#I've just been trying to stay awake bc I keep falling asleep in my chair and fucking up my back and sleep schedule

[smalltimidbean]

Going Through It This Week

[the-final-sif]

listen i would love to see more of the whole "katsuki's been kidnapped multiple times" bc it's one of my favorite headcanons i've seen for him. i love ppl adding layers to his character and his experiences and i wanna know what you have planned past everyone finding out

Okay, I’m gonna go off of the “they found out after Katsuki was kidnapped again and they only knew that it happened when he finally showed back up to school.” route.

Katsuki gets kinda weirded out by how everyone’s reacting so weirdly, he doesn’t understand why Aizawa is asking him so many questions or making a big deal out of it. Sure, he’s kinda guessed by now that it’s not normal after all, but that doesn’t explain any of this.

They’re in Recovery Girl’s office now, Aizawa has already been fussing at him and gotten a report on his injuries. Recovery Girl is out at the moment but she should be back soon. Katsuki has already tried to argue that he bandaged all his injuries up himself, but the glare he got from his teacher put a stop to that.

Now they’ve moved on to Aizawa questioning him on his previous kidnappings and his teacher just seems to be getting more and more stressed out. Katsuki doesn’t understand what he’s doing wrong, but it’s freaking him out because he’s been rationalizing and dealing with all of this for so long. Finally, he snaps.

“Why do you care?” And he meant it as a sarcastic remark, but Aizawa can hear the tremor in his voice, can see the minute shake of his shoulders, how Katsuki won’t meet his eyes. 

“Kid, you got kidnapped. Of course I care about that, I’m your damn teacher and part of my goddamn job is keeping you safe.” He wants to say more, wants to say that Katsuki is a fucking child, and that on it’s own should be reason enough for him to care. That it’s not just a part of his job, he cares about Katuski himself. But Aizawa knows better then to say that. Maybe one day, but not today. Not when Katsuki’s already trembling and exhausted. Not when his pride couldn’t bare the insult of care, of being seen as the child he is.

“I mean, yeah, I guess I can kinda get you asking questions about the shit that went down this weekend, even though I had it under control, but what’s up with asking all these fucking questions about me being stupid when I was younger? None of it matters, I got out, I dealt with it, I learned from my shitty mistakes and I moved on. It doesn’t change anything. I’m fine.”

Sometimes, Aizawa wonders if Katsuki says these things because he genuinely believes them, or if he says them because if he doesn’t, if he didn’t dismiss the pain and shrug off the weight of his fears, then he might shatter under the burden of it all.

“Katsuki,” and that one word holds too much fucking emotion in it for Katsuki to take, he wants to curl into a ball and go to sleep, his heart is still to raw and his brain too messed up from having chains on his wrists and a muzzle forced into his mouth again. “Just because you aren’t dead or maimed doesn’t mean you’re fine. This stuff, it hurts. It leaves scars. I don’t know what the fuck was going on in your childhood that you were left to deal with that by yourself, but you aren’t alone in this anymore, okay?”

It’s been a long fucking weekend, and Katsuki is so tired that he can’t keep his walls up. Not quite. So he doesn’t argue, just ducks his head in a half nod as he tries to pretend there aren’t tears welling up in his eyes.

Aizawa can’t help himself then, he sighs, sitting down beside Katsuki on the bench and slinging an arm over the kid’s shoulders. It’s a gentle motion, a light squeeze, but Katsuki leans into it just a little bit and that’s enough.

Recovery Girl gets there soon after, and Katsuki protests healing at first, he doesn’t have much stamina left and there’s no way he can go back to class afterwards, but Aizawa tells him on no uncertain terms that he is not going back to class today, and so he relents.

That leaves Aizawa with a sleeping teenager who he doesn’t want to leave alone and 19 worried teenagers waiting for him back in his classroom.

In the end he sends Mic to tell them class is canceled today. None of them were going to be able to focus anyways, and they need some time to recover from the shock anyways.

All-Might finds out not too long after that, and his mind flies back to Katsuki on that night when he fought Izuku. He struck suddenly, by how it wasn’t the kidnapping itself that upset Katsuki. It wasn’t the villains that could’ve killed him, could’ve done all sorts of awful and terrible things to him. It was seeing someone else hurt trying to rescue him that upset Katsuki. That he was unable to understand.

Izuku put it together too. They both understand and can’t understand at the same time.

Katsuki wakes up, and he’s still freaked out by how much people care, but he accepts it with time.

