Chapter Text
Katsuki has a problem, and it’s not that a man with bulls’ horns tried to pick him up from kindergarten the other day. It’s not that he saw a boy at the boardwalk with hooves for feet, or that he could’ve sworn the teacher in the next class over had feathers underneath her sleeves.
It’s that when he tries to tell someone what he’s seen, no one will listen.
He knows the other kids in his class are always telling stories, mixing up the stupid fairy tales their teacher reads them with real life, but he’s not one of them. He’s not seeing anything that isn’t there. He’s not that dumb. He’s smart. Dad tells him that almost every day, and his teacher calls him “one of the brightest pupils she’s ever seen.” He doesn’t understand - why wouldn’t she believe him?
For every adult that laughs and ruffles his hair, Katsuki lifts his chin a little bit higher, and for every hissing voice or tail that flicks under a skirt, he clenches his fists a little tighter.
It turns out adults aren’t just bad at listening to Katsuki’s horror stories. They’re bad at listening all the time.
Katsuki has this realization in the middle of a times table test. He’s speeding through it, every answer on the page the second he sees the two factors, when he starts to feel someone’s eyes on him. Like he’s being watched. Sure enough, the kid in the seat next to him has his eyes glued on Katsuki’s paper, glancing back and forth and only scribbling down the answers Katsuki’s already gotten to. But when he sticks his hand up high and shouts, “Teacher, he’s cheating!”, all he gets in return is a dry, “No talking during the quiz.”
He’s the smartest kid in the class, with the fastest times table time. If she won’t believe him when he says someone’s cheating, then he thinks she might just never believe anyone about anything at all.
He puts this theory to the test two days later after school. It’s his first fight, and he comes out victorious - against two fourth graders, no less. One that bumped into him on the path behind the school, and his friend who called Katsuki a shitty first grade wimp when he wouldn’t say sorry. The path is just conveniently out of sight, by a part of the building with no windows and no adults walking by. They’re not quiet; they keep screaming when Katsuki hits them and saying but you’re just a girl, even though Katsuki isn’t a girl. When he finally beats them, they run away crying I’m telling, and he never hears anything about it ever again.
Katsuki learns two things from the fight. One, that he’s stronger than anyone. The thing is, he really didn’t know he had it in him. He knew that he was smart, and he knew that he was tough, and he definitely didn’t think that he was weak. That, though, was the moment he knew - he was never gonna lose a fight in his life, no matter the opponent. No matter the odds.
The second thing he learns is that he never needs to listen to anyone else. Not if they can’t hold up against him. One year and twenty-something fights later, and he hasn’t been proven wrong.
At age eight, Katsuki knows three ways to sneak into the house without Dad noticing the blood on his face.
The most exciting by far is to scale the oak tree by his window up to the tallest branch, then leap to the windowsill and hoist himself inside. It’s also fun to take the back door into the garage and weave through all the boxes of fabric and photos and Katsuki’s old toys until he makes it to the ladder that unfolds from a secret hatch in Dad’s closet, and duck through the hallways from there.
The third way is the easiest, and by extension the lamest, but it becomes Katsuki’s default anyway. If Dad’s in his studio, Katsuki will hear his music and the jittering of the sewing machine from outside. Once he knows for sure he’s busy, he can walk right through the front door and clean himself up before Dad even realizes anyone’s there.
He doesn’t hate Dad. Dad takes him out for pancakes at the diner on his days off and picks him up from school when he’s sick. Dad listened to him when he told him he was a boy and took him to get his hair cut and bought new clothes for him. Dad is, in every other way, all he’s ever needed. But Dad wouldn’t get it. If Dad found out, he would ask him who did this to you - and if Dad found out how many more uppercuts he’s given than received, he would make Katsuki stop fighting, and that’s the one thing he can’t do.
So, dinners are quiet. Hiding it from him is so easy it’s stupid; Dad asks about school (easy), and the friends who sometimes follow him home (boring) and if he’s talked to Deku at all recently (obviously not), and on nights when the dark circles under his eyes are particularly heavy, he’ll talk about his day with words like double deadlines and a bit of a workplace spat and always more paperwork to be filed. He takes Katsuki to see his shows sometimes, still, when he can’t find a babysitter or doesn’t want to pay for one. Katsuki used to go to those events a lot more, before he had the will to fight against wearing shirts with itchy collars and tight shoes.
Sometimes he talks about Mom, but there’s only so many times you can repeat the same five stories. Katsuki doesn’t care, anyway. Wherever she went, he doesn’t need her. Never has.
If she came back, he’d spit on her shoes.
The first time it happens, it’s so strange that Katsuki could chock it up to imagination. A delusion. The lingering side effects of the one hit he took that day, in the alley behind the convenience store all the way across town from his house. That day’s fight was a nasty rematch with some middle schooler he beat two years ago who apparently still has time to pick fights with fifth graders. It played out just about the same as last time. Katsuki was on his way home from school; the guy didn’t even have time to finish a sentence, jeering at him leaned up against the wall, before Katsuki had him in a headlock.
“You think you’re cool?” the kid spat up at him five minutes later, thrashing his shoulders. Katsuki’s foot was on his collarbone and his fist was on a collision course with his eye, but he still refused to go down without a fight. “You’re-” hack- “you’re nothing. No one cares about you. No one likes you. This is all you have.”
“You should shut your mouth,” Katsuki shouted back. Then he jammed his elbow into his throat, and left him there, crumpled on the ground.
On the way home, through the sketchy side of town to the part with the clean new department store to his neighborhood, Katsuki kicks every rock he sees down the sidewalk and every stray can into the gutter. In all its stupidity, this is all you have repeats itself over in his head. As if that guy has the top grades in his class, and the fear and respect of everyone around him, and a stronger right hook than anyone. If Katsuki didn’t have so much, people wouldn’t care so much about trying to take him down.
He takes a shot at an empty beer bottle. Whatever. He’ll just keep beating them until they get it through their skulls.
The clanking and banging of the sewing machine fills the house until Katsuki closes his eyes that night, and long after, too. It weaves itself into Katsuki’s dreams. When he falls asleep, he’s walking down a long tunnel, the click-clack of his footsteps echoing off the walls in a rhythm. Katsuki doesn’t dream much, but tonight, it’s vivid and detailed, like a movie. He squints; there’s something down there, at the end of the tunnel. It’s bright, but he can’t see it.
The closer he gets, the more the dream starts to change. First, he’s walking, then running towards the light, then out into it, and then he realizes it feels more like he’s awake than dreaming. He looks away from his hands, and they still look the same when he looks back. He looks down; he’s wearing the pajamas he fell asleep in, right down to the hole in his left sock. He feels his feet planted solidly on the ground, but there’s no ground to plant them on - just a swirling pink mist that stretches as far as he can see.
And there’s a woman in front of him.
She’s standing something like fifty feet away, but she looks as tall as she would if she was right next to Katsuki. He blinks; doesn’t get any smaller. In fact, the closer she gets, the taller she looks - but, somehow, he can’t say he knows what she looks like. It’s like his mind can’t decide whether her hair is long or short, her eyes soft and round like his dad’s or sharp like his. Even when he thinks he can tell, she still looks sort of...fuzzy.
But she’s huge, and she’s wearing some sort of white dress that falls down her arms in big, billowy sleeves. As she walks over to Katsuki, the smell of roses follows her.
She stops right in front of him. He only reaches up to her knees. So Katsuki’s staring up at this giant woman, trying with all his brainpower to figure out who she could be and what she’s gonna do and if he can move in this dream - if he can move then why does he feel stuck in place - when she bends down to her face is right in front of his.
Square up, is what he’s gotta do. Legs apart, fists curled, face set. If she’s gonna try to swat him out of existence, it’s coming any second now. He could probably take her, he figures, even if she is fifty feet tall and old. It’s just like a boss battle in the games he plays at the arcade after school. He’s never lost a fight. He’s not about to lose this one.
The giant lady opens her mouth, and Katsuki curls his fists tighter, ready for the pounce; but when she speaks, it’s with a dry, tired tone.
“Why are you doing this, kid?” she asks, annoyed and disappointed and completely out of place.
“Who the hell are you?!” he shouts back.
A look of surprise passes over her face, rippling through all the shifting features. Just her nose is wider than Katsuki’s entire body. “Whoa, whoa. Swearing already? How old are you now? It can’t have been more than six…” She purses her lips. “Maybe seven years.”
It’s here that Katsuki realizes the weight of the predicament he’s in - that is, the terror of having a dream about a huge lady who could crush him and does not seem scared of him at all is another entirely. He settles, as usual, on not letting up his guard. “I’m ten!”
The lady considers him for a second, and then her mouth falls into an O. “Ah. I get it.” She snaps her fingers, and suddenly, she’s person-sized - taller than Katsuki, and just a little shorter than Dad. She still looks fuzzy, sort of, like he’s looking at her out of the corner of his eye, but as she shrinks, the fog seems to clear up a little bit. Her hair is still shifting from color to color to color, but he thinks it’s stopping more on a pale blonde, like his.
“Ten does sounds more right, doesn’t it,” she says. Her eyes look far away and dreamy, the way Dad’s do when he talks about- when...
