Chapter Text
The first thing Katsuki does when he arrives at school on Monday morning is drop his internship forms on Aizawa’s podium, ignoring the man dozing on the floor in his bright yellow sleeping bag.
He’s early, same as always, moving to his seat. He sets his bag down on the floor next to him before pulling out his notebooks and pencil case. Midnight is giving them a test today, so he has to make sure his desk is perfectly arranged. Three pencils on his left side and three on his right, all six sharpened to a dangerous point and spaced evenly apart, easily accessible in case one is broken. A pencil sharpener on the top right corner of the desk. His notebook perfectly centered in the middle.
The last time his desk wasn’t arranged neatly he failed a test. Sure, it was years ago, all the way back in primary school, but he refuses to let it happen again. He can’t fucking fail a test again. It’s bad enough he’s fucking third in class—not for long, he promises himself. He’s going to surpass Glasses and Ponytail soon enough.
He’s never seen anyone else in class do this on test days. He never saw anyone do it in middle school, either. It’s not normal, he knows, but he can’t stop himself.
No one’s said anything about it, though.
To your face at least.
No, he’s not doing this. It’s just his anxiety. No one talks about him when he’s not around. Especially not the way he organizes his desk.
Fuck, something’s wrong.
Fuck!
Everything’s perfectly spaced out, isn’t it? No, it’s not that. Is it the angle of the pencil sharpener? Hm, fuck—what the fuck is it?
It’s taking so much time, fuck!
Everyone else is going to be arriving soon. Shit—he'd fucking seen Ponytail out in the hallways by the vending machine, chatting with some chick from 1B and Uraraka, and usually Glasses and Icyhot are both pretty early. Same with Deku.
He could just leave it, right?
No, he’s not going to fail another fucking test. No. It’s not going to fucking happen.
He adjusts the position of a pencil again, then leans back slightly and checks the desk over again. One pencil on the right side is slightly out of place, so he fixes it and checks again.
It’s perfect.
Thank fuck.
Ponytail and Uraraka enter the classroom at the same time, chattering away about some bullshit he doesn’t give a shit about.
“Good morning, Bakugou-kun!” Ponytail greets brightly.
Katsuki’s not going to deal with this. Give someone a fucking inch and they’ll take a mile, right? He’s not going to give her the chance to think they’re friends or some shit.
“Hi, Bakugou!” Uraraka says, grinning.
Fucking disgusting.
He turns back to his desk, opening his notebook to go over his notes for hero art history. He hates this subject. It shouldn’t be a fucking requirement for hero students—an elective at most, because what the fuck does he need to know this shit for? Back on the first day of school, Midnight had described the class as “using art history as a way to study the relationship between heroes and the public”. It’s an interesting enough concept, sure, but hero students shouldn’t have to do this shit. Isn’t that what the fucking business course was for?
“Oh!” Deku’s voice calls suddenly, and Katsuki whips his head up to bare his teeth at the shitty nerd in a threat. Deku swallows, glancing around and Uraraka and Ponytail’s confused faces before turning his gaze back onto Katsuki’s desk. “I, uh, just remembered we had a test!”
Katsuki hates the look on Deku’s face. He hates that Deku knows what this means. It’s bad enough that Deku’s in his fucking class but the nerd shouldn’t know him this fucking well. It’s fucking disgusting. Sure, Deku’s never admitted that he knew what Katsuki’s desk means but Katsuki’s not a fucking idiot, and the nerd isn’t fucking subtle.
Fuck.
He’s not going to yell. He’s not going to do it. Absolutely not.
He settles for a low growl when Deku slinks past him to his own seat with a squeaky, “Morning, Kacchan!”
Katsuki turns back to his notebook, checking his notes. He’s got this. His desk is perfectly arranged, his notes are always perfect, everything is fine.
He ignores everyone else as they enter the room, only grunting in response to Kirishima’s bright greeting, reviewing his hero art history notes.
“Alright,” Aizawa says, and Katsuki glances up at the man, who’s finally standing up behind his podium, looking around the room with the same tired, slightly annoyed expression he always wears. “The first thing I need you to do is hand in your internship paperwork. Bakugou, I’ve noticed you’ve already done it, thank you for being on top of it.”
Katsuki barely keeps back the victorious smirk. Good, he’s the first one to hand it in.
