Chapter Text
Katsuki bites himself.
This is something that his parents notice early on, but they don’t do much to stop it. Their thoughts are too preoccupied with the antics of their daughter, who is a year older than Katsuki and twice as destructive.
It’s not until things go too far that they start paying attention to Katsuki, and by then it’s too late: he has blood on his hands, on his arms, on his face, and when the nurses at the hospital clean it off of him, they gasp at the sight of dozens of teeth marks sunk deep into his flesh.
Katsuki doesn’t seem to feel any pain. He smiles even with blood smeared all over his mouth, his few teeth stained red and growing in sharp. He starts to cry as his wounds are cleaned, but that quickly stops when his sister is brought into the room - his tears turn into laughs and giggles, his pudgy hands reaching for Himiko as she is set down beside him on the hospital bed and instructed to behave.
Her responding smile is unsettling, but it softens when she looks at her brother.
“Katsuki,” she coos. “You’re all bloody! Maybe you’ll be just like me!”
For that, she is scolded.
“Don’t put those thoughts in his head. He’s nothing like you, Himiko.”
Katsuki is perfect, and his sister is not. Himiko is nothing but a blueprint - a lab rat, of sorts. A guidebook on what behaviors to watch out for so that their future children won’t turn out like her.
Katsuki cries when his sister is taken away, but it’s for the best. His parents don’t want him to be infected by his older sister’s vile habits, so they make her sit in the waiting room while the nurses and doctor finish treating Katsuki’s wounds. When they get home, Himiko is sent to bed with no dinner for her comment, and Katsuki is fussed over and rocked to sleep in his mother’s arms.
Katsuki is nothing like his sister.
And his parents will do everything in their power to make sure it stays that way.
This is Katsuki’s first real memory of his parents: being pinned to the ground as they file his fangs down into something normal.
That was always the magic word, when it came to them. Normal. Like it was some kind of key, something that would unlock every door in life. Just the sound of it is enough to make Katsuki flinch, and, right now, all he does is scream as his father holds him tight and forces his head still.
He is four years old, and he can’t stop crying. He has blood on his hands from the bird he found in the backyard, and blood on his face from the split lip his father gave him when the man saw his son holding the limp mass of feathers.
Katsuki kicks and screams, hot tears pouring down his face. He’s crying so hard that he thinks he might throw up, and his mother is crying as well as she drags the metal file achingly across his too sharp teeth.
“I’m helping you, I promise,” she sobs. Her face is nothing but a blur, but Katsuki still feels sick at the sight of it. “You can’t be like your sister, Katsuki. You can’t.”
Why not?, Katsuki wants to ask. He likes his sister. She reads him bedtime stories and kisses his knees when he scrapes them. Why can’t I be just like Himiko? I love her.
But he doesn’t say that. He knows that his father will only hit him for talking back.
So he just cries and cries and cries as his parents hurt him, unable to do anything to protect himself. He can hear his sister banging on her door, yelling to be let out, for their parents to leave Katsuki alone, but she’s locked in her room - she always is, these days.
Later that night, Katsuki will hear her screaming in pain as their father hits her. The man calls her a bad influence, a monster, a waste of space, but to Katsuki she is none of those things. She is just his sister, and when she slips into his room later that night, he makes space for her in his bed and doesn’t flinch when she sinks her fangs into his arm.
Her tears sting in the open wound she leaves behind.
“I’m sorry,” she sobs, blood a dark smear on her chin. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
She sounds like their mother when she cries.
Katsuki doesn’t point that out, just stays quiet and runs his tongue over the flat edge of his teeth. When Himiko falls asleep at his side, he bites and gnaws at his wrists, but it doesn’t work. His teeth aren’t sharp enough to pierce through his skin, not anymore.
He truly is nothing like his sister.
He’s nothing at all.
—
Eventually, Katsuki’s baby teeth fall out, and his fangs grow back in. But he doesn’t ever do anything not-normal ever again.
He has learned his lesson.
As long as he’s normal, he won’t be hurt.
—
Katsuki is the luckiest person in the world.
He isn’t aware of this until his sister tells him, whispering the words into the silence of the bedroom, “You know, you’re the lucky one.”
Katsuki goes still at the sound of her voice, staring at her in the glassy sheen of the mirror. She’s seated in front of her vanity, and Katsuki is behind her, fingers half-knotted in her hair as he tries to detangle the unruly strands.
He asks, “What?”
For a long, long moment, Himiko doesn’t answer him. The shadows under her eyes are darker than ever, her gaze downcast as if she can’t stand the sight of her own reflection.
