Chapter Text
Katsuki stares down at the practice problem in front of him. It’s giving him more trouble than he thought it would – which is fucking annoying, considering every other problem before this one only took the time he needed to write down his work. It’s one of the harder textbooks the old hag and his dad sent him. Their latest care package sits close to his pillow on his bed, the snacks and handwritten note left at the very bottom.
Rain falls gently outside, a normal rain as far as Katsuki can tell, no curse nonsense like Midoriya does when he’s upset. Katsuki has cracked his sliding glass door open just enough to let it be a backdrop to his study session. The golden-hour light is muddied by the storm clouds, it won’t be long before Katsuki needs to turn his lamp on.
Well, just staring at the damn problem won’t get anything done. Katsuki gets up and scrounges through the care package, pausing when he finds a bag of sour patch watermelon tucked between the spicy peanuts and rice crackers. There’s a little sticky note attached with his mom’s neat handwriting across it.
“This is for Midoriya. Don’t you dare keep it for yourself!”
The old hag remembers a lot more than Katsuki expected her to. Katsuki doesn’t even like sweet candy, anyway. He puts it on his nightstand to take with him to class tomorrow. Not that it’ll do much good, Midoriya’s been straight up missing class these days. The troll doll never seems too concerned about it, but he doesn’t know Midoriya like Katsuki does. He doesn’t know what it used to be like when Katsuki just had The Presence following him around and subtly scaring the shit out of him every other hour of the day.
Katsuki turns and looks outside his sliding glass door. The rain’s coming down harder, he should close the door if he wants to keep the floor dry. He returns to his seat without doing so. He tries to solve the problem for another ten minutes, the rain bearing down on the ground outside. He has to turn his lamp on halfway through, the page glowing like a screen under the direct beam of light. He digs his pencil in hard and drags, the sound of tearing paper filling his room. He crumples up the loose leaf of paper he was working on and tosses it into the trash can under his desk without looking, satisfied when he hears it clatter down to the bottom.
He closes the textbook like it insulted him and stands up, heading for his bookshelf – the one he brought with him, not the school-issued one. He nudges the textbooks that slumped to the side and pauses, his fingers lingering on the spine of a leather-bound book.
Jujutsu Clans in the Modern Era, yet another book Katsuki’s checked out from the library. If there were a librarian, they would never have let him take this one out when he has yet to return so many others, but there is no librarian, just a logbook and a pen that’s half-dead. Really, going off the quality and topics of some of these books, it’s clear the clans and high grade sorcerers just use the library as some kind of goodwill to clear up their own shelf space. That’s fine with Katsuki, who’s been playing catchup ever since he set foot on this damn campus. That isn’t what makes him pause, though.
This is the shelf he specifically reserves for his general education workbooks – math, English, science, and Japanese. So why is a book on jujutsu on this shelf? He tilts his head down to the shelf he reserved for those books and sees that it’s crammed to the point of bursting. Ah, so he must’ve tossed this one into his general education shelf because he couldn’t find the room. At this rate it won’t be long before jujutsu books take over his shelves entirely.
For some reason, Katsuki wants to blow something up at the thought.