Chapter Text
Katsuki’s room is cold. Even though it’s summer the cold seeps into his skin. He’s still wearing his school uniform, worn out from being dragged around. The space around him seems to float, its familiar poster-clad walls closing in and disappearing into darkness. The light is off. The sun melts away through the window.
It’s light, it’s dark, it’s something in between. It’s light again. He doesn’t move. The All Might plush on his desk stares with judging felt eyes. The sole picture of him and his mom and his dad where he’s smiling, the one they took when he was four and insist Katsuki displays sits on his bookshelf or the nightstand. He’s not sure. He can’t hear well through the static. Or see. Or feel. He sits on his bed, against the decorative brick wall. It’s supposed to be cool to the touch, but he can’t feel it. Nor can he feel the scratchy, over-washed fitted sheet covering the mattress.
He’s not sure how long it’s been. A breath in and the sensation of air in his lungs makes him cough. His throat is dry. He needs water. He tells his body to get up and get the damn water, but as soon as the words leave his brain he watches them get eaten up by the void.
It takes at least twenty minutes for Katsuki to get his finger to twitch, and twenty more to win against the million needles pricking his body and stand up.
“We’ve got the scoop you’ve all been itching for, dear listeners,” says the female anchor. The fluorescent shine of the studio lights makes the pallor of her skin and blue of her half-suit pop. She leans forward into the mic, eyes glowing. “Welcome to the afternoon segment of Ata-hi news. Today we’re here to talk about none other than the recent drama at UA. To be more specific, the one surrounding one Bakugou Katsuki. The kid can’t seem to keep his name out of the headlines.”
“This might be the last we hear of him though, Houyori-san,” chimes in the male anchor, a chalky guy with slicked black hair and a matching outfit in a darker blue.
“Right you are Osenu-san. And that’s because dear listeners, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, he’s gotten himself expelled from UA.” Osenu gasps for dramatic effect as Houyori shuffles some papers in front of her, “For the lesser informed, Bakugou-kun was the victim of the Sludge Villain incident early April of last year, the one that caused several million yen in damages and had to be resolved by All Might himself. Also the winner of this year’s UA Sports Festival for year one students. He is, or rather was, a member of the infamous Class 1-A, the one whose students are always finding themselves in trouble.”
“No villains to be blamed for this plight.” Osenu chuckles cynically. “He’s a handful, to say the least.”
“Mm.” Houyori gives a slight nod. “He entered the scene with a bang at the Sports Festival. With one of the highest scores on a UA entrance exam in recent history, he’s got quite the quirk and quite the battle skill. He promised rather cockily that he’d win in his pitiful rendition of a student pledge, but got so angry when he did that he needed to be chained to the podium with quirk restraints to participate in the award ceremony.”
“—And I’m sure we all remember holding our breaths watching his ruthless fight with Uraraka Ochako in the first round— ”
“Needless to say, not the best first impression. Many among the rising hero news circles theorized he’d be the type to fizzle out, or perhaps mellow with age and proper schooling.” Houyori’s face shifts from neutral to exasperated, eyebrows pinching. “Unfortunately, seems the Sports Festival was only a glimpse into a deeper-rooted problem, and it’s safe to say Bakugou-kun’s chances in the hero industry are as good as gone.”
“A student getting expelled from UA is not an uncommon occurrence; many can’t handle the stress and workload and get into trouble or drop out. 1-A’s homeroom teacher Eraserhead is, in particular, known for expelling students he deems unfit.” Osenu adjusts his headset. “But looking at Bakugou-kun’s statistics, he seems to be excelling. This case is jarring because Bakugou Katsuki was expelled for being a bully, and a pretty severe one at that.”
“How do we know that you may ask? It’s because an insider from UA was kind enough to confirm this for us!”
“According to this insider, who has elected to stay anonymous, one of Bakugou’s current classmates also went to middle school with him and had been a long time victim of his. The student had been keeping his mouth shut for years since no one had ever stepped in before, but it seems something went awry and he finally spilled the beans to a teacher.”
