Chapter Text
"When I was six years old, eight years old, my grandmother decreed a garment of hare , which would ward off all evil. And, so, she made a coat of hare fur and took in the seams, and, inside, tucked pencils and books."
Excerpt from 'When I was six years old' by Marosa di Giorgio, translated from the Spanish
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For as long as he can remember, Shinsou Hitoshi has been an insomniac.
Looking back on his life til now, he supposes he probably wasn't born an insomniac. It must have started at some point, but he can't tell exactly when , because his memory is fuzzy in all of the worst ways.
Both his current teenage years and gone-by childhood lay splotchy in his mind, a mix of painful memories interrupted, silenced, and mostly forgotten. It all just feels like a strange gray blur, made of long spouts of exhaustion, choices between fight or flight, and cycles of trying his best and giving up and trying his best again.
Amid the mess of his life, it's no wonder he can't remember when precisely it was that he became unable to sleep more than a few hours per night.
Maybe it was- 'Quiet. Nothing.'
Maybe when his- 'Shut up.'
Even if he really tries to. It just won't come to mind. He just has a really bad memory.
Maybe it was when he was first introduced to foster care. That's the kind of stuff that can mess with someone's sleep, right? He had just turned six, and he doesn't remember much of that first house besides the fact that it was... alright. The Inoues were just fine. They weren't necessarily loving, or even happy, but they were patient with him. There were even a couple of older kids there who taught him a little bit of the ropes of being a foster child, though with warning words and dark looks.
The family was kind to him, somewhat. At first. He was just a toddler and the only thing to hate about him was his quirk, so people were a bit more willing to overlook it. But only for so long.
After a while, foster parents and siblings alike grew tired of having to ignore his questions. It was exhausting , having to watch their backs around him, to look at him sternly, silent, whenever he'd question something until he apologized, took it back, and stated instead what he'd meant to ask. It wasn't their fault. It was just too much work, having a villain-to-be in the house.
Hitoshi tried to fix it. He was just a child and he knew very little of what had become of his life and what he was supposed to do, but he knew that which no one needs to be taught: self-preservation. He was only just beginning to grasp that his mother was gone and not coming back, (no coming back from the dead, after all- Shut up) , only just beginning to understand what his role as a foster kid was (to be polite, grateful, quiet, quiet, quiet) , but already perfectly aware that if he didn't look after himself, no one would.
And so he did, in the way he knew how. He made himself a non-issue. He stopped talking unless when answering a direct question. He made no demands at all. He did not try to make friends. When he cried, he did so in perfectly practiced silence.
He had to leave the Inoues anyway. Somewhere in a government office, a file with his name on it read "disruptive" in fresh black ink.
Eventually, Hitoshi figured out that no matter how small, nice, and quiet he was, his quirk would always be a problem, even if he never came close to using it. It's an evil, violent power, one able to turn a man into a stone. Its very existence, the threat inherent to it, was more than enough to eventually force him to pack his bags and move to a new foster family, never staying long enough to grow roots anywhere. After all, who would want a wild predator in their home, no matter how domesticated?
"Risky" and "unmannered" joined "disruptive" .
Already few were willing to let him into their home. But none were willing to put up with him for long.
When he finally fully understood and accepted this, the system had already eaten him right up and licked its lips. He was nine years old and had been at his fourth foster home for a couple of months. The Furukawa home was... not so nice. He looked around and even with his childish comprehension of social cues, he could almost watch in real time as that family grew tired of him. They had never liked him to begin with, but as the weeks went by, the lady of the house resented him more and more, and the other kids looked his way less and less.
That was when he grew the defiance, the pettiness and sarcasm, the attitude problem (what some would call a personality, albeit a roughly shaped one).
Then he was labeled, with bright red ink by his name and quirk, a "dangerous" case, instead of a complicated child. He was a goner.
'Stop thinking about it.'
The point being that when Hitoshi thinks of being nine, in that fourth house, the faded yellow walls in the silence of that dead-end street, he knows he already wasn't sleeping well.
The stress and the fear of knowing that just a room down was Furukawa Hotaru, his at-the-time foster mother, who now openly despised him, filled him with adrenaline even when he knew she was sleeping. Hotaru was a heavy sleeper, yet when it came to him, an even heavier hitter, and so did Hitoshi's traitorous mind remind him.
So he would stay up, silent and unmoving, listening to the other kids in the house arguing with each other.
(They were new, he tries not to remember. That was their first foster home and they had just arrived which is why they were still noisy, he wants not to remember. They hadn't yet learned that silence is a bitter-mouthed savior.)
The insomnia mustn't have started at nine, for he's almost certain that the lack of sleep didn't feel new to him, even then. He'd simply tell himself he would compensate the next day by having a sip of black coffee when his foster mother wasn't looking.
He didn't really drink coffee, at that age, mainly because most homes wouldn't allow him to. Not because it was bad for a child, of course not, but because the parents usually liked it, and didn't want to waste something good on him. Truthfully, that's a big reason why he started drinking it in secret anyway - to prove a point. It tasted terrible and burnt his tongue and made him even more nervous than normal but look , he'd tell himself. I can have good things, too.
A few years and houses down the line, sleep was even rarer and coffee was a must.
Even in the alright houses that followed (the ones that didn't believe in physical punishment, where he was prohibited from speaking but not muzzled, not like he was in the fifth, the seventh, eighth, and eleventh) , sleep would never come easy to him.
It seemed that no matter how many houses he blew by, how safe or dangerous, nice or mean alike they were, he would always just end up in the middle of the night, staring up at the ceiling and seeing nothing at all.
And if he can't remember when it started, he may as well assume it's been this way all along, and question it no further.
(Somewhere very old and very quiet, deep in his brain, he knows.) (He knows, even if he doesn't want to know, that he already had eyebags before the system.) (He knows because when his mother was alive, he used to touch her face and say 'We match!' and she would laugh softly and respond 'Yes we do, but it's not a good thing'.)
'I said stop thinking about it.'
That is to say, Hitoshi is used to not getting more than three hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, at 16 years old, it would be much more surprising to get a full night's rest than not. The insomnia is just part of who he is, now, and it would make no more sense to be upset at this fact than to be upset at his hair color or the date of his birth ('or his- Shut up').
But right now, dragging his feet out of the house (the twelfth house, the Kumamotos), with his muscles weighing him down and his eyes fighting to stay open, he finds himself infuriated at his insomnia in a way he hasn't been for a long time.
He cannot afford to be tired today. He needs to be in his absolute best shape, as well-rested as he can be.
But last night, his brain didn't get the memo, and the blank walls kept him company way into the night. So caffeine and pettiness are his only hopes to get him through the day of his long-awaited transfer exam into the hero course of UA.