Siren Song (All Might x Reader)

Chapter 40: Healing

How long had you been floating in this state of half existence?

An hour? A day? A week? A month? Years?

You didn't know. You couldn't feel time move as you floated in an endless expanse of nothing.

You vaguely remembered what had happened before you'd died. You'd failed to drain All for One's quirks all the way and he'd crushed you because of it. You couldn't see what happened with your loss of vision, but you felt your body crushed against the rocks all the same. You wondered how the rest of the battle had gone. Had your sacrifice been enough to help? Had Toshi succeeded? Or was he floating in the afterlife like you were?

Death wasn't like you'd imagined it would be. There was a black nothingness, sure, but the sensation of blinding pain still lingered. As you floated through existence, your body felt scattered, bits and pieces floating around separately in the void. You were unable to move, completely at the mercy at the forces that moved you back and forth endlessly.

Was this what hell was like? The pain that seemingly had no source was fitting enough for the endless torment of hell, and after all of the people you'd hurt in your years in the sea you supposed you rightfully deserved the torture. You hoped Toshi was spared the same fate if he had passed during the fight. With all of the people he'd saved and all the good he'd done you couldn't imagine him deserving anything other than paradise.

Your thoughts of him helped to dull the pain slightly as eons passed by. You thought of his laugh, his smile, his eyes. You remembered your first date with him, the time you'd saved him when he'd come home bleeding. You thought about his hands on your skin, his lips on your neck and every other delicious place he'd explored. You reminisced on the promise he'd given you moments before the fight; the promise of a life together. The memories made the pain dull, the time pass quicker, until suddenly you felt something. Something real, tangible.

The tiniest piece of you, barely bigger than the tip of a needle, merged with another after having traveled what felt like miles to get there. It started with two, then three, then four until tens and hundred and thousands of them converged together as if magnetized onto a single point.

Slowly, those miniscule pieces took shape, forming metatarsals, ankles, tibias, fibulas, and femurs. The seams between each piece of you burned where it joined the rest of your body, a white-hot pain that never went away no matter how many more pieces returned to you.

Your tail was the first thing to fit itself back entirely together. The pain was like nothing you'd ever felt before as shards of bone moved and shifted back together over hours and hours. Your spine and arms were the next things to reassemble, your body straightening and snapping into its rightful position. Like a complicated puzzle, your skull and ribcage pieced themselves together around new organs. When everything was in its rightful place, layers of muscle and skin and scales grew over you in a protective coating. Finally, hair and eyelashes and other superficial things grew back as they had once been.

Eventually, the pain waned, though it never disappeared entirely. It was soon replaced by other sensations like hot and cold, hunger and emptiness, exhaustion.

As sensation returned to you, you questioned more and more if you were really in hell. The sensations you began to feel were too similar to things you remembered on earth, and the torture seemed more akin to the ache of broken and mending bones instead of the burning fires of hell.

You spent all of your energy taking stock of the things you could feel. You were in water, that was one thing you were sure of. You could feel your limp body bob in and out of the waves, could feel the heat of the sun or the coldness of rain pelt you as the weather changed. You could feel the brush of a fish or seaweed from the bottom of the ocean floor against your scales, could taste and feel the saltwater when your lungs took their first breath. When your hearing returned, you could hear the quiet rocking of the waves, the sound of a boat motor passing overhead, the bubbles of something nearby. You wanted to call out, to yell for help or to just see if anyone was there, but you couldn't even move your mouth or make a sound.