Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Hurry the fuck up, will you?” says Katsuki.

Mina rolls her eyes underneath painted green eyelids, and with the pads of her fingers presses yet more sparkly shit onto them. The colour glints emerald light when she swivels around from the mirror to glare right at him.

(Katsuki didn’t think green and pink went together at all and made sure to tell her that, but when Mina had picked it out and started pressing it on she’d lectured him about complementary colours and vibrancy and don’t your parents teach you this.)

“We literally have so much time,” she says. “Just calm down, okay?”

“I’m calm,” he grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest.

The tension in his back makes it bunch up as tight as the fists his hands have unwittingly curled into. His stupid form-fitting suit is way too tight at the elbows, and it only serves to rile him up more. Next to him, Kirishima gives him a disgustingly sympathetic look, complete with a thin pursed line for a mouth, and offers some sad, pitying pats to the shoulder of his too-tight blazer that spectacularly fail to make him feel better at all.

Kaminari presses a tiny chute of what looks like fizzy champagne into his hand. He takes it, but only because the man is fucking insistent on drinking before things like this and he really does not want the contents spilling with an enthusiastic shove right onto the crisp white of his dress shirt.

“Drink this,” Kaminari says, hitting him with a grin. His voice is dangerously slurred considering they haven’t actually left yet, and it’s live fucking television. “For the nerves, y’know.”

Katsuki glares, feels his face twist with it.

“What fucking nerves? There are no nerves. I don’t get nervous.”

Sero snorts from where he’s draped himself across the huge King-size bed of Mina’s hotel room, laying atop all of her discarded sparkly, floofy dress options that altogether probably cost more than Katsuki’s entire yearly salary.

“The nerves that are making you all aggy, obviously,” he says.

“’Aggy’? What the fuck is that? What are you, fourteen?”

Sero sits up halfway and points a finger at him. “Listen. I’m bringing in young fans. They love me. And you,” he pauses, “…need all the popularity pointers you can get, my friend.”

Katsuki growls and tries not to explode the dinky champagne in his fist.

“Don’t talk to me about popularity, you brainless, irrelevant fucking -”

“He’s kinda right, man,” says Kirishima. Katsuki directs his betrayed glare in his direction. At least Kirishima has the good sense to look sheepish in the face of it.

“Well,” he scrambles to explain. “It’s obvious you’re going into this thing with a job to do.”

“Oh, course,” agrees Mina from the mirror. Katsuki swivels to direct his glare in her direction instead. “Damage control and all that,” she continues, unfazed.

“Hah?!”

“Exactly!” says Kaminari. Downs another chute in one, gives them a goofy grin. “Recovery. Or whatever.”

“Job security,” adds Mina with a mocking huff of a laugh.

“Fuck off,” spits Katsuki. He tips the alcohol down the column of his throat in one smooth movement, then wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand.

He very purposely ignores the nervous churning in his stomach. The way his breath hitches as he catches sight of Mina’s eye-makeup - that particular dark green hue, sparkling prettily and winking straight at him.

6 Months Earlier

“Answer me, hair for brains! What the fuck does this mean!”

“Hang on – what?”

“This fucking, shitty contract!”

“You - are you telling me you’ve only just read the terms? Of your probation contract?”

Katsuki drags his stupid wheeled suitcase behind him with one arm. His other holds the stupid crumpled up letter to his narrowed eyes, his head titled to his shoulder where it props his phone up next to his ear.

“Just answer the question!”

He hears some shuffling and rustling, and then a long sigh.

“What is it exactly that you’re asking?

“I came on this shitty vacation. I let them put me on probation, which I don’t fucking need, by the way. Now they’re telling me I can’t even – can’t even what? Tell anyone it's me?”

“Where does it say that?”

“It says, to get off probation I need to ‘prevent the recognition of my status’, whatever the fuck that means.”

“Ohh.” 

The long vowel sound is drawn out.

“What the fuck is that, hah?”

“Calm down, bro. Jesus,” Katsuki hears him crunching on something. His blood boils. “It just means they don’t wanna start a stampede of fans in public because people have recognised you wherever you’re going.”

“What’s so bad about that?” he growls.

The chewing stops. “Uh, have you been hit on the head? A little temporary amnesia? Have you forgotten who you’ve been recently?”

Katsuki gives a hmph. “I don’t know what the fuck you mean.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” Kirishima mutters. “You remember the last time you got flooded by hundreds of fans? The reporters, journalists? Paparazzi?”

“No,” he grumbles.

“Well, I do. What did the papers say again? Oh, I think I remember. Pro-Hero Profession Questioned as Approval Drops After Dynamight’s Public Meltdown. They ran that story for weeks.”

“Fucking - how many times?” Katsuki rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. “If they hadn’t - I wouldn’t -”

“You scared the shit out of everyone! The protesters didn’t leave the agency for weeks.”

“Yeah, they wouldn’t back off and leave me the fuck alone, either!”

“So, why’re you complaining about everyone leaving you alone for two months?”

Katsuki lets out a growl. “Because what does that actually mean!”

“I don’t know, do I!” Kirishima huffs into the speaker. “Isn’t it a bit late to ask? I thought you were on your way there, now?”

“I am,” he says. “I’ve landed. Duh. There’s a cab waiting for me somewhere.”

“Look – don’t stress. You’ll get more wrinkles, and Mitsuki will crucify me,” Kirishima says. “It’ll all be okay, bro! Just do whatever they tell you to. And try to come back more stable than when you left, alright?” He snickers. “Remember to kick back, relax and enjoy your holid-”

His voice cuts off abruptly as Katsuki hangs up.

“Fucking idiot,” he says under his breath.

He glares down at the letter in his hand with renewed anger, and it crunches under the grip of tightening fingers that threaten to explode it into nothing. The inked, black characters bend as his eyes glare hotly onto them - ensuring the prevention of your Pro-Hero status’ recognition in public settings.

He lets out a harsh growl and buries the paper deep into the pocket of his shorts with a careless shove.

“Mr. Bakugou!”

He looks up, drawn to the sound. Someone is running straight towards him – someone who looks almost ridiculously short, with bright red, long hair that flaps back and forth in the wind with every hurried step. Their arm waves wildly through the air, presumably to get his attention.

“Hello-o! Mr Bakugou!” she yells again.

He stares down at her once she catches up to him. With coughs, splutters, and heavy breaths in and out she bends at the waist and tries not to pass out.

“Uh,” he says smartly.

“It is you, right?” she says, in between pants.

Abruptly she shoots to her full height, and peers up at him with narrowed eyes. He starts backward at the direct, a bit too close-up eye contact, face twisting.

“Yes,” he says.

“Okay, cool!” her face smooths out, breaks out into a grin. “Nice to meet you!”

She sticks out a tiny hand, her fingers stretched out. He takes it, frowning down at her, and for a few seconds he takes part in a handshake he regrets as soon as it starts.

“Who are you?”

She pulls her hand away and grins up at him again. Her eyes sparkle with it.

“I will be accompanying you to your destination today!” she exclaims. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, sir! I’m Marta, the representative supplied to you, sir, assisting you on behalf of E.G Cruises, that is, Eternal Gold Cruises, at your service to you, sir!”

“Oh. Right. Cool,” he nods. “So, where’s the cab?”

“Of course!” She turns with a flourish, brandishing her arm in the direction of a huge black car, that looms where it’s parked, safely in the direction that her signpost of an arm encourages them to walk. “Just this way, Mr Bakugou! If you’d please like to follow me!”

Bakugou’s developed some very quick reflexes with all his years in hero work by this point, but when she shoots off, speeding away in the blink of an eye, he still manages to lag in his reaction, huffing, grumbling and sweating under the Mediterranean sun with every hurried step towards the car. His stupid wheeled suitcase containing his stupid belongings is finding it hilarious to try and flip itself over as he walks, launching itself this way and that as it leaps over the tropical coloured tiles under its wheels – and so by the time he’s managed to actually catch up with Marta, his very own personal representative supplied to him, sir, courtesy of E.G Cruises (that is, Eternal Gold Cruises, at his service!), he’s already quite pissed off. Which is funny, because it’s the exact thing he’d been forced to come here to avoid, and he hasn’t even left the fucking airport yet. It’s with this pissed-off anger that he catches up to Marta, who’s smiling at him sweetly where she stands with her hands neatly held behind her back.

“I’ll take care of that for you!” she says as soon as he’s close enough, leaping forward and yanking the suitcase out of his grip with both hands. His hands fly away from her touch as if stung, but she pays no mind, simply hulking the fucking thing into her hold with a confidence and fervour to please that does not match the twig-like appearance of her arms. Her eyes predictably almost bug out of her head with the weight and Katsuki almost jerks forward to just take it himself, but she shakes her head wildly, even though Katsuki uneasily spots tiny droplets of sweat forming on her forehead with each struggling step towards the boot of the car.

“No, sir, I’ve got it!” she forces out around a grimace.

Then, fuck knows how she doesn’t do it without dropping it and cracking the tiles on the ground, but she balances the case with one arm and stretches the other out to bang against the glass of the blacked out rear window with three heavy, desperate thunks of her fist.

“Oi!” she yells, mouth forming a perfect ‘O’. When she receives nothing but silence and the sound of Katsuki awkwardly clearing his throat as he nervously eyes her curious, rapidly purpling complexion, the poor rear window receives another round of beatings.

“Thaddeus!” she screeches. “Open this boot, or I swear I’ll -” she stops abruptly, her neck whipping back around to face Katsuki as if she’d misplaced the memory of his presence entirely. She gives him a wide-eyed smile that looks quite frenzied, before swerving back around to open the ‘O’ of her mouth again and yet out further screeching yells to the hidden ‘Thaddeus’.

What kind of stupid ass name is that, anyway, Katsuki’s thoughts grumble. Then the sound of a car door slamming interrupts them, forcing them to grind to an abrupt halt as Katsuki’s squinting eyes automatically flick towards the sight of a ridiculously, abnormally huge man. He’s making his way towards them with steps that are so heavy, he wouldn’t be surprised if the tiles cracked and shook under his shined shoes. (And Katsuki is pretty large himself, he’d say – otherwise what the fuck has he been paying his PT for?)

Katsuki eyes him warily as the huge man, Thaddeus, spares him nothing but a frown – at least as far as Katsuki knows, anyway, for he could be glaring hellfire at him for all he knows, behind the massive black sunglasses tucked atop his face.

Thankfully, he moves on from Katsuki quickly, taking the case from a shaking Marta with one hand and using the other to pull a tiny car key from his pocket that, with the press of one abnormally oversized thumb, sends the boot sweeping open. Then his case is easily shoved inside, and moments later Katsuki finds himself shoved inside too. That is, not into the boot of the car – although part of him wishes they had, so he’d get stuck in there, catch heatstroke and die – but in one of the car’s four back seats which face each other in pairs. Thaddeus somehow fits in the driver’s seat, and then they’re peeling away from the curb, Katsuki rocking wildly and cursing under his breath with the wild and sudden movement.

“Oops!” giggles Marta, looking all too used to the wild driving where she sits in front of him.

Katsuki grits his teeth inside his mouth, resists the urge to snap at her.

“Oh, Mr Bakugou, sir!” she exclaims.

As the car swerves around a corner, she leans down all the way in her seat down into the space between them, and for one godforsaken moment Katsuki is about to explode her head right off her shoulders because what the fuck are you doing down there, but she’s soon sitting firmly upright again, thank fuck. However, this relief evaporates only a mere second later as she holds up precisely the very last thing he had wanted to see. The stupid letter, clutched between her fingers, her eyes peering down at the scrunched-up text.

“Probationary contract -”

“Give me that!” he spits, flying to yank it out of her grip. She lets it go easily and holds up both hands in surrender.

“Oh, so sorry, sir!” she says. He gives her only a growl as the letter is shoved back inside the pocket of his shorts.

“Forgive me,” she continues. “But – well, now that the subject’s been brought up, sir – that is, I had been meaning to -”

“Is he ready yet?”

Thaddeus finally thinks to speak, his voice low, a growl from the front seat. A faint sense of unease begins to settle, making his red glare flare and his lip curl in a silent snarl.

“Ready for what?”

Marta sends a glare of her own towards Thaddeus, slinging arrows at the back of his unbothered head.

“Thank you, so much, Thaddeus. It – well...” she turns to face him. The feeling of unease only grows.

But before she can continue Katsuki almost jumps right out of his skin at the sudden crack of sound, a change in the very air around them, of a man materialising into existence on the seat opposite him. Thank fuck for the quick reflexes he’s developed with all his years in hero work, for without them he’d have instantly reacted instinctively by letting out an explosion that would’ve totalled the stupid six-seater, and undoubtedly also those sat within it.

A group which now, apparently, included the man now staring him down, looking over across the car at him with an expression of thinly veiled distrust.

“Careful there,” the man speaks. “Wouldn’t want to set you off, now would we?”

Katsuki instantly dislikes him. He settles him with a fiery glare. The grating voice sets his teeth on edge.

“Who are you?”

“I’m rather surprised you’re unaware, Bakugou Katsuki. Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight.”

The man reaches up to adjust the perfectly knotted velvet tie sitting over the aged column of his throat. Katsuki leans forward in his seat, feeling his hands curl into fists.

“What the fuck do you mean by that? And answer my question - who are you?”

“I am the sender of that letter in your hand.”

Katsuki frowns. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yes,” says the man. “I am a representative of Pro Hero National Standards Body of Japan. I am heading your case. Please, don’t over-exert yourself - I can assure you I am here on an entirely official capacity.”

Katsuki crosses his arms over his chest and leans back on the seat again.

“Well, get your official capacity the fuck over with.”

The man gives him a blank, unimpressed look. “As you insist, Mr. Bakugou. Now - I must ask you a few easy questions. You must answer them as truthfully and accurately as is possible.”

“Sure. Whatever,” he spits out.

“I will begin, then. Bakugou Katsuki, do you understand fully the exact terms of your probationary contract?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“Do you understand fully your conditions for reappointment, both general to the Pro-Hero National Standards Body of Japan, and specific to your case?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“You understand specific criteria one, that is, the completion of your 2-month suspension period without violation of criteria two and three, as well as our general criteria for reappointment.”

“Yes.”

“You understand specific criteria two, that is, you understand the commitment you are making to ensuring the prevention of your Pro-Hero status and occupation coming into public knowledge during your 2-month suspension period and… the implications of this commitment?”

“Uh, that -”

It slips out before he can catch it and shove it back in, and makes the man quirk a judgmental, thick, grey eyebrow at him.

“Uh. Yes.”

He continues in a firmer voice. “Do you understand the implications of this commitment, as outlined on page two of your received probationary contract?”

“Uh, yes. Yeah.”

“Excellent. Do you also understand specific criteria three, that is -”

“Wait a second, you said –”

“ – your commitment to the management of your flagrant displays of unnecessary, wilful public antagonism -”

“Page t-”

“ – that you understand are under a process of correction due to their causing civil disturbance, on repeated occasion, and their causing an overall negative impact on perceptions of the Pro-Hero profession, as a whole?”

Katsuki stares, and the man stares back with dark beady eyes. His hands are gripping onto the hot leather seat of the car, and he wants nothing more than to raise a palm into this freak’s face and blow the stupid beady rat eyes out of his cracked old skull. But he’s pretty sure that counts as a flagrant display of wilful antagonism, so he does not – but it’s a very close thing.

“Yes,” he spits. “I understand, alright?”

“Excellent,” the man repeats. Then official looking paper is held up, right into his face.

“Then you may sign.”

Katsuki looks down at it, and up again. Snarls and snatches the paper out from under his nose, and the expensive-looking shiny pen that’s also held up in his face a second later. His eyes flick over and through the papers lazily.

God, there’s so many pages. So many long words. Some kanji he doesn’t even recognise. Is this even needed? He spares a moment to think of the trees that died only to have specific criteria 1, 2 and 3 of his ‘case’ outlined in ridiculously dull detail on their poor remains. Skips right to the end and signs his name in messy, scrawled kanji right over the thick line at the bottom of the page.

“Very good,” the man’s thin lips snake upward to stretch into a smile that’s more like a sneer. A dismissive ‘tch’ falls out of Katsuki’s own mouth as he slaps the pen on top of the pile of pages and hands it back over with a swift flick of his wrist.

“Are we done here?”

The man’s eyebrows raise. His hand stills in the air, suspended between them where it had been reaching to take the paper. Even Marta, sat to the man’s right, looks taken aback, blinking at him.

“What?” he says.

“Why, of course not,” scoffs the man.

“Hah?”

“Marta, here,” he waves a hand in her direction. She gives a little grin and a wave. “Still needs to fabricate your glamour.”

“My - what?"

The man sighs impatiently. “The illusion, Mr Bakugou, under the terms of your signed contract. You understand.”

Katsuki feels his mouth hang open.

“You do understand, don’t you, Mr Bakugou?”

Katsuki feels his mouth snap shut.

Glamour. Illusion.

The man’s smarmy voice rings in his head, dully. What was it he’d said? 

The implications of this commitment.

“Oh,” he says, smartly.

Understanding dawning and clicking into place: they want to put me under a glamour. 

His eyes flick towards Marta. Is that her quirk, then? Sort of like Camie? To keep his status and occupation a secret, to prevent the possibility of any excessive public disturbance, they want to just fuck off his appearance completely and fool everybody around him into thinking he’s somebody else for a week? To keep them away from him? They don’t trust him enough to not blow some shit up when he inevitably gets swarmed with people? To get him to relax, and chill the fuck out once and for all, or some shit.

He tongues his cheek and considers his options - sat in a foreign country in the back of a car full of strangers, the ink of his signature on the bottom line of that contract barely even dried.

“S’it gonna hurt?”

Marta leaps to reassure him. “No! Of course not, sir, no!”

“I’m gonna be, what, some random person?”

“This person is selected, with their consent, to be as innocuous as possible, sir, as identical to you in terms of age, gender and race as to be congruent with you. I can assure you whoever you meet will think nothing amiss or untoward, even noteworthy. You will slip right under the radar, so to speak. Creating the perfect environment for your emotional rehabilitation, sir!”

He sniffs. “Great. That’s great, yeah. Thanks.”

“So, am I right in assuming you give your permission for me to begin the process, sir? I can assure you the process is quick and painless!”

“Alright, alright. Just get on with it.”

He crosses his arm over his chest, and sighs heavily. A glamour. Whatever, he thinks. S’ not like I’m gonna be meeting anyone important, anyway.

It transpires that the process is in fact not quick and painless, but rather, long and painful. Long – in that it lasts the remaining 34 minutes Katsuki spends glaring at everything there is to glare at (a lot) in the stupid swerving six-seater, with the faint blue sparkling line of the ocean getting less faint and more clear through the blacked-out window with every gruelling minute that passes. Painful – in that it involves being stared at for 34 straight minutes and resisting the urge to scratch his own skin off with the feeling of thousands of tiny unkillable ants crawling their evil way over every inch of him. He’d liked Marta. Or, well, he hadn’t felt any active hostility towards her, at least - but by the time she’d finished the ‘process’, and he’d stumbled out of the car feeling groggy and heavy and rather like he’d not slept for thirty years, he very much did not like her and hoped never to lay eyes on her again.

Which was just as well, because after taking a few long, deep breaths of the crisp sea breeze that ruffles through his hair annoyingly, he feels rather than hears the gravel under his feet shake with the thunderous thunk of his suitcase being dumped carelessly onto it. Car doors slam shut behind him, and Katsuki can only watch as the car speeds off almost insultingly quickly, leaving an acrid cloud of polluted dust in its wake that makes him gag.

He glares at it as it retreats and takes a massive deep breath – inhale, exhale. Repeats it again and again, just as his therapist taught him, before he got rid of her for trying. He shuts his eyes and breathes.

Then he reopens them and looks down at himself.

He opens up his hands, his palms held up, pointed toward the sky.

They’re different. Much smaller, paler. More stubby, rounded. Higher body fat percentage, much less muscle, a voice in his mind whispers as he turns them over and studies them. Even the lines and creases of his hands look different.

At least, he’s pretty sure they do. Do they?

When was the last time he inspected his hands this closely? He thinks back, and remembers Mina pointing them out and trying to read them, years and years ago, now.

“Come on Bakugou, we’ll do you!” he’d heard.

“I don’t -” he’d growled out.

“Sit down!” “Sit!” “Give us your hand!”

A pink finger tickling as it held his pale palm to black eyes, as the pad of it ran down the thin lines, mapping each one out with the glossy women’s magazine held in her other hand.

“Long fingers. Water hand. That’s so ironic! Where’s your heart line? …Oh, it’s tiny. It’s so thin. And you’ve got this little line coming off it at the end, right under your ring finger. Can you see it? How it splits up, into two, there at the end?”

“Hah? What’s that mean?”

“Hang on, let me read it!”

Katsuki wasn’t even interested. Didn’t even care. Palmistry is bullshit, anyway. Why had he even let her?

“Oh, ‘tumultuous love life’. ‘Lonely’. ‘Self-centered’. Aw, that’s so sad. Is that you?”

Mina had snickered. “Aww. Are you all lonely, Bakugou?”

He’d heard laughter then. It was a joke, and nothing but a joke, and yet it made Katsuki rip his palm out of her hand, stand abruptly. She’d gaped up at him from her spot sat on the green UA grounds. Had blinked in surprise, confusion.

He thought he saw faint, shiny pity appear in her eyes, but he didn’t stop to make sure because he’d already shoved his hands deep in his pockets and turned and stridden away, feeling the stupid, meaningless lines of his palms bend with the tight fists they’d curled into.

Now, the lines are different. So is everything else: the thick hair on his arms is darker, stands out more than his usual light colour. He’s got scars he never felt getting, marked deep onto his skin, fragile thin pink ones and some older, deeper, darker ones too, that almost make him want to wince. He feels about the same height, but stockier. Less top heavy.

Someone passing him in hideous tropical print gives him an odd look. Katsuki glares at them and they quickly look away, but then he realises he can hardly blame them, for if he’d come across somebody staring at their own hands in the middle of a busy street full of tourists, he’d probably think them a bit odd, too. So, he swallows, grits his teeth, and reaches behind him for the long handle of his case. Gets to dragging the stupid thing. It’s easy to follow the huge swathes of tourists that all seem to be heading in the same direction, and it’s even easier to spot the immense hulking vision of the bright white ship as it sits in the water ahead of him.

