Chapter Text
Katsuki sets the stack of files on his desk. He has three thousand, five hundred and fifty-six internship offers to sort through. It’s going to take the entire weekend, but he’s prepared. He made enough meal-replacement smoothies for the whole weekend last night. His parents had fucked off to Tokyo for the next few weeks. He’d taken the thirty-two-gallon plastic garbage bin with an attached paper shredder from his father’s office and set it next to his desk, knowing that the offers might have his personal information on them.
The first step to completing any task is to break it down into smaller chunks.
So, the first chunk of this task: get rid of the internships he wouldn’t take.
He opens his laptop, opens a playlist of lo-fi instrumentals, and pulls up the Japanese National Hero Ranking, filtering the rankings down to only the top fifty. He has no time for anyone ranked lower than that. Hell, he has no time for anyone lower than the top twenty, but maybe he’ll humor them.
It’s fucking tedious work, annoying as fuck, flipping through copy-pasted, formal cover letters and comparing them to the ranking before running them through the shredder. After the first hundred offers, he’s got the top fifty heroes in Japan memorized. The trash bag has to be replaced after the first two hundred offers.
Katsuki takes a break just after he reaches the thousandth offer to shower, take his contacts out and put his glasses on (honestly, fuck his father for passing down his shitty fucking eyesight), and chug the flavorless smoothie down before settling back at his desk, swiping his finger over the trackpad of his laptop to open the hero ranking again, and continuing to sort.
He’s found offers from twenty-seven of the top fifty heroes in Japan, all stacked neatly in a manila folder on the corner of his desk. Those are definitely enough to sort through and pick an internship from, but he’s admittedly curious. The highest ranked hero he’d found so far is Yoroi Musha, currently ranked eighth. He doubts that Endeavor will send him an internship offer after the shitshow that was the Sports Festival, and All Might doesn’t take interns, never has, so his highest possible offer would be Hawks, the third-ranked hero.
By the time he’s gone through one thousand, five hundred and seventy-seven offers, his eyes are stinging from exhaustion. It’s late, almost midnight, and he only has one thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine offers left to sort through.
He’s made enough progress on the stack to justify stopping for the night, pushing his chair back from his desk and stretching his back. He stands, straightens the stack of offers he still needs to sort through, before pushing his chair back under the desk.
It might be a Friday night, but he won’t slack off on his evening routine. The shredder bag is only half-full, so he can leave it for the night. He checks the thermostat, turning the temperature down slightly in an attempt to keep himself from sweating through his mattress in the night. He brushes his teeth and silently pulls the bandages from his cheeks, revealing harsh, still-healing red lines in the shape of the godforsaken muzzle.
He curses to himself as he carefully applies the ointment given to him by the family doctor—Katsuki had refused to go back to Recovery Girl after the awards ceremony and had left U.A. as quickly as he possibly could. He knows he should leave these cuts uncovered, but honestly it doesn’t matter. His skin doesn’t scar over, he’s taking the medication the doctor prescribed to keep them from getting infected in the meantime, everything’s going to be fine.
He grabs the gauze and carefully reapplies it, glaring at himself in the mirror. He’ll finish sorting through the offers in the morning.
.
Katsuki starts his day the same way he always does. He goes downstairs to his mother’s home gym and runs six miles. He lifts weights. He does yoga for about an hour. He takes another shower, then downs another shake in the kitchen and fills his water bottle for the morning. He pulls off the bandages in his bathroom, applies the ointment, and leaves the gauze off.
Only one thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine more offers to sort through.
He settles down at his desk, rearranging the stack of unsorted papers, his laptop, and the stack of viable internship options to make room for his water bottle. He reopens the lo-fi playlist and the Japanese National Hero Ranking, and gets to work sorting again.
It’s grueling, boring work. He knows that behind the boring, repetitive cover letters are a more personal letter explaining why those heroes had offered him an internship, but he’s not going to bother with anyone who can’t get off their ass and rank higher.
The two thousand, three hundred and sixteenth offer gives him pause.
The seal on the top of the paper is the Justice League’s symbol. Joining the Justice League is the highest honor a hero can receive. Only the best of the best heroes ever get an invite. Those are the heroes called for the biggest things, like alien invasions and major disasters. They’re the representatives of the worldwide hero community to the rest of the world.
He scans the details of the cover letter. It’s as generic and bland as the rest of them—still written in perfect Japanese, though—and it’s from Batman.
Batman...Batman is an American hero.
An American hero wants him as an intern?
Cementoss had covered this in history towards the beginning of the year. Back when heroism first became a viable career, the U.N. held a meeting about the rules that heroes would have to follow. After that meeting, a much smaller group of countries held their own meeting and came up with The International Convention on Hero Licensing Regulations. It was basic shit, really, the different kinds of hero licenses there were, the requirements for receiving a hero license, blah blah blah, but what it also did was create a pod of forty-eight countries that had one joint hero license, the Global Hero License, granting anyone who got a license in any of the pod countries the ability to work as a hero in any of the other pod countries.
Katsuki had the list of countries memorized (Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Mexico, Great Britain, Albania, Georgia, South Africa, Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Kenya, New Zealand, Canada, Paraguay, Belize, plus the entire European Union: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia, Romania, Portugal, Slovakia, Poland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Malta, he thinks, bitterly). It had taken him hours to memorize all of them, and it was a damn good thing, since Cementoss had included that as a surprise extra credit question on a test, a point for every country you could list. Glasses and Ponytail had both forgotten two or three countries, and Katsuki had grinned maniacally when he realized that he came out on top.
