Chapter Text
Genos got a lot of fan mail… Well, “a lot” was probably understating it. He got boxes full of the stuff. It made sense, of course; Genos was an S-class hero who’d saved city after city from destruction, but would always stop whatever he was doing to incinerate a Tiger or Wolf-level monster if he saw one. But the letters weren’t only from people he’d saved. They also came from what Saitama could only think of as his fan club - the giggling girls (and boys, too) who signed their notes full of fawning adoration with a heart or a couple of x’s or, in the case of the especially bold ones, their phone number.
And, while Saitama thought it was going a little overboard, he was fine with it. Sure, he pretty much exclusively got hate mail in his weekly Hero Association delivery, but he wasn’t doing this whole hero thing because he wanted praise. Honestly, some of the letters were pretty funny, too. Who called someone a “cunt muffin”? Seriously. What was that even supposed to mean?
So every Tuesday, when the Hero Association dropped two packages on their doorstep, Genos and Saitama went through their mail together. It took the cyborg a lot longer to through his mail, especially since he politely read each and every letter, while Saitama mostly just skimmed. After he was done, he’d hand over his letters to Genos and let the cyborg incinerate them, mostly because Genos claimed that simply throwing them away wasn’t sufficient - such insults deserved to be turned to ashes. Saitama wasn’t sure he agreed, but Genos seemed to take a sort of vindictive pleasure in burning up the notes, so whatever. Let the kid have some fun.
One Tuesday afternoon in early February found them sitting around the kotatsu, Saitama huddled under the blanket and refusing to admit that his upper body was freezing as he read his mail. He’d turned the heat off after a warm spell hit Z-city and he was refusing turn it back on even though the respite from the cold was well and truly over. Money was money, after all, and even with Genos paying rent, there never seemed to be enough of it to go around. Sure, that was partly because Saitama wouldn’t let the rich bastard pay for everything, but at least his pride was still intact this way.
Saitama shivered, staring down at a letter written in red ink on a piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped out of a notebook. “Go to hell, cheater!!!” it informed him, and he sighed, setting it with the rest of his hate mail. As usual, there wasn’t a single good one in the bunch.
He handed the pile over to Genos without a word. When the notes weren’t taken from him immediately, he frowned and looked up. Genos… Genos was staring at the letter in his hands, his mouth open and a blush coating his cheeks. Saitama’s eyebrows went up. First of all because who knew cyborgs could blush, and second of all… Well, what the hell would even make a cyborg blush.
“You… Alright there, Genos?” he asked, raising one eyebrow and setting his mail on the kotatsu.
The cyborg started, dropping the letter, which had still been halfway in its envelope. “Y-yes, sensei!” he stammered, but Saitama was no longer listening - he was too preoccupied with staring at the photos that had spilled out of the envelope.
They were of a woman. A woman with full breasts and thick thighs. A woman who was, most definitely, naked. In the first photo, she was posed bending sexily over the back of a couch, her, well, everything on display. The next was an overhead shot of her laying on a bed, one hand tangled in her hair and the other between her legs. Saitama’s mouth dropped open as his eyes darted over the other photographs, each of which was equally raunchy and one of which contained a dildo.
Genos squeaked. “Oh! There are photos too!” Saitama looked up and found that the cyborg was even redder than before. He emitted a little puff of steam from his shoulder vents and Saitama wasn’t sure if he should laugh or not.
Instead, he said, “What else is there?”
Genos looked slightly alarmed. “Nothing sensei should concern himself with!” When Saitama gave him a look, however, he relented. “The- the letter. It was very… detailed.” He looked away, and Saitama suspected that if the blush function he had hadn’t only seemed to extend to his cheeks, that his entire face would have been as red as a tomato.
Saitama snatched the letter, which was written on an expensive-looking piece of stationery, from where it had fallen and scanned it quickly. His eyebrows went up as he read. It started out as standard fare for Genos: the woman first praised the cyborg’s heroics and confessed that she had feelings for him. However, the letter didn’t stop there. It continued, detailing what she would like to do to Genos and how and where, as well as what she would like him to do to her. The contents were absolutely filthy and the activities described therein ranged from vanilla to the much kinkier side of things.
Saitama… Saitama didn’t usually feel much. That wasn’t to say that his nervous system wasn’t intact; he meant “feel” in the strictly emotional sense. And it wasn’t like he was some kind of robot - Saitama felt happiness, and sadness, and anger. They were just… numbed down. Like someone had put a dampener on his emotions and forgotten to take it off. Joy dulled to a sense of contentment, sadness caused him to frown instead of cry, and anger tended to feel more along the lines of annoyance.
What Saitama felt now, though, was such a far cry from the usual flickers of feeling that he experienced that it surprised him. When he looked at Genos, with his blush and his wide, gold and black eyes, there was a surge of- of something in his gut. He couldn’t quite place a name to it, but he knew that it wasn’t pleasant. It twisted his insides and suddenly he wanted to- to find the woman in those photos and- and hit her. How dare she make Genos look like that, feel like that. How dare she think it was okay to send naked photos of herself to a stranger just because he was a celebrity!
Saitama began to gather up the photos, picking them up one by one. The first one he picked up got accidentally crumpled in his hand, and Saitama looked down at it in surprise; he’d thought he’d been being delicate. After that, he was more careful, but several of the photos still received accidental crinkles or holes. After he was done gathering them all up, he thrust the pile at Genos. “Here.”
The cyborg looked down at the crumpled photographs and letter with confusion. “Sensei, I don’t understand. Do you wish me to keep them?”
“No! God, no,” Saitama said, something twisting in his gut unpleasantly at the idea, “I- I mean, do whatever you want. But if I was you, I’d burn them.” He felt a twinge of guilt saying that… Honestly, if he got naked photos in his mail, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with them.
Genos nodded. “I see. You’re right, sensei. I should not let myself be distracted by such things, or take advantage of the woman in these photos when I have no intention of pursuing a romantic relationship with her.” He charged up the weapon in his palm and incinerated the letter and the pile of photographs before Saitama could even open his mouth to respond. “There. It is dealt with.”
Some of the tension in Saitama’s shoulders unwound for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. He picked up his mail off of the kotatsu and handed it to Genos. This time, the cyborg took and burned it without hesitation.
“Thanks,” Saitama smiled, something in his stomach flipping when Genos gave him a small smile back.
“It’s not a problem, Sensei. I’m more than pleased to be of service to you.”
For some reason, those words stuck with Saitama the rest of the day.