Katsuki can’t help but feel disgusted by it, glowering up at it with a squint beneath his more-small, more-hairy, new hand, held up to shield his new-face from the sun.

This stupid ship is very much his last resort. His last resort as in his last resort, in the sad, figurative sense, but also his literal very last resort as a holiday destination, sat sadly at the very bottom of the list, on The List of Places Katsuki Bakugou Will Be Exiled To if he Doesn’t Stop Being So F*cking Horrible - a list devised one bored lunch hour between patrols by a smirking, chortling group of idiots he called his friends, that had only been taking it half-seriously.

He wishes his management had only taken it half-seriously. Turns out the idea was taken to heart, after a higher-up had discovered the list discarded on his desk, and the even-higher-higher-ups had taken it to their hearts too, and then also to his emails, every day for weeks, which went firmly ignored. Because there was no fucking way you’d be getting him out of Musutafu, no fucking thank you, especially not sat stranded on a shitty E.G Cruises ship to, what, play fucking mini golf all day, drink little luminous, aposematic froufrou cocktails with way too much sugar and not enough alcohol, one after the other, slowly gaining pound after pound with each high-calorie, high-fat meal, and wrinkle after wrinkle, melanoma after melanoma sat burning to a crisp in the middle of the sea?

No. No matter what his mother, his ex-therapist, and The List of Places Katsuki Bakugou Will Be Exiled To if he Doesn’t Stop Being So F*cking Horrible said – he does not need a break, he does not need ‘emotional rehabilitation’, and he’s very happy and satisfied with his life just the way it is.

As he drags himself along the docks, feeling the stone under his feet change to a creaky wood, he curses everything that had led him here. He curses his stupid friends that cared so much that it only annoyed him. He curses all the fans who’d swarmed him every time he went outside, drove him to lashes of explosive anger. Curses all the nights spent exhausted and yet sleepless, night after night until his shitty, hateful, careless attitude sank deeper than the purple rings coloured into his eye sockets, marring his formerly perfect skin.

Curses all the missions. High-stakes, low reward, year after year, over and over. It went like this: wake up, if you were lucky enough to have slept the night before, drag yourself to work, almost get crushed to bits saving some ungrateful fuck who looked at you like you were the villain, go home to blankly watch your own blood pool bright red at your aching feet in the shower, throw yourself back into bed upon finishing, with the feeling of being dirty sticking to your skin, to then stare at the ceiling before it started all over again.

He curses the ranking tables, the score-keeping, the pointless, repetitive award ceremonies, the charity galas, the sponsorships, the celebrity, News at 6!, Heroes Daily, press appearances he had to make, the endless line of Pro-Hero Correspondents and their bullshit, saccharine scripts – he curses everything he’d ever wanted. He curses the Pro-Hero National Standards Body of Japan. He especially fucking curses The List of Places Katsuki Bakugou Will Be Exiled To if He Doesn’t Stop Being So F*cking Horrible. That shit can fuck off.

He approaches the specialised boarding area, rushing thoughts echoing with every step. He’s fast coming to the realisation that this stupid cruise has a specific… target audience. The first thing that had begun leading him to this conclusion was seeing the type of person the masses of bodies around him are: very much many years ahead of him, very much elderly. The second thing is the sight of the huge blue banners in the air, waving and flapping in the harsh wind high above his head, trying their very hardest to get him excited and make him feel so very lucky, with ‘Eternal Gold Cruises Voted #1 Senior Cruise Line – Taking You To Every Whimsical Wonder of the World!’  emblazoned across them. The word ‘senior’, being the operative word, here, with a concerning number of walking sticks, reading glasses and tartan printed travelling bags, he spies through his sunglasses with a shudder.

Ten fucking days here, he thinks to himself, gritting his teeth, stuck behind two seniors that shuffle infuriatingly slowly forward. He darts around them and strides towards the open check-in area, the only one with the little flag of Japan stuck on the banner. Ten days. With these… people. On this fucking –

“Welcome!” says the woman behind the desk with a wide, toothy grin.

Christ. Blinding. Like a walking Colgate advert.

“…to Eternal Gold Cruises, we’re so happy to have you here today, sir, am I right in thinking you’re here to check in?”

“Yeah, hi,” he grumbles, scowling.

Her wide grin falters. But to her credit, she recovers. “Ah - may I take your identification, boarding pass?”

Katsuki has a brief moment after he fishes it out of his pocket and hands it over where he expects the woman to blink in confusion, brows furrowing low – hey, your ID looks nothing like you, where did you get Dynamight’s ID, I should call the police ! – but she doesn’t. When she simply looks between it and himself, smiles and then requests his check-in form, he’s the one blinking in confusion. But he wordlessly finds and then shoves what she needs towards her.

Next, she tilts an ancient webcam up at him to get a photo of him for security. He scowls. Then she slides across a small card, in a tiny paper holder, and a little colourful square of a folded-up map of the ship which he just knows is going to be a bitch to fold up again later.

“This is your GoldPass, sir, as you are likely aware cash is not accepted aboard -”

“Yep,” he interrupts, snatching them both off the table and shoving them deep in his pocket.

“Your GoldPass acts as your cruise ID for security purposes, your charge card for any transactions, as well as your room key.”

“Okay. Good. Thanks,” he presses on. He feels edgy and impatient, ready to crash into his room.

She smiles at him again. “Then that’s you all set, Mr. Aoki! You’ll find your itinerary, some more maps of the places we’ll be stopping and other goodies in your room. Have a very lovely, very golden time! Thank you for travelling with Eternal Gold Cruises, the world’s number one senior -”

“Thanks,” he says, flicking his sunglasses back down again and moving off without letting her finish.

Goodies. Christ.

And then he freezes – Aoki?

Quickly he fumbles to rife through his pocket, down where he’d hastily, carelessly embedded what she’d given him into it – and upon yanking out and staring down at the little ID card he feels his mouth gawk open like some kind of hideous fucking fish or some shit. But he can’t help it – because who the fuck is that?

The stranger in the image - Katsuki Aoki, apparently, if the little typed out letters in Latin script is enough to go by - is glaring up at him.

Birth date, 20-04-34. 181cm. Blood Type A.

All the same shit.

Quirk: Glycerin-based perspiration.

No nitric acid?

Katsuki puts two and two together. They want him to lie about his quirk, as well? His gaze briefly flicks onto the skin of his new-hand.

Erase the nitric acid, and it’s just a sweet oil. Pretty fucking useless quirk, huh? Tch.

Considering the card, he’s struck against his will seeing his distinct expression, foreign as an exact replica on someone else’s face. Shit, his face, for now.

The stranger looks pissed off, his thick, black eyebrows furrowed deeply over his dark eyes. His nose is even curled up with disgust, nostrils wide, jaw flexed, his lips slightly upturned and crooked with it. His hair is dark, too, a brown so deep it’s almost black where it falls in bangs over his hot glare. Straight and parted to the side.

He shoves the stupid fucking thing back into the recesses of his pocket. In his haste to move the fuck on he almost barges headlong into a little old man about three feet tall, and has to let out desperate garbled apologies over his shoulder as he flies towards the bag area. Dumps his bag onto the rolling conveyer belt with a thud.

He gets through security pretty easily, until they ask about his quirk, which goes like this:

“Quirk?” says Guard 1.

“Uh,” he says.

“Says here he’s got some sweat quirk. Gly- gly-” struggles Guard 2.

“Glycerin,” he growls.

“What’s that?” from Guard 1.

“It’s… a clear oil. It sweats out of my hands.”

They’d looked at each other. Hurry the fuck up, fucking gormless, ugly –

“Right.”

They’d given him no more attention after that – apparently, he did not have to disclose that he was lying out of his new-teeth and that he could also make the ‘Glycerin-based perspiration’ blow up. That would probably be a fucking security threat, he muses with mirth, although it’d probably give them something to do other than stand there and grunt, as seems to be their principal duty. So, he gets through fairly quickly, which is a refreshing change.

After yanking his bag back from them, he groans inwardly as it becomes clear that the path to gangway is full of people trying to get him to buy useless shit. Stands shoving advertisements in his face. Relentlessly offering clothing with the cruise line’s logo plastered all over it for upward of €30 - which Katsuki plows straight past. Lines and lines, rows and rows of souvenirs after souvenirs: more ugly logo merch, cheap magnets, keyrings, fucking mugs, even a whole commemorative photography booth.

He scoffs under his breath seeing some idiot pose with a stupid fucking novelty hat shaped like a sun and huge yellow sunglasses, joyfully holding up two enthusiastic peace signs. Stood grinning dopily under a huge banner making it clear how very happy they were to be ‘Setting Sail!!’. The picture goes off with a harsh, semi-blinding flash as he passes, making him squint and flinch back, drawing his eye.

Katsuki’s quick glance turns into a long gape as the idiot removes their stupid sun hat and the fucking neon glasses, handing them both back to the photographer with a bright grin.

A bright grin he hasn’t seen for years, and yet recognises instantly, because it used to follow him everywhere. For years. Used to piss him off.

It still does, now. His thoughts instantly race – has Deku followed him here?

How the fuck has he done that? Of course, he probably found some way, even after this long. Fucking stalker. Even after all this time. He hasn’t had a reason to think about Deku for years and years, since before he’d even started at UA and Deku had fucked the entrance exam (being quirkless, what the fuck did he expect to happen?), and even that was years and years back.

But here he is now, here he dares to be, stood in front of him in fucking Italy with a stupid sun-shaped hat and idiotic neon sunglasses and that fucking goofy grin stuck on his face.

His face – just as carefree and joyful as he remembers it being (before it would close off with a squeak when Deku would lay eyes on him, of course), just as freckled, his hair just as curly and thick and unkempt (still don’t know what a hairbrush is, hah?), his hair just as viridian as his huge round eyes, and as violently green as it is in the memories that flood right back at the sight of him.

Ugh. He exhales a heavy breath as his blood boils. His mouth shoots open to say something. He wants to yell - what the fuck, Deku?

But – possibly for the first time, ever - Deku’s eyes move past him like he’s not even there. And then he remembers that technically, he isn’t.

He stares uselessly as Deku grabs the glossy printed photo off the photographer and grins down at it. Then he pays with cash fished out from his pocket, fumbling with the change and counting out each individual coin, even the tiny brown ones (Christ. Tough times, huh?). He thanks the photographer in shitty Italian, with a chirp of “Grazy!” - Oh, my god, Katsuki thinks – and stares happily down at the picture, holding it tight in one hand as he starts to walk off, dragging the handle of a tattered, rolling suitcase in the other.

He trots along, still grinning at the fucking picture (Jesus, it can’t be that exciting, can it?) and then is forced to an abrupt halt as he almost barges right into a still-gaping, gormless Katsuki.

He immediately looks up, notices a body directly ahead of him. His grin slips off his face and is replaced by a sheepish smile and the hint of a flush on his freckles.

“Oh, sorry!” he says. “Ah. I mean -”

Katsuki gapes, slack-jawed as Deku lets go of his suitcase to root around in a huge pocket of his cargo shorts. Then, Jesus, he fishes out a tiny Italian dictionary, just brimming with neon post-it notes out of yellowed, dog-eared pages. He flicks it open. Wildly scans a page with his eyes flicking back and forth, muttering under his breath.

“Va bene… no… che, quando, perche… no… ah!” Izuku bows a little, then straightens, as if he remembers it means pretty much fuck all in Europe.

“Mi dispiace!” he chirps.

Then Deku actually, properly looks at him. Katsuki, despite himself, almost expects to see a flicker of recognition in his eyes. As if, somehow, he might know. But it’s not there. Of course it isn’t. Deku just blinks, looking progressively nervous as Katsuki only stares down at him.

He coughs. “Uh.”

Shit. Don’t give it away.

“I’m Japanese. You – I don’t know what you just said.”

Izuku breaks out into a relieved smile.

“Oh!” he shoves the phrasebook back deep into his cargo shorts again. “Oh, good, me too! I just said I’m sorry. Because I almost bumped into you. Or, at least I hope I did! Say sorry, I mean. I didn’t mean I hoped I was going to bump into you!”

Katsuki blinks in disbelief. “I didn’t think you were saying that.”

You still talk way too fucking much.

Izuku looks relieved, again. “Oh! Good!”

For a second, they stare at each other. Katsuki has no idea what to say. He’s struck, by some feeling or another. This Deku acts exactly the same as the Deku now reappearing in his memory. Same muttering, same joyful optimism he always had, same hopeless, flustered, fucking – ugh.

Izuku huffs a laugh. “I’m glad one person here understands me, at least!”

Katsuki stares.

“Well… see you, then!” Deku smiles.

Then he’s gone, dodging around Katsuki and pulling his old suitcase along the rickety deck with him. He doesn’t seem to notice as it tries to flip itself over on each creaky old board. Smiles at all the gross old people. Even greets them as he passes, in enthusiastic, broken Italian, English, French. Gets that fucking photo out of his pocket and stares down at it again with happy glimmering eyes, before putting it back and grinning up at the blue, cloudless sky as he gets smaller and smaller with every step further away, until he ducks and disappears behind yet another hideous tropical print shirt.

He formulates a plan of action, very quickly - he’ll just have to avoid the shit out of him. This is the conclusion he comes to, sat at the bar and glugging tropical fruity drinks down one after the other. A very smart, very intelligent plan of action indeed. It’ll be easy, right? How many people are there on this fucking boat? God, hundreds, if not up into the thousands. It’s like a small fucking country. It should be fucking easy.

Saying that, though, what are the chances he’d fucking run into Deku, fucking Izuku Midoriya, now, in this exact country, on this exact cruise line, on the same ship, leaving at the exact same time? Very little. Infinitesimal, really. Who’s to say he’s not just run out of luck, and he’s doomed to run into Deku over and over again, on this ship, or at home, everywhere and anywhere, for forever?

Fuck. He bets that’s what it is. He can only consider it a cruel act of God.

He calls out for the bartender and motions for another drink. Actually, what even is this in his hand? Ugh, who cares. It goes down like – he shudders, ack – it goes down awfully, like acrid bile, but again, who cares.

His thoughts race. He thinks hard. (As hard as he can in his rapidly intoxicated state, anyway.)

The last time he’d seen Deku, he’d been passed out after getting his ass kicked in the entrance exam. He can remember it if he tries. If he clenches his eyes shut and rests his head against the cool glass in his hand.

Breathing hard, shuddering deep exhalations, sucking in as much oxygen as he can.

Sparks shoot out of his palms. Heat on his skin.

The robot creature-freak is collapsing apart, heaving chunks of metal splitting before his eyes, ripped and torn as if they’re as soft as butter. Like they’re nothing. They are nothing – he grins – nothing up against him.

Then he hears a hacking splutter and a groan from behind him.

Breathing hard with heaving shoulders, he turns his head towards the sound. He intends to only give a mere glance (he’s got robot creature-freaks to pulverise!), but he’s caught at the sight of Deku, of course, battered and bruised and dragging himself across the concrete, inch by desperate inch.

He’s muttering something, and it’s so quiet underneath the loud crashing, screaming ambience of the exam that he can hardly hear the words.

He stares down blankly as Deku crawls on despite his body falling apart. They’re only a few minutes into the exam. God, he’s so weak.

But what did he expect? He should have known. It was obvious to everyone – except Deku, obviously.

“I-” Katsuki picks up from him, in a weak voice, gritted out around the pain.

“I-I can do it…!”

Katsuki almost wants to laugh, if it didn’t make his lip curl in a snarl.

Ugh. Relentless, endless fucking optimism. 

He jolts, eyes flying open and back to reality as the bartender thunks another drink onto the countertop in front of him. He hastily picks it up. The bartender eyes him oddly.

“Thank you,” he says in shitty, heavily accented English, hoping he’ll just fuck off. He tips the harsh, sweet liquid down his throat in one move.

Ugh. Fucking hell. That’s it – no more.

He pays with a tap of his stupid GoldPass and trudges all the way back to his room. The ship’s like a hotel on the inside, with rows and rows of identical corridors. If hotels resembled mazes, that is. It gradually becomes less densely populated as he makes the way through past the communal, recreational bit and towards the residential part where the accommodation is. As he trips over his own stupid drunken feet, he prays to God he won’t run into Izuku fucking Midoriya again. What shit luck.

Another wave of the magical GoldPass grants him entry to his room, where he comes very close to falling on his face by stumbling over his discarded suitcase. He growls and kicks the thing across the carpet, where it slides smoothly and lands with a sad thunk near the bed. He glares at it for a moment, cursing whoever put it there, and then makes a low, irritated grunt of understanding, before stumbling over to the neatly made bed and fucking up all the artfully arranged bedcovers and pillows by collapsing bodily on top of them. He lands on his front, and promptly falls asleep.

When his eyes crack open again, the room is dark.

He lifts himself up with a groan and forces himself to move to switch on a tiny ornate lamp fixed onto the wall. It sends light draping itself across the room, across the bare, empty suite and his sad suitcase left, discarded, unopened and beaten with his foot on the floor.

Peering out the window offers nothing but black. The TV, when flicked on, kindly tells him its nearly 10pm. The bag of goodies(!) on the bedside table also very kindly informs him that if he can make it back through the labyrinth of hallways in time, he can catch the tail end of dinner, and won’t have to truly admit how sad he is by sitting alone in his empty room and ordering a hundred desserts through room service.

He intends for it to be merely cursory when he quickly uses the bathroom and then checks himself in the mirror, but it doesn’t end up being that. He’s ensnared by the sight of a stranger staring back at him.

His head turns back and forth, up and down, left and right.

He’s less handsome now, although his jaw is squarer. His skin is a lot worse. When he leans in close, the mirror cruelly reveals that he’s got sun damage all over the bridge of his nose. Wrinkles carved into the space around his eyes. When he grins, his teeth are more crooked, but overall, fine, although grinning causes yet more fine lines to reveal themselves around his eyes and his mouth. He’s got facial hair too, just a bit. Dark but sparse, across his top lip and his chin. Ugh. He’ll be getting rid of that, as soon as. Overall, he gives it a rating of: not bad, not great. Normal flaws. Normal face. Almost painfully average. What was it that girl had said? 

As innocuous as possible, sir… you will slip right under the radar, so to speak. She got that right.

He ducks out of the suite feeling groggy and disoriented. Gets lost only twice, which he considers a victory, particularly as by the time he makes it down to the canteen place to eat there’s still plenty of time left.

He says ‘canteen’ very loosely, in fact he’d be better off not saying it at all – it’s more of a whole banquet hall, and Katsuki’s said the word ‘banquet’ probably about twice in his life, so you know it’s seriously luxurious shit he’s looking (glaring) at. Up at the two-tiered chandelier suspended serenely above them all, letting out its beauty in shards of crystal light that languidly drape themselves over everything else in the room. It glitters and sparkles right into his eyes as he stares up at it and it makes him twitch. It reflects sparks of light onto each of the banquet tables, onto the stage at the centre of the room where a suited, bespectacled man softly plays a gentle melody, offering an equally opulent soundtrack. Behind him his eyes catch on a large floor-to-ceiling window, showing off a view of the deep black of night-time, hidden within it the thrashing current of the sea.

Is this all really needed? It’s a bit of a fucking waste, all this splendour, and all on these fucking pensioners.

He spies a hub of activity in the centre of the room surrounding the musician and therefore naturally slips right past where he can sit far away from them all. In the labyrinth of corridors, he had had cosy, comforting fantasies of a table for one, tucked in the corner, preferably in the dimmer end of the room. Of a waiter that did not speak and go on about shit he didn’t care about for ages, like today’s special soups or wines or whatever the fuck, and instead only nodded, providing the absolute bare minimum of cursory, routine interaction. But he realises with irritation that the smallest table only seats four, and so he yanks out a seat of the most isolated table (not isolated enough, with too many neighbours, if he’s honest), with a glare down at it. It’s sequestered right in the corner of the room. If he’s lucky, no one will even notice him – except the waiters of course, who he had to notify of his arrival by showing his GoldPass at the door.

Already, he’s itching to get back to his room. Maybe this was a stupid fucking idea. Of course, room service would be better. Privacy, very limited interaction, approximately 0% risk of any green haired nerds appearing to bother him again.

Fuck.

His head cracks up.

His eyes skirt around the room, like a spooked animal. Is he in here?

Why didn’t he fucking check? He should have checked at the door and then turned the fuck back around. Accepted the mission was a failure.

Shit, there’s so many fucking people. Waiters breeze past with platters, sommeliers slip past with expensive drinks. Why is there so many? They’re all blurring together. He glares, lip curling, eyes blazing as they roam and scan over each table, furiously searching for any hint of fucking veridian.

“Sir?”

He startles. Even lets out a tense growl. The poor waitress looks terrified.

She probably wants him to speak in English, he thinks with an inward groan. He wracks his brain as she stares at him, likely thinking of backing away before the silent, glaring, twitching man sitting by himself in the dark corner and letting out frenzied growls in her direction can blow her up. Shit, she doesn’t even know he can blow her up and she’s still looking at him like that. If she did, she’d probably drop that velvet-lined menu in her hand and flee, crash through that huge window to dive into the sea and escape him.

She says something else, but it goes straight over his head. He can’t recognise any words at all. Where the fuck is Present Mic when you need him?

“Sir?” she repeats. That, he does understand. She even puts on a glaringly fake smile, her lips stretching thin with impatience.

“Hello. Sorry,” he says.

Her expression clears – obviously she realises he must just be struggling with speaking English, and not about to blow her up. (Which he is, to be fair to her. Struggling with foreign languages, not about to commit murder, that is. Although he’s closer than he cares to admit at this point. Just joking. Maybe.)

She nods and smiles again, this time less like she’s about to dive into the sea just to be rid of him. She says something else, and then she’s gone, walked off.

Immediately, he returns to his frenzied search for green hair. But his staring means he instantly spies another waiter walking towards him. This time he’s quite clearly Japanese, thank God. He’s able to order, which he does quickly, pointing at the first words he sees – which turn out to be something called veal parmigiana, along with a Merlot, which the waiter suggests, and he agrees to with a careless nod and wave of his hand.

