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The fighting stopped with everything dead, in one way or another.
Hizashi lay on his back, arms twisted and strained and legs pinned under the last bit of rubble to fall. His neck hung at a crooked angle, barely resting on a slab of cracked concrete which tilted at a jaunty degree to slope away from his back and down into... something behind him. Something wet and soft and once-warm pressed against his side like a hug, like a mattress, like a perfect breeding place for squirming maggots and buzzing flies, like the promise of rot. Its blood seeped around what remained of Hizashi's leather jacket and coagulated in the grooves of his skin.
He tried to breathe as little as possible.
He almost tried to lie to himself and say it was the pain that stabbed at his ribs whenever his torso flexed that made him lay as limply as possible. He could come up with plenty of arguments, if he could be bothered; his legs could be damaged further if he tried to tug them out from under the collapsed roof, or the muscles in his arms could give out and he'd be left with no movement left.
Realistically, though, he had nowhere to go.
He'd entertained Japan for as long as he possibly could have, and more. He'd made his world one of bold ambition and soft acceptance; he'd put on a thousand different faces, smiled a million subtle and radiant smiles tuned to the occasion, called out countless hopeful cheers and wishes and enduring platitudes, and for what?
Violence. Always, always, more violence.
It always was, with him. They'd ripped each other all to pieces, Hizashi and the Nomu, teeth and claws and screaming and snarling and skin, muscle, bone, like rabid mongrels too far gone to lie down and die. He'd lost his directional speaker fairly early on in the fight, struck by a reinforced tail and thrown aside as a precious hunk of dead weight. It hadn't mattered; he was the only one left for kilometres, thrown in as a last resort once it became clear that the Nomu would travel any distance to kill and the evacuation had only delayed the inevitable. What was a person, in this war, when quirks could slaughter so efficiently? Why send in an army to suffer brutal annihilation when all Hizashi would have to do was scream?
Hizashi let his eyes glaze over, ears ringing in the strangely unexpected silence. He'd killed them. He'd killed them all. He was capable of that. He wondered, distantly, whether that was immoral; the Nomu were once human, after all. How many surgeries did they have to undergo before being disqualified from empathy? What level of insanity does one have to reach before becoming officially, unquestionably, inhuman? Kurogiri was a Nomu; it was sentient. Where was the line? Was there a line?
Hizashi thought of the way Kurogiri looked at Shigaraki, the way he followed him half a step behind, the distant concern in his voice when Shigaraki said or did something too... too far gone. Hizashi wondered how Oboro always managed to be so human, and why Hizashi was always stuck watching it like he was missing something at his core.
Hizashi didn't really care about whether the Nomu were or weren't human. He couldn't bring himself to empathise with them whether they deserved it or not. Whatever that made him, it really didn't matter; they'd killed each other fair and square. Hizashi had screamed and screamed and screamed like everyone always knew he would, he brought down buildings to crush bones and bit and tore and grappled and bled and clawed and he'd earned his right to die through desperation and bloody, empty rage.
Hizashi hadn't ever really wanted to survive this. Hadn't wanted to for much, much longer than he'd ever admit.
The war didn't hollow him out. The war didn't make him restless with pointless, unrelenting anger. He didn't know what did, or when, but it was long enough ago that if Hizashi had to admit to how long he'd lived like that he would have to admit to a whole life of lies. He'd postured, and posed, and chattered, and smirked; he'd fed the public exactly what they'd needed to see, exactly the right amount and type of sincerity to sell it to the most skeptical of critics. In private, he'd hugged to hide his face; clung to an honest man in the middle of the night and braided the secrets he couldn't speak into his dark hair, gave all the love he didn't know he could feel and brushed aside the kindness he could never truly stomach. Shouta loved something of him, Hizashi knew, but he saw precious little, and Hizashi would always have to wonder whether it was enough to mean that Shouta loved him as he was. He hoped he'd never find out.
The blood had somewhat dried by now. Hizashi wondered whether, if he held his hands still enough, the blood would linger in his veins and the dying process would actually kick in. He wondered how much longer he'd wait. It hurt, dying hurt in a way he'd never wanted but secretly knew he'd suffer through eventually, once the violence in his throat and the restlessness in his blood and the hollowness in his chest finally caught up to him. A fly buzzed next to his ear, and for once he couldn't be bothered to bat it away.
He just had to hope he'd die properly in a moment.