Chapter Text
Today I am feeling:
Bakugo Katsuki was feeling humiliated. Probably more humiliated than he had ever felt in his life, but he sure as hell wasn't going to circle that or color it in or whatever the fuck he was expected to do with the "feelings chart" he was handed by Toshinori Yagi, his new group outpatient counselor (his words) and prison guard (Katsuki's words).
The phrase "emotionally constipated" had been passed around more than once before to describe Katsuki, and at this point in his life he wasn't going to deny its suitability. But even that had never meant he was so dense he'd need to look at a list of feelings clearly written for children in order to help him identify how he felt. There were even crudely drawn smiley faces by each feeling so he'd know what it'd look like if he ever saw it on his own face or some shit. Jesus Christ.
This whole situation couldn't have been more condescending. To make matters worse, the only other patient who'd even bothered to show up on time was clearly a dorky brown-noser. Katsuki had just spent twenty minutes of his life he'd never get back in the waiting room, watching the freckled nerd read an issue from a comic book series Katsuki himself hadn't even thought about since he'd sold his whole childish collection at the start of middle school.
Then Toshinori (a man who looked exceptionally decrepit for his age and therefore shouldn't be teaching Katsuki shit about how to be healthy, mentally or otherwise) finally came along, introduced himself to Katsuki, and brought them into the room where he'd be serving his time three hours every Tuesday afternoon for the next eight weeks. For about .5 seconds, Katsuki was relieved to be finally getting this over with. Then Toshinori handed him the feelings chart. Katsuki grabbed it from him on the way to sitting down across from the nerd at a big table with a pile of crayons on it. "We start with the feelings chart every day," Toshinori said before sitting down together with them at the end of the table.
That nerd kid was somehow staring down at his own feelings chart with deep concentration, red crayon ready in his hand. After some time and what must have been careful thought, he started going through with the crayon, circling more than one feeling off the long list. Overachiever. Probably just wanted to make Katsuki look like he was overreacting or uncooperative for not even circling one yet.
"Would you like some help?" Toshinori dared to softly ask Katsuki with all the patience in the world after Katsuki'd just been sitting with his arms crossed for a few minutes, first staring at the nerd and then defiantly off at nothing. Help? Identifying his own fucking emotions? Because the words next to the smiley faces were just too big for Katsuki's high school dropout peabrain? Is that how people were going to see him now? As a fucking idiot?
Katsuki gritted his teeth and glared for all he was worth. "Which word on this list means I'm feeling like grabbing a couple of these crayons and shoving them into those sunken eyes of yours?" he gruffed out through clenched teeth. That oughta wipe that fake-nice smile right off Toshinori's old face.
Toshinori looked a little taken aback for a moment, but before he could say anything, the nerd leaned over the table to point at the bottom right corner of Katsuki's piece of paper and said, "There's a spot right here where you can write in your answer".
...
...Did he truly think Katsuki was too fucking blind to notice he could write whatever he wanted in the bottom corner or was he just being a smart ass?
"Huuh?!" Katsuki narrowed his eyes at the boy, ready to explode on him about how he can fucking see, and the nerd should keep his sticky fingers on his own side of the table if he didn't want to lose them, but the hand was already being quickly pulled away like it'd been burned. The nerd nervously pulled his own paper into himself and seemed to be trying to take up as little space as possible now and not meet Katsuki's eye. That was more like it. Katsuki slammed his hand down on the table and leaned forward. "There's not nearly enough space there to write that much, nerd."
"We don't call each other names here, Bakugo," Toshinori said with a quiet smile, lacking any bite or authority. It almost reminded Katsuki of his father, who was so used to his mother being around to play authoritarian that he never knew what to say when she wasn't there. When Katsuki was little, he liked his mother the most. Sure she was more strict with him, but it was that sense of authority and confidence that helped Katsuki feel secure. If he was sick, he'd be taken care of. If he was wronged, there was someone who would make it right.
