Chapter Text
Bakugou Katsuki has always wanted to die.
Ever since he was young, even before he really knew what death was, he wanted to go to sleep forever. He has been tired since the day he was born, a fact that didn’t concern his parents until he grew past the age that babies stopped napping all day.
He remembers falling asleep in daycare, then in primary school. His teachers would scold him, his mother would yell at him, and his father would give him those horrible looks of disappointment - but he simply wasn’t able to stop it from happening. He would be awake one moment, and gone the next, slumped onto the floor or over his desk, sometimes even passing out at the dinner table. His eyes would flutter shut in the middle of a conversation, or he would be writing something and the pencil would go skidding across the paper as he collapsed forward in a dead faint.
All the adults in his life seemed to want to believe that he was simply acting up for attention - even though he got plenty of that from the powerful Quirk that manifested when he was on the cusp of turning four - and it took much too long for his parents to realize that maybe they should take him to the doctor.
And, when they finally did, Katsuki sat through dozens of tests and exams, only to be told that nothing abnormal showed up on the brain scans.
Well, the doctor didn’t tell him, specifically.
She told his parents, and his mother opened her mouth to fuss at him, only to to be cut off in the middle of her sentence when the doctor said, in a calm and even tone, “It might be narcolepsy.”
Katsuki’s mother looked at her. “Narcolepsy?” she echoed, sounding stunned. Katsuki couldn’t remember the last time he heard his mother sound like that - she always seemed to be so in-control, ruling both her job and her family with an iron fist. “He’s six years old, for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t have anything to be tired about.”
“Narcolepsy can occur in children as well.” The doctor’s smile was tight and strained, like she would rather be cleaning up shit than talking to the force of nature in front of her. “If you would like to be more certain, we can run an analysis of your son’s cerebrospinal fluid. If the level of hypocretin is low in the fluid surrounding your son’s brain, that might help us in our diagnosis.”
And then Katsuki’s father stepped in.
“You keep saying that it might help,” he said, voice low in the same way it always was when he was trying to scold Katsuki for something. He was always gentle about it, but his words carried so much weight that it was like being crushed under a solid ton of stone. He demanded respect, and people usually gave it to him. “Is there any way to get a definite answer?”
Katsuki remembers feeling bad for the doctor. He didn’t often have both of his parents’ attention at the same time, but when he did, he felt suffocated by their presence.
And the doctor obviously felt the same, because she stumbled a little bit on her next words:
“We can do a sleep study, but it will take time.”
“So will the fluid analysis thing help or not?” Katsuki’s mother asked. “I don’t have time to sit around watching him sleep, and I’m not leaving him alone here.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be here,” the doctor said, as if trying to pacify her. “I would refer you to a specialized sleep clinic, and the tests would be performed there. I can assure you that they will handle your son with the utmost care.”
Katsuki’s father frowned. “And how would that help determine whether or not he has narcolepsy?”
“There are two kinds of tests that they would conduct,” the doctor explained. Katsuki watched her face carefully, but she never so much as made eye contact with him. Never even glanced in his direction. “There’s the polysomnogram, which is an overnight study to determine whether rapid eye movement occurs too early in the sleep cycle, and then there’s the multiple sleep latency test -”
Katsuki’s mother held up a hand, and the doctor instantly fell silent.
“You never answered my question,” Katsuki’s mother said. Her voice was slightly raised, frustration beginning to creep into her tone. “Will the fluid analysis help or not?”
Katsuki’s father looked at her, eyebrows furrowed. “Mitsuki, it wouldn’t be fair to put him through a spinal tap if there are other, painless ways to determine whether or not he has this thing.” He paused for a moment, searching, and then corrected himself, “Narcolepsy, I mean.”
“I’m not going to sit around watching him sleep.” Katsuki’s mother’s voice was firm, leaving no room for debate. “He does enough of that already.” She glanced over at Katsuki, who straightened up on the exam table as soon as his mother’s gaze landed on him. “You’ll be fine, right? All they have to do is stick a needle in you. I think you’re strong enough to handle that.”
Katsuki remembers that moment well. Looking back, it was pivotal in his relationship with his mother. He opened his mouth and said, “I don’t like needles,” and could feel something shift in the room, like a lock clicking in place.
His mother said, “I don’t care.”
“Mitsuki.” Katsuki’s father sounded tired, worn-out. “Don’t put him through this.”
“You’re too fucking soft,” came his wife’s biting reply, and then she looked at the doctor and said, “I’ll sign the forms for the fluid analysis thing. Just get it done as quickly as possible, I have to get back to work soon.” She glared at Katsuki, who shrunk back in response. “You should be grateful that I’m taking this much time off for you. I bet you’re faking this entire thing just to be a pain in my ass.”
