the only exception | bakugou katsuki

01 | pisces' war

Yuna laid down in the field and saw a constellation of her very own horoscope: Pisces.

The stars were scattered across the night canvas in an acute angle, except that they were more distant than each other—a bridge between bridges for evolution to transpire. They looked like mere horns morphed from a sheep, but it was just two fishes dancing in the deep cerulean sky.

It was symbolized by two fish swimming in opposite directions, representing the constant division of Pisces' attention between fantasy and reality as the current of what they breathe in leads them to their destiny—Yuna, however, doesn't believe in one.

As the final water sign, Pisces has absorbed every lesson—the joys and the pains, the hopes and the fears—learned by all of the other signs. Perhaps that might be true, and Yuna had to learn that the hard way at such an early age. With such immense sensitivity, Pisces can easily become and must remember to stay grounded in the material realm (appropriately, Pisces rules the feet).

Yuna could only do nothing but let the sky above her define who she was as she failed to notice the tears streaming down her face.

And deep down in her rose-coloured heart, she wished—her lips quivered—she was a Leo instead.

__________

As a skater, Yuna brings her board every day. Sometimes she skates depending on her mood or perhaps, the weather that she couldn't change. She viewed it as a treasure of some sort while others may view it in such a way that it feels taboo and yet, it made her seem like one—Yuna didn't give two shits either way.

"Yuna! You're coming with us?"

She turns with a smile that conceived too many, and adapts quickly to the world her soul despised.

"I can't. I got chores to do." She then apologized with a chuckle that tasted somewhat bitter, but her classmates bought it anyway.

"Oh, bummer." They laughed—it was on purpose and ridiculing, but Yuna let that go as usual because why waste time?

And then they turned away—she didn't need to look over her shoulder like before to know that their mouths were running on fuel. Perhaps gossiping about how tattered her board looked like how the dirt from tars clung on the wheels with bits of dead autumn leaves were stuck in between.

Without further ado, Yuna stepped on the board and skate away.

The rain was serein; a cloudless drizzle while grey hues swirl among the blank white firmament as alternative blasted in her jet black headphones on her tucked rosy strands that gently touch her cheeks, a cold, autumn breeze that lingered on for months.

That was when the feeling of being alive kicks in; she starts entering a melancholic trance in which she become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—rain puddles streaming down the streets, tall trees leaning in the wind, the raw sound of the wheels underneath her soles—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive for just this moment each day, an act that is done purely for its own sake.

That was when Yuna, collided her head with another.

She landed hard on her back, but that didn't mean her head wasn't the most painful yet. Her board skidded across the street—ah fuck, she'll take it later. Now she had to—

"Fuck! That hurt!"

A grunt followed after as Yuna kept hearing the same voice cursing over and over, which only made her head feel worse than a hangover.

"That shit hurted," she winced as she pressed her pounding head gently.

"No shit. Watch where the fuck you're going, headphones."

Yuna immediately glanced up at the name she was given, and grinned.

"Ah, Bakugou Katsuki. Nice to finally meet you! You live in the neighbourhood or something?" She chimed, adapting casually to the situation no matter who the person was—except that the familiar blond she sees everywhere in school was hard to miss.

"You're stalking me now?" The vexed blond glowered down at her. Yuna now thinks she looked stupid sitting on the cold hard ground.

"Actually," she finally gets up, feeling her knees sting but painless enough to stand. "You're famous since the sludge days."

"Fuck off. I don't have time for this shit."

Bakugou shouldered past her, not bothering to check her for injuries, walking down the path she planned on going to.

"Yeah, I know." Yuna lets out a bitter chuckle at the situation. Though it didn't matter much, it shouldn't either.

She dusted off her prestigious school skirt, or was it anyway when she fell on the wet pavement since it rained earlier during the day, but she brushed it off. She fixed the sling from her bag before walking across the street to pick up her lost board, staring at it for a few moments before she decided to walk down the path to her house, instead of the one she originally planned to eat dinner at a sushi store nearby.

In the midst of walking home, she lets out a soft laugh while something beneath her ribcage ached.

The cause of it was the rueful fact that where she came from was a place that defined no love—something that most people think it would be easy to leech from once it was found. Yuna finds that very hard to believe, especially when she lost it to a battle long ago in this war.

A house, so vivid looking with its dandelion walls and daisy white windows, while the interior covered by the sun, was actually a core ready to implode any time when Yuna hears the same steep voices trying to win over anything but happiness—a vicinity she's used to since young while she tries to find escapism within the little cracks in every wall.

Yuna ignored the storm in the room as she passed by the shards scattered across the kitchen, made her way upstairs without a bother before walking into her room, shutting out the words that were meant for her parents, not for her.

She took in a deep breath within the grey walls of her room, adorned with posters of outer space and old maps she found one day when she helped her father clean the basement back then—ah, the memory was still lucid, but she swept it away.

The strange wistfulness of used books from her shelf, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Yuna thought those were the perfect words to define her family.

She had only realized it a week after a tragedy happened, but that was a tale to tell another time.

Perhaps she was used to this, maybe a little too much, but she was getting there.

She had the desire to care less about things—to loosen her grip on her life, to stop glancing behind her every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from her before she reaches the end zone—rather to hold her life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of the trusted ones, always in play.

Trusted ones, as she speaks, there was never one to trust in the first place. Especially when it all falls in the very place that led her own parents to this war.

A love like war.

And if there was going to be someone who could stop it, it would be impossible, Yuna thinks—because she never believed in one either way.

Even if someone could, then—Yuna felt her eyes sting when she heard a crash downstairs—they would be the only exception.

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revamped! there aren't major changes, just some additional paragraphs and whatnots.