Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 19) - A Shigaraki X F!Reader Fic
Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 19) - 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-down 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 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
Chapter 19
You pitch forward, but Tomura’s there to catch you, and for a moment, everything’s right where it should be. You’re home. You didn’t leave him. He won’t let you fall. For a single split second, you let yourself believe things will be okay. Then one of Tomura’s hands brushes over an open wound and you cry out. When he pulls his hand back, his palm is shiny with blood. Tomura looks at his hand, then looks at you, and you see his eyes widen – first in horror, then in rage.
“You thought I’d blame them?” he asks his conjurer. “You think I’m weak. You thought I was stupid, too? You’re the one who tried to take my human away.”
He’s trying to put his arm around you, but you’re bloody from shoulder to knee. There’s next to nowhere he can touch that won’t hurt you, and with every second that passes, his anger grows, until he’s practically vibrating with fury. “I wouldn’t dream of taking your human from you,” Shigaraki says to Tomura. “On the contrary, I want to ensure that you keep her forever – without having to make any unnecessary changes to yourself!”
“What?”
Tomura sounds baffled. “Nomu,” you mumble. You seize the hand that’s been searching for a place to hold you and press it to your cheek. “He wants to make me a Nomu.”
“Think about it,” Tomura’s conjurer says. “As a Nomu, she’d be much less breakable. Much less mortal, too. All that effort you’ve put in to understand her – this way, she’d understand you. The process was nearly complete when she left to return to you.”
“Escaped.”
“It wouldn’t take much,” the conjurer says, like you didn’t speak at all. He’s coming closer. “It could be done in a matter of hours. If you wish it.”
“If I wish it,” Tomura repeats. Your blood turns to ice.
“Of course,” the conjurer says. “As I said, I’ve neglected you all these years. I’ll do what I must to make it right.”
Tomura’s thinking about it. Is he thinking about it? You don’t know. “You idiot,” Dabi shouts. “She wouldn’t be your human anymore. She’d be something else, and he’d own her just like he owns you!”
“Look what’s been done to her,” Shirakumo says, his voice low and quiet. “I know what it’s like. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
“Do you truly believe they have your best interests at heart, Tomura?” Shigaraki asks. “They’ll do anything to keep you trapped here, using your power for their own protection. You’ll be a slave to their fear forever. I’m offering you freedom.”
“At a cost.”
It’s Aizawa’s voice. He’s the only human who’s spoken up since you crossed the property line, and he speaks again, his voice perfectly calm. Not to the conjurer. To Tomura. “It comes at a cost,” he says again. “Neither you nor he will be the one to pay it.”
You still have Tomura’s hand pressed against your cheek. He looks at you, then at his other hand, smeared with your blood. You see fury flash in his eyes. Then he turns away, putting his back to the street, pulling you with him. “Spinner,” he says, and Spinner hurries forward. Tomura shifts you from leaning against him to leaning against Spinner. “I need both hands to clear this level.”
He’s not going to give you to his conjurer. He was never going to. Spinner ushers you away, pulling you over to where the noncombatants seem to be huddled – Himiko, Eri, Jin’s youngers siblings. Tomura, meanwhile, materializes fully, cutting off his conjurer’s access to the world between as he starts down the steps. “You were gone too long, Master,” he says. “There’s nothing you have that I want.”
“Yes, come here. Let me see you. I – ugh.” The conjurer makes a disgusted noise. “Now I see where my brother’s spirit went after it ceased to trouble me. You look like him. I’m aware you can’t control how you look when you embody yourself, but – forgive me. It’s quite frustrating.”
“I don’t care who you think I look like.” Tomura stops at the edge of the yard, just prior to the gate. “I’m pretty. My human said so.”
He sounds so proud of himself, and your heart leaps. Even the fact that half your neighborhood is laughing semi-hysterically doesn’t check your joy. You twist in Spinner’s arms, catching a glimpse of the conjurer standing on the opposite side of the gate. He looks horrible. Whatever energy the bracelet released when it broke, it looked like it scalded him, or boiled him, peeling back his skin until his face is nearly devoid of features. He’s looking at Tomura blankly, completely nonplussed. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do.
Finally he clears his throat and speaks again. “You’re quite possibly the most powerful being in this world. Is this – protecting this single neighborhood, and that particular human – truly all you intend to do with it? Is that the extent of your will?”
“No. This is.” Tomura crouches, sets his hands on the ground, and your fence blows apart for the third time this year.
That’s not all that happens. The ground shakes. You feel everything around you ripple and shift, and you hear Dabi swear loudly. Eri and Himiko are both cheering. You look around for answers and find Spinner staring, slack-jawed. “He said he could. I didn’t think he’d actually do it –”
“Do what?”
“Expand the boundaries of his power by force.” Aizawa’s got his gun. “His spirit is still tied to the property, but the entire neighborhood is now within reach of his abilities.”
“That means he can do more to all of them,” Shinsou says. He’s hunkered down with the other kids, but he doesn’t look like he likes it. “Except it means it’s easier for them to get to us, too.”
Jin’s mom steps out of your house. She’s holding a baseball bat and her expression is grim. “Go inside,” she tells her children, and most of them get up and hurry through the door. She looks at you. “Look after them. We’ll do the rest.”
You want to say that you’ll fight, too, but you can barely stand. There’s no way you’ll be anything but a liability. “I can fight,” Himiko protests.
“Me, too!” Shinsou gets to his feet. “We’re way outnumbered. You need us! We can help.”
Aizawa and Jin’s mom trade a glance. “Fine,” Aizawa says. “Himiko, back up Dabi. Shinsou, back up Shirakumo. Don’t engage anyone on your own. Understood?”
Himiko nods and takes off, pulling a knife out of absolutely nowhere. Shinsou casts about for a weapon, picks up a shovel that’s leaning against the house, and takes off, too. With nothing else to do, and Aizawa and Jin’s mom already taking up defensive positions in the yard, you herd Jin’s remaining siblings into the house. Eri’s already inside. She’s in Phantom’s crate, with Phantom. Phantom is whining, a low, continuous sound of distress, but when she spots you, she rockets to her feet, trampling Eri in an effort to get to you. You sink down to the floor, trying to greet her without getting any of your wounds stepped on.
From outside the window, you hear the conjurer’s voice. “Remarkable work, Tomura! But you don’t need to be so gentle with the use of your power.”
“Don’t worry.” Tomura’s voice is flat and icy. “I won’t be gentle on you at all.”
The air temperature plummets, inside the house and outside of it, and you hear the first set of screams rise. You’re seized with a desperation to see the fight, to see Tomura and make sure he’s okay, but you’ve got the kids and Phantom you’re responsible for. You rack your brains, trying to think of where the safest place to hide them will be. Finally you settle on the corner of the room, along the same wall as the front window. No one who peers in will be able to see them easily, and it’s a straight shot from here through the kitchen to the back door in case you need to get out in a hurry. Jin’s siblings, usually raucous, are quiet and scared. Eri’s the most agitated of the group, so you put her in charge of Phantom to give her something to do. And then you drag yourself across the floor again so you can peer out the window.
It looks like someone’s unleashed hell. The scene is eerily lit with flashes of blue fire, and you can see wisps of essence drifting through the air. Too many of them. At least two ghosts are already dead.
You search the battlefield, picking out every live ghost or ghost-adjacent on your side – Shirakumo, Natsu, Nemuri, Dabi, Tomura. They’re all here, although in Tomura’s case, here is a relative term. He’s almost fully materialized, but not quite. That’s not good. He needs to materialize fully if he wants to cut off his conjurer’s access to his power. Does he need to be dematerialized to access his own power? You should have asked, or somebody should have. If he can’t fight –
But he can fight. A ghost comes within reach and Tomura seizes them, blows them apart, adding more shreds of essence to the icy breeze. The next opponent is an embodied ghost. Tomura hits them hard enough to cave in their chest, then tosses them away. He didn’t drain them, even though draining them would have been faster. Why?
“He can’t,” Eri says quietly. “He wants to be like us. If he drains somebody he will be.”
And if he does, his conjurer will kill you all. The others are holding their own in the fight, but when you watch Tomura carefully, you realize that he’s stepping in to save them when they get in over their heads. That’s why he’s not fully materialized. When he’s incorporeal, his reach is longer. He can get to the others before they even know they’re in danger. “Knock it off,” Dabi snaps. “Quit stealing my kills.”
“Be faster, then.” Invisible hands grab Dabi’s current opponent, yank them backwards off their feet, and smash them face-first into the ground. It must be a live ghost, because they explode into a cloud of essence, and they don’t come back. “I’ll do this by myself if I have to.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to,” Hizashi hollers from somewhere out of sight. You can’t see him, but you see dark liquid spray up, and you decide not to think too hard about what it is. “Focus on your own fight! He’s – fuck! Nem, watch out!”
You don’t see what happens, but you see Nemuri sprint through your field of vision, clearly in full retreat. “Quit screwing around! Do it now!”
Tomura materializes fully. You always know when he’s done it, because you always see him stagger slightly when his feet hit the ground. Shigaraki tsks from somewhere nearby. “You think that will save you? Why do you think I brought so many of my friends?” he asks. You feel the ground shake, once and then again. “You can access the world between even while wearing that weak form. Show me what you’re capable of!”
The thing that appears from the shadows is enormous. You’re not sure if it’s a Nomu or just another ghost, but it towers over the rest of them, dwarfing Tomura so badly that he looks like a child’s plaything compared to it. You watch Tomura brace himself, hands outstretched to make contact, but the thing swats his hands aside. Then it seizes him around the waist and clenches its hand into a fist.
You scream in horror. You can’t help it when you see the spray of blood that exits Tomura’s mouth, the way his head falls back, eyes blank and bloody, features gone slack. The monster squeezes harder, then gives a vicious shake, and you swear you can hear his neck snap. Tomura might be the one crushed to death in the monster’s grip, but you’re struggling to breathe. “Tomura –”
Improbably, agonizingly, his head turns in the direction of your voice. Then he dematerializes, leaving the monster with an empty, bloodstained hand.
“He’s okay,” Eri whispers to you, but you don’t believe her. Tomura materializes fully again, just out of reach of the monster, but he looks shaken. You’ve never seen him look like that before. “See, he’s okay! He’s –”
This time, Tomura dodges one of the giant’s hands only to get grabbed by the other. It seizes him with the other hand, too. Then it tears him in half.
He can feel things when he’s materialized. You know that. Some things feel good and some things feel bad, and as you watch the monster destroy his physical form again and again, you’re sick with horror at how much it must hurt. You watch him die three times, five times, twelve times, his limbs torn off, his skull crushed, his body mangled beyond repair. Every time he materializes again whole, he looks worse. Not marked by what’s happened before. Tortured by it, haunted by it, until the monster seizes him and it begins again.
You can’t look away. Some part of you feels like you owe it to him not to. If you can’t help, if all you can do is sit and watch, at least you can let him know you’re here.
The monster throws him to the ground and stomps on him until his body disintegrates into a puddle of tissue and shattered bones, and he doesn’t reappear quickly. Second after second ticks past without him materializing again. Then a familiar rush of cold comes over you, and when you look away from the window, you find Tomura crouched beneath it.
He looks awful, sick and sweaty and pale, and when you reach for him, you can feel how badly he’s shaking. You pull him into your arms and hold on tight, ignoring the bright flare of pain from your wounds when he slumps against you, when he hugs you back even harder. There’s no time for a kiss. There’s not even time to speak. Just a split second of contact that leaves your skin damp with his cold sweat and his shirt stained with your blood, before he dematerializes and reappears outside the house.
The giant swings for him again, but this time it misses – and it misses its second swing, too. Tomura’s gotten his feet under him, and he’s moving faster than he was before, so fast that your eyes can’t track him. It makes your head hurt to try. You squeeze your eyes shut for a split second, only for them to fly open when you hear the sound of glass shattering right next to your head. You open your eyes and find an embodied ghost leering down at you.
You struggle to your feet, trying to stay between the ghost and the kids, trying to figure out how permanent the embodiment is. You strike out towards his face and see him flinch – but he doesn’t blink. Fully embodied, which means you don’t have to worry about being drained, which means you need to fight. You’re not a good fighter by any means, and you’re worse now, courtesy of every other horrible thing that’s happened today. When the ghost strikes at you, you’re too slow to dodge, and he knocks you sprawling across the floor.
You have to get up. The kids. You have to get up so you can protect the kids, but when you try to rise, the ghost kicks you in the ribs and knocks you back again. “Go on,” he says, leering down at you. “Call for help. Call him.”
