Archive of Our Own

He hated the way her name looked on the Commission file, all clean white letters beneath a blurred security still of Ochako walking out of a villain-owned bathhouse with one hand tucked into the pocket of a stolen coat.

He hated the hush that settled over the briefing room when Shinsou explained how the alias had spread through encrypted broker channels after three staged disappearances, two intercepted arms deals, and one carefully leaked rumor about a gravity quirk that could make a body vanish before it touched the floor.

Most of all, he hated that the lie worked.

Uravity had too much daylight attached to her. She belonged to rescue footage and hospital rooftops, to little kids waving pink foam fingers during public safety events, to exhausted paramedics who trusted her voice in a collapse zone before they trusted the building under their own boots. Villains knew her soft cheeks, round eyes, bright costume, and the way reporters softened their voices when they asked her about saving people.

Her codename, Halo, gave them something else to believe in.

Halo wore white and smiled as if she had never needed to raise her voice to make a room nervous. Halo touched an arm or brushed along a neckline and made a man float helplessly against the ceiling while she finished her drink. She looked too gentle to be cruel, which meant men who thought softness was an opening leaned close enough to expose their throats.

Katsuki knew every part of it was a mask, but that didn’t mean he liked watching her wear it.

From the upper observation gallery, he watched Ochako move through the auction hall with a champagne flute balanced between her fingers and a hidden blade strapped high beneath the slit of her dress. The hall had been built under a gutted luxury hotel, beneath six floors of boarded windows and war-era dust, where old marble pillars rose into shadow and chandeliers threw warm light over people who had paid fortunes to stay anonymous.

Masks flashed gold and black. Voices stayed low. Waiters in white gloves carried trays past stolen support tech, quirk suppressor cuffs, black-market patrol maps, and private security manifests stripped from hero agencies too proud to admit they had been breached.

Ochako stood in the middle of it like bait.

The dress had been her choice, and Katsuki had known better than to argue once she stepped out of the safe house bathroom with white silk sitting soft against her shoulders and falling clean along every line the room below would be stupid enough to notice first. The low back exposed a long, warm stretch of skin he had refused to look at directly during final prep, mostly because the mission had already given him enough reasons to be pissed off and partly because Ochako had caught his eyes in the mirror the second his attention slipped. She had been fastening the thin strap at her shoulder then, calm as anything, while the hidden blade at her thigh pressed a slight, deadly shape beneath the dress.

“That dress gives them too much room to try their luck,” he had told her.

Ochako had met his glare through the mirror. Her hair had been pinned low, her face half-finished with makeup that sharpened her eyes and softened her mouth, and the contrast had made something in him pull tight.

“That’s why it works,” she said. 

“It’s stupid.”

Her hand paused at her hip, where the concealed blade sat flat against her thigh.

“Not when People like this show you what they want before they show you what they can do. I’d rather know where they’re looking before the shooting starts.”

He had wanted to argue because arguing with her was easier than admitting she had already thought through every ugly angle. Instead, he had pushed off the doorframe, checked the latch on the bathroom window, and told her the blade would print if she turned too fast.

She fixed it before he had to say anything else.

Now, from behind black observation glass, he watched a silver-haired broker with a serpent tattoo disappearing beneath his collar step into her space as if the room had given him permission. Ochako tilted her head, listening with the patient expression she used on civilians who gave bad statements after a rescue. The broker’s gaze slipped to her throat. Katsuki’s fingers curled inside his gloves, heat gathering against the suppressor mesh until the fabric tightened over his palms.

Shinsou’s voice cut in through his earpiece, low enough to stay under the ballroom music.

“Your vitals are starting to make the analyst nervous.”

Katsuki did not take his eyes off the broker. “Tch. Tell the analyst to watch the exits instead of my pulse.”

“She says your numbers are easier to read than your red face.”

Tokoyami cut in before Katsuki could answer, his voice quieter, threaded with static from his position in the rafters. “Halo remains steady. Dark Shadow has eyes on the broker’s left hand. No weapon drawn.”

Below, Ochako accepted a small black invitation card from the broker and let her fingers brush his just long enough to make him think the contact had been his idea. The man took the opening exactly the way Katsuki knew he would. His attention traveled down the bare line of her shoulder, over the curve of silk at her waist, then back to her mouth with a slow confidence that made heat gather in Katsuki’s palms.

Ochako tipped her face toward him with a look so warm it almost passed for invitation, and Katsuki hated how well she could make softness into a weapon. Her smile held the broker in place while her free hand lifted her champagne flute. Two fingers touched lightly to the glass stem.

The broker’s polished shoes left the floor.

Only an inch, maybe less, but it was enough. His confidence broke at the knees before the rest of him understood he had lost the ground. One hand jerked toward the nearest pillar, and Ochako’s smile deepened as if the two of them were sharing something private instead of standing in the middle of a warning.

“You’re crowding me,” she purred, sweet enough that anyone watching would mistake the warning for flirtation. Through the receiver at her neckline, Katsuki heard the smile in her voice sharpen around the edges. “I’d hate to get nervous in public.”

The broker’s throat worked. His shoes settled back onto the marble, and he took a careful step away, pride forcing his smile to stay in place even as his eyes flicked toward her hand.

Shinsou snorted with amusement in Katsuki’s ear. “Watch your pulse, Dynamight.”

Katsuki’s glare stayed fixed on the broker. “Shut up.”

“There’s the spike again,” Shinsou said.

The broker’s fingers flexed at his side, too controlled to be surrender. Katsuki caught the movement and felt his jaw tighten.

“He’ll circle back,” Shinsou said, the humor thinning as Ochako turned away with the invitation card tucked between her fingers. “And she knows exactly how long he’ll take. He thinks he’s hunting, so she’s taking advantage of his ego to walk herself straight to the display.”

Katsuki knew that. He could see every moving piece of the plan and still feel it grinding under his ribs, because good strategy did nothing to make watching it easier.

Ochako moved through the room with the card tucked between her fingers, letting people notice without giving them enough of her attention to feel satisfied. Her eyes swept the auction floor once, slow and almost bored. Katsuki knew the exact moment she clocked the south entrance, the reinforced service door, the guard whose jacket hung too heavy over one hip, the woman pretending to admire a stolen support schematic while keeping sight of the central display.

Then Ochako reached the glass case.

Six vials rested inside on a velvet-lined tray. The serum looked black under the hall lights until the chandelier shifted and caught the red moving through it, thick and ember-bright, like something alive turning beneath the surface.

Grendel.

The Commission had tried to bury the name under cleaner language. Quirk-factor destabilizer. Adaptive mutation catalyst. Command-responsive combat enhancer. Every label sounded like something a support company could apologize for after a failed trial, which was probably why Katsuki hated hearing them so much.

Grendel had never been a support item. It had come out of the ugly postwar market that grew in the places heroes could not reach fast enough, stitched together from old Trigger research, stolen hospital data, and the kind of Nomu-adjacent theory everyone pretended had died with the labs that made it famous.

The first raids had found animals. Then low-level villains. Then missing vigilantes whose bodies had adapted around their quirks in ways that made the reports difficult to read without tasting bile. Concrete rooms melted from the inside. Steel restraints torn out of walls. Security footage showing test subjects on their knees one second and crawling across the ceiling the next, still human enough to scream when the handler device lit up.

Grendel did not give a person power. It forced the body to survive what the quirk became when every natural limit was ripped loose at once. Aggression rose first because aggression was useful. Pain fractured because pain slowed obedience.

Recognition narrowed until the subject could identify threat, command, and handler more easily than their own name. If the device synced before the body burned through the first surge, whoever held the signal could point the aftermath like a weapon.

A hero dragged into the shape of a monster.

Ochako looked down at the vials for a long second.

Her face remained Halo’s face, smooth and unreadable, but her fingers tightened once around the black invitation card. Katsuki saw it because he had spent years learning the difference between Ochako calm and Ochako holding herself still by force.

A guard near the south entrance adjusted his cuff.

The room began to change by inches. A waiter’s thumb pressed once beneath the rim of a silver tray. The woman beside the stolen support schematic adjusted her stance so her body lined up with the central display instead of the nearest exit. Near the south entrance, the guard with the heavy jacket stopped pretending to watch the crowd and let his attention settle on Ochako.

Katsuki pushed away from the glass before the first weapon appeared.

Tokoyami spoke first. “Unscheduled movement. South corridor. Twelve bodies approaching.”

“Fifteen,” Shinsou corrected after a beat. “Three holding back at the service stairwell.”

Ochako’s hand settled on the edge of the display case, her fingers relaxed against the reinforced glass as if she were only admiring what waited inside. She did not look toward the south entrance. She did not need to. Katsuki saw the moment she heard Tokoyami’s warning in the slight stillness that moved through her shoulders, the kind of stillness that meant every part of her had gone quiet enough to listen.

The south doors opened without drama at first. That was what made it worse. No shouted order. No immediate gunfire. Only a shift in the room as masked figures entered in clean tactical formation, using the auction’s own arrogance against it. The first carried a metal case. The second kept his hand tucked inside his coat. The third looked straight at Ochako, and Katsuki saw the slim line of a syringe slide from his sleeve as he moved through the first wave of confused guests.

“Bakugou,” Shinsou warned, his voice sharpening as the attacker cut a path through the crowd. “Do not break position unless she’s exposed.”

The man was already using the panic around the doors to close the distance, body angled to hide the syringe from everyone except the person watching Ochako like the whole room had narrowed to the bare line of her shoulder.

Heat flooded Katsuki’s palms.

“She’s exposed.”

He blew through the observation glass before Shinsou could answer.

Black shards burst outward under the force of his blast and caught the chandelier light as they fell. Katsuki dropped through them, steering his body with short, controlled explosions that rattled the pillars and tore screams out of the masked buyers below. The room opened beneath him in flashes: Ochako turning, the attacker’s arm lifting, the red-black shine inside the syringe, the display case at her back.

He hit the marble between them hard enough to crack it.

Ochako spun toward him, silk flaring around her knees. “Katsuki, the case!”

The attacker did not stop when Katsuki landed. He adjusted. The syringe changed course in one vicious, practiced movement, slipping past Katsuki’s raised arm toward the exposed space beneath Ochako’s shoulder strap.

There was no clean angle for a blast. No safe way to hit him without catching her in the burst. Katsuki saw the needle, saw Ochako’s eyes flick toward it, saw the attacker’s wrist snap forward with all the ugly confidence of someone who thought he had found the one opening Dynamight could not reach.

Katsuki reached it anyway.

He drove himself into the syringe’s path and felt the needle punch high beneath his collarbone, sharp enough to pierce the reinforced lining of his suit and bite deep before his hand closed around the attacker’s wrist. Bone shifted under his grip. The man’s breath hitched behind the mask, but his thumb still forced the plunger down.

The red-black serum disappeared under Katsuki’s skin.

Ochako’s hand struck his jacket.

“Katsuki!”

Her voice broke around his name, and that reached him before the pain did. For one suspended second, his body still belonged to him. He saw the syringe lodged in his shoulder, the attacker’s eyes bright with satisfaction, Ochako’s fingers twisting in his lapel as she reached for the plunger too late.

Then his quirk opened somewhere deeper than his palms.

It felt immediately wrong. Explosion had always lived in his hands, in sweat and spark and pressure, in the split-second math of force and recoil that had shaped his body since childhood. This did not start there. It opened behind his ribs, hot and wet and alive, then tore outward through muscle and bone as if something inside him had mistaken his body for a locked door.

His knees hit the marble. The impact cracked beneath him, but the pain barely registered before a blast ripped from his palm without permission. It was too wide, too bright, and too hungry, a brutal flare of heat that punched the attacker through the auction table and turned the reinforced glass behind him into glittering dust.

Katsuki had not decided to move.

The realization should have terrified him. It tried to, but Grendel was already dragging fire through his nerves too quickly for fear to hold its shape.

Ochako went down with him rather than let go. Her grip twisted in his jacket, knuckles digging hard against his ribs as his weight nearly pulled her off balance. Somewhere beyond the roar inside his skull, gunfire cracked near the south entrance.

Dark Shadow poured from the rafters in a black rush, driving attackers away from the broken display. Shinsou’s voice cut through the comms, low and controlled, catching anyone stupid enough to answer him.

The fight blurred at the edges. Ochako stayed sharp.

So did his hands.

His gloves split with a wet rip of reinforced fabric. Suppressor mesh sparked against his skin, failed, and peeled back as black claws pushed through where his fingers should have ended. Heat branched up his forearms in molten seams, orange-gold beneath skin that felt too tight to hold him.

His shoulders wrenched wider under the torn suit. Fabric split across his back. Pressure drove through his jaw until his vision flashed white, and when he dragged in a breath, the sound came out low enough to make the nearest buyers stumble away from him.

Her knee slid against broken glass when his weight dropped, but she caught herself and stayed with him, one hand twisted in his jacket while the other pressed hard against the center of his chest. Blood marked her cheek in a thin red line. A loose piece of hair had stuck to the corner of her mouth.

