A State of Decay

Chapter 10

It was late Wednesday afternoon, and Izuku found himself sitting on a remarkably ugly brown, corduroy sofa. He ran his hands over the fabric while waiting for the therapist to arrive. Izuku had been running late, but the therapist, Katsumi Ono, seemed to be running even later. 

He runs his hands over the couch, and his fingers catch on a part of the fabric that feels different from the rest. Looking down next to his thigh, he sees a part of the couch that's been damaged in the shape of a handprint. On his other side, there's another one. He puts his hands in the handprints, lining up his palms and fingers in the pre-existing shapes. While his hands were a bit wider than the ones that left the prints, his fingers were slightly shorter. As he got around to thinking about the kind of quirk that might leave handprints like that, the door opened, and a woman rushed into the room. 

"I swear to God, it's always something," she huffs. "So sorry I'm late!" 

The woman takes a seat across from Izuku after dropping an abnormally large pile of books and papers on the floor next to the chair. She has long, blonde hair that's being kept out of her face by a purple bandana. She's wearing a purple dress with a black cardigan. She holds out her hand and introduces herself. 

"I'm Katsumi Ono; you can call me whatever you like," she says with a smile. Izuku takes her hand and shakes it. 

"Izuku Midoriya," he says. "It's a pleasure to meet you." 

"Likewise! So, what brings you here?" she asks as she pulls a notebook from her stack of books. She taps a pencil on the pages, and her golden eyes search Izuku's face. 

"Um, well, a friend, or not a friend exactly- I guess an acquaintance recommended I go to therapy and suggested you, but I don't really know what I'm supposed to say or do; I've never really-" 

"Hold it!" she says, smiling, cutting off his word vomit. "You're Tomura's friend, aren't you?" 

"Well-" 

"I just want to start by saying that it's normal for heroes to go to therapy. There's nothing shameful or wrong about it," she states. "The fact that you've come at all shows a willingness to work on yourself, which is more than a lot of others can manage."

Izuku nods. He knows many heroes who could benefit from something like this but would never stoop down and actually accept the help. It's not that Izuku felt shamed for coming here; it's just that he can't even iterate his thoughts to himself, so he wasn't sure how he was even supposed to start something like this. 

He runs his hands over the prints on the couch again, trying to center his thoughts. His mind was racing, and he wanted it to stop. 

"I can already tell you're an overthinker," Ms. Ono says. "You probably have a hard time calming your mind enough to sleep and stuff, yeah?" 

"That's right," Izuku says with a slight nod. 

"Well, I can give you the cliche answer and tell you to do some breathing exercises when you feel like that, but I have a feeling that won't work for you." She writes something down in her notebook, and Izuku is curious about what it is. He feels he's hardly said a thing, but she's already drawing conclusions about him. Still, he says nothing. "How often do you spend time with friends?"

"I try to do it as much as I can, but I'm either busy or too tired most of the time," Izuku responds honestly. With how often he's out at night, he mostly sleeps during the day when all his friends are awake. This gives him even less time to hang out with them. He's on his own a lot of the time, he realizes. 

"What makes you tired? How are you sleeping?" 

"Well, I mostly do my hero work at night, so my sleep is all over the place." 

She writes something down in her notebook. "Have you considered switching to working in the daytime? It might help your sleeping schedule."

"With the work that I'm doing, it would be impossible to do it in the daytime," Izuku responds. 

Villains are more likely to be active at night, so if he wanted to connect with any of them, he needed to be up at night. He wasn't interested in going back to standard hero work since it didn't seem to help anything anymore. 

"I know I don't know anything about what you do, but I'd really like to recommend that you work during the day and sleep at night," she states. "Or, at least offset your schedule a little bit, so you're working half the amount you are now so that you can fix your sleeping schedule at least a little bit." 

"I don't know if I can do that." He scratches the back of his head as he thinks about her words. At the moment, it didn't seem like something he would be able to do. He needed to work nights. There was no way around it at the moment—not with the direction he wanted to take his hero work. 

"Okay, we'll table that for now, but I'm also going to suggest you try to spend more time with friends. If things start getting to be too much, or your mind starts to run, just have someone you can call and talk to about things." 

Izuku runs through a list of his friends in his head. The last thing he wants is to be a burden to any of his friends. He can't think of anyone he could talk openly about this stuff with. He wouldn't want anyone to worry. 

"I don't want to worry my friends," he tells the therapist. She taps her pencil on her bottom lip. 

"If they're your friends, they will want to help you," she says. "I understand your concerns, but I can pretty much promise you that if they care about you, they'll want to help you." 

I don't need help, Izuku thinks to himself. He just needs to get his thoughts under control. The last thing he wants to do is make anyone worry on his behalf. 

Plus, pretty much none of his friends know the extent of what he's been working on. There's no one he can talk to about these things without giving too much away, so he really wasn't sure what he was going to do. 

By the end of the session, she's given Izuku two missions: find someone he can talk to about this stuff and start keeping a journal. Whenever his mind is running, she wants him to fill a whole page with his thoughts, claiming it might make him feel better if he's at least able to get them out of his head and onto paper. 

He thanks Ms. Ono, and leaves the office, unsure if it helped. 

When Izuku gets home, he sits at the desk in his bedroom with a new notebook in front of him and a pencil in his hand. He taps the writing utensil against the page, wondering what things he should write. 

After he finally starts, he just lets his thoughts flow onto the page with no rhyme or reason or breaks for paragraphs. Before he knows it, he's filled a whole page with random thoughts. It's things about work, about his friends, and about Shigaraki. 

Part of the page is filled with his worries about being a burden to his friends. He really doesn't want any of his friends to worry about him. They all have their own things going on, seeing as pretty much all his friends are heroes with their own traumas from the war. Yeah, they'd understand where he's coming from, but that's just it; they probably have many of the same thoughts as him. 

None of them are coming to him with their concerns, so why should he burden them with his? It wouldn't make sense. He wonders why none of his friends have wanted to talk about things for a while. Maybe it's Izuku's fault for not reaching out to them. Perhaps they don't trust him to talk about these things, or maybe they feel the same way he does. Regardless, he knows that he can't reach out to them. All it would do is cause needless worry. 

His problems seem to have no solution, and the last thing he wants to do is shove those worries onto someone else. He just can't. 

He lets out a deep breath as he looks over the page, admitting to himself that it's at least a little bit satisfying to see his brain vomit on a page.