#i love watching this lil taglist grow every ch!

[ms0milk]

𝟒 | 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐞 𝐎𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐞

ー✧ prince!bakugou x royal guard!reader

"His glowing red eyes try to kill you, to set you on fire like his mother’s do and he must succeed– someone succeeds– because the campsite goes up in one searing blue pillar of flame."

cw wrestling bkg to safety for 4k words, and so so much protective worry. fire-related injuries, incredibly brief reader panic sequence (overthinking). reader does not get to enjoy her first time seeing the ocean. someone is trying very hard to kill you (and doing very well) 4.6k

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Bakugou doesn’t much care for carriage rides. He gets nauseous easily tucked away in those glorified jewelry boxes and would always rather be on horseback. It’s been that way since he was little. It's too stuffy and he needs the fresh air.

Where is he now? Is he riding?

It feels like he’s being carried to bed by his father after a late party. It feels like he’s dying.

The ground whizzes rough underneath the pair of you and at the rate you’re driving this horse, all three of you will be dead before you can even make it inside the city walls. The prince’s hands are clammy when they reach out for nothing. You’re gasping, retching and dripping with blood.

“Highness– please– please hold on to me!”

It’s your fists wrapped in the sprinting horse’s mane, not his, and he thinks that’s strange. Bakugou is slipping out of consciousness against your back and you’re trying to figure out how one man alone could cause so much destruction.

The prince’s bloody hand tightens around your waist when he tries to pull back beside the campfire, but you hold him in place without moving. Does he know what’s coming? You level his sword to the danger ahead. 

“I know it’s you master,” the ghost sings from deep in the trees. His voice reverberates from every direction. Grass tips flicker with fire in a perimeter around the campsite. The chill of the naught-winter wind shivers through branches, bringing the voice closer and closer to the clearing like he’s lighter, faster than air.

A blue glow flickers between tree trunks and no one breathes when the apples beside you hiss, scream, and whither, and then bake into ash. Not a soul.

Kirishima looms across the clearing shielding his companions more successfully than you’re managing the prince, and Aizawa crouches in the carriage nearby with his bow drawn.

“How was Aldera?” That haunting voice hums again. The blue din is closer now.

The prince snaps, growling, and leaps out from behind you towards the treeline but you don’t need Shinsou’s bellowed warning to drop the sword and dive onto his back.

Another arrow whizzes under your arm as you tie your leg between Bakugou’s and use his momentum to smash you both, skidding, into the dirt. You land above him like this on your knees and it’s silent again. Shinsou and Sero watch back to back in horror as little fires dance through the trees in a circle around you.

You shouldn’t have let the caravan stop at the river today, you curse– you curse Aizawa– and curse the prince for the fight he’s putting up now trying to get you dislodged from his torso. Though, you wonder how he hasn’t gotten free yet, why he hasn’t turned you into a firework.

Furious shouts go up around you, but the prince, the only thing you need worry about is pressed to the ground between your thighs and his ashen hair clings to his forehead in a cold sweat. A sick sweat. His glowing red eyes try to kill you, to set you on fire like his mother’s do and he must succeed– someone succeeds– because the campsite goes up in one searing blue pillar of flame.

“Welcome home!”

Through the fire a slender black boot emerges over the treeline.

“Kids, run!”

In a flash Bakugou has the same idea as you and for a second ahead of the flames he’s no longer struggling in your grip. Shouts and the smell of burning hair scream to life around you and before the air becomes too hot to breath the prince tugs you into his chest, you grab the edge of his cape, and kick the campfire irons hard enough to roll the pair of you up in the thick red fabric amid the fire.

If you survive this night you won’t ever be able to return home and look your master in the eyes, let alone the queen. You’ll be stripped of your titles, your apprenticeship, your place in the castle, and you’ll deserve it. You’ll wander and no one will mourn you.

“Highness, up!” You shout into the tiny space between your bodies in this fireproof cocoon you’ve made; it isn’t just for show that Alderans are known as dragon tamers.

Your foreheads press together and the sweat slick makes it hard to move well. He’s cold. The fire outside whistles without much by way of kindling to stick to and you know you have to run before another wave erupts, “Up, now!”

Kirishima balances his friends in his arms and on his shoulders, and what parts of them he can’t cover are shielded by a viscous screen. Mina shouts your name from where she dangles around his neck when you throw the prince’s cape open, but she’s not fast enough to warn you. A man runs dark and lithe through the clearing in a zigzag that would be difficult to follow even if you were paying attention to more than the limp prince caged between your arms.

