Archive of Our Own

Katsuki makes the mistake of solving a decade cold murder case his first day on the job. Showing off his competence and intelligence to his employers seems like a good thing, right?

Wrong.

Fucking everyone had eyes on him after that, from the Chief he wanted to impress to the public he most certainly did not, to the goddamned press circuit wanting a “few minutes of his time” every five seconds like they think they’re his job. He may or may not have broken a camera. Or ten.

So, after mandated anger management classes and a few years riding patrol, Katsuki promotes.

That was his second mistake.

“The fuck is this?” he demands, throwing his backpack into his chair. He puts enough force behind the move that his chair rockets into the half-wall separating his desk from the rest of the bureau.

Several heads duck in his periphery, the other shitty detectives in this shitty police department wary of his admittedly well-earned reputation for unprovoked physical violence. He scowls at the only person who didn’t duck, and therefore the only outlet for his wrath. “Cases,” Shitty Hair announces cheerfully, as if that’s cause for cheer when Katsuki cleared his queue yesterday.

“The fuck do I have more for? There weren’t any goddamned robberies last night!”

“Language,” rounds his shoulder, and Katsuki turns just in time to see Half and Half disappear into the break room.

“I’ll say whatever the fuck I want!” he shouts, perhaps a little too loud judging by the shadow that shuffles to life in the nearby office. Even Shitty Hair lowers his head submissively when the fogged glass door, a relic from the 70’s to match the crumbling infrastructure built before Katsuki was born, opens to reveal the unimpressed face of their assigned Sergeant.

Aizawa blinks his bloodshot eyes around the room before his gaze lands unerringly on Katsuki. “Stop yelling so early in the morning.”

“Nine ain’t early by any stretch of the goddamned imagination and you know it. The fuck is this, Sarge?” Katsuki demands a second time, pointing at his desk and the groaning stack of Manila files crushing his keyboard. A long string of j’s is rapidly overtaking his password box.

“Cases,” Aizawa clarifies flatly.

“Said like my eyes don’t fucking work,” Katsuki snarls through bared teeth. He’s been told more than once, usually by piss-scared criminals or lip-wobbling idiot civilians who suddenly forget how to speak when questioned by the police, that talking through a clenched jaw while peeling his lips back makes him look like a rabid wolf hungering for meat. As he usually adopts the expression when he’s restraining himself from mauling a moron, he figures the description apt enough. “Why are they on my desk?”

“Because I want you to solve them.”

Katsuki swallows his first ten responses, finds that the eleventh does not adequately express how he currently feels, and reverts back to his tenth, and arguably least aggressive, reply. “Why the hell should I care what you want?”

Aizawa blinks in sleepy disregard for Katsuki’s insubordination. “Fine, take the suspension.”

Suspension?

Katsuki narrows his eyes and waits for Aizawa to crack, only Aizawa’s made of hardier material than their last shitty Sergeant. They both know that, come hell or high water, Katsuki will never willingly subject himself to a day off. He can barely stand weekends, which he only takes after his dogged seven-day work week was declared a violation of international slavery laws and the Chief threatened him with this self-same suspension. Now he only works six-day weeks, and cashes out his vacation hours before the administration realizes that mountain is probably worth climbing too.

Grudgingly curious at what Aizawa deems worthy of a suspension threat, Katsuki flips open the top case and sees the gruesome spread of congealed blood forever captured in hazy Polaroid yellow. “A goddamned murder? When was this taken, 1968? Jesus.” His free middle finger shifts the picture aside to reveal a sliver of report from, he guessed it, 1967. “Did I do something to piss you off.”

“Cleared your case load. Now I’m required to provide you busywork until our next robbery. Besides,” Aizawa continues in an absent way Katsuki instinctively distrusts, “you have experience solving cold murders. Should be easy for you.”

Katsuki grinds his teeth against the biting desire to argue. He knew opening that stupid cold file was a mistake, and he did it anyway.

With the stretching silence clearly declaring which of them won this argument, Aizawa retreats into his office and slams the cheap glass door. Katsuki still has no idea what he does in there beyond occasionally assigning cases and lowering department morale. Well, Katsuki’s morale, at any rate.

Shitty Hair, being shitty, whistles approval and half stands to offer his palm across their conjoined desks. “Nice, dude! Robbery your first day in detectives, now cold murders? You’ll be lead homicide by next year!”

Having been well trained by his numerous workplace sensitivity courses, Katsuki slaps Shitty Hair’s palm with his own in a paper-thin attempt at camaraderie. “Go die in a fucking snake filled hole. I don’t want homicide. That position is a media nightmare.”

“You’d be so good at it though,” comes as Shitty Hair sits down.

Katsuki growls and unlocks his desk drawer for his badge and radio, which he clips to his belt with practiced efficiency. Although detectives rarely follow a dress code considering how often they roll around partially undercover, the Department still expects suits and ties except on true undercover days or, more often, casual Thursdays. Katsuki never arrives in slacks, since that’s how idiots ruin their church clothes, and changes in the locker room before starting his shift. Today, however, he feels entitled to the dress-down since he’s the only one stuck reading moldy old reports from his mom’s childhood.

He digs around in his bag and pulls out the underarm holster he prefers wearing on dress down days. Putting it on requires removing his flannel, which he does with prejudice. Shitty Hair naturally feels the need to wolf whistle. “Look at them guns!” he crows like they don’t hit the gym together at least twice a week.

Katsuki bares his teeth at the grown man-child he calls a partner and aggressively switches his service weapon from his waist to his underarm holster. He tosses the waist holster into his backpack before throwing it under his desk and slamming into his chair. The stack of dusty homicide cases towers high enough to completely block his computer screen, although he can somehow still see the bright red tips of Shitty Hair’s shitty hair. “I would fucking stomp homicide,” he continues before Shitty Hair thinks he’s somehow conned Katsuki to the dark side here. “That’s why I don’t want it. Solving bloodbaths with a mountain of forensic evidence is too damn easy.”

Shitty Hair’s head pokes sideways around the bulk of Katsuki’s case tower. “Too easy?”

“Please,” Katsuki scoffs, offended that anyone would question his pristine solve record. “It’s almost always a family member or serial killer. And we’ve never had a serial killer at this shitty department, which might actually be fun to work. At least they’re more thought out than a rock rolling downhill.”

“Dude, it’s easy to forget how smart you are when you act like such an ass,” the other man says mildly.

Katsuki glares at his stupid face with its stupid encouraging smile that he’s endured since they ran the Academy together. “Fucking focus on your ridiculous pile of vehicle burgs, Shitty Hair.”

“One day you’ll call me by my name.”

“Please hold your fucking breath and I might deign to call an ambulance for you.”

Shitty Hair returns to his pile while Katsuki stares down the case tower. Although only seven files, murders by nature involve more paperwork than average, and each folder is about quadruple the thickness standard of other cases written in ye olden times. One is even taped over an extensive tear, as if the evidence tried to burst free in a mad bid for someone to notice it already. He unearths that case since it’s made such a spectacle of itself. Katsuki has to wedge his fingers in the scant space between the folder and the items inside, knuckles straining wide, before he pulls a full ream of paper from the overstuffed file. As if in retribution, two ancient cassette tapes skitter across his desk to knock his pen holder and stapler onto the floor, while a grotesquely large stack of rubber-banded evidence cards bursts like a fucking firework, showering his desk in ragged yellow parchment. “God damn it.”

He cleans everything up because the mess will bother him if he doesn’t, then banishes the remaining folders to the corner of his desk where they can think about what they’ve done wrong. The messy bastard that caught his attention takes up the remaining space.

The report, written in pencil because police department procedure in the seventies clearly mistrusted the solid dependability of pens, tells of a routine welfare check gone haywire. Neighbor called in that the victim stopped bringing his trash to the street. No answer upon knocking, yadda yadda, officers notice an open upstairs window, grab a ladder, and hello decapitated skull, licked clean by the victim’s starving beagle. Little prick then rummaged around in the body for the internal organs, leaving the cause of death undetermined. Katsuki squints and yanks a notepad into writing distance, because fuck him if he’s going to keep referring to this pencil nightmare. Neighbors noticed nothing. Family members live far away and therefore noticed nothing. Victim’s phone records revealed take out and sex lines, therefore amounting to nothing. No assets beyond the rickety house itself, no inheritance or money saved, no giant insurance payout. Fuck, this guy didn’t have a life, how the hell did he anger someone enough to kill him?

Sighing, Katsuki sets aside the damn useless report and pulls the evidence cards into range. Blood evidence, blood evidence, video of the meager autopsy, filthy clothes, fingerprints, fingerprints, swabs of the dog, pictures of the dog, pictures of the scene, the clean bedspread, knives from the kitchen, voicemail recorder—

Voicemail recorder?

Odd, he thinks, pulling it from the stack. He reads the description a few times, something about tracking down the callers that, based on the report, amounted to nothing. Guy only had messages from a couple debt collectors, a takeout place, and a doctor. Why bother keeping it?

Katsuki picks up his desk phone and calls down to the Warehouse.

“Property and Evidence, Shinsou speaking—”

“Yo, Gremlin, you got seventies homicide shit down there still?”

There’s a short pause. “Detective Bakugou, I presume. What can I do for you.”

“You can answer my fucking question, for starters,” Katsuki snaps, fist clenching so hard around the phone that the cheap plastic creaks. He hates when people waste his time.

“Yes,” the Gremlin answers like he thinks Katsuki is slow.

Katsuki forcibly reminds himself that he has attended plenty of anger management classes in his career and does not need more assigned to him because he drove the six miles to the evidence Warehouse and strangled the Gremlin with his bare hands. “Pull case number 74-33017 for me. I’ll be down to collect it today.”

“Homicide evidence does not leave the Warehouse without clearance from the Captain.”

“Then set up a fucking cassette player next to the fucking evidence box on a fucking table in the middle of the fucking Warehouse for all I damn well care.” He hangs up before the urge to strangle grows any stronger, and, figuring he has nothing to lose, lifts the phone and starts dialing a new number.

“Uh, you okay over there, bro?” Shitty Hair asks.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Hello?”

Swallowing his frustration takes more effort than Katsuki wants to expend, so he doesn’t bother tempering the gruffness of his voice when he says, “Detective Katsuki Bakugou, Musutafu PD. This Sakura Nakamura?”

“Yes?” she answers like she doesn’t know her own fucking name.

“Couple questions about your brother Genji’s death. Can you talk?”

“Genji? Wow, I, um, I had no idea anyone was still looking into his case. Let me just—can you excuse me a minute? Thank you.” A door shuts down the line, followed by the staticky whisper of wind. “What would you like to know, detective?”

“Was he sick?”

She pauses, either thinking back or waiting for a little elaboration Katsuki never gives because his time is valuable and he doesn’t like wasting it explaining the obvious. “Well, he did complain about a headache last time we spoke.”

“A headache,” Katsuki repeats flatly. “Anything else?”

“It was persistent,” she defends, because in lollypop land it’s logical to care about the opinion of a stranger. “I thought he wanted money for pills or something and hung up on him.”

“Right, thank you for your time.” He disconnects before she tries pumping him for information he doesn’t have, then jots down the date and time so he doesn’t forget this conversation when writing his supplemental report. Katsuki scratches his head with the pen, frustrated that he cannot in good conscience dismiss what may just be the worst hunch in the history of mankind. Still, a full body and no cause of death? A pristinely licked skull and no organs? Not blunt force trauma, that’s for certain, or the skull would have fractured. Not a stabbing or shooting, since they would have found a massive blood stain on the carpet. Not decapitation, because some evidence would show on the neck bone beyond the imprint of tiny dog teeth. Poison, maybe, but some of it would linger in his muscle and intestines, which the helpful mutt left untouched.

That leaves—

Katsuki calls the on-duty warrant judge and briefly explains what he wants and why. Being a cold case murder that can be solved with one measly document, the judge has no reason to refuse.

A few minutes after Katsuki hangs up, the shifty-eyed desk officer waddles into the room clutching a single piece of quivering paper. “H-here,” he says, curly hair bobbing oddly as he ducks and shuffles to avoid eye contact while Katsuki stares. Holy shit this guy is short. Comically short. How the hell did he pass the Academy? Imagine this little cartoon person hopping fences like Mario trying to leap a flying turtle. Did the world contribute to the hilarity by making that godawful bouncing noise?

“Thanks, extra,” he says before he dies laughing, snatching up the freshly faxed warrant. “Oi, Shitty Hair, you rolling with me?”

“Where we going?” Shitty Hair agrees absently. His fingers still over his keyboard a few seconds later and Katsuki watches in vague satisfaction as his pointy face pops up showing all kinds of surprise. “Wait, how do you already have a lead? It’s been, like, an hour!”

“Because I’m good. We rolling or not?”

“Working something fun?” Yaoyorozu asks, entering the bureau as the midget with the fucked-up curls tries to leave. He starts to greet the statuesque corporal, stutters when he catches sight of her generous chest barely covered by the sparkly strappings of an undercover prostitute, and sprints from the room holding a hand over his nose to hide the obvious nosebleed.

“Little pervert,” Katsuki mutters.

Both Shitty Hair and Yaoyorozu blink at him. “What?”

“Stupid cold cases are more fun to work than fucking politicians without a condom, Midriff.”

“Watch your language!” Half and Half yells from across the room, because he’s an overinvolved prick with better than average ears and an unhealthy soft spot for the corporal in question.

Katsuki leans back just enough to flip the prick off.

“Easy, Cujo,” Yaoyorozu says, amused. “And I can handle myself, Todoroki. I have a few juicy pictures I think you’ll like. Just a couple politicians caught without a condom.”

“Bring it here,” Half and Half demands, still above normal volume yet soft around the edges.

Katsuki rolls his eyes and wonders how long they’ve been fucking.

He grabs Shitty Hair and leaves before things grow even more awkward, not wanting to hear the two of them flirt like no one else is in the room. Or the building, for that matter. Katsuki also takes the long way out of the bureau to avoid the creepy desk officer and his oily, messed up curls.

The department allots ten undercover vehicles for detective use in the budget every year, with one or two rotating out due to wear and tear. Katsuki picks his new favorite whenever his prior favorite rotates out. His most recent favorite ended its career on the scrap heap after another detective drove through an intersection during a high-speed pursuit without bothering to check both ways first. Totaled. His favorite fucking car. He no longer allows anyone else to drive his favorite car. Which means Katsuki always drives when he rolls with other detectives. Shitty Hair knows his place and forgoes the driver’s side when Katsuki unlocks the vehicle. “So, where are we going again?”

“Somewhere.” Katsuki unhooks the radio from his belt and turns down the volume, while Shitty Hair flicks on the car scanner. Several voices begin droning on about routine calls for service that Katsuki lets filter in like white noise. His mental map of the city updates as officers identify their locations and statuses, just in case anyone calls for backup. They check the lights and sirens before Katsuki pulls out onto the main road.

Shitty Hair hurriedly buckles up. “Well, if you’re gunna be cagey about where we’re going, you can hear about my burglary spree on the way.”

“Goddamned gangsters from Hosu did it, fuckwad.”

Katsuki feels the heat of a familiar glare burn into the side of his skull. “Got any evidence to support that wild accusation?”

“What, do I have to do everything?” he snorts.

“Ha, didn’t think so!” Without looking, Katsuki reaches over and smacks Shitty Hair on his shitty face. “Ow, damn it, that hurt!”

“It was meant to.”

“I’m still telling you about my burglaries,” Shitty Hair pouts.

Katsuki rolls his eyes and lets that filter to the back of his mind too, autopilot taking him down familiar roads while his eyes scan the public around him. Working patrol hones a keen sense for bullshit that Katsuki never learned to shut off after he promoted. Sometimes, when he’s bored, he cruises around in his undercover outfit and issues traffic tickets to morons.

His eyes clock tickets the way normal people clock, fuck if he knows, puppies and shit. He spies a group of juveniles that deserve a truancy charge for skipping school. Bicycle pretending the rules of the road don’t apply to everything with wheels. Car next to them has expired tags. Car on the corner rolls the red light while turning. Another damn bicycle riding wrong way traffic. Transient drinking from a bottle wrapped in brown paper like that trick actually works. Katsuki can practically smell the booze from here. Open container, intoxicated in public, probably carrying a meth pipe. If they were just cruising, Katsuki would stop and write all these tickets with manic glee at the overtime hours he’ll rack up sitting around in court. However, they are on a self-imposed timeline. Katsuki wants to wrap this shit up before lunch. The faster he mows down these ridiculous cold case murders, the sooner Katsuki returns to his real job.

He picks up speed as they near their destination, only for sirens to wail alive behind them. Growling in frustration, Katsuki veers right and flicks on his hazards. A few overzealous lawbreakers try to sprint ahead of the ambulance, but a causal activation of his police lights keeps the lane clear for the passing red van and requisite black and white caboose. Katsuki checks his rear-view mirror for ambulance chasing idiots and finds himself staring at someone who is staring back. The kid has his mouth open like he’s just seen a celebrity, only the press badge around his neck tells an entirely different story that Katsuki in no way wants to hear. He glares at the kid, shuts off their red and blues, and rejoins the thick traffic driving toward the hospital.

“The hospital, really?” Shitty Hair sighs when he notices.

“Or you can walk back to the precinct. Your choice.”

Huffing, Shitty Hair crosses his arms and sulks in the passenger seat as the great white building looms over their windshield like an ominous premonition for how long this visit will inevitably take. They park in the nearby structure and walk across the bridge into the second-floor lobby, where a desk nurse raises an eyebrow at their warrant and tells them to have a seat.

Shitty Hair perks with an idea two minutes into their wait. “Hey, how about we go to the clerk’s off—"

“Shut your dirty mouth.”

“Right, well, as I was saying, they pried open five car trunks with a crowbar on Tanner, but the two nearby burgs used a slim jim on the driver’s side door instead, which I think means two groups operating in the same area.”

“Wrong. It’s fucking veterans showing rookies the ropes.”

“No way, dude,” Shitty Hair argues, forcing Katsuki to join the conversation or risk letting his fellow detective even think he won here, because he absolutely didn’t. They go back and forth over the earsplitting screams of shitty visitors for a good thirty minutes before Katsuki hears, “Detectives?” Every head in the damn lobby snaps up to watch them approach the counter, rubbernecking the possibility of a crime occurring in their vicinity and feeling entitled to information they haven’t earned.

The smiling person who called for them does not appear to be either a doctor or nurse. Their suit is a little too sharp, their hair a little too neat, and Katsuki pings him for a lawyer long before he introduces himself with a limp handshake. “This way, gentlemen.”

Wanting to be away from eavesdroppers, Katsuki follows the lawyer into a posh office lined with wooden bookshelves, floor to ceiling windows, and a massive boat of a desk. The computer is sleek and modern, the carpet plush, the personal pictures replaced by accolades and diplomas. Katsuki hates the guy even before he rounds the desk and sits with his fingertips pressed together like a bad movie villain. “What can I help you with today, gentlemen?” he asks through a smarmy smile.

Katsuki produces the warrant from his flannel pocket, making sure the guy sees his gun. “It’s detective, and you can give me the medical records listed here.”

“Medical records are protected under HIPAA.”

“Yeah, and my right to them is protected by a district judge. You really want to fight over a guy who’s been dead forty years?”

They lock eyes, the lawyer visibly weighing his weight class against two detectives wielding a warrant, while Katsuki quietly menaces the man with his much greater muscle mass and quickly rising temper. Finally, after what feels like an age, the lawyer pastes a paper-thin smile over his distaste and takes the warrant between two outstretched fingers. “Give me a moment to verify this.” When neither Katsuki nor Shitty Hair move from their planted position in front of the desk, that thin smile strains even thinner. The lawyer starts punching in phone numbers all slow and methodical like that’s supposed to scare two guys who make their money by confronting armed criminals.

“If Hosu really did it—” Shitty Hair says, continuing their argument from the lobby.

“They did.”

“—then why not tag? They always tag somewhere nearby.”

Not always, Katsuki almost says, but he cannot actually spoon feed the whole department, although throwing a bone every now and then seems fair enough. Especially after a half hour spent arguing in circles. “It’s an initiation, dumbass.”

Shitty Hair lights up. “Which means they don’t want the juniors affiliated with them if they make a mistake!”

“Took you long enough,” Katsuki sneers.

Shitty Hair retreats from the lawyer’s office already tugging out his cell phone to search social media for suspects, now that he knows where to start looking. With his partner gone, Katsuki feels free to glare threateningly at the sweat beading on the lawyer’s balding forehead. The slow number dialing miraculously speeds up. “It appears everything is in order,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’ll have a nurse bring the files. They cannot leave this room, of course.”

“Then she can also bring me copies.”

The lawyer opens his mouth to argue, visibly reconsiders, and buzzes the nurse for copies instead. They spend an awkward couple minutes together waiting for the nurse to arrive, and each offered folder is slimmer than the last. Seems Katsuki’s victim did not believe in spending money on his health, at least until his health began punishing him for the neglect. The sister was right—the guy had a lot of headaches, going back a good year before his death. Katsuki flips to the final entry made after the idiot passed on. Doctor wanted to speak with the victim about his, oh. Well, that will do it. Katsuki’s surprised the dog ate the guy’s brain, considering.

Katsuki thanks the lawyer and nurse for their cooperation and goes to collect Shitty Hair.

“Already? Dude, you’re fast.”

“I knew what the fuck I was looking for,” Katsuki explains. “You find anything on your spree, or do I gotta solve that one too?”

“I’ve got a lead,” Shitty Hair says defensively, pocketing his phone.

Katsuki snorts. He practically gift wrapped that lead. “Right. I need to make one more stop. You rolling or am I dropping you for a potty break?”

“Drop me and I’ll buy lunch.”

“Deal,” Katsuki agrees. He drops Shitty Hair at the station with a promise to be back by two, their usual lunch hour, and drives those six shitty miles to the Warehouse. Gremlin looks pleased to see him. “My homicide box?”

“On the fucking table next to the fucking cassette player,” Gremlin says, unblinking. His light gray eyes are just this side of purple and abnormally creepy.

Still, Katsuki finds himself liking the guy a little more every time they meet. Leastways this evidence technician knows how to get things done around here, unlike the few others Katsuki has had the misfortune to work with. Everything he asked for is exactly where he asked to have it, up to and including the dimly lit, flickering lightbulb requisite to every gloomy evidence basement. Even when they’re not in a basement at all. Katsuki has the sneaking suspicion that Gremlin unscrewed the bulb a bit.

“Nothing leaves this room,” Gremlin orders in a calm, uncompromising voice.

“Whatever,” Katsuki says, “Close the door.”

Gremlin does, leaving Katsuki in blessed, perfect silence. He opens the top of the dusty box and finds the promised bloody clothing, alongside a few tightly packaged fingerprint cards and knives. At the very bottom, Katsuki unearths the old, decrepit yellow voicemail recorder. He removes the ancient tape, pops it into the record player, and skips past the useless messages to the one he wants.

“Good morning. This is Doctor Branford looking for Mr. Farroway. I would like to set up an appointment with you as soon as possible regarding your overdue annual physical. Please call us when you receive this message.”

Katsuki sits back in the cheap metal chair with a sigh. Too little too late, Doc.

He closes his eyes and thinks about the fragility of his career, as bright and ephemeral as a flashpoint. Why is this job so damn easy? Why, when he dreamed of car chases and fist fights, did he find himself burning out on sheer boredom? Why did he choose a path of service only to end up a useless puzzle solver, arriving too late to be of any use?

The sudden crack of a distant gunshot snaps his eyes open, and he waits through the rapid pulse of his heart as the echoes fade steadily into awkward silence.

He really wishes that would stop happening.

“Gremlin,” he calls, cracking his suddenly sore neck.

A few seconds pass before footsteps sound in the bare concrete hallway and the door opens. “Yes,” Gremlin says, not quite a question.

Katsuki cracks his neck the other way. “I’m done here.”

“Fantastic,” comes unenthusiastically from the doorway. The door itself pushes open wider, admitting rays of harsh fluorescent light. “Then you can get the fuck out.”

“And I thought I had a shitty temper.”

“And I thought people with talent preferred utilization over waste. Sadly, we are both disappointed.” Somewhat surprised by the mildly acidic response, Katsuki leans the chair onto its back legs and props a combat boot against the table edge, eyeing the sharply dressed Gremlin from head to toe. Clothes like that, he probably wanted to be an officer once. Probably failed the Academy, physically, judging by those skinny limbs.

Too bad, he has a mind like a freshly sharpened sword.

Katsuki lets the chair drop onto all fours. Then he heaves himself up, grabbing his scant few notes in one absent hand. “Alright, Gremlin. I’m gone.”

“Please never come back.”

“Maybe when I’m dead,” Katsuki snorts, somewhat ironically. The way he’s feeling, that might be sooner rather than later.

He drives back to the station in a daze, not feeling as accomplished as he probably should for solving a forty-year-old case in less than a day. Some of that mild disappointment must show on his face, since the officers standing around drinking coffee flinch away from him when he walks into the bureau. Many of his emotions tend to translate into anger.

“Back so soon?” Vulture notices, black eyebrows crawling up his sharp forehead.

“With results,” he confirms.

The bird tries on a small smile that looks as awkward as Katsuki feels to see it, and they go their separate ways without further conversation. Katsuki then marches directly to Aizawa’s office. “I solved one of your shitty cases.”

The sleepy Sergeant rouses enough to make an inquisitive noise. He somehow looks worse than he did that morning, and Katsuki frowns at him in vague concern. While Aizawa professes to insomnia and keeps a literal sleeping bag in his office, exhaustion is not a word which Katsuki associates with the Sergeant. Exhaustion breeds stress, stress breeds depression, depression breeds the ever-threatening loom of suicide. Katsuki would rather not break in a new boss so soon after promoting into this department. “And you felt the need to tell me this, why?”

“Because you’re the Sergeant and it’s your fucking job to know this shit?”

“It’s my job to read reports.” His bloodshot eyes pointedly drop to his desk. “Oh, look. Nothing is here to read.”

“Damned shitty caterpillar,” Katsuki snarls. He slams out of the office and to his own desk, where he can write his supplemental report solving this stupid cold case. At least he’s not bogged down by seventies technology, writing on a damn typewriter or, worse, scribbling in illegible pencil for someone decades down the road to decipher. Although he hates the idleness inherent to desk work, Katsuki types up reports quicker than average. Particularly when there’s not much to tell.

“Mind explaining how you solved that case so fast?” Shitty Hair asks, eyes open and curious.

Feeling somewhat charitable, Katsuki explains, “Guy had a fucking brain tumor that no one bothered to follow up on because he never went to the doctor.”

Shitty Hair whistles. “Damn, that easy?”

Katsuki cannot deign that stupidity with an answer when all his less-than-acceptable emotions are quickly raising his already high blood pressure. Instead he prints, signs, and drops the two-page blurb in Aizawa’s little-used inbox tray, along with the slim medical folders and search warrant, all tagged appropriately because he doesn’t believe in half-assing shit. God, he’s going to write at least six more of these. Katsuki prefers the modern effectiveness of an online filing system. “Fucking done!”

“I don’t care!” Aizawa calls through the closed door.

Blood pressure instantly crashing through the glass ceiling of his limited patience, Katsuki stomps all the way back to his desk just so he can dump the bursting file into the inbox tray too. The rickety plastic bends into a pathetic “u-shape” that will probably break if Katsuki solves even one more case today. Katsuki spitefully hopes Aizawa finds the mess worth his persistent disregard.

That done, Katsuki decides to eat his mid-morning snack. He passes Half and Half on his moping way to the breakroom. They share a glance of mutual dislike that crackles.

“Try to keep your voice down,” Half and Half mutters.

Already rounding the corner, Katsuki replies, “Your mom likes me loud.”

Although mom insults are inherently tacky and juvenile, they work every time. Katsuki can literally hear the guy’s teeth grinding. It’s so damn obvious that he has a mother complex. And, perhaps a little ironically, a father complex. Hell, maybe just a shitty childhood.

Not that Katsuki cares beyond noticing.

The break room is blessedly empty, and Katsuki goes about chopping his fruit and veggies uninterrupted by morons trying to squeeze their way into the microwave. He dumps the lot into his personal bullet blender, alongside some protein powder and almond milk, and sets about making his daily smoothie. Beside him, the coffee maker bubbles away creating the inky addiction everyone else uses to manufacture energy. Like caffeine is a better addiction than heroin.

A sudden commotion on the main floor draws his limited interest as he pours his smoothie into a cup. He cleans his precious blender before bothering to investigate.

There’s a stranger standing by his desk talking to Shitty Hair. Small and slim, wearing an oversized green sweatshirt and criminally small shorts. Definitely not a lawbreaker. Katsuki would be surprised if this twink stole a pack of gum. He approaches cautiously, having been ambushed by furious families and hysterical victims on more than enough occasions to develop a healthy caution of strangers. Closer inspection reveals a faint green cast to what he thought were black curls, a generously rounded ass he cannot help eyeballing, muscular legs slightly bowed outward in a charming suggestion of sheer fucking sex, and a goddamned press badge. It’s only when he’s almost on top of them that the kid shifts enough for Katsuki to recognize those giant puppy eyes from earlier today, when that damn ambulance stopped traffic.

His dismayed groan attracts their attention.

The kid glows with excitement to see Katsuki. Well, that’s new. The press usually harangue him about badgering witnesses or breaking cameras. Katsuki holds his protein shake level with his chest as a deterrent against unwanted hugs. “Hi!’ the kid says, voice squeaky. God, is he out of high school yet? “My name’s Izuku and I work for the local paper writing short column pieces. I was hoping I could interview you, Mr. Bakugou?”

“The fuck?” Katsuki asks Shitty Hair.

The moron shrugs, expression unaccountably smug. “Don’t ask me. You’re the one he has a hard on for.”

Having seen more genitals than he cares to admit over the course of his career, Katsuki checks that the kid’s shorts are very firmly covering his very soft cock. If he’s even a man. Katsuki’s not entirely sure at this point.

“Please, sir?”

“Why?” Katsuki demands, baffled. He knows himself well enough to recognize that his personality sucks. More than one person in his acquaintance has likened him to a dumpster fire of rage and mommy issues. No one wants to hear what he has to say, not even his own boss. Speaking of, why did Aizawa allow the press in here? Isn’t that against a rule somewhere?

“I, um, if you’re too busy?” the kid offers, happy grin drooping at the corners into disappointment.

On familiar ground, Katsuki says, “I’m always fucking busy,” and sits at his desk with its stack of cold case murders and nothing else.

The kid follows him into his stunted cubicle, where Katsuki uncomfortably notices that his legs are not only charmingly bowed, but smooth as buttermilk. Literal perfect sex legs. “Can you at least tell me what you were doing at the hospital earlier?”

Katsuki looks from the kid’s doe eyes to the notebook he whips out of nowhere, pen at the ready. “No.”

“The public wants to know—”

“Fuck the public, and fuck your useless fucking outdated paper.”

Peripheral vision catches Shitty Hair thunking his forehead against his desk. In hindsight, that insult might bite Katsuki in the ass later. Whatever, it’s true. No one reads newspapers anymore.

“Look, Deku—”

“Izuku,” the kid corrects wearing that same damn smile, as if Katsuki’s dumpster fire personality somehow makes him happy. Considering that this is the exact opposite of what Katsuki wants, Katsuki figures either he magically grew a sympathy bone since this morning, or the kid is insane.

“Deku,” Katsuki repeats, “I don’t care what your job is or what the fuck you thought ambushing me was going to accomplish. I’m not talking to you, so go away.”

Undeterred, the kid asks, “Can you just tell me what you’re working on?”

“Suppressing the desire to bodily throw you out.”

His smile finally falters a little. “Oh.”

“Goodbye,” Katsuki smirks, turning back to his uselessly ancient paperwork. None of the other folders jump up and down shouting ‘me, me!’ like the first one, so Katsuki grabs a folder at random. The lingering presence at his side keeps him from opening it. “You’re still fucking here.”

“Those files look old,” Deku deduces. When Katsuki chances a glance up, he finds the kid glowing with excitement again. It’s almost cute, maybe even attractive, except how that intense interest is preventing Katsuki from doing his job. “Are those—cold cases, oh my god, you’re solving unsolved homicides!”

Katsuki stands up so he can effectively loom over the kid. He has several inches and fifty pounds on the tiny thing, although that doesn’t seem to be much of an advantage against the blinding grin currently abusing his retinas. “What part of go the fuck away confused you, Deku? I can’t read my damn files if you’re gawking at privileged information.”

“Which one?” Deku begs. “I just need to know which one you’re looking at, Mr. Bakugou—”

“Detective!” Katsuki snaps. His hand twitches with the need to grab this kid and throw him through the nearest window.

“Detective, you’re right, I’m so sorry. There are only twenty-three unsolved homicides on the department’s record. You have six folders there, but you went to the hospital earlier, and you just opened a new file, so that means you solved one!” His milky green eyes zero in on the unopened folder while Katsuki tries to catch up with that mumbled rant enough to process what the hell is going on here. The kid knows way too much.

“Shitty Hair…” he growls.

Both Shitty Hair’s hands shoot up in a ‘who me?’ gesture Katsuki believes, if only because the other detective can’t lie for shit. “I didn’t say anything.”

That avenue closed, and with no other obvious options, Katsuki flatly concludes, “You’re stalking me.” The kid blushes. It’s ugly in contrast to his overall greenness. Thoroughly frustrated, Katsuki calls, “Pervert, get over here!” at the upper range of his lungs, just enough to echo into the hallway outside the bureau. When the creepy desk officer with his greasy round curls doesn’t immediately appear, Katsuki roars, “DESK OFFICER!” at top volume. The kid and Shitty Hair both wince in tandem.

Luckily, a loud thump precludes a sudden burst of activity outside. Something tall slams through the bureau doors a second later, revealing a pristinely dressed officer with slicked back hair and glasses reflecting white from the crappy fluorescents. He even salutes. “Yes, sir! Officer Iida reporting!”

Shitty Hair slaps a hand over his mouth and starts shaking silently.

“Sonic the Hedgehog,” Katsuki greets, having never met this idiot before, “Escort Deku outside.”

There’s a moment of silence before Sonic asks, “Me? I’m Sonic?”

“Do your fucking ears work, or are they just decoration for your goddamned egg head?” Finger pointed helpfully at the door, Katsuki reiterates, “Take Deku outside before I do it myself.” He puts just enough growl in his voice to imply the threat of excessive violence without actually stating it outright. His anger management therapist would be proud. They still hesitate though, Deku and Sonic sharing a confused glance as if they cannot possibly understand why he wants them both removed from his workspace, and all his therapy goes out the window. He crashes his fist against the desk hard enough to rattle his smoothie. “Now goddamn it!”

Jumping, Sonic touches Deku on his small shoulder and says, “The exit is this way, sir.”

Deku blinks his milky green eyes at Katsuki, all sweet and syrupy. Too bad for him that Katsuki hates sweets. “One quote?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Katsuki snarls through bared teeth.

They finally leave, and Katsuki sits down to do his actual job uninterrupted by morons. Shitty Hair keeps pretending he’s not laughing at the opposite desk, his own case load woefully untouched. Katsuki wishes they sat close enough to each other that he could kick his partner silent.

“Smooth,” Half and Half sneers from his little vice corner.

“Enough to be given special fucking assignments no one else has wanted to touch in forty years,” Katsuki sneers back. While everyone may dump on his subpar personality, no one can question his work ethic or intelligence.

Now that he has a chance to actually breathe here, Katsuki unloads his second homicide onto his desk. More pencil, great. At least the forms are updated, meaning it’s recent-ish, from—1992? Fuck. This one looks a little more complicated than the last one at least. Old man gone missing, presumed murdered. No corpse ever recovered despite a rather scarily intense excavation in an empty lot near the victim’s house. Detective at the time believed it was the, oh god, the hairdresser, really? What twisted up, stupid logic conjured that ridiculous idea?

Sighing, Katsuki grabs his notepad.

Shitty Hair interrupts him a little over two hours later. “Lunch?”

“Yeah, alright,” Katsuki grunts, abandoning his useless notes because this bullshit makes no fucking sense. It’s as if the officer who took the initial report, and the detectives who completed the follow up, and the sergeants who signed off on all this nonsense, were concussed. Possibly brain dead, to go along with the actual dead guy currently rotting in the ground somewhere. Katsuki rubs his forehead. “I need grease.”

“Pinks?”

Katsuki leans over just so he can glare across their conjoined desks at the faintly grinning moron. “When the fuck are you gunna get over that?”

The faint grin turns into a faint blush. “Get over what?”

“You know perfectly well what, asshole. How many fucking burgers are you going to make me eat in a week?”

“Hey, you’re the one asking for grease!” Shitty Hair defends himself. He stands up and starts straightening his shirt. Unlike Katsuki, he actually dressed for a proper workday in a deep red button up and black slacks. His gun and badge look far more professional on his belt than the faint bulge of Katsuki’s kit beneath his wrinkled flannel. People look at Shitty Hair and think respectable authority figure. Those same people look at Katsuki and nervously clutch their purses closer.

Not that Katsuki gives a shit what people think about him, but his bosses tend to have opinions unfavorable to his career path, so he plays nice and covers up his firearm when he’s dressed down in civilian clothes.

This flannel makes him look out of place though, standing next to Shitty Hair. The man preens like a peacock.

“I didn’t ask for that fucking gross expression on your face,” Katsuki huffs, the wind taken from his sails. He follows his partner to the car like a beaten mongrel begging for scraps, led more by hunger than friendship. His stomach is hoisting picket signs against the injustice of waiting seven hours between meals, even though he gave the needy bastard a smoothie. Like always, he drives, taking the familiar turns through the city until he reaches the garish pink building named, creatively, Pinks. By a woman who dyes her hair pink and wears pink clothes and has a personality like a bubble bath. For whatever shitty reason Shitty Hair makes his shitty decisions, he took a liking to the owner and eats here every chance he gets.

“Welcome to—Eijiro! Hi!”

“Hey Mina,” Shitty Hair replies shyly, beaming. “Got a table for me and Baku-bro?”

