Chapter Text
Seven Years Ago
“ It’s a once-in-lifetime opportunity.” She tries to smile, but she can’t seem to help but wring her hands, and she doesn’t look happy. “Everything…everything I’ve ever wanted. I guess.”
“You’re lying.” He doesn’t ask.
“Why would I do that?” She laughs, a rough and ragged thing so unlike her usual one that he almost can’t believe it’s coming from her. “What, you think I came all the way out here hoping you’d beg me to stay?”
“‘Course not.” He looked her up and down and tried not to let the sinking feeling in his stomach reach his chest. “I don’t beg.”
“Like hell you don’t.” Another harsh bark of laughter. “You’re Ground Zero, after all. Ground Zero, who doesn’t need anything from anyone but for the five people above him on the billboard to fall from grace so he can take their spots.” Her eyes are wild and her hands aren’t wringing each other anymore. “Why would plain old number-seventy-five Uravity ever expect him to ask her to stay? That would be ridiculous.”
“You want me to, don’t you.” He tries not to let his voice take on that familiar knife’s edge of contempt, but he can’t stop himself. “You want me to get on my knees and tell you that I love you and insist you stay with me or whatever romantic crap it is you like.”
“Why would I?” Ochako’s always known how to take as much as she dishes out. “You couldn’t pay me to stay with someone who talks to me like that.”
“Go to France,” he mutters, dangerously low, and clenches his fist. “Go to the damn moon, for all I care. You said it - I don’t need anyone.” And oh, traitorous lie - “and I sure as hell don’t want anyone.”
It’ll be years before he knows why he told that lie.
**
Present
Her name is Ikeda Hikari.
Apparently.
Ten years of professional heroism and five with his own agency and Katsuki’s managed to dodge every prospective intern who’s come sniffing around for a placement, and he’s proud of that. The last thing he needs is a bunch of high school brats who think they know everything cluttering up his workspace, taking his attention from the things he actually needs to think about - sure, the good ones can hold their own in combat, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to get anything done if he has to babysit a teenager in battle.
Besides, they irk him.
They’re all so bright-eyed, so utterly convinced that their futures couldn’t be brighter. They’ve got this light in their eyes that makes him uncomfortable, or maybe it just makes him want to knock some sense into those empty heads because it’s not going to be all that rosy for them if they make it, less so if they don’t, and they’d better learn that now. Some think they’re going to be the best (good luck), others think they’re going to save the world (even less likely), and most are convinced they’re hot stuff regardless of motivations (most aren’t). They’re endlessly irritating and a distraction and-
Well, if he’s being honest, they make him feel so hollow he could cave in on himself.
Katsuki’s never been one for self-reflection, though, and he’s determined not to examine the reasons for that discomfort, so he avoids aspiring heroes altogether.
Until this one.
He slams the penthouse door behind him, and the gesture leaves him entirely unsatisfied even though it shakes the whole frame. He drops his keys in the rabbit-shaped dish on the counter that Miruko had given him as an unwanted parting gift when he’d left her agency to open his own (he doesn’t even know why he still has it) with a huffier-than-usual sigh, pokes the salt shaker on the counter until it nearly tips over out of sheer spite, and leaves the outer layers of his costume in a heap on the living room floor before he collapses to the sofa, papers in hand.
Katsuki can’t resist reading them over again, as if this situation is going to be improved by another confirmation of what he already knows, and he unsheaths the first packet - the informational one, not the stack of release forms - to find a teenage girl looking up at him with a glower instead of the smile she’d probably been asked for.
Ikeda Hikari, U.A. High School. Second-year. Quirk: Combustion. Combat type-
He knows all of that, though, and it doesn’t interest him, so he studies the girl’s photograph again. It’s in black and white, so he can’t make out the color of her hair or skin or eyes, but her face is pretty and defined and he’s almost positive she’s that one student in every grade whom the rest of the class fawns over for no reason at all. She doesn’t smile - not even close - and she’s staring directly at the camera, as if challenging it, almost the way he always had (though her dead-serious expression makes for a much more intimidating tableau than his contorted ones ever had). There’s obviously nothing conventional or lackadaisacal about this girl, which...well, if he has to have an intern, she might as well be a decent one, so he supposes that’s a plus.
