Work Text:
perfection.
my body is not
my own.
Bakugou Katsuki, even from a young age, had always felt… not quite right.
Not quite a part of the world, not quite at home in his place in it.
It took him a long time to figure out why, and when he finally did, he was able to see all the little things that made him feel so different.
He couldn't even remember when it had begun.
But even when he was very small, he looked exactly like his mother.
With the delicate features of a child and the long blonde hair that resembled Mitsuki’s, people always assumed he was a daughter instead of a son.
“She’s beautiful, Mitsuki!” they’d say to Katsuki’s mother, and he would, strangely, not care at all that they thought he was a girl.
It didn't matter to him at all.
But it mattered to his mother.
“How dare you! My son is not beautiful, he is handsome!” she’d hiss, and Katsuki would feel a sudden prick in his chest. Like someone had poked a pin into his heart.
A small hurt, easily ignored - weakness was not tolerated in the Bakugou family, after all.
But, to Mitsuki’s consternation, as Katsuki grew up, he began to look more and more like his mother.
People they were meeting for the first time would call Katsuki pretty, thinking he was a girl, before Mitsuki swiftly shut them down, more harshly every time.
When Katsuki was four, Mitsuki decided enough was enough.
She sat her son in front of the bathroom mirror and hacked his hair off with a pair of kitchen scissors as messily as she could, telling him how long hair was for girls, and that boys weren’t meant to look like girls. Ever.
(Her modellike desire for perfection was briefly swallowed by her need to shove Katsuki into the box she’d designed for him.)
That night, little Katsuki ran his hands through his short, spiky hair, and felt a sense of loss like he never had before.
The small prick in his heart spread into an ache.
That night, Katsuki cried himself to sleep, for reasons he wasn’t able to verbalise, or even make sense of.
After that, Katsuki threw himself into ‘boyish’ pursuits, desperate to make his mother happy (proud).
He’d always considered heroism as an option, had loved All Might passionately since the first time he saw him on TV, but when his quirk came in, his future was decided on the spot.
His fathers nitric acid and his mothers glycerin combined to give him the quirk of Explosion, something with so much potential that Heroism seemed suddenly like the only viable option.
So Katsuki discarded the quiet admiration he held for ballet, his secret love of gymnastics, and focused all of his considerable determination on honing and perfecting his quirk.
As Katsuki grew up, and developed the arm and shoulder muscles necessary to cope with the kickback of his explosions, less and less people mistook him for a girl.
People he bumped into on the streets would now say “Excuse me, sir,”, instead of the “Pardon me, miss,” that he used to get.
He knew his mother was pleased with that, and he knew he should be too - and sometimes he was. Sometimes it felt right, and normal, and he felt right and normal.
But sometimes, for some reason, it only spreads the ache further.
His mother got worse and worse as Katsuki grew up, and as a result, so did Katsuki.
There was so much pressure on him, all the time, for everything.
If he dared to get even a 99 on an exam, his mother would berate him for hours, yell at him how much of a disappointment he was.
Katsuki would stare at the floor, blinking back tears, because he was so tired, all the time.
He was training his quirk, working out and running in all his free time.
When he came home from school, he studied and he trained.
His mother expected perfection. But god forbid she praise him for it.
He used to bring home perfect scores on tests, aching for some kind of acknowledgment - a pat on the head, maybe, or even a hug - but he never got it.
She’d look at his scores and nod, like she’d expected that.
Like being the best was the bare minimum, and anything less made him a failure.
Katsuki would never admit that it hurt, but it did.
He never stopped looking for his mothers approval, for some kind of pride, recognition in his hard work. And every time he got nothing, the black hole inside him grew.
It was why he hated Deku so much.
Deku would show his mother good scores - all 90s, he was a smart kid - but not perfect, when she came to pick him up, and Katsuki would hear her praising him, telling him how wonderful he was.
They’d walk home together, holding hands, Inko promising to get him an ice-cream as a reward.
And Katsuki would stand there, alone - his parents had stopped picking him up from school once he was able to read the street signs - and despite his warm quirk, he’d feel so, so cold.
The jealousy, the ‘why can’t I have that, what does Deku have that I don’t’ would fester inside him, and when he felt the tears burn behind his eyes, he’d choke them down and turn them into anger.
Bakugou’s weren’t weak.
He didn't need his mother to coddle him.
He didn't need anyone!
