Chapter Text
It is a few minutes past midnight, Eijirou is sitting at a bar table alone. He's drinking his second glass of a colorful alcoholic cocktail, while sketching some doodles in his sketchbook.
It's Friday night, so the bar is a little crowded. Groups of all kinds are squeezed everywhere, businessmen enjoying their Happy Hour; uncomfortable couples meeting each other for the first time (when they clearly met each other on Tinder, Eijirou guesses); long-time couples just enjoying their night; groups of college students, enjoying their lives before the tests begin; and just a few people like him, hanging out by themselves.
It's not like he doesn't like it, he's been doing this for a few weeks now, he likes his time alone, without Mina or Denki trying to cheer him up for God knows why , actually, he knows why, but trying to cheer him up because of that isn’t going to change what happened, after all.
He's sketching a character on his sketchbook: he has an impressive physique and a muscular body, he wears a vest that consists of two shoulder pads that are shaped like gears that wrap around his shoulders, while his chest is left uncovered, and wears a skirt with a ripped pattern over pants with an "R" belt-buckle.He's also wearing a mask around his mouth that looks vaguely similar to an animal's fangs. His hair is spiky, and has two locks that resembles horns. Eijirou smiles for himself, proud of the drawing.
When he leans over to reach for his bag, looking for some coloring markers, a girl approaches, pulls up a chair and sits, smiling kindly at Eijirou.
“Oh! Hi Jirou! Wasn’t expecting to see you here!” Eijirou smiles. He knows the purple short haired girl. Jirou Kyouka is Kaminari’s ex. They broke up a week ago. According to Kaminari, she said that he was too ‘childish’ for her. Kaminari and Jirou had been dating since the last year of high school.
Kaminari cried everyday for about three days after their breakup, on the fourth day he was pretending that he didn’t care, but Eijirou and Mina often heard him cry in the bathroom after someone touched on the subject of dating. On the fifth day he was moving on, he changed her contact name back to ‘Jirou’ (former was ‘Kyo-babe’ with a purple heart emoji). On the sixth day he removed all pictures with her around the house and didn’t say a word about the subject. Today, on the seventh day, Kaminari reopened his Tinder account.
“Why are you alone, dude? I didn’t even see you before, I’m sorry!” Jirou was leaning her elbows over the table, holding up her chin with closed fists. Jirou and Eijirou weren’t that close, they just talked when Kaminari brought her home, or when they all hung out together.
"Yep." Eijirou grins to her. "I'm alone." Eijirou says bashfully. People make “hanging out by yourself” more of a thing than it should be. What’s the problem with it anyways? “I don’t do it very often but it’s been good to clear my mind you know....”
“Makes sense to me!” Jirou grins. She leans her back against the chair, and keeps curling her longer purple hair lock with a finger, nervous. “So… And about Denki?”
“He’s a mess, but he’s trying hard to move on. Guess he finally will turn into a better person.” Eijirou says honestly. Kaminari is his best friend since high school, and he knows that he always has been such a womanizer type, and he used to joke around a lot for a twenty-three year old guy. But Jirou isn’t like that, she has matured so much since the high school days. She still is that grumpy and sweet at the same time girl that he used to know, but not when we talk about relationships.
“I really hope so, Kiri.” Jirou sighs. “Hope he can find someone better than me, tho.” She chuckles, but Eijirou knows that it is forced. Before Eijirou says anything, she starts “Anyways, my friends invited me to come here, this place is really comforting for anyone,even more so if you're dealing with a break up!” Jirou chuckles, but Eijirou knows that she’s upset too about the broke up. "Do you wanna come? I promise you won’t regret it!" She says suddenly, Eijirou is really avoiding social interaction today but it seems that the world doesn’t want to let him do whatever he wants to. He is thinking hard about refusing the offer, but she grabs his wrist and pulls him with her.
“C’mon dude, let’s have some fun tonight!” Jirou says while dodging them around the tables and drunk dancing people with a kinda weird tone, like she knows he’s going to like it? He avoids overthinking about it. He just had time to get his backpack and his sketchbook before being pulled away.
<hr>
She pushes him in front of the table and says "This is Kirishima, isn't he cute?" She stands by his side, picking up a lock of his black hair, grining to the people around the table.
