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self-indulgent little hurt/comfort oneshot. Established Tomura/Reader, no quirks AU, angst with a happy ending. CONTENT WARNING: discussion of suicide and the aftermath of a suicide attempt. This fic is recovery oriented, but please scroll past if you find the content triggering at all.

reentry

The couch in the therapist’s office isn’t very comfortable. Tomura shifts around awkwardly, trying to find a place to lean back that doesn’t make his broken ribs groan with pain, but he’s not having much luck. He thought therapist couches were supposed to be comfortable — sprawl out, kick his feet up, take a nap while some guy tries to analyze his dreams. This doesn’t feel right.

Then again, Tomura tries to kill himself two weeks ago, and he just got released from the hospital half an hour ago. Of course he doesn’t feel like he fits into the world any longer. That’s what happens to people who try to leave — try, and fail. Not that Tomura was planning to fail. His plan was pretty foolproof. Except for one thing.

“Tomura,” the therapist says, and Tomura looks up. “Let’s switch chairs.”

“No,” Tomura says. “I’m fine.”

“You have —“ the therapist consults Tomura’s discharge paperwork “— six broken ribs from CPR, and they aren’t giving you anything stronger than naproxen. And all my clients complain about my couch.”

“Get a new couch, then.”

“Sure,” the therapist says. “Between now and then, switch seats with me.”

“No,” Tomura says. He crosses his arms over his chest as he leans back, and his ribs increase their bitching from a groan to a scream. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If you’re going to be here, you might as well be comfortable,” the therapist says. “You don’t get extra XP for toughing it out. At least not in here.”

“XP?” Tomura snorts. “Did they tell you I like video games or something?”

“Maybe,” the therapist says, unruffled. “Are you switching or not?”

“Fine,” Tomura says. He gets up, grimacing, and the therapist does the same — at which point Tomura realizes that the therapist is a lot taller than he is. “Uh —“

“Thanks.” The therapist plops down on the couch, leaving Tomura to sit down in the chair, which is more comfortable than the couch by a long shot. “So. Which one sucked more — the last two weeks or the two weeks before that?”

“Are you serious?” Tomura laughs, because it feels like the thing he’s supposed to do. “I spent the last two weeks eating hospital food and going to therapy groups and having people look in my mouth to make sure I took my pills. The last two weeks have been shit.”

“But you weren’t on an involuntary hold,” the therapist says. Tomura grimaces. “Once you were medically cleared, you could have left at any time. But you chose to stay. Which leads me to believe that the two weeks before that were worse.”

It’s quiet for a second. “What did you say your name was?” Tomura asks.

“Yamada Hizashi,” the therapist says. He sprawls out on the couch and props his feet up, house slippers and all. “Let’s talk about the other two weeks now.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what they do in inpatient. They pack your head full of distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills and make you do a safety plan, but outpatient is where we get into making sure this doesn’t happen again.”

“How do you know I don’t want it to happen again?”

“Voluntary inpatient,” Yamada says. Tomura rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying — that seems like a lot of shit to go through for no reason.”

Tomura’s tempted to report that there is a reason — so everybody will get off his back long enough for him to make a plan that will work this time. But his heart wouldn’t be in it, not the way it would need to be for him to convince anyone. He might not want to die anymore, but he still doesn’t want to keep living and feeling like this. “A month ago,” he starts. “A month ago I had to testify against the guy who adopted me.”

“How was that?”

“It blew.”

“Yeah?” Yamada sits up. “Tell me more.”

There’s not a ton to tell. Tomura’s testimony was pretty straightforward. Everything that he remembers from his childhood fit pretty neatly into the charges his fake dad was facing from the other victims. Not that Tomura’s a fucking victim or anything. Yamada’s eyebrows go up when Tomura says that, but he doesn’t interrupt, and Tomura goes awkwardly on. “Anyway. I said all the shit, and then the defense attorney got to cross-examine me. He tried pretty hard to trip me up and make me perjure myself. And —“

“And?”

