Chapter Text
The war was over. The streets pulsed with life, an electric current of relief and joy weaving through the crowd. People cheered, their voices rising in unison, laughter spilling from lips that had once only known fear. Strangers embraced, old friends toasted to their survival, and music played from every corner, a symphony of victory echoing into the night.
And yet, I could only stand there, frozen amidst the revelry, offering small, strained smiles to those who clapped me on the back and grinned at me with unfiltered elation. Their joy was genuine, hard-won, and well-deserved. They had lived. They had survived the worst of it. I couldn’t be upset with them for celebrating when the darkness had finally lifted. I couldn’t fault them for relishing a world that, for the first time in so long, wasn’t drenched in blood and loss.
But even as the air buzzed with triumph, my mind remained shackled to the past, to those final moments. The ones that had stolen pieces of me I would never get back. The ones that made victory taste like ash on my tongue.
So I stayed until I could no longer pretend, until my face ached from the forced smiles and my hands trembled beneath the weight of memories I wasn’t ready to face. Then, I slipped away.
The quiet of my dorm felt suffocating. The echoes of laughter and celebration still rang in my ears as I locked the door behind me, the silence pressing down like a vice. I barely made it to the bathroom before the tears came—hot, unrelenting, unstoppable. My knees hit the cold tile, my shoulders shaking as I gasped for breath, sobbing in the solitude of my own suffering.
My phone vibrated beside me, message after message flooding in from friends still basking in the afterglow of victory. Invitations, cheers, words of relief and excitement. I ignored them all.
Because while the war was over for them, it would never truly be over for me. Not when every time I closed my eyes, I was met with the hollow, childlike gaze of my greatest enemy. A gaze not filled with rage or malice, but something far worse—emptiness. The kind of emptiness that came from a life stolen before it had even begun.
Tomura Shigaraki never had a choice. Not in his pain, not in his hatred, not in the path that had been carved out for him long before he could fight against it. And that was the cruelest part of all. Because I saw it now, too late to change anything. Too late to offer a hand instead of a blade. Too late to ask who he might have been if someone had just—just given him a reason to believe in something else.
Because for all the blood on his hands, for all the destruction and suffering he had caused, the truth was undeniable. He was just like me. A product of forces far beyond his control. A weapon shaped by the hands of those who had come before.
And maybe that was why the war would never truly end. Not for me. Not for the part of me that understood him in a way I never wanted to. Not when his ghost would always be there, lingering at the edges of my conscience. Not when, in another life, in another world—he might have been standing beside me instead of against me.
Not when, in the deepest part of my heart, I knew that if things had been different… I could have been him.
I sat there on the cold tile floor, tears flooding my vision and streaking down my face. Everyone was calling me the hero; congratulating me on my success. But I could never feel that success. Not when all that mattered to me is the countless number of innocent lives lost.
I’m no hero.
I can’t be. Not when so many people were and are hurt because of me.
Shigaraki’s childlike eyes are not the only thing that haunts my sleep—they are just the beginning. Those eyes, empty and innocent, frozen in time before hatred swallowed them whole, stare at me in the spaces between dreams and reality. They remind me that before he became a monster, he was just a boy, desperate for kindness, for a hand to hold. I see them every time I close my own, and I wonder—if someone had reached out to him back then, would things have been different? Would we have been spared this endless cycle of destruction?
But even Shigaraki’s childlike eyes are not the worst of it. My best friend's lifeless body is burned into my mind, more real than any nightmare could ever be. I held him. I saw the light leave his eyes, and no matter how many times he stands before me now, alive and breathing, saying my name like it’s not my fault, like I didn’t fail him—I can’t believe it. The past is unshakable. My hands will always remember what it felt like when I lost him. He tells me he’s here. He tells me I didn’t let him down. But the truth? The truth is that I did. I let him die, and nothing will ever undo that.
And then there’s the Todoroki family. They were on the edge of something they never thought possible—peace, healing, a future together. They fought so hard for it, clawed their way toward happiness despite all the pain, and in the end, they gave it all up. For me. So I would win. So the world wouldn’t fall apart. How can I live with that? How can I face them, knowing that their chance at happiness was just another sacrifice in a war I was meant to end? They deserved so much more than this.
Ochako—her heart will always be too big for this world. She saw Toga, not as a villain, not as an enemy, but as a girl in pain. She reached for her, saved her, and in the end, Toga died a hero. But no one will ever know. The world won’t sing her name, won’t tell her story the way it deserves to be told. They’ll never understand that the girl they feared, the girl they called a monster, died proving she was never one. Ochako believed in her when no one else did, and for that, she lost everything. I can still hear her voice, steady, unwavering, as she fought for a future where even people like Toga had a place. But the world isn’t kind to people like Ochako. It only takes. So now her voice shakes and tears fill her eyes. And her kind heart is broken, and I can’t heal it.
I can’t shake any of it. The mistakes, the losses, the unbearable weight of everything I’ve done, everything I failed to do. It builds inside me, pressing against my ribs, clawing at my throat. Even when I try to breathe, the overwhelming feeling never fades. I don’t know if it ever will.