You will know me, and that’s enough

KrBk Soulmate au

For years, the only thing that got Katsuki through the day was his soulmate mark, a tangle of crimson characters scrawled across his wrist. He looked at those words and knew he would one day be loved.

QRT, please don’t reply!
Soulmate au within the canonverse
Trans Bakugou, of course
Angst with a happy ending
Bakugou POV

Based on this tweet! https://twitter.com/B2Josh/status/1184986137712091136

TW // discussion of child abuse, self-harm/body mutilation, and transphobia, but nothing graphic

It has a happy ending I promise
Hope you all enjoy! Please let me know what you think!

Katsuki is six, when it happens. It was supposed to happen when he was five, but he was a little late, for some reason, and no one could ever figure out why.

His fifth birthday came and went and Mitsuki went ballistic, stripping him naked and inspecting every inch of his skin, looking for a mark. She found nothing, no words or symbols or colors, nothing to indicate how he was supposed to know his soulmate.

Masaru has his mark on the sole of his foot, so perhaps that’s where Katsuki’s was as well, but there, too, was nothing.

He went to doctor after doctor and they were all baffled—every test indicated that he did indeed have a soulmate, so where was his mark? Why was his skin bare?

Was there something wrong with him?

His sixth birthday came and went, too, and Mitsuki cried and cried. She cried behind a closed door but Katsuki could still hear her, could still understand what she rasped between sobs that rattled the very foundations of the house.

“She’s already such a shitty little tomboy and a bully,” Mitsuki wailed, as if in pain, as if a victim, “And now this?! No soulmate to take her off our hands? Babe, what are we gonna /do/?”

Hearing that made Katsuki feel a lot of things, but he had no idea what. Was he upset? Hurt? Angry? Betrayed? Insulted? He didn’t know. He still doesn’t know. More than anything else, he was confused. Didn’t Mitsuki love him? Isn’t that what moms were supposed to do?

Katsuki is six, almost seven, when it happens.

He’s outside with Deku, playing All Might like they always do, and his wrist goes up in flames. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. The pain is blinding, like he’s looked directly into the sun for an hour.

For a long moment, he thinks his quirk went off and seared his skin, somehow, but that’s not quite it. He knows what that feels like, has watched his flesh bubble and burn beneath his palm—this is different.

This has him doubling over, tears instantly pouring down his cheeks, chasing one another in a race toward the earth.

“Kacchan?!” Deku screams, stubby fingers reaching out towards Katsuki’s face, making him instinctively flinch back. Fucking Deku, always trying to help him like he’s some damsel in distress.

Newsflash, dipshit, Katsuki’s no damsel! He doesn’t need help! He doesn’t need anyone’s goddamn help, especially not some loser with stupid freckles and no quirk.

He shoves Deku aside with his shoulder, smirking to himself despite the pain when Deku falls to the ground like a sack of bricks. Serves that little asshole right. Katsuki doesn’t need him or anyone else.

His wrist abruptly stops stinging and he looks down, expecting a wasp sting or perhaps a cut he hadn’t noticed before. Instead, there are words. A /mark/. He squints at it but he… can’t read it? Why can’t he read it?!

He can read the kana just fine, but there’s a kanji here he doesn’t recognize. That doesn’t make any sense. He knows dozens and dozens of kanji!

What kind of person is his soulmate, who’s using such a strange word?

Deku’s mumbling to himself like he always does because he’s fucking annoying like that. “Oi, Deku!” Katsuki snaps, valiantly ignoring the fact that he’s still crying and his words are wobbly, “Shut your damn mouth! It’s just my mark.”

“Your mark?! But—Kacchan—I thought you didn’t have one!”

God, he’s so irritating. Katsuki really wants to knock his teeth out. “Obviously I just got it, stupid! Use your goddamn brain for once!”

“Kacchan, you really shouldn’t swear so much. My mom says—”

Okay, that’s about enough of that. If he listens to Deku talk for much longer he’s going to have an aneurysm. “Whatever. I’m going home.” And with that, Katsuki zips out of the park, heading back toward his house at a near sprint.

