Archive of Our Own ^omega

a newlywed game fic — bakugou katsuki × midoriya izuku

set roughly three years after the fall of all for one. pro hero careers are in full swing and the recently married (two months, to be precise, in a ceremony that trended on twitter for six days straight and caused a minor international incident because kirishima cried so hard he set off a building alarm with his hardening). the gang is all here. someone brought tequila. nobody thought to bring consequences.

The rooftop of Kirishima Eijirou's apartment building in Musutafu is, objectively speaking, one of the most beautiful places in the city at night, and this is not a small claim because Musutafu is not a small city, and it is not a city that does nights quietly or without opinion.

It sprawls below them like something poured out and left to shimmer — the kind of city that doesn't sleep so much as it shifts between registers of wakefulness, moving from the bright lights of mid-evening into the deeper, more velvet-edged frequency of midnight, and then beyond that into the strange luminescent quiet of two in the morning where the only things still moving with purpose are taxis and people with secrets.

The skyline is not as beautiful as it once used to be, with its towers and its ambition and its refusal to be anything other than cosmopolitan and internationally legible; the effects of the war still lingering.

Musutafu's skyline is now something more personal, more layered, built up over decades of quirk-accommodating architecture that gives the city its particular silhouette — a building here with reinforced blast walls on the upper floors, a block there with the visible imprint of something large having been stopped by a hero's body sometime in the past and then renovated around rather than demolished, the general skyline peppered with the small illuminated crosses of support centers and the warm yellow windows of apartments where people are still awake, still cooking, still arguing about what to watch, still living the insistently ordinary life that requires extraordinary people to protect it.

The rooftop has been transformed, is the thing.

This is what Momo Yaoyorozu does when she is given even a twenty-four hour window and the vaguest suggestion of an occasion: she transforms things. She had arrived at nine in the morning with a clipboard and an expression of focused creative ambition that had caused Kirishima to simply hand her his key and go get breakfast with Kaminari and leave her to it, because there are forces in this world that cannot be redirected, only accommodated. By the time anyone else arrived at seven in the evening, the rooftop had become something else entirely.

String lights — obviously not the cheap plastic kind, come on it's Momo Yaoyorozu, but the warm glass-bulb kind that glow amber and honeyed and cast everything beneath them in the soft impression of being inside a dream someone is having about summer — have been strung in overlapping canopies from the four corners of the rooftop, low enough to feel intimate, high enough that Kirishima's hair doesn't catch (barely). There are low tables, the kind you sit around on floor cushions, arranged in a horseshoe configuration facing a small elevated platform — not quite a stage, just two wooden steps and a cleared space, but the intention is clear.

The cushions are deep jewel tones, emerald and burgundy and a rich indigo that looks almost black in the amber light. There are plants that Momo has brought in actual pots — real plants, trailing and lush, something with tiny white flowers that smells faintly of jasmine. There are candles in glass holders along the low railings.

There is a bar cart that Kaminari immediately stationed himself at upon arrival and has not left since. There are, because Momo is Momo and she thinks of everything, two matching wooden boxes sitting on the elevated platform labeled respectively KATSUKI and IZUKU in small elegant lettering, each containing a pair of shoes.

The shoes are the bit.

The game, as Momo has explained in the group chat three separate times and in person twice, works as follows: around fifty questions, some directed at Katsuki first and then Izuku second, some the reverse, some answered simultaneously. After each question and answer, the respondents hold up a shoe — their own to indicate themselves, their spouse's to indicate the other person. Points are awarded for matching answers. The game, nominally, has a winner, but everyone present already understands that the real game is watching two of the most intensely competitive people in the known universe be forced to cooperate in order to score points, which means the real prize is the spectacle of what happens when they don't match.

The friends gathered on this particular rooftop on this particular warm September night are, in no particular order: Kirishima Eijirou, who planned this and is already on his third beer and radiating the contented glow of a man whose two best friends just got married to each other exactly as he predicted they would; Yaoyorozu Momo, who is running the game with the methodical efficiency of someone who has made flow charts for this occasion; Kaminari Denki, who is at the bar cart and has been making increasingly ambitious cocktails for the past hour and offering them to people without naming the ingredients; Ashido Mina, who arrived last and is wearing a sparkly purple top and has already taken seventeen photos for her instagram; Jirou Kyouka, who is sitting against Momo's side and has her headphones around her neck and is wearing an expression of deep private amusement at everything; Todoroki Shouto, who is sitting very straight and very still with a drink he has not touched and who has the particular expression of someone who is extremely invested in the proceedings but will not admit this under any circumstances; Uraraka Ochako, who is sitting next to Todoroki and is already tipsy and keeps leaning over to whisper commentary into Todoroki's ear and getting no visible reaction but persisting anyway; Iida Tenya, who is sitting very upright on his cushion and has already requested three separate clarifications about the rules and who has privately (loudly) expressed concern about the privacy implications of this sort of exercise and who is drinking what appears to be sparkling water but is actually a gin and tonic because Kaminari has been using the last half hour to swap them out and Iida hasn't noticed yet; and Sero Hanta, who is lying stretched across two cushions like a cat and has a beer balanced on his stomach and is simply delighted to be here.

There is also a camera.

Two cameras, actually: one professional-grade on a tripod in the corner that belongs to the documentary crew that Kirishima — with a level of organizational ambition that surprised everyone, including himself — has arranged to be present, and one phone belonging to Ashido that she has wedged into a small ring light stand and angled at the central platform, which is already live on her instagram story.

The camera crew is a small one: a director named Hayashi who has covered hero events for six years and therefore has a high tolerance for chaos, and a single camera operator named Futaba who is already looking around at the assembled group with the expression of someone who has vastly underestimated the assignment. Hayashi had told them this was a light post-wedding celebration piece, "something warm and accessible, the newlywed game format, very charming." Hayashi had not met this particular group of people before tonight. Hayashi is learning things.

This footage, it should be noted, will eventually be purchased by at least three separate media outlets and one streaming service, and the highlight reel — specifically the moment approximately forty minutes in that will come to be known in internet parlance simply as The Shoe Incident — will be the most rewatched hero-related video of the year.

But that's later.

Right now the sun has just fully dropped below the horizon, the string lights have come on all at once as Momo connected her phone to the switch, and everyone has drinks, and Izuku and Katsuki are walking up the stairs from the interior of the building side by side, Katsuki a half-step ahead as he always is, Izuku talking already before they've even cleared the door—

"—I'm just saying, you agreed to this—"

"I agreed to come to the dinner, babe, not to whatever the hell Shitty Hair has—" Katsuki stops walking when he clears the rooftop door and takes in the string lights and the camera and Momo standing with a clipboard and Ashido already pointing her phone at him and his face does something complicated and rapid, moving through surprise and processing and calculation and landing on a kind of resigned exasperation that is so specifically his that Izuku, coming up behind him, walks into his back.

"Sorry—" Izuku cranes around him and looks at the rooftop and his face does the opposite thing, moving from startled to delighted so fast it barely registers as two separate states. "Oh, this is beautiful, Yaomomo—"

"This is a trap," Katsuki says.

"It's the newlywed game," Momo says, with the energy of someone who has been waiting to say these words for approximately thirty-six hours. "Fifty questions. Sit down, Katsuki."

"Absolutely not—"

"Sit down," says Kirishima from the cushions, pointing imperiously, already grinning, "both of you, right there, in the middle, the camera is already rolling—"

"We're rolling," confirms Futaba from behind the camera, with professional neutrality.

"We're on the 'gram," confirms Ashido, with rather less neutrality.

Katsuki looks at the camera. Then at Ashido's phone. Then at Izuku's face, which is lit up with the specific brand of excited delight that Katsuki has never once in twenty-three years of knowing him been able to argue with, not genuinely, not when it's real like this. He makes a sound in the back of his throat that is the vocalization of a man choosing his battles, which is a sound that has been heard more frequently in the two years following Izuku's proposal than in all the years preceding it combined.

"Fine," he says.

"Oh my god," whispers Sero, mostly to himself.

"Sit," says Momo, gesturing to the two central floor cushions on the elevated platform — side by side, facing the horseshoe of their friends, and the amber lights are warm above them, and the city breathes below, and someone in the group already has their phone out to live-react.

Izuku sits first, cross-legged, settling easily, and when Katsuki, although he's supposed to sit with his back to Izuku, chooses to sit beside him and Izuku automatically leans slightly into his shoulder — not a full lean, just the casual gravitational drift of two bodies long accustomed to shared space — and Katsuki does not move away. He just sits there with his arms folded across his chest and his expression set to its professional default of mild aggravation, which means he's fine, which anyone who has known him long enough understands implicitly.

"Alright," says Momo, and clicks her pen, and the night begins.

question one. who is messier?

"Me," says Izuku immediately, and holds up his own shoe.

There is a pause. Everyone looks at Katsuki.

Katsuki is holding up Izuku's shoe. Matching. First point.

"Of course it's you," Katsuki says, with the certainty of a man stating a fact about All Might's might.

"His hero notes," Katsuki continues, which was not a cue for him to continue but here they are, "take up seventeen physical notebooks which he leaves on every surface we own. He has a system—" this word carrying the particular weight of someone who has been told about the system many times and remains unpersuaded of its merits— "and the system apparently involves the kitchen counter, the bathroom vanity, and for some reason that I still have not received an adequate explanation for, the inside of the dryer—"

"I was analyzing the weight distribution of Cementos's old hero costume," Izuku says, not defensively at all, just informatively, "and the dryer was warm and I was thinking—"

"You left a notebook in the dryer."

"It survived."

"The ink ran."

"Most of it survived."

Kaminari, from the bar cart: "First point, first chaos, we are going to be here all night."

[He finds it on a Thursday morning in their third week of living together, back before the ring and before the wedding, back when they were still in the slow astonishing process of discovering all the ways domestic coexistence with Izuku Midoriya differs from every other domestic coexistence in the known universe. He is doing laundry. He is not a person who enjoys doing laundry but he is a person who requires clean clothes and who has an extremely specific standard for how clothing should be laundered, which means he does most of the laundry himself by choice, which is a situation he is at peace with. He opens the dryer to transfer clothes and finds the notebook.

He stands there for a very long moment.

He takes the notebook out. It's warm. The cover has a small drawing of Mount Lady on it that Izuku has done himself in ballpoint pen during what was probably a meeting, and underneath the drawing in Izuku's handwriting it says vol. 12 - weight distribution + impact analysis. He opens it. The ink on the pages nearest the drum has ghosted outward slightly, the careful technical writing becoming impressionistic, the force diagrams going soft at the edges. It looks, actually, a little like art.

He puts it on the counter and texts Izuku: found your notebook. Izuku texts back three minutes later: "which one?" which is the correct answer of someone who genuinely does not know which notebook in particular has been found and is not being obtuse about it. Katsuki sends a photo. Izuku sends back: oh no, the dryer note, that's volume 12 — wait is the ink okay?

Katsuki photographs a page for him. Izuku sends: oh that's actually kind of beautiful.

Katsuki does not respond to this for four minutes and then sends: "you are so unbelievably strange." He photographs the cover drawing of Mount Lady and sends it too.

Izuku sends back seventeen exclamation points and then: "can I frame the volume 12 pages?" to which Katsuki says yes to and then, because this is the kind of person he has become, apparently, he also says: "I love you."

The framed pages are currently hanging in their hallway.]

question two. who said 'I love you' first?

The pause before this one is exactly 1.4 seconds, which is long by the standards of this particular pair, both of whom have reaction times in the professional hero range.

They look at each other.

Katsuki looks away first, which is the only data point anyone in the room needs, but Momo says "shoes, please" with the energy of someone who will not be allowing shortcuts tonight.

Izuku holds up Katsuki's shoe.

Katsuki holds up Katsuki's shoe.

Match. Two points.

"Oh my god," says Uraraka, and grabs Todoroki's arm, and Todoroki lets her because that is simply the arrangement.

"I already knew this," says Kirishima triumphantly, pointing at the camera, "I am on record as knowing this, Futaba please make sure you got that—"

"Got it," says Futaba.

"I also knew this," says Mina, leaning forward so intensely her drink sloshes, "we all knew this—"

"We didn't all know this," Sero says. "Some of us were robbed of witnessing it."

"It was—" Izuku starts.

"Moving on," says Katsuki.

"It was extremely—" Izuku continues.

"Question three," says Katsuki, to Momo, with great urgency.

"It was in the hospital," Izuku says, to the group, not to Katsuki, because he knows perfectly well that Katsuki is not going to stop him, only redirect — there is a difference — "after the Shiketsu incident with the—"

"Deku—"

"—the one with the collapsing underground sector and the—"

"Nobody needs the context—"

"—and Kacchan had been pretty badly hit and his quirk was temporarily suppressed and we were in adjacent beds in the support wing and it was three in the morning and he thought I was asleep—"

The group is so still you could hear the string lights hum.

"—and he said it," Izuku says simply. "Because he thought I was asleep. And that he'd been thinking it for a while and it just—came out."

