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It starts when random mob characters start shouting "Dynamight! Drop the bombs!" at him when he's on patrol.
Katsuki has no idea what they're even fucking demanding that he do, but it's not like he's ever given a shit about whatever the background nobodies think they can demand he do anyway.
Ignoring it doesn't make it stop, is the thing. Usually, if he just ignores those first pitiful attempts to get a rise out of him, they fade away soon enough. With this, it's like the mobs just only get more enthusiastic about it with time.
"Wow, Kacchan," Deku says, when Katsuki's kicked up on their couch and bitching to him about it. "That's so weird. Just, so-- so weird. People sure are completely inexplicable!" He doesn't look up from where he's messing around on his phone.
Katsuki is far too mature to do something juvenile like whine 'pay attention to me', so instead he flings Deku's special edition microbead All Might pillow at the nerd's head and yells "Are you EVEN fucking LISTENING."
Deku catches it one-handedly without looking up, so at least he's paying that much attention. "Sorry, Kacchan," he says, "I was just-- checking up on ChikTak."
"Fucking ChikTak," Katsuki groans, leaning back and dropping his head onto the sofa cushions. "I don't get why everyone's so obsessed with that shit."
"I guess it's just inexplicable, Kacchan," Deku says, and shrugs his shoulders jerkily before he shuts off his phone. "Totally inexplicable."
Then it's when a reporter manages to corner him while he's doing disaster cleanup. Katsuki and the press have been in a steadily escalating war of attrition since even before he'd launched his hero career, and he's pretty fucking pissed at how many of them have stepped up their entrapment tactics recently.
Her perfume was already way too much and it doesn't get any better when she shoves herself and her microphone even further into his space and gives him a well-practiced plastic smile.
"Dynamight!" she trills, having caught him mid-arrangement of a pile of debris into something he could blow in one go. "Let's hear some words for our viewers at home!"
He lifts his head, tamping down on the reflexive urge to snarl at both the reporter and the camera. "What," he snaps, because he'd agreed with his publicist he'd stop with the snarling at the vapid lifestyle motherfuckers who never have anything to ask about the actual damn work he does. That doesn't mean he has to be welcoming about it.
The woman bulldozes on with the peppy attitude that actually made these kinds of morning show talking heads annoyingly resilient. "The cut of your costume made you a star from the start, but that famous chest of yours has been all over the internet lately. What do you have to say about all the ChikTak attention your most impressive assets have been getting?" She waggles her eyebrows at the camera.
Katsuki blankfacedly stares at her, her camera operator, and then her again. "Half of the utility of my quirk is about stabilizing myself against the recoil," he says flatly, wondering if he should be switching to less complicated words like when he talks to a small child. "I train for the best possible muscle capacity to account for it."
"With all the benefits," the reporter says, turning to the camera and winking.
Katsuki crosses his arms over his chest, tilting his jaw up. "I get every one of them," he says. "Don't ever expect anything less from me."
The reporter pops her hand over her mouth. "Oh my."
"Damn right," Katsuki says.
He brings it up to Deku over the dishes that night. "The fuck does that even mean, famous chest," Katsuki grumbles as he shakes the water off his dish gloves and hands Deku the next plate to be dried.
"I bet it's your workout routine, Kacchan!" Deku says, scrubbing his dish towel over the plate hurriedly enough that if it hadn't already been extensively quirk-proofed it'd definitely crack. "It's just so comprehensive!"
Next time it's Ponytail who seeks him out.
They haven't ever really run in the same circles, hero work and social life both. Still, she approaches him two days later, when they're both off duty.
She gives him a small list of contact information. "It's a private support group," Ponytail says, using both of her hands to gently close his own around the card she'd just handed to him. "It's not often we have a man in this sort of… situation, but we welcome all types, and we all know what you're going through."
She's so sincere about it, warm with quiet encouragement. The confusion over where the hell this is even coming from throws Katsuki off long enough he doesn't even jerk his hand out from hers immediately.
"Going through what," he says, off balance and on edge from it.
Ponytail gives him a small, reassuring smile. "With the hashtag and the trending on ChikTak--"
"I don't give a fuck about what they're saying about me on ChikTak," Katsuki snaps.
Ponytail nods like she understands. "Good choice."
"Something is fucking up and everyone is acting suspicious about it," Katsuki announces to Deku that night, narrowing his eyes when it makes the foremost suspect trip over his own feet.
"Ha ha ha," Deku says, using the actual words 'ha ha ha' instead of just laughing awkwardly like a less terrible shitty liar. "That's soooo… weird."