“And I guess triggered me,” Tomura says, fed up. “My girlfriend was ready to chew his head off for that one, but I was fine. I told her that, but she didn’t buy it.”

Looking back, Tomura knows why you didn’t buy it. Why you were never going to buy it, and you were right not to. “Your girlfriend,” Yamada says. “She was the one who found you?”

Tomura’s stomach clenches. “I was fine when we left the courthouse, but things started getting worse. I felt like shit. About everything. Nothing felt good anymore, not even the stuff I like. It all came back up, and it felt so bad. I remembered —“

“Do you need to take a break?” Yamada asks. Tomura gives him a weird look. “You’re scratching.”

He is scratching. Tomura hasn’t done that in a while — or at least he hadn’t, a month ago. After the trial, he was scratching constantly. He pulls his hand away from his neck and forces it down onto the arm of the couch. “I don’t need a break. I need to get this out or I’ll end up right back where I started.”

“Sure, maybe. But think about how we got here. You’re telling me it started with having to vomit all this stuff back up at the trial, and now you’re about to do it again.” Yamada shakes his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against talking about this stuff and I’m not scared of it. What I am worried about is getting into it when you don’t have the tools to calm yourself back down. Do you know what diagnosis they gave you in there?”

“Unrepentant asshole disease?”

Yamada snorts. “Good one. It’s PTSD,” he says. Tomura blinks. “That’s part of why you’re here with me. One component of my practice is something called EMDR — eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — which is designed in part to take the punch out of the things that trigger you. But before we work on that, we start by building some stuff.”

“Building stuff?” Tomura glances around Yamada’s office. “I don’t see any legos.”

“Nah. We’re building stuff in your mind palace,” Yamada says, and cracks a weird grin. Tomura opens his mouth and Yamada keeps talking. “You’re about to tell me that your mind palace is a dumpster fire, and I’m going to tell you that it’s garbage can, not garbage can’t —“

Tomura snorts, then cringes. Yamada notices but doesn’t comment. “And we’re going to build another, smaller dumpster in there. A container for all the shit feelings that this kicks up for you. We’re also gonna build a safe room — somewhere you can go that feels secure and peaceful. Got any places like that?”

“No,” Tomura says. Then he second-guesses it. “Maybe —”

“We’ll get into that in more detail next time,” Yamada says. “Today I just want us to focus on what you were thinking and feeling leading up to the attempt.”

“Isn’t that gonna trigger me?”

“That’s why we’re talking about it in here,” Yamada says. “I want you to be able to notice your feelings and thoughts when they start to take a turn, because that’s the spot where you can interrupt it.”

“Interrupt it,” Tomura repeats. He feels his hand creeping back up towards his neck and yanks it down again. “How?”

“That’s a good spot for your distress tolerance skills,” Yamada says, “but I’d also recommend reaching out for help. Telling somebody you’re struggling.”

“No,” Tomura says. “They don’t need to deal with my shit. They’ve got shit of their own.”

“Yeah. And based on your discharge paperwork, all your friends and your girlfriend came to visit you in the hospital,” Yamada says. “That’s a way bigger hassle than just being there when you need someone to talk to, right?”

Tomura’s not going to get into that. “I did this stuff. On my safety plan.”

“Yeah. But if asking for help isn’t something you’re used to, it helps to plan out exactly what you’ll say,” Yamada says. “And before that, we need to work on recognizing when you need to say something. Ya dig?”

Tomura tries to imagine saying something. Turning to you and telling you he’s thinking about dying, that he loves his friends and loves you but can’t take living when he feels this sick. How would you even answer? Nothing you could say would fix it, and wouldn’t it make you feel bad? To know that Tomura wants to die and —

“You love your girlfriend. Think about which is worse for her,” Yamada says, and Tomura realizes he spoke aloud. “Hearing that you want to die, or coming back and finding you in the middle of it?”

“Don’t guilt-trip me.”

