Chapter Text
It’s raining.
The sky is shitting water like it’s been held back from the bathroom for days.
And everyone wants to go off school grounds and buy bread. Because it’s the weekend, and yesterday Aizawa-sensei actually encouraged us to get a life, so it’s not because we’re addicted, and for some god-spiteful reason you’re the only one who knows how to drive —
And for all that Denki is very bad at saying no in general, there’s also this: the fact that Denki definitely, wholeheartedly does not intend to set foot outside of the dorms on this fine day.
Weekend.
Maybe whole week.
“It’s just the rain,” Denki tries to explain without explaining. “And the lightning.”
Kirishima winces in sympathy. “Oh yikes, man. Yeah, I can definitely see why you wouldn’t want to go out in this weather, considering… you know…” He gestures vaguely at Denki.
“Zappy powers,” Denki agrees, plastering an unabashed smile on his face. “Kind of makes me go a little haywire. I wouldn’t want to fry the car.”
Not that Denki’s ever fried a car — hell, he’s even hotwired a few stolen ones, those of which are his greatest, carefully-untraced accomplishments. He’s just saying that, hypothetically —
“Maybe you should get better control of yourself for once,” Bakugou mutters under his breath. The bread-desirers have enough tact to pretend they didn’t hear him at all, considering that their outage actually hinges on whether or not they can stay on their transportation’s good side, but Denki knows better; and even though he knows Constipated Explosions-Up-My-Ass Bakugou doesn’t really mean anything by it, it still stings.
Like.
Ouch.
For a minute there, Denki had actually thought he’d escaped his perpetual case of everything he’s ever fucked up following his brain everywhere it and its two braincells travel, except of course that’s impossible when Bakugou is always right when it comes to anything that rationally disregards the whole idea of emotions and other such trivials. Including this case.
(But then maybe his mother wouldn’t have been among those pouring rocks, and maybe his father wouldn’t have had to come to the realization that his kid would never amount to anything but disaster, and maybe Denki would have a name better than what it is.)
Denki still hasn’t gotten over it, no matter how he tells Kaiyo otherwise. He hasn’t really gotten over it, even if everyone at Yuuei doesn’t seem to know, or even notice at all.
It’s so strange, really. For a bunch of kids who are supposedly among the smartest, most talented, generally capable and undoubtedly selfless high schoolers in the country, they’re also horrifically unobservant when it comes to the rapidly fluctuating emotional state of their classmates — whether it be the traumatic leftovers of the last months that spill over in someone’s night or the spiraling insanity that plagues their local phone charger, it never really fails to strike Denki as something of irony.
Nobody can see him losing his mind, and Denki would distinctly prefer to cling to the illusion as long as the lightning lasts.
“Yeah,” Sero breaks in, amused. “Try to not blow up the microwave, alright bro? I need my two a.m. instant ramen.”
“And we all know how Sero gets when he doesn’t have his two a.m. ramen,” Ashido helpfully inputs unhelpfully, teeth bared in a smile. “Why do you even get up at two a.m., anyway?”
Sero promptly elbows her.
She immediately kicks him in the shin, hard.
So Denki looks Bakugou in the eye, tilts his lips up, and says, “I wouldn’t dream of it, Blasty Boy.”
It’s not that Denki will actually go haywire , per say. Contrary to popular belief, he’s actually got a fair enough grasp on his quirk to make sure nothing like the incident happens again, and whenever the intrusion of the perpetrating event slips forth again, he knows for sure that the only one getting hurt will be him.
Making sure he sticks to schedule, of course.
More like he’lll be holed up in his room for the next eight hours before classes start again, very much in the state of Shinsou-level insomnia until the storm passes — which will probably last a solid three or so days, if judging by the intensifying sparking of electricity in his veins; which will, indeed, also be very much Not Good for Denki’s general state of existence, considering his inherent inability to focus on anything at all, let alone when he’s sleep deprived.
Denki can successfully predict that he’ll be shut in his room with at least twenty batteries plugged into his mouth for output and a charring pillow over his head, flat on the uncarpeted segment of his floor where he can bury himself into the staticless ground and let time float away like Uraraka snatching his Switch. He won’t be on his phone, because he definitely doesn’t want to break it — considering that he’s fried enough of them during thunderstorms that Kaiyo has literally banned him from so much as checking the time on it —, and he won’t be drinking or eating despite his carefully harvested candy/energy-drink stash under the bed, and he’ll be doing everything in his power to not throw up.
And to feel vaguely like a human being, though that’s not exactly the most frequently accomplished endeavor he’s chased after during thunderstorms.
Yes, it’ll be excellent. Nobody dares to try to check on him in general because he’s one of four in Class 1-A to get away with effectively locking his door beyond the attempts of bypassing that everyone around has somehow fulfilled, so he doesn’t need to worry about getting caught.
Denki peaks in attractiveness at these trying times. Eyebags and lopsided eyelids and frizzy hair and all.
Man, being a real human person with a real human body that needs to exist is the worst.
“After all,” Denki finishes smugly, not entirely sure what to be smug about, “I need my two a.m. ramen, too.”
Bakugou scoffs, the solitary non-sleep-deprived teenager in the entirety of these dorms (excluding Yaomomo and Iida, of course, in all their shared rich-kid galore). “Whatever,” he grumbles. “I don’t need you indigents’ shitty bread, anyway.”
“C’mon,” Ashido wheedles immediately to Denki, dark eyes wide. “Please? It’s wet outside. You wouldn’t want us to get wet. You know — your dearest, loveliest, selfless, favorite friends.”
“He said no,” Bakugou retorts, probably not intending to make Denki feel better but actually very effectively doing exactly that. (Definitely, it’s definitely; if the guy ever gains any competent emotional awareness, Denki will eat his socks with soy sauce.) “Let’s just go somewhere else.”
“But the bread,” Kirishima laments exaggeratedly. “Bro. Love of my life.”
Sero collapses backwards onto the couch from his perch on the armrest and flings his hands uselessly in the air. “Take pity on us poor schoolchildren. Not everyone is so rich to afford actual restaurants.”
“Poor schoolchildren my ass . At least poor schoolchildren have more goddamned self-dignity than beefwitted bread gripers,” Bakugou grits through his teeth, completely ignoring the implications that only rich people can go to restaurants.
Ashido gasps in mock-horror and Kirishima pulls Sero back by the knobbly elbows from biting Bakugou like a feral dog, and the lightning strikes again.
Before, it was just a dull throb — yet another impulse traveling up Denki’s bare feet and into his heart where he can feel it slip around and race for a few hyperactive minutes. Now, it splits frantically like timelapsed branches on a tree, each and every sakura petal spreading to the bruising tips of his fingers and toes, leaving his knees a little weak and his head a little dizzy as the minutes of his friends’ arguing drags onwards.
He flinches as Ashido’s voice escalates, cracking through the shards of electricity and crackling down his spine.
Denki needs to go.