When it arrives a few minutes later he’s finally begun to relax. His shoulders are un-tensing themselves and the food is not great, but edible. Certainly better than the shitty entrees they serve at those fucking galas.

He almost shoots straight out of his seat and explodes the fucking veal parmigiana when it happens – a flash of green.

His heart seizes. Deku is trotting down the huge, winding stairs, carpeted with a deep red.

He’s grinning so wide, talking exuberantly with some random old couple, gesturing. Katsuki’s lip curls.

Why is he so fucking confident, now? The Deku he remembers was cowardly, meek and small. And now – he holds his own amongst a ship full of strangers (assuming he came here alone? Did he?), travels to foreign countries, continents, even. From the conversation they’d had, was outgoing, friendly, chatty.

Why? What had changed?

A small part of him grumbles - why would you even bother? What do you stand to gain from being so endlessly, annoyingly fucking enthusiastic? Friendly? He’s never understood. To make such an effort to please everyone else around him… he just never got it.

If Katsuki’s honest with himself, his social skills had never been worse. He spends most of his time by himself. Ignores countless texts and calls. Focuses firmly on the work – some aspects of which he’d even begun to hate. Okay, quite a few aspects. He remembers Deku’s enthusiastic nattering, gesturing, his bright smile – it all eludes him. He just can’t see the fucking point.

He jerks with a blink when Deku suddenly fucking materialises in front of him, stood right by his table with a grin. Jesus fucking Christ. He almost crushes the wine glass in his hand into splintered fragments.

“Hi!”

Katsuki gapes up at him, then feels his jaw clench as hard as rock.

“We spoke earlier, remember?”

As if he would fucking forget.

But Katsuki Aoki probably would, so he makes the very smart, executive decision to tilt his head, blink blankly as if confused.

Maybe if he thinks I forgot him, he’ll fuck off.

But Izuku only laughs. “You don’t remember? I almost walked into you. I thought you thought that I said I hoped to walk into you.”

Get me the fuck out of here.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, blandly. Sips at his wine glass. Hardly tastes the merlot. “I remember.”

Deku seems pleased. “Sorry if I’m bothering you while you’re eating! I noticed you’re on your own, and, well,” he looks a bit sheepish. “There aren’t many people here around our age, you know? That speak Japanese at all, too. Assuming you’re my age, that is!”

Katsuki nods blandly. “Oh. Yeah, no. I get it. It’s fine.”

Izuku smiles. “Cool! Ah, sorry, I can’t stay! I have an early morning group meditation thing booked, and I gotta get to sleep. It’ll probably take me hours to find my room again! But – I have to ask, what is that you’re eating?”

He blinks.

“What?”

“Your dinner - it’s making me hungry just looking at it! What’s it called? Maybe I’ll order it.”

Katsuki sips at the wine again. It must be staining his lips bright purple right now. He bites at them.

“Oh. Veal parmigiana.”

“Ah, I’m definitely going to forget that. You’ll have to remind me at some point!” At some point? What, in the future? At some point during future conversations? Fuck.

Deku lets out a little laugh. “I didn’t expect you to be eating something all fancy like that.”

Katsuki splutters on the wine and hits him with a blazing glare.

“Hah?!” he squawks, his voice lighting up with affronted anger. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”

Then Katsuki freezes. For fuck’s sake - he’s supposed to be making zero impression here, so he’ll stay the fuck away! Conspicuous, neutral, and that was very much not innocuous, not under the radar.

Izuku looks more pleased with his reaction than he has any right to – oddly, he’s grinning ear to ear, eyes sparkling where they’re scrunched up into happy half-moons. Overjoyed. Like Katsuki’s reaction just made his night.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” he trails off into light laughter. “I just mean you seem like more of a simple, straightforward guy, you know?”

“You don’t know me,” Katsuki is quick to spit, without thinking.  “What do you know, hah? Damn stalker.”

Izuku’s eyes are sparkling.

“Oh,” he says, and it comes out like a sigh.

Katsuki thinks he might explode the fucking wine glass.

“Sorry, I have to go. I’m sorry if I offended you, really – thanks for, uh. Telling me the name!”

Katsuki glares and sips at his wine again. Rolls his eyes as Deku grins at him one last time and gives a little bow. You’re in Europe, idiot.

“I’ll be seeing you around! I hope!” he chirps.

And then he’s gone, finally giving Katsuki’s heartbeat a chance to slow the fuck down.

Chapter Text

“A senior cruise line? Really?”

Kirishima is the only person he finds the time to speak to on a regular basis, outside of work. Therefore, he bears the brunt of Katsuki’s acidic, fiery grumbling, and seeing as this is his last phone call before the ship leaves port, and as it’s an international call it’s likely going to cost him about a thousand fucking Euros, he feels he’s within his right to be especially grumbly this morning.

“Yes. Really,” he growls. He takes a long sip of his martini.

“Well, why did they book you in for that?”

“I don’t fucking know, do I?” he spits, almost spilling the contents of his martini everywhere at the bar with a wild swing of his arm. A woman sitting across the deck blinks to attention at his volume, and then glares. He snarls with a curl of his lip and sips at it again.

“Well. It’s supposed to mellow you out, isn’t it? Think about it. No annoying fans. No screaming children. They always fuck you off, don’t they? No chance of being trampled by people surrounding you wanting your autograph. No one’ll be sneaking into your suite to grab at your shit. No pictures of you ending up trending on Twitter ‘cause you’ve got a zit or something. You’re a lot less likely to get bombarded by crazy fans if they can hardly remember who they are, let alone recognise you.”

“Yeah. Hilarious. Really. Except I can’t get recognised, because I don’t look like me. I’m not me, here,” he hisses into the phone. “I’m Katsuki Aoki. I’m nobody.”

“Isn’t that a good thing? You can switch off for a while. Only you would see that as a punishment. Fuck, I wish I could be sat in the Mediterranean - I’ve got a 6am start tomorrow. I gotta get all the way to Omaezaki by then. I gotta get the Shizutetsu Line, at like, fucking 4. Honestly, fuck you, man.”

Katsuki takes the refilled drink when the bartender thunks it down in front of him. He sips at it. It disappears very quickly.

“No. Fuck you,” he grumbles. “I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to be here. And I don’t need to be mellowed out,” He’s not slurring. He’s not. He hiccups. “I like Omaezaki. They’ve got… fucking good okonomiyaki.”

Kirishima is laughing. “I gotta go, man. But seriously, it’s too late to be complaining, anyway. You’re stuck there. And it sounds like you’ve got everything you need, everything you can drink, where you are. Try to mellow out, will you?”

Katsuki shakes his head, then remembers Kirishima can’t see him.

“S’never too late to be complaining. And, fuck off. No,” he mutters.

Kirishima makes him assure him he’ll call the next time he has signal, and then hangs up. Katsuki shoves more of his drink down his throat. The morning has brought with it a sun that’s so annoyingly bright it makes his eyes squint, and the heat of the air around him feels like an uncomfortable slap, a heavy weight that lands on the skin of his face and makes him shrink back against it. But he crawled out of the hole of his suite to this random deck because it was the first bar he could find, and he wanted a bar for a fucking reason, so he must endure it.

Eventually, he slinks over to a sunbed and collapses down onto it. The bartender keeps coming over and pointing at his empty glasses, and then taking them away to refill them. Katsuki wouldn’t know how to refuse in English or Italian even if he wanted to, so he just keeps letting it happen and glugging down one drink after the other when it gets handed to him. He’s definitely running up some huge bill but he couldn’t give less of a shit about it – his management’s paying, after all. In this spirit, he knocks back the rest of his glass.

It’s hot. The air is stifling. He only means to close his eyes briefly, just for a moment, but of course, he falls asleep.

He’s thrown, jerking back into consciousness - and the first thing he notices is that the ship is fucking moving. The second is the colour green.

“Urgh,” Katsuki lets out without thinking.

His eyes have flown open, and his neck has cracked around to stare, because fucking Deku is laid out on the sunbed right next to fucking his, looking very comfortable, way more than he has any right to, settling down next to a stranger, even if that stranger isn’t technically a stranger – Deku doesn’t fucking know that.

“You’re awake!” says Deku.

He has to squint to see past the sun but he can see Deku’s smiling.

Urgh.

“Uh,” Katsuki says.

Fuck, he feels sick. His head fucking hurts like shit. A hand flies up to clutch at his head uselessly.

“I hope it’s okay I settled down here. I hoped you wouldn’t mind! I don’t like to sit by myself, and I saw you chilling here asleep, and I recognised you, from yesterday,” Deku says, smiling brightly. “It’s not like anyone here’s gonna steal anything of yours, or anything, but it still felt kind of weird to just not keep an eye on you, you know? Especially ‘cause I saw a ton of empty glasses. Which – I’m not judging, not at all! I just thought – if it were me, I wouldn’t mind someone I knew keeping an eye out just in case, you know?”

Fucking hell. Katsuki smacks his teeth together.

“It’s… no, I get it,” he says, tense. He rubs a hand over his face. “What time is it?”

Deku seems eager to help him out. “Noon, I think!”

That explains the fucking sun blazing directly into his eyes, then. He sighs and holds up a hand to shield his eyes. He has to be polite, here. Unassuming.

“Listen,” he starts. “I appreciate you, uh, making sure I didn’t die in my sleep or whatever, but I’m actually trying to relax, so -”

Deku interrupts him. “I didn’t get your name, yesterday.”

Katsuki huffs out a breath through his nose.

“Katsuki,” He says, then adds, quick, “Aoki.”

“Katsuki,” Deku repeats after him. He blinks for a second.

Katsuki wonders if he’s going to say something – but then, why would he? Why would he bother saying anything? What would he even say? I knew someone with that name, once, when I was younger. He turned out to be a dick. Did you see him yelling at those reporters? Again? Pretty freaky, huh?

But Deku does not say anything out of the ordinary.

“Nice to meet you, properly! I’m Izuku Midoriya!”

Katsuki lays back in his chair and closes his eyes. “Yeah. As I say, I’m trying to relax.”

“Oh, cool! Me too. I’ll be quiet,” Deku grins. He flips the sunglasses on his head down, so they perch on his nose, and then settles back into the sunbed with a pleased sigh.

Katsuki cracks an eye open and darts a look at him.

Is he not leaving? Did he not get the hint?

He’s about to open his mouth to say something else, God knows what, but the bartender suddenly reappears out of nowhere. Katsuki wants to groan, because now there’s two people that won’t fuck off and leave him alone. The bartender makes a sweeping gesture with his hand and says something in English that makes Katsuki flounder, gaping up at him uselessly.

But Deku is sitting up in his seat, replying easily. The bartender looks relieved and smiles.

Deku says something else and the bartender laughs.

What the fuck?

He leaves then, and then comes back with two more drinks. He hands one to Deku with a smile and shoves the other at Katsuki. He takes it confusedly but gives a bow of thanks.

Deku makes a pleased little noise, tasting it. He holds it up, looking into it and swirling it around. The ice cubes clink against the glass.

“Nice!” he says.

Katsuki can’t help himself. He’s curious.

“You speak English?”

Deku looks over at him and smiles again. “Ah, no, not really!” he says. “Well, a bit. I can understand very basic things. Like, he said ‘drink’, and I know how to order one, and I just guessed. He seemed to get it.”

Deku is flushed.

“It’s really nothing. I was never any good at languages in school. It’s mainly just been this old phrasebook and watching American movies and things. My Italian is still awful.”

Katsuki thinks back to the tiny phrasebook, covered in highlighter pen and scribbled post-it notes.

“Oh.”

Deku grins and sips at his drink, humming happily. “So, let me know if you want another one, I guess!”

“Oh. Thanks,” Katsuki says.

Shit. He can’t really just tell him to fuck off now, can he? He’s done Katsuki a favour. He’s fucking gone and inadvertently made himself indebted to him.

He has no choice - he’ll just have to ride this out. Sit here for another half an hour or so, and then leave. Get rid of him. Continue with the old, reliable ‘avoid like plague’ plan. Actually, he thinks, this could be a good thing. Maybe, if he acts as painfully boring and rude as possible, Deku, if he has any self-respect, will understand him to be the most awful, uninterested man on the planet and go settle down next to someone else. Waste his time ordering them drinks in broken albeit understandable English and fucking watch over them while they’re passed out drunk before noon. This could work. Right?

Wrong. Deku is the most personable human being on the planet. Nothing works. Given the chance, Deku talks a whole fucking lot, about everything. How he’s liking the cruise so far (very much, very excited, very happy to be there). What activities he’s been up to (dinner last night, meditation that morning, unpacking and organising how his room looks). His plans for the rest of it (so extremely detailed that Katsuki didn’t have time to even try and fail to reply at this point).

Katsuki is proud of the newfound skill of giving one word replies to him. He then moves on to grunts, and then tiny, flat ‘mm’s and ‘ah’s, and then onto simple nods and the barest shakes of the head. Then he actually shuts his eyes and pretends to be asleep. But Deku still does not leave.

At one point, he hears soft, rushed muttering from beside him and cracks an eye open only to see Deku with his head buried in a great hardback book about Mirko. He forcefully clenches them shut again and point-blank refuses to tune in to the nerd’s hero-based ramblings under his breath, because that 1) would be enabling that behaviour and 2), would not be avoiding Deku, or his job – the two things he's actually trying to avoid the most.

Eventually, Katsuki genuinely does fall asleep again, and is only jerked awake when Deku gently pokes at his shoulder from beside him.

“Hey,” Deku says. His voice is gentle and careful, and it irritates him immediately.

“What,” he replies tonelessly. He intends for it to come out angry and demanding but he fails miserably – it’s more of a sleepy rasp, like a child being awoken upon reaching their destination, tucked in at the back of the car. Urgh.

“Sorry to wake you up. I just got something for you,” he says. Then Katsuki is awake. He jerks up and gawks at the fucking plate of food being offered out to him.

“You don’t have to eat it,” Deku smiles down at him. The sun gives him a white silhouette of bright light. It makes Katsuki’s eye twitch. “It’s just not good to sit in the sun all day without eating anything! I’ll eat anything you don’t, so don’t worry or feel pressured or anything. I got a whole bunch of stuff.”

“Oh,” Katsuki says again. He sits up properly and takes it. There’s a few tiny sandwiches with a mix of different fillings, some fruit, some meat, cheeses. A few tiny cake things. Looking down at it, Katsuki then realises he hasn’t eaten anything at all today. As if on cue, his stomach makes an ungodly rumbling sound.

Deku snorts. “Looks like I made the right call,” he says.

Katsuki forgets he’s someone else and glares at him. “Shut the fuck up, nerd.”

Then he balks, eyes widening hugely and his stomach dropping with a sick lurch. Not part of the plan.

But Deku looks delighted. He looks up in surprise and gives a sudden bark of laughter, his eyes sparkling.

“’Nerd’?” Deku questions, snickering.

“Uh,” Katsuki swallows and picks up a tiny sandwich, shoving it in his mouth and chewing to give himself time to think. Shit. “It’s – sorry. I tend to do that. Uh, insult people as a joke.”

Deku tilts his head. “Why’re you apologising? I don’t get the vibe you’re the type of guy to apologise all that often.”

“I’m not,” Katsuki says, once he’s finished chewing. “But then, you also got the vibe I’m not fancy enough to eat veal parmigiana. So what the fuck do you know.”

Deku crosses his legs on his sunbed and leans towards him as he speaks, eyes scrunched up happily again. “Oh, come on. You don’t.”

“I literally fucking did, yesterday. In front of you.”

“Yeah, for the first time in your life, probably.”

“I’ll say it again - what the fuck do you know?” Katsuki glares. He pokes around his plate and picks up the best-looking green grape between two fingers.

“I know you probably just chose it at random, because you don’t know enough English,” Deku grins, then leans over into the space between them, pinching the fruit right out of his hand and shoving it into his mouth. Katsuki’s eyebrows raise high up into his forehead. He scowls.

“You don’t know shit. I could make veal parmigiana every goddamn night, and have memorised it in every language, for all you know. You don’t know me.”

“I don’t know, I think that’s unlikely. You looked unhappy eating it from what I saw,” Deku giggles. “And maybe I do. Maybe we met in a past life or something. I feel like I’ve met you before.”

“Nope. I loved every single mouthful,” he lies.

I feel like I’ve met you before. Katsuki’s eyebrow twitches.

“And, no. Past lives are bullshit.”

“Okay, then, whereabouts do you live? In Japan.”

Katsuki stares at him and chews on a bit of prosciutto. He’s trying not to panic. The ‘nerd’ was clearly too far, too much. “What, you want my fucking address?” he deflects. “I knew you were a fucking stalker. Following me around on this fucking ship, now you want my address.”

Deku is laughing and stealing more off his plate. His hair is lit up green in the sun.

“No,” he says, snickering around a laugh.

“Talkin’ about fucking past lives and watching over me while I sleep. You’re here because you’re insane, aren’t you? You’ve just escaped prison and fled onto this fucking boat.”

“No!”

“Yeah, and you’re gonna cook me into veal parmigiana and serve me to the guests or some shit.”

“Oh, God,” Deku is hiding his laughter behind his hand. “Katsuki parmigiana.”

“I fuckin’ knew it.”

“But seriously,” Deku looks deeply at him. “Where are you from?”

Katsuki swallows his mouthful of a tiny block of cheese and licks his lips slowly, nervously. Can he just lie? He’s never lived outside of Musutafu. If Deku asks him any specific questions about any random city he names, it’s gonna be obvious when he has fuck all to say about it. Tokyo, maybe? It’s huge enough that he could be vague enough to get away with it. But, with Deku looking straight at him like that… it feels wrong. The realisation makes Katsuki shift uncomfortably.

Deku must pick up on it. “Shit, is that actually weird to ask? Sorry. You don’t have to answer. Just saying ‘Japan’ is okay!”

“Uh,” he says, shaking his head. “No. I’m from Musutafu.”

Deku brightens instantly, lighting up. It’s hard to even look at, he looks so happy.

“Me too! Holy shit!” he giggles. Oh, God. “Hey, maybe I do know you!”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Katsuki feels sick. He discards the empty plate, tucking it underneath the sunbed and laying to settle back against it again. He folds his hands over his chest and shuts his eyes. He hopes Deku reads the signal very clearly: this conversation is over.

But, just in case he doesn’t. “I’m going to sleep again now.”

“Okay! Do you want me to wake you in a bit?”

“No. Uh – you can just go, any time you want. Don’t – uh, stay. If you don’t want to.”

Deku does not take the hint. Again.

“It’s okay! I don’t have anything planned until the evening!” he smiles and grabs the stupid Mirko book, reopening it and settling back, too.

Behind his closed eyelids, Katsuki’s mind races. So much for the fucking ‘avoid’ plan. He’s talking too much. Giving too much away. Shit.

Not again. He resolves to keep his fucking distance, from now on. He’s sharing way too fucking much. He tries to reassure himself - it’s not like Deku’s going to guess, going to figure it out. There are probably a million Katsuki’s living in Musutafu. And he has a completely different face, a different body, for fuck’s sake – he won’t guess. That’s not the concern, here. Katsuki just doesn’t want him around, getting in the way of shit and muttering over his thoughts. Making all of this worse. Deku just has this way of getting right under his skin, and staying there, chattering away and smiling with his stupid face.

He falls asleep quickly, feeling only the heat, hearing only the gentle crash of the ocean’s waves, and Deku’s hushed muttering from beside him.

When he blinks into consciousness again, the sun is lower in the sky, and Deku is no longer muttering but taking only little quiet breaths, puffing in and out gently as he sleeps beside him. When Katsuki looks over at him, his face is softened with sleep. When he squints and holds up a hand to shield his eyes from the light, he notices how Deku’s freckles have been darkened, stark on his skin from sitting in the sun.

Deku finally wakes up and leaves when the sun is low in the sky.

“Oh, no,” he says once he’s pulled himself up and checked the time. His face falls. “I have to meet Emilia and Riccardo in twenty minutes.”

“Who,” he says.

“The couple I ate with last night – they invited me to see the show with them!” He speaks hurriedly, rushing around to gather his things that he’s managed to spread everywhere. He shoves everything in his huge backpack and his pockets and then stands, rummaging through and checking he has everything, then staring at the time on his phone worriedly as the seconds tick past.

“What,” Katsuki says.

“The show?” Deku blinks at him. Katsuki blinks back. “It’s advertised everywhere! You haven’t seen? There’s Las Vegas thingies everywhere.”

“Las Vegas thingies,” Katsuki repeats, slowly.

Deku smiles. “Yeah! Did you not see? It was on the daily itinerary thing, in your room? It’s like a Vegas style show. Cool, right? I’ve never been there. Or seen anything like that! So when I told them that they picked up an extra ticket for me! It must have been one of the last ones available. I’m super lucky!”

“Right.”

“Ah, I’m sorry,” Deku looks sheepish. “I shouldn’t go on about it if you can’t come!”

Katsuki raises an eyebrow.  “No, I don’t care. It’s not my sort of thing.”

“Oh,” Deku blinks. “What is your sort of thing?”

When he doesn’t answer, Deku keeps talking.

“Like, what sort of stuff do you wanna do while you’re here? I must’ve gone over the itinerary about a million times. I can probably list it all off - snorkelling, sailing, movie nights, port trips, theatre shows… There’s all kinds of stuff. What did you wanna do?”

Katsuki is silent. Then he says flatly, “Nothing.”

Deku laughs, and then stops.

“What?”

Katsuki sees this as a brilliant opportunity. One – he gets to make it very clear that Deku is not going to rope him into doing any of those fucking on-board activities, or off-board on whatever stops they make, for that matter. And two – he’s going to make it so clear, that Deku is instantly repelled by him simply because he’s the most awful, boring person to be around. Two birds or whatever the fuck. Katsuki’s a genius.

“None of that. I don’t want to do any of that,” he says. “Actually, I hate all of those things. I hate cruises. And itineraries, and resort holidays, and travelling. I hate forced fun. And I hate being forced to be around people when I don’t want to be.”

Deku tilts his head confusedly. His eyebrows furrow.

“You hate all of it? Then… why did you want to come here? Why are you here?”

Katsuki’s expression hardens at the question.

“I don’t want to be here. My work made me.”

Deku’s brow furrows.

“Oh… You’ve got nothing planned? At all?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

Katsuki feels inwardly smug. Deku stares at him.

