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i.
Ochako doesn’t know why Bakugou keeps shooting her glares across the room in training. She’s not totally sure what she’s done wrong. Honestly, she keeps wracking her brain, ducking beneath Iida’s fist and snapping forward to try landing an open-palmed slap on his chest, but he’s quick despite his size even without his quirk working, and it isn’t long before he slams her out of bounds.
She rolls out of it with a groan and catches Bakugou eyeing her up again. For a second, she wonders if he's spoiling for another fight against her like in the festival – she’d put up a pretty decent fight, and honestly, she thinks he respects her for it, if even a little bit.
But then he stomps over when she takes a water break, and she gets her answer fast when he pokes her hard in the shoulder.
“You owe me a favour,” he accuses. Ochako stares.
“What?” she replies, baffled. “I don’t owe you a favour.”
“You owe me a favour,” Bakugou repeats. “I’m coming to collect.”
“I don’t owe you a favour!”
“Apple pie. Last week. With the pipsqueak.”
Ochako snaps her mouth shut and scowls at the memory of Bakugou swooping in to fix her baking disaster right at the last second before Eri even noticed it went wrong.
“You didn’t have to keep glaring at me,” she complains ruefully. “Fine. What do you want?”
Bakugou’s eye twitches. Ochako, in a moment of inspiration, suddenly realises precisely what Bakugou came over here for.
He’s about to ask her for help, and has decided that the best way to do it was claim that he was collecting on a favour. She smothers her giggle, because she doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of his Howitzer’s, but it’s probably the greatest struggle of her life.
“Get on my back.”
Ochako blinks.
And then she blinks again.
And then she narrows her eyes.
“Say that again?”
“Get. On. My. Back.”
“You know, I think I’m gonna want you to run me through your logic on this one,” Ochako deadpans, raising an eyebrow. “You want me to do what, why, and how?”
His eye twitches again. She actually takes a small amount of glee in making him this frustrated. It’s a level of irritation he only seems to garner when looking at Deku, which itself, is no mean feat. Those two drag the absolute best, and worst, out of one another. Today, it looks like it’s Ochako’s turn.
Bakugou stretches out his neck and grits his teeth, spitting through them in irritation.
“I can’t carry people like every fucker else can, or they’re gonna get blown to bits, and I can’t fuckin’ move.”
Suddenly, it doesn’t really seem so funny anymore. She doesn’t let herself drop her smile, though, crossing her arms.
“And that means I have to get on your back?”
“That means you have to get on my back,” he confirms, twitching yet again. “Because if I drop you from up there,” and he points at the very, very high ceilings where Tsuyu is pacing. “You don’t go splat on the fucking floor.”
Okay. Maybe he did think this through. It’s actually kind of rare Bakugou doesn’t, but still. “You could have asked Sero,” she complains anyway, though, just for the sake of it. “Or Deku, now he has—”
“Are you getting on my back or not, Round-Face?”
“If you’re going to get an attitude with me, then you owe me one.”
“Nope.”
“Then I guess I’m not helping you out,” Ochako goads.
“Oh, for – fucking fine!”
“Yes!” she squeals. “You owe me some of that mochi your mom sent that one time.”
“What? You were the little fucking thief—”
Before he finishes the sentence, she launches herself onto his back, making him stagger slightly under her weight. She’s deceptively heavy because of all her muscle, especially after staying in the dorms full time. Ochako’s actually getting enough nutrition and protein to build as much muscle as everybody else, now, and she’s making up for lost time. It’s only an instant, though, before Bakugou rights himself with a grunt.
“Don’t float me,” he warns as she crosses her arms over his neck, and her legs around his waist. She feels a little silly, especially when Kaminari happens to glance over and does a double take, only to start laughing hard at the sight. “Stay right where you are. don’t move. Don’t slip. If you slip, I’ll catch you.”
“If you’ll catch me, why do you need me?”
“Fuck you,” he replies, and then he’s blasting off, rocketing up into the sky like a shot, stabilising the two of them securely in mid-air.
She’s been up higher on her own, but it’s actually kind of nice to not have that vague, distant nausea niggling at her, to not be battling her own equilibrium and rely on someone else’s stability, for once.
“Alright,” Bakugou snaps, sounding far too uneven for her liking. “You good?”
She resists the urge to roll her eyes. “I’m fine. I’ve been in higher places than you have.”
“Don’t fuckin’ sass me!” he roars at her. “I will drop you!”
“You literally asked me to do this so I couldn’t be dropped. Be my guest.”
He mutters something to himself that sounds suspiciously like, so fucking annoying, but she just sniggers in his ear as he reorients them.