The girl returns the affectionate expression so obviously that Katsuki wonders how they’re not married with three adorably color clashing babies already. “I always have a table for my two favorite detectives!” She hurriedly snatches up a couple menus. “Right this way, gentlemen!”

They follow her generously swinging hips to a table near the back that gives perfect sight lines to the entirety of the business. Katsuki still cases the joint, wary, because his job involves solving robberies from quaint little shops just like this on a daily basis. Interview rooms see any number of culprits, from the young and dumb to the tweakers high on drugs, even the elderly and desperate looking for an easy buck to pay their mounting medical bills. Just about anyone can whip out a gun these days.

Not much going on in Pinks at this hour, just late enough in the afternoon to avoid the lunch rush, yet not so late they abut the dinner crowd. Couple teenagers playing hooky, a drunk at the bar guzzling beer, few oldies on vacation from their senior home, with the requisite white bus waiting patiently outside.

Oblivious to his career induced paranoia, Pinky sets down their menus and flutters her long eyelashes at Shitty Hair. “Here you are! I’ve been messing around with a new burger recipe, if you both want to give it a try?”

“Is it greasy?” Katsuki asks.

Pinky reacts like she forgot he was even there. “Oh, uh, yes, of course! And spicy!”

Katsuki feels a nasty smirk crawl across his face. While he grew up in a house where food was willingly eaten or shoved down his unwilling throat by an overbearing mother, Shitty Hair grew up—delicate. “Bring it on, bubble gum. For both of us.”

She beams and flounces off to fill their order along with the usual bevy of drinks. Shitty Hair always orders soda; Katsuki water or, if he’s feeling frisky, tea. Unsweetened, because fuck sugar. He hates the stuff. Beyond reason, according to Shitty Hair, who waits a few seconds after Pinky leaves before his smile drops. “What the fuck, dude.”

Katsuki smirks wider.

“What the fuck,” Shitty Hair hisses again, voice wobbling. “You know I can’t eat that!”

“You can and you will, dipshit.”

“I-I—I’m gunna spend all afternoon on the toilet, bro. If I even make it to the toilet!” His pointy face goes wide and panicky in a way that Katsuki desperately enjoys.

He leans back in the booth and does a quick scan of the still empty windows. “Karma.”

“For what?”

“For not doing something about your horrendous fucking crush in time to save me from the aftermath.” Shitty Hair starts whining in the back of his throat like an injured puppy. “Stop fucking whining. It’s just the truth.” He taps his fingers on the table, the sound a soothing rhythm in counterpoint to his slow heartbeat. “Not sure how to solve my old guy murder,” he admits thoughtfully.

“Wanna talk it out?”

Katsuki glares at Shitty Hair for being a dumbass. “Why the fuck do you think I’m bringing it up?”

“Fair,” Shitty Hair says, because Satan put him on this Earth to be entirely unbothered by Katsuki’s temper, forcing Katsuki to come up with creative ways to pay his partner back for all this complacency. Now that they’re sharing leg space, Katsuki can kick him like he’s been dying to all day. “Ouch.”

“Are you bullying Eijiro again?” Pinky interrupts, swooping into view with Shitty Hair’s soda and, fuck yes, a lemon in Katsuki’s water.

Shitty Hair sits up excitedly like the carbonation won’t fuck him up worse than Katsuki’s lemon, and pastes on a smile that appears real, save for the foot he’s jamming into Katsuki’s shin. Well, if they’re going there, Katsuki’s winning. He twists their ankles together and slams Shitty Hair’s foot down at the worst possible angle without full-on causing a break.

Of course, the girl staring at Shitty Hair like he hung the stars notices when his face warps from happy to pained. “Katsuki, that’s enough!” she scolds.

“I’ll stop when he stops being a dipshit.”

She keeps pouting at him though, her lips as puffy and ridiculous as her fat baby cheeks, and Katsuki has a secret weakness for cute little baby things wobbling at him for attention. He stares at her pretty hard, well aware how unfriendly he looks and entirely unsurprised when the teenagers next to the window suddenly find somewhere else to play hooky. Pinky remains unmoved, forcing Katsuki to concede unless he wants spit flavoring his burger. “Fuck, fine,” he growls, letting his boot go slack enough for Shitty Hair to escape.

His pointy faced relief is insulting. “Thanks, Mina, you’re the best.”

She blushes and actually twirls some of her bubble gum hair around her finger. Jesus they’re oblivious. “I’ll have your food out in a couple minutes. Do you want anything until then?”

“Nope,” Katsuki says before Shitty Hair can adjust their order.

The soft glare Pinky adopts tells Katsuki in no uncertain terms that he’ll find worse than spit in his burger if she sees any more funny-business at this table. Katsuki rolls his eyes but nods all the same. The protesting picket signs in his stomach somehow multiplied on the ride over, adding rhythmic chants and smoke bombs and shit. He gulps half his water once Pinky leaves just to appease the bastard a little longer.

“About my old guy,” he continues as if that entire interlude never occurred. Sometimes the best path through hell is the one already beneath his feet. “He basically disappeared off the face of the fucking earth with no workable leads.”

“No body?” Shitty Hair asks, willing to roll along through hell without wandering off to sightsee. Katsuki likes that about his partner, when Shitty Hair isn’t otherwise being shitty.

“Nope.”

“What’d the detectives at the time think?”

Katsuki clenches his fists until the knuckles strain white at the mere memory. His therapist warned him repeatedly against overly aggressive nonverbal behavior, especially those intended to intimidate or otherwise physically dominate another person. Katsuki reasons that the current targets of his wrath are already dead or otherwise unavailable, so this doesn’t count. “Something about the hairdresser having an affair with someone three times her age for the money and killing him when he stopped the gravy train. Except what goddamned logic does that make? The crime’s too clean to be a passion murder, and the girl didn’t gain anything for killing him. Hell, she fucking lost money!”

Shitty Hair stirs his straw in his soda before taking a slow, contemplative sip. Katsuki refrains from kicking him into spitting his theory out already. “Who else stood to gain from the murder?”

“I already know the family did it, that isn’t the fucking problem,” Katsuki growls.

“Then why the hell are you telling me this?”

“I answered your stupid question, I didn’t say it was helpful information!” Katsuki drags an impatient hand through his hair to keep from enacting his throttling fantasies on Shitty Hair, who arguably deserves a modicum of Katsuki’s nonexistent patience. “The detectives focused so fucking hard on this stupid hairdresser angle that they didn’t bother watching the family until it was too late. Bastards inherited granddaddy’s money and bailed out of the area, taking all the fucking evidence with them.”

“Oh,” Shitty Hair says so fucking helpfully. “That sucks, bro.”

“No shit.” Katsuki resumes tapping his fingers on the table, only his heartbeat has ratcheted up a bit in the intervening minutes since he stopped so the rhythms no longer match. He swallows a few deep breaths to settle back down. “I don’t think I can solve this one. Not without a body.”

“So find the body?”

Well, there goes his slowing heartbeat. “Fuck you, what do you think I’ve been doing for the past two hours? It’s probably gone, either dumped in a landfill or eaten by sharks or some shit.”

“Then give the case back to Sarge. Or put it at the bottom of your pile and review it later.”

Katsuki downs the rest of his water to avoid saying something unforgivably vile about Shitty Hair’s mother. Even he recognizes an irrational impulse when he feels one. “I’m not giving back shit,” he admits mulishly. “And I’m damn sure not giving up either. I will find that fucking body, one way or another.”

“Dude, you equally scare and impress me at the same time. Did you know some of the guys are taking bets on how long it’ll be until you kill someone?”

“Course I do,” Katsuki answers in what he feels is a reasonably mild voice.

Shitty Hair frowns at him though, so that was clearly the wrong approach to this conversation. Whatever, not like Katsuki gives a shit what Shitty Hair thinks. “Since when?”

“Since they started? Not like they’re subtle.”

“I placed my bet at a Chuck E Cheese, bro. I’d say that’s pretty off the radar.”

Katsuki almost laughs, because the answer’s literally right there, except Shitty Hair looks seriously baffled at how Katsuki could possibly guess that something shady is going on in this scenario. After several seconds of silence wherein Katsuki gives his partner the opportunity to grow a brain cell and his partner very obviously does not bother trying, Katsuki says, “And why the fuck is an unmarried, childless adult hanging out in Chuck E fucking Cheese, asshat.”

“…okay in hindsight maybe not the best plan.” Shitty Hair smiles like lack of self-awareness is somehow funny, before continuing, “But wait, how’d you know it was a bet about you?”

“Pikachu can’t keep his mouth shut.”

Shitty Hair leans across the table and demands, “Kaminari tattled?”

“Good as,” Katsuki admits, rolling his eyes in exasperation at the collective stupidity of his oblivious coworkers. “He bragged in the station gym about making bank on an upcoming bet, then looked at me like I was the fucking boogeyman when I told him to move his fat ass off the weight bench. Three days later he sends Soy Sauce Face over with a mountain of overdue traffic subpoenas from my time on patrol that no one bothered forwarding along. Moron had his fucking camera out to record. Doesn’t take a goddamned genius to connect the dots.”

“I wondered why you didn’t strangle Sero that day.”

“And give Pikachu the satisfaction? Not fucking likely.” Movement in his peripheral vision announces Pinky’s return, and Katsuki sits back just in time to avoid a hot burger to the face. Pinky very clearly almost misses the table entirely, her large eyes focused shyly on Shitty Hair. His burger is set delicately on the table and, on inspection, has a larger patty and more slices of bacon than Katsuki’s. “Playing favorites, bubble gum?”

Predictably she blushes. “Of course not!”

“Sure,” he snorts. He picks up the burger and takes a huge bite despite the mostly empty glass of water on the table. The first swallow goes down like pure fire and lands in his empty stomach with all the flaming retribution of a nuclear bomb. Serves the bastard picket signs right. Katsuki lets his burning mouth grin in vicious triumph over his shitty stomach and his shitty best friend, who watches him wide-eyed like he’s a zoo animal misbehaving behind the glass.

Well, fuck him then. Katsuki catches Shitty Hair’s abused ankle between his own, keeping him effectively trapped at the table, and says, “Gunna eat, dick cheese?”

Pinky, heretofore distracted by the spectacle Katsuki apparently makes when he eats, notices the distinct lack of activity on the other side of the table and goes all doe-eyed at her future husband. “Oh, do you not like it, Eijiro?”

The blood drains from Shitty Hair’s pointy face. “Uh, no, it’s fine, Mina! Just watching the animal eat first.”

They share a glance that Katsuki doesn’t appreciate, not that he can eloquently complain when his lips have thrown up their own picket signs against cruel and unusual punishment. He settles for a simple, “S’good.”

Pinky looks appropriately startled by this high compliment. “Really? Everyone says I went too heavy handed with the habanero sauce.”

“They’re fucking wrong.”

“Thank you,” she says, back to twirling her hair. “I didn’t know you liked spicy food.”

He nods rather than explain that he associates spicy with home, and his overbearing mother, and a time in his life when everything was rainbows and nothing seemed capable of hurting him. Now Katsuki daydreams about the potential applications of his firearm, and not always against others. Besides, neither of these idiots care about anything beyond each other, as proven when Shitty Hair actually takes a bite of his burger, small and tentative and not enough to keep his eyes from watering. “Oh wow,” he chokes, reaching for his soda. “That’s—something.”

“You like it too?”

He makes the mistake of drinking before answering, widens his eyes in horror, and settles on a loose necked nod that no one would believe save the heart-eyed waitress hoping to give him a dozen babies in the near future. She beams at Shitty Hair and, having successfully wooed her love only in her own mind, finally widens her visual scope enough to notice that Katsuki’s out of water. “Let me refill your drink, detective,” she says politely.

Katsuki waves her off and waits until he sees her pink bob flutter into the kitchen before saying, “Bet you’re hurting.”

“Foock yew,” Shitty Hair mumbles back.

Ankles still locked together, Katsuki takes relative pity on his best friend and reaches for the jalapenos on Shitty Hair’s burger. He even picks the pepper jack cheese off and drops it into his own mouth, chewing thoughtfully. While not exactly an afficionado about food, being someone who prefers maintaining energy over fussing about taste, Katsuki nevertheless recognizes a good quality cheese when he feels it sliding down his throat. He reluctantly approves of Pinky’s interest. “Relax, fuckface, eat what you can. I’ll even swing you through a drive through if you still buy.”

“Yer g’na mack m’pay?”

“Keep backtalking me and I’ll make you eat these jalapenos too.”

Duly threatened, Shitty Hair cries down at his relatively de-spiced burger that will nevertheless wreak havoc on his delicate stomach, and resumes eating.

Pinky returns after a little while with more water and soda, not that Shitty Hair needs more, having learned his lesson about carbonation. The lack of jalapenos on the burger visibly piques her concern, especially when she sees Katsuki popping them like squishy chips between bites of his own burger. Shitty Hair notices too and pastes a thin smile on while he chirps about paying, before literally fleeing to the hostess stand to accost a very surprised waitress. “Katsuki,” Pinky says slowly, staring back at Shitty Hair. “Did you purposely order something Eijiro dislikes?”

“He ate it, didn’t he?” Katsuki retorts, unwilling to answer honestly and risk spit in future burgers. He has no illusions about the frequency of their return visits.

Hands on her generously curved waist like a parody of parental authority that in no way measures up to his actual childhood, Pinky scolds “You are a terrible friend!” like that will change his behavior.

“Take that up with Shitty Hair, he’s the one who refuses to leave me alone.”

For some reason, that earns him a look of pity he does not appreciate, and he scowls at her just so she knows she’s on thin ice before dropping the last few jalapenos into his mouth. Shitty Hair appears almost finished paying, and he wants to return to his old guy murder while the information is still fresh in his mind. Give a detective too long with a few un-patterned facts, and he’ll come up with an explanation in self-defense that will prove both persistent and wrong. Katsuki never gives himself time to fall into a rut on cases. He needs a solid lead before the end of day, or this case will go in the garbage alongside his shitty personality.

“You’re too smart for your own good,” Pinky says, apropos of nothing. When Katsuki looks up at her, she’s smiling for some odd reason that he vaguely wants to understand, knowing as he does that she will eventually be a fixture in his life. “Ooh, I can see your gears turning!”

“Least I have gears,” he snorts. “The fuck you smiling for?”

“Nothing,” she blatantly lies to his fucking face.

Only the sudden reappearance of Shitty Hair saves her from a righteous animal mauling the likes of which would land him back in anger management. “Paid up, Baku-bro. Ready to head back to the station?”

Said like Shitty Hair actually wants to leave despite the no doubt painful bubbling in his stomach. Even a little spice goes a long way in that shitty digestive system. Still, his old guy murder won’t solve itself, so Katsuki shrugs and stands up to loom over Pinky, who’s pepto-pink hair barely crests above his ribs. “Move your ass, bubble gum.”

She smiles at him again and shuffles aside until she nearly bumps Shitty Hair, close enough to hug if either of them bothered lifting their dead arms.

“Thanks for the food, Mina,” Shitty Hair says shyly.

“No problem,” she replies, back to twirling her hair and fluttering her eyelashes. Katsuki rolls his eyes behind her back and earns Shitty Hair’s shitty glare. “Come back soon!”

“Knowing this idiot, probably tomorrow.”

“Fuck you, Baku-bro.”

Katsuki scoffs and pulls his keys from his pocket to get this vomit-inducing show on the road back to reality. “I only fuck singles, dipshit. C’mon, or I’m leaving you here.”

“I-I am single, I swear—”

Looking between them, from Shitty Hair’s useless sputtering to Katsuki’s knowing smirk, Pinky blushes to the dyed roots of her hair and scuttles back into the kitchen, leaving Shitty Hair standing open mouthed in the middle of the dining room. Herding him outside takes far longer than Katsuki wants to spend doing something other than his job. Just his luck, the car grew a little green tumor on the bumper while they were eating. Katsuki flinches hard enough to draw Shitty Hair’s attention away from Pinks. “Oh, hey, journalist kid!”

“Dumbass!” Katsuki snaps, but it’s too late. The kid’s milky green eyes snap around, and he runs over on his gorgeous sex legs to confront them mere feet from their only means of escape. “Did you stalk us again?”

“I saw your car,” the kid admits breathlessly.

Now that the picket signs have been lowered and the urgency to solve his old guy murder has stalled out on a lack of viable leads, Katsuki’s sleeping libido sits up and links that breathy voice with the charmingly bowed sex legs in his rapidly reprioritizing mind. Those legs would look better if they were thrown over his shoulders and covered in red impressions of his teeth.

Fuck, the kid’s probably not out of high school. Katsuki doesn’t want to arrest himself for statutory.

He glares down at the kid for being sexy, and cute, and infinitely determined to throw his milky eyes between Katsuki and a clear prison record. “Go. Away. Now. Before I fucking throw you in lock up for obstructing my ability to do my damn job.”

“Aw, Baku-bro, he just wants to write a story about our best detective. Give him a chance!”

“Not helping,” he tells Shitty Hair.

“I really don’t want to bother you, Detective Bakugou,” the kid interrupts, pen and paper already out and poised to prove him a goddamned liar. One of his hands is all scarred up for some reason, little slashes and nicks that take Katsuki a second to recognize. Defensive wounds from a knife. Katsuki narrows eyes at the kid and takes him in again, from his smooth gorgeous fucking sex legs to his hopeful little smile. Violent crime victims tend to lean towards paranoia or, more likely, jadedness, their understanding of the world forever altered by the shitty things people do when improperly motivated. This kid looks way too innocent to be a victim, and yet.

The kid’s still smiling, somehow, staring up at Katsuki with pupils the size of nickels. He should be at home watching cartoons, not out here accosting police detectives in a diner parking lot for a story that doesn’t exist. Katsuki breathes hard and rocks his weight back on his heels, knowing he’s fucked. “I’m seriously considering a restraining order here.”

“Yeah right, you hate court paperwork,” Shitty Hair says, effectively emasculating his threat. Katsuki kicks the idiot in his abused shin. “Ow, damn it, stop kicking me!”

“Then stop being a dipshit!”

“Please,” the kid begs with those big green eyes all creamy and soft like a warm, fuzzy blanket on a cold night. Plus, those goddamned gorgeous sex legs are right fucking there, and that mild, breathy voice his fucked-up brain decided belonged in his spank bank. Somehow, the kid knows Katsuki’s secret weakness for cute little baby things leaning on him for support and went in for the kill. “Just one, honest quote. I think the community would love to know that someone bright and dedicated is closing up these old wounds.”

Katsuki actually knows better than to cuss out the community to the press. “Look, Deku, I’m not in this for the public jollies, all right? Let me do my goddamned job.”

The kid stares at him for a long, excruciating second that Katsuki struggles not to fidget through, wondering why the hell he doesn’t just hop in the car and take off for sanctuary. Must be those damn milky eyes. Pond water. Algae. Gross, slimy things that Katsuki in no way, shape, or form enjoyed trailing his fingers through as a child, fascinated by the texture and murky, understated colors. Not even a little.

“Did I break you?” he asks, not sure which answer he’s hoping for.

Good thing he had no expectations, since the kid answers with fucking nonsense. “That will do. Thank you, detective.”

“Whatever.”

The kid’s already writing whatever the fuck in his little notebook, pink tongue jutting out from between his puffy pillow lips. Fuck, he has freckles. Katsuki slams into the car like the hounds of hell are nipping at his heels and waits until Shitty Hair follows suit before activating the child locks. Neither of them deserve what they want right now.

“Seriously, child locks?” Shitty Hair demands, ineffectively tugging on the door handle just to prove he can’t get out.

Katsuki starts the car. “I want to get back to work. Preferably today.”

Shitty Hair rolls his eyes and slumps in his seat without putting his seatbelt on, an effective tactic against Katsuki driving away. They’re left staring out at the world through a vaguely dusty windshield, the kid still standing there looking like something Katsuki desperately should not touch, while Pinky rubbernecks the drama from behind the cracking paint on her diner window. “I hope that journalist saves your clipped toenails in a nasty shrine,” Shitty Hair mutters, clutching his stomach in both hands.

“Keep this up and I’ll make you regret it,” Katsuki warns.

Unlike the restraining order, this is not an idle threat. Shitty Hair side eyes him for potential weaknesses, a lamb thinking he somehow morphed into a wolf while the real wolf sizes him up for meat. “How?” he asks belligerently.

Katsuki shifts the car into gear and makes like he’s going to drive despite the missing seatbelt that will send Shitty Hair through an otherwise pristine windshield if they get into an accident. “I’ll tell Aizawa the real reason you called in ‘sick’ last Wednesday. With the descriptive voicemail you helpfully left on my phone at three in the fucking morning.”

Shitty Hair’s mouth drops open. “You’re actually Satan in disguise, aren’t you?”

“Only on Thursdays,” Katsuki answers in bland disregard for the joke. People liken him to the devil often enough for the shine to dull. “Put on your fucking seatbelt already.” Shitty Hair does, and they finally pull away from the most awkward lunch in the storied history of uncomfortable lunches. Katsuki catches one last glimpse of the kid in the parking lot when he checks the rearview mirror, that oversized sweater a beacon in the murky gray afternoon sunshine, buttermilk legs reflecting the light.

He’s so fucking attractive.

Katsuki may or may not strangle his steering wheel all the way to the station, whereupon he throws Shitty Hair out and stalks toward the gun range for some much-needed stress relief. Hell, maybe a few rounds at a fake paper person will curb his lingering desire to turn his firearm on himself.

He stays there for over an hour, firing round after round after round, his flannel thrown over the nearest chair. Katsuki typically carries two guns—his primary, either clipped to his belt or tucked in his underarm holster, and the small ankle gun he creatively straps to his fucking ankle. He’s shot three people in his career, two of which died thanks to his direct intervention. The third he wishes died, enough that, if given half the chance, he would probably strangle the man with his bare hands on sight and damn any witnesses. That said, Katsuki has other guns, being a typical policeman with a typical interest in things that go boom. His gun safe at home houses four rifles, ten more handguns, and a shotgun, with requisite bullets in alarming amounts. He also may or may not have an AR-15 and a few live grenades. For emergencies.

Yeah, it’s overkill, but cops are paranoid for a reason. The last person Katsuki killed broke into his house while he was sleeping, unaware that Katsuki had extensive combat training, both for his career and for private interest.

Katsuki still sees the fucker’s face on his closed eyelids at night.

He empties his current clip and moves to grab another, still jittery down deep in his stomach where mistakes are born, and comes face to face with his unimpressed Sergeant. “Fuck!”

Aizawa mimes removing nonexistent earmuffs until Katsuki buys the obvious clue. “Range staff says you’ve been here over an hour,” he notes blandly, bloodshot eyes darting down to stare at the gun smoking in Katsuki’s hand. It’s his ankle one, because it’s been a while since he bothered test firing the thing. “People are concerned.”

“Earphones,” Katsuki growls, hands clenching hard around his gun and earmuffs.

“Officer Jirou cares,” Aizawa interrupts his mounting rage, “most specifically about the recruits waiting their turn in your booth. Please return to the detective bureau.”

“I’m—”

“Now, Bakugou.”

The fast incoming writeup is visible in his bloodshot eyes, forcing Katsuki to weigh his current mental state against his future mental state, when a writeup like that will inevitably add ammunition to another slavery argument against his work hours. Something in his neck pops, and he realizes his jaw has gone nuclear without his permission, grinding so hard the muscles are straining. He hurriedly ejects the fresh magazine from his firearm before he thinks too long about one way to relieve the pressure. “Fine, sir. That all?”

“How’re your homicides coming?”

Katsuki bares his teeth at Aizawa. “I’m down here, aren’t I?”

Aizawa, well familiar with Katsuki’s fluctuating mood, absorbs his silent rage in passive silence. glancing down the range floor to the fake paper person Katsuki blew a fist sized hole through one tiny projectile at a time. His lips quirk into something that approximates a smile, if he was the monster about to eat the protagonist in a horror movie. “I thought you’d shred through them like you do everything else. My mistake.”

“Fucker, you’re just trying to bait me.”

“And it’ll work,” Aizawa agrees, unbothered. “I expect you upstairs in fifteen minutes.”

He walks away, leaving Katsuki alone with one bullet in the chamber and a bubbling feeling of failure in his chest. Without looking, he points his ankle gun at the target and fires. The soft thwack tells him he aimed true. Tossing the ugly orange earmuffs on the counter and scooping up his flannel, Katsuki stalks past the waiting line of recruits, shivering in their freshly polished boots with eyes demurely canted away from his ferocious expression. Earphones stands slightly behind them popping bubble gum like she hasn’t a care in the world for the position she just put Katsuki in. As usual, she has her customized headphones hanging from her neck, tinny music pumping loud enough that Katsuki hears the muffled lyrics as he’s storming past her. “Want your head shot sent up?” she asks his retreating back.

“Go fuck yourself,” he replies, reloading his magazine one bullet short.

The area designated for cleaning firearms is mercifully unpopulated. He sits rather than actually do what he’s supposed to, methodically twisting his ankle gun from one hand to the other, safety off and barrel pointed up at his own face. It’d be so easy.

He clenches his jaw and clicks the safety back on.

Katsuki doesn’t do easy.

The bureau’s pretty empty this late in the day, most detectives preferring earlier hours, where they can ambush suspects either on the phone or in person while the suspects are sleepy enough to absently answer incriminating questions. Katsuki takes the opposite approach—he wants his suspects awake. He wants them to see him coming and know that they’re fucked, that he’s going to catch them one way or another, come hell or high water, his bullet or his bare fucking hands. They fear Katsuki, and that’s just how Katsuki likes it.

Half and Half has gone home, his prostitutes putting themselves away until the late evening. Shitty Hair probably took off also, only rarely working the same hours Katsuki does. Vulture is still at his desk, at least, and they share a nod of companionable disinterest.

His old guy murder is right where Katsuki left it. A random cup of coffee is also there, and Katsuki stares suspiciously at it. Everyone knows he doesn’t drink coffee.

“Who left this?” he asks Vulture.

“Some kid,” Vulture replies. “Small. Smiley. Green.”

Fucking Deku. Katsuki sits in his chair and moodily stares at the coffee cup with its cheerful green logo, as recognizable as the sun in the sky. It’s an unwritten rule that officers do not ingest items brought in from unknown sources. Katsuki in particular refuses food from all manner of people, including station wives, Shitty Hair, and the almost weekly birthday celebration cake, although that last is due to the ridiculously high sugar content. No one likes him, therefore he cannot in good conscience eat potentially contaminated food, even if the contaminant is just a prank laxative.

The kid seems to like him though. A lot. For who knows what reason. Katsuki rotates in his chair, using his thigh muscles to twist him first one way and then the other, staring contemplatively at the coffee cup.

He’s never tasted coffee before.

A taste wouldn’t hurt, he reasons, somewhat afraid he’s lost his mind. Except the cup is still hot, meaning he just missed the kid. The warmth seeps through fingers gone cold with a persistent sense of despair.

The first sip brings his eyebrows up.

“Good?” Vulture asks.

“Yeah.” It’s tea, a strangely pleasing mix of lemon, mint, and peach, despite a sharp burst of sugar on his tongue that he could really do without. He takes another sip and lets the heat linger in his mouth.

“From your boyfriend?” Vulture deduces on, admittedly, solid intel. Cops do not accept drinks from unreliable sources. Usually. Vulture has no idea that Katsuki is on a knife’s edge about to tip over, and what should be raising red flags instead flashes a bright, acidic green, urging him forward. If this has contaminated spit in it, it’s Katsuki’s own damn fault.

“No,” he admits, setting the tea aside. Too much at once and the sugar will coat his mouth. “He’s a fucking stalker.”

There’s a lengthy pause where Vulture has thoughts he keeps to himself, because unlike the rest of the department he knows how to keep his sharp nose out of other people’s business. “Shall I bar him from entering next time I see him?”

“Doubt it’d fucking work,” Katsuki says instead of the sudden, visceral threat that charges up his tongue for Vulture to find his own stalker journalist.

His mom just started laughing for no good reason.

Apparently finished making small talk, Vulture returns to his computer like Katsuki should be returning to his cases. He stares hard at his old guy murder folder, scowl resigned, because he knows better than to believe himself a quitter. He’ll bust down whatever wall stands in his way until he finds the truth, even if the truth is something he’d rather throw down a deep hole and never think about again.

He flips open his notes and rereads the pertinent information. Eighty-year-old, moderately wealthy guy reported missing by his daughter. Inheritance seemingly split between the daughter and the son after the mandatory seven-year sanction against legally updating the old man’s status from missing to dead. Entire family picks up and moves as if they coordinated an escape from the long reach of law enforcement.

Who moved first, he thinks, glancing at the ridiculously long list of involved parties. Daughter and son, husband and wife, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Nothing in the report about who moved first, just a bunch of bullshit about the hairdresser.

Well, at least he can use a computer for this. Katsuki navigates to a popular real estate website. He searches the grandfather’s house first, unsurprised to find it listed for sale not one day after the death declaration and sold four months later for a decent sum. The daughter’s house is up next, except her house was actually a rental. Katsuki will need to call the rental company for that information, which they may or may not cough up without a warrant depending on who he speaks to and how he asks. The son, then, before he makes any sudden moves that will cost him several hours of his nonexistent patience. Seven years one month after the old guy disappeared.

Katsuki taps his pen and figures he’s missing something.

He keeps staring at the great-grandchild’s name. Not even a year old when the dude disappeared, old guy barely knew her. Wonder where she ended up.

Police databases only turn up so much, but he has a name, and it’s been twenty years. She probably has a social media account of some kind. It takes a little doing since people these days like to make up cute nicknames for their profiles, but he eventually finds her. She’s passing pretty, wearing too much makeup and a low-cut shirt, pursing her puffy painted lips at the camera. Her earrings are fucking diamonds.

Real diamonds?

Katsuki zooms in and squints. Well, he’s no expert, but that looks real to him. He searches the parents next, one grandson and his wife. Unlike the daughter, they do not have social media nor any cute nicknames he has to decipher. They do have jobs and a house payment. Low income jobs for a pretty expensive house. He glances at his notes and links the grandson to the daughter who reported the old guy missing.

Tapping his fingers, Katsuki looks at the computer, his notes, the case file, over and over until his eyes blur.

Just for reference, he searches the other four grandchildren as well. Three were too young, unless pre-teens can comfortably plan out a sophisticated murder. The other grandchild, another male, was about eighteen, strapping and good-looking from his picture, already accepted into a four-year university that a quick search confirms he attended and graduated. He has a decent enough job and property that matches his income. Meanwhile, older brother didn’t attend college, was working in fast food at the time of the murder, had a girlfriend and a new baby. Babies are expensive.

Follow the money, Katsuki tells himself, staring at those damn diamonds.

Eldest grandson, then, but how did the daughter fit in? Was she in on it? Was her husband? Was the grandson’s girlfriend for that matter?

Wife must be, at least, or she would question the sudden income. Daughter too, or else why pass down so much inheritance to one person, enough that the great-granddaughter owns diamonds? Unless Katsuki read this all wrong and everyone received an equal share which only some of them felt the need to spend flamboyantly.

Katsuki puts his head in his hands and sighs. He has no fucking proof. Of anything.

“Hey Vulture,” he says to his desk. A polite grunt encourages him to continue. “Can I bounce some shit off you?”

“Sure.”

Katsuki sits up in his chair and pivots in little half circles, neck loose so his eyes can rove the yellowed ceiling tiles mindlessly. “Guy disappears, gets declared dead, family inherits and moves. Only one of them is acting suspicious, but I’ve got no solid link between him and the inheritance. And no body.”

“…do you have a copy of the will?”

“No,” he says, but he can fucking get one. “Even then, if they have equal shares—”

“Maybe some of them gave money to the suspect?”

Katsuki sits up. Depending on the size of the inheritance, a big house and diamonds could be a stretch. Especially years after the murder for some guy who clearly has trouble making smart choices. “Payment for the murder,” he mutters to himself, fists clenched. He’s suddenly happy they all moved far away, or he’d be going to prison right now. “Thanks, Vulture.”

“Anytime.”

It’s late in the afternoon, but not so late that a phone call will go unanswered. He rings up the law firm handling the last will and testament of the old guy, spending precious time going over his credentials, providing identifying information for the deceased, reaffirming his credentials, exchanging fax numbers, feeding a letterhead request through, reaffirming his credentials, receiving a copy of the will, asking questions about the content, reaffirming his credentials, and making notes about what they tell him.

The clock informs him with a helpful chime that he should be going home. Katsuki barely hears that over the blood ringing in his ears.

Fuckers, the lot of them.

He scans a copy of the will before his shaking hands wrinkle it up, then waits until Vulture leaves before hollering his outrage and banging his hands against his desk until they stop shaking.

It’s not the will, he thinks, eyes burning. The guy had money, dispensed it to his family. Simple. It’s that he changed the will just weeks before he died, when his first little great-grandchild came into the world, born to his financially struggling eldest grandchild. Any good grandfather would loan money to his family. Any good grandfather would set up a trust to dispense the money after he died, for family members who couldn’t fucking handle the burden of adult responsibility enough to pay their bills.

Three-way split between the daughter, son, and great-granddaughter. Great-granddaughter turned eighteen and inherited her share, buying diamonds thanks to the grandfather she will never remember.

So where the hell did that house money come from? The cars? The extravagancies he sees when he rams through the great-granddaughter’s social media feed, jewelry and vacations going back literal years. She set up an account in middle school by the look of her acne, posting pictures of a vacation she took the year before in the sunny tropics. At a goddamned villa. Almost six years prior to inheriting her share of the grandfather’s modest fortune.

Three-way split, and he’s looking at all of it right here. In one fucking place.

His hands clench again, still shaking, so he bangs them a few more times to increase blood flow.

Daughter lives with the eldest grandson in their decent house, her husband long dead. Katsuki angrily wonders if they killed him too before refocusing on his little old guy. The son currently lives up north in a modest retirement cottage, fishing in the lake. He retired late for a guy who inherited a bunch of money. Second eldest grandson is still working. His husband and their three children seem on the up and up at first glance—simple vacations, cheap jewelry, beaming smiles in all their pictures. Katsuki distrusts them anyway.

He needs financial records from the eldest grandson. Needs to follow the money. Katsuki makes a few calls, sends a few fax requests, dances a dozen more rounds affirming his credentials. He wakes up a judge twice.

“Dude,” Shitty Hair greets first thing the next morning.

Katsuki looks up wildly from his sprawling paper maze on the floor of the bureau. “What?”

“Did you go home?”

The grease he wipes off his forehead tells him no, he did not. “Look at this,” he says instead of bothering to refute the obvious. He crabwalks through the paper until he reaches the stack he wants, text gray after repeated copying and covered in four different shades of highlighter. “Both daughter and son are paying the fucking grandson a monthly allowance, have been for years. Since, wait for it—nineteen fucking ninety-two. Not a week before the old guy went missing!”

“Motherfucker,” Shitty Hair breathes, dropping to his knees across from Katsuki. He picks up the phone trace Katsuki had to exchange a kidney for, now covered in highlighter marks and red arrows. “You backtracked all of it?”

“Fuck yeah I did.”

Shitty Hair stares at him and then says, voice unaccountably soft, “I think you need to go home.”

Katsuki snorts.

“I’m serious. Your pupils are the size of quarters, dude.”

“I’ll sleep in the interrogation room,” Katsuki retorts, because that’s a thing he’s done on more than one occasion. He has too many guns at home. “I want these motherfuckers. I want them in my fucking holding cell, peeing their goddamned pants over how hard I’m going to fuck them for this.”

“How about a shower?” Shitty Hair negotiates.

“How about you fuck off.”

The fingers that try reaching into his blind spot he dodges, but he can only go so far before he messes up his paper maze, and Shitty Hair eventually pulls a red pen out from behind his ear. Oh, Katsuki forgot about that one. “Baku-bro,” Shitty Hair says seriously, “this isn’t going anywhere. Shower, change into your spare clothes, get something to eat, take a nap. Then we’ll talk about fucking criminals over the interrogation room table.”

Katsuki rubs the grit from his eyes and sits back on his heels. “I have something here now.”

“Don’t make me report you to Sarge.”

Another suspension threat, fuck. Is he that easy to manipulate? Katsuki glares at Shitty Hair for abusing their friendship, but Shitty Hair remains as unmoved as ever by Katsuki’s anger, gone stale after ten hours spent frantically highlighting bank statements. He knows an unwinnable battle when he sees one.

Standing hurts, forcing him to pound a fist on his aching left knee until the bastard straightens out. He clearly bypassed the age for spending all night kneeling on the floor without his noticing.

“I fucking hate you,” he tells the whole goddamned world.

Shitty Hair returns the anger with a small smile. “Yeah bro, I know. Sleep first.”

“Shower first,” Katsuki corrects, because now that he’s no longer buried in evidence, he can actually smell himself, and it’s not pretty.

He notices the coffee cup as he’s trying to maneuver his way out of the maze and, without really thinking about why, he scuttles back in to gulp the remaining liquid. It’s cold and still too sweet, but it fills his painfully empty stomach just right. Shitty Hair refrains from commenting at least, letting Katsuki escape to the locker room where a few early rising officers double take at whatever awful animal his expression became overnight. The exhaustion hits him in the shower as he’s scrubbing his armpit. The vague next step he’s been considering since about three in the morning goes scattering against the foggy edges of his consciousness, and he just barely makes it to his locker before he collapses, hot forehead pressed against the cold metal.

Several assholes leave him there for however long before he feels a hand jostling his shoulder.

“Wh’t?”

“Kirishima said you were sleeping,” comes Half and Half’s disapproving voice.

Katsuki’s too tired to scowl. “Was.”

“Preferably somewhere other than the locker room and wearing more than a loose towel.”