What a load of bullshit. As far as the Katsuki of today was concerned, both his parents could go fuck themselves.
But at least Toshinori hadn't yet wronged him as badly as the nurse who'd handled his intake into the program an hour ago and asked him personal questions right in front of his mother. Katsuki couldn't think of a single valid reason why they'd need his sexuality on file in the first place, but the least they could have done was tell his mother to wait in the hallway if they were going to ask private questions like that to a teenager. Was it her first fucking day or were they all that dense here? No one seemed to even regularly work the front desk, maybe this whole place was simply under-staffed and under-competent.
"What the hell do you want to know that for, huh, old pervert?" got him a slap on the back of the head from his mother, and his absolute refusal to answer got him a frustrated sigh from the nurse who still hadn't seemed to think twice about the awkward situation she'd put him in.
"We'll come back to that one later," she had said. Katsuki was willing to bet she'd either forget or pretend to forget for her own sake.
"Midoriya," said Toshinori, snapping Katsuki out of his thoughts. "Why don't you introduce yourself to Bakugo and then go ahead and get us started by telling us which feelings you circled today."
Huh? Giving up on waiting for Katsuki to pick up a crayon made sense, but were they not gonna wait for everyone else to arrive? "We starting without the others?" Katsuki asked, gesturing his head at the three other empty chairs sat at the table.
"There aren't any others," Midoriya quickly supplied because he probably loved to take any opportunity to tell Katsuki he was being stupid to make himself look smarter.
"It's been only me and Midoriya for a couple weeks now," added Toshinori. "We're typically a small group anyway, but the last couple kids graduated from the group, and now you're here. Before I forget, remember not to exchange phone numbers or email addresses with each other until you're out of the program. That's a rule, understand?"
That was almost funny. Katsuki gave Toshinori the most displeased expression he could muster. Like hell he had any intention of interacting with this kid more than he had to, much less keeping in touch after it was all over.
And he was the only other patient? So much for group therapy. It's not like he wanted to be surrounded by a bunch of hormonal idiots complaining about their breakups like it was the end of the world anyway, but there was something so uncomfortably intimate about doing therapy with just this one other kid he definitely had nothing in common with. Fucking great. His mother picked the worst time to force him into group therapy. Teen suicide attempts weren't even in season.
Technically, this was intensive outpatient psychotherapy, a program designed to teach people coping skills and life lessons or some shit. Like Katsuki hadn't gone to the most elite school in the prefecture. Like he needed extra special lessons that aren't taught in school because he didn't even know how to just act normal. It was demeaning as hell.
Katsuki's mother had found this program on her own and strong-armed him into joining. Not that she could make him do anything he didn't want to, because she fucking couldn't. But ever since he was expelled from school, she'd been so absolutely, proactively relentless in trying to get him back on the right path, that he'd barely had a moment to himself to even process his own devastation.
She wanted him to keep going to his afterschool cram school as though any college would let him in without a diploma. She wouldn't shut up about how she already paid the non-refundable tuition. Maybe Katsuki would have even felt a little bad for quitting if she wasn't trying so ridiculously hard to rub it in. Or if it felt like she cared more about her son's well-being than the money she'd never see again.
She even wanted him to keep meeting up with his high school clubmates like a creep, when not one of them had even reached out to him once when he got kicked out. His mother said it must be hard for them to know what to say or if he even wanted to hear from them, so he would have to be the one to send the first message. Which he was never going to do. Now Katsuki was forced to ask himself if they'd ever really been his friends, and if not, if that was their fault or his.
But if coming to this program once a week would placate his mother enough to give him a bit of space for the next few months, he'd sit in the colored plastic chair and he'd speak when spoken to, even if it was just to tell the speaker to fuck right off. Speaking of...