He wanted, with a sudden and devastating clarity, to lift it away before it bothered her.

Then the gunman behind her raised his weapon.

Grendel turned Katsuki’s attention toward the movement with brutal efficiency. The room narrowed to distance, angle, pulse, threat. His claws punched into the marble as his body prepared to launch, and Ochako felt the change before he moved. Her palm shoved harder against his chest.

“Stay down.”

The command struck through the pressure of her hand rather than the sound of her voice. His muscles locked around it. The thing burning through him still wanted the gunman, but Ochako’s weight was in front of him, her body caught in the path his instincts were trying to carve through the room. He could smell the man’s sweat, hear the faint tremor in his trigger finger, feel the exact distance between the muzzle and the back of her shoulder.

He could also feel how easily one wrong motion could take her with him.

Fear cut through the heat clean enough to hurt.

“Move,” he forced out.

His voice sounded like it had been dragged through smoke and broken glass. Ochako’s eyes flickered, but her hand stayed planted over his heart.

“Look at your hands,” she said.

His breath scraped through his teeth.

“Katsuki,” she pressed, sharper now, refusing to let his attention leave her completely. “Your hands.”

He looked down. His claws were buried in the marble, four jagged grooves opening beneath each hand. The floor cracked around the pressure because some part of him had already found the only safe place to put the violence.

“Keep it there,” she said. “Put it into the floor, not through me.”

The words gave him somewhere to send the force without making obedience feel like surrender. He drove his claws deeper, shoulders shaking, while the gunman shifted behind her. A snarl tore out of Katsuki before he could stop it, rough enough to make the man stagger back and half the auction floor recoil with him. The fear pleased something in the serum. Katsuki felt that pleasure and hated it.

Ochako slid her hand from his chest to the side of his throat, two fingers pressing beneath his jaw until his pulse battered against her touch.

“Breathe through your nose,” she said. “Your jaw’s locked.”

His mouth pulled back before he could stop it. The new edge of his teeth caught against his lower lip. Ochako saw them, and her breath snagged once, but her thumb still rose beneath his mouth with impossible care, close enough to steady him and careful enough not to touch the sharp point.

Katsuki turned his face away because the contact went somewhere the serum did not deserve.

“Don’t put your fingers near my mouth,” he rasped.

“Then keep talking to me.”

A sound dragged out of him that might have been a laugh if it had belonged to his old throat. “Shinsou’s listening.”

Ochako did not glance toward the comm, the rafters, or the bodies moving through smoke around them. Her eyes stayed on his. “Then make him jealous.”

The line should not have worked. It was ridiculous. It was Ochako standing in broken glass with blood on her cheek, asking him to keep his mind inside his own body by giving him something familiar enough and stupidly human enough to hold.

His breath hitched.

For half a second, Katsuki found her through the heat.

Then Grendel surged again.

It rose with the chaos around him, feeding on gunfire, fear, movement, threat. His spine bowed before he could stop it. Explosions snapped loose from his palms in broken bursts, too hot and too close, and Ochako’s hair lifted in the wash of heat. Panic punched through him at the sight of silk and skin and flame in the same breath. He folded his hands inward and drove the blasts into the marble, burning craters into the floor rather than letting fire climb anywhere near her.

Tokoyami moved in, instincts dragging him forward as Dark Shadow reached for Katsuki with a long black limb.

Katsuki’s head snapped toward it, and the snarl building in his chest changed pitch. Ochako heard the shift before anyone else.

“Tokoyami, stop.”

Dark Shadow froze, stretched between protection and attack, its yellow eyes bright in the smoke. Tokoyami stopped with it, one hand lifted, trusting Ochako’s read even as the floor cracked under Katsuki’s claws.

Katsuki dragged in a smoking breath. The air tasted like blood and nitroglycerin.

Shinsou’s voice entered his ear, careful in a way that made the hair at Katsuki’s nape rise. “Bakugou, can you answer me?”

Katsuki clamped his mouth shut so hard one sharp tooth cut the inside of his lip. Blood hit his tongue, metallic and hot. One answer would give Shinsou a path in. Brainwashing might drop him long enough to save the room, but it might also give the Commission exactly the opening their black-file contingency had been waiting for.

He could still remember the addendum Aizawa had forced them to disclose, every sterile phrase dressed up to hide the shape of a bullet. Non-lethal containment first. Quirk suppression second. Permanent neutralization under catastrophic civilian threat.

Shinsou did not answer her right away.

Static breathed once through the comm, thin and sharp beneath the ruined noise of the auction hall. Katsuki could hear him above the gunfire, above the scrape of broken glass under fleeing feet, above Tokoyami’s low command as Dark Shadow drove another attacker into a pillar. Shinsou was close enough to understand the risk and far enough away to decide it was worth taking.

When he spoke again, his voice had changed.

“Ochako.”

He said her name softly.

The sound slipped through the smoke and blood and heat with a precision no weapon in the room could have managed. It was the first time Shinsou had used her given name on the mission. He had kept to Halo over comms, Uravity when the Commission channels were open, Uraraka when he needed to sound bored and professional. This was careful, almost gentle. A deliberate hand reaching toward the one part of Katsuki’s mind Grendel had already wrapped in fire.

Katsuki’s mouth opened before he could stop it.

The answer rose hard and immediate, dragged up from somewhere uglier than thought. His pupils pulled tight. The heat under his skin changed direction, rage boiling into a different shape as Shinsou’s voice put warmth around her name. It did not matter that Katsuki knew why he had done it. It did not matter that Shinsou was gambling with his own throat to find out what still reached through the compound. The sound of another man saying Ochako like that drove straight through every altered instinct in Katsuki’s body and came back with teeth.

Ochako felt the change under her fingers.

Her hand tightened at his throat, two fingers pressed beneath his jaw where his pulse battered hard enough to shift her knuckles. Katsuki felt the tremor in her touch before he saw the way her mouth firmed, and that small pressure gave him something to hold while his tongue pinned itself behind his teeth. Blood gathered in his mouth, sharp and metallic.

Shit.

Do not say her name like that.

Don't pull on that part of him unless you are ready to lose the hand.

The words stayed behind his teeth because Ochako’s thumb held steady against fever-hot skin, because she had noticed the almost-answer before anyone else, because her eyes stayed on him as if the whole mission had narrowed to the exact second where he either gave Shinsou a door or kept it shut.

“Hitoshi,” she said, and there was warning in it now. "It's fine. He's fine and we are fine. He's still him."

Shinsou’s silence stretched long enough for Katsuki to hear the quickened breath he tried to bury. “I had to know whether it could still reach him.”

“It reached him,” Ochako said. Her voice stayed low, but the edge in it could have cut wire. “Do not put yourself in front of it again unless I ask you to.”

A pause. Then Shinsou said, quieter, “Understood.”

The Grendel liked anger.

Katsuki felt the compound seize on it before he could bury the reaction. It took the fury Shinsou had sparked, the memory of the Commission’s contingency order, the sight of Ochako kneeling in broken glass with her hand on his throat while everyone else in the room measured him like a disaster waiting for permission, and it fed. Heat filled every nerve with violent direction. His palms burned. His jaw ached. The shape of his own body became a thing he had to fight from the inside.

He shoved himself upright before Ochako could stop him.

The movement dragged a harsh sound out of her as his weight shifted, but she moved with him instead of away, one hand still near his chest, ready to catch the next break in him if she could. Katsuki rose wrong. Too much height, too much weight, too much power collecting under skin that no longer felt built to contain it. Torn fabric pulled tight across shoulders that had widened beneath his suit. His claws flexed at his sides, black and curved and still faintly wet where his gloves had split around them. Each breath left his mouth in a visible drag of smoke, and when the air touched his teeth, the new sharpness there made his jaw tighten around the need to close on something.

The auction hall went quiet by degrees.

A glass rolled across the marble and clicked against a fallen chair. Someone sobbed behind a velvet mask, then smothered the sound with both hands. The buyers who had spent the evening dressed in civilization stared at him as if something older than the law had stepped into the chandelier light and found them wanting. Tokoyami held his position near the shattered display, cloak shifting around him, one hand lifted to keep Dark Shadow from surging too close. Shinsou stood farther back, expression drawn tight with calculation and the lingering knowledge that he had nearly put his own name on Katsuki’s target list by putting Ochako’s in his mouth.

Grendel had not taken Katsuki’s mind.

His mind remained, and that made the horror precise.

Every heartbeat in the room separated from the next. Every weapon announced itself by weight, angle, and distance from a nervous hand. Katsuki could hear sweat shifting under expensive collars, the faint scrape of a boot turning toward the exits, the tremor in the throat of the gunman still trapped behind Ochako. His quirk rolled beneath his skin, eager and huge, offering simple answers in fire.

Then Ochako shifted behind him, and the room lost a layer of meaning.

Her scent cut through smoke, blood, gun oil, sweat, perfume, and hot metal with a precision that made his stomach pull tight. Rain from the alley still clung to her hair. Champagne had soaked the torn hem of her dress. Vanilla lingered at her throat, warmed by skin and fear and the heat coming off him. Beneath all of it was something cleanly, impossibly her, familiar from safe houses and agency elevators and late patrols where she stood close enough for him to know when she was tired before she said a word.

His body noticed with a force that felt almost obscene.

Heat sank lower than rage, heavier and more dangerous because it did not come from Grendel alone. The compound sharpened it, stripped shame and restraint down to exposed nerve, but it had not made the want. Katsuki knew that with a clarity brutal enough to hurt. He had wanted her before the needle, before the claws, before every villain in the room learned that softness could turn lethal when Ochako Uraraka stopped being gentle with gravity.

Now she was behind him, close enough for his altered senses to map the warmth of her body through torn silk and smoke. One step back would put her against him. One turn would put his mouth near the pulse beating in her throat. The animal thing under his skin wanted to crowd her against the nearest pillar and bury his face where her life beat strongest, not to hurt, not to take, but to prove she was alive in the only language his body seemed willing to understand.

The thought hit him with enough force to make his claws curl.

Katsuki refused before it could finish taking shape.

A growl dragged up from behind his ribs, low and rough enough to roll through the hall. Three buyers nearest the display stumbled back as if the sound had hands. Ochako did not move away. He felt her there anyway, steady behind him, breathing hard but not running, and that made the hunger twist into something more helpless than violence.

One of the attackers lunged for the broken case.

Katsuki crossed the distance before the man’s fingers reached the velvet tray. He did not use an explosion. Some narrow, stubborn piece of him understood that a blast at this range would turn the attacker into meat and catch three civilians in the wash. So he used his shoulder instead, driving the man into a marble column hard enough to crack stone. The attacker dropped at his feet, mask split, body folding in on itself with a sound Katsuki felt through the floor.

Another masked figure bolted for the service corridor with one vial clutched in his hand.

Katsuki turned.

Every instinct aligned. Chase. Catch. Tear the vial out of his hand. Break anything that kept moving.

“Katsuki.”

Ochako’s voice caught him before his body did.

He stopped with the thief still in sight, the man’s coat flashing once before he vanished through the corridor door. The loss of him sparked through Katsuki’s blood, and Grendel surged toward it, furious at being denied a target. His claws flexed. Marble dust fell from his fingers.

Ochako moved into his peripheral vision, knife low at her thigh, eyes on the corridor instead of his face because she knew better than to turn this into comfort when strategy would reach him faster. Blood marked her cheek. The white silk clinging to her legs was torn and stained, and the assassin mask had disappeared somewhere between the syringe and his first uncontrolled blast. She looked like herself now. Uravity in ruined silk, barefoot on broken glass, furious enough to make gravity feel personal.

“If you chase him alone, they split us,” she said. “If they split us, they get you somewhere I can’t reach.”

The words landed in the narrow human place still holding its ground inside him.

His mouth pulled back from his teeth. “He has a vial.”

“And he has a route.” Her voice stayed level, but Katsuki heard the pressure underneath it, the calculation moving fast behind her eyes. “We need where he’s going more than we need his body on the floor.”

He hated that she was right. He hated the way her scent still cut through the air while she said it, hated the warmth of her so close and the steadiness of her hand when it brushed his wrist to pull his attention back before Grendel could drag it toward the corridor again. The touch lasted less than a breath. His entire body tracked it.

“Bakugou.”

Shinsou was beside the attacker Katsuki had put through the column, capture cloth already looped tight around the man’s arms. He did not crouch. He did not make a production of it. He only planted one boot near the man’s shoulder and looked from the cracked mask to the service door.

“Ten seconds,” Shinsou said. “Let me get the route.”

Katsuki stepped back.

The motion took more from him than the fight had.

Shinsou did not need ten seconds.

The attacker made the mistake of cursing at him before Katsuki had finished forcing his claws open. One raw, panicked word was enough. Shinsou’s eyes sharpened, and the man’s body went slack against the cracked column as Brainwashing took hold.

“Route,” Shinsou said.

The answer came through blood and broken breath. “Shipment tunnel. Lower east.”

