Chapter Text
Izuku doesn’t think he’s ever been addicted to it, not really.
He can’t remember the first time he thought cutting himself was a good idea, and he doesn’t remember a specific incident causing it.
Most of his days in middle school are a blur — well, more like a blur with a lot of specific instances his brain disobediently flashes back to; in shame, even though it was years ago.
Back then, he was constantly on high alert, heart rate spiking several times a day — he’s sure of that — and in those moments, he believed the smallest of humiliations to be the end of the world. It was kids steering clear of his seat at the start of the year, fighting over who has to sit next to shaking, mumbling Deku. It was having to find a partner to work with when people quickly teamed up and avoided his gaze, or worse; stared and laughed at him. He always wished he could disappear in those moments; he hated having to force some poor, less obviously hateful person or people to work with him and watch as over time, they grew more and more tired of him. It was laughter and whispers, people glancing back at him in the last row with one unreadable look or the other. And Izuku never knew what it was that he was doing wrong most times, which made it a lot more difficult to deal with the situation.
In preschool and elementary school, kids and especially Kacchan, were more physically violent. They were too young to really get in trouble for it, especially when quirk malfunctions were par of the course.
Izuku sometimes wished that things could be as straightforward as they were back then; when kids would insult him to his face or push him or use their quirks on him; when they were too young to look at him and see his deepest fears and insecurities written on his face and know just the best, most painful way to use them against him. Izuku never told anyone he wished he could be beat up again — although, really, he didn’t have anyone to tell, anyway — but he often wished things could be as simple as clumsy fists and childish insults.
Now it was Kacchan and his friends emptying his locker, clogging toilets with his notes — usually hero notes; he always needed to clean those up if he didn’t want to get in trouble — and calculatingly pouring the stickiest juices they could find on both him and his school materials. It was Kacchan telling everyone about what Izuku was writing about, and them quoting it back at him, laughing about how stupid and desperate he sounds. It was someone stealing his school uniform during PE, laughing as Izuku made up some excuse to his teacher that no one bought and having Izuku sit around in sweaty clothes all day with ‘gosh you really stink Deku’s being said whenever someone came anywhere near him. It was Kacchan tearing down his dream with arguments that got crueler and more convincing by the day.
One time, Kacchan said, ‘Like Deku.’ to some unflattering adjectives his social studies teacher used to describe a mentally ill artist who lost his mind to his obsession with creating the perfect painting, without ever having any kind of success before his death. He remembers that moment much more clearly than some of the others, because it started regular calls and whispers of ‘like Deku’ to a variety of different, usually negative descriptions of people (or objects) his teachers incorporated into their lessons.
Most people found this hilarious — other than the teachers that is, whose mild annoyance steadily increased until it turned into a weary acceptance (like it did with most things eventually) when they realized their ‘settle down’s and ‘stop interrupting me’s didn’t do anything about it.
One of their new younger teachers that year would shoot Izuku annoyed looks whenever it happened, and even asked him in a private conversation after class to save the jokes for outside of the classroom. She lectured him on why these kinds of ‘pranks’ would not be taken to kindly the older he got, and that he should really start caring more about proper behavior and the time and place ‘to goof off with his friends’. Izuku could do nothing but stare, embarrassed but also, feeling an inexplicable swell of joy in his stomach, he thinks, at having this person, this teacher, think he is not only in on the joke but also the kind of person like Kacchan, who is popular and confident enough to get people to laugh along with him. He should’ve explained himself, should’ve told her the truth, but he wanted to pretend for as long as possible that what she said was true; that Izuku really was the kind of person who had friends.
Instead of smiling awkwardly or burying his face in his hands, Izuku would laugh along with everyone else in English class, wanting to be seen as a normal, well-liked student, who was popular enough not to care about upsetting his teacher. And although it scared him, he thought it was still worth it, even when the teacher gave him detention. Something must’ve happened in the hours between their class and the detention, however — maybe she talked to another teacher about it, maybe she saw Kacchan and his friends emptying his bag in the hallway, or, maybe, terrifyingly, she tried to find him during lunch break and overheard some of the other kids talking about him. He’s not sure what it was, exactly, but when she entered the classroom, her face held none of the sternness he appreciated so much about her.
