Author's Note: Hi there and thanks for reading! I appreciate your time and feedback very much. Dropping a minor trigger warning in this chapter regarding what I can only describe as "rape allegory". Y'all ready for the sludge villain?
Katsuki chokes.
He chokes more than once, in fact, during this week alone. This time, it's on his dinner. A piece of fried breading clings to the back of his dry throat so resolutely that his face turns red and he has to slam a fist into his chest to force it down. It's a mundane thing, but so obvious that both his parents stop eating to stare at him as he alternates between coughing, breathing, and retching.
The resulting silence - a loaded thing in the Bakugo household - hangs in the air like a rising stench until Katsuki blows it away with a relieved gasp. He throws back a sip of water and the family dinner table returns to life.
"Guess it must be karma," jokes his mother. Her chopsticks gently click against one another as she adjusts her grip.
Katsuki glares at her; a flash of red eyes and a flash of white teeth. Who cares. Not him. Besides, there's no such thing.
Mitsuki raises an unbothered eyebrow. "Just seems like someone's really got it out for you. Piss anybody off lately?"
In his mind, Katsuki scans over countless other children with names he can't be bothered to remember, all in black uniforms. Extras, extras, extras, extras. All of them, extras. The possibilities are ambiguous and swirling into a blur - except for the sudden interrupting clarity of a head curly hair and small, fluttering hands covering a mouth as if to hide a knowing smile.
Katsuki snatches his bowl into his hands and stands.
"Gonna eat in my room," he says, escaping the narrow space between the table and his chair.
"What, your father and I aren't good enough company for you?" challenges Mitsuki with a snort.
"Don't wanna deal with your shit while I'm tryna eat," Katsuki fires back.
"Oh, so now I get the attitude?!" she snaps, immediately escalating the discussion to a permanent higher volume. However, the crack in her voice peels away the cloak of obfuscating anger for just an instant before it buttons closed again. "Just gonna run away with your tail between your legs?!"
"Shaddup, you damn hag!" he hollers, already moving.
Mitsuki slams her palms on the table with a spectacular bang as she rises to her feet. The water glasses tremble in its wake. Katsuki's father, Masaru, also flinches.
"Don't you dare speak to me like that!" roars Mitsuki. "Get back here and sit your ass down, Katsuki!"
"Um," says her husband, reaching a delicate hand over the table for his distraught wife, "why don't we let him be by himself for tonight? Just this once? Maybe he just needs—"
His father's soft voice fades into the walls as Katsuki trudges up the stairs and rounds the corner to his room. But his mother's loud counter follows him through the sheetrock like a vengeful spirit.
"So he doesn't have to tell us if he's got a problem?!" Mitsuki snaps. "We get to just sit here and pretend everything's fine, huh? Our only son gets plastered across the news as the nightly victim, and we're supposed to let him pretend-!"
Katsuki closes his door. In fact, he slams it. It doesn't block his mother out completely, but the resounding bang does a good enough job of creating a new kind of noise in his head that keeps her very far away.
He imagines that it's an explosion. And when her voice bleeds through again, he imagines more of them, and louder. His palms shake with the phantom sensation of combustion and itch with the denial of it. And he can feel himself sweating. It's like having a fever, except the sweat does nothing more than feed the risk of flame instead of cooling him down. He's sweating in rivers down his arms and on his palms, and it's so bad that the sugar-sweet smell of it concentrated in his closed-off room makes him lightheaded despite his mounting headache and grinding teeth.
Katsuki throws open a window in a burst of desperate willpower. The cooling air of the late spring evening blows over his face like a blast of water, and he gasps into the dulling color of the evening sky. Numbly, he absorbs the rows of houses and black asphalt trails forming his neighborhood, and then the mountainous shadows of the apartment complexes standing at its border.
They're full of other people, he realizes, almost stupidly; amazedly; fearfully. They're full of people he may or may not have ever seen, but who know all about him. Know all about his humiliation; all about his weakness. The city is full of the people he's meant to impress and baffle as protector, as hero, as perfectly untouchable, and their first impression of him is as a helpless, useless middle school child with a monster halfway to wearing him like a suit and an entire block in ruins in his failure to fend it off.
Katsuki is leaning on the windowsill before he can parse that his legs are shaking. The sky is falling, probably. Or he is falling.
He tears his eyes away from the skyline and looks to the ground. He looks to the starting glow of the streetlights like there's someone hiding in it, watching him - someone he wants to find, but dreads to find. He can't help looking to the streetlights. He doesn't know why.
Except he does know why.
Except he doesn't. And nobody is there. Not with curly hair, not with freckles, not with a stupid expression or dirty red sneakers. Nobody's there. It doesn't make sense. But it makes perfect sense.
Because Izuku hates him. It happened this way, in this order, with this outcome, because Izuku hates him. He must hate Katsuki. Because that's what makes the most sense.
His legs give out. Katsuki hits the floor with a thud.
