#nitro whumptober 2022

[candleshopmenace]

fight fire with fire [make the flame grow] | day twelve: cave in

SUMMARY

“Bakugou?” Todoroki asks. “Are you alright?”

No, I’m laying on the filthy floor for fun, Icy-Hot, why don’t you join me?, he opens his mouth to say, but he only gets to, “No,” before the world fizzles to nothingness and he passes the fuck out.

—

When Aizawa-sensei decides to pair him up with Todoroki for a training exercise, Katsuki isn’t quite stupid enough to think that it could ever possibly end well.

Unfortunately, he’s right.

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When Aizawa-sensei announces a training exercise, then proceeds to tell them that they won’t even be allowed to choose their own teams - some bullshit about having to be able to work with people that they’re unfamiliar with - Katsuki isn’t quite stupid enough to think that it could ever possibly end well. The prediction is further solidified by the fact that Aizawa-sensei, in all his imperial wisdom, decides to pair him up with Todoroki fucking Shouto. 

Fucking Icy-Hot.

Katsuki looks over at Todoroki, who doesn’t even look fazed, and then looks back at Aizawa, his mouth open to protest. His teacher’s expression stops the complaint before it can even leave his mouth. He’s watching Katsuki, like he’s gauging his reaction, and, when he notices Katsuki staring, he just raises an eyebrow. What? he seems to be asking. Are you really going to admit that you can’t handle being partners with your own classmate? Nobody else is upset, Bakugou, so why are you?

Katsuki grits his teeth and looks away, giving up. In the battle of wills, he’s the one who blinks first. He’s distracted throughout the rest of Aizawa’s lecture about safety and the importance of teamwork, and, by the time that the class starts to disperse towards the training grounds, Katsuki has no fucking clue as to what he’s supposed to be doing. He walks along with his classmates anyways, listening for clarification before he asks it - asking is the simplest choice, the most logical, but the consequence isn’t always worth the easy answer.

Kirishima jogs up beside him and claps a hand down on his shoulder. “How are you feeling, Bakugou?” he asks, and, out of the corner of his eye, Katsuki can see a flash of gleaming white as his friend grins at him.

“Go away,” Katsuki snaps, shrugging Kirishima’s hand off. “Go bother Pinky.”

“Nah.” Kirishima continues loping along beside him, smile never faltering, wide and shark-toothed. “I like being with you.”

The knot in Katsuki’s chest loosens, just slightly, and he has to glare down at the ground to hide the way that his face is burning. Kirishima is always so fucking honest about his feelings that it makes Katsuki feel like he’s speaking a whole different language, like the rest of the world is rushing by him and he’s the only one that’s standing still. 

Kirishima loops an arm around his shoulders like it's the most natural thing in the world and, leaning forward so that he can see Katsuki’s expression, so that Katsuki can see his, he says, “You know what I’ve never noticed, Bakugou?”

“What.”

“You’re actually taller than me. You just slouch so much that I’ve never noticed before now. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Not really,” Katsuki says, trying to sound bored, but the way that Kirishima’s eyes glint with amusement tells him that his attempt was unsuccessful. Katsuki swallows, stares at his feet. “Who are you paired up with?”

“I’m with Iida,” Kirishima says, and Katsuki knows even without looking that he’s frowning. “Aizawa-sensei really went out of his way to take us out of our comfort zones. Didn’t he pair you up with Todoroki?”

“Yep.”

“Yikes.” Kirishima shifts, his grip tightening almost imperceptibly. “That’s gotta suck. You two aren’t on the best of terms, right?”

That’s a nice way of putting it, and it's not even exactly true. Todoroki hasn’t been acting any differently towards Katsuki. It's Katsuki himself who has changed. It's Katsuki who’s single-handedly fucking things up, as always. He’s being immature, irrational, and he’s terrified that he’s going to get a failing grade on this training exercise - sabotaging himself is one thing, but sabotaging a classmate? Even one that he doesn’t like?

That’s a whole other fucking story.

But Katsuki doesn’t say that. He’s not like Kirishima, or Ashido - he can’t just talk like they can, can’t be as open. He likes to think that he would if he could, but he can’t. He can’t, and so he just huffs, thoroughly irritated, “Aizawa is a fucking sadist.”

“Aren’t all teachers?” Kirishima asks, without a beat missed.

Katsuki laughs, once, sharp. It's loud and completely involuntary, and he has to bite his tongue to stifle it. “You’re ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head.

Kirishima smirks, satisfied. “Pretty sure that says more about you than it does about me.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean, Shitty-Hair?”

Kirishima doesn’t elaborate, like the answer is instinctive, and they fall into an easy silence all the way until they reach Training Ground Beta. There, when they stop, Kirishima finally lets his arm drop from around Katsuki’s shoulders. He says, “Oh, by the way.”

Katsuki glances at him, wary. “What?”

“We’re doing another one of those rescue situations. You and Todoroki have to go into the basement layer of one of the buildings and bring the hostage back safely.” He clicks his tongue against his teeth, thinking, then shrugs and says, “That’s what Aizawa-sensei said, anyways. There’s probably more to it that he’s not telling us. You know how he is.”

Oh. So that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

“... I already knew all that,” Katsuki says, dismissing. “I was paying attention.”

Kirishima’s responding grin is big and bright and fucking blinding. “Right,” he says, and he sounds like he’s holding back a laugh. “Of course you were, Bakugou.”

It's not Todoroki himself that is the problem.

It's his fucking Quirk.

Sero, when Katsuki told him that, looked at him like he was crazy.

I’m not crazy, Katsuki had said, painfully aware that the words echoed hollow no matter the context. It reminds me of Dabi. All that Goddamned fire, it fucks with my brain.

To make it all worse, Katsuki has to see the bastard every day, since they live in the same fucking building. He’s tense whenever he leaves his room, expecting to turn a corner and find Todoroki watching him, expecting to turn a corner and find Dabi watching him, expecting to turn a corner and find a mirror, reflecting his image and revealing all his thoughts to the world, and what would people have to say about that, the fact that he couldn’t tell the difference between a hero and a villain? 

He knows what they would say.

The stress has gotten to him. 

It's too much.

He’s gone insane.

And maybe he has gone insane. Maybe he’s always been insane. Maybe he’s delusional, seeing patterns that aren’t there, jumping at shadows, waking up screaming, shaking and sick to his stomach and not even in control of his own fucking mind.

But, no. 

Katsuki isn’t crazy.

He’d know if he was crazy.

Still, there are moments where the light catches on Todoroki’s silhouette and throws it against the wall, looming, imposing, far too familiar, burned skin and flashing eyes and simmering anger, and it's on those nights that Katsuki doesn’t sleep.

So, it's not Todoroki himself that’s the problem, but that doesn’t mean that Katsuki is very enthusiastic about being stuck with him for God knows how long. Just the two of them. Underground. And it must show on his face, because the first thing that Todoroki does when they’re out of earshot of the rest of the class is turn to Katsuki and ask, blunt as ever, “Do you have a problem with me?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki says, automatic, then mentally curses himself for never being able to respond like a normal fucking person. But he’s committed to the bit, now, and so he continues, “I’ve got a lot. Which one are you referring to, Icy-Hot?”

“The one that’s making you avoid me.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Katsuki walks faster, feeling Todoroki’s eyes boring into the back of his head, burning. “Just because I don’t like being all buddy-buddy with you doesn’t mean that I’m avoiding you, it just means that I think you’re a stuck-up bastard.”

Todoroki doesn’t pause, doesn’t rise to the bait, just keeps walking, footsteps light behind Katsuki. He’s following him like he’s a pursuit predator, waiting for Katsuki to collapse from exhaustion. That thought just pisses Katsuki off even more, and he all but rips the door of their assigned building off of its hinges. He hears Todoroki mutter something under his breath and his hackles raise. He snaps, defensive, “What was that, Icy-Hot?”

Todoroki brushes past him. “I didn’t say anything.” 

“Bullshit.” Katsuki slams the door shut, cutting off the outside world and leaving them with nothing but the flickering overhead lights. There are probably cameras in here, which means that someone - Aizawa-sensei, most likely - is tracking their movements, but hopefully he can’t hear their conversation because Katsuki and Todoroki are supposed to be working as a team and bickering with each other probably doesn’t classify as teamwork. “I heard you. You said something.”

“I did not.” And Todoroki’s voice is flat, calm, but Katsuki swears that he can hear an undercurrent of smugness, like the cat that ate the fucking canary and knows that it got away with the crime. “Maybe you’re having hallucinations, Bakugou.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I never said you were.”

Katsuki seethes silently and walks ahead of Todoroki, yanking open the door that leads down to the basement. He tries to shut it before Todoroki can walk through, but Todoroki just wedges a foot between it and the frame. Katsuki glances down at the bastard’s shoes, mutters a curse. Steel-toed. He could stand there all day.

Katsuki spins on his heel and starts down the stairs, putting as much distance between the two of them as possible. It's dark - no surprise there - and he nearly falls on his face several times, but the good thing about being in pitch black is that no one can see your embarrassing stumbles. His feet hit the floor, and the lights come on, searing into Katsuki’s eyes. “Fuck,” he says, raising one hand to shadow them, then yells up the stairs, “Hurry the Hell up, Icy-Hot!”

Todoroki calls back, “You’re not very good at working in teams, are you?”

“Yeah, well.” Katsuki turns in a slow circle, inspecting his surroundings. “Group hugs and trust falls aren’t really my style.”

“And obviously all that you care about is style.” This time, Todoroki’s voice comes from right behind him, and Katsuki slams his elbow back on reflex. The motion is cut short when Todoroki grabs his arm and simply forces it down to his side, saying, “Aizawa-sensei will deduct points if you break my nose.”

“Like I give a shit, Icy-Hot,” Katsuki snaps, his heart thudding so hard in his chest that it's fucking painful. He yanks away from Todoroki, shoves his hands in his pockets, and stalks down the hallway. If not for Todoroki’s inhumanly fast reflexes, he probably would’ve gotten more than a broken nose - he would’ve been knocked out, and then Katsuki would’ve had to drag his sorry ass all the way back upstairs. “Don’t fucking sneak up on me.”

“I wasn’t sneaking up on you,” Todoroki says, and now there’s finally something in his voice other than bland indifference. He sounds annoyed, almost. “You just weren’t paying attention. Just like you weren’t paying attention when Aizawa-sensei was explaining the assignment.”

“I was paying attention,” Katsuki snarls. Then, as an afterthought, “Fuck you.”

“No,” Todoroki says, sounding even more annoyed, “you weren’t. I saw you. When Aizawa-sensei said that we were going to be partners, you looked like you’d just been handed a death sentence.”

“Why the Hell were you watching me?” Katsuki yanks open the door to a service hallway and starts down the path, raking his fingers along the wall to orient himself because there’s not as much light in here as there was back in the main hall. “Goddamn creep.”

“I’m just trying to figure out why you hate me.”

“Why do you even care? We’re not friends.”

Todoroki goes silent for a moment, then says, “Maybe so, but it's still important to be civil to your future coworkers. You never know when you might need to team up with them. What happens if you can’t work well with someone because of a petty disagreement? What do you think will happen then, Bakugou?”

It's maybe the longest thing that Katsuki has heard Todoroki say uninterrupted, ever, and so he keeps his own response short and simple. “I guess I’ll die.”

Todoroki takes a deep, deep breath. Katsuki’s sure that if he turned around and squinted, he’d see the bastard glaring daggers at him.

Katsuki quickens his pace.

They continue walking in silence for several minutes, but, unlike how it was with Kirishima, this one is tense and charged with static. It's like they’re both thinking so loudly that it's bordering just on the verge of being audible, settling like a blanket of needles across Katsuki’s skin. He jolts when Todoroki finally speaks, voice low.

“You piss me off, Bakugou.”

Katsuki’s steps stutter for just a moment, and then he keeps moving forward. “Get in line, bastard.”

There’s a harsh clang! from behind him, loud and metallic, that can either be the building settling or Todoroki kicking the shit out of something random to avoid punching Katsuki. It's probably the latter. He tends to have that kind of effect on people. 

“I don’t know why you seem to hate me more than you hate any of our other classmates, and I’m not sure if I even want to know.” Todoroki’s words echo against the walls. “I just want it to stop.” When Katsuki doesn’t respond, he seems to get even more angry, and his voice has a waspish snap to it when he says, “You keep acting like I’m actively dragging you down, but you didn’t even know what you were doing until Kirishima explained it to you. And, even now, you’re just wandering around - do you know where you’re going? Do you even care if we get a bad grade? You keep calling me a bastard, but how am I the bastard when you’re pretty much useless?”

“Fine,” Katsuki snaps, fists clenched so tightly that they ache. “You don’t want my help finding the damn hostage dummy? You’re on your own.”

“You aren’t even helping!”

“You aren’t, either! You’re just following me around like a fucking dog!” 

Todoroki sucks in a sharp breath, presumably preparing to accuse Katsuki, once again, of being useless, and Katsuki readies himself to say something scathing in reply, but then before either of them can speak the ceiling shudders above their heads.

Todoroki’s first reaction, apparently, is to look at Katsuki with wide, accusing eyes. “What’d you do?”

Katsuki sneers at him. “I didn’t do shit.” But he looks up, worried, as the building gives another rumble, louder than the first and so deep that his teeth rattle in his jaw. 

Todoroki takes a step back, then another. “Maybe -” he starts, but Katsuki never learns what he’s about to say, because, at that moment, the entire fucking ceiling collapses. The unfortunate thing about that is that Katsuki happens to be standing in just the right spot to get whacked in the head with a falling chunk of concrete.

He hits the ground like a sack of fucking rocks.

Pain rings through his skull with the clarity of a church bell, and everything is dark. He can’t tell if it's dark because he has his eyes closed or if it's dark because all the lights are broken, but it's dark, fucking dark, and then a flame fizzles to life right by his face and he realizes that, yes, his eyes had been open the entire time. 

“Bakugou?” Todoroki asks. “Are you alright?”

No, I’m laying on the filthy floor for fun, Icy-Hot, why don’t you join me?, he opens his mouth to say, but he only gets to, “No,” before the world fizzles to nothingness and he passes the fuck out.

History echoes. History repeats. Todoroki and Dabi are more alike than they should be, and that’s not something that Katsuki can outrun. That’s not something that he can fight.

He is waking up in his dorm, as is the norm these days, and he is slumped over his desk. He’d fallen asleep while doing homework, or while studying - he can’t tell. His vision blurs if he focuses too hard. He stands up. Stretches. When he turns around, Dabi is sitting on his bed, reading one of Katsuki’s books. Katsuki goes by him into the adjacent bathroom, expecting and accepting Dabi’s presence. As he walks past, Dabi clamps a hand around the back of Katsuki’s neck.

Glad you decided to join us, kid.

Katsuki wakes with a jolt, panting, his chest aching with how hard his heart is beating. 

The banality of the horror is what makes it terrifying. The idea that he accepted Shigaraki’s offer. That he said yes.

The idea that Dabi would be able to find him regardless of his location.

Breathe, Katsuki tells himself. In, out. In. Out. Breathe. There’s no one here, no one is touching you, stop acting like this.

The first thing he notices is that his tongue is pasted to the roof of his mouth with concrete dust. He tastes blood and grit whenever he swallows, which he does, convulsively, trying to clear his throat. He coughs, once, harsh, and just in his periphery, a figure appears, fuzzy and indistinct and shaking in the wavering, flickering light.

“Good morning, Bakugou.” Todoroki steps into view, and Katsuki sees that his shoulder is coated in flames, casting shadows over his skin. “Or afternoon. I don’t know how long we’ve been down here.”

Katsuki blinks at him, his still slightly-incoherent mind overlaying the image of Dabi on his classmate’s face, blurring the two together until they look like the exact same person. He can’t keep himself from tensing when Todoroki crouches on the ground beside him, and the movement sends a flare of pain racing up his leg. He sucks in a sharp breath and squeezes his eyes shut, but they fly back open not a second later when he hears Todoroki ask, “What’s your favorite color?”

Katsuki winces as Todoroki puts his hands on his leg, stares at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“Personally,” Todoroki says, “I like the color blue.”

“Like, a computer error screen?”

“No, light blue. Almost white.”

“Fucking basic -”

Todoroki shoves his hands down hard on the lower half of Katsuki’s leg. There’s a hot burst of blinding pain and Katsuki curses, trying to pull away, but Todoroki just holds him in a firm grip, unrelenting. Katsuki sags back against the ground, gasping for air, tears burning the corners of his eyes. 

“Bastard,” he hisses between gritted teeth.

Todoroki gives him a look that’s almost apologetic. “It was broken,” he explains. “I had to set the bone.”

“Well, it hurt like a bitch, Icy-Hot.” Katsuki lets his head loll back until he’s staring at what remains of the ceiling. He can dimly see lights blinking sporadically up above, not close enough to really be any help but close enough to annoy the shit out of him. “How’d that happen, anyways?”

“A tile fell on your leg. I had to pull it off.”

“No, not - not that. How’d the fucking building collapse on us?”

Todoroki doesn’t respond right away, just follows Katsuki’s gaze to the gaping hole above them. Then he says, thoughtfully, “Maybe Aizawa-sensei accidentally hit the destabilizers.”

“The… what?”

“The destabilizers,” Todoroki repeats. “In the control room. Every building is wired to the control panels, so Aizawa can basically do anything he wants down there, including -” he glances back up at the ceiling, grimaces “- cause a cave in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, maybe he saw that we were fighting and decided to lighten the mood.” 

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“It was a joke, Bakugou.” Todoroki frowns at him. “You really do have a concussion, don’t you?”

Does he?

Katsuki shifts, pushing himself up with his arms, wincing at the ache of his entire body. “Maybe,” he says, struggling into a sitting position. “Do you think that’s why my head hurts?”

“I’m surprised if all it’s doing is hurting, seeing as you got hit pretty solidly.”

“Ah, well.” Katsuki brings his fingers to his scalp, hissing out a breath when his fingers come back wet and glistening red in Todoroki’s impromptu torchlight. “My mom always said I had a thick skull.”

Todoroki coughs, loud and sudden, and the sound is suspiciously similar to a laugh. He smothers it in a closed fist, coughs again, and then looks at Katsuki. “Do you think that you can walk?”

Katsuki stares at him for a long, long moment. “Can I… walk.”

Realization dawns on Todoroki’s face, wavering and uncertain in the light of his flames. “Oh,” he says, just that, and then falls silent. 

“I mean, maybe if you made me a splint…”

“I don’t have the materials.”

“That is the lamest excuse I have heard in my entire life, Icy-Hot,” Katsuki says, but, as he looks around, he realizes that it's also the truth. “Damnit. So, what? We just wait around to be saved?” Before Todoroki can say anything, he answers himself, “No. No way. Help me stand up, Icy-Hot.” “But your leg -”

“Fuck my leg.” He holds out a hand, expectant, and, with what is obviously great reluctance, Todoroki reaches down and takes it. 

“Are you sure?” Todoroki asks, and, when Katsuki nods, he sighs and hauls Katsuki to his feet.

The regret is instantaneous. 

His world screeches to a halt as the consequences of his own fucking stupidity hit him like a tidal wave, rolling in over his head and drowning out Todoroki’s voice with the roar of his pulse in his ears. Fuck, he thinks. Fuck. Bad idea. Really, really bad idea. The pain is like a living thing, an animal with a thousand teeth, gnawing at his leg. He doesn’t know if he’s crying. He doesn’t even know if he’s breathing. All he knows is that his entire body is burning and he’s very, very close to passing out again.

Finally, he’s able to hear past the sound of his own heartbeat. “Bakugou?” Todoroki is asking. He sounds halfway between annoyed and concerned, but the annoyance melts off as soon as Katsuki hisses a ragged, shaking breath between his teeth. “Do you need to sit back down?”

Katsuki shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He can feel blood dripping down his face, the wound apparently having opened again from being jostled. “I’m fine,” he somehow manages to say, even though he’s pretty sure that his leg isn’t the only thing that’s broken. It's fine. He’s fine. He just needs to get the fuck out of here so that he can go to Recovery Girl and find out what freak accident landed him in this situation in the first place. 

He really, really hopes that it was an accident.

“- ugou,” he hears Todoroki say, and he realizes that Todoroki had been talking to him the entire time. He also realizes that, at some point of time, he’s been shifted so that his arm is around Todoroki’s shoulders. Todoroki has put out his flames and relit them in his hand so that Katsuki doesn’t get burned, and Katsuki’s pride demands that he yank away and try to walk on his own, but, the moment that the thought occurs, he’s overwhelmed with a full-body ache of exhaustion that leaves him so dizzy that he feels physically sick to his stomach. Todoroki repeats, “Bakugou.”

“What?” Katsuki snaps, trying to turn his head so that he can see Todoroki’s face, so that he can glare at him. It doesn’t work out as planned, though, and just leaves him feeling even worse than before.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Icy-Hot, fuckin’ peachy, just give me a moment,” he tries to say, but knows as soon as the words leave his mouth that maybe a third of them come out as planned. He hears Todoroki take a short, sharp breath, and then there’s a foom! sound that makes Katsuki’s heart stop, and the flames in Todoroki’s hand burn bigger and brighter than ever, too close, too fucking close, and he jerks away and the world turns into a kaleidoscope of up-down-up and when his vision clears he’s still standing but the fire is gone and Todoroki is holding onto him so tightly that it hurts.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Todoroki says, slow. “I’ll go and get help. How does that sound?”

Katsuki feels so confused. He feels like he’s miles away from everything that matters, tethered to the ground only by the pain ringing through his body. He feels like he’s about to throw up, like he’s dying, and he knows that what Todoroki is saying is logical, is the best choice, but he’s not quite selfless enough to go along with it. The idea of being stuck here, in the dark, by himself, injured and helpless and alone…

He shakes his head.

Todoroki sighs, and Katsuki can’t help but wonder if that question had been a test. If he was meant to say yes. If he was meant to give up and give in, if refusing made him more of a burden than an asset. 

Has everything been a test?

Has Katsuki learned the wrong lesson from all of them?

Has Katsuki learned anything?

“... Right,” Todoroki says, and the flames flicker back to life, lighting his face in a campfire glow. Katsuki forces himself not to flinch, just closes his eyes and breathes in deep. There’s nothing stopping Todoroki from dropping him and leaving. He has to remember that. They’re not standing on equal ground right now, because Katsuki is hurt, Katsuki is useless. He has to remember. “Well, then. Just lean against me, I guess. Don’t put weight on your leg.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Katsuki says, enunciating each word to make sure that it comes out clear, to make sure the clusterfuck of a sentence that he said a few minutes earlier doesn’t happen again. “Recovery Girl will fix it.”

Todoroki starts forward, his arm braced against Katsuki’s back to prod him to follow, and it's a while before he talks again. When he does, though, he says, “But it’ll hurt. You shouldn’t put yourself through more pain than necessary.”

“I don’t give a shit, Icy-Hot. I just wanna get out of here.”

Todoroki adjusts his grip so that he’s supporting more of Katsuki’s weight. He says, almost casually, “You never told me what your favorite color was,” and now Katsuki recognizes it for what it is, an attempt to take his mind off the pain.

A thought flutters across his mind, unbidden. Dabi wouldn’t do that. He stumbles a little bit, rights himself, is quiet for a moment before he says, “Orange.” He swallows, says, “And I like green.”

“What kind of green?” 

“Dark -” Out of nowhere, nausea slams into him, making his throat tighten and his head spin. Spots dance in his vision and he blinks, blinks again, shaky on his feet and tripping over himself, and it's a minute or so before he can speak again but Todoroki is patient, Todoroki waits and doesn’t force an answer, and the thought comes back, full-force, Dabi wouldn’t do that. 

Is his mind trying to convince him that there’s no reason to see similarities between Todoroki and Dabi? 

Is that what’s happening? 

Has he stooped so low that his own damn brain has to slip him sly reminders that his classmate isn’t a villain? 

Dabi wouldn’t do that. 

Yeah. 

He knows.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growls, low in his throat.

Todoroki glances at him, eyebrows slightly raised. “Me?”

Katsuki shakes his head, wonders if he should explain. No. That’s not the kind of thing you tell anyone, ever, that you’ve been mentally comparing them to a kidnapper for weeks, that you don’t hate them, you just hate their Quirk, something they can’t control. It's easier, he thinks, if he doesn’t breathe a word about it. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. But isn’t that what they all said?

He shivers so hard that it's almost a convulsion. Todoroki’s grip tightens, and, when Katsuki looks over, he sees that he’s staring at him with obvious concern. Katsuki resists the urge to laugh. Todoroki is worried about him. Todoroki is worried about him, and it's actually showing on his face, and so that means that Katsuki must look really, really fucking bad.

They keep walking, with Katsuki getting increasingly more disconnected with every step. His entire body is nothing but pain. His entire life is nothing but pain. He is the embodiment of pain, and it's all his fucking fault because he couldn’t stop arguring with Todoroki.

Just before they reach the stairs, Katsuki turns to the side and throws up. It's nothing but stomach acid, and then it turns into dry heaving. He braces himself against the wall, panting, involuntary tears streaming from his eyes. There’s a hand on his back, steady, and he blinks and Todoroki is there, leaning down to look at him.

“Bakugou,” he says.

“I’m fine,” Katsuki says. Maybe. He doesn’t really know if he’s spoken at all, doesn’t know if this is just a dream, a delusion. He says it again, “I’m fine,” and straightens back up. He wipes a hand across his mouth. “Let’s go.”

“Bakugou, we need to go up the stairs. I’m not sure -”

“I said, let’s go.”

Todoroki frowns. He wants to argue, Katsuki can tell, but Katsuki doesn’t give him time to say anything - he just slings his arm back around Todoroki’s shoulder and waves a hand towards the stairs. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go.”

And so they do.

[candleshopmenace]

vengeance in my heart [death in my hand] | day eleven: sloppy bandages

SUMMARY

“You can’t see me,” Shouto insists, then actually peeks around Fuyumi’s legs to stare Touya dead in the eye. 

“You’re looking right at me, bud,” Touya says. “I can definitely see you.”

“No,” Shouto says, simple as anything, and it's so unbearably adorable that Touya’s heart thuds painfully in his chest. 

“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “I can.”

—

Touya’s entire body aches, and he feels like shit, but he has his siblings with him and they’re laughing and smiling and it's in moments like these that he can pretend that everything is okay.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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When Touya wakes up, the first thing that he notices is this: there is blood in his mouth. 

That fact in and of itself isn’t unusual, but it's the second thing he notices that sets this situation apart from countless others, and the second thing he notices is this: he’s not in the training room.

He can tell because, instead of hard wooden paneling under his back, there’s something soft. Plus, it smells different - there’s no ever-present scent of ashes and burning meat. It's… weird. He doesn’t necessarily enjoy waking up in the training room, but at least it's familiar. So, yeah. It's weird, it's odd, and he doesn’t fucking like it.

Touya tenses and sits up, wincing at the way that his muscles protest the movement. They’re sore - no surprise there, at least - and he already knows that it's going to be Hell to get dressed in his uniform for school, much less actually go to school, sit down for hours, and come back home to get his ass beaten into the floor all over again. 

Rinse, repeat. 

But orders are orders, and Touya knows what his role is. He’s his father’s favored son, and that means that he comes when his father calls and he goes when his father points, and, if something in him longs for more, well. 

He’s smart enough by now to know that nothing good ever comes from speaking his mind.

Back to the unfamiliar setting, though, he’s definitely not in the training room, not unless his father got drunk and hired a new interior designer. He’s not in his bedroom, either. Or anywhere that he recognizes. That should be enough to instantly set him on edge, but he’s so tired that he can only manage a kind of weary, muted shock as he traces his eyes across the pale pink walls, the posters, the dolls and stuffed animals gathered at the foot of the bed. 

Blandly, to himself, he says, “What.” 

He says, staring particularly hard at a teddy bear with bright green fur, “What the fuck.” 

The door to the room creaks open, and Touya doesn’t turn his head quickly enough to avoid getting hit by a blur of white. He almost yelps at the contact, because the way the kid’s hands are digging into his back actually really fucking hurts, but he bites back the sound, settling on balling the sheets up in his hands instead. “Hey, Natsuo. What’s up, buddy?” 

His sibling goes still in his lap, and Touya thinks for one terrifying moment that he’s gotten the wrong name, that it's actually Fuyumi who’s attacking him like this, but then Natsuo winds his arms around Touya’s neck, effectively choking him, and whispers in his ear, “I’m so happy that you’re awake.”

“Yeah,” Touya wheezes. He feels like he’s been run over by a truck, and Natsuo isn’t really helping matters, but he can’t quite bring himself to voice his complaints out loud. “I’m awake, yeah. What’s going on?”

“You were bleeding,” Natsuo tells him, and his grip gets even tighter, like he’s afraid that Touya will disappear if he lets up the pressure for even a second. “I thought you were going to die. Fuyumi thought so, too, even though she says that she didn’t.” He buries his head in the crook of Touya’s shoulder, and his voice is muffled when he says, “You looked really bad.”

Touya closes his eyes and tries to remember the events that led up to this. What was going on before he lost consciousness? He’d probably said something snarky to his father again - that was usually how he ended up being knocked out - but how did he end up here? And why was he bleeding? Burns didn’t bleed, they… well, they burned. The flesh was already cauterized, which was safer in the long run but still hurt like Hell, and so he definitely shouldn’t have been bleeding. 

Maybe Natsuo was mistaken.

“Hey,” he says, jostling Natsuo to get his attention. “Are you sure I was bleeding?”

Natsuo leans back so that he can see Touya’s face. He nods and rubs at his eyes, which Touya is now realizing are rimmed with red. Like he’s been crying. Like he’s been crying because of Touya.

Guilt sinks Touya’s stomach like a stone, because, damnit, he thought that he was past making people cry because of him.

Before he can think of something to say, a flash of movement in his peripheral vision catches his attention. He looks over and sees that Fuyumi is standing in the doorway, and then it clicks - he’s in Fuyumi’s bedroom. Of course. Who else would decorate like an eleven year old girl other than an eleven year old girl?

Which begs the question, Why the fuck did he wake up in here and not the training room?

Like she can hear his thoughts, Fuyumi fiddles with the hem of her dress and says, “Dad told Mom to get you out of there so that he could get someone to clean the floor.” She stares down at her feet as she talks, a noted nervous habit, one that he doesn’t comment on. “My room was the closest, so we brought you here.”

Someone to clean the floor.

Ah, so he had been bleeding. 

“Shit, Fuyumi,” he says. “Did I ruin your sheets?”

He shifts Natsuo off of his lap and moves to swing his legs over the side of the bed and stand, then pauses when he notices that there’s someone behind Fuyumi. The figure is shorter than her, so he hadn’t seen them until now. There’s only one person it could be, and so Touya says, amused, “Shouto, I can see you.”

Shouto shakes his head, a swirl of red and white, like he thinks that if he denies it enough then Touya’s observational skills will cease to exist. “No,” he says, simple as anything, and it's so unbearably adorable that Touya’s heart thuds painfully in his chest. 

“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “I can.”

Shouto shakes his head harder, then actually peeks around Fuyumi’s legs to stare Touya dead in the eye. “You can’t see me,” he insists in that way that only toddlers can, like his word is law and anything that goes against it is obviously wrong. Babies and egotistical maniacs, they’re the same. They think they rule the world.

“You’re looking right at me, bud,” Touya says.

“No.”

Natsuo huffs, yanking on Touya’s shirt to get his attention. “Anyways,” he says, clearly irritated that Touya hadn’t been focused on him, “you were bleeding, and -”

“Oh!” Fuyumi says, ignoring the way that Natsuo snaps, I was talking! “Shouto, didn’t you want to give Touya something?”

She stares down at Shouto, expectant, and Shouto stares up at her, uncomprehending. Fuyumi smiles at him and prompts, “To make him feel better?”

Touya can see the moment that her words process in Shouto’s head. Realization dawns across his face, and he nods so hard that Touya’s worried that his neck will snap. He detaches himself from Fuyumi and wobbles toward Touya in that drunken old-man way that little kids walk, and Touya raises his eyebrows when he sees the first-aid kit held in his baby brother’s hands. He glances up at Fuyumi, questioning, and she nods, making gestures for him to play along, and so when Shouto slams the box down onto the bed, Touya obligingly asks, “What’s that?”

Shouto crawls up onto the bed so that he can pat Touya’s leg through the sheets. He says, very matter-of-factly, “Magic.” He grips the latch of the kit with both hands and tries to pry it open. 

After watching him struggle for several moments, Touya asks, “Do you need help?”

“No!” Shouto says, offended, like Touya’s offer was a direct insult to his pride. “It’s mine!” He fights with the box for another minute or so, then scowls and shoves it towards Natsuo, demanding, “Do it.” When Natsou flicks it open in less than a second, Shouto’s frown only deepens. He glares at Natsuo, and Natsuo stares back, bemused. Finally, Shouto huffs, irritated, and turns to Touya, holding out his hands. “I want your arm.”

When Touya hesitates, Shouto huffs again, louder, and repeats, “I want your arm!”

“Okay, okay, jeez!” Touya gives him his arm. He watches, eyebrows raised, as Shouto - with great flourish - lifts a roll of bandages from the first-aid kit and starts to wind it around his forearm in a way that honestly does a really shitty job of covering the cut that Touya hadn’t even noticed until now, what the fuck. 

“Wow,” Fuyumi murmurs. She’s sidled up behind Shouto and is peering over his head, admiring his handiwork. “How’d you get that?”

Touya shrugs.

Fuyumi sighs, obviously unsatisfied with the answer, but she drops the subject. 

Natsuo, though, isn’t quite as considerate. He presses himself to Touya’s side and stares up at his face and asks, with all the enthusiasm of a little kid watching a movie villain get defeated by a hero, “How do you get hurt all the time, anyways? Do you get into a lot of fights? Are you going to have scars?” He grins, giddy. “Scars are badass!”

“Natsuo,” Fuyumi admonishes. “Don’t curse.”

“You’re not my mom,” Natsuo says, smug. “You can’t tell me what to do. And even if you could, I’m faster than you. You can’t catch me.” He looks up at Touya again, the grin still firmly in place, unwavering. “Have you seen me run, Touya? I’ve gotten really fast. I bet that I could even beat you! You need to play with us more - you used to play with us all the time, but now you don’t. Why’d you stop?”

Touya blinks down at him, stunned into silence by the onslaught of questions. Before he can come up with an answer to any of them, Shouto smacks the flat of his hand against Touya’s arm and loudly proclaims, “Finished!”