He isn’t rising with you, “Your Highness! Prince Bakugou!”

He groans, flushed, against the ground without any more wounds than the slice he got across his palm when he caught the arrow meant for you. He growls when you rip open his vested furs.

He must have been struck– his head? Is it a burn? You’re frantic on your knees beside him while you look from his twisted face to the blue hell around you and back down again, and try to picture your escape without ever stopping fully to process. Horses are screaming. The prince’s hissing melts into groans and he slips his elbow against the ground to sit up while you’re trying to locate a weapon– figure out why your halberd isn’t in its sheath on your back– try to locate the nobles and Aizawa and the Champion and–

You whip back around when Bakugou’s golden hand tugs at a piece of your hair, alight in blue flames and smothers it in his fist. He bares his teeth, “get…away.”

“Me or her?” The ghost whispers coolly from behind.

You gasp as his rough cheek brushes yours, and he muffles your snarl when you turn to strike him, with one horribly leathery hand. A hand that grips the edges of your face hard enough you think you’ll pop before you’re able to claw his fingers from the divots they’ve made of you.

He’s crouching now and his other hand comes up to pry your jaw open so you can’t bite off the two fingers that have found their way into your mouth.

Hats off to dying. Of all the things to fear in the world, closed spaces, big crowds, exams, introductions, the flu– dying like this is fear unimaginable. The man rots visibly in sections across his body, his face. He wears clothes like they’re gauze and steams from his horrible stitches. He also lets you go. 

More accurately, you are thrown from his grip before he can roast you alive when Master Aizawa flies through the man’s head with his knee. You’re knocked away rough against the ground from the impact. It’s so horrible you want to cry laughing at the fact Mina thought you might be a flame mage, that someone like you could wield magic like this, just three days ago.

“Y/n!” Aizawa seeths when he lands and charges immediately for a second attack against the mage before he can fully rebalance. There’s no new fire for now. He shouts over his shoulder to you, “Due east, Y/n! Get Bakugou to Takoba!”

Master Aizawa must sleep as much as he does to recover from fighting, because the man moves like a panther. Hair in his bloody eyes, bandages wrapped around his fists, he fights faster, strikes violently harder, than your eyes are able to keep track of. Two blows to the mage’s throat, one caught in a fist and the other landing just below a collarbone. Back handspring to dodge a knife and a flourish to ensure he lands facing his opponent. A sprint that turns into a double boot kick sending both him and his opponent crashing through the clearing.

In the second he gets from the distance, Master Aizawa pulls a canister from his belt and throws it into the air. With a hiss and a whistle, it bursts open and a single blue light screams straight up miles into the sky, into the stars, and out of sight leaving nothing but the bright glow above you.

“Get a horse!” He shouts again to you, dazed at the edge of the clearing, “The flare is an or–!” The scarred mage is up, noticeably free of fire, and charging the master. You’re pulling yourself together.

“It’s an order to open the city gates!”

In the center of the clearing, Bakugou wants to roar. If he could it would be loud enough to splinter the earth but something locks his sparks and his anger away. Kaminari cries out a little ways behind him, Sero and Kirishima are shouting instructions to each other, and no one seems to see him.

The prince, with great effort, rolls over. First onto his face and then with a white knuckled fist in the dirt, onto his forearms. With a trembling effort he pulls his legs underneath him and finally he swells up to a kneel. Something has lit every dry surface, every leaf, hair, scrap, and cloth, on fire. Blue fire. He would feel the peeling burns on his bare shoulders and back if he wasn’t so fucking cold.

To his right, Sero releases great lengths of ribbon into the trees whose canopies are lost to flame, “The fire will spread! Slow it down!” Kirishima tugs the ribbons hard enough to break trunks and to uproot dead saplings.

To his left, Kaminari is slouched against Mina’s chest in a singed tunic and blood smears stain their clothes in errant patterns. Shinsou’s close-by, freeing the last of the horses.

The carriage is a white wicker lantern, gone, gone, silver trim, chandeliers and all, up in smoke. Bakugou staggers to his feet when Shinsou lifts Kaminari’s limp body from Mina’s arms, but he doesn’t have a drop of strength left in him, let alone a spark, let alone a step or an arm to use to carry his injured friend out of the fire to safety. But you can.

