Chapter Text
The next thing you were aware of was a hard body curled over yours.
There was a ringing in your ears, and a muffled noise beyond it, like someone was shouting through cotton.
“--rat. Oi, brat!” someone was shouting, from what sounded like very close by. “Brat, you’re fine, open your eyes.”
The body over you shifted, and your eyes snapped open, only to come face-to-face with pro hero Deku. Over his shoulder, you could just see the ghostly figure of Bakugou, looking angry and concerned all at once.
Deku had apparently grabbed you and leapt to the opposite end of the hall, covering you as the other end of the corridor crumbled, debris pinging off the walls around you. Grey powder choked the hall, dredging up all-to-familiar memories of your own workplace caving in—
A pair of fingers snapped in front of your face, Bakugou’s own face poking around Deku’s shoulder. “Breathe, brat, you’re gonna be fine.”
You sucked in a breath obediently, and Deku’s eyes searched over you. “Are you alright?” he asked.
You nodded, and he shifted off of you, turning to the opposite end of the hall. “Keep behind me, okay? Something’s coming.”
No sooner had he said it than several bodies climbed out of the hole that had been blown into the side of the building, masked men in varying levels of tac gear and hero uniforms you did not recognize. Deku dropped into a fighting stance, blackwhip flickering to life at his arm. Your heartbeat pounded in your ears.
“Get back against the wall, in the corner,” Bakugou said. “The nerd will get this.”
You turned to look at him, eyes sweeping over his handsome face. He looked seriously concerned, sending your heartbeat tripping all over itself. He was leaning into you, like he meant to curl over you himself, which reminded you all over again why he couldn’t, and why you were here in the first place.
“Your room,” you said, your voice a little strangled. Deku’s jump had put you right at the end of the hall, directly in range of Bakugou’s hospital room.
Bakugou said something, but you didn’t hear him, too focused on heading straight for his room. You shouldered open the door, relieved to see the room was still in order, untouched by the explosion, except for a small puddle of water on the floor, where a plastic cup of water had apparently overturned itself off a side table.
You froze at the sight of the figure laying still in the hospital bed. It was unmistakably Bakugou, ashy blonde hair sticking up in wild tufts, long eyelashes resting against the tops of those ridiculously high cheekbones. His soft mouth, always curled meanly when he was awake, was slack in sleep. He looked ridiculously pretty, despite the plethora of tubes sticking out of him. Your heart throbbed in agony for him, for the soft, helpless version of this man who lay before you.
“If you say anything mushy I’ll kill you,” he said from behind you. You jumped, having momentarily forgotten the other Bakugou.
“Alright, let’s fucking get this over with,” he said, moving past you. He stepped over to where his own body lay, with that eerie absence of footprints that had haunted you since that first night in your kitchen.
With little ceremony, he reached out and stuck his hand through his own chest. You waited a beat, but nothing happened. The Bakugou in the hospital bed lay still, and the Bakugou who’d been haunting you for weeks made a frustrated little noise, punching into his own chest harder.
“Maybe if you lay down in yourself?” you suggested, jumping when the wall behind you shuddered with the unmistakable weight of a body slammed into it. Deku and his opponents. “Uh, and quick.”
Bakugou muttered something about not taking orders, but he stretched out over his own form, lowering himself. For a minute, you thought it might have worked, as he disappeared inside himself. But then his ghostly figure sat back up, looking beyond frustrated.
“I feel like I was more certain that was going to work,” you said, disappointedly.
Bakugou’s long fingered hands clutched at his own hair, pulling in obvious dismay. “We’re gonna fuckin’ think of something–”
The sound of the wall blowing open cut him off, the impossibly heavy thud of a body being thrown straight through thumping through the room. A humongous man in dark tactical gear rolled across the floor, slamming into the opposite wall with a crunch.
You startled, your heart shooting into your mouth.
And then it stopped beating entirely as the man groaned and rolled over, climbing to his knees. Unnaturally blue eyes fixed on you first, then flickered over to where Bakugou lay, and a horrendous smile curled the man’s mouth.
“Hello, number two,” he said, in wickedly pleased tones.
Bakugou stiffened where he sat, half out of his own body, and a snarl curled his mouth. “I’ll fucking kill you–”
But the man couldn’t hear him, rising to his feet.
