Chapter Text
Being taken from the ruins of Jaku City was a relief at first. It promised safety and survival. Field medics treated the worst wounds. Med-evac teams stabilized bodies where they could and soothed minds. None of them knew yet that Central Hospital was a horror all its own.
Every hallway he'd seen was lined with occupied stretchers. Supplies were low. Staffing was lower. When was the last time he saw a person with a staff badge? Or any non-patient at all?
Cries of physical and emotional pain were constant. It was louder here than on the battlefield. The hospital's walls trapped the sounds inside. Wails and moans echoed and filled the narrow space to overflowing.
Those walls that held screams too close were also too white. The fluorescent lights reflected sharply off of the glossy paint. It made it both hard to see and hard to not see. The person on the opposite side of the hallway had been writhing before but had become still. His brain screamed at him to watch, to know if their chest was still rising and falling. It screamed at him to block it all out too. To ignore the way blood gathered on the hem of the saturated and disheveled sheets. To stop watching as each drop became too heavy and fell into the large pool forming on the floor.
Did he have his own pool? Probably. Every single part of him felt like it was both freezing cold and on fire. The scattering of scrapes were his mildest injuries, but they stung the most. Nothing was muted at all so his hazy thoughts couldn't be blamed on lingering pain medication.
He realized that, after everything that he had said and done and felt, he was probably going to die in this random hallway. He would slip away without witness, staring at a person that he refused to accept had already met a similar end. These thoughts should probably make him laugh, or cry, or scream. Instead he simply released another shallow wheeze and wondered distantly how many more he'd get.
It didn't really matter how many. They had failed. Shigaraki had escaped. Those who survived their hallways today wouldn't get many more breaths anyway. Neither would the people that avoided injury, or weren't caught within the crossfire. They may survive today. But tomorrow, death will come for them too. Or the next day, or the one after that.
He thought of his colleagues. His friends. His love. His students. His little girl. Rage ignited in a brief, incandescent flash, before blackness enveloped him.
He didn't remember waking. It was more accurate to say that he noticed that the scene was different now.
It seemed that his personal purgatory was still in a hospital. Fair. He did always hate them.
He was in a private room. Low murmuring sounded from outside the door, but it was quiet inside. There were no monitors or tubes in sight. Evening light slanted in through a large window to his left. It made everything look soft. Deceptive, since the hospital sheets were as stiff and scratchy as ever.
It sank in that he had been looking around with both eyes. He ran his finger under his right eye and the skin was smooth. There was no uneven half-moon marking his survival after the USJ. Feeling bolder, he moved the blanket aside and pulled up his right pant leg. He poked at the flesh of his shin. Maybe he looked like the mental image of himself in this place, and the damage to his eye and leg were too new. If that were true, though, he should have his scar. It proved his commitment to protecting his students and that made him surprisingly proud of it.
With a sigh, he wondered what to do. Could he leave this room? If he could, did he want to? He was in no rush to see whatever might be out there even, or maybe especially, if it was a hospital hallway.
Instead, he fixed the sheets and blankets and lay back on the pillows. He let his eyes close and his head loll to one side. He felt strange, almost high, but that wasn't quite it. After a few minutes, he realized that it was the feeling of not battling bone-deep exhaustion for the first time in years. He wasn't tired at all.
Upon realizing that sleep wasn't happening, he stood to look out the window instead. Sleep wouldn't be necessary now, so maybe it was impossible. Insomnia would fit with every other hospital experience he ever had.
When the door slid open, he stood still and watched in the window's reflection.
Nezu walked in and closed the door behind himself. He didn't look right though. No suit jacket, vest, or tie. His rumpled white dress shirt and pants matched his unbrushed fur. He barely lifted his feet as he moved toward the bedside. He looked up and startled.
“Pup!” The voice was right but the tone was wrong, and Nezu hadn't called him that in years.
Shōta didn't react to Not-Nezu talking, just watched him evenly. Not-Nezu hurried over and held Shōta's right hand in both paws. Shōta wasn't sure why he expected them to be cold, but they weren't. His paws were warm. Soft. Familiar.
Not-Nezu's ears flattened. “Say something?”
Wishing Nezu was actually with him would mean wishing him dead, wouldn't it? He tried to ignore how badly he wanted it. But each time he pushed it away, it pressed back harder. He took a few steps to be further apart. Maybe not touching would make it ache less.
Not-Nezu held the end of his tail and let his shoulders slump. He looked small. It reminded Shōta of when Nezu first met Eri. Nezu could rarely let himself look small, speak softly, or be gentle. The lab taught him that those things were vulnerabilities he couldn't allow.
Not-Nezu's voice matched that memory too. “You know that you're safe now. Don't you, Shōta-kun?”
The behavior was unusual for Nezu, but it was also exactly as he remembered it. It made Shōta uneasy. He pressed his back to the cool glass of the window. The cold was too short-lived to be grounding. He sat heavily on the floor instead.
Their faces were level with each other's now. Shōta examined (Not?) Nezu's face, watching the tiny shifts in his expression. If this was Nezu, then Nezu was dead. If Nezu was dead, was Eri dead too?
Shōta's stomach flipped and his lips went numb. He closed his eyes tightly. It seemed unfair that panic attacks were still possible here.
He felt soft paws running through his hair, and he felt 12 all over again. “It's okay now, pup. I found you.”
“I…don't…understand.” Shōta whispered each word between gulps of air.
“What don't you understand?” (Not?) Nezu asked, carefully detangling a knot.
He had to work himself up to the question. “Am…”
(Not?) Nezu hummed his encouragement.
“Am I…alive?”
The paws stilled in his hair. “Yes, pup. I found you in time.”
The crash of emotion was disorienting. This was Nezu. Nezu was alive. He was alive, but Eri wasn't here. Was she safe? And the battle. They failed. And at least 6 UA students were injured that he knew of. Did the students get help? Did they get lost in their own hallways?
The hallway.
Would he ever really leave that hallway?