Suicidal Todoroki x Midoriya | What it Means to Love

55 | Can I Fix Myself?

Shoto Todoroki

Sometimes I still ponder whether or not slipping into sleep will one day yield for me the product of ceasing to wake. I truly am such a cruel monster. Words such as 'abnormal' or 'anomalous' fail to encapsulate the full extent of whatever it is I might be. Can someone who claims to cherish their mother have any fitting place in society when witnessing her passing provoked absolutely no emotion? Horrible... I truly am horrible. Deplorable. Abominable. Execrable. There are far too many synonyms and the like, yet none of these words—or an amalgamation of words—can truly describe me. I thought it would perhaps be beneficial to terminate my emotions and follow in line for Endeavor, but I couldn't have been more wrong. A fool falls to prey far too easily.

Izuku, why is it that you love me when you strongly disliked how cold I was? You said you highly doubted that anyone would care if I was injured. You found my inability to feel sorrow over the death of the cashier to be an inexcusable flaw.

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

I do apologize for lacking the capacity to feel that, Izu. It never truly dawned on me how selfish it was of me to become emotionally repressed, reserved, closed off...or however you would like to label it as. Can I still feel anything? I do not know. Is this love truly a lie? No... I refuse to believe that. Was the culmination of hatred that led to Endeavor being 'dismantled,' to put it lightly, a lie? Or was I simply deceiving myself with facts and the biased thoughts of hatred I once held and allowed to fester? I wish I could understand. But I digress... Izuku, do you still hate how unfeeling, cold, uncharitable, phlegmatic, astringent, etcetera, that I am? Again, there are far too many synonyms, and despite that, none of them would truly suffice to describe how I feel. Or, perhaps more accurately, what I fail to feel.

Izuku, what does it feel like to feel emotion? Regardless of how frequently I might mull over past and present, I cannot say whether or not I can or cannot feel. I feel as though I can, yet even then, I was struck by paltry stupefaction rather than proper bereavement when Mom died. Are my emotions seldom and selective? I would not know. I feel so numb. The vacuity of my mind regarding emotion is rather nettling, but is that perhaps for the best? I would not know.

Sighing a long breath into my pillow as I shift my position in my futon, I lightly press my left hand over my stomach. With a few blinks of my astonishingly leaden eyelids, I nuzzle my head further into my pillow.

I cannot even eat properly yet, I internally rebuke myself. Today has certainly proven to be an exceptional setback, but I miraculously managed to eat a few bites of soba for dinner. Still... I have been informed a plethora of times that I do not eat often enough, I eat too little, I'm unhealthily thin, I need to gain weight due to the fact that I am severely underweight, etcetera, etcetera... I detest hearing those remarks. I despise knowing that they are pointed at me like knives and that they are right. I hate looking at the truth—I hate looking at myself. Although it is an incentive to repair what I've mutilated, I do not need to be reminded of the truth that I am excruciatingly aware of. I...truly abhor the effects it has branded me with. I can only hate and berate myself for what I've become. I know what I need to do, but my self-loathing has indubitably subjugated those pleas. When I peered into the mirror at Yaoyorozu's house and realized how much weight I had lost, I felt sick. Blasé to the tangible pain I might be, yet the mental scars never cease to be the deepest ones. Why is it that my life seems to be the inverse of what one would define as 'normal' for a human being? Human... Am I? Am I human anymore? Was I human? A human body, indeed, but human thoughts and functionality?