So then when Deku came in the next day, all smiles and happiness, Katsuki would hiss nasty things at him, things his mother yelled at him when he didn’t meet her impossibly high expectations.
‘Useless’
‘Stupid’
‘Weak’
It felt good not to be the one choking back tears for once.
For this reason, Katsuki wasn’t able to talk about the ache in his heart with anybody.
He didn’t understand it.
Didn’t understand how sometimes he’d look in the mirror, and he’d be proud of his physique, he’d see the effects of his hard work and be happy with how he was progressing.
Even if he wasn’t good enough in virtually every other way, at least he knew that his constant exercise produced results.
But other days, he’d look in the mirror and hate what he saw looking back at him.
His arms were too large, his thighs too thick, his hands too rough.
It made him want to be sick.
In those times, only watching videos of graceful ballerinas and flexible gymnasts helped calm the roiling feeling of wrongness in his stomach.
Things improved slightly for Katsuki when he discovered the possibility of aerial potential for his quirk.
It gave him a viable excuse to join a gymnastics class - you couldn’t flip around in the air if you didn’t have flexibility.
He slimmed down, became toned instead of bulky, though his shoulders and back retained most of the muscle mass.
Gymnastics made him more graceful, which was an added bonus.
All of this alleviated the ache in his chest just a little bit.
On the bad days he no longer wanted to tear his skin off and escape his body, be someone, anyone else.
His body now, slim and streamlined, felt more right than it ever had before.
And though his mother only increased the pressure on him, and her punishments started to involve denying him food, and locking him in the hallway closets for days instead of hours, he felt a lot more settled.
People started mistaking him for a girl again, especially if he wore big hoodies that hid his more masculine arms.
He didn’t want to admit how nice it felt.
For a few years, things were manageable.
Not good - living with Mitsuki made that impossible - but he no longer felt as helplessly angry.
He was marginally kinder to Deku as a result - didn’t start anything unless the guy annoyed him (which was… often)
Hiding things from Deku became harder, because whenever Deku beat him in anything academic, Katsuki would come into school the next day with bruises and a nastier attitude.
Deku wasn’t stupid, but the thought of anyone finding out how weak his mother made him was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat.
Heroes weren’t weak.
Then the Sludge Villain happened.
One minute, Katsuki was walking down an alleyway, feeling like the biggest piece of shit ever for saying what he did to Deku - he knew how it felt to want to die, knew how it felt to have someone tell you to do it -
And the next he was fighting for his life.
The slime forced its way down his throat, into his nose, ears, every available orifice.
Katsuki fought, struggled, tried to scream every time he managed to gasp in a desperate breath.
‘Such a pretty host,’ gurgled the villain, and Katsuki felt his blood run cold.
Suddenly, his strange, shameful desire to sometimes be mistaken for a girl felt like the reason for this.
Irrationally, Katsuki thought for a split second that he was being punished for thinking like that.
That this was all his fault.
He set off bigger and bigger explosions, more desperate than ever to get away, get this villain out of him!
Because he still kept forcing his way down Katsuki’s throat every time his explosions expelled the slime, and it hurt like he was swallowing broken glass.
When, finally, at long last, the Sludge Villain was blasted out of him by All Might, he collapsed to the ground, coughing up blood and heaving in massive breaths of air.
He couldn’t even look at Deku, knowing that someone so weak, so far below him, had seen him like that.
He couldn’t look at All Might. His idol, his reason for becoming a hero, just saw him as another weak victim who needed rescuing.
He could hardly breathe through the humiliation.
He escaped as soon as he could.
When he got home, sore and tired and raw, his mother was there.
Katsuki had to stand there for hours as she screamed at him, telling him how pathetic he was, a disgrace to the Bakugou name, someone she was ashamed to have as a son.
She punctuated her words with slaps that got harsher and harsher as she worked herself into a rage.
When one of the slaps sent an exhausted Katsuki to the ground, she lost it completely.
Katsuki didn’t even have the strength to curl up away from her vicious kicks, even when he heard something crack.
It was the first time she hurt him badly enough that Katsuki would qualify it as a beating rather than a punishment, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Later, he found out Mitsuki had broken three of his ribs and fractured his wrist, rendering him unable to train while they healed.
She managed to make that his fault too.
When Katsuki got into UA, his father hugged him for the first time in as long as Katsuki could remember.
It felt like hugging a stranger.
His mother just told him what she always did whenever he achieved anything.
“Failure is not an option, Katsuki. Make me proud.”
