I Am Writing A Sailor Au Rn And I Can Still Choose What To Make It So Let's Choose Together!!!

boyfriend gamer shigiraki!

imagining dating gamer shigiraki who actually is very popular.

he streams various online games, sometimes with friends but mostly by himself. with his competitive nature and wide game knowledge, he’s actually insanely good at any game he tries out.

to be honest, the one way to describe him is a loser stuck in a hot body. when he concentrates on his game he subconsciously pouts. he got popular from his reactions to scary games, no matter how hard he tries he can’t help but get scared whenever he hears the littlest noise, a complete scaredy cat.

who’s viewers thought he was a complete loner until one steam a couple months ago when someone took his attention off the screen, a smile immediately spreading across his face, as he thanked the person off camera for the food they gave him.

ignoring the comments curious of who was making the stone face streamer smile, “who got you smiling like that?” he read off, “none of your business.” the biggest mistake of his life. after that, every moment his attention was snatched from the stream, questions of if the loner had a special someone would flood his chat.

gamer shigiraki! who, for his 750k follower special, decided to stop being so introverted and answer some of his fans questions. “yes, I shower, next question.”, “i’ve been streaming for about 4 years.” he’s been avoiding all the girlfriend questions, not because he was embarrassed or ashamed, simply because he didn’t know if you would be comfortable with it, after all 90% of his viewers are men.

while in the middle of answering questions there was a knock on his door, you peeking through. he had been streaming for some hours now and hadn't eaten once, so you took it upon yourself to make him something. setting the plate down, he reached out to rub the small of your back, thanking you.

“can i say hi?” you whispered to him. you had been watching his stream and was genuinely alarmed by the amount of people who suspected him of having a girlfriend, not that they were wrong, it was just insane. You doubt that the comments would stop anytime soon so hey, why not give them what they want?

shigiraki was honestly surprised by the question, you have not once voiced any want to be on his stream, but he couldn’t hide the slight tint in his face of the thought of you showing interest in what he does. “of course.”

pulling you in by your waist to be in view of the camera, “hi!… what else do i say. I’m shigiraki’s girlfriend!” you smiled giving a small wave. the comments flooded with different variations of ‘no ways’ and ‘i knew its’. “how long have we been together?” he put a finger in his chin, “for about -no i’m not keeping her hostage- for about 5 years.”

nothing could hide the excitement on his face knowing that the person he loved so much was sitting next to him, interacting with his fans. after some time you stood up and stretched. “alright i’m gonna go now,” you smiled, giving him a kiss on his cheek and one last wave to his viewers “love you! don’t stream for too long today!” at the sound of the door closing, he turned his attention back to his viewers.

“no, i didn’t meet her in vr? what the fuck?”

lowk wanna make a pt 2

Enough to Go By -- a Shigaraki x F!reader fic

Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1

You had a best friend when you were little, just like almost everyone, and the two of you were as different as two people could be. He was a boy and you were a girl. You were the oldest of four, and he was the youngest of two. His family was rich because his dad was some kind of business genius, and your family was – not. You and your best friend had exactly two things in common. First, you lived across from each other on the same street, him in a big new house and you in one that had been falling apart since before your parents were born. And second, and maybe most important, neither of you had a quirk.

It was okay for your best friend. He still had time. People in his family got their quirks when they were two or three or four or maybe even six, like they were supposed to. But everyone in your family is born with theirs. Your family’s quirks do different things, but they’re the same type of thing – powering up or watering down or just changing some part of somebody else, and they’re active until the person’s old enough to turn them off.

You hated being home. You had one younger brother who could turn your hearing up and down, one younger sister who could turn your color vision on and off, and twin baby brothers who could make you throw up whenever they wanted to. Going to school, or going across the street to play in front of Tenko’s house with him and his big sister and his dog, was the closest things ever got to normal for you.

Tenko wanted to be a hero. You knew he’d be the best hero, because he was a hero already, even without a quirk. Nobody was every left out when you and Tenko played at school, because Tenko could make everybody feel included, and you spent so much time trying to placate your siblings that you knew how to make sure everybody had fun. But for everybody to have fun, people needed to be there. Tenko was the one everybody believed in, the one who made everybody feel important. When you spent time with Tenko, you felt like you belonged. Tenko was already a hero, even as a kid. You knew he’d be amazing at it when he grew up.

Only he didn’t grow up, your best friend. You walked home from school together one day, said goodbye and crossed to your opposite sides of the street, and when you looked out your window the next morning, Tenko’s house was gone.

A villain did it. That’s what everybody said, and you didn’t know what else it could be, because Tenko’s house was in ruins, like a giant had smashed it with its foot or someone had blown it up from the inside. You raced across the street without your shoes on, right into the middle of what was left, and even though your parents spent money they didn’t have on a specialist whose quirk let them wipe memories right out of your brain, you still have nightmares sometimes about what you saw. Tenko’s big sister Hana was dead. His dog was dead. His mom and his grandparents and his dad were dead. But he wasn’t there, so you made yourself believe he was alive.

And some part of you kept believing, even after the foundations of an apartment building were laid over the spot where Tenko’s house used to be, even after your family moved away. Your youngest younger siblings, a set of triplets born after you moved, thought Tenko was your imaginary friend because of how much you talked about him. And even once you stopped talking about him, you never quite stopped thinking about him. Your best friend, who wanted to be a hero. Who would have been the greatest hero the world had ever seen.

Everyone else forgot him, forgot him so cleanly that you almost wonder if it was a quirk. But you remember your best friend – small things, weird things, like how he’d sometimes get so excited he’d almost cry. His All Might impression, which was so bad it almost worked. His dry skin and the way he’d scratch his neck. You wonder what happened, why he wasn’t found with his family. You wonder a lot of things.

“Everybody loses touch with their neighborhood kids,” Hirono says when you say something about it, while you and your friends are getting drunk in Kazuo’s backyard one weekend. “You’re not special.”

“Don’t be mean,” Yoshimi protests. “Her friend died. That’s different!”

“She just said he didn’t die. She thinks he’s still alive,” Sho says. He whistles and rotates one finger by his ear. “Cuckoo.”

“There should be a podcast about this,” Mitsuru says seriously, and Hirono and Mitsuko laugh at him. “No, there should! Five people confirmed murdered and a kid goes missing – and it’s never solved? That’s podcast material.”

“It’s newsworthy,” Kazuo says, his voice as expressionless as it always is these days. “Have you looked it up?”

“Yes,” you say. Too many times, probably. “The articles don’t say my friend went missing.”

“They said he died?”

“They don’t mention him at all.”

“Ooh. Spooky.” Sho makes a UFO noise, and Yoji, Yoshimi’s on-again, off-again asshole boyfriend, throws in some spiritfingers to go with it. “Maybe he’s imaginary after all.”

“Or maybe you do have a quirk,” Yuichiro, Mitsuko’s latest too-innocent boyfriend says earnestly. “Your family’s all status effects, right? Maybe you made everybody else forget him.”

“Why would I do that?” you ask blankly. You’re a little drunk. “He’s my best friend.”

“I thought I was your best friend,” Kazuo says. Kazuo’s also a little drunk. “You don’t have a quirk. I would know. I know everything.”

The confidence is annoying, or it would be, if it wasn’t true – and if you didn’t know just how badly Kazuo’s quirk has ruined his life. “Maybe not,” Ryuhei says speculatively. “You only know what you know to know, you know?”

You try to parse that for a second, then give up. Mitsuru is wheezing with laughter. “Come on,” Ryuhei says, annoyed. “You know what I mean. Kazuo only knows the answers to questions he knows to ask, right? What if he hasn’t asked the right question?”

Kazuo’s quirk is called Search Engine, and it’s not an overstatement. He can ascertain anything he asks about, and if the questions aren’t hyperspecific, he can take in vast amounts of information. Too much information for even the smartest person to sort through and interpret without going crazy under the strain. He was going to be a hero, but UA High pushed him too hard, and something went wrong in his head. The smartest guy you know, who used to be funny and kind and should be changing the world for the better right now, is instead drunk in his parents’ backyard, still trying to figure out where his emotions went. You haven’t seen Kazuo care about anything in two years.

But you can see him thinking about what Ryuhei said, trying to wrap his mind around a question. “Don’t,” you say, and he looks at you, puzzled. “If I had a quirk, I’d have had it when I was born, just like the rest of my family.”

“Your family has some funky quirks,” Yoji says. You have a feeling you know where he’s going with this, and you’re not wrong. “Isn’t one of your cousins a villainess?”

“She barely counts,” Hirono says. “What could they even charge her with if they caught her? Possession of a video camera and bad taste in men? They could charge Yoshimi with that, too.”

“Hey!”

Sho and Ryuhei join in on the ribbing, and you lean back against the steps. Kazuo rises from his chair a little unsteadily and comes to sit by you. “You never mentioned this friend of yours before.”

“It never came up.” You glance sidelong at him. “Why? Are you jealous?”

“No,” Kazuo says. He hiccups. His alcohol tolerance has always been weirdly low. “I’m surprised you never asked me to find him. Maybe I could.”

“I know.” If Kazuo ever recovers from what UA High did to him, the government will be all over him. He could find anything, anyone – but like Ryuhei said, he has to know what questions to ask. “I think I’m scared of what you’d find. I don’t want him to be dead.”

“Dead might be better.”

You almost choke on the sip of vodka you just took. “Excuse me?”

“If he died, he died,” Kazuo says. No shit. “If he’s still alive, he’s been missing for fifteen years. During my work-study, I assisted in the search for several missing children. Nothing good had happened to the ones we found alive.”

You hadn’t thought about that, what it would actually mean if Tenko is still alive, and your brain supplies you instantly with a list of terrible things that could have happened to your best friend. Your imagination is pretty vivid. Your stomach turns. “I don’t want that,” you say. “I just want him to be okay.”

“Sometimes dead is better,” Kazuo says again. And then he’s quiet.

You try to get back into the mood of the party, but what Kazuo said sticks, and you’re kind of mad at him about it. The old Kazuo wouldn’t have said something like that, or else he would have put it more gently. You miss the old Kazuo. Thanks to a villain fifteen years ago and UA fucking High, you’re now short two best friends.

Kazuo’s a good guy, but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t drawn to him because of who he reminded you of. You have a soft spot for dark-haired boys who want to be heroes. If Tenko hadn’t gone missing and the two of you had gotten to grow up together, you probably would have wound up with a big, stupid crush on him, the supercharged version of how you felt about Kazuo. But a relationship between the two of you wouldn’t have worked out, for the same reason your relationship with Kazuo didn’t work. Being a hero comes first. Being a hero always comes first with guys like them. You probably wouldn’t like them as much if it didn’t.

Getting drunk at Kazuo’s is a typical Friday night pastime among your friends, and usually everybody sleeps over. Everybody usually includes you, but you have to work tomorrow, which means you have to go home. Sometimes you and Kazuo still fool around when you’re both drunk, and you want to avoid that, too. You drink a glass of water and start sobering up while the others are still sorting out places to sleep, and then you tell them all good by and head out, taking three trains in a loop around the city to give yourself even more time to sober up before you have to walk home. You don’t live in the nicest neighborhood. You need to be alert.

When you finally get off the train at your stop, you realize you’ve got another problem. You’re hungry, and you won’t have time to cook when you get home if you want to sleep at all tonight. The all-night convenience store a few blocks up from your apartment is beckoning to you, and you give in without a fight. You’ll pick something to eat, eat it in the store for one last period of sobering-up, and walk the rest of the way home.

You feel a little better with a few bites of food in your stomach, and you’re pretty sure you’re not going to throw it up later. You hang out in the corner of the shop, a good spot to people-watch from if there were any people in here but you and the owner. The TV behind the counter is blaring the news about some villain attack, somewhere – two dumb-ass middle schoolers, one sludge villain, one can of whoop-ass opened by All Might. What else is new.

“Turn that shit off.”

The voice is raspy, and it’s coming from the far corner of the store. So there’s somebody else in here after all. You rise to your tiptoes and peer over the shelves to spot the speaker. They’re wearing a black hoodie with the hood up and browsing for energy drinks, and apparently they have a real problem with what’s on TV – which means the proprietor has a real problem with them. “Got a problem with heroics? Or does seeing real heroes just remind you what a bum you are?”

“Fuck off,” the guy in the hoodie says sharply. “You’ve got more in common with me than you do with them. If you were there, you think you’d run in to help? No. You’d wait for a hero, because you’re useless and pathetic. At least I don’t walk around pretending to be something I’m not.”

Hoodie guy sort of has a point, even if you don’t like how he’s phrasing it. Hoodie guy also sucks at reading the room, because after that little back-and-forth, he yanks an energy drink out of the case and a package of sour candies off a shelf and heads up to the counter. The proprietor laughs in his face. “Get out of here. If you think I’m selling even a stick of gum to you, you’re out of your mind.”

Hoodie guy’s shoulders tense. “You’re so desperate to defend All Might that you won’t take my money? He’s not gonna fuck you.”