Instead, she looked mildly embarrassed and pitying as she apologized to him and told him to go home. She added something vague about a guidance counselor being available if he needed help with anything — the one teachers always alluded to when they didn’t want to deal with him.
“It’ll get better, eventually.” She said at last. “You’re doing well, not to react. They’ll move on to something else.” She patted him on the shoulder and left. Izuku could do nothing but hang his head low and nod, fearing that — although nothing indicated it — she might know what he was trying to do when he laughed along with them and feeling very ashamed about the whole thing.
It took several months for that ‘something else’ to come, and instead of scolding looks, his English teacher avoided his gaze resolutely, never calling on him and giving him a good participation grade anyway. That ‘something else’ turned out to be getting Izuku in trouble with the teachers, and he’s not sure what exactly he did to start this one — maybe it was inspired by the detention he got for his classmates laughing at ‘like Deku’ — but he thought this was much worse than even getting laughed at for reasons he didn’t understand.
Because most teachers believed it was really him when they found scribbles about heroes on their desks with a few pages of his hero notebook as ‘evidence’ scattered surreptitiously on the floor nearby; they thought he was ‘finally acting out’. Then one of the more studious girls claimed Izuku scribbled all over her homework, starting a stream of similar accusations. Izuku’s not sure how many, because he usually only found out about them when a teacher pulled him aside to scold him and tell him they thought he was ‘better than that’. They didn’t give him much more than a detention at most, maybe to compensate for all the times kids didn’t get in trouble for anything they did to him.
The only one who didn’t believe he was the one causing trouble was his English teacher. She put an end to all the false accusations by getting other teachers on his side and rendering his classmates’ efforts moot. Sometimes, he still regrets being too embarrassed by his past behavior to thank her for it.
Not all of middle school was insults and pranks, though. He was always tense, trying to prepare himself for the next attack — because that’s often what they felt like, even if they were harmless, usually — trying to think of a way to react in the least humiliating way possible — that never worked — which was a lot more time-consuming than the actual being teased part.
A lot of his time was spent trying to make himself as small as possible, drawing as little attention to himself as he could, alone, and sometimes, in hiding.
Most of his breaks he was alone in a bathroom stall, waiting for the bell to ring. By second year, when teachers cared a lot less about the no-phone-use-on-school-grounds rule, they were spent alone in a bathroom stall with a phone. There was no service in there, but Izuku always came prepared with an article or a paper downloaded on one hero or another. Sometimes, he even read hero fiction books.
Anything to do with heroes was what got him teased the most, but still Izuku desperately clung to it, because if he didn’t have his dreams, what did he have? People would still dislike him; he was weird and rambling, he wasn’t funny, he wasn’t a good conversationalist — on the rare occasion someone talked to him, he often said things he regretted later. He said just the wrong it thing at just the wrong time, despite his best efforts not to.
He needed to believe in his dream; he needed to believe that there was a chance, that if he just tried his best and kept going, he’d somehow be rewarded for it. Izuku knows now that even back then he was lying to himself, vaguely aware of it somewhere in the back of his mind, but much too scared to think of what would happen if he stopped.
And sometimes during that blurry but also too painfully clear time of his life, Izuku hurt himself.
The first time, he was stressed out about the next school day. He wasn’t sure why exactly or when exactly it was — nothing specific, but he thinks it was sometime at the beginning of middle school. He cut himself accidentally when he opened a can of beans, and something about that — the pain, the blood, he wasn’t sure — fascinated him. He removed the top of the can and did it again, this time on purpose. It helped. Izuku kept his makeshift blade in a drawer under a pile of his old school notes, certain that his mom would never take the time to look through them.