It always made Katsuki want to cry or laugh whenever she said that.
If he hadn’t made her proud with this - getting into the most prestigious hero school in the country - how could he ever reach her expectations?
He had never made her proud in his life.
(That didn’t stop him from wanting it with every fibre of his being.)
UA was both different and exactly how Katsuki had pictured it.
Everyone was powerful, everyone was strong, and there were plenty of smart people in the class.
Katsuki knew straight away he was going to have to drive himself into the ground if he wanted to stay ahead of the pack.
After the first day, after losing against a boy he’d been better than all his life, he pretended Deku didn’t exist.
The bruises that made breathing a challenge reminded him of his weakness every time Deku so much as twitched.
It didn't matter.
It didn't.
He could still be the best, still be perfect.
(It didn’t matter that no one in the whole school ever mistook him for a girl anymore, not with the uniform and his infamy.
It didn’t matter that the ache in his chest spread once again.
It didn’t matter that his body started feeling foreign again.)
With USJ came Kirishima.
A boy with bright red hair and a hardening quirk started talking to Katsuki, and, frankly, he was at a loss.
He’d never done this before.
In middle school, he had followers, and those who stayed out of his way.
(And those who hated him, and fought him, and allowed him to practice his training in real life.)
But this Kirishima asked him about his day, asked him to help him study, and praised him as easily as breathing.
The first time Kirishima said that something he did was ‘awesome’, Katsuki nearly cried.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been complimented.
Great things, hell, perfection was what was expected of him. He wasn’t… complimented for it.
He wasn’t sure what Kirishima wanted out of this, but he agreed to tutor him in the subjects he was weak in (which was most of them).
Kirishima called him ‘manly’ a lot, and it made Katsuki more confused than anything.
On some days, he basked in Kirishima’s favoured compliment, took it greedily whenever it was given.
But on some days it twisted his stomach uncomfortably, and he wanted to scream, “I’m not manly!”
Katsuki wasn’t stupid. Putting the pieces together was taking a while, because he refused to accept it every step of the way, but he knew what picture everything was forming.
He was a freak.
He wasn’t perfect, even though he tried so hard to be.
Then came the Sports Festival, and the thought solidified.
People booed him when he fought Uraraka, were rooting against him when he fought Todoroki.
He didn’t understand.
He’d worked so hard for this, put everything he had into training for this.
Why couldn’t anyone ever see that?!
Todoroki refused to fight Katsuki with his full strength like he had Deku, and that was the last straw.
Arms screaming at him from the Howitzer, he ran to where Todoroki had fallen, shouting at him because he knew if he didn’t, he’d start sobbing.
He couldn’t win like this!
This wasn’t the perfect win he needed!
All he saw was purple, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
When he came to, he was chained to a podium, had his hands in heavy duty quirk restraints he knew were collecting his sweat in a dangerous way, and… he was muzzled.
It felt like the Sludge Villain all over again.
As the podium was raised into the audience, and hundreds of eyes and cameras looked at him struggling against his restraints, all Katsuki could think was how weak he was.
How disappointed, how angry his mother would be.
But most of all, he was terrified. His heart was hammering out a frantic rhythm, his hands kept popping in his distress and burning his arms in the close containment of the restraints.
He fought and struggled, gasping for breath, while everyone looked on and watched him.
It felt so eerily similar.
Once was an accident, twice was a coincidence, three was a pattern, right?
He was one incident away from being a pattern, and he knew it was all his fault.
He wasn’t perfect.
He was weak.
It was clear that All Might agreed - he didn’t say anything about Katsuki being chained up in front of everyone, just replaced the muzzle with a medal.
Katsuki wanted to die.
Things only got worse from there.
His mother’s punishment for embarrassing her on national television left him limping for weeks.
Everyone in school now saw him as some kind of villain in the making, and most people flinched away from him in the corridors.
He stayed stuck in third place for academics, no matter how much he studied, and he just didn’t know what to do.
Both the black hole and the ache got bigger with every day.
(Even his secret forays into makeup in the middle of the night didn’t stop him from feeling like he wanted to rip off his skin.)
Things came to a head at the training camp, and Katsuki’s life took a turn for the worse.
‘Well,’ thought Katsuki bleakly, as he sat chained to a chair, making eye contact with the leader of the League of Villains, ‘I guess it’s officially a pattern.’
With every word the blue haired man spoke, Katsuki felt the black hole in his chest grow.
Actual, real villains thought that he would want to join them?