"And?" says Ashido, nearly off her cushion.

Izuku smiles, and it's not the performed smile or the bright public smile but the quieter one, the one that lives lower on his face and takes up more of it. "I wasn't asleep."

"The fact that I thought I could get one past you," Katsuki says, shaking his head, and his voice is doing the thing it does when he's trying to sound dismissive and isn't quite succeeding, "while you was lying two feet away—"

"I didn't say anything for like a whole minute."

"Oh yeah, the nerd was fucking processing— He said 'yeah, me too, now go to sleep Kacchan'—"

"That is a very reductive characterization of—"

"And then you turned over and pretended to be asleep again."

"I was processing—"

Kirishima has his face buried in his hands. His shoulders are shaking.

"To be clear," says Jirou, with the measured calm of a journalist getting facts straight, "that was his version of 'I love you too.'"

"Obviously," says Izuku.

"Obviously," says Katsuki, at exactly the same time, and they look at each other again, and something passes between them in the amber light of the rooftop, some quick private current of recognition, before Momo says "moving on" with great professional authority.

question three. who takes longer to get ready in the morning?

"Him," they both say, simultaneously, each pointing at Katsuki.

Katsuki rolls his eyes. "Obviously me, I have standards—"

Izuku groans. "It used to be forty-five minutes before I put a timer on the bathroom—"

"The timer was an assault—"

"I was late to a briefing—"

"Because Aizawa schedules briefings at six a.m. like a person who has made peace with being miserable—"

Match. Three points. Momo is already smiling, the controlled smile of someone whose flow chart is going according to plan.

"I feel like we've all experienced the forty-five minute morning," says Sero, tilting his beer toward the sky in toast. "Like. When we were in the dorms. That man stood in front of the mirror and communicated with his reflection."

"I was not having a good morning. I also did not get proper rest and who's fault do you think that was? Not to mention I had to talk myself into not killing the reporters when they shove a microphone in my face." says Katsuki.

"On Tuesday morning at six thirty."

"Quality doesn't have a schedule, Sero—"

"This is incredible," says Ashido, to her phone, to the 8,000 people watching her instagram story, who are definitely going to make this a moment.

question four. who is more likely to cry at a movie?

Shoes go up: both pointing at Izuku.

"That is fair and accurate," says Izuku, who does not appear remotely bothered. "I cried at the bee movie—"

"The bee movie—" Kaminari spins around from the bar cart.

"There's a scene where Barry realizes how much he's isolated the bee colony from their purpose and I—it resonated—"

"You cried during the bee movie—"

"I am a very emotionally available person," says Izuku pleasantly, "and I find that it serves me well professionally and personally, and also Kacchan always pretends to have something in his eye but I see you—"

"I do not—"

"Grave of the Fireflies—"

"That is a different conversation—"

"You made me pause it twice—"

"The sound design was affecting—"

The room. Everyone in the room looks at Katsuki. Katsuki holds their collective gaze with the imperious dignity of a man who knows he has already lost the specific battle currently being fought and is choosing to hold the larger territory.

"Question five," he says to Momo, and Momo, who is barely keeping it together, says "question five" with great seriousness and marks four points.

[flashback, their living room, 11 p.m., six months before the wedding:

It was Izuku who suggested Grave of the Fireflies, which he had never seen despite being a person who has watched an enormous quantity of animated film and has opinions about all of it. Katsuki had seen it a little, in a class screening in middle school, and had not at the time been equipped to properly process the experience, and had simply sat very still through it and then gone home and eaten dinner in silence and then slept for eleven hours.

He is better equipped now. He is still not, as it transpires, fully equipped.

They are twenty-two minutes in, the two children still finding their way, still in the early registers of the film's emotional logic, and Katsuki pauses the playback.

"What—" Izuku starts.

"I need a minute," says Katsuki, which is not a thing he often says, and he gets up and goes to the kitchen and stands at the sink and runs his hands under cold water for approximately thirty seconds and then comes back and sits down.

"Okay," he says.

Izuku is watching him with an expression that has no performance in it at all, just the clear, attentive, private version of care that Katsuki has gotten used to receiving and has not yet found the correct frame for receiving gracefully.

"Do you want me to tell you how it ends?" Izuku asks.

"No."

"Do you want to watch something else?"

"No."

Izuku considers this. "Do you want me to hold your hand?"

"Yes," says Katsuki, with the directness of someone who has practiced saying the true thing instead of the armor-plated version of it. It took him a while. He's gotten better at it.

Izuku holds his hand for the rest of the film.

At the end, when Katsuki gets up to get water, Izuku follows him to the kitchen and doesn't say anything, just stands beside him, shoulders touching.

"Sound design," says Katsuki finally.

"Mm," says Izuku.

"The composition."

"Right."

Katsuki drinks his water. "Masterful filmmaking is an assault on a person."

"Completely," says Izuku.

They go to bed without further discussion of it. Izuku texts his mother the next morning: watched Grave of the Fireflies last night with Kacchan. She texts back: how is he. He texts back: he's fine. He cried. He has depths. She sends a heart.]

question five. who apologizes first after a fight?

This could easily ruin the evening.

Because anyone who has known Bakugou Katsuki for any significant length of time knows that the question of apology has never been a simple one; it has been, at various points in his life, a mountain, a closed door, a country he didn't have a passport for. And anyone who has known Midoriya Izuku knows that he has a complicated relationship with his own needs, a habit of smoothing things over before the thing itself has been properly acknowledged, of absorbing the sharper edges of conflict into himself to protect the other person, which is a form of love that can become, if you're not careful, a form of disappearance.

They know all of this. The group on the cushions knows all of this. The two men on the platform in the amber light know all of this.

Izuku holds up his own shoe, slowly.

Katsuki holds up his own shoe, equally slowly.

They look at each other, and the look is something — and the shouting match starts at once.

"Okay to be fair, lately Kacchan has been doing a lot of romantic apologies—"

"What the fuck Izuku, you have not apologised a single time in the past two years, I swear to God—"

"You literally made me stop apologising unecessarily—"

"Unecessarily being the key word. The broken dishwasher is entirely your fault and you know it but I replaced it and I apologised for not doing the dishes myself which led to—"

"You know I can't operate the dishwasher—"

"Huh," says Sero, softly.

"Okay, yeah he does," Izuku says, to the group. "It used to be—" he pauses, and the pause has texture— "it used to be different. Right," he says, and this is to Katsuki.

"Used to be you did all of it," Katsuki says, flatly and his voice is factual, without flinching from it the way he once would have. "That was — that was not a good situation. I was working on that."

"You were working on it," Izuku confirms, the same way, just fact. "And now he does."

"Sometimes simultaneously," Katsuki adds, which is true and which is also, somehow, the most revealing thing he's said yet, because the idea of Bakugou Katsuki saying I'm sorry at the exact same moment as the other person, the two of them colliding in the doorway of accountability — that image is specific and real and everyone in the room is filing it away.

"Does that count as a match?" Momo says quietly, looking at her clipboard.

"Yes," says Izuku.

"Yes," says Katsuki.

Five points.

[flashback, their apartment, seven months ago, a Sunday:

The fight is about work, which all their worst fights are about, because work is the place where they are both most themselves and most exposed, where the things they protect in ordinary life — the cracks, the hard places, the old sharp corners — are nearest the surface.

It had started, as the worst ones do, quietly: a comment about a mission debrief that carried more edge than Katsuki intended, which hooked something in Izuku that pulled harder than either of them expected, and then they were in the thing, the real heated core of it, both of them at full volume, which in this apartment means quite a lot of volume, because they are both people who feel things strongly and whose bodies have learned to express strong feelings through the same physical channels as their hero work, which means arguments look like arguments.

It ends, as it always ends now, with the voice dropping out first — Izuku's, because Izuku runs hot and then cold and the cool is always his, it arrives before Katsuki's does — and in the silence Izuku says: "Good night Kacchan. Whatever."

And Katsuki fixes himself right away. "I'm sorry. I pushed too hard baby, I'm sorry—"

They stop.

They look at each other.

Katsuki's expression is doing the thing it does in private, the thing that would probably astonish anyone who knew only his professional face: it's open. Not soft, never fully soft, but open in the way a window is open, letting the air move through.

"It's okay. I'm sorry too." says Izuku.

"I love you." says Katsuki.

Neither of them moves. Then he crosses the room and sits down on the couch beside Izuku, not touching but close, the way you close a circuit, and he says, starting over: "I pushed too hard. About the Fukuoka thing. I know you're not — I know you're not questioning my judgment about the mission, you were questioning the call on the eastern approach, those are different and I reacted like they were the same thing."

Izuku listens to all of this without interrupting, which is the thing he has gotten better at: letting the whole thing come out before he responds.

"And I'm sorry," says Katsuki. "I was also wrong about the eastern approach, for the record."

"You were absolutely wrong about the eastern approach," Izuku says, "and also I'm sorry I said it like I did, I wasn't being fair about—"

"You were completely fair—"

"I was a little harsh—"

"You were accurate—"

"Shush. I'm sorry." Izuku says.

"It's okay."

"I love you too."

"Mm. Come to bed now baby?"

"A little later, let's just sit here."

Katsuki puts his feet up on the coffee table, which is something he only does in their apartment, in this specific configuration of exhausted-and-done, and Izuku leans sideways until his head is on Katsuki's shoulder, which is something he does whenever the angle of Katsuki's shoulder invites it, and they sit there as the Sunday afternoon comes in through the window, making its particular quality of light across the carpet, and the fight is over.]

question six. who is the better cook?

The speed with which Katsuki holds up his own shoe is almost insulting in its certainty.

"The answer," he says, "is objective."

Izuku, holding up Katsuki's shoe: "He's genuinely gifted. This is not a controversial question."

"Oh, don't start being gracious about it now, this morning—"

"I'm gracious about it because it's true—"

"You can't even boil water correctly—"

"The science of boiling water is more complex than—"

"It goes cold to hot, Deku, you don't need to— there's no analysis required—"

"I was thinking about temperature gradients in relation to quirk—"

"You are not allowed near the stove," Katsuki says, to the group, with the flat authority of a man reading from a document he has personally notarized, "and this is a safety issue, not a judgment issue, his hands literally run warmer than average and he once read the wrong burner and—"

"One time—"

"You read the wrong burner—"

"The knobs were mislabeled—"

"They were not—"

"They were slightly ambiguous—"

Mina is lying flat on her back on her cushion, staring up at the string lights, breathing through a full-body laugh. Kaminari has turned from the bar cart to watch. Iida, who has just taken his third sip of what he believes to be sparkling water, is beginning to look slightly more relaxed than he did at question two, which Kaminari clocks from across the rooftop with quiet satisfaction.

"Six points," says Momo, through a smile she has stopped trying to suppress.

question seven. who is the first one asleep at night?

Izuku, immediately: "Him."

Katsuki, with great offense: "No."

Izuku, pleasantly: "You fall asleep in under four minutes once your head hits the pillow. I've timed it."

"Why are you timing it—"

"Because I find it fascinating—"

"You find everything fascinating—"

"You literally go from 'lights off' to asleep in under four minutes, it's remarkable—"

"I have good sleep discipline—"

"You are also out like a light, it's like watching someone turn off a lamp, it's kind of adorable—"

"I will end this game—"

"He's definitely first asleep," confirms Kirishima, with the authority of someone who spent two years in shared hero dorm rooms with Katsuki. "And I say this with love: he can sleep anywhere. In transport vehicles, on briefing room tables, on Sero—"

"Why was he sleeping on Sero—"

"Post-mission, Sendai, three years ago," says Sero, raising his beer with the air of a man memorializing a cherished occasion. "He'd been on rotation for seventy-two hours and Kirishima and I were the pickup vehicle and he sat down between us and was asleep before we cleared the city limits and then he listed sideways onto my shoulder and did not wake up for two hours and I did not move because I was afraid of what he'd do to me if I woke him."

"Smart choice," says Izuku.

"Extremely smart choice," confirms Katsuki, without any apparent awareness that this is self-incriminating.

Shoes: both pointing at Katsuki. Match. Seven points.

[flashback, their bedroom, any of approximately three hundred nights:

This is what it looks like:

The room is dark except for the particular dark of a city bedroom, which is never fully dark, always carrying a little of the outside — the amber wash of the street lights, the occasional sweep of headlights, the faint blue of a passing emergency vehicle dissipating before it fully arrives. The window is cracked the way Katsuki always cracks it, regardless of season, because he runs warm and because he has slept with the sound of outside his whole life and considers its absence a form of deprivation.

They've been in bed for perhaps twelve minutes. Izuku is reading — his phone, held above him in the dark, the screen dim — and reading something about muscle memory and quirk application, probably, or possibly something about someone's hero history, or possibly both simultaneously because he has a gift for the parallel consumption of information that has never stopped being slightly impressive. He is propped on his left elbow and reading with his right hand and his feet are tangled with Katsuki's in the way they always end up tangled, some combination of habitual seeking and gravitational proximity.

