Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Katsuki knows that something is wrong as soon as he walks into the common room.

His friends are gathered together by the couch, giggling amongst themselves for no apparent reason. None of them look up when Katsuki says his usual, “Good morning,” a habit formed by weeks of living in a confined space with his classmates. The lack of response isn’t enough to do anything but annoy him, but what really stops him in his tracks is the silence that falls as soon as he takes a step towards his friends.

It’s as if a switch has been flipped - the laughter stops, and he finds himself pinned under the weight of several unfamiliarly cold stares.

“Do you need something, Bakugou?” Kaminari asks.

Katsuki blinks. He opens his mouth to speak, then falters, stunned into silence by the sight of a scowl on his friend’s usually smiling face. Finally, he manages to find his voice. “Is something wrong?”

“Nah, not really.” This time, it’s Ashido who speaks. She smiles at him, but it’s nothing like the bright, sharp-toothed grins that he’s used to from her - this is cold, almost perfunctory, the polite smile you’d give to an annoying stranger that refused to leave you alone. “I mean, everything was fine until you showed up, but that’s not a big deal. You can stay down here if you want.”

Her words are accompanied by a brief bout of giggles from the rest of their friends, but the sound of his classmates’ amusement doesn’t make Katsuki feel as warm as it usually does. Mostly because he’s pretty sure that they’re laughing at him - that he’s being made fun of.

“... Alright,” Katsuki says. He knows that he should feel angry, but instead there’s a sickness building at his core, a heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. His mouth is dry, and he feels as if he has taken a blow to the head: his entire world has been knocked off-kilter. “If any of you guys are hungry, I can make breakfast…?”

He doesn’t know why it comes out sounding like a question, shaky and unsure. 

“No, that’s alright,” Sero pipes up. He’s sprawled out on the couch, long limbs askew on the cushions like his only goal is to take up as much space as he can. He almost reminds Katsuki of a spider, voice sickly sweet as he says, “We were actually planning on going out to eat. Right, guys?”

“Yep!” Kaminari grins. “Kirishima found a pretty good place!”

Katsuki glances over at Kirishima, who hasn’t said a single word since Katsuki arrived. He searches his friend’s face for any kind of answer to the odd behavior, but Kirishima refuses to meet his gaze. 

Katsuki swallows, mouth dry. “What’s the name?” he asks, tearing his eyes away from Kirishima to refocus on Kaminari. “I probably know where it is.”

Kaminari’s smile turns the tiniest bit smug. “Don’t bother,” he says. He shakes his phone slightly, screen lit up bright for just a second before dimming once more. “I’ve got directions.”

Frustration flares to life in Katsuki’s chest, his famously short temper coming into play. “You don’t need directions if I know where it is.” 

Kaminari laughs. “Well, it’s not like you’re coming with us, Bakugou!”

And he says it so matter-of-factly, like it’s common sense - Katsuki instantly deflates, anger draining out of him like air from a leaky balloon. “Oh,” he says. “I thought…”

Ashido blinks at him, wide-eyed and innocent. “You thought what?”

“Nothing.” Katsuki’s response is too fast, throat tight as he curls his hands into fists at his sides. “Nothing. It’s fine.”

“Ah…” Sero sits up, smile stretched wide across his face. Katsuki tenses even further at the sight of it - he’s picked up on the situation enough to know that nothing kind is about to come out of his classmate’s mouth. “I mean, if you’re so desperate for somebody to hang out with, I guess you could come with us.”

Before Katsuki can answer, Kaminari groans. “No way!” he says. “All he’d do is complain the whole time, you know how he is!”

“That’s easy to deal with,” Ashido scoffs. She leans against the arm of the couch, idly checking her nails. They glitter in the overhead lights, and so do her eyes as they dart over to Katsuki, flicking up and down in a bland once-over. “He’ll shut up if you ignore him. Everybody knows that.”

Everything is happening too quickly for Katsuki to process. He thought he knew his place among his classmates - thought that his friends wanted him around - but it’s quickly becoming clear that he was wrong. The dynamics seem to have shifted without him even knowing, and he feels as if he has been slapped across the face - the aftermath of a hard blow, first a cold sting and then nothing but flaring heat, blazing hot on his cheeks and the tips of his ears. 

“I -” Katsuki blinks, disoriented. “I’m fine. I don’t need…”

He trails off, taking a step back.

Sero’s grin reaches his eyes, making them sparkle with amusement. “See you later, Bakugou.”

“Right.” Katsuki feels very small under the combined weight of his classmates’ gazes. He doesn’t remember ever feeling like this around them - even when they first met, they were friendly. He has never really had any doubts about his standing with them… until now, at least. “If you need anything -”

Kaminari cuts him off. “You’ll be the last person we call, trust me.”

And that makes everybody laugh - even Kirishima chuckles a bit, smothering the noise behind a closed fist. Katsuki’s eyes snap to him, and he sounds almost desperate as he asks, “Kirishima?”

Finally, Kirishima looks at him. “What?” 

Katsuki stares at him, searching for some kind of answer as to what the fuck was going on. But Kirishima’s expression is unreadable, holding none of the kindness that Katsuki has long-since become accustomed to. 

Katsuki knows that he should be angry. He has always been good at that, at solving his problems with violence, with the dull thud of his fists against living flesh, knuckles smeared with blood - but this is different. This is wrong. There’s nothing here for him to fight but his own wounded feelings, and that’s just pathetic.

Katsuki knows that he’s hard to be around sometimes. It makes sense that his friends would want to hang out without him.

But, no matter how logically he tries to frame it, he can’t quite wrap his head around the way that he’s being spoken to. There’s no build-up, no nothing - he was on good terms with all of his friends last night, playing video games with Kaminari and Sero past his usual bedtime, painting Mina’s nails, talking with Kirishima, pinning Jirou’s hair back into new and interesting styles… 

What the fuck could have happened in that short period of time?

Eventually, Katsuki can’t stand it anymore - he looks away from Kirishima, almost dizzy with confusion as he says, “Alright, I’ll get out of your way, then.”

“Great!” Mina beams at him, all sharp teeth. “Are you just gonna go hang out in your room, Bakugou? That’s pretty sad.”

Katsuki grits his teeth. “You obviously don’t want me here,” he points out.

“Well, maybe you should make some friends.”

“I thought -”

Katsuki stops himself.

I thought you guys were my friends, is what he had been about to say, the words bitter on his tongue, but he swallows them down and turns around instead, stalking back towards the elevator - what he said was true, his presence clearly isn’t wanted here, or even necessary. All he’s doing is taking up space.

As he reaches out to press the elevator button, he’s startled back by the sound of the lift hitting the ground floor. The doors slide open, and Jirou steps out, staring at him for a second before saying, “Oh, it’s just you.”

There’s still a clip in her hair from last night.

Katsuki’s hands twitch with the urge to rip it out, but he holds himself back. “Yeah,” he says, voice harsher than he means it to be. “It’s just me.”

“Hm.” Jirou walks towards the rest of their friends, not even giving Katsuki a backwards glance as she says, “Talk to you later, Bakugou,” in a bland tone that makes it clear that she wouldn’t mind if she didn’t have to talk to him ever again.

“Fuck you,” Katsuki responds, the words out before he can stop them. 

He storms into the elevator, jamming his finger against the button that makes the doors close faster, and hides his face against his arm as soon as he’s out of sight. His chest is tight, and his eyes burn - he’s not even hungry anymore, the only ache in his stomach born from the anxiety eating him alive. 

What is happening?

He feels as if he has stepped into some kind of alternate universe - nothing is right, and everything is wrong. His skin prickles, and he can’t breathe properly no matter how hard he tries to force himself to calm down.

This has to be some kind of misunderstanding, he must have done something wrong for his friends to treat him so coldly. That’s the only logical explanation. 

He did something wrong. He needs to find a way to fix it.

Katsuki feels sick.

He stumbles out of the elevator as soon as the doors open to his floor, fumbling the lock of his dorm room open with shaky hands as his breaths rip harsh and ragged from his throat. His vision blurs, and he’s dangerously unsteady on his feet, slamming the door shut behind him and then just standing there, frozen, wondering how he could possibly fix his mistake when he wasn’t even sure what he did wrong in the first place.

Shit. Shit, he needs to be better. He’s supposed to be perfect, he’s not supposed to make mistakes, this is his own fault - he can’t blame his classmates for being cold to him when he’s such a flawed person, an example of everything that a hero isn’t supposed to be. 

He’s too loud, too rough, too much. He’s lucky that he has been tolerated for this long.

He can’t fucking breathe.

Whenever he closes his eyes, whenever he blinks, all he can see is the way that his classmates were looking at him - their coldly amused gazes, their bright, mocking smiles. 

He’s stupid. He’s so fucking stupid for thinking that he was a fixture in their friendship.

Katsuki’s heartbeat is roaring so loud that it’s all that he can hear, pounding in his ears as he struggles for air. His head hurts, his lungs ache. He feels sick, stomach twisting as nausea churns in his gut - he thinks he might be going insane, legs shaking beneath him before giving way to the hard floor below. 

He curls in on himself, trembling like a scared little kid.

When he was in primary school, his friends pulled a plastic bag tight around his head, a stupid childhood prank that lasted only as long as it took for them to realize that he couldn’t breathe. This feels a lot like that, but worse - there is nobody here to help him, and he’s suffocating all alone, unable to think logically as tears press hot behind his eyes.

Fuck, he’s being stupid.

That thought doesn’t help at all. He knows that he’s being stupid, that he’s overreacting, but he can’t stop himself. He has always been an emotional person, ready to snap at a moment’s notice. He hates it, he hates his stupid crybaby tears, and he hates himself - nothing new. 

For as long as he can remember, he has been aware of the fact that there was something wrong with him.

No matter how hard he tries to be normal, he’s missing something crucial, something necessary in order to function like a regular person, to regulate his feelings and learn from his mistakes. He just keeps doing the same things over and over again, he doesn’t change, he doesn’t grow - it’s no wonder that his friends finally grew tired of him. He’s fucked up, he’s ruined. No, he’s not ruined - that implied that he was something good that somehow got tainted. He has never been good. He has never been anything worth keeping.

And there’s nothing he can do to change that.

Chapter Text

It takes more than an hour for Katsuki to work up the courage to leave his room again. 

Part of it is because he wants to make sure that his friends are gone so that he doesn’t disturb them anymore, but most of the reason why it takes so long is because he spends a better part of that hour curled up on the floor, sniffling softly as his thoughts rip him apart from the inside out. 

He knows that he’s hard to deal with. His earliest memories are of being told to calm down, to sit still and be quiet - to be good.  

He’s too loud, the daycare attendants would whisper to his parents when they thought he wasn’t listening. He yelled too much, he hit too hard, his temper was too short to make him anything other than a liability, a ticking time bomb, something dangerous and desperate to be contained. 

He should be locked away. At least then he won’t hurt anybody when he inevitably explodes.

… But he thought he was getting better. 

He really, truly thought that he had finally managed to pass himself off as somebody worthy of friendship. He cares about his classmates, and he’d made the mistake of thinking that those feelings were reciprocated.

He’s such a fucking idiot.

Katsuki feels dizzy, a low whimper wrenched from his throat as he struggles to breathe. His chest hurts, and he feels so sick that he thinks he might throw up. 

He doesn’t know what he did wrong. All he knows is that his friends hate him, and it’s his fault.

It has to be his fault.

When Katsuki finally sits up, his head is foggy and his cheeks are tacky with dried tears. He wipes at his face as he stumbles into the bathroom, flicking on the lights to catch a glimpse of his reflection, eyes bloodshot and hair flattened on one side from laying on the floor. He looks ridiculous. He looks weak.

And he feels weak, loose-limbed and shaky as he closes his eyes against the sight of his own stricken face. 

The only way to fix a mistake is to apologize and promise to never do it again. He knows that, even though he doesn’t know what mistake he made in the first place. He thought that things were good - he thought that he was good. 

But he’s not. He’s not good, and he’s stupid for thinking that he could ever pretend otherwise.

Katsuki is such a bad person. He’s horrible, awful. It disgusts him, he makes himself sick, he wants to peel his skin from his bones and bleed out until there’s nothing left of him. He’s too much of everything bad, he’s too much.

He doesn’t realize that he’s burning himself until he smells the smoke.

“Fuck,” he whispers, voice trembling on the word. He pries his hand away from his arm, and the rush of air against the fresh wound brings tears to his eyes, breath hitching in his throat as he stares down at the injury.

Katsuki hates burns. He hates the stinging pain of them, the way it reached deep and refused to leave for days. To make it worse, this burn is in the obvious shape of a hand - it’s clear to anybody with eyes that he did it to himself.

He used to do that all the time when he was little, still learning how to control the raw destructive force of his Quirk. He was always hurt, back then. Scraped knees, black eyes, bruised knuckles, bloody lips. Little injuries on a little body that shook with too much rage to be controlled. 

But he’s not a child anymore. He’s supposed to be calmer, he’s supposed to be responsible for his own actions. He can’t place the blame on anybody else, not this time.

And if it hurts, he deserves it.

Katsuki curses quietly under his breath, forcing the tears back as he opens the cabinet to fumble around for the first-aid kit. He yanks it open with shaking hands, heart dropping when he rummages through it and finds no burn cream - he could’ve sworn that he had some, but his memory has never been great when it came to small details like this. His mind slips through the cracks, he loses his thoughts, he pisses off his mother with his inability to recall things that she tells him happened, mistakes that he made without even realizing. 

He swallows hard, tears burning insistently behind his eyes. His throat aches, his heart beats too fast in his chest, nausea churning in his stomach as little sparks pop from his palms. He needs to control himself, he needs to calm down. There is nobody here to witness him freaking out, but he somehow feels like he’s still being watched, like he’s putting on a show.

Everything that Katsuki does is for attention.

Even this.

Fuck. Fuck, he needs to calm down. There’s a problem, he messed something up, he needs to fix his mistake before everybody realizes that he’s not really in control of anything at all.

Katsuki sniffles, wiping at his face. He turns the bathroom light off on his way out, hand shaking as he reaches for the handle of his door, twisting it and stepping into the empty hallway. 

He glances both ways before heading towards the elevator, pressing the button that will take him to the fifth floor. He’s nervous, because Sero’s dorm is on the same floor as Todoroki, but he reminds himself that Sero isn’t even on campus right now - no, he’s with Katsuki’s other friends, having fun.

I mean, if you’re so desperate for somebody to hang out with…

Katsuki hates that it’s so obvious how lonely he is.

The bell dings. Katsuki steps out as soon as the elevator doors open. He makes a beeline for Todoroki’s room, slamming the side of his fist against the door with a sharp, “Icy-Hot!” That stupid nickname, familiar and almost comforting to say. “Open up, I need something from you!”

He doesn’t hear any footsteps over the sound of his own ragged breaths, but the door swings open after a few seconds. Todoroki’s hair is damp like he has just taken a shower, water darkening the shoulders of his shirt. 

For a long, long moment, neither of them speak. Katsuki stares at Todoroki, and Todoroki stares right back at him, the tension so thick that it feels like a physical weight pressing down on Katsuki’s chest.

Katsuki takes a deep breath, then breaks the silence.

“I need burn cream.”

Todoroki blinks at him. “Why?”

“None of your business,” Katsuki snaps, the response automatic, and then curses himself for being so harsh - he has to smooth down his edges if he wants people to like him, he has to be less of himself and more of what his classmates want. He tries again, “Look, I know you have some. I’ll replace it if I use too much.”

“Hm.” Todoroki tilts his head slightly, eyes narrowing as he gazes down at Katsuki. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

“Huh?” Dread settles like a stone in the pit of Katsuki’s stomach. The burn on his arm flares with pain, heightened by the fuzziness overtaking all of his other senses. “Bullshit.” His mouth is dry, his smile a little manic. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Todoroki simply stares at him, silent.

“You said it yourself!” Katsuki reminds him. He can’t help the way his voice shakes - he feels cold all over, the only warmth coming from the handprint he branded into his own skin, a physical mark of weakness. He’s pathetic. “During that interview, you called me your friend!”

“And you instantly refuted it,” Todoroki says. His eyebrows furrow, he frowns slightly like he doesn’t see that Katsuki is falling apart at the seams. “We’re not friends, Bakugou.”

This can’t be happening.

Katsuki trembles, eyes wide and legs shaking beneath him. His knees are weak, he feels like he’s about to throw up, and his vision blurs no matter how many times he blinks. “Fine,” he says. “Fine, we’re not friends. I still need that burn cream.”

He’s telling the truth - his entire arm feels like it’s on fire, smoldering with nothing to soothe the ache. A glance shows that the skin is stretched red and shiny, and he knows that it will blister soon. He wonders if he can go to Recovery Girl without anybody noticing, then realizes that she will most likely tattle on him to his teachers, and then he’ll have to sit through a lecture from them and feel the weight of Aizawa-sensei’s disappointment like a lead blanket draped over his shoulders.

No, he’s better off handling this on his own.

He doesn’t want anybody to see him like this.

“How’d you get hurt?” Todoroki asks. His tone is bland, like he doesn’t actually give a shit. “Looks like a hand. Did you do it to yourself?”

Katsuki’s fists are clenched so tightly that it makes his knuckles ache. “I’ll burn the rest of your fucking face off if you don’t get me that cream right now.”

He regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth. He watches in real-time as Todoroki’s expression goes cold, mild interest replaced by a blank stare. His classmate’s eyes are sharp as knives, cutting deep into Katsuki’s skin.

“I think you should go to the nurse’s office, Bakugou,” Todoroki says. He’s only an inch taller than Katsuki, but it might as well be a mile - Katsuki suddenly feels very, very small. “I don’t know how to help people that hurt themselves.”

Katsuki smiles without meaning to, a nervous, shaky thing that tugs at his dry lips. “I didn’t mean to say that,” he says, as close to an apology as he can get. He’s his mother’s son - the only things he says directly are insults. “C’mon, you know I wasn’t being serious! I - I -” His chest is tight, he feels like he’s about to throw up. “Icy-Hot -”
“That’s not my name.”

“Todoroki,” Katsuki amends, desperate. “Look, I’ll make it up to you, okay?”

“You can’t give me anything that I don’t already have.” Todoroki frowns at him. “You don’t even have your own burn cream.”

In any other situation, this scenario would almost be funny. Todoroki is right, Katsuki really can’t give him anything that he doesn’t already have. He can’t give him gifts, he doesn’t even know what his classmate likes, not really.

And that’s fitting, because they aren’t even friends.

No matter how much Katsuki wants them to be.

Katsuki’s feelings don’t matter. He’s stupid, he’s foolish, he’s all the worst things a person could ever possibly be. There is nothing good about him except for his Quirk, and all he uses it for is to destroy - he breaks everything he touches, he leaves smears of blood like lighter fluid on the ground. One wrong move, and he’ll burst into flames. He wishes that he could crumble into ash.

He wants to fucking die.

“Good luck explaining that to Recovery Girl,” Todoroki says. His voice is cold, or maybe Katsuki is just hearing things. He can’t tell - the ringing in his ears is too loud. “She likes you, I’m sure she’ll go easy on her lecture.”

“Todoroki -”

But the door is already closed, slammed in Katsuki’s face.

Katsuki’s stomach hurts. His entire body aches, his breaths ragged and uneven as he stares at the door like Todoroki will open it again. He stands there for too long, just trying to regain his composure, and then turns around and walks back to the elevator, shaking with the effort it takes to not fall apart completely. 

He’s losing his friends one by one, ticking them off like marking chores on a checklist. He can count them on his fingers, the loss of affection, the cold eyes, the sharp smiles that held no warmth. It’s as if everybody woke up and collectively decided that they no longer wanted to be associated with him, that he was more trouble than he was worth.

And the worst part of all is that Katsuki has nobody to blame but himself.

Chapter Text

Katsuki doesn’t go to Recovery Girl.

He can’t stand the thought of sitting through a lecture, or possibly even having to deal with Aizawa-sensei’s disappointed stare. He knows that his teacher would be pissed if he got bothered for something as simple and stupid as a self-inflicted burn. 

He remembers the way that Aizawa-sensei looked at him at the start of the year. That mild distaste, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, like he couldn’t believe that Katsuki truly belonged in his class. 

And if Katsuki showed him this, the imprint of his own hand seared deep into his skin…

He doesn’t know what would happen.

Part of him whispers that Aizawa-sensei wouldn’t be mad at him - the hero has always shown a lot of patience towards him, especially after Kamino - but Katsuki can’t take that chance. 

If not with anger, Aizawa-sensei would look at him with pity, and that would be even worse. That would be horrible. Just the thought of it makes Katsuki’s stomach twist, nausea churning in his gut as he makes a wild grab for his phone, snatching it from his nightstand.

No matter what, he can’t let anybody know that he hurt himself.

But he still needs help.

He scrolls through his contacts with shaky hands until he finds the one he wants, jamming his finger against it and waiting anxiously for the call to connect. It goes to voicemail three times before his father picks it up. 

“Yes, Katsuki?”

Just from those words, Katsuki can tell that his father is annoyed. It’s not even noon, but Katsuki knows that he gets up bright and early to get started on his work. And here Katsuki is, bothering him for something stupid. 

Katsuki’s face feels hot. He’s acting like a child. He starts, “I -” and then stops, hesitates. He almost wants to hang up the call, but he knows that would only make his father worry - it’s not often that Katsuki reaches out first. “I need your help with something.”

“Mhm.” There’s the familiar scratch of pen against paper. “Is it important?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki says, because it’s important to him. His heart races too fast in his chest, he can feel it in his throat. “None of my friends like me anymore.” He has to fight to keep his voice steady as he holds his phone to his ear, the screen cool against his burning hot skin. “And everybody is being so mean to me.”

It sounds so childish when it’s said like that. It sounds selfish, it sounds pathetic, it sounds weak. But it’s the truth. It’s the truth, it’s the reason why he’s so upset - and he hates himself for it.

More than anything, Katsuki craves the feeling of being wanted. For a while, he thought that he finally was. And then this…

All he wants to know is what he did wrong.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Katsuki whispers. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, free hand curled tight in the sheets at his side. “I was hanging out with them last night, and it’s not like we got into an argument or anything - I was good, I was being good, I don’t know what happened -”

“Katsuki.” The sound of his father’s voice stops him in his tracks. “You need to take deep breaths. Remember what the doctors said.”

Katsuki tries to listen. Really, he does. But his chest is too tight, and he can’t do anything but gasp for air. He doesn’t react to things like he should. It’s as if every word spoken to him triggers a fight-or-flight response, and he only has a split-second to decide which one to choose - and he’s wrong, he’s always wrong. He does all the worst things and never gets better, he thought he was changing but he’s not.

He’s frozen, static, stuck in time. He can’t be fixed because he was never whole in the first place. Programs, therapy, countless behavior management sessions - all useless, all wasted on Katsuki’s inability to act like a normal human being. 

His father is talking to him. Katsuki can hear the soft cadence of his voice through the speaker, but he can’t quite make out the words being said. His ears are ringing too loud, heart beating too fast, breaths so ragged that they tear at his lungs. His skin is hot and feverish, he feels like he’s about to burst into flames.

“Dad,” he says, voice thin and choked. “Dad, I don’t know what to do.”

His whole body aches. He wants to cry, but he burns so hot that the tears stay trapped behind his eyes. 

“Were you speaking nicely?” his father asks, and Katsuki feels like a child again. “Did you watch your tone? Those things are important, you know.”

“I -” Katsuki chokes. “I did everything right.”

