Ultra Responsibility (My Hero Academia X Spider-Man Reader)

Issue 95 - Negative View

I was on my knees.

I don't remember falling there. I don't remember the moment my legs gave out. One second I was standing in the wreckage, and the next I was down in it, palms pressed to broken ground, blood dripping from my chin and splattered across my face in ugly red streaks.

My mask hung peeled back around my neck.

My breathing wouldn't slow.

In.

Out.

Too fast.

Too shallow.

My chest hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt, but none of it was louder than the thing in front of me.

I stared at it.

At them.

At the shape on the floor that my mind refused to understand no matter how many times my eyes forced me to see it.

"No..." I whispered.

The word barely made it out.

My arms hung uselessly by my sides. My fingers twitched once, then curled in against my palms like they wanted to hide too.

"It can't be..."

My vision blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again. My whole body had started shaking and I couldn't tell if it was rage or grief or fear or all three trying to tear through me at once.

"You can't be..."

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to crawl away.

I wanted to disappear into the cracks in the floor and never come back out.

Instead I just knelt there, breaking apart in silence.

Then the arms came around me.

Black tendrils slid over my shoulders, under my arms, across my chest, wrapping me tight. They held me close, close enough that they should have felt warm. Safe. Like comfort.

They didn't.

They were suffocating.

A vice made of affection.

A trap dressed up as mercy.

A voice breathed at my ear, low and intimate and wrong in exactly the ways it knew would hurt most.

"This is your fault."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

It only made the words clearer.

"You could have prevented this."

The tendrils tightened.

"If you hadn't held back..."

My breath hitched.

"If you had just done what was necessary..."

The voice almost sounded tender.

"None of this would have happened."

I shook my head once, weak and useless.

"No..."

The voice ignored me.

"They would still be alive."

That landed.

That one sank straight through my ribs and lodged in whatever was left of my heart.

The arms pulled tighter still, my own suit hugging me like it wanted to crawl inside and wear my grief as its own.