katsuki's baby siblings that he adores
Katsuki is face-blind. He’s been this way for as long as he can remember. Everyone is a stranger to him — even himself, it’s a surprise every time he looks in the mirror — his mom, his dad, his little brother and sister— everyone. But he knows them, obviously, they’re his fucking family, but he doesn’t have a single clue what they look like. If you asked Katsuki what color eyes his little sister Mahoro had, he would be unable to answer. He’d at least try to bring up her face in his head, conjure up her eyes and mouth and nose — but he’d come up blank. Always blank. It was like his head would go completely and utterly empty, shutting down on him. It was exhausting — especially when no one else knows about it. He tries to act normal, to ignore the spike of fear that shoots through his heart when someone grabs him in the school hallways, or when someone abruptly hugs him without speaking first.
Usually, Katsuki’s main identifiers are voices. He has excellent hearing, and he can tell — almost — exactly who it is by the sound of their voice. The pitch of it, how low or high it is, is it breathy or raspy, deep or shallow, the way it curls around r’s — all of it helps Katsuki identify who the hell he’s looking at. When he figures it out, their face is screenshotted by his brain — but. Y’know when you take a screenshot on an IPhone , and it pops up at the bottom left corner of your screen then slides over and disappears? That’s how it is with Katsuki — he’ll realize who the person was, but the minute their face was out of view — it was over. And then he’s surrounded by strangers again. Just like that.
In a world where Katsuki is constantly with people, he still feels so lonely. He knows no one — not really. Sure, he knows them, knows what color they like best and how they like to wear their hair — and that’s only after listening and occasionally looking for identifiers because sometimes people sound really fucking similar and their voices blend together into deafening white noise and sometimes he can’t tell anyone apart — not even himself when he speaks and do you have any idea how fucking terrifying that is?
And other from that, Katsuki is doing absolutely fucking wonderful. Pleasant, even. Joyous, possibly. Maybe. Sort of. Actually, not at all. Not one bit. There is no atom in Katsuki’s body that is okay — Katsuki hasn’t been okay since that dreaded day on the rooftop when he was six. That dreaded day when he flung himself off said roof, hoping to fly like Superman, because back then, Superman was everything he wanted to be. But now, Katsuki just wants to be alive by the end of the month. Everyday is a fight, whether it be in the hallway when some rando — not actually a rando, probably one of his friends that he doesn’t really know but does — starts talking to him like they’ve known each other for so freaking long, or him suffocating to death in the boy’s bathroom because he’s having a daily, severe panic attack at the very thought of going out there to be swallowed up by a swarm of strangers and mummies and faceless people who all look the fucking same —
Katsuki’s breath hitches and his chest tightens as he remembers what it feels like — panicking like that. It’s not small — no, not at all — it’s not something Katsuki can just pull himself out of. When Katsuki experiences an episode like that — it’s like the world is shaking and crumbling and Katsuki is breaking along with it, until he’s nothing but a wheezing, gasping puddle on the bathroom floor, until Katsuki can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move . He just curls himself into a ball, as small as he can possibly make himself, and hyperventilates until he either a.) passes out from lack of oxygen which will land him in the nurse’s office or b.) one of his friends — that he does not recognize. Can you imagine how that makes him feel? — finds his pathetic, crying ass and acts all worried and shit and calms him down with those breathing methods that they use in the movies. Speaking of movies, Katsuki doesn’t watch a lot of those. Why would he, when every time a person pops up, he’s asking himself have I seen you before? Or are you new?
He can never tell.
So he has to pretend when he watches All Might cartoons with Katsuma — his little brother — and Mahoro. He’ll have to act like he knows who the hell All Might is when he shows up on screen. Though, Crayon Castle is much easier to watch than All Might — only because the crayons don’t have actual, diverse faces — they all look the same with the black lines for smiles and black circles for eyes. Unfortunately, he doesn’t watch that one a lot because Mahoro doesn’t really like it — he figures it’s because she’s in fourth grade. While Katsuma is still in third, he likes to watch it. Most of the time, when they do watch it, it’s only because Katsuma managed to convince Mahoro with the best puppy-dog eyes you’ve ever seen. Of course, Katsuma tells him that, because he wanders into Mahoro’s girl cave to do so. It takes him a moment to figure out who the little boy talking to him is.
