Chapter Text
Katsuki was vaguely aware of the fact that Deku was saying something, but it was going in one ear and out of the other. Everything sounded like it was underwater, and given the way he couldn’t breathe, he might as well have been. Deku’s internal voice was commenting on how Katsuki was weirdly frozen, but again he couldn’t register it.
‘Does he actually know I’ve been cutting myself?’
No. No, no, no. There had to be some mistake. And the twisted part was, Katsuki couldn’t even completely disregard the fact that this could be happening, because Deku’s entire career at U.A. had been about hurting and sacrificing himself. Even with the fabric covering most of his body, Katsuki could count eleven scars on his exposed skin. Six of them were on his right hand, lacing through his fingers and the back of his hand, four of them were on his left hand and gnarled fingers, and one newer scar sliced through his right eyebrow, touching down onto the corner of his right eye.
Underneath his clothes, Deku had more scars. Apparently, a lot more than Katsuki thought. Now that he was thinking about it, Deku hadn’t taken his clothes off in front of anyone in their class in a long time, possibly since the middle of their first year, right after All Might’s end. He always took a shower in one of the two available cubicles in their locker room. If they were taken, he would wait as long as he needed to until one became free. Katsuki had always chalked it up to him being insecure about his body, but now there was a more ominous reasoning.
“Kacchan!” Deku’s voice said out loud, breaking through the wave of anxiety that had submerged Katsuki. “What’s wrong? I’ve been calling your name for five minutes!”
Katsuki let his eyes trail over Deku’s limbs. Thinking logically, The odds that Deku would hurt his own legs were slim to none. He wouldn’t do anything to risk his shoot style, since his arms are already fucked to all hell. That left his arms and his torso left. Still, Katsuki couldn’t just ask him to take his shirt off, especially if that was where Deku was hurting himself.
Then again, he didn’t really have any other option, did he?
“Deku,” Katsuki said slowly, reaching out with both hands to grab hold of Deku’s shoulders. The boy stared up at Katsuki with a mix of caution and concern, not sure where the conversation was going. “I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to swear on All Might’s grave that you’ll tell me the truth.”
“Of course Kacchan,” Deku said seriously. All Might’s grave was serious business, after all. “Whatever you want to know.”
Katsuki knew he was going to regret saying that. “Are you cutting yourself?”
(x)
Izuku stared up at his childhood friend’s face blankly, not able to register it the same way Katsuki had been nearly catatonic only moments before. Katsuki gave him time to himself for a moment however. Izuku swallowed hard, his fresh wounds aching with every frantic beat of his heart. ‘How in god’s name did he find out? Did I accidentally say it this morning and he just didn’t confront me until now? That’s not like Kacchan though, he would have yelled at me outside. Hell, why isn’t he yelling at me now? God, what do I say? He’s just looking at me with those eyes. I swore on All Might’s grave I wouldn’t lie, but…’
Katsuki’s face grew stormy. “Don’t even think about lying to me nerd.”
‘Wait.’ “Kacchan.”
“What, Deku?”
‘Can you… hear my thoughts?’ He thought the sentence instead of speaking it, looking closely at the older boy’s facial expression to gauge his reaction to the accusation. It didn’t disappoint. His mouth fell open a bit with surprise, and he even took a small step back. Devastation washed over Izuku in a moment as he truly realized that he couldn’t get out of this one. If Katsuki heard his thoughts, then… ‘oh god, what else have I thought about since Friday morning? Have I thought anything incriminating? Why the hell didn’t he tell me?’
“Because I knew you’d freak the fuck out like this,” Katsuki spat, gaining his fire back. “I knew you would spend the next few days as an anxious mess, and you would second guess every single thing you thought or said in an attempt to hide whatever the fuck you’re always thinking about. You’d probably pass the fuck out from stress.”
That admittedly made sense to Izuku, but that didn’t mean he was any less pissed. “I have a right to know if my fucking thoughts are being listened to, Bakugou Katsuki!”
The way Kacchan’s face turned white might have been funny if Izuku wasn’t seriously reconsidering his childhood promise to Auntie Mitsuki that he wouldn’t murder her son in cold blood. He was really rethinking that “sending a box full of venomous spiders” idea right then.
“The what?” Katsuki asked, still listening to Izuku’s inner monologue.
“No, you don’t get any right to speak!” Izuku hissed out. They’d switched roles in a moment. Izuku was spewing with anger and rage, whereas Kacchan was trying to calm him down and deescalate the situation. Oh, how the turntables. “You invaded my privacy! I thought we were friends now, Kacchan, and then you go and pull something like this? And then you have the audacity to confront me about something private?”
It was like the reminder relit the doused spark inside of Katsuki, because in the next moment he was back to his usual, spitfire self. “You know what Deku? I’m glad I didn’t tell you if it led to this fucking moment. You’ve been cutting yourself! You’re not a fucking imbecile, I know you know how dangerous that is! Are you trying to end your hero career- no, your fucking life- before it’s even started?”