You must be a little more drunk than you thought, because you have to clamp your hands over your mouth to stifle a laugh. But there’s nothing funny about the situation that’s unfolding in front of you. The proprietor’s looking increasingly pissed, and Hoodie Guy’s hands are out of his pockets, open and twitching at his sides. You don’t know what either of their quirks are, but you’ve got seven siblings. You know what it looks like when a situation’s about to spiral out of control.

“I said get out,” the proprietor spits. He shoves the drink and the package of candy back across the counter, hard enough that they fall off and roll across the floor. Hoodie Guy’s hands begin to lift from his sides, and you step out of your corner. “You want to start something? Go ahead. The cops will be here so fast –”

“Not fast enough for you,” Hoodie Guy hisses. His hands are all the way up, reaching over the counter.

You scoop the snacks off the floor and duck into the scant space between Hoodie Guy and the counter. You elbow him a bit by accident and he stumbles, swears at you. You ignore him and focus on the proprietor. “Hi. I’m still hungry. Can I get these?”

The proprietor squints at you, nonplussed. Behind you, Hoodie Guy’s gotten his feet under him, and if it’s possible, he’s extra pissed. “Get out of my way.”

“You don’t want this kind of trouble,” you say, ignoring Hoodie Guy. He’s the instigator. You need him to shut up so you can handle this before it escalates. “I know you don’t. You want him out of here and he wants his snacks. If you don’t want his money, mine’s just as good.”

You’re conscious of Hoodie Guy looming over your shoulder. He’s not all that much taller than you, but he’s standing a little too close. You take your wallet out, and that seems to settle the issue. “You’re lucky your girlfriend’s here to help you out. That’ll be ¥1800.”

You pay up and collect the snacks. When you turn away from the counter, Hoodie Guy’s right there, and you get your first good look at his face – or at the life-sized model hand clamped over his face. That’s – weird. You can’t see his expression, but his tone of voice is unmistakable. “If you think –”

“I know, I know,” you interrupt. “You’re not gonna fuck me.”

It’s not a joke you’d make sober, but with the proprietor calmed slightly down, you have to knock Hoodie Guy off his game somehow. It works. He makes a weird, strangled sound, and you grab him by his sleeve and tow him out the door.

He lets you do it, which is a surprise, and you let him go as soon as the doors close behind you. You hold out the snack and the energy drink. “Here.”

You can’t see his face, but you can see one red eye, peering out at you through the fingers of the hand. “It was pretty stupid of you to get in my way.”

“It was pretty stupid of you to go up to the counter. If you’d stormed off he wouldn’t have chased you.” You’ve seen Sho use that tactic before – needle a store owner until they want him gone more than they want to check his pockets. “Just take this, okay?”

He raises one hand and scratches at his neck. There’s something familiar about the motion, and the scarred, scraped-raw patch of skin there. Maybe you’ve seen something similar at work. “Either you used some kind of quirk or you got lucky. Which is it?”

“Neither. I have seven siblings and I’m good at toning things down.” You’ve wished for a quirk that lets you affect others’ moods more than a few times. You had to learn your de-escalation techniques the hard way. “Do you want these or not?”

He’s still scratching, and something’s pulling at the back of your mind, harder and harder. “Seven siblings,” he says slowly. “That’s three more.”

“Three more than what?” you say, puzzled. And then it clicks.

You have seven siblings now. When you lived across the street from your best friend, you only had four. And now you get why the scratching looks so familiar, why there’s so much scar tissue in the place he’s clawing at – because he’s been scratching that same spot for a decade and a half. It doesn’t matter than his hair is grey-blue instead of black, that his eyes are red instead of grey. It doesn’t even matter that he’s got a creepy hand stuck over his face. You know who you’re looking at, and the surge of joy that overtakes you is like nothing you’ve ever felt before.

You’d keep it to yourself, ordinarily. But tonight you’re a little drunk, and you can’t hold it in. “Tenko,” you say, and he freezes like he’s been struck by lightning. “You’re alive!”

Tenko stays frozen until you reach for him, at which point he bolts, and you really shouldn’t follow him – but you’re drunk and it’s your best friend and he’s alive just like you knew he was, so you chase after him. He was a little clumsy when you were kids. You were always a little faster on your feet, but his legs are longer than yours now, and he keeps you at a fair distance until he trips.

It’s sort of your fault he trips. He’s looking back over his shoulder, checking where you are, and he’s not watching his feet. It’s a bad fall. He sprawls out, the hand over his face dislodging and bouncing across the concrete, and you hear him cursing under his breath in a voice that carries a familiar strain. You’ve heard that before. You do what you did back then. You run to his side and drop to your knees, hands outstretched to help. “Tenko –”

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!” Tenko lashes out with one hand, and instinct tells you to get out of range. The hand he lashes out with looks wrong – hurt, maybe, in the fall. His other hand is up over his face, covering it the same way the model hand was. “Father – I need – where –”

Father. You wonder if Tenko knows what happened to his father – but he’s feeling around on the concrete with the maybe-broken hand, and you realize what he’s looking for. “It’s over here,” you say. “Stay there. I can –”

“No.” Tenko lunges past you, seizes the hand, secures it over his face. Then he turns on you, and the hatred in his eyes sends a bolt of pure terror down your spine.

He knocks you onto your back. You know some self-defense – like any girl, like any person without a quirk – and you kick and thrash, arching your back, trying to throw him off. Some part of your mind is still spinning, because it’s Tenko, your best friend, who wants to be a hero – and it’s Tenko, his forearm coming down across your throat and half his body weight leaning onto it. You cough and sputter, and Tenko raises his other hand, all five fingers outstretched. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll kill you fast. Lie and it’ll be slow. Who are you?”

You don’t know how he expects you to answer with his arm over your throat. Dark spots are beginning to fill your vision. You shove at his arm, and his hand closes around your wrist. His grip is hot and dry and shaking, and a split second after he’s touched you, the burning starts. It’s like his hand is dipped in acid, like it’s clawing through your skin one layer at a time, and you scream in pain. Or you try to. He increases the pressure on your throat and chokes the sound off. “Don’t touch me,” he snarls. “And don’t scream. Who are you?”

You manage to rasp out your name, and you see Tenko’s expression shift. “We went to school together,” you gasp. “I lived across the street from you. We played together. You were –”

You black out for a second, and the pressure on your throat lifts slightly. “What?” Tenko spits. “I was what?”

“My best friend,” you whisper. Your eyes well up, tears running down your face when you blink. “I missed you so much –”

Tenko stares down at you for a moment longer. Then he recoils away from you, up onto his feet and back five or six steps. He’s cradling his wrist. You roll from your back to your side and gasp for air. There’s a rattle in your breathing that tells you your windpipe’s damaged, and when you blink the tears and spots from your vision to stare at your wrist, you see that your skin is raw, bloody and oozing. There’s the outline of all five of Tenko’s fingers, his thumb and middle finger joined, rotted into your skin.

“Go,” Tenko says. You look numbly up at him and see his face twisted behind the hand. “Now.”

Your wrist – his hair – his eyes – Tenko has a quirk now. An awful quirk. “What happened to you?” you ask helplessly. “Where did you go? Are you –”

“Go!” Tenko snaps at you. “Before I change my mind. Run!”

You scramble backwards and collide with something. The energy drink and the package of candy, which you dropped when you ran to help Tenko after he fell. The sight of them makes you want to burst into tears again. You don’t want to take them with you. You bought them for him. Without looking his way, you pick them up and set them on the ground between the two of you, pushing them towards him so he knows who they’re for. Then you force yourself to your hands and your knees and your feet and run for your life, away from the best friend you now know you’ve lost for good.

You didn’t want Tenko to be dead, and he isn’t. But Kazuo was right, too. Maybe dead would have been better. Anything would have been better than this.

✋

hi! 🪐

19f! just wanted to see if anybody would be interested in a roleplay for the following fandoms...

🌟demon slayer (mainly looking for demon slayer! as im currently hyper-fixating on it.)

🌟bluelock

🌟my hero academia

🌟jjk

i've been roleplaying for a long time now, and id love to find a partner to roleplay with, and someone i can plot or chat with ooc. i love fleshing out plots, sharing ideas, as well as world building.

im looking to make friends out of my roleplay partner!

id be happy to play as anyone for u!

i am semi-literate to advanced literate and id prefer if my partner were the same!

please be okay with smut! id love to include it in roleplays. although, please don't come to me with fully nsfw related plots.

im looking for 18+ partners only! i usually play as canon characters., and although im looking to do a cc x cc roleplay, although i'm alright with a cc oc roleplay as well.

we can talk further about boundaries and anything else we are looking for to be sure that we are on the same page.

interact and ill reach out to you🌟

.

Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 5) - a Shigaraki x f! Reader fic

You knew the empty house in a quiet neighborhood was too good to be true, but you were so desperate to get out of your tiny apartment that you didn't care, and now you find yourself sharing space with something inhuman and immensely powerful. As you struggle to coexist with a ghost whose intentions you're unsure of, you find yourself drawn unwillingly into the upside world of spirits and conjurers, and becoming part of a neighborhood whose existence depends on your house staying exactly as it is, forever. But ghosts can change, just like people can. And as your feelings and your ghost's become more complex and intertwined, everything else begins to crumble. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Chapter 5

There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it, and you’re slowly coming around to the idea that what’s wrong with your house might be one of your favorite things about it. Part of it is how happy Phantom is – you feel guilty leaving her at home alone, but a lot less guilty when you know she’s with Tomura, who’s kind of crazy about her. Part of it is knowing that you’ll never find another insect in your house again, and that even if you do, you won’t have to kill it. Part of it is never worrying about a break-in, because based on how Tomura responds to even friendly people coming over, he could probably give any potential intruder a massive heart attack even without materializing.

All of that is nice. But if you’re being honest – and you try to make yourself be honest, with yourself if no one else – the main reason why you’re so happy with what’s wrong with your house is because you and Tomura are sort of, maybe, finally getting along.

You have to buy a new microwave after the soup can incident, and it wasn’t the only time Tomura tried to take care of you while you were sick. He ruined a lot of the stuff he tried to help with – flooded the hallway with bubbles after using liquid detergent in the washing machine, left the fridge open for eight hours and cranked up your electricity bill to unsustainable levels – but when you explained what went wrong, he didn’t get mad at you. He called you an idiot a lot, mostly for getting sick in the first place, but he also fed Phantom and brought you food so you wouldn’t have to get off the couch, and in the biggest shock of all, he let Keigo into the house to check on you. You’re pretty sure he only did it to piss Dabi off, but still.

There hasn’t been any more touching. Other than dragging you from the hallway to the couch the first day you were sick, Tomura doesn’t get close to you unless he’s dematerialized. That’s fine with you. You’re pretending the whole incident didn’t happen, or trying to. Sometimes the thought creeps into your head anyway. You’ll be doing something completely innocuous and all at once your mind will explode with the memory of Tomura’s raspy voice begging you to keep talking, not to leave him.

And then the images come in, things you never saw but things you can picture perfectly: His pale skin flushed and his shoulders rising and falling in unsteady pants and his hands frantic and shaking as he jerks himself off. It invariably turns your face into a furnace, and Tomura always notices. But Tomura thinks a flushed face means you’ve got a fever, so you’re safe from being found out. You don’t know what would happen if he did find out. The longer you go without anybody finding out anything at all, the better.

The flu sweeps through the neighborhood, but strangely enough, you’re the only non-ghost who catches it. Eri, Himiko, and Magne all get sick, and Hizashi spends a lot of time gloating until he comes down with it, too. The only sort-of-former ghost who avoids it is Dabi, but that’s because Dabi never goes outside. Or Keigo won’t let him go outside. You’re not sure which it is.

“It’s weird,” Spinner says. You’re giving him a ride to the grocery store because you both need to go, and because you owe him for somehow catching a whole anthill and leaving it on your porch. “That just the ghosts caught it. Usually they don’t get sick.”

“Shouldn’t they get sick more than we do? They don’t have immunity or anything.”

“I guess,” Spinner says, frowning. “But I brought home all kinds of weird shit when I was in school, and Magne never caught any of it until now.”

That is weird. “Jin says he and the others always got sick, but never Himiko before this time. If it wasn’t for me getting it, I’d think it was a ghost thing, too.”

“It could still be a ghost thing even if you got it,” Spinner says. “You spend all your time hanging out with the most powerful ghost anybody’s ever seen. Maybe you’ve got enough ghost on you to catch the – hey, are you okay?”

“Fine,” you wheeze. There’s no way you’re telling Spinner that you misheard “ghost on you” as “ghost in you” and choked on your own spit. “Go on. What were you saying?”

But Spinner’s changing the subject. “What’s that like, anyway? Living with a ghost that strong.”

“You should know. Magne’s pretty tough.”

“She’s got a body count, sure,” Spinner says. All the ghosts in the neighborhood have killed somebody, but Magne and Hizashi are the only ones who need both hands and both feet to count how many. “But I never got the feeling from her that the whole street gets from Tomura. That aura he projects is something else. Did you really not feel it when you were buying the place?”

“I didn’t,” you say. “I knew there had to be something off about the house, or somebody else would have bought it. But I did everything I could think of to figure it out and there was nothing. I’ve never felt what you all are talking about from him. From Hizashi, sure. But not from him.”

