A/N: Hi and welcome! If you've come back to re-read, welcome back and I love you immensely. If you're just joining us now, feel free to comment/review/etc. I try to reply a lot, even if it's a new comment on an old chapter! I would love to hear your predictions, theories, headcanons, and general opinions about my work! Also, constructive criticism is welcome! If you find any holes or inconsistencies, please let me know!

Trigger Warning: Inpatient at a mental health hospital, restraint, forced drugs, schizophrenia, hallucinations

It was common knowledge that you could use the voices in your head to find your soulmate, or rather, that your soulmate was the cause of the voice in your head. Even a dunce like Kaminari Denki could gather that much, but the details had to be explained multiple times before he felt like he actually understood.

He asked his parents why he didn't hear anything, and they explained that the soulmate voices will come later, and you can only hear them when they're singing. Denki thought that was weird but accepted it. He didn't make the rules, of course; he was hesitant to ask why in fear of that exasperated look coming across their faces again when he just wouldn't give it a rest. So, he forced himself to accept that answer as it was and not seek out more detail.

When he heard the voices for the first time, he was ecstatic, but also overwhelmed. No one had told him that he would have two overlapping voices at the same time, both singing different songs. As soon as they both appeared, though, they were both gone. It was disorienting, and the experience knocked him over as he was changing for gym class at school. It took him a while to get his balance back. Recovering from the effects of his lightning quirk, he was finally getting the hang of, but having two voices suddenly jolt through his mind only to stop just as abruptly left him out of it for longer than usual.

Denki was understandably upset when he was taken to the nurse's office and reprimanded for using his quirk when he was not allowed to, and how many times do I have to tell you? He had tried to argue that he didn't use his quirk, but no one bothered to listen. Denki slumped down into the chair, wrinkling his nose in distaste at both the antiseptic smell of the nurse's office and the unsurprising trend of ignoring what he has to say. The nurse had called his parents and told them about him becoming disoriented from using his quirk, yet again, and interrupting his studies. He couldn't stay focused on being mad at the nurse for long, though, because the excitement at hearing his soulmates' voices kept pushing its way to the forefront of his mind.

When he got home, he was excited to tell his parents the news.

"You'll never guess—" he started, only to be interrupted by his displeased father.

"The nurse called again today, Denki. What have we told you about using your quirk during school?" he reprimanded, sounding entirely perplexed at why his son could not understand and follow such a simple rule.

Denki opened his mouth to explain, but his mother started talking before he had a chance.

"We're only worried about you, honey. We don't want you to fall even further behind than you already are," his mother stated, concern lacing her voice, making Denki feel even worse than he thought possible.

All Denki wanted to do was tell them his good news, and they weren't listening to him because that nurse didn't listen to him and passed on false information. No matter, though! He easily decided that he would just have to correct everyone!

Denki excitedly started, "I only fell over because I heard my soulmates in my head! I didn't use my quirk! I swear! I heard my soulmates!"

In his excitement, Denki had jumped up and down in place, squeezing his hands together against his chest to try to contain his excited energy and wearing a huge smile on his face, waiting for his parents' reactions. His father had smiled at first, but his mother looked concerned right away with no hint of happiness for her son.

"What did you say, dear? Soulmates? You heard more than one voice?" she questioned gently, and Denki's father's face fell to match the concern on his wife's.

"Yeah!" Denki announced excitedly. "Two soulmates! Double lucky!"

Denki should have known something was off when his parents didn't reprimand him for yelling indoors. Maybe he did know something was off, in hindsight, but just wanted so badly for something to go right for him for once that he ignored it in hopeful bliss.

"Honey," his mother started, a sad worry blatant in her eyes, "no one has two soulmates."

She was wrong, of course. It was rare, but it happened. But how was little 12-year-old Denki supposed to know that? In Denki's mind, his parents knew everything, and they had never been wrong before, so he never thought to question his mother.

Denki was scared when he sat next to his parents in the emergency room. The nurse had led them through a corridor behind locked doors, but he never went through doors that locked behind him when he was there a year ago when he broke his arm.