He /has/ to know what this says.

“Mom, dad!” He calls as he stomps into his house, “I got my mark!”

Mitsuki is down the stairs in a flash, face already flushed from the effort of fucking booking it and nearly tripping in the process. She picks him up and roughly plops him onto the counter, demanding to see it, looking equal parts nervous and excited.

Beaming, her shows her the bright red characters scrawled across his wrist is a messy but still legible script.

“Katsuki.” She sounds… pissed? Why is she pissed? What did he do wrong? “What the fuck is this?”

What? He doesn’t understand. “My mark?”

“Do you know what this says?” He frowns. He knows what most of it says.

It says ‘Bakugou, you’re… something’. He’s not sure what the something is, but it’s just because he doesn’t know what that kanji is.

At six, he really shouldn’t know any kanji that aren’t in his name, anyway. He’s kind of a genius, though, so he knows more than his fair share. Just not this one. “What’s it say, Ma?”

Mitsuki frowns. “It says China?”

“Hah?”

“Well, it says Han dynasty technically, but baby, that says China. What the fuck kind of nonsense is that?”

When he looks it up at school, Katsuki discovers that yeah, that kanji has one universal reading. かん. Kan. It’s China when used in compounds and Han dynasty when used on its own. What the fuck?

He waited so long for /this/? All those extras he went to school with harassed him over /this/? Over the goddamn character for the Han dynasty?

After that, Mitsuki is absolutely unbearable. Even more so than before, somehow, which Katsuki hadn't thought possible.

Every time Katsuki slouches she hits him with, “How do you expect your soulmate to love an old crone?”

Every time he eats with his fingers instead of his chopsticks she tuts, “Do you think your soulmate will love a cavewoman?”

Every time she catches him without shoes on she scolds, “How could your soulmate ever love such a lazy, sloppy bum?”

Why is everything about his soulmate, all of a sudden? Nothing he ever does is for him, anymore, it’s all for this person he’s never met. This stranger. This fucking no-name extra. This person who thinks he’s Han.

Two weeks later, he tries to burn it off.

Mitsuki does nothing but wax poetic about his soulmate, already loudly planning their wedding and trying to get Masaru to design Katsuki’s dress. But Katsuki doesn’t want to wear a dress. He doesn’t want a soulmate who thinks he’s Han.

He doesn’t want any of this shit—he can’t handle his mom looking at him like that, like he’s a piece of meat she’s trying to sell.

She has all these expectations of him, and he just… can’t be that little girl Mitsuki wants him to be, starry eyed and waiting for her soulmate to sweep her off her feet.

The explosion is loud and it rings in his ears like the tolling of a bell. The smell of burning flesh makes his stomach twist and turn but he can’t stop, won’t stop searing those horrible words off his skin.

If they’re gone, he won’t have to look at them, won’t have to listen to Mitsuki and her bullshit anymore.

It hurts. It hurts so fucking bad. Nothing has ever hurt this bad, like lava boiling under his skin, like his flesh is melting and peeling from his splintered bones.

He can’t hold back the screams, the howls of pain that tear out of his raw throat.

Masaru finds him and wraps him up in his big arms, hauling Katsuki into the bathroom and running lukewarm water over the burn.

Katsuki is still screaming and Masaru is crying, both hunched over the sink like gargoyles, shaking in tandem.

“Why did you do this?! Why did you do this?!” Masaru is wailing through his sobs, wild and accusatory, but Katsuki doesn’t fucking know.

Katsuki never knows why he does what he does. He simply acts. He simply /is/.

The burn doesn’t even scar. Even after all that, after the tears and the screams and the pain. Masaru says it’s soulmate magic but Katsuki just thinks he’s cursed, doomed to have his own eulogy scrawled across his wrist.

At Katsuki’s yearly physical the next month, Masaru quietly brings up his attempt at self-mutilation, because he’s a fucking traitor.

Katsuki shoots his father the dirtiest glare he can manage but it does nothing, not with Katsuki’s round eyes and even rounder cheeks, not when Masaru won’t even spare him a glance.

