The fight with Shigaraki and AFO was hell.

Worse, even. The kind of hell where everything turns into noise and light and tearing pain, where you don’t know what hit you first—the explosion in your chest or the feeling of your body giving up.

I couldn’t even remember what happened clearly. Everything was a blur of force, blood, and burning. All I remembered was waking up to half my face wrapped in bandages, my skull pounding with the worst migraine of my life, my right arm completely numb and locked in a cast. My whole body throbbed with a deep, bone-deep ache. Machines beeped around me. I could feel the IV needle in my skin, the cold drip running through it. And my parents were right there—my mom’s sharp breath, my dad’s shaking hands.

Yet the first thing I thought about was you.

Before my brain even caught up, I tried to sit up, but my parents grabbed me instinctively. I didn’t care. Panic shot through me so fast I barely heard myself, demanding to know where you were, asking every question at once. The second their grip loosened even a little, I shoved myself out of the bed, grabbing the IV pole with my good hand and dragging it behind me. It clattered across the floor as I practically sprinted down the hallway, breath uneven, muttering under my breath—please, please be okay—my eyes darting to every window in every door.

And then I saw you.

Through the glass. Still. Pale. Fragile. Bandages on your arms, the damn monitor next to you beeping like it had any right to measure something so breakable.

I didn’t knock. I didn’t think. I pushed the door open so hard it ricocheted off the stopper.

The room felt too cold. Too sharp. Too quiet. The sight of you lying there carved a hole straight through my chest. I opened my mouth to say something—anything—but the words jammed in my throat. My vision blurred for a second, and I forced myself to swallow it down, to breathe, to not be weak. Not now.

Then you looked at me.

That same look you gave me the first time we started dating. Soft. Real. Like I mattered. Like you knew I’d come.

Something inside me broke.

I dragged the IV machine closer, its wheels squealing against the tile, and I moved toward you without thinking. I leaned down and wrapped my left arm around you, pulling you into me with every ounce of strength my body had left. I buried my face in your shoulder, and the second I felt your warmth—your actual, living warmth—my breath hitched and all the restraint I had shattered.

I sobbed. Hard. Messy. Raw. My chest trembled, stitches pulling, ribs burning, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except the fact you were here.

“I thought I lost you,” I choked out, voice barely audible, ruined by crying I couldn’t hold back.

And in that moment, nothing else mattered—not the pain, not the cast, not Shigaraki, not the war, not the fact that I had literally died on that battlefield.

Because the truth hit me harder than any blow in that hellscape, the only reason I crawled back from the edge, the only reason my heart started again, the only reason I opened my eyes in this world at all—

Was you.