Falling for a Flower - Bakugo X Reader

Chapter 19

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Week 3 – Tuesday

The sun was hot that day, blaring through the classroom windows in the late afternoon. Lulling UA's class 3A into a midday haze of drooping eyelids, twiddling pens, and open yawns.

And to make matters worse, today's subject was math, of all things.

Ruffling his papers at the front, Aizawa sighed.

"...Here, if we look at the slope of the line, we can map out the following equation. Pointing downwards indicates a negative slope, and with the intercept in the positive y axis..."

Katsuki's eyes stared fuzzy at the chalkboard, white lines burring together in his conscious. A place where he was thinking about everything, but math.

In particular, he was stuck on a problem. Not one of functions and derivatives, but a social one. And he was running out of time to solve it.

Your extra practice was scheduled for tonight – per usual – and Katsuki was more than aware of it. The other two hadn't gone so well... and if tonight was like the others, he could only imagine that you and him would end up back at square one, frustrated with each other and treading the same muddy ground.

When it came to battle practice and quirk training, he'd learned over the years to tolerate his classmates, to work together with them. Afterall, they were all training to be heroes. Katsuki couldn't' fault that.

But in dance? He could barely suffer through partnering with pinky raccoon eyes. As for you? Well... Calling your partnership 'cooperation' would be more than a stretch.

The unsuccessful ballet tutoring was becoming more noticeable. He could feel it in Aizawa's disappointed stare. Hear it in the sharpness of the Director's critiques in class. Her patience with the boy was growing shorter by the day like a burning fuse.

The furnace of a classroom made him restless. He slumped into his chair, the pain of his hips sending a flame up his spine. It wasn't just his hips, but everywhere that carried a tenderness. Ballet classes were taking a toll on him in this battle, and if he didn't get his act together, he was going to lose.

Fortunately, you seemed to be the tool to save his spot at UA and relieve the stress on his body with your ballet experience and so called 'stretching expertise'. But in order for a tool to be useful, one needs to know how to work with it first. And that was a whole other problem.

Where would he find the answer? Shitty hair could be useful, but after the previous fiascos of the red-haired dumbasss working with you, he wanted to avoid getting partnering advice from the boy who nearly threw you through the ceiling and crushed you in the ground.

(TRACK – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes)

All these lines, intertwined in a mess with no end. Bakugo was stuck. Why did you have to make things so complicated for him?

His head was still caught in the quiet of the common room. Transfixed on the late dinner the two of you shared the other night. He couldn't even pinpoint why he brought up the idea, why the hell he was really helping you in the first place. Part of it was some strange instinct. When you danced or played with your stupid flowers, there was this invisible force, like the puppet hag's threads, that would drag him towards you. It was like trying to fight against admiring a meteor shower, or a deer pausing in a forest. Beautiful things, but fleeting. And he didn't want that feeling to end.