The doctor gasps overdramatically and Katsuki makes a loud retching sound, just to spite her, just to show how little he respects her and her unnecessary dramatics. He knows she doesn’t really care about him. None of them do.

It takes almost an hour for Katsuki to convince the doctor that he’s fine, it was just a one-time thing, he really does know better, now. The doctor still makes Masaru schedule Katsuki a psychologist appointment, but Katsuki knows full well he’ll never go.

Mitsuki will let him weasel out of it. She always does, if it's something that's for his own good.

Of course, Katsuki’s right. He’s always fucking right. Masaru obediently makes the appointment but Mitsuki vetoes it with a vengeance, saying that Katsuki’s not crazy, and he certainly doesn’t need a goddamn shrink.

For once, he agrees with her.

Masaru, surprisingly enough, makes a big stink about it. He insists they do /something/, because Katsuki fucking tried to burn his own skin off, and that’s concerning.

He and Mitsuki bicker and bicker about it for days upon days until they finally compromise—they’ll buy Katsuki a journal and hope his “mental instabilities” resolve themselves.

Joke’s on them, Katsuki thinks, because he /has/ no mental instabilities. He’s perfectly fucking fine. He’s not crazy or stupid, he doesn’t need a shrink, and he certainly doesn’t need to bitch about his feelings in a stupid diary.

It takes him three months to actually write his first entry, but it does feel kind of good to put it all on paper. Maybe having a journal isn’t all that bad after all.

Journal entry I

It’s not until Katsuki is eleven that he finds out there’s another reading of the kanji 漢. It wasn’t something he was looking for, since he’d resolved himself to forget all about his dumb mark that made no sense, but something he stumbled upon.

He’s flipping through some stupid shounen manga when he sees it, used to describe a character. There’s kana over it—おとこ, otouko. But that pronunciation—that means man? There’s already a kanji for that?

He shakes his head and flips around in the back of the manga, finding a page explaining some of the slang, and within it, he finds what he’s looking for—a 漢 is a man’s man. His wrist, his /soulmate/, is calling him… manly?

Holy fuck. Why does that sound so right? Why did that make him feel so warm? Does he want to be manly? Is that what he’s been striving for all along, without even knowing it?

Is that why being called ‘sweetie’ turns his gut to rot? Is that why he bit Mitsuki the last time she tried to force him into a dress? Is that why he insists his hair stay short and his shirts stay loose?

Is that why he feels so comfortable around boys, why he’ll do almost anything to earn and keep their respect? Is that why everything seems so wrong right now, why he hates to be seen, why he can’t stand to be a damsel in distress? He’s no damsel. He’s no girl.

Katsuki is a boy, he realizes. He’s a /boy/.

Unsurprisingly, Mitsuki laughs at him. She tells him he’s delusional, that he’ll grow out of it, that he’s just plain wrong. It’s obvious that she thinks he’s stupid, and that hurts. He’s eleven years old and his mom laughs in his face.

His soulmate, though. His soulmate wouldn’t laugh. His soulmate thinks he’s manly, his soulmate knows the truth, even if no one else does.

A soulmate mark varies from person to person—some people have shapes, some have splashes of color, some have words. Those with words have the first genuine compliment their soulmate will ever think about them.

That means Katsuki’s soulmate will look at him and think he’s manly, that means his soulmate will look at him and know who Katsuki really is. Even if his family won’t accept it, even if his friends won’t accept it, he’s sure his soulmate will, one day.

All Katsuki has to do is wait for them.

He doesn’t tell Mitsuki about the alternate reading of 漢. She doesn’t ask and he keeps it covered, these days, because it’s just for him. It’s private. He has to protect it from her, because she’ll blame his mark for him being trans.

Because she’ll taint it, ruin it like she’s ruined so many other things, like she’s ruined him.

They fight a lot, these days, over the littlest things. It’s not really anything new but he’s now more willing to snap back than he ever was, so their arguments are nothing short of explosive.