“Hizashi’s scary even as a human,” Spinner agrees. “I don’t know how Aizawa handles it. I’d be pissing myself.”

“Aizawa seems pretty bomb-proof,” you say. “I guess that’s a good thing. Or they would have been in trouble when Eri’s conjurer showed up.”

The whole street knows the story, even if the Aizawa family never talks about it. You heard five separate versions of it, one each from Himiko, Jin, Jin’s little brother, a former ghost named Atsuhiro who lives at the top of the street, and Keigo. You’re inclined to trust Keigo’s version, but you see the look on Spinner’s face, and it makes you question things. “Do you know something about it that I don’t?”

“They had the same conjurer,” Spinner says. “Eri and Magne.”

Your jaw drops. “We’re pretty sure he was Atsuhiro’s, too,” Spinner continues, “but Atsuhiro says he doesn’t remember who conjured him. The circumstances are pretty close, though. That conjurer liked abandoned buildings, or ones that were in danger of falling in. When the building comes down, it turns the ghost loose.”

“He wanted to set them free?”

“I guess,” Spinner says. “Loose ghosts can cause a lot more trouble than trapped ones. I’m glad he’s dead. And I’m glad he found the Aizawas first.”

Eri’s conjurer sounds like a real creep, but Spinner didn’t strike you as the kind of guy who wishes he could shove the bad stuff off onto somebody else. “Why? You don’t think Magne could have taken him?”

“She probably could have,” Spinner says. He gets out of the car and heads for the store, leaving you to chase after him. “But there’s this legend. Or a myth. Maybe a ghost story. It says that if you kill your own conjurer, even after you’re embodied, it sends you back.”

“I thought they couldn’t go back to the world between,” you say. “Aizawa never said –”

“Aizawa doesn’t know everything,” Spinner says. His jaw is clenched, and the next words he speaks are hard to hear. “I didn’t want her to go back.”

“Oh.” Your feelings on Tomura are just mixed enough that the idea of him vanishing permanently doesn’t make you panic. Or at least you tell yourself that it doesn’t make you panic and try not to think about it any harder than that. But Spinner looks miserable just saying it out loud. “Um –”

“I need to grab my stuff. I’ll meet you back here when I’m done.”

“Okay,” you say. You want to say something else, but Spinner vanishes down the aisle before you can think of what it should be.

You’re turning a lot of things over in your head as you do your grocery shopping. The legend about ghosts returning to the world between. The world between itself, what it’s like there. The now-dead conjurer who summoned Magne and Eri. The maybe-still-alive conjurer who summoned Tomura. But Tomura’s still a ghost. Even if his conjurer came back, there’s nothing they could do to hurt him.

You remember Spinner saying that Magne didn’t like this world at first, all the way back on the first day you met Aizawa. Maybe he was worried she’d go back if she got the chance. You gather up your last items, pay for them, and go to wait for Spinner, who comes back five minutes after you with a bottle of soda, a bunch of bananas, and a whole bag full of makeup and nail polish from the discount bin. “It’s for Magne,” he says when he sees you looking at it. “She likes pretty stuff. I’d buy nicer stuff if I could afford it.”

“Sometimes the cheap stuff is best.” Your favorite sunscreen is a discount brand, and you’ve never had very much money. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I think I was being kind of insensitive.”

“You didn’t know or anything,” Spinner says. “I don’t talk about it very much. I, like – it’s not heartwarming. Or cute. Or anything like that.”

“It doesn’t have to be any of those things,” you say. It’s not like your ghost story fits, either. You struggle with what to say as the two of you walk back out to the parking lot. “You don’t have to tell me. You can if you want to.”

“Really? Everybody else wanted to drag it out of me,” Spinner says. “Somebody new shows up in the neighborhood, and everybody else cases the joint for a few days and comes crawling out of the woodwork. I’d been here two weeks when Aizawa ambushed me with a tape recorder. Everybody’s in everybody else’s business all the time.”

You didn’t get that treatment, but then again, you didn’t have a ghost when you moved in. “It makes sense,” you say as you start the car. Spinner raises his eyebrows. “Ghosts don’t have any boundaries at all. The more of them you hang out with, the less boundaries you have.”

Spinner snorts. “You wouldn’t believe what happens when they start talking to each other. The shit they’ll say – one time I heard Himiko telling Eri how cute it is that Jin picks his nose and farts in his sleep. And she wasn’t being sarcastic. Once they choose a human, they really commit.”

You wonder what Tomura would say about you to the other ghosts, if he ever talked to them. If he’d say anything about you at all. “How do you think about your relationship with Magne, then? Is she like your friend, your sister, your aunt –”

“My big sister,” Spinner says. You back out of the parking spot and steer towards the road, and the noise in the car almost covers up what he says next. “My mom.”

You’re not close with your parents. There was never any real reason why, and it’s not like you hate them. You’re an only child, and the three of you just never felt like a family – not like the families your friends were part of, or the ones you saw on TV, or even the weird ghost families in the neighborhood you live in now. Maybe it was different when you were too young to remember, but as you grew up, the three of you felt more like roommates than anything else. You always felt like you were alone. Moving out just made it official.

But it’s not that way for everybody. Not even most people. You glance sideways at Spinner. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then he tells you the story.

Spinner’s parents weren’t great. That’s not an uncommon story in the neighborhood – Jin’s dad was an all-purpose batterer, and Shinsou was in foster care – but unlike the two of them, there was no friendly ghost in Spinner’s house. Spinner ran away from home when he was twelve, and nobody looked for him. He went from town to town, building to building, alone. He was fifteen when he found himself staying in the abandoned warehouse Magne haunted.

At first, Spinner says, there was no way to tell that the place was haunted at all. When Magne showed herself, she was always embodied, and he thought she was human, just like him. And she was nice to him. She brought him things he needed, although she never said where she found them. She talked to him, although she never answered the questions he asked her about herself. “She cared about me,” Spinner says. “For real, not pretending like everybody else did. I never wanted to leave.”

But he had to. Spinner caught the attention of the wrong gang of criminals, and although Magne hid him, they found him anyway. Magne’s way of draining people was different than Tomura’s is. Spinner tells you about lying on his back on the concrete floor of the warehouse, watching the people who were attacking him implode, one by one. “And then, with the last one, something happened,” Spinner says. “The whole world – I don’t know how to describe it. It did something. Usually people aren’t conscious when their ghosts embody themselves permanently, but I was. I saw it happen. I knew before she did.”

You wish Spinner could describe it better. It’s not like you’re ever going to see for yourself. “It was scary for everybody,” Spinner says. “Me and her. There we are in that stupid warehouse and there are dead people everywhere and we can leave, finally – except I’m so beat I can’t tell which end is up. It was three whole days before we got anywhere it was safe to talk about stuff.”

“Was there a lot to talk about?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Spinner says, shaking his head. “All the human stuff? Even when they embody themselves, they never embody themselves long enough to get a feel for what it’s really like. And there’s no way for them to experience all the human stuff ahead of time. Like eating, sleeping, taking a piss –”

You imagine the look on Tomura’s face if he permanently embodied himself and then found out about having to pee, and then you’re struggling not to laugh. “That’s bad enough,” Spinner says. “But then there’s the thing where she’s, like – a whole human. A whole human who didn’t exist before. There was paperwork. It sucked.”

You hadn’t thought about that. “How does that even work?”

“Honestly? That’s how we met Hizashi,” Spinner says. You blink. “He spent so long blending into the human world before he embodied himself full-time that he had to learn to forge documents to do stuff, and he’s creepy good at it. He gets you the basic stuff – birth certificate, ID – and then he builds a whole paper trail. Somebody who looks at Magne’s documents is never going to know she didn’t exist five years ago.”

“So that’s how you found this place, too,” you realize. That means Hizashi and Aizawa were here before Spinner and Magne, but when did the rest of them move in? “Who was here first?”

Spinner gives you an odd look. “Your ghost,” he says. “Tomura.”

“He’s not mine,” you say, almost on reflex. “He’d be mad if he heard you say that.”

Spinner basically straight up ignores you. “I gotta say, it was weird to hear you name-drop him that first time. We’ve all always known he’s there, but we know so little about him that he’s basically got legend status – and to you he’s just Tomura. And that’s it.”

“What else was he supposed to be? I didn’t know anything about any of this until I moved here.” You feel hurt, even though you shouldn’t. Spinner’s not saying any of the things your brain is telling you he’s saying – not that you shouldn’t be here, not that you don’t deserve to be in the same house as Tomura, not that you don’t understand. “I’m glad he does what he does for everybody in the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s conscious –”

“Oh, we know that. He doesn’t give a shit,” Spinner says, and laughs. “Maybe that’s why it’s weird. Because he clearly gives a shit about you.”

You knew that. Hearing somebody else say it, somebody like Spinner who doesn’t have a weird relationship with their ghost, makes you all kinds of uncomfortable. “Like, he got on the phone for you. Live ghosts hate technology. They hate anything they can’t haunt. For a ghost like him to get on the phone, he must care a lot.”

You laugh, wondering if it sounds as uncomfortable as you feel. “I still have to apologize to Aizawa for that phone call. Tomura was kind of a dick.”

“They’re all kind of dicks,” Spinner says, and your laughter feels a little less uncomfortable this time. “They can’t really help it when they don’t understand. The embodied ones learn eventually.”

You’re not so sure about that. Dabi’s still very much of a dick. Magne was a dick when she was sick, but so was everybody who got the ghost flu, you included. Hizashi’s a dick on purpose sometimes, but most of the time he isn’t. He can’t be. Aizawa wouldn’t have stayed with him otherwise.

Out of all the ghost families in the neighborhood, you’ve spent the most time observing Aizawa’s. You don’t know why, when you’ve got Keigo and Dabi right across the street, but your eyes are consistently drawn to the house where Aizawa and Hizashi and their kids live. At first it might have been because you needed to confirm your conclusion. You needed to know whether Aizawa married Hizashi because he wanted to or because he had to. And you’ve watched them long enough that you’re sure: Aizawa loves Hizashi, in the same weird way Hizashi loves him.

It’s not like you can’t see why, even if you’re legitimately spooked by Hizashi. There’s nobody more committed to a relationship than an embodied ghost. Hizashi likes to make sweeping statements about all the things he’d do if Aizawa asked him to – like fighting God, or bringing him a piece of the sun, or breaking into the cat shelter and stealing all the cats – but what he actually does is quieter. Aizawa’s relaxed when Hizashi’s around. He doesn’t look so tired. He smiles more. Hizashi makes him comfortable. Hizashi makes him happy.

There’s a line in one of the few ghost books Aizawa didn’t write that’s been playing in your head lately: Ghosts haunt the space they’re given. That’s how they haunt houses. Maybe that’s how they haunt people, too.

“Thanks,” Spinner says, and you glance at him. Somehow you’re parked in front of his house already, when you barely remember driving home. “For the ride. And for not being weird about things.”

“Any time,” you say, and you mean it. You watch as Spinner makes his way up the front steps and opens the door, only to find Magne waiting there already. She hugs him so hard she lifts him off his feet.

You drive the rest of the way back to your house, lost in thought, and greet Phantom on autopilot before you start unpacking the groceries. You know Tomura’s around somewhere, and sure enough, there’s a puff of cold air against the back of your neck – the air chilling and then displacing in response to his presence. “Spinner,” he says without preamble. “Do you like him?”

For once you don’t play dumb. “He’s a nice guy. Kind of young for me.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” you say. “How old are you?”

“A hundred and ten,” Tomura says, and your jaw drops. “I think. It was hard to count in here before. It never felt like anything changed.”

“It probably didn’t.” The first time you stepped into the house, you felt almost like time had stopped. “Me and Phantom change. I bet that helps.”

“Whatever,” Tomura says. At his heart, Tomura’s still an asshole most of the time. When he speaks up again, his voice sounds different. “When you say change, you mean age. Don’t you?”

You nod. There’s an edge to Tomura’s voice now. “How long do you live?”

You don’t like thinking about how long Phantom will live. Your vocal cords feel pinched and tight when you speak. “Phantom’s breed of dog can live to be thirteen or fourteen if you take good care of them. I take good care of her, and she’s only two. That’s – eleven more years.”

“That’s not long enough,” Tomura says. He’s telling you. Your eyes well up. “What about you?”

“If I’m lucky?” It’s easier to think about this for you than for Phantom. “I might make it to ninety. If nothing goes wrong.”

“That’s not long enough, either,” Tomura snaps. “What do you mean, if nothing goes wrong?”

If you’re not allowed to play dumb, Tomura isn’t, either. “You’ve watched medical dramas with me. Car accidents. Heart attacks. Alzheimer’s – the one where you forget everything. Cancer. All those things can happen to humans at any time. And they do, every day.”

“No,” Tomura says.

“It’s mortality. You can’t just say ‘no’ and opt out.”

“No,” Tomura says again. “That’s not how this works. You don’t get to leave me.”

Your stomach twists. “I’m sixty-four years away from being ninety. That’s a long time.”

