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Izuku watches them.
Watches how Shouto freezes his tears before they can fall (before crushing them with his fist), watches how his flames flicker out within moments upon impact, as though they're exhausted, pushed to the limit. His voice sounds too shaky for his usually rational personality; his plans have no tact and are founded upon half-assed instinct instead. He flees with wounds that he shouldn't have received if he had been fighting with intentions of victory. He glances at his hands, bruised and torn - and Shouto finds himself involuntarily shaking. All he can register inside, is his numbness.
Izuku watches Katsuki stand in the middle of a battlefield. He looks into Katsuki's eyes, expecting explosive anticipation, but all he sees is helplessness, confusion. The prideful and arrogant glint has long gone, and all that is left of Bakugou is the empty husk of an abandoned child. When he smashes his fist into the wall at night, nobody else has the heart to stop him; when he bashes his foot into the already defeated training dummy, he only ceases when his legs give way. He stops at nobody when it comes to his accusations, but the aggressive words he spills eventually lose their meaning. He has only himself to blame.
("What are you doing?" Deku whispers.)
Izuku observes Ochako as she becomes a human doll. She vomits at the lightest touch of her quirk, passes out with exhaustion but then somehow struggles to sleep at night. Sometimes, she forgets to eat; the food almost always leaves her stomach as quickly as it would come, anyway, and her arms and legs are disturbingly frail. Sometimes she carries out a task and forgets what she's doing in between, leans on Asui and it feels like forever before she can get up again. Her smiles are fake, and her laughs are hollow.
Izuku brushes the dust off Tenya's old pieces of equipment. Looks as he buries himself in theories and techniques, polishing off everything he has again, and again, and once it looks seemingly perfect, moves forward and tries to find another thing to tinker with. Tenya is the type of person to combat darkness with productivity, and at first Izuku marvels at how he can be so brave, how he can continue life as it had always been - but then he notices how short of breath he is when he runs distances that were laughably easy before, and how his lectures get more concise, soulless, by the day. Tenya tries to fight it his own way, but it's all in vain. He works and works, and does not stop.
("Please don't cry." Izuku tries to say.)
He studies Tsuyu, who comforts the others with no hesitation. She gives them a shoulder to cry on and she uses her tongue to make her embraces feel even more secure. Her voice is straight-forward, but soothing and calm. When the lights are out at the dorms, she goes to her balcony when she thinks no one is watching and cries, with only the cooling breeze to dry them. One day before Class 1-A are dismissed for the day, Aizawa-sensei discreetly hands her a pack of tissues; she silently accepts them, but they lie forgotten in her bag.
(When Izuku opens his mouth, his voice sounds strangled. "What's wrong?"
Nobody even turns their head in his direction, and then Izuku knows the answer to his own question. "...Oh."
A blanket suffocates the class of 1-A, and Izuku could mumble anything and no one would emerge from its mist.
"I'm right here." He cries out, desperately. "Please.")
Days turn into weeks, turn into months.
Shouto's flames slowly but surely revert to their majestic colours, still reckless and weak, but nonetheless are more contained. He stops looking at his tears like a weakness - he realises that it's normal to cry - he inhales slowly, and his eyes now look directly ahead. He learns how to consult others, even managing to talk to Bakugou, of all people, where his blunt, brash opinions had actually proven effective. Eventually, he brings himself to look at Midoriya's dorm door again, where he had constantly averted his sight previously, and on one occasion finds a small sticky note slipped underneath the door. ("I believe that your heart can be warm again." He reads slowly - without thinking, it's placed upon his chest like a prayer.)
Katsuki learns how to control his anger - he doesn't learn how to get rid of it completely; frustration is a fundamental role in his identity, after all. He takes as many flaws as he can find within himself, and blows them into ashes. When he manages to go a week without unleashing any sort of violence, he doesn't feel like he's a shaken soda can, set to explode at any moment - instead, there's peace in its place - a weird feeling, but pleasant at the same time. Of course, a week is all he can muster, but his thrusts are no longer filled with malice and regret. There is nothing but pure determination to move forward. The day that he reaches his week-long milestone, he finds pieces of duct tape dutifully stretched across the numerous holes he'd made, signed with nothing but the name "Deku".
Ochako still pukes often, of course, but she does survive longer. She remembers to take her nausea medication instead of simply dismissing it, and has her first sleep without nightmares for months. It's not a particularly good sleep of any sort, but it is a beginning of many. She doesn't flinch at the sight of freckles anymore, and can take on so much more weight than she could've possibly done back when she couldn't walk without wobbling. After a particularly exhausting day of training, she finds on her bedside table a modest cup of tea and a sticky note beside it with undeniably Izuku's (...very shaky?) handwriting: "You don't need to carry all your burdens by yourself."
Whenever Tenya takes a break, he manages to glance past his self-hatred for doing so. After a day off, he comes back better as ever - he stops looking at every single thing he could blame himself about - and while the girl in the Support Department, Hatsume Mei, doesn't understand anything about the concept of grief, she is happy to help him in his endeavours. His movements become less robotic over time, and he somehow musters enough self-esteem to scold his classmates again. It's hard, but he comes to terms with the fact that he'd only been productive because he would hate himself more otherwise. Mei tells him one day, "That Deku boy told me to pass a message! He says that you need to chill," she laughs, and when Tenya squints at her, very, very confused, she unhelpfully lifts up one of her latest gadgets as an explanation. The ghost noises she makes aid him in no way whatsoever.
When her classmates finally get the hint, everybody tackles Tsuyu to the ground with whispers of "I'm sorry" and "God, why didn't you tell us?" and other incoherent apologies for not seeing her pain - and Tsuyu cries again, her normally-controlled voice dissolving into sobs. Ochako almost strangles her with how tight she clings on, and Tsuyu is both focused on interpreting the grateful mumbles Ochako says into her ear, and also focused on finding oxygen. She's no longer afraid to ask for a tissue, no longer afraid of being a burden to others. A poor doodle of a frog on a neon green sticky note is on her bedside this time, and on the back is a scrawl of "It was nobody's fault, and I am proud of all of you."
And Izuku is proud. He's proud of how they miraculously pulled themselves out of hell - how they finally discovered their own definition of 'acceptance'.
And no, while they haven't quite mended themselves perfectly, Izuku is certain that someday, they will.
And while it's a strange thought to have, Izuku can finally say that he's happy to die.