But he doesn’t
want
her.
Really, he’d only taken her because Aizawa had called him four times and all but threatened his life if he hadn’t agreed to take her on, which is funny considering how little he seems to esteem his former student. Stranger still when one cosiders that he was the one who raised this girl, apparently, after her parents in Brazil shipped her across two oceans to Japanese grandparents who were as ill-equipped as they to deal with her quirk.
Seems like he’d be begging Katsuki to turn her down given the level of respect he has for his...methods, but no, apparently Hikari is hell-bent on interning with him (of course she is - everyone is, however slim their odds of success may be) and he’s not about to let Katsuki crush her dreams.
Well, that’s his problem.
Which he’d turned into Katsuki’s problem.
And never mind that reflexively lighting oneself on fire when stressed (her skin can’t burn, but everything around her can - most useful) is just about the coolest quirk he’s ever heard of and a whole damn mood, if he’s being honest. He doesn’t want a kid poking around in his business whether she’s Aizawa’s or the stiffest competition for the #1 spot he’s ever going to get or anything else. Sometimes it seems like all Katsuki knows how to do anymore is be alone, and that, more than anything, is the norm he can’t let a kid interrupt.
Because it’s true, what they say about hero work. It’s as isolating as anything a person could do and, if you’re doing it right, it leaves no room for the selfish pleasures other people get to indulge in. Some heroes in his year claim to be friends but that probably means they text once a month and see each other at class reunions. So he doesn’t bother with the pretense - other than his mother who’ll drive up to Aichi and beat him to a pulp if he doesn’t answer her calls, he hasn’t spoken to anyone he wasn’t on a job with in...how long now?
Eight months. His brain supplies the answer even though he wishes it would shut up. Eight months ago he’d gotten a text from Uraraka - a picture with a tame elephant that she’d taken on some girls’ trip to Thailand five years in the making captioned “wish u were here ;)” and later (embarrassed to no end) admitted to having sent while she was drunk - and that had been it.
Eight months.
He’d been so shocked he’d almost dropped his phone when he’d gotten that text, and he still thinks about it far too often.
Maybe it’s because it let him think, for a traitorous instant of hope before the other shoe dropped, that all had been forgotten without his even knowing it.
Maybe it’s because he knows now that it’ll probably be the last.
Probably because, alone in an apartment with far more floor space than he could ever use, it’s all there is to think about. The usual admonitions to “focus on work” only hold him off for so long, and there are always moments when he lies awake at night in which it seems utterly impossible not to let his mind wander until it reminds him of that text or the invitation to dinner with a few of his classmates from Kirishima that he hadn’t even responded to. And they can’t distract him forever from the fact that - unless you count that hag and her hellish determination not to let her only son disappear under a rock for the rest of his earthly life - his personal life is suspiciously underpopulated.
Which is fine. Which is how it’s supposed to be, because connections are liabilities and the people who protect the things others hold dear aren’t supposed to get a taste of the things they’re fighting to preserve. It’s best to resign oneself.
And then along came this stupid kid with her stupidly amazing quirk and somehow - somehow - he’d been unable to shake her off the way he had the hundred or so interns who’d tried the same thing she did, which is all kinds of frustrating.
He doesn’t know the first thing about having interns.
He doesn’t know the first thing about sharing his life with another person anymore, and no, the Ground Zero Agency sidekicks don’t count when not one of them knows a thing about him that hasn’t been published in a million teenybopper magazines targeted at middle school girls with hero crushes on a man who’d rather disappear than be the target of their admiration.
He doesn’t know how he’s going to get through this at all.
**
Ikeda Hikari doesn’t smile, doesn’t bow, doesn’t use proper honorifics, doesn’t bother with the pretense of politeness. She was supposed to come to the office in civilian clothes today, but her black jeans and black shirt aren’t really all that different from the magenta-accented black catsuit she’d been wearing in her official picture. She greets each sidekick she passes with a curt nod if anything at all, sizes up the agency like she’s casing a joint she wants to rob as a nervous sidekick (Copyright Violation Hero: iCloud, quirk: Mainframe, job: Tech Person Because Bakugou Is Bad At Computers) takes her back to the offices, and sets her hands on her hips when she reaches her mentor’s office.