“Maybe it’s none of your business, Kacchan!” Izuku snarled. They had been gradually getting closer and closer, but now they were practically nose to nose, breathing in each other’s air like a couple of raging bulls. “Since when have you ever given a fuck what I do to myself, huh? Wasn’t it you that practically begged me to kill myself when we were fifteen?”
Izuku knew it was too far the moment he said it. Katsuki’s expressions shuttered closed in an instant, becoming dark and guarded in a way they hadn't since their fight at Ground Beta. Izuku’s inner self was already wincing and apologizing, but he refused to give the thoughts merit by verbalizing them. “That’s not true and you know it. I said it once. One time, Deku, and I’ve regretted it every moment of every day since. I’ve been making up for my mistakes in the only way I know how; by using my actions. If that’s not good enough for you, then fucking say so.”
The deadly calm in Katsuki’s voice was a hundred times worse than any screaming match the two of them could have had. Izuku swallowed against the lump in his throat, his fingers and toes already beginning to turn cold from anxiety. He stared down at the ground with his mind in such a race that he himself could only pick out a word or two. Finally, he looked up into Katsuki’s ruby eyes determinedly. Without hesitation, he reached down and grabbed the hem of his shirt. When he yanked it over his head, the fabric fluffed his hair up considerably, but he didn’t bother patting it down. Not when Katsuki’s eyes were already fixed on his wrists and torso.
Izuku’s scars were a myriad of colours, shapes and sizes. Some of them he’d had since he was quite young, perhaps ten or eleven years old. Those were all shallow and somewhat superficial. The deeper ones all started in their first year of middle school, when he was thirteen. He’d gone to a convenience store near his house and bought a pack of razor blades meant for men’s razors. Before then, he’d been using a blade he’d unscrewed from a pencil sharpener.
Now at seventeen years old, his pain tolerance had risen to obscene amounts. His cuts had gotten deeper, more reckless, and often left him tired and sluggish from blood loss. It was these reasons that he never overdid his little “sessions,” since he really didn’t want to die before he got the chance to save the world. Today, he’d admittedly gone overboard.
The worst part of his scars were the words. By his last year of elementary school and first year of middle school, Izuku had already been feeling such a loss of control. His mother started working odd hours due to her nursing job, Kacchan had officially stopped speaking to him unless he was harassing him, and he had no friends and no quirk. His father had been MIA for practically his entire life. The only thing that Izuku could control was food. And control he did; he ended up losing more weight than he’d ever meant to, but by the time he met All Might, it was an addiction he couldn’t stop. Instead of growing along with the rest of the kids of Aldera Junior High, his growth was stunted by his self-imposed malnourishment.
He was ashamed of himself, and ashamed of his body. At fifteen years old and five-foot-five, his lowest weight was eighty-seven pounds. He’d been skin and bones and was dizzy every time he stood up or sat down. It had taken his mother a long time to notice since she had such strange working hours, but by the time she had, she’d begun crying and begging him to eat every day. Eventually the crying turned into yelling, which turned into trying to discipline Izuku into eating. Nothing had worked, because by that point Izuku would rather die than give up the only part of his life he had some semblance of control over.
He wasn’t sure that Kacchan remembered that time in his life, but given the look on the blond’s face, he’d never known before. ‘God, this quirk is the worst.’
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? About any of this?” Katsuki breathed. His gaze was still fixed on all of Izuku’s scars, like the sight was so disturbing he couldn’t bear to look away. Izuku couldn’t even be mad at him for it; he hated looking at himself in the mirror for a reason.
“Why didn’t I tell my bully that I was cutting and starving myself?” Izuku repeated, raising an eyebrow at Katsuki. That finally made the blond meet his eyes again, a hard look settling in them once more.
“If you had told me, I would have- I would have-”
“You would have what? You would have stopped?” Izuku asked incredulously.
“I would have helped you,” Katsuki emphasized. His fists clenched at his sides, like he was barely restraining himself from popping sparks with his quirk. He’d gotten a lot better with his anger management since All Might had died, and at times like these he really showed it.
“You hated me, Kacchan.”
“I never hated you!” Katsuki spat. “I was fucking jealous of you, alright? I knew you were better than me! I knew that you had more chance of being a hero in your second fucking toe joint than I had in my entire body, and it pissed me off. I thought you were making fun of me every minute of every day because you knew it too.”
Izuku wasn’t even sure what to say to that. “That sounds like hate to me.”
“Even so, I didn’t want you fucking dead.” Kacchan shook his head like he was trying to clear it. He was no doubt thinking about the day that he’d told Izuku to jump off of their middle school building- Izuku certainly was. “I never wanted you dead,” he reiterated quietly.
Izuku exhaled, recognizing that their arguing was silly. He grabbed his shirt and yanked it back over his head, feeling a bit more secure now that one of his biggest secrets wasn’t so out in the open anymore. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve been over it for a long time.”
