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Even when Bakugou returned from the war, it never really ended. The flashes of explosions, the blood spilled, it will never leave him. It’s as permanent as the new scars stretched over his skin. As permanent as the never ending ache in his arm. And for once, he is tired. He’s never felt this empty before.
Bakugou looks at his classmates, eyes haunted and smiles strained. They’re just as changed as he is. Just as scarred. They’re never going to be what they used to be. They’ll never laugh as fully, sleep as peacefully. They are never going back to the kids they once were.
If Bakugou could, he’d take all their hurt away. Trap it all into his own beating heart, because what else was he good for, if not being used? Bakugou is a hero, he is a weapon, a prop, a tool. He is something to be used. He has been his whole life. It’s all he’s good for.
Maybe if he did fill his heart up with everyone else’s hurt, he could finally feel full.
Ever since he came home to the dorms, he feels so out of place. Among the bright colors and soft music and the people he loves. He doesn’t fit his old life anymore.
It’s so stupid, but sometimes he thinks if he could just be a kid again, go back to when the world was small and he was smaller, it’d fix him.
He knows it’s not true, he’s been fucked up from the moment he was born, all angry and cursing and spiteful, but the childish hope still lives in a small corner of his head, along with all his other impossible hopes and dreams.
Bakugou sits alone in his room. The lights are off, and his window is open. The night has long since enveloped the sky, stars poking through the clouds swirling above. It was quiet, the way so few nights truly are anymore. The one’s Bakugou can remember are all filled with screaming and tears, some of them his— all the rest are all a blur.
Bakugou is tucked away on a corner of his bed, legs hanging over the edge. He stares out of his window thinking, not even trying to sleep. He knows it’s late, knows he should sleep, but Bakugou knows a lot of things.
He knows what a human ribcage looks like with its muscle exposed and bones crushed. He knows what Deku’s voice sounds like as he goes past his limit again and again and again. He knows what Kirishima looks like as his hardened skin shatters. He’s seen buildings turn to ash in seconds, seen embodiments of hope give up.
He knows the names of every identified casualty of the war, he’s memorized them all in between classes and sleepless nights like these. He knows that he was almost one of them.
Bakugou knows what it feels like to die.
So he doesn’t sleep. He keeps staring at the stars, eyes rarely flitting to the dark shadows in his room. He almost wants to join them. Climb his way into the sky and dance with those radiant balls of light. He’s so tired of fighting. He never thought he’d feel like this.
The fire in his heart is gone; smoke swirls out of him and he knows he can’t give up. Bakugou isn’t allowed to give up. The fates decided for him— the moment he cheated death. He can’t waste his second chance.
He may never be a star, but Bakugou can be a hero. Even if nowadays, all he wants to do is hide in his room.
His arm aches at his side and he lifts it into his field of vision. It still hasn’t healed fully, he’s starting to think it never will. Maybe he never will. He shifts it back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fingers. Even small movements hurt. It’s pathetic.
The world right now feels just like the aftermath of a bomb. Bakugou spent the last of his fire making sure the world didn’t collapse in on itself, and all that’s left of him is smoke.
Bakugou is smoke. He is a remnant of who he used to be. He is a fraud, a liar, a coward. Bakugou is a living ghost, in every meaning of the phrase. What he wouldn’t give to feel just a bit more of how he did the day the war ended.
He remembers the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He was bruised and bloody and dying, and it was the most he’d felt alive in years. Looking up from his hands, he really looks at his room instead of staring blankly at it. It’s a mess.
Well, messier than he’s ever allowed it before. He’s sure one of his idiots like Pikachu would worship the bits of visible floor space, but to Bakugou, he can tell how much he’s let himself go. It’s disappointing.
He has dirty clothes piled in a corner, papers are scattered everywhere, half empty water bottles have nestled into his bedside table. His desk is a fucking graveyard at this point. It has a couple snapped pencils, too many books, and his tiny pencil sharpener he keeps in his pencil case that broke earlier today. Probably his own fault if he’s honest, he can’t remember.
What’s left of it is a few shards of plastic and a razor, still sitting idle on top of some papers from when he was doing work hours ago.
Bakugou tries standing up and going to finally get his shit together, to actually be productive for once. It feels like a monumental task.
Somehow, his legs stand and walk forward toward his desk after staring at the mess for too long, leaving him only a little light headed. But as he reaches to go throw away the broken sharpener, his hand stops on the metal bit left of it. The razor. Something about it makes him pause. He doesn’t really want to throw it away.
He feels frozen in time. He’s not here, not now. He’s somewhere else entirely. It almost feels like the first time he woke up in the hospital, after the war. It was quiet then, too.
It was him and him alone, just like now. Alone in his room, with no eyes to see him. No one there to judge. It’s not like the walls will snitch.
The razor sits in Katsuki’s hand, innocent and unassuming. It’s small.
Slowly, Bakugou closes his hand around it. He sees his fingers wrap the scrap of metal, but his thoughts feel far away.
In a split second, Bakugou clenches his fist around it, squeezes hard. He doesn’t know why. He feels pricks of pain shoot through his palm. He feels something.
He’s been so numb lately, treated as something fragile, that the new pain that hasn’t been a constant since the war feels better than anything he could ever imagine. If Bakugou is hollow, if he is empty, maybe the blood pooling in his hand will fill his void heart. It bleeds out of him in little pinpricks of blood. A smile creeps onto the corner of his lips.
He wants it deeper.