Shrugging him off takes effort, so Katsuki just fumbles his locker open and reaches for the standard black shirts he keeps hoarded there after what feels like a lifetime of wearing them under his patrol uniform. Only his stiff uniform pants are still in here, and Katsuki pulls them on without underwear because he has no fucks left to give. He shuffles back into the bureau wearing unlaced boots and the wet shower towel hanging limp in his hand, a makeshift pillow wherever he drops. There’s a group of detectives muttering over his paper maze now, including Aizawa, who zeroes in on Katsuki with creepy speed and blinks a silent warning. That, at least, he can muster a scowl for. He flops his hand toward the interrogation room and slinks off before anyone else notices him and starts asking awkward questions.

The interrogation room at the far end of the hallway is blessedly cool. He flips the sign on the door from vacant to occupied and lets himself slump to the floor, towel stuffed sloppily under his cheek.

He’s out in seconds.

When he wakes up, it’s afternoon, and he’s starving. “Goddamn Shitty Hair,” he tells the empty room with its roaring air conditioning. Katsuki could use another four hours sleep. Except someone probably touched his paper maze by now, which is unacceptable, so he tightens the laces on his boots, scrubs his face with the towel, tries not to taste his own mouth, and storms out into the hallway. Several people stare at him as he prowls across the bureau eyeballing his maze for contamination.

It all looks relatively untouched. “Did anyone mess with it?” he demands of Shitty Hair, who looks relieved to see him.

“Nah. Lotta people stopped by to ask what the hell you’re doing.”

Katsuki gives Shitty Hair the stink eye. “You better not have tattled.”

“Just to Aizawa,” Shitty Hair demurs, although his eyes are twinkling a little, because they both know that his all-nighter will be in his next evaluation, if not a writeup later today. “Hey, listen, so that kid stopped by again—”

“Fuck,” Katsuki snarls.

“—he lit up when he saw your papers. I kept him by the door so he couldn’t see anything.”

“What does he want?” Katsuki asks the universe because, at this point, he doubts even the kid knows. He gave the kid a quote already.

It takes him a second that he blames on sleep deprivation to notice Shitty Hair resting his head on his fist, expression so amused that he must know something Katsuki is still in the dark about. Well, Katsuki can change that. He advances on Shitty Hair menacingly. “Woah, easy tiger!” Shitty Hair pops up off the desk and scoots his chair back towards the stairs. “Hey, so, guess what?”

He’s too cheerful to trust. Katsuki crosses his arms against an inevitable delivery of bad news. “What?”

“The kid isn’t actually a kid!” Katsuki flicks a disbelieving eyebrow. “No, okay, so when he stopped by, he asked if you liked the tea which, ha, I saw you gulp it. We talked for a little bit about you, guess he had no idea how much you dislike sweets—”

Katsuki advances on Shitty Hair again, who squeaks like he’s a cute baby thing Katsuki will forgive, except he’s actually pointy and ugly, and Katsuki is unmoved.

“Fuck, okay, so long story incredibly short—he’s a little younger than us.”

“How little?”

“Like, a few months? I don’t know your actual birthday dude. He might even be older than you.” While he waits for Katsuki to fill in the blank, cute, Katsuki tries to rearrange his understanding of the world. He’s six months older than Shitty Hair, making him probably around the same age or slightly older than the kid. Who is actually an adult. Charmingly bowed sex legs is legal. Gorgeous, buttermilk sex legs with milky green baby animal eyes is legally fuckable.

No, fuck, having sex with a journalist will ruin Katsuki’s career long before his garbage personality does. Every single case he brings to the district attorney will be questioned, suspect number one when a scoop hits the paper. Katsuki needs this job more than he needs fantastic sex with those gorgeously muscular heroin legs.

Thinking about his mom takes care of his burgeoning hard on. “Fine, so he has a baby face,” Katsuki admits, hoping the knowledge said aloud will settle into his bones a bit quicker. “Shitty nerd still has no right to my work or my files. Or my personal life.” The last he directs at Shitty Hair, who appears entirely unmoved by the ultimatum, his smile deceptively innocent. Katsuki has seen literal criminals pull the innocent act off better than his best friend. “Fuck, you’re so annoying. Did my phone ring at all?”

“Couple times.”

“Perfect,” he says, leaping half his papers to reach his desk faster. Most people do not call Katsuki—not even victims. He’s efficient and mean, enough that people figure if he wants them to know something, he will call them when he’s damn good and ready. He hoped for some calls today though, having left numerous voicemails throughout the night at ungodly hours no doubt alarming some of the recipients listening, and that’s without the sleepless mania turning his voice into that of an electronic hamster speaking at twice the normal speed.

The biggest coup comes from the tax agency, who assure him in polite tones that they do find the grandson’s finances suspicious in regard to his daughter’s trust fund, and will be looking into the family immediately.

If for whatever reason this criminal case goes tits up, at least he has these morons on a financial chopping block.

He kneads his hands across his desk like a hungry cat playing with his favorite toy and smiles. It’s apparently not a nice smile, as the desk officer currently approaching actually turns around and leaves the room. A few seconds later, just when Katsuki’s amping up to dive into his paperwork again, Sonic stiffly speed walks to the edge of his paper kingdom. “Detective Bakugou?”

“Fucking what, Sonic?”

The man readjusts his glasses in a self-comforting gesture as obvious as crossed arms are a self-hug. “Uh, you have a visitor.”

Katsuki stills like a spooked prey animal. “Is it my mom.”

“No? It’s the boy. From, um, yesterday.”

“Again?” he asks, strangled, his heart suddenly galloping up his throat. The kid already stopped by today while Katsuki was sleeping!

“Yes. He says that, uh, he was told not to come in here uninvited anymore?”

Katsuki shoots a suspicious glance at Shitty Hair who raises his hands bemusedly. “Wasn’t me,” he says. A quick sweep of the bureau reveals Vulture at his desk diligently ignoring the rest of the room, and Katsuki feels an abrupt, shocking burst of fondness for a guy he barely knows.

“Alright, fine, tell him to fucking sit.”

Even Sonic looks surprised, exchanging yet another speaking look with Shitty Hair similar to the one he shared with Deku yesterday. What in the fuck does everyone have to say about him that they’re too scared to actually voice aloud?

Whatever, people fear him. That’s nothing new.

He shuffles out of his paper maze and remembers halfway to the door that he forgot to brush his teeth. And he’s about to meet a legal adult with perfect sex legs. He reroutes to the locker room for a vicious scrub down, taking time to actually wash his face with more than a towel and apply deodorant. Katsuki then feels inexorably naked staring at himself in the mirror, wondering what the fuck he forgot. His badge. His gun. His radio. His flannel because he’s dressed down in nothing but a black shirt and black uniform pants.

God, he’s going to look stupid wearing a flannel.

Fuck the flannel, it’s dirty anyway. He rambles through his locker for his brown leather shoulder holster which he abandoned in there sometime this morning, checks his firearm, and pins his badge and radio to the belt he hastily yanks from the loops of yesterday’s pants.

Nothing he can do about his hair.

Katsuki slinks out of the locker room and ignores the wide, shark-toothed delight Shitty Hair beams at him from across the bureau. The kid’s right where Katsuki expected, bouncing near one of the many glass cases of department memorabilia decorating the lobby. He’s wearing another overlarge sweater and tragically tiny shorts, his curls pinned back by a baby pink headband, milky eyes and freckly cheeks on full display.

Katsuki wants to fuck him into the ground.

“What you want, nerd?” he asks instead, coming up behind the kid in an effective loom.

The kid doesn’t even turn around, just beams at Katsuki through the glass’s reflection and points at a newspaper clipping. “Do you remember this?”

Katsuki squints. “Yeah. Fuckers ambushed me for that picture.”

“That was your first cold murder solve, right?”

They both know it was. The article says so in big, bold italics separate from the rest of the text, quoting something he said when reporters accosted him outside the precinct after the arrest. His face tells more of a story than the quote. “Not here for you to pick my brain. You need something?”

Those milky eyes widen up into their baby animal mode. “Lunch?”

His stomach chooses that moment to growl vehemently, because his last meal was literally the last time he saw this kid outside Pinks. Watching that soft face suddenly start glowing his way combines with the angrily rising picket signs in his belly, and Katsuki admits defeat in the face of overwhelming odds. “Fine,” he agrees, shoving his hands in his pockets before he reaches out to throw the kid over his shoulder and make like a Viking to the nearest bedroom. “Where?”

The kid adopts an expression like all his Christmases came on his birthday this year. “Pinks? You like it there, right?”

“Fuck no I don’t. Shitty Hair’s got a crush on the owner.”

“Oh.” The kid sucks on his pillowy lower lip until the skin deepens into a juicy strawberry red, forcing Katsuki to think about something other than that mouth wrapped around his cock. Seriously, did the divinity Katsuki not believe in craft this person for sex? He glares down at those buttermilk legs and hates himself for his own persistent weakness. “How about, um, there’s a place that does hot pot—”

“Shabu Wara in Hibiya district?”

Moss green eyes go glittery and shiny like a gemstone, reflecting Katsuki’s disturbed face back at him. “How’d you know?”

“I’m an officer, how many times do you think I’ve driven this city?”

“That’s right, you were a patrol officer for six years!” the kid blurts, looking delighted. He even bounces like a cartoon character, bowed legs easily projecting him up a full foot each time until their eyes nearly come level. His sweatshirt bounces with him, revealing a strip of ribbed stomach as buttermilk as his legs for tantalizingly brief seconds, more than enough time to drive Katsuki insane with the urge to bite there, just dig his teeth into the soft skin beneath that swollen little belly button and listen to Deku squeak.

He’s clearly hungrier than he thought. “Right, fucking stalker. Let’s roll before I die of starvation.”

The kid lurches into motion, short legs working double time to keep up with Katsuki’s longer stride as Katsuki leads him to the back lot and his department issued car, a little dirty after a few days spent driving the town. Katsuki will run it through the wash later. He barely remembers to flip on the car radio, being used to a partner riding shotgun who actually knows what they’re doing in a patrol unit. The kid lights up at that too, his face avidly fixed on the tiny speaker spluttering out various bursts of code. “What’s happening? On the radio, I mean?”

Katsuki checks his mirrors and pulls from the lot, absently answering, “Vehicle burglary, domestic violence, rash of parking tickets.”

“You hear all that?”

“My fucking ears work, shitty Deku.”

The kid sits back in the seat Katsuki has only seen Shitty Hair in for years, smile plush and sweet on Katsuki. Fuck, keep his eyes on the road, don’t crash. He loves this car. “It sounds like gibberish to me,” the kid says, voice lemony. Katsuki doesn’t even know what that means, but he likes it. “All numbers and static. Like a code no one wants you to crack.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“Did you learn this at the Academy?”

Snorting, Katsuki takes them the scenic route along the back side of the city, bypassing the main traffic thoroughfare and, coincidentally, most of the officers on patrol. “Where else? That’s what the Academy is for.”

“You graduated top of your class,” the kid confirms, reupping his stalker status. “Just beating out Todoroki Shoto for number one. He has the highest rating on firearms, right?”

“Yeah, and I kick his fucking ass at weaponless combat, what’s your point?”

“Nothing,” the kid chirps. He sticks his hands under his buttermilk sex thighs and starts swinging his legs in the scant space provided by the footwell, possible only because he’s significantly shorter than the person sitting there yesterday. At a red light, with nothing to watch but the idiots violating laws all over the place, Katsuki finds his gaze drifting to those thighs. They’re muscular, like the kid both runs and lifts a decent amount. Bundled up in a curved vehicle chair like this, his tiny shorts ride up enough that Katsuki can see where muscle morphs into plump, bitable ass.

The light turns before he embarrasses himself, his peripherals saving him from staring at the wrong green blob and missing his cue to move.

The late lunch rush essentially fucks him for parking. Katsuki has no problem walking, spending most of his life holed up in the gym working out his various aggressive tendencies on inanimate punching bags incapable of complaining about his conduct to his boss. He just barely remembers to check on Deku. The short-legged blob seems content enough walking beneath the midday sun. He even bumps Katsuki while they shuffle down the crowded sidewalk together, tiny touches Katsuki cannot bring himself to avoid. Deku’s skin is criminally soft. Soft and smooth and fleshy.

“Hi, can we have a table outside, please?” Deku asks the hostess when Katsuki misses the mark while thinking desperately terrible thoughts about his own mother.

The girl smiles flirtatiously at Katsuki and swivels her hips toward the deck.

“This okay?” the kid asks while the server tries her hardest to make him look at her hilariously subpar legs. Her misaimed seduction does more to dissipate his lust than thoughts of his mother, which is certainly saying something.

“Fine,” Katsuki answers in the mildest voice he can muster. “Hey, how about instead of shaking your ass, you get us some water? This isn’t a strip club.”

The girl immediately stops putting the moves on him. “Bastard.”

“That was a little mean,” Deku says like Katsuki is not fully aware of the effect he has on other people. Katsuki rolls his eyes and starts dicking around with the salt and pepper shaker for something to do. Least no one else wanted to sit outside in the muggy sunlight, just edging from seasonably cool to uncomfortably chilly. How the kid and his tiny shorts manage, Katsuki has no idea. “I’m serious, you could have been a little nicer.”

“Probably. She might spit in my drink now.”

“If she does, I’ll have her fired,” the kid bubbles up, his freckled cheeks gone an ugly, blotchy red not unlike wine spilled on an otherwise pristine white carpet.

It’s not attractive at all, except for how he looks like a wet kitten outraged by the bath water, and Katsuki finds himself smiling for no reason he can explain without sounding like a nutjob. “Relax, my stomach can handle anything,” he says, hoping to soothe the kid’s temper before Katsuki actually thinks the word endearing in conjunction with an otherwise purely sexual regard for another person. “If she throws a fit, I’ll tell her I’m gay.”

“Are you?”

Katsuki snorts a laugh. “You tell me, stalker.”

“Well, you don’t have a girlfriend,” the kid answers seriously, green gaze thinning out as he thinks. He starts mumbling concerning words under his breath like Shoto and Kirishima which, no, definitely not.

“I’m gay,” Katsuki sighs. “Fucking full on bent into a pretzel. And no, I don’t have a boyfriend, so you can stop that line of thought right there.”

The kid sparkles at him a bit. “Okay,” he says in a peppy child voice.

Suspicious at the unceremonious way that conversation just died, Katsuki sets aside the dueling salt and pepper shakers and laces his fingers together on the table, an intimidation tactic that works for whatever weird psychological trigger bullshit allows larger, puffed up animals to intimidate small fuzzy ones. “Why are you so obsessed with me?” he demands outright, figuring now’s his time to find out.

“Um,” the kid stutters, staring at Katsuki with an expression that definitely does not read as intimidated. “Well, I don’t think you’ll like it so I, um, I don’t want to tell you.”

His eyebrows crank down. “What.”

“See! That, that face! You look like you wanna beat me up!”

“Thinking about it,” Katsuki lies, because that open baby face makes him want to indulge in an entirely different kind of physical activity.

Perhaps serendipitously, an entirely new waitress brings them two waters and a professional smile. “Hi! What can I get started for you both?” she chirps, whipping out her notepad in a creepy imitation of Deku, who visibly realizes they forgot to look at the menu.

“Um, more time?”

“No problem,” the waitress says, unfazed. Her notebook snaps shut and disappears into her apron. “Flag me down when you’re ready!”

She flutters off in a cloud of overwhelmingly flowery perfume, leaving Katsuki free to flap open the menu and glance over his options before his stomach stages an actual revolt and shuts his brain down in a dramatic faint that will definitely activate a work suspension. “This isn’t over, Deku,” he tells the chicken and beef plate.

“I know,” Deku answers, sounding soft and fond like he adores Katsuki’s garbage personality.

Maybe he does. Maybe he’s such a stalker that he appreciates the aggressive way Katsuki approaches problems, like wild creatures to be overcome and dominated rather than anything worrisome. Dogged determination comprises the majority of his endurance in this job, and about all his success. It also keeps him contemplating their meal options instead of fixating on the weight of his gun against his ribs.

After a while spent staring down at the menu, Deku ventures, “Do you have allergies?”

“What did I just say about my stomach, moron.”

Deku’s ears pink up and, for the first time, Katsuki honestly wonders if this kid has a crush on him. It’s an alarming realization, considering the effect those legs have on his sanity. “How about we share? The Spicy Ma looks really good, but it’s too big for just me.”

Katsuki quickly locates the Spicy Ma on the menu and, yeah, that’s enough meat to fill two Deku sized stomachs. Luckily, he has Katsuki here, who can eat a meal this size all by himself on a regular day, never mind when he’s already half-starved after a rough nap on the concrete interrogation room floor. “Fine.” He snaps his menu shut and sets it aside.  “Might want to order a couple sides and extra rice.”

“A couple?” Deku repeats, still blushing. He buries himself in the menu for a few minutes, muttering too low for Katsuki to reliably understand. When he returns to the land of the normal, he seems mostly recovered, and he flags down the waitress without reconfirming his autonomy to order for them both. “Hi, sorry we took so long! Can we have an order of the Spicy Ma with, um, with seafood and beef? And some spicy edamame, an order of gyoza, and the octopus balls?” He darts a glance at Katsuki when he’s finished rattling off their large order, as if to confirm that what he wants is okay, and Katsuki raises eyebrows at him for being a weak ass little bitch. His soft jaw sets. “Can we also have an extra order of fried rice and yakisoba?”

Katsuki hides a smirk in his crossed arms. Little punk has some balls after all.

After the waitress leaves, he half expects Deku to launch into an involved apology about the cost of their meal, except he does a complete one-eighty and starts asking Katsuki questions instead—about the Academy, and patrol, and what he sees in the restaurant right now, and if there’s anything interesting happening on the radio attached to his belt, volume lowered so as not to bother other people.

He’s a curious little thing, intelligent and unbothered by Katsuki’s foul mouth, and Katsuki starts answering, too caught off guard to protect himself like he usually does.

He tells Deku about meeting Shitty Hair because they shared a dorm room during the Academy, and how much field training sucked when the person overseeing your progress rode shotgun in your car, and the rush of patrolling the streets catching criminals in the act. He misses patrol and admits it for the first time aloud with Deku’s creamy eyes watching big and bright from across the table, a delighted smile curving his ridiculous pillow lips. Katsuki points out the jittery homeless man fussing for drug money on the sidewalk off the deck, the teenager riding his skateboard through a stale yellow light, the woman flirting with the flower shop attendant across the street despite the big diamond glittering on her ring finger. He clocks the dirty spill forgotten two tables down, and the couple arguing inside over who will pay the check. The radio keeps chirping about a pursuit occurring on the other side of the city, some punks caught stealing beer from a gas station. He’s so busy talking that the food comes as a surprise.

It’s his turn to flush when the waitress smirks at him knowingly. “Anything else I can get you?”

“No thank you,” Deku says, already digging into the hot pot. He’s doing it right—hard vegetables going in one after the other, carrots and corn and taro root. “Are they still chasing the gas station thieves?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki says blankly, mental map still updating despite how his attention has somehow snagged on the careful way Deku wields his chopsticks as he stuffs half a gyoza into his pink mouth. He’s already reaching for another one. Katsuki hurriedly snatches up his own chopsticks in self-defense. “Fucker, don’t eat everything by yourself.”

“Sowwy,” Deku giggles, his freckled cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. “M’not much of an eater, so I don’t get appetizers much.”

Eat with me more often almost comes out of his stupid mouth. “Your problem, not mine.” He picks up an octopus ball and crunches through the fried exterior to the meaty interior. Tastes too fishy to his untrained palate, the octopus probably starting to go off before they fried it. He eats another before Deku catches one up and loses this nice lunch in the toilet later. A tinny shout from the radio precludes him stabbing a third, and he pauses with his chopsticks hovering over the plate, fingers from his free hand twisting the volume up on his radio briefly. When the information doesn’t warrant a response, he turns the volume back down and finishes another octopus ball before noticing Deku staring. “What?”

“Is the pursuit finished?”

“Basically. Fuckers crashed the car. One took off on foot.”

Deku stops chewing and looks a little concerned. “Will they find him?”

Katsuki swallows a mean laugh, reminding himself that most people do not have firsthand knowledge of how the police operate. “They’ll release a couple dogs, make those kids regret their criminal activity for the rest of their moronic lives. Once a dog sinks their teeth in, they refuse to let go until their handler tells them to, and dogs run a lot faster than people. I’ve seen criminals fight the dog and get their extremities bitten off for the trouble.”

“Wow, that must be so cool to watch,” Deku says like an absolute psychopath. “Hey, did you ever handle a dog?”

“No,” Katsuki answers, mystified by this relaxed response to police brutality. Most people reply to canine comments with open horror, forcing Katsuki, or more often Shitty Hair, to patiently explain that a petty theft is indeed just a petty theft and not worth releasing the dog. They release the dogs because the morons drove through busy intersections and crosswalks against the red at high rates of speed, their vehicle effectively transformed into a deadly weapon capable of killing anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Instead, Deku seems more concerned about Katsuki not training a dog himself. “Why not?”

“Not cut out for dog training. Too much of a temper.”

Deku smiles a little and shuffles some gyoza bits around his otherwise empty bowl. Little bastard ate all five. “I can see that. I can also see how dogs must really like you. They do, right?”

“Yeah. Apparently ‘cause I’m an animal.”

Deku actually laughs, something Katsuki’s acquaintances rarely do around him when they know his temper over perceived slights usually escalates into physical violence. He hates people laughing at him but, somehow, those freckled cheeks and pillow lips effectively soothe the sting of being regarding as a joke. “Oh, we need to add the herbs and seafood!” Deku notices, prompting them both into action. They mess around adding things until the soup burns so low the waitress swoops in with another refill from a shiny metal teapot, and then they have to start all over, because of course the new broth diluted the flavor they spent so long creating.

When they’ve scraped the bowl of their pot and emptied all the plates, Katsuki feels somewhat…pleasant.

“Wow, that was so good,” Deku sighs. He even pats his tummy like a cliché.

“Dessert, gentlemen?” the waitress asks, collecting their detritus with the expert professionalism of someone who regularly cleans up after unnecessarily messy customers.

“I have no idea if I can eat any more.”

“Why the fuck not,” Katsuki says over Deku’s mumbling. The little green idiot pops up and smiles, as easy to read as a large print book. “What d’you have?”

“Our popular items are dango, daifuku, anmitsu—”

“Daifuku!” Deku chirps, no longer so reluctant for dessert. He beams at Katsuki encouragingly until Katsuki rolls his eyes and waves the waitress away for some damn daifuku. She smirks at Katsuki again like he’s a whipped boyfriend which, in hindsight, this may or may not have morphed into a date somewhere down the line.

The thought gives Katsuki a few seconds pause.

His dates all typically follow the same pattern. They pick him up, usually at the gym or on the street. He takes them home for some rigorous physical activity, then boots them in the morning when they inevitably expect more than Katsuki gives anyone.

His dick is on board with this plan, puffing up in his pants while he watches Deku muse about the daifuku coming to their table, whether it will be filled with traditional bean paste or something more exotic, like a strawberry. Katsuki would pay a lot of money to see Deku’s pink mouth biting into a bright red strawberry, juice running in glittering drops down his chin. He has a scar there too, Katsuki notices with alarming intensity over a long-healed injury inflicted upon a veritable stranger. Yet it’s a knife wound that should definitely not exist on that precious baby face, and he flexes his hands beneath the dubious privacy of the table edge, wishing he had a throat to strangle.

The daifuku arrives on a pretty little plate decorated in brown branches and pink cherry blossoms curved delicately around six dumplings in the traditional soft colors, pink and green and white. The pink one has a strawberry in the middle.

Turns out, Katsuki is paying a lot of money to watch Deku bite into a strawberry.

“Oh, it’s so good,” Deku moans like pure fucking sex in the middle of a public restaurant. Katsuki’s dick is officially A Problem. “Here, you have to try them! Oh, oh, the green one, try the green one.”

Katsuki diligently stuffs the thing into his mouth. It tastes like pure sugar.

“Is it good?”

He shrugs instead of admitting that he fucking hates sweets. Better to focus on the good things in life, like Deku biting into the soft pink one to the strawberry beneath. It’s an unfortunately dried strawberry, no juice to paint luxuriously across Deku’s perfect pillow lips. When Deku bites into the white dumpling and happily squeaks, “Bean paste!”, Katsuki forgives the dry strawberry it’s transgressions.

His radio crackles again, and he turns it up expecting more bullshit about the beer thieves. He does not expect a “237 in progress in Hibiya district” and whips his head toward the street, hunting with his eyes even as his legs propel him upright. There, the fucking homeless crack addict is trying to steal some lady’s purse. Katsuki vaults the table and the little deck barrier, boots landing a few feet below on the sidewalk with a booming crash that sends bystanders scattering. He only has to slice across one car hood before he’s close enough to bark, “Police, put the knife down!”

The tweaker lurches closer to the lady instead. “Need the money,” he babbles while jerking the knife back and forth as if he cannot decide between stabbing and slicing. He has the jittery expression of someone coming down off a truly spectacular high and realizing just how far left he has to fall before he reaches bottom. “Please, I need the money, just give me a little money!”

“I said put the knife down,” Katsuki orders in his best calm the fuck down voice, his hand twitching toward his gun. No, fuck, the tweak deserves better than a gunshot. So does Katsuki. “You don’t want to hurt this lady. Look, she’s terrified. Money’s not worth what you’re doing. Just put the knife down and we can talk about this, okay?”

“B-but I need the money!” He lunges again, nearly nicking the lady, who lets loose an earth-shattering scream to ring Katsuki’s ears.

Figuring that’s about as much leeway as Katsuki can reasonably give a criminal in the act, Katsuki leaps forward and closes his bicep around the tweak’s upper body. His momentum drives them first into the wall, which accepts their weight for a handful of painful seconds before they bounce back. Katsuki grunts as the full weight of the guy lands on his bent spine, struggling to keep their shared weight upright while maintaining his grip around the idiot’s torso and fumbling for the knife. Naturally, as he’s winding his sweat-slick hand around a flailing, dirty wrist, the tweaker twists to stab at the arm Katsuki has wrapped around his chest. “Fuck!” Katsuki yells, just barely managing to dodge in time. The tweaker hardly notices that he’s free, still hyper-fixated on his chosen victim and mumbling ‘need the money’ over and over like a broken record player. Katsuki’s hand itches for his gun. “Drop the knife now!” he barks instead, lunging forward again. This time, he catches the tweaker’s wrist before the inevitable stab.

He doesn’t hear backup. No sirens, no shouts of ‘police’ or unholstered weapons. Just a crowd of panicked rubberneckers screaming nonsense.

The tweak twists in his grip, slippery with accumulated dirt, trying to stab him again, again –

“Fuck,” Katsuki repeats grimly. Without further hesitation, he snaps the tweaker’s wrist. The knife clatters to the sidewalk amidst the high-pitched scream of an injured person. Before Katsuki can brace for the inevitable, the tweaker hunches forward to protect his broken wrist, and overbalances their combined weight to the ground.

Stars burst across his open eyes as his arm is crushed beneath them with a distant crunch. When the dull throb of a bruise does not sharpen into an explosion of broken bone, Katsuki blinks back to himself and realizes there’s blood pooling beneath the bastard’s limp skull. Thankfully, a small moan and some wild squirming reassure Katsuki that he did not accidentally snap the tweaker’s neck on the way down. He breathes out once to relieve the sudden tension in his chest and sets about yanking the tweaker into compliance. Too late, he remembers that he’s a poor man’s cop today, dressed down to the barest of bare minimum without any fucking underwear much less his kit. Furious, Katsuki traps both the injured and uninjured wrists in one hand and uses the other to bark into the radio for his fucking backup. “Detective Bakugou on scene in Hibiya, one in custody with injuries. Someone get me some fucking handcuffs!”

The guy tries to wiggle out from under him, back surging and legs kicking in a futile attempt to dislodge Katsuki. He continues babbling about needing money because of how much he’s hurting, so Katsuki eases up on the guy’s ribs lest this turn into a medical emergency on top of everything else. “Stop fucking struggling, you’re under arrest for attempted armed robbery.” Then he looks at the alarmed crowd. “Any of you who witnessed this need to stay right here until officers arrive so we can take statements. Lady, you hurt?”

The victim seems shocked that Katsuki is talking to her, purse clutched to her chest like it’s her baby the tweak tried to steal instead of her wallet. She also has not moved from her trapped position against the wall, frozen there in a snapshot of the worst experience in her life. “N-no, I’m okay, I’m—oh god, he tried to stab me!”

Reminded, Katsuki reaffirms the discarded weapon’s status and finds a curious teenager already approaching with fingers outstretched. “Don’t touch that,” he barks, annoyed. The boy flinches, caught, and retreats into the growing crowd. At least two dozen people have approached in the intervening minutes from crime to capture, half of them wielding cell phones in the ubiquitous ‘currently filming’ position which, great, this event will definitely hit the news stations. “Everyone back up, give us some space here! And you, stop wiggling before you hurt yourself worse, I have you in custody.”

“I’m sorry,” the tweaker wails. “I just needed the money, I swear, I’m hurting man, I’m hurting a lot, please!”

“Ambulance is coming, hang on.”

The tweak predictably does not listen, still babbling on and on about the money and the pain, no doubt more withdrawal related than because of the broken wrist Katsuki currently has pinned beneath his knee. Finally, after a few awkward seconds spent glaring the crowd into submission, Katsuki hears sirens round the corner and tires skidding up. A couple officers hurriedly appropriate the tweaker from Katsuki before Katsuki breaks the guy’s other wrist while trying to keep him from squirming free. Blood gushes from the tweak’s shattered nose in a free-flowing waterfall that looks more gruesome than it actually is. “Damn, detective, did you smash his face into the ground?”

“We fell,” Katsuki says, shaking out his arms and dropping down to stretch his calves. It’s been a long time since he pinned an uncooperative suspect for any significant length of time. “Vic is over there clutching her purse like a teddy bear. Knife landed by the window.”

“Got it.”

More officers arrive, thankfully without their sirens, and Katsuki joins the effort to corral confused spectators into some kind of order so they can take statements. Then he’s towed off and interrogated himself, the duty Sergeant stern as she walks him from second to second three times over, checking and rechecking his story for holes. It’s only as he’s telling her for the fourth time why he was in Hibiya when the robbery started that he remembers Deku and looks up at the restaurant deck. The curly haired journalist has disappeared.

Shocker, he thinks, scowling and angry over an abandonment he really should have expected. No one likes seeing their date football tackle a homeless drug addict in the middle of dessert.

“Hey Sarge, Captain on the horn for you!” one officer shouts, effectively saving Katsuki from a fifth interrogation. Scowling, the Sergeant reluctantly releases him to paramedics. Which, whatever, he’s fine. Probably stuck writing an after-action report for the rest of the afternoon. He lets the paramedic poke and prod at him, ask questions, check his pupils and shit. A comment about his pallor reminds Katsuki that he has more at stake here than disappointment over a ruined date. Use of force incidents are always reviewed, particularly when they cause injury. Sleep deprivation leads to questions Katsuki would really rather not answer, but he’s not a liar either, and he tells the paramedic in biting frustration that he spent all night working on another case. The two paramedics share a speaking glance. Katsuki’s getting really sick of those damn things. They run over his non-existent injuries one last time, making a grand old show. Documentation, perfect.

He scrubs the hair at the base of his neck and goes to sit on the curb the second they release him from their lukewarm custody.

“Detective?”

“Deku?” he asks, pausing mid-step.

Seconds later a familiar ball of green energy barrels into his chest. “You’re okay?” Deku begs anxiously, hands roving over Katsuki’s arms and shoulders and stomach like he expects to find a stab wound. His grip is shockingly strong for such a little guy. “I saw and—that was really scary, watching you fight an armed criminal! Are you sure you’re okay? Did a medical person look at you?”

“I’m fine, Deku,” he musters, grabbing those hands before they wander somewhere dangerous. Except then he’s touching their buttermilk softness, feeling the strength and writing callouses and raggedly chewed nails that bite into his palms as earnestly as Deku bites his puffy lower lip, milky eyes blown wide. “The fuck you still doing here?”

“Oh, well, I started recording after you jumped off the deck, and the police wanted a copy.”

Great. “Did I flip the table?”

“No, although one of the cups fell and shattered.” Whatever expression crosses his face makes Deku blurt, “But it’s okay! The restaurant waived our whole bill after they saw you arresting someone across the street.” Yet another reminder of how badly Katsuki ruined this date. He blows out a frustrated breath and releases Deku’s hands so he can comb his own hair back. Katsuki wants to tug the strands out by the fist, wants to kick his feet and rage at the grim reality that nothing ever goes well in his life. Not even the things that seem so fucking easy for other people, like going on a date with someone cute and interested.

He’s so busy hating himself that it catches him by surprise when Deku abruptly slithers under his bent arm into a full body hug. Katsuki cannot remember the last time anyone hugged him. Elementary school? Maybe during the Academy, when half-hugs and arm punches ran rampant around the locker room like a disease.

He swallows and looks down at Deku all snuggled between his pecs like Deku belongs there, green curls limned gold in the strong midday sunshine. Having not done this in literal years and terrified of fucking up the second good thing to happen to him today, Katsuki tentatively lays his hands on Deku’s slim waist. He does not expect the little sigh that suddenly blows across his nipple in a blatant if unintentional tease, and he tightens his grip in lieu of yanking back the reins on his sudden desire to suck Deku’s cock. Except Deku keeps rubbing steady hands over his back while plush lips press into his shirt for a subtle kiss he wishes would travel north and, like Pavlov’s dog trained to associate a bell with food, Katsuki associates such touches with what he usually receives after a date.

Self-preservation prompts Katsuki to push Deku away before he winds up on the front page of the local newspaper for the wrong reason.

“Sorry,” Deku blushes, fiddling his fingers together. The scarred ones look especially horrific in the churning red and white ambulance lights. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I’ve just—no one I know has ever run headlong into danger like that. It’s frightening! But also really, really cool.” His milky eyes abruptly go all glittery in that familiar hero worship way he’s used to seeing on Deku’s face now, and Deku says, “You’re so cool, detective!” in such an earnest tone that Katsuki instantly feels uncomfortable with the praise. No one speaks to Katsuki like this. Not honestly, anyway, and he knows from personal experience how sharply the truth can cut.

“Whatever,” he mutters. “I’m stuck here for a while. You can head off.”

“I can also stay? If you want?”

Katsuki wants to fuck Deku in the back of this goddamned ambulance hard enough to make the rig rock, that’s what he wants. “No, I have to get back to work after this anyway.”

Deku’s pillow mouth pouts down in disappointment, which is about as unfair as the happy nipple sigh. “Yeah, I’ll—you’re at work. I, um, can I use the video I took to write an article? About this arrest?”

Fuck. Katsuki scrubs a hand through his messy hair and glances around for any salvation in the form of a handy supervisor. When none presents themselves, Katsuki hedges, “Check with the handling officer. Widespread publication taints the evidence in court, makes it fucking useless. Not sure if they need your video for that.”

“Okay,” Deku agrees, still staring up at Katsuki with his big green pond water eyes, pupils all swollen up into reflective black diamonds. Katsuki looks distinctly flushed in their reflection. “Can I, um, maybe stop by the station a little later? Bring you some more tea?”

“Without sugar,” Katsuki blurts instead of, you know, telling Deku no.

Deku’s freckly cheeks flush up with pleasure at this stupidly blatant invitation, and Katsuki watches in dismay as the lingering midday heat drags a single curl free from the headband to coil seductively around Deku’s left eye. Why’s he so damn pretty? How is this fair? “Yes, of course, detective,” Deku says shyly while Katsuki tries and fails not to find him unbearably cute. What the fuck does he have to be shy for? Katsuki’s the one flailing feelings all over the place. “Tonight then!”

“Tonight.” He watches those gorgeous sex legs shuffle Deku into the thick crowd before sitting his dumb ass on the curb to await orders, hands lax over his bent knees, head low. He’s a fuck up. He’s a moron. He’s every terrible thing he has ever said about another human being. Jesus.

When the Sergeant finally returns to kick him off her scene, the thoughts spinning around inside Katsuki’s head somehow take over his nervous system. He cannot stop the jittery bouncing of his knee or the tight pressure currently attempting to snap his sternum in half and expose all the terrible parts of himself he wishes didn’t exist. The instinct trained into him in the Academy tells Katsuki to hide somewhere safe until the danger passes, so he drives himself to his little-seen apartment approximately four miles away. If anyone asks after his detour, well, he literally has no underwear on. That and, he did just tackle a homeless tweak to the ground. His clothes now require burning.

In reality, he barely makes it inside the door before he’s shoving a hand down his pants and yanking on his cock, curses muffled into his shoulder.

It’s over pretty quickly.

He clenches his fist over the evidence, thick because it’s been way too long since he last relieved himself with any real intent, and goes to clean up before his clothes give him secondhand scabies. The shower trails tantalizingly warm water over his chest, prompting him to remember Deku’s soft pillow lips pressing over his heart and the happy nipple sigh that had his mind frantically retreating from an internal screen reel as hardcore as anything seen on a skeevy porn site. Without the discouraging effect of a public venue, each mini movie runs across the backs of his eyelids in high definition. Groaning, Katsuki grabs his dick and pulls until his spend splatters the tile. Two days, he scolds his overeager cock. Two fucking days and it’s already like this, huh?

Redressing on autopilot, Katsuki returns to the station barely half an hour after he left the robbery scene, whereupon Shitty Hair catcalls him and a few detectives clap.

It’s like they all know he achieved two orgasms in ten minutes.

“Fuck off,” he roars, hoping to scare them away.

Instead he attracts Aizawa, who motions him into the sergeant’s office with a crooked finger and tells him to have a seat. Door closed, not a good sign. “Should I be concerned about you?” Aizawa asks the desk, his sleepy eyes drooping like he hasn’t a care in the world despite calling Katsuki in to ream him out.

“I don’t fucking know what your job requires of you, Sarge.”

Aizawa sighs. “Let’s watch, shall we.”

Katsuki almost says watch what, except Aizawa pushes his computer screen sideways and, shit, that’s Hibiya. When he hits play, Katsuki sees himself landing on the sidewalk like a demon summoned from hell, his hair wild and teeth bared in a vicious animal snarl more appropriate for the Serengeti than a suburban shopping area. The entire encounter strikes him as relatively clean, if perhaps a little gruesome. That blood puddle will definitely make the evening news.

