Chapter Text
“Oh, y’know, I didn’t wanna wake up this morning.”
All too common words from Kaminari Denki, and always played off as a joke. They’re typically followed by some quip in order to explain his behavior—why he was late to breakfast, why he was late for class, why he showed up on time for class but with the wrong shoe on each foot and his tie messed up...
“It’s too damn cold out, dude, and my bed is so warm…”
“I was having this sick dream where—get this—I actually passed a test for once…”
“The usual existential realizations about Quirks. I mean, like, could Kouda control Nedzu with his Quirk? ...And exactly how much would I have to pay him for him to try it?”
His friends laugh at his words and move on to something else, with Denki fading into the background of the conversation now that he’s no longer drawing all the attention to himself with his one-man comedy show. He has his mask is down to a science, always up from the moment he steps into a room with another person, but even so, when the chatter fades in his ears to a low hum and he’s not in the spotlight anymore, he starts to slip.
I didn’t wanna wake up.
It took him a while to realize what that meant.
Back in middle school he had first interpreted it as not wanting to face the day’s issues: having to deal with a certain teacher or assignment or friend. But one night he laid awake, staring at the ceiling, eyes heavy but unclosing, and he came to the realization that he didn’t know what day it was.
And he didn’t care.
Not about that, not about what was due tomorrow, not about what teacher was going to reprimand him, not about which of his friends would have some petty drama. It didn’t matter—and yet he still didn’t want to wake up. It wasn’t what was coming. but what wasn’t. Before he knew it, all of the joy had been drained out of his days like sand in an hourglass.
It wasn’t like that all the time. There were days where he felt on top of the world, celebrating winning training matches or visiting the mall or playing video games with his classmates. There were also days where he was flung in the complete opposite direction—his emotions were still there, still powerful, but volatile, exploding in his chest and erupting in the form of stupid little hiccuping and tears he had to muffle with a pillow to prevent Iida or Kouda from hearing.
On the days when he didn’t want to wake up, it was an impasse. He could put on a smile and go through the motions and force out a laugh—all autopilot. At night he would lay down and feel nothing but a quiet, heavy exhaustion in the pit of his gut, all other emotions turned pale and monochrome.
One of these days he’ll slip into the numbness, he fears, and never come back out.
He feels better at Yuuei, though. He has more better days now that he’s away from the apartment and living in his dorm room, but that doesn’t stop the pendulum from swinging, sending his state askew with it.
Today Denki wakes up and turns off the alarm, watching the faint beginnings of dawn attempting to penetrate past the curtains. There’s a whining voice in the back of his head, like a toddler stomping its feet, yelling “I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna!” But he has to. He always has to.
Ignoring the protest in his muscles, he crawls out of bed and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. There’s a brief temptation to open the balcony door and toss the mirror off, just to watch it shatter on the lawn, just to see if it’ll make him feel something more than just the shadows of emotions he’s experiencing now, but that’s not an option. He needs to see himself to ensure he looks okay enough. There’s the general downside he gets with it, a faint twinge of frustration that he’ll have to see the same stupid fucking shell he’s been stuck with for the past sixteen years, but better to cause himself discomfort than his classmates, right?
He combs through his hair, ignoring the slight static cling that lingers in the strands—a simple byproduct of his Quirk. He bares his teeth to make sure nothing’s stuck in them, then grins. It falls after a few seconds. He just hopes it can outshine the bags under his eyes. At the very least, if anyone asks about those he can say he needs a spa day, and then his friends can giggle and take pictures while he lies on the couch which cucumbers over his eyes and Ashido painting his nails hot pink. Turning the symptoms of his problems into gags is a good way to distract them.
He hears a knock on his door. Sighing, he puts on the grin and opens the door, already knowing who will be there to greet him.
Iida stands, back rigid, arms out in a usual odd gesture. He’s already wearing his uniform and looks far more awake than any teenager should this early in the morning. “I just wanted to check and make sure you’re awake, Kaminari! It’s important that you have enough time to eat breakfast—it’s the most important meal of the day.”
The last thing Denki feels right now is hungry, but he nods and gives the class rep a thumbs-up. “No need to worry, man, I’ll be down in a few. Thanks for checking, though.”
Iida nods and walks off, presumably towards the stairs.
Denki closes the door and sinks against it, sliding to the ground as he buries his face in his hands.
Again, again, again as always he feels as though he’s stuck on a fucking hamster wheel. His classmates are great, his teachers are great, and for God’s sake, he’s literally going to the best hero school in the country. He has no reason to feel this—this empty . People would kill to be in his spot. Yet even now, working towards a dream he’s held since childhood, he feels as if he needs to get away from it all somehow.
Sometimes he wishes he had a snake-like Quirk, one where he could shed all his skin and get rid of himself, turn into something better or at least something different . But of course that’s a stupid suggestion—snakes always look the same after they shed, just bigger, and Denki knows his visage is only shrinking with time as he sinks into a hole he doesn’t know he’ll ever be able to climb out of.