“UA is notorious for its harsh stance against serious bullies. The faculty realized the student didn't feel any remorse and intervened. Reportedly he got expelled and didn't take to the news kindly, considering he was dragged out of the building kicking and screaming- Audio only listeners might want to lower their device sound for this—"
The image of the two anchors in their studio shrinks to the corner as another window enlarges and fills the screen. It begins rolling, a little grainy and shaky, but clear enough to see that it’s Katsuki, cursing censored with loud bleeps as he’s dragged across the halls of UA by two security bots, leaving a path of explosions in his wake. When the camera returns to the studio, the female anchor winces at the clip.
“This, along with several others from different perspectives, was posted on Twitter on Monday and went nothing short of viral, amassing more than five million views overnight. It made people immediately curious.”
“But wait—” Osenu’s voice goes lower as if he’s trying to imitate someone else. “—you might say— that just shows Bakugou-kun getting dragged around because he didn’t like getting expelled! It doesn’t explain why! Who’s to say the bullying rhetoric isn’t made up? And I’d reply that we all hoped it was that way at first, but soon accounts of people who knew the guy in elementary and middle school surfaced, and they only served to confirm that he was indeed a bully growing up.”
“To seal the deal, a short voice clip —one we aren’t playing because the contents can be triggering— featuring Bakugou suicide baiting a quirkless junior high classmate was leaked to our colleagues at Rokumo two days ago.”
Osenu sucks in a breath. “It’s a shame, he had potential.”
“Meh,” says Houyori, “plenty of talented kids out there. I wouldn’t want someone like that playing hero in the first place.” Her gaze turns bitter. “And you know, to act like that, you’d think he’d have grown up in unfortunate circumstances. But nope, he’s in fact the only son of the Bakugou’s, yes, the fashion famous ones, has a perfect combination quirk for hero work and was fawned over extensively as a child. This is your typical case of a privileged kid wanting to feel strong by pushing others around. I say good riddance.”
“Isn’t it all a bit harsh? He’s young and driven.”
Houyori scoffs. “Driven to be a villain maybe. I’m glad UA opted to knock him down a peg and dish the consequences. I hope other schools follow suit. No one likes to talk about it, but we’ve got serious bullying and quirkism problems these days, and it all starts with the schools.”
“Can’t disagree there.” Osenu shakes his head at the somber mood that’s fallen on the studio. “Speaking of that problem, we’ve invited pro-hero and anti-discrimination advocate Rebound to discuss the topic at length, so make sure to stick around, because we’ll be right back after the break-”
Katsuki presses the off button so hard the remote starts smoking. Stupid media extras and their unwanted opinions. He doesn’t know why he watched that crap as long as he did in the first place.
He falls backward into the living room couch, messy pillows and balled-up covers digging into his back. The plastic wrapper of the sandwich he forced himself to eat sits discarded on the hag’s expensive carpet.
So it’s been three days since he got expelled. Apparently. He’s still wearing his uniform. The mechanical tick of the wall clock grates on his ears.
Fuck.
Katsuki isn’t sure where everything went wrong. He’d been killing it at UA, thank you very much. Sure there were moments of insecurity at the very beginning when he’d first realized UA’s standards were indeed no joke and he’d have competition for the first time in his life. Sure he’s still pissed at Half n’ Half for backing off last second during the Sports Festival final and making Katsuki look like a fool. But he got over it. He moved on and destroyed the written midterms- probably beat out even Ponytail in Chemistry and Physics.
All that was left was the practical, and the universe must have it out for him, because he was paired with Deku, of all people, and against All Might. The hardest match-up possible. Worst of all he had to- he had to do fucking teamwork with Deku to win. Or at least that’s what Deku insisted they needed to do. It should go without saying that Katsuki wanted to ignore him, but the nerd went as far as to punch him to make a point.