"I'm Midoriya Izuku. I've been coming here for about a month, ever since I was discharged from the hospital where they kept me for suicidal ideation." He said it all so resigned. Or maybe matter-of-factly, like he didn't just dump his baggage, brutally dark and heavy on Katsuki, a total stranger. Maybe he'd said it so many times now, to so many medical professionals, to other patients, that the words didn't really mean anything to Midoriya anymore. In the world he'd been living in, that Katsuki was meant to join, these personal words were a normal part of one's self-introduction, next to your favorite food or hobby. That seemed pretty fucked up.
"I'm feeling..." Midoriya pulled his sheet of paper up to look at it, as though he truly needed it to tell how he was feeling instead of just asking his own damn self. "Anxious... and excited."
"Anxious and excited," Toshinori repeated weirdly bright considering the subject matter. "Why don't you tell us about that?"
"Um... since it's only been me here for a bit. I'm excited there's a new person. But also anxious," Midoriya mumbled, unable to stay still in his seat the whole time, fidgeting with his paper, and refusing to look at either of them.
"And why do you think you're feeling anxious?"
Katsuki found that question intentionally obtuse. Everyone sitting in this room knew exactly why Midoriya would feel anxious at Katsuki being there. Katsuki was the worst type of difficult person you could cross paths with when you're doing outpatient fresh out of the hospital for wanting to die. Maybe they'd determine Katsuki unfit for being in a group setting and get him away from this shaking leaf of a person, because he sure as hell wasn't gonna censor himself around him.
"I don't know," Midoriya lied, and that pissed Katsuki right off, but Toshinori seemed unfazed. Midoriya probably had him fooled with his teacher's pet act, but Katsuki knew Midoriya was just being a judgmental asshole. Judging that Katsuki couldn't handle hearing why he made him uncomfortable without lashing out. Little fucker thought he was better than him.
"It's ok to not always know why you're feeling anxious," Toshinori meaninglessly supplied.
So Midoriya could just say he was feeling any which way about Katsuki without any consequences or even prodding to elaborate?
Katsuki grabbed a stupid black crayon from the pile and quickly found and circled a word on his own sheet of paper, stupid black crayon for children breaking in half under the weight of his completely normal grip while circling. He slammed the broken crayon down, stuck together in one piece only by the paper wrapping, and looked straight up at Midoriya, who crumpled his own paper a bit during an attempt to curl even more in on himself.
"Bakugo," said Toshinori, looking down at Katsuki's paper. "You've circled 'annoyed' on your paper. Do you want to talk to us about that?"
"Nope." Katsuki kept his eyes on Midoriya while he answered. Midoriya refused to look back, though he totally knew he was being stared at.
"You don't have to today, but sharing feelings and discussing them each week is an important part of keeping in touch with ourselves and each other as we head into each new session. I'd like for you to try to participate next time if you're feeling ready," Toshinori said with a smile, either totally ignoring or unaware of how targeted Katsuki's world-circling had been toward Midoriya.
Toshinori went on to give this week's lesson on coping with anxiety or something. He droned on for awhile with his fake smile and fake positive attitude, occasionally checking notes because apparently he didn't even know what he was talking about enough to not need them. Midoriya was occasionally asking questions, taking notes in a journal he must have brought with him in his backpack, which made since with this being an afterschool program. Even when Katsuki had been a student, he was hardly the note taking type. He was born with a naturally superior memory, and his good grades had been more or less effortless up until high school.
Midoriya was obviously a model patient through and through, the exact type of kid who belonged in a place like this. Katsuki zoned out for awhile, finding the whole thing legitimately beneath him, when finally something Toshinori said grabbed his attention.
"What if I told you that the butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling you get when the next issue of your favorite comic is about to come out, or maybe you're waiting for that new figure in the mail, is the same as that negative feeling when meeting someone you don't know for the first time, or when you have a difficult test coming up."
Those things worth getting excited about sure sounded very specifically geared toward Midoriya. Was Toshinori even making an effort to grab Katsuki's interest at this point? "What do you think about that, Katsuki?" Toshinori suddenly asked him.