At that moment, three things happen. One, a ringing starts pounding through Katsuki’s ears. Two, something plunges down and hits the bottom of his stomach and makes everything feel way, way too real; like if it ever was a dream, it’s not anymore. And, three - the lady sits down on the ground, pats the space next to her, and says, “So, Katsuki. Wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“How do you know my name?” Katsuki says. Over the ringing, he barely hears his own voice. But the lady just huffs, jokingly, and rolls her eyes.
“Kids these days. You think you’d recognize your own mom.”
And it doubles. “Mom?”
The lady - his mom - smiles, and suddenly, Katsuki doesn’t feel so awake anymore. He’s dreaming - he’s got to be dreaming - that’s the only explanation for how his mom is in front of him, smiling and saying, “Hey, kid,” with a gentle voice. Throwing her arms around him - weirdly, weirdly, warm, in a way he’s never felt. “Do you want to talk about whatever’s going on? My kids are lovers, not fighters. Clearly, your dad isn’t helping, not that you’re giving him the chance.”
She says it right into his ear, on his shoulder, and the voice is low and gentle and-
With all of his power, he pushes her away.
“Get off of me! You can’t just show up now. I don’t need you.”
He shouts it so loud that his chest feels heavy recovering. The lady - not Mom, not his mom - goes quiet, but for a second she looks- actually hurt.
“I know it hasn’t been easy,” she says. Her eyebrows and eyes and everything is pointing down, like an upside-down V. “I’ve done the best I can. I can ward away the monsters, for a while. Kids, I have no control over. That’s why I-”
“Those were real?”
She looks almost shocked that he interrupted her, but when the shock goes away, the same smile she had before comes back. “There’s a lot you don’t know about. You’ll find out in time.”
“There were monsters chasing me when I was five, and you’re telling me I’ll find out in time.” He doesn’t really know what it makes him feel, but it makes the ringing turn into more of a pounding. He doesn’t need a mom, but having one standing in front of him acting like she’s helping him by doing nothing is worse than if she stayed away completely. It’s stupid. It’s messed up.
“I know it doesn’t seem ideal, but that’s how it is. Some things, you’re better off-”
“Shut up!” Katsuki screams, and at this point, it’s hard to see straight. “And get away from me! I don’t need you, just go away!”
For the briefest second, a look of annoyance passes over her face, and melts away just as fast. “Fine, don’t talk to me about it. I’ve had preteens before. I get it. You take your time, and in the meantime, I’ll figure something out for you.”
The lady tries one last time to pinch his cheek, but he pushes her away. “What does that mean?”
“You’ll see,” she sings, and before Katsuki can wonder how the hell she thinks she’s going to make up for the past ten years, she holds out her arms. “Hug your mother goodbye?”
“No.”
The last thing he sees is that annoyed look making a reappearance as she steps back and waves a hand. “Have a nice day, kid.”
The house smells like pancakes when Katsuki wakes up.
There’s light streaming through his window, and birds chirping outside. It’s a little too nice of a morning to be natural. He feels completely awake and refreshed; no fuzz in his head at all. It’s all so weirdly perfect that it takes him a few seconds to remember to be mad.
That had to be a dream. That lady better hope it was a dream, because otherwise, that lady’s got another thing coming. That’s the conclusion he comes to as he rolls out of bed, and keeps telling himself as he goes to brush his teeth.
The stupidest part is, somewhere along the line, he started to think that maybe he was just a kid seeing things. For years, everything seemed normal. But the fact that he started to believe that it was - that he went against his gut, even for a second - makes him angrier than anything else. He’s stronger than anyone. He doesn’t need to listen to anyone. Those are the rules he made for himself.
Stronger than anyone. Doesn’t need to listen to anyone.
In the kitchen, there’s a huge stack of chocolate chip pancakes on the counter, towering on top of a plate, and even more on the pan Dad’s handling. Katsuki’s footsteps are light, but on his way in, he stubs his toe on a chair. He’s never accidentally run into a chair. Something is seriously wrong today.
Dad startles at the noise and calls, “Good morning, kiddo!” over his shoulder. He’s wearing that apron that he brings out when he’s finally got time to cook them a real meal; it’s bright green, with What’s Cookin’ Good Lookin’? printed across the front in swirly white letters. Katsuki hasn’t seen that one in a while.
“I handed in my portfolio for fashion week, so you know what that means,” he says, halfway to singing. He balances another pancake on his spatula all showy, only for it to hit the floor when he sees Katsuki’s face.
“What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t want to say it. Saying it makes it real, which it isn’t. But seeing that all of Dad’s concern is directed at him, and none at the lump of batter oozing over the hardwood, the words come out on their own. “I...had a dream about Mom.”
Dad considers him for a second, then immediately switches off the burner.
“Aw, Katsuki,” he says, like he’s still five. Within one second, he’s been pulled into a lung-crushing hug. “I know it must be hard, growing up without her around-”
“That’s not it, old man,” he protests, squirming away. “I saw Mom. She talked to me.” Why does everyone around here think hugging is the answer to everything he says? Plus, it’s weird. Dad switches into panic mode faster than anyone he’s ever seen, but right now, he looks completely unfazed.
“So she did, huh,” he mutters, as a fond look fills his eyes.
It’s that same far-off, dreamy look Mom, or- whoever she is, got on her face last night, and that confronts him with the truth.
“She’s not a person,” Katsuki says, slowly. It’s a statement, not a question.
“Well, she’s as much of a person as you and I are,” Dad says.
“But she’s not a person,” Katsuki tries again, harder. There’s got to be a reason that Dad called her his muse but has no pictures, only dresses he made for her. That she’s never shown her face to him until now, but seemed to know everything that was happening to him. “What is she?”
“I don’t really know,” Dad says, and even if he’s still clueless, at least this time he doesn’t sound like he’s hiding anything. “But she was wonderful. You’re just like her, you know.”
It’s not the answer he wants, and he knows it. But the smell of pancakes is filling up Katsuki’s nose, now, and though they don’t talk much over breakfast, they sit there until they finish the whole stack.
She doesn’t deserve thanks for it, but when he goes to sleep that night, he doesn’t have any dreams at all.
The next morning, there’s a love letter on Katsuki’s desk.
He’s never seen one in person, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess what it is. It’s a little white envelope sealed with a heart-shaped sticker, smiling up at him when he gets to class. Inside is a piece of pink paper, neatly ripped out of a notebook and written on in little red letters.
Bakugou-kun,
Please meet me by the cherry trees on the north side of the building after school. There’s something I want to ask you.
There’s no name, but it’s signed with a heart.
“What’s that?” one of the guys who sits near him asks. Katsuki crumples it up before he can see it, and ignores every question, and thinks about it all day.
The first thing he decides is that there’s no way it’s anyone in his class. Not a chance. These girls wince when Katsuki raises his hand and shoot looks at him when he passes and ask to switch when they’re partnered together. Someone who’s unafraid of him - who’s this unafraid of him - must at least be from another class. She’s probably never even spoken a word to him. That’s pathetic. Honestly pathetic. A girl pathetic enough to leave a love letter on the desk of someone she’s never spoken to deserves to be put in her place for even trying - to hear the rejection right to her face.
So, that’s how he ends up walking to the north side courtyard when class gets out, the note crumpled in his hand.
He feels stupid. This is stupid. This is beneath him, and the closer he gets to the girl waiting under the cherry trees, the less he feels like he even wants to involve himself with it. The girl is textbook cute, like a manga protagonist, with big round eyes and bits of her hair tied into little pigtails above her ears. When she hears Katsuki coming, she turns around wringing her hands in front of her chest - instead of the usual sailor tie, there’s a big pink ribbon on her shirt.
For a second, there are honest to god hearts in her eyes. Katsuki blinks, and they disappear.
“Uh,” he says, after a few seconds pass in silence. He had planned to come on hard and make this quick, but she’s way more helpless than he had expected. Spacy. It’s sort of making him want to just leave and let her stay undisturbed in her weird world. “Hey.”
But even that much makes her face melt into a shy, wobbly smile. “You came.”
She’s looking at him like he just brought her beloved dog back to life, so Katsuki decides, actually, screw this. He’s not letting this happen. Hard and quick. “Listen. I don’t-”
“Wait,” she interrupts, looking all shaky. “Please, let me tell you what I came here to say.”
“No, but I don’t-”
“Bakugou Katsuki.” The girl bends into a full ninety-degree bow, and her voice rises with it. “I’ve been in love with you since the moment I first saw you. Please go out with me!”
Her voice cracks halfway through.
“No.”
The girl’s head perks up. “No?”
“How many times do I have to say it.” At his sides, Katsuki’s fists are all but crashing in on themselves. He came here and everything, didn’t he? Is that not enough?
“But I...” the girl trails off, and for the first time, Katsuki realizes how unhidden they are. For a romantic confession spot, there are plenty of people passing by, watching. Two guys a little older than him are on the sidewalk now; as they turn their heads, he sees one of them smirk.
Katsuki grits his teeth a little harder. “For the last time. I’m not going out with some girl who’s never talked to me. Do you even go here?”