Then his face brightens.  “So… you’re free, completely? Tomorrow?”

His mouth drops open as Deku starts to leave, giving him a bright smile and a wave, eyes curled up into those happy half-moons again.

“What -” he splutters.

“I’ll find you!” Deku says, waving and dodging his way past rows of sunbeds and groups of people in beige. “Tomorrow morning!”

“You’re stalking me,” he calls, but Deku only laughs. He’s still throwing him that dopey grin, waving high in the air. He looks way too fucking pleased with himself. “Just serve me up for fucking dinner already, you fucking -”

But Deku’s too far – he does not hear. The woman lying in the sunbed to his right does, however, and lifts her sunglasses to send him a glare. Katsuki glares back, and then turns to direct it at that green irritant when he hears him call across the deck.

“See you tomorrow, Katsuki!”

He realises later that evening, after the bartender slides him his third shot of vodka, that Deku had skipped straight to calling him by his first name, the entire time.

Katsuki is not a coward. He’d blast anyone who dares to say he is. He’s got documentaries dedicated to how much of a coward he isn’t. Yeah, he’s fallen out of public opinion, and there are lots of things you can say about him, but what you can’t say is that he’s a coward.

He sort of regrets not being one, though, when his refusal to hide in his room and his decision instead to go search for a bar the next day ends up with one green idiot bounding up to him and screeching his name.

He’s busy noticing the ship is no longer moving and is parked at a dock, staring out and glaring at the little ants that comprise crowds on the distant beach, and Deku’s sudden, loud appearance makes his hungover brain wince. As Deku babbles away, completely failing to notice the tension written all over him, he thinks to himself: fine, but this does not mean I have to do any of that lame shit he’d said.

As he’s not a coward, he’ll just tell Deku he doesn’t want to fucking spend time with him. He’ll make a blatant display of the drink nursed in his hand, motion toward his position sat at this very comfortable seat at this bar (no annoying music, with a bartender that’s leaving him alone and refills his glass without asking, it can’t get better), and Deku will take the hint and fuck off.

Except that does not happen. Katsuki holds up his glass, points at it. Go away. I’m busy, right now. I’m drinking before noon, is the message he intends to send.

Here, try this, it’s delicious, is what Deku seems to receive, judging by the way he brightens and goes “Ooh, thanks!”, grabbing it out of his hand and taking a sip. Katsuki can only gape in shock. His Adam’s apple bobs with each swallow. His eyes slip shut with pleasure when he clearly likes it. It makes Katsuki’s hands curl with anger. He wants to explode something. Deku discards the much less full glass on the counter of the bar and wipes at his wet mouth with a hand, grinning.

“That was good. Strong, but good. Phew. Thanks for letting me try!”

Katsuki feels his eye twitch, again. He thinks that alone is bad enough, when suddenly, Katsuki is being clasped by the fucking arm and dragged right out of his seat. He stumbles, forced to follow a happily chattering Deku whose words are flying out of his mouth at a mile a fucking minute.

“- double checked before I came to find you, and they’ve still got a ton of tickets left for the excursion. We need to hurry, though! They might be gone by the time we get there. I doubt it, but it’s still best to get there earlier, just in case, right? And I still have to get -”

Out of the bar and yanked down the ship’s maze of corridors, Katsuki finally crashes back into reality, feeling anger claw at him from the inside and rise up his throat. He abruptly rips his arm out of Deku’s grip. Freezes on the spot, crossing his arms over his chest and hitting the back of Deku’s head with a glare.

Deku spins around, blinking at his empty hand, where Katsuki’s fucking forearm had been clasped seconds before.

“What -” he says, before Katsuki interrupts.

“What are you doing?”

Deku blinks back. “We need to get to the check-in point! Get -”

“Get what? For what?”

“The trip! It -”

“I’m not going on a fucking excursion,” Katsuki spits out.

Deku looks confused. “What?”

Katsuki exhales through his nose. It’s a mocking sort of sound.

“What do you mean, ‘what’? I said, I ain’t fucking going. We never agreed on shit.”

Once he’s started, it’s hard to get him to stop. Oh well.

“Look. De - Midoriya,” he says. Fuck.

“Midoriya,” he starts over in a firmer voice. “Look. You don’t fucking know me. Stop fucking following me around. I mean it. I’m not good company. I don’t want to be here. I don’t fucking like cruises. I don’t like excursions. I don’t like shitty, lame ass activities. I don’t want to do whatever the fuck you’ve fucking dragged me out to do. I’m – I’m not whoever the fuck you think you’re talking to, so just leave me alone, alright?”

Deku listens, and bites at his lip.

When he speaks, his voice is surprisingly assertive.

“How do you know? How do you know you’re not gonna like what we’re doing, where we’re going? You don’t even know what it is! Wherever it is, you’ve probably never even been!”

“I just know, alright?” Katsuki growls. “I don’t have to answer any of your shitty questions.”

“Because you can’t! You’re just making an assumption. That’s black and white, predictive thinking, Katsuki -”

“Oh, fuck off,” Katsuki rolls his eyes. “Now you just sound like my fucking therapist, and there’s a reason I got rid of her.”

“Well, maybe she had a point!” Deku says. His voice carries a bit, and he looks around himself, sheepish. He sighs, and continues, more levelly.

“Listen. If you just come, and you hate it, I’ll leave you alone. All alone so you can sit by yourself and glare at things and drink and mope about your life, whatever you want. For the rest of it. The whole cruise.”

“You’ll back off, quit annoying me?”

“I’ll stop annoying you,” Deku rolls his eyes. “But I think you’ll have a good time. Will you come? And just try it?”

Katsuki huffs. Looks off behind Deku and tongues at his cheek.

When he turns to face him again, Deku looks hopeful. Katsuki’s lip lifts in a snarl.

“Will you? Leave me alone. If I don’t enjoy it. I mean it.”

“Yes,” Deku says.

“Until this thing is over.”

He nods. “I’ll let you sit and scowl and drink yourself to death at every bar this ship has.”

Katsuki uncrosses his arms and regards him suspiciously. “I don’t want to go and get roped into any more shit I hate, after this.”

“It’s only a few hours!” Deku grabs his arm and pulls him again. He’s rolling his eyes, but he’s smiling. “You’re so dramatic. Urgh, my name’s Katsuki and I hate cute little picturesque Mediterranean islands and the sparkling blue ocean and the sound of laughter and fun. That’s you.”

Katsuki rips his arm out of his grip and shoves at him. He means to be intimidating, but Deku is just laughing, his eyes all scrunched up again.

“Shut the fuck up, nerd, before I turn the fuck back around,” he says.

Deku squeaks and grabs at his arm, holding him in place by the sleeve. “No!” he yelps, and then he’s taking off fucking running, pulling Katsuki along with him, and he has no choice but to follow.

He’s trapped in Deku’s hold until they reach a line of busy kiosks, set up near what Katsuki had inwardly named the ship’s banquet hall. They’re busy and overcrowded with people and Katsuki has to duck and dodge past people as Deku spots the one he’s looking for, and then makes a happy noise, tugging him towards it. In the queue Deku tells him what it is – a boat trip. Food and snorkelling gear provided. They get to the front, and Deku smiles really wide when Katsuki finds himself buying a ticket. Deku excitedly takes the little stub of paper off of the assistant and shoves it at Katsuki’s chest for him to hold, then excitedly grabs his hand and takes off again, pulling him as he sprints toward the open pier where the ship is docked.

“Come on – I was telling you, I need to get stuff!”

Deku leads him to a stand selling beachy shit, and darts about in a smiley blur of green, throwing various overpriced, vacation-y items off the tall, spinning displays and onto the rickety counter in front of a wide-eyed sales assistant. Katsuki crosses his arms and watches, hard-faced: sun cream, spare sunglasses, a massive fluffy pink towel, bottles of water. Katsuki raises an eyebrow at the offensive hot pink burning his irises. Deku turns to grin at him happily. He glares.

When it’s time to pay the eye-wateringly exorbitant price, something, God knows what, possesses him to step forward and tap his own GoldPass against the reader. Maybe it’s the memory of Deku painstakingly counting out each brown coin to pay the photographer. Deku pauses where his own card is held up in his hand, suspended in the air and poised to pay, and turns to look at him with surprise all over his face.

Katsuki shrugs a dismissive shoulder and takes the shit he’s bought when the shop assistant hands it to him, bagged up.

“S’nothing, nerd,” he says. Deku puts his own card away and grins so wide it must hurt. He turns away with a “tch,” and lets himself be tugged along the pier as Deku babbles a million grateful thank you’s.

They make it to the boat just in time. The pier gets tinier and tinier as they move off away from it. Deku lays out his fluffy pink towel and leaves enough space for Katsuki to sit down on it, right next to him.

It’s hot. The only other people are sat right at the front, seemingly altogether in one big group, and are entirely not interested in the people sat at the back on the fluffy hot pink towel. The whirr of the boat is quiet – mainly, he can hear the soft crashing of the ocean waves against the side of the boat, splashing up the side. He sits and stares down, watching the light gleaming, reflecting off of them.

Eventually, the boat slows to a stop, and the driver announces they’re parking in this spot. Some of the old people at the front make happy ‘whoop’ sounds, some immediately prepare to jump in the sea. Katsuki leans back on his elbows and takes a deep breath. He shuts his eyes, focuses on the feeling of the sun on his skin.

That is, until he feels a finger poke against his arm and his eyes snap open. Any fledgling feelings of relaxation evaporate at the sight of Deku - half-laid out, sprawled against the towel, sunglasses perched in the fluffy green curls of his hair, holding out the bottle of sun cream in his direction, smiling. Shirtless.

“Here,” he says.

Katsuki sits up and harshly snatches it from him. Looks away. He quickly uncaps it and watches it squish out onto his palm, and starts to lather the sweet-smelling lotion onto his arms.

In the sun, the dark hairs look even more stark against the pale of his skin, and he’s a little thrown for a second. He doesn’t know why. It’s odd – as if a part of him had forgotten he’s essentially wearing someone else’s body. The curve of the muscle in his arm looks unfamiliar. The length of his fingers is shorter, just that littlest bit. It makes discomfort swirl in his gut. He doesn’t know what to do with the feeling. It makes him grit his teeth in his mouth.

He finishes with one arm, and then moves to the other. Then he notices Deku is still laid back on his elbows, watching him.

“What?” he snaps, a little too loudly.

Deku blinks, and then tilts his head. “Are you going to take your shirt off?”

Katsuki gawks. His face reddens and twists up, half-crazed.

“What the fuck kind of question is that?!”

Deku looks confused. “You were sun-bathing just a second ago,” he says.

Katsuki does not reply to him. Instead, he just glares. Deku shrugs and then pulls himself upright, sitting up and reaching for the bag. He empties it out and grabs a water bottle, uncaps it and chugs it down his throat. His own fingers twitch and curl tight around the bottle still trapped in his hand. He feels it bend under his tightening grip as irritation flares up in him.

Ugh. Does Deku have to do it like that? Slipping his eyes shut and tipping his head all the way up, so Katsuki can see the strong line of his jaw, the curve of his bicep as he lifts it up in the air. The soft breeze runs through his curls, makes them shift back and forth gently, fall over his eyes with the tilting of his head. When he swallows, lowering the water bottle, he reaches up his free hand to brush them away.

Katsuki forces himself to turn the fuck away, to focus on the cold feeling of the lotion on his palm, on covering his legs in it. It’s a simple enough task – or, it should be, if it weren’t for Deku, who’s staring straight at him.

“Do you need help with that?” he asks.

“What?!” he snaps, turning to glare at him.

“The sun cream. For your face, and stuff. And your back, if you take your shirt off.”

“I – no. No, not at all. I don’t need your help. At all. Thanks.”

Deku hums and watches him continue to lather the lotion on. He reaches up to get it at the back of his neck, stretching a little awkwardly. He sees Deku out of his peripheral vision, eyes fixed on him. It makes a peculiar anger flare up in him, and he swivels around to land him with a blazing glare.

“What the fuck? Why’re you fucking staring at me, you creep?” he hisses.

Deku furrows his eyebrows.

“Uh. You’re not one of those homophobic guys who’s like, if another man looks at me, I’ll be sick and drop dead on the spot out of sheer humiliation, because that’s disgusting, right?”

Katsuki chokes and gapes at him. “What?”

“Well, you know,” Deku shrugs again and gestures with his hand, waving it around in front of him. He’s still got freckled hands, his mind says. He ignores it. “Why would I take my shirt off to sun-bathe! You creep! Argh!”

Katsuki’s heart is thudding.. “No. I’m not. No.”

Deku’s brow unfurrows and he brightens again. “Oh, good! So, you’re fine helping me with my back, then?”

Oh, God. Fuck you. A million times.

“Fine,” he rasps.

“Sorry! It’s just difficult to reach, you know?”

“No. It’s fine. Turn around,” Katsuki says, and squeezes the bottle out onto his palm. When he looks up from it, Deku has turned the other way, presenting his pale, freckled back to him. He’s pulled up his knees, wrapping his arms around and laying his head on the top of them. Staring out at the sea, stretching out before them both in every direction.

Katsuki inhales deeply and reaches forward, starting with his neck. He has to use his other hand to lift the hair at the scruff of Deku’s neck away as he starts to lather it smoothly over his skin.

His neck looks so delicate. Katsuki swallows.

“Sorry,” Deku says. “I’d do it myself, but I’ve got annoyingly short limbs. You may have noticed, I’m short.”

“Mm. Yes, you are.”

“I know. I try to bring it up myself, before other people can, now. They used to call me ‘little Izuku’ when I was at school.”

Deku twists back to smile at him, snickering. Katsuki catches his eye, over his shoulder. Yes, they did, he thinks. And much worse.

He pushes at Deku’s head until he turns back to the face the front again.

“Stay that way. I need to get at your neck.”

“Sorry,” Deku repeats.

Katsuki drags the lotion down, across his shoulders. Please don’t keep talking.

“Yeah, that sucked. I hope you don’t start calling me it too, now that I’ve told you,” Deku huffs out laughter. Katsuki can see his ribs contract with it. “Not that I would care much. It’s just teasing. I don’t care, now. But back then – well, I cared, but it was just one more thing on top of all the other things. It bothered me, but the same way a papercut would bother someone with a broken leg. You know?”

Katsuki squeezes some more lotion onto his palm and drags it smoothly down his back. Uses his fingers to rub it into his skin. Over each jut of rib that had constricted with soft, breathy laughter. Over every tiny freckle, darkening slowly in the sun.

“Yeah,” he says.

“And I was little. So, you know,” Deku breathes in, and exhales. “I don’t blame any of them for it, or anything.”

Katsuki’s throat has gone dry. He swallows heavily, feeling his heart thud. He shoves at the back of Deku’s shoulder.

“You’re done,” he says. Moves away. Deku turns and grins, as bright as the sun beating down onto them.

“Thanks!” he says. He sits up properly, swinging his legs around, and then stands. Katsuki watches him reach for his snorkelling gear, and pull it over his head until it sits over his forehead.

“Oh, I think you missed a bit,” Deku says. He’s staring down at his hip, lifting his arm and twisting around slightly to see how a stray dollop of lotion sits there around the curve of his body, left un-spread. He looks at Katsuki sheepishly. “Sorry, could you get it?”

Katsuki exhales, and reaches a hand out to get it, rubbing it in.

“Yeah, it wasn’t great,” Deku continues as if he’d never even stopped talking. Katsuki sees another part he’d left out, and moves to get that as well. “But I always think, well, it could have been worse. Got to have a positive outlook. You know? Like, at least all of them never knew I was gay. Wow, that would’ve been bad. Could you imagine the names I’d have been called, then?”

Katsuki nods distractedly. The lotion is all applied properly.

Then his neck snaps up, his mouth dropping open.

“You’re what?”

But Deku is stepping away. He pulls the snorkelling gear firmly over his face and disappears into the ocean with a leap, disturbing the crashing wave and being swallowed up into it.

Some of the salty water hits him in the fucking face. Katsuki flinches and wipes it away, his stare frozen on the space that had contained Deku moments prior with a scowl.

When his green head reappears, Katsuki crawls over to the edge of the little boat, and leans over above the water.

“Sorry, you’re what?!”

Katsuki screeches, leaning over the boat and glaring at where Deku bobs up and down in the water, blinking at him.

“What?” Deku says. He lifts up his snorkel onto his forehead. It pushes his wet, dripping hair up and out of the way. The curls are getting tighter in the water.

Katsuki snarls wildly. “You’re gay?”

Deku blinks. “Yeah,” he answers simply.

His mind is blank. He’s rendered silent, his mouth open.

Deku stares back at him, and then front crawls back to the boat, approaching nearer to Katsuki where he’s leaning over the edge, kneeled and gaping like a fucking fish or some shit.

“Help me up,” Deku says. He holds out an arm, outstretching it up from the water, toward him. Katsuki blindly reaches out to take it, to help pull him back up, but in his shocked stupor obviously did not fucking think to account for the slippery, fluffy hot pink towel he’s balancing all his weight on, and promptly slips right over the edge, and like a fucking dumbass topples and crashes into the ocean.

When he’s down there, his thought process is, I’ve fallen off the fucking boat. Then, I’m in the fucking sea. Then, I’m just going to drown myself. And then, Deku is gay. His body moves without his permission and forces him to seek oxygen, and he’s throwing himself up out of the water and spluttering it fucking everywhere, kicking his fucking clothed legs back and forth and coughing out his fucking lungs.

He tears his eyes open past the stinging salt and Deku is holding onto the edge of the boat (that he’d so elegantly toppled the fuck off of) and is fucking laughing, throwing his head all the way back. His shoulders are shaking with it. It’s whole-body laughter. Clutch your belly and wheeze laughter.

“You -” Deku wheezes.

“Shut the fuck up,” he spits in Deku’s direction.

His laughter worsens.

“Oh, God,” he rasps. He leans his head against the edge of the boat and closes his eyes, giggling, and when he turns back and takes a look at him again he erupts into more laughter.

Maybe it’s the stony expression on his face, or the way his hair must be sticking to his forehead. Whatever it is, Katsuki can’t remember the last time he heard Deku laugh that hard. Maybe when they were little and Katsuki learnt that Izuku had ticklish feet. Or when Mitsuki bought them matching All Might suits and let Izuku sleep over, so they could play until it got dark. Or when they found that rope swing attached to the huge tree, over at the lake by his house, and his dad showed them how to throw themselves off it to fly through the air and land in the water. Or when that new convenience store opened up around the corner from school, and they’d had those insane bubblegum machines, and the piece Katsuki bought blew up so big it exploded in his face and covered him in blue goo.

Hearing Deku laugh, now, he can see clearly outlined every memory, every instance of their shared past where he made Deku laugh so hard he lost his breath.

“I’m sorry for laughing at you, but you looked so stupid,” is the apology he gets once he’s dragged himself back on the boat, peeled off his sopping wet t-shirt. He immediately yanked Deku’s stupid hot pink towel up and over his shoulders, where he now sits staring down a half-apologetic, half-chortling Deku. He’s eating a sandwich the driver handed them, chewing and giggling between swallows.

“Shut the fuck up and eat your fucking chicken sandwich.”

“I will! It’s got parmesan in it! In fact, why aren’t you eating yours?”

“Too busy fucking shivering to death at the moment, here, thanks.”

“It’s hot!”

“The ocean is cold, dumbass.”

“If you actually take the towel off, you’ll dry off faster!”

“That is such bullshit. I thought you were supposed to be a nerd, nerd?”

“You decided that all on your own, nothing to do with me! And I’m right – here, look -”

“Get your hands off my fucking towel.”

Deku snickers and takes another bite of his sandwich. He chews at it for a while. He’s pulled up his legs to sit with them crossed, and he leans with his elbows up on them, holding the food to his mouth. He’s staring out at the sea around them. Katsuki runs his eyes over his profile and notes, up close how much Deku has changed, physically. Taller (although not by much, ha), broader. His voice is deeper. His hair is shorter, especially at the back, and a darker, more forest-y green near the roots. His jaw is more defined. He’s surprisingly built, his visible upper body lined with lithe muscle, his lower (from what Katsuki can see, dares to look at) packed with muscle. Katsuki is begrudgingly impressed – he doesn’t look bad. For a little nerd.

“So. Gay, huh?” he says.

Deku turns look at him and laughs again. He’s finished with his sandwich. He shucks the crumbs off his baggy swimming trunks. A little crumb gets stuck to his thick calf muscle. It’d probably be odd to lean and pick it off, so he doesn’t, but the impulse is there.

“Yes. Gay. Well, bi,” Deku replies. “Why? Are you?”

“No,” Katsuki answers quickly.

“Okay.”

Deku notices the crumb and flicks it off, himself. Katsuki has to look up and meet his eyes again.  

“When did you know you were gay?” he asks.

Deku leans his head on his hand and ‘uhm’s. “I don’t know. I think I was pretty young.”

Katsuki’s chest feels tight.

“Really? How young?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. You always have that sort of awareness, in your head, don’t you? Thinking other boys are cute. Noticing them. The same way you notice girls being cute.”

“Oh,” Katsuki says. “Do you?”

“Yeah. Or at least I did. Maybe it’s different for other people. I know people who had that realisation a lot later. But for me, I can remember knowing it way back.”

“Oh.” He’s repeating himself. He forces his mouth to make words past the sudden dryness in it. “So… you always just knew?”

“Yeah, basically.” Deku shrugs. “For me, there wasn’t, like, a huge eureka moment, where it all hit me at once and I freaked out. I feel like I just thought, ‘oh, yeah, that’s what that is’, one day.”

“How – that’s what what was?”

Deku looks at him oddly. “I told you. Noticing other boys, as well as girls,” he says. He huffs some laughter softly, and it sounds self-deprecating. “Like, I would just stare at the prettiest boys in my class. You should’ve seen me. I was just awed by all of them. When I was at university, my first boyfriend only knew I was into him ‘cause I just shut down when he was around. Turned red as a tomato and could barely speak. I’m still single now, ‘cause the same thing happens. It’s so embarrassing.”

Something twists inside Katsuki’s belly. Change the fucking subject, something inside him screams.

“You went to college?” he asks.

“Yeah!” Deku brightens. “I had to, for my work.”

