Doggone Boy is Mine

That boy is mine.

Valentine's Day is rounding the corner, and everyone knows fully well that the popular pro hero Bakugou Katsuki is going to get courted well and thrown over with gifts.

Every year, people send more and more.

Hearts, chocolates, postcards confessing undying love, poems that rhyme "explosion" with nothing at all and somehow still get sent in.

And every year, the blond does not seem interested.

He signs for the packages because his agency makes him, glances at the return addresses with flat disinterest.

But this year is different.

For the past several months, the agency's scheduling department has been pairing Katsuki with Todoroki and Kirishima more on joint patrols and missions.

A logistical decision, born out of complementary quirks and overlapping districts.

Katsuki hasn't complained.

If anything, he's seemed lighter lately. He laughs more easily, he shows up to briefings two minutes early instead of storming in at the last possible second, and he's started bringing an extra onigiri to work "in case," which everyone has silently agreed not to comment on, because the two times someone tried, Katsuki nearly took their head off.

With Kirishima, he jokes around, throws mock punches that pull at the last second, laughs, open-mouthedly at Kirishima's terrible puns.

He leans his shoulder into Todoroki's on rooftop stakeouts, nudges him out of his broody silences, gets him talking about something other than agency politics until Todoroki cracks the ghost of a smile.

Both of them have noticed the change.

Neither of them has put together why.

So this year, Todoroki decides that he is going to get Bakugou Katsuki something for Valentine's Day.

So does Kirishima.

Neither of them tells the other.

———

The shopping district near their agency headquarters is strung with pink and red garlands by the second week of February, and every storefront window has been given over to hearts, cupids, and displays of chocolate stacked into pyramids. Todoroki has never particularly cared for the holiday. It always struck him as a slightly desperate performance of feeling, dressed up in cellophane but this year he finds himself standing in front of a confectionary window for a solid four minutes, weighing the relative merits of dark chocolate pralines versus a mixed assortment.

He's midway through deciding when a familiar voice calls his name.

"Oh! Todoroki!"

Kirishima jogs the last few steps to close the distance, grinning, a small stuffed bear tucked under one arm with a red ribbon looped in a lopsided bow around its neck. He's clearly proud of the bow. He adjusts it as he arrives, like he wants Todoroki to notice it specifically.

"Kirishima," Todoroki says, and glances down.

In his own hands is a red heart-shaped box, a white satin ribbon tied with considerably more precision than Kirishima's effort. He'd redone it twice at the register until the girl behind the counter had gently offered to do it for him. "That's a cute bear."

"Right?" Kirishima beams, holding it up for inspection. "I saw it and just knew. He's got the little candy wrapped around his paw and everything, see?" He waggles the bear's mitted hand, which is indeed clutching a small foil-wrapped chocolate heart.

"What'd you get?"

Todoroki tilts the box slightly so Kirishima can see. "Pralines. Dark chocolate, mostly. Sixty to seventy percent cacao. I did some reading. Overly sweet chocolate can read as impersonal, like you didn't put thought into the recipient's actual taste."