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Most days Hanta came home with new wounds. It’s not like he expected U.A. to be gentle on it’s aspiring heroes, but his life would be so much simpler if that were his only problem. No, most of his injuries were self-inflicted.
It’s not as bad as it sounds, he promises himself every time his brain runs wild with scenarios in which he actually explains it to another human being. Most of the time he’s not aware of his wandering fingers until he’s tasting blood. It’s not obvious unless you know what you're looking at, the spots on his face and limbs look like smudges of dirt or faint freckles once they’ve healed over. Bug bites suck, he says when he’s sporting fresh scabs. It’s too dry out today, when someone points out his peeling lips. His elbows get hit the hardest, so most of the time he just tries to cover them up from prying eyes and his own buzzing hands.
I’m not doing it on purpose, but no one ever believes that. Hanta has tried expressing how sometimes the texture of his skin and the feeling of tape excreting from those small slits makes him want to pick at it. Until he peels away the loose skin from a scrape or chapped lips it’s the only thing he can think about. Sometimes when his anxious thoughts are getting away from him, all he can do is scratch at a bump or wrinkle until it stings. With his family it’s different, they’ve known him since birth, they’re used to it. His new friends don’t know how gross he really is.
He thought he had a good idea of what he looked like, but then Hanta is couched in the USJ. Smoke fills the dome, his ears are ringing. He’s watching All Might beat the shit out of a massive, looming, twisted creature. Even from across the field he can smell sweat, sterile chemicals, and exposed muscle. All Might yeets the playdough monstrosity into the sun, and Hanta relaxes for the first time since the villains appeared.
Then he spots him.
All Might faces a young man covered in disembodied hands. His skin is gaunt, and pale, and he’s shrieking obscenities while tearing into the skin around his neck with fervor. Hanta’s stomach twists violently, because he recognizes the desperation in the man’s movements. It’s disgusting to watch and it only makes Hanta feel worse, because what if that’s what he looks like?
His dad picks him up early.
“The girls are still at school, I can tell them to give you some space when I go pick them up if you want?”
He catches his dad’s wrinkled eyes briefly in the rearview mirror.
“Nah,” he shrugs. “I just want things to be normal.”
He forgets his backpack in the car but his dad is already holding it when he turns back.
“Dad?” Hanta’s voice cracks. “Can you…sorry…I don’t…”
He’s clutching one elbow with white knuckles. His dad drops his backpack in front of the stairs when he realizes there’s blood dripping down his son’s arm. Hanta lets his fingers be peeled back. The skin lining the tape slit is ripped. He winces at the look on his dad’s face.
“I thought the paramedics checked the whole class?” His dad rummages through the kitchen cabinets for the first aid kit.
“They did.” Hanta says, growing more and more nauseated. “I was fine, just some scrapes. It was…this was after.”
His dad’s gaze softens as he cleans and disinfects Hanta’s arm. “Well, no tape from this guy for a while, but it should only take a few days to heal. You’ll be fine before the break ends.”
Hanta can’t help but stare at all his old pock marks. His fingers itch to pick at them until they go away.
His dad finishes with the bandage and then pulls his son into a strong, reassuring hug.
Hanta’s chest doesn’t feel as tight. “There was a man there, one of the villains.”
His dad covers up the way his shoulders stiffen by gently rubbing his back, encouraging Hanta to continue if it would make him feel better. He sniffs, and buries his face into his dad’s chest.
“He…he got upset when All Might beat him. He couldn’t stop scratching his face.”
“Oh, kiddo.” His dad squeezes Hanta’s shoulders. “I got you now, you’re safe. You’re nothing like the people that attacked you today.”
Hanta pulls into himself. “I know…I’m just scared that I…that I look that way. I know what I am, but I can’t control how other people perceive me.”
His dad lets go. “That may be true, but you know what?”
Hanta looks up at him.
“Those guys are just assholes in spandex, my kid goes to the best hero school in the country.”
Hanta’s mouth twitches, then breaks into a shaky grin. “Yeah, I do.”
His dad smiles in turn. “It’s okay to feel all these things, you've been through something that even most hero students don’t experience until after graduation. It’s a lot to process, and it’s going to be hard and uncomfortable, but working through it is healthy. No matter what it looks like. I’m here to help and support you. You can talk to me about it alone, or with your sisters, or I can help you find a counselor if you prefer. You don’t even have to think about that right now, you definitely need to rest.”