Katsuki whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The doctor finally looked at him, only to instantly avert her gaze and focus on the woman before her. “There are many things to consider before finalizing this decision,” she said, absolutely refusing to make eye contact with Katsuki no matter how desperately he tried to get her attention. “While the risks of this procedure are low, the back pain that sometimes accompanies it might cause discomfort for several days. I think that it would be much more reasonable to conduct the sleep studies before doing a lumbar puncture.”
“Then why did you even bring up the spinal tap in the first place?” Katsuki’s mother asked. “God, is everyone in this hospital as useless as you?”
“Ma’am -”
“Shut up.” Katsuki’s mother glared at the doctor, and then at her husband, and then finally set her gaze on Katsuki himself. “Fuck, Katsuki, you’re more trouble than you’re worth. All you had to do was say that you were brave and strong and not scared of needles, and then this bitch wouldn’t be giving me this much trouble. But, no, you chose today of all days to be a stupid fucking crybaby.”
Katsuki muttered, “I’m not even crying.” He refused to meet his mother’s eyes, heart racing too fast in his chest. His body always seemed to think that it was in the middle of a physical fight whenever he spoke to the woman that birthed him. “And I’m not stupid.”
“Why don’t you pass out like you always do?” his mother snapped. “Matter of fact, just stay asleep. I don’t feel like dealing with your bullshit anymore.”
Katsuki’s father said, “Mitsuki!”
“And you’re no help!” Katsuki’s mother responded, looking at her husband with fury written across every inch of her face. “You coddle him too much, Masaru! I’m sick and tired of always having to be the bad guy just because you want him to think that the world is kind to people like him.” Her fists clenched at her sides, like she was about to throw a punch. “Nothing about this world is gentle to people that are different. I just want a normal kid, is that too much to ask?”
“He’s not normal!” Katsuki’s father said, and the words stung like a slap across the face. “He can explode things with his hands, Mitsuki! That’s about as far from normal as you can get!”
Whenever Katsuki thinks back to that moment, he remembers thinking that both of his parents looked like monsters. Their faces were twisted with rage, grotesque masks of fury, and the worst part is that they looked like that because of him, because he wasn’t normal, because he wasn’t capable of softening his edges for his father or baring his teeth for his mother - not in any way that counted, not in any way that mattered.
He wasn’t capable of being what either of them wanted. He could only be himself, an inhabitant of this fucked-up body that he was granted, and that simply wasn’t enough.
Katsuki felt so small, sitting there on the exam table with his hands folded neatly in his lap, his gaze trained on the tiled floor so that he didn’t have to look at his parents. He was able to hear them, spitting insults and arguments back and forth over his head, but at least he didn’t have to see the way their features were made unrecognizable by the sheer violence of their anger.
He remembers wanting to die.
He didn’t quite think of it as dying, not back then. His mind wasn’t quite capable of grasping the concept of forever - with all of six years to his name, a week into the future felt like a lifetime.
No, in that moment, Katsuki simply wanted to sleep.
And so he did, slumping forward like his strings had been cut. His mind went blank, his muscles weak as he toppled off of the exam table, heading straight for the floor - later, his father would tell him that the doctor rushed forward and caught him before he crashed to the ground, and his mother would scoff and say that she should have just let him fall.
When he woke up after a few minutes, the forms were signed, his father was silent, and he was on his side with his knees held to his chest as the doctor shoved a needle into his back. Katsuki remembers being terrified throughout the entire thing.
He wasn’t stupid, no matter how much his mother claimed that he was. He knew that the spine was fragile, and the worst part about it was that it was also important, and he had been alive for long enough to know that fragility and importance were horrible qualities to have at the same time.
But the procedure only took a few minutes, and there were zero complications.
Katsuki got a pat on the head from his father, and a bitter, “Was that so hard?” from his mother, and then he got to read a book in the waiting room while the doctors ran their analysis of the fluid they took from his back, which ached like a massive bruise - but Katsuki was smart enough not to mention how much it hurt.
Things only really went wrong when the doctor came back and said that the results were inconclusive.
Katsuki didn’t know what the word meant at the time, but he made sure to look it up in his dictionary when he got home, after his mother finished yelling at him. He traced his finger down the page until he found the definition, and learned that what the doctor was saying was that they had done the test for nothing.
Of course, he gathered that much from his mother screaming at him in the car that he had just wasted all their time, but he liked to get the concrete answers for things.
