Work Text:
Why do we hate ourselves instead of the people who made us hate ourselves?
When Bakugou turned nine, yelling became a permanent part of his day. Maybe it was his fault for talking back every time he was unfairly insulted. Every time his mother screamed at him for getting an incorrect answer on a math problem or achieving less-than-perfect on an exam, he would argue back, defensively stating that it wasn’t his fault he was human and made mistakes. Masaru would then join the shouting match, telling Bakugou to show more respect and to become less of a disappointment. Then he’d cry--ugly, fat tears that streamed down his face and soiled his sleeves--and he wouldn’t be able to stop them, not even when the insults became taunts of “You shouldn’t be crying, you don’t deserve to,” and “Playing victim now? As if your tears will change anything.”
He’d wipe his face on his shirt as more tears fell. This is normal though, he often thought, I’m sure they still love me. Because they still buy me snacks and tell me they love me before I fall asleep.
Once, his mother--in a fit of rage--ripped up his Japanese textbook, and threw it out the front door. She angrily handed him a roll of clear tape, wordlessly instructing him to find the pages and piece it back together. He stood there on the cloudy Saturday morning for half an hour before Izuku found him shivering and coaxed the story out of him, and helped him find the pieces.
It’s out of love, thought Bakugou. That’s what they said. They’re only angry because they love me enough to want my success.
On another occasion, he stood in the bathroom after another morning of shouting, staring into the mirror trying to see where he had gone wrong and why he couldn’t have just shut his stupid mouth and listened. He ended up feeling angry and murderous, his young mind not knowing whether to blame his parents or himself. He chose to blame the former: the healthier choice, and the one that he would never choose again. Bakugou wondered if his parents hated him as much as he hated them at that moment.
---
When Bakugou was eleven, nothing had changed. The yelling had subsided a little, if he squinted hard, but it was quickly replaced by a quiet disappointment. He didn’t know which was worse, knowing that he would never be enough, or getting yelled at for not being good enough.
One day before school, his mother became furious when he didn’t catch on immediately to a concept she was trying to explain. Mitsuki yelled that it was the millionth time she had explained it--Bakugou wondered for a moment how that was possible, for he’d only heard it twice--and that he was an idiot who could never learn anything right. He was used to that particular line, and didn’t think much of it. However, his mother must have had a rough week, because she angrily phoned the school and told them that there was no way her son was going to classes that day. She knew that Bakugou enjoyed school since he was an avid student--and likely saw attending class as a 6-hour reprieve from his home life--and she decided to use that against him. The secretary quietly explained that it was the federal law for all students to attend school unless they were unwell or a family emergency arose. Mitsuki told her that she was not going to take the boy to school, and slammed the phone shut on the table, before turning back to Bakugou with an unreadable expression.
An hour later, the school sent one of their counselors to drive the boy to school. Masaru quietly opened the door for the staff members, afraid of the legal consequences, and ushered Bakugou out the door with a none-too-gentle reminder not to dirty the family name and to behave himself. He sat quietly under a tree for hours after his last class, completing his homework, before his father finally gave in and picked him up.
The next day was a school holiday, so he skipped breakfast, and went downstairs only to pack his bag that night for the upcoming school day. Bakugou realized that the art project due tomorrow was missing, the one that he had worked on for weeks. As he searched the living room and kitchen for the lost homework, some colored papers on the counter caught his eye, and he slowly stopped walking and stood frozen with shock. The project he had worked for weeks on was in shreds, pieces of different sections mixing into a maelstrom of colors that resembled his thoughts. He idly remarked that this was oddly similar to the other times his mother had ripped his belongings, before bursting into devastated tears, not knowing how he was going to turn in the work on time.
Bakugou confronted his mother, and she tearfully apologized and confessed that she was angry and ripped up what she assumed was a drawing he had done for fun. She told him she was so sorry and made him a warm drink as he began the daunting task of redrawing entirely. Right before he honed his focus and traced new lines, he thought, Maybe she was just having a bad time and I was being a terrible child, like usual. It’s okay, she still loves me, my parents still love me.
---
When Bakugou hit his twelfth birthday, he made the worst decision of his life. It wasn’t to take drugs or to give up on himself. He wasn’t so stupid as to waste his quirk’s potential--not his, the quirk’s, as his parents so often reminded him--and he certainly wasn’t going to fuck up his future by messing up his body. Rather, he decided that emotions were rather useless to him.
Maybe it was one too many insults, one too many shouting matches, one too many sobs in a dark corner of his room--he’d long since learned not to cry in front of others--that brought him to this epiphany (to most, it would seem ludicrous, but his young impressionable mind had been molded by overwhelming negative emotions). Regardless of the reason, Bakugou had reached the conclusion that emotions were nothing but a liability. A weapon his parents used to hurt him, the weird stab at his heart that made his eyes sting and throat hurt. However, he couldn’t be completely void of feelings in public, or people would ridicule and stare. Sorting through his assortment of common emotions--sadness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, anger, and a neverending void in his chest that he had not yet identified as a particular feeling--he decided to act angry on the outside, and stay emotionless within. A fine shield, he supposed.
