Archive of Our Own

Toga Himiko fades in.

She knows her circulatory system very well. This is a strange thing to claim awareness of, but it makes perfect sense to her: she understands intuitively the way blood flows through her arms, passes up her neck, slopes into her feet. She knows where her blood is and where it should be and that there's not enough of it. This, too, makes sense; she had just given Ochako a transfusion. The last of her strength, diverted into the girl with the nerve to care for a wreck like her. Her extremities are cold but Ochako's body is warm, so warm, curled against hers. She is sticky. Why is she so sticky? Oh, yes. The blood, and the lack thereof. Crimson patches, sprawled over her uniform. A pool over her stomach. Her clothes, breaking off into Uraraka's. The feeling of her closed fist, gripping that little All Might doll, pressed against someone else's abdomen. The connection. Ecstatic and beautiful. 

She is light. So, so light. Heart and soul, it's like she's made of fleece. Iron clings to the top of her mouth; what a nostalgic, comforting taste. Like frozen strawberries in sweet cream, coating her tongue in memories of the friendship and girlhood she never had. Ochako was cold but now she is warm. So, so, so warm. Himiko has never experienced a sensation like this in her life. Like all of the evil that had been incubated within her has crawled out of her wounds, her eyes, and sunk into the peat below them, and all that was left was the goodness she abandoned in her dreams.

Uraraka is crying, lines of tears down her dirty, grimy cheeks. Covered in blood. Why-- oh, right, because she is dying. Because they are both dying. People are screaming, but it's nothingmore than a dim echo in the outer reaches of Himiko’s mind. Ochako doesn't need to be crying; she is going to live, after all. Going to live in the same world that denied Himiko so profoundly, with the knowledge of what she's done, here, on this day. Earth is rotten, unforgiving. Ochako is the seed in the grisly soil, the bloom against terra dark -- petals, groaning out of the decomposition. This planet without her is not worth guaranteeing.

Her blood mingles with Himiko’s own, her life draining away and leaving her only partially transformed. Behind prickling limbs, already asleep with the promise of satisfied death, spreads a cocktail of lovely affection. Intermingled with Ochako like this, she thinks that she's okay. She spent so long wanting to be someone else, lived an entire life in perpetual becoming, that it would be alright for her to lie against the dirt as a chimera, half herself, fully in love. Strands of almost brunette hair cling to the sides of her face, adoring the sweat and the viscera and her blush. 

She collapses over Ochako’s body, and she remembers the way Jin died, a knife in his back, and screams of betrayal on his lips. Utterly abandoned and deceived, double-crossed twice, leaving with a bang and a whimper. So full of hatred and fury and salt. How did it feel, when it happened? Was it quick, or was it suffering? Is it like they say, and at the end of the light, there's a perfect moment of peace? Himiko thinks that must be the case; how else is this embrace explained? Ochako’s chest rises and falls shallowly under her costume, fitful and weak jerks not budging her from the ground. She is calling out limply for Himiko. Her name sounds nice, inside of Ochako’s mouth. She wonders -- how would it taste? Would it be just as sugary, if she let it fill her own tongue? She doesn't know. She can't move. But it's okay. It's okay. Ochako can't fix everything.

So, Himiko will fix what she can, herself. It will be her final duty to this broken system. It will be her final apology to Ochako. And maybe to Izuku, too. Maybe she misjudged him; maybe she misjudged so many people. A sorrow carves her out from the inside, but it doesn't remain. She is too gentle right now for bitter anger. There is love, and only love.

She whispers a goodbye, but she doesn't know if it actually ends up leaving her. Her energy is low, too low, for her to be certain or anything, beyond the intense physicality of Ochako's body, near and dear and present under her static touch. 

Thank you, she says. Thank you for loving me enough.

Toga Himiko fades out.

-

There are shouts, screams. Someone is pulling Ochako off of Himiko. “Uravity!” Her mangled auditory cortex manages to rearrange the syllables being barked at her into her own name. “Are you conscious? Can you speak? Please, say something!”

“I...” She tries to, but it's garbled, incoherent. Words slide out of her in a crumple, but even in her daze, she can sense Himiko’s body, slumped beside hers. Unmoving. Plasticine. “Himi-- chan--” Her breaths come out in hard, hot puffs. Everything that leaves her makes her head spin. The sky above her is black. “Himi-- ko-- chan--”

“Toga Himiko has lost a lot of blood,” says the voice. There’s weight on Ochako’s arms, pushing her upward. “It’s not likely that she’ll--”

“She has to live!” Now it’s Ochako who’s screaming. The howl rips her throat raw, copper curdling in her bronchii. Each beat of air that pounds into her writhing form hits her lungs with a screech and a jolt. “Pl-- please, she-- she wants-- she told--”

“Urara-- Uravity, you can't strain yourself!” She's being lifted now. She is heavy, and conscious of that. Feeling is slowly drifting back into her, an awareness of how much space she occupies in the universe. Her gravity. Spittle froths in the corner of her lips. She's afraid, so so so afraid. Even her veins are trembling. Hot tears spill over, her eyelashes dark with destruction and antimatter. She tries to thrash, but something snaps over her arms. Stabilizers. She's being put onto a gurney. “Please, you have to breathe--”

“Himiko-chan!” she repeats, burbling. She tosses her head back and forth, each hit blinding her. Snow flurries across her vision until she feels her consciousness palpitate, the blizzard closing in. Her heart is pumping Himiko's blood into her brain. “She-- save her--” she yelps, pain searing through her chest, coagulating around her knife wound. Its ache is nothing compared to the injury to her heart, and her ears ring. “Himiko-chan! Can you hear me--”

Then, it's all at once. There is no subtlety to fainting. One moment she is shrieking, and the next there is only dull pollution, everything going slack as her head hits the soft bedding of the gurney with a thump. Tethering her to Himiko was a string that had been unceremoniously snapped, and she, covered head to toe in detritus and stardust and promises, falls fitfully into the realm of the dead.

