#big thanks to q.lizzy 1st

[ms0milk]

𝟖 | 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐚 (𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐞 & 𝐭𝐰𝐨.)

ー✧ prince!bakugou x royal guard!reader

"You do flinch though, when the prince parts your legs with his hips at the lip of the counter to be this much closer and tilts your face up with that same oddly soft hold from before, a thumb and forefinger balancing your chin where he wants you."

cw (I) bkg mom mode activate, reader attempts murder at a dinner party, super brief paranoia sequence. (II) accidentally suggestive wound-tending, a completely reasonable misunderstanding + bkg is momentarily horrified by what you think of him. 5.7k.

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It's akin to murder in Aldera, killing an ant or fly or caterpillar– to not move worms off the path after a rainstorm. Your home is love.

The little Todoroki Prince is delicate like his mother and his kingdom, like his older brother and sister seated beside him, pale and silent, but as he sits down to eat he crushes a spider making home between the candles and sweeps its body off the table without thought.

It’s a nagging dread across your cheeks, it’s the prickle of a thousand invisible whiskers towards the danger in the corners of this bustling room of feast. Something is wrong with Takoba. The Todorokis are quiet and unpleasant, sure, but something else– someone– shouldn’t be here.

“Y/n?”

Your head tilts to Kirishima sitting at the table in front of you when his low voice cuts through the clamor.

“Are you okay?”

“Mm.”

He smiles as if to say just checking, and pours himself back into his meal and a conversation between friends.

Is Takoba truly so wealthy that they can hire pleasant crowds on demand? Where did all these happy feasters come from? Where do the wicked crows from the throne room roost? The sparkling white hall where you’re stationed this evening bathes in dusk and endless candlelight, music, fine dancing, fine food and kind company. It is the warmest room in all the kingdom for one night only.

All day long you tried tracking down the simmering blond princling currently sitting with his back to your post, but he hid, like a whelp, until dinnertime.

“Where is Prince Bakugou’s chamber?” You attempted to interrogate the maid sent to deliver your change of clothes and show to your room last night, but she just shook her empty head.

A soldier was posted to your door at dawn and you scared him out of his polished boots in your own Takoban uniform well before the sun even crested the castle walls. As delicate as the kingdom and all its trinkets could be, the cotton padded tunic did an admirable job of keeping out seachill. Your halberd bled a red gash down the back of your white and blue uniform and you felt altogether ready for war.

“The feast has been planned for weeks– you must attend!”

“I mustn’t do a single thing.”

“I’ve been ordered to take down your preferences. The prince himself–”

“My prince?” You cocked your head to the nagging butler who had finally caught up to you outside of the soldier’s quarters. Aizawa and all his exhaustion had been no help in your search.

“No, M’lady the Tako–”

“– I am not your Lady.”

“Miss please,” he’d begged. He’d begged and begged until he grew too weary of your wandering.

The prince’s less than modest attitude soured your sleep, even after the shock of opening your chamber door to a room fit for a lord. Green ivy rugs, climbing their little fingers in a pattern across the floor to the sea-facing window beside your bed. Four wooden posts and white linen curtains. It would take two of you to touch the ceiling and ten more to reach from one wall to the next and by all means you should have slept like the dead.

But Bakugou’s smug canine grin burned into your eyelids like a flare. Marching alone down a hallway, you bared your teeth to the thought.

“I’m sorry Ma’am, I haven’t seen him.”

“I’m not important enough to know such things.”

“Who?”

“Weren’t the Alderans injured? Maybe the hospital?”

Through every level of the seashell castle, through every kitchen and office and workshop and training ground, you searched for the prince’s chambers. You marveled all the way through the grand entryway and combed empty jeweled halls and peeping windows. You wished a good morning to Lady Mina and Sero on their way to breakfast and stormed anxiously through the outdoor walkways built into castleside, trying your hardest not to peer over their railings into the sea.

Ahead of you now Prince Bakugou looks too polished and still all too natural at the head of the table while you stand guard behind him, close enough to pluck a golden hair off his head.