Of course, Deku’s plan was stupid in the end and All Might thwarted it in an instant. Then followed a mess of punches to the gut and beat down after beat down. He pushed until the end, even used an explosion too strong, and suffered the knockback so Deku could win for them. But Katsuki passed out and apparently Deku was dumb enough to try and come back to save him. Somewhere along the way, the timer ran out and they failed.
When they woke up in the infirmary and had to suffer through a lecture from Aizawa, Katsuki was ready to tear Deku a new one. What he didn’t expect was Deku objecting to the results and with that stupid voice and stupid determined face; declare he shouldn’t be forced to work together with the person who bullied him for a decade and have it affect his grade.
In typical Deku fashion, he seemed to both be unable to stop airing out load after load of their dirty laundry and horrified by everything coming out of his mouth like he was worried for Katsuki. Katsuki couldn’t even deny anything, because he isn’t a damn liar. Aizawa wasn’t like those spineless teachers at Aldera or the elementary school whose name Katsuki doesn’t even recall. He fixed Katsuki with a look so grave just remembering it makes his skin break out into shivers, and called Nezu to discuss things more at length.
UA had tapes of pretty much every interaction he and Deku had had inside the school grounds because of course, they did the damn stalkers. At the flip of a coin, Katsuki’s behavior the teachers had already seen happen transformed into ‘bullying’ and ‘abuse’. Exploding Deku’s face during quirk training became ‘possible harassment’. Telling Deku to shut the fuck up with the muttering so Katsuki could hear what the ever too quiet Cementos was saying was deemed ‘unnecessary intimidation’.
And maybe things could’ve gone different if Katsuki hadn’t told Aizawa some dumb shit in his fit of anger. Because sure, as much as he hated Deku, Katsuki knew that what he’d been doing to Deku before UA was wrong, in fact, he’d known that since after the Sludge Villain incident, which is why he’d stopped. But Katsuki was bubbling with barely contained rage. Because Deku -who had the audacity to pull a quirk out of thin air yet be absolute trash at using it, who’d been the reason they hadn’t passed in the first place- decided to be a manipulative shit and have this conversation at the most damning time possible.
So Katsuki got expelled.
He rolls on the couch and muffles a groan against the back cushion. If that wasn’t enough, the media found out, so now he’s getting chastised by everyone and their mothers and extras he doesn’t even recognize are claiming they used to know him for their two minutes of fame. It’s a miracle Deku’s name has yet to be leaked, but as has been proven time and time again, fate likes him a whole lot more than it does Katsuki.
His head, his arms, and his entire body hurt even though he’s done nothing these three days but sit still. The squishy couch seems to swallow him whole, and his bones fall like lead against it. The house is quiet. He closes his eyes.
When he wakes up, the date on his phone informs him he’s slept for two days straight. He frowns and his back aches, his awkward positioning on the couch probably the culprit. His uniform sticks to him, and he realizes it’s not a good idea, to sit in unchanged and by now explosive sweat-soaked clothes for almost a week. He forces himself upstairs and into the shower.
The water is so cold it makes dark spots swirl in his vision. He doesn’t have enough of a mind to turn it to the hot side, taking instead a rushed, freezing shower and throwing on whatever clean clothes he can find. His hair drips water all over the hardwood floors and he can’t bring himself to care.
Nothing in the house moves but him, not even the fake plants by the kitchen windowsill. It’s exactly as the hag and the old man leave it every time they leave—
“—should’ve never been born at all!”
Because he’s petty, he knocks over one of the stupid vases in the hallway and it falls to the floor and shatters with an unceremonious crack. Stupid vase. It’s not as satisfying as he expected.
Memories follow every step in this place, furniture placed to cover scorch marks from when he was a brat and couldn’t yet control his quirk, scuffs, and nicks on the pristine molding he’d try to hide in time for his parents’ returns from their work trips, lest he gets an earful from the hag and those dumb, disappointed looks from the old man. His training equipment in his room upstairs, the attic converted into a dump for destroyed bits and pieces.
