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Toya closed his eyes, certain the flatline would soon arrive, only to jolt awake when the monitors spiked instead of stopped. He was still alive. Exactly how, was a mystery he preferred not to consider.
Surviving the Final War had never been his intention. Death had always occupied the starring role in Toya’s personal drama, enough to burn itself into even the Great Endeavor’s memory. But heroism, like villainy, rarely cooperated with one’s grand ambitions. Thus, Toya awoke neither to fame nor triumph, but to the dubious honor of becoming the nation’s most dangerous patient. Doctors, confronted by his inconvenient survival, politely imprisoned him in the most sophisticated contraption money and morality could devise.
People were born with gifts. The world enjoyed pretending these gifts came with equality, fairness, and promise, but Toya had spent twenty-four years learning otherwise. Their gifts determined status, careers, and—occasionally—even wars. The game was utterly rigged.
His quirk had served well, blue flames burning away the greatest of his enemies and razing the household that built him. For that much, Toya could die with a smile. His status, that of the eldest son to the country’s greatest hero, formerly, second to All Might, meant Toya could not die with one. Endeavor’s remaining upper-class privilege lingered. It still bought things. Like silence, access, and favors. Like this private suite.
Central Hospital had no official wing for villains, but its state-of-the-art facilities guaranteed that the most nefarious of the surviving villains, had their father paid for, had everything they needed for the unambiguous and permanent state of quarantine. Toya’s room came with armed guards, bulletproof walls, and two dozen medical professionals whose salaries were contingent on their absolute silence. Beneath an uninviting ceiling lamp stood its centerpiece—an upright cylinder of surgical glass and stainless steel, filled up to his collarbones with preservation fluid. Toya floated there, since any traditional bedding would weld to his flesh. He felt its chill more than saw its details, just enough to know it kept him alive without ever letting him forget he was on display.
Machines crowded nearby in sympathy: sedative pumps, oxygenators, dialysis units, cooling arrays hissing reproach each time his temperature crept too close to boiling, ventilators wheezing as if in imitation. Its plastic hose, threaded into the trachea, hung down in a loose coil around his throat. Other, less identifiable tubes pierced him in every conceivable orifice.
He hadn’t merely scarred. Four limbs amputated; internal organs ravaged beyond surgical optimism. They could have discarded Toya into the rebuilt Tartarus, society’s usual repository for monsters. But pity—or maybe policy—had sealed him instead within sterile glass, bound by tubes and wires pretending to life.
Toya had been Dabi for so long. He’d nearly forgotten how it felt to be a Todoroki. His family had always been masters of silence—not the polite kind, but the cold and cutting variety. Rei’s silence was delicate repression. Fuyumi’s, varnish diplomacy. Enji’s, stubborn avoidance. Shoto wore silence awkwardly, never quite knowing what to do with words. But Natsuo’s silence frightened Toya most—it spoke not of forgiveness but of abandonment, the unfeeling withdrawal of someone moved to forget.
Early memories fuzzed with meds, but things came back, in pieces. The women of the house glazed their eyes. The men ignored them. Enji and Shoto adhered to predictable, unpleasant routines. Natsuo constructed careful distances to survive. Toya had always pushed past safe limits, desperate for recognition until the only direction left to push was beyond death. Then he burned, an accident, or so the reports claimed, his quirk immolating himself.
The prodigal son had returned, absent applause. But to what end?
It began, as most days began now, with the pod’s gentle click-whirr, reminding itself to keep the patient alive. At five-thirty, it performed its daily sunrise, pumping synthetic blood, testing the rhythm of a heart too spiteful to cease. Clear glass arched over Toya like a coffin. Grafts were stitched precariously onto where skin consented to exist, carbon-fiber electrodes pinned into nerves, and titanium rods screwed in place of bones. Most components were borrowed prototypes.
Consciousness drifted under sedatives and anesthesia. Boredom was always the first mercy to abandon ship when death dragged its feet.