And he’s telling the truth. At least, he thinks he is. He can’t be sure - his memory is spotty at the best of times. Too many injuries when he was younger, his Quirk blowing him head-first into hard surfaces, face smacked against the concrete when the older kids would start fights with him. He walked home dizzy and disoriented most days, tripping over his own feet - he feels like that now, like every step he takes will send him crashing to the ground.

He thinks that he would feel better if he knew that his actions led to this, that being shunned was a direct result of something he did. He could understand this if it happened after he insulted a classmate, or got into an argument with one of his friends, or badmouthed somebody in the heat of the moment. 

But this is different, and the simple truth is this: no matter how hard he tries, he can’t think of anything he did wrong.

Maybe this is something that should have happened a long time ago. Maybe, instead of one big mistake, he has just been accumulating a lot of small ones, and eventually his classmates decided that they had enough. Maybe this is what he deserves. 

And he hates the thought of it, but maybe his friends never even liked him at all.

“Katsuki.” The sound of his father saying his name breaks through the scrambled panic of his thoughts. “Katsuki, listen to me. Are you sure you aren’t just misinterpreting something? I know you aren’t exactly the best at picking up on things. Maybe you should just go up to them and ask if they’re actually mad at you.”

Katsuki can’t breathe. His mouth is dry, he feels like he’s seconds away from collapse. When he was little, he played a game with his classmates: stack blocks in a tower, locked together, then pull them out one by one until it all falls down. The one who dealt the killing blow is the loser. Katsuki feels like that right now, like someone has just pulled out a vital part of him, like he’s going to fall apart at any moment.

All of his structure, gone in the blink of an eye.

He hears his father sigh, the sound staticky over the phone, filtered through the rasp of Katsuki’s ragged breaths. 

“I have to go, Katsuki,” his father says, voice soft. He’s not being cruel about it, or mean, and that makes it even worse. Katsuki prefers it when insults are thrown like a punch at his face - at least then he knows that he’s allowed to fight back. “I wish I could talk for longer, but I’m very busy. I’ll try to call you back when I have time.”

Katsuki hates begging, but his pride is nonexistent at this point. “Please,” he says, and hears his father pause - the man had undoubtedly been about to hang up the phone. “Dad, I just want - I just want to be normal, it’s not fair -”

“I want you to live a good life, Katsuki,” his father interrupts. “I want you to grow as a person. And that means you have to learn how to solve your own problems.”

But the only problem is Katsuki. He’s the only issue here. And he doesn’t know how to fix that.

“Dad -”

His father sighs. “Katsuki, I don’t mean to be harsh, but you need to calm down.”

Katsuki explodes. He always does, in the end.

“It’s not fucking fair!” he snaps, voice too loud - it echoes against the walls and bounces back, high and mocking. He hates the sound of it, tears pricking at his eyes as he curses. “Nothing ever goes right for me, Dad! I always fuck it up, it’s not fair!”

“That’s a very self-pitying thing to say,” his father scolds. “I know I didn’t raise you like that, Katsuki.”

Katsuki starts to cry. He can’t help it, the tears coming hot and fast as they spill down his cheeks. His stomach twists, head aching with an intensity that makes him feel like he’s about to throw up.

He hates it when his father gets mad at him. His mother was tolerable - she had the same kind of anger that Katsuki did, passed down and inherited, the kind of anger that left holes in the drywall and bruises on Katsuki’s skin - but his father was an entirely different story. 

His father’s anger was cold. His voice turned to ice, his normally loving expression smoothing out into bland impassiveness, unreadable - unreachable. 

Katsuki hates it almost as much as he hates himself.

The worst thing is that it was only ever Katsuki that managed to make his father mad. When it came to everything else, his father dealt with it with a smile on his face, tone gentle, hands soft. But there’s something wrong with Katsuki, something that brings out the worst of the people he loves. He ruins everything he touches, he breaks everything he cares about. He’s so bad, he’s so horrible, he’s sure that everybody is just waiting for the day that he dies.

“I’m -” Katsuki hiccups. “I’m sorry, don’t be mad at me -”

“Katsuki…” His father sounds exasperated, and Katsuki just sobs even harder. “I’m not even mad at you. I’m just very busy, okay? I said that I would call you back when I have time.”

Katsuki’s breaths are ragged, lungs burning and throat rubbed raw. His stomach hurts, pressure building at the base of his skull as his grip on his phone tightens so much that he thinks the case might cut into his skin. And his arm - his arm feels like it's on fire, the pain able to be ignored up until now, reignited by his distress. 

He almost wants it to hurt more. He feels like he deserves it.

“Maybe go talk to your teacher?” his father suggests, and just the thought of that sends a spike of fear stabbing through Katsuki’s chest. “He always has good ideas, doesn’t he? I’m sure he’d be able to help.”

“But I want you to help.” The words come out shaky and pathetic, practically a whine. He feels like a child. He feels so small. “I - I don’t know what to do -”

Logically, he knows that he has survived worse than this. This is basically a petty childhood squabble in comparison to the fights he has gotten into since the start of the year. But at least he knew how to handle those - at least he knew what caused them. He hates getting his feelings hurt, because it was so hard to explain to other people, so hard to describe the painful emptiness that ate him alive, the hollowness of his chest, the way it made him want to die.  

He hates how the smallest things can tip him over the edge.

“I’ll call you back,” his father says, voice firm. “Try to calm down. I love you, Katsuki.”

Katsuki is still crying when his father hangs, ears ringing with the sound of a disconnected call. The phone drops from his hand, his chest heaves as he struggles for air. He’s almost glad that Kirishima left - at least now he knows that none of his friends will hear him break down like this. 

Because that’s exactly what he’s doing - he’s breaking down, deteriorating. Splitting apart at the seams, unable to hold himself together for any longer. His skin is cold, but it sizzles at his touch. 

And when he burns himself again - and again and again - he barely even feels it.

Chapter Text

Katsuki has always known that there was something wrong with him.

The realization hit him when he was a child, and has been a constant thought at the back of his mind ever since. He sees the world in plain facts, and here is the plainest fact of them all: Katsuki is different from other people, and there’s nothing he can do to change that.

Being different is scary. 

He has always been able to play it off as something good - he’s passionate, he’s confident, he gets the job done - but, deep down, he knows that it’s nothing to be celebrated. 

There’s some kind of fault in his wiring, a glitch in his system - whenever something goes wrong, he reacts like a gunshot, harsh and violent. There’s no resistor in his circuit, nothing to slow the anger that courses through his veins instead of blood. It’s like clockwork, the only predictable thing about him: he sees red, and then he explodes.

He remembers breaking a lot of toys when he was younger, blind fits of rage that left him shaking in the aftermath. His parents laughed it off back then, and grew concerned when the anger persisted as he got older, getting worse and worse, the cost of his destruction climbing higher with each passing day. He got sent to therapies, to behavioral management programs, to new and wonderful doctors that promised to fix his mind and calm him down and bring out the best in him - but nothing worked. 

He’s broken, and he hates it. He hates himself. He can only be defined by what he is not, and he has never been anything worth keeping.

Katsuki doesn’t know how long he stays in his room, curled up in his bed as his arms sting with fresh burns. He’s too tired to even cry, body heavy with exhaustion, nothing left of his previous tears but soft, hiccuping sobs that come at random intervals and refuse to stop.

He can’t even really blame anybody for pushing him away, not really. He knows how difficult he is to handle. But he just wishes that he had gotten some kind of warning before it happened. Even worse than that is the possibility that he did get a warning, and has just been ignoring the signs in the way that you tend to do when you see something that you don’t want to. 

He wants to find some way to absolve himself of the guilt, but knows that this is all his fault - it has to be. He must have done something wrong. 

But he doesn’t know what.

Did he say something? Did he do something? Did everybody simply grow tired of him, of his endless complaints and childish outbursts and refusal to change for the better? 

Katsuki has always been something of a novelty, something new to admire before the shine wore off and he was cast to the side. He always tries to stay in the spotlight, as attention seeking as a child even at sixteen years old, but he can’t deny the fact that he’s no longer a very interesting person - his whole class is full of people that are used to being admired, so he’s really nothing special.

But no matter how hard he tries to rationalize it, something about this feels wrong.

It takes him too long to calm himself down enough to move, and even longer to force himself to stand up. He shuffles listlessly around his room, body so heavy that it feels like his limbs are made out of solid metal, chest tight and sniffles persistent as he pulls a long-sleeved jacket over his head.

The drag of fabric against his burned arms makes him wince, but he doesn’t allow himself to cry about his self-inflicted injuries. He did it to himself, he deserves the pain. He wipes at his face as he pulls his hood up, shadowing his face from view, taking a deep breath before opening his door and stepping outside. 

He looks both ways before starting down the hallway, not wanting to run into anybody, then hurries to the elevator. He feels small, like a ghost of himself, like he has been hollowed out and diminished - he usually wouldn’t balk at the thought of interacting with his classmates, but right now he feels like he would fall to pieces if somebody looked at him the wrong way, or even looked at him at all. 

He feels fragile, like he’s made of glass. One wrong move, and he’ll shatter completely. 

Katsuki basically sneaks out of the dorms, head low and movements quick and sharp, heart racing at the mere thought of running into anybody. His arms burn under the heavy fabric of his sleeves, and sweat beads on his forehead as he struggles to maintain a steady pace and not simply just break out into a run to get to Recovery Girl’s office as soon as possible - doing that would just draw more attention to him, and right now that’s the last thing he wants.

Thankfully, Recovery Girl is available even when school is out. It’s like she lives in her office, always there even when Katsuki shows up at the most inopportune times, which he does quite often - late night training gone wrong, a stupid sprained ankle or pulled muscle - and this time is no different: the door swings open almost as soon as he knocks on it. 

Katsuki doesn’t know what expression he’s making, but it’s enough to stop the scolding that usually comes when Recovery Girl catches sight of him. He’s bracing himself to be fussed at, but the nurse just looks him up and down, eyebrows furrowed, and sighs.

Katsuki falters, the words he had been about to say dying on his lips. He must look horrible to garner such a reaction, and his stomach twists at the thought of his vulnerability being so on display, so obvious.
“I -” Katsuki’s face burns with humiliation. “I need help with something.”

Recovery Girl’s eyes narrow. “Are you hurt?”

Katsuki shifts on his feet. It’s ridiculous to be afraid of a woman so small, but right now he feels like he’s teetering on the edge of something dangerous, like he’s walking a tightrope and to make the smallest mistake would send him spiraling. He can’t trust his own reactions, can’t predict what would happen if something else went wrong today - any little thing could be his final straw.

He doesn’t know what would happen if he got pushed too far. 

Recovery Girl sighs. “Come in, come in,” she says, ushering Katsuki inside her office. “Sit down and tell me what happened this time.”

Katsuki takes a seat on the edge of the nearest bed, clasping his too-hot hands in his lap. His arms hurt, his whole body aches, and there’s a ringing in his ears that refuses to go away - simply put, he feels like shit, and he’s sure he looks the part as well. 

“Well?” Recovery Girl watches him expectantly. “What happened, dear?”

Katsuki feels ridiculously small, shrinking beneath the woman’s gaze. His arms itch and burn under his sleeves, hidden like a dirty secret. He starts, “I -” and then stops, faltering. “I did something stupid.”

With the way the day is going, he’s expecting some snide comment in reply. He’s expecting something mean, something that hit him hard with a lasting ache, something like, When are you not doing something stupid?  

More than anything, he’s expecting to be laughed at. To be mocked.

Recovery Girl says, “Oh, sweetheart.”

Katsuki’s hands curl into fists in his lap. His palms are sweaty, his fingers burn into his own skin. He takes a deep breath, then another, but it does nothing to clear the fogginess of his mind - he feels like he has taken a blow to the head, like everything is jarred slightly out of place. Off-kilter, unbalanced: even though he’s sitting, he feels like he’ll collapse at the slightest touch. 

“Stop that, you’re hurting yourself,” Recovery Girl scolds. Her small hands land on Katsuki’s own, uncurling his fingers from their tightly-clenched fists. “Now, show me what happened. No point in suffering any longer than you have to, dear.”

Katsuki grits his teeth, steeling himself. “Fine.”

And then he pulls up his sleeves.

There it is, the big secret, unleashed and unveiled: horrible, sick, twisted. There’s no pretending that he hasn’t done this to himself, not when the burns are in the perfect shape of his hands, four fingers and a thumb, burned and bruised into his pale skin. 

The silence that follows is too loud. Katsuki suffocates under the weight of it.

“... I’ll get Eraserhead.”

“No!” Katsuki’s voice is sharp and almost shrill, echoing against the walls and making Recovery Girl stop dead in her tracks. “He’ll be mad at me!”
Recovery Girl stares at him. “What?” 

Katsuki’s chest aches. He’s breathing too fast, too hard, making himself light-headed and dizzy. “I - I’m -” His hands are shaking with a faint tremor that refuses to go away no matter how hard he tries to force them still. Weakly, he says, “Don’t tell him. I don’t want him to know.”

“Bakugou, you hurt yourself.”

Katsuki feels sick. He hates the way those words sound, hates the way they leave no room for doubt, hates the fact that they’re true. He hurt himself, he did all of this to himself, he’s the main cause of his own pain. There’s nobody else to blame. All of this - everything - is because of him.

“If you don’t want me to tell your teacher, I’ll have to contact your parents instead.” Recovery Girl lays the words out plain and simple, cutting no corners, doing nothing to soften the blow. “I thought that you would prefer Aizawa-sensei, because he’s closer.”

Katsuki wants to throw up. He’s sure that he’s about to, but manages to swallow back his nausea at the last second.

“He won’t be mad at you,” Recovery Girl reassures him. “He won’t be upset. I promise.”

“But it’s stupid.” Katsuki’s eyes sting with the familiar burn of oncoming tears, pressure building at the base of his skull. “It’s fucking stupid. I’m not supposed to - to - I’m not supposed to hurt myself.”

“Bakugou…” Recovery Girl sighs. “I’m being serious when I say that I have to tell somebody about this. It’s a risk, a hazard - it’s dangerous. If I know about this and say nothing, and then later something even worse happens -”

“It won’t,” Katsuki promises. “Nothing bad is going to happen, I’m just - there’s a lot going on, I can’t -”

“Let me tell your teacher.” Recovery Girl’s voice is painfully gentle. “He cares about you, Bakugou. If he learned that something like this happened without his knowledge, he would be devastated.”

Katsuki’s bottom lip starts to tremble, that stupid crybaby habit. “You don’t know that.”

“I’ve been around that boy since he was your age.” A smile creases the wrinkled folds of Recovery Girl’s face. “Trust me, I know.”

Katsuki sniffles. His heart skips beats in his chest, dread a heavy weight wrapped around his throat. Squeezing tight, like a vice, like a hand, choking the air from his lungs. 

He has always been an independent person, despite his longing for human connection and friendship. Whenever he got hurt as a child, he always tried to deal with the injuries by himself. Back then, it was nothing more than scraped knees and the occasional accidental burn, and he didn’t want to bother his parents about stupid stuff like that, so he would apply ointment and bandage cuts and keep the wounds clean, safe in the knowledge that nothing would scar - he had his mother to thank for that. Always alone, despite the attention that people paid to him. And, right now, asking for help just feels so wrong.

But he’s trying to be better. He’s trying to be good.

Finally, Katsuki speaks.

“Fine.”

Even though she probably would have just called Aizawa-sensei regardless of Katsuki’s response, Recovery Girl looks relieved. “Thank you, Bakugou.”

Katsuki knows that he’s doing the right thing. It has to be the right thing, if it’s what is wanted from him. He’s good at fulfilling expectations, at being everything all at once. 

This is the right thing to do. 

But Katsuki is jaded, and, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t quite shake the feeling that something is about to go wrong.

Chapter Text

Katsuki almost died when he was born.

At least, that’s what his mother tells him. She frames it as a joke, laughing as she says that Katsuki has been scaring her half to death since the moment he was born, but the punchline always falls flat - Katsuki can hear the rawness of her voice, the shadow of fear that flickers across her face as she relives the memories, and he feels unbelievably guilty for causing such distress.

No matter how hard she tries to play it off, Katsuki knows that his mother worries for him.

So, ever since he was old enough to form his own thoughts, he has been determined to prove that he can take care of himself.

But, so far, the only thing he has proven is that he can’t.

As he sits in Recovery Girl’s office, waiting for his teacher to arrive and see what a mess Katsuki has made of himself, he doesn’t feel like a hero. He doesn’t feel strong or capable or worthy of respect. 

He just feels like a failure.

Katsuki flinches when Aizawa-sensei walks through the door. He can’t help it, the sharp movement automatic and instinctual, arms stinging with pain as he yanks his sleeves back down. 

Aizawa-sensei falters. “Bakugou?”

Katsuki glances at him, then immediately looks away, breath hitching in his throat at the glimpse he caught of his teacher’s expression.

He hates the look on Aizawa-sensei’s face. It’s worse than anything he could have expected. He’d been prepared for anger, for frustration, for annoyance.

But nothing could have prepared him for this.

Aizawa-sensei looks devastated .

“Bakugou.” There’s the sound of approaching footsteps, and Katsuki has to resist the urge to curl in on himself. He wants to hide away like a child. “Recovery Girl said that you were hurt?”

Katsuki is hurt, but even worse than that is the fact that he did it to himself.

And something in his teacher’s voice makes it clear that Aizawa-sensei knows that.

Katsuki regrets every action that led up to this moment. His skin prickles with discomfort, and making eye contact with his teacher makes his stomach twist. He hesitates for several seconds, then reluctantly drags his sleeves back up his arms, the fabric bunching at his elbows.

“Bakugou…”
Katsuki looks away.

“Bakugou,” Aizawa-sensei repeats. His voice shakes, and so do his hands as he reaches out to hold Katsuki’s wrists in a gentle grip. “Did you do this?”

“I’m - I’m sorry,” Katsuki says. He hates the way he stammers when he’s nervous, tripping over himself to apologize. He hasn’t even been scolded yet, and he’s already falling apart - if his mother was here, she would call him pathetic. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about her right now. He always seems to do that when he has fucked something up. “I didn’t mean to.”

Aizawa-sensei sighs. “Tell me what happened.”

“He can explain while I treat his injuries,” Recovery Girl pipes up, speaking for the first time since Aizawa-sensei entered the room. Katsuki’s attention snaps to her, and he grimaces at the sight of a first-aid kit in her hands - he’d been hoping that she would just work her magic on him and have him fixed up in a few seconds, but she would probably just rattle off some bullshit about him looking too exhausted if he asked. Maybe that’s a precautionary measure, a way to ensure that he won’t do this again: he hurt himself, now he’ll have to deal with a slow healing process. 

Recovery Girl follows his gaze, and then seems to read his mind in the way she always does. “I’ll heal you fully after you get some rest.”

“I’m fine,” Katsuki says. “I’m not tired.”

That’s a lie. He’s exhausted, every muscle aching with the tension threaded through it, his bones a heavy weight, his skin clammy and oversensitive. There’s a ringing in his ears that won’t go away, a cruel voice whispering at the back of his mind. 

He’s weak, and everybody knows it. All of this pain is nothing but a punishment.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Recovery Girl won’t heal him. He doesn’t know what he would do if he saw a blank canvas of skin. Destruction has always been his first instinct, a knee-jerk reaction, and his palms itch with the urge to burn. 

That’s why nobody likes him - he’s too violent. They tolerate him until they have an excuse to cast him aside. It’s always been like that, for as long as he can remember. He secured his place among his peers with sheer strength alone, demanding respect and attention, knowing that nobody would care for him otherwise. 

But his strength has no purpose now, not when compared to people of equal value.

Katsuki isn’t stupid. He knows that there’s something wrong with him. Something twisted and horrible that warped his thoughts and left him breathless with the constant weight on his chest, crushing the air from his lungs. He can’t trust himself. He can’t do anything but hope that things will get better - but he does nothing to improve, he just waits to be acted upon, stagnant. He’s pathetic. He’s fucking useless.

Katsuki makes some kind of noise, wrenched from the back of his throat. 

His vision blurs, his hands shake. The only thing keeping him from hurting himself again is the firm grip on his wrists that only tightens further as Aizawa-sensei says, “Bakugou, look at me.”

Katsuki doesn’t want to look at anybody, much less his teacher. He already knows what expression will greet him - that devastation, that worry, written clear across the hero’s face. 

But he lifts his head anyways, because he knows that his real worth lies in the fact that he does as he’s told. He bites and kicks and fights like a rabid dog, but he always gives in at the end - he’s weak, spineless. He always has been.

He meets Aizawa-sensei’s eyes and feels sick all the way down to his core.

“You need to breathe,” Aizawa-sensei tells him. “I need you to breathe, Bakugou. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Katsuki feels light-headed, dizzy. His thoughts make no sense. He lurches forward, trying to stand up, only to be stopped when his teacher says, “Don’t do that.”

“I -” Katsuki’s voice is hoarse. “I want to see my friends.”

He wants to apologize for whatever he did wrong. He wants to be around them, even if they don’t like him anymore - even if they never liked him at all. He’s greedy, he’s selfish, he doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. 

Is it really so bad to want to be wanted?

All Katsuki does is want. He’s a black hole, he’s destructive. He ruins everything he touches, and he always finds a way to shift the blame - he’s a fucking narcissist, and he’ll never be anything better than that. 

“I wanna talk to them,” Katsuki whispers. He feels numb. His hands are cold, the constant heat erased by his teacher’s stare. “I need to talk to them, I need to know…”

He just needs to know what he did wrong.

“I know, I know,” Aizawa-sensei says, in the tone you’d use to calm a frightened child - nonsense babble with no purpose other than to soothe. “Let’s just get you fixed up, and then you can go see your friends. I’m sure they’ll be happy to see that you’re alright.”

Katsuki stares at him, deathly silent. He’s vaguely aware of the fact that his arms are being moved, the cool sting of air against his burns doing nothing but sending him spiraling deeper into his thoughts. 

“How does that sound?” Aizawa-sensei asks. He’s being too patient, too kind - Katsuki isn’t used to it. He can’t reconcile this teacher with the one who had him dipping his hands into boiling water not too long ago. “Where are your friends, anyways? Why didn’t one of them come down with you?”

“They don’t like me anymore,” Katsuki whispers.

“What?” Aizawa-sensei’s eyebrows furrow. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bakugou. Your friends love you.”

The back of Katsuki’s throat starts to burn. His hands curl into fists in his lap, only to be pried apart by Recovery Girl as she continues to bandage his self-inflicted wounds. 

“Relax, dear,” she says. “Talk to your teacher. He just wants to help.”

“That’s right,” Aizawa-sensei confirms. “Now, tell me why you’re so convinced that your friends don’t like you. Did you get into an argument?”

“No,” Katsuki says, and that’s the worst thing - as far as he can tell, there’s no reason for any of this. There’s no logic behind it. He’s been on his best behavior, he’s been good. He’s been trying his hardest to be somebody worthy of love, but it didn’t work. Nothing can disguise how rotten he is. “No, I didn’t.”

Finally, a bit of frustration creeps into Aizawa-sensei’s voice. “Then why would they be mad at you?”

“They’re not,” Katsuki says. He closes his eyes and sees the flash of his friends’ smiles, their laughter echoing in his mind. They weren’t mad at him. No, they were just completely indifferent to him, mocking and amused - but not angry. It’d be better if they were. If they were angry, that is. He’s used to that. “I don’t know what happened. I - I don’t know what’s going on.”

“... Alright.” Aizawa-sensei’s gaze is a heavy weight. “I think you may be skewing things out of proportion, Bakugou.”

