Indiscriminate
A Boku no Hero Academia oneshot.
Summary: Kaminari Denki hated using his quirk, but it wasn't always like that. It wasn't until an event in his past changed his entire world. At least when he went "stupid", he didn't think about what using his quirk implied—until that stopped being true, and the events continued to haunt him at every use.
Warning: Rated T for language and angst.
Kaminari Denki was almost five. He barely hit his father's hips, and it took the leap of an Olympic champion to get him into the front seat of the car. His older brother by six years, Raiden, shut the door with a grumble behind him. Denki could barely see over the dashboard, but he was an adult now. He raised to his knees and bounced up and down, waiting for his dad to find the keys to the car.
Why did he have to find them?
His feelings compacted, condensed—a chemical reaction before the combustion. Indiscriminate shock: 1,000,000 volts.
Kaminari Denki was fifteen now, and the electricity crackled from his pores, and it surged down from his head to his feet. He felt like a thousand bees were inside of him, and suddenly, they were all free to escape—and then he let go of the rope of control and got lost in the abyss.
The electricity slammed into his skull, and in an instant, the dirt of the training grounds turned into a tile floor. He crashed into the cold surface, and everything went black.
"Denki!"
He opened his eyes again, not to the sharp scowl of Jiro, but to a woman with soft brown hair and honeycomb eyes and thin eyebrows pinched in worry. Kaminari felt like all the color had drained from his face. There's no way… she can't be… he thought quickly. It couldn't be a quirk, he just fought Jiro!
The woman sat the mop in her hands to the side.
"Denki, sweetheart, are you okay?"
Kaminari opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a loud wail that surprised even himself. She quickly stooped to her knees and scooped him up in her arms.
"Shhh…" She smoothed back his hair. "It's okay Denki, you're okay…"
Only, he wasn't. He knew he wasn't three-feet tall, he was fifteen. He knew he lived in an apartment in the crowded city, not the old house in the suburbs.
And he knew his mom was dead and had been dead, for a long, long time.
But the memory went as fast as it came, and he soon woke up to the plastered ceiling of the infirmary—the feeling of his mom's warm embraced still trapped around him.
Not again, he thought and pressed his palms to his eyelids hard. Not again.
"Oi Kaminari!" Kirishima caught up with him after school, Bakugo trudging behind him. "You doing okay? I heard Jiro beat you up."
"Seriously!" Kaminari threw his hands in the air. "More like I beat myself!"
"If you knew how to control your quirk, you wouldn't suck ass," Bakugo mumbled, and Kirishima put a hand on his shoulder, only for him to jerk away and mumble "shitty hair" under his breath.
Kirishima smiled, "I'm sure it wasn't too bad, Kaminari. I'm just glad you're okay bro!"
"Of course! Nothing can bring me down!"
Kirishima wrapped an arm around his shoulder and squeezed. "Glad to hear it! We'll see you at the arcade later all right!"
They exchanged waves. Kirishima dragged Bakugo after him, who griped all the way down the sidewalk. When they were out of sight, Kaminari let his hand drop.
Kirishima's touch couldn't wipe away his mother's.
Kaminari made it home—somehow, in the haze that settled over his mind—and tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter.
"I'm home," he called to the empty apartment and fell onto the couch.
He tried not to think of the morning training session, about the gentle voice saying, "Denki, sweetheart", but it all crashed into him like a wave from the ocean. Just when he thought he learned to swim, a bigger and more dangerous wave came and threatened to drown him again.
His stress trickled into electricity, and the static made his hair stand on end. His fingers twitched.
Denki tried to count to ten. He tried to sing an annoying song to himself or think of the plot of some rom com he and Mina watched or run through the countless conversations he had with Sero—but all of it cumulated to that voice, whispering, "Denki", and if the walls of his apartment weren't paper thin, he would have screamed.
Instead, he released electricity.
Using his quirk was always like grappling with a rope ladder. The calmer he was, the higher he was on the ladder. The more stressed he was, the further he slid, and if he slid too far down, he threatened to fall off and lose all control. That's where he was, clinging to the last rung, the course fibers digging into his fingers. Sometimes, he could manage to hang on and keep from going stupid.
But this time, his fingers let go.
He hit the same grey tiles with a thump.
"Denki, did you trip again?" It was a man this time, and Kaminari swallowed thickly. Dad.
"No!" He called back in a small voice and stood up.
He was barely tall enough to reach the counter, and when he looked down, he confirmed he was a child again in a lightning bolt shirt and character-covered socks.
Hey, it's my favorite shirt…
"Why don't you come to the living room and watch a movie with me and Raiden?" his dad asked.
"Okay!"