Around this time, he remembers being fascinated by a character in a hero show, who self-harmed. She was a student at a prestigious hero school (so the farthest thing from what he thought he would ever be) who was put under a lot of pressure by her parents to succeed (also very different from his own situation). And yet, despite their different circumstances, he felt an inexplicable draw to her. He felt like he could understand her the most in the moments she carved words into her skin, an expression of relief on her face, even though he’d never cut anything but small can cuts into his hands when he was feeling overwhelmed. Something about her pain and the way she dealt with it — as well as an inexplicable feeling of envy — inspired him to try more.
She used a box cutter, and he knew for a fact they had one too. Just a few days ago, his mom had to cut open the boxes their new kitchen table came in. He thought the box cutter would work much better, was easier to hide and probably posed a lower risk of infection.
Izuku was hesitant and curious as he sat on his bed with the blade in his hand. He could feel the adrenaline already, a kind of fear and giddiness he didn’t experience often as he brought the box cutter down on his skin very gently — although it didn’t feel that way at the time — and he had some red lines with a few tiny droplets of blood to show for it. He still wasn’t sure why, really, but it made him feel better.
When his mom took him to the local outdoor pool and they were lying on the loungers, instead of worrying about potential disastrous run-ins with his classmates, Izuku was examining the thin, almost imperceptible white lines just above his knee in the sunlight, wondering if they were as visible to his mom as they were to him, hoping in some hidden, dark corner of his mind that his mom would ask about them — she didn’t.
He didn’t do it again until several months later, after the summer was over. Adding another few small scratches that weren’t even bleeding enough for blood to start flowing down the side of his legs.
He didn’t know enough to feel ashamed of how small those cuts were, at the time, but now that Izuku’s more experienced, he looks back on his younger self with a great amount of pity for how naïve and presumptuous he was.
He did it again the next year, after a fight with his mom, in which she told him he was an ungrateful son that’s very difficult to love — he hadn’t done his chores, pushing them off until his mom eventually broke down over his behavior. She never took those words back, but he felt much better after his thigh was a mess of raised scratches — most of them not bleeding at all — and he wondered if they would turn into scars he could look at too. He felt calmer, and he felt comforted by the small amount of blood he could see on the toilet paper he used to wipe it away.
The next time he cut, all of them were bleeding and they turned into scratchy red lines first, pink lines second before fading to become white ones too.
The summer in his second year of middle school, his mom was tense and stressed out about her new job as a social worker — she had completed the training while working another job and he was very proud of her. Izuku didn’t like causing trouble or tension, but somehow things still often ended with a fight, his mom yelling things at him that Izuku doesn’t think she meant and him being too scared of making things worse to apologize — as if him drawing attention to himself could make anything worse when she was angry at him already, as if apologizing alone would give her more ammunition, more of a reason to be angry at him.
Izuku was more anxious than at school, even though the things kids said and did to him were much more hateful than anything his mom ever said. And yet, his mom’s outbursts were more unpredictable, and he never knew how he could stop himself from saying just the thing that would set her off on a tirade over things he’s sure she’d been stewing over.
Point is: Izuku was nervous all the time and he had more time to hurt himself over it and fewer chances to get caught.
He thought about it often, as a kind of comfort, knowing that in ‘two days’, ‘tomorrow’ or ‘the end of the day’, he’d have a chance to make himself feel better.
He had a routine, of sorts: lock the bathroom door, get undressed, take out a blade from the box of thick box-cutter blades he ordered on Amazon, cut himself, and shower. If he was still bleeding after that, he felt especially accomplished and used some toilet paper to wipe it off.
One time that summer, for no particular reason other than feeling very frustrated with himself, Izuku cut deeper. The skin parted slightly, revealing a smooth white that he would later come to know as the dermis, and filling the small gap with blood. This was the first time the blood started to flow down in earnest, on the left side of his leg (where the cut was), and Izuku let it stain the bathroom tiles even though he could’ve stopped it. He made two more cuts just above the knee, both of them revealing that same white for a moment, as if time stopped, before being covered in blood and flowing over.
