Chapter Text
How exactly did I end up in a situation like this…? , sighed Todoroki in the back of his mind. He used his left hand to wipe the sweat coating his forehead before he dropped it back down to his imprisoned body, the springs on the bed creaking just the slightest in protest.
Why was he imprisoned to a bed, you may ask? Because Bakugou Katsuki had decided that the right side of his body was essential for him to be able to sleep throughout the record-breaking heatwave currently hitting half of the world.
And how did Bakugou discover that ‘cheat code’, you must be wondering too? It all began with an explosion. A very big explosion.
-.-
It was the middle of the night. The moon shone high in the sky, dotted with stars one could hardly see in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. The thermometers read 31ºC - despite the late hour in the night, despite being the middle of September.
Class 1-A’s dorm was in utter silence, with only the cicadas ever so often singing in the patio located in the middle of the building. Everything was calm, peaceful, just a regular night in U.A. High School.
Until a sudden deafening explosion rocked the entirety of the building around, titanic shockwaves coursing through its reinforced structure.
Doors opened in a row and fully awake students who had been sleeping so peacefully half a second ago rushed towards the explosion’s site.
“What happened!?” yelped Midoriya right away as soon as he exited the elevator together with the other residents of the male side of the 2nd and 3rd floors on the 4th floor. “Are we being attacked by villains again!?”
“I have no idea!” roared back Kirishima, one of his hands continuously banging on Bakugou’s door. “Hey, Bakugou! Are you okay, dude!?”
A loud ‘fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!’ was the only audible answer before the door was kicked out of its hinges, hitting Kirishima straight on his (luckily hardened) face.
“I… Haa… am going to kill something… Haa…” panted Bakugou, slowly stepping outside of the bedroom spewing black smoke. His whole body was drenched in a mixture of sweat and water from the fire sprinkler system, and small droplets of a nitroglycerin-charged liquid fell from his clenched fists. “Fuckin’ climate change, get ready to be slaughtered real nice... “
“What…?” interjected the other students in nearly complete unison as they observed Bakugou walk towards the elevator with flabbergasted expressions.
“Is there any villain called ‘Climate Change’...?” asked Kaminari with a whispering voice.
“Technically, yes,” acknowledged Tokoyami with a small nod of his bird-shaped head. “It’s a villain that has haunted humankind since ages before Quirks first appeared. A terrifying enemy that threatens to wipe out all life from the planet Earth… It all began at the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when man dared to-”
“Um… Kacchan, are you okay?” hesitantly asked Midoriya, following his childhood friend after having rolled his eyes around just the slightest at Tokoyami’s ongoing overdramatic explanation on climate change. “Is your Quirk going out of control?”
“Fuck off, Deku! Unless you want to get blown up together with all the extra carbon dioxide around this area!!” roared Bakugou, glaring daggers at Midoriya as he impatiently waited for the elevator to return to the 4th floor. “Shit…! Who said climate change is just a scientific ploy…? Bring them over to me, I’ll shove this into them from their asses all the way up to their rotten brains!!! Argh, shit! Not again!”
As if reacting to his heated rage, Bakugou’s hands started crackling slightly, shortly after exploding into blinding flash grenade-like devices just as the elevator’s door opened.
“Woah!” yelped Satou, a large, thick wall of ice appearing before him and Todoroki almost as fast as the blinding explosion.
“What’s going on?” asked Todoroki, opening a hole on the ice wall with his fiery left hand. He couldn’t quite understand what was happening on the 4th floor but with the way Bakugou was cussing non-stop, Midoriya was rolling around on the floor screaming for his stinging, half-blinded eyes and all the other students’ flabbergasted open mouths… he was certain there was no villain around, at least.
“K-Kacchan… a warning first, please!?” whimpered Midoriya, rubbing his green eyes with the pads of his fingers.
“I told you to fuck off, didn’t I!?” roared Bakugou, desperately trying to wipe his sweaty palms on his soaked sleeping wear. He turned his head towards the elevator with a sharp movement. “And you, Half-and-Half Bastard! Hurry up and get that stuff out of my way! I need a shower ASAP!”