Katsuki is asleep.

He went to sleep approximately three minutes after the light went off, between one breath and the next, the way a body accustomed to rest goes to rest — without ceremony, without staging, as simply as water finding level. His face in sleep is different from his face in waking, not softer exactly, but quieter: the constant low-level operational readiness of his professional expression is offline, and what remains is something younger and more truthful, the face of a person who is simply a person, breathing.

Izuku lowers his phone and looks at him for a moment.

He puts his phone on the nightstand.

He turns off the screen.

He lies back, facing the ceiling, in the dark, in the sound of the cracked window and the city below and Katsuki's even breathing beside him, and he thinks the small, luminous, ordinary thought that he thinks most nights: that he is here, in this room, with this person, and that the distance between where they started and where they are is something he cannot fully map, only live inside.

He is asleep within twenty minutes.

Katsuki, for the record, does not move once all night.]

question eight. whose idea was the proposal?

Everyone sits up slightly.

Futaba the camera operator zooms in, slowly, with the instinct of someone who has just sensed a story.

There is a pause.

Both of them hold up their own shoes.

The room erupts.

"WAIT—" Mina is on her feet, actually on her feet— "BOTH of you?? AT THE SAME TIME??"

"It was—" Izuku starts.

"It was—" Katsuki starts.

They look at each other.

"You tell it," says Katsuki, with the air of someone making a strategic concession.

"We—okay, so," says Izuku, and he's smiling the low quiet smile again, the real one, "we had apparently both been planning it, separately, for about three months without knowing the other one was—and we were on the roof at—at our building, not this building, our building—"

"Just tell the story babe—"

"I am telling the story, I'm setting the scene—"

"You're setting the scene—"

"It was evening," Izuku says, with precisely the energy of someone who will set the scene because the scene deserves to be set, "and we'd just come back from this really brutal joint operation in Nagoya that had gone overtime and we were both exhausted and we went up to the roof because it had been raining earlier and the sky was doing—you know that thing after rain where the whole sky looks—"

"Washed," says Momo softly, and Izuku points at her.

"Washed, exactly, and we were standing there and I had the ring, in my jacket pocket, I'd been carrying it for three weeks—"

"I'd been carrying mine for five weeks," says Katsuki.

A sound moves through the group like a wave.

"Five weeks—" says Kirishima—

"It was the right moment," Katsuki says, with the defensiveness of a man who has been asked about this before and knows that the five weeks is going to continue to be a thing, "I was waiting for the right moment—"

"And I said," Izuku continues, "I said, 'Kacchan, I've been thinking about this for a while and I—' and he said, at the exact same time, 'I need to say something—' and we both stopped and then we both reached into our jacket pockets—"

The sound again, louder.

"—and we both pulled out rings at the same time," Izuku finishes, and he looks at Katsuki, and the look is simply, unreservedly, the most privately delighted human expression that any person in the rooftop has ever witnessed on his face.

"She has a photo," says Katsuki, jerking his chin toward Uraraka.

Uraraka, going slightly pink: "I was not there—"

"You walked past us on the roof—"

"I went up to check on the plants—"

"You TOOK A PHOTO—"

"I was STARTLED—"

"She took a photo," Katsuki confirms, to the group, to the camera, to the watching world. "Before she screamed."

"I didn't scream—"

"She screamed," says Izuku fondly.

"I made a sound," says Uraraka, with great dignity.

Eight points.

[the roof, six months ago, after rain:

The thing about the sky after rain is that it does something to the light, strips it back, renders everything in the particular key of washed and attentive, the clouds carrying themselves differently, the air with that clean electricity, the city below looking briefly like itself again without the summer haze.

They are standing at the railing. Both of them have been standing at the railing for four minutes and thirty seconds since they came up here, ostensibly to cool down after the fourteen hours in Nagoya, and neither of them has said anything in two minutes and forty-five seconds, which is not unusual, which is one of the things about them — the silences don't require filling. The silence is a room they both live in comfortably.

Izuku's hand is in his jacket pocket.

His fingers are on the box.

He has been on the verge of this moment for three weeks and he is aware that he is on the verge again, the same way he is aware of the particular quality of his heartbeat and the specific way the air moves through him right now, the same way he is aware of everything important: fully, in detail, without distance.

He takes a breath.

"Kacchan," he says. "I've been thinking about this for a while, and I—"

"I need to say something," says Katsuki, at the exact same time.

Silence.

They turn to look at each other.

Izuku clocks the hand in the jacket pocket. The expression on Katsuki's face — not the one he wears in the world, the angry, mean one, the one that maintains the fiction of inaccessibility, but the one beneath it, the operating system running under the interface, which is simply: open.

"Oh," says Izuku.

"Oh," says Katsuki.

They pull out the rings at the same time.

The rings are, it will later be established over the course of an extremely long group chat thread, nearly identical in style: plain bands with a small accent stone, chosen because both of them spent time in their respective jeweler's not talking about aesthetics but about durability, about whether the band would hold up under repeated quirk use, under pressure and heat and cold and impact, about whether it would still be whole at the end of a hard day. They had arrived, independently, at the same answer.

They stand there holding their respective rings, looking at each other, in the washed evening light above the city.

Katsuki says, then, the simplest possible version of what he means: "Yes."

"Yes," says Izuku.

Neither of them has technically asked the question.

Both of them know the answer.

They stand there for a while longer, not putting the rings on yet, just holding them — the weight of the thing still in the air, something that needs a moment to be real before they close the circuit.

Then Izuku starts laughing.

And it's not the polite laugh or the public laugh or even the bright easy laugh: the real one, the one that takes him off guard, the one that bends him slightly, the one that is fully free. He laughs because it is extraordinary, because it is entirely them, because of course they both did this, because of course.

After a moment Katsuki makes a sound that is not not a laugh.

Then Uraraka walks through the rooftop door looking for her plant.

She makes, definitively, a sound.]

question nine. who is more likely to get into trouble off-duty?

Both shoes go up pointing at Katsuki.

"That's not—" he starts.

"The convenience store incident," says Izuku.

"That was not—"

"The airport thing—"

"I was provoked—"

"The press conference where you—"

"I was provoked—"

"The thing with the other pro hero at the awards ceremony—"

"He started it—"

"You threw a canapé at him—"

"It was more of a launch—"

"From across the room—"

"With significant accuracy—"

"That's not an exculpatory detail, Kacchan—"

"Nine points," says Momo, who has been waiting patiently through all of this, and the group dissolves.

question ten. who wears the other person's clothes more often?

Both shoes point at Izuku. Fast, certain, no hesitation.

"He has," says Katsuki, with the expression of a man who has fully surrendered the territory and is simply reporting on its current occupation, "a specific one of my hoodies that I have not seen on my own body in approximately four months and when I mentioned this I was told that it is his now—"

"It's my hoodie," says Izuku pleasantly.

"It's my hoodie," says Katsuki.

"It lives in my side of the closet."

"That doesn't make it your—"

"It smells like my shampoo now."

Katsuki opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. "I—" He stops.

"Possession is nine tenths," says Izuku serenely.

Katsuki makes a sound that is the sound of a man choosing not to pursue a line of argument not because he has lost it but because winning it would require admitting certain additional things that he is not prepared to admit on camera. He looks at Momo. "Ten points."

"Ten points," confirms Momo, and absolutely everyone in the group clocks what just happened and absolutely no one says anything about it.

[intermission note: Kaminari has now distributed three rounds of drinks. Iida has had four gin-and-tonics that he still continues to believe is sparkling water and has begun to loosen up in ways that are subtle but legible to anyone watching his posture, which has gone from ninety degrees to approximately eighty. Todoroki has drunk his one drink, slowly, and has been watching the proceedings with the same expression he uses when gathering data in the field. Ashido has texted her instagram followers a poll asking whether Bakugou or Midoriya is "winning the vibe" and the results are running sixty-forty in Izuku's favor, which Kaminari has shown to Katsuki on his phone, which Katsuki has responded to by looking directly into the live camera and saying "tell them they're wrong" and the comments section has erupted and Ashido's story engagement has gone up forty percent in six minutes.]

question eleven. what is your partner's most annoying habit?

This is the first question they answer separately — Momo has Izuku stand up and wait near the bar cart, just out of earshot (Kaminari offers him a drink cheekily), while she asks Katsuki first.

Katsuki, thinking for approximately one second: "He narrates."

Momo: "Can you elaborate."

Katsuki: "He talks out loud while he's thinking. Like he's giving a briefing to a room he thinks is empty. At seven in the morning. About quirk mechanics. I have heard detailed structural analysis of Kamui Woods' new containment technique at six forty-five a.m. while I was trying to drink my coffee in peace—"

"I learn better when I vocalize," Izuku says, from over by the bar cart, not quite out of earshot.

"YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE—" Katsuki turns.

"I have good hearing," says Izuku.

"How does he do that," says Sero, genuinely marveling.

Izuku is brought back. He answers: "He makes a sound when he's reading something that irritates him. Like a very small, controlled explosion. A tiny plosive sound. And then he puts the thing down with significant force. Every time. Financial documents, bad-faith media coverage, emails from people he finds professionally inadequate—"

Katsuki, staring ahead with great dignity: "The sound is involuntary."

Izuku nods sagely. "It is very consistent."

Katsuki: "The sound is a normal human response—"

"Sometimes I can tell from the next room whether he liked the email."

"You can't—"

"The force of the phone on the table tells me a lot too—"

"This conversation is over—"

"Do the answers match?"

The group considers. "They're both about communication habits," offers Jirou.

"Broadly, yes," says Momo, and awards the point generously, and the group applauds this decision.

Eleven points.

question twelve. which one of you is more stubborn?

Absolute simultaneous silence.

Then, simultaneously: "Him."

They look at each other.

"You," says Katsuki, pointing.

"You," says Izuku, pointing back.

"You are the most stubborn person I have ever encountered in my professional or personal life—"

"You argued with a support beam once—"

"That beam was structurally compromised—"

"You argued with it for forty seconds before it fell—"

"I was right—"

"The beam fell—"

"I was right about the structural compromise—"

"Kacchan, you once refused to ask for directions for an additional twenty-two minutes in Osaka—"

"I had a general sense of the layout—"

"We ended up in the fish market—"

"Which was fine—"

"Which was great," Izuku says, and a small, involuntary warmth gets into his voice on this, the memory recontextualizing itself mid-argument, "but we were an hour late and Kirishima had to call twice—"

"Kirishima also cannot read a map—"

"I think you're both stubborn," says Todoroki, calmly, from his cushion.

This lands with the particular weight of a Todoroki observation, which is to say: it lands with the weight of something obvious being stated by someone who never states anything that isn't true.

Silence.

"He's right," says Uraraka.

"He's always right," says Iida, who has just taken another sip of what he is calling sparkling water and who is gesturing with slightly more enthusiasm than earlier.

Momo: "Shoes?"

Both of them, after a pause, hold up both shoes simultaneously, one in each hand.

The group: a very long, very satisfied collective sound.

Twelve points.

[flashback, Osaka, fourteen months ago:

They are trying to find the conference venue. This is not a complicated task. The conference venue is in central Osaka and they have been to Osaka before and they have phones with maps. The reason they do not have maps currently open on their phones is that Katsuki said he knew where it was and Izuku said okay because he trusted this, which was not incorrect — Katsuki does have a strong spatial sense, he is generally good with layouts, he navigates efficiently in Tokyo and in most places they frequently visit.

He has, however, not been to this specific area of Osaka in three years and the streets in this part of the city have a particular quality of repetition — similar blocks, similar angles — that creates a kind of systematic error in the spatial memory.

Izuku knows this. He has known this for approximately twelve minutes.

He is walking beside Kacchan.

He is watching the way Kacchan's face does the thing it does when recalibrating — a small tension in the jaw, the eyebrows shifting from certain to less certain to a managed neutral designed to not communicate less certain.

He says nothing, because he has learned, with precision, the specific difference between helping and undermining, and that the map-on-the-phone is currently the latter.

They walk for eleven more minutes.

They arrive at a fish market.

The fish market smells extraordinary. It is covered and enormous and the vendors are calling over each other and there are tanks of live specimens and the light through the covered roof is that specific filtered light that makes everything look slightly more alive.

"Huh," says Katsuki.

"Map?" says Izuku.

A pause.

"Map," says Katsuki.

While Izuku opens the map, Katsuki buys them both skewers of grilled something from a stall he passes, which is the move of a man who has lost the directional argument and is pivoting cleanly to the thing he can win, which is food. The skewers are very good. The fish market is, genuinely, excellent.

They are forty-seven minutes late to the conference.

"Worth it?" Izuku asks, in the elevator up to the conference floor.

"We got the skewers," says Katsuki.

"That's a yes."

"That's not a—the point is the skewers were objectively good and I was right about going to the fish market."

"You didn't mean to go to the fish market—"

"But we did go, and we got the skewers, and they were good."