Touya looks at the bandages and says, “Oh.” They’re certainly… unique. “It looks great, Sho. You did an awesome job.”

Fuyumi and Natsuo nod their agreement, and Shouto beams at all of them. “I did it by myself,” he says, proud, then clambers up to Touya’s lap and grabs his face. Touya forces himself not to tense - this is a rare moment in which they can all be together, happy, and he refuses to ruin it just because of his irrational reactions to literally everything. Shouto presses their foreheads together and peers into Touya’s eyes. “You feel better?”

Touya takes a deep, deep breath. “Yeah,” he says, and pulls his baby brother into a hug. Shouto squirms a little but then settles in surprisingly quickly, even reaching up to wrap his arms around Touya’s neck, and Touya has to press his face into Shouto’s hair to hide the fact that he’s inexplicably close to tears. 

Inhale. 

Exhale. 

Breathe. 

He holds Shouto a bit tighter. He loves him so much. He loves all of them so much. He loves his entire fucking family even though he can hardly be considered a part of it save for the moments like this, where he can spend time with his siblings and talk to them and remind himself that they’re real, like he’s real. 

“I feel better.”

[candleshopmenace]

pain makes you strong [fear makes you brave] | day sixteen: mind control

SUMMARY

“Behave, Katsuki,” Auntie Mitsuki says, taking his arm and shaking him a little. “Tell your friend how you got hurt.” When Kaachan doesn’t answer, just glares at the ground, she shakes him harder. “Katsuki.”

Kaachan’s shoulders slump. Without looking at Izuku, he mutters, “I fell down the stairs.”

… Izuku’s pretty sure that he’s not telling the truth.

—

When Kaachan is dropped off at school in the morning, he’s wearing a cast.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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Izuku is interrupted from the show - he’d been watching All Might take down villains! - by the door to Kaachan’s bedroom swinging open so hard that it slams against the wall.

It's his mother, looking like a ghost with how pale her face is. With the door open like this, he can hear the sounds of yelling coming from all the way downstairs.

And, somehow, without his mother even saying a word, Izuku knows.

“Come on, honey,” his mother says, and she holds out a hand. It's shaking. She’s shaking. “We need to get out of here.”

Izuku presses the red button on the remote and scrambles off the bed, taking his mother’s outstretched hand and letting her pull him out of the bedroom. She leads him down the hall and down the stairs and down the hall again until they reach the front door, and, even though he knows that he shouldn’t, Izuku can’t help but glance over his shoulder. Auntie Mitsuki is kneeling down in front of Kaachan and holding him by the collar of his shirt, and, when she raises a hand with an angry expression on her face, Izuku flinches and stares at the floor.

“Don’t look,” his mother hisses, even though she’s looking, too. She yanks open the door and pushes Izuku outside first, then grabs his arm and practically drags him to the car waiting in the driveway.

They almost make it.

“Inko!”

Izuku turns, recognizing Uncle Masaru’s voice. 

He’s on the front porch, holding onto the railing with both hands, and behind him the door gapes like an open mouth. Someone is screaming and someone is crying, and Izuku feels a little sick because the crying sounds like it's coming from Kaachan. He wants to go back in there and help, but his mother is still holding him tight by the wrist and he doesn’t think that she’d be willing to let him go so that he could save his friend.

“Inko,” Uncle Masaru says again, but he sounds more calm than he did the first time, like he’s maybe taken a few deep breaths. Hanami-sensei always tells Kaachan to do that whenever he gets too angry about something. “You’ve got something planned?”

“I do,” Izuku’s mother says, and his head snaps up so that he can look at her because she’s not telling the truth. They don’t have anything planned, they never have anything planned. They were supposed to have dinner with Kaachan’s family, and Auntie Mitsuki said that Izuku and Kaachan could have a sleepover if Kaachan behaved. 

Izuku doesn’t think that he’s going to be able to have a sleepover tonight.

Uncle Masaru smiles, but something about it is wrong. His eyes usually crinkle at the corners when he smiles, but they’re not doing it now - in fact, he actually looks kind of upset, like he’s almost angry at Izuku’s mother. “Ah. And what could that be?”

Izuku winces as his mother’s grip tightens on his arm. 

She doesn’t speak for a long, long time, like she thinks that maybe if she doesn’t answer Uncle Masaru will go back inside and shut the door on all that loud crying. He doesn’t. He just leans against the railing and keeps smiling that wrong smile. It makes his face look like a mask, Izuku thinks. A plastic mask, the mouth nothing but a long, thin line stretching all the way up to his cheeks.

Finally, Izuku’s mother says, “I have a job interview.”

Uncle Masaru’s eyebrows shoot up high. “At this time of night?” he asks, sounding like he doesn’t believe her at all. “It's awfully late.”

“It's the only time that they could fit me in.” She takes a step back, then another, and turns and opens the door to the front seat beside the steering wheel. “Get in the car, Izuku.”

Izuku hesitates, then shivers when Uncle Masaru looks at him. “You’re leaving already, Izuku?” he asks, and he sounds sad. “Don’t you want to play with Katsuki some more?” Then, to Izuku’s mother, he says, “Why don’t you leave him here? He can have that sleepover Mitsuki promised, and it’ll keep him out of your hair until you finish the interview.”

“No,” Izuku’s mother says, and she pushes Izuku towards the car. He listens this time, clambering up into the seat. It's too big for him, and the door is too heavy to close, and so he buckles himself up and listens as his mother says, “It's fine, Masaru. I don’t want to be any trouble. Thank -”

Somebody screams.

It's nothing like it was before, when Auntie Mitsuki was fussing at Kaachan. There’s no words this time, just a long, drawn-out noise of pain that makes Izuku clap his hands over his ears. He hunches over into himself, trying to block out the sound, but it creeps between the cracks of his fingers and echoes in his head and he starts to cry because he’s never heard Kaachan sound like that, ever, not even that one time when Kariage accidentally hit him in the face with a baseball, and that had been really bad because it’d made Kaachan’s nose bleed and he had a big bruise on his eye for the rest of the week. 

“Holy shit,” he thinks he hears his mother say, and then the car door on Izuku’s side is slamming shut and his mother is climbing in on her side, turning her keys in the spot beneath the steering wheel. 

When Izuku uncurls and looks at her, he sees that she’s even paler than she was before, and she’s shaking again, all over. 

She backs down the driveway and moves the car onto the road, and Izuku looks out the window. The door to Kaachan’s house is shut, now, and Uncle Masaru isn’t on the porch anymore. Maybe he went inside, to help Kaachan with whatever was hurting him so much.

Izuku hopes so.

Everything is quiet in the car as his mother drives it down the road. Izuku doesn’t speak, just fiddles with the bottom of his shirt, the laces of his shoes. He doesn’t think that he should talk. Not until his mother talks, anyways.

And, finally, when they’re almost home, she does. “That wasn’t right,” she says, and Izuku looks at her. Her eyes are red where they should be white, and she keeps sniffing the way that Yasu does whenever the people with lawnmowers cut the grass at school. “A mom shouldn’t act that way, Izuku. It's not normal. A mom shouldn’t hit or yell.”

“But Auntie Mitsuki hits Kaachan,” Izuku protests. “And she yells at him, too. A lot!”

His mother takes a deep breath. “Exactly,” she says, and her voice sounds wrong, just like Uncle Masaru’s smile looked wrong. She sounds angry. It's weird, and Izuku doesn’t like it at all, so he pulls his legs up to his chest and leans as far away as possible. His mother doesn’t seem to notice. She just says, in that angry voice, “You’re not going over there again, Izuku.”

Izuku gapes at her, eyes wide. “But - Kaachan -”

“Don’t argue with me about this, Izuku. My decision is final. You’re not going back over there ever again. It's too dangerous.” She looks away from the road so that she can glance at him. “Do you understand?”

Izuku nods, miserable, and they spend the rest of the drive in silence.

When Kaachan gets dropped off at school in the morning, he’s wearing a cast. It's bright orange, but the neon color just makes him look even more pale when he staggers into class and sits down in his spot on the carpet by Izuku. He doesn’t say anything, even when Kariage pokes him in the side and asks who he got into a fight with this time, and he still doesn’t say anything when Hanami-sensei crouches down in front of him and asks him if he’s okay. She gives up, eventually, and goes back to reading her book aloud, but she keeps looking at him like she’s worried.

When Kaachan finally speaks, it's when they’re all eating lunch. “Stop looking at me like that, Deku,” he says, and he sounds like he wants to be angry, but his voice is too rough and scratchy for him to be very scary. He mostly just sounds tired.

Izuku repeats his response several times in his head before he actually says it because he doesn’t want to make Kaachan even more unhappy. “What do you mean?”

Kaachan narrows his eyes at him, and Izuku realizes that there are dark smudges under them, like he somehow got black paint smeared there. And they’re red, too, the same way Izuku’s mother’s eyes were in the car last night. “Looking at me like I’m your fuckin’ pity project,” Kaachan snaps, then bites down angrily on a carrot. “I can still beat your damn ass, Deku.”

Izuku frowns at him. “I’m just worried,” he says, because he doesn’t know what Kaachan meant by pity project but it was probably something bad, if he said it like that. “You look tired. Did you sleep?”

Kaachan huffs. “No.” He picks at the grass for a moment, then tears off a piece and throws it in Izuku’s direction. “I was stuck in the fucking hospital all night.”

“Because of your arm?”

“No,” Kaachan says in a weird tone, stretching the word out. “Because of my leg.”

Izuku’s eyes go wide. “You hurt your leg, too?”

Kaachan tears out a whole handful of grass and throws it at him. “It's called sarcasm, Deku,” he says, laughing a little as he watches Izuku try to get all the dirt off of his clothes. “Keep up.”

“Kaachan, that was mean!”

Kaachan just grins and shrugs. “I don’t care.” He looks over his shoulder to where Kariage and Yasu are kicking a ball around in the parking lot and sighs. “This cast is a pain in the ass.” 

“I think that you’ll feel better in no time, Kaachan!”

Kaachan groans and turns back and finishes eating his lunch, frowning the entire time. He doesn’t let Izuku help clean up at first because he says that Izuku never does it properly, but then he accidentally spills his water bottle on an anthill and feels so bad about it that he shoves both of their lunchboxes into Izuku’s arms and refuses to speak until they make it back to class. After Izuku drops their stuff off by their backpacks, he grabs Kaachan’s wrist and pulls him towards the blocks in the corner. Kaachan huffs and sighs but starts to build a castle anyways, as best as he can with only one free hand. 

Izuku pauses in the middle of putting a red triangle block on top of one of the towers. Kaachan notices and stops, too, looks at Izuku with narrowed eyes. “The Hell do you think you’re doing?” he asks. “We’re not finished.”

Izuku stares at the ground. He really likes playing with Kaachan, and he can’t believe that his mother said that he couldn’t go over to his house anymore. Auntie Mitsuki got angry sometimes, but it's not as if she’d ever hurt Izuku. She hurt Kaachan, though, and Izuku’s mother had said that moms weren’t supposed to do that. And if moms weren’t supposed to do that…

“Kaachan?”

“What.”

“Is Auntie Mitsuki actually your mom?”

The question must surprise Kaachan a lot, because he turns to look at Izuku so fast that his cast knocks into one of the towers and sends it crashing to the floor. “Shit, Deku, look what you made me -” He huffs, cutting himself off, and narrows his eyes at Izuku. “Of course she’s my mom, the fuck made you say that?”

Izuku doesn’t look at him when he speaks. “My mom said that moms aren’t supposed to hit their kids.”

“Yeah, well. Auntie Inko is going soft.” Kaachan bends to pick up the blocks, putting them back in their box. “That’s what my mom says.”

Izuku swallows. “My mom said that I can’t come over to your house anymore.”

Kaachan freezes.

Izuku winces, watching Kaachan for any sudden movements. But he’s not moving at all. Izuku doesn’t think that he’s even breathing. He’s just standing there, silent, and Izuku can practically hear his thoughts rushing through his head.

And then Kaachan moves, and Izuku ducks as his friend kicks their castle so hard that it sends blocks bouncing off the wall. Izuku covers his face with his hands, peeking at Kaachan through the cracks in his fingers, waiting for him to calm down and take deep breaths like Hanami-sensei taught him to, but he doesn’t. Once all of the towers are gone, he turns on Izuku and starts yelling at him, so loudly that Izuku can’t even understand him, can only hear the noise. He catches some of the words, like stupid and Auntie and Deku, but, for the most part, he just flinches against the wave of sound coming from Kaachan’s mouth. 

Kaachan’s fist is curled tight by his side like he wants to hit Izuku with it, but he doesn’t. But he doesn’t stop yelling, either, not even when Hanami-sensei starts walking towards him. Actually, he just starts yelling at her, too, and he may not have hit Izuku but he doesn’t mind trying to hit her, and none of the blows ever land but Izuku winces all the same when their teacher grabs Kaachan’s arm and pins it to his side.

Kaachan screams and thrashes, his legs kicking out as Hanami-sensei picks him up and opens the door and carries him outside, probably to put him in time-out until he was ready to play nicely again. 

Izuku slowly inches out of the corner that he’d shoved himself in when Kaachan first started yelling. Kariage, who was trying to see out of the window in the door by standing on his tip-toes, gives up and walks over to him. “What was that about?” he asks, eyes wide.

Izuku’s throat hurts. He looks at the floor when he speaks, trying to hide the way he knows that he’s about to start crying. “My mom doesn’t want me to go over to his house anymore,” he whispers. “B-because - Auntie Mitsuki - she -”

That’s all he can say before he bursts into tears.

Kariage takes a step back, eyes somehow going even wider. He looks around for help, but all of their classmates have stopped talking about how Kaachan got carried out and have now resumed playing. 

“... Ah, shit,” Kariage says finally. “Why are you even crying?”

Izuku sobs so hard that his chest starts to hurt. He tries to keep from being too loud by pressing his sleeve to his face, but that just makes it so he can’t breathe. He sits down hard on the carpet and bawls into his hands. “It's my fault!” he wails, so upset that he feels like he might throw up. “It's my fault he got hurt!”

That seems to get Kariage’s attention, because he sits down in front of Izuku and leans forward, expectant. “What’d you say?” he asks, then, “Did you just say that it’s your fault he got hurt? His arm got hurt because of you? The fuck did you do, Deku?”

He sounds angry, and that just makes Izuku start to cry harder. “I didn’t mean to, it's just - it's j-just -” He stumbles over his words, trying to explain that he really hadn’t meant to drop the plate, that it had been an accident, but Kaachan had said that his mother wouldn’t be angry! Now, though, he wonders if Kaachan had just meant that she wouldn’t be angry at Izuku. “He - he said -”

Before he can finish, the door slams open and Kaachan comes storming in. He stomps over to where the backpacks are hanging on their hooks, and all the other kids scatter out of his way to avoid being stepped on. Kaachan yanks his bag down and pulls it roughly onto his shoulder, and is almost out of the door again when Auntie Mitsuki steps into the room. She grabs him by the arm that’s not in the cast and bends down, and she must say something to him because he jerks back like she’s just slapped him. She lets go of him and he stands still, glaring down at the ground.

Auntie Mitsuki doesn’t look very happy, and Izuku almost starts to cry again when she looks at him and starts walking over. Kariage jumps to his feet and crosses his arms when she comes closer, but Izuku can’t move. He just watches, wide-eyed, as she comes to a stop in front of him, completely ignoring Kariage’s upset-sounding, Hey!, so that she can crouch down on the ground and look directly at Izuku. 

“Hey, there, Izuku,” she says, and she sounds nothing like she did last night, when she was hitting and yelling at Kaachan. “How’d your mom’s interview go last night?”

Izuku’s eyesight is getting blurry again, and he realizes that he’s shaking so hard that he can’t see Auntie Mitsuki properly. He sniffs and opens his mouth to answer, not knowing what he’s going to say, only that he can’t tell her the truth, which is that his mother didn’t even have a job interview last night, so she definitely didn’t go to one. “G-good,” he says, then he looks over and sees Kariage’s angry expression and can’t stop his eyes from overfilling.

Auntie Mitsuki gives him that same smile that Uncle Masaru gave him and his mother. Izuku wonders if they learned it from each other. “Izuku, sweetheart, why are you crying?” She reaches out and pulls him into a hug even though he doesn’t want a hug, doesn’t want to be touched by the same hands that hurt Kaachan’s arm. “There, there,” she says, rubbing circles onto his back, and his entire body starts to shiver. He doesn’t try to hug her back, just stands there, and then he looks up over her shoulder and sees Kaachan staring at him. 

Before Izuku can pull himself out of Auntie Mitsuki’s arms, though, Kariage stomps his foot, points at her, and says, “You’re the one who hurt him!” in a loud voice that makes Hanami-sensei, who’s just walked back inside, look over at them. 

Auntie Mitsuki’s hug starts to feel less like a hug and more like she’s trying to trap him. “Excuse me?”

Kariage huffs and puts his hands on his hips, narrowing his eyes at her in a way that he probably learned from Kaachan. “You hurt Katsuki’s arm!”

Auntie Mitsuki’s fingers press against the back of Izuku’s neck in a way that makes it so that he can’t lift his head, but he can still almost see the look on her face when she hisses out, like a snake, “You little shit…”

From the way that nobody says anything for a while, Auntie Mitsuki and Kariage are staring at each other. Izuku shifts, mumbling against the shoulder of Auntie Mitsuki’s shirt, “Auntie, you’re squishing me.”

“Sorry, dear.” She finally, finally lets go of him, lets him stand up. She stands, too, turns around and calls out, “Katsuki?”

Izuku watches as Kaachan flinches, his head snapping towards his mother’s voice. He looks at Kariage and then Izuku and then Auntie Mitsuki and says, “Yeah?”

Auntie Mitsuki holds out a hand, waving him forward. “Come here.”

Kaachan pauses, puts his free hand on his cast. He looks at Izuku again, then shakes his head.

Izuku doesn’t have to see Auntie Mitsuki’s face to know that she’s frowning. “I said, come here, Katsuki.” When Kaachan still doesn’t move, she says, almost yelling, “Now!”

“Ah, Bakugou-san?” Hanami-sensei steps in front of Kaachan, one of the younger kids propped up on her hip. “As nice as it is to see you, I’m afraid that you can’t distract the other children.”

Auntie Mitsuki looks at her for a long time, then laughs a little and says, “Katsuki, honey, come here.”

Hanami-sensei’s arm moves, and it takes Izuku a little bit to realize that she’s reaching behind her, putting a hand on Kaachan’s shoulder to keep him from moving. “Bakugou-san,” she says. “Let’s talk outside.”

“I’m afraid that I don’t have any time to waste,” Auntie Mitsuki says, ruffling Izuku’s hair and then keeping her hand there, fingers tangled in his curls. “Katsuki, come here.”

There’s a flash of movement, and then Kaachan appears from behind Hanami-sensei’s legs, peeking out like he’s scared. Hanami-sensei looks down at him and mutters something, too quiet for Izuku to hear, and Kaachan nods. 

He walks over to Auntie Mitsuki, and she finally lets her hand fall from Izuku’s head if only so that she can grab Kaachan’s good arm and shake him, leaning down to hiss, “Fucking behave, Katsuki.” She turns him towards Kariage and gives him a little push, says, “Tell your friend how you hurt your arm.”

Kaachan stares at Kariage, and Kariage stares back. 

Auntie Mitsuki shakes Kaachan harder. “Katsuki.”

Kaachan’s eyes focus on the ground. “I fell down the stairs,” he mutters, then yanks his arm away from his mother’s grip. “There. Happy?”

“That’s not true,” Izuku finds himself saying. “That’s not… that’s not true. Kaachan didn’t fall down the stairs. I would’ve heard it!”

Kaachan glares at him. “Shut up, Deku, you were watching TV.”

“I still would’ve heard it!” Izuku protests loudly, then looks at Kariage, points at Kaachan. “He didn’t fall down the stairs, he’s lying!”

“Deku, shut up!”

“No!” And now he’s crying again, like a baby. He stabs a finger at Auntie Mitsuki and says, “She hurt his arm, he didn’t fall down the stairs, I was outside and he started screaming!”

Someone touches his shoulder and he looks up and sees that it's Auntie Mitsuki. “Izuku, honey,” she says, her eyebrows furrowing. “What’s gotten into you? Are you feeling alright?” She puts her hand on his forehead and asks, “Do you feel sick at all?”

And he does, but not because he’s sick sick. He feels sick because she’s acting like Izuku’s lying to her and Kariage, even though she’s the one who’s lying. He shakes his head and scrubs his arm across his eyes, sniffling. “I’m not lying,” he says. “I heard him.”

“Izuku, no one was screaming last night. Right, Katsuki?”

Izuku looks at Kaachan, waiting for his answer. Kaachan doesn’t look at him, just stares down at his feet and says, quietly, “Yeah.” His eyes flick over to his mother, then to Izuku. “Yeah, Deku, no one was screaming.”

Kariage groans, obviously frustrated. “I can’t tell which one of you is lying!” he complains. 

Auntie Mitsuki laughs. “No one is lying, sweetie,” she says. “Izuku’s just a little confused, that’s all.” Then she reaches down and grabs Kaachan’s hand again. “Come on, Katsuki. We’re going home. Say bye to your friends.”

Kaachan doesn’t look at Izuku or Kariage when he speaks. “Yeah,” he says. “Bye.”

And, just like that, they’re gone.

Kaachan doesn’t come to school the next day, and neither does Hanami-sensei. They have a different lady, one with gray hair and glasses that keep sliding down her nose. She doesn’t read them stories, and, when Yasu gets upset about Kariage accidentally breaking one of his crayons, she doesn’t tell him to take deep breaths. She just puts him in time-out. 

Izuku eats alone at lunch, watching Kariage stand in the parking lot with his arms crossed, upset because Kaachan didn’t show up, and, when his mother comes to pick him up, when she asks him about his day, he just shrugs and says that it was pretty boring without Kaachan. 

“Oh,” she says, and reaches over and turns down the radio. “He didn’t show up?”

Izuku shakes his head and flips through the pages of a picture book, pretending not to notice the way his mother keeps looking at him in the mirror with worried eyes.

Kaachan shows up the next day, but Hanami-sensei doesn’t. When Izuku comments on this, trying to get Kaachan to talk because he’s being quiet again and it's making him nervous, Kaachan just says, “She got fired.”

“What?”

“Are you fuckin’ deaf?” Kaachan glares at him, then huffs and looks away. There’s a scrape on his face, a thin cut across his cheek. “I said, she got fired.”

“Why?”

Kaachan doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t speak to Izuku for the rest of the day.

They’re walking home from school when Izuku brings up the topic again. “Kaachan?”

“What.”

“Are you sure your mom loves you?”

Kaachan looks up towards the sky, watching the clouds and squinting at the sun. After a moment, he says, “Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“All parents love their kids, Deku. They have to.”

“Are you sure?”

Kaachan sighs, kicking at the sidewalk. “Yeah,” he says finally, after staying quiet for a long time. “I’m sure.”

[candleshopmenace]

hope to fall asleep [before you fall apart] | day nine: tossing and turning

SUMMARY

“What the Hell are you doing wandering around on the fourth floor?” the boy asks, crossing his arms over his chest, bending down so that they’re eye-level. “Why are you even awake? It's two in the fucking morning, and you’re, like, five. You should be asleep.”

“I was asleep. I woke up.” Eri frowns at him. “And I’m seven years old, not five.”

“You’re a runt, that’s what you fuckin’ are.” 

—

“What are you doing out of bed, kid?”

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A boy with red eyes is staring down at her. He has spiky blonde hair and is wearing a black t-shirt with a skull on it, and he almost looks like he’s smiling when he says, “The Hell are you doing out of bed, kid?”

Eri takes a step back, then another, her mouth dry. She knows that she’s seen this boy before - maybe she’s even been told his name - but, right now, she can barely remember anything about him except for the fact that he sometimes yelled at Deku. Deku acted like it didn’t bother him, and maybe it really didn’t, but she knows that it’d bother her if she got yelled at by someone like the boy in front of her, and so she just clamps her mouth shut and watches him warily. 

Maybe he'll go away if she doesn’t say anything. 

He doesn’t go away. He crouches down so that he can look at her face, and he tilts his head, like he’s confused, like she’s confusing. “You haven’t been sleeping, have you?” he asks, and she knows that he’s looking at the dark smudges under her eyes that look like the ones that Eraserhead always had, the ones that Present Mic clicked his tongue at whenever he saw, saying, Shouta, you need to get some rest, or, Shouta, we talked about this! To Eri, he always said, Are you having nightmares, sweetie? He said, in a voice that could be so loud but was always so, so soft whenever he spoke to her, Is there anything I can do to help?

She never does tell him the truth, in the end. 

She knows from living with her uncle that adults didn’t really ever want answers when they asked a question, they just wanted you to stop doing whatever they were questioning about, and, so, whenever Present Mic said stuff like that, she always smiled and shook her head, No. 

No, she’s not having nightmares. 

No, he can’t help. 

No, no, no. 

It's a lie, and lies are bad, but nothing would be worse than making Eraserhead and Present Mic worry about her just because she has bad dreams sometimes. She’s not a baby. It's not like she’s scared of the dark or anything, it's just that she sometimes feels like it's about to swallow her whole, like she’s going to open her eyes and find herself back in her room at her uncle’s house, like everything good that had happened from then to now had just been her imagination. There are some nights where she tries to fall asleep but she can’t, she can’t, and she just lays there and shifts and tries to get comfortable and nothing works at all.

The boy with red eyes snaps his fingers in front of her face to get her attention and she flinches away, breath hissing sharply between her teeth. The boy drops his hand quickly, looking thoroughly apologetic. “Sorry,” he says, and sounds like he actually is, “that was stupid. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Eri tugs at her sleeves, pulling them down past her wrists, stares at the ground. “It's okay,” she mumbles, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She’s not used to having people say that they were sorry. Usually she was the one saying it. 

Nothing makes any sense anymore.

Her head snaps up as the boy straightens. He drags a hand down his face and sighs, deep, and she notices for the first time that there are marks under his eyes, too. He sees her staring at him and he smiles, just a hint of white between his lips before he asks, quietly like he doesn’t want to wake up the other people on the hall, “How’d you get up here, anyways?”

She points at the elevator, and he follows the motion, scoffs, “Yeah, no shit. I meant, how’d you get into the dorms in the first place? Don’t you live with Aizawa and Yamada?”

Eri bites down on her lip, says, “They’re busy. Mina is supposed to be watching me.”

“She’s not doing a very good job.” The boy’s voice is flat. “Fuck, what would she do if you got hurt? What if you went into the kitchen and started a fire?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Eri protests, crossing her arms firmly over her chest. “Plus, I’m not a baby. I wouldn’t get lost or anything.”

“Then what the Hell are you doing wandering around on the fourth floor?” the boy counters, mimicking her pose, bending down so that they’re eye-level. “Why the Hell are you wandering around in the first place, huh? Why are you even awake? It's two in the fucking morning, and you’re, like, five. You should be asleep.”

“I was asleep. I woke up.” Eri narrows her eyes at him. “And I’m seven years old, not five.”

“You’re a runt, that’s what you fuckin’ are.” The boy runs his fingers through his hair, grimaces. “Well, I guess I can’t just leave you here, damnit,” he mutters, and holds out a hand, sharp, insistent. “C’mon. We’re going to go get some food, and then you’re going the fuck to bed.”

“I’m not hungry,” Eri says, tentatively slipping her fingers between his. His palms are rough and calloused, just like the way that he speaks, but his grip is surprisingly gentle. “And what about you? Why aren’t you asleep?”

He doesn’t answer at first, just leads her to the elevator and presses a button that she recognizes as the one that takes them all the way down to the bottom floor, the place with the couches that Momo and Kyoka liked to sit on and watch movies together with her in the middle, and Kyoka would lean over sometimes and kiss Momo on the cheek, ruffle Eri’s hair. As they step onto the carpet, the boy says, “Just like you, I guess.” He takes her towards the kitchen, reaches over her head to flick on the light switch. “I was asleep, and then I woke up.”

“Why?”

The boy lets go of her hand so that he can pull open the fridge, the sound jarring in the nighttime silence. “Fuck if I know,” he says, and pulls out a drawer, comes up with an apple. “You like these, don’t you?”

“Are you having nightmares?” Eri asks, and the boy jolts so hard that the back of his head slams into the top of the freezer door. 

He mutters something under his breath, something that she probably shouldn’t repeat, ever, and turns to glare at her. “The fuck did you just say, kid?”

Eri swallows. “I asked if you have nightmares,” she says, and then, “And you can’t answer a question with a question. That’s what Denki always says.”

“That little shit,” the boy says, with something like wonder in his voice, like he can’t believe how much of a little shit Denki is. “I’m the one who taught him that.” He rubs at the back of his skull, wincing, and then nudges the refrigerator door shut with one slippered foot. He opens and closes cabinets until he finds a cutting board, then pulls out a knife from a drawer. He chops the apple in half, then in half again, then in half again, until he has eight pieces, yanks the dishwasher open and drops the slices onto a plate. He hands it to her without a word, fingers curled around her shoulder to guide her into the living room in the dark. Only when the lamp in the corner is on, bathing the two of them in a warm yellow glow, does he speak. 

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess that’s what those fuckers are called.”

“What?” Eri asks, biting into an apple, carefully avoiding the seeds. “Nightmares?”

He makes a disgruntled sound of agreement, his arms slung across the top of the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. “They’re stupid as all Hell, but they always wake me up. It's annoying.” He pauses, head tilting back so that he can stare at the ceiling, “When I first saw you, you know, I thought you were a ghost.”

Eri finds that she can’t keep herself from smiling. “What?”

“I mean, can you blame me? You were this pale little midget girl staring at me like I just ran over her damn dog, I thought you were all my wrongdoings given a human fucking form, and it didn’t help that you didn’t talk at all.” And he just keeps going, keeps speaking, and, despite herself, Eri finds that her eyelids are drifting shut. As they close, she feels someone guide her down gently against the couch cushions. She grabs at the boy’s hands when they start to move away, refuses to relinquish her grip, and, dimly, she hears him sigh. “Fine, kid,” he says. “Fine.”

Eri falls asleep.

[candleshopmenace]

ice in your mind [fire in your heart] | day eight: back from the dead

SUMMARY

Eijirou read in some book that people looked peaceful when they were in comas, that they looked like they were sleeping, but whoever wrote that is a damn liar because Bakugou doesn’t look like he’s asleep. 

Like this, expressionless and still, he looks dead.

He looks dead.

Eijirou barely manages to make it to the bathroom before he throws up.

—

He feels hollow.

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Bakugou is in a coma.

Ejirou flinches when he hears the news. He thinks that everyone does. Bakugou and coma don’t belong in the same conversation, much less the same sentence.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Mina bury her face in her hands.

Jirou is the one who speaks up first, her voice surprisingly level and calm. She’s changed out of her ripped and filthy clothes, but she hasn’t gotten cleaned up beyond that - if Eijirou looks closely, he can still see crescents of dark red blood dried under her nails. She says, “Okay.” Swallows, continues, “When do the doctors think that he’ll wake up?”

Aizawa-sensei doesn’t answer, and Eijirou hears himself say, quietly, “Do the doctors think that he’ll wake up?”

“Eijirou,” Sero hisses, sharp as broken glass. “Don’t say shit like that.”

His eyes are burning. He blinks rapidly, focuses on the ground, his hands, his shoes, anywhere but his teacher or his friends because he knows that if he looks at them he’ll start crying, and he can’t cry, not now. Bakugou isn’t here to be strong, so Eijirou has to be strong for him. He says, “Edgeshot and Jeanist fixed his heart, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was dealt a pretty massive blow to the head.”

Aizawa-sensei sighs far deeper than what should be humanly possible. The exhale sounds like it was taken from twenty lungfuls of air. “The doctors aren’t sure yet,” he says, and Eijirou knows that he’s telling the truth because there’s a weary resignation in his voice that Eijirou hasn’t heard from him before. He’s heard it from a lot of people, sure - countless foster parents, his frazzled social worker, even from himself - but never Aizawa. Never Eraserhead.

It makes his entire chest ache.

“Yeah,” Eijirou says, the word ringing like a bell, echoing. “I figured.” He closes his eyes and kneads his palms into them, trying to stave off the headache he can feel building in his temples. “Well, I’m going to go home, going to spend some time with my moms.” He looks up at Aizawa. “I can go home, right?”

“Of course you can, but, Kirishima -”

Eijirou doesn’t hear what he’s about to say next.

He’s already gone.

Kaine rushes at him the moment that he steps inside. Eijirou bears her rapid-fire questions for as long as it takes him to kick off his shoes, then brushes past her, climbs up the stairs, fists curling at his sides when he hears her start after him.

“Eijirou,” she says, breathless, “are you okay? Are you hurt? I saw you on the news, what happened? Why did it take you so long to come home? Eijirou? Eijirou, are you even listening?”

And it's a fucking trip and a half, to see the stoic, ice-cold woman he’s been fostered with for years act like she actually cares, like she doesn’t see him as just a tool to boost her image, and, had it been any other day, he would’ve laughed in her face.

He settles for slamming his door in it instead.

The first time that Eijirou visits Bakugou in the hospital, he hardly even lasts a minute. He read somewhere, in some book, that coma patients looked like they were sleeping. Whoever wrote that, he decides, is a Goddamned liar, because Eijirou has watched Bakugou sleep and it looked nothing like this. He’s pale and expressionless and layered in bandages, and it makes Eijirou’s stomach twist.

Bakugou doesn’t look like he’s sleeping.

Bakugou looks like he’s dead.

He looks dead.

He looks dead.

Eijirou barely manages to make it to the bathroom before he throws up.

The second visit goes a little better, if only for the fact that Eijirou is able to stand being in the room for more than a few seconds. It also goes a lot worse, because it ends with him being dragged away in handcuffs.

It happens like this: he’s not alone.

He is at first, but, a few seconds in, the door opens and a woman with blond hair steps inside. 

She looks exactly like Bakugou, exactly like Eijirou’s best friend, and he feels his hackles rise.

The woman stops short at the sight of him, and suddenly they’re locked in a staring contest that Eijirou refuses to back down from because Bakugou has told him a lot of stories about his mother and none of them are favorable, and Eijirou owes Bakugou the world but right now he’ll settle for protecting him when he can’t protect himself.