After all of that, Katsuki’s parents decided to go through with the sleep studies. They didn’t really have much of a choice, not if they wanted to find out what was wrong with him, and that’s when the answers started filtering in. He was diagnosed with narcolepsy - even though he reported no hallucinations or dreams of any kind, something that made the observing doctors scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders in confusion - and his parents were instructed on how to minimize the symptoms, maximise his comfort, and ensure that he was well aware of the fact that his condition wasn’t his fault.
He only knows that they were instructed to do that because he saw the pamphlets and typed notes that the doctors had given his parents. He saw no real evidence that they had learned anything at all.
In fact, as soon as they got home, his mother told him that this disease was his fault, and so were any and all of the problems that she had in her entire life, ranging from the time from before Katsuki was even born to that very second that she was yelling at him, stretching even further into the future problems that she knew she would have, even though nothing had even happened yet.
It was all entirely unreasonable, but his mother blamed him for her high blood pressure, his father’s headaches, and the permanent stain on the living room carpet from that one time he spilled his juice. He was single-handedly responsible for the devastation of their family, her boss being an asshole, and the fact that she wasn’t able to find curtains to match the couch cushions because he passed out in the middle of one the family shopping trips years ago. She blamed him for everything and anything, and probably would’ve gone on to blame him for the sky being blue or the grass being green if his father hadn’t stepped in and sent him to his room before she could get that far into her verbal tirade.
Katsuki yelled back at both of his parents, then stormed up the stairs and slammed his door shut behind him, the loud bang only making his mother’s voice even shriller as she screamed through the entire house to reach his ears.
Eventually, she calmed down, and Katsuki was finally able to mope around in his room in peace. He laid in bed for a good while, but found that he wasn’t able to sleep no matter how hard he tried - a rare occurrence, one that pissed him off to no end - and then he spent hours staring up at the ceiling, waiting out his mother’s anger.
She was quiet, but her fury was undoubtedly simmering in her chest, and would be brought back to a raging boil as soon as she caught sight of him.
It took several days for things to go back to normal.
For Katsuki, normal was an easily definable term when it came to his family. He made a mistake, or fell asleep at the wrong time, and he got yelled at for it. He brought home notes from the teachers, and even though his grades were excellent, his father shook his head in disappointment when he read the neat lettering that stated that Katsuki had dozed off in the middle of a lesson - sometimes he even had a bruise right in the middle of his forehead from hitting the desk too hard. His mother fussed at him, he was sent to bed without dinner, and his father would sneak him a plate of food in the dead of night to ease the rumble of his stomach, and that’s how the cycle went, repeating itself over and over until Katsuki was lulled into a false sense of complacency, comforted by the knowledge that a diagnosis didn’t really change anything at all.
So, things went back to normal, and they kept on being normal for several weeks.
And then the first prescription came in.
He remembers seeing the bottle for the first time, filled with white pills that looked humongous through his young eyes. His mother shook it to make the contents rattle in the silence, and then said, “These are to keep you awake.”
Her voice was remarkably calm as she spoke, holding none of the usual annoyance that came whenever she so much as looked in Katsuki’s direction. She popped off the lid, shook one of the pills into her palm, and then held it out to Katsuki like it was an offering - but he saw it for what it really was: a demand.
Katsuki took the pill.
He drank no water with it because his mother didn’t give him any, but it was fine. He only felt like it was stuck in his throat for a few minutes, and then he swallowed it down like he did with all the other bitter pills that life liked to force into his mouth.
Maybe he should view that moment as something symbolic. If he was well-articulated, he would draw connections between being drugged and surrendering control to his mother, but the truth of the matter was that he had given up his life to her a long time ago, practically from the second that he took his first breath. He was always going to end up like this. He could hiss and spit all he wanted, but everybody knew that he was trapped under his mother’s thumb.
Besides, it’s not as if he could claim that the pills didn’t help. He read the label on them, and couldn’t find the name in his dictionary, so he looked it up on one of the school computers - and got yelled at later for searching up drugs in public - and learned that they were stimulants, and they really did keep him from falling asleep so much.
But, when he did sleep, he still never dreamed about anything.
He would listen to his classmates describe their vivid nightmares and feel oddly left out, like he was being excluded from some kind of human connection, like he was lacking something vital and necessary, but he knew that it was ridiculous to feel that way, so he never mentioned it to his parents, or the doctors, or even his friends.
His mother set a strict bedtime, and woke him up at the crack of dawn every morning, and enrolled him in what felt like every damn physical activity that the school and community had to offer, and, finally, Katsuki was normal.