The Alderan guests and Takoban royalty perch on a platform at the front of the room and an expanse of feasting festivities stretch out before them. Thankfully this crowd is less oppressive, it is less hateful and more excited to eat the fine food and sing merry songs than to bother much at all with you. Even a place as callous as Takoba enjoys hot meals with friends.

Kirishima gives piggyback rides to children brave enough to approach and Mina watches on, picking petals off the set flowers and tossing them gleefully to the rowdy bunch. The crowd, all seated at their own long tables, giggles and cheers and soon the redhead is lost under a pile of little girls in their poofy ball gowns.

Whiskers twitch again and your gaze shoots across the room to a man milling with drink trays and the blindspot of a candle behind him where the wall stills in darkness. You’re brought back to the light when a voice hisses,

“Denki! Quit it–”

Sero admonishes his friend as Kaminari gorges on roast vegetables and sliced meats that have wafted their warm autumn sweetness through the seashell castle all day long. The noisy eater is seated directly beside the fairy blue prince and his bellsong siblings who’ve hardly spoken a word all evening. The three of them dazzle even without their mother present, they wear it like the color blue was made for them and you know that behind her sick, the Takoban Queen must be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.

Mina squeals at something the fair princess has said and Sero, along with the youngest Todoroki clap and smile when Kaminari starts to hiccup from all his inhaling of food. More people who already know each other and more reason for you to feel a bit out of place.

When Prince Todoroki tilts his delicate face far enough towards you, you can almost catch a glimpse of the famous red framing his features. What does he sound like, you wonder? Out of all of them Bakugou is the only one whose face you can’t see, broad shoulders pressed flat back against his chair as he lounges.

“Quit starin’ Eyes, you’ll ruin my appetite.”

“Yes, sir.”

The fork squeaks as his fist tightens around it. Where has he been hiding?

"..Little Alderan…"

Sweat prickles your temples when a ghost calls to you suddenly, traveling from shadow to shadow in the candlelit room, swimming through them strategically to be closer. Shadows cast by dancing men, or thrown behind full mugs of ale across the long feasting tables. The steaming scars of the flame mage still burn ripe across your mouth from where he grabbed you in the forest, like a muzzle. You stand with square shoulders and hands behind your back and wish Shinsou or Uraraka were here to share your paranoia but they’re stationed outside with their men where fire demons don’t dance across the walls.

The prince doesn’t seem bothered by the song or dance or laughter; he only wipes his mouth and looks out over the crowd. He peers behind his tall chair towards you every so often, never truly looking, and it rubs something in you wrong the way he can’t even trust you through one meal.

You’re far enough away from the joyful crowds that they can’t swallow you whole. Harps and horns do not make your heart race and you only need worry about the six royals in front of you and the gaggle of incompetent Takoban guards standing similarly around them. Prince Bakugou’s head bobs as he eats. Tens of candles burn so hot across his table that their melted wax pools around his plates and bowls and he reminds you of his father the way food will just steal his attention away. How is this the same cruel man from last night? It is hard not to remember his family while you watch him.

A clatter of silver across the floor startles the table’s attention from friends to the feasters and you jerk your dagger in its scabbard, but a child has just tripped on his too-big shoes and into the side of a serving tray.

It is too eerie for words, this happy bustling hall, and too threatening to explain. Gods, it’s hot in here. Blue lords and blue ladies create the sea beneath you and fires, even the smallest candles, threaten to set their world alight. Sometimes when you blink, the cream calm world goes horribly blue.

“Cool it.”

A creaking wooden chair pulls your focus and in his seat your prince shifts while Mina makes a show of declining a great many offers to dance from beautiful suitors. He watches on like always, peering into the depths of the room and through the idle chatter. Without his red cape Bakugou appears broader, less contained, tucks his chin into the crease of his shoulder and submits to boredom. He rasps across the high lilt of a fiddle, “Calm down.”

