Chapter Text
Sometimes, when his dad is working late, his mom will take him with her to the studio. He always grumbles and complains about it but secretly it’s his favorite thing in the entire world; she always lets him look at their hero collection concept designs, even if his eight year old mind can’t quite wrap his head around caring for any hero other than the best.
He spends most of his time loitering between sets, listening in on conversations he has no right to. If they didn’t want him to hear, then maybe they should’ve kept their mouths shut. A lot of the topics don’t make much sense and fly over his head, but a few of them stick. Smaller. Lighter. Beautiful. Perfect .
(Anything so he's not Bigger. Heavier. Ugly. Wrong.)
It’s late one day when they’re driving back from the studio when Katsuki’s stomach growls. He’s leaned into the door, shoes tucked off so he could pull his knees to his chest without getting yelled at about the leather, and for the first time, he hesitates to demand they stop for food.
His mother is on the phone with his dad and she’s complaining about how one of the models for an upcoming show gained too much weight. “Her lack of self control is disgusting. How do you even gain five kilos in a week?” his mother sneers, flipping off a red sedan as they speed past it. “Well tell her that if she doesn’t go on a diet soon, I’m going to have to cut her from the show and then I’m going to have to find a new model. Again.”
He pinches at his belly, pokes at the roll that forms and shifts as he leans into his knees, and keeps his mouth shut.
The end of primary school brings with it growth spurts for most of the class, but Katsuki shot up nearly 10cm in the past year which makes him both the tallest and coolest sixth grader at Aldera Elementary School. The nurse had frowned when he compared the difference in his physical to last year’s but eventually just told him to make sure he was eating enough since he was still a growing boy.
Stars exploded the light of his vision as he stepped out of the office, grinning at his followers as he leans cooly against the wall. He tells them the good news and keeps his mouth shut when they start to talk about lunch. His stomach aches. It’s better this way.
(It’s Midoriya— Deku —who goes to catch him when he stumbles to his knees on the way home, body weak and vision fading, wondering how much he must weigh if even the fucking nerd was strong enough to hold him up, blabbering on about nitroglycerin and blood pressure and being careful before he’s pressing a candy into the palm of Katsuki’s hand.
Katuski looked at him dumbly, too fixated on the quick pace of his heart to understand. He feels like he just ran a marathon with how fast his heart is beating and he presses one hand harsh against it, taking a few deep breaths to feel the way it quickens and slows with the exhale. When he swallows the saliva that pools in his mouth, he just feels sick.
“Your quirk, uh- It causes the hypoglycemia, right? The fainting? The candy can help raise your blood sugar so you don’t feel as dizzy,” he explained, reaching in and pressing the back of his hand to Katsuki’s forehead with a frown. “You don’t feel warm, but you should get some water anyway. Do you need help getting home?”
Katsuki had pushed him off the second his head straightened, snarling at him to keep his hands off of him. Deku ran home, Katsuki started keeping a piece of candy tucked deep in his front pocket for days like that.)
His mother reminds him of it as she piles his bowl high with extra servings of rice and meat that night. “You heard the doctor, we need to get some meat on these bones,” she jokes, pinching his cheek just shy of painfully before he pulls away with a scowl. Face’s bleed easily, the last thing he needs is a bruise. His upper arm already has a bruise from where she had grabbed him after he got home, yelling about how she is sick of getting calls from the nurses office, but at least he can hide that with long sleeves and posturing. He bruises easier lately but he tells himself it’s a sign of strength instead of weakness. His control brought him here and that was admirable, wasn’t it? Didn’t it make him the best?
“I’m not that hungry,” he mutters, pushing his food around and ignoring his father’s concerned gaze. “Can I be excused?”
His mother puts a hand on her hip, raising an eyebrow as she gave him a once over. “You better not start starving yourself, that shit isn’t healthy. If you want to lose weight, you should go on a diet, but you’re still too young to be worrying about things like that.”
“You’re one to talk, hag,” he retorts, even as his father sounds a soft ‘Katsuki’ in warning. “When’s the last time you weren’t on a diet? Or better yet— When’s the last time you were on one that worked?”
Her face hardens, lip curling up in distaste. “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean, brat? Don’t start getting smart with me!”
