Chapter 6: A Most Improper Confession
The corridor outside Bakugo’s quarters was antiseptic and silent, a stark tube of polished concrete and steel that seemed to drain the warmth from Ochako’s skin. She stood before his door, a solitary figure in the humming institutional dimness, clad in nothing but a foolish confection of black lace. The chill of the floor seeped into the soles of her feet, a grounding discomfort that did nothing to calm the riot within her breast.
Her phone, a sleek, dark rectangle, felt like a lodestone in her damp palm. The plan, formed in the clear, rational light of her own tidy apartment, now seemed the product of a deranged mind. She would record a confession. She would speak aloud every secret touch, every whispered profanity, every betrayal that stained her conscience. She would play it for Izuku. The truth would sever the knot, however bloody the cut. It was the only honourable course.
She raised a trembling hand and knocked, the sound absurdly meek against the reinforced metal.
The door swung inward with sudden, violent force. He filled the frame, backlit by the low, orange glow of a single desk lamp within. He was shirtless, a towel slung around his neck, his hair damp from a recent shower. The scent of cheap, sharp soap and his own particular heat—like ozone and crackling embers—washed over her. His crimson eyes did not widen in surprise. They travelled over her, from her anxious eyes to the lace straining over her bust, down to her bare legs, with a slow, appraising stillness that felt more invasive than any touch.
A long, silent moment stretched between them, punctuated only by the distant hum of the building’s generators. Her prepared speech, her noble intention, curdled on her tongue.
“Well?” he said, his voice a low rasp. “You just gonna stand there and freeze?”
He reached out, not for her hand, but to curl his fingers possessively around the swell of her hip, his thumb digging into the softness there. The contact was electric, a jolt that melted her bones. Her resolve, so carefully constructed, collapsed into dust. He pulled her inside, and the door hissed shut behind her, sealing her fate.
His quarters were a monument to militant utility, yet tonight they felt like a dragon’s den. The air was thick, stale with spent energy and the bitter ghost of protein powder. A cracked mirror on the far wall caught the moonlight from the narrow window, fracturing the room into sharp, silver pieces. Before she could speak, before she could even breathe, his mouth was on hers.
It was not a kiss of affection, but of consumption. Her back met the unforgiving surface of the door with a soft thud. His hands, calloused and demanding, slid down to grasp her backside through the flimsy lace, squeezing with a frank carnality that made her gasp into his mouth. She loved it. The shame of that love was a fire in her veins.
“I—I need to—” she managed between bruising kisses, her mind frantically clutching at the fragments of her plan.
He grunted, uninterested in her needs, and walked her backward toward the bed, his grip on her unrelenting. The backs of her knees hit the firm mattress, and she sat with a jolt. Her phone was still clutched in her hand, a desperate, forgotten totem. As he loomed over her, peeling the towel from his neck and discarding it, her fingers fumbled with a blind, panicked urgency. She tapped the record icon and, without looking, propped the device against the rumpled pillow beside her, the camera’s glass eye pointing toward the bed. A small, steady red light winked to life in the gloom.
A witness. Her intended judge.
He followed her down, the springs groaning in protest, his weight a familiar and devastating anchor. He did not ask about the phone. He likely did not care. His attention was on the lace, which he treated as an impediment to be destroyed, not removed. The sound of it tearing was obscenely loud in the quiet room.
“Bakugo,” she breathed, a plea and a surrender wrapped into one.
“Shut up,” he murmured against her throat, his breath scalding her skin. His hand smoothed over the curve of her stomach, then lower, his touch knowing and utterly devoid of tenderness. He prepared her with a ruthless efficiency that left her shaking, her own body arching in treacherous welcome. When he entered her, it was with a single, deep stroke that stole the air from her lungs.
She cried out, a sharp, broken sound. Not Izuku’s name. His.
The phone’s red light pulsed, a tiny, unwavering star in the chaotic dark. Every thought of confession, of honour, of Izuku’s trusting brown eyes, was blotted out by the sheer physical reality of the man moving over her. Each thrust was a punctuation mark demolishing her sentence of good intentions. Her hips rose to meet his, her legs wrapping around his waist to draw him deeper, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the hard, sweating planes of his back.
“Is this what you came for?” he growled, his pace intensifying, the bedframe striking the wall with a rhythmic, hollow thud. His hand slid beneath her, gripping the flesh of her rear, pulling her into each drive with a force that bordered on violence.
She could only nod, a frantic, wordless agreement. Speech was beyond her. Coherence was a memory. The world resolved to sensation: the burn of her lungs, the delicious strain of her muscles, the mounting, terrifying pressure in her core. Her moans were not phrases but raw data of pleasure, a stark audio record of her capitulation. She chanted his name, a ragged prayer to a deaf and merciless god.
Her climax, when it broke over her, was a silent scream made flesh, a convulsive wave that left her blind and shuddering. He followed soon after, a stifled curse hot against her ear, his body rigid as he spent himself within her.
Stillness, then. Heavy, panting silence, broken only by the drip of a tap from his small ensuite. The red light on the phone continued to glow, a silent, accusatory eye.
