Chapter Text
Denki has always wanted to become a hero.
It’s been his dream since he was a kid, back when everyone in his class still dreamt of being heroes. They’d play at being heroes and villains with their Quirks, even though it was technically against the rules to use them.
Those childhood dreams have long since been left behind, everyone, it seems, except for him.
He doesn’t know why he still clings to that stupid dream. A hero is strong and smart, and he’s neither. His Quirk could potentially be strong, sure, but it goes all over the place when he uses it and he’d probably end up compromising his allies. And he doesn’t have the brain for it, either. His grades have barely been above passing since elementary school, his parents are sure to remind him of that.
It’s only when he enters middle school that his grades start to become a real problem. His midterms and finals scores are going with him all the way to high school, and in this state, there’s no way he’ll ever be accepted into a decent school with his shit scores.
It’s not like he doesn’t study. His parents have been sending him to private academies and assigned him tutors like everyone else, and he’s learned material grades ahead multiple times. The problem is, that no matter what he tries, nothing he learns seems to stick in his stupid brain. All his friends have long since moved on to high school material while he still struggles with stuff two grades ahead.
He doesn’t know why he does so badly on tests, even when he seems to finally start to get a grasp on what he’s learning. He never has an answer whenever his mom starts yelling at him, asking him just what the problem is with him, while his dad tries to calm her down by saying that he’s not worth it.
It makes him so angry to hear them say those things, sometimes he’ll snap back with something hateful of his own but that always just makes things worse so he just waits. Trying to tune out what they’re saying and try to hold back his tears as they soak his workbook, pressing the tip of his mechanical pencil into his thumb, biting down on the inside of the cheek just to stop the tears from falling.
She’ll eventually calm down, puts all the things she’s swept onto the floor back on his desk and shelves. She’ll sit down with him and apologize, saying that he’s smart, he really is, he’s just not trying hard enough, and if he tries, he’ll be good. She’ll say that she believes in him and hugs him and sobs into his shoulder and apologizes again for being such a bad parent, and he feels bad about ever hating her.
But it always happens again, always because he fucked up again. Because he procrastinated on homework or was late and made his parents wait for him in traffic, because he fell asleep in class or failed yet another test. Then the whole cycle happens again, his parents yelling at him and throwing things but never at him, the apologies and the reminder that even though they might have gotten a little overboard, it was his fault in the first place.
They don’t hit him, not a lot or that hard, anyways. The worst they’ve done is grab his hair or slap his head. They’ve only threatened to kick him out of the house a couple times, the furthest they’ve went is to pack him a bag and push him outside before holding the door shut, it only lasts a couple minutes and he’s always called back in after that. And if he packs a box cutter in his bag once, planning to kill himself if they actually kick him out, it doesn’t matter because they don’t even make him leave in the first place. He puts the box cutter back when they’re not looking, and that’s that.
He’d started cutting a few months before that incident. Nothing severe or dangerous, just a few shallow lines on his thighs every time he felt like he needed to be punished. It’s not an addiction, not yet anyways. It’s always a conscious choice to cut himself, he could stop if he really wanted to, but he doesn’t want to stop. He relishes in the twisted satisfaction of watching blood well along the cuts, the inflamed red around the cut when it starts to heal, the twinge of pain that comes from the pull of fabric on still-healing cuts.
His parents find out. He overhears them talking about it one night, when he gets up in the middle of the night for a cup of water. He doesn’t know how they know, and he barely sleeps that night, wondering what they’ll say. But there’s a slight hint of relief there, too. His parents know now, so they can help him, right? They can fix what’s wrong with him and stop him so that he can get better.
They never bring it up.
A days passes, then a week, then several months, and they never talk about it once. His mom tells him that she loves him, once, and that she would be sad if he were hurt, but that’s it. His box cutter sits in plain view in his stationary tin, and they don’t even take it away.
On one hand, he’s relieved. He’d been so scared of them getting mad at him for it, or demanding to see the cuts or forcefully admitting him into a mental hospital. But on the other hand, there’s the crushing disappointment that they didn’t do a thing. Like they don’t even care that he’s hurting himself.
