Chapter Text
Secondary genders are nothing but a pain in the ass, as far as Katsuki’s concerned.
Like he gets it. They’re a part of everyone’s natural biology, and there’s no way to just easily get rid of that. But it’s not like they’re in the damn dark ages anymore. He doesn’t have to be at the whim of his basal urges like a fucking animal.
Sure, back when quirks first manifested and society was thrown into absolutely chaos, all semblance of control over instincts was lost. Betas brutalized in the streets, omegas going missing, alphas sedated and muzzled out of fear of them going rabid—just the stories from the history books were bad enough to make anyone queasy. It’d been a true hellscape for certain, but it’s not even close to that anymore.
As society stabilized and development restarted, so did the quest to re-civilize mankind. Now, that sort of bedlam is practically unthinkable, and secondary gender status became just another normalized, trivial component of someone’s life, like quirks, race, or primary gender.
Now, if someone were to give into some of their instinctual behaviors, no one would judge them. Hell, they’d even find some of them cute or whatever, but Katsuki doesn’t give a shit. Why should he? Modern medicine exists for a reason, and there’s no way he’s gonna let himself be at the whim of his instincts when scientists have practically perfected the art of making stable, non-addictive suppressants with little to no side effects.
To be fair, though, he supposes he is on the luckier side. He’s from a family affluent enough to afford top pharmaceuticals like that. He lives in an era where secondary-gender-based discrimination is at its lowest.
Oh, and he’s an alpha.
He’s never really cared much for the title, outside of the inherent power that comes with it. He’s gonna be a top hero—no, the top hero—and it’s no coincidence that all the highest ranking heroes were alphas. After all, alphas were generally leaders, the top of the top, with both the power and assertiveness to reach sky-high.
All in all, being an alpha is perfect for Katsuki. After all, he’s strong as hell, stronger than anybody else that dares to come in his way. It’s like Mother Nature had already known all the success he was no doubt bound for when creating him, giving him a knot and pheromones enough to knock everyone around him down several pegs.
Well, almost everyone.
“Hey, Hero-san!”
Flickering his eyes up, Katsuki lets himself look away from the police officer in front of him to instead look for the source of the voice. It takes him a little while, will all the wreckage and debris crowded around from their villain fight. He and Shouto had been on patrol with Burning, when they found themselves having to wrangle up some villains trying to rob a bank near the city center. The fight was fucking fantastic, but they caused a shitton of structural damage, and Katsuki always knows that Endeavor’s gonna chew their ears out for it.
Like he’s much better.
After a couple more seconds, Katsuki finally spots them: a couple of men sauntering right on over to Shouto. They don’t look to much older than them—maybe in their early twenties at the most, and they both look a little scuffed up. From the looks of it, they’re just bystanders that got caught up in the chaos and weren’t able to evacuate in time.
And yet they’re smiling, these big, dumb, beaming smiles that leave a bitter taste in Katsuki’s mouth. Aren’t they a little too chipper for folks that got caught up into an inner-city villain fight? He certainly thinks so.
“Yes?” Shouto asks, turning to face them with his blank-as-always face. “Do you need assistance?”
“Nah, we just wanted to thank you!”
Shouto doesn’t look any more intrigue, his face a perfect image of polite disinterest as he stares at the men to continue.
“Kid like you’s gonna turn into a big strong hero one day, y’know that?” the first man says with a grin. “Really, you’re like a pro already! What’re you, a first year?”
“Second,” Shouto corrects lightly. “If you’re uninjured, I’ll have to ask you to leave the site. The police need to conduct investigations—”
“C’mon!” the second man interrupts. “There’s gotta be something we can do to thank you! You really saved our butts back there. That kid over there,” he pointed his pudgy thumb over in Katsuki’s direction, “blasted up the restaurant we were in, y’know?”
Katsuki feels his eye twitch in annoyance, and he clenches his fists and breathes deeply to reign in his budding anger. You can’t beat up civilians, he can practically hear Shouto chastising in his head. God, this was so damn annoying.
“Yes, well,” Shouto starts, furrowing his eyebrows, “my partner does a bit of a destructive fighting style, but I can assure you it wasn’t unintentional—”
“Still, man!” the first guy pitches in. “Shouldn’t heroes be more careful?”
“Falling debris is unpredictable and—”
“Lucky we had you around,” the second man chirps up again, his grin turning more pointed and sleazy by the second. “We woulda been crushed to rubble, if you didn’t ice up the place!”
“You really came through for us!” his friend adds, and Shouto nods tersely.
“I’m happy to see you’re safe,” he says courteously. “And again, if that’s all, I highly recommend taking leave so you don—”
“Aw, don’t be like that, Hero-san!”
Katsuki’s eyes go wide when suddenly, one of the men’s throwing a long, lanky arm around Shouto’s shoulders, pulling him close and holding him surprisingly tightly with a side-hug. Shouto looks just shocked, thrown off by the sudden physical contact as his eyes open wide and his shoulders hunch over a little.
“We wanted to thank you somehow!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Both of them are practically sneering at this point, and Katsuki tries not to think of how uncomfortable that makes him feel. “Show our gratitude and all!”
“That’s not necessary,” Shouto protests. “It’s part of my duties as a hero—”
“Aww, that’s no fun! C’mon, let us be nice and treat you to something, Hero-san~”
“Yeah, we’ll show you a good time, so come with us for a bit!”
“As I said, that’s not necess—”
Shouto cuts himself off suddenly, and Katsuki can just barely hear his sharp intake of breath. His eyes narrow when he sees Shouto start squirming in the man’s hold. He’s not moving much, just enough to try and slip away without seeming rude, but he’s completely stopped talking. It doesn’t even look like he’s breathing, as his eyes flicker back and forth between the two men with a barely veiled panic in his eyes.