Bakugou muttered quietly to himself, “Harden your heart. It’s not so difficult, imagine all of the emotions hiding somewhere deep inside of you, never to be found again. It’ll hurt less when your feelings are gone.”
And slowly, day by day, he was gone. Where Bakugou was before now stood an angry young man, with an empty look behind his irises that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard he concentrated behind his bathroom mirror.
It didn’t matter, because no one noticed anyway.
He felt unbelievably free without his emotions. His lack of guilt and indignity meant he no longer talked back, and his mother slowly replaced some of her yelling with more physical punishment. However, other than the very occasional physical acts--a few shoves a year, getting dragged out the door by the hair every few months, maybe a couple slaps with a ruler for a wrong answer--all was well, and Bakugou was fine with his lack of feelings and angry persona. Even if it meant bullying Izu-no, Deku, and pushing down the painful twinges when his parents threw another scathing reminder of how worthless he was.
It is okay , he thought. They still tell me that they’re doing it out of love, and Old Hag apologizes sometimes by tucking me into bed or buying me something I like. This is completely normal.
And maybe Bakugou really was fine--as fine as he could be in such a situation--until he found that he could no longer distinguish between things he liked and those that he didn’t, and began losing passion for the only hobbies he had ever loved.
---
Now he’s fourteen, and he’s been through a lot. Somewhere along the way he picked up self harm, maybe as a trend or on accident, but now it’s the only thing getting him through the hard days. He’s hooked and he knows it’s unhealthy, but there’s no better solution, so he carries on with it. He wants to feel something now, but his emotions are messed up and he needs pain to ground him, to remind him that he can still feel something. Sometimes Bakugou relies on sex--as disgusting as he knows it is--as a coping mechanism. Something about the moments of intense pleasure offers momentary reprieve from his sorrows and doesn’t leave the obvious scars of his other unhealthy coping mechanism.
He’s often suicidal, not the intense kind of ideation that leaves him shivering, gripping a handful of pills, but rather the quiet feelings that creep in, slipping into his thoughts and jarring him back to painful reality. It was the constant thoughts of “They’ll be better off without you, maybe they’ll give another birth and have a better kid,” “Pathetic, you’d be better off dead,” and the golden “You would stop being such a burden” that plagued his thoughts, sometimes a quiet hiss and at other times ringing deafeningly in his ears. And of course, there were the occasional depressive episodes that left him shaking, digging a razor into his palm to quiet the impossibly loud voices in his head, that sounded all too similar to the yells of his mother. Those clusters of days or weeks were horrible, the worst of them leading to night after night of staring at stolen bottles of prescription pills, wondering whether it would be best to just end it all.
Bakugou’s feelings confused him; sometimes, he would laugh maniacally at himself for being so damn weak, and no tears would leak even though his heart screamed in pain, while at other times he would cry and hurt himself because of the most insignificant things. He had his emotions back now, but he was no longer the confident child Bakugou who would take on any villain and brag about it afterwards. None of his newfound feelings made much sense, and at times he wished to repress them again and never spare them another thought.
He bullies Deku constantly, feeling bad immediately after every thrown insult, but he had to keep up his angry mask. When Bakugou yelled at the green-haired boy to jump off the roof of the school and hope for a quirk in his next life, it took all of his willpower to not sprint after the boy and apologize, confessing that in reality he was the one who deserves to jump off the building. He doesn’t, since his lackeys are around him, but the crumpled, teary face of Izuku stops him from sleeping that night and he follows the quirkless boy around all week to make sure that he didn’t try anything reckless.
At UA, he hears the term “abuse” from Todoroki as he eavesdrops on his conversation with Deku. It triggers something within him. Bakugou always thought that his parents were normal, and that it was completely usual to be pushed around or insulted by them, as long as they apologized or made it up to him later. He searched up the word “abuse,” and played around with it for a while, before making up his mind that his parents were fine. They loved him, he loved them back, and it didn’t matter that he had to lose his emotions for it to work, that he had to hide behind a mask of anger, that he hid in his room all day to avoid seeing them. It was completely okay because they were different now, and if he behaved, they would love him. He only hid in his room because he couldn’t trust them sometimes, especially after a particularly painful flashback or episode, but he knows the lack of trust is just his fault because they had already apologized and offered him money, snacks, and gifts.
It wasn’t abuse, right? He wasn’t beaten every day, and the insults were nothing but the truth. The nights he spent desperately clutching his stuffed animals, pretending they were loving parents, and the nights he still spends sobbing into his teddy bear as the voices assaulted him; those were fine, nothing he couldn’t deal with, because it’s not abuse if they apologized, if they loved him now.
The past was his own problem, because everyone else had moved on by now.