Suicidal Todoroki x Midoriya | What it Means to Love

18 | Prey of Despair

Izuku Midoriya

My tears wet Todoroki's cheeks, and once I open my eyes, I notice how his eyelids are heavy and twitching. His glassy, empty eyes carry a saturnine glint of repressed sorrow and self-reproach. Those emotionless, dismissive eyes, I now realize, are precisely the same as when I first gazed into them. Now saddled with an abundance of knowledge regarding Todoroki, I am able to see with extreme lucidity through the mud which once clobbered my naïveté. Reaching this revelation, I not only want to unfetter all of my tears filtering slowly out from my eyes, but I also want to take all of Todoroki's tears so he no longer has to bear this burden alone.

Now Todoroki's tears begin to pour down his cheeks and snake down the side of his head. I've never seen him weep and break down before, and once never thought he was capable of it, but here I am. His eyes don't lie, but to any regular person viewing his seemingly void eyes, they simply appear to be filled with icy malice. They reflect a kind of lamentable grief that screams for help—for something to provide him with some form of reprieve. Like two exalted ancient beasts, his eyes appear to be shatterproof and omnipotent, but staring at them from just the right angle reveals the faults they naturally conceal so proficiently.

The eyes are so silent, and yet so deadly. They tell you all kinds of things without any words to be spoken. They can hide countless scars, or reveal them all like the flickering stars in the night sky. They can show you the truth, or cajole you into pursuing a fabrication of deceit.

My heart throbs to consider how mortally wounded my words must have left Todoroki at the beginning of the school year. I'd been so blindly taking the hand of the shadows into the dark without realizing it myself, never taking into account that my words could act as lethal blades—weapons to cut someone open and tear through their heart. Slowly but surely, the stars and moon began to slip away from my field of vision as I treaded deeper into the shadows...until I saw his inconsolable eyes beckoning for me, for someone, for anyone. He'd hit the floor of the ocean and was preparing to end it all with one final breath of burning water.

"She wouldn't have died if you made the bandages tighter!"

"How can you be unfazed by this woman's death? She did everything she could to live, and you're just going to ignore that and move on?"

"And I would appreciate if you refrained from putting your words in my mouth."

"You proved that to me today."

In my eyes, I was the one who set Todoroki's suicide plan in stone. To me, it seemed like he had long succumbed to the idea, but I was the one who dismantled him. After all, I proved that to him that day. What did I prove? I still can't say for certain what I proved to him, but I have the feeling that I proved to him that the world didn't need him—which, of course, wasn't true, isn't true, and never will be true. Then again, I can't say what it is he's thinking, but I know that I at least contributed to his decision to commit suicide by falling off of the bridge that day.

I never knew...that I was killing you from the inside and the outside. Guilt scorches the roof of my mouth and intertwines with my tears. While you were s-suffering in isolation, I was relishing the friendships you never had, and the friendships that you probably longed for. Shoto... Shoto! Deku, you i-idiot... You analyze everything, so why could you not analyze him in time? Why couldn't you identify your own mistakes? One hand is all it takes to save a life...but one hand is all it takes to take a life.

Fumbling to reach up for my head and face, Todoroki lifts his head from the ground and forces the two of us into a complicated embrace. He's holding me as if I'm going to be sucked away by the receding tide of fate, allowing his ocean of unshed tears to finally fall. I don't want to know the absolute agony he must be enduring inside, but I can guesstimate based off of how desperately he's clinging to me with his painfully large eyes producing a vast abundance of tears. For someone who had struggled through years without feeling any emotions—someone who was forced to hold everything inside until nothing remained because it had all drained—to suddenly be wallowing in grief, I know that inside, he must have shattered like glass.