“DEKU!” you called worriedly, but there was no answer from the hall, only the sickening crunch of dozens of impacts, the pro still clearly fighting off an entire wave of villains.
You didn’t know if you could count on help from his corner.
Before you knew what you were doing, you’d shot across the room to Bakugou’s side, positioning yourself in front of him. “If you come closer, I’ll kill you,” you said, trying to sound as hard as Bakugou had.
The man laughed, eyebrow rising. “Will you now,” he said flatly. Not even like a question, like there was no doubt in his mind at all that you couldn’t.
“There’s a reason I’m the one stationed in this room,” you said, lying your ass off. You drew yourself up, trying to look like a pro hero with a handle on the situation. “You can’t even begin to think of what my quirk will do to you. If you want to live, you have five seconds to leave the room.”
The man just laughed again, eyes sweeping you head to toe, down your sweater set to your rapidly bruising wrist, down to your jeans and sneakers. “Interesting hero costume,” he said.
“You’ve never heard of plainclothes law enforcement?” you said mockingly, but you could tell he had no interest.
Your heart rate tripled in your chest, beating so hard you thought it might rip open your chest.
“Get out of the way, brat,” Bakugou was saying behind you, voice quickly growing louder. “You don’t have a quirk.”
As if to confirm what Bakugou was saying, the man chuckled again. “I’ll take my chances,” he said, drawing closer, and your blood iced over in your veins.
“Move, brat,” Bakugou shouted again, his voice strangely frayed. “Y/N, if you don’t fucking move–!”
But you couldn’t. You had no idea if it was fear freezing you in place, or something else, but you closed your eyes, curling over Bakugou’s body, the icy chill of him splitting your shoulder where his ghost form stuck out right through you. The villain raised a hand, something crackling in his palm, and that familiar white hot fear lanced through you–the understanding once more, that you were going to die.
It was like grit in your eyes, dust in your mouth, the screams all around you again. The dark, the dim, the blinding fear, the knowledge that this time, Bakugou couldn’t save you—
You gripped him tight, a scream tearing from your throat as the man’s hand descended. There was a sudden flash of an eerie silver light, but it didn’t seem to be coming from him. It lit up the room under your hands, blinding you, blinding the man in front of you.
But his hand descended still, black flames licking his palm, and then–
A hand shot out, gripping the man’s wrist, halting it inches from your nose.
You stared, heart hammering. Something shifted under you, a chest heaving, and then there was a disgusting, wet gurgling noise, like a tube being yanked from a mouth.
“I told you to get out of the way, you damn brat,” a voice rasped, hoarse and throaty, but unmistakably familiar.
And then Bakugou Katsuki himself was shifting underneath you, body warm and hard and incredibly, unbelievably alive. An arm curled around you, pressing you to his chest as a white-hot flicker lit up your vision, and an ear-splitting boom rattled the room just behind you. The kickback sent the hospital bed crashing into the wall, all sorts of machines startling into a frenzy of beeps, and Bakugou grunted underneath you.
The man was blown back through the wall he’d come by, just in time for two black tendrils to catch him, securing him in place. Deku came darting in faster than your eye could track, stopping before the two of you. Green lightning still crackled around his limbs and his suit had been shredded in several places, several welts down the side of a bare arm. His skin was dripping with sweat, and he wore an expression more terrifying than you would have ever attributed to the kindly number one.
His face cleared when he registered the two of you smushed up together on the hospital bed, a sunny smile breaking out across his freckly face.
“Kacchan!” he cried, leaning over.
Bakugou’s hand raised directly up to his face, crackling with a clear threat. “If you fuckin’ touch me, nerd, I’ll put as many holes in you as this hospital.”
Deku halted where he was, but he still looked pleased. “Kacchan, it was true? It really was a quirk, and you were stuck with…?” he trailed off, clearly lost on your name.
“Uh, Y/N,” you supplied.
Bakugou’s gaze flickered downwards, snagging on yours, and you knew he felt the way you sucked in a surprised breath, pressed together as the two of you were. He looked good–healthy, flushed, alive, no more ghostly paleness about him, no indistinct edges. He looked perfectly normal—perfectly handsome and strong, your brain supplied unhelpfully.