Then, the nurse started asking him questions, like if he wanted to hurt himself. He was very confused and denied everything, but she kept asking if he was sure he never hurt himself or thought about hurting himself.

They asked him how long he's been hearing the voices, and he wanted to tell them that they were his soulmates, not just random voices, but his words died in his throat when he remembered that his mother said that it wasn't possible. If they weren't his soulmates, he guessed they were just voices after all. He had been so excited, too.

Dejectedly, he explained how it had just happened earlier that day in school. The nurse made him think back to try to remember if he had heard them before, but he said no. The nurse asked him and then his parents to confirm about if he had had any traumatic experiences and how he had been sleeping and eating.

The doctor talked about him with his parents like he wasn't even there, asking if he had been under an immense amount of stress recently. They were throwing around big words like "psychotic" and "schizophrenia" and "hallucinations" and "delusions" and Denki didn't know what they meant, exactly, but he could infer enough to figure out that it wasn't good.

"Schizophrenia doesn't usually present itself until the late teens or early twenties." Finally, the doctor addressed Denki directly, "did you get to hear your soulmate sing, yet?"

"I thought the voices were my soulmates," Denki muttered dejectedly, wiping the tears from his eyes before they could fall. He felt so stupid, crying when there really wasn't anything to cry about. The lights were too bright, and the room was too white, and the words were too big, and he felt too small, but there was no reason to cry. "They both started at the same time and then stopped quick. I couldn't even make out what they were saying. They were just loud, saying different things, and then they were gone."

The doctor had opted to not explain to the family that it is, in fact, possible to have two soulmates for a few reasons. First was that it was a controversial topic; even when fated by destiny, polyamory was frowned upon, and many parents would rather not have the stigma surrounding their child if at all possible. Second was that maybe the voices weren't his soulmates. It was rare for people to develop schizophrenia so early in life, but young Kaminari was young to be hearing his soulmate, too. That plus the rareness of having more than one soulmate led the doctor to believe it was more likely that Denki was hallucinating and not hearing multiple soulmates. Third was that the probability of his electric-type quirk causing enough trauma to his body to elicit schizophrenia wasn't zero. It would not have been the first time that a physically demanding quirk pushed people into schizophrenia earlier than was usual.

The doctor wanted to have Denki sing and see if he got a response back, but that was for his own, selfish curiosity alone. Hallucinations could just as easily sing back, masking as a soulmate or two.

The doctor recommended inpatient treatment to get Denki stabilized on the medications he would need to offset the hallucinations, a preventative measure to keep the hallucinations in check, he had explained.

Denki thought he was scared before, but it was a whole new level when an ambulance came to take him away and his parents weren't going to ride with him. He had to ride with strangers to a different place where he had never been before. When the ambulance stopped, the EMTs helped him climb out. It was frightening and disorienting being somewhere he had never been before with strangers that he had never met before. If his parents hadn't waved him goodbye, he would have sworn he was kidnapped; he still wasn't entirely sure that he hadn't been.

Just as he was about to run for his life, thinking that this must be some horrible plot to a terrible horror movie, his parents pulled into the parking lot. They had filled out paperwork, and Denki's relief of having his parents was short-lived as they left after Denki was safely behind a locked door that would only open with a key card.

Without a second thought, Denki impulsively slammed his hand against the locking mechanism and released a small stream of electricity, trying his best to not fry the system completely.

His small, secret practice sessions had entirely paid off in that moment, and he was able to open the door and dart out only to be immediately restrained by the workers on the unit. If Denki wasn't absolutely panicking, he would have wondered if one of the technicians had a future-telling quirk. Denki was screaming and crying and struggling as the team of fully grown adults struggled to pin him to the ground. They tried to calm him using soothing voices. They tried to explain what would happen once he calmed down, so he knew what to expect. He didn't hear any of it over his own wailing and the panicky, erratic heartbeat pulsing in his ears.