If the house looks like there’s no way a kid with explosive hands ever grew up in it, it’s because Katsuki makes sure it does. It’s not the first time his parents have left him to tend for himself and it won’t be the last -that is if they don’t kick him out when they get back- and he’s not about to let them get on his case about his household management skills when often his parents are so busy holed up in their studio upstairs that films of dust would start building over the kitchen counters were he not here to take care of them.
The Bakugous are a family that believes in hard work and perfection, nothing less than the best. Katsuki hasn’t done a good job of keeping up that reputation.
Framed award certificates line the walls, top university graduation diplomas, fashion innovation awards, medals of merit, Katsuki’s own first places in regional competitions. He feels a sudden urge to smash them all to bits, especially the ones marked with his stupid name. The lonely, soulless house is stifling and the wall of awards seems less like a display to be proud of and more like a reminder of how much he’s lost.
He’s never liked the house more than your average guy likes their house, but today, he can’t stand the sight of it. He dries his hair with a towel and pockets his phone and keys, heading outside to god knows where.
The following week is spent wandering the streets like a stray cat, leaving home at the crack of dawn and returning as late as possible (just to fool himself into trying to sleep for a few hours, it doesn’t work) then rinse and repeat. Katsuki has never been a big fan of people or crowded spaces, but the uncountable gazes on his back feel extra heavy, and it’s the Sports Festival aftermath all over again. He wears dark clothes unsuitable for the summer, covers his hair and face, yet he still gets recognized. It’s nerve-fraying.
The worst are by far the mothers who see him crossing the street and turn to another crosswalk ten meters away as if they've stumbled upon a walking plague bearer. On one memorable occasion, a kid with big blue eyes wearing that yellow elementary student cap had walked up to him and pulled on his sleeve.
"My mama said you're a big bad villain boy," he'd stammered, looking at Katsuki with quivering lips. Katsuki wasn't sure if this kid had balls of steel or no self-preservation instincts because what kind of brat walks up to a dude they're told is dangerous to ask point-blank if they're a villain. "Are you gonna 'xplode me?"
When Katsuki says it took every bit of willpower not to indeed explode the brat and get himself charged with murder, he means it. He'd stuck for a safer: "Fuck off you little pest!" and shook the whimpering thing from his sleeve until the little monster's mother had popped out of nowhere and taken him away, apologizing and begging Katsuki not to hurt them.
And maybe seeing her tear-stained face, terrified of a threat that wasn’t there shook him up a little. On his way back home his eyes had caught on the T-turn, only a few blocks left of which was the apartment complex a certain nerd lived in, facing, two streets away, the park they used to ‘play’ in as kids.
You’re a big bad villain boy
Fucking Deku.
(In the kitchen of said apartment, a green-haired boy choked on his food.)
He stops going out at all the next day after some freak on the subway thought it would be fun to try and feel him up. He almost gets in hot water with the police for near blasting her face-off, and he doesn’t even bother checking the internet for the new videos of him being a hooligan that have surely spread.
This new shut-in life, it’s boring.
Katsuki’s the type of guy who’s always kept busy. A quirk like Explosion is much harder to control than he makes it seem, and from the moment he got it and began looking up to All Might he’d trained every spare moment of the day. Katsuki is gifted at a lot of things, but he’s also smart, and any smart person knows that talent or desire alone is not enough to move forward in life.
That’s a reason he hated middle school Deku, the shitstain was always going on and on about how he’d go to UA and be a hero but did nothing to prepare for it other than his stalker notebooks.
The thing is, outside of heroics, quirks don’t matter as much as you’d think. Sure they might help steer a path in life, say if you have a sound-based quirk you might be pushed towards music, if you have a healing quirk you might be encouraged to be a medic. But that’s like any other plain old talent. It’s something that makes your choice easier. At the end of the day, you can still become a doctor with a sound quirk, you’ll just have to work harder than someone with a healing one.