The prince has tilted his ale warmed cheeks far enough again for you to see an expression clearly, empty but present, and you make a point to only glance. To just watch a little. To linger on a few pieces of golden hair that stick to his face with sweat. Oh how angry it makes you, how beautiful he is and how easy it would be for him to get away with anything. What a wonderful distraction from the imperceptible threat you can’t quite shake.

He shuffles his tongue across his teeth and tilts a little further– far enough that you realize he’s peering directly at you from the corner of his eye. An accusatory jewel. The candles in front of him flicker suddenly a hot, hot purple.

“You hear me?”

You do not.

Those candles set on the table jump for a moment, quivering in the windless Hall all while two figures slip across the edges of the room: one a man cloaked and the other his shadow. Your hands can hardly stay still within each other while the tiny flames all around your company flicker white then red, then purple again– they are fighting to be blue.

Kirishima is the first to see you advance. He is the second to try and stop you.

You know that, had you given the champion time he would have taken your hands and asked again, are you alright? But he saves his worry at the sight of your hand on your dagger. Between the redhead and the prince you approach their table and bend calmly at the hip, quietly blowing out the candles that surround their food and faces.

Prince Bakugou barely has time to register your presence or come up with some horrible quip before you’re at his side and drawing your weapon.

“Do not–”

“– Y/n!”

For all their showy training these two are not faster than you. Kirishima lurches for your dagger from his seat in shock, so you drop it to keep all his fingers attached and plant a steadying foot behind you.

Joy dies when your halberd launches across the room.

Through the familiar stretch of your bicep, relief pours when you fetch it from your back, through the strain and still of aiming well trained eyes and finally through the flex of your ribs when your back arches and whips itself forward to create the deadly momentum you need. Release. Thumb, index, middle and ring, the bloodred weapon sails from your fingers. A star begging to explode.

You unsettle something in him, Prince Bakugou, and as a rule he does not like to watch you. But his mother’s favoritism starts making sense tonight, that crazy fucking woman.

Thunk, is the hollow sound of pierced wood followed by a flat squeak of musicians trailing off midsong and the immediate hush of dancers and feasters. You must look as smug as you feel because your aim is, as always, perfect. The tip of your halberd spears a cloak to the wall, trapping but still sparing the man wearing it and necks crane to the front of the room. Your royal table stares. One head behind the next, mouths open, eyes bulging, those might be tears in Kaminari’s eyes– and even in a kingdom as incompetent as this one, you suppose only one thing can happen next.

Almost immediately the Takoban guards seize you. The room erupts.

“–Y/n!”

“Stop!”

“Don’t– wait, wait!”

Your body is snatched up by armored men and thrown flat onto the wooden table with all of its webs and candlewax. “Don’t dawdle!” You shout into the hard surface you’re pressed against, “He’ll get away!”

But you are the spider now and no one is listening. 

To their credit, the Todoroki siblings gather themselves quickly enough to stand. One of them, the little prince, waves an arm and shouts to his men– maybe ordering them to release you, maybe ordering to kill. It’s so, so loud now.

The Alderan company and their thunder can’t help you, the champion is held back by Sero and Mina whose eyes dart to every face in the room to try and find reason in your attack. Kaminari clutches the arm of the guard who takes a bit too much pleasure pressing your face hard against wood grain with a hand on the back of your head.

It’s a different sort of chaos from the prince’s smoking of the throne room. No one swarms, in fact no feasters yet have the courage to walk past the spot where your weapon has sunk deep into the elven doors, and flee into the safety of the hallway. A little talisman to ward off the flies. A talisman no longer containing the shadowed man, only his cloak and a shred of shirt cloth.

“He’s–!” You grunt, struggling against heavy hands holding your body down and moreso than that, to be heard. He’s escaping! You want to scream but fingers have threaded their way through the hair at the base of your head and gods it hurts when you’re yanked back up by a braid. Momentarily lightheaded by the rise, you consider all the ways to get this guard on his back without having to cut his hands from your hair.

“Oi,” a firesoft voice breathes, soot ash and matches, “let her go.”