Softly, Bakugou’s mother says, “Oh.” She takes a step forward, light on her feet, and Eijirou feels his fingers sharpen into claws where they’re wrapped around the bedside railing. Holding out a hand, smiling like her son isn’t in a coma less than a foot away, Bakugou’s mother says, “You must be Kirishima. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Eijirou doesn’t return the sentiment. “Bakugou Mitsuki, right?” he asks, and the way her eyes narrow is all the answer that he needs. 

This is the woman that left bruises on his best friend’s skin.

This is the woman that locked him in his room, no food, no water, for endless stretches of time.

This is the woman who taught him to penalize even the smallest of mistakes, every fault and every error, until he was full of self-destructive habits so deeply ingrained that Eijirou wasn’t even sure that they could be unlearned.

This is the woman that hurt Bakugou in more ways that any villain ever could, and, standing here, Eijirou realizes that he hates her from the very bottom of his soul.

Bakugou’s mother glances almost casually at her son, then looks back at Eijirou, and her smile shifts into a smirk, cold and cruel. “Are you two close?” she asks, low and dripping with innuendo.

The railing creaks in Eijirou’s grip.

Bakugou’s mother continues, “I’m not a bad person, Kirishima, despite what he must’ve told you.” She leans over to brush a lock of hair from her son’s face, even going so far as to press a kiss to his forehead. “I just want him to be someone I can be proud of.” Then she leans back, frowning at the bandages, sweeping back the thin hospital sheet and raking her eyes over the swaddled stump of his left arm. “Though, I don’t see how that’ll be possible if the scarring is too ugly.”

And that’s where everything boils over. 

Nurses come running almost the exact second that Eijirou starts yelling, and if he weren’t so angry he’d probably find their quick responses amusing. But he is angry, and there’s nothing funny about that. He’s roaring rage, not quite out of control enough to actually hurt anybody but upset enough to want to, and people are talking to him, trying to calm him down, and that only serves to make him even more pissed.

He’ll learn later that the hospital went on lockdown because of him, but, right now, he doesn’t care. A security officer, big as All Might in his glory days, wrestles his arms behind his back and cuffs his wrists together, and Eijirou curses at him, curses at everybody, damns Bakugou Mitsuki to the lowest pits of Hell and spits and kicks and snaps his teeth at the slightly smug look on her face. 

They drag him outside and shove him into the back of a police cruiser, and Eijirou spends his overnight stay in the jail cell kicking at the bars and screaming himself hoarse.

“Do you think that he’ll be okay?” Sero asks him one night, eyes pinned vacantly on the sky above, focused on the purple haze clouds and unforgivingly bright stars.

They’re all back in the dorms now, which is just as well because Kaine insisted on keeping up the concerned parent act whenever she saw him - which thankfully wasn’t very often - and that, when combined with her wife’s ever-present curiosity, made him feel like he was being smothered. 

He stares at the ground below as he ponders his answer. 

“... Well,” he says finally, frowning. “If he wakes up, he’ll have to deal with being down an arm, and he’ll probably have chronic pain for the rest of his life, and his eye -”

“That’s not what I meant,” Sero says, cutting him off. “I meant, like, his head. His mind. Will he be okay?”

Eijirou falls silent for a long, long time, then says, “I’d love to say something positive, but he did just die, get brought back to life, and is now in a coma that he might not even wake up from. And if he does wake up, he’s going to be hit by a wave of reporters, ten times worse than the rest of the class, and you know as well as I do that he’s going to blame himself for everything, and, to make it all worse, he’s got an asshole of a mother to deal with. So, no, Sero, I don’t think that he’s going to be fucking okay. He’s going to be fucked in the head, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to help him at all.”

Sero doesn’t even flinch at Eijirou’s harsh tone, just sighs and brings his knees up to his chest. “Yeah,” he says, and he sounds so, so tired. “I thought so.”

There’s something wrong with him, he thinks. Something bitter and twisted and mean. Something rotten, festering in the chambers of his heart and spreading to his lungs until everything he says is tainted, razor-edged and meant to harm.

He says this to Mina one day and she yanks him into a hug, sobs into the crook of his shoulder and his neck and tells him that he’s not a monster, that none of this is his fault, and, while he appreciates the lies, he can’t help but envy the fact that she can feel sad enough to cry when the only thing he’s felt for the past few weeks is hollow.

The third visit is supervised. 

Eijirou doesn’t like it, and Aizawa-sensei hates it even more than he does, but Bakugou’s mother was insistent: she was graciously not going to press charges against him, but, if he wanted to be able to visit her son at all, an authority figure capable of subduing him had to be present at all times.

I’m taking the stress of your situation into account, she’d said over the phone, but any threat capable of bringing harm to my son must either be neutralized or cut out of the equation entirely.

Then, and in her voice was a smile that he could fucking hear, she’d said, Don’t you agree, Kirishima?

“Don’t do anything crazy this time,” Aizawa-sensei says as he opens the door to Bakugou’s room, ushering Eijirou inside. “Because then I’ll have to knock you out, and I don’t want to do that.”

Eijirou ignores him, doesn’t answer, just looks around the room and notes how it's changed since he last saw it. For one, the railing on the bed has been replaced. And there’s a bouquet of white roses on the dresser that wasn’t there before. The crystal fluted vase is surrounded by little… tokens, is all that he can think to call them, tokens of affection. Some of them - a miniature All Might figurine, a jar of shiny trinkets - are instantly recognizable as the sort of thing their classmates would bring, but others, like the sketchbook with a constellation-patterned cover, are harder to place. 

“Huh,” Eijirou says, and his voice sounds empty and wrong over the beeping of the heart monitor. “You have a lot of people who -”

A lot of people who love you. A lot of people waiting for you to wake up. A lot of people who want to hear your voice again.

He can’t quite find the correct way to end the sentence, and so he trails off, stares down at Bakugou’s preternaturally still face. “I miss you,” he says, and, to his eternal credit, Aizawa-sensei doesn’t say anything when Eijirou finally starts to cry.

[candleshopmenace]

hope is a mistake [you'll go insane] | day fourteen: failed escape

SUMMARY

His mother clears her throat and looks up at his father, expression pleading. “Enji, dear,” she says, obviously trying to play peacemaker. “It's a school night. Maybe you should -”

“Shut up.”

And it's the way his father says it, so casually, so <i>carelessly,</> that makes Touya’s blood boil. He’s on his feet before he can stop himself, and, without thinking, he snaps, “Don’t talk to her like that.”

The room goes deathly silent.

—

“You should run away,” Fuyumi says, and Touya’s heart stops.

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“Touya?” his mother asks when he breezes past the kitchen, the front door clicking shut behind him. “Is that you?” 

He doesn’t say anything, but she seems to find an answer in his silence, because she hurries out and takes his arm, fingers unintentionally digging into the burns that he’s kept hidden under the sleeves of his blazer all day. He bites back a protest, a flinch of pain - it doesn’t even really hurt, he tells himself. It's the unexpectedness of it, is all. 

His mother asks, still holding on, “I made some cookies with Natsuo earlier, do you want some?”

“No, thanks.”

Her face falls. “But you forgot to take the lunch I packed for you, and I know you don’t like the school food. You must be hungry, right? I can make you something to eat. Nitsuke? You like nitsuke, don’t you?”

Touya shrugs. “I’m not really hungry, Mom,” he says, and starts forward again. She doesn’t let go of him, keeps walking beside him, and his temper flares. He wrenches his arm out of her grasp. “Leave me alone.” 

He shoulders his bag and storms up the stairs, and she finally seems to take a hint because she doesn’t follow. 

But she watches him. 

He can feel her eyes burning into his back, cold as anything. 

He almost makes it to his room before he gets interrupted again, this time by an only slightly more tolerable presence - Fuyumi, grabbing hold of the back of his jacket. 

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, just to see the way she narrows her eyes at him. He waits for her petulant, I’m not a kid!, but it doesn’t come. Huh. She must’ve had a bad day at school or something, because her protests to the nickname had been one of the only constants about her since he started using it. 

She says, almost accusatory, “Touya.”

He says, mimicking her tone, “Fuyumi.” He bats her hand away and steps into his room, waiting for her to follow before he shuts the door. He sits down at his desk so that she can sprawl across his bed, legs kicked up against the headboard. He spins around slightly in his chair, focuses on her. “What’s up?”

She doesn’t answer right away, just keeps staring at him like she’s never seen him before, and, just as he’s about to ask if she’s okay, she says, “You should leave.”

Touya’s eyebrows shoot up without his permission. 

What the fuck does he mean, he should leave? Where does she want him to go, the kitchen? With their mother? No way. He can’t help the anger he feels when he’s around her, wild and unbridled and just barely controlled, smoking through his fingers and making his words hot and sharp and bitter. He feels so pissed when he’s around her, but she’s his mother and he doesn’t want to hurt her, and so it's best to avoid being near her at all. 

“This is my room, Fuyumi,” he says, slowly, utterly confused. 

She makes a frustrated noise, waves her hands in the air like she’s trying to explain something that she can’t find the words for. “Not, like, leave your room,” she says, sits up and looks at him with those eyes that were so light when she was born, those eyes that have settled into the gray of storm clouds rolling in overhead, dark and promising vengeance. “You should leave here. The house.”

… What.

“You want me to… run away?” Touya asks. She nods, and his heart drops even as he looks at her with fond amusement, grinning in a way that only she and her ridiculous antics can make him. “Hate to break it to you, kiddo, but there’s no way in Hell you’re getting rid of me that easily.”

She grips the sheets in her fists, wrinkling them. “I don’t want you to leave,” she huffs, avoiding looking at him like she thinks that she’ll lose momentum if she so much as makes eye contact, “but you should.”

Touya spins a pen between his fingers, still smiling slightly when he asks, “And why is that?”

“You were crying last night,” Fuyumi says, and the pen clatters to the desk. Before he can question how the fuck she heard that and why she was awake so late in the first place, she continues, “And I was thinking that, y’know, Dad only ever hurts you, right?” She swallows, cringing slightly at her own phrasing. “So if you… if you left, it's not like he would do anything to me or Natsuo or Mom. We’d be safe, and so would you, and so you should leave before he hurts you more.”

Touya doesn’t speak for a moment, feeling her words like a physical blow. It punches him in the chest, forces the air from his lungs, and all he can do is stare at her as he processes what she’s just said. 

She heard him last night. 

She heard him even though he was trying so hard to be careful, to not wake anyone up, to bandage his wounds and stitch his cuts in a way that wouldn’t disturb his family. 

She heard him, and now she wants him to leave. To run away like a kicked dog, tail low and head down, abandon her and Natsuo so that he could have a slim chance of… what? Of living on the streets? Of barely scraping by? He’s twelve, there’s no way in Hell that anybody sane would be willing to hire him - he’d last a few days, tops, before he was forced to return. 

The prodigal son, coming home.

Finally, carefully, he says, “It's not that simple, Fuyumi. Besides, I don’t want to leave.”

Her head snaps up and she gapes at him, eyes wide. “But you - you -” Her voice is wobbly, and Touya looks closer and realizes that she’s almost crying. Great. Because making his baby sister cry is definitely the way to become a hero. “You were bleeding and there was - there was blood, on the, the floor, and - you had burns, and you were bleeding, Touya, what if you die?”

Touya forces a laugh, light-hearted. “Don’t be dramatic, Fuyumi,” he says. “I’m not going to die.” Then, before he can stop himself, “Heroes never die.” 

It's a phrase that his father has repeated enough times that he can taste it in the air during their training sessions, potent as ash on his tongue. 

Heroes never die, heroes never get to die, because it's not a luxury that they’re allowed. They always have to keep fighting, breathing, standing victorious for just another day as death lurks in the background, waiting, watching, sometimes drawing near but never close enough to touch. 

It's one of the facts of life. 

Grass is green, his name is Todoroki Touya, and heroes never die.

Fuyumi scrubs an arm across her eyes, wiping away her tears. Touya’s attempts at reassurance don’t seem to have worked. If anything, they’ve made her even more distressed. “He hurts you,” she says, and her voice rings hollow. “He hurts you and he hurts you and he’s never going to stop.”

Touya takes a breath, blows it out. Leaning back in his chair, he stares up at the ceiling, at the glow stars still pasted there as a reminder of better times. Not good times, necessarily, but better. Anything, he thinks, would be better than this.

He’s never going to stop.

“... Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

Dinner is quiet. They’re all here, which is unusual, and so nobody is speaking. Touya, never very talkative on a good day, adamantly refuses to be the one to break the silence. Fuyumi stares down at her plate and doesn’t make a sound, tear tracks still dried on her cheeks. Even Natsuo is quiet, poking at his food with the pair of plastic training chopsticks wedged in his small fist, eyes darting periodically over to where their father is sitting at the head of the table. 

Touya doesn’t know how to feel about that, the fact that their father is so frequently absent from his siblings’ lives that his baby brother hardly even recognizes the man - on one hand, he’s grateful, willing to bask in the relief that they won’t have to go through the same shit that he does, but, on the other hand, it pisses him off to no end. His siblings deserve better than this, to be treated like they’re invisible. For fuck’s sake, Natsuo is four. He’s practically a baby. He’s a fucking baby, and their father is acting like he’s just an annoyance, something unthinking and unfeeling.

It's fucking unfair.

Touya puts his cup down a little hard and curses internally when the noise draws his father’s attention to him. 

“Ah, Touya,” he says, voice as deadly and liquid smooth as kerosene ready to ignite, “how was your day?”

“It was fine.” He swallows down a bite of fish - his mother made nitsuke for dinner, seemingly determined that he eat the dish, one way or another - and glances warily up at his father, gauging his reaction. “I got all the questions right on my math test.”

“Good. Keeping your grades up is important if you want to get into Yuuei.”

That’s what every conversation ends up going. Yuuei. The pride of Musutafu, the stomping ground of future heroes, the school that Touya himself is expected to attend, willingly and happily, in just a few short years. He’ll be honed to perfection, showcased to the world, wrapped in plastic and smiling under the eyes of his teachers, his classmates, the entirety of Japan, relegated as a weapon and advertised as a savior.

Right.

His father, having apparently taken Touya’s lack of response as a sign that the four-sentence conversation was over, goes back to eating. 

Touya seethes and glares at his food. 

There’s a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and he looks towards it, sees Fuyumi staring at their father with the most dejected expression on her face, the slump of her shoulders speaking volumes about her disappointment even though she doesn’t open her mouth. 

It's like this every time. 

Their father asks Touya about his day, then proceeds to ignore the fact that he has two other children, both of which are now capable of holding conversations. Every fucking time. It's expected, routine, but today is different in the fact that Fuyumi’s words are still ringing in Touya’s ears. His blood is boiling and there’s something pacing inside of his chest, borderline feral, resentful and spiteful and hostile, acerbic. 

Fuck this, he thinks, and says, loud, “I’m not your only kid, you know.”

And everything freezes, like someone just hit pause. Nobody moves. Nobody breathes. There’s only anger simmering deep in his stomach and gasoline in his veins, flowing fast and dangerous and racing for his heart. 

Then, calmly, his father says, “Yes, Touya.” He looks up and the glint in his eyes is cold, the way that a deep burn is cold, freezing, the heat of it leaving marks where it sinks down below Touya’s skin. “I’m aware.”

He should stop. 

He should shut up. 

He should back down. 

There’s a million things that he should do, but, in the end, Touya does none of them. He meets his father’s gaze and says, the words hissed between his teeth, “Then act like it.”

Silence. There’s nothing but silence, thick and heavy. It fills the room and steals the breath from Touya’s lungs, making him dizzy, disoriented. Did he just say that? He can’t believe he just said that. Is he stupid? He’s so, so fucking stupid, what is wrong with him -

His father stands, and Touya has to tilt his head back to look at him. The man looms so far above him that he blocks out the light, warped and distorted by the way that Touya’s entire fucking body is going numb with shock and fear and horror. He looks like the monster in a nightmare. He looks like a villain. 

“Touya,” he says, in that same calm, steady voice, and the only sign of his irritation is the way that his lip curls, ever so slightly, as he stares down at him. “Meet me in the training room.”

Touya swallows, panic slurring his thoughts together. He realizes that his metal chopsticks are warping in his hand and he hurriedly drops them. The sound of them hitting the table is enough to jar him into answering, “But it's a school night. I have school tomorrow.”

Pleasantly, his father says, “I don’t remember asking.”

Touya glances helplessly around the table. Fuyumi has her hands over her ears and her legs curled up to her chest, her eyes squeezed shut, and Natsuo is watching the scene unfold with a look of abject terror on his face that should not be possible for someone as young as him. His attention snaps to his mother when she clears her throat and says, “Enji, dear, maybe you should -”

“Shut up.”

It's said casually, carelessly, which is probably why it makes Touya so pissed. He’s on his feet before he can stop himself, staring at his father, fists clenched at his sides, saying, “Don’t talk to her like that.” His voice rising, yelling, “You don’t get to talk to her like that!” 

He’s almost sick with the mixed waves of anger and fear pulsing through his body, and his breaths are coming in quick, jerky rasps, the way they do after he runs a mile, runs two, runs three, but nothing has even happened yet. 

Nothing has even happened, but he still feels like he’s suffocating. 

He opens his mouth to do something - plead his case, maybe, or gasp for more air - but then his father is storming around the table, and Touya’s arm is in his hand, and the unhealed burns under his sleeve are being rubbed raw in a way that makes him cry out. 

His father drags him out of the dining room and down the hall, walking so fast that Touya can’t even keep his footing. When Touya tries to yank away, his father’s grip just tightens and tightens and tightens until he can feel the bones creak together, then snap. 

Touya screams.

The sound is cut off sharply when his father yanks open the door to the training room and throws him inside, sending him skidding across the floor. He scrambles up, cradling his arm to his chest, stumbling back with every step his father takes towards him. He realizes that that’s a mistake only when he gets crowded against the wall. His father closes one hand around his jaw and forces him to look up, to make eye contact, and Touya’s breaths turn even more shallow, scathing, as he sees his father’s expression. He looks fucking murderous. What was Touya thinking, provoking him like that? Anything that happens now is just his own fucking fault.

“You do not,” his father says, and his fingers dig so painfully into Touya’s face that Touya feels his legs give out, “get to talk to me like that. Understood?”

Hating this, hating himself, Touya nods. 

Shouldn’t he fight back? 

Shouldn’t he hold out for as long as he can? 

He’s the one who started it, so why is he so afraid to deal with the consequences? 

Why is he so pathetic?

His father lets go, and Touya crumples to the floor, heart pounding so fast that his chest aches with it. He feels like he’s about to throw up. Every muscle in his body is tense with anticipation, and his eyes are locked on his father, who is now turning on his heel and heading for the center of the room, discarding parts of his hero outfit - his gauntlets, the communicator clipped to his belt - even as he walks. 

“Well, boy?” he says, and looks at Touya. “Stand up.”

And so he does.

He staggers into the kitchen later that night, shaking so hard that he can’t see straight, clothes stinking of smoke, and the first thing he does is yank open the cabinet. Food, he thinks. I need food. Stuff that will last, that won’t go bad, that will survive being carried around in a bag for God knows how long. 

He hurts you and he hurts you and he’s never going to stop.

Yeah. 

He knows.

He hesitates, though, fingers hovering over a box of crackers. If he leaves, he’ll be leaving his family to fend for themselves. There’s no telling what his father will do if he’s gone. Will he turn his anger onto his other children, the ones who are more helpless than Touya has ever been, will ever be, or will it fizzle out completely until he’s nothing but a shell? 

Touya fervently hopes that it’d be the latter, but, really, there’s no way to be sure.

He imagines Fuyumi with burns on her arms and Natsuo with bruises on his face and feels so physically sick that the world spins. He grabs the counter to steady himself, head hung low, blood dripping a steady line down his chin from his badly torn lip, the mark of a heavier-than-usual blow. 

His wrist screams with pain, but even that is drowned out by the way his entire body is on the verge of collapse. 

Bullshit, he thinks. This is bullshit.

He doesn’t want to flinch every time one of his classmates brushes a little too close, doesn’t want to have to keep restocking the first-aid kit in his room, doesn’t want to hurt so much that he’s forgotten what it feels like to not be in constant agony. 

He can’t do this anymore.

He can’t.

He wipes furiously at the tears forming in his eyes and yanks down the crackers. Fuck this, fuck his father. He’s leaving. He can find somewhere better than this, better than a father who hits him until he’s bruised and burned and bleeding red and then leaves him on the ground, shaking, vision turning black. 

He slams the cabinet shut and stomps up the stairs. 

He’s almost to his room when, like fucking déjà vu, a door creaks open as he walks past it.

Despite himself, Touya stops. 

Natsuo peers up at him, wide eyes glinting in the darkness, his hair sticking up all over the place like the feathers of a baby bird. 

He must’ve been asleep. 

Shit. 

Touya must’ve woken him up. 

They stare at each other for a long, long moment, silent, and then Natsuo says, “You’re bleeding.” And one hand leaves the frame of the door to reach up, like he wants to touch the wound. “Are you okay?”

Touya grits his teeth and looks past his little brother, into his room. The walls are a light, light blue - he knows this because he helped paint them himself - and there’s a lit lamp on the nightstand that casts long shadows across the floor. He swallows, says, “Go back to sleep, Natsuo.”

Natsuo’s eyes narrow at him, irritated. “You were stomping.” His hand drops back down to his side, hangs there, limp. “Did Dad do that?”

“Do what?”

“Hurt you.”

Touya pauses, stares down at him. He must be quiet for a moment too long, because Natsou huffs, crosses his arms. “Don’t lie to me,” he says. “I’m not a baby.”

Touya can’t help it - he smiles, split lip stinging sharply with the motion. “Right,” he says. “Of course you’re not.” He crouches down so that they’re eye level, says, amused, “You’re a big boy, aren’t you?”

Natsuo practically preens. “Of course I am,” he says, like he’s stating a fact.

Touya raises a hand and ruffles Natsuo’s hair. “Of course,” he agrees, and stands back up. “And you’re very brave.”

Natsuo’s smile glints white. “Well, you are, too! You were all like, Don’t talk to her like that!, and it was so cool.” He nods, satisfied with his assessment, and says, “I want to be just like you.”

“Oh, really.” Touya suddenly feels inexplicably sad. “I’d rather you stay the way you are.”

“But you’re better. You have this super great Quirk and everyone loves you.” Natsuo juts his chin up, stubborn, and states in a way that leaves no room for any argument, “I’m going to be like you.”

… Great, Touya wants to say. Angry and bitter and pissed at the world. What he actually says, though, is, “Sure you are.” He reaches down to flick Natsuo lightly on the forehead and nods towards the bed. “Go back to sleep, Natsuo.”

Natsuo opens his mouth like he wants to argue, but then he just groans. “Fine.” He goes to close the door between them, hesitates. “Good night.”

“Good night.” When Natsuo still doesn’t move, waiting, Touya raises an eyebrow. “Can I help you?”

Natsuo looks at the ground. “I made some cookies with Mom,” he says. “While you were at school.” He glances back up at Touya, hopeful, and asks, “Did you eat one? Mom said you liked that kind.”

“Not yet,” Touya says, and, when Natsuo’s face falls, he hurriedly adds, “But I’ll eat one in the morning, okay? I promise.”

Natsuo nods, once, sharp, and closes the door, leaving Touya alone in the hallway to curse his own stupidity. I’ll eat one in the morning. Right, because that was exactly the kind of thing that one ate before running away, a fucking cookie. He stalks into his room and throws the box of crackers onto his desk, uncaring when it sends a couple pens and pencils clattering to the floor. He rakes his hands through his hair. 

This is stupid. 

He’s stupid. 

His entire life is just one fucked moment after the other, never-ending, relentless, and that’s exactly why he’s trying to get away, but then he thinks of Natsuo, his expression open and trusting, and that, for some reason, just punches the fight right out of him. His baby brother. His little baby brother. And Fuyumi, so caring and concerned. 

How could he leave that? 

What kind of monster is he, to even consider abandoning them?

And so, instead of packing a bag, instead of slipping on his shoes and going downstairs and locking the door behind him, disappearing before the rest of the house had a chance to wake up, Touya simply changes his clothes and falls into bed, staring up at the ceiling.

… There’s always tomorrow.

[candleshopmenace]

ask no questions [hear no lies] | day thirteen: dislocation

SUMMARY

“Do you like to fight, Hitoshi?” the therapist asks, and Hitoshi thinks of bloody knuckles and split lips and how fucking tired he is of always having to bite his tongue.

Do you like to fight, Hitoshi?

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

—

Nobody ever talks to him, but everyone talks about him. He can hear them, see them, pointed fingers and flashing teeth. They always shut up, though, when they notice him watching. 

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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He hasn’t stepped outside in three weeks. The world is big and wide and bright - at least, that’s how he remembers it. Maybe it's changed in the time he’s been holed up in the white-walled room. He wants to know if everything's the same, but he doesn’t know how to make the blinds over the window go up, and the people who visit him never talk to him. They never talk to him, but they talk about him. He can hear them, see them, pointed fingers and flashing teeth, Is that him? The kid who -

They always stop when they notice him watching. 

Nobody ever answers his questions, not even the silly ones, not even the really important ones, like the ones about his parents. He hasn’t seen them in a while. Are they okay? The last thing he remembers before waking up in this place is being strapped into his seat in the back of the car, being driven to preschool because his mother thought he was too young to walk there himself. And he remembers asking something stupid, insignificant - he can’t even recall what it was - and then there had been a jerk and a jolt and a sound like ripping metal, and he’d shut his eyes, and he’d woken up here.

Without anything to do besides listening to the steady beep-beep-beep of the machine with the green zigzag line going across its screen, the hours drag. And he knows that they’re hours, because, the day before what he now refers to in his head as The Mystery, his teacher showed him and his classmates how to read a clock. He wonders if she’ll be upset that he’s missing so much school. He doesn’t know how he’ll explain to her that it isn’t his fault.

Days pass.

Nobody comes.

His name is Shinsou Hitoshi and he’s alone.

His social worker is a pretty lady with a tired smile, and she tells him to call her Kanagi, Ka-na-gi, beautiful, lovely, calm. She also tells him that he just needs to find his place, like he’s a puzzle piece lost in the world, waiting to find a bigger picture to click! into. She sounds so sincere every time that she says it that he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s wrong, that he doesn’t want to find his place, because he already knows where he belongs and all he wants to do is go back to it. 

All he wants to do is go home.

After Kanagi takes him to the doctor and the doctor tells him what his Quirk is, the kids in the group home start being mean. 

For example, when he tells Hinowa - his best friend, or so he thought - the news, she tries to push him off of the highest part of the climbing frame at the playground, and then when she gets out of time-out she tries to do it again, and again, and again, and so Tokiatsu - the lady who runs the home - tells him to stop playing with her. 

Hitoshi listens, but then he sees Hinowa whispering to Yuusou, a boy three years older than him, and, later that night, when Hitoshi asks to have a turn on the game, Yuusou shoves him to the ground hard enough to make him hit his head. 

He calls Hitoshi a freak. 

He calls Hitoshi a witch. 

He calls Hitoshi a monster and a mutant and a demon and tells him that he’s never going to get adopted, ever, because no one would ever want a future villain as a son.

Tokiatsu lets him stay in her room that night, and, when she thinks that he’s asleep, she calls Kanagi. She talks to her for a long time, in hushed tones, and says, They’re trying to hurt him, Kanagi. She says, I don’t know what to do. She says, and she sounds like she’s about to cry, Get him out of here.

And so Hitoshi ends up with Marai, who has a mean smile, a bad temper, and a fridge full of yellow-blue cans that Hitoshi isn’t allowed to touch. 

And so Hitoshi starts elementary school with bruises on his arms and bruises on his chest and bruises on his throat, and he doesn’t know how Kanagi finds out but she’s at the front door a few days later, dropping down to her knees and pulling him into her arms. “It's not your fault,” she tells him when he apologizes and apologizes, face buried in the crook of her neck and hands balled tight in her shirt. “It's not your fault, I promise,” and, once again, Hitoshi doesn’t tell her that she’s wrong.

Hitoshi is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office for his yearly check-up when the question hits. He pauses in the middle of coloring in the lines of a printed-out picture of All Might and looks up at Kanagi. She’s not looking at him, is leaning back in the rigid plastic chair with her eyes closed, and so he clears his throat to get her attention. She gives it to him without a complaint.

He says, wording it carefully so she has no reason to get mad like Yuusou, like Midai, “I think that you’re very nice to me.” He turns back to his crayons, gripping the purple in one tight fist, avoiding her face. “I think that I wouldn’t mind if you were my new mom.”

“Oh,” Kanagi says, and then falls silent. She doesn’t speak for a long, long time, but when she does, all she says is, quietly, “I’m pretty sure that All Might’s suit is blue, Hitoshi.”

“... Right,” Hitoshi says, and switches out the colors.

He doesn’t bring up the topic again.

Kanagi doesn’t love him, he realizes later. She only cares about him because it's her job. He’s only ever a job to people, a burden.

He feels stupid for not figuring it out sooner.

“Shinsou Hitoshi.”

In the man’s mouth, Hitoshi’s name sounds like a death sentence. The man slams Hitoshi’s personal file down on the desk and watches him, waiting for a flinch. It doesn’t come. 

“He’s a good boy,” Kanagi says. She’s sitting in the chair beside Hitoshi, her hands in her lap. “He’s very clever, very polite. I’m sure that he’ll cause you no trouble at all.”

“Are you sure? I can’t take in a child who will end up being an embarrassment.”

I don’t want him, Kanagi is saying. Take him.

I don’t want him any more than you do, the man is saying. Keep him.

Hitoshi stares down at his hands, clenches his fists in his lap. He says, “I’ll be really quiet.” He looks up at the man, who is staring at him with newfound interest. “You won’t even know that I’m there. I promise.”

“What, boy? Afraid of being last?”

It's a test, it's a test because everything is always a test, and so Hitoshi bites his tongue and doesn’t answer.

The man looks at him, watches him, and then nods once, sharp, and glances at Kanagi.

“I’ll take him.”

He watches the door to his room creak open later that night, and the only thing he’s able to think is, Ah. So that’s why he wanted someone who knew how to keep their mouth shut.

Hitoshi learns to pack a bag fast and run away faster - when things go wrong, he climbs out the window and is gone before Kanagi shows up to tell him that he has to leave anyways. They always drag him back, eventually, because he’s seven years old and seven-year-olds aren’t all too good at playing hide-and-seek, but one time he manages to disappear for five days before someone finds him. Back then, he counted it as a win in his book, that he managed to elude capture for so long.

Now, though, he wonders if they were even looking.

His foster mother of the month takes him to the science museum when he’s nine and a quarter, and he’s been there exactly twenty-eight times since - kids under twelve get in free, and so do kids with a lockpick. That first time, he holds his foster mother’s hand all the way until they make it to the space exhibit, and then he breaks away, darts this way and that for three full hours and ignores the overhead announcements calling his name. 

Kanagi shows up on the doorstep on the evening of that very same day, but the disappointment on her face is worth it, he thinks, to be able to look at the stars.

“There’s a word,” Hitoshi says to his teacher one day, lingering after class in an attempt to get the bitter taste off of his tongue, “for something that’s just slightly out of place.”

She tilts her head, thinking. She’s young, new, fresh from college, not yet used to the bustle and clamor of Hitoshi’s current middle school, and it shows in the way that she’s taking time out of her own lunch period to answer the strangely-structured question of a back-row student. Finally, she offers, “Askew?”

Hitoshi rolls the word around in his mouth, tastes it. He shakes his head. “No, that’s not it.”

“Askance,” she tries. “Awry. Amiss.” Then, when Hitoshi shakes his head again, she’s silent for longer than before, quiet. And then she says, “Dislocated.”

Hitoshi stares past her, out the window. Seeing things that aren’t there. “Yeah,” he says, after a long, long moment. “That sounds about right.”

You’re one of the lucky ones, Kanagi tells him one day, in the space between a group home and another family as fake and manufactured as plastic. 

He’s riding in the front seat, too tall at the age of thirteen to have an excuse to do anything else. Being in the back would make it look like he was avoiding her, and while he wants to, sometimes, he doesn’t want to alienate the one person that he can count on to treat him like he’s worth anything. 

Alienate. 

That’s another word he’s learned, scouring through the dictionary that someone in the home gave him as a Christmas present, probably as a joke gift, but he appreciates it anyways. It's a way to pass the time while he’s waiting to be placed with another new mother or father,

Anyways, Hitoshi looks at Kagani, wary. I don’t get it.

You’ve got a chance to change the world.

He’s a monster, an example of how Quirks could define lives, could plan them out without the user’s input. He is thin and sly and quick on his feet, a villain in the making, sharp teeth in a shark’s grin. But he’s pretty, Kanagi tells him, when he smiles. People like that, having a kid they can show off in public, that can sit still and sit quiet and sit like a prop in a show, a pawn, a china doll on a high shelf. 

And so, she tells him, he should smile more. 

She tells him about how he should always be presentable, always be polite, always be nothing more than a boy painted as a statue painted as a boy, anything to increase his chances of being picked. Like he’s a dog in the kennel of a pet shop. Like he’s a slab of meat.

She tells him all of this and more.

She tells him a lot of things.

She tells him, there in the front seat of the car, You can prove that people with mentalist Quirks aren’t always bad. You can raise the standard for kids like you. You can change the world, Hitoshi, don’t you want that?

No. He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to change the world. He just wants to be enough. But nobody listens when he says no, and nobody cares, and so he just shrugs and watches the world blur past outside. 

Yeah, he says. Sure.

He’s out of the foster home by the end of the week, and it's not his fault, but it is, because it always is.

It's his fault that his foster mother’s real son, six years older than Hitoshi, had grabbed his hair and dragged him off the couch, cooing, Look at you, you’re so adorable. 

And it's his fault that he thought about how one of his old classmates leered at him a while back and said that he was probably going to get a job as a street walker, so he might as well start practicing now, and how he had shut up when Hitoshi broke his teeth in with a blow that split his knuckles open wide.

It's his fault, it's his fault, that’s what he was told when his new foster brother was flat on his back and there was broken glass on the floor and people were screaming at him, your fault, your fault, why can’t you ever fucking do anything right? Why can’t you listen? What is wrong with you, Hitoshi, we’re trying to do you a favor and you’re just spitting it back in our face, get out, we don’t want you here.

Kanagi had shown up in the flash of ambulance lights, had shaken her head when the police officer unlocked his handcuffs and shoved him towards her. What did you do this time? she asked. Never, What happened this time? 

What happened and what he’s done are two completely different things.

I defended myself, Hitoshi spat back. He was dragging me by my fucking hair.

You could’ve asked him to stop.