" Oh . This is ‘the’ guy?" A small girl, with short brown hair, big round eyes and pink cheeks says, Eijirou tries his best to ignore her suspicious voice tone. “Hi Kirishima!! Nice to meet you, darling!” the girl waves towards him.
"We kinda saw that you were all alone there, it’s unfair enjoying Friday night alone." A girl with a long dark green hair, big round eyes, and frog shaped like face says.
Eijirou blushes with the comment.
"T-Tsuyu-chan, how bold of you!" a tall girl, with black hair held up in a messy bun, with fancy clothes says. She blushes due to what the other girl said.
"No no it's fine! Really! Like she said, I was alone so, it's no problem at all..." Eijirou chuckles.
Not that it is a problem, but Eijirou really was planning to stay the whole night sketching and drinking until he felt dizzy, calling it a night and getting a cab home. That’d be a nice way to forget about your worst problems.
"Oh, great!" A small boy with curly messy green hair says. Freckles cover his cheeks and nose, his eyes are big and kind. "You can sit here, it's empty!" He stands up and pulls a chair offering to Eijirou.
The table where they're sitting is round, and has seven chairs squeezed together around the table, on top of it there's a mess of empty cans, glasses and bottles, some cold and oily french fries resting on a plate in the center.
Eijirou nods and smiles, and dodges people and chairs to get the place he was nominated to, between the freckled boy, and a grumpy blond one that seemed to not give a fuck about anything going on at the table. Just when Eijirou gets closer, he saw that the blond guy was drawing on an iPad, and his eyes widen.
When Eijirou sits, the freckled boy introduces everyone.
"So, Kirishima. I'm Midoriya Izuku! This is Momo," he points to the tall girl with the black hair besides him, she raises a hand and says Nice to meet you, Kirishima-kun, grinning kindly.
"this one you already know, right? Jirou" Jirou shows her tongue, then she blinks to him,
"the two girls there are Asui and Uraraka," he points to the two short cute girls, that smile when they’re introduced, waving a hand towards him,
"and this one is Kacch—"
"Bakugou." The blond guy cuts in, raising his bright red eyes in direction of Midoriya, piercing him. "Don't keep giving people that sucker child-like nickname, Deku." The blond guy, Bakugou, says, right before focusing his eyes on the iPad again. Now that Eijirou is close to him, (too close, to be honest) he sees that the guy is sketching paintings of people around the bar.
"Yeah, right, I'm sorry, Kacchan" Midoriya chuckles sheepishly before sitting on his place again. "Make yourself at home, Kirishima!" Midoriya smiles wide to him, before he resumes talking to everyone.
Kirishima nods, but he feels super out of place there. He’s a bit nervous and doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes he crosses looks with someone around the table, he’s feeling that everyone is glaring too much to him, and that makes him feel weirder.
He asks for another drink and drinks it slowly, chit chatting with everyone, getting to know them a little bit.
Uraraka and Asui (or Tsuyu, like she insisted him to call her) are a couple. The brown haired girl studies Engineering, and the other is a professional swimmer.
Momo is the heiress of her parents’ company. From what he heard about, it’s a multinational one.
Jirou, like he already knows, studies Music in the college, and has an still unknown cover music YouTube channel, she isn’t that popular, but her voice is amazing and she rocks on the guitar like no one else.
Midoriya is an artist, like Eijirou. But he works for a huge game company as a character designer. Eijirou didn’t tell anyone about his career, or whatever you want to call it. He is really ashamed of what he does, so he usually doesn’t tell anyone about it, neither of his parents know right, just Ashido and Kaminari, he told them, because he knows that they would not judge him for anything.
After a while, Eijirou noticed that the iPad guy hadn’t said a word. And from everyone around the table, he’s the one that most interested him, he doesn’t know why, properly, probably he just wants to see his iPad. So he returns to drinking his fancy cocktail and starts observing the guy.
It took awhile for him to realize it, and when he does, he raises his gaze, and when his eyes meet Eijirou’s he frowns, and quickly looks away.
“What?” He scoffs, returning to drawing. Eijirou thinks that’s amazing how this guy can manage drawing in front of people, he can’t do that.
"So... You have an iPad, that's so cool! I'm saving money for one, I guess that iPads give us a amazing creative freedom anywhere" Eijirou says, excited. He's being honest.
