Controlee

64. Pillar

Rule 93: You are not required to do it alone.

She was sitting with Oboro. She'd been sitting with Oboro since he found out the truth.

Bakugou had seemed to appreciate finding out why Otsuka had dragged what he'd thought was an ex-villain from the battlefield with them. Of course, he'd displayed his gratitude by kicking her and Oboro out of his room.

Otsuka had considered going into her own room, getting some rest— she was certainly in need of it— but she didn't like the idea of leaving Oboro alone after his life had turned upside down. To him, over a decade (closer to fifteen years, actually) had passed in a moment. She couldn't imagine what it must be like, but she knew she'd always appreciated company each time her life took a sudden turn. She wasn't going to leave him to face this alone.

Otsuka was the one to go to the door when someone knocked. Maybe it was her lack of sleep, but— given her location of inside a hospital room— she'd been expecting to find doctors on the other side. Neither man on the other side of the door was a doctor. She caught herself before she could open the door any wider, keeping it just wide enough to show her face.

Shit. She forgot Aizawa and Yamada were on their way.

Double shit. Oboro was in this room, and they had no idea he was alive.

She smiled, maybe, it might've been more of a grimace. "Hi," she greeted, trying to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do now. She could just open the door, that was one way to handle this.

No. No, that was not one way to handle this. Oboro had thought she was playing a prank when she told him, Aizawa and Yamada would probably think this was some kind of villainous plot. They'd been heroes for a decade, that lent itself towards a certain mindset that would not easily accept a dead boy as living without it being something dangerous.

"Hi there," Yamada returned, hand lifted in the smallest wave.

She needed to do what she did for Oboro. She had to break it to them gently, and she had to explain how it all happened so they'd be in with a chance of believing she. They'd grieved this boy for fifteen years, she had to convince them he was right here.

Oboro had really been through enough in the last... well... fifteen years not to have to deal with his grown boyfriends' first reactions to seeing him neither dead nor aged a day. "Hi," she said again. They were both frowning at her. That wasn't a good sign. She needed them calm and not suspicious or this was not going to go well. They'd already been worried about the mysterious tagalong she'd mentioned on her phone call to them, she could not make that worse. "One moment, please."

She shut the door, keeping one hand on it just in case they decided not to knock a second time.

She truly thought she deserved to take this opportunity to say, with passion, "Fuck!"

"Is that them?" Oboro asked, voice so soft she almost hadn't heard it.

Otsuka snapped her gaze up to him, taking the deepest breath she could without hurting her ribs. She was way too sleep-deprived to be doing this much thinking, but did she get a choice in the matter? No. As per usual. Truly, she had the worst luck. She must've brutalised the universe once for her karma to be this bad. "I'm going to talk to them, just— you know— try to prepare them, a bit. If that's ok?"

Oboro nodded. "Yeah, yeah. You're probably right. Talking first is probably a good idea."

"Right," she agreed, nodding either to herself or back to him. She wasn't sure.

All the things they taught her at the control school. Shockingly, there'd been no lesson on how to tell someone their dead high school friend is now alive because villains were using his body this whole time and her quirk reacted weird to that.