Right, because everyone always reacts so well when I ask them a question.

She hadn’t answered, and Hitoshi had gotten into the car, silent, seething.

You can change the world, Hitoshi.

Yeah, right.

He can say whatever he wants in here, it won’t be repeated. Unless he says that he’s going to hurt himself, because then it will be repeated and repeated and repeated until the right person is found to make him cut that out.

There is nothing between his chair and hers. It's an open space. He doesn’t open his mouth. She talks him through the protocol, the legal obligations she has, the terms of the contract. 

She says that Kanagi says that he has problems with anger and problems with control and problems with socializing properly and he has more problems than he should have but, oh boy, can he throw a punch. 

Do you like to fight, Hitoshi? Do you like martial arts? 

Her voice is kind and neutral and way too fucking nice. 

A mental evaluation is not what he agreed to, but it's what Kanagi agreed to, and she makes the rules. She should be the one answering all these questions, he thinks, but he knows that this is a requirement if he’s ever going to be accepted into Yuuei.

Do you like to fight, Hitoshi?

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

“Fists up, stance lowered, feet apart.”

Hitoshi stumbles, caught off-guard, and barely manages to dodge a blow that whistles past his ear a bare inch away from his face.

“Watch out for your blind spot. Watch out for your opponent’s blind spot.”

He doesn’t move fast enough to completely avoid the second strike, and it glances off his shoulder hard enough to make him wince.

“Don’t stand still, keep moving, make yourself a harder target to hit.”

He throws a punch of his own, but all that Aizawa does is catch him by the wrist and force his arm down. “Don’t telegraph your movements,” he says, and Hitoshi huffs and slaps at his hand until he lets him go. He has no idea how Aizawa manages to talk and fight at the same time, but it's irritating, how little effort it takes for him to render him immobile.

As if sensing his frustration, Aizawa sighs. He drops back into a crouch, raises his fists in front of him. “Feet apart,” he repeats. “You need a steady base.”

Hitoshi mimics him, frowning. “I don’t know how I’ll remember this in the middle of a fight,” he says, honest.

Aizawa’s lips twitch like he’s trying not to smile, but it somehow doesn’t feel malicious. More like he’s amused by Hitoshi’s complaints rather than Hitoshi himself. “You’ll remember if you get knocked on your ass enough times,” he says, and, yeah, that makes sense, but it sounds like a pretty painful way to learn a lesson. Hitoshi says so, and Aizawa snorts a laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“Feet apart,” Hitoshi mutters to himself, trying to commit it to memory. “I need a steady base.”

“There we go,” Aizawa says, encouraging, and then lunges forward. Hitoshi’s expecting it this time and he pivots to the side, blocks a blow, and lands one of his own on Aizawa’s arm. He barely even flinches, but he knows he has to feel it because the spot that he hit is steadily turning red. Aizawa moves like he’s about to try to aim a hit at Hitoshi’s ribs and he shifts accordingly, then sees what’s about to happen a second too late.

Aizawa sweeps his legs out from under him and sends him crashing to the ground.

The impact knocks the air from his lungs and he lays there on his back for a good minute, gasping for breath. When Aizawa crouches down beside her, probably checking to see if he’s being dramatic or if he’s genuinely winded, Hitoshi glares half-heartedly at him and hisses, “This is child abuse.”

Aizawa raises an eyebrow. “You’ve got to watch for the feints, Shinsou,” he says, and straightens up, holds out a hand to help him off the plasticky blue mats of the training room. 

Hitoshi takes it, letting Aizawa pull him to her feet, says, “Yeah, I noticed.” He rolls his shoulders, feeling an ache resonate bone-deep through them, and takes a deep, steadying breath. 

Aizawa tracks the motion, frowns. “Are you tired?”

“Oh, please. This is easy.”

Aizawa laughs, long and loud, and Hitoshi smiles.

[candleshopmenace]

process of recovery [process of discovery] | day seven: shaking hands

SUMMARY

There are times when he wonders if he deserves it, deserves this, deserves to even have friends after all that he’s done. 

Does he deserve them?

Does he deserve anything?

—

Deku doesn’t even look up when Katsuki walks into his room and closes the door behind him. He just turns a page in his book, scribbles down a note, and asks, “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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It’s fucking weird, the fact that it took so long to realize that he was friends with Sero. The realization went a little bit like this: Katsuki sprained an ankle during training one day and was limping back to his dorm to take a hot shower and collapse into bed, and, from behind him, Sero’s voice called, Katsuki?

Despite himself, Katsuki had stopped, leaning his weight heavily on his right foot to avoid putting too much pressure on his left. What?

Sero jogged up beside him, adjusting the strap of his bag on his shoulder. His hair was damp and spiked with sweat, and he raked his eyes up and down over Katsuki, said, You’re limping. Are you hurt?

I’m fine, Katsuki had said, and he meant it. It was nothing that he couldn’t deal with himself. He knew a lot about treating shit like this from a childhood of picking fights both with older kids and his mother, and he had a first-aid kit in his room for that very reason - most hero students, he knew, had the exact same thing. It was an unspoken rule that nobody should bother Recovery Girl more than strictly necessary, and so unless it was for something serious enough to merit immediate attention, they all avoided her office like the plague.

You are limping, Sero repeated, like maybe he thought that Katsuki hadn’t heard him the first time. 

Yeah. No shit. It's fine. Leave me alone.

Sero seemed to take that as an invitation to grab him by the wrist and drag him towards the dorms. Katsuki stumbled and cursed and inevitably followed, since that’s the direction he was going in the first place and he didn’t see the point in getting Sero to let him go only to walk the rest of the way by himself, but then he started to vehemently protest when Sero - instead of letting him go into his own room and lick his wounds in peace - pressed the button that would take them to fifth floor. 

Sero pulled him into the fourth room on the right and shut the door behind him. Katsuki scowled and sat down on the bed, watching as Sero rummaged through the rows of drawers by his desk. I don’t need help, he said, glaring. It's just a sprain.

Sero sighed and turned towards him with a roll of compression bandages in his hands. It's important to treat these things when they happen, he’d said. That’s what Mina tells me, anyway. She says that friends are always supposed to take care of each other.

The way he said it implied that he wasn’t just referring to Ashido, and Katsuki blinked at him. We’re friends?

You say that like it’s a bad thing, Sero had joked, but his smile was wide and nervous and Katsuki could see right through it.

… I guess it wouldn’t be. Katsuki had kept his eyes on the ceiling, on the plant in the corner, on the patterned rug, anywhere but the boy in front of him. If it was you.

Sero stared at him for a long, long moment, long enough that anxiety started to spread through his chest like a blooming flower - maybe he’d read the entire situation wrong, and maybe he’d just destroyed whatever shred of comradery existed between the two of them.

And then, Sero said, Oh. He’d handed the bandages to Katsuki, catching his eyes and grinning. Blasty likes me afterall.

I’m surprised that you like me, Katsuki had said, and he didn’t know if it was the pain or the way that Sero was looking at him, but it came out a bit more sincere than he would’ve liked. He started wrapping his ankle so that he wouldn’t have to see the expression on Sero’s face.

There was a pause in which neither of them spoke, in which the only sound was the in and out of their breathing. Then, finally, Sero had said, Nah. He’d said, with a smile in his voice, tentative and fragile, I like you just fine.

… And that was that.

There’s something to be said in the fact that Katsuki isn’t surprised at all when he opens his door and finds Sero waiting for him. Had it been anyone else, Katsuki probably would have accused him of being a creep and a stalker, but, since it's Sero, all that he does is sigh. “You know,” he says, and Sero’s eyes snap to him, lightning-quick, “there’s a little thing called knocking. You should try it one day.”

Sero huffs a laugh. “Didn’t wanna bother you.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

Sero grins at him, wide and toothy, and Katsuki finds himself, somehow, smiling back. 

Because that’s the thing about Sero - by the time you realize that you’re friends with him, it's already too late to back down. He has a way of attaching himself to people that reminds Katsuki of the saying about boiling frogs. First Sero asked your opinion of something, and then the next day he waved to you in the hall, and then the next day he sat beside you at lunch, and the next day he wanted to show you a new show that he’d found, and then a new movie, and then all of a sudden he was sprawled out on your bed like he belonged there and chattering your ear off as you tried to study. 

And that’s it.

That’s exactly what fucking happens.

Katsuki steps to the side and says, “Well, are you coming in or not?”

Sero’s grin gets impossibly wider. “Actually,” he says, “I was hoping that you’d be in the mood to burn some energy.”

“Aren’t I always?” Katsuki glances around his room, says, “Let me get my shoes.” Once they’re on and tied firmly, he steps into the hall and closes the door behind him. “To the track?”

Sero’s eyes narrow. “What is up with you and the track?” he asks, and his voice is teasing even despite the worried edge. 

Katsuki shrugs, unwilling and unable to explain why exactly he always felt drawn to running as an option when it came to ridding himself of excess energy. It's a question that has been raised plenty of times - despite initial impressions, Sero is a very observant person - but Katsuki has never been able to come up with an answer, and so he just says, “Do you want to go or not?”

“Sure, man,” Sero says, and throws an arm around his shoulders, leads him towards the elevator. “I’ll dance with you.”

There are times when he wonders if he deserves it, deserves this, deserves to even have friends after all that he’s done. 

Does he deserve them?

Does he deserve anything?

Katsuki’s lungs are burning. His hands are shaking and he feels like there are blisters coating the bottoms of his feet. He glares down at the stretch of track ahead of him, focus narrowing until the marked white lines are all that he can see. Four more, he thinks. That’s not even that many. Anyone could go a mile.

He closes his eyes, lightheaded and stumbling in his steps. He doesn’t even realize that he’s not running anymore until Sero slows to a stop beside him. “Katsuki?”

When Katsuki doesn’t answer, Sero clicks his tongue and drags him to the bench on the sidelines and sits him down on it, hand pressed bracingly into the small of his back. “You stopped on lap three,” he informs Katsuki.

Katsuki doesn’t answer.

He hates how quickly his mood can shift, all the fucking time. Not even half an hour ago, he was joking with Sero, laughing, and now here he is, barely keeping himself together. It's fucking pathetic, is what it is, and when Sero says, again, “Katsuki?” with an unspoken question in his voice, Katsuki stands.

“I’m tired,” he says. “I’m done for the night.”

Sero watches him leave. Katsuki knows.

He can feel his eyes on his back.

The door is unlocked. 

Katsuki knocks lightly on it before letting himself in, and then he stands in the warm room, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him before closing the door behind himself with a soft snick! that makes him flinch.

Deku’s sitting on his bed, reading a book. He barely looks up at Katsuki. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

The stupid All Might clock above the desk says 3:19 AM. Katsuki stretches his arms above his head and bends backward so far that he nearly loses his balance. He straightens up. Blinks the black dots out of his eyes.

He says, “Can’t sleep. What about you?”

“I’m working on the report. But you’ve already finished yours, Kaachan.” Finally, his gaze flickers in Katsuki’s direction. “Do you think you can help me?”

When Katsuki doesn’t answer, he sighs. “I’ll take that as a no. Have you eaten? I didn’t see you at dinner - you need to eat. Do you want to pass out during training?”

“I need your help with something.”

Deku nods and looks back down at his book. “I bet. You look like shit.”

And then it occurs to Katsuki how sleazy this scene could look to any bystander: him, standing in his classmate’s dorm room at three o’clock in the morning, listening as said classmate tells him that he looks like shit. Katsuki, sneaking around to talk to Deku, everyone else asleep, Deku spending the early hours of the day with a boy in his pajamas.

He grits his teeth. “I mean it. I’m in trouble. Fucking help me.”

Deku pauses, looks around his room for a moment. It's the same as his room back in his and his mom’s apartment looks - crowded with All Might paraphernalia and family pictures. Bright and warm and messy, coffee rings on the wooden desk, posters littering the walls.

Carefully, Deku says, “Have you considered talking to Hound Dog?”

Katsuki chokes on his own spit. “That - mutt? He did a photoshoot for my parents.” He’d probably tell them everything that Katsuki said. Katsuki shakes his head. “No fucking way, Deku.”

“How about a psychologist? I know someone. PhD. Very nice.”

“Why can’t I just tell you? Why can’t you just sit here and listen while I tell you everything?”

Deku looks at him, looks at his book, and closes his eyes. “You shouldn’t be coming here. If someone sees you, sneaking into my dorm so early in the morning… I could lose my scholarship, Kaachan. Anybody could get the wrong idea.” He glances down at his own outfit, which is just sparse enough to be considered inappropriate. Thin undershirt, feet bare, hair messy. He’s just rolled out of bed, probably to finish up the report that Aizawa-sensei assigned them. It's due today, and Deku always has been great at procrastinating.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Katsuki snaps. “I - I run and I run and I run, but nothing gets better. I - I can’t go to my mom, you know how she is, she would just tell me to stop being weak and I can’t - I’ve been having these nightmares and I can’t live like this.”

“I told you, there’s a psychologist -”

Katsuki holds up a hand to cut him off. “Let me tell you the thing about psychologists,” he says. “You know Sero? The tapey one?”

Deku, he rolls his eyes. “The famous Sero Hanta, dealer to the high-school heroes.”

“I don’t care about what you think of him. I don’t give a shit. But his parents, they sent him to a shrink last year - and he had, like, three sessions with this chick, and he confided in her that he, y’know, sells a little pot. It wasn’t more than a month and the good doctor was hitting up my friend for drugs. His psychologist.” He sinks down on the bed beside Deku and puts his head in his hands. “I’m not talking to any fucking shrink.”

Then, as Katsuki sits there, Deku does something that he’s not expecting. He leans over and wraps his arms around Katsuki’s shoulders, holding him tight. Katsuki flinches a little, but he doesn’t pull away. Just squeezes his eyes closed so hard that they pulse in their sockets.

“Kaachan,” Deku says. “Katsuki. I care about you, but I can’t do this. I’m not a therapist. I can’t - I can’t help you. You need a, a professional. Not… me.”

Katsuki’s bottom lip trembles. He bites down on it. “But I don’t need a therapist. I’m not some - some basket case. I just need someone to talk to.” He looks up. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”

Deku sighs. “I know that. You know that.” He pauses. “What if I talk to Aizawa-sensei and get him to find a therapist who has experience with your kind of… problems?”

Katsuki takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Shakes his head.

They both stand up. Deku puts a hand on Katsuki’s back and nudges him towards the door - or, tries to, at least, because Katsuki plants his feet and looks around Deku’s room one last time. It's so warm, and calm, and safe.

Katsuki’s shoulders start to shake. “I don’t want to leave,” he whispers.

And then he starts to cry. 

He buries his face in the crook of his arm. His nose is running. Deku’s right - he looks like shit. He’s too tired to care.

Deku sighs and pulls Katsuki into a hug, Katsuki’s head dropping down onto his shoulder as he starts to really cry. Bawling like a baby. He tries to calm himself down - he knows that he’ll just work himself into a breakdown at this rate - but then he thinks about how cold his room is in comparison to Deku’s and it only makes it harder and harder and harder to breathe. He’s taking in big, heaving gasps of air, so violent that they rip his throat to shreds, and he’s clutching onto the back of Deku’s shirt like he’s a lifeline, a lifeboat in a stormy sea. 

Deku says, “Kaachan,” and then breaks off, like he doesn’t know what else to say. He says it again. “Kaachan…”

“I can’t,” Katsuki says, and then digs his face deeper into Deku’s shoulder. This was stupid. This was stupid. He’s so - stupid. He shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have, have bothered anyone, should’ve just dealt with this on his own. He could’ve just dealt with this on his own, but he’s just - “Fuck,” he says, voice raw. “Fuck, I’m so stupid. I can’t do this, I -”

Deku’s grip on him tightens. “Can’t do what?”

“Anything!” The word comes out as a sob, hurt and confused and so, so angry. “I can’t do anything right! I’m just a - a fucking asshole, I’m not anyone great, I’m not even good, fuck, I can see why I got fucking - kidnapped. I deserved it. Why did you come to save me? I told you not to come!” He shoves himself away from Deku, but he can’t - he’s not mad at him. He can’t look at Deku and not see how fucking angelic the bastard is in comparison to himself. “You, you could have gotten hurt, and it would’ve been my fault, and -” And then he breaks off.

He’s still shaking, and he’s still crying, but his eyes are a little bit clearer. 

He closes his eyes.

Takes a deep breath.

Opens his eyes.

“... Kaachan?” Deku asks, his hands held up, like he’s expecting to have to protect himself from Katsuki at any given moment. “Are you okay?” Fuck no, Katsuki wants to say. Are you fucking stupid?

He doesn’t. He doesn’t. He just says, “I’ll be fine.” Again, like it would make it the truth, “I’ll be fine.”

He starts to walk away, towards the door, and to his back, Deku says, “I don’t care what you say. I’m talking to Aizawa-sensei.”

Katsuki doesn’t answer.

He acts like he can’t even hear him.

As the door closes, Deku shakes his head. “All right, Katsuki,” he says under his breath. “See you tomorrow.”

[candleshopmenace]

no reason to stay [a good reason to go] | day five: running out of air

SUMMARY

If Denki is being honest, this isn’t really how he was expecting to go out. He doesn’t actually know how he expected to go out, but it sure as Hell wasn’t like this, this being stuck under the surface of a lake in the middle of nowhere, Quirk rendered useless by the fact that he’s surrounded with water, with his friends’ voices yelling in his ear. 

—

Kaminari Denki closes his eyes and breathes in deep.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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If Denki is being honest - which he is most of the time, contrary to popular belief - then this isn’t really how he was expecting to go out. He doesn’t actually know how he expected to go out, but it sure as Hell wasn’t like this, this being stuck under the surface of a lake in the middle of nowhere, Quirk rendered useless by the fact that he’s surrounded with water, with his friends’ voices yelling in his ear. 

Now that he thinks about it, though - and he’s trying hard to not think about it, but that kind of thing is easier said than done, especially when one has nearly nothing to think about except for the fact that they’re going to die, alone, because of their own Goddamn actions - it's kind of fitting. Kind of ridiculous. Kind of a little bit of everything, terror and sadness and dark humor, all mixed into one. 

I’m going to die, Denki thinks, and he feels strangely calm about it. I’m going to die, miles away from everyone I have ever cared about. I’m going to die.

Over the comms, someone, probably Bakugou, snaps in a voice crackly with static, “Oi, dumbass! Are you there?”

Denki almost wants to laugh. Yeah, he wants to say, just to hear Bakugou’s reaction, I’m here, but probably not for very long. 

His lungs are already starting to burn. 

He’s sinking like a stone, and, if he squints, he can just make out the shadowy silhouette of the villain he was supposed to be fighting. Maybe it's a good thing that he’s going to die, if only so that he doesn’t have to bear the humiliation of watching Bakugou or Kirishima being able to defeat someone that he couldn’t. He despises them sometimes, for being so good at everything he’s not. That’s a shit way of thinking, and fucking selfish, but it doesn’t make it any less true. 

“Denki!” and it's a different voice, sharp and panicked, “Where are you?”

There’s a harsh bout of feedback as someone clears their throat. “Didn’t he go after that villain?” Sero asks, and he must be in the middle of running or fighting or something because he sounds out of breath. “The one with the density Quirk?”

“Density Quirk?” Ashido echoes, and there’s the distinct sound of metal crumpling. “So, like, he can make things super heavy?”

“Or super light,” Kyoka muses. “Why did Denki go after him?”

And that is the question, isn’t it?

Denki remembers reading somewhere that toddlers couldn’t be left alone in a bathtub because their heads were giant in proportion to their bodies, and they couldn’t really support themselves properly. It was like what happens when you flip a beetle onto its back, it's not able to get right-side up without help. So, you’re not supposed to leave a toddler alone in a bathtub, because if they lean forward they won’t be able to sit back up. Their head will just keep getting lower and lower until it's in the water, and they will drown. If you leave them in there for more than six minutes, it's game over, the kid’s done for. They won’t recover. And Denki isn’t a baby, he’s a fucking third-year in Yuuei, but he feels just as fucking helpless. 

If he talks, he drowns. 

If he takes a breath, he drowns. 

All because of a stupid fucking disagreement, he’s going to die.

“That might be my fault,” Sero says, but Denki can barely even hear him over the rush of blood in his ears. 

He’s still sinking, or maybe that’s purely psychological, because it feels like he’s been in the water for forever and the lake can’t possibly be that deep. 

Maybe he’s already dead. 

Maybe he’s a ghost. 

“The Hell do you mean, it's your fault?” It's Bakugou again, and he sounds angry, again, but there’s an undercurrent of worry there that makes Denki’s throat burn in a way that has nothing at all to do with a lack of air. “What the fuck did you say to him, Sero?” And that’s another thing that Denki’s going to miss, the fact that Bakugou has actually gotten around to calling them their names. The first time Bakugou called him Kaminari, Denki nearly had a heart attack, thinking that he’d done something wrong and was about to be straight up killed for it, but when the shock faded he’d realized that, no, Bakugou was just finally acknowledging the fact that they were friends. Or, well, verbally acknowledging it. 

Denki’s going to miss that.

Sero says, defensive, “Hey, I didn’t mean to offend him! He just took it the wrong way!”

“That’s not a fuckin’ answer, Sero.”

“Well, if you would let me speak -”

“Guys,” Kirishima cuts in, irritated. “Not the time. Sero, just tell us what happened.”

“Right, right, I know.” Sero makes a frustrated noise, accompanied by a resounding crack! that echoes over the comms, reverberating until Denki can feel it all the way down to his bones. “So I noticed that the density guy was sneaking away, right, and Denki wanted to go after him. And I was like, No, let someone else handle it, he’s pretty powerful, and I guess that he thought that I was saying that he wouldn’t be able to take him down? And I didn’t mean it like that, it's just -”

There’s a rustling sound, and then Ashido’s voice pops back into existence, far too loud, “Hanta, what direction did the density guy go?” 

“I don’t fucking know!” And that’s a fact that most people don’t pick up about Sero - aside from Bakugou, Sero had the worst temper in their entire friend group. He’s got a short fuse, which is something that surprised Denki when they first met. “You think I have this damn city mapped out? This is supposed to be a fucking holiday!”

“Oh, calm the Hell down, Tape-Face, she’s not asking for you to be a GPS, she just wants a general direction.” Bakugou is surprisingly good at being the voice of reason in situations like this, and it shows when he says, “Kaminari, if you can hear us, turn on your comms. I’ll track your location.”

“You can do that?” Ashido asks, incredulous. “When did that happen?”

“Same time I got Hatsume to make them waterproof. Not falling for another Deku trap.” Bakugou huffs a breath at the memory of when Midoriya got lost in an unfamiliar city back in their second year. Denki remembers that Bakugou had been pissed about that for an entire month afterwards, in which he refused to call Midoriya anything but, That Goddamned Villain Magnet. “Kaminari, can you hear me?”

Denki’s mind feels fuzzy, like he’s made of static and air, like he’s about to float away, but his body does feel less heavy now. Maybe the Quirk is, like, distance based? That’d make sense. Still, it takes a huge amount of effort to wrench his arm upwards, makes his chest feel like it's about to explode. He slams a hand against the comm in his ear, wincing on impact, and there’s a familiar bzzt! noise as the microphone clicks on. 

“Jesus Christ,” Bakugou mutters. “How the Hell did you manage to get so far?”

By trying to prove a point, Denki wants to say. I tried to show that I could take down a villain by myself, and look where it got me. Look where it fucking got me. 

He doesn’t answer, obviously, because he can’t, and when Bakugou speaks again he sounds halfway between irritated and concerned. “Kaminari? Talk to me, Chargebolt.” There’s a sound in the background, the rhythmic thumping of feet hitting the ground, and Denki realizes that Bakugou is running.

Denki’s entire body is somehow numb and freezing at the same time, and he feels like there’s ice crawling over his skin. His throat aches like a fucking bitch. 

Towards the end of last year, a retired Pro Hero had come in and shown them all how to survive an interrogation. She had shoved Denki’s head into a bucket of water, all the while instructing him to seal his lips and close his eyes and hold onto a single image, something important, something precious, and Denki had always thought about his friends. He pictured them all together, acting - for once - like actual kids their age were supposed to, smiling, laughing, joking around, none of the defensive seriousness that they had all adopted before their first year was even over. 

This feels a lot like that, except Denki knows that there’s no one waiting to pull him out of the water if it goes too far.

“Denki?” It's Bakugou again, and Denki wonders, dimly, as to why he hasn’t heard from his other friends in a while. “I don’t know what’s going on, but stay awake. I’m almost there.”

Drifting in the water like this and cold inside and out, Denki can almost pretend that none of this is happening. That he’s not as useless as he thinks. That he’s not helpless, holding his breath and waiting for Bakugou to come save him, a knight in shining armor swooping in to rescue a damsel in distress. 

If this is what death feels like, pain and then nothing but eternal white noise, then it makes him wonder if living is really worth it. And he’s heavy, so heavy, like the Quirk has been reactivated and now all he needs to do is wait for his lungs to collapse.

He can’t give up. He’s so close to being a hero, a real hero, and isn’t that all that he’s ever wanted? Isn’t that everything he’s dreamed of? To be a hero, someone that kids could look up to, someone that always did the right thing. And so he can’t give up, because he’s a hero, and heroes never break. Isn’t this what a hero would do? Stay strong like this? Be brave like this? But, still, the urge to just let himself float and float and float is so strong that he can taste it, metal in his mouth.

There’s a splashing noise above him, deafening as the sound of the sky cracking open, just as he closes his eyes and breathes in deep.

[candleshopmenace]

hell is empty [all the devils are here] | day four: hidden injury

SUMMARY

They chain him up like he’s a fucking monster.

I’m not, Katsuki thinks, even as he thrashes and feels blood run down his wrists where the cuffs chafe against his skin. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not -

The crowd roars its approval, and Bakugou Katsuki screams.

—

Katsuki is seven years old when he gets called a villain for the first time, and it happens while he’s sitting in the passenger seat of his mother’s car.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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I.

Katsuki is seven years old when he gets called a villain for the first time, and it happens while he’s sitting in the passenger seat of his mother’s car. It's almost casual, the way she starts the conversation - it's nothing at all like how she spoke back at Katsuki’s school, when she was shooting him furious glares in the spaces of the principal’s words - and so he doesn’t trust it at all. 

She says, “What, no excuses?” 

She can’t seem to keep her eyes on the road. She keeps glancing over at him. He avoids her gaze, staring at his hands and the dashboard, crossing his arms over his chest, scowling out the window and watching the trees blur by in one big smear of motion, fast as the beat of his heart. He doesn’t hate very many things, not yet, but he hates it when she looks at him like she’s looking at him now, like he’s something the world chewed up and spat back out at her feet. Like she can’t see herself in him.

When he doesn’t answer, his mother sighs. “Katsuki.”

At the sound of his name, he turns his head a fraction of a degree, just enough that he can see her clearly in his peripheral vision. “What?” he asks, eyes darting between the set of her jaw and the way her hands are clawed around the steering wheel, white-knuckled.

“Don’t you think that I deserve an explanation?”

Katsuki bites the inside of his cheek and slumps down further in his seat. He’d gotten into fights before at school, but this one was unfamiliar because it had been his mother, not his father, who had shown up in the aftermath. It was fucking weird, and he still wasn’t sure as how to deal with it. Finally, he says, “He had it coming.” He knows even as the words leave his mouth that they’re nowhere near enough.

His mother swerves around a street corner and Katsuki goes crashing hard against the door. His teeth dig into his tongue as pain shocks through his shoulder. “That’s your answer?” his mother snaps, voice waspish and sharp. “Are you fucking serious, Katsuki? He had it coming?” She yanks the car into the driveway and kills the engine, snarls, “I didn’t raise you to be like this. I don’t know what I raised you to be, but it sure as Hell wasn’t a sociopathic little freak.”

“I’m not a freak,” Katsuki says, instead of saying that he’s not the one that started the fight, instead of saying that none of it was his fault in the first place, he was just the one that got blamed because he was always the one who got blamed, the one that everyone pointed their fingers at. 

Ignoring him, his mother says, “I don’t know why you’re like this. What is wrong with you?” She tugs the key out of the ignition, looks at him, and says, “Do you know what happens to kids like you? Kids who grow up angry?”

“No.”

“They turn into fucking monsters, that’s what happens to them. They turn into monsters and then they go to jail, and if that happens, Katsuki, I will disown you.” She leans across the armrests of the center console and closes one hand around his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “Do you understand me, Katsuki? I will disown you, and you won’t be my son anymore. You’ll be dead to me.”

Katsuki stares at her, grits his teeth, and doesn’t answer.

Her nails dig into his skin, and his cheek throbs where his classmate had managed to land a punch. “Listen to me, Katsuki,” she says, enunciating every word, driving the point home. “You are going to grow up to be a villain, and when that happens, I will disown you. You won’t be part of this family anymore. You will rot in jail and I will let you, because that’s what people like you deserve. Do you understand?”

Katsuki takes a deep breath. His throat burns, and his knuckles ache where they're split open and crusted with blood. He’s silent for a long, long moment, and then he says, “Yeah.”

He says, in a voice heavy with resignation, “Yeah. I understand.”

II.

The next time it happens, he’s almost expecting it. 

After all, what else could someone like him be called? 

He is nine years old and he is shaking. His pulse is roaring in his ears, drowning out everything except for the sound of his mother’s voice, his own ragged breaths.

“I give you food!” his mother screams, and Katsuki can all but feel the foundations of the house tremble under his feet. “I give you a roof over your head! I give you everything you could ever want, and you still don’t even have the decency to treat me with respect, you ungrateful little -”

“Mitsuki,” Katsuki’s father says, and grabs her arm. “The neighbors.”

Katsuki’s mother jerks away, her eyes set on Katsuki. Her fingers curl and uncurl at her sides, like she’s itching to wrap them around something - his throat, probably - and squeeze. “Fuck the neighbors,” she says. “And fuck you, too, Masaru. Fuck this entire family.” She stabs a finger at Katsuki and he just barely manages to keep himself from flinching. “Get the Hell out of my face, or I swear to fucking God that I will kill you. I should’ve seen you for what you were when you were a baby, should’ve cut my losses, but I didn’t, and look what that’s gotten me. A son who acts like a monster and a husband that won’t even take his own wife’s side.”

Katsuki stares at her, chest heaving. It always ended like this, in a screaming match that only served to drive a wedge between him and his parents - Hell, this had started as a normal conversation! It had only turned into an argument when Katsuki said something that his mother didn’t agree with. Even now, he can’t pinpoint exactly what it was that set her off. Talking to his mother was like trying to walk through a minefield - he never knew what topics were harmless and which ones would make her blow up in his face. 

“I hate you,” he hisses, then stalks past her and up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door against the sound of her footsteps storming behind him. He sits down on his bed and throws his comforter over his head, cloaking himself in darkness. 

He doesn’t know how long he stays like that, but he knows that he only moves from the spot when he hears a knock on his door. 

It's his father, has to be. 

His mother isn’t the type to wait to be invited. 

“Come in,” he says, poking his head into the air, wrapping his blanket around his shoulders like a cape. He watches warily as his father steps into his room. “What do you want?”

His father smiles, but it's tight and forced. “How are you feeling?”

Like shit, Katsuki wants to say, but he doesn’t. He just narrows his eyes and says, “That doesn’t count. You can’t answer a question with another question. That’s stupid.”

His father’s smile becomes a little more genuine, and the knot in Katsuki’s chest loosens just a bit. He looks pointedly at the spot beside him on the bed, and his father huffs a laugh, sits down. He ruffles Katsuki’s hair. Katsuki leans into the touch despite himself, the gentleness more than welcome after his mother’s razor-sharp words. 

Did she really hate him enough to want to kill him? 

Was he really that horrible of a son? 

Katsuki blinks rapidly. He’s not going to cry. If he didn’t cry when his mother told him that she wanted him dead, then he wasn’t going to cry now just because his father is trying to minimize the damage. But his eyes still burn when his father says, “She didn’t mean it, you know.”

Katsuki’s chest feels compressed tight whenever he takes a breath, like every emotion he’s ever felt is being forced into the space between his ribs and his lungs. He nods and then nods again, says, “Yeah, I know,” because he knows it's what his father wants to hear, even if it's a fucking lie, even if his father knows that it's a lie. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t mean it. Maybe if he repeats it enough times he’ll believe it. 

His father puts a hand on Katsuki’s shoulder, tugs him into his side. “She loves you. We both love you.”

“How do you know?” Katsuki asks before he can stop himself. 

His father blinks at him. He opens his mouth. Closes it. He says, eyebrows furrowed, “Sorry, what was that?”

Katsuki glares down at his hands, regretting even saying anything. “How do you know that she loves me?”

The hand on his shoulder tightens. “All parents love their children, Katsuki,” his father says. “They have to.”

“Oh.” 

For a while, neither of them speak. They sit in silence, staticy and tense, just the sound of them breathing and the air conditioner whirring through the vents. The house is so cold that he feels like he’s freezing all the way down to his bones. 

Finally, almost reluctantly, his father says, “Katsuki, don’t you want to be a hero?”

Katsuki’s eyes flick over to him, scan his face. Where is he going with this? What is he planning? Carefully, he says, “Yes.” Looking across the room at the poster taped onto his closet door, All Might loudly proclaiming, I AM HERE!, he says, “I do.”

“Well, Katsuki, an important part of being a hero is being able to respect the people who are more powerful than you.”

Ah. So that’s what this is about. Katsuki hefts his blanket tighter around his shoulders, shoving his father’s hand away. He mutters, “It wasn’t even my fucking fault.”

His father hums under his breath, considering. “Maybe so,” he says, but there’s an edge of doubt to his voice that makes Katsuki’s skin crawl. “But sometimes you just have to accept the things that you can’t change.”

“But it wasn’t my fault,” Katsuki insists.

“Katsuki, are you even listening to me?”

“She just started yelling, and I don’t even know why!”

“Katsuki -”

“I fucking hate her! I hate her! She always acts like I’m stupid!”

“Bakugou Katsuki!”

Katsuki halts. His hands are trembling, and he can smell smoke, and his vision is blurry. He sniffs miserably and swipes his arm across his eyes. He can feel his father seething beside him, which isn’t doing anything to help him get his feelings back in check. Making his father angry is a hard thing to do, and once he got well and truly pissed he rivaled even his wife in terms of fury. It's never been aimed directly at Katsuki before, but he’s seen it happen - once when he was six, his parents brought him along to a ball, and he’d been able to witness his father get into an argument with a coworker. By the time security got called, there was broken glass everywhere and Katsuki had a cut on his forehead from getting in the way of a flying vase.