When he started zapping people, it wasn't on purpose. He was so stressed and scared that his quirk just started letting off excess energy. Luckily, he didn't hurt anyone. He felt like he was suffocating on his own snot and tears as he apologized through his sobs for using his quirk even as he continued to let off small shocks. To the staff's credit, they didn't let go and continued to attempt to reassure Denki even as he was letting off small shocks as he struggled to regain control over his emotions. When the charge nurse came to give him an injection to calm down, the order to give him a quirk-nullifying drug was already passed down from the doctor as well. Unknowingly to Denki, the nurse saved him some heartache by mixing the drugs so that he only had to get jabbed once.

The nurse was empathetic. She loved kids, and hearing Denki's howls and pleas tore her heart apart; this was not what she signed up for. She wanted to help kids, but drugging them against their will never felt right, no matter how out of control some of them got. He was already crying even harder because he couldn't control his quirk in his current mental state, so it really was necessary to give him the injectable sedative and quirk-nullifier. It scared Denki even more, though. With the blood pounding in his ears as he struggled only to get nowhere and a nurse coming at him with a needle in hand only for his captors to forcibly turn him over onto his side and pull his shirt up and his waistband down enough for them to get access to the injection site… it was terrifying. He couldn't hear the explanations over his panic and probably wouldn't have believed them anyway. In that moment, he truly thought that he was going to die. If he didn't die from whatever they injected him with, his panic was sure to suffocate him.

The injection didn't hurt as bad as Denki had feared and the drugs worked wonders. Denki had calmed down considerably, and he was able to hear the staff talking to him. The man holding down his left shoulder explained to him that once he was calm, they were able to let him go. Denki continued to apologize over and over again, tears still leaking from his eyes, for shocking them. All of them provided reassurance that none of them were hurt and that he was okay. If Denki picked up any frustration from any of them, he wouldn't have known it was because they had requested over and over again to give the first quirk-nullifying drug upon arrival because this type of thing happened all of the time. It was only a matter of time until someone got hurt, and it wouldn't be the fault of the scared patient they were holding down, but the higher ups who thought it was inhumane to drug someone upon entry to restrain their quirks, but thought it was just fine to submit them to a restraint in the lobby of the unit after they use their quirk to try to escape.

Two of the three workers who held Kaminari down ended up putting their notice in. The risk was too high and the reward not enough as they had to hold down a 12-year-old kid who was struggling, scared to death, and still apologizing to them through his tears about shocking them when they were the ones preventing his escape. Both technicians that quit loved the kids, but the lack of support from the institution itself was unforgivable and unsustainable.

If Denki had thought that the embarrassment was over, he was sorely mistaken. Next, two male workers had taken him back a hallway to a bathroom that had no door, just a curtain. They didn't let him close the curtain as they had him strip and hand over his clothes. He didn't know what they were looking for as they ran their hands over his clothes and double-checked the seams, but he didn't care to ask either. He was tired from the struggling and the sedative and he was ready for bed. He didn't protest when they took the laces out of his shoes or the string out of the hood of his jacket, though he would curse them all later when he struggled to get the string back in after he was released.

It was near 10 in the evening, an hour past his bedtime already. Time seemed to have dragged on since going to the emergency department after school only to end up here hours later. Denki hoped that in the morning he could go home and forget all of this ever happened. He was thankful, at least, that it was so late that he didn't have to try to fight against the drugs to stay awake.

The workers explained to him, once again now that he was calm, that he would be there for at least a few days. That shot down his hope at going home the next day, but he was thankful that they were being honest with him after they had just dealt with his over-the-top tantrum. In truth, he wondered why they didn't lie to him to prevent another one, but he wasn't complaining.

Denki was so exhausted that even as he was falling asleep, the voice that began to sing softly didn't jolt him back into awareness. After a second voice joined in, this time singing the same song instead of blurting out different lyrics, Denki was easily lured to sleep, even in an unfamiliar place, in an unfamiliar bed, with an unfamiliar roommate snoring in the bed next to his.