The pod deserved a name, Toya thought idly. Perhaps Coffin-Lite. Or Death-Ware 9000. Its manufacturers displayed less imagination, calling it simply BioStasis followed by decimals Toya would only care about if the pod went down. The warranty in spec sheets politely warned that spontaneous combustion would void all guarantees. Toya found the clause reassuring; warranties existed precisely because things were expected to break, and Toya had always obliged expectations.
There were no screens, no radios, but loops of vital signs. Occasionally, technicians activated environmental sims so that holographic carps would circle the inner curve of the glass. Toya hated fish. He’d named one Enji Jr before deciding the carp deserved better.
Aside from medical staff, the pod remained unvisited until Hawks, the new President of the Hero Public Safety Commission, authorized “family access” for first-degree relatives, though strictly contingent on Toya’s debility.
Eight-oh-six saw Enji Todoroki roll into view, spine rigid with pride alone. The sleek wheelchair advanced under Rei’s careful hands, halting precisely halfway across the pod’s diameter. Rei lingered briefly before stepping back, and Toya noticed how Enji’s shoulders subtly sagged as if she’d taken more than mere physical support with her.
The microphone by Toya’s lips crackled, prompting gently. Toya was certain the medical technicians intended it as kindness, not punishment, though kindness could feel like torture. A silver tracheostomy tube gleamed at his throat, fitted neatly with a valve permitting speech on days the sedatives deemed him worthy of conversation. Toya never knew quite how much voice he’d be allotted each morning; sometimes he managed three ragged sentences before the ventilator greedily reclaimed his breath, other days his lips moved soundlessly against the glass, silent movie style, communicating nothing at all.
“Dad,” Toya rasped, choosing the older title. Endeavor had retired quietly after the Final War, a single-sentence press release marking his exit from heroism.
Enji cleared his throat. “Morning, Toya.” On his lap rested a notebook, annotated with clipped news—international relief efforts, villain sentencing updates, regulations for quirks—small talk, were it not all depressingly hinged upon war crimes. Toya stored these details dutifully, though he doubted he’d ever need them.
Apologies from Enji came like clockwork—neatly wrapped, unbearably hollow, and destined to vanish upon contact with the glass.
Rei reappeared shortly thereafter, bearing a thermos of miso soup that Toya would never taste. Toya watched Rei pour steaming broth carefully into a cup, placing it within view atop panels near his pod. A ritual meaningful enough to Rei to justify Toya’s tolerant silence. Toya couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like Rei’s old self returning whenever she spoke of childhood stories. Enji excused himself, promising to return after lunch. Toya acknowledged it with no more than a slow blink, his eyelid grinding painfully through scar tissue, an exhausting yet necessary proof of life.
“We’ll be here every day, Toya,” Rei murmured once Enji had left. “You know, I dreamed of you yesterday.”
Toya’s eyelids felt unbearably heavy. He wondered which ghost had visited Rei’s dreams—himself at three, perhaps, innocent and equally demanding, or at twenty-three, bright as wildfire. He wasted one precious breath. “Good dream?”
Rei nodded, smile sad but gentle. They might have said more, but guards always materialized once Toya’s vitals hinted instability; prolonged maternal conversations were categorized alongside powerful narcotics—strictly regulated. Before leaving, Rei pressed two fingers to her lips, touching them to the glass. Toya’s breath briefly clouded her fingerprint before the ventilator erased all trails of tenderness.
Next up, Shoto’s visit at eleven-fifty, textbooks clutched under his arm. Hospitals were meant for healing, not algebra, but Shoto had refused to abandon either. Toya might’ve rolled his eyes if both had cooperated.
“You’ve officially joined Class 2-A,” Shoto announced, opening a calculus textbook marked neatly with colored tabs.
Toya managed strained noises that passed for laughter, dry and brittle. “That’s three grades higher than I made it at thirteen, before my supposed death. Didn’t even graduate middle school. Anyway, pretty sure universities draw the line at dead villains.”
“You’re not dead,” Shoto pointed out. “You can take the entrance exams.”
