Work Text:
Sometimes, in the dead of night, Izuku wonders. It’s not the bright-eyed hopeful meandering thoughts of a youth-filled, too-bright child, nor the well-worn jaded musings of a man beyond his years.
It’s a quiet thing, silent.
Izuku does not dream, in his wide-awake witching hours.
He thinks.
Sometimes about his childhood. Sometimes about his time at Aldera.
Sometimes about the war.
It’s all different, each thought, rolled around and settled on his tongue as he stares at the ceiling with bone-deep aches. Little pearls, formed from every little piece of himself lost and refound, rebuilt from shattered pieces.
Always, Izuku thinks about what would have happened if he had just… given up.
If he had gotten the quirkless diagnosis at aged five and accepted his worthlessness, his weaknesses, and abandoned his dreams of heroics. If he had grown tired of burning hands and crinkled grins and mocking laughs and gave up the way he was baited into all throughout middle school. If the constant fight for survival against the League had wrung him out to dry and left him a shell of a person the way it almost did, if he had just stopped, one day, one fight, and let fate have its way with his body.
It’s a collection of reoccurring thoughts, haunting Izuku’s every moment he lets his mind wander.
Surely, he would be told you need help or this isn’t normal should anyone know.
But they don’t, so he’s left to think in his silence, mouth dry and tongue heavy and body itching to go-go-go because maybe then, if he’s moving, working, distracting himself with every little possible thing to do, he can outrun himself and have a moment of peace.
He knows he can’t go on like this.
Overworking himself to the bone to get rid of the energy humming deep in his tendons lest he vibrates out of his own skin, exhausting himself until he crashes and doing it all over again.
Sometimes, in the dead of night, Izuku wonders how much simpler his life would be if he gave up.
Then again, he wouldn’t be where he is now if he ever did, surrounded by a support system he can’t bear with a rekindled relationship with his best-friend-ex-bully-something.
But, then again, he wouldn’t have known the pain of losing everything he worked so hard for. He would’ve never seen the lengths he could reach, just how great he could be, to have it ripped away so cruelly from his palms until he was left breathless and empty again, quirkless diagnosis heavy in his hands for the second time in his life as the world mourned his losses.
Fate never was kind, was it?