She doesn’t wait to be greeted, introduced, or even acknowledged - he’s still looking down at his paperwork when he hears her speak. Her voice is lower and stronger and smoother than he’d thought a sixteen-year-old’s would be, but it’s not that or even her brazenness which takes him by surprise.
It’s her greeting itself.
“I know you don’t take interns, and I have a feeling you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like being thanked, so while I’m normally not so rude as to refuse to thank you for taking me on, this time I’m not gonna bother.”
Somehow - improbably - Bakugou Katsuki has never felt more seen.
**
“Hey. Feet down.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” Hikari has her own way of doing things, but apparently, when it comes to orders from her mentor, Hikari’s an angel, and she kicks her feet down off the card table she’s been assigned as a desk at his request. If she gives her swivel chair a few spins instead, he doesn’t comment.
Things Katsuki now knows about Hikari: she’s sharp, a little like Yaoyorozu without the waffling and the tendency towards self-loathing; she can dish it out as well as he can and take it even better; the lockscreen of her phone is a photograph of three girls - herself, one he’s pretty sure is Eri (probably, functionally, Hikari’s sister - he’d forgotten about that), and a friend of theirs, blue-haired and lanky, whom he recognizes vaguely from the sports festival - on e beach somewhere. She’s an eager learner, even when it comes to paperwork, and she’s chomping at the bit to get out in the field-
And he hates how much he likes her already.
She’s tough as nails and doesn’t ever set herself on fire when she’s startled, which speaks to a level of quirk mastery that surprises him. She’s flagrantly impolite in every conventional way, but she respects him with every bone in her body. She doesn’t ask questions.
Katsuki is used to isolation now, invulnerable to others’ attempts to break it (or so he likes to think). He knows how to keep people out and rarely feels compelled to let them in; it’s half of the reason he hates people who come around begging for internships so much. But - though she’s a kid and an intern and shouldn’t mean anything at all - he doesn’t feel the need to throw Hikari out of his office when she pokes her head in to let him know that High Tide got fried chicken and it’s in the break room, or asks him an innocent question about paperwork that even he has to admit is reasonable.
Normally he’d cuff a sidekick for the same question, for the crime of admitting to such a glaring gap in their knowledge. He should extend the same treatment to his intern - isn’t that why she’s here? But…
He doesn’t.
Never does.
He has to have some limits, though, and those begin and end with her constant requests to be taken out on patrol.
**
“Ground Zero, I don’t get it.” Hikari crosses her arms, leaning her hip against the door frame as if she belongs here. “I’m supposed to be learning about the day-to-day life of an operational pro, and I know you’re all lone-wolfish and stuff but...don’t I kinda need to go on patrol at least once?”
“Said it yourself, kid.” He takes a bite of cold fried chicken, at least a day old but serviceable. “I don’t do partners.”
“Okay, but I’m gonna get a failing grade if-”
“Your own fault for pickin’ me as your mentor.” He doesn’t, he figures, have to pretend to be good at this.
He would think that would be enough to get Hikari to back down. After all, she owns multiple Ground Zero hoodies, and he’s seen her wear them before, so she’s clearly not afraid to let people know why she chose this of all agencies to intern with; he’s been banking on her admiration of him to keep her from stepping as far out of line as he knows she wants to. Ikeda Hikari, though, never seems to knoq when to quit.
“Ground Zero,” she tries again, voice straining. “I know it’s not my place-”
“It ain’t.”
“-but I have to do a comprehensive writeup of what I did at my internship, and if I have to tell my teacher that I sat around an office listening to Whirlwind talk about Mexican novelas the entire time I was here, I’m gonna fail.” She searches his expression for any sign of empathy from her mentor. “So, not trying to butt into anything personal here-”
“It’s not personal! I just don’t like working with partners!”