Her eyes are big and watery, now, and she clutches her hands closer to her chest. “I-I just transferred in.”
“Find someone else. And leave me alone,” he says. Walking away, he ignores the tears starting to fall down her face. It’s her own fault.
That night, he finds himself in the same swirling pink dreamscape, and just like last time, Mom appears in front of him displeased and unimpressed. Katsuki is more than ready to continue on the note they left on and rattle off all the things he thought to say to her while replaying their conversation in his head today. But this time, all she says is, “Not your type?”
“That was you?”
“I was so sure you’d go for soft-hearted girls. Someone to bring out some tenderness in you.”
That unleashes a storm of so many clashing thoughts in his mind that all he can do is repeat, “That was you?” Ten years he doesn’t have a mom, and the second she decides to show up, all she wants to do is get him a girlfriend? What even is she than she can- who does she think she is that she wants to tell him he needs that?
Mom looks down at the way he’s glaring, and shakes her head. “Oh, well. It was just a test run,” she says - and when he doesn’t glare any less hard, she adds, “Yes, and a thank you would be nice. Ten is a great time to start dating. The mind’s blooming and the heart’s innocent.”
It squirms around in his chest. “My mind’s not blooming.”
“Not the one for you. Noted.” Then, with a smile, she squats down and ruffles a hand through his hair. “A little romance would do you some good! It’s just something to think about. Don’t you worry. I’ll find someone else to round you out. And try not to make her cry next time?”
“I told you I don’t want your help,” he says, pushing it away. “And girls are gross.”
“They grow up so fast,” she sighs, as if she had seen any of it - as if she’d been there the whole time.
The next girl doesn’t hit him with a confession of love, but a basketball to the head, and a loud and bright invitation to go get burgers on the way home from school. Katsuki doesn’t give a shit that Mom summoned someone to do him physical harm. Thinking about how she couldn’t wait even one day before trying again, though, he does feel like ripping something apart.
“I thought you might like ‘em feisty!” she defends herself that night, with as much of an I’ve done nothing wrong face as ever. “Since you had to go and make Keiko cry.”
“Who?”
“You didn’t even ask her for her name?” Pinching both of his cheeks between her fingers, Mom clicks her tongue. “My Gods, Katsuki. Has your dad not been teaching you manners?”
“Shut up,” he says, “I don’t care about girls.” - but giving in quietly, as he learns, is not one of her strong suits.
Even though it’s clearly not a recipe for success, she doesn’t stop at two, or even three girls. Nearly every day for the rest of Katsuki’s fifth grade year, a new transfer student or athlete or mysterious model-quality preteen appears in his way. Some of them call him over to confess, like the first girl. Sometimes, they show up at his desk or in front of his locker, holding back from an immediate declaration of love but all too eager to introduce themselves to him. She even goes out of her way to make a few of them bump into Katsuki on his way to school; after the first couple, he stops offering to help them pick up the books that spilled from their bags. There are countless love letters that hit the bottom of the trash can in a wad.
He sees the first girl talking to a few other randos one day, walking home after school, and catches a few more of them around after their scheduled appearance, too. Apparently after she exoduses these girls out of wherever they came from, she dumps them here to bloat up the town forever. Like this situation needed to get worse.
It’s nothing but an annoying, unavoidable new part of his routine, but Katsuki doesn’t notice that people have started to catch on to it until he realizes he hasn’t been challenged to a fight in months.
Come Valentine’s Day, the classroom is decorated with heart garlands and flying cupids. Katsuki doesn’t get cards or chocolate from anyone in his class, but there’s a huge, heart-shaped box waiting for him - bigger than any of the others. He’s trying to decide if it’d be less conspicuous to sneak it into his backpack or drop-kick it into the trashcan when the guy in the desk next to him says, “Disappointed?”
Katsuki narrows his eyes. “The hell does that mean?”
“It’s just that I thought you might’ve been expecting more. You seem like you’d be into this kind of stuff.” The shitty tilt to his smile is nothing Katsuki’d ever give five seconds of thought to, but that guy never used to look at him like that. That guy used to stay five feet out of his way in gym class like he was scared that if they bumped into each other, he’d never see the light of day again.
It only takes about three seconds for his head to hit the ground.
Katsuki gets a three-day suspension for misbehavior and picks up a deeper scowl in turn; that kid doesn’t look his way again, but the story sets off a chain reaction. Dad freaks when he gets the call from the school, but when Katsuki shouts over his nervous babbling that it wasn’t his fault, that he was provoked, the sucker actually believes him.
He gets out of the whole mess with no groundings and a pamphlet for a fancy new private school read to him over dinner - emphasis on disciplinary action to maintain a peaceful school life, Dad stresses - and, vehemently, refuses to feel guilty. If anyone’s in the wrong here, it’s not him, it’s Mom. She’s the one who took his reputation away from him - everything he’s worked to be seen as, thrown out the window, completely out of his control. She must see how her failure of a plan screwed him over, too, because she doesn’t show up in his dreams to chew him out, for the fighting or the lying to Dad, and she doesn’t send any more girls his way through the rest of his time at that miserable school.
But when he turns eleven, she tries a different angle.
It starts once he graduates from Aldera, at the new school, which is nice. No more creaky rusty desks or well-worn textbooks or mysterious stains on the walls, just a shiny new cafeteria and a state-of-the-art computer lab and a class of kids that look lifted from the crowd at one of Dad’s events. There’s a whole new crew of wannabe delinquents and shithead lackeys glaring at Katsuki from the back of the class, but all it takes is one scowl and the fact that he’s not wearing the customary tie during his self introduction for rumors to start flying. Two days into the school year, they’ve already devolved from I heard he was kicked out of his old school for fighting to I heard he’s the son of the biggest Yakuza leader in the country, and he’ll inherit the position on his sixteenth birthday. People leave him alone, and that’s good. Here, the teachers have a sharper eye, a code of conduct outlined from the very first day. It doesn’t look like he could get away with as much here.
People leave him alone, until they don’t.
Two months into the school year, the first day he manages to shake Dad off his back and convince him to let him walk himself to school instead of being driven there like an endangered animal, Katsuki flops down at his desk with all the carefully showy lack of care as ever. Normally, people scoot away at just that, so he’s not even accounting for people in his surroundings when he hears someone say, “Is anyone sitting here?”
There’s some guy standing in front of him, with floppy hair and his black uniform top unbuttoned to show his collar. Katsuki’s never seen him before; if he doesn’t know the seating arrangement, or the shit he’ll get from the teachers who care about the dress code, he must be new.
“It’s assigned seats,” he answers, ready to be left alone. But the guy looks at him with a quirk to his smile, and sits down in front of him, in a seat that belongs to a girl who clicks her pen nervously all class.
“My name’s Takahashi,” he says.
“Okay.” Not gonna remember that.
“I just transferred in, but I keep getting lost. It’s a really big school.” At this point, Katsuki’s just staring at him wondering why he hasn’t taken the hint and left already. After a few seconds, like a test, he adds, “Maybe you could show me around sometime?”
“Katsuki, who’s this guy?” asks one of his classmates, strutting towards them in front of two others. They’re not Katsuki’s friends, because Katsuki doesn’t need to be friends with people below him. They just sit by him, and say his name so much that people start to fear it.
But when this guy hears it, he looks back to him and asks, “Your name’s Katsuki?” with a smile. His whole face is lit up. “I like it. It sounds really nice. Katsuki.”
And that’s when it hits him.
As a jolt runs up Katsuki’s spine, one of the guys next to him snorts. “What the hell?”
“What?” Takahashi says, eyes wide open in confusion. Katsuki’s mind is racing trying to figure out a way to stop what he knows is about to happen from happening, but it’s like he’s been drenched in ice water. His body is frozen in place.
“We don’t even know you and you show up saying gay shit. It’s gross,” he hears his classmate say, but it washes right over him like a wave. No. Shit. Fuck. “Right, Katsuki?”
His throat feels too dry to respond.
“Get out,” he manages to croak - straight ahead, to the idiot still looking down at him with big, sincere eyes.
“Are you oka-”
“Get out of here,” Katsuki shouts, his gut so twisted in on itself that it hurts to say it. The look on his face changes from worried to plain sad as he leaves the room, and his shitty classmates snicker and pat his back once he’s gone, and it takes a lot, lot longer than that for the you’re being watched right now voice to shut up in his mind.
That night, there’s a fire in Mom’s soft, warm eyes that Katsuki never could have imagined there. “Katsuki.”
“What the hell was that?” he shouts back, because she shouldn’t get to be the one who’s disappointed right now.
“I could say the same thing to you!” she says, in a scandalized tone that makes it clear she isn’t going to get it. “I’m not letting my kid grow up with bent morals. Love takes all kinds of shapes, and I don’t want to see you hurting people for who they love again.”
“But why would you think I was like that.”
“I just wanted to give you the option. I thought it might be better.”
And the worst part is that it was better.
It can’t be better. It took an entire childhood of beating down everyone in his way to get them to stop trying to prove he isn’t a boy or screaming at him that he isn’t. If they had found out what was going on back there - that if it had been him and Katsuki alone, then the sight of him might not have made it feel like he was squeezing into a box not meant for him - that there wasn’t only one opening to stab him through, but two-
It all bubbles up and escapes him as a scream. “Fuck off! Leave me alone! I never asked for this!”