Besides, for most jobs quirks are entirely useless. His dad’s nitric acid quirk does nothing to help in fashion design, or anywhere outside of the chemistry field. You can become the richest CEO in the world even if your quirk is shitting rainbow shit. Because, with quirk use so heavily regulated and most quirks being well, lame-ass quirks instead of actual strong powers, there’s not much difference. Even discrimination is based more on appearance than power-level of quirk, which is why people with mutant-type quirks have been campaigning for more rights for years. It’s them and the people with quirks deemed too villainous that bear the brunt of society’s ire.
When it comes to hero work though, quirks are everything. And while heroics is a very sought-out profession —it’s the standard answer when you ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up— very few make it, and fewer are competent at all. Most people are content with regular jobs, and most kids grow out of their hero-phase after elementary school, or maybe fail some hero-course mock exam and realize they aren’t cut out for it. Katsuki is sure that every single extra at his old class who claimed they wanted to be a hero has moved on toward becoming an accountant or some shit. It’s normal.
Someone with no quirk at all like Deku is an anomaly, yes. He’d get side-eyed and teased, but Deku is smart, as much as it pains Katsuki to admit, and if he’d picked some other dream job people would stop paying attention to his quirkless-ness and realize that. No, the whole reason Deku was constantly being stepped on in elementary and middle school was that he was delusional. He didn’t just insist on being a hero with no power, he didn’t even attempt to make up for it by preparing physically.
That wimpy Deku had been planning to take the UA practical entrance exam with zero combat training and muscle mass in the minus. If that kid had tried to hit a robot it would’ve busted his knuckles. Katsuki was right in the end, wasn’t he? Quirkless Deku would never have passed that exam. He’d been telling Deku the cold hard truth. The only reason he got into the hero course is the overpowered quirk he pulled out of his ass. Or rather… ‘received from someone’.
When Deku told him that after the humiliating first loss, Katsuki was sure he’d come over to look down on him in typical Deku fashion. But the more he thought about it, the more the clues began piling up. Frogger pointed out how similar Deku’s quirk was to All Might’s, Icy Hot asked if Deku was the hero’s secret love child, All Might always seemed to be paying extra attention to Deku. All Might was there on the day of the Sludge Incident, and it was after that that Deku began bulking up.
Yeah, it clicks. It’s obvious in hindsight. Deku yells motherfucking SMAAASH every time he attacks, and there was no way UA was Deku’s first proper meeting with All Might, the nerd would’ve shitted himself in the middle of class if that was the case.
There’s the problem of how the fuck a quirk can be passed down, but it’s Deku and fate loves him, Katsuki wouldn't be surprised if he got a dozen more quirks because he has the great virtues of recklessness and overgrown tear ducts.
But if All Might chose him… he must be doing something right that Katsuki isn’t. Katsuki hasn’t been able to bear even looking at Deku for the longest time. There’s something there that makes him want to squirm, some other reason why Deku is such an eyesore other than his delusion…
He stabs his chopsticks into a piece of pork. This must be the dozenth time he’s ruminated over the cluster fuck that is his relationship with Deku during this self-imposed isolation. He’s angry that his thoughts keep coming back to this, but sitting on his bed with a cardboard cup of spicy pork instant ramen in his lap, he doesn’t have anything better to do.
Uneventful would be putting it lightly, Katsuki doesn’t even remember the last time he’s had so much convenience store food; he hasn’t lived off Seven-Eleven ever since his parents left him alone at home for a whole two weeks when he was seven and he had to finish their entire supply of frozen meals. He learned how to cook after that.
The cup of noodles is finished, and he forces himself to get up and put it away. The kitchen cupboards are looking sparser by the day, even though he hasn’t been eating much. He’ll have to go out and restock soon. It feels too pathetic to admit he’s dreading it.