“I refuse to mention your language on official radio traffic anymore, on account of how you never listen,” Aizawa begins when the clip ends. He sounds tired. “I am, however, highly concerned about your abnormally high number of brutality incidents.”

Damn it. “He had a knife.”

“He did. Did you really have to break his wrist over it?”

Katuski scowls and crosses his arms as the invisible wound in his chest cracks open again, spilling out a thousand things he’d rather not hang on a laundry line for the world to criticize. This is basically how his last IA started. “Should I ask for my union rep?”

“Your choice,” Aizawa acknowledges. “However, please bear in mind that I am the only thing standing between you and administrative leave.”

Forced vacation in close proximity to his many firearms, no guarantee of a return to duty, Internal Affairs ransacking the remains of his life looking for ill-intent while the public condemns him for doing his job. Probably no more dates with Deku. Literally his worst nightmare. Katsuki lets gravity take his neck backwards and stares at the ceiling while wishing, wryly, that Aizawa’s shitty office chairs had wheels. “Fine. What do you wanna know.”

“Why did you break his wrist?”

“I was alone, backup an unknown amount of time away, and struggling to prevent him from stabbing me in the face.”

Aizawa takes a few long seconds to process Katsuki’s curt train of thought. “You had him about the throat—”

“Chest.”

“—about the very, very upper chest in a solid control hold. Your other hand controlled the arm wielding the knife, and he did not have a good angle for stabbing anything other than your forearm or himself. Try that explanation again.”

Katsuki bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from baring his teeth at his commanding officer in a blatant, inexcusable challenge to Aizawa’s authority as a sergeant. Blood fills his mouth, forcing him to swallow several times before speaking. “My hand was sweaty, and that poorly angled knife almost took my eye out. Contrary to how that appeared, I had limited control, and that guy was too high to follow commands. It was break his wrist or risk serious injury. I chose to break his wrist.”

“And his nose.”

That Katsuki lifts his head for and whatever Aizawa sees then causes him to blink in surprise. “He threw his weight forward and took us both to the ground, thereby breaking his nose. Let me reiterate since I apparently wasn’t clear the first time: I had limited control and no backup.”

“Firstly,” Aizawa begins in the mild tone that Katsuki has learned to distrust since promoting into this department, “since I apparently was not clear either, your continued disregard for your personal and mental health forces me to evaluate your use of force incidents differently than I do others. Secondly, you have a high number of them, which creates personnel problems in this department I’d prefer not to see crucified publicly. Thirdly, I in no way find you an incompetent individual, nor do I believe you ignore anything which negatively affects your performance. This leads me to conclude that you are unaware of the problem inherently because it does not affect your performance. When was the last time you attended therapy, detective?” Katsuki stays silent, unsure how to articulate that Aizawa is wrong—that Katsuki is aware of the problem and doesn’t address it because the lack of effect on his performance also justifies him avoiding something that makes him acutely uncomfortable. “Detective?”

“Last week,” Katsuki answers. He goes to therapy every week on his one day off, where he spends a full hour talking about work to someone who nods and smiles and occasionally asks a pointed question designed to make him think differently about his experience, but in reality has him questioning his own sanity on an ever increasing scale.

“Does it help?”

Katsuki looks at his knees and thinks about lying. “Not really. It’s a fucking waste of time.”

“Then why do you go?”

“Because talking about shit is better than administrative leave.”

Aizawa sighs in the soft, disappointed way that tells Katsuki he missed something important, and Katsuki vows to review this conversation later and figure out what the hell message the cagey bastard is trying to convey. “Bothersome shit, I hope, otherwise yes, it is a waste of your time, and I will purposely add more therapy onto your docket just to spite you.”

“Fuck you,” Katsuki grunts without heat.

“No, thank you,” Aizawa replies in his typical unconcerned way. He spins his computer screen back around and stares at the frozen video thoughtfully. “No more sleeping in the interrogation room.”

“Oh, come on!” Katsuki yells, nearly leaping to his feet in outrage. “I was functional!”

Aizawa shoots him a dry glance that coherently articulates how much he disagrees. “Why are you so upset? It’s not like you can bring your cute boyfriend here for a comfortable sleepover.”

Katsuki’s mouth actually drops open as his body attempts to formulate a rebuttal his brain hasn’t quite thought up yet. “Boy—what? I don’t have a fucking boyfriend!” Does he mean Deku? No, that would be ridiculous. The kid brought Katsuki tea one time, and they went on one date. Gossip cannot have spread that fast.

“That’s not what I heard.”

Fuck, gossip apparently does spread that fast. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Maybe not yet,” Aizawa acknowledges with a sharp little smile that Katsuki inches away from, not used to being the smallest predator in the room. “Don’t worry, gay is okay in this bureau. I have a husband myself.”

“I don’t care,” Katsuki strangles out from behind tightly clenched teeth. He already knew about Aizawa’s husband, and he gives zero fucks what other people think about his personal life. What has his back straightening in alarm is the reality that police officers take great joy in needling each other, hunting for weaknesses they can exploit like wolves following a heard of buffalo, waiting for the sick one to start lagging behind. Katsuki refuses to become a lame prey animal begging for slaughter. He refuses to let others wield his own budding feelings against him for sport, because time has proven that Katsuki has little defense against a Deku related assault. His back-to-back orgasms not thirty minutes ago are proof of that. “My private life is none of your business. Don’t fucking talk about Deku anymore.”

“You call your boyfriend useless?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Katsuki snaps, having never had much patience for repeating himself like it’s his problem the other party misunderstood or misheard the first time. “He’s—a little nerd stalker I indulged with food.”

Aizawa smiles that sharp, predatory smile again. “Congratulations, I expect a wedding invitation in the mail next year. Finish your after-action report, Bakugou, and I want those papers of yours swept up before end of day.”

Throat tight around a desire to argue that will ultimately get him nowhere, Katsuki grits, “Fine.”

“I am also quite serious about not sleeping in the interrogation room. This isn’t a hotel.”

“Says the guy with a fucking sleeping bag in his office,” Katsuki spits, unwilling to cede all his ground here.

Aizawa just snorts, well aware that he has plenty of ground to sacrifice before he loses this war, and waves Katsuki out of the office. Katsuki storms into the belly of the bureau still seething, all eyes on him and his stomping approach to his own messy desk. Out of spite for what’s happening, he decides to organize the paper maze first, ears red with more than just anger, although he’s comfortably assured that his emotions translate into anger enough that no one will suspect anything. So what if Aizawa saw right through to the heart of his insecurities? Aizawa sleeps more than he talks.

“You fired?” Shitty Hair asks worriedly, shitty hair a red starburst in his peripheral vision.

Katsuki bares his teeth. “Fuck no, I’m not. They can’t afford to lose me, and I did nothing wrong.”

“Next time, try actually updating officers on the radio, instead of leaving everyone yelling your call sign into the ether,” Half and Half criticizes from his cozy little vice corner where his only recent field work occurred inside a van with Happy Flowers written in purple cursive on the side. He’s also rather famous for losing his otherwise cool temper and tearing after escaping johns, dropping his radio in the process and forcing the helicopter to find him fist-fighting in a random backyard six blocks from where they initially lost sight of him.

“Keep throwing stones in your glass fucking house, asswipe,” Katsuki warns him. “I responded to the incident in Gotanda.”

The non-burned half of Half and Half’s face flushes with rage.

“Ooh, low blow,” Shitty Hair sings, reaching down for a fist bump Katsuki readily provides, if only to see that flush deepen into an unattractive purple. “But seriously, admin leave? Forced vacation? Your hours were scary high on your last paycheck.”

“Bought m’down, and no, I’m not leaving,” Katsuki grunts. There are too many papers, he needs a better organizational system than caddy corner stacks. He cracks his back and moves to unload some new folders from the office supply closet. Logic dictates he use the label maker to legibly identify each folder, only logic has never met Katsuki’s schoolteacher father, and Katsuki employs typesetter handwriting so perfect he has no compunctions writing his first draft in pen, unlike the pencil reliant fuckers in earlier decades. He sits down in the middle of his paper castle and begins aggressively organizing each clump of records by order of date, type, and family member.

It takes almost three hours.

“How are you not bored?”

“Work ethic,” Katsuki mutters, mouth wrapped around three different colored pens. He started color coordinating when he realized exactly how many stacks he separated all this evidence into. Now he’s neck-deep in another phone record, eyes darting even as he fumbles up his desk for a highlighter, because how did he miss this burst of communication the first time around? Maybe he needs to go through everything again, just in case.

Shitty Hair sighs and, miraculously, the highlighter rolls into his hand. “You seriously scare me, bro.”

“Welcome to Fright Night.”

When he’s almost finished with his monumental clean up, Katsuki realizes that Shitty Hair should have gone home before Katsuki returned from his apartment shame trip. He glances up to see Shitty Hair typing slow and steady on his computer, brow furrowed and a little tired. Fucking considerate dick.

Katsuki finds a box to load his evidence into and writes the case number in black marker along every side so no one mistakes it as junk. His literal sweat and tears went into this box. He will die before he lets anyone shred a single page. That done, Katsuki heaves himself into his desk chair and powers on his computer. It feels like a while since he last checked his email, so he does that, frowning at all the spam their IT department swore the new system would filter out of his inbox. He deletes with prejudice and starts wading through a pile of other agencies’ crime bulletins. One sticks out, being a robbery by a tweaker holding a knife, with a grainy image reminiscent of the guy Katsuki tackled earlier today. Katsuki calls the handling detective and provides the arrest number, having forgotten to actually grab the suspect’s name. Whatever, the detective seems grateful enough.

He still has an after-action report to write. Now that he’s calmed down some, the words flow easily enough. The adrenaline rush crashed his system with focus so hyperintense that plenty of details are almost fuzzy in his recall, and he harkens back to the video Aizawa played for him to supplement his memory. He will sleep well tonight, if nothing else. Speaking of sleep, Katsuki carefully documents his functionality on top of explaining the wrist breaking in acute, painstaking detail. Hopefully a well-written report and Aizawa will keep IA off his back. That finished, Katsuki is left sitting in the gradually deepening twilight with a sick feeling in his stomach like he cannot leave, not yet.

“Baku-bro, you done?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki admits reluctantly, blank eyes roving across his well-ordered desk with its six folders and one banker’s box.

Shitty Hair yawns and stretches, unconcerned by the anchorless expression Katsuki can feel rising on his face. “Thank god, dude, because I am beat. Wanna head out before the traffic snarls?”

I need my tea first, a little voice Katsuki has never heard before starts screaming in his mind. His hands clench restlessly, trapped by his own expectations. “Fuck off first. I have something I need to finish.”

“You just said you were done!”

“With my work,” Katsuki glares, hands flexing out of their clench in preparation to fight. Some guys like the closed fist approach, their hands already in the perfect position to punch. Katsuki prefers the options inherent in open hand combat, from throws to blocks to, yeah, punching. Sometimes hard and repeatedly until his knuckles bleed and an instructor drags him off the mats yelling about restraint. Shitty Hair used to hold the bag for him, so he knows how Katsuki gets. He’s never been afraid that Katsuki will lose all reason and beat him to death, but that doesn’t mean he blatantly ignores the potential for physical violence characteristic of their friendship.

He slowly stands up, eyes on Katsuki, and mumbles, “You alright, bro?”

Katsuki flexes his hands again. “I’m sick of that fucking question.”

“Then do something about why everyone asks after your mental state all the time,” Shitty Hair says reasonably enough. He probably has no idea how often Katsuki fantasizes about eating his own gun. “Look, I love you like a brother, but you’re sliding off the rails a little bit. Get back on track.”

Not the first time Katsuki has heard that since he started this job. Not nearly the first time. He looks down at the desk again and reasons that Shitty Hair means well. “Get out.”

Sighing, Shitty Hair packs up and ships off, leaving Katsuki fiddling alone in the bureau, wondering if he should go home and make a probably overdue appointment with his department assigned therapist. He loosens the straps on his holster until they stop biting at his tense shoulders, gun sagging down against his ribs. Even though he took a shower four hours ago, he still feels dirty, fingers dripping filth. Katsuki’s neck muscles tighten up without his permission, and his hands start flexing, and suddenly his breath is shallow and he knows what this is, fuck. Katsuki hurriedly removes his guns and walks the empty bureau, panting, trying not to look at his desk. His eyes are burning, and his lungs feel too small, and he wants to scream until his chest bursts open and all the grime comes pouring out.

It’s already been three years, he thinks, horrified at himself. Three years and he still feels as powerless as he did the second after it happened, when hot blood splattered across his face and a distant scream echoed in his ear like the gunshot already spent.

He crouches behind the dubious comfort of a random cubicle wall and releases a dry sob.

His guns are right there. Right there.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” Katsuki tells himself, his voice as wrecked and ragged as the gaping wound in his chest. “Fucking—stop it, please, fuck.”

Of course, his fucked-up brain never listens, and he’s back in that shitty apartment—mess on the floor, upturned drawers and strewn clothes intermixed with the hot stench of rotting food, white walls stained yellow from persistent cigarette smoke. A shattering crash, adrenaline pumping like a firehose, hands shaking. Wait for back up, no, can’t wait, someone’s—

Katsuki frantically slaps both hands against his ears in a futile bid to drown out the gunshot.

He relives the same moment several times, again and again behind his fluttering eyelids. Crash, gunshot, blood. Crash, gunshot, blood. Crash, gunshot, blood.

When will this stop?

Katsuki just wants to work. He wants to be busy, so busy things like this stop happening. Wants the echoes to fade and the tears to dry and his breath to come normally, easily, like it’s supposed to. His hands do little to drown the screaming in his own mind, and he rocks on his heels, wet face shoved between his trembling knees until the gunshot misses its next cycle.

When he opens his aching eyes he’s back in the bureau, and nothing has changed.

Exhausted, Katsuki wobbles upright and shuffles back to his guns, staring at their gleaming temptation in the low fluorescent light.

It would be so easy.

“Detective?”

Katsuki looks up and around wildly, stinging eyes landing on a startled Deku all small and frail in the doorway to the bureau, a familiar coffee cup in his buttermilk hands. “Deku, uh.”

“Are you okay?” He rushes in on small feet, sneakers squeaking. “Did the medical people miss an injury? I have a first aid kit in my bag, hold on!” Watching him skid to a stop like a desperate slide over first base reanimates the portion of Katsuki’s brain that likes protecting small baby things. He wraps a loose hand around Deku’s wrist before the kid goes hunting through an ugly mustard yellow bag for something Katsuki doesn’t need.

“I’m fine,” he croaks, although his voice definitely betrays the lie. Whatever, everyone lies to him all day long. It’s nothing new. “Just—remembered something awful. Why’re you here?”

In answer, Deku lifts the coffee cup. “I promised you tea, detective.”

Something hot and a little sweet actually sounds good right now, so Katsuki takes the cup and swallows a long sip. No sugar this time, just lemon and peach. He hums approval and takes a much longer sip, letting the warmth seep down into the cold pit his stomach became while he had his little freak out in the corner. “Thanks, nerd.” Instead of brightening like Katsuki half-expected at the rare show of gratitude, those milky green eyes continue to stare at him in contemplative silence, seeing things Katsuki no doubt wishes he wouldn’t.

Finally, after what feels like an age spent eyeballing each other warily, Deku opens and lifts his arms like a child asking for a hug. Katsuki balks. “What, are you serious? The fuck we hugging for?”

“You look like you need one,” Deku replies simply. Before Katsuki can begin swearing like that statement most definitely deserves, the kid pulls out that damn pair of pond water eyes, shiny and wobbling and needy like every little helpless baby animal to ever walk the earth, and he mumbles “Please?” in that lemony voice Katsuki really, truly wishes he hated.

“Fuck, fine,” Katsuki growls in reluctant defeat, vowing silently that he will address this persistent weakness at some point in the near future. For now, he shuffles forward until strong arms loop around his waist and Deku’s curly green head finds a seemingly comfortable spot snuggling his breastbone. Katsuki immediately wants to throw Deku off like he would anyone else, except the kid’s so fucking tiny he would break on impact, and so Katsuki stands there trembling instead, restless and chained in place while strong hands massage the tense muscles in his back.

“Wow, you’re so muscular,” Deku murmurs into his chest.

Katsuki blows out an angry breath. “You fucking know what you’re doing, don’t you.”

“What am I doing?”

“Don’t play dumb, I’m a walking lie detector.”

The head propped on his chest burrows in like Deku fully expects to be thrown off now. “M’sorry, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Katsuki stares down at the bundle of tenacity currently latched around his middle like a fucking mutant koala, giving him his second hug in literal years just hours after giving Katsuki the first one. “Nice success rate, dipshit.” Deku flinches, his hands bunching down tight over Katsuki’s shoulder blades. Little nerd definitely knows what he’s doing. The grip reminds Katsuki instantly of sex, of sweaty hands scrambling for purchase across his back, nails biting and breathless. He needs to leave before his better sense joins forces with his libido and makes use of the interrogation room for a forbidden activity other than sleeping. So of course his dumb mouth says, “Why the hell do you even like me? We don’t know each other.”

The hands stroking over the backs of his shoulders shuffle in guilty denial. “I, um, we’ve met. Before. Once.”

“Fucking when?” Katsuki demands. He would remember those gorgeous goddamn sex legs anywhere, never mind these perfect milky pond water eyes wobbling up at Katsuki all shy and sensual.

“Your, um, a case you solved a while ago. I was—the victim. Sort of.”

His arm, Katsuki thinks, shoulders straightening. Knife wounds, did he solve a robbery involving egregious knife wounds? No, definitely not, he would remember that too. On patrol? The kid knew about his patrol record so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Katsuki handled plenty of bad knife attacks before promoting, enough to forget the less pertinent details. “Assault? Rape?”

“I would, um, I’d rather not talk about it?” Deku asks timidly. “It’s just—I really do think it’ll upset you and, well.”

Katsuki’s covered in fucking tears after spending however long crying in the corner like a pathetic jackass. “Right,” he sighs, defeated. He hasn’t the energy to press after this mystery anymore today. “I’m going home then. Fucking let me go.”

Reluctantly the kid releases his shoulders and slinks away, mossy eyes darting up and away and up again, as if he can’t stand seeing Katsuki’s expression for longer than a few seconds at a time. Katsuki initially thinks the ugly cry face turned him off, except he’s blushing pretty hard and fiddling his fingers around again, sex legs squeezed tight together. Something about this situation appeals to the freak, enough that he mumbles, “Do you wanna grab some dinner?”

His stomach rolls at the very idea. “No, not eating tonight.”

“Lunch?”

They never did finish their daifuku, did they? Katsuki ruined the whole fucking thing by leaping from the table with an unattractive animal snarl. A second chance. “Sure,” his stupid mouth agrees before his brain catches up.

The kid starts glowing before he can take the words back and, god, he’s so goddamned pretty. “Th-then I’ll meet you here at noon! We can try, um, Italian? That has a lot of carbs, right? And protein?”

“Worried about my diet, nerd?”

“A little,” Deku admits, creamy green eyes drifting down to Katsuki’s flat stomach. “You, um, you seem like you work out a lot.”

Katsuki does, usually in the gym during his regularly scheduled shift or at home in the middle of the night when the gunshots and blood keep his eyes peeled open well beyond the reasonable hour. He converted the second bedroom into a makeshift home gym shortly after his first shooting and spends more time in there than he does in his actual bed. “I do,” he agrees plainly. “Fucking required for my job.”

“I can cook!” comes blurting out of nowhere. Deku’s blush visibly regrets speaking.

Too bad, since Katsuki’s already imagining all that buttermilk skin wearing nothing more than an apron and a smile. “Well, I eat like a fucking horse.”

“I’ll make lunch tomorrow,” the kid glows, pillow lips pink and slick and begging.

“Sure,” Katsuki agrees like a moron too distracted by a pretty face to remember all the reasons this is such a bad idea. Journalist. Former victim. Stalker. Screaming nightmares. They seem so small compared to that blindingly bright smile. He wants to cart Deku home over his shoulder, have sweaty athletic sex all over his house, then curl around this small, compact creature until sunlight cracks across his eyelids like a brick to the head.

What the hell is happening to him?

“Okay,” the kid says, interrupting Katsuki’s steadily building panic, “then I’ll bring lunch for us tomorrow. Lots and lots of protein. And, um, maybe a little dessert?”

“Nothing too sweet,” Katsuki demands.

Nodding, Deku agrees, “Nothing sweet,” and, for whatever reason, curls his small hands in Katsuki’s shirt. His gorgeous lips still look so inviting, parted and pink below his soft milky eyes and that starburst of brown freckles, each more kissable than the last. “I, um, I’m really looking forward to seeing you tomorrow, detective,” the kid says as soft as his eyes. “At noon?”

“Noon.”

The kid smiles and Katsuki’s heart does this weird, unfamiliar flip. It’s only after Deku picks up his bag and scuttles outside, casting shy glances over his shoulder the whole way, that Katsuki identifies this new feeling as anticipation. To eat lunch two hours early with his stalker. He sits down hard in his rolling chair and throws his head back so he can stare at the blessedly uncomplicated ceiling for a few minutes of uninterrupted bliss. Then, feeling dirty, he shoves a hand into his pants and yanks until he comes. Three times in one day.

He’s fucked.

Well, that’s not new, although the rest of it is. Katsuki wipes his wet hand on his pants and takes himself to the locker room, where he gathers his discarded clothes from the day before. Then it’s out to his motorcycle, bought with his first paycheck and never regretted beyond the abhorrently high gas bill. He splits traffic all the way home. There, it’s like his persistent exhaustion catches up with him. He carefully unholsters his firearms, undresses into his hamper, takes another goddamned shower in what feels like a day of them, and stumbles naked into his bed. The adrenaline dump from earlier takes him to the threshold of sleep, but it’s still another two hours before he can bring himself to step over the edge.

Katsuki’s up by four a.m., energy buzzing through his veins after a nightmare spent running, and he whiles away the morning beating his boxing bag.

“Feeling better today?” Shitty Hair asks when he rumbles into work half an hour early.

Katsuki grunts a reply lest he succumb to the temptation of cursing his best friend out for all that shitty compassion, and kicks his bag under the desk.

“Least it’s Thursday,” comes as he’s ripping the lid off his evidence box. He shoots Shitty Hair the evil eye for even daring to bring up the end of their workweek with his dirty mouth. “Easy, man. I’m not trying to push your buttons.”

“Then shut the fuck up.”

“Someone’s definitely feeling better.”

Katsuki slaps the lid down hard over his evidence box, turns to brace his closed fists on the desk, and says, “Keep talking and we’ll see how much my mood has improved. Go on.”

Shitty Hair mimes zipping his lips with a smarmy smile.

They work in relative silence for the rest of the morning, Katsuki quickly reviewing the evidence for his old guy murder and trying not to think about his lunch date, while Shitty Hair does whatever. Where the hell did they bury the old guy’s body, Katsuki wonders repeatedly, even as he strategizes a solid circumstantial case that he can hopefully file with the District Attorney tomorrow. The flagrant financial abuse points to a very strong motive, the phone records from both the daughter, the grandson, and the old guy placing them in linked areas just prior to the disappearance and not mentioned by the daughter in the initial report.

It’s not enough, he thinks, scratching his head with the closest pen so he doesn’t tear out his hair with his bare hands.

He needs that goddamned body.

“Detective?”

“Fucking what, Sonic?” he asks without looking up, unfortunately familiar with the desk officer’s voice now. Pervert probably moved departments or, more likely, decided avoiding Katsuki would prolong his career. And his life.

Sonic has no such self-preservation instincts, or at least not enough to prevent him from doing his duty. He stiffly says, “Visitor for you.”

Katsuki sits up so fast he bangs his knees against the bottom of his desk. “Ow, fuck!”

“Easy there,” Shitty Hair says with uncluttered curiosity. “You expecting someone important, Baku-bro?” Somewhat, his brain supplies helpfully, because it’s about as shitty as Shitty Hair and, although in the past anger transference has proven useless in diverting the other detective from prying into his personal life, Katsuki gives it one more shot with his best glare. Shitty Hair’s eyebrows predictably rise. “Oh man, is it that kid again? Seriously?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” Katsuki says with as much dignity as he can muster. “Sonic, tell Deku to have a seat.”

“Yes, sir.”

With Sonic gone, Katsuki can safely straighten his notes and check his outfit. He wore what he always wore on Thursdays—a burnt orange flannel over a standard black shirt, baggy brown cargo pants, his boots. The anticipation from the day before somehow morphed into a sudden irrational nervousness over his appearance, and he smooths a hand through his floppy bangs, uncertain. He’s overdue on a haircut, too late now. Besides, Deku likes him anyway, despite his garbage personality and sloppy appearance. Katsuki has no logical reason to feel nervous.

“Dude.” Katsuki glances up with a warning glare that Shitty Hair meets head on, smiling for no reason at all. “Relax. That kid likes you, and I can’t exactly fault his good taste.”

“Don’t be gross.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who sucks dick in this bureau.” Shitty Hair rests his pointy chin on his laced fingers in a classic thoughtful pose that does not in any way make him look smarter than he is, eyes canted upwards. “Although I probably would if given the right incentive,” he mumbles. “Bet it tastes awful.”

Not one to mince words, Katsuki bluntly replies, “It does.”

Shitty Hair’s pointy nose wrinkles. “Whatever, you do you, man. Preferably after work.”

“The fuck kind of meeting do you think this is?” Katsuki demands, fingers flexing indecisively between his preferred open-handed combat stance and a stranglehold on the edge of his desk.

“A date,” Shitty Hair says, no bones about his openly approving expression.

Well, he’s not wrong. Heat blooms in Katsuki’s face that he literally cannot hide without making the reaction even more obvious, so he settles for owning it, letting the anger in his eyes speak for the embarrassment in his cheeks. A date with Deku. His stomach grumbles in earnest demand that he end this conversation already and move to the best part of his day, and Katsuki is inclined to agree. Deku is much better company than his shitty best friend. “Whatever,” he says, standing so he can adjust his badge and radio. “You’re eating alone today, dipshit.”

“Remember, no hanky-panky at work!” he shouts as Katsuki walks away, loud enough that the entire fucking bureau snaps their heads up to eyeball the drama.

So Katsuki wastes a few minutes angrily strangling Shitty Hair with his bare hands until he feels the ubiquitous wrestling tap on his forearm that signals defeat. Shitty Hair effectively put back in his place, Katsuki goes to meet Deku.

The kid’s sitting in one of the waiting chairs idly kicking his feet. He’s wearing little ankle boots that accent his bowed, muscular legs, coated today in the thinnest pair of black pants Katsuki has ever seen. The lumpy sweater and cheerful yellow headband Katsuki expects at this point, yet the sight still somehow punches a hole right through his metaphorical chest wound, numbing the worst of his lingering doubt. Katsuki wants to kiss every square inch of Deku’s buttermilk body. Since he’s not an actual animal, he restrains his baser urges into a rude snort that picks Deku’s curly green head up. Deku glows at the sight of Katsuki hunched awkwardly in the doorway. “Detective, hey, hi!” He hurriedly leaps up and across the room to bounce not a foot away, freckled cheeks a delicate pink latticework. “How, um, how are you? Is your day going well?”

“Well enough,” Katsuki mumbles blankly.

“That’s good,” Deku sighs, no doubt relieved that Katsuki recovered from that ridiculous crying jag yesterday, that he’s not so pathetic as to eat his own gun over something so stupid. Not that Deku’s aware that Katsuki wants to eat his gun. Not that Katsuki will ruin their first real date with mutterings about gunshots and blood and fogged baby eyes.

If Katsuki has his way, maybe Deku will never know. Which, in hindsight, is probably not a healthy approach to a relationship.

Fuck, they’re not in a relationship. First date. Keep his expectations in line.

“Ready?” he asks over the uncomfortable twisting in his heart. Cracking his chest wound open so those little hands can root around hunting for the persistent infection can wait for another day. Another date. Maybe even a goddamned relationship.

The happiness glowing from Deku’s beautiful face seems to suggest such a thing is possible. “Yes, I—yes! I have, uh, here.” He bounces back to his chair and the literal basket sitting on the polished tile floor, complete with a crackled brown baguette and red checkered picnic blanket. It looks too large against his tiny chest, Deku hugging the worn whicker as he approaches with a shy smile that Katsuki wants to kiss pliant. “Where, um, where can we eat?”

“Outside,” he pronounces instantly, the phantom eyes of his fellow detectives already crawling across his shoulders.

Deku seems satisfied with the suggestion and follows Katsuki out of the police department, down the busy sidewalk, and into a verdant park just two blocks away. The looming community center attracts an uncomfortable amount of children that Katsuki instinctively avoids, taking them past the playground and baseball field and the ugly benches he’s caught dozens of transients sleeping on throughout his career. There’s a row of cherry blossom trees visually separating the park from a nearby neighborhood, followed by a large, swaying maple that Katsuki heads for with firm steps, thoughts of sunburn on that buttermilk skin turning his stomach inside out.

Sadly, Deku looks as unbelievably beautiful under the dappled shade as he does just walking around as usual, forcing Katsuki to distract himself from staring by laying out the blanket flat between the maple’s upraised roots.

“The cherry blossoms are so pretty!”

“They’re literally twigs,” Katsuki argues before his brain catches up to his mouth, and he freezes like a startled bird, eyes darting to a rapidly unpacking Deku.

“Yes, but pretty twigs,” he agrees easily, seemingly unbothered by Katsuki’s persistently garbage personality, even when it catches fire. “They look nice in contrast to the traditional houses on the other side. Here, can you open this for me?”

Clumsy hands suddenly occupied by a mason jar that he cracks open on instinct, Katsuki watches Deku unload multiple large containers onto their blanket. He has what looks like a salad, pasta still visibly steaming inside clear glass, sliced raw veggies, tomatoes and cheese and olives mixed into some kind of oil, fried chicken, and the baguette. Katsuki looks down at the jar in his hand and sees something that looks like hummus.

Flushed at the obvious effort sitting before his crossed legs, Katsuki ducks his head away from the milky green gaze sizing him up.

“Well, um, I thought we could start with the salad?” Deku offers. “But we don’t have to!”

Fuck, Katsuki’s already ruining everything by being a grumpy, recalcitrant ass over a thoughtful lunch. He girds his shriveled nuts, takes a deep breath, and meets Deku’s worried gaze. “Salad’s fine.”

The shy smile Deku hits him with should be classified as a weapon of mass destruction. “Okay!”

Two plates magic themselves out of the basket that certainly does not look big enough to hold them. Deku hums while he dishes them each a portion, one about triple the size of the other. “So, what are you working on today, detective?” he asks. Naturally, because he’s clearly unfair, he licks his thumb after drizzling on the dressing, prompting Katsuki to suddenly care far less about the food.

“Not telling you about my cases, shitty nerd,” Katsuki replies on instinct, eyes caught on those pillow lips twitching into a delighted smile.

Fuck, he’s cute. Way too fucking cute.

“Here.” He slides the larger portion into Katsuki’s lap, his pond water eyes shimmering in the dappled sunlight. “And I figured not. Still, I’m happy to hear about what you do! Detective work is hard, and you somehow make it look so easy.”

Unable to craft an appropriately acerbic reply with those eyes crawling across his warm skin, Katsuki hurriedly shoves a loaded fork into his mouth. The salad tastes like citrus and berries, borderline sweet yet just shy of the forbidden edge. Katsuki feels an odd buzz of energy afterward that he attributes to the sexy way Deku leans across the blanket, pert ass raised and gorgeously thick leg stretched back, to reach the hummus Katsuki abandoned on a nearby root. There’s apparently a bread knife in the basket which Deku uses to slice perfect circles off the baguette. He layers the hummus and raw vegetables on some, the tomato and olive mixture on others. Katsuki eats whatever Deku places in front of him. “Which one do you like better?” Deku asks.

Katsuki, busy chewing, panics. Does he like one more than the other? Should he just pick one at random, or will Deku walk away if he admits that he hasn’t a preference? The hummus is creamy, the olives beautifully bitter.

He hasn’t an answer by the time he swallows. “Uh.”

“Are they bad?”

“No, not—they’re both good?”

Deku perks a little at the praise, freckled cheeks pink. “Really? I’ve never made them before, and the hummus is store bought. The internet said cucumber—” He claps a hand over his mouth for no reason, staring at Katsuki in undeserved horror. “I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve, um, here, we can—pasta! I brought pasta!”

Confused, Katsuki says, “Sure?” and accepts the resultant plate of pasta. It’s cooled since they ate the salad and bread. He takes a bite without really investigating what’s on his fork.

And almost chokes.

“What? Is it bad? Oh god, it’s bad!” Deku says anxiously.

Katsuki wants to disagree, except his mouth has forgone picket signs against cruel and unusual punishment and gone straight to screaming retreat. Fuck, it’s so spicy Katsuki barely tastes anything beyond the burning retribution. Are his eyes watering?

A slice of bread slathered in hummus appears in his peripherals and, pathetically grateful, Katsuki wolfs it down whole.

Oh good, his tongue is still attached.

“I’m sorry!”

Deku sounds like he’s crying, so Katsuki shakes off the lingering sting. “For what?”

“It’s too spicy! You seemed to like the hot pot with spice so I added some to the pasta, but I don’t usually make spicy things and it’s way too much. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” Rough hands try to steal his plate from him. “You don’t have to eat it.”

Relying on his greater physical strength, Katsuki retains a firm grip on the plate despite the fingers trying to peel him off. “Back the fuck off, I’m hungry.”

“But it’s too—”

“My stomach can handle anything,” Katsuki snaps. Deku made this pasta for Katsuki, and Katsuki is damn well going to eat it, no matter what protest his shitty mouth makes. “Here, pass me that hummus jar.” Shaking, Deku does, and Katsuki aggressively mixes some into his pasta before tentatively attempting another bite. It’s almost too much. Almost. “It’s good.”

“Liar,” Deku mumbles, his beautiful pond water eyes glittering with real water. He tries on a meek smile when Katsuki scrapes more food into his stinging mouth, encouraging Katsuki to keep going until, miraculously, the plate is empty. By mutual decision they forgo the rest, with Deku almost slamming the lid back on the container before stuffing it into the basket where it can await future disposal. Deku is far more hesitant offering the chicken, not that he should be. After the burning retribution of that damn pasta, the chicken cracks in his mouth, beautifully crisp around a juicy center. He slurps the meat down to the bone, regretful when it’s gone. They finish the bread and olive mixture, Deku sitting on his curvy hip and pressing each bite into Katsuki’s mouth with his scarred fingers. Part of Katsuki wants to protest that he’s a grown ass man and can feed himself. The less logical, mostly lust-struck rest of him wants to roll over top Deku, slot between his gorgeous sex legs, and suck each little finger until those soft algae eyes swell into shiny black diamonds. “You’re staring at me,” Deku says in that lemony voice, pretty gaze half-lidded.

Another piece of bread slips between his lips, along with two of those lovely fingers. He just barely refrains from licking. “Cause you’re so fucking green.”

“Oh!” For whatever reason, Deku actually looks flattered. “I guess I am.” He feeds Katsuki another bread slice and inches closer. His delicate eyelashes remind Katsuki of translucent butterfly wings. “My eyes are green and I, um. Okay, don’t laugh, but I dye my hair!”

Laugh? Katsuki almost spit-takes. “You what?”

His smooth eyebrows crank down into something Katsuki hesitates to call a glare, because a cute little baby face like this cannot pull anger off very well. “I said don’t laugh!”

“I’m not!”

“Your expression says you wanna,” Deku argues which, well, Katsuki has no idea what his face is doing. It defaults to anger so much that Katsuki stopped keeping proper track beyond the various shades of annoyance bubbling in his chest. The current feeling seems far less explosive than usual, prompting Katsuki to honestly wonder if he discovered a new emotion sometime in the last few minutes. “My hair is naturally browner than this but I wanted hair like my mom’s, so I dyed it. Guess the home dye looks a little off since everyone says my hair is green now.”

“It’s pretty,” Katsuki says, because he clearly lost his mind somewhere between that ridiculous pasta and now.

Still, the honesty pays off when Deku goes all lush against his side like a happy puppy wanting cuddles. “You’re really sweet,” Deku sighs softly. He definitely knows what he’s doing, not least of which the hand he tangles in the flannel above Katsuki’s galloping heart. Swallowing, Katsuki lays his arm across Deku’s shoulders. They’re small and strong, like the muscular thigh slipping casually alongside his own and, fuck, this is technically cuddling, isn’t it? “Hm,” Deku hums, sounding pleased. The noise keeps Katsuki from leaping to his feet and sprinting for sanity. “Can you tell me about your job now?”

“Shitty journalist pumping me for information,” Katsuki complains. “Told you I’m not talking about my cases.”

“Won’t use it,” Deku pouts.

Lie detector evidently developing a concerning amount of rust, Katsuki believes Deku. He rarely believes anyone, not least of which because his job requires constant vigilance, yet something about those goddamned baby animal eyes opens his dumb mouth. “I’m not that interesting.”

“I disagree.”

“And you’re fucking wrong,” Katsuki sighs in defeat. “Every case is basically the same, because criminals are equally stupid. They leave evidence that can be traced back to them. I follow the evidence, and there the dumbasses are, usually with their thumbs up their fucking asses.” His arm tightens involuntarily around Deku’s shoulders as he remembers the scars on Deku’s arm, that someone put them there with the intention to hurt soft little buttermilk Deku. That they succeeded once, when Deku lived outside the immediate sphere of Katsuki’s protection. He hopes whoever attacked the little nerd took a bullet to the face shortly afterward.

“Guess you’re right,” Deku says while Katsuki fantasizes about utilizing his gun for shooting someone other than himself. “I mean, the things I find out as a journalist are really surprising. People aren’t great at keeping secrets, especially from their friends and family.”