Katsuma has two identifiers; his voice, obviously — soft and childish, of course, a voice easier to connect with his baby brother — and the Edgeshot pin clipped to his clothes at all times. Edgeshot is a hero from the cartoon All Might & Heroes. Just as it sounds, it’s one of several cartoons in the All Might franchise. Edgeshot is his favorite, it’s literally all he talks about. Katsuma was always so passionate when he spoke about Edgeshot, it was impossible not to listen to him. Katsuki knows, at least, that he could listen to Katsuma talk for hours and hours and not get bored. Katsuma was his baby brother, after all.
Mahoro, on the other hand, is a little bit easier to identify than Katsuma is. Her voice is more rough, and a little more girlish — don’t let Mahoro hear him say that, she’ll beat him black and blue — though . . . Katsuma’s voice is pretty girlish, too. Mostly because he’s so. . . gentle and soft spoken and quiet when he speaks. It’s the total opposite for Mahoro — she sounds like a teenager when she talks, all smart-sounding and mature. It made Katsuki a little sad — his sister was growing up.
Speaking of his sister.
“HURRY THE HECK UP, YOU LOSER!” she yells furiously from behind the bathroom door, and it takes a second for Katsuki to realize that it was actually Mahoro and not his mom. Yelling is a bit more difficult to tell apart, especially with his mom and Mahoro being similar. Katsuki and Katsuma were more like their father, a little quieter and definitely nicer.
“Okay, you filthy monster.” Katsuki deadpans, pulling the toothbrush from his mouth to pit the toothpaste into the sink. When he looks back up, a stranger is looking at him in the mirror. The stranger has deep, blood-red eyes that have specks of dark orange and gold and brown near the pupils if you stare long and hard enough. The stranger’s hair is wild like a lion’s mane, all spiky and pointing in every direction. It’s blonde, but there’s bits of dirty blonde and brown strands of hair here and there. The stranger has freckles, but they are faint and just dust over his nose and his cheekbones, barely there. The stranger has uneven lips, but they still manage to look perfect — their bottom lip is fuller than their upper one — they are kissable, looking just right for a lover to pull the lower lip between their teeth and tug. They have high cheekbones and yet — they look soft, their cheeks. You can almost see the remaining baby-fat from when they were a child. They have a sharp, square jaw that looks hickey-worthy and the perfect place for another’s fingers to slot between the junction where the jaw meets the neck, tilting their head and — there’s also a beauty mark on their face near their ear.
The stranger is him.
Katsuki stares at himself in the mirror, slowly bringing up a hand to touch the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks. He doesn’t blink, because as soon as he looks away or his vision blacks out a millisecond, the image of his face will disappear and he’ll have to talk in all the details of his face again.
“ KATSUKIII!” Mahoro screams. Katsuki’s head snaps away from the mirror, mouth gaping in a gasp of surprise, his heart pounding from the startle that the yell gave him.
Instantly, the image of his own face dissolves from his mind. And once again, he’s a stranger to himself.
“Jesus fuck,” Katsuki whispers under his breath, running a shaky hand through his hair. He doesn’t like yelling. His parents fight a lot. It scares him, sometimes — the way they scream at each other. The way something shatters as if it were thrown against the wall, as if it missed its target. The way doors slam and echo throughout the whole house, shaking the foundation with the vibration it makes.
Katsuki shakes his head and swallows, not bothering to look in the mirror again. If he does, he’ll want to memorize himself and make a useless effort to remember his face. He’ll fail. Every time, he does. He turns towards the door and twists the knob.