“Alright, well, my homework is calling for me,” he informs his friends abruptly, trying to not sound like he’s dying right here and now because he isn’t . He had no plans to do his homework at all, and certainly not now, but he laughs awkwardly and finger-guns them even as his internally creaking limbs are screaming at him to stop. “Try to not have too much fun without the entire party, yeah?”
That’s also a lie. Denki is self-aware enough to recognize that his presence doesn’t really mean that much to his classmates.
Bakugou’s eyes slant ever so slightly at that, leaving him wracking his brain for whatever might’ve been arousing of mild curiosity, before the expression flickers away so fast it might’ve been a mirage of lightning, and the other kids’ bickering is abruptly shut off by a borderline-hollered, “Shut the fuck up.”
They shut up. Tactfully.
Denki pretends it doesn’t hurt when they leave without him anyway, opting to leave him behind on their ideally-innoxious expedition. After all, his only real purpose in being invited along was as the driver, and he can’t even drive for them when he’s barely contained within himself.
(So how soon will the tightrope of toleration be tipped into the circus ring of insignificance? They’re only still interacting out of obligation.)
Think of us when you’re doing homework in your dry, warm room, Sero tells him, jagged smile stretching across his face. I’d slap you on the back, but I’d rather not get zapped.
Ha, that rhymes! he almost says, except they’re gone by the time the haze fades out and he can remember how human speech works.
Oh.
He really wishes a friend would stay sometime, but that’s always been too much to ask, he supposes.
⌁⌁⌁
It’s raining.
Denki doesn’t like it.
Rain is wet, and cold, and generally miserable to be in. Bright green child-sized galoshes aren’t tall enough to prevent the massive puddles from pouring in between his freezing toes, and his poncho hood wasn’t pulled up soon enough to prevent the water from integrating neatly into his splayed out hair. Mom doesn’t have an umbrella, because she personally thinks that they’re impractical and useless and attractors of lightning, and after his whining for a solid five minutes about how wet everything is, she hauls him into her arms and ineffectively tucks him beneath her bulky red raincoat as they set off for the car.
Denki, realizing that he’s probably reached the point of making her kind of upset at him, remains silent as he curls his arms around her neck like a clingy monkey and buries his face into her chest. She’s wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater, one that she always reminds him that his grandma knit, the swirly fuzz going a little static against his fingers as he brushes against the soft yarn, and Denki quietly thinks to himself that he could probably trace these patterns forever.
Mom grumbles and shifts the grocery bags on her shoulder. “Brat,” she mutters. “This is the last time this is happening. You’re a big kid.”
They’re full of rice crackers and xiao mantou and puff snacks, Calpico and mochi and dango, because it’s Denki’s sixth birthday and he’s going to have a party at the grassy park across from their house. The plasticky wrappers crinkle a bit with the motion, causing her to let out yet another huff of irritation as she tightens the raincoat around her body, and the sound of sloshing in the bottle of processed lychee juice accompanies the cold orchestra of the rainstorm.
Denki is quiet as he can possibly be. Mom doesn’t get mad, not really, but she gets tired a lot and sometimes snaps out in ways that hurt more than sticking his fingers in power sockets.
Suddenly, there’s this burst of something vibrating beneath his skin. It’s discomforting and sharp and a little bit painful, but he bites his tongue and doesn’t let himself say anything because he can handle the sensation. His heart picks up with the racing feeling, thudding weirdly loudly in his ears, and his hands feel warmer than they should from playing with a yellow-yarned sweater. It’s kind of a heady-inducing feeling, he starts to realize as he lulls further into the increasing humming buzz rippling gently between his fingers like cupped koi ponds in the spring, and not entirely bad by conclusion.
He giggles as the tingling gets a little louder, scrapes against his insides a little more. Mom stiffens and starts walking faster, rain starting to slip into her awkwardly wrapped coat and splashing into Denki’s already-wet hair.
“Denki,” she says, voice soft against the rattling rain.
Denki hums, resists the urge to poke her hair with that intensifying droning that makes him feel really weirdly excited. His fingers are shaking a little bit now, unable to draw at the yellow sweater Mom wears, and as he guiltily pulls them away, the threads are floaty and coming away with his hand.
I’m a magnet? he realizes gleefully, fiddling with a zipper instead and feeling it vibrate under his touch. He can’t wait to tell tiny, incompetent baby Raiko — she’s going to be so amazingly jealous.
“Denki, baby, listen to me right now,” Mom orders quietly, shifting the grocery bags to one shoulder and pulling a pair of rubber gloves out of her purse that she always carries around for some reason. “I’m going to put you on the ground, and we’re going to run to the car as fast as we can, okay? And if we don’t make it, don’t touch anyone. Not even me. I’ll be right behind you.”
She looks at the sky, and starts counting.
Denki whines and stubbornly holds on tighter because the ground is wet and slippery and he doesn’t want to trudge his small green-rubber feet through their sluggish puddles any longer as the rain gets heavier, pouring sleets of dark grey on his body. Didn’t Mom pick him up so they could get to the car sooner? Now she’s saying that she wants him to walk all the way there, on his own.
What a jerk move.
So he does what any five year old would do:
“No,” he declares automatically, kicking his feet and the rain-insulating rainboots off with the action.
(If we don’t make it never actually set into his ears, and even if it had, he wouldn’t have understood anyway.)
“Don’t wanna run,” Denki continues brattily. “Or walk. Walking is hard.”
Mom inhales, and starts trying to pry his hands away from her neck. “Fine,” she grits out. “But I need you to get off me, Denki, alright? You need to stand on your own, just for a minute. I’ll get your shoes for you after. Let go.”
No, Denki tries to repeat, except the penetrating scent of hand sanitizer being poured up his already-underwater nose strikes his whole body. His lips don’t move, and his head hurts, and his vision whites out and he can’t feel anything at all except the warmth of his mother’s yellow sweater twined between his numbly stinging fingers.
⌁⌁⌁
People don’t really know this, and Denki doesn’t really make it a point to advertise it either, but he almost always feels absolutely, entirely, unequivocally insane.
Like, not in the sort of I think I’m going to snap and kill everyone in the room . No — Denki’s general feelings of insanity stems from an entirely different place, the sort that he wishes could get bundled up and stored away in an insane asylum’s straightjacket as an excuse for everything innately wrong with his head and body.
Maybe more among the lines of I think I’m going to have a breakdown and accidentally kill everyone in the room because it’s an inevitable part of how I exist , and also in the way of his head constantly overflowing with thoughts in a way that no one else’s really seems to do (and in the way of constantly wondering just when people are going to catch up and leave him in the dregs of the dust storm, and in the way of it having been way too long since he last felt halfway like a human being with real human emotions). It doesn’t help that he’s been pretty consistently referred to by such flattering terms by many, many adults in his severely overrated life.
For all that Kaminari Denki is (mostly) a genuine, sociable flirt at heart, he is also very deeply insecure. And fucked in the head, in all the most inconvenient ways.
Not that he would admit that, because the whole humor of #SelfDeprecation died out ages ago, and so if he were to trash-talk himself on the regularity that he so wishes to, then his really-nice-classmates might get worried. And Denki doesn’t like it when people are worried about him , because there are so many other people worth worrying about a whole lot more, and okay — maybe he just doesn’t like it when people care about him.