Hanta wipes away any remaining tears. “I want to talk later, but ice cream and a movie sound so good right now.”
“You got it. Shoyu tamago tonight?”
“Hell yeah!”
Since the USJ incident, Hanta makes more of an effort to hide and prevent his picking spots, but he doesn't feel as bad about having them in the first place. Maybe horribly embarrassed at most, but he doesn’t feel ashamed. It’s progress he’s proud of.
He’s sitting in his new dorm room, running his eyes over the space one more time for anything else he wants to put up. It helps that they’re allowed to decorate however they want. The dorm room is almost identical to his back home. It’s because Hanta is slowly realizing the move is going to be difficult. He should be taking a page out of Bakugou’s book and napping off all the jittery energy socialization gives him but he can’t help it, he wants to hang out with his friends! He breaks the skin on his bottom lip before the night’s over and twice more the next day.
It’s like that all through the first week. Toes are stepped on, nerves are shot, boundaries are tested. Hanta comes to the horrible realization that privacy has been completely redefined.
“Dude,” Ojiro eyes him in the bathroom mirror, “do you need to borrow some bug spray or something?”
“Hm?” Hanta finishes wrapping his hair up in a towel. He’s not currently wearing a shirt (somehow he grabbed two pairs of pants before hitting the showers) and there’s a few fresh red scabs scattered along his shoulders.
Ojiro folds his hands sympathetically. “You’re getting eaten alive.”
Well, some of them had started as bug bites, he wasn’t about to spew complete bullshit.
“Nah, I’m good.” It was all he could do not to pick them open again. “They don’t even bother me.”
Ojiro did not seem convinced, but Hanta was out of there before further conclusions could be jumped to. He makes sure he wears shirts that cover up any new scabs.
Then he’s hit where it hurts.
“Ow!” Is what he would have said, if his mouth hadn’t been full of food, so it was more of a startled, unintelligible gurgle.
Hanta was two seconds into what was supposed to be a delicious plate of dumplings when his mouth started burning. Iida, sitting directly across from him, is so startled he drops his chopsticks.
“Sero? Do you require assistance?”
“Mm.” Hanta takes a gigantic sip of water. “Please no. It was just hotter than I expected.”
But he knows what really happened, because it’s nowhere near the first occurrence. The salt from his favorite sauce made the still-healing skin on his mouth hurt like hell. He might as well have been stabbed in the back.
“Alright.” Iida nods. “Being cognizant of the temperature of your food and beverages helps avoid such injury.”
Todoroki snorts to himself, pushing around a plate of the barest dumplings Hanta has ever seen.
He makes brief eye contact with Kaminari, before laughing it off. Anything to push past the weird calculating look on his friend’s face right now. Hanta resigns himself to unsauced dumplings for the rest of dinner.
“You’re bleeding,” Kaminari says later that night in his room.
Hanta looks up from the textbook he’s reading, and realizes he zoned out on a paragraph and had been idly scratching at a zit for the past five minutes. He winces. “Whoops, thanks.”
“You’ll be bleeding when I’m through with you!” Mina bites her tongue and smashes her fingers against the buttons.
“Mina!” Kirishima yelps. “This is Super Mario! We’re on the same side.”
“I am not immune to propaganda.” She cackles.
“No she’s right, fuck being a plumber, I wanna blow shit up.”
“You’re not even playing!” Kirishima says, playing exasperated as he ruffles Bakugou’s hair and is subsequently shoved off.
“You just don’t want me to throw this fire flower at you because you’ll lose your tanuki power.”
“Denki please.” Kirishima mashes buttons furiously. “I’ve managed to keep this thing for ten whole minutes.”
Hanta laughs.
Later that night, he gets up at what must have been near midnight to get a drink of water. He frowns when he notices the lights are on in the bathroom. When he opens the door, the figure standing in front of the mirror startles.
“Denki?”
Kaminari sighs in relief. “Shit dude, you scared me.”
Hanta manages to glance around in his tired stupor. He sees a pair of tweezers on the counter.
“Dude, what are you doing?”