It dissolves into an argument, him and his mom yelling while his dad tries to calm them all down. His hands close around a pair of chopsticks—his own, he notes—and explodes them, charred pieces dropping into ash at his feet. His mom sends him up to his room and tells him to fix his shitty attitude before she fixed it for him. His dad wraps the bowl he leaves behind and tells Katsuki to grab it if he does feel hungry.
Katsuki rolls his eyes as he stomps his way back up the stairs. His stomach growls. Whatever. Static fills his limbs, his body running on autopilot to make it up to his room before he crashes. The last thing he needs is another long night of lying and yelling.
He doesn’t know the last time he’s eaten.
He doesn’t know if he cares.
If you were to ask Katsuki before school, he would’ve told you that it was a good day. He woke up early and yet entirely well-rested, skipping breakfast in favor of getting in a morning workout before his shower. He met up with his friends on the walk in, letting himself drift along with the sounds of their miserable voices and they hadn’t even managed to annoy him for once.
It’s the middle of fifth period when things take a sudden abrupt drop into bad.
Health, for all intents of purposes, was an alright class. Katsuki didn’t necessarily really care about it but he could recognize its importance, which means he spends most of the period wishing he was anywhere else and mentally counting back the hours to see how long it’s been since he’s eaten, what it had been and then considering if it had been worth it.
(The answer is no, as it always is. It's never worth it. He never learns.)
They had a class on eating disorders not that long ago; a class that was filled with laughter and rolled eyes, comments from his classmates about how they loved food too much to ever starve themselves as they all copied notes from slideshows filled with models and teenage girls—Katsuki still feels the wrongness that settled over him as his teacher talked about the common demographic and encourage the girls in the class to come to her if they ever needed someone to talk to. He uses it to justify to himself why he doesn’t bring it up. No one would believe him anyways.
It wasn’t the first time they've been weighed in class together. They do it at the start and end of every year for gym, but their health teacher had decided it was a fitting point in the curriculum to have them step on a scale at the front of the class so they could do an exercise to calculate their BMI. Katsuki swallows back the admittance that he’s far too aware with these numbers, settling into the routine of normalcy and forcing himself to put on an air of confidence.
He steps on the scale in no time, eyes locked with the chalkboard in front of him instead of looking down at the digital scale reading. It wouldn’t be right, he knows that. His uniform and shoes are added weight, negligible, and he’s had so much water today that he knows it wouldn’t be right.
His teacher whispers back a number he doesn’t even try to catch.
He tells himself it’s not fear but confidence as he steps off without a word to go back to his seat. A few of his classmates try and peek over to look at his notebook when he starts writing the equation down, regardless of the threat of explosive palms in their face, and he almost misses Deku’s turn.
Katsuki watches Deku squirm as he stands on the scale, stepping back only to be gestured on again once the numbers cleared. When he steps off again, he toes his shoes off and lets his uniform jacket slip from his arms with a hunch to his shoulders as he curls in on himself. A third time he steps on, arms wrapped around his stomach; his shirt follows the shape, an outline of his ribcage through the white fabric.
Jealousy coats his tongue black.
“46.3 kilograms.” No one else had their weight read out. (Katsuki does the mental math to fathom how long it would take for him to reach that with his current diet, and then a different more restrictive one, and then considers if weighing that little would kill him). The teacher had purposefully singled out Deku—again, as always—and laughed as she spoke, her mock attempt at a whisper echoing throughout the classroom, “Midoriya, that’s far too low, are you starving yourself, honey? I’m going to have to report this, you know this.”
Deku shook his head quickly, tugging at his fingers as he whispered something back to her, excuses for his weight probably, too quiet for him to overhear—not that he could with the way his ears were ringing—before he was stepping back to his seat behind Katsuki, tears in his eyes.
“I bet he’s doing it for attention.”
“No way, he’s probably just too dumb to eat.”
"Obviously he’s trying to kill himself.”
Whispers curl in the air around them, punctuated with the laughs of middle schoolers, and Deku shrinks in on himself, like he’s trying to disappear. Katsuki lets him, his head spinning.