Sometimes that’s a little literal, seeing as Katsuki’s burned plenty of clothing and scorched more than one table.

He normally has great quirk control but something about Mitsuki’s ribbing makes him boil over almost instantly. She knows exactly how to push his buttons, exactly how to get under his skin, and then she plays the victim when he erupts, which just pisses him off more.

Mitsuki’s old habits are starting to get intolerable, now that he’s accepted the truth about himself. She's always liked to dress him up like a little doll and flaunt him as an accessory and nothing more, like that’s all he was born for.

She’s a beautician trying to get her foot in the door to work with models, and apparently models love little girls in pink dresses, something Mitsuki is happy to provide. She covers Katsuki in makeup and frills and one day he decides he’s had enough.

He simply won’t let her do it anymore. He fights and kicks and screams, sometimes biting if he’s feeling particularly belligerent, because she’s doing it just to spite him, at this point.

What was once a half-hearted ploy for clout has become a game of cat and mouse, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who is the cat and who is the mouse.

He’s eleven and he doesn’t have any friends. He has cronies, sure. He has people who follow him around because they like watching him bully people, or because they’re scared of him, or both. But he doesn’t have friends.

Sometimes the cronies are enough. Sometimes they're not.

He’s eleven and he cries a lot, when he’s alone.

When his parents go off on some trip and leave him alone for the weekend, when he’s soaking in the bath, watching his fingers prune, when he’s in bed, huddled under the covers, burying his face into a pillow that’s starting to get discolored from all the saline.

He’s starting to get used to always having a headache, always scrubbing at puffy eyes.

He has his spiral, still, at least. What he once fought so valiantly against has become his only solace in life, the only way for him to vent the raging inferno he keeps in his chest.

Journal entry II, part I

Transcripts available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3y-rkCYlRlKneognABxocM4dspNOB1NTFqg0Nv04sk/edit?usp=sharing

Journal entry II, part II

Transcripts (including translations) available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3y-rkCYlRlKneognABxocM4dspNOB1NTFqg0Nv04sk/edit?usp=sharing

Of course, she finds out about the kanji reading, eventually. He’s just a child and she’s a tyrant and he can’t hide anything forever. He’s fourteen when he lets it slip, when she forces him to wear a skirt for a family dinner, and his whole body stops being his own.

In the restaurant, uncomfortable with his thighs exposed and chafing, he throws his plate at the wall and hisses, “My soulmate believes me, why can’t you?”

Livid, she demands to know more, words whispered because of their audience but no less vicious. There will be hell to pay when they get home.

At the house, she rounds on him. “Where did you get such a stupid idea?” She spits, like he’s doing this to personally spite her, like he wouldn’t give /anything/ to not be this way. He says nothing and she hits him. He says nothing and she hits him again.

Eventually, she gets it out of him, because he’s fourteen and can really only handle so much. He spits out an expletive-laced explanation and she hits him again, just for good measure, just because she can. Who would she be if she didn’t throw her power around here and there?

A few days later, she announces over breakfast that he’s not going to school that day. He grips his chopsticks so tight they shatter and crack beneath his fingers. He can feel the splinters digging in and it grounds him, just barely.

“I have perfect attendance,” he snarls, “I’m not missing shit!”

She kicks his shin under the table, and he clenches his jaw, determined not to show how much that hurt. If he did, she’d tell him to take it like a man, since he wants to be one so bad. That’s what she always does and it’s seriously starting to get old.

“Shut up! I’m taking you to the fucking doctor, brat, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“The doctor? Why? I was there three months ago. I’m not sick.”

Waving her hand dismissively, she says, “It doesn’t matter, just go get dressed. We’re leaving in a half hour.”

What the hell is going on? He feels dread settle low in his gut.

In the car, she doesn’t speak to him. It’s odd but a welcome relief from what he’s used to, so Katsuki revels in it while he can, because it surely won’t last.

The radio is loud enough to drown out all other sounds, but Katsuki can easily tune it out, too, since it really doesn’t sound all that loud to him.

