A Chance Encounter (Chapter 1)

Despite what you might be led to believe, if you were listening to Katsuki or Izuku reminisce about their school years, Katsuki had not been above reproach. Sure, he’d been a spoiled brat who pretty much always got his own way, and he’d been good at taking anyone who dared to question him and threatening them into submission, but he’d also been the butt of a lot of jokes, had dealt with a lot of teasing about certain… aspects of his personality. Or, lack thereof.

See, Katsuki had never been a kid who had “crushes”. When all his classmates were trying to sneak a peek into the girls’ changing room, or smuggling dirty magazines to each other’s houses after school to flip through together, Katsuki had been… Disinterested. And his “friends” had, of course, given him hell about it. Katsuki had never really cared about fitting in, until that topic began. And when he tried to fit in, it just made things so much worse.

There was a time, for instance, that he’d just… picked a girl at random. They’d all been talking about their class crushes, huddled in a back corner, and they hadn’t even believed him when he said he didn’t have one. They’d gone on and on about him keeping it a secret and all that “not trusting us” bullshit, until he’d just kind of… Picked one.

Her name was Amari, she was maybe the only classmate whose name he still remembered to this day. She was a nice girl, quiet, liked to dance. He’d figured she was a safe bet, someone who wouldn’t be a pain about it, someone who he never really interacted with enough to make it come up and be an issue.

Until, of course, he found out one of his shitty extras also had a thing for Amari. He’d practically disowned Katsuki as a friend for it, which had seemed ridiculous even back then as a shitty ten year old. And worst of all, the assholes thought it would be a funny idea to tell Amari that Katsuki had a crush on her, because trust your friends, right? Bastards, the lot of them.

He shouldn’t have cared, really. He didn’t actually like her, it was no big deal.

Only he saw the look on her face when they told her, the look of disgust like he’d never seen before.

Even from a girl he didn’t like, that hurt.

His damn mother had nagged about it endlessly, as they went home that afternoon. She could tell something was bothering him, that much was obvious, and she had this shitty way of trying to make him talk about it. He’d given her a half-truth, in the end. His friends were all going stupid and girl-crazy and it was annoying and ridiculous.

“Maybe I’m just more mature than them,” he’d grumbled. “I skipped that stupid phase.”

“No, you’re not,” she’d answered, so matter-of-factly. “They’re the more mature ones, you’re just not there yet.”

Maybe that was the real reason he remembered it. Not because of the stupid friends and the girl who was horrified at the thought of Katsuki liking her, but because of his mother’s blunt, uncaring insult to compound the bad mood it had put him in.

Come to think of it, that was probably the last day he told her anything about what was “on his mind”, too.

Over the years, when the stupid-crush phase still didn’t happen, Katsuki started to think about… Sexuality. He’d learned what “gay” meant when he was pretty young, that was something his parents hadn’t hesitated to explain when he’d heard the word for the first time. They’d been cool about that, he supposed. He knew they wouldn’t take issue with him liking guys.

So maybe that was it, he figured. He wasn’t girl-crazy like his friends because he liked boys?

Only, he’d never exactly felt anything for a guy either.

And honestly, he tried. Katsuki never failed at anything in his life, sexuality was not going to be the first. So he started looking harder, started picking out traits he liked in people. Izuku loved heroes, that was a good quality – maybe he liked the damn Deku? And there were those guys who hung around him and told him he was cool, those were good things, maybe that was a crush?

Maybe it wasn’t that he didn’t have crushes, he just didn’t really know what they were.

That had to be it.

High school rolled around, and that was where he learned the word that changed his life: Bisexual.

It made so much sense. He’d never been able to figure it out – guys or girls? Which one did he like? He found good qualities in both, so it had to be both, right? But he’d never even known that was an option until Sparky said it.

“I’m bisexual,” Kaminari told the group, as if it was no big deal. “Guys are hot, girls are hot, why pick just one?”

His mouth moved without even thinking, the words coming out as if he’d known it his entire life instead of being a new revelation.

“Me too.”