He can hear his father take a deep breath, blow it out. He says, in a slightly strained voice, “Katsuki, be quiet and listen to me.” His words say, Please let me speak, but his tone says, Shut the fuck up, Katsuki.

Katsuki shudders and pulls his knees up to his chest. 

His father continues, “Your mother has been under a great deal of stress lately, and you’re not helping matters by antagonizing her every chance you get. You say you want to be a hero, but there’s a lot more to being a hero than winning every battle you fight - you have to know when to back down.”

In other words, when to turn the other cheek. 

Katsuki is so, so cold, but he’s burning all the same. His chest feels like it's made of hot coals, like it's scorching him from the inside-out. 

“A hero that doesn’t take other people’s feelings into account isn’t a hero at all, Katsuki.” His father puts his hand back on his shoulder and Katsuki tenses, tries to shrug it off, but the grip just tightens and tightens. “And if someone isn’t a hero, what does that make them?”

Under his father’s expectant gaze, Katsuki relents. He says, anger and shame and pain mixing together in his throat until he feels sick to his stomach, “A villain.” He curls his fists, and his nails stab into his palms. “That makes them a villain.”

“And do you want to be a villain?”

The hand on his shoulder falls away. His father stands, looks down at him. He rakes his fingers through his hair. He looks tired, and Katsuki feels so guilty that it's hard to breathe. Here his father is, acting as the mediator between his wife and his son, and Katsuki isn’t being helpful at all. In fact, he’s being worse than not helpful. He’s being actively destructive. He’s being fucking useless.

“Katsuki,” his father says when he doesn’t speak. “Answer me. Do you want to be a villain?”

Katsuki shakes his head.

“Then stop acting like one.”

His breath hitches. The words jolt him all the way to his core, punch the air from his lungs. He bites his lip and nods again, sharper, blinking back the stinging of his eyes.

“I don’t like having these talks, Katsuki,” his father says. “I don’t like having to choose between you and your mother when you get into an argument. Think about that next time, okay?”

“Okay,” Katsuki whispers, and the tears overflow, spill down his face. His voice cracks when he says, “I’m sorry.”

His father sighs. “I know.” 

With that, he turns and walks out of Katsuki’s room without looking back. 

He closes the door behind him.

Katsuki’s heart aches.

III.

The third time, it's his own damn fault. He does it to himself. The word is spit out in his own voice, a knife turned inwards, the blade resting against his neck and his fingers wrapped around the handle, testing its weight. 

He’s sitting on the roof with Kariage, legs kicking back and forth over the edge. One move forward is all that it would take, but Kariage is here, the person he loves more than he’s ever loved anyone before, and Katsuki may be an asshole but he’s not enough of an asshole to traumatize his best friend. Later, he tells himself, come back when you’re alone, and he knows even as he thinks it that he won’t end up doing it. He’s selfish, much too selfish to give his mother the satisfaction of having him dead.

He’s twelve years old and he wants to die.

Kariage blows out a stream of smoke, tilts his head to look at Katsuki. “You always look so pissed,” he says, and he sounds almost fond. “What’s going on in that head of yours, huh?”

Katsuki thinks, for a long moment, of what he could possibly say. What answer he could give. I think that I’m going to Hell, he almost says, actually does start to say it, “I think I’m -” and just barely manages to cut himself off. 

Kariage’s eyes glitter with amusement. “Katsuki?”

Katsuki swallows, hard. He stares up at the sky stretching above him, stretching beyond him, endless and infinite and unforgivingly bright, and says, “Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” Kariage says, grinning around his cigarette. “You’re always thinking about something, Katsuki. You know that. I know that. So cut the crap.”

Katsuki laughs. It's yanked out of him, involuntary, and he couldn’t stop it if he tried. He smothers it behind his hand, stifles it until he can look at Kariage without a hint of humor. “Fine,” he says, and nods towards the little white stick burning and burning and burning between Kariage’s fingers, “I was thinking about how much that thing stinks.”

In response, Kariage brings it to his lips and blows a cloud of smoke right into Katsuki’s face. Katsuki jerks back, coughs, snaps, “I hate you.”

Kariage smiles, wide and sharp. “You love me.”

“You fucking wish.”

Kariage snorts and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure.” He stubs the cigarette out on his palm and flicks it over the side of the building, ignoring Katsuki’s scolding of, That’s littering, dumbass. “Anyways, really, the Hell is up with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” he mocks, doing a poor imitation of Katsuki’s voice. “So… what? You’re just being moody for no reason?”

“I’m not being moody,” Katsuki huffs, then pauses. “Wait, am I being moody?”

“Um, yeah.” Kariage raises an eyebrow. “What happened? Did Missie die or something?”

“My cat is fine. It's just -” Katsuki leans forward, watches the people milling around down below. It's going to be time to go back to class soon, since the school seemed to think that twenty minutes was enough time to wait in line, get lunch, and eat said lunch, but he doesn’t want to leave. He just wants to stay up here, forever, wind blowing in his ears and Kariage at his side. “What do you want to be when you’re older? What do you want your job to be?”

“Weird question, Kit-Kat.”

“Shut up and answer.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Kariage glaring at the sky, like he’s asking God why he has to be the one to deal with Katsuki’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. He says, sullen, “I mean, I guess that being a mechanic or something wouldn’t be too bad.”

“A mechanic,” Katsuki echoes.

“I said what I said.” Kariage looks over at him. “And you’re going to be a hero, obviously.”

“Yeah,” Katsuki says. “I want to be a hero.”

Kariage’s eyes sharpen, and Katsuki curses at himself. The thing about Kariage is that he’s smart. Maybe not so much in academics, but when it comes to reading people he’s a Goddamn genius, and he has an uncanny knack for spotting details that anyone else would overlook. “Oh?” he says, almost to himself. “So that’s what’s bothering you.”

Katsuki bristles. “Shut the fuck up,” he says, harsher than he means to, but Kariage just gives him a shit-eating grin that only serves to infuriate him further. “Damnit, Kari, get out of my fucking head.”

“I’m not doing anything. If you can’t stop thinking about me, that’s your fault, not mine.”

“You’re a fucking bastard and I hate you.”

“Mhm,” Kariage hums, sounding unconvinced. “Sure.” He pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offers it to Katsuki.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Like Hell you don’t, you stuck-up little shit.” Kariage shakes one out of the box, grabs Katsuki’s hand, presses it into his palm. “I’ve seen you smoke, you damn loser. You do it when you’re stressed.”

“Fuck you,” Katsuki says, but doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t let go, either, even as he says, “And I’m not stressed.”

He used to have a touch of asthma, back when he was a little kid. All the smoke from his explosions, all of those accidental fires. It's gone now, but it might come back if he accepts. No, he should say. He should tell Kariage to quit the habit. He should get off the fucking roof. He should stop thinking about what his body would look like, hanging from the bar in his closet, flat on its back with a bullet in its head, bloody and broken on the ground. 

There are so many things that he should do, but, in the end, he knows that he won’t.

Kariage’s lighter flares to life, and Katsuki’s a goner. 

After a few minutes of silence, in which Katsuki gets so light-headed that Kariage grabs his collar to stop him from tumbling end-over-end into oblivion, Kariage says, “So, I’ve decided that your brain is a bit of a bitch.”

Katsuki smiles, just slightly. “My brain is a bitch?”

Kariage nods, waves a hand in a wide, pointless gesture. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” He takes a long, long drag, blows it out. “Because it makes you feel bad about yourself, and I don’t think that you should feel bad about yourself. Y’know what I’m saying? It's like - like - it's your brain’s fault, but it's not your fault.” He makes a frustrated noise, the kind he used to make back when they were kids and he couldn’t puzzle out a word, couldn’t sound it out properly. “I’m not even making any sense.”

“Yeah, you’re not, but I think I get it.”

“Anyways, anyways.” Kariage’s fingers tap a drumbeat against the roof. “You’re stressed about the entrance exams, aren’t you?”

“What? No.”

“Well, you’re stressed about something, and I know it's related to being a hero.”

“Yeah?” Katsuki’s throat burns, burns, burns, and he keeps his eyes fixed on the sky. “What makes you say that?”

“Because when I said, You’re going to be a hero, you said, I want to be a hero.” A subtle tic of grammar, an entire world of difference. “So, what’s up? Do you think you’re not going to make it?”

Maybe it's the cigarette, or maybe it's the fact that it's Kariage who’s asking, but when Katsuki opens his mouth and starts to speak, he hears himself tell the exact truth to the boy on the rooftop beside him. “I’m pretty sure that I’m a villain, Kari,” he says, and the admission, the honesty, sears like whiskey on his tongue. “I only ever seem to do the wrong thing. I’m a failure and a waste of space and I deserve to die.”

There’s nothing but the whistle of wind for a long moment, and then Kariage says, slowly, “Katsuki.”

And it hits him.

Oh. 

Oh, fuck.

Fuck, what has he done?

He’s on his feet and heading towards the door, running away again, before he even stops to think about what he’s doing - and that’s his problem, isn’t it, the way that he never fucking thinks? What is wrong with him?

What is wrong with him?

IV.

The fourth time doesn’t really count, since it's not explicitly said, but the sentiment is there. 

Oh, yeah, the sentiment is definitely there.

This is becoming a routine, Katsuki thinks, bitterly amused even as he yanks against the restraints that tie him to the pedestal. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, something about being forced into a role that he doesn’t want. Something symbolic. Or maybe it's a joke. Katsuki always has been absolute shit at telling the difference between the two.

I would spit in your face if I could, Katsuki thinks, all rage and borderline mania even as he stares at the smile that’s been hung on his closet wall for longer than he can remember, I AM HERE! 

All Might takes off the muzzle to give him a medal, a stupid, worthless medal, and Katsuki’s teeth snap shut just bare centimeters away from his fingers. All Might keeps on grinning, but his voice is cold when he leans forward and hisses low enough that no one else can hear, “Behave yourself.”

Like he’s a fucking dog, sit, heel, fetch. Like he’s the one who’s being irrational, like he’s not fucking tied up on live TV, like he’s not being handed a prize that he doesn’t want, doesn’t deserve. Like he’s not even worthy of being treated with basic human decency.

Like he’s a Goddamn villain.

I’m not, Katsuki thinks, even as he thrashes and feels blood run down his wrists where the cuffs chafe against his skin. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not -

The crowd roars its approval, and Bakugou Katsuki screams.

V.

When it happens for the fifth and final time to date, it's because Katsuki was having a bad day. It's hard to classify what counts as a bad day and what counts as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, but he’d say that the one that kick-started the mess that followed definitely fell in the latter category. 

So, it started with a bad day, got worse, and turned into a bad week. He failed a training exercise and made Icy-Hot pissed, because after Kamino, Katsuki can’t quite stand to be in the same room as the bastard - something about his fire reminds Katsuki way too much of Dabi. 

After that, he flunked a test that he’d studied for, actually studied for, and that had dropped his class ranking down until he was down below Deku - Katsuki could make it up, of course, but it was the fact of the matter that frustrated him. He shouldn’t have to make anything up. The look that Aizawa-sensei had given him when he handed back the paper didn’t help, either. Why was Katsuki the only one that he looked at like that, like he was actually worried? 

It didn’t make any fucking sense.

So, yeah, he’s a little bit on edge, and, of course, the one that makes him snap is Kirishima. 

The person that was usually able to calm him down is the very one that sends him past what is probably the point of no return, and now Katsuki is about to lose the only person who he feels comfortable, truly comfortable, and it’ll be all his fault because he couldn’t reign in his tongue or his temper for one more fucking second.

It starts like this: Kaminari won’t leave him alone. Whether he genuinely wants company or is actively trying to be annoying is something Katsuki has not yet figured out, but it's irritating as Hell and he wants it to stop. And the truth of the matter, the crux of the issue, is that Katsuki actually wouldn’t mind hanging out with Kaminari, if it were just him. But he and his friends are like a flock of seagulls - if one of them goes somewhere, the rest of them follow. 

And so Katsuki ended up here, here being on the couch in the common room, crowded in the middle and surrounded by his classmates, half-heartedly watching a movie that he can’t focus on because he can’t stop thinking about how much he’d like to go back to his dorm and fall into bed and close his eyes and sleep until he stopped feeling like his skin was going to crawl right off of his bones. 

Jirou digs an elbow into his side. “Are you good?” she asks, and that - of course - draws Kirishima’s attention to him, so now he has two sets of eyes burning into him instead of just one. 

Katsuki grits his teeth. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Mind your own business, Ears.”

“Ears?” Jirou’s voice is an odd mix of amused and concerned. “Haven’t heard that in a while. Are you sure that -”

“I said that I’m fine,” Katsuki snaps. “For someone with great hearing, you’re surprisingly shit at listening, Ears.”

Kaminari, who’s sitting on the ground in front of the couch, tilts his head back against Katsuki’s knees and frowns up at him. “Hey, Bakugou, uncalled for. Lay off a bit.”

“There’s a better way you could’ve said that, Denki,” Sero says, and shoots Katsuki an apologetic smile. “He’s just worried about you, Katsuki.”

“Aren’t we all,” Jirou mutters.

She says it in a way that makes it clear that she’s not expecting to be heard, and Katsuki’s hackles rise. He whips his head back towards her. “What was that?”

Ashido’s arms are slung over the top of the couch, and she bats one hand towards Katsuki’s face in an ill-advised - and ill-fated - attempt to get him to simmer down. “She didn’t mean anything by it,” she says, and maybe it's a good thing that she’s at an angle that doesn’t let her see Jirou’s expression, because it's downright fucking murderous. “You know how Kyoka is.”

Kaminari jumps in, as always, with, “Hey!” like he’s the one who just got insulted. 

Jirou wrinkles her nose at him. “Oh, shut up, Denki.” Ignoring his indignant sputtering, she looks at Katsuki. “Look, we’re worried about you.”

“Yeah!” Kirishima butts in, and his hands are around Katsuki’s arm now, like he’s making sure that he won’t make a break for it. “You’ve been so quiet lately, which is weird because we’re in the dorms now and so I thought -”

“Eijirou,” Sero says. He reaches over and pries Kirishima’s fingers away from where they’re digging into Katsuki’s skin. “You know he doesn’t like to be touched. And I told you that -”

“But look at him! He looks depressed!”

“He doesn’t look depressed, he just looks pissed as Hell, and I would be, too, if I was in his position.” Sero makes a sharp cutting motion through the air, directed at Katsuki, and it's ridiculous but Katsuki still can’t stop himself from jerking back. “It's obvious that he doesn’t want to be here, but he’s watching the damn movie with us anyways, and all you guys are doing is arguing!”

Katsuki stands so quickly that he almost steps on Kaminari, who yelps and scrambles back. “Right,” Katsuki says. “I’m going to sleep.”

“Bakugou, it's only eight o’clock,” Jirou says, bemused.

Kirishima gets up as well. “The movie isn’t over!” It's an obvious attempt to get Katsuki to stay a little longer, and, Hell, it even almost works, but then Katsuki imagines having to stay down here with people who talk about him like he’s not even there, people who have the best intentions but execute their plans hilariously badly, uncoordinated, and something in his heart starts to tick-tick-tick away like a time bomb.

“I don’t care,” he says, and it's a lie, it's a fucking lie, because he wants to spend time with his friends and he wants to be around them but he’s so scared of what will happen if they stand in the blast zone while he inevitably explodes. “I’m going to sleep, and if any of you wake me up, I swear to God that I’ll be a bitch to you in training tomorrow.”

“Bakugou,” Kirishima says, and makes a move like he’s about to grab Katsuki’s hand. He huffs when Katsuki yanks away, says, almost irritated, “Look, everyone knows that you’ve been stressed lately, and all we’re doing is trying to help! Let us help you! I know we can’t make everything better, but we can at least make it so that you can relax a little.”

Katsuki doesn’t know why he says it. He doesn’t. He feels like he’s standing outside of his own body, like nothing is tangible, real. “Yeah,” he says, and his own fucking voice sounds like it's coming at him from the end of a tunnel. “Because that’s all I need in my life, right? Yuuei, villains, and Kirishima Eijirou by my side.”

Kirishima flinches but hides it well, just keeps pressing forward, “And this is my point, Bakugou! You act like you hate all of us but I know that you don’t!” He takes a long, deep breath, looks at Katsuki with accusatory eyes. “You’re just so Goddamn stubborn, Bakugou, and you make it so hard to help you.”

Something hits the ground - Katsuki’s heart, maybe - and Katsuki follows, the weight of the world crashing down hard on his back. He shakes and he shakes and he feels like he’s yelling, and Sero has jumped up from the couch, Ashido is shouting, and there’s a hand on the back of his collar that drags him to his feet. When Katsuki’s vision clears, when the red fades away, he sees that Kirishima is still on the floor of the common room. He has a hand to his mouth and is looking at Katsuki like he’s something to be afraid of.

“What the fuck, Katsuki,” Sero gripes in his ear, still holding him firmly by the arm. “What’s gotten into you?”

Katsuki’s breaths rip at his lungs. “Nothing,” he snarls, and a voice in his head croons, You sociopathic little freak. “Nothing, just -” He stares at Kirishima and his fingers curl back into fists, skin splotched and red with his friend’s blood. “Fucking idiot, you should’ve used your Quirk.”

“He didn’t want to hurt you,” Ashido grumbles, irritated, like it should’ve been obvious. She’s crouched down by Kirishima’s side and is glaring up at Katsuki. “You know, because that’s what heroes do.”

Kirishima drops his hand from his mouth, hisses, “Mina,” and Katsuki watches a line of red creep down his chin. 

“Don’t get all pissy at me! He’s being a dumbass! He’s acting like a -”

“Hey, none of that.” It's Sero, again. He steps between Katsuki and Ashido, like he thinks that maybe if he blocks Katsuki’s view he won’t realize what Ashido was about to say. “I think we all just need to get some rest.”

Katsuki takes another breath, feels it rattle in his throat. He isn’t even in control of himself right now, and that’s just pathetic. Kirishima hasn’t looked him in the eye once since Katsuki punched him, hasn’t even gotten off of the ground, but tomorrow he’ll probably greet Katsuki with a smile that he doesn’t deserve, because that’s how Kirishima is, always so forgiving, and Katsuki is taking advantage of that, he’s such a horrible person -

Kaminari comes out of the kitchen with Jirou in tow. He’s holding a roll of paper towels and a water bottle, and he tosses both to Kirishima. Jirou looks at Katsuki, mouths, Get some sleep.

Katsuki shakes off Sero’s hands and walks towards the elevators, pausing for just a moment with an apology on his lips. But apologies don’t make things better, and apologies don’t fix mistakes. 

Nobody tries to stop him when he lets the doors close behind him, and Bakugou Katsuki has never felt more like his mother’s son.

[candleshopmenace]

let us live [we must die] | day one: adverse effects

SUMMARY

When Bakugou shudders beneath her, Kyoka thinks for a moment that he’s about to wake up. He’ll probably laugh at her for being so worried, but it’ll be light-hearted and it wouldn’t hurt, as long as he was okay. 

And then his body twitches again, and she realizes that he’s not getting better. 

He’s getting worse.

Somebody grabs her shoulder and yanks her away just as Bakugou starts to seize. 

-

"Anyways," Bakugou says. "Have you ever heard of a nitroglycerin overdose?"

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[ao3 link]

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Kyoka doesn’t have a death wish, but when she turns the corner and sees Bakugou standing like he’d just been socked in the stomach - slightly hunched over, one hand braced on the wall and the other gripping at his chest, panting shallowly - she can’t stop herself from asking, “Are you okay?” And then she winces, because she knows as well as the next person that Bakugou hates questions like that, that he tended to take them as a personal affront, a jab at his pride, and she’s really not looking forward to being yelled at by one of her best friends.

But Bakugou’s shoulders tense, and his head snaps up, and Kyoka’s mouth goes dry at the glazed look in his eyes. He’s not angry, that much is clear. He just looks… confused, like he doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know where he is. Sweat drips down his face. He blinks once, twice, but continues looking just as puzzled as before, and the words that drag themselves from his mouth are thick and slurred, nearly incoherent. “I… yeah, no, I’m fine, I…” His hands twitch. Kyoka watches with muted shock as they start to tremble. “Got a fuckin’ headache.”

Kyoka steps forward, reaching out to steady her classmate because he looks well and truly on his way to collapsing, but then she freezes when he lets out a pained hiss. “Bakugou?”

He screws his eyes shut tightly and shakes his head, says, “I’m fine, Ears, just -” He takes a sharp, gasping breath, and maybe it's just her imagination, but his knees seem to buckle just a little. 

And then a lot. 

And then he’s dropping to the floor, and the hand that’s on the wall drags down the rough concrete, and Kyoka’s pulse leaps into her throat and stays there, pounding, as she stares at the red streaks left behind. Kyoka snaps her eyes to Bakugou, still slumped on the ground. She knows first-aid - it's a required course - but there’s a big difference between splinting fake injuries on training dummies and dealing with the fact that one of your friends has just fainted in front of you.

“Bakugou?” And her voice is so small that she hardly even recognizes it. She stumbles forward, kneels down, and grabs his shoulder. Shakes it, hard. “Bakugou?” His skin is damp and tacky with sweat, but it's so cold at the same time, and his heart is thumping far harder than normal when she presses her fingers to it. “Ba -”

Bakugou jolts, smacks her hand away. “Quit fucking groping me,” he snaps, an obvious attempt at humor that falls flat when a full-body shudder ripples through him. “Shit, Ears, I’m fine. I just -”

“You just fainted,” Kyoka bites out, far sharper than she meant to, but she’s worried. “Stop moving. Stay still.” She checks his temperature. “It's not a fever. When did you start feeling sick?”

“Jesus, Ears, I just said that I’m fine, would you just… just -

His eyes roll back into his head, and he topples back. Kyoka catches him just before he can crack his skull open, and she lowers him to the ground with shaking hands, stares at his face, breaths coming shallow with the all-too-familiar feeling of mind-numbing panic. 

“Bakugou?” she says, but it's weak, and there’s no way he’d be able to hear her, anyways. He hasn’t merely fainted this time. He’s passed out. 

Kyoka tries to drag Bakugou onto her back, but his dead weight is more than she can handle even though he’s always been on the slimmer side - something about aerodynamics, that what he’d told her when she asked, during one of the rare moments when he was relaxed and open to questions, and she’d raised her eyebrows, said, like a bullet?, and he’d laughed so hard that he nearly fell off her bed - and anxiety gnaws at her stomach. She considers yelling for help, but that’d be useless. They’re so far away from the rest of the class right now that she could scream her throat bloody and no one would hear. 

“Damnit, Bakugou,” Kyoka says, and her voice is thin and trembling. She props him up against the wall and zips up his jacket, all the way up to his chin. After a moment, she takes off her own jacket and layers it on top of him. She stands, forces herself to breathe deep, let it out. 

She whispers, “I’ll be right back,” and it's useless because he can’t hear her, but it makes her feel better anyways. 

When she was younger, too small for contact sports, she’d taken up track. It was out of boredom, really - this was before she started martial arts classes, before her parents decided that she needed to know how to defend herself - but she’d found herself genuinely enjoying it. It was natural to her, the rhythmic thumping of her feet on the pavement, the measured breathing, and the best thing about it was the fact that she didn’t have to be bigger or smarter than any of the other kids, didn’t have to outwit them or prove herself. She just had to be fast and impossible to keep still, and those were traits that she had been born with. 

And so, like a fifty-yard dash, Kyoka takes off. She sprints down sidewalks and through alleyways, turns corners, lets the thoughts fade to background noise as her head fills with nothing more than concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She runs until her legs feel rubbery and her lungs start to burn, and her chest aches, and she really isn’t pacing herself at all. She runs and runs and runs, right up until she bursts out the doors and stumbles onto the concrete strip in front of Ground Beta. 

She doesn’t even have to say anything. Later, it might be even funny, the way that Aizawa-sensei takes one look at her and then surges forward, but right now all she does is spin on her heel and start running back, re-tracing her path. She goes even faster than she did the first time, even though all the muscles in her body feel like they’re on fire, like they’re being stabbed with a thousand needles, and sweat is pouring off of her, and she doesn’t stop. 

It's not a race, she knows this.

She still skids past the finish line a good ten seconds before the rest of them.

Bakugou looks worse than he did when she left him. She can barely even detect the rise and fall of his chest, and she falls to her knees, rips her jacket off of him, presses shaking fingers to his throat. His pulse flutters. Still breathing heavily, exhaustion clinging to her like a second skin, she pats him lightly on the cheek. “Bakugou,” she says. His lips are tinged with blue. She feels so useless that she wants to cry. She shouldn’t have left him. She should’ve sucked it up and carried him back. “Baku -”

When he shudders beneath her, she thinks for a moment that he’s about to wake up. He’ll probably laugh at her for being so worried, but it’ll be light-hearted and it wouldn’t hurt, as long as he was okay. 

And then his body twitches again, and she realizes that he’s not getting better. 

He’s getting worse.

Somebody grabs her shoulder and yanks her away just as Bakugou starts to seize. 

She hits the ground hard, lands on her elbows, watches in horror as Aizawa rushes past her. He fumbles with Bakugou’s jacket, yanks the zipper down. Hands latch beneath Kyoka’s arms and drag her to her feet, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the scene in front of her even when a voice - Yaoyorozu’s - starts to whisper reassurances in her ear. Bakugou is convulsing, jerking so hard that it looks like it's all that Aizawa-sensei can do to turn him on his side. 

Kyoka can’t stop watching.

There are voices behind her, and she realizes that if Yaoyorozu is here it means that the rest of the class has probably followed them, too, but she can’t move, can’t speak, can only lock her jaw and grit her teeth and stare with wide, blurry eyes as her classmate, her friend, has a fucking seizure in front of her. 

Yaoyorozu’s breath hitches, and there are several shocked gasps as blood starts to drip down Bakugou’s chin, red as burning coals. He’s bitten his tongue. At Kyoka’s other side, Kaminari breathes out, “Oh, fuck,” which just about explains the situation perfectly. “What the Hell. Shit, Bakugou -”

Before he can say anything else, Todoroki and Midoriya turn the corner in front of them. Both boys are obviously panicked - Midoriya’s skin is pale even though he’s panting from the run, and Todoroki keeps clenching and unclenching his fists - and Midoriya swivels his head around. His eyes land on Bakugou, who now seems to be finally going still, and he stumbles to a stop beside Aizawa. Drops down. Hovers his hands above Bakugou’s body, like he’s afraid that touching him would just make everything worse.

Bakugou’s breathing evens out. He opens his eyes, and there’s a horrible choking noise as he tries to speak through a mouthful of blood. He coughs violently, body shaking, and now Midoriya does touch him, helps him sit up. 

Aizawa sits back on his heels. Rakes his fingers through his hair. When he turns his head and looks at the rest of his class, the confusion is written clear across his face. “Okay,” he says, and he sounds lost, “I need someone to go get Recovery Girl. Bring back a stretcher.”

“I don’t need a damn stretcher,” Bakugou snaps, voice rough. “I can walk just fine.” He picks himself off of the ground gingerly, carefully, wavers on his feet. Nearly falls. Midoriya grabs him to keep him upright. Bakugou snarls at him, actually snarls at him, and rips his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” 

Aizawa stands, gives his student a look that is thoroughly unimpressed. “Todoroki. Yaoyorozu.” Without taking his eyes off of Bakugou, he repeats, “Bring back a stretcher.”

“I TOLD YOU I DON’T NEED IT!” Bakugou yells, and wipes his arm across his mouth, streaking blood over his skin. His palm, the one that’d been braced against the wall when he fell the first time, when it was just him and Kyoka, is torn raw and red. 

And it's that detail, of all things, that snaps Kyoka back to the present. 

She takes a step forward, says, “Bakugou,” and manages not to jolt when the full weight of his glare lands on her. There’s something else in his expression, something bitter and hurt, and a realization hits her: he’s embarrassed.

And why wouldn’t he be? He doesn’t even like being asked if he’s okay, for fuck’s sake. This entire thing - the fainting, the seizure, the aftermath - must be Hell on Earth for him.

“... Oh,” Kyoka whispers, and Bakugou shouldn’t be able to hear it but he apparently does, because his lips draw back over his teeth and his eyes narrow and his hands curl into fists.

“Oh, fuck off, Ears,” he hisses. “I told you I was fine, damnit. There was no reason to turn this into a whole - a whole thing.”

There’s a flicker of movement as Yaoyorozu, spurred by some hidden signal, clears her throat. She and Todoroki haven’t left to go get the stretcher, despite Aizawa-sensei’s instructions. “Excuse me,” she says, unfailingly polite, “but maybe all of us should go back inside?” Her meaning is clear: we should give him some space.

“... Alright,” Aizawa says, and, just like that, they leave. Midoriya lingers for a moment, looking reluctant, but Yaoyorozu grabs his wrist and pulls him away with none of her usual gentleness. 

The wind whistles through the buildings, the alleyways, as Kyoka stares at Bakugou, as Bakugou stares at Kyoka. Blood drips down from Bakugou’s lips, coats his chin in thick, grisly red. Kyoka should be the bigger person. Should step down first. Should take into account the fact that Bakugou is exhausted, that he’s hurt, that he probably needs medical attention. But she’s angry, too, because he made her worried and now he’s throwing it back in her face and -

She lunges forward and aims a punch at his eye. He dodges, obviously, and catches her arm and twists it behind her back, but it's the thought that counts. “The fuck was that for, Ears?”

Kyoka slams her elbow into his stomach and yanks away when his grip loosens. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” she snaps, voice hot with virtrol, and raises her fist again, threatening. 

Bakugou’s face goes through several different expressions at once, finally settling on fury. It's fitting. At least now they both match. “It's not a big deal.”

But it is. It is a big deal. Kyoka doesn’t really know what happened, the events that led to Bakugou’s exhaustion and subsequent collapse, a fucking seizure, but - but -

“Fuck you,” Bakugou says. “I’m going to go sleep it off. And then we can forget all about this.” He starts to brush past her. Kyoka latches her fingers around his wrist before he can get too far. He struggles a little bit, but it's telling when he gives in all too easily, shooting her a tired, half-hearted glare. “Let go, Ears, I’m fine.”

Her grip tightens.

“Seriously, Ears.”

She doesn’t let go.

There’s a pause, a bated breath, both of them waiting for the other to back down. Then, almost-defeated, Bakugou says, “Look, I’m tired.” When she doesn’t waver, he groans and snaps, “Jirou fucking Kyoka.”

She finally drops her hand back to her side, and he spins around to look at her. Freezes. “Shit,” he says, and his voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. “Shit, I -”

Kyoka presses her lips together and glares down at the ground, crossing her arms over her chest. If there’s one thing that has always annoyed her about herself, it's the fact that she always cries if her emotions run high enough, if everything builds up all at once. It's fucking infuriating, and she hates it. 

“... Jirou.” Bakugou’s voice is quiet and awkward, stumbling, like the hands of a blind man feeling out new territory. 

Kyoka wipes furiously at her eyes. Every breath makes her throat burn, but she clamps a hand over her mouth and refuses to make a sound, refuses to say anything, refuses to look at Bakugou. Refuses to do anything but stand there, crying silently like a fucking scolded toddler, and she’s almost expecting Bakugou to laugh and walk away. He doesn’t. He blows out a sigh and puts a hand on her shoulder, leans down so that he can peer up at her from under her bangs. “Shit,” he says, “Did I really worry you that much?”

Kyoka nods miserably.

“... Huh.” Bakugou smiles thinly. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”

She bristles, shoves him away. “You idiot!” she says, hot and sharp, voice bordering on a shout. She’s always been told - by her parents, her teachers, her brother - that she loses her temper too quickly, and it's at times like this that she believes it. Bakugou is pissing her off in a way that people rarely ever get the chance to, and that fact pisses her off even more. “The Hell do you mean, first time? Everything you do worries me! Jackass!” 

Bakugou at least has the decency to look a little wary. “That’s not what I -”

“Then what did you mean?”

“I -”

“Because I’m sick and tired of you acting like this -” and she gestures frantically to Bakugou’s entire body “- isn’t a big deal! And I’m not just talking about today! It's all the time with you, Bakugou, to the point where I’m surprised you haven’t been put on suicide watch. You’re always so Goddamn reckless! You need to open your fucking eyes and realize that you have people who care about you! I care about you! I care about you, and you make it seem like - like - like I’m being annoying by making sure that you’re okay!”

Nobody says anything after she finishes her rant, the words echoing off the buildings around them, and now Kyoka is crying again, harder than before, so hard that she can’t even muffle the sounds. She buries her face in her hands so that she doesn’t have to see Bakugou’s expression. She doesn’t want to see it. She doesn’t want to see anything. She just wants to close her eyes and wake up ten years ago when her biggest concern was what dress she should wear to her elementary school talent show.

Footsteps approach. They stop in front of her. She doesn’t look up, irrationally convinced that to do so would be met with a bloody nose, or, at the very least, a black eye. As far as she knows, yelling at someone like Bakugou never ends well. 

So she’s completely caught off guard when he just yanks her into a hug. She freezes. Her face is burning, but she tentatively wraps her arms around his waist and squeezes back. It's tentative and hesitant and completely awkward, but it's an actual hug, and she honestly can’t tell which of them needed it more. Once she stops crying enough that the only sign of her tears is a bout of hiccuping breaths that refuses to go away, Bakugou pulls back, stares at her. “Okay,” he says, and there’s something almost unbelievably fragile in his voice, “do you feel better?”

Kyoka tries for a smile. “I’m not the one who had a seizure, Bakugou.”

Bakugou flushes red, all the way up to his ears. Huh. Kyoka wasn’t even aware that that was something he could do. “Right,” he says, and he suddenly seems very interested in the sky, the ground, a bug crawling by his shoe, everything except Kyoka. “That.”

“Yeah.” Kyoka crosses her arms. “That.” 

Bakugou resolutely avoids even looking in her direction.

Kyoka sighs. “Look, Bakugou, I want to help. That’s literally all I’m trying to do, so get it through your thick skull that not everyone has to have ulterior motives, okay?”

Bakugou gnaws at his lower lip, then grimaces, presumably at the taste of blood. He wipes his palms on the front of his pants. His eyes flick over to Kyoka, then dart away twice as fast. 

“... So,” he says. Stops. Looks down at his hands, curls his fingers. “You know the training exercise, right?”

She does. It's why she’d been looking for Bakugou in the first place. 