Like that, all the softness and patience drains out of Mom’s face. “Listen, mister. I’ve been avoiding the issue, but that’s no way to talk to someone who did something nice for you.”
“You don’t get it! If you keep doing this you’ll ruin everything.”
“Since when has love ruined anything?”
“You don’t get it!” Katsuki shouts. He’s shaking so hard that he feels like he could catch on fire, but Mom doesn’t budge. Doesn’t try to take him seriously for a second.
“You don’t fucking get it,” he shouts again, and the next thing he knows, she’s gone. Ran away, like the coward she is.
There’s a simple solution that Katsuki decides on almost as soon as he wakes up. They just won’t find out. He won’t give them a chance to.
He moves through the next year of middle school with that mindset - the wide stance, the slouch in his back wherever he goes. If smiling makes him look weak, then he won’t smile anymore. He’s tough. He’s the toughest guy in the class. He can’t be taken down, and if anyone has anything to say about that, they can answer to the sole of his shoe.
Mom hasn’t visited him since that night, and every time he starts another fight or joins in on the name-calling himself, he thinks she’ll finally grow a pair and come yell at him about it again. Maybe she’s just expecting worse. Maybe she knows he can reach a lower rock bottom, and is waiting in anticipation. Her fault, he decides. When she finally shows up, she can yell at him about it until her throat gives out, for all he cares. She doesn’t know anything.
It’s not until June, just on the brink of summer vacation, that he’s once again hit with a, “Hey there.”
Katsuki is sitting at his desk, packing up his bag to leave, and there’s a guy he doesn’t know, who he’s never seen around, standing there and smiling down at him. Where has he heard that one before.
“What do you want.”
“It’s kind of embarrassing, talking out here,” the guy says. “Can we go somewhere more private?”
He just keeps staring at him like that, like he’s not moving until he gets a yes. Took her long enough. Katsuki squints; he could take this guy. He’s got a skeevy tilt to his smirk, but he’s lanky and skinny and not any taller than him. If he wore the winter uniform to look more tough, it’s not working; he looks like he’s drowning in it.
If anyone sees, or asks what’s going on, he can knock him out on the spot. Easy. So Katsuki kicks off of the desk, one leg at a time, and wordlessly locks eyes with him as he stands. Your move.
The guy doesn’t try to talk to him at all on the way, anyway, just leads a few paces ahead and looks back at him every now and then like he’s worried he’ll lose him. They make it through the hallways, down to the main floor and through the schoolyard; Katsuki catches a few classmates sending stray glances his way, but they all turn away as soon as he glares at them. He doesn’t have to raise a hand.
Eventually, he stops at the mouth of an alleyway, but even then, he’s quiet. Katsuki stops at the entrance, first, and then walks a few steps deeper in to show he’s not scared of him. The whole time, he just keeps watching him with that crooked, uneven smirk.
It’s gross. The guy probably knows he’s a freak, and that he should give up now. But once what feels like a minute has passed, Katsuki throws him a, “So. What.”
“You’re interesting, you know that?” he says back, lazily. This guy talks too slow, like he’s not afraid of being cut off. It pisses him off, on the surface, but there’s also something off about it. No one at his school is unafraid of him. He’s stronger than anyone. He doesn’t have to listen to anyone. But this guy talks slow. “I’ve been watching you for a while. I’ve checked out a lot of people, but there’s something about you.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean,” Katsuki says. He didn’t notice in the classroom, but his eyes are a stark yellow. They stand out from the rest of his face. In the shadow of the alley, they almost look lit up.
“What do you want me to say?” he drawls. It could just be Katsuki, but his mouth shouldn’t be able to tilt that much. “That I’m glad I met you? Want to see more of you?”
Katsuki juts out his chin, and starts to curl his fists. “If my mom sent you, I don’t give a shit.”
“It would be nice if I was, wouldn’t it?” he says, as his skin starts to peel from the corners of his mouth and melt away into- mud.
The second he realizes it’s mud dripping down and covering his body in huge, bubbling globs, he realizes he can taste it.
There are red alarms going off in his head. He tries to take a breath. It’s in his mouth. “What-”
“Don’t try to struggle! You drown faster if you do,” the guy says, his voice so warbled it’s unrecognizable. Katsuki makes a swipe for his face, but it’s useless; his hand passes right through, and comes away drenched in clumpy brown gunk that climbs up his arm.
It’s then, when less and less air is making its way to Katsuki’s brain, that things start to feel fuzzy. He tries his best to regain his stance, but before he knows it, he’s on his back, and it’s harder and harder to move. As he thrashes forward, he catches a glimpse of what the thing has become- makes out a body of gooey greenish sludge and two loose yellow eyes and a huge, crooked grin overflowing with more sludge- he’s seen a lot of shit in his life, but never this close, and nothing like this. Whatever this is.
Whatever it is, it’s distinctly not human, and as mud starts to fill his throat, Katsuki feels so stupid to have ever stopped listening to the voice in his gut- so mad that the people around him told him not to, like they knew any better. Mad - if his mom hadn’t carried on this stupid routine so long, whatever monster this is wouldn’t have caught onto it, and Katsuki would have trampled him down from the get-go. Weak, to be making no ground even as he kicks and screams and claws and his vision goes dark - and someone must find him, but all he can remember is kicking and screaming until he wakes up in the hospital.
At twelve, Katsuki doesn’t know how he could accumulate so many boxes and still not have enough important things to fill a suitcase.
Dad is trying to fill out the empty space with things he knows Katsuki doesn’t need - clothes with the tags on them and photo albums he won’t open. He’s got that blank look on his face that means he knows things aren’t okay, but wants Katsuki to think they are.
Fuck that. If he knows this is wrong, he can stop it. “I don’t want to go to camp.”
“It’s not a regular camp. It’ll be good for you.”
That just sounds like something from one of the brochures in the shrink’s office Dad took him to last year.
“What, they’re gonna make me- talk about my feelings?” Group therapy? Retreats disguised as camping trips? No fucking way.
“I heard they have a rock climbing wall,” Dad says, his patient smile wearing thin as he folds up a raincoat and lays it on top. Yeah, right. Dad won’t even tell him what this place is called. Like that doesn’t scream front.
“Fuck that,” Katsuki shouts, out loud this time. “I don’t need to go to camp. It’s not my fault that guy attacked me. I could’ve taken him. I’m-”
“Katsuki.” Both of Dad’s hands are on his shoulders, now, in a final plea for cooperation. “This was your mom’s idea, remember? She would know how to keep you safe.”
Whether Mom has to do with this or not, Katsuki doesn’t like the wording. He doesn’t need protecting. He’s strong. He’s tough. He’s not going to lose any more fights, that’s not who he is. He can fend for himself. And he doesn’t need to have every detail of where he’s going kept secret from him.
“How long am I going.”
Dad keeps smiling, but the corners of his eyes fall, just a little. “I don’t know. A long time.”
Katsuki slams the door behind him.
The next day, Katsuki sits for twelve hours in the front seat of Dad’s car and doesn’t say a word. Dad tries a few things - asking him questions, offering up control of the radio, even suggesting the alphabet game in a moment of desperation - but Katsuki doesn’t respond. Apparently, he cracks him right at the end, because when he stops the car, Dad hands him his bag with nothing more than an, “Off you go, then.”
His finger’s pointing to a gate down the dirt road marked Delphi Strawberry Service, half-obscured by the tall grass. He doesn’t even try to ruffle Katsuki’s hair before going to close the trunk.
Katsuki follows his footsteps in shock. “You’re not coming in?”
“This is as far as I can go,” Dad says, like it’s nothing. “I don’t really get it either.”
There’s something about the detachment of it that brings Katsuki’s blood to a boil. He can picture the therapy circles already. “Bullshit.”
Dad looks at him like he’s trying to figure out just what scolding he deserves for that, and then, so fast that Katsuki can’t push him away, he leans down and wraps his arms around him.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” he says, and squeezes tighter than Katsuki’s ever felt. “I’ll come get you for the holidays, okay?”
“Don’t cry on my neck, old man, that’s gross,” Katsuki bites out. He should be able to push Dad off him, no problem, but Dad doesn’t budge no matter how he squirms. Whatever wall he had up, he must’ve dropped it completely.
As an attempt at a sweet last parting, it completely backfires - it just confirms what Katsuki’d been thinking, that Dad just sees him as a little kid. Dad doesn’t need to worry about him, and he doesn’t need to be here. If he wanted him to be safe, he wouldn’t be sticking him somewhere where he probably won’t even be allowed to fight for himself.
But when Dad pulls away, it’s with a firm, “I’ll see you for the holidays,” and then a, “Have fun, alright?” - and Katsuki thinks, why even bother with the have fun if what you’re thinking is be safe.
