Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Tingling skin - you taste like ashes, soaked in rain and mud from a cold night in summer. You feel like honey and molasses, trickling down charcoal fingers stickily with hardened resolve. Shining like a star at its brightest ― you are a supernova on the verge of greatness. Or perhaps you were something smaller.
Bits and pieces, you are made of sand / you are made of dreams and hopes long gone. Because they -- you have disappeared with the folly of your ever-fleeting childhood ― of your split ends and watery smiles. You are bittersweet; hate and love and anger cracking like your skin. Burning you from the inside out as you scream into your mind. Your mind echoes back unpleasant as ever - you want to say it out loud. The monsters might hear you so you staple your lips shut with withheld screams -- one day you will staple them together with metal as your skin falls apart and you burn to cinders.
You burrow under your blankets to hide from the creatures that haunt your mind - you drink your tea too sweet and love too fast, too hard / you crash too easily; your insides wax poetic about how you are frost wielding fire too hot for this earth. Organs melt and your skin turns to goo, rendering to puddles of red and something else. You cannot see as well as others ― you have never been the greatest at what you do. There will always be someone leagues above you.
Then - who isn't? Who isn't above you with a body for frost wielding a fire so blistering it kills your skin and you fall apart / as if you were together in the first place?
Irony has different takes. Irony is your mother's fear and your father's rage. The irony is your parents seeing too much of the other. Irony is bitter and burning like your father's anger. You, for one, have had enough of this irony; enough of your body taunting you - you are never enough / you never were / never will be. You love too much and you fall too fast too hard too―
Too much, you are too much and not enough at all. Too much for your mother, who sees your hair and eyes and cries because you look like the monster that does not hide under your bed (you wish you had those monsters, they were less scary than the real ones). So you stay away from your mother as she entertains your twin sister. Your sister who is the opposite of you ― you are slow to trust, slow to love, slower to anger.
In your father's eyes - you have them, you know how he thinks (you crack all the mirrors and you swear to change the color of your hair one day) - you are nothing short of your mother's weaknesses. Her kindness is not enough / never enough. You prayed that this hell would end one day ― you know it will not. It will not because you are too little for your father, who towers over you frighteningly. (Other children, the ones on t.v., you think, aren't scared of their fathers.)
You are too young to train, says your mother. You are too old to not, says your father ― or they would say. Your mother cannot look you in your eyes - you don't blame her, you can't either. Maybe you're both cowards, tiptoeing around broken cups and too hot hand and too cold rooms.
Today is your birthday - you got your curse when you were almost three, you wish you didn't. Wish you didn't have your father's eyes and your mother's weakness. Wish you weren't too much and too little and nothing and everything. You wish you weren't sickly / you wish you were sick forever. Maybe then you could stay far, far away from mirrors and such. The eyes that stare back at you remind you of the too real too strong monster that sleeps one-two-three doors down. You do not see your mother's stature or the curve of her eyes ― no, you see the man, the monster that hurts and hurts and hurts one of the only people you've loved. It's not a lot to compare to, though, you don't have many people to love. There's your twin sister, who is kind in all the ways your mother is, and she is enough - she is not like you. There is your younger brother, who chills and heats the draft around him with shallow, labored, breathes. To you they are enough -- to the monster, they are too little. Less than you, who wields fire too hot in a body for cold.
Now you have another one to love, to protect. He is your baby brother, who looks like your mother, even if half of his is the devils' portrait. You say nothing because you are painted red and diamond-hard blue. He is young and excited and he prefers cold to hot, your siblings to you. You cannot judge him, for you are the same.
You prefer your soba cold and your mother to your father.
There are obvious things. You like your skin together instead of apart, you like your sisters' cool hands against your back [you liked your mother, but you don't know if she will ever feel the same], you like winter to summer and fall to spring. You like cold too much and heat too little. Too much your mother, too much your father.
Things would be better if you were gone, you're already disappearing, you smell like dry-rot and mildew, you taste like ashes and smoke. A campfire and a supernova, a necromancer for the living.
You are falling apart, finger calloused, the only part of your body that refuses your mother's ice, the only part of you that is truly a monster. Stocky hands, long fingers, your fingernails burn, your skin does not. The monster has not figured it out yet, because your nails bleed off and you convulse, fingertips dressed in ash from your too hot flames on your ice-proof body.
Never enough ― you will never be enough / you will always be too much. So - in tune with both, you decide that you will be nothing at all.
For the first time, you do not scream when your frost body taunts you with too hot flames. (You laugh and laugh and laugh.)
Blue like your diamond-hard eyes lights up around you, blue like hellfire and cremation and everything that hurts and hurts and hurts. You feel your skin melting away, for good, hands remain intact as your face falls apart, purple burns that no sutures can ever fix, you smell like a crematorium. You burn away the dry-rot and mildew, burn away the rotting that holds your bones together and you cry until your tear ducts melt together from too hot tears and longing for love.
Touya Todoroki is dead, Dabi rises from the ashes. Dressed in burns, and painted with hate.
You are stardust and ashes, a supernova and a campfire, you are too much / too little / too late.