He settles back in his seat, rolling his eyes as the rest of the losers in class search for their paperwork.
/
Katsuki opens his phone’s clock app, setting a timer for fifty-seven minutes. The extra three minutes gives him enough time to get back to the locker room just before everyone else. Lunch is an hour long with another five minutes to get back to classes, but it he won’t eat for that long. His lunch is a very simple bento, handmade last night, zakkokumai, tonkatsu, and cucumber sunomono. Normally he doesn’t eat something as unhealthy as tonkatsu, but he knows that hero training this afternoon will be intense. He needs the extra calories to burn.
He usually can finish his lunch in only twenty-four minutes, leaving him with thirty-three minutes free to do whatever he needs to do. He needs those thirty-three minutes to start reading. That’s why he isn’t in the cafeteria, instead he’s in an unused classroom in the second-year hall, because he knows Kirishima was trying to pull him into sitting with his annoying ass friends, and he knows they won’t let him study in peace. They never seem to.
He finishes his lunch in only twenty-two minutes.
Perfect.
On Sunday, after the nonsense that was Saturday’s phone call with his parents discussing his decision to intern in America, he’d decided to take the train to the Mustafu University’s campus and wander into their bookstore. He’d picked up a copy of Introduction to International Heroics: Fifth Edition, the beginner’s textbook for History of Heroics majors—or fucking extras who weren’t good enough to be actual heroes and instead decided to talk about them for a living.
If he’s going to be interning internationally, he might as well have some basic knowledge of international heroics. He knows that U.A. is supposed to touch on international heroism at some point in their third year, but it’s better to be prepared. Especially since most of U.A.’s heroics students tend to work the same internship for their entire schooling. Which might be an issue considering how far away New Jersey is to Mustafu, but he supposes he’ll be able to find an interim internship if he needs to.
The textbook is thick and heavy—and it damn well should be, considering he spent a good chunk of the pocket money his father had given him on it—as he hauls it out of his bag and onto his lap. He’s got the same set of six highlighters he uses for Cementoss’s history class already out.
The first step is simple, taking the same set of highlighters he uses for Cementoss’s history class and copying over the guide he made for that class onto the inside front cover of Introduction to International Heroics: Fifth Edition.
Purple for dates. Pink for names. Yellow for quotes. Blue for key facts. Orange for key words. Green for organizations.
Alright.
He opens the textbook, skipping the foreword and the table of contents, going right to the first chapter, Official Heroism: The Beginnings.
The International Convention on Hero Licensing Regulations [ICHRL] was a series of international diplomatic meetings that resulted in the formation of the Global Hero License [GHL], a license allowing powered or non-powered individuals to receive governmental permissions to use their abilities in order to act as a private peacekeeping force [“Heroes”]. The agreement originated in 2102 and have been updated several times since, most notably adding language to extend the opportunity to non-powered individuals in 2146, following the Non-Powered Equal Rights Movement.
While each country in the Global Hero Licensing Coalition [GHLC] agreed to recognize the legal right of licensed Heroes to use a GHL in any country in the GHLC regardless of the country it was first issued in, each country was left free to create their own standards and requirements to receiving the GHL. In Japan, potential Heroes must complete three years of training and specialized education from an accredited “Hero school” before receiving a GHL. However, in the United States of America and Canada, potential Heroes are personally trained by an already-licensed Hero, using a Sidekick Hero License [SHL] for at least five years before receiving a GHL.
The name given to quirks vary between countries—in the United States of America and Canada, people with quirks are called “metas”, in Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and China, they are referred to as “quirks”, and in most of Europe, people with quirks are called “mutants”.
He’s finishing highlighting “metas” and “mutants” in orange when the alarm on his phone goes off.
Katsuki carefully puts his highlighters back into their case before putting the textbook back in his bag. He closes his bento, carefully cleaning up after himself to leave the empty classroom exactly as he found it. He’s not sure if he’s even allowed to be here, but he’d rather not get in trouble for this.
Time for hero training.
He’s the first to the locker rooms, just as he planned. He’s timed it out exactly so he can be already mostly dressed when the rest of his idiot classmates show up. Time is of the essence when it comes to hero work, whether it’s combat or rescue. There’s no time to fuck around and waste time.
He spent a lot of time as a child changing in and out of clothes as quickly as possible until it took him less than a minute. Mitsuki was a huge help, teaching him the tricks she used as a model to quick change behind the scenes of fashion shows. Deku joined him a few times when they were really little, but he doubts the nerd kept up the habit.