Being cared about means that people will notice things. And it also makes you all the more susceptible to the impending crash of reality when they notice too much.
He’s not worth it, when there are so many other people who need that care more and so many people that he’s left in a place of needing that care. And of course, the fact that people need help because of him stems from his insanity and curse of a quirk.
Denki is insane, and that’s not really a new fact to most people either.
(After all, most people don’t accidentally kill their mother at the ripe age of six and end up being a scared kid in a world that’s scared of them.)
If his class had known him when he was younger, they would’ve known he’s borderline certifiable. All the kids from primary school knew that from his brain to his history, and so did all the kids from his junior high school because someone had leaked said history before he could successfully cultivate becoming a human person in their eyes; and the only reason Class 1-A doesn’t know is because he’s been so careful in being everything he wasn’t before this year.
It wasn’t exactly kept under the wraps — before moving out to Saitama and into Kaiyo’s somewhat crummy neighborhood of predetermined preadolescent delinquency, the press had gotten the wind of it all, and there was really no way to keep that sort of information from adult teachers who'd had adult responsibility over him. So they’d known, and they hadn’t exactly been the kindest about it either through the carefully reserved stares from the first days of school; and unfortunately, seven year old kids are unfairly perceptive, so they’d caught on rather quickly that this is the murdery lightning-kid.
Considering how explicitly his quirk is advertised through his shaky hands and attention span and hair, it’s not really all that surprising in retrospect.
Denki never really stood a chance at all from the moment he was born with electricity in his veins.
(They probably didn’t even need that as an excuse, but it was nice enough to attribute to a quirk for a moment when he was younger.)
Denki is very bad at being a person because people never liked him, so he didn’t really like them back, and it was a pretty decent arrangement all around back when he was thirteen. He’d tried a few times, sure, but it’d never ended well.
He even still has a notebook on that.
Twelve year old Kaminari Denki’s guide to the art of other human people:
- Don’t interact.
- If step A fails, then don’t get attached.
- People lie all the time and are very unsettlingly good at it.
- “Friends” never last.
Denki was pretty good at following those four baseline rules, from twelve through fifteen. It’s not that complicated and never has been.
And things changed, and so he adjusted the rules accordingly.
Fifteen year old Kaminari Denki’s guide to the art of other human people:
- Avoidance of conversations centralized around you.
- Stay unnoteworthy but not useless because at least there’ll be a reason to keep you around temporarily.
- If you’re kept around, it’s never more than toleration.
Friends never last.
Of course, there’s more. There’s Don’t talk too much or people will express the fact that they’re tired of you, and there’s also Forgiveness is a facade; the things you say and do will never leave, and there’s definitely Give them what they want to see.
There’s Don’t be a real human person who has high-maintenance feelings when in the presence of others and Turn your personality into something that people can actually interact with and Keep so many shitty jokes on your tongue that your perceived personality is nothing but an unholy plethora of said shitty jokes — which is basically a summation of staying shallow and unworthy of real attention despite the stupid, selfish craving for it.
They’re oddly specific, yes, but also it’s very relevant based on a number of shitty situations Denki would make sure to defend should he ever delve into this gloriously effective manual.
With more and more time spent in the presence of other human people, it’s led to Never be anything more or less than the comedian and Don’t validate yourself because then people will recognize your oversized ego for what it is ; but most of all, it’s This will never last.
The rules always fluctuate, but that one will always remain a constant.
The idea of friends will never last.
And now, he’s neck deep in a wormhole where he’s simultaneously laughingstock and also the most human he’s ever been, at Yuuei’s curriculum full of kids who are somehow kinder than all the kids he’s known before. He’s the center of the joke from every math question he doesn’t know how to answer and every seizure that paralyzes his bones in place after the lightning, and while it’s not necessarily attention that makes him feel completely good, it’s still attention. Nobody’s ever given him attention in his life, not since the incident, and he’ll take it all in if it’s what he’s given, because who is he to object?
Sure, maybe constantly striving for attention from somebody at all is kind of a generally shitty mindset, and maybe Denki’s big mouth is incapable of warranting exclusively good attention. But talking is fun, and people aren’t actually mean here.
(There’s a small, very small part of him that thinks that being the butt of the joke isn’t quite the stellar goal he should be shooting for in high school — especially at a hero high school, the most renowned in the country —, but it’s better than being the social outcast commonly considered to be a mass murderer, so he doesn’t complain and swallows his words like too-big suppressant pills and sour water.)
He inflates his personality, makes it big and colorful and everything he isn't (or hasn't been? He's not totally sure how it works, if he's always been this way but emotionally/socially repressed). And people at Yuuei buy it. They don't question him, don't second guess his place in society or the dirt of person he might naturally be.
So what if everyone thinks he’s shallow? It’s better than being the outcast. Better than being dangerous. Being insane.
Denki does everything within his 3.4 million volts of repressed power in his body to be the reliable constant in his classmates’ lives that they don’t need to think about as another person with more human feelings, who will give them everything.
Denki does everything he can to pretend to be a human person with normal human feelings, and nobody at Yuuei ever seems to notice that he’s losing his mind.
⌁⌁⌁
The lightning strikes.
Once, twice, three times; and every time, Denki screams up his vocal chords even after they’ve gone dry and somewhere out there, his mouth is spitting up blood.
Denki has been designed to be a lightning rod from before he even entered this life — a conductor, a generator; a mess of an overactive nervous system wired like a child’s crayon scribbles across dozens of sheets of crumbling paper. His quirk is something that his body has been prepared for since before it emerged, because if he wasn’t already born this way, he would’ve been dead the moment his electrocytes properly sparked up. He’s zapped himself before, cried for hours after doing it for the first time and gradually gotten used to the numb static that comes with the sensation.
But being struck by lightning is entirely different.
It’s paralyzing and freezing and burning at once, a sort of energy like static against fields of fuzzy flower carpets folded out across thousands of power generators. It’s like getting stabbed with a thousand and one needles against every upstanding hair on his skin, driven deeper and deeper with every drawn out second the lightning keeps striking into the liquid ground. It’s too intense and instant to catalogue into real human feelings or condense into real human words, but it seems to last forever as it drags through every pore of his skin and every vein of blood underneath.
He can’t even breathe. He’s drowning, and it’s not even raining hard enough to fill a swimming cup of water, let alone a pair of small lungs.
The six year old lightning rod is screaming because everything is on fire, and he can’t feel his body at all and slowly, he can’t feel his mind anymore. Denki is nothing more than a bundle of living cells akin to a plant with no pain receptors or thoughts, with the ability to leak tears from the corner of golden eyes and cough out blood.
And no one reaches for him, because who would?
(If Denki were there, he wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have saved himself at all.
He would’ve put himself out of his misery.)
Electricity is oozing through his veins, sparking off his skin and wreathing in arcing yellow light through the pouring raindrops.
Denki doesn’t see it at all. He’s still clinging to his mother, fingernails digging bloody scratches into her arms and face buried in her chest, and completely unaware of how they tip forward and into the concrete with a sickening Crack! as he holds on with every seizing muscle in his body.
