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The car is right there. You can see the glossy black door waiting beyond the barricades, the suited driver standing by it with the kind of stiff posture that says he has been told not to react to anything short of a missile. It is maybe twenty feet away. Twenty feet and an entire wall of people.
Camera flashes keep firing in your face. Somebody on your left is calling your hero name in a voice that turns shrill on the last syllable. Another fan has shoved a programme booklet over the barrier and is pleading for an autograph. There is perfume in the air, hairspray, somebody’s takeout coffee, the expensive powdery smell still clinging to your gala clothes after three straight hours of smiles and handshakes inside the ballroom.
You sign the booklet. You smile for a selfie. You tell yourself you can do ten more seconds of this, then five, then just enough to reach the car.
It would almost be easier if it were hostility. Easier if anyone here were actually trying to hurt you. But they are thrilled, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, leaning over the barriers to get a little closer to No. 6. They are only excited. They are only loud. They are only grabbing for your attention because they think it costs nothing for you to keep giving it.
Being the No. 6 Hero means you don’t get to belong to yourself in public anymore. You belong to the lenses, to the fans screaming your name, and to the reporters shoving recorders toward your face like bayonets. You are far newer to this part than Bakugo is. He was famous before he even settled into the Top Ten. People have been fawning over him since he was a teenager with a temper problem and a habit of destroying training grounds. You are still trying to get used to what it means when your face starts showing up on giant screens outside train stations, when magazines write two-page articles about why you were smiling at a restaurant, when strangers speak to you as though they know you just because they once saw you bleeding on the evening news.
"Don’t stop moving," he mutters. His words aren’t for the crowd. They’re for you, vibration-low and edged with a warning he hasn’t vocalised yet.
A hand brushes your bare shoulder. Another catches the edge of your sleeve.
You keep that smile going. Until your cheeks hurt.
Somebody asks if the dress is custom, and you laugh politely, even though you barely hear yourself over the noise. The gown had seemed a good idea under the hotel lights: sleek, fitted, dark enough to flatter, slit high enough that your stylist declared it bold without being slutty. Out here, right now, it feels like borrowed skin. Your heels are biting. Your earrings feel too heavy. Every inch of you still needs to stay available for photographs.
You keep stepping sideways. The driver catches the movement and opens the rear door another few inches.
You’re so close.
"Please, just one more!" A girl squeals, holding up a phone with a case covered in tiny glitter stars. "You and Dynamight are seriously my favourite hero duo."
You pose again because saying no to that face would make you feel monstrous. The photo takes too long. She squeaks so hard you think it might crack glass.
A second phone appears. Then a third.
Security is trying to keep the line from collapsing, but the crowd is swelling now that more people have spilled out from the gala exit. Somebody shouts Bakugo’s hero name from somewhere behind you, and the whole pack jolts like a flock changing direction at once.
You turn your head on instinct, and that is when it happens.
A man in a suit leans over the barrier, grinning so hard it pushes his cheeks flat. "Hey, wait—just sign this—" His fingers close around your forearm before you can step away, not painful at first, just abrupt, a stranger’s hand hot on your skin. "Please, my daughter’s a huge fan."
Your breath catches.
There is no room to move. Bodies press in from both sides, close enough that the air itself grows hotter. More voices pile on top of each other. A biro nudges against your wrist. Someone else shouts your hero name right near your ear and it scrapes over your nerves like sandpaper.
You should say something.
You should pull your arm back and tell him not to touch you.
You should.
Instead, you get stuck there with that sweaty grip on you and every instinct you have splitting a thousand different ways: hero training telling you not to escalate, public image telling you not to make a face, your own body quietly screaming at you to get out.
The noise goes thin and sharp.
You hear yourself say, "Sorry—just a second—"
The hand tightens. He’s not being cruel, just insistent, as though he assumes you’ll understand.
A shadow cuts across the flashes.
Then there is a shoulder in front of you, broad and black-suited and familiar, forcing a wedge of space where there wasn’t any before. Bakugo moves like somebody kicking through a door. One second, you are trapped behind a line of eager faces, and the next, he’s there, driving the crowd back with the sheer violence of his presence.
"Back off," he snaps.
He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to.
Some people start to recoil on reflex. A woman with a camera stumbles back into somebody else. Security finally gets their heads out of their asses and starts pushing the front row behind the flimsy barrier again.
Bakugo’s eyes drop to your arm. The man is still holding you.
Bakugo goes very still.
The sound that leaves him doesn’t qualify as a word. It sits lower than that, a rough vibration torn straight from his chest that travels up through his teeth, ugly enough that the people nearest him flinch before their brains catch up. Even the guy gripping you finally seems to register that he has made some catastrophic mistake. His smile vanishes.
Bakugo steps in close enough that the man has to crane his neck to keep eye contact.