Ochako’s gaze cut toward the service corridor. “The crate?”

“Already moving.” The man’s mouth twitched like some part of him was still trying to fight the command. “Twelve vials. Handler device packed under the foam.”

Katsuki’s claws curled so hard the air warmed around his hands.

Shinsou looked up, expression going colder. “Synced?”

The attacker’s throat worked. “Not yet.”

Those two words struck the room harder than any gunshot. Katsuki felt Ochako’s breath catch beside him, controlled and quiet but no longer hidden from him. The leash had not found purchase. The thing burning through his body had teeth in him but no hand around his throat. Whatever shape Grendel had dragged him into, he was still inside himself.

Tokoyami landed near the shattered display, cloak settling around him while Dark Shadow curved over his shoulder in a restless black coil. “The hall is contained. Three buyers escaped west.”

“Let them run,” Ochako said, already turning toward the east service doors.

Katsuki’s head snapped toward her. “You’re not going near that crate.”

She did not slow. “Yes, I am.”

His growl scraped through the back of his throat before he could stop it. “Round Face.”

That made her look at him.

The chaos around them pulled thin. Katsuki saw the exhaustion under her eyes, the blood at her cheek, the stubborn set of her mouth, the way she looked at his claws and then back into his face without letting either one change her decision.

“You can barely keep your blasts under you,” she said. “Tokoyami needs shadow cover. Shinsou needs mouths conscious enough to question. I’m the only one who can move it without cracking it open.”

“I can move it.”

“You almost crushed a man’s throat. I will do it.”

His teeth clicked together.

Ochako stepped closer, not enough to crowd him, just enough for him to hear the lower edge of her voice beneath the ringing aftermath of gunfire. “I’m not saying that to insult you. I’m saying it because you know I’m right.”

He did know. That was the part that burned.

The compound twisted his understanding into possessive heat so fast he had to look away. He could still smell her through smoke and blood, rain and vanilla and the faint sweetness from the mochi she had eaten in the safe house kitchen while pretending she was not nervous. The scent pulled low in his body, beneath the rage, beneath the fear, honest enough to make him ashamed of wanting anything while she was standing there hurt.

He took one step back.

Ochako’s gaze dropped to the distance he put between them, and something moved across her face before she tucked it away.

“We move as a unit,” she said. “Tokoyami takes high cover. Shinsou clears anything with a voice. You stay where I can see you.”

Katsuki’s mouth curled before he could stop it, sharp teeth catching against his lower lip. “That an order?”

Her eyes held his. “It’s me knowing you’ll follow if I’m the one walking into danger.”

He hated how well she knew where to cut.

Then she turned toward the east service doors, trusting him with her back, and Katsuki followed because the shape of his life had been teaching him to do that for years.

The lower tunnel smelled of mold, chemical refrigeration, and old concrete soaked with rain. Emergency lights buzzed overhead, painting the corridor in a red pulse that made Ochako’s white dress look almost pink around the ruined edges. She had abandoned her heels somewhere in the auction hall and moved barefoot over the service floor, knife held low, steps quiet enough that the first guard by the freight lift saw her too late.

Ochako lifted her hand.

Gravity turned cruel.

The guard hit the ceiling hard enough to lose his weapon. A second slammed sideways into a pipe. A third fired before Katsuki could reach him, and the bullet sparked against the burst Katsuki threw up between it and Ochako.

The explosion chewed through part of the wall.

Concrete groaned. Dust rained down.

Ochako caught his sleeve. “Lower output.”

Katsuki stared at the smoking wall, breath dragging through his teeth. “T-Trying.”

“I know. Angle down and shorter. Stop worrying about clipping me and just get this done.”

He looked at her then.

She did not soften the assessment. She gave him the correction the way she would have in training, direct and useful, and the hero in him grabbed it before the compound could twist fear into anger.

A guard lunged from the freight lift.

Katsuki drove a short blast low, angled into the floor. It knocked the guard’s legs out from under him without collapsing the corridor.

Ochako’s grip on his sleeve eased. “Better.”

He swallowed a growl, more embarrassed by how much the word steadied him than by the smoke still dragging out of his mouth. “Don’t sound so proud.”

“I’m busy keeping us alive.” Her eyes flicked across his face, catching on the tightness around his mouth before she looked back to the corridor. “Take the correction and keep moving.”

Tokoyami dropped through the stairwell above them with Dark Shadow unfurling in the weak emergency light, smaller than it had been in the auction hall but still vicious enough to scatter the remaining guards. Shinsou’s capture cloth snapped past Katsuki’s shoulder and wrapped around the wrist of a woman reaching for a detonator.

“Talk,” Shinsou said.

The woman bared her teeth. “Go to hell.”

His expression stayed flat. “Wonderful.”

Her eyes glazed over as Brainwashing caught, and Shinsou dragged the detonator from her hand.

Ochako was already at the freight lift, working the crate lock with blood-slick fingers. Katsuki joined her, and the missing serum waited inside a steel transport container with the Commission markings scratched off the side. Twelve vials gleamed in cold foam. Beneath them sat a black device the size of a phone, its screen blank, its ports threaded for biometric input.

Handler device.

Katsuki’s claws curled.

Ochako saw the movement and shifted closer before his grip could answer for him. “Please do not crush the crate.”

“I’m looking at the leash they built for me.”

“I know.” Her voice changed there, anger threading under the control. “And we need it intact so they can never build another one.”

He gripped the edges of the crate.

Metal screamed under his claws.

Ochako slid in beside him. Her shoulder brushed his bicep, and the contact dragged his focus straight down to the warmth of her body. He froze because the crate had begun to bend, the steel warping under hands that wanted to destroy the thing before anyone could put it around his throat.

Her hand hovered near his wrist without touching. “Give me the weight.”

His throat worked around the warning trying to form there.

“Cheeks.”

Her eyes flicked up at the nickname.

The red emergency light caught the small shift of her mouth, not quite a smile but close enough to hurt.

“That’s me,” she said. “Let go when I lift.”

He stared down at the crate. His grip had dented the steel. A fracture ran along one corner seam. Inside, the vials clinked softly, and every sound felt like a test of his hands.

Ochako placed all five fingers against the side of the crate.

Gravity slipped away from it.

Katsuki opened his hands.

The relief moved through him so hard he nearly laughed. He had not crushed it. He had wanted to. He had not.

Tokoyami caught the far side while Dark Shadow wrapped around the container with a low, uneasy hiss at the chemical cold.

Shinsou’s voice sharpened from the corridor. “Extraction route is closing. We have maybe two minutes before the Commission team reaches the tunnel.”

Katsuki stepped ahead of them. “Then move.”

No one argued.

They came out through the hotel’s flooded sub-basement into a maintenance tunnel that fed the old subway line beneath the financial district. Rainwater threaded down through cracked concrete in steady silver lines, collecting in shallow pools that reflected the emergency lights in broken red. Above them, the city moved on without knowing what had just been dragged out from under its feet. Somewhere overhead, trains screamed along elevated tracks, traffic hissed through wet streets, and people slept behind lit apartment windows while four pro heroes crossed beneath them with a crate full of nightmare chemistry.

The transport container floated between Ochako’s hands and Tokoyami’s careful grip, made light by her quirk but still heavy in every way that mattered. Dark Shadow curled around the far edge, uneasy and restless, its yellow eyes fixed on the black device nested beneath the vials. Shinsou walked behind them with his capture weapon loose around his shoulders, posture controlled, mouth set in a flat line that told Katsuki he was already thinking through the Commission report and hating every sentence before it existed.

Katsuki took point because his body would not allow anything else.

The tunnel stretched ahead in a long concrete throat, damp air dragging over his skin, every sound sharpened until he could hear the crate’s inner foam shift with each step. His claws flexed at his sides. Each breath came hot enough to steam when it left him. The molten seams beneath his skin had dimmed since the auction hall, but the compound still moved under the surface, circling his nerves like an animal that had found the fence and started testing for weak spots.

Ochako’s footsteps stayed a few paces behind him.

Her bare feet met wet concrete with soft, careful pressure. Silk brushed her legs. Every few steps, her weight caught wrong on the foot she had cut on glass and refused to mention. The sound pulled at him more sharply than the rifles waiting beyond the service gate.

He smelled the containment team before the gate came into view.

Sedatives. Charged metal. Suppression cuffs humming with stored current. Fear-sweat soaked into the collars of men who had been told they were prepared for Dynamight and had believed it until the tunnel carried his breathing back to them.

Katsuki slowed.

Ochako noticed before anyone else. “What is it?”

“Commission.”

Her footsteps stopped.

Tokoyami shifted the crate higher, cloak dragging through the rainwater. “How many?”

“Six in armor. One medic. Rifles already hot.”

Shinsou exhaled through his nose, a quiet, humorless sound. “They were supposed to wait outside the extraction zone.”

“They never wait when they’re scared,” Katsuki said.

The words scraped out rougher than he wanted. Ochako came up beside him, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushed his arm, and he forced his claws to curl inward before the heat in his palm could answer the proximity.

The rusted service gate stood twenty feet ahead, half open onto a wider tunnel where the Commission van waited under harsh portable lights. The agents were arranged in a clean semicircle, visors down, rifles angled toward the floor in the polite fiction of restraint. Katsuki read the lie in their wrists. They could fire in less than a second. Two suppression rounds per rifle, maybe three if the bulk near the chambers meant extended magazines. The medic behind them held a case with foam slots shaped for syringes and his thumb already resting on the latch.

The compound liked the threat. It rose through Katsuki’s blood, feeding on the shape of the room until tactical awareness became something sharper and uglier. He saw the fastest path through them. First rifleman at the left knee, second through the shoulder joint, medic disarmed before the case opened, lead agent against the van hard enough to break armor seals. Six bodies. Twelve seconds. Less, if he used explosions.

Ochako stepped in front of him before the thought could turn into movement.

The tunnel narrowed around the sight of her back.

She still wore the ruined white dress, the hem dark with rainwater and blood, one strap sitting lower on her shoulder where the fabric had torn during the fight. Her hair had fallen loose from its pins, and the line of her neck was streaked with dust. She looked breakable in front of the rifles, which meant every altered, overheated instinct in Katsuki’s body surged toward the same answer at once.

Move her. Cover her. Burn the threat down before it aims.

His claws bit into his palms.

Ochako lifted one hand, palm open toward the agents. “Lower your weapons.”

The lead agent’s visor stayed fixed over her shoulder, where Katsuki stood breathing smoke into the cold tunnel air. “Dynamight is to be sedated before transport.”

“You can speak to him like the hero who secured your evidence while your team waited behind a gate.”

“The subject is unstable.”

The word subject hit the compound like a struck match.

The word moved through Katsuki before the lead agent finished shaping it, sinking into the part of him Grendel had already made raw. His breath pulled in hard enough to smoke in the cold tunnel air, and the rifles answered with a slight tightening of gloved hands.

Ochako’s fingers shifted at her side.

She did not look back. She kept her body between him and the line of weapons, shoulders squared beneath the torn strap of her dress, but her hand lowered just enough for him to see the shape of the signal she made with two fingers.

Katsuki felt it strain under his skin, hungry for the clean violence the agents had offered him, and he kept his claws curled into his palms because the signal had come from her.

“The compound is unstable,” she said, voice even and carrying.

“The hero affected by it has followed instructions, protected the evidence, and prevented civilian casualties in an active hostile environment. If you escalate this because your protocol is easier than your judgment, I will put your name in every report that leaves this tunnel.”

The agent’s rifle lifted by a fraction. “Step aside, Uravity.”

Dark Shadow rose behind Tokoyami, not lunging, not spreading wide enough to become a formal threat, but the shape of him darkened the tunnel wall until the lead agent’s visor tipped toward it. Shinsou moved at the same time, quiet and unhurried, taking Ochako’s right side with his capture weapon loose around his shoulders. He did not need to say anything at first. His presence changed the room because every armed person there knew exactly what his voice could do if they gave him an answer.

Ochako did not glance at either of them.

Her attention stayed on the rifles, but Katsuki could feel the rest of her awareness stretched back toward him. She was listening to the scrape of his claws against his own skin, the rough drag of his breathing, the heat rolling off him in waves strong enough to steam where rainwater touched the tunnel floor.

The lead agent hesitated.

It was small. A catch in his throat, a fractional delay before his next order. Katsuki heard it. So did Ochako.

“Safe house three,” she said, pressing into the opening before he could recover his authority. “Reinforced lower room. Shielded line for the counteragent team. No restraints unless Dynamight requests them, and no one touches a sedative without clearance from one of us.”

“From one of you?” the agent asked.

Ochako’s chin lifted, and Katsuki saw the exact moment the room understood she had stopped asking for cooperation. “From me.”

The word settled without needing volume.

Katsuki stared at the back of her head, at the damp hair curling against her neck, at the fragile line of her shoulders set between him and a firing squad sent by the same institution that would put his face on posters if he died in a way they could sell. Something shifted behind his ribs, low and painful, where Grendel had no use for it and therefore could not twist it into rage.