-

Toga Himiko fades in.

Aah, this must be the journey to the afterlife. A dull thrum vibrates in her bones and punctures her eardrums. Strange, though. She thought she'd feel healed, after death, all the parts of her that were torn meticulously put back together. Instead, all she has it dreariness. The adrenaline that had forked into her so that she could save Ochako has worn off, and now she is just sick and tired and waiting to be picked up.

Did she ever believe in life after death? Probably not. Those rules of Heaven and Hell were just as restrictive as the ones governing hero society. If she carries herself in a certain way -- if she represses all that she is, if she acts the pious daughter, if she's normal -- she'll be granted access to the garden? Oh, she can only be free through mutilation, that’s it. She'd end up at the gates with her organs hanging out, having vivisected herself to even be considered by His Holiness. All the same she would be covered in blood and she'd be turned away regardless. No one wanted to know what was inside. It repulsed them.

Hell wasn't a better option. Eternal damnation, just for being herself? She had enough of that in the waking world, thanks. As no stranger to chains and shackles, she had very little interest in being cooped up with them for the millennia that death entailed.

Maybe she thought there was nothing on the other end. Like a television being unplugged. One yank and everything was over; liberation was a pool of darkness and tar that she could fall into.

But this doesn't seem like Heaven or Hell or nothingness. Instead it seems like metal, noisiness, hardness. Agony fritters through her, first in the bottoms of her feet, and then in her collarbone, and then down her spine. Like there is rust in her cells. Do the dead twitch? She feels like she does, pain coursing through her at breakneck speeds. There is no relief.

And it's odd, but... She gets the sense that Ochako is right next to her -- her solidity, her forgiveness -- but that can't be the case. She saved Ochako. She can't be here. It's not right. Even with that incongruity in mind, the other girl's presence is comforting. Her brain slips around her ears, sloshing in her skull, motorized into movement. A constant, industrialized buzz, reverberating on a skeletal level. Ochako must have lived. It's the only thing that makes sense in her dull psyche.

The garbled sound of speech. Every now and again, a bang in the wall of infinity, a jolt. A dizzying knowledge of her surroundings. Blobs of indistinct colours, dim torch light, undulating in her not-all-there vision. She misses Tomura. And Touya. And Shuuichi. And Atsuhiro. And Jin, too. Maybe she doesn't believe in Heaven or Hell or any of that but she still hopes she can see Jin just one more time. So they can hug. So they can dance. So she can apologize for ever letting him go, that last time in the Gunga Villa. For not taking Hawks out. 

She is so tired. More tired than she's ever been before. Her thoughts wash away and erode the sides of her mind, smoothing and forgetting. A sea of white greets her in the interstice, waxing and waning and squelching and souring. Like a blanket over every single part of her, blocking her from the world and all of its wants. Shattering her.

Toga Himiko fades out.

-

Ochako tells Deku to do his best. 

Isn't that what she's always done, for him? That's what his name means -- you can do it. Half-breathing and close to death, she manages to say it out loud. Delirious, it's the only thing she knows she absolutely has to do without fail. Like when he almost failed the U.A exam. Like when Blackwhip took over. Like when they brought the broken soldier home and even his haven wanted to reject him. She is weak and begging for life and she will still lay it down for him, unquestioning, just like she did for Himiko.

Himiko. Himiko, Himiko, Himiko. Her sallow lips barely twitch with breath. Ochako told her about her crush on Deku; she hadn't ever done that with anyone else. It was private, embarrassing. Intensely personal. Was Mina obsessed with knowing? Of course. And Aoyama knew, too, didn't he? Back during their exam against Thirteen, he had asked as much, and he -- he always spent so much time, observing the people around him, watching painstakingly for anything that could have put a chink in the mask. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, that's the saying, and his enemy was himself, monitored to the brink of insanity. If only Ochako could have listened to him, talked about romance, she's-- she's always too late, too slow. Too late to save the world. Too slow to absolve its darkness. Himiko had said that, too. That she can put in the stitches but never rescind the gouge.

Her interest in Deku kept her chest warm and that was all it had to do. He, her hero, inspired her; that was enough. She could hold it close and never let it go. But Himiko was different. Brave. Honest in every single way. She asked Deku to be her boyfriend so fearlessly that Ochako was desperately, fitfully jealous of her candour. If only she could have a paucity of that courage -- maybe she would have been able to reach Himiko sooner. Maybe she could have helped Aoyama. Maybe nothing would have ever got to this point. Maybe maybe maybe.

Pixie Bob’s hand is on her shoulder, holding her in place. “You need to preserve your strength,” she whispers, harrowed. Wasn't she joking, the first time 1-A met the Pussycats, about being not a day over eighteen? Her eyes are changed now. Glassy and heavy, wrinkled and dull. She has aged a million years. They all have. “We'll be at the hospital soon, I promise. You fought well. It's up to Deku, now.”

Painfully, Ochako’s fragmented psyche manages to piece together the question that has haunted her her entire first year, since she watched Deku take out the zero point monster, since she watched All Might disintegrate with his fist punched toward the sky in the wreckage of Kamino, since she held Nighteye in her quivering arms and watched the light die from his eyes. She had been there. She had been right there, and she still couldn't--

Who will be the heroes’ hero? Who will be out there, protecting them? Who will tend to them? Who will be the anchor to the world?

Her eyes flicker over to Himiko. Distant. Dreamy.

