The two soldiers march up to her as soon as Hawks is gone. "Princess, are you all right?" Yoarashi asks, without any seeming regard for the large bleeding gash on his shoulder.
"Y... yes," she says, with a betraying tremor in her voice.
Iida glances at the shadows behind them and asks her in a careful, low voice, "Is this really all right, Princess Uraraka-kun? This is a major deviation from the task given to us by our highness!"
"We have... other ways to get around him, your highness," Yoarashi adds in the softest voice she's ever heard from him. "It's a gamble, but you still have a choice not to..."
And if she does, they're facing certain death as traitors and they know it. But they're still giving her a choice. There's something to be said about their loyalty and their conscience.
She shakes her head. She's had to face a lot of situations, 'choices' without any real choice, hasn't she?
She faces them with a strong sense of conviction, and tells them her choice.
Shouto closes his eyes, willing the pain to go away from his left arm.
The curse has always been a source of unbearable pain. When the form of his left side shifts with each new crack of skin, he feels the heat like lava seeping from his flesh. He gets the urge to burn something, to destroy things. He hates having to act like an animal, hates having to be locked in this tower day after day so that his destructive tendencies only affect this space, but at least he hurts no-one in his solitude.
He looks his claw. He didn't mean to hurt her when she fell, but he had no choice but to use his power to grab her before she crashed to the rocks below. He hates how the monster-side of him celebrated at the sight of her blood flowing from her wounds and flooded the floor. He hates how dangerously close it came to consuming more of his human side when he saw her in pain. It's a good thing that he remembered some minor healing spells he could cast with his right side.
Even better still that the monster side of him suddenly decided to calm down when she fell in his arms in a heap.
Strange, he thinks, as the claw flexes and unflexes, still painful but not as searing as before. The pain is kinder to him when the princess was close to him. The knowledge of her leaving this place in one piece and returning to her own castle in one piece somehow helps to stave the usual burning pain off.
He never would have guessed that the daring young woman who would rather fall to her death and remain nameless than to wait in her prison quietly was a crowned princess. He thought that someone so brave and plucky, dressed in men's clothes, would be nothing more than another peasant girl that Hawks picked up from the streets.
What possessed him and that stupid King of theirs to decide to kidnap royalty? Do they think that true love discriminates by social class?
Doesn't he know that whoever it is, it's impossible for anyone to love him? Forget his looks or the curse, is there anyone in the world who can love someone as damaged as him?
Is there anyone who would even think of staying with him?
Thinking of the King removes the calm in his heart, and another surge of pain consumes his left side. He bites the inside of his cheek and lets the wave pass. Damn, keeping his emotions stable has been difficult as the days pass. He wonders when the blissful day comes that he wakes up and sees that the curse has finally consumed his right side too. At least he wouldn't be in pain anymore, and the King would finally stop bothering him about this.
Why would you do this, Mom, he thinks once more, as the last vestiges of the pain fade away. I know he hurt you, but...
He lets out a long-suffering sigh and stands up from his favorite spot for brooding by the window. It's no use to ask himself questions that will never be answered. There are more useful things he can do in this prison of his, like reading a book or ripping it apart or burning it just so to see how much fire a volume can withstand before it burns to a crisp. There's another volume of the King's biography here somewhere...
As he walks to where he keeps the tortured volumes, he hears footsteps thudding along the winding staircase outside. He recognizes the heavy steps of Iida and Yoarashi, but there's another set of them, quick and light and almost floating over the steps and to the outside of his door--
The moment his door bursts open and she comes in, buried in capes, out of breath, and anxious, the left side of his body suddenly cools.
They stare at each other in silence, with only Princess Uraraka's ragged breaths between them. Cautiously, he comes closer to her, making sure that this isn't a complex hallucination caused by his prolonged isolation.
She comes forward, and he feels her warmth from the closing distance. When she's at an arm's length away from him, she swallows nervously and looks at him-- both sides of him, he's sure--and takes a deep breath.
"So... I changed my mind," she tells him within the wash of odd feelings coursing through his cursed side. "I'm staying here with you."
