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Reality comes in flashes, sound mixes with touch, and he can’t move.
A scream.
A wail.
The ground is hard on his back, and there is something in his chest. There is nothing in his chest. His skin is peeled away from his body, exposing his ribs and heart to the smoke-filled air, stinging sharp and burning, and there, in the rain, Bakugou Katsuki stops breathing.
There is nothing but darkness, but even that isn’t solid. Everything is black in a way that isn’t really black, more the absence of anything than anything at all, and there are endless visions and dreams flickering against the walls, making it feel like he’s been sitting in a movie theater for a very long time.
The film reel spins.
He is seven years old and suddenly afraid of storms. He hasn’t ever been afraid of them before, but he is now, maybe because it's his first time actually being stuck outside during one. It's loud and wet and cold, soaking his clothes, the clouds cracking open and pouring down and pasting his hair to his face and making him shake and shiver.
Thunder cracks overhead, and lightning arcs across the sky, and his mother’s words echo in his ears, Just go, Katsuki. Get the fuck out of my house.
Surely she hadn’t known that the weather would take a turn for the worst. She would never endanger him on purpose, not like this.
For lack of a better place to go - Kariage is out of town, and like fuck he’s going to go crawling to Deku’s house - he drags himself to the playground and sits inside one of the slides, a foot or so back from the mouth of the opening. He curls his legs up to his chest and shivers, buries his face in his knees, tries to keep himself warm.
To a soundtrack of bone-rattling cracks and earth-shattering tremors, he falls asleep.
a voice says, achingly familiar, i miss you.
Eventually, he wakes up.
Movie over.
—
He goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth and finds himself staring at his reflection.
He hasn’t looked in a mirror since he woke up in the hospital. It's not that he’d been actively avoiding them, but he had no real desire to see what a mess his face had turned into, what marks his temporary death had left as a permanent reminder. But, for some reason, he can’t tear his eyes away. It's like watching a car crash - you wanted to see the blood, wanted to hear the screams, even though you knew deep down that such desires were sick and twisted and wrong.
The boy in the mirror looks like shit. His skin is pale, save for the long scar that branches down the side of his face, torn and uneven. He has dark circles under his eyes, so deep that they look almost like bruises, and Katsuki finds himself lifting his hand to make sure that the boy in front of him does the same.
This is him.
He shouldn’t be ashamed of it - Todoroki never seemed to have a problem with his scar, and Deku sure as fuck didn’t complain about the state of his arms - but that knowledge doesn’t stop the disgust that swells in his chest. If anything, it just makes it worse.
This is him.
This is him.
Katsuki starts shaking so hard that he feels physically sick to his stomach.
He covers up the mirror the first chance he gets.
Mom, he types, then stops. He hasn’t actually spoken to her since he woke up, and for this to be the first contact he makes with her… it feels sleazy, somehow. Cowardly. Like he’s hiding behind a screen so that he doesn’t have to look her in the face.
But, still, there’s a question burning in his lungs that refuses to leave him alone.
Are you proud of me?
He deletes the message and throws his phone across the room.
There is a knock at his door.
Katsuki freezes in the middle of turning a page in his book. It's late afternoon, and, by all rights, he should be hanging out with his friends. But he just can’t bring himself to go downstairs and talk to anyone like nothing has changed, because, in reality, everything has changed. He’s changed. Something fundamental and precious has been snapped deep inside of him and he doesn’t know how to fix it, doesn’t know if it even can be fixed, and it feels… cruel, to pretend that he’s the same person he was at the start of the school year. To fool his friends and classmates into thinking that he’s still him.
There’s another knock.
“... Coming.” Katsuki slides off of his bed and pads across the floor, cautious, wary. He opens the door slower than he normally would, looks at who is standing in the hallway, and sighs. “Hey, kid.”
“Um, hi.” Eri peers up at him, her eyes slowly widening as they scan him from head-to-toe. “I just - I heard that - well -” She fidgets slightly, twisting the strap of her backpack between her fingers. She keeps glancing at his left side, where the sleeve of his shirt hangs empty. “Deku said that you weren’t feeling well and so I - I wanted to see if you…” She takes a deep breath, like she’s steeling herself, and then blurts out, “I made you some cookies!”
… Well.
That’s interesting.
Katsuki stares at her. He doesn’t know how to respond to that. Should he be angry that Deku is spouting his business off to anyone who listens, or should he be touched that a little kid that he’s barely even spoken to is worried enough to bake him treats?
He must take too long to answer, because Eri flushes red to the tips of her ears and ducks her head. She mumbles, “But it's okay if you don’t want them.”
“No,” Katsuki says before he can stop himself, before she can leave. Angry at the world as he is, he’s not yet bitter enough to make his teacher’s daughter upset by turning down a gift. “That’s not what I meant.”
She looks back up at him, beaming. “So you want them?”
Ah, Hell.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”
Grinning, she swings her backpack off her shoulders and puts it down at her feet, unzipping it. She pushes aside papers and folders until she comes up with a bento box wrapped in cat-patterned fabric. She holds it out to him proudly. “They’re sugar cookies,” she says, practically bouncing in place with excitement. “I put sprinkles on them!” Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “And my dad helped, I guess.”