"So you do know," Katsuki says, crossing his arms over his chest.
Deku's gaze skitters down to his collarbones, then lower, then back to his face, cringing like the guilty nerd he is. "It's- it's a meme, Kacchan."
Deku ends up showing it to Katsuki on his phone. It's got a heinous amount of views and comments listed for how stupid it turns out to be. It's just a clip of Katsuki pulling his costume's soaked shirt off over his head, then the same shot from a different angle in slow motion zoomed in on his chest, then again even slower and closer but this time in monochrome with a dropping slide whistle and the sound of two explosions.
"So the bombs here are what, the noise?" Katsuki asks.
"Bombs do make noise!" Deku agrees, bobbing his head with wide eyes.
Katsuki shakes his head irritably. "I don't fucking get the point of this shit."
"Well, it's-- the point is about your, um-- your pectoralis major. Majors. You know. Just, they're-- major. Sizable," Deku says, trailing off.
"Idiots. It's called a targeted workout." Katsuki shoves the wide collar of his tank down so he can grip one of his pecs in his hand demonstratively, sinking his fingers into it. "The best kind've muscle's powerful and pliable," he finishes with a smirk.
"Pliable," Deku echoes faintly, before he blinks and comes back to himself. "Right. It's just a meme about how your, um, your chest is really… pliable. Sizable and, and... pliable."
Katsuki scoffs. "That's it? These creeps need to get themselves real lives."
"Well," Deku says, "I guess the internet's just weird like that! So there's really no point thinking about it further. Ha ha!"
"Ha ha," Katsuki repeats back to him in deadpan before rolling his eyes. "Yeah, whatever."
So Katsuki doesn't think about it further, shuffling it into his perception as yet more easily discarded background noise from the easily discarded background characters.
It works fine up until a villain takes ChikTak's server cluster hostage to his pit-making quirk and the threat to drop the whole building, servers and all, down a deep one. He then demands Katsuki, the Clod Squad that he calls the rest of his hero collective, and for whatever godawful reason Deku and the Invisible Nudist to be the ones to face the prick and negotiate his terms to not drop the entire building down a hole where Katsuki already think it belongs.
"Not ChikTak!" Kaminari gasps when they've all been assembled. "The bastard!"
"Why are we even here," Katsuki demands.
"Dunno," Sero says. "I'd think the point was targeting our agency, but Midoriya and Hagakure are here too, and you and Invisible Girl don't even have ChikTak accounts."
The Naked Wonder shrugs. "I never bothered because the filters seem like half the fun of it. But I'll do anything if it's to save the internet!"
"You get it," Kaminari says fervently.
"There's not even people in there," Katsuki says. "So what if he crushes some servers?"
"Seriously, Kats?" Mina says in disbelief. "It's ChikTak. Don't you know about ChikTak?"
"I don't care about ChikTak," Katsuki corrects as Kaminari and Mina practically drag him along to the negotiation site. "It's just a bunch of shitty, repetitive videos that waste people's time. Why does anyone care?"
"I care so much," Kaminari whines, desperately tugging Katsuki forward by his gauntlets.
"Bakugou, you don't get it," Mina moans in a lower key than Kaminari as she pushes Katsuki from behind. "ChikTak is literally my lifeblood."
"Well that's goddamn sad. Maybe after this you'll just have to get yourself a real life."
"Bakubro, please," Kaminari begs him now, reedy and desperate. "If you aren't gonna do it for the memes then do it for me. I need this."
"You already spend too much time on the internet, Dunceface," Katsuki says, entirely devoid of pity.
Kaminari turns to beseech Kirishima, who's been following behind them. "Save us, Red Riot! Do that thing you do! Tame this feral beast!!"
"Uh," Kirishima says, "I mean. ChikTak dying would be a real bummer. I'd miss the challenge videos."
"Wasn't one of those fucking things why you broke your arm last season?" Katsuki accuses, relaxing his chokehold just enough so Kaminari can wriggle himself out of it.
"Uh," Kirishima says.
"Bakugou," Sero says seriously, drawing up to his full and considerable height. "If the Packugou doesn't have ChikTak to burn off all our insatiable meme energy, our only outlet will be the groupchat."
Katsuki grits his teeth.
"Fucking-- fine," he says, and stomps towards the ChikTak headquarters.
"It'll work out, Kacchan," Deku says as he follows behind Katsuki, like it was ever even in doubt when Dynamight's on the job. He's been way too quiet otherwise. "I've got this."
Katsuki snorts. "Figures, you shitty nerd. You've been fucking around on your phone more than enough for it." He'd aimed it to sound derisive, not sulky. From Deku's wince, he's pulled it off.