Toya sighed through the valve. “I’d rather die properly.”
Unfazed, Shoto began scribbling equations, pencil tapping in sync with the heart monitor’s light pulse. Toya weighed the value of wasting what little speech remained. Finding none, Toya settled for clicking his tongue, just enough to remind Shoto of his audience, however disinterested.
During the Final War’s closing days, battles had torn the city apart, skyscrapers and highways crumpled, dust clouds blotting out the sun. Somewhere above it all, Toya had ridden thermal currents in the furnace of his father’s fire, all the while his mother’s frost quelling only the edges.
Below, Fuyumi and Natsuo had picked their way through fallen girders and cracked asphalt, calling for him. Fuyumi’s voice had cut through smoke: “I can’t take any more loss!” Natsuo’s had cut deeper: “Quit causing trouble! You sorry excuse for a brother!” Then Shoto had arrived—Great Glacial Aegis casting an ice age into that inferno—snuffing out Toya’s wildfire, along with the hatred had been fueling it. Against all odds, they survived.
The family reunion might have postponed Toya’s final act of self-incineration, but did little to change the inevitable. Toya’s life had been nearing its end. No one spoke of miracles. Days felt borrowed, slipping from their fingers faster and faster.
Once there had been hallways echoed with the stampede of small feet chasing each other, until their father’s shadow fell across doorways, and silenced them all. Now the man towering no more. Wheelchair-bound. Occupied far less space. Things weren’t better, but Toya supposed they had learned, at least, how to love one another properly. Everyone huddled close, as though proximity might stitch old wounds. Often, the hospital’s fluorescent lights caught the faces around Toya’s glass prison—watching him, attentive in ways they had seldom been when Toya craved it most. This was all he’d ever wished for. Funny that it took dying for them to grant him. Dad. Mom. Fuyumi. Shoto. Despaired in Toya’s last breaths… Except Natsuo.
Night after night, Toya listened to the muffled footsteps outside the door. His heartbeat leapt at each faltering pause, daring to hope.
“Natsuo’s busy with college,” Fuyumi had said, deploying the same soft-edged voice once used to excuse Enji’s absences and Rei’s hospital stays.
“Natsuo’s volunteering for the war relief,” Shoto had said. “Med students are needed.”
Nothing had left Rei’s mouth. Sometimes silence told truths words couldn’t bear. Sometimes silence was kinder than promises never intended to keep.
Twelve-thirty found Fuyumi here with a lunchbox for Shoto. She fussed, unwrapping rice balls, offering water, smoothing stray papers. Shoto abandoned calculus for food; there were some things even genius couldn’t out-prioritize.
“How’s teaching?” Toya rasped, the words grinding on ruined vocal chords.
Fuyumi’s chuckle warped tinnily through the glass, lending itself a levity. “The school’s a wreck. I’m drowning in lesson plans. But the kids…they’re good, mostly. Just scared of the world we’re leaving them.” Fuyumi shook her head. “They ask things no handbook covers. ‘Miss Fuyumi, can I have a boyfriend AND a girlfriend?’ Or, ‘Miss Fuyumi, being a third wheel sucks!’ Braver than we were, I guess. Kids these days…”
Shoto paused mid-chew, cataloging her tone, her pose, as if trying to work out the formula behind human emotion. Likely Shoto’s classmates suffered similar analysis.
“In case you’re wondering,” Fuyumi added, glancing slyly over her shoulder. “No, Shoto. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Toya fought back another smile; Shoto resumed chewing with great dignity. Fuyumi stayed a few minutes more, rearranging Shoto’s growing mountain of textbooks, before retreating to her afternoon classes. Silence crept back in. Through the lull, the familiar ache returned—the ache of Natsuo’s absence, settling into the empty space Fuyumi had left behind. Toya could almost see it—Natsuo dropping beside Shoto, teaching their youngest brother cheap mobile games, laughing too loudly. Toya pictured Natsuo thousands of kilometers away, moving briskly through unfamiliar hospital corridors, sleeves rolled, steady hands saving someone else’s brother.