You seal your mouth shut. If you didn’t scream for Tomura to save you while his conjurer was torturing you, there’s no way you’re going to do it here. The ghost draws his foot back to kick again, only to yelp and stagger as Phantom bites down hard on his other ankle, shaking and snarling until he loses his footing. She’s not the only one trying to help. Eri’s hitting the ghost in every spot she can reach, her tiny fists balled up and her face twisted with rage.
“No!” she shouts. One of her blows catches the ghost in the groin and he nearly falls. That’s your opening. You crawl across the floor, heading for the fireplace and the fire poker hanging from a hook on the wall. “No! You’re not supposed to be here! Go away!”
Her voice rises to a shriek, and you hear an odd, strangled sound. You twist around and freeze, struggling to grasp what you’re seeing. The ghost is – shrinking. From an adult to a teenager to a child to an infant, and finally to nothing, vanishing out of Eri’s grip completely. Eri looks surprised, then pleased with herself. “I didn’t know I could still do that!”
She scrambles across the floor to you and starts patting your head. “It’s okay! I got him! You don’t need that.”
You grab the fire poker anyway, your mind still reeling. “Is that how you – got people before?”
Eri nods importantly. Then her eyes brighten. “I have to go!” she announces, and before you can stop her, she bolts out the front door. “Tomura! I have something for you!”
You want to tell her not to distract him, but then he crashes through the porch roof, sprawled out with wooden spars protruding from his torso, his shoulder, his mouth. He dematerializes, then reappears, and Eri seizes one of his hands. “Here!” she says, and you see something pass from her hand to his. “I helped! Go!”
Tomura nods in thanks and disappears off the porch at lightning speed, while you pour all your energy into getting ahold of Eri and pulling her back inside. Eri goes willingly. “I have to tell Himiko,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. “Maybe she can do it too.”
You vaguely remember Hizashi saying something about how Eri had massive untapped powers as a ghost. Somehow she figured out a way to pass off a human-sized dose of life-force to Tomura without requiring him to drain anybody, and when you peer out the broken window, you see Hizashi dart past the giant as it pursues Tomura, slapping Tomura in the back of the head on the way. Tomura turns to snarl at him, but when he steps back out of the giant’s range, he’s notably faster. Hizashi can still drain people, maybe. But there’s another live ghost in the equation who can do the same, and Nemuri dips in next, tapping Tomura’s shoulder before dematerializing.
You don’t see where she goes, but the giant staggers, howling in pain. You look to Eri, wondering if she knows. “He’s a Nomu,” she says by way of explanation. “She’s in his heart.”
You remember what Rumi did to the conjurer’s henchman she caught and feel like you’re going to be sick. The giant reaches into its own chest, trying to remove Nemuri, and blood oozes out, spattering the grass, the fence, everyone fighting in the yard and on the street. It stumbles, then stumbles again, and its shadow falls over your house.
If it falls on you, you’re all dead. “Get out of there!” Aizawa shouts. You yell for the kids, grab Phantom, and bolt into the yard once the others are out.
Nemuri and Tomura have gone from trying to kill the giant to trying to stop it from crushing the house, and the two Nomu jump in to help. For a second you’re confused about why they’d want to protect the house at all, but then you remember that even with extending his power over the neighborhood, Tomura’s still strongest inside the property line. If the house is destroyed, there’s nothing at all to stop the conjurer from coming through.
Where is the conjurer, anyway? A chill that’s got nothing to do with the high concentration of ghosts in the area runs down your spine. You turn just in time to see the conjurer step through your front gate.
Aizawa spots him, shoots him, his aim solid even with one eye. But Tomura’s incorporeal, pushing the boundaries of his power to try to contain the falling giant, which means the conjurer shrugs off the shot like it’s nothing. Then he slips into the crowd, weaving in between the combatants, making it impossible for Aizawa to shoot him without the risk of hitting someone on your side. Aizawa snarls, turns to deal with another opponent, and you set off.
You take the kids to hide. There aren’t very many good places to hide, but anywhere the giant isn’t is a good place to be. You find Keigo and tap his shoulder just after he’s finished knocking out an embodied ghost, leaving them easy prey for Natsu. In retrospect this wasn’t your brightest idea. He swings a crowbar at your head and almost knocks you out, checking his swing at the last minute. “Don’t do that! Why are you walking around? You should be –”
“I need you to take them and help them hide.” You gesture at the children. “In your house. I don’t know. Just get them out of here.”
Keigo stares at you. “And what are you going to do?”
“I have to get to him. The conjurer.” Your legs go weak when you think about what you’re planning to do, but you lean on the fire poker and stay on your feet. “I’m the only one he has a reason not to kill. I can get close. If I time it right –”
Keigo doesn’t need you to finish the sentence. He nods and turns to the kids. “We’re gonna cross the street and go hang out at my place, okay? Let’s go.”
Eri hesitates, but she eventually follows Keigo and Jin’s siblings. You force yourself upright, tighten your grip on the fire poker, and start off through the crowd in search of Tomura’s conjurer.
You’ll only get one strike to bring him down. It’ll have to do the job, and courtesy of Garaki, whatever inhibition you had against hitting another person with the intent to kill them is long gone. All you have to do is picture what’s happened to Tomura since Shigaraki got here, and you see red. One hit to stun him, and then as many more as it takes, until he’s dead and Tomura’s safe and this is over for good.
Shigaraki must be trying to stay hidden. With Tomura materialized for most of the fight, his conjurer’s access to the world between is cut off, which means he won’t be able to defend himself if one of the Nomus on your side comes for him. You can’t defend yourself, either. Where would you hide?
The house. The house is the best shelter there is if one isn’t worried about the giant, and the conjurer probably thinks you’re still in there. You look towards the house and spot him climbing the front steps. His back is to you. Tomura’s materialized, darting around the back of the house to evade the giant. Now’s your chance. You renew your grip on the fire poker one last time and set off at an unsteady run, ducking around fights where you’re beneath the combatants’ notice. Originally your plan was to hit him in the head, just like you did to Garaki, but as you close the distance between the two of you, you realize that you don’t have the strength or the balance for a swing. There’s a sharp point on the fire poker. That’s what you’ll use.
You remember thinking, when you were deciding how to attack Garaki, that you couldn’t stab someone. That’s changed. You make it two steps up the short staircase to the porch, lose your footing, and fall forward against the conjurer’s back, getting your makeshift spear into position just in time. Your momentum does most of the work. The fire poker stabs into the conjurer’s back, sinking in to the base of the spike. You apply the last of your strength and shove it the rest of the way, fighting the resistance of muscle and bone until you’ve run him through.
Blood gushes from the wound, soaking you all over again, and Shigaraki Akira lets out a pained grunt. It’s a much quieter sound than you’d make if you’d just been stabbed, and it’s the first sign that something’s gone wrong. The next is when the handle of the fire poker is yanked out of your grasp, pulled into the conjurer’s body. He’s pulling it through, hand over hand, until it exits his body on the other side.
You stumble, losing your footing, and fall backwards down the steps as Shigaraki Akira turns to face you, fire poker in hand. Blood is running from his mouth, but he’s smiling at you, and as you watch in terror, the wound in his chest closes completely. “Excellent try, but your timing was poor,” he says. He tosses the fire poker down the steps to clatter at your feet. “Why not try again?”
You should. Just because Tomura was incorporeal when you stabbed Shigaraki this time around doesn’t mean he will be the next time, but when you reach for the fire poker, you can’t close your fingers around it. The hard landing feels like it’s jarred some circuit loose in your brain, and you can barely move. The pain’s flooding back in, too, and suddenly you’re struck by the futility of it all. Even if you pick it up, even if you fight again, you’ve lost the element of surprise. He’s bigger and stronger than you. You don’t see how you can do anything but lose.
Shigaraki leers. “You spent all your will on one strike,” he says. He’s coming down the steps towards you. You shuffle backwards, but not fast enough. “Shimura’s farewell gift helped you escape my purpose for you before, but it won’t do so again. This won’t take but a moment.”
He reaches down and seizes you around your throat, hauling you to your knees one-handed. His other hand reaches out and snags a passing ghost, yanking them out of their embodiment in a single smooth movement. You can see the spirit twisting in his grip as his hold on you shifts, forcing your head back and your mouth open. “It’s a shame Rumi escaped. She would have suited you and Tomura better,” he says. You bite down on his fingers to no effect, and he grips your jaw tighter in response. “But this will do. Don’t struggle, now. There’s no need when you’ve given up already. Just – swallow.”
Something cold brushes your lips, then the back of your tongue, something that squirms and wriggles horrendously as it tries to escape. You raise your arms and try to pry the conjurer’s hand off your jaw, but his grip is iron, and it’s getting hard to breathe. He’s going to force the ghost down your throat, turn you into a Nomu, and you won’t be you anymore – and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t pull his hand free. You’re reduced to scratching at his knuckles as you choke on the ghost he’s trying to bind to you.
His grip on your jaw tightens past the point of pain. “Don’t struggle,” he instructs you again. “Just –”
Something plows into him from one side, moving too fast for you to track it. You sprawl out on the ground, coughing up what little essence you were forced to swallow, and the ghost he was trying to force-feed to you vanishes in a split second. You’d run if you could, too. Instead you struggle to pick your face up out of the dirt to see what’s happened to the conjurer.
The giant’s gone and Nemuri is nowhere to be found, but Tomura’s on his feet. He’s standing over the conjurer, eyes blazing but curiously blank. His shirt hangs in tatters. His blue-grey hair’s gone white. The very air around you is crackling with the evidence of his power.
The conjurer looks at him, what’s left of his mouth curving into a broad smile. “Well done, Tomura,” he says. “You’ve claimed your power at last. Dispense with the others.”
Tomura doesn’t move, but all around you, enemy ghosts and Nomus burst apart into clouds of essence, until the entire neighborhood hangs under a heavy fog. The only ghosts left are the permanently embodied ones, who promptly bolt. Tomura lets them go. The conjurer gets to his feet, grimacing slightly, but once he’s standing, he smiles for Tomura. “Now put an end to all of this,” he says. “Destroy the house.”
Tomura looks towards the house. He extends one hanz, and for a moment, you’re convinced he’ll destroy it. The conjurer’s right – it was a prison. Maybe it’s always been a prison to him, even if it was home to you. Then a vicious smile comes to Tomura’s face. He turns away from the house and seizes his conjurer by the throat. “I think I’ll destroy you.”
His conjurer doesn’t answer. That smile is still on his face, and you see Tomura’s eyes widen in surprise a moment later. He’s materialized. His conjurer has no access to the world between through him. So why is he hesitating? You see something crawling across the conjurer’s skin and blink hard as you try to get a handle on it. When you realize what it is, your stomach turns.
It’s essence. Tomura’s conjurer is covered in clouds of ghostly essence. Was he always like that? No, you would have noticed during the time he spent torturing you. You were out of it, but not enough to miss something like that. You see Tomura frown, shake his head. A wave of cold sweeps through the neighborhood, instantly coating everything in a sheen of frost and ice, but the conjurer only laughs. “You’ve already broken them. They can’t be blown apart smaller than this, and the neighborhood is full of the remains of your enemies. Even if you could destroy them, I’ll always have more.”
The scraps of essence are beginning to move, crawling over Tomura’s hand, and he draws back, revulsion on his face. The conjurer gestures, and the fog you saw hovering over the neighborhood descends. Where it touches a ghost, embodied or not, they recoil. When it touches a human, like you, the cold begins to burrow through your skin. You’ve got a lot of open wounds. It doesn’t have far to go before it hits bone.
You don’t want to scream, but as the cold begins to writhe beneath your skin, you can’t help it – and you’re not the only one. Human or Nomu or ghost, it doesn’t matter. Whether the scraps of essence trigger a response of disgust or agony, all you and the others can do is scream for it to stop, and the conjurer’s voice rises above it all. “This stops when you decide it does, Tomura. You can’t destroy me the way you wish to. Destroy the house, and I’ll let them go.”
“No, you won’t.” Tomura looks miserable. “I can see inside your head. You won’t let them go as long as you think you can control me with them. I know what you think I won’t do.”
“If you do what I ask of you, you’ll find I’m very reasonable,” Shigaraki Akira says. “I’ll have no reason to hurt them if you comply.”
But he will. Every time he thinks Tomura won’t do what he wants, he’ll hurt you all until Tomura bows to his will. The question of whether Tomura cares about the neighborhood has been settled for good – he does care. Enough that he’d give in to his conjurer to protect you all. “I don’t believe you,” Tomura says. His hand closes around his conjurer’s throat again. “And I’ll destroy you however I have to.”
Garaki had the chance to speak, but Shigaraki Akira doesn’t. You see a split second of shock on his misshapen features before he begins to disintegrate at the throat.
