Work Text:
Whenever someone asks Eijirou what his biggest fear is, he always laughs and says something silly, like spiders, or pop quizzes in Aizawa's class, or killers in horror movies. Nobody wants a serious answer to that question, not unless it's something that everyone understands, like death and speaking into a crowd and failing.
Even if they were asking for a serious answer, Eijirou wouldn't even know where he'd begin.
How do you put into words the way dreadful despair fills your stomach, weighing it down with the realization that a friend is growing apart from you, that the place you had in their heart has been long gone, replaced and filled with something—with someone—else, of greater importance and meaning than he ever was?
How do you describe the aching of growing close and growing apart, of being told "I'll be right back" and being left behind, alone and waiting, watching them stand by someone else, smile bright and wide on their faces, clinging onto the thin string of hope that they'll come back, that they didn't forget, only for them to leave with someone else, snapping that fraying string into two?
How do you explain your impulse to be loud and bright and present and here, to constantly make yourself known so that the world can be reminded of the space that you take up with your existence, so that you're not erased and written over, long-forgotten beneath the new, rich text, not a single trace of you left behind?
How do you tell someone that nothing terrifies you more than remembering and remembering and remembering, to try and be remembered, only for everyone to forget and forget and leave?
How do you look someone in the eyes and tell them about how the pattern always repeats--people come into your life, and you love and care and cherish, your day lights up at the sight of them, and they feel the same too, but only for a while, because after a while your brightness dulls and your loudness becomes an annoying grating on their ears and they grow cold and distant and you realize that oh—you're a second choice, you were never their first, like they were for you?
How do you answer the question and say that you don't care how you're held, that you just ache for the feeling of being wanted, of being remembered?
How do you comprehend the horror of being forgotten?