Izuku, looking at him. "You're incredible."

"I know," says Katsuki, and the elevator opens.]

question thirteen. what would your partner's last meal be?

Katsuki's answer comes immediately and requires no consultation: "Katsudon. His mother's. With the extra soft egg and extra broth."

There is something in the way he says it that makes Uraraka press her hand to her mouth and giggle happily.

Izuku: "Kacchan's own spicy miso ramen, the one he makes on Sunday mornings, with the soft-boiled egg that takes eleven minutes exactly and the specific green onion cut—"

"Twelve minutes," Katsuki says automatically.

"It's eleven—"

"If you're going for the right consistency it's twelve—"

"The last time you made it it was eleven minutes on the egg—"

"I was slightly rushed—"

"So your standard is twelve but your execution is eleven—"

"My execution is also twelve—"

"But I have eaten that ramen like seventeen hundred times and the egg has always been the eleven-minute version—"

"Because I'm usually multitasking—"

Momo, patiently: "Do the answers match?"

"Yes," says Izuku.

"Obviously," says Katsuki.

Thirteen points.

question fourteen. what does your partner do when they're nervous that they don't realize they do?

This one, again, is separated. Izuku goes to the bar cart. Kaminari hands him a drink with silent solidarity.

Katsuki, to the group: "He hums."

The group waits.

"Not a real song. Or sometimes a real song but he doesn't know he's doing it. Just — a low sound. When he's processing something difficult or waiting for news. He was doing it in the hallway outside the mission debrief room for the Stain operation follow-up for eleven minutes straight and he looked genuinely startled when I pointed it out."

Momo writes it down. Izuku is brought back. He sits, and there is something quick in his expression when he looks at Katsuki — the slightly disarmed look of someone who wasn't expecting to be seen in a particular way.

Izuku, to the group: "He—" a small pause, making sure he's saying it right— "he gets very still. Usually he's always a little bit in motion, even just micro-adjustments, restless in the way that people who have a lot of physical energy are restless. But when he's nervous he goes completely still. Like a system pause. And then he does one very deliberate, very controlled breath. And then he moves again and he's fine."

The group.

Katsuki is looking somewhere above Momo's head.

"I didn't think anyone noticed that," he says.

"I notice everything about you," says Izuku, which is not a performance and not inflated and not a line, just the specific truth of someone who has spent twenty years paying attention.

"Fourteen points," Momo says softly.

[the hallway outside the debrief room, two years ago, morning:

The humming started somewhere between minute four and minute five and by minute eight it had settled into something recognizable — not a current song, something older, something from the soundtrack of one of the animated films Izuku watched in the early years of his hero career when he needed to decompress, the kind of melody that lives in the unconscious and surfaces under pressure.

Katsuki was standing four feet away, back against the wall, arms folded, watching the far end of the hallway where a window looked out onto the commission building's interior courtyard.

He was aware of the humming. He was aware that Izuku was not aware of the humming. He was aware of the particular quality of Izuku's current stillness — the outward stillness, the controlled surface, which was the performance of readiness over a substrate of real, unglamorous anxiety about the debrief.

He said, at minute eleven: "You're humming."

Izuku stopped. Blinked. "Was I?"

"Yeah."

A pause. "Was it loud?"

"No."

Izuku considered this. "What was it?"

"Couldn't tell. Old."

"Hm." Izuku was quiet for a moment. "Did it bother you?"

"No."

The door opened. The debrief coordinator called their names. Katsuki pushed off the wall and went in first, because that was the dynamic — he went first, Izuku followed, had followed since they were four years old and standing at the edge of something that felt too big, and neither of them had ever examined why except that it worked.

In the debrief Izuku was perfectly composed.

In the elevator going down afterward, Izuku started humming again.

Katsuki didn't mention it.]

question fifteen. who is the bigger romantic?

Shoes: Katsuki points at himself. Izuku points at himself too.

Mismatch.

The room explodes.

"EXPLAIN," says Mina.

"He's the bigger romantic," says Izuku, gesturing at Katsuki with his husband's shoe, "when it comes to gestures, but me—"

"You tried to kiss me in the middle of a villian at—"

"Don't bring that up Kacchan—"

"Okay, fine. You also write things down—"

"That's just record-keeping, you also do that—"

"About us—"

"About life—"

"I found," says Katsuki, to the group, with the controlled energy of someone airing evidence, "I found a document on his laptop, not intentionally, the file was open, it was labeled 'miscellaneous hero notes' which is a lie, it was a document of—"

"That's private—"

"—specific dates and the details of what happened on them—"

"That's just a journal—"

"It included the date we first had coffee together as adults and what you ordered and what the weather was—"

The group turns to look at Izuku.

Izuku, who has gone exactly the shade of pink that his freckles know, says: "I have a good memory and I like to document things—"

"You documented that I 'looked annoyed but in the specific way that means comfortable'—"

"THAT'S—that's an observational note— Kacchan also does it!"

"That's a diary," says Jirou, very gently, in a tone of absolute delight.

"It's notes—"

"With weather," says Katsuki.

"IT WAS A NOTABLE WEATHER DAY—"

"Who is the bigger romantic?" Momo asks, with the patient tone of a judge returning to the central question.

"ME."

"Me."

"It's not a damn competition Kacchan!"

"It is literally a competition you dumbass."

Sixteen points.

[flashback, the document on the laptop:

Katsuki was looking for the shared mission report file, which Izuku had said was in the heroes folder on his desktop, which it was not, so he was searching, and the open window he clicked into by mistake was titled 'misc notes (do not open' and the DO NOT OPEN in the title should have been sufficient and it was, mostly, enough — he closed it within six seconds.

But in those six seconds he read the following entry, approximately halfway down the document, dated fourteen months earlier:

"March 12. Coffee at the place near the commission. Katsuki ordered black coffee without milk — usually it's with milk, must have been a particular-mood-of-morning. Light rain, the fine kind. Across the table he looked the way he looks when he's not doing anything for anyone, which is still my favorite version. I asked if he was okay. He said yes. He was telling the truth. I paid. He said nothing about it. The rain had stopped by the time we left."

Katsuki sat with the closed laptop for about forty seconds.

Then he got up and finished making dinner.

Later, when Izuku came home and they were eating, Katsuki said: "I ordered the black coffee that day because they'd run out of the good oat milk, for the record."

Izuku looked up from his bowl.

A pause.

"You read it," Izuku said.

"Accidentally."

"Okay."

"I was looking for the mission report."

"Okay," Izuku said again, back to his bowl, but different this time — something settled in him, something that had been in a small, careful posture becoming a different posture.

"Just wanted to correct the record," says Katsuki.

"Right," says Izuku. "Thanks."

They finish dinner.

Three weeks later, Katsuki makes a note in his own phone of the specific angle of a late afternoon in their kitchen when the light comes through the window and catches Izuku's hair, and the fact that Izuku is reading something and humming and has absolutely no idea about the light or the note or any of it.

He doesn't call it a diary.]

question seventeen. who would last longer in an argument with the other's mother?

Izuku, immediately: "Neither of us. Inko Midoriya is an immovable force of nature disguised as a very soft-spoken person and she would defeat both of us within four exchanges—"

"She would."

"He actually agrees with this—"

"She has a specific look—"

"The look—"

"You know the one—"

"The one where she's not saying anything but the air changes—"

"I have been shut down by the look twice and I'm a professional—"

"Twice?" says Kirishima.

"Once when I argued with Deku in front of her about the Kamino aftermath—she didn't say anything, she just—" he makes a specific gesture with his hands that everyone in the room who has met Inko Midoriya immediately understands— "and I stopped talking and apologized and I don't know how it happened—"

"It happened," Izuku confirms, with deep fondness, "she texted me afterward to say Katsuki apologized very nicely—"

"The second time was when I said the thing about All Might being overrated for pedagogical efficiency—"

"Oh no—"

"I was making a technical argument—"

"In front of Inko Midoriya—"

"I know—"

"Who has a framed photo of All Might in her kitchen—"

"I know," Katsuki says, again, in the tone of a man who has sat with a mistake and processed it fully. "She served me tea anyway. But I felt it."

"You felt the look," says Izuku.

"I felt the look." A pause. "She's terrifying."

"She's wonderful," Izuku says.

"Both," says Katsuki, and means it.

Match. Seventeen points.

question eighteen. who gets more jealous?

"Kacchan."

"Me."

Katsuki turns to stare at him. “What—”

“You do,” Izuku insists. "You agree with it too!"

"Yeah but why are you agreeing with it? Do you not get jealous—"

“I've seen Bakugou jealous," pipes up Kaminari. "You just don’t call it that, but you do, you get all— all—” he gestures vaguely with his hands, searching for the word, “—grumpy and louder than usual and you hover.”

“I do not hover.”

“You do,” Uraraka says immediately, far too pleased, “you literally stand right behind him and glare at people.”

“That’s just my face.”

“Your face gets worse,” Kaminari adds helpfully.

Izuku leans closer, resting his forehead briefly against Katsuki’s shoulder, voice dropping just enough that it feels like something private even though everyone can hear it.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, smiling, “I like it.”

And then, because Katsuki is drunk enough to be honest and surrounded enough to not know how to stop himself, he mutters, “You get jealous too.”

Izuku blinks.

“I do not—”

“You do,” Katsuki cuts in, sharper now, but there’s something underneath it, something almost smug, “you just act all nice about it, but I’ve seen your face when someone gets too close.”

Izuku’s face goes red.

“Oh my god,” Mina whispers, clutching her chest, “they’re both insane.”

"They matched," says Momo softly, and marks the point, and does not make a ceremony of it.

Eighteen points.

Ashido, very quietly, to her phone, which she has lowered: "Chat we're watching real ones right now."

[ standdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

question nineteen. if your partner could only use one word to describe you, what word would they choose?

Izuku, immediately, quiet and certain: "Honest."

The group looks at Katsuki. "What word," says Momo, "do you think Izuku would use for you?"

Katsuki thinks. It is not a quick deliberation or a deflective one — he actually thinks, the way he approaches problems that deserve thought. "Honest," he says.

Match. Nineteen points.

"Not 'explosive'?" offers Kaminari.

"Not 'handsome'?" offers Mina.

"Honest," says Izuku again, and there's nothing more to say about it, because it's exactly right, and everyone in the room knows it.

"If your partner could only use one word for you, Izuku, what would it be?" Momo redirects.

Katsuki, without hesitation: "Relentless."

Izuku looks at him.

"In the good sense," says Katsuki.

"I know," says Izuku.

"Still going?"

"Still going."

Izuku, to the group: "I would say dedicated. But relentless is—also right."

"Do they match?" says Momo.

"In spirit," says Jirou.

"Award it," says Sero.

Momo awards it. Twenty points.

question twenty-one. who is better at keeping secrets?

Mismatch. Both point at themselves.

"I maintain absolute operational confidentiality—"

"He told Kirishima about the engagement ring at week two of the five weeks he was carrying it—"

"That was—I needed a second opinion—"

"You told him about the ring, Kacchan—"

"I told him I was considering a ring—"

"I texted him a photo of three options," Kirishima confirms from the cushions, cheerfully.

"You sent photos—"

"I needed perspective—"

"You're terrible at secrets," says Izuku, with enormous affection.

"I maintain operational confidentiality excellently—"

"About your feelings, though—"

"That's a different category—"

"Is it."

Katsuki holds Katsuki's shoe. Izuku holds Izuku's shoe. They look at Momo. "Split point?" she asks.

"Split point," they agree, because neither of them will concede the category entirely, which is the most them outcome possible.

question twenty-two. who takes the other person's side in arguments with other people, even when the other person is wrong?

Both shoes point at Katsuki.

Katsuki lowers his shoe. "That's—"

"You do," says Izuku.

"Mhm."

"Wow, I love seeing this side of Katsuki man."

"I do it strategically—"

"Uraraka's birthday dinner," Izuku starts immediately. 'The one with the venue thing—"

"The venue was over-priced—"

"You agreed with everything I said about the venue being fine and then later at home you said I was wrong about the venue—"

"You were wrong about the venue—"

"But you took my side in front of everyone—"

"Because," Katsuki says, and stops.

"Because?" says Mina, leaning forward.

"Because," Katsuki says again, with the deliberate, careful inflection of a man releasing a true thing with full awareness of what he's doing, "it's not the right time or place. There's a right time and place to tell him he's wrong, and a restaurant table with eight people at it isn't it."

The group considers this.

"That's very mature," says Iida, who is on his fifth sparkling-water-that-isn't.

"That's also kind of romantic," says Uraraka.

"It's strategic," Katsuki insists.

"It's both," says Izuku, and he's looking at Katsuki again in that way.

Twenty-two points.

[Uraraka's birthday dinner, four months ago:

The venue is, in objective fact, slightly over-priced. The pasta is good but not excellent. The ambiance is the specific kind of designed ambiance that tries hard enough to undermine itself. These are real critiques and Katsuki has them.

