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Whenever Camie would fuck around on her phone in free moments during the remedial classes, Katsuki usually didn’t give a shit. If she wanted to futz around doing who knows what instead of trying to absorb the lessons into the few brain cells that existed in her ditsy head, that was on her.
When her obsession with whatever she did on her phone ended up distracting Shouto to the point that they had been chattering away for at least twenty minutes after the class ended, Camie gushing as she pointed out stuff on the screen while Shouto looked on like she was telling him the best cold soba recipe ever, Katsuki started to get a little pissed. The idiot hadn’t even changed out of his costume yet, stopped outside the locker rooms without a care in the world like they wouldn’t get in trouble if they weren’t back in time for curfew.
“Icy Hot, hurry your ass up or I’m leaving you behind!” Katsuki finally yelled, the steps he made toward the exit a sign that he wasn’t kidding. Mostly.
Shouto startled at his yell while Camie smirked and nudged his shoulder, her other hand clicking off her phone and sliding it into her pocket. “Better head on out with your bae before he blows his top.”
The blank look on Shouto’s face showed he didn’t process any of her words (who could?), but he nodded anyway and headed into the men’s locker room, Camie disappearing into the women’s.
Five minutes hadn’t passed before Shouto reemerged, school uniform on and costume case in hand, and he walked over to where Katsuki was waiting only a few steps away from where he was before. “I’m sorry you waited so long for me,” he said, slipping his warm left hand into Katsuki’s free right one, second nature now that autumn was fully upon them.
The action still made Katsuki’s face burn, even if they’d been together for a few weeks already. “Whatever.” He tugged Shouto toward the exit. “Let’s go, I’m fucking starving.”
“Are we getting soba?”
“In this weather? Hell no.” The cold breeze that met them as Katsuki pushed open the door was even more confirmation that he didn’t want to eat anything remotely cold for the next several months. “Hot udon.”
“What about next time?”
Katsuki cut his eyes over to him; even if Shouto’s expression was largely unchanged, his eyes were a little wider as he looked back at him.
Katsuki squinted. That suspiciously looked like puppy eyes. Kirishima must’ve been trying to teach him how to do it, the little shit. Shouto was barely doing it right yet his eyes stabbed right through to Katsuki’s heart, and he quickly looked away, his face burning all over again. He was getting soft, damn it. “We’ll see.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small smile tug up Shouto’s lips, like he could already tell that meant yes.
The sky was tinted gold as they walked to the train station, side by side. The entire way was crowded with people as they headed home from work, as was the station itself and the train back to Musutafu; they’d just barely managed to squeeze into the car, packed in with salarymen and kids leaving extracurriculars as they shared a handle.
Katsuki kept his gaze aimed out the window, watching the Japanese scenery fly by and keeping his shoulders tense against the people who brushed against him on the turns. He felt like a fucking sardine crammed into a can.
He braced against the next turn, but when somebody jabbed him in the shoulder he turned to snap at them, only to stop when he realized it was just Shouto, his finger still raised. He barely blinked at the second of rage aimed at him as he raised his other hand. “Look at this.”
He was holding up his phone, and Katsuki squinted at the screen. It looked like the title screen of a game, with a drawing of All Might with his fist raised like he had at Kamino standing front and center and other pro heroes taking up the background. In front of All Might’s chest in big bold letters was the title Heroes For All . The phone’s volume was low, but above the din of the noise of the train Katsuki could make out the jingle that was always played during All Might’s interviews through the teeny speaker.
It piqued the interest of his inner nerd, but he still raised an eyebrow at Shouto. “The hell is this?”
“It’s the game Camie was showing me. You get to make a character who trains with pros to defeat villains.”
Katsuki snorted. “Isn’t that what you do everyday?”
“Yes, but this looks fun. You can pick what your character looks like and the quirk that they have, and you can make your own team of heroes to work with.” As he explained he showed Katsuki the character he’d made so far—more generic than Shouto actually looked, his avatar’s hair pure white, a label at the bottom of the screen saying he had some kind of water quirk—as well as a team of pros, all of them mid-tier heroes. Shouto’s tone and face didn’t reveal much excitement, but Katsuki could see the way that his mismatched eyes glimmered, his own form of a smile.
So Katsuki just hummed, his head leaning against his raised arm and eyes now watching Shouto poke at the phone screen. “Just don’t get distracted like she does, or I’ll kick your ass.”
“I won’t.”
Yet Shouto’s eyes stayed glued to his phone. For the rest of the train ride, while they ate dinner at the ramen stall, and as they walked back to campus he stayed playing the game. Even when they said goodnight to each other, the duo ascending the stairs of the dorms together at 8pm, Shouto paused at the landing of the 4th floor to kiss Katsuki’s cheek as he did every night, then in the next second he was back to the game as he continued up to his floor.
Katsuki watched him go with a frown. He really would get distracted at this rate.
As he unlocked his room, he pulled out his phone, navigating to the app store. There’s no way that game was as fun as Shouto seemed to make it out to be.
The game was way more fun than Katsuki expected and he hated it .
It turned out to be a gacha game of all things, which he detested on principle. From watching Kaminari play whatever games he had on his phone almost nonstop throughout the school day and whining about being out of powerups or whatever the fuck, he knew how addictive those games could be. He avoided them to not get drawn into that mess, and because he had better things to do.
