Love/Hate (Lemon GarouxReader 🍋)

Damage Control

Author's Note: Hello! Very nice to be back :) Just a little T/W for implied parental death!

He is seized by a terrifying rattling gasp, ripping him out of a deep blackness, bringing him back to life. Lungs on fire as if fully surfacing from great depths, having just escaped the grip of death.
Garou's vision betrays him. He cannot tell if it is day or night. He cannot tell where he is or how he got there but he vaguely has the sense that he is no longer at that god-forsaken broken plain, his place of defeat.
All he can feel is cold earth under his bare back, wrapped in the remnants of black, greasy bandages lying limply around him, and pain. Searing, gut-wrenching pain pinning him to the ground.
He gasps again, back arching, ribs creaking, throat raw and dry.
There is no question of thinking. His mind lays shattered. Broken and fragmented. Flashes of dim images race through the battleground of his head.
He cannot put any of them together.
He barely remembers who he is. But the fragments of memory, sharp as broken glass, keep coming, chaotic and bewildering, tormenting him.
He sees in one of those fragments something terrible but cannot tell what it is, only knows like a wild animal knows that it may kill him and he claws at his chest, ripping off the last of the bandages.
The pain never lets up and he knows he cannot stand.
Everything feels broken, bruised under these slowly passing clouds high above.
He reaches out his hands, feeling his surroundings. His senses are barely able to deliver any useful information through the din, the horror, the war in his mind.
Slowly, he reaches his arms out further, teeth gritted against the burning ache of his muscles. A little further and further until he can reach no more when his bloodied, calloused fingertips suddenly hit water.
He cannot think, cannot walk, but the primal need drives him, spurs him to move.
Water.
He manages, slowly, painfully, to turn himself over, panting, delirious on the hard earth. It is less than three feet away.
Water.
He drags himself, fingers digging into the dirt, drags himself towards the icy pool. Each movement is a colossal struggle, piercing the air with loud animal groans.
It feels like an eternity and he begins to almost forget what his goal is as his mind rages on trying to put itself back together with a frightening violence, insists on showing him things he does not want to see.
But he makes it. Barely makes it.
Plunges his head without second thought into the water, clear and freezing. A complete shock.
Every mouthful is agonizing. The cold is brutal but he drinks anyway.
His body, despite himself, fights to stay alive as dried blood dissolves off his face and dances like ribbons in the water below.
When he can drink no more, he pushes himself away and rolls over onto his back, breathing hard, looking up at the gentle clouds as his memories continue to torture him, memories he can make no sense of. He does not know whether he is awake or dreaming.
Everything goes black again as he becomes faintly aware of the sound of massive rushing water somewhere close by.
He passes out at the edge of a lonely, secret waterfall.

You have little recollection of the 24 hours following Ryo and Tareo's rescue, of the 24 hours after you were savagely confronted with an image of Garou that-
You cannot bring yourself to describe it.
You remember bits and pieces.
You vaguely remember being told that Ryo and Tareo were found. Tsukiko hugging you, squeezing you so tight, crying her own lovely eyes out. You remember finally seeing Ryo's face on the fuzzy pixelated screen and yelling, clutching Tomo's laptop, barely being able to hear his artificially tinny "Onee-chan" before the connection cut off again.
You remember demanding, desperately demanding, to be taken to him while Tomo could do nothing in that regard but gently settle you down while tears of relief sparkled in the corners of her own eyes.
You remember the fear, the guilt you felt as Tareo's parents arrived. His mother, a round kindly woman, in her own hysterics as you awaited for the boys to arrive. The way, with shaking hands, you tried to apologise to them. Tsukiko in a deep bow of her own apology, tears streaking her cheeks as the weight of her guilt for organising the outing weighed her down.
But Tareo's loving mother would have none of it, grabbing first Tsukiko, then you, in the tightest mother hen hug, only thankful that the kids had come back alive, speaking nonstop about how much happier Tareo had been ever since he met Ryo.
And then the arrival. The helicopter landing on the steel and concrete roof. Running towards it before being given permission, before the doors had even opened, everything drowned out by the deafening noise of the propeller, your heart in your throat.
You told yourself you wouldn't cry and add to the stress of your little brother, but it was impossible.
The second he had stepped his small foot in its tattered show onto the concrete, you could not hold yourself back, suddenly sitting down on the concrete, grabbing him and squeezing him so close he could hardly breathe as you cried, big, unstoppable tears that took the breath out of you and tore at your throat.
You wanted to apologise to him most of all, to tell him you loved him over and over but the tears, the wrenching sobs, made it impossible. You could hardly breathe, let alone speak.
You have no idea how long you clung onto him like that, as if for dear life, next to the sleek helicopter but no one asked you to move.
Ryo had been so happy to see you, running into your arms, the pure joy of relief. But now that he was back on the ground, surrounded by all these people who were so happy to see him, the gravity of everything that had happened caught up with him and he began to cry too, grabbing at your coat, not wanting to ever let go, face buried against your shoulder. Adrenaline giving way to all that suppressed fear.
You don't know how long you two remained like that. But you remember that eventually the boys were taken to the Hero Association state-of-the-art hospital several floors below.
There were no broken bones or life threatening injuries. Just a lot of rough scrapes and poor, blistered, grazed feet.
You remember your aunt arriving and more tears being shed. The boys were being kept for 24 hours of observation and you would not leave Ryo's side.