Deku swallows once and repeats himself in the annoying murmur he only uses when he's gotten himself stuck in his own head. "I've got this."
"Hey guys, droppitohno here, streaming live from my villain debut as theeee Memester!" the villain rattles out into his phone in one breath before quickly clipping it onto the front of his costume. There's even a bodycam frame built into his costume to slide his phone into. That's what annoys Katsuki above all else, even more than the hammed enthusiasm and rushed, pitchy delivery to his invisible audience.
Pit-trap-whatever excitedly hops up onto his feet, gesturing at the crowd of heroes he'd demanded. "And look who I got for my ground-breaking first series, Hero Memestream Live! Strap in, except you really won't believe what happens next, lawl."
The villain, who Katsuki decides he's gonna call 'Shitstream', unclips his phone so he can turn it back on himself and make a thumbs up. "So remember to like and subscribe for more villainous content!!" he chirps before he clips the phone back on and turns to face them.
"Now this is a collab," Shitstream says, grinning at the real audience he'd finally fucking deigned to acknowledge. His exaggerated expressions are just as obnoxious as they looked aimed at his phone. "Well then, heroes! If you want to save ChikTak, you gotta stay tuned."
He gestures with a flourish that is entirely pointless, because he's not even in the frame on his own shitty camera. "Don't panic, my gorge-ouses, it's not anything violent. We'll just be having a bit of fun, lawl. Subscribe and donate to see more of your heroes really unmasked, without that social media shield that we all know some intern is carefully curating to seem genuine. You'll only get these real, exclusive liveleaks on my channel--"
"Yeah, whatever, this is about the fucking view count you jack off to like ever other obscenely oblivious embarassment who uses chatspeak in public, get to the FUCKING demands," Katsuki cuts him off loudly, because he had already lost any potential interest he could have in this encounter after the declaration of nonviolence.
Shitstream stutters. "N-no, lawl is more than just a basic LOL! It's a reference to one of my vids on--"
"AND I object to the accusation my ChikTak account is anything but one hundred percent uncut me," Mina interrupts.
"Yeah!" Kaminari says. "I'm real as-- as a real-- I'm real as fuck!"
"Yeah," Sero agrees. "They wouldn't be nearly so embarrassing otherwise."
Mina and Kaminari both nod. "Yeah, that's-- no!"
Shitstream doesn't reply, using the moment to recover his composure so he can finally get to those fucking demands. "So yeah, you're all gonna do your most popular memes while I stream it. Lawl," Shitstream tacks on defiantly, and is even brave enough to stare right back at Katsuki while he says it, which as far as Katsuki's concerned is strike fucking one.
Shitstream arranges them to come up one by one to the center of the courtyard so he can film whatever dumb shit he's clearly planning. Kaminari's up first and Shitstream circles him for the best angle while he panhandles at his virtual audience for donations to the cause of his future villainy.
Katsuki silently vows that each and every donor down to a single cent spent is going to see consequences for this. They had better, or Katsuki will personally track them down one-by-one and mete it out his own damn self.
Turns out all Shitstream wants from Kaminari is to film him attempting his best Pikachu impression while he jumps around and pulls some renamed moves. "The most humiliating thing about this is that there are nitwits who actually find it funny," Katsuki comments to Deku icily as the rest of them watch the disgraceful display. "Reference is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer."
"Wait, say that again live on the stream," Shitstream demands and shoves his phone right into Katsuki's face.
"I'm going to roast you alive on that fucking stream," Katsuki snarls back at him.
Shitstream pulls his phone back. "That works too, lawl," he says, all downright ballsy about it like he's been since he'd gotten Kaminari to make a fool of himself.
(Well. More of a fool of himself.)
Mina's next. She has to improvise a handful of dance routines to some piped in clips of hyper-annoying pop songs. Katsuki doesn't blame her for cringing throughout; the music itself is cringey enough.
Antigonish has to put on the full camo tactical gear the villain had so graciously brought with him and pull some dumb poses for those watching.
"I actually kind of like this!" she says while she's setting up for the last shot. "It makes me feel like a badass."
"You look like a badass, girl!" Mina cheers, holding up her own phone to take more pictures.
Commander Commando turns to strike a final pose for Mina. "And I'm making a peace sign, just so you know! Wait, let me get my gloves."
Sero swears when told to do a 'tape selfie', which turns out to be just as brainless as it sounds.
As he wraps the provided strips of clear tape around his head to smush his features into something even worse, Katsuki says "That looks like it'll hurt like hell to get out of your hair."