“No!” Katsuki’s temper flares, hot and sharp. “No, I’m not! I’m being serious, just fucking listen to me -” His heart beats too fast, a constant ache in his chest. “I’m not crazy!”

He knows what he saw, what he heard. He knows.

“I never said that you were.” Aizawa-sensei watches him with too-sharp eyes. Katsuki feels like he’s being dissected, like his teacher can see every thought lurking in the darkness of his mind. “Don’t put words in my mouth. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense for your friends to suddenly not like you anymore. Have you tried talking to them?”

Katsuki glares at him. He has to bite his lip to keep from speaking, to stop himself from saying something that he might regret. 

“I’m going to assume that means that you haven’t.” Aizawa-sensei sighs. “But that’s not important. We’re getting off track. What’s important is that you hurt yourself.”

Katsuki flinches. “Don’t say it like that.” 

Those words are ugly, harsh. He doesn’t like to think of it that way. It’s a self-correction, a punishment. He looks down at his arms and realizes that Recovery Girl has finished bandaging them - he hadn’t even noticed, too distracted by going back-and-forth with his teacher. He looks around, but the woman is nowhere to be found. Then again, she’s small enough to be easily missed - maybe Katsuki just isn’t looking hard enough.

“Bakugou.” Aizawa-sensei demands his attention. “You hurt yourself.”

Katsuki shakes his head. 

“Bakugou -” Aizawa-sensei visibly grits his teeth, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “I know that you probably don’t want to talk about this, but it’s important. If you don’t want to speak with me, I can refer you to Hound Dog, or call your parents -”

Katsuki jolts, eyes wide, panic racing through his veins like adrenaline. “No!” he says, and his voice is too loud - his teacher takes a step back, startled. “No, don’t call them, I’m fine!” 

He even smiles to show how fine he is, a wide, nervous bare of teeth. 

Aizawa-sensei looks unconvinced. “I hope you know that I just want what’s best for you, Bakugou. I’m not going to be upset with you for anything - and I doubt your parents would be, either. They care about you.”

“I know.” Katsuki fidgets with the hem of his shirt, twisting the fabric between his fingers. He doesn’t look at Aizawa-sensei as he speaks, keeping his gaze fixed firmly on the tiled floor of the infirmary. “I just don’t want to bother them.”

He doesn’t want to bother anybody, actually. He just wants this all to be over.

“That’s very considerate,” Aizawa-sensei says, voice soft. “But sometimes you need to bother people, especially if you need help. I wish that you had come to get me before any of this happened.”

Tears prick at Katsuki’s eyes. He opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a choked noise, sniveling and pathetic. 

Aizawa-sensei puts a tentative hand on his shoulder, the grip settling when Katsuki doesn’t flinch away from the touch. “I know that this is hard to talk about,” the hero says. “I won’t pretend that I’m well-versed in these kinds of conversations, but I am always willing to listen to you. It’s my responsibility to take care of you…” He trails off. “And I clearly haven’t been doing a very good job.”

Katsuki closes his eyes. His headache is back, hammering at the base of his skull. Exhaustion clings to him like a static film, like wet fabric - heavy, all-encompassing. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to do anything ever again. He feels every emotion so fully that it’s completely overwhelming, leaving him walking the razor-fine line between calm and fury.

He whispers, “I wanted it to hurt.”

Aizawa-sensei goes still.

Katsuki swallows, hard. “I didn’t mean to hurt myself,” he says. “But I was happy that I did.” 

The pain was almost a relief. Something he could control, an action that didn’t come from being acted upon - his own two hands, burned deep into the fragile skin of his arms. 

“I’m sorry,” Katsuki sniffles. He wipes at his eyes, jostling his teacher’s hand from his shoulder - he doesn’t feel like he deserves the comfort. All he deserves is what he’s gotten, he needs the pain to grow as a person, to be better, stronger. “This won’t happen again.”

Aizawa-sensei stares at him for a long, silent moment, then says, “This conversation isn’t over, Bakugou.”

“Well, I want it to be.” Katsuki can’t force any real heat into his voice, the words falling flat. “I don’t wanna talk anymore. I’m tired.”

Aizawa-sensei frowns, a crease forming between his eyebrows. The shadows underneath his eyes look darker than ever, his ever-present air of exhaustion worsened by Katsuki’s mere presence. 

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Aizawa-sensei says, speaking slowly like he’s talking to a child. “You can sleep here for a while. I’m sure Recovery Girl won’t mind.”

Katsuki forces a smile. “On these crappy beds?” he asks. “Are you trying to sabotage me, Sensei?”

His attempt to lighten the mood does nothing to help. His teacher just sighs and says, “Bakugou.” 

“... Fine.” Katsuki shifts, uncomfortable. His body hurts, his mind fuzzy as he stares down at the bandages wrapped around his arms. He doesn’t know if he made the right choice by coming here. He feels like all he’s doing is fucking things up. “If it makes you happy -”

“None of that smart-aleck stuff.” For the first time since this conversation started, a faint glimmer of amusement flickers across Aizawa-sensei’s face. “Just get some rest, kid. We’ll finish this conversation later.”

Katsuki silently hopes that later never comes. He watches his teacher for a moment, then sighs and kicks off his shoes, letting them fall to the floor as he throws himself back against the bed, not bothering to get under the sheets. He’s careful not to jostle his arms, the slightest movement making the burns flare to life beneath the bandages. “Good night,” he grumbles, just to be a little shit.

“I’ll be here when you wake up,” Aizawa-sensei says, not rising to the bait. “I promise.”

Katsuki closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

Katsuki wakes up to the sound of his name being called, a hand on his shoulder jostling him from his sleep:

“Bakugou.”

He keeps his eyes closed for several moments, hoping that the person will go away. He’s still tired, and his body is slowly coming alive with the familiar aches and pains that consciousness always brings. He wants just a few more seconds of rest, but the awareness of where he is closes in fast, and he opens his eyes and sits up in the same motion, attention snapping to Aizawa-sensei. “What?”

Aizawa-sensei blinks at him, seemingly startled by his reaction, but his voice is as bland as ever as he says, “Somebody is calling you. Thought you might want to know.” He holds up Katsuki’s phone, the screen lit with the unfamiliar sight of an incoming call. “Looks important.”

“... Yeah.” Katsuki’s mouth is suddenly, painfully dry. “It probably is.” 

He leans forward, snatching the phone from Aizawa-sensei’s hand with more force than intended, but he can’t bring himself to apologize - he can barely think at all, chest tight and skin prickling with creeping dread.

He wants to ignore the call. 

Really, he does. 

But he knows his mother well enough to know that she would just keep calling him until he answered, and she would only get more pissed off with each failed attempt.

He swipes the call to accept at the last moment, holding the phone to his ear and offering a tentative, “Hello?”

“Katsuki.” His mother already sounds irritated, and Katsuki has barely even said anything yet. “Masaru called me. He said that you were having some kind of mental breakdown, and he’s a big softie, so he felt bad about hanging up on you.” She pauses, then asks, “Where are you?”

Katsuki swallows, deathly aware of the fact that his teacher is staring at him, watching his every move. “The infirmary?” He’s not sure why it comes out as a question. He tries again, “I had to go to Recovery Girl,” but that sounds even worse. “Nothing serious, I just -”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No!” The response is automatic, instinctive. It’s also a complete lie. “No, why would I do that? I’m not stupid.”

His mother scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

Katsuki’s heart is beating like he’s fighting some kind of life-threatening battle - his mother tends to have that effect on him. He sneaks a glance at Aizawa-sensei, who meets his gaze and raises an eyebrow, silently questioning. 

Katsuki looks away, shame a hot flush across his face. He’s almost expecting his teacher to grab the phone and tell his mother exactly what happened, which would be both humiliating and terrifying - for all of her doubt, he’s pretty sure that his mother would never seriously consider the fact that Katsuki was actually capable of hurting himself. He can’t imagine what her reaction would be.

“Well?” His mother is as impatient as always, her anger familiar and almost comforting. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“No.” Katsuki shakes his head as if his mother can actually see it. She feels like a physical presence, her voice alone enough to shoot anxiety through his veins like adrenaline. “Nothing happened.”
His mother sighs. “Then why are you in the infirmary?”

Katsuki is so stupid. He feels vaguely ill, his heart nothing but a constant ache in his chest, grip so tight on his phone that the case digs into his palm. “I was sick.”

That’s not a lie. He was sick, but it was mostly in his head.

“Mhm.” His mother sounds unconvinced. He almost wishes that this conversation was happening in person, if only so he could attempt to read her expression. “Right. Are you saying that you worried your father for nothing?”

Bitterly, Katsuki says, “He didn’t sound very worried.”

“He’s always worried about you.”

“Well, he did a shitty job of showing it.” Katsuki knows that he shouldn’t be bad-mouthing his father like this, but his mother had a special talent for wording things in a way that was sure to piss him off. "He hung up on me. He said he was busy.”

His mother groans. “Katsuki…”  

Katsuki exists in a weird limbo of emotions. He loves his parents, but they irritate him in a way that everything else failed to do. “Fine,” he says, spitting the word out. “Fine, I’m sorry for wasting your precious time. Is that what you want to hear?”

“No.” His mother’s voice is firm. Her tone alone is enough to make Katsuki feel small, like he’s a child again, being scolded for making a mistake. “I want to hear that you didn’t do anything stupid. But I don’t know why I’m even bothering to ask, because all you do is stupid shit. It’s like you get some kind of perverse pleasure from stressing me out.”

Katsuki scowls. “I’m not stupid.”

“There you go again, twisting my words. I never called you stupid. I said that things you do are stupid.” His mother huffs, clearly frustrated. “Stop being so sensitive, Katsuki. I know I didn’t raise a little bitch, so stop acting like one.”

Katsuki grits his teeth, pinching his leg hard to force back the tears burning behind his eyes. He doesn’t want to start crying, not over something so stupid as a now-familiar insult - as soon as his mother figured out how much it pissed him off, she used it whenever she wanted to gain the upper hand in an argument.

Whenever she says it, all he can think about is how she called him weak for getting kidnapped, and it fucks with his head, makes him feel like he can’t breathe. 

He hates it, and he wants to hate her, but he can’t. 

“I have to go.” Katsuki’s voice shakes, and he doesn’t sound as angry as he feels. “Thanks for checking up on me.”

It would have been better if she never called him at all, but he doesn’t say that. He’s not in the mood to get yelled at for being disrespectful, and he knows that that’s exactly what would happen if he voiced the thoughts racing through his head.

His mother sighs again, long-suffering. “I hope you feel better soon,” she mutters, her voice hard like she’s being forced to say the words. “Get some rest, drink lots of water. Make sure that you’re eating properly, too - a healthy diet is important if you want to keep up with your classmates.”

At the mention of his classmates, the nausea comes back full-force. Katsuki had almost been able to forget about them and their odd behavior, replacing one struggle with another, but the reminder of how he’s never able to quite fit in with them hits him like a blow to the face. He remembers mentioning that to his mother one time, in the way you always talk to your parents about your feelings in those rare moments of peace, and his mother brings it up every time she needs to prove a point, in the way parents always do when they want to remind you that they have single-handed control over your entire life.

“Well, goodbye,” his mother says, seeming blissfully unaware of the fact that she just ruined Katsuki’s day even more. “I’ll tell your father that you’re feeling better.”  

She hangs up without waiting for a response, ending the call in the same way you’d rip off a band-aid: harsh and abrupt, sure to sting a little, but better in the long run. Katsuki doesn’t know how much more conversation he’d be able to handle. 

He sets his phone down on the nightstand, avoiding Aizawa-sensei’s gaze. 

For several long moments, there’s nothing but silence. Katsuki feels it like a physical weight, heavy and suffocating, wilting further the longer his teacher stares at him.
Then, finally, Aizawa-sensei asks, “Are you hungry?”

Katsuki winces, nerves completely shot. “No,” he says. He’d been interrupted by his classmates’ odd behavior before he even had a chance to make it to the kitchen. “But it’s not a big deal. I’ll grab something to eat when I get back to the dorms.”

That’s a lie, and he feels like they both know it.

On the off chance that Aizawa-sensei actually lets him leave, Katsuki will go straight to his room and lock the door. He can’t stand the thought of interacting with anybody right now, especially not his classmates, and there was nearly always somebody in the kitchen - teenagers got hungry a lot, apparently.

“... Right.” Aizawa-sensei clears his throat. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

Katsuki stays quiet for a moment, considering his options. He can talk about what happened, about how betrayed and upset and confused his classmates made him feel… or he could do none of that, and handle it on his own, like he always does.

Or, at least, like he’s supposed to.

He’s not a child. He didn’t act like this even when he was a child. He’s gotten soft over the past few months, weakened by some unknown force that left him sniveling and helpless in the wake of any kind of conflict. His father is right - he needs to know how to deal with his problems alone, without bothering anybody else about them.

That’s all he does: he bothers people. He’s loud and abrasive in all the worst ways, demanding time and attention that he makes no effort to return. 

It’s no wonder that nobody can stand him. He can barely even tolerate himself.

“Bakugou.” Aizawa-sensei’s voice is gentle, and Katsuki hates the fucking sound of it, hates the fact that he has to be talked to like he’s something fragile. “I’ve been a teacher for a long time. Nothing you say will faze me.”

Katsuki absolutely despises the way that his teacher seems to be able to read his thoughts. “I don’t know, you looked pretty fazed when you saw what I did to myself,” he mutters. “I’m not stupid, Sensei. You don’t have to act like you know how to deal with me.”

Because that’s all he is, really - something to be dealt with. A problem to be assessed, handled, and solved. 

… He wishes that there was some way to actually fix him. 

He doesn’t want to be like this forever. He doesn't want to always be in a constant state of disrepair, broken down by his own actions. He’s like a puzzle that’s missing a handful of pieces - no matter how hard anybody tries, he will never be whole. He’ll never be perfect. 

And, if he can’t be perfect, what was the point of anything?

It’s clear that nobody wants him around. His classmates tolerated him until they were able to shrug him off. He doesn’t know what the tipping point was, and he wishes that he did - at least then he would be able to justify it. But, no. It came without warning, and all he feels is this helpless anger.

Katsuki is good at being angry. It’s the only thing he’s good at, really. He has always had a short fuse, a temper that snapped at the drop of a hat. He’s mean, he’s vicious, he’s cruel. 

The right thing is to make people as mad at him as he is at himself.

Katsuki swallows, takes a deep breath, and then strikes.

“The only reason you’re doing this is because I’m your student,” he says. His voice is low, but it sounds deafeningly loud in the silence. “You feel obligated to care about me. Your whole job is to make sure I don’t kill myself before I get a chance to die on the field.” His mouth is dry, chest tight, hands trembling where they’re curled into fists in his lap. “If I caused my own destruction, I wouldn’t be a hero. I’d just be a fucking loser, and you’d be a failure as a teacher.”

Katsuki is good at pissing people off. He says all the worst things, pushes all the wrong buttons, and then steps back and watches them explode. He likes to be intentional about making people hate him. He knows that it will happen eventually, so all he does is speed up the process. 

“Right?” Katsuki asks. “After all the trouble you went through to get me back after I got myself kidnapped, you don’t want to lose me before I can go out in a big blaze of glory. It wouldn’t reflect nicely on you, would it?”

Aizawa-sensei stares down at him. “I know you’re trying to make me mad,” he says. “It’s not going to work.”

But Katsuki wants his teacher to be mad at him. He wants to be left behind, abandoned. He doesn’t deserve anything better than that. He’s stuck in a cycle of self-destruction, as if he can be redeemed if he hurts his own feelings badly enough. 

“Fuck you,” he says. “I’m done with this touchy-feely shit. I’m going to my room.”

He starts to stand up, only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He tries to shrug it off, but all Aizawa-sensei does is hold onto him tighter. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“Don’t touch me.”

His teacher sighs. “Bakugou -”

“Don’t touch me!” Katsuki repeats, yanking out of Aizawa-sensei’s grip. He looks around the room, frustrated. “Where’s Recovery Girl? I need her to tell you to leave me alone.”

“She had to go take care of something.” Aizawa-sensei’s voice is low and calm. “She asked me to make sure that you’re okay.”

Katsuki scoffs. “You mean she told you to keep me from doing anything stupid.”

Aizawa-sensei is silent for a moment too long, and Katsuki knows that’s exactly what Recovery Girl said. “Bakugou -”

“Right,” Katsuki says. “Fine. Whatever!” He sits back down on the bed, glaring at his teacher. “I’ll stay here until she comes back and heals these stupid fucking burns, I don’t care. I don’t have anything better to do.”

Really, he doesn’t. His friends hate him, his classmates have shunned him, and his parents are mad at him. All he can do is wait for something else to go wrong.

And something else will go wrong, he’s sure of it. 

He hopes it hurts. It’s what he deserves.

Chapter Text

Recovery Girl heals Katsuki’s arms as soon as she gets back, which just sparks another argument because Katsuki is an asshole and Recovery Girl likes to indulge him. He asks why she didn’t help him sooner, and she responds that he was so exhausted that he would have simply passed out - to which Katsuki replies that that made no sense, since she made him go to sleep anyways, so it’s not as if he wouldn’t have been forced to rest regardless of whether she healed him or not. 

Recovery Girl tells him to respect his elders, and Katsuki sneers and says, “Fuck you.”

The bickering only stops when Aizawa-sensei steps between them. “That’s enough,” he says, sounding exasperated. “Bakugou, sit back down. You’re not going anywhere.”

Katsuki scowls at him. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he says, but he listens anyway, because Aizawa-sensei is his teacher and Katsuki does have a modicum of healthy respect for authority figures, despite popular belief. “I want to go to my room.”

“No.” Aizawa-sensei’s voice is firm. He won’t look at Katsuki for more than a few seconds at a time, and Katsuki is convinced that it’s his fault - most things are. “We still need to talk.”

Katsuki’s anxiety spikes, his hands curling into tight fists in his lap. “What is there to talk about?” He glances around the room for Recovery Girl, and finds that she has wandered back to her computer, back turned to Katsuki and Aizawa-sensei as she types away on her keyboard. “Recovery Girl, tell him that I need to get some rest!”

Recovery Girl glances over her shoulder. “Listen to your teacher, dear.”

Katsuki huffs in frustration, leveling a glare at the hero standing in front of him. “I want to go back to my room,” he repeats, forcing the words out between gritted teeth. “Look, I’m fine!” He holds up his arms to prove his point, the skin smooth and perfect once more - he ignores how it makes him feel the urge to mark it up again. “This is why I didn’t want Recovery Girl to call you. I knew that you would just act all worried and shit.”

“Bakugou.” Aizawa-sensei’s voice drops into a low, harsh whisper. “She told me that you hurt yourself. I have every right to be worried.”

Katsuki’s face flushes hot with embarrassment. He can’t even dispute Recovery Girl’s claim - because it’s true, he did hurt himself - but he shoots a glare at the back of her gray-haired head, then refocuses on Aizawa-sensei. “Well, I’m fine now,” he says, “And I’m not sure what you plan to achieve by keeping me here. I just want to go to my room so I can get some rest.”

That’s also true. He doesn’t want to do anything but curl up in bed and try not to think about anything at all. 

Aizawa-sensei watches him for a few moments, and Katsuki has a flicker of hope that the hero might actually listen to him and let him go - but the man just sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know what will happen if I let you leave,” he says, like he’d be sending Katsuki into some dangerous battlezone if he allowed Katsuki to do the one thing that he actually wants. “My job is to keep you safe, Bakugou. I can’t do that if I can’t see you.”

Katsuki’s lip curls in irritation. “You just don’t want me to do something stupid.”

He knows that he shouldn’t be arguing with his teacher, but he also knows that he’ll go insane if he has to stay trapped in this white-walled infirmary for any longer, the smell of antiseptic stinging his nose and the tackiness of burn cream still lingering on his skin. 

Fuck, he wishes that he never came here at all. 

Katsuki blinks rapidly, trying to get rid of the stubborn tears burning behind his eyes. He hates the fact that he cries so easily - he hates showing any kind of weakness at all, especially in front of people he respects. 

Aizawa-sensei looks tired. He always does, but he looks especially exhausted right now. “Bakugou -”

There’s a knock on the door.

Katsuki’s head snaps towards the sound, pulse ratcheting up a notch as he watches Recovery Girl hop out of her chair to go answer the call. 

Katsuki starts, “Wait -”

But it’s too late. 

The door swings open, and standing there is a person that Katsuki definitely does not want to see right now.

Aizawa-sensei straightens up, frowning slightly. “Todoroki, what are you doing here?” he asks, sounding concerned, and, despite himself, Katsuki feels concerned as well, looking his classmate up and down for any visible injuries. 

Seeing nothing, Katsuki asks, “The fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, I’m not hurt,” Todoroki says, voice as bland as always. “I just wanted to see if you were here.” He pauses, then adds, “You weren’t in your room.”

Katsuki stares at him. “You went to my room?”

Todoroki shrugs, nonchalant. “I wanted to talk to you,” he says, like it’s no big deal, like the answer should have been obvious. “I was worried.” 

He says it so plainly that the words take a second to process, the gears in Katsuki's head turning for several long moments before everything clicks into place. “What the fuck do you mean, you were worried?”  

His face is hot - he can’t tell whether he feels embarrassed or furious.

Todoroki steps into the infirmary, nodding a thanks at Recovery Girl before refocusing on Katsuki. His eyes are just like his Quirk, burning into Katsuki but freezing him in place at the same time. “I was worried,” he repeats, staring at Katsuki like there’s nobody else in the room. “You seemed pretty upset.”

Unlike Todoroki, Katsuki is aware of the fact that there are two people here that know nothing about what is going on. He sneaks a glance at Aizawa-sensei, then freezes, caught in the act - his teacher is staring directly at him, eyebrows furrowed and mouth pressed into a thin, tight line. He looks like he’s trying to figure things out, and Katsuki realizes in that moment that he can’t let that happen.

Even though he’s upset, Katsuki still cares about his classmates.

He doesn’t want to get them in trouble.

Katsuki takes a deep breath, then another. His head clears slightly, even though his fists are still clenched so tightly that it makes his hands ache. “I’m fine,” he says, forcing his voice steady and calm. “You can leave now, Todoroki.”

Todoroki blinks at him. “Are you mad at me?”

“No.” Katsuki has to force himself to speak. “Just go away. I’m sure your friends want to spend time with you.”

Todoroki watches him for a moment more, then looks at Aizawa-sensei. “Can Bakugou leave with me?” he asks. “I can make sure that he doesn’t get hurt again.”

“Did you know that he was hurt?” Aizawa-sensei asks, like the answer isn’t obvious. 

The real question is also obvious: did you know that he hurt himself?

Katsuki wants to crawl into a hole and die.

“Yes,” Todoroki responds, short and simple, but Katsuki has been around him long enough to know that his classmate feels uncomfortable right now, pinned under the weight of their teacher’s stare. “I told him to come here. I didn’t think he’d listen.”

“Well, I’m not stupid,” Katsuki says, even though he does in fact feel very, very stupid. “I went to you because I needed burn cream, and since you wouldn’t -” He catches himself before he lets it slip that Todoroki denied him help. “And since you didn’t have any, I came here.” 

Aizawa-sensei and Recovery Girl share a glance, and then Aizawa-sensei looks at Todoroki and says, “I think Bakugou should stay here a little longer.”

“But he’s not hurt anymore,” Todoroki says. “I want to talk to him.”

Aizawa-sensei hesitates slightly, a split-second of indecision, before saying in an almost gentle tone, “I don’t think he wants to talk to you right now, Todoroki.”