Katsuki only realizes he’s stroking small circles along Deku’s arm when he suddenly stops, fingers frozen in an awkward pattern that cracks retribution through his knuckles.

“But still, not everyone understands how evidence ties into the bigger picture, what to leave out as irrelevant and what to chase down until the thread unravels. That’s why I think you’re so impressive, detective.” Deku, oblivious to the slow rolling epiphany currently twisting Katsuki into a pretzel, tilts his head back against Katsuki’s bicep and smiles at him, butterfly eyelashes hazing his pretty pond water eyes into glittery shadows. Those eyes probably lure plenty of unsuspecting people into their mysterious depths, as sweet and unthreatening as a white sand beach right up until the undertow sweeps them out to sea. Katsuki’s all undertow, yet somehow plenty of people blab their secrets in his vicinity enough that he solves cases faster than most other detectives. The right pressure on the right person, like fingers on a lever, lowers all kinds of bridges, and Katsuki has ignored the basic, most primal investigative technique in the known universe to chase his tail around endless mountains of paperwork. “Detective?”

“I have to return to work,” he says blindly. “Need to—make a phone call.”

“Oh, okay,” Deku replies, sounding remarkably sad.

His voice grinds through Katsuki like sand through gears, effectively halting him halfway to standing, and he stares down at the disappointment tugging Deku’s perfect pillow lips into a small frown. “I’m…sorry?” he questions, feeling helpless. He can’t help that he has to work, yet something deep down in his stomach starts screaming at him to do something, damn it. Look at those meek little baby eyes. “I, uh, fuck. This was—nice.”

Deku immediately starts glowing again. “Yeah? I’m sorry about the pasta, though. I’ll do better next time.” Next time rings through Katsuki’s head like a Notre Dame bell. Deku wants another date? “If that’s okay with you?”

“Sure,” Katsuki’s mouth blurts on autopilot, terrified to miss this chance while Katsuki’s head is still reeling. “I’ll take you out, or something.”

“Or I can bring you lunch again tomorrow?”

He’s full, yet his stomach manages an eager grumble that dusts red over both their cheeks, Katsuki mortified and Deku looking entirely too flattered. “Fine,” Katsuki bites out, jaw flexing around the urgently unfamiliar desire to flee. “I—tomorrow. I’ll basically be alone in the office anyway.”

“No one else works on Friday?”

Katsuki scowls at the reminder. “Fucking shitty Half and Half will probably do a stake out in the evening, and Vulture sometimes comes in when he’s handling a big gang thing. Don’t expect anyone else.”

Glowing, pink lips parted, Deku reverently asks in that lemony tone Katsuki really should learn to hate already, “So we can be alone together?”

“Goddamned succubus,” Katsuki mutters, glaring down at this walking temptation.

Deku adopts an expression equal parts surprised and pleased, as if he takes pride in throwing Katsuki off balance. Katsuki wants to tackle him into the tree roots and fuck him until he cries, wants to walk back to work with biting scratches all down his back and bruises forming on his hips from those muscular legs squeezing down tight. His dick makes an earnest request to harden which he ruthlessly denies, but the temptation of those happy pink lips lingers like a hit to the head, demanding attention, and Katsuki’s weak. Groaning, he leans down and presses a hard, no-nonsense kiss to Deku’s slack mouth, aware that anything more intimate than this will definitely end in a public indecency charge. “Wait, don’t stop,” Deku whispers when Katsuki backs away, almost stumbling in his haste to save himself.

“I—my case—” Katsuki stutters, mouth tripping around the desire to keep kissing. A deep breath disperses some of his anxiety. “If I start now, I really won’t fucking stop, Deku, and I have to work.”

“One more,” Deku bargains.

He’s up on his feet before Katsuki can formulate a rejection, strong arms lacing around Katsuki’s shoulders and butterfly eyelashes fluttering blissfully as their lips meet again.

Fuck, these goddamned pillows are so soft.

Defeated, Katsuki hugs Deku’s much shorter body onto his tiptoes and deepens the kiss, tongue prying between those plush pillow lips into the wet mouth behind. Deku makes this gorgeous noise in response, somewhere between a kitten’s mewl for milk and the throaty whimper of a pleased prostitute, both used to getting their way. Fingers thread through Katsuki’s hair and tug him down as Deku’s hot tongue returns each lick with a dirty twist, clearly experienced. Someone else has had this, he realizes, eyes snapping open when he most certainly did not remember closing them. Deku looks as pretty as a summer sunset, all flushed cheeks and soft curls.

Mine, flits through his head, followed rapidly by horror at his own possessiveness over a veritable stranger. The emotion lands like a boulder in his stomach—that he doesn’t want to share, that he hates whoever taught Deku to kiss so well, that if he has his way no one else will ever catalogue the soft contours of Deku’s mouth and all the attenuate noises Deku makes when he’s kissed just right.

He sucks Deku’s bottom lip between his teeth and bites perhaps a little too hard, judging by Deku’s sudden flinch.

When he pulls back to admire his work, he finds Deku’s mouth swollen and lush as a rainforest.

“One more,” Deku breathes, not even opening his eyes before he’s pushing at the back of Katsuki’s head, demanding what he wants.

Katsuki kisses the hinge of his jaw instead, each inch of skin as temptingly soft as his lips. There’s a cute little freckle right below his earlobe that Katsuki sucks to juicy redness, hoping savagely that he’s the only one who knows about it. Deku giggles approval and lengthens his throat, letting Katsuki find another tiny freckle slightly deeper back, just barely visible beneath Deku’s curls. He sucks that one too, feeling a bit like a slavering dog with his favorite bone, hand locked around the base of Deku’s neck lest he get any ideas about retreating before Katsuki’s well and truly finished here. “That feels really nice,” he sighs, limp in Katsuki’s grasp. Katsuki hums acknowledgment, too busy following a trail of beige freckles into the thick of Deku’s hair to respond properly, his nose locked behind a small ear where Deku’s scent deepens, fresh as ripe berries. “Do you really have to go back to work?”

Fuck.

Teeth clenching in reluctance, Katsuki forces his mouth away from all that buttermilk skin. “Yes.” The hand around Deku’s neck regretfully transitions to his own hair, which he ruthlessly combs away from his forehead, the strands hot from the sun and a little greasy. “Shit, I need to finish my case today, before I get stuck in a rut.”

“I guess I can sacrifice your company for the rest of the afternoon,” Deku teases, flush lower lip caught in his teeth. “Do you still want your tea tonight?”

The resultant relief is crushing in its intensity. “Fuck yeah.”

“Tonight then.” Being a goddamned fantasy made manifest, Deku tilts up just enough to bestow a feather light kiss on Katsuki’s chin before retreating to his little basket of goodies. Katsuki wants to stay and clean up, except he also wants to suck Deku’s cock against this tree, so he backs away instead, boots crunching in the winter dry grass. “Oh,” Deku suddenly says, cutting off Katsuki’s retreat. “I forgot your dessert. Here, take it with you as a snack.” He thrusts a small bag forward, patterned with little badges and cartoon police units and tied with a bright blue ribbon edged in gold. “They’re dark chocolate dipped almonds, sprinkled with a little salt! Not sweet at all, I promise!”

Katsuki stares down at the dessert in his trembling hands and feels his face grow hot. “Thanks, nerd.” Stuffing it in his pocket, he flees on the speed of his long legs, ignoring Deku’s flustered goodbye in favor of saving his own dignity before he really does commit an act of public indecency.

No one has ever made him a dessert he actually likes. No one bothers, because he dislikes more of it than he tolerates, yet bitter dark chocolate combined with salt and paper dry almonds sounds more than edible to him. He licks his lips and fantasizes that he can still taste Deku there. A few more hours and Deku will—no, fuck. Katsuki scowls while waiting for the crosswalk light to change, hand tight around his little bag of almonds. They’ve only known each other a couple days, shared technically one kiss. He should in no way feel so miserable at parting for less than a day. Less than half a day.

Katsuki checks his watch and curses. It’s barely one o’clock.

The rage rampaging through his veins rapidly clears a path to his desk as officers and detectives alike leap out of his way. Shitty Hair left while he was at lunch, probably taking advantage of Katsuki’s absence to flirt with Pinky. Well, whatever, peace and quiet.

He hides the almonds in his desk drawer while telling himself that he’s not treasuring them at all, merely saving them from an unceremonious death at the hands of his moronic coworkers who sometimes forget how violently he reacts when they steal shit off his desk without his permission. He’s not risking his almonds. That accomplished, Katsuki yanks the lid off his banker’s box and rifles through the paper inside until he finds the phone number he wants. Then he sits down, dials, and waits.

“Hello?”

“Akihiko Yamamoto?”

“Yes?” the second eldest grandson asks suspiciously, not expecting a random caller to know his name.

Too bad, because this conversation is about to get a lot worse. “Detective Katsuki Bakugou, Musutafu PD. I’m looking into your grandfather’s death. Can you answer some questions?”

There’s a moment of extended silence whereupon Katsuki tries not to lose his temper on someone who may or may not hold all the answers Katsuki needs to solve this case. This guy’s the least suspicious and therefore the least likely to have involved himself in the murder, but he must know something about his own family. “Listen, I don’t know who you are—”

“Feel free to call the general police line and have them transfer you to my desk.”

“Bakuro, you said?”

“Bakugou, Musutafu PD.”

The line abruptly disconnects and, left adrift, Katsuki waits impatiently for the call to transfer through. It takes ages because dispatch apparently likes to chat instead of do their jobs. Katsuki uses the intervening minutes to lay out pertinent evidence for reference—phone calls, bank statements, that damn picture of the great-granddaughter’s diamond earrings. The audio recorder is almost an afterthought. He’s flexing his hands when the phone finally rings, and his greeting perhaps comes across a little too aggressive. “Wow, attitude,” Akihito says mildly. Then again, he’s a married gay man living in a largely conservative country. He’s heard worse than Katsuki can dish out.

Not one to apologize over spilled milk, Katsuki continues, “Tell me about your family at the time your grandfather went missing.”

“Well, uh, it was me and my parents, my brother—”

“I know your family tree already.”

“Right, guess you do. I’m not used to talking about it, to be honest. Grandpa was a great man. He wouldn’t have just—wandered off like mom kept saying.” Good, he was suspicious at the time, or maybe just in hindsight. “No one really seemed to care apart from me. The twins thought he would come back, that he was probably in a hospital or something, and Yuki was too young to understand.”

Katsuki squeezes his thigh against the urge to fidget, not wanting to risk a corrupted recording of this conversation because he can’t resist making noise. “What about your older brother, Masaru?”

“He—Masaru was upset. He’d been upset for a long time. Once the baby became a reality, I mean. He and Ran were excited at first, till mom started ragging on him to pay for more things around the house. She told me she expected all three of them to live with her since Masaru is so bad with money. As a second son, I always knew I was going to pay for myself, but mom babied Masaru a lot. Probably too much. He didn’t like being ordered around.”

“Did he ever ask your grandfather for money?”

Akihito’s snort answers that question adequately. “All the time. And uncle, and dad, and me sometimes. I told him to get a job.”

“What did your grandfather tell him?”

“You think my brother killed him, don’t you,” Akihito not quite asks, his voice deep and resigned. A sudden flutter of noise in the background depicts a scene Katsuki can picture all too easily—the husband pretending not to listen while washing dishes, one of the children hovering in the doorway with open eyes and mouth, Akihito slumped in a chair staring blankly at the floor, wondering how his happy life suddenly came crashing down around his ears. Katsuki has seen this scene play out more times than he wants to count.

He puts his head in his hand and sighs softly, dredging up the last of his compassion. “I’m not sure.”

“I am,” Akihito pronounces gravely. It’s not as shocking a statement as it should be. “What do you need, detective? Dirt on my family? My opinion on what happened, who was involved? How they did it? I don’t have a lot of answers. I just know that mom and brother were arguing one day, smiles the next. Brother suddenly had money, and I didn’t know where it came from. What do you want from me?”

“The body,” Katsuki replies before his dumb brain catches up to his overeager mouth. He nearly slaps himself for his stupidity. “Do you have any idea, any at all, how they could have disposed of your grandfather?”

Again, Akihito goes quiet, his breath thick where it was once soft. “I—brother had this place he used to go to. Outside the city. A secret base. Maybe there?”

Katsuki almost breaks something in his haste to open a map. “Where?”

The grandson goes into the painstaking detail of familiarity, mentioning crooked trees and strange rock formations until Katsuki can pinpoint the location on an otherwise unhelpfully forested map. He tells Katsuki other things, information he probably considers fool’s gold while Katsuki watches in wide-eyed glee as his case takes on a platinum hue—how the son started popping by the house just before the murder despite being too busy in the years before, the strange arguments over selling the old guy’s property, drunken phone calls late at night slurring about bounced checks and mounting expenses, first from brother then, as the years stretched, from mom. The kicker comes near the end of the call, when Akihito begins reminiscing about a particularly nice holiday some years ago, the eldest grandson having splurged on lavish food and decorations. The only dark spot occurred over presents, when mom drunkenly mentioned a cassette tape and grandson dragged her into the kitchen for a whispered disagreement.

Cassette tapes are too old to keep in this rapidly evolving technological age. Even Katsuki’s stubborn mother transferred all her old tapes to the cloud. Why keep a cassette? Unless it was valuable. Blackmail?

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Yamamoto,” Katsuki says perhaps a little too gleefully. He’s already drafting the warrants in his mind.

“No, thank you, detective. For not forgetting about my grandfather. I—” Akihito swallows loud enough to travel over the frail phone lines, his breath hitching like he’s about to cry. It’s the most emotion he’s shown during the entire call, and of course, it’s right at the end when Katsuki is eager to be elsewhere. “You have no idea how hard it is to go through life not knowing what happened. I thought I would never really know. If—If you find him, please tell me. I would like to give him a proper burial.”

“Uh, yeah. I’ll call you,” Katsuki promises on autopilot, uncomfortable with the emotional direction this conversation just took.

The grandson breathes a small sigh of relief and mumbles, “Thank you,” again before disconnecting. Guilt sinks its sharp talons into his chest as he slowly replaces the phone in its cradle and sits back in his chair. Katsuki understands what an awful thing he asked that man to relive. Has relived his own nightmares more than he cares to—to his superiors, to Internal Affairs, to his therapist and his mom. He pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a deep, steadying breath. What’s done is done, and he has a job to do.

He downloads the recorded audio onto his computer and pops on a pair of headphones. Although the conversation still rings fresh in his ears, the recording allows him to slow and replay every sentence, pick apart the details, read between the lines for nuggets he probably missed in the moment. He lays out the bare bones of his supplemental, using the phone and bank records as equal evidence to the recorded conversation. Attorneys rarely file on circumstantial cases, yet they may make exception for a homicide, not least of which because Katsuki compiled so much evidence. A body would make or break the case depending on the autopsy results, yet Katsuki cannot bank on finding the body at the eldest grandson’s “secret base.” He can, however, bank on this supplemental report granting Departmental backing to dig up every fucking square inch of that plot. If the old man’s out there, Katsuki will find him.

He writes until his fingers hurt, only partially aware of the outside world. Shitty Hair returns during his thirteenth replay of Yamamoto’s description of his brother’s financial strain. That pointy face twists from dreamy satisfaction to a concerned pout that Katsuki resolutely ignores lest they begin a lengthy conversation about feelings that, quite frankly, Katsuki does not need.

Eventually, Shitty Hair reads the mood and packs up for the day, shooting one last frown at Katsuki before he disappears out the bureau doors. Half and Half wanders in not an hour later dressed down in undercover wear, the Happy Flowers van keys twirling around his finger with their distinctive yellow daisy keychain. His mouth moving forces Katsuki to engage, and he removes his headphones grudgingly. “I’m fucking busy.”

Mismatched eyes adopt an unimpressed air that poorly hides the simmering anger beneath. “How long will you remain on duty?”

“Till I’m done, bitch.”

“Estimate?”

Katsuki checks his watch. “Like, four hours?”

Half and Half nods approval Katsuki does not need or appreciate and pockets his Happy Flower keys. “I’m surveilling the girls on Fifth tonight until approximately one in the morning. As patrol usually finds themselves too busy to assist me during the evening hours—”

“Listen to the goddamned radio, is that it? Jesus Christ, just fucking spit it out. I don’t need your life story.” Katsuki hangs one ear bud over the ear facing his radio and jams the other back into place, already rewinding the precious few seconds necessary to resume picking apart his audio. “I’ll let you know when I fuck off for the night.”

“Thank you,” Half and Half says through his teeth.

Katsuki cannot help a small, victorious smile at getting under the cold bastard’s skin. “Wipe your ass with that paper-thin gratitude, ‘cause I sure as fuck don’t need it.”

“You are insufferable.”

Katsuki waits a few seconds for the man to leave, only he continues standing some feet away from the desk clearly expecting an angry response and, well, Katsuki never backs down from a challenge. If they’re going there, Katsuki’s winning. He glances up at the bastard’s dead eyed stare and feigns bored surprise. “You still here?”

Predictably, Half and Half blooms red like a ripening tomato, anger painting spring fever across his ugly face. He storms off instead of responding, no doubt consoling himself atop his high horse. Let him think he’s better than Katsuki. Katsuki’s not the one trying to prove that he matters. Katsuki knows his own worth. He knows his talent, his decent looks, his drive. Katsuki also knows how little that shit matters in the grand scheme of things. Even ambitious people wind up stuck in traps not of their own making. Even the best intentions fall flat.

His hand is halfway to his ankle gun before he catches himself, fingers curling into a fist against his trembling thigh.

Damn it.

Katsuki shakes off his gloom and resolutely focuses on his case. The radio picks up speed not half an hour later as the workforce returns home en masse. Car accidents. Domestic violence. Kids gone missing after a long day at school. Old people found dead. Disputes with neighbors over trash cans.

He keeps listening despite how the noise sometimes drowns out his work, slows down his productivity. The calls eventually shift direction, become less about people returning home and more about what they get up to at night. Car accidents become drunk drivers. Missing kids find their way home after curfew. The domestic disputes give way to stranger rape and club brawls. Only once does Katsuki hear Half and Half on the radio requesting assistance on picking up a specific john. A patrol unit answers up before Katsuki can even sigh, and so Katsuki continues typing long past when he expected, cramped fingers protesting the abuse. His report is well over twenty pages long and still unfinished when he hears soft footsteps approaching him from behind. “Still here?” Deku whispers across the back of his neck.

Katsuki resolutely tells his dick to settle down. “Yeah. It’s fucking late, Deku.”

“Sorry.” Not actually sounding very sorry, Deku loops his arms around Katsuki’s shoulders and dangles a cup of steaming tea barely an inch from Katsuki’s nose. “I wanted to see you.”

Taking the tea before he loses his nerve, Katsuki settles back against Deku’s strong chest. “Yeah.”

“You look tired.”

“No shit. Been up since—fuck, I don’t even know.”

Deku hums a little, somewhere between acknowledgment and contentment, and settles his chin on top of Katsuki’s head. Unlike Shitty Hair, he has a soft, round chin, perfect for cuddling like this. Katsuki cannot even muster any outrage at being the little spoon. “Then I definitely should have come earlier. We could have hung out longer.”

Hung out? Bad idea, Katsuki’s brain screeches, while his overeager dick sits up like an obedient dog and his heart begins a festival grade celebration. He clearly needs sleep more than he thought.

“I’m not the hanging out type,” he manages around all that conflicting emotion.

“Neither am I? My friend Ochako says I’m an awkward turtle—not that I’m awkward or, oh jeez. That came out wrong.”

Too late, Katsuki has already snorted burning tea up his nostrils at the image of Deku as a little green turtle, and he laughs brokenly, the tea dribbling from his nose turning the sound wet and ragged. He can’t remember the last time he laughed so lightheartedly. “You’d make a cute turtle,” he chuckles, using the back of his hand to wipe the tea away. “Hell, you’re already halfway there, all green and stubby legged.”

“My legs aren’t stubby!” Deku pouts. Katsuki doesn’t even need to see his face, he just knows. “Maybe a little bit short compared to someone like you and, and, okay, so they are a little crooked too—"

“Like your legs,” Katsuki admits, still high with lingering amusement and tired enough not to care what comes out of his mouth.

His reward is Deku curling closer, arms tight around Katsuki’s shoulders and lips mumbling, “Really?” into his hair all shy and soft. Katsuki’s eyelids flutter on their own. He sets the tea on his desk before it winds up all over his lap and leans back into the feeling, somewhat surprised at how much he enjoys cuddling like this. Being held and taken care of by someone who acts like Katsuki hung the moon and stars.

Katsuki used to hate being babied like this. He lashed out at his friends, his parents, his handful of boyfriends, over and over until they learned not to reach out lest he scratch them with his prickly disregard. He had this—idea, growing up, that he was the best. That he was better than everyone around him. The hero of the story, not the damsel in distress. Any overtures of kindness morphed into suggestions that he was somehow incapable of navigating the world alone. What a joke. Of course he can’t navigate the world alone, the world fucking sucks. Katsuki wakes up screaming every night. He has panic attacks. He throws himself into work because he hates his own company enough to imagine his own face on the punching bag beneath his fists. And none of it is his fault. He knows that as well as he knows the penal code book gathering dust under his desk. Knowing matters little when it’s his finger still on the trigger, waiting to exert pressure and destroy his life from the inside out.

Being quietly comforted like this reminds Katsuki that, despite the foreign blood dripping from his hands, nothing about him has really changed. He’s the best.

At least to this one person, he’s still the best.

“Can I go home with you?” Deku asks, whisper soft.

Katsuki’s eyes flicker open. “What.”

Squeezing his shoulders, Deku snuggles deeper into his hair and mumbles, “I really wanna go home with you. E-even if we don’t…you know. I was just really looking forward to seeing you tonight.”

“Like me a lot, don’t you, nerd?”

“Yeah,” Deku breathes. “Please, detective?”

“Don’t think that’s a good idea.” The Viking in his head is already halfway to kidnapping Deku, predator eyes pinned on the image of Deku sprawled out on his sheets, gorgeous legs spread wide and pretty freckled face flushed pink with pleasure. Katsuki barely reigned in his baser urges at lunch, when they were out in the open and his work awaited. He will not be so lucky in his own bedroom. He scrubs a frustrated hand through his hair to disperse the lovely phantom brush of Deku’s proposition over his scalp. “I’m practically a fucking animal. Don’t have much confidence that I can hold back in this situation.”

“That’s okay!”

Suspicious at that overly chipper response, Katsuki spins in his chair and finds Deku glittering at him, pond water eyes swollen and soft pink lips stretched into a delighted little smile. Fuck, he’s so gorgeous. “I’ll fuck you. Really hard,” Katsuki tries, because honesty takes him plenty of places he would rather not go.

“Promise?” Deku asks, entirely unbothered as he steers Katsuki back onto the matter at hand. Perhaps even eager for the rough sex Katsuki stupidly just promised.

Fuck. Katsuki literally has no willpower here.

Groaning, he creaks upright and snatches Deku into his arms for a painfully tight squeeze, half-heartedly hoping to scare the other man off while desperately trying to merge their bodies together until it’s impossible for Deku to leave. Deku mumbles nonsense encouragement with his pretty diamond eyes and latches onto Katsuki’s face, yanking him down. Katsuki makes it halfway only to have his neck jerked back by the fucking headphone cord. He ruthlessly tosses them aside.

Deku’s lips are just as soft as he remembers from lunch, pliant and greedy. His dexterous tongue quickly pries Katsuki open and slips inside, forcing Katsuki to match him thrust for thrust or get swept away. It’s not exactly a fight for control since Katsuki has nothing to lose. Deku tastes a little sweet. He tilts his head to smash their mouths closer and breathes these gorgeous noises into the warm air between them that Katsuki could listen to until the heat death of the universe. His hands, small and strong, tangle in Katsuki’s hair, alternately petting when Katsuki does something Deku likes, and yanking when he wants more. Katsuki gives whatever he can, moaning into Deku’s mouth when he feels the soft tugs at his neck encouraging them deeper into each other, until he feels molded to another person, edges blurred into obscurity, entirely lost.

God, he could do this forever.

“—eed assistance on Fifth. Unit copy?”

Katsuki pulls up and away, panting into the abrupt silence.

“No, detective, I want—”

“Shut up.” Deku’s white teeth bite into his swollen lower lip as they wait, and wait, and wait. God damn it. “Fucking piece of shit Half and Half bastard,” Katsuki grinds out. He disengages from Deku reluctantly and snatches his radio. “Detective Bakugou en route.”

“Copy, detective. ETA?”

Late enough that there probably won’t be any traffic, he reasons, answering, “Approximately ten.”

There’s a moment of suspicious silence where he waits for Half and Half to acknowledge his traffic and dispatch chimes up instead. “I’m going to kill him,” Katsuki pronounces in the low, aggressive voice he uses when he’s dead fucking serious.

Before he can really work up into a proper steam, Deku leans up and kisses him tenderly. It’s so affectionate that he freezes, uncertain how to respond. Affection in his childhood meant a slap to the head and an insult, maybe a pat on the back from his father if Katsuki was feeling particularly low. Hands rubbing in reassuring circles over his biceps never factored into anything beyond a snort at the movie theater as the protagonists clearly made fools of themselves. Real people didn’t behave that way in his experience, and now all his fears have come to roost in the cold rafters of his mind. Deku’s obviously not a real person. “Calm down, it’s okay. I’ll wait here until you’re finished.”

“Bullshit you’ll wait here,” he snaps. “You’re not going through my fucking files, shitty nerd.”

Deku’s pretty eyes widen. “Oh, I wouldn’t—"

“Like fuck I’ll believe you. C’mon.” He grabs Deku by his surprisingly muscular arm and drags the smaller man out of the bureau. The lobby’s empty of all but the desk officer, who stares at Katsuki in visible alarm when Katsuki dumps Deku into a chair. “He doesn’t go back there without me, got it?” he commands the desk officer, who looks appropriately scared. A rookie, by his uniform.

He better not roll over for Deku’s gorgeous everything.

Katsuki leaves before his temper firebombs his budding relationship. The drive to Fifth Street takes ages longer than reasonable, and he mutters a sullen status update into the radio when he parks a block over. Not five seconds later his cell phone rings.

Half and Half bastard, of course.

He answers with a hard swipe of his thumb. “What.”

“We have a john causing problems,” comes stiffly over the line. Half and Half makes no bones about his prejudice against people who purchase sex. He has a mild hard on for the porn industry, and a full on black-out rage for anyone beating prostitutes, most especially female prostitutes. Katsuki figures his mommy issues collided with his daddy issues in this situation, having once heard Half and Half talk about his dozen brothers and sisters. Few women willingly have that many children, and fewer still are happy about it. Katsuki, being an only child born to a physically violent mother, cannot empathize with whatever weird family drama prompted Half and Half’s ongoing poor judgment in regards to men beating on women. Particularly when it cockblocks him.

Still, crime is crime, and taking advantage of the weak strikes Katsuki in his own sore spot, so he reigns in his frustration. “What’s he look like?”

“She, this time. Dyed blond hair, medium build, tall. Black dress, high heels.”

“The fuck’s she doing, refusing to pay?”

Voice tight, Half and Half mutters, “Preying on the younger girls and not taking no for an answer.”

Katsuki frowns and props the phone between his shoulder and ear so he can check his gun. Just in case. He then reaches into the backseat and retrieves his rarely used patrol laptop. “You and Midriff can’t handle one pushy pedophile on your own?”

“Yaoyorozu will run the woman off in a couple minutes, at which point you’ll arrest her. She’s driving a black newer model BMW—”

“Got it,” he interrupts, opening the call screen and scanning the notes for a license plate. “Charges?”

“We’ll file those after the fact.”

Katsuki breathes hard through his nose and runs over his options, discarding responses until he comes across one palatable enough to prevent escalating an argument. He wants to go home sometime tonight. “She will ask why I’m arresting her and, quite frankly, if you’re sticking me with the fucking paperwork while you sit on your assignment, I need a goddamned reason to bring her back to the station. Tell me the fucking charges.”

“Attempt kidnapping and solicitation of a minor for sex.”

“You really think the DA will file on attempt kidnapping here? Seriously?”

“Said by the person asking what charges to file because he’s not involved beyond locking the handcuffs,” Half and Half snaps.

Not wanting to pay for yet another patrol computer, Katsuki throws the laptop into the backseat before he snaps it in half and flexes his hands around the steering wheel instead. “Look, bastard, I can just as easily drive back to the station and let you deal with this shit yourself. Either bring me in or leave me the fuck out of it, but you don’t get me halfway.”

Half and Half blows an angry breath into the phone speaker, yet his moral decency rides up on him just like Katsuki expected, and he audibly grinds his teeth through the explanation Katsuki deserves while they wait for Yaoyorozu to chase their pedophile into Katsuki’s waiting handcuffs. He has a decent grasp on the crime occurring on the next block when Half and Half does the human version of a dog going on point and mutters, “She’s in her car travelling northbound. Stop her before she loops around to the pink district.”

Fucking pink district. Katsuki starts the car even as he seethes, because naturally, if the straights sell their wares in the red district, then the gays must be in the pink. It’s all fucking red to him.

He spots the car travelling low and slow right where he expected, and he activates his red and blues with relish. The BMW shifts lanes like the woman wants to bolt which, ha. Katuski revs his V8 loud enough to shake the window panes on the empty buildings around them, and the BMW parks without any further fuss.

Katsuki hates car stops. Every cop does, since they involve the most uncertainty on approach. Officers never know if it’s a dotty old grandma on her way to buy yarn or a gang member palming a .45 because they have a dead body in the trunk. While Katsuki knows he’s dealing with a pedophile, he has no clue if she’s armed, if there’s someone else in the car. Least Half and Half is only a block away should shit go sideways. He knocks his knuckles on the driver’s side window with his hand on his firearm and mimes rolling the window down.

So, that’s definitely not a woman.

“Can I help you, officer?” the buff, bald-headed bodyguard looking motherfucker behind the wheel asks.

“Shut the car off.” There’s a moment of defiance where the car keeps running and Katsuki’s blood pressure skyrockets, but then the engine cuts, and he breathes the barest sigh of relief. One threat handled. “Need all of you out of the car.”

“It’s just me—”

“Don’t fucking lie to me, I’m not in the mood. Everyone out now.” The meathead complies while flexing his muscles to look intimidating. He’s half a head taller than Katsuki, no small feat, and about seventy-five pounds heavier. All muscle. If Katsuki loses any teeth on this stop, he’s sending Half and Half the exorbitant dentist bill in the mail. “Listen,” he says, staring the bodyguard in the eye. “You know why I’m pulling you over. You know what’s happening. Either step aside and let me do my job or go to jail with your client on accessory charges.” The man glowers at Katsuki while sizing up his options. Well, if he needs incentive. “I have a gun and nothing to lose, not to mention back up around the corner. Start something, and you can be damn sure I’ll end it.”

Grudgingly, the man puts his hands-on top of his head. Not what Katsuki asked for, but he’ll take it. He pats the man for weapons then has him sit on the hood of the car. After taking the keys, of course. More than one asshole has used those for makeshift brass knuckles.

The blonde pedophile has yet to show her face. She must know what’s happening, but when he raps on the window again and orders her out, she asks, “Why am I being stopped, officer?” in the poshest, butter won’t melt voice Katsuki has heard outside of the north end. Rich girl, huh? Probably a trophy wife or daddy’s pet. Even better.

“How about you exit the vehicle and we’ll talk about it?” he says. When he tries the handle, it’s locked. “Unlock the door.”

“Tell me why you stopped my car.”

Not while she’s still moving around freely. That’s how stupid cops wind up attacked and overpowered. Hell, he still has the jolly bald giant watching this fiasco.

He pulls the car keys from his pocket and unlocks the entire car, which prompts the kind of mad scramble in the backseat Katsuki usually hears from suspects frantically attempting to hide evidence. A muffled cry all too familiar from various domestic violence calls has him wrenching the door nearly off its hinges. The blond woman looks as Half and Half promised—dyed hair, black dress, stiletto heels perfect for stabbing. She has her sharp crimson claws wrapped around the face of a little girl, maybe nine or ten, and yeah, Katsuki sees red. He grabs the woman by the ankle and hauls her screaming from the vehicle. She’s in handcuffs inside a second and slammed onto the nearby curb. “Don’t move,” Katsuki growls at her.

“Fuck you!” she screams and hocks a loogie at his face. He dodges and, incensed, pushes her onto her stomach. The bulky bodyguard shuffles around on the hood but stays sitting when Katsuki glares at him.

Well, he’s definitely not handling this on his own. Katsuki pulls his radio. “Code three response to the corner of Fifth and Flower, one detained.”

“10-4. Advise on injuries.”

“Negative, no injuries. Child in distress.”

The blond woman starts screaming into the grass at the top of her lungs, struggling against his grip on her cuffed hands and kicking her legs like a kid throwing a tantrum. Disgusted, Katsuki requests a spit hood from responding officers.

Luckily, the Happy Flower van comes tearing around the corner before the situation escalates.

Half and Half looks vicious on the approach. “The fuck is going on?” he demands, gesturing at the screaming suspect.

In answer, Katsuki jerks his head at the BMW.

He hears more than sees Half and Half react. The guy goes totally, perfectly still for the briefest instant Katsuki likes to think is him deciding between the angel and devil on his shoulder. The angel wins this time. “Hey, it’s okay,” Katsuki hears him murmuring, “I’m a police officer. You’re safe now, alright? I’m going to take this off now, nice and slow. Tell me if it hurts.”

The girl starts crying immediately.

Katsuki curls his lip at the sound, his own devil encouraging him to push this pedophile’s face so deep into the ground that she breathes nothing but dirt and dies. He reins that shit in hard.

Shit show, what a fucking shit show.

Back up arrives nice and quick now that officers know children are involved, more than one abandoning lesser duties to help out. Two of them take the screaming pedophile into the back of a cruiser, while three more cuff the sullen bodyguard and a veritable herd forms a protective barrier around the victim. She’s small and dirty and visibly traumatized, staring up at each officer in wild fright. Katsuki barrels into the group and disperses as many of them as he can until child services responds, at which point the girl is safely swallowed into the comforting arms of soft-eyed therapists. He hunts through the crowd for Half and Half, locating him at the pedophile’s cruiser readying for an interrogation. The woman’s still fucking screaming.

“Oi, bastard!” He waves Half and Half away from the noise.

“Sit rep?” Half and Half asks in annoyance when they can hear each other over the combined screaming, gossiping, and sirens. Someone with caution tape goes sailing by with a ziiiiiiip, and Katsuki takes unfair relish in hacking the tape down as soon as the guy rounds a nearby tree. Middle of the night scenes in abandoned industrial areas do not require cordoning off.

“Bodyguard driving, no way he misunderstood the tied-up girl in the back. Accessory charges?”

“Absolutely.”

“Bodyguard cooperated, got out and gave me the keys with minimal fuss. Suspect refused to cooperate and locked the car. Heard muffled screaming so I opened the back door and saw our suspect struggling with the victim. Grabbed the suspect by the ankle and yanked her out for handcuffing.”

“Victim assistance?”

“I needed a spit hood and a hobble for that.”

Half and Half appears unappeased by this information yet nods his assent. Handling uncooperative suspects, even handcuffed suspects, takes finesse. “Girl’s being taken in. We’ll interview her in the morning with the therapists. I’m thinking kidnap, assault, rape.”

“Rape?” Katsuki demands.

“She’s—visibly injured,” Half and Half mutters delicately. Considering the substance of the conversation, that’s about all Katsuki needs to hear.

He lets loose a rough breath and cards a hand through his hair. “Need me tonight?”

Half and Half glances over the scene. “No,” he decides kindly, considering Katsuki cannot remember the last time he slept properly. It’s been a bad fucking week all around. “Will in the morning for the interview, and I’ll need your supplemental for the arrest by midday.”

“Fine.” He balls both hands into fists imagining the kind of sick fuck that preys on little girls like that. Katsuki wants to drag that bitch behind a tree and stomp her to death. He wants to break every bone in her body, see the fear on her face as he caves in her twisted fucking skull until there’s nothing left. But that would make him a monster of equal proportions, and he’s had enough of that nightmare to last ten lifetimes. Katsuki contents himself with the knowledge that, much as he hates to acknowledge people other than himself, Half and Half cares enough about his vice victims to treat suspects like they beat up his own mother.

Half and Half watches him contain his rage in silence, waiting for Katsuki to calm down before he says, “Thank—”

“Don’t you dare fucking thank me for doing my job, and I’d better not see this shit cropping up on my annual eval.” This unnecessary drama is why he hates vice. He forces his fists to relax and rubs the budding ache in his neck. “I’m heading off, don’t expect me to answer up on the radio any more tonight.”

“Fine.”

They glare at each other in mutual dislike, a frenemy farewell, before Katsuki stalks back to his car. He has to flash his lights and honk more than once to squirm free of the crowd, his car being parked uncomfortably close to the BMW, and he takes great relish in tearing through yet another string of tape on his way to freedom. Katsuki checks his rearview mirror only once to confirm the victim is now in the back of an ambulance, safely separated from her abuser. He doesn’t even know her name.

Katsuki speeds back to the station on the knife’s edge of losing his mind for good. He has to sit in his parked car in the back lot, panting his frustration into the steering wheel while telling himself in no uncertain terms that his firearm is off limits.

That girl was so fucking young. Too young to be victimized like that. She will go home a changed woman, forever stained by this experience. Girls like her usually end up on the streets eventually—probably hooked on drugs, and with no self-esteem to want better for herself. Some other predator will recognize the signs of someone desperately searching for love in all the wrong places and will take advantage of her former victimization to victimize her again. It’s not Katsuki’s responsibility to see the girl home safe. It’s not his job to follow up on her mental health and make sure she knows that her experiences cannot and will not define her worth. It’s not even his job to find her killer when she’s inevitably strangled to death in a back alley, panties down around her ankles and track marks up her inner elbows. Katsuki works robbery.

He has to remind himself that he likes working robbery.

His heart is still pumping harder than normal when he slumps into the station and finds Deku sitting right where Katsuki left him, sexy legs swinging. Both he and the desk officer look relieved to see Katsuki. “Detective!”