It’s not a look Katsuki’s seen on Shouto before, and that’s the excuse he’s giving himself to justify stomping over there almost immediately.
“Oi!” he practically barks as he trudges over to the trio.
His shout seems to have broken whatever spell had fallen over them. No longer are the two men hovering predatorily over Shouto, and instead, they’re jumping back as though they’ve been burned. Shouto, too, seems to snap out of whatever weird panicked haze he’d been in, and his normal impassive mask settles back in as he takes a step towards Katsuki.
“The hell you doing?” Katsuki snaps at Shouto, his anger more for show than anything else as he watches the two men out of his peripheral vision. “We have reports and shit to do.”
“R-right.” The slight hitch in Shouto’s voice doesn’t go unnoticed, but Katsuki doesn’t point it out. Instead, he watches him turn to the two men and give a small, polite nod. “I’ll need to be off. Please make sure to stay safe on the streets.”
“But—!” one of the men shouts in protest, ignore his friend nudging him with his elbow to discourage him.
“Wanna fuck right off?” Katsuki drawls.
“You can’t—”
“We have work to do, so get lost.”
“H-hey man, take it easy!” the friend stammers out under the force of Katsuki’s glare. “We didn’t realize he was yours!”
What.
Katsuki’s about to growl, because fuck, no one outside of their stupid class’s supposed to know he and Shouto are dating, so how the hell did these fucks find out—
“Y, yeah!” the other man pitches in. “Ya didn’t scent him or anything, how’re we supposed to know?”
“If you really wanted to claim him yourself, you shoulda done something—”
…Claim?
“The hell’re you—”
“What do you mean?”
Katsuki blinks at Shouto’s blunt question, watching how he looks back and forth between the two men curiously. He looks about as confused as Katsuki feels, while the two men just seem baffled at both of them.
And that’s when Katsuki notices it. It’s not too noticeable, not in an wide, open-air space like this with debris and dust floating all around, but he can still sense if it he pays close enough attention. The budding smell of something entirely unfamiliar—mixes of old pines and dried-out cigarettes. It’s not coming from Shouto or Katsuki, nor from anything on the streets itself, but rather, from the bodies of the two men before them.
Their pheromones.
Katsuki guesses having Shouto around as his boyfriend, instead of some other idiot, is another stroke of luck on his part. If he had to catch feelings and shit for someone, he’s glad it was for Shouto and not for some other dumb fuck who cared more about gender dynamics. Shouto’s an omega, but he seems to care about that about as much as Katsuki cares about being an alpha.
That is, not at all.
He’s the only omega Katsuki’s ever met that doesn’t fit the usual bill. He isn’t all cutesy and peppy, he doesn’t get obsessed with families and romance, and most importantly, he’s independent as hell. He doesn’t need or even ask to be pampered or waited on like he’s a damn invalid, and he’s strong too. Strong enough to be one of the top kids in the class, even in a hero school teeming with alphas and betas that have the genetic advantage on him. Being an omega is practically irrelevant to his progress as a hero, as far as Shouto’s concerned.
It doesn’t always sit well with Katsuki, though, since he knows that Shouto’s disinterest is only partially voluntary.
He knows what Shouto had to go through, growing up in Endeavor’s household where presenting as anything besides an alpha was grounds for disappointment. He knows that Shouto had been on suppressants at a dangerously young age, from the second he presented, and that he was never given any chances to learn about his own biology.
All those mandatory lessons even Katsuki was put through to learn about his own urges and needs, Shouto never got. All the important life experiences and the critical points in his omegan development were ignored, and that’s got to have fucked him up somehow. Still, Shouto takes his own ignorance in stride, and Katsuki would be lying if he didn’t commend and even appreciate his resilience.
That doesn’t mean his ignorance can’t be annoying as fuck.
“Get lost,” Katsuki snaps at the two men, before grabbing Shouto by the wrist.
He plods away quickly, not giving the men to say even another thing as he drags Shouto away wordlessly. He doesn’t want to give any explanations, doesn’t want to sit down and talk through why the fuck Shouto didn’t notice two complete strangers trying to scent him.
But then again, maybe he did notice.
Katsuki thinks, with a sharp wrenching in his gut, about how Shouto had gone entirely stiff after a few moments in the men’s presences. How the second one of them had gotten their arms around him, he’d gone into a tense panic and writhed around for a chance to escape while still keeping his social graces.
He might not have known what was going on, but his subconscious sure did.
“Katsuki?”
Katsuki only stops and glances back when they’re a good enough distance away from the two men, far enough that their vile stenches wouldn’t permeate through his senses anymore. They halt near Burning, who’s still busy talking to the police and hadn’t even noticed the incident, when Katsuki finally turns around.
“What’s going on?” Shouto asks, eyebrows furrowed in a light concern to break that otherwise perfectly stoic expression of his. “Everything okay?”
God, he’s such an idiot.
“C’mon,” Katsuki says. “We have work to do.”
Shouto lets him brush off the subject with nothing but a worried frown, and Katsuki hates how the very sight of it makes his heart pang. He doesn’t let that distract them, though, nor does he let his thoughts linger on the disgusting scent of the two men from earlier. He doesn’t let himself think about all their talk about scenting and claiming, and the revolting way it made something in his gut curl pleasantly when he thought about it. He doesn’t think about any of that stuff, because it’s distracting and he’s not about to let himself get distracted.
They have patrol to continue, after all.