He also has: Izuku across the table from him, talking about the pasta with genuine enthusiasm, gesturing with his fork the way he does, explaining to Sero why the sauce technique is interesting. He has: the specific quality of Izuku's evening-out voice, which is slightly warmer and more expansive than his daily voice, the version of him that opens when he's around people he loves in a context that isn't work. He has: the particular way the candlelight does something to Izuku's expression that Katsuki has been cataloging, involuntarily, for the past two years.

Mina makes a comment about the wine list. Izuku defends the wine list. The wine list is, Katsuki privately agrees with Mina, overpriced for the quality.

He listens to Izuku defend the wine list with the full force of his characteristic thoroughness — the framing of the argument, the specific supporting points, the genuine engagement with the premise — and he thinks: he's wrong about the wine list.

Then Katsuki says, "He's got a point about the pairing options," and gestures for someone to pass the bread.

Izuku glances at him with the quick, slightly surprised look he gets when Katsuki agrees with him in company.

Later, at home, Katsuki says: "The wine was over-priced."

"I know," says Izuku.

"You knew?"

"I looked it up while Mina was talking." A beat. "You still took my side."

"Someone had to hold the line on the pairing options argument."

Izuku, getting into bed: "Was it the look?"

A pause.

"The candlelight was doing something to the—" Katsuki stops.

"The candlelight was doing something to what?" says Izuku, who is now watching him with the expression of someone who is going to remember this.

"The wine list discussion," says Katsuki, and turns off his light.

"Oh for goodness sake Kacchan."

"You're beautiful I'm sorry."]

question twenty-three. who snores?

"Him," they both say.

Then they both look at each other.

"I don't—" says Katsuki.

"You absolutely—" says Izuku.

"I have never snored—"

"Kacchan, it's not a character flaw, it's physiology—"

"I do not snore—"

"You snore when you've had a physically demanding day—"

"That's—that's just—deep breathing—"

"I have audio," says Izuku.

The group.

"You," says Katsuki slowly, "have audio—"

"My phone was on the nightstand—"

"You recorded me—"

"I recorded the phenomenon—"

"Why do you have audio of me—"

"Because it started after the Niigata operation and I thought it might be sleep apnea—"

"It's not sleep apnea—"

"I showed it to Recovery Girl—"

"You showed Recovery Girl audio of me snoring—"

"She said it was benign situational snoring, post-exertion, nothing to worry about—"

"You went to Recovery Girl about my snoring—"

"I was concerned—"

"You were concerned—" Katsuki sounds less angry about this than he has any right to be, which is the tell.

"You do care about his health," Todoroki observes, in the tone of someone noting the weather.

A very long pause.

"Delete the audio," says Katsuki.

"I'm keeping the audio," says Izuku pleasantly.

"Delete—"

"For medical documentation purposes."

"Momo, next question," says Katsuki.

"Twenty-three points," says Momo.

question twenty-four. who is more likely to start a fight at a restaurant over bad service?

Both shoes point at Katsuki. No hesitation, instant, from both of them.

"...yes."

"The incident in Sapporo—"

"The service was objectively unacceptable—"

"He asked to speak to the manager at a ramen shop—"

"The broth was wrong—"

"It was fine—"

"It was not—there was a fundamental error in the dashi-to-miso ratio and I identified it immediately and I tried to address it constructively—"

"You called the broth 'a betrayal of regional tradition'—"

The group has completely lost it. Sero is lying flat on his cushions again, beer on his chest, eyes closed, just breathing. Kaminari has turned entirely around from the bar cart and is supporting himself on it from laughing.

"A betrayal," says Mina.

"Of regional tradition—" says Kirishima.

"It was." Katsuki says this with the full unbothered certainty of a man who has examined his choices and found them all defensible. "I stand by it. The manager agreed with me."

"The manager apologized to me," says Izuku.

"After agreeing with me," Katsuki clarifies.

"...yes, after agreeing with you," Izuku concedes.

"I know my broth," says Katsuki.

Twenty-four points.

question twenty-five — the midpoint. who shushes people at the theatre?

Both shoes are Izuku's.

"For all of the nerd's politeness, he's a mean little bitch inside movie theatres."

"Kacchan!"

"You shushed a couple yesterday, during porject hail mary—"

"They were talking during the music of Rocky's partner's name!"

[intermission:

Kaminari has made something called 'the midpoint cocktail' which is a slightly alarming shade of orange and is being distributed regardless of whether people asked for it. Iida has accepted one, not knowing what is in it, which is a testament to how the evening has gone. Ashido's instagram story has now been viewed by approximately ninety thousand people, and she has read several comments aloud to the group, including one that says "Bakugou is a closet romantic I KNEW IT" and one that says "I WAS THERE IN THE MOVIE THEATRE IZUKU LITERALLY SHUSHED A COUPLE INFRONT OF ME" and one from what appears to be a verified hero news account that says "we are watching THE newlywed game of the year and it's only question 25."

The camera crew has not moved except to adjust angles. Futaba has the look of someone who set out to cover a pleasant domestic segment and has instead captured something that they will tell people about for the rest of their career.

On the platform, between questions, Katsuki has his arm resting along the back of the cushion behind Izuku, not around him exactly but creating the architecture of around him — the possibility space of it, casually occupied. Izuku has noticed this in the same way that you notice the change in room temperature: without making a thing of it, just adjusting.

The night has gotten properly dark now. The string lights are the full illumination of the world. The city below has deepened into its late register. It is eleven fourteen p.m.

"How are we doing?" Momo asks, mostly to herself, reviewing her clipboard.

"We are doing magnificently," says Sero, from his horizontal position.

"We are," Momo agrees, and turns the page.]

question twenty-six. what is the dumbest thing your partner has ever done in the name of heroism?

"Him," they both say, pointing at each other, simultaneously, which is now established as a pattern.

"You first," says Momo, to Katsuki.

"He once—" Katsuki takes a breath— "punched a bus."

"In fairness," says Izuku, "the bus—"

"He punched a city bus—"

"The bus was falling—"

"With his face—"

"With my FIST—"

"I watched you punch a city bus with your face—"

"With my FIST—"

"A bus—"

"The hydraulic catch wasn't—"

"With your face."

"AND IT WORKED," says Izuku, raising his voice to the register that he doesn't use often but that carries, in it, the energy of someone who has broken every bone in his body multiple times and remained thoroughly unrepentant about the circumstances, "the bus was recovered, there were twelve people on board, and I set a new record on the impact analysis—"

"You set a new RECORD on the IMPACT—"

"Momo, your turn," says Kirishima, generously, to move them along.

"Izuku, dumbest thing Katsuki has done?"

"He tried to take on a Class A villain alone because he didn't want to call for backup because—" Izuku turns to him— "why was it again?"

"The comms were being jammed," Katsuki says.

"He could've retreated."

"I had the situation—"

"You had a fractured collarbone and a suppressed quirk in a jammed comms zone with a Class A—"

"I had the situation—"

"—and when I broke through the jamming field and got to him he was—" Izuku pauses— "he was actually fine, technically. Physically. He'd—he'd managed it." Another pause. "I was—when I saw the state of the area I was—" he doesn't finish the sentence.

Katsuki, quietly: "I know."

"I know you know."

Match. Twenty-six points.

question twenty-seven. who is more protective?

Simultaneous, both shoes pointing at Katsuki.

"This is correct and accurate," says Todoroki.

"Shut up will you—" Katsuki starts.

"Kacchan."

"I'm professionally vigilant—"

"You once moved physically in front of me because a journalist pointed a camera too fast—"

"That was a reflex—"

"You've done it three times with cameras—"

"Camera operators move unpredictably—"

"You do it when we're out and someone raises their voice near me—"

"I—that's—" Katsuki stops. He looks at his husband. There is a brief, sincere communication that passes between them that has no words and needs none. "Yes," Katsuki says. "Fine. Yes."

Izuku: "It's one of my favorite things about you."

Katsuki, staring at the city: "We're going to have a conversation about announcing—"

"I'm announcing it right now," says Izuku pleasantly. "It's on the internet."

"Twenty-seven points," says Momo.

[any street in Musutafu, recurring, always:

The thing is it's not a decision. That's the part Katsuki can't explain and therefore doesn't try: it's not a decision, it's not calculation, it's just—his body updates its positional data and makes the adjustment. The way a hand moves to cup a flame. Involuntary. Prior.

He doesn't think about it.

He knows Izuku has noticed. He knows Izuku has noticed every time, cataloging it in the same way he catalogs everything — with attention, with precision, without making it a thing in the moment.

He knows it means something, this noticing without making a thing of it.

He knows Izuku doesn't need protecting. That's not what it is.

It's just: here is the space beside you. Here is my body filling it. Here is the available evidence of the fact that I am here.

Language is not his best channel. It never has been. His body has always been faster.]

question twenty-eight. finish this sentence: my partner always makes me laugh when they—

Katsuki, thinking: "When they try to explain something they already know everything about to someone who doesn't know anything about it. He goes—" he gestures at his own face— "he goes full professor. The voice changes. He got a delivery person once and spent four minutes explaining something about the building's structural reinforcement and the delivery person was—they left educated."

Izuku, smiling immediately: "When they don't realize they're singing while cooking. Not humming. Actual lyrics. At full voice. When they think I'm not home."

A very specific silence.

"Katsuki," says Kirishima slowly, "are you—are you a singing-while-cooking person—"

"No."

"He is," says Izuku.

"I am not—"

"What does he sing?" says Mina.

"This old Alicia Keys song—"

"Do NOT," says Katsuki.

"Kacchan's version of this girl is on fire—"

"I am going to—"

"THIS DUDE IS ON FIREEE," says Izuku.

A pause.

"You have a genuinely good voice," Izuku says, and there's no comedy in it, just the fact.

Katsuki looks at him.

"It's not a thing to be embarrassed about," Izuku says, and he's not performing this either, just saying it clearly, the way he says true things.

Katsuki looks at the city. "Twenty-eight points," he says to Momo.

Momo marks it.

Ashido makes a sound into her phone that is the sound of approximately ninety thousand people's live reactions distilled into one person.

question twenty-nine. what is the best gift your partner has ever given you?

Izuku: "He found the original print edition of the first official All Might hero analysis from the Hero Association archives. The one from the first year of the era, the founding documentation. I'd mentioned once — once, in passing — that I'd never been able to source it. He found it. It took him—how long did it take you?"

Katsuki: "Six months."

Izuku: "Six months, which he spent without telling me, tracking down the original print through the historical hero archives and three separate collector contacts. He gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday."

"That's—" Uraraka has both hands over her face.

"What did he give you?" says Mina.

Katsuki, and here is the interesting thing: he takes a moment. He doesn't take moments on easy questions. "He wrote the mission report for the Nagoya operation the way I would have written it."

The group waits.

"We were both there. We both had to write individual reports. Mine were — after the Nagoya thing I was — I was dealing with some things. I wasn't going to be able to write the report the way it needed to be written and I knew it. He knew it. He wrote his version and then he gave me his notes and said use whatever you need. He'd written them from my perspective. Not his. Mine. The way I think, the way I structure analysis, the way I rate risk." Katsuki pauses. "No one can ever do that. He—" he stops.

"He sees you," says Kirishima quietly.

"Yeah," says Katsuki, and it's just a word but it lands the way simple words land when someone has been working up to saying them for a long time.

"Twenty-nine points," says Momo, and her voice is very steady.

question thirty. what does your partner do when they think you're not looking?

Katsuki: "He texts his mom about me."

The group giggles again.

"How do you—" Izuku starts.

"I've seen the corner of the screen twice. Your typing speed changes."

"My typing speed changes?"

"You type faster when it's your mom. You type slower when it's work. You type—a medium speed with faint regularity of pause when you're talking about me."

"...I—how do you know it's about you?"

"Because," says Katsuki, looking directly at his husband, who has gone the shade of pink that currently involves his ears, "you smile like— OH STOP LOOKING LIKE THAT PINKY."

"He's a detective," says Sero from horizontal.

"He's in love," says Jirou.

"Izuku," says Momo, "your answer."

Izuku: "He checks. When we're in public, at events, in groups — he checks on me. Like hovering, and it's every few minutes. A look. Just — a quick scan to confirm I'm in the room and I'm okay. He does it without stopping whatever he's doing, and then he goes back to it. I'm not sure he's fully conscious of doing it."

Katsuki is looking at the city again. He has the expression of a man whose reconnaissance has been documented by the opposition.

"Are you?" says Mina. "Conscious of it?"

A pause.

"Partially," says Katsuki.

"Twenty-nine, thirty points," says Momo.

[every event, every room, every space they share:

It is the same motion every time and it is not a decision: the scan. The locate. The confirm.

The way a sailor knows north without thinking about the compass. The way a body knows warm from cold before the brain registers the category.

Izuku, in the room: located. Status: fine. Note the thing he's holding, the person he's talking to, the current expression. Fine.

Back to the conversation. Back to the work.

Fine.]