Aizawa-sensei had been running the entire class through a series of drills to test their Quirks’ strengths, and Bakugou had gone all out, most likely because some stupid dare that Kaminari or Kirishima had put him up to. 

Kyoka was one of the first ones to notice that Bakugou disappeared after his turn was over, but when she’d mentioned it to Aizawa, he’d just shrugged it off and said that Bakugou was probably running around Ground Beta, blowing off steam and excess energy. 

Not in those exact words, but close enough, and Kyoka hates, now, how easily she accepted that explanation, but it had sounded logical at the time, had sounded like something that Bakugou would do, and the idea was bolstered by the fact that explosions could be heard coming from far within the model city if one was listening closely. 

Only when it was time to go inside and change back into their school uniforms had Aizawa-sensei frowned. He’d told Kyoka to find Bakugou, to tell him that it was time to head back to class - when Kyoka had protested, asking why she had to be the one to do it when there were plenty of other suitable candidates, all Aizawa had done was give her that infuriatingly deadpan look that seemed to be his one and only signature move. 

And so Kyoka had sighed and walked into the training grounds, calling out Bakugou’s name. 

She hadn’t expected him to answer, so it really wasn’t much of a surprise when her shouts were met with silence, but the further she went without hearing any sound at all, the more worried she became. Bakugou wasn’t the type to hide himself away. He was the type to go in, guns blazing, in a flurry of fireworks and sparks.  

And it was at that point, when she was well and truly on edge, that she had found Bakugou.

“Mhm,” Kyoka hums, nodding warily. Where is he going with this? What could a harmless diagnostic test have to do with the absolute shitshow Bakugou had gotten himself into? 

For all she knows, he’s just stalling.

Bakugou opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again and snaps at her, “Look, you can’t tell anyone this, okay? I’m only telling you because I know you won’t leave me alone unless I do.”

“Noted.”

Bakugou huffs and looks away. His voice is halting, stilted, when he says, “It's my Quirk.” Kyoka blinks. “To have seizures?”

“What the Hell, Ears. You’re supposed to be smart.”

Kyoka frowns, unsure of what to do with such a backhanded compliment. “Well maybe you should just tell me what’s going on instead of being all cryptic about it, Bakugou.”

Bakugou stares at her for a long, long moment, in which becomes sure that she has overstepped, that she’s going to be blasted to Mars and back because she couldn’t rein in her tongue for one fucking second, but then Bakugou snorts and shakes his head, mutters something under his breath that she can’t quite catch. She doesn’t bother asking him to repeat it again, just prompts, “Well?”

All traces of humor disappear from Bakugou’s face. He scowls at her, then says, “It's nitroglycerin.” He shifts on his feet, tucks his hands into his pockets, pointedly doesn’t meet her eyes. “My Quirk. It's more complicated than that, but that’s the basic explanation. I sweat nitroglycerin and that’s what makes shit go boom.”

“... Boom,” Kyoka repeats drily.

“Is there an echo in here?”

“I’m still not seeing what any of this has to do with you giving me and half the class a heart attack.”

“Can you please shut up?”

Kyoka shuts up, if only because he asked her nicely.

Bakugou continues, “Anyways, have you ever heard of a nitroglycerin overdose?” Without waiting for her to answer, he launches into an almost-ramble that reminds her inexplicably of Midoriya, like he’s trying to get the words out as fast as he can so that he can walk away and forget that he ever said them at all. “Your blood pressure drops. You get cold. Your vision gets blurry, and you get a really bad headache, and, if it's serious enough, you pass out, or have a seizure. Or, if you’re a lucky bastard like me, you get to have both.”

“But doesn’t your body, like, have safeguards?” Kyoka asks, then winces. That question sounded so insensitive.

Thankfully, Bakugou doesn’t seem to notice. He nods in a way that’s almost distracted and says, “Yeah, I guess. But if I overuse my Quirk or something, it has… adverse effects for a little bit. Happens if I get drunk, too. Or sedated. The seizures are rare, though. Wasn’t expecting it to happen.” His expression slowly turns horrified. “Do you think Aizawa is going to call my mom?”

“I mean -” Kyoka grapples with her words, trying to find something that won’t upset him further but also isn’t just an outright lie. “You did have a seizure, Bakugou. You almost bit through your tongue. Look, it's still bleeding.”

“Fuck you, no it's not.”

Kyoka stands her ground. “Bakugou, there is literally blood flying from your mouth when you speak. You’re still bleeding.”

Bakugou presses a hand to his lips, pulls it back, glares at the red glistening on his fingers like it has personally offended him. “Goddamnit,” he snarls, and, true to Kyoka’s word, more blood flecks his chin. “You know what? I don’t even care. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.” With that, he starts to walk away.

Kyoka follows him, equal parts amused and cautious. 

If she’s being honest, she doesn’t understand Bakugou. Probably nobody understands Bakugou, except maybe Midoriya, and that’s because the two of them have known each other practically since birth, because Bakugou is fucking complicated in a way that almost seems intentional, like he doesn’t want anyone to get too close to him. For all that Kyoka has learned about her classmates, it is Bakugou who stubbornly remains shrouded in mystery.

And this? What was this but a case in point?

There were some aspects of Bakugou that Kyoka related to - the flares of anger, the sudden irritability, the defensiveness about things she believed in - but, for the most part, they weren’t alike enough for her to really see things the way he did, for her to help at times like these. 

The difference, she thinks, lies in the fact that he refused to admit that he had people who actually liked being around him. 

They were admittedly few and far between, but the fact remains that he did have friends who cared about his well being, who stayed at his side not out of a sense of obligation but because they wanted to, because they genuinely enjoyed his presence. Kyoka genuinely enjoys his presence. He’s loud and he’s brash and he’s blunt, but there are times when his voice goes soft and his face goes calm and his hands turn gentle where they’re brushing Ashido’s hair or painting Yaoyorozu’s nails or fixing the collar of Kaminari’s shirt, and it's in those moments that his guard goes down and he lets himself joke and laugh, lets himself be more a teenager and less someone dead-set on being the best.

“... Jirou,” Bakugou says, and Kyoka realizes that he’s stopped walking, realizes that she’d been so deep in her thoughts that she hadn’t even noticed when they reached the fourth floor.

Kyoka blinks, raises her eyebrows. “What?”

Bakugou stares down at the ground. “It was nice of you,” he says, slowly, carefully. “To, y’know. Help me. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Of course I did,” Kyoka says. And, with that, she nods towards his door. “Go get washed up, okay?. Get some sleep.”

She turns to leave, to head back to the elevator. She’s sure that Aizawa-sensei won’t give Bakugou grief for missing the rest of class, so long as he made sure to go to Recovery Girl afterwards, but the same leniency probably won’t be extended to her. Before she can press the down button, though, Bakugou’s voice stops her. 

“Thanks, Jirou.”

“No problem,” Kyoka says. Bakugou can’t see her, but she smiles anyway. “What else are friends for?”

[candleshopmenace]

fly like lightning [strike like thunder] | day seventeen: reluctant caretaker

SUMMARY

Denki isn’t good at a lot of things. He knows that. He isn’t good at reading, or at sitting still, or at following directions. He’s not good at cooking, or at paying attention, and he’s truly horrible at calming people down. 

He’s not good at a lot of things. He knows that.

Why does it hurt so much, then, to hear it said out loud?

—

Tragedy hits as hard and fast as a striking snake, leaving Denki reeling in the aftermath.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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His mother and father are yelling at each other when Denki walks inside. Or, rather, his mother is yelling - which isn’t rare in and of itself, but it's the fact that it's directed at his father that makes it concerning - and his father is speaking to her calmly, placating, so cool and controlled that he sounds almost condescending from where Denki is standing. 

Denki keeps one ear turned to the argument as he takes off his shoes, adjusting his bag on his shoulder as he straightens back up. His parents are in the living room, and his mother is being loud enough that her voice has hopefully concealed the sound of the door opening and closing, but Denki still moves as quickly and quietly as possible to his room, stepping lightly to avoid making the floorboards creak. 

He sits down in his desk chair and spins once or twice - okay, three times - in a circle before pulling out his notebooks, already dreading studying for the test he has in class tomorrow. It's hard to focus when his mother is yelling so loudly that the foundations of the house seem to shake, but he tries to push through the noise anyways, tries to distract himself from the fighting with verb conjugations and a million different to greet someone in English - hello, how are you, good morning, good afternoon, nice to meet you, it's been a while, how is your family doing - even though he knows that it's a losing battle. 

He finally gives up when there’s a crash under his feet, the sound of something breaking, rolling himself across his room to shut his door just as footsteps start to pound up the stairs. A moment later, something bangs against the wood so violently that the sound echoes, reverberates, and from the hallway there’s a fit of cursing so wild and unhinged that it contains some words that even Denki has never heard before.

Eyebrows raised, Denki locks his door and buries himself in the blankets on his bed, pulling them up over his head. It's dark, but he uses a flashlight to see the pages of the storybook his father used to read to him when he was a little kid - his father doesn’t do that anymore, but that’s okay, because Denki isn’t a baby. He’s almost six. He’s too old for fairy tales and bedtime stories. 

He doesn’t get dinner that night because he doesn’t want to open his door, but that’s fine. He ate at school and he’s not really hungry. He just reads and reads until he falls asleep, flashlight still lit up in his hand, blankets still piled on top of him, and, when he wakes up to a silent, empty house, he gets dressed and walks to school. He fails the test, but that’s okay. He’ll just work harder next time.

He thinks that it’d be easier to study, though, if his parents would fight just a little more quietly.

One day, his teacher asks him why he has a cut on his forehead, and when he tells her the truth - that he accidentally got between his mother and father during a screaming match and got hit in the face with a flying lamp - her eyebrows pinch together like she’s worried. 

She gives him a weird little smile, tight and uncomfortable looking, and, yeah, it's strange, but Denki brushes it off anyways. 

At least until he goes home one day and his parents and sister are all crammed together on the couch, smiling at an unfamiliar lady sitting in the chair across from them. 

“Denki!” his mother says when he walks through the door, hesitantly untying his shoes and sneaking glances at the lady. “Come here, baby.” 

She pats her lap and Denki crawls up into it, feeling like a little kid even though he isn’t, he’s old enough to walk to school by himself and not have to hold anyone’s hand when he crosses the street. 

“This nice lady is going to ask you some questions, okay? Make sure to be polite!” His mother’s voice is as cheerful as anything, but she hooks one arm around Denki’s stomach like she’s making sure that he won’t run away. 

Denki spends most of the visit confused and grasping for the correct answer, but he must pass this test, at least, because the lady leaves with a smile and a bow, the door clicking shut behind her. The moment the lady’s car is out of the driveway, Denki scrambles off of his mother’s lap and starts towards the stairs, like usual. His sister pushes past him, all but sprinting to her room, and it's only because of that that his father is able to grab him by the back of the shirt and stop him so suddenly that he almost chokes. “Do we beat you, Denki?” he asks, and there’s that voice again, patronizing. “Do we hurt you so badly that you have to go to the hospital?”

Denki blinks up at him, confused, and slowly shakes his head. “No…?”

“Well, that lady thought that we did. That’s why she was here.” His father lets go of his shirt but Denki doesn’t move, feeling like he’s made of ice. His father continues, sagging back down against the couch, “Do you want to be taken away from us, Denki? Do you hate us?”

“No,” Denki says, faster this time, sharper. His mind whirls and spins, full of questions. “But why - what -”

He cuts himself off when his mother abruptly sweeps his hair back from his face with one hand, grabbing his chin with the other to tilt his head up. She stares at him for several moments, then scoffs. “The cut isn’t even that bad, Denki,” she says, sounding disappointed. “You’re seven. You’re too old to be acting like a baby.”

And, oh, that’s when Denki understands.

“Oh,” he says, and his vision swims. He feels unsteady on his feet. His teacher, asking how he got hurt. Denki, telling the truth. The lady, asking him questions. “Was that -” “Do you know what happens when kids get taken away from their parents, Denki?” his father asks. When Denki shakes his head, the movement jerky and aborted with his face still caught in his mother’s grip, his father says, “They never get to see them again. Ever. Do you want that?” “No,” Denki says, fast, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, panicked. “No, I don’t want that.” Then, frantic, “I’m sorry.”

“Apologies are just words, Denki. Actions speak louder.”

Actions speak louder than words, and so, the next time his teacher asks about an injury - a bruise across his cheekbone from being whacked solidly across the face with a thrown teacup - he just shrugs and says that it was an accident, that he was being clumsy.

It's not a lie, he thinks, but it's not exactly the truth, since he’s wondering more and more if they’re even accidents at all.

Denki isn’t good at a lot of things. He knows that. He isn’t good at reading, or at sitting still, or at following directions. He’s not good at cooking, or at paying attention, and he’s truly horrible at calming people down. 

He’s not good at a lot of things. He knows that.

Why does it hurt so much, then, to hear it said out loud? Part of the reason, he thinks, is because it's his sister who’s saying it. 

“Jesus, Denki,” she says, and grabs his wrist and pulls, and he bites his tongue to keep from cursing at her as his shoulder joint pops back into place. “You can’t do anything right, can you?” And his devastation must show on his face, because she takes one look at it and groans, yanking her hair back into a ponytail as he slowly sits up, flexes his arm back and forth. “It was a joke,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Can’t you take a joke?”

Yeah, he can, if the joke is actually, y’know, a joke.

He doesn’t say that, though, doesn’t say anything, and Daiya sighs and stands up. “Fucking retard,” she mutters under her breath as she walks out of his room, and her voice is just loud enough that he can hear her.

He’s pretty sure that that’s intentional.

The boy in the back of his class has a deck of cards and a bottle of… something. Denki finds him on the roof, shuffling and reshuffling his spades and aces and clubs and diamonds, and he grins up at Denki like he knew he was coming, like they’ve been friends for years.

“Denki, right?” he asks, and Denki tries not to jolt at the use of his given name.

“... Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” Sitting down cross-legged across from the boy, he asks, “What are you doing?” Pointing at the bottle, he asks, “What’s in that?”

The boy winks, fast and sly, and Denki notices that he’s missing one of his front teeth. “Nothing you need to know about,” he says, sing-song, then starts to deal out two cards each in front of both of them. “You know how to play Spanish Twenty-One?”

Denki hesitantly shakes his head, bracing himself for the backlash. But the boy just shrugs. He doesn’t say, Aren’t you stupid? He doesn’t say, If only you were smarter. He just says, “That’s fine.” 

His eyes flick up to meet Denki’s, and his grin is blinding. 

“I’ll teach you.” 

Denki wraps his arms around his legs and rests his chin on his knees, sighs. His parents are both out of the house, and Daiya is staying late at school for her nerd club, so, by all that was right in the world, this should be a good day. And it had been a good day - Sero had helped him with his homework, and he hadn’t gotten frustrated even once - up until the moment that his mood decided to nosedive. 

The change was sudden, like a casual misstep on a staircase, leaving his head light and his heart caught in his throat. 

He’s not good enough for Sero’s friendship. He’s not good enough for this. He’s not good enough for anything. He’s worthless, a joke, a disappointment. He ruins things, kills every fucking thing that he touches, he’s stupid and he’s useless and -

Sero sits down next to him, throws an arm around Denki’s shoulders with a long sigh. “Man, I am tired,” he says, tilting his head until it knocks against Denki’s. “How are you feeling, Denki?”

Denki huffs. “You don’t need to keep watch over me,” he mutters, low.

“I’m tired,” Sero says. “I wanted to sit down. You just happened to be here.”

“Bullshit.” Denki shrugs, trying to dislodge Sero’s arm. “Get off. You smell like beer.”

“Ouch. That hurts my heart, Denki, how could you be so cruel?” Sero grabs at his chest, gasping dramatically. “I will never recover from this.”

Denki rolls his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.” He shakes himself harder, finally breaking free of Sero’s grip, and stands. He holds out a hand to help Sero up and his friend grins, wide, like Denki’s just offered him the best gift in the world, and Denki knows that it's wrong to feel this way but when Sero looks at him like that it makes him feel like he’s someone special. 

One day, Sero will get tired of him. Denki is a horrible person, slicing off portions of Sero’s time. How many countless hours has Sero spent beside him, sacrificing a social life just because Denki is so needy? One day, Sero will get tired of him, and Denki knows that he should break off the friendship first, should be the bigger person and let Sero know that it's alright to leave, to walk away, because Denki has always been expecting to end up alone. 

Denki should be better than this, but he’s so scared. He’s scared and he’s greedy and he’s selfish, he’s so fucking scared, and he needs Sero’s approval. He needs his jokes and subtle affection, his sharp humor and loud laugh. 

Denki’s so scared.

Tragedy hits as hard and fast as a striking snake, leaving Denki reeling in the aftermath.

He doesn’t believe it. 

He can’t believe it. 

He had seen Daiya not even a couple hours before, had tried to tempt her into buying him ice cream. She’d been a bit moody, which really wasn’t all that uncommon, and he’d been trying to cheer her up when she stormed out of the front door, slamming it behind her so hard that the house seemed to shake.

And Denki had let her leave, thinking that she was just going to walk it off. 

Denki had let her leave, and she had died. There wasn’t even a body. A freak accident, according to the police. A villain attack. She got in the line of fire, and, well. There were consequences. 

There were consequences.

Like what had happened was a slap on the wrist, a minor infraction. Like Daiya could come back from the dead, from being vaporized, lesson learned. 

The police officer bows, says, I’m sorry for your loss, and Denki stalks upstairs to keep himself from punching him in his fucking face.

He shows up to the funeral drunk and stumbling, slurred in his words and his steps, leaning against Sero for support as his parents try to distance themselves from him because he’s a fucking embarassment. 

“You’re a fucking idiot,” he snarls at the empty casket. “A Goddamn fucking idiot extrodianare, that’s what you are, what is wrong with you -”

“Denki,” Sero says, cutting him off and holding him up, arm wedged just below the line of Denki’s shoulders. “Look, I know this is shitty, but you can’t yell in here. Do you wanna go outside?”

It's probably the wrong time for self-pity, but it fills Denki’s mind anyways. God, things haven’t changed one bit. His luck is so fucking shitty. He’s so fucking shitty. What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?

“Denki,” Sero says again, quiet, then doesn’t continue.

Denki doesn’t even realize that he’s laughing until he starts crying.

“This is your fault, you know.”

Denki flinches at his father's tone. An answer rises like bile in the back of his throat, I know, I fucking Know, Dad, but he swallows it down, his pride demanding an automatic protest. “That’s not true.” He crumples the hem of his blazer in his hands, lets go, watches the creases relax. Rinse, repeat. “That’s not true. I had no idea that she’d do - do that. She -”

His father slaps him across the face.

Denki jerks back on instinct, stumbling out of the man’s reach to avoid another blow. Tears sting his eyes, involuntary, but he blinks them away, takes a calm, measured breath. Before he can speak, can say something, anything, to talk his father down from one of his frequent fits of temper, his father takes a step forward and grabs him by his collar. “Are you fucking arguing with me about this, Denki?” he hisses, his breath hot and laced with the smoke of something burning, something distinctly chemical, searing into Denki’s lungs like a brand. 

Denki chokes, turns his face away, eyes watery and blurry from the lightning-strike smell of his father’s anger. “Dad, wait -” 

His father continues like he hadn’t even spoken. “You stupid fucking child! You kids are all the same, you turn fourteen and think you know everything. I try to have a civil fucking conversation and you turn it into an argument! Don’t try to argue with me, Kaminari Denki! Do you hear me? Don’t argue with me!”

Denki’s heart is beating so fast that he thinks he might throw up. He stares at the sparks crawling across his father’s teeth and wonders if the same thing happens to him when he gets pissed, but that train of thought is abruptly derailed when his father shakes him so hard that his head snaps back and hits the wall. 

His father snaps, “Am I not speaking Japanese, Denki? Do you not understand what I’m saying?”

“I - I -” Denki stammers, voice caught in his throat. “I d-do.”

“Y-y-you d-do?” his father mocks, fist twisting tighter in Denki’s collar until he can barely breathe. “Then why didn’t you answer me, huh?”

Denki feels like crying. “What -” he starts, about to ask for the question to be repeated, the question that he supposedly hasn’t answered, but he bites his tongue. Doing something stupid like that would only make his father even angrier, and he’s pretty sure that Sero was one badly-explained bruise away from calling the police on his parents, and so Denki frantically searches his mind, his father’s words. Don’t argue with me, he’d said. And then he’d said -

Oh.

“Yeah, I - I heard you.” To his complete and utter horror, hot tears well in his eyes and overflow down his face. Damnit. “I heard you.”

“Good boy.” His father’s gaze bores into him with an intensity that makes him want to dissolve into nothing. “Now, as I was saying, this is your fault. Your sister is dead because of you, you fucking murderer. You said that that’s not true, but you’re a dumb fucking child and you don’t know shit because you’re stupid and naïve and I bet you’re thinking, Oh, Dad, you’re a liar, you’re so mean, but I’m telling the truth, Denki, and the truth is that you’re fucking pathetic.” He pauses, takes a deep breath to calm himself down, and then smiles at Denki with such sick amusement that he feels like a collapsing star, teetering on the verge of exploding, supernova. “Now, Denki,” his father says, kind, “nod if you agree.”

I hate you, Denki thinks, and he doesn’t know if he’s talking about his father or himself. You horrible fucking human being. Monster. You’re a monster. 

He nods.

[candleshopmenace]

words left unsaid [deeds left undone] | day fifteen: new scars

SUMMARY

Mom, he types, then stops. He hasn’t actually spoken to her since he woke up, and for this to be the first contact he makes with her… it feels cowardly, somehow. Like he’s hiding behind a screen so that he doesn’t have to look her in the face.

But, still, there’s a question burning in his lungs that refuses to leave him alone.

Are you proud of me?

He deletes the message and throws his phone across the room.

—

He covers up the mirror the first chance he gets.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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Reality comes in flashes, sound mixes with touch, and he can’t move. 

A scream. 

A wail. 

The ground is hard on his back, and there is something in his chest. There is nothing in his chest. His skin is peeled away from his body, exposing his ribs and heart to the smoke-filled air, stinging sharp and burning, and there, in the rain, Bakugou Katsuki stops breathing.

There is nothing but darkness, but even that isn’t solid. Everything is black in a way that isn’t really black, more the absence of anything than anything at all, and there are endless visions and dreams flickering against the walls, making it feel like he’s been sitting in a movie theater for a very long time.

The film reel spins.

He is seven years old and suddenly afraid of storms. He hasn’t ever been afraid of them before, but he is now, maybe because it's his first time actually being stuck outside during one. It's loud and wet and cold, soaking his clothes, the clouds cracking open and pouring down and pasting his hair to his face and making him shake and shiver. 

Thunder cracks overhead, and lightning arcs across the sky, and his mother’s words echo in his ears, Just go, Katsuki. Get the fuck out of my house. 

Surely she hadn’t known that the weather would take a turn for the worst. She would never endanger him on purpose, not like this. 

For lack of a better place to go - Kariage is out of town, and like fuck he’s going to go crawling to Deku’s house - he drags himself to the playground and sits inside one of the slides, a foot or so back from the mouth of the opening. He curls his legs up to his chest and shivers, buries his face in his knees, tries to keep himself warm. 

To a soundtrack of bone-rattling cracks and earth-shattering tremors, he falls asleep.

i miss you, a voice says, achingly familiar. i miss you.

Eventually, he wakes up.

Movie over.

—

He goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth and finds himself staring at his reflection.

He hasn’t looked in a mirror since he woke up in the hospital. It's not that he’d been actively avoiding them, but he had no real desire to see what a mess his face had turned into, what marks his temporary death had left as a permanent reminder. But, for some reason, he can’t tear his eyes away. It's like watching a car crash - you wanted to see the blood, wanted to hear the screams, even though you knew deep down that such desires were sick and twisted and wrong.

The boy in the mirror looks like shit. His skin is pale, save for the long scar that branches down the side of his face, torn and uneven. He has dark circles under his eyes, so deep that they look almost like bruises, and Katsuki finds himself lifting his hand to make sure that the boy in front of him does the same. This is him. 

He shouldn’t be ashamed of it - Todoroki never seemed to have a problem with his scar, and Deku sure as fuck didn’t complain about the state of his arms - but that knowledge doesn’t stop the disgust that swells in his chest. If anything, it just makes it worse. 

This is him. 

This is him.

Katsuki starts shaking so hard that he feels physically sick to his stomach.

He covers up the mirror the first chance he gets.

Mom, he types, then stops. He hasn’t actually spoken to her since he woke up, and for this to be the first contact he makes with her… it feels sleazy, somehow. Cowardly. Like he’s hiding behind a screen so that he doesn’t have to look her in the face.

But, still, there’s a question burning in his lungs that refuses to leave him alone.

Are you proud of me?

He deletes the message and throws his phone across the room.

There is a knock at his door.

Katsuki freezes in the middle of turning a page in his book. It's late afternoon, and, by all rights, he should be hanging out with his friends. But he just can’t bring himself to go downstairs and talk to anyone like nothing has changed, because, in reality, everything has changed. He’s changed. Something fundamental and precious has been snapped deep inside of him and he doesn’t know how to fix it, doesn’t know if it even can be fixed, and it feels… cruel, to pretend that he’s the same person he was at the start of the school year. To fool his friends and classmates into thinking that he’s still him.

There’s another knock.

“... Coming.” Katsuki slides off of his bed and pads across the floor, cautious, wary. He opens the door slower than he normally would, looks at who is standing in the hallway, and sighs. “Hey, kid.”

“Um, hi.” Eri peers up at him, her eyes slowly widening as they scan him from head-to-toe. “I just - I heard that - well -” She fidgets slightly, twisting the strap of her backpack between her fingers. She keeps glancing at his left side, where the sleeve of his shirt hangs empty. “Deku said that you weren’t feeling well and so I - I wanted to see if you…” She takes a deep breath, like she’s steeling herself, and then blurts out, “I made you some cookies!”

… Well.

That’s interesting.

Katsuki stares at her. He doesn’t know how to respond to that. Should he be angry that Deku is spouting his business off to anyone who listens, or should he be touched that a little kid that he’s barely even spoken to is worried enough to bake him treats? 

He must take too long to answer, because Eri flushes red to the tips of her ears and ducks her head. She mumbles, “But it's okay if you don’t want them.”

“No,” Katsuki says before he can stop himself, before she can leave. Angry at the world as he is, he’s not yet bitter enough to make his teacher’s daughter upset by turning down a gift. “That’s not what I meant.”

She looks back up at him, beaming. “So you want them?”

Ah, Hell.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

Grinning, she swings her backpack off her shoulders and puts it down at her feet, unzipping it. She pushes aside papers and folders until she comes up with a bento box wrapped in cat-patterned fabric. She holds it out to him proudly. “They’re sugar cookies,” she says, practically bouncing in place with excitement. “I put sprinkles on them!” Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “And my dad helped, I guess.”

Which meant that Aizawa-sensei probably did everything, then let Eri decorate them before he put them in the oven. Katsuki can’t help but grin slightly at the idea of his teacher, usually so adamant about preaching the importance of being self-sufficient, doing all the hard shit himself and letting his daughter take credit for it.

“I bet he did,” Katsuki says, and takes the box from Eri. “Thanks, kid.”

She nods and moves like she’s about to walk away, then pauses. “I hope you feel better soon.”

Katsuki huffs a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “Me, too.”

… And that’s that.

Until it's not.

“... Kaachan?”

Katsuki can’t even pretend that he’d been asleep, but he still can’t keep the irritation out of his voice when he looks over at the girl standing in the doorway. “Don’t call me that.” He sits up, blankets pooling around his waist, and glances at the clock on his nightstand. “What the Hell do you want, kid? It's two in the fuckin’ morning.”

He can barely understand Eri’s response. That isn’t really much of a surprise, seeing as his ears ring all the Goddamn time lately, but right now it's not because he can’t hear worth shit. Right now, it's because she’s speaking directly into the stuffed animal she’s hugging in her arms - a hot pink teddy bear he remembers winning at the arcade for Ashido - and the fur is muffling her words.

“... What?”

Eri refuses to look at him, but she at least speaks so that he can actually hear her. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Katsuki blinks at her, wondering if he actually has managed to fall asleep, if he’s having a really ridiculous fever dream. There’s no logical reason as to why Eri is bothering him because of such a stupid reason, especially since she’s apparently supposed to be having a sleepover with Ashido right now. “Okay? I’m not sure how to help you with that. Go by yourself. You’re not a baby.”

Eri makes a wordless noise of protest and shakes her head. “I don’t want to go on my own!” She looks at Katsuki with pleading eyes, says, “I’m scared of the dark!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” Katsuki runs his hands through his hair. “Did you really come all this way to ask me to take you to the bathroom? Why didn’t you ask Pinky? I’m not getting out of bed, kid, I’m too tired.”

Eri sniffs, and Katsuki only has time to think, Oh, shit, before she shakes her head again, so hard that he’s afraid that she’ll break her own damn neck. “I’m scared of the dark,” she repeats, voice watery. “And I don’t want to turn on the lights because that’ll wake Mina up, and… and…” She hiccups, looking for all the world like she’s on the verge of tears, and Katsuki wonders how a fear could get to be so strong that it turned a usually brave kid into a fucking crybaby.

He sighs, relenting. “For the love of God,” he mutters, yanking open his bedside drawer and rummaging through photos of him and his friends, pens, pencils, and crumpled bills until his fingers close around what he’s looking for. 

He holds it up for Eri to see. “Look. A flashlight. C’mere.” She creeps over, tentative as someone approaching a sleeping beast, and he wedges it in her arms beside the stupid stuffed bear. “Use the damn light, then leave me alone and let me rest. Just make sure to give it back tomorrow, got it?”

Eri nods, blinking rapidly. “Thanks.”

“Yeah. Whatever.” Without another word, Eri scurries away, shutting the door softly behind her. 

Most nights, Katsuki doesn’t sleep at all. He has to rely on the perpetually uncapped bottle of pills on his nightstand to get any relief from his insomnia. He wants to pour the entire Goddamn thing down his throat on most days. They don’t really do a damn thing to help, seeing as he wakes up with a jolt whether he takes them or not, but it's the principle of the matter, he guesses. The idea that he can control this one part of his life.

It takes seven sleepless nights for him to give up. Seven sleepless nights for him to say fuck it, to yank open his door and stalk to the elevator, to push the button that’ll take him to the common room. 

It's late, he rationalizes, and so there’s probably not anyone crazy enough to be awake. Everyone is in bed, getting rest because they have class the next day - classes that Katsuki thus far has been exempt from attending, though he doesn’t know how long that’ll last - and no one is awake, there’s no way that anyone is stupid enough to be awake.

That argument dies in his throat the moment that he sees that the kitchen lights are on.

Shit, he thinks, and is just about to step back into the elevator when he hears a voice say, “Bakugou?”

Katsuki swallows, resists the urge to stay silent out of spite. “What.”

There’s a clanging noise, the sound of the refrigerator door being closed, and then Jirou of all people sticks her head out of the kitchen. “What do you mean, what?” She smiles, but it's thin and tight and wrong, like she’s not sure how she’s supposed to act around him, like she can’t remember. “Get in here. I’m making tea.”

“Tea?” he echoes, moving forward despite himself. “Since when do you drink tea, Ears?”

Jirou scoffs and turns on the kettle. Her hair is longer than it used to be, Katsuki notices. She’s been letting it grow out. He doesn’t know if it's intentional or if it's because she’s been too busy to cut it, but it looks nice. She says, reaching up to pull down a glass jar of tea leaves, “For a while, now. Momo got me -”

She cuts herself off when he steps into the light. 

He’d been prepared for her reaction, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. Her eyes gnaw into him like the teeth of some rabid animal, ripping away layers of skin to reveal what’s hidden underneath, and he purposefully turns his back to her, opening up the cabinet so that he can get two cups.

Finally, awkwardly, Jirou continues. “So, yeah, like I said. Momo got me hooked.” 

Katsuki hums but otherwise doesn’t answer, not trusting himself to speak, and Jirou scrambles to fill the aching silence. 

She wasn’t like this before - it used to be that she would stay quiet until someone else spoke - and he wonders, now, if she’s scared of what might happen if she lets the air grow still. He wonders if it's his fault that she’s acting like this. He wonders, in the spaces of her words, her frantic efforts to say something, anything, if he’s done something wrong. 

She tells him about Yaoyorozu and she tells him about Kirishima, like she thinks that maybe he’s forgotten all about them in the time that he’s stayed holed up in his room. Maybe he has. She tells him about her parents and she tells him about her siblings, and she’s in the middle of a long, rambling story about how one time her brother tied a string around one of her loose teeth so that he could yank it out but he ended up yanking out the wrong one and there was blood everywhere and their mother was pissed -

He says, barely audible, “I like your hair.” Because he finds that it's easier, now, to say that kind of stuff out loud. Because his heart could stop at any moment, nothing is guaranteed, and he should say what needs to while he still can. 

Jirou chokes on whatever she was about to say next, coughs. Glances at him, wide-eyed, and then stares down at the infuser she’s shaking the leaves into. He looks at her hands and realizes that they’re trembling. He’s pretty sure that they didn’t do that before. He wonders how many things he’s forgotten, how many details and memories have slipped through the cracks. 

“Thanks,” Jirou says, and Katsuki can see the way her jaw is clenched. “I haven’t had long hair since middle school. Thought that now was as good a time as any to give it another shot.”

Katsuki blinks. “You had long hair in middle school?”

“Yeah. Mostly to spite my brother.” The kettle starts to scream and she flinches away from the noise, and Katsuki reaches over and turns off the heat. “Thanks. Anyways, like I was saying, my brother was a jackass when I was younger. When I was like, six - seven? - he chased me down with all his friends and chopped off my hair.” She huffs a laugh, bitterly amused. “Our mom beat his ass for that.”

Katsuki frowns at her, eyebrows furrowed. “Why’d he do that?”

Jirou shrugs in a way that’s far too casual to be anything but forced. She pours water into the cups that Katsuki pulled down, puts an infuser in each. He wonders if she knew that he was coming. “I don’t know why that bastard does anything,” she says. “Besides, it wasn’t even a big deal. His knife nicked me a little bit, but that’s about all.”

“He cut you?”

“Not badly.” She reaches a hand behind her head and grabs her hair, lifting it to reveal a thin white scar at the nape of her neck. “I was more upset about him ruining my aesthetic, honestly.” And then she gives herself a shake, like she’s forcing her mind back on track, and grabs both cups. She brings them to the common room and Katsuki trails behind, useless save for the fact that he’s the one who turns on the lights, and they sit down on the couch. Jirou takes a sip of her tea, wincing when it burns her mouth, and then looks at him and says, “So, what have you been up to?”