“Aizawa-sensei is definitely on his way here. Shouldn’t you go talk to him rather than go take a shower?” pointed out Iida, helping the half-blinded Midoriya to a standing position.
“You do that, yeah, Class President?” scoffed Bakugou, his feet impatiently tapping on the floor as he waited for Todoroki to melt the ice barricading the elevator. “Me taking a bath and getting some fuckin’ sleep after three whole sleepless nights takes precedence to blowing up with pro hero Eraser Head, got it? Done yet, Todoroki? Great, good night, suckers!”
With those words, Bakugou bulldozed his way inside of the elevator and pressed the ground floor button, not even giving enough time for Todoroki and Satou to get off.
“I thought your Quirk worked better with hot weather,” pointed out Todoroki, his voice breaking the silent ice inside of the elevator.
“Yes, hot weather, not extreme weather!” said Bakugou after clicking his tongue. “Nitroglycerin gets extremely unstable at high temperatures! You never studied chemistry, you wannabe-honour-student!?”
“What about the AC in your room?” asked Satou, slowly taking a couple of steps back away from Bakugou - at least as far as the elevator allowed him to.
“If it wasn’t totally busted when it stopped working three days ago, then it sure is now, together with my whole freakin’ room,” grumbled Bakugou, a bulging vein twitching in anger on his forehead. “Not that it was helping much in the first place. It only made it worse whenever I was outside.”
“A shower won’t help you much either,” added Todoroki. “I’m sure chemistry classes taught you that nitroglycerin isn’t easily soluble in water. You’d rather rub your hands with alcohol or acetone to lessen the intensity of the explosions.”
“‘Done that already!” roared Bakugou, clicking his tongue in annoyance right after. “But it doesn’t work that well when I’m constantly sweating like a pig and adding fresh batches of nitroglycerin one after the other, now does it? A cold shower at least cools me down for the next hour or so.”
“Freezing your hands then?” suggested Todoroki, eyeing the nitroglycerin factory as he said such. Two large blocks of ice instantly formed around Bakugou’s fists, throwing him slightly off-balance with their sudden appearance. “Better?”
“Ngh… One! Have you ever heard of fucking frostbite!?” roared Bakugou, swinging one of his makeshift ice maces at Todoroki. “Two! The moment these things start to melt, you and the whole damned school are gonna wish to be at least 5 kilometres away from me!! Last but not least! All I need is less than 13ºC to not blow up with anything anymore. There’s absolutely no need for below freezing tempera- Achoo! Fuck! You’re only making things even worse for me, you damned Half-and-Half brainless moron!”
“Sorry,” apologised Todoroki with his usual blank demeanour.
When the elevator arrived at the ground floor, Bakugou made an automatic beeline towards the male bathing area, not sparing a single second to the small group of female classmates anxiously waiting for the elevator’s arrival.
“What happened?” asked Yaoyorozu, quickly looking at Todoroki and Satou by the elevator’s entrance and the fuming Bakugou on his way to the bathing area. “What was that explosion? And why are Bakugou-san’s hands stuck in ice?”
“Ah… To make the long story short, Bakugou’s Quirk is not working properly at the moment and Todoroki probably just made it worse,” answered Satou, nervously taking glances at Bakugou’s back until he disappeared from sight.
“Why is his Quirk going out of control?” asked Uraraka, her head slightly tilted to the right.
“Oh, the nitroglycerin in his sweat is probably reacting at the heatwave’s abnormal high temperatures,” concluded Yaoyorozu, figuring out the current situation with just a couple of short explanatory sentences. “Once the ice in his hands melt, the nitroglycerin accumulated in the water will most likely destabilise with the temperature change and enter in combustion, resulting in more explosions. Todoroki-san, you definitely messed up this time.”
“Sorry,” apologised Todoroki once again, this time accompanied by a slight slumping of his shoulders.