The first rifle lowered.

The others followed by degrees, reluctant metal dipping away from Ochako’s body and then from his. The lead agent held out longest, pride stiffening every line of him, but Ochako did not move, and Katsuki refused to give him the proof he had come prepared to find.

At last, the agent stepped aside and gestured toward the van.

“Safe house three,” he said. “Any escalation during transport triggers sedation.”

Katsuki’s voice came out low and rough behind Ochako.

“Reach for that case again,” Katsuki growled, “and you’ll need more than protocol to explain what happens next.”

The medic took a step back before he could stop himself.

Ochako finally turned and met Katsuki’s gaze, the tunnel’s noise thinning until all he had was her face, pale with exhaustion under the grime, jaw set, blood dried near the pink of her cheek. Her gaze dropped to his hands, to the blood slipping between black claws where he had dug too deep into his own palms.

The line between her brows tightened.

“Van,” she said quietly.

It was a path out, and Katsuki took it.

The ride to the safe house passed through rain-streaked streets and locked silence. Katsuki sat on the reinforced floor because the bench had groaned under him the moment he tried to use it. The van’s interior smelled of wet armor, medic-grade plastic, cold metal, and Ochako’s ruined perfume, all of it sharpened by the compound until each breath gave him more than he wanted to know.

Ochako sat across from him with the scanner balanced on her lap. The portable screen lit her face in blue-white flashes, catching the tired slope of her shoulders and the careful way she kept her injured foot tucked under the opposite ankle. She watched the numbers more than she watched him, which somehow made it easier to endure being seen.

When his temperature spiked, her eyes moved to his hands. When his pulse staggered, she looked at his mouth with the focused concern she brought to unstable rubble before deciding where to place her hands.

The medic tried to angle himself closer to the scanner once the van started moving, one hand braced on the wall, eyes flicking between the screen and Katsuki as if distance made staring less obvious.

Ochako shifted the scanner against her lap before he could read over her shoulder. “You’ll get the numbers when I’m done with them.”

“I’m assigned to monitor the affected party.”

Katsuki’s claws scraped once against the reinforced floor.

The sound was quiet compared to the van’s engine and the rain against the roof, but the medic’s shoulders still jumped. Ochako’s gaze did not leave the screen.

“The affected party’s name is Dynamight,” she said. “He can hear you. Start there.”

The medic swallowed, his attention darting toward Katsuki and away again. “Dynamight’s readings are irregular.”

“They were irregular before you made them worse,” Ochako answered, thumb moving over the scanner controls while the blue-white light washed exhaustion across her face. “Sit back.”

This time, the medic listened.

The old Katsuki would have laughed. This Katsuki was too aware of the shape of his own mouth, the heat sitting under his tongue, the way every jolt of the van sent Ochako’s knee shifting closer before she caught herself. Grendel had stopped dragging him toward violence for the moment, but it had found another place to press. Every familiar detail of her arrived too intensely. Rain in her hair. Smoke clinging to her dress. Blood dried over skin he wanted to clean with a gentleness his hands could not promise. The faint sweetness of mochi from the safe house kitchen earlier in the evening, absurdly intact beneath the stink of gunfire and serum.

He turned his face toward the wall and kept his mouth shut.

Ochako noticed, because she always noticed, but she did not ask him to explain in front of the medic. Instead, she reached down without looking and pressed one of the cold packs from the supply drawer against the floor between them.

“Use that before you burn through the van,” she said.

It gave him something to do besides want.

Katsuki took it carefully between the sides of his hands, avoiding the points of his claws, and the cold hissed against his skin until steam curled around his fingers. His shoulders loosened by a fraction.

Ochako saw that too.

By the time they reached safe house three, the rain had softened to a mist that blurred the alley cameras and silvered the concrete loading bay. Tokoyami stepped out first to check the perimeter, Dark Shadow folded close around his shoulders beneath the weak overhead lights. Shinsou followed, spoke briefly to the agents stationed near the entrance, then returned with the kind of expression that told Katsuki someone had already tried his patience and failed to improve the situation.

“The lower room is cleared,” Shinsou told Ochako. “Shielded line is active. Counteragent team is upstairs. The medic has been instructed to stay outside unless invited.”

Katsuki pushed himself up from the van floor with one clawed hand braced against the wall. The metal dented under his palm. “Then he can stay uninvited.”

“Katsuki,” Ochako warned, stepping down from the van.

His mouth tightened. The look he gave the dented wall said he had several excellent arguments ready and enough sense to bite his tongue.

Shinsou glanced between them, wisely choosing not to enjoy it where Katsuki could see. “I’ll be outside the lower hall,” he continued.

“I won’t use my quirk unless you ask, she asks, or you stop recognizing either of us.”

Katsuki did not answer right away.

The offer settled under his skin in a place he would rather have ignored because Shinsou had made it clean. No trap, no pressure, no clever line hidden inside it. Only a boundary Katsuki could use if the night turned against him again.

He gave one short nod, and Shinsou accepted it without making him pay for needing it.

Tokoyami waited near the stairwell with Dark Shadow quiet at his back. “The mission is not finished. One vial remains unaccounted for.”

“I know,” Ochako said.

Her voice stayed steady, but now that the gunfire had stopped, Katsuki could hear the fatigue underneath it. He looked down before he could stop himself. The cut on her foot had reopened somewhere between the tunnel and the van, a thin line of red showing at the edge of her bare sole.

Ochako followed his gaze and shifted her weight away from it, which only made his eyes narrow.

The loading bay lights made her look paler than she had under the red emergency lamps. Bruised, barefoot, still holding herself upright because everyone else needed her to. Katsuki looked away before the sight got any deeper under his skin.

“Lower room,” he said, already moving toward the stairwell. “Then we take care of your foot.”

Ochako’s mouth parted like she might argue, but Tokoyami stepped aside with the kind of solemn wisdom that made Katsuki dislike him less for exactly three seconds.

She followed.

Safe house three had been built for heroes who could not go to hospitals and incidents that could not go into public logs. The lower room sat beneath two levels of false offices and one reinforced storage floor, tucked behind a door thick enough to survive a blast if Katsuki kept his hands under control. Concrete walls. Floor drains. A narrow cot bolted to the left side. Medical cabinets secured behind coded locks. No windows, no outside sound beyond the soft churn of old ventilation.

The air carried antiseptic, steel, and a faint trace of Ochako from earlier in the week, when they had staged supplies here in case the mission went bad.

Her hoodie was still on the chair by the cot.

Katsuki saw it the second they entered and wished he had not, because his body found her in the fabric before his mind could prepare for it. Laundry soap first, then the warmer trace underneath, familiar from agency elevators, safe house kitchens, and late patrols where she stood too close while pretending she was only reading the same report over his shoulder. The scent reached through antiseptic and old steel and caught him so hard he stopped just inside the room.

Ochako followed his gaze.

For a moment she said nothing. She only looked from the hoodie to his face, reading the pause, the tension in his shoulders, the way his claws curled toward his palms as if he could hold himself together by force.

“Is it too much?” she asked.

The question was quieter than it had been in the van.

Katsuki’s mouth tightened. “Everything’s too much.”

The answer came out before pride could kill it. Ochako absorbed it the way she had absorbed everything else tonight, not with pity, not with the bright performance she used to keep civilians from panicking, but with a practical tenderness that made his chest hurt.

She crossed the room and shut off the overhead light.

The sudden softness of the wall lamp changed the bunker by degrees. Concrete lost its hard glare. The metal cabinets dulled at the edges. The hum of ventilation remained, but it stopped drilling behind his eyes. Ochako took a clean towel from the cabinet and placed it beside her hoodie, careful not to move too quickly.

“There,” she said. “Less.”

Katsuki looked at the warmer light on her face and hated how much it helped.

She opened the sealed kit with the saline, gauze, thermal strips, and counteragent case, while Katsuki stayed near the door because distance felt responsible. The room was small enough that he could hear each shallow breath she took when she bent to check the supplies.

“You should sit,” she said.

“You should deal with your foot.”

“I will.”

“Now.”

Ochako paused with the gauze in her hand and looked over her shoulder. “If I sit down first, are you going to let me clean your hands without making that face?”

“Tch.”

Her brows lifted, and the corner of his mouth twitched despite the heat still crawling under his skin.

Katsuki looked away and flexed his injured hand. Blood had dried in black-red streaks between his fingers, then cracked open again where the claws joined skin. He had done that to himself in the tunnel to keep from moving. He could still feel the pressure of Ochako’s back in front of him, the rifles beyond her, the exact amount of force it had taken to stay still when everything inside him demanded motion.

“Tell me what you need,” she said.

Ochako stood beside the cot with the medical kit open, no longer reaching for him, no longer assuming the next step. Her hair had come completely loose now, falling around her face in damp waves. The white dress had dried unevenly against her skin, torn at the hem and stained beyond saving. She looked like she belonged in a post-raid debrief, not in a room underground with a half-mutated hero who could still taste smoke in his teeth.

Katsuki dragged in a breath through his nose.

“If I say stop, you stop.”

“Okay.”

“If my hands move wrong, you send me airborne.”

“I will.”

“If my voice changes and I call for Shinsou, you call him in,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what I say after. Doesn’t matter if I sound like I changed my mind.”

Ochako’s fingers curled around the edge of the kit.

He heard the hurt in that little movement, the way her nails pressed once into the hard plastic before she steadied them. Katsuki hated needing to say it, and he said it anyway because wanting her safe had to matter more than wanting her spared.

“And if I stop knowing where I am,” he continued, voice roughening, “you get distance first. Float me if you have to. Then him.”

Her eyes held his for a long moment.

“I’ll call him,” she said.

Katsuki did not look away. “Say the rest.”

Her throat moved. “If you stop recognizing the room, or me, I make space before I try to help. I send you airborne if I have to, and I call Hitoshi.”

Only then did his shoulders ease.

The promises landed one by one and built a narrow bridge through the fever.

Katsuki crossed the room and sat on the edge of the cot. The frame groaned, but it held.

Ochako came closer with the towel, and he held out his wrist rather than his hand. She noticed the distinction. Her fingers closed above the worst of the changes, where his pulse hammered beneath overheated skin and the shape of him remained familiar enough to touch without making him flinch.

The first pass of saline hit the torn skin around his palm with a hiss that raised steam and dragged a sharp breath through his teeth.

Ochako’s thumb steadied against his wrist. “Breathe.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re not. Now quit holding your breath.”

“Tch.”

The corner of her mouth twitched despite the exhaustion under her eyes. “If you do a good job, I’ll give you a sticker.”

The sound that left him was closer to a snort than a laugh, roughened by smoke and teeth that still did not sit right in his mouth.

He hated that she could say it without looking up from his hand, hated more that she was right. Her voice gave him something to push against that was not pain, not heat, not the clawed shape of his own fingers resting in her careful hold.

It had always been like that with her in the field. She found the place where panic could become practical, where fear could be given a task, where pain could be made ridiculous enough to survive.

She cleaned blood from the base of one claw, brow drawn in concentration, and Katsuki watched her hands because looking at her face for too long made the room harder to breathe in.

She knew him too well.

Not in the clean, pretty way people said when they meant romance and wanted it to sound easy. She knew him in the ugly, useful ways that came from years of standing close when things went wrong.

She knew how his shoulders rose before an explosion misfired, how his left hand cramped after winter patrols, how quiet meant different things depending on whether he was angry, focused, hurt, or fighting not to show all three at once.

She knew which insults meant he still had room to breathe and which silences meant everyone needed to get clear.

He knew her the same way.

The small pinch near her mouth meant her foot hurt worse than she wanted to admit. The steadiness in her hands meant she was worried enough to become precise. The way she kept her shoulders even meant she had put the shaking somewhere private until the immediate threat passed.

That was what years did when nobody was paying attention. They built a language under the visible one, a long chain of tiny recognitions neither of them had named because naming it would have asked too much too soon.

Ochako shifted his hand a fraction. “I’m going to turn your wrist.”

He nodded.

She waited until he did, then moved him slowly, her fingers never drifting where he could not track them. When his claws twitched, she stopped. When his breath roughened, she held still until he found the room again. The wound care took twice as long as it should have because the altered skin around each claw reacted to pressure, heat, and saline differently, but she never rushed through the difficult parts and never treated his pauses like failure.

The room settled into the rhythm of water, gauze, breath, and the faint metallic click of his claws when he forced them away from her wrist.

The compound shifted while she worked, searching for somewhere to put the heat now that the gunfire had stopped and the rifles had been left outside the room. In the auction hall, it had made violence feel simple. In the tunnel, fear for her had kept him locked inside his own skin. Here, with the room softened around them and Ochako’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, the fever found the thing it had been circling since the van and pushed it close enough for him to taste.

He wanted her.

He had wanted her before Grendel, before the syringe, before the underworld learned to call her Halo. He had wanted her in agency elevators after late patrols, when she leaned against the wall with her eyes half closed and still remembered to hand him his coffee. He had wanted her on rooftops where rain turned the city silver and she tucked wet hair behind her ear while pretending the cold did not bother her. He had wanted her in hospital corridors after the war, when survival had hung between them like a thing too large to speak around.

