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"Progress isn't linear," your physical therapist reminds you. It takes every last ounce of self control to keep yourself from snapping that you know hands white-knuckling the wood of the parallel bars.
You want to scream at all your therapists and doctors and nurses that you know progress isn't linear. There's no way for you to not know when you've heard it about a hundred times a day in the six months since the war.
It's even harder to deny when you watch your classmates, fellow hero students, struggle through recovery. The depression and anxiety and PTSD had swept through the nation, and had taken down aspiring heroes and pro heroes alike in massive swathes. You'd watched as the interest in becoming a hero dwindled, no longer a fantasy pipe dream for anybody, but instead a hard earned title with terrifying, life threatening responsibilities.
"I know," You huff out, mostly out of pain and exertion, and you try to take yet another excruciating step. You know you're only moving a few inches at a time — a sad shuffle, if you're honest — but it feels like miles.
There are a few of your classmates also in the PT room, all working on one motor skill or another. Midoriya is seated at one of the tables by the window, working with his own therapist to just grip a pencil.
You'd watched the terrifying green-haired aspiring hero go from screaming and shouting through tears to quiet frustrated sniffling and stifled tears when they'd had him working on the fine motor skill of writing. It had broken your heart, knowing that prior to the war he'd spent nearly all his spare time writing in that notebook he kept. Before the war you might have offered him a smile, some gesture of encouragement, but now you could barely even take a step before the titanium pins holding your joints together jostled and pain shot through you.
You're still hunched over, bracing yourself on the wooden bars, and you can feel a tug on your gait belt as your therapist makes sure you aren't going to fall on your face. You take another sad, measly, step forward and pain races through you, from your toes all the way up through your spine and into your skull. There's a quiet shout as you do it, and for moment you think the sound came from you, but your gait belt remains relaxed.
The shout had come from next to you, Kaminari had fallen, his therapist catching him before his knees could even hit the ground.
You'd watched him struggle through therapy too. His Quirk leaving his body wracked with uncontrollable shakes and tremors. You could still recall very clearly the absolute frustration and anguish he'd expressed at one of the early class therapy sessions over his autonomy being robbed from him.
You could relate.
"Fuck!" He curses, and you can tell he's biting back tears. You take another step, and it hurts so bad a grunt of pain escapes your gritted teeth, knees buckling so hard that your therapist can't seem to react fast enough, and you barely catch yourself on the bars.
You look over at Kaminari, and he's watching you through the long fringe of his blonde hair, the black streak he dyed into nearly entirely faded out. You know he's taking stock of your injuries, the same way you're assessing him, as you ease yourself to the padded floor with a heavy sigh.
"This never seems to get any easier, does it?" He asks, and he's offering you a smile.
"No," you agree in a rasp, vocal cords scraping roughly, never to sound like they did before the war, "It doesn't."
You quickly wipe away your stray tears of pain, turning your head in hopes that you don't have to watch as his expression morphs into something like pity. Or understanding, maybe. Either way, the looks people give you now make you sick to your stomach.
You'd been beaten nearly to death. Though, who hadn't. And although you hadn't had quite as exciting a resuscitation as Bakugou had, you'd been resuscitated twice during your hospital stay. The surgeries had been intensive, not that you'd know having been practically comatose for the three weeks following the end of the war, and recovery had been painfully slow.
Your throat had been ruined, and the reconstruction hadn't been easy — or pretty. So now your voice was a shallow rasp of what it had once been, and that was an improvement from the disturbing gargle it had been at the first class therapy session.
Kaminari was eyeing the marred skin on your neck, angry raised pink and red skin whorling around your neck and up to the right side of your chin and jawline.
Again, not pretty.
"I ha-haven't—haven't seen you without ban-ba-bandages before," Denki comments quietly, and when you lift your head to offer him a wry grin he's looking away, face twisted into something that looks like shame. Or maybe it's embarrassment. You have a hard enough time picking through your own emotions without the help of your therapist to be trying to decipher anybody else's.
"Oh, yeah, sorry," You mutter despondently, a hand coming to feel at the whorls of scar tissue, "I know it's pretty nasty."
Kaminari's therapist is helping him into a wheelchair now, the same as yours, holding onto you by your gait belt.
"Nah," He says, shaking his head as he leans back into the wheelchair. Then he's wheeled out, and his therapist takes him down a hall you've never been down.
"Progress isn't linear," Denki's therapist tells him.
"I know," Denki says, and he's glad that his voice is his right now. No stuttering, no awkward stumbles, his brain firing only the synapses it needs to, "It's just— I went from having total control to having none in just a little over a day. And the worst part is I did it to myself. People would have died if I didn't, but I would still be me if I hadn't."
Denki knows he's shaking, knows because his therapist is offering him a blanket— still not able to tell when he's got tremors or when he's actually shivering. He just shakes his head at her, not sure that when he opens his mouth next he'll be able to speak.
"People would have died either way," His therapist tells him, "Had you been put in your position again, knowing what it would do to you to stay, would you do it again?"
Denki looks appalled, shocked, maybe even a little angry at the thought, "I'd do it a hundred times over if that meant we had a better chance at winning the war."
For some reason, as his therapist points to him, telling him that he's got answer right there, he thinks of you. Wonders if you'd do it all again, even with the knowledge that you'd end up potentially with the worst of the injuries.
