Mom leaves in the morning like she always does. She kisses him goodnight and calls him her little hero and then like it was all a dream, she has disappeared. His mind is gone again and the voices that replace it won't stop screaming.

The awful thing that lives in his head with him tells him he doesn't deserve anything, that he's selfish and that he's a monster. His ears pop pop pop and crackle, fizz, and hiss and he can hear the boom across his head. He hates it. He doesn't want to be selfish, he doesn't. Kacchan was selfish and Kacchan hurt him. Kacchan is still hurting him, even though he's not with Izuku anymore. He doesn't want to be like Kacchan. He doesn't want to hurt people.

His mother can't really look at him when he's like this―

She won't be able to stand him if he gets worse. So he'll be something good.

He wants to help, he only wants to help. To help like All Might, though he doesn't always smile because sometimes people need to know that it's alright to be sad. That everybody cries and that they have a right to be upset and angry about their situations. They have a right to cry, and he'll say it a thousand times over. Because Kacchan was wrong, he wasn't a crybaby. He was―is―overemotional. And everybody tells him that it's a good thing, that it's what makes him Izuku.

(He wonders who Izuku is to them. When he looks in the mirror his skin withers away into wood, he's just a worthless Deku after all.)

(Kacchan is a hero, why would a hero lie?)

(Right, Kacchan is a hero. Kacchan will burn down buildings and sear skin, Kacchan will be the villain. Only villains leave bubbled skin and crying eyes behind them. But Kacchan is a hero, so maybe all the villains are Hero's and all the heroes are Villains, the big baddies, ones at the top, like Tomura's sensei. Like Endeavor, like, like―)

(Take a swan dive off the roof and pray for a quirk in your next life!)

(Then what is he? He can't be a hero. Deku's aren't heroes.)

(Izuku―he wants―he wants to be something.)

He can still hear his father slamming the door behind, he can still see it.

Izuku gets up, out of bed. And he wonders if he looks like that, too, when he leaves. He wonders if his mother can hear him shaking.

_

All men are not created equal, Tomura thinks. It makes him angry enough to pour his apple juice in a shot glass. It makes him feel grown. Makes him feel like he can do something about it.

Like he can save Izuku, like he can save anyone.

Tomura can't stand real alcohol, it's bitter and it burns and―well, he knows his father used to drink when he was upset.

His father used to drink and he'd get mad. Mad enough to break his glass and take a bath to the table and smack nee-chan and mother and him around―course Tomura would cry and scream and he'd get thrown out til his father was sober enough to realize that it was fucked up to make your kid sleep with your dog outside.

Nee-chan used to sneak him food. Izuku reminds Tomura of her. Dark hair, dark eyes, gaunt face, round eyes full of fear and guilt and guilt and guilt, so he tries to make it better and she turns to dust and.

And well.

Well.

Tomura doesn't know what he would do if he killed Izuku.
_

It's quiet out, Shouto thinks. It's quiet. Natsuo―who insists on being called Natsu-nii is reading on the ratty couch tucked in the corner of the equally ratty bar. The bartender, Kurogiri, is humming some off-key tune from a song Shouto maybe heard on the train on his way to school.

It's late, it's quiet.

That bastard, which Natsuo calls Endeavor exclusively―name coined by Dabi two months prior, never notices anything between eleven-PM and four-fifty-three-AM. Shouto doesn't know how Natsuo came across this information, but Shouto sure glad he did. Learn the information―or info, as Natsuo's boyfriend denands it be called.

Shouto didn't know you could date boys if you were a boy, but Natsuo looks at the blue-white haired self-proclaimed leader of the Midoriya Protection Squad the same way Uraraka looks at Call Me Tsu, Asui. Who he knows Uraraka―who also tells Shouto to call her by her first name―has a massive crush on. He's not quite sure if they're together or not, but Uraraka always looks dazed.

Shouto wonders, abstractly, if he looks at anyone like that.

The clock ticks. Two-three-four-AM it reads, Shouto wonders a lot at two-three-four-AM. There's nothing else to do, he usually can't sleep and he doesn't like to remember, because there isn't anything good there. If there is it's with his mother which always leads back to the same scene of whispers and crying and the tea kettle screaming and getting louder and louder until he realizes it's him screaming and his mother his pressing ice to his burn whispering―to him this time―that she's sorry Shouto, she's so sorry he just scared her, she's so sorry baby, Shouto―

So he doesn't really like remembering this late-early in the morning.

He blinks. The clocks changed again. Three-four-one-AM, it reads. They should leave now, Shouto thinks. They should catch a train back to the house so Shouto can sleep some, or at least make tea.

"I think we should go." Shouto says. His voice is off-key, too. Like Kurogiri's humming. Maybe it wasn't Kurogiri that was off-key, then. Maybe it was Shouto. He wonders. "Natsuo, I think we should go."

The clock ticks. Three-four-two-AM. Shouto feels it under his skin, the way it ticks through the air, it sets his spine straight. His throat hurts. "Natsuo―"

"I'm coming, I'm coming. Hey, Kurogiri, mind dropping us off at, uh." Natsuo blinks and furrows his brows. Then he snorts and tells Kurogiri their address. Shouto thinks Natsuo trusts these people with his life. He wonders what they did.

"Goodnight." Kurogiri keeps humming that off-key tune. Shouto ponders, for a moment, if he's the one that's off-key, off-kilter, head underwater.

(Is he dreaming again?)

"Night, 'Giri." Natsuo mumbles.

"Yes. Goodnight Kurogiri-san."

Kurogiri chuckles, the clocks ticks. Three-four-three-AM. It's an anagram.

The world is gone, black, purple. It reminds him of Dabi, inexplicably.

He wonders―he wonders. What happened to Touya again?

_

It's unsettling, walking down an empty street. It's five-AM on the dot―but Izuku is a disjointed person. He's all calloused hands and sharp teeth. Nails biting into his skin, tearing away his waxen skin to reveal the damage, he's broken. He's awful.

And his mom might be waiting at home and here he is wandering down the empty streets, vying for everything to pass so he doesn't have to think about it, but he does anyway. It loops and loops in this awful shade of brown-red-green that he can never quite name, it slinks in his stomach, weary and cold. Chills break out on his arm because his jacket is too this for this. He wants to go to the bar. Maybe. Maybe.

Izuku doesn't know what he wants, to be fair. It isn't a lot―he wants to be held by hands that will not break him, nor try and stitch him back together (he is so, so greatful that his mother stayed―but he also knows that there's something missing in her eyes; he knows that look from the mirror), he wants warm food, and to hang out with all his friends. He wants Kacchan to leave him alone in his sleep and he wants to stop thinking about how―

(You wanted to burn, didn't you? That's what you wanted, to hurt, so it'd be more real. So you wouldn't feel guilty about it when you―)

Izuku grits his teeth.

"I don't," he says, like it's true. Like there's someone―something that believes him. "I―I don't." Saying it out loud makes it real, makes it real like scars never did, he thinks. If he says it out loud then maybe it'll come true. If he says it out loud, maybe, maybe, he'll stop thinking about it so much. Maybe he'll stop dreaming about that stupid gate, about All Might's stupid smile, haunting him. Maybe, maybe, but the odds are stacked against him.

It could be worse, though, but Izuku has always gone against the odds, even when they sneered at him.

"I don't want t-to die." The air laughs at him, like it's a joke. Like this is all some hind of silly thing. He hardens his resolve. "I-I don't want to throw myself off a building."

He creases the end of his shirt until the top scratches at his scar. "I don't―I don't, shut up, Kacchan."