Actually, he was better than normal. He figured out pretty quickly that your coolness factor significantly heightened when you weren’t passing out all the time, and that combined with his Quirk skyrocketed him amongst his peers, turned him into some kind of legend, infallible and untouchable. His grades were perfect, his father no longer had headaches, and he was everything that a mother could ever want - that is, he would be everything that a mother could want, if he had ended up with any mother other than the one that he was given by some cruel twist of fate.
He realized a couple weeks into his daily pill intake - and subsequent normality - that his mother would never be satisfied with him.
There was always some new pinnacle of perfection that he could reach, some new goal that he could achieve. He was a failure unless he could learn to be something greater than himself, and Katsuki really wasn’t capable of that, especially not at such a young age.
That realization is what completely skewed his definition of what the term normal really meant.
Because, when you really got into all the gritty details, Katsuki’s mother didn’t actually want him to be normal. She wanted him to be different, as long as that difference was something good, something that could be bragged about instead of being hidden away like some kind of dirty secret. He supposes that he can’t blame her for that - after all, that’s what every parent wants. They want to be able to praise themselves for raising a perfect child, a pristine canvas that had no marks and was able to be painted in the image of success, wanted to know that they were good, that they were better than all the other mothers and fathers in the world.
Parenthood was nothing but pure, unfiltered self-projection.
When you have a family, those people in that family get to know all the worst details about you, and, in turn, you get to know all the worst details about them. A mother and a father and a child - or children, multiple, if that was your kind of thing - all exist as nothing but mirrors of each other, a reflection that shows off all the cracks in your façade and worsens them until you break wide open.
So, when a mother has a child, the first thing they wish for is that they will be perfect.
Of course, no sane mother would ever admit to that. They would spew some bullshit like how they wished for health, or safety, or a long life. But the truth was that they want their baby to be perfect, devoid of any flaws or cracks, and they keep on hoping that their child will be perfect because if a mark ever appears, the blame will fall on the parents’ shoulders.
It’s cruel, and it’s unfair, but that’s just how life works.
That being said, Katsuki thinks that a lot of things in his life are unfair. He’s not enough of a whiny bitch to complain about anything, but he gets lost in his head for hours at a time, mulling the same thoughts around until he’s sickened by himself. He takes a pill in the morning, struggles through the day, sets off a few firework sparks in his palms to keep his classmates fascinated by him, runs himself ragged in whatever sport or activity his mother has scheduled for him, and then he goes home, does his schoolwork, eats dinner when allowed, and falls asleep. He doesn’t dream, he’s not good enough for that. He’s there one moment and gone the next, and then he wakes up and does it all over again, over and over and over until his life has become so organized and boring that he feels like he’s going insane.
He supposes that it’s just human nature to have everything you could ever want and still want more.
Katsuki is greedy, selfish, and a pain in the ass. He works himself to the bone and still finds the energy to argue about everything. All that physical exercise is supposed to tire him out so he goes to sleep as soon as he turns the lights off, but he somehow manages to be a massive bitch about things that piss him off, and he gets pissed off about everything.
At least, that’s what his mother says, and she’s usually right.
But that’s getting off-topic. There really is a point to this story, even if Katsuki himself hasn’t really been able to figure out what it is. He doesn’t seem to be learning anything, and he hasn’t yet come across a direct narrative foil, nor does he have any end goal in mind. He wants to be a hero, but all children do. Katsuki has a better chance of success, given that some genetic twist gave him the perfect Quirk to take down villains, but, other than that, he’s not any different from other kids his age.
Except for one crucial detail.
Bakugou Katsuki kills himself when he is twelve years old.
He uses a simple method - a classic, really - and slits his wrists in the bathtub, fully-clothed and up to his chest in warm water. He watches the blood drip down the long, vertical cuts, blinks dumbly at the way it glistens in the low light. He used the pointed tip of his pocket knife to carve deep into his skin, and it sinks down to the bottom of the tub with a dull thud.
Everything is perfect, almost cinematic.
The water turns red around him, and his head feels heavy, so he lets it fall back to hit the tiled wall. He feels really good about himself, from all the endorphins and shit, and then he doesn’t feel anything at all.
He’d gotten into an argument with his mother that morning, something stupid with hurled insults that stuck in his mind all day. He has always been good at blowing things way out of proportions, maximizing even the smallest of hurts or injured feelings, and, when he got home at the end of the day, he dropped his backpack to the ground, sat on the edge of his bed, and thought about his life for so long that he gave himself a headache.
And then he decided to kill himself.
He wrote out a note, got his knife, and filled the bathtub. He dragged the blade so hard against his skin that it made him see stars. He did everything right, set his body up nice and neat for his parents to find, and then something horrible happened:
He came back to life.
And that’s where the real story starts.