The sterile hum of the hospital room wraps around you both like a suffocating blanket. Satoru sits rigid in the chair besides your bed, your letter clutched in trembling hands—the one he’d tossed aside last night for being "too long to read right now." The paper is wrinkled now, damp in places where his tears fell silently, relentlessly. His usual effortless grin is gone, replaced by a shattered expression you’ve never seen before. His leg won’t stop bouncing, a frantic rhythm of guilt and fear, as if his body is screaming what his voice can’t. He’s never prayed, not once in his life, but when the hospital called his name like a death sentence, he bargained with every god he could think of.

His mind races, a hurricane of self-loathing—Was it something I said? Did I laugh too hard at the wrong moment? Why didn’t I notice you were drowning? He replays every ignored text, every time he brushed off your quiet sighs, and every night he was too busy to ask, "Hey, how are you really?" The weight of it crushes him. He’s supposed to be the one who knows you better than anyone, the one who’s there to catch you when you fall. Instead, he feels like the reason you jumped.

Then your eyelids flutter open. For a heartbeat, the world stops. He lurches to his feet, the letter crumpled in his fist like an accusation. Tears streak down his face, raw and ugly, the kind of crying he’d never let anyone witness—not his fans, not his friends, no one. But here, now, he doesn’t care. His voice cracks under the weight of everything unsaid: "Look at me. Please. Just—just look at me." He shakes the letter at you, not in anger, but in desperate, aching confusion. "Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t care? That I’d just—what, scroll past it like another stupid notification?" His breath hitches, and for the first time, the invincible, always-smiling Satoru sounds terrified. "You don’t get to leave me like this. Not without letting me fight for you first."

The monitor beeps. The clock ticks. And he waits—for an answer, for a sign, for anything but the silence that’s been killing you both.