Ardent Hope II. Chainsaw Man x Male Reader Insert.

15. Phantom Pain.

(Y/N) could feel the life slip out of his own fingers. For countless seconds turned into eternities he struggled to maintain the capacity to keep a steady breath, gasping through the phantom pain of a missing limb and the hole in his chest, he knew he had to keep pushing forward, just a little longer. His sight blacked out a couple of times and so did his mind, seeing nothing but flashes of what was happening, ranging from the moment he was pulled from a humid hole of putrid stench on the side of the street by a hand he didn't recognize at first, to another of him being dragged onto the pavement and trying to help himself crawl through the debris Quanxi guided him through, only to be comforted by a last sight of Power's face staring down at him. Even through all the effort, he could tell he was dying. It wouldn't be wrong to say he was scared, it felt inherently different this time, in the way he was breathing, in the way the pain spread through his body, in the way he covetously stared into Power's eyes and the countless emotions that he could read in them, only for him to understand, and in the way he tried to maintain his composure not to make Power feel worse, trying to hold back his tears of pain and shock. He knew what it was to feel when you were about to die, of course. It felt like he was slipping down into a black hole once again, struggling to hold on just a second longer as a downpour made his grip slippery, and a freezing cold numbed his fingers. The last thing he felt as his eyelids, now heavier than steel, closed slowly, was the comforting hand of Power sitting atop his chest, before a pair of glowing yellow eyes and spirals of crimson red, a familiar sight, stared at him through the darkness and ordered a whispered "Wake up." Into his ear.

"Get out of my head..." He whispered in between the darkness of the pitch black void surrounding him, numbingly cold, where he could feel nothing but the dread of his own existence, where he couldn't hear anything but his own blood coursing through his veins. He tried to plea at first, not to obey the whisper, recognizing the voice very well. "Get out of my head, Makima..." He whispered once again before all lights went out, right at the moment just another whisper into his ear founds its way to perturb him for the remaining of his life.

"No..." The whisper said, just as (Y/N) felt himself vanish onto the darkness. "No, I won't." He heard, and for a single second, he ceased to exist.

"How long I've been out?" (Y/N) asked, his eyes still shut, his voice hoarse, and a stinging pain at the back of his throat the moment he finally decided to ask. The sunlight entering the window at his side was starting to get itchy on his closed eyelids, he assumed it must've been around nine o'clock in the morning when he finally woke up, just like the voice commanded him to do. He decided to ask first because, even though he couldn't exactly see him, the smell of booze and cigarettes was too much of a giveaway for him to realize he wasn't alone in that hospital room.

"A day and a half." Kishibe responded calmly, looking through the window at the park in front of the hospital with a bottle of whiskey on his hand. "It's March already."

"Oh..." (Y/N) simply sighed.

"...We thought you'd fuckin' die. And you actually did, for a moment." Kishibe finally admitted after the silence between them had grown too long. "It took us hell to figure out how to calm Power down, you know?"

"I figured, honestly." (Y/N) fought the weight of his eyelids to finally open his eyes, and the stinging sunlight made him almost squeal as he ushered to sit down on the mattress. He recognized the hospital room for it was the same he had rested on the day he fought the Bat Devil, back when he first met Power. He would've loved to just keep going with his slumber, but perhaps there were more important things at hand. "Did Denji and Nayuta come to see me, by any chance?" He asked, rubbing his eyes lazily.