The King is Dead

Dilemma

Was it really that funny?

Was it really so funny to watch that video?

Was it really that fucking hilarious that the man had to be sent out of the room?

He laughed at the image of a six-year-old screaming as his skin was cut by a drunken fool. He laughed at the worn-out voice of a man who was torturing a human being.

Was it funny? Shouto wanted to try and laugh. Maybe it was.

Nobody else had laughed. Was it really that funny?

Aizawa had been sent out too, after the other man opened his mouth to speak. There was laughing, the man laughing said something Shouto couldn't hear over his own screams on the screen, he couldn't focus when Fuyumi was staring at the back of his head. He could practically hear Natsuo's teeth clenched against each other, grinding away at his enamel.

Shouto doesn't think it's funny.

After whatever he said was out in the open, Aizawa had jumped from his seat and cussed the man out, he was kicked out of the courtroom as well, only taken back in when he'd calmed down and was needed for witness testimony. When he got to the front of the room he told them all about what Shouto had been doing these past months. Suffering from panic attacks and begging to see his father in some kind of sick Stockholm syndrome way. He told them about the weight limit Endeavor had kept for Shouto, about how the latter was still struggling to meet the limit, so affected by the abuse he couldn't break the habits he'd created in order to survive.

Hizashi told them the same, telling stories of finding Shouto standing in his room in the middle of the night, open-eyed and seeing things that weren't there. He told him about the night terrors Shouto had, where he would stay fast asleep but scream at the top of his lungs, twist and writhe in his sheets as if he was in pain.

Fuyumi told them so much more.

And then after hours of arguing and admitting and confessing... the judge declared that Shouto would not have to be taken to prison as long as he continue in therapy and extra counseling, and took mental health tests every week to make sure he wasn't planning anything. It would go on like that for two years, and if he wasn't taken into custody by then, he could live his life how he wanted. A normal boy in a world that wouldn't hate him anymore.

He didn't feel normal, sitting in his old closet. He doesn't remember the floor being so red. The walls have awful handprints that fade into the mess on the floor.

New blood rests there too, flowing from his wrist as a result of the broken glass he'd used to cut it. An old beer bottle that was unfortunately empty.

Was it so funny? That someone had to laugh at a torture victim?

He'd broken it and used the sharpest piece to dig into his skin, drawing crimson lines vertically down the length of his forearm. It was ragged and hardly painful compared to some of the things father did.

It's weird, listening to everyone explain what they saw of Shouto made the boy realize he really was strange. He misses the man in the videos. The man who kicked and punched and  burned. The man who took the whiskey bottle and broke it over his eight-year-old's head. The man who cut Shouto while holding his head underwater, age ten.

He misses the man who did all of that.

Because somewhere in between the screaming and beating, there was love.

Shallow love that was somehow so welcome. Perhaps it was because he never got anything like it. Shouto simply didn't know better. He accepted it and forgave. He forgave and forgave and forgave until he had nothing left. He forgave his mother for trying to kill him. He forgave father every time he went too far in the punishment. He forgave Fuyumi and Natsuo for leaving. He forgave Touya for hating him.