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The dream has you in its teeth. This is the burden you bear.
You're sixteen years old—no, almost sixteen.
You're fifteen. The calendar says you're three days away from the birthday you've stopped caring about. But Jeanist cares, or at least pretends to, because there's a party tonight and you've been told it matters.
"You've been so good lately," he tells you, adjusting your collar. "Stay on your best behavior, and maybe we can discuss that trip to Paris you wanted."
Paris.
You've never been, but you know how gorgeous it is from the few magazine clippings you've hung on your walls. You want to go so badly it hurts. To see some place so perfect, a city of light and wonder and hope, because maybe there you could learn a little about humanity again.
"Okay," you hear yourself say. "I'll be good, promise."
The party starts at eight. By eight-fifteen you've already been handed off.
The first is a man you don't recognize. He doesn't do much. Just pulls you into his lap during a conversation about stocks and keeps you there, one hand around your waist, the other holding a champagne flute. You sit still and let him feed you the occasional bite of fruit, trying not to think about how your bladder is starting to ache.
You should've gone before. You knew this, and yet you didn't. Jeanist had been clear—no bathroom breaks once the party started. It disrupts the flow, he'd said. Makes you seem unavailable. And unavailable is the same as ungrateful, and ungrateful is the same as punishable, so.
By nine, you're beckoned by someone with manicured fingers.
This surprises you. The women at these parties are usually decorative—wives and girlfriends and daughters arranged like flowers that you aren't allowed to touch. You've seen your reflection in their lost eyes before.
But sometimes, rarely, they aren't hidden in the shadows.
You like the ones that step into the light. Not in any way that matters–you'll never be safe with anyone here, not even yourself. At least with them you can almost pretend to be.
"Such a pretty thing," Her arm curves around your shoulders, other hand resting on your thigh. "Hakamata told me all about you."
You don't need to ask what she means by that. He tells them you're clean and quiet and that you only weigh fifty six kilograms. He also says you won't cry unless they want you to. You're a product now—with features and benefits, and she's considering whether to buy.
She keeps you there for almost an hour. Her fingers walk up and down your arm, pinching and tickling at your skin. Her lips press against your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. When she laughs, she presses her breasts against your shoulder. It's all very chaste, or it would be, if you were anyone else.
Except you're you. And that's the one thing you can never run from.
It's the softness that does it every time. Her hands are soft. Her chest is soft. She smells like perfume and powder, and when she pulls your head down into her lap, her thighs are soft too.
You've never been attracted to women, but you close your eyes and think of how soft your mother's hands used to be when you were small, before you became unlovable, and that's enough to make you hard.
Shame on you. She would be sick if she knew what went on inside your head. She'd look at you with those unfeeling eyes and call you a miserable fucking degenerate, and she'd be right. She'd be so goddamn right.
But you can't help it. You just have to lie there with your face in a stranger's lap and your dick throbbing between your legs, knowing that every second of this is proof of what you've always suspected:
You're disgusting. You're so fucking disgusting it makes you want to peel your own skin off and step out of yourself entirely. You won't ever have to speculate the depths of your own depravity anymore. Your body is answering every question you've ever asked.
Yes, you're broken. Yes, you're wrong. Yes, you'd spread your legs for anyone who touches you gently enough, and that makes you no better than them.
You can hate yourself in so many different ways that each branch of self-loathing feels like its own entire tree. You can want to die and want to come and want to be held all in the same breath, but none of these wants will ever cancel each other out.
She passes you off eventually and you're passed off again, and again, and by ten-thirty the party has thinned and Jeanist is guiding you upstairs with a hand on the small of your back.
"One more," he murmurs. "Be respectful, and Paris is yours."
You nod. You've run out of words by now.
You don't wait for instruction once you reach the room. You've done this enough times to know. Strip efficiently—shirt, pants, underwear—then fold everything into a neat pile on the chair by the door. Move to the bed and lay down on your belly. You never know what to do with your arms, so you just fold them under your jaw.
The client is already there. You didn't look at his face when you entered—you don't want to remember his face—but you can hear him moving. The springs groan as he joins you on the mattress. The entire room groans in tandem.
The client must be impatient, because he wastes no time. A hand grips your hip and rolls you over. Millions of caterpillar-like fingers crawl, telling you exactly what he wants—they grope your waist, your chest, the back of your thighs. And then—
A prodding down, down, down below. That's the signal. That's the starting gun.
Bang.
And you're off, racing toward a god you don't believe in, praying for the deaths of everyone in this place, everyone in this city, everyone everywhere, but mostly—mostly—yourself.
And in the same second, you think: I've never wanted it more than I do right now. Because that's what you do every time, isn't it? Every time it happens, you think this is it— this is the most I've ever wanted to die.
And then the next time comes, and the next, and the next, and you think it all over again.
So what does that mean? Are you a liar? Making everything worse in your head than it really is? Are you so desperate that you've convinced yourself this is unbearable when really you're bearing it just fine?
Or is there simply no limit at all? An infinite capacity to suffer, a soul that stretches and stretches and never breaks—just frays until it's transparent, holding nothing, feeling everything.