Is she worthy of being that saviour, after all that has played out in front of her? She tries to put a hand out to the other girl but her neurons don't make the connection and no part of her raises. No part of her even stutters. She feels like she's suffocating, down in these bones. On the most primal level of her being she's suffering, trapped, angry, unsure. Is this what it was like all the time, for Himiko? Her ribs crack open with an outpouring of bruised ego and empathy and so much sadness. Why couldn't Himiko have come to her sooner? Why, Goddammit, did it take so long for her to hear the girl’s cries? Nausea pokes and roils in her gut, hot and then cold. Her eyelids keep lowering further and further no matter how much she fights it off...

She's only sixteen, she thinks, suddenly...

...Himiko is probably around the same age, right...? They never had the chance to talk about that stuff... sixteen and lying on the precipice, like this, the earth torn open, the greatest trauma at the birth of the universe... she feels like she had only just turned sixteen, but it was last year, already... is it March? Or... is it April, already...?

...It’s Bakugou’s birthday soon, isn't it? Deku mentioned that, she thinks, the back of her head tingling... that he's usually the oldest in their classes... they should do something nice, celebrate, but he'd probably hate it, no matter what they did... maybe, um, Jirou... Jirou could perform something? Like she did... during their culture festival... that was so fun... it was when things were good...

Himiko could come, too, they'd all... that would be... that would be nice...

She has to make it... She has to--

-

Toga Himiko fades in.

There is clattering, the sound of gears and wheels. And there are voices, too. Men's and women's, loud, demanding. The afterlife is weird. She never thought it would be quite so overstimulating. And now there are people touching her, prodding her. Sticking things into her -- oh, this is soft and familiar. The warmth of the flow, descending into her body. She almost feels real for a split second, just a second. Rough hands force her into different positions and with each jerk a massive spear of pain stabs through the back of her head. Her scalp is on fire, each and every follicle a new site of a burn. She moans and whimpers with each fresh flash of agony that rips through her skin, tossing herself back and forth.

And then it stops. All of it. The spectacle, the discomfort. A sound wave that stretches out. A heart monitor that flatlines, and she is left lying there in the aftermath, the silence. Drifting in and out and in and out. No pings. No echoes.

Oh. 

Tomura is here, too, in the afterlife. Standing in the corner of the room, like a ghost, sickly pale against the grey walls. That means they lost. That Izuku must have killed him. The heroes prevail yet again.

He doesn't look like he did during the battle, though. He's the Tomura that Himiko remembers from last year, with choppy blue hair and exhausted eyes, a stiff posture and yellowed skin, his frame pitted and slight. He doesn't have the hands, though. Where did they go? How come he looks like that in death? Is Himiko different, too? She tries to touch her stomach but something is holding her down. No matter. It’s him. It feels like it’s been forever since the two of them saw each other.

“Did you lose, Tomura-kun?” Her voice is not her voice; it's far too coarse, parched. She speaks in a murmur.

“Mnm.” His, though, is like it had been recently, during the war. Toned down and stable, not as erratic as it had once been, when the League first formed. He looks at his palm, flexes his fingers. No abcess in the centre. “Well... I guess I did. Kinda. I think I'm okay with it, though.”

“Hm? Really?” Himiko asks. “That's not how you've been talking lately. You haven't been yourself. I'm glad you're back to normal.”

“Well, I haven't been myself,” replies Tomura thickly, sarcastically. He hovers at the edge of -- where is Himiko, anyway? “But there isn't anything this world can do for me anymore. I think I'm...” He gazes off. “I think I'm done.”

“I think so, too. Me, I mean. I'm done. I got beat.” She giggles. It rises up through her, hot and carbonated. How long has it been since she just got to talk with Tomura? He sounds a little off, a little silly, but it's him! She's giddy with it. “I got totally beat by a hero,” she sighs with laughter. “Did you know, Tomura-kun? I like girls, too. I like Ochako-chan. Do you remember her?”

“Not really. I thought you liked Midoriya Izuku.”

“Oh, you remembered that?” she squeals. She never thought Tomura listened to her. This is so wonderful. This is perfect. This could be Heaven if she tried. “I don't really like Izuku-kun anymore. He doesn't get me. I tried to ask him out but he shot me down,” she responds glumly; Tomura stares mildly over at her, unblinking. “He wanted to put a stop to our world, you know?”

“No, that's not it,” drawls Tomura. Himiko wiggles her hips; something is poking her. Lots of somethings. “He wanted to stop us. Or, he wanted us to want to stop ourselves.” He scratches his ear with his pinky. “That's all.”

“Is that really that different?”

“To him, probably.”

“Mmm, I think that I get it,” Himiko tells him. Heat crushes into her cheeks. “‘Cuz, like, Ochako-chan wanted to save me, but I told her no matter what she did, she couldn't make all the bad stuff go away. It's all still there.” Her lips quirk up, drunk on the memory. “But still, she said I have a cute smile. Do you think that, Tomura-kun?”

“I think you have a lunatic’s smile.” Himiko laughs again, and she can't stop laughing. All of this is so funny. She's sad she hasn't seen Jin, yet, but for right now, with this rarefied air in her lungs, making her lightheaded, she's content. 

“Hey, when do I get to see Jin-kun? Or Touya-kun?” She gazes up at Tomura, and all of a sudden he's so watery, all shapes, no definition. He's a smear on the wet wall, and it startles her, to go from talking to nothing at all. She can't rub her eyes and she can't feel where her heart is. All he appears as to her is a palimpsest of fear and regret and resolution. She trembles, nailed to the ground, ice in the veins of her throat. She doesn't like it, the stillness, the stagnation. The pausing of all things, the freezing.

“Not yet.” His voice still comes, a tether, leaking out of the walls, enveloping her. “Sorry, Toga.” She doesn't feel like Tomura ever used to apologize. He never did anything that he needed to apologize for... Straight and true, just like her own affection. “You're going to have to keep waiting for that.”