He’s deranged, in the thunderstorm that crackles around his being. Wild, dripping with electricity like water down a drainpipe. Insane.
(And it was so gorgeous, too, from afar where you can’t hear the people dropping to their knees or see the dying child.)
⌁⌁⌁
“Oi, you finally joining the party of Can’t Sleep At Night?”
Shinsou pauses in the frame to the kitchen, hand resting on the side, before sighing. “You didn’t see me,” he says to Denki without hesitation, not bothering to even attempt activating his quirk.
Denki blinks, not really getting it. Well, he does get it, in a way, but like —
“You know you’re like, allowed to be awake whenever you want, right?” Denki asks, fully aware that Aizawa The Hypocrite would have his head for making such a presumptuous, wildly inaccurate claim. There’s a cup of half-spicey instant ramen cradled between his palms, very much untouched because sometimes Denki gets distracted concentrating on all the ways to arrange the digital clock and tends to forget why he’s here in the first place, and the wafting scent of it has already faded with the rapidly ceasing warmth it once held. He puts it down, turns the rest of his attention to the doorway. “It’s not illegal to raid the kitchen at 2:00 a.m.. I’m here all the time at 2:00 a.m..”
The purple-haired boy scoffs lightly, a little rough. “Right.”
Bullshit, remains unsaid.
Bullshit to which, Denki isn’t entirely certain, but he doesn’t exactly feel like getting into a pointless argument at this hour. Denki’s own insomnia tends to stem from a high place of his own electricity, something that he wasn’t quite aware classifies as insomnia until he got here, but in terms of the legality of raiding the dorms’ kitchen…
Well.
Denki tilts his head and looks a little closer, and is that redness in the gleam of his eye the natural state of sleep deprivation the boy perpetually exists in, or is it the remnants of tears? If it’s the latter, Denki would have to be a complete, merciless dick to let the guy go back to his room all alone, especially since he probably came here to get water or something and is now too embarrassed to be in the presence of other human people.
Right. Everyone in these dorms is fucked up in one way or another, and those are definitely the remnants of wiped away tears. And Denki likes to imagine that he’s very good at saying approximately the right things to people when they’re sad, even if he doesn’t really believe them himself, and Shinsou is so fascinating in the way he coils up and releases all the pent-up emotions slinking down his spine.
“C’mon in,” Denki says, softening his voice a little and trying to pretend he knows what he’s doing. Considers taking initiative to get water, before deciding that no, Shinsou would not like being mothered like that. “If you want to talk, I’m not going to judge you for your shit.”
“No, thank you,” Shinsou reponds stiffly.
Ah, yes — the spiraling case of I don’t talk about my feelings because I’m emotionally constipated and also asking for help is the most mortifying experience a human being could ever go through . Explosion Chicken Bakugou definitely has a pretty spikey version of that stuffed up his rigid ass, and it seems like Shinsou’s got the same problem.
(And Denki is definitely above such emotional repression, because he is. Super good at feeling things. Like the normal human person he is.)
“Give me your best,” Denki offers, sitting back on the spinny pink stool that Ashido must’ve aggressively monetarily coerced Yaoyorazu into producing.
“People like you will never get it,” Shinsou says lowly, turning away from the lamplight and Denki.
Denki tilts his head and waits. There’s that lull, the part that Shinshou wants to fill up, but isn’t quite sure if he should, and Denki has inspected enough human beings to understand that they’re words that need to be vomited up before he ends up sick.
“You’re — You’re naturally good. You’re flashy and nice and associated with light, in a way that society likes. People like me?” He grimaces. “We’re fucked. Nobody wants us. Not even family.”
Denki ignores the unusually nice things for his deflated ego Shinsou’s saying about him in favor of focusing on the second part of it all. Nobody wants us. Not even family.
Definitely not family.
Denki knows about Shinsou’s family, to an extent. He’s forcibly drawn Shinsou into enough conversation to get him started on the uphill shithole that is Class 1-A, given enough concept of friendship to gently tip the fish bowl out into the wild and send the boy out into gaining a social life better than Denki’s own, because all he really needs is a push; and in the process, he’d learned… more personal information than had been intended to be released, probably. Including the fact that some parents are just awful — not in the way of just up and leaving, but rather the sort who hurt their children.
And that’s not cool, but he understands part of it: Nobody wants us. Not even family.
“I, um.” Denki looks away, at the kitchen lights reflecting on the shiny floor, not really sure if the other boy actually wants him to impose his oversized lungs and input on the situation, but it feels right to. Like it would be wrong to just leave it there, and let him turn and leave and trudge back upstairs to his room to cry alone without a cup to replenish. “Yeah. I get it.”
“Get what?” Shinsou demands harsly, lines in his body all defensive and angry but really just confused, so Denki shrugs and pushes his sharp discomfort to the back of his mind.
“You know what happens when people get struck by lightning? Like, a lot of consecutive times? In very conductive rain and wet pavement?”
Distilled water isn’t conductive — it’s pure, neutral. Rainwater is full of small acids, swaying in motion; falling apart into ions, and pulling sparks along.
Shinsou’s eyes widen ever so slightly, and Denki barrels on with his useless, unfiltered mouth before he can stop himself because fuck if he just wishes someone here would understand how terrifyingly dangerous his very existence actually is. If only someone would see how he’s losing his mind, how it’s been lost years ago.
Maybe this will be it, to get him out of this course and back to the places of empty despair. Denki was never meant to be anything better.
“Cardiac arrest and epilepsy,” Denki lists off bluntly, curling his fingers inwards so he doesn’t start apathetically ticking off the damage he caused to the innocent people like a checklist of items he needs to get done in the day. He doesn’t want to know what he looks like, in the limelight of the kitchen at 2:00 a.m. with the yellow dancing in his hair and dents under his eyes and trembling fists at his sides. “Cataracts. Deafness. Broken bones. Mass hospitalization. Funerals.”
My mom, too, and my whole family with that.
“... Oh,” Shinsou manages awkwardly.
“ ‘Oh’ is approximately correct,” Denki agrees, fighting back the stupid urge to laugh. There’s nothing amusing about this situation, really — not when Shinsou is standing here after everything his family put him through, hearing about all the fucked-up shit his classmate did as a six year old. ( This is why they called you insane.) “But it didn’t really get like… that.”
(But it could’ve, if he’d stayed. He’s old enough to know that now. He’s so, so lucky that Kaiyo took him in, even after everything he did.)
“The point is, I…” What is the point? I know what you mean, to be rejected by everyone around you because of who you are, except you never did anything bad and you didn’t deserve it. I did. “I know it’s different, but — well.” Denki shrugs, again, trying to feign indifference but getting the feeling that he’s completely failing the act and pushing the murmurs further beneath the grainy sand in his mind. “Kids at my school knew. It wasn’t exactly kept under the wraps, though I know that some people tried. And well, it kind of followed me through the years, so I get it.”