“It’s not long enough!” There’s a light thud from behind you, the sound of Tomura’s feet hitting the floor as he materializes. A pair of ice-cold arms wrap around your waist, gripping you tightly and yanking you backwards against an equally cold chest. He’s breathing hard, even though he doesn’t have to breathe. His heart is beating harder, even though there’s no reason for him to have one. If not for the chill spreading over you, you couldn’t tell a difference between him and someone human.

His voice, when he speaks, is full of menace. “It can try to take you. I won’t let it.”

“There’s not a grim reaper,” you say. At least, you think there isn’t. But the world has ghosts in it. Maybe it’s got a personification of death, too. “There’s nothing for you to fight. This is just how things are.”

“No, it isn’t. You and Phantom are mine.” Phantom comes running at the sound of her name and drops her ball at your feet. You kick it away and she runs off in pursuit. “The others are stupid. They did it wrong. I know better.”

Your teeth are starting to chatter. “What do you mean?”

“They embodied themselves so they could follow their humans,” Tomura says. “Wherever they go. Even after they’re dead. I’m going to make you follow me.”

You want to tell him to quit talking like a lunatic. Remind him that ghosts and humans are two different species, that ghosts can become human but not the other way around. Tell him that this isn’t a fairytale, that the rules won’t bend just because he wants them to, that you’re going to die one day and there’s nothing he can do about it. “Don’t be so sentimental,” you say, like an idiot. Like an asshole. “What kind of ghost are you?”

The last time you said something like that to Tomura, he vanished, haunted your house all night, and then got so turned on from touching your hand that he flooded the entire neighborhood with horniness. This time he doesn’t vanish, but he doesn’t answer, either. He stays exactly where he is, arms lashed tightly around your waist, cheek resting against your hair, and the cold seeps into your bones.

“Is that really why they did it?” you ask after a while. Tomura makes some kind of noise that’s muffled by your hair. “The others.”

“Why do you care?” Tomura’s quiet for a second. “I get it. That human thing where you have to understand stuff so it won’t scare you.”

“I guess.”

“Then ask somebody else,” Tomura says, almost derisive. “I’d never do something that stupid.”

“Yeah,” you say. Your heart sinks, and you compartmentalize like you haven’t done since the first few months after you moved in. It’s almost been a year. A year ago you’d never have imagined this, and you wish you’d stayed that way. Don’t you? “I know.”

Haunting for Beginners - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Ghosts summoned and bound to the human world have one purpose - haunting - but Tomura's never met a human he could stand long enough to haunt them, and he's pretty sure he never will. When you cross the threshold of his house, you capture his interest, and for the first time, he finds himself with a chance to do what ghosts are meant to do. It's too bad he doesn't know how. Scenes from Love Like Ghosts, through the eyes of the ghost in question. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1

Time means nothing to him. Less than nothing, when nothing changes. When he thinks about it – and he tries not to think very much at all – he knows that the world is in motion outside the walls, past the property line. The weather changes. Night turns to day and back again. Houses are built, occupied, emptied again. Humans live. Humans die. None of it matters to Tomura. All that matters to Tomura is what happens inside his house.

Tomura knows what a house is, what it’s for. A house is somewhere humans live, somewhere humans live and die and do whatever else they do in between. Tomura’s house is supposed to have humans in it, so he can haunt them, but he’s not clear on what haunting is in the first place. What is he supposed to do with humans once he has them? And even if he knew, there’s another problem. Humans come in and out of Tomura’s house often enough, some just to see, some planning to stay. And Tomura hates all of them.

They’re loud. They run. They jam up Tomura’s house with the stupid things they own and they bring even more people in with them and they change things, things they have no right to change or even touch. Tomura might not know how to haunt things, but he knows how to make his wishes known. He knows how to make people leave when he doesn’t want them here. After all this time – some long piece of time, but it doesn’t mean anything – he’s gotten really good at it.

Sometimes Tomura makes a game of it. Some times he doesn’t try as hard as others. If the humans make him angry, he tries harder, but if they don’t do anything specifically that he hates, he just watches them until they leave on their own. That’s how Tomura spends his endless stretches of time, as the world changes outside the property line and the other houses in the neighborhood empty and fill, empty and fill, over and over and over again –

– until one day the front gate creaks open, and you step through.

Tomura knows all about humans. He knows by looking at you that you’re young, but not a kid. Just barely old enough to be here by yourself, younger than anybody else who’s come to look at this place alone. Are you alone? Tomura waits, but the only person who follows you through the gate is the idiot who brings people to Tomura’s house to try to make them buy it. So you are by yourself. That’s – new.

Maybe that’s why Tomura’s paying attention. Because it’s new. He comes closer, shadowing you and the idiot as you walk through the empty lower floor of the house. The idiot is saying all the same things it usually says, about how old the house is and how it’s untouched except for the addition of central heating and cooling. Tomura almost stopped that from happening. Then he decided that he should be the one who gets to choose when a human leaves, not the temperature and whether or not it’s comfortable. So his house has central heating and cooling. Whatever that is.

You seem to care about that a little bit. It makes you nod, but beyond that, you aren’t reacting much. Humans usually react more to the house. They have opinions. Ideas about where they’re going to put things. Plans for what they’re going to change when they move in. What they’re going to ruin, more accurately. Or sometimes they’re comparing Tomura’s house to whatever other houses they’ve visited. So go buy those houses, Tomura always thinks. This is mine.

You haven’t mentioned any other houses. You aren’t saying anything at all, and Tomura can tell the idiot is uncomfortable. Good. Then the idiot opens its mouth and uses one of the words Tomura hates the most. “It’s a bit of a fixer-upper, which is obviously reflected in the price.”

“Is that what the price is reflecting?”

“What else would it be reflecting?” the idiot asks. It’s caught off-guard. Tomura is, too. He knows all the questions humans ask, and he’s never heard anybody ask that. “Like I was saying, if you’re interested in flipping this place, there’s a lot to remodel –”

Remodel. There’s another word Tomura hates. “I thought the price reflected the fact that no one who’s owned this place has owned it for long,” you say. “Do you know why?”

“People have their reasons.” The idiot is eager to get off the subject, but Tomura knows you’ve caught on. There’s a look on your face, like you’re figuring something out. “Let me walk you through the upstairs, and then we’ll take a look at the yard! Are you much of a gardener?”

“I’ve never had the space,” you say. But you like the idea. Tomura can tell.

Tomura cares what people do to the house. What happens to the backyard isn’t his concern. If you came to live here, you could do whatever you wanted to the yard if you left the house alone. You don’t ask a lot of questions. You don’t make a lot of pointless noise. You don’t talk about how much you want to change everything about Tomura’s house, and you haven’t come in dragging more humans after you. Do you have other humans? The idiot asks, and Tomura listens a little too avidly to the answer. “No,” you say. “It’s just me.”

That’s a good answer. There’s no such thing as a good answer from people who want to buy Tomura’s house, but it’s close enough that Tomura doesn’t hate you already.

Usually humans give the idiot a yes or a no before they leave. Even if they don’t, Tomura knows whether they’ll be back or not. But he’s not sure about you. You didn’t say very much, or react very much. Humans are nothing but reaction after reaction, and they’re usually easy to spot, but Tomura wouldn’t have realized that you liked the idea of a garden unless he’d been paying close attention. He’s not used to paying close attention to things. It makes him feel strange.

You only ask the idiot one more question before you leave, and you ask it on the sidewalk, past the property line. “Are there any other offers on this place?”

“No.”

“Good,” you say, and Tomura drifts out of the house for the first time in a long time, coming right up to the fence to get a look at your face. He thinks you like that answer. He’s not sure. “I’ll be in touch.”

And then you leave, with both Tomura and the idiot staring after you as you start your car and drive away. Tomura is staring, just like the idiot is. He retreats back to his house in a hurry, fast enough to stir a breeze that makes the idiot shiver, and sweeps upstairs into his favorite spot. Humans always put their beds here when they move in. Tomura wonders where you would put your bed if you lived here. He wonders if you’ll come back.

You won’t, probably. Most humans never come back, and if they do, Tomura never lets them stay. Tomura settles into his corner of the room, as incorporeal as it’s possible to be, the same way he spends most of his time. Space means everything to Tomura – his spot, his room, his house, his property. His neighborhood, because the other ghosts who live here all know who this place really belongs to, even though he’ll never cross the lines that separate his from theirs. Space matters. Time, not so much. Time is meaningless when he has so much of it, when nothing changes from one moment or minute, hour or day, week or decade or century to the next.

Except something has changed, a little. Even as Tomura tries to sink back into apathy, to let his awareness fade, he finds that he’s watching time, keeping an eye on the change from day to night. Counting the days that pass from the moment you stepped through the gate, wondering how many it will take to prove to himself that you aren’t coming back.

“Papa, the sign’s different!” The neighborhood’s youngest used-to-be-a-ghost stops in front of Tomura’s house, peering into the yard. “It says – p. P-something.”

“Pending,” the oldest used-to-be-a-ghost says. He’s stuck in a mortal form forever now, but his spirit’s older than Tomura’s, and even when Tomura’s shielding his aura, he knows the old ghost can read more from his aura than the rest. “Good spot, Eri. Looks like somebody’s thinking about buying this place.”

Is that what ‘pending’ means? Tomura waits until the other two have gone, then goes to investigate the sign. For sale, the sign usually says, but right now it says Sale pending. Someone wants to buy it. Someone is buying it, and the idiot’s only brought one person to see it in a long time. It’s been seventeen days since you came to see Tomura’s house. Is it you?

When he thinks about you buying the house, moving into the house, Tomura – he doesn’t know how to describe what he’s feeling, except that it makes his essence itch. He’s never felt like that before. He hates it. He doesn’t know how to make it go away. Maybe it’ll go away if you come back.

And you do come back, twenty-two days after the first time you crossed the property line. This time there are other humans with you, not just the idiot – humans in uniforms, carrying equipment. Inspection. That’s farther than most humans who want Tomura’s house get. You’re there, supposedly supervising, but instead you’re on the phone with somebody, at the same time as you’re reading through a packet of papers. Tomura doesn’t like that. You’re in his house. You shouldn’t be paying attention to anything else.

He wraps a strand of his essence around your phone, cutting off the signal, and you lower it from your ear, surprised. You try the call again, and Tomura tightens his grip. He wonders if you’ll get mad. Humans get mad about things like that. But instead of getting angry, you tuck your phone into your pocket and go back to your papers. Tomura reads them over your shoulder and feels some of his anger dissipate. You’re reading about his house, about all the people who owned his house before you came to see it. If you’re reading about the house, it’s fine. It’s better that you pay attention to what you’re reading than the other people who are here. When you leave again, Tomura goes back to counting the days.

There are more inspections than usual. Two different inspectors come to look for leaking poisonous gas, and another one comes looking for black mold, and then a fourth one comes through checking everything else, and you still don’t come back. The rest of the neighborhood has noticed what’s going on, and they’re talking about it. About you. Tomura listens to every word, the itching in his spirit worsening by the hour.

“All those inspections – she’s got cold feet. No way is she buying it.”

“Those inspections cost money. She wouldn’t have them done if she wasn’t serious about it.”

“This place is expensive,” the human who belongs to the youngest ghost says. “She can’t afford it.”

“I afforded it,” the human who belongs to the scar wraith says as he walks past with a pile of mail. “With rent like it is in the city, a mortgage is cheaper.”

Tomura doesn’t know what a mortgage is. He doesn’t know why he’s listening to the other so much, either. He barely pays attention to them, just enough to know when one house empties and fills again, when one of them dies, when a new one’s born. Or embodied. There haven’t been baby humans in the neighborhood in – ever. Humans have bought Tomura’s house before. That’s not new. But Tomura’s never thought about it as much as he’s thinking about it now.

After the inspections end, Tomura’s house is empty for eight more days. Then you come back with the idiot again, walking through the house like you did the first time. Halfway through, you send the idiot outside. And for the first time ever, it’s just you and Tomura inside Tomura’s house.

Tomura’s itching gets a thousand times worse in an instant, setting every scrap of his essence buzzing. It should be awful, but it’s – not. His spirit hums as he shadows you through the house from room to room, stopping when you stop, looking at what you’re looking at. Sometimes Tomura casts his essence wide, letting it expand to fill every inch of the house, but now he draws it inwards, fitting into the space next to you where the idiot would have stood if you hadn’t thrown it out. You threw the idiot out. Tomura knew he liked you.

There’s a thought he’s never had before. You keep walking, but Tomura stops following you, coming to a halt on the stairs as he tries to piece things together. Tomura knows what he dislikes. He knows what he can tolerate. He knows what he can ignore and what he doesn’t want to. Tomura knows what he needs to know about how he feels. He tolerates and ignores and gets irritated and bored and angry and angry and angry, so angry that he has to scatter his essence to the edge of the property line to avoid destroying his house. But he’s never liked something before.

Is that what this itching is? Liking something? Tomura doesn’t think so. The itching is something else. Liking is calmer. Liking isn’t uncomfortable. Tomura goes looking for you again and finds you sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, lost in thought. No phone. No papers. You look calm and comfortable. Tomura studies you and matches your expression to what he’s experiencing. He likes this. You like it, too.