"Extremely," Sero agrees, grinning all the while. "But it's for ChikTak. Sometimes you just gotta do it for the memes."
"He gets it," Kaminari says, hand pressed over his heart.
"Hashtag martyr," Mina whispers reverently
After Sero's apparently willing debasement, Kirishima's ordered to take off his shirt (more of his shirt), wrap himself in some popsicle-colored pride flag, and shout some doubtlessly idiotic image macro slogan about "himbo rights".
"The fuck're those," Katsuki says, more rhetorical grumbling than real question. Deku, who's still being unusually quiet even throughout the whole dumbass debacle this has turned out to be, finally pipes up just so he can answer completely unnecessarily. "Well, Kacchan, it's a meme about--"
Katsuki cuts him off brusquely. "Don't and won't ever care. Unless he breaks another arm on this shit," he amends curtly. "If that asshole manages to again I'm gonna be the one wiping ChikTak from the face of this earth."
"You don't mean that," Shitstream says. He's been hovering around Katsuki and Deku ever since he'd found out Katsuki is in fact eminently quotable, thank you very fucking much. "It's ChikTak."
"No," Deku says, too quietly for the phone camera. "He really means it."
"Get in my face again and I'll show you the real meaning of a permaban, Shitstream," Katsuki spits at him.
The asshole only gasps and starts speaking into his phone again. "Did you hear that, my gorge-ouses? The exclusive Dynamight diss! Big leagues, baby! You heard the man, let's get hashtag Shitstream going--"
"Strike fucking two," Katsuki growls at the chattering villain's retreating back. Deku takes a short breath, then a deeper one that Katsuki can recognize by instinct at this point in their lives as the pull cord to the mumble-powered monologue machine he'd married.
"Kacchan, I guess this is pretty late for me to be bringing it up, but on the internet there's people who say certain things and people who post certain things, and when it comes to taking them personally I really think as heroes it's best to try to be objective and unaffected about what or whatever the public might be saying about our personal assets--"
Katsuki rolls his eyes and pushes Deku forward with a rough shove to his back. "Yeah, whatever. You're up, nerd."
Deku, being Deku, is only instructed to say 'fuck' into Shitstream's phone camera.
Deku, being Deku, yet somehow still manages to fuck it up. He has to repeat it several times to the camera until he can say the full word without stuttering, which is pretty rich for someone Katsuki's seen scream it at full volume before.
Deku red-facedly tries to flee back to him, but Shitstream is already shouting "And finally, it's that love-him-or-hate-him icon, Dynamight!! Let's blow this up like only the man can, my gorge-ouses!!!"
"Kacchan, I just really think--" Deku tries as Katsuki stalks past him. "That's a first," Katsuki snarls in passing.
"Dynamight!" Shitstream declares, flashing his phone erratically between himself and Katsuki like he's gotten a sudden-onset tic. "Announce to my viewers that you're going to…" he queues up the sound of a drumroll and Katsuki seriously contemplates making that the strike three on breaking the rule of nonviolence.
"...Change your hero name to Kacchan Sugoi!"
"Aw, that's so cute!" the Legal Exhibitionist gasps, apparently genuine. "You'd match!"
Mina, however, draping herself over Flasher's shoulder and cooing, is not.
"Right," Katsuki says, drawing his gauntlets up, "I'm destroying ChikTak myself."
"Another one!" Sero calls over Kaminari's wordless wail. "There's so many Dynamight memes out there, just pick another one!"
"There are what," Katsuki demands. His palms are still sparking.
Shitstream glances back towards the server hangar before lifting his phone again. "That's-- I'll-- do the-- the bombs! Drop the bombs!"
At first there's only silence.
"Oh no," Deku whispers.
"Oh dang," Kirishima says.
Sero groans, long and loud. "You fool. You've doomed us all."
"Hashtag martyrs," Mina tearfully agrees.
"F", is all Kaminari has to say.
"What the fuck," Katsuki says, taking deep breaths in between like his therapist told him to do, "does that even mean."
Shitstream, caught off-guard by the reaction, meekly says "You know, just-- take your shirt off."
Katsuki tears his costume's top in half off his chest with a shout of inarticulate rage and slams it onto the ground.
"Woah," Shitstream says, "Uh, that was gif-able and all, but not the meme. I meant your titty drop."
"My what."
"Oh no," he hears Deku echo from the distance.
"You know," Shitstream blithely continues, "When a girl takes her shirt off and the tits bounce down. Only, you're a guy, so it's funny because the bombs you're dropping are--"
"Is that what the randoms have been hounding me about all this time?" Katsuki says slowly.