"Yeah." the guy just says, "I guess it is. I kinda earn this shit to write a review or something, so annoying..." Bakugou snorts while sketching. Write a review? How famous is this guy to earn things just for a review? Eijirou thinks.
"So... Can I see it?" Eijirou says bashfully, he hopes he isn’t being bold, it's just his dream to have an iPad, he's probably looking like a child, but he doesn't mind at all, when will he have the opportunity again?
Bakugou frowns and rolls his eyes, with the pencil, he closes the drawing application and opens the gallery app, then gives the device to the black haired guy, the tip of Eijirou’s finger touches unintentionally the back of his hands, he shivers for he doesn’t know the reason . He takes the iPad as carefully as he can. When he looks to the screen, his jaw drops.
He asked to see the iPad itself , not his drawings. But holy fuck, Eijirou is glad that the guy misunderstood his question.
Right there, in front of him, in his hands , he's seeing sketches of the probably most famous webcomic from the whole Internet.
<hr>
"U.A.: Pro heroes in action!" is a comic written by a person under the pseud King of Explodo-kills. The webcomic has a huge fandom on social media, it even has a page on Reddit, where people keep discussing a whole month about theories of things that the writer give hints in the last chapter. It's been releasing for about four years, one or two chapter per month.
The story tells about a world where all people are born with 'quirks', that gave them different powers. There are people that take advantage, using their quirks for bad things, known as villains, and people that arise to protect civilians, known as heroes. But not only that; together with a quirk, people is also born with a 'soulmate mark', and there's just one other person with the same mark as another one, they’re called soulmates. When someone finds the pair of their soulmate mark, their quirks doubles it's powers incredibly. Each one is destined to find each other and be together for the end of days.
The main character is a hero called Deku , born without a quirk, but with a soulmate. He suffered bullying during his whole childhood for not having a quirk, but his quirk was revealed when he found his soulmate, the hero Shouto.
Nowadays, Deku is the hero number two in the heroes ranking, and he's trying his best to surpass the hero number one, Ground Zero. He's the most powerful hero in the whole story, just behind the retired hero All Might.
Ground Zero, on the other hand, was born with a powerful quirk, but with no soulmate mark. Deku and Ground Zero are the biggest rivals.
Besides, there's a lot of other heroes in the story. Uravity , the girl with the ability to make objects float through touch; Froppy , a girl with many frog-related abilities; Ingenium , a guy with engine-like protrusions that allow him to move at extraordinary speeds; Cellophane , a dude that can eject adhesive tape from openings located on both of his elbows; Chargebolt , a guy that has the ability to charge in electricity and emit it out of his body as a sort of protective aura that electrocutes anyone through contact; Alien Queen, a girl with an Acid quirk, that allows her to create corrosive liquid from her skin, plus many others.
Then Eijirou's favorite, who is underestimated by the fandom, is called Crimson Riot, who possesses a hardening quirk, Eijirou thinks that he's so manly with his quote " It's about living without regret."
"Oi? Still in this dimension?" Eijirou was suddenly cut out of his thoughts while looking at each sketch page carefully. He looks up to meet Bakugou’s red eyes, a frown in his forehead. "Could you give this device back to me, before you, I don't know, fucking pierce it with your goddamn eyes ?" He stretches a hand in Eijirou's direction.
" Oh. Right. I'm really sorry Bakugou. I just didn't know that, hm... That you're the writer behind U.A.!" Eijirou puts a lock of black hair behinds his ear, astonished and ashamed.
Eijirou is being nothing but honest. In the U.A. comic's Reddit pages, there's one dedicated to discovering who's the writer, everyone guesses that it probably is a thirteen year old super gifted awkward boy, that probably eats pizza and microwave hamburger the whole day and doesn't have the ability of social iteration at all . But in reality, it's a grumpy huge handsome guy. Eijirou blushes about this thought. Well, the last part, of the lack of social iteration ability was correct, at least.
"Do you fucking know it?!" Bakugou seems surprised. Eijirou is confused, this guy really doesn't know how famous he is?
"What? Dude, you're like, my number one inspiration for drawing. I read your comic since it was released, bro!" Eijirou says the words with burning cheeks, he guesses that he's only being able to talk with his goddamn Artist inspiration because he's drunk. Bakugou opens and closes his mouth sometimes, but chooses to take the iPad back from Eijirou's hands, going back to drawing, snorting.
