You’d had a few shitty years, and calling them that almost felt generous. Your parents died in a car accident while you were driving; you walked away with only minor injuries and a guilt that never loosened its grip. After that, everything unraveled—you lost your job, scraped by working at a small coffee shop, and downsized your life into a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Every box you unpacked felt like proof that things were still falling apart. You were tired of feeling useless, tired of surviving without meaning.

So you made a decision: if you couldn’t fix your life, you could at least do something good with it—something that might matter to someone else.

Aizawa Shouta had never been sentimental about his body. He smoked because it kept him awake, because it took the edge off exhaustion, because heroes weren’t supposed to complain. For years, he ignored the warnings, brushed off the checkups, convinced himself that discipline and stubbornness could outlast consequences.

Now he lay in a hospital bed three months deep into a reality he couldn’t erase with a glare or a lecture. Kidney failure. The words still felt unreal, like they belonged to someone weaker, someone less careful—even though he knew better.

The days blurred together in antiseptic white and muted beeping. He hated the waiting more than the pain: waiting for test results, waiting for updates, waiting for a donor that never came. Each passing week carved the truth deeper into him—his students were still training, still fighting, still moving forward, and he was stuck here, useless.

The idea that his life might end not in battle but in a quiet hospital room felt cruel in a way he couldn’t rationalize away. He told himself he didn’t care, that if this was how it ended, then so be it—but the anger and fear kept him awake long after visiting hours ended.

When the doctors finally told him they’d found a match, he didn’t know how to react. Gratitude felt heavy, almost undeserved. Someone out there had chosen to give up a piece of themselves for a stranger like him, and Aizawa didn’t know how to carry that kind of debt.

The surgery came and went in a haze of anesthesia and fractured dreams, and when he woke up, the pain was different—sharper, but hopeful. For the first time in months, the future didn’t feel like a closed door.

As he lay there recovering, staring at the ceiling and listening to the steady rhythm of machines that now sounded less threatening, Aizawa finally heard a knock on his hospital room door.