Natsuo had always sought steadiness. Solid things. Safe things. Which home could never quite be.
Natsuo’s only appearance had been months prior, in June, shortly after the Final War concluded in May and the tribunal ruled Tartarus unfit for Toya Todoroki. Doctors had deemed the life-support pod immovable. Guards had ensured constant vigilance. Thus, the family had come.
They all bore burns from the War. Rei and Fuyumi’s hair had only just begun to regrow. Toya registered their arrival through blurred outlines; his vision, impaired even before, had worsened. But surely they’d looked at the worst parts, where his skins had melted off, limbs ended in seams, guts put on display. In the back of the room stood Natsuo, arms crossed, harder to make out than others, as if drawn from a separate reality. Never stepped forward. Nor engaged. With guards calling time, Natsuo turned away first. Enji’s jaw clenched but no one made a scene.
Later official logs insisted that Natsuo Todoroki never passed security that day. Maybe Toya hallucinated it. Maybe Toya didn’t. Reality was no longer something Toya could hold with both hands. Either way, the ache left behind was real enough.
Back in the present, lunchtime ended. Shoto stowed his textbooks, promising to relay greetings from classmates Toya neither recognized nor welcomed. The overhead lights dimmed to an amber hue, rounding out the day.
Night belonged solely to whispering hoses. Toya counted his regrets in private silence and saw Natsuo’s face in every empty space. “Let’s… play! Tomorrow! Okay?” Back then thirteen-year-old Toya had said to eight-year-old Natsuo, lying side by side on futons during one of few good nights. “After I ask Dad to come to Sekoto Peak. After Dad sees my training. Tomorrow. Then we’ll play.” It had been the winter night before Toya set himself—and Sekoto Peak—ablaze.
That episode looped like film reels, unchanging and unforgiving. Tomorrow had never come. Between hissing wires and tubes, Toya almost heard Natsuo’s sleepy reply: Yeah. Tomorrow.
His solitary wish—to see Natsuo again, to speak as brothers once might—went unmet tonight, as it always did.
Morning arrived with its habitual, mechanical pleasantries. Doctors pronounced his counts stable. Spite, it seemed, was all Toya still controlled.
Eight-oh-five again saw Enji’s entrance, one minute sooner than the day before. Enji brought news of reconstructions, Mirko’s prosthetic trials, and Hawks’ labor disputes. Toya endured it all behind the glass.
Days bled into weeks. Time inside the pod stamped whichever date felt convenient. Each morning at eight-o’clock, Enji reloaded, the same as the last. Sometimes with good news, “Spinner has regained partial consciousness,” and “Compress accepted a plea bargain.” Sometimes Rei joined. Sometimes Fuyumi. Both offered mundane snippets of lifestyle that hummed on beyond Toya’s isolation: the freezer finally repaired, the new house laid, a loaf of sourdough that rose perfectly in the hospital bakery. Such details sounded almost alien coming through the glass.
Doctors rotated daily. Guards changed weekly. The tubes delivered sedatives, nutrients, oxygen; the heart monitor thumped on. Toya had adapted to being a data point, a collection of vital signs in a display case.
Fuyumi, determined to out-smile despair, talked up the city’s plans to recast hero statues, citizens repainting murals, and the hospital cat that’d given birth to four kittens, patterned like their calico mother. Then, almost as an aside, Fuyumi mentioned Natsuo: he’d graduated college early and, out of the blue, broken up with his girlfriend.
No one elaborated. Fuyumi launched into a lament about the cafeteria’s lack of seasoning. Rei and Shoto pretended it mattered. Enji observed them all, lips pressed tight, never mentioning the empty slot in the lineup.
Before leaving, Fuyumi pressed her forehead to the glass. “He’ll come. When he’s ready.”
Apologies and forgiveness alike have poor schedules: they’re either demanded too soon or offered too late. Toya let Fuyumi’s words rest where they were.