Kaminari grimaces, “uh…drugs?”
Hanta snorts. “You don’t need any more drugs.”
He cracks a small grin and rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah…uh, sometimes I can’t sleep and I just…if I tell you, you can’t be weird about it.”
Suddenly Hanta is very awake. “I promise.”
Kaminari scratches the back of his head. “Okay so…basically sometimes I can’t sleep so I just come here and uh…pull my hair out. Mostly my eyebrows and lashes. It’s not as bad as it sounds, most of the time I don’t realize I’m doing it it’s just–”
“Like autopilot.” Hanta finishes. “Like if you just do it your brain will be quiet for a second.”
Denki’s head whips up, the two of them stare at each for a moment.
Then Denki chokes on a short, nervous giggle, and points at him. “Oh–just like the spiderman meme.”
Hanta is so taken off guard by the tone switch his laugh comes out sounding like a bark before he slams his hands against his mouth. But it’s too late, his anxiety is whirled away by how fucking funny his best friend is.
Hanta, holding back peals of laughter, crouches and points back.
Denki loses it.
He cackles into his hands and as much of his shirt as he can mash into his face. It's high pitched with drunken edges of sleep deprivation. It’s surreal and raw at the same time. Hanta can’t help but find it funny because he’s not sure if can handle anything else. So thank fuck he’s here with Kaminari. His friend’s shoulders shake and his face goes red with effort. Tears drip off his face.
Hanta pauses.
“Denki?”
Kaminari isn’t laughing anymore. He’s sniffing quietly into his pajama shirt, wiping away tears. Hanta wraps an arm around his shoulder.
“Denks?”
“Sorry,” he mutters. “I get weird when I’m tired.”
“I know, dude. You should go back to bed.”
“Can’t. Tried. Brain won’t shut up.”
Hanta thinks for a moment. “Okay. I have an idea.”
He leaves Denki on the common room couch within eye and earshot. In the kitchen, he gets to work making two mugs of champurrado the way his dad taught him. There’s no masa harina in the dorm pantry (yet) so Hanta will just have to make do.
Cooking isn’t really his thing, at least not anywhere near Bakugou’s level, but occasionally he does stuff like this because it reminds him of his family. He wonders if Denki’s family is as understanding as his. He wonders if Denki even knows he has a condition with a name.
Denki is holding his head in his hands when Hanta sets the mug down in front of him.
“Hot chocolate?” He perks up.
“Similar enough.” Hanta shrugs. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” his voice is slightly slurred. “Just a small aura. It’s going away on its own. Need to get more sleep.”
“Shit. Tell me if you need anything.”
Denki nods, hands wrapped around the mug. The two of them sit in comfortable silence. Hanta doesn’t really know what to say. He started focusing on comforting his friend, now it feels like they might have drifted too far away to talk about it again.
“This is good.” Denki yawns, which Hanta takes as a good sign. “Lil’ spicy.”
“That’s my rapper name.”
Denki smiles, and then it fades. “Sorry about freaking out on you again.”
Hanta shrugs. “Seriously dude, it’s fine.”
“I’ve never known anyone who like…” He trails off. “Got it.”
He can always trust Denki to thwart Hanta’s social anxieties.
“I used to go to a therapy group when I was younger, met a few other kids with trich.” Hanta fiddles with the sleeve of his pajamas, relishing the gritty texture of champurrado on his tongue.
“Ah.” A weird look crawls onto Denki’s face. “I’ve heard of the name before, I just didn’t think I had it like, bad enough? It feels stupid now that I’m saying it out loud.”
Hanta frowns. “Bad enough to what? Be diagnosed?”
Denki exaggerates a wince. “I kinda thought I thought I was just weird, or it was an ADHD thing or something. This is actually kind of a bit to take in but I’m super tired right now so…” He flashes a weak peace sign.
Hanta looks him up and down. Even in the dim light from the kitchen he can see Denki’s choppy eyelashes and severely thinned eyebrows. “Dude.”
“And since I manage to leave my head alone most of the time, it never felt real. People I read about had it so much worse than me. Simultaneously gross and not gross enough. Y’know?”
Hanta knows all too well. But the champurrado is starting to weigh on him, and he doesn’t even know where to begin with expressing that. He doesn’t think Denki is expecting him to, he just needed to tell Hanta how he’s feeling because right now he’s the only person who can understand.