Everyone knew. I tried to start over in junior high, except everyone still knew somehow and it left me the way I always was. Maybe it’s just because of how I am, but it’s easier to pretend it’s because of the people I hurt. Nobody bullied me, but nobody let themselves look at me long enough to see my eyes so they wouldn’t have to know if I was human or not, and the invisibility isn’t the same.
“Being alienated because of your quirk,” Shinsou offers. There’s something in the gleam of his eyes, like he can hear every unsaid word running through Denki’s mind, and it’s both disconcerting and oddly comforting.
“Yeah, that.”
(No, not really, because you’re so much better than me and you’re safe and kind and caring and in control, and how can I even dare compare myself to you? It’s not even the natural state of my quirk — it’s what happened because I had no control.)
They stand in silence, the microwaved cup of shitty ramen still between them and going cold on the countertop. Denki doesn’t really feel like moving forward to touch it so much anymore, not after that very unappetizing conversation, and settles for shoving his hands in his pockets. Glances at the ceiling, the clock that reads 2:07 a.m.; taps his foot.
Sometimes, Denki forgets how awkward it is to exist when he’s so caught up with everything around him.
Suddenly, Shinsou steps forward, lowers his face to inspect the cup. “This looks like shit,” the boy declares abruptly, picking it up and shoving it back in the microwave.
Before Denki can protest that that was his very effort-ful efforts of making food at this hour, Shinsou slams the door shut and starts reheating it, looking so incredibly chill that he almost falls over with envy.
A silence hovers over them, not exactly uncomfortable.
Denki chews on his lip.
Then, Shinsou takes the ramen back out, snaps a conveniently placed pair of chopsticks in half, and with a completely deadpan, Todoroki-eating-soba-esque expression on his face, starts shoveling Denki’s 2:00 a.m.-prepared ramen into his mouth. Like a complete, utter bitch who did not just have a heartfelt bonding experience with his now ramen-robbed classmate.
“Give that back!” Denki shrieks indignantly, lurching forward to snatch at the cup, and oh, that shit-eating soft lilt of a smirk is not what Denki came here for.
Denki did not come down here to acquire yet another stupid attraction to yet another stupid classmate at this stupid school full of hot people, yet he can feel his cheeks going red at the sight because dammit, he’s ready to swoon off the deep end at that goddamned smug, pretty face alone.
Shinsou pretends to ponder that for a moment. Regards the floppy paper cup and the floppy paper kid in front of him.
The absolute fucker.
“I think not,” he finally says mildly. “Not until you figure out that that shit’s not your fault.”
“Wh — What?” Denki sputters, still flushing over Pretty Hot Boy’s long-vanished expression. “What do you even mean?”
Shinsou rolls his eyes like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You know perfectly what I mean, Kaminari. I can physically hear your self-destructive mindset through the kitchen tiles. I’m not giving this back until you’re done with that, because it’s pathetic.”
“... That’s like, the nicest thing anyone under the age of thirty has ever said to me about the incident since it happened,” Denki marvels mildly, perfectly aware that Shinsou wasn’t really looking to be nice about it, and also not intending to agree in any shape, way or form for various impersonal reasons.
Something in the other boy’s expression softens at that, before reverting back to its typical resting scowl. “Don’t get used to it.”
Denki laughs, truly and genuinely. “Of course. You’re not here to make friends, after all.”
That is, after all, a perfectly understandable desire.
⌁⌁⌁
That’s the kid who caused the power-blackout. The little shit who personally fried all those new patients and killed that poor woman. Do you even realize the collateral damage he caused with that stunt and the outage? And you volunteered us to take the shift, you dimwit.
He’s six. Stop being such a dramatic fuckhead.
He’s dangerous. Insane. Wish they’d just put him in a psych ward instead of leaving us to handle this disaster; the medical industry is full of cowards. Don’t get too close, you’re not immune to getting your brains blown out by lightning — careful! Wear some gloves and read the precautions first and suck up your tears, dammit. You’re going to get killed by him.
I read them, you paranoid ass. You're such a pussy. Bet you're wishing Boss put quirk suppressors on him.
I — No wonder they let you on the job; you’re too soft for this society. Better you than me, I suppose — I certainly don’t want to go in there. He conducted a solid 1.1 billion volts, I heard. Shit, dude, lightning’s not even supposed to have over a billion volts in it.
Haven’t you ever heard to ignore the rumor mill? Oh, right, you have the emotional maturity of a two year old. My bad.
Someone pries at his arm, leaves behind a sharp pain. Denki is pretty sure he’s supposed to open his eyes or something like that, except he can’t feel anything except the prick of a needle and a low huff from a person who’s got to be somewhere in his general vicinity.
Something’s missing. Something happened, but he can’t remember what it is — his brain is just so wretchedly empty right now.
He’s reaching forward in the fog, reaching the rainstorm on the other side of the cloudy surface, and it pulls away into darkness before he can clasp his fingers around the dark globe. Denki doesn’t know what he’s physically touching with his fingers, because the texture doesn’t feel like chunky yellow sweaters or familiar throw blankets strewn across the pillowy papasan chairs.
It’s weird how hard it is to identify anything. His fingers feel kind of like they’ve fallen asleep, the way they do after he’s shocked himself too hard (stuck his fingers too deep into the outlet out of sheer asinine curiosity), and it feels like dripping overly sweet strawberry hand sanitizer up his nostrils, down his eyes and across his face; sharp and stinging and overwhelming in every sensation, except it spirals through his body is fractals and keeps coming.
So he does what any six year old would do — “Mommy?”
It doesn’t sound quite right to his ears. Nothing sounds right to his ears.
The sounds stop. Everything is silent.
"He's conscious," the first voice finally declares, muffled in comparison to the person at the bedside.
The nicer needle-stabber scoffs, a little off in the generally tolerant tone they'd been carrying before. "How observant. Get in here, or so help me."
"He wants… his mom, " Unobservant goes on, sounding oddly surprised.
"I told you, he's six! What did you expect from a six year old? Of course he wants his mom, it’s not his fault."
There’s a shuffling sound of plastic, and then silence.
The silence drags onward and so does the silence in his thrumming body, so Denki holds his breath and tries to not scream. Needle pokes at his arm again, this time pulling out a needle that he hasn't really processed feeling at all until the sensation of its metal sliding out registers in his static veins, and with the instinctive twitch and jump off sparks, the doctor(?) person grumbles in some semblance to sympathy.
"You good there, kid?" Needle asks.
No, Denki tries to say, except it comes out as "Mmmpfh". Everything is wrong and I don't know what is, but I want my mom and I want to go home and why does everything feel like my foot fell asleep?
Very descriptive.
"Oh," Doctor Person says. "Oh, uh, okay. That's cool. This is fine."
Unobservant lets out a snort. “Real comforter, Setsuko.”
“Like you’re any better, dickhead,” Setsuko answers shortly. “Now shut up and let me do my job if you’re not going to help out.”
“Dickhead” actually goes quiet, and a rubbery finger prods at his face. “Alright, kid,” she says, a little bit roughly. “I need you to, like, say something. Stop playing dead-fish; it’s not very fun or pleasant for me to look at.”