Some names grow heavy when left unsaid. Natsuo’s name became such. Toya glanced at the space between Fuyumi and Shoto, imagining someone broader, taller, with spikier hair. Toya rehearsed ice-breakers: Why didn’t you stay? Why did you leave? Why dump that mouse heteromorph girlfriend of yours? Letting unanswered questions drift only deepened the ache.
Weeks lengthened into months. December slipped in with its chill. Fuyumi taped paper snowflakes to the walls. Enji kept up with sentencing reports, such as Spinner’s rehab schedule, Compress’s parole terms, and Toga’s memorial. In a nation now governed from prefab offices, every headline clawed for proof that redemption stories still sold. Rei developed new soup recipes—pumpkin, corn, shrimp, tofu—with all the optimism of spring. Shoto sat beside the pod with pencil and watercolor, sketching classmates, particularly the broccoli and the durian, whom Shoto had invited for family dinners, according to Fuyumi.
The durian had been quite ill-tempered and foul-mouthed when kidnapped. Toya knew that firsthand. He hoped Shoto had developed some tact. Unlikely. Shoto probably pushed every button that boy had. It would’ve been amusing to observe.
Through it all, Natsuo did not visit.
One evening, well past visiting hours, Toya woke to footsteps outside the ward. He cracked one eye. The telemetry graph flickered as his pulse jumped. Toya pictured Natsuo’s face: first that cool appraisal of the machines, then that casual dismissal of the layouts, and finally that disappointment saved for Toya, as if a poorly treated wound had festered exactly as the charts predicted.
Natsuo would pause at the pod’s glass, until only inches separated them. The low voice Toya remembered, from childhood bickering over who washed the dishes, would cut through the hush. “They told me you’re stable,” Natsuo might grunt, flat, factual. “Stable, not improving. True?”
Toya would muster the strength to incline his head, given that no other part of him could move. Natsuo would grimace. “I should’ve come sooner,” Natsuo might admit, thumb brushing scars along his jawline—souvenirs of Dabi’s final dance. “But I kept thinking: if I walked through that door, I’d have to choose what to say. Turns out there’s no perfect line. Just the fact that cheap apologies don’t rewrite history.”
The overhead lamp would buzz in approval.
Toya would lean forward, seeking any crack in the silence. None appeared. All that existed was the cardiac monitor ticking faster by the second.
Toya might blink twice—“No”—in answer to that unspoken query of forgiveness. Natsuo would scratch his head, already expecting refusal as a fair exchange for his own absence. “I figured.” Sighing. “Shoto said you’d be honest.” Natsuo would offer a tight half-smile. “I thought if I looked you in the eye, I could decide whether to leave that old altar standing. Seems it stays.”
Toya might blink once—“Yes”—to acknowledge the silent wish that Natsuo could remember his favorite ice-cream flavor. But even Toya couldn’t recall it now. Natsuo would straighten. “Take care,” Natsuo would say, a phrase better suited to casual acquaintances. He would turn, white lab coat vanishing into black, without a backward glance.
Certainly that scenario would have been a better ending.
Instead the ceiling lights illuminated a slender figure in the doorway. Sedatives must’ve been warping his vision again, Toya thought, until the figure hesitated, inhaled, and resolved into Fuyumi Todoroki. “Natsuo sent a postcard.” Her voice sounded oddly detached.
Fuyumi held up a small rectangle—the Statue of Liberty silhouetted by a garish American sunset; on the reverse, Natsuo’s familiar handwriting read:
Mom, Toya, Fuyumi, Shoto—
I’m fine. Got into a PhD track in the States.
Don’t wait for me.
No “wish you were here.” No return address.
Fuyumi pressed the postcard to the pod’s glass. The neat script fractured across Toya’s ruined reflection. For a heartbeat, Toya allowed himself the luxury of imagining anonymity in distant crowds; a fresh start achieved through mere geography, rather than fire and death. He shifted slightly, rattling several wires and tubes, and dismissed the thought.