It’s quick, faster than that– in fact, it takes the same amount of time for Prince Bakugou to separate you from the soldier as it did for him to give the order. Before you’re even pulled back up to standing, a heavy hand wraps around your bicep and he plants his other over the soldier’s headpiece to let loose a few tempered sparks. As you're yanked into his chest the guard goes flying.

Others replace the first, soldiers alerted to danger by the haunting sound of an explosion rush from the floor where they watch over stunned guests, and to the platform where their own Takoban Royals are once again under threat from Aldera. It’s never ending. Even as you plan to attack them it isn’t lost on you, what a headache you have been to these royal guards.

It’s easier to focus on one thing.

You have to plan your defense and you certainly have to find an escape route, but you can’t see over the swell of his shoulders. His warmth, his caramel, it’s distracting, it’s all too distracting– it’s all moving in slow motion. Broad but not all that tall, soft, Bakugou’s body surrounds you momentarily as he steadies you both from the recoil of his shot.

“Enough!” A low voice like bells is heard suddenly so clearly that the rest of the voices in the Hall become mud. They all become racket in comparison to, “Leave them.” 

They all become cut glass played against, “We’re fine.”

Around the room soldiers freeze mid stride in shock presumably and folded inside of each other, you and Bakugou must look exactly like them because the Todoroki siblings are standing as calm and bored as napping babies. The eldest even reaches into his quilted jacket breast to check the time on a pocket watch.

“Go on then, leave them alone,” the princess reiterates, little flecks of red warming white hair. Her crystal glasses glint so bright in the candlelight one could hardly see her eyes but her stance is strong and her blue dress whips about the floor from the sudden quiet of the room. The silence of the forgotten partygoers is comical, a collection of a hundred wide eyes blinking from one action to the next like bats in a cave.

Bakugou seems to realize how closely he’s holding you and pushes you away with his hand still around your bicep.

“She needs to be punished!” Your blown-away guard insists, “She fired into a royal crowd!” He’s collecting himself as best he can from where the prince shot him backwards, disgruntled, armor crooked, and generally singed. He rushes you in the grip of your prince, and before you can brace yourself, before the youngest Todoroki can cooly object or your champion can finally hit someone, Bakugou snarls and jerks you forward.

“You think I can’t punish my own fucking staff?���

You teeter on the lip of the platform step and the prince practically throws you to the floor from how close behind he’s pulling you, caramel vicegrip still firm on your arm. Bakugou tears into the thick hush of the Hall, heavy footsteps, nagging growls, indignant muttering. You just try to make sure you don’t roll an ankle from how quickly you’re expected to move, down off the platform and into the petrified crowd.

Kirishima cups his hands around his mouth and tries to call after you, which gets him exactly zero response. In fact the prince grips your arm bruisingly harder at the request as he marches you both through the parting sea of partygoers. They stumble over each other to both watch and hide from you in their fancy clothes.

“Highness–” you grunt, but you’re cut off immediately with another tug. Your cheeks sting from being dragged across the table. He doesn’t seem to be marching you to the entryway, but past it, to a door at the back of the room. “See?” You grumble and reach out for your halberd with your free had as the pair of you pass it, “My aim–”

“Do not!” Bakugou spins around and seethes. He swats your hand and jerks you forward yet again to leave the red weapon exactly where you’ve sunken it, “Not helping ya little fuck.”

If last night was a short fuse, what you’ve cut for yourself tonight is a lit explosive. Oh how the prince rumbles. He holds you somewhere between ferocity and urgency and you hate to remember– you curse yourself for your timing– just how deeply you embarrass him. How many different ways you could have detained the suspicious figure– even if he was a mage, the mage, even if fires did beg to turn blue.

Past the long wooden tables, past frightened guests and musicians tuning on the orders of their exhausted princess, Bakugou tows you to the back of the room. He kicks a modest door in and blinding candlelight pours wet warm over your shadows. Veins throttle the back of his hand. The hand that grips your arm so tightly– his hand that relaxes and slips as he storms inside behind you, to cup your elbow.

