Chapter Text
Katsuki didn't sleep. He'd known he wasn't going to sleep the second he got home, still in yesterday's shirt, smelling like rubble and champagne in a combination that should have been illegal. He sat at his kitchen table with his laptop and a mug of coffee he didn't remember making, and at some point around one in the morning he opened a blank document, and at some point around four, he'd filled ten pages.
He hadn't planned to write anything. He'd have to explain that later, to people who wouldn't believe him: it wasn't a strategy. It wasn't a move in any meaningful direction. It was just true things, coming out faster than he could stop them.
He wrote about the banner. About standing under his own face while a man three miles away needed someone who never showed. He wrote, we have confused being seen with being useful, and we have built an entire industry on the difference, and didn't stop to wonder if that sentence was good, only whether it was true. He wrote about Kirishima, about the stupidity of a system that could hand out a commendation and a liability warning for the same forty minutes of a man's life. He wrote, somewhere along the way we started measuring heroes in renewal rates instead of people saved. He wrote about being twenty-two and believing, actually believing, that the job was the rescue and not the room afterward where someone explained what the rescue had cost in sponsorship terms.
By page six he'd stopped being angry in a straight line and started being angry in circles, the same three ideas coming back dressed differently. He knew it was equal parts passion and bad writing and did not care, because for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, he wasn't performing anything for anyone. Page ten ended mid-thought, more command than sentence: pick a side. you can't sell both heroism and fame without killing people on the way to the top.
He didn't reread it. That was his first mistake. His second mistake was the distribution list.
He'd meant to send it to Monoma. Just Monoma, a private, furious, unhearable scream directed at exactly one person who deserved it. His thumb slipped, or his exhaustion had burrowed too far into his head, or some part of him that had been quiet for three years decided it wanted an audience, and the document went out instead to the agency's entire internal list — every hero on the roster, every admin, every intern who'd ever refilled the coffee machine, four hundred and twelve people who woke up the next morning to ten pages titled, in Katsuki's own furious 3 a.m. font choice, THE END OF HEROISM AT THE HANDS OF A PAYCHECK.
He found out what he'd done at 7:14 a.m., when his phone wouldn't stop buzzing.
He got to the office anyway, because staying home felt like hiding. He wasn't going to give Monoma the satisfaction of being a hero who hid. What he had not accounted for was the state of the lobby.
There was a child behind the reception desk, seated in Izuku's chair with a stack of sticky notes arranged in front of him like a very serious filing system, wearing a name tag that read, in careful six-year-old handwriting, HELPER OF THE DAY. He was informing a very confused delivery driver, with total gravity, that the driver would need to "sign here, and here, and also here, that one's just for fun."
The driver, bless him, signed all three.
Izuku was one desk over, actually working, occasionally glancing at the kid with fondness. He'd clearly negotiated this arrangement as the least chaotic of his available options that morning and was, so far, winning.
Katsuki stood in the doorway and watched the delivery driver leave looking politely bewildered.
"That's a kid."
"That's astute of you." Izuku didn't look up from the monitor, where he appeared to be doing three things at once, none of which looked like they were going well. "Daycare called an hour ago. Some kind of pipe situation. I didn't have anyone else, and he promised he'd be good, so."
"You have a kid."
That got Izuku to look up, finally, one eyebrow raised, like he wasn't sure if Katsuki was joking. "I've had a kid the entire time you've known me."
"You've never once mentioned that."
"It's never come up. You mostly talk to me about sponsor logistics and how much you hate ties."
Katsuki looked at the kid again and the resemblance hit him all at once. He had the same unfairly large green eyes and the same unhurried, watchful way of taking in a room before deciding what to do. It was like looking at a smaller, louder, considerably more feral draft of Izuku.
"He looks exactly like you."
"That tends to happen with biological children, yes."
"I have so many questions."
"You have zero questions. We are not doing this right now."
"You brought your kid to work."
"I brought my kid to work the day you emailed a ten-page manifesto to the entire company, yes. It's been a morning."
The kid looked up from his sticky notes, saw Katsuki and folded his hands on the desk like he was about to conduct an interview.
"Do you have an appointment," he said. His eyes were so fucking big.
"Do I—" Katsuki looked at Izuku. Izuku, wisely, said nothing and let this happen. "No. I work here."
"Everyone says that." The kid clicked an imaginary pen. "Name."
"Hiro." Izuku, mildly, from the other desk. "He owns the building, technically. Be nice."
"Oh." Hiro considered this new information with visible interest, unbothered rather than embarrassed, and revised his approach instead of abandoning the bit. "Are you the angry guy?"
Katsuki opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out of it.
"Hiro," Izuku said, in a dreading tone. He loved his son very much and was also praying for the floor to open and swallow them both, "that's not — you don't just ask people that."
"You said it first. You said it to Obaachan on the phone this morning. You said 'I think Katsuki's finally lost it,' and then you said the angry guy thing."
"I did not say it like that."
"You kind of did," Katsuki said, mostly on reflex, and Hiro pointed at him like he'd just been vindicated by a witness, without a trace of malice, purely delighted to have backup.
"See!"
"Don't encourage him." Izuku had his head in both of his hands.
"I'm not encouraging him, I'm agreeing with him, those are different." Katsuki found himself, against every instinct he had, crouching down slightly so he was closer to eye level with a six-year-old who had, at some point in the last ten seconds, started stamping his sticky notes with an invisible stamp for emphasis. "What else did your dad say."
"Katsuki, I swear to god—"
"He said you have anger issues," Hiro reported, with the flat, cheerful honesty unique to small children who have not yet learned that some things are supposed to stay unsaid. He stamped another sticky note for good measure, "and that you dress like you're mad at your own clothes."
Katsuki straightened up slowly and looked at Izuku, who had gone the color of a man watching his entire professional composure leave the building without him. He pinched the bridge of his nose and gestured to his son.
"I don't remember saying that second part."
"You said it last week. About his tie."
"I stand by the tie comment," Izuku muttered, mostly into his coffee, "the tie was doing something violent."
"My tie was fine."
"It looked like it was trying to escape."
Hiro, apparently satisfied that he'd sufficiently briefed the new arrival, went back to stamping sticky notes. He considered the meeting successfully concluded. Katsuki stood there for a second, in the wreckage of his own morning, phone buzzing in his pocket with what was almost certainly Monoma's blood pressure reaching new heights.
He felt the ache in his chest do an unfamiliar, complicated swoop that he didn't have time to examine, because that was the exact moment Monoma appeared in the doorway.
"Bakugou. My office. Now."
Katsuki looked at Hiro, who gave him a small, unbothered thumbs up, like he was sending him off to battle.
"You're gonna be fine," Hiro said. "Dad says you're too stubborn to actually get fired."
"Your dad," Katsuki said, already walking toward what he suspected was, in fact, going to be exactly that, "has never been more wrong about anything in his life."