Bullet | Suicidal Todoroki x Midoriya

Prologue

Cold. Everything was cold. It wasn't uncomfortable, yet it wasn't quite comfortable—it was a natural feeling that I assumed would augment my future resistance—but it would never suffice as a desirable feeling or state. Frigid winds whistled with wintry despondence and desideration. The cold lunged through my head, crawled through my body, and snapped at my veins. My fingers would tremble. My senses were chilled. Yet, even the most resplendent and brilliant flames could not truly thaw the glacial venom coursing through me. I was used to it.

Clouds. Everything was dim. A thick smog hung overhead, cast its shadow down below, and laughed with a thunderous uproar at its work. Sunlight would occasionally drizzle through, but that barrier of clouds was a formidable foe. I squinted to grasp for a vestige of clarity, but all was far too hazy. I blinked. I rubbed my eyes. I shifted my view. No matter where I looked, those snickering clouds obscured my vision. I began to forget what the unimpeded, lucid world looked like.

Snow. Everything was white. The snow drifted, twirled, flittered and fluttered as it descended in beads of a powdery ice. It drowned the world with a bleak blanket of crystalline flecks. For a fleeting moment, it felt so pleasant. It piled up onto my body, but although light and seemingly innocuous, the snow aggregated until it felt as though it was crushing me. It sapped the heat from my body while weighing me down—it almost felt like a deadly hug. It stuck. It stole. It stayed. I could feel it filling my insides. I stopped trying to shake it all off.

Fire. Everything was clear. The cold dampened, the clouds dissipated, the snow melted... I was never fond of fire, but without it, I would never have survived. It was beautiful. I drank the fire as though desperate for water. It burned, but for a while, I felt stable and relaxed upon igniting it again and again. The flames singed my skin to shatter the shackles of the cold clutching my body, but eventually, all I could see was an ocean of fire. Desiring more, I sank towards its ardent core. It helped. It hurt. But the world outside my cage of fire only continued to crumble. I needed those flames, even if they were eating me alive from the inside.

Ice. Everything was frozen. Slabs, sheets, spears... The ice was voracious. Crackling, cracking, and crunching, the ice gnawed through my flesh and infiltrated my bloodstream. Each day, despite my efforts, the ravenous deluge of ice insidiously suffused my body. It felt like a glacial noose thickening around my neck. Yet, I realized that my senses were frozen, and nothing managed to dent the shield of ice surrounding them. It was benumbing. It was unfettered. It was anathematizing. Even so, the impulse to purge what I believed to be my repressed feelings was wedged into the depths of my memories, but regardless of how I desperately attempted to grasp it, the alleviating release and disposal of those feelings never arrived. That frigid impulse caused me to constantly choke and gag on my livid thoughts, but I was simply empty.

It took me a long time to identify the feeling that was the lack of feeling, but my feelings were numb. Those feelings were subdued by the ice coiling around them, and it felt as though I'd shoved them aside and watched as they shattered across the ground. The deleterious frost ensconced my heart to harden it, and that was the way it seemed to perpetually remain. Yet, the frost was a pernicious poison; it thickened into impregnable blades of ice, and by the time I endeavored to pull one of those blades free, I became cognizant that those blades were agitating reminders of that interminable pain. Even though the ice was splintering my heart, I couldn't feel it...

Numb. Everything was numb. Meaningless. Everything was meaningless. Erased. Everything was erased. Gone.

Nothing but the past present is gone, but even then, is it truly gone? I don't know the answer, so, please tell me... Somewhere, is he still alive?

A/N:
first few chapters start off a bit slow.

also, only the prologue is written in first person, and i intentionally excluded the character perspective from it.