Archive of Our Own ^beta

The trouble, Katsuki’s fairly certain, starts with the talking meat bun that hatches from his egg and calls him mama.

And then it just gets worse from there.

It’s bad enough that this is all a live stream and he can hear Uraraka cackling her fool head off not too far away, but this isn’t the only crappy thing that’s happened to him since he picked up Second Life and decided to give it a go.

It’ll be fun, they’d said. You’ll like the fantasy VR elements, they’d said.

Fucking liars, the lot of them, Katsuki mentally snarls, dropping the meat bun in his hands and stalking off. 99% realism his ass—what kind of realistic fantasy game gave him a talking meat bun from a boss battle with a wolf king? Not to mention his character design and specs… and his pain-in-the-ass team members.

Speaking of pain-in-the-ass team members…

“He’ll come around,” the long-haired demon bard tells the meat bun, who’s sobbing hysterically for its mama. “Don’t worry—he may look like an utter barbarian, but he’s got a heart somewhere in there.”

“And he’s got ears too, you fucking idiot,” Katsuki yells back, making the mistake of looking back and meeting the bard’s heterochromatic eyes. “I am not that sentient bit of food’s mother, Shouto, and if it doesn’t shut up then I’m going to eat it and complain to the goddamn GMs!”

“What, that your pet is reflective of your usefulness in this game?” Shouto asks mildly.

“For fuck’s sake, Shouto, could you stop being a salty fucking bastard for just one second?” Katsuki wheels around and stalks back to Shouto, jabbing a finger against his chest. “It was one wolf,” he snarls, hating how he has to get on his tiptoes and still crane his neck to meet the tall fucker’s eyes. “If you can’t even stay out of the way and layer buffs properly, then you deserve to get killed like an utter fucking noob!”

“Oh, so just who was the noob who let that wolf through again?”

Katsuki draws back his fist, more than ready to punch the smug little smile off Shouto’s face—but before he can connect, the meat bun’s bouncing up between then and crying out, “Don’t hurt papa, mama!”

“Papa?” Deku asks in a faint voice, even as Katsuki grabs the meat bun and shakes it back and forth, screaming, “I am not your mama, you defective fucking bun!”

“You should really be nicer to our child,” Shouto murmurs with a shake of his head, rescuing the dizzy meat bun from Katsuki’s clutches and cuddling it. “How can you expect it to be strong like us if you constantly abuse it?”

“Meat Bun is a boy, papa!” the meat bun—which is called Meat Bun, because of course it fucking is—helpfully chimes in.

“Our son, then,” Shouto replies diplomatically—

But as the meat bun coos and snuggles against Shouto’s chest, as Uraraka hiccups and tries to get out of the literal pool of tears she’s lying in while Deku hovers worriedly by her side—Katsuki throws his sword onto the ground, almost strangles himself trying to throw his cloak off too, and rips his VR goggles off in time to cut off Round Cheek’s renewed, hysterical giggling.

“You are never,” Katsuki growls, clambering out of the VR chamber and levelling his middle fingers at Shouto’s groggily-blinking form, “getting me to play that cracked fucking game again!”

“If you say so,” Shouto replies with his most insolent shrug, and is left to end the stream on his own when Katsuki screams and storms out of their study.

Shouto gets Katsuki to play the cracked fucking game again.

It’s the second week of Katsuki’s declaration and they’ve skipped at least five live streaming sessions—Shouto had refused to play anything else, even League of Legends, and Katsuki had been bombarded by emails and comments from their subscribers. They’d built up quite a following on their tri-weekly streams, drawn by Katsuki’s ruthless intellect and Shouto’s random luck—but it was their synergy that people kept coming back for.

The way they unerringly covered each other, no matter how many members were in their team or how competent they were. Katsuki’s profanities and Shouto’s quips, abrasive but somehow easy in a way that was more entertaining than off-putting. Their expertise, honed from years living together as roommates and then partners, and even their subtle displays of affection—touches that lingered a little too long, gazes that were just a little too soft.