He searches online about it and tries to convince himself that his parents just didn’t know what to do about it, that’s why they didn’t do anything. But he still wishes that they did something. Something more than just a few empty words of love.
He doesn’t know if he believes his mom when she tells him that he loves him anymore. Not when she’s been screaming at him about how much of a failure he is a couple minutes before. She’s called him several things, a monster, something sent to make her life miserable, a failure, trash. He knows that they’re all empty words, that she didn’t really mean it, but it still hurts.
He stops hurting himself. He still feels like he deserves to hurt, but he’s scared of this thing turning into something worse, something as bad as an addiction. He knows that he’s nowhere near there yet, but he wants to stop while he still can.
It’s mostly easy to stay clean. He’s only been hurting himself for a few months at most, and it was never serious, anyway. He still wants to hurt himself sometimes, but eventually the feeling passes.
And then he absolutely tanks his second-grade first-semester midterms.
They’re so terrible that he’ll have to get a near-perfect score on his finals to make up for them, and even then he’ll barely get an A.
His mom gets mad at him, of course. It’s justified, he’s the one who messed up and failed, so he deserves this. She throws everything that’s on his desk on the floor, grabs his hair and shakes him, yells at him.
“How could you fail this badly?” She shrieks. He’s on the floor, staring at the ground and trying not to cry as he chews his cheek, hard. He wants to hurt himself so badly but he can’t because his parents are still here.
You can cut yourself later, he tells himself. When this is over.
“Answer me, Kaminari Denki!” She yells, picking up his textbook and shaking it wildly as the pages crumple in her grip. “What’s the problem with you? Tell me what’s wrong with you!”
“Give up,” His dad snaps, snatching the textbook from her and placing it back on his desk. “He’ll never learn, just give up on him. He can live however he wants, whether he turns out to be a failure or not. Just throw him away.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We can’t just give up on him! Not after all the money we’ve wasted on him!” His mom shouts, rounding on his dad.
“I’m telling you, just give up on him!” His dad shouts back.
He scratches desperately at his wrist, trying to tune it out. Scratching isn’t enough, he needs to cut. He needs to cut. Maybe he should just kill himself, that would fix everything. His parents’d be happier, and he’d be free.
The window is just behind him. He could get up and turn around and open it and jump, right in front of his parents. He thinks about the fall, the drop, sending a thrill through his bones. He could do it.
“Kaminari Denki!” His mom yells, forcing him back to the present. “ You tell me. What’s your plan?”
A lump catches in his throat and he whispers it out hoarsely.
“Speak up!” His mom shrieks at him, taking a step towards him. “What the hell are you gonna do?”
“I want-” He chokes out, his voice catching. “I want to be a hero.”
Whatever his mom might have been expecting, it definitely wasn’t that.
His mom laughs, a sound between a snort and a huff.
“A hero?” She says incredulously. “You really think that anyone can be a hero? Heroes have to be smart, Denki, and powerful. Do you really think you can do that?”
“I-I can train,” He says desperately. “And U.A. doesn’t look at middle school scores, I just have to do well on the exam. I can study really hard for the written test, and the practical test is more important, anyways, so if I train really hard I can-”
“Denki,” His dad says, sighing. “You have to be realistic about this. U.A.? Really? You think you can keep up with the most prestigious hero school? Those kids aren’t joking, they’re serious about becoming heroes. A kid like you has no chance of surviving in there, even if you do manage to get in.”
“Your father is right,” His mom chimes in. “Being a hero is a nice dream, but you have to be realistic, Denki.”
That stings, even if it’s true. He swallows and bites his cheek, trying not to let the tears fall.
His parents go right back to yelling at him, and they don’t bring up the hero thing ever again.
He starts training, though. Even though he knows that it’s futile, he wants to try.
He gets up earlier to run laps around his neighborhood before heading to school, looking up workout routines online and starts doing them. It tires him out and he falls asleep in class even more than usual, his homeroom teacher eventually calls his mom about it, which causes another round of yelling from his parents.
But he doesn’t give up, no matter how much his parents discourage him. He trains his Quirk at the local park, at late night when no one is around, and slowly builds up the intensity in his blasts. His Quirk fries his brain and makes him go dumb and woozy, but he’s stronger now, so it’s fine.