The trail is overgrown with plants and dotted with deer tracks and dead empty, but Katsuki follows it lugging his bag behind him until he comes up on a hill with a huge, blue house standing on top. This says camp; even then, there’s no one there except one man sitting on the wraparound porch. He’s got long black hair that covers half his face, and he’s completely slumped over in his wheelchair. Not much of a camp counselor, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
The man stares Katsuki down, and in a voice so low that he might as well not have used it in weeks, says, “Name.”
At the base of the stairs, Katsuki puffs out his chest. “Bakugou Katsuki.”
With all the speed of someone who couldn’t care less, and might not even work here, the man produces a clipboard from the chair and flips through its pages until he lands on what must be Katsuki’s. “Pre-registered,” he notes, then locks eyes with Katsuki. “Unclaimed. Do you have any idea who your mom could be.”
Katsuki pauses a second. It’s not like Mom’s ever told him her name, so he can’t answer, anyway. But why does he need to know. “No.”
The man stares back at him like he can tell it’s a lie, but he looks away and starts silently checking things off on the clipboard anyway.
“I don’t want to be here,” Katsuki says, a final line of defense. He has to at least try.
“You’ll get used to it,” the man says, as he starts to get out of his chair. “You’re bunking in Hermes Cabin for now. Is that all you brought.”
It’s supposed to be a question, but he says it like he knows. Katsuki’s about to say something about how up his own ass that makes him sound, but when he stands to reveal not two legs, but four, and a whole horse ass to boot, all he can do is choke out a laugh and a, “What the fuck.”
By age seventeen, Katsuki has a reputation about him.
A team leader five years undefeated in Capture the Flag. The best melee fighter in camp, even without flashy powers to help him. A senior camper whose name everybody knows, with a permanent bunk in Hermes Cabin and a scowl that sends the new kids running.
No other camper has been here for five years without being claimed, anyway. It’s not like he had any choice but to have a reputation.
It’s obvious to Katsuki who Mom really is the second he learns the Gods’ names - Aphrodite. Goddess of love and beauty. Of course. The only thing that hag’s done for him is fling love interests his way and insist she’s helping. Not only is she the most useless ally in the real world, she’s the worst curse to bear here, too. Aphrodite kids aren’t strong, and they’re not tough, and they don’t even make appearances in ninety-nine percent of the Capture the Flag games, so it’s no wonder nobody respects them. All Aphrodite kids get are names flung around behind their backs and pity claps when they try to put up a fight in the arena.
Katsuki has spent every second of his life since getting here running in the other direction. The plan is simple - rise so far to the top that when the day eventually comes, nobody will look at him any different. Nobody will have the balls. For years, that’s all he ever shows - he leads his team in new winning strategies, and takes every victory he can in the arena, and offers up absolutely nothing more of himself. Nobody needs to know.
“I could claim you any time,” Mom says, sometimes, in dreams and visions. It’s not meant to be a threat, but that’s how it sounds anyway. I could end this all for you. I could take it all away.
Don’t you dare, Katsuki thinks back as he holds a younger camper against the floor of the arena with his foot. Force is all he’s ever known. He’s never stopped fighting, and he has no intention of changing that now. It’s worked for him so far.
Katsuki should know better by now than to expect that fate has his best interests in mind. but until July, his seventeenth summer seems like it’s passing by, for the most part, normally.
Seventeen is different than sixteen and very, very, markedly different from twelve. Even when he was fourteen, the counselors knew better than to try to tell him what to do, but seventeen grants him a certain level of control. Now, he’s almost an adult. Just a few months from graduation on a normal timeline. He’s taller now than ever, and his jawline is stronger, and now that his chest’s flat, he doesn’t slouch everywhere he goes, either. If people look at him and doubt that he knows what he’s doing, they know better than to say it.
It’s looking like life might start offering him everything he hasn’t gotten so far - until July.
It’s an uncannily perfect summer day, somehow hot and balmy and cool depending on who you ask. Katsuki is sitting on the edge of the rock wall platform baking in the sun, flanked by two of the idiots that still try to stick themselves to his side: Ashido from Nike Cabin, who always wears so much clumpy black eyeliner that it looks like she has no eyes at all, and Kaminari, who acts like a bigshot for belonging to a Big Three Cabin, until he gets lonely and has to choose a cabin at random to force his presence onto.
They’re insufferable, but grip strength isn’t Katsuki’s strong suit, and none of the twelve-year-olds who flock the rock wall make good competition. He wouldn’t sit with these guys for more than two minutes willingly, but when he told them race me on the wall, now, they said let’s at least wait for Sero to get back, and that guy is tall and scrawny enough that he can scale it like a goat scaling a cliffside, which is a compelling argument. So, ten minutes later, and he’s still sitting there, letting their brain dead conversations seep into his ears like poison. Willingly.
“Ugh, man,” Kaminari sighs, leaning back on his hands and swinging his legs back and forth. “I must not have eaten enough breakfast. Those cattails are starting to look like corndogs. Would it sound crazy if I said I wanna go bite one?”
“No, because if you wanted, you totally could,” Ashido responds, way too enthusiastically for someone who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Katsuki doesn’t look up from tying his shoelaces, but someone has to beat some common sense into these two. “No, you can’t. What are you, stupid?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ashido’s shoulders slump. “But I heard they’re edible.”
“Just the stems, idiot. You can’t bite the seed pod, unless you want it to blow up in your face.”
There’s a pause, before Kaminari chimes in, “That’s an awful lot of aquatic knowledge, Blasty.”
Katsuki grits his teeth. He knows what’s coming. “Don’t-”
“Or should I say, Son of Poseidon?”
Ashido gasps. “Oh my Gods, I can totally see it.”
“Fifty bucks says it’s true. Wow, I can’t believe I never thought of that. You won the swim relay last summer, right?”
Before he can get out another word, Katsuki grabs his face and grips it as tightly as he can. “How many times do I have to tell you to cut that shit out?”
Kaminari tries to push his hand away, and fails. Still, through smushed cheeks, he says, “I’sh harmlesh fun, Kacchan! Beshidesh, i’sh not your money on the line.”
“Yeah, come on,” Ashido whines. “I still don’t get why you don’t want to know who your parent is.”
Of course she doesn’t get it, because her brain is the size of a ground-up walnut. But it’s not their place to be guessing when he hasn’t even told them that they can rule out the Gods. It’s the same as how Kaminari acts like he bestowed the nickname Kacchan upon him. They don’t know who called him that when he was a kid or why he made him stop, and he’s not going to tell them, but they still managed to guess it without a hint. They already love to make fun of him when he’s giving them nothing to laugh at. One day or another, they’re going to land on the right answer, and when they do, they’ll never look at him the same again.
“Ow. Uncle. I call uncle,” Kaminari says, now resorting to trying to kick Katsuki’s hand off him. “You sure it’s not Ares? No other campers are that aggro all the time.”
“If you really wanted me to let go, you’d think to shut up,” Katsuki grouses. Sero is a piece of shit in his own right, but if he doesn’t show up in the next thirty seconds, someone’s getting their teeth knocked out.
“Yo!” calls a voice from behind them.
Speak of the devil.
Katsuki drops his grip on Kaminari, who starts pounding at his chest and gasping for air like he’d actually been trying to strangle him. He’d rather save his energy; last time, he finished just a short enough window in front of Sero that he hit him with a smug, “Hold onto your crown next time!” He has no intention of leaving room for that today.
The smug shitty face in question is the first thing that pokes over the hill, followed by the rest of his lanky self, hands in his pockets and shirt hanging off of him as usual. That much is normal, but as he comes closer, Katsuki realizes he’s not alone; there’s someone else walking up the hill beside him, who he’s never seen before.
The first thing Katsuki notices about him is his absolutely fucking ridiculous hair. There are other kids at camp that are blond like him, and a few redheads and water nymphs with green and blue and purple hair. Ashido’s is still stained pink from last spring, for fuck’s sake. But hair dye isn’t easy to come by in middle-of-the-woods fuck-all nowhere, and this guy’s is the color of a firetruck, and it looks like shit.
It sticks out more because the rest is, honestly, not disgusting. The guy is tall, almost as tall as Sero, so just about the same as Katsuki. He must not’ve gotten the camp shirt yet, because he’s wearing a faded old sweatshirt with what looks like a rock band logo on the front. As he gets closer, Katsuki can see that his face is sun-tanned and solid, broken into a steady, bright smile. He’s the kind of guy that makes Katsuki want to straighten his back and jut out his chin- and looking at him, that’s about all he wants to let himself feel.
Once the two of them are standing in front of them, Kaminari cuts out the act to say, “Whoa, we’ve got a newbie?”
“When I went to go check on the herbs at the Big House, he was there,” Sero explains, then gestures to him like take it away, dude.
The new guy lifts a rough, bandaged hand out of his pocket before answering; his eyes are bright, like he’s thrilled to get to take the mic. “Hey! I’m Kirishima,” he says, then locks eyes with Katsuki before flashing a grin full of huge, shark-like teeth. “Nice t’meet you guys!”
Oh, no.
There’s no fucking way she found a way to get one in here.
Disrupting the path of the glare Katsuki’s gaze has turned into, Kaminari’s arm juts out and grabs Kirishima’s hand. “Kaminari Denki!”