Denki looked around. His mom wasn't in the kitchen this time, so he slowly walked to the dark living room. Raiden was splayed out on the loveseat, flicking the lamp on and off with the snap of his fingers. Kaminari shared his hair—except Raiden kept his up in a ponytail, and it was the only resemblance other than their eye color that marked them as brothers. His dad sat on the couch perpendicular to the love seat with a container full of popcorn. His hair was a dark shade of Denki and Raiden's.
Kaminari never realized that before.
He crawled onto the couch with his dad.
"Hey little bee," his father said, "Your knees are scraped. Sure you didn't run in the kitchen?"
Kaminari wanted to ask "Dad, what's going on?" but his mouth spoke something else entirely. "Maybe a little, but I'm okay!"
His dad laughed. "I'm sure you are."
Raiden finally got bored of flicking the lamp on and off, and he flopped back on the cushions, completely forgetting the movie. He asked, "When are we supposed to pick mom up?"
"She'll be off in thirty minutes."
No, Denki wanted to scream. Anxiety and fear suddenly compacted and condensed inside of him. He knew what was going to happen, the events that would follow them leaving the house. He wanted to scream even more, to grab his father by his collared shirt and beg him not to move from his seat. But the child body smiled for him, even though his eyes burned from the tears. "Yay!"
Then, there was a chemical reaction—Kaminari jolted and fell off the couch, onto the carpet of his apartment. Tears streamed down his face.
He didn't care if his neighbors heard the sobs.
It was night now, and Kaminari stared at his bed sheets like they were prison bars. His phone buzzed again for the eighteenth time, but he ignored it. It was ten, and even though he was prone to staying up much later, he knew he needed the rest after so much discharge. But he was afraid.
He was afraid to dream.
He took a shower, first. Brushed his teeth for ten minutes to delay the inevitable, but too soon he was crawling into the sheets with every intention to sleep but no intention to carry through with it.
He kept hearing noises, familiar noises. A pan sliding on the stove. The sound of laser guns through the wall. His dad's laughter.
His dad's laughter haunted him.
Kaminari felt his heart contract and tightened. He pressed his palm to his chest and curled into a tight ball, but nothing was enough to stop his tears from falling again.
Dammit, he thought, man up, Denki.
But he couldn't.
After the first tear came many. The dam burst, and there was little he could do to catch the fishes once they escape and dampened his pillow. He felt his breath shuddering in his chest, throbbing into a silenced sob that made his body ache all over. There was pressure in his lungs, behind his eyes—like dozens of hands were pressing down on him, voice laughing and whispering "Denki", and a hundred voices still asking when they would pick up his mom from work.
Even with the same name, the child in the lightning bolt t-shirt and matching hair was not the same as the child sobbing in his bed sheets right now. They were incompatible, but linked, like Kaminari's quirk when he balanced between sanity and stupidity with a single attack. He had been naïve.
Now he was sobered to reality.
The reality of that afternoon that haunted him at every use of his quirk.
It took some time, but his dad eventually found the keys. He walked out into the garage with a sheepish grin and waved them.
"Let's go see mom!" Kaminari cheered, and his father unplugged the electric car from its socket before he slid in to the front seat.
"Not so loud, Denki," Raiden grumbled.
"Do you really think you're old enough for the front seat?" his father asked him, and Denki nodded fervently. "Yes! I have to see mom first!"
His father smiled but reached across him and slid his seat belt into place. "Safety first then."
From what Denki knew, his mother worked with some important people in the city. They only had one car, so often his stay-at-home dad would drop her off and pick her up whenever her shift ended. Denki and Raiden always went with him when school was out, and Denki especially liked to watch the street lights pop on as they passed.
"It's like you're using your quirk, Raiden!" he said. "Do you think I'll be able to do that too?"
"It takes skill. You'll probably break the lightbulb."
"Good thing we have extras!"
His dad laughed and pulled into the familiar parking lot. "Yes, good thing we have extras," he said.
Denki unbuckled when they came to a full stop and reared up on his knees again, pressing his face to the window. His mother waited for them on a bench, adjusting her high heels, and she waved when she saw them. Denki waved back and smiled wide, his cheeks making a pale circle on the window.
"I see mom!" he said and dropped back on his butt.
The moment his mom got in the car, he told her all about his day. About the stray cat he spotted in the backyard and tried to lure out with a leaf (Cats don't eat leaves, Raiden interjected), how he helped dad make macaroni for lunch and did the stirring all by himself (and cleaned up too, his dad added), and about the robot movie they watched and slippery kitchen floor. His mother listened through it all with a soft smile on her face.
Denki would have kept going, too, if he didn't feel a shock through the leather of his seat.
"Ow!"
His father glanced over. "Denki? What's wrong?"
"Raiden shocked me!"
Raiden scowled, "Did not!"
"Did too!"
"Did not!"
His father looked at Raiden in the rear-view mirror. "Raiden, we talked about this. You can't use your quirk on other people."