You're either a liar or you're boundless, and you don't know which is worse. So you pray.
And you pray.
And you pray.
And you—
Are being torn apart.
This is why you hate God.
God was never going to listen to you, you idiot. He's just a story people tell themselves to pretend that pain is something more than just pain—that it serves a purpose, or at least means something.
But no.
There's just a stupid little boy getting ripped apart on a bed that isn't his, in a room that isn't his, in a life that isn't even his.
And no amount of praying will make it anything other than that, so you stop hoping for anything at all—and float.
Up, up, up.
This is good, you muse numbly. You should be grateful for this special power of yours, even if it hurts.
And it does. It hurts so fucking bad.
But that's okay! Because you're drifting higher with every thrust, and soon you'll hit the sky and disappear—no one will find you ever again. You just need to wait for your body to be empty enough to climb back inside.
From here, you see a boy on the bed—you, that's you down there—with a slack face and unseeing eyes, mouth hanging loose. The client's spine curves and snaps into him, vertebrae popping, and you think abstractly of the snake that shed its skin in your backyard when you were seven.
You'd watched it wriggle free of itself, brown and new and terribly vulnerable, but your mother had pulled you away before you could play with it.
Dirty, she'd said. That's dirty, Katsuki. Do you want to get sick?
You know she'd say the same about you now. Or maybe nothing at all.
Either way, the client is foreign—you picked up on that right away. American, maybe, from the way his vowels stretch and snap. You don't speak English. You know fuk and slut and gud, mostly because they've been grunted and growled into your skin. But it's like a dog barking at pigeons through a window—loud and unnecessary for everyone involved.
He's saying something long and garbled now, words tumbling over each other, and you catch maybe one in ten.
Something something gonna.
Something something fukin.
Something something—ruin.
Gonna ruin you, kid.
You blink froggishly from where you're perched up above. Rune? Is that a word?
You remember the fantasy movies you used to watch with Izuku before you stopped watching anything at all. There were runes in those... maybe?
The villains were always drawing symbols in the air that glowed and pulsed with dark magic. They could change a person's fundamental nature—so is that what this is?
A spell? Is he casting something on you?
You feel a wild, desperate hope bloom in your chest. Magic is way better than God, and cooler too, because it doesn't pretend to love you. And more than anything, you want to know if it comes with wings.
You try to picture what they'd look like—your wings. White like a dove? Black like a crow? You've always liked crows. People think they're ugly and sinister, but you know better. Crows are smart and remember everything.
Yes, you silently beg the American who might be a warlock, suddenly starving for it. Yes, please. Give me black feathers and a sharp beak. Draw the symbols into my skin with your cruelty. Carve it deep! Give me a reason to keep living that isn't just fear of dying!
Just fix me, please!
You decide, in that floating place between pain and nothing, that you need to see.
You need to watch the magic happen.
So you swallow hard to dislodge the lump of unspent screams in your throat, tasting the residue of every "stop, no, please" you've held back, and glance down.
Just a little peek. A teeny tiny flick of the eye.
And what you see is—
Oh.
Oh, that's a lot. That's—
Magic, magic, where the fuck is the magic?
You're yanked down from your perch in the corner of the ceiling, slammed back into the bloody mess this warlock has made of you. There's no symbols burning themselves into your flesh or feathers sprouting from your shoulder blades. There's just red—so much red—coating the entire world.
Why did you look? Why did you look?
You just had to, didn't you. Of course you did. Now you're gonna have to stuff your underwear for days unless you want to bleed through your pants. The thought comes to you stupid and small, the kind of thing that shouldn't matter but does.
Your mom rarely will anymore, but sometimes she does your laundry without saying anything. Just pulls it from the hamper and shoves it in the wash because that's what mothers do, even the ones who stopped knowing how to love their children a long time ago.
You only narrowly avoided her berating you for the stains last time. What was the excuse? Not a nosebleed—that would've been too obvious because the blood was in your underwear, not on your face, and even you aren't pathetic enough to try and sell that lie.
You'd said... you'd said it was from a fight. At school. Some asshole had messed with you and you landed on the concrete too hard. But I won, you added to the end of that miserable conversation, because winning was supposed to make the blood acceptable. Winners bleed. It's proof they were brave enough to fight at all.
She'd looked at you and said very simply, I don't give a shit if you won. I care that you're tracking filth through my house, damn brat.
And that had been that. Case closed.
The American warlock is still moving. He doesn't seem to notice; or perhaps he just doesn't care about the wreckage beneath him, so you lie there and take it.
God is dead. Magic isn't real. Really, what else is there to do?
You lie there and take it, and somewhere along the way—between the third time he flips you over and the fourth time he tells you to stay still, goddammit,—your bladder finally gives out.
At first you think maybe you did the other thing. The good thing, relatively speaking—because it won't end in anyone getting angry.
Did you—? Did you come?
You've done it before. Much to your eternal shame, you've done it lots of times since your body decided that being good was the same thing as feeling good.
