When you wake, it's to the antiseptic hum of the infirmary — that sterile quiet that presses too close against your ears, the faint buzz of fluorescent lights, the slow, mechanically beeping machines insisting that you're still alive. The air smells of alcohol and old blood. Your tongue is heavy. Your throat burns. Your chest feels tight. Your head — well, it's a miracle you even have one. Everything aches — a deep, marrow-deep ache that reminds you of being scooped out and stitched back together by hands that weren't quite sure how to fit all the pieces back.
For a few disoriented seconds, you think maybe you're still dead. Maybe this is what the afterlife smells like — bleach and sadness and that crushing weight on your chest that makes it difficult to so much as draw breath.
Then you hear a voice.
"Good morning, sunshine," it says, lilting, smug, far too cheerful for how terrible you currently feel. "It's okay. Daddy's here to take care of you."
Your eyes snap open.
Gojo Satoru is sitting in a chair beside your bed, a new pair of sunglasses perched upon the bridge of his nose, and a smug grin plastered across his stupidly perfect face. One long leg is propped up on another chair, and he's twirling your IV drip cord like it's a toy.
You scream.
It's not a dainty, movie heroine sort of scream either — it's a full-bodied, raw, startled scream that bounces off the infirmary walls. You flail so hard the blanket goes flying and something on your bedside tray clatters to the ground.
In less than two seconds, the door bangs open.
In an instant, the door slams open so hard it ricochets off the wall. Yuta barrels in like a one-man apocalypse, dripping wet — hair plastered to his forehead, shirt clinging to his chest and torso in ways that your fried neurons definitely don't need right now. His katana is already half-drawn, eyes wide and wild with leftover adrenaline. His eyes are wild and for one terrifying second, the Cursed Energy rolling off him makes the entire room waver.
Rika materializes with a monstrous snarl, her form flickering with restless fury as her eyes sweep the room for threats. She spots Gojo first — the tall, lean idiot standing over your bed — and the look she gives him could vaporize small countries. Glass bottles rattle, the floor trembles, the overhead lights flicker.
And for a split second, you think that you're about to die again.
"WHAT HAPPENED?!"
Rika lets out a shriek that rattles the windows, and a bed frame snaps clean in half from the pressure. Shoko's gonna have words about that later.
"Oh, come on!" Gojo yelps as Rika lunges forward, the room shuddering from her presence. "It's me! Your beloved sensei! I wasn't doing anything inappropriate, I swear!"
Yuta's expression twists in confusion, then dawning horror. "Wait, Rika — stop, it's just — GOJO-SENSEI?!?"
Gojo holds up both hands like he's about to negotiate a hostage release. "Now, Rika, sweetheart, we can talk about this—"
Rika screeches and hurls a table across the room.
"SHOKO!" Gojo howls, dodging a flying medical tray.
Right on cue, Shoko appears in the doorway, holding a clipboard and a cigarette she hasn't even lit yet. She takes in the chaos — Gojo half-crouched behind a rolling stool, Yuta drenched and looking like a wet cat, Rika glowing like an impending apocalypse, and you, still dazed and very much shell-shocked from all the commotion — and sighs like she's aged twenty years in five seconds.