“Sheesh, so testy,” Hikari mutters, raising her hands in surrender. “Anyway. Don’t mean to insert myself where I’m not wanted, but...don’t you think you kinda have an obligation to take me on at least one patrol if you agreed to take me on as an intern?”
“I took you on because both of your parents and your sister threatened my life.” He tries to look as cold as he knows how. “Not because you’re special, and sure as hell not because I wanted an intern.”
She stands in the doorway, hands in the kangaroo pocket of the Ground Zero hoodie she wears over her hero costume when she’s hopeful that he’ll finally put her to work. And even though she’s barely an inch shorter than Katsuki, Hikari looks very small indeed.
**
“Hikachan?”
Hikari unfurls, untangling her legs to drop them over the side of the couch for some semblance of normalcy as her brother approaches. He’s worried - she recognizes that look, eyes wide and head tilted to the left - and his big sister’s work-study woes shouldn’t be his, so she forces a smile. “Hey, Daichi.”
He approaches, though he still stands a yard or so off - Daichi hates it when his space overlaps with someone else’s. “Why are you sad?”
I’m not, Daichi, she should say, because Hikari is tough as nails and she’d never let anything so stupid as a scathing lecture from her lifelong idol make her curl up in defeat like this. She should smile and ruffle his hair, because he is her baby brother and, at six, he’s not supposed to know that sisters or sixteen-year-olds are anything less than invincible, but she doesn’t.
“You know how they say never to meet your heroes?” she says to no one in particular.
“Never...meet heroes?” Daichi’s head tilts to the right this time. “But Otosan and Okaasan-”
“They’re right.”
**
The thing about teenagers, apparently, is that they are stubborn.
Hikari shows up at the agency in full hero costume - no sweatshirt this time (he almost feels guilty for that one) - and, when Katsuki leaves, she follows. Never mind the sidekicks throwing each other nervous glances behind her retreating back - she’s going to make this stupid, stupid internship work or die trying.
Because she should’ve known: she should’ve known that the abrasiveness she’d seen herself in when she’d watched his interviews wouldn’t make an exception for her, should’ve known that the fact that she of all people had related to him meant he wouldn’t exactly be a ray of sunshine. She should’ve seen this coming from miles off but she hadn’t, instead blindly admiring someone who thought as little of her as she did of Fusenobu (offense: giving her sister a concussion at the Sports Festival) or Iwamoto (offense: unbearably uptight) in her class. So she has to make that ground up now.
Has to tough it out, even though the last thing she wants is to deal with Bakugou Katsuki another day.
“I’m coming with you,” she says coldly, and she doesn’t allow herself to be contradicted.
**
Ikeda’s not actually an awful patrol partner. She’s quiet, quick, and observant, and since this area is usually quiet on weekday mornings, she isn’t much of a hindrance. It probably wouldn’t have killed him to let her do this without forcing her way in.
Still. Bakugou doesn’t have a reputation for pride without due cause.
That aside, though, he’s surprised to find that he misses having a second pair of eyes. She’s new to the area, so she catches things he’d probably miss in his familiarity with this route, and the day that they’re called in to attend to a nearby bank robbery, it’s her quick thinking that keeps the perpetrator trapped in the vault (her quirk, apparently, creates enough heat to seal a metal door shut - really, it’s an ingenious solution) until backup arrives.
He doesn’t even mind admitting that the girl who’d kept the heist crew at bay is his intern when a few heroes who’d taken longer than most to arrive ask for a debrief. And they all seem to have something to say about it but it’s only one voice Katsuki picks out of the many to hone in on - couldn’t avoid it if he tried.
“Thought you didn’t take interns, Ground Zero.”
**
Hikari had never imagined that her mentor might freeze up at the scene of a crime but somehow he’s done it now - running a group of new arrivals through the events of the past half-hour one moment and frozen in place, eyes blown wide, the next.
It’s not hard to figure out why.
When he finally gets his wits about him, he turns to Uravity, and the look on his face is so many things at once that she can’t decide which of at least five things it expresses is the dominant emotion.
“Since when am I Ground Zero to you?”