Chapter Text
Over the years, Kaminari has learnt to live with how shit his overloads are. Sure, he’s slowly building up his tolerance to his own electricity, and he’s much better now than when he was a child. But they still come, familiar and painful. The pain is something he’s also become used to, to the point where half the time he barely even registers when every inch in his body is lighting up like he’s on fire, or when his nerves flicker like they can’t decide if they’re on and registering sensation or off and feel nothing.
It depends on the type of overload, he supposes. He dumps each one into any of three categories.
There’s sudden, smaller overloads, “baby shocks”, usually that come with minor overuses of his quirk, like a tiny flare that tip-toes over the line; a mini power surge, if you could call two million volts “mini”. Those just make his limbs shake and flail and his mouth spew pure nonsense, but mentally only take him a few minutes to recover from. Times like when Bakugo had pulled him behind the bushes and sucker punched him, the sudden force to his gut causing sparks to spread over his entire body for just an instant, flinging him into stupid land for 15 minutes while his classmates laughed at him.
(Bakugo had apologised for it, weeks later. Kaminari had pretty much forgotten it, considering everything that had led up to it, and everything else that had followed – villain break ins, ruined camps, kidnappings, and then his friends disappearing on secret missions and coming back highly traumatised. Still, apparently it had lingered in Bakugo’s mind, enough that, one chilly winter afternoon, when Aizawa had paired the two up to run errands for him around the school, Bakugo had interrupted Kaminari’s rambling chatter with a hand on his shoulder and a “shut up, idiot” before he’d given the meanest, shortest and somehow one of the most sincere apologies Kaminari had ever received.
“After Kamino, I needed a distraction before class. You made an easy target, so I figured I’d make you go stupid for a bit. I shouldn’t have done that, it was fucked up, and I shouldn’t have hurt you. Sorry.”
Bakugo had let go and kept walking, leaving Kaminari spluttering and running to catch up. “W-wait, is this about-”
“Tch, yes, idiot, what else would I be talking about?”
“I mean, I guess you haven’t actually hit me all that much outside of training, but still. This is a bit sudden.”
“Whatever, dunce face. Keep walking, the faster this is done, the sooner we’re back to class.” Bakugo glared over at him. In Kaminari's opinion, it lacked it's usual heat. “And if you tell anyone, I’ll kill you. Got it?”
Kaminari snorted, shrugging. “Whatever you say, Bakubabe. But you’re forgiven anyway. Honestly, I’d actually forgotten about that, so don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Kaminari laughed, tilting his head. The wind had blown some of Bakugo's white-blond hair across his eyes, and Kaminari's fingers twitched at the thought of reaching over and fixing it for him. Instead, he tightened his hold on the books they were delivering across campus, gave the other boy a rueful grin, and said, "You forgot to add the "idiot" at the end, Bakubabe. Don't forget, otherwise I'll start thinking you like me or something."
Bakugo snickered. "Fuck, can't have that, now can I, moron?")
Then there was his “mid-surges” which came with prolonged use of his quirk. Those hurt him less physically, just mild tremors, intense fatigue, and occasionally he’d lose feeling in parts of his body for minutes or hours. However, these ones hurt him mentally a lot more. Electricity and fatigue blended into him being unable to focus his eyes or his hearing turning off, his ability to form coherent thoughts leaving for a while, and more often than not he’d be speaking to someone or doing something and then he’d blink and it’d been four hours and he was on the floor covered in piss and drooling. Those made him uncomfortable. Those were the ones Aizawa had sent him to Recovery Girl for, the ones that had been “seizure inducing”, and the ones that had first made his closest friends realise how unfunny his overloads actually were. Which also made him uncomfortable – he didn’t like to worry people, and the idea of being comforted after was pretty foreign.
(It was the first time he’d woken up in Recovery Girl’s clinic after an overload, although “waking up” wasn’t quite right. For once, feeling comes back online first – sadly not his motor-control though – followed very closely by his hearing, which is also somewhat unusual as that usually comes in last. He hears his own voice, useless and wordless noises spilling unfiltered out of his mouth, his jaw aching something fierce. He registers shuffling nearby, something that sounds like a patented Bakubro sigh, Ashido and Kiri’s voices murmuring and mixing to his left. There’s an itch on his left foot. His shirt is twisted and the sensation of his collar pressing funny on his neck makes his fingers twitch.
Minutes later, light filters back into his eyes, and he blinks and now his other foot itches, and then he’s looking around at six people and oh, he can move again. When did he stop talking? His stomach rumbles.