[it is midnight. the drinks have been distributed, redistributed, and in some cases quietly confiscated (Momo has been managing Iida's intake with a gentle hand since she worked out what Kaminari has been doing, though Iida is now genuinely having a good time and has said so twice, in a voice that is three degrees warmer than his sober voice). Todoroki has had half of a second drink. Kirishima has been in a state of pure contented emotional bliss since approximately question two. Sero has migrated from horizontal to sitting-upright because the questions got real and he wanted to be present properly. The camera is still rolling. The city is still there below, doing its midnight things, warm and continuous.]

question thirty-one. what does your partner worry about most that they don't tell you?

The question lands in the silence before Momo has finished saying it, which is the sign of a good question.

Izuku is quiet for a moment.

"Whether the people he's responsible for — professionally, in teams, in training — whether he's asking the right things of them. He sets high standards because the job requires high standards and because Kacchan genuinely doesn't know how to operate at anything less than full intensity. But I think he worries, privately, whether the standard is his or the job's. Whether the standard is right." He pauses. "He doesn't say it. But I've seen what he looks like when a trainee struggles."

Katsuki does not confirm or deny this. He is looking at his hands.

"Katsuki?" says Momo.

"He worries—" Katsuki stops. Starts again. "He worries that the people he loves are going to—" another stop— "he has this thing. This thing where he'll be in the middle of something ordinary and he'll go—he'll go somewhere else for a second. And then come back. And I think it's—I think he's running the probability on something he won't name."

Izuku is still.

"He doesn't tell me," Katsuki says. "Because he doesn't want to name it. Because naming it gives it—" he moves his hand— "definition. He doesn't want to give it definition."

"Do you know what the probability is about?" Kirishima asks, quietly.

"Yeah," says Katsuki.

Everyone in the room who has been around long enough knows what the probability is about. The job. The cost of the job. The specific, unspoken math of people who put their bodies between danger and everyone else, and what that math eventually demands.

"Match?" says Momo.

Neither of them says anything for a moment.

Then: "Match," says Izuku.

Thirty-one points.

question thirty-two. when did you know this was the person?

Katsuki first.

He takes a longer pause than anyone has seen him take all night.

"I was—" he starts, and stops. "We were kids. I know how that sounds. I know what people will do with that answer, especially people who know the whole—" he gestures at the space between himself and Izuku, meaning the whole history, meaning the long complicated road of it— "but I was a kid and I was—I was too everything. Too loud, too sure, too much of whatever I was. And there was this one person who just—kept showing up. Kept being there. Not afraid of the loud. Not deterred by the too-much." He stops. "I didn't have the language for it then. I had it wrong for a long time, in terms of what I did with it. But when I ask myself when I knew—" he looks at Izuku, and it's the most direct he's looked at him all night, nothing managed about it— "it was before I had the word for it."

The rooftop breathes.

Izuku: "For me it's—I have a different answer to the question depending on which layer of knowing you mean. There's the layer where I always knew, the way you know something in the body before the mind catches up. And there's the layer where I knew with my mind and I felt it change things. And that—the second layer—was about three years ago. We were doing a joint patrol, late shift, and nothing happened, no incidents, just the patrol. And we were coming back across the bridge and I looked sideways at him walking next to me and I thought, very clearly, very suddenly: I want this to be the last face I see at the end of every day for the rest of my life. Very clear. Very simple." He pauses. "I almost said it right then."

"Why didn't you?" says Ashido, barely above a whisper.

"I thought I might have misread the situation," says Izuku.

"I had," says Katsuki, with the flat certainty of someone reading from the same internal document Izuku just read from, "the exact same thought. On the same bridge. I don't know if it was the same shift."

A very long silence.

"It was the shift on March 8th," says Izuku. "The Shinjuku east bridge."

"SEE HE'S THE FUCKING ROMANTIC HE REMEMBERS EVERYTHING—"

"When was the shift you were talking about Kacchan?"

"January 22nd. Asakusa overpass."

Ashido can barely contain her laughter.

They look at each other.

"Different days," says Izuku.

"Same thought," says Katsuki.

"Yes," says Izuku.

"Yeah."

"Match," says Momo, and her voice is entirely under control, which is impressive, given that she is also, very quietly, holding Jirou's hand.

Thirty-two points.

[the bridge, january 22nd, three years ago:

It is 2 a.m. and the Asakusa overpass is empty except for the two of them, which is not unusual at this hour on this shift, and the city is doing its 2 a.m. configuration — reduced and quieter, the energy turned down but not off, a city in the lower frequency of its own consciousness.

They have been on patrol for four hours. There have been three small incidents, all resolved. The night has been, by the standards of their work, easy.

Katsuki is walking.

He looks sideways.

The bridge has this particular quality of lighting — old-style lamp posts, warm orange, close together, so the light comes in intervals but without real dark between them, a continuous warm pulsed illumination. Izuku is walking through it, in and out of the lamp circles, and at this hour the usual performance of his gait has dropped away — the professional posture, the alert-ready thing — and he's just walking, hands slightly open at his sides, looking at the city with the expression he wears when he's thinking about nothing or thinking about everything in the same register.

Katsuki looks at him and has the thought.

It arrives with the simplicity of something that has always been true and has simply been waiting for the exact right configuration of light and hour and tiredness and ordinary motion to surface.

He looks at Izuku walking through the lamp circles.

He thinks: this is the face.

He does not say this.

He will not say this for approximately two more months.

But he thinks it.

He looks forward again, at the bridge.

The thought is very clear. The city is very warm in the lamplight. He walks.]

question thirty-three. what has your partner taught you that you didn't expect to learn?

Katsuki: "How to stop."

A beat.

"He's taught me—he has this ability to be present. To be fully in a moment without—without already being in the next moment, or the one after that. I am constitutionally, professionally, and personally incapable of not being in the next three moments already. I'm always — running the next scenario, the contingency, the correction. He just—he's where he is. And being around that, over years, being around someone who inhabits the present that thoroughly—" he pauses— "I've gotten better. I haven't learned it. But I've gotten better. That's him. That's what that is."

Izuku is looking at Katsuki with the expression that is going to make the highlight reel — just the quality of the attention, the full-body presence of it, a person who hears what they're being told and receives it without deflecting it.

Izuku: "Kacchan has been the very definition of victory to me all my life. He's taught me to make the best out of every thing I'm given. He's also made me feel okay about being angry. About being violent. Without—without eating it, or converting it, or making it something more acceptable. He's angry when he's angry, fully, without apology, and he's also fine afterward. He doesn't carry it as something shameful. I used to—I would feel angry and immediately try to process it away or—or aim it at the safest possible target, which was usually myself. He's taught me, by example, that anger is just—information. That it's allowed to exist. That you're allowed to have it and then let it go."

"Do those match?" says Momo.

"Yes," says Jirou. "They're both about the same thing."

"What thing?" says Uraraka.

"Each other," says Jirou simply. "They've taught each other how to be more themselves."

Thirty-three points.

They were all drunk now.

Kaminari, who was acting as the emcee with all the subtlety of a fireworks display, was perched on the arm of a chair, his own face flushed with alcohol and power. He squinted at his phone, the screen illuminating his features as he scrolled through a list that Mina had been adding to all night. “Okaaay,” he drawled, his voice slurring, “next one is a classic. From Sero.” He cleared his throat with theatrical importance, and Sero, from his spot on the floor, gave a double thumbs-up, his grin wide and wolfish. “For both of you: ‘What is Bakugou’s… dirtiest… turn-on?’” He enunciated each word with a messy precision, his eyes glinting with mischief.

question thirty-four. What turns the other on?

Uraraka buried her face in her hands, but was peeking through her fingers, while Todoroki, seated serenely with a glass of water, simply raised an eyebrow, a faint, almost imperceptible smirk on his lips.

Midoriya’s giggling fit intensified for a moment, a cascade of breathy laughter that ended in a hiccup. He turned his head, his nose almost brushing against Bakugou’s bicep, and he squinted up at his partner’s profile with the unblinking focus of the profoundly drunk. “Oh,” he said, his voice soft and wonderous, as if he was revealing a profound universal truth. “When I’m strong.”

The room fell into a stunned, anticipatory silence, the air crackling. Bakugou, who had been staring at a point on the far wall, slowly swiveled his head to look down at Midoriya, his movements uncharacteristically languid. “Wha?” he grunted, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.

Midoriya nodded vigorously, the motion sending his curls bouncing. “Mm-hmm,” he hummed, patting Bakugou’s chest with a limp, affectionate hand. “When I, like, pick you up. Or pin you down. Or when I, um,” he paused, his brow furrowing as if trying to recall a complex equation, “when I use Blackwhip to hold your wrists above your head, and you just… stop. You stop fighting, and you get this look, like—” He made a vague, expansive gesture with his free hand that seemed to indicate the universe, his eyes going wide and earnest. 

“Fuckin’ traitor,” Katsuki mumbled, but his voice was thick with affection. He reached out a heavy, uncoordinated hand and curled it around the back of Midoriya’s neck, his thumb stroking the short hairs at his nape in a way that was both possessive and soothing. “S’true though,” he added, his words running together, directing his glassy-eyed gaze towards the slack-jawed Kaminari. “Fucker gets all… all glowy and shit, green lightning… fuckin’ hottest thing I ever seen.”

“Kacchan. What’s your favorite?”

Katsuki, who had been watching Izuku's lips as he drank, seemed to be having trouble following the thread of the conversation. He grunted, a questioning sound.

“My favorite thing to do to you,” Izuku clarified patiently, patting his chest again. “Mina wants to know.”

"You love it when I beg."

Kirishima actually fell off the couch. Sero was wheezing, tears streaming down his face. Uraraka let out a sound like a boiling kettle.

But Katsuki wasn’t finished. He pulled back just enough to look Izuku in the eye, his gaze intense and searing despite the blur of alcohol. “Nah,” he corrected himself, his voice a gravelly murmur that somehow silenced the chaos around them. “When I cry. When I'm so fuckin’ gone on it I can’t help it, and you’re just… so fuckin' good, and those big fuckin’ eyes are all bright, and you’re sayin’ my name—” He cut himself off with a slow, shuddering exhale, his thumb still stroking the back of Midoriya’s neck. “Yeah. That’s your favoite."

Thirty-four points.

[the gap between question thirty-three and question thirty-four:

In the video, which will be edited down and released and re-watched, this moment appears as:

After Izuku finishes speaking, there is a pause of approximately twelve seconds. In the video it plays as twelve seconds of the rooftop and the string lights and the ambient sound of the city and two people in amber light facing each other.

What the video doesn't capture, because the camera angle is slightly wrong: Katsuki puts his hand on the back of Izuku's neck.

Izuku leans into it, slightly, the way a plant goes to sun.

Twelve seconds.

Then Momo says "question thirty-five" in her most professional voice and the world resumes.]

question thirty-five. what does home mean to you?

Katsuki goes first, which is the unexpected thing — in the earlier questions he had deflected or redirected or chosen his moments, but he goes first now, turning to face Izuku directly, which he has mostly not done for the soft questions, as though looking straight at them somehow raises the stakes beyond manageable. He looks at him.

"Anywhere Izuku is."

A beat.

"And the apartment," Katsuki adds, with the tone of a man immediately regretting something that went too clean, "the apartment is good, the location is good, the kitchen situation is excellent—"

"He means me," says Izuku, to the group, warmly.

"I meant the apartment—"

"You said me first—"

"I said both—"

"You said me first, the apartment was the amendment—"

"The kitchen really is—"

"He means me," Izuku says again, and his voice is the low quiet happy version, the one that Katsuki makes appear.

Izuku's turn: "The kitchen table at seven a.m. And his voice from the other room. And the sound of him being somewhere in the same building as me." A pause. "I grew up — my mom and I moved a lot when I was small, before the neighborhood, and I spent a lot of time—not unmoored, she was always there, she was always enough. But I spent a lot of time learning how to be okay wherever I was. Learning that home was portable. That it was an internal thing." He pauses. "And then it became external. It became a specific kitchen table. A specific voice." He looks at Katsuki. "You."

"Match," says Kirishima, before Momo can, and he says it with the voice of a man whose emotional investment in this answer has been twenty-three years in the making.

Thirty-five points.

[it is 12:47 a.m. the gin-and-tonics have been established. Iida knows about the gin and has chosen to simply continue. Kaminari has made what he is calling "the emotional support cocktail" which is technically a paloma but he has added something else and no one is asking. Sero has moved to sitting directly next to the platform, like a person who wants to be in the front row of a play. Mina has been FaceTiming someone who appears to be her mother, who has been watching the instagram story and wanted to weigh in in real time. Todoroki has had a second drink, finished it, and appears to be in a state of contented emotional equilibrium that no one is going to mess with. The camera is still rolling. The shoe incident is approximately eleven minutes away.]

question thirty-six. who takes longer to get over a disagreement?

"I do," says Katsuki.

Izuku holds up Katsuki's shoe. Match.

"He's very self-aware about this," Izuku says.