“I’m gonna do some training exercises,” he warns her. “Feinting, dodging, faux-attacks, shit like that. Don’t fucking move.”
Bakugou sets off without bothering to wait for her affirmative. She suppresses a yelp as he moves harshly, in unpredictable directions that have her holding onto his back for dear life, even going so far as to—
“Not the neck, not the neck!” Bakugou chokes abruptly, and she does yelp then, loosening her grip on his throat as he tries to keep them both upright. “Are you fucking dumb?”
“A scared kid’ll do the same!” she berates him back. “You can’t handle a bit of light choking then a kid’s gonna beat you!”
“Fuck you!” Bakugou snaps.
At the end of the session, when her feet are on solid ground once more and she and Bakugou trade angry barbs, she realises that it’s the start of a friendship that absolutely terrifies the rest of the friends – not that any of them, of course, would ever admit it.
ii.
It becomes a staple of their training.
Ochako doesn’t mind it in the slightest, because it actually lets her train her equilibrium and quirk control at a distance, keeping control of her floated objects as Bakugou darts across the entire training facility with her comfortably sitting on his back. It’s almost like a little holiday that Aizawa approves of – in fact, he’s even going so far as to get them all training in similar ways.
Today, though, Bakugou has other plans, crashing hard into the ground right in front of Deku, and Ochako gives him a cheerful wave.
“Deku,” Bakugou sneers, and Deku tilts his head at them in confusion. “Fight me.”
Deku and Ochako share a vaguely baffled look.
“Uh… hello?” Ochako says, raising an eyebrow even though he can’t see her. “I’m right here, you know.”
“Yeah, I know, Cheeks,” Bakugou snaps. “Deku, you’re going to fight me.”
“But what about—”
“She’ll be fine,” Bakugou dismisses, before smirking so hard that Ochako can hear it in his sneer. “Unless you think you’re so shitty at controlling your damned quirk that you’re gonna hurt your little girlfriend.”
Uh oh.
Ochako sees the exact instant that Bakugou’s needling gets underneath Deku’s skin, because there is absolutely nothing, not one person who can rile Deku up as quickly or efficiently as a particularly sharp jab from Bakugou.
For a brief instant, Ochako fears for her life.
“I’m not worried about that, Kacchan,” Deku says, tone hardened with steel, and his lips curl into a smirk that looks almost identical to Bakugou’s. The way these two boys are perfect mirrors of one another terrifies Ochako in about fourteen different ways, and the danger in Deku’s tone as his skin lights up with sparks makes her shudder. “I think it’s you that needs to be worried. You’re the one trying to catch up to me, remember?”
And before Bakugou can even growl low in his throat, Deku is bouncing into the skies, black whip oozing from his fingertips and gouging into rock.
“Holy shit!” Ochako yelps when Bakugou narrowly evades a falling boulder sent their way from Deku’s assault. “Do you want me to—”
“Fuck no!” Bakugou snarls. “You stay fucking there, and let me handle this, got it?!”
“But you—”
“I said hold tight!”
She doesn’t really have a choice – not if she wants to stay in the air and not splat on the ground, but a part of Ochako actually kind of enjoys the thrill of a fight that’s not actually hers. Deku knows not to underestimate Bakugou, and if anything, he actually trusts the other boy not to let Uraraka get hurt, and so he’s not holding back at all.
It’s no secret that Deku has to hold back a little bit of his quirk – at least, Deku thinks it’s a secret, but it’s a particularly sore spot for Bakugou and naturally everybody knows about it, but seeing Deku’s power this close, Ochako actually kind of gets why he would.
It’s blinding, it’s brilliant, and it’s terrifying.
“You really do need to catch up, Kacchan,” Deku taunts, unbelievably unlike him except in that way that he only ever is with Bakugou. “Training to save people on your back? I already did that, remember?”
“Yeah!” Bakugou snarls back, launching an explosion that makes Ochako wince hard back in his direction. “’Cause your quirk is so shitty you needed a snot-nosed little brat to help you out!”
Yeah.
Bakugou should know better than to insult Eri.
Ten minutes later, Ochako can only try to look innocent as Bakugou and Deku look anywhere but at her, each other, or Aizawa. The teacher taps his foot impatiently on the ground, eye twitching dangerously.
“I had nothing to do with it.” Ochako tries. Aizawa’s flat look quickly deters her from trying again.
Ochako is not, in fact, allowed to train on Bakugou’s back and fight with Deku without supervision anymore.