You can do it. You finish shaking your brain straight after the impact and rip your horrible riding cloak off of your horrible tunic before the fire that’s eating it eats you up too. Aizawa’s a little ways ahead of you throwing punches and blocking kicks and keeping the flame mage from showering your group with any more fireballs, but he still let this happen and so did you, and you’re trembling with anger.

They’re safe with me. You snatch one of the mage’s arrows out of the ground from where it missed you and charge.

You have to get the prince out of here, you have to return to the queen in one piece so you can see her just one more time and then you’ll surrender to death, you promise the stars right now they can take you as long as you can go back home just one more time, I swear!

Not that you’re much of a bargaining chip now. It’ll just have to do. It has to be enough because the prince is stumbling blindly through flames ahead of you. From this distance he bends like a broken mirror in the heat waves and patches of fire crawl up his furs, barely upright.

You launch into the fight without your halberd or anything even resembling armor and land like a koala onto the flame mage’s back with only that little arrowhead in your fist to anchor you there.

When he shouts, you dig its point as deep into his shoulder as you can manage before the shaft snaps in your fist and you grab a fistfull of his hair to replace it. Aizawa balks when you kick off the mage’s back and send his head down with a yank as you fall to the ground in front of them. The second your feet tap the dirt you’re off.

You wish you had seen the mage take Aizawa down with him. So you could piece together the master’s magic before the mage crushed his head in the dirt to keep his eyes covered.

Bakugou is not going to stay upright for much longer. Without a destination he crumples back down to his knees. He wants to lay down and fly all at once but he’s simply slipping away backwards into the dirt. Before he falls flat into the flames you throw your legs out underneath you from a sprint and slide behind him to catch his body in your lap.

He’s drenched in a sickly sweat that reeks of burnt sugar and sour. His golden chest heaves with effort under your fingers. You cup his cheeks in your dirty hands. He looks angry unconscious and still there is no feeling like finally holding him safe in your arms. He could hate you all he wanted, fire you, banish you, execute you– no matter. He could burn holes through your armor with his ruby eyes and sear your skin with his magic, he could shout if he wanted to. He was permitted to strike you, challenge you, but you were not going to let the queen’s son die.

Mina’s voice is a surprise when she pushes your head down from behind and leaps out in front of you, “Duck!” She lands on her knees and waves her other arm in an arch between your bodies without a second to spare in blocking the incoming pillar of fire. A thick greengray wall spreads across the air like she’s painting it with a brush and flames burst to life around you, diverted by her shield. She whips her head back, “Are you okay?!”

These flames are weaker than before, and don’t singe you from proximity alone. You attempt to reply, but you are grappled first.

A rough hand snatches your waist from behind at the same time as the fires die down and Aizawa’s growls echo from the other side of the wall. The hand is Kirishima’s and he’s pulling you to your feet in the same fluid movement he makes to toss Bakugou over his shoulder.

He’s running, pulling you and speaking to you all at once over the sound of the burning forest, instructions maybe, leading you to a lone white horse at the edge of the trees. His pull on your wrist doesn’t keep you from reaching back for Mina, but she’s already running in another direction, towards Shinsou with a limp Kaminari in his arms in an all-dirt part of the clearing that can't lap up fire.

“Don’t stop!” She cries when she sees you, and disappears with her injured friend and the guard into another section of the forest past the clearing. You must be truly exhausted, because your feet aren’t on the ground anymore and you aren’t putting up a fight. Kirishima hoists you onto the horse’s bare back with more shouted instructions. Bakugou is tossed on next.

Kirishima does not look gentle anymore. With firelight illuminating his back, his cheeks are cracked. His hands are tearing and savage.

“Y/n!” He grabs your cheeks in one of those rough hands from below and keeps Bakugou upright on the horse with his other. He points to the sky and thrusts your face upward, and following his sharp finger you can trace the path of a blue flare going up in the distance between thick canopies.

“Takoba answered Aizawa’s call! The gates are open!”

On your other side, Sero uses Bakugou’s singed cape to tie the two of you together and wraps a length of his white ribbons around your chests for good measure.

“What about you?!”

“Only one horse, just go!” 

You don’t have the time to argue. With the prince in such a state on your shoulder you barely wait for Kirishima’s response before you’re digging your heels into the frantic white horse and wrapping your fists into her mane while she bolts, quickly far, far away through the trees towards her home.