“He always wants to talk to me.” Todoroki sounds very sure of himself, and Katsuki supposes that he has given him reason to think that - he always lets Todoroki into his room whenever his classmate comes knocking on his door, a favor that very clearly wasn’t able to be reciprocated. “Right, Bakugou?”

Katsuki feels sick. He can’t wrap his head around the switch between how Todoroki was talking to him earlier and how he’s speaking now, his tone even and calm where it was harsh not so long ago. The difference makes him feel dizzy, light-headed. 

Finally, he says, “Okay.”

The barest hint of relief flickers across Todoroki’s face. 

“Bakugou -” Aizawa-sensei looks conflicted. “I don’t know if you should leave.”

Katsuki struggles to keep his composure. He has a tight hold on the emotions writhing in his chest, and if he lets his grip loosen for even a second, he thinks he might explode. “I need to talk to him,” he says, staring directly at Todoroki - his classmate stares right back at him, silent. “I need to…”

He trails off, not finishing his sentence.

I need to know what I did wrong.

Aizawa-sensei and Recovery Girl look at each other again, and seem to have some sort of conversation without talking at all. For several long moments, nobody speaks - the room is so quiet that Katsuki is sure that his heartbeat is audible to anybody that listens hard enough.

And then Aizawa-sensei glances over at Todoroki. “You should have come to me as soon as you saw that he was hurt. If anything happens this time, contact me immediately.”

“What?” Katsuki feels weak, diminished, infantilized. He can tell that this entire situation has changed the way that his teacher sees him, and he hates it with an intensity that he can’t quite put into words. “He’s not my babysitter.”

Aizawa-sensei’s gaze softens when he looks at Katsuki. “I just want to make sure that you stay safe,” he says. “Now, go talk with your friend. I’ll be here if you need me.”

Katsuki’s throat feels tight. He stares at his teacher for a few moments, wondering if he should argue, prove that he isn’t as weak as the hero now seems to think he is - and then he gives up, settling into a sense of heavy resignation.

He hasn’t given Aizawa-sensei any reason to think that he isn’t weak, after all. 

“Fine.” Katsuki stands up, unsteady on his feet. “I’ll, um - I’ll see you later, then.” He looks at Recovery Girl, who watches him with a knowing gaze. “Thanks, I guess. For helping me.”

Recovery Girl nods. “Take care of yourself, dear.”
Katsuki’s mouth is dry. He leaves the infirmary without another word, stepping into the hallway and watching as Todoroki closes the door behind them. He stares at his classmate, silently waiting for Todoroki to initiate the conversation - but Todoroki just glances at him, then starts walking away. 

Katsuki hurries after him, not realizing how desperate that makes him seem until it’s too late to stop. “Todoroki -”

“Are you okay?” Todoroki doesn’t look at him as he speaks, but he slows down just slightly so that Katsuki can keep pace with him. “Those burns looked pretty bad. I’m glad you went to Recovery Girl.”

Katsuki doesn’t know how to feel. “Todoroki,” he repeats, like that’s the magic fucking word, like the fact that he knows his classmate’s name will somehow endear the bastard to him. He swallows, then asks, “Why did you come to check on me?”

He’s not sure what he wants his classmate to say. He doesn’t know what would be better - for Todoroki to admit that he holds no personal affection towards Katsuki and just came to see him out of some sense of heroic obligation, or for him to give some kind of explanation, a reason as to why he was acting so cold earlier, because the only conclusion that Katsuki can draw from their previous conversation is that Todoroki fucking hates him.

But Todoroki doesn’t answer the question at all. He just asks, “Are you hungry?”

“No.” Katsuki thinks that he would throw up if he tried to eat right now, his stomach twisted into knots. “No, I’m not.” He slows to a halt, tired of trying to keep up. He feels stupid and weak, like there’s something he’s missing - some kind of joke that everybody knows except for him. “I just want you to answer me.”

Todoroki stops, glancing back at him. “I was worried,” he says, giving the same fucking excuse as earlier - it’s infuriating, but Katsuki barely feels angry, just exhausted. “Now, let’s go back to the dorms. You look really tired.”

Katsuki feels lost.

That’s the only way he knows how to describe it. He feels lost, like he’s been shoved out into some unknown territory without any way to reorient himself. All the things he took for granted are gone, all of his relationships corrupted and convoluted - he doesn’t know what to say next, doesn’t know how to tell whether or not his classmate is being honest.

He’s always been able to depend on Todoroki to tell the truth.

Now even that is ruined.

Katsuki’s eyes burn. He wants to disappear, wants to run away. He thinks that maybe he should, but then Todoroki starts walking again, and Katsuki is no better than a loyal dog - he always returns to the side of the people he cares about. 

“If you hate me, just say it,” Katsuki whispers, quietly enough that maybe his classmate won’t hear him.

Todoroki glances over at him, but doesn’t respond.

They walk to the dorms in silence.

Chapter Text

When they get back to the dorms, Katsuki gets about five seconds of peace and quiet before Todoroki opens his big mouth and says, “I think your friends are back from the café.”

Katsuki glances over at him, frowning. He doesn’t know how Todoroki knows that Kirishima and the others were going to a cafe in the first place, but he supposes that it makes sense - after all, this sudden switch up probably means that Katsuki’s friends were now closer with Todoroki than they were with Katsuki.

That thought makes him feel sick. 

So much has changed in such a short period of time. But even worse than that is the possibility that this isn’t sudden at all - maybe he was just too blind to see the signs that his classmates hated him.

Maybe he was just so desperate to be loved that he ignored everything that even hinted that nobody ever liked him at all.

Todoroki watches him expectantly, waiting for a response.

Katsuki looks away. “Well, I’m sure they don’t want to see me,” he says, and that sounds so stupid, so self-pitying. “I’m going to my room.”

Todoroki sighs, “Bakugou -”'

But Katsuki is already walking away, making a beeline for the elevator and stabbing his finger against the button. He’s thankful that Todoroki doesn’t follow him, but he feels his classmate staring at him as Katsuki steps into the elevator and selects his floor - and he knows that he’s to have to talk to Todoroki again sooner or later, because the bastard never knew when to give up.

The doors slide closed, and Katsuki allows himself to relax just slightly. 

He glances down at his arms, hidden by the sleeves of his jacket, and feels some kind of deep, aching dread. He wishes that Recovery Girl didn’t heal him so completely. He wishes that he never went to her at all, wishes that his self-inflicted injuries had been allowed to mend on their own. 

Maybe that would have helped. 

Katsuki is destructive by nature. He’s been this way ever since he was young, and his Quirk just fed into that habit - he breaks things, he ruins relationships, he makes people hate him so that he can feel justified in hating himself. 

He presses his fingers to his wrist, feels the heat of them sear into his skin, measuring his own pulse - and then he yanks his hand away, cursing himself for being so fucking weak.

He knows what would happen if he showed up again in Recovery Girl’s office. It hasn’t even been half an hour since he left - Aizawa-sensei is probably still there, and Katsuki can imagine the look of disappointment on his face if Katsuki went crawling back to him, tail tucked between his legs and fresh burns on his wrists. 

Katsuki is pathetic, selfish, unheroic - but he’s not cruel enough to make his teacher worry about him any more than necessary.

Fuck, he wishes that he never got any help at all. 

Katsuki knows that Aizawa-sensei thinks less of him now, and the worst is that Katsuki can’t even blame him. There’s no way to trust a person that constantly ruined things for themselves. 

Katsuki fucking hurt himself. He burned the skin off his arms for no good reason, then cried and sobbed and screamed like a child throwing a temper tantrum.

That’s not something a hero would do.

The elevator dings, announcing that they’ve arrived at the correct floor. Katsuki steps out when the door slides open, almost completely numb despite the shame burning hot in his chest. 

He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He doesn’t know what’s about to happen next - the only thing he knows is that things are surely about to get even worse.

This is only confirmed when a familiar voice says, “Bakugou!”

Fuck.

Katsuki grits his teeth, refuses to meet his classmate’s eyes. “Get out of my way,” he mutters, trying to inch around the person in front of him, but Kaminari is as persistent as ever, blocking Katsuki’s path.

“We were just talking about you!” Kaminari says, and Katsuki can hear the smile in his voice - bright and blinding, almost mocking in its brilliance. “Have you just been in the dorms this whole time?” He laughs, “Bet you didn’t know what to do without us, right?”

Each word is like an individual blow, a slap to the face. 

“What are you doing here?” Katsuki asks, giving up on trying to get around his classmate. “This isn’t your floor.”

“Ah, I was just talking to Kirishima.” Kaminari sounds so fucking cheerful. It grates on Katsuki’s nerves, makes him feel sick to his stomach, his fists curling at his sides and shaking with the urge to strike. “Hey, are you just going to go hang out in your room? That’s pretty boring.”

Katsuki doesn’t know what to do. He wants to leave, but at the same time, he’s desperate for this conversation, for some kind of human connection - he’s used to Kaminari being sharp and witty, this doesn’t even hurt that much. 

At least, that’s what he tries to tell himself.

The difference between this interaction and all the ones that came before today is that Kaminari no longer likes Katsuki, and Katsuki knows that. This isn’t playful banter. Katsuki isn’t capable of snapping back any clever remarks, not right now. 

Katsuki takes a deep breath, then another. His eyes burn, his chest hurts like there’s something gnawing at his heart, making it hard to breathe, hard to think.

He’s always upset about something - it’s been that way for as long as he can remember. 

This is just another emotional outburst, another over-the-top reaction, another tally mark on the long list of his flaws.

He just needs to calm down.

Katsuki wants Kaminari to like him. He wants all of his friends back.

And if that means he has to become something docile, something easy to hurt and mock… if that’s what they want him to be…

“Did you guys have a good time?” Katsuki asks.

His voice is quiet, all his anger and annoyance drained from him like air from a leaky balloon, leaving him deflated and numb. He meets his classmate’s gaze, and Kaminari blinks at him, smile still strung high across his face.

“At the restaurant,” Katsuki clarifies. “Or the café. Whatever it was.”

“I -” Kaminari blinks some more. His eyebrows furrow, he looks confused. “I mean, it was kinda quiet, but…”

“Well, I hope you had fun.” Katsuki has to fight to keep his voice steady, his tone calm and even as he brushes past his classmate, who doesn’t try to block his path this time. “I’m going to my room. I’ll see you in class, Kaminari.”

Katsuki walks away, feeling his classmate’s eyes burning into the back of his neck. He goes into his room, then locks the door behind him and stands still for several moments, wondering what he’s supposed to do next.

Katsuki walks across the room, sits on the edge of his bed, and thinks of ways to reinvent himself.

If his classmates don’t like him, then he can change. He can be adaptable, he can become something worthy of love, of friendship. He wants people to like him, despite the way he always flaunted his strength, his independence. The simple truth is that Katsuki is desperate for attention. He always has been. 

And now he’s being starved of it, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Katsuki doesn’t realize that he’s crying again until the first tear drips down his cheek. He wipes at his eyes in a harsh motion, sniffling quietly. He’s so weak, so pathetic - he feels sickened by it, disgusted with himself.

Maybe this is what was meant to happen all along. Maybe this was some planned intervention, an attempt to change Katsuki, make him easier to handle, take him down a notch.

Maybe this is a good thing.

Katsuki doesn’t get along with other people. He’s always felt like he was lacking something that made him human, like he was devoid of the coding and programming that would allow him to make friends easily, like he has never been fully able to integrate into society the way his peers seemed to do without even thinking about it.

The only way he has ever been able to make people pay attention to him is to be better than everyone else. He’s always had to be loud, flashy, the strongest in his class.

But he doesn’t need to do that anymore. He’s not the strongest, and he should stop pretending that he is.

Katsuki stares down at his hands, vision blurred with tears. He feels dizzy. His head spins, the world knocked off-kilter even though he’s sitting down. 

He’s not surprised that his friends got tired of him. He’s tired of himself, of the constant breakdowns and mood swings and inability to change, tired of the way his mind liked to blow things completely out of proportion, making him explode at the drop of a hat. 

He’s so fucking tired.

Every mistake he has ever made weighs on him, pressing down on his chest and leaving him unable to breathe. His fear steals the thoughts from his mind, his throat so tight that it’s impossible to speak. 

He should stop inflicting himself upon others. 

He’s a curse, a burden. 

He’s single-handedly responsible for everything bad that has happened since the start of the year - he has always been at the center of the problem, the catalyst for disaster. His friends have gotten hurt because of him, his classmates wounded, his teachers injured, his childhood hero completely put out of commission because Katsuki was too weak to defend himself.

Katsuki doesn’t want to believe all the horrible things his mind whispers to him, but he knows that it’s all true.

He’s nothing but bad luck. Everything goes wrong when he’s around. His relationships rot, he tears himself apart, and then depends on other people to put him back together - he’s so fucking selfish.

He’s being dramatic. He’s overreacting. He can’t blame people for hating him when he can barely even tolerate himself.

No, none of this is the fault of his classmates. 

It’s a surprise that they were even able to put up with him for this long. 

Katsuki isn’t crying anymore, completely numb. He feels cold, like all of his blood has frozen in his veins, like there’s no chance of him ever warming up again. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, still and silent and staring down at his own hands - the hands that have caused so much destruction and grief, the power that gave the hope of being a hero in the first place. He feels so useless. He feels like maybe it would be better if he disappeared, if he never showed his face again - he feels so guilty that his classmates even had to pretend to like for this long before revealing the truth.

Eventually, Katsuki stands up. His legs are weak, his steps shaky as he walks to the bathroom. He turns on the shower with trembling hands, making the water as hot as possible, then gets undressed and stands beneath the boiling hot pour, hoping that it will warm him up, make feel less like he’s carved out of ice and more like a human being.

He stays in the shower until the heat makes him feel dizzy, then stumbles out and dries himself off. He’s so tired, so weary - he gets dressed and collapses onto his bed, closing his eyes.

He’s been having nightmares recently, so he knows that there’s a good chance that he’ll wake up feeling even more exhausted than before.

But anything would be better than being awake right now.

He forces his thoughts to settle, burying his face in his pillow and taking deep, steady breaths. Some childish part of him hopes that this has all been nothing but a bad dream, that he’ll open his eyes and his friends will still love him.

But he knows that this is real, and there’s no way to fix it.

Really, the only thing he can do is ignore it - and so that’s exactly what he does.

As he drifts off to sleep, he only has a single thought:

I hope I don’t wake up.

Chapter Text

Katsuki’s dreams are sharp and violent. He’s always had nightmares, ever since he was little, but they’ve gotten worse in the past few months - too bad to be written off as nothing but a hyperactive imagination. 

He doesn’t tell anybody about them.

He feels ashamed that he can’t allow himself any peace even when he’s asleep, that his body is stuck in a constant state of fight-or-flight. His heart beats too fast, his mouth goes dry. He wakes up in a cold sweat, his mind nothing but a haze of fractured memories and a constant, pervading kind of fear.

He usually just takes a shower and walks it off. He has more important things to do than worry about a few bad dreams, even if they left him shaken for the rest of the day, the cycle repeating night after night until he was sure that his exhaustion was written all over his face.

But this isn’t a normal day.

When Katsuki wakes up, he simply lays in bed, staring at his ceiling as he allows his own thoughts to tear him to pieces. 

The sun is still shining through the crack of his curtains, sending a sharp slice of light across his floor. He should go outside, get some fresh air. He hasn’t even exercised today, too caught up in all the unexpected drama he found himself drowning in. He should run a few laps, sweat away all his worries, push himself past his limits in an effort to forget everything that has happened today.

There are so many things he should do, but every action feels about as useless as planting flowers in the shadow of a falling nuclear bomb. No matter what he does, it’s all going to be ruined by his inability to maintain anything worth keeping.

Katsuki curls up in bed, hides his face against his pillow. He feels so lost, his classmates’ words running through his mind on repeat, cruel and also amused, like they were having fun at his expense - like it was nothing but a joke to them, to break Katsuki down into tiny little pieces. He’s used to light jabs from time to time, but not like this, never like this.

This all feels like one big nightmare, but the scenery doesn’t change no matter how fast he blinks. The only thing the action does is force the tears from his eyes, his sobs muffled by the pillow he has pressed against his mouth. 

He really, truly just wants to know what he did wrong.

He’s been thinking so hard about it, combing every interaction through his mind, trying to find flaws in his speech or behavior, but he hasn’t been able to piece together enough to form a whole picture. He needs it spelled out to him, like he’s a child, being scolded and told that his actions hurt his friends. 

But his friends didn’t seem hurt at all. 

They just seemed happy to put him in his place.

Well, that’s fine. He can change for them. He hates pretending to be something he’s not, but he loves his friends more than that, so he’ll do anything to make them like him again. He’s pathetic, he’s selfish, he’s so fucking fake - but he can be trained like a dog if the incentive is good enough. 

He just wishes that his friends had asked him to change, that they had talked to him before deciding that this was apparently the best course of action to take. 

Katsuki has spent his entire life trying to catch up to the expectations placed on him. He’s been complimented so many times that the words lost meaning, told of all the potential he has by people that barely knew him at all, praised and lauded as something superior, perfect, better than the rest…

But real friendship was something that he had to work hard to earn. 

And he thought he finally did it, thought that he cracked the code, only for it to be taken from him in a single day. His world turned upside down, his classmates’ smiles turned sharp and mocking, and it was simply too much to handle. Even now, he can’t fully grasp what happened.

Maybe Aizawa-sensei is right. Maybe Katsuki really is blowing things out of proportion.

He feels so trapped in his own head.

Katsuki’s father always liked to call him an overthinker. There were times when Katsuki was younger when he would sit in silence for hours, agonizing over two simple choices - what snack to eat, what movie to watch, what games to play - and the minutes would just tick past, Katsuki’s thoughts spiralling out of control.

He thought he outgrew that. He seems to be uncovering a lot of old habits, recently.

Katsuki doesn’t feel any relief when he stops crying. He just feels numb, staring at one of the posters on his walls and wishing that there was some simple fix to this situation. He should go up to his friends and apologize for whatever it is that he did wrong - he should take the initiative, bite the bullet, force himself through a humiliation ritual and pray that they don’t leave him hanging. 

But what if they reject him? Even worse, what if they laugh at him?

He doesn’t know what he would do.

He would probably get angry, that automatic, knee-jerk reaction that he has carried with him for as long as he can remember. His rage drowned everything out, left his ears ringing in the wake of it, as purely destructive as the heat of his palms.

He wants to blame it on his Quirk. 

He wants to claim that his taste for ruin came from some genetic lottery, that his wires crossed the day the sparks flared to life in his cradled hands - but he knows that it has always been with him. 

There’s been something wrong with him from the day he was born, and he’s only gotten worse since then.

He wonders what his mother would think if she could hear the thoughts running through his head. She would probably scold him, tell him that she raised him better than this - and she’d be right. She did as best as she could with what she was given. 

The simple truth is that Katsuki simply isn’t good at being a person. He isn’t normal, and he never has been. No matter how hard he tries, his peers always seem to be able to pick up on that, sniffing him out, tolerating him until he became unbearable, because they were nice like that. Katsuki doesn’t deserve the kindness he has been shown up to now. He doesn’t deserve anything until he can learn how to behave like a normal human being. 

Katsuki feels so fucking sick.

His stomach hurts, and so does his head. He’s thinking so much that the thoughts cancel each other out, leaving nothing but white noise and a faint whisper at the back of his mind. He replays all the moments in which he said something wrong, laughed a little too loud, was too slow to pick up on the punchline of a joke, and the longer it continues, the more he becomes convinced that his classmates truly never liked him at all.

All this time, he has been nothing but a pity project. 

But what did he expect?

He’s known since the first day of school that he was surrounded by people that were better than him. Maybe not in terms of sheer strength, but power isn’t all that goes into the making of a hero. No, his classmates were so brave and capable and kind and understanding, and then there was Katsuki, rotting alone in his room because he’s too much of a fucking loser to give a simple apology.

Katsuki worries himself sick, physically ill. His stomach twists, and there’s an incessant ache at the base of his skull, leaving him trembling and weak. He’s so stupid. He’s doing this to himself, locked away in his dorm instead of enduring a few minutes of embarrassment in exchange for clearing up this whole misunderstanding.

That’s what this is. That’s what this has to be. 

If this isn’t just a misunderstanding, and his suspicions are confirmed that his classmates have never truly liked him, he doesn’t know what he would do. 

He would hate himself, he thinks. And he would pick apart every single relationship in his life, because surely that would mean that there were other people that didn’t like him, that were just pretending to tolerate him because it was the right thing to do - he would follow the trail to his teachers, heroes, his own parents. 

But maybe that would be the better option, maybe it would force him to actually change. 

Maybe that’s the entire point of this all - some kind of experiment, intervention. He never reacts to things unless they hurt him. Maybe this is the only way to drill the point home.

But he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know, and he never will unless he stops being such a fucking wimp. 

That’s what his mother would tell him if she was here. She would smack him on the head, tell him to get off his ass and fix the problem that he made. He almost wishes that she was here with him, even though he knows that it would all implode within seconds - he and his mother are too good at pissing each other off, their personalities so similar that it was like trying to force two like-pole magnets together. No matter how much force was used, they would never get along well enough to agree on anything. 

Nothing important, anyways. 

Katsuki rolls onto his back, glaring up at his ceiling. He’s self-aware enough to know that he’s running out of possibilities to overthink. He also knows that if he wants things to go back to normal, he needs to straight-up ask his friends what happened, what caused this sudden change in personalities. 

More than anything, he needs to know how to fix it.

Katsuki slowly drags himself out of bed, every movement a struggle against the part of him that just wants to get under the covers and sleep all this away. He shuffles over to his door and spends several long moments staring at him, hand frozen mid-reach, chest tight and vision blurring even though nothing has even happened yet.

Fuck, why is he so scared?

All he can think about is how off the common room seemed today, the atmosphere changing as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. He was able to tell that something was wrong, that his presence had changed his classmates’ moods. He can see it all so clearly, the memory a permanent mark on his mind.

Ashido’s polite smile. He can hear her voice in his ears: everything was fine until you showed up.

And the way his friends laughed…

If it had just been her saying it, he would’ve been able to brush it off. Ashido wasn’t mean-spirited, but her humor took some getting used to - sharp jabs, giggly insults that didn’t really hurt at all. But then the rest of his friends joined in, making everything worse. Even Kirishima didn’t do anything to stop it, even though he was the one that usually stepped in to moderate things, able to sense when people were feeding off of each other’s energy and swinging the situation out of control.

Katsuki’s hand drops back down to his side, curls into a fist.

He doesn’t want to go through that again.

The mere thought of subjecting himself to being nothing more than a laughingstock makes him feel so sick that he thinks he might throw up, his breaths shaky and his legs weak beneath him. His eyes burn, and the sharp sting of tears persists no matter how rapidly he blinks.

“Fuck,” Katsuki whispers, frustrated. He wipes at his face, sniffles harshly as he tries to regain his composure. He can’t believe that he just got his feelings hurt by his own thoughts - he probably isn’t even remembering things right. “Shut up, shut up, shut up…”

He’s so fucking pathetic.

He’s supposed to be a hero. He should be able to handle this responsibly, without breaking down at the mere thought of being laughed at. 

But every time he starts to calm down, he remembers something one of his friends said or did and starts crying again. He hears the words so clearly, sees everything like the scene is playing out right in front of him. His friends, his classmates, his parents - he knows what they think of him, but they can’t possibly loathe him more than he hates himself right now in this moment, trapped in his own thoughts.

He’s so stupid. He’s so selfish and self-pitying. He’s all the worst traits a person could ever have, combined and jammed into a single body, no room left for anything good or even decent. He’s horrible. He’s fucked up and ruined, and whenever somebody tries to fix that, all he does is lash out like some kind of wild animal.