Kaminari dashes forward and then drops to his knees in front of Katsuki, hands clasped upwards as if he's in prayer. "Please, no, Bakugou, you just don't get it," he whimpers, "They only did it for the meme."
"And that's strike fucking three," Katsuki says, squaring his shoulders and dropping into battle stance. "You're all out."
"No! Not the internet!" the Streaker shrieks from behind him.
"B-but you can't!!" Shitstream says, waving his phone frantically. "You'd be destroying ChikTak forever!!!"
"Good," Katsuki says, and charges.
In the end, Shitstream lets it happen and doesn't even try to go through with it before Katsuki's hand is wrapped around his throat.
"I just can't. It's a part of me," he says. "ChikTak… is a part of us all."
"This guy gets it," Kaminari whisper-talks from the all fours he'd dropped to when Katsuki had rushed the motherfucker.
"ALL OF YOU GET A FUCKING LIFE," Katsuki roars, shaking his prey and raising his head to the open sky.
Shitstream shrieks at the howl and faints, held up now only by his obnoxious phone-slot jumpsuit. Katsuki drops him in abject disgust.
He breathes out and finally opens himself to the incandescent rage built within him that burns brightly enough it manages to break past the limits of his almost-limitless capabilities and loop back around to something downright beaming.
Katsuki doesn't often get mad like this, but when he does, it's only ever been at one person and one person only.
"Deeeeku," he says pleasantly, turning his head slowly and aiming a brilliant smile at his nerd. Deku flinches, face drawn and wretched.
Sero grabs Invisible Girl and tosses her over his shoulder before making his retreat. "What? Mina, what's--"
"No time to explain!" Mina says.
"Go go go!!" Kirishima adds, back hardened as he herds them all ahead of him and out of range.
"F", Kaminari says, clasping his hands again and ducking his head in Deku's direction before hurriedly backing away with the rest of them.
Katsuki is the kind of furious enough he's actually losing time. One moment his friends had cleared the area, and the next moment he's airborne and aimed down at the lying green garbage motherfucker that was supposed to be minding this sort of shit.
"Did you think it was so fucking funny!? This bullshit? Think you can hold it over me, laughing at me behind my back, aaah!?!"
"That's not it, Kacchan!" Deku pleads as he continues his full defensive around Katsuki's full offense. "I'm sorry!"
Another skip at that and he's aiming his next shot over the sound of Deku's stuttering and scrabbling noises as he tries to get out of the way. "--living it up while you lorded it over the internet running wild mocking my fucking 'tits'--"
"I'm so sorry!" Deku wails. "But I-- I only-- I only kept it from you because I love your tits too much!!!"
It's a bizarre enough confession, even from the shitnerd, that it stops Katsuki in his tracks. "What."
"I just-- your t-- breasts! Chest!! Pectoral muscles-- pectoralis major-- majors-- y-your sizeable--" Deku gropes at the air desperately.
"Breathe, Deku."
"--Your bombs, Kacchan!" Deku finishes, still groping at nothing.
"Changed my mind," Katsuki says, "Fucking choke."
Deku slumps down, now that he's out of the immediate danger of imminent death.
"I didn't want things to change," Deku says, voice quiet and thoroughly hangdog. "And, and-- I thought if you found out about it you'd either start defiantly flaunting them wherever to whoever or defiantly never show them in public again and I didn't want either."
"I just-- I wanted you to be how you are," he admits, small and shameful. "Not how you are to everyone else."
The fight's draining out of him with Deku's stupid-and-yet-every-sentence-somehow-stupider confession. Katsuki settles back on his feet, sighing long and loud through his nose.
"Deku, you idiot," he says. Deku flinches again.
Katsuki closes the distance between them in a few strides. "Why would I change jack shit over what everyone else thinks? You've already got me."
He bumps his shoulder into Deku's exasperatedly. "And it's not like anyone but you will ever get their hands on 'em. You've won, so stop being such a fucking loser about it."
"Kacchan I love you so much," Deku blurts out in one breath, eyes shining.
"Yeah, whatever," Katsuki grumbles, looping an arm around his husband's neck expectantly so Deku can close the distance and kiss him.
What neither of them realize at the time is that just because Shitstream was knocked out doesn't mean his bodycam had stopped streaming.
#yeahwhatever starts trending.
"I don't fucking get how shit like this became the endpoint of the internet," Katsuki seethes down at Deku's phone.
"Don't worry about it. I've got it." Deku says as he presses himself against Katsuki's back and a kiss to the back of his ear.
"You better," Katsuki says.
"I've got this, Kacchan," Deku says. "I've got you."