“Yo.” He simply says, grinning tiredly and sticking two of his fingers up to pull a peace sign at them. His nose feels sore as the smile pulls at the muscles on his face.
Aizawa, Bakugo and Recovery Girl all sigh heavily, Sero winces and glances away, Ashido looks like she wants to cry even though she smiles back at him, and Kirishima actually is crying. His focus gets pulled to the ticking of the clock on the wall above his bed, Recovery Girl says something but it’s too soft for him to follow, a bird flies past the window-
“Problem child, can you hear us?” His head snaps around, and he ponders about the taste of metal on his tongue.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I can hear. Were you talking? Sorry, focusing is hard right now.”
Recovery Girl shuffles around to his side and pulls out a small torch to check his pupils, and the familiar routine of a doctor checking over his body post-overload quickly loses his interest. “Perhaps you should give him a few more minutes, Aizawa.”
His teacher hums. There’s a piece of white thread stuck to his sleeve. “He’s had hours. But if you think it’s best. Please let me know when he’s a little more present. You four – do not be late to class. Lunch finishes in twenty minutes, please eat something.”
“What’s for lunch? I’m hungry.” His stomach rumbles again, like it’s agreeing with him, and then he actually registers what his teacher says. He lurches forward, one arm flailing in a weird panic-wave. “W-wait, hours? What’d I do? What happened?”
Recovery Girl hushes him and pulls his arm back down. His friends look uncomfortable, and Aizawa finally brushes the thread off his shirt. “We’ll… talk later, Kaminari. Your friends can fill you in.”
After Aizawa leaves, his friends very kindly don’t do that. Recovery Girl pokes and prods and says words at him that he barely hears and his focus is continuing to spiral, and then she leaves and someone hands him an orange that takes his entire focus to peel, then the bell rings and his friends don’t leave until Aizawa storms in again and snaps at them. It’s not until then that they actually say anything, or at least he thinks, he hasn’t been paying attention. They don’t end up talking about whatever caused him to overload, which he’d already figured out, but… well, they’re nice to him, not their normal nice but a pitying kind of nice. Placating, treating him like glass. It’s weird, he’s used to laughter and ribbing, and he knows he’s made them uncomfortable for whatever reason, and that in turn makes him feel uncomfortable.
Ashido is one of his closest friends and they’re pretty physically affectionate, but while he appreciates the soft kiss she presses to his cheek and the squeeze she gives his hand, it’s more gentle than she’s probably ever been with him. Kirishima looks like he’s scared of touching him, giving him the barest brush of knuckles on his own instead of the bruising knuckle bump he normally gives him, and his lip wobbles as his eyes start watering again. Bakugo, amazingly, is the one to touch him most, a hand shaking his shoulder lightly and the other holding his jaw to make Kaminari look him in the eye as he hisses “get stronger, fucking idiot, and don’t do this again, fucks sake,” before he’s stalking off. Sero follows it by barely touching him as well, save for brushing his fringe behind one ear and smiling without teeth at him, and that’s the one that cuts him up inside the most. His nose throbs faintly.
Kaminari spends the rest of the school day in the clinic with his head spinning and his senses slowly coming back to 100%, and wants to smack himself when Aizawa tells him after school has ended that Kaminari had overloaded himself three times during morning training, then dropped an hour later in Mic’s class, face first into his desk, choking on vomit and seizing on the floor with his nose gushing blood. No fucking wonder he was so exhausted, no wonder his nose, no longer broken, still ached, and his friends were so fucking beside themselves.
He doesn’t sleep very well that night, and neither do any of his friends, he finds out as everyone walks quietly to class together the day after with bags under their eyes. If Sero and Bakugo both slip a hand into his as they walk, nervous at the newness of the action but looking like they were doing it to comfort them more than Kaminari, well, he’s still annoyed about the reason, but he isn’t going to complain about it out loud.)
Then there were “big ones”. He’d only had three of these. Maybe four, now, he supposes in a small, partially conscious part of his mind. Only over loads that stand out get put into this category. These are the “probably could’ve died”, the “probably should have died” type of overloads. The ones that steal his memory, and mark his body, and leave him with lasting affects that sadly he won’t ever forget, even if the cause of them is lost to his waking brain.
