A Hero's Villain

Flirting with Fire

News vans lined both sides of the street in front of Endeavor Agency, squeezing traffic down to one narrow lane Katsuki's mirrors barely cleared and slowing his race against an impending firestorm to a crawl.

Left leg bouncing, he looked up through the sunroof to the top floors of the Agency. To his window, his desk and drawer.

His notes.

Or, where he hoped his notes were.

In a field overgrown with poisonous problems, the notes were nothing more than weeds, but right now they were the only thing Katsuki could tend to.

He just needed to see them. Hide them. To fix one fucking thing. Numb to everything else, he had anchored himself with those thoughts while Hana closed out their interview with a few hasty reminders to vote and a thank you to the viewers. Choosing not to comment on the dead air she had signaled for when Katsuki stood, the flash of pink he'd caught, she tried to sweep it all under the rug.

Instead, she made things so much worse.

Hidden by the tinted windows of his truck - a convenience he'd argued for and, surprisingly, won despite the illegality - Katsuki snuck glances of the chaos as he rolled forward. A forest of tripods crowded the sidewalk while the cameras atop them watched the Agency doors. Camera men fiddled with settings and angles or fussed like worker bees over their reporter queens. Drawn by the promise of sickly-sweet gossip, civilians and heroes alike pressed in from either end of the street, effectively closing the city block. Pouring in from the next streets over, news crew late to the hive darted out between cars, juggling their gear and searching for an opening to set up.

All this because he couldn't keep his fucking mouth closed.

For the first half of the block, he had slipped by unnoticed, but the closer he came to the Agency doors the denser the crowd was. For every idiot who stepped out into traffic, the ten cars between him and the shelter of the gated Agency parking garage were forced to stop and the chances someone might recognize his vehicle climbed. Black on black might not be as obvious as Kaminari's electric yellow Supra, but he didn't doubt some fucking fan knew what he drove, right down to the damn license plate numbers.

Shuddering, he tightened his hands around the steering wheel. The leather creaked; his knuckles popped.

Nine cars to go.

He cracked the back windows, just enough to pull in some fresh air, and nudged his truck forward. A potent mix of his quirk, his woodsy cologne, and a fake pine car freshener added to the headache that had been building since Hana and the station producer trapped him backstage after the interview. He'd lost nearly thirty minutes to their apologies. Both had sworn the questions were screened. Both had promised some form of damage control.

Empty words; worthless reassurances.

It had only taken one audience member with a phone to capture his vow and spread it like a virus. Transmitted by tags like '#Dynamite', '#GEMGD', '#Heroes', and '#WhosYourHero', the whole damn city had been exposed in the few minutes he'd stolen to scrub his face clean and swap dress clothes for jeans and a t-shirt. The video had hundreds of thousands of views before he'd fled the studio.

Was Endeavor one of them? Was Shoto?

Six cars now.

Rolling to a stop when another dumbass cut through traffic, Katsuki pulled his phone off the charger. Worry closed around him like a vise and tightened by two rotations: nothing from Endeavor, nothing from Shoto. Their silence set his nerves on edge.

Endeavor was as unavoidable as morning, but Shoto-

Shuddering clicks and a frenzy of voices drifted in through the open windows, pulling his attention to the Agency entrance. Another hero made the mistake of trying to leave through the front doors, and the reporters swarmed him. Katsuki couldn't make out their words, but it didn't take much to guess they were asking if he'd returned. The other hero, a coworker whose name Katsuki didn't even know, shook his head adamantly, raised his palms, and slowly stepped back until the glass doors swallowed him.