Deku weighs less than him. ( Deku is also a damn head shorter too , he reminds himself even as he starts adding up the weight of his clothes and shoes). Deku, the nerd whose mom still makes him overfilled bentos where the special ingredient was love , weighed less than him, the closet competitive anorexic, and there’s a moment where he has to consider if this was Deku’s big grand plan all along.
If anyone was going to know about his secret it would be the person who’s basically been stalking him every day for the past forever, and if anyone was going to go out of their way to remind him that he was always going to be second best it would be shitty, quirkless, loser hero-wannabe Deku. He'd just have to beat some sense into him during lunch and remind him that no matter what the competition, Katsuki was always going to win it so he might as well give up now.
There’s just one problem with his plan; Deku doesn’t go to lunch.
Katsuki doesn’t blame him—being in class with 20 other kids who hated him was enough, a lunch room with hundreds didn’t seem like the best place—but he is curious, which is why Katsuki hangs back after class, gesturing to his lackeys to go off without him and leave him alone with the nerd.
He waits for Deku to start packing up and heading out too, mostly so he can follow him into the halls and figure out just where he’s spending lunch, probably bully him a little when it’s one of the bathrooms or some dusty supply closet, and it takes five minutes of pretending to pack his stuff away for him to realize that the annoying sound of pencil on paper never stopped behind him.
Fine, see if he lets that stop him.
“Oi, Deku.” Katsuki turns in his seat, a hand gripping the corner of Deku’s desk even if the other looked wary of it. The notebook is quickly flipped closed—Katsuki notes the title ‘Body Analysis for the Future, Vol. 2’ with a sick apathy—and shoved deep into his backpack, amidst other loose papers and a crinkling of plastic. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Deku shrinks back in his seat, obviously trying to make himself appear smaller and less annoying, but all it does is serve to remind Katsuki of just how tiny the nerd was. His uniform hangs off of him and dwarfs his frame beneath it, so grossly the wrong size that Katsuki wonders just how long it took him to lose the weight. His sleeves fall past his wrist without even touching the skin. It’s not jealousy but it’s something close that has him sparking off against the wood against his palm.
Deku stammers out a nervous mess of syllables but Katsuki is pushing himself up from his chair and standing over him, hand held up in warning to keep him in his seat. He was starting to get pissed off and even if he could recognize that it wasn’t Deku’s responsibility, it definitely was his fault.
“Where’s your lunch, nerd?” he sneers, snatching up his yellow bag and rifling through loose papers and charred notebooks. Deku’s hands lurch towards the bag but stop just centimeters away, seemingly recognizing that it would be better to just let Katsuki do what he wanted instead of getting all of his things blown up.
“Kacchan—” Deku starts, tears in his eyes as he squirms in his seat. “I forgot it today. I don’t have it.”
The thought doesn’t sit well with him. A few moments more of searching, Katsuki gives up and just turns the bag upside down, letting its contents rain down to the floor at their feet. The expected bento box is nowhere to be found, loose candy wrappers rain down from the bottom of the bag, Deku wraps his hand around his wrist then and his pointer finger just barely overlaps his thumb.
He recognizes the gesture, the same self soothing motion he’s been copying for a near decade now, one copied from people he knew now are just as sick as he was. He wonders where Deku learned it from.
Katsuki reaches in fast, striking like a snake as he curls his fingers around Deku’s wrist, pulling it towards him roughly even as Deku yelps in surprise and jerks back. Katsuki knows his hands are bigger than Deku’s but there’s something morbid about the way his thumb overlaps the second knuckle on his pinky when they wrap all the way around. Deku won’t meet his eyes, wide eyed gaze transfixed on their hands in the same way that Katsuki’s is.
He feels fragile. Katsuki can feel the way the bone shifts under his skin, ulna poking unforgivingly into his palm. If Katsuki grabbed his wrist too hard he’d probably snap it. It probably wouldn’t even be hard. He can feel his pulse, deceivingly slow for all of the fear in his eyes, and he knows that Deku knows it too. His grip tightens and Deku whimpers but makes no move to stop him, accepting his role as the one who’s just supposed to take whatever Katsuki gives him without complaint or struggle.
Katsuki’s got a half painted picture and he doesn’t like the look of it.