“Aizawa-sensei should be on his way here,” noted Ashido. “It’ll be safer to unfreeze Bakugou’s hands while he’s erasing his Quirk. It might not explode that way… maybe? Though I’m worried about his hands getting frostbite by that time.”
“If he’s unconsciously causing explosions because of a heatwave alone, I don’t want to imagine what will happen if he needs to have his hands wrapped in bandages during a heatwave…” said Satou, a shudder crawling up his spine at the thought alone. “He’d destroy the whole school...”
“Sorry…” apologised Todoroki for the third time, his blank expression now resembling a misbehaving puppy after having been severely scolded by its owner.
By the time every 1-A student gathered on the ground floor, Aizawa, their homeroom teacher, was already halfway through with the detailed tale of why the fire alarm went off and a bedroom had become muddy black with water and soot.
“Now I see,” acknowledged Aizawa with a single short nod of his head. “Todoroki, Kirishima and Sero, come with me to the bathing area. The rest of you should get outside of the dorm. The building has been built to sustain extensive damage but better safe than sorry.”
“What’s the plan, Aizawa-sensei?” asked Kirishima once the two groups separated, one towards the bathing area, the other towards the safety offered by distance from the volatile student.
“My Quirk can prevent Bakugou from secreting more nitroglycerin but I can’t do much about the one he already produced,” explained Aizawa. “Which means we need to safely isolate and store it so it doesn’t blow up on its own. Todoroki, you need to regulate the temperature inside of the bathing area and slowly get it high enough for the ice to melt but not high enough to cause an explosion. Kirishima, use your hardening to slowly break the ice around his hands and get it away from his skin as soon as possible. Sero, use your tape to wrap any big chunks of ice that aren’t fully melted yet to prevent the nitroglycerin from spreading through the whole bath.”
“Got it,” acknowledged the three students in unison.
“Bakugou, how are you doing?” asked Aizawa as they stepped inside of the bathing area.
“How about I answer that one after I get some freaking sleep?” snorted Bakugou, sat down underneath a showerhead, the cold water running at full power. “Better yet, after the heatwave ends?”
“I can’t give you an end date for this one nor assure you that another heatwave won’t happen so you’d better find some countermeasures to extreme weather as soon as possible,” instructed Aizawa, squirting a few eye droplets to his Quirk’s source before he activated it and erased Bakugou’s. “You guys can start.”
“We’ll get this ice out of you in a jiffy,” reassured Kirishima, crouching down next to Bakugou. He readily hardened his fingertips and started lightly tapping on the small ice boulder covering his right hand. “Without any more explosions, if you will.”
“Bakugou, sorry…” apologised Todoroki, also crouching down beside Bakugou. He activated the Quirk on the left side of his body just the bare enough to be warmer than the usual human body temperature, slowly raising it at nearly unnoticeable levels.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” scoffed Bakugou, rolling his eyes around at both the reassuring words and the apology.
The ice removal process was slow and lengthy, with several pauses to allow the pro hero Eraser Head to blink his eyes and add a bit more of the eyedrops. By the time Sero wrapped the last chunk of nitroglycerin-charged ice, the night could already be called early morning.
“Aizawa-sensei… Can we please have a day off today…?” groaned Sero, sprawled on the moist floor of the bathing area. “Or at least have permission to sleep during classes…?”
“A night without sleep won’t do you, teenagers, any harm,” stated Aizawa, squirting the small amount of eyedrops liquid left in the pocket-sized squeeze bottle into his dry, tired eyes. “Bakugou, go to the infirmary and have Recovery Girl check your hands. Todoroki, go with him. Tell the others it’s safe to come in already on your way out.”
“Okay,” meekly acknowledged Todoroki - the totally opposite reaction that Bakugou had.
“I don’t need an escort to the infirmary. The problem’s my hands, not my legs,” grumbled Bakugou, a sour expression on his features as he picked himself up and took off his soaked shirt. The wet slap his shirt gave to his back when he threw it over his shoulder must have been stronger than he had intended, for his knees wobbled around and his vision swoon his surroundings around into a misty mess. “Ngh…!”