They’d lost a few subscribers at first, when they’d come out as an official couple—but their unplanned hiatus had hit them harder, and it was common knowledge that Katsuki cared more about gaming than Shouto. Was more invested in completing supposedly impossible quests, had less patience for bugs that would detract from the gaming experience—

It’d been Katsuki who started streaming alone until he’d pulled Shouto in. It wasn’t the same without Shouto sitting beside him, and the fucking bastard had locked him out of their shared account, so.

“We’re not going to stream again until you log back into your Second Life account,” Shouto says for the third time that evening, slow and patient. “If you hate it that much,” he continues in a softer tone, placing his hands on Katsuki’s hunched shoulders, “then we’ll only clear the beginner quests, and then we’ll move onto a different game.”

“Like I’d fucking believe you,” Katsuki snorts—he knows which of them is the perfectionist, and it’s not Shouto with his odd socks and his messy, tangled ponytail.

Shouto’s not cowed by his thick, palpable disbelief though—he never is, and most probably never will be—so all he does is turn away with a half-shrug. “Your loss,” he says over his shoulder, shuffling over to his armchair and the trashy paperbacks he’s replaced their streaming nights with, and…

Katsuki doesn’t want to give in. He doesn’t, because that stupid meat bun and his stupid barbarian Shouto chose for him while he’d made an emergency loo run are fucking stupid, but… he also misses the calming familiarity of grinding. He misses the envy radiating from everyone whenever Shouto gets the best loot, the terror when he decimates a mob with minimal help from his partner—even the infrequent times when their other friends hop online and join in their tri-weekly routine.

He really doesn’t want to stride around bare-chested, fluffy fucking cape trailing after him like some sort of beast-king. He especially doesn’t want a meat bun calling him mama every few seconds.

But if the meat bun calls Shouto papa enough times to piss him off—as slight as the chance is—and if he can get some actual decent clothing at a main city…

He sighs gustily, dragging himself from the couch to grab their VR sets, and isn’t surprised in the slightest to see Shouto put down his period romance and take his set with the faintest of smiles.

“Not a single fucking word,” Katsuki hisses, stomping off to their study.

“Of course not, dear,” Shouto murmurs, snickering over Katsuki’s burst of swearing.

(but before they get into their VR chambers and get back into the game—Shouto puts his hands on Katsuki’s hips and kisses him sweetly, and he’s not scowling quite so much when they go under)

“I’m sorry, mama!” is the first thing Katsuki hears when the game’s fully loaded, milliseconds before something warm and soft smacks him right in the face.

He overbalances with a squawk, arms pinwheeling gracelessly in the air, but there’s a hand planted in the small of his back and he manages to right himself in time. “Smooth,” Shouto murmurs in his ear, amusement clear in his tone, but he doesn’t push further—they’re streaming again, after all, and Shouto’s a little shit but he’s not that much of one.

Still, Katsuki grabs the meat bun and pelts him at Shouto, smirking in vindictive pleasure when the stupid, wailing thing smacks him right over his eyes. “Papa!” it shrieks in despair, fountains of tears spraying from its eyes as Shouto grunts from the pain, staggers and barely manages to keep his balance.

“What a lovely family reunion,” one of their companions for the night snickers, and Katsuki levels a glare at Shinsou even as he pointedly doesn’t help Shouto peel the meat bun off his face.

“You want an introduction to the fucking meat bun?”

“Somehow, I doubt you’d want it to call me ‘uncle’,” Shinsou drawls, just as the meat bun bounces back over to them and pouts over ‘mama’ using a bad word.

“I,” Katsuki snarls over Shinsou’s chuckles, “am not your mama.”

“But mama is mama!” the meat bun insists, sticking its lip out further in its godawful pout.

“I’m not your mama, you fucking meat bun!”

“Are too!”

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Am—”

“Maybe you should call him ‘older sister’,” Shouto suggests, hip cocked and wicked smile partially obscured by his flowing white locks, “since your mama isn’t very mature.”

“B-But mama is mama,” the meat bun wibbles, “even if mama keeps saying bad words.”

“I’m going to shove you into the jaws of a wolf,” Katsuki promises darkly, levelling a finger at the meat bun, “and then I’m going to shove your papa into another one, and you can both be wolf droppings together!”