“Liar,” he mutters, dropping his wrist in favor of digging into his front pocket to pull out the piece of hard candy he keeps there, tossing it at Deku’s forehead before turning on his heel to grab his bag and stalk out of the room. Now they’re even.
He throws himself into training for U.A..
Katsuki, for as much as he wants to be light and slim, isn’t an idiot. Katsuki was going to be a hero and heroes had to be strong, which meant working out, and the most important aspect of working out was nutrition. If he wanted to bulk up in time for U.A., he couldn’t afford to just skip meals and watch the weight drop, so he sacrificed one form of control for another.
His dad says he’s proud of him for taking care of himself. His mom teaches him how to cook.
He starts tracking everything he can, focusing on keeping his body clean instead of small, lean instead of fat. He uses his allowance to buy a fancy scale, one that stays under his bed and out of sight of his parents, and starts tracking even more. He meal plans and preps, spending hours researching ingredients and recipes to make sure they fit within the rigid structure of his diet. It’s not the same as starving but it’s the closest form of control he can have and still be strong enough to be a hero.
(Sometimes, when he coughs too hard, he swears he can still feel the sludge clinging desperately to the lining of his lungs, but when he shoves his fingers down his throat to get it out, all he loses is his lunch.)
Inko smiles warmly at him when he makes his way downstairs and his brain short circuits.
The tension in the living room air is suffocating. His head feels like it’s stuffed with wet cotton, rational thought trapped like a fly in spider’s silk.
“Good morning, Katsuki,” she greets, pushing herself up from the couch next to his father to offer him a hug. He takes it, mostly because he’s not a monster and Inko’s hugs are literally impossible to avoid. “It’s been so long, you’ve gotten so big, haven’t you? You’re taller than me now.”
Breakfast sounds too heavy for his stomach. He hides his flinch at the words as a flinch at the contact and she pulls away, her hands shaking on his shoulders, her smile sad. She’s not even really at him, her eyes meeting his and looking through him, seeing someone else.
His mother’s voice carries soft from the kitchen, kind and gentle in ways it never is towards him. “Don’t force yourself, sweetheart, it’s okay.” A quieter voice follows, too quiet to make out the words but he recognizes the sound of soft sobs. “Just try a little more.”
Katsuki’s slow to react, gaze turning towards his dad in the interest of explanation. He blames it on the lack of proper nutrients lately for how his mind is slow to connect that Inko Midoriya would do anything for her son, even if it means having to ask her best friend for help.
“Is De– Midoriya here?” The family name is clumsy on his tongue after years of constant ridicule and fear grows icy in his veins. Deku wasn’t a tattletale, he was a pushover in love with the idea of being better than everyone all by himself, he wouldn’t tell them what Katsuki’s done to him, but there wasn’t any other reason for him to be here, was there?
Deku was crying. That’s who made that sound, his mind connects.
His father nods, meeting Inko’s eyes in silent conversation before he sighs. “He’s going through something hard, Katsuki… Have you noticed anything going on with him at school? Has he said anything to you?” He lowers his voice with a quick glance to the kitchen door. “Inko said he hasn’t been eating lately.”
I’m going through something too, he thinks bitterly. He hasn’t eaten lunch in weeks and he skips breakfast half as much, but he’s not small like Deku is so no one cares. Instead, he tetters carefully into the ‘thin enough’ category so people compliment him but don’t question it. Part of it is on purpose—Deku’s seen enough ridicule for his weight in the past few weeks that Katsuki, even though he knows they would never treat him the same way they did Deku, keeps his mouth shut and his weight steady so no one clocks onto it—but a twisted part of his mind whispers that maybe he’s just using it as an excuse because he isn’t good enough to be smaller like he’s supposed to.
Anorexia, he wants to say. Deku has anorexia and everyone in school makes fun of him for it, which only makes him starve himself more. It wasn’t supposed to get this far but now he doesn’t know how to stop it. Katsuki only knows that because Deku told him, once, when he cornered him in a classroom and popped warning sparks against his collar in search of the reason, and Katsuki didn’t tell anyone because Deku made him promise, once, when he was a dumb naive kid with a missing front tooth and a best friend, that he would take his secrets to the grave.
