weary travelers.

PORCELAIN SKIN IS PRETTY, IT CRACKS UNDER ROUGH HANDS

He still remembers those days. They are like fleeing memories. If two children― two children-but-not who wanted to explore. To be the best, glued at the hip and wandering through the evergreen forest. Not telling anyone else. It was their safe space.

Not anymore. Now it has trails of blood and beer-bottles. Now the children-but-not have split apart. One will seize the day, helping and saving. Rescuing the damaged with calloused hands and a smile. The other will sit alone, in a chair full of forgotten stories― he'll wonder when they stopped being children-but-not and grew to teenagers and adults. He wonders when the little den in the neck of the woods he'd called a second home was a place where his hands killed everything including himself.

He still remembers those days, where he would smile a harsh smile. He didn't know it was a sneer as his best friend bit his lip and tasted red.

The day he'd destroyed anything that could have been was the day he'd broken a child― he'd killed a child with nothing but harsh words and searing hands. He'd marked someone as useless with a scar that mars half a body with despair and rage.

But he still grins, because this is not the future, and fate is a cruel, cruel mistress who seeks to push and push her play-things until they crack and break. (The boy with searing, hurting, breaking hands wonders if he was fate, once. Because he has pushed a child until he could not see himself as human any longer.)

This is a sad story. The ending is broken into shards of helplessness and the death of a boy who could have been a man. A child-but-not who had never grown to help himself the way he'd saved others. This is the story of a boy living in tragedy. A story that ends with heart wrenching sorrow and despondency and a graveyard with one-too-many lives lost to remember. This is the story of a hero who could have been.

But fate is a cruel mistress, and she does not know how fragile humans are. (Or perhaps she does not care.)

_

Kacchan still gives him burns, even though they're going to high school next year. He is angry today, but he is always angry. Sometimes Izuku wonders what he could be so angry at. He has everything Izuku doesn't, so he can't be jealous. Being jealous would be stupid and Kacchan is genius, even though Izuku came in first on every test. Even though he could help Kacchan become stronger.

Kacchan doesn't need help, though. He had to remember. He has to remember that he's worthless and useless and an ugly, broken little thing. Choking on ashes and despair, burning with a grief and melancholy.

Kacchan is the best― it is a fact ―he has the most powerful quirk and everyone loves him (or fears him). He smiles with all teeth and crumpled noses. But Izuku knows. Izuku knows that he will always burn, and hurt, and scar.

Heroes don't scar, Izuku knows. Heroes don't hurt. Only villains hurt, so Kacchan is no hero. Kacchan is a villain. But not all villains are bad; some of them have to be bad to survive and to help. And some wear masks perfectly crafted to hide the murder in their eyes. Kacchan isn't a good villain. Maybe one day he'll learn how to hide the malice in his tone. Maybe he'll learn how to fake a smile, like Izuku.

Or maybe he's wrong. Because if Kacchan is a hero, what does that make the rest of them? With practiced smiles and fake reassurance. Does that make Izuku the villain? All broken hands and too-far-gone eyes that have seen too much too many times.

"If you want to be a hero so much I think I might know an easy way to become one,"

Then Kacchan sneers and Izuku flinches away, the hand on his shoulder is smoking with an unsaid threat. He knows not to say anything, he's a Deku after all. (Deku's don't speak. Deku's don't do anything. He takes the beating, he always takes the beating. Otherwise, Kacchan will beat someone else up, and that would be selfish and Izuku Midoriya is not selfish. He will not let anyone else see what he's seen. He will not let others crumble at the hand of an overgrown child with hate burned onto his soul.)

"just take a swan dive off the roof and pray you'll be born with a quirk in your next life!"

Then Kacchan leaves, his lackeys follow, and Izuku does not let himself cry. He bites his lips until they are bitter and red and bleeding. He won't listen to Kacchan. Killing himself would be selfish, he can't leave Mom like that. He can't, he won't. Besides, he would leave so many lost souls behind. The tired eyes of broken people that are no longer seen as such.

He can't do that. It would be selfish, and while Izuku is many things― a coward, a freak, useless, worthless, waste of space, mistake, powerless, Deku ―he is not selfish. He does know when to give up though, and he is sensible enough. So even when he sees a villain attack on his way home, he has lost all hope.

There are some things that are better not done, he can not become a hero. He has turned fate around, he will save people. He always has, he always will. Not like this, though. He will not become a menace. He will strive to become average, a normal civilian. Mom would be happy, she was always so scared whenever he said he would become like All Might. That's the only expression he can remember, or maybe it's the only one he shows.

He knows he looks like Mom. He knows that. Even if the mirror is cracked and he doesn't look at it too often (freckled face and white hair―), he knows that at least. That he won't leave her even if she killed him, because whenever he cried, she cried too.

Like mother like son. It is a mantra, something like a standstill in time that will ground him to the earth. Something like a poem, like what the kids at the end of the block tell him when he can't breathe. (Five things, four things, three things, two things, one thing.)

His gaunt cheeks, they do not flush, his tired eyes that have burrowed into his skull. Tired and broken and stretched too thin after one-too-many nightmares. He chases daydreams of playing in a forest too close to refuge, in a world dipped in yellow. Once he thought it was sunshine, ever bright and burning. The color has chipped away, rotten and ugly. World's fading to a bitter end, children-but-not rot under the ever-blue sky.

His hands― he does not remember them before. They are cracked with bones that never sat still and callouses that never fade. They were blisters, once. They hurt, once. His hands don't hurt anymore, they do not feel. They haven't felt since he thought yellow was kind and that heroes have no alternative motivation for saving lives.

Fate is a cruel mistress, he tells the children-but-not who have lost a future, who have seperate ribs and torn skin. The world is not kind, it never has been, he tells them.

Nobody will save you, so pick up the pieces of your shattered bones and find the safest place to stay. Don't stoop to the level of greed, do not let envy consume you, he tells the broken children that cannot walk straight.

He tells them that the grass is greener on the other side, but they are blind to the light.

He gives them all scraps of food, the things he was supposed to eat, but the butterflies do not let him stomach it. "Good-goodbye!"

They smile with chipped with and broken jaws, creasing their eyes until they become slits.

"Bye, Big Brother!"