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The footage hit four million views before either of them had even finished their post-mission paperwork.
It wasn't even a dramatic clip, by hero-fight standards. No explosions worth cropping into a thumbnail, no near-miss with a building.
Just eleven seconds: Dynamight hauling Deku up off the pavement by the front of his costume after a villain's Quirk knocked him flat, one hand cupping the back of Izuku's head to check for a concussion, both of them breathing hard, foreheads a few inches apart, and Bakugo saying something the mic hadn't caught but the internet had, within the hour, decided to lip-read as at least fourteen different confessions of love.
"It says 'don't die on me, idiot,'" Izuku said, squinting at his phone in the agency break room. "That's what he actually said. I was there."
"The people have decided," said Ochako, not looking up from her own phone, "that it says something else."
"It clearly says 'don't die on me, idiot.'"
"Sure. Sure, Deku." She turned her screen around.
The clip had four separate slow-motion versions, a fan edit set to music, and a trending hashtag that combined both their hero names in a way that made Izuku's ears go hot just reading it.
Bakugo, when he found out, did not take it well.
"I am not," he said, for the fourth time, to a conference room containing two PR managers, one very calm agency director, and Izuku, who was doing his best to look anywhere but directly at him, "doing a press statement about my feelings."
"No one's asking you to have feelings," said his PR manager, a woman named Fuyuko who had clearly done this exact negotiation with him before and had the weary patience to prove it. "We're asking you to not deny it very hard for two weeks while the algorithm gets bored and moves on to someone else's scandal."
"That's still lying."
"It's not denying, which legally and PR-wise is a different category—"
"It's the same category, it's just cowardly about it—"
"Katsuki." That was Izuku's agency director now, folding her hands. "Your agency and Midoriya's agency have a joint charity gala in nine days. The optics of two heroes who just went viral for what half the internet is calling a love confession showing up separately, looking awkward, saying nothing — that's worse than the rumor. Significantly worse. We'd like you to attend together. As — " a pause, delicately chosen, "— an item. For the duration of the event."
"An item."
"You don't have to elaborate on anything," Fuyuko said. "You show up together, you're seen together, you let one photo happen where you look like you tolerate each other, and then the story dies of natural causes within a month like they all do."
Bakugo's jaw worked. He looked, briefly, at Izuku — who had gone very interested in a spot on the table — and something crossed his face that Izuku didn't catch in time to interpret.
"Fine," Bakugo said. "Fine. One event. We hold hands like a couple of PR mannequins, we go home, this never happens again."
"Wonderful," said Fuyuko, already typing. "I'll schedule a coaching session."
"A what."
The coaching session was, in Izuku's professional hero opinion, the single most humiliating hour of his adult life, and he had once been thrown into a river by a Quirk that turned solid ground into soup.
"Okay, hold hands," said the media consultant, a bright, relentlessly cheerful man named Sano who had a clipboard and absolutely no fear of Bakugo, which Izuku found almost more alarming than the exercise itself.
Bakugo took Izuku's hand like he was defusing something. Izuku, for his part, was fairly sure his pulse was audible from across the room.
"Good, good — now, more natural. Dynamite , you're gripping it like you're trying to break it."
"I'm not trying—"
"Loosen up. Deku, lean in slightly. Like you want to be there."
"I do want to be there," Izuku said, before his brain could stop his mouth, and then immediately wished the floor would open.
Bakugo went very still.
"— for the gala," Izuku added, too fast. "Obviously. For the charity. It's a good cause."
"Right," Bakugo said, in a voice that had gone strangely careful. "The cause."
Sano, either oblivious or too professional to comment, clapped once. "Great! Now, eye contact—"
Izuku made eye contact with Bakugo and immediately regretted every choice that had led him to this room.
Bakugo's ears were red.
Izuku's face was, without question, doing something similarly catastrophic. Neither of them looked away, though, which was somehow worse than looking away, a full five-second held gaze in front of a media consultant taking notes on a clipboard like this was completely normal workplace behavior.
"This is so stupid," Bakugo muttered, not letting go of his hand.
"Extremely stupid," Izuku agreed, also not letting go.
"I hate this."
"Me too."
Neither of them moved.
The gala itself was worse, in the specific way that things you've been dreading are always worse once they're actually happening to you in real time, in a tuxedo, under lighting designed to be photographed.
Bakugo showed up to Izuku's apartment to pick him up — Fuyuko's idea, something about "the arrival matters as much as the event" — and stood in the doorway for a solid three seconds just looking at him before catching himself.
"You clean up fine," he said, gruff, already walking back toward the car like the sentence hadn't cost him something.
"You too," Izuku called after him, grinning, and did not miss the way Bakugo's shoulders went a little stiff.
The event itself passed in a blur of camera flashes and small talk with people whose names Izuku forgot as soon as he heard them, Bakugo a warm, solid presence at his side the entire night, hand laced through his exactly the way Sano had coached — except somewhere around the second hour, it had stopped feeling coached.
Bakugo's thumb moved absently against his knuckles during a boring speech about fundraising totals. He steered Izuku by the small of his back through a crowd without seeming to think about it. He leaned down at one point to mutter this guy's been talking for eleven minutes, I timed it, directly against Izuku's ear, and Izuku had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing in front of a city councilwoman.