Denki considers becoming an alive fish instead of a dead one, even though he’s very much not-dead, and he’s pretty sure Setsuko is aware of that.
“No,” he responds like a dead fish, because he can.
Dickhead makes a scowling noise, which, wow — Denki did not know that people could convey their emotions through onomatopoeias. “Stop being a brat. We don’t want to be here any more than you want to, so let’s get it over with so I can go home and your dad can pick you up and dispose of you wherever he pleases.”
“Kaiyo, I am begging you to shut the fuck up for once in your life.”
“What? You said it yourself: he’s six. I’ll say whatever shit I want to say around the kid, ‘cause he’ll forget it in half a day.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of kids being impressionable?” Setsuko presses, and Denki wants to curl up and cry because his head hurts so much and these bickering adult-people that he doesn't even know aren’t helping and he just wants his mom. He doesn’t know what’s happening or why he’s here alone in his head in a clean-smelling bed that isn’t his own and why everything hurts so much, or why he can’t remember anything that’s going on, let alone the fact that apparently he’s already six years old. “Oh, shit.”
“Where’s my mom?” Denki repeats desperately, giving up on all pretense of Hostage Situation because he’s small and afraid and very, very useless. There’s nothing worse that can happen, even though he doesn’t even know what’s happened. He tries opening his eyes, except the light is too bright and he slams the lids shut almost immediately.
Why does it hurt so much to use his eyes?
“Ah, well.” Setsuko sounds nervous in a way that she hadn’t previously. “She, uh — you did a number on her. Um.”
“You’ll probably see her soon,” Kaiyo Dickhead inputs, to which Setsuko inhales sharply.
“Kaiyo!”
… “Sorry. It’s just… I —”
“Yeah. I… know. I get it. Just try to be a little more open-minded, okay? This is a literal child we’re in charge of right now, and just because you’ve happened to have acquired a personal grudge against him doesn’t change that.”
“I know.”
And Denki doesn’t get it.
(He did a number on her? What does that even mean?)
Denki doesn’t get it at all at that point in time, with his eyes shut tight and his heart monitor flatlined because he shocked the electrical equipment too hard, isolated with a bunch of adults who are scared out of their minds by his very presence in a way that he won’t understand for another ten years.
(Later, he’ll learn over a billion volts coursed through his thrumming blood each hit, and people will always tell him that It’s a miracle you lived, kid when what they really mean is How come you’re not dead?
No. What they really mean is Why are you fine, and everyone else isn’t?
Why are you the only one who came out of it fine when you're the one who hurt us all?
Denki doesn’t know the answer himself.)
⌁⌁⌁
“Do you ever just think about death?”
It’s 4:20 a.m.. Denki is yet again tucked in Sero’s hammock like a leaf-wrapped banana slug delicacy, staring at the ceiling and counting all the ways to turn the projected red sketches of the digital clock into all the various numbers and letters, and the words tumble recklessly out of his mouth before he can stop it.
Oops.
There’s a pause and a ruffling of sheets, like Sero is shifting over to look at him through his sleepy drug-shot eyes, even though it’s pitch black other than the humming clock light.
“No, not really.”
“Like,” Denki plows on, too exhausted to fight the dumb brain thoughts, “don’t you ever think about the fact that one day we’re going to die? Doesn’t it scare you, a little?”
It does for him. “One day we’re going to die, and in the whole scheme of things, we’re so incredibly inconsequential. And all we’re ever really chasing after is some stupid happy brain chemicals, so how is it that so many people are able to keep going with no good reason at all?” Denki knows that thinking this way is really selfish and doesn’t help anyone, let alone the other people who actually deserve good things; understands that people don’t like being around people who think like him — but he’s always been terrible at keeping his outpour of self-loathing to the back of his mind, after too much time of suppression. “Sometimes, I just think about it, I guess.”
Denki understands that he would be more reckless in general if it weren’t so embarrassing. He’s not too scared of death itself, but he does find the thought of just never waking up kind of unsettling.
It’s weird.
Well, okay, maybe he disregards his own life a bit too much. But more than anything, he doesn’t want to leave somebody to have to deal with his dead body.
If he were to be run over by a car, that would just be mortifying on all levels because it would mean he’s so oblivious to the outside world that he can’t even be bothered to notice a car running down the street, even if he’d jumped straight into it. And further than that, he wouldn’t want that weighing on someone’s conscience, his own inability to think straight; and more than anything, he wouldn’t want to embarass that person by making them late to their tooth-washing appointment because he had the audacity to get in front of their car while it was driving.
Inconveniencing someone. That would just be generally embarrassing, and he’d want to apologize, except he’d probably be flopping around like a dying fish on the road, or maybe he’d straight up be a useless road-pancake.
“That sounds like some world-class existentialism going on in that empty brain of yours, Kami,” Sero responds, voice low, and Denki very carefully does not flinch even though nobody can see him in the dark. “But no, not really? Why would I think so much about death when there’s… you know… here?”
Denki didn’t always think this much about death.
It’s something about coming to Yuuei. Meeting people who don’t entirely hate him (yet), and feeling maybe-good for once in his life, and that’s something he doesn’t want to lose even as it becomes ever the more clear what he hates about himself.
Being at Yuuei, constantly surrounded by human beings who actually know what they’re doing with their lives — that have a purpose, a drive, an understanding of their own existence?
It does nothing but drive in the fact that Denki is utterly fucked in the brain.
Like, sure, when he was younger he’s always been aware that people around him aren’t as perfect as they seem on the outside. But he’s never realized that nobody else is in a constant passive state of second guessing and on edge in every social situation and afraid of talking to people up until now, where he’s surrounded by people who just get each other, and it makes him realize that no — not everyone is like him.
The kids before his classmates now — they weren’t likable by any means, and they didn’t talk to him. Most of them didn’t really have any dreams for any future, other than the unstated expectation to end up dead in a ditch by the solid age of eighteen or so, and Denki had kind of assumed that’s what the rest of the world looked like. He remembers back when he was nine and just restarted school in Nishikawaguchi, a kid had accidentally unleashed their volatile quirk in the school and the teachers spent three hours only to break her arms until she passed out from pain as a solution, and the authorities never came; and he’d turned to the girl sitting next to him underneath the desks to ask, Why did no one come?
He hadn’t always lived there. Other places actually have heroes around, and other places aren’t falling apart at the seams in the whole adult-ing and teenage-ing departments.
She’d barked out a laugh, squinted at him like he’s stupid even though everyone had known that he was the “nerd” of the class. Then she’d said, slowly and maybe a little disbelievingly, No wonder you live here too.
The cynicism became a natural.
(Nishikawaguchi wasn’t always this way, but it’s for people that no one else really wants. That’s why everyone there gets each other, and why Denki’s always thought he’s good at people in general.
He doesn’t like thinking too much about the fact that nobody really wants him.)