“He’s been in that chair since you left, sir,” the desk officer assures Katsuki urgently.

“Great. C’mon, Deku.” Deku hops to his feet and latches onto Katsuki like a baby koala, face open and yearning and gorgeous. Despite how lovely he looks and how much Katsuki usually enjoys Deku’s touch, the muscular grip around his arm instantly ignites claustrophobia. He endures the discomfort until they reach his desk where he can disengage to lock up for the night. His radio he unclips from his belt and stows in the usual charging station. The blinking green light instantly transitions to an alarmed red, signifying the need for recharge that Katsuki empathizes with all the way down to his marrow. He locks his various drawers and, as an afterthought, picks up the tea he abandoned however long ago. “Ready?”

“Ready!” Deku chirps, mustard yellow bag slung over his shoulder and toes bouncing. At some invisible cue Katsuki does not realize or intend to send, Deku steals Katsuki’s unoccupied hand and starts dragging him from the bureau.

Surprised, Katsuki stumbles after Deku without resistance. First cuddling, now handholding? This keeps up and Katsuki will turn into a romcom character completely against his will or, worse, into Shitty Hair. Forget his usual nighttime routine, that would be the real nightmare. “The fuck are you doing now?” he demands, yanking on their joined hands to no avail. The kid’s ridiculously strong, which normally cranks Katsuki’s gears.

Now, it just makes him a little nervous that he apparently can’t say no here.

“Um, going home?”

They bypass the wide-eyed desk officer and the lobby doors, emerging into the crisp autumn evening. Persistent smog has turned the lamps into distant glowing stars, hazy around the edges. It feels like walking into a dream. “I know that, dipshit,” Katsuki tells the murky blue police sign. “We taking your car?”

Deku stops. “I, oh. Is it that far? I thought we could walk.”

Katsuki snorts at the idea of walking to his apartment. It’s literally across town. “My bike’s parked around back.”

“A bicycle?”

This time, Katsuki laughs outright. Him, riding a bicycle? He hasn’t owned a bicycle since grade school, hasn’t ridden one in even longer. He will never be caught dead churning his spandex clad thighs in the slow lane. He frees his hand and leads Deku toward the gated driveway separating the tidy rows of police cars from the open street. According to their old Captain, the Department installed the gate after one of the local crazies got it into her head that she loved him and spent her afternoons trying to bust through their various doors. Katsuki harbored healthy skepticism for this tall tale until he saw the newspaper clippings proudly hung in one of the numerous station hallways, depicting an Einstein-haired fifty-something sandwiched between two grim faced officers with the headline ‘Local Transient Arrested for Breaking into Police Station.’ That story is almost as ridiculous as Deku believing Katsuki rides a bicycle. “Think you’re funny, don’t you, shitty nerd. You ever been on a motorcycle?”

“Motorcycle,” Deku squeaks in a queerly high voice. “No, I—wow. That’s, um, that’s kind of scary? But I trust you, I absolutely trust you. One hundred percent!”

“The more you repeat yourself the less I believe you.”

Deku swivels those milky green eyes up at him and smiles shyly, looking equal parts smitten and reassuring, even as his hands white knuckle the strap of his bag. “I trust you, detective.”

He’s such a goddamned liar. “Whatever, I won’t crash,” Katsuki states blandly, having never been in a single car accident. He’s functionally immune to public stupidity after accepting a paycheck to clear the streets of it. Katsuki has dodged everything from other vehicles, to confused pedestrians, to an improperly strapped barbeque that whipped off the back of a truck and somersaulted end over end into two oncoming cars before landing upside down in a planter. Katsuki spent the better part of an afternoon alternating between explaining the situation to the responding traffic officer and screaming obscenities at the moron who mistrusted the solid dependability of carabiners.

He keys in his passcode for the gate and walks Deku to his motorcycle, a black Kawasaki with delicate red trim. Assuming that Deku will hesitate on the mount, Katsuki picks him up by the waist, ignoring his surprised squawk, and plops him in the seat. The bike groans a bit when Deku leans, forcing Katsuki to stay hands-on lest the moron trash their ride home.

“Here’s how this is gunna work,” he begins, one hand locked around Deku’s thick thigh while the other retrieves his helmet. “You’re gunna wear this, and no fucking complaints about what it will do to your hair. Hold onto my waist and lean when I lean, got it?”

“Okay,” Deku says meekly. “Where’s, um, your helmet?”

“Only own one.” With a warning squeeze to Deku’s thigh, Katsuki mounts in front of Deku and kickstarts the bike to drown out the protest already working out of that pink mouth. “Hold on!”

Arms come around his waist after a moment and, figuring Deku won’t know any better, Katsuki reaches around to stuff the yellow bag between their bodies, weight secured between Deku’s legs, then urges Deku’s forearms tighter across his abdomen. Deku’s chest goes flush with Katsuki’s back in a way that Katsuki tries not to find suggestive and, with the kick stand safely disengaged, Katsuki takes off.

Deku screams so loud that Katsuki can hear him over the roar of the engine, but he calms down from that drama after a minute or so, and Katsuki falls into the familiar rhythm of driving home.

It’s nice out, he thinks, glancing up at the smog obscured stars.

Maybe Deku will agree to go for a drive sometime, just the two of them in the countryside. Maybe they can have another picnic, take a nap in the dappled shade. Hell, if Deku catches Katsuki on a good day, maybe they can endure a cheesy romantic date at the local amusement park. He can probably last an hour surrounded by screaming children and harried parents. Maybe.

Katsuki pulls up outside his home already regretting inviting Deku here. Healthy relationships require more sacrifice than Katsuki thinks he’s ready to give.

“Deku, listen—” he begins, turning off the bike and slamming his kickstand down.

“That was amazing,” Deku interrupts in that breathy, lemony voice that twitches through his dick against his will. He swallows the words trying to tumble out of his mouth. “I’ve never—been on a motorcycle before. It’s so fast and smooth, like riding a rollercoaster!”

“A rollercoaster,” Katsuki summarizes in disbelief.

“Yes! I ride them even though they scare me a lot, because it’s the good scary, you know?” Katsuki cannot in good conscience respond since he cannot remember the last time he rode a rollercoaster, let alone endured an amusement park. See? They’re clearly incompatible. Before Katsuki can articulate this unassailable truth, Deku hops from the bike, twirls in an unfair display of his gorgeous sex legs, and shyly returns the helmet. “You ready to go inside?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki lies.

He locks his bike on autopilot and follows Deku up the stairs, chest increasingly tight at the thought of continuing any further into this strange, uncomfortable vulnerability. Rather than sex, Katsuki wants to spend all night firing his gun at the station’s range or punching his boxing bag until his knuckles bleed. Yet he invited Deku back to his apartment with the explicit promise of sex, and Katsuki has never backed down from a challenge in his life, let alone a promise. He mimes confidence all the way to his door, only for his key to miss the lock on the first try. Fuck, that’s embarrassing. He tries again with better results and lets Deku into his apartment.

It’s clean, at least, more because he keeps very few possessions and spends as little time as possible between the claustrophobic walls than because he has a hard on for dust. Deku seems impressed anyway. That, or he’s a better actor than Katsuki initially gave him credit for.

“Throw your shit wherever,” Katsuki mutters, crouching to untie his boots.

He does not expect the small hands that yank him back up, or the pretty pink lips that claim him while those milky eyes go dark and predatory. “Bedroom?” Deku asks in his soft, lemony voice.

And Katsuki is still weak as fuck.

Groaning, he grabs Deku around the waist and drags them both into the bedroom. Deku makes more of those lovely noises as encouragement, hands raking sensually over his shoulders and back, lips finding every patch of skin available and leaving burning hot hickeys with his fierce little mouth. Katsuki throws him on the bed just to get some breathing room and watches, panting, as Deku frantically unbuttons his skin-tight pants. Straight to business, is it? Familiar, if nothing else, although something of a disappointment. Katsuki strips his flannel and begins unstrapping his firearm holster, unwilling to leave his guns just lying around for burglars to use against him. The abrupt silence from Deku prompts him to glance over. Deku’s watching him, lidded eyes glassy and appreciative, his fingers paused in the middle of removing his tight green underwear. Fuck, there’s a wet spot beading at the tip of a significant bulge Katsuki recognizes from his few frisky boyfriends who, frankly, used Katsuki for sex.

The thought wrongfoots him as he realizes he wants more than that from Deku. More than sex. His heavy heart twists in a mixture of shame and anxiety.

That’s not something Katsuki has ever intentionally sought out. He’s fallen into relationships accidentally before, where fuck buddies suddenly started to expect cuddling and dates and flowers and other romantic shit that rarely crossed Katsuki’s mind. None of those feelings lasted once they realized how dedicated Katsuki is to the job, how little time he spends at home, how he screams at night and panics during the day and sometimes blacks out for minutes at a time, which his therapist assures him is normal behavior after a traumatic experience.

Katsuki looks down to process this new information and resumes removing his gear.

Whatever he feels about physical intimacy right now, he promised sex. Besides, they can always talk about potential romantic entanglement later. If Deku sticks around after tonight. Fuck, what if he doesn’t? Katsuki bites his lip. He has no idea what to do with abandonment. Not so early in a relationship. If it’s a relationship at all. His hands clench around his shirt as he imagines beating his own face on his boxing bag, because he’s a fucking idiot, probably always has been. He strips himself bare nevertheless, letting Deku see his scars and his heaving chest and his desperate need for affection right now, when he feels cracked open and a little lost.

“Wow,” Deku says instead, sitting up enough to run his hand down Katsuki’s chest. “You’re the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.”

“Better be,” the Viking demands before Katsuki can reengage his brain to mouth filter.

At least Deku appears somewhat delighted by the possessiveness. He finally wiggles his underwear off, revealing those goddamned gorgeous sex legs in all their glory, spread just the way Katsuki wanted to highlight the plump red cock nestled in a small bush of brown curls. “Hurry? Please?”

“I—okay,” he chokes, swiftly throwing his gun in the nightstand drawer. He’ll lock it up later. As an afterthought, he removes his ankle gun and knife, then collects the lube and condoms. Fuck, so this is happening. This is really happening right now. Should he get naked? Probably, except he’s comfortable like this for the moment, and he kind of wants his mouth all over those legs. Condom first, he thinks, crawling onto the bed with one at hand. He carefully tears it open and rolls the purple rubber down Deku’s length. It’s hot in his hand, shockingly heavy for being so short, and he tries a few pumps to familiarize himself before going further. Deku’s head flings backward instantly, mouth open and curls sprawling beautifully across the pillows.

Figuring that’s encouragement enough, Katsuki lays between those pretty, perfect legs and finds a decent rhythm pumping his hand while his tongue traces aimless patters from one muscular thigh to the other. Forget looking like buttermilk, they’re as soft as velvet—silken and fleshy, twitching taut whenever Katsuki teases teeth. He loses himself a little in the drifting satisfaction inherent in touching the one aspect of a person that he likes the most. They really are unfairly lovely legs, from the delicate blue skin behind each knee to the pressure of small toes digging urgent demand into his lower back, Deku mumbling, “oh, oh please, that’s—”

“Yeah?” Katsuki checks, because he’s gone too far too fast with prior boyfriends and landed a punch to the mouth for his trouble.

“Yes, yes, oh god, please don’t stop!”

Enthusiastic consent, check. Specific consent still required. Katsuki stops pumping his hand and disengages his mouth, murmuring, “What d’you want?”

“I—what?”

Since Deku sounds so damn confused, even a little hurt by the sudden halt after he begged for more, Katsuki props up on his elbow so he can lock their eyes together and let Deku see how serious he feels about this. “I’m not catching you off guard because I didn’t check with you before, like, shoving my tongue up your ass. Tell me what you want, or I’m gunna stick with a handjob.”

“R-rimming is an option?” Deku squeaks, his milky eyes going full black diamond in a huge tsunami of pupil. “That, please that one. I haven’t in a—a really long time.”

Katsuki likes rimming more than he likes sucking dick, having smelled more dick cheese in his lifetime of locker rooms than he can consciously ignore. The job requires its fair share of literal shit, sure, but that’s from gross people, people Katsuki never in any way wants to fuck. Deku smells clean, his hole lightly dusted with brown hair and winking the same perfect pink as his puffy pillow lips. Just for posterity’s sake, Katsuki checks, “You showered?”

“E-every day?”

“Down here,” Katsuki grunts, thumb pressing to that tiny pucker so there’s no further miscommunication on the subject. When he glances up, Deku’s nodding rapidly. “Okay.”

That settled, Katsuki resumes kissing Deku’s gorgeous thighs, this time with a clear goal inward. Deku makes this soft, mewling sound and opens his legs to accommodate Katsuki’s approaching shoulders. Not wanting a groin injury here, Katsuki takes the initiative to throw one over his arm, thigh temptingly close to his face. Deku’s mewl turns into a deep, appreciative groan, and his strong toes resume kneading the muscles in Katsuki’s back.

Katsuki’s nose is under Deku’s heavy red balls when he realizes they forgot to prop Deku’s hips up, and he spends a few seconds tea-bagging himself in thought before, shrugging, he throws both legs over his shoulders and uses his own forearms to prop Deku up to the perfect height. Deku smells as clean as he should for sex like this, hole twitching open in the subtle way of someone who regularly plays here. The first lick produces some sweat taste, the second a more manly musk he associates with rimming. Katsuki settles in, hands curved around Deku’s waist and nose teasing across his taint. The flat of his tongue prepares the muscle for a more intrusive thrust from the tip, Katsuki less than surprised when Deku’s rim spreads so easily, already ready for a couple fingers.

Someone else has had this too. Someone else taught Deku about his pretty hole and the secret little button inside. Someone else saw Deku with his gorgeous legs spread, and his curly head thrown back, and his lemony voice rising in soft praise as his toes scrabble relentlessly for more.

Katsuki growls and nips Deku’s puffy rim in reprimand for sharing. Deku’s squeak sounds far from bothered. “Yeah?” Katsuki checks.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” is the only answer he receives.

“Deku—”

“Please I’m so close oh my god please please,” Deku babbles, his hand fumbling down to stroke his purple-clad dick.

Fuck, already? Katsuki hurries before he misses all the action, setting his mouth to thoroughly Frenching Deku’s pliant hole until the thin muscle tightens up around his tongue and Deku starts wailing in a high pitched, delicate voice. His spine is arched when Katsuki looks, nipples straining visibly against his shirt and flushed red all down his neck.

Unsurprisingly, Katsuki’s cock wants in on that action.

He sits up wiping his mouth and watches Deku come down from the particular high of orgasm, limbs twitching and breath heavy. Entirely lovely. This is what he wants, this satisfaction that comes from pleasing a partner, seeing someone he likes happy and content in the immediate sphere of his influence. Katsuki has little experience making other people happy. They dislike his prickly personality and excessive reliance on physical violence to end disagreements. More than one boyfriend has told him, usually while crying and throwing personal items at his head, that he has no empathy. That someone in love does not speak to their partner the way he does. That he’s unnecessarily cruel, even apathetic at times. Unsupportive.

Katsuki has no idea how to be anyone other than himself. He tried, once, frustrated by the constant verbal abuse over something he apparently refused to change. Naturally, that ended in disaster. His steady underlying rage layer built and built and built until he could no longer see anything except his own anger. Long story short, he got his ass dumped and his television stolen as compensation for emotional damages.

Televisions are easy to replace. So, too, was the boyfriend, which in hindsight probably explained the primary fracture in their relationship. Katsuki did not care. He rarely cares about his boyfriends. They serve a function and, once they stop serving that function, Katsuki happily sees them out the door. When they leave on their own, he feels vaguely lost. They make clear the reason—him. It’s always him. He’s not good enough, never has been. The constant reinforcement of his inadequacies weighs heavy on that oozing, exposed wound in his chest, broken open by the ringing gunshot keeping him up at night.

Deku is probably no better than all the previous guys Katsuki took a chance on. He’s arguably prettier, maybe even nicer.

Katsuki’s terrified he will eat Deku alive.

“That was amazing,” Deku sighs over Katsuki’s rising dismay. His eyes open, and their hazy consistency sparks a small firework of pride. “Come here.” Stiff, Katsuki crawls up to lay between Deku’s spread legs and receives a soft kiss for his efforts. The hand that pets down his stomach replaces that nice little firework with a sharp burst of anxiety. His extensive Academy training in self-control keeps him from tensing up until Deku’s hand tries sliding under his pants, and the sharp, visceral no he feels has him leaping off the bed, unsure what his face is doing that has alarm rising in Deku’s expression. “Detective, what’s wrong?”

Katsuki has no idea beyond the need to leave, so he does, banging into his bathroom and turning on the shower just for something to do. Then he climbs in, clothed, because he’s fucking insane.

Like a goddamned dinner bell ringing for the dog to come eat, the water ignites the sense memory of dripping sweat, and he’s back in that fucking nasty apartment. “No,” he whispers, grabbing his head. “Not now, fuck!” Too late, the gunshot echoes through his aching eardrums, and he bites back a scream when he feels familiar heat splash across his cheeks. The crash happens not seconds later, empty beer bottle shattering on the peeling linoleum floor. Sirens ring in the distance, too far to help, and Katsuki knows what happens next, he knows what happens—

“Detective?”

“Go away!” he roars, flinging his arm out in a useless attempt to keep unwanted bystanders out of the carnage. Pressure on his trigger finger, another gunshot. His back slams against the wall to avoid the blood already coating his face, and he can’t help sobbing, helpless when confronted by the tenacity of his own mind. Again the crash, thick glass meeting tile made soft with age, the sound of a person scuttling just out of sight. He peels his eyes wide in a mad bid to locate the source of that sound. Deku’s hovering just outside the shower door, milky eyes so incredibly green, pupil shrunk to the size of a pin with surprise. His hands are knuckled tight in the front of his shirt, legs still bare after what Katsuki did to him. He mouths Katsuki’s title, inaudible over the shower and the gunshot. Glock 22, thirteen pounds of recoil jarring up his forearm, through his tensed elbow, and into the protective round of his shoulder. He throws his arm up to block the blood and grinds his teeth when it hits anyway, thick and vicious.

“I-I’m sorry,” Deku says loudly, “I’m r-really sorry, I didn’t me-mean to—”

“Not you,” Katsuki pants, flinching from the crash.

Mercifully, Deku takes him at his word without bothering to argue. He sniffles back his upset, squeezing his eyes shut for a brief moment that Katsuki appreciates, because that means Deku’s no longer looking at him. Katsuki tries to catch his breath enough to order Deku out of the bathroom, out of the apartment, as far away as Katsuki can manage to chase him in the little time he has before he breaks apart completely. Deku opens his eyes before that happens, remarkably calm. “What can I do to help?”

“I—I don’t know, I don’t—” he breaks off when he hears the gunshot crack across his eardrums, words trailing into an animal whine.

“Okay,” Deku says as the blood splashes. He steps into the shower and lightly cups Katsuki’s waist in his terribly gentle hands, trusting despite Katsuki being able and willing to break Deku in half should his mind slip any farther down the slope of insanity. “Breathe with me, alright? Just match your breathing to mine.”

“I don’t have a—a problem with my f-fucking breathing!”

“Then it’ll be really easy, won’t it?” The challenge spurs Katsuki into baring his teeth, a predator protecting the tenuous borders of his territory from someone already well within the walls. Somewhat aware of his influence in this emotionally lopsided relationship, Deku tilts up to kiss the point of Katsuki’s chin and mumble reassurances. The gunshot keeps cycling, over and over until he can barely stomach this self-inflicted punishment for a second longer without clawing his own eyes out. “Breathe, breathe,” Deku repeats every time the blood hits his face. It feels endless, like prison bars slamming down around him on all sides, squeezing inward in painful increments. The hands on his waist prevent Katsuki from fighting free. He’s terrified of throwing Deku across the room and waking from this nightmare to an even worse one, green hair parted around a terrible crack, milky eyes sightless, the surrounding tile stained red.

Katsuki has witnessed family scenes like this enough times to know how they end when improperly handled. He bites down around his panic, his urgent desire to flee, his twitching trigger finger scrabbling helplessly at the shower wall.

He almost sobs his relief when the gunshot finally misses its cue.

“You’re okay, it’s all okay. Keep breathing with me, alright? In and out, in and out.”

Coming down hurts worse than rocketing up in the first place. Katsuki usually handles this part alone. He swallows his regret, his shame, his embarrassment. He rolls them up into the tiniest ball he can manage and stuffs it way down deep with all his other unwanted emotional reactions to shit that doesn’t matter, because it’s already over. It happened, much like this mortifying panic attack in the middle of sex. Nothing he can do but put himself back together. It’s a little easier having Deku there, because Deku somehow adopted that steady dispatcher voice used to walk officers all across the globe through life or death crises. On the other hand, the reality of someone witnessing his breakdown strikes Katsuki in his soft, vulnerable places, unprepared and unarmored.

The showerhead rains ice cold water over both their heads, flattening those pretty green curls over goose bumped skin. Deku’s lips are pale, his cheeks ruddy. Katsuki carefully shuts off the shower. “Oh, is it over?” Deku asks, calm voice rising in surprise.

That the episode ending isn’t obvious should alarm Katsuki, but doesn’t. “Yeah.”

Deku’s hands suddenly race around his middle and cling to his back, nails biting down with a sharp sting. His curly head burrows into Katsuki’s chest seeking comfort Katsuki’s not entirely sure he’s ready to give. “You scared me,” he mumbles. “Did I—make it worse? By coming in here?”

“I don’t know,” Katsuki grunts. It’s always fucking terrible.

“I didn’t know what to do. You—you looked really upset. Do you want to talk about—”

“No,” Katsuki interrupts. Or, well, more like barks. He’s talked plenty about the attacks to both his therapist and his mother, repeatedly enough that the words feel rote, as lifeless as the body rotting six feet below ground in the cemetery seven blocks from this very apartment. Katsuki has never visited the grave, not even for the funeral where he was told in no uncertain terms that he was unwanted. He knows the exact location anyway. “No sense talking about shit that already happened. The past doesn’t change.”

“How we feel about it does,” Deku rebuts as soft as the little shivers tracking up his arms.

Fuck, they’re half-dressed in a cold tile shower with the water at the lowest temperature possible. Deku should be in a taxi headed home by now. Another relationship destroyed. Good job, Bakugou. “Towels,” Katsuki orders listlessly.

There’s a little pause where Deku audibly disapproves of the abrupt topic change yet decides for whatever reason not to push the issue. This small concession ignites both agitation and relief in Katsuki, because he’s not so weak that a little conversation scares him, but he’s feeling pretty goddamned fragile right now. Too fragile to expose his vulnerability anymore tonight.  “That’s a good idea,” is the very obvious yet somewhat soothing placation that Deku chooses as the means to lead him and his frazzled self out of the shower. He even tugs on Katsuki’s hand like Katsuki is a child. “Well,” he says while they’re clumsily drying off. “I don’t know about you but sleep sounds pretty good right now. Can I stay here for the night?”

Katsuki almost drops his towel. “Uh.”

On the one hand, screaming nightmares. On the other, Deku. Katsuki’s internal scale teeters on the brink of a decision he cannot take back once made, and his mind spins around both possibilities quick as a moron begging for a speeding ticket, because Katsuki somehow still has a chance at this relationship, and he doesn’t want to fuck it up. What’s worse? Drawing a boundary this very instant, or allowing Deku inside to see past the tip of this massive emotional iceberg? Will they sink like the goddamned Titanic?

He takes too long being indecisive, and Deku’s smile dims. “Oh, I see. That’s okay! You probably want to be alone after—after that. I understand.”

“It’s—not that,” Katsuki growls, hating himself for the way his breath stutters. Somehow, his internal ping pong match ended with the ball out of bounds. “I have fucking nightmares. Really bad ones.”

Deku blinks. “So do I?”

“I scream. And thrash around. Literally all night.”

“Um,” Deku says, now looking a little alarmed. “Do you have enough pillows for a, uh, a wall? Not that I want a wall! But both our nights will be ruined if you punch me in the face on accident. Your hand is big enough to break my nose.”

“Why are you so fucking calm?” Katsuki demands in mounting frustration, because he literally laid out the worst case scenario for a one-night stand—interrupted sex, panic attack, probably no sleep, and now a broken fucking nose. He lives half of those qualifiers most every night, sometimes more than once, and can attest with complete honesty that anyone able to cash out and try another machine should do so without hesitation or regret. “I’m not worth—this,” he continues, gesturing at Deku’s perfect everything.

“Yes, you are,” Deku replies in an aggressive voice Katsuki has never heard from him before. Katsuki takes an unconscious step backwards.

“The fuck?”

Deku advances on him, looking small and fierce like a kitten suddenly grown into a powerful lynx. His progress forces Katsuki to engage or retreat and, still off-balance from his attack, Katsuki retreats, nearly braining himself on the shower faucet when he stumbles on the small lip demarcating the shower from the rest of the bathroom. He just barely catches his considerable weight on the slick tile wall, wide eyes fixed on Deku’s pursed pillow lips and flushed cheeks. “You are a smart, determined, hardworking, brave, beautiful person, okay? I wouldn’t be here otherwise. So don’t say that about yourself, or we will be arguing.”

“You’re fucking nuts,” Katsuki realizes. “God damn it. ‘course I land the crazy obsessive stalker. I will kick your ass if you try skinning me.”

“Your skin is too pretty to cut up,” Deku says with a small, teasing smile. “Promise me.”

“Fuck you.”

“Later. Promise me you won’t talk about yourself like that. At least around me. I’m not gunna tolerate it, detective.”

“Fucking nuts,” Katsuki reiterates, but he does unplaster himself from the shower wall and return to the bathroom proper, his chest almost touching Deku’s. Up close, Deku looks small and helpless again, his green eyes pleading. Cute little manipulative minx. “Fine, whatever. No point discussing shit that doesn’t change, anyway.”

Those pretty eyes roll in clear exasperation even as Deku grabs his hand and laces their fingers. “I’ll take my minor victories for now. C’mon, it’s getting late, and you must be dead tired.”

“I’m not joking about the screaming nightmares.”

“And I’m not joking about a pillow wall. We’ll figure it out.” True to his word, they manage the most ridiculous wall Katsuki has ever seen, pillows and repurposed sheets and an extra winter comforter that desperately needs airing. There’s barely enough room for people on this bed now, yet they somehow manage that too, Deku squeezing himself onto one side while Katsuki struggles not to flail off the bed on the other. “What, um, what time do you wake up, detective? I’m usually up around seven.”

Katsuki snorts a cruel laugh. “You’re in for a fucking unpleasant surprise.”

“That early, huh? Should I get up with you?”

He takes the time to consider both scenarios. Deku wandering around after Katsuki while Katsuki boxes, and makes breakfast, and cusses at the chipper newscasters while waiting impatiently for the weather report. Or, Deku snuggled down in bed mumbling sleepy comments while Katsuki tiptoes around hunting for his socks. Both are—nice. Too nice. Katsuki rolls to hide his face in the nearest pillow and mumbles, “Do whatever you want.”

“Okay. Good night, detective.”

Katsuki thinks he says good night back, or at least he means to. Only next thing he knows, it’s one in the morning and he’s on the floor. “Th’hell?” he asks his own ceiling.

A curly head pops over the side of the bed, Deku sleep rumpled and soft. “You rolled off the bed.”

“Great,” he grunts. “Was I screaming?”

“A little.”

Katsuki translates that into a lot, probably too much, and stands up. He feels less wired than usual after waking up in the middle of the night and, yawning, figures he can attempt sleep one more time. He wakes up a little over half an hour later to Deku urgently calling his name, and he spends the better part of another twenty minutes panting between his upraised knees, trying to catch his breath. The third time around is worse. He lasts maybe an hour before he’s up and fleeing the persistent darkness of his own bedroom. Deku follows him into the kitchen and holds his waist while he downs two full cups of water to counteract all the sweat he unleashed on the bed. “I’m done,” he sighs, too tired to bother putting on a façade.

“I figured as much,” Deku mumbles. He cracks a cute little yawn and nuzzles at Katsuki’s armpit. “What’re you gunna do?”

“Box.”

“Mmkay.” The arms around his waist squeeze him tight. “M’gunna sleep, is that okay?”

“Be honest, are you a real person?” Katsuki asks over his shoulder. He only receives a giggle in response, which is not an answer, unless one lives in a horror movie occupied by creepy moving dolls. The answer must actually be no. “Fine, whatever. Dismantle the pillow wall to cover my sweat and you should be fine.”

“Your sweat smells nice,” Deku sighs.

He’s just way too cute for Katsuki to handle. “Freak.”

They dismantle the pillow wall together, and Katsuki actually finds himself tucking Deku in. Deku sleeps curled up on his side with the covers pulled almost entirely over his face, leaving only his hair and eyebrows visible. Katsuki stands at the foot of the bed listening to Deku snore in a high enough register to summon dogs, before he retreats to his gym, where he beats his bag for the rest of the morning. He’s totally wired by sunrise, showered and dressed and quietly cussing at the television, when Deku shuffles out of the bedroom. “Morning, nerd.”

“G’morning,” Deku mumbles through a dopey smile. He b-lines directly into Katsuki’s lap and snuggles down like he signed a lease to move in. “Mm, you smell like bacon.”

“Food’s in the microwave.”

Deku hums acknowledgment and snuggles down even further, his gooey sleep face mashed into the shirt Katsuki planned to wear to work. “Missed you.”

“I saw you two hours ago.”

“Missed you,” Deku insists, sighing happily. Right over Katsuki’s goddamned nipple. Again. Only this time they’re alone in his apartment away from prying eyes, and Katsuki technically has no obligation to work today. He wraps Deku in his arms, both hands palming that plump ass, and drops hard, open-mouthed kisses in the fleshy place where Deku’s jaw joins his long swan neck. “Oh! Do you like morning sex?”

Katsuki pauses in his kissing. “Who the fuck says no to sex?”

“You, last night. Which was totally understandable! Just, you know, there are reasons.” When Katsuki sits back to stare Deku in the face, shocked he brought up last night and even more shocked that, somehow, Deku sucked all the sexy out of the room, Deku blanches. “I still want sex,” he blurts out. “I’m saying yes! Definitely yes!”

“You’re a walking fucking disaster, shitty nerd.” He’s somehow entertained, or maybe just indoctrinated to picking up other people’s messes, and his dick hops on board with last night’s plan.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Deku notices, squirming down until his plump butt hugs Katsuki’s cock.

“We doing this?”

“I already said yes!”

“Specific consent,” Katsuki reminds Deku even as he hoists the smaller man into his arms and begins the short walk back to the bedroom. The phone rings before he even leaves the living room. “Goddamn it,” he snarls, propping Deku onto one forearm so he can fumble for the cell phone in his back pocket and answer with a gruff, “This better be fucking good.”

“Did you forget our appointment?” Half and Half’s gratingly familiar voice snaps in response. “The girl’s interview starts in less than an hour. Where the hell are you?”

Having actually forgotten about the other drama from last night, what with the panic attack and screaming nightmares and the promise of fantastic morning sex, Katsuki closes his eyes in what feels rather a lot like dismay. “I’m on my fucking way, bastard. You at the station?”

“When do we ever do child interviews at the station?”

“Since I don’t actually work with children, why don’t you fucking tell me?”

“Thank all the gods for that.” Half and Half rattles off the address, forcing Katsuki to replace the comfortable, squirming warmth of Deku with a shitty pen and paper. He hangs up and googles the address himself. Therapy office. Naturally.

“I have to go,” Katsuki says.

“I gathered that,” Deku replies in a subdued, disappointed voice. His downturned head and thick curls thoroughly hide his gaze from view. “I—I heard something about a little girl?”

“I can’t tell you anything—”

“That’s okay! I just—she’s okay? Right?” When his eyes snap up, fighting through the screen of his curls and the intensity of Katsuki’s impatience, Katsuki catalogues a myriad of sympathy and remembered pain. How fucking old was he when he suffered those scars?

Katsuki rubs a hand through his hair to keep it from snatching Deku and making promises he damn well can’t keep. “No, she isn’t.”

“Oh.”

They kind of look at each other for a little bit, neither quite sure what to say to bridge this sudden, gaping chasm between them. Katsuki’s erection has basically castrated itself in preparation to watch a young child relieve extensive sexual trauma, while Deku no doubt traverses the dark pathways of his own memory. Katsuki has no familiarity comforting people—is actually the last person on call for that kind of victim assistance. He wants to, is the thing. Wants to reach out now to Deku, say the right words, offer the right physical comfort, bring back the soft, easy smile he somehow earned this morning after last night’s shit show.

But he’s himself, and here they are instead. Awkward. “I, uh, I’ve gotta…”

“Right,” Deku says with false cheer. “Let me just put on my clothes and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“You don’t have to leave,” is what his stupid fucking mouth chooses to blurt out for no goddamned reason.

Deku freezes like a startled bird, milky eyes blown wide and shiny. “Oh, I—really?”

“I mean, fuck, it’s not like I’ve got anything worth stealing.” Except his expensive gym equipment and the dozen guns locked in various drawers around the house, with requisite ammunition and spare parts. He needs to strap a couple on before he leaves. “I’ve got a spare key. Take your time showering or whatever and lock up when you’re ready to go.”

“You trust me?” Deku says, shy.

Which is the crux of this insanity, isn’t it? “I know where you work.”

“Guess that’s fair,” is the truly bright response, Deku beaming up at him wearing nothing more than the shirt he borrowed last night and his own pretty, freckled skin. He surges up on his tip toes to kiss Katsuki’s chin and mumble, “Have a good day, detective.”

And Katsuki’s at a stoplight when he breaks out of that daze. He stares at the bright red circle interrupting his autopilot progress through the city, then at the cars surrounding him, then at the motorcycle between his thighs, engine purring. “The fuck,” he asks himself, tired. “Get a hold of yourself. It’s no big deal.” Except it felt like a big deal to leave someone in his house, to have someone wish him a good day at work for the first time—ever. He clutches his handlebars against a sudden tsunami of complex emotion he has no context to manage without directions, and he maybe panics a bit, right there in the middle of the street, breath sawing painfully hot through his lungs—

The honk of a horn snaps him out of it, light gone green while he indulged his persistent anxiety, and he drives to the clinic with focus born of sheer willpower.

Half and Half stands outside looking beyond irritated, and they cuss at each other quietly all through the lobby, up the elevator, and into the viewing room. The interview is—awful. Horrifically, brutally, no holds barred awful. The girl came from another country and learned English from listening to the people her parents sold her to, so her vocabulary is suitably vulgar for the things she’s describing. Her owner tossed her around like a party favor, kept her nearby like an accessory, played with her until she bled. The girl’s eyes are hollow, her voice small and flat. She does not play with the crayons or markers on the table, nor does she look at the pretty murals depicting happy rabbits and shit. She just stares at the floor, lifeless.

The interview lasts four hours and seventeen minutes.

“Tell me this bitch is still in custody,” Katsuki asks when the door closes behind the girl.

Half and Half’s lips thin. “House arrest. Daddy paid her bail.”

“Fuck. You better get that shit revoked.”

“Working on it,” is the bastard’s irritated response. “I’d have an easier time of it if you finished your supplemental report like you promised.”

“Like I have nothing else in the whole fucking world to do.”

“Your victims aren’t traumatized.”

“No, my victims are fucking dead!” Even Katsuki is surprised by the venom in his voice, and he bites back a tirade of unwarranted anger, because Half and Half has a point about the missing report. No judge worth their salt keeps someone in custody on the basis of an unfinished investigation. “You’ll have your report before end of day, alright?” he compromises. “Now, is that all, or do you want me to do even more of your fucking job?”

Half and Half squints at him and refuses to take the argument bait, for whatever reason. “Just the report, thanks. Did something happen to you?”

“What?” Katsuki demands.

The bastard tilts his head so his hair parts around the burns on his face, revealing the one off-color eye he usually keeps hidden. It’s a shockingly sharp gray, almost white, and Katsuki glares at it for being so intimidating when he otherwise finds Half and Half less scary than a small child in a poorly designed Halloween costume. “Something’s different about you,” Half and Half mutters. “You’re more—considerate.”

“Fuck you, I haven’t changed.”

“Fumikage says you have a boyfriend.”

“Who the fuck is Fumikage?” Katsuki snaps, fed up with this roundabout gossip bullshit. “No, I don’t care. My private life is none of your business.”

“So you do have a boyfriend.”

His eye twitches. He knows because it twitches so hard his vision on that side blacks out for a second. For once, he wants to pull his firearm and clock someone else with the resulting bullet. “Listen, you fucking prick. The next time you ask me a question about my private relationship, real or otherwise, I will goddamned nuclear bomb the bureau with your shit, you get me?”

“You don’t—”

“—eight months now, that about right?” he asks of Yaoyorozu. Half and Half’s eyes widen, and his expression freezes into some ugly mix of surprise and anger. “Yeah, so keep your questions to yourself, shit stain.”

Half and Half’s mouth purses, but he nevertheless waves Katsuki away. Katsuki almost takes himself home on sheer autopilot before remembering that today is a workday, and Deku is probably not at his house anymore, and he has actual shit to do besides fuck the nerd through his mattress. He stops at a local restaurant and orders some ramen for a half-hearted lunch, then heads back to the bureau. As expected, no one is in today, and he sits in the blissful quiet typing up his report entirely undisturbed.

Fuck the bastard and his insinuations about Katsuki’s competence, Katsuki finishes writing that nightmare in less than two hours.

Then it’s on to the other nightmare—his old guy murder. He skims through the supplemental he wrote last night and smiles a bit, satisfied. The meager remainder of his afternoon he spends calling the other family. The murdering prick of a grandson hangs up on Katsuki. The wife acts all confused, demurring in an overly sweet voice that she won’t talk to Katsuki without her husband present, before politely disconnecting. The daughter doesn’t even answer, probably warned by the son she loves so damn much that the police were digging up old skeletons. The son up in the mountains seems entirely confused about who Katsuki is, and why he’s calling, and actually answers a couple questions before catching a clue. Then he also hangs up.