If he’s honest with himself, a rare occurrence these days, he’s felt like shit. Truly and utterly like shit. He sits alone in his room when he’s not in class. He’s not allowed to train yet. Every smile he tries on his face feels forced. He’s weak and powerless now, and he hates it.
It’s not the hate he’s used to, exploding and fiery and loud. This rage is quiet. It’s deadly. It’s eating him alive.
It feels like giving up.
Bakugou has spent his days being a martyr, since he was born, and especially now. He wants to be one, truly. He wants to suffer, needs to suffer, so nobody else has to. He’ll take every hit meant for his friends, every foul word the media spews, because it’s what he was meant to do. He’s spent enough time in his life hurting others, it’s only fair.
So here he stands in his room, a god bleeding. He feels alive again. The rush of euphoria is a shock, as the blood lazily drips to the floor. The cut isn’t deep, but it stings, and Bakugou wants more. He wants to feel something other than his own pathetic thoughts.
He wants to finally be something akin to the battle-crazed, bloodthirsty soldier he was who never made it out of the war, the version of him more alive than he is now.
He opens his palm, sees the cut, and stares. A small red line, almost blending into his scarred hands if it weren’t for the bright color. Blood pools in his hand some more, and he feels like this is how it should be. He deserves to bleed. It’s fitting.
Something inside his heart crumbles anyway.
He puts his arm back at his side, razor falling with it. The world is static, and his room is empty, and there are no eyes here. There are no ears listening into thin walls, no figures hiding in the shadows, and there is no ghost left anchoring to his soul. He drops onto his knees.
The razor glints in the faint moonlight in front of him from where it clattered to the floor, taunting. Bakugou stares at it for too long, and he wants. There is a yearning in his heart for something.
He may not know what it is, but blood can still fill a wound. It can find a way to fill this wanting too.
Bakugou reaches for the razor again. He picks it up gently, gingerly, careful, and raises it to his wrist. The metal in his hands feels like freedom. The blood dripping onto the ground feels like power. The sting in his palm is control, and the hole growing in his heart feels divine.
He is empty, and he is whole, and like this, Bakugou can be something again. This time, he gets to choose what.
He raises the metal to his wrist, just a few inches away from his bleeding palm. Slowly he presses down, and this time he gets to see the way the blade digs into his flesh, peels away his skin, the way it carves him open. He thinks of peeling all his skin off, piece by piece, in morbid curiosity.
Then quickly he slashes the razor over his whole wrist. He does it again, then twice, then three times, four and it burns. Blood bubbles up from his veins and pours onto his wood flooring.
He is burning and he is alive and his blood is red-hot. There are no sparks, but there is heat, and this, he thinks, will be a fitting replacement for the fire that vanished from his heart.
His eyes are drawn to his mirror, and Bakugou pauses. He looks at the scene in front of him, and he almost laughs, it’s funny. Here is the great hero that’s defeated countless villains, sitting on his floor with a blood stained razor and tears in his eyes, and since when was he crying?
He looks further, sees his crazed eyes, the red staining his skin that matches them, and he realizes no one can know about this. He looks crazed, manic, he feels manic. His lips pull to a grin, and giddily Bakugou thinks he’ll just have to pick up on the fashion trend of fingerless gloves.
If anyone asks about the scratches, he can tell them he has a new hobby of feeding the neighborhood stray cats. They’d all laugh, and joke about how a poor little kitten could defeat the Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight, and he’d pretend to fight down a smirk. Eventually, the red would fade to pink, and the cuts will look like just the rest of his scarred skin. Everyone would forget.
Everything would be okay, he would be okay. As long as no one knows, as long as he gets to keep this.
By the time the night sky lightened, just before the sun shows its face, he’s dizzy and the world is barely there in front of him. He feels light, like he’ll drift away into the atmosphere, but that’s not really true.
He feels like he’s drowning, he’s drowning in nothing. He looks to his marred arm, flesh at his wrist a battleground. It reminds him of the war. The bodies bleeding and bleeding and bleeding drip by drip. He can be just like them now. He’ll drown in his blood.
His floor is a mess, he never did clean his desk. What a waste of time, he almost thinks, but he stops before the first word graces his thoughts. Guilt, shame, thoughts of how selfish he is try to poke through his cotton filled mind, but they barely brush the surface. He’ll feel guilty tomorrow. He’ll be ashamed tomorrow. He’ll clean his floor, and bandage his wrist, and fix himself tomorrow.
He’ll do it tomorrow because tomorrow will come, and it will keep coming, and will keep being there just out of reach again and again and again, because Bakugou Katsuki is not allowed to die.
He has people to save, a hero to be. He is an immortal martyr, an undying sacrifice, and he will keep living no matter how many times he cuts into his skin. He will keep living tomorrow and tomorrow and all the days after.
He will keep living because that’s what he was destined to do, no matter the ghost in him that died in the war, or his flame-heart that still beats but is only left as smoke, rotting in his chest. Bakugou will keep going, and that is what he wants to do, and he’ll keep telling himself that until the day he finally believes it.
Bakugou slumps against his bedside, not bothering to climb onto his mattress. His face is cold against the floor, and it’s the most comfortable he’s been in months. He’s tired, and he’ll keep being tired, because that’s all he is now. It’s all that’s left of him.
He doesn’t feel any better, but for a moment, a single, small moment, he felt full again. Whole.
Bakugou falls asleep on the floor still bleeding. He’ll deal with the aftermath later. For now, the floor is oddly peaceful, and standing up feels like an impossible task. He finds that he doesn’t really mind it, though.
He’ll fix himself in the morning, he’ll pull himself together tomorrow. It feels just like a death sentence anyway.