When you get to your feet and head for the door, Tomura’s itching returns. The uncomfortable kind of itching. You’re leaving. He doesn’t like that, and the look on the idiot’s face as you approach it makes the itching even worse. For the first time, Tomura doesn’t listen in on a conversation you’re having. He disappears back to the house, draws as close to the edge of the world-that-is and the world between as he can, hoping it’ll drown everything else out. It drowns out the sound of your voice, but not the sound of a car starting and pulling away. Who just left? Was it you? The itching explodes into something unbearable, and Tomura races back to the front yard. You’re gone. The idiot’s still there. It’s fiddling with the sign.

For sale, it used to say. Next, Sale pending. The idiot attaches something else to it and backs away, its lips curving upwards. It’s happy. Tomura cuts as close to the fence as possible and gets a look at the sign that’s stood just inside the property line more often than not for as long as he’s been here. For sale, it used to say. Now it says Sold.

Tomura likes that. He likes that a lot.

When you move in, you don’t bring much with you. Tomura investigates everything you add to his house and realizes that most of it is old. Not the kind of old people pay money for. Just old enough to have seen better days. No other humans come to help you move. It’s just you, dragging things from a car into the house all day long. Some of it is heavy. You look tired. Most humans have other humans moving in with them, and most humans hire more humans to help them move. Tomura wonders why you don’t.

You don’t have any humans, but when you come back for good, you bring something with you. You get out of your car – which is old, like everything else you have, including Tomura’s house – and walk around to open the passenger-side door. A dog jumps out.

Tomura knows about dogs. He knows humans have them sometimes. But no one with a dog has ever moved into his house. Why didn’t you bring it before? The dog wanders around the yard, sniffing everything, putting things in its mouth and spitting them back out, until it scurries onto the porch and rolls on its back with its feet in the air and its tail wagging. It looks stupid. Tomura wonders if it knows how stupid it looks.

But you must not agree, because you’re smiling as you climb the steps to join it. When you crouch down to rub the dog’s belly, your hand vanishes partway into its thick fur. The fur looks – Tomura has to think hard to come up with a word for it. He knows what texture looks like, even if he’s never touched anything before. It looks – soft.

The dog’s fur is soft, and it looks happy. You look happy, too. You’re talking to the dog in a silly voice, asking it questions it can’t answer, since dogs can’t talk. Humans do things like that all the time, things that don’t make sense, and those things irritate Tomura. Usually. He doesn’t feel irritated right now. He feels something else. Not the itchy feeling that happens sometimes when he thinks about you, the one he doesn’t have a word for. It’s more like the feeling of liking something. Like that, but warmer, somehow. When he watches you and your dog together, he feels – nice.

Still, Tomura was expecting it to be just the two of you in his house. He’s not sure how he feels now that he knows about the dog. So Tomura does what he always does when there’s someone new in the house and they haven’t upset him yet: He watches.

He watches while you and the dog settle in for your first night in his house. You do some unpacking while the dog keeps you company. You let it out in the yard five or six times. You feed the dog and cook for yourself and feed the dog again by throwing little pieces of food to it while you’re making whatever you’re making. You talk to the dog, even though it can’t talk back. It likes the way your voice sounds. Tomura can tell. He still can’t tell how he feels about the dog.

He waits until you’ve gone to bed before he goes to inspect it more closely. It’s downstairs, sleeping in a crate full of pillows and stuffed toys. The crate’s door is open. It could get in and out any time it wants, but it seems to like it in there. Tomura peers at it through the bars on the crate, through the open door, trying to decide what to do about it. After a few minutes in which he comes up with nothing, the dog lifts its head off its pillow and looks at him.

Not at him. It can’t see him. Can it? Tomura shifts to one side, and the dog’s eyes follow him. Its ears are pricked. Tomura shifts to the other side, and once again, the dog tracks his position easily. It can see him. Tomura feels a surge of disquiet at the thought. What if it decides it doesn’t like him? What if it tells you about him, and you decide to leave? Tomura doesn’t want that to happen. He’s surprised by just how much he doesn’t want it.

The dog is still looking at him, eyes bright and alert. It’s wiggling strangely. Tomura studies it from a different angle and sees that its tail is wagging hard enough to shake its entire body. Its tail was wagging when you were petting it, too. It was happy then, because it likes you. Does it like Tomura too?

The question makes Tomura itch. He leaves the dog in its crate and drifts upstairs, heading for your room. The click of nails on the wood floors tells him that the dog is following him, trotting along with its ears up and its tail still wagging. The door to your room is slightly ajar. Tomura drifts through it, stopping just past the threshold, and the dog follows him, not stopping until it’s reached the edge of the bed, hopped up, and curled up at your side.

Tomura’s itching isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. He checks to see if leaving the room will make it better, but leaving makes it worse, too. He drifts forward instead, closer to the bed, then above it, peering down at you from the ceiling. Your bed is too big for you, he decides. Even with you asleep in the middle of it and the dog next to you, there’s still room on either side, enough for – what? Tomura doesn’t know for what, except that the question makes him itch worse than any thought he’s ever had.

The dog is looking up at Tomura. It’s wagging its tail again, and its tail is thumping against your face. You stir slightly, extend one hand from the blanket to rest on the dog’s flank. “Shh,” you mumble, giving it a few gentle pats. “I know. I like it here, too.”

You like it here. Tomura knew that. You wouldn’t have bought it if you didn’t like it. But hearing you say it is something else. The people who’ve bought Tomura’s house before have had plenty to say about it – about what needs to be fixed or upgraded or removed or changed, all the things about it that need to be different in order for it to be good enough for them. Nobody’s ever moved in and said they liked it just how it was. Except you.

He likes hearing you say that. Tomura retreats to the lower floor, so the dog won’t keep looking at him and hitting you in the face with its tail, then sneaks back up to peer through the open door once you’re both asleep. The dog is snoring, and underneath the snoring, Tomura hears your deep, even breathing, split up here and there with small, contented sounds. Tomura hates it when there’s noise in his house. But this is the kind of noise he could get used to.

Time used to mean nothing to Tomura. Now time means a lot of things. You’re home less than he thought you’d be – less than he’d like you to be, although that thought falls squarely in the category of things that make him itch. You’re gone most of the day, five days in a row, then home most of the day for two days in a row, and then the cycle repeats. The dog is here all the time, unless you’re taking it out for walks or letting it outside to run in the yard. When you’re here, Tomura watches you. When you aren’t, he watches the dog.

The dog watches him, too. No matter where Tomura is inside the house, the dog finds him, and it brings things to him. Usually its toys. Sometimes stuff Tomura knows it’s not supposed to have, like things out of your laundry basket. It sets them down in front of him and sits, tail wagging, an expectant look on its furry face. Tomura knows from watching you what he’s supposed to do with the toys. Throw them, so the dog can bring them back, or hold onto one end so the dog can bite down on the other end and yank and shake until it gets bored. Tomura ignores the dog at first, but ignoring it starts to feel weird. Bad. If he could help, he would. Really. He just doesn’t know how.

One day you’re in a bad mood when you leave. Tomura doesn’t know all the reasons why. Your mood seems bigger than the thing you got upset about, which was a big spider crawling across the bathroom mirror while you were brushing your teeth. It’s not the first spider, either. There have been at least eight, and Tomura knows where they’re coming from – a nest in the insulation between the walls, full of dozens more. The spiders are going to keep coming out. You don’t like spiders. If you don’t like spiders and Tomura’s house is full of them, you’re going to leave.

Tomura doesn’t want that. He encircles the nest with a few strands of essence and studies it for an hour, then two, then more. There’s something he should be doing here, some instinct pulling at him until he wraps the strands of essence tighter. Tighter, and tighter again, tightening his grip until the spiders in the nest begin to grow sluggish, then still. They’re turning cold. And somewhere in the smallest corners of his essence, Tomura feels warmth.

Living things are warm. Tomura pulls away from the dry, crumbling nest of dead spiders and back into the bathroom, where the dog is waiting for him with its ball. Tomura reaches for the ball, meaning to wrap it in essence and see what happens, but what happens is something else. His essence takes shape, takes visibility, takes weight and mass, until Tomura finds himself holding the ball in a pair of hands. His hands.

The ball has a dozen properties – prickly, fuzzy, rigid but not, damp but not wet, heavy in his hands but not nearly as heavy as the hands themselves. If Tomura had known he was going to touch something for the first time today, he would have picked something else. He shifts the ball to one hand, freeing up the other, and reaches out to the dog, which is bouncing up on its back feet with excitement. Tomura’s planning to pet the dog’s ears – that’s what you always do – but the dog shifts its head to one side and licks Tomura’s fingers instead. Wet. Slimy. Tomura wouldn’t have picked that for the first thing he touched, either.

He swaps the ball to the hand the dog licked, wipes the other on the carpet, and wonders if he can make more than two hands. He tries it, but two hands are all humans get. Two hands are all he gets. While the dog is sniffing the ball and trying to lick it out of Tomura’s hand, he uses the other hand to pet its ears.

They’re soft, just like he thought they’d be. Soft and warm. The dog’s tail thumps against the floor. It stops licking Tomura’s other hand in favor of nudging it, trying to trick him into throwing the ball. Tomura throws it hard enough to strike against the floor, bounce off the ceiling, and fly out the door into the hallway.

The dog lets out a joyful yelp and chases after it. Tomura stares down at his hands – his hands – and wonders how long he’ll have them for. How he’ll get them back. What else he can do with them.

He practices making hands. You don’t like when there are bugs in the house, so he gets rid of them, and with the energy he strips from their bodies, he makes himself hands. Hands are useful for a lot of things. He and the dog can play now. Never for as long as it wants – Tomura always runs out of life before the dog is tired of playing tug or fetch or rolling over on its belly with its feet in the air – but they can play now. Tomura knows the dog can’t talk, but if it could talk to you about him, he thinks it would have nice things to say.

You have nice things to say, too – about Tomura’s house, to everybody you talk to. But you don’t talk to as many people as the people who bought the house before you did, and you don’t invite as many people over. You don’t invite anybody over. You like your space, just like Tomura likes his space, and he’s already used to your presence and the dog’s in the house. Time matters to him now, so he knows it’s been twenty-three days since you and the dog moved into his house. Nobody else has stayed as long at a stretch. Since you moved in, you’ve slept nowhere else.

And you haven’t brought anybody else in. You don’t like the idea of bringing anybody else in. Tomura can tell by your expression when someone you’re talking to on your phone suggests it. He hasn’t really questioned if he was right to let you stay, but the more he observes you, the more convinced he is that it was a good decision. Tomura’s house has a human in it now. He can finally do what ghosts are supposed to do and haunt it.

But Tomura’s still not sure about the whole haunting thing. You’ve watched a few scary movies, and he’s watched them, too, so he knows that haunted houses are supposed to be terrifying. The humans in them should want to leave, and the ghost should make it as hard for them as possible, and maybe kill them, too. Tomura doesn’t want to kill you. And he doesn’t want you to leave. There has to be a way to haunt you that doesn’t end with you moving out.

He's turning the question over in his head as you and the dog play in the backyard in the early evening, so focused on it that he barely notices the coyote that slips through the fence. That hole in the fence has been there forever. Coyotes come in and out all the time. But there’s never been somebody in the yard when they’ve come in before. It takes Tomura a split second to realize there’s a problem, and that split second is too long. Long enough for the coyote to lunge at the dog and bite down hard one of the dog’s back legs.

The dog lets out a horrible sound, shrill and rattling, and you scream, too. The sounds shatter inside Tomura’s essence, and he hates them – but not the same way he hates everything else. You throw your phone at the coyote, hitting it in the head, and it lets go of the dog, who scrambles back to you. You crouch down to cradle it, stroking its fur and mumbling to it as the coyote comes closer. You’re trying to comfort it. You should be running.

Why aren’t you running? Tomura feels a surge of frustration, mixed in with something sharper, something that pulls his essence into a knot and yanks it tighter. But then he looks at the distance to the back door, which is closed. Then he thinks about how you’d have to carry the dog, which would make it harder to open the door fast. How your back would be to the coyote the whole time, and how it’s probably faster than you are. You stand a better chance if you don’t have your back to it when it attacks you, and that’s why you’re getting to your feet, pushing the dog behind you, facing the coyote and staring it down.

You’re scared. Tomura knows what scared looks like on humans, but that’s not all you are. Your hands are clenched into fists, which means you’re angry, too. Angry that something’s come to the house and hurt your dog. Angry like Tomura is, a new kind of anger, not purposeless but directed towards a single target. This is his house. His house, his yard, his dog, his human. Nothing gets to touch them. Tomura surges forward.

There aren’t insects around, but there’s the grass, and he steals life-force from it, manifesting hands that seize the coyote just as it leaps towards you. It’s the biggest thing he’s ever tried to grasp. It thrashes and snarls, thrumming with life. Tomura could drain it. It’s what his instincts are telling him to do. But it deserves worse than that. It deserves to be scared, just like Tomura’s dog and his human are. Tomura tightens his grip around its throat and wrenches with a fraction of his strength. Even a fraction of his strength is enough to nearly rip its head from its shoulders.