“Right. This makes it the fourth night you’ve gone without any sleep so you could maintain your Quirk stabilised. Of course the problem is your hands, your legs, your whole body,” said Aizawa with the most deadpan expression all students present had ever seen him do. “Todoroki, you’re definitely going with him. Even if that means you have to drag him there like a sack of potatoes. Understood?”
“I don’t need any help!” roared Bakugou, loudly stomping his feet on the floor. He then proceeded to yomp his exhausted body out of the bathing area.
“Todoroki,” shortly said Aizawa, the thumb pointed in the sulky student’s direction spelling everything else.
“Bakugou, don’t be so stubborn,” sighed Todoroki, a quick run enabling him to catch up with the blonde. He grabbed him by the waist and hoisted him up to his shoulder, following their teacher’s instructions to a T.
“Put me down, Half-and-Half Bastard!!” roared Bakugou, flailing both his arms and legs around in hopes to hit Todoroki nice and hard and free himself. It didn’t go as well as he had planned. “And I’m not being stubborn! Now let me down!”
“Is Recovery Girl at the infirmary at these hours?” asked Todoroki, ignoring Bakugou completely to hear out his teacher’s answer. He could hear the cussing and yelling but his brain registered none of them.
“I’ll contact her and ask her to go there,” said Aizawa, waving his hand at them with a shooing motion. “Okay, Sero, Kirishima, time to dispose of the nitroglycerin around here. Go call some of the other guys to help give this bath a good spring cleaning.”
“Bakugou, stay well behaved, ‘kay?” said Kirishima with a sparkling smile, patting Bakugou’s back on his way to the dorm’s front door.
“Want me to tape his wrists and ankles, Todoroki?” jokingly asked Sero, a shit-eating grin on his lips as he also rushed past them. “His mouth too, while I’m at it. Ahahaha!”
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill all of you once this is over!!” threateningly roared Bakugou, once again erupting in a raging limb flailing battle that ended up being yet another fruitless waste of energy.
“What’s this, Bakugou? Did you go from a pile of dynamite to a sack of potatoes at daybreak, like a war-time Cinderella would?” snorted Mineta when he saw Todoroki coming out of the dorm building with an extremely pissed off Bakugou sprawled over his shoulder.
“Do you want me to bury you with both, since you’re asking for it so nicely?” barked back Bakugou, throwing Mineta the middle finger. “No! Don’t even try me, Deku!”
“O-Okay…!” squeaked Midoriya, having been cut off before he could even say the letter A for ‘Are you okay, Kacchan?’
“Geez, I’m surrounded by pests…” grumbled Bakugou under his breath, his eyes still stuck to the small crowd steadily decreasing in size. The building was now safe and sound, most were definitely going to go back to their rooms and get a couple of hours of sleep before the first period of classes started. That annoyed him deeply, for more than one reason. “Maybe I should have destroyed the whole damned dorm and buried them underneath the debris, rather than spend so many sleepless nights trying to not blow up anything…”
“That’s just the sleep deprivation talking,” said Todoroki, not the least bit shocked about Bakugou’s terrorist tendencies - or at least he hoped said terrorist tendencies were truly just the result of sleep deprivation.
“Sure, whatever. Now put me down!” ordered Bakugou, throwing a punch underneath Todoroki’s ribs, later pushing and pushing his knuckles into his torso. “It’s barely daybreak but it’s already plenty of hot! Way too hot to be so close to a fuckin’ fire machine!”
“Then…” mumbled Todoroki, his words trailing off as he lowered Bakugou to the floor and then readily lifted him up once again, switching him from his left shoulder to the right one. “Is this side better?”
“The floor is better!!” roared Bakugou, hitting the back of Todoroki’s head with his elbow. “Ugh… You’re so freaking annoying! Hurry up taking me to the infirmary and then scram!”
“Yes, yes,” sighed Todoroki as a conversation finisher. From there on and until they reached the main school building, it was silence.
