Chapter Text
When he was nine Katsuki's mother was diagnosed with Bipolar depression and mania, Borderline personality disorder, and OCD.
Before she got sick she was his mom. She would cook breakfast and dinner and she would do all the chores with a small smile on her face and a tired look in her eyes. And she would play heroes with Katsuki and ruffle his hair and call him her little rascal. She was nice to him and she was caring.
And then she found out Masaru was cheating on her. And she filed for divorce without a second thought.
After all the lawyers and meetings and the unavoidable battle for custody she was frazzled and different and apathetic.
So Katsuki tried to do the chores and tried to cook for her. But there was eggs shells in the eggs and he chipped a glass doing the dishes and all the clothes in the wash came out a different color.
And instead of calling him her little rascal and ruffling his hair when her hand reached towards his face it ended in a smack and him crying.
She didn't rush to his side immediately, standing there for a moment with a cruel look in her eyes before snapping out of her haze and apologizing profusely. Pleading with him 'it'll never happen again, I promise!!'
But, it did.
And after every bad screaming match Katsuki begged her to go see a doctor because she clearly wasn't right in the head and there was something wrong. But she always refused and told him he was the crazy one.
And he started to believe it, too.
So when the slaps turned to fists he didn't think it was wrong. And when she locked him in the closet he didn't bat an eye. And when she called him a weak piece of shit he didn't care.
By the time he was nine years old he did all the chores and did most of the cooking. His mother would only make dinner occasionally for him so he had to feed himself all the time.
And when Deku cried and acted dumb at school he would hit him because there was something wrong with Deku and that's how you're supposed to treat people like that, right?
Then, one day his mother was shopping with him in a grocery store, and as she walked through the aisles her hands shook and danced around, and like always people asked her if she was okay, if she needed any help, and she would just look at them with disgust.
And an employee stopped her and asked if she could stop flailing her hands because it was scaring the other shoppers and his mother lost it.
She screamed at the employee, she broke boxes of food, she almost attacked the employee but security stopped her before she could do that. And Katsuki just watched.
After a few days of her not leaving her room after that she agreed to see a doctor. And when she got her diagnosis she went home and stayed in her room for another few days. And Katsuki was scared.
He was scared to go to her room and end up bothering her, but.... What if she died and her body is rotting slowly above him upstairs?
Sometimes when she was starting to lose her fight she would threaten to hurt herself or kill herself. He was scared she would. She knew he was.
When she wouldn't leave her room or would grab a knife and then drive away in the car to scare him he knew she was just trying to fuck with him. Just trying to mess with his head to make him remember who was in charge and what would happen if he fought her on things. But that didn't stop it from hurting him.
And shit, when he was fourteen he told Deku to kill himself because Deku was ill and that's what he was supposed to do, right?
And then the sludge villain happened.
As he struggled for dear life he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't see , and he could feel the slime covering every inch of his body and forcing it's its way down his throat even as he fought it. Deku tried to save him, and he distantly thought that surely it was because Deku was crazy since nobody else wanted to save him.
Even after all might 'saved' him (he isn't weak, he doesn't need saving) nobody asked him if he was okay. Nobody seemed to care. He knows what he would say if someone asked him, 'what? You think I'm weak enough to be hurt by that bitch?' but he never gets to say that. Nobody asks.
When he goes home his mother is in a bad mood, she saw him on tv and how they portrayed him as a crazy destructive monster and not a fourteen year old kid.
His mother does something she's never done before and forces him outside. She tells him he can come back inside in the morning. He asks if he can get his stuff but the door is already closed. So he sleeps in the park underneath a bench. It's cold, and it's wet. And he really hopes she doesn't do this again.
But Mitski realizes that she can just make him leave and she won't have to deal with his shit. And she does. When she gets fed up and tired of him begging for her to take meds, or pleading with her to try therapy she drags him to the door and slams it.
So he makes himself a camp in the woods. He hides his equipment in a hole nearby and pretends he didn't spend the night shivering and crying when he goes to school the next day.
Because he's seen the stares, the looks people give to him because hes a delinquent. He's seen the looks people give Mitski for being crazy. He decides he'd rather be feral than crazy, and so he doesn't tell anyone about his home life. They'll see he's the crazy one, and they'll hate him. And all the same things he did to Deku is what everyone will now have to do to him.
That's something he can't let happen.