"Take your damn hand off her," he says.
There is nothing theatrical in it. Bakugo doesn’t bother with polished hero optics or that fixed public smile. He just delivers it flat, jaw locked tight enough for the muscle near his ear to twitch.
The man lets go immediately, his face draining of colour. "I—I was just asking for—"
"The hell do you think this is?" Bakugo cuts in, every word crisp as broken glass. "A petting zoo?"
Nobody laughs.
The man recoils, mutters an apology to absolutely no one in particular, and vanishes into the crowd with the rest of them backing off in a messy wave. Fans who were still holding out posters lower them. A teenager who had been shouting your name now looks as if she wants to melt through the pavement.
You are free.
Bakugo turns to you so sharply the tails of his black jacket swing. He looks expensive tonight against his will: fitted dark suit, shirt collar open because there is no force on earth that could keep him in a tie, blond hair combed into something that had probably looked presentable half an hour ago and now sits wild again from how often he has shoved his hand through it.
His gaze races over your face, your arm, your stance.
"You okay?" It comes out harsher than the question deserves, but you know him well enough to hear what sits underneath it.
You nod too quickly. "Yeah. Just—crowded."
His mouth flattens.
He plants a hand at the small of your back, firm and hot even through your dress, and steers you toward the waiting car. There are still people calling your names, still flashes popping from the curb, and security are trying to recover whatever professional dignity they had five minutes ago. Bakugo ignores all of it. He keeps himself half a step behind you and to the side, all hostility and threat display, making it obvious to anyone with a functioning set of eyes that they are not getting near you again tonight.
The driver shuts the door the second you duck inside, and silence drops like a curtain.
The city is still out there, camera clicks and engines and distant shouts muffled by the thick glass, but compared to the pavement outside it feels unreal. Cold air from the AC brushes your overheated skin. The leather seat beneath you is cool and smells clean, expensive, faintly sweet in a way you can’t place. Your own reflection looks back at you from the tinted window: lipstick smudged at one corner, hair coming loose, eyes wider than you expected.
Bakugo gets in after you and slams the opposite door with enough force to rattle the frame.
"Drive," he tells the driver.
Then he reaches up and drags the privacy partition closed with a hard shove. The panel slides into place, turning the front half of the car into another world.
For a second, all he does is sit there, knees spread, chest rising too fast, one hand braced on the seat. The city lights slip over the scar on his cheek and the line of his throat. You have seen him angry more times than you can count. This isn’t that. Anger is usually louder. Easier. This feels like he swallowed a live wire, and it’s still sparking inside him.
You lean your head back against the seat and let the cold air hit your face. "Katsuki—they didn’t know."
His eyes snap to yours. "What?"
"We haven’t gone public, remember? That was your call." Your voice sounds rougher than you wanted. "He wasn’t trying to be an asshole. None of them were."
Bakugo stares at you as though that’s the dumbest thing he has ever heard in his life.
"I don’t care if they knew."
He scrubs a hand over his mouth, then points at your arm. Faint pink fingerprints still bloom where the man grabbed you.
"That bastard had his hands on you."
"I’m fine."
"Quit saying that."
The words crack across the little space between you. You blink.
He leans forward, elbows on his knees now, glaring at the floor for half a second before looking back up. "Don’t give me that crap. You were standin’ there with that fake-ass smile like I wouldn’t notice something was off."
Embarrassment stings hot behind your ribs because the worst part is that he’s right. You kept playing nice because that is what a rising hero is supposed to do when cameras are rolling, and nobody has technically done anything wrong.
"I was handling it." You mutter.
"Like hell you were."
His voice drops lower on the last word. His fingers drum once against his thigh, then stop. He notices you noticing. Annoyance flashes across his face at the betrayal of his own body.
You shift closer across the seat before you can think better of it. "Katsuki—"
He catches your wrist and hauls you the rest of the way.
The kiss lands hard enough to jar your teeth. Not messy or careless, but hungry in a way that feels halfway to violence. His hand slides around the back of your neck, holding you there while his mouth works over yours like he’s starving and furious about it. You open for him with a sound you don’t mean to make. He takes the invitation instantly, tongue pushing deep past your teeth, breath hot, as if kissing you is finally letting something out.
Your hand fists in his jacket.
He breaks the kiss just enough to get words out. "The hell were you doing, just standing there while they grabbed at you?"
Your pulse is still uneven from the crowd, from him, from the way he saw straight through you. "I didn’t let—"
He kisses you again before you finish, shorter this time, biting your bottom lip hard on the way out.
"They cornered you." Another kiss at the edge of your mouth. "And you were still playing the nice hero." His nose brushes yours as he speaks, voice frayed with restraint. "The hell did you expect me to do? Stop being a dumbass."
