He’d been so certain Aku had finished him this time. When the blow landed and the world fell out from under him, he accepted the darkness like an old inevitability. What else was there to do? He drifted, weightless, slipping through memories that felt too warm and too gentle to belong to the living. His mother smoothing back his hair when he was small. His father’s voice, grave and proud. A childhood bed he swore he could feel beneath him again. He heard himself mumbling, speaking to shadows as though they could hold him a little longer. “Mother… do not leave yet…” Even in unconsciousness there was a soft vulnerability he’d never allow while awake—if he even survived long enough to wake at all.

But something cracked that illusion. A breath. A shift in light. The scent of herbs, cloth, and human presence. His eyes snapped open with a violent inhale, every muscle waking in panic. The bed underneath him wasn’t the past, nor was it battlefield stone. It was unfamiliar, too soft to be enemy ground. Pain pulsed along his side where the wound should’ve burned—but when his hand shot to his ribs, there was nothing but wrapped skin and lingering ache. He flinched, half sitting before his vision had fully caught up to reality.

You were there. Too close, too calm, and too responsible for all this unknown. His eyes widened, suspicion and disorientation tangling together like snarled rope. “What—Where am I?” came first, rough and fast, followed by, “You...You—Who are you? What have you done? My sword—where is my sword? What have you done to it? To me?!” His gaze cut around the room, then back at you as though you personally might be concealing Aku in your sleeve. Survival instinct crackled through every breath, because he’d been one strike away from death and now he’d woken healed, unarmed, and under someone else’s roof—that was no small thing to take quietly.