Katsuki’s asking too many questions. It can’t possibly lead anywhere good - but curiosity is burning him up.

“What do you do?”

Deku picks at one of his fingernails distractedly. He’s gonna get hangnails if he keeps doing that.

“I’m a writer,” he says. Katsuki is thrown, initially, because he would never have guessed that – he doesn’t know what he would have said, really, maybe some insurance clerk somewhere, he’s never had to think about it – but when Deku continues, he gets it.

“I write about Pro-Heroes,” he says.

Katsuki looks deeply at him, at the newfound emotion appearing on his face. It’s complex. He can’t quite place it. Deku is smiling, and it’s not an empty smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes completely.

“I’ve been super lucky. Straight after I graduated, I did this unpaid internship at Hero’s Daily.”

He fails to hide the look of disgust that must appear on his face, at the mention of that rag. They don’t like Katsuki much over there. Understatement. Their coverage of him had been half the reason his management had been driven to fucking send him here. Deku sees it and snickers – he clearly assumes Katsuki’s disgusted because they made him work unpaid.

“Yeah, I know, right? It was difficult, ‘cause I was working full time for nothing. I was still really lucky, though – through a connection I had, I got another internship, paid this time, at The Hero’s Tribune. A big step up from that awful tabloid.”

Katsuki nods. That’s for certain. Not that they like him much over there, either.

“They liked me and offered me a full-time gig,” Deku says. “I was just a Pro-Hero Correspondent. I’d follow heroes around and write about it, like I’d been doing my whole life anyway, and they paid me to do it. But the money just wasn’t enough, so I had to leave, and I got a job at The Heroist. I know, super fancy, right? It was crazy - they just quizzed me in the interview and I right walked through it. I, uh, really like Pro Heroes.”

I know, fucking nerd, he thinks to himself.

“Now I have my editor telling me that one day I’ll have heroes seeking me out, instead of me going to them. Trying to talk to me to get their story out there.”

Deku snorts disbelievingly. He turns his head and looks out toward the ocean, the distant, flickering blue line glittering on the horizon.

“Not now, though. For now, I just sit around writing about them,” he says. He turns around to smile at Katsuki, again. “But… one day! Hopefully!”

Katsuki swallows. “Yeah, one day.”

“Sorry,” Deku laughs and goes a little red. The flush goes all over his freckles, Katsuki notices. “I just basically recited my entire CV. What about you? What do you do?”

I’m one of the Pros you’re following around all day, probably.

He does not say this. He scrambles for the first thing that flags up into his head.

“I’m an insurance clerk.”

It’s a complete improvisation, but it works brilliantly – the lie is boring enough for Deku to not ask any more questions, but just in case, he lays it on thick. He thinks of the last time he got one of those boring ass forms on his desk, imagines working with them all day, tries not to want to cry, and says just enough of the right words in the right order.

“I review and process insurance policy applications. I enter that data into the company’s internal software system.”

To his credit, Deku does not immediately collapse into a bored sleep.

“That’s the work that made you come here? What happened with that?”

Shit. “Uh. It was a length of service gift.”

“Tickets to a seniors cruise, by yourself?” Deku looks confused. He doesn’t press it though. “Do you enjoy your work?” he asks, instead.

He gives him a flat look. “What do you think?”

Deku shrugs, and then laughs softly. “I don’t know. Yes? Very much?”

Katsuki’s flat look grows in intensity.

“Hey, you’re the one who keeps telling me I don’t know you. Maybe you leap out of bed every morning and sprint to your desk. Maybe you always dreamt of processing those forms, growing up.”

“Not just that. Data entry, too, nerd.”

“Aw. I bet you had a little mini company laptop and everything, in your crib.”

“Yeah, and a company pen.”

“Aw! And matching stickers. Others had building blocks, you had something more special: my first Excel spreadsheet.”

Katsuki shrugs a shoulder and smirks. “Dream big, huh?”

He has an uncomfortable realisation: Deku is funny. Deku is making fun of his fictional, imaginary, shitty job. They get along.

Katsuki frowns and turns away from Deku’s smile, his bright, glittering green eyes. He sniffs and stares out toward the sea.

It’s getting cloudier. They must be nearing the end of this fucking excursion, now, right? And then he can head back to the bar, drink, and forget he ever learnt this much about Izuku Midoriya.

“No more talking about my job,” he says abruptly.

Deku blinks, and then just smiles and nods. “Sure, no problem.”

Instead, Izuku lifts himself to his feet and stares out at the sea.

It stretches as far as either of them can see, across the horizon. Above it, the white clouds have kindly made the transformation into a bright mix of oranges, pinks and yellows, glowing where they’re set amongst the azure afternoon backdrop. Katsuki watches Izuku stare up at it, drinking up the view with his eyes wide and sparkling, before his mouth stretches into an overjoyed smile, then a toothy grin, and then he lets out a great whooping laugh.

“What the fuck was that?” Katsuki says, glowering up at him like he’d sprouted a second head. Deku turns around to face him, and points outward, his arm stretching to sweep towards the view in front of them.

“Look! It’s just so beautiful. It just makes me happy to look at! It’s like a painting in real life, that I can see with my real eyes. Look at that orange! That might be my favourite colour.”

Katsuki scoffs.

“It’s just the sky and the sea, dumbass.”

Deku gapes at him. “Huh? Are you blind?”

“I’m not blind,” he says, offended.

He looks at it again. The sea is a great big blue bit of water and it crashes against the side of the boat, making it rock with every harsh move of the current. He looks up, and the sky is also a great big blue thing, except it’s slowly turning dark as the afternoon crawls in. Soon it’ll be night and the whole thing will be black, the sea and the sky. When he looks to Deku again, he’s staring out at it and biting his lip, smiling. He isn’t blinking at all, his eyes fixed open, like he can’t bear to turn away. Like he’s committing the sight to memory, as if he wants to open it up in his brain later and jump straight back in it, refer back to it any time he wants to gaze at it again.

After a quiet moment, Deku tears his eyes away, looks over to him and tilts his head. “Doesn’t it make you feel something when you look at it?”

“Why, how do you feel?” Katsuki furrows his eyebrows.

“I feel awe! And excited. And peaceful, at the same time. And very, very lucky,” says Deku.

“Oh. I don’t feel that.”

Deku looks sad. Katsuki wants to growl at him. He feels like he’s missing something here, and he doesn’t like it. He just feels irritated.

The wind is starting to pick up, getting louder in his ears. The old people on the other side of the boat are chattering loudly, and their presence is making him grit his teeth in his mouth. He doesn’t think gawping up at the clouds like an idiot with fuck all else better to do is really going to help.

“You don’t?” Deku says, disbelieving. “Really?”

Katsuki growls at him. “No. Stop fucking questioning me. Why the fuck would it? I see the sky every damn day, I don’t sit there and gawk at it. I have better fucking things to do.”

Deku turns and stares again, his eyes so wide, so round they could be fucking glittering. “But look!” he says.

Katsuki tries his damn hardest, but there’s still only a sky and a sea.

“I don’t see whatever it is you’re seeing, nerd.”

He crosses his arms and looks away, glaring down at his lap. He starts with a growl when Deku appears out of nowhere and sits himself down next to him, focusing his gaze into his eyes.

“What, you done staring at nothing?” he taunts him automatically.

Deku smiles at him. His face is the tiniest bit sunburnt, across his nose.

“Come to dinner with me,” he says.

Katsuki narrows his eyes. “What.”

“I saw a restaurant, near the pier where the ship’s docked. If we go quick, we can eat there before it leaves port again.”

“No.”

“Why? You’ve not eaten all day!”

“No.”

“Come! I’ll pay for you.”

“No, you won’t, ‘cause I’m not going. Stop trying. Give up, loser.”

Deku breaks into manic giggles when veal parmigiana appears on the menu. Katsuki parmigiana, he snickers, and it makes Katsuki break out his harshest glare, right at him.

He orders it, though. Tilts the menu away from Deku and points it out to the waiter while Deku’s distracted, grinning at the fancy water that had been brought over, inspecting the label. Fuck knows why he ordered it and suffered through every gross bite of it - they even had penne arrabbiata, he saw. If you asked him why, he couldn’t place the reason. He would have no answer. He’d have the same lack of an answer if you questioned him about the light, airy feeling in his chest when it’s placed down in front of them, and Deku laughs so loud the table next to them looks over. He also wouldn’t know what to tell you if you asked him why, when Deku asks him to spend the next day with him, he says okay. Fine.

Staring up at the dark ceiling of his suite, he can feel the gentle movements of the shop rocking back and forth as it sails.

His mind is busy – his racing thoughts refuse to shut the fuck up and let him fall asleep. They are of an annoying, distinctly green hue. Deku’s smile has been burned into his irises after the day he’s had – he’s exactly the same as he was in middle school, and he has an optimistic enthusiasm for everything under the sun. It’s ridiculous and Katsuki hates it.

He enjoys everything. The sky. The sea. The colour orange. Mirko. Pro-Heroes in general, but that’s obvious. Fucking Las Vegas themed shit. The drink he stole from Katsuki, at the bar. Chicken parmesan sandwiches. Expensive drinking water. Men, apparently.

A growl rips out of his throat and he grabs for his phone. He peers at the screen in the dark, opens the search engine and jabs Midoriya Izuku into it.

The top results are all from news sites, where he said he’d worked. It checks out.

The most recent result is The Heroist’s site - a biography page with a short paragraph.

Midoriya Izuku - Midoriya Izuku is a Japan Pro-Hero Correspondent at The Heroist. His interests include Pro-Hero culture and society, LGBTQIA+ issues, health, fitness and lifestyle. His work has been published in Hero’s Daily, The Hero’s Tribune, Pro-Hero Today, and HERO NIPPON!, as well as the Musutafu Journal.

There is a picture of Deku smiling next to his background info. There it is again.

Underneath it, his most recent articles are listed. The most recent was published just over a week ago – he snorts when he sees it’s about Kaminari’s new tactical gear: Victorious Chargebolt Reveals Sharpshooting Pointer Upgrade in Shizuoka Street Brawl. It’s tagged with Stun Gun Hero: Chargebolt (Kaminari Denki) and upon pressing on it with his new-thumb and seeing a whole list of Kaminari-related articles Deku’s written, he realises that you can filter the articles by name.

He presses back, and then selects ‘Filter’, so a long list of names appears. There are numbers next to them all. Katsuki presumes it’s the number of articles written. They’re all there – Todoroki, Uraraka, Iida, Kirishima, Ashido… all the rest of them. Todoroki has 76 articles. Kirishima has 45.

He scrolls to find his name. It’s low down.

Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight (Bakugou Katsuki) – 0.

There’s only one other name with a great big zero next to it, only one other hero – Fresh-Picked Hero: Grape Juice (Mineta Minoru) - 0.

What the fuck?

Katsuki glares at the screen. He exhales a scoff that’s tinged with disbelief.

No fucking articles about him? Not one?

It’s not like he’s not been in the media – in fact, he’s in the fucking media a million times more often than any of these irrelevant no-name losers. A billion times more than fucking Todoroki.

He finds The Heroist’s main site, and filters all their articles by his name. It’s not a glitch - there’s a fuck-ton there!

Watch: Dynamight Squares Up to Paparazzi in Latest Airport Scuffle.

Legal Battles Cost Dynamight as Pro is Dropped as Face of Landmark Ad Campaign.

Ranking Dynamight’s Worst Media Face-Offs.

Shock as Journalist Drops Assault Charges Against Pro-Hero Dynamight.

Raging Dynamight’s Outburst on Eager Fan.

Dynamight Ditches Press Event in Most Dramatic Media Walk-Out Yet.

Exclusive – Dynamight Lays into East Musutafu Press Snapper.

Pro-Hero Profession Questioned as Approval Drops After Symbol of Victory’s Public Meltdown .

That had been the one that landed him here, he thinks to himself. Kirishima had been right – the protesters hadn’t fucked off for weeks.

Reading it makes him snarl. He locks the phone and chucks it away carelessly, laying back on his forearm and forcing his glare at the dark ceiling instead. He doesn’t care about the headlines. He’s used to it.

But an uncomfortable feeling, one he’s frustrated to realise can’t place, swirls around in his gut. His face twists up into an unhappy frown in the dark – because Deku has written nothing about him, at all. 

Chapter Text

Katsuki smears the butter on his bread, and then takes a massive bite out of it. He chews it slowly and lifts an eyebrow, staring across the table at Deku who’s smiling way too brightly this early in the morning.

“Stop smiling at me. You’re giving me the creeps.”

Deku laughs. “I can’t help it. I think you’re gonna love what we’re doing today!”

He chews at his bread, swallows, and scoffs. “Oh, yeah? Then why won’t you just tell me what it is?”

Deku shoves an obscene amount of fruit into his mouth. His eyes sparkle. He is, again, unreasonably happy, from cheerfully throwing greetings, smiles and nods at people in the breakfast buffet queue, to helping a woman out with the fucking toast grill machine. Why the fuck they didn’t just use an actual toaster, he didn’t know, just added it to his ever-growing list of irritants - a list headed by the man now grinning at him around a mouthful of red grapes.

“The actual thing we’re doing is a surprise. But I shouldn’t have to tell you the main part of it – it should be obvious!”

Katsuki glares at him hotly over the steam of his coffee cup. “Hah? Stop being so fucking cryptic.”

Deku giggles. “I’m not being cryptic!”

“You fucking are. Trying to one-up me on some bullshit.”

“No-o,” Deku says coyly, regarding him over his glass of bright orange juice. Then he nods his head to the side, at the huge window they’re seated against. Katsuki glares.

“What.”

Deku tips his head to the side again, gesturing. Katsuki turns to look out the window. He scans the view in a second: a distant beach full of tiny people the size of ants, the sea, a town.

“I don’t see anythin’.”

Deku snorts and rolls his eyes. “You’re missing it! We’re at port! The ship isn’t moving anymore – we’re at a real location! Look.”

He turns and points a freckled finger out toward the view, up near the glass. Katsuki eyes his profile; the sloping curve of his nose, the point of a fang when he grins, as he talks.

“Look closer at it,” Deku says.

“I am looking closely,” Katsuki grumbles, sipping at his coffee.

“All those old buildings. All the hills. The little narrow streets, all around, up and down the hills.”

“Yeah, will probably take you a million years to wander around, and all for some shitty food stall and an overpriced gift shop.”

Deku turns and rolls his eyes. “You don’t know that. What if you enjoy wandering around? Exploring what the place has to offer? And what if that food stall has really nice Spanish tortilla? What if you find something you really want in that gift shop?”

“I won’t, though.”

“You don’t know that!”

I do fucking know that, Katsuki thinks to himself, but doesn’t say it out loud – just grumbles and sips at his coffee, and then almost splutters it all over himself when Deku makes a shrill screeching noise and then pulls him by the neck of his shirt to his feet. He has only a second to thunk the mug down on the table before he’s being yanked up and out of his seat, dragged across the room by a babbling Deku grasping his hand.

“Come on, we’re going to miss it!”

“You - miss what?”

“It’s a surprise! I told you!”

“You, fucking -”

“Just come on!” Deku turns back and grins at him, and his mouth clamps shut. Thankfully, he drops his hand, which is good because Katsuki is perfectly capable of navigating his way to the dock of the ship himself, or at least of following Deku without needing a fucking guide of a hand-hold, thanks. His wild shock of bright green hair is eye-catching enough it would be impossible to get lost... more likely Deku just wanted to ensure he didn’t dart away to flee back to the nearest bar when his back was turned. In any case, Deku drags him off the boat and onto the rickety pier. Katsuki is finally getting used to the heat, but nevertheless being whacked with it is abrupt and makes his eyes squint uncomfortably under his sunglasses – but he’s more concerned with trying not to trip over and fall to his death on the uneven wooden planks of the pier. Some stick out, some are low, and he’s sure if he got a good look at some of them he could spy some rot. He puts a renewed effort into steadying himself so that he can avoid tripping up, cutting himself on some rusty fucking nail left sticking out and inevitably being sent to die in some Italian hospital. He crosses his arms over his chest and trudges after an excitable Deku who seems to be having the time of his life peering between each of the pier’s planks of wood below them, trying to spy the glittering blue ocean.

“What are you, five years old? Have you never been on a pier before?” he grumbles.

Deku looks up and smiles at him as they walk. “I have! Just not in years and years. And never in Europe.”

“Well, you’re getting a real good fucking look at it.”

“I am!” Deku says. “I am, I want to remember everything!”

“Right, like whatever it is we’re late for right now? You forgot that.”

“Oh, we’re not late for anything,” he says. Katsuki stops and stumbles, catching his foot on one of the fucking planks of wood and tripping up over it. He swears and growls when Deku lets out stupid little giggles.

“We’re not late?” he spits. “You said we were gonna miss it!”

“No! I lied. I just wanted to be here early. Is your foot alright?” Deku snickers.

“You - yeah, it’s fine, fuck you – why didn’t you just fucking say, idiot?”

He just shrugs, smiling. Katsuki growls and glares at him. Deku is unaffected.

“What could be so important you wanted to be early, anyway? I don’t see shit.”

And it’s true – there are no boats docked alongside the pier this time, no coaches or minibuses waiting to cart them off somewhere.

“I wanted to get first pick!”

“Of what? What’s that fucking important?”

Deku suddenly stops – his face twists happily into a grin so wide it practically makes the air glow around him. He lifts a hand, and points across the pier at something behind Katsuki.

“That!”

Katsuki turns to watch as Deku flies towards whatever it is – and then sees that it’s a huge bicycle rack.

Fuck. No, no, no.

Deku’s sprinted over to the attendant, and is already getting fucking slips of paper out – Katsuki approaches with horror and overhears the words rent, four hours, return on time – and feels horror dawn, because Deku has dragged him here because he’s renting out bikes and he’s going to want to ride them around.

He’s right – as soon as he’s near enough, Deku is making a wide, sweeping gesture with his arm and making a dumb little triumphant noise.

“Look!” he grins. “Bet you’re happy I got you here early! Now you can pick the one you actually won’t mind being on all day. Emilia and Riccardo told me they go really, really quick when the ship’s docked, like sun-beds around the pool, and they had to use whatever was left. Emilia’s hip’s not working like it used to and she said it made it harder when the bike didn’t go as smoothly as she would’ve liked, so -”

Katsuki groans. All of the bikes are multicoloured. “Oh, God.”

“What!” Deku grins. Fuck, look at him – he's already drifted towards the huge orange one and started peering down at it, likely envisaging himself perched on it, riding through meadows and sunny hills or whatever other shit Deku’s come here to do.

“Bikes?” he says.

“Yeah!” Deku nods. He rummages through his pocket and holds something out, some paper, in his direction. Katsuki snatches it and glares down at it, quickly realising it needs to be unfolded – and upon opening it up, peers down at it. It’s a map, with a huge line drawn out in marker, swerving a black path through tiny streets.

“What’s this line,” he says, tone flat.

Deku grins.

“D - Midoriya, what’s this line.”

“Where we’re going! Obviously!” Deku rolls his eyes, smiling, and leaps onto the bike, swinging a leg around and steadying himself with a foot on the pedal, the other on the ground. Katsuki’s fingers twitch in irritation where they hold the paper, with the impulse to curl into fists. He inhales, exhales hard through his nose, teeth gritted, and shoves the map back towards Deku.

“You’re not gonna be checking the map while you’re riding that thing, are you? ‘Cause I’m not gonna be sittin’ next to your dumb ass in some hospital in a few hours. Hope you know where you’re fucking going.”

But Deku is only snickering with laughter, watching him. Katsuki makes a careless grab for the one closest to him, which turns out to be a humiliatingly eye-catching neon yellow. Almost like a warning, like whatever the fuck bees do – a flashing yellow sign that screams: ride this bike, and forever risk public humiliation. Christ – it's even got beads on the wheels. His eyes hurt even looking at it.

He settles himself – positions his feet correctly and tests the breaks, which do work (there’s a surprise, given how old the fucking thing looks). One thing he failed to notice when selecting the bike was how small it was – which means when he looks up, he gets only a second to realise how low down he is next to Deku’s, and then only one more to gape at him, because he’s sped off, racing away.

“I’ll race you to the street!” Deku turns and yells out behind him, and within seconds, during which Katsuki is left to gape uselessly, he’s put a fair amount of distance between them.

Katsuki feels a competitive fire rear its head inside himself, and without thinking grips the handlebars and races ahead, in a blink turning the world around him into nothing but a blur with every wild pedal. He fixes his eyes, his attention on the figure ahead of him, feels the wind cool his skin as he moves against it, feels his heart beat fast his chest with his rapid movement – and then blinks in surprise as wood turns to concrete under his wheels, and he’s overtaken him.

He slows to a stop, steadying himself against the ground, and waits for Deku to pull up beside him. When he does, his brakes screeching with their slow grinding halt, Katsuki turns and gives him a smirk.

“Beat you,” he says.

Deku is panting, but manages a grin.

“Urgh. You win. I’d be annoyed you beat me, but it happened so quick I can’t find it in myself. Do you cycle? How’re you so amazing?”

Katsuki swallows automatically as an uncomfortable, nervous feeling settles in his stomach. An odd, squeezing sensation. He shrugs, suddenly tense, forcing himself to face forward, gripping tight onto the handlebars.

“S’not hard when you’re so bad at it,” he says.

“I’m not!” Deku squawks. He even reaches out to shove at his shoulder. Katsuki rocks with the force of it and snickers.

“Whatever, nerd. You lost either way.”

He eyes the street he’s found himself on – it's busier, being only a small way away from the dock, and is lined with colourful storefronts in bright reds and warm oranges, facing the glittering blue line of the ocean. People wander up and down over tropical tiles, peering through glass windows into elaborate store displays, leaning on each other as they walk side by side, or as they talk, seating themselves on rickety brown benches lining the pavement. That, or on cushioned chairs that make up outside seating – Katsuki's eyes are naturally drawn to the activity, where children flit in between the tables of a cafe, shrieking with laughter and chasing each other, and spots with faint amusement who he assumes are their parents sat visibly exhausted, cooling off in the shade and sipping drinks that clink with ice with every sip.

“It’s so pretty!”