The following morning, Katsuki wakes up with a killer headache and a fever of thirty-nine degrees for the first time in seven years. It’s true that he hasn’t been doing the best at self-care, often going to sleep with wet hair and feeding himself junk food only when he’s hungry His motivation is dead. But getting sick? God has it out for him.
A scouring of the bathroom medicine cabinet leaves him with packets of expired pills -his parents rarely get sick either- and he realizes with a groan he’s going to have to head to the local pharmacy to get some pain killers and antipyretics. The weakling part of him that has taken charge as of late whispers he should leave it, that he might as well let himself die from something as dumb as a fever in this day and age since his existence doesn’t contribute much to the world anyway.
It’s out of spite against said worthless voice that he gets up regardless of the fuzzy cotton in his skull and shivers breaking out over his skin. He grabs a couple of grocery bags with him, figures he should do double duty, and buy some shit to refill the kitchen cupboards with.
The neighborhood pharmacy is closed, because of course it is, since Katsuki’s body decided it would be fun to get sick on a fucking Sunday. He’s forced to head for the big chain pharmacy the next block over, the one that’s open twenty-four seven.
The sounds of a scuffle trickle into his ears and he pauses, peeking into a narrow alleyway to the side of the street. It smells of nauseating decay; the brick walls are covered in a thin brushing of moss and right there, at the back, a tallish, lanky man is towering over a much smaller person.
“C’mon old lady,” he jeers, “let go already—”
He shifts a little and Katsuki can see the woman clearly now, grey hair pinned up, thick glasses sitting on a wrinkled face. She and the man are in a tug of war, both gripping what looks like a tiny purse and pulling on opposite sides. Katsuki is frozen for a moment due to the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. Is this an attempted mugging? How weak is this dude that he can’t even beat a ninety-year-old?
A glint of metal reflects against the brick, and Katsuki watches as the man’s silver hair goes taught, before straightening into hundreds of needles. This isn’t any old purse snatcher.
“—the crux of being a hero isn’t just victory Bakugou. It’s kindness. It’s offering others strength and hope. It’s making them feel comfortable and safe. If you can’t comprehend that, if you insist on doing the opposite, you need to reevaluate why you even want to be a hero in the first place.”
But he isn’t anything Katsuki can’t handle either, so he charges, propelling himself with his quirk even though it’s kind of illegal and barrels straight into the dude, sending his body slamming into the wall with a little more force than necessary.
Fuck, that hurt. He rubs his nose where it smashed against brick, then whirs around to check on the villain. Surely enough, the guy is passed out but still breathing a few handful centimeters away. Mission success, even though Katsuki’s fever-addled body is lacking its usual finesse.
“Thank you, boy,” calls the old woman, already up and dusting off her bright yellow-dotted black walking yukata. “Hand me my walking cane will you.”
Katsuki stares, brain slowed. The tapping of her sandaled foot against concrete snaps him out of it, and he feels around for the cane. It’s rolled to the corner of the alley. He grabs it with an extended hand and holds it out to her, still unmoved from the spot where he’d crashed into the wall. She takes it and leans into it like a crutch, eyes sizing up Katsuki with intensity.
They’re slathered in yellow gold color, from irises to eyelashes. Katsuki suppresses a shiver. She kind of reminds him of Recovery Girl.
“Are you alright?” she asks after a beat. Katsuki feels flush, well, even more than before, and his face morphs into a sneer, suddenly aware of his current position, collapsed like a fool after he barreled into the wall.
“I’m fine!” he says too quick, shifting to a standing position. Those unsettling eyes narrow, before shifting away.
“Settle down, you youngins these days are always on the defensive,” she mutters.
“Hah?”
A sigh.
“Boy, are you lost?” What’s this, twenty-one questions? For the first time in these five minutes, Katsuki feels she recognizes him. It’s a stupid inquiry. He’s not five. It’s easy enough to navigate Musutafu. So he says: “No.”
