Katsuki knew he was going to have a bad day as soon as he walked into work and saw Haruka, the public relations officer his agency had personally assigned to him, at his desk.

"Good morning!" she said as he approached.

"Is it?" he asked, brushing past her in the direction of the locker room.

"Well," she said, following him, "before you go out on patrol today I've been asked to run something by you." Katsuki turned to face her and she indicated an empty side-office for them to talk in.

"Is it that fucking serious?" he demanded, trying to remember if he had done anything recently which might warrant a dressing-down. Haruka just ignored him, unlocking the office door and holding it open for him. He followed her in and leant up against the wall with his arms crossed, waiting to hear about what he had done wrong this time.

"This is more of a pre-emptive measure," Haruka said once they were in private. "The agency has suggested — and I agree — that it might soften your image and give you broader public appeal if you were in a stable relationship."

Katsuki took a moment to gauge whether she was joking and then scoffed. "Too busy taking down villains to date, or hadn't you noticed?"

Haruka smiled. They had argued more than once about Katsuki's stance that his image didn't fucking matter as long as he was delivering results. "What we're suggesting is a staged relationship with another pro."

He stared at her. "The fuck?"

"It wouldn't take much," she continued. "A few outings here and there, let the press snap pictures of you, attend the odd event. The public would eat it up."

"You're out of your mind," he said, shoving off the wall and heading for the door. "No fucking way."

"Well, Uravity's people —"

He stopped in his tracks and looked over his shoulder at her. "Fucking Round Face?" he said. "No way she'd agree to this shit."

Haruka smiled at him, "She's on board."

Katsuki scowled at Haruka. His high school crush, really? It was hard for him to imagine her going for something like this — least of all with him. It wasn't like they had kept in touch after graduation; he couldn't even remember having a conversation with her outside of work and even those were brief and perfunctory. Just because she liked to make people smile didn't mean she was a fucking pushover and she wouldn't do something like this just because her agency asked her to. "Doesn't matter," he said. "Tell her, or her people, or whoever the fuck that they can forget about it." With that he left the office and headed over to the locker room to suit up for patrol.

Around lunchtime Katsuki's phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.

≫ Hey, it's Uraraka (you know, Round Face!) Got your number from the agency. Can we meet up?

He stared at it for a few minutes: it was obvious what she wanted to meet to talk about. He scowled. Why was she so eager to do this? It seemed almost more insulting to her than to him that her agency seemed to think she couldn't succeed without a boyfriend to boost her image. If he were being honest he was more than a little offended on her behalf: it was as if everyone just forgot that she was an incredible hero in her own right. There were times when he felt like he was living on another fucking planet listening to the way people talked about her.

Against his better judgement he shot off a text inviting her to his apartment after patrol and shoved his phone in his pocket for the rest of the day.

Katsuki took a shower and cooked himself a simple dinner when he got home. It had been an uneventful day but he found himself thrumming with nervous energy, unable to get settled on anything to do while he waited for Uraraka to arrive.

There was a knock on the door at exactly seven o'clock. When he opened it Uraraka met his eyes. This was the first time they had seen each other in person in years barring brief interactions at incidents when everything was blurred and distorted by adrenaline, colours bleeding into each other and sounds echoing. It was as if a bolt of electricity shot right through him.

It wasn't like he didn't know what she looked like — he would die before he let anyone know how closely he had paid attention to her career — but it was different when she was standing so close he could reach out and touch her. She was in casual wear: black jeans and a grey sweater, long hair tied back and no makeup — and her eyes were just as big and cheeks just as pink as they had always been. It was just her, completely her: gutsy and round and Uraraka. He took a step back and let her into his apartment, following her with his eyes as he shut the door behind her.

She toed off her shoes and padded into his living room as if she owned the place, taking a seat on his sofa. He tried not to think about how much she looked like she belonged there.

"Most people would offer me a drink," she said, looking back over her shoulder at him with a sweet smile as he followed her in.

"Fuck that," he said, taking a seat next to her, throwing his arm across the back of the sofa because he did own the place.

"Hm," she said, nudging his foot with her own. "I didn't want one anyway." She was more self-assured than she had been back at UA, he thought, and he was glad about it — although he also recognised the danger inherent in it: she had always been able to knock him onto the back foot somehow, even when she was unsure of her own footing. He eyed her cautiously. She tilted her head with a mysterious smile and then said, "They told me you refused."

"Obviously," he said.

She nodded with a knowing smile. "I figured, but I thought I might try to change your mind."

Usually he would relish a challenge from her but he was still reeling from the discovery that she had agreed to this, let alone that she was invested enough to want to convince him to go along with it so he just said, "Why do you even want to do it?"

