BakuJirou Oneshots

Anything Can Be Badass

It’s stupid. The more she stares at it, the sillier it feels. It’s a goddamn hairclip, for fuck’s sake. A baby pink, marbled barrette the size of her pinky. It’s not her style at all. But Kyouka still stares at it, something akin to longing unfurling in her chest. 

“Hey, Jirou, what’s wrong?” Kaminari calls from where he and the others had kept walking after she stopped to stare at the shop window. The rest of the group stops too, with Kirishima, Mina and Sero looking vaguely curious while Bakugou just looks miffed. Kaminari jogs back to her, before following her gaze to the window to the pink clip. “Oh, you gonna get it?” he asks curiously. “Wow, it’s cute! I didn’t expect it with your style!” And boy, does she know.

Pink has never been part of her aesthetic. Black and red and skulls have always been her thing. Pink is for girls like Mina and Uraraka, and Yaoyorozu. Pink is for pretty things, and it clashes against her badass rocker vibe like nothing else. In some strange way, she almost feels like she’s not allowed to like it; like it’s off-limits to her. She’s chosen her look, her personality, and pink and pretty isn’t part of it. So Kyouka tears her gaze away from the window and plasters a grin onto her lips, nudging him in the ribs. “Nah, not my aesthetic. Let’s go.” 

Kaminari chirps his agreement at the statement and follows her back to the group happily, talking his head off at something or the other. As they fall back into step, Kyouka feels her gaze fall onto Mina’s lilac summer dress, and the way it flows with her walk. She doesn’t hate her own style, by any means. She owns it. She just… sometimes she wishes that it wasn’t so… so restrictive. She wishes she could walk into class with a pink clip in her hair and not have to think about how it doesn’t fit. She tears her eyes from the swirl of Mina’s purple skirt, and forces herself to join the group’s chattering again. The shop window is forgotten. 

That evening, Kyouka is finishing off her math homework when there’s a knock at her door. She startles, before slowly rising to her feet to answer it, while wondering who the hell would want to talk right now. To her utter confusion, it’s Bakugou. He’s still in the clothes he’d worn when they went out in the afternoon, and he’s clutching a small brown paper bag in his hand. His expression is stonily unreadable, and they stare at each other awkwardly for a moment. 

“Hey?” she asks finally, and he glares at her as if she’s the one standing at his door and inconveniencing him. 

He grumbles something incomprehensible under his breath, before reaching forward to her hair. She almost flinches back on instinct, until she feels a familiar tingly scrape against her scalp and freezes. He’s pushing one of the bangs at the side of her face back, gentler than she’d ever thought him capable. His expression is intense, like he’s fighting a particularly tough villain and not standing in her doorway fiddling with her hair at eight in the evening.

After a few more moments of fumbling, he finally steps back, giving her an assessing look. “Looks alright,” he mutters. His ears are turning red, and he refuses to meet her wide-eyed gaze. 

She slowly raises a hand to the side of her face, feeling a cool, rectangular shape holding her fringe back that she absolutely knows. Just in case, she takes a step back into her room to stare at herself in her table mirror, and swallows at the sight of light pink against her indigo hair. It looks wrong in every way possible, the colours clashing and and the pink too bright against the reflection of her all-black and red furniture. But her chest is singing, and she raises a hand to the plastic again, running her fingers across the smooth marbling almost reverently. 

Bakugou wordlessly steps into her room to stand behind her, and he catches her eye in the mirror. “It suits you.” he says simply. She wants to laugh at the absurdity of it, at the lie that she wants to believe so desperately. 

“It really doesn’t,” she whispers, not looking away from his piercing gaze. 

“Then why are you smiling?” he asks quietly. She tears her eyes back to her own reflection, and realises with detached surprise that she is smiling. The plastic clip feels like gold against her shaky fingers. She swallows thickly, but she can’t push the smile off her cheeks. 

“Pink doesn’t really fit the whole badass aesthetic I’ve got going on, though,” she says, a wordless question. He smirks at her in the mirror, raising a hand to flick her ear jack playfully. “Then make it fit.” He presses the brown bag into her hand firmly, and when she opens it to see another of the same barrettes, as well as a few other clips in varying shades of pink, her heart soars. She turns to wrap her arms around him in a wordless hug, and if he feels her dampen his shirt when he hugs her back, he doesn’t mention it.

The next morning she walks into the class to chaos. A dozen people are crowded around Bakugou’s desk, with the latter resolutely ignoring them in favour of the book he’s reading.

“Dude,” Kaminari is repeating like a broken record. Kirishima is sobbing in the back about how manly Bakugou is (nothing new there, really).

“What’s going on?” she asks, and Uraraka turns to her, beaming. “Bakugou-kun painted his nails pink!” she chirps excitedly. “He’s not telling us why but when Mineta tried to make fun of him he threw him out the window!” Kyouka freezes before turning back to stare at Bakugou. He holds her gaze and raises a hand to show off shining baby pink nails, arching a brow in challenge. “That’s so badass!” Kirishima moans. “He gives no fucks. So manly!”

Kyouka feels a flush rise on her cheeks, and murmurs in agreement before moving to her desk quietly.

The day after that, when Kyouka walks into class with her head held high, Kaminari is the first one to notice. “Oh! Jirou, you bought it after all! It looks super cool!” he says excitedly, and she grins back in thanks. Mina materialises next to Kaminari to pore over the clip in her hair. “God, Jirou, that’s so cute! Let me borrow it sometime!” she begs. Uraraka perks up as well, bounding over to look. “Wow, Jirou! It looks so cool on you!”

Kyouka feels the same happiness that she’d felt that night, blossoming in her chest. Bakugou hip-checks her as he walks past her to his seat, turning back to grin at her wolfishly. “Pretty badass, Earlobes,” he says. She flips her hair at him playfully, as if showing off the clip, and he flips his middle finger at her, the matching pink tone making them both snort.

-wonhaebunny