PASSION, k. bakugo

"I must be a hero." Her voice echoed in the training room, slightly panting from the aftermath, sweat clinging to her collarbone, control gauntlets still smoking faintly at the wrists.

"You must? But you don't want to." His voice was quiet, softer than his usual loud, rude remarks, and that alone made her look up.

"It doesn't matter."

"IT DOES MATTER, GODDAMMIT!"

This time, from frustration maybe, he screamed, the sound bouncing off the training room's reinforced walls. Then he continued, quieter but no less furious, "Becoming a hero needs passion, Ruth. Your passion is somewhere else! Stop running away from it."

_

She was supposed to be a rockstar. Instead, she's stuck in Class 1-A.

Ruth Silva spent five years running from her family's name, building a life on stages instead of in shadows until one phone call dragged her back to a legacy she never wanted.

Forced into U.A.'s hero course on her parents' orders, she plans to do the bare minimum: survive three years, graduate, and go back to the only dream that ever felt like hers.

But surviving gets a lot harder when you're surrounded by classmates who'd give anything to be in your seat and even harder when the loudest, angriest, most infuriatingly determined one of them refuses to let you fake your way through it.

Katsuki Bakugo doesn't do "going through the motions." He doesn't understand half-measures, and he definitely doesn't understand someone who has real talent and treats it like a burden.

So when Ruth Silva shows up to his class radiating quiet resentment instead of ambition, he makes it his personal mission to figure out why, though he would rather die than admit that, and against every instinct he has, starts to care about the answer.

Between combat trials, dorm life, and a family who never once asked what she actually wanted, Ruth has to face the one question she's spent a decade avoiding: does becoming a hero have to mean giving up the person she already fought so hard to become?