The U.A. entrance exam draws nearer, and he studies the best he can for the written exam. He tries, but he can’t get anything to stick, so he just memorizes everything the best he can and crosses his fingers for luck.
As expected, he does terribly on the written exam, but he manages to make up for it in the practical. His Quirk, low in precision but high-range and powerful, is perfect for immobilizing the robots. He just barely manages to get in the Hero Course, his practical score filling in for his atrocious written score.
His mom is proud of him, and she tells him so, ruffling his hair before giving him a hug.
“See, I knew you could do it, you just had to try,” She says.
His dad is still doubtful. “You’re never going to make it,” He says coldly. “The real Hero Course kids are on another level than you. Don’t be surprised when you end up failing a month in.”
Denki ignores him, because he’s feeling the best he has in months. He’s even stopped cutting for nearly half a year, he got accepted into U.A.’s Hero Course, and everything is great.
It's his first day, they're doing the Quirk assessments and the teacher's already threatening to expel the lowest-ranking student, and he's pretty much resigned to the fact that it's going to be him but no, it ends up being the Midoriya kid, the one who breaks his hands. It all turns out to be a logical ruse in the end, but he reminds himself to be careful. He certainly wouldn't put it past Aizawa-sensei to expel him.
At first he's relieved that he doesn't seem to be the worst in the class, but Midoriya starts improving scarily fast, to the point he's no longer breaking his fingers while Denki's still struggling with his precision. It makes him want to cut, and he tries not to, but he ends up doing it anyway.
He ends up becoming friends with Kirishima, Mina, Sero, and Bakugo. Bakugo’s always mad, his palms cracking with explosions and yells at everyone else in a way that reminds him of his mom when she gets mad, which scares him a little but he doesn’t show it. Kirishima, Mina, and Sero are all loud and energetic and friendly, and so he tries to be more upbeat as well, so they don’t get tired of him. They’re all very touch-affectionate, which is kind of overwhelming at first but he gets used to it. He’s never had this many friends before, and he doesn’t want to lose them.
The USJ attack happens and he manages to be of some use, but it doesn't really count because he would've been useless without the blanket Momo created to protect his classmates from his attack.
He watches Aizawa-sensei throw himself into danger for them, how he's ready to die for them if necessary, and feels this weird twinge of hope. That maybe he actually cares. Unlike his middle school teachers who'd yell at him for slacking and threaten to take points off his assignments and make him want to hurt himself.
The weather's starting to get warmer. It's mostly fine because his uniform and gym clothes both have long pants, so he can mostly get away with it. Some of his classmates are starting to wear shorter gym clothes, but not so much that he stands out, so it's fine. He has to change in the bathroom or in the locker rooms after everyone else is gone, and no one has seen him yet, or questioned him about his behavior. Everything is fine.
Finals come and he fails completely, as expected, scoring last in the class and landing himself in remedial classes. His parents give him hell for it, tell him that he’s better off quitting, he tunes it out and cuts himself later in the night, thin red lines against the pale skin of his thighs. The old cuts have scarred over by now, the white barely visible. So far he’s been lucky, but he has no idea how he’s going to get through training camp without anyone spotting his self-harm wounds, when it's all shared dorms and shared bathrooms.
The League attacks and he's useless, of course. Bakugo gets kidnapped and his classmates save him and Denki does nothing. He cuts into his thighs deeper in compensation.
He never takes care of his self-harm wounds, or sterilizes where he cuts. It’s probably going to make his scars look worse in the long run, but he doesn’t care. The wounds aren’t that serious, anyway, they never bleed through his pants and the most he has to do is wipe away the few spots of blood with a paper towel.
He could still stop, sure. He could stop if he wanted to, the problem is just that he doesn't want to. He wants to be broken, he wants to be covered in scars and absolutely disgusting. The sight of his scars calms him down, even if it is twisted. He runs his fingers over his scarred thighs, wondering what's wrong with him. Why he wants to be this way.
There’s something wrong with him. That’s nothing new, he’s always known there must be something wrong. Why he never seems to learn or improve, why his parents have to yell at him again and again and yet he still doesn’t get better. Why he does this.
The problem is, he doesn’t know how to fix it. And he doesn’t think he ever will.