The summons hit Izuku’s inbox at 04:11, priority flag red and unblinking. He was still damp from the shower, towel hanging by a thread on his hips as steam curled out of the bathroom. The subject line read: HPSC: Immediate Briefing — Level Omega. He didn’t think. He tapped Accept, then stared at his reflection while the map pinned coordinates. The mirror showed eyes too tired and a mouth he couldn’t make stop tightening when he thought of Bakugou’s face under harsh lights.

He dressed fast, uniform swapped for plain black and a jacket that didn’t catch on anything. The city at pre-dawn was a line of sodium lamps and long shadows. The car the Commission sent was silent except for the soft navigation prompts. Izuku tucked his hands under his thighs to stop the jitter he couldn’t shake.

Security at headquarters was tighter than usual. Palms on glass, retina scan, the mechanical whisper of doors allowing him through in measured increments. A handler he didn’t recognize met him in the corridor—thirties, short hair, expression that didn’t give anything away.

“Agent,” she said. “Follow me.”

Her badge read Saito. She moved like she didn’t waste steps. They passed rooms with smoked glass, silhouettes bent over tables, the low hum of pressure he’d come to associate with situations that would bend everything for months.

In a small conference room with no windows and a metal carafe sweating on the table, Saito laid out a case file. Photos slid into the sterile light. Bodies on stretchers with lines of scar tissue at the base of their skulls. Close-ups of empty vials with residue that gave Izuku a headache to look at too long. A warehouse wall tagged with a symbol—a stylized splice of two circles, one black, one white, threaded by a barbed line.

“Quirk-trafficking,” Saito said. “Not just activation enhancers. Full transfers, modifications, black-market surgeries. We have clusters popping in three prefectures, and chatter says an entity is consolidating. We need deep inroads. Long-term.”

Izuku’s jaw locked. He knew what it meant: missed patrols, missed agency obligations, a life split by lies. He knew why they were asking him: he could adapt. He could become small enough to fit into dark places and big enough to crack them open.

“What’s the angle?” he asked, resting his fingertips on the table, careful not to smudge the gloss on the photos.

“Underground fighting circuit,” Saito said. “They recruit from there. We’ve got a route into their farm system—mid-level handlers who bring them new muscle. Your cover: disgraced pro who flamed out after a family scandal. You’ve got tape from your school days that supports a scrappy narrative. You can take hits and you can make it look good.”

Izuku accepted the tablet when she handed it to him. The file populated with a new identity: Midorikawa Itsuo. History stitched from pieces of truth and lies. A mother who worked in a hospital. A father gone. Fights kept off the record. He didn’t let his mouth twist when he saw how closely they liked to hew.

“How long?” he said.

“As long as it takes,” Saito said. “You won’t be solo. We’re pairing you.”

His head came up, a flash of heat in his chest that he fought to keep off his face. “Who?”

“You’ll meet your partner at secondary briefing,” she said, which was not an answer. “Your role is to analyze from the inside. Keep contact minimal. Comms will be intermittent. If the handler assesses compromise, you are to exfil and burn the identity.”

He thought of the press conference. He thought of the alley where Bakugou had shielded him without looking. He thought of standing shoulder to shoulder without breaking each other first. He didn’t let any of it show. He nodded once.

“I accept.”

Her eyes moved just enough to catalog the decision. She slid a key across the tabletop. Physical, heavy in his palm. “Safe house,” she said. “Your handler will deliver logistics at 0900 in Briefing Three.”

He tucked the key into his pocket and left with the file. The corridor smelled like antiseptic and coffee. He imagined a different handler, a different room. He imagined someone else sitting across from a table just like this one, saying the same words. He pushed the thought down, set the pace of his breathing to four counts in, four out, and headed for the elevator that would take him to the next step.

Bakugou’s summons burned a hole in his sleep at 04:13. He didn’t remember falling onto the bed. He remembered heat, water, the training room flooding, and then dark. The message dragged him up like a hook under the ribs. He swore into the pillow, rolled, and had a shirt over his head before he was fully awake.

He didn’t wait for a car. He took his bike, engine snarling in the quiet street like something that wanted a fight. The Commission building rose out of the city like a block dropped in from somewhere with worse weather. He slapped his credentials at the scanners and glared at the cameras like they were trying him.