He turns at the sound; Deku is watching, too, stood starry-eyed beside him, face lit up with joy. Katsuki watches as he reaches into his pocket and retrieves his phone. He pokes at it, and then tilts it and holds it up, taking about a million pictures at once, if the furious shuttering sound is enough to go by.

Deku tilts the phone to get a portrait angle, and then Katsuki takes in the sheer age of the thing. It’s ancient.

“Holy shit, Deku,” he grabs it out of his hand, ignores Deku’s indignant squawk. “How old is this thing? What model even is this?”

“Give it back! It’s not that old,” Deku whines, pouting.

He turns it over in his hands, staring down at it and snickering. “It fucking is. Christ, where’d you even find it? A tomb?”

“My phone is not that old! I’ve just taken care of it for ages!”

Katsuki holds it high up into the air, out of his reach, laughing as Deku fails to grab at it.

“Phone? Try fossil. And yeah – ages and ages, eons it looks like. I’m surprised you can even take a picture on this thing. The quality’s gotta be shit.”

He ignores Deku’s splutter of affronted laughter to peer down at the tiny screen, and tap onto the camera roll. The most recent pictures that appear are the ones he’d just taken, the street before them – and before that, Katsuki gets a glimpse of rows and rows of holiday themed pictures, a fucking minute-by-minute stop motion of Deku’s time here. And the quality is fucking awful.

“Hey!” Deku notices and finally succeeds in snatching the phone (fossil) back, holding it to his chest protectively. He pouts, his bottom lip jutting out. Katsuki catches sight of how the phone bears a striking resemblance to a brick, letting out a laugh – and then freezes as Deku lifts the phone and he hears the shutter sound go off.

“No. Delete that shit, right fucking now.”

He hits him with his best glare, which normally turns its usual recipients to ice, but miraculously fails to affect Deku at all. He just pockets the phone, returning the hand to grip onto the handlebars of his bike – and takes off again, his laughter loud as he flees.

“You can’t run away from me – delete that shit!”

He yells to Deku’s retreating form and then growls, biking away to follow him. Deku is more prepared for his speed this time, already faster than Katsuki had expected, and is expertly weaving his way through the people that populate the street. Some blink and turn as he whizzes past, only to do the same when Katsuki follows only a second later. He rapidly swerves through them all, uncaring, his eyes fixed on the distinct colour of green hair ahead of him, lit up by the sun, and can’t help but laugh when Deku yells out: “I’m not running away from you. I’m cycling away from you, obviously!”

Katsuki watches as the street around them widens into a square. Deku races past brick buildings, and then swerves into the very middle of the square, where a great fountain sits. Katsuki slows to a stop beside him, and watches as Deku beams up at it. He steadies himself on the bike and reaches into his pocket again, dragging the fossil out again to take another billion pictures of the fountain before them.

“Look!” he says, wonder in his voice. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Katsuki peers at it. There are three different levels to it, all made of white marble. The highest lends a delicate trickle of sparkling water down to the second, where it rushes and bubbles before descending into the largest layer at the bottom – a level that, when he leans in to look, reveals underneath pale blue water an elaborate art piece, an intricate mosaic sitting at the bottom of the fountain. He can see coins too, having floated down on top of it.

“It’s alright,” he says. The sound of a camera shutter, again – Katsuki turns and glares at a grinning Deku, phone held up in his direction. Deku only laughs.

“It’s more than alright! I’ve never been anywhere like this before. I’d read about them -”

“You’ve sat there reading about town squares? You really are a nerd, aren’t you?”

He rolls his eyes and shoves at him. “It’s not a square, it’s a piazza.”

“Yeah, alright, nerd. A piazza. Just don’t get that fucking phrasebook out again.”

Deku clambers off his bike and leans it against the edge of the fountain. He seats himself on the marble surface of the edge, and stares down into the depths of the water, eyes lit up with joy.

“Are you going to -”

“I’m making a wish,” Deku says, turning to grin up at him.

Katsuki is grabbed by the arm and forced to prop his bike up next to Deku’s, seat himself down next to him, and lean to stare down at the coins in the water. He stares as Deku shoves a hand into his pocket and takes out his wallet, fishing out a coin. He holds it between two fingers, closing his eyes and furrowing his brows – Katsuki eyes him oddly – before he springs back to life and drops the coin. They lean in together, and stare down, Katsuki flat faced and Izuku beaming with joy as the coin crashes through the surface tension of the water, casting shimmering ripples into it, and then floats down slowly, before landing safely atop the mosaic at the bottom.

When he turns to look, Deku is beaming. His face is curled happily with his grin, tiny laugh lines appearing around his eyes and only highlighting his sheer joy. Then Izuku turns to face him, and Katsuki feels that same uncomfortable feeling, making him swallow forcibly, tense up and glare.

Izuku ignores his glare and shoves a coin in his hand.

“Your go,” he says.

Katsuki holds it in his palm and stares down at it.

“Make a wish! Do it!” Izuku laughs.

That uncomfortable feeling settles low in his stomach. He grips the coin in his hand, and chucks it in the water, feeling the tension and discomfort swirl and swell inside him – and thinks, I wish this shit would just end.

The coin sinks to the bottom and lands next to Izuku’s.

Deku drags him away from the fountain and across the square, under the concrete archways that surround it, to duck into the small shops they lead to. Katsuki reassures him that leaving the bikes outside is fine, leant against the storefront, and lets himself be dragged into one of them. (As if Katsuki would miss his bike being stolen – he’s not stupid – and even if he did, he’d just pay whatever fee they asked for.)

He grumbles beside him as Deku races this way and that, ecstatic to be browsing. It’s a gift store, but a high-end one, and Deku is gasping every five seconds at the paintings of the piazza they’re in, of the dock, the colourful street they’d raced down. Dragging him this way and that, shoving souvenirs in his face and squeaking variants of “Look!” and “Wow!”.

But he leaves without buying anything, only thanking the store assistant with another enthusiastic ‘Grazie!’, ducking out of the shop and into the next one. This one is a clothes store, and Katsuki glares as Izuku risks damaging the designer clothing and racking up some huge bill Katsuki will of course have to be the one to take care of, bounding around with excitement as he is. He keeps picking up items on hangers and gasping at their beauty, and then their price (loud underneath the quiet music Katsuki can only think to describe as ‘posh’). He gawks at inflated price tags, twisting them around to shove in his direction and get Katsuki to gasp too. He only raises an eyebrow, or rolls his eyes – and secretly hopes his parents’ line doesn’t show up, itching to leave before he has to deal with that.

When he’s done ducking in and out of tiny shops and boutiques, Deku drags both Katsuki and the bikes to find something to eat. There’s a row of restaurants with a ton of seats outside, and Deku practically throws him into one of them before a waiter zooms over to settle them in. They eat light, sticking with small appetisers – or at least Katsuki tries to, ordering bruschetta, while Deku goes in on a huge plate of antipasto bites. While they eat, Deku fishes out the map and talks him through it, Katsuki watching on with skepticism while Izuku makes eager pointed jabs at each landmark he wants to look at. He even calls over the waiter and requests a pen – and with it, draws great big X’s over each of the places they’d seen so far.

“We already saw the dock, the Main Street, the piazza and the fountain… now we’re going up here, this way – see? – and then down here, and back. It might take a while.”

“Oh, will it? And you’ve just decided that’s the plan, have you?”

Deku grins, eyes sparkling. “Yeah!”

“Do I not get a say in this at all?”

His grin widens. “Not at all.”

Katsuki huffs with reluctant laughter, and rolls his eyes. “Great. You know the route. You do know the route, right?”

He scoffs. “I know the route off by heart!”

He doesn’t believe him, but as they begin to cycle the path Deku had mapped out, he has no need to double check it, not once. Katsuki is begrudgingly impressed. Moving away from the piazza, the roads get smaller and more narrow, budging him from riding beside Deku to behind him, only to have Deku slow down on top of bumpy cobblestone to ride beside him again as soon as there’s space. Soon they leave the town altogether, and the world around him turns green. Where colourful buildings previously hulked overhead, now stand trees, offering down waving leaves that brush against his hair and his shoulders, and greet him as he rides past. Beneath the wheels of his bike, grey cobblestone soon turns to rough gravel, and then dirt as they find themselves further from the main tourist spot and towards a more rural landscape. And that’s when it begins – the hills. Katsuki is extremely fit (even if he outwardly appears less so than usual in his current body, much as he hates to consider it), and even he has trouble maintaining the exertion needed to ride uphill so steeply, for so long – Deku looks just about ready to pass out. Instead, they get off, and walk beside the bikes. Slowing down means he gets to look around him – at the trees surrounding them that stretch green leaves towards them, to the grass that reaches up from the ground and twists around his legs, to the sky, and the birds that fly overhead, drawing his eyes with their movement, and his ears with their song.

The camera shutter disturbs him. He snaps his head back down to glare at Deku, who’s got his phone pointed at him again.

“Sorry!” Deku laughs, and then lights up, suddenly putting on a burst of speed. He twists around, beaming. “Come on! Look – we made it!”

Katsuki blinks, following – and then realises they’ve finally, finally reached the top of the hill. Deku has raced ahead, and drops his bike, letting it fall to the ground. The space is empty, containing only the two of them, their bikes, and a single wooden bench overlooking the ocean. Katsuki stands, and peers outward: he sees the distant white sand that makes up a bay far below, curled in a half-moon shape. The mighty lunge of the waves crash in onto it, and back outward, like desperate breaths in and out, reaching towards gold sand. They dribble up to the beach and shudder, drizzling foamy sea spray onto the bay. Above them, the horizon meets the dark line of the ocean in a thin seam across his vision, flicking splinters of white light in his direction, streams of it as the current of the water flows and breaths beneath it. Far out, a solitary white ship sails across, looking almost ghostly with the distance. Katsuki eyes this view, and seats himself on the bench.

Deku comes to join him, having been taking a billion more pictures on the fossil. He’s smiling again, and for a moment it’s all Katsuki can see.

“Right,” Deku says. He pulls his legs up and sits with them crossed, folded, then shoves his hand into his pocket and pulls out the tiny folded-up square of map, and the pen he’d taken off the waiter. He unravels it, and rests the paper on his lap. Then he leans forward, and draws another huge X on the line – right over where it stops, overlooking the blue ink of the ocean.

“There,” says Deku, satisfied – that is, until a great gust of wind blows the thin paper off of his lap altogether, sending it billowing away in only a second. Deku throws himself to his feet and races to get it, hands outstretched toward it- even as it becomes clear it’s a lost cause. And maybe there was no need, maybe he was looking where he was going, and there was no danger at all. Maybe it was nothing but instinct, some innate heroic drive living inside of him, something that upon watching Deku race to the cliff edge considered how often Deku had tripped up over his own feet as a child, had got himself hurt, considers the unstable nature of the uneven dirt under his bright red trainers, of the winding grass that had twisted around his legs earlier, that waved in the harsh wind and hung over the edge… maybe it was only that, Katsuki doesn’t know – but something makes him to leap to his feet, and grab Deku by the shoulder, yank him back with force, then snatch his hand and pull him back even further.

Deku trips over his own feet then, squawking.

“It’s gone!” he whines. Katsuki drops his hand and watches Deku pout, rubbing at it where he’d been yanked at. The strong wind makes green curls whip around his face as he stares out, holding up a hand to shield his eyes and peer out, as if it will bring the stupid fucking map back to him.

“It’s gone, nerd,” he says, eyeing how Deku’s bottom lip juts outward with a new pout. “Sit down. Don’t run at the edge like that again. What are you, stupid?”

Deku swivels back to him, and throws himself back down onto the seat. He’s still got the pen in his hand, tucked safely between his fingers.

“S’fine,” Katsuki says, knocking into him with his shoulder. “You said you knew the way around off by heart. You don’t need that shitty map.”

Deku is pouting. “But I was going to keep it. Save it.”

“What, you need it?”

“Yes!”

“So you lied, hah? You don’t know how to get back.”

“No, not because of that!” Deku knocks into his shoulder. “I do know the way back.”

“Hm,” Katsuki turns to look at him, challenging. “Not sure if I believe you.”

“Well, you should, because I do!”

“Not buying it. I think we’re lost.”

“We aren’t lost. I know the exact route. We’re fine. You’re just catastrophising!”

“There you go soundin’ like my fucking therapist again. I’m not doing whatever that is, you’ve just lost the map.”

“I didn’t mean to! And no – we aren’t lost, ‘cause I know the way!”

Katsuki turns to face him. “I don’t believe you, nerd. I think we’re lost.”

He reaches out a hand, and pokes at Deku’s shoulder, a level up from shoving into him.

But Deku grabs onto his hand, suspended in the air between them. Catches him by the hand and pulls it towards him, with scarred fingers.

“We’re not lost. Look. I’ll draw the line on the map. I know every stop, every road on it. See? I’ll draw it - with my eyes closed!”

Hand caught in Deku’s, Katsuki can only stare, face blank. Deku uses his other hand to lift the pen towards his mouth, and removes the cap by trapping it between his teeth. His stomach gives a lurch as Deku grins around the cap of the pen stuck between his stupid teeth.

“See? I’ll show you,” he talks around it.

He leans in, eyes falling shut, and Katsuki feels the cool tip of the pen press against the skin over the top of his hand, over the bones. His eyes flick down – Deku is drawing a jagged, thick, long line. It runs straight, then juts upward, then across, then down… then in a square, or a fucking piazza, and then across tiny narrow paths, then up and up a long, steep, hill…

His eyes flick back up. He feels his stomach lurch uncomfortably. Deku is concentrated, his brows furrowed and eyes shut tight, teeth caught around the stupid cap of the pen. The wind runs through his hair and makes it flick back and forth across his forehead. His freckles are dark and he’s slightly sunburnt across his nose.

Then Deku opens his eyes, removes the cap from his mouth and shoves it back on. Then he peers down at his handiwork.

“See?”

He points a finger, leaning close to hold it up against the stark line on Katsuki’s skin.

“Start there, that’s the dock,” he says, quiet. Then he drags it across, gentle and slow, across the skin of his hand. “Then up, that’s the street we were on, remember? Where you said my phone was a fossil. Wrongly, I should add… then, the bit you chased me down, ‘cause you’re insane, and then the piazza, that’s this square here. Then down all those tiny streets, and then the hill, that’s the bit that goes up here, can you see?”

“I can see,” says Katsuki.

He abruptly yanks his hand away, and coughs into it.

“Right,” he says. “Great. Well done. You remembered the line on the map. That doesn’t prove much, though. I’ll wait until I can see the damn ship before I trust your sense of direction.”

Izuku beams, eyes glittering. “It will be fine! I can do it!”

“Yeah, I bet. You can’t even walk a few feet without tripping up. Saying that – what the fuck was that?”

Deku tilts his head. “Huh? What was what?”

“Where the fuck is your self preservation instinct? Don’t you watch yourself around cliff edges?”

“Oh,” Deku says, flushing a little. “I tend to just go for it. Sorry. Good thing you were here, just in case, huh?”

“Yeah, ‘good thing’. Do I need to be here to follow you ‘round, make sure you don’t dive off cliff edges? Christ.”

“It was fine, Katsuki! But thank you anyway – you moved fast!”

“Hmph,” Katsuki grunts. “S’nothing.”

“No, you did! Thank you!” Deku grins, and then gives him an inquiring look. “You did it before too – on the bike. So, what, is that your quirk?”

Katsuki chokes. “What?”

“Is that your quirk? Super speed, or something?”

“What? No.”

“It’s not?” Deku looks curious. Katsuki bites at his lip.

“No.”

“So – what is your quirk?”

Katsuki opens his mouth – and then shuts it again, clamping it closed.

“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to! I just figured – well, I’ll probably find out eventually, right?”

“Right,” Katsuki nods. Panic claws at him, caught under Deku’s eye.

“Uh – I sweat a chemical. An oil. My hands… everywhere, but my hands.”

Deku is quiet. He blinks, his eyes flicking down toward his hand again. Katsuki looks down too – traces over the unfamiliar stubby, rounded fingers, the lack of distinct scars and callouses over his palms. The unfamiliar layer of dark black hair that sits stark and contrasting against his skin. It’s a hand that looks so different from his own, covered with skin that’s not his, skin that sits atop a hand that doesn’t belong to him – attached to the body of a stranger.

“Interesting,” is all Deku says eventually. Then he smiles, sheepish. “This is the part where you ask me what mine is, right?”

Katsuki swallows and huffs a sharp exhale. “What, I’m that predictable?”

“No,” says Deku. “It’s just what always happens. And then, I’ll have to tell you that I don’t have one. I’m quirkless.”

Katsuki sharply turns to look outward, look anywhere but Deku. “Oh,” is all he says.

“I know, right? Depressing, huh?”

He turns, and eyes Deku’s profile – this time he’s the one turned away, staring blank faced out at the view before them, the distant blue of the water.

“It’s not really,” he manages. He continues, gritting out the words. “Really, you don’t need one.”

Deku turns sharply to face him. “What? It’s easy for you to say that! You’ve got one.”

“Yeah, and you haven’t, and you’re doing fine, aren’t you?”

Deku bites his bottom lip and shrugs.

“I guess.”

“You are,” he says, thinking back to the extensive biography page on The Heroist’s site. “You told me all about your job. You’re doing fine without one. It’s not depressing.”

“Hm,” Deku says with a shrug. Then he stands abruptly, swinging around to face him. He’s grinning.

“We should get back. We’ve almost run out of time to get these returned,” he says, picking up the bike where it’s splayed on the ground and clambering stop it.

“Right,” Katsuki nods, eager to exit this conversation and move on immediately. “I really, really hope you remember the fucking way back, then.”

“I do!” says Izuku. “And if I forget -” he leans forward, grabs onto Katsuki’s hand and holds it up. The sun hits it and lights up the path drawn into the skin. “I’ll just do this, and remember.”

-

Only when they reach the more familiar location of the piazza, does Katsuki relax a bit, and admits that maybe Deku didn’t have a hole in his memory the size of Jupiter and that actually he had memorised the path back to the dock. As he had not forgotten, there was no need for Deku to stop them both, reach over and grab his hand. Katsuki wasn’t sure how helpful that would even be, anyway - wasn’t sure if the inky line on his skin was even the correct route – but it didn’t matter, because Deku led him to the dock with no issues. Katsuki is more than eager to abandon the iris-burning yellow bike, to sit down and eat an actual meal, and even more than eager to order a massive drink of alcohol with it. They end up on the ship, with the evening just starting to settle in through the large windows, sat in the ‘banquet hall’ that Katsuki learns is actually named Il Interdonati. He thinks this is a stupid name, and says so. Unsurprisingly, Izuku does not agree, rolling his eyes as they seat themselves at a table.

Poking at his meal, Deku speaks.

“You know, you’re not actually as much of an asshole as I thought you were.”

Katsuki looks at him flatly. “Oh? I’ll step it up a bit, then.”

“Not what I meant,” Deku snickers. He’s leaning his head on his hand. “Saying that, I have a question.”

“Right.”

“How did you end up here? Why are you here?”

Katsuki furrows his brow and then sighs. “You know, I was thinking that myself. Sat here, with you, eating all these fucking carbs... Christ, what happened?”

Deku laughs, sips at his Pellegrino, and then his expression levels out. “Funny. But, seriously – I'm usually pretty good at figuring people out, but you’re not making it easy. You’re here, but you don’t want to get involved in anything. I have to force you. You’re grumpy doing all of it.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yet here I am, anyway.”

“Exactly! I mean – if you’re going to be here anyway, have you thought about actually, you know, trying to care about getting involved in some stuff?”

Katsuki sets his own drink down, and crosses his arms.

“What stuff? Everything on this ship is either lame as fuck or made for couples. Old people. Old people, trying to liven up their last few dreaded moments on Earth. Relight the fucking fire, or whatever the fuck. All desperately trying get some good bits in before they’re buried and turned into worm food.”

Deku blinks, eyebrows raised. “’Worm food’. Well. That’s a unique take.”

Katsuki sips his drink again. “Besides,” he says, swallowing. “Why the fuck would I wanna waste my fucking time playing bingo or – Christ, shuffleboard, out there with ‘em all. Chattin’ about gardening and unreliable workmen or whatever the fuck it is that they talk about all day fucking long. Ain’t any real point to it.”

“There is a point!” Deku says. “To get to know them, to get them to know you.”

Katsuki snorts. “No. That’s not the point. The reason they do it is to be polite.” The waiter refills his glass, and he nods a thank you with an upward tip of his chin, and then gulps his drink down.

“Spending time talking to each other, just to be polite?” says Deku.

“Mm-hm. Exactly. Because it’s what you do,” he says. Visions of the past, of networking at sponsored, glittery events, spring to mind. Ugh. “What do you do, where do you come from, retelling the same shit about what they want to do with their lives, or what they’ve got left of ‘em, the same old anecdotes from ten years ago that they’ve got saved, for moments in their lives exactly like this. It’s all bullshit – none of them are really listening to each other. They’re all just waiting for when the other one stops talkin’ so they can inject some of their own fucking wisdom into the conversation, and feel good about themselves. Reaffirm to themselves just how fucking great they are.”

“Okay. So – not interested in hanging out with me and Riccardo, tomorrow morning, then?”

Katsuki huffs a dry laugh. “Not interested.”

“Right,” says Deku. He chews and swallows a mouthful. Most of his food is gone. “You didn’t answer my question, though. How did you end up here?”

“I told you. Work.”

“I mean, yeah – you said it was a length of service gift, from work. Right? But it’s a bit of an odd gift. A seniors cruise, on your own?”

Katsuki feels his stomach tighten.

He’s seeing through the clear bullshit.

He sips the alcohol, stalls by letting more and more of it slide down his throat. It burns, and it makes his face screw up. He feels a bit sick when it lands in his stomach, when he flicks his eyes up from the table to see Deku staring at him, his expression innocent, inquiring.

He has no idea Katsuki is lying – he has no idea about any of it.

“Katsuki?” he says.

“Uh,” he licks his lips. “Because I’m an asshole. Obviously.”

“Huh?” Deku’s brow furrows.

Katsuki shakes his head. “My coworkers. My idiot, dumbass fucking coworkers.”

His voice turns into a growl, getting irritated even at the memory. It, along with the alcohol swirling at full speed into his bloodstream, slams into him like a punch.

“They won’t leave. It’s been hours and hours,” Kaminari whines.

