Chapter Text
ARE THE TOP TWO HEROES IN JAPAN DATING? the headline reads. The picture they run is rather flattering, the two of them beaming at each other after a mission, grimy, exhausted, but happy. Midoriya is wiping a trail of blood off of Bakugou's cheek, and Bakugou is giving him a soft, frustrated, reluctantly grateful look.
Midoriya's still staring at his phone when a pair of arms come around him, warm, and a chin settles over his right shoulder.
"Whatcha lookin at?" Bakugou asks, still not fully awake yet, bleary-eyed and rough-voiced. Midoriya smiles at him.
"Work," he replies.
Bakugou bats at his phone until it falls to the covers.
"'s a Saturday," he says. He rolls back, carrying Midoriya along with him. They end up in a tangle of blankets since this maneuver hadn't been thought out completely. After a bit of kicking, they end up sorting themselves out, Midoriya on his elbows, smiling down at his husband.
"We're on call," Midoriya reminds him gently.
Bakugou yawns, showing off all his canines as if making a point.
Midoriya gives up and snuggles in. Bakugou's right. Lazy Saturdays are lazy Saturdays, and even in the unlikely event of a crime getting reported, they're pretty far down on the list. They deserve a break.
"What do you want to do today?" he asks. "Besides catch up on sleep."
Bakugou cracks open an eyelid and looks at the clock on the bedstand. It's 12:30PM, already afternoon, the sun filtering brightly through their curtains.
"Oh shit," he says, sitting up, his voice sharp. "Half the day's gone already."
It's Midoriya's turn to reach out and pull him back down.
"It's a Saturday."
Bakugou pushes himself up on one arm. Midoriya ends up hanging off of his arm. He gives Midoriya a little shake. "Up, hero boy. You told me not to let your sleep schedule slip."
Midoriya groans and lets go, falling back onto the bed. Bakugou scrambles up to his knees, tossing all the covers off. Midoriya buries his head underneath the pillow. Mercilessly, Bakugou rips it away from him.
"Nooo," Midoriya whines. He still can't understand how Bakugou can go from sleepy to fully-alert just like that. "I was so comfortable just now."
Bakugou knees him in the ribs. Midoriya rolls over with the blow, laughing.
"Make me breakfast," he says.
Bakugou leans down to kiss him. Brushes his thumb fondly across the corner of Midoriya's mouth.
"It's lunchtime by now," he says. Midoriya ignores him.
"Pancakes?"
"Pancakes," Bakugou says, and then gets up to feed his husband with a black hole for a stomach.
.
"Have you noticed?" Midoriya asks. "You're letting me touch you a lot more, in public."
Bakugou is in a black tank top, his shoulders bare, and he can't hear Midoriya over the sizzling of the pancakes on their flat grill. Bakugou had insisted on buying it even though they had a perfectly fine pan, but they're making good use of it now.
"What was that?" he calls back.
"Nothing!" Midoriya says, and digs into his pancakes so that he doesn't have to face Bakugou's searching gaze.
"I didn't catch what you said," Bakugou says, coming around and setting down a plate stacked with more pancakes. He slides into his chair and then leans back. Midoriya gives him a small smile and waits for him to realize.
It takes Bakugou less than a minute of scrolling on his phone to see the same headline that Midoriya had seen that morning. Midoriya tries not to watch for his reaction, but there's a queasy feeling in his stomach all the same. He's not sure if it's from the extra syrup or not.
"Is this the 'work' you were talking about this morning?" Bakugou asks, showing him the screen of his phone.
"Yeah."
"Hm." Bakugou returns his attention to his phone. After a moment, he says: "That's a pretty good picture."
"I know, right?" Midoriya bursts out, excited, then grins sheepishly. "I already saved it somewhere."
Bakugou rolls his eyes. "You know this is a published picture, right? You can find it if you just look it up."
"Yeah, I know, but -"
Bakugou looks over to their living room, which is currently equally covered in All Might posters and memorabilia and boards with newspaper clippings with their faces and their colleagues, a collection of all the villains they've fought and defeated. Deku probably has kept a record of all their fights and will probably end up compiling some kind of statistics on them. He collects data like nobody's business.
"You should really digitize all this," he says. "We have a computer, but you keep insisting on using your notebooks. You can't back up a notebook."
"I scan them," Midoriya says defensively. "They're backed up that way. And some of them are never gonna see the light of day anyway!"