(The first was when he was 6 years old, and he’d been scared by a dog that had jumped at the fence next to him, the sudden aggressive barking startling him and sending him tripping backwards into a puddle. The street lamp and a car parked next to him had both exploded, and to this day his memory of the following few weeks was dark and hazy. All he remembered was the dog’s barking, and the cold of the water, then heat, then blank nothingness, then he was crying in the living room because his mum had just told him he’d turned 7 a week before. He’s still afraid of dogs, wishes he wasn’t scared every time he’s forced to admire them from a distance.
The second had been when he was 8, and he’d been pressured into shoving a fork into an outlet because some of his classmates had wanted to see what would happen. Ten city blocks had lost power, he’d lost another week of memory and had only been spared from expulsion because of his classmates admitting that they’d made him do it, and because of his condition afterwards – it had taken nearly two months before his motor functions had been declared “practically back to normal” by his doctor. The faint white, once bruise-purple Lichtenberg scar running from his left palm all the way to his shoulder was the only physical reminder from this particular incident, and part of why he’d decided early on that he would never, ever try become a hero who used a weapon that he’d need to touch in order to use.
The third had been a few months before the U.A. entrance exam, and while initially he hadn’t suffered quite as bad as previous times, that’d been the one that had left a constant reminder about the dangers of over using his innate abilities. A scar was one thing, a fear of loud barking was another, but brain damage was a whole new ball park. He still doesn’t know what had caused happened, probably never would, but when his brain had switched on, he’d been in a hospital. He couldn’t hear anything aside from loud ringing, and his limbs were aching and his mouth tasted like blood, but he could see doctor’s mouth moving as he spoke; could see the many machines he was hooked up to, saw the bandages on his arm; could see his mother’s tears and weak smile as she’d sat beside him and patted his hand when he’d reached for her. Words like “suspected mugging” and “over load” and “permanent, quirk-induced ADHD and possible long term motor-function issues” had swirled around his confused brain, not really having any meaning until it was a week before he was supposed to be taking the entrance exam and he was fighting with his mother in the kitchen because she didn’t think he’d actually make it in to U.A. anymore, “with your conditions” and she’d rather him give up on his own accord rather than take the exam and have his dream be taken away by someone else.)
Whenever Kami finds himself overloading, which he is now, he almost finds it calming, in a way. It’s not quite peaceful – even if his mind has lost control over his body, it doesn’t mean he’s disconnecting from it, he still feels everything in some part of his brain – but it’s something close, a kind of release. All he can do is mentally sit back and “enjoys the ride”, as he’d once described it to his boyfriends. He knows that this will be a bad ride, that he’s probably going to lose his memory again, that this might make his ADHD worse or ruin his motor functions again, or maybe end up with some new thing to make his day to day life just a little bit harder. He knows he’s been training, he knows his tolerance is so much better than when he was 6, or 8, or 14, he knows that he’s strong and will only keep getting stronger, but… but…
Well, he can’t actually get stronger though, if he ruins himself too much, ends things before they really start. His friends have poked fun at his brief moments of cowardice before, but fear clings to him, less of what danger is coming at him and more at the danger he poses to himself, or his friends. He can’t grow stronger if he’s dead. He hopes he doesn’t actually die, as a barely registered warning of “potential brain death” slips into his mind briefly, before it’s yanked back out of his brain just like every other thought he currently has does, each flicking in and gone in an instant, just like the white-hot pain and then numb nothing continue to flick back and forth throughout his body. Everything and nothing happening simultaneously, overwhelmingly shocking pain and total, complete, perfect emptiness.
Bakugo, his beautiful Katsuki, is fighting so hard, full of fire and determination and raw power. Hanta had been fighting so hard as well, before the white haired, overpowered asshole fuck had sent his amazing best friend flying along the mountain side. Fuck, everyone was trying so hard, some harder than they’d fought in their lives. He’d seen the smoke in the distance, something that looked like a red/blue laser lighting up the area where Kirishima and the others had run off to, the light somehow so much darker than the brilliance of Aoyama’s own navel laser, and the flames. He’d seen the giant cloud of dust and the roars of Dark Shadow to the right side of the island, and he’d sent a mental prayer in to the void that tomorrow he’d be okay and everyone would be okay too, and that he’d get a glimpse of Ashido’s crazy, gorgeous grin, that he’d be able to poke fun at Tokoyama’s hair. He hopes they all make it. He hopes he remembers it, if he even gets to see tomorrow.
Kaminari hopes, worries for an instant that he won’t, thought gone the next. He thinks back to Katsuki and Midoriya talking about the white haired asshole fuck controlling the weather – the memory flickers – he remembers grinning down at the kids and making a joke about being a lightning rod – there’s another flicker of physical pain as his body convulses – “no one controls lightning like I do, don’t sweat it, kiddos!”