He rolled off her with a tired sigh, his arm flung over his face. The sweat on their skin grew cold. Ochako lay staring at the stained ceiling tile above his bed, feeling the slow, inevitable return of conscience. It seeped back in like icy water, filling the hollows his passion had carved out.
The recording. It was all there. Every gasp, every wanton plea, the unmistakable sound of the bed, the ruin of her own voice. It was not a confession. It was evidence. It was her own conviction.
After a few minutes, Bakugo sat up on the edge of the bed, his back to her. The moonlight cut across the hard lines of his shoulders. “You’re thinking too loud,” he said, his voice flat. He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, a habit he permitted himself only in private.
“I have to go,” she whispered, her own voice sounding alien, rough with misuse.
“Obviously.”
She moved slowly, her limbs leaden with spent passion and dread. She found her torn lace, a pathetic scrap now, and could not bear to put it on. She dressed silently in the practical clothes she had worn over it, her movements mechanical. All the while, the phone’s red light watched her. As she fastened her trousers, she finally reached for it, her thumb hovering over the button to stop the recording.
She did not press it.
Instead, she slipped the still-recording device into her pocket, where it felt like a live coal against her thigh. The truth was in her possession now, but it was not the sanitised, repentant narrative she had imagined. It was something feral, honest, and damning.
She left without another word, passing through his door back into the cold, rational hallway. The walk back to her own room was a passage through a ghostly landscape. She imagined Izuku asleep in his bed, his face peaceful in the certainty of her goodness. The weight of the phone in her pocket was immense.
Once inside her own ordered space, she finally withdrew it. The screen glowed in the dark, displaying a running time of over twenty minutes. She pressed stop. The file saved automatically.
The file saved automatically.
It sat in her library of mundane notes and sunlit selfies, a tumor of sound. For three days, the phone was a lodestone in her pocket, its gravitational pull warping every cheerful word she offered Izuku over lunch, every planning session, every debrief. Her laughter during training exercises began to sound brittle and strange to her own ears, a porcelain veneer over rotting wood.
On the fourth evening, certainty hardened within her. She could not confess to Izuku blind. She needed to hear the instrument of her own destruction first, to measure the depth of the chasm she had created. The desire was morbid and essential. Her quarters were dark, the only light the sterile blue glow of the phone screen as she navigated to the file. She plugged in a single earbud, the silicone tip feeling like an insertion of guilt directly into her skull.
Her thumb hovered, a tremor in the still air. Then she pressed play.
Silence filled the earbud, a hollow, waiting silence punctuated by the rustle of fabric and a soft, damp sound she recognized, with a lurch of her stomach, as their first kiss against the door. Her own breath, sharp and nervous, hissed on the recording. Then his voice, a low, distorted rumble. “Well? You just gonna stand there and freeze?”
Hearing it was an out-of-body experience. The Ochako on the recording was a stranger, one whose breath hitched with unmistakable anticipation, not protest. The sound of his hand gripping her hip was audible, a faint slide of skin on lace. A soft, surrendering gasp escaped the past-Ochako, a sound that made the present-Ochako press her own fist against her mouth.
The tearing of the lace was a shockwave of static. Her own voice, pleading “Bakugo,” then his command to “Shut up,” were not the dialogue of lovers but of predator and willing prey. The intimate, wet sounds that followed were obscenely clinical through the tiny speaker. She heard the grunt of his effort, the rhythmic, pounding creak of the bedframe, a chorus to her own escalating ruin.
Then her own voice, unfiltered and raw, filled her ear. Moans that were pure, animal want. A broken, sobbing chant of “Katsuki, Katsuki, please,” that held no thought of Izuku, only desperate, clawing need. The climax she recalled as a silent internal shattering was, in fact, a sharp, ragged cry, followed by his guttural, satisfied curse.
The recording ended with heavy breathing, then the mundane sound of him moving, the rustle of sheets. A final, damning minute of silence where only their exhausted respiration remained, a duet of aftermath. The file clicked off.
She sat paralyzed, the earbud screeching with dead air. The clinical details of the room—the humming mini-fridge, the faint traffic from the street below—rushed back in, but they were now layers over a different, truer reality. The recording was not a confession. It was a vivisection of her own character, revealing the frantic, shameful creature beneath the hero’s costume. She had thought herself trapped in a web of conflicting affections, but the audio proved a simpler, uglier truth: she was a creature of avid hunger.
A firm, familiar knock rattled her door. “Ochako? You in there?” Izuku’s voice, muffled but clear, was kindness itself. “You missed the team dinner. I brought you some curry.”
The phone, now a hot brick of evidence, fell from her numb fingers onto the bedspread. The earbud was still in her ear, a cold, dead worm.
The earbud was still in her ear, a cold, dead worm. She ripped it out as if it were a parasite, the cord snaking against her neck. Izuku’s second knock, more concerned, compelled her body to move while her mind remained trapped in the audio’s lurid tableau.
“Just a second!” she called, her voice miraculously steady.