He tried his best to tune out the guy's words, feeling tears burn behind his eyelids.
Then one of the villains - the large woman (Magne?) - smacked him across the face.
“Listen to Shigaraki, brat!”
The emptiness in his chest turned to vicious anger in a flash, and his mouth was moving before he could stop himself.
“My mom hits harder than you, hag! Try again!”
The woman's eyes widened slightly in shock, before she schooled her expression and did as he asked, nearly knocking over the chair with the force of the blow.
Katsuki spat blood on the floor and grinned at her.
“Not yet, bitch!”
Before the woman could reply, a girl danced into view, twirling a knife in her small fingers.
“I bet I can do worse! Please, Shiggy, let me have a go! He’s so pretty and cute, I want to see him bleed!”
Katsuki felt sick.
Why was it always villains calling him pretty?
He hated it, because he didn’t.
A secret, pleased preen at the compliment furled in his chest and he bit his lip at the shame of it.
Then the girl - Toga? - skipped closer, the gleam of madness in her eyes, and traced his cheekbone with the point of the knife.
The other villains left the room, and the guy with the scarred face looked at Katsuki with what was almost… pity, before shutting the door behind him.
Toga advanced on him, and giggled.
“This is going to be so much fun!”
Outside the door, Dabi tried his best to ignore the increasingly desperate screams, and pretended the ache in his chest wasn’t because of how much of himself he saw in the blonde kid.
‘My mom hits harder than you!’
Dabi curled his hands into fists, and walked away from the door, determined not to care about a random potential recruit.
The pained screams still echoed in his ears even once he couldn’t actually hear them anymore.
When Katsuki saw Kirishima holding out a hand for him, he felt hope for the first time in a long time.
There was one person who didn’t think he was a villain.
One person who thought he was worth saving.
So he blasted off, and grabbed hold.
Kirishima’s hand was warm, and sweaty, but Katsuki didn’t mind.
For a second, he even forgot about the ache in his chest and the black hole in his stomach.
He didn’t tell anyone what Toga did to him, didn’t think he was able to, and so when his mother delivered her own punishment for his weakness, he actually begged her to stop, for the first time since he was a little kid.
It didn’t work, of course, just made her angrier.
And since school was over, she didn’t need to worry about keeping the bruises out of sight.
His injuries still hadn’t healed when Aizawa and All Might came to visit, so his mother shoved concealer at him and made sure he knew exactly what the consequences of letting on that he was in pain were.
And when she hit him, and called him weak, and his teachers sat there and said nothing, the black hole gained more ground.
Even the teachers knew it was his fault.
Knew that All Might was retired, looked like that, because of him.
Knew that the destruction of Kamino was because of him.
Knew that everything was because of him and his weakness and his failure.
When they’d driven away, Katsuki locked himself in the bathroom, broke apart his razor, and dragged it over his skin.
He cried, properly cried, for the first time in a long time.
And when his leg was bloody and his head felt stuffed with cotton, he packed away the razor blade, bandaged his leg, and went to bed.
He lay there staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering if the sharp sting in his leg was enough of a punishment for his weakness.
Vowing to do better. Be perfect.
It was in the dorms that his mask finally cracked beyond repair.
They’d been there a few weeks, and everyone was walking on eggshells around Katsuki.
No one mentioned the kidnapping, no one mentioned the League of Villains and no one mentioned Kamino.
It made Katsuki want to scream.
He’d had nightmares almost every night since Kamino, and moving into the dorms did not change that.
He had Shoji, Jirou and Kirishima shooting him worried looks when they thought he couldn’t see them.
In an effort to avoid the nightmares, he started not sleeping, studying and training to avoid it.
The shadows under his eyes were practically black, and now it wasn’t just those three students staring at him with open morbid curiosity, but everyone.
He was top of the class, finally, but being perfect at long last didn't give him the happiness he’d wanted it to.
He texted his mother, knowing that it was futile but hoping it wasn’t.
He told her that he was top of the class, both academically and heroically.
She didn’t even bother replying.
Read at 23:47
Katsuki cried.
(When would he be good enough?)
The beginning of the end happened on a Thursday.
Katsuki hadn’t slept more than four hours over three days, and he was worn out.
His body disgusted him, his weakness made him desperate and his loneliness ate at his determination.
His thighs were aching from his latest punishment, and he dug his nails into them whenever he felt his eyes drooping.
And then Mineta opened his stupid mouth.