It’s fast and mercilessly simple. Tomura drains his conjurer to death at lightning speed, scattering essence into the air, and as the empty set of clothes falls to the ground, you see Tomura’s feet touch the mostly-dead grass in your front yard. There’s the little stagger he always does when he lands, like he’s not quite used to being on solid ground. And then the world begins to bend and warp around him, midair tearing open just behind him. A rush of cold sweeps over you again, a thousand times worse than anything you’ve felt from Tomura or any other ghost. It’s the world between. It’s pulling him back in.
Tomura’s body begins to fray, strips of skin peeling off and being sucked into the rift behind him, a moment before it yanks him off his feet entirely. In a split second he’s nearly swallowed whole. All that’s left of him is one hand reaching out, grasping uselessly at the air, seeking something, anything, to hold onto.
You move without conscious thought. You throw yourself forward and seize Tomura’s hand in both of yours, one hand closing around his palm and the other around his wrist. You don’t know if you can stop this. If there’s any way to stop this at all. But you know for a fact that you’re not going to let go of him. Wherever he goes, you’re going there, too. Tomura’s hand grips yours just as tightly. His knuckles have gone white. And his hand is warm.
Another set of hands covers yours and you nearly jump out of your skin. When you look to your right, you find Spinner crouched next to you. He gives you a strained smile and tightens his grip on you, and on Tomura. “You gotta hang on,” he shouts at Tomura. “I heard there’s a shiny Giratina in the new Pokémon game.”
You almost laugh. You would laugh if you couldn’t feel the cold leaking out of the world between. Another set of warm hands closes onto you, one around your wrist, one reaching further up Tomura’s arm. Himiko’s teeth are bared, either smiling or snarling – you’re not sure which. “Don’t you dare let go,” she says – to Tomura, not to you. “Your human will never forgive you, and neither will I!”
The pull of the world between is getting stronger. It’s dragging on Tomura, and now it’s dragging you, Spinner, and Himiko, pulling you closer to the breach. “Oh no you don’t,” a voice says sweetly, and someone grabs you and Spinner around the waist at once. Magne’s grip is strong as she hauls you both backwards. “Jin, honey, you too!”
Jin is holding onto you and Himiko. He’s pulling hard. With their help, you’re no longer losing ground to the world between – but you’re not making progress, either, and your hands are starting to go numb. An agonized howl issues from somewhere within the rift and your blood turns to ice. He’s hurt. This is hurting him. You have to get him out of there.
You open your mouth to call for help, but before you can, the air is unceremoniously forced out of your lungs as someone bearhugs you from behind. “Hold on,” Kurogiri instructs – not Tomura, but you. Tomura’s nails are scrabbling at the inside of your wrist, but you’re so cold you can barely feel them. “We will do the rest.”
Only Tomura’s forearm was visible before. Now his elbow and his upper arm are free of the rift. There’s another scream from inside it. Someone scurries past you, much closer to the rift than you thought anyone would dare to go, and grabs Tomura by his upper arm. “Pull together,” Atsuhiro shouts at the rest of you, as ice begins to spiral up from the spot where his hands are wrapped around Tomura’s bicep. “Now!”
Tomura’s shoulder emerges from the rift, but even as you pull him free, his grip on your hand is weakening. You tighten yours in response. “Hang on,” you beg him. “Come on, don’t do this. Hang on!”
Another yank and his head is free, but something’s wrong. He’s not conscious. His head is hanging forward, his hair in his eyes, and even when you say his name, he doesn’t stir. You keep pulling, and so does everybody else, but once you’ve freed his torso, the world between fights back. Even with all seven of you struggling to free him, you can’t win. Tomura’s hand is almost entirely limp in yours.
Himiko notices, too. She raises her voice. “Help!”
Who’s going to help you? Everybody who’s ever shown they care about Tomura is already here, fighting to steal him back from the world between. You know Aizawa won’t intervene. You wouldn’t be surprised if Hizashi tried to push Tomura back in. Who’s left? Keigo’s watching the kids. You don’t know where Nemuri is. Jin’s mom – Natsu – nobody. This is who you have. You’re not enough.
“Fuck,” Dabi explodes from somewhere behind you. You barely have time to tighten your grip on Tomura before a pair of burning-hot hands lock onto your forearm and haul you backwards.
You can smell your own flesh burning, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters, because eight of you are enough. One final yank, all of you pulling together, and Tomura tears free of the rift, falling forward into the pile of rescuers and landing mostly on top of you.
“Ew, he’s naked!” Himiko scrambles backwards, and everybody else follows, as you shift Tomura off of you and onto his back. He’s definitely naked, whatever remained of his clothes torn away in the effort to free him from the world between, and his body’s a mess. There are patches of burns and frostbite, bleeding fractures in his dry skin, his lips split and bloody. His eyes are closed. He’s not moving.
“Tomura.” You shake his shoulder, gently at first, then with increasing desperation. “Please. Please wake up.”
His skin is warm. He’s permanently embodied. He’s alive, or he was. You feel for a pulse at his neck, but you don’t know enough about taking pulses to know if you’re even touching the right spot, and your fingers are still numb. Is his chest rising and falling? Your eyes are so blurry with tears that you can barely see, and you blink hard, trying to clear them away. A few droplets roll down your face to splatter on Tomura’s shoulder, his cheek. You keep shaking him, fighting to hold in a sob. You’re injured. You’re in pain. The cold of the world between is in your bones, and none of it hurts as badly as the thought that you’ve lost Tomura for good.
You’re so busy shaking him that you barely notice when he stirs, but you can’t fail to notice the hand that rises, first to brush at his face, then to awkwardly wipe under your eyes. Even then, it barely registers. You think you’re imagining it, that you wished so hard your mind told you it was true. “Don’t leave,” you say, the same words you’ve heard him say so many times. “I need you. Don’t leave me. I –”
“Stop crying on my face.” His voice is so quiet you can barely hear it, but it’s his. You’d know it anywhere. “Don’t be stupid. I’m right here.”
It’s not a dream, or a wish come true. If everything was exactly as you wanted it, the second sentence out of Tomura’s mouth after he embodied himself wouldn’t be “don’t be stupid”, so that’s how you know it’s real. Tomura’s alive. He defeated his own conjurer. He saved everyone. And you, with a whole lot of help from the neighborhood he’s always pretended he hates – you saved him.
It’s okay now. It’ll be okay. You get a split second of pure happiness and relief before the pain floods in, and for the first time since you were dragged out of the conjurer’s torture chamber, your mind gives up the ghost. Tomura’s crimson eyes, staring up into yours, are the last thing you see before everything goes black.
More Posts from Flamme-shigaraki-spithoe and Others
A new life for Tomura part1
This poor man 🥺
oh but can you do good things shigaraki addition??? plez
pairing: yandere!Shigaraki Tomura x darling!reader goodiebag WARNINGS: yandere, angst
tip-jar: Kofi
He fears hurting you.
Not in the pretty love bites and itty bitty bruise or two or ten he gives you, but really hurting you.
He might end up giving you some more proper damage every now and again when you fight back or make him hunt you down after escaping, but he doesn’t really enjoy inflicting that sort of pain on you at all.
The thought of actually hurting you haunts him.
He’ll dream about it. Wake up shaking and in tears, wide-eyed and hyperventilating, unable to speak, and itchy like never before. And he’ll be afraid to look, the chills strangling him as he slowly turns to his head to where you ought to be lying. Dreading, with every knot in his gut tightening, the bed is full of dust.
But there you are. Pretty face still pretty on the pillow, adorable soft snores escaping you with a little spill of drool running down the corner of your mouth. And he breaks out into a cold sweat of relief, finally allowed to breathe again.
Though guilt still haunts him where he lies awake thinking about maybe, just maybe… letting you go.
tip-jar: Kofi
Well. The threatening display worked to quiet Lambert, just not in the way that was intended.
Scene doodle I have planned for The Rehabilitation of Death
For the first time in his life, Tomura Shigaraki has full control of his quirk. With this newfound freedom, there is so much that he wants to do. And it just so happens that you are at the very top of that list.
Fandom: My Hero Academia
Pairing: Tomura Shigaraki x GN!Reader
Rating: Explicit - Minors DNI
Contains: GN!Pronouns, Smut, Soft Shigaraki, Penetrative Sex (Reader Receiving), Oral Sex (Reader Recieving), Pre-Paranormal Liberation War, Post-PLF Manga Spoilers tho, Established Relationship, Alcohol, Massage, League Shenanigans. (Honestly, no crazy CW's with this one lol. It's just fluff and smut and angst lol)
Notes: I tried to write something wholesome to try and heal our mourning Shig-simp hearts... It had mixed results lol.
AO3 Link
Like my work? Please consider commissioning me or contributing to my Ko-Fi!
That seemed a little too easy.
It’s the first thought that crossed Shigaraki’s mind when he came to on the Doctor’s operating table. Don’t get him wrong, the time Ujiko had spent vivisecting him from finger to finger had been hell on earth, but it seemed to go by a little too quickly for four months.
“That’s because it’s only been a week,” Ujiko explained as he approached Shigaraki with a paper cup of water — an absolutely pathetic offering considering the world of pain the man had just mercilessly put him through.
But Shigaraki took it anyway.
“Didn’t realize that there were going to be breaks,” he said before knocking back the cup in one gulp.
“Once we begin the transference of All for One, there won’t be,” Ujiko explained, “What I was working on this time, was completing your quirk.”
Shigaraki’s brows furrowed, “What do you mean?”
Ujiko chuckled, gesturing to the paper cup in the new leader’s hands, “Why don’t you try putting your pinky down?”
He shot the doctor a confused look, not sure what exactly that would accomplish other than sparing him a trip to the trash can. But upon Ujiko’s nod of reassurance, he looked back down at the cup, bringing his raised finger down on its crease experimentally.
Shigaraki’s eyes widened immediately.
The cup was still in his hand.
It didn’t turn to dust. Didn’t even crumble or sport a single crack. He touched it with all five fingers and yet it stood with as much integrity as the steel IV pole next to him.
He snapped to the doctor, something unreadable in his voice, “Is… Is decay gone?”
“No, no of course not. I’d never purge you of such a powerful quirk,” Ujiko assured, “You just have control over it now.”
Shigaraki willed decay to activate, testing Ujiko’s explanation, and in an instant, the cup dissolved under his touch, just like he was used to.
He stared at his hand in disbelief, the dust falling through his fingers. He couldn’t believe this…
“And it’s not just turning it on or off, all or nothing,” Ujiko continued, “You can stop the spread of decay at certain points, activate it with just one finger — you have full control.”
Shigaraki snapped to Ujiko, intensely. Desperate. Maybe he should’ve been doing a better job of maintaining his poker face like Sensei would’ve, to try and hide the way this was affecting him. But he just couldn’t. Not now. Not when something he’d longed for so badly, so primally was so close to his grasp.
“Are you sure?”
Ujiko didn’t seem to take notice of this lapse of control however. Or at least, he didn’t care. His bushy mustache just raised with a small smile and pride in his work.
“Quite sure.”
Shigaraki’s eyes narrowed. He was not fucking around here, “ How sure?”
Ujiko’s smile shifted slightly, a challenging smirk pulling at the corners as he offered his own hand as fodder.
Shigaraki slapped his fingers fully atop the back of Daruma’s fat hand, letting the full extent of his anger and emotions drive him. He wanted to test this fully, test that even in fits of passion, he wouldn’t lose control.
And he didn’t.
Daruma Ujiko stood just as whole and living in front of him as the moments before. The only change was the chuckle of satisfaction that Shigaraki’s dumbfounded expression brought him.
“Pretty neat, huh?” Daruma said, turning back to start pulling out equipment for the next phase of experimentation, large hulking tubes and wires that looked more akin to HVAC parts than real medical equipment.
Neat wasn’t exactly the phrase Shigaraki would use. But he didn’t really care anymore.
He had shit to do.
“Now, regarding the next steps in your transformation—”
The EKG machine behind him beeped loudly and suddenly, signaling that it had been disconnected. Ujiko turned back to Shigaraki curiously, watching as he pulled off the various electrode pads scattered across his chest and back.
“You don’t want to get started?”
“Tomorrow,” Shigaraki answered, ripping the IV from his wrist as he hopped off the table.
“But what about the power? Your dreams?” Ujiko pressed, something strained, irritated starting to form in his voice, “I would think that these are all things you’d want without delay.”
“I do. But achieving them one day later won’t kill me. And I have some shit to take care of before I grind for four months.”
Ujiko clicked his tongue, clearly unsatisfied with this new development.
He knew exactly what Shigaraki had to go take care of. And he didn’t like it. Didn’t like you . He’d never liked you in fact. You asked too many questions. Had too many suspicions…
But Shigaraki didn’t care about the doctor’s disapproval, simply turned to him after slapping a bandage over his free-flowing wrist and commanded, “Warp me back to the villa.”