She snatched the phone from the bed, the file still open on its screen, and thrust it deep into her desk drawer beneath a manual on rescue protocols. She smoothed her hair, pinched her cheeks to force some colour into them, and opened the door. Izuku stood there, holding a paper takeout container, his green eyes soft with friendly concern. The kind aroma of curry wafted between them, a smell of normalcy that made her stomach turn.
“You okay? You look pale,” he said, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation, his presence usually a comfort that now felt like an intrusion.
“Just a headache. Lost track of time,” she murmured, accepting the container she knew she could not eat.
He nodded, believing her instantly, because he always believed her. This fundamental trust, so freely given, was the anvil upon which her heart was being crushed. He sat on the edge of her neatly made bed, chatting about the dinner’s inconsequential gossip—Kaminari’s latest blunder, a new training regimen from Aizawa. His words buzzed around her like harmless insects. She watched his lips move, his freckled face animated with a simple, earnest warmth, and saw the ghost of the recording’s audio superimpose itself: the sound of her own voice, begging for Bakugo.
The dissonance was a physical nausea. The honourable confession she had planned was ashes. But the evidence, that brutal, unedited document, remained. It was the only form of truth left to her, even if it was a weapon that would maim them both.
“Izuku,” she interrupted, her voice cutting through his story about the curry recipe.
He fell silent, his head tilting in that attentive, birdlike way he had. The room felt airless. She walked to the desk, her movements slow and dreamlike, and opened the drawer. The phone was a dark slab in her hand. She did not look at him as she spoke, her eyes fixed on its black screen.
“I have to show you something. From the other night.” She took a ragged breath. “I thought I could explain, but… I can’t. You just have to see.”
Confusion knit his brows, but his expression remained open, patient. “Ochako? What is it?”
She did not answer. She merely crossed the room, sat beside him on the bed—a careful inch of mattress between them—and pulled up the video file. The thumbnail was a dark, indecipherable blur. She set the phone in his hands, her fingers brushing his, and the ordinary contact felt like a betrayal.
“Play it,” she whispered.
He gave her one last puzzled glance, then tapped the screen. The video player opened, filling the small display with the grainy, monochromatic gloom of Bakugo’s room. The camera angle, propped on the pillow, was cruelly perfect. It framed the tangled sheets, the shifting shadows, and the two figures as Bakugo pulled her into frame, his back a muscular canvas of moving tension.
Izuku’s breath hitched. He said nothing. He simply watched, his grip on the phone tightening until his knuckles bleached white.
The silent, visual roll of her shame began. There was no audio yet from the tiny speaker, but the language of bodies was eloquent enough. The desperate clutch of her hands on his back. The way her head fell back, not in struggle but in offering. Then the sound crackled to life, low but unmistakable: a torn gasp, the wet shock of a kiss, the rustle of fabric giving way.
Izuku did not move. He did not speak. He watched, as if studying a hostile combatants’ tape, his body rigid beside her. Ochako forced her own eyes to the screen, her punishment to observe him observing her ruin. She saw the moment his analytical focus shattered. It was a subtle thing: a slight parting of his lips, a slow, unconscious swallow.
Her gaze, drawn by a horrified magnetism, dipped lower. The evidence of his body’s brutal, ungovernable honesty was plain against the fabric of his trousers. She stared, a cold void opening inside her chest. This was not the reaction of a betrayed heart; it was the raw, primal response of a man confronted with a naked spectacle of the woman he desired in the throes of a passion he did not inspire.
He did not stop the video. The soft, rhythmic sounds of the bed continued, her own stifled cries tinny from the speaker. His breath had grown shallow. The most painful thing for her was the fact that she didn't get aroused at all. Watching her own degradation, witnessing his involuntary excitement, she felt only a vast, freezing emptiness. There was no heat, no answering pull, just the clinical horror of the experiment and its result.
A strange, detached calm settled over her. She reached out, her hand moving as if belonged to someone else, and touched the strained fabric of his trousers. He flinched, a full-body spasm, but his eyes remained locked on the phone’s screen, where the ghost of her past-self arched and pleaded. She undid his button and zip with efficient fingers, dipped her hand inside, and found him hot and hard.
He made a choked sound, part protest, part agony. He did not push her away. His hips gave a minute, helpless jerk into her cool, deliberate touch. She began to move her hand, a mechanical friction utterly divorced from tenderness or desire. On the screen, the recorded Ochako was reaching her peak, her cries crescendoing. In the present, Izuku’s head fell back, a strangled groan escaping him as his own climax was wrung from him in swift, pulsing waves, his body tensing then collapsing.
The video played on to its silent, post-coital aftermath. He slowly, clumsily, reached out and stopped it. The room was then filled with a silence more profound than any that had come before, thick with the scent of spent salt and currying spices gone cold.
He looked at her, his eyes wide with a shattered comprehension, glistening with unshed tears of confusion and shame. She withdrew her hand, wiping it clean on the bedspread beside her with a motion of profound finality. She felt nothing. She was a cavern of ice.
“Why?” he finally managed, the word cracked and raw.
She had no answer that could ever bridge the distance between the warmth in his eyes moments ago and the desolation in them now, or fill the void where her own heart had been. The momentum of their ruined understanding propelled them forward into a future she could no longer foresee.