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Izuku isn’t sure if he feels like the good type of alone or the bad.
He isn’t sure if it’s the type of alone that you grow in. The one where you learn to be by yourself, to love yourself, to function as a member of society on your own. The alone that includes slow mornings with good coffee and easy yoga. The alone that wraps itself around you like an old friend, leaving you content and satiated with your life.
Or if it’s the type of alone that leaves you empty. The kind that sits in your soul and reminds you that there is no one for you to lean on, no one there for you to hold on to when the storm of life tries to toss you overboard. The one where you scroll through social media and see engagement after marriage after first home bought. The one where you still feel like you’re 18 and muddling through life while also being 25 and holding down a career.
He sits on his balcony in the city and attempts to look at the stars, only to stare at a purple-black sky full of clouds.
It seems to reflect the roiling in his chest tonight.
Tonight he’s not sure if it was worth taking the path he has. If the trauma and isolation have left him a better person to heal as or if it has left him bitter and unchanged. Maybe, maybe if he had just tried a bit harder to hang onto that one friendship or that one partner he might feel a different way. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like he had wasted the past seven years and was now behind his peers.
He sits on his balcony and he thinks “Is this where I really want to be? 25 and a mess on the inside and the outside?”
The healing has been hard. He’s slugged through session after therapy session only to feel like he’s more broken than he was before. His therapist reminds him that sometimes you have to break yourself down to put the pieces back together, but he doesn’t feel like there were pieces to break down to begin with. Even so, he ceaselessly tries to beat back the never-ending self-deprecation and trudge through recovery like a sailor against the tide.
He knows that recovery has been good for him. The flinching, the nightmares, and the flashbacks are so much better. His medicine finally feels like it’s working and the tight knot of anxiety in his chest has finally relaxed enough for him to not feel like he has to gag constantly.
Though occasionally he stares at his apartment, the one his mother helped him decorate for the first time as an adult, and thinks that he isn’t truly sure he understands what it means to be happy. Not in the way he projects himself to be. Not the sunshine-bright way that tabloids and tv interviews convey him as. He doesn’t feel like the top five hero Deku, but the insecure and minuscule Deku from middle school.
He peeks at the scars that crisscross his skin and thinks of how he’s earned them, how each one is a mark of his resilience. The kind of perseverance he doesn’t usually feel on nights like this. Nights where he feels like the space between the planets: cold and empty.
Izuku may be an adult now, but happiness seems to slip through his fingers like sand. It doesn’t even clump like the wet sand from crashing waves so that some of it might stick. No, it is the dry sand of a desert that lacks the proper surface tension to cling to his skin. He’d take even a grain of proper contentment to soothe his aching throat.
He tries. Oh , he tries. He tries to obtain the happiness he sees on the faces of others his age, but nothing he tries works, he is stuck reaching and reaching and nothing. Not a single ounce of the happiness he craves. Not a single flicker of warmth. Just the cold emptiness he's grown so used to. The only time he gets to feel that flicker of warmth, so fleeting and rare, is when he saves someone or chats with his friends. Something he can't do often with the distance now between them.
He settled himself in Musutafu and climbed his way to the top of the charts through sheer willpower and hard work. He buried his head in the sand and watched as his friends succeeded and grew into proper adults, while he continued on his path to outpace All Might. Now he’s so close he can imagine it and he doesn’t feel the way he was meant to. Success was meant to bring him satisfaction and with it happiness. He’s succeeded, but what now?
Izuku doesn’t even have hobbies anymore.
He’s been too busy to continue the things he enjoyed in high school, things he clung to in order to maintain any sense of sanity. Now he clings to the career he has carved for himself and hopes that it’s enough.
It isn’t .
You think it would be, enough that is. It’s all he’s ever dreamed of. Since he first laid eyes on the debut of All Might, Izuku knew that he was meant to be a hero. It was a destiny that not even quirklessness could take from him. He was meant to be a hero and he had worked his ass off to do it. Every jab from a peer, every harsh word from a teacher, every achingly sore muscle from intense workouts or long study sessions had been worth it.