“I don’t even have a mailbox.”
For the first time ever, Fuyumi’s polite affect cracked with frustration. “Would it kill you to say two words? Like ‘fuck off’?”
“Probably,” Toya conceded, raising a scarred eyebrow at Fuyumi’s huff. “What, am I supposed to be losing it? Like anyone bothered telling me for weeks… Remind me. Was this little jaunt ‘to the States’ before or after ‘dumping girlfriend’?”
Fuyumi’s face contorted with unfiltered outrage. “Before! Can you believe it? He broke it off the day before the wedding! Months spent planning their future, talking about a family. Then—bam! Off to America for his career. The poor girl hired a merc! Shot him but missed by inches, more’s the pity. Fuck him. Just like our…”
Both siblings blinked rapidly at each other through the glass barrier, until Fuyumi thumped her head, lightly but repeatedly, against Toya’s sophisticated, expensive, life-supporting pod. A sharp snort escaped Toya first, barely audible through the ventilator’s hiss. Fuyumi glanced up, startled, and then they both burst into hysterical laughter—ragged, breathless wheezes rising dangerously alongside Toya’s heart rate.
Alarms shrieked. Doctors rushed in; sedatives flowed obediently through Toya’s veins, dulling the edges of reality. Before retreating, Fuyumi slapped the offending postcard defiantly against the glass, securing it with stickers. Until the reinforced doors sealed. Beeping machines and flickering lights settled back into their usual arrangement, leaving Toya with silence again. Breath left Toya in slow deflation. Somehow, the emptiness felt identical to the one that preceded it, only worse for having briefly been filled.
Early the next day, hospital bureaucracy confiscated the postcard for “security scanning. The petty thing sent Toya’s bloodstream surging with catecholamines; graft tissue took offense, launching a full-scale revolt. By evening, Toya’s status report blazed SYSTEMIC FAILURE in cheerful red letters.
In place of Natsuo’s postcard arrived scrolls of consent forms, disclaimers on donating one’s body to medical education. Toya asked Fuyumi to sign them in his stead.
Since the postcard, Toya’s vital signs had become a mess. Doctors escalated sedation, prescribed graft fortifiers, and attempted a dozen pharmaceutical miracles to stabilize what remained of him. The diagnosis, however, stayed discouragingly consistent. Inevitable systemic failure. Timing uncertain.
As his body weakened, Toya’s mind wandered more persistently toward Natsuo. Not the adult one, nor even the teenager Toya last glimpsed before Dabi, but the small boy who used to trail after Toya into fields a little beyond their house. Toya drifted into frequent reveries, slipping out of reality and into afternoons spent chasing beetles and listening to cicadas. He would close his eyes, reopen them somewhere distant, and smile mysteriously to himself, caught even the oblivious orderlies steering wide. Those who approached and questioned Toya would be responded. But none could quite shake the feeling that Toya’s true self occupied elsewhere, another reality, one they shouldn’t disturb.
The family spoke to Toya in quiet turns.
“Your father build us the new house,” Rei whispered. “If—when—you’re strong enough, maybe we can move the pod there. You might like it. The sunrise is lovely.” She was smarter than that. They both knew that this pod would not relocate as easily as a wheelchair, and that houses tended to burn themselves up after Toya took residence. Even if they did not, it implied the house waited for such.
Fuyumi chatted about her students planting cherry saplings along rebuilt parkways, speculating cheerfully about blossoms next spring, carefully omitting that Toya wouldn’t witness any of them.
Enji attempted no grand repentance. He knelt beside Toya’s pod and placed his scarred palm against the pod. “I was wrong, Toya. The ledger will never balance. But I’ll stay until the numbers stop moving.” Then he closed his eyes, perhaps recalling the endless absences he’d left in his wake.
Shoto flipped open his phone. “The therapist suggested positive stimuli.” He scrolled past cat memes. Cats had always seemed to Toya singularly indifferent to human suffering, which might be beneficial in certain moments. “Don’t tell Fuyumi though. She’d go buy a dozen and they’ll drag their muddy paws on my schoolwork.”