It’s no fucking wonder that nobody likes him anymore, if they even ever liked him at all.

… He can’t do this.

Katsuki goes back to bed. He gives up like the loser he is, lays down and pulls his blankets over him in an attempt to block out the chill he feels creeping under his skin. He doesn’t usually sleep this much - he’s never been one to sit still and let the world pass him by - but right now he feels so exhausted at the mere thought of leaving his room, or even doing anything ever again. 

He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, doesn’t know why he feels so tired.

The only thing he knows is that, sooner or later, he’s going to have to rip the bandaid off. He’s going to have to leave, interact with his classmates, deal with their glares and their jokes - and maybe he’ll even figure out what went wrong.

But he doesn’t have to do that right now.

Katsuki pulls the covers over his head like a little kid hiding from monsters and closes his eyes, drifting off to sleep once more.

Chapter Text

Katsuki goes downstairs.

He can’t stay trapped in his room for even a second longer, no matter how desperately he wants to hide away from this. Every choice he makes feels like the wrong one, so he comes to the conclusion that he should pick the option that actually affects something in his life, even if the outcome will leave him feeling even worse than before.

He almost wants something bad to happen. He craves the pain, the destruction.

He just wants to feel anything but this horrible numbness that left him so hollow that the rattle of air in his lungs echoed throughout his entire body. He feels like he’s made of glass, like he’ll shatter at the slightest touch - and he just wants to break, wants to get it over with so he can hurry up and start picking up the pieces of his life.

Delaying the inevitable isn’t going to help anything. 

He knows that.

So he takes a deep breath, opens his door, and forces himself to step into the elevator before he can think too hard about what he’s doing. He jams his finger against the button for the common room, shaky and nervous by the time he arrives on the bottom floor.

This is just like what happened this morning. He stepped out to talk to his friends, and everything went wrong.

He feels so fucking sick.

Katsuki is tired of this. He just wants things to go back to normal. He doesn’t know why this is happening right now, doesn’t know why his life decided to implode on this specific day, but he just wants it to stop.

He steps out of the elevator, lifts his head, and comes face-to-face with literally the last person he wants to see right now.

“Bakugou!” Sero says. He sounds delighted to see Katsuki, the complete opposite of what Katsuki feels at the sight of him. “What are you doing out of your room? Did you get tired of being antisocial all day?”

Katsuki stares up at him, silent.

He doesn’t know what to say. He knows that Sero is making fun of him - his classmate liked to tease people, and always seemed to know the right way to get under Katsuki’s skin - but there’s something in his voice that freezes Katsuki in his tracks.

Sero grins at him, all shiny white teeth. “What, too good to answer?”

“Shut up.” Katsuki forgets all about how he’s supposed to change for the better. His thoughts leave his mind, and the only thing that exists right now is the person in front of him and his own seething anger, bright and violent. “Get out of my way. I’m going to the kitchen.”

Fuck, he’s messing this up. He should be apologizing, promising to be kinder, calmer, whatever his classmates want him to be, but he can’t get this morning out of his head. He can’t stop thinking about how Sero was one of the first people to cut straight through his heart, voice mocking as he said that Katsuki was so fucking desperate to hang out with his friends.

And it hurt so much to hear those words leave his classmate’s mouth, the pain only amplified by the fact that Sero was right.

He was right, and that was the worst part of all.

Katsuki has always been desperate to be wanted. He has always craved attention, affection, every form of human contact that he was given. He has always felt alienated from his peers, like he existed on a separate plane of reality, like he was missing some kind of intrinsic trait that would let him know how to act, how to be loved for something that was more than superficial. 

And he thought that he had finally gotten that, that he had cracked the code, only for that comfort to be ripped away in a second.

It’s almost funny how fast his life came crashing down.

“Hey, Bakugou.” Katsuki is snapped from his thoughts by a hard flick to his forehead, his eyes widening as he flinches away. “Why are you just staring at me? Didn’t you say you were going to the kitchen?”

Katsuki’s throat feels tight. He swats away his classmate’s raised hand, brushes past him without a backwards glance. “Fuck off,” he mutters, low enough that he knows there’s a real chance that Sero won’t even hear him. 

But he must be louder than he thought, because Sero calls after him, “This is why nobody likes you, Bakugou! You’re way too rude!”

Katsuki’s eyes start to burn. He hurries to the kitchen, desperate to get away from the mocking eyes of his classmate. He knows that he has no real purpose for being here - he isn’t hungry, and even if he was, he’s feeling so nauseous that he would simply throw up anything he ate - but he also knows that something bad would happen if he kept talking to Sero. 

He would say the wrong thing, overreact like he always does, and then Sero would just have even more ammunition to use against him.

Those last words sting: this is why nobody likes you.

He’s right. He’s fucking right. 

People only like Katsuki when they can get something from him. He can’t even blame them for that, because he’s so aware of the fact that he’s horrible, rotten to the core. The knowledge of his own faults and flaws is a constant presence at the back of his mind, pushed to the forefront by the events of today.

Katsuki blinks rapidly to clear his vision, then yanks open the fridge. He sees nothing but insubstantial snacks and his own cooking lining the shelves, packaged neatly and ready for anybody to eat. 

He should make something. He always feels better when he’s in the kitchen, a trait he got from his father. He needs to calm down, he needs to get ahold of himself, he needs to become something worthy of love.

More than anything, he needs to be useful.

But his body feels so heavy, and he almost wants to die. His conversation with Sero drained all the energy from him, leaving him so hollow and numb that it’s like he’s nothing but a shell of skin and bone, like he’ll crumble at the slightest touch.

His mother is right. He’s so fucking sensitive.

Katsuki slams the fridge door shut so hard that it makes the bottles lining the inner shelf rattle. He wants to punch a wall, want to destroy something, wants to ruin his life before someone else has the chance to do it for him - but he’s pathetic, and so all he does is cry.

He can’t help himself, can’t stop the way the tears sting at his eyes before spilling down his cheeks. He’s deathly aware of the fact that he’s still in the kitchen, that somebody could walk in at any time, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like as much of a big deal as it would be on any other day before this.

His classmates already know that he’s awful. 

It’s only fair that they know that he’s a little bitch, too.

Still, he tries to stay quiet. He remembers this happening a lot when he was younger, random bursts of tears that showed up whenever his emotions ran too high, but he’s too old for this. He shouldn’t be acting so weak, so childish. 

He’s pathetic.

Shit, he needs to get out of here before someone sees him like this.

Katsuki wipes frantically at his face, breathing hard. His chest hurts, his head aches with an insistent pain that refuses to go away or even let up for a single second. His bottom lip trembles even as he bites down so hard that he tastes blood, and his legs feel like they’re made of concrete - it’s a struggle to even put one foot in front of the other.

He peeks his head around the corner, looking around to see if there is anybody in the common room. He spots Sero sprawled out on the couch, watching television with his back to the kitchen, seemingly unaware of the fact that Katsuki was losing his mind just a few long strides away.

Katsuki forces himself to take a deep breath, mapping his path in his head. He just needs to hurry to the elevator and get back to his room before anybody else can see him.

And, after that…

He’ll have to have a conversation with somebody at some point. He can’t just keep hiding away from his classmates - weekends don’t last forever, after all. He’s being stupid, cowardly, a million other things that he can’t put a name to but make him feel sick to his core whenever he applies them to himself.

But he’s thinking too far ahead.

Right now, the only thing he needs to do is run away like the wimp he is.

Katsuki sniffles weakly, stealing one last glance at the back of Sero’s head before hurrying towards the elevator. He walks fast, almost running in an attempt to keep from being stopped, but it doesn’t work - Sero is training to be a hero as well, and his awareness of his surroundings is just as good as the rest of them.

“Leaving so soon?”

Katsuki curses internally, finger hovering just above the button that will call the elevator down to the bottom floor. He knows that he shouldn’t rise to the bait, but there’s something in Sero’s voice that makes his hackles rise, his skin prickling like he’s being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles. He mutters, “Leave me alone, Sero.”

“Wow!” Sero says. He somehow manages to sound both excited and mocking at the same time, amusement evident in his voice. “I didn’t even know that you knew my real name, Bakugou!”

“Shut up,” Katsuki whispers. “I’ve always known your damn name.”

Sero laughs. “Well, you could’ve fooled me.”

Katsuki feels cold.

He doesn’t have to think very hard to figure out what his classmates think of him. He’s an asshole, he’s rude, he’s selfish and mean and cruel. He doesn’t deserve their friendship or even their company. He’s lucky that he was tolerated this long - if faced with himself, there would be blood on his hands within the first five minutes of the interaction. 

But he cares. He really, really cares about his classmates, about his friends. 

He thought they knew that.

Katsuki has to blink fast to force back the tears burning in his eyes. He slams his thumb against the button over and over, desperate to get away, aware of the fact that he’s probably alerting Sero of his distress, but he doesn’t give a fuck anymore. 

He just needs this to be over. He was stupid for ever coming down here in the first place.

Katsuki rushes into the elevator as soon as the door opens, ducking out of sight and hitting the button to take him to his floor. He hopes that there will be nobody in the hall when he gets out, but his luck has always been shitty, and his heart drops when he spots a familiar head of red hair.

“Oh, Bakugou!” Kirishima says. He’s not even pretending to do anything productive, stationed right outside of Katsuki’s door like he’s standing guard. “There you are!”

Katsuki bristles, stepping out into the hall but not moving a single inch closer than that. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Kirishima’s grin is so bright, and the sight would be almost comforting if Katsuki didn’t feel so sick to his stomach. “Well, I live here,” he says. “Also, I wanted to talk to you. Are you doing anything important?”

No. No, Katsuki isn’t doing anything important. His current plan is to just hide in his bedroom for the rest of the day, and hopefully die in his sleep.

But he doesn’t say that.

Instead, he says, “Fuck off. I don’t wanna talk to you.”

Kirishima blinks at him, smile dimming slightly. “Oh,” he says. “I just wanted…”

He trails off, like he’s unsure of what he was about to say next.

Katsuki watches him for a long moment, then huffs a short, sharp laugh. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I got the message loud and clear.”

That must be why Kirishima is here, after all. His classmate is too kind for his own good, it makes sense that he would try to spell things out so that there was no room for any confusion or misunderstandings - he’s such a good person, he’ll try to communicate even with somebody he hates.

Katsuki’s heart aches in his chest, a constant pain. He walks forward, ignoring the way Kirishima is staring at him, and mutters, “Get out of my way,” as he opens his door. “I’m sure you have better things to do than waste your time talking to me.”

Kirishima reaches out, grabbing his wrist. “Bakugou -”

And, for some reason, Katsuki explodes. 

“Don’t touch me!” he snaps, yanking his arm away. His voice is too loud, echoing against the walls, the volume of it leaving his ears ringing with the combined noise of his own rapidly-beating heart. “Fuck you, Kirishima!”

If his classmates hate him, he hates them right back. It’s a mutual feeling. At least, that’s what he tells himself. 

Anything to make it a little easier to bear.

Kirishima stares at him, and Katsuki’s face flares with heat. He slams his door in his classmate’s face, locking it behind him, trying and failing to calm himself down. He feels so horrible, so sick to his stomach and disgusted by his own weakness.

He just alienated himself from the only classmate that spoke to him with any kindness at all.

He’s so fucking pathetic.

After several silent moments, he hears Kirishima walk away.

Katsuki stands there for a long time, replaying the conversation in his head. His own voice rings in his ears, loud and shrill, and he can’t stop thinking about the look on Kirishima’s face, that stunned expression, almost scared…

Katsuki knows that he has been crying far too much today, but he can’t stop the sobs that hiccup out of him as he buries his head in his hands. He has the fleeting thought that he should let his palms ignite, burn his brain right out of his skull, but he forces the urge back in favor of crying like a baby, the tears coming too fast to control.

He ruins everything. 

He just had a chance to plead his case, to bring his friends back into his life, and he blew it because he was too much of a fucking asshole to calm down for even a single second.

He’s so stupid. He doesn't deserve friends, doesn’t even deserve the kindness of his teachers. He’s going to end up rotting and alone, and the only person he can blame is himself and his stupid inability to act like a normal fucking human being.

Katsuki cries so hard that he almost makes himself sick, bile rising in the back of his throat. He chokes on his tears, wiping frantically at his face in a way that does nothing but stick the water to his skin, his chest heaving as he struggles to breathe past the weight pressing down on his chest. 

He wants to die.

The thought hits him like a physical blow.

He has thought about dying, sure. He has even considered doing it himself several times over the last few years. 

But those thoughts were always vague, a split-second wish for death. There was an almost fantastical layer of unreality to them, like he was wishing for such a thing only because he knew that it wouldn’t happen. He would look at the other side of the fence, see that the grass was greener, and know that he wouldn’t be able to touch it for a long, long time.

But this time, the thought is plain and simple, and it carries so much weight.

His mind clears for just a moment, leaving nothing but the echo of the words ringing in his skull.

He wants to die.

Katsuki knows how easily a life can be taken. He’s thought about it many times before: the flash of a knife, the snap of a rope. He curls his fingers around his own throat, feels his pulse beating too fast under his skin, and wonders what would happen when it finally stilled forever.

… He’s so fucked up.

Fresh tears form in Katsuki’s eyes as he drops his hand back to his side. He can see it all so clearly - his body lying cold and still, his eyes dull like roadkill he would find on the side of the road - but he forces those thoughts from his head. 

Katsuki staggers to the bathroom, footsteps an uneven beat against his floor, and sticks his head under the faucet. The cold water is a shock to his system, breath hitching in his throat as he looks up and stares at himself in the mirror.

His face is stained a permanent shade of red, the flush spreading hot over his cheeks and burning at the tips of his ears. 

He looks like shit.

Well, he feels like shit, so it’s only fair that his appearance matches that.

Katsuki blinks the water from his vision. His hair is plastered to his forehead, eyes bloodshot and unfocused, and he feels so sick, so wounded…

He wants to die, but he doesn’t deserve it.

Not until he has fixed this mess that he made.

But, right now, all he does is use his shirt to wipe off his face, taking a deep breath as he looks around his room. He keeps his dorm neat and tidy, but his hands itch to do something useful, so he sets to work on making his bed, straightening his desk, putting things back in their proper places - anything to keep his mind off of the situation he has only made worse with his insistence on doing all the wrong things.

By the time he finishes cleaning, his room is spotless, the sky is dark, and his body aches with exhaustion. He changes out of his clothes, which stink of cleaning products, and collapses onto his bed, burying his face in his pillow. 

He doesn’t feel any better than he did a couple hours ago, but at least now he has an excuse to be tired.

Katsuki completely ignores his usual bedtime routine in favor of staring at his ceiling for an unfathomable amount of time, wondering how he can possibly fix this. He should be responsible, should just go right up to Kirishima and apologize, hoping that his classmate would serve as a bridge to close the gap that has formed between him and the rest of his peers, but he knows that he’s not going to do that.

Katsuki also knows that he deserves to be alone. He’s too stubborn, too selfish, too fucked up in all the worst ways. He ruins things for himself, then cries like a baby when he has to deal with the consequences of his own actions. 

His thoughts are always the worst at night.

Katsuki sniffles, tears leaking from his eyes. He doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring. He hopes that things go back to normal, that this was all some trick of the universe to remind him of how good he has it, but he knows that when he wakes up, things will only go downhill from there.

He just wants everything to be okay again, but that’s too much to ask.

Katsuki falls asleep with tears on his face and a heaviness in his chest, hoping against all hope that he will never wake up again.

Chapter Text

Katsuki wakes up in the middle of the night, as tired as he was when he fell asleep. His stomach hurts, cramping with hunger, and every breath sends a spike of pain through his skull. 

He needs to get up.

But just the thought of moving makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Katsuki lays there for a long time, too tired to do anything productive but in too much discomfort to doze back off. His thoughts are hazy, barely-there fragments of memories that are just present enough to be a solid weight on his chest. He remembers going down to the common room and coming back up in tears, but worse than that is the confrontation that happened in the hallway just a few paces away - he snapped, like a bad dog, something uncontrollable. He let his anger get the best of him. He showed his true colors, scared away the only person willing to hear him out, and ruined things for himself, like he always does.

Now would be a good time to start crying again, but Katsuki doesn’t have any more tears to spare.

Katsuki rolls onto his side, staring at one of the posters on his wall.

… He can’t keep acting like this. He’s drowning in self-pity, the weight of it crushing the air from his lungs. He needs to be better, stronger, needs to handle this situation with the strength expected from a hero-in-training, but it’s so hard.  

Every time he tries to make things right, something goes wrong. 

He knows that he’s the cause of a lot of his own problems, but this feels different. This feels like it’s intentional, like all of his classmates are plotting against him, working towards a shared goal to make him feel as terrible as possible.

But that doesn’t make any sense. He’s overthinking things, trying to find a way to exempt himself from taking responsibility for his own downfall. He can’t blame his classmates, he can’t blame his friends - the only person he has to blame is the one he hates the most in the entire world.

Katsuki closes his eyes for several seconds, takes a deep breath.

He needs to get up. He needs to make himself useful. He knows that that’s the only way he’ll start to feel better about any of this.

Katsuki gets out of bed with what feels like a herculean amount of effort, his bones so heavy that he thinks they might rip through his skin and clatter to the floor. He glances at his reflection before he leaves, taking in the sight of his bloodshot eyes and messy hair, then shakes his head and walks out the door before he can second-guess what he’s doing. He needs to get food, and then he can mope around until sunrise - that’s all the time he’ll allow himself before he forces things to go back to normal, one way or another.

When he gets down to the common room, he’s already expecting somebody to be there, but the sight of a shadowy figure lounging on the couch still makes him flinch. He relaxes just slightly when the person sits up, bright green eyes blinking out at him from the darkness.

“Deku.” Katsuki keeps his voice carefully neutral. “What are you doing down here?”

“Kacchan!” Deku blinks at him, wide-eyed and nervous. His smile is a mask, stretched like hard plastic across his face, fake in all the worst ways - or maybe Katsuki is just seeing things, assuming the worst. “I - um, what are you doing down here? It’s really late!”

Katsuki’s nerves are completely shot, hands curling into fists at his sides as he braces himself for this conversation to fall apart. “Yeah, no shit.” 

“Couldn’t sleep?” 

For what it’s worth, Deku sounds like he’s genuinely curious, but Katsuki has always been defensive, especially around him. He can’t help but feel like he’s being mocked.

“I can’t sleep either,” Deku continues, oblivious. “I had a really busy day.” pauses, then asks, “What did you do today, Kacchan? I didn’t really see you around. I thought that you were gonna go to that café with your friends, but they said that you were too tired…?”

Katsuki feels vaguely ill.

Deku backtracks, “I mean, I’m just curious! I’m not, like, trying to get into your personal business or anything.”

“Shut up.” Katsuki’s head hurts, an incessant ache that makes him feel sick to his stomach. He can’t handle this, his mind on high-alert, scanning every single word for backhanded comments or double meanings - he’s almost desperate to be hated. At least that would give some meaning to the nausea churning in his gut. “Go away, Deku. I’m busy.”

To prove how busy he is, he turns on his heel and walks to the kitchen. He sways a bit on his feet, dizzy and light-headed, but forces himself to move in as straight of a line as possible. He flicks on the kitchen light, takes a shaky breath as soon as he’s out of sight of Deku’s curious gaze.

… There was something weird about that conversation.

He might be overthinking it, but Deku was acting strangely, like he knew something that Katsuki didn’t. But, at the same time, he seemed totally oblivious - when he mentioned that Katsuki’s friends said that he was too tired to join them at the café, that only left two options: he knew what happened and was pretending otherwise to spare Katsuki’s feelings, or one of Katsuki’s friends had lied about it to him, for some unknown reason.

There’s so much going on, and Katsuki can’t make any sense of it at all.

He waits several moments until he hears the elevator ding, peeking around the corner to make sure that Deku has left, then opens up one of the cabinets and digs around until he finds Kaminari’s stash of cheap snacks. He picks out a bag of chips, glancing at the nutrition label before deciding not to give a fuck. He hasn’t eaten today, and he’s too tired to actually cook, so he’ll tide himself over with these empty calories until dawn breaks and he forces himself to get over this whole fiasco.

Katsuki leans against the counter as he eats, chips crunching loudly in the silence. He doesn’t really care for the flavor of them, but beggars can’t be choosers - his mother loved to tell him that whenever he complained about something stupid.

He gets himself a glass of water, drinks it all. His fingers are greasy, his head still hurts, but he feels marginally better than he did when he woke up. That probably had something to do with the fact that he just had the first somewhat normal conversation of today, paired with the half-assed meal he just ate, sitting heavy in his stomach but better than nothing.

Katsuki sighs, wiping his hands off on his shirt in a rare display of messiness. He’ll just change when he gets back to his room. He should probably eat something else, bask in the peace of finally having the common room and kitchen to himself, but he doesn’t know if he’d be able to handle the silence for much longer than this. He’s used to being asleep by this time, waking up early in the morning to work out and train - even when he had nightmares, he just stayed in his room until his alarm rang to start the day. He knows that some of his classmates are night owls, but it feels weird to join their ranks, even for just a few hours.

… It’s weird, actually. 

There should be more people down here.

Katsuki frowns, glancing at the clock displayed on the microwave. He wonders if everybody just collectively decided to fix their sleep schedules, or if they simply didn’t feel like hanging out in the common room after-hours. 

Whatever the reason, it’s weird.

Katsuki’s skin prickles as he sets his glass in the dishwasher before hurrying to the elevator. He presses the button, nearly jumping out of his skin when the doors open. 

He’s being paranoid, irrational.

But, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop his hands from shaking.

Too many things have been going wrong recently. He doesn’t want to add anything else to the list. He jams his thumb against the button that will take him to his floor, then holds tight onto the railing, dread crawling up his spine as the elevator creeps upwards. 

He needs to get himself together, needs to stop being so fucking scared. Because that’s exactly what he is: scared. He’s terrified that something else will go wrong.

The doors slide open, and Katsuki tentatively steps out into the hallway. His socks snag against the carpet, tension woven tight through every muscle of his body, breath caught in his throat as his eyes lock on his door. He’s just a few steps away. 

Just a few more steps, and then he can lock himself away for the rest of the night.

But he’s frozen, paralyzed by a fear that he can’t quite name.

A voice breaks the silence:

“You’re up late.”

And Katsuki reacts like a gunshot, reflexes trained and perfected until there’s no room to think - just pure action, the swing of his arm and the crack of his fist connecting with his classmate’s jaw.

“Ow!” Ashido yelps, reeling back. She stumbles away, clutching at her face, eyes wide as she stares at Katsuki. “What the fuck, Bakugou?”

Katsuki’s hand drops limply to his side, knuckles stinging with the impact of the blow. 

“Shit,” Ashido mutters, wincing in pain as she presses her fingers to her mouth. Her lip is bleeding, sharp teeth smeared with red. “Fuck, that hurts.”

Katsuki stares at her. He feels sick, he feels sick, he thinks he might throw up if he doesn’t get out of here right now. He blinks and blinks and blinks, but the scene remains the same - his friend, bleeding in front of him, bleeding because of him. 

He’s horrible. He’s terrible.

He’s all the worst things a person could ever be.

“I -” His voice catches in his throat, air trapped in his chest. “I didn’t mean -”

Ashido frowns at him. “Hey, calm down,” she says, in the tone you would use to scold a rowdy child. “I don’t see why you’re so upset. You’re not the one that’s hurt.” Her eyes scan Katsuki up and down. “Wow, you look like shit. What are you even doing up this late?”