Denki’s mug is almost empty when his hand droops. Hanta catches it because he’s been watching Denki and half expected this to happen. Even though his friend said the aura would go away, Hanta has learned Denki has a poor track record when it comes to gauging his focal seizures. He glances at the clock on his phone and feels even more tired at the sight of it being just past one in the morning. Wrapping an arm gently around Denki’s shoulders, Hanta waits.
A minute later, Denki blinks and lets out a groan.
Hanta pats his back. “Bedtime, pikachu.”
Denki looks ten times as exhausted now. Eyelids fluttering and head swaying as he comes back to himself. “Hmm. You make a strong case sir.”
Hanta makes sure he gets back to his dorm safe, and passes out as soon as he hits his bed.
They don’t really talk about it the next day, or the days following. Besides the occasional (loving) “do you want me to zap you when you go for that scab again,” or “do you have something in your eye or do you want me to distract you,” traded between them. It’s a dynamic that Hanta doesn’t mind.
“Okay be honest. How bad is it?”
Mina looks up from her phone and chokes. “Oh Denki, my sweet baby boy, who did this to you?”
Kaminari deflates, black ink is smudged across his face like he fought an octopus and lost. “Mina pleeeeeaaase. I just wanna look hot.”
“You trying to copy my fucking eyeliner?” Bakugou demands at the same time Kirishima perks up and asks, “For who?”
Denki tosses him an exasperated eye roll. “Is it not acceptable for a boy to want to look hot for himself?”
Kirishima nods. “Manly.”
“Right, come here. I basically invented eyeliner.” Mina beckons for Kaminari to sit in front of her mirror.
“Not convinced you didn’t fuck it up on purpose just to get undivided attention.” Hanta ducks when Denki tosses a makeup brush at him.
“Yo, no yeeting my stuff.”
“Sorry Mina. On an unrelated note, while you’re working, I’m going to be giving y’all an update on my moon Nuzlocke.”
“I thought we were going to watch a movie?” Bakugou mutters under his breath.
“Wait, I need to know if my son Dwayne is okay.”
Denki inhales dramatically. “I’m sorry Kirishima.”
Kirishima’s jaw drops. “No…”
Hants leans back against Mina’s foot board as Kaminari dives into the long winding tale of how Dwayne the Rockruff Johnson lost his life in an epic battle against the evils of the world. He’s got a bundle of small metal rings–a fidget toy borrowed from Kirishima–in one hand. It’s one of those rare days where the whole dorm is filled with a sense of peace. Hanta feels it down to his core, even the urge to pick is absent.
“Anyway, I forgot that you made me equip a figy berry, and that’s literally the only reason I got out alive.”
“He’s not dead?” Kirishima squawks.
“Oh no, he’s a Lycanroc now.”
Hanta snorts.
Kirishima clutches his chest, deep in the throes of emotional heartburn. Denki grins because he’s a smartass who takes great care to maintain that title.
“Whoa.” Mina stops wiping eyeliner off Denki’s face. “Uh.”
Denki laughs nervously. “That’s the last thing I want to hear in this situation, Mina. What’d you do to my face?”
“Nothing, at least I don’t think so. You’re missing like, a lot of your eyelashes though.”
Denki stiffens. “Oh.”
Hanta meets his eyes from across the room, then Denki’s gaze fixes on the floorboards.
“Oi,” Five minutes ago it seemed to all the world that Bakugou was checked out, scrolling on his phone. Now his eyes are boring into Hanta with an intensity that burns. “What’s the big deal? Why’re you two being weird?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Hanta scoffs.
“Fuck off.”
“Kats.” Kirishima reaches for his arm.
“Stop it guys, it's fine. It was me, I pulled out my eyelashes.”
Denki’s fists are clenched around the hem of his shirt. His eyes are still glued to his pikachu-print socks, and his fingers tremble slightly.
“You…what?” Mina is staring at him. They’re all staring at him.
Hanta winces.
“I have…like…it’s like an anxiety thing. Sometimes I feel like I have to, sometimes I don’t even notice. I was…I was hoping the eyeliner made it less obvious.”
