I keep having ideas for scenes that won't work with the main story, since it's being written entirely from Kageyama's perspective. This one is angsty but others will be just…so much fluff. Next one will probably be Tsukishima angrily fighting the urge to give Hinata a gift.

She held it in until much, much later. Shouyou was asleep. Granny had taken Natsu home. The hospital was quiet and dark and deep and still. Those sweet boys were long gone, leaving behind their good wishes, their gentle touches and heartfelt words. The nurse hadn't been by in a while. The doctors had changed shifts.

She bent over in the armchair, her stomach erupting in knots and coils of liquid fire. It rose inside her like smoke in a chimney, stinging, burning, aching, filling her throat with ashes and her eyes with tears. The first sob was quiet, escaping through frantic fingers pressed to her mouth. Then another slithered out, and another, until she was crying desperately, soft and low and choked. She didn't understand. She didn't understand.

"Shh, shh." He came, warm hands, the hands she had always loved, wrapping around her shoulders, trying to rub stillness into her shaking bones. "Don't cry, don't cry."

"I can't…stop," she said between sobs, doing everything she could to muffle them. Both hands pressed over her face now, trying to force it all back in again. It wouldn't go. It was too big, and it hurt too much. She had been stronger earlier, when her son was awake, when her children needed her. She couldn't be strong anymore.

"Shhhh. Shhh, now." He slid into the chair next to her, awkward—they were no longer teenagers, and his hip pressed painfully into her side, and she knew it had to be as uncomfortable for him as it was for her. But he wrapped himself around her and held her still, lending his strength, and she curled into his chest and tried to stop shaking.

"How could anyone do this?" she asked. "How could anyone do this to our little boy?"

"I don't know," he whispered. "I don't know. Please, you must stop crying."

Don't tell me what to do, she wanted to say. Don't you know that sometimes a mother must weep over her child?

But all that would come out was the same question again. "How could anyone do this?"

Shouyou, her sunflower child, her brilliant shining boy. Who would hurt him? Who would dare? Only someone who believed himself the master of this world, above all judgement, all shame. Only someone who cared for nothing, who knew nothing, who saw only darkness in his eyes. The light of her son must have hurt in that darkness, too bright, too piercing. Perhaps that was why the monster had felt a need to snuff it out.

"Shh," he kept saying, low and sweet and soothing. "It will be all right."

He would cry later, she knew. Alone, in the shower as water ran around him or in the kitchen over his tea. He had always been good at showing a face of only cheer to the world. It was one of the things she loved about him, that indomitable heart. He was strong when she could not be. Later, perhaps, she would be strong for him. But not right now. Not right now.

"How could anyone do this?"

He had no answer. After a time, perhaps a long time, they both quieted. They listened to the silence, to the soft breaths of their son sleeping in the hospital bed, steady and labored. It was the only kind of peace they could find right now, so they accepted it, and were still.