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“When you grow up,” Mitsuki tells Bakugou when he is thirteen, “don’t let any opportunity slip through your hands.”
Katsuki is still in the genkan, wrestling off his shoes as she says this. He’s grown too fast for his uniform to catch up with him in the seventh grade. When he finally shoves the damn things off his feet, he looks up at her. He tilts his head, questioning, gaze already too intense for his age.
Ma crouches down easily into his space and ruffles his hair. “Just ’cause you woke up one fine day and decided you wanna be a damn hero, doesn’t mean you can’t do other shit too, Katsuki.”
Katsuki furrows his eyebrows. She presses a thumb to the little wrinkle that dips in the middle, as if to physically soothe it out. It doesn’t work. He frowns harder, says, “The fuck’re you on about?”
She squints at him. “Where the hell d’you hear that word?”
“You,” Katsuki tells her, smug. “You said it in the kitchen—”
Her eyes flash in the way that only a mom’s can, but she’s stifling a smile. “Alright. Put your shoes in the rack like a good kid.”
“’M not a kid.” He puts his shoes in the rack.
Mitsuki reaches out to help him out of his gakuran, but he knocks her hands away and unpins the gold buttons, chin dipped down to work it open himself. She’s hardly fazed, just crosses her arms instead, curls her fingers around the purple cardigan Katsuki has seen wear ever since he could even remember such petty details.
“As I was saying. I saw you looking at a drum set coupla days ago at the mall.”
Katsuki scowls, flinches his head away with a low tch.
She clears her throat purposefully. “Remember when you were seven? I told you not to eat the floaty chillies in soy sauce. Guess what you did?” He remembers. He’s heard the same damn story repeated at dinner parties with his boring designer parents and their boring designer friends. But Ma pushes on, anyway. “You ate every single goddamn chilli. And then drank all the soy sauce. And then you fell sick for a week—”
“The hell is your point?!” Katsuki bursts out. Jesus, he’s not even set foot into the house yet, still wearing his damn socks. He wiggles his feet to fend off the clamminess nestled in the steamy gaps between his toes, stubbornly unwilling to meet Ma’s eyes.
“The point is, bub, you can do it,” she says, calmly.
Katsuki looks up.
She’s grinning now. The broad, unhinged kind of grin Katsuki's seen on himself. “You can do it all, if you want to. Even if everyone says you can’t. You’re the kind of brat who only comes by once a damn century, who’ll keep going for no damn reason, just ’cause you fucki—’cause you goddamn can. And that’s why, you don’t have to limit yourself to just one thing. You can do everything you set your mind to, Katsuki.”
(When Katsuki finally walks into the house, there’s a drum set in the corner of his room. The shells are pure white, matte to the touch, and the polished steel edges and cymbals glitter like shiny circles through the rheum that floods his gaze.)