They don't get house arrest. Ochako will take a win when she gets one, even if it does involve a week of afterschool detentions and double cleaning duty.
iii.
Bakugou takes an unexpectedly mature, or truthfully, immature, solution to losing Ochako as a training partner.
“Deku!” he bellows across the training hall. Ochako can see the exact instant that Aizawa realises he forgot to forbid Deku from training with Bakugou like this. She also thinks she can see the minute he decides whether or not he’s going to step in, and probably that he’s not paid enough to unless they kill someone. “Your turn!”
“Wha—Kacchan!”
“On my back!”
“They’re really going to do this,” Mina marvels, clapping her hands and watching the show delightfully. “This is so fun. Two thousand yen says that he smashes Midoriya into the ground on purpose.”
“Two thousand says Midoriya won’t stay still and tries to take over,” Kaminari throws into the ring.
“Two thousand says they’re going to be a good team and work well together.”
A beat.
Everyone turns slowly to Kirishima, who’s face wrinkles up in resignation. “Yeah. Okay. That’s a long shot.”
“Kacchan, hang on—”
“You hang on, shitty nerd! Don’t make me drop you!”
“You’re going to get h—”
“Finish that sentence and I’m gonna kill you!”
Oh yeah, Ochako can’t say she misses that. She can’t lie that it isn’t unbearably entertaining to watch Bakugou bounce around the gymnasium with a great blob of green holding onto his back for dear life, both of them yelling abuse, some more literal than others, at one another.
“Kacchan, you’re overcompensating your right side, you always do this—”
“I don’t need your fucking advice!” Bakugou roars right back, but course-corrects and darts to his left.
They have to turn back to their own training again eventually, because Bakugou and Deku could be at it all afternoon if they wanted to, and given that Aizawa hasn’t intervened yet, they’re probably good to go unless something bad happens, or until one of them gets bored.
It’s Ochako’s fault it happens. She knows it is, and even though Tokoyami tries to take the blame for loosing Dark Shadow on her boulders in mid-air, Ochako knows she should have released them the instant she caught sight of the direction the boulders were careening into.
But panic set in, fingers fumbling together and failing to release her grasp on her quirk, yelling out a panicked, Look!
Deku twists in an instant, leaping back from Bakugou’s back and smashing into the boulder, but being in mid-air afforded him less power, and control, than he intended, and something goes wrong, and then there’s a streak of red from somewhere as Deku tumbles head over heel over head down, down, down towards the ground, one hand outstretched to the sky no matter which way he twists. He’s reaching out, Ochako realises, running though she knows it’s fruitless, knows she won’t get there in time this time like she had back then, back during the exams, a lifetime ago.
He's reaching out for Bakugou.
The blond reacts so fast, though, it’s like lightning; once Bakugou realises that Deku is falling, falling, falling, not catching himself, doing nothing but look back up, he’s screaming to himself in a half-panicked way, the way he does when he’s desperate and is beyond swearing, beyond yelling, beyond insulting anyone. Bakugou’s gauntlet snaps around Deku’s wrist when they’re too close to the ground for comfort, and he’s slowing their ascent to launch Deku back up, where it’s safer, where he can slam Deku onto his back for real, and land hard on the ground.
“Deku!” Ochako yells breathlessly, tears dripping down her cheeks as Deku tries to shake off glazed eyes and blood streaming down his face. Concussed. He’s concussed.
Aizawa’s pushing through, then, urging Bakugou to let Midoriya down onto the ground so he can sit for himself, walking him through the basic first aid care they’ve all been taught to give, but have yet to put into practice, all waiting with bated breath for the recovery bots.
“I’m fine,” Deku smiles shakily, a little too lopsided. “Sorry, sensei. Need to practice that more.”
Aizawa’s eye twitches. “We’ll put some time in for it,” he says, instead of outright forbidding it.
“What the hell were you even thinking, you shitty nerd?” Bakugou snarls once Aizawa’s done. “You didn’t even try to stop yourself from falling, you didn’t do shit.”
But Deku just looks at Bakugou with nothing but vague confusion, his tone unwavering when he speaks.
“I knew you’d catch me, Kacchan. You always do.”
Their company falls silent as Bakugou’s face falls slack, and then carefully blank, before he turns away with a low grunt, and doesn’t say another word.
iv.
It’s not training, next time.
It’s just… a bit of fun. That’s not really a sentence a lot of people would have associated with Bakugou before, or at least, not at the start, anyway, but he’s competitive and easy to needle into a competition, and before anybody knows it, there’s a piggyback race. Nobody admits to it being their idea, not even for a second, but when Bakugou crouches down and lifts Kirishima up onto his back without even a grunt, all hesitance is lost to glee, scrambling over one another to pick partners and teams.