Something hot and shaky moves through you. The air-conditioning, the leather, the sealed dark of the car, the city sliding by outside while he crowds into your space smelling of expensive cologne and sweat and the faint bite of his nitroglycerin under the surface—it all tips together until you feel almost drunk on it.
You touch his face. "Well, I’m here now. Safe."
His expression changes in a way that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know him so well. The anger doesn’t vanish, but it shifts. Gets swallowed by something more naked.
"Yeah," he says. "You are."
Then his hand is on your thigh, pushing the slit of your dress open until cool air hits the skin high above your knee. His thumb digs in once, hard enough to make your breath jump.
"You’re still shaking," he mutters. "C’mere."
You almost laugh because you are already practically in his lap, but he means something else. He guides you down across the back seat, one big hand at your waist, the other lifting your leg over his thigh. The leather gives a little under your shoulders, the hem of your dress rides up. The ceiling of the car suddenly feels low and intimate, the dark glass throwing back fractured glimpses of your gold earrings, pale skin, his broad frame bending over you.
"Katsuki—"
"Quiet."
It’s not impatience. It’s certainty.
His mouth finds your throat, then the underside of your jaw, rough but careful where it matters. One hand slips between your thighs and his thumb presses right against your underwear. Heat zips through you so fast it almost hurts. You jerk into him on instinct.
"Yeah, thought that might shut you up," he says against your skin, as if he’s been waiting for your body to stop lying on your behalf.
His fingers hook the fabric aside. The first stroke over your clit has you biting back a cry so sharp it turns into a gasp. You are already wet. More than wet. Embarrassingly, desperately ready, your body caught between the residue of panic and the relief of having him here and the filthy thrill of being handled like this in the back of a moving car while the whole city outside has no idea.
He knows exactly how to use his hands. Katsuki Bakugo does not do anything badly, and you have benefited from that fact more than once. Two fingers slide through your slick, gathering it, then circling back to rub slow and firm where you need it most until your knees twitch.
"Couldn’t focus on a damn thing out there," he says, watching your face now instead of what his hand is doing. "Just wanted you in here."
You swallow. "I thought—ah—you were gonna kill someone."
"I was real damn close."
That would be funny if he were not pushing a finger inside you at the same time. Your head knocks back against the seat. He works you open steadily, thumb still grinding tight patterns over your clit, never giving you enough space to think. Your hips start chasing the pressure. The cool leather under your back and the cold air blowing across your overheated skin make every touch feel brighter, sharper.
"You do that crap every damn time, y’know that?" He says. Another finger. A slight curl that finds the spot that makes your whole body seize. "Pisses me off."
A broken sound slips out of you.
"That’s it." His forehead dips briefly to yours, voice dropping. "Drop the act. I’ve got you."
The words punch straight through whatever composure you had left. Your orgasm catches fast, built on too many things at once. Humiliation, relief, how closely he watches you, how good his hand feels, how the night has left you rubbed raw in all the places nobody else can see. It hits with your legs shaking and your mouth open against his shoulder, a helpless little rhythm jerking through you while his fingers keep going just long enough to drag every last pulse out.
You come down in pieces, thighs wet, breath snagging.
"Fuck," you whisper.
"Yeah."
He sits back just enough to yank his belt open. The metal clicks loud in the enclosed car. He shoves his trousers down far enough, fists himself once with a strained look crossing his face, then nudges your knees wider.
You’re still oversensitive, still damp and trembling, dripping onto the black leather seat, and something about the way he looks at the mess of you—pleased, possessive, a little stunned by it—sends another rush of heat straight through your stomach.
He lines himself up and pushes in.
The stretch makes you gasp again. You’re used to his size by now, but sinking back around him while you’re still soft from your release feels overwhelming anyway. A warning growl, quieter this time but no less mean, rumbles out of him as he holds there for half a beat, eyes shut, one hand planted by your head.
Then he moves.
The car is long enough that the ride stays mostly smooth, but every turn and every brake sends a different kind of sway through the seat beneath you. Bakugo uses it. He keeps one hand under your thigh, holding you open, and drives into you with deep, controlled thrusts that still feel edged with the same temper he carried in from the street.
"Look at this," he says, and the words come out focused. "Knew all that nice-girl crap would drop the second I got my cock in you."
You laugh weakly, and it breaks into a moan when he hits deeper. His mouth curves without mercy.
He leans down and kisses you again, shorter, dirtier, his hips never stopping. Your head is full of static now, body bouncing lightly against the seat, every push of him making your thoughts blur at the edges. He’s slick with sweat, and every so often, one of those little blasts kisses hot against the curve of your breasts.
"You know what pisses me off most?" He says against your mouth.
You can barely string words together. "What?"