Castle on the sea doesn’t even begin to describe the scene ahead when your horse bursts out of the forest.

Your breath only comes in wheezes now. Your bones aren’t broken but you’re not processing enough thought to feel them if they were. The prince’s face between your hands in the clearing– that’s what you’re processing. You don’t know what’s wrong. You don’t know where his injury is. You wish you were the horse racing your prince to safety so that you could do more than just cling to him with all the strength in your body to keep him from falling into the sand.

You have to take hold of his hand when it reaches again limply past you towards nothing and you try as hard as you can to wrap it into the horse’s mane like touching anything other than you will remind him that he’s alive, and to please just hold on.

You remember the little blond boy, your same age, sneaking off to the library in the middle of the night by the light of a single candle. And you sneaking behind him to peek at his magic from behind the cracked library door. He used to hunch over a different book every night at the great wooden table, books so big he had to carry them with both hands, and blow the candle out once he read his fill. Like clockwork, the second your eyes grew became comfortable in the dark his little sparkles trickled into focus, springing up from his fingertips in pinks and purples.

Bruises that same color bloom atop his thigh now, the thigh nestled behind yours. If you had talked to that little boy maybe this wouldn’t be happening. Maybe he could have taught you magic before it was too late and he would trust you now to stand between him and danger. Bakugou groans against the back of your neck.

Takoba is not just a castle, it’s a city on the sea– on a hill– a mountain– a cliff. It’s a city your horse might not survive the climb to at the rate you’re driving it. Polished stone walls reach up over the buildings and homes inside effectively enough that the only thing you can see behind those protective walls is the white marble castle at the very top, craning up towards the stars in spires. There’s nothing at all behind the city– behind the castle– except for black water. 

You tug the prince's cape to keep him flush to your back against the waves of the horse’s gallop. It pulls his broad shoulders around yours and a mumbled curse drifts in his breath across your cheek. You’ve made a promise to every person you’ve spoken to in the past four days, and every single one has been to protect him.

There’s nothing but grass and sand between the edge of the forest and the beach, which means there’s nothing but distance between your horse and a Takoba hospital bed. A flash of red whips through the air in your periphery and if you looked back for a single second, you would watch smoke and the growing blue of fire in the forest not even a mile away. But you choose instead, to focus on the city gates coming into focus dead ahead.

Kirishima was right. In an arc at the center of the walls, the gates are open wide and lined with guards who are only dots in the distance now but become more and more detailed the closer your horse sprints to their post.

“Prince of Aldera!” You scream into the sea air to try and announce yourself before entering the city. The chain of guards in the gateway don't make a space for you to pass and so you call to them again. The prince’s full body shudders as you shout his title and when he tries to lift his head he only gets as far as your ear before his cheek is flat against your shoulder. You clutch a hand to his head to keep him close to you, “Aldera convoy! Clear the way!”

These guards don’t wear seafoam lace or shiny pearls. They don’t break formation and they raise their weapons straight ahead in warning. You think of Jeanist. You apologize to Jeanist.

“Y/n what would you say are the qualities of a diplomat?”

“Patient, sir.” Your voice was shaky because you were only seven years old when you had your first geography lesson.

“Anything else?”

This specific day you walked through the West Wing to pick peaches. So the sun shone warm over your cheeks and you were overconfident, sticky with juice. “Probably a little boring.”

Now you apologize to Jeanist again, for good measure. Because the closer you get to Takoba’s city gates, the more armed guards there are fortifying the line, shouting things that you can’t make out, and it’s obvious you are not cut out to be a diplomat.

“Aldera Royal Guard!” With one hand on the cape tying you together, you use the rest of your strength to lean deep and close to the thrusting neck of your horse and bring the prince forward with you. Through a mouth full of mane you bark, “Stand down!” and toy soldiers become fully grown not five-hundred feet uphill from you, two-hundred feet– fifty feet– and you apologize again to the queen, your companions, your master, this poor fucking horse– to the prince cradled in your hand you just say, stay.

With a final drive of your heels, the horse launches over the soldiers without slowing and clears the line with four echoing hooves crashed down on the cobblestone of the city square.

Only a few stray guards catch your last syllables, the white of a Takoba horse, and a glimpse of the prince’s blond hair shaggy against your back but it’s enough for a chorus of ‘don’t shoot!' to go up in their ranks. 

