Goodbye Solitude

Chapter 3

His cellphone alarm jingled bright and early at 7am, as usual. Bakugo pulled open his eyes, glaring at all the shitty light that filled his bedroom. Reaching under his pillows he searched for his phone, his groping growing more frantic the longer the alarm went off without finding it. Then it dawned on him that it was still in his pocket and he dug it out. He had slept with his in his pocket the whole night. The battery was now only at 52% and he hated it. Starting the day at anything less than 100% did not sit well with him. He plugged it into the charging cord and hoped it gained a little battery life while he got ready for work.

He plopped back on his bed, trying to gauge how bad his hangover was. Did he need aspirin or could he tough it out?

"Bakugo?" Kirishima dragged himself into his room, clutching his head. "How are you doing?"

"Apparently better than you."

"That's good, I feel terrible. You have some Excedrin or something?" He squinted his eyes and looked down at Bakugo, who reluctantly sat up in bed. He paled. "What the hell happened to you?"

"What?" Bakugo tilted his head in confusion.

"Where you attacked in the middle of the night?" he demanded angrily.

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The blood, man! Blood all over!"

Bakugo stumbled out of bed and flew into the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror. Minor, obviously only surface-level, streaks of blood tracked from his forehead to cheekbones in vertical stripes. The worst part was his neck. It was a mess of dried blood.

Then it all came back to him.

He swung around to glare accusingly at Kirishima, who was watching him in the bathroom mirror. "You!"

Kirishima's face shifted from worry to bewilderment. "Me what?"

"You don't remember?" he snorted in disbelief.

"Remember what?"

"You bit me!"

His red eyes grew huge in his face. "No way!"

"Yes way! You tripped on my shoes and fell on me. Next thing I knew, you bit me!"

Kirishima leaned against the bathroom door and buried his face into his hands. "Kill me now," he murmured. "Should we go to the hospital? What if you need stitches? I'm so sorry, super sorry."

Bakugo pulled a mass of toilet paper off the roll and got it a bit wet. Chunks of wet paper fell into the sink as he blotted at the blood on his neck, inspecting the damage in the mirror. "Hmmm, no hospital. I don't think it's that bad. I think this is like a head wound, I think it just bled more than most wounds do."

Kirishima looked under the sink, the cabinet door hitting Bakugo lightly in the legs. "You got any first aid stuff under here? Oh! Here we go!" He pulled out rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, gauze, and every box of Band-Aids he owned and threw them all on the bathroom countertop.

Kirishima poured some of the alcohol on a cotton ball while Bakugo stubbornly kept trying to use the rapidly disintegrating toilet paper. "Here, let me help." The redhead pushed his hand in the way and started cleaning his neck.

Bakugo huffed in irritation but let him gently wipe off his neck. He looked away, trying to not feel self-conscious about the fact that they now stood so close to each other. The bite mark stung as the cotton ball touched his raw wound and he hissed quietly. As the blood was removed, it revealed two perfectly symmetrical, dotted, crescent marks that were impossible to play off as anything but a bite mark.