Don't Be Afraid of Shadows (BakuDeku)

◅ Prologue ▻

'Life itself is but the shadow of death'
Thomas Browne

Bakugou Katsuki wasn't alone. He hadn't been alone for a long while now.

The shadow lurking in the corner of his room had been there as far back as he could remember, with only Katsuki ever noticing it.

On rare occasions it had moved, at one time even making it as far as the back porch only to then slink back into its corner in Katsuki's room.

Katsuki hadn't spoken a word about it of course. He wasn't getting into trouble with his parents for his wild imagination anymore. The first and only time he'd tried to tell them about it, the whole house had ended up in uproar. Thankfully, he'd been so young at that time that once he'd calmed down they'd put it down to the fearful imaginings of a child.

Katsuki doesn't remember the first time he noticed it was something other than a shadow, but he knew that he'd always avoided that corner of the room. It just seemed to emanate sadness, fear, hatred, loss.... The list of negative emotions went on. In the past it had sucked the joy from Katsuki by just looking at it, but he'd seemed to have built up a tolerance to it over the years.

Once, when Katsuki was seven, only a few years after they'd moved into the house, he had been colouring in his superhero drawings with brightly coloured crayons while laying on his bed. He had been humming his favourite superhero's theme tune to himself when movement caught his eye over the edge of the bed.

He'd peered over to see a baseball roll slowly to a stop beside his bed. Katsuki had lost that ball to the corner a week earlier, and as with all things that landed in that space, he'd forget they even existed until his mother would come to tidy away the forgotten things.

So, with a frown on his face, he'd let his eyes follow the trajectory of the ball's roll back to the corner.

Even that day, with the bright summer sun streaming through his windows, the corner had remained dark and shrouded in shadow.

His ruby eyes bored into the corner, searching the place where the walls met for any sign of what made him feel so damn down and depressed when he looked into that space, for what caused his blood to freeze in his veins whenever he accidentally stepped into the shadow, for what had rolled his ball back to him. Nothing good could be behind those feelings, right? So he'd collected his colouring and crayons, and without taking his eyes off of the corner, he'd left his room trying to escape it.

Over the years, as Katsuki grew his room inevitably changed, and the corner became home to an electric guitar that was bought for him one Christmas which he never did learn to play.

Now Katsuki laid in his bed watching the shadow in the corner of his room as if it would move and stretch out towards him. Absurd really to think such a thing could happen, but there had been a few instances where the shadow was just simply not there. The longest period being the time it seemed to have moved to the downstairs hall and stayed there for a whole day before returning to plague Katsuki's room once more.

Katsuki supposed that the shadow had every right to be there. Corners are the natural home of shadows afterall, especially on autumn nights such as this, when the dark started to close further and further in on the light. What right did Katsuki have to think something sinister lay within it?

He couldn't blame the shadow for being what it was. Of course it was dark and eerie, and he could at least admit it to himself... a little scary.

It's presence was a constant in his life. There had been a period, before he became a hormonal teen, that he'd been lonely and started greeting the shadow when he entered his room and saying his goodbyes to it when he left. But when he'd accidentally done that in front of one of his middle school friends, brushing it off as them having shitty hearing, he'd decided he needed to stop that. At the time, it had just felt right to treat it that way, he couldn't really explain why.

Sometimes even now, on days when he felt particularly lonely, he'd still nod in silent acknowledgement of its presence. Try as he might, he could never completely ignore its existence.

Katsuki closed his eyes tightly and tried to sleep. There were long periods of time where he hardly noticed the shadow. He'd become habituated to it. He could sometimes go weeks without noticing it, or feeling the cold hurt emotions that seeped from it. But tonight was not one of those nights.

On nights where the feelings of dread and despair were particularly strong, Katsuki would wake up crying tears of pain that were not his own. He had the horrible feeling this would happen tonight. He guessed he was probably due a night of unrest.

After hours of tossing and turning, Katsuki finally slipped into a dreamless sleep, and in the small hours of the morning he silently wept.

The shadow in the corner wept with him.

The next day Katsuki fell asleep over his math book, his friends across the classroom looked worriedly over at him and the dark circles that adorned his eyes.

Frankly, right now Katsuki didn't care. He felt at peace. He even managed to dream a little.