Well, since they’re all on alert now anyway, he starts drafting his arrest warrants.

The idea of a warrant is very simple—I wish to arrest this person for this crime, please and thank you. The actual implementation requires a full written report and approval from a District Attorney. Sadly, attorneys don’t work on the weekend, which means Katsuki has until the courts close at five o’clock to get all this finished.

He tweaks his report, making sure to tighten up all the complicated links between the initial report from 1992, the documentation he spent days pulling and cataloguing into usable data, and the transcribed conversation with the grandson. He submits the report for supervisor approval, then calls the on-duty Sergeant. The Sergeant curses him out for dumping a thirty-three-page supplemental on him without warning, but he settles down when he realizes it’s for a homicide and agrees to look it over and approve it quickly. Katsuki then calls the Homicide DA and walks her through all the petty details point by point. She agrees to quick file the arrest warrants to a judge as soon as she receives the report. No guarantee that will be completed before the end of day.

Well, Katsuki may not be able to arrest the killers this weekend, but he can bring his old guy home.

Katsuki tackles the beast of a warrant necessary to dig up the “secret base.” Search warrants are inherently more work than arrest warrants. An arrest warrant essentially needs only a chargeable crime. A search warrant needs descriptions—a lot of descriptions. Exactly where they plan to dig, what they intend to pull from the site, how deep they will go, whether or not they need to bust down trees, which crew they plan to hire, how many officers will be involved, and a thousand other little nit-picky details that boil down to step-by-step instructions on the entire operation. If a perfect stranger cannot complete this task based solely on the search warrant’s contents, then Katsuki wrote the search warrant wrong.

He submits that with fifteen minutes to spare and calls the court clerk just to make sure the paperwork lands on the judge’s desk before the judge goes home.

When finished, his heart is hammering so hard that he actually takes his own pulse in vague concern that he’s about to drop dead from an ill-timed heart attack. It’s only when he feels the wide, painful grin on his face that he realizes—he’s excited. Elated. Katsuki lays his head against the back of his chair and stares at the ceiling basking in this uncomplicated happiness. That lasts maybe three minutes. Then the fax comes in, and Katsuki leverages up to collect his warrant.

“Sarge, am I clear to dig up a body?”

“—Bakugou?”

“Yes,” Katsuki confirms impatiently. Aizawa sounds incredibly tired for the amount of sunlight still outside the bureau windows. “Got a warrant to dig up my old guy if he’s there. Am I clear to borrow some patrol units or not?”

“Your work ethic will be the death of me,” Aizawa sighs. “Take another detective with you. Actually, take two. If there really is a body out there, you’ll need the man power.”

“Shitty Hair and Vulture will help.”

“…Right. Call me if you find something. Otherwise, I’ll see you on Monday.”

Katsuki hangs up and calls Shitty Hair first. The asshole is very clearly on a date, but he takes the news with admirable professionalism, considering Pinky’s whiny voice in the background, and agrees to meet Katsuki at the station in twenty minutes. Vulture answers on the first ring, agrees to help with minimal explanation, and gives Katsuki a timetable of thirty minutes. Katsuki then phones the crew they contract for operations like this, whose services are engaged maybe three or four times a year at most, and who therefore jump on the opportunity to spend all night collecting a hefty paycheck.

While he waits for everyone to arrive, Katsuki stomps across the precinct to bang on the Sergeant’s door. It’s almost time for shift change, so there’s twice the usual number of officers loitering in the hallways watching a detective approach like Katsuki is an exotic predator animal stalking innocent suburbia. Katsuki ignores their curiosity with the aplomb of sheer practice. The watch commander, unfortunately, has already traded over, and instead of the fully informed Sergeant Katsuki expected, he opens the door to find the familiar, sadistic smile of Sergeant Kayama. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite little firecracker,” she greets. “How are ya, Bakugou?”

“Peachy,” Katsuki replies, because this particular Sergeant reacts unpredictably to insubordination. Sometimes she finds insults and interruptions funny. Other times she screams herself blue and files suspension paperwork. This is too important a task to risk angering her. “I need to borrow some patrol guys for an operation.”

“Oh? What kind of operation?”

“Body retrieval.”

The smile drops off her face instantly. “How many officers do you need?”

“Ten should suffice. Just need help cordoning off the scene and keeping nosy civilians out. Myself and two other detectives will manage the actual digging.”

“Area?”

“About an acre.”

Kayama nods and stands up. She wears her uniform custom fitted to hug her curves and show off the generous bounce of her breasts. Katsuki would be critical of her style, except he has seen her use her body to fool any number of chauvinistic criminals, having worked beneath her particular brand of leadership for two of his six years on patrol. She’s effective, if also a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. “I’ll find you twenty officers, even if I have to call some off duty. When’re you briefing the team?”

“The other two detectives will be here in—” Katsuki checks his watch. “Fifteen minutes. We’ll gear up, which’ll be another ten or so, then meet in the bureau. Give us forty-five?”

“Done.” She pauses at the door, and says over her shoulder, “Good luck,” before disappearing.

That task completed, Katsuki retreats back to the comfort of the bureau and checks his pulse again. He feels calmer than he did earlier, yet his heart is still racing hard enough that he goes to splash water on his face. Then it’s time to gear up. He’s already strapped into his vest and checking his sidearm when Shitty Hair rolls in looking dolled up. Katsuki cannot contain a small smirk.

“Shut up,” Shitty Hair groans. “Mina finally agrees to a date, and here you are ruining it.”

“She’ll fucking marry you if you ask, dipshit.”

“Who’s getting married?” comes Vulture’s quiet voice from the doorway, black eyes blinking between them.

Katsuki checks his watch again and bares his teeth at Shitty Hair. “You said twenty minutes!”

“There was traffic!”

“Bullshit, you were rounding first base. Vulture arrived on time!”

“I’m here, aren’t I? Christ, you are impossible to please,” Shitty Hair pouts. He stuffs himself into his vest alongside Vulture, and they both check their firearms. Katsuki leaves them to their mumbled gossip about Pinky while he loads up some visual aids for the briefing. Luckily, the bureau has a kickass printer, and even a monkey can compile a decent informational packet. He emails the packet to the dispatch supervisor, who sends him a frowny face and thumbs up in reply.

Then the officers troop in by twos and threes, openly curious. Kayama really did dig up twenty.

“Alright, gather around and listen up!” he barks to get everyone to stop gossiping amongst each other. “Long story short, I’ve got an old man murdered in 1992 who may or may not be buried out at the site in your packet.” A few of them shuffle to the appropriate page, while the rest stare at him expectantly, because they don’t care where they’re going. “It’s a kid’s treehouse that probably hasn’t seen a kid since the 80s, but people still hike in these godforsaken woods. I don’t want anyone entering the site. We’re cordoning off the entire area with tape and stationing each of you at intervals to keep civilians out. There are pictures in your packet—these are suspects. If a single one of them shows up, you slap them in cuffs and detain them for questioning. Don’t ask them shit. Just hail me on the radio—me specifically. Call me by name, my call sign, or ‘hey you’, I don’t give a fuck. The middle-aged prick is our primary and has some crazy rage problems. Assume he’s armed if you see him. Any questions?”

“How long’s this gunna take?” one moron pipes up.

Katsuki curls his lip and takes a few steps forward until he’s nose to nose with the man, who adopts the expression of someone feeling intense regret. “If time is your concern here, then you can get the fuck out.”

The guy looks down at the floor and shakes his head. “No, sir. Sorry for asking.”

Katsuki swivels his gaze around at the group. “Any more stupid questions?” When they all stay mercifully silent, Katsuki nods. “Alright, move out.”

The crew meets them at the site as the sun dips below the horizon, and for the next six hours, they dig. A few curious bystanders try to peek through the blue wall into the action, then, when they are righteously turned away, inform the media, who descend like rabid dogs to demand answers that none of the officers can provide. Katsuki has no head for public relations, while Vulture has no familiarity with the case, but Shitty Hair has spent enough time watching Katsuki tear through evidence that he placates the crowd admirably enough. Or at least so none of the media stooges bother flagging Katsuki down. None of them want to risk his reputation for cursing on live television and breaking cameras.

That said, they turn up nothing.

Katsuki slams his car door and sits with his head against the steering wheel, breathing hard. He wants to rage—wants to bang his hands against the pristine interior, roar swear words, strangle the prick grandson. But what good will that do?

So, he sits.

“Baku-bro? You okay?”

“Do I fucking look okay?” he says in a strained snarl, so disappointed he’s come out the other side into sheer, bottomless exhaustion. “Get in the car, dipshit.”

“Okay. I’m sorry, man.”

Katsuki waits until he hears Vulture climb into the backseat and two seatbelt clicks before he picks up his head and starts the car. He cannot look at either of them. “Tell that to my old guy.”

The after-action briefing lasts maybe ten minutes. The old guy’s body wasn’t out there. The end.

Shitty Hair slaps him on the back and praises his work with a small, tentative smile at odds with his otherwise pointy confidence, so Katsuki shoves him aside and demands he go home already, because Katsuki is sick of his shitty face. It’s not a lie. Katsuki does not want to see—anyone right now. Not a single person in the entire world. Seeing means explaining that he failed. That his old guy is still out there, dead in some shallow grave, or eaten by wild animals, or sunk to the bottom of the fucking ocean. Katsuki has no idea, will probably never know. Accepting the truth hurts almost as much as admitting it aloud, making it real. Katsuki isn’t ready for that.

He dresses down, and packs up, and goes home with listless turns of his motorcycle and vague thoughts about eating his weight in something fried.

Imagine his surprise when the light is on inside his apartment.

“The fuck?” he asks, pulling out his firearm. Who turns on the light to burgle? At this hour? He scans the street for suspicious cars and only finds the familiar outline of his neighbors’ familiar houses. He creeps inside, expecting a ransack, and instead sees Deku dozing on the couch. He hurriedly re-holsters his firearm. “Deku?”

Milky green eyes flutter open, and there’s a moment of held breath before they light up. Deku sits straight, beaming, his whole expression open and elated. “Detective! Welcome home!” He clamors off the couch while Katsuki is still attempting to unpack the many layers of his surprise. Deku stayed? Or came back? Why would he bother to stick around, after—everything? Katsuki isn’t a prize. Especially today. “I made some dinner,” Deku says, puttering into the kitchen and opening the oven. He comes back holding a plate of spaghetti piled high with meatballs. “This time, I am absolutely sure it’s not spicy! I barely used any peppers at all, actually, and just to add body to the sauce. There’s mushrooms, and onions, and some—detective? Are you okay?”

Katsuki stares at Deku in blank incomprehension of the question. “Huh?”

The spaghetti lands on the table, the mittens come off, and then Deku’s cupping his—no, wiping his cheeks. “You’re crying,” he whispers, concerned.

“I—” Katsuki starts to say. An explanation? A denial? He has no idea. His soul feels detached from his body, like in a few hours this will all become too real for him, so he has to distance himself now or crumble under the crushing weight of emotions he’s not prepared to feel. In the end, he says nothing, just stares at Deku until those baby animal eyes soften into marshmallow, and his lips lift into a sweet, comforting smile.

“It’s okay,” he says, cupping Katsuki’s cheeks. “You had a bad day, huh? Come on, eat some dinner and then we can go to bed, okay?”

“Okay,” Katsuki parrots.

The spaghetti tastes nice, and Katsuki says so. They cuddle on the couch for lack of a better term, Deku leaned against Katsuki’s shoulder rubbing his stomach while Katsuki eats in a basic mechanical response to hunger. When he finishes, dropping the plate on the table despite his usual abhorrence for lazy bullshit when the kitchen is literally right there, Deku sidles even closer, bending his gorgeous legs to brush up against Katsuki’s thigh. He’s wearing another pair of tiny shorts from what appears to be an endless supply of them, and slipper socks, and an oversized sweatshirt that Katsuki hesitates to identify as his own. “Better?” Deku asks sweetly. Katsuki can only grunt. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“I figured. The news—well. You probably don’t want to talk about that either.” Katsuki closes his eyes against the reminder of the media presence, both at the scene and currently in his house. Like always, any words he speaks matter more than they should. “I know you didn’t find what you were looking for,” Deku goes on, “but I’m sure you will someday. The detective I know always finds his man.”

“It’s not the suspect I’m looking for,” Katsuki snaps. “I was—” His throat closes up.

Fuck, why is this so hard? It’s just one old guy, who died years and years ago. Katsuki has enough evidence to bring down the people who killed him even without the forensics. What does it matter, long term, if he returns the body to the other grandson? To move grandpa from an unmarked grave to a marked one? It’s all dirt in the end. The person’s still dead. Nothing to do at that point but accept the inevitable. Why worry about what cannot be changed? Why agonize over the past when he still has the future to contend with? Bad shit happens every day.

He hunches forward and puts his head in his hands, surprised to find himself shaking.

“Detect—”

“Stop calling me that!” Katsuki roars for no damn reason. He’s suddenly sick of the title, sick of the responsibility.

He wants his gun.

“Deku, I think you should leave,” he says, sounding far calmer than he feels.

“O-oh,” Deku stutters. Katsuki cannot bring himself to look at those baby animal eyes, but he can hear the hurt in Deku’s voice. “That’s—yeah. I overstayed my welcome, huh? I should—I should go, like you said. Leave you to, um, to your weekend.”

It’s alright. Bad things happen every day. What’s one more?

“Yeah,” Katsuki agrees.

His heart is no longer racing. Nor are his hands shaking. So this is what certainty feels like. He remembers, distantly, this feeling. Back before the gunshot that ruined it all. Cycles and cycles. It started with a gunshot; it’ll end with a gunshot. A fitting conclusion to a shitty book Katsuki wishes he could rewrite from the start.

No one will miss him much. Sure, maybe the loss will hurt at first, but everything hurts. Time heals. Probably.

Katsuki wouldn’t know, would he?

“Um, det—mis—” Deku swallows hard and shuffles off the couch. “Do you, um, want me—”

“Get out.”

“O-okay. I’ll see you—tomorrow? At the-the station?”

“I don’t work on Saturdays,” Katsuki lies. No one comes into the station on Saturday. They may not even notice his absence until Monday.

Wait, no, the gunshot. Someone will hear that in a quiet neighborhood like this.

He clenches his fists on his knees and waits through a tight chest as Deku packs up the meager detritus he littered the apartment with today—his laptop on the nearby chair, his shoes, a pen with a dorky police car bobbling on the end in dramatic arcs like a fast sprint down a bumpy gravel road. Gorgeous, buttermilk legs making slow tracks around the small living room, pausing at the door, turning. “I can’t just leave you like this.”

“You can and you will.”

“But you’re not even—cursing.” That’s the barometer for his mental health? Talk about an indicator that he should put everyone out of his misery. “De—Katsuki, please. Please? Don’t make me go.”

“I want to be alone.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Katsuki clenches his jaw. Well, if Deku wants to watch— “Fine.” He un-holsters the firearm beneath his armpit, ejects the magazine, and places both pieces on the table next to his empty spaghetti plate. Then he unhooks his badge and puts that there too. Useless metal bullshit that represents all the painful crap he put himself through for almost a decade. Lastly, he grabs his ankle gun. The familiar weight is comforting. “You want to watch?”

“Oh my god,” Deku gasps, dropping his things by the door. “Are you—you’re suicidal. That’s what—what last night was about. You’re—”

The word gives him pause, because Katsuki has never labelled the tight, twisting anxiety in his chest before. Is he suicidal? Katsuki looks down at the firearm trembling in his fingers and figures, yeah. He is.

“I’m tired,” he tells the gun, because he cannot bring himself to look at Deku right now. He rotates the firearm between his palms, a familiar comforting gesture that precludes him clearing the chamber and deciding to live another day. Usually. He has more willpower than this, or at least he thought he did, but he cannot continue straining for something that he feels will never come. It’s too late for him now. A gunshot for a gunshot. That seems fair. “I’m just—so fucking tired.”

He’s a little surprised when he feels Deku’s weight depress the couch cushion next to him. “So tired that you want to sleep p-permanently?”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

Deku’s small hand touches his, forcing him to grip his gun tightly or risk it being taken away. “I’ve been tired before,” Deku tells him in a soft, wobbling voice, recoloring the fluttering touch of his fingers. “Every day felt like ants under my skin, waiting to nibble their way out of my every pore. I kept asking myself why I bothered waking up each morning when every day was the same miserable routine. Nothing made me happy. Not until—well. Not until my hero came swooping in to rescue me.”

“I’m not a fucking damsel in distress,” Katsuki snarls. Deku may be talking in the first person, but Katsuki damn well knows what he means.

Or at least he thought he did, up until Deku kisses his cheek and mumbles, “I know. It’s exhausting, having to be everyone’s hero all the time, isn’t it?”

His simple question strikes Katsuki in his unprepared soft bits, and then he’s crying, big fat tears racing for freedom despite how desperately he attempts to slam the gates and bar their way. They’re overflowing in a painfully accurate parody of the emotions bleeding out of the wound in his chest, and his hand starts to shake around the gun. “Not a hero,” he sobs. “I’m—I’m a fucking monster.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“What the fuck do you know, huh?” Katsuki swipes a hand across his wet face and hunches away from Deku and closer to his firearm, a literal cold comfort. “Bet you read all the pretty stories told by the department’s PR rep and draw bullshit conclusions about this shit like you have any idea what’s going on.”

“Then just—tell me. Tell me what is going on. I want to help, detective. Please!”

“Like you can!”

“We won’t know until you let me in!”

Let him in? Katsuki thinks in mild horror. He never lets anyone in, not all the way. Letting people in means acknowledging that doors swing both ways, that whatever goes in will displace the shit inside until it all comes spilling out in an endless, overwhelming torrent. “That’s not a good idea.”

“Why not? What’s the worst that could happen?”

“You could—” His brain catches up to his mouth before he finishes, and Katsuki sits for several long seconds trying to come up with a viable consequence to sharing. Sure, Deku may hate him, but Katsuki plans to kill himself anyway. Deku could spread the word, print a column in the paper and out his dirty little secret, except Katsuki will be too dead to care about his reputation. His family will be upset, but then, they’re already well aware of what Katsuki’s done. Deku will be stuck with the knowledge, but he’s asking for it. Literally. Katsuki swallows hard around a sudden swell of anxiety and realizes, rather pathetically, that the only thing preventing him from discussing this situation is his own pride.

No officer wants to discuss the terrible things they see and do on the job. Admitting weakness leads to unintentional complacency, and a complacent cop wakes up six feet under. Best to layer callouses over the wound and pray that infection never sets in. Katsuki has always done very well at that. He’s always been more abrasive than the average officer, resorting to violence at the drop of a dime and stomping on his allies to reach his enemies with the flaming wrath of legal retribution held high. It’s only after he comes home, locks the door, decompresses—only after he sheds his armor that he sees the infection bubbling up out of his skin, feels how it writhes and bites at his insides, twisting them up until he can no longer see a path free of this endless ache.

The department mandated therapist knows the basics, having been briefed on his personnel jacket prior to him plonking himself unwillingly in her office chair. He still hasn’t talked to her beyond generalities. His mother knows, having put Katsuki up in his old bedroom for the few months of his forced medical convalescence and listened to him scream every night, sobbing and shattering whatever happened to be in arm’s reach.

The prospect of talking to Deku breaks cold sweat across his palms, fingers slipping around his gun before he tightens them to the point of pain. “I don’t want to,” Katsuki admits, quiet. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Please. I promise I won’t write anything about this or-or whatever else you’re afraid I’ll do. I just want to help. That’s all I want here, I swear.”

“Like I’m supposed to trust a stalker,” Katsuki says, even as he acknowledges that he does trust Deku. His inner lie detector remains alarmingly quiet in the face of Deku’s impassioned plea, and Katsuki has to wonder why Deku seems to care so much. They’re basically strangers. Beyond the apparently extensive stalking, at any rate. This—the panic attacks, and excessive overtime, and suicidal delineations—should have chased Deku off long before this moment. “Why do you care?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me?”

“Quid pro quo, that’s your angle here. Fuck.” Katsuki’s curiosity gets the best of him, because he does want to know why the nerd clings to his arm like he cannot imagine walking away. He tries not to enjoy the warm, tingly affection raking across all his tender places.

Fuck it.

His free hand clutches the back of his clammy neck, nails biting down as a dubious anchor to reality while he dives into the deepest, darkest corner of his memory, hoping all the sharks found somewhere else to sleep for the evening. “I—you know my patrol record.”

“Yes,” Deku whispers, featherlight and hopeful.

“Then you know I was involved in a burglary case some years ago that, uh, wasn’t really a burglary.”

“No?” The sudden relief crushes his chest wound inward like a collapsing star, and he hunches forward to protect the damage, shaken. Everything’s public record in a police department. Katsuki thought, in an unacknowledged way, that the information was out there for the taking. That a dedicated person could unearth his trauma if they wanted. Deku’s the most dedicated stalker Katsuki has ever met, and not even he knows about the burglary gone wrong.

He scrubs his free hand into his leaking eyes and muffles a sob. “Some lady called,” he manages through the sucking pressure. “Said there was a burglary in progress, apartment with kids. Turns out she was just—just fucking pissed off. Hated the family there, hated the noise and the mess. Always calling child services trying to get the kids taken away. When that didn’t work, she resorted to the cops. I got there first, fucking only one riding lights and sirens to an emergency. Everyone else knew about the old lady, see, didn’t bother to tell me. They thought it was funny that the overtime guy was taking a prank so seriously. I went in, I fucking went in by myself, thinking there were kids in danger. Didn’t realize I was the f-fucking—” His throat closes, vision spotty, and he’s lifting his firearm a second later, fingers shaking as he tries to preemptively end the encroaching emotional agony. Deku whispers reassurances and hugs him tight, too tight to fight free without injuring the smaller man, and so Katsuki slumps there, panting and frightened like a goddamned injured animal caught in a trap. He grips his own head and squeezes, hoping to relieve some of the building pressure. “P-piece of shit fucking bitch old lady! I should’ve shot her instead!”

“How old?” Deku whispers, sounding about half as horrified as Katsuki feels to be reliving this nightmare.

“Four. He just—popped up from behind the bed, just a little fucking kid playing—” Katsuki snarls and twists in Deku’s grip, hot face knocking against soft curls. “F-fuck!”

Deku shushes him even though he’s not making much noise and, however hard Katsuki struggles, however much he bucks and growls and tries to pull away, Deku somehow finds the fortitude to hold on. “I hope that old lady died in jail,” he whispers fiercely, using his disproportionate strength to tuck Katsuki forcibly into the soft column of his neck. “I hope she regretted her decision to pick up that phone until the day she died.”

Despite himself, Katsuki snorts a fractured laugh. “She’s still alive, dipshit.”

He feels Deku puff up beneath his cheek, as indignant as a small child staring down the injustice of bath time when he’d rather dig up worms and eat mud in the yard. “Then I hope she dies a horrible death alone in jail. She is in jail, right?”

“House arrest, last I checked,” Katsuki answers. He checks pretty often on her. Far as he can tell, she’s happy in her new apartment well across the continent, surrounded by old people as bitter as her. No kids to fuss about in her flowers, leave toys lying around where unsuspecting adults can step on their painfully sturdy edges. Just the ringing quiet of a little boy’s death.

Katsuki hears that quiet every night, thick and oppressive over his echoing heartbeat banging like a barrel drum against his ribcage.

The sudden crash jolts through the tense muscles in his back, and Katsuki cannot contain a terrified scream as familiar green curls and gray couch fabric vibrate into a sterilized, fuzzy memory of the apartment where Katsuki sacrificed the last of his sanity hoping to save a little boy’s life. “No, no, fuck no, please fuck—”

“Detective! What’s happening?”

“What the h-hell do you th-think!”

Deku throws his powerful, gorgeous legs across Katsuki’s lap and forcibly yanks Katsuki out of the past. They tumble together onto the couch, tangled up like a pair of ropes tied into a loose knot, and Katsuki somehow loses his grip on the gun. It clunks to the floor just out of reach.

“What’s happening?” Deku demands, pressing their foreheads together like he didn’t just manhandle Katsuki into submission.

And Katsuki hears the gunshot as if from a distance, feels the remembered recoil up his arm, the hot splash of blood on his face. He’s there again, standing in the middle of a combined living room and bedroom, boots squeaking on the sweating tile floor. Red sprays up the wall in slow motion as small, round eyes go flat and dark, the bullet clean through the boy’s smooth baby forehead. Even on instinct, Katsuki had good aim. Caught between the need to help and the need to call for help, Katsuki stood frozen in place, gun still raised, until his coworkers arrived. They finally picked up the pace after hearing the gunshot. Katsuki couldn’t answer a single question. He dropped his gun, hands shaking, and slowly knelt down to stare at the crumpled body of the boy he just killed, quickly swamped by panicking blue uniforms, voices urgently radioing for an ambulance, a supervisor, their public relations officer. A counselor. The boy’s parents. Eventually, the coroner.

The mother spit in his face. Katsuki remembers that well, for all that the words she screamed at him have faded into impenetrable fog. He has never blamed her. Not once, not for anything.

Katsuki lets his face drop into the soft curve of Deku’s neck and, for probably the first time since he shot that little boy, he cries. The sobs shake his whole body, forcing him to hold onto Deku or fall off the couch alongside his gun. He apologizes, or at least he thinks he does, over and over until his voice is hoarse and his nose so stuffed up with nasty snot that he can’t breathe. The memory, his disappointing day, the hundreds of hours he’s spent passing his ankle gun back and forth between his hands—it catches up to him all at once, and he actually falls asleep crying.

He’s literally never done that in his entire life.

He should do it more, he thinks, groggily, when next he wakes up. It’s still dark, which is normal for him, but he’s sprawled on the couch beneath a small throw blanket his mother shoved into his hands when he moved, instead of panting awake in the sweaty tangle of his own bed. His head feels…odd. Not bad, necessarily. Heavy, clogged with cotton, and a persistent ache behind his eyeballs that tells him he needs to drink some water—but not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, that’s easily the longest period of time he’s spent asleep in too long to count. He turns his face away from the crusty remains of his crying jag intending to impart this momentous occasion onto the only other person who would probably care, and realizes that he’s alone on his couch. Deku is nowhere in sight. Katsuki props himself up on his forearms and listens over the dull base thud of his heart until he picks up the faint, whistling snores coming from his open bedroom door. The relief is—crushing, and he maybe wastes an hour breathing wetly into the couch attempting to regain control over his fluctuating emotions.

Then he does what he always does at this godforsaken hour and starts getting ready for work.

“Where are you going?”

He freezes in the middle of grabbing his shoes. “Uh.”

Standing in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing one of Katsuki’s old Academy shirts and nothing else, Deku crosses his arms and frowns at the hand Katsuki has wrapped around his service weapon. “Where are you going?” he demands again, voice hard.

“Work?” Katsuki asks like he’s suddenly not certain. Fuck. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I didn’t. I just—don’t want you to go somewhere where there’s no people. Right now.” The reason is damningly obvious after what happened last night, and Katsuki holsters his service weapon with a guilty conscience. He hasn’t thought about shooting himself all morning, and now it’s the only thing on his mind. “Do you want to have breakfast with me? And then maybe I can, um, come to work with you?”

Katsuki grinds his teeth into his bottom lip to prevent an instinctive agreement to spending more time with Deku and stares at the other man, helpless against his own want. “What for?”

“So we can talk.”

“We talked last night.”

“Not enough,” Deku says firmly. “Please come inside. I’m sure whatever you’re working on can wait.”

It can’t, Katsuki almost says. Last night’s failure reminded Katsuki of everything still left to accomplish on this case. The arrest warrants never came in, which means Katsuki must grind his gears all weekend fantasizing about the look on that prick’s face when he snaps the handcuffs on. He also needs to draft up a plan for retrieving the ubiquitous cassette tape that may or may not contain the metaphorical smoking gun. Maybe even a location on where to actually find his little old guy.

But Deku’s right, in retrospect. His old guy has waited decades to come home. He can wait another few minutes.

Katsuki slowly drops his shoes and follows Deku’s gorgeous bare legs into the kitchen, where Deku starts making eggs like that’s a normal thing to do at four in the morning. “Can you put your gun on the table?” he asks the eggs quietly.

Figuring that’s fair, Katsuki unholsters his ankle gun and drops it on the counter.

“I meant the—other one.”

“My service weapon?” Katsuki asks like he has any other gun on his person. He even looks down at it. “I don’t, uh. It’s my ankle gun. That I—you know. With.”

Deku nods, accepting. “I think you should lock that one up then.”

“Ordering me around in my own fucking house,” Katsuki grumbles, but he does, trading his ankle gun for a slightly bulkier one that he has never once thought about using against himself. Locking the small safe door feels oddly final, and Katsuki wonders if he will ever open this little gun safe again. Probably not. “There, you happy?”

“Marginally.”

Deku plates the eggs with some cut up strawberries from Katsuki’s fridge that Katsuki does not remember buying, and some orange juice that he definitely did not buy. “I don’t like juice,” he admits. Half expecting an argument, Katsuki is surprised when Deku keeps the juice and pours him a cup of water instead and reflexively says, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Deku props his elbows on the counter across from Katsuki. “So.”

“Are these eggs a bribe?”

“No. They’re a distraction. I’ve found it’s easier to talk and eat.” Katsuki makes a face. He knows he does, because Deku makes one right back, looking as exasperated as Katsuki’s mother after she received yet another call from the school about his behavior. “Do you feel better after last night?”

Fuck, so they’re doing this.

Katsuki takes a deep breath and, yeah, the eggs do help. He can chew while he organizes his thoughts. “Guess so.”

“Was that the first time you’ve talked about it?”

“Fully? Yeah. Been to see a therapist every Sunday since it happened. Department’s orders.”

“And you don’t talk to them?” Katsuki shakes his head and looks down, because he knows he’s about to be scolded. “Maybe they’re not a good fit for you then.” Surprised, he looks back up, and Deku’s smiling at him for no reason. “What? It’s okay. I’ve been to therapists before. It took me years to find the right one. Will you promise me that you’ll talk to—whoever you need to talk to, so you can find a new one? And keep looking until one of them clicks?”

“Okay,” Katsuki agrees, because that seems easy enough in the wake of the argument he erroneously thought they were going to have.

“Thank you. Do you think about—about suicide a lot?”

“Not this morning.”

Deku’s pretty pond water eyes close, and he looks close to tears despite Katsuki’s poor attempt at comfort. “How often?”

“Uh.” He chews his eggs until the entire plate is gone, trying to think. Then he sets his fork down and scrubs his wet hair, because he was in such a hurry to leave before Deku woke up that he didn’t bother drying off. He still needs that haircut, the top shaggy, the bottom growing out into a hilarious puff. Maybe he’ll do that today before going into work so he looks sharp as shit when he slaps those cuffs on. “All day, basically,” he summarizes, his mind drifting away from his ankle gun towards the next place he can dig up in pursuit of his old guy. Maybe the prick buried grandpa in the backyard like a cliché.

“Detective. Katsuki.” Katsuki blinks up at Deku. His name sounds nice in that lemony voice. “Are you okay?” he asks quietly, and Katsuki can tell immediately that he’s seeking reassurance. That he doesn’t want to worry about Katsuki killing himself somewhere out of sight.

So Katsuki puts in the effort to catalogue his feelings. His entire face hurts in what he hesitates to identify as normal after a crying jag that lasted basically all night. His back aches after sleeping face down on the couch. But his mind is clear and sharp like an uncontaminated lake and, for once, Katsuki can see straight down to the bottom without little eyes looking back. He’s still upset in that low-level way he’s been since the gunshot, but it feels settled. Placid. No longer a churning sea waiting for the right storm to send water crashing over his head. No longer waiting to drown him in misery and regret. Does he still regret? Yes. So much. Is he miserable?

Not really.

He blinks.

Not really? More like—not at all? Fuck, is crying all he needed to shed the dead weight of his own anxiety?

Katsuki searches a little more and concludes, wryly, that he still feels pretty anxious. Just not hands scrabbling against the cold metal of his firearm anxious. More like he’s side stepped the worst of the drama as it rolled on by, and now he’s just waiting for the pendulum to swing back around.

He sits up on his stool and reaches past Deku for the hand towel he knows hangs on the drawer there. Then he scrubs at his sopping wet head until he feels like a human being. “I’m fine for now. Probably a good idea to hire another fucking therapist to eat up my Sundays.” Deku seems far from reassured when Katsuki drops the towel, so he tries, helplessly, “I’ll talk with you first? Before I, fuck, I dunno. Go for my ankle gun?”

“Okay,” Deku says, pretty face relaxing. “Thank you.”

And he’s—he’s so gorgeous, sitting there with crust around his pond water eyes and red lines on his chin from Katsuki’s cheap bargain bin sheets. Katsuki cannot imagine surviving last night without Deku there. What will he do in the future if Deku leaves?

He doesn’t want Deku to leave.

“Are you—staying?” he asks hoarsely, fingers twisting in the towel as a poor substitute for dragging Deku into his arms and never letting go.

“Yeah,” Deku agrees all easy like he didn’t just rip Katsuki’s heart out of his chest for keeps. “Well, I mean, not today. I really do want to go to work with you, and I promise I won’t write a single article about police related anything! Then I have to return to my own apartment at some point and pick up some stuff if I’m going to be sleeping over regularly. If, um, if you’re okay with that?”

“Fuck yeah I am,” Katsuki blurts.

The sunlight that suffuses Deku’s face is well worth all the heartache they took to reach this point, forcing Katsuki to confront the reality that he would do anything, be anything, to keep Deku looking at him with those eyes. If going to therapy and sacrificing his dogged work schedule and never touching that ankle gun again is what it takes, then so be it. Katsuki’s all in. He leans across the table, careful to telegraph his intentions, and is nearly bowled over when Deku surges up to smack a smelly kiss to Katsuki’s waiting lips. Katsuki slips him generous tongue anyway, as a reward for agreeing to this madness.

They part wetly. “Okay,” Deku says brightly, his face flushed. “I’m going to get ready now. Don’t go anywhere without me!”

Katsuki watches Deku skip into the bathroom, listens to the shower start with a riot of off-key humming, his own shirt slapping the tile before Deku gives a small little shriek and a stuttering, “C-cold!” He prods his cheeks just to confirm that his face is indeed stretched into a manic smile, before he gets up and wanders after Deku. He needs to re-brush his teeth.

After messing around in the shower for longer than Katsuki feels comfortable admitting even in his own head, they hop on Katsuki’s motorcycle and take off for Deku’s apartment. Katsuki tries to keep his judgment to himself, but he knows this neighborhood a little too well, and mutters under his breath until they leave. Then they stop at the barber for the haircut Katsuki desperately needs. The barber, familiar with his attitude after several years of cutting his hair, starts trimming him without bothering to ask what Katsuki wants, which has the unintended consequence of galvanizing Deku to intervene. “I don’t want a mohawk,” Katsuki blurts in confusion. Deku actually shushes him for interrupting. He’s too stunned to retaliate appropriately as Deku goes on telling the barber to keep it long on top with a gratuitous fade around the sides.

Silence proves golden when Deku rubs eager fingers from the buzz cut on his neck to the thick mop on top and purrs. “That feels nice.” He even tugs a little which, fuck, since when is Katsuki’s hair connected to his dick?

Katsuki pays with his eyes lowered and Deku all but hanging off his shoulders. “Keep the change,” he mutters.

Then they’re off to the station, where Deku hovers protectively over his desk while Katsuki makes the appropriate calls to cancel his therapy appointment for the next day and reassign his therapist. The HR rep seems a little alarmed that he’s even calling, mentioning more than once that he’s seen this therapist for several years now, and asking him what changed. Only the hand still rubbing his neck keeps Katsuki from exploding his rising anger all over the place.

When that’s done, Deku kisses him.

“What was that for?” Katsuki frowns from his desk chair.

“I’m trying a reward system,” Deku replies happily. He kisses Katsuki again before trotting over to Shitty Hair’s desk. “Can I sit here?”

“Like I give a fuck.”

Deku plops down and kicks his legs around, because he’s still a good foot shorter than Shitty Hair. They work together quietly. Deku taps away at his laptop, and the muttering thing Katsuki has heard from Deku before is apparently a compulsion. Not that Katsuki minds. That soft, whispering voice tells Katsuki exactly what the nerd is working on at any given second, and none of it involves him, or the not-burglary, or anything about his old guy.

Katsuki orders his dick to calm the fuck down. He can’t even see the nerd from this angle.

“I gotta make a phone call,” he says. “And you can’t write shit about it, you understand me?”

“Okay,” pipes up over Shitty Hair’s computer screen. Deku quickly returns to his muttering, leaving Katsuki free to dial.

Akihito picks up on the fourth ring sounding more than a little hesitant. “Detective? Is something wrong? I saw the—the news, about the…”

“I didn’t find him,” Katsuki admits gruffly. “I’m sorry.”

There’s a moment of stilted silence before Akihito laughs, breathless with misery. “I figured not. I’d hoped—but yeah. Thank you for trying, detective.” A low voice murmurs in the background. “No, they didn’t find grandpa, Thomas. Yes I—detective? What happens next?”

Katsuki rubs his forehead and leans back in his chair to stare at the ceiling. “Honestly? I have no idea. I’ll forward everything up to the DA, hope they file charges. But as far as finding his body…”

“I get it. It’s been—too long. There’s only so much we can do, right?”

“Right,” Katsuki says, even as his free fist clenches hard enough to tremble. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. This is more than I ever thought would happen,” Akihito says kindly. “Keep me updated? Please? On the trial I mean. If there even is one.”

“You got it.”

They hang up and Katsuki feels no better for having made the call. He unlocks his desk drawer and pulls out the raggedy 90’s file folder, flipping pages until he finds the original missing person’s report. Attached is a yellowing polaroid photo of the victim about three weeks before he died. His hair’s pure white, his smile wide and wrinkly as he bounces a baby in his lap. Probably the great-granddaughter. Katsuki realizes, belatedly, that he doesn’t even know the guy’s name. He flips the picture over and it’s right there—Hiromasa Ito. Eighty-two at the time of his disappearance.