Bakugou sighs. "You do realize that after you die, a single page from one of those journals is gonna sell for millions, right?"
Midoriya blanches at the prospect. "I sincerely hope not. It's all gibberish."
"No it's not." Bakugou can call it uncool all he wants, but Midoriya's notes and observations from years ago have saved his butt more times than he can count.
"It's gibberish to everybody else," Midoriya corrects. A smile is playing at his lips, and he leans back in his chair. The plate of pancakes is cleaned out. "And it won't sell for millions. I won't let anybody sell them."
"Even after you're dead?"
"No," Midoriya says thoughtfully. "I really have to clean it up and make it into a database or something. I never really thought about it, but when I was younger, if All Might hadn't given me his quirk, I really might have become a quirk researcher or something."
Bakugou pauses in the middle of cleaning up the plates. "Really?"
"Yeah," Midoriya gives him a small smile. "I was fascinated by quirks ever since I was a kid. Especially yours. Do you know how long I spent thinking about how your quirk worked?"
"Oh, so you were fantasizing about me even back in middle school?" Bakugou can't resist teasing.
Midoriya somehow manages to flush and roll his eyes disdainfully at once.
"I thought it might explain your personality, somehow," he says. Bakugou laughs. "An explosive quirk, and an explosive temper. You know, I don't understand how you managed to be such a good student all through middle school and high school. You always seemed to be itching for a fight."
"No I wasn't," Bakugou argues, leaving the table for the sink.
"Yes you were!" Midoriya calls out after him. They argue back and forth about it for a few minutes, but then the doorbell rings, and they both forget the subject.
.
As it turns out, it's just the mail, so they spend a couple hours of the afternoon sorting through buckets of fanmail. Some are from the Hero Association, promotion offers, team up requests. Those all go into the 'work' pile, and Midoriya gleefully ignores them for now. The rest are a wide range of childish scribbles on paper, to long, typed-out, thoughtful notes.
Midoriya tries not to point out that he gets the larger pile, because then Bakugou will point out that he gets more gifts, and then it'll turn into a competition. Bakugou is still a bit sleep-deprived from the events of the week, so he crashes on the sofa as Midoriya carefully opens each letter, reads each word, and files them into his memory.
"You know," Bakugou says sleepily. "I don't think I've ever seen you throw away any fanmail, not even the super weird ones."
Midoriya glances over at him. He has moved onto the couch as well, and their legs are tangled comfortably together, even in the summer heat.
"That's because I haven't," he says. "Thrown any away, I mean. I've kept them all."
Bakugou removes his arm from his face. "Really?"
"Yeah," Midoriya swings his legs back down to the floor and goes over to the bedroom closet. He comes back while hauling a huge filing cabinet with him.
"You're serious," Bakugou says flatly, his expression going through a strange mixture of fascination and horror.
"I've saved yours too," Midoriya tells him, plopping the filing cabinet down on the living room table. "Well, all the ones you've gotten ever since we've moved in together."
Bakugou sits up. Midoriya pops open the lid and reveals a nearly full box crammed with letters, divided by year. They're all still in their envelopes and the whole thing is filed as neatly as something you would find in a detective's office.
"I can't believe you," Bakugou says.
"I've showed you this before!" Midoriya tells him, flipping through the letters. He goes back to the very beginning and pulls out an old piece of paper, beaming. "This was my first one, actually! Remember Kota?"
The lettering on it is old and faded now, but it has been lovingly preserved, folded along the same creases over and over.
Bakugou gives him a startled look. "Kota? Wait, do you mean the pro hero, Water Horse?"
"Yeah, that's him," Midoriya says, his smile going a bit wider. "He was the kid at the summer training camp, in our first year at UA."
"Oh," Bakugou goes still. "Yeah, how could I forget. The one where I got fucking kidnapped."
Midoriya reaches out to brush his hands into Bakugou's hair. Bakugou shoots him an annoyed look.
"Yeah," Midoriya says, softer. "It was the one good thing that came out of that whole incident."
Bakugou catches his wrist, presses a reluctant kiss to the inside of it.
"I didn't get any letters till I became a pro," he says. "How the hell were you getting letters while you were still a student?"
Midoriya grins at him. "Well, I had the right mentality long before I went pro. And Kota was a kid. I'm pretty sure the Pussycats forced him to write it."
Bakugou rolls his eyes. "Does he know that you still reread his letters?"
