The ward was always too cold.

​

Kyla wrapped her thin blanket tighter around her shoulders, pretending it could keep out the other uncomfortable things about being stuck here, like the sterile hum of the fluorescent lights, the sleepless nights, or the memories trapped behind her eyelids whenever she closed them.

​

There wasn’t much to enjoy here, locked away from the world. The first few times Kyla had been hospitalized, the novelty of the experience had at least provided something. But by now—her fifth or maybe sixth time getting treatment behind these same walls—everything had blurred into a monotony that she felt she hated just as much as she hated everything else.

​

The hallways that always smelled like bleach and something damp. The locked windows, the clocks that ticked too loud, the nurses and doctors and therapists who asked her the same questions over and over until she was sick of them. She had been here long enough to know the rhythms of the locked ward—medication at seven, therapy group at nine, a supervised walk at noon. Everything meant to keep her contained in both body and thought.

​

She had stopped trying to make friends after the first week. Most people came and went, and the ones who stayed long enough to remember started to blur together in her mind. But then he arrived.

​

She noticed him the first time he came in, escorted by two nurses and a doctor who wouldn’t look him directly in the eye. His arms were all bandaged up, with what looked like burn marks at the edges. But that wasn’t what she noticed first.

​

It was his eyes. She had never seen someone with eyes so bright before, so beautifully blue. Looking into them felt like getting lost under crushing ocean waves, ripping the breath away from her lungs for only a moment. If he noticed, he didn’t show it in his expression, his gaze fixed on her only briefly before looking away.

​

Touya Todoroki, they called him. (If her treatment thus far had changed anything, it wasn’t her unparalleled ability to eavesdrop). Admitted for depression, delusions, arson... and something about “aggression management.” The staff spoke about him in clipped tones, as if his name was a wound that might reopen if said too much or too loudly.

​

Kyla noticed him before he noticed her — sitting at the end of the lounge, eyes half-lidded, tracing the uneven line of the scars on his hand with an absent finger.

​

He didn’t talk to anyone. He never attended group therapy. When the nurses handed out meds, he’d stare at the pills for a long moment before swallowing them dry. The others avoided him, but Kyla felt something pull at her... maybe loneliness recognizing itself.

​

On her twelfth morning there, she found him alone in the hallway, waiting outside a room that they used for something called electroconvulsive therapy. Kyla wasn’t sure what it was or if she only imagined it, her mind racing with possibilities of the horrors that something like that could entail, but she swore she felt the air around them buzzing faintly with something like tense static.

​

He didn’t look up when she sat across from him, folding her hands almost formally in her lap across the muted blue fabric of the hospital scrubs she wore.

​

“Are you going to run away?” she asked softly, her voice tentative in the silence.

​

Those bright eyes flickered up, holding her in place now with a gaze that burned with intensity. He snorted, as if amused by her question. “If I could, I would’ve burned a hole through the wall by now.”

​

She didn’t flinch at that, though she thought maybe she should have. “Does it hurt? The electricity?”

​

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I forget it mostly. Forget about other things too. I guess that’s the point of this shit though, right?”

​

They sat in silence. The kind that weighed heavily on her chest like something she couldn’t figure out how to escape. But she wasn’t sure what else to say. Finally, she spoke, her voice barely louder than the din from the TV in the lounge.

​

“If there’s things you want to remember, you can tell me. I won’t let you forget.”

​

He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say anything at all. But the way those blue eyes softened before he turned away said enough.

​

Days passed. Weeks, maybe. The clocks here meant nothing. Sometimes Touya was loud and sharp-edged, sometimes more distant, quieter. Sometimes he remembered their first talk; sometimes he didn’t. But he always came back to her — in the dining room, in the art therapy sessions, in the shadowed corners of the courtyard.

​

They never talked about their pasts, in spite of her offer. Only small things:

​

how the coffee tasted like ash,

how rain sounded against locked, heavy windows,

how hard it was to sleep in a place that checked in on you every three hours.