Nobody else came here paranoid. Sure, as the attacks keep increasing in frequency and the scars keep growing on their skin, the paranoia grows as much as the raised skin, but at least they’ve got an excuse now. Denki’s never had an excuse for why he’s scared of everything and everyone, or why he’s always second guessing himself on every word that’s ever come out of his mouth; or why he’s filled with dread and thoughts of death whenever he’s forced to think about his future, or why he’s never really felt good up until he arrived here — except he’d just kind of taken it as a given when everyone else in his surroundings were always just like that.
Here’s the thing: when you’re eating trashy hamburgers from the moment you were able to properly chew food with grown in baby teeth, you don’t recognize that they’re a pile of professionally-made shit until you taste actually good ones.
And it just makes him realize how messed up he’s been from the very start.
The longer he spends around functional human beings, the more the juxtaposing contrast of sanity between him and them becomes clear.
He was born with a curse of a quirk, and now it turns out that he was also born to be inherently messed up in his head. Which is always real reassuring when it comes to remembering that he exists as a real human person in this world.
Being at Yuuei has done nothing but verify the fact that he’s losing his mind and has been for years. He likes thinking about death, and he likes how much it hurts his heart to keep on living around others, and something messed up in him vaguely likes being this way despite his rationality hating it so much more.
Further than that, these kids are better than it all. No matter how hard Denki has tried to keep himself detached from the idea of caring too much about Class 1-A, he can’t lie to himself and say that he doesn’t care about his classmates, and yet in spite of how much he does love them, he also hates them for being so normal. Now that Denki likes being here, likes being in the company of people he genuinely wants to be able to call his friends if friends weren’t so dangerous, he can’t help but be more afraid of death.
One day, this is all going to be ripped away in one way or another — a metaphorical death, or his own inevitable doom.
“I don’t know,” Denki confesses, quietly, after time spins on a bit too long and the tapestry’s strings fall a little too loose. “It’s stupid, right?”
Sero probably shrugs, though Denki wouldn’t know. “I mean, feel free to think your own brain thoughts, you know? I think about all the various ways turtles might take over the planet one day, or how I can get Todoroki to chill out and properly get higher than Taipei 101 with me. I’m not judging your weird shit, bro.”
It’s not just weird shit, though. It’s how I think, and how I can’t stop thinking, and how I can never get my own brain to shut up about the garbage it’s constantly on.
“I guess so.”
“Hey, now.” Sero’s voice sounds a little worried now, which Denki doesn’t like, because people shouldn’t be worried when they’re around him. It means that they’re scared of him, or they’re scared for him, and being scared for him is just a waste of their own emotional capacity.
All around, awful.
“Kami, it’s alright to be weird. We’re all kind of limp and useless and stinky like Bakugou’s sweaty tanktops sometimes. We all have our shit, and that’s what makes us work,” Sero says firmly. “Just don’t let it fuck you up too bad, yeah?”
Denki laughs tightly. “Since when did you get so wise?”
Sero is probably drowning in the backhanded compliment, and is too tired to pick up on Denki’s rapidly dying will to try. “Are you implying that I wasn’t before?” There’s a pause, then: “C’mon. Throw your worst at me. Even Bakugou’s working on it, even if he’s still got leagues to go.”
“I think,” Denki says eloquently, with the utmost sincerity, “that there might be something wrong with me.”
Nobody else is inherently like this.
Sero shifts, probably throws his head back, barks out a laugh. “I mean, yeah, bro,” he agrees easily, like he’s forgotten everything he’d said before and doesn’t actually consider such a blunt statement to be a statement of the genuine truth. “There’s probably something wrong with all of us, to be fair. You’re not special.”
⌁⌁⌁
(The people are mad. Of course they’re mad — this six year old kid nearly killed their family member, and ultimately left them crippled for life.
Eventually, Denki will learn that Kaiyo’s sibling was amongst the victims.)
Dad visits, eventually.
He doesn't quite look at him like he's a monster, no. Dad's not mean and never will be — he's soft and cuddly and very touchy, and if there was ever a point in the man's life where he was afraid of anything at all, it wouldn't have been noticeable without being told.
But he looks at him like he doesn't recognize his own son, and Denki doesn’t like that.
Daddy doesn't want me anymore, Denki realizes fourteen days after his sixth birthday.
Nobody wants him anymore. That's why he's all alone in the middle of nowhere, away from the hospital where he could hurt everyone more than he already has; isolated from the world in his quarantined little white tent, alone with the dripping IVs and white lights running from his own electricity.
Nobody wants him, because he’s a horrible child who will never be able to do anything right. Maybe that’s why Mom was always sad and maybe that’s why she’s now somewhere out there carefully avoiding him and all the damage he can inflict on everyone around him. Nobody wants him because he’s dangerous, and insane, and unstable — and everyone knows that instability of a mental state in a quirk that activates through instability in the air is all the more a bad concept overall.
“Denks,” Dad tries. Crouches down, eyes level to the transportable hospital bed, grasps the six year old boy’s hands in his larger ones and squeezes gently. (There are thick violet-blue rubber dish gloves slid over them, halfway to the forearms. Dad hadn’t even used those back when his quirk had come in, and neither had Mom — except Mom isn’t here.)
“It’ll be okay, yeah? I love you.”
Of course Dad loves him. Why would he not?
And Dad turns away.
“Love you too,” Denki mumbles out through the thick feeling in his mouth, like all the saliva from the day’s suddenly culminated and sucked out in one moment. He sticks his hands out all grabby and needy and stares expectantly at the turned away back, at the trembling muscles located at the back of his neck; yet the moment those words leave his lips, there’s an awful choking sound coming from his dad.
Dad never cries. Denki doesn’t think he’s ever seen Dad cry and never thought he would, except that’s definitely the unmistakable sound of crying.
It’s awful. Dad’s not supposed to cry, except he’s crying right here and now, and Denki doesn’t know what to do about it.
“It’s ‘kay, ‘cause why would it not be?” he whispers, trying to do the comforting thing that Mom’s always done, except Mom isn’t here so she can’t do it for him. Obviously, he doesn’t do a very good job, considering how his breath hitches on that and the stumbling sobs keep pouring out like water over ridges in a basin. “Daddy?”
“It’s gonna be okay,” he says again, still not looking. “You’ll be okay. It’s for the best.”
Something so uncomfortably cold coils up in the bottom of Denki’s stomach, so similar to the way lightning struck his nerves and rendered him frozen to the shock.
(It’s a sensation he’ll get oddly used to, one day, after the storm has passed and there’s enough space for actual feelings in his mind.)
And Dad leaves.
Denki has always known that his family loves him. It’s the sort of thing that kids like him should be taking for granted — getting pried/hauled out of the outlet with loving disposable gloves when a stupid toddler sticks his fingers in too far and discovers an affinity for sparking; being read bedtime stories at night after the moon rises and the only light around is unbridled electricity emerging from pudgy fingertips; cradling and hugging and kissing and so much casual touchy and verbal affection, just handed over on a platter that doesn’t even need to be ordered. It’s like those known facts of life: the skies are blue, grasses are green, and Denki’s family loves him.
Yet as his father turns around and leaves him all alone in a tent where nobody loves him, and doesn’t look back, Denki starts wondering if he’s been colorblind this whole time.