“Hey, Bakubro! We missed you at lunch!” Kirishima calls, appearing in the locker room. “Where’d you even go, man?”
Katsuki doesn’t respond, pulling his gauntlet onto his right arm. Fifty-two seconds. Not bad, but it could be better. He’ll get it next time.
“Where are you going for your internship, Bakugou?” Sparkplug asks randomly. “We all talked about it at lunch but you weren’t there!”
Should he answer? Does he want to deal with their inevitable questioning? Can he get away with a blunt, basic answer?
“I’m going to Esuha City, Fat Gum’s agency!” Kirishima declares.
Fat Gum isn’t in the top fifty. How disappointing.
He doesn’t pay attention to the other extras rambling about where they’re going, though he does catch that Birdbrain is interning with Hawks. Icyhot is unsurprisingly interning with his father. Is that it? How boring.
“Come on, Bakubro! Tell us where you’re going!” Kirishima says, draping an arm over Katsuki’s shoulders.
Katsuki slams his locker shut. “New Jersey,” he states plainly, shrugging the redhead off him and storming out of the locker room. “Hurry the fuck up, extras!”
/
“Bakugou, stay behind a minute,” Aizawa’s voice rings out, and Katsuki pauses in his clean-up for end-of-the-day homeroom, turning to look at his teacher. The man’s actually awake for once, seated in his chair behind his desk, looking through Uniform’s head at him.
What the hell does he want? Katsuki had only yelled at Deku once today, and it was during hero training, when he fucked up, so it shouldn’t fucking matter—
It must have something to do with his internship choice.
Fuck, was it a fake offer? Did Aizawa leave it in the stack by accident? Did he fill one of the forms that came with the offer out wrong? Shit, he fucking shredded Best Jeanist’s offer, so now he has no fucking internship—
Katsuki cuts his train of thought there, refusing to let his brain fall into another anxiety-induced spiral.
Everything is fine.
His internship being in America just means he has more paperwork to fill out. Visas and shit.
Probably.
He takes a breath to even himself out, turning back to pack up his things. I don’t have the fucking time for this, he thinks, checking his phone, because he has to be at Dr. Kobayashi’s office in two and a half hours and it’s forty-five minutes and a train transfer away—
He can feel those annoying green eyes on his back, the goddamned nerd, and he bristles. He doesn’t have time. There’s no time for this shit, because he knows Aizawa won’t deal with his shit, and he can’t miss another appointment with Dr. Kobayashi. The last time he’d skipped out on the appointment, he had to deal with Dad’s bullshit guilt trip about emotions and shit, and he’s not letting that happen again.
The classroom slowly empties around him, and Katsuki deigns to let out a growl when shitty fucking Deku hesitates in the doorway.
Aizawa leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “I went over everyone’s internship choices during lunch,” he states simply.
Katsuki raises an eyebrow. What in the fuck is this? Katsuki had filled out every piece of paperwork that came with the offer, and he’d even faxed a copy over to Mitsuki to sign instead of forging her signature like he does for almost everything else. He’d been exactly right, that Dad had been easy to break down when faced with both his wife and son.
“Is there a reason you chose to intern almost eleven thousand kilometers away? In another country, even?” Aizawa asks after a long moment of tense silence.
Who gave a shit?
“It’s fucking Batman,” Katsuki responds blandly. Does he need any more reason than that?
Aizawa hums in response, picking up a file on his desk. “Alright,” he says plainly, flipping the page in the file. “Is everything else okay?”
Katsuki raises an eyebrow, staring at the man. “Why the fuck wouldn’t it be?”
Aizawa studies Katsuki’s face for a long moment, looking for cracks in the glass, something that betrays Katsuki’s words. He won’t find anything. Katsuki refuses to let it happen.
“Fine, Bakugou,” the man says, handing him a printed out plane ticket. “I’ve talked to your parents and Nedzu—you'll be excused from class for a day before the official internship and a day afterwards for travel time. Nine days total. Your flight is in two days.”
Hell fucking yeah. It’s a real internship. Thank fuck.
Katsuki takes the plane ticket and carefully tucks it into his backpack. “Is that all?”
Aizawa looks at him for another few seconds. “Yeah, kid. Get out of here.”