“Well, that works,” Shinsou hums mock-thoughtfully, “since you’re already a piece of shit.”

Katsuki growls, every bit as feral as a wolf even as Shouto snickers and Deku, newly-spawned from where he’d logged in late, claps his hands to his mouth and utterly fails to stifle his laughter.

“This ain’t a fucking comedy channel, ladies!” Katsuki snaps, flicking his cloak peevishly behind himself, “so let’s get going already!”

“You know Kacchan’s going to kill you for that, right?” Deku asks Shinsou, shaking his head with mirth alight in his eyes—but they all obligingly wander off into the woods, and soon they’re too busy farming for loot to snicker over Katsuki’s relationship with his godawful pet.

“Well, that was useless,” Katsuki mutters under his breath, glaring at the junk in his inventory. Most of the rarer drops had been bard-specific items—because of course they were, even when Shouto was in his team and should therefore have spread his luck to everyone, including him—but there’d been a necromancer staff for Shinsou and even an alchemy set for Deku.

So why—why had he only gotten a fucking toe ring after clearing out the woods three times over? What the hell was a barbarian meant to do with a toe ring anyway, choke a fucking wolf with it? Propose to someone in his fucking group and then confirm his intent by slipping it onto their goddamn toe?!

“Maybe it’s because of Meat Bun,” Shouto interjects, cutting off Katsuki’s unconscious rant. “He might not look like much,” he adds, when Katsuki gives him an incredulous look, “but he did help us attract a few stragglers.”

“Yeah, by crying for us to help him—it,” Katsuki hastily corrects himself, when Shouto arches a brow at him and the meat bun bounces happily on his shoulder. “And it couldn’t even do anything about the crippled wolves I left near it! At least it should—I don’t fucking know, choke them to death or something!”

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Shinsou says then, “but maybe you’re just too stupid to figure out how Meat Bun works.”

“Hitoshi!” Deku exclaims, smacking Shinsou’s shoulder—but he’s also very carefully not looking at Katsuki, which is as much of a red flag as the teeth sinking into his lower lip.

“You shitsnacks think I’m dumb?” Katsuki hisses, lip curling at the three disbelieving looks that nets him. “You think I can’t make this meat bun bend to my will?!”

“We’d never think such a thing,” Shouto says in an utterly unconvincing tone—

And that’s it, Katsuki’s had enough of all their uppity fucking opinions on the meat bun.

“I’m going to make this meat bun the most useful fucking pet in this shitty game,” Katsuki declares, snatching the meat bun from Shouto’s shoulder and valiantly ignoring its cries of mama’s gonna play with Meat Bun! “I’m going to whoop your asses with this stupid bun, and then we’ll see who’s laughing later!”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to?” Shouto asks, tilting his head with a prim little frown. “Because I don’t know about you, but a barbarian with a meat bun doesn’t exactly strike fear into my heart right now.”

“Just watch me,” Katsuki hisses over Deku’s and Shinsou’s snickers, and glares down at the meat bun in question.

“Alright, let’s go kick some ass,” he tells the stupid, doe-eyed thing.

“Meat Bun’s gonna make mama proud!” the stupid thing chirps back at him—and Katsuki, with a supreme effort, doesn’t shove it into his mouth and eat it for calling him mama again.

Now, if I can just get it out of calling me that… maybe I could dress Deku up in a skirt, Katsuki thinks, plans already whirring around in his mind as he strides off with the meat bun perched happily on his shoulder. Then I’ll show ‘em, and this fucking defective game.

“I can’t believe he actually fell for it,” Izuku whispers, gaze trailing after Katsuki’s rapidly-disappearing form.

“I did say he had a heart deep down somewhere,” Shouto replies with a little shrug, before he pats Izuku’s shoulder and strides after his partner.

It’s stupid and childish, will likely make Katsuki even more mad at him if he ever catches onto their little ruse—but if they never get a pet or adopt a child in their life, at least they have this game-generated meat bun.

And he does make for a cute little wife, Shouto thinks with a satisfied smile. My cute little wife, he amends as he draws near, slipping a hand into Katsuki’s—and though Katsuki sneers, he also squeezes his hand back, which is good enough for him.