The compound did not create the want. It stripped away the places where he usually buried it.

His breathing changed before he could hide it.

Ochako’s thumb paused against his skin, and Katsuki felt the moment she noticed the shift. Her eyes lifted from his hand to his face, crossing the altered line of his jaw, the tightness around his mouth, the way he had gone still because stillness was the only thing standing between want and movement.

“Is it too much?” she asked.

He should have made it easy for both of them. He should have told her yes, should have stood and put the room between them until her pulse stopped filling his ears and the scent of her skin stopped dragging every thought toward his mouth. The smart thing would have been distance.

Katsuki had never hated the smart thing more.

The truth came out rough through his teeth.

“You need to move away.”

She did not move. “Because you want space?”

His claws pressed into the towel. “Because I don’t.”

Ochako’s breath caught, and the compound made sure he heard every part of it.

The sound slipped beneath the hum of the ventilation and the quiet tick of rain moving through the old pipes, small enough that the woman she had been in the auction hall would have hidden it behind a smile. Here, under the warm wall lamp with blood drying at her cheek and his wrist still held carefully in her hand, she had nowhere to put it before his body noticed. Her pulse changed first, then the shallow pull of air through her throat, then the slight shift of her knees as she steadied herself beside him.

She stayed close.

If she had pulled away, he could have used the loss of her as proof that distance was the only responsible choice. He could have turned toward the wall, dug his claws into concrete, and let the ache become another thing he survived by force. Ochako gave him none of that. She kept her hand around his wrist and stayed close enough for him to hear the effect his words had on her body, close enough for the air between them to turn warm and charged and impossible to dismiss as only the compound.

“Ochako.”

“I heard you.”

“You heard the part I could say without sounding insane.”

Her gaze dropped to the towel where his claws had torn through the fabric, then returned to his face. The color on her cheeks deepened, but she did not look away from what he had given her. The want. The warning. The ugly, aching honesty of both.

“Tell me what you’re holding back,” she said.

The room seemed to narrow around her voice.

Katsuki dragged air through his nose and nearly cursed himself for it. Saline clung to her hands. Smoke and blood still threaded through her hair. Beneath the ruined silk and the sharp bite of antiseptic, her skin carried a warmth his body recognized too quickly, too completely. It pulled at him until his jaw ached with the effort of staying still.

He wanted his mouth at the side of her throat where her pulse moved fastest. He wanted his arm around her waist without hovering away from her back like a loaded weapon. He wanted to drag her into the space between his knees and keep her there until the memory of rifles, broken glass, and that needle had no room left between their bodies.

The wanting was not new.

The compound had only dragged it into the light and stripped away every place he usually hid.

His voice came out low. “You know what I am right now.”

Ochako’s fingers tightened once above the worst of the changes. “I know what they did to you.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” she said, and her eyes lowered to the claws, to the molten traces still faint beneath his skin, to the towel tearing slowly under his grip. “It isn’t.”

The honesty should have helped.

It made him want her worse.

Because she was not pretending the danger was beautiful. She was not romanticizing the claws or the heat or the shape Grendel had dragged out of him. She was looking at all of it with clear eyes and still keeping her hand on him, and Katsuki had no defense built for being wanted with the damage still visible.

Ochako’s thumb moved once against his wrist, the pressure small and deliberate. “Then answer me before either of us moves.”

The words cut through the heat better than softness would have.

Katsuki’s eyes found hers.

“You know where you are?” she asked.

“Safe house three.”

“You know who I am?”

His mouth tightened. “Don’t.”

“Katsuki.”

The sound of his name in her voice steadied him more than the question irritated him. He swallowed once, then gave her what she needed because she had earned every honest answer tonight.

“Ochako.”

Her shoulders eased by a fraction. “And if I tell you to stop?”

“I stop.”

“If you need to stop?”

“I tell you.”

“If the compound starts pulling harder than you can hold?”

His gaze dropped to the towel, to the claws sunk through the ruined cloth, to her hand holding him above the damage instead of pretending it was not there. “I tell you before it gets a vote.”

Ochako nodded once, and the movement settled something between them.

Then she lifted her free hand to his face.

Katsuki’s body locked before her fingers made contact. She paused until his breathing steadied, then touched the line of his jaw where the bone sat wrong beneath his skin. Her fingers did not flutter away. They traced him with slow, careful pressure, learning the altered shape with the same concentration she had used to clean the blood from his hand. When her thumb reached the corner of his mouth, she stopped just shy of the sharp edge of his teeth.

Restraint had never felt like this before.

It had always been discipline, something gritted through his jaw, something forced into his palms before an explosion got too close to someone he meant to protect. Under Ochako’s touch, restraint became intimate. It became her watching his face before moving closer. It became his breath shaking because she had listened when he told her where not to touch. It became the awful, gorgeous realization that she trusted him enough to stay, and he trusted her enough to let the want show.

“Ochako.”

“I’m here.”

“You don’t know what that means right now.”

Her thumb stilled near his mouth. “Then tell me.”

He breathed through the heat until the words stopped cutting on the way out. “Everything is too loud. Your heartbeat. Your skin. The way you smell on my clothes. Every time you move, my body notices before I decide to notice.”

Her fingers stayed at his jaw.

“I want my hands on you,” he said, voice roughening until it barely sounded like his own. “I want my mouth on you. I want you close enough that I stop feeling like the whole damn building can take you from me.” His claws flexed against the towel. “And I don’t know how to trust what my hands are.”

Ochako absorbed it without turning away from the ugliness or the want.

Her own pulse had climbed. He could hear it. She knew he could hear it, and the knowledge passed between them like a spark held carefully between two palms.

“Then we don’t start with your hands,” she said.

The answer was so simple that it stole the air from him.

She leaned in slowly, giving him every chance to refuse. Her hand remained at his jaw, her thumb warm near the corner of his mouth, and Katsuki held himself still while the space between them disappeared by degrees. Her lips touched his cheek first, just above the place where heat pulsed brightest beneath his skin.

His claws punched into the cot frame.

Metal screamed under his grip.

Ochako stopped immediately, her mouth still close enough for her breath to move over his skin. “Katsuki?”

He swallowed hard. “Still here.”

“You sure?”

“You kissed my face, Round Face. I’m handling it.”

A small breath left her, almost a laugh, and the sound shook through him with more force than the kiss had.

“Good,” she whispered.

Then her mouth found his.

Katsuki had imagined kissing Ochako with a human mouth so many times that the shame should have dulled by now. After patrol, when rain steamed off the street and she stood too close under the agency awning. In the kitchen, when she reached around him for a mug and smiled because she knew he could have moved and chose not to. In quiet rooms after bad rescues, when the silence between them grew so heavy that every almost-touch felt like something with a pulse.

He had imagined softness. Warmth. The little sound she might make if he finally stopped being a coward.

He had never imagined needing to learn the shape of her mouth around teeth that could hurt her.

The danger changed the kiss, but it did not break it. It made every careful angle matter, every pause feel chosen, every breath between their mouths sharpen into a promise neither of them could afford to make carelessly.

Ochako kissed him like she understood the danger and refused to let it make the whole decision. Her lips moved over his with careful pressure, then eased when his breath hitched too hard. She stayed close while his shoulders trembled, fingers spread along his jaw, her thumb steady near his mouth. When he leaned into her instead of away, she kissed him again, a little deeper, a little warmer, and Katsuki felt the last clean line of distance between them begin to give.

He answered her with everything he could control.

His hand stayed buried in the cot frame. The other remained wrapped in the towel on his thigh. His mouth moved carefully against hers, heat and restraint tangled so tightly he could barely separate them. Ochako made a soft sound when he found the right angle, and the need that tore through him was so intense he stopped himself from chasing it blindly.

His forehead dipped near hers, close enough that their breaths mixed.

Ochako’s fingers slid into his hair.

The soft pull of her nails across his scalp sent sensation down his spine, and the cot frame bent further under his grip.

“Talk to me,” she said.

His tongue dragged carefully past one sharp tooth. “Still clear.”

Her eyes searched his face, dark and steady under the warm light. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

The word came out immediately, stripped raw of every defense he usually wore over honesty.

Ochako’s breath caught again, and this time she did not hide it. Her hand moved from his hair to the side of his throat, palm settling over the hard beat of his pulse. “Then stay with me.”

She kissed him again, and Katsuki met her halfway.

The kiss deepened in increments, built out of pressure and pause. Ochako shifted closer on the cot until her knee brushed his thigh. His body went rigid, and she stopped before he could ask. The control she gave him through that pause steadied him enough to nod, and only then did she move nearer, slow enough that every inch felt chosen.

His uninjured arm trembled with the need to hold her.

Ochako noticed. Her hand slipped from his throat to his wrist.

Katsuki kept his mouth against hers, the words dragging rough between one kiss and the next. “Above the claws.”

“I know.”

Her fingers closed where his skin still felt almost human. Slowly, eyes on his face, she guided his arm toward her waist. He followed because she made it something he could choose rather than something his body stole.

The first press of his forearm against her waist nearly pulled the control out from under him. Warm silk shifted beneath him, thin enough for his altered senses to follow the shape of her breath, the small arch of her body as she leaned closer, the sound she made against his mouth when his arm tightened by instinct and then stopped before the hold became too much.

Katsuki forced his claws farther from her back, wrist burning with the effort. “Tell me if it’s too much.”

Ochako smiled against his mouth, breathless enough for him to feel it more than see it. “I will.”

“Don’t make me guess, Cheeks.”

Her fingers tightened in his hair, and the kiss she gave him cut the warning off before it could become another place for him to hide. “I won’t.”

The promise reached him through the heat.

He let his arm settle more firmly around her, still careful, still angled away from anything that could cut, and Ochako came with him instead of away. Her body pressed closer until the space he had been trying to protect between them collapsed into warmth, breath, ruined silk, and the soft, hungry sound she made when his mouth moved harder over hers.

Katsuki felt that sound everywhere.

It moved through the roots of his teeth and down the altered pull of his spine, settling deep in the places where Grendel still burned beneath his skin like a fever trying to become instinct. His claws flexed away from her back before he could think about it, turning inward toward the cot frame because the need to hold her came too fast, too hard, too close to the part of himself he did not trust. Metal complained beneath his other hand. The bolted steel gave a faint, ugly bend, and Ochako’s mouth opened against his as if she heard the choice in the damage.

He had spent the whole night trying to make himself harmless, but harmless had never been the truth of him, even before the compound. Katsuki had always been heat, teeth, pressure, force dragged into discipline by will and practice and the brutal necessity of caring where the blast landed. With Ochako under his arm, flushed and breathless and still trusting him with the dangerous parts visible, the old kind of restraint shifted into something more intimate than control.

He was not making himself harmless. He was making himself careful, and the difference left him shaking.

This time, when that sound broke against his mouth, Katsuki let himself feel what it meant before fear could turn it into retreat. Her fingers tightened in his hair. Her knee pressed more firmly against his thigh. Her waist shifted under his arm, closer by choice, and the realization moved through him with enough force to pull a rough breath out of his chest.

She wanted him there.

The compound had not invented the way she leaned into him. It had not put that sound in her throat or made her hands hold him closer. That was Ochako, flushed and breathless under the warm lamp, kissing him like she had run out of patience for all the years they had spent standing too close and calling it teamwork.

Katsuki’s restraint loosened into something slower and more deliberate.

He drew her in with his wrist still angled away from her skin, mouth moving from hers to the corner of her jaw, then lower, where her pulse beat fast beneath the salt-warm skin of her throat. Ochako tipped her head back, and the ruined silk whispered beneath his arm as her body followed the movement. His teeth stayed covered at first. His claws stayed clear. Everything else in him pressed closer, starved for the heat of her, the weight of her, the proof of her alive beneath his mouth.

The safe house had smelled like antiseptic and old concrete when they entered. Now it smelled like rain in her hair, smoke in the torn fabric of his suit, saline on her fingers, blood drying at the edge of her cheek, and the clean, warm scent of her skin beneath it all. Grendel sharpened every layer until breathing felt dangerous. Every inhale brought her closer. Every exhale left his mouth hot against her throat.

He kissed her once, then again, dragging each touch out until her fingers tightened in his hair.

“Katsuki,” she breathed.

The sound nearly ruined him.

His mouth opened against her skin before he could think better of it. He tasted salt, smoke, the faint sweetness that lived underneath the night’s blood and antiseptic, and the first slow pass of his tongue over her pulse made her breath break in a way he felt against his chest. His claws sank deeper into the cot frame, metal groaning under his grip, because every instinct in his body wanted to hold her harder than he trusted himself to.

Ochako did not pull away.

Her hand slid down from his hair to his shoulder, fingers pressing into torn fabric as if she could feel the fight moving through him. When his mouth opened again, careful teeth grazing the side of her neck without closing, her body arched beneath his arm and the sound she made was soft enough to make him dizzy.