She made a strange face and then said, "It's been hard for me to make my way up the hero rankings. Being associated with you would help generate some buzz around my name."

He eyed her. "Me specifically?"

She held his gaze. "You especially." He looked away: of course. Uravity could date any other pro hero and it would generate headlines but the clash in their images would add another layer of intrigue. It was all so calculated. She spoke again, breaking into his thoughts, drawing his eyes back to hers: "You have to admit it would be a good story — 'Eight years after that fateful Sports Festival match, they could deny their feelings no longer.'"

Her playful imitation of those gossip rags just pissed him off and he snapped, "I never took you for a liar, that's all."

The smile vanished from her face. "Excuse me?"

"You're really gonna pretend you feel something you don't to score a few points with the media?" he demanded. "What happened to that girl who stood across from me and gave it her all anyway?"

She stared at him for a moment and then said, "Fuck you, Bakugou." She stood up and walked over to where she had left her shoes, starting to pull them on. He watched her, his traitorous mouth almost trying to twist itself into a grin at this — a real challenge — as he stood up to follow her.

When she had finished putting her shoes on she turned and faced him. "It's easy to have principles when you've never had to worry about money," she said. "Don't you get it? Everyone's not like you. We can't all go in front of the cameras and say exactly how we feel and still shoot up the rankings. I've had to watch what I say, wear, and do since I was fifteen years old just to meet you at the starting line. You get to be considered amazing just for existing and I had to fight tooth and nail for you to even learn my name."

He opened his mouth to respond but for once he had nothing to say. He felt as if he were fifteen again, standing across from her in the arena, watching her talk to him as if she knew something he didn't, as if she were about to drop something on his head that would crush him.

Then she did.

"I thought you might say yes as a professional favour and because this is a win-win for both of us," she said, eyes flashing with a type of fire he hadn't seen since that day. "You could have just said no and maybe we could have had a nice evening catching up but I didn't come here to be insulted." With that she left his apartment, slamming his door behind her.

Katsuki stared at the closed door for a few moments but thought better of following her out of the apartment. He let out a little groan of frustration: their first real conversation in years and it had gone about as poorly as it could have. He stalked back to his sofa and flopped down on it, crossing his arms with a frown.

It's not like he didn't fucking know that she came from less money than he did and it wasn't like he hadn't noticed that nobody seemed to take her as seriously as she deserved. In fact, it pissed him off. It had always pissed him off. It was one of the reasons he'd had some of his image problems back at UA after all: there was a distinct overlap between the type of person who thought Round Face was a frail girl and the type of person who thought that he was a monstrous bully. He supposed he had his answer as to why she even wanted to do this, and it absolutely wasn't that she wasn't insulted by it.

She was asking so much of him and she didn't even know it. But how the fuck was he supposed to say no when she put it like that? — when she said this would help other people see what he had always seen: just how fucking amazing she had always been?

It was it was also a reason to be around her, which was something both sharp and sweet at the same time. Being around her hurt, knocked him off balance, made him feel like he was losing control — but she also pushed him past his limit and made him stronger. He knew too that just as he saw something in her that others didn't she saw something in him: she had never looked at him as a villain or treated him as something dangerous, not once. He had always appreciated that. Now here she was, back in his life, asking him to do this: just another of those little ironies his life seemed to like to serve up from time to time — some real monkey's paw type shit, honestly.

Who's the real liar? his traitorous thoughts asked him.

Ochako had calmed down a little by the time she reached her own apartment, more annoyed with herself than with Bakugou. What had she expected, anyway? For him to consider her feelings before implying she was a sell-out? This whole endeavour had been a waste of both of their time and the worst thing about it was the painful reminder that even now his opinion mattered to her. He had once taken her seriously when almost nobody else did and it hurt to think that he might think less of her because of this.

It doesn't matter, she told herself. Bakugou was nothing more than a former classmate: his opinion shouldn't matter any more than anyone else's. It was embarrassing that she had let him get under her skin enough to fly off the handle at him like that. She usually kept those types of frustrations to herself but there had always been something about Bakugou which prompted her to say more than she meant to, reveal more of herself than she wanted. Maybe it was for the best that he had refused to have any part of this staged relationship scheme. The agency would find someone else, the media would stop writing hit pieces about her 'spinsterhood', and she would weather the humiliation of knowing that Bakugou thought she was inauthentic.

Hypocrite, she thought with a fond smile as she heated up her dinner. She knew not every feature of his costume was as functional as he liked to claim.

Her phone vibrated as she sat down at the table with her food. She frowned at the screen. Bakugou?

≫ If I said yes, how would this work?