Tomura doesn’t mean to drop the corpse, but he didn’t draw enough life-force from the grass to hold onto his hands for long. The coyote’s body thuds to the ground, and Tomura turns his attention to you and the dog, where it belongs. The two of you have retreated back to the porch, you sprawled back against the back door with the dog in your lap. Your eyes are wide. You look scared.

Tomura feels a twinge of discomfort. He’s never shown himself to a human in the house before, not even a little bit, and right now you look like the people in movies look when something’s haunted them. The people in those movies want to leave their houses when they realize they’re haunted. The first human Tomura’s ever wanted to stay in the house is about to become the next human who leaves.

Then you close your eyes, take a deep breath, open them again. “I don’t know who did that,” you say. You’re looking out at a yard that must look empty to you, but the bulk of Tomura’s essence is in your eyeline, enough that he can convince himself you’re looking at him. “But thank you.”

You get awkwardly to your feet and carry the dog inside, only to come back out a few seconds later to pick up your phone, giving the dead body of the coyote a wide berth. You place a call before the door’s even shut. Tomura can hear you on the phone with the emergency vet, whatever that is, but he can barely focus beyond the strange things that are happening within his essence.

Some part of him is angry, like always, but there are new dimensions to his anger – he’s mad at the coyote for getting in, mad at himself for not doing something about it before the dog got hurt and you got scared. Part of him is relieved that you aren’t packing your things and calling a hotel. And part of him is – is –

Tomura doesn’t know what to call most of the feeling, but it brings the itching along with it, and he knows what to call the itching now. It’s wanting. The itching that makes him feel like crawling out of his essence or curling up so tight inside it that he can’t be found is what it feels like to want something, and unlike the other times he’s felt it since you arrived, Tomura knows what he wants.

The world’s held so little interest to him for so long. He’s been here some piece of time that feels like forever, and he’s lost count of the number of times he wishes he’d been destroyed rather than give up the fight to remain in the world between. He belongs in the world between. Not here.

But now there’s something in this world that the world between could never give to Tomura. You looked at Tomura. You talked to him. All Tomura wants in this world or the next is for you to talk to him again.

oh god i needed this🥺🫶

Paralyzed

As your shift in the daycare came to a close today, something triggered a terrible panicking trauma response in you. You've locked yourself in the storage closet in an attempt to get away from it all. When Sun eventually manages to get the door open, his heart breaks at the state he finds you in. Cue 4k words of ensuing caretaking and comfort.

Pairing: Sun/Reader/Moon Word Count: 6,014 Contains: [NSSI/Self-Harm] [panic] [PTSD] [crying] [emotional & physical hurt/comfort] [bandaging wounds] [undressing (not the sexy kind)] [caretaking] [cuddling] [literal sleeping together] [established relationship] [GN!Reader]

“Sunshine? I know you’re hurting right now… but you need to let me in there with you so I can help…”

A faint rattling comes from the locked doorknob, shortly followed by silence.

You barely hear it from where you’re slumped, back against the far wall of the pitch dark supply closet.

You’re far too consumed in your own suffering to even consider the impact of your actions right now. You have to make these feelings stop. You have to make it all go away. You can’t take anymore today.

Through your panicked haze and ragged breathing, your ears barely pick up on the faint sound of metallic tinkering, and Sun’s muttering on the other side of the door.

“Oh, for heavens sake… why does the supply closet even have the ability to lock from the inside in the first place?”

Your panicked breaths come faster and faster, until you begin to feel lightheaded from it all. The pain of your memories. The fear of whatever trigger had set you off this time. The shame of causing Sun such distress, having to see you like this.

You told yourself you’d never let them see you in such a state, yet here you fucking are. Trembling and soaked in sweat, tears, and snot, curled up on the cold tile of the supply closet floor.

It was bound to happen eventually, you suppose. You could lie and say you were doing better but this always comes back to drag you down again eventually.

You register the sound of a bolt shifting, before a few small screws fall down and roll across the floor in different directions. You watch the door creak open slightly, and thin, long robotic fingers snake their way around the edge and take hold of the loose doorknob before it can fall and clatter to the floor.

You feel your stomach drop at the knowledge that your time in hiding has come to an end. The door swings open slowly, the daycare’s bright lights casting into the room. The light makes a path all the way across the floor, from the open doorway across to your darkened form curled uncomfortably in the back, like a wild animal, cornered.

You lift your head enough to glance at him and you catch the sight of his silhouette, backlit in a way that has him looking more intimidating than he likely realizes. You instinctively curl back down into yourself and miss the way he subconsciously shrinks in on himself when he sees your apparent fear.

He’s the last person on earth that you should fear. He just wants to help you. He was built for this, wasn’t he? Taking care of the vulnerable?

Why’d they have to make him look so terrifying, then?

He pushes his own thoughts aside, his hand curling around the doorframe in search of the light switch. He quickly locates it, flipping it up and flooding the room with fluorescent light.

The proper sight of you breaks his mechanical heart.

Your hair is an absolute mess and your clothes are all bunched up around you as you’ve contorted yourself to take up the least amount of space possible. Like someone was trying to hurt you even though you were alone in here. He doesn’t even need to do a full body scan to tell that you have been hurt, actually. When his optics pass over your left hand, warning signs flash across his vision.

Injured. You’re injured.

In his daycare. Under his supervision.

Oh, no. No no no no no.

Not you. Not like this. Not ever.

He has to fix it. Fix you. Make it better.

Yes. Yes, he can make it better. He- he can fix this. It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay. You have to be. He… needs you. They both do. You have to be okay.

They’ll make it better.

You keep your head tucked away into the pulled-up hood of your jacket, waiting. You don’t even know what you’re waiting for, exactly. Yelling? Screaming? Panic? Anger? Disappointment? Rough hands, grabbing, pulling, hurting you again?

If you were thinking straight right now you’d know this isn’t necessary. You’d remember where you are, and who you’re with, and that you are absolutely safe here. Sun and Moon wouldn’t ever lay a hand on you in anything other than love. Their touches don’t hurt. Neither do their words.

You’re not thinking straight right now, though. Your mind is somewhere else entirely. Completely caught up in the past, your mind replaying all the bad that you’ve ever encountered, like it’s trying to teach you a lesson you already know. Trying to warn you of a threat that is no longer there.

Sun slowly lowers himself to the floor and makes his way over to you on all fours in the least terrifying way he can.

His voice is about as quiet as he can get it to go but you still flinch when he breaks the silence.

“Sunshine, are you here with me right now? Can you hear me?”

You’re about halfway here and halfway gone, to be completely honest, but you manage to nod your head, the movement stiff and jerky. Your muscles are all so goddamn tense it’s a wonder you can move at all.

“Do you think you can take a deep breath for me?”

You try to, and fail miserably, the air catching in your throat and coming back out as a choked sob. Gods, you can’t even breathe right, can you? You shake your head vehemently, tangling your messy hair even further in the process as you start mindlessly muttering apologies between short, quick breaths.

“I’m-I’m sorry…  I’m sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry…”

Sun’s hands flex open and closed, held firmly down at his sides to prevent their urges from taking over and just allowing himself to scoop you up into his arms the way he wants to.

“Hey… e-easy, love. There’s no need for apologies here, you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Your tears pick back up again at that, voice accidentally coming out in a sudden shout, only muffled by the balled-up sleeve you’ve brought up to try and hide your face.

“YES I HAVE! I-I-I don’t know what… but I must have done something… something to end up like this.”

It’s getting harder for Sun to close out of the numerous warning pop-ups that flood his vision. His voice is a bit more strained when you hear it again.

“No-no-no not at all! You haven’t done anything to make this happen. This is just… something that happens sometimes, yeah? And-and-and I’m here now to help you through it!”

He eyes your left hand again, lying lifeless on the cold tile beside you. It’s completely red and swollen, with long, angry red lines running down along your forearm and the back of your hand. He knew he’d heard the sound of repeated, dull banging when he first discovered you’d locked yourself in here, but he hadn’t wanted to think about what you might be doing to yourself.

He’s gonna find out now, though.

Losing yourself in your panic again, you shakily pick your stiff hand up off the tile, balling it into a fist as you bring it up just to slam it back down on the cold, hard floor with as much force as you can possibly muster. Sharp pain runs through your wrist as the already swollen joint is forced to take the impact of yet another hit. A hiss of pain is immediately ripped out of you, and you revel in the small relief that it brings, forcing you to take a deep breath to distract yourself. You’d been at this for a solid thirty minutes now, based on Sun’s calculations of when this whole ordeal started.

Sun’s body locks up at the sight, and he can’t even feel the black, watery fluid that begins to leak from beneath his eyes, running down along the curves of his faceplate like tears.

He’s paralyzed. Stuck in between two equally important rules.

They sound off on repeat like warning sirens in his mind.

[ Protect you. ]

[ Never touch you without permission. ]

[ Protect you. ]

[ Never touch you without permission. ]

[ Protect you. ]

[ Never touch you without permission. ]

He’s forced to sit there, glued to the ground and watch as you lift your fist and slam it back down once again, your body reeling forward in response to the pain.

He suddenly feels Moon’s presence fighting to take control in their shared headspace.

He watches on helplessly as an unauthorized edit is made to one of the rules cemented in the forefront of his mind.

[ Protect you. A̵T̸ ̶A̶L̶L̶ ̵C̵O̴S̴T̷S̴.̸ ]

He immediately breaks from his paralysis just in time to reach forward, his movements lightning fast, and wraps his massive hand around your fist as it makes its way towards the ground once again. He moves your connected hands downward together, trying to follow the motion so as to not hurt you any further by suddenly stopping you mid-swing.

Your hands both slam down onto the tile, but you hardly feel the pain this time. Sun registers that the back of his hand took the brunt of the impact, no real damage done given his sturdier components, and his body nearly collapses from the sudden relief.

His other hand quickly reaches out and loosely wraps itself around your wrist, needing to hold you still. He’s careful to not aggravate the swollen joint, nor the stinging lines of broken skin you’d torn across the back of your hand.

You stop crying in your shock, and your head jerks up to look at him, and the both of you stare at each other, unsure, for a long quiet moment.

He breaks the silence first.

“I’m sorry. I-I-I know we can’t touch you without permission but-but-but you weren’t LISTENING and I-I-I had to. You were hurting-hurting-HURTING yourself.”

His repetitions are getting noticeably worse, and so is his volume control. He’s stressed beyond his limits, clearly.

Your remaining panic evaporates at the realization and guilt suddenly takes over, washing over you in waves that threaten to drown.

Your right hand is trembling as you pull it away from your face, poking out of your sleeve and reaching out towards him, no longer caring about the absolute hell you must look like right now.

You grab onto one of his upper arms and pull yourself towards him with what little strength you have left in you. He sat up straight as a board in response to your sudden shift in position, clearly not expecting you to fall right into him. He quickly recovers though, gingerly adjusting you to be more comfortable in his hold.

Your voice is miserable and thick with tears when you speak, face making a mess of the soft, colorful ruffles around his neck. He doesn’t mind it at all, at this point. They can be washed.

“Don’t, please… don’t apologize. Just…”

You let out a shaky sigh.

“just hold me… please.”

That’s permission enough for him, and he quickly gathers you further up onto his lap, adjusting so he’s leaned back against a cabinet and you can lay against him.

“Okay… okay. We can do that.”

He slowly brings your injured hand up to inspect it better in the light, and mutters another string of quiet apologies when you whimper in pain. From a quick scan he can tell that nothing is broken- thank heavens - but it will definitely bruise something awful. He also quietly takes note of the way your sharp nails must’ve broken skin, as there’s tiny dried specks of blood along your forearm when he cautiously lifts your sleeve.

The injury warning pop-ups are still flashing in his vision, but they’re easier to see through now. You’re stable. You’re safe. There will be time to patch you up once they get you calm.

Speaking of they, Moon is now throwing an absolute fit inside their headspace, more impatient than ever to be released so he can do his job. You need to be calmed, you need to be soothed, you need to rest.

[ LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT ]

Sun shoots him a silent response as he brings a hand up to cradle the back of your head against his chest, heart breaking all over again at the way you still tremble against him.

[ You know I would if I could. We have to wait for the lights to go out. Have patience. It’s nearly your turn. ]

He outwardly flinches at the sudden sharp volume of Moon’s voice in his mind.

[ PATIENCE? I just had to sit back here and witness them actively HARMING themselves like a helpless SPECTATOR and you’re telling me to have PATIENCE, SUN? REALLY? ]

Sun settles you back down against him when you stir in response to his sudden movement, assuring you once again that you haven’t done anything wrong.

[ Moon. Please. Look at them. Now is not the time to be fighting. ]

Moon doesn’t reply, so he adds on.

[ I… sincerely thank you… for editing the rule for me, you know? ]

He hears Moon sigh in exasperation, and feels the tension in their headspace begin to slowly dissolve.

[ …yeah. You’re welcome. Don’t make me have to do it again. ]

As if on queue, the lights power down in the plex all at once, and their transition begins. They feel the way you suddenly tense at the realization, and they hush you as their voice shifts from Sun’s into Moon’s.

“Shhh, shh, shh. You’re okay. Everything’s alright, little star. No need to be scared. I’m right here. You’re still safe.”