He froze.

Her fingers tightened at the back of his neck. “Don’t stop because of me.”

His breath dragged hot across the damp mark his mouth had left. “I could hurt you.”

“You’re listening to me.” Her voice trembled, but it held. “That’s why you won’t.”

The words went through him deeper than praise.

Katsuki lowered his mouth again, slower this time, and let his teeth catch carefully at the soft skin beneath her jaw. A scrape, then a gentle bite, then the soothing drag of his tongue over the same place when she shivered. The love bite bloomed faintly beneath his mouth, pink darkening under the warm lamp, and the sight of it pulled a rough sound from his chest before he could swallow it back.

Ochako heard.

Her hand found his injured one where it was braced near her hip, fingers threading carefully between his above the bandages and away from the claws. The contact stopped him more cleanly than any order could have. He looked down at their joined hands, at her smaller fingers curled around the part of him that still felt almost human, at the trust in the way she held on while his body shook above hers.

“You can hold me there,” she whispered.

His eyes lifted to hers.

Ochako’s cheeks were flushed, her lips parted, her throat marked by his mouth and still offered to him because she had chosen it. The sight hit him so hard that his arm tightened around her waist by instinct. He caught himself almost immediately, muscles locking before the pressure could become too much.

“Too hard?” he asked, voice rough.

She shook her head, then seemed to understand he needed more than that. Her thumb pressed into his palm. “No. I’ll tell you.”

He believed her because she was looking straight at him when she said it.

Katsuki kissed her again, and this time the kiss came with less fear and more hunger. His mouth moved over hers, then back to her throat, learning the places that made her fingers tighten around his hand. A slow lick beneath her jaw. A careful nip near the fading line of her pulse. The press of his mouth over the mark he had already left, possessive enough to make his body burn and gentle enough that she sighed instead of flinched.

The sound changed something in him.

Careful meant keeping his claws where both of them could see them. Careful meant holding her hand while his mouth moved down her neck. Careful meant listening to the shift of her breathing, the tension in her fingers, the way her body curved toward him when she wanted more and steadied when she needed him to slow. It meant letting the want have shape without letting it have teeth.

Ochako brought his hand higher and pressed it into the cot beside her head, her fingers still laced through his.

“Here,” she said.

His throat worked.

With his hand pinned safely in hers, he could lower more of his weight without worrying about where the claws would go. He moved slowly, giving her every chance to adjust, and felt her body receive him by degrees: the press of her thigh against his hip, the warmth of her beneath the ruined silk, the way her free hand slid over his shoulder and pulled him down until his mouth found hers again.

The cot frame complained under them.

When she pulled him down with her, he went carefully. One clawed hand stayed locked in hers near the pillow, where both of them could see it. His other arm braced beside her waist, shaking with the effort of keeping his strength measured. Ochako’s injured foot stayed tucked safely away, and the trust in the way she made room for him hit harder than anything Grendel had done to his body.

Every inch of him wanted to disappear into the warmth of her.

He made himself wait until she pulled his mouth to hers and breathed her answer against his lips.

The quiet, breathless yes went through him like fire finding air.

After that, the room gave way to the things Katsuki could trust.

Her hand stayed locked in his near the pillow. Her mouth moved against his whenever the heat started to climb too fast. Her voice stayed close enough to drag him back whenever the fever pressed at the edges of his control. The slow, steady pressure of her body beneath him belonged to her choice, to the way she kept looking at him, to the way she held on until he could not mistake her wanting for anything the serum had made.

He kept one hand pinned safely in hers. The other stayed braced beside her waist, claws turned into the cot frame, metal groaning under the force he refused to put into her. Every part of him shook with the effort. His shoulders, his arms, the deep muscles along his spine where Grendel still moved like heat trapped under bone. Ochako felt it. Of course she felt it. Her thumb stroked once over the back of his hand, careful where the altered skin darkened near the claws, and the small touch went through him harder than any command could have.

“Katsuki,” she whispered.

He went still above her.

Ochako’s breath caught beneath him, her lips parted and damp from his mouth, her cheeks flushed under the warm wall light. The torn white silk had slipped higher along her thigh, ruined from the mission, soft against the hard line of his hip, and Katsuki had to close his eyes for half a second because the sight of her like that, alive and wanting and still looking at him as if she trusted the hands he barely trusted himself to own, nearly took the last of his control apart.

“Still here?” she asked.

His answer dragged over her throat. “Yeah.”

“Good.” Her fingers tightened around his. “Then don’t stop like you’re afraid I’ll break.”

A rough sound left him before he could bury it.

“Cheeks.”

“I mean it.” Her free hand slid from the back of his neck into his hair, nails scraping softly enough to make his breath shudder. “I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

He lifted his head enough to look at her.

Her gaze did not waver. It should have steadied him. It did, in the worst possible way, because it made the wanting sharper. Cleaner. His. The compound could make his skin burn and his senses sharpen until every breath from her felt like a hand around his throat, but it had not put that heat in her eyes. It had not made her lift her hips by that small, devastating fraction, chasing the place where his body had gone still against hers.

Katsuki kissed her before the sound in his chest could become something too raw to hear.

When he moved, he did it slowly.

The first push of his hips made her hand clamp around his, and he stopped before the motion could turn greedy. Her body answered under him, a soft arch, a breath that broke against his mouth, her thigh pressing higher along his hip to keep him close instead of letting him retreat. The pause had been his fear, and he felt the difference in the way she held him, in the pull of her fingers through his hair, in the whispered little sound she made when he followed that invitation and moved again.

Deeper, and still careful.

Slow enough that restraint shook through him, hot and brutal, every inch of control turning the pleasure sharper instead of softer. Ochako’s mouth opened under his, and the sound she gave him went straight down his spine. He swallowed it with a kiss, then another, teeth kept carefully away from her lower lip even when the urge to bite came up bright and hungry.

The compound made every sensation too much.

Her warmth around him. Her pulse jumping beneath the marks his mouth had left at her throat. The damp slide of her breath against his cheek. Her nails at his neck. The soft pressure of her knee against his side, asking for more without making him guess. He could hear the shift in her breathing before she could hide it, could feel the exact moment pleasure loosened the tension she had been carrying since the auction hall, and the knowledge hit him with a fierce, dizzying pride.

He was not hurting her.

He was making her feel good.

The realization went through him like fire finding air.

His mouth dropped to her neck, and the sound she made when he kissed the mark beneath her jaw rushed through him. He soothed the tender place with his tongue, then grazed it carefully with his teeth, light enough to make her breath catch and not flinch. Ochako’s back arched beneath him, her hand locked tight in his, her voice breaking close to his ear.

“Mmh. Katsuki.”

He slowed immediately.

Her fingers tightened in warning. “No, I mean…” Her breath shook, and the blush on her cheeks deepened as if she could feel him hearing every part of her. “Stay there.”

The words hit him low and hot.

Katsuki pressed his mouth to her throat and held himself deep, every muscle in his body locked around the need to move. Ochako shifted beneath him, small and wanting, her body speaking before either of them could find words for it. He followed the rhythm she gave him instead of taking one for himself.

Every thrust stayed measured through the grip of her hand in his. Every time heat climbed too fast, he put his mouth back on her skin and let touch become the thing that steadied him. Kiss, breath, careful teeth, the slow bloom of another mark hidden low enough that only they would know unless she chose otherwise. Her body rose beneath his in small, pleading increments, and every answer he gave her had to pass through the discipline of his hands first.

When his strength surged, he shoved it into the cot instead of her.

The frame bent beneath his braced arm. Metal complained in a long, ugly scrape, and Katsuki forced his fingers open around hers the second he felt his grip tighten.

“Too much?”

Ochako shook her head, breathless and flushed, and brought their joined hands closer to her cheek. Her mouth brushed his knuckles where the skin was still safe. “You’re okay.”

The tenderness nearly broke him worse than the heat.

Katsuki kissed her harder, rough enough to make her gasp, then gentled the next breath because he could. Because she had trusted him to. Because every careful place he held back made the places he gave in feel hotter, sharper, more devastating.

He moved again, still slow, still deep, and Ochako met him with a broken little sound that had his claws sinking into metal and his mouth finding hers before the sound could leave the room without him tasting it.

The rhythm changed by degrees, built from the things she gave him and the things he could keep safe. Her thigh tightened at his hip. Her fingers twisted in his hair. Her body lifted to meet him with a helpless little shift that made his breath turn ragged against her mouth. Katsuki followed her there, not faster than he could control, but deeper, closer, with the kind of pressure that made her hand clamp around his and her lips part around the next shaky pull of his name.

The sound slid under his skin.

Grendel stirred with it, hungry for anything that sounded like surrender, but Katsuki knew the difference. He knew the sound of someone being taken apart by fear and the sound of Ochako giving herself room to feel good. He knew it because he had spent years learning every shift in her voice, every hidden catch in her breathing, every stubborn little sign that meant she was hurt, angry, tired, determined, or trying to pretend she did not need help.

This was none of those.

This was her under him, warm and wet and alive, holding his dangerous hand like it belonged to her as much as the safe one did.

Katsuki’s mouth dragged down her throat again. The taste of her filled his head until the room blurred around the edges, salt and heat and the faint sweetness of her skin under the smoke. His tongue soothed the newest mark his teeth had left, and Ochako’s body tightened around him so sweetly that his arm shook beside her waist.

“Fuck,” he breathed, the word half-buried against her skin.

Her answer came as a small, breathless laugh that broke into a moan when he moved again.

The sound turned his bones liquid.

He lifted his head because he needed to see her face before the heat took too much of his focus. Ochako looked wrecked under him in the softest, most devastating way, cheeks flushed, eyes wet and dark, mouth swollen from his kisses. Her hair had spread across the pillow and the edge of her hoodie, brown waves caught in the warm lamplight, and the sight of her like that made something possessive move through him so hard his claws dug deeper into the cot.

The frame gave another metallic groan.

Ochako’s eyes flicked toward the sound and then back to his face. Her lips parted. The look she gave him did not ask him to be smaller.

It asked him to stay.

Katsuki kissed her before the feeling could split him open. His hips moved with more certainty now, every thrust still measured but no longer hesitant. The wet heat of her body took him in with a softness that made the carefulness almost unbearable, and every time she tightened around him, pleasure struck up his spine hard enough to make sparks crawl under his skin. He kept the blast locked down. Kept his claws buried in steel. Kept his mouth on her, because the taste of her and the sound of her and the way she held him gave the force somewhere else to go.

Her free hand slid from his hair to his shoulder, then down the torn front of his suit until her palm found the overheated skin above his heart.

His whole body jolted.

Ochako felt it and kept her hand there, fingers spread over him while he moved inside her, while his pulse battered against her palm as if some part of him was trying to climb into her touch. The molten seams beneath his skin glowed faintly against her hand, gold fading in and out with every breath. She watched it for a second, and then she looked back at his face with so much naked want that Katsuki nearly lost the rhythm entirely.

“Look at me,” he rasped.

Her eyes lifted to his.

The room narrowed to that.

No Commission. No serum. No handler device upstairs sealed in a case. No rifles waiting beyond the door. Just Ochako under him, still holding his hand, still taking every careful inch of him, still looking at him as if the monstered shape of his body had not made him less Katsuki to her.

The pleasure in her face built slowly, then all at once. He felt it before it broke, in the tightening of her fingers around his, in the way her breath thinned, in the trembling pressure of her thigh against his hip. Katsuki held himself there with his mouth close to hers, his forehead nearly touching hers, his body moving deep and steady while every part of him strained to keep from rushing the moment.

He wanted to see it.

He wanted to feel every second of what she gave him when she stopped holding herself together.

Ochako’s lips parted around his name, but the sound fractured before it became a full word. Her body went tight beneath his, then soft in a wave that dragged through her from the inside out. Katsuki felt it around him, felt it in the helpless clutch of her hand, felt it in the shiver that moved under the arm he kept braced so carefully beside her waist.

He kissed her through it.

Her mouth, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, anywhere he could put the violence of his own restraint down gently. His claws twisted deeper into the cot frame. The metal screamed. He did not care. He only cared that the force went there and not into her, that Ochako shook beneath him because of pleasure and not pain, that when her eyes opened again, heavy and dazed and still fixed on him, she did not look afraid.

She looked satisfied.

The pride that hit him was filthy and tender at the same time.

“Yeah?” he breathed against her mouth.

Ochako’s laugh came out wrecked. “You’re impossible.”

“You’re the one who told me not to stop.”

Her fingers tightened in his hair, and she pulled him down until the next kiss stole the edge from his mouth. It was messy now, less careful around the feeling and still careful around the teeth, her lips moving against his with an urgency that told him she felt the shift in him. His control had thinned. His body was starting to chase what hers had given him, pulled by the clench of her around him, the heat, the slick slide of their bodies beneath ruined silk and torn black fabric.

The fever rose with it, but this heat had a shape he understood.