“It’s not a guilt-trip. Just a question.” Yamada shrugs. “Let’s look at it another way. If it were her and not you, which would you rather —”

“I get it, okay?” Tomura’s not going to run away from it, but that doesn’t mean he wants to harp on it. “I’ll make you a deal. We can talk about anything you want as long as it’s not that.”

“Deal,” Yamada says without blinking. “Walk me through the day of.”

They spend the rest of the session working on identifying and naming the kind of feelings that lead to Tomura wanting to off himself. It’s a harder job than Tomura thought it would be. Therapy is weirder than Tomura thought it would be. He can’t decide if it’ll be helpful yet. But it’s somewhere to go that’s not work, so it’s probably worth it for that alone.

Towards the end of the the session, after they’ve scheduled the next one, Yamada hands Tomura the reminder card and leans back against the couch. “This thing is even worse than I remember,” he remarks. “Who’s coming to pick you up?”

“My girlfriend.” Tomura still feels weirdly proud when he says that, even though you’ve been together for going on three years. “She was supposed to get me from the hospital, but her job said they’d fire her if she took any more time off work.”

“She’s been taking some time off?”

“That’s what she said,” Tomura says. “Why are you asking about her?”

“She’s clearly an important person in your life,” Yamada says. Important. That’s understating it. “She also lives with you, which means she’ll be in a position to observe how you’re doing. As she was before.”

“I think she’s okay. She’s been okay when she visited,” Tomura says. “She goes to therapy and everything. Since before I met her.”

You go every week, like clockwork. Tomura couldn’t really figure out why, since you seem normal. “She probably talked this out with her therapist already.”

“I’m sure,” Yamada says. “Still, go easy on each other. Reentry from inpatient is tough, even if you’ve got a soft landing. Go ahead and hang out in the lobby until she gets here. I’ll see you next week.”

“Next week,” Tomura agrees. He puts the reminder card in his wallet, in front of his ID, and slinks out onto the lobby. His ribs are still broken, but as long as he’s not leaning or lying on something, he’s okay.

He can see your car parked in the parking lot outside, and you’re leaning against the hood, holding something. As Tomura opens the building and steps out into the weak winter sunlight, he sees that it’s a bouquet of flowers.

You look so pretty standing there, and you smile when you see him, and as Tomura picks his way across the parking lot, your smile grows. Nothing about seeing you fixes what’s wrong with Tomura, but seeing you feels good even when nothing else does. That safe, calm place thing Yamada was talking about — Tomura’s pretty sure it’s somewhere, anywhere, with you.

You open your arms as Tomura reaches you, and he walks into your embrace without breaking stride. You’re careful when you hug him, but Tomura hangs onto you tight, letting his head fall against your shoulder and turning his face into the side of your neck. You smell really good, like always, and your body is soft against his sharp edges, and what Yamada told him to do before feels a little easier to imagine now. He’s told you a lot of things, and they haven’t scared you away just yet.

“Hi,” you say. “How was it in there?”

“It was okay,” Tomura says. “He seems like he has ideas about stuff. And I don’t hate him yet.”

“That’s a good sign.” You hug Tomura a little closer, then let go. You hold out the flowers. “Here. These are for you.”

Tomura wants to hold you, not the flowers, but he takes them anyway. “Why did you get me flowers?”

“I don’t know,” you say, shrugging. “It just felt like the right thing to do. Do you feel up for a walk?”

“Huh?”

“I thought it might be nice to get some fresh air before we go home,” you say. “What do you think?”

You’re tense. Tomura’s standing close enough to you that he can feel it. “What’s the real reason?”

“We need to talk,” you say, and Tomura’s blood turns to ice. “Not about anything bad. It’s just — everybody’s coming over to hang out, and some of them are already there, and I want to talk to you beforehand, first.”

“They’re all coming over?” Tomura asks, surprised. “Even Kurogiri?”

