Work Text:
Katsuki Bakugo was good at very few things.
But one of them was kissing.
He'd figured this out approximately four months ago, on a Tuesday afternoon, in Izuku Midoriya's stupid bedroom with the stupid All Might posters still plastered on every available surface like some kind of shrine to their shared childhood. They'd been sitting on the bed close, always so close these days, and Izuku had been talking about something. Homework, maybe. Or the new hero rankings. His mouth had been moving, and his hands had been gesturing, and the afternoon light had caught the green of his eyes in a way that made Katsuki's chest ache like someone had reached between his ribs and squeezed.
So he'd kissed him.
And Izuku kissed him back.
And for seventeen full seconds, Katsuki had forgotten about everything else.
That was the thing about making out with Izuku. It was the only time the noise in his head went quiet. No static. No counting. No voice that sounded too much like his telling him that 'he was a burden, a failure, a waste of oxygen who'd done nothing but hurt people his entire life'. When Izuku's hands were in his hair and their foreheads were pressed together and they were both breathing hard and laughing between kisses like they'd invented something new, Katsuki felt almost normal.
Almost.
He was sitting in the backseat of his mother's car now, watching the buildings pass through the window. They were going to dinner. A family dinner, at a restaurant his parents liked. His mother was driving. His father was in the passenger seat, scrolling through his phone. Everything looked normal. Everything looked like a normal family doing normal things on a normal Friday evening.
Except Katsuki's hands were shaking.
He shoved them under his thighs and pressed his palms flat against the seat. The pressure helped. It always helped. Grounding, his therapist called it. A technique. A strategy. A tool in the toolbox. Katsuki hated the toolbox. He hated the language they used in therapy-- the strategies and the coping mechanisms and the wellness plans and the safety contracts. As if any of it had ever stopped him from wanting to disappear.
"You're quiet," his mother said, glancing at him in the rearview mirror.
Katsuki didn't answer. It was easier than talking, which was easier than fighting, which was easier than whatever alternative his brain came up with at three in the morning when he was alone in his room and the darkness felt like a living thing that wanted to swallow him whole.
"Katsuki," his father said, gentle the way he always was, careful the way he'd learned to be over the past year. "Your mother asked you a question."
"I heard her."
"So answer."
"Nothing to say."
His mother's jaw tightened. He could see it in the mirror-- the way her teeth pressed together, the way her shoulders went rigid. She was angry. She was always angry lately, not at him, not exactly. She was angry at the situation, at the hospital, at the insurance company, at the world that had taken her son and broken him into pieces she didn't know how to put back together.
But anger was anger, and when it lived in a house with someone like Katsuki who had enough anger of his own to burn the whole place down, it found its way out in all the wrong directions.
The restaurant was warm and loud, full of families and couples and people who were probably not thinking about whether their kid was going to try to kill himself again. They were led to a booth in the back. Katsuki slid in against the wall. His parents sat across from him. Menus were placed on the table. Water was poured. Normal things. Normal, normal, normal.
He ordered with barely looking at the menu. He wasn't hungry. He hadn't been hungry in weeks, but he'd learned to order anyway, to push food around his plate, to make it look like he was eating because not eating was a symptom, and symptoms meant questions, and questions meant the hospital.
His mother ordered sake. His father ordered a beer. They shared a look across the table that Katsuki pretended not to see.
"So," his father said, after the drinks arrived and the appetizer had been set down and the silence had stretched long enough to become its own entity sitting at the table with them. "We've been talking."
Katsuki's stomach dropped.
"About what," he said, even though he already knew.
"About you, kiddo."
"Don't call me that."
"Katsuki," his mother said, and her voice was sharp but not unkind. Not yet. "We got a call from your doctor today."
His 'doctor' was his psychiatrist. She was a small woman with gray hair and glasses who always wore the same cardigan and who had the annoying habit of waiting in silence until Katsuki filled it with something he regretted saying. She'd been seeing him for a year. Since the first time. Since the night his mother had found him in the bathroom and the world had cracked open and nothing had ever been the same again.
"She thinks it would be a good idea for you to go back to the program," his mother continued.
The program. That's what they called it. The program. Like it was a summer camp or an after-school activity and not a locked ward on the first floor of the psychiatric building where they took your shoelaces and made you talk about your feelings in group therapy and the walls were painted a sickly green that was supposed to be calming but just looked like illness.
"No," Katsuki said.
"Katsuki--"
"I said no."
He could feel it starting. The heat in his chest. The tightness in his throat. The familiar wave of anger and shame and desperation that came whenever anyone mentioned the hospital, the ward, the program.
It was like being told he was being sent back to prison, except he'd committed no crime except being too broken to function in the world.
"You haven't been doing well," his father said, and his voice was so gentle it made Katsuki want to scream. "You're not eating. You're not sleeping. You missed three days of school last week--"
"I was sick."