The sound of an argument drifts up the stairs, deafeningly loud in the silence. Now that neither Katsuki nor Himiko are talking, their parents’ voices are as piercing as a scream in the dead of night, sending chills up Katsuki’s spine as he hears words like crazy and dangerous and mistake being thrown back and forth between their mother and father.
They’re fighting about Himiko, as always.
Katsuki makes sure to stay as normal as possible so that his parents don’t get mad at him, but Himiko never does the same. Even when she tries her hardest to be friendly, her smile is always a bit too wide, a bit too sharp, and she scares her classmates away.
It makes Katsuki sad. He loves his sister, and he wishes that everybody else would, too.
Himiko is a year older than Katsuki, and a couple inches taller, but she looks very, very small when she repeats, “You’re the lucky one.” Her voice is hard, carved from her mouth by the sharp teeth that flash bright whenever she smiles. Katsuki knows the way they feel when they’re buried in his arm, in his neck. “Everybody loves you.”
Her hair is still tangled around Katsuki’s fist, limp as the dead animals that he used to find his sister crouched over when they were kids, and Katsuki is hit with the sudden urge to yank it, to force some sense into his sister’s head. “Don’t be stupid,” he says, voice a low growl. “Half the kids at school want to kill me.”
He’s telling the truth. He can’t remember a time in which he wasn’t being glared at in the halls, his knuckles bruised and bloody from having to defend himself against people that wanted a piece of Toga Himiko’s little brother.
He doesn’t say that last part, of course. He knows his sister would feel horrible if she knew that her very existence was a target on Katsuki’s back.
“But they don’t mess with you,” Himiko says, and Katsuki bites his tongue with too-sharp teeth to keep from refuting her. His sister’s shoulders hunch inwards, making her look smaller than ever. “They don’t call you names or push you around or anything. It’s not fair.”
Katsuki sighs, reaching over to grab the brush from the counter. He tugs lightly on Himiko’s hair to get her to straighten up, then says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” as he starts to comb through the still-wet strands. “I don’t even know why you care so much. Don’t bother trying to make friends if everyone just treats you like crap.”
“But I want friends!” Himiko snaps. Katsuki flinches at the sudden anger in her voice, grip tightening on the handle of the brush. “I want people that aren’t scared of me! I don’t want to be weird!” She reaches up and scrubs at her eyes, and it takes a moment for Katsuki to realize that his sister is crying. “I just want to be normal. I want to be like you.”
Katsuki’s skin prickles with discomfort. He’s heard those words countless times over the years, and they usually meant that he was about to have to sneak the first-aid kit from downstairs in order to cover up the bite marks sunk deep in his flesh.
But, for some reason, his sister doesn’t attack him. She just sits there, still and silent, and allows Katsuki to finish braiding her hair. Before he leaves to go to bed, she pulls him into a tight hug and kisses him lightly on the forehead. He doesn’t think much about it until the next day, when she doesn’t come home from school and the house is swarming with police officers, the television flashing bright with news about a teenage psychopath that killed her classmate and fled the scene, disappearing without a trace or even a goodbye.
After the initial investigation, after everything dies down, Katsuki’s parents tell him to pack his things and get ready to move to a different city. They’re leaving this house behind, letting the memory of Himiko rot while they start a new life without her.
It’s not fair, but Katsuki doesn’t have a choice.
When he tries to argue, his father slaps him so harshly that it jerks his head to the side, and his mother yells at him until he loses control of his carefully-contained emotions and starts to cry.
They don’t take any of Himiko’s belongings with them. Everything that Katsuki packs is thoroughly inspected to make sure it carries no sign of that so-called devil child. All of her posters are still on the walls of her bedroom when they close the door for the final time.
On the day that they move, Katsuki has to be physically dragged out of the house, wood from the doorframe wedged under his nails and blood dripping down his forehead from where his father slammed his head against the car to get him dazed enough to shove him into the backseat.
Katsuki cries the entire way to the new city, curled up in the back of the car and weeping for the sister and love that he lost. He traces the scars on his skin with shaking hands, wondering how he could possibly be the lucky one in the family when everything seemed to be going wrong when he was around. The only lucky thing about him is that he ever got to know his sister in the first place.
He starts a new life, without Himiko. He bends to his parents demands and doesn’t mention her at all. But she’s always on his mind, haunting his very soul: no matter how many friends he makes, all he really wants is her, but she’s gone.
His sister is gone, and she took a part of him with her.
Half of a pair, Katsuki suffers under his parents’ cruel hands and keeps his emotions locked down deep in his chest, wondering every day if it would be better to simply die and rid the world of a cursed bloodline. He decays more with every passing moment - he rots, like a corpse.
Katsuki has been dead since the moment he was born.