This horse is not going to stop until it reaches the edge of a cliff, so with one fist full of its mane and other full of the prince’s cape you drive through the sleepy square and up the main street to the castle sitting fat atop the hill.

Late-night straggling citizens drunkenly jump out of your war path into gutters and shopfaces. Horseshoes against cobblestone is a much better warning sound than you’d anticipated and you’d grin at your luck if Bakugou wasn’t very nearly flying to the ground from all your jerking ministrations. An arm wraps around your waist with a deep gasp in your ear as the prince clings to someone in a dream.

“Aldera Royalty! Stand clear!” Candles in the windows around you flicker on, “Clear the road!”

The royal castle is much more imposing up close, sprawling wide across the top of the city. A city, you realize now that you’re inside, so large you can’t actually see the walls farthest from you let alone the great black sea that extends forever in every direction behind it. All that matters is Takoba Royal Castle, dead ahead. Shelter for the prince and a new polearm for you to return to the forest to fight with.

Prince Bakugou’s forehead against your bare neck is so hot that the icy cold of his knuckles burns. He’s not muttering anymore, or gripping your tattered clothes as tight as he was just a second ago, so you call for a medic over and over before the castle gates come into view in the hopes that a doctor is waiting for you at the front doors.

You’re not even sure you could let go of him long enough for a doctor to take him now.

“Halt!”

You do not halt.

“Do not approach!”

You grind your thighs against warm white flank with every drop of strength in your body to prepare for the whiplash of this horse coming to a stop on the other side of the final obstacle between your prince and his hospital.

The castle gates are open like Aizawa’s flare instructed them to be and there’s nothing– sweet nothing– to destroy in order to get through. Your horse knows the way. She claps over cobblestones in a straight line to the entrance and bounds across the threshold of wrought iron.

The courtyard glistens white in the moonlight and the architecture on this side of the castle is delicate just like the blue fairy carriage. It is one great, smooth seashell with little windows for divots climbing all the way up to the spires. White balconies wind around outside to create footpaths in the free air and a grand rounded archway forms the frame for every door you can see. If you were closer you’d see too, the carvings on these archways and on every marble stone that builds the castle, depicting wars, births, deaths, and history.

But the second your horse slides to a jarring and terrible, screaming halt on the smooth marble driveway, a shock of arrows are released through the air over your heads and you remember again the might of a castle protecting its queen. You’re surprised by the numbness of your limbs when you try to raise your hands into the air. You feel as if you’re still moving in the sudden still. And shaking terribly. “My prince!” You can’t see where the arrows came from, or the bowmen and you don’t know where to direct your voice. Your horse trots and cries in place. The prince would be able to announce himself. His voice would carry like yours can’t.

“We have one hundred bowmen trained on your position, stranger. Dismount!”

You can’t, I can’t. You realize now just how much strength it took from your legs to keep your body and the prince's on horseback without a saddle. Your arms and hands too, tremble with fatigue. How do you tell them?

“Dismount!”

You have to explain yourself or keep Prince Bakugou safe from their archers. A girl in silver armor emerges from an illuminated archway to the right of the main doors and clicks her heels across the marble pavement. She is blunt, “Where did you get this horse?”

When she steps closer you can see her round cheeks clearly in the cold moonlight and the dark circles you must have caused her by throwing the city into high alert so late. You only need her to take Bakugou. You need a stretcher for the prince and a weapon to return to the forest with so your friends don’t fall to the flame mage alone.

“Aldera Guard,” you offer her, “please.”

When her eyes go wide with realization another soldier is already sprinting into the courtyard at full speed. He’s in a tunic, not armor and he shouts something as he approaches, but you can’t hear either of them very well now.

“Kacchan!”

The girl turns around and shouts something too, a sense of urgency lighting up her face when she registers the burns on your clothes. The prince tightens his hold around your stomach.

“Please,” you repeat and clutch his golden arm.

The next time you lean your head forward it’s because you’re slipping off of your horse, and when the armored guard races forward to catch you it only takes a touch because your body and prince’s begin to float just a little ways off the ground.

A surge of guards arrive on the scene upon hearing the calls for “medic!” and “fucking now!” and when the real flood of staff pours into the courtyard in all their soft nightclothes, it takes five of them to uncurl your fingers from the prince’s cape and it takes another three to unbunch the back of your blouse from his fist.

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