i hate you. (Bakugou Katsuki x OC)

23 | Recover, Review, and Restart

My first thought when I wake up on the stretcher is that I've surely died and gone to Hell. The blood-red tint to the moon wasn't the only reason my mind made this jump, though it definitely did not help the counter-argument.

No, it was the searing pain in my arm. Starting at the wound in my left forearm and slowly overtaking every single part of my body. At first, I thought I was on fire. The way my costume clung to my skin, soaked with sweat wasn't a great sign. And whenever one of the mystery hands scraped my skin, while padding gauze onto various cuts or lifting a CPAP to my face, they felt like ice.

Yet, somehow, I felt frozen at the same time. My muscles trembled with a deep shiver, a chill penetrating deep into my bones. When I opened my mouth, to say what, I'm not entirely sure, my teeth chattered instead. Is this how Shoto feels all the time, I thought to myself, somehow insufferably hot and unbearably cold at the same time?

Shapes moved around me, blurred and indistinct, like shadows in a nightmare. I could hear voices, but they sounded distant, muffled by the roaring in my ears. My vision swam, black spots dancing in front of my eyes as I struggled to focus on anything, to anchor myself to reality.

I got to hand it to the Devil, he sure knows how to torture people.

"It seems that the tranquilizer is wearing off," a voice cut through the haze, sharper than the rest. I tried to turn my head towards it, but even that simple motion felt like dragging a boulder uphill. My arm—God, my arm—was the epicenter of it all, the source of the agony that radiated outward, consuming everything in its path. I could feel something festering there, deep beneath the surface, like a poison spreading through my body.

For a fleeting moment, I wondered if this was it. If this would be the last thing I felt, this unbearable mix of heat and cold, pain and numbness. My breath would hitch, my vision would narrow, and the credits would roll.

But then a different sensation broke through the fog—a tight pressure around my upper arm, followed by a sharper, more focused pain as someone tightened something. The agony flared white-hot, and I finally found my voice to beg them to stop.

"Ma'am, please hold still," the voice said again, urgent now. "I understand the tourniquet hurts, but we need to stabilize your infection before..."

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The next time I wake up, I feel noticeably less on the verge of death. Most of my injuries—the slice on the palm of my right hand, the bruising from Tenya's kick on my leg, and the splitting headache—had eased into a dull throb and the pain from my left arm had gone away completely.

I blink a few times, trying to clear the haze from my mind. The overhead lights are too bright, stabbing into my skull, but they're real. The sterile scent of antiseptic floods my nose, grounding me. I'm not in Hell. I'm in a hospital. God damn it.

"Koyasu? Are you awake?"

My eyes flash to the foot of the bed to find Izuku scribbling on a napkin at the foot of my bed, his familiar green curls tousled and matted from lack of care. He's got a few scrapes and bruises, and his ankle is in a splint, but nothing like what I remember from the fight. How long was I out? I wonder, my eyes drifting to the digital clock on the wall. It reads "13:42". About seventeen hours since I started patrol with Native, then.

Native. Patrol, the hero killer, the fight. With the sudden absence of the pain, my mind finally has enough room to pour into every single mistake I made last night. Stain hadn't been looking for a victim last night until he heard Native speak to me. If it weren't for that, Tenya might have never come across the Hero Killer, as much as he looked for him. And if Tenya and I weren't there, Izuku or Shoto wouldn't have been either. The entire night, all of it, leads back to me.