He doesn’t know why he started feeling nauseous and dizzy, or why his vision became spotty like he was about to pass out. He didn’t know back then, either, although he eventually attributed it to his cutting, which he felt a strange, sick sort of mixture of pride and fear over.
But now he knows that those cuts were nowhere near deep enough to cause those symptoms, and the blood loss was minimal at best. It only happened one other time, the next time he had the courage to cut again after that scare — and after the same kind of superficial dermis-level cuts, too — but it never happened again after that.
He figures he was just shocked or generally unwell — dehydrated or hungry — and always takes care to drink enough water on the days he harms himself.
He eventually got over his fear of passing out and having his mom find out about his habit when he realized that not all dermis cuts lead to unconsciousness (none of them really did).
He didn’t always cut deep enough to see white, but he couldn’t deny that he felt much better when he did.
By the time he met All Might, his thighs were covered in several small reddish, bluish worm-like scars that he took comfort in, even when he didn’t have any fresh cuts.
The occasional dermis cut had turned into cutting until he had at least one. He didn’t feel like he did enough, like he was good enough in a way, unless he could do something he was easily able to do before, which was split his skin until he saw white.
Still, Izuku only cut rarely and irregularly. Sometimes he’d cut once a week, other times he wouldn’t for months. He had a rule he stuck to usually, though, which was to wait until his cuts healed, or at least showed no signs of infection, before he cut again.
After he met All Might, Izuku cut himself even less often. He had a meal and training plan, and later a study plan, that regimented every moment of the day, and he was usually too distracted and exhausted to harm himself. He even considered quitting altogether, because All Might deserved a better successor, but then something would happen, and he’d cut himself anyway.
Besides, he thought, 5 months before the entrance exam, exhausted, pressing a piece of toilet paper against a single dermis cut on his left upper thigh, my legs are too ruined stop now.
Ruined might have been a bit of a strong word to describe a few scars, but when those scars told a very obvious story, it didn’t matter how many or how deep they were. One of his scars was over a year old, and although it had faded somewhat, it was still pink and raised.
What reason did he have to stop at that point? He couldn’t make the scars go away anyway, so why not make sure that they at least looked bad enough that they wouldn’t just look pathetic if anyone ever saw them?
He sometimes imagined people in his life seeing his scars, thinking, or saying (depending on the person), “You can’t even harm yourself properly.”, “You’re clearly just doing this for attention. If you weren’t, if you had any serious issues, they’d look much worse.”
That’s what he thinks when he looks at his thighs. He usually feels better that they’re there, but sometimes he regrets making it so he can never show this part of his body to anyone, ruining it, but not properly ruining it. He knows that a lot of his thoughts aren’t normal, but he’s too deep in them to change or want to change.
He only cut himself on three separate occasions in his ten months of hell, and he regretted them when he needed to haul trash and run around feeling a constant sting that got worse at the occasional movement or brushes with the high number of objects he was carrying and passing.
He managed to play off his yelps, jumps, and scratching of the area when itchy (or agitated) well enough, but All Might looked mildly concerned when he narrowly escaped the piles of trash he toppled over with some of his pain-induced movements.
“Are you alright, young man?” All Might asked, looking him up and down with great care and kindness he was sure must’ve been unique to the number one hero.
“Y-yes.” He said, getting back to work, because he didn’t know how else to react.
Later, he saw these unexplained acts of kindness and concern more and more often, especially after starting at UA, and although he got better at reacting to them, that never quite stopped him from being caught off guard.
It also made him a lot more cautious about any hints that could allude to his self-harming habit. Sure, it would’ve been disastrous if anyone ever found out about it in middle school, but it would’ve only hurt Izuku, not anyone else. Now, though, people he barely knew were getting worried about every small scrape he got, not just broken bones.
He worried about them in turn, even though he’d never been brave enough to show open concern towards anyone’s smaller hurts, physical or otherwise, in middle school. It wouldn’t have been welcome then, but he has friends now; friends who care about him and friends he’s allowed to care about in turn without being pathetic or desperate for doing so.
