20 | Hang On

                                    

                                          
Shouto Todoroki
Todoroki hobbled over to the bathroom with an ungainly limp, leaning against the door frame as he descried Bakugou, who was washing up at the sink. "Are you all right?" Todoroki queried with soft, rounded words.
Bakugou slowly nodded, despite the tremors jolting through his body. "I didn't...mean a single fucking thing I said," he uttered in a cracked, seething whisper as his digits curled into his glistening palms. "I just... Shouto, I—"
"You should rest for now," Todoroki interjected. "Maybe we can talk about this later. Here." He formed a small slab of ice for Bakugou to ice his wound with before wrapping it up in one of his clean shirts and handing it off.
With the eyes of an exsanguinated rabbit, Bakugou did not blink as he grabbed the sheathed ice and pressed it to his head. "I'm... I'm sorry." His teeth clicked together and lumbered out of Todoroki's dorm with a river of crows digging into the flesh covering his face.
Once Bakugou exited Todoroki's dorm, Todoroki locked the door and rummaged through his dresser. After extracting a brown serpent of desire, he pushed the chair at his desk to the middle of his dorm. Standing on the chair, he reached up and affixed the noose in his hands to the ceiling.
I don't feel anything, Todoroki realized as his fingers traced along the braided vertebrae of the noose. Nothing he said hurt me. If anything, if there's an emotion I'm closest to feeling, I think it would be happiness. My freedom is here. I'm relieved. Finally...
Slipping his head through the noose, Todoroki glanced down at the rope that would sever his ability to breathe the moment his weight fell through. He nodded as if to reassure himself of his decision. Staring up at the winding spiral of rope that he would soon hang on after submitting to the fraying, teethless jaws at the bottom, he exhaled all the air he could wring out from his lungs. Then, Todoroki stepped off the chair and kicked it over.
Don't think about anything, Todoroki snarled at himself. Don't think about anything. This is what I wanted. It hurts. It burns. But that's a small price to pay for how much suffering I've put Bakugou through. I deserve to feel this horrible pain that I don't have many words to describe. I want it to slowly tear me apart. Slowly break me. Slowly drain the life from my body. All just to suffer for all the times I've fucked up. I'm not human. I'm countless creatures pretending to be human.Todoroki could hear the muffled sound of dull, wooden thumps. It's too late. You told me to kill myself, so even if you said that you didn't mean anything you said, you still wanted to tell me to die on impulse. If that was one of your first impulses, you must truly hate me. It hurts so much. Not that the person I made the mistake of getting attached to wants me to die. I'm glad, if anything. If I weighed more, would the process be faster? I don't have to live in this pathetic body anymore. I don't have to restrict how much I eat to the point where I'm starving because my own father would beat me for being anything less than severely underweight.
It's surreal to know I could have just minutes left to live, Todoroki realized as his writhing body began to cease its futile but instinctive struggle. It might even be moments. I wanted this. I did this to myself. I'm the only one to blame. I'm a hypocrite. Taking ideals and advice and giving them out without following them myself... My head's blurring with the world. It'll be over soon. The pain in my chest that was killing me from all those years ago died out a while back, but even so, I still want to die. I'm not needed in this world. I'm just a selfish burden that tries to help others but fucks things up instead. Soon. It hurts so much... I keep trying to breathe when I know I can't, and when I know that if I did, I'd only exacerbate the agony. It hurts, it hurts...
As Todoroki's consciousness trickled from his head that had been painted in a deep blue, he watched with drooping, bulging eyes as his saliva drooled down to the ground.