Katsuki sighed, and lifted his head up from where it'd been leaning on his hand. "What do I think about that? I think this is a less informed version of what I've already been taught at school. I know you're just doing your job, but I went to the best high school in the prefecture. There's just not that much you can teach me. I get what you think you're saying. We interpret the feeling as negative and we just have to reframe it. You're describing Han Seyle's research. But there's more to it than that. Are you familiar with the Yerkes–Dodson law?"
"No, Bakugo. Can you tell us about that? It sounds like it could be a very helpful addition to our conversation." Toshinori's smile for some reason got brighter even though he was getting fucking schooled by his own student.
Irritated, Katsuki flipped his dreaded feelings sheet over and started drawing on the back. Midoriya leaned over with wide eyes to look upside-down at the end result — a bell-curved line graph in orange crayon (which had also quickly and frustratingly broke).
"So the bottom is how pressured you are. From bored as shit," he pointed with the crayon to the left of his diagram, "to totally wired." He moved the crayon to the right. Midoriya let a tiny giggle out that caught Katsuki completely off guard, and he jolted his head up to see a small smile on Midoriya's face. The fuck did he find so funny?
Midoriya began attempting to copy the upside-down diagram onto a page in his journal even though he could just Google it. Toshinori was leaning over a bit himself and staring attentively, and though Katsuki felt all kinds of exasperation that the guy who was supposed to be teaching Katsuki seemed to feel no shame at all at being taught a more educated version of his own lesson, he went ahead and turned the sheet around so the two of them could see it better.
"Take your example of feeling stressed before a big test. It's good to be in the middle, between the extreme left or extreme right. Because that's where you're peak stimulated to perform well. It sucks ass to feel not challenged, but you don't want to be overwhelmed either. So no, it's not a matter of just reframing your stress into eustress, or as you put it," Katsuki winces, "your negative feelings into butterflies. Because too many butterflies is still a bad thing. You'll still choke on your test,"
At that, Katsuki put the crayon he was pointing at the diagram with down, and leaned back in his plastic chair. "Not that test-taking is a relevant example to me anymore," Katsuki added. "But I don't read comic books anymore either so maybe this lesson wasn't for me," he said, cracking a smile.
Midoriya blushed, probably in embarrassment at his geeky hobbies, and his eyes got impossibly wider. "Are you a high school graduate? Oh, but, you said you don't take tests and with an ability to recite stuff like this off the top of your head, I'd think you wouldn't skip college. But you can't be old enough to be a college graduate, this is adolescent IOP. Or maybe you're so smart you graduated early-"
"I'm a high school drop out," Katsuki grinned, interrupting Midoriya's ramble. Normally he felt ashamed of dropping out, but somehow Midoriya's endless muttering of how impressive Katsuki was and how it must mean he was in academia made blurting this out now suddenly feel like a badge of honor. Like he was so smart he didn't even need school. "I got expelled."
Midoriya looked fascinated, more than before, like maybe he wanted to take notes on Katsuki too. "What'd you get expelled for?"
He was expecting that. It was the question that always came, that was always going to come up for the rest of his life. But it wasn't something he could just answer with a simple phrase or sentence like whoever asked would always think. And it was fucking private anyway.
The truth was, Katsuki didn't have a full picture of what had even happened, and the school board refused to tell him beyond some made up bullshit about their uniform policy which had literally never been enforced. Katsuki suspected what they were doing was illegal and he'd have grounds to sue if they got specific about the real reason he was expelled. All he knew was the pressure of going from being the best without even trying at his nowhere middle school to working himself to the bone just to keep up at his fancy private high school led to losing his temper at the exact wrong classmate. Just one little blow up at the son of the headmaster, after spending over two years sucking up to him like his mother said he had to, and he was worth as much as trash blowing around by the side of the road. What a waste of time.
So instead of bothering to go into all of that, he just answered, "Not wearing my tie." He knew it didn't sound believable, or not like the whole truth at least, but he wasn't going for that. He was going for 'leave me the fuck alone about it.' Maybe he'd even get an apology for being asked something so completely not Midoriya's business.