It was, against every prediction Izuku had made going in, kind of fun. It was, worse than that, starting to feel less and less like a performance.
Around the time the string quartet took a break and the room filled up with the low roar of two hundred conversations happening at once, Bakugo tipped his head toward the terrace doors. "Getting some air. You're coming, you're my item, that's how this works apparently."
The terrace was mercifully empty — everyone else still inside, orbiting the open bar and the dessert table — and the city spread out below them in a wash of light, the kind of view Izuku still wasn't fully used to having access to, even years into this career.
Bakugo braced his forearms on the railing and let out a breath like he'd been holding it since the coaching session.
"You okay?" Izuku asked, coming to stand beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
"Hate rooms like that." Bakugo didn't look over. "Too many people deciding what to think about you based on eleven seconds of footage."
"For what it's worth," Izuku said carefully, "I don't think anyone in there actually cares what the footage really meant. They just liked the idea of it."
"That's not better."
"No," Izuku agreed. "It's not."
They stood with that for a minute, the party noise muffled behind glass doors, the city doing its slow, indifferent glittering below them. Izuku found himself watching the line of Bakugo's jaw instead of the view.
"Can I ask you something," Izuku said, "and you don't get to threaten to set anything on fire in response?"
Bakugo's mouth twitched, despite himself. "No promises."
"When Sano had us doing the — the eye contact thing. In the coaching session." Izuku's pulse was doing something unhelpful just bringing it up. "Was that hard for you? Or was it—"
"Deku."
"You don't have to answer—"
"It was the easiest part of the whole week," Bakugo said, low, still facing the skyline instead of him, like it was easier to say to the city than to Izuku's face. "That's the problem."
Izuku went very quiet.
"I've spent two weeks getting handed scripts about how to seem like I want to hold your hand," Bakugo went on, jaw tight, words coming out like he'd rehearsed them and hated that he had to. "And the actually humiliating part isn't the script. It's that none of it needed writing. I already—" He stopped. Started again. "This is stupid. Forget I said anything."
"I don't want to forget it," Izuku said.
That got Bakugo to finally turn and look at him — really look, none of the careful, camera-ready distance from earlier in the night, just him, a little wrecked around the edges by his own honesty, waiting to see what Izuku would do with it.
Izuku didn't say anything clever. He didn't have anything clever left in him. He just reached over and laced their fingers together, no cameras, no coaching, no reason to at all except that he wanted to, and felt Bakugo's hand tighten around his like he'd been waiting all night for someone to make the first move that counted.
"For the record," Izuku said, quiet, "I already knew. I've known for a while. I just didn't think you—"
"Don't," Bakugo said, but gently, and stepped in close enough that their foreheads nearly touched, the whole party and its four million-view scandal completely forgotten on the other side of the glass. "Don't finish that sentence. I want to be the one who does something about it, for once, instead of just — being handed the moment by a PR department."
"Okay," Izuku breathed. "Okay. Do something about it, then."
A voice called from just inside the doors — Fuyuko, ever-efficient, ever-badly-timed — "Photo op in five, you two, don't wander off—" and Bakugo let out a short laugh against Izuku's temple, more exasperated fondness than actual annoyance.
"Five minutes," he muttered. "Of course."
"We'll finish this later," Izuku said.
"We'd better."
They went back inside hands still linked, and something had settled between them that hadn't been there an hour earlier — no longer a performance either of them needed coaching for.
The step-and-repeat backdrop lit up with flashes as they stepped in front of it for the one sanctioned photo of the night. Bakugo's arm settled around Izuku's waist, easy, certain, nothing like the stiff, coached version of it from a week ago.
Someone from the crowd of photographers called out, half-joking, "Give the people what they want!" — and there was a beat, a half-second of held breath, where Izuku genuinely didn't know what was about to happen.
Bakugo turned his head. Looked at him. Whatever had been decided out on that terrace was still sitting plainly on his face, and he clearly wasn't bothering to hide it anymore.
"For the cause," he said, low, like it was a joke and also, very much, not.
And then he kissed him.
It wasn't a stage kiss. Izuku would know — he'd braced for a stage kiss, quick and careful and photograph-shaped, back when he thought that was still the plan. This was not that. This was Bakugo's free hand coming up to the side of his jaw, this was a full second too long to be for anyone's benefit but their own, this was every camera in the room going off in a wall of white light that neither of them appeared to notice at all.
When Bakugo pulled back, he looked, for the first time all night, completely undone by his own decision-making — and not remotely sorry about it.
"That wasn't in the coaching," Izuku managed.
"No," Bakugo agreed. "It wasn't."
"Are you going to blame the cameras for that one?"
"...No." A pause, ears fully scarlet now, no longer pretending otherwise. "Do you want me to?"
"No," Izuku said, and found he was smiling so hard his face hurt. "No, I really don't."
Somewhere behind them, Fuyuko was already fielding four separate calls from outlets wanting exclusive comment, and the hashtag was about to break records it had no business breaking, and neither of them cared even slightly, because Bakugo hadn't let go of his hand, and didn't, for the rest of the night.