“Huh? But why?” She tries to raise her voice, but it splits out at the edges, peeling off into ineffectual, elusive sheets that fall away haplessly. The paint in the room starts to curl up and flutter toward her, off-white petals in a windstorm. Panels lift from the musky floor and tower as rainstorm clouds, weighty with snow and thunder. Himiko’s eyes almost roll back as she processes all of this, her surroundings coming to her in winks and blinks and barely-formed realities. Anything she attempts to grip shudders from her grasp with a weak cry before it disintegrates, diminishing into ash that coats her in its soot, the remembrancer of its disappearance. Gone, she is still glazed in charcoal. Is Tomura still here, then? This must be his Quirk, that’s making everything go away. “Tomura-kun?” 

No answer.

Space itself begins to distort, and time, to distend -- everything overhauled, stripped away. A pervasive calm descends in the midst of it all, distilled into the divot in Himiko’s clavicle, absorbed by her. This destruction -- it's what Tomura would have wanted. It's what all of them wanted. A world that was easier for them to live in. It was always that simple, so simple; why was that so hard for everyone to understand? Oh, but there's the rub, isn't it? They didn't want to understand. It's easier to be ignorant, to push away everything that doesn't conform to their narrow viewpoints, to brand the dropouts as failures. The wretched. The sick. It's safer that way, less... disquieting. The societal monster keeps bleating and gorges itself on the flesh of the unlucky few. The machine keeps running so long as there's someone's blood to grease it.

So Himiko kept hers, took it from others. Stole. Screamed. Refused to submit herself to the gears and the whirring and the tetrameter of the slog. And would it not have been for Ochako, she could have continued on like that, stayed for forever in the losers’ prison. She kept to her devices and this hero world shunned her from theirs; one was polar, and the other, non. Some people had to be the oil in the water -- that was the way it worked. How it always worked. How it will always be. Heroes and villains, destined to put knives in each other, time immemorial.

There's no room for emulsion in this binary. The only place the transgressors may occupy is death.

Toga Himiko fades out.

-

This isn't the part they show on television.

The fighting is exciting. The goodbyes, teary. The resolutions, admirable. But this is the worst of war, the real horror. The crumbled buildings. The corpses caught under slabs of concrete. The lives that were wiped away as collateral damage. You can't step a single foot without crushing shrapnel. They knew what was coming. They planned and still things turned out like this. Ochako never knew the tang of metal in her lungs quite so intimately until now. The bad guys are in captivity and Himiko is dead. Their duties are far from over.

The busy work keeps her occupied. They patch her up and send her into the ruins of society, expecting her to fix it. And she will, every time. Bit by bit, brick by brick. Rebuilding. Fixing herself in the process. This is what a hero does.

If nothing changes, then what was the point of any of this?

“Ochako-chan.” She rubs her eyes as Tsuyu cocks her head, concerned. She's still smarting from her injuries. The energy that would have been needed to heal her up completely with Recovery Girl’s Quirk would have surely hospitalized her, comatose, for days. She needed to be out on the field. For herself, but mostly for everyone else. “You should take a break. You look exhausted, kero.”

“Mm... I'm okay. I can keep going,” she insists plainly.

“I'm worried about you, Ochako-chan. You're always putting others first, kero.” Unconvinced, Tsuyu plods in front of her, blocking her from the rubble they've been working on clearing. “Do you remember how upset I got, kero? When Midoriya-chan and the others went to save Bakugou-chan, despite our warnings?”

“Yeah. I remember.” How long ago that seems now.

“It felt so awful. Just holding it in,” Tsuyu recounts. Her hair falls messily, tarnished by the wind. “And it will just build and build until it explodes, kero.”

“I'm sure everyone feels the same,” Ochako deflects wearily. “Hardly anyone can expect us to be at our best after what we've just been through.” Her arms are sore to their very core.

“It's about Toga Himiko, right?” Ochako winces, gutted. As if a hard tool is being dug into her flesh, scooping it out piece by piece. “Ochako-chan... what happened wasn't your fault, kero.”

“What happened?” A sudden burst of rage makes Ochako’s throat tremble, its hollows dull and dry. “She died! And it's because-- because I wasn't strong enough! I--” She catches herself, horrified, the rest of the outburst trapped in her windpipe. Torpor and anxiety and arcane sadness depress upon her and will her footsteps back. She tremors. “I'm sorry, Tsuyu-chan, I didn't mean to yell at you. I'm sorry.” She repeats it. Maybe it will do its office this way.

Tsuyu puts her hand on Ochako’s back, patting it firmly, then rubbing small, soothing circles. “No, I am, kero. I was insensitive.” She waits, then, for Ochako to go on. She sucks back the tears that threaten to form.

“It just... it's not fair. She was brave, and strong...” She flicks her hand over her face. “But because of her Quirk... because others thought she was a ‘freak’...” she echoes Himiko’s own language, her chest constricting as her words trail away. She doesn't even know what to say, really. How could she possibly give shape to all of this pain? Lost, her lips part, so much left unsaid hanging on the edges. So much that she'll never say, now, that she'll carry with her to the grave and then beyond that. “Did you ever get Quirk counselling in school, Tsuyu-chan?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” She looks away briefly. The sky is sad and cloudless. “They get to heteromorphs earlier than other kids. Because... well, you know why,” she says, with tempered frustration. Another string in Ochako's heart snaps with barely contained rage.

When she was young, she was dazzled by the work of heroes and the good they did for the community. Her parents were poor but happy. The unseemly aspects of society -- which, upon closer inspection, seem to comprise all of it -- were kept far away from her, until she was put face to face with them at the tender age of sixteen. But people like Tsuyu, and Shouji, and Himiko were all born into the boxes she didn't know existed. She begins to shake uncontrollably. 

