Work Text:
Izuku was falling.
He knew it with a certainty that was weird considering that he was laying firmly on solid ground.
The cold concrete pressed into his back.
It was freezing, even if it was barely autumn with the wind making his curls shift from time to time and his hands like little cubes of ice and flesh.
Izuku was shivering.
It came with falling, he thought.
His eyes were wide open and he was looking at the plants above him, steadily, but gently swaying in the light breeze. The night behind the leaves was stark black.
Like ink.
Or Tokoyami's feathers.
It was starless, only a big hole that threatened to swallow Izuku if he ever reached the end of his fall.
Distantly, he was aware of the odd way his cheeks felt. Everything felt odd, really but his face felt odd-er.
More odd.
It was the tears that had rolled as small blue droplets down them.
He wondered if his freckles got smudged by them.
The boy shuddered, briefly, biting his lip when he suddenly remembered again why he was here in the first place.
Why he was falling like he hadn't fallen in a while, why he was crying like he hadn't in a while, three stumps of smoked cigarettes next to him on the yellow ground.
Grief hit him like a train.
It was a sudden thing, he found, a fickle one.
Grief was… hard to describe, really.
It was always there like a dull ache when it was fresh, making smiles dim and eyes tear up and yet it somehow always surprised him when he became aware of it.
Grief was memories that hurt and felt warm and joyful and nostalgic and wistful at once, so many emotions packed into one that the mind couldn't help but try to flee.
Izuku closed his eyes and his stomach lurched slightly as tears once again started up.
He was still falling.
Perhaps he was falling faster now that his eyes couldn't tell his brain that he was in fact standing still.
Cold snuck up his throat and a tear snuck down the same path.
Izuku shook with the weight of his feelings.
He had always had too many of them, had always swallowed them all until they burst out of him.
Volatile.
Izuku was volatile.
Not a word most people would use, but the greenette found it fitting, was weirdly fond of it.
Another sob.
Another memory.
Of the two of them, smoking together with her smoking fast, too fast and almost desperate, hungry.
She'd always smoked like that.
He wondered if she had done it still before she died.
Izuku would never know.
It wasn't like they had had contact as of late, wasn't like he had known quickly that she was gone.
He had seen it as a tribute, had seen the hashtags and prayed they weren't true.
'Is she okay?', he had asked a mutual friend, her best friend if not a close friend of his.
'She chose to go last week.'
Such a pretty way to say that she had killed herself.
Izuku spiraled as he fell, shaking as his hands came to grip his own arms.
Some kind of self hug perhaps.
He needed a hug, but he also just wanted to hug the one person he couldn't right now.
Could never again.
Izuku sat up.
Tears still rolling down his numb cheeks, he went to gather the burnt out cigarettes and angled down the streets to dispose of them.
The stars were still absent.
It was fitting.
The streetlights cried with Izuku, bled their yellow light all over the sidewalk.
He remembered her names.
She had several of them, two, maybe three she used regularly and one she didn't want to be called ever.
Her birth name.
The thing her parents called her.
The thing that would be written on her gravestone.
Izuku felt sick about it. He briefly considered going to talk some sense into her parents, two people he didn't know but blamed wholeheartedly for all of the shit he'd heard from her.
The wrong name was on top of her obituary.
'At least she won't be affected by it anymore,' his mom had said.
She meant it in a soothing way, a last ditch effort to calm his hysterical crying when he'd read it and yet it rang hollow.
Inko didn't know how important a name was.
A cop car drove past Izuku.
He stared after it, still crying visibly, shaking as he walked unsteadily back to the house he lived in.
A helpless laugh escaped him.
It wasn't funny. It wasn't a nice laugh either.
A rough tone after the smoke, set into the universe as if he was trying to get his sanity back.
Grief was a weird thing.
Izuku was freezing and he didn't think that it was only because of him laying on the ground for too long.
He'd loved her, loved her like an artist loved a painting or a biologist loved and interesting flower.
She'd been a beautiful soul.
Light and sadness and fear and ghosts following her behind as she fought for life, all packed into a fragile person.
Izuku wondered what had happened to her dog.
Then he thought about her laugh.
Grief was like that too sometimes.
Fractured, as if every memory needed to be remembered this instant lest they faded. Whitened out and disappeared against the sadness pulling him down.
At least he'd stopped falling.
Izuku slipped back inside, blindly walking until he reached his bed, shaking and shivering his way under the blanket.
It was still too cold.
Viridian eyes stared at the ceiling as flashes passed and flickered through his mind.
Izuku had barely known a day that she had gone, had taken wings as some teacher of his had once called it, another pretty way to say it.
Too pretty for the ugly reality of it all. But who was Izuku to decide how people grieved.
He had known barely a day even if it had been a week since it happened. He already missed her, even if she hadn't really been in his life for months.
God.
Izuku stared at the ceiling some more as his heart fell apart.