Chapter Text
The venue smelled like champagne and lies. Katsuki had been standing under the same light for forty minutes. Somewhere behind him, a banner with his own face on it swayed every time the air conditioning kicked on, so that every few minutes he got to watch himself nod solemnly at nothing. The real him was not nodding solemnly at anything. The real him was deciding how much longer he had to stand here before it stopped being a professional obligation and started being assault.
"You look like you're planning a murder," said the earpiece.
"I'm planning several," Katsuki said, without moving his mouth much. There were cameras. The last time he'd been caught talking to himself at an event, it ended up as a meme with four hundred thousand likes and a caption about his mental health.
"Good. Save one for the guy from Detnerat, he's been asking Monoma when you're doing the meet-and-greet for forty minutes and I might combust if I have to relay one more message from him."
"Tell him I said no."
"I told him that twenty minutes ago. He wants you to say it to his face. He thinks that'll change something."
"It will. I'll be ruder."
A pause on the line. Katsuki had learned to recognize it, after several months, as Izuku trying not to laugh in a room full of people who'd ask him why. Izuku had a talent for looking unbothered, mild, faintly bored, which made every agency executive in the building assume he had no opinions. It was the single funniest miscalculation available to modern man.
"You're allowed to just do the meet-and-greet," Izuku said. "It's like, twelve minutes. I timed the last one."
"I'm not gonna stand there and let some sponsor's kid take a selfie with me so his dad can slap my face on a poster claiming I use their goddamn support gear, I don't use their support gear, I've never used their support gear—"
"You used it in March."
"That was an emergency, Deku, I would've used a traffic cone if it was fucking load-bearing—"
"I'm just saying, technically—"
"Nobody asked you to be technically correct. That's not your job."
"It's not not my job," Izuku said. Katsuki could hear the smile in it, that smug little edge Izuku thought he hid and didn't. "Front desk covers a lot of ground, turns out, including your part time assistant."
Katsuki was saved from answering that by a waiter sliding past with a tray of something small and orange and inedible-looking, and by Monoma appearing at his elbow. He'd been waiting all night for an excuse to talk to him.
"Bakugou. A word."
"I've got a word for you, Xerox. It's no."
"You haven't heard what I have to ask."
"I don't need to. Whatever it is, it involves me standing somewhere for longer than I already am, and the answer's no."
Monoma smiled like he'd already decided the conversation was a win before it started. "The Detnerat rep would like ten minutes. That's all. Ten minutes, a few photos, and everyone in this room gets to go home having done their jobs."
"I already did my job. I showed up. I put on the stupid tie." Katsuki tugged at it, just to make the point physically. "Ten minutes is ten minutes you people don't get."
"It's the difference between a sponsor renewing and a sponsor walking, and you know that."
"Then tell the sponsor to renew because I'm good at my actual job, not because I let some guy's kid take a picture with me holding a water bottle I've never touched in my life."
"Katsuki." Izuku's voice, low in his ear, careful. "Just — do the ten minutes. I'll owe you."
"You already owe me for the thing with the printer."
"That printer incident was not my fault."
"You told them I broke it."
"You did break it—"
"That's not the point."
Monoma was still standing there with his patient, punchable little smile, waiting Katsuki out like he was a toddler mid-tantrum, which was, Katsuki knew, exactly the read he wanted people to have of him tonight. Reckless. Difficult. A liability with good PR numbers, barely worth the trouble.
He gave the ten minutes. He hated every second of it. He shook the Detnerat rep's hand, and the rep's kid's hand, and posed for a photo he already knew he'd look furious in. He thought, the entire time, about how there was a version of his life where he'd never signed the co-ownership papers, never let the agency's business side talk him into events like this one, and was instead somewhere doing his actual job — rescues, kicking ass, never wearing another goddamn tie.
He was midway through a second, unplanned photo — the sponsor's wife wanted one too, apparently, despite nobody clearing it with him — when his radio went off on the emergency band. One burst of static. Then a callsign he knew on instinct, because it belonged to the one hero on his roster who'd run into a burning building without checking to make sure he'd look good in the footage first.
Kirishima.
Katsuki went still, camera flash still going off around him like nothing had happened, like the entire room hadn't just tilted six degrees.
"Katsuki?" Izuku's voice changed, flat and alert. Something shifted in Izuku's room before Katsuki said a word.
"Nothing," Katsuki said. It was a lie. They both knew it. Izuku let him lie for exactly as long as it took him to figure out what to do about it, and not a second longer.
"That's not nothing. What's the callsign say."
"Deku—"
"What does it say."
Katsuki looked at the little screen on his radio again, at the coordinates scrolling under Kirishima's designation, at the severity tag that made his stomach do something ugly and fast. He looked at the Detnerat rep, smiling, waiting for a third photo nobody had asked him to take. He looked at Monoma, who hadn't seen the radio yet, who was still operating on the assumption that tonight was going exactly the way he wanted it to.
"I have to go," Katsuki said, to nobody in particular, and started moving.
"Katsuki, you cannot leave right now, we have a schedule—" Monoma, behind him, voice climbing.
"Fucking watch me."
"You are contracted to this event until nine—"
"Then sue me." Katsuki was already at the door. "Deku. Get me eyes on the location, now."
"Already pulling it up." A pause, the sound of Izuku typing fast, somewhere across the city in an office that smelled like coffee and printer toner instead of champagne. "Oh, Katsuki — it's bad. It's pretty bad."
"How bad."
"Bad enough that I'm not going to lie to you about it while you're driving."
"I'm not driving yet, I'm running to the car, tell me now."
Izuku told him.
Katsuki didn't hear the rest of what Monoma shouted after him. He was already gone, out the door and into a night that would quickly become the worst one of his career. He didn't know it yet, but it was going to cost him a hell of a lot more than a photo op.