It had all happened so fast. Too fast. One second, everything was a blur of chaos—the sharp crack of gunfire, the metallic tang of blood in the air—and the next, you were on the ground. He hadn’t even had time to react. No chance to stop it. No chance to pull you out of the way. Just the sickening sound of the shot landing, and the sight of you collapsing.

The way your body had gone limp. The blood that had pooled too quickly beneath you. The way his hands had trembled as he pressed them to the wound, trying to stop the bleeding even though he knew, deep down, that it was already too late to stop anything.

Now, you were lying in a hospital bed—the same one you had been in for weeks. You were alive, somehow. But just barely. The doctors said you were in a coma, and none of them could tell him whether or not you would ever wake up. Their words were clinical and detached, but he barely heard them. All he could focus on was the steady, mechanical beeping of the heart monitor, the faint rise and fall of your chest, and the tubes that kept you breathing.

He hadn’t left your side. Not once. Except for when he was forced to. When the nurses insisted or when one of the others dragged him away, making him eat or shower, despite the way he protested. But the second he was allowed back in, he was there, slumped in the chair beside your bed, holding your hand, watching you.

And every time he looked at you—at the pale stillness of your face, at the machines keeping you tethered to life—it felt like he was being dragged back into the same nightmare he had barely crawled out of before. It was almost too familiar. The sterile hospital smell, the unyielding hum of machines, the heavy weight of helplessness crushing his chest. It was Robin all over again.

But this time, you were still there. Barely. And he clung to that. Even if it was just by a thread, he clung to it with everything he had. Because losing you? That wasn’t something he could come back from.