This clearly wasn’t up for discussion. Ujiko could’ve protested, sure, but at the end of the day it wouldn’t have mattered. Shigaraki wasn’t a kid anymore, far from it. He’d taken the mantle of true leader by force, and held his head high with the confidence that accomplishment deserved. If he wanted to do something, he was going to do it. The risk of upsetting the doctor or even his master was not a concern anymore. It barely ever had been.
So in the end Ujiko just sighed and turned to his obedient servant sitting patiently in the corner, “Johnny.”
Shigaraki didn’t so much as flinch as the warp came spewing out of his mouth. In fact, a rare sheen of childlike joy took over his features instead. Daruma noted this with a shaking head as he warped away. Oh well. If Shigaraki wanted one last night with his companions, with his little distraction , who was Ujiko to get in the way?
This was the last night he’d have control over his own body after all. Might as well let him enjoy it.
“Robber!” you cheered victoriously, pumping your fist over the seven you rolled.
“Noooo, not again!!” Toga cried out.
You grabbed the little gray token off the board, twirling it around tauntingly as you hum, “Hmmm, and where should I put him? I wonder…”
Spinner glared at you from across the board, “If you put it on my wheat field one more time—”
“Great idea Spinner!” you mock-gasped, already well aware of where you were planning to put it, and slap the Robber down in the center of Spinner’s monopolized wheat hex.
“Great move! Cheap shot! ” Twice, the last player of the group, piped in.
“ Damn it !” Spinner punched his fist down on the table, shaking the drinks surrounding the board precariously.
“Oi, oi careful there!” you said, grabbing your glass of wine protectively, “If you party foul, you lose a turn.”
Spinner just grumbled irritably, grabbing his own beer and knocking it back to try and quell some of his frustration. You giggled at the sight. It would be easy to assume that Shigaraki was the most competitive and aggressive game player out of the League, but he actually managed to keep his cool during sessions most of the time. No, it was undeniably Spinner that was the most uncontrollably competitive, and it never failed to make you smile.
Even as the thought of Shigaraki threatened your demeanor with a frown.
You shook out the thought, because of course, you had another certain player to focus on. And you turned to her pointedly.
“Alright Toga, half your hand, let’s go.”
She gasped, “Whaaaat? What are you talking about!? I only have six cards!”
“That’s because two of them are sticking out of your sweater.”
Toga looked down to her sleeve, where indeed the corners of two resource cards were poking out rebelliously.
She snapped back to Compress in offense, who sat on the couch behind her, observing the game amusedly with his own glass of wine in hand, “Atsuhiro! You said that trick would work!”
“I’m sorry my dear,” he shrugged his hands tragically, “But it seems your sleight of hand needs a bit more work.”
Toga groaned, pulling her cards out of her sleeve and looking over which ones she wanted to discard with a pout.
Crushing his finished beer in his hand, Spinner turned back to Dabi who sat across the room, as far from the game as possible, and pretending not to watch it all, like he wsn’t invested in a single thing in this room. Not at all.
“Oi Dabi, can you grab me a beer?”
“You’ve got legs, get it yourself.”
“But the fridge is right freaking next to you!” Spinner shouted, pointing at the minifridge that actually, was not only right next to Dabi, but that he was currently resting his feet on top of.
But Dabi was a son of a bitch. So rather than even giving him an answer, he just crossed his feet over the fridge, making himself more comfortable.
“God, seriously ?!”
Shigaraki watched this all from the doorway with a whisper of a smile on his face. He’d stopped by his bedroom at the villa to grab a button down and even considered grabbing a quick shower while he was at it before coming here — the griminess of a week of experimentation sticking to him thickly. But ultimately he’d been too eager to see his comrades.
Yet, once he got to the doorway that the familiar rowdy laughter of his League led him to, he couldn’t help but just stop and take in the moment. It was nice to see them all so comfortable and content after months of chaos and vagrancy. And it was a look that especially suited you.
While you’d never been particularly materialistic or image-obsessed (if your decision to be with him didn’t make that obvious), you certainly also weren’t one to turn down the finer things in life when offered. And clearly here, you’d been offered, given the cashmere sweater and expensive bottle of wine you were currently enjoying. The regular access to showers and brand name moisturizers and cosmetics certainly weren’t hurting you either. Your skin was clearer and more glowing than he’d seen in months. You’d even seemed to have some time to style your hair today.
And of course there was your laugh. That big, uninhibited laugh that you only let out when you were truly comfortable. In general you were a pretty pragmatic person. It’s one of the things he’d always appreciated about you, particularly when surrounded by this circus that he calls a villain group.
You approached new situations skeptically and took most things seriously. It’s not like you had no sense of humor, quite the opposite actually. But you also were very aware that there was a time and place for everything. When the pressure was high, laughter was nowhere to be found. And it had certainly been nowhere to be found for a while now.
So it went without saying that seeing you like this now, laughing over a game board, cheeks tinged slightly-red from the wine, completely taken care of and without a care in the world…
It was quite the sight for sore eyes.
“Shigaraki?”
He blinked and looked back to Spinner who, in standing to go grab a beer from the fridge, had turned and spotted him in the doorway.
“Tomura!” Toga squealed excitedly, jumping up out of her seat with Twice to join Spinner in barraging him in the doorway.
“What’re you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be leveling up with the Doc?” Spinner asked.
“Got a night off,” he answered simply.
“That’s awesome boss! Who needs ya?! ”
He turned to look past the three as you approached behind them, much calmer than the others, as usual. But that didn’t mean you weren’t just as thrilled to have him here. The adoration in your eyes was clear from across the room and it warmed him up in a way that he’d learned to really enjoy.
“It’s good to see you,” you said, simple and sweet. There was clearly so much more behind those words, but you knew how Shigaraki felt about doing shit like that in front of people, so you kept it subtle.
Apparently the caution was unnecessary though, as Shigaraki seemed to have lost his own patience for pretense. Even if it made his next words the spark that set off a firework show of “ooo’s” and teasing from resident forever teenagers, Toga and Twice.
“Yeah…” he breathed, “...Can we talk? Alone?”
It was all you could do to sit down on his bed when he told you.
“Full control?” you repeated in disbelief.
“Full control.”
You smiled, so genuinely, eyes starting to shine. You weren't even thinking about what this meant for the two of you yet, you were just happy for him, for the peace he could now live with. The burden that had eased.
“That… That’s amazing Tomura…”
Shigaraki stared down at you, a lump of nerves settling in his gut. He wasn’t affected by things like nerves or apprehension very much anymore — barely ever was in the first place, and especially not now that he had all the confidence and authority of a “Supreme Leader”. But he couldn’t keep those feelings from surfacing in that moment, couldn’t shake the image in his mind of things going terribly wrong.
Of you crumbling into a pile of dust and viscera in front of him.
He swallowed down those fears though, and started to reach out a shaky hand, “Can… Can I…?”
Whatever apprehension he felt, you obviously didn’t share. You shot out a hand immediately, without hesitation. With complete trust in his word. In him.
His trembling palm pressed against your own firm one, fingers still raised taught and high on instinct, careful not to make contact. You slotted your fingers through his own, bringing them down to hold his hand with none of that same carefulness. His knee-jerk reaction was to scold you for being so reckless around his hands, just like he always did, but he held the words back, knowing he didn’t need to anymore. But the subconscious anxiety buzzing within him was just the same.
You didn’t rush him either. Just gave him a squeeze of reassurance, and that was enough to finally encourage him to put a finger down. And then another. Tip by tip resting firmly and fully against your knuckles, until only his pinky remained raised.
He stared down at the horrid appendage, the one that had betrayed him so many times. That he could remember the horrible, gruesome ways in which it had destroyed in full, vivid detail now. Of the damage it could do to not only the world, but had done to his world. To Mon-chan, his mother, his sister…
The League was his world now — you were his world. And the idea of destroying that all with his own hands. It was too much.
No, he decided, starting to pull away. This wasn’t fucking worth the risk.
But you leaned forward then, pressing your lips gently against his, locking him in place. You didn’t deepen it, nor did you pull away. You just held yourself against him, willing him to understand that this would all be okay. That he was a “Grand Commander” now, and with that came taking risks. Risks that you’d stand behind him through to the bitter end.
How you managed to communicate that all in just a kiss — how you always managed to communicate so much with so little — should’ve been a quirk of its own honestly. But regardless of how, the comfort of those unspoken words was enough to spur him forward. Shigaraki brought down his pinky.
And you didn’t turn to dust.
You pulled away in fact, just a little, your eyes fluttering open as a soft, tearful smile spread across your face.
“Tomura—”
He surged forward, all of that hesitation and fear from before vanished in an instant. He shoved your hands together forward, pressing you to the bed as he kissed you with new fervor. His free hand came to hold your face, full and tight, all five fingers scrambling up the length of your cheek, your temple, tangling tight into your hair.
You sobbed happily into his mouth as he pulled his other hand free from yours, running it all across your body, disintegrating your clothes on contact, and then bringing those fingers back up the same route of bare skin, fully in control.
He was just as quick to decay his own clothes as you reached forward to try and tear at the top button of his shirt, which, while haphazardly done, was still too secure for either of your patience. He needed to feel you, all of you. Every inch against every pad of his fingers for the very first time.
And possibly even the last.
He didn’t want to think about that now though. He just wanted to shove you up higher onto the center of the bed, shoving your legs open wide as he kissed down the expanse of your chest and stomach. As he buried himself into your center, the pads of his fingers squeezing painfully tight into the pudge of your thighs.
But you didn’t mind the pain. Not only because it surged the pleasure just that much further, but because it grounded you. Reminded you that this was real. It promised a world — no matter how distant or near-impossible it was in reality — where Tomura Shigaraki could be whole and happy.
Where he could fully be with you.
Your legs strained against his grip, instinctually trying to close as his working tongue pushed you closer and closer to climax. It wasn’t going to take you long at all to reach that peak. After all, the intensity and emotion of the moment aside, it had been a long while since your last coupling. The weeks of recovering from his fight with Re-Destro, the full month you all spent fighting Gigantomachia. And of course, even before that, with the close quarters and stress that came from living on the run and in complete squalor, your escapades had become pretty few and far between. (It was hard to get in the mood when you hadn’t eaten or showered properly in over a week).
So yeah, suffice it to say you were pretty touch-starved at this point, the work of your fingers on lonely nights at the villa having absolutely nothing on Shigaraki’s skillful tongue. And the voraciousness with which he assaulted your sex certainly wasn’t slowing things down for you either.
He didn’t even need to slip his long, knowing fingers into you to have you coming undone — he wouldn’t want to right now anyway, completely losing himself in the way your thighs felt squeezed between his fingers, but that feel of his nails digging into you spurred you on in their own way, ripping a cry from your throat as you came hard under his lips.
Shigaraki smirked up at you, wiping the excess slick from his chin with the meat of his palm, “Missed that.”
You smiled back at him, your own tinged with a bit of sadness as he climbed up over you, hands running up your ribcage. Because you didn’t just miss this. You missed him. And you knew that feeling wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. In fact, it was just getting started.
His brows furrowed at your expression. He’d always been good at reading you, and it’s not like you were being particularly subtle, “You good?”
You chased the melancholy from your smile quickly, planting a happy peck at the corner of his mouth before showing him teeth, “I’m great.”
He hummed, a gentleness overtaking his own features as he stared down at you. Adoration, pure and whole and unrestrained, particularly as he brought a hand back up to cup your face. His fingers spread across the expanse of your skin greedily, his thumb dipping down into your mouth.
They were small gestures, little things that he seemed the most eager to do with his newly-attained range of touch. But it was obvious that they were huge to him. They were a freedom and a comfort that he’d been chasing his entire life. Even if he didn’t know it.
He groaned as you wrapped your own fingers around his cock, guiding him eagerly to your entrance. You had to. As much as he obviously wanted to fuck you, he couldn’t bare to take his fingers off of you for a second. He’d settle for fucking the plush of your thighs if it meant that he could hold you fully in his hands for just a second longer.
You, of course, were not so willing to settle.
“God—fuuck yes,” he growled, low in his throat, as he sank slowly into you, eternally grateful that for once your patience was even more lacking than his.
You grinned up at him`, shifting your hands to settle on the hard curves of his hips, “That’s good, huh?”
It was all he could do to nod shakily, lip biting back a breathy whine and brows knitting hard, as he tried desperately not to blow his load immediately.
You hummed happily at the sight, bringing one of your hands up to run across his cheek and through his hair. You remembered thinking a few months ago just how much those fights with Gigantomachia and Redestro had hardened him, aged him. Foolishly, it had even had you questioning briefly if this would be the end of your relationship. If maybe the shift that occurred during his awakening would chasm too big a valley for you two to bridge.