Aizawa hadn’t come in yet, but the whole class was there already.
Mineta got up, swaggered over to stand in front of Katsuki's desk, adn said, “Oi, Kacchan!”
Katsuki lifted his head and pinned Mineta down with a gaze that was no less dangerous for its exhaustion.
Mineta squeaked, but didn’t leave him alone.
“So, Kacchan, I think everyone is curious,” - and at this point Aizawa shuffled into the room - “what happened when the League of Villains kidnapped you?”
Katsuki just stared at him, memories shoving up to the forefront of his mind.
“I want to make him bleed,”
“This is going to be so much fun,”
“You scream so pretty, Kitty,”
“Shhh, I’ve barely started!”
‘My mom hits harder than you’
‘Weak’
‘Weak’
‘Weak’
“Bakugou-”
Before Aizawa could finish the question, Katsuki burst into hysterical tears.
The class watched in speechless horror as he hyperventilated, sobbing so hard that his whole body shook with it.
When he started setting off explosions against his own skin, Aizawa shook himself out of his numb shock and cancelled his quirk, picking Katsuki up and striding out of the classroom at a pace none had ever seen him use before.
Katsuki came back to class the following Monday, and no one brought up the League of Villains again.
He told Kirishima about it, quietly, one night, after Kirishima snuck into his room to rouse him from a nightmare.
He showed Kirishima the scars Toga had left on him, but clammed up quickly when Kirishima asked where he got the others.
He allowed Kirishima to tell the ‘Squad’, but asked him to keep it to himself otherwise.
He called himself weak and pathetic so many times that Kirishima started crying too, and called him ‘manly’ in an attempt to make things better.
But Katsuki only cried harder, and after a lot of gentle coaxing, told Kirishima about his deepest shame.
How sometimes he didn’t feel manly, in fact, he felt the opposite.
How sometimes he liked being mistaken for a girl.
How he hated himself.
Kirishima put his arms around him, and told him there was nothing to be ashamed of.
They didn’t speak on that topic for a long time after that.
Katsuki went to therapy twice a week, and slowly the nightmares started receding.
He told her about his secret after a year.
She helped him understand.
‘Gender nonconformity’, she called it, and encouraged Katsuki to experiment with feminine things.
When he wore a dress for the first time, he had a panic attack and tore it off himself within two minutes.
But eventually, he managed to wear one in front of Kirishima, who told him he was beautiful.
He told her about his mother a year after that, and though he was already 17 and nearly an adult, she still pushed through the custody arrangements, and had him legally emancipated and in the custody of the school for the remaining year of his childhood.
His mother raged, turned up at the school, threatened and called him, but the evidence was stacked against her, and she gave up eventually.
Katsuki knew that undoing everything his mother had done to him wouldn't be as easy as this, and that he’d probably always be a perfectionist and work himself too hard and criticise himself with his mothers voice - but it was a start.
When Kirishima confessed to Katsuki in their last year at UA, Katsuki felt like a puzzle piece had finally slid into its proper position.
Kirishima called Katsuki his partner instead of his boyfriend, and Katsuki had never felt so light.
Kirishima treated him with kindness, asked before he touched and praised Katsuki honestly whenever he could.
In turn, Katsuki tried his best to help Kirishima improve by sparring with him, tutoring him, and helping him up whenever he fell.
When they slept together for the first time, Kirishima - Eijirou - called Katsuki a good boy and a pretty girl in the same breath, and Katsuki felt safe in his arms.
They graduated, and opened a joint hero agency.
They worked their way up the ranks, and Katsuki was not hated, or called a villainous hero, like he’d feared he would be.
He was called a ‘bad boy’, a ‘daredevil’, and it felt good to finally, finally be recognised for his hard work.
And then, one day, the top 100 heroes were invited to a ball.
All members of the graduated Class 1-A would be there.
Katsuki walked in wearing a floor length red dress, matching the shade of Eijirou’s tie.
The photographer's mouths fell open as one, before they swarmed the pair with questions and flashing cameras.
Katsuki looked at Eijirou, and Ejirou looked back at him, love and pride shining in his eyes.
He realised then - striving to be perfect had taken his childhood away from him, turned him bitter, and lonely, and desperately sad.
But being here, now, with his boyfriend, and hopefully future husband, wearing a dress in public and feeling none of the shame he would have five years ago?
This moment was perfection.
(And it made all the pain leading up to it worth it.)
fin.