When she begins to rock, I roll

Friendship

Kyoka always assumed Bakugou would listen to only the angriest, screamiest, most brutal metal that he could get his hands on. He seemed the type. It was a very weird discovery to notice him lapping his foot to a song she was listening to turned up a little too loud and barely audible for him, and that had sent the two of them down a strange rabbit hole together when it came to drumming up a conversation and starting into some sense of excited conversation with him. She'd never really had an angle of approach with him before; they were always just kind of classmates and nothing more. Which was fine, as she never really felt the need to go make friends with everyone in Class 1-A. But there was something about Katsuki and the possibilities of his taste in music that she was deeply enticed by. She had to find out more.

By that afternoon they were sitting in her dorm room and swapping music back and forth, and Kyoka had almost forgotten who she was talking to here. They took turns spinning songs they liked and fishing for things the other hadn't heard of, and across the spectrum, Katsuki was definitely into some rough and hard music, but it wasn't nearly as violent as she was expecting, and quite a few almost soft rock tracks threw her for a loop. Somewhere in the midst of it all she realized she was sitting in her dorm room chilling with Katsuki Bakugou and that everything about it felt almost normal.

"I didn't know you had such a chill side to you," Kyoka said, ending up lying on her stomach by the edge of the bed, while Katsuki sat on the floor and braced against the edge, where they could each keep an earbud in their ears while they talked. "Or that you had such good taste in music."

"What? Did you think all I listened to was brutal death metal?" he asked, pretty relaxed as he lingered there, definitely feeling more in tune and in the moment than he was used to. There was something almost soothing about hanging around here, as he turned his head over to look at her.

"Honestly? Yeah, I did." Kyoka didn't shy away from the truth as she sat there, feeling like she must have earned some benefit of the doubt for how nice this hangout was and how well it was going. It all felt so warming, so welcoming, and Kyoka was unafraid of opening up here. "Figured it'd be the angriest shit and nothing else."

"I love that shit," Katsuki said, brushing off any idea he wasn't all about it. "I just listen to other shit. I'm not an ass hole all the fucking time, you know. Just most of the time." It all felt weirdly normal and agreeable, but he was comfortable here, and taking a nice break and a calm moment to chill out with someone he hadn't expected to be getting along this easy with. "Music helps calm me down."

With a firm nod, Kyoka shifted in position a little bit. "It helps me a lot too. I didn't know we had this in common, but it's nice to know I'm not alone. Music helps bring me up when I'm in a bad mood. Or cool me down." The more she learned about Katsuki and how he interacted with music, the more interested in things Kyoka became, leaning into the conversation and starting to really connect with him beyond shared taste in bands. "Nobody else really understands it. Even Denki."

"What is it with you and Denki anyway?" Katsuki asked, trying to sound casual and not at all like he was prying about things. He didn't want to seem too out of line or like he was fishing for details, like he was just making small talk here. "I keep seeing you two around a lot. Are you dating?"

Kyoka scoffed at the idea a bit. "Not really. Well... Sort of? It's complicated." She reached her hands out from underneath herself, fretting with her earlobe jacks a little bit as she tried to think of the right way to put this. "We're... 'doing stuff' together. And spending a lot of time. I know he likes me, and I kind of like him, but we haven't really agreed on anything, we're just spending a lot of time around each other. The sex is alright and he's nice and all but th--oh, you don't want to hear any of this."

"Sure I do." Katsuki was walking a dangerous as hell line now as he turned his whole body so he was poised directly toward her, hands settling into his lap.

With a roll of her eyes, Kyoka brushed him off with a flat, "Come on."

"We're chilling and I'm having a fine time. If you need to talk about something, go for it." Bakugou was feeling in decent spirits sharing his taste in music with someone who not only liked a lot of the bands he did, but who could feel that same emotional resonance from music, which had him in a good position to be amenable to listening and other 'real friendship' activities.

Still not entirely sure what to believe, Kyoka decided to roll with it. "Denki's a flirt, but once I said I liked him he became a totally different guy. He started paying too much attention to what he was saying, now he's too tense and nervous to be cool around me, when him being pretty chill was what I liked about him in the first place. It doesn't feel honest, like he wants to make me happy more than he wants to be himself. And it's cute he's so nervous about things, but I just kind of... Well, he's maybe a bit too soft."

"You want him to insult you?" Bakugou's brow furrowed as he tried to piece it together a little bit, tried to make sense of exactly what she was getting with for that last part. It all made sense until she reached that bit, and now he felt like he was losing her.

"Not that kind of soft. I mean more... when we're having sex. He almost doesn't want to put his hands on me in case he hurts me but I kind of really, really like it rough." She couldn't help but feel the colour filling into her cheeks as she confessed as much. "I shouldn't have said that. That made things weird, didn't it?'

Bakugou wasn't about to mince words as he said, "Yeah, it did." But he did it with a laugh, and Kyoka joined him in the laughter as she found herself drawn a little bit more toward him.

"The more I think about it, I guess he's just not what I was expecting, and it's kind of... Okay, this is going to make it a lot weirder. But what I was expecting was something a lot more like what we're doing here. Hanging out, spinning some tracks, talking about stuff and just chilling. If you were pulling my hair right now it'd pretty much be exactly what I thought getting with Denki was going to be like." She didn't realize until too late just what she had said, eyes going wide as she placed a hand over her mouth, the shock of such a confession definitely throwing her.

Katsuki just laughed. Hard. He almost fell over from how hilarious that confession was and how much she was completely unprepared to deal with any of what came with that, consequentially speaking. "Holy shit," he said, slamming his hand down on the bed in raucous amazement. "I shouldn't be laughing so much but that's pretty fucked up. Both for Denki and for me." He eased down from his laughter spike, shivering a little bit as he stood steady, as he looked at Kyoka with a growing, amazed smile. "Wow. Fuck. Poor guy though. You're a really cute girl, sucks that he's fucking it up."

"Thanks?" Kyoka wasn't sure if it was something she should have taken as too strong a compliment given the weirdness surrounding this all. "I don't really know how to take being called cute after that. Or really at all, kind of." She looked off to the side, feeling nervous and tense, before circling in frustration back around to possibilities. "But it's really weird that I'm enjoying hanging out with you better than with the guy I'm fucking and sort-of dating. What does that even mean?" She found the frustrations only taking deeper root as her mind began to run with the possibilities, off into directions that she really didn't feel confident about, frustration rising as her mind circled the drain until Bakugou finally just up and said it.

"Probably means we should fuck."