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Izuku Midoriya is bleeding.
He knows he’s bleeding, but no one else notices the wounds, and it’s not obvious at a glance, not at all. Red gushes from him every second of the day and soaks itself into his clothes, leaving none of their previous colour behind. He drips his life all over the place, leaving little trails and splatters behind as he walks from room to room, hall to hall.
He’s happy, he thinks. UA has been good for him, and that’s not a lie. But still—he bleeds.
The wounds were first carved into his skin when he was four years old. Little pieces of concrete left marks on the surface, but none ever made it past his skin. By all rights, they should have healed by now, but Izuku can still sometimes feel the indents in his palms. They’re tiny, barely worth noticing, but sometimes it feels like his entire hand had been crushed by them. Maybe it’s just old pain from breaking his bones, but it gives him a sinking feeling in his gut that has him leaning all too often over the sink, waiting for vomit that never comes.
Sometimes his hands feel like there’s nothing between the skin and the bone inside. That’s when his head starts to spin. Holding anything, touching anything—it all gets too much, so he excuses himself from wherever he is, reassuring smile on his face, and curls up by himself until it goes away. Or, no, he doesn’t curl up. He holds his hands—his whole body really, but especially his hands, his palms—away from anything they can touch. It makes him feel a little less like he’s collapsing in on himself. He can stand perfectly still for hours at a time, and sometimes he does it even when his skin isn’t crawling with emptiness. He started doing it at the beginning of middle school—back then, it was just another excuse for Kacchan to call him creepy. Now, he makes sure that no one sees him do it.
Eventually, his muscles return to him, and his skin fits once more. He shakes himself off, checks his palms for indents, and when he finds none, he puts his smile back on and returns to the world.
The wounds were expanded later on—when he was about seven, maybe eight. He was just running through the trees, but he must have run into something with thorns because the next thing he knew there were thin lines that ran all the way along his arms and legs. They looked far more precise than what anything of nature could have done, but Izuku doesn’t like to think about it too much and never has, so he simply patched himself up when he got home, and soon enough, they were gone.
He can still feel them, though. Over time, he’s felt the blood start to seep from the cracks, but whenever he looks down there’s nothing there. He doesn’t even have scars, and the scratches were never anything more than skin deep, but they ache, sometimes. Just like the indents in his palms.
Invisible red started to stain his clothes from the moment he got those scratches. On particularly bad days, when Kacchan was too much and the teachers cared even less than usual, he tried to scrub it out. All that ended up doing was hollowing out his hands once more, until he had to stop his attempts. He knows now that this blood is not the kind he can remove with physical or forceful means. He has to wait. It will go away of its own accord, in its own time—he just has to wait.
He thinks he might be imagining things, but the scratches have gotten deeper over the years. Not by much, not enough to be fatal, but they bleed much more than they used to. With the constant opening and closing, the skin is becoming something he’d rather not think about. So he doesn’t. And like the indents from gravel he carries on his hands, whenever he begins to bleed, he quietly slips away to deal with it. He splashes water onto his face because he knows putting it on his arms and legs will do nothing to help, and he waits until it stops.
He’s found that it’s okay if he walks around with the blood still there. No one notices, or if they do, they don’t care to comment, or maybe they don’t care at all. All blood dries and flakes off eventually, and when he’s with other people—with friends—it takes much less time to do so.
But he can’t be around people while he’s bleeding. The blood, it makes him different. Angry. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism, or maybe it’s just another symptom of whatever is making the wounds reopen. Either way, he can’t be with others when he’s bleeding. Not his mum, not his friends, not anyone at all.
He acts a lot like Kacchan, if he’s around people when he bleeds. That scares him.
When he was fourteen, fourteen and desperate, fourteen and bleeding, fourteen and hollow save for his bones, he was shot.
There are three bullet holes, and none of them have exit wounds. One was received just hours after the first, and the third he got nearly a year later. They’re mostly in his torso—one stuck in his ribs, just about grazing his lung, and another on the same side of his body by his hip. They make him feel lopsided, and when he got them, it was a struggle to stay standing at all. He’s used to them now, though.
The third buried itself just above where he knows he can feel his pulse. This one is on his other side, so it balances him out a bit, but he doesn’t like to think about it. It came far too close to killing him, and he can’t have those kinds of words running around so close to their cause, so he stores the feelings they coax from his heart down by his stomach for safe keeping. He knows the value of fear, has felt it firsthand. He also knows that if someone hands you a tool, you don’t just throw it away. You’ll need it eventually, you just have to be patient.
And he knows he’ll need it. He knows.
Occasionally, the metal buried in his body starts to throb. It presents like a particularly bad headache, or a stomach cramp, or a coughing fit, depending on who’s in the room. He can feel the cold metal through his skin, chilling him right to his core. It he’s particularly unlucky, he’s left with a hollow cavern that they rattle around in between his skin and bones. It’s times like those when he’s thankful for how still he can be when he puts his mind to it. He doesn’t like to hear his worst memories ringing in his ears.
On the worst days, the most overwhelming ones, the wounds open, and the blood comes gushing out. Those are the times when he spends most of the day alone, locked in a bathroom stall, dripping red on the floor. He doesn’t want to get it on his desk, and he doesn’t like seeing it in his room, so he’s only got this option left. He doesn’t like doing it, but the alternative is grinning and bearing it, and when he’s like that, he can’t even bring himself to try.
He knows, with the dorms now in place, that someone is going to find out sooner rather than later. He knows, with more friends than he’s ever had before, that one of them will ask where he goes, when he disappears for seemingly no reason. He knows, with the utmost certainty, that he cannot hide forever.
His wounds have been open for so long that they’re starting to ache more often than not. He knows he should talk to someone about this—a teacher, a friend, his mum—but he can’t bring himself to say it out loud. What would he even tell them? How could he possibly explain anything that’s been happening to him for the last ten years? Where would he even start?
His throbbing wounds are starting to slow him down, but that’s not because they’re bleeding. The oldest has been marking his hands for ten years, and the others have been open for far too long already. The bleeding is slower now, but that’s not a good sign. He’s half worried that his heart is starting to get tired, but he knows that’s not what this is.
His wounds are infected. He looks out at the world, sees legacies and heroes and villains and everything in between, and he can’t tell himself that he doesn’t know why. He’s covered in blood that no one can see and only he can feel. He’s alone and in pain, even though he’s surrounded by people and his body is as whole as it’s ever been. His eyes are focused, yet his mind wanders through a wasteland that has not quite come to pass, and he sees.
Izuku Midoriya is bleeding.
He is not the only one.