Work Text:
Izuku Midoriya trembled.
He trembled because he knew there was no way out of this mental battle. He’d been down this road before. This itch under his skin would destroy any progress he’d made so far.
The knife was right there, taunting him and gleaming in the light, despite its real purpose of slicing vegetables for today’s meal. These knives usually didn’t bother him, but he had thrown all his blades away last week with a half-baked attempt to quit. It’s a losing battle; he knew it would be.
It’d only been one week.
In his mind, he’d already failed. Because he knew he wouldn’t be leaving this room without making up for all the time he had lost. So he wrapped his fingers around the knife, lifted its heavy body off the kitchen counter, and poised the blade inches from his skin.
He breathed in,
And out.
And succumbed to his urges, repeatedly stabbing the knife over and over into his stomach. Pain blossomed beautifully into a sharp, all-encompassing ache, throbbing in timing to his heartbeat. He could hear it roaring: Tha-thump, tha-thump, blood pouring rhythmically out onto the kitchen tile with uncomfortable squelches, dying it red. Izuku collapsed to the floor and let the knife drop with him, mind blissfully quiet.
His breathing felt far too strained to be comfortable. He wished he could choose to let his body be still, but no matter how hard he tried, his body would keep pathetically moving, working as a dying machine to survive.
He wished his classmates would stop screaming, stop trying to save him, but he didn’t deserve to serve his last moments in peace. Things didn’t work out like that for people like Izuku Midoriya, and apparently, this didn’t either.
He let himself be dragged onto the stretcher. He let the doctors heal him, leaving perfectly smooth skin where scars were supposed to be. And he let the heroes try to save him, because they’re heroes, and that’s all they’ve ever known how to do. They’ve never known how to let things go, how to accept that some things can’t be healed, can’t be changed.
So when Mr. Aizawa asked, “Why? Why did you do it?” Izuku was silent, because anything he said would be twisted into some problem that needed to be solved, a question with an answer, rather than an acceptance that it’s just how Izuku Midoriya is and always will be.
He’d known it ever since middle school when he’d trade his bullied body for others. It was a vain sacrifice, a temporary solution: His own twisted way of feeding his hero delusion while being punished for existing. He reveled in it. He knew he could keep his head down and still be a hero. He was smart enough to know that he shouldn’t bring his hero notebooks to school. He just did it anyway. He wanted to be hurt, to be punished for his miserable existence as a useless creature worth less than the dirt beneath his feet.
Things changed when he got into UA. People stopped seeing the truth. They didn’t see who Izuku really was. Even when he destroyed his body and broke his bones over and over, they didn’t see it. Only Kacchan could look through the rose-colored glasses, but even then, it wasn’t enough.
Izuku was forced to change tactics. If they wouldn’t punish him, he had to do it himself, so he experimented. Izuku became a scientist that used his own body as a test subject. To push the body further than ever gone before. Could his heart still pump as spindly nerves were exposed to burning oxygen? Could he run his fingers along the bare bone of his scalp, uninterrupted by skin or hair? Could he remain fully conscious, even if he let himself bleed into a tub of his own blood and gore?
He was addicted. Izuku had let pain rule his life to a point to where he could barely function when his class moved into the dorms. He had to limit himself, and because they were blinded by their delusions of Izuku’s goodness, they didn’t see it. It was purely incidental that they got their first real taste when Izuku snapped in the kitchen. They’ll still deny it, though. Deny that the green-haired boy sitting in that hospital bed was a monster in human skin, and they’ll continue to deny it until the layers of Deku’s mask is slowly peeled away.
They’ll get bits and pieces. Maybe they’ll find his notebooks, with frantic scribbles of his experiments in testing the human body. Maybe they’ll notice the strangely amateur surgical scars wrapped around his limbs. Or maybe they’ll realize that all the smiles were too tightly strung, incapable of being let down for even the briefest moment.
One day, Izuku’s classmates will collect all these clues and glue them together in a twisted collage, and when they do, they’ll be powerless to stop it.
With his room painted crimson and chunks of meat strewn like roadkill, Izuku Midoriya will be dead.