He remembers Cementoss telling the class that American heroism is very different from Japanese heroism. American heroes are traditionally trained individually by an established hero, not through hero schools. Apparently, American heroes value privacy more than Japanese heroes, because they still believe in secret identities.
Everyone in the world knows Batman, but no one knows who he is.
Why the hell would an American hero—let alone the founder of the Justice League—offer him an internship?
Sure, he knew that Twinkle Toes had gotten an offer from some Parisian hero agency, but that shit made sense. Twinkle Toes was born in France and moved to Japan for school.
As far as Katsuki knows, no one else in his stupid class got an offer from overseas.
He’s been to America before, forced to attend some fashion event as an accessory for his mother, and he remembers liking it.
Katsuki stares at the cover letter for a few long moments.
Would he even be able to go to America for his internship? It’s a weeklong internship, yeah, but it’s in America. How long would that flight even be? He doubts his parents will care about the trip—because Mitsuki’s always harping on him about somehow becoming more independent, like he hasn’t practically been living alone since he was eleven, and Dad won’t be too hard to bully into agreeing.
Aizawa wouldn’t give him the file if Katsuki wouldn’t be able to take the internship, right? And Twinkle Toes is going to a French hero agency, isn’t he? Wasn’t that what the guy was rambling about today in between class?
He silently places the cover letter on top of the to-consider pile.
Only one thousand, two hundred and forty offers to go.
It’s lunchtime by the time he shreds the three thousand, five hundred and fifty-sixth internship offer.
Katsuki sits back in his chair. He has forty-three offers tucked into that manilla folder on his desk, his water bottle is almost empty, and his room is filled with seventeen garbage bags of shredded internship offers.
Asahina-san, his parents’ housekeeper, is coming on Wednesday, but he knows he’ll never hear the end of it from Mitsuki if he leaves these here for Asahina-san. It’s lunchtime anyway, so he knows he should take a break, have another meal replacement smoothie, maybe run a couple miles and take another shower. Could lugging these bags around be considered a workout?
Well, no, because they weigh less than fucking nothing, apparently.
Alright. Lunch it is, then.
.
Katsuki takes a long sip of his smoothie, typing out a text to his father with one hand.
Outgoing: Oi, doormat. You still using the shit you got up on the whiteboard in your office
Incoming: Of course you can use the whiteboard, Katsuki! Before you erase it, though, send me a picture of what’s on it?
Incoming: Are you doing well, Katsuki? Do you need any more pocket money? Remember you have an appointment with Dr. Kobayashi Monday night!
He snorts at his father’s bullshit, rolling his eyes and shoving his phone back in his pocket. Trust his father to be so fucking worried about him. He takes the final sip of his smoothie and sets the glass in the dishwasher.
He finishes moving the garbage bags out to the back shed for Asahina-san to deal with when the trucks come around, then moves the half-full bin back into his dad’s office. It’ll be easier to work with the whiteboard in there than moving it to his room.
Chunk two of this task: read the more personalized offers and take a SWOT analysis of them.
(He does end up taking several pictures of the whiteboard before erasing it, sending them to his father, because if he’s a soft bitch for anyone, it’s his dad.)
Most of the offers he shreds as soon as he read the first few lines of the personalized letter. All about how they can fix him, or make him better, or some bullshit like that.
His highest ranked offer came from Best Jeanist, fourth in Japan. There isn’t a personalized offer in there, just a cover letter, a train ticket, the forms he’d need to fill out, and a sheet with instructions and directions to the Genius Office.
Presumptuous.
Obviously, the asshole assumed he would be Katsuki’s best offer, a top five hero.
It’s the condescending nature of Jeanist’s offer that makes Katsuki’s eyes flick over to the offer from Batman, still untouched on top of the pile of other offers, the Justice League seal flashy and holographic, reflecting the light from his bedroom window.
Aizawa wouldn’t have given him the offer unless he could actually take it, right?
Best Jeanist might be top five in Japan, but only one Japanese hero has ever been invited into the Justice League officially: All Might, and he’s still only a part-time member.
And he knows this isn’t a fake offer, because U.A. had screened every single offer their students received.
Plus—rumor has it that Batman and his associates were all quirkless.
Katsuki’s aware that for whatever reason Americans had a higher quirkless population than Japan’s, so for Batman to be as famous and as powerful as he is—Katsuki had always been drawn to power.
Back when shitty fucking Deku lied to everyone—said he didn’t have a fucking quirk, the piece of shit—sure, Katsuki had bullied him about it, but it wasn’t about him being quirkless. Deku had never taken any fucking initiative. He didn’t work for it. He just sat there fucking talking about it. Batman was living fucking proof that quirkless people could be amazing heroes, and Deku did nothing but dream.
Katuski did want to work on his hand-to-hand quirkless combat, after all.
How long would a flight to America be, anyways?
He glances at his laptop, still open to the same lo-fi stream he’s been listening to all morning, and opens a new tab.
Tokyo to Gotham flight time, he types into the search bar.
Twelve hours.
He could deal with a twelve-hour flight, couldn’t he? He has copies of the syllabus for all of his classes and PDF copies of his textbooks downloaded onto his laptop, and it would open up more time to physical training if he already completed most of his schoolwork...plus he’d be ahead of Glasses and Ponytail...
Best Jeanist’s offer is still on the table his dad uses to stitch together prototype designs, the train ticket in full view.
Katsuki enjoys watching it shred.