“Don't get me wrong. It's not like what I went through is comparable to what Toga Himiko or Shouji-chan did, kero.” Tsuyu gets closer to her, wrapping a protective arm around her. She's trembling, too; Ochako feels it in her shoulders. They sway together in the derelict remains. “But I sympathize.”

“I want to-- no, I have to do something about it.” Sitting in front of Aizawa, Tsuyu at her side. Telling him that she wants to save people. “Did I ever tell you why I wanted to be a hero?”

“For your parents, sake, right?”

“Yeah. But it's different now.” She sees Himiko every time she blinks. Her ecstatic blush and her ambrosial tears are seared forever into the back of her eyelids. “Somebody has to... reform all these messed-up rules. Nobody should...” Her stricken face, back in that old apartment, during the Paranormal Liberation War. Eyes damp, smile plastic. Why couldn't Ochako have noticed sooner? Why why why? “Feel like they're alone.”

“It's not right,” Tsuyu agrees. “And that's admirable, kero. But as for right now...” She pats Ochako one more time on her lower back before she moves away, rubble clinking under foot. Her back hunched with anticipation, she finishes: “There's a lot to be done here, kero.”

Ochako runs her sleeve over her face, catching tears in the spandex. She nods tersely, the rims of her eyes burning, and Tsuyu offers her one of her slight smiles. “We can do it together... okay, kero?” 

“Okay,” Ochako echoes, willing herself to believe it. The spring sun breaks over the grey clouds as they get back to it, shaping the future with their hope and their hands.

-

Toga Himiko fades in.

The first thing she becomes aware of is the pang in her stomach -- craving. Starvation. Do the dead hunger? Surely they must, otherwise ghosts wouldn't exist. She comes to with an unabated ache in her gut that reminds her of easier times.

She is in the same room as before. Is this Hell? There are no mirrors, after all. And she is still tied down. She wriggles her body and feels fabric crumple around the movement. It all feels startlingly... real. Her sluggish manners remind her of those early mornings with the League, down on their luck before Re-Destro took them in (put euphemistically). She doesn't hurt quite as much anymore, no, she feels rather mild. Floating, as if in supersaturated water, salt pressing up into her back. She thinks she heard something about that, back when she was a kid... a sea that had such a high salt concentration it would keep anyone from sinking. What was it called again...? She can't remember.

This time, when she tries to get up, her body actually gives. Her neck creaks with the effort, but she manages to lift her head; her hair is strewn about her listlessly, clinging to the sweat that runs into her collar. She blinks once, then twice, adjusting to the light. It's not dark in here, anymore -- rather, the fluorescence is sterile, revealing little cracks in the baseboards. She gazes around in anodynic awe.

“Oh, Toga-kun. You're awake.”

Himiko jumps when the door across from her opens, revealing a bland man in white with a clipboard. She instinctively presses herself against the back of what she's sitting in (which, she has belatedly realized, is a bed), scrunching up her shoulders. She pushes her tongue into the tip of her canine. “Are you God?”

“God? No, I'm afraid.” The man doesn't look fazed. “My name is Doctor Kaida.” 

“Doctor...?” Himiko lags. She looks down at her hands -- pasty, limp -- and then back up at the doctor’s milquetoast expression. The curve of his stomach. The arch of his brow. The way the light sits on his hair, the shadows that gather underfoot. The swish of clothing. In the background, a steady beeping. Her ears ring with blood -- wet and hard, like feet hitting mud, rain on sediment. “I don't... understand.” Her voice is tinny. “I mean, I died, right? Me and Ochako-chan... We were talking, and I...”

The doctor levels their gazes. He looks like a younger, more handsome Garaki, but that -- “No, Toga-kun. You lost a lot of blood, but you survived. You've been in and out of consciousness for... a week, I'll say.” He looks down at the papers in his grip. “I'm sorry, it's been hectic with the war effort. It's been nine days.”

Himiko stares, and stares, and stares. 

She's alive? She... 

Her racing heart makes whatever machines hooked up to her go crazy. The rush begins with heat in her wrists and a chill in her abdomen, a fork in her calves and a stab up her spine. She is mind-splittingly present, suddenly -- like she was, back in those moments of clarity before death -- entirely aware of every bodily process creaking on within her. Her respiration, wired and straggling. The minute twitches of the muscles in her toes, her fingers, the backs of her ears. The eternal life spilling over her being. 

She never looked toward the future. Tomura wanted to create a world for them -- a world they could live in. The next world, the only world that would sustain them. But Tomura was strong, stronger than Himiko, and Touya, he lived for his revenge -- it was a flame that burned hotter than anything around him. Even Magne (she thinks with a sharp stirring in her gut) lived however she wanted, as whomever she wanted. Himiko was envious of her endless strength of heart. She lived and died with that conviction. And now here Himiko sat, distinctly, nauseatingly conscious, when everyone else had been stolen from her, as the girl who only ever wanted to be someone else. 

How ironic that the borrowed time is all that ticks on.

Her breaths come out in hot, slurried gasps that thrust out of her chest, doubling her over. Limp arms collapse over her thin blanket, shoulders heaving with each squeak of her lungs. If she's still here, then something is wrong. She didn't give Ochako enough blood. She didn't give her enough, and now she's dead, now she's dead and Himiko has to go on living without her--

“Ochako-chan!” she cries, choked. “Where is she?” A vengeful growl, aching its way up the back of her throat. “Let me see her!”

The doctor gives her a puzzled look. “Oh, Uraraka Ochako?” he finally says after a pregnant pause. How dare he be so monotone. How dare he be so unaffected. He twiddles the corner of his clipboard and anger harpoons her through the side. “She’s not here,” he offers with bland disinterest. “Yes... she was air-lifted with you from the battlefield, but she was put in a different hospital.” He blinks. “Because your condition was much more immediately severe.”

“She... huh?” 