Katsuki’s head spins. He can’t keep track of anything, attention split between the blood on his classmate’s face and the words she’s hurling at him. 

Ashido waits several seconds, then scoffs and digs her phone out of her pocket. Holding one hand to her mouth, she uses the other to type several words out, then glances back up at Katsuki. “Seriously, dude. You look like you need to sit down. I don’t see why you’re so tired, it’s not like you did anything all day.”

The blood is bright red, dripping down Ashido’s chin.

Katsuki whispers, “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.” Ashido takes a shaky breath. Her gaze darts down to Katsuki’s hand, then back up to his face. “Get out of my way. I’m going to Eijirou’s room.”

But Katsuki can’t move. He feels so horrible, so sick, he can’t stop looking at the forming bruise on his friend’s face, helpless with the knowledge that his own hair trigger reflexes put it there. If he had paused for just a second -

“Bakugou.” Ashido’s voice is harsh. “Move.”

If Katsuki was smart, he would take this opportunity to ask her what was going on. He would say that he’s sorry, apologize a million times for this infraction and all the ones that came before, all the rules of social interaction that he wasn’t even aware that he was breaking - but he isn’t smart. He’s proven that time and time again today. He isn’t smart. He’s so fucking stupid that he makes himself sick to the the stomach. 

He should apologize. He should do something right for once in his life.

But Ashido shoves past him in a rush of motion, and Katsuki is sensible enough to know that he shouldn’t reach out and grab her. He roughhouses with her sometimes, but this is different. He just punched her in the fucking face, for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t want to make this situation any worse than it already is.

And so he just lets her leave, chest tight as he watches her slam Kirishima’s door closed behind her. He stares at it for several seconds, almost expecting for Kirishima to come out and ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing, but nothing happens.

That’s almost worse.

Katsuki is still too shocked to even cry, hands shaking as he curls them into tight fists at his sides. He takes an unsteady breath, and then another. His stomach twists. He doesn’t know how he will be able to look Ashido in the eye after this, knowing that his hands brought pain upon her for literally no reason at all - he got startled like a little kid, and acted like one, and somebody he cared about got hurt because of him.

He’s so fucking horrible.

Katsuki knows that he has a short temper, but he can’t even brush this off as it being because he got mad at something. No, this was pure adrenaline, an automatic reaction.

And what does that say about him? 

Why is it his first instinct to lash out, to inflict pain?

He doesn’t want to be like this, but he doesn’t know any other way to exist. He has always been like this, too quick to anger, too easy to provoke. He wishes that he could be something else, but nothing works, and it never gets better no matter how hard he tries to become someone tolerable and reasonable and easy to love.

Katsuki’s hands are too hot. His nails bite into his palms, smoke curls from his skin. He wants to burst into flames, wants to burn until there’s nothing left of him but ash and dust and a stain of dried blood on the carpet.

Katsuki can’t even cry. He’s so fucked up that he can’t even cry.

He takes a deep, shaky breath, then quietly walks to his door. He opens it, steps inside his room, and shuts it silently behind him, his movements careful and almost robotic. He’s running on autopilot right now, chest barely moving with each breath, air caught at the back of his throat as he changes his shirt and sits down on the edge of his bed.

Katsuki doesn’t even bother trying to go back to sleep.

He’d have nothing but nightmares, anyways.

Chapter Text

Katsuki is still awake when dawn breaks on the horizon.

His body aches with exhaustion, and he feels sick with dread when he thinks about what the future will hold. He watches as the light of the rising sun peeks through the slats of his blinds, nails clawed into the sheets at his sides, palms burning holes through the fabric, and struggles to keep from branding himself with the imprint of his own hands.

He could do it. He could hurt himself and hide the burns better this time. 

He deserves it, even.

The logical, reasonable thing to do is take himself off the map. His friends hate him, his parents don’t have time for him, and he’s nothing but a burden to his teachers. All of that could be excused, if not for the fact that he just hurt his classmate.

When a bad dog bites, you don’t try to retrain it. 

You just put it down. 

That’s what a normal person would do, anyways. There were always some people that were so soft, so gentle and caring, and they always ended up making things worse in the long run.

Time passes slowly, and Katsuki doesn’t move at all. He feels the rise and fall of his chest with each breath he takes, feels his heartbeat hammering against his ribs, but he doesn’t feel alive at all. He feels separated from his own body, like he’s stuck halfway outside of himself, numb and unfeeling.

There’s a knock at his door.

Katsuki lays there for several moments, hoping that the person will go away, but the rapping of knuckles on wood persists, so he reluctantly drags himself up and across his room. 

He calls out, “What do you want?”

“Bakugou.”

Katsuki freezes. He’s not the best at recognizing people by voice alone - or recognizing people at all, really - but the person who just spoke does so in a tone that’s unmistakable, flat and reasonable but with the slightest bit of anger to let him know that he’s just fucked something up.

His teacher says, “Open the door. I need to speak with you.”

Katsuki blinks, then blinks again. He’s never heard of Aizawa-sensei personally meeting with a student in their own dorm - the hero seemed to avoid interacting with his students as much as possible outside of school hours - so he knows that he must have done something truly heinous. His chest starts to ache, and he rubs at it idly as he takes a step back - his stupid heart, acting up again. The motion makes his eyes catch on a flash of purple-red, and he looks down at his hand to find that his knuckles are bruised.

Aizawa-sensei says, “Bakugou.”

Katsuki’s head snaps up, breath catching in his throat as he realizes why his teacher is here.

Aizawa-sensei knocks on the door again. “Bakugou, I know you’re in there.”

Katsuki swallows. He starts, “I -” and the memories flash through his head, rapid-fire: his fist connecting with Ashido’s jaw, the look on her face, the way her eyes widened before narrowing when she realized who hit her. He thinks about the events that lead up to it, the knowing glances and mocking laughs and horrible words that struck him like a knife to the heart, and he can’t fucking stand it, the pressure mounting in his chest until his hands curl into trembling fists at his sides. 

He spits out, “Fuck off.”

Shit. Shit, he shouldn’t have said that - not right now, not to his teacher. His nails dig into his skin, sparks popping from his palms and making the air smell of smoke and something sweet. 

Aizawa-sensei says, “Bakugou, open the door.”

Katsuki grits his teeth. His clothes are rumpled and his hair is a mess. He wonders if he can use his unkempt state as an excuse to delay the inevitable, then decides against it. Aizawa-sensei sounds like he’s getting impatient, and Katsuki doesn’t want to make him any angrier than he already is. 

So, he opens the door. He doesn’t really have any other choice.

Aizawa-sensei stands before him, tall and formidable. He’s dressed in the simple black jumpsuit of his hero uniform, his capture weapon coiled around his neck like a friendly snake, his eyes hard as he gazes down at Katsuki. 

Katsuki stares back at him, still and silent. He has a thousand things he could say, a million excuses he could make, but not a single sound leaves his mouth. He doesn’t want to make the situation worse than it already is.

He’s good at that, at making things worse. At taking good things and corrupting them, digging his nails into the seams of everything he loves and pulling until they shatter to pieces in his hands - his classmates, his friends, everybody he loves.

He ruins everything.

Aizawa-sensei says, “I’d like to talk to you about something.”

Katsuki’s lips twist into a smile, bitter and sardonic. “I’m sure.”

And, just like that, he’s set the tone of the conversation. He hates himself for it, for being so fast to fire back a sarcastic reply like he has something to prove, but it’s instinctive at this point. He doesn’t know how else to be a person. 

“Let’s go down to the common room,” Aizawa-sensei says, not rising to the bait. “I don’t want to disturb your classmates.”

With that, he turns on his heel and walks towards the elevator. He doesn’t even look over his shoulder to make sure that Katsuki is following after him, like he knows that Katsuki will simply do as he’s told without complaint, and Katsuki is silent as he does exactly that. The elevator ride is painfully awkward, and Katsuki dutifully trails after his teacher as the man leads him to the common room area - all bark and no bite, just like his mother has accused him of being many times before.

“Sit down,” Aizawa-sensei says, turning on one of the lamps. The light of it casts his face in shadow, makes him look almost eerie. “I need to get back on patrol, so I don’t have much time to talk. I just wanted to clear something up before I started making assumptions.”

Katsuki reluctantly sits down, back unnaturally straight and hands in his lap. He feels vaguely ill, shoulders tensing as his teacher takes a seat in the chair across from him.

A full minute ticks by, neither of them willing to break the silence, and Katsuki has never been a patient person.

“Well?” he asks. “Are you going to get mad at me?”

Aizawa-sensei frowns. “I’m not mad.”

“Right.” Katsuki glances away for a second, unable to bear the weight of his teacher’s gaze, and then looks at him once more. “Whatever. Can we just get this over with?”

Aizawa-sensei watches him for a few moments, then sighs and settles back against his chair. “Bakugou,” he says. His voice is calm and almost gentle, and the sound of it would be almost soothing if Katsuki’s wasn’t so high-strung right now, every muscle tensed in preparation to run. “Is it true that you hit your classmate?”

And Katsuki is a lot of things, but he isn’t a liar. 

At least, he tries not to be. He tries to be good, tries to be honest, but there’s just something broken inside of him that sharpens his voice and leaves his responses bitterly sarcastic, like the filter between his brain and his mouth is destroyed, twisted, warped.

He spits out, “Shut up.”

Aizawa-sensei’s eyes narrow. “Ashido was telling the truth, then,” he says, and Katsuki’s heart drops to the pit of his stomach. “There are certain rules that everybody has to follow, Bakugou. You’re not supposed to fight with your classmates unless it’s a supervised training session.”

“It wasn’t a fight,” Katsuki says, and this time he’s telling nothing but the truth. “I - I just - she was there, and she surprised me, and…”

He trails off, trapped in the memory of his fist connecting with Ashido’s jaw. He was capable of throwing worse punches than that, but the blow had been hard enough to stun, the impact splitting her lip and swelling her cheek and leaving her staring at him with those wide, scared eyes for just a split second before she remembered that she was supposed to hate him - and then she looked at him with anger, furious, the disgust on her face enough to freeze Katsuki in place and leave him hollow, numb.

But it wasn’t a fight.

No, it was just Katsuki’s stupid, skittish instincts that led to this moment right now.

“I’m not mad at you,” Aizawa-sensei says, and Katsuki already knows what’s about to come next, cringing in preparation of the words, “I’m just disappointed. I understand that today has been a long day, but that’s not an excuse to lash out at your classmates. I wish that you had come to me instead of allowing your emotions to gain control of you.”

“That’s not what happened.” Katsuki’s chest feels tight, eyes stinging with those stupid crybaby tears that have hounded him for as long as he can remember. “I didn’t pick a fight with her. I didn’t mean to hurt her at all.”

But that’s a lie, because he threw the punch with the intention to harm. 

That’s all his hands are good for.

He’s nothing but a monster, leaving a path of destruction in his wake, the mark of his burning hot fingers seared into every surface that he can touch - metal, wood, skin. Nothing is safe from him. He’s not even safe from himself.

Aizawa-sensei sighs. He’s obviously exhausted, the shadows under his eyes darker than usual, and Katsuki feels guilty as if he painted them there with his own two hands. 

“Alright,” Aizawa-sensei says. “Tell me what happened, then. Don’t leave anything out.”

Katsuki stares at him, suddenly at a loss for words. His mind is blank, like it has never experienced a thought a day in his life, and even his famous ability to bullshit excuses seems to have come to a complete stop, leaving him silent and scrambling for something to say.

He could start the story from this morning, mention how all of his friends were suddenly acting strange, but he already did that. He stumbled to the infirmary and cried his heart out to his teacher, then said that everything would be alright, that he was fine - and both of those statements were clearly lies, because if he was telling the truth, Aizawa-sensei wouldn’t be in front of him right now and his knuckles wouldn’t be bruised from punching his classmate in the face.

If he was fine, none of this would be happening. 

And if he was normal, all of his friends wouldn’t have turned their backs on him in the first place.

All of this boils down to the fact that Katsuki is inherently flawed. 

He’s been faulty since the day he was born, pieced together with all the wrong parts, and people only tolerated him because of his strength. Here, he has no special abilities to speak of. He isn’t better than anybody else, and so there’s no reason for his peers to respect him, but he thought that he was past that. He thought that they were his friends, that they liked him despite all of the terrible things he was capable of, but, no. He was deluding himself this entire time, so desperate to be wanted that he fabricated relationships, overestimated his importance to his classmates, and now it’s all falling apart around him because nobody is willing to play along with this fantasy world that he has trapped himself in.

That’s it. 

That’s the only explanation.

The pieces click together with a snap so jarring that it takes his breath away. None of his classmates have ever liked him, but they were kind people, so they allowed him to hang out with them and join in on movie nights and do all the things that friends would do - but this entire time, he has been stuck in a space one step away from being a simple acquaintance. 

He doesn’t know why he didn’t see it sooner.

Aizawa-sensei is speaking, but the sound of his voice has long-since faded to background noise. Katsuki watches him, dazed, and comes to the conclusion that his teacher doesn’t like him, either. He doesn’t belong in this school for heroes, doesn’t deserve to occupy the same seats and share the same air as people who were so much better than him.

“I’m sorry,” Katsuki says. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

Aizawa-sensei falls silent, stares at him for several long seconds, and then says, “I’m not asking for an apology, Bakugou. I just want to know what happened.”

“If that was all you wanted, you would have waited until morning,” Katsuki says. His voice trembles slightly, but he’s more sure about this than he is about anything else that has happened tonight. “You’re just here because you want to make sure that I don’t hurt anyone else.”

“Is it a crime to be worried about my students?” Aizawa-sensei doesn’t deny the charges, just subverts them like a good liar. “I’m worried about you, Bakugou. I always am.”

Katsuki can see right through him.

He wonders if this is how lunatics feel when they strike gold, find that one piece of information that makes their wild conspiracy seem so real and true. He feels as if all the loose ends have been tied up in his mind, like all the dots have been corrected, lines crossed: none of the people here like him. 

When he looks at the world with that perspective, everything makes sense.

“You’re not worried about me,” Katsuki says. “I’m not stupid, Aizawa-sensei. I’m not a fucking idiot. You can’t trick me with all your stupid textbook answers - I don’t need you to lie and tell me that you care when I know you don’t. I didn’t need anybody to pretend that they liked me!”

Why don’t they understand that?
Katsuki is fine with being disliked. He can even handle being hated.

But, being strung along, taunted, teased with the idea of friendship and love…

That was a new kind of torture. 

Katsuki feels sick. His head hurts, his breaths come sharp and fast like they’re being yanked from his chest, eyes burning as he furiously blinks back tears. He’s a complete mess, and he hates the fact that somebody is here to bear witness to how badly he’s falling apart.

“What are you talking about?” Aizawa-sensei asks. He sounds so concerned, but it’s all fake, it has to be fake, if he’s being genuine about it that means that Katsuki has somehow tricked him into caring for him and that’s even worse. “Your friends contacted me because they were worried about you. Ashido said that you looked sick, tired - they care about you, Bakugou. We all do. I just want to make sure that you’re okay.”

“I’m not crazy,” Katsuki says. His mouth is dry, and his hands twitch with the urge to hit something. “Stop treating me like I’m crazy! I know what’s going on!”

This is some kind of coordinated effort to take him down a notch, a multilayered scheme to put him in his place. He doesn’t know how many people are in on it. He can’t take anything at face value, not anymore - hell, he can’t even trust his teacher. He glares at Aizawa-sensei and sees concern written in every line of the man’s face, but all he feels is sick with guilt and anger, and that horrible anticipation of something going wrong.

He’s so fragile right now. 

One wrong move, and he’ll shatter completely.

Katsuki hides his face in his hands, palms burning hot against his flushed skin. He’s on the verge of crying, but no tears come, leaving only ragged, desperate gasps of air that make his chest hurt and his shoulders shake.

Aizawa-sensei reaches towards him. “Bakugou -”

“Don’t touch me!” Katsuki snaps, and his teacher’s hand instantly retreats. “Leave me alone, I don’t need your fucking help! I don’t need any of you!” 

His vision blurs, and he feels both hot and cold at the same time, caught between two extremes: he wants people to like him, but he knows that it’s better to be hated than merely tolerated. 

It’s not fair.

He keeps repeating that in his mind, a childish mantra - this isn’t fair.  

He thought that he was doing so good. He thought that he had people that loved him despite all his attempts to avoid that. He thought that he could finally belong somewhere, befriend people that didn’t just listen to him because they feared the destruction he could cause, and then this happened.

It’s not fair.

“Look at me,” Aizawa-sensei says, and Katsuki’s attention snaps to him, the instinct well-trained from months under the hero’s care. “I’m not sure why you seem to think that your friends hate you, but they don’t. I remember you mentioning this when you were in the infirmary, but I didn’t give it much thought, which is entirely my fault, but…” He sighs. “Have you tried talking to them? I’m sure that this is all a misunderstanding.”

… The one person trying to help isn’t even taking him seriously.

This isn’t fucking fair.

“What do you want?” Katsuki asks, the words out before he can stop them, and Aizawa-sensei frowns at him, eyebrows furrowing. “Why are you here? I’m telling you what’s going on, and you’re just - you keep saying that I’m making shit up! I don’t know what to do, I - I don’t know what I did wrong -”

If he knew what he did wrong, he would be able to fix it.

But nobody is telling him anything.

“Bakugou.” Aizawa-sensei’s hands are up like he’s trying to soothe a wild animal, his expression neutral and his voice flat as he says, “Calm down.”

Katsuki stares at him for several long seconds, stunned into silence. Those words lodge deep in his soul, flip some kind of hidden switch, leaving him breathless in the wake of them.

Aizawa-sensei opens his mouth to say something, maybe backtrack, but it’s too late:

Katsuki explodes.

He used to do this all the time when he was younger. His peers knew all the right buttons to press to make him go blind with rage, vision whiting out, racing thoughts replaced with nothing but the need to destroy - his middle school friends called it going nuclear, and watched the fallout with knowing smiles on their faces. 

He isn’t even aware of the words leaving his mouth, just knows that they’re horrible because he wants them to be.

Aizawa-sensei’s expression is lost to the haze of Katsuki’s mind, his voice nothing but a low murmur, indistinct, and Katsuki is crying too hard to hear anything properly. At least, he thinks that he’s crying. He must be, because his face is wet with tears, eyes stinging, chest heaving as he clamps his hand around his own wrist and burns himself in an attempt to bring himself back to reality.

That’s how it always works. 

A hard reboot, his mind forced to react to the pain - but, this time, his skin barely even sizzles before the flames of his Quirk die out.

“Are you insane?” Aizawa-sensei’s voice is too loud, grating in Katsuki’s ears. He has to resist the urge to cover them. “Bakugou, put your hands down - put them down! Now!”

Katsuki’s head feels foggy. He needs the pain, craves it like a drug, stares dumbly at his teacher and wonders why a hero that always preached about being logical couldn’t see that this was the most rational choice right now. He hurts himself, makes himself better. It was a simple, homemade recipe for success, one that he has followed since the day he realized that self-inflicted pain was the key to control.

Aizawa-sensei’s eyes are so wide that Katsuki can see the whites of them, irises flashing red as he erases the heat from Katuski’s hands. “Bakugou, I’m your teacher.” He sounds like he’s grasping at straws. “Listen to me.”

The barely-there burn that Katsuki had managed to inflict stings a little as he digs his nails into it. “No,” he says. “No, I need…”

He needs some kind of physical reminder of his own weakness. He needs to look at a wound and be able to think, I put that there. He needs to know that he’s the reason for all of this, that he’s the root of his own pain, that he has nobody to blame but himself.

And some horrible, self-pitying part of him whispers that maybe this will make his teacher take him seriously.

Aizawa-sensei’s Quirk falters for just a second, and the burn inches deeper. 

The next thing Katsuki knows, Aizawa-sensei is forcing him out of the door and into the brisk early morning air. Katsuki struggles, hisses and spits like a trapped animal, but Aizawa-sensei blocks all of his blows, doesn’t throw any of his own. He wrestles Katsuki to the ground, pins his arms behind his back, and says, “Bakugou, I need you to calm down.”

“Stop touching me!” Katsuki shrieks in response, struggling against the tight hold. He kicks and thrashes, scrapes his cheek open against the concrete. His heart is beating so fast that he thinks his chest might explode. “Fuck you, let go!”
“You’re trying to hurt yourself.” Aizawa-sensei says the words so plainly. “I’m taking you to Recovery Girl. I was clearly mistaken to let you come back here in the first place.”

He hauls Katsuki to his feet and half-drags, half-carries him down the sidewalk. Katsuki struggles every step of the way, cursing loud into the open air, but nobody comes to his rescue and Aizawa-sensei’s grip is so tight that it cuts off circulation in his arms, leaving his hands cold and his fingers tingling with pins-and-needles. He tries to use his Quirk, uncaring of what destruction it might cause, but that’s useless as well - he can’t even feel the embers of it beneath his skin, power erased by his teacher’s flat stare. 

“I hate you,” Katsuki spits out, childish. “I hate you! Let go!”

Aizawa-sensei doesn’t respond to that. His grip loosens slightly - not enough to break - but he’s silent as he hauls Katsuki to the infirmary, pulling him along like he’s marching him to an executioner. 

They’re only a few paces away from the front doors of the school when Katsuki goes limp, dead weight. “Sorry,” he says, pleading, desperate. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again -”

“I never should’ve let you leave in the first place,” Aizawa-sensei mutters, voice low. “This is my fault. I’m so fucking stupid.” He opens the door and shoves Katsuki inside the building. “I’m taking you to Recovery Girl, and then I’m going to talk to your classmates about what’s going on. This is ridiculous.”

Katsuki’s emotions are running so high that it circles right back around to leaving him completely numb. “Are you gonna call my parents?”

That’s what he’s really scared of, at the end of the day.

“No,” Aizawa-sensei says, and Katsuki feels weak with relief. “No, not right now. I need to know what’s happening before I make a call like that.”

Katsuki takes a shaky breath. “I already told you what happened,” he says. He has gone through every scenario a thousand times, dissected every interaction in his head, but Aizawa-sensei just won’t listen. “All of them are being fuckin’ weird. But don’t yell at them or anything, I don’t want…”

He trails off, lapses into silence.

Katsuki doesn’t know what he wants. He wants his friends to like him again, but he doesn’t want that love to be fake. He wants all of this to be one bad dream, but he also wants it to be real so that he can have proof that he is as horrible of a person as he thinks he is. He wants some kind of explanation, but knowing the concrete truth would destroy him. He’s so full of contradictions that it feels like he’s driving himself insane, no outside help needed to twist his thoughts into something terrifying, steal the air from his lungs. He’s sick and twisted, capable of turning even the most ordinary scenario into a full-blown breakdown, and the worst part is that he has always been this way.

Katsuki is so lost in thought that he doesn’t even realize that they’re nearing the infirmary until they come to a stop in front of the door. Aizawa-sensei glances at him before kicking the wood and calling, “Recovery Girl, I need some help over here.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Katsuki hisses, irritated. He makes a half-hearted effort to struggle out of his teacher’s grip, the attempt as futile as he knew it would be. “Shit, lemme go. I don’t need her being all worried when she comes out and sees you hauling me around like I’m some kind of prisoner.”

“No.”

Katsuki growls in frustration. “Fuck you.”

Aizawa-sensei opens his mouth to speak, then goes quiet when the door swings open. Katsuki freezes as well, paralyzed by the intimidating sight of Recovery Girl glaring up at him, eyes glinting behind the wire frames of her glasses.

