Chapter Text
He is so tired. He’s tired of worrying. He’s tired of the anxiety. The fog. The pain. The lying.
He’s tired of washing blood out of his bedsheets. Out of his clothes. He’s tired of assuring Fuyumi everything will be ok. That he’s okay.
He sits up and his head spins, a painful throbbing behind his eyes.
His phone is cracked and sitting on his nightstand, the flashing screen telling him he has messages.
Midoriya: hey. Are you okay?
They’d had a stupid training session today with the oh so wonderful number one hero. He was at school. Where he should be safe. Where he thought he was safe.
Endeavor had knocked him fucking stupid. He’d gotten up off the floor a dozen times more than he’d wanted. Aizawa had to use his quirk to stop the fight when he’d decided to burn the other side of Todoroki’s face and give him a nasty concussion.
He’d been sent off to recovery girl, Izuku at his heels.
The scar wasn’t as bad as the one on his left. But it wasn’t gone either. His skin had chilled with shock, frost forming on his injured face and he’d given himself frostbite and a burn.
Now he was symmetrically disfigured.
He also got slapped in the face with the realization this, living under his father’s thumb, being demeaned and ridiculed and beat down, may never actually stop. He may never actually be able to escape.
He’s been counting down the days until he’s eighteen. Until he graduates. Until he has some semblance of independence.
But that’s only at home. He’s a hero. There’s an aspect of collaboration that’s expected of him. With anyone. With everyone. It’s even more common now that All-might is retired.
He’s so tired.
He’d thought he could do it. Knowing there would be an end date. Knowing there would be a time he could finally be free. Now it’s like he’s staring out at the sea and hoping he can see land at some point. He has no idea when that some point might be.
He had found an Island with Izuku. A break. Someone who knew the hell he went through every time he went home. Every time he answered the phone to a voice that was loud enough most people thought he was on the speaker setting. But it just isn’t enough. It’s not enough to have someone know, to have someone understand. He just wants it to be over.
He’s tried coping. He’s done every internet search he can think of at the library at school. He can’t do it at home because Fuyumi would worry and his father would be pissed his masterpiece needed help.
He’s tired of losing chunks of the day to fugue states. He’s tired of looking at his ceiling at three in the morning with charred sheets because the nightmares just won’t go away.
He’s tired of Bakugo yelling at him for leaving icicles in his ceiling. Tired of waking up and needing honeyed tea because his throat is raw from holding back screams. He hopes he’s not actually screaming in his sleep.
Maybe when he’s a pro, he’ll just let a villain kill him. Let it be over then. It happens all the time. It almost happened to Tenya’s brother a few months ago. It could happen to him. Nine hundred and forty days until he can sit for an actual license… How bad would it be to die during his work study? Would his preceptor feel guilty? Would it be possible? He knew Izuku and Kirishima had dealt with a very strong villain.
Hell, maybe he’ll be lucky and the league will kill him while he’s still a student. Maybe Dabi and his strange preoccupation with the Todoroki family will incinerate him.
Maybe not.
He already knows what it feels like to burn.
He doesn’t want to do it again.
He looks at his arm. His left side. The silvery scars lining his forearm. Marks of days he’s only had one way to pull himself out of the haze.
He bleeds because he hates how it feels to burn.
He’d been so angry the first time. He’d looked in the mirror, looked at his face, at what it had done. It had sent his mother away. He had sent her away.
She forgives him but it doesn’t make it better.
An iced fist had shattered the mirror, pieces falling and clinking into the porcelain sink. He’d cut his hand cleaning up, watching the blood stain the white. Ebb away it’s purity. His focus had been drawn to the throb in his hand, to the pulsing around the wound, the heat of the blood dripping down his skin.
It had been a moment he didn’t think of his father that hated him. Of his mother that left him. Of his sister that stood by. Of his brother who was so angry. Of the one they never talk about.
He’d kept a particularly well-shaped shard. It had a blunt edge from where it had been lining the mirror, polished and beveled. Good to grasp without slicing his fingers too much.
He kept it in his sock drawer.
He used it more than the socks.
He also had sleeping pills. He’d tried them. They made him sleep. But they didn’t make the nightmare go away. Instead, he was just trapped in them. Living an interminable loop of every bad moment of his life, unable to wake up.
What if he never woke up?
Does he actually have to wait for someone else to do this, or can he? He looks at the jagged bit of his reflection in the broken mirror.
No. He doesn’t.
His countdown is three. Friday. It’ll give him the weekend. His father has a conference so he’ll be on campus. His friends will think he’s at the hospital with his mother or accompanying his father.
No one will look for him.
Not until it’s too late.
Todoroki: I’m fine. Do you want to walk?
___________________
Walking with Izuku, it almost changes his mind. He knows he’ll miss his friends. He’ll miss Izuku and Tenya and Ochako and Momo. He’ll miss Eijiro and Denki and even Katsuki in his own way. He’ll miss everyone. They filled the gaps he didn’t even know he had, gave him somewhere to go where he was an equal.
It almost changes his mind.
He gets weird looks on Friday when he meanders the classroom after homeroom socializing. He doesn’t say goodbye. It would be too obvious, too weird if he did. But it’s his closure.
“Bye Shoucchan,” Izuku calls out as Shouto walks away, ready to say his last ‘goodbye.’
“Goodbye, Izuku.” It hurts more than it should to say that one word. Makes his throat tight and his lip tremble. He doesn’t like the idea of never seeing his best friend again. Of never seeing what they could have been.
But he hates the idea of ever seeing his father again. Of seeing the flash of fear in his mother’s eyes everytime she first turns around and sees him.
He wishes he had a bath in his room. It’d be easier for whoever is unfortunate enough to clean it up. As it is, he lays out some towels on his bed, hoping it’ll be enough. He considers writing a note, explaining his actions but he can’t. He can’t leave Fuyumi to deal with what happens when the prodigal son of Endeavor kills himself and leaves a note saying it’s all because his father abused his family.
It’s not fair to her. He’s kept quiet all these years because he didn’t want to deal with it. Didn’t want to hurt his mother worse. Didn’t want to itemize everything that had been done to him. To her. Didn’t want to be called a liar.
He’s seen enough of hero supporters to know they wouldn’t believe him. There’s no medical evidence, nothing but the word of an obviously unstable child. It’d be no different than all of the celebrities that got away with abuse and assault and violence before heroes came onto the scene.
People don’t want to believe their idols could ever do something terrible. Better to berate and batter the victim into just shutting up.
He won’t leave his family with that.
He upends the bottle of pills, tossing the bottle up under the dresser and flips the shattered piece of mirror between his fingers.
He swallows the pills.
And creates a chasm from wrist to near his elbow.
Very quickly, his stomach turns, churning violently with the medication and bile burns his throat. His vision blurs and his head is woozy.
Then it’s black.
He floats in the black. It rocks, almost like he’s on a sea. On black water, surrounded by darkness. The crash of water starts fading and for a moment he hears his name, an agonized shriek that’s all too reminiscent of the way his sister sounded that night in the kitchen with the burning, then the blackness swallows him whole.