Katsuki doesn’t answer for a long, long moment, just stares down at the carpet. What has he been up to? It's been a week since he came back to the dorms, but he hasn’t really done anything significant, anything worth mentioning. He’s covered up the mirror. He’s woken up screaming every single night. He’s spent an unholy amount of time typing out messages to his mother, to his friends, then deleting them, phone wobbly and unsteady in the fingers of only one hand. 

So, really, what has he achieved?

He swallows, avoids Jirou’s eyes when he says, “Well, Eri visited me.”

Jirou hums under her breath, leans forward to set her cup down on the coffee table. “What for?” she asks, and he searches her voice for anything accusatory, anything malicious, and finds nothing.

“She made me cookies. Sugar cookies.” He swallows again, mouth suddenly dry. Those cookies have been sitting on his desk ever since the day the kid gave them to him, still wrapped up in that cat-patterned cloth and tied with a knot he didn’t even bother trying to fumble with. They’re a constant presence, demanding his attention, and he thanks God that Eri didn’t see them when she scampered into his room to get the flashlight.

“How’d they taste?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t tried them.”

Jirou hesitates, like she wants to scold him, but then all she says is, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

There’s an awkward lull that expands and expands between Katsuki’s ribs, pressing against his heart. He flexes his fingers, curling and uncurling them, looks everywhere that isn’t Jirou. Finally, when he can’t take it anymore, he says, “She’s afraid of the dark.”

Jirou goes tense, like she’d forgotten that he was sitting beside her. “Who?”

“Eri.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah.” She glances over at him. “How’d you learn that?”

“She told me.”

To her credit, Jirou doesn’t question it any further than that. She just says, “Yeah, she is. Poor kid.” And then she pauses, like she’s gathering her strength and her words, and says, “Y’know what’s weird? I didn’t even notice that I was afraid of lightning until I met Denki a couple years back.”

“Sounds more like you’re afraid of being in his Quirk’s radius.”

“You know what? You’re probably right.”

They sit there in the common room in the middle of the night, drinking tea and talking about meaningless things, and so many things are still wrong with Katsuki’s life, but, for a few precious moments, he feels like everything is alright.

[candleshopmenace]

once you leave a headstone [you never really make it home] | day ten: taser

SUMMARY

“I never wanted this job,” Bakugou hisses, bringing his face down close to hers, “and I never wanted to be your mentor. You were a fool to volunteer, and you’re an even bigger fool if you think that you’ll survive.”

—

Nemuri’s voice is cold when she says,“Try to stay out of trouble.” She glances back over her shoulder, and the look in her eyes makes Ochako feel like she can’t breathe. “I’m not sure if you could survive the consequences.”

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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Ochako never thought that she’d become a tribute. Sure, she’d been enrolled in the closest training academy since the year of her sixth birthday, but so had pretty much all the other kids in her part of District One. And, honestly, she wasn’t what people thought of when they pictured a proper victor - she was smart, sure, and cunning, but she was also small for her age and so slightly built that she regularly got bodily picked up and thrown off the mat in practice sparring sessions.

So, yeah. Ochako never thought that she’d become a tribute. She never planned to be a tribute.

It's funny, then, that she stepped forward and volunteered at all.

—

The day of the Reaping is sunny and bright, even though it's still early enough that Ochako has to smother a yawn behind one hand as she stretches out the other, letting the Peacekeeper prick her finger and blot her blood into the little paper square marked with, Uraraka Ochako, Age 14.

“Thank you,” she says to the Peacekeeper when he lets go of her wrist. “Happy Reaping, sir.”

He nods, says, “Happy Reaping,” and moves onto the next person in line.

Ochako stifles another yawn and files into the fenced-in area for fourteen-year-olds, pushing through the gathered clusters of her classmates until she spots her best friend. “Mina!”

Mina looks up from where she’d been sketching in her notebook. “Mornin’, Ochako,” she says, then scans Ochako from head-to-toe. “You look nice.”

Ochako feels her ears flush, chest going warm like it always does whenever Mina compliments her. She’d die for Mina, she thinks, and she’d do it without an ounce of regret. “So do you. I like your dress.”

Mina’s grin pulls up at the corner, crooked. “I made it myself,” she says proudly, handing Ochako her sketchbook so that she can take the fabric of her skirt into both hands and swish it back and forth so that it glitters in the sun. “I finished it just in time for today.”

Ochako doesn’t know how Mina manages to find enough time to sew clothes, what with how busy the teachers at the academy keep them, but she’s great at it. If she keeps it up, she could maybe even become a Capitol stylist.

Mina puts an arm around her shoulders, an easy, casual gesture that makes Ochako’s heart feel like it's beating through her ribcage. “Look,” Mina says, nodding towards the stage set up in front of the massive Justice Building. “Here comes Bakugou.”

Ochako watches as Bakugou Katsuki, the victor of last year’s Hunger Games, sits down in the chair beside the Capitol escort’s. Ochako wasn’t really paying much attention to his Games, too focused on trying to juggle her father’s blooming business and training to sit down and watch TV, but, from what she’s heard, he caused an uproar last year by clawing his way back from the brink of death so that he could set the arena - a gigantic forest with a clearing in the middle for the Cornucopia - on fire. He’d barely survived, and, by the time the hovercraft pulled him out, he was wheezing from smoke inhalation. Even now, months later, his presence causes the crowd to break out in a hushed murmur. Bakugou wasn’t any older than Ochako, but he rarely ever left his house in the Victor's Village, even to go to school. Many people - Ochako included - weren’t expecting him to even bother showing up today.

“Guess even he can’t resist the Reaping,” Mina says, and, though Ochako dutifully smiles, she has to bite her tongue to keep from saying that she wishes that he’d just stayed at home. Something about him - the shiny pink burn scars up his arms, the glint in his eyes, the way he holds himself like a predator about to pounce - unsettles her deeply. He reminds her of a time bomb, primed and ready to explode.

After the rest of the Victors take their seats, the mayor - who happens to be Mina’s mother, and, as loath as she is to admit it, is probably the reason that Ochako got a scholarship to go to the training academy at all - steps up to the podium and starts to read about the history of Panem. It's nothing that Ochako hasn’t heard before, and so she quickly grows restless, inattentive. She looks around at the different age groups and wonders what two people are going to be called up as tributes this year. Someone strong, she hopes, and fast, someone who can uphold District One’s shining reputation and keep it in the Capitol’s favor.

“It's a time to repent and a time to give thanks,” the mayor finishes, and, out of the corner of her eye, Ochako can see Mina mockingly mouthing along to the words. She catches Ochako looking and sticks out her tongue, and Ochako, grinning, refocuses on the mayor just as she introduces the Capitol attendant. Ochako doesn’t know why she bothers, seeing as it's been the same person for years - Kayama Nemuri, a tall, pretty woman with long black hair.

“It's great to be here, District One!” she says into the microphone, voice booming through the speakers placed evenly around the square. Her face, Ochako knows, is being shown on screens in the adjacent streets, for the people who straggled in late and weren’t able to find a good seat. “I know all of you boys and girls want a chance to make your district proud -” and the people around Ochako make varying sounds of agreement “- but, unfortunately, only two of you will have the opportunity. And so, without further ado, it's time to find out who our lucky tributes are!” As she crosses the stage to the glass ball of girls’ names, everything goes deathly still. To the sound of nothing more than the wind whistling through the buildings, she reaches in, rummages around for several seconds, and, with great flourish, withdraws a small slip of paper. The tension builds and builds and builds, anticipating, as she makes her way back to the podium.

Somewhere in the crowd of families, a baby starts to cry, but the wail is quickly hushed. Nobody wants to miss what Nemuri is about to say.

Slowly, slowly, Nemuri unfolds the piece of paper, drawing out the moment for as long as possible. She clears her throat and looks down to read out the name, and maybe it's just Ochako’s imagination, but it looks like she falters for a second, her eyes going wide. And then she says, in a loud, clear voice, “Our female tribute for the 108th Hunger Games is a very, very lucky girl.” She smiles, wide and gleaming, and says, “Ashido Mina, will you please step forward?”

… What?

There’s a moment of stunned silence, and then the square explodes with noise. Mina’s mother is on her feet, staring directly at her daughter like she’d been acutely aware of her exact location the entire time, and, at her side, Ochako hears Mina whisper, “Oh.” Swallow, then say, “Oh, no.”

And that’s when Ochako remembers - Mina never paid attention in class. She was always focused on designing clothes and planning out her future. She didn’t know what plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous. She didn’t know how to make a snare. She didn’t even know how to make a fire. Which meant that she wouldn’t stand a chance in the arena, no matter how many sponsors she managed to charm.

Mina takes a deep breath and starts to walk towards the stage, face pale and fists clenched so tightly that they’re shaking, and her skirt flashes around her legs in metallic gold and silver, and that’s when Ochako sets her jaw and makes a decision.

“I volunteer,” she says.

Mina stops in her tracks by the eighteen-year-old section and looks over her shoulder, mouths, No.

Ochako ignores her and says, louder, “I volunteer!” She storms up the aisle towards Mina, grabs her wrist, holding her back from sprinting up onto the stage because that’s something that Mina definitely would do if given the chance. “I volunteer as tribute!”

Nemuri beams down at them. “Oh, you two must be rivals, for you to be so enthusiastic about taking away her shot at glory. In fact, you’re so excited that you forgot all about the proper protocol for -”

“Does it really matter?” the mayor asks. Her voice is bland, like she couldn’t care less, but there’s a very real gleam of pain in her eyes when she looks between Ochako and Mina. “The girl volunteered. Let her up.”

Mina shakes her head, hard, and claws her hands around Ochako’s arm. “Don’t,” she hisses, low, desperate, “Ochako, you can’t, you -”

“Let go of me!” Ochako snaps. The shock of the situation is settling in, and it's like being hit with one of the Peacekeeper’s stun batons, a jolt that electrifies her blood and makes her heart ache deep in her chest. She’s small. She’s weak. She has no skills to speak of. She’s going to die in the arena, bringing shame to her family and her district, and she’ll never get to see Mina again. “Let go of me, Mina.”

Mina’s fingers are abruptly pried away from where they’d been digging into Ochako’s skin, and Ochako looks over, sees that an older boy from the academy has somehow managed to pull Mina off. Ochako doesn’t know him very well, but Mina obviously does, because she only fights and kicks for a moment before going limp in his hold, staring at Ochako with an expression of mixed betrayal and horror.

Ochako forces herself to look away. She takes a moment to brace herself, then mounts the steps and walks across the stage. 

Nemuri grins at her. “I bet you’ve got some hidden talents, right?” she asks, which is just a nice way of saying that she looks as meek and helpless as she feels. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

Her mouth is dry. She stares down at her feet as she speaks, unwilling to look out at the crowd. “Uraraka Ochako,” she finally mutters, the microphone catching her voice and broadcasting it all through the district. 

“Uraraka?” Nemuri asks, and Ochako knows what she’s going to say next. “Your father is the up-and-coming jewelry manufacturer, right? He’s a brilliant man!”

“... Yeah,” Ochako says weakly, mortified. She can practically feel her father’s eyes boring into her. “He is.”

“Your parents must be so proud of you right now,” Nemuri gushes. “I’ll make sure that someone interviews them later.” Before Ochako can think of a response to that, Nemuri breezes to the bowl of boys’ names and fishes out a paper. 

Ochako closes her eyes, resisting the urge to put her face in her hands.

What has she done?

What has she done?

Ochako sits on the velvet couch in the visiting room, shoulders drawn forward. She twists the hem of her shirt between her fingers, trying to focus on the feel of the fabric against her skin rather than the burn in her eyes and throat. She can’t cry. No matter how hopeless all of this seems, she can’t cry. She refuses to make it seem like she’s given up already.

The doors open.

Her head snaps up. 

Her mother and father walk into the room, arm-in-arm, looking for all the world like they just came back from one of the Capitol parties they’ve recently been invited to attend - perfectly poised, in control, flawless. They come to a stop in front of her and Ochako forces herself to keep her face still, expressionless, as her mother drops down into a crouch and studies her. 

She hates the way her parents have changed. It used to be that they were as poor as dirt, but at least they were a family. Now it feels like Ochako is living with plastic dolls whenever she visits home from the academy.

Finally, her mother says, “Do you know if they return the tributes’ tokens to the family if the tribute dies?”

Ochako’s hands shudder in her lap. She blinks rapidly, shakes her head.

Her mother clicks her tongues. “Pity. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped.” She twists her wedding ring off of her finger, the diamond glinting in the light, and presses it into Ochako’s palm. “Make sure to keep this on you,” she says. “We want people to be able to see it, and I, for one, don’t want it to be lost.”

And now Ochako does meet her eyes, confused and horrified by the implications of her words. “What?”

Her mother frowns slightly, eyebrows raised. “Well, Ochako, sweetie, you can’t possibly think that you’re going to survive, right?” Like she hasn’t just ripped out Ochako’s heart, she continues, “You were supposed to be our legacy. With you gone, we’ll have to bring in more business to support ourselves when we retire. So keep the ring on.”

After the numbness fades, anger fills Ochako’s chest. She closes her fist around the ring so tightly that she can feel it cut into her skin, then raises her arm to throw it across the room. Her father catches her wrist and squeezes it so tightly that Ochako can feel the bones creak. “Did you not hear your mother, Ochako?” he asks, as pleasantly calm as always.

Ochako grits her teeth. “I don’t want this stupid ring,” she snaps. At her mother, she snarls, “I don’t want your stupid token.”

Her mother tsks again. “So irrational,” she says. “That’s what got you into this situation in the first place, Ochako. You did this to yourself.”

Ochako is shaking with fury by the time that her parents leave, the Peacekeepers reaching in to shut the door behind them. When they’re gone, Ochako curls her knees up to her chest and buries her face in her arms and tries to remember how to breathe. You did this to yourself. You did this to yourself. Because she did, didn’t she? She made the choice to volunteer. But it wasn’t really a choice at all, because it was Mina, Mina, and Ochako knows that she wouldn’t be able to bear living with herself if she let her best friend get cut down in the arena.

As if on cue, the doors open again, and Ochako lifts her head just in time to see Mina rushing towards her. Her makeup is smeared across her face, and her eyes are rimmed with red, and her entire body is trembling when she throws herself at Ochako and yanks her into a hug. “I’m sorry,” she sobs into Ochako’s hair, hysterical. “I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry!”

Ochako tentatively reaches up and smooths circles into Mina’s back. “You don’t have anything to apologize for,” she says, and feels Mina’s grip on her tighten to the point where it's nearly painful. “It's not your fault.”

Mina sniffles and pulls away, wiping at her eyes. “You shouldn’t have volunteered,” she says, voice cracking. “You - you -”

“What, are you already giving up on me?”

Mina huffs a watery laugh, shaking her head even as her shoulders shudder so hard that it looks like she’s about to break apart. “No, no, of course not.”

“Good.” Ochako forces a smile that she really, really doesn’t feel. “Because I’m coming home. Just watch me.” 

The lies taste like blood in her mouth, but they’re worth it for the way that Mina relaxes, ever so slightly. “You have to,” she says, and her hands slide down Ochako’s arms. She twines their fingers together. “You have to come back to me, okay? Promise.”

Ochako swallows and nods. “I promise.”

And then the Peacekeepers are throwing open the doors and pulling Mina away as she screams curses at them and thrashes, yelling that they have no right to do this, that her time isn’t up, damnit, that she’s going to report them and get them all fired, and then Ochako is alone in the room, all alone.

She takes a deep, shaky breath and slips her mother’s ring onto her finger. The gemstone gleams and shimmers as she turns it back and forth, inspecting it.

I’m going to die, she thinks, and only then does she allow herself to cry.

Dinner in the tribute train is quiet and awkward. 

District One’s other tribute - a lanky, long-haired boy named Hiruka - keeps trying to strike up conversation, but the only one who replies is Nemuri, and so he eventually gives up and focuses on shoveling as much food in his mouth as humanly possible. Based on the way that he’s eating like there’s no tomorrow, Ochako would say that he belonged to one of the few families that didn’t send their children to training academies. 

It's strange, then, that nobody stepped up to take his place.

As dessert is being served, Bakugou - one of the mentors this year, much to Ochako’s discomfort - finally speaks. He looks at Hiruka and says, “What training do you have?”

Hiruka’s eyes have a sharp glint to them that Ochako doesn’t like. She makes a mental note to watch her back around him. “I’m good with knives,” he says, “and with people. And at putting knives into people.”

Bakugou makes a humming noise under his breath. Ochako’s expecting him to ask her the same question that he asked Hiruka, but he doesn’t. He just turns back to eating.

Ochako bristles and shoves a bite of cake into her mouth, silently seething. The other mentor, a woman with short brown hair, notices and tries to question her about her skills, but Ochako just ignores her, finishes her food, and storms out without asking to be dismissed, slamming the door shut behind her.

In the morning, she dresses in the simplest clothes she can find in the closet and pulls her hair into a ponytail, slipping on her mother’s ring before she leaves for breakfast. They’ll be in the Capitol soon, she knows, because the distance between it and District One is the shortest route in Panem, which means that she’s going to be subject to the whims of her stylist within hours. She sincerely hopes that she doesn’t get one that chooses to represent her district by having her stark naked with jewels covering only the most necessary parts.

When she steps into the dining car, Hiruka doesn’t comment on the way that she stomped out last night. All that he does is glance at her, take a sip of coffee, and say, “You look nice.”

“Thank you,” Ochako says, sliding into the seat beside him. He’s dressed unexpectedly well, and she wonders if she was wrong to assume that he never attended a training academy. 

Maybe he just has a big appetite. 

Stranger things have happened.

Bakugou enters next, and he doesn’t even look at Ochako. Apparently he’s only here for the sake of keeping up appearances and making his presence known, because he gulps down a glass of orange juice and then stands back up to leave, and, when he’s by the door, Ochako hears herself say, “Do you have something against me?”

Bakugou doesn’t pause, doesn’t show any sign that he’s heard her at all, just continues walking.

Ochako’s blood boils. She starts after him despite Hiruka’s protests, catching hold of Bakugou’s sleeve as he turns a corner. “Look,” she says, “you’re supposed to be my mentor, so why don’t you act like it?”

And, finally, Bakugou acknowledges her existence. He shakes her off, sneering down at her. He looks even more threatening up close, towering over her, but Ochako just puts her hands on her hips and glares at him, standing her ground. She doesn’t know why she’s acting like this, like a dog vying for his attention, but she can’t find it in herself to stop - he was in the Games last year! His knowledge is the most valuable because it's the most recent, and he’s refusing to help her for reasons that she can’t fathom.

It's infuriating.

“I don’t even know your name,” he says, mixed parts amused and dismissive.

“It's Uraraka,” she informs him, jogging to catch up to him when he starts to walk away again. She stumbles back, barely avoiding a blow that would’ve completely wiped her out, and says, “Uraraka Ochako.”

“Well, Uraraka Ochako,” Bakugou says, drawing out the words, mocking, “are you always this annoying?”

“What is your problem?” Ochako asks, voice bordering on a yell. “I’m not asking you to bend over backwards for me, I’m just asking you to do your job, you selfish, immature -”

Pain rings through the side of her face and she staggers, kept from crumpling to the floor only by the way that Bakugou curls his fingers into the collar of her shirt, yanking her upwards until her toes are barely even touching the floor. She sucks in a ragged breath, agony pulsing in waves through her cheek as he shakes her slightly, leans in close, and hisses, “I never wanted this job, and I never wanted to be your mentor. You were a fool to volunteer, Uraraka, and you’re an even bigger fool if you think that you’ll survive. You wanted my advice? Here it is: the best you can do is pray for an easy death.”

And, with that, he drops her. Her legs give way the moment that her feet hit the ground and she sits down heavily in the middle of the hallway, gasping for air. Tears prick her eyes but she blinks them away, both hands pressed to her face to brace the injury. She’s pretty sure that her cheekbone is cracked. And her pride.

Bakugou stares down at her for a long moment, then huffs and starts - once again - to walk away. 

Ochako scrambles upright. “Hey,” she says, voice slurred with blood. Her tongue feels like it's stuck to the roof of her mouth. “Hey, wait!”

“What is wrong with you?” Bakugou snaps without looking back, but at least he pauses in the doorway of his room, and at least he’s listening to her. “Do I have to break your damn legs?”

“No. Don’t do that.” Ochako swallows, tasting copper, and asks, “I just need you to answer a question. One question.”

Bakugou sighs, raking his fingers through his hair. “What do you want?”

“Do you really think that I don’t stand a chance?”

In response, Bakugou laughs and slams his door shut in her face.

“What happened to you?” Hiruka asks over lunch. “You look like shit. No offense.”

“Nothing happened,” Ochako huffs, squeaking her fork loudly across her plate and feeling gratified when the squealing noise of metal on ceramic makes Bakugou wince. “Just had a run-in with a bastard who doesn’t know how to do his job.”

“Keep talking about me like that,” Bakugou says, and sets his glass down on the table a little harder than strictly necessary, “and you’ll be dead before you make it to the arena.”

Ochako gives her his nicest, sweetest smile, and it pulls painfully at the bruise covering her cheek but is worth it for the look on his face. “Careful, Bakugou,” she says. “There are witnesses.”

Bakugou’s cup shatters in his grip, the shards cutting deeply into his hand. He curses, pushes himself back from the table, and - much to Nemuri’s horror - uses one of the silk napkins to stem the flow of blood. The chair topples to the ground as he stands up and stabs a finger at Ochako. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he snarls, voice echoing against the walls of the dining car. “If you want to be a victor so badly, learn how to have some fucking respect.”

Ochako’s hands are shaking, that’s how angry she is. “Stop acting like you’re so much better than me,” she snaps, harsh, and in her peripheral vision she can see Nemuri start to rise, fingers curling around something in her pocket. Ochako continues, building up steam, “You’re not better than me. You’re not better than anyone! You only won last year because you got lucky, and everyone in this room knows it!”

For a moment, it looks like Bakugou might actually rip her head off, but then he just storms out of the room, slamming the door shut so hard that it rattles in its frame. He leaves a trail of blood on the carpet, glistening in the light.

For a long, long moment, nobody speaks. And then, finally, Hiruka says, “Well.”

He says, pausing to take another bite of his sandwich, “That was interesting.”

Ochako doesn’t respond, and they finish the rest of the meal in silence.

—

After the tribute parade, Ochako washes off all the makeup her prep team layered onto her and watches last year’s Games. 

Bakugou’s Games.

The interviews bore her half to death - the most notable one is the female tribute from District One, a girl that Ochako vaguely recalls seeing in the halls during class changes - and so does the bloodbath at the Cornucopia when the bells sound. Things only start to get interesting about half a day in, when the District One girl, who Ochako now remembers as being named Utsushimi, finds Bakugou and somehow coerces him into working as a team.

Bakugou looks… different. He doesn’t look the same as he does now. In the video, he’s all spit-fire arrogance and brash confidence, nothing like the sullen, defensive boy that he is today, and Ochako can’t help but wish that she had this Bakugou as a mentor, because he seems like he would actually try to keep her alive. The Bakugou that she has now is just a jackass.

On the sixth day of the 107th Hunger Games, Utsushimi dies.

She and Bakugou had just gotten into an argument about something stupid - in Ochako’s opinion, anyways - and Utsushimi had stormed ahead on the path, not watching where she was going, and she walks right into a trap set out by District Five - she’s electrocuted. 

Ah, Ochako thinks, watching as Utsushimi’s body convulses and twitches, her mouth pinned open in a silent scream, So that’s what that looks like.

Bakugou tries to save her - which comes as a surprise to Ochako, because he seemed like the type to be interested only in himself - but is stopped, tackled to the ground by one of the District Five tributes, a girl with wild black hair and a crazed gleam in her eyes. Bakugou fights her off, stabbing the first weapon he can find - a particularly sharp stick - through her throat, but by the time he staggers to his feet, covered in blood, it's too late. 

Utsushimi’s cannon has fired. 

She’s dead.

After that, Bakugou seems to go insane, jumping at shadows and destroying anything that moves. He’s paranoid and jittery, to the point where the commenters wonder aloud if he’s somehow been pumped full of artificial adrenaline. 

By day nine, the pool of contestants is down to ten people - Bakugou, the male from District Two, the female from Seven, both tributes from Eight, both tributes from Three, the girl from Ten, the boy from Four, and, most surprisingly of all, the girl from Twelve. Usually the kids from Twelve got picked off first, but the girl seems to have survived this long by being quick on her feet and elusive. 

Day nine is significant in the fact that it's the day that Bakugou’s manic high crashes. 

He trips as he’s walking and doesn’t stand back up, just curls in on himself like a mortally wounded animal waiting for death. He looks pathetic, honestly, thirteen years old and covered in blood and dirt, the only sign of life being the shallow rise and fall of his chest, and he probably would’ve died if not for the fact that the District Twelve girl quite literally stumbled upon him at sunset.

Somehow, she manages to convince him to sit up, to eat, to drink. When he asks her why she’s helping him, voice a hoarse croak, she smiles and says that he reminds her of her younger brother, back home in what she calls the Seam. 

Don’t you want to go back to him? Bakugou asked.

The girl looked up at the sky. I did, at the start, she said. But, now? Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t know how I’ll be able to look at him knowing that he knows what I’ve done to survive.

Oh, Bakugou said, and that was that.

The District Twelve girl, made precious by her kindness and her dogged survival, dies the very next day. It's brutal and drawn out, almost torturous, her gasps for air and the way that Bakugou raises his knife, again, to plunge it deep into her stomach. 

“What are you doing?” someone asks, right by her ear. 

Ochako yelps, spinning around. Bakugou rips the remote out of her hands and shuts off the TV, then sneers at her expression. “The fuck are you looking at?” he asks. “Why are you awake? Why were you watching that? Weren’t you paying attention last year, dumbass?” His questions come rapid-fire without giving her a chance to respond, and he shakes the remote in her face like he’s fussing at an unruly dog or a child that refuses to listen. “Go to bed and get out of my sight.”

Ochako stares at him, eyes wide. That girl - District Twelve - had helped him, had practically nursed him back to health and refused to let him give up on himself, and, in thanks, he had… 

“You’re a dirty fucking cheat,” she whispers.

The effect is instantaneous. 

Bakugou bares his teeth at her, looking for all the world like the boy in the video who shoved a stick through the throat of the girl that killed his district partner, and she can see, now, how he was able to burn eight people to death and come out alive.

Ochako says, “You…” She glances at the blank TV screen and then goes back to staring at him. “She helped you, and you repaid that by killing her? Is that the kind of person I have as a mentor? Is that the kind of person you are?” She doesn’t even realize that she’s yelling until her words echo back at her, ricocheting like bullets off the walls. And maybe it's ridiculous, that she’s acting like this when she herself is about to be put in the same situation that he was in, but at the very least she’ll have her honor. He has nothing. He has no ground to stand on. He’s a backstabber, a traitor to someone who was kind to him, and that surprises her more than it should.

Bakugou drags a hand down his face, and Ochako notices that it's wrapped heavily with bandages. “Fucking Hell,” he says, and one blood-red eye glares at her from between the cracks of his fingers. “I hate people like you. So damn self-righteous. People like you are always the first ones to go batshit crazy in the arena, have you noticed that?”

“I’d rather be batshit crazy,” Ochako hisses out, low, “than a complete monster.”

She sees it coming even before it happens, in Bakugou’s sharp intake of breath, the way his shoulders tense, and she dodges to the side as he lunges at her. He hits the ground hard enough that her own body aches in sympathy, but the rest of her, the logical part, is filled with nothing but horror. She remembers seeing Bakugou in school, remembers watching him banter back and forth with his friends. Did the Games really change him this much? Or was he always like this?

She watches as Bakugou slowly, slowly picks himself up from the floor, and he must’ve hit his face when he collided with the ground because his lip is split and there’s blood trailing down his chin. He jabs a finger at her, sharp, and she can’t stop the way that she flinches back - the look in his eyes, it's almost feral. “I’m going to kill you,” he whispers, and it's said with such grim certainty that she feels a chill go down her spine. “I’m going to kill you.”

Before he can make due on his threat, however, he goes deathly still. And then he jerks, just like Utsushimi in the video, electrified and twitching, eyes wide and pained and focused on something just over Ochako’s shoulder. 

He collapses to the ground, and, for a moment, Ochako is terrified that he’s dead. And then she hears footsteps from behind her, the signature click-click of high heels, and she turns to see Nemuri walking towards her with a regretful look on her face. “Sorry about that, Ochako,” she says, ruffling her hair as she steps past. She crouches down beside Bakugou and presses two fingers to his throat. “Did he hurt you at all?”

Mutely, Ochako shakes her head. 

Nemuri nods, satisfied, and straightens back up. “That’s good. I heard the crash and came as fast as I could. I’m glad I made it in time - your stylist would give me Hell if I let your pretty face get any more bruised than it already is.”

Ochako somehow manages to find her voice, but she can’t look away from Bakugou, passed out on the floor with his limbs still spasming occasionally. “What,” she starts, and her mouth is so dry that it's hard to swallow. “What happened?”

“Well, he’s been pretty violent since the Games. As a condition of him being able to be a mentor, he has to wear this -” and she bends down again, pulling the collar of Bakugou’s shirt away from his neck to expose a band of metal clamped down tight against his skin “- at all times. It's a safeguard of sorts, to make sure that he can’t hurt anybody.”

Ochako looks between her and Bakugou, her heart pounding so hard that she can feel it in her throat. “But he said that he never wanted to be a mentor,” she whispers, barely audible. 

“He didn’t,” Nemuri says, letting go of Bakugou, standing up. “But both Todoroki Enji and Todoroki Shouto refused, and so we were left with him.” She punctuates that statement with a look of pure contempt directed at the boy sprawled out on the floor. “I’ll admit, fourteen is a bit young to be a mentor, but a victor really should have more self-control, don’t you think?” 

“Yeah,” Ochako says weakly, agreeing for the sake of agreeing.

Nemuri sighs, shakes her head, and starts towards the door. “Well, he’ll be out for a few hours. Get some sleep, sweetie.”

Ochako jolts, alarmed. “Are you going to leave him?” she asks, and she doesn’t know why she’s so vehemently against the idea. He did just threaten to murder her. 

Nemuri laughs. “No, of course not. I’ll send someone to deal with him in a few minutes.” And then she pauses at the doorway, seemingly lost in thought. She says, finally, “Ochako, dear?”

Ochako’s head snaps up. “Yes?”

Nemuri’s voice is cold, cold, cold, the kind of cold that freezes you in place and seeps down deep beneath your skin and never leaves you, ever. “Try to stay out of trouble.” She glances back over her shoulder, and the look in her eyes makes Ochako feel like she can’t breathe. “I’m not sure if you could survive the consequences.”

With that, she walks away.

Her footsteps echo.

[candleshopmenace]

anger is blood [malice is the wisdom of our wrath] | day six: ransom video

SUMMARY

“How many times do we need to go through this, Shinsou? Think of how much pain you could save yourself if you just gave in.”

“Yeah,” Shinsou says, and there’s something like a laugh in his voice, “I get that a lot.”

—

Shinsou screams, the sound hoarse and seemingly ripped from somewhere deep in his throat, and all that Shouta can do is watch.

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[ao3 link]

[discord server]

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Shouta knows the moment that he wakes up that it's not going to be a good day. Mostly because he wakes up early. It's not by choice and it's not by obligation, but because of Nemuri, fucking Nemuri, is standing over him and saying in a voice devoid of pity or sympathy, “Get your ass up.”

Shouta blinks at her. His mouth feels gritty, which means that he’d passed out without brushing his teeth. “What time is it?”

Nemuri props her hands on her hips, scowls. “A quarter past five,” she says, tapping her foot in a way that says that he should’ve been up and moving an hour ago. “C’mon, Shouta, we’ve got a meeting at six! Get dressed!”

Shouta groans into his pillow. “I hate you.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

Reluctantly and resentfully, Shouta drags himself out of bed. He shuffles to the bathroom across the hall and turns on the shower as hot and high as it can go, which earns him a half-hearted trickle of water. God, he hates Nemuri’s apartment. Despises it. Not only is it in the literal worst part of town, it doesn’t even have decent… anything. Beggars can’t be choosers, but that doesn’t stop him from wishing for his own warm bed and functioning shower. Goddamn villains, forcing him out of his own damn house. He stands under the spray for a moment, then struggles out again. Towel wrapped around his waist, he staggers to the kitchen to get some breakfast, then sighs when he opens the cabinets and comes face-to-face with nothing but bare shelves. 

Jesus Christ, he always forgets that her eating habits are even worse than his.

“Nemuri!” he calls, and waits for her responding, What?, before saying, “We’re going grocery shopping after work!”

“I don’t want to!” 

“I don’t care. You can’t live off of -” He looks around for an example, gives up. “What the Hell. What do you even eat? There’s literally nothing in here, Nemuri.”

Nemuri pokes her head out of her door, scowls at him. “I was going to pick up breakfast,” she says, defensive. “And I just haven’t had time to go to the store recently.”

Shouta snorts. “Right.” He gets dressed, brushes his teeth, and then drags a comb through his hair. He’s just started to wind his capture weapon around his neck when his alarm goes off, phone buzzing in his pocket. He takes it out, glances at it, huffs in irritation. This is the time that he normally wakes up. Fucking Nedzu, calling a meeting at ass o’clock in the morning and barely even bothering to give them a few hours’ notice - if Shouta hadn’t been up late last night, chances are that both he and Nemuri would’ve missed the meeting, since Nedzu sent the email at nearly midnight. 

Shouta yells, “Nemuri! We have to go!”

Footsteps pound past him in the hall. “Hurry up!” and then the slam of the front door, the little shit.

Shouta curses, grabs his bag, and follows her, barely remembering to put on his shoes before heading down the stairs and into the parking lot. He ducks into the passenger seat of Nemuri’s car half a second before she fucking floors it, tires squealing as she jerks around the corner. 

Shouta says, glaring at her, “You’re a horrible driver.”

Nemuri glances over at him. She’s not as put-together as she is on most days - she’s wearing her regular glasses instead of the ones she wears with her costume, and her hair is pulled back into a messy ponytail - but that doesn’t make her grin seem any less shit-eating. “But other people aren’t,” she says, perfectly confident, like that makes any sense at all.

“You are so full of shit, Nemuri.”

