Maybe We'll fix Each Other

Chapter 8

He couldn't get a sense of anything. It felt like he was falling and floating all at the same time. Exhaustion weighed his body down in a way he couldn't describe, but the familiar pain that typically laced his bones was dull.

He should move. He should open his eyes. But he couldn't.

It was nice.

He'd been pushing himself for so long that having this...nothingness...it was nice.

Memories seemed to run together. It was confusing. Days from his childhood meshing into his miserable adult life. He didn't like this as much. He wanted the darkness back. The darkness didn't remind him of disappointed glances and heavy handed punishments. The darkness didn't remind him of days spent scrounging through dumpsters and prowling through alleyways. The darkness didn't remind him of being unable to protect Eri and–

ERI.

Dabi's eyes whipped open and he jolted partially upright, immediately letting out a pained groan and crumpling back down. Breathing heavily, he lifted his head and glanced down at his body to take in his surroundings.

He was in a hospital-grade bed, wrists and ankles handcuffed and medically restrained to the handrails. And those were in addition to the quirk suppressing metal cuffs around his wrists. Overkill much?

Dabi dropped his head back on the pillow, exhausted from that simple inspection. There was a thick nasal cannula in his nose. He could also feel one IV in the back of his right hand and another just above his left elbow, nearly at the seam of one of his staple lines.

There was a steady hum of medical equipment, and Dabi dropped his head to the left to take a look at it. There were multiple infusion pumps by the head of the bed, which he assumed were giving him whatever was going through the IVs.

As he was straining his eyes to try and read the pump screens at an angle, the doorknob to the room twisted. The monitor at his side betrayed the way his heart rate picked up, gaze narrowing in as the door opened.

A woman with deep green hair dressed in light blue scrubs walked in, absently reading a sheet of paper in her hands. She walked up to the side of the bed and folded the paper before shoving it into one of the pockets on her scrubs and looking over the infusion pumps.

Dabi didn't know what the fuck was going on. "The fuck are you?" he demanded. Well. He tried to sound demanding. In reality, his voice was breathier than normal and pretty quiet.

The woman startled, taking a step back and rattling the medical equipment. Wide eyes met his.

"Oh! You're awake!" she said, before hurriedly pressing forward and crouching down so she was eye level with him. "How do you feel?"

Dabi did his best to glare. "The fuck are you?" he growled out.

The woman let a pause sit between them before replying. "I'm Dr. Nakamura. I've been taking care of you these past few days while you've been in critical condition."

Dabi felt his breath catch in his throat. Days? It didn't help that that fucking monitor sped up with his heartrate again. Dr. Nakamura's eyes glanced up at it but she didn't say anything.

When Dabi kept silent, she continued. "You were brought to the hospital four days ago with extensive injuries. You had severe burns on your arms, inflammation around your throat, as well as a stab wound in your side that had caused slow accumulation of blood in the space between your chest wall and your lung. We were able to drain the blood and heal your wounds, thanks to a hero whose quirk allows her to heal physical injuries."