Chapter Text
Katsuki stands with his forehead pressed against the wall. His phone skids across the floor, and he hears a dull thump as it hits the leg of a chair. He knows he shouldn’t have gotten so riled up by his mother’s taunting. He’s been busy, dammit. But now he’s fucked–completely. He takes the train home in a week, and his mother is expecting his boyfriend, which would be fine except for the fact that said boyfriend doesn’t fucking exist.
He complains to his friends about his situation when they pile into his apartment for last-minute cramming before the remaining tests. He sends an extra glare at the idiot duo, since Denki is practically sitting in Eijirou lap, and he is more pissed off than usual about being single.
“So what I’m hearing is that you need someone to be your boyfriend for ten days,” Eijirou sums up.
“Yeah, basically. How the fuck am I supposed to find someone? I only have a week.”
“Dude, why did you tell your mom you had a boyfriend in the first place?” Denki asks.
Katsuki refuses to answer that question.
“You could try to find someone on Tinder,” Hanta suggests.
“Or Grindr.”
Denki rolls over laughing. He tries to say something but the only word Katsuki can actually understand is “dickpic.” He stabs Denki with his foot in an effort to get him to shut up.
“Do you fucks have any actual ideas?”
The room goes silent for a minute.
“Put posters up around your campus?” Mina suggests.
“You’re all fucking useless,” he snaps.
Katsuki angrily picks up one of his textbooks. If they’re just going to laugh at him, he may as well ignore them and study. He tunes back into the conversation sometime after Denki has gotten to his fridge and distributed alcohol. If they were ever studying, they sure as fuck aren’t now. Hanta is already red in the face, Denki is actually sitting in Eijirou’s lap, and Katsuki is ready to pitch all of them out the window.
“Oh, did you hear–Deku’s back in town?” Eijirou suddenly seems to have remembered that Katsuki exists.
Katsuki becomes a little less likely to throw his friends out of the window. “Oi, only I call him that–Who’d you hear that from?”
“Possessive.”
Katsuki kicks Denki again. Sharply.
“Just tell me who the fuck you heard it from,” he tells Kirishima.
“IIda.”
Katsuki withdraws his foot. If he heard from Iida, the information is probably reliable. Still, having Deku back in town doesn’t help him a whole lot. Unless–
“Isn’t he gay?” Mina cuts in.
“I’ve literally known him since he was born and he’s definitely not–wait, hell–” he stops abruptly. “He’s never had a girlfriend.”
“Told you!” Mina says in sing-song.
“That doesn’t mean shit.” Katsuki sighs.
“If he wanted a girlfriend, he would have had one by now. I heard he has a fanclub,” Denki says.
“What the actual fuck–why? Who the hell would want to be in a fanclub for that nerd?”
“You may think he’s a nerd,” Mina says. “But he’s pretty cute if you think about it.”
Katsuki tries to think about it. Deku’s hair is always a mess. His eyes are too big. He does this thing where he starts thinking to hard and mutters incoherently until someone tells him to shut up. But cute? Katsuki remembers him laughing, and the way his eyes light up. Sometimes his freckles remind him of galaxies. He has a habit of turning red easily and hiding his face in his collar. And, okay, shit. Katsuki has to admit that he has thought Deku is cute more than once–quite a lot more than once, if he’s being honest (which he’s not.)
“Uh…” Katsuki replies. “Maybe when I was plastered?”
Mina rolls her eyes. “He is cute. And a nice person. Go ask him,” she says.
It sounds simple, but Katsuki is hesitant. For one thing, it’s fucking Deku. For another, it’s goddamn fucking Deku. They may be childhood friends , and he hasn’t seen the nerd since he left for some fancyass exchange program in America with Toshinori “All Might” Yagi a year ago. Deku has gotten farther away from him since childhood, and while they’re still friends, they’re hardly close. Throw in the fact that he sometimes gets an uncomfortable feeling in his chest when Deku smiles at him, and it should be obvious that asking him to be the fake boyfriend is a fucking terrible idea.
As luck would have it, he runs into Deku, almost literally, when he stops by the café at the corner of his street. Katsuki needs to pump his system with caffeine so he can stay awake long enough to stuff more information into his brain, which is why he’s standing at the door of the café in the first place. He blinks at the familiar face in front of it.
“Kacchan?”