“Even him,” you say. You must have had to bring out the big guns to get Kurogiri to stop by. He’s really busy, and the stuff he’s working on can’t exactly be interrupted. “I’d just like to talk to you. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” Tomura says. Yamada’s building is across from a park. “Over there?”

“Perfect.”

The two of you walk in silence for a little while, Tomura holding the flowers, your hand resting in the crook of his elbow, just above the bandages. You were the one who said you and Tomura needed to talk, so Tomura waits for you to speak up, and you do. “Is there something I could have done that would have stopped this?”

“No.” Tomura feels your grip on his arm tighten slightly. “This was all me. Are you — okay?”

“How are your ribs doing?” you ask instead of answering. “When they brought you in they were worried about a sternal fracture, but they never told me anything more about it.”

“No, just the ribs,” Tomura says, and you nod. “Are you going to answer me?”

“No, because this isn’t about me. I’m not going to make this about me.”

“It is,” Tomura says. “We’re together. We live together. You’re the one who found me.”

“I’m the one who broke your ribs,” you interrupt, and Tomura stops walking to stare at you. “You were still alive when I got there, but you stopped breathing while I was on the phone with emergency services. I’m the one who started CPR.”

Fucking hell. “I didn’t mean —” Tomura breaks off, struggling for a nice way to put it. “It wasn’t supposed to be you. You weren’t supposed to find me.”

Tomura put a lot of thought into killing himself. He waited until a weekend you went home to visit your family, so you’d be around people who love you when you got the call. He didn’t want anyone to have to find him, but he knew someone would, so he asked one of his neighbors if they could watch Moro for a few hours, telling them he’d pick Moro up at ten-thirty. When he didn’t come to pick Moro up, the neighbor would figure out something was wrong and call the cops, and the cops would find Tomura once it was already too late. It should have worked. It would have worked, except —

Tomura thinks about what you would have seen when you got home and feels misery rush up and over his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be you,” he says. “Why did you come back?”

“I got a bad feeling.” You won’t make eye contact with Tomura. You’re staring off into space in a way that looks too familiar, a way Tomura understands deep in his bones. “I get anxious sometimes over nothing. I can cope with anxious. But this was, like — they say people get a sense of impending doom before they have a heart attack. It felt like that. And I knew I was fine. So it had to be you.”

Tomura didn’t tip you off somehow. He didn’t hint or leave something undone or do anything to make you think that when you kissed him goodbye it would be the last time you ever saw him. Tomura did everything right. And you still knew. “So you turned around.”

“I almost killed myself hanging a u-turn across four lanes of traffic,” you say. “I called emergency services before I even got out of the car. But your plan was too good. Even with all of that I was almost too late.”

The two of you are still walking, somehow. Tomura stops, and so do you. “And ever since they told me you were going to make it,” you say, your voice tight and shaky, “I’ve been wondering if you’re mad at me for coming back. If you wish I hadn’t broken your ribs. If you —”

“No.” Tomura’s still holding the flowers you gave him. He doesn’t want to put them down. “I feel like shit about what happened.”

“I don’t want to make you feel like shit —“

“I know. It’s not you. It’s me. And my therapist said I have to tell you how I feel when I feel like that.” Tomura wonders if it would be stupid to walk back to Yamada’s office and tell him he needs another hour of therapy. “Everything felt so bad. I wanted it to stop and I didn’t care how, and I didn’t see another way out. But I want to. That’s why I stayed in the hospital and I’m seeing a therapist and I’m going to keep taking the stupid antidepressants even if they make my dick stop working —“

Your mouth twitches slightly. “They make more than one kind of antidepressant. We can find one that doesn’t do that.”