He’s starting to suspect that his quirk is damaging his hearing, but that’s just a hunch, since he can still hear pretty much everything he needs to. If some extras have to repeat themselves, well, that’s their problem, not Katsuki’s.

It takes almost an hour to arrive at the office, which seems absolutely bonkers. Why would Mitsuki drive an hour out of town when his primary care physician is six minutes away from their house? Is this some kind of specialist?

Katsuki only needs one specialist, and he’s not stupid enough to even hope that’s where they are. He knows better than to delude himself—he learned that years ago.

Mitsuki would never take him to a gender specialist. She hates him far too much for that.

Inside, the waiting room is overly sterile. It smells like disinfectant and he wants to gag, wants to run, wants to burn this place to the goddamn ground. They’re at the dermatologist and, despite what Mitsuki might think, Katsuki’s not an idiot. He knows why they’re here.

He’s forced to sit in a cheap chair in the corner while Mitsuki flirts with the guy behind the desk, who seems wholly uninterested in even looking at her.

After getting ignored for long enough, she huffs and eventually flops down next to Katsuki to fill out the fat stack of paperwork in silence, obviously pissed about being snuffed.

Katsuki plays on his phone, scrolling through Twitter and tweeting death threats on his priv when he’s sure she’s not looking. She’s got a nasty habit of snooping through his shit—phone included—so he takes all the precautions he can to keep his private stuff private.

His online persona is his true self and he knows she’ll ruin that, if she finds it. His followers call him king and sir and he holds onto that with an iron grip because he has little else.

When his name is called, Mitsuki grabs him by the wrist and drags him into the examination room, not even giving him a chance to walk there himself like a normal human being.

She pushes him towards the exam chair and he growls but still sits, pissed off but not willing to cause another scene in public, because he’s learned that what happens when they get home isn’t worth the momentary relief derived from a public outburst.

The doctor is an old man, so old that Katsuki’s not sure how he’s still alive.

His words whistle and his voice is breathy and Katsuki fucking hates him. “So what can I do for you two lovely ladies?” the doctor asks, sickly sweet.

Katsuki clenches his fists and his palms crackle, but Mitsuki doesn’t acknowledge it and neither does the doctor, both apparently content to ignore him, even though he’s the entire reason they’re here.

“I want her mark removed,” Mitsuki says plainly, which, while what Katsuki suspected, still hurts like a gunshot to hear aloud.

“Why would you ever want that?” The doctor rasps, scandalized, bushy eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline.

Yeah, Mitsuki, why would you?

Folding her arms over her chest, looking annoyed like the doctor is the one in the wrong here, Mitsuki huffs, “It’s filling her empty head with crazy ideas, doc, and it’s just not good for her. We’ve tried everything to fix her—this is our last hope. I want it gone.”

Fix him? He doesn’t need to be fixed. There’s nothing wrong with him. Why can’t she see that? Why can’t she love him the way she did before, when she would tuck him into bed and kiss his hair for no reason? He’s still the same kid, still her only child—that much hasn’t changed.

Why did him realizing a fundamental truth about himself lead to such a paradigm shift? What’s different, really? Is he unlovable, now? Is that why she looks down her nose at him, why Masaru won’t meet his eye?

No. He can’t be unlovable, not really, because his soulmate will love him. His soulmate will see a man and his soulmate will love that man.

The doctor is giving Mitsuki some condescending lecture about the risks of removing a mark but she’s adamant that she wants it off, because of course she is.

Katsuki’s too young to have any say about this and he knows that, knows that he’s trapped here in this cramped office with too-bright lights, knows that his time with his mark is dwindling.

It’s not easy, but he manages to slink off to the bathroom and snap a few good pictures of his mark, blood red under the fluorescent lights. She’ll have it burned off his skin, but she can’t burn it out of his mind, too.

He’s already in the habit of covering it, so it’s not like she’d notice if he drew it back on every day. She can’t take it from him, not entirely—he won’t let her. She’s already taken too much.

It hurts. Or, it should hurt, but Katsuki doesn’t feel much of anything. The doctor uses some kind of acid to dissolve the mark and the skin around it, and Katsuki can already tell it’ll leave a nasty scar.

