Supernova

Chapter Fifty One - Three's a Crowd, Even in Heaven

A few hours before we were to leave, to dinner as a girlfriend, I reminded myself, not a Courting Assembly, we found ourselves in my room. I needed to find something to wear. Well, that was the second priority. The first was cleaning up after my own outburst. I crumpled up the extravagant dresses and corsets and shoved the dagger and the perfume bottles and seashell art back into the suitcase and closed the top of it harshly.

I made sure to notice now that the mood in the room was less frantic, that among the gifts found in that suitcase, the diadem was not among them. Thank God.

Bakugo stood in the middle of my room, arms crossed, glaring, making no effort to hide his uneasiness and distaste. I told him he could sit on the bed, or bare mattress, I supposed. He clicked his mouth and remained standing. I didn't push it.

"What do I wear?" I asked him after I kicked the overflowing, barely closed suitcase into the corner of the room and opened the closet to reveal my more recently purchased clothing. "Something decent?"

"What do you wear?" He asked me back. I was surprised by his tone. Feigned indifference, and more than that, light shakiness. "To a Courting Assembly?"

"I've never actually attended one," I admitted honestly. He clicked his mouth. Tch. So much scolding could be jam packed into a sound that lasted just a fraction of a second. "And that's not what we're doing, but to answer your question, it's a very formal event. Everyone involved is selling themselves to some degree, so."

"So." It was a dismissive word. I didn't care to add onto it any more than he cared to continue.

I wore something decent. I thought so, anyways. I took it upon myself to go into the stranger's small suitcase in my closet and pull at the fabrics until my hands landed on yet another dress with a tag sure to impress anyone who knew anything about clothes. I had dressed a lot nicer before I'd entered The Academy compared to afterwards. I had enjoyed shopping, once. Appearing as a Princess, costume included, had once been deeply important to me. It had faded after I left Switzerland, and never really rekindled. I widened my arms and span around once I was dressed, and Bakugo gave me a nod and small almost-smile that he was trying to hide behind his hand. I took that as approval.

We walked to his house. It didn't seem to take very long, however, with my left arm burning from the elbow all the way down to the fingertips, I had no way of knowing how long it really took. I recognized the route though. If we'd stayed on the main road and walked a couple more blocks, we'd have found ourselves at the apartment Demon and Elias were squatting in for the month. If we took a right at the end of the main road, we'd find ourselves on the city's outskirts and at the entrance to the path that lead to the training spot before too long. It was a long way from my dad's house. He was all the way on the other side of the city.

How refreshing.

The Bakugos had a large house. Not as big as mine, or Momo's, of course, but big nonetheless. The front yard was separated from the street by a gate, which unlatched rather than unlocked. Cocky bastards, I thought to myself. No, I then reminded myself. It is because they don't have anything to fear. Nobody is going to creep into the house of two tailors to murder them for a chance at filling the space they'd left. What I noticed as we approached the front door was that the size suggested they had more bedrooms than they'd need for the three of them. I'd never considered another possibility.

"Do you have siblings?" I asked him as we stepped onto the porch.

He seemed confused but he said, "Nope, just me."

It came on the back of a sigh, like that was an annoyance to him, but it filled me with a great relief. Heir Bakugo, my mind said. Quiet, brain, I told it back.