Things settle down eventually, they go back to normal, but not really. Not quite. There’s a new normal now.

Katsuki isn’t left alone much anymore. Not unless he’s in his room and he’s kicked everyone else out of it for some peace and quiet. If he’s going out somewhere, it seems at least one of his classmates is following after him. Most often it’s some subset of the bakusquad. If he’s going home it’s almost always Izuku. He’s surprised by how often it’s people outside of that group though. All of his classmates have gone with him at least once. Even though he bitches about it, he doesn’t mind that much. 

There’s a new set of rules for students too, when you leave the dorms you give an estimated return time, and if you’re more then an hour late and you don’t text your homeroom teacher to let them know you’re okay, they start looking for you.

Katsuki was annoyed by the new rules until some gen ed kid with a rich family actually got their lives saved by it. It makes the whole system feel less targeted, so he settled down about it. 

Aizawa doesn’t follow the kid around, god no, he’s not going to invade a student’s privacy like that, but he makes it more of a point to know where Katsuki is. To know when he’s going home, or just going out.

It quickly becomes apparent and then suspicious to Aizawa that Katsuki never goes home. Even Shouto goes home sometimes, he has siblings he likes to visit apparently. Katsuki doesn’t.

When Aizawa had asked if Katsuki had ever talked about the fact he was kidnapped with his parents, the teenager had laughed. Then quickly shut his mouth when he saw Aizawa’s worried expression. What kind of parents don’t notice their own damn kid going missing? Aizawa had been wondering for months now.

Summer break is coming up, and most of the kids are supposed to go home. Katsuki is one of the few that isn’t excited for it.

After getting approval from Nezu, Aizawa approaches Katsuki two weeks before summer starts. He’s staying at the dorms over the summer, for safety reasons. Aizawa already got approval from his parents. They didn’t even question it. Didn’t seem to care much. Katsuki is wide eyed, but he doesn’t protest, not even his usual bluster. He just agrees, muttering that it’ll be nice to keep up on his training, and that’s that.

It can never be quite that easy though, and that very fucking weekend Katsuki was in such a good mood that he went out with a few of his classmates to the mall. All it took was him getting distracted by something in a shop window, he pauses for a moment to look at it, and then the assholes were on him. Something’s over his mouth, and he’s slipping into blackness.

He wakes up chained up with a headache, and he’s fucking tired, but he knows the drill.

It doesn’t take him long to pick the locks, doesn’t take him long to dispatch the guards and tie them up. Doesn’t take long for him to find the dumbass behind this whole thing and start a fight. Every bone in his body aches, but he keeps fighting.

The whole thing can’t have taken him more then two hours, so he’s fucking shocked when just as he takes a nasty blow to the shoulder, the front door of the place is broken down and there are people rushing in. He’s still kinda drugged out, so it’s surreal for him as suddenly Aizawa is there and has hands on his shoulders, and he’s being steered outside.

His classmates are there. Some of them anyways. Izuku isn’t. He’s apparently inside, having only just been hauled off the now unconscious villain.

It’s like he’s been teleported to a new world, and it’s confusing and strange, the idea that people noticed he was gone. That they cared enough to come get him, when they probably knew he could handle it on his own.

He must’ve said that last bit out loud, Aizawa’s grimacing now.

“Just because you can handle it on your own, doesn’t mean you should have to kid. You deserve some goddamn heroes in your life too. Now sit own here and let the paramedic look you over.”

Katsuki does, he answers the paramedics questions as best he can, and they take some blood and tell Aizawa something about sleeping it off.

Sleeping sounds awfully nice right now.

The adrenaline is fading, and some part of Katsuki screams that he needs to stay awake. That he needs to get himself home or they’ll catch him again. That this is do or die.

But that’s not right. Aizawa’s here. His classmates are here. Other people are here, and for some reason they’re helping him.

Even if Katsuki’s brain is still worried, his body knows it’s safe, that it doesn’t need to keep pushing and pushing anymore, and so he fades out. Trusting for once in his goddamn life that he doesn’t need to save himself. For once in his life, it’s okay to let someone else do that for him.

When he wakes up, he’s in the infirmary, and he can see his classmates scattered around the room, Aizawa in a chair to his side, Mic leaning on Aizawa’s shoulder and All-Might to their left. Everyone’s asleep. It’s like 3 am in the morning.

One deep breath in, one deep breath out. Katsuki lets himself relax on purpose this time, and as he falls back asleep he does it knowing for a damn fact that everything will be okay when he wakes up. He’s not alone anymore.