Of course, in the privacy of the League’s quarters, off of the stages and away from all the new adoring fans (bandwagoners, you and Spinner sometimes like to joke), he had been the same old Tomura Shigaraki, if not a little more confident and level-headed. He still complained about how everyone sitting on his bed eating dinner while he was on strict bed rest was too loud, still invested himself fully and kicking ass at every little game – from video games to cards – they challenged him to in order to pass the time with a cocky little smirk on his face.
And right now, with his face flushed and mouth agape with pleasure, he still looked just as young and ready to take on the world as the day you met him.
Finally he started to rock into you, slow and deep. One of his hands slipped down to the crux of your neck, fingertips biting tight into that smooth skin as he pulled you closer and closer into him. The other found a tight, desperate purchase on the handle of your hip. He used the grip of both to pump harder and deeper into you with every snapping thrust.
Minus the dry spell the two of you had endured over the last couple of months, you and Shigaraki had, overall, had a lot of sex over the last year that you’d known him.
Like, a lot of sex.
Rough sex, soft sex, angry, and fun. And while the man who claimed to hate everything would of course be remiss to admit it, there had indeed been quite a lot of genuine, intense lovemaking mixed in there too. But this right now, with all of the feelings and newness and longing that came with every stroke and whisper?
If Tomura Shigaraki was in fact capable of love, you were positive that this was the representation of that.
His lips dropped hot against the shell of your ear, peppering desperate bites and kisses along the skin as a string of breathy babble spilled out between.
“God fuck, you’re so perfect. Feel so good. Every part of you, so good. So fucking perfect…”
Overwhelmed with emotion and pleasure, it was all you could do to just mewl out his name, “Tomura, Tomura, Tomura—!”
His hips rolled against you with every hard buck, stimulating your aching sex in the way he knew you loved. That would have you clenching and spilling around him over and over again in the way that he loved. You weren’t even sure if it was intentional at this point, or if you had memorized each other’s bodies so well that it just became an instinctual part of his movement. You certainly didn’t have the forethought to drag your nails up the curve of his spine in the way that had him cursing and speeding up immediately.
“F-Fuck, I’m not gonna last like that—” he growled out, rutting desperately into you in spite of his own warning.
“G-Good,” you breathed back, rolling your hips right back into his, “Don’t.”
“B-But—”
He couldn’t get the rest of the words out, his mouth overtaken by a deliciously loud moan instead as he hit that deep, spongy spot inside of you that was heaven for the both of you. You got the message anyway.
But he wanted to keep fucking you. But he wanted this to last.
But he never wanted this to end.
You tangled your hand through his locks, reveling in the fact that there was so much more to hold now, and yanked his head back hard so he’d look at you.
“But nothing,” you smiled through hot, huffing breaths, “You’re fucking crazy if you think this is our only round.”
He stared at you in complete awe for a moment, hips almost coming to a stop as he took in this moment, took in you and the way that you always seemed to know what he was thinking and what he needed, even when he didn’t.
Even if he hadn’t had his own dreams for the future, looking at you now, reveling in all that you’d been through together and all that you’d done for him, thinking about all that you deserved… If he could destroy this rotten society just so that you could have the freedom to be half as happy as you looked in this moment for the rest of your life, he’d gladly fucking do it.
Shigaraki’s face mirrored yours quickly after, a wide lascivious grin spreading across his face. It was all teeth and joy and feral desire to absolutely fucking wreck you. And let himself pound into you with the most reckless abandon he could muster.
You cried out at the new punishing pace, nails pushing hard into his skin, and heels locking sharp around his waist, spurred by the desperate need to have him pound into you harder, deeper, faster. Until you were completely coming apart around him, with his own violent release following close behind.
About two hours later, when you’re lying blissed out, sticky, and half-asleep on Shigaraki’s bare chest, he told you to roll over onto your stomach.
You groaned in protest — while your spirit was eager to roll around the sheets with him as much as possible before the sunrise, your body was sore and spent.
“Not for that,” he said, nudging your shoulder, “Just trust me.”
There was still some visible exasperation as you finally gave in, joints and back aching as you moved them before they were ready. You rolled over onto your stomach, dropping your cheek into the mountain of pillows that awaited you.
Shigaraki followed, moving his body over yours and straddling your hips. You were about to scold him for tricking you when, rather than grinding himself into the curve of your ass or thighs, he simply sat down on your butt and brought his hands to the base of your back. Then he started to knead and you knew exactly what he was doing.
Many a time during your months on the run did you take it upon yourself to try and alleviate some of his stress. Of course one of his favorite ways (and yours too) of doing so was to fuck each other’s brains out. But there were also many times when that wasn’t exactly an option. Whether because there were others around or because he was elbow deep in work for their next operation.
At times like those, when he was hunched over a shitty, half-dead laptop he’d manage to scrounge up from a dumpster, or held his fingers to the bridge of his nose, staring up at the ceiling as he tried to fight off an impending headache from the constant pressures of responsibility — you’d usually come up behind him and rub his neck.
It wasn’t like you made a big show of it or anything. Most of the time you’d just reach a single hand over to him and start to stroke his neck without a word. Not expecting him to say or do anything, not even expecting a thank you. You just wanted to do whatever you could. When it was just the two of you around whatever sorry excuse for a base you’d managed to find, or when you’d been lucky enough to be settled in a safehouse with private rooms, you’d manage to talk him into laying down on his stomach, much like this, and work knots that he could’ve sworn had been there since birth, right out of his back.
He never said anything about it, never thanked you nor told you to stop, but in retrospect he did realize that it was one of the few things that managed to bring him even a smidgeon of peace over those many stressful months, that actually got him through it all. Particularly in the fights against Gigantomachia, where, the second the beast was asleep, you’d insist he lay his head down in your lap while you rubbed softly at his temples, lulling him near instantly to do the same.
It truly meant the world to him, even if he’d never admit it. A deep, foolishly sentimental part of him always wished that he could return the favor.
And now he could.
Of course… That didn’t mean he was any good at it.
“Pinching, you’re pinching,” you winced as his thumbs pressed together, unoiled, on a patch of your back awkwardly.
“Oh shit,” he released his grip, settling to just rub his fingers up and down your back slowly, “Sorry…”
“It’s fine. You just can’t do it that hard if you don’t have any oil or lotion, you know?”
His brows furrowed, “You always did it that hard without any of that crap and it felt fine.
You smirked back at him playfully, “That’s because I’m really good.”
He shot you a look, completely unimpressed.
“I liked what you were doing before,” you conceded.
This was clearly something he wanted to do, and who were you to complain or judge when he was being so unabashedly giving?
“When you were using your palms. Just pressing and kneading with your whole hands rather than trying to do any pressure point stuff is really nice.”
“Yeah, okay…” he nodded, concentration settling over his features as he followed instructions.
You sighed, burying your face back into the pillows as he ran those hot, calloused hands purposefully up and down your back.
This was nice.
Again, while he wasn’t hurting you anymore, the massage itself wasn’t particularly skillful. It did put you at ease though, the way his smell and presence, the way those hands — even when you could never feel them fully against you — always managed to put you at ease.
After at least thirty minutes passed and Shigaraki showed no sign of stopping his ministrations, you peaked back up at him.
“You don’t have to keep this up you know.”
He snorted, “Yeah I know.”
And you should’ve expected that response. Because of course he knew. He wasn’t doing this out of obligation or anything. Tomura Shigaraki didn’t do anything he didn’t want to after all.
You rolled your eyes, “I just mean that you must be tired after all that. Don’t you want to sleep?”
“I’m gonna be asleep for the next four months. I think I’ll be good missing one night.”
The message behind those words was clear. He only had so much time to spend with you, he wasn’t going to waste even a second of it with something as stupid as sleeping.
You should’ve been flattered by that. And of course you were. And truth be told, you had the same mindset as him. You had no plans to sleep that night either, even if he had. But the reminder of his fate for the next four months brought a bitterness to your mouth that overpowered the sweetness of this opportunity.
“Sleep, huh?” you said doubtfully, “Is that what the Doctor is calling it?”
“I guess suspended animation,” he corrected himself, “Or whatever the fuck.”
Amongst other things. Hellish agony he believed was the way the Doctor so eloquently put it. But he’d chosen to spare you (and the rest of the League) those particular details.
Even without that knowledge though, you still weren’t thrilled by the prospect. Of course because you were going to miss him, but mostly because you trusted that fucking doctor about as far as he could throw you. Which, for that portly little creep, you were pretty sure wasn’t far.
Particularly, because now that the excitement and happiness you’d had for Tomura’s newfound quirk control (as well as the fog from your repeated orgasms) was starting to fade into something more grounded, a sneaky little question managed to worm its way into your head.
Had the Doctor been capable of “fixing” his quirk this entire time?
A loud pounding on the door suddenly broke the silence, at least two fists rapping. And then Twice’s muffled call of, “Alright you two, you’ve had your fun! Now come out and play with the rest of us! Take your time! Make babies if ya want!”
You snorted at the call. Shigaraki was substantially less entertained.
“Jiiiin!” Toga whined from the other side of the door, “Leave them alone! They want some privacy!”
Ah, so the two fists knocking must’ve both been Twice.
“But you missed Shigaraki too, Toga!”
“I know, but…”
A stretch of silence. And then apparently Toga’s support for love was outweighed by how much she missed her friend. Because then two more fists started knocking on the door.
“Tomuraaaa, come ooouuuut!!” Toga cried, Twice starting up his own pounding on the door right along with them.
“Yeah, yeah— come out! Stay away !”
“I’ll kill them…” Shigaraki growled, glaring at the door heatedly.
You just giggled as you rolled over under him, dropping him to sit on your waist.
“Oh don’t be like that Tomura,” you cooed, reaching up to cup his cheek in your palm and turning him to look at you, “We should all go hang out. I’m not the only one who’s gonna miss you these next four months, you know.”
He sneered at the suggestion at first, wanting nothing more than to spend the entirety of these next twelve or so hours with his hands holding on to you as tight as possible.
But then he really got thinking about it. About them.
Spinner, Toga, Twice, Compress, hell, even Dabi. There wasn’t going to be time to fuck around with them all once he woke up. They’d be going straight into action, into war. Into the future, wherever that may lead. This wasn’t just going to be his last guaranteed chance to enjoy time with you. It was his last chance to spend time with any of them, until they achieved their goals. And by the end of all that, who even knew how many of them would still be alive?
It was a weight he’d carried around with ease as they planned out their attack over the last couple of months, a weight he’d been carrying for the past year if he was being honest. But it never felt as heavy on his soul at this very moment.
You were right. Absolutely right.
How annoying, he thought with a grumble.
You smiled as you saw that shift on his face, the slight softness that always fell over him when he thought about the League, even if he wasn’t aware of it.
“Alright?” you pressed.
He sighed, “Yeah, yeah. Alright…”
And then let the corner of his mouth quirk up ever so slightly as he looked down at you, so splayed and fucked out and pretty. He leaned down to press a long, but surprisingly chaste kiss on you, for someone that was still sitting atop your naked form with his own.
Because just because he was going to get up, didn’t mean he was going to be in any rush.
Caught up in the feel of each other, neither of you noticed the click of the door and Spinner’s voice announcing, startlingly clear, “Guys, the door is unlocked.”
“Ack— SPINNER!! ”
“Okay, you’ve got that all memorized?” Toga chirped, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor.
“Yeah, I guess.” Shigaraki, across from her, shrugged, strongly resisting the urge to tell her about how stupid this all was (again).
“Great! So then we start in that first position, crossed arms,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest by example.
Shigaraki sighed and mirrored her.
“Alright! One, two, three!” she sounded off excitedly, before fluttering her hands eagerly and singing, “Misssss Maaaaaryyyyy Mack, Mack, Mack! All dressed in black, black, black…”
You grinned from your position on the couch, glass of wine in hand, as you watched the two. Shigaraki was pointedly not singing along with Toga, but he was matching her claps with impeccable accuracy.
The League had been just as stunned and excited to hear about Shigaraki’s new upgrade. Not to the point of immediately jumping on his dick, but that was obviously more than okay with him.
No, they were more interested in giving him a speedrun through all of the things he’d missed out on in life from not being able to grab it with all five fingers. Playground clap games that Shigaraki, as a boy, couldn’t say he ever played even before his quirk awakened, were apparently of the highest priority to Toga.
“With silver buttons, buttons buttons— Tomura, you’re not singing!”
“And I’m not gonna,” he grumbled back, but not stopping his hands, “Take the W as it is, or don’t take it at all.”
You laughed at the sight, a new glass of wine that you were sure Shigaraki would want by the end of this.
Mr. Compress read Shigaraki’s palms next.