"I am aware of my limitations," says Katsuki.

"It's actually gotten much—"

"He doesn't need to—" Katsuki starts.

"I'm just saying it's improved significantly—"

"I said I was aware of it—"

"You have excellent self-awareness—"

"You don't have to announce every improvement like I'm a rescue project—"

"I'm complimenting you—"

"It sounds like a report card—"

"It sounds like appreciation—"

"'Your grudge-holding has improved significantly' is not appreciation, it's—"

"Thirty-six points," says Momo, firmly.

question thirty-seven. what is your partner's most dramatic hero moment that is your favourite?

Izuku: "He once— at the Chiba press event, two years ago — he did a full running diagonal AP shot through a falling crane in front of approximately four hundred journalists, completely excessive response to what was an industrial equipment malfunction that could have been resolved with two workers and a harness, but it was—" he pauses— "it was genuinely incredible."

"That was not dramatic, I have a better one." Katsuki says.

"You were watching the camera coverage when it went down."

"I—I was doing a risk assessment—"

"You absolutely clocked that there were cameras."

"The risk was real—"

"The risk was manageable and you chose the most visually spectacular—"

"The efficiency of the approach—"

"Was extremely photogenic," Izuku finishes.

There is a pause.

"The crane was falling," Katsuki says.

"It was," says Izuku.

"It was a real risk."

"It absolutely was."

"The angle was also good."

"The angle was extraordinary," says Izuku, and he's grinning now, the full one, unguarded.

Katsuki, very quietly: "The photo was good."

"The photo was incredible. I have it framed."

"Which one."

"The mid-shot diagonal."

"That's the good one."

"I know. That's why I have it framed."

"Where is it framed."

"In my office."

Katsuki does not say anything for a moment. Then: "Good."

"Katsuki's most dramatic moment of yours?" Momo redirects, professionally.

Katsuki: "He once convinced a villain — a Class B, mid-range, genuinely dangerous individual — to turn himself in through a twenty-minute conversation. In the middle of an active evacuation. While a building was on fire three blocks away. He just — he sat down on the ground, on the pavement, and he talked to the man like they were having lunch and the building three blocks away simply had to wait."

"Did the building wait?" says Futaba, from behind the camera.

"It was fine," says Katsuki. "The fire was handled. But for twenty minutes I was standing twenty feet away watching Izuku talk someone through a crisis while an entire block of Shibuya waited." He pauses. "He got him to surrender without a fight. Without a single quirk. Just—words."

The group is quiet.

"That's heroism," says Uraraka.

"Obviously it's heroism," says Katsuki, with a particular note in his voice. "I just—" he stops. "It was something to watch."

Thirty-seven points.

question thirty-eight. finish this: the moment I knew we'd be okay was—

Katsuki: "When he argued with me. The first time, post—after everything, after the apologies and the working-through, the first time he looked at me in a disagreement and just said 'you're wrong about that' without softening it. Without managing me. Just — said the true thing." He pauses. "Before that I was still worried he was — adjusting for me. After that I knew he wasn't. And if he wasn't adjusting, then it was real. Then it was actually okay."

Izuku smiled. "When he told me I'd done something badly. The first time in our adult professional relationship that he pulled me aside after a mission and said 'the call on the southern approach was wrong and here's why' — not performing frustration, not displacing something else, just — straight and direct and informative about something I'd gotten wrong. I'd—for a while I'd been wondering if he was—" he pauses— "wondering if he was being careful with me in a way that would mean we could never just be colleagues. And then he told me I was wrong and explained why and I thought: we're okay."

"They both needed each other to be honest with them," says Jirou quietly, to Momo, to the general air.

"Yes," says Momo.

"They both needed to know they were safe enough to be real."

"Yes," says Momo again.

Match. Thirty-eight points.

question thirty-nine. what would you do if your partner quit hero work?

There's a pause. The question has more edge than some of the others — not dangerous, just real. Because hero work is not incidental to either of them; it is the organizing principle, the context, the reason they know each other in the form they know each other.

Izuku: "I would love that. Kacchan gives me a heart attack everytime he steps out. Can't wait for whatever came next."

Katsuki, carefully: "Same."

"No protest?" says Kirishima.

Katsuki smiles. "I'm far more enthusiastic. We all know Izuku and his self sabtaging ways. And baby, baby I know you've wanted to be a hero all your life, I did too, but you're not going to die on a field, I promise you."

"Thought you liked it when he was all strong?" says Ashido.

"Shut up Pinky."

"I thought Bakugou would be the type to convince Izuku not to quit."

"Nah. If he came to me and said 'I'm done' — I would ask him once if he'd thought it through. Once. And then whatever he said, I'd be done fighting him about it."

Izuku, looking at him: "That's — I didn't know you'd thought about that."

"I think about it," Katsuki says flatly.

"You've never said—"

"It's not a thing I want to put in your head when you're fine." A beat. "But I've thought about it."

"Would you want to know," Izuku asks, and the question is quiet, "if it got to that point for me? Would you want me to tell you?"

"Yes," says Katsuki, without delay.

"Okay," says Izuku. "Same for me."

"Okay."

Match. Thirty-nine points.

question forty. what are you most proud of about your partner?

Katsuki doesn't go first this time. He looks at Momo, who reads the question, and then he looks at Izuku, and he says: "You go."

Izuku: "How far he's come. And I don't mean that in a — I mean it in the specific, technical, professional and personal sense: the distance between the person he was at fifteen and the person he is now is extraordinary, and it was all him. The work, the recalibration, the — the hardest kind of growth, which is the kind where you have to look at yourself honestly and not look away. He did that. He does that." He pauses. "And I get to watch."

Katsuki is very still.

Then: "He—" Katsuki stops. He is doing the thing where he is managing the expression, keeping it at a register he can hold without dropping it. "He never—" another stop. "He never stopped. The thing about him that I have watched since we were four years old is that he never — there was never a version of Izuku Midoriya that gave up. On the work, on the people, on anything he decided mattered. And he decides things matter. Carefully and with full weight. And once he decides—" he shakes his head slightly— "you can't move him. And that—" a pause— "that's the thing I'm most proud of. That he's like that. That he was always like that."

Silence.

"He said since you were four," says Kirishima, with a voice that is doing something specific.

"Yeah," says Katsuki.

"You were four years old."

"I know how old I was."

"You've been watching him since you were four years old—"

"We grew up in the same neighborhood—"

"Since you were FOUR—"

"Can we—"

"That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard—"

"The whole thing has been romantic dunceface."

"SINCE YOU WERE FOUR—"

"FORTY POINTS," says Katsuki, to Momo, loudly.

"Forty points," confirms Momo, barely.

[the neighborhood, summertime, both of them four:

This is one of Izuku's earliest memories and he doesn't know it's one of Katsuki's too:

A cicada, caught in the hedge, buzzing. Izuku crouching to look at it, completely absorbed, in the way four-year-olds are absorbed by small moving things — total attention, no remainder.

Katsuki, beside him, also looking. Telling him something about how the buzzing works, because Katsuki at four already knows how things work, already has opinions about mechanisms and structures and the way the world is organized. He is explaining the cicada and Izuku is listening with the same total attention that he is giving the insect.

This moment lasts approximately forty-five seconds before they are both distracted by something else.

But here is the thing:

Katsuki knows what the buzzing is. He explains it.

Izuku listens.

They are four years old and standing side by side in the summer afternoon and this, in one of its earliest possible forms, is them.]

question forty-one. what is something about your partner that other people get wrong about them?

Izuku: "People think he's simple because he's direct. He's — the opposite of simple. He has the most complex relationship with his own interior life of almost anyone I know, and he's built an enormous amount of care and precision around managing it. That looks like bluntness from the outside. It's not bluntness. It's—it's a very sophisticated system."

Katsuki: "People think he's soft. Because of the—" he gestures at Izuku generally, meaning the freckles, the smile, the general warmth of him— "the impression. They think 'gentle' means 'soft.' He's one of the hardest people I've ever known. In the actual sense — in the sense of what he can take, what he'll hold, what he'll keep going for. That's not softness. That's the other thing. The opposite of soft."

"What's the opposite of soft?" says Uraraka.

"Steel," says Todoroki, without inflection.

"Tempered," Katsuki confirms.

Match. Forty-one points.

then comes question forty-two and The Shoe Incident.

[context for the uninitiated: the newlywed game, in its traditional format, involves holding up the correct shoe above one's head to indicate the answer. the shoes in the wooden boxes on the platform are — as Momo will later explain in the post-segment debrief — the dress shoes worn by Katsuki and Izuku at their wedding, included as a sentimental touch that Momo found in a wedding-game planning guide at 1 a.m. and which she thought added a lovely symbolic weight to the proceedings. the shoes are, by Momo's assessment, sentimental objects. they are not, by Katsuki's assessment, objects that should be weaponized. this distinction will not, as it turns out, prevent what is about to happen.]

question forty-two. who has the more embarrassing childhood story?

Izuku, without hesitation: "Him."

Katsuki, without hesitation: "Me."

Match. They agree on this.

Momo: "Can you share one? From each other's history?"

Izuku: "For Katsuki's: when he was eight, he got his quirk use evaluation done at the support center and he was so determined to get the highest possible rating that he did seven consecutive maximum-output blasts in the testing chamber and then pissed himself from the effort. In a medical facility. In front of six evaluators and his parents."

The group: "..."

Katsuki: "The rating was excellent."

"His pants were wet," says Izuku.

"The rating was excellent."

"His pants were wet—"

"Immediately after achieving an excellent rating—"

"You have such a specific relationship with your own limits," says Sero, wonderingly.

Katsuki, now, for Izuku: "When he was nine, he wrote a twelve-page analysis of All Might's hip rotation mechanics and submitted it to his homeroom teacher as his social studies project."

"That was actually very thorough work," says Izuku.

"The assignment was 'something about your community'—"

"All Might IS a community—"

"Your teacher sent a note home—"

"She was impressed—"

"She was concerned—"

"She was impressed and concerned," Izuku clarifies.

"She was concerned," says Katsuki, and is now holding up Izuku's shoe — an indicator in the context of this question — and Izuku is reaching for his shoe box with great conviction and here is where it happens:

Izuku, in reaching for his shoe, leans across Katsuki's lap.

Katsuki, already holding a shoe, brings his arm down from above his head at the exact moment Izuku leans across him.

The shoe makes contact with the back of Izuku's head.

Not hard. Not damaging. But: audible.

There is a one-second silence.

Then: "KACCHAN—"

"I was PUTTING IT DOWN—"

"YOU HIT ME WITH THE SHOE—"

"You LEANED INTO IT—"

"It was your SHOE—"

"It was GOING DOWN—"

"You hit me with my own wedding shoe—"

"I WAS BRINGING IT DOWN—"

The group. The group has entirely lost the structural integrity of its seating arrangements. Mina is on the floor. Sero is laughing so hard his beer has been relocated to a safer position by Kirishima, who is also laughing, but who has the presence of mind to protect the beer. Kaminari is at the bar cart again not because he needs a drink but because he needs something to hold onto. Iida, who has five gin-and-tonics in him, is laughing with his entire body in a way that is new information about Iida as a person. Even Todoroki is doing the thing where the corner of his mouth goes, the nearly-smile.

Izuku is rubbing the back of his head, grinning, and then the grin becomes a laugh, the real one, the full-body one.

Katsuki is sitting with the shoe in his hand and an expression on his face that is fighting itself — the "I am Not Responsible For This" expression warring with the part of him that is also — not laughing, never laughing first, but: tilted. Present in the comedy of it.

"The camera got that," says Futaba, from behind the camera.

"Definitely got it," confirms Hayashi.

"It's already on the story," says Ashido, from where she has ended up, which is approximately six feet from where she started.

"I did not hit you with the shoe intentionally," Katsuki says, with great dignity, placing the shoe down with precision.

"You hit me with a shoe on our anniversary game—"

"It was going DOWN—"

"IT WAS OUR WEDDING SHOE—"

"ARE YOU HURT—"

"No—"

"Then it's fine—"

"IT HIT ME IN THE HEAD—"

"It was GOING DOWN—"

This exchange continues, escalating and then de-escalating and then becoming something else entirely — laughter bleeding into the argument until the argument is mostly laughter, Izuku's full real laugh and Katsuki's adjacent response to it, the almost-thing that lives next to laughing — and the city below continues its midnight life and the camera continues rolling and the world will see this clip about seventy-five million times over the next two weeks and something about it, about the specific texture of how two real people navigate even the ridiculous micro-crises, will make people around the world think of someone they love.

"Forty-two points," says Momo, when there is breath enough in the room again, "and we're moving on."

question forty-three. what is one rule you'd add to your relationship?

Katsuki: "We're not allowed to have a serious conversation in the first fifteen minutes after either of us walks in the door. There's a decompression period. No serious conversation during decompression. This is already a thing but I want it official."

Izuku: "That we have to take at least five trips a year for fun. To keep the whimsy."

"Five internation trips?"