The hand he had across your shoulders tightened, scarlet eyes trailing over your face with a weight like a physical touch. “Brat,” he rumbled quietly. “I told you to get out of the way.”
You couldn’t do anything but shake your head. There were no words to explain how much that wasn’t going to have happened, whether you wanted it to or not. “I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—You saved me, once.”
Calloused fingertips caught against the fabric of your shirt, shifting it against your skin. “That’s cause I have a fucking quirk, and you—” Bakugou stopped suddenly, his eyes going a little bit rounder at the edges. His blonde brows drew together, that soft mouth pouting in contemplation.
Deku shifted restlessly next to the two of you, and you tried to ignore that you were basically lying on top of Bakugou, chatting as though this were at all normal.
Finally, Bakugou spoke, his sharp gaze spearing you. But not as pointedly as his next few words did.
“Brat,” he said. “I think we need to talk about whether or not you’re actually quirkless.”
—
A week later, an insistent rap at your door split the quiet of your apartment.
You hadn’t even scrambled off your couch before an impatient voice growled at you through the wood. “Hurry the fuck up, Y/N.”
An excited little thrill went through you with the gravelly tone, even as you suppressed the urge to roll your eyes. Bakugou Katsuki stood on the other side of the door when you yanked it open, looking better than you’d ever seen him.
A week out of the hospital had truly returned all the color to his face, his movements sinuous and smooth, no sign that he’d been laid up in a hospital cot for nearly three weeks straight. He looked damnably perfect as always, and you thought you’d never get used to how horribly, wonderfully present and alive he felt in the flesh.
You’d seen him in passing just a few times over the intervening week—once when he was discharged from the hospital (though that had been more him throwing off the hospital staff and walking out, forcing them to complete the necessary discharge work), and again at his agency, to get officially retested for quirk with the in-house specialists.
This morning he was dressed warmly against the autumn chill, in dark jeans and a black jacket and grey scarf. He was also, bizarrely, wielding a file folder like some kind of terrifying cross between a supermodel and tax accountant.
As he brushed past you, letting himself in with zero invitation, you could feel the warmth of him, smell the charred, sweet scent of his quirk on him.
“By all means, come in,” you said to the empty air of your hallway.
Bakugou made a scoffing noise, kicking off his boots and moving over to your couch as though it were his own. “I fucking lived here, I don’t need a damn invitation.”
“Lived is an artistic interpretation,” you said following him. “Complained, harassed, and haunted are more accurate summations of your time here.”
Bakugou rolled those pretty scarlet eyes. “If I had to see you fucking prancing around in your little towel and watch you chop vegetables like an animal, I lived here.”
An involuntary heat spread across your nose. “You are the one who annoyed me out of the shower.”
Bakugou smirked, a wicked slash across his mouth, and the heat spread all over your body. He waved the file folder, slapping it down on your coffee table. “Your samples came back.”
Your nerves prickled in apprehension, eyes darting up to catch his. “Oh. Um….and…?”
He folded his arms across his chest, the shape of his biceps still all too visible through the dark fabric of his sleeve. “You have a quirk.”
Your heart froze in your chest, and it felt like all the blood in your body turned to sludge, stopping up your veins. “Is it–?”
Bakugou’s handsome face went perfectly serious for a minute. “Apparently the lab techs at the agency couldn’t get a good read on it. They had to send it out to someone from national.”
You regarded him quizzically. “What does that mean?”
“It means, we know how you never got diagnosed correctly.” Bakugou’s piercing gaze swept down your face. “They told me a bunch of medical bullshit, but basically your quirk is triggered only via insane amounts of adrenaline–they weren’t even able to identify the presence of the correct genetic material until they tried replicating the life-or-death ratios of adrenaline you would have been experiencing both times we think you used it.”
It felt like ice crystals were blossoming in your veins. You swallowed past the lump in your throat. “So I—so it was me, then. I quirked you.”
Bakugou nodded, and you had to look away from him, guilt rising.
You. It had been you who’d been responsible for everything that had happened to Bakugou. You who’d trapped him here, you who’d pulled him away from his life and everything he knew. And while he was in the middle of saving you, too. You’d repaid him by somehow cutting him out of his own body, attaching him to you instead.