Ochako leaps onto Iida’s back with a devilish smile, with Hagakure having already leapt onto Deku’s – “He’s totally the only one that’ll beat Bakugou! I call dibs!” – and yells for them to charge.
There’s so much laughter in the air, especially when Shouji clambers onto Satou’s back at the latter’s insistence, or when Todoroki tries, baffled, to let Mina claw onto his back, or even when Tsuyu and Jirou team up. The icing on the cake is when Aizawa turns up, and, incredibly, finds himself coerced into joining by Eri, too, who rides on Aizawa’s back and giggles the whole race.
It becomes a competition, after that, not to see who's the fastest, but how many people can clamber onto one person's back and have them still walking. For the longest time, Bakugou and Deku are leading the charge, and whenever Deku does anything at all, Bakugou isn't one to let up. After that, it becomes a matter of knowing just when Bakugou is going to stop giving out piggyback rides, and the answer is - well, it's an alarmingly long time.
The last one to get a piggyback ride from Bakugou is Eri, and basking in the orange glow of the setting sun, with their almost, not quite matching blond hair, and their red eyes, and the way their eyes are always turning to Deku, either to see if he's watching, or to check if he's gotten himself into trouble in the instant they looked away, one might even think that the two were siblings. They’re exhausted by the time the sun goes down, but everyone is smiling, or smirking, or grinning or just asleep on the grass already, and there’s a whole world of piggy-back rides out in the world to give and Ochako wouldn’t trade any of them for the world.
1
Ochako doesn’t recall how they got separated from the rest of the class, from the rest of the battlefield. All she knows is that they’re somewhere remote, somewhere their earpieces can’t pick the radio waves up for, and that Ochako’s quirk isn’t working.
She doesn’t let herself panic.
Nobody told her this was a possibility, not explicitly, but with how the Overhaul raid went all those months ago, and the way the wars changed the tide of the battle, she knows it was naïve to ever believe them to be freed of the burden of quirk-erasing technology. All she can do, though, is hope that it’s going to be temporary. Her priority is Bakugou’s concussion, and the way he breathes hard, gritting his teeth when Ochako checks him over for injuries.
She thinks she herself is fine, but the signs of a concussion are less obvious to yourself, and so she has no way of knowing for certain. All that matters is that she’s able to move, while Bakugou…
“We need to go,” he grunts hoarsely, followed by a weak, guttural cough. Ochako really wishes they were third years and had taken more first-aid courses. As it is, they’re just barely second, and she doesn’t know enough. “We have to move.”
There’s something unspoken in that sentence, and she spends almost too long trying to parse it’s meaning.
“Then get up,” Ochako chokes out around her own cough. It’s like she’s inhaled something thick and heavy. She wonders if it was a gas. She wonders if that means it’ll wear off soon.
Bakugou’s upper lip curls, and he shakes his head. “C’mon, Cheeks.”
She’s the only one that can move.
Despite herself, despite her trembling body, despite the fear locked in her chest, Ochako can only laugh. It’s a weak, pitiful thing around her throat, stealing breaths she can’t afford, and it only bubbles and fizzes into a dizzying little sob that she can’t afford either.
“We never practiced that,” she gasps for breath a long time later, when Bakugou’s shaky, bloody hand grasps her shoulder to regain her attention. “All that time, we never thought—”
“Get high ‘n mighty about it,” Bakugou grunts weakly. “I will fuckin’ kill you.”
There’s only laughter. There can only be laughter, because she’s going to cry anyway. Ochako’s weak in as many ways as she isn’t, but she is physically strong. Nobody expects it of her, especially not before they moved into the dorms, but adequate nutrition, regular training, and having Kirishima and Deku as friends meant that Ochako pushed her limits more than she ever thought she could handle.
Bakugou slung along her back feels less like a burden, like a hindrance, and more like a wreath, like a burst of power, a display of her own strength in equal measures to Bakugou’s trust. He trusts her, like this, because he doesn't berate her, he doesn't correct her, he doesn't tell her that she's done a thing wrong, but lets her work, lets her move, lets her take the lead.
“Tell anyone about this, I fuckin’ swear,” he mutters under his breath, but he doesn’t dare move against her back. He’s warm, and radiates heat, and that in turns helps her shivering cease, her steps more and more sure with each rocking motion.
They prepared for this.
Maybe not in the right way, maybe not at the right time, but they prepared. Ochako will carry them to safety. She was born to lift burdens, and Bakugou always had the heaviest of them all.