And despite having everything handed to him, despite being so incredibly blessed by everyone around him, Izuku started cutting himself more often.
And although he was privately happy about moving into the dorms, and the lack of expectations, anger and disappointment directed at him, it also gave him more freedom to cut himself.
It’s funny, really. Here he is, with caring friends and teachers, his mom finally happy with him (he thinks), a very powerful quirk given to him by the man he admires most in the entire world (who’s also personally training him), and yet he spends a lot of his time wondering when he’d get to cut again. Not even Kacchan is really being mean to him anymore, but he still goes to his half-bath most weeks, locking his door and adding another eventual raised scar to his collection.
One time, he was genuinely worried about one of his wider and longer cuts getting infected, so he opened the Reddit app, for once without the intention of having a long-winded discussion about heroes (more specifically: All Might). He wanted to ask for advice in r/healthadvise or r/meddocs. Only r/healthadvise allowed discussion of self-harm wounds, but they only allowed photos as a link, and Izuku was too exhausted from training to figure out how to do it. That’s when he found the sub r/injuries, but before he could post his photo and question, he saw several other posts asking about self-harm wounds.
And when he tapped on one of them, that’s when his eyes finally opened.
Over the years, he’d begun to think of himself as somewhat of a seasoned self-harmer, and he felt the same sick sort of pride about that as he felt whenever his cuts were a bit wider or longer than the ones before, or when his scars became raised and blue in the cold weather. And yet, all this time, he’d barely hurt himself. Not like these people, who carved out entire chunks of their skin, or at the very least cut until their skin parted much further than Izuku’s and orange bubbles started showing.
Izuku felt ashamed, as he often did, about his own insufficiency and previous overconfidence.
(And a distant part of himself wondered when he’d become so sick that instead of being worried about these people’s very serious injuries, he sees them as competition and something to strive for. But he couldn’t let himself think about that for long, because then he’d have had to admit that he’d lost sight of himself and his values a long time ago when it came to the best possible way to destroy himself.)
Izuku continued looking at photos of people’s self-harm wounds, seeking out specific subreddits for both fresh and scarred wounds, taking it all in. He was forced to conclude that most people are doing much better than him.
He learned about the different layers in a wound-care post (epidermis, dermis, fat, fascia, muscle, bone), paying much more attention to the different depth categories than how to properly care for them. His attempts at self-harm really were pathetic, he thought, as he looked at an image of a gaping wound on someone’s stomach, muscle tissue on someone else’s leg, and the deeper wider cuts that he could now recognize as fat cuts – or beans, as people sometimes referred to them. What he’d been doing in the beginning had merely been epidermis cuts or cat scratches, and he only reached dermis or styro later on.
He hadn’t even cut deep enough to need any medical attention. The classification of ‘definitely needing medical attention’ started with fat cuts. (He definitely wouldn’t have gone but having a wound classified as such was still important to him, somehow.)
Looking at those posts was a very humbling experience, and Izuku stopped taking his own wound care so seriously. He also grew frustrated with himself, trying to go deeper and wider, but also being too worried to go too deep and having someone find out.
It did happen, though, some weeks after starting his Reddit self-harm journey. He finally cut deep enough to see those yellow fat bubbles, feeling giddy and scared at the same time. It wasn’t the first cut that day that did it, but the third, after being angry at himself for barely seeing the dermis in his second cut. He stopped then, and pressed his tissue to the wound, lifting again and again to take a look at it.
It’s beautiful. He thought, and not a second later, God, I am so messed up.
He cried about that out of self-pity for a good half an hour.
He cleaned the cut right after but didn’t do any special kind of wound care like he probably should’ve. He showered and disinfected it, but he didn’t have the patience to bandage it, so he spent a lot of time picking little pieces of fabric out of his wounds later on. That was part of what he liked about it, the picking on it, how one single cut can give him so much satisfaction for so long, just by throbbing and looking bad.