Right?
But as Izuku sat here on his balcony and reflected, he wasn’t so sure.
Don’t get him wrong! He’s thankful for everything that his mentors and mother have done for him. He had a support network worthy of the gods and he leaned heavily on it when he needed to. But now he wobbled away from the said network on the legs of a newborn deer, determined to stand on his own in adulthood.
However…
Izuku had found his worth in proving that he was deserving of a quirk that was bestowed upon him in tandem with a legacy that needed fulfilling. A legacy that he achieved, a mountain he had spent scaling for the better part of a decade. It was scary, hard, and sometimes downright terrifying, but he had climbed. He climbed until he could feel the cold of the height seep into his aching hands, mangled and twisted from his struggles, and he climbed some more. He reached, and reached, and reached until he finally grabbed onto the edge of the final summit. He had lifted himself, struggling beneath his aching muscles to push just that little bit more until he finally sat up on the ledge and turned around to look... Only to be paralyzed with the fear that it wasn't worth it .
The view came with pain and debts he could never repay. It came with PTSD and loss and therapy and medication and the requirement of having to heal from a brokenness so profound it was indescribable.
Healing has been stumbling down the mountain in the pitch black of night. He has fallen just as many times going down the mountain as he did going up, if not more. He has had to rest, to stop and breathe. He has had to pause and remind himself of why he was climbing back down to begin with. There have been rockslides and avalanches in his path or chasing him from behind, but he has chosen each time to find a better path to safety. Izuku is nowhere near the bottom, but he may be halfway now.
No, he wasn’t whole again. Not by a longshot. But the work he had put into taping himself back together is there.
His therapist once told him that grief does not shrink or lessen, you just grow to carry it. He feels that. The growth. Vines have started to wind their way through the cracks in his soul until he feels like it looks a little less broken and more like a regal building that is slowly deteriorating. One that could be rebuilt with the proper care.
And maybe he has begun to think of his soul as a building in need of repair. It is covered in graffiti and consists of mostly crumbling walls, the floors have holes and the windows are all broken. And though it looks as if it should be condemned and left to the fates of nature, he has painstakingly begun to rebuild the foundation brick by brick.
It can be seen in his demeanor. His shoulders are no longer tight by his ears and his skin no longer wan. His clothes fit better and his hair has a shine to it again. There are still circles under his eyes and a shake of his hands, but that is outweighed by the gleam in his eyes and the pink tinge to his cheeks.
His wholeness is no longer defined by how many civilians he can save or how many spots he can jump in the hero rankings, but by who he is outside of what his life has revolved around for so long. Izuku’s world has opened to more than just his mission to succeed. Now, as he reflects on what he's gone through, he sees a future as uncertain as a broken clock but doesn't fear its embrace. Instead, he stares ahead, not exactly prepared but ready for what's to come.
He knows it won't be easy, that there will be tears and pain and struggles just as there have always been. He is his mother's child, after all, emotions are held within his chest until they crash over his walls in the shape of tears and anxiety. Yet he stands tall in front of these feelings, understanding them in a way he couldn't before. Instead of fearing their presence, he welcomes them as they are. Realizes that they aren't as world-ending as they feel, that they won't drag him back into the pit of despair he had to crawl out of. They no longer burn in his mind, rampaging across his thoughts and leaving only the ash behind.
Maybe he won't become the light and inspiration he had imagined as a child, not a symbol of hope or peace as those before him and those after him might be, but he could be someone they can look to and believe. They would look at him, at the way he pushes past the burning fire of his emotions until they flicker and dull into a warmth that settles his shaking limbs and aching bones, and believe in him. Believe in how, no matter what happens, they will survive .
As he sits on his balcony and stares up at the clouded purple-black sky, Izuku feels a broken piece slide back into its place.
He decides that he is the good kind of alone.