Soulmate mojo can’t fix everything.

He has to wear the bandage for six weeks. Masaru cleans the wound for him every morning and every evening, silent and somber as he does so, like he’s lost something, too. Katsuki doesn’t think Mitsuki told Masaru what she was planning.

That almost hurts more than the removal, somehow. Almost.

She just does whatever she wants, without regard for her child or her husband, without giving a single shit about the consequences. Why is she so selfish? The world doesn’t revolve around her, as much as she seems to believe it does.

When the bandage comes off, after all those weeks, there’s a dark red pucker where his mark used to be, brilliant against his pale skin. It’s gnarled and ugly and he hates it.

Every night, he curls up under his covers and stares at his phone, at the pictures he took of his mark before it was ripped away from him. He uploaded them to his private twitter as a backup in case she ever finds them on his phone, but so far, he’s avoided her notice.

She actually ignores him more often than not, these days, which would’ve once stung. Now it’s just a welcome relief to be simply passed over instead of harassed.

When he can, he redraws the characters on his wrist with a blood red sharpie, one that’s as close to the original color as he could find. Despite the resemblance, it’s still not quite right.

There’s something off about it, like it’s a shade too dark or a shade too light, but Katsuki can’t really tell which. Either way, it’s /wrong/.

Many nights, his thoughts drift to his soulmate. What are they doing now?

Did they feel it when the mark was dissolved, was burned out of his flesh? Was it burned out of their flesh, too? Did it hurt them as much as it hurt him?

Maybe. Katsuki’s not sure how that kind of shit works. He really hopes they didn’t have to suffer alongside him.

He misses his mark. He misses it more than he misses anything, more than he misses spending his days playing in the sun, more than he misses laughing openly, more than he misses when his mother actually loved him.

When his mind wanders, his pencil traces those characters. He scrawls them in the margins of his notes, of books and manga, of his journal, of any scrap of paper he can get his hands on. His hand won’t forget the shapes, and neither will his mind, because he simply won’t let it.

His soulmate is out there with his words on their wrist and Katsuki will find them, somehow. He has to.

He has to find the only person who will truly know him, who will see him as he is, as he wants to be.

Every day is harder than the last, exhausting when he has to fight every moment to just be himself, and he is beginning to wear thin.

When it takes so /much/ just to wake up every morning, he’s not sure where he finds the energy to kick and scream and hiss. He’s not sure when his well will run dry but he thinks he might be nearing the bottom.

He’s only fourteen and he’s fucking drained, wondering if—even hoping that, on the bad days—the end is nigh. He’s so, so tired.

Is it so bad to want a goddamn break?

Besides the words, there’s one other thing that keeps him going from day to day: he’s been having dreams. Soulmate dreams.

Honestly, he’s not 100% sure that they’re soulmate dreams.

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to be able to tell definitively—all he has right now is a gut feeling, and while his gut has never let him down before, it’s not exactly infallible. The dreams just feel… /magical/.

Magic put his soulmate’s words on his wrist, so is it so crazy to think that the magic could put them in his dreams, too?

The dreams start hazy and shadowed, too dark for him to make out much of anything. Over time, they become clearer, visible but still surreal, as if they’re behind a curtain of opalescence instead of thick, smothering fabric.

Katsuki sees a young boy, sometimes, but only glimpses. A flash of black hair. A wide, sharp-toothed smile. A snort laugh. A loud voice that stutters so much the dream itself quakes with it. Katsuki starts to fall in love, the tiniest bit.

He stills journals, but lately he’s been sketching sprawling patterns of spirals and trees instead of writing words, because there’s not much more he can really say. Words were taken from his skin and sometimes it feels like they were taken from his mind, too.

Occasionally, though, he manages. It’s usually only when something particularly bad happens, like when he gets locked in his room for 12 hours or Mitsuki gets extra violent.

Sometimes the words bubble up and he has to get them out, out, /out/, for fear of what would happen if they stayed in. He knows it will be nothing short of a calamity when his damn finally breaks, and everything he’s held back comes flooding forth.