“Goddamn. Is that all? You’re acting like you killed a guy.” Bakugou says, then pops an earbud in and returns to his phone.
Denki glances up at him, surprise stretches his features. “Oh, I guess I keep expecting people to be freaked out.”
He looks over and once again meets Hanta’s shocked stare.
Hanta looks away.
He’s witnessing the whole thing go down, feeling like he can barely breathe. People have freaked out to his face before. Sure, he’s closer to these four than he has been to anyone in a long time, but it does nothing to settle the unease he feels about how nonchalant they are. His heartbeat picked up a few minutes ago and Hanta isn’t even the one spilling his guts right now.
“Well, I guess I want to help if I can?” Kirishima offers. “Just say the word.”
Denki grins from ear to ear. “Thanks bro.”
“Same, I can still help you with your eyeliner if you want?” Mina wrings the black pen between her hands.
“Oh yeah, I was also a hundred percent serious about being hot. Punk me up, Mina.”
She laughs, which for Mina involves a lot of uncontrollable snorts. “Dork.” She resumes reapplying his eyeliner with a steady hand. Conversation returns to normal. Too normal. Too quickly.
Hanta doesn’t even remember what movie they ended up watching, he’s too busy boring a new hole into his elbow.
“I thought you were going to tell them too.” Denki says.
The electric guitar in his hands is unplugged, part of one of Denki’s many schemes to burn off his excess electricity. Try as he might, Hanta doesn’t think Denki is going to be able to substitute an amp.
“I think you’re going to blow your eardrums out if you’re not careful. I’d rather not witness any of Yamada-sensei’s horror stories up close.” Hanta hands him the plug from the amp to an outlet. “Try this one.”
“Oh right, lmao.” He says, pronouncing it as ‘luh-meow’. “Also stop deflecting or you have to put another hundred yen in the therapy jar.”
“I didn’t recall deflecting being on the list of jar crimes.”
“Five hundred.”
Hanta rolls his eyes. “I just didn’t feel…ready.”
Denki sticks the plug in his mouth and the amp gives a small, pressured click as it wakes up.
“Badass,” he laughs around the wire in his mouth, then strums a few simple chords. “Are you worried how they’ll react? Y’know Ernest Hemingway once said, the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
“Eh.”
Technically he wasn’t worried. He was present when they found out about Denki’s trich, he watched them brush it off like it was nothing. Trust? That was something different.
“Just used to handling it myself, I guess.”
Denki doesn’t reply immediately. For a moment Hanta listens to the sounds of him plucking each groaning string. Until the app on Denki’s phone lets out a chime to indicate the string is back in tune. The next chord he plays is distinctly sweeter.
“High five?”
Hanta pulls his hand away from his face to return Denki’s high five with as much teenage begrudge as he can muster, and switches to fidgeting with a spinner ring on his middle finger.
“You don’t have to.” Denki says, with a level of seriousness not common for him. “Loneliness in hardship is no way to live.”
“Who said that one?”
Denki cracks a smile full of light and warmth. “I did.”
His heart skips a beat.
Hanta’s had nightmares before, sure. Who doesn’t? There's lots of material for his anxiety-soaked brain to pick through, especially after the USJ, especially after the training camp. But they’re just bad dreams.
That’s what he keeps telling himself, as he splashes his face with water as cold as the tap allows. It’s about three in the morning, he’d woken up in a cold sweat a few minutes before.
The memories of being trapped in the school room with all his friends and their stress with nothing to do but wait as each update of Bakugou’s demise came painfully slow are especially fresh tonight. Every time he tried to close his eyes after that, his mind started racing and his heart started pounding. Usually he has trouble staying focused, now he can't think about anything else.
They’re just bad dreams.
His eyes catch on something in the mirror. There’s a scab on his neck, it looks like a small scratch. Probably something he unknowingly picked up in training. The texture is different from the rest of his skin, it’s raised and rough. Hanta goes to pick at it mindlessly, telling himself that it’ll at least calm him down when that’s never how it goes.
He watches himself give into the compulsion, picking at the skin on his neck with a disturbingly vacant look on his face. He’s not even looking at his body anymore, just a vague shape that fills him with a sense of disgust.
The image of a man covered in dead, grasping hands slams into his brain with such force Hanta chokes.