“Ashido Mina,” Ashido says, pointing at herself with a wink. Sero turns to her to say something about how she’ll get to give another one of her famous first-day tours, and Katsuki feels the panic alarm in his head flash like a strobe light. They have no idea what’s happening. That’s why they’re being so damn jovial. Telling them would blow it all - everything - but if they had any idea who this guy was or what he was doing here-
“Do you have any idea what cabin you belong to?” Kaminari asks.
“Not yet,” Kirishima says, scratching his neck with one hand and lifting the other in a shrug. He talks with his hands and his eyes light up and there are pale brown freckles on his nose. “But I never knew my dad, so that’s a start, right?”
“Don’t worry, man,” Sero says, taking his place next to Ashido on the platform. “You’ll get your claiming soon enough.”
He won’t because he’s not real and there’s no reason he should be here. It’s the social contract of being where everyone in camp could see him stopping Katsuki from letting loose completely and showing Mom exactly what he thinks of her little plan, but he still can’t stop his fists from curling up on themselves - in, and then out, and then in again.
“My old man claimed me after I shocked the whole lake on my third day here,” Kaminari says, with nothing to worry about. Wholly and entirely carefree. “A pretty memorable moment, if I do say so myself.”
“Don’t say that like you’re proud of it,” Katsuki snaps.
It’s not loud enough to release all the tension that’s built up, but it does turn a few heads. Kirishima cocks an eyebrow, and all at once, his face changes - happy and steady to wholeheartedly concerned. “Uh?”
“That’s our friend Bakugou,” Sero explains. The ‘yeah, that’s about what I’d expect’ teasing in his voice is as clear as the goddamn daybreak, but he follows it up with, “He called us all here to take a stab at the rock wall. So far, no one’s ever beaten him to the top.”
Kirishima glances up at the top of the wall, then back down at Katsuki. “Sounds like a real man!”
That tears it.
Five years with the camp’s protective barrier stopping Mom from getting to ruin his life whenever she feels like it. Five years of peace! Is that all the universe thinks he should get? Does she think she’s helping him with this? Fucking- decided that after all this, he’s still missing something? That she can fix him with some Frankenstein boyfriend? That she can make him say things engineered to win him over and he won’t see through it?
Staring at Katsuki, Kirishima’s eyebrows are furrowing together now, and his mouth drops into a careful, thoughtful frown. “Are you okay, dude?”
“What the fuck do you know?” He never figured out if she could see through her love zombies or not, but just in case she can, Katsuki funnels the full scope of his anger into it. He noticeably flinches; Katsuki takes that as proof.
“Nothing, I was just-”
“Come on, Bakugou,” Kaminari says at the same time, with none of the patience of their new friend.
Katsuki jumps to his feet, and before anyone can try to drag him back down, walks away with a, “Climb the wall yourselves.” Fuck this. He’s not giving his mom the satisfaction of thinking he’s fallen for it, even for one minute. Looking at someone and feeling his heart drop into his stomach doesn’t mean she’s won against him. Not even close.
“He’s cool, promise,” he hears Sero say, just before he’s out of earshot. “Sometimes.”
Katsuki deals with that backyard potion mix of feelings the same way he would any other: in the arena.
The counselors say they keep these things around to teach self defense in case of an attack, but that’s bullshit. This camp hasn’t seen danger since the years before Katsuki arrived, long enough that its last battles are woven in tapestries on the walls. Not so much as an argument with the satyrs in the woods about moving the beginner archery course out of the woods. No. The real reason this camp still has a sword fighting ring and weekly battle games and a melee arena that everyone knows belongs to Katsuki is that if you put a few hundred-odd kids with battle instincts in the woods and didn’t give them a chance go wild, the place would be under rule of chaos. Katsuki sees the way Aizawa watches, satisfied as the campers all patch each other up, exhausted after a game of Capture the Flag. He knows what he’s doing.
If it’s all about hierarchy anyway, then nobody can say anything when Katsuki throws some preteen Athena Cabin wimp to the ground.
They hit the floor with a smack; before three seconds is even up, Togata Mirio, the head counselor of Apollo Cabin, is helping them up by the hand and sending them back to their family. “Any challengers?” he asks, as he swoops around to survey the crowd. He’s obnoxiously cheery, like the emcee for a kids’ show. He has one hand cupped around his ear and everything. “Come on, anybody think they can take down our resident champ?”
His fifth victory of the day is met with less cheers and more scattered, hesitant claps from the crowd that’s gathered, and naturally, not a single one of them steps up to plate. Katsuki is still basking in the string of victories, exactly where he wants to be - body heavy and breaths deep and face splitting into a grin he can’t stop.
“I’d like to see you try!” he shouts, if only to watch the way the new meat in the crowd flinches and steps back.
Good. Stand back. Katsuki’s about to call it a day and claim that vengeful, serves-you-right kind of pride that a good run of fights refills in him - when a voice from the back of the crowd rings out, “Then you’re on!”
It’s not a voice he knows well, but he knows exactly who it’s gonna be. Katsuki’s mood plummets bottle-rocket fast into the floor.
You’d think Mom would at least try to be subtle about forcing her way into Katsuki’s life again, but there’s Kirishima pushing through the crowd, his shitty hair like a beacon over everyone else’s heads. When he makes his way to the front, Katsuki sees he’s changed into an orange camp shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal a pair of toned, tight arms.
He’s got a sword dangling loosely from his hands, one of those things they give beginners who don’t know their own fighting style yet. The grin on his face is equal parts determination and no-holds-barred excitement, pointed directly at Katsuki.
It’s all about hierarchy in the end, this arena, to the camp and to Katsuki too. Katsuki lets the runts charge at him so they won’t charge at each other, and in turn, they learn that there’s no way they’ll ever stand above him. It’s a hierarchy with two clear tiers - him versus anybody else. On that principle alone, he’s never turned down a match.
Mom picked the wrong place. If he’s gonna be subject to this shit again, Katsuki thinks, then at least this time, he can beat him up.
“I only fight with my hands.”
“I can respect that,” Kirishima says, because, of course he does. The sword clatters against the floor, and Togata picks it up gingerly before it can dice up anyone’s shoes.
“Well, alright! Looks like we’ve got a brand new challenger!” he says, hamming it up so much he almost sounds desperate. Must be hard to pull enthusiasm out of people who know what kind of death match they’re in for. “Let’s keep it rolling along, then! Three seconds restrained is a win, and remember, you can call uncle any time!”
Katsuki settles into stance on his corner of the ring - knees bent, and arms at the ready. After popping his neck, Kirishima does the same, then shoots Katsuki a grin.
“Ready…”
“Let’s make it a good one!” he says, curling his hands into fists.
“Go!”
Even if he did have time to respond, Katsuki wouldn’t have. The first second makes the match: something Kirishima clearly hadn’t prepared for. When Katsuki charges forward, he’s immediately able to throw him off his feet, and he flies back with a grunt- good. Kirishima doesn’t think he knows his tricks just from watching him. Katsuki can follow with his right hook.
It lands square on his cheek, just like he knew it would, and even knocks him the rest of the way to the floor, too. His head hits the mat with a pointed thwack.
“One, two,” Togata counts. Katsuki shakes his arm out in satisfaction. Figures she’d send a pretty face who can’t take a-
“You know how to make an entrance, huh?” Kirishima springs to his feet with that same grin as before, and there’s no sign of damage on his face. It’s not even red. “I like that! Let’s do this for real!”
-...hit.
This isn’t any time to be thinking about whatever high-durability model Mom sent his way; Kirishima’s leg is already swinging towards Katsuki’s midsection, foot fully flexed. He just narrowly avoids getting a sneaker toe jammed into his waist, and deflects a fist to send one back from the other side. It gets him right in the nose, and if it were anyone else, it’d be bleeding, maybe even broken. But Kirishima changes his position and comes at Katsuki from behind, like he didn’t even feel it.
What the fuck?
Katsuki barely manages to avoid the tackle, and the next three, and a flurry of punches and kicks with this is the longest match I’ve ever fought running on loop in his head. It’s not that Katsuki can’t land hits on Kirishima; it’s that it’s like his hits don’t faze him. Even his shitty grin won’t waver, like he’s having fun. Like he’s reveling in this. The longer it goes on like this, the more Katsuki’s anger starts to boil, shaking the lid. In a moment of exasperation, Katsuki aims to grab his jaw, and Kirishima lifts an arm just in time to block it. Instantly and tight enough to hurt, he wraps his fingers around Katsuki’s wrist, and there’s a death defying sort of grin on his face - a neither did I sort of grin. The next thing Katsuki knows, his head is tilting towards the ceiling, and his feet are starting to lose their grip on the mat. He’s heading down at a rapid rate, but as air whooshes through his ears, he swears he hears a cheer.
No. Not here. Not ever. He can’t, under any circumstances, fall now, so he swings with everything he has until the sole of his sneaker connects with Kirishima’s jaw.
The grip around Katsuki’s wrist loosens. He rips free just quick enough to stomp down on Kirishima’s chest to pin him to the ground for one, two-
“Three seconds! It’s Bakugou’s win!”