Oh Gosh. He annoyed the guy? It really wasn’t his intention. He wants to apologize but he doesn’t know what for.
He continues observing him drawings, quiet. After a while, Eijirou starts looking to the guy itself. His hair is pale blond, it’s naturally spiky , his skin is incredibly pale too, fair for someone that probably don’t leave his house very often. His face is… Handsome? The shapes of his face are soft, contrasting with the sharp apparently-permanent frown. His eyes are really red, Eijirou feels that he can loose his mind if keeps looking into them for too long.
This guy is gorgeous as heck.
And oh no.
But before he does anything stupid, he decides to go home. He stands up, everyone around the table looks at him, except Bakugou.
"Hm, guys, I need to go back home. My roommates are probably calling the police after me right now." He rubs the back of his neck.
"Oh, no problem, Kirishima! We're here around this same hour, every Friday, come back next week with us! You’re a really nice guy! Loved to talk with you!" Uraraka smiles wide to him.
"Thank you Uraraka..." He blushes. "It was a pleasure to meet you guys." Eijirou grins to them, grabs his backpack, and waves a hand towards them.
He trips on someone's feet, and walks fast towards the pub payment counter. He pays for his cocktails and gets out of the place.
He takes his phone from his pocket and tries to unlock it, just to realize that the battery's dead.
"Shit." he murmurs to himself.
He didn't drink very much, but he feels his balance fail and his eyes getting a bit blurry.
<hr>
While walking towards his apartment, he keeps thinking about a lot of stuff. Ninety percent of them, probably
Bakugou.
Yeah, nice.
He thinks. It wasn’t enough being platonically in-love with ‘King of Explodo-kills’? Is he going to have a crush on the real life guy too?
You’re an emotionally fucked up person, Eijirou.
He blames himself. He's doing it very often lately.
Before he could notice it, he’s in the apartment lobby, entering the elevator and pressing the button ‘4’.
You should at least have asked for his number, you dork. He keeps talking to himself. Does Bakugou remember when he retweeted Eijirou’s joke about Ground Zero being handsome?
Eijirou’s Twitter is filled with U.A. webcomics fanart, from himself, and RTs from other artists. A couple months ago, the writer retweeted a dumb joke about how good-looking Ground Zero was, with his black tank top, that hot eye mask, and eyeliner in his eyes to fill the space between the mask and his skin. Ground Zero using eyeliner was a huge headcanon along the Fandom, and a couple chapters before the author's retweet, Ground Zero using eyeliner became canon. That broke the fandom for a while.
Oh wait.
Fucking hell.
He just realized that the character Ground Zero looked like a lot with Bakugou himself. Probably he made him based on his own appearance.
So… About those things.
He finally grabs the door hand and opens it, just too late to realize that it’s the wrong apartment.
Or it is now, for the past weeks.
“Erm… Ei?” The voice from Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu comes from inside the apartment. Eijirou jumps when hears his voice.
“Oh fuck I…” he is speechless, while he was rambling drunk he walked to his old apartment.
His ex-boyfriend’s apartment.
His ex-boyfriend that is bare chested just wearing sweatpants with a girl in the living room holding a Playstation controller, seated on the ground, just wearing underpants and Tetsu’s old t-shirt, that Eijirou used to use for sleeping.
“Who is it, Tetsu?” The girl shouted from the living room, choosing to not pause her game to see what’s happening. Eijirou’s heart skipped a beat hearing the girl calling him by his first name.
“Hm, it’s just—” Tetsutetsu started but Eijirou interrupted.
“It’s just his old friend.” Eijirou forced a not-naturally wide grin.
“Yeah, Kendou... My old friend.” Tetsutetsu mirrors his words. “Do you… Hm need something, Kiri?” He’s holding the door, a hand on his hips.
“No. Sorry for bothering you… I, uh... “ Eijirou is so ashamed as he never felt before in his life. “Wrong apartment. Sorry for the intrusion…” He bowed quickly then ran towards the elevator.
“No! Kiri! Come back! We need to talk!” Before Tetsutetsu could see his stupid tears crossing his face, the elevator door closes.
Eijirou is definitely a emotionally fucked up person.