“Clearly fucking not!” Katsuki hissed, gesturing to all of him. “You’re still doing it! You’re skipping meals, and when we ate breakfast this morning…” he trailed off nervously, like he didn’t want to bring up his invasion of privacy again. Izuku thought back to breakfast that morning, wracking his brain for an answer on what Kacchan was talking about. It came to him a moment later. He’d been worried about how many calories were in that breakfast. He’d needed to give himself a pep-talk to force it down. Later, he’d battled against the urge to throw it all back up again.
Katsuki’s face darkened, and Midoriya resisted the urge to hit himself. How could he keep forgetting that Katsuki could hear him? The blond’s point about not wanting Izuku to worry himself into sickness over the next few days was making more and more sense. “I’m over the… food thing. Mostly anyway. I’m always going to struggle with it because that’s just how eating disorders work, but I’ve been dealing with it by myself for a long time.”
“Fine, whatever,” Katsuki conceded, although he clearly didn’t want to. “I’ll believe you on that. What I’m really worried about is the... “ he hesitated, clearly not knowing how to put it delicately. Izuku snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, ignoring the slight twinge of pain he got when the movement pulled on his fresh wounds.
“The cutting,” he deadpanned, finishing the older boy’s sentence. Bakugou’s eyebrows knitted together, but he nodded anyway.
“You need to stop it,” he told Izuku. “It’s not… it’s not healthy.”
Midoriya couldn’t help it; he barked out a bitter laugh. “It’s not healthy? I know it’s not healthy Kacchan, I’m fucking cutting myself. I’m not a complete idiot.”
“Could’ve fooled me!” Katsuki snarled. “You have an insane pain tolerance Deku! The entire fucking school knows it! What if one day you cut too deep in an important place? You could die, or you could permanently damage something! What if you bleed out alone and One for All died with you?” The boy was pacing back and forth now, his hands flexing at his sides while he held back the sparks that threatened to fly from them. “There’s too many dangerous variables, not to mention it’s- it’s-”
“It’s what?” Izuku asked quietly. It wasn’t often that he watched Katsuki fall apart like this; the only other times he’d seen the boy this upset was at Ground Beta in their first year, and then again at All Might’s funeral. Izuku’s anger faded with every concerned word from the volatile boy’s mouth until he was more of a spectator to the meltdown than a participant.
Katsuki whirled on him, and Izuku was flabbergasted to see that tears burned in those crimson eyes. They hadn’t fallen quite yet, but the fact that they were present in any capacity was enough to make him freeze in place. “It’s fucking selfish! Do you have any idea how this would make any of us feel? How crushed your mom would be, or how hurt your fucking nerd squad would feel?” He laughed bitterly. “All Might would fucking hate himself for this.”
Somehow, Izuku didn’t think Katsuki was talking about All Might. He stepped forward a bit, swallowing hard as he tried to gather his thoughts to figure out what to say. They were so jumbled that he doubted even Katsuki could figure out what he was trying to say. “Kacchan… I need to explain something to you. I’ve been doing this for so long that it doesn’t phase me anymore. I don’t see it as something bad that I’m doing; it’s just a way to relieve some stress.”
Katsuki was looking into his eyes now, gauging his truthfulness. “That’s fucking dumb, Deku. You have no idea what this would do to the class, do you?”
Izuku frowned a bit. “Honestly? I don’t think it would do anything to them. I think they would think it was weird, maybe gross, but no, I don’t think they would be upset.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it makes me a bad person, but that’s just how I was raised.” The unintentional jab wasn’t missed by Katsuki, although Izuku breezed by it like it was nothing. “I was raised to think that nobody gave a shit about me. I can’t change seventeen years of experience.”
“Fifteen,” Katsuki corrected. Izuku paused.
“Fifteen?” He asked.
“Fifteen years of experience,” he said. “You’ve been at U.A. for almost two years, and I can say without a doubt that every single person here gives a damn about you.”
Izuku didn’t need a mind reading quirk to hear the conviction in Katsuki’s words. He couldn’t help what he did next, as it was what he’d always done best; Izuku broke down and cried. Katsuki caught him just as his knees gave out, lowering them both to the wooden floor of Midoriya’s dorm room. Izuku leaned closer into his childhood friend’s chest, smelling familiar burning caramel with every sniffling inhale. Katsuki’s fingers buried into the back of his messy curls, lightly scratching against his scalp comfortingly.
“Please, Izuku,” the blond murmured against his hairline. His voice was shaking almost as bad as Izuku’s body. “Please, just try, alright? Please.”
Izuku closed his eyes and played the sound of his given name on Katsuki’s lips through his mind. If there were two things that Kacchan didn’t do, it was say Izuku’s name, and beg. Here he was, doing both of those things. The meaning behind them wasn’t lost on Izuku.
“Alright Kacchan,” he muttered back. He curled his fingers into the well-worn black fabric of Katsuki’s shirt. “I’ll try.”