She sighs again, damn her, then unhooks the cover of her little purse, sticking a sleeved arm elbow deep into it. That should not fit in there and neither should the metal tin she’s near-ripping the hem of the purse to take out. She unscrews the cap of the cylindrical tin and offers him a cookie.
“Thank you for saving me.” Katsuki’s irrational anger flares. Is she messing with him? She chokes through a sudden coughing fit before clearing her throat. “Take it, I baked them myself. It’s rude to reject gratitude food from an elder.” He doesn’t trust her, and the overwhelming smell of the fresh cookies is making him want to puke.
“Fine, be that way.” She huffs, putting the cookie back in the tin and the tin back in that tiny purse like a magician. Instead, she holds out a business card. It’s pure yellow, with a single stamped phone number in the back. “It’s the card for my shop,” she says, “I don’t give this to many people you know, but you saved me, so I owe you a debt. Call if you ever need help and I’ll pay you back for today.”
Before Katsuki can start yelling about never needing help, she turns heel, walking out of the alley with a slight limp.
“Oi, what about this guy?” Katsuki calls, referring to the villain still limp against the wall.
“Leave him.” She waves a withered hand. “He can get up on his own when he wakes up.” Then she’s disappeared behind the corner of the street.
Well, that’s irresponsible, Katsuki thinks. What if this guy ends up doing something worse than purse-snatching? They’re just gonna let him get away? He thinks about leaving him tied up, but what if no one finds him and he starves in this alley and it’ll be Katsuki’s fault? He groans, positive his brain is making this way more complicated than he needs to be. He opts to tie the dude up with a crusty length of rope discarded by the trash can in the alley, then uses the payphone around the corner to call the police.
“Hello,” he starts in a voice pitched an octave too high, purposefully shaky. He’s paranoid about getting recognized and seeing the new headlines ‘Delinquent Bakugou Katsuki strikes again. Beats up civilian and leaves them to rot in alley.’ Yeah, no thanks. As embarrassing as this is to do, his forty-degree boiling head cannot think of anything better. “This guy tried to snatch my purse. A young man showed up and tied him up.” He recites a rough address. “Come get him or whatever.”
“Ma’am, wait a second, you—”
“I don’t care you shi- er, I mean, I’m very busy young man, so pick him up to avoid yourself future trouble. He’s gonna say he didn’t do anything, but don’t trust him. You have truth quirk people over there, yeah? Have them ask him and you’ll see. You’re welcome.”
Katsuki snaps the payphone back in its place before the guy can reply. He did his job. He might as well have hand-delivered the guy to the police station. It’s their fault if they don’t deal with him now. His head still hurts. Right. The pharmacy.
Katsuki comes out of Seven-Eleven with two bags of enough food to feed a small army and another with all his medical supplies. The pharmacist had not been subtle with hiding his apprehension, treating him noticeably worse than the customer Katsuki watched him head with before. Fuck that guy.
Home is more than half an hour’s walk away from this store, but his stomach demands food now. It’s rare that he’s hungry. Fatigue is all he’s been able to feel lately. That and the occasional intense, consuming rage. He’s given up on any sort of balanced meal plan. He can’t even remember if he’d eaten anything at all today, and yesterday he had cups of that calorie bomb of a ramen that would’ve never touched his old, meticulous diet with a ten-foot pole, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Katsuki’s stomach growls again and he begrudgingly halts his pace. His knees feel like they’re gonna give in. Okay, he’ll stop at a bench and have one of the steamed buns he got. It’ll be quick. He looks stupid, alone, flushed, and surrounded by groceries on a sidewalk bench, but people these days seem to think he looks like a freakshow no matter what he does, so does it matter? He tears into the steamed bun with a vengeance.
He isn’t sure what possesses him to click open his phone he swipes away the dozen missed calls from his dad, much less login to the hero forum app.
Katsuki has been avoiding that app, as frustrating as it feels to be behind on news. Reason number one is that he’s been forced to unsubscribe from a dozen news networks that thought it would be fun to stick their nose in his private business. The hero forum is user-run, so it doesn’t take a genius to guess people on there will be even more ruthless.