​

Their connection was slow, still a fragile thing. But it was real.

​

And in a place that Kyla felt was meant to strip people down to their numbest selves, that felt like a type of rebellion.

​

--x

​

The hallway lights had dimmed, footsteps from the night staff whispering across the linoleum like ghosts passing through. Touya lay awake in the narrow bed, his eyes fixed on the ceiling tiles — counting the cracks, the stains, the quiet seconds between his heartbeats.

​

He was focused on the uncomfortable feeling of trying to remember something that he had forgotten, a memory that hovered just out of consciousness in a way that pissed him off. Maybe pissed him off less than what had happened in the memory did. But either way, it made him burn inside that he couldn’t remember it now.

​

But he remembered her.

​

The girl with the blanket always slipping from her shoulders. The only one in this damn place who didn’t seem afraid to look at him, even knowing what he was here for.

​

He got up. No reason. Just that restless itch under his skin again — the one that never stopped burning.

 

His bare feet made no sound as he moved through the hall, the world washed a cold azure in the light of the emergency alert signs. A blue he felt was far more bitter than the sort of blue he was used to seeing.

​

He fixed the staff sitting at the nurse’s station with an icy stare, as if daring them to stop him from his restless wandering.

​

And that’s when he heard it:

​

A soft, uneven sound coming from the lounge — small, muffled sobs that didn’t belong to any of the night-shift staff.

​

He followed it before he could talk himself out of it.

​

Kyla sat curled up in the corner of the couch, knees pulled to her chest, hands trembling around a crumpled paper cup. Tears streaked her face, barely visible in the dim blue lighting. She looked small, breakable — a fragile thing he felt was too human for a place like this.

​

Touya stopped in the doorway. He almost turned back... comforting people wasn’t something he was good at. It wasn’t something he did. But something twisted in his chest, something sharp and familiar that propelled him forward.

​

“Wish I could offer you a cigarette,” he muttered quietly.

​

Kyla looked up, her grey-green eyes betraying how startled she was. “S-sorry. I didn’t mean to—” She let out a shaky breath and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought if I stayed out here, it’d be easier.”

​

“Is it?”

​

“No.”

​

He hesitated for only a heartbeat or two, then sat down beside her, his shoulder pressed against hers.

 

They sat like that for a while. The silence wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t cruel either.

​

“What did they do to you?” she asked finally.

​

He huffed out a faint laugh, low and bitter in his chest. “What didn’t they do? It’s like a light show, then I blackout... eventually wake up feeling like someone replaced my brain with static for a while.”

​

“That’s horrible,” she whispered, tears threatening to spill from her eyes again.

​

“It’s not that bad. It does make me forget why I’m here, I guess.”

​

Kyla swallowed hard, pressing a shaky hand against the bandages on his arm gently. “What if you forget the good things too?”

​

“Then maybe that shit wasn’t worth remembering.”

​

But even as he said it, he could hear the lie that echoed in it — because there she was, sitting right next to him, and every single broken nerve in his body refused to forget her. He quickly changed the subject, leaning back against the back of the couch and staring up at the ceiling, at the clock, at anything but her right now.

​

“Why were you crying?”

​

She hesitated, her hand on his arm gripping tighter for a moment before she answered. “Sometimes it feels like I’m never getting out of here. I’m so tired of it.”

​

Touya didn’t tell her she was wrong. He just reached out, slow and uncertain, and placed his hand over hers — a rough, calloused weight, but steady.

​

Her breath caught in her throat. When she didn’t pull away, he could feel it. It felt like a current running through him, a lightness in his heart and a flutter throughout his body that no amount of electricity they could pump into his brain could ever rival. It terrified him.

​

When she finally fell asleep against his shoulder, Touya didn’t move. For once, he could feel the storm inside of him—the one he had been both desperately trying to quiet and trying in self-hatred to fuel with his own anger for years—fall silent.