They’d all stared at him like he’d grown an extra head, and honestly, Katsuki wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t like him to volunteer information so readily, usually they had to prod and pry to even find out what he’d eaten for breakfast.

But then…

“That’s cool, bro,” Kirishima had grinned, clapping him on the back. “I get it.”

“Big Mood,” Ashido had laughed. “We’re gonna have to rename ourselves from the Bakusquad to the Bisquad!”

Turned out half his friends were bisexual, too. Go figure. It was like a damn magnet had drawn them together into this little cluster of queer. And that should have been it, right? Happily ever after.

Except…

Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as he’d expected.

For one thing, his friends were constantly horny. They were thirsting after celebrities left and right, making lewd comments about heroes under their breath, and as much as he tried not to hear about it, he knew half of them were sneaking into each other’s dorm rooms at night too.

Katsuki… Really didn’t have any interest in that.

Because he was a hero. At least, he was going to be. There were more important things to think about, like training and internships and work studies and provisional licenses and kidnappings and- Well, the list went on. He had no time for guys or girls, for dating, for hook ups. He just…

Didn’t care.

Not unlike a familiar day in the corner of a much smaller classroom, with much smaller kids around him. He didn’t care, but no one would have believed that.

All the same, he made it through. He labelled a couple of relationships “crushes” with the best guesses he had, even went on a couple of dates with a girl he met from another school who seemed like she had similar interests and hobbies. Of course, he’d quickly realised that he didn’t feel like texting back ninety percent of the time, and her little sad-face emojis when he had to go to class or training were not as cute as she thought they were, so that had ended after… Four months? And about as many dates.

So he wasn’t a complete newbie, coming out of school. He knew he didn’t give a damn about the gender of the people he dated (which he later learned may have been more like pansexual, but he couldn’t face the damn kitchen jokes anymore so he stopped bothering with that distinction after about a month) and he knew what it was like to go on dates, knew what it was like to kiss a girl, even knew…

Okay, so a guy got curious sometimes. He’d given out a couple of awkward handjobs and had a hand or two down his pants in return. With friends, they were decidedly not relationships, because…

Well, because they hadn’t wanted it, he supposed. He would have gone on dates with them if they asked, had them firmly in his “this is a crush, right?” camp, but they had… kind of laughed at him, for the idea of dating him.

Didn’t stop them campaigning for a blow during a sleepover, though. Ugh. Men were such trash.

The girls had been slightly better, even though they still hadn’t actually dated. One in particular had insisted she didn’t want to date, had been into some other dude, but that hadn’t stopped her from cuddling with him as they watched a movie on his laptop, or experimenting with some weird-ass kink shit that he’d agreed he could potentially have been interested in.

Okay, maybe potentially hadn’t been in his words. It was more like “yeah, let’s do it” leading to a bunch of experimentation and even a few attempts at writing her erotic stories about the things they’d discussed. He preferred to forget about his nineteen-year-old self’s weird awkwardness around sex. He still had the stories, though. Hidden away in a secret folder in the depths of his laptop hard drive. So sue him, it had been kind of fun to mess around with that stuff.

The actual sex part he had never gotten to, but the foreplay or whatever? Yeah, that was fine.

He didn’t exactly crave it, didn’t get antsy and deprived without it like his friends did (seriously, did they not realise they had two perfectly good hands?) but it was…

Fine.

Over the years he even collected some certain coloured stripes in his bedroom, just for… You know what? He wasn’t even sure why he had them, to be perfectly honest. He’d just seen a little flag with those three stripes and thought it would be neat to own. Had found a keychain in the same colours, that made him think “why not?”. It was a group he belonged to, he may as well have something that belonged to the group, like the way he kept t-shirts from his old bands and sports teams.

So yeah, Katsuki was fine. He was comfortable, he had a group that might not have been exactly like him, but they were similar on a fundamental level – like how heroes were all heroes, even if one rescued trapped turtles at the beach while another beat up villains in the city.

Until he was twenty-one years old, and he stumbled across a new word on the internet.

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