Yet as soon as he downloaded Heroes For All on his phone that night, he couldn’t stop playing. He was up until almost midnight, exhausted with stinging eyes and a dangerously-low phone battery, as he worked through the tutorial section of the game and build up a foundation for his digital hero persona. The starting physical design and quirk options were basic as hell, but the options that could be unlocked was where the gacha elements came in. Quirk upgrades, better costumes, even more heroes could be unlocked through special events and leveling up and earning the in-game currency by winning battles to buy it all.
It was designed to keep you locked in and engaged, especially since the heroes of the top ten were the last to be unlocked with an insane amount of money. But also, All Might was there too, despite his recent retirement, right in the highest tier. And as much as Katsuki loathed gacha games, he had to unlock him; even if All Might had talked to him after his fight with Deku, guilt still clung to him after what happened at Kamino. Unlocking All Might in the game and winning a few battles with him could be a kind of payback and closure for all the battles he couldn’t have now because of Katsuki.
So in his free time, he started to grind. As determined as he was to meet his goal, he still wasn’t an idiot, only playing during lunch, for an extra hour after he said he went to bed, and on the weekends when he didn’t have homework or remedial classes, away from the prying eyes of any of the idiots in the squad.
It was one of those weekends that he was holed up in his room playing, laying on his stomach in bed and headphones on so nobody would hear the game audio through the walls.
He was oblivious to his door clicking open, the muted steps making their way over to his bed until a cold hand touched his back. He jerked, whipping around with wide eyes and meeting the equally-wide eyes of Shouto, his hand still hovering in the air. “ Fuck , wear a bell or something, shit,” he sighed, flopping back onto the mattress and pausing the battle he was doing at the moment.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” The bed dipped as Shouto laid next to him, Katsuki scooting over to make room. “You’re playing the game?”
Katsuki’s face warmed as he grabbed his phone again, taking out an earbud so he could still hear Shouto. “S’not the worst.”
Shouto’s eyes were doing that happy sparkle again, and a small smile pulled at his lips that had Katsuki’s face heating even more and attention going back to the game before he exploded.
Shouto settled into his side, a companionable silence falling over them as he watched Katsuki play. The battle ended—in Katsuki’s victory, obviously, he might hate the principle of gacha games but he wasn’t gonna be shit at them—and as he headed to the shop to spend his newly-earned currency, Shouto leaned in with furrowed brows. “You don’t have All Might yet?”
Katsuki barked a laugh. “You kidding? It’s gonna take me ages to unlock him.”
“But I have him already.”
Katsuki paused, then looked at Shouto for even a hint of a joke but there was nothing, just his same stoic and serious expression. “Bullshit. All Might’s fucking expensive and you’ve barely been playing longer than me, there’s no way you’ve unlocked him already.”
Shouto simply pulled out his phone and navigated to his game’s collection before handing it over for Katsuki to see. Sure enough, All Might was already unlocked and Shouto’s top pick for his hero team. The former #1 hero wasn’t the only one unlocked, however. As Katsuki scrolled through Shouto’s inventory, his eyes growing progressively wider, he saw that most of the heroes were unlocked. Best Jeanist, Edgeshot, even fucking Wash. He had most of the costume and personalization options for his character even if his activated choices were still basic, and his in-game quirk was upgraded into something way more complex than the water shit he was doing at first. Everything that the shop offered, save for Endeavor and anything with his likeness on it, was in Shouto’s inventory, with thousands of the in-game currency left in his bank.
Katsuki turned his baffled expression to Shouto. “ How? ”
“I bought them,” he said simply.
“No, like- a lot of this shit takes forever to save up enough money for, some of it you can’t even buy outright with the tokens, you gotta wait for the special events to unlock them! I barely see you on your phone too so there’s no fucking way you’ve played enough and won enough battles to get every single fucking thing.”
Shouto’s face scrunched in confusion. “The game said I could buy everything outright, though?”
“Hah? The fuck are you talking about?”
Shouto took his phone back, and Katsuki watched him navigate to the screen to purchase more in-game currency . He tapped the most expensive option, the funds immediately appearing in the game’s bank with a cheerful jingle. “When I tried to buy things with the in-game currency it told me to buy more here since I didn’t have enough. So I did.”
“Wh- you- you used your own damn money on this shit?!”
“Of course not, Katsuki, that would have been too expensive for me. I used my father’s credit card.”
Even among his frustration that startled a laugh out of Katsuki. “Of course you did.” Once he sobered though he fixed Shouto with a look. “Buying everything outright defeats the purpose of the game, dumbass. You curb the addiction aspect of it at least, but you’re supposed to earn the heroes and powerups and all that shit. Makes it feel worth it.”
“Oh.” Shouto looked down at his phone, considering. “Should I delete everything and start over?”
“...lemme play with All Might first.”
Shouto easily handed his phone over, and Katsuki scrapped his previous team choices to build his own. “Your team is shit, you’re supposed to be well-rounded in fights.”
“I never had a problem, I was able to defeat the villains easily.”
“ That’s because you maxed out your stats too early, dumbass -”