Nemuri’s grin widens. She looks back towards the road and accelerates even more, and Shouta thanks all the gods that he can think of that it's early and nearly no one else is insane enough to be driving at this time in the morning. “As Jordan Baker said,” Nemuri says, sing-song, “it takes two to make an accident.” And then she turns on the radio, signaling the end of the conversation, and starts to tap her nails against the steering wheel in beat to the music blaring from her speakers.

After a few minutes of staring out the window, Shouta looks back at Nemuri and says, “You’re being awfully nice.”

Nemuri turns the volume down, just a notch. “I’m always nice,” she says, and, when Shouta snorts, she gasps like his disbelief is a personal affront to everything she holds dear and close to her heart. “Excuse you,” she says, offended, “who was the one who brought you flowers every day when you were stuck in the hospital during finals with that bullet in your leg?”

“You visited me twice in the hospital, and you said both times that you were only doing it because you needed help studying. And you never brought me flowers.”

Nemuri pauses. “I sent texts.”

“You sent porn.”

“Well, who needs fucking flowers, anyways?” Nemuri huffs and slams her horn at a particularly slow driver, flipping them off in their rearview mirror. She switches lanes, speeds up, and then cuts in front of them. She asks, “What time is it?”

“You have a phone.” “I can’t look at it while I’m driving, Shouta.”

“Oh, really. You’ll break every law in existence but you refuse to break this one? That makes a lot of sense.” Still, Shouta glances at his screen. “It's almost six.”

“Shit,” Nemuri says, and somehow manages to go even faster. Within minutes, she’s pulling into the teachers’ parking lot behind Yuuei. She kills the engine and drops her keys into her purse, swings her legs out of the door. “C’mon,” she says, and is already halfway to the school building by the time that Shouta manages to unbuckle his seatbelt and scramble after her. “We’re going to be late.”

They’re almost to Nedzu’s office when Shouta hears Hizashi call out from behind them, “Hey!”

Shouta stops automatically at the sound of his voice, turns. “Yeah?” he asks, scanning Hizashi head-to-toe. He looks like shit, which is worrying - Hizashi worked three jobs, but he always somehow managed to be presentable. Right now, it looks like he has, quite literally, just rolled out of bed. “Morning, Hizashi.”

Hizashi gives him a distracted nod, but his eyes are fixed on Nemuri. It's like they’re having a silent conversation, which is both irritating and familiar. Finally, Hizashi says, “Yeah. Yeah, good morning.”

Shouta looks between him and Nemuri. “Is something wrong?”

Again, Hizashi hesitates. Something flickers across his face - anxiety, maybe, or trepidation - but then disappears just as quickly. “Let’s just go inside,” he says, and nods towards the door. 

With one more suspicious once-over of his best friend, Shouta twists the handle. Hinges creak like something out of a horror movie - Shouta is forever convinced that Nedzu keeps them unoiled just so that one feels a sense of foreboding when they enter the room - and the door opens into Nedzu’s office. 

Shouta blinks.

All of the first-year teachers are gathered around Nedzu’s desk, sitting in chairs that had to have been brought up from a classroom. 

“Ah, Aizawa-sensei,” Nedzu says, and smiles. For a rodent, his face is weirdly expressive. It's fucking creepy. “Nice of you to join us.”

Shouta opens his mouth to respond, to say something that would probably get him fired on the spot, but Nemuri cuts in, grabbing his wrist in a silent warning. “Sorry, sir,” she says, dipping her head in a bow. “Traffic trouble.”

“Traffic,” Kan says, eyebrows raised, “at five-something in the morning.”

“More importantly,” a man starts. Shouta vaguely recognizes him as the 1-C teacher - so sue him if he can’t remember all of his coworkers’ names, it's six fucking AM and he should still be asleep. He waves his finger between Shouta and Nemuri, smirks. “You two rode together? When did that start?”

Tomo snaps his head over to him, narrows his eyes. “Don’t be disgusting, Takahashi.”

The Class 1-C teacher, newly dubbed Takahashi, holds up both his hands, waves them back and forth in front of him.  The expression on his face is somehow both panicked and apologetic. “I was joking, I was joking.”

“Well, don’t.”

Shouta blinks as the scene plays out in front of him. Tomo was usually one of the most mild-mannered teachers in their group, so to hear him get irritated by something that was obviously just an attempt at humor is… weird. It's weird. He’s not sure how to feel about it.

From behind his desk, Nedzu clears his throat. “Alright, settle down.” He clasps both hands in front of him. “So, everyone already knows why we’re here, right?”

Everyone in the room nods. 

Except for Shouta. He says, “What?”

Nedzu looks at him with a puzzled expression, which is a rarity that doesn’t make Shouta feel any less tense. “You don’t?” His eyes flick to Nemuri, who stiffens beside Shouta, her grip on his arm tightening. “Midnight, I thought I told you to brief him before the meeting.”

“... What?” Shouta repeats, feeling for all the world like a broken record. Feeling like an outsider, too, because he’s obviously been left out of something important. “Brief me on what, Nemuri?”

“Um,” she says.

“Nemuri.”

Nemuri winces, looks over at Nedzu with pleading eyes. “Sir, I couldn’t do it. I think it's better if you tell him.”

Takahashi frowns. “What’s the big deal?” he asks, leaning forward in his chair, forearms braced against his knees. “If anything, I’m the one who should be upset. The kid’s my student, not his. Just tell him, fuckin’ Hell.”

Nedzu sighs, long and drawn out. “And this is why I wanted him to be notified before the meeting, Nemuri, so that he would be prepared for what we will be discussing.” He looks at Shouta. “It's my understanding that you’ve been interested in mentoring a general studies student?”

Shouta’s mouth goes dry. “Shinsou Hitoshi?” he says, and it's almost a question, not quite, and his mind is running through all the worst possible scenarios. “In 1-C? This meeting is about him?”

Nedzu nods, expression grave as a doctor delivering news about a terminal illness. “As of yesterday night, at nine o’clock sharp, he’s been declared missing.”

“Oh,” Shouta says, and then falls silent for a long, long moment, processing the words. Declared missing. For someone to be declared missing, they have to be gone for twenty-four hours. If it was made official as of nine PM last night, then that means that Shinsou hasn’t been in contact with anyone since nine PM two days ago, which means that this is a very bad situation. Which means that Shinsou could be hurt, or worse. Which means that Shouta really should’ve been told about this sooner. 

Shouta says, finally, “What the fuck.” He looks around the room, hoping that this is just some kind of sick joke, and meets Takahashi’s suddenly solemn eyes. He says it again, with a bit more emphasis, “What. The. Fuck.”

A hand lands on his shoulder, and Shouta spins on his heel, slaps it away hard enough that Nemuri winces. “Shouta,” she says, placating, and then sighs. “I didn’t want to make you upset.”

“Oh, really?” Shouta asks, and he must sound fucking pissed because Hizashi takes a half-step back, like he thinks that Shouta might rip into Nemuri and then go after him. That doesn’t sound like a bad plan, actually, now that he thinks about it. “You didn’t want to upset me? You do understand how that makes this worse, right? What the fuck is wrong with you? What even goes through your head? I’m more upset now than I would’ve been if you had just told me when it happened!” Seething, he turns and stabs an accusing finger at Nedzu. “Why didn’t I get notified when they did? Did everyone in this room know about this bullshit before me?”

Ishiyama clears his throat with a sound like wet gravel, and Shouta’s attention snaps to him. “If I recall correctly,” Ishiyama says, “you were on patrol when Nedzu set up the video conference. You turn your phone off while you work, don’t you?”

Shouta’s arm drops back to his side. “Fuck,” he says. He takes a deep breath, then another. Losing his shit in front of a room full of coworkers is not how he expected to spend his morning. “Fuck.” Looking back at Nedzu, he says, “What are we going to do about it? And if you say that we’re not going to do anything about it, I swear to God -”

Shikyo, silent until now, cuts him off. In a voice slightly distorted and metallic by his mask, he says, “Eraserhead, do you need to step outside?”

“No, Snipe, I don’t. What I do need, though, is some answers. Nedzu -”

Every phone in the room simultaneously buzzes with a notification, and that’s enough to make him stop talking. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and everyone else in the room does the same, and he double-taps on the message without any hesitation at all - this is far too well-timed to be a coincidence. The text is nothing but a short line of words and a video with a plain black thumbnail. 

Tick-tock, the message says, and Shouta’s blood goes cold. Almost robotically, he full-screens the video and hits the play button, bracing himself for the worst even as his world narrows down to the nightmare in his hands. 

The black fades away, revealing a boy sitting in full view of the camera.

It's Shinsou. 

He’s tied up in a way that prevents him from moving even an inch - his legs are buckled tightly, and his arms are pinned down from his elbows to his wrists with thick leather straps. There’s even belts looped around his waist and chest, pressing his back flat against the chair.

Jesus, Shouta thinks. The kid must’ve put his captors through Hell to warrant such careful restraints.

Shinsou looks… bad. There’s no other way to put it. He looks bad. There’s a slash across his cheek, the kind one would get from being hit full in the face with a metal-knuckles fist - Shouta knows because that has happened to him several times - and his lip is split and crusted with dried blood. His shirt is torn to shreds, and through the scraps of fabric Shouta can see, even in the video’s dim lighting, that his ribs are deeply bruised.

He looks as bored as ever, though, uninterested and unattentive. He stares steadily at something off-screen, his eyes flat and his expression carefully neutral. Shouta wonders, briefly, who or what it is that Shinsou is looking at, but he’s not left in the dark for very long - a thin, lanky figure soon walks into view and stands in front of the camera. 

“So, Shinsou,” and the voice is staticy and harsh. “Are you ready to tell me what I want to know?”

“No way in fucking Hell,” Shinsou drawls, and, despite everything, pride flares in Shouta’s chest. He knew the moment that he saw him at the Sports Festival that Shinsou had the potential to be a great hero, and, so far, all that the kid has done is prove him right.

“Oh, that’s a pity,” the person says, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Well, how about you tell your teacher to stand down?”

“Nope.”

Teacher, singular? Shouta glances across the room at Takahashi, then refocuses on the video. The person - villain, Shouta thinks, criminal, bastard, low-life degenerate - clicks their tongue. “How many times do we need to go through this, Shinsou? Think of how much pain you could save yourself if you just gave in.”

“Yeah,” Shinsou says, and there’s something like a laugh in his voice, “I get that a lot.”

The villain sighs heavily. They step to the side, and Shinsou comes back into view once more, head tilted to the side, a lazy grin stretched across his face. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very disobedient child?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a fucking creep?” The moment that the last word leaves Shinsou’s mouth, his eyes widen, and for the first time since the video started he actually looks like he’s scared. “Wait, shit, wait -” 

Spasms run through his entire body and a scream rips from his throat, hoarse and unexpected. His head falls forward as he gasps for air, and Shouta notices for the first time that there’s a collar around Shinsou’s neck, shining metal and visibly sparking, and the anger that fills Shouta’s chest is so potent that it's damn near poisonous. He can hear his coworkers’ gasps of horror and sounds of protest, but, most of all, he hears the way that Shinsou is panting, sees the way his shoulders are shaking. 

When the electricity stops, Shinsou looks up, his face pale and in stark contrast to the bright red blood dripping from his nose, over his lips. “Fuck you,” he whispers. In the low light, his eyes are glinting with tears. “I hate you. I’m going to fucking kill you, you sick bastard.”

The villain tsks under their breath. “It's not my fault that you broke the rules. You only have yourself to blame.”

Shinsou shudders with a leftover tremor, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Shouta can see the thoughts running through his head, the calculations and plans, and he’s almost expecting it, expecting something monumental and game-changing, when Shinsou says, “Fine.” He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, resting it against the chair. “I’ll tell you.”

“Oh?” The villain sounds smug, pleased. “That’s all it took? I have to say, I was expecting more.”

“Fuck you,” Shinsou mutters, but then says, “yeah, yeah, whatever. Come closer.”

The villain huffs out an amused laugh and obliges, even leans down closer so that they’re eye-level with Shinsou. Like this, Shouta can only see about half of Shinsou’s face, but he can still tell what’s about to happen, because it's the exact same thing that he himself would do in this situation and Shinsou is more like him than he cares to admit. “No,” he finds himself saying, even though the kid can’t hear him. “Don’t do it, Shinsou, don’t -”

Shinsou spits in the villain’s face.

“Oh, shit,” someone says. Hizashi, maybe.

For a long, long moment, nothing happens on-screen. And then, slowly, almost leisurely, the villain raises a hand and wipes it along their cheek. They straighten up, and from the way that Shinsou’s eyes are narrowed, the two of them are probably glaring at each other. “Was that necessary, Shinsou?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

The villain turns like they’re about to walk away, and then spins back around and slaps Shinsou so hard that his head jerks fully to the side and a resounding crack! echoes in Shouta’s ears.

“And here I was thinking that you were going to play nice,” the villain says, and one hand lashes out, lightning-fast, to seize Shinsou’s hair. They yank it, force the boy to look up at them, uncaring of the pained hiss that whistles through Shinsou’s gritted teeth. “You know,” they say, almost casually, conversational, “I’m recording this.”

For the first time, Shinsou’s eyes look directly at the camera, and the villain crows a laugh. “That’s right,” they say. “Since you weren’t cooperating earlier, I had the idea to put on a little show, then let your teacher decide whether or not he wants to give in. But now, I’m wondering if that was such a good idea. After all, what if he decides that you aren’t worth the price?”

Understanding flashes across Shinsou’s face, and he starts shaking his head frantically at the camera. “Sensei, don’t listen to him, he wants -”

A hand claps down over Shinsou’s mouth and nose, effectively shutting him up and cutting off his air. “None of that,” the villain says, low and mocking, like he’s discipling a dog. Shinsou immediately tries to rip himself away, to take a breath, but the villain doesn’t let up - if anything, he presses harder, seeming to take sadistic pleasure in the way that the boy’s movements get increasingly panicked and jerky. 

Shouta watches in numb, muted horror as Shinsou’s body goes limp.

After a moment, the villain withdraws his hand. He stands over Shinsou, staring down at him, then shrugs and turns to look at the camera. It's the first time that his face is fully visible, and shock rockets through Shouta’s chest, jarring him to his core. In his peripheral vision, he sees Hizashi’s head snap up, feels his eyes burning into him. 

“Teachers of Yuuei,” the villain says, and smiles. His teeth glint, sharp, in the light. “You have a choice to make. If you call a cease-fire on my business and allow me to operate in peace, I’ll give your student back to you, and then we’ll all be happy.”

Shouta’s blood is freezing, and his mouth is so dry that he can’t even swallow. No, he thinks. No.

The villain’s grin widens impossibly further, predatory. “Eraserhead,” he says, adding a croon to the name that makes Shouta’s skin crawl. “I eagerly await your answer.”

And the video ends.

There is complete, absolute silence for one long, long moment. Nobody talks. Nobody even breathes. Shouta stares down at his phone with wide eyes. His hands have a tremble to them that won’t go away.

Finally, someone speaks. Yells, actually. 

“What the fuck was that!” 

Takahashi jumps up and stalks across the room to grab Shouta’s collar, damn near yanking him off his feet, and Shouta is too numb to even protest. 

“Are you telling me that this is your fault? Tell me that this is just a shitty joke, Aizawa, tell me that my Goddamn student wasn’t just fucking kidnapped and tortured because of you! This is all just bullshit, right?” 

He shakes Shouta, hard, and yells in his face, “Why the fuck did you let this happen? Are you just determined to fuck over all the students in this school? First the kid at the fucking Sports Festival, and now Shinsou? He’s not even your student! He’s mine! Stay in your own class, for fuck’s sake! Why can’t you just do your job and protect a few Goddamn children?”

Hizashi puts a hand on Takahashi’s shoulder and yanks him back, snapping, “Don’t talk to him like that, you bastard.”

Before Takahashi can respond, Nedzu’s voice cuts through the room. “Everyone, sit down.”

Seething, Takahashi reluctantly loosens his grip on Shouta’s collar. He shoots one last bitter at the both of them and storms back to his chair, slumps down in it, arms crossed over his chest like a petulant child. 

Shouta remains standing. 

“Aizawa,” Nedzu says, and points one tiny paw at a chair that’s off to the side, one of three that’s obviously meant for Shouta and Hizashi and Nemuri, dragged up from a classroom and empty. “Take a seat.”

My fault, he thinks. This wasn’t supposed to happen. When he took up the case, he didn’t think that it would hurt anyone but him. My fault. He could deal with having to avoid his own house like the plague after he noticed that someone followed him there every time. He could deal with sleepless nights spent patrolling the stinking alleyways of lower Musutafu in search of a clue that would help him land an immoral motherfucker behind bars. He could deal with having to watch his back every time he so much as took a stroll down the sidewalk.

But this?

This was way over the fucking line.

“Aizawa,” Nedzu says, louder, like he thinks that Shouta hadn’t heard him the first time. “Sit down so that we can discuss our next course of action.”

Shouta stares at him, stares at Takahashi. My fault, he thinks, and he rolls the words around on his tongue until his jaw aches and he tastes blood in his mouth. My fault. My fault. My fault. My fault my fault my fault my -

“Excuse me for a moment,” he says, and, without waiting for an answer, heads for the door and closes it behind him as he steps into the hall. 

He’s halfway to the parking lot by the time that Hizashi catches up to him, hooks his fingers around his wrist. “Shit, Shouta,” he says, and he sounds breathless. Shouta wonders how long it took him to realize that he was going to take care of this himself.

Shouta shakes off Hizashi’s hand and continues walking. “Don’t touch me,” he snaps. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

“You were already so stressed, with the - with the case and stuff, and so -”

“Do you really think that matters? Me being stressed? When there’s a kid out there who’s probably scared out of his fucking mind, who gets -” Shouta gestures wildly, trying to convey a concept that he can’t quite find the words for. “Who gets fucking electrocuted every time that he asks a question? Not even every time he uses his Quirk! Every time he asks a question!” He rakes his fingers through his hair, shakes his head - he still can’t wrap his mind around the fact that someone could do that to a kid, even though he literally just witnessed it. “God,” he says, and sighs. “This is all my fault.”

“No, it's -” Hizashi sputters when Shouta just starts walking away again. “Hey, Shouta, what are you even planning to do?”

“Me?” Shouta asks, and his own voice sounds distant, even to his own ears. He thinks about his answer for a moment, and then he smiles, slow and steady. “I’m going hunting.”

[candleshopmenace]

pray for us sinners [now and in the hour of our deaths] | day three: gun to the temple

SUMMARY

The tiles under his feet are cold, and the water in his ears muffles even the tiniest of sounds. Down here, everything is quiet. There are no loud voices or angry hands or bloody noses. There is nothing. He is nothing. He should go back to the surface, but he’s tired. He’s tired. He’s so tired.

-

Shouto is drowning.

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[ao3 link]

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It starts like this: on the sixth day, God created Man. 

God created Man, shaped him from blood and flesh and bone and put stars in his cold, staring eyes, and He admired His creation, as small and insignificant as it was, because it was a distraction from the war raging around Him, the galaxies ripping themselves apart, His beloved angels crashing from the Heavens with broken wings and shattered halos. 

God gave Adam the Garden, and God gave Adam the world, but it wasn’t enough. It is never enough. Having everything and wanting more is called greed. The Bible teaches that greed is a sin, that one should give themselves to the people that they love and the people that they hate and the people that they’ve never met, should pour their heart and soul into their work, their words. 

Having everything and wanting more is called greed, and it is the worst sin of all. 

From the moment that he took his first breath, Adam never stopped wishing for more. God granted his wishes, of course - Adam was His newest creation, and He loved him in the way that a father loved a child. Adam was His child. His pet. His toy. And so, when Adam asked for something, God indulged him. God listened. God smiled down at Adam, and Adam was too young and stupid to know that His attention was something beautiful to have, something deadly. 

I want that, Adam said. I want that. I want that. I want that. 

One day, though, he asked for too much. Faster than he could blink, the gates of Eden slammed closed in his face. He was locked out and shunned, and his Father’s voice boomed down from everywhere, nowhere, deafening. 

At first, Adam couldn’t believe it. It was just a mistake, he pleaded, but God was unforgiving. Next, Adam grew angry. You’re abandoning your son over an apple? No answer came, and Adam fell to his knees. It won’t happen again, he promised, and, when he was met with silence, he lapsed into muteness and wouldn’t speak no matter how much Eve prodded him to. And, finally, Adam nodded. I understand, he said, and stood up. He brushed himself off and took Eve’s hand in his own. I understand, Father. 

Adam walked away from the only home that he had ever known, and he never once looked back.

The moral of this story is this: all it takes is one mistake. One stupid, stupid mistake. Ignorance. Disobedience. That’s what got Adam locked out of the Garden of Eden. That, and greed. It's an inherent part of human nature, to always long for more, to always look for the next mountain to climb. Having everything and wanting more is called greed. Remember. God gave His children the Earth and the stars and the moon, and yet humanity remains grounded, buried in their sins in the same way that Adam buried his rib beneath the roots of a tree. 

Remember.

A coffin. 

Ash in the air. 

A gravestone.

Dust on his tongue. 

Beside him, his mother whispers, God commanded Abraham to strike down his son. In some versions of the story, Isaac willingly laid himself down on the altar. He bowed his head and welcomed the blade, and Shouto wonders, now, what it would be like to be that selfless. 

What would it feel like, to love someone so much that you would welcome death as long as it was by their hands?

Throughout the funeral, Shouto doesn’t shed a single tear. His father is holding onto, and Shouto is so small that the man’s fingers overlap around his wrist like a shackle. Once the ceremony is over, sinfully short, his father looks down at him and asks, “How do you feel, Shouto?”

Shouto watches tears roll down his mother’s cheeks and wonders what it would be like to be able to cry so freely. He wonders about a lot of things, but he never asks the questions out loud - there is no time for simple curiosity, no time for games, not when he is training to be a hero. 

“I don’t know,” Shouto says. He looks up at his father, at the bright flames that hurt his eyes, at the twisted set of his mouth, and he wonders why he always feels so cold when he’s standing next to the man. “I’m not - I’m not sad.”

His father smiles. “Good. Your brother was a failure. He won’t be missed.”

You have passed my test well. 

The words are unspoken, but they ring clear all the same. 

As they walk away from Touya’s grave, the hollow pit in Shouto’s chest burns with frost.

God has a tendency to destroy. It must’ve been hard to resist flooding the world in those few weeks that Noah was finishing his ark. 

A finger on the trigger, waiting. 

Waiting. 

“Again,” his father says.

Shouto spits the blood out of his mouth, and he, as always, gets back to his feet.

The kettle screams.

Gentle hands wrap bandages around one side of his face. Shouto sits still on the examination table, back straight and breaths steady, and wonders if this is what it feels like to die.

Nobody will ever love him like God does. Nobody will ever take care of him like He does. That’s why He hurts him, Our Father, Who art in Heaven. He does it to make him stronger, to make him better. 

Shouto prays to Him every night, lips moving soundlessly. His mother may be gone, whisked away to somewhere incomprehensible, unreachable, but her teachings remain. 

Hallowed be Thy name.

Shouto prays to Him every night, even though he wonders, sometimes, if He even cares.

Shouto has a nightmare. 

That fact in and of itself isn’t anything special, seeing as he gets them several times a week, but what sets this one apart from the others is that he can’t wake himself up no matter how hard he tries.

There is something - someone? - standing in front of him. It's human-shaped, almost, save for the fact that it looms so far above him that he has to crane his neck to see the featureless oval that vaguely resembles a head. 

A voice booms down on him from everywhere. Nowhere. It's deafening. “What are you afraid of?” There is no mouth on the thing before him but the words seem to come from one anyways, and, as the thing speaks, red appears on its torso, its arms. 

“You’re bleeding,” Shouto says, calm and collected. 

“You are mistaken.”

“Is it not your blood?” It's a question, and Shouto automatically draws back, mouth snapping shut.

The thing tilts its head. “Do you really think I’d hurt anyone?” It doesn’t bend down, not exactly - it's more like it folds at the knees, hits the ground in front of him. Shouto tries to back up, but he can’t. He’s pinned in place. “Do you really think I’d do that to somebody, after all the kindness I’ve shown you?” The oval of its face becomes sharper, more defined, as its voice grows deeper. 

It sends shivers down Shouto’s spine, and he finds himself saying, “No, no, I don’t, I’m sorry.”

“Why would you think that of me, Shouto? Have I ever done anything like that?” The red on its arms drips down its skin, which is slowly changing color, turning from blinding white to tan. 

“No, you -”

“So why would you ask that? Do you hate me, Shouto, after all I’ve done for you?” It cups Shouto’s face in its palms and he notices that its hands are tacky with blood. The face gains more definition, and he finds himself staring into two freezing eyes. “Don’t you get it, Shouto?”

Scalding water pours down, choking him, burning, melting him like candle wax until he is nothing more than a gleaming white skull, shining perfection and waiting to be rebuilt. 

“You’re my Adam, Shouto. My masterpiece.”

Shouto’s breaths are ragged, harsh. They scrape the inside of his throat and sear into his lungs like a brand. He gasps out, “And what does that make you?” He means for it to be biting and bitter, but it comes out more sincerely curious than he would have liked. 

“Well,” his Father says, and laughs. “I suppose that makes me God.”

He grabs Shouto by the throat and slams His knuckles into his face. He tells him stories of His past, of His failures and mistakes, and says that He wants Shouto to be better than him.

Shouto sneers and says, “That’ll be easy.”

His Father snaps his arm like He’d snap a villain’s neck, and Shouto bites his tongue until it bleeds.

A girl in Shouto’s Literature class stands up on the first day of middle school and reads the words chalked in English on the board at the front of the room. “Hell is other people,” she says. Her voice is soft and lilting, almost musical, and as she sits back down, her eyes catch on Shouto’s.

Shouto quickly looks away.

He hadn’t even realized that he’d been staring.

There is a gun in his Father’s dresser drawer. Shouto isn’t supposed to know about it but he does anyways, and sometimes when his Father isn’t there he sneaks into His room and takes it out and holds it in his hands. He pretends to shoot his Father through the head, muzzle pointed at His pillow. He turns it on himself and watches his reflection in the mirror. 

In the end, though, he always puts it back.

Suicide is a sin, after all.

Half a week into the school year, Shouto throws the first punch. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know why. The other boy’s words are blended together in his mind, meaningless now that the moment has passed, but they strike a chord deep inside of him. Like the thinnest string on a violin, something in his heart screams, and before he knows it his classmate is laid out on the floor, clutching at his nose and crying. Shouto only gets a split lip, so, all things considered, he’s the one who wins.

The girl from before is the one who pulls him away from the scene. She grabs Shouto’s hands and he doesn’t pull away, and she leads him down the halls, and she dabs at his face with a wipe when the actual nurse rushes out to treat the boy that Shouto fought. She introduces herself as Yaoyorozu Momo and apologizes when he winces at the sting of rubbing alcohol.

The girl asks, “What did he say?”

The girl asks, “Did you hit him first?”

The girl asks, “What’s your name?”

Shouto shrugs, and shrugs, and shrugs.

Before the end of the month, Shouto’s middle school has banned him from taking martial arts as an elective.

Yaoyorozu won’t leave him alone.

She walks at his side whenever she can, waves to him across the cafeteria, and picks him as her partner every time in gym class. When he snaps at her, asks her why she even bothers, she gives him a smile that makes him feel fragile and delicate and one wrong move away from shattering. “No one deserves to be lonely,” she says.

“I’m not lonely.”

And she just raises her eyebrows at him, like she knows that he’s lying.

His name is Todoroki Shouto. 

He tells it to Yaoyorozu, and she nods, says that she already knew that. Not that she’d been stalking him or anything, of course. It's just that he was very recognizable. 

“I wish I wasn’t,” Shouto says. “I wish that nobody knew who I was.”

She frowns at him and tilts back in her chair, the front legs leaving the floor. Staring at the ceiling, she says, “But aren’t you going to be a hero? Follow in your father’s footsteps?”

“Where has that kind of thinking ever gotten us?” he asks. It reads rhetorical, as it should, but he can’t help the plea in his voice that makes his words breathe, Where will that kind of thinking get me?

Yaoyorozu gives him an odd, odd look, but doesn’t bring the subject up again.

“So, what seems to be the problem?” The principal smiles at Shouto’s teacher without looking at Shouto himself, and Shouto crosses his arms over his chest. “As far as I know, Todoroki hasn’t had any disciplinary issues recently, Takenaka-sensei.”

Takenaka-sensei’s hand tightens on Shouto’s shoulder, and she launches into a spiel, a line of concerns that have plagued her since the first day of school. She holds fast to Shouto even as she continues to speak about him like he’s not even there. He’s never there.

“He’s far too angry for a normal child,” Takenaka-sensei insists.

The principal nods and nods and watches him. Shouto doesn’t watch her back. He’s not there.

“And he’ll usually ignore everyone who tries to talk to him. I’ll call his name and I know he can hear me, but he won’t answer. He’ll barely look me in the eye. Todoroki. Hey, Todoroki, look at me, please.” When Shouto doesn’t speak, Takenaka-sensei huffs in irritation. “See?”

The principal nods and nods and says that she does. Then, when Shouto’s teacher pauses to draw a breath, she asks, “And what are you expecting me to do about it?”

“Talk to him or - or something.”

“Or something.” The principal sounds vaguely amused. She stands up and comes around her desk, crouches in front of Shouto. His hands are gripping the sides of the chair so tightly that his knuckles are white, and he vehemently avoids meeting her prying, probing gaze. She clicks her tongue like she’s scolding an unruly dog and takes his face into her hands. “Todoroki,” she says, and Shouto’s breaths are halted, jerky. The principal and teacher either don’t notice or don’t care. “Todoroki, if you don’t listen to Takenaka-sensei, I’ll have no choice but to call your father. Do you understand?”

Shouto stares at her, silent.

“Do you understand?”

“See, I told you he was too angry to be normal,” Takenada-sensei gripes, but the principal hushes her and looks back at Shouto.

“Todoroki,” she says. “I asked you a question, and I expect a response. If I don’t get one in the next five seconds, I will have a talk with your father.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” The principal straightens up, smooths her palms down the front of her shirt. She smiles at Takenaka-sensei. “See? He’ll talk if you threaten to bring Todoroki-san into it.”

Her tone implies, He’ll do anything if you threaten to bring Todoroki-san into it, and it's true.

He hates himself for being so weak.

The principal calls the home phone even though Shouto followed her directions, and the blow that his Father delivers to his head makes it impossible to walk straight for the next two days.

After that, Shouto takes the gun from his Father’s drawer, and this time he doesn’t put it back.

No one notices.

Life goes on.

Shouto is drowning. 

The tiles under his feet are cold, and the water in his ears muffles even the tiniest of sounds. Down here, everything is quiet. There are no loud voices or angry hands or bloody noses. There is nothing. He is nothing. He should go back to the surface, but he’s tired. He’s tired. He’s so tired.

One of his classmates has to drag him out of the pool, but he doesn’t give them a chance to try mouth-to-mouth. He gags and chokes and curses in their face and pretends that he isn’t almost crying. The other kids don’t know what to make of it other than Todoroki Shouto can’t swim, but Yaoyorozu refuses to move more than a few steps away from his side for a week afterwards. She clings to his arm and he lets her and she takes that as an invitation to ask and ask and ask a never-ending stream of questions. 

Are you okay, Todoroki? 

Shouto? 

Do you want me to call you Shouto? 

Are you okay, Shouto?

I’m always here to help you, Shouto, you know that, right? 

Shouto? 

Shouto? 

Are you listening to me, Shouto? 

What are you thinking, Shouto? 

What were you thinking, Shouto? 

Are you stupid, Shouto?

Do you want to die, Shouto?

Why did you get into the pool, Shouto, if you knew you couldn’t swim?

Why did you get into the pool, Shouto?

Why did you get into the pool?

In the end, she only stops when Shouto kisses her. He kisses her, and she kisses him, and it feels wrong and it feels right and it feels like something splintering inside of him, something priceless, irreparable. When Yaoyorozu pulls back, she doesn’t even look fazed. “I know you did that just to make me stop talking,” she says, and her hands slide down his arms, anchor around his wrists. “I know you don’t like me like that.”

Shouto frowns, but he doesn’t leave. Not yet. “If you knew, why did you kiss me back?”

The smile she gives him is unlike any smile he’s ever seen. It's small and it's soft and it's impossibly sad. “That is the question, isn’t it?”

In another world, Shouto would have gotten himself to say something - an apology, maybe - but in this world all he does is shoulder his backpack and walk away. 

Hell is other people.

Other people are Hell.

Hell is a girl named Yaoyorozu Momo, who seems to have made it her personal mission to make Shouto feel like he’s important to someone other than his Father. Hell is Takenaka-sensei, who is malicious without meaning to be and has Todoroki Enji on speed dial. Hell is Shouto’s mother. Hell is Shouto’s brothers. Hell is Shouto’s sister. 

There is no one more Hellish, however, than the boy that Shouto comes face-to-face with on the very first day of high school. He doesn’t say much at all to Shouto, nothing except, “Move,” when Shouto accidently blocks his way into the classroom, but Shouto’s fists still twitch at his sides.

Later, Yaoyorozu catches him staring at the back of the boy’s head. She leans over and says, “That’s Bakugou Katsuki.”

“Oh,” Shouto responds, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t tear his eyes away.

When he gets home and takes his shoes off, when he slams the door to the training room open so hard that it shudders in its frame, his Father looks up. He says, sounding almost proud, “Someone’s angry.”

“I’m not,” Shouto snaps, and he doesn’t say that he has found a rage that burns colder than the fire his Father has gifted him, because that, above all else, would be sacrilege.

Why did you get into the pool, Shouto?

There are times when it seems like he is still drowning. It doesn’t feel half as bad as it probably should.

Why did you get into the pool?

It ends like this: Shouto is about to leave the Garden of Eden.

If anger can be righteous, does that mean that rage is something holy? It boils in his chest, unrepentant sin, burning and bright and divine.

“Don't do this,” his Father says, and for the first time ever, He looks almost scared. 

“Put the gun down,” He says.

Sucide may be a sin, but Shouto has been begging for forgiveness for his entire life. There’s only so many times that someone can be beaten down before they get the hint that God doesn’t want them on Earth. There’s only so many times that someone can die before it sticks.

There is cool metal on his forehead, and he thinks that this is maybe how he was supposed to go out all along. 

“You aren’t my God,” Shouto says, and laughs and laughs and laughs. “There’s nothing holy here.”