"He's got the fat number one hero paycheck Kaminari."

"And Bakugou's got it too. Oh yeah, they're the only ones who can afford it."

"Who knew Midoriya was luxurious?"

"Do those match?" says Momo.

"They're both about protecting time," says Jirou.

"Match," says Momo.

Forty-three points.

question forty-four. where is the most unconventional place you’ve ever had sex

"I'm going to murder all of you."

"Is this also going on the cameras?"

“The breakroom of Ground Gamma." Katsuki interrupts.  "On the damn couch. After he blew up a simulation. Was wearin’ his hero suit. The utility belt left fuckin’ marks on my hips for a week.” He said it with the same tone one might use to discuss the weather, leaving Todoroki blinking slowly, a faint dusting of pink on his own cheeks.

Then it was Jirou’s turn, her earphone jacks twitching with barely suppressed amusement as she leaned over to stage-whisper to Midoriya. “Midoriya. Bakugou’s a screamer. Is he a screamer? Details. What kind of sounds does he make?”

Izuku, who was now practically melting into Katsuki's side, his body limp and trusting, let out a dreamy sigh. He tilted his head, resting his chin on Katsuki's shoulder to look at Jirou. “He’s not a screamer,” he said. "Kacchan is a very breathy, growl kinda—"

"Shush."

Kirishima was just staring into the middle distance, a look of profound awe on his face, muttering, “Bro… bro, that’s my bro…”

[their apartment, any morning, recurring:

This is what shows up first: the fact of it.

Katsuki is in the kitchen at six forty-five a.m. and the light is coming in the east window and he is making coffee the specific way that requires the specific beans and the specific grind and the specific temperature, and this is his practice, this is his morning, this is the thing that belongs to the hour before the day begins.

And here is the thing that has gotten into the practice without announcement:

He makes two.

He has made two for — he doesn't count, but longer than the ring, longer than the apartment, back to the first time Izuku stayed over and woke up and came to the kitchen in the morning and stood there in the too-big t-shirt and the messy hair looking at the coffee situation and Katsuki had wordlessly handed him a cup before Izuku could navigate the question of whether there was an available cup, and since then Katsuki has simply — made two.

Every morning.

Regardless.

He does not think of this as love. He does not call it anything. He just makes two cups.

The second cup is always ready at the same time Izuku appears.

This is not a coincidence.]

question forty-five. what does a perfect day with your partner look like?

Izuku: "A day where the only obligation is each other. Somewhere new enough to be interesting. Good weather, ideally. And him cooking — he'd cook and I'd watch and ask questions about the technique and he'd explain it with gradually increasing frustration and then give me something to taste and it would be excellent and we'd argue about something unimportant and then take a walk somewhere we haven't been."

"Every day with Izuku is a perfect day."

"Hey! No fair! That's my answer too!" Izuku wails.

"Fuck off Bakugou there's a whole fucking side to you we haven't seen."

"It's for my husband."

"Yes Kaminari, it's for me only." Izuku admonishes.

question forty-six. what is your greatest fear about the future?

This one is answered with a look first — they look at each other before either speaks, which is a new thing in the game, something that started around question thirty and has been present since, this checking-in with each other before the words.

Katsuki: "That I'll get it wrong when it matters most." He pauses. "I know what I'm like. I know my register and my tendencies and the specific ways I fail. I know them precisely. And I know that knowing them doesn't prevent them. It just means I see them coming. And I worry about the one I don't see coming. The one that costs something I can't get back."

Izuku: "That we'll get too used to it. To the extraordinary thing. That we'll—not take it for granted, that's not exactly it—but that the accrual of the ordinary will make it harder to see how remarkable it is. What we have. What we are." He pauses. "I never want to stop seeing it clearly."

"Those are both about loss," says Kirishima quietly.

"Yes," says Izuku.

"Different kinds of loss," says Kirishima. "One's about action, one's about perception."

"Yes," says Izuku.

"But both about the same thing in the end," says Kirishima.

"Yes," says Katsuki, and Kirishima, who has known both of them since they were fifteen and who has spent ten years watching what they are to each other through all its forms, nods.

question forty-seven. who tops?

That was surprsingly boring. 

They switch.

Huh.

question forty-eight. what is the truest thing you know about your partner?

Izuku: "That he is trying, all the time, with everything he has, to be the best version of himself. That this is not performance and not ambition in the conventional sense — it's something older and more essential, something that was there before the heroics, before the career, before any of it. He is trying. He will always be trying. And that — that is the truest thing I know."

Katsuki: "That he means it. Whatever he says — the care, the commitment, the—" he pauses— "the way he is with the people he loves. He means it. All of it. There's no percent of him that doesn't mean it. I've never—" another pause— "I've never met anyone like that. I've never met anyone who was entirely their own word. That's him. He means it."

"They both found the true thing," says Todoroki.

[any evening, repeated, indefinitely:

The apartment at nine p.m.:

Katsuki at the kitchen table with the debrief reports, coffee cold beside him, pencil in hand, underlining something.

Izuku on the couch with a notebook, lying sideways, feet over the armrest, writing something fast and small and then pausing and writing something else.

The television off. The radio off. The particular quiet of two people being in the same space without needing to narrate the fact.

At some point — nine twenty, nine forty, the time varies — Izuku looks up.

He looks at Katsuki at the table.

The light is on above the table and it catches his hair and the angle of his jaw and the slight furrow of concentration that lives between his eyebrows when he's reading something carefully.

Izuku looks at him.

He has the thought, which is not new, which lives in the same place as breathing: here he is. Here he is, and here I am, and here we are.

He goes back to writing.

He does not say this.

He has said it other times, in other ways, and Katsuki knows it the same way he knows the coffee temperature and the decompression window and the sound of the specific tread on the stairs that means it's Izuku coming home.

He knows.

The apartment is theirs.

The city is below.

Here they are.]

question forty-nine. what would you want people to know about what your partner is really like?

Izuku: "That he is — that the things he's best at are the ones that nobody sees. The preparation. The care. The way he thinks about the people under him, the junior heroes, the trainees — he thinks about them constantly, obsessively, with the same intensity he brings to everything. He worries whether he's giving them what they need. He stays late. He reviews footage of their work not to criticize but to find the places where they're almost there and need a specific nudge in a specific direction. He does all of this without talking about it. He talks about results. He doesn't talk about the work behind the results." A pause. "I want people to know about the work behind the results."

Katsuki: "That he's fucking funny—" he pauses— "he's not the person from the news coverage. The news coverage gets him kind of right — he is like that, the warmth is real, the commitment is real, none of that is managed. But what the coverage can't get is how — how funny he is. He has this— this completely unexpected dry thing that only comes out when he trusts the room. This very specific, very precise wit that he keeps quiet until he's decided he's safe to use it, and then it just — comes out, and it's some of the funniest, most precise social observation I've ever heard, and the people who only know him from the public facing — they've never heard it. They don't know that version. And—" he pauses— "that version is the one I get. And it's—" he doesn't finish the sentence.

"It's what?" says Momo gently.

"It's my favorite version," says Katsuki.

The night gets its warmest, gentlest silence yet.

"You say my jokes are bad." Izuku pouts.

"Only to pull your leg babe, you know I laugh."

"Midoriya tell us a joke!"

Katsuki groans. "I lied. I don't actually want people to know—"

"Did you know that NASA is launching a rocket?"

Kaminari stopps drinking. "Huh? Really?"

Izuku nods. "It's to apologise to the aliens for littering space."

"I guess that's valid—"

"Do you know what it's called?"

Katsuki laughs. "No, tell us what it's called 'Zuku baby."

"Apollo G."

question fifty. 

Momo holds her clipboard. The rooftop is still, which is not its natural state — this rooftop, with this group, exists in a state of near-perpetual warmth and noise and the movement of people who like each other and show it. But right now it is still, and the string lights are warm above them, and the city is below, and it is nearly 2 a.m., and everyone has been here for six hours, and the last question is:

finish this sentence: the life I want is—  if it weren't for your partner, how do you see your life looking like?

"Not gonna lie guys, I'd probably fuckin' kill myself."

Tokoyami raises his glass at that.

Kirishima snorts into his cup. "Oh shut up Bakugou."

Then Ashido says "okay CHAT we are absolutely UNWELL" to her phone and the moment breaks into laughter, into the full warm sound of a rooftop of people who love each other and have just spent an extraordinary night watching two of them be exactly who they are.

after

The camera crew packs up at 2:15 a.m., Hayashi shaking both of their hands with the energy of someone who has had a genuinely good professional experience and knows it. Futaba pauses on the way out to tell Izuku she'll send a clip of the shoe moment because it's excellent, and Izuku laughs, and behind him Katsuki says "delete it" but not with enough conviction to mean it.

The friends stay.

This is what the camera doesn't get and the instagram story doesn't capture: the after. The hour where no one leaves and no one is doing anything in particular and the drinks have been switched to water (mostly) and the string lights have been turned to their lowest setting, which makes everything amber and slow, and Mina and Kirishima are talking about something that makes them both periodically lose it, and Iida and Uraraka are having a completely earnest conversation about municipal hero regulation that would be concerning at 2 a.m. if Iida didn't have the slightly flushed face of a man having a genuinely good time, and Sero and Kaminari have migrated to the railing to look at the city and are doing the thing they do where they talk about everything and nothing in perfect synchrony.

Todoroki is sitting with Momo and Jirou, not talking, just—there. Jirou has Momo's hand. Todoroki has a glass of water and the quiet, resting expression of a person who has been properly seen without being made to perform being seen, and that is sufficient, and the night is good.

And on the platform, which is no longer a game stage and is just two cushions and two people, Katsuki and Izuku are sitting the way they've been sitting all night — close, without making a thing of it, the habitual proximity of two bodies long accustomed to shared space — except that Izuku has tilted sideways now, fully, so his head is on Katsuki's shoulder, and Katsuki has his arm around him, actually around him, and they are not talking.

They are watching the city.

It is 2:30 a.m. and the city is doing its 2:30 a.m. thing, the specific deep-night register of it, the warm amber of the street lights and the blue-white of the distant towers and the moving lights of the last taxis and the still lights of the buildings where people are still awake, still living, still being the small ordinary continuous fact of themselves.

"How many points?" says Izuku, not raising his head.

"Forty-eight," says Katsuki. "Out of fifty."

"Which two didn't match?"

"The stubborn one. And the secret-keeping one. Both split."

Izuku considers this. "I think we're both stubborn."

"Obviously."

"And I think we're both bad at different kinds of secrets."

"Obviously."

Izuku turns his head slightly, not enough to see Katsuki but enough that Katsuki can see the edge of his expression if he looks down, which he does. "Good game."

"Stupid game," says Katsuki.

"You liked it."

"It was invasive—"

"You liked it," says Izuku again, with certainty.

A pause.

"It was fine," says Katsuki.

Which means yes. Which is the specific Katsuki language for yes that Izuku has had twenty years and fifty questions and one very long night to learn, and which he has learned precisely, the way he learns everything: with full attention, with care, with no remainder.

Below them, the city looks pretty still.

Above them, the string lights flciker.

In the amber slow warmth of the rooftop, the night continues its particular life — the laughter from the railing, the earnest regulatory conversation, the soft talking of the couple on the cushions, all of it continuous and ordinary and not ordinary at all, the way most important things are not the events but the in-between, not the fifty questions but the architecture of everything that makes the answers possible.

Katsuki tilts his head slightly, minimal, almost imperceptible, so it rests against Izuku's.

The city is very warm in the light.

The night is long.

[credits: the shoe incident clip will be viewed 75 million times in two weeks. it becomes a meme template that people use for "unintended consequences" scenarios. bakugou katsuki will never once acknowledge this.

the documentary piece will air three months later. the rating is the highest for a hero-related documentary special in six years. the twelve-second pause after question thirty-four will be cited in multiple media pieces as "the moment."

inko midoriya watches the full documentary three times. she sends both of them a text that says: i'm so proud of both of you. she sends it at 2 a.m. and doesn't apologize for the hour. izuku is mortified that she heard the sex questions.

mitsuki bakugou watches the documentary once, pauses it at the question about first love, sits with it for forty seconds, and then calls masaru and says: he got it right. masaru says: he always was going to. mitsuki doesn't say anything for a moment. then she says: yeah. and then: i know.]

[kirishima eijirou watches the final cut four times. he cries all four times. he is not embarrassed about this. this is one of the many things that make him who he is.]

[somewhere far in musutafu at some point after the documentary airs, a person who has never met either of them watches the twelve-second pause on their phone on the train home. they think of someone they love. they get off at their stop and they go home and they say the thing they've been meaning to say for a long time.]

[and somewhere in the world, far away from musutafu and the lives of the characters that have touched us in so many ways, wherever you are right now, yes you, the reader with your device under your hands, your favourite heroes have made you laugh yet again and they're telling you there is so much in this life to live for, and you come to realise: everything. everything will be just fine.]

[this is what heroes are for.]

— fin —