of your own shirt, gripping tight, anchorless, overwhelmed by the sudden intensity of them—Bakugou's mouth working slow and filthy against your throat, Kirishima's breath hot against your cheek where he'd bitten, both of them crowding you into the bench like you were the only thing in the world worth having.

For a second—maybe two—neither of them moved. You could feel the tension coiling through both of them, Bakugou's arm rigid where it braced against the bench behind you, Kirishima's fingers trembling almost imperceptibly against your overheated skin. They had lost it, whatever careful restraint they'd been holding onto, and the three of you hung there in the dark, breathing hard, the moment stretching thin and electric between the festival lights. You were burning up, molten, unable to think past the heat of them.

Then Bakugou exhaled against your neck, something almost like a laugh, and pulled back just enough to press a chaste kiss to your shoulder. The cool air that rushed in made you shiver, your skin still radiating warmth. Kirishima released your cheek, smoothing the spot with his thumb before dropping a soft kiss there in apology, his smile crooked and sheepish when you opened your eyes. You were still warm all over, your pulse thrumming in your ears.

"Sorry," he murmured, though he didn't sound sorry at all.

"Shut up," Bakugou grunted, but his hand found yours—his palm was furnace-hot, grounding—and squeezed once before he leaned back, the mask slipping back into place even if his eyes still burned.

The Deku plush lay forgotten on the ground until Kirishima finally surfaced from wherever you'd all gone, laughing softly as he rescued it and pulled you both to your feet with the kind of easy strength that made you feel safe, wanted, and kept.

BABIES FIRST DATE STOPPP... i was kicking my feet and squealing like a maniac

They needed a date and kisses ofccc

Not to mention you now have a hickey from Bakugou... I wonder what's gonna happen next...

Thank you to my lovely beta reader @faemagic88 !!! She really helped me out on the little things as well as the ending; you guys got that little bit of losing control there at the end because of her. She's the GOAT, guys; saved my ass for this chapter.

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