"None of those extras out there know you’re mine." He thrusts harder, enough to drag a cry out of you. "Stand there screaming your name like they know a damn thing about you." Another snap of his hips. "None of ’em know who gets you spread out and whining like this."
His words hit you somewhere deep and strange. You clench around him, and he curses, dropping his forehead to your shoulder for one second before lifting it again.
"You hear me?" His grip tightens at your thigh, enough to bruise. "They can look all they want. They can jerk off over interviews for all I care." Another hard slam of his hips. "But this?" He forces deep, pressing at your cervix, his voice low and vicious in your ear. "This is fucking mine."
Heat rolls through you in another wave. You are too wrung out to keep up with him, too full of him and the night and the lingering buzz of having almost gone under in that crowd, only for him to drag you back by force. Your eyes sting for a stupid second.
"Katsuki—"
He reaches between you and puts his thumb back on your clit. The sound you make is wrecked enough to earn a dark, satisfied look from him.
"Fuck," he growls. "You gonna make a mess again? Come on my cock."
You come again with less warning this time. So hard your heel slips on the seat. Bakugo catches your leg, drives in deep, and loses whatever control he had left. His rhythm goes feral. You can feel the exact moment he tips over—his jaw clenching, the breath tearing out of him. He buries himself and stays there while he comes hard inside you, one hand clutching at your waist as if the force of it surprises even him.
He’s still shaking as a red light washes through the tinted glass and disappears. The air-conditioning hums on. Then he does something that would make half the country faint if they saw it: he carefully shifts your dress back over your hips and presses a kiss to the side of your knee before pulling away.
You stare at him.
"Don’t start." He grunts.
He fixes himself one-handed, then reaches into the console for the little folded packet of wipes the driver keeps stocked, because he has been briefed on exactly what sort of disasters occur in this car. Bakugo clicks his tongue at the sight of them but uses them anyway, cleaning between your thighs with brisk efficiency that turns gentle whenever you twitch. He wipes his own hands, then yours, for some reason that makes no practical sense and still nearly undoes you.
When he is finished, he gathers you up with surprising ease and shifts until your head is tucked under his chin and your legs are draped across his lap. The suit jacket comes off and lands over your shoulders.
You let yourself sink into him. His shirt is warm. His heartbeat has finally started slowing under your ear.
The aftermath in him is always strange to witness. The rage burns off and leaves this concentrated attentiveness behind. He smooths your hair back from your face, thumb brushing once across your lower lip.
"You okay?" he asks again. This time it sounds less of a demand and more something he has to know.
You nod. "Better."
"Hn."
A pause. Not awkward. Just him deciding how much he is willing to say.
"You scared me," he mutters at last, looking out at the dark glass. "Not because I thought you couldn’t take care of yourself. I know damn well you can. I just saw you getting stuck out there and knew what it was doing to you."
You go still.
His arm tightens around you. "I hate that shit."
"I know."
"No, you don’t." He clicks his tongue and looks down at you, his expression still fierce even now. "You matter too much for me to stand there while idiots act like buying a ticket means they get a piece of you."
The car turns. Light slides over the scar on his cheek again, the line of his mouth, the stubborn set of him. He is still holding your gaze like it owes him something.
Then he says, "Screw this. I’m done keeping us quiet."
You blink. "What?"
"Us." The word seems to annoy him on principle. "I’m done acting like you’re just my partner when every idiot with internet access already treats us like a package deal anyway."
You push up on one elbow. "Katsuki, the ratings—"
"The ratings can choke."
You laugh before you mean to. He scowls like you have offended him and then, because he is who he is, keeps going.
"I know what’ll happen. I know dumbasses’ll whine about professionalism and favouritism and whatever dumb garbage they can dig up." His hand settles flat on your back. Steady and certain. "I don’t care."
You search his face. "You really mean that?"
He gives you a look that clearly screams don’t insult me.
"I’m not letting a bunch of extras decide what I do with my life." His thumb presses once into your side, grounding both of you. "And I’m sure as hell not standing next to you in public anymore not getting to touch you."
Heat rises in your chest all over again, softer this time and somehow worse for it.
You tuck yourself back against him. "I like that idea..."
In return, you get the tiniest shift in his mouth. Not a smile. Something meaner—more him and all private.
"Good." He looks smug about it for half a second. "Too bad if you didn’t."
By the time the car slows outside the private garage entrance to his building, you are drowsy from the comedown and the low thrum of the engine and the way his fingers keep combing through your hair without him seeming to realise he is doing it. The city can have its rankings and its flashbulbs and its screaming crowds for one more night.
In the dark back seat, held close under his jacket, you let yourself enjoy the first quiet moment you have had all evening.
Bakugo tips your chin up, brushes his mouth against yours in one more brief kiss, and says, with all the easy charm of a loaded weapon, "Next event, you stay where I can get to you before they do."