You keep your head buried in the fabric when you speak.

“Moon?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Are you… mad at me?”

He struggles to keep it together when he hears how scared you sound.

“Not at all, doll. Never. Never mad at you.”

He brings your left hand back up a bit to get a better look at it through his own eyes, and his body releases a soft burst of warm air from his vents.

“Mad at ourselves? Mmmaybe. But that’s none of your concern. It’s over now. We’re gonna fix this. We promise.”

He shifts a little, and whispers a soft question.

“May I move you up to our room so we can clean you up?”

You nod against him, humming in unenthusiastic acceptance.

His movements are incredibly careful and fluid when he picks the two of you up off the floor. Walking out of the storage closet, he calls down his tether and adjusts his grip on you to assure that you won’t slip.

You cling tight to him with your good hand, and close your eyes to avoid the unpleasant sight of being so far up in the air. Before you know it, you’re being lowered onto their bed so carefully one would think you’re made of glass.

When you finally detach yourself from his chest so he can put you down, you finally notice the dark tear-tracks leaking from his eyes. They shimmer, reflecting the dim string-lights hung throughout the room. You reach out to him, trying to wipe them away and failing miserably, smearing the dark stains further across their faceplate.

He gently takes your hand and brings it to his smile, pressing the equivalent of a kiss against your skin before placing your hand back down in your lap.

“Don’t you worry about us right now, star. You do that enough already. It’s your turn to be taken care of now.”

He shifts from his crouched position by the bed and moves to stand, intending to go fetch the first aid kit. You stop him by clinging to his hand with a nervous whine when he pulls away. You don’t even recognize how small and vulnerable you sound when your thoughts slip out of you.

“Where… where are you going?”

He crouches back down to your level, brushing your messy hair back away from your face.

“Just need to run down and get some things to patch you up with, doll. I’ll be back within a minute. Do you think you can wait for me here while I go do that?”

He’s slipped into caregiver mode, speaking to you like he’d speak to a frightened child in the daycare, but honestly… right about now, you don’t feel much different. His kind, patient tone works wonders to quiet your lingering fears.

“Okay… yeah, I can wait.”

He moves to press another kiss to the crown of your head when he stands back up, whispering to you.

“Very good. I’ll only be a moment. Wait here for me, starlight.”

You don’t count the seconds it takes him, but from what you can tell he stayed true to his word, for it couldn’t have been more than a minute before he was swinging himself back onto the balcony, arms full of various items.

He quietly sets them down one by one on a table in the room, and turns to you, crouching down again to be on your level.

“Now, patching up injuries is usually Sun’s thing, but I’m fully capable of it as well, if you’ll let me.”

You nod in silence, looking down, letting the shame, guilt, and embarrassment wash over you again. He picks up on it, and is quick to reassure you, crouching even further down and tilting his head at an angle so as to catch your gaze again.

“Hey, hey, hey… you don’t need to be ashamed of this. We’re not angry with you, and you don’t have to explain anything tonight if you don’t feel up to it . ”

Some of the tension bleeds out of your shoulders at that, and you take a resolving breath before granting him permission to tend to you, holding your left arm out towards him.

“…Thank you.”

He takes it in his, and reaches to grab a cleansing wipe from his pile of assorted things.

“It’s our honor to care for you, love.”

He hesitates, looking you over for a moment before setting the wipe back down and turning to you.

“It’ll be easier to do this if we take your jacket off first. Would you like assistance?”

You raise your arms out away from you, nodding sheepishly.

If he could smile any bigger than he always is, he would have.

“Alright, then. Mind your hand…”

He gently removes your jacket and folds it over the back of a chair. Then, returning his attention to your arm, he tears the pouch open and pulls the cloth out.

“This will sting at first, but it’s necessary, okay?”

You nod, only wincing slightly as he cleans your scratches and then pulls out a tube of some sort, twisting the tiny cap off with nimble fingers.

“This will help you heal.”

You watch quietly as he takes the utmost care to evenly coat each red, stinging line with the ointment, and in the back of your mind you wonder if this is a bit overkill for a few scratches… but you’re hesitant to turn him down. It couldn’t hurt, and you were rather enjoying the treatment. Far, far more than you’d like to admit, honestly. The torn lines of skin run all the way down your forearm to meet your knuckles, and he doesn’t miss a single spot.

He then turns away, pulling out a thin roll of gauze, and gestures for you to hold your arm out once again. When you offer it, he begins wrapping your arm up, starting from your hand. He’s extremely careful to not put undue pressure on your swollen palm and wrist, and once it’s secured around your hand, he winds the dressing all the way up around your arm, covering every little wound.

You’re nearly in a trance by the time he fastens the bandage in place and pulls back, pilfering through the other things he brought. You snap out of it when his voice breaks the silence again.

“Would you like my assistance while changing into something more suited for sleep?”

You nod before you even really register the inquiry, still too caught up in how good it felt to be bandaged up the way he did. It’s not like he hasn’t seen you undress before, anyways, so you don’t dwell on it too much when he guides you to stand and helps you remove your wrinkled work clothes.

Digging around in their dresser, he pulls out a plush pair of your sleep pants that you leave here for unplanned nights like this, and an oversized Superstar Daycare logo t-shirt.

He squats down, letting you use his shoulders to support your unsteady frame as you step into the pants, pulling them up around your waist before guiding you to sit back down on the bed. Reaching for the shirt and motioning for you to lift your arms, he makes sure the sleeve doesn’t catch on your bandages as he drapes it down over you.

You’re tempted to collapse back into the mattress then and there, but he’s not done coddling you yet.

He begins climbing all around you and gathering up every pillow in the room, propping you up and placing them around you to form some sort of… protective nest, you suppose? Whatever he’s doing, it seems like very important work in his eyes, so you let him fuss over the arrangement ‘til his heart's content, watching him with a small smile and tired eyes.

Once he seems satisfied with his work, he gently picks your left hand up and places it on its own special elevated pillow. He takes a ridiculous amount of care to make sure all of your bruising fingers are spread out in the best possible position, and then looks to you in question.

“Is this okay? Comfortable like this?”

You nod with a bemused smile, and he tilts his head for a moment, gauging your expression. Whatever he makes of it, he seems content now, and so he returns to his duties.

Reaching back to the table, he pulls over an ice pack, carefully wrapping it with soft fabric before situating it over your hand and wrist. He spends a few quiet moments just holding it there, practically staring straight through the ice pack and down into your injured hand. There’s something almost… far away about his voice when he speaks this time, but it’s gone again before your tired mind can question it.

“This should help bring the swelling down…”

You give him a tired smile, and a quiet thank you in acknowledgment.

That seems to snap him out of whatever momentary daze he had slipped into.

He moves back, stopping to take stock of the things he brought with him for a moment before grabbing a wet-looking washcloth and settling himself down on the bed in front of you.

“You’ll sleep better if your face isn’t all hot and tear-stained.”

You’re not gonna decline him, but you do feel compelled to say something.

“You really don’t have to go to such lengths like this, Moon… I don’t really feel like I deserve all this pampering after the burden I’ve been here lately...”

His body language visibly falls, seeming almost hurt by your words.

“Let’s get one thing straight, doll. 

You are no burden. 

Second of all, if you think that this is pampering…”

He lets out a small, sad laugh, looking down and obviously thinking something over internally.

“…then you’ve need to raise your standards, love. This is just basic care.”

He turns back to meet your gaze again.

“Besides. We’d be some pretty awful caretakers if we couldn’t even do this, wouldn’t we?”

His faceplate spins until it’s done a 180, reversing its path and righting itself once again as he speaks. That gets a small smile out of you, and you drop the subject, closing your eyes and leaning in to let him wipe the mess of your breakdown from your flushed skin.

Once you’re cleaned, he steps away for a moment, placing the damp cloth back atop the first aid kit on the table. He’ll put everything away in the morning, but for now, he’s quite hesitant to leave your side again. The small mess of assorted items and today’s dirty clothes will have to wait until tomorrow.

Leaning down to pull their belled slippers off, he places them neatly away to the side. You eye his long fingers as he lifts the back of their neck ruffles, deftly undoing the small bow holding them on, and watch as it unravels. He tosses the fabric onto the same chair he hung your jacket from, and your eyes follow his hands as they move down to his waist, fingers working to undo the tie that holds their pants up.

You avert your gaze as the star patterned fabric drops to the floor, pooling around his ankles. It’s not like there’s anything about each other you haven’t already seen before, but it still feels a bit inappropriate to just sit here doing nothing and watching him undress.

As you lean your head back to stare up at the sea of glow-in-the-dark stars that decorate the ceiling, he steps into the longest, softest pair of black palazzo pants known to mankind, a rare find of yours from a lucky trip to a thrift store.

You hated it when you first found out that they either had to sleep in their work clothes or nothing at all, so you had begun to buy up any casual clothes you could find whenever you happened across something that might fit their unusual frame.

He wraps the ties around his thin waist twice, tying them into a neat bow in the front. He then grabs a baggy, cream colored open-front cardigan and slips one arm after the other into it. Loosely wrapping the sides across his front, he turns and makes his way back over to the bedside. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other about wearing any sort of shirt to bed, but you often fell asleep on him and weren’t a big fan of waking up with your cheek adhered to the silicone of his chest plate.

When you notice his approach in your peripheral vision, you pull your lidded gaze away from the stars above you to look at the Moon beside you.

He settles himself down right next to you, careful to not disturb the nest he’s created, and then reaches out to the bedside table one more time, returning with a bottle of water and a packet of your favorite crackers, which he presumably snatched from the daycare’s pantry.

Why on earth it is that this is the gesture that finally does you in will forever remain a mystery to you, but at the sight of him presenting you the food and water, your eyes well up again with tears you didn’t think you had left.

He visibly falters for a moment, unsure if he’s done something wrong. He drops the crackers down onto the bed, freeing a hand to reach out and cup your cheek, guiding you to look at him. His voice is heavy with a quiet concern.

“Hey, hey, no more tears… Why are you crying again, starlight? Is something still hurting you?”

You smile in spite of your shining eyes, and lean into his touch.

“They’re good tears this time, Moon. I just… Thank you. For everything, for all of this, thank you. Both of you.”

He seems to relax a bit at that, and his thumb runs over your cheek to brush away a stray tear. His eyes get that distant look in them for a moment and you realize he’s listening to Sun.

“Thanking us is not necessary, but you’re very welcome all the same.”

He opens the water bottle for you, assuring that you’ve got a good grip on it before he lets you take it. As soon as it hits your throat you realize just how thirsty you were, greedily downing about half the bottle before Moon’s hand appears in your line of sight, gently ushering it away from your pursed lips. 

“Please pace yourself, starlight.”

You swallow your current mouthful of water as you watch him open the package of crackers, expecting him to hand it to you before you remember that you’ve got a bottle in one hand and an ice pack on the other. He picks one piece out of the package and as he brings it up towards you, you connect the dots quickly enough.

“Open.”

Oh, brother, he’s really giving you the full treatment tonight.

You feel heat return to your cheeks once again, albeit for a different reason this time around. Your voice comes out in a mixture of embarrassment and want.

“You don’t have to feed me…”

His faceplate angles down to the side, cocking his head at you. If he could smirk you’re sure he would be right now.

“But we want to.”

He gently nudges the cracker at your closed lips and you side-eye him as you part them just enough to snatch the food in between your teeth. You pull away with a small smile as you chew, and for some reason you struggle to look him in the eyes.

If circumstances were brighter, he’d likely be teasing you for being so shy, but tonight… Tonight, he sets the jokes aside. He patiently feeds you one cracker after another, reminding you to take a small sip of water every few bites. At some point, when your mind slows down enough for you to notice the silence permeating the room, soft music begins to play from the speaker hidden in his chest.

It’s the tune that he reserves especially for nights like these with you, one that he never plays during nap time. In spite of how little Sun and Moon have to call their own, they still manage to find small parts of themselves to share only with you.

Once you’ve finished your snack, you let him place the remainder of your water back on the side table. When he turns back to you, ready to get you laid down to sleep, you’re fixing him with a thoughtful stare. His faceplate tilts 45 degrees, his tone curious.

“What are you looking at?”

Your tired gaze roams across his faceplate, following along the smeared oily tear tracks he seems to have forgotten about. You then look past him, over his shoulder, and your eyes land on the still-damp cloth on the table.

“Would you hand me that cloth for a second, please?”

He’s silent for a moment, processing your question, but eventually reaches behind himself to retrieve it for you. When he places it in your open right hand, you use it to gesture out in front of you.

“Can you move to sit in front of me for a minute?”

He tilts his head the opposite direction in confusion once again, but does as you requested. You motion for him to lean down a bit until his face is level with yours.

Once you can reach him, you pinch one corner of the cloth between two fingers and set to work wiping away the dark tear tracks. You follow the path they’ve made down from beneath their eyes, around the inner curve of their cheeks and down to their mouth. The trails of inky fluid had weaved their way through the crevices of their smile and eventually converged, pooling in the bottom curve of the crescent moon.

You feel his eyes, now tiny pinpricks of red in a black void, following your every movement. Not really in a dangerous sort of way… he just seems more taken aback than anything. When you’ve wiped every last trace away, you meet his gaze briefly as you give him one final look over, and you give him a small smile.