Hours became shapeless, measured only by sedative doses and mechanical rhythms, indifferent to Toya’s weakening pulse. Dreams pressed harder against waking life, the membrane between the two wearing thin. Toya slipped across it as easily as breathing.
Toya found himself standing on the postcard’s distant shore, skin whole beneath his familiar black coat, watching strangers and not-strangers crisscross. Eventually, Toya noticed Natsuo there too, silhouetted against salt-laden winds, head tilted as though in greeting. “It’s easier breathing in another country,” Natsuo might muse. “Must be the air quality.” He might be considering tests. Or rents. Or how many hotpots would fit in his tiny studio apartment.
Toya found himself sprawled beside Natsuo on tatami mats in their childhood home. Cicadas droned lazily; summer air breezed through open windows, scented of freshly mown grass. Fuyumi pressed ice cream into their hands. Natsuo scolded Toya mildly not to spill. Toya nodded absently, attention already captured by an abrupt silence outside, as if the cicadas had all vanished at once.
“Toya, your friends are here.” Enji’s voice carried none of its old impatience.
The sliding doors opened on Shigaraki, leaning irritably against a wall, Toga, waving her pocket knife, and a swarm of Twices, among clones the original, who should’ve long been dead, cackling above the rest. Even Kurogiri hovered nearby, listening to Twice’s joke about a bird walking into a bar.
Toya knew it had to be a dream. But Toya smiled anyway.
Around dawn, doctors stepped back respectfully, giving them privacy. Toya floated in and out of awareness. He recalled Enji’s ledger analogy; perhaps some debts remained unsettled, particularly involving Natsuo. A memory resurfaced clearly: both of them younger, in the garden, Toya coaxing a fuzzy bumblebee into Natsuo’s palm and promising it wouldn’t sting. Of course it did. Natsuo’s surprise and betrayal had been profound, though brief, and Toya realized he’d never properly apologized.
Toya clung to this trivial regret, savoring its simplicity as monitors gently recorded the slow surrender of vital signs. The pain gradually receded, replaced by weightless clarity. Toya felt suddenly sure Natsuo would appear at last, suitcase in hand, breathless with apologies. But the hospital door remained steadfastly closed, revealing no hurried arrivals.
Miracle drugs could only buoy the flesh for so long. His flame winked out, eyelids also shut—not intending to die, but to dream. In that fading shimmer of consciousness, Toya saw all the floor cushions finally occupied. No one spoke; they simply sat, facing the low table and watching the muted television until the bells of New Year’s Eve began ringing from far away. Warmth crept oddly through the preservation fluid, perhaps heaters had shorted out, or perhaps his body simply had ceased caring. In any case, no burning; just mild warmth.
The final sound Toya registered was cat memes, unrolling down Shoto’s phone. Life, it turned out, could slip away amid astonishingly minutiae. Beyond that, hush stretched out.
The monitors began shrieking their protests, metallic and unbelieving, bathing the room in flashing red lights. Oxygenators whined in futile urgency. Nothing beyond the glass stirred to the noises. The Todorokis sat together, reluctant to admit what had occurred, because acknowledging it meant accepting the world would carry on without one of their own. Eventually, they collected scattered belongings, preparing to leave, only Enji paused, staring through the glass with conviction:
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
But tomorrow now followed its own schedule. And the boy in the glass pod had no further appointments to keep.
Outside, dawn swept through hospital corridors, painting walls in shades of antiseptic white and the skylights in glorious gold, as though nothing extraordinary had happened, as though a boy hadn’t once tried to burn down the world simply to be seen.
Inside, alarms faded. The room settled. Elsewhere, perhaps, a fuzzy bumblebee wandered across Central Park, alighted briefly near Lady Liberty, then took flight in search of its next unsuspecting hand. The owner of said hand would remember the night before Sekoto Peak—the promise his brother had whispered to him—that tomorrow they’d play together.