The silver kitchens are alive. Handmaids and bakers and strongmen heft vats and soups and bread every which way as the door to the Hall closes behind you, and you have to duck or dodge every few steps to keep out of their bustling paths.

“Clear out! I need the flouring tables,” your prince barks into the kitchen carnage and in his new oddly gentle hold you’re only reminded of his presence because of that voice. The one that splinters wood and drops plum pits to your gut no matter how many times you hear it or how many times it’s barking directly at you.

Punishment. Dragged from your post, from your entire company, to be punished by him with the full roster of kitchen staff here to watch. Shame boils every stream of blood in your body so violently you have to cup your chest to believe the rate your heart is beating.

The man crude enough– you suppose, the only man who even ranks highly enough– to treat you like a toy. After growing up beside one another. Chewing you up, spitting you out, nothing but ridicule for an entire week punctuated by last night’s wretched performance of submission.

The prince must feel your heartbeat in his fingertips because he begins marching faster the second it picks up from your embarrassment, “Hurry up.”

While Bakugou guides you deeper into the organized chaos, maids and bakers and butlers shift slowly under his orders like watching ants change course in a rainstorm. Great big balls of dough are heft from the counter islands in the center of the room, silverware clatters, fires blaze around you from cold new stoves starting, and most impressive of all, every worker buzzing through the bedlam keeps up their pace without faltering.

Muscle plump bakers trot past and behind you every which way, narrating their movements with cupped hands to teammates.

“Behind!”

“This isn’t sugar.”

The prince’s odd orders add to their symphony, “Cold water and boning tweezers– need ‘em yesterday!”

“Someone light this for me?”

“Hey will you– and this—”

“Here Kats, tweezers.” A butler in a highcollar frock pulls the metal from her pocket and drops them cold into your prince’s hand on her way out the door with an ale tray.

Kats? You dare a glance as the butler makes her way back into the Hall. Just one, a look not a stare, up the curve of your collarbone to his clenched jaw and even just a little higher than that. The prince’s brandfire pupils glow behind lids half shut with exasperation. Hooded, heavy eyes watch yours. He’s looking.

He’s looking at you and your mouth has gone dry.

You don’t know how to prepare yourself because you aren’t sure what to expect, least of all Bakugou lifting you up under the arms like you aren’t fully suited and setting your hips on the closest countertop. Partially stunned and partially professional, you make sure to sit up straight suddenly at his eye level, legs dangling, to receive your punishment. The bluefire mage is as far as he’s ever been from your mind.

“Been telling you to calm down all night,” he rasps– to himself if volume is indicative of anything. Even his inflection goes menacingly quiet now that kitchen chaos can’t slip between the pair of you. He keeps the tumult behind him and boxes you between his shoulders, grumbling before closing in, “My fault for thinking you had a brain in that thick skull.”

You have to keep yourself from clutching his wrist when the prince abruptly cups your jaw and begins rocking your face slowly side to side, and you hope beyond all hope that whatever he’s going to do to you ends quickly enough for you to return to your post unbruised; he looks like a man that likes to leave marks.

If he takes this much pleasure in your pain, why does he still wear your earrings? Your golden suns hang in mismatched holes from his many missing piercings but they still scream with Aldera pride. He knows that they’re yours. He knows this as he thumbs your stinging cheeks, as he turns and barks requests into a half-listening crowd, and as you try your best not to pull away from him. He refuses help, companionship, and protection– it must only be to torture you.

“Give me your hand.”

The way he speaks is not dissimilar from last night. Mean. When Bakugou finishes warming your face like putty in his fingers, he arms himself with his tweezers and waits for you to execute his orders. “Hand,” he repeats and you don’t hesitate this time to give him what he wants.

You do flinch though, when the prince parts your legs with his hips at the lip of the counter to be this much closer and tilts your face up to meet his with that same oddly soft hold from before, a thumb and forefinger balancing your chin where he wants you. Like a cat who kneads suddenly with its claws, your skin prickles at every agonizingly delicate touch of the prince’s fingers as you wait for sparks.