"Maybe it was static electricity," his mother gently suggested.
"No! Raiden shocked me!"
"I said I didn't, stupid!"
Denki shot up in his seat, and his father swerved a little in surprise. "Take it back! I'm not stupid!"
His mother reached for him. "Denki, sweetheart, please sit down! It's dangerous, you should be buckled up."
Denki ignored the urgency in her voice. Instead, he grabbed his father's empty coffee cup from the cup holder and threw it at Raiden. His brother raised his hand, and electricity cackled between his fingertips. Denki's blood went cold when he stared at the angry expression on his brother's face, and he felt a pressure in his head. His parents were saying something, but the words stopped processing. His finger tips trembled, and his hair fluttered from static.
His mother unbuckled and lunged to grab him, but Denki reacted like a chemical reaction—combusted on contact and spilt all the pressure, all the electricity, into the air around him.
The first time his quirk manifested.
Indiscriminate shock: 1,000,000 volts.
He didn't even have a chance to grab onto the rope ladder before he fell. For a moment, it felt like he was flying—paused in mid-air, his brother's golden eyes wide, his mother screaming his name, his father releasing the wheel. Then something hard smashed against his head, and it went dark.
Denki cried for light when he woke up, but then there was too much of it, and he squinted against the flashing reds and blues. His head felt like it was spinning and stable all at once; that he could see sharp lines at one moment, and then blurry spots the next. Someone shined a light in his eyes, and he winced.
"We got a live one here," someone said.
All Denki could croak was, "Mom."
Only, there was no mom. There was no dad. There was no car.
Denki had caused the car to crash when his quirks manifested—electric breaks killed in the oncoming traffic. Unharnessed, he had been ejected from the car, only a concussion and scratches to mark his transition from the naïve child to the sober one. When they loaded him in the ambulance, he saw a twisted shape in the middle of the road, with a white sheet draped over it. All he saw was one high heel sticking out from the sheet.
And he screamed.
Kaminari woke up screaming to the sound of his front door swinging open. He didn't get much of a breath in before his door was knocked down, and Kirishima, Sero, Mina and Bakugo found him with dried tears on his face and more developing.
"Denki?" Kirishima asked anxiously, "You weren't answering our text, what's going on?"
But Denki couldn't think of words, only the twisted figure under the sheets and the whispers and the pressure before the release—and he grabbed his bed sheets tightly and sobbed. Sero and Kirishima were at his side in seconds, Mina only a fraction behind, and Bakugo awkwardly stood at the door like he didn't know what to do with himself.
Arms were around him in an instant, but the moment he felt a pressure at the back of his head, his cries turned into unintelligible screams.
"Denki, it's all right!" Sero said.
"It's just us!" Mina added and cupped his face, but he knew the electricity was building. He was already holding the last rung of the ladder. He knew there was no way he could hold on.
"Leave!" he screeched, "I'll hurt you!"
His electricity fizzled like static through his hair, and all he could think of was the car, the car, the car.
That's why it was called indiscriminate shock. His quirk killed whoever it could.
But his friends didn't let go.
"I'll shock you," he sobbed. "Please… please leave."
Kirishima tightened his grip on his friend. "We're here for you. I'm not leaving."
"Neither am I," Sero said, running his fingers through his friend's hair. Kaminari hiccupped and looked up to Bakugo.
"What?" Bakugo grunted, "I'm not fucking leaving you like this, either."
Denki was terrified of himself, and yet, his friends didn't move. He tried to suck in the breaths he was losing in his fight with his tears, and slowly, ever so slowly, the pressure in his head began to recede, and the haunting whispers began to stop.
"It's okay, Denki," Kirishima said, giving his shoulder a soft squeeze. "You don't have to talk about what's going on... just know we're here for you, okay?"
Denki knew he couldn't say the words. I hate my quirk, I don't want it anymore. But he was stuck with it, for life, a mark of what he did that day when he accidently killed his family.
He had to control it. And he knew the only way he would be able to learn to control it was at UA, under the guidance of Aizawa-sensei and the others. Kaminari had to learn, no matter what.
He didn't want to kill indiscriminately again.
Kaminari cried in the arms of his friends. Though he never told them why he was upset, it didn't take much evidence for them to assume what buzzed inside his head. So they held onto him tighter still and let him cry out the emotions he forgot to feel when quirk killed his family.
That's what his quirk always was to him his first year at UA— an uncontrollable, killing quirk.
Then in his second year, Hatsume Mei introduced him to the accuracy of Pointers.
This is my headcannon for Kaminari's past.
It's been awhile since I wrote a fanfic. A professor crushed my soul in short story, and I'm only just recovering from the blow. I'm hoping this fanfic will help me regain some of the reasons why I love writing again and give me a chance to unload all the harbored emotions I retained during this semester. Today, I'm finally free of her.
Soul Spirit