koi no yokan - when you meet someone and know that you will inevitably fall in love with them

bakugou never liked that phrase or the bad memories that came with it. but then he meets someone at the UA entrance exam and decides to give it a second chance.

[a kiribaku thread]

— bakugou centric
— mentions of verbal abuse
— yes im reposting this shhh
— qrt instead of replying please
— canon is like a stupid little rubix cube, and when i rearranged a few things it started making a lot more sense

At first, the phrase was more of an annoyance.

His sister would use it all the time, pointing out moments in movies or looks shared by strangers.

“It’s koi no yokan,” she would say. “They’re feeling it right now.”

Keomi was twelve when she learned what koi no yokan was, and she almost never shut up about for years afterward. Her best friend Akane’s quirk gave her the ability to see red strings of fate that connected people destined to fall in love or something, +

so she and Keomi would always talk about fate and star signs and whatever else they deemed interesting. Katsuki thought that kind of stuff was stupid, soulmates weren’t even 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭, but the two girls would still drag him into their conversations if he wasn’t careful enough.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes Katsuki would come home to his father cooking in the kitchen and his mother demanding someone bring a certain type of fabric upstairs to her +

while Keomi complained loudly about how the english version of koi no yokan, "love at first sight", was too plain and boring to even be compared to her favorite phrase, and a dumb shojo romance that absolutely no one was watching played on the TV.

Katsuki wasn’t as annoyed by his sister and her obsession with fated love on days like that.

But those days never seemed to last.

They would usually end in fights, ones between Keomi and his mother, who both had equally bad tempers and the will to never back down. Katsuki rarely saw the ends of those fights. He was always sent to his room before they got worse.

But when the house got quiet and everything seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, Katsuki would sneak into his sister’s room and she would whisper quietly about koi no yokan and soulmates until he dozed off.

And on the nights that neither of them could sleep, she would tell secrets. Usually, they were of her crushes, Akane was recurring as were some random boys from her school. Katsuki could never keep track of them all, and crushes were dumb anyway, so why did it matter?

“Trust me, Katsuki,” she had said one night. “One day it’ll matter. One day you’ll feel koi no yokan and your entire world will change.”

Katsuki adamantly disagreed, and he even avoided Keomi for a few days afterward out of spite.

It didn’t last, because the next time his mother’s screams echoed through the house he was right back in Keomi’s bed, listening to her ramble on as he drifted off to sleep.

Her voice filled the silence and his mind, white noise that calmed his nerves and made it easier.

The things she talked about were boring but comforting, and they made it easy to fall and stay asleep. It helped, and he never realized how much it did until it wasn’t there anymore.

Keomi left when Katsuki was eleven. There was no warning, no goodbye, nothing that hinted she was leaving. Katsuki hadn’t heard much of that night’s fight from upstairs in his bedroom, but as far as he could tell it was normal.

Nothing broke, no one raised their voice to the point that neighbors would hear. It wasn’t any different from the usual fights. It was normal.

But it must have been different to Keomi, because when Katsuki woke up the next morning she was gone.

The last few days of spring break were a blur. Katsuki’s parents kept him close for most of it, as if they were afraid Katsuki would run away too. They filed a missing person report and talked to the police, but the days dragged on and it became more and more apparent.

Keomi wasn’t coming home.

When the three of them realized that Keomi was gone, 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 gone, something in each of them broke.

Mitsuki snapped. She became harsher and relentless, nothing was good enough and everything had to live up to her expectations. With Keomi gone she focused her attention on Katsuki and his goal of becoming a hero, but her support felt more like opposition.

She critiqued and insulted him constantly, telling him he wasn’t studying or training enough, that he was too weak to even become a hero, much less number one. When her temper flared she lashed out at anyone close to her, and it never took much to get her angry.

Webbed cracks split through Masaru, sapping his strength and distancing himself from the people he loved. Katsuki’s father had always been only calm one in the family, diffusing arguments instead of engaging in them but still defending others if things got bad.

But then he lost Keomi, and part of him got lost too. He withdrew, spent more time working and cooking than anything else, and stopped standing up for himself altogether.

And when Keomi left, Katsuki shattered. He gracelessly, violently shattered into a million fucking pieces.

Katsuki had trusted Keomi, had confided and listened and 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘥 in her, and she didn’t even say goodbye.

It hurt.

It hurt more than he wanted it to.

Katsuki wanted to hate her. She left him alone with a ruthless mother and a cowardly father, he had every reason to be mad. But he just couldn’t.

She was still his sister, still the one who helped teach him how to cook and who would stay up with him when he couldn’t sleep. She was still the person that stood up for him when their mother crossed a line, still someone he admired and looked up to. Still his sister.

So instead of hating her, Katsuki blocked her out.

Keomi didn’t care about him, and he wouldn’t care about her either. It was equal. Fair.

He was going to become the number one hero and he didn’t need her help. He could deal with his mother, he could deal with the pressure, he was fine.

Katsuki had never needed his sister anyway, she was just another person who got in his way.

Still, some part of him wished Keomi would come back.

☾ ☾ ☾

Months passed, and pieces of Keomi began to disappear.

The sheet music she would scatter across the piano was organized or thrown away, his parents stopped cooking her favorite foods, and the books she would leave lying around were neatly tucked into shelves.

If it wasn’t for her room, Keomi would have been absent from the entire house.

As far as Katsuki knew, the room was just how it was before Keomi left, but his mother had locked it from the inside ages ago and she was the only one who had the key.

Before his mother locked it, Katsuki would sneak into his sister’s room and stay up for as long as he could, hoping that maybe Keomi would turn up at some late hour of the night. She never did, and after awhile Katsuki stopped trying.