Midoriya looked down at his own hands, fiddling with his fingers in his lap. "I'm not in school either," he got instead of an apology. Midoriya's fascinated, awkward smile was erased and his voice was all wobbly. "My school withdrew me for missing too many days. I've had anxiety as long as I can remember and I always managed to make do, even if it got worse sometimes. But it got harder in high school and. And then... I stopped being able to make myself go. And I thought maybe I just needed a break, that one day I'd be ready to go back."
"And then they kicked you out," Katsuki said.
"No," Midoriya said, looking up and holding Katsuki's gaze for the first time. "They didn't kick me out. They withdrew me."
"The fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"I wasn't expelled. I wasn't punished. I'm not a student there anymore, but... I can be again. Maybe if I meet with the school board once I finish IOP, and I show them that I've gotten treatment and I got my meds in order and everything... they'll consider letting me back in."
"Yeah fucking right," Katsuki spat out. Midoriya flinched, looking shocked, and Toshinori was already raising his hands up in preparation to de-escalate, but Katsuki wasn't gonna let this go without saying his piece. Because he wasn't merely annoyed with Midoriya anymore or a little pissed off. He was completely livid. How's that for knowing his emotions?
Here they both were, discarded victims of an oppressive system that didn't give two shits about either of them, to the point where Midoriya could have lost his own life over a meaningless fucking attendance policy, and Midoriya was drawing a line between them. He thought he was above Katsuki because he was 'withdrawn' instead of 'expelled'? Same. Damn. Thing.
"You think the school board's gonna look at your record of mental illness, hospitalization and the laundry list of drugs you probably take just to function like a semi-normal human and think 'Wow, he sure got his shit together, let's let him back in!' Wake the fuck up," Katsuki stood up and looked down at Midoriya, who wasn't looking away anymore. He looked right back at him, expression almost unreadable save the tears forming in his eyes. "You know why they kicked you out? You're a truant. A liability, asshole. You were making them look bad. And you want to walk back in and hand them proof they were right about you? That's an absolute riot. Take my advice and give up. You ain't ever graduating high school, nerd."
"All right, Bakugo, that's enough," Toshinori finally attempted to assert as though Katsuki wasn't already done. "Sit down. We don't call each other names in here and we don't say things that can impede anyone's recovery. Everyone here deserves to feel safe to share."
"And I'm not sharing?!" asked Katsuki. "I'm sharing what's on my mind, same as he was!"
"Lower your voice," Toshinori said calmly. So completely condescendingly calm, like he wouldn't stoop to Katsuki's level and get emotional. Everything Katsuki was saying was totally true, and it was being ignored because he was too loud or too abrasive. Fucking figures. If everyone treated Midoriya with kid gloves all the damn time, to the point where they even sugarcoated his own expulsion with a bullshit word like "withdrawal", Midoriya was never gonna get better no matter how much negativity he turned into butterflies. And if everyone around him was trying to convince him things weren't even fucked, he'd think it must be his own fault he felt so shitty.
Midoriya was fucked. Katsuki was fucked. And no philosophy, psychology or magic words to start living by would turn this all around. Because it wasn't their damn fault in the first place. And telling them they're just not thinking positively enough couldn't be more cruel. Because a school's image was more important than its students, and no one was saying anything, and God forbid if Katsuki said anything about it that he raised his voice like a human being who was feeling something real.
And this was all going just as shit as Katsuki had expected anyway. It's not like he was here because he believed it would help him. He wasn't the one who needed help. Sure, he had his flaws. He got that. He lived in the harsh reality of that every day of high school until it weighed down on him so hard he snapped. But fixing those flaws would not fix his life. He didn't do this to himself.
Katsuki sat back down. He took his feelings page back, flipped it over, and pointedly circled 'angry.' He looked Toshinori in the eye and said with all the levelled artificial calm he could muster, "Today I'm feeling angry. There. I shared my feelings just like you wanted."