If last round’s claps were hesitant, these ones are scared to sound; dozens of scared little campers whose precious underdog couldn’t hack it in the end. Kirishima looks completely stunned, lying flat on his back. Hiding his panting with a sneer, Katsuki leans over to investigate; that hit should’ve knocked out some teeth, but his face is completely unscathed. Just like he thought. She didn’t even program damage into this one. Just some half-baked, bullshit attempt at a-
There’s a tug on his arm, and Kirishima is definitely holding out a hand.
“Good game!” he says, nothing but sincere excitement and interest, sweat plastered and glowing. “I have no idea how you thought of that last move, that was so-”
Katsuki smacks his hand away.
“You can’t get me,” he growls, through strained breaths. “Don’t start thinking you can.” - and part of it is directed at Kirishima, but most of it isn’t, so Katsuki doesn’t look back at him as he storms away.
This time, the chicken breast on his dinner plate takes the brunt of his anger, as he tears through it with a knife. Did he piss off one of the Gods personally to deserve this? He’s never met any of them, but if they’ve got kids, then he’s kicked their asses. Mom wouldn’t be above using her powers as cruel and unusual punishment if someone asked her to, either. It makes perfect sense, actually, when he thinks about it. In last week’s Capture the Flag game, he debuted a new battle plan that sent a record number of kids to the infirmary. He should’ve known the Gods would be petty enough to try and extract some cosmic revenge over that.
He’s running through the faces he punched to see if there’s any whose names or folks he bothered to learn - not many - when the table shakes in front of him.
“Mind if I sit here?” Kirishima says, and when Katsuki looks up, he meets him with that same shitty grin. He says that, but he’s already sitting at the place across from Katsuki. The worst part is, he can’t even say no - not like he’s got anywhere else to sit, if he hasn’t been claimed yet. Who could someone like him belong to, anyway. How would that even work.
...Maybe Apollo. Those guys are always annoyingly unaware of how annoying they are.
“So we can ask for anything, huh?” Under Katsuki’s calculating stare, Kirishima eyes his own empty plate, then Katsuki’s. “That looks really good. Can I try some?”
Katsuki douses his chicken in orange juice before sneaking it into the Aphrodite fire.
That night, all Mom has to say is, “I thought you were a better cook.”
“You brought me here to tell me that?” Katsuki asks, skeptical. She looks displeased - unimpressed, even - but there’s no acknowledgement of the sentiment behind it. Nothing.
“If your siblings knew you were poisoning your mother, they’d put you at the end of the bathroom queue,” she tuts.
Katsuki bites down a laugh. Siblings. Those people aren’t his siblings. None of them has ever exchanged a word with him. Not up to their standards, apparently. “Then it’s a good thing I don’t live there.”
“One of these days, you will,” she says, and fine, yeah, okay. If she just wants to play the same old routine, then fuck him, apparently. “Once I’ve gotten over your complete willingness to poison your dear old mom and decide to grant you that privilege.”
“I’d rather sleep in the stables.”
Mom rolls her eyes. “Knock yourself out,” she says - and for a second, he almost thinks she’ll leave it at that. And then, so performatively casually, she adds, “So, this Kirishima kid.”
“Fuck off,” Katsuki groans. Of course. Nothing ever changes and no one ever listens to him and nothing can ever go the way he wants it to-
“Don’t swear at your mother. And I like him! He’s cute.”
That’s...huh. That’s not incessantly pushy, so, not normal. “Yeah?” Katsuki asks.
“Mhm,” she nods, more neighborhood mom gossipping than celestial-tier matchmaker. “Honestly, Katsuki. If you would just stop resisting the good things fate sends your way-”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Hey. What did I just say.”
“He’s not one of yours?”
Mom’s mouth falls into an O. It takes her a second to process the question, as if it’s completely unfounded in reason or logic or, most importantly, lived experience - and when it does click, she has the audacity to laugh about it.
“It’s not funny,” Katsuki says, through gritted teeth. How hard would he have to pinch himself to wake up? “You pulled that shit for years, what the hell was I supposed to think?”
“Honest, I had nothing to do with this one,” she claims, practically wiping away tears. “If you think he’s that perfect for you, though, I’d be happy to help you two out!”
“I don’t think he’s-” he starts to seethe, before realizing how ridiculously stupid the entire situation is. “No. Just. Leave me alone.”
“Hey.” Mom’s hands find their way to his cheeks, surprisingly gently. “Katsuki. Look at me.”
He doesn’t want to, but she’s not moving. “What.”
“Is that so bad?” she says, like it isn’t obvious.
“Yes.” It’s so much worse that she has nothing to do with this. At least before, he knew any bullshit feelings he had were the fault of divine intervention. But if Kirishima’s just some guy, and not one of hers- and Katsuki- looked at him and thought that he-
He wants to throw up.
Seeing the pain in his face, Mom chuckles. “That unsure of yourself, huh?”
It’s so off that for a second, he forgets what he’s heaving about. “Huh?”
“There’s no need to worry, kid,” she says, a weird spark lighting up her eyes. “Any son of mine can be a real maneater. Don’t worry. You’ll have him falling for you in no time.”
Only about as hard as any other pinch, it turns out.
For a summer camp made to house kids who can’t fend for themselves, Half Blood’s got a shitty graduation rate. People come in their teens, and maybe leave for the school year, but hardly anyone ever packs their bags and leaves for good. They either become head counselors or get a job working the stables or disappear to college during the year, but come summertime, they’re back to keep the camp population as bloated as ever. It’s not like the Gods have ever stopped having kids. At this point, hosting welcome bonfires every week is redundant. Not like the newbies are going anywhere. Katsuki blames Aizawa for not getting on the old folks’ cases about growing a pair and setting off, but he curses him for making attendance mandatory.
“You’re the only one who’s ever complained,” he said, when Katsuki expressed this perfectly reasonable feeling. “Taking time to talk to your cabinmates would do you some good. Shut up and make a s’more sometime.”
His cabinmates are prime examples of people who aren’t going anywhere. If there was anyone interesting among them, Katsuki would know by now. It’s hundreds of loud, sugar-high kids crowded around a set of benches singing along to the same camp songs every week. Nobody in their right mind would find this fun - but on a muggy Friday night, where mosquitos and fireflies circle the fire pit, he finds himself standing in the s’more line anyway. Whatever. It’s not like fate’s ever delighted in giving him a say, anyway.
Case in point: Kirishima.
If it’s not his Mom, someone else must have it out for him. He can’t shake the thought. Kirishima’s sitting on the other side of the fire from where Katsuki’s standing, in between Sero and Kaminari on a long log bench; Katsuki’s view is blocked by the flames and the ever-rising tower of smoke, but when he looks over the crowd even for a second, his eyes immediately fall on him, and even when he doesn’t look, he’s loud. When he turns, he can see the way Kirishima’s shoulders bump up against Kaminari’s, how he drops his jaw to laugh at something Sero says. You’d think he’s been here forever, from how happy he looks between them. Lifelong friends. If he’s still sitting with them, then he hasn’t been claimed yet. They probably don’t pester him about it. He probably asks them about their lives back home, and they tell him everything they want him to know, and he tells them the comfortable version of the story, too, or maybe he doesn’t have anything to-
“Could you move if you’re not gonna make a s’more? Not to be a jerk, but other people are waiting,” someone says from behind him. A target. Great. Katsuki cracks his knuckles as he turns - but. Damn. It’s Uraraka, still barely standing at a strong five-foot-two, her round cheeks puffed and a bandaid covering the bridge of her nose. She’s been here as long as Katsuki has, but they’ve hardly exchanged one word outside of a fight. That bubbly girl-next-door act of hers can’t fool him. She’s had it out for him since he beat her precious little Ares Cabin in Capture the Flag the year she was claimed.
Katsuki grunts and steps to the side.
She has all the room in the world to crack a graham cracker in half and put a piece of chocolate onto a plate, but the nosy fucker still pipes up. “You could just talk to him, you know.”
It makes his whole face pinch up, like Dad’s used to when he’d burn dinner on a too-hot flame. “What makes you think I-”
“Nobody’s ever won against you, right?” she says, looking up at him with her brown eyes fully open. An honest question for an honest observation. “I heard he got pretty close.”
A mosquito lands on Katsuki’s arm. He swats it hard enough that it becomes a sticky brown spot. It’s loud enough between the chatter and the firewood falling against itself that even people trying to listen wouldn’t hear her, but that doesn’t mean she can get away with saying that shit. “Fuck off. If he could’ve beaten me, then I wouldn’t have gotten him out so early.”
“You’re not impressed even when you’re impressed?!”
She doesn’t just look confused, she looks stunned. It’s so obviously fake.
“Why don’t you stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Round Face? Or do you need me to remind you why I never lose.”
It’s his brand of sneering that sends everyone else running, but over the years, she’s grown a tolerance for it. “Ugh, geez. Let’s go sit down. It’s better than standing here all night, right?”
“Wrong.” The Ares bench is right next to where Kaminari and the rest of them are sitting. He’s not dumb enough to let her drag him there.
“That’s a lie. Come on. Tell me why that move I tried against you last week was the worst thing you’ve ever seen,” Uraraka pushes. She has no reason to try so hard. He’s never shown her anything that should make her want to be his friend. But like she read his mind, she adds, “I’m always trying to improve! I study karate at home, you know.”
