Chapter 9 (Finale)

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The following Monday, when Iida sees two unfamiliar women in civilian clothes on the front of HeroMag - or, as he once heard Sero refer to it, the trashier little sibling of Weekly Shield - he pauses, because it's not often they feature non-heroes on the cover. He only needs to read the headline (HERO-KIDNAPPING SISTERS TELL ALL!) to know who they are, and he puts the magazine back.

No one brings it up to Iida at work, but he sees the magazine everywhere he looks - more places than he saw the cover with Todoroki the week before. "It's a hot mess," Sero tells him, when Iida asks for his opinion on the article itself. "It seems like they panicked when Todoroki's interview was published and tried to sanitize theirs, to make it seem less scummy. There's some weird paragraph at the end about how the magazine doesn't 'endorse their actions,' and the tone is all over the place, like it was edited last minute. They can't decide whether to portray them as, like, celebrities, or criminal masterminds, or what. It's so badly written."

Despite what Sero said in his surprisingly detailed critique, Iida thinks the quality of the writing probably does not stop people from purchasing the magazine - he keeps seeing the women's faces again and again until the next issue of the magazine comes out.

Iida never reads it. He's made his mind up; maybe he'll change it someday, but he isn't ready yet. Todoroki's article was bad enough; Iida does not want to think of how negatively he might be affected by this one. He wishes he hadn't even seen the picture, because he doesn't want to know the women's faces at all.

Bakugou doesn't read it either, so they don't discuss it much. And, slowly, little by little, it fades, it all fades, but the routine he shares with Bakugou is the same, and Iida is glad about that.

He realizes a few weeks later that the idea of Bakugou going back to his own apartment permanently is more than distasteful - it's frightening. Somehow the best things in Iida's life all seem to involve Bakugou: getting home from work and having someone to eat dinner with, listening to the sound of his breaths as the two of them drift off to sleep, and, most of all, those unguarded conversations they have nearly every night. It feels so natural to be with him that Iida shudders to imagine living any other way.

After days of thinking about it, he decides to ask Bakugou to move in with him. It seems the best way to ensure this happiness does not slip from his grasp.

Iida begins the conversation in what he hopes is a subtle way: "Your apartment now - are you on a month-to-month lease?"

"No, a year." Bakugou's tone is casual, but the abrupt way he looks at Iida is not. (Iida is probably not as subtle as he hoped to be.) "But it ends in two months, and I haven't renewed it yet."

"Why not just move in with me?" Iida says. "I think we've-"

"Yes," Bakugou says, without an ounce of hesitation, and Iida smiles.

---

Iida would be a fool to not consider what this means. Not what it might seem like to others; Iida's already established their mutual apathy regarding what the world thinks about them. No, something like this means something - it can't not. Even Iida and his lack of experience can see that. Before, that they shared a bed was explained by Bakugou's nightmares and the emotional support Iida provided. Bakugou coming over all the time was to cook, of course, which was his way of repaying Iida. But for Iida to say now that there's any purpose to them living together besides his unabashed affection for Bakugou would be a lie.

The idea of confronting what, exactly, they are - the thought of looking for the best word to describe this closeness - is a little more than Iida can handle. In a very un-Iida-like fashion, he decides to stop thinking about it and let it rest for a while. Not forever; but for the time being, he decides to simply go with the flow.

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