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There are many things that aren’t associated with Iida Tenya, the man with the booming voice and calves of steel. People call him square, rigid, and a buzz kill. They think he is too stern. Too smart. Too rich.
And so the verdict is formed. Iida Tenya is branded with a lonely future. No one, even from a young age, wanted to be friends with the boy who they assumed hadn’t a gentle bone in his engine powered body. Maybe that was a good thing. Iida was able to work hard. He was able to get into Yuuei. He was able to open a new door for himself.
However, Yuuei didn’t help everything. It hadn’t been some magical cure all for his insecurity, his fear, the assumptions. Some of his classmates still saw him the way most people did: a goody-goody, an overachieving perfectionist annoyance, a stuck up rich kid, someone too blunt for his own good. Sure, he had friends who knew these things were far from the truth. It just didn’t fix the feeling deep down that everyone else was right. Fear threatened to drown him. Perhaps he was too stern, too harsh. Perhaps he was only special because his father and brother were famous heroes. Perhaps he wanted perfection too badly.
The worries ate away at him, bit by bit. It sometimes felt like he was little more than a robot, always repairing, reworking, troubleshooting. When did he get to just be Iida Tenya? It seemed only Uraraka and Midoriya liked him, brashness and all. And it hurt. It stung.
If he could have anything, Iida wanted to love himself. He wanted people to see the side of him that wasn’t machine powered, the side that played fetch with the dogs at the park and cradled his young cousins close when they visited. He wanted to stop feeling like he was something to be reset when an unsavory habit appeared.
Iida looked at himself in the mirror. He picked up his letter opener from the counter and set the cool blade to his skin. As he pulled it across, he let out a sob of joy. There was blood. There was so much blood; he was real. He was alive. He wasn’t a machine. If that could be fixed, maybe everything else could be, too.