Which meant that Aizawa-sensei probably did everything, then let Eri decorate them before he put them in the oven. Katsuki can’t help but grin slightly at the idea of his teacher, usually so adamant about preaching the importance of being self-sufficient, doing all the hard shit himself and letting his daughter take credit for it.
“I bet he did,” Katsuki says, and takes the box from Eri. “Thanks, kid.”
She nods and moves like she’s about to walk away, then pauses. “I hope you feel better soon.”
Katsuki huffs a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “Me, too.”
… And that’s that.
Until it's not.
“... Kaachan?”
Katsuki can’t even pretend that he’d been asleep, but he still can’t keep the irritation out of his voice when he looks over at the girl standing in the doorway. “Don’t call me that.” He sits up, blankets pooling around his waist, and glances at the clock on his nightstand. “What the Hell do you want, kid? It's two in the fuckin’ morning.”
He can barely understand Eri’s response. That isn’t really much of a surprise, seeing as his ears ring all the Goddamn time lately, but right now it's not because he can’t hear worth shit. Right now, it's because she’s speaking directly into the stuffed animal she’s hugging in her arms - a hot pink teddy bear he remembers winning at the arcade for Ashido - and the fur is muffling her words.
“... What?”
Eri refuses to look at him, but she at least speaks so that he can actually hear her. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Katsuki blinks at her, wondering if he actually has managed to fall asleep, if he’s having a really ridiculous fever dream. There’s no logical reason as to why Eri is bothering him because of such a stupid reason, especially since she’s apparently supposed to be having a sleepover with Ashido right now. “Okay? I’m not sure how to help you with that. Go by yourself. You’re not a baby.”
Eri makes a wordless noise of protest and shakes her head. “I don’t want to go on my own!” She looks at Katsuki with pleading eyes, says, “I’m scared of the dark!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” Katsuki runs his hands through his hair. “Did you really come all this way to ask me to take you to the bathroom? Why didn’t you ask Pinky? I’m not getting out of bed, kid, I’m too tired.”
Eri sniffs, and Katsuki only has time to think, Oh, shit, before she shakes her head again, so hard that he’s afraid that she’ll break her own damn neck. “I’m scared of the dark,” she repeats, voice watery. “And I don’t want to turn on the lights because that’ll wake Mina up, and… and…” She hiccups, looking for all the world like she’s on the verge of tears, and Katsuki wonders how a fear could get to be so strong that it turned a usually brave kid into a fucking crybaby.
He sighs, relenting. “For the love of God,” he mutters, yanking open his bedside drawer and rummaging through photos of him and his friends, pens, pencils, and crumpled bills until his fingers close around what he’s looking for.
He holds it up for Eri to see. “Look. A flashlight. C’mere.” She creeps over, tentative as someone approaching a sleeping beast, and he wedges it in her arms beside the stupid stuffed bear. “Use the damn light, then leave me alone and let me rest. Just make sure to give it back tomorrow, got it?”
Eri nods, blinking rapidly. “Thanks.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
Without another word, Eri scurries away, shutting the door softly behind her.
Most nights, Katsuki doesn’t sleep at all. He has to rely on the perpetually uncapped bottle of pills on his nightstand to get any relief from his insomnia. He wants to pour the entire Goddamn thing down his throat on most days. They don’t really do a damn thing to help, seeing as he wakes up with a jolt whether he takes them or not, but it's the principle of the matter, he guesses. The idea that he can control this one part of his life.
It takes seven sleepless nights for him to give up. Seven sleepless nights for him to say fuck it, to yank open his door and stalk to the elevator, to push the button that’ll take him to the common room.
It's late, he rationalizes, and so there’s probably not anyone crazy enough to be awake. Everyone is in bed, getting rest because they have class the next day - classes that Katsuki thus far has been exempt from attending, though he doesn’t know how long that’ll last - and no one is awake, there’s no way that anyone is stupid enough to be awake.
That argument dies in his throat the moment that he sees that the kitchen lights are on.
Shit, he thinks, and is just about to step back into the elevator when he hears a voice say, “Bakugou?”
Katsuki swallows, resists the urge to stay silent out of spite. “What.”
There’s a clanging noise, the sound of the refrigerator door being closed, and then Jirou of all people sticks her head out of the kitchen. “What do you mean, what?” She smiles, but it's thin and tight and wrong, like she’s not sure how she’s supposed to act around him, like she can’t remember. “Get in here. I’m making tea.”
“Tea?” he echoes, moving forward despite himself. “Since when do you drink tea, Ears?”
Jirou scoffs and turns on the kettle. Her hair is longer than it used to be, Katsuki notices. She’s been letting it grow out. He doesn’t know if it's intentional or if it's because she’s been too busy to cut it, but it looks nice. She says, reaching up to pull down a glass jar of tea leaves, “For a while, now. Momo got me -”
She cuts herself off when he steps into the light.
He’d been prepared for her reaction, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. Her eyes gnaw into him like the teeth of some rabid animal, ripping away layers of skin to reveal what’s hidden underneath, and he purposefully turns his back to her, opening up the cabinet so that he can get two cups.