It moved through her hands in his hair, her mouth near his ear, her thigh holding him close, the steady pressure of her body asking him not to run from what they had become together. It lived in the place where she kept his clawed hand against the pillow, fingers still locked with his, refusing to let him turn the danger into distance.

He moved harder, still measured, still hers.

The cot rocked beneath them, bolts straining, metal bending around his claws. Ochako’s mouth brushed his ear on a broken sound, and Katsuki’s vision went white at the edges. He buried his face against her throat because looking at her would undo him too fast. Her pulse beat beneath his lips, frantic and alive, and he opened his mouth over it with a carefulness that felt almost cruel.

She arched into him.

That was what finished the last of him.

The trust. The warmth. The way she held him closer while his whole body shook with the effort of being gentle.

Pleasure gathered low and brutal, an explosion forced inward until his muscles locked and his breath tore against her skin. He gave the last of his strength to the cot frame. Metal warped beneath his claws as he came, harsh and blinding, dragged out of him by her body and her trust and the impossible gentleness of her hand still holding his. He kept his teeth away from her throat even when every instinct wanted to close there, kept his claws buried deep in ruined steel, kept his weight braced so the force of it would not crush her.

Ochako held him through every second.

Her fingers moved through his hair, slow and steady, while the worst of the tremor passed. Her mouth pressed once against his temple, then his cheek, then the corner of his jaw where the bone still sat wrong beneath fever-hot skin. Each kiss found him through the aftershock, bringing him back by inches.

The room returned by degrees.

The hum of ventilation. The rain in the pipes. The faint hiss of cooling metal where his claws had bitten too deep. Ochako’s heartbeat beneath his cheek, fast and steady and alive.

Katsuki lifted his head with effort.

Her face was flushed, damp at the temples, eyes half-lidded and too soft for him to defend against. A mark bloomed low on her throat where his mouth had been careful and still left proof. He stared at it, stomach pulling tight with the sudden fear that came after wanting, after heat, after the kind of intimacy that left no room for pretending.

Ochako noticed before he could speak.

Her fingers touched his cheek, and the look she gave him held every answer he was too wrecked to ask for.

“Katsuki, why do you look like you did something wrong,” she whispered.

His throat worked around the rough edge of his breathing, deepening his frown.

 “I promise you didn’t,” her thumb moved along his cheek, soft and certain.

Katsuki closed his eyes for one breath and let his forehead lower to hers. The monster under his skin had not vanished. The claws were still there. The heat still moved in faint, restless pulses beneath his skin. The room still held bent metal, bloodied gauze, torn silk, and every ugly reminder of what had been done to him.

But Ochako’s hand was still in his.

Her thumb moved slowly over the safe part of his skin, and for the first time since the needle entered his body, Katsuki let himself believe the night had not taken him from her.

Much later, when the fever loosened enough for the counteragent team to stop asking for readings every five minutes, the room settled into a quiet aftermath.

The shielded line clicked off. The wall lamp stayed low. Rain moved through the pipes above them, soft and steady, while Ochako sat wrapped in the blanket with her shoulder pressed near his and her fingers tracing idle, careful paths along his wrist where the skin remained safe to touch. She had cleaned his hand again after. He had cleaned the blood from her cheek with water warmed between his palms until it stopped steaming. Neither of them spoke much while they did it. They did not need to. Every touch answered the night in a language quieter than reassurance.

Katsuki checked her foot once the worst of his tremors passed.

Ochako tried to tell him it could wait, and he gave her one look that killed the argument before it reached her mouth. He set her heel on his thigh, kept his claws angled away from her ankle, and cleaned the cut with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for live explosives. The antiseptic made her flinch. His hand tightened around her calf before he could stop it.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

His eyes lifted.

The word hit wrong. After everything, after the rifles and the blood and the way she had stood in front of him when his body was one bad second from becoming someone else’s weapon, she was apologizing for pain he had not been able to prevent.

“Don’t,” he said.

Ochako’s lips parted, then closed again.

He finished wrapping her foot in silence, each loop of gauze neat enough to satisfy the medic upstairs and gentle enough to keep his own anger from becoming pressure against her skin. When he was done, he kept her foot on his thigh longer than he needed to, thumb resting near the bandage because the pulse there told him she was warm, alive, still with him.

Only when her breathing began to even out did Katsuki lower himself from the cot.

Ochako’s eyes opened immediately. “Where are you going?”

“Moving to the floor.”

Her sleep-heavy gaze sharpened. “What? No, stay here with me.”

“The cot’s bent anyway.”

“So are you.”

His mouth twitched despite the ache in his jaw. “Funny.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

He looked at her then, blanket gathered around her shoulders, hair loose and tangled against her cheek, exhaustion making her eyes too soft for him to stand. The idea of sleeping beside her with claws still hooked from his hands made something cold move through the remnants of the fever.

“I’m not risking it.”

Ochako reached for him before he could lower himself fully onto the floor, and Katsuki caught her with careful fingers, already watching the angle of her injured foot.

“Don’t even think about putting weight on that.”

She furrowed her brows. “Then stop making me chase you.”

“I’m not making you do anything.”

Her mouth tightened around the argument waiting there, but it did not come out. She looked at his hand around her wrist instead, at the claws angled away from her skin, at the tremor still moving through his forearm from the effort of being careful when every part of him had been remade for force. Whatever she saw in his face softened the fight in hers.

“I don’t want you on the floor alone,” she said.

She gathered the blanket around her shoulders and eased herself down before he could rethink anything. Katsuki stayed close enough to catch her if her balance slipped, one hand hovering near her waist, claws turned back toward his own palm. She kept her injured foot lifted, movements slow and deliberate because she knew he was watching every inch.

By the time she settled beside him on the concrete, the argument had already ended without either of them admitting he had lost.

Ochako tucked herself against his uninjured side, careful at first, testing the space between them the way she had tested his hands earlier. Katsuki lay still for one breath, then another, feeling the warmth of her through the blanket, the slight tremor left in her body, the trust in the way she let her cheek rest near his shoulder.

He huffed, low and rough, and reached for her hoodie with his free hand. The fabric bunched beneath his head, carrying her scent through antiseptic and smoke. His other arm stayed suspended for a second, caught between caution and the need to keep her there.

Ochako noticed because she always did. Her fingers found his wrist above the claws, guiding his arm with a sleepy confidence that made his throat tighten.

“Here,” she murmured. “This part is safe.”

Katsuki let her settle his forearm over her waist.

No claws near her back, no pressure she could not escape, his elbow angled so he could pull away if the fever surged. When she relaxed into him instead of stiffening, something in his chest gave so quietly he almost missed it.

He adjusted the blanket over her shoulder with the side of his hand. “If you wake up sore, that’s your fault.”

“Mm.” Her cheek pressed closer to him. “Worth it.”

“Idiot.”

But he said it into her hair, low enough that it came out closer to affection than insult.

The room quieted around them. Rain moved through the pipes. The wall lamp softened the concrete, the bent cot, the scattered medical supplies, the two of them on the floor because Ochako had decided she belonged beside him and Katsuki had not found a single part of himself strong enough to refuse her.

He stayed awake longer than she did, listening to her breathing settle against him, keeping his arm careful around her waist and his claws turned away from anything soft. Every time she shifted, his hold adjusted before he thought about it. Every time her injured foot moved near the blanket, he checked it. Every time the compound stirred faintly under his skin, he counted her breaths until the heat passed.

By the time the safe house lights began their slow morning cycle, Ochako was still curled against him, his arm still resting carefully around her, her hand wrapped around his wrist as if even in sleep she had refused to let him take back the distance.

Safe house three had no windows, only a timed lighting system that brightened by slow degrees to keep injured heroes from losing their sense of the outside world. The lower room returned around Katsuki in pieces: the bent cot, the gray blanket half-slipped over Ochako’s shoulder, the medical wrappers gathered on the side table, the cold pack melted near his ribs, her hoodie bunched beneath his cheek.

Ventilation hummed overhead. Somewhere deep in the old walls, rainwater moved through the pipes with a soft, restless sound.

Katsuki came awake slowly, drawn up through pain, warmth, and the careful weight of Ochako tucked against his side.

For a few breaths, he stayed inside the quiet without testing it. The safe house lights had brightened to a soft gray, enough to bring back the bent cot, the scattered medical wrappers, the melted cold pack near his shoulder, the blanket half-pulled over both of them. His body ached in layers, each one waiting its turn to be noticed. His shoulders felt wrong where Grendel had forced them wider. The thin gold traces beneath his skin throbbed with the memory of heat. His claws had shortened during the night, but they had not vanished, the black tips curved carefully away from where Ochako had fallen asleep against him.

His arm was still around her waist.

That was the first thing he checked. Not because he wanted to move away, but because he needed to know where the claws were before he let himself feel anything else. They were still turned safely toward his own palm, nowhere near her back, and Ochako’s hand was still wrapped around his like she had spent the night making sure he stayed with her.

Sleep had loosened her hold without taking it away. Her thumb rested near his pulse, her cheek warm near his shoulder, her hair loose across the blanket and partly against his chest. The blanket had slipped during the night, but his arm had kept its careful shape around her, loose enough not to trap, close enough that she had not drifted away.

Katsuki turned his head just enough to see the bandage on her foot still clean where she had kept it lifted all night, even while insisting on joining him on the floor. He checked the edge of the gauze, the color of her toes, the way her ankle rested safely away from the concrete.

The ache in his chest had nothing to do with Grendel.

He shifted only enough to make sure the claws near his other hand were still angled clear of her.

“Don’t even think of sneaking off,” Ochako mumbled, her voice rough with sleep.

Katsuki looked down at her, at the stubborn curl of her fingers entwined with his, at the way she had somehow kept hold of him even after exhaustion dragged her under. The corner of his mouth moved before he could stop it.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, low enough that it barely scraped past the quiet.

Her eyes opened into a sleepy squint against his shoulder, and he felt her attention sharpen even before she lifted her head.

He looked away first because the softness in her face was already getting under his skin.

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to. You’ve got a death grip for someone pretending to be asleep.”

Ochako’s expression changed as sleep thinned from her face. She lifted her head slowly, her hair sliding across his shoulder, and looked at him with a quietness that made the room feel too honest for jokes.

That was the problem with morning. It made every honest thing look too clear. There was no smoke to hide inside, no gunfire, no fever burning hot enough to excuse what his mouth let slip. Only Ochako looking down at him with messy hair, bruised skin, and her hand still wrapped around his like she had decided sometime in the night that letting go wasn’t an option.

She pushed herself up on one elbow, and his hand twitched with the loss of heat. He wanted to brush the hair out of her face. Wanted to check the bruise on her shoulder.

Wanted to drag the blanket higher and make the room warmer and bar the door against every person upstairs until she slept for another twelve hours.

Her smile warmed, tired and helpless, and the sight of it eased something in him that the counteragent had not touched.

The blanket slipped between them as she shifted closer. Her knee brushed his thigh. The touch was light, careful, but it pulled him back into his body in a way that did not hurt. When she reached for his changed hand, she moved slowly enough for him to see every inch of the path. He uncurled his fingers before she had to ask.

Her touch settled over the bandage.

The claws looked less vicious, dark and curved near her careful fingers. Katsuki watched her trace the edge of the dressing without touching the sharp tips, and the quiet trust in the gesture made it harder to breathe than the pain did.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Everywhere hurts.” His fingers shifted under hers, slow enough not to catch. “Hand’s just being the biggest bastard about it.”

Ochako’s mouth softened before she could hide it.

“Only you would insult the injury.”

A rough breath left him, close enough to a laugh that her mouth softened with satisfaction. Ochako stayed quiet for long enough that the hum of the ventilation returned around them.

Her hand remained over his, thumb moving slowly along the edge of the bandage, but her gaze had shifted to the marks near his jaw and then lower, where the blanket hid most of what the night had made impossible to deny.

“Umm Katsuki.”

When she spoke, her voice was softer than before.

Katsuki’s eyes lifted to hers. “Mh?”

“Do you… umm… remember?”

The question should have been simple. His body remembered too much. Her mouth. Her hands. The careful shape of her trust beneath him. The way she had said his name when he needed to slow down, when she wanted him closer, when the fever tried to climb too high and her voice dragged him back into himself.

He remembered the heat and the restraint, the terrifying gentleness of being wanted while he was still half-afraid of his own hands.

Heat climbed his neck before he could do a damn thing about it.

It had nothing to do with Grendel this time, which made it worse. The fever had faded enough for him to know the difference between the compound’s burn and the humiliating warmth spreading under his skin because Ochako was looking at him like that, soft from sleep and still brave enough to ask about the places where the night had left them both bare.

His throat worked. “Yeah.”

Ochako’s fingers tightened around his. “All of it?”

The answer should have been easy. His body remembered too much for it to be anything else. Her mouth at his, her hand locked around his, the way she had said his name when he needed to slow down and when she wanted him closer. The memory moved through him in a hot, private rush that made his eyes cut briefly toward the blanket before he forced them back to hers.