"No," Midoriya laughs. "Although, maybe I should tell him. It would be hilarious to see his reaction."
"Don't," Bakugou pulls him onto the couch, into his lap. He wraps his arms around Midoriya's waist, and squeezes possessively. "He's gonna think you have a crush on him."
"Kacchan, he's twelve years younger than me!"
"Still," Bakugou nips at Midoriya's shoulder, causing him to drop the letter with a yelp.
"Wait, wait -" Midoriya dives after the letter, folds it carefully, and puts it back. The living room table is a mess of open letters now.
"You know," Bakugou says, his face pressed against Midoriya's shoulder. "If you want the press to know that we're married, I'm not opposed to it."
Midoriya twists around to look at him, but Bakugou tilts sideways and falls sideways onto the couch cushions. Midoriya follows along, dragged by Bakugou's arms around his waist, until they're both lying sideways on the couch.
Midoriya's heart bangs hard against the front of his chest. It takes him a moment to catch his breath.
"Are you sure?" he says quietly. "I don't really mind the way things are now. Everyone who's important already knows."
Bakugou squeezes him a little tighter, his hands pressing against the front of Midoriya's chest. He taps a finger there, in time with Midoriya's heartbeat.
"You'll get less fan mail from girls trying to get your attention," Midoriya tosses out. Bakugou laughs.
"You're the one who reads all of those, anyway," Bakugou says. "I don't mind."
Midoriya tries to twist around to look at him, and this time Bakugou lets him. They end up facing each other on the small couch, their noses centimeters apart. Bakugou looks at him, calm, his gaze steady.
"And besides," his fingers tighten against Midoriya's hip. "This way, everyone will know that you belong to me."
"Even the villains?"
He's answered with a sharp, canine-filled smile. "Oh, especially the villains. They've got another thing coming for them if they try to target you."
Midoriya presses forward impulsively and catches Bakugou's mouth in a quick kiss.
"You'd think that people would have caught on a lot sooner," Midoriya says, starting to grin. "I never call you by your hero name. I keep calling you Kacchan, and you kept letting me get away with it. Even during work. I don't know how that didn't tip everybody off."
"Yeah, well -" Bakugou trades a kiss back, longer this time, his lips rough and warm against Midoriya's. "I'm pretty sure everybody thought I was too much of an asshole for anybody to marry."
Midoriya stifles a laugh. He pokes at Bakugou's collarbone.
"They should see you cry," he says. "How come you never cry in front of cameras? If you did, a lot of people will realize that you're just this huge softie on the inside."
"Hey," Bakugou retaliates by rolling over and pinning Midoriya down, catching his wrist and pinning it down against the cushions. Midoriya looks up at him, his bright green eyes alive with amusement.
"How do you plan on announcing it?" Bakugou asks. He leans down to brush his lips against the side of Midoriya's jaw, making Midoriya squirm. "I'm telling you right now, I'm not doing a press conference. I won't answer questions about our sex life or how many kids we want."
"I could just call you 'hubby' in front of the cameras," Midoriya suggests. They both wrinkle their noses at each other and then burst out laughing.
"You never call me that," Bakugou says. "And I'll kill you if you do. I'll assume that you're an imposter."
"Okay, okay," Midoriya laughs. "Then maybe I should just kiss you after our next mission. Just try not to get injured."
"Or maybe we could just leak a photo of me kissing you in a dark alleyway," Bakugou says. "If you're so insistent on getting on the press's good side, why not drag it out, make it seem like we're having some clandestine affair."
Midoriya doesn't answer for several long moments, too busy laughing over the use of 'clandestine affair'.
"At that point, they'll just start grilling our friends," Midoriya says. "Can you imagine Iida trying to keep our marriage a secret? He's such a bad liar, he'd never make it past the first question."
"Kirishima has been dying to blab for the past two years," Bakugou says. "He'll probably cave first."
Midoriya turns his head and presses a kiss into the crook of Bakugou's elbow. He sighs happily.
"Or we could just not do anything," he says. "Just let little things slip. We can just stop being so careful. It's not like we have to hide, and it's not like we have to tell anybody directly anyway."
Bakugou grins down at him. "That's what I've been doing this entire time," he says. "I'm good with this. No extra work on my part."
"Sounds like a plan," Midoriya says, already distracted by the way Bakugou has been tracing patterns on the skin of his stomach. He leans up for a kiss, and they spend the rest of their Saturday not thinking of much of anything at all.