Shit. Katsuki has to close his eyes and open them again. Deku is still standing there, so he’s apparently not the product of some strange, fatigue-induced hallucination. He stares for a minute. Deku is still Deku, but he’s lost a lot of the adolescent awkwardness in his features and there’s a kind of confidence in the way he stands that Katsuki doesn’t remember seeing before. He doesn’t know if it’s a change that just happened in the last year, or if it’s something he just never noticed before. And, damn, for some reason, he can’t get Mina’s “he’s pretty cute” out of his head.
“Deku,” he replies. “Hey.”
Why does he sound so fucking awkward? Oh, right, maybe it’s because he’s trying to figure out how the fuck to ask Deku to be his not-boyfriend for ten days, because, unfortunately, Deku is the only option he has left before he has to start asking random people around campus.
“What are you doing for the holidays?” Katsuki asks.
What a smooth way to open the conversation. He’s known Deku since before they could walk, and this is the best he can come up with.
“Uh,” Deku hesitates. “I was going to visit my mom, but she already had a trip planned to visit my dad, so I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”
“Come with me, then.”
Deku raises his eyebrows questioningly. There’s nothing explained in that sentence, and it’s an odd request. Katsuki realizes that he probably should have made that a question and probably should have given that some context.
“I mean,” Katsuki tries again. “I need someone to come with me when I go home.”
He looks at Deku’s confused face. He is doing one shittyass job of explaining his situation. Katsuki clears his throat.
“I may have told me my mother that I have a boyfriend who she’s now expecting me to bring home for the winter holidays. And I’m–uh–single.”
At least Deku has the grace not to laugh outright, though he does stifle a kind of snort. He regains composure after a moment.
“So you want me to pretend to be your boyfriend?”
“Something like that. Also, just to clarify, you are…not straight, right?” Fuck, this is awkward.
“Huh?” Deku flushes. “I thought I told you.”
Katsuki frowns. He would definitely remember that. “Nope. All I know is you haven’t dated a girl, and you’ve never mentioned anything about having a crush on anyone either.”
“Well that’s–” Deku turns a shade darker. “I guess I forgot to tell you.”
“When’d you figure it out?”
“Um–when I was sixteen, why–?”
Katsuki cuts him off. “You forgot to tell me for five fucking years? I thought we were friends.”
“I’m sorry.” Deku makes it sound like a question.
“You’re one hell of a shitty friend,” Katsuki says.
“Says the guy who hasn’t said a single nice thing to me in the more than two decades we’ve known each other.”
Wait, that can’t be true. Katsuki searches his memories for something to prove Deku wrong. He can’t come up with anything. What the fuck.
“Uh, hold on,” Katsuki says, and Deku waits patiently while he struggles.
“You’re…uh…” He tries to think of something nice that has nothing to do with pretty eyes or his stupid (cute) laugh. “You are… not a shitty person?”
Deku snorts. “After two decades, I’m used to it. Also we’re getting off topic.”
He’s silent for a moment before he looks back up at Katsuki, and Katsuki has to forcibly stuff Mina’s voice into a corner of his head where he can’t hear it.
“I’ll do it, I don’t have anything better to do,” Deku says.
Deku leaves him in the café after telling him they should discuss things further. Once Katsuki is done with exams and studying for the day, he has to think about how pretending to have a boyfriend works. Deku comes to his apartment, and Katsuki gestures him inside and then watches him drop a sheaf of paper onto the table. That’s another thing he should’ve thought about. When Deku does something, he always researches and plans before executing. It’s only ten days, but when he sees Deku next that evening, he has at least that many pages of notes.
“I’ve been thinking,” Deku says. No shit. “First of all, what’s the schedule? It’s not just your mom we have to, uh, convince, right?”
“No.”
Unfortunately, being a fashion designer’s son comes with the perks of being dragged to shitton of holiday parties. The more he thinks about this, the more he realizes it’s a shitawful idea. But he’ll be damned if he goes and tells his mother now that he made it up.
“I think there are three this year.”
“All formal, right?”
Katsuki nods, grimacing slightly. “You’ll have to deal with a bunch of pretentious fucks, too.”
“Great? Also, I only have one suit.”
“We’re about the same size, I can probably find you something to wear.”
Deku nods and turns to his notes. In the next hour or so, they come up with the story of how long they’ve been together and how it happened. The conversation involves a lot of not really looking at each other and muttering, but they come up with something in the end that sounds plausible.
“Are you free for lunch tomorrow? We should practice.”
Katsuki looks up. “Practice what?”
“You know–” Deku gesture vaguely. “Boyfriending.”
Boyfriending. Right. They need to act like they’ve been together for awhile, and not like a couple of dumbasses.