The door creaks open, and there’s a little girl, about waist-high (to him, at least) with peanut-brown hair styled in two pigtails — both held up by a different colored hair tie; one blue with a blue raspberry on it, and the other pink with a strawberry on it. The girl wears a pink-overall type dress, with a black tank top underneath. She is tapping her foot impatiently, where her white sandaled-feet thump against the hardwood floor. She has a few freckles on her sun-kissed skin and her eyes are a deep, dark brown.
“What is taking you so long ? ! ” the little girl says — Mahoro. His baby sister, his little munchkin —
Katsuki rubs the back of his neck and sighs, not looking away from her face once, desperate to remember it, to commit it to his memory, to keep her in his head forever so he doesn’t have to wonder who the hell she is every time he sees her. “Sorry, Mahoro. I lost track of time.” he apologizes.
Mahoro scoffs and rolls her eyes. “ Clearly. ” she says, shaking her head. Katsuki sighs again, though this time it’s more fond than regretful. He walks forward a few steps and bends down to pull her in for a hug. Mahoro squawks indignantly, squirming in his embrace.
It’s gone now. Katsuki doesn’t remember a single detail of her face. Not her eyes, not anything. Nothing. He remembers nothing. Nonetheless, he hugs her tight, burying his face in her shoulder for a few seconds.
A moment later, Mahoro sighs — that little kid sigh that they make when they pretend to be a parent and over-exaggerate. She pats his hair with a huff. “Jeez, what’s wrong, you bozo?” she doesn’t mean to, but she sounds incredibly worried. Katsuki pulls back, and he tries to ignore the sudden racing of his heart as he scrambles to piece together the details of her face again. He knows it’s her, most of the time he does, just by how she sounds and how she walks — but her face is like a stranger’s — new and unknown.
He leans down and kisses his baby sister’s hair. He ruffles it — and she doesn’t even complain how he “messes it up”.
“Let’s go, Mahoro. Don’t wanna be late for school. Mom’ll get our asses — butts. ” he corrects himself at the last moment, feeling his cheeks flame red. “She’ll get our butts .”
Mahoro giggles and nods, forgetting about what she needed in the bathroom and heading downstairs.
Her face is gone, again.
“Katsuma!” he calls, trying not to sound as gloomy as he feels, “Are you ready?”
“Almost!” Katsuma calls from his bedroom. Seconds later, a small boy races out of a room. His hair is light — caramel-brown. His eyes are chocolate, swirling and milky. He’s got freckles painted across his chubby toddler cheeks, and he’s also wearing overalls — but blue, not pink like — like — like Mahoro’s. An Edgeshot pin is clipped to his shirt. He’s wearing crocs.
It’s his baby brother, his little goober — Katsuma.
“You look cool today, little man.” Katsuki grins, running his fingers through Katsuma’s hair when he comes close enough, bending down to be eye-level with him.
Katsuma’s eyes sparkle and he grins a huge, beaming smile, like Katsuki had just handed him the fucking universe. Dimples pop on his cheeks and Katsuki’s heart clenches. His throat gets a little tight.
He doesn’t want to watch his little brother grow up — his baby brother . Because he’s fucking terrified that when Katsuma walks across that stage to receive his diploma, Katsuki won’t even know.
Fuck.
“Thanks, Kat!” Katsuma exclaims, flying forward to wrap him in a tight hug. Katsuma squeezes his shoulders. Katsuki swallows roughly and embraces Katsuma back, fighting back the onslaught of tears. “I love you, bubby!” he says, as he does every morning.
Katsuki closes his eyes. “Love you too, you little goober.”
Katsuma giggles and pulls back. He runs past Katsuki and down the steps, calling back to him, “ RACE YOU TO THE CAR!”
Katsuki grins, a bittersweet and almost sad feeling in his chest. He gets up from his kneeling position on the ground and sighs. He walks by his room and hauls his school bag to his shoulder.
“Unescapable purgatory, here I come,” Katsuki grunts dryly, already dreading his day, even though he’s not at school yet.