Himiko sucks in a cold inhale that steals through her torso, wrapping around into the spine, liquid nitrogen that caulks the space between each vertebrae. Frozen in time, the room is flooded with ice that crashes over the bedspread and filches to her fingertips. It invades her IV drip and soon the white is everywhere, white, white, so white, no red, the snowstorm closing in on her. Every mark and tarnish and blister is stripped away and all that remains is a barren wasteland in its stead.

You're going to have to keep waiting for that. She hears Tomura’s voice in the dredges of her follied memory. Because she was still alive? How did the two of them speak, if she had never died? It really seemed like it was Tomura, the old Tomura, only imbued with the sensibilities afforded at the end of one's life. He had a new maturity to him that made her demise only more certain. If he was there and she was waiting, then that meant he was dead, right? That part was all true? Izuku fulfilled his mission and killed him.

Jin was gone and so was he and their murderers lived to paint history.

Where the Hell does Himiko fit into the wreck?

“Ochako-chan,” she exhales. It's more of a stutter, a weep. She digs her claws into the blanket. “Let me see her,” she repeats, more subdued, her mouth puckered. “I want to see Ochako-chan.” The machines hooked up to her whine with dismay as she tugs at the cords. The electrodes cling stubbornly to her skin, rooting under her clothing -- which is no longer hers. It's drab, inoffensive wear, grey and excessively tacky in that regard. Not cute at all. The doctor jerks toward her like he cares about her.

“Toga-kun, stop!” One hand flies out, but he doesn't touch her. She looks up, sullen and rueful. “You're going to hurt yourself. You were injured very gravely.” He clicks his tongue, like he's in thought. Then, he opens his mouth. “If you want to see Uraraka-kun, take your hand off of those cords.” He puts this slowly. “I'll let you have visitors once your condition improves, okay?” 

He's manipulating her. He has to be. Cruel hands in white coats, glasses over stern, cacographic faces. What was that lady’s name, again? The reporter, the one she met in Daika -- the one who looked at her with compound eyes like she were nothing more than a science experiment gone wrong, the prime example of social malpractice. Himiko thinks that disguised malice is even worse than outright bigotry. Silver tongues shape the false concern and stiff untruths that paved the story of her short life. If they rejected her outright, she could match that intent in full. The moment she's given a glimmer of hope, though -- how funny it is to watch the deranged little girl’s ground disappear beneath her feet. 

Right? That's how it's always been. It's easier to be let down hard than have the rug yanked out. It’s all about simplicity.

“Toga-kun,” the doctor calls for her again. He crouches now, staring into her, but she averts her gaze stubbornly. “I'm not lying. Your body is still very weak. You need to take more time to rest.”

Screw this society. It demanded winners and losers and got surprised with the flunkers. Screw this hospital bed and screw the doctor. She doesn't care about any of it anymore. She just wants to see Ochako. She wants to see the one person that might make this all feel okay again. That might take away her shame and her fury and leave her just as weightless as she did when they lied with the spring flowers and the ashes of their own childhoods.

She didn't solve everything but she made it better and right now Himiko just wants it all to be better. She tried to understand. She wanted to understand. Himiko’s friends are dead and yet she remains. The girl who was blessed with a family that loved her and normal friends whom she could love yet remains.

There are bullet holes where the heart should be.

Toga Himiko fades out.

-

Being summoned by the new head of the Hero Public Safety Commission is frightening.

The Safety Commission -- what a joke. The war had torn back the drywall to reveal the rot that festered in the hidden crevices of society. The black mould that was always there, creeping through the rafters and the support, strangling the wood bit by bit. With each passing day, it weakened the foundations more and more, until the collapse was finally imminent. None of it was sudden, realizes Ochako, disillusioned as she walks up the steps to the President’s office, but was instead the intersection of time and frustration. A simmering pot that had boiled all its water off, and was now being swallowed by soot from ground zero. Deku had told her about Lady Nagant, about his guilt and hers. And it was the Commission who ran the Hero Polls, wasn't it? Todoroki's family... it was torn apart by the reduction of heroism to numbers and popularity, wasn't that the case? The need to be the best in the country above anything else. It caused Deku and Bakugou so much heartache, too.

After what she's witnessed, Ochako can firmly say: you can't rank heroics any more than you can rank human life. It's just not right. That's how they ended up with teenagers that have body counts and hate crimes against heteromorphs. The brighter the spotlight, the more effortless its shadows. All of this leaves an acrid taste in her mouth as she dubiously eyes the handrail that her palm barely skates over.

If everything just goes back to the status quo, what was the point of Himiko’s death? Of Midnight’s, Majestic’s, Native’s, all the heroes and the villains -- everyone, not termed by their morality? 

If they died believing in a better world, then she thinks it's her responsibility to bear that belief. Someone needs to carry that torch. 

Hawks welcomes her in with a beckon. Hm, wasn't he-- Ochako’s mind is fuzzy. Certain things about the war, all of its lead up and aftermath, can't be recalled clearly. It's a trauma response, she was told by the doctors.

A trauma response. She has trauma now. Forever.

But she seems to remember something about Hawks also having been groomed by the Commission, just like that Lady Nagant. Was it... did she hear it from Tokoyami? Or Deku? Or was it that broadcast that Todoroki's brother did, when he revealed the truth about his parentage? It was everywhere. What made him want to rebuild the Commission?

Did he really think he'd be able to do it better this time? 

“Uravity. Come and sit,” he says, gesturing to a chair across from his desk. How cliché. She obliges, smoothing her skirt. She hasn't grown that much since enrolling, but her uniform still feels too small somehow. “I have something very important to tell you.”

Nerves swoop into her, a free-fall of anxiety into the bottom of her stomach. She has absolutely no idea what this could be about. “Yes? What is it?”

