POV: Garou
Summary: Inside Garou's fractured consciousness, we experience his reality: fragmented sensations, flash-panic instincts, and the echo of forgotten battles. He doesn't think in sentences. He doesn't remember faces. But when he hears the word "hero," something old and terrible flickers back to life—something buried under fists, screams, and defeat.
Sound moves through him before he hears it.
Vibrations in glass. Pressure shifts. The low hum of electricity behind the walls. All of it registers as pattern. Patterns he can track. Predict. Exploit.
People talk. Loud ones. Dry ones. One of them laughs like thunder. The other clicks when she walks—sharp, controlled, dangerous.
He doesn't understand their names.
He understands their postures.
The tall one—muscles like stone, voice like battle—he is loud, but honest. Predictable. The man with the shield—cautious, centered. A leader. The woman with red hair—sharp. Knife-mind. Cold heart. She sees him the way predators see each other.
Then there's the white one.
The woman who entered.
Her voice had edges. Her thoughts did not speak in words—they screamed in color, bled into the back of his skull. She reached for something, and touched everything instead.
It hurt.
But he let her.
He let them all.
He is not confused.
He is waiting.
His body is a coil of memory. Every twitch of another's foot, every flex of a thigh muscle—he sees it. Stores it. Adjusts.
He watches the shield-man walk. Then mimic.
The red-hair one twist—he folds it into himself.
The green one, the angry one, he is not here now. But Garou remembers the tension. The fight scent. The way his blood moved when near rage.
And that tall one—Thor. His charge. His step. His fake-left. He predicted all of it.
Because Garou has done it all before.
He cannot see their faces from the past. But he remembers the weight of them. The rhythm of impact. The pain of change.
Pain taught him.
Pain made him.
Flesh broke. Bones shattered. He learned to bend, not snap. To pivot, not resist.
The others call him something.
Garou doesn't care.
He hears a word—muttered. Laughed.
"Growl."
That's not it.
Another voice speaks.
Not mocking. Not loud.
Just… clear.
"Hero."
Everything stops.
The word cuts through him like a bell through silence.
He doesn't know who said it first.
He doesn't know if it was for him.
But something inside stirs.
Buried deep, under ice and fists and old rage.
A voice—not his own, not anymore—whispers:
"I wanted to be one."
Then he closes his eyes.
And forgets it again.