Huh… It is better, noted Bakugou in the back of his head, having equally decided that any further resistance would just tire him out more than he already was. He released all of the tension on his muscles and allowed his body to lay completely inert over Todoroki’s left shoulder as if a futon airing out in the sun. Colder than the right side but still warm enough to not be called icy. It actually… does feel... pretty good…
“We’re here,” announced Todoroki, momentarily halting in front of the infirmary’s door before he slid it open. “Bakugou?”
“Huh? Oh. Right,” babbled Bakugou, his brain startling awake at the call of his name. He slid his naked torso against Todoroki’s shoulder, walking inside of the infirmary on his own.
Recovery Girl was already inside.
“Aizawa-kun has explained to me what happened,” said Recovery Girl, urging the two students towards the examination area with her soft, wrinkly smile. “Let me see your hands, Bakugou-kun.”
After a quick examination and a small healing kiss to the top of his head, the infirmary visit was deemed as over.
“The frostbite was only in its initial stages so your hands didn’t suffer a lot of damage. However, just to play safe, do keep an eye on them. If you notice any changes to your performance or feel any type of stinging pain in them, come see me again,” advised Recovery Girl, lightly patting Bakugou’s lower back as she walked towards the door. “Aizawa-kun also told me that your bedroom is unusable at the moment so you can rest here in the infirmary until classes start. If by the time I start my working hours you’re still sleeping, I’ll give you a class exemption leave for today. Sleep deprivation is extremely bad for a growing body. Make sure to change out of those soaked clothes too, or you’ll catch a cold. Feel free to use the extra gym jerseys kept on the supply cupboard.”
“Okay,” acknowledged Bakugou with a small nod of his head.
With a closing door, the infirmary was drowned in awkward silence.
“I’m going to return to the dorm now,” announced Todoroki, his legs readily motioned forward towards the door. If a hand hadn’t grabbed the back of his clothes, he’d have reached his goal. But sadly enough, Bakugou had other plans for him.
“That’s all? You’re not going to take responsibility for what you did to me?” asked Bakugou, a small frown mixing with a knowing smirk.
“You were the one who told me to leave as soon as I finished taking you to the infirmary,” pointed out Todoroki, an eyebrow slightly arched in puzzlement.
“Yeah, ‘changed my mind a bit,” said Bakugou as he shrugged his shoulders. He released Todoroki’s clothes and went to look for the mentioned extra jerseys inside of the unlocked cupboards. “You’d probably be handier than any AC and for as long as you don’t try to turn me into an explosive ice cube, I’d be able to keep my Quirk under control while sleeping. Which is the only time I can’t accurately prevent the nitroglycerin from going kaboom and blow up with half of the world.”
“Okay…?” acknowledged Todoroki, not really understanding where Bakugou wanted to get at with all of that.
“Get in the bed. I’m dying for some sleep,” instructed Bakugou, quickly taking off the rest of his wet clothes and put on a pair of pants and jerseys, leaving the zipper open to not start overheating his body before he could get some actual sleep on him. “Why are you just standing there? Hurry it up, will ya?”
“Huh?” interjected Todoroki, caught completely off guard when Bakugou grabbed his arm and started dragging him towards the closest bed. Amidst so much confusion, he was easily pushed down on the bed.
“Lend me that cold right side of yours for a little while longer,” said Bakugou, his smirk growing exponentially as he leaned over Todoroki’s half sat down, half laid down body.
It was an instant KO. The moment Bakugou’s head landed on top of Todoroki’s right shoulder, with his torso and legs closely glued to the right side of his body, he blacked out immediately.
How exactly did I end up in a situation like this…? , sighed Todoroki in the back of his mind.
He momentarily thought about silently sneaking out of the bed - Bakugou seemed to be greatly relishing on his icy right side but he couldn’t say the same for himself, now having to withstand his body heat, Bakugou’s body heat and the heatwave all at the same time, with the AC turned off and no open windows - but he quickly scratched off that idea.
Who would have thought Bakugou likes cuddling in bed?