They supposed that this was technically something they could’ve done even before Shigaraki’s upgrade, but with how careful and particular he’d been with anybody getting anywhere near his hands, it definitely wasn’t something they had ever thought to give a go before now.
He decided to read the palm that hadn’t been marred by the fight with Redestro, for more “accuracy” (a reasoning that Shigaraki had openly scoffed at).
“Your love line is quite straight and short,” Compress explained, “Which indicates that you don’t have a lot of interest in love.”
“Booooo,” a red-faced Toga whined from her place on the floor between your legs, shooting Shigaraki an aggressive thumbs down.
You promptly grabbed the half-empty can of chuhai next to her foot, and moved it up to the side table out of her sight. Underage drinking was officially done for the night.
Unbothered, Mr. Compress continued his reading, running his mechanical finger along the top line of Shigaraki’s palm, “Since your love line begins below your middle finger though, it also means that when you do love, you’re quite selfish about it.”
You chuckled, “Hammer? Meet nail.”
“Oh shut up,” he waved you off with his free hand.
“Next is your head line, which represents the way you learn and communicate, as well as your overall intellectualism and thirst for knowledge.” Compress turned to the rest of the group, finger raised as he lectured.
Dabi, from his place leaning judgmentally against the wall across from them, huffed, “Alright, I agree with the Boss on this one. This is really stupid.”
Toga grinned at him, pointing teasingly, “You’re just saying that because you don’t have any more lines in your palm to read! Jelly!”
“I’m not—”
“Jelly!” Twice backed Toga up with a chant, “Jelly, jelly, jelly! Peanut butter !”
Dabi just sighed and returned to his nth beer of the night.
“You have a deep and long head line, that runs separate from your heart line,” Compress continued, “That means that you’re clear and focussed, with a great sense of adventure and enthusiasm for life.”
Shigaraki snorted, “Alright, now I know this is bullshit.”
You flicked his cheek scoldingly, “Just keep going.”
“I also see a singular cross in your heart line, which suggests that you carry some emotional crisis.”
Compress didn’t linger on that point. After all, everyone in this room was dealing with the same thing in one way or another.
“The lifeline is the most interesting in my opinion,” Compress explained, “As opposed to what you might think, it doesn’t have to do with the length of your life, but the quality of it. Yours runs close to the thumb and forks downwards, which means you’re often tired and a pessimist.”
Toga snickered a bit at that, “Still think it’s BS, Tomura?”
“I’m getting the distinct feeling you guys are doing this just as an excuse to insult me to my face.”
You gave his freehand a squeeze, “Oh we don’t need the pretense to do that.”
“ Oi. ”
“There’s a circle in the line too, which predicts great injury or hospitalization.”
The League looked at him pointedly, and he just rolled his eyes.
“The last detail about your life line is a curious one. It’s short and shallow,” Compress said, cocking his head in a way that clearly indicated that he didn’t exactly agree with it, “Which indicates that you’re easily manipulated by others.”
Your frowned.
The rest of the League members pulled faces that clearly showed their similar disagreement with the reading. But you, thinking back to all his interactions with All for One and the Doctor, everything in his life that he’d described to you…
Well, you weren’t so sure.
“Pffft, like I said,” Shigaraki scoffed, gesturing for you to hand him his wine, “It’s all bullshit.”
Deliberately, Mr. Compress did not read Shigaraki’s fate line.
You weren’t sure when the night turned into the League taking turns with choosing tasks for Shigaraki to complete, but you weren’t going to complain. You were already looking forward to Toga’s next round after she’d screamed up into the security camera you all knew Skeptic was watching irritatedly through to get her some string for cat’s cradle.
Spinner’s turn was pretty simple though, and at first, not especially different then before. You thought at first that maybe that was by design, that Spinner just wanted to spend some time with Shigaraki the way he always had.
He wanted to play video games.
Of course, there was a twist.
“Fingers down.” Spinner scolded him for what had to be the fifth time in the last ten minutes, “Toga, I need chicken.”
“Yes, chef!” she chirped back happily.
“God, fucking—” Shigaraki growled, forcing his pinkies back down onto the controller against every instinct in his body.
Years of having to hold things in a particular way had caused him to develop a very particular controller grip. One that, once, back at the bar — god, that felt like it was so long ago now — several of you had tried to mimic, just for the hell of it. (Or more accurately, just to get his goat). And it had been hard . The general consensus had been that no normal human should be able to hold a controller like this, let alone hold a controller like this and be as good at video games as Tomura Shigaraki was.
Now though, the shoe was on the other foot — or more accurately the controller was in the other hands — as you all forced Shigaraki to go a couple rounds of Overcooked while holding the pro controller like a normal fucking person. And it was not going well.
“Stop dropping shit!” you yelled hysterically next to Shigaraki, “Do you see how many burritos we still need to make?!”
“Do you think I’m doing it on purpose?!” he shouted right back, possibly more worked up than you’d ever seen him.
Toga on the other side of him giggled. She and Spinner were having absolutely no trouble at all on their side of the kitchen, “Tomura, I thought you were supposed to be good at video games.”
“I am! I’m just not used to this grip— FUCK! ” he screamed out as his character once again fell off the map, throwing his controller down onto the carpet.
The room erupted in doubled over laughter and “woah woah woah’s”, over the tantrum the sorts of which none of you had seen since the early days back at the bar.
Maybe he wasn’t such a good sport after all.
With Twice’s request, even you had to admit that things were getting a bit ridiculous.
Twice slammed his elbow down onto the table, holding his palm open for Shigaraki to take, “Gimme all you got, boss! Go easy on me, please!”
Shigaraki, on the other hand, seemed the most enthusiastic about this one, placing his own elbow on the table and grabbing Twice’s hand tight in his own with a cocky grin.
You suspected that the many beers he’d knocked back (not to mention the entire bottle of wine the two of you had killed together) played a decent role in that, but it was also impossible to deny that their dear leader was fiercely competitive, no matter the game.
“Ready?” you asked, looking between the two. They nodded, and you begrudgingly stepped further into your role as referee, clapping as you counted down, “Three, two, one— arm wrestle!”
The room blew up in a (small) chorus of screams and cheers. Actually, even that was generous. As referee you were expressly forbidden from picking sides (Twice was very serious about that), and Compress and Dabi were too composed and too uninterested respectively to participate. It was just Spinner and Toga going wild and slamming their hands on the table as Shigaraki’s and Twice’s muscles strained against each other — although they were more than loud enough for the whole group.
“Go, Jin go!” Toga cheered rhythmically, “Go, Jin go!”
“Kick his ass, Shigaraki!”
The match lasted a respectable amount of time, both sides putting up a pretty damn good fight. And while Twice was built like a tank and was no slouch either — he probably would’ve won this by a moderate margin a couple of months ago — Shigaraki’s month-long escapade with Gigantomachia had given him a strength and will that surpassed Twice’s own.
“Arrrrgh— damn it !!” Twice shouted as Shigaraki slammed his fist down into the table definitively, “Great game Shigaraki! Die!”
You chuckled as Twice got up from his seat, head dropped in defeat, then turned to Spinner, who was already rolling out his dominant shoulder.
“Next challenger,” you gestured to the seat, “You’re up.”
Dabi didn’t have any requests throughout the night (surprise, surprise), just a lot of eyerolls and snippy commentary. But he also didn’t ever split off from any of you, which made you consider that he may not have thought this was all as stupid as he claimed.
The part of the night he seemed to enjoy (or at least, not vocalize his annoyance or the group’s childishness over), the most, was when around 4 am rolled around.
Out of ideas and exhausted, but absolutely refusing to go to bed, the League decided to take a particularly noisy and drunken nightwalk around the property (much to the dread of whichever resident’s window they passed). This quickly turned into an equally harebrained climb up onto the roof so that you could all watch the sun come up.
That sunrise was still a good hour or so away though by the time you all got settled up there, and as chatty, adrenaline-filled, and drunk as most of you were, the late hour and comforting breeze was starting to get to you all.
Twice and Toga had long fallen asleep, heads resting together. Compress, with his hands folded over his stomach and Spinner, curling up tighter into a ball with every minute, were not far behind. Dabi’s eyes were closed, but he might’ve still been conscious. He didn’t make a sound either way.
Only Shigaraki seemed to be wide awake, staring up at the waning moon with a complex expression on his face. He looked like he was thinking hard, but also somewhat at peace. Grateful for this moment, but already mourning its inevitable end. Exhilarated by the future that began for him tomorrow.
Wondering just what exactly he’d be leaving behind in the past.
You watched this all cross his face, not shifting between expressions, but clearly feeling it all at once. Overwhelmed, and unprepared to process it all. The one thing that seemed to keep him grounded was the hand that held yours, tight and warm. Anytime tonight that his hands weren’t occupied with whatever silly ringer the rest of the League was putting through, he was threading those fingers right back with yours, savoring the one new experience that he truly wanted to indulge the most in.
And you were more than happy to let him.
He shifted a bit in surprise as you nuzzled into his shoulder, squeezing his hand just a bit tighter in your own.
“You’re still awake,” he commented, voice horse with the sleep his body clearly wanted.
“So are you,” you mumbled against the fabric of his shirt, just breathing him in.
“Yeah, but you need sleep,” he chuckled, “Like I said, I’ll be having more than enough of it for the next four months.”
You stilled against him, frowning.
Right. The next four months.
Shigaraki seemed to sense your shift in mood, and kicked himself. That was a stupid thing to mention again when you’d finally managed to put it out of your mind for a few hours, and when that fate itself was even fewer hours away.
He ran his thumb with a restlessness that was once reserved for his nails against his neck. Even with that itch seemingly gone for good from his life, Shigaraki was still a fidgety person by nature. Especially when uncomfortable.
“You guys will be busy,” he grumbled, “Planning the attacks, organizing your regiments, training… You’ll barely even notice I’m gone.”
You didn’t comment on the stupidity of that statement, even though it was a really, really stupid and patently untrue thing for him to say. Because frankly, it wasn’t what was on your mind at the moment, not the front of it anyway. Of course the fact that you were going to miss him and these days together was a constant parasite, gnawing and suckling in the back of your brain. But truly, your current concern was a bit less melancholy. Less abstract.
Shigaraki had full control over his quirk now. And it was great and beautiful and nothing short of a miracle of course, you wouldn’t trade this night and all the memories opened up by that particular door for anything in the world. And yet you could not fight that question that had first struck your mind the first moment you had to actually think about it.
Why now?
That question wrenched through you painfully, no matter how much you loved the feel and sight of his hand in your own. Because sure, Shigaraki had been out of touch with the Doctor ever since All for One’s arrest. But what about the last sixteen some years that he’d been at the personal beck and call of All for One and his ward? Why hadn’t he ever adjusted Shigaraki’s quirk then? Was it a matter of technology, a breakthrough in quirk alteration he only recently was able to make? Or was it something else? Was there something bigger going on here?
What was he not telling you all?
Shigaraki looked down at you, giving that flat expression of his that you knew translated to concern. You looked up from your locked hands to meet his gaze. He stared into you, those deep pools of carmine that stood so hard against the rest of the world, now soft and imploring. Even more than they were for the League. This look was for you.
“Tomura—”
“It’s gonna be worth it.”
You paused, that newfound calm confidence in his voice silencing you in an instant.
“I know these next four months are gonna be hard for all of us. This war is gonna be hard for all of us,” he said, turning to stare back up at the stars, “But it’s all going to be worth it in the end. We’re gonna make a new world where you’re all able to live as you want to. To be free. And this power that the Doctor is giving me... That’s going to assure that it all happens.”
“And… You don’t think that you can do all that now?” you breathed, “You’ve gotten so strong already, Tomura. Maybe you don’t even need that power.”
He turned back to you with a small but sincere smile. The one that betrayed that deep down tenderness he always tried so earnestly to hide. That called his bluff, revealing that there were feelings other than hate in that cursed body of his.
The one that made your heart skip a beat.
“I don’t want to take any chances,” he said, bringing his free hand — all five fingers — to rest on your cheek, “Not when it comes to my comrades’ dreams.”
Not when it comes to you .
Those unspoken words were loud and clear.
You swallowed something tight in your throat, fighting the burn that threatened to overflow from your eyes, the worry that brawled to burst out from your chest and ruin everything. But you had no choice but to shove it all down.
Forcing a smile onto your face, you squeezed his hand tight.
“I understand.”
His own smile remained the same, although a bit of relief did seem to fall over his eyes. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to your temple and stayed there, breathing as much of you in as he possibly could.
Shigaraki had made up his mind. He was going to go through with this. And there was nothing you could say, no concern you could voice or ultimatum you could give that would change his mind. This decision was beyond his own wants and dreams at this point. It was for something far more important to him, even if he’d never admit it.