Sometimes he wishes he could change his name and dye his hair and pack all his shit into a tiny bag and jump on the next flight to somewhere far, far away, where he could reinvent himself and pretend he hasn’t existed somewhere else before. Except travel requires paperwork and money, neither of which he has, and if he drops out or suddenly disappears from Yuuei his friends will ask questions and get concerned and either they or the media, curious about the disappearance of such a school’s hero-in-training, will track him down.
Sometimes he wishes he could just crawl somewhere dark and hidden—under a rug, a hole in the ground, the dark, distant bottom of the ocean—and sleep for a long, long time, and not have to be stuck in his head at all.
He stands up and pinches the inside of his arm.
No time for that. He has to keep going.
❧
It’s the worst kind of solution.
Denki’s surroundings are dark apart from the faint glow of his alarm clock, the numbers telling him that everyone else is likely asleep by now. If he listens closely enough he can hear Iida one room over, snoring. He lays in bed, warm under the covers, eyes drooping and heavy, his thoughts jumbled but calm, as if he’s viewing them from a distance, like watching cars on the street roll by from the safety of a bedroom window.
His emotions are similarly distant, but present enough that he can put names to them. Most prominent is the sense of peace that first washed over him twenty minutes ago, flushing out the endless gray slate in favor of something that could maybe be called ease. The runner-up is sleepiness; not the bone-deep exhaustion he’s used to, but just his body preparing to fall into unconsciousness. And then there’s a faint pang, far off from the first two, of guilt-slash-shame-slash-fear, for what he’s done, for the fact that it’ll be there tomorrow morning, and for the fact that someone might figure it out.
What kind of hero cuts themselves?
In the past he’s seen the occasional article about it, and it’s been discussed during their hero classes before. The mental health of heroes is a tedious thing—the constant stress of witnessing people hurting, and sometimes even not being able to save them from dying, is enough for some to break under the pressure. A few years back, one popular hero was found dead in his apartment with a note. Another hero was hospitalized after she jumped off of a bridge. And a poor state of mental health doesn’t merely manifest through those ends either, of course; unhealthy coping mechanisms can crop up, too: drug abuse, excessive gambling, compulsive spending…
They had done worksheets on communicating with their ‘support network’—the classmates they’re closest to—and engaging in healthy coping mechanisms. The problem was that when Denki looked down at his answers, he had felt a sickening sense of guilt for lying. He would never go to any of the people he’d listed for help beyond studying. His strategies all failed when he had his worst days, the times when he would break down crying or would barely feel at all. But his answers were apparently enough to convince the teachers, because they never sent him to a psych ward or the guidance counselor’s office or even approached him after class with a soft voice of pity, asking “Are you okay?”
He guesses it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism because he’s hurting himself, but at the end of the day he doesn’t see much of an issue with that. It’s not about being suicidal—no, no, he’s never categorized himself as such; at the worst he’s occasionally looked at a high building and wondered what it would be like to fall. Instead it’s about how he knows he doesn’t deserve to be here and is taking up space, how he knows he’s fooling everyone into thinking he’s a better person than he’s not, how he knows that someday he’ll slip up and cement himself as an ultimate, irredeemable failure and then none of the people he cares about will ever look at him again. It’s the least he can do, to punish himself.
The side of his right hip stings. It was the most logical choice, by process of elimination. The Yuuei uniforms are worn short-sleeved during the longer months, and he couldn’t stand wearing long pants all the time during the summer. If he got caught with scars—or, God forbid, wounds —from what he’s done, then Yuuei would check him into a psych ward, and the press would inevitably sniff that out and have a field day with it. Heroes are supposed to look infallible to the public; the last thing he needs is to establish himself as weak and unstable (even though that’s the truth) before his career has even begun.
And it’s not like it matters. He can just get punched during training tomorrow and ask Recovery Girl to heal him, and then he won’t have to worry about it at all. No one will know. No one will ever have to know.
Is this going to become a regular thing? he asks himself.
Denki knows that when he finds things that work out for him, he clings to them like a lifeline. It’s the reason why he spends so much time with his friends; he’s never mentioned his issues to them, but they’re still closer than any other friends he’s ever had before. It’s the reason why he keeps up his smile and his jokester attitude, deflecting questions and concerns or preventing them from being born entirely. It’s the reason why, for so long, he stuck to the same strategy of a one-hit-K.O. when it came to using his Quirk—it had always been effective enough to impress, and he guesses that’s the only reason why Yuuei bothered accepting him, if anything else.
Of course he’s going to do it again. Nothing else worked.
For the rest of my life? Again his worries come out. Or will someone figure it out first?
He doesn’t want to think about it anymore.
He rolls over on his non-injured side, ignoring the dull throb of his secret and the shame it brings along with it, and drifts off into nowhere.