He rips his hands away but now his mind just has something new to latch onto. The image of Shigaraki burns itself into his eyelids. Hanta can feel the hand on his face, on his throat. They’re cold, clammy, and stiff from rigor mortis. They clutch his body like it’s the grave they should have been laid to rest in long ago.
Hanta grits his teeth, and scratches.
He didn't get much sleep that night.
It’s Saturday, he lets himself sleep long through the morning. That way he doesn’t have to see the damage he caused last night. That was always the worst part. He gets a compulsion, he picks, the results give him tunnel vision, anxiety, and more compulsions. Rinse and repeat.
“Hey Sero? You up yet?” Mina’s voice floats in through the space between the door and the frame. “Can I come in?”
Hanta’s heart clenches. He wonders if he can pretend to still be asleep.
“I’m worried about you, dude.”
That was the problem with the dorms, if he’d been at home, he would be able to get to the first aid unbothered. He didn’t bring his emergency makeup kit from home because he was too embarrassed at the thought of someone else finding it.
“Open the door in the next thirty seconds or I’ll fucking bash it in.”
Bakugou’s voice lights a fire under Hanta’s ass, and he scrambles to put on some shorts. He hesitates, then grasps the doorknob.
Bakugou’s face is the only one that remains unchanged. Hanta glances quickly over the faces of the other three and sees all the same shock and concern he’s used to. He’s not sure what to say, so he doesn’t say anything.
Bakugou lets himself in unceremoniously and plops into Hanta’s hammock.
“What happened to your neck?” Mina asks quietly, reaching out to get a better look.
“Um...” Hanta’s thoughts are racing too quickly for him to get a hold on anything. Why were they here now? Did Denki tell them something? Was he about to be kicked out from the squad? “I don’t…know.”
Bakugou waves. “Why is everyone still in the hall?”
Hanta stares, bewildered as his friends file into his dorm one by one.
“We’re throwing a welfare check party.” Kaminari jokes, but even that is strained after seeing Hanta’s neck.
He hasn’t even plucked up the courage to look at himself. He has no idea what horrors they’ve witnessed. Gauging from their reactions, it’s not pretty.
Bakugou is the hardest to read. He’s got a low affect and on the surface level, doesn’t seem to react at all. But looking to Bakugou’s face won’t tell you anything but what he wants you to know. Hanta wouldn’t be able to explain how, even at gunpoint, but he's gotten better at picking up Bakugou’s vibes over the months. Unfortunately, his nerves are shot and all he knows is Bakugou is currently not exploding, which is a good sign.
Mina’s dark eyes pinched wide, she’s more focused on the first aid kit in her hands. Hanta doesn’t resist when she reaches out once more with a cotton pad of rubbing alcohol and a large bandage. He relishes the sting. Her hands are careful, gentle, like she’s painting, but everything else about her body says otherwise.
Kirishima’s shoulders are taught with confusion, his whole body gives off lost golden retriever energy. His hands twitch like he wants to help Mina, but he doesn’t know what to do. His eyes flick over to Hanta’s wound occasionally.
Denki is obviously concerned, and his leg bounces absentmindedly. Out of the five of them, for once he’s the calmest. He seems willing to wait for Hanta to collect himself.
Bakugou twitches, like the silence is a swarm of gnats. “So, you’ve got that same shit as the hand fucker.”
Hanta winces.
“Blasty!” Mina gasps.
“What?” The bridge of his nose crinkles. “Can we please just fucking talk about it? All this beating around the bush is making me— “
Bakugou cuts himself off abruptly. Hanta can’t tell if it's for lack of a better word or personal censorship. He bites down on the urge to touch the bandage.
“Is it…” Hanta’s voice breaks. “Is it like, really obvious?”
To his surprise, Bakugou shakes his head. “No.” His voice drops to an eerie level of quiet. “I saw him. Up close.”
Fuck. That’s right, Bakugou had gotten an eyeful of the disgusting ritual during Kamino. Hanta’s mouth presses into a shaky line of guilt.
“Stop. Whatever you’re thinking, stop it.”
Bakugou is the only one Hanta knows who can manage to hold himself uncomfortably while sitting in a hammock. But he’s pulling it off just fine as he stumbles into what Hanta thinks is an attempt at comfort.