“Oi, brat, look at me,” Bakugou demanded, his raspy tones cutting through your train of thought.
Your eyes lifted to his.
“If I have to hear any kind of self-effacing type bitching out of you—” he said, leaving the threat hanging.
You knew he was baiting you, but the pissy look on his face still annoyed you enough to arrest your spiraling thought patterns. “Bakugou. If you don’t shut up I’ll quirk you on purpose.”
He flashed that wicked smile at you again, like he’d like to see you try.
A tiny shiver went down your spine. You didn’t doubt you’d never get the drop on the number two hero again.
Then, you asked more quietly. “How does it work?”
Bakugou tapped the file folder he’d spiked onto your coffee table. “The nerds all explained it in here. A phantom quirk, they’re calling it. There’s some matter manipulation bullshit where you’re capable of removing some chemical function of the body–basically tearing out some amount of energy. You keep it running in proximity to yourself.”
You did not love that. “And you said–it takes like, life-or-death amounts of adrenaline…I’m not in danger of randomly quirking someone if I get startled, am I?”
Bakugou shook his head. “They told me it’s like hysterical strength. Regular people who lift cars and shit in life-or-death scenarios aren’t at risk of accidentally picking up a car when they get scared. You’d really have to be in a specific situation for it to happen again.”
That was a relief. Your fists unclenched themselves, and you dried your clammy palms on your jeans.
“Can I–is there someone I can talk to about the specifics?” you asked. “I have about a million questions. How I’m the only one who could see you. How–if I ripped out your energy, why you came with, like, clothes–?”
A blonde eyebrow went up, and Bakugou’s roguish smirk returned in full force. “Wanted me without clothes, huh?” he asked, a note of something you absolutely did not like in his tone.
The ice in your veins dissolved under a scorching flash of heat.
“Okay I–no–that’s not what I said—” you said quickly, scooting back from him on the couch even as he leaned in towards you. “I just meant like, good thing you weren’t naked, uh—”
Bakugou leaned in even closer, his eyes molten. “You’d like that, huh, you little pervert?” he laughed. His mouth had that mean curl to it again, the one that you both hated and hated that you loved.
“I didn’t–”
“Heard all about how you think I’m handsome and strong,” Bakugou purred, ignoring your protests.
God he was the worst.
You were so embarrassed. You didn’t know what to do with your face or any of your limbs.
A hand closed over your newly-healed wrist, tearing it away from where you’d apparently tried to cover your face.
“Been wanting to do that,” Bakugou said, sounding satisfied.
You rolled your eyes, skin tingling under the pads of his fingers. “I hate to break it to you, but you’d already been roasting me since the second I quirked you,” you informed him irritably.
“No, brat,” he said, and you thought he sounded a little bit fond. “I meant touch you.”
You froze in his hold, eyes darting up to catch his again. He held your gaze firmly, all hot red intent.
“Yeah,” he said, as if in answer to the question you were too stunned to ask. “I promised you were in for it, once I was alive again. And considering you’re the one who quirked me, you’re really gonna get it.”
Another violent shiver went up your spine. “Actually, I think I told you–”
You startled when Bakugou’s face was suddenly much closer to your own, the heat of his mouth so near your own lips that you could feel the breath leave him with the lightest exhale.
“I’m gonna fuck you, brat,” he said, so soft and low against your mouth. “That okay?”
You were nodding before you even registered that you had moved. Your ears burned with your own audacity, and his.
You felt more than saw the smirk again. “Good.”
Then Bakugou’s mouth was against your own, just as deliciously soft as it looked. He pressed towards you, all hot, hard planes, so solid and so very real against your palms as they came up to grasp him.
He pressed you down into the couch, your head against the very pillow he’d beaned at you the first night you’d met him, mouth devouring yours. It felt like every shift of his body, every flicker of his tongue was just as horribly exacting as he was–intentional, meticulous, deliberately executed to drive you crazy. You clutched at the collar of his jacket, letting out involuntary, soft little noises under his mouth.
“Yeah, brat,” he said approvingly, breaking away from your mouth to kiss a path down your throat, long fingers pulling the collar of your camisole down. “Gonna show you what I thought about you in that little fucking towel.”