“He eats fine at lunch,” he tells them, because he knows, no matter how much he wants to deny it, even if he is bitter or spiteful and wants to tell them exactly what they already know, maybe even the things they don’t, he keeps Deku’s secrets. The hero in him knows he’s making the wrong decision—what good are Deku’s secrets if he’s going to die from them?—but some small corner of his mind imagines another trophy on his shelf and that’s all it takes to convince himself that he’s doing it for their competition. It doesn’t matter if Deku doesn’t know it’s a competition, Katsuki does and he is going to win it because that’s what he is; a winner, someone who never loses. He’s never been one to take the easy way out. He doesn't win to a forfeit. He’s not going to start now. “I haven’t noticed anything wrong.”
Inko breaks at the admission and Katsuki leads her back to the couch, rubbing her arm as tears gather in her eyes. Masaru wraps an arm around her shaking shoulders as she settles back into her space and Katsuki feels dread roll in his stomach. He mutters out that he’s going back upstairs and his father promises to grab him later for lunch.
His dreams cover him green and invade his mouth, forcing him to choke on his own tongue as he’s puppeted around the streets. His hands let off warning shots and smoke invades his nose as fire burns around him, singing the edges of his sleeves and licking up his wrists. He keeps trying to lock eyes with anyone but they all look away, turning their backs to him. ‘Good riddance,’ they say.
He tries to scream for help, begging anyone to please just save him; he promises to be better, to be good, to be whatever they want from him but sludge fills his lungs as black spots his vision. Before his body can fully go limp, there’s a yellow backpack soaring through the air, dropping papers and candies on its way and he hates the relief it gives him before the panic sets in.
In his dreams, the heroes leave him to die.
(In his nightmares, Deku does too.)
The Midoriya’s stay for lunch and Katsuki has to watch the way Deku drips tears into his rice, his sniffles and hiccupping sobs fading background noise to the conversation that lingers on the edge of him. Inko rubs her hand over his back in what Katsuki assumes is meant to be a soothing manner but it only manages to make him cry harder. The only real benefit is that no one questions it when all he does is push around his own food, his appetite long gone from the theatrics.
He knows he should eat. His parents have been very accommodating with his new diet thus far, even with the extra expenses, and he knows he should eat. He has an entire page written out, front and back, about the importance of every meal he eats. It’s not food, it’s fuel so his body can build the muscles he’s trying to build and burn away the fat, calculated perfectly because he’s never been one to let things go half-assed.
Even still, he finds himself reverting back to old habits at the dinner table. He’s just so tired of it all. He’s already skipped breakfast, what’s the harm in skipping lunch too?
The adults share a silent conversation with their eyes above his head, questioning glances back and forth, before they’re sent away and Katsuki is sitting on his bed with the nerd still crying in front of him. It’s quieted down significantly but no matter what, Deku can’t seem to stem the flow of tears.
“Don’t touch anything,” he instructs him, just to be a prick, dragging his gaze over collarbones that peek from beneath his shirt collar. It feels so aggressive, the way his bones poke from his skin, but Deku himself looks weak. His skin is pale, bruises lingering up his legs and arms even though Katsuki knows a few of them should’ve faded by now, and if he didn’t know any better, he’d assume he was going to pass out with how much he’s cried.
He acts like he’s mourning. It’s pathetic.
“My mom thinks I have a problem with food,” he mumbles out, once the tears have dried and Katsuki relents and lets him sit at his desk in forced silence. He’s playing with a piece of candy, twisting the plastic wrap open and closed over and over again. It matches the one Katsuki should have exploded months ago.
“Don’t you?”
Deku’s smile is faded, distant. His mom calls his name downstairs, telling him to come say goodbye because they’re leaving soon. “I don’t know,” he admits, quietly, just to Katsuki, in the quiet of his room that has seen too much and yet nothing at all. He stands, a steadying hand on the back of the chair. Katsuki can practically see the stars dying out in his eyes. “I thought I would be fine. I thought I had it all under control.”
"I didn't." He stops in his doorframe, not looking back. "I hope you do, Kacchan."
Deku spends summer break at the hospital. Katsuki lets the candy on his tongue dissolve slowly.