Katsuki purses his lips.

“Detective? You okay?” He looks up to find Deku peeking over the top of Shitty Hair’s computer with an expression of concern on his pretty face. Probably eavesdropping.

“Fine.” Katsuki blows out a breath and stands. “Be back.”

He walks to the nearest color printer and copies the photo, then carries the resultant product to his desk. It takes an embarrassing amount of time to locate a pair of scissors, then a little bit of a hack job to cut the excess paper away. He pins the picture to his cheap corkboard half-cubicle and puts the original back in the folder.

Deku watches him the whole time with his sad pond water eyes, only ducking away when Katsuki glares. “What do you want for lunch?”

“I don’t fucking care.”

“Well, you don’t like juice, or desserts, or—do you like anything sweet?”

You, Katsuki almost answers before he remembers that he has dignity. “No.”

He can literally hear Deku’s pout. “Okay. How about some ramen? There’s a decent shop near here. We can walk.”

Katsuki snorts a laugh at the idea of leaving. “Fucking cute. I’ve got shit to do, nerd.”

“You need to eat!”

“Which is why restaurants deliver. I’m not wasting a whole fucking hour when I can’t come in until Monday to finish up.” He shuts his old guy case and taps the folder on the desk to organize the papers inside. By all rights, he should dump the folder in Aizawa’s inbox. The case is essentially out of his hands now, attorney intervention required. His grip tightens around the old manila at the very thought of letting go. “Just pick something up.”

Deku’s head pops over the computer again. “But—”

“My ankle gun’s at the apartment, remember? I’m not gunna fucking blow my brains out while you buy lunch. Get the goddamned ramen if you want it.”

“Promise?” Deku asks in an entirely too small voice, his knuckles visibly white and big algae eyes blown wide with worry. He’s so fucking cute that Katsuki leans up and kisses his pouty pink mouth for an embarrassingly long time. Not like he can pull away when rough fingers start dragging against the freshly shaved hair at the back of his skull, tugging him close so Deku can slip him tongue.

His mouth feels bruised when he pulls away, and he just barely remembers to mutter, “Promise,” in answer to Deku’s question.

Deku’s puffy pillow lips tug into a tremulous smile. “Okay. I trust you, detective.”

“Told you to stop calling me that.”

Blushing, Deku squirms and mumbles, “Katsuki.”

Katsuki gapes at this perfect little miracle, from his gorgeous freckles to his shy smile to the sexy arch of his buttermilk legs. “Go,” he says, gutturally. “Before I fuck you through this fucking desk.”

Pond water eyes bright, Deku hops up and scuttles from the bureau.

Katsuki sits in his chair and rubs the heel of his hand into his erection, head tipped back to stare at the blessedly unsexy ceiling tiles. When that finally goes down some minutes later, Katsuki surges up and grabs his old guy folder for a long, contemplative stare. Really, the only place for it is Aizawa’s inbox. More to the point, Katsuki has other cases—five other cases to be exact, each one with a victim as innocent and deserving of justice as the happy old man watching Katsuki from the wall.

Blowing out an exasperated breath, muttering curses at his own sentimentality, Katsuki slams open his active case drawer and stuffs the file in with the five others in there.

He shuts the drawer before he changes his mind.

He’s going to find Hiromasa Ito before he retires. Come hell or high fucking water, he will find that goddamned body if it’s the last thing he ever does in his life.

The next folder on the stack Aizawa gave him looks innocent enough, yet Katsuki instinctively mistrusts what he may find inside. He learned his lesson with the old guy, and he’s not about to unlearn it.

2001. Victim an eighteen-year-old kid found floating in the bay. Duct tape around his wrists and ankles, a rope around his neck. Dead for days before being found. Beaten within an inch of his life, tortured with bruises and cuts and broken bones. Died of asphyxiation. No forensic evidence. Fingers eaten down to the knuckle by fish. Teeth knocked out of a dislocated jaw. No identification found anywhere on his threadbare clothes. John Doe.

Katsuki closes his eyes and takes a long, fortifying breath.

Then he picks up the phone.

“Hello?” a deep, unfamiliar voice greets on the line.

“I need to talk to Aizawa.”

“Oh, um. Who is this?”

“Detective Bakugou.”

“Bakugou!” the guy says warmly as if they know each other. Katsuki has a terrible suspicion he’d rather not make the effort to confirm. “Shota talks about you all the time. Says you’re the best he has, which I can absolutely believe. I’ve read great things in the paper!”

“Right. He home?”

“Yes, I believe so—honey! Your favorite detective is on the phone!”

“I don’t have a favorite, Hizashi,” comes the disgruntled response as the other line picks up. “Bakugou, if this is you asking to work tomorrow, I flat out don’t want to hear it.”

“No favorites my ass,” Katsuki snipes back just because he can. Aizawa knew exactly who his husband meant when he summoned the bastard to the phone. “I could be calling about my fucking missing body.”

“But you’re not,” Aizawa replies.

No, he’s not. Katsuki rubs his thumb along the edge of the file open on his desk, eyes caught on the gruesome pictures taken right after they pulled the body from the water. Poor kid is bloated to unrecognizability, hair and eyes torn away by hungry fish, mouth split in multiple places from a well-placed fist, skin blue with cold. “I want homicide,” he tells Aizawa flatly.

There’s a long pause. “Do you.”

“Yeah. And you’re gunna fucking give it to me, because I’m the best you’ve got in this bureau.”

“There a reason for your sudden change of heart?”

Gaze tearing away from the horribly broken body that’s going to be his next project, Katsuki instead looks at the happy old man taped to his cubicle wall. “Yeah.”

“…I suppose that’s all the information I’m getting here,” Aizawa sighs. “I’ll talk to the brass on Monday, but I don’t see any problems promoting you up. Tensei’s overwhelmed working that detail alone. He’s been needing a partner since Torino retired.”

Katsuki scowls and sits back in his chair. “Fucking prick needed to retire ten years ago.”

“Your strange prejudice aside, is this really what you want?”

Figuring that’s a fair question, Katsuki thinks about it—changing partners, working with someone he literally exchanged no more than five words with since promoting into the bureau, seeing gruesome shit like this up close and in person. He rubs a thumb across his mouth and looks again at his old guy. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he says. “I’ll start with a quadruple arrest on Monday.”

“Make it Wednesday. The brass still needs to approve the promotion, and you need to partner up with Tensei. Let him know what you’re working on.”

“Fine.”

“Good luck, Bakugou. And congratulations.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Katsuki says and hangs up before Aizawa gets all sentimental on him. Then he stands up, taking care to close the file folder lest Deku return while he’s away, and walks over to the little homicide corner he’s ignored for years. Unlike the rest of the bureau, homicide actually has an enclosed office style set up, with two desks facing each other dead center of the room. Katsuki opens the door and flicks on the light, which sparks ominously like a bad premonition. He scowls around. There’s a whiteboard behind the occupied desk which has scribbles and circles all over it. Tensei, whoever the fuck that is, is apparently decently organized, if a little haphazard in a way that Katsuki appreciates after compiling his paper maze. He picks around the printouts and maps and fallen pins until he can look at the board up close. There are at least five distinct cases up here.

No wonder the guy needs help.

Katsuki scowls and scratches the back of his head before spinning to eyeball the pristine desk that basically belongs to him. Bigger than his old desk, at least. There’s another whiteboard over there all taped up with newspaper clippings. Solved cases. Katsuki flips through them idly until he finds one he rather dreaded seeing—the one he solved when he first started. Of course, that’d be in here. Fuckers.

He sits at his new desk and lays his head back. The tiles are comfortingly familiar.

“Detective?”

“In here!” Katsuki yells before Deku can start panicking too severely.

The smell of warm food precludes a little green blob appearing in the doorway looking entirely too relieved to see Katsuki alive and well. “What’s this?” he asks in a blatant attempt to avoid the elephant in the room.

Katsuki takes the reprieve. “Homicide.”

“Oh.” Deku sounds oddly subdued as he sets the ramen on Katsuki’s new desk and wanders over to look at the newspaper wall. “I recognize some of these,” he says. His finger naturally lands on the one Katsuki would rather avoid. This entire shrine is coming down as soon as Aizawa officially announces the transfer. “This one. I’m surprised it’s here.”

“Think Torino handled that case before I solved it. He was the last detective in here.”

“Torino. Yeah. I remember him.”

“You do?” Katsuki asks suspiciously. He’s not jealous that Deku apparently stalked someone else. Not at all. “Guy’s a cocky prick. How the fuck did you know him?”

“He interviewed me for this case.”

Katsuki goes still.

Unaware of Katsuki’s hunted animal response, Deku tilts his curly green head and taps the article, voice soft. “I was eight, and my dad took me to an amusement park. It was the first time we ever went anywhere without my mom. I—ran off, I guess. Saw something I liked. By the time my dad noticed, some guy was dragging me behind one of the rides. I didn’t know what was going on, wasn’t even scared until my dad started yelling. Then the guy pulled a knife.” Katsuki’s eyes dip down to the arm Deku has tucked against his side, the one covered in dozens of slashing scars. “Doctor said I was lucky to survive,” Deku continues in a detached voice. “My dad—wasn’t. I was too young to remember any pertinent details, and the case went cold.” Deku’s pretty pond water eyes swivel around to look at Katsuki. When he smiles, Katsuki’s ears ring. “Till you found him. I never did thank you for that.”

“I—” Katsuki looks from Deku’s tentative face to his own irritated mug framed forever in ugly yellow newsprint, and he swallows hard. “Fuck, Deku. I don’t even remember—”

“I know, it’s okay. You don’t really care about the victims.”

Katsuki flinches. It’s not his job to coddle victims. Not even his job to avenge them. He just—catches criminals. Makes them pay for their mistakes. He’s never cared who he hurts to achieve that end.

Never even knew one of the people he stepped on was probably Deku.

“How did you find him?” Deku asks before Katsuki can muster any logical response that doesn’t involve admitting what a piece of shit he is.

“I, uh. Just followed what was there. Guy’s a predator. Predators don’t—stop. Figured he’d done it before.” Leaning forward puts him closer to Deku, his face in line with that pert ass, but for once his focus is on something less than physical. “Thought to myself, why would the guy need a knife to kidnap a little boy? Found a registered sex offender from another county who cut kids up for fun. His type was—you. That age, I mean.”

“It seems so simple when you put it like that,” Deku sighs. His fingers rub the newspaper one more time before falling away. “I couldn’t pass the psychological evaluation to become a cop because of my, um, my trauma. That’s why I went into journalism. I tried to find him, Katsuki. I tried so hard—”

Deku abruptly starts sniffling, and Katsuki doesn’t think before surging upright and tucking Deku beneath his jaw. “I found him for you,” he says fiercely. “I fucking got him, and he’s gunna rot in prison being gangraped by murderers for the rest of his worthless life.”

“My hero,” Deku laughs, his voice wet and sweet even as his hands clench in Katsuki’s shirt, trembling and white knuckled with some emotion Katsuki hasn’t the experience to name. Fear, maybe. Relief. Who the fuck knows. He pulls Deku tight into his chest and figures, yeah, this is happening. Stockholm syndrome or not, good idea or not, healthy or mutually assured destruction, Katsuki cannot reverse time and dodge this bullet. He’s a wild dog chained in the backyard now, a domesticated animal. He can’t let Deku go. For better or worse.

“Fuck,” he breathes, burrowing into Deku’s soft hair. He smells like Katsuki’s body wash. “I’m goddamned nuts, that’s what I am.”

“What?”

Embarrassed, Katsuki mutters, “I really fucking like you.”

Deku makes this breathy, surprised little noise in the back of his throat and winds his arms around to clutch at Katsuki’s back. “Really?” he asks, voice small and trembly.

“Yeah,” Katsuki says, sealing his fate. “I’m a suicidal, overaggressive, workaholic nutjob who’s probably going to fall in love with you. For what that’s worth.”

Another one of those sweet noises precludes the strong hand that grabs his neck and forces him down into a shockingly intense kiss. Deku wastes no time prying Katsuki’s lips open and licking inside with all the force of an imperialist expedition looking for new land to claim. Groaning, Katsuki swoops Deku off his feet and slams him down on the desk, uncaring when the ramen rattles off the edge and spills all over the place. Guess they’re fucking through the desk after all.

He fumbles for his belt buckle cursing the futility of releasing his cock when Deku has those gorgeous legs wrapped vicelike around his waist. Deku notices too, as one hand comes down to push at his little shorts while the other rakes through the hair Katsuki cut to Deku’s taste. Deku whimpers encouragement, his tongue still mostly in Katsuki’s mouth. It’s embarrassingly fast, with Katsuki holding Deku in place by the small of his back and frantically jerking their cocks together, while Deku clings to his shoulders and gasps. The way his long swan neck tips back deserves more attention than Katsuki has the brain cells to deliver, and he drops his open mouth onto Deku’s Adam’s apple only to pant there, useless as a lump. He comes with a curse, forcing Deku to dig his feet into Katsuki’s ass and hump upward until he, too, comes between them with a gorgeous wail.

Katsuki just barely catches them with his messy outstretched hand before they slide off the desk.

“Fuuuck,” he groans through the aftershocks. “You’re so fucking gorgeous.”

Deku hums and drags Katsuki down for another kiss. This is clearly going to be a thing. “I really like you too,” he purrs. “So, so much. You have no idea.”

Figuring he should get an idea, he asks, “What’s my shoe size?”

“Eleven and a half,” Deku answers promptly.

“Blood type?”

“A positive.”

“Favorite color?”

“Red.”

“Wrong,” Katsuki takes far too much pleasure in saying. Below him, Deku startles and blinks up at Katsuki confusedly. In answer, Katsuki rubs a thumb beneath Deku’s left eye. “Your eyes remind me of a pond I used to spend my summers playing in. Algae filled mucus puddle, really. Don’t know why the fuck I liked it so much.”

“Oh,” Deku says, looking charmed when, really, that wasn’t a compliment by normal people standards.

“You’re a freak,” Katsuki tells Deku warmly. “C’mon. This desk isn’t technically mine yet.”

Deku clamors up after Katsuki with adorably wobbly knees. “Yet?”

Buttoning up, Katsuki sighs and glances around the shabby little office one last time. Newspapers and whiteboards and a thousand printouts of gore. “Yeah. Asked for homicide while you were out buying—” he looks down at their spilled, cold, dirty lunch. “Fuck.”

“That’s great! Not about lunch, that kind of sucks, but homicide! You’re gunna kill it!”

Katsuki snorts.

“That was unintentional!” Deku giggles.

“Sure it was, nerd.” He wraps Deku up beneath his arm and leads them out of homicide, making a mental note to notify the janitorial staff of the spill. And the—mess. Fuck, he’ll owe them all a week of lunch. Maybe two weeks.

Worth it.

He cracks his neck when they reach his old desk and accepts the hand Deku rubs over his belly while they stand there staring at the desk he’s spent the last few years riding hard enough to put the whole bureau to shame. Looking at the trappings of his old life, he figures—fuck it. Fuck everything.

“C’mon, Deku. Let’s find something to eat.”

“But—work?”

“It’ll still be here on Monday.”

The way Deku looks up at him for that, pond water eyes glowing in the shitty fluorescent light and pink lips stretched into a delighted smile, is well worth the anxious discomfort he feels at abandoning his assignment. He reminds himself rather pointedly that his latest victim has been dead since 2001, and Katsuki hasn’t taken a proper day off since high school. He can afford lunch with his—boyfriend.

No, he can’t use that word in all seriousness.

“The fuck do I call you?” he asks as they exit the bureau and walk leisurely toward the exit, his motorcycle keys twirling in his free hand.

“Um, you call me Deku?”

“I mean—us. This.”

“Oh.” Deku leans his head on Katsuki’s chest and continues rubbing Katsuki’s stomach, around and around in soothing little circles that quell some of the anxiety away. The desk officer on duty looks horrified to see Katsuki snuggling anyone as they pass by, and Katsuki smiles at her meanly while hustling them into the midday sunshine. Finally, after much frowning and lip biting, Deku shrugs and rolls his head back against Katsuki’s bicep to beam at Katsuki. “I’m okay with Deku.”

“Useless fucking shitty nerd.” He kisses Deku anyway, because that pretty mouth is there and he can. “Fine, then what the fuck are you gunna call me? And don’t you dare say detective.”

Deku pokes his tongue out from between his pink lips. “Katsuki?”

“What, you don’t have any imagination?”

They separate to mount the motorcycle, only Katsuki leans against the beast instead, holding their ride hostage while he smirks and waits for an answer. Deku puffs his freckled cheeks out in indignation and crosses his arms. He very clearly stole another sweater this morning, this one from the police academy, all threadbare and soft. Deku swims in the gray fabric so that his tiny shorts are barely visible, giving the illusion of nakedness that Katsuki finds blisteringly attractive even with Deku scowling at him. He jangles the keys between them. “Fine, how about—” Deku pauses dramatically. “Katsuki-kun?” Katsuki scoffs. “Katsu-chan?” He wrinkles his nose at the idea of a nickname that sounds like food, but shrugs anyway, okay with it long term. “You don’t like it.”

“It’s fine, nerd. I know how much you like food.”

“You’re better than food,” Deku pouts. “Kacchan?”

“I’m better than a five-year-old, too.”

“You really, really prefer Katsu-chan to Kacchan?” Katsuki opens his mouth and cannot in good conscience choose one over the other. “That’s what I thought, Kacchan. My Kacchan.”

‘My’ anything actually sounds rather nice coming from Deku.

Katsuki looks down at his crossed boots and shuffles them in the layer of wind dust coating the asphalt. “Yours,” he agrees.

He sees Deku’s feet approach before hands cup his cheeks and lift his chin up. Deku smiles at him soft and sweet, his eyes sparkling, fingers lightly stroking up into Katsuki’s hair. “I want you to take me home and fuck me against the front door.”

Well, Katsuki’s definitely keeping this fucking haircut. “Lunch?” he asks hoarsely.

“Fuck lunch,” Deku says with that same sweet smile.

Katsuki doesn’t need telling twice. They mount the motorcycle, and Katsuki perhaps drives inadvisably fast down residential streets until they park in a skidding slide in front of his home. He does end up fucking Deku against the front door, Deku squealing loud enough to alert the neighbors if anyone happens to walk by. Then they stumble to the couch for another round. Then the living room rug. Then up against the hallway wall. Then the floor of his bedroom. Then a detour into the shower, which turns into twice in the shower and once on the bathroom sink. Then, finally, in the bed.

“Oh my god,” Deku says meekly when Katsuki finally rolls off. He looks about as debauched as Katsuki feels. “That was—”

“Yeah,” Katsuki agrees.

Deku rolls over and glitters at him a bit. “That was—was—”

“Yeah,” Katsuki repeats slowly while wondering if they went too hard in the shower. He clearly knocked the kid’s head into the tile when he wasn’t paying attention.

“You’re amazing,” Deku beams at him.

“Fuck yeah I am.”

“Not very flexible—”

Katsuki snarls and rolls overtop Deku again, much to Deku’s squealing delight. “Be grateful I let you top at all. It’s been—” He stops and tries to remember the last time. That’s a thing he’s done. He knows he has. Probably. “Whatever. My ass fucking hurts.”

Deku giggles and clutches at Katsuki’s back. “Mine hurts!” he says, still sounding far too delighted for the topic of conversation.

Grunting, Katsuki noses at the ring of marks he left on Deku’s neck. “Couldn’t help it.”

“Good,” Deku whispers. He licks Katsuki’s ear and sucks the lobe, purring like a little kitten rolling around in an entire bowl of cream, and Katsuki groans to feel his dick stirring like Pavlov’s fucking dog. “Oh,” Deku gasps when his thigh inevitably brushes down below. His face, if possible, grows even more delighted at this turn of events. “Again?”

“No,” Katsuki says, even as he knocks Deku’s legs apart. “Fuck, I’m not a teenager anymore.”

Deku licks his swollen mouth and wraps a strong hand around Katsuki’s chafed erection. “One more time,” he says in that falsely sweet voice that Katsuki is rapidly learning promises devious things for the future. “Please? Kacchan please?”

Which, well.

Weak protests firmly batted away, they literally spend the entire weekend having sex all over the apartment. Katsuki loses a decorative vase in the kitchen and a picture off the wall, both gifts from his overbearing mother. They each endure a rather serious case of rug burn on their knees, back, and elbows. Deku nearly chips a tooth on the kitchen tile. Katsuki draws the line when his own head shatters the mirror in the bathroom, and he has to pick bloody glass from his scalp.

“You need new stuff anyway,” is Deku’s bright and unrepentant response.

Contrary to logic, they do not go shopping that weekend, and Katsuki limps into work on Monday cursing the demon he unknowingly unleashed upon himself. Shitty Hair bursts out laughing when he spies Katsuki hobbling around like an old man. “Oh my god, oh my god, you got laid! HARD!”

Katsuki endures the pain inherent in walking around to Shitty Hair’s side of their conjoined desks so he can strangle his best friend until the idiot taps submission. “Fucking right I did,” he sneers over Shitty Hair’s desperate hacking coughs. Then he adjusts his sore dick into a slightly less punishing position.

“Disgusting pig,” Half and Half mutters from across the fucking room.

“Least I’m getting some!” Katsuki says, knowing as he does that Half and Half can’t retaliate without outing his secret relationship to the entire bureau.

Half and Half knows it too, and flushes up a satisfyingly angry red.

It’s then, of course, that Aizawa walks up. “Do I need to schedule another sexual harassment training seminar?” he asks the room at large and, magically, every fucker in the bureau suddenly finds other shit to do.

Katsuki frowns at them all for being weak. “Any word from the brass, Sarge?”

“Ever heard of patience?” He levels Aizawa a flat expression. “Thought not. You’re approved. I even updated Tensei since you took your sweet time getting here. He cried.”

“From joy or despair?”

“I didn’t ask.” Aizawa glances down at the desk Katsuki keeps immaculately clean, his one concession to personal affects being the picture he hung on Saturday. Aizawa spends an inordinate amount of time staring at that picture before turning his creepy bloodshot eyes on Katsuki. “Take an hour to move your things and settle in with Tensei. I expect weekly reports from homicide on your open cases. Cold cases are on the backburner until the newer ones are solved. Clear?”

“Not a fucking rookie, Sarge. I’ll have my shit ready.”

Apparently satisfied, Aizawa wanders into his office, leaving Katsuki to endure the open surprise on Shitty Hair’s face. “Dude.”

“Don’t say it,” Katsuki snaps.

Ignoring him, Shitty Hair stands and leans across their desks. “Dude. You’re homicide? Since when?” Katsuki looks unironically at the clock hanging on the nearby wall. “Fuck you, bro, you know what I mean. That’s awesome, congratulations! I knew you’d get it soon.”

“I didn’t get anything,” Katsuki admits as he creaks down into his chair to unlock his desk. He can probably walk these files over to homicide without borrowing a box. He doesn’t have much. Just the unsolved oldies and his old man. In hindsight, that should’ve been motivation enough to abandon the robbery desk. “I asked for it on Saturday.”

He hears more than sees Shitty Hair sit down. “Oh. After—not finding the body.”

Katsuki stacks his files in his lap and plucks his old guy off the wall. “Yeah. Not giving up on my old guy. Not yet.”

“Did your warrant come through?”

He didn’t actually check, and he still has to move his shit and meet his new partner. “No fucking idea,” he sighs. “Doesn’t matter. Aizawa wants me to hold off on the arrest until Wednesday.”

“Since when do you listen to Aizawa?”

As he does not have a good answer to that question that doesn’t involve talking about Deku, or suicide, or his ridiculously amazing new sex life, Katsuki settles for a shrug. He picks up his files and almost falls over when his thighs protest this new strain. God, and Deku already said he’d be waiting for Katsuki at home today. He even said home.

Down boy, he tells his overeager dick.

“Be seeing you, dipshit,” he tells Shitty Hair.

“Pinks for lunch?” Shitty Hair replies hopefully, those damn puppy eyes out in force, and Katsuki scowls at him for just long enough to make that smile falter.

“Alright.”

“Hell yeah!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Aizawa yells from his office nearby. “Bakugou, get your ass in gear!”

“Yessir,” Katsuki snorts. He shares one last exasperated glance with Shitty Hair, the idiot still beaming fit to split his face, and then he walks across the bureau to homicide.

The janitorial staff mercifully cleaned his and Deku’s mess over the weekend, leaving only the overwhelming pile of papers everywhere. There’s a tall, tan detective in the room currently scribbling on the one visible white board. He looks over when Katsuki kicks the door jam in greeting and smiles warmly. “Aizawa said you’d be heading my way.” The guy stretches a hand out. “Bakugou, right? I’m Tensei Iida. Feel free to call me Tensei.”

Katsuki drops his files on the empty desk and shakes the offered hand. “Katsuki. Call me what the fuck ever.”

“Roger.” Tensei returns to his white board. “I hear you have experience in homicide?”

“Some. Cold cases.”

“Cold cases are the worst,” Tensei sighs. “At least fresh murders allow us to actually interact with the crime scene. I’ve got seven open right now. Know any of them?”

“Not a one.”

Tensei waves him over and points at the board. “This is the big one. Seven-year-old kid found raped and beaten in Gotunda. These two are escalated domestic, pretty open and shut with the right evidence. This one is actually three victims, gunshots. I’m thinking gang related. Fifth is a strangled prostitute, don’t have that one on the board yet, but the brass is worried it might be a budding serial killer so that’s priority two. This one was from last month, mutual combat ending in seventeen stab wounds and a slit throat. Suspect is still outstanding, but we’ve got a name. Last but not least, teenager had her baby cut out of her stomach. I’m dead in the water on that till forensics comes back.”

Katsuki looks over the board thoughtfully and, figuring it’s his first fucking day, turns to Tensei. “Which cases do you want me to handle?”

“Ready to jump in just like that?”

Snorting, Katsuki crosses his arms and stares the older man down. “Got four arrest warrants in the works right now, homicide from 1992. Should be ready by Wednesday. Think you’re good to jump in on that?”

Tensei stares at him for a couple seconds and then smiles. It’s a lot more genuine than the face he greeted Katsuki with, something Katsuki didn’t notice at the time. The guy must be killer in interrogation if he’s fooling Katsuki’s otherwise perfect bullshit detector so early in their acquaintance. “Fair enough. Think you can wrap up the two domestics?”

“Sure. And I’ll find that fucking stab-happy prick for you free of charge. Gimme a week.”

“I think I’m going to like you,” Tensei says in a peppy voice that Katsuki finds strangely familiar. Whatever, he’ll figure it out eventually.

“Jury’s out on my end.” He dumps his files in the nearest drawer, careful not to remember what Deku looked like sprawled across the polished walnut top, and turns to give the newspaper wall the hairy eyeball. “You want to save this shit? ‘Cause it’s coming down whether you like it or not.”

“That was Torino’s thing.”

“Trash it is.”

They work in admirable quiet for the rest of the morning. Tensei occasionally mutters to himself, not that Katsuki minds. He accustomed himself to that kind of background noise over the weekend. He pulls down the newspaper clippings to reveal a completely fucked white board, so he tears that down too and lugs it to the dumpster, cursing the newly developed weakness in his lower half. On his way back to the bureau, he stops to requisition a new one from the desk officer. Sonic is on duty and salutes him when he leaves.

“Hey, you related to Sonic?” he asks Tensei when he returns to the office.

The guy blinks up at him and, really, it’s a shame Katsuki didn’t notice before. They look fucking identical. “Who the hell is Sonic?”

“Don’t know his fucking name. Officer who operates the desk. Looks just like you if you wore glasses.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s my little brother.”

“Figures.” Katsuki glances out the door and sees Shitty Hair in the distance. He’s up and straightening his button-down shirt like he usually does before seeing his future wife. Which means it’s lunchtime. “Yo, Knuckles, wanna grab lunch?”

“…is that me? Am I Knuckles?”

“Is there someone else in this fucking room, asswipe? Lunch, yes or no.”

Knuckles glances down at his marker and caps it. “Sure, I can eat. Where are we going?”

Seeing Shitty Hair approaching from the corner of his eye, Katsuki feels his mouth curve into a vicious grin. “You ever eaten at Pinks?”

“Once or twice,” Knuckles remarks curiously. “Why do you have that look on your face?”

“Ever seen a bitch cry?” Katsuki asks in the rhetorical belief that Knuckles will not understand why exactly Katsuki wants to see a bitch cry, never mind identifying the bitch in question. That said, Katsuki rarely needs a reason to fuck with Shitty Hair, and Knuckles will see for himself soon enough.

He’s more than a little surprised when Knuckles quirks an eyebrow and says, “Yes.”

They stare at each other, assessing, neither one dropping their poker face enough to give away any unwanted secrets, and Katsuki decides he likes having a partner who can go pound for pound in the ring of his admittedly caustic personality. He deliberately relaxes, letting his shoulders ease down and his weight settle back on his heels. Knuckles blinks. “Think we’re gunna get along just fine, Knuckles,” Katsuki says.

“Jury’s out on my end,” Knuckles replies in a deadpan reflection of Katsuki’s earlier proclamation, startling Katsuki into a genuine laugh.

“Woah, dude, are you actually laughing?” Shitty Hair’s voice chirps from the doorway, and Katsuki cuts that shit off immediately. “Aw, don’t stop! That was kind of nice. Freaky, but nice.” He shuffles into the office and claps Katsuki on the shoulder all friendly because he has no idea what’s coming. “Hey, nice to meet you man. Name’s Eijiro. Me n’ Baku-bro here worked property crimes together. He’s a prick, but you get used to it.”

“Tensei, and I’ve worked with worse. He tells me we’re going to Pinks?”

“Yeah,” Shitty Hair sighs lovingly, not even remarking on Katsuki inviting someone else along on their lunch date.

The someone in question looks rightfully confused at whatever the hell mushy feelings shit has taken over Shitty Hair’s pointy face, so Katsuki, being in a somewhat generous mood, explains, “He’s in love with the owner.”

“Shut up, Baku-bro. She’s gorgeous.”

“She’s the same color as a chewed-up wad of gum, moron.” Katsuki dodges the swipe to his face and locks Shitty Hair into an arm-bar. “Gimme a reason.”

“I’ll—tell Izuku!”

“What, that I’m bullying you?” Katsuki snorts and steers Shitty Hair out of the room by his trapped arm. If the idiot were smart, he’d aim low and take Katsuki out at his jellied knees. Sadly, the Academy clearly taught Katsuki’s best friend nothing, and he follows Katsuki’s prodding with a panicky face all swollen red in a sick combination of anger at the position he’s in and genuine concern that Katsuki will hurt him. What a moron, for more than just the obvious reasons. “Even if you had his phone number, which I highly fucking doubt, I sucked his dick this morning. And drank his jizz. I am Jesus fucking incarnate in his eyes. You comin’, Knuckles?”

“I can tell you’re going to be a roller-coaster of a partner, Bakugou,” Knuckles says mildly from behind them. “You care if I drive?”

Katsuki actually releases Shitty Hair for that one, turning to lock metaphorical horns with a warily frowning Knuckles. “Yeah, I do,” Katsuki pronounces bluntly while Shitty Hair mutters and rotates his sore shoulder in careful circles. “If you have a problem with that, ride in another fucking car because I don’t give a shit for your opinion.”

Knuckles’ eyebrows snap up. “You been to anger management?”

Shitty Hair starts laughing. “Been? He holds the rec—ow! Damnit, Baku-bro, stop hitting me!”

Katsuki ignores him. “We rolling together or not, Knuckles?”

“Depends on who’s driving,” Knuckles says in a trifling voice that Katsuki instinctively distrusts. “How about a game, then, to see who deserves the wheel?”

“You’re on,” Katsuki bites despite knowing that he’s being played.

Clearly a sibling used to trading games for prizes, Knuckles whips both hands into the air, one palm flat and the other curled into a fist. “Best two out of three,” he challenges, gaze flinty. Katsuki scowls at the juvenile reality in front of him but nevertheless puts his own hands up. He never backs down from a challenge, after all.

“Oh my god,” Shitty Hair gasps like a Victorian lady clutching her pearls. “This isn’t happening.”

“Shut the fuck up,” both Katsuki and Knuckles say in unison.

They slap their fists into their palms three times, and Katsuki mercifully ignores Shitty Hair whispering “Janken!” in the background. He bares his teeth when he sees that Katsuki used paper on his rock and immediately moves to continue. This time, Knuckles’ stupid paper falls to his scissors.

“What’s going on?” he hears Deku’s sweet voice ask from—somewhere.

They both choose rock.

“Hey Izuku!” Shitty Hair greets while Katsuki and Knuckles glare at each other. “They’re just deciding who’s driving. You here for lunch?”

“Um. Yes? If, um, if that’s okay—”

“You’re staying for lunch, Deku,” Katsuki snaps before that chance leaves him. Turns out, he will pay just as much money to see Deku eat a burger as bite into a strawberry. He and Knuckles tie again, this time on paper, and he curses the delay. “Just lose already, you fucking wannabe hedgehog prick!”

Knuckles’ face twitches with irritation. “Never, you ugly crocodile fuck.”

Katsuki’s hand slips in surprise. Too late, Knuckles yells in delight, and Katsuki roars, “Rematch!” at the upper register of his lungs, uncaring when half the bureau stands up in their cubicles to rubberneck the drama. He flips them all the bird.

“Take your loss with dignity, Vector,” Knuckles says in a falsely sweet register that grinds Katsuki’s gears.

He bares his teeth at the other man threateningly, and damn whatever his therapist has to say on the matter. He traded her out for a newer model. “What the fuck did you just call me, huh?”

“Turnabout is fair play.”

“Ooh, that’s a good one!” Shitty Hair laughs. Katsuki even hears Deku laugh which, fuck. On the one hand, Katsuki does not like being the butt of the joke. On the other, he rather loves the tinkling giggle currently spilling like diamonds from Deku’s swan throat, and he swallows back a rather embarrassing response to that, face hot.

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met?” Knuckles says before Katsuki pops. He sticks his hand out at Deku. “Tensei Iida.”

“Izuku Midoriya,” Deku chirps back.

“That’s Baku-bro’s boyfriend,” Shitty Hair interrupts conversationally. Knuckles seems interested in the discussion when Katsuki checks, eyebrow up and expression friendly in a classically attentive expression that Katsuki now automatically distrusts after seeing the engine under the hood. Shitty Hair has no idea he’s being milked for information. “They’re super cute and in love, but don’t worry. Katsuki likes to keep his emotional shit close to the chest. He’s not gross about it.”

Deku blushes an embarrassed pink that Katsuki instantly wants to see more of while simultaneously wanting to punch Shitty Hair in the mouth for daring to discomfit his—Deku. “If I like keeping my shit close, why the fuck are you airing it all over the bureau?” Katsuki grinds out as an acceptable compromise between two warring emotions. Shitty Hair puts his hands up and backs away, grinning. “That’s what I thought.”

“Stop bullying everyone,” Deku orders with an actual wagging finger. Katsuki follows the finger with his eyes, then notices the person attached.

He blushes to his roots.

“Oh, uh, okay,” he splutters, too busy gawking at the rather blinding sight of whatever the fuck shiny pink shit Deku put on his perfect pillow lips. His abused lower half valiantly attempts to react.

“Oh my god,” Shitty Hair whispers.

“I take it this isn’t normal,” Knuckles replies drily.

Katsuki flips them all the bird, attention still hyper fixated on the sweet curve of Deku’s lovely little mouth. “On second fucking thought,” he begins.

“Nope,” Shitty Hair interrupts. “Nuh-uh, no way, you’re not abandoning me for lunch when I haven’t seen you in days. We gotta celebrate your first day in homicide!”

“Homicide!” Deku repeats in a sparkly glitter voice that brightens the conversation like sunrise over a barren field. Which, great, now Katsuki’s half-formed plans of afternoon delight are thoroughly trashed. He glares at an oblivious Shitty Hair as his best friend and his boyfriend give each other happy high fives like his assignment to homicide is somehow their accomplishment and not his own. “That’s great, wow! You’re going to be amazing!”

“I’m over here, fucker,” he says sourly.

Deku giggles and finally abandons Shitty Hair to claim his rightful place wrapped around Katsuki’s arm. “Sorry Kacchan.”

“Kacchan!” Shitty Hair repeats.

Abruptly, Deku is not smiling. He bares his teeth at Shitty Hair and says, “No,” in the deepest voice he’s ever used in Katsuki’s hearing. Katsuki feels his eyebrows snap up in a surprise mirrored on Shitty Hair’s pointy face.

“Huh,” Shitty Hair says.

“How about that lunch,” Knuckles interjects in a falsely bright voice that Katsuki doesn’t trust.

Katsuki glares at them all and says, “One fucking word from any of you and you’re dead.”

Shitty Hair mimes zipping his lips with a bright, mischievous smile that means he’s deferring his inevitable death until after lunch so he can see his sweetheart one last time, while Knuckles merely shrugs his shoulders and gestures toward the door, expression blandly uninterested. When he meets eyes with Katsuki, he winks.

“I hate you all,” Katsuki growls.

Hands digging like claws into Katsuki’s bicep, Deku giggles, which is a rather accurate summary of his fucked up emotional state.

Whatever. Deku isn’t the only fucked up asshole in the room.

Head held high, Katsuki leads his trio of chattering idiots out of the bureau with the folded picture of his little old guy still burning a hole in his pocket and phantom blood still splattered across his hands and face. He feels like a caricature of a human being, just one false step away from cracking the façade and sending his whole house of emotional cards tumbling into a messy heap of tears and shame. His ankle gun stalks the back of his mind, an ever-present temptation he halfway worries will always haunt him.

Maybe this is all a mistake. Maybe all Katsuki ever does is fuck up repeatedly, one after the other like seconds ticking away the future one small, chipped piece at a time.

Maybe Katsuki doesn’t give a shit anymore if he’s making a mistake. For now, he’s just getting lunch.

What the fuck can go wrong during lunch?