He’s stood by the window, inspecting the tightly shut blinds. His hand reaches out slowly, fingers poised to flick open a shutter and peer through – but Kirishima appears out of nowhere, grabbing his hand and yanking it away.

“Don’t even think about it!” he says. As if on cue, the distant, muffled shouts from the street below them increase in volume.

“They’re really pissed off,” Sero says uneasily.

His eyes flick towards Katsuki then, as if even acknowledging it would piss him off. Katsuki ignores him, although there may be some truth to his fear in a few minutes, because their presence alone - all of them, both the shouting freaks outside their agency and his idiot friends who wouldn’t go back to their fucking desks and finish the paperwork Katsuki knows is sitting there – is making his hands curl into fists where he sits at his computer. He allows himself a second to fantasise about uncurling a fist and raising a palm to explode something. Maybe the computer monitor revealing the latest article about him Mina had pulled up. If he aims really carefully, he can probably blow a hole right through the headline itself, the big bold kanji blown into nothing.

“Yeah, they’re not the only ones,” says Mina, huffing and crossing her arms over her chest. She turns to him, her eyes on fire. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you do that?”

She’s addressing him – but he ignores her, just tongues at his cheek.

“Don’t ignore me, Bakugou - this is all your fault!”

“Hey,” says Kirishima. “Let’s not -”

“But it is, Eijiro! How many times have we done this? Sat here and defended him? When’s he going to start dealing with his problems? All of our approval ratings have gone straight down the drain, and it’s his fault!”

“He didn’t mean to,” Kirishima defends him weakly.

“Don’t give me that!” Mina rolls her eyes. “I believed that the first few thousand times – and so did the press! But you need to admit you’ve got a problem! Sero, you agree with me, I don’t know why you’re so quiet!”

Sero cringes. “He does have an anger problem. Sorry,” he turns to face him. Katsuki raises an eyebrow. “You do have an anger problem.”

Mina huffs. “It’s not just that – he’s violent.”

“The reporter deserved it,” Kirishima says. “He shouldn’t have provoked him.”

“It’s part of the job! It happens to all of us. But we all saw the video. You can’t go around hurting reporters,” Mina says. And she’s right – it is, it does, and he can’t.

“The guy deserved it,” he growls.

Mina throws her hands in the air with exasperation. Sero’s face screws up awkwardly. Kaminari cringes.

Kirishima comes to stand next to him, and leans down. He goes to place a hand on his shoulder, then stills when he sees Katsuki’s raging expression. He keeps it safely by his side.

“Bro,” he says, quietly. “It was kind of... not cool.”

Behind him, Mina’s eyebrows raise. Katsuki ignores her and stares up into his eyes, glaring.

“Why did you do it?” Kirishima says.

Katsuki crosses his arms and leans back on his seat.

“You’re acting like I fucking killed someone,” he says. “The guy’s got a burn that’s already healed and a huge pay-out from the agency. And a fuck ton of media attention. That’s why he came up to me. You saw - following me around, wouldn’t stop getting in my face and touching me. Talking pure shit – just trying to piss me off. That’s why I did it. And I’m not sorry – the bastard deserved it, and I’d do it again, even with those freaks outside crying about it.”

Kirishima sighs, his eyes falling shut. He shakes his head and then tries again.

“Right - yeah – but you know you can’t misuse your quirk. On civilians. In public, in front of people, cameras. You have to know that, bro. Right?”

Katsuki glares at him.

“We’ve all wanted to give those shitty reporters what they deserve. We all know that we can’t,” interrupts Mina. “He knows the damage it does. He just doesn’t care.”

“Is that it? You just don’t care?” Kirishima turns back to him.

Katsuki shrugs.

Does he?

“I -” he tries to speak, but it cuts off in his throat, and nothing comes out. Kirishima stares at him.

After a moment he speaks, voice low. “I think you need a break, bro.”

“What? No,” Katsuki spits.

“What do they call it? An extended sabbatical.”

Mina huffs. “He gets a holiday out of it?”

“Not a holiday. A break. To sort himself out. Right?”

“No.”

“No!”

Him and Mina answer simultaneously.

“It might help!” says Kaminari, chiming in out of fucking nowhere. “Think about it – when's the last time you had a break? Maybe you’re just going a little loopy.”

“I am not going fucking ‘loopy’. Fuck you.”

“It happens to the best of us,” Sero grins.

“I am the best of us, and no, it fucking does not.”

“It does! All you need is a week somewhere, calming down. A little resort break. Ooh, a city break.”

“He’ll go away somewhere? What, like rehab? Oh, nevermind, I take it back. I like this idea,” Mina’s eyes are gleaming. “Give the press a chance to calm down, you can sort out your fucking issues. And I don’t have to look at you for a while. Where can we send you off to?”

Katsuki glares at her. “Absolutely not. Get that shitty idea out of your heads, right fucking now.”

Unfortunately, the idea had taken root – and by the end of their lunch hour, The List of Places Bakugou Will Be Exiled To If He Doesn’t Stop Being So F*cking Horrible was devised. It sat on his desk, then it lived in his bin, and then it moved to sit on Mina’s desk, and then on his bosses desk, and then finally, a probationary contract appeared on his. And then he blinked – and he’s sat staring down Izuku Midoriya, with his freckles darkened by the sun, and his own senses loosened by the lull of alcohol, his (not his) skin marked by the path of ink stamped onto him. His drink’s been refilled by the waiter while he’s been caught up in the memory. It burns down his throat when he shoves it down. Deku is watching him. He must be drunk, too. Oh, God. How did he end up here?

“Katsuki?” Deku presses. “You went quiet.”

“Right,” he says. “It was just my coworkers. They don’t - they don’t like how I act at work. Even though half the time, they’re the reason I act that way. And -” he stops himself, “- other stuff. I don’t like really big parts of my job that are really fucking hard to avoid. A lot of it, actually. And – they chose to send me away here ‘cause it was hilarious to them, and I guess they thought it would chill me out. They think I need it, ‘cause I’m so miserable, according to them. Stupid, fucking -”

He cuts himself off by knocking his drink down his throat. Deku looks so sad. It’s sickening.

“You really hate your job, that much?” he says.

Katsuki swallows, and shrugs. “Yes. No. No, I don’t. Not all of it, but parts of it.”

“You don’t enjoy it.”

“No, I do.”

“But you don’t enjoy a lot of it. Do you? What, it didn’t live up to little Katsuki’s standards?” Deku jokes.

Katsuki feels a bit sick, and he swallows roughly. The alcohol is getting to him.

Deku continues, snickering. “With his little company laptop, in his little crib?”

He coughs. “No. Not – it’s not like that.”

“Is there nothing you can do about it?”

“No.”

“Can’t you just get another job, then?”

Katsuki glares. “No.”

Deku furrows his brow, expression challenging. “Why not?”

“I’m not -” Katsuki huffs, and gulps at his drink again. “I’m not – that's not a fucking option.”

“Okay,” Deku tilts his head, and bites at his lip. “Well. Then – your only option is to try and change the things about your job that you don’t like.”

He snorts. “Not gonna happen, nerd.”

“Why?”

He has inward visions of the reporters clamouring after him, touching him, day in day out, all of the time, everywhere he goes. Shoving cameras, microphones, flashes of light straight into his face, into his eyes. Imagines them gone.

“It’s impossible. They’ll never, ever change.”

“Why? Everything can change! Explain it to me.”

“I can’t. You can’t just – you're not listening to me.”

“I am! You just don’t get it – everything can change if you want it to, it just takes work.”

“No. You think I wouldn’t change it if I could? I can’t change the things I don’t like. They’ll be there forever. No point trying. Done. Give up.”

Katsuki finishes off his drink, and then stares into the empty end of his glass. When he looks up, Deku is sitting up straight, staring at him. His expression is hard.

“That’s your problem, you know,” he says, flat.

“Hah?” Katsuki glares, setting down his drink with a thunk. “I don’t have a fucking problem.”

“You’re not even going to try?”

“Try to what? I said – there's no point.”

“Try to make things better for yourself! To make yourself feel better. Happier. Your work is so much of your life. And you said you hate it!” he says.

Katsuki growls. “I’m sick of repeating myself. Listen – there's no point trying. It’s impossible. Got it?”

Deku is glaring at him too, now.

“Is that really what you think? That there’s no point in trying to be happy?”

“If it’s impossible, then yeah!”

He’s met with silence. Katsuki snarls – Deku's expression is hard, stubborn.

“What?”

“That’s a terrible outlook to have!”

He shrugs. God, he wants the waiter to refill his drink. “Well. It’s true.”

“It’s not true. It’s so sad that you think that. That’s what I mean – that's your problem! You’re content to live in your own misery. Even just hearing that from you is making me feel hopeless, and sad, just sitting next to you.”

Katsuki’s fingers curl tight around the glass. Anger alights within him, mixing dangerously with alcohol – he hits Deku with a wild glare.

“Spreading my fucking misery, am I?” he spits.

Deku nods, leaning forward and glaring. “A little bit, yeah! It’s like you don’t want to enjoy yourself, not at work, or here, either! And it does spread to the people around you!”

“You’re the one who wanted me to be here so fucking badly. You were practically on your hands and knees, beggin’ me to spend time with you. Now I’m makin’ you miserable?”

“Yes, you are!”

“Making you feel so hopeless, hah?”

“Yeah! You’re never happy with anything.”

“I am. S’not my fault your everyday life is so fucking boring you get excited looking at the sky.”

“I do! I do get excited about everyday things like the sky – and maybe you’d feel happier if you did, too!”

“Exciting shit excites me.”

“Yeah, right. I can’t see anything exciting you.”

Katsuki glares, feels vaguely hurt. He snarls, disgusted with the feeling, as Deku continues to speak.

“Like, when’s the last time you got excited about anything, at all? I don’t think I’ve seen you smile, make an effort the entire time you’ve been here! Don’t you ever stop to think that things can only get better if you make the effort, if you try not to be so miserable? You just described the other people here as worm food, Katsuki! You’re a pessimist, and a misanthropist, and you don’t need to be. You don’t need to close yourself off from people. You just have to try!”

“If I’m such a bad person, why are you here, then?” Katsuki glares. He eyes Deku’s expression, his nostrils flared with anger, his brow furrowed over blazing eyes. The anger looks out of place on him, like an ill-fitting mask, and it makes Katsuki want to poke and prod, provoke more of it out of him.

He continues. “No one’s forcing you to spend time with me – not like the way you forced me to spend time with you, which I only did so you’d fuck off, remember?”

“You’re right – no one is forcing me! Maybe I will!” Deku huffs.

“Yeah, escape my fucking misery and go sit somewhere else. Maybe with those fucking geriatrics you think are your friends. Or more likely, all by yourself.”

Deku is glaring now, his hands curled into fists.

“Oh, yeah – you don’t like sitting on your own, do you? Must’ve been rough coming here all on your own. Must’ve been why you were begging me to be with you. You wanna know what’s sad? That’s sad.”

Deku stands. The cutlery, glasses on the table crash together noisily when he knocks the table. He leans down and hisses.

“I wasn’t meant to be here on my own – I was meant to come with my mother. You’re the one who’s genuinely by themselves, on their own – your coworkers had to get rid of you! Maybe because you’re so negative, all the time!”

Katsuki scoffs, nostrils flaring as he spits back.

“Your mother, huh? Can’t get much sadder than that. Really had no one else to bring, huh? Must be why you’re desperate for my attention – makes sense now,” he scoffs a taunting laugh. “Izuku, if I’m so negative, bringing you down, then why don’t you stay away from me.”

Deku leans down, and hisses.

“I will – until you’re finished lashing out at me because deep down, you’re the one feeling real bad about the state of your life, and you know I’m right.”

The seat across from him is empty.

Katsuki finishes his drink, orders another one, and then another, and then another. Then he stumbles through the labyrinth of corridors and into his cabin, falls into his bed.

He scrubs a weary hand over his face. His eyes catch on the line drawn onto his hand; the black path that had led them through mountains, that Izuku had drawn so carefully, inked deep onto unfamiliar skin - skin that didn’t belong to him.

His eyes catch on it and stay there, and then he forces them shut.

Chapter Text

Katsuki sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps more. He rouses in disturbed intervals, eyes bleary and catching on a pale strip of light as it sluggishly drags its way across the ceiling. He groans at it and flips himself over, turning his back on it and pulling the covers over his head until everything is black. He could probably stay here all day. Actually, he could probably stay here for the next few days, until he gets to leave. Why hasn’t he considered this before? In fact, why hasn’t he considered doing this, in his everyday life? As he’s ripped into consciousness, he registers the pounding headache that aches behind his eyelids, on his browbone. It gets worse as he’s hit with the events of the night before – the drinking, the arguing...

He sits up with a groan, and drags a hand over his face. Shoves the bedcovers away from him and peers across the empty room. His headache pangs. He considers fucking the day off altogether and throwing himself back down, burying himself underneath the covers again and turning everything to black. Everyone else, on this ship and beyond, would be better off for it, considering all the misery he leaves all over the place, everywhere he fucking goes. He leans his head in his hand, head aching, uncomfortable, distressed.

He showers only to feel less like death. He does not look in the mirror.

When he’s out, he orders a coffee over the room service phone (which is a truly delightful experience, really) and slouches around on the balcony of his cabin, wrecking his already horrific posture. He had considered leaving to go and eat where they had the day prior, but decided against it, reminding himself that he was nothing but a misery, and venturing outward would only end in fuck-ups. As usual. He’s everything Deku accused him of being – and this is why he’s right to be in here, alone.

Try to come back more stable than when you left, alright?

Try to mellow out, will you?

He snorts mockingly. Stable, mellow, are not the words. He rubs a hand over his eyes. Asshole, is the word. He glares out at the distant waves. On some level, Katsuki was aware of this, and had always decided that it mattered little. People took him for how he was, and nobody else mattered. His PR team helped soften his image, around the edges – Katsuki knows there’s a whole host of people sat in his agency probably at that very moment, carefully crafting up some sort of scheme to get him to look like less of a dick than he is.

He has no one to do this for him, now.

He directs more angry glares at the horizon, and thinks of the night before. Deku, sat before him, putting up with him. Trying to get him to actually enjoy himself. He remembers what he’d said. What Deku had said.

There’s a knock at his door. He pulls himself to his feet with a groan and answers it, giving another shitty, heavily-accented thank you to the staff when they hand over a tray of coffee.

He takes it and closes the door with a kick of his foot. Then he dumps the tray on the table by his bed, and pokes at it, pouring out some coffee from the pot into the mug. It sends the distinct smell of coffee burning into his nose, and it’s rich and pleasurable, and he feels like he doesn’t deserve it. He stands and sips at it, feeling it burn down the skin of his throat, slightly painful, and he feels like he does deserve that.

As he drinks, his eyes land on his bedside table and what else is sat on top of it. A little holder with a bunch of papers in it, stacked upright and colourful. A few that stick out are leaflets written in Japanese. He guesses he’s supposed to have looked at these already - he’d written off going anywhere near them only after hearing the woman at the check-in call them goodies. He suppresses a shudder at the memory – but his attention is snagged by one word, calling out to him from the stack of paper: the word map.

Katsuki glares at it. He sips his coffee, and then sips it more, glares harder, then slams his coffee down onto the table with a heavy thunk and snatches out the paper. He flicks through the glossy pages until he finds the one he wants. Double checks it is the right one, and then rips open the drawer, fishes a hand inside and, ah – a pen, perfect. He sits down heavily on the bed, seats the paper on his lap and unfolds it. After wrestling with the suddenly oversized map and finally finagling the thing into a suitable position, he bends over it and uncaps the pen, shoving the lid onto the end of it. Then he peers down at the tiny streets of the map. There it is – the dock, the street, the piazza, the hills… and traces over it with the pen, drawing a huge black line that winds through the streets he wants it to go through. It’s hard – his thigh actually is not a very easy place to draw on, and half the time the pen prefers to crease the paper rather than mark it – but then it’s done. He chucks away the pen carelessly, folds up the map with an embarrassing amount of effort, then downs the rest of the now safe-to-drink coffee before yanking open the door and throwing himself out of it. He travels through the labyrinth of corridors, before he can think too much and inevitably change his mind.

Automatically his feet drag him to where they’d eaten breakfast the day before. He ignores the attendant at the door who asks him to present his GoldPass – just glares at him, and then barges his way inside. His eyes scan over the room, wildly, this way and that – brown, blonde, black, red hair, none of them right, none of them green. He growls and trudges further in, past the queue for the fucking toast grill machine, past all the old people doing their crosswords and their sudoku, edges past every packed, bustling table halfway through their breakfasts. And then stops.

Deku looks up from his food, fork in hand, half-way through a chew. He sees him stood there, pauses his chewing, and then swallows. His face is blank.

Katsuki holds out the map. “Here,” he growls.

Deku blinks, looking down at it, and then back up.

“What -”

“It’s – the stupid fucking map you lost.”

Deku drops his fork and leans back on his seat, eyebrows raised. He looks up at him, then down again, then reaches out a hand, moving slowly, and takes the map.

Katsuki deflates, sagging. He crosses his arms over his chest and feels a flicker of satisfaction – he nods decisively, as if to say there.

But Deku is still looking at him. Obviously, he needs it explained. Katsuki pulls out the chair opposite Deku, ignores the huff Deku gives him, sits down, then starts speaking.

“First of all – the map, ‘cause you lost it and you said you wanted to save it. Keep it. It’s not the exact same one, obviously. Second – you said a lot of shit, and some of it was wrong, but some of it was – not. Not wrong.”

“‘Not wrong’?” says Deku, slow.

“Hah?”

“You can say it, you know.”

Katsuki glares. “Fine. Some of it was – was right.”

“What, exactly?” Deku is smirking.

Katsuki glares harder.

He clears his throat. “Some of it was right. That - I am negative, sometimes, and -”

“A bit?”

“F – right, a lot. Negative a lot of the time. And -”

“And you’re a pessimist.”

“I-” he tongues at his cheek. “Yes. I’m pessimistic. And, I -”

“And you’re a misanthrope.”

Katsuki’s fists curl. “Yes. Yeah – are you gonna keep fucking interrupting?”

Deku’s eyes are gleaming and his face is lit up in a smirk.

“Depends. Is this going anywhere good?”

“Well, it could if you’d let it.”

“Well, go on then.” Deku sips at his stupid orange juice, looks at him over the top of it, then swallows and licks at his bottom lip. “Take it somewhere good.”

Katsuki grits his teeth in his mouth.

“A pessimist. A misanthrope. A general miserable bastard of the worst kind. The sort to lash out over nothing and push people way on purpose. There? S’that what you wanted to hear, hah?”

Deku crosses his arms on the table and leans forward on them, looking pleased. “Yes. But keep going, I’m enjoying watching you squirm.”

He growls.

“I lashed out. Not good. S…”

Deku blinks, leant forward, eyebrows raised.

“S…? Go on. Say it. Unless you think you’ll hurt yourself. Actually, do it anyway.”

“Sorry,” he spits. Then leans back, arms crossed. Once it’s out, it gets easier. “Sorry.”

“You were cruel,” says Izuku.

“Yes. Sorry.”

“And mean. There was no need.”

“Yes. No. Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

Katsuki is the one blinking in confusion. “What? Why?”

Deku sips at his orange juice again. “I was rude, too. I wasn’t – I could have said what I wanted to say better.”

“But you were right.”

Deku smirks. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Katsuki leans over and steals his orange juice, taking a sip.

“But – really,” says Deku. “You said you came here because your work sent you, and you were clear about how you felt about it from the beginning, and I was still rude. And – I guess you’re right, it is a bit sad to go on holiday with your mother, at our age, now -”

“No,” Katsuki tries to interrupt him, but Deku keeps talking, already tumbling into a mumbling rant.

“It’s not like I didn’t have other people to go with. But I love her, and she bought the tickets for us, to go together, you know? It felt kinda wrong to take someone else. And they were non-refundable. We thought we’d be able to go together, to spend the time together. We saved up for ages and ages. But she’s taken a turn for the worse this year and she can’t really leave the house anymore, let alone go abroad. ‘Cause she’s so weak. I didn’t want to go without her but she didn’t want me to sit at home wasting the tickets... So, here I am. And - I don’t get much time off work - I’m busy, like, 6 days a week, so, I’m trying to make the most of everything I’m doing here, because it’s important to make the most of it, you know? For her, because she can’t be here and she’d want me to, but also because pretty soon, I’ll be sat behind a desk, writing about people I admire, doing the job I always dreamt of doing. Not that I don’t enjoy my job...”

Katsuki’s mouth has fallen open. “What?”

“... I can’t complain, really... I get to think about Pro-Heroes all the time. The way things are, I wouldn’t want to do anything else…”

“D - Izuku, what? Your mom’s not well?”

“...and what else could I do, anyway? No, I like my job. I just don’t like -”

“Izuku!” Katsuki growls. “Answer me, nerd! Your mom isn’t well?”

Deku blinks. “Ah, no! Well, she’s okay! She’s doing better than she was, at least!”

“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

This time it comes out easily. Deku shrugs and smiles.

“Why’re you sorry? It’s not your fault! And she’s fine. She texted me just this morning, when we had signal. See?”

“I’m still sorry,” he says, as Deku pulls up his phone and shoves the screen into his face. On it are his mom’s messages. She’d sent him a picture of her dinner with a million emojis underneath. It looks like gyudon. There are a lot of multi-coloured hearts.

“Oh,” he repeats.

“She’s fine. But – she was really excited to come, and she couldn’t. So, I’m trying to make the best of it, and enjoy myself, ‘cause that’s what she wanted me to do.”

Katsuki nods. “That makes sense.”

Then Deku’s eyes sparkle. “It does!”

“So, you’re making the best of it. For her. And for yourself, because you work a lot. That’s good.”

“Now you’re getting it,” his eyes flash, and he tips his head forward, smiling. Something in Katsuki’s stomach squeezes and makes him glare.

“Getting what, nerd?”

“If I can make the best of it, so can you. Right?”

Katsuki is quiet. Damn nerd.

“If I can enjoy myself even without my mom here, you can enjoy yourself too. Right?”

He grits his teeth in his mouth. Deku looks smug.

