Izuku is a disappointment. That is all he will ever be. There’s no coming back from this, no climbing out of this pit. He’s been self-destructing, been letting himself crash and burn, for years. It leaves something bitter filling the back of his throat—the taste of bile, that he swallows down.
His thumb hovers over Aizawa’s contact name. He… could call. Perhaps. Maybe. His teacher… former teacher… has continued to help his class, even long after they’ve graduated.
Does Izuku even deserve his help, though? So many hands held out, so many chances turned away from…
He’s closed every window and locked every door, literally and metaphorically.
He closes his phone, too, and opens the only thing left to him: the bottle of painkillers in his right hand.
Akibara Yuuki, Deku’s manager, doesn’t hear from him in the morning. She sends an email, and when she receives no response, she sends a text, and when there’s no response to that, she calls.
No one answers.
Worry is a stone in her gut—he’s always on time (or early) to work, and on the rare days he takes off, he always, always lets her know at ungodly hours of the morning, or several days in advance.
She doesn’t think much of grabbing the spare keys to his apartment that he keeps in a secret compartment of his locker (of course she has access to all of that) and walking the few blocks to his building. He lives several floors up, and a short elevator ride later, she’s striding down the hallway to his apartment and knocking, loudly, on the door.
“Hel-lo-o!” she sing-songs, projecting as much as she damn well wants to. His neighbors can deal with it.
There’s no response, no sound of someone moving around inside. He does not open the door, all bleary eyes and messy hair, apologizing for—for sleeping through his alarm, or losing track of time on a phone call, or something mundane like that.
The stone in her gut grows heavier.
“Alright! I guess you give me no choice,” she chirps, pulling his keys out of her pocket and inserting one into the first lock. “In I come!”
He has three locks on his door, and it takes her less than thirty seconds to unlock all three, and then she’s in, politely kicking her shoes off at the door.
Less than thirty seconds later, she finds his body.
Japan is left reeling. Their Number One just killed himself. What does it say about your country when your Symbol of Hope just committed suicide?
Deku’s death reaches everyone. People around the world mourn him and ask the usual question: why did he do it?
Izuku’s death reaches fewer people.
Yuuki, after the body has been taken care of but before the news breaks, begins making phone calls. Letting Midoriya Inko know what happened before she hears it on the news is the only mercy left for her. Following Inko are Izuku’s two support techs, first Hatsume Mei and then her partner Melissa.
After hanging up on Melissa, Yuuki’s thumb hovers over one more number.
Before she can second-guess herself, she calls.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Uravity. It’s Akibara Yuuki. I… have news.”
A pause on the other end of the line.
“It’s not good news, is it?”
“He killed himself. Coroners say it happened around three this morning.”
“…Thank you for letting me know.”
Uravity hangs up on her, Yuuki’s phone giving three final beeps to signal the end of the call. Finally, she lets herself cry, the building pressure having become too much for her to hold back anymore.
Miles away, another woman begins to cry as well. She had walked away months earlier, because she was crumbling, trying to support her best friend while he was determined to kill himself.
It looks like he finally succeeded.
Those four women—Inko, Mei, Melissa, and Ochako—are the only four Yuuki manages to call before the news breaks.
At UA, Snipe pulls Aizawa Shouta aside the moment his break begins.
“Didn’t want you to hear from the news,” Snipe says, pausing and glancing at the door of the teachers’ office. “But—he’s dead. Midoriya’s dead.”
Shouta blinks, once, twice. “How?”
Snipe doesn’t respond for one heartbeat, two. “Suicide.”
“…Suicide,” Shouta repeats, blinking again, looking away. “He killed himself.”
“That’s what the news is saying,” Snipe replies, his tone gentler than Shouta’s ever heard it.
All Shouta can do is close his eyes as an ache overtakes his chest. He’s lost his second son now, hasn’t he?
Elsewhere in UA, a notification causes Eri’s phone to vibrate. Normally, she doesn’t care to check her twitter notifications, but the teachers are switching out right now, she has time.
Whispers break out around her as she pulls her phone out of her pocket and turns it on.
The notification comes up on screen and she immediately turns it back off. If she doesn’t look at it, then it doesn’t exist, right?
But the whispers reach her ears.
“He killed himself?”
“Deku committed suicide… the articles aren’t saying anything else, though!”
It’s not going away.
Eri stands and runs out of the classroom, ignoring her classmates’ exclamations behind her. She shoulder-checks her teacher, and she does not care.
If it won’t go away, then maybe, she can run away, far enough and fast enough, she can run away to him, find this and Rewind this—
(Cold hands in hers, cold and dead, her knees aching against the morgue floor as she cries and sobs and reaches for the power within her.
She cards her fingers through purple hair that’s tacky with dried blood. Her brother does not lean into her touch, he never will again.
“Eri?”