He remembers seeing you get wheeled past him in the hospital when the war had ended. A nurse had been on top of you, doing chest compressions, and he would never forget how air had wheezed past your lips, and the noise your ribs made as they cracked from the compressions. He'd been horrified when you passed by, his classmates who could stand gasping at the state of you as you'd been wheeled by. He remembers the many odd angles your legs had bent, and the vicious burns and cuts in your neck, and how your face had been so bloodied and bruised and swollen you were unrecognizable. The only indication it was you had been your tattered hero costume, hanging off of you in shreds.
"A friend of mine," Denki starts, even though he knows todays session is coming to a close, the visual timer his indicator, "Was in even worse condition than I was after the war. I think the worst condition in our class. They're still attending classes even though they can barely walk most of the time. I know they'd do it all again, too. But I can't imagine why they'd want to suffer through all that they have again."
"Why don't you ask them that?" His therapist suggests.
The next day Denki does just that. He hunts you down on wobbling legs, world tilting as he does, after classes had ended. Despite most everybody in class still suffering mobility issues, regular classes had resumed two months after the war had ended. And despite your incredibly limited mobility, your Quirk helped you get around better than most.
The war had either drawn friends closer in the aftermath, people clinging to the bonds they already had, like Denki had done, his friendships with his classmates who were willing even stronger than they had been prior to the war. Or it did what it had done to you, the remnants of war weighing so heavily that seclusion seemed to be the only option.
Then again, most everybody had become more withdrawn in the aftermath of the war. Conversations between anybody was stilted, even amongst those who had been closer than close.
So when he'd finally hunted you down, exhausted and shaking so bad it was wonder he'd managed to find you at all, it was an odd sort of relief when you'd smiled in greeting.
You'd hidden away on dorm roof, knowing that if anybody wanted to talk to you the stairs made the process all that more difficult for most of your classmates. You waved him over, and he wobbled his way over to you trying his best to walk steady, even as a particularly bad wave of tremors came over him.
"To what do I owe the pleasure?" You'd asked in way of greeting when he'd taken a seat next to you near the edge of the roof. You even smiled at him, halfway forced, but mostly genuine, the muscles in your face atrophied from a general lack of use over the past six months.
Denki smiles in return, his mouth twitching wildly as his brain misfires, "I was hoping I could ask you something. If that's okay?"
A spark of panic runs through you, there aren't usually very many scenarios when you're asked a question that doesn't make everybody uncomfortable when you deign to answer. You spare a glance at him, searching for any signs of discomfort in his face. Finding none, you nod slowly.
"If you could go back, would you still have fought in the war, knowing what you know now?"
You stare at him, and you can already see the regret sinking into his face. You rush to find an answer. You'd had a similar conversation with your therapist before, back when the concept of survivor's guilt had been new and foreign. You had told your therapist yes, of course you would, because -
"-It didn't really feel like there was any other choice to make," The words leave your mouth involuntarily.
Your classmates had expressed similar sentiments, that they were there, what else were they supposed to do? You didn't care that you were already there, time and place had nothing to do with it. You could've been out of there in a matter of minutes.
"You could've walked away, though," Denki says, knowing the same as you that getting away wasn't the issue like it had been for most of his classmates, "You had a choice. Why did you stay?"
"I was either going to die that day or live with a lifetime of guilt. Dying seemed easier at the time."
He flinches at the mention of death, having tasted it himself, "But you didn't."
"No," You agree, "I didn't. I wrecked myself, and I'd do it all again, even as I am now if it means I can die knowing I did all that I could."
He hums, maybe with electricity, you don't know. You don't look over to check.
"Nobody would have been mad at you if you'd left."
"I would have."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
Your words haunt Kaminari in the days that follow, and he makes an active effort to drag you into his friend groups activities. You let him pull you along for lunch with his friends, and you try your hardest to greet them with the same enthusiasm they did.
His friends are riddled with about the same amount of scar tissue you are, Bakugo perhaps the worst. You'd heard about his meeting with death on the battlefield with All For One. He'd sought you out maybe a month after Kaminari had integrated you into their friend group to talk about the shared experience of dying.
Then, suddenly, you couldn't seem to shake Kaminari, try as you might. He was walking with you to and from class, and the two of you did physical therapy together, even though you'd progressed to a point where you could start more intensive training and he still wobbled every other step.
So, maybe it was a two-person effort that pulled him into your life, an integral player. Or maybe it was an unhealthy trauma bond, you couldn't tell, chest still numb in the aftermath. Though, you couldn't tell if the numbness was from your anti-depressants or the war.
"I'm glad you've found a support group of sorts," Your therapist tells you at your next visit, "It's important to have friends and strong bonds in times like these."
You nod along numbly. Granted, your therapist's right, you've been feeling better since that day on the roof when Kaminari had hunted you down to ask you what nobody else seemed to want to.
"Kaminari's been a really good friend to me," You tell your therapist, "Feels like I haven't been as good of a friend as I maybe should be."
Your therapist only hums, and leaves with the advice that you should maybe do something to let Kaminari know you appreciate his friendship with you.
The next time Kaminari finds you on the roof, you're greeting him with a Pikachu phone charm and a box of his favorite cookies.
"To say thanks," you tell him, even though he doesn't ask and you don't look at him. Kaminari's chest blooms with an electric warmth and this time he's sure it's not from his Quirk.
"You should call me Denki," Is all he says, and he feels giddy at the thought, "We're friends, after all."
You hum, your legs swinging gently over the ledge of the dorm roof. You smile with no restraint when you finally return his gaze, your eyes meeting his shaking golds.
"Only if you call me (f/n), Denki."
It's like you took a shot of dopamine when he smiles in return, and says, "Okay, (f/n)."