This was for all of you.
And who were you to stand in the way of that?
The fears wouldn’t ease with time, the nagging in the back of your head wouldn’t be forgotten through training or planning or anything else that you could do in the next four months to try and drown it out. But you just had to suck it up. You had to support him.
You could talk about your fears and the Doctor and any secret ambitions he may have after this ordeal. After the war even. You could talk about anything then, really. It was only four months after all.
And the two of you would soon have all the time in the world.
Obsession [Shigaraki x Reader]
TW: Stalking, drugging, kidnapping, murder, Stockholm syndrome, Shigaraki being obsessive (hence the title).
Reader is gender neutral.
Originally published on Wattpad.
You hissed and screamed as the blue-haired villain snatched your wrist, forcibly dragging you out of his room. He threw you onto the floor with little effort, right in front of the entry/exit door.
"I'm done trying. I'm fucking done." He growled, "All these escape attempts, all these damn tears. If you won't love me, then go. Get out. I'll find someone better than you."
This was your chance. Your mind was sending panicked thoughts throughout your body, begging you to run, to shout for help and finally leave this hellhole. You knew that, if you just pissed him off enough, he'd give up. Once he saw you weren't going to come around...
Oh but that was the problem. You were coming around. You just refused to show it. You hid the Stockholm syndrome with a mask of bravery and hatred, refusing to comply with his demands when really, you just longed for his touch. You'd lay awake at night, trying to convince yourself that you despised him. But you just couldn't. You started to pity him. You started to empathize with him, and his morals.
You remembered those late night talks where he'd tell you about his past, rambling about how no one helped him while in his half-asleep state.
Goddammit.
You had waited so long, and now that you were finally being let go, you couldn't bear to leave your captor.
"Well?!" He snapped.
Sighing, you hugged your knees to your chest, "Great job, Shiggy. I think I have Stockholm syndrome."
The man tilted his head in confusion, "Stockholm syndro... What? What're you talking about?"
Tch. He really was delusional. Did he seriously think that this love was real? That you were just playing hard to get all this time? Jesus fucking christ.
"It means, um... You kinda start to... Feel good things about your captor, 'n shit..." You mumbled.
Shigaraki's eyes widened. Then he smiled. Then he yanked you back up from the floor, his arms encasing you in a warm, tight hug.
"Oh, baby! I knew it! I knew you'd fall for me! I just had to keep you here long enough. You were just playing hard to get, I knew I was right!" He rambled, accompanied with a manic laugh, "You're mine... Mine! No one else can have you! You belong to me, my player two. You're mine, mine, mine, all mine!"
So. How did this all happen? How did you meet such an ugly fate? Well.
It started off when Shigaraki was playing Minecraft, in a server created from a Discord server he joined. He'd been playing for quite some time. It was nice playing with other people every now and then. But then he met you.
You were a newbie in the server, seeing as you only had leather armor and wooden tools. You were nice, frequently talking to the other members in the chat. You complimented Shigaraki's skin, so, he gave you one of his iron tools.
Then you whipped out your netherite armor.
And he freaked out.
It was hilarious from your point of view, seeing Shigaraki's many keyboard smashes in the chat. You left the scene, and he chased after you, demanding you give him back his single iron sword.
He was chasing you for a good amount of time, until you eventually gave it back. But only if he gave you his Discord username. Odd... But he complied. Apparently you thought he was fun and wanted to play with him more often. Awh, that was sweet.
The two of you started talking. And talking. And talking... You soon became so close that you trusted Shigaraki enough to start sending him pictures of yourself. You were amazingly attractive. No, no, you were perfect. A cute little face, and a wonderful personality? Oh yes.
You noticed Shigaraki, or as you called him, Shiggy (that was his nickname, is if he'd tell you his real name) started texting you more often. Calling you more often. You didn't know it but he was getting attached. Obsessed, even. No one had ever shown him this amount of kindness, and he needed more. He needed your validation. The way you treated him as if he was an actual human, and not a villain, was seriously enough to get him addicted to you.
Any pictures you sent him? Automatically saved to his gallery. Audio messages? Downloaded. Face time calls? Recorded. You were like a drug that he couldn't get enough of.
The problem came when he attacked U.A. for the second time, taking Katsuki Bakugo hostage.
You'd messaged him, sympathizing with the school's loss. Unfortunately he took this personally, and wrote a long message to you about how the hero system was corrupt and Shigaraki was doing a good thing by destroying it. Of course he didn't outright tell you his identity, but it was enough to make you suspicious of him being a criminal, and you stopped talking to him.
Shigaraki was heartbroken. He couldn't go a day without talking to you. So you know what he did? He hacked into your account, and found your email. Then he hacked into your email, and found your address.
He was going to kidnap you. You'd be all his. He was sure that, with enough convincing, you'd realise that he was right about the heroes and you'd forgive him!
So right now, he was standing across the street from your house, waiting. Well, not for you. He was waiting for your boyfriend. Now he could just scoop you up and run away, leaving him to forget about you, but no... That wouldn't be satisfying at all! Shigaraki wanted to see him rot, wanted to see him decay.
He deserved it, anyway. Before the angry message, you vented to him about your boyfriend cheating on you, but you didn't have enough money to move out. And he sure as hell wasn't moving, he was the one who paid for the house.
The thought of someone cheating on such a beauty like you was enraging, Shigaraki tore away at his neck just thinking about it. So when your boyfriend finally arrived, well, he wasted no time.
Before he could even unlock the door, Shigaraki placed his hand on the man's shoulder, disintegrating him in an instant, staining the concrete with a mixture of blood and dust.
"You're much more tolerable this way," Shigaraki muttered as he stepped over the pile and touched your front door, walking inside the house once the door decayed.
He sat himself comfortably on the couch, waiting for your arrival.
So he waited, and waited, and oh my god how long were you going to take?! Shigaraki was not a patient man! He knew you had work, but, he didn't know when you finished! Urgh! This was so damn frustrating!
He was about to storm through the doorway and leave the house, until he saw someone's car pull up in the driveway. Oh, it was you.
Immediately, he sped back to the couch. The position made it so you wouldn't be able to see him upon entering.
Your screaming was heard, as Shigaraki remembered your boyfriend's decayed body. Oh, right, haha. You wouldn't be entering the house anytime soon, not when he'd clearly paid a visit to your house. So he went outside to see you hiding in your car, presumably trying to dial the authorities. Not today.
You screamed again as you saw Shigaraki jump onto the car and shove his hand against the windshield, disintegrating it as he reached inside to grab you. You tried to escape through the driver's door, but you fell right into his trap, as he got off the car and wrapped his arms around you from behind. He pricked your neck with a syringe, injecting you with some sort of drug.
And you passed out in a matter of seconds.
When you awoke, you were in a room unfamiliar to you. Both your ankles and wrists were tied to the bed, your legs sprawled out and putting you in a rather vulnerable position.
"Aha, you're awake." Said the man sitting in the corner, "Did the drug really knock you out the hard? I swear I put in a small dosage..."
A chill ran down your spine upon hearing his voice. You recognised that voice. But not from the news, no. You couldn't even find the strength to scream as the realisation hit, this villain was the man you'd been talking to on Discord. How could you have been so stupid? How did you not realise that the nickname "Shiggy" was just an abbreviation for "Shigaraki"?!
"Oh, please don't be afraid, D/U (Discord/Username). I won't hurt you... Well, unless you make me. Hehe." He crooned.
You swallowed nervously, "Wh- Why would you do this...? Why did you kidnap me?! Was it because I stopped texting you?!"
Shigaraki cackled, "Matter of fact, yeah! I love you, D/U. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you! You acted so kind towards me, haha! Big mistake, because now," He walked over to plant a kiss on your cheek, "I get such a warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest when I see your messages. When you face time me. I'm in love with you, D/U~"
"I- I have a boyfriend! You know that!" You cried.
He cocked his head to the side playfully, "Not anymore! But he made you so sad, didn't he?~ Don't worry, I won't ever cheat on you. I'm loyal. Unlike him."
"What do you mean not anymore?! You didn't kill him, did you?!"
"Of course I killed him! Say... This whole time I've been calling you by your Discord user. What's your name, sweetheart? Go on, don't be shy."
You didn't want to answer. You'd always been careful about telling your real name to strangers online, but now that you were facing an infamous villain, you wanted to tell him even less.
But the sharp glare he gave you was enough to convince you otherwise.
You took in another anxious gulp of air, "L- L/n... Y/n L/n..." (Your/name Last/name)
His smile came back to his face, "Oh wow, it suits you perfectly!"
This was all... a lot to take in. You had just gotten back from work, and now suddenly you were tied to a criminal's bed. You'd been chatting to the Tomura Shigaraki all this time? Oh god. Part of you wanted to believe this was all a dream.
"S- So, you... really did kill my boyfriend...?" You asked.
Shigaraki giggled, "Yeah."
A few tears leaked from your eyes, you were somewhat glad he was gone. You despised yourself for thinking this way, but, at least you didn't have to deal with his constant affairs anymore.
"Aww, baby, don't cry. I'm sorry. Kidnapping you was kind of the only option left... Heh. You want me to untie you?"
You nodded, and Shigaraki disintegrated the ropes holding you down.
"Will I ever–"
"No." Shigaraki interrupted cheerily, knowing what you were about to ask. You'd never see your family again, which caused a few more tears to drip down your cheeks.
"Now I won't hesitate to tie you up again if you misbehave. Oh that reminds me, we have some rules to go over... Better put your listening ears on." Shigaraki said, sitting very closely beside you. "Because you're gonna be here for a long time."
It was a whole mix of emotions right now. Everything seemed to be moving so fast. You'd have to listen and see what Shigaraki's rules were before you could make up your mind about whether you felt safe, or vulnerable.
Author's Note: 1930 words and I still feel like I rushed this ._.
Perspective, chapter 1 of 2.
tenko x cis female and poc friendly reader
safe for work // 4.8k words // AO3.
warnings: ...jealousy? some actions may be seen as creepy.
summary: tenko goes to art school and gets a crush on a musical theater major.
Horizon Line -- an actual or imaginary line in a work of art representing the point at which water or land seems to end and the sky begins.
×X×
Tenko had fallen asleep before the performance had even started.
He had long lost track of how long he'd been awake for. It was the end of his first semester in university and the prestigious art program he had gotten into busied him with project after project. He was running out of steam. Honestly, he had been running on fumes for weeks now.
He'd rather be in his dorm finishing his assignments instead of sitting in one of the theaters in the performing arts building. If it wasn't a requirement for Fine Arts majors to attend other Fine Arts events, he would have never have set foot in this place. The noise of the attendees filling the room and the orchestra tuning their instruments was grating his sleep deprived nerves.
He grumbled and crossed his arms as someone took the seat beside him. His leg bouncing as he grabbed the program the usher had handed to him when he first entered. Tenko's bloodshot eyes were barely able to process anything more than The Phantom of the Opera on the front of the flimsy pamphlet, before shutting it and glaring at the scarlet curtains on the stage.
A few minuets later, the lights began to dim and he sighed in relief as the room quieted. He could finally catch some much needed sleep.
He tried stretching his stiff legs in an attempt to loosen himself up and closed his eyes.
Only to open them at the sound of your voice singing to him on the stage.
"Think of me, think of me fondly when we've said goodbye. Remember me, once in a while, please, promise me you'll try."
Tenko was mesmerized. Watching you on stage woke him up more than the energy drinks he'd been living off of all semester. He was absolutely immersed with your performance. He soaked in your every word and movement and before he knew it, two hours had gone by and the cast was being applauded as they bowed.
He sat in awe for a moment as the auditorium lights flicked on and he stood, shuffling through the crowd. He found a nice corner of the lobby behind a pillar as he and some other audience members waited. He skimmed through the program and found you. He whispered your name like a secret only he could ever know.
The cast slowly came out one by one and thanked the guests for coming. Tenko's eyes darted around impatiently. Finally, out came you in the white gown you wore in your final scene, looking like an angel that had come down to offer his sorry existence some respite.
You greeted and thanked the attendees as they praised you and handed you flowers. It was the final night of your musical and you were beaming. Tenko's fingers fidgeted at his sides as he yearned to get closer to you and experience your radiance himself.
A guest bowed and left, leaving an opening for him to approach. He took a step out from behind the pillar, but you turned at the sound of your voice coming from behind you. Tenko recognized the person as the man who played the Phantom and sighed when he saw you turn and leave the room.
When Tenko returned to his dorm, he searched your name online and found your social media. His night was spent watching your videos. He didn't realize how much time had passed until his alarm went off and he saw the sunlight peaking out from behind onyx curtains. It was time for him to get ready for class.