He wondered, sometimes, how all of this would’ve looked to an outsider. Him, calmly picking at a dark grey, greenish inch-wide wound, carelessly removing pieces of both skin and fabric, without even washing his hands first, throwing the little pieces of skin tissue on his bedroom floor without a second thought. He looked insane, probably. He sometimes pictured himself as someone who can only exist in a horror movie, possessed by some kind of monster that keeps blankly reopening self-inflicted wounds in the low light of his desk lamp. Other times he sees himself as he really is; pathetic and desperate, seeking attention he doesn’t even want.
He could picture his mom saying, “Those cuts are fine, Izuku. They’re nothing but scratches. They’ll heal fine on their own.” Like she did when he came home with a few minor burns and scrapes in elementary school.
She turned out to be right, of course. Izuku doesn’t have scars from being bullied (other than a white line on his knee from when he fell down the stairs trying to run away, but that doesn’t really count), and sometimes he wishes he did, not because he wants people to see and feel sorry for him , but because that would make it matter more, to himself. He could look at those and know that what happened was bad enough to still think about, and maybe he would feel less of an urge to make scars of his own.
It’s not attention he and all those people posting their wounds and scars on Reddit want, it’s validation, which is very different.
He still stuck to his only somewhat serious promise of not cutting himself until the previous injuries were healed, if only to avoid any complications that could interfere with his hero training (other than the discomfort in the area, of course).
It took about a month for the fat cut to heal, and at times, Izuku was worried that the wound swallowed one too many tiny pieces of fabric and decided to get infected, but it didn’t. It healed slowly and started looking pretty disappointing as the weeks dragged on; eventually just becoming another raised worm-like disfiguration (and not even the worst looking one; since he had dermis cuts that had been longer and wider, just shallower) on his right upper thigh.
Izuku had run out of space on his left thigh in his second year of middle school, and he’d been running out of space on the other one too. He generally avoided cutting too close to the knee – where people were more likely to see — and in the groin area — which felt a bit less protected. Cutting over scar tissue wasn’t the same, however — it’s a different, much harder to control kind of pain and damage; it’s harder to cut through, but when you finally do, you’re much more likely to overdo it. He was thinking of eventually cutting on his outer legs instead of just on top of them, finding his cuts very minuscule and limited when he saw them from a distance.
For now, however, overcoming previous limitations and filling his upper and lower thighs with cuts would do.
Just like with the dermis cuts before, after reaching the fat layer once, Izuku didn’t feel satisfied unless he had at least one fat cut in each round of cutting. He did this for what came after the cutting, not for the catharsis brought on by the process itself; fat cuts weren’t more painful than dermis cuts the moment his blade split the skin, but they were in the weeks that followed.
When he started cutting deeper, the number of times Izuku self-harmed decreased again. Whenever he felt stressed out, anxious, on the verge of tears, or often, frustrated with and angry at himself — which were the emotions most likely to lead to a cutting spree — he told himself that he’d get to do it soon, even when it was a week away. He was disciplined about it, in his own way, even though cutting yourself isn’t typically considered a great show of self-control.
And now, in his second year of high-school, when truly everything’s over, when there aren’t even any villain attacks to worry about, other than a few small time criminals UA can fend off with ease, Izuku can feel himself deteriorating, can feel his fragile self-control slip, giving way to a sort of recklessness that has been there before, but which he was too scared to entertain in middle school and too determined and distracted to think about at UA.
Lately, though, he hasn’t been able to shake the feeling that his friends are only spending time with him out of pity or some sense of obligation, not because he has anything worthwhile to contribute. Sometimes, he can see himself from the outside, rambling about a hero, too far in his analysis to stop in any convincing, non-awkward way, but desperately wishing that he could. He’s often too unfocused to make his thoughts sound even remotely intelligent or coherent, and he usually ends up going in circles that make his friends frown and cut him off (kindly, of course, but it’s embarrassing nonetheless). He often tries to shut up and listen, but no matter how hard he’s trying to do that, he just never seems to be able to come up with the right responses to keep the conversation from devolving into awkward silence.
