mha sick fics (angst)

the first day of sickmas: Asthma (dadzawa)

(request)

Izuku always had asthma, ever since he was a kid.

Izuku found it weird that Katsuki ever thought he could be looking down on him when he was always stumbling behind and quite literally wheezing to keep up.

His health problems mostly stopped with the asthma, but other than that he was fine. Despite being generally fine, he was still archetyped as the weak kid because of his quirklessness.

Other kids would steal his inhaler, toss it around, make him run for it, and leave him a sweaty, wheezing heap on the ground in the process. Over and over teachers would have to pick him up and help clean the mud off his knees. As he got older, the bullying got sneakier, teachers stopped caring so much, and he was left to clean the mud off his knees on his own. He didn't want to worry his mother by being the butt of his classmate's violent jokes, so he kept to himself.

Even after all the bullying growing up, especially by kids who aspired to be heroes, Izuku was still desperate to be a hero, still desperate to be equal to the rest of his classmates, and determined to make it happen, maybe even moreso than when he was a kid. The more he was picked on, the more he wanted to prove every one of his bullies wrong.

Thankfully, All Might put him on the path to making that happen. Even better, his doctor told him (after a mild flareup his mom brought him to the doctor for) that his asthma should start getting better as he grew up.

He was truly ecstatic. New school, new friends, new quirk, how could he not overjoyed?

Life was finally looking up for Izuku Midoriya.

❄️❄️❄️

Around Christmas of his first year at UA, Izuku's asthma symptoms flared.

It was a couple days before the big holiday when even going up the stairs left him in need of his inhaler. Classes had ended and he'd been spending less and less time with his classmates celebrating in the dorms because he was having so many little attacks.

Christmas eve is when things went drastically south.

Despite the lingering excitement of Christmas morning, Izuku went to bed that night not feeling his greatest. He thought he was starting to pick up a cold or some other unidentified illness with the way his asthma had been flaring. He knew he wasn't in for anything good. He kept his inhaler by his bedside table, but he could barely get to sleep in the first place.

He had shortness of breath that made it extremely hard to fall asleep. Whenever he laid on his side or stomach, he just couldn't pull in enough air, but he didn't feel comfortable sleeping on his back. It felt like he had a pallet of bricks laying on his chest. Any time he inhaled, he felt the need to exhale again immediately, like his lungs couldn't defy their own gravity anymore, like his respiratory system was being compressed.

Eventually, he managed to fall asleep, but woke up again around 3am in a cold sweat with his heart beating rapidly. His breaths were short and shallow, and he felt his chest ache as he began to wheeze. He pinched his eyes shut, trying to make it go away, but it was only getting worse. It was beyond irritating to wake up on the middle of the night with an asthma attack. He was praying that this interruption in his sleep would leave him with enough energy to deal with his classmates tomorrow morning. He missed his mom and wished that the threat of villain attacks didn't confine them to the dorms. With the ever present asthma attacks, loud and impatient classmates, and distance from his family, today was already shaping up to be the worst Christmas he'd ever had.

The only sound in the silence of his room was his wheezing and the ruffle of sheets as he calmly moved to grab his inhaler off his nightstand.

He took a puff and waited for his airways to open up, but they didn't, they kept closing.