The semester had finished with him acing art and barely passing his core courses. It was winter break and with most students away, the campus was deserted. The thought of having no one to go home to didn't even cross his mind as he spent the break filling his sketchbooks with you.
His second semester started off much better than the first one. His art had rapidly improved from how much he'd been practicing recently.
He found a spot he liked. It was a small outdoor table nestled between some trees on the southern campus dormitory area. The weather on this side of the country wasn't as cold as other prefectures would be in January, but there was still the occasional breeze that made his dry skin prickle up with goosebumps. The rain was more likely to get him sick, although, since he was under the wide umbrella of the table, he found that unlikely and continued his sketch of you.
A week and a half later, he gulped down the last of his cold medication and slammed the container down in frustration. He leered at the harrowed reflection on the bathroom mirror. His eyes were heavy with deep bags, his skin a sickly colour, and his hair hadn't been brushed for 2 or 3 days. He let out a sigh.
×X×
He found another spot he liked, safe from the chilling late January rain. It was in the performing arts building, in a seating area by the entrance. The art program may have been the school's top program, but it's grand yet modern appearance showed that there was no skimping of funds. The grand architecture and romantic interior design was a contrast to the art building's modern and sleek appearance. On the outside, the building designs complimented each other, with this building being a few stories shorter than the building next door that Tenko was used to. Noisier too.
Tenko had his earbuds in as he slouched on the upholstered chair, sketching, when he noticed a familiar form in the corner of his eye.
It was someone he recognized as your frequent scene partner that you seemed to be joined at the hip with, if your social media was anything to go by. Tenko felt a spark of excitement bubbling inside of him and he looked around hoping to see you, but your face was not among the crowd of students. His hope deflated to disappointment and he scratched the side of his neck. You were likely already in class.
It was ten minutes into the hour when Tenko decided to leave. He gathered his things and carried his sketchbook in his arms as he stood and walked away from the seating area.
He tripped over his feet and bumped into someone, his sketchbook flying out of his grasp.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry!!"
It was you.
Your sweet voice was full of apology as you bent down to grab his sketchbook for him. He watched in awe at how swiftly you moved. He was at a loss for words. Your fingers froze over the edge and Tenko realized what page it had landed open on.
"Is that... me?"
Your voice sounded so pretty, even when you were confused. He felt his face burning as you grabbed the sketchbook and stood. Your eyes stared down at the sketch of you he had just done while in the seating area, when he was itching to catch a glimpse of the top of your head through the crowd.
You were so close now and it was going to kill him.
"This is from my Jekyll and Hyde audition last spring, right? Back when I was trying to get the role of Lisa Carew..."
You were so close now and he knew you'd think he was a creep for watching your old videos and bumping into you. You probably thought he had it all planned out, like some sort of stalker.
"Is it okay if I flip through..?"
His brain was screaming at him to say 'no, give it back' but his head nodded, unable to deny you of anything you wanted from him. Yes, there were sketches of you without any clothes on and he was well aware of how that would look, but he couldn't find it in himself to care. He would rip out his heart for you to use as a hand warmer, if you asked.
He watched with a gut wrenching mix of horror and delight as you flipped through and took your time to study every page. Drawing had always come easily for him, with hands being his favourite body part to draw. Expressions were a bit more difficult for him to feel satisfied by so he preferred to leave faces blank or smudged out. With you, he actually put in the effort to capture your expressions.
He could see your eyes carefully observe every stroke he made and take in the details. The furrow in your brow as you focused had him contemplating whether or not he wanted to reach his hand over to your face and smooth it out or leave it perfect the way it was.
You hand him the sketchbook and he snaps out of his thoughts.
"Huh?" He had been too in his head to hear what you had said.
"Thank you, I've never had someone draw me before. It feels really nice." You say with a soft laugh. The sound made his skin itch and the tips of his fingers tingle with electricity. He clutched his sketchbook tight enough to pale his knuckles. His nails dug into the material as he barely remembers to stop staring and nod.
You offer him praise and he feels dizzy. You were so nice. Why were you so nice? To him? He wanted to speak but he couldn't decide on what to say.
"I'm super late to practice and my partner's going to be on my ass about it." You sighed. "I gotta go now. You wave goodbye and disappear down the hallway.
He was also a little late to class, his professor shot him a judgmental look as he entered the class a few minutes later. Tenko couldn't bring himself to care. You knew he existed.
×X×
The weather was nice and Tenko was sketching at the outdoor table, when someone sat across from him. He looked up and saw you with an ice cream cone.
"I knew you looked familiar! You're the person that's always out here working on something."
He felt his face heating up as you took a lick of your ice cream. You were so forward. He didn't expect you to approach him again. He had chalked the positive end of your last conversation up to politeness.
"I guess you've been drawing this whole time, huh? Mystery solved. Also explains why you're so good at drawing."
"Thanks to your performances," Tenko says without thinking. He immediately panics at how creepy he sounded.
"Oh, is that why you draw me? I thought it was the outfits since the costume department goes all out for lead roles. Huh, interesting." You continue licking your ice cream while watching him and he has to look away, he felt so shy in your presence. He didn't feel worthy of your attention. You were so soft, so pretty, so talented and he was just a creep with a crush that couldn't stop himself from sketching you constantly.
He looks down at his hands as he stumbles through his nerves when he explains how watching you had helped him with movement, making his art more fluid and dynamic. When he finishes, he looks up and sees you smiling at him. The sight made his breathing hitch and he rasped out a small, "what..?"
Were you making fun of him? Is that what this was? Were you actually just here to-
"You should let me do some reference work with you? I could do more stuff for you."
His eyes widened and he could feel his face heating, the corners of his lips tugging. He didn't know how to speak without making a fool of himself and he was thankful you kept talking. He was happy to sit quietly and watch you.
"We could schedule private sessions, that way it can be just the two of us without anyone interrupting."
"What?" Questioned a third, deeper voice.
The two of you look up and see your partner staring down at you while holding an ice cream cone of his own. "What kinda weird shit you getting into now?"
Your brows furrowed. "Hm? What do you mean?"
"Your wording sucks."
You took a moment to think about it and became flustered. "I didn't mean anything strange," you assured Tenko.
"Sure, pervert."
"Anyways, this is my new friend, uh..." you look over at him sheepishly, "Sorry, what's your name?"
"Shimura Tenko..." His fingers fiddle with the corner of his paper.
"Can I call you Tenko? Or is that too familiar?"
Tenko's face heated up, "Th-That's fine..."
You nod enthusiastically before looking back up at your partner. "This is my new friend Tenko. He's the artist I was telling you about!"
"Oh, so you're the guy who draws her naked?"
"I-It's art..!" You defended.
"S'weird, but whatever." The man seemed bored as he licked his ice cream and took a seat in the chair beside her. "Todoroki Touya. She's like a leech so you're stuck with her now. My condolences."
You nod as you take a lick of your ice cream, "We are now bonded for life."
Tenko awkwardly looks between the two of them, unsure of what to say. The two performers end up in a conversation and he can tell you were trying to include him so that he didn't feel left out. After some bickering, Touya takes a bite out of your ice cream.
"How can you just bite it like that!? Doesn't it hurt your teeth!?"
He shrugs, "The cold never bothered me."
You hum a song from a children's movie as you pull out your phone and hand it to Tenko, asking him to insert his Line I.D. because you want to friend him. He looks between you and Touya, crimson eyes glancing at the arm the other man was lazily resting on the back of your chair.
"Is that okay..?"
You tilt your head in confusion, reminding him of a puppy. "Why wouldn't it be?"
Tenko looks from your kind eyes over to Touya's turquoise ones that seemed to be blazing with fire. As soon as Tenko blinks, the heat was gone and replaced with an impassive expression. Perhaps the dark look directed towards him was simply his mind playing tricks on him.
He typed in his username and you send him a friend request as soon as the phone is returned to you. You angle the phone above your head to take a selfie. Touya shoves his head into the frame, sticking his pierced tongue out as he photobombed.
You notice the time and sit up in a hurry, stating you have a paper due that you still haven't worked on. You run off into the student housing across from the outdoor table.
Tenko watched as you disappeared into the building before looking over at Touya who still sat at the table, only to find that the man was already staring at him. Tension thickened the air like smoke from a fire that made him feel like he was suffocating. He opened his mouth to speak, but Touya scoffs and finishes his ice cream in a single bite before getting up to leave. Tenko watched as Touya swiped his student I.D., shooting him a cocky grin as he entered the same dorm as you.
Tenko felt his phone vibrate and unlocked it to see you had sent him your class schedule so that you two could plan a time to meet up. He eagerly studied the photo and you sent him another photo. It was the selfie you took before you left.
"It was nice seeing you again, Tenko! Let's set up a day to hang out!!"
He could feel the heat rising from his neck to his ears.
You were too cute.
×X×
Over the next 3 weeks, you and Tenko have lost track of the amount of times the two of you had hung out. Sometimes for drawing references, sometimes to eat at the dining hall, sometimes just for the hell of it. Your schedule was busier than his so he was appreciative of the fact that you went out of your way to be with him. Especially on today, of all days.
You and Tenko sat on the floor, your backs against the mirror of the small practice room as he clutched the bag of chocolate cookies you had given him. They were homemade, you said. You had baked them on your dorm floor's shared kitchen. They were in the shape of hearts, flowers, and a bunny for Tenko. He didn't think he would ever forget the ache in his chest when you told him he reminded you of a bunny. The cookies had pink and red icing made with natural ingredients, which was why the palms of your hands were stained with beet juice. He licked his dry lips at the thought of you working hard. Just for him, too, because apparently Touya was a picky eater so you simply bought blue food colouring to use on his cookies. He swallowed anxiously as you continued speaking.
"I was hoping that maybe I'd get chocolates today."
"Isn't Valentine's Day when the girl gives the guy the chocolate..?"
You nod, "Yeah, the norm is girls give chocolates to guys on Valentine's Day then on White Day the guy can give the girl chocolates in response, but you never know! Girls can give girls chocolates, too. It happened to my friend in high school, though it was the guy version of that. Anyways, the whole gender thing Japan does isn't really my cup of tea. Who cares what your gender is, just give people chocolates."
You sighed before continuing, "I've never gotten chocolates before. I know, it's kinda silly to whine about this, but I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic so can you blame me?" You laugh softly to yourself. "If Touya was here, he'd say yes and that it's my fault. He's always teasing me about these kinds of things." Tenko watches as you purse your lips deep in thought.
Tenko chewed his lip before quietly asking, "And Touya? Won't he give you any on White Day?"
"Maybe, but it'll be different." You pull up your knees and hug them. Your thighs were distracting and he struggled to keep his eyes off of them. "The cookies I gave to Touya were obligatory chocolates, not the 'real feeling' kind you would give to someone you like. Last year, I gave Touya obligatory chocolates and he started complaining because he had already received too many sweets. I was so jealous, but at least I managed to convince him to give me his chocolate."
Though he enjoyed snacks, Tenko didn't really care for the holiday. He never really had a reason to... until now.
"Tenko, have you ever gotten chocolates? I mean, other than the ones I just gave you?"
"No."
"So I'm your first?"
He nodded, moving his head to stare down at the sketch in his lap. His fingers fiddled with the corner of the page, crumpling it more and more until it became limp from wrinkling. He'd always found destroying things to be quite soothing for him.
"I..." Tenko was hesitant but decided if you were going to reject him, it was better if you did it sooner rather than later. "I used to live in an orphanage..."
In the corner of his eye, he can see you moving your head quickly to look at him. He tried to swallow his nerves as he continued speaking.
"My family died in an accident when I was five. I was sent to live with a distant relative since there was no one else and the situation was not... ideal. The kids at my new school picked up on my gloominess and shunned me. Even when my great uncle died, my presence would be deemed too unsettling to anyone who tried getting to know me."
He was too afraid to turn his head to look at you so he continued fiddling with the page, ruining more and more of it. You place your hand over his, calming the destruction.
"I used to live in an orphanage, too."
Tenko's eyes widened and he looked at you. "Are you... lying?" He whispered.
"My parents died in an accident when I was little. Wrong place, wrong time. I had no other family in Japan, so I got placed in a children's home. I wouldn't lie to you, Tenko."
His eyes scanned your face, looking for any sign of this being a trick but he could tell from the warm sincerity in your eyes that you were telling him the truth. "I don't know what to say..."
You smile softly at him, "You don't have to say anything."
The feeling of your thumb rubbing circles against his thumb made Tenko's heart tremble. He wanted to swim in this feeling, to drown in it.
He watched your eyes glance down from his and at his lips, his breathing hitching in anticipation as you leaned in slowly to-
The practice room door opened, making the two of you flinch. Tenko missed the feeling of your hand as you leaned back and glared at the intruder.
"