Chapter Text
The thing about old wounds is that you can ignore them all you like, but that doesn't change that they're still there.
Someone did that to you. Someone pushed you down, grabbed your head and dunked in the water until you were drowning, over and over again. Someone beat you down to the ground, again and again until you were at your lowest and still didn't stop, no matter how much you begged.
They may have stopped now-
But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Those wounds happened, because you have the scars to prove they did.
-
There are good days and there are bad.
He finds himself thinking back to that day, from time to time,
'If you want to be a hero so bad, take a swan dive off the roof and hope for a quirk in your next life!'
His bad days always bring him back to his worst day. Joke's on Kachan though. He got a quirk all right, and he didn't even have to commit suicide to do it.
So why does he still think about it?
-
It starts when Izuku thinks, "What would happen if I did jump?"
He's thought about it a lot, dreamed about it, imagined the aftermath. It had always been depressing, because he could only ever imagine his mother missing him.
It’s different now though. Now, the thought comes with a plethora of guilt. 13-year-old Izuku Midoriya hadn't has All Might as his mentor. He hadn't gotten into U.A, hadn't made a bunch of friends along the way.
16-year-old Izuku Midoriya has friends that would be devastated if he were to die. They would blame themselves for not seeing the signs, for not catching on until it was too late.
He couldn't do that to them. Three years ago, he only had his mother to worry about. Now, he has his friends and a mentor too.
(Nobody ever told him, how suicide is often a very selfish act.)
-
He tried cutting his wrists, once.
That had been back when he was 14 years old, drowning deep in his feelings of helplessness. Because no matter what he did, it was never enough, right? No matter what he did, Kachan would still hate him, he'd still be quirkless, useless Deku.
In the parts of the internet where there is an understanding of 'what goes on here, stays here', there are people who know there's no use in preaching about 'getting help' and 'talking to someone', not when everyone is in the same boat. So, people talk about why a person resorts to self-harm.
It's a form of control, basically. And when controlling the kind of pain, you're feeling ends up being more control than you have in your own life, well, then there's no way of stopping the cycle.
But after Izuku tries the cutting-his-wrists bit and it doesn't work, he realizes that self-harm isn't just scars on your wrist.
When Izuku Midoriya was 14, self-harm was pushing himself to the brink of exhaustion while staying up late at night to study, so that the next school day would more or less pass by in a blur and he wouldn't have to live through it. Self-harm was purposefully not treating his wounds and it was missing meals.
When Izuku Midoriya is 16, self-harm is breaking his bones, over and over again without giving himself time to heal. It's pushing himself to the point of exhaustion with his training. It's keeping small bruises and cuts, the ones that can be hidden without permanent damage, hidden and untreated until they heal on their own.
It's pushing himself over his limits, and not taking care of himself.
-
He wrote his first suicide note (it got long though, so it's more a letter) when he was 14 and about to turn 15. Until then, envisioning his death had been the closest he had come to 'suicide', barring that one time when he'd gone up to the school roof, looked over the edge, and went back down in tears.
Writing that letter had felt final in the way nothing else ever had. It felt like the final nail in the coffin, and it would have been, if he wasn't a coward.
He's still a coward.
The idea of free falling through the air had snapped him out of doing it. He thought about using pills, thought about the effort it would take to find the right ones, thought about his mother finding out, and stopped thinking about it. He thought about hanging himself, thought about actually finding rope sturdy enough, thought about his mother finding him there, and stopped thinking about it. He thought about cutting himself open, thought about the pain, thought about how it couldn't be much worse than what Kachan put him through daily, thought about his mother finding him there, and stopped thinking about it.
Before U.A, it always came back to his mother.
But now he lived in the dorms, so it didn't anymore.
-
He keeps the letters he writes. His mother has more than anybody else, because each time he writes them he thinks of more things he wants to tell her. But he has a few for each of his friend as well, he writes one for Todoroki, for Ochako, for Iida, every time the night gets bad enough that he's writing in the first place. It usually stops him from actually moving onto the ‘killing himself’ part, let's him pull himself together just enough to go to bed, so that when he wakes up in the morning the day can reset and he can try again.
On one of the nights that the feeling of sinking helplessness got especially bed, he wrote a letter for Kachan, but this time, there weren’t any lies. Since nobody would see these letters until he was dead, he could be honest with himself, which meant that it was hard to write anything nice to the person who started this mess in the first place.
Whenever he writes a letter to Bakugou, he ends up feeling uncomfortably angry, because some part of him wishes he could say those words to his face. He can’t though, not without the insurance that he doesn’t have to face Bakugou’s ire, Bakugou’s denial, since he’d be dead by then.
-
Some days are bad, but some days are good too.
He befriends Shinsou after the Sports Festival. Sometimes, if he pesters the tired-looking boy enough, he can even convince him to hang out with him during lunch. He spends that time alone with Shinsou though, because Shinsou has no interest in socializing with his other friends.
That's fine. Izuku knows what it's like to be afraid of people's judgement. He lives with that fear himself, every day.
Which is what makes him realize; he feels a shared camaraderie unlike any other with Shinsou. He knows why, of course, because 'villainous quirk' is only a step up from 'quirkless', but Izuku realizes that his feeling of camaraderie is only one sided, because every time Shinsou looks at him, he cannot see past the heroic quirk that Izuku now has.
But that's not his fault, because Shinsou can't know a history if it was never told to him.
Izuku wishes that he can be brave enough to correct that, one day.
(Shinsou finds out, and it changes everything.)