He presses his face so close to yours that for a second you think he might kiss you. Force himself onto you. Closer than two swordsmen crashing at their hilts, your faces mirror each other in the prince’s concentration. Whiskers sear. This is the only kind of punishment you won’t tolerate. You can’t– you know that you’ll strike him. Wine and honey roll from his tongue in puffs of sweet air as he leans in further– as you struggle with the sudden proximity and try not to let your thighs cradle his.

Bakugou doesn’t seem to care about your wide eyes this time, doesn’t really seem to be paying them all that much mind in his focus. What is it? What is he focusing on? A week without looking at you and now the bridge of your nose is the most interesting thing in the world?

“You’re a fucking headache.”

“Sir, I–”

“Told you not to call me that.” He plucks what feels like a hair from your cheek and your eyes flood immediately and involuntarily with sensitivity, “Well, Eyes? Or– hah, should I call you captain?” One sharp exhale like a laugh and his head cocks a bit to the side, “Since you’re obviously so qualified to be my fucking keeper.”

Prince Bakugou crowds you between bread proofing bakers, a confinement that should make your skin itch, and stands tall in the chaos of the bustling kitchen, a room that would otherwise fill you with dread. He pinches your cheeks again with his tweezers and drops something from them into the hand that you’ve given him, and somehow even in the overheating swell you don’t bubble over with panic. Even as you picture all the ways to disarm him, he is the one still thing you focus on to stay calm.

“Fuck are you so tense for? I don’t bite.”

“I’ve seen you bite many times,” you breathe into his shoulder, monotone and confusion.

What is he waiting for? When is he going to strike you? Burn you? Take you? The anticipation and confusion is worse than whatever punishment he could dream up. The violence always in his eyes and the way you can’t even find a hint of threat right now in his concentration, chills you. His borrowed white formalwear radiates cold from all its twinkling silver baubles but the warmth of his body obliterates the chill. Chest against chest, it shocks your overstimulated nerves and sends you ever closer to the sensation of being trapped in your skin.

He continues his gentle pinching as you continue gauging how much stronger than you he might be. Lifting you like nothing, throwing men through the air, even if you tried to fight back you might not be able to stop him.

A bowl of ice water appears beside you on the counter and the woman who delivered it tosses a rag your way, casually, as if Bakugou’s already dragged a thousand disobedient guards into the kitchen to disrupt her soup stirring. It only reminds you though, that no one here seems to be all that interested in Bakugou’s royal status and subsequently even less interested in coming to your aid if he decides your body is the only penance he’ll accept.

He waves his thanks to the kitchen and pulls away from you for a moment, never making eye contact but still taking something in. A part of you. Like admiring a painting, or more likely– with those furrowed brows– wincing at a carriage wreckage. He wets the rag and rings it out in a fist without looking away.

Prince Bakugou Katsuki looks so much like his mother it’s going to break your heart.

You flinch when he brings the wet cloth to your lips and a lump swells in your throat when it makes him smirk. How could someone this cruel come from the woman who raises the sun? His ashen hair, shoulders thick from training his magic, soft leather hands and beautiful eyes– the sun did create him. And she asked you to keep him safe.

The prince drops the rag in its bowl and takes your jaw up in his hold again, presses his hips back to yours to be closer, still just as eerily gentle. You must be biting your tongue hard to taste all this blood.

Even as a sparkworn palm steadies itself on your thigh instead of the countertop beside you, all you can think of is your queen’s request– your orders. You won’t resist him. You fired into the crowd in a foreign castle. Your prince spared you a public humiliation and you won’t deny him your punishment.

“Highness,” you can barely hold dignity in your voice as you speak into his tunic from how closely he keeps you, and something about the pitiful sound makes him pause his little strokes at your cheeks. You muster the courage to continue, “Please just– just be quick.”

“What, so you can go back out there and assault another waiter?” He growls back, distant with focus, “All that got you this time was a face full of splinters.”

