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With his blinds shut tight and curtains drawn, Izuku can almost tuck away evidence of the passage of any time at all.
Soft shadows trace his walls in gentle mockery. No amount of wishing has allowed the world to pause for him.
He studies his fingers. Face-up, palm-up, the ceiling is dark, and his eyes strain to make out the fainter lines of busted, crooked knuckles.
There’s a wrongness rooted inside of him. Some pinhole of an opening, made wider and darker with use and time. He’d grown used to the feeling of running against a ticking clock, but nothing grows to burst inside him anymore. He’s a leaking well.
This body, he’d assumed, would fall short in other ways. It’s not how he expected to burn out.
Voices lower themselves past his closed door. His stomach twinges and cramps in another involuntary reminder of the hour.
Izuku tries to be upset — as much as he can before it swallows him. He knows, deep down, he has good reason to be devastated. His body is wracked with the tangible evidence of a war poorly won. He’d envisioned a broader future that painted itself teasingly before him only to be yanked roughly from a broken grasp.
He’d been meant to have a career of longevity. He’d been meant to have a greater impact. He’d been meant to wrestle control and fine-tune it, and get better and stronger, and save the people in front of him properly without tossing it all away for an exchange far out of his favor —
That’s as far as he gets, now. The words only came out of him once.
It was meant to be a fuller victory.
It was meant to be forever.
Above all else, he wonders where Kacchan is.
They make poor excuses of ducked-out eye-contact and Izuku tries as hard as he can to pretend he’s not shrinking away from him. He’s aware of Kacchan’s presence in any room just the same as the nervous system knows an open wound.
He’s not avoiding him.
At least, not any more than anything else, which isn’t for lack of wanting. But Izuku was a temporary placeholder for a long-held duty, an understudy in a finite performance, and the show and his role are over.
He’s not sure where he — fits here anymore.
He doesn’t know how to talk to him.
Normalcy with Kacchan became their work. Normalcy with Kacchan was the war. Normalcy with Kacchan was strategy and reevaluation and chasing each other’s heels to keep up in a universally understood direction, forward.
None of these things exist anymore.
He knows there’s a ball in his court. He holds blank cards in hand he can’t seem to set on the table. There is a silence and Izuku should be the one to break it, but Kacchan’s words sounded so much like finality.
A future he’d wanted, no longer deemed possible. Kacchan’s number in his phone, and the failed start of so many empty messages. Even if he were to talk to him now, what would he say?
He didn’t realize how much it would weigh on him, when everything else sat heavy on his shoulders. Pressures indistinguishable in form from the rest. He’d spent so many years wishing for easy conversation with Kacchan, and all subjects burnt out at once.
Izuku lets his hand fall, and it thuds against the mattress at his side. He knows all the scars mean something, and he’d throw his body on the line all over again if given a redo. Maybe this is just what life is like, never knowing when precious moments could be the last of their kind until the awareness is so encompassing it becomes impossible to enjoy any of them.
The flames that lick in his belly used to comfort him. It’s not so much like that now — more like the slow rotation of coals. He studies the feeling too closely now, always certain he can feel the dregs running out.
He’s afraid to ask anyone what his future holds. He’s carved out enough of it with his own two hands.
Please, he begs himself desperately, only once. Don’t be too broken to keep going.