The handler waiting for him was a man with neat hands and eyes that didn’t blink enough. “Dynamight. This way.”

“Use my name again and you’re paying for my dry cleaning,” Bakugou said, because the silence needed to be punctured by something. The handler didn’t react. They didn’t, usually.

In the room they gave him, the table was the same size as a coffin. The file that slid across it was thick enough to bruise. He flipped it open with two fingers and scanned fast: photos, chemical analyses, lab diagrams that made his lip curl.

“Trafficking,” the handler said. “They’re moving quirks like product. The ring recruits out of unsanctioned arenas. We need someone who can sell vicious and win.”

Bakugou snorted. “Congratulations. You found the right bastard.”

“Undercover,” the handler said. “You’ll have cover as a washed-out underground fighter. History of altercations, unreliable attitude. Your real rage will help. You will not be yourself.”

Bakugou leaned back, chair creaking like a dare. “And?”

“And you’ll be paired,” the handler said. “Two-man cell. It gives us redundancy and covers your blind spots.”

He felt the flicker under his sternum he didn’t want. He folded the feeling into irritation. “Who?”

“You’ll meet them when you need to,” the handler said. “The cell will occupy a safe house. There will be a schedule. If your personal issues jeopardize the case, you will be removed. Permanently.”

Bakugou’s jaw tightened. He had a list of personal issues as long as the city grid, but he had one that mattered. He kept his eyes on the file. He liked the smell of the paper. He liked the way it grounded him somewhere that wasn’t a press room or a training hall flooded up to his thighs. “I accept.”

The handler slid a key at him. He caught it without looking, thumb stroking the edge. Real metal. Not everything was a code you could change after the fact.

“Briefing Three,” the handler said. “0900.”

Bakugou stood, file under his arm, the key cutting a half-moon into his skin. The elevator hummed. He watched numbers crawl and told himself it didn’t matter who waited at the end. He told himself the job was the job. He told himself he could do precise, he could be a scalpel, he didn’t need anyone calling out angles over the line to make him hit his mark. He held the lie steady and stepped out when the doors opened.

Briefing Three was colder than the corridors. The lights were too bright, the table too clean, a stack of cover dossiers centered with surgical precision. Saito stood at the head with another handler, a grey-suited man with a face like a locked drawer. A wall screen idled with the symbol Izuku had seen—the spliced circles and barbed line. A folder at each seat, two seats facing each other.

Izuku stepped in first, pulse steady by force. He took the chair on the left, set the key near his elbow, and squared the folder with the table edge. The door opened behind him, the air shifting with heat and a specific ozone tang he could have picked out blind.

“Sit,” the other handler said, voice clipped.

Bakugou’s footsteps were the same as they’d always been: grounded, impatient, daring anyone to be in his way. He stopped when he saw Izuku, the temperature dropping like a vent had opened to winter. His mouth went dangerous.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, flat and sharp.

Izuku’s chest went tight around a breath he didn’t take. He did not stand. He did not look away. “You didn’t know either,” he said, not a question.

“Enough,” Saito cut in, gaze pinning both of them. “We briefed you individually. This is the joint briefing. You will listen.”

Bakugou dragged the other chair back with a squeal of metal, sat with his legs spread and his jaw set. He tossed his key onto the table so it clinked, a challenge. Izuku kept his hands still.

“The cover,” Saito said, sliding two thinner folders forward. “You’ll enter the Sumida circuit as free agents. Disgraced, volatile, short on options. We’ve seeded the narrative. Bar fights, bad debts, a promoter you stiffed. You’re a package deal—trained together, fell apart, crawling back as a team because it’s the only way you get booked.”

Izuku’s name on the cover was MIDORIKAWA ITSuo. Bakugou’s read KAMIYAMA KATSUO. The photos had them darker, meaner, exhausted in believable ways.

“You expect me to sell ‘team’ with him?” Bakugou’s laugh had teeth. “I’ll blow the whole ring before I pretend we—”

“You will,” Saito said, over him. “Because your overlay is better together than apart. Your combined record sells. They look for efficiency, brutality, rhythm. You have that. You will demonstrate it.”