“I'm not a fan of dolling things up, so I'll get straight to the point.” He taps his finger on a set of papers. “Toga Himiko’s body was recovered at the same time as yours and she was admitted to hospice. Her recovery has been difficult, but she's alive.” He gazes at Ochako, and gives her a quarter of a smile. His makeup is smudged and tired. “She wants to see you.”

Silence.

She daren’t even breathe.

“What?” Her own voice comes out tangled and wrong, held at a distance. It returns to her in a round, a cacophony, one which she is not the source of. Her pulse makes the rounds, seething in the floorboards and the walls. The entire room is an extension of her body, her heartbeat and her lungs; below her palpitates and behind her distends. A gasp gets caught in her throat and her surroundings clench with it. Sickening hope starts in her gut and spirals outward. She's on fire and it begins in the breast. “Really? She's... she's okay?”

“I dunno if ‘okay’ is the best word.” Hawks’ splitting of hairs irritates her, but she's too overwhelmed by everything else to pay heed to it. “But she's alive. She's been requesting to see you ever since she regained consciousness.”

She can't help it. 

The emotion too great for her beaten body to withstand, it spills out in a foam over her, in great, shuddering tears and full-body shakes. Caught like a tiny leaf in a typhoon, maybe she should feel more shame at completely breaking down in front of Hawks, yet her indescribable joy saves her the embarrassment. Open-mouthed and sobbing, Ochako presses her fingers into her brow and feels the hot tears chase into her wrists. Her shoulders wobble with all of the weight she's been holding onto, bearing like it's the cross. Like she's the only barrier between peace and war. She's the pin in the grenade.

Oh, how Atlas wept.

“I--” she chokes. She lets her face fall into her sleeve, hiding herself. “Thank you. I'm-- I'm so glad,” she hiccups, her diaphragm screeching. “I'm so glad,” she repeats in a snot-filled murmur, the rims of her eyes stinging. Her heart pounds.

“Well, when you're ready, someone can take you to see her,” Hawks tells her. 

Maybe Ochako should be angry. Maybe she should be downright furious. That this was kept from her. That they've sequestered Himiko away, forbade her visitors until this very point. It's been a not insignificant amount of time since Shigaraki’s fall and the comparative end of the war. She's been on her feet working and they've kept Himiko in the dark, just like they always have.

These feelings will come later. But for now, she is a wellspring of gratefulness and joy and anticipation. 

Tsuyu said she always put others first, right? That she neglected herself. Sacrifice is the easiest and most noble way to self-sabotage. She looked out for others and never herself. She had always been that way -- looking at others’ happy faces, wanting to be the one to put the smile there. That fulfilled her. It made them feel good, and it satisfied her, too. It gave her a purpose.

Right now she feels so intensely selfish it might swallow her whole. She wants to see Himiko, for no other greater reason than to know she's alive and they can be in the same room as one another. She can reach out and touch her soft, pale skin, they can hold each other like they never did in an alternate childhood. And she can tell Himiko that she's cute as many times as she wants before her mouth gets too dry to speak. Their fingers can finally interlock, and--

Oh.

There's more to this, isn't there. She recognizes the popping in her stomach, the fluttering against her sternum. It's like this with Deku, sometimes. Or, at least, it was -- before everything got so complicated. Back when she had the luxury of just being a girl with a crush. Those feelings deepened and transmogrified until this point, where she had no idea how to classify them. It wasn't only admiration. It wasn't only seeing someone and thinking them to be sweet and cute. What she's feeling now, this giddiness, this unquestioning devotion -- it's all very familiar, is it not?

She doesn't know if she can compare them, though. Her feelings, she means. It's all so complex that her head hurts, but that might be from the crying. It's as if every synapse in her brain has been stripped and left to dry. 

Both Deku and Himiko have that same steadfast dedication that attracts her. No matter how much the world refuses them, they beat back ceaselessly against the grain. Ochako admires that in them in the same way it makes her jealous. How Deku sprinted ahead while she dallied and tarried away, too mixed up with her feelings for him. He never looked back, but not for a lack of trying. He was simply tenacious to every end, good and bad. And she didn’t want to bother him, to stand in the way of his ascent.

But she liked how Himiko looked at her. Looked and kept looking.

Liked how the two of them spoke.

“Now,” Ochako gurgles. “I want to see her as soon as possible.”

-

Toga Himiko fades in.

She was napping, probably. There isn't much else to do while in hospice, and the dregs of a dream snatch at her mind as it slowly wakes. She thinks it had been about her youth, but it had been distorted, friendlier, kinder. So, in that way it was pleasant, but she doesn't remember much else.

There are voices. Real voices. Banging down the hall that leads to her room.

A girl’s, irritated: “You're keeping her down here?”

A man's, somewhat lackadaisical, defensive, inspiring a great rage inside of Himiko: “We had to, for the safety of--”

“For whose safety?! She's in a hospital bed! You're treating her like a prisoner!”

“Uravity, please-- she is a criminal--”

Not any girl’s voice. Ochako. She sounds like the home that Himiko never got to have, and she startles fully awake, every bit of exhaustion flaking off of her as a shed skin. Snapped alert, her heart rate skyrockets and her legs go red-hot.

“Just let me see her!”

And who else should open the door.

Playing out in slow motion, Ochako, pretty and ruffled and streaked with worry, pauses in the threshold. Whoever escorted her is clearly hanging back, and her chest is heaving, eyes blown open. Like she can't believe what she's seeing. Himiko can barely believe it, either. Chills crawl up her arms and then blast across her whole body. Nausea cakes her insides.

She's seeing her. She's seeing her Ochako again. She's seeing tomorrow.

