Moments Between

Izuku Midoriya

One will understand that grief is intimate, once they carry a paralyzed, thorned, empty heart, severely for a long time, inflected by unexpressed, undefined, and misunderstood misery. Grief excavates hurricanes under one's skin, that once it bites, it marks, as if it's forever for life in the moment.

It doesn't let you be a hero. It breaks you and destroys you; it gets you on your knees until you give in to the tremendous pressure. And the human psyche could only do so much; protecting one from their darkest deisres and pulsions, helping one to avoid stepping over the line by unabling from even thinking about it. Containing their dilemna by erasing and repressing them.

It was a truly magnificent intstrument, if only one's grief wasn't greater than what their psyche could handle.

One thing they don't tell you is how grief will turn you madly inward. That it will make you deal not only with the sudden rush of pain, but so too with what lived beneath the bone before. And that it takes a hellish strength.

And when all is said and done, when you've given it your all and more, when it appears all your efforts were not enough, you commit to that one thing you vowed to not do: to commit a sin. And then you would cling to that sin because that is all you have going for you.

(Even good people find themselves in bad struggles, seasons, and situations. It's not because they are horrible, but because they are human.)

It had been that way for Izuku, where he would tuck the beat of his pulse in every ache his heart gave away. He refused to feel dead while wearing a curve on his lips. He refused to not feel alive by not breaking oh so well, just to be whole.

Until he didn't. Until he couldn't.

He can feel her absence in his soul, loud and luminous. Sometimes it's a hushed echo, lingering low and lurking loose, but it never fades. It takes a break but it never breaks away.

The glass tipped, the sand fell, and Izuku began to cry. He cried for everything. He cried for her. He cried for himself. He cried because he knew there was no going back, either to his home or to who he had once been. He cried because everything was lost. He cried because the dream of life and the dream of hope and the future are nothing more than illusions and fantasies. He cried himself to numbness.

He cried because the world is an empty suit of armor.

Then Izuku will ask himself, when everything makes him feel small, when everything just drowns him and he can't seem to move to escape the euphoria of dying, when the silence suddenly makes him understand the many ways a person can die but still be alive - when will he let go, when will he give up, and he'd answer himself back, I don't know.

How long does a fox stay in a forest, caught in a trap, before it decides to gnaw its own foot off? How long before she decides, that her best chance is to try and live without a part of herself? How long, how long.