A handful of notifications; messages from private numbers; pop onto the screen. Reason two, since his phone number presumably got leaked these messages haven’t stopped. He turns off notifications every time and every-time new numbers send shit. Just the usual, “Go die in a ditch,” and, “You look sexy in chains come over so I can ruin you,” or, “I saw you on the street today wanted to bash you into the pavement,” or, “You’re a stain on hero society.”
Stupid extras fancy themselves self-righteous doing this shit. Loser-ass behavior.
—take a swan dive off the roof and maybe you’ll be born with a quirk in your next life—
He swallows air and it tastes horrible.
Loser-ass behavior.
Swiping all the notifications away, he scrolls down his feed, the appreciation posts for All Might and news of Edgeshot’s recent major arrests familiar in a way that makes his chest warm. He’s missed these, feels kind of dumb that he’s been too much of a coward to open the app for days.
That is until he stumbles onto a post from the UA-watch sub-forum titled Shinsou Hitoshi, a new rising hero student?
He taps on it against better judgment. A picture of the purple dude Katsuki remembers from the Sports Festival fills the screen.
[...] Shinsou, a student in the GenEd course had a good showing at this year's Sports Festival; one of the greatest runs for a GenEd student in recent record. It looks like he has a mental based quirk, which means that, more likely than not, the only reason he didn't make it into the heroics course is the fact that this year's practical entrance exam, one centered around robotic enemies, put him and other participants with non-combat quirks at a disadvantage.
Could Shinsou prove the system wrong? I think so, he seems like a competent choice if a little lacking in hand to hand. We’ve all been wondering who’s going to replace Bakugou in class 1-A[...]
The phone cracks and the screen fizzles to black against Katsuki’s steel-grip fingers. He feels the telltale tightening in his chest.
It’s over, isn’t it?
That childish, hopeful, hidden-but-there part of him that had been whispering this was all a lie, a stupid mistake, a nightmare, that he'd be back at UA with a personal apology for wasting his time when he woke up; it's doused with a bucket of ice-cold water.
Katsuki’s stay at UA has been a constant string of losses, and a single word from Deku was all it took for him to lose everything.
He’s acutely aware of the fact that his breaths are coming out more like wheezes, and it’s enough that passers-by have started to notice. He can’t- he refuses to break down in the middle of this very public park and find people snickering at videos of him being pathetic all over the internet in a couple of hours. So he grabs his bags of things and, steamed bun forgotten runs as fast as his shaky legs will go back home to scream into a pillow in peace. Fuck.
The heat of the cloudless sky prickles at his skin as the edges of his vision begin to fuzz.
Katsuki stumbles into the driveway in a daze, trampling all over the neat lawn. He’s so out of it that he doesn’t notice the knocked-over flower vases by the gate or the fallen mailbox.
He doesn’t notice that, but he does notice the front door pushing open beneath his fingers without the need to turn the key, even though he’s sure he locked it three times over before leaving. If possible, his breathing stutters further. His blurry eyes take in the hall slowly, nothing is out of place yet everything’s wrong. He dumps the bags onto the floor, vision fuzzy, and tip toes into the living room. And fuck that’s a motherfucking stranger sitting on his couch can this day get any worse--
The stranger’s skin is a garish map of grafts, held together by dozens of staples, and he stands with a calmness that’s the exact opposite of how Katsuki feels. His limbs are heavy and groggy but he moves on instinct, igniting an explosion in front of him, aiming at nothing in particular yet hoping it will somehow make this stranger disintegrate.
He knows the moment it goes off that he’s lost, and when the flash clears, Katsuki can barely make out the stranger’s words over the deafening thrum of his own sped-up heartbeat.
“How the mighty have fallen, eh, kid?”
An unfamiliar hand closes around his neck and he doesn’t even have time to inhale before a very much familiar black mist engulfs the room and everything disappears.