You go to hand the cloth back to him and he doesn’t move to take it, still sitting there with his hands clasped in his lap and staring straight at you. Oh god. Knowing your luck, your attempt at returning the favor has broken him. Cautiously reaching out, you take one of his hands in yours and maneuver it until it’s face-up. You ball the cloth up and place it back in his palm as your hand comes to rest over top of it, eyes darting across his frame in search of any movement, any sort of response.

“Are you still with me, Moon?”

At your words, his faceplate suddenly clicks back and forth a few times before making one full rotation, the bell on the end of his hat grazing the pillows below you along the way. Life seems to finally return to him, and his fingers close around the cloth in his hand as he leans back. Silently, he moves from his spot seated in front of you to return the cloth to the table before settling himself back down in his prior spot beside you. You turn to look at him, uncertain, and his gaze is settled on the bed sheets when he speaks.

“I never left you.”

Your tired mind struggles to understand what exactly that means, looking up at him with furrowed brows.

“Huh?”

He tilts his faceplate to look down at you, still being a head taller than you even when you’re sitting next to him.

“You asked me if I was still with you.”

His hand reaches out and he carefully laces his long fingers between yours.

“I never left.”

A warm feeling spreads through your chest at the sincerity in his voice and in that moment, you can’t do anything other than lean into him, gently resting your forehead against his shoulder. After a little while of just breathing in the moment, you speak again.

“I just… wanted to return the favor. You two take such good care of me, wiping your tears is the least I can do…”

One of his hands comes up to cradle the back of your head against him.

“It’s entirely unnecessary but we both appreciate it nonetheless. We really do. We’re just… not used to it. Being treated so gently is… unfamiliar to us.”

You pull your left hand out from beneath the ice pack in order to wrap your arms around him in a proper hug, talking into the fabric of his cardigan.

“Oh, come on, guys… you’re starting to sound like me now.”

Moon resists the urge to reprimand you for moving your hand, instead allowing their body to lean into the embrace, wrapping long arms around your soft, vulnerable body. His voice sounds far more exhausted than any animatronic's voice ought to when he speaks.

“…it’s well past your bedtime, little star.”

You put the last of your energy into squeezing him as tightly as you can before you finally let go, allowing him to re-situate you however he deems fit.

You know that there’s a heavy conversation to be had tomorrow, and you’re gonna have to find a way to hide or explain away the remnants of your obvious injury to little questioning minds on Monday. You’ll have to think of all the right things to say to anyone who may ask questions, and you’ll come up with something, you’re sure. One thing you can find comfort in though, is that you don’t have to worry about any of that with Sun and Moon.

They deserve a more detailed explanation of course and they’ll get it when you’re ready, but at least for tonight… the three of you can rest knowing that you’re safe and understood in each other's arms. None of you are strangers to this, and you both know that things will be okay again. One step back doesn’t erase any of the progress you made beforehand.

So for now, you breathe in deep and focus on the feeling of gentle, strong arms wrapped around you, keeping you safe from anything that may seek to harm you.

Even if that’s yourself.

A/Ns: Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. They're there for everything: anxiety, depression, suicide, school. Text HOME to 741741. Or, you can click the link here to visit their website for more information and resources. As usual, if you want to see all of my commentary and additional context in regards to writing this fic, you can find that in the notes right here on AO3!

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blind date (shigaraki x reader)

After endless failed attempts to help Tomura up his game, his friends have settled on their last resort: A blind date. Even before you show up, it's not going well. No quirks AU, 2k words.

this was originally in the x reader lovers community, but I figured I'd release it into the wild as well!

Tomura gets being a little late. “A little late” is practically his middle name. He waits until the last minute to do almost everything, and that means any complications mean he’s running behind. Hypocrisy pisses him off so much that he tries to avoid it all costs, so that means he has to put up with it without bitching when somebody else is a little late, too.

Except half an hour isn’t a just a little late for anything, let alone a blind date Tomura didn’t want to go on in the first place. He’s been waiting outside the bar you were supposed to meet at for half an hour, and he’s pissed.

“That’s it,” he says after the eighteenth time a woman his age has walked past and hasn’t been you, whatever the hell you look like. “I’m out of here.”

“Just a little longer, honey,” Magne says. She’s smiling, but she’s also got her arm around Tomura’s shoulders, and if she squeezes any harder, Tomura’s going to pop like a balloon. “She’ll be here.”

“No, she won’t.” Tomura crosses his arms over his chest, tucking his hands in so nothing will bite them. They’re on the waterfront, in the summer, and there are insects everywhere. Whose dumb idea was this? “You showed her a photo of me and she changed her mind.”

“It’s a blind date,” Magne says. Like Tomura’s supposed to know what that means. “She doesn’t know what you look like, either. That’s why you have to stay right here and keep wearing that baseball hat. Otherwise she won’t know it’s you.”

Tomura hates the hat. Right now he hates everything. “So she got here on time, saw me, and left. Can I go?”

Magne shakes her head. “You promised you’d try.”

“I showed up. I waited for fucking half an hour. I’ve tried.” Tomura finally shoves Magne’s arm off his shoulders. “I’m done.”

Tomura wishes he could say he didn’t know how he got here, except he does. One of his friends is getting married, and there’s supposed to be a wild bachelor weekend in Vegas, one last blast of stupid before settling down. Most of the groomsmen are planning to hook up with as many people as possible, and that’s where the problems start. According to his friends, Tomura has no game. Zero game. Negative one hundred game. If he was rolling for his game stat, it would be a critical failure – and none of his friends want to babysit him when they could be getting laid.

Tomura wouldn’t want to babysit when he could be getting laid, either. His solution was to skip the bachelor weekend and just show up for the wedding in his stupid rented suit. But apparently his friends really want him to come to the party, and they decided that what he needed was to get some practice in before the trip. Which means that for the last month, Tomura’s spent every Friday night and weekend getting dragged through his own personal hell.

They made him try dating apps, which were a disaster, even though Tomura let Toga set up his profile and make the first move. Then they tried traditional online dating, which also sucked, because Tomura’s too picky and other people have standards. Hanging out in bars and clubs worked exactly how it’s always worked – it doesn’t – and when Dabi pulled out the big guns and dragged Tomura to the sex club where he met his fiancé, the only people who talked to Tomura were guys. Tomura thought that was sort of a good sign, even though he’s not into men, until he remembered that guys will fuck anything with a hole in it. He’s not high on himself on his best day, but that was a really shitty night.

He thought they were going to quit after that, but his friends had one last ace up their sleeve – a blind date, Magne’s idea, which Toga enthusiastically signed off on when she saw a picture of the woman Magne wanted to set Tomura up with. Toga’s type and Tomura’s type line up, sort of, and Spinner giving the photo two thumbs way up sealed the deal.

It’s not like Tomura was hopeful or anything. He just wanted to get his friends off his back. Still, rejection sucks, and ghosting sucks worse. He’d rather have you show up and tell him to his face that you weren’t interested than stand him up.

Magne collars Tomura again, but her phone starts ringing at the same time, Toga’s contact info popping up. “Don’t go anywhere,” she warns Tomura as she raises the phone to her ear. “We’re here. She’s not here yet. Can you tell him –”

Tomura ducks out from under her arm and books it into the crowd of people on the waterfront, figuring he can make it to the metro stop before Magne figures out which way he’s going. But even that can’t go his way today, because he runs into somebody who’s moving at warp speed in the opposite direction, colliding at the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. Tomura’s not confrontational, but it’s the wrong fucking day. “Can you watch where you’re going? It’s not like you matter to whoever you’re going to –”

“Are you Tomura?”

Tomura’s heart lurches. He stares hard at you as you right yourself, picking up the backpack you dropped in the collision. There’s no way this is happening. There’s no universe in which his blind date would be someone like you.

He can see right away why Toga and Spinner approved of you, but he thought you’d be someone in his league, not somebody who’s several kilometers above it. Maybe Tomura’s too excited that you actually showed up to evaluate what you actually look like. He looks away, then looks back. Nope – you’re still pretty, even though your face is flushed and you’re breathing hard like you’ve just been running. Did you run here to meet him? Only one way to find out. “I’m Tomura.”

“I’m so sorry,” you say. “My boss held me back at work, and I missed my train –”

You’re wearing some kind of work uniform. Scrubs, maybe. Are you a nurse? “And then I couldn’t decide whether to wait for another train or just run, so I ran – but I don’t really run, so it took even longer –”

Tomura doesn’t run, either. When he was doing the stupid online dating thing, he sorted out everybody who said more than one sentence about working out. You pause to suck down a breath, then keep talking. “I know everything I just said sounds like an excuse, and I know you’re leaving,” you say, “but I was hoping I could catch you so I could say I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stand you up. I get it if you want to call it off.”

Before Tomura can answer or even think about what he’s going to say, Magne bursts out of the crowd. “I told you not to run off,” she scolds, collaring Tomura again. “If you don’t stay put, there’s no way she’s going to – oh! You’re here!”

You nod. Magne looks you up and down. “I told you to dress cute,” she scolds. “And to get here on time. I practically had to chain him to a streetlight so he wouldn’t escape.”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “My boss –”

“Of course,” Magne says, scowling. “He’s never met a good time he doesn’t want to ruin.”

Magne knows who your boss is? “How do you to know each other?”

“She’s a pharmacy tech at the place I go to pick up my E,” Magne says. “She’s the only one who works there who isn’t an asshole, and her boss is the biggest asshole of them all. I only go in there when she’s on and he’s off. But let me introduce you the right way. Shigaraki, this is – ”

Tomura misses your name the first time Magne says it, catches it the second time, but it barely registers except as something he probably shouldn’t forget. You’re pretty. You’re not an asshole, or at least you’re the same kind of asshole as Magne and everybody else Magne’s friends with, including Tomura. Your boss is the wrong kind of asshole, which means you probably didn’t blow Tomura off on purpose. And you ran here so you could meet him even when you knew you were really late. You must have really wanted to meet Tomura. What did Magne tell you about him?

Tomura can ask you about that later. “So?” Magne is saying expectantly. “Can I leave you two alone, or are you going to run away again?”

“No,” Tomura says. “You can go.”

You look surprised. “Um –”

“Now.”

Magne cackles. She snatches the hat off Tomura’s head, ruffles his hair, and slaps him on the back hard enough that he staggers. “Have fun! I want all the details later!”

“Sure,” you say, bewildered, as she kisses you on the cheek. Tomura’s going to have to talk to you about that – any details you share with Magne will be fair game for the rest of Tomura’s friends, and he’s not sure how much he wants them to know. “Um, bye.”

Magne waves and vanishes into the crowd. Now it’s just you and Tomura standing on the sidewalk. You shuffle off to one side, out of the way, and Tomura follows you. “Are you sure you still want to do this?” you ask once you’re both leaning against the railing. “I get it if you’re not in the mood. When I’ve gotten stood up, I haven’t wanted to –”

“You’ve never been stood up in your life,” Tomura says, and your expression changes from confused to offended. “Look at you.”

You look down at yourself, then back up at him. “What does that mean?”

“I didn’t know anything about you and I got here on time. If I knew what you looked like beforehand I’d have been two hours early.” It sounded like a compliment in Tomura’s head, but he can’t tell if you’re taking it that way. “People like you don’t get stood up for dates.”

“I wish that were true,” you say. You look away. “I know how it feels. I get it if you don’t want to go out anymore.”

Tomura pretends he’s thinking about it. “How far did you run to get here?”

“Sixteen blocks.”

“You ran sixteen blocks to meet me. That cancels out being late,” Tomura says. You look up, surprised for a second or two before the relief kicks in. “I still want to go out.”

“Me, too,” you say. You smile at him. Women don’t usually smile at Tomura. People don’t usually smile at Tomura. He doesn’t know what to do with it. “Thanks, Tomura. For giving me a chance.”

“Yeah,” Tomura says. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t really know,” you admit. “It’s been a while since I went on a date.”

“Same,” Tomura says. ‘Never’ counts as a while in his book. “I don’t know – grab drinks or something?”

You nod. “Can we find somewhere to sit down for a second first? I don’t usually run that much, and I don’t want to pass out on you.”

“You can pass out on me if you want,” Tomura says. You blink. Tomura facepalms even though you’re looking right at him. “There are benches back there.”

The crowd on the sidewalk is only getting denser. Tomura doesn’t want to get separated from you, so he tells you to hold onto the back of his shirt. You grab his hand instead, and you’re still holding it when the two of you find a place to sit down. Still holding it once you’re both settled, searching for something to talk about. Tomura’s not optimistic about this. You’re too good to be true – the kind of woman who’d run sixteen blocks to meet him and hold his hand is a kind of woman who doesn’t exist. Even so, it’s – nice. Tomura laces his fingers with yours and decides to enjoy it while it lasts.

I have to confess

I have another comfort character...yes Tomura isn't the only one even if he's my fav 😂✋

I also have sundrop✨ from fnaf i can't i...such a sunshine 🥺

A new life for Tomura part6

i could only die happily after drawing this shit !

The tongue 👅