Bakugou woke up feeling slightly less like he'd been hit by a train but also like he didn't want to know how he ended up in his bed. The very idea of Kirishima having carried him in made him want to start his cycle of vomiting again from sheer embarassment, which only worsened when he looked over at his nightstand and found that it was groaning under the weight of an entire case of Gatorade bottles. He realized his door was partly open when he heard voices floating through it quietly.
"-really angry and aggressive when we met last year. It worried me, but honestly this feels almost worse because he's just quiet and tired now." Kirishima sounded concerned.
"Angry and aggressive?" Kaminari's voice queried.
"Yeah, like he yelled a lot more than he does now. And swore at everything. I mean he wasn't like a total asshole or anything, he was just super irritable. Looking back it was kinda just funny sometimes and felt more like him than this. It probably wasn't healthy but at least he had energy."
A sigh from Kaminari. "I don't know, man, I didn't really interact with him until we started working together later last semester."
"It did sort of get worse around then, didn't it?" Kirishima mused. "I know something bad happened at some point in his life and he doesn't seem to be dealing with it, maybe it's just eating away at him after all that time. I mean you can't have nightmares or get sick that often without something snapping eventually, right? And all those little habits he has, I never want to comment on them or make him uncomfortable but they seem to bother him."
Bakugou cringed. What had he expected, that his roommate just didn't notice? Kirishima was always patient with him, but that didn't mean he didn't see anything. The guy wasn't stupid. Well, fuck. He wasn't trying to listen in, but he was oddly anxious about letting them know he was awake and being forced to talk to them. What if they started asking questions?
"What can we do to help him, though?" Kaminari asked. "If he won't talk about anything."
"I don't know," Kirishima said, sounding frustrated. "All I've managed to pick up on is that he's upset about someone named 'Kacchan' and someone named 'Deku' or something. He says those names a lot when he's tapping or having a nightmare. But I'm also not about to go prying into his past unless he asks me to, so I'll probably just never know."
"Those are some weird fuckin' names," Kaminari commented, and Bakugou snorted quietly to himself. Yeah, Kaminari, childhood nicknames were like that.
"Ugh, this is so frustrating!" Kirishima burst out. "I just wanna fucking help and I can't. I think Bakugou's a good guy and he doesn't deserve to struggle like this!"
A good guy? Kirishima thought that Bakugou was...good? Why? He'd just said that at best, Bakugou was aggressive and angry. He was mean and closed-off and irritable and either loud or dead silent. He wasn't good or friendly or kind. Kirishima was the one who'd hauled him off a public restroom floor, carried him to bed, and stockpiled Gatorade on his nightstand without asking for a single thing in return. Bakugou didn't do things that allowed people to get close to him like that. Though, he had let Kirishima do it for him, which was almost worse. What had he been thinking? He never would have made it home on his own, though, and he'd rather die than risk causing a car accident by trying to drive when he was that sick.
"I don't think Bakugou is gonna vomit and choke to death in his sleep now," Kaminari said, and Bakugou almost choked anyway. "Let's go watch something fucking stupid and get our minds off it."
"That sounds nice," Kirishima's fading voice said, and Bakugou finally felt brave enough to roll over and search for his phone.
It was buried in the Gatorade on his nightstand, and when he unlocked it, the first thing he saw was a new contact left up. The slot for the first name said Shinsou and the slot for the last name said asshole that watched you vomit in a public restroom. The contact photo was a blurry photo of Bakugou slumped against the wall. Talk about a weird interaction, he thought to himself, but he smirked a little too as he hit 'message' and typed out a text.