(Because he wouldn’t be lied to about being loved, right?
That would just be rude.)
“I’m sorry, kid,” Kaiyo says, dark eyes glimmering with a familiar yet different sort of sadness. “Don’t worry about it, alright? It’ll be okay.”
At this point in his life, Denki doesn’t really know what “it” is, so he just nods dutifully and tries to forget the look on Dad’s face when he first saw him.
But she doesn’t really know that at all.
He never looked back.
⌁⌁⌁
There’s a number that keeps calling Denki.
He’s sitting in the main area of the dorms, Kirishima sprawled across his lap and Ashido and Sero intensely contesting in a staring contest over who would accompany Bakugou in the kitchen tonight. Bakugou, dearest King Explosion Murder himself, is sitting on the one-person chair with his feet kicked up on the coffee table, scrolling through his phone and tch -ing loudly every half minute.
Denki squints at the Unknown Caller before decidedly swiping down, declining the call and going back to fiddling with his computer.
Recently, he’s been messing with learning some actual computer software, since it turns out that his quirk is very useful with zapping with computers in general and fucking with their soft and hard functionality. Technically speaking, if he shuts off electrical abruptly enough at the right impulses, he can effectively corrupt and destroy harddrive data.
It’s actually really fascinating, some of the things Midoriya comes up with, including but not limited to: interfering with electronic communications, switching out the whole pointer-shooter support with short wires to act as a stungun, and even playing around with people’s neurotransmitters in numerous ways.
Not that he’s planning to do any of that, of course, but also there’s always a chance it’ll come in handy one day. Especially if he fails at this whole attempted hero-thing.
Really, the only part Denki developed pre-Yuuei that could actually be considered interesting is his communications headset. It’s mostly running on a variation of wabun code, with a few built in signals aside from it, where he sends off electrical impulses to whatever base he can access from whatever location he happens to be in. Not exactly the most effective device, but certainly useful in a way that also happens to utilize Denki’s strange plethora of knowledge based on the extensive textbook collection he’d saved up to buy from the bookstores many years back.
Kirishima puts his head full of spikey, uneven red hair into Denki’s lap, and Denki’s stupid, useless, traitorous heart can’t help but like it. Don’t get so attached to this touch, Denki knows. It’s rule #7, pretty solidly up there on his guide to living, yet it’s so easy to disregard as Kirishima hums and treats his lap like the comfiest pillow available when there’s dozens of other pillows scattered about the living area.
Why did nobody tell him that touching other people doesn’t have to feel like crawling around in his own body? Why did nobody tell him that it’s so easy to get attached to the very idea?
He’s never liked or even enjoyed the concept of touch at all in his life, not since Dad got up and left him alone and he realized that his family would never exactly be a whole thing anymore, and Kaiyo certainly isn’t anywhere near the epitome of touchy-feely-ness. Denki’s come to understand that other people seem to like it, so he does his best to pretend that he does too and gets overly affectionate at any given opportunity, but now he’s starting to doubt his own self-control considering how it almost feels like he actively seeks it out at this point.
So there’s that. He’s using Kirishima as his own portable desk, plug shoved in his own mouth as his own portable charger and subconsciously finding himself gnawing on the charged metal despite the fact that it cannot possibly be healthy for him (or the charger itself), when the first call arrives.
It happens three times; and each time, Denki picks up the phone to check and ignore, which sidetracks him from his current problem regarding triangles, as well as Ashido and Sero from their staring.
After the fourth ring begins, Ashido eventually huffs a laugh and breaks in, “Maybe you should just pick it up?”
“Yeah, it could be important if they’re so desperate,” Kirishima agrees helpfully. “Leaving others hanging is unmanly.”
“It’s probably just some broke scammer, dude,” Sero points out. “Put it on speaker!”
Bakugou scoffs but actually tilts his head in curiosity, planting his feet on the floor rather than pressing down on the circular glass pane. Denki’s got the tact to not point it out (and well, the preservation of his own life, too).
Denki regards the caller for a few more moments, before swiping up and putting it on speaker. “Hello?” he mumbles around the plug in his mouth.
Dead silence.
“Aw, c’mon,” Ashido complains, jutting her lip out. She brightens up and clambers to her feet, dropping to sit next to Denki’s phone and pulling it into her own fingers. “Hey, mystery scammer man!” she announces. “You’ve disrupted our very important staring contest over good fucking food, so you’d better got something good to say. Got any free cars on your end?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how scams work,” Sero mutters.
“... Nevermind.” A voice comes through on the other end, rough and low and maybe kind of frustrated, and Ashido jumps back, as if she wasn’t expecting an actual human person to be on the other end of the call. “This is clearly not Denki.”
Ashido jumps backwards again, even more startled, stumbles into Sero. Kirishima lifts his head up to peer blearily at the phone.
Denki actually jumps this time. “Huh?” he blurts out, before he can stop himself, then cursing his mouth for running too fast because he’s just incriminated himself. Now, he can’t deny and say that he’s not Denki, and now whoever’s on the line knows his undeniable identity and will probably use it for malicious intent, and why is he like this. He probably just handed the League some unholily convenient sort of weapon through his phone number and I.P., and now he’s going to have to switch it out except Kaiyo is broke and he quit his part-time job when moving into the dorms which means that he’s not going to have a phone for a very long time and —
Bakugou stiffens, leans forward. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands harshly, tone biting and cold and leaving no room for argument.
“Is that Kaminari Denki?” the person asks, and Denki wants to scream. Bakugou scoffs, but glances at Denki, almost like he has the decision to reveal what he wants even though everyone in this room knows that he’s Kaminari Denki.
No, he wants to deny. Should.
But the silence has dragged on, long enough to be telling of everything, and Denki is fucked.
“Please tell me I finally got it right,” Mystery Creeper grumbles. “It took me, like, seven tries, and I’m still mortified over every single wrong call I made.”
“Um, yeah,” Denki finally responds, feeling very stupid and like he’s making a very bad choice. “I suppose that would be me. Um.”
Should I know who you are? Is that too direct? How about Why are you using my given name?, or How the hell did you get ahold of this number?
His classmates have fallen silent beside him, realizing that something here's not quite right, and letting him listen. Denki doesn’t have it in him to turn it off speakerphone yet, because he’s a tiny bit afraid of what might be said if he were to take it in private, yet he knows that logically, whatever’s happening could very well expose him on speaker.
“Can I ask who you are?” he eventually settles for.
“Oh.” They go silent, as if disappointed, and Denki can’t prevent the uncalled for flood of disappointment in himself at that even though he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to right now — because someone is disappointed in him.
“I guess I can’t really blame you, Denks. It’s been… a while.” Nervous laughter.
And Denki is finally hit with the vertigo catching up to him, and he lurches forward to turn the caller off speaker before yanking it straight up to his ear.
“It’s Dad, kid.”
Oh. That’s, uh.
“… That’s not good,” Denki hears himself saying, even though that’s the stupidest, most generally-irrelevant response he could make out of the million-and-one word combinations out there, and then he promptly hangs up.