“We didn’t come here to…fucking… I don’t know, yell at you.” A weird look passes over his face for just a millisecond, like he was surprised by what he said. Bakugou reaches over and gently shoves Kirishima’s knee. “Kiri, tell him.”
Kirishima sits up. “Oh. Yeah. Todoroki said you were up late last night, and that he was concerned.”
Of course. They hadn’t been in the dorms for that long, but everyone has experienced Todoroki’s complete lack of presence in one way or another. If he didn’t want to be seen, he wouldn’t be. Hanta wonders how long he was observed, if at all.
This was it. He was going to tell them, because it was getting harder to carry this on his own.
“Sero.” Kirishima’s voice wavers. “Are you…hurting yourself on purpose?
Everyone holds their breath as Hanta’s anxious train of thought comes to a full stop. It takes a moment to comprehend the question.
“Oh, shit. No!” He swears. “No, it’s not like that. Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it.”
Here he goes. Hanta prays they don’t think he’s gross or sick like that man. He doesn’t want to become someone else’s nightmare.
“That thing that Denki told you about?” Hanta's thumb goes to the spinner ring around his middle finger. “There are a few different types. I get compulsions to pick at my skin. It’s…gross. Sorry.”
“Hey Sero.” Mina holds his face in her hands so she can stare him down. “I don’t care about gross. I just want to know if you’re not doing okay.”
Hanta’s eyes start to water. “You don’t care that I…that I look like a villain?”
“No!” Mina swipes her cheek and tackles him in a hug, followed by Kiri and Denki moments later.
Hanta is overwhelmed by the warmth of their bodies and hearts. He’s so used to not receiving this. He’s so used to just wanting it. He’s used to seeing his body as a gross thing, not a body that other people love.
Kirishima sucks in a huge breath to battle against any manly trails of snot threatening to breach. “Thanks for telling us. I bet it felt all consuming sometimes, right? Like you were simultaneously blowing it out of proportion and being eaten alive by anxiety?”
Hanta nods and squeezes them harder.
“You’re making us all cry!” Denki laughs through his own tears. “Except for Blasty, but I bet he’s crying on the inside.”
“Tch.” Bakugou rolls his eyes, he still manages to look soft. “For the record, Soy Sauce, you don’t look like a villain. Trust me,” he pulls a few hundred yen out of his pocket and drops them into the therapy jar, “I would know.”
Kirishima gawks at him. “You can’t just use the jar to self-deprecate with a price.”
“Stinky rich boy behavior.” Denki mimes swatting away a bad stench. “Ironically this is not a cash money move.”
Hanta laughs, and feels a massive weight lift off his shoulders.
“On this episode of Blasty’s privileged ass, why pay for therapy when you can pay to do the exact opposite?” Mina snorts, wiping her face clean of any remaining tears.
“You do what you gotta do to keep the fam together.” Bakugou shrugs, a prideful smirk appeared on his face the moment Hanta cheered up.
“No.” Kirishima pouts.
Bakugou drops another hundred yen in the jar.
That afternoon Hanta tells them everything. He’s cared for by his friends, his little family. They don’t tease him where it hurts, they patch him up and figure out methods to help that don’t embarrass him or make the compulsions worse. It won’t make it go away, but he doesn’t feel so terribly alone.
Sometime later, he’s alone in his room. Hanta slides a pair of headphones over his ears and presses play. The music starts and chews idly at the rest of his senses. The beat starts to pick up. Hanta stands and lets it consume the rest of his brain. The buzz of neurodivergence leads him into a fairy ring and asks for just one dance.
His body starts moving the way it was made to. It’s a mix of Mina’s hip hop and instinctual stimming. His shoulders jump, his fingers cross and twirl to synth. He bangs his head and twists his wrists to tambourines. Somewhere in the tantalizing hum of his favorite songs he knows a few tears slide down his face. But Hanta can’t stop smiling. It’s part of the native language of his mind. He’s a rugged landscape of champurrado and pock marks, of Denki’s jokes and Mina’s laugh, of Kirishima’s heart and Bakugou’s strength. How could he be ashamed when he is made up of the people he cares for so much?
Hanta Sero laughs and dances alone in his room, but he's never felt more loved.