He sucked a slow bruise into the line of your neck while his fingers slid into the cup of your bra, carefully peeling the fabric down so it sat under your breasts, pressing them up. His mouth moved down, passing over a nipple and then the other, tongue darting out to lick a slow line over it.
You hissed, clutching his collar tighter. “Bakugou—”
“It’s Katsuki,” he said into the side of your breast, red eyes flicking up to catch yours. “Call me Katsuki.”
He pressed his mouth to your nipple again, tongue flickering over it in a way that made you jerk against him. You watched the line of his mouth cut into a smirk before he did it again, catching the other in his fingers and drawing his thumb over it.
“Baku–Katsuki, you—”
Katsuki surged up to take your mouth in another kiss, pressing himself flat against you. You could feel the hard line of him in his jeans, better when you shifted so that he pressed into the cradle of your hips. One of his hands dug into your thigh, drawing it up along his side, as he licked long and slow and absolutely filthily into your mouth. His thumb made another soft pass over your nipple, so soft you could barely feel it, and the feeling made you want to crawl out of your skin.
“Katsuki!” you gasped.
His hands were suddenly at your jeans, unbuttoning them quickly and yanking them down your legs. He had to leave you, standing up quickly to rid himself of his own pants, and no sooner was he back on the couch than you were in his lap, pressing him back into the cushion, mouth on his.
“Fuck, angel,” he said, hands gripping your thighs, steadying you over his lap, adjusting so that he was sitting against the back of the couch. You could feel the bare heat of him pressed against your core, and you gave an experimental grind of your hips. His head tipped back as he groaned, bearing the line of his throat, and you kissed him there, pleased at having put the number two hero on the defensive.
Katsuki eventually got your back by lining the two of you up, pressing you down onto him with a hand at your hip. You hissed with the stretch of him inside you, hot and full and absolutely perfect.
“Knew you would feel so fuckin’ good,” he said, propping you up against his chest with an arm banded around your waist, snapping his hips up into you. “Do you know how many fucking times I just wanted to bend you over? How many times I wanted to fuck the brat right out of you?”
You clung to his shoulders, letting him kiss you all over your face, down your neck, pressing back down eagerly to meet his thrusts. You loved the flex of his abs against your own stomach as his hips rose to meet yours.
His fingers pressed against your clit, light and absolutely maddening, making small, firm circles that made you whimper. His mouth found your breast again, and your hands fisted in his blonde hair, riding him harder.
His fingers applied a little more pressure to your clit, and you couldn’t stop the embarrassing little noise that escaped you. He seemed to like it, doing it again and again, until you were completely out of control of your own reactions, squirming on his lap, under his mouth, gasping out his name, over and over, until—
“Gotcha, you little brat,” he laughed as you rode out your orgasm against him, ducking back in to kiss you on the mouth. His pace picked up, faster and faster until he, too, was gasping out his pleasure against you, holding you down onto him with a grip like iron, groaning your name into your hair.
“Good, brat?” he asked, his breath stirring the hair at your temple.
You nodded, pulling back to kiss him again.
You couldn’t believe you’d just fucked the annoying ghost who’d haunted you for three entire weeks–or that he’d apparently been thinking of fucking you the whole time too.
“You want lunch or something?” Bakugou eventually asked, when the two of you had finally caught your breath again.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” you asked, climbing back into your underwear and pants. “It’s my place, I should be making lunch for you.”
Bakugou made a rudely dismissive noise as he followed you up to pull his own pants back on. “Not the way you fucking cook. Come on, nerd, I know where all your shit is now. I’ll show you how you’re actually supposed to use a knife.”
You groaned, “Not this again.” But you followed him into your kitchen obediently, helping him dig out ingredients from your fridge.
“And this time you can’t ignore me,” he said smugly, laying things out on your counter. “If you do shit wrong, there’s no escaping me now.” He let a bicep flex menacingly, and he bared all his teeth in a threatening smile.
Another lick of heat washed through you at the sight of that wicked white smile on his mouth. Even though you’d freed him from you, it seemed like there really was no escaping him.
And you had the thought that you didn’t really want to–maybe not ever. You looked forward to finding out whether he’d continue haunting your apartment, this time willingly.
You suppressed the urge to ask him if this made him your ghoulfriend–no, your boo.
You had the feeling you’d find out soon enough.