𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐢𝐞𝐬 || S. Todoroki x Reader

7 - Suspicions

"You're still in here, kid?"

Hawks' voice pulled you out of your rhythm beyond hope of regaining it again.

You'd hoped after entering home, he'd simply go take a shower and lollygag around until you got around to making dinner. But he proved you wrong when his footsteps echoed at the lip of the training room's entry, impatience tugging at his attention.

The second you'd gotten home from boba with the other students in your class you'd thrown your backpack in your room, changed into something that you could breathe in, grabbed your wraps, and started kicking the closest thing that would swing back.

After having exhausted the training dummy, sending it over too many times for its own good, you resorted to the good-old constant sand-weighted punching bag.

Time had slipped past your fingers too fast, no matter how many times you sent the fake opponent away.

Emotions rarely got the best of you, having been trained to master the art of concealing them for most of your life. But sometimes stray bits and pieces managed to slip beneath the cracks and tore you to shreds.

You felt like a walking paradox; emotions that shouldn't have been there painting the corners of your mind and pushing your body into its only source of real release.

Mina, Sero, Kirishima, Kaminari, hell even Bakugo (who'd grumbled the entire time you occupied a booth in the boba shop). Their laughter felt like it was seeping into your body through every pore until it'd turned you inside out. It was only after you closed your front door could you actually take a full breath.

Only fragments of that recognizable heaviness nipped at the edges of your mind. You couldn't fight your way back under the familiar comfortability of numbness, of manufactured dialogue built into your very existence.

Without it, you felt naked, you felt exposed.

Who were you supposed to be if not what you were made for?

How were a bunch of kids distracting you from forgetting your very place in this world? How had they managed to wrench your fingers free of that snug state of being when you hadn't even considered getting rid of it?

Todoroki. How had one boy extracted so much from so little? Why had you let him?

His blue and gray eyes burrowed their way into your brain, burning a place in the back of your skull. His blunt and arrogant words that stirred your stomach, hot vexation sticking to the sides until you almost felt sick.

You'd never felt like this before, emotion had never come so fast, so blind to everything else, so merciless.

Before it had been controlled, contained, programmed.

Like your daily dose of prescription quirk suppressant tablets; a dry print on your tongue slipping down your throat and out of sight so fast it was forgotten before you set the glass of water down. A quick burn against your stomach, and a quiet rumble putting you into a pleasant sensation slightly detached from your body.

The worst part was that you couldn't just stop seeing them. You couldn't shut the door on those reactions, because that meant shutting it on your classmates too.

And why couldn't you do that? Because that's not what you were told to do.

It was unknown, even to you.

So you wrapped red fabric around your knuckles too tight, kicked the tingling feeling in your shoulder blades in the gut until it doubled over into nothing, and trained until you couldn't see straight.