Finally, awkwardly, Jirou continues. “So, yeah, like I said. Momo got me hooked.”
Katsuki hums but otherwise doesn’t answer, not trusting himself to speak, and Jirou scrambles to fill the aching silence.
She wasn’t like this before - it used to be that she would stay quiet until someone else spoke - and he wonders, now, if she’s scared of what might happen if she lets the air grow still. He wonders if it's his fault that she’s acting like this. He wonders, in the spaces of her words, her frantic efforts to say something, anything, if he’s done something wrong.
She tells him about Yaoyorozu and she tells him about Kirishima, like she thinks that maybe he’s forgotten all about them in the time that he’s stayed holed up in his room. Maybe he has. She tells him about her parents and she tells him about her siblings, and she’s in the middle of a long, rambling story about how one time her brother tied a string around one of her loose teeth so that he could yank it out but he ended up yanking out the wrong one and there was blood everywhere and their mother was pissed -
He says, barely audible, “I like your hair.” Because he finds that it's easier, now, to say that kind of stuff out loud. Because his heart could stop at any moment, nothing is guaranteed, and he should say what needs to while he still can.
Jirou chokes on whatever she was about to say next, coughs. Glances at him, wide-eyed, and then stares down at the infuser she’s shaking the leaves into. He looks at her hands and realizes that they’re trembling. He’s pretty sure that they didn’t do that before. He wonders how many things he’s forgotten, how many details and memories have slipped through the cracks.
“Thanks,” Jirou says, and Katsuki can see the way her jaw is clenched. “I haven’t had long hair since middle school. Thought that now was as good a time as any to give it another shot.”
Katsuki blinks. “You had long hair in middle school?”
“Yeah. Mostly to spite my brother.” The kettle starts to scream and she flinches away from the noise, and Katsuki reaches over and turns off the heat. “Thanks. Anyways, like I was saying, my brother was a jackass when I was younger. When I was like, six - seven? - he chased me down with all his friends and chopped off my hair.” She huffs a laugh, bitterly amused. “Our mom beat his ass for that.”
Katsuki frowns at her, eyebrows furrowed. “Why’d he do that?”
Jirou shrugs in a way that’s far too casual to be anything but forced. She pours water into the cups that Katsuki pulled down, puts an infuser in each. He wonders if she knew that he was coming. “I don’t know why that bastard does anything,” she says. “Besides, it wasn’t even a big deal. His knife nicked me a little bit, but that’s about all.”
“He cut you?”
“Not badly.” She reaches a hand behind her head and grabs her hair, lifting it to reveal a thin white scar at the nape of her neck. “I was more upset about him ruining my aesthetic, honestly.” And then she gives herself a shake, like she’s forcing her mind back on track, and grabs both cups. She brings them to the common room and Katsuki trails behind, useless save for the fact that he’s the one who turns on the lights, and they sit down on the couch. Jirou takes a sip of her tea, wincing when it burns her mouth, and then looks at him and says, “So, what have you been up to?”
Katsuki doesn’t answer for a long, long moment, just stares down at the carpet. What has he been up to? It's been a week since he came back to the dorms, but he hasn’t really done anything significant, anything worth mentioning. He’s covered up the mirror. He’s woken up screaming every single night. He’s spent an unholy amount of time typing out messages to his mother, to his friends, then deleting them, phone wobbly and unsteady in the fingers of only one hand.
So, really, what has he achieved?
He swallows, avoids Jirou’s eyes when he says, “Well, Eri visited me.”
Jirou hums under her breath, leans forward to set her cup down on the coffee table. “What for?” she asks, and he searches her voice for anything accusatory, anything malicious, and finds nothing.
“She made me cookies. Sugar cookies.” He swallows again, mouth suddenly dry. Those cookies have been sitting on his desk ever since the day the kid gave them to him, still wrapped up in that cat-patterned cloth and tied with a knot he didn’t even bother trying to fumble with. They’re a constant presence, demanding his attention, and he thanks God that Eri didn’t see them when she scampered into his room to get the flashlight.
“How’d they taste?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t tried them.”
Jirou hesitates, like she wants to scold him, but then all she says is, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
There’s an awkward lull that expands and expands between Katsuki’s ribs, pressing against his heart. He flexes his fingers, curling and uncurling them, looks everywhere that isn’t Jirou. Finally, when he can’t take it anymore, he says, “She’s afraid of the dark.”
Jirou goes tense, like she’d forgotten that he was sitting beside her. “Who?”
“Eri.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah.” She glances over at him. “How’d you learn that?”
“She told me.”
To her credit, Jirou doesn’t question it any further than that. She just says, “Yeah, she is. Poor kid.” And then she pauses, like she’s gathering her strength and her words, and says, “Y’know what’s weird? I didn’t even notice that I was afraid of lightning until I met Denki a couple years back.”
“Sounds more like you’re afraid of being in his Quirk’s radius.”
“You know what? You’re probably right.”
They sit there in the common room in the middle of the night, drinking tea and talking about meaningless things, and so many things are still wrong with Katsuki’s life, but, for a few precious moments, he feels like everything is alright.