I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 178 178: I love you too.

(It hurts.)

The thought was flat. Factual. His nervous system reporting information he already knew.

(It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts—)

He kept breathing. In through his nose, out slow, the same way he'd been doing since the first loop when his body had figured out that controlled breathing was the only thing he had consistent access to when everything else went wrong.

Han trembled against his side. Small and scared and trying very hard not to show it, which was somehow worse than if he'd just let himself be scared out loud.

Si Hon looked at the ceiling.

Then at the blocked exits.

Then at Han's face, eyes squeezed shut now, knuckles white where he was gripping Si Hon's shirt.

He made a decision.

It wasn't a complicated one. It arrived fully formed and he didn't spend time debating it.

With his legs burning and his lungs working harder than they should have been, Si Hon shifted his weight and forced himself upright.

The pain that shot through him from the movement was significant enough that his vision blurred briefly at the edges— he waited for it to pass, which it did, mostly— and then he reached down and shrugged his ruined uniform jacket off his shoulders.

He shook it once to clear the worst of the ash and wrapped it around Han completely, pulling it closed at the front until Han was bundled inside it with only his face visible.

Han looked up at him. Confused. Eyes still wet. "What are you doing?"

Si Hon looked at the exit.

The fire filled it wall to wall, floor to ceiling, a solid wall of it between them and the outside.

Past it, somewhere— the front door. The stairs. The sky. Cool air and rain that he could almost feel from here if he thought about it the right way.

"They say dying by fire is one of the worst ways," he said. His voice came out even. Almost calm. "And even if you forget it after we reset—" He looked down at Han. "I don't want that to be something your body remembers. Even for a little while."

Han stared at him.

His bottom lip started going again. He grabbed the front of the jacket— Si Hon's jacket, still warm from being worn, now wrapped around him— with both fists. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I love you, dad," he said. Quiet. Completely genuine. The kind of thing a child said when words were the only thing they had left.

Si Hon's chest did something complicated.

(This is bad for me,) he thought distantly. (Haha. I don't even know what to do with that.)

He looked at Han for one moment. Then he leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of Han's head— quick, clumsy, not practiced at all— and straightened back up.

"I love you too," he said.

Then he picked Han up, tucked him close against his chest with the jacket wrapped tight around him, and ran.

The fire hit him from every side the moment he moved through the doorway but he didn't slow down.

His feet found the floor through the heat and he kept them moving— one after the other, fast, not thinking about what was happening to his arms and his legs and the exposed skin of his neck, just tracking the direction of out and moving toward it.

The hallway stretched ahead of him through the fire and smoke and he ran the length of it with Han held against his chest and his uniform burning and the repetition running underneath everything else like a repetition his brain had locked onto because it needed something to hold.

(It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.)

He knew. Yet, he kept running.

The front doors.

They hit him sideways, bursting open as he crashed through them with his shoulder, and then—

Cold.

Rain.

The sky had darkened fully while they were inside, heavy clouds pressing low over the school grounds, and water came down in steady sheets that hit Si Hon's burned skin like something between relief and additional pain, both at once, neither canceling the other out.

He stood there for half a second just breathing— actual full breaths, clean air, the smoke thinning immediately in the open space— and looked up at the sky.

The dragon circled overhead.

Far below it, scattered across the school grounds— bodies. Aeloria's team. Students who hadn't made it out. Everywhere was dark and empty from this angle. The fight was over. He'd already known it would be.

He walked to the front stairs.

Set Han down carefully against the stone railing, still wrapped in the jacket, and crouched in front of him. Han's eyes had gone heavy— the smoke, the heat, the emotional weight of the past however long all catching up at once, his body making the executive decision to check out for a little while.

Si Hon watched his eyes flutter closed and his breathing slow into something steadier.

"Sleeping," Si Hon said quietly. "That's fine."

He stayed crouched there for a moment after Han went still. Rain soaked through what remained of his shirt and ran down the back of his neck in cold lines, and his burned legs registered the temperature change with the particular unpleasantness of damaged nerve endings trying to recalibrate.

He looked at his own hands again. Still shaking, but less than before.

He stood up slowly.

Looked at the school entrance behind him.

The fire inside was visible through the broken ground floor windows, orange light pulsing steadily in the dark. He could feel the heat from here, rolling outward through the shattered glass, mixing with the cold rain into something neither warm nor cool.

He took one breath.

Then he walked back in.

The fire took him quickly this time. No running, no direction to move toward, nothing to carry. Just the hallway, and the fire, and the rain still audible somewhere behind him getting quieter as he moved further in, and underneath all of it— underneath the pain and the heat and the repetition still running its loop in the back of his head— something that was almost, almost peaceful.

It hurt.

And then it didn't.

***

His eyes opened.

The first sound was chalk.

Then a phone screen lighting up.

Then someone laughing in the back of the classroom at something on their screen, the kind of laugh that was trying to be quiet and failing completely.

Si Hon sat at his desk.

Hands flat against the surface.

Breathing— for the first time since any of this started—

Almost right.

"Haha, I love being alive."