Don't think, he threatens himself, white-knuckled and fuming. Don't think about useless shit that doesn't matter. Next time, you'll be on the other side of the equation. You'll never be so pathetic ever again. I will make sure that it never happens again!
He kneels on his floor alone with his dinner and glares at it like it did something to deserve it. It's just a bowl of katsudon.
He snatches a piece of pork from the top and shoves it into his mouth. It chokes him the same as in the kitchen; drags a suffocating trail across his tonsils and down his throat like sandpaper across his skin; like spying eyes seeing the truth about him that they shouldn't; like hands where he doesn't want them; like a greedy line of invading sludge pressing its way into his mouth. He gags.
And he gags again. And then he makes himself swallow.
"Fuckin' piece of shit," he mutters between hurried gasps of air. "Fuck."
In another moment, his breathing is even. The clock on his bedside table broadcasts the changing time with an irritating glow. Katsuki is gripped with the urge to destroy it - destroy something - but he swallows it down just as thickly as his food before cursing himself for leaving his water behind.
He risks looking down at the bowl. It's full but for two bites taken from the end. His chopsticks tap an irritated porcelain rhythm against the side of the bowl.
Across the park, on the other side of the neighborhood, Izuku is surely eating the same stupid dish with his stupid smile and his stupid gestures. He is probably picking up each piece of pork and stuffing it in his mouth with gleeful abandon, his face a mess spattered with rice and freckles, completely satisfied, secure in the knowledge that the katsudon in his bowl is delicious, is helpless, is completely at his mercy, and that Katsuki is also-
No. He is eating his fried pork and rice. And that's all it is. It is a common meal symbolic of a victorious triumph. It is comfort food.
It is Izuku's favorite food.
Suddenly, Katsuki cannot stomach it. He can barely look at it. These things are related, but he cannot pinpoint why. He cannot allow himself to think why. He cannot think. He cannot.
Katsu. Victory. Katsudon. Katsuki. Kacch-
The bowl meets the wall with a silent shriek and a clatter of porcelain. The katsudon smears down the paint in a line of pale sauce and golden crust. Rice crumbles on the ground beneath it, half in and half out of the bowl like broken snow piling in a field. It smells delicious and fresh, but Katsuki is too full of disgust to appreciate it. He stares at it until the quivering, numb feeling in his chest dissolves to sand under the familiar, torrid wave of rancid anger. His gritted teeth click and gnash as he curses himself, curses the situation, curses Izuku. It's so easy. The anger is so easy.
And it's wasteful. He snarls at the ruined meal. God, it's such a waste.
Quickly, before either of his parents might come to see, Katsuki hurries to fetch a rag, a bag, and cleaner. He shuffles the wasted food into the bag, wipes down the walls, and checks the rim of the bowl for chips or cracks. He finds nothing, but that isn't good enough. It's never good enough. Nothing is ever good enough until it is nothing; becomes nothing.
He wipes down the area until there is nothing to find and hides the bag in the trash. The chopsticks he places on the bowl as if he's finished. But he hasn't. It makes him sick all over again.
It's a goddamned piece of fried meat his mother was kind enough to make for him and he couldn't even manage that much, but he's going to pretend like he did. He's a liar. He's a coward. He's a fraud. He's weak, and a waste of space, and he's useless!
And he is crawling into bed at eight o'clock, numb and overfull despite his empty stomach. The dull, omnipresent roar in his ears washes over him, over his thoughts, as he closes his eyes and shuts out the world.
He dreams that he is drowning, drowning, drowning; suffocating beneath the hungry desires of a slime creature determined to possess him from the inside out; determined to pry open his mouth, tear through his clothing, slide inside him like he is nothing but a glove. It is not gentle, not subtle, when it pushes him down and covers his hands, smothers the explosions, molds itself to his body. The creature takes and takes and takes, even as Katsuki screams and chokes never, never, fuck you, I hate you, I hate you, die, die, DIE!
The creature laughs when he reaches out to claw with his hands, rip away with his teeth, kick and thrash with his entire body. He struggles and struggles, spewing acid and every acrid word he knows, and when next he opens his eyes, his captor is no longer pressed against his body in a suffocating embrace. Instead, his captor looks down at him with green eyes so large and so focused Katsuki might fall into them, might drown in them, might find himself falling forever into the wide mouth just below them, grin growing, teeth sharpening, lips saying, "Kacchan…"
The morning's light finds no evidence, ever. Katsuki gives no evidence, leaves none of it behind in his waking mind, not even for himself. In the morning, there is white noise. In the morning, there is routine, or a longer, more dreamless sleep if he lets it come. The hours before he faces his classmates are his and his alone, secured in the unsettling, disorienting frustration of his willfully oblivious solitude. When his bubble pops and class begins, or some unbidden thought floats up to his waking mind from beneath the mire of his subconscious, a quick display of anger is enough to burn it up like a gas; enough to hide the telltale smell of sulphur leaking from his heart and slowly spilling over into his every action, his every move, his every day.
Oh, God, if only he wasn't a human explosive.