You've come while crying and begging for it to be over. You've come in the shower, alone, hating yourself more each time. You've come in someone's mouth, on someone's hand, with someone inside you, outside you, and every other place you didn't want to.
You'd do anything for it to be that, but you didn't do the good thing at all. Not this time, Katsuki. You did the bad thing.
He stops mid-thrust and goes completely still. You can't breathe.
You did a very, very bad thing.
"What the fuck?!"
He rips himself out of you like you're contaminated. It tears open an entirely new hole in this perforated bag of flesh you wear, and he looks at you like it's crawling with maggots.
"Dirty fucking bitch," he snarls, "Pissed yourself? Are you serious!?"
You don't need to speak his language to understand. The repulsion in his eyes is universal.
"—didn't say anything about—god, that's fucking nasty—"
You did this.
He's climbing off the bed, wiping at his sullied skin with your clean clothes by the door.
You did this.
If you'd just gone to the bathroom before the party like you were supposed to. If you'd said no to the champagne, if you'd been better—
"Ruined the whole fucking night—" you did this you did this you did this you did this "—didn't pay all that goddamn money to end up covered in—"
Paris is gone. The trip, the light, the hope—all of it, gone, because you're not just a whore, but a bad one. You can't even get raped right and he's cursing again because he can't put his pants on over the mess. He whips his head at you with blazing eyes.
"Well?!" he spits. "Apologize, you little shit!"
The words mean nothing to you. You stare at his mouth, trying to decode them by their vibrations—every language has vibrations—but you're still caught in the mud, moving too slow. You've never even heard anything like it before.
The American makes a noise of pure disgust. He crosses the distance between you in two strides, grabs a fistful of your hair, and drags.
You don't have time to brace yourself. You're pulled off the sheets and then you're on the floor—on your knees, palms, staring at the wet patch spreading across the carpet. It's pale yellow. The smell reminds you wildly of summer camps and Izuku's tears when he'd wet the bunkbed you both shared. He didn't stop crying until you let him climb into the top bunk and pressed a palm over his mouth, whispering shut up, shut up, or they'll hear.
You'd kept him there all night, your hand still resting on his face even after his breathing evened out—though he doesn't need to know that. You just liked the feeling of his drying tears under your fingertips. You'd thought: this is what it means to be needed.
It made you feel powerful.
You don't think you can ever feel like that again.
"Clean it the fuck up."
You still can't understand, but you understand the grip on the back of your skull, shoving you further and further down. This is a language older than words—submission—mouth to mess, tongue to stain, make yourself small enough to fit inside of the shame you've created.
Later that night, week, year, you'll try to remember the specifics. How long did it last? Was it really even that awful? How did it feel kneeling there there, bent over your own mess? The details will scatter like roaches when the light hits them. In your slight of sight, but just out of reach.
You won't remember this for years to come, when you're eighteen and safe in your own bed with Izuku's arm around your waist.
The ceiling was reflective.
You understand this now, the way you understand all things in little flashbulb bursts, but the ceiling was a mirror. It had always been a mirror.
And when you floated up and up and up to that safe place far away, you weren't escaping at all. You were just staring straight at yourself. Stiff and frozen in place, pinned like a butterfly under glass, witnessing yourself be destroyed from every angle at once. Boy watching boy watching boy watching boy.
An infinite tower of witnesses, none of them able to look away, none of them able to do a single fucking thing. Just you, and an army of all the yous that ever were or ever would be.
The dream releases you from its hungry maw.
Katsuki wakes with a scream caught behind his teeth, body seizing so violently that he kicks the blankets clean off the bed and nearly throws himself off the mattress entirely.
His hand flies to his groin, checking for a wetness that isn't there. The other slaps against the wall behind him, fingernails scraping uselessly at—what? What is he looking for? The switch to turn off the memory? The seam where the past and present split apart? He keeps checking, palm pressing flat against his stomach, his thighs, the wall. Dry. Dry. Dry. No mirrors, no warlocks, just—snoring.
Izuku.
The most obnoxious sleeper on the planet.
Katsuki's lungs finally unlock. He drags in a breath so deep it burns, then another, then another. The air tastes like the food they'd had for dinner and the laundry detergent Izuku started buying last month because it's "gentle on sensitive skin, Kacchan, don't give me that look."
Safe. You're safe. You're safe.
The mantra doesn't always work, but tonight it does. Tonight the smells and sounds of this life Katsuki's created for himself, by himself—with a boy made of sunshine and love—root him back in place.
He turns his head on a neck that feels like rusted hinges. There, tangled in the sheets he'd kicked aside, Izuku sleeps on. One arm reaching toward the empty space where Katsuki had been, fingers curling and uncurling loosely. His curls are an untamed mess, and a thin line of drool darkens the pillow beneath his cheek.
Izuku shifts, mumbling something that sounds suspiciously like "mm... Kacchan..." before settling again.
He looks stupid. He sounds stupid. It's the only damn thing Katsuki wants to wake up to for the rest of his stupid, beautiful, impossible life.