“This better be good,” she says, and Katsuki cringes, looks away. “Do you have any idea how early it is? Why are you getting hurt at this hour?”

“It was my fault,” Aizawa-sensei says, speaking up before Katsuki has a chance to. “He burned himself a bit, but it’s not too serious. I just need you to watch him while I talk to his classmates.”

Recovery Girl puts her hands on her hips. “I’m not a babysitting service, Eraserhead.”

“Just a few minutes,” Aizawa-sensei says. “Please.”

They’re talking about Katsuki like he’s not even there, and it’s driving him insane. His hackles rise, his eyes narrow, and he has to bite his tongue to stop himself from saying something that he might regret.

Recovery Girl sighs. “Fine,” she says, and gestures for them to enter. “Let’s see what I can do for you, Bakugou.”

Aizawa-sensei finally lets go of Katsuki’s arms. He rubs at his wrists, shoots a glare at his teacher, and then steps into the infirmary. He’s instantly hit with the smell of disinfectant - he’s been here enough times to know that Recovery Girl did most of her cleaning at the crack of dawn, when most people were asleep. And then there were freaks of nature like him, who always got hurt at the most inopportune times, a sentiment that is conveyed well by Recovery Girl’s frustrated glance in his direction as he takes a seat on the closest cot.

“I didn’t want to come here,” Katsuki says, trying to get on her good side. “Aizawa-sensei dragged me all the way here. He damn well knocked me out, bashed my face against the sidewalk and everything.” He points at the scrape on his cheek for emphasis, says, “Look what he did to me, Recovery Girl. He’s so mean.”

Aizawa-sensei lingers in the doorway. “It’s my job to keep you safe, Bakugou.”

Katsuki laughs to take the edge off, but he’s so high-strung that he thinks one wrong move will cause the tension to snap. He feels like he’s on the verge of either hysterical tears or complete apathy - walking a tightrope between two equally dangerous extremes. “Yeah, I sure feel safe now,” he says. “What’s gonna stop me from burning my fuckin’ face off once you leave? No offense, but I don’t think that even Recovery Girl could fix the damage that I’m capable of.”

He gets pissy when he’s nervous, runs his mouth like it’s the only thing he knows how to do. He talks and talks and talks, tries to get an edge on his opponent, and sometimes it works - but Aizawa-sensei is used to him by now, calm and even-tempered, so the attempt falls flat.

“Don’t be rude, Bakugou,” Recovery Girl scolds, but her voice is light as she pulls up a stool and dabs ointment on the cut on Katsuki’s cheek. He winces at the slight sting, wrinkles his nose when she presses a perfunctory kiss to the bandage she smooths over the wound a second later. “Let your teacher handle his business. I know you won’t cause any trouble, you’re such a sweet boy.”

Katsuki grimaces. “You’re senile,” he decides. He has been called many things, but sweet was never one of them. 

Recovery Girl doesn’t confirm or deny the statement, just reaches out and grabs his wrist. She turns his arm from side to side, inspecting the minor burn, and says, “I wish that you would stop hurting yourself.”

“Don’t say it like that.” Katsuki can’t meet her gaze. “You make it sound like I do this every day. This has literally only happened a couple times.” He glares at Aizawa-sensei, who stares steadily back. “I didn’t even want to come here.”

“Your teacher knows best.” Recovery Girl pops open her first-aid kit and spreads burn cream over the slightly raised skin. Katsuki grits his teeth through the uncomfortable sensation, curls his free hand into a fist. “He cares about you a lot, probably more than you care about yourself. He just wants to keep you safe.” She glances over at Aizawa-sensei and says, “You can leave, dear. I’m sure that Bakugou won’t cause any trouble.”

Aizawa-sensei looks hesitant to obey, watching Katsuki with an unreadable expression for several seconds before saying, “Fine. I’ll be back as soon as I’m done talking to the rest of the kids.”

Katsuki’s stomach twists. He has to look away as his teacher leaves, sick with the idea of his classmates getting scolded, yelled at, or worse. He’s upset, but not upset enough to wish any kind of harm upon the people that he loves and cares about - and he knows how scary their teacher is when he is angry. He was like a force of nature, unstoppable, tearing down everything in his path, prying apart lies until the truth broke wide open in front of him.

But, on the other hand, he wants to see what happens. 

He wants some kind of explanation, even if the confirmation of all his worst fears would leave him heartbroken for weeks. He wants to know that he isn’t going crazy, that all of this - the glares and taunts and isolation - was real, that he wasn’t simply deluding himself into playing the victim. 

Recovery Girl finishes bandaging his arm and returns to flitting around the infirmary, sorting papers and scrubbing surfaces as she hums a cheery tune under her breath. Katsuki watches her, bored out of his mind and sick with anxiety at the same time. He’s desperate to rush back to the dorms and find out what’s going on, but he also knows that his composure would fall as soon as he looked at one of his classmates. 

The only thing he can do right now is be patient.

Katsuki closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and waits for it to be over. 

Chapter Text

Aizawa-sensei is taking a long time.

Katsuki’s head hurts, a constant ache. He can’t stop wondering what’s going on back at the dorms, can’t help but feel pathetic and childish - like a snot-nosed brat running to the playground monitor to cry about how his friends are being unfair. 

He really does feel like a little kid, sitting in the infirmary with his hands in his lap, swinging his legs back and forth, so full of nervous energy that he thinks he might explode if he tries to force himself still. Recovery Girl keeps trying to talk to him, but Katsuki’s thoughts are roaring so loudly that he can’t hear a single word that she says.

He feels disconnected from the world around him, like there’s an invisible barrier keeping him from reaching out and changing things in any meaningful way. He could brute-force his way through like he always does, but he’s so violent and destructive towards himself and everybody around him, and he’s tired. He’s tired of it all. He wishes that someone would just tell him what was going on so that he could handle it in a calm, rational way, wishes that he had all the pieces to this puzzle that he has found himself trapped in, but nothing makes sense. 

He thinks that he might go insane like this, kept in the dark, locked away like some fragile doll on a high shelf. 

Aizawa-sensei is taking so long, and Katsuki’s chest grows tighter with every minute that ticks past. He keeps a careful eye on the clock on the wall, notes that it’s been more than half-an-hour since his teacher left.

What could be taking so long?

Maybe all of his classmates are listing out the reasons they have to hate him. Maybe they’re convincing Aizawa-sensei that he should hate Katsuki, too. It’s not like it would be hard: Katsuki’s list of flaws is endless, constantly being updated at the back of his mind. He’s so aware of all the ways he has failed to be a decent human being, but he does nothing to change, and that’s even worse than being naïve. 

“Bakugou.” Recovery Girl pats him on the knee, the touch snapping him out of his thoughts. “You’re going to worry yourself sick, dear.”

Katsuki grits his teeth and looks away. “I’m not worried.”

“Mhm.” Recovery Girl sounds unconvinced. She pries open his hand and presses a few small candies into his palm, the brightly-colored wrappers making his eyes hurt and his stomach twist. “Here, eat these,” she says, and closes his fingers around them. “You’ll feel better.”

Katsuki almost gags at the thought of the sickly-sweet sugar dissolving on his tongue. He shoves the candies into his pocket, makes a mental note to pawn them off to the first person he sees. “I’m fine.”

Recovery Girl says, “You’re shaking.”

“No, I’m not,” Katsuki says, holds up a hand to prove his point. He frowns when he realizes that she’s right - he’s trembling like a frightened animal, full-bodied and terrified - but he says, “I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep that much.”

“That much is obvious,” Recovery Girl says. Her words are blunt, like she can’t be bothered to soften the blow. Katsuki supposes that’s just what happens when a person gets old - they stop giving a fuck about how people react to them. He hopes that he can achieve that kind of peace one day, but he knows that he’s probably going to be an anxious mess right up until his final breath. Recovery Girl asks, “Have you eaten at all?” and sounds like she already knows the answer.

“I’m not hungry.”

Katsuki’s telling the truth. He’s trembling and shaking and weak - showing all the signs of being hungry, starved - but he really thinks that he might throw up if he tries to eat something, and that would just be a huge waste of everybody’s time. 

“Sweetheart, you need to eat.”

Katsuki glances at the clock again. “He’s taking a long time, isn’t he?”

“Stop worrying about that.” Recovery Girl frowns up at him. He feels the weight of her gaze like a brand, wonders if she has ever had to deal with someone as fucked up as him before. “Eraserhead is talking to your classmates. He’ll be back as soon as he’s finished.”

Katsuki feels physically ill. “He wouldn’t have to talk to them if I wasn’t being such a little bitch about this,” he says, and the words sting as they leave his mouth, so he knows that he’s right - the truth always hurts, after all. His eyes sting as well, burning with those stupid crybaby tears. He feels weak and pathetic, like he’s something less than human. Like he got all fucked up when he was being put together and now he’ll never be able to function like a normal person. “Shit, he should’ve just left me alone. I would’ve shut up about this if he had just ignored me - why didn’t he just let me figure this out on my own?”

He’s barely aware of the fact that he’s saying all of that aloud. He needs to get the words out of his system before they burn a hole through his chest. 

Recovery Girl sighs, pats his knee reassuringly. “He cares about you, dear,” she says, speaking in an unbearably gentle tone like she thinks he’ll fall apart if she treats him like the hero-in-training that he’s supposed to be. “He cares about all of his students. He always has.”

Katsuki’s bottom lip starts to tremble, and he bites down on it until he tastes blood. 

“Everything is going to be alright,” Recovery Girl says, and smiles up at him. Her eyes crease with the motion, wrinkles deep-set into her face - Katsuki doesn’t think that he’ll ever live to be as old as she is. He wasn’t built to last. “He’s talking to your friends, and I’m sure that when he comes back, he’ll tell you that all of this was just one big misunderstanding.”

But Katsuki doesn’t know if he wants it to be a misunderstanding.

He’s horrible and fucked up, so he almost wants it to be the devastation that he’s convinced it is. He wants all of this to be his fault, wants to pick apart every single mistake he made, wants to ruin himself with the knowledge that this could’ve been avoided if he had acted a little nicer or said the right things. He wants his own blood on his hands, wants it to hurt.

He’s not normal.

Normal people don’t think this way.

Katsuki scrubs at his eyes, takes a shaky breath. His heart is beating so fast that it makes him feel light-headed. He whispers, “Stop trying to make me feel better,” and tries so hard to stop himself from crying, but a tear burns down his cheek despite his best efforts. “I don’t need you to tell me that everything is gonna be fine. I’m not a little kid, I know when you’re lying to me.”

He’s not a little kid, but he’s weak and immature and falls apart at the smallest change of plans, the slightest shift of tone. He’s not a little kid, but he sure acts like one.

Fuck, he’s such a failure. 

Katsuki feels like he’s about to be sick. He thinks he might collapse even though he’s sitting down, trapped in this infirmary and held captive by his own horrible thoughts. His hands are too hot, aching to burn something, to press marks into his skin so that he has some evidence that he’s being punished for what a shitty, fucked-up person he is. He deserves to be hurt because his body was built for the pain. He’s self-destructive, a ticking time bomb: if he doesn’t hurt himself, he’ll hurt somebody else, because that’s just what he does. He ruins things for himself and then cries like a baby when nobody wants to spend time with him. 

He’s a fucking loser, and the worst part is that he’s aware of that, and he still does nothing to change. 

Katsuki feels like he’s locked inside his head. He can’t escape from himself, no matter how hard he tries. He’s trapped in the confines of his own skull, forced to listen to the horrible thoughts that his mind flings at him, insults slicing into his skin like knives.

“Bakugou,” Recovery Girl says, and now she sounds worried, and that’s his fault, too. “Are you listening to me?”

Katsuki nods, breaths ragged as he tries to regain his composure. He blinks several times, floats away a bit, forces his attention back to Recovery Girl. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice shakes in a way that makes him want to die. He sounds so weak. “Yeah, you were saying…”

And then he trails off, because he hadn’t been listening at all.

Recovery Girl’s eyebrows furrow. “I think you need to get some rest,” and she speaks very carefully like she’s not sure what will set him off next. He hates it when people walk on eggshells around him, but he also knows that one wrong move might shatter him completely - he’s so full of contradictions and conflicting emotions, he thinks he would be better off as a mercy kill, the way a vet euthanizes a dog that can’t be saved. “I also think that you need to eat.”

“That’s your solution?” Katsuki asks, incredulous. “I’m a fucking wreck, and you’re telling me that food will make it all better?”

“No, but I’m saying that it might make you feel better,” Recovery Girl corrects, like that’s such an important distinction. “All living bodies need nutrients to function, Bakugou. There’s no way around it. I know that you said you’re not hungry, but it’s obvious that you’re feeling faint.”
Katsuki’s smile is sharp and humorless. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you’re very pale,” Recovery Girl says. “You’re shaking, irritable, and anxious. I could list off more symptoms, but I think those are all I need to get the point across.” 

Katsuki opens his mouth to defend himself, then shuts up when he realizes that he can’t. 

Recovery Girl delivers the diagnosis like a killing blow, “Low blood sugar.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Katsuki switches between moods so quickly that he makes himself dizzy. “That’s not what the problem is, old hag.”

Recovery Girl scurries across the room and opens one of her drawers. “No, but it’s certainly worsening the problem,” she says, rummaging around before triumphantly holding up a candy bar. “These are my favorite. It’s not the same as a real meal, but it should settle your nerves a bit.”

Katsuki feels ridiculous. He was just on the verge of tears, and now the school nurse is lecturing him about nutrients and sugars like that’s the biggest issue right now.

“Here,” Recovery Girl says, rushing back over to him. “Eat this.”

She holds up the candy bar for him to take, and Katsuki swats it out of her hand before he can stop himself. “Fuck off,” he says. “If you’re not going to help me, just leave me alone.”

Recovery Girl puts her hands on her hips. “I’m trying to help, Bakugou.”

“You keep giving me candy!” Katsuki snaps, frustrated. “I’m fucked up, my friends hate me, and you think sweets are going to fix anything? Are you fucking insane?” 

He’s spiralling, losing control, doing all the things he said he would stop the moment he got cold-shouldered this morning. 

“Fuck you,” he spits out, and he doesn’t really mean it but the words leave his mouth before he can stop them. He’s always doing that, speaking without thinking, and then he wallows in self-pity when nobody wants to spend time with him. He’s nothing but the selfish, entitled brat that his mother would accuse him of being when he was younger - he wishes that she hit him harder to really drive the point home, because then maybe he wouldn’t be such a mess right now. “I hate you.”

Recovery Girl doesn’t react beyond a single raised eyebrow. “If you hated me, you wouldn’t be sitting here, talking to me.”

“I’m here because Aizawa-sensei made me come!” Katsuki’s voice is too loud. He hates how fast his temper snaps, hates how extreme his emotions are - he’s always caught between devastating lows and exhilarating highs. There’s no resistor in his circuit: he burns himself out. “He was worried because I started crying like a baby, tried to hurt myself - it’s his job to make sure that I don’t do anything stupid, he doesn’t care about me beyond that.” He says, “And neither do you!” and watches a million expressions flicker over Recovery Girl’s face. “Stop acting like you care about me. I know the only thing I do is make your life harder.”

“Well, I’m not working here because I wanted an easy life,” Recovery Girl points out. “I knew what I was getting into the moment I signed up for this job. I don’t regret it at all.”

“It must kill you,” Katsuki says, and Recovery Girl pauses. Katsuki takes a shaky breath, then continues, “Having to pretend that I belong here, I mean.”

Because the simple truth is that Katsuki doesn’t belong anywhere. 

He has always been different, has always existed in a class of his own. He has been able to play it off as something good, but there’s some part of him that aches with the knowledge that he will never truly fit in. 

He would’ve been a pariah in his younger years if he wasn’t so strong. He was popular, but there was a shallowness to it, like if he would be rejected if he revealed his inherent flaws for even just a second. He was the best, and that kept the wolves at bay for so long, but now he’s not the best, not anymore. 

He’s not even good. 

He’s horrible, and all of his friends seemed to have realized that, and now there’s no going back to the way that things were. He wishes that he could apologize, but he’s not even sure what words he would have to say - he’s not even sure what he’s been hiding this whole time, just knows that it’s something horrible, something that left him rough around the edges, sharp to the touch.
Katsuki has always felt like he was never supposed to exist at all.

Recovery Girl is speaking, and Katsuki can’t hear her but he’s sure that she’s trying to reassure him, and he feels awful about that, like he’s tricked her into believing that he’s something he’s not. He wants to tell her that there’s nothing good about him, that he can’t be salvaged because he’s been broken since the day he was born, but the only thing that comes out when he opens his mouth is a choked sob. 

He doesn’t deserve to be here. He’s not good enough to be a hero. He’s so fucking weak, and he’s tired of pretending that he’s not.

Katsuki buries his face in his hands and forces himself to take a deep breath. His palms singe against his skin, not hot enough to burn, but he kinda wants to blow his own head off. He doesn’t give into the urge, but it thrums under his skin like a second heartbeat, impossible to ignore - he needs to be punished for all these flaws that only he seems to be aware of. He’s like some kind of animal: he only learns through pain. He needs to break himself so that something new can rise from the ashes of what he used to be, needs to dig his nails into the cracks of his mind and rip it apart, dissect his brain, bloody his hands so that he can finally become something worthy of the most basic human companionship.

He needs to know what the problem is so that he can fix it. 

No. 

No, that’s not right. 

He’s the problem, and there’s no way to fix that. He’s irreparable, irredeemable, so horribly broken that no amount of love could every rectify that, and his friends tried, they were good to him, they must’ve done their best to help and then abandoned him when they realized that it was just a wasted effort, that must be what’s happening - but why didn’t they tell him? - and his classmates are all such amazing people but this feels cruel, unfairly cruel. 

He was fine with being hated and rejected.

But the least his friends could’ve done was give him a little warning. 

Katsuki is crying again, but he doesn’t realize that until his shoulders are shaking and he can’t breathe. He tries to muffle the sound of his sobs, tries to force the tears back, but his grip on his emotions is loose at the best of times and right now he feels like he’s falling apart.

Katsuki calms down, eventually. 

He doesn’t want to worry Recovery Girl too much, and he runs out of tears. His heart is a red-hot mass in his chest, heavy with dread as he watches the hands of the clock tick the seconds and minutes away. He waits for the door to open, for Aizawa-sensei to walk in and break the news - this is all Katsuki’s fault, his friends got tired of him, he was right about everything - but nothing happens, and the anxiety eats Katsuki alive. He hates this long, drawn-out torture: he wants to rip the band-aid off, wants to get it over with, but the infirmary is silent save for the sound of his own ragged breaths.

He allows Recovery Girl to coax him into laying down, but he can’t close his eyes, and he definitely can’t sleep. He rolls onto his side so that she doesn’t have to see his face, stares blankly at the wall. He feels sick with nerves, stomach twisting further with every minute that passes without an answer.

When the door finally opens, Katsuki sits straight up. 

He moves faster than he has even in life-or-death battles, looks at Aizawa-sensei, searches his teacher’s expression for any sign of anger or frustration - and he sees both of them written on there, but what’s worse is the disappointment etched clearly across the hero’s face. 

Hesitantly, Katsuki asks, “Aizawa-sensei…?”

“Let’s go back to the dorms,” Aizawa-sensei says. His tone is completely unreadable, and he holds out a hand like he’s helping a little kid cross the street. “I think your classmates will be able to explain the situation better than me.”

Katsuki reluctantly stands up, inches towards his teacher. “Did you yell at them?”

“Not really.” Aizawa-sensei puts his hand on Katsuki’s shoulder as soon as he’s within grabbing distance. “I asked them what was going on, and… they told me their side of the story.” He pauses, then adds, “They don’t hate you, and they’re not mad at you. They seemed surprised that you thought that.”

Those words should make Katsuki feel better, but they have the opposite effect. 

“It’s a complicated situation,” Aizawa-sensei summarizes, like he can read Katsuki’s thoughts, sense the sickness building inside of him. “Like I said, I think it would be better for you to talk to them about it.”

He ushers Katsuki out of the infirmary, not even giving Katsuki a chance to say goodbye to Recovery Girl. Katsuki allows himself to be led down the hallway - which suddenly feels like the length of it has been stretched to miles, like every footstep brings him barely an inch closer to the truth - and they’re almost to the doors by the time Katsuki musters up the strength to speak.

He asks, “Before we get there, can you tell me if I was overreacting?”

Aizawa-sensei is silent for a few moments, then says, “I think all of this could’ve been solved with some communication, but I also think that this never should’ve happened in the first place.” His answers are so cryptic, the vagueness doing nothing but worsening Katsuki’s growing anxiety. “I’ll be there while you talk to them. They promised to behave.”

Katsuki falls silent, sensing that that’s the best he’s going to get out of his teacher. He feels cold despite the sun warming the air, pulse ratcheting a notch higher with every step he takes. Aizawa-sensei’s hand is tight on his shoulder, the man silent beside him, and as they approach the dormitory - and Katsuki gets closer and closer to learning the truth - he can’t help but feel like nothing will ever be the same again.

Chapter Text

Katsuki has never seen the common room this quiet.

He’s been down here late at night, in the early morning, and every time in between, but the atmosphere has never been as artificially still as it is right now. He walks through the door and freezes a few paces in, gaze locked on the sight of all his friends standing still, waiting for him, and feels so suddenly suffocated that he thinks he might really pass out.

Kirishima and Ashido are standing next to each other, Jirou and Kaminari in another pair. Sero is the outlier, huddled off to the side with his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face - he obviously doesn’t want to be here, which is fine, because Katsuki doesn’t want to be here, either.

Aizawa-sensei prods him forward. “Take a seat,” he instructs. “Your friends have something they want to say to you.”

Why can’t you just tell me?, Katsuki wants to ask. He casts a glance over his shoulder and is met with his teacher’s indifferent stare. Why do I have to talk to them?

He’s not brave enough to give a voice to those questions, but they run endlessly through his mind as he sits down on the couch, carefully keeping the coffee table between him and his classmates. He’s not afraid of them, but he’s wary of his own reaction to whatever is going to come next. 

“Alright,” he says, and his voice is remarkably steady. “What’s going on?”

For several long moments, there’s nothing but silence, and Katsuki feels the tension like a physical weight pressing down on his chest. He looks at Aizawa-sensei, who seems to be standing guard by the door, but his attention snaps back to his classmates when he sees a rustle of movement.

“This is stupid,” Sero says, and doesn’t elaborate.

Kirishima glances over at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Don’t be rude,” he scolds, then looks at Katsuki. He hesitates for a few seconds, then starts, “Bakugou…”

Katsuki stares at him. He thinks about how Kirishima acted on that first morning, the stifled giggle he smothered behind his palm, then thinks about him waiting for Katsuki at his door, asking to talk to him. He thinks about all the moments that came before that - the shared laughter and smiles, the after-school hangouts and stupid arcade games - and asks, “What’s going on?”

He can’t help the desperation in his voice. He’s pleading for some kind of answer that will make all of this make sense - it doesn’t even have to make things okay. He just needs an explanation for why he’s being shunned like this. 

Katsuki says, “Look, I’m not even going to be mad.” 

He feels pathetic, like he’s one step away from begging on his knees.

“I’m sorry,” Kirishima says, like that’s really what Katsuki wants to hear right now. “I told them that it was a bad idea, but they didn’t listen -”

“Hey, don’t blame it on us!” Sero pipes up, offended. Katsuki looks at him and sees his classmate staring right back at him, and then Sero’s glare flits away to focus on Kirishima.  “It was supposed to be funny - it was funny. None of us knew that he would react like that.”