And then the lightning stops, he’s empty, everything hurts, fucking fuck it hurts so fucking bad, and awareness flickers like everything else inside him does. Kaminari’s burning eyes catch a glimpse of blue streaks and blackish-grey clouds swirling overhead, he tastes blood and nothing, sees lovely, beautiful, sad, hurt, angry crimson eyes and blond hair, sees green lightning, sees a flash of the ground and maybe a body in black, yellow and white in the dirt, far too far away for Kaminari’s liking.
Then it’s all gone.
Then it’s all back, and gone again in a moment.
Relief; burning; a twitch of his fingers, and his back arching hard enough that his head, hands and feet are his only contact points to the ground; and then it’s gone, muscles released of all tension.
Kaminari hears a tinny whining, and a weird rumbling, and booms that echo in his ears – or maybe they just echo everywhere – and he hears a whimper close beside him and something a bit like it’s dragging, or being dragged. He can’t feel anything, or see yet, and for some reason electricity isn’t thrumming through his veins quite like it normally is, and he has no idea where he is right now, but he can hear – which is unusual as that usually comes in last – and what he hears is both confusing and concerning as fuck.
He hears himself mumbling, thinks he might actually be close to saying actual words, and then he focuses on the choked gasp beside him. He has nothing but his hearing to go on, but he knows in an instant who it is. Even if his focus is shitty on goods days – and he figures that today is a very bad, not good day – he knows it’s Sero. It’s Hanta. It’s his Hanta and there’s bad noises and Hanta sounds hurt, and so every ounce of awareness Kaminari has focuses so hard on that quiet gasp that he barely notices that he’s starting to feel his fingers again.
He isn’t sure if he’s moving his body or if it’s still involuntary movements, but suddenly his entire physical being lights up with stabbing heat and there’s hard ground and rocks underneath him that dig into his skin, and there’s trembling hands clinging to his arm that he curls towards. He slurs some kind of vague noise and he knows that Hanta hears him calling to him.
“F-fuck, D-denki, holy… god, oh g-god… look at you…” A hand covered in grit is pressing against his face, and it’s so nice even if the touch absolutely kills him, sensation searing across his fried nerves. He thinks he flinches, isn’t sure if his eyes are open or closed. Kaminari doesn’t know what’s happening, can barely focus on trying to form coherent thoughts, finds it easier just to vaguely register what he can hear and feel for now. If he made a list of what he did know, it’s that he’s overloaded himself, and that there’s some kind of battle or something, and that Hanta is hurt, and that Katsuki isn’t here, where the fuck is Kats.
“K-k-k-kaaaa…tsss…k-k…”
Hanta hushes him, whimpers, sounds so fucking pained and tired that it makes Kaminari’s heart squeeze. “Ssh, Denks… it’s okay… it’s gonna be okay, mi amor…” He hears heavy emotion in Hanta’s voice, knows that Hanta doesn’t really believe what he’s telling him. Feels a flash of fear, worried he’s fucked up somehow, but the fear morphs and grows as his heart pounds. It’s fear for Hanta; it’s fear for Katsuki who isn’t here but Kaminari thinks might be close because occasionally the booming in the distance sounds awfully familiar; it’s fear for whoever else might be around them. It’s fear of whatever fuck has made his beautiful, laid back boyfriend sound so unlike himself.
It’s fear because there’s something big and scary and bad happening and Kaminari is blind, on fire, he feels like he’d given Zeus a high five, and he can hear just how fucking terrified Hanta is, letting out choked and cut off gasps, something close to a sob that stabs at Kami’s pounding heart like a knife.
“Haaaan…” Fire creeps up his limbs and his side as Hanta shifts, lies next to him, groans and hisses weakly as he moves, wraps his large body around Kaminari like a filthy, gangly blanket. His own arm shifts, feels dirt and dust on his boyfriend’s back, feels rips in his fucking hero costume, and hopes his sight comes back soon.
They shake, and he mouths his boyfriends’ names like a never ending chant. Hanta rocks them, the ground rocks them too, and when his eyes switch back on, he wishes they hadn’t. He starts to sob, when he sees broken earth and hell and destruction, and the dried blood crusted to his boyfriend’s face. Hanta quickly pulls his face towards his own, kisses him hard, forces him to keep his gaze locked with his own. Fingers clutch and they shake, lying on ruined ground, looking only at each other and flinching when their third love’s booming explosions sound off in the distance.