To prove her point, she steps into a karate stance, like it helps her case to remind him that she’s one of the ones who gets to leave.
Over to his side, the fire spits up and sends sparks flying everywhere. There’s a choice there. Katsuki glances back at it, then to Uraraka, then knits his eyebrows tighter. “No one who does karate has such shitty aim.”
Uraraka frowns. “That’s no fair. I land hits on you all the time.”
“Who the fuck has ever aimed for someone’s shoulder? You’ve never gotten my face.”
“How do you know I wasn’t aiming for your shoulder?”
“No chance. You’ll just break your own-”
“Hey, this is a conversation!” Uraraka cuts him off, with an obnoxiously cutesy gesture to the side. “You know where conversation happens? The benches.”
She should already know that won’t convince him, but she also steps just a few paces away from the table, and even Katsuki knows that they shouldn’t be blocking the line. This campfire is all these kids have, judging by how fucking big of a deal they make it.
“You suck more than anyone. And your balance is shit,” he says, moving just far enough to get out of the way.
“You keep grabbing me by my ankle, though?!” she says over her shoulder, moving just a few more paces back. “Nobody could keep standing after that.”
“No, because if you had caught yourself on your hands, and used your core to bounce back up, that wouldn’t knock you out.”
“I heard Kirishima tried to flip you over.”
“Yeah, and if I had as shit balance as you, he would’ve gotten me.”
A new voice chimes in, “I would’ve?”
Katsuki freezes, first in the face and then all the way down to his feet. He doesn’t want to look down, but when he does, he sees that, somehow, Uraraka led him all the way to the benches. His eyes fall directly on Kirishima’s - wide open, expectant, and reflecting the orange of the campfire light.
He rips his gaze up and throws it back towards Uraraka. “Fuck you,” he hisses.
As someone in her cabin taps her arm, Uraraka flashes him a cheeky fucking smile and disappears onto the bench. What a convenient way to remove yourself from the shit you started.
His mind’s reeling with all the things he’s gonna say to her the next time she even so much as breathes the same air as him, but Kirishima hasn’t taken his eyes off Katsuki.
“Wanna sit? Here, there’s space,” he says, scooting to the side and motioning for Sero to do the same. Once a gap has formed, he pats it and looks up at Katsuki with a grin.
Katsuki’s not putting up with this just because she dragged him into it. “No.”
“C’mon, Kacchan, the songs are about to start,” Kaminari says. He does a little drumbeat on the log, as if he’s totally innocent and not actively making things worse.
“Kacchan?” Kirishima’s eyes light up in recognition, the way you would if you figured out an inside joke. “Is that your nickname, or-”
“Why do you care?” Katsuki spits, feeling himself start to heat up, like his blood boiling him from the inside. “I’m not your fucking friend.”
It’s not the harshest thing Katsuki’s said - not even the harshest thing he could’ve said now - but apparently all he had to do was say it, because Kirishima’s face falls. No more pretend cheeriness or patience; just undeserved disbelief. Even fucking Dunce Face drops the act.
“Uh,” he says, through a slack jaw.
Katsuki feels his fists clench. “Like that’s a surprise? The same thing goes for you losers. All of you.” As he speaks on, he lets his voice rise. He knows how they really see him. If they didn’t think he was a short-fused maniac, they wouldn’t keep him around, always pushing at him until he explodes just so they can laugh at him afterwards. Why not? Why not here, out in the open where everyone can see. “Fucking disgusting. Don’t act like you didn’t know when-”
“Bakugou?” Kirishima tugs on his arm, hard, to force him to meet his eyes. There’s a million variations of don’t fucking touch me he could unload on him, but it’s then that he notices - Katsuki hadn’t noticed it before, but he’s not just lit up gold by the campfire; there’s a weird pink glow bathing the side of his face, reflected in his eyes, and on his shirt, his hand where it grips Katsuki’s.
It’s coming from Katsuki.
“No way,” he hears someone gasp from behind him, and then he realizes that’s all he can hear - the crackling of the fire, and a chorus of gasps and whispers. Katsuki looks up; there’s a few hundred eyes facing his way. Wherever he turns, the pink glow follows, and casts itself over the faces - people he’s known for years and campers he’s never talked to, counselors and teachers, all looking on in shock and confusion and absolute silence, eyes pinned on him.
With that, Katsuki’s suddenly in a self defense situation. Survival instinct. He forces himself to snap back into reality enough to notice that the clothes he’s wearing definitely aren’t his own, either. The second he registers that they’re there, they start to itch. It’s a sleek, silky black suit, neatly tailored and painstakingly stitched with little silver flowers on the sides and around the back, and gold flicks of fire light dance up its sides. It sits on him heavy and tight and itchy.
That would explain why everyone’s looking at him, but that still leaves the question why is this happening ringing in his head. Come on, think. How can he figure this out. He- his pulse is quickening now, and his throat rests heavy like the shield that’s appeared in his hand. Oiled and glossy, beaming a warped reflection of the scene up at him.
He doesn’t even want to see what’s happened to his face, but when he looks down at the inside, he notices something’s carved there. In ornate lettering, it’s the words, You’re welcome.
Fuck.
“Sero, you owe me five bucks,” Kaminari whispers. Katsuki hears it, over the rush in his ears, but the weight of the situation is crashing on him all at once. They know now. Not just Sero and Kaminari and all the idiots who have tried to be his friend. Everyone.
It starts as one laugh, clamped over almost instantly by a pair of hands, but that’s all he needs to hear to decide he needs to run.
Mom must be really fucking proud of herself for this one - messing with Katsuki’s head yesterday, messing with his head his whole life, only to make good on her threats in the cruelist way possible. Did she think he wanted this? Did she thinks that this would somehow help him with-
No. He’s not going to be her pawn. She doesn’t get to decide what’s best for him, she doesn’t even know him- so he turns around and storms past the bonfire benches, past the cabins, and straight into the woods behind camp.
Deep enough into the forest that his shiny new dress shoes are caked in mud, Katsuki is charging over twigs and holes and bumps in the path, still fuming; no destination in mind, just further and further, as far as he can go. To think that Mom thought in any universe he’d want her to make him into her fucking dress up doll in front of every person who’s ever had a say in how he’s seen - what did she think was going to happen?!
He keeps his thoughts focused on that, the one targeted source of the problem, because he knows that if they stray, he’ll just start thinking about what comes next. Forced out of his own bed and laughed out of the arena. The things they’ll say- what they must be saying already, back there at the-
“Hey, Bakugou! Wait up!”
He’s so wrapped up in his own personal tornado that he almost doesn’t hear it, but even though he does, he doesn’t heed it any mind.
“Get away from me,” Katsuki spits, picking up the pace. Kirishima’s not slow, and his footsteps crunch against leaves and sticks at at least a running pace.
“Dude, hey!” This time, it’s just feet behind him. His hand grazes Katsuki’s, but he rips it away. “Are you alright? Let’s get back to the-”
“Don’t you fucking get it?” Katsuki turns, just to see his face as he finally takes the hint. “I don’t want you here.”
With the trees blocking the moonlight, it’s hard to make out, but Katsuki sees Kirishima back up, and for a second, thinks he’s going to laugh at him. Right. He’s not some fucking cosmic dream boy, he’s exactly as pathetic and shallow and narrow-minded as the rest of them - but the next thing he says is, “I don’t get it.”
Katsuki stops in his tracks, his feet a solid crunch on the ground. “What.”
“Everyone’s always saying how cool you are when they give you a chance, and how they’re happy you’re around.” Kirishima says it in a low, stark tone, hard lines on his face. “But it’s like, I’ve been trying to be nice to you for two days, and you just keep blowing up at me. I thought there was more to you than this.”
This might be the longest Katsuki’s seen him go without smiling - like this is a big deal to him. Like he gets to have Katsuki be a big deal to him. He doesn’t even know him.
It’s still pitch-black, closed-door dark, but Kirishima must see the way that twists Katsuki’s face, because he cringes and tries again. “Wait, that came out worse than I meant. I know this is a big deal to-”
“Get away from me.”
“Bakugou, no-”
“Do you want me to kick your ass?!” Katsuki raises his voice, so loud it scrapes his throat. “Get out of here.”
The words echo off the trees, bouncing around them and only fading once they know they’ve been heard. For a second, Kirishima just stares at him, something like sadness and hurt and disbelief in his eyes - and for one fucking point to his credit, he nods, and quietly, starts making his way back towards camp.
It’s as he’s standing there, breathing heavy and watching his figure grow smaller and smaller against the darkness, that Katsuki decides he knows one thing for sure. These people don’t know him. He knows better than any of them- doesn’t have to listen to any of them. Whether it’s Kirishima or Uraraka, Kaminari and Sero and Ashido or anyone else at this camp, his dad or his stupid mom, his old friends, his classmates, the very first kids to ever raise a fist against him - they don’t know him. They don’t know anything about him. This doesn’t change that, so Katsuki keeps walking deeper and deeper into the night until he’s sure every single one of them has left.