Kirishima scowls. “How is any of this funny?” he asks, and gestures at Katsuki. “Look at him!”

Right.

Katsuki is something to be contained and observed, prodded and inspected. He’s only worth looking at when he’s having the worst moments of his life. He feels all the eyes on him and is reminded starkly and suddenly of those silly little shows he would participate in during primary school - he would always get stage fright under the hot glare of the spotlight, would freeze and stare out at the crowd until he remembered his lines.

His mother would yell at him, afterwards. He’s not allowed to be nervous. He was her strong little hero, after all.

Right now, he doesn’t feel strong or heroic, but he does feel small. He thinks that he can slip right between the cushions if he tries hard enough, but he’s too tired to do anything but sit back against the couch and watch the play-by-play of Kirishima and Sero arguing in front of him. He’s not really paying attention, lets his eyes wander to the rest of his friends - Ashido looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here, and Kaminari and Jirou are whispering quietly to each other. He wants to ask them what’s going on, but then Ashido lifts her head slightly and his gaze catches on the bruise marring her skin and he suddenly feels so guilty that it steals the air straight from his lungs. 

Aizawa-sensei calls out, “Settle down.”

He’s using that voice that all heroes have in their repertoire of skills, that sharp tone designed specifically to make people listen to them, and it works: the argument falls silent.

“If you don’t tell him what happened, I’ll do it,” Aizawa-sensei continues. “And if I have to do it, I can promise that it won’t end well for any of you.”

“This is stupid,” Sero repeats, spitting the words out like they taste bad. “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got homework to do, tests to study for -”

Aizawa-sensei smoothly interjects. “Why don’t we talk outside, Sero?”

Sero groans, exasperated. He throws his long arms out in a helpless gesture, shakes his head, steps forward to glare fully at Katsuki. “Look, are you gonna start crying if I tell you the truth?”

Katsuki shakes his head even though his eyes are already burning with anticipatory tears.

He can hear other people talking, but the only person he can focus on is Sero. His classmate’s teeth flash white in the overhead lights, straight and perfect, and his voice is sharp as he says, “It was a joke.”

Katsuki feels like all the air has been punched out of him. “What?”

“None of it was real,” Sero says. He’s not smiling, and his voice is cold, hard. “It was a stupid prank, Bakugou. I don’t know why you didn’t figure it out sooner.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Katsuki feels like his throat might be closing up. “All that shit you said -”

“- didn’t matter,” Sero finishes. “Did you really think that any of us were being serious?”

Katsuki’s head spins. He feels like he might collapse even though he’s sitting down, his chest tight and heart racing achingly fast as he listens to Sero continue talking, rationalizing and explaining. Eraserhead interrupts at some point, drags Sero outside by the arm and slams the door behind him, and Jirou casts an odd glance in his direction before allowing herself to be pulled away by Kaminari, and Katsuki just sits there, frozen, and tries to remember how to breathe.

He stands up at some point, dizzy and disoriented. He looks at Kirishima and sees his own reflection in his classmate’s eyes, sees the pallid paleness of his skin and realizes that he looks like shit.

He also realizes that he’s shaking again, trembling like a scared child. His hands have a tremor that refuses to go away, his breaths come out thready and weak, and an insistent ache pulses at the base of his skull like he’s being smacked repeatedly with a hammer.

He echoes, “It was a prank?”

No, that’s not right. 

That was such a simple word, something funny and harmless that didn’t really encompass the range of emotions that floods through him when he thinks about the long hours that came before this. 

It was a prank, but it was also a bad joke - and he was the punchline.

Ashido watches him warily, like she thinks that he’s going to attack her at any second. Her fingers twist in the hem of her shirt, her eyebrows furrow, and she hesitates for several moments before asking, “Are you mad?”

That’s the question that tells Katsuki what all of this was for. 

He feels impossibly young, like he’s a little kid again, being scolded for breaking the toys at daycare - but he also feels older than his body, bones settled into a kind of weary acceptance.

He doesn’t know why it took so long for something like this to happen.

Katsuki has been playing this game for as long as he can remember. His classmates push all the right buttons, say all the wrong things, then step back and watch him explode: it’s a familiar song and dance, his vision tinted red in the aftermath of the fallout. He knows that he should give them what they want. He knows that he’s only worth looking at when his lack of self-control strips him of all bodily autonomy, leaves his fists bruised and bleeding and his heart beating so fast that he thinks that he might die from it, knows that he’s only good for a few moments of entertainment at a time.

He knows that he should be angry.

He wants to be angry.

But he doesn’t feel anything, and that’s even worse.

“No,” he says, and he’s telling the truth. “No, I’m fine. If it was just a prank, I guess that I overreacted.” He moves to stand up, only to freeze when Ashido takes a sudden step back. His heart skips a beat in his chest, but his voice is remarkably steady as he says, “I’m going to my room.”

Ashido’s face flushes. “I - I’m - I was just -”
She falters, falls silent.

Katsuki can’t blame her for being wary around him - he did attack her, after all - but he can’t help but wish that she was a little more subtle about it. He hates the thought as soon as it crosses his mind, feels his own face go hot with shame. “I’m going to my room,” he repeats, and wonders if there’s a part of his mind that wants someone to stop him, explain to him that things aren’t as they seem. He knows that’s not going to happen, so he just straightens up fully and clears his throat. “I’ll see you guys later, then.”

“... Bakugou.” Kirishima steps forward, puts a hand on Ashido’s shoulder. “You’re really not mad at us?”

Katsuki asks, “Do you want me to be?”

He thinks that he could force himself to get upset if he tried hard enough, if that’s what his classmates really want him to do. He can be whatever they want if it means that something like this will never happen again.

Kirishima frowns. He gnaws at his bottom lip for a few moments, sharp teeth miraculously not cutting into his skin, and then says, “Yeah.”

“Why?” Katsuki finds himself asking. “What’s the point?”

What’s the point of anything, really? How will being upset make this situation any better?

Kirishima shrugs. “I dunno,” he says, and at least he’s being honest - Katsuki has always liked that about him. “It feels like you should be mad at us.”

“Well, I’m not,” Katsuki says. He tries to smile and fails miserably. His face refuses to move, lips twitching into more of a grimace than a grin. “I’m not mad, and isn’t that better for all of us? Things can go back to normal, and we can forget about all of this, and -”

He cuts himself off mid-sentence, chest aching so deeply that he thinks he might be having a heart attack. He takes a shaky breath and feels it burn in his lungs, blinks back that familiar onslaught of tears as he struggles to keep his composure. He has no right to be upset, not over a stupid prank - a stupid, shitty joke, that’s all it was, that’s all he’ll ever be.

He feels so lost.

He should be happy that his friends aren’t mad at him, that he’s still worthy of their love now that he knows how much it hurt to have it taken away. He was broken and put back together, and now he’s whole again, but there are still cracks and the light is shining through them and illuminating all his flaws, and he’s so sure that the rug will be pulled from under his feet at any second. He’s nervous, he’s scared like a little kid, he thinks he might die if he doesn’t get out of here right now.

“I - I’m gonna go to my room,” he says, and he hates the way he stammers, hates everything about himself. “I’ll see you guys later - maybe I’ll cook dinner or something. I don’t know.”

Planning for the future seems so silly. He’s not sure if his classmates will still like him in the next few minutes, much less hours from now.

Kirishima’s smile is wide and nervous. “That sounds good,” he says, but his heart isn’t in it. He was usually delighted whenever Katsuki announced that he was going to make dinner, and jumped at the opportunity to suggest foods and dishes that would inevitably be shot down, but right now it’s like he has been replaced with an imposter. “Are you sure you don’t wanna stay down here with us?”

Katsuki stares at him for several seconds, then looks at Ashido, and then finally glances over at the closed front door. He imagines Aizawa-sensei scolding the rest of his classmates, knows that he doesn’t want to be here when they come back inside - Sero will undoubtedly be furious, and Aizawa-sensei will probably try to force Katsuki to either go back to the infirmary, eat, or maybe he would make him do both of those things, and Katsuki really can’t stomach that white-walled room or even the thought of food right now.

… And he doesn’t want to talk to his friends, either. 

He hates to admit that to himself, but it’s the truth. He can’t trust his classmates, not anymore, maybe not ever again. He’s not mad - he’s not even disappointed - but there’s a sickness growing in the pit of his stomach and he thinks he might throw up if he has to stay here for a single second more.

“I need to rest,” he says, keeping his voice as steady as he can make it. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep.”

Guilt is stark on Ashido and Kirishima’s faces. Katsuki has noticed over the past few months that they tended to make the exact same expressions - he supposes that it’s a side-effect of them knowing each other for so long. He remembers reading somewhere that old married couples started to look alike, and Ashido and Kirishima aren’t old or married, but that’s probably exactly what’s happening. 

There’s no point in thinking about stupid stuff like that, but Katsuki ignores his other thoughts, the ones that whisper at the back of his mind and tell him to just give up and become the worst version of himself.

He says, “I’ll be down to make dinner,” and then brushes past his friends, making his way to the elevator. He’s careful about how he moves forward, places his feet like he’s avoiding broken glass - his mother told him that he walked funny when he was younger, and it’s stuck with him ever since, because he doesn’t know how to let things go. He just lets his grudges rot and fester inside of him until they come spilling from his mouth in a bitter, torrential pour. 

He’s so fucking pathetic. 

Katsuki makes it to the elevator without being interrupted, even though the path feels a mile long and his legs shake beneath him. He presses his thumb against the button and holds it there for several seconds, hands trembling and fingertips cold, his friends’ eyes burning holes through the back of his head.

He feels like he’s going insane. His stomach lurches, he jabs his thumb harder against the cool metal and wonders why the elevator isn’t coming down. He doesn’t remember it ever taking this long, he doesn’t know why -

“Bakugou.”

Kirishima’s voice breaks him out of his thoughts.

“Huh?” Katsuki glances over his shoulder - the image of his classmate swims like there are tears blurring his vision again, but his eyes don’t burn, so he knows that he’s not about to cry. “Do you need something?”

Kirishima sounds distinctly nervous as he asks, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Katsuki’s response is automatic, instinctive. His skin tingles, his mouth feels dry, and his forehead has broken out in a cold sweat - but he’s fine, he just needs to go to his room and sleep this off. He needs to get out of here. “I’m - uh, I’m just gonna…”

The words wander away from him, lost to the haze of his mind.

“You’re not even pressing the button,” Ashido points out. Katsuki startles, glances at his hand, and sees that she’s right - his thumb is more than an inch away from where it needs to be. “Look, Bakugou -”

Kirishima asks, “Are you sick?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki admits. His throat feels raw, like he’s been yelling for hours. He sways slightly on his feet, stumbles a little bit, and just barely manages to keep his balance. “I’m sick of this fuckin’ place.”

He presses the button and does it properly this time, movements slow and deliberate. His classmates say something, but he can barely hear them - no, he can’t hear them at all, ears ringing and thoughts dulled as if his head has been stuffed full of cotton. He watches hazily as the doors slide open, staggers into the elevator like a dead man walking.

He hears the tail-end of a sentence:

“- need to get Aizawa-sensei.”

The doors close, and Katsuki prods several times at the button for his floor. He leans against one of the side railings and closes his eyes, feeling like he’s being spun in a million directions at once, gears and pulleys moving and twisting all around him, his thoughts a dizzy blur as they swarm against the walls of his skull. He feels like there might be something wrong with him, something that goes deeper than his emotional outbursts and unreasonable reactions - something physical and tangible, but he can’t quite figure out what it is. 

He doesn’t want to think about anything. He doesn’t want to think about his classmates or his friends or his teachers, doesn’t want to think about how all of this was nothing but a bad joke, with him at the butt of it. 

He doesn’t want to think, and so he doesn’t, and it’s as simple as that.

Katsuki hears a faint mechanical whirr, and knows that he should open his eyes, but his body feels so heavy. He stays slumped against the railing, cool metal pressed to his suddenly feverish skin, forcing himself to take deep breaths that don’t do anything but make him feel light-headed.

Shit.

He’s really falling apart, isn’t he?
Katsuki can’t focus on anything. He hears the doors open, but it’s like the sound is being played from far-away, unreachable, his body disconnected from the real world.

The elevator beeps once, twice. He feels it shift beneath his feet.

“Bakugou?”

Katsuki makes some kind of noise in response to his name being called, knees weak and legs shaky like those of a newborn animal. He imagines taking a step forward, then imagines himself face-planting once that monumental effort proved to be too much to bear. 

He doesn’t know where this sudden helplessness is coming from. He’s been running on fumes for hours, and he doesn’t know why his body chose this exact moment to give up.

“Bakugou.” 

He knows that voice, but can’t quite put a name to it. He hears footsteps and the click of a button, and the elevator stops beeping, and the person says it again:

“Bakugou.”

He finally realizes who it is.

Katsuki mumbles, “Fuck off, Todoroki.”

He doesn’t need to call him that anymore. He knows that the joke is over, the truth revealed, and that everybody should be back to normal. He says the right name anyways, a force of habit or a slip of the tongue, and Todoroki sounds a little surprised as he asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Fuck off,” Katsuki repeats, but there’s no heat in his voice. He forces himself upright and blinks several times, back to normal - it must’ve been a dizzy spell. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your floor.”

“I wanted to see if you were in your room,” Todoroki says, as mildly as always, like that’s the most normal thing in the world to do. 

Katsuki stares at him for a few seconds, then scoffs and looks away. “Whatever,” he says, and steps out of the elevator. “Leave me alone.”

To his immense displeasure, Todoroki follows after him, chasing at his heels like a lost puppy. He trails Katsuki all the way down the hall and puts a hand on his shoulder when Katsuki comes to a stop in front of his door, and Katsuki’s immediate instinct is to shrug him off, but Todoroki’s grip is too tight and his tone is suddenly, strangely urgent as he asks, “What’s wrong with you?”

Katsuki should get pissed off at that, but he’s too tired. His voice is bland when he says, “I want to fall asleep and never wake up.” He makes no move to go inside his room, the door hanging open on its hinges like a gaping mouth, threatening to swallow him whole. He asks, “Why didn’t you tell me it was a joke?”

“What?”

“It was a joke,” Katsuki repeats, the words flat and lifeless. “Nothing but a shitty, stupid joke. What, they didn’t tell you that before asking you to act like an asshole?”

“They didn’t -”

“Fuck off.” Katsuki’s voice is shaky now, for reasons that he can’t quite understand. He’s not upset. He doesn’t have the right to be upset. “Leave me alone, Icy-Hot. I don’t wanna talk to you.”

“No.” Todoroki grabs Katsuki’s wrist before he can slip away. “No, I didn’t know it was a joke.”

Katsuki stares down at the point of contact, mind too hazy to figure out which hand Todoroki was using to hold onto him. He thinks about the difference between frost burns and regular burns, wonders which one would be more painful. “Don’t touch me.”

“I really didn’t know that it was a joke,” Todoroki insists. “I’m telling the truth. I thought -”

“What?” Katsuki interrupts. “What did you think it was, Icy-Hot? What the fuck did they tell you to make you act that way, huh?” He feels a hot prickling behind his eyes and knows that he’s about to burst into tears again, over-emotional in all the worst ways. “Did they tell you that I fucked something up, that they were mad at me? Huh?”

Here’s the question he really wants to ask: did they tell you that I deserved it?

But he keeps that one locked away, because he doesn’t really want to know the answer. He feels like both an affirmation or a denial would be a lie, feels like he’s caught up in some twisted, convoluted scheme that’s slowly driving him insane.

He’s getting upset. 

He knows that he’s getting upset, but he can’t do anything to stop it. He tries to force these horrible feelings down, tries to soften his voice and smooth out his rough edges, but he’s being irrational, hopelessly distraught over something that doesn’t even matter in the first place.

Todoroki says, “You’re really pale, Bakugou.”

“Shut up.” Katsuki can feel himself shaking. “Shut up. I hate you.”

Todoroki’s nails dig into his wrist, press into the thin skin. “I don’t want to let you leave,” he says, and speaks slowly, carefully. He usually seems to say everything that comes to his mind, but this feels different - like he’s deliberately choosing which words are allowed to leave his mouth. “I feel like you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Leave me alone!” Katsuki snaps, face flushing hot at the memory of stumbling to Todoroki’s door, pleading like a beggar for the first-aid kit, only to be denied. He hates the fact that somebody has seen him in such a vulnerable state, and with that hatred comes the knee-jerk urge to rectify it, to punish himself for allowing that to happen. His palms flare with heat, fingers twitching with the urge to pop sparks off against his own skin. “Fuck, don’t you have any kind of tact? You can’t just say shit like that!”

But Todoroki is right, that’s the worst part. 

Katsuki is going to hurt himself the second that he’s left alone. He’s just wired wrong, screws rattling loose in his head - he doesn’t know why he’s like this. He wishes that he could be anything other than this massive fuck-up that he’s always been, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how.

Todoroki stares at him. “Are you going to hurt yourself?”

Katsuki’s head spins. His entire body aches worse that it did after all of those back-alley fights he would get into when he was in middle school, his heart beats too fast, he knows the right answer but he can’t bring himself to lie - and so he says nothing at all, staring at his classmate with pin-pricked eyes.

“I’m going to get Aizawa-sensei,” Todoroki says, speaking very calmly. “He’ll probably bring you back to Recovery Girl, so that you can get some rest… and whatever else you need to feel better.”

Katsuki swallows, mouth dry. “No,” he says. “No, I’m not going back there.”

He’s sure that if he steps foot into that office one more time, he won’t be allowed to leave. He would be forced to sit there and spill his guts as Recovery Girl wrote all of his horrible thoughts down on her clipboard. He doesn’t know what would happen after that, and he doesn’t even want to think about it.

“Bakugou -”

“I need to go to sleep,” Katsuki says, suddenly desperate. He could move right now, bolt into his room and slam the door, but he feels tethered to the ground by the grip on his wrist - he doesn’t know where this sudden fear is coming from, but he’s scared of doing anything to upset the people close to him. He feels like this fragile peace might come crashing down if he makes one wrong move. “I - I promised to make dinner -”

“It’s still morning, Bakugou.”

“Shut up!” Katsuki has to resist the urge to slam his head against the wall. “Shut up, I know that!” He just needs to plan it all out, he needs to have things organized with no room for any mistakes. He feels his hands growing too hot to bear and knows that he needs to let off some steam, but Todoroki is holding on tight to him and Katsuki is too weak to muster up anything but a shaky, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

Not about this.

Not about anything, really.

Katsuki doesn’t want to talk to anybody ever again. His mouth is always getting him in trouble - that’s what his mother liked to say, and she was usually right - so he should just shut up completely, live his life as a stupid mute so that people will like him. 

Todoroki’s eyebrows furrow. “I’m taking you to Aizawa-sensei,” he says, and it’s not a question. “Why’d he leave you alone?”

“I don’t need a fuckin’ babysitter, Icy-Hot.”

“He asked me to keep an eye on you,” Todoroki muses, almost to himself. “I didn’t do a very good job. I think he’ll be upset with me when I see him again.”

“Well, you don’t have to talk to him.” Katsuki tries to break the grip on his wrist, but the attempt is as weak as the rest of him. His limbs feel loose and disjointed. “If you would just let me go get some sleep, I’ll be good as new when I come back out.” He smiles, and it’s all teeth, jaw aching with the forced effort of it. “Don’t have to worry about anything, Todoroki.”

Todoroki’s mismatched eyes narrow. “Don’t call me that.”

“Fuck you,” Katsuki responds, pleasant demenor falling away as if it had never been there at all. “Make up your mind, asshole.”

“Bakugou…” Todoroki hesitates, stares at him with a slightly confused expression. He looks like he’s trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle. “Are you listening to yourself?”

Katsuki blinks. “What?”

“You’re not speaking properly,” Todoroki says. “You’re slurring your words, like you’re drunk. I know you’re not drunk, so you must be sick -”

“I’m not sick!” Katsuki snaps, that anger flaring up again before dying out just as quickly, flames smothered under the heavy fog shrouding his mind. “I’m not sick,” he repeats, quieter. “I’m just tired. I wanna go to bed.”

His body feels so heavy. He thinks that he might fall asleep like this, standing straight up on his aching feet and shaky legs. His heart has settled into a slow, steady beat, and he can feel the pulse of it at the base of his throat, chest aching with every breath he takes. His shoulders hurt like the weight of the world has been lowered onto them. He just needs to get some rest, and then he’ll be good as new. He’ll close his eyes and when he wakes up everything will be back to normal: his friends will smile at him when he steps into the common room, he’ll cook full meals for everyone while staunchly denying that he will, he’ll sit on the edge of the bed during sleepovers and pretend not to be paying attention to whatever stupid movie his classmates have put on this time. He wants things to go back to normal, but he doesn’t know if they ever will, and he hates that, he hates that so much, and more than anything he hates himself for not figuring out that it was just a stupid prank. He’s sure that the outcome would’ve been much better if he had simply laughed in his friends’ faces that morning, if he had asked them where they got off on being jackasses all of a sudden - and he’s sure that they would’ve laughed as well, unable to maintain their façades when he pointed out the ridiculousness of it all. 

That’s what he should’ve done. 

He should’ve seen from the start that it was just a stupid joke.

But it’s too late for that now, and nothing will ever be the same again.

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he doesn’t even hear the chime of the elevator hitting their floor, doesn’t realize that there’s someone rushing towards him until he has already been grabbed by the shoulders and spun around. He stares up at Aizawa-sensei, and his teacher stares back at him, the silence stretching on for several unbearable moments before it’s broken by the sound of Todoroki’s voice.

“He doesn’t look that good,” the bastard says, throwing Katsuki under the bus. “I was about to come get you.”

Aizawa-sensei doesn’t look away. “Go to your room, Todoroki.”

“I’m worried about him,” Todoroki continues. He completely ignores the order to leave, insists on hanging around like a stubborn leech that refuses to be pried away from its victim’s leg. “He’s really pale and shaky, and he’s speaking weird. I think he needs -”

“Todoroki.” Aizawa-sensei cuts him off. “Go to your room. Now.”

Todoroki opens his mouth like he’s about to protest, then sighs and casts one last glance at Katsuki before walking away. His slippered feet scuffle across the carpet, and then there’s the familiar sound of the elevator opening, and then he’s gone - just like that.

And, finally, Aizawa-sensei’s expression softens.

“How are you, Bakugou?” he asks. “I know that must’ve been a shock. I shouldn’t have let Sero break the news like that.”

Katsuki stares at him, impassive. His emotions have worked through him like a sickness, the fever broken and his mind perfectly numb. He says, “I’m fine. He wasn’t that bad.”

Aizawa-sensei frowns. “Bakugou -”

“I want to go to bed,” Katsuki interrupts. He knows that’s rude, but he doesn’t feel like being caught in a long conversation with one of the last people he wants to see right now. “I need to get some rest, and then…”

He doesn’t know what will come next. He doesn’t want to think too hard about the future.

Aizawa-sensei watches him for an unbearably long amount of time, then sighs and pats him on the shoulder. “Fine,” he says, but sounds somewhat wary. “I’ll be down in the common room if you need me. I still need to talk to your classmates about what happened, get the full story. I don’t know what possessed them to pull a stunt like this in the first place.”

There’s a lot of things that Katsuki wants to say to that, but he’s too tired. He just nods and watches as his teacher walks away, then slips silently into his dorm and closes the door behind him, the room dark save for the morning light spilling through the cracks of his blinds. He burrows under his blankets like a child hiding from make-believe monsters, closes his eyes, and drifts off to sleep.

He doesn’t know why he feels nothing at all, but it’s better this way.

It has to be.