Journal entry III, part I

Transcripts (including translations) available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3y-rkCYlRlKneognABxocM4dspNOB1NTFqg0Nv04sk/edit?usp=sharing

Journal entry III, part II

Transcripts (including translations) available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3y-rkCYlRlKneognABxocM4dspNOB1NTFqg0Nv04sk/edit?usp=sharing

He’s fifteen, now, and he has to make a choice. He can either keep rolling over and showing his belly, keep letting Mitsuki do whatever she wants, or he can stand up for himself.

The choice is dire, at this point, because he’s not sure how much more of her bullshit he can handle without having a genuine breakdown.

The decision is easy to make but difficult to put into action. Luckily, Katsuki is stubborn as all hell, so if there’s anyone who could make it happen, it’s him. He’s done letting her walk all over him, and he’s finally strong enough to back that up.

She can hit him and it won’t hurt much. She can fling insults and those won’t hurt much, either. His skin is thick and his muscles are strong.

He’s getting HRT if it’s the last goddamn thing he does—he’ll burn the house to the fucking ground if he has to, he’ll kick and scream and fight, he’ll do /anything/. He doesn’t care at this point, seeing as he has nothing else to lose, seeing as he’s not as weak as he once was.

High school looms and he needs to be his true self for that, since he’ll be in the spotlight from day one, and he simply couldn’t handle the world seeing him as a girl.

He’s not a girl. He’s not.

Despite what everyone around him says, despite what they all call him, he’s /not/.

Eventually, Masaru gives in. He is weak and bends to Katsuki’s will, because Katsuki has finally mastered the art of manipulation through guilt. If he can make Masaru feel guilty enough, Masaru will bend, and once he does, Mitsuki will, too.

She will bend to only one thing, and it’s Masaru, when he gives enough of a shit to actually try. He pleads Katsuki’s case and she relents within minutes.

Katsuki hates her. Katsuki hates them both.

Testosterone, once he starts it, does help. Katsuki’s still miserable—and if he’s being honest, probably clinically depressed—but it helps. At least he’s starting to feel more like himself, more comfortable in his own ill-fitting skin.

The changes are slow but they happen, gradual enough to where Katsuki barely notices them. He looks at himself and sees the same woman who’s always looked back at him, but when he looks at a picture taken just 2 months ago, he realizes he’s different.

Mitsuki, vile as she is, dangles his shots over his head. If he wants them, he has to bend over backwards, has to prostrate himself before his jailor and hope he isn’t found wanting.

He’s always found wanting.

His doctor scolds him for skipping so many doses and Katsuki wants to tear his own hair out, wants to burn and burn until there’s nothing left. Some days he goes up in flames and he learns, over and over again, that there’s no foundation beneath him.

There’s just a band aid slapped over a gaping, infected wound. Soon enough he’ll just give out, will finally bleed down to the quick. He can’t keep doing this forever.

He’s just a child.

The only thing keeping him sane is his soulmate. He’s been having more and more dreams, just still images and flashes of sound, but they’re enough. His soulmate is out there, reading shitty manga and snort-laughing, and Katsuki aches.

Katsuki loves him, he realizes. He loves this boy he’s never met, simply because the boy will one day see him as he wants to be seen, will one day accept him as he is, instantly.

He loves his soulmate because the boy can’t jump rope, because he still stutters over his words but he’s doing so much better, because he found a stray puppy with a broken leg last year and nursed it back to health.

Katsuki’s soulmate is so undeniably special, hand-crafted by the forces that be just for him, just to be his match.

Knowing that there’s someone out there—perhaps someone who needs Katsuki as much as he needs them—is sometimes the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.

His soulmate is waiting for him, and they’ll meet at Yuuei, Katsuki just knows it.

And since he has to get into the school for that to happen, he studies hard and aces every test, practicing with his quirk in the backyard until Mitsuki starts throwing things at him from an upstairs window.

He’s getting in. There’s no way he’s not getting in.