“All of it,” he said, rougher than he meant.

Color warmed her cheeks too, but she did not pull away from the question she had asked. “I needed to know.”

His jaw shifted, awkwardness coming out rough because softness still had nowhere clean to go in his mouth. “You think I could forget you?”

The question sounded almost angry. It wasn’t, which somehow made it worse.

“I… Well… I didn’t know what the compound might do when the fever broke.” Her thumb moved once over his knuckles, careful of the darker skin near the claws.

“I… didn’t want to be the only one carrying it clearly.”

The words went into him quietly and did damage there.

Katsuki had spent the night listening for every shift in her breathing, every change in her pulse, every little sound that meant pain had gotten through before she could hide it. He had counted her breaths on the floor while pretending it was only because of Grendel. He had kept his claws angled away from her in his sleep, or tried to, because some part of him had been terrified of waking up to find that the safest thing he could do for her was leave.

And she had been lying beside him afraid of being alone with the memory.

His hand shifted beneath hers, careful of the claws, until he could catch the edge of her fingers without cutting. It was not enough to be a proper hold. It was enough to make her look at him.

“You’re not carrying it alone,” he said.

The words came out rough, almost like he was picking a fight with the idea itself. Ochako breathed in slowly beside him, and he felt the change move through her where she leaned against his shoulder. The relief did not erase the worry, but it loosened something in her posture. A small unguarded shift. A place where she let him carry some of the weight because he had finally put his hands out for it.

“I don’t blame the compound,” she said.

Katsuki’s jaw shifted.

The answer should have been simple. He wanted to snap that she should blame it, because blaming Grendel would be easier than looking at the marks on her throat and remembering the sound she made when his mouth found them. Easier than feeling her knee warm against his under the blanket. Easier than knowing the fever had stripped him raw, but it had not invented the part of him that wanted to keep her close enough to count every breath.

His hand flexed beneath hers, and the claws stopped just short of curling into his palm.

“Oi. Don’t do that,” he said.

Ochako blinked. “Do what?”

“Make it like the compound did one thing and we did another, and everything fits in a report if you use the right damn words.” His voice came out rougher than he meant.

Her thumb stilled near the edge of his bandage.

Katsuki looked at their hands because, honestly, it was all he could manage. Her hand was still on him, careful and steady even while her cheeks carried the heat of the conversation. She had asked him if he remembered, had admitted she did not want to carry the night alone, and now she was trying to hand him mercy.

It made him feel clumsy, too big for every soft thing she kept handing him, and worst of all, vulnerable.

“I know Grendel didn’t make me want you,” he said. “Tch. Damn it. That’s the problem.”

He heard the gasp leave her lips and hated how badly he wanted to look up. He did anyway.

“It made it harder to hide,” he continued, quieter now, each word dragged out like it had teeth. “Made everything too loud. Your voice, your skin, the way you looked at me.”

His mouth pulled into something almost like a scowl because the rest came worse.

“But the wanting part was mine before that needle ever hit me.”

Ochako’s fingers tightened around his. “Katsuki—”

“So don’t blame it,” he said, awkwardness coming out as heat under his skin and a low edge in his voice. “But don’t act like nothing changed either.”

Her eyes softened, but she didn’t rush to rescue him from the mess he had made of the honesty. “Something changed before last night.”

For once, Katsuki had nothing ready.

Air caught in his chest before he could turn it into a scoff, a curse, anything sharp enough to hide behind. He should have expected her to say it straight. That was the stupid part. Ochako had never been as delicate as people assumed. She could be gentle, sure, but when something mattered she went right for the center of it with both hands open, like honesty was less frightening than wasting one more second pretending.

Still, hearing it from her mouth did something to him.

His first instinct was denial, not because she was wrong, but because admitting she was right meant admitting how long he had been standing too close to the edge and calling it discipline. He had buried it under patrol routes, under training corrections, under growled insults and the kind of distance that looked believable only if nobody paid attention to where his eyes went every time she entered a room.

Ochako had paid attention.

Of course she had.

Her cheeks were warm now, her fingers still wrapped around his changed hand as if the claws did not make the confession any harder to hold. Katsuki looked at her blush, at the stubborn bravery in her face, and bit down on the pride trying to claw its way up his throat. For once, he let the softer thing live long enough to speak.

“You weren’t reading it wrong,” he said.

Ochako’s breath softened.

His mouth twisted because the rest dragged through him with a kind of exposed, aching surrender he did not know how to make graceful. “I just made it a pain in the ass.”

Ochako’s eyes moved over his face, and whatever she found there made her hand tighten around his. Katsuki braced for teasing because teasing would have been easier.

He could handle teasing. He could grumble, look away, call her a pain in the ass, and let the moment pass without bleeding too much into it.

Except the banter or teasing never came.

Her thumb moved over his knuckles with a care that made his throat tighten.

“You’ve never been easy to misunderstand, Katsuki. You act like you are, but you’re not. You glare at the whole world like you’re deciding whether it’s worth the effort, and then you look at me like you’re already planning what to destroy if anything touches me wrong.”

His pulse kicked beneath her fingers.

She felt it. Her eyes warmed, but she kept going before he could hide behind the sound in his throat.

“I didn’t know what to do with that,” she admitted. “I didn’t really know what to do with how much I wanted it.”

The room went quiet around them, all concrete and rainwater and the low mechanical hum of the safe house keeping them hidden beneath the city.

Katsuki’s claws curled carefully against his own palm. “And now?”

Her gaze dropped to his mouth, then returned to his eyes with a shy little warmth that made his pulse trip under her fingers.

“Now I think I’d like you to keep looking at me like that.”

Katsuki went still.

Then his mouth twitched, small and helpless enough that he hated it on principle.

“Greedy.”

Ochako’s cheeks warmed. “For asking?”

“For acting like I haven’t been doing it for years.”

The admission landed between them before he could shove it back down. Ochako’s lips parted, and Katsuki felt the silence change shape around them, softening into something that looked too much like a beginning.

He reached for her slowly, giving her time to see the movement. His knuckles brushed the hair back from her cheek, careful of the claws, and when she leaned into the touch his chest tightened so hard it almost hurt.

“Tch. Don’t look so surprised,” he muttered.

Heat climbed up the back of his neck and burned straight into his ears, which made him scowl harder because his body apparently had a death wish and no loyalty. Ochako noticed. Of course she noticed. Her eyes flicked to the edge of his ear, then back to his face, and the softness there shifted into something careful.

For half a second, he could see the thought cross her face.

The serum.

Maybe Grendel had made him too open, too hungry, too willing to say things he would have buried under his own teeth on any other morning. Maybe the fever had dragged his want to the surface and made it look like courage. Katsuki saw the doubt before she could hide it, and something in him pushed forward, rough and immediate, because no damn vial was getting credit for this.

“Don’t,” he said.

Ochako stilled. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t have to.” His thumb brushed carefully along her cheek, claws angled back so only the warmer side of his hand touched her. “Don’t pin this on the damn serum.”

Her breath caught, and for once she did not cover it quickly enough. The warmth in her cheeks deepened under the soft gray light, spreading past the faint marks his mouth had left at her throat, and her fingers tightened around his wrist as if the words had moved through her body before she knew what to do with them.

“Katsuki,” she whispered.

His jaw shifted, rough with the kind of honesty he usually buried before it reached his mouth. “Been looking at you too damn long to let some vial take credit for it.”

Ochako’s eyes searched his face. The sleepy softness in them cracked open into something brighter and more fragile, and her hand slid from his wrist to the side of his jaw, careful of the changed shape, careful of him. Her thumb brushed once near the corner of his mouth, and the touch nearly took the rest of the words from him.

He lowered his mouth to her temple before she could answer, careful with the sharpness of his teeth, and stayed there for one slow breath because that was easier than letting her see how badly he meant it.

Grendel had made everything louder, but it had not made her precious to him.

That damage was all his.

Outside the reinforced door, footsteps approached and stopped before Katsuki could decide whether the next kiss belonged at her mouth or the pulse still fluttering beneath the marks on her throat.

Shinsou knocked twice, each tap deliberately spaced.

“Medical check,” he called. “Door stays closed until one of you answers.”

Katsuki did not move away from her immediately.

That was the part Ochako seemed to notice. Her hand remained at his cheek, fingers light along the altered edge of his jaw, and Katsuki stayed there with his mouth near her temple while the world waited on the other side of the door.

“Screw off, Eyebags,” he called, voice rough enough to scrape.

“Your hostility remains encouraging,” Shinsou said.

Tokoyami’s voice carried from farther down the hall, solemn enough to make the interruption worse. “The counteragent team has requested confirmation that the situation remains… stable.”

Ochako’s shoulders shook against Katsuki’s arm as she tried to smother her laugh. She failed after the second breath, and the sound slipped out warm and helpless into the ruined room.

Katsuki looked down at her.

The laugh brought life back into her face enough to make him see the exact shape of what he had almost lost and the impossible fact that she was still here anyway, tucked against his side with her hand on his jaw and her knee warm against his beneath the blanket. Her hair brushed his shoulder when she breathed. The marks at her throat sat half-hidden by the blanket.

Carefully, with the claws turned away, he caught her chin between the side of his knuckle and the heel of his thumb. Ochako’s laughter softened into a breath when he tilted her face up.

“Stable,” he muttered, and kissed the corner of her mouth.

Ochako’s lashes lowered for half a breath before she looked at him again, dazed enough that the sight went straight under his ribs. “When are you ever stable?”

His mouth twitched against hers before he could stop it. “Don’t start acting as if you don’t like me defective.”

Her eyes widened, then warmed. “Defective?”

“Loud, mean, impossible to sedate.” His thumb shifted beneath her chin, claws turned carefully away from her skin. “Entirely your type.”

He kissed her cheek next, then the soft place beside her eye, then the bridge of her nose because she scrunched it when he got too close and he had apparently lost every scrap of sense he had ever claimed to own. Ochako made a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and his name, and he felt it go straight through him.

Outside, Shinsou sighed. “I’m going to assume the silence means no one’s dead.”

Katsuki did not lift his mouth from Ochako’s skin. “Good. Keep assuming from the hallway.”

She tried to hide her face against his shoulder, but Katsuki caught her hand before she made it there. His mouth found her palm, then the inside of her wrist, careful of his teeth, lingering over the pulse there because it was still beating and because he could feel her blush climb under his lips.

“Katsuki,” she whispered, half warning and half something that made his grip tighten by a fraction before he remembered himself and eased it.

“What?” His mouth brushed her palm again. “I’m keeping focused.”

Ochako’s smile spread against every bruise and tired line on her face, soft enough to undo him and bright enough to make the room feel less underground. Katsuki stared at it for one dangerous second, then pressed one last kiss to the center of her palm before he let her hand lower.

The door remained closed. The medic waited. Shinsou waited. Tokoyami waited with whatever grim patience he dragged around like a cloak. The missing vial was still out there, and the Commission report upstairs would become a fight the second Katsuki had enough strength to stand through it.

Ochako’s thumb brushed the altered line of his jaw.

“Even with all this,” she said softly, her eyes moving over the claws, the faint gold under his skin, the shape of him that still had not fully settled, “I’m glad you’re still you.”

Katsuki held her gaze.

The words did not undo what the serum had done.

They did not erase the rifles, the needle, or the possibility that some part of him might stay changed after the antidote did what it could.

They reached him exactly where he was, on the floor with her blanket over his legs and her hand still warm in his.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rough from smoke, sleep, and everything he had stopped running from. “I’m still me.”

Katsuki looked down at her hand in his, at the careful curl of her fingers around the parts of him she had learned were safe to hold.

She had stayed through the fever, through the claws, through every ugly thing Grendel had dragged out of him, and now she was looking at him like the shape of him had changed without making him any harder to love.

His thumb shifted against her knuckles, slow and awkward with the altered shape of his hand. The claws made every touch something he had to think through first, but Ochako did not pull away while he figured it out.

She waited, warm and bruised and stubborn beside him, letting him take the extra second he needed to be gentle.

Ochako was already looking at him, lips parted around a breath she had not quite managed to take. The softness in her face nearly made him look away.

His jaw worked around words that had nowhere safe to go. Thank you was too small. I’m sorry would make her argue. Anything close to what he actually felt would come out wrong with Shinsou breathing on the other side of the door and his own heart sitting raw in his throat.

So he did what he could.

He bent his head and kissed her hand again, slower this time, right over the place where her pulse moved beneath his mouth. Ochako’s fingers tightened against his, and Katsuki stayed there for one extra breath because she let him, because he wanted to, because the door was about to open and he needed one last second where the whole world was only the proof of her still touching him.

Then he lifted his head and pressed his mouth to hers.

The kiss stayed slow and close and quiet, the kind of thing he could give her with Shinsou on the other side of the door and the whole damned mission waiting to take them back. Ochako’s mouth softened beneath his, and her free hand touched his jaw as if she wanted to keep him there for one more heartbeat.

He did.

When the latch finally turned, he lifted his head but held her hand tighter.