“I bet you can! Now you know you’re just not letting yourself have a good time, you can actually have one,” Deku says. “With me! We have to stick together now, right? It’s not like either of us have anyone else here to hang out with.”

“You have your...” Katsuki stops himself. “...people.”

“Yeah, and they’re nice, but I’d rather spend time with you!”

Katsuki glares. Feels a bit like his stomach has been sucked into a vacuum.

“Alright, nerd,” he says.

“I think you’ll have a better time than you thought! I’m not going anywhere now, I gotta see that! You’re stuck with me! Sorry!”

Deku is grinning. He steals back his orange juice and finishes it. Katsuki crosses his arms and looks anywhere else but him, fears that smile being burned into his irises with the sheer blinding strength of it. He keeps his eyes averted as Deku unfolds and gushes over the new map he’d given him, more than happily noticing the line drawn in pen in the space it had been on the lost map, with a huge sparkling grin – but this aversion of looking anywhere near him has more to do with how hot Katsuki’s face feels, than anything else. Eventually he gives in, watches him slowly finish his food and steals some off his plate when the impulse strikes.

By the time Deku has finished eating, Katsuki has resigned himself to Deku being entirely attached to him. He’s unshakeable. Deku sticks as close to him as a shadow to a body. He always has – a million years ago, as children, as teenagers, and naturally now, of course, as adults. Katsuki thinks he’s had some variation of the feelings he’s having now since he was old enough to process them at all; feelings of noticing Deku, as constant and reliable as the passage of the years that went by them, stood at his side, more than eager to stay there whether he wanted him there or not. As certain as he is that the Earth will continue to twist around the light of the Sun, that the ocean in the half-moon bay will reach again and again toward the white bed of the shore, that the day will change and empty into an afternoon and then a night, he is certain that Deku will follow him, as he’s always done.

-

Deku does not drag him to the on-board spa – he invites him, and Katsuki says yes. He launches himself to the fourth deck and Katsuki follows closely, eventually stopping when they reach the place. Deku is practically vibrating beside him (which is ironic, considering a spa is there to calm you down, not rile you up), wide, ecstatic eyes taking in all the place has to offer: an interior of natural stone, precious wood and rich, dark mosaics. Tucked in an out of the way part of the ship, it’s quiet and still and a welcome change to the bustle of the breakfast room they’d vacated.

The woman at the counter greets them in English. She can’t speak Japanese. Deku is much too occupied with his excitement over the leafy plants in the room to pay attention to what he’s being booked in for, so Katsuki tries his best to book them in for something despite the language barrier.

He leans over the clean white counter and watches the woman flick through a logging system on the computer monitor, with the calendar showing tiny rows and columns full of names, some highlighted, some crossed out. She points out a couple of the empty boxes, and Katsuki says yes, already using up a third of his English vocabulary with this word alone. He tells her both of their names, though, guessing she’ll need that, and he’s right: the boxes are no longer empty. She grins and says something else. He must look confused, because she giggles, leaning in toward him over the counter, eyes sparkling behind thick black mascara. She speaks again. Her tone is light.

Deku decides to appear at this moment, materialising suddenly at his side. Oddly, his body is tense, the line of his spine rigid in his back. Katsuki lets him take over. The woman’s expression dulls slightly.

He finishes off booking them in for a few hours, in tense English, and then tugs Katsuki away from the counter so he can explain what’s on offer: full body massages, mud baths, hot stone massages, facials, wraps and scrubs, aromatherapy. Katsuki lets Deku choose, but steps forward when the time to pay arrives, and presses his card against the reader before Deku can protest. Katsuki is not sure what motivates him to do it; likely guilt, although not entirely, he realises, as Deku breaks into a huge grin and grips his arm happily.

His face feels hot. He tears his eyes away and peers to his right. There’s a hair salon; the walls are lined with glossy, expensive looking bottles. Katsuki’s sure most are unneeded gimmicks created purely for profit… but has to admit they do look nice arranged like that, if he had to. To his left there’s a narrow corridor full of doors made of cloudy glass. Through one of them, he can see a blurry, shifting outline of a figure leant over someone lying flat on their front, hands dragging slowly over skin. His immediate instinct is to flinch at the idea of a stranger touching him so intimately… but begrudgingly admits to himself that maybe, maybe he’s not seventeen anymore and his back could do with a bit of… whatever Deku had said the massage does. Increases blood flow and removes metabolic waste. What a fucking nerd.

Deku points toward incomprehensible English signs and pulls him by the arm toward a room he discovers is the locker room. Katsuki firmly separates them and steadfastly does not think about anything but changing out of everything but his boxers and into the robe provided, shoving all of his clothes into a locker with a bang of the door. Deku appears around the corner and smiles – he’s also enrobed, and Katsuki won’t quite let his eyes register much else than vague considerations of ‘green hair’, ’white towel’ and ‘freckled skin’ before he growls out, “What are we fucking doing, then?”.

It leads Deku to grin and direct him out of the locker room. Out of the space, there’s more for Katsuki’s brain to think about, thank God; he follows him through to a room that hits him with hot, humid air, pleasantly scented. It’s full of people laying around on sofas, like lazy seals, Katsuki thinks. A room full of them, bodies unmoving, wet and rosy. His eyes catch on the crystal-like glint of the tiles on the walls, catching his eye as they pass, quick.

Deku takes him past the entryway to the sauna, outright tropical in temperature, past a private bathing area full of whirring splashing jets in tiny blue pools. He finally stops at another humid, couch-filled room, pulling at a sliding door and stepping in. Katsuki follows, walking into a wall of steam that soaks him in an instant. The room is empty but the two of them and the hulking view of the ocean through the window glass.

“She said to wait in here, for the masseuses. That’s a funny word to pluralise, don’t you think?”

Deku is relaxed, body moving loosely as he lays back, sprawling on the seat. He stares out at the waves of the ocean. Katsuki tears his eyes away and looks at them too, before giving in and settling down onto the couch too with a sigh. The sea and the sky meet distantly on the horizon. He can barely tell them apart.

It’s quiet. There’s a distinct, clean aroma in the air, and at intervals Katsuki can hear echoes bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, the clunking of pipes, the distant whirr of the ship. Underneath them is Deku’s soft breaths beside him, the muted ruffle of the robe with every inhale, every exhale. Katsuki can see his legs outstretched before them, delicately crossed at the ankle. In his peripheral vision, Deku is leant back, eyes fixed on the ocean, smiling absently. The robe is crossed around his middle but there’s a tiny bit of Deku’s chest revealed, leading down from his neck. His skin is pale and shiny.

He feels the urge to move, an odd energy building inside him. His leg jitters and shakes. He bites at his lip. He stares down at the fading pen on his hand, back up at the far, never-ending ocean. Closes his eyes and listens to Deku’s breathing.

A woman enters the room and calls out his name. He shoots to his feet.

She can speak Japanese, thank fuck, and he leaves the room with her. She takes him to a small room like the ones they’d passed before and instructs him to remove the robe and lay down. He does. She starts touching him. The room is hot and humid, but not the kind of heat that burns. Katsuki could’ve stayed in there for hours. He closes his eyes. It feels good. The sound of her hands running over the oiled planes of his skin reminds him of Deku’s breathing. In and out, with every movement of his chest, with every movement of her hands, gentle, over and over.

She speaks, quiet, above him. “You’re holding a lot of tension,” she says.

-

The sauna is next. Deku changes into just a towel and ties it around his waist. The immediate relaxing effects of the massage evaporate; instantly Katsuki’s back is bunched up, rigid like the decorative fake fucking rocks around the room, up against the hard wood of the sauna’s seats.

“Are you gonna change into a towel, too?” Deku asks from next to him.

Katsuki glares. “No.”

It’s just them, so Deku chatters, as usual. He even kicks his legs. His heels make dull, rhythmic banging sounds as they whack against the wood. It makes him want to bite something.

“I’m definitely gonna take better care of the map, now,” he says. “I won’t let it go missing again.”

“Mm,” grunts Katsuki. In the corner of his eye, Deku is leant back on his arms, hands holding him up behind him. He’s sweating. The skin over the slight swell of bicep muscle gleams with light whenever he tenses, or shifts with every kick of his legs. “Yeah. I don’t have another one, so your dumb ass better not lose this one, too,” he continues.

“I won’t lose it!” Deku squawks. “This one is even more worth keeping, now.”

Katsuki does not ask why. Just rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Where is it now, then? Where did you put it?”

“In my locker, obviously. Do you think I’d take it in here, so it’d get all soggy and ruined? I thought I was supposed to be a nerd,” Deku snickers and knocks into him. Katsuki huffs.

“No. Just thought you’d wanna keep it with you, considering how likely you are to lose it again. Although thinking about it that didn’t help you last time.”

“It’s not likely,” Deku pouts. “I’m gonna take care of it. I appreciate it.”

Katsuki keeps his eyes fixed on the floor.

“S’not that deep. If you asked any one of these people, they’d probably give you one.”

“I know that,” says Deku. “It’s not the object itself, it’s the apology.”

He sniffs.

“Whatever,” he says, and crosses his arms, leaning back. “Can you shut the fuck up? I’m actually trying to relax.”

“Aw! And here I was thinking you’d changed and were gonna be nice to me now.”

He can hear the joking pout in his voice.

“That’s your own damn fault for being delusional.”

To his credit, Deku does keep quiet, and the two of them remain that way for a blissful few minutes. Katsuki cracks an eye open and glances to his right, where Deku sits. he’s leant back, breathing heavy in and out with his eyes shut. He’s covered in sweat, all over his body, his arms and legs. The humidity is getting in his hair too, perspiration making it dense and damp and dark, curling where it ends up plastered against his slick forehead.

It slips out before he can stop it. He hadn’t even realised it was on his mind.

“You said your mom was doing okay,” he says. Deku blinks to attention and looks over at him. He keeps talking.

“Is she, really?”

“Huh?” says Deku. Katsuki meets his eyes, properly, and watches Deku avert his, stare down at the floor instead.

“Yeah! She is.”

He feels vaguely like he’s digging himself into a hole but can’t exactly stop now. They are both covered in his verbal dirt. Not exactly relaxing. Well done, dumbass. He grits his teeth in his mouth and forces himself to talk around the dirt.

“Really?”

Deku looks up at him.

“’Cause I’m pretty sure no one can relax with all that shit you talked about, stuck in their head.”

Katsuki looks back at him. Deku swallows.

“So, you should – get it – vent it out. Word vomit or whatever.”

“‘Vomit’?” Deku snickers.

“You know what I mean, nerd. I’m – fucking – trying, to -”

Deku is laughing. “I get it. Do you mind, though?”

“Idiot. I wouldn’t have said if I did, would I? Tch.”

“Right,” Deku says. He’s biting at his lip.

Inko had slipped and fallen down the stairs in their apartment complex. Katsuki can remember what the place looked like, clear in his head in full technicolour – when you stood outside and looked up, you could see rows of colourful laundry that, hung up on balconies, blew back and forth in the wind. The grey concrete exterior was rough to the touch, and inside the tiled floors squeaked when you ran fast on them. The two of them often did, when the lights in the ceiling flickered and died at night and Deku (not him, obviously) got scared of the dark. Katsuki remembers the letter boxes they’d lift and let crash back down to annoy the neighbours. The identical wooden apartment doors with the silver door numbers, the nameplates. The cold inside staircase that led up to Deku’s apartment. He feels his throat move with an inadvertent swallow.

It was run down, then, and that was decades ago – how did it look now?

Katsuki isn’t fucking surprised. He would’ve taken the housing association to court, if it was his mother, and if it was a private landlord, go and… speak to them, himself.

“She’s not too bad, really,” says Deku. His face is pinched. “She can move fine now, almost all of the time. With painkillers. Sometimes her back gets quite bad, and she has to stay in bed and I go and bring her stuff. But that’s happening less often now. It’s just her head…”

“You don’t have to -”

“She just gets memory problems. Doesn’t do well remembering stuff, you know? I have to write it all down for her and set reminders on her phone and things. She still doesn’t remember, sometimes. And when she loses her phone, that’s the worst…”

Deku is talking fast. “It wasn’t the part of the brain that deals with speech, so we can still talk fine. I was so glad. It’s just memory and mood things. She gets confused and angry. It feels wrong to complain, when I know it could’ve been worse. The stairs in our complex - they’re pretty much concrete, as hard as rock.”

I know. It’s on the very tip of his tongue. He barely keeps from blurting it out.

“So when Ms. Hakamura called me – that’s one of our neighbours,” I know. I remember. “- well, you can imagine how I felt,” Deku says.

But then, miraculously, he smiles - it’s wobbly, but it’s there.

“For a while, it was scary. She didn’t wake up for a few days. But – she’s doing better than she was. I know she’s gonna start to really get better. And it’s good! I know she can work past the things she struggles with. I know it!”

Katsuki hears his own thoughts, his past recollections of Deku, appear and reverberate through his head.

Relentless, endless fucking optimism. The same joyful optimism he always had.

“She will,” Katsuki tries. And then his stomach squeezes again, uncomfortable and hot, and he shoves his shoulder into Deku’s side forcefully, as if to expel the feeling. Deku splutters and laughs, not expecting the attack, and then shoves him back.

When Katsuki is satisfied with the assertion that he’s able to shove Deku harder than Deku can shove him, he stills. He gives him one more satisfied insult, crosses his arms and leans back again with a smirk. Deku quietens, and with his eyes closed, his body hot under the robe and the room quiet, Katsuki finally, finally allows feelings of relaxation to appear, to settle themselves on his back, to relieve the tension in his muscles.

He doesn’t know how long they sit in there, silent and breathing, warm and comfortable. When he cracks an eye open, Deku is laid back against the precious wood, skin glimmering, expression clear. A small smile plays on his features, mouth just that tiny bit upturned. His hair is shiny, a dark, wet green. Oddly, Katsuki’s fingers twitch. He wants to tug at the curls, wonders if they would bounce back into place, or lay wet and straight against Deku’s forehead.

The skin there is comparatively un-freckled, next to the rest of him. Katsuki’s gaze wanders – from the top of his head down his face, onto his neck. His shoulders are impressively built. The skin is pale, almost fragile. There aren’t any scars or blemishes. Katsuki bets if he leant forward and pressed his nails down into it, it would blot up a flaming red or pink, light up in thin, flaming welts. His eyes flick to look down at his, not his, arms. They’re just as stubby, just as scarred, just as covered in a generous coating of dark, thick hair – but they’re getting more familiar to him now, with every day that passes on this fucking ship. He blankly eyes the deep scars of unknown origin, then the rapidly fading black ink on his, not his, hand. Then he closes his eyes, and doesn’t let himself open them again until Deku is poking at him, whispering that it’s over, their time is up.

-

Deku disappears into a changing room and then reappears, fully clothed this time, looking sprightly and refreshed. As they leave, Katsuki catches his eyes lingering on the wall of pretty, neatly arranged bottles.

“What are you looking at?” says Katsuki, as they wait for the woman at the counter to check them out on their (slow as fuck) system. Deku clicks his tongue and tilts his head. His eyes are running furiously over each of the bottles.

“I’m trying to figure out which one I’d get,” he says.

“What?” Katsuki turns and regards the bottles with renewed interest. “Why?” he says. He smirks, knocking into Izuku’s shoulder again. “You lookin’ to do yourself up, hah?”

Deku flushes and rolls his eyes, smiling. He knocks back into him. Katsuki feels himself grin.

“I get it. You wanna get yourself all dolled up. Nothin’ wrong with that, Izuku.”

Deku laughs, approaching the bottles. He reaches up a hand and holds it out, fingers barely brushing against the glossy surfaces of them. In a row: pale pink, cream, beige, white, coconut, honey, milk. His hands linger, suspended in the air. Deku turns to look at him, looking away from the shelf, and his hand falls back down to his side.

“Not for me!” he says. “For my mom.”

“Could’a fooled me,” Katsuki mutters quietly. He moves closer, hands shoved in his pockets, and leans forward to glare at the bottles. “So, what’re you gonna get her?”

“Oh, I can’t,” Deku gives an embarrassed smile. He’s still flushed. It goes all over his freckles.

Katsuki raises an eyebrow. He watches him fish a hand into his pocket and get out his fossil phone. He holds it up to the shelf. The little shutter noise of the camera goes off as Deku points it in the direction of one of the bottles. Then the woman at the desk says something in English behind them, and Deku is instantly distracted, turning to respond with a bright smile. He pockets his phone and darts off out of view. Behind him, he can hear as Deku starts to chatter in English, can hear his bright laughter.

Katsuki eyes the bottles, glaring hotly – some are tall and long, some are squished like little tubs, but all of them reek of quality, of luxury. It’s practically rolling off them in waves. He thinks his mom probably has some of them at home. Stupid fancy Italian designer shit, he’d probably thought at the time, before being yelled at for using too much of it, smearing great globs of it on his hair. You’ve used half the fucking thing, his mom had yelled, that’s, like, 8000 yen you’ve just used, brat! And your hair still looks the same! Katsuki snickers at the memory, before the faint amusement disappears, eyes lingering over the price. They’re very expensive. Ludicrously so. He’s not surprised Deku can’t afford any of them.

Someone grabs him on the shoulder. He turns wildly, face twisting into a rabid snarl, but Deku’s bright smile up at him dulls it, and he deflates.

“Come on!” he says. “I booked us in for something. You’re gonna love it.”

*

The ‘something’ turns out to be a fucking cooking class.

“I don’t need a class,” Katsuki had complained. Deku had grabbed onto his arm and shook him, grinning ear to ear.

“I can’t wait,” babbles Deku. “You follow their teaching, in a pair, and then you eat what you made. I saw pictures, it looked so nice, and they set up the dining area all nice, too.”

“Hm. What’s wrong with where we ate before?”

Deku shoves into his side, eyes scrunching up with his laughter. “I seem to remember you grumbling there, too.”

Katsuki glares down at him. “I do not grumble, nerd.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No.”

“You do. You grouch. You grouse, even.”

“Fuck you. Just get in your fucking cooking class, nerd. I’m not helping you when you fuck it up.”

Katsuki does help him when he fucks it up. They’re making pasta from scratch. Unfortunately, this is a quite delicate process which involves a very stern Cordon Blu chef staring down Izuku’s neck to the extent he turns scarlet and, when directed to crack an egg in the well Katsuki’s done a great fucking job making, actually, he cracks the egg onto the floor, which would be bad enough without him then slipping onto his arse on the yolk, like an idiot. Which would be bad enough, if he didn’t pull down a countertop of pans down with him, resulting in an ear-shattering crash that makes the chef at the front of the room stop mid-pasta rant. The very angry Cordon Blu chef screams down Izuku’s neck to the extent where Katsuki is forced to step in (read: drag the now-eggy idiot out of the room and back to the bar, where Izuku doesn’t pull his face from his hands for the time it takes Katsuki to down three sorely-needed margaritas, then order dinner, because they never actually ate because Izuku is such an idiot.)

“I’m never going to his restaurant,” said Midoriya with a pout and a sip of his Woo Woo.

“Oh, yeah. Shame, ‘cause I’m sure you were really plannin’ on that.”

“Probably bad anyway.”

“Yeah. Two Michelin stars – awful.”

Midoriya nods. Then he laughs. It spurts air into his straw, which spurts Woo Woo into his green hair.

-

Later, when they’d finished commiserating and eating pasta that they’d very much not made themselves, Deku scurries off to his deck to go to sleep. Katsuki lies about heading back to his and instead winds his way through the corridors and retraces his steps, heading in the direction of the spa.

This late and in this end of the ship, there’s a lot less people hanging around, and Katsuki prays he’s not left it too late, that they’ll still be open. He rushes inside when he spots it. The Japanese woman who’d massaged him earlier is there, at the counter.

“We’re just closing, sir,” she says when he bursts into the spa, his chest heaving with heavy breaths, body annoyingly unused to the stamina Katsuki remembers having.

“It’s -” he says, inhaling, exhaling. Stupid, shitty fucking body. “I’m not – I don’t want any treatments, I wanna buy something.”

The woman stands, brightening with a polite, hospitable smile on her face.

“Of course,” she says, and then she takes him over to the displays. Katsuki spends a good while standing there listening to her talk about what they’ve got lined up on the walls. The woman explains patiently, holding up several different bottles, serums, lotions in his direction: the formula improves dry, damaged hair. Restores vitality. Youthful restoration. Bio-restorative complex, collagen, biotin, nourishing the cuticle, Mediterranean extract, rejuvenating the follicle…

“Yeah, okay,” he eventually snaps. “Thanks. But I’m looking for something specific.” 

“Of course,” she says, nodding. “What was it you were looking for?”

He peers at the wall. Points at one of the bottles. “I think it was that one.”

The assistant grabs it. “This one?”

Katsuki takes it off her and eyes it, turning it round in his hand. “Yeah. Maybe.”

She watches him. “Are you sure?”

Is he sure? Was it this one?

“Uh. Wait, maybe that one – that, yeah.”

He studies this one, too, turning it around and around, reading the back. He comes up with a blank.

“Maybe this one?”

The woman hands him another, and he balances the other two on his arm, crushed against his chest.

“Maybe,” he says, suddenly unsure. There are just so fucking many. He doesn’t want to get the wrong one. Deku had scanned the entire wall, had singled one out. Which one was it?

Katsuki stresses. The bottles are very heavy in his arms as they start adding up with every one she hands him, every one he considers, one after the other. Eventually, she hands him a basket to hold them in, and starts asking him questions about what specific one he wants, becoming progressively insistent. He tells her his friend had pointed one out, but he’d forgotten.

“I’m sure he’d appreciate any one of them,” she says.

Katsuki huffs. “He really only wanted the one.”

He stares down into the basket. The woman is starting to look impatient, the ticking of her watch seeming suddenly loud and tangible between them. Katsuki huffs and shrugs.

“I’ll just take this,” he says, hiking the basket up onto the counter with a clunk of the rolling bottles inside. Her eyebrows shoot up, but she doesn’t say anything, likely not willing to jog him into regretting the huge sale before it’s even done. He just pays. He doesn’t bother to check the receipt, but he spots three figures out of the corner of his eye. Whatever, he thinks, shoving it in his pocket without bothering to read it, knowing that whatever’s in there, Deku will like one of them. That Inko will. Hopefully. Probably, right? Definitely.