Chiyo has healed many people.
She has seen many horrific things, of bones bent in ways they shouldn't, horrible deep gashes on one's flesh, of burned and torn things, and even fractured skulls. Bloody and inevitable.
She is a healer, and thus she has seen horrific things.
But then, but then,
(She remembers, though, the first time she healed something that shouldn't be. She had seen bloody arms cut deep by claws, ashen and smoky, eyes gashed, broken beak and chipped off fingernails that always seemed to seer and burn and hiss. And then she continues to remember more— collecting memories of something that looked like it belonged to a horror movie than real life.)
But Chiyo is old and she isn't getting any younger, even if she grows canyons in her skin and silver in her hair whenever Tokoyami came in, his two friends holding his arms as if he could fall apart any minute.
(She remembered the first time he came in, almost scaring her half to death.)
"It's nothing serious, " he'd shrug her away, bones showing from torn flesh in a way that wasn't— "I can't help it."
"What do you mean you can't help it? " Recovery Girl would gasp out to him, reaching for his bloody (smoky?) limbs even as she ignores the way his muscles and tendons seemed to writhe.
He's looked at her hands then, watching as she tended to him, with Chiyo not understanding why he isn't flinching or overall reacting to the procedures she's doing on him even as his friends gagged at the sight. It's meant to be painful, even for hardened Pro Heroes, how the thread and needle sinks and comes up from the skin like anchors; but he hadn't reacted at all.
(She never understood the boy, ever since his first time in her office, the first time the liquid from his IV blackening—)
(And she'll never understand him then.)
Chiyo knows how the body works, how it looked like from the inside out, how it worked as much as clockwork, and knowing everything about the Human (he's not?) anatomy like it's a blueprint upon her desk. Healing is her quirk, after all, spreading from her kisses like syrupy medicine in it's own form, and thus it is her nature. It is her duty to nurture and care.
(Even if she can't quite make herself to care for him when Everything about him are all interweaving flesh and nerves, black and with flesh too vast and deep. Unreachable, depthless. Like a field of red weeds simply intertwining with each other as the roots of an infallible tree.)
The boy never really did answer her questions. Even as she roped him into the bed or drowned his system in anesthesia— he could simply melt off from those captive things and he'd be back on his feet again.
(Of course, she remembered things. Some not. She'd always remember those bleached bones and not-flesh, almost parasitic and sentient of themselves. She'd remember so much red as her hands are engulfed in them, like it's eating her own limbs as they stitched and mended.)
(Then she wouldn't remember orifices that weren't there before. Full of jagged teeth and jutting little bones, scratching her skin as it tore the littlest bits from her fingertips. She wouldn't remember the burning, like acid is pouring from those gashes that's never too shallow or deep at the same time.)
(She remembers a lot, but she doesn't remember More.)
The boy called them Slips.
And it's normal, after all, if only for him. His friends call them 'accidents', his teacher would tell her so, too, but she called them slips because the boy told her so.
(But how could you call That— peeking bones and laughing flesh— 'accidents', anyway? She never understood why they called them that when it was clear Tokoyami was doing something to himself.)
Chiyo had never heard him scream, because Tokoyami would always come in with his voice hoarse anyway, like he'd already done it, as if in a thousand years he'd come miraculously to her office like everything is normal even if his own body contradicted him so. Chiyo had never him utter something that indicated the he was in pain, only grunts and scoffs and huffs, like he'd always been waiting for it to happen.
What was It, anyway?
(Well, like usual, no one tells her anything about it. Those two doberman mutants that seemed to be always at the boy's heel would look away, and his other buddies would ignore her and move on to the other question. His advisor only asks if he was alright.)
(Are they hiding something?)
(Well it's obvious that they were, weren't they?)
Chiyo is a healer, again, it is her nature to care and nurture. It is her instinct as much as the needle in between her fingertips and the chemicals in the tablets.
But it's not like he can heal something that's not really human, can she?
(Right?)
(You see, it's funny, healing things that would never heal— metal through bone and iron through skin that never quite closes up the way phantom pains could go away, in a series of living dreams in the wake of every day sense. Like a gash on the earth, a valley and a river, dried up and knows of the inklings of the past.)
(And you can't heal what's never there in the first place.)