I am normal.

Chapter 7

'These are the best years of your life.'

Older people would often say that as if every single day of being a teenager wasn't stressful, full of pressure and, overall, simply exhausting. Of course we'd be grumpy and sleep in every now and then. The best years of your life but you are expected to spend it all studying. The best years of your life that happen to determine your future.

Teenagers have a lot of things they can do but restricted with most. You can't smoke, drink alcohol, stay up too late, have sex... all of which the majority seem to do anyway. Doing any of those would land you in a whole heap of trouble if your parents cared enough. So why is it called the best years of your life if adults can do things teenagers can't? Actually, it is precisely the fact that teenagers are told not to do it yet seem to do it anyway. Because they know they're not supposed to. They're reckless and hormonal, a bit grumpy and rebellious too. Why give such people a large weight on their shoulders with their future inside?

'These are the best years of your life.'

But the older generations seem to only say it because they have regrets. Things they wished they had done but never did and cannot. 

Katsuki had a regret. No, he had many. But they weren't things he wished he did do, they were things he wished he didn't do. For example, he regretted ever bullying Izuku Midoriya. He regretted spending hours and hours of his middle school time tormenting one guy. He regretted everything he had ever said to him. He regretted ever causing the scars that littered his body, Katsuki did it so much he got addicted. He couldn't stop no matter how hard he tried or how tired he was.

The one regret he had that he wished he had done during middle school was satisfy his curiousity. He would've stopped anything from happening, witnessing things he wished he never witnessed, forming something he could not commit to out of fear. Alas, Katsuki did not. Maybe he was still clinging onto life back then. Reaching out for some form of hope that never really came. But he could still do it now.

Still, he could hardly call his teenage years the best. If what people called the best was drowning in self-pity, wishing you had never been born, harming yourself to the point it left permanent scars for everyone to see, then what was adulthood like? The same or worse?

When he was younger, he could imagine his adulthood being full of glory. Katsuki would go around saving people, he would have a stable life with a stable family, he would be popular like All Might. But, honestly, could he really achieve that? Him? Katsuki Bakugou? A boy famed for his villainous persona? As if. 

Call it cowardice. Call it weak. Katsuki saw no other option. There wasn't another. 

He was weak, he knew that. Why else would he have been kidnapped by such people? Why else would All Might's reign come to an end? Katsuki was too weak to even protect himself from his own mind, let alone anything else.

It was funny though. Katsuki had wanted nothing more than to become a hero yet, everyone saw him easily swayed by villains. They thought, due to his violent and brutish personality, that yes, Katsuki Bakugou would definitely join the villains if they so much as asked. Even now, even though it was all over, they still...

Katsuki knows. No matter how much his classmates try to hide it from him, turning the news off every time it came up and keeping him off his phone as much as possible, what did they think he did when he got back to his room? Sleep? Probably but he didn't. He saw the very things they were trying to keep away from him in all it's glory, he saw. The media hated him. The public hated him. He would have loved to have said it didn't affect him at all, Katsuki hated no one more than he hated himself after all. However, that wasn't the case. If he couldn't have a decent opinion of himself then to be okay, he had to rely on the others around him. Eijirou Kirishima, Izuku Midoriya, Shoto Todoroki, Ochako Uraraka, Tenya Iida, Aizawa Shota; six of the many whose opinions of Katsuki Bakugou he cared about no matter how strange they were.