"You weren't sick, Katsuki." His mother's voice again, harder now. "You couldn't get out of bed."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine." She set her sake glass down. "I found the notebook."
The world went cold.
"What notebook," Katsuki said, but his voice had gone thin and reedy, and he couldn't feel his hands anymore.
"You know which one."
He did. He knew exactly which one. The small black notebook he kept in his desk drawer, under the spare notebooks and the old worksheets and the junk he'd accumulated over years of school. The notebook where he wrote the things he couldn't say out loud. The plans. The methods. The reasons. The running tally of days he'd wanted to die and the number of times he'd almost done something about it.
It was private. It was the most private thing he'd ever had. More private than his thoughts, because at least his thoughts could be rewritten, rearranged, denied. The notebook was evidence. The notebook was proof that he was exactly as broken as everyone feared.
"You went through my stuff," he said.
"I was putting away your laundry. The drawer was open--"
"That's bullshit. You were looking."
"Katsuki, language--"
"You had no right." His voice was rising. The other people in the restaurant were starting to look. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything except the fact that his mother had read his notebook, had seen the inside of his head laid out in black and white, had witnessed the full scope of his pathetic, disgusting, irreparable brokenness.
"I'm your mother," she said. "I have every right to make sure you're safe."
"Safe," Katsuki spat. "You think sending me back to that place makes me safe? You think locking me up with a bunch of other crazy kids and making me talk about my feelings and taking away everything I care about makes me safe?"
"I think it keeps you alive."
The words hung in the air between them. His father had gone pale. His mother's eyes were bright, shiny, on the edge of tears that she would never let fall, not here, not in public, because Mitsuki Bakugo was not the kind of woman who cried in restaurants.
"I'm not going back," Katsuki said.
"Your doctor has already recommended it. The insurance approved it. There's a bed--"
"I'm not going."
"--available on Monday. We're supposed to bring you in at eight in the morning."
"NO."
He was standing now. He didn't remember standing. The table jolted. The water glasses shook. His mother's sake tilted and spilled, a thin pale river running across the white tablecloth. The other diners had stopped pretending not to watch. A server hovered nervously near the kitchen door.
"Katsuki, sit down," his father said.
"Tell her I'm not going. Tell her she can't make me."
"She can. And we will. Because we love you, and we're not going to let you--"
"You're not going to let me what? Finish what I started? Maybe I should. Maybe everyone would be better off—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He couldn't. The words caught in his throat like broken glass, and suddenly he was crying, which was the worst thing, the most humiliating thing, standing in the middle of a restaurant full of strangers and sobbing like a child while his parents watched with the terrible, exhausted grief of people who had been through this before and knew they'd go through it again.
His father stood and put an arm around his shoulders. "Come on. Let's go outside."
Katsuki let himself be led. He didn't have a choice. His legs were shaking too hard to resist, and his vision was blurred with tears, and the walls of the restaurant were closing in, and he could feel his heart hammering against his ribs like it wanted out, like it wanted to escape the cage of his body the same way he did.
Outside, the air was cold. It was November. The wind cut through his jacket and he wished it would cut deeper, through skin and bone and whatever was inside him that made him this way.
His father guided him to the side of the building, away from the entrance, and they stood there in the dark while Katsuki cried and cried and couldn't stop.
"I know," his father said. "I know it's hard."
"You don't know anything."
"I know you're scared."
"I'm not scared." He was terrified. He was so terrified he could barely breathe. The ward meant being watched. It meant the fifteen-minute checks. It meant the fluorescent lights and the group sessions and the other kids who looked at him with hollow eyes and told him it gets better, it gets better, it gets better, in voices that made it clear they didn't believe it either.
"I'm not going back," Katsuki said again, but his voice had lost its edge. It was small now. Desperate. The voice of a fifteen year old boy who had been fighting so hard for so long that he'd forgotten what he was even fighting for.
"Katsuki." His father's hands were on his shoulders, holding him at arm's length, making him look up. "I need you to hear me. We are not doing this to punish you. We are not doing this because we're angry or because we don't want to deal with you anymore. We are doing this because we love you more than anything in this world, and we cannot lose you. Do you understand? We cannot lose you."
The words broke something in him. A dam, a wall, a careful construction he'd built to keep the truth out, and the truth was this: he was not fine. He had not been fine for a long time. The notebook was proof. The attempts were proof. The nights he spent sitting on his bedroom floor with his back against the door and his hands pressed over his ears and the voice in his head screaming at him to end it, end it, end it-- those were proof.
He was not fine, and he was tired of pretending he was.
"Okay," he whispered.
His father pulled him into a hug. Katsuki let himself be held. He was fifteen years old, and he was going back to the psych ward, and his father's arms were around him, and the November wind was cold, and he was crying into his dad's shoulder like he was five years old again, and he wished-- God, he wished-- he was normal.