Before you can process his words the prince claps your cheek to agitate the last few flecks of wood still embedded there under the skin.

“Leave it to a Takoban carpenter to serve their guests on fucking driftwood.”

What?

Your angry prince, shoulders hunched, jaw set, frowning– always frowning– is plucking your…splinters? What splinters? Cradling your face instead of attending his own feast? Instead of punishing you? Instead of screaming, striking, exploding– instead of pulling your tunic apart by the buttons and eating you.

“What are you doing?” You breathe again, unsure of if you’ve even said the words out loud.

“You got the short term memory of a goldfish.”

Prince Bakugou drops the tweezers in the water dish after dusting clean his now-wood-free canvas and tilts your face up a bit higher to match his gaze. Your hips connect. Cold blooms at your mouth where the prince presses the icy wet rag again and this time you realize he’s wiping blood from your nose.

Does he not remember marching you through the Hall five minutes ago? Last night’s raised hackles and voices flash so vividly in your mind that you still feel his arrogant breath down the back of your neck. The furious canines that kept you up all night. Who is this?

“Titania almighty you’re jumpy, what happened to my Alderan Captain huh?” But his eyes stop half way through their rolling before he finishes speaking again. His hand freezes where it steadies your jaw, fingers and thumbs cupping you there and a warm pinky stilled at your throat with his words, “Like you think I’m–” knotted brows fall as he realizes, “– that I–”

Slowly, your prince’s face lowers to the shadow your body casts in candlelight and for the third time in your life, you watch each other. Wide red eyes, too near to see clearly, burn into your own and you can’t quite decipher all that they’re saying. His fingers twitch like he’s only just realized who it is he’s touching and how he’s touching her and for a moment you can feel his thighs tense inside of yours. Like he’s going to run away. Blond hair sticky with kitchen sweat brushes your temples from how close you’re kept. 

“Did you think–”

“Let go of me.”

At the same time Bakugou realizes your fear, violence finally returns to you. How long has it been?

Heat soars from your heart to every tip of your body in humiliation. From the top of your head to the points of your fingers, you reel forward off the counter to disrupt his hold and he similarly jerks away from you, chest and hips parting, fists clenching.

Heads turn at the sudden disruption. The rhythm of these kitchens never stops, but maneuvering around Alderans has become tonight’s full time precaution and at the very least you could be considered entertainment.

You and your prince stand facing each other. You, chillingly still and bleeding so slightly, and Bakugou at a safe distance.

Growling, taunting, threats and blows, spitting, sneering– why now of all times to be kind? Your mouth forms the question. Hours of patience, a lifetime of service, admiration, devil’s advocation, self sacrifice, pride. But your voice can’t quite push it out.

Is it fun? Toying with me?

Prince Bakugou stares across the floured floor at you, cheeks and neck so flushed it makes his white tunic glow. Your posture curves inward like a stalking cat as you stare back.

For the first time in his life, Bakugou can’t find words. You won’t know what he’s trying to say for a long time and for now it’s a coincidence and a blessing that you’re too grieved to speak.

When you push silently past him back into the Hall hardly a soul notices you. Music swells and children dance. Blood drips from your nose as you march, your cheeks sting, and slowly blue lords and blue ladies at the edge of their tables catch chilling sight of you. You consider all the ways you should apologize to the waiter you speared in your delirium.

Slowly, forks are lowered and necks crane. Slowly mother’s pull their daughters closer, drunkards stop singing, eyes fall on your stride. The music tapers out as you approach the front entrance.

A genuine laugh is so close to escaping you when the entire room winces in unison– you plant your heel to the polished white wall and rip your halberd from where it’s still wedged, pretty and red, in the elven door and with a flourish the polearm is back in its holster between your shoulders. Your company is gone; no one sits at the royal table. Bakugou doesn’t follow from the kitchens.

As you slip from the Hall and back into the seashell castle, you’re sure you’ll be punished for this too, whatever the fuck that means.

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