He keeps replaying conversations in his head, even conversations he knows no one else really spares a second thought; he assumes people often walk away with a general sense of annoyance or dissatisfaction after talking to him without specifically remembering any of the stupid things he says — or at least he hopes so.
And still Izuku can’t stop thinking about how that made him sound too proud, and that other thing too desperate and attention-seeking, how he was too honest about something socially capable people know not to be honest about, how this one conversation made him seem incredibly self-obsessed to the person he was talking to (Izuku knows he’s self-obsessed, but he’s trying so desperately to pretend he’s not).
He wonders where he gets the energy to spend so much time non-constructively worrying about things he said in the past when he can’t spare even a fraction of that energy for anything else.
He does the bare minimum for school at the latest possible time, and it shows in the worsening grades of the assignments he turns in. Even in middle school, he’s always tried to do his homework as well as possible, if only to please his teachers — he suspected that this was at least part of the reason they never got him in too much trouble over the things his classmates accused him of. But now, he can’t get himself to focus on the task at hand, even in study sessions with his friends. He tries to pretend he’s working on the material, but he can tell that they don’t always buy it, which is straining their friendship.
He keeps making mistakes in conversations, in training, in class, in his chores (he broke a plate just yesterday), and when he’s finally alone in his room at night, that’s all he can think about. It’s covered with a weary blanket of hopelessness that stems from the fact that he’s making the same mistakes over and over again, and despite beating himself up about them just as many times, nothing has changed and he’s back to being the same old self-obsessed, awkward, pathetic little crybaby he’s always been, and he just doesn’t seem to be able to escape it.
He’s so tired of going in circles, but more than anything he’s just really getting tired of himself.
He can’t bring himself to limit his cutting to once a month, or even once a week anymore. He wants to do something drastic; he wants to see a wide, gaping cut that stretches across his entire leg, he wants to see fascia and maybe even muscle; he finds himself caring less and less about the consequences, about possible infections, or permanent damage. He wants to cut deep, and he wants to cut deep enough that no one would be able to look at his legs and go, ‘Oh that’s nothing, why are you doing this? Attention?’. In the darkest corners of his mind, he wants his friends to see and understand how he feels, wants his mom to see and take him seriously, but he knows that it doesn’t work like that, and he’d never sink low enough to do that to anyone.
He sometimes thinks that he wouldn’t care if he accidentally cut his femoral artery (which he has always been worried about even though he doesn’t think he’s cutting anywhere close enough to hit it), and he sometimes pictures himself bleeding out from an accidental cut, unwilling to call for help, just waiting to pass out and never wake up again.
Izuku would never kill himself, and these thoughts scare him sometimes, so his method of escalation is making fat cuts almost every day, whenever his frustration with himself is boiling over.
He wonders how long this will be enough, if his fat cuts will ever look as pathetic to him as his dermis cuts do now.
All of his cutting doesn’t help with emotional control at all. Izuku is often on the verge of tears at the most inopportune times, and Izuku can honestly not answer the question of, ‘Is everything okay? Why are you crying?’ his classmates ask whenever he isn’t good enough at hiding it. Izuku doesn’t know, and not knowing makes him feel even more teary, and other people knowing and seeing it just makes the lump in his throat bigger.
His answer is usually that he’s not crying and when it’s bad enough, Izuku leaves the room.
Izuku’s desperate, for something, he knows that, he just doesn’t know what.
Izuku’s never though of his self-harm as an addiction, but as his fat cuts get wider and longer, and his reasons to hold himself back sound more and more flimsy and irrelevant, he can vaguely tell that he’s crossing a point of no return, that this will probably end with something serious that he’s not scared enough of to stop.
Izuku will cut himself a few weeks later, after a conversation with Todoroki. He’ll post a photo of it to a small subreddit under the guise of asking for medical advice, all the while knowing he would not take it. He’ll want to know how people would react to a wound like that, if it’s bad enough already for stitches. The only thing he’ll feel bad about is triggering someone, not even considering the consequences of taking a picture with the UA half-bath’s monotone grey and white colours in the background.