“Fine.” Tomura doesn’t actually know if his antidepressants fuck with his libido. He hasn’t been on them long enough, and the PTSD is probably enough to kill any mood for a while. “I want to find another way out. And I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to if you hadn’t come back. I’m not mad. I just — I wish you hadn’t had to see that.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t done it?” you ask, then cringe. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Tomura doesn’t want to have to tell Yamada he lied to you about stuff. He has a feeling Yamada will hassle him about it next week. “At the hospital they said people regret it right after they do it. That’s why so many people call the hospital on themselves. And I —”

Tomura trails off, considering the moments before he passed out. Remembering how he thought he’d feel lighter, and how he felt so much heavier instead, a huge weight pressing down on his chest with nowhere to go. He didn’t feel peaceful. He felt wrong. “I thought it was probably too late to stop it. So I didn’t try. But I would have if I’d thought it would work.”

“Okay.” You take a deep breath, let it go, and Tomura wonders if you’ve been worried about this the whole time. If you expected him to get mad at you for saving him. “I’m sorry I put you through all of this today. I felt like I had to know.”

“My therapist said I have to get used to talking to people about this stuff,” Tomura reminds you. Your mouth turns down at one corner. “It’s fine. I probably owe you a lot of explanations anyway.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” you say. You wipe under your eyes. “Let’s go home. Do you want to grab anything on the way?”

“Is there food at this party you’re throwing?” Tomura asks. You nod. “I want to go home.”

It’s quiet on the drive back to the apartment. Tomura has his hand on your leg, since you won’t hold his hand while you’re driving, and he watches you. You’re a good driver, so safe it’s almost boring. It’s hard to imagine you driving the way you must have to get home in time to stop him.

Tomura would drive like that if he thought you were in trouble. If he got stuck in traffic he’d get out of his car and run the rest of the way to you. Tomura wonders if you know that. Maybe not. If you did, you wouldn’t have thought he’d be mad at you for bringing him back.

“Hey,” he says, and because you’re at a stoplight, you look at him. “I love you. You know that, right? Even if I don’t say it a lot —”

“I know,” you say. “You don’t have to say it for me to know.”

Sure — but Tomura’s thinking about what Yamada said. Saying how he feels. Maybe that goes for feelings that aren’t bad, too. “I know you know. I’m still gonna say it. Get used to it.”

The corner of your mouth pulls up in a slight smile. You detach one hand from the steering wheel, lift Tomura’s hand off your thigh, and kiss it, only letting him go when the light turns green. “I love you, too.”

“I know.”

Tomura thinks about the flowers you got him. His friends who are waiting for him at home. His dog, who’s probably going to ignore him for a month to pay him back for leaving. His broken ribs and the fact that he definitely lost his job and the knowledge that even as he’s getting better, he has a lot of shitty days ahead. But Moro will forgive him eventually. Tomura’s friends still love him, and so do you. Even amidst everything that’s gone wrong, Tomura knows there’s plenty of things worth hanging on for.

And if he ever needs a reminder, you’re right there. Next to him as he walks back into his apartment, next to him as he hugs his friends and Kurogiri, next to him all night long and still there in the morning. There’s no way Tomura can forget. He remembers every time he looks at you.

Favorite series 🦗

Goretober Day 14: Body Horror

The summer hikaru died

U3U

You and the League of Villains meet someone with a quirk that can show people alternate life paths if things had turned out differently.

Everyone’s a little “ehhh idk” about trying it, so Shigaraki, being the leader, is willing to go first.

He sees himself growing up, getting away from his abusive household, and leading a normal life.

Shigaraki is like, this is pretty mundane.

Until he starts seeing images of himself with someone else— you. He sees you kiss him and he’s in complete disbelief.

The images fade away and he’s already demanding another go, “Show me another path.”

In the next one he has the decay quirk, but he’s a rescue hero. He works alongside another hero— you, again. He sees you holding his hand and he’s still in disbelief.

“Okay, that’s enough.”

Afterwards, Shigaraki knows that everything he saw is unattainable—

His eyes drift over to you and he keeps replaying the intimate moments in his head.

Except you.

One of the best villains and character overall.. 😭🧡

my type if you care

🎉🛐

Going insane lately idk

🛐🧡

Goretober day 10: Amputation