“Himi-- Himiko-chan!” Ochako flies toward her in a blur, and before Himiko can realize, she's winded by a tackle as girl meets girl. Ochako vibrates with kinetic energy, each and every part of their connection so wonderfully alive. Nerve endings take in the contact and reverberate it through her bones, so all of her being is tuned so perfectly to Ochako's weight, the brush of her hair, the heat of her body. Her entire physicality, her reality, is speaking to Himiko. “I'm so-- I'm so--”

“Ochako-chan...” She reaches to meet the embrace, to feel her quivering, her tough muscles made tiny and trembling under Himiko’s searching, desperate touch. Ochako starts sniffling madly, burrowing her face into Himiko; she smells clean, but in a different way than the hospital surroundings, sterile and dispassionate. She has the scent of linen and fresh beginnings. “I waited so long,” she whines.

“I know, I’m sorry-- that it took me all this time,” Ochako blubbers, nuzzling, “they just told me you survived. I-- I’m so happy to see you again!”

And in spite of herself, tears, too, prick Himiko’s eyes. Crying always leaves a bad taste in her mouth. She was told off for it, berated. Her expression, her excitement, her genuine smiles -- too creepy, too upsetting for everyone else to look at. Why couldn’t she just be normal, express herself normally, pare herself down? Why did she have to be a cursed child? She should’ve been left in a coin locker when they had the chance.

But she wasn’t allowed to cry, either. Tear tracks made her look delicate, dainty, soft. Unlike the freak she actually was. She disarmed people with it, almost made herself out to be just a regular girl, living her regular life. They were her most powerful weapon; with them, she shifted the blame off of herself. She made herself into a victim and all it cost was some congestion and a red face. Tears spill out of her with reckless abandon, running into her pillow, and into Ochako’s clothes.

Ochako pulls back a little, but remains ever so close. Himiko is able to take in all of her at this distance, her round, kind eyes, auburn and flecked with autumn amber, her round, flushed cheeks, the curl of her bangs, her lips, her lips, her lips. Her smile is watery, strained tight by emotion. She is the future. She is the everything. 

She wipes her eyes. “I know you said that-- that no matter what I did, none of the bad stuff will go away, I know, but--” She sucks in a breath with a sound like a gunshot. Himiko’s skin crackles with flame everywhere that Ochako leans herself. “I want to be the one who makes sure-- none of that happens. Not to you--” another suffering inhale, “--and not to anyone else, ever again. I’m going to help you. I swear on it, okay?” Her hand rests right atop Himiko’s breastbone, inching up toward her neck. The tips of Himiko’s thighs, right where they join into her hips, feel weaker than every other part of her. Not to you. For her. For her and her and her one million times over. Her heartbeat warbles.

She never knew that being Toga Himiko could feel this nice.

That she could live and love the way that she pleased.

Just another girl -- the happiest in the world. This world.

“I swear on it,” Ochako repeats with an expression like iron. 

“You’re really strong, Ochako-chan, you know?” Himiko’s own hands start to reach up, but the heat pulsing through them makes the task more than a little difficult. They wibble through the air uncertainly, their endpoint being Ochako’s face. The pulse that runs across her heartline brushes Ochako’s jaw, just briefly, and her fingers claw for steady ground. Arm hanging off of the back of Ochako’s neck, Himiko grins beneath her wild tears. “But I dunno... when they’re gonna let me out of this place. I’m sick of it.”

Ochako shifts her weight, bringing her hand to Himiko’s, closing it over her knuckles. Warmth like an injection, a new and fascinating heat fills Himiko’s veins as Ochako holds their hands together, near and the dearest thing in her life, over the curve of her jawline. Her fingertips graze the lobe of her ear, tickled by stray brunette strands. Eyelashes clotted, Ochako asserts to her with a definite, private, “I’ll wait.”

Something seizes Himiko’s chest before she realizes it, a brand of smoke unfurling in the den of her heart, and Ochako’s lips are over hers. 

Chaste, soft. There’s a balm on her -- cherry, maybe? No, definitely strawberry. Strawberries in sweet cream. Lip chap. Red all the way down. She tastes like a fever and liberation and being good again. She’s a summer bonfire and fireflies in the creek. Would Izuku have kissed her like this? Probably not. It’s good that it’s not Izuku, then, and her fangs pull at Ochako’s bottom lip when she withdraws, hungry. Wanting. Living. She would give it all up and Ochako wouldn’t make her. That’s love, isn’t it?

More so than Izuku and Stai-sama.

Her head feels full of lint.

“Ochako-chan, do you like girls?” Himiko runs her tongue over her own lips, swallowing metal and forever. Pretty pink stains across Ochako in an instant, down her neck and even on her elbows. She blinks like a little sparrow beats its wings -- rapid and like it’s all she knows how to do.

“Um, I think so.” Her voice is higher than normal. “I like you, Himiko-chan.” She shrinks into her shoulders, stray tears caught on her chin. She looks like a ruin. “That’s the first time I’ve ever kissed anyone,” she adds, much smaller. Embarrassed. “I didn’t realize until a little while ago. I’m sorry, that...” She blows out a strip of air. “That it took me this long.”

“It’s okay, I guess.” Ochako is still holding her tight to her face. “It took me a long time, too.”

Ochako leans over, rests her forehead against Himiko’s. It’s hot, so very hot, and she can hear the other girl’s quick breaths, pinging out of her, short and shallow; Himiko feels like she could fly forever like this. Like she could never come down. 

There’s a lot that Ochako can’t change. She’s just one person, after all, against an entire system. Himiko knows this, in a small, rational part of her mind, but she lets it lie, just for now, enjoying the sensation of her saviour over her, touching her, forgiving her. Reaching out through the destruction of her once-youth and the tyranny of her childhood to scrape away the refuse and find what glows.

Maybe she can’t change a lot. 

But there’s enough for them to redo, together.

Toga Himiko does not fade out.

Not this time.