A soft voice behind her, calling her name, and Izuku’s there, eyes swollen and red and his hair a mess. Tear tracks, still wet, shine on his cheeks.
Even though he’s been crying just as much as her, he takes her hands, the chill of his metal hand and the warmth of his flesh hand shocking compared to the nothingness of Hitoshi’s.
She cannot Rewind death, she learns that day.
There is no raising the dead.)
In France, they do not see the news until they wake up. Of course, the first thing Tenya does when he wakes up is check his phone for the time.
The news notification is at the top of the list, and underneath that, his class’s groupchat is blowing up.
All he can do is lay in bed and watch the groupchat until Mina, fresh tears in her eyes, opens the door to his room and lets herself in.
“Tenya,” she says, voice breaking. “Get up.”
He does not, so she sits down, rests her hand on his shoulder. “You need to eat something. Please.”
With the effort of lifting an immoveable weight, Tenya sits up. The moment he’s upright enough, Mina wraps him up in a tight hug. “Yuuga’s making breakfast… Come eat with us?”
He’s sobbing into her shoulder, but still, he nods.
Thousands attend his public memorial, all offering their tears to an idol they never knew.
A much smaller number receives invitations to the private service, organized and planned by one Akibara Yuuki.
All of his former classmates—the surviving ones, at least—somehow manage to make it. Ochako spends the whole time crying into Tenya’s suit. Shouto is there, silent and stony-faced, sitting to the side by himself. Mina sits with Hanta and Yuuga, holding their hands, while Kyouka and Momo sit together for the first time since their breakup.
No one stands up to give speeches or eulogies about him. All the pretty words were spent at his public memorial.
Instead, they’re all saved for after, when the former Class 3-A invades Momo’s house and takes over her private bar.
Shouto is there as well, still silent and stony-faced, until Momo walks over to him.
“You look like you need to get something off your chest,” she says, offering him a glass filled with whatever alcoholic abomination Mina had put together.
Shouto takes it, drains it, and freezes it over. “I told him I didn’t ever want to fucking see him again unless he was over being so fucking selfish.” His face does not screw up in anger, but their immediate surroundings cool off by several degrees. “That was the last fucking thing I ever said to him.”
“I’ll get us both more drinks,” she replies. “This seems like the kind of thing we should be drunk for.”
There are gaps in their class, gaps in their life, that can never again be filled. There is another in memorium statue to visit, cold, impersonal stone standing before them instead of a person, a friend, a brother.
It’s too big, Ochako decides, the first time she visits it. Izuku had been… he had been a force of nature, a personality larger-than-life, but…
She looks at the statue, and it doesn’t look like him. The shoulders are too broad, the proportions just a bit off, like the sculptor was instructed to cut a figure closer to All Might than Deku. The compact form of her best friend is pasted over by a false image, pushed and prodded and adjusted until it fits the traditional image of heroics.
Turning away from the memorial, she pulls out her phone and opens up her pictures. She has an album, just of him, all the pictures she has of Izuku separated out and banished to their own folder where she cannot, somehow, accidentally stumble across them and remind herself that she couldn’t save him.
She looks at them now, tears building up behind her eyes, her heart aching, and she thinks that this folder of pictures, put together because she just can’t stand looking at them mixed in with all the others, is a better memorial to him than the statue behind her.
Yoarashi Inasa becomes the Number One Hero, and just like Endeavor before him, it’s a hollow victory. Izumi Kouta loses a mentor and big brother, and Paladin, the senior-most of Izuku’s team of sidekicks, steps up to take the lead of his, now her, team.
“It’s just… not the same without him,” she murmurs one day, and her teammates all agree. Deku had been the one to bring the four of them (four, because Kouta is, without a doubt, part of their team, has a job waiting with them after graduation) together. They are only a team because they are the ones Deku had trusted to watch his back.
Some job they did of that, huh? They watched his back so well he survived long enough to die by his own hand.
Yuuki remains as their manager, returning after a leave of absence filled with fire and fury.
“This system,” she whispers to Paladin, hissing and spitting with the rage of one thousand disturbed cobras, “killed him. It set him up to fail. No one else sees it, but I do. Will you let me show you?”
Paladin lets Yuuki show her.
Years down the line, when people remember Deku, they remember Japan’s Symbol of Hope. They remember a martyr. They remember him as the swan song of heroics, the last great hero before the end of the glamor age and celebrity cops.
When people remember Izuku, they remember a tragedy. They remember watching him self-destruct, they remember pushing him away and watching him pull away in turns. They remember the heart and soul of their family.
They remember their regrets.
There are too many regrets to name, regrets belonging to people named Ochako and Tenya and Inko and Shouto and Mei and Melissa and Shouta. Maybes, what-ifs, and could-have-beens bite at their heels and lurk in the shadows, ready to strike.
He’s not around to care, but no one remembers a disappointment.