These days, he can’t get away with scribbling his words back onto his skin like he did before. He’s too active, too explosive, too /much/ to keep anything hidden, least of all sharpie marks across his wrist.

Instead, he keeps writing them like he’s always done, over and over and over again.

The characters are so familiar to him that he can draw them with his eyes closed, which he often does. He traces the shapes on desks and walls, scribbles them on errant sheets of paper that he burns afterward, anything to keep them fresh in his mind.

His soulmate will love him no matter what, his soulmate won’t withhold his hormones, his soulmate will look at him and see a man. His soulmate will look at him and see a hero.

The entrance exam is drawing nearer and nearer and he never stops moving, never stops climbing with bloody fingernails toward the top. He has to do this. He /has/ to.

If he stops now, he knows he’ll never start again. That will be that.

Endless hours are spent under the sun, skin burning and peeling under her scrutiny, but he pushes on. His explosions are too small, his legs are too slow, his chest is too heavy. Every breath is so, so much work, and every day he wonders if it’s worth it.

He wonders why he bothers.

Dark hair. A stutter. A laugh that echoes. That’s why he bothers—that’s what will make this all worth it one day.

Journal entry IV

Transcripts (including translations) available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3y-rkCYlRlKneognABxocM4dspNOB1NTFqg0Nv04sk/edit?usp=sharing

With Yuuei on the horizon, Katsuki decides to start working on his emancipation case. He knows he’s too young, now, but once he turns 16, he’ll be eligible.

He turns 16 during his first semester in high school and he wants to have everything ready by then, even if he’ll realistically have to wait longer than that to actually be free. It doesn’t hurt to start collecting evidence now.

He takes pictures of his bruises. He records audio and video of her yelling at him, berating him, treating him like dirt instead of a child.

He documents everything he can and uploads them to his private Twitter for safekeeping, because he knows he’ll need them, one day, and he can’t risk Mitsuki finding them on his phone. He’ll guard these the way he guards everything—fiercely, and with all he’s got.

Time passes like it always does. It passes in waves, in bursts of change amidst a sea of the same. Days go by and Katsuki’s body changes, ever so slowly, and the world around him changes, too.

One day he’s scolding his cronies for smoking—if those dipshits get caught, it’ll go on Katsuki’s record, and he needs that shit squeaky clean to get into Yuuei—when suddenly everything is /wet/.

It’s dark as night and he’s being lifted off the ground by something all-encompassing, something engulfing him, something blocking out even the sun.

What the fuck is happening?

There’s a voice in his ear, raspy and vile, but he can’t understand what it’s saying, if it’s saying anything at all. His quirk fires off without him triggering it and he smells wood burning before he sees an awning up in flames.

The fire is everywhere, leaping from stand to stand, creating a curtain of shimmering heat. It hits him all at once—that voice, this sludge, his quirk; it’s a villain. He’s been captured and his power is being used against him, being wielded as a weapon against the masses.

Holy shit, he’s a /danger/.

The filth is so heavy, so smothering, that Katsuki’s vision goes in and out. Sometimes he’s completely submerged, sometimes he’s allowed an errant breath, but there’s always sludge across his tongue, always sparks cradled in his palms.

His vision focuses and there’s Deku, dumbstruck with wide eyes, looking at Katsuki like he fucking pities him. Katsuki would rather die at the hands of this villain than have Deku—fucking Deku—look at him like /that/.

When Deku takes that first step forward, when his arms start pumping at his sides, Katsuki screams. Katsuki screams and screams because Deku is /below him/, Deku is useless, quirkless, and Katsuki is no damsel in distress.

He doesn’t need help from someone weaker than him, from someone with a loving mother and an M on his birth certificate.

And suddenly, there’s All Might. Katsuki has posters and figurines of this man, and here he is, saving Katsuki’s ass like some pathetic child. It’s goddamn embarrassing.

To make matters worse, there are news cameras everywhere. He’s in a boy’s uniform, so they will all see a boy, but that’s only a small comfort.

He’s still on national TV because he was too fucking weak to fend off a villain, because even after everything, he's still not enough.