Izuku swallowed the reflex to smooth the edges. “You can give us separate covers that intersect. We can meet in-venue, build rivalry, make it more believable—”

“No,” the man in grey said. “You are tethered. One key to a safe house. You move like a unit, you sleep like a unit. That’s your angle. A single point of control. Easier to monitor. Harder to split and flip.”

Bakugou’s chair scraped back two centimeters. “I don’t need a babysitter. I don’t need him watching my six. He drags. He talks.”

Izuku’s temper flared, hot under the careful breathing. “You blow holes in walls. You forget civilians when you see red. You want to ‘sell vicious’? You’ll sell sloppy without someone to call you down.”

Silence hit like a lid dropping. Saito’s eyes narrowed a fraction. The grey-suit’s gaze ticked to the screen, then back.

“You’re making our case for us,” Saito said. “You don’t like each other. Good. The ring doesn’t recruit friends. It recruits people who can win together because they have to. Your bickering reads as authentic. Use it.”

Bakugou leaned forward, forearms to the table. His hands were scarred and steady. “No. You’ve got a dozen underground idiots who can throw hands. Pair me with one who shuts up.”

Izuku’s mouth was dry. “Pair me with someone who won’t blow cover the second someone looks at him wrong.”

The man in grey placed a palm flat on the table. “This isn’t a negotiation. This is the assignment. Your handlers selected you based on parameters you don’t have clearance to dispute. You will pose as a two-man cell, disgraced, hungry, efficient. You will enter the circuit tonight. You will be seen together. You will get noticed. You will take the meetings we direct you to. Or you won’t take the case.”

Bakugou’s eyes cut to Izuku, bright and mean. “You walk, nerd?”

The old nickname hit like a bruise pressed. Izuku held his gaze. “I accepted,” he said. “Because the people in those photos can’t.”

Saito’s mouth softened by a millimeter, then firmed. “Cover details. You met in a sanctioned gym, got thrown out for violating code of conduct. You burned a promoter, and he’ll vouch for your unreliability—he’s ours. You owe money to a loan shark—also ours. You have one handler in the circuit—Kageyama—who you don’t know is ours. You will not break cover unless you are burned.”

Bakugou kicked his heel against the chair leg, a small, precise explosion of sound. He didn’t look away from Izuku. “We make one thing clear. You talk when I say. You follow my lead in the ring.”

Izuku’s laugh was without humor. “You want me to sell believable? Then you follow mine outside it. You don’t posture at the wrong people. You don’t blow our timeline because your ego needs air.”

Saito stepped between the gazes like a blade. “You will both defer to me. You will both shut up unless asked. If your personal dispute compromises the mission, you will be pulled and sanctioned. That includes suspension of licenses and public censure. Are we clear?”

The room breathed. Izuku’s knuckles were pale on the folder edge. Bakugou’s jaw worked once, twice.

“Clear,” Izuku said, first.

Bakugou’s answer was a growl smoothed into a word. “Clear.”

Saito slid a slim black phone across the table. “Safe house address is preloaded. One key. Don’t lose it. Don’t split it. Be there by 1100. Your first fight is at 1900. You have eight hours to make the apartment look lived in and your partnership look convincing.”

Bakugou snatched the phone. Izuku picked up the key, the weight suddenly heavier than metal. They stood at the same time, chairs protesting in dissonant harmony.

“Try not to kill each other before the ring does,” the grey-suit said, already turning to the screen.

Bakugou shouldered past him at the door, deliberate, hot. Izuku didn’t flinch. They walked out side by side with an inch of air between them that felt like a wall of ice, and the key bit into Izuku’s palm as if it had teeth.

They hit the corridor and the quiet was a pressure system, the kind that made your ears ring. Fluorescents hummed. The floor was polished enough that Izuku could see the blur of Bakugou’s shoulders, tight and squared, in the shine.

“Don’t drop that,” Bakugou said without looking, a flick at the key in Izuku’s fist. “You lose it, I’m blowing the lock.”

“It’s one key,” Izuku said. “Saito said not to split it.” He hated how reasonable he sounded when his nerves were sparking. “We can make a duplicate on the way—”

Bakugou shot him a look that could have scorched metal. “You gonna log that with daddy Commission too? We’re undercover. We use what they give us. We don’t improvise two hours in because you get twitchy.”

Izuku rolled the key into his other palm, counting the teeth and the weight out of habit. “We improvise when it keeps us alive,” he said, softer. “We always have.”

Bakugou’s snort was ugly. “Don’t start with the ‘we.’”

They took the elevator down because there was nowhere else to go. Doors shut them together in a box. Izuku could smell smoke and soap, something clean trying to scrub over something that wasn’t. Bakugou’s hands flexed in and out at his sides as if missing the weight of gauntlets he wasn’t allowed.

“You heard the schedule,” Izuku said to fill the air. “We need to hit the safe house, stash anything traceable, establish patterns. If Kageyama sends someone to check, they need to see signs of life. Toothbrushes. Takeout. Laundry.”

“You want a chore chart?” Bakugou said. The word was a knife.

Izuku’s jaw tightened. “I want us not to get burned because you thought crumbs on a countertop made you look weak.”

“Crumbs don’t make me look weak,” Bakugou said. “You do.”

The doors slid open before Izuku could swallow down a reply that would get them both sanctioned. They stepped into the lobby with the muscle memory of not touching. Cameras tracked, indifferent.

Outside, the air was thin with late winter and exhaust. Bakugou stalked ahead, then reined himself in and matched Izuku’s stride without seeming to want to. It was an old rhythm, one that made Izuku’s throat ache because it didn’t need words.

“Covers,” Izuku said, flipping his folder open as they walked. “Kamiyama and Midorikawa trained under a guy named Tsutsui out in Nerima. He’s on file as a brute who got deregistered. We got tossed for fighting in the parking lot. You broke a guy’s nose. I—”

“Coward-punched him?” Bakugou said.

“Dragged you off,” Izuku said, ignoring it. “We owe three hundred thousand yen to a loan shark in Shitaya. We stiffed a promoter named Nakao. He’ll vouch that we exist and that we’re a pain. Our first fight is booked at Sumida on a novice card, two-on-two. We need to look like we like money more than rules.”

“That part’s easy,” Bakugou said. His eyes cut sideways. “You going to take the edges off in there? Smile at the recruiters so they think we’re safe?”

“They’re looking for efficient and dangerous,” Izuku said. “Not unhinged. We sell the thing they can use.”

Bakugou’s mouth twitched like he wanted to bite. “You say ‘we’ again and I’ll—”

“What?” Izuku stopped at the curb. It was careless and he hated that he did it, but the thread snapped. “You’ll do what? The thing you always do? Get loud, make it about how you don’t need anyone, make it all explode until I have to—”

Bakugou stepped in, heat pulsing off him. “Until you have to what, Deku? Lecture me? Take a hit meant for me? You already built that into your plan?”

The name hurt and soothed in a way Izuku couldn’t handle. He looked past Bakugou’s shoulder and fixed his focus on a bus ad peeling at the corners. “I built in what will keep us from failing. You’re not the only one who—”

He caught himself and shut it down. He wouldn’t bleed in a street.

Bakugou’s breath sawed once, hard. He stepped back as if he’d heard the edge close. “Safe house first,” he said, flat. “Then you can draw your little maps and I’ll tell you where they’re wrong.”

Izuku didn’t argue. The cab ride was silent except for the driver’s radio and the city sliding by in glass reflections. Bakugou kept his knee bouncing like a tremor he couldn’t arrest. Izuku kept his hands on the key and the phone like talismans.

The safe house was in a building that had been new forty years ago and never updated. Third floor walk-up. The lock turned with a stiffness that said it hadn’t been used in months. The door stuck on the swollen jamb and then gave.

Inside, the air had that hollow, pretense-of-living smell. Bare couch. Table with one scar down the center. A kitchenette with two cups in a cabinet as if someone had thought of it and stopped. A single bedroom with a door that wouldn’t latch unless you lifted and shoved. Saito hadn’t been joking about one key and one everything.

Bakugou threw his bag onto the couch. It slumped into the cushion like it belonged. He moved through the space fast, cataloging exits and sightlines with the sharp motion of a man who hated walls. He flipped the mattress on the floor with his boot, tested the windows, jerked the curtains once to see if they were lined. They weren’t.

Izuku put the key on the table, center, metal against wood like a point they could orbit. He opened drawers. There were cheap sheets, a first aid kit that was stocked like someone had thought of what they’d need, a roll of duct tape, a box of burner SIMs. He took a breath that filled and emptied nothing.

“Shower is clean,” Bakugou called, and it sounded like an accusation.

Izuku turned the burner phone on and pulled up the preloaded map of Sumida. He could feel Bakugou behind him without looking. The room pressed at his skin.

“We need to decide how we present,” Izuku said. “Who talks first, who doesn’t. Your posture reads as ‘will swing at anything that moves.’ That sells. But if you blow at the wrong guy, Kageyama ghosts us.”

Bakugou leaned on the other side of the table, knuckles to wood, crowding without touching. “You going to tell me when to shut up?”

“Yes,” Izuku said, and the word came out steady. “And you’re going to tell me when to stop explaining and hit harder. We both do the thing we’re good at. We don’t try to be each other.”

For a second, something eased minutely at the corner of Bakugou’s mouth. It wasn’t a smile. It was a flicker of recognition. He looked at the key between them, then at the bedroom door, then back at Izuku.

“One bed,” he said.

“One couch,” Izuku said.

Bakugou’s gaze dragged over him slow, not appreciative, assessing, like measuring weight and speed and whether his shoulder would fit under Izuku’s arm if he needed to carry him. “I’m not taking the couch.”

“I don’t care where you sleep,” Izuku said. “I care that we get through tonight without anyone seeing through us.”

Bakugou reached out, tapped the key once with a finger, a small metallic note. “We make it look real,” he said. “You and me. A unit.”

Izuku hated how the word made his chest move wrong. He nodded. “We make it look real.”

Bakugou pushed off the table. “Then stop standing there and make the place look like we live here.”

Izuku moved. He set cups on the counter, dropped a takeout menu and crumpled the corner, tossed a hoodie over the back of the couch where Bakugou’s bag lay like a threat. He found a pen and scrawled a phone number from the burner onto the wall near the door, under a light switch, like a habit someone had. Bakugou went through the fridge and left the door ajar for a second too long, enough for condensation to bead. He threw an empty bottle in the trash so it clinked.

They circled each other, performing the intimacy of existence without touching. In the bedroom, Izuku yanked the sheets onto the mattress with the efficiency of someone who had slept in worse. Bakugou came in and dropped a blanket on the floor near the bed, a territorial line without saying it.

When they ended up back at the table, the key still sat in the center like a dare. Izuku reached out and pulled it toward his side by a centimeter. Bakugou watched his hand like a fuse.

“Don’t lose it,” Bakugou said again, lower.

“I won’t,” Izuku said. He held the key until the bite of the edge marked his skin. He let the mark stay. He didn’t look away when Bakugou finally did. The next hours would be a test. The ring would be worse. The key was a promise and a trap.

The phone buzzed with a text from Saito: Be visible by 1730. Be convincing by 1900.

Bakugou’s mouth thinned. Izuku nodded once. The air between them stayed cold and tight and necessary.

The knock wasn’t a knock. It was the scrape of the door and Saito stepping in without waiting, eyes cutting over the staged mess with a quick, clinical tally. He looked at the tossed hoodie, the ajar fridge, the scrawled number, the mattress half-made, the blanket on the floor like a border.

“Good,” he said, and it wasn’t praise. “You’ve got the illusion of life down.”

Bakugou straightened from the counter, arms folding, chin lifting. Izuku felt his spine align without thinking, the posture of being evaluated drilled into him. The burner buzzed again—a calendar ping. Saito held out a small envelope. Inside were laminated IDs that would not hold up to forensic scrutiny and cash, counted in bands.

“You’ll get more after the first fight,” Saito said. “If you’re still in.”

Bakugou bristled. “We’ll be in.”

“You’ll be in if you remember you’re not Bakugou Katsuki and Midoriya Izuku,” Saito said. “You’re Kamiyama and Midorikawa, a pair of idiots who like to hit things and hate being told what to do, and you can’t slip, not once.” His gaze slid between them, reading the static like it had its own light. “Which brings me to this.”

He took a step closer, lowering his voice even though there was nothing in the empty building to hear. “You two are an asset together. On your own, you’re loud, messy problems. I don’t care about your history. I don’t care who broke whose nose in middle school. If I get one hint that whatever this is—” a flick of two fingers between them— “bleeds into the mission, if it costs us access or spooks Kageyama, I pull you. Not a suspension. Not a timeout. You’re off. Dishonorable discharge from the case, black mark, no appeals. You will not get assignments like this again for a long time, if ever. Understood?”

Izuku’s mouth was already forming the automatic “yes, sir.” Beside him, Bakugou’s jaw ticked hard enough to creak. Izuku got in first. “Understood.”

Bakugou smirked, ugly and thin. “Understood,” he said, like chewing glass.

Saito didn’t blink. “I don’t give this speech to every team. I’m giving it to you because I had to watch your press conference and then your hallway footage and then your medical reports from UA. You light each other up. It’s useful. It’s dangerous. Decide which it’s going to be.”

Izuku swallowed the reflex to explain, to promise more than he had a right to. He kept his hands loose and visible. “We’ll keep it contained,” he said, steady. He felt Bakugou’s stare dragging across his cheekbone like a spark looking for tinder.

Saito nodded once. “You have one key. One. You lose it, you move out in a hurry with nothing. You let your temper make choices, it’s over.” He looked at Bakugou. “You’re not in charge.” He looked at Izuku. “Neither are you. The mission is. If one of you can’t handle that, tell me now and I’ll split you and eat the failures.”

Silence. The fridge motor kicked on. A siren wailed and faded three streets away, thin through glass.

Bakugou’s fingers flexed against his bicep, then stilled. He angled his head, eyes on Saito’s shoulder. “We’re not going to hand you an excuse to bench us,” he said, quieter than Izuku expected.

Saito held his stare for three seconds longer than polite. Then he stepped back, the room seeming to expand a millimeter with the space. “You’re visible in twenty minutes. You’ll hit the ramen shop two blocks east. You’ll be seen arguing about money, not about respect. You’ll pay cash. You’ll go to Sumida. You’ll be convincing by 1900 or you’ll be back here scraping this place clean alone.”

Izuku nodded. “We can do that.”

Saito was already at the door. “Last thing,” he said, hand on the knob. “If you need me, you don’t. You need each other. That’s the work. Make it about the work.” He left without waiting for assent, the stairwell swallowing the sound of his steps.

The quiet folded over them like a wet blanket. Bakugou stared at the door as if willing it to come back so he could slam it. Izuku’s pulse knocked against his throat in a rhythm that wanted motion, an outlet that wasn’t talking.

“We can’t fight like we do,” Izuku said finally. The words were low, carefully shaved down to function. “Not where anyone can see it.”

Bakugou’s laugh was sharp and laughless. “So we fake it, then.”

“We choose,” Izuku said, and he hated how earnest it sounded. “To not give them what they expect.”

Bakugou’s eyes cut to the key in Izuku’s hand, to the indentation it had left in his skin. He took a step in, stopping within the exact radius where heat licked at the fine hairs on Izuku’s forearm. “I’m not apologizing for anything.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” Izuku said. He watched the minute shift of Bakugou’s shoulders, the way a breath came in and didn’t blow. He lifted his chin. “Truce,” he said, not an offer, not a plea. A boundary.

Bakugou held his gaze like it was a test and then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, he nodded. “For the mission,” he said.

“For the mission,” Izuku agreed.

They stood in it for a beat, the shape of something like agreement fitted wrong and strangely right between them. Bakugou reached out and picked up the envelope Saito had left, shoving the cash into his pocket, flipping the IDs across the table. Izuku caught his and slid it into his wallet next to cards that didn’t have his name. Their fingers didn’t touch.

“Ramen,” Bakugou said, biting off the edge. “You do the talking. I’ll do the glaring. We make it look real.”

Izuku squared his shoulders. He clipped the key to the inside of his pocket with the tiny carabiner he always carried, the motion practiced. He looked up to find Bakugou already watching. “We make it work,” he corrected, quiet.

Bakugou snorted. But he went to the door and waited, hand on the frame, not leaving him behind. When Izuku reached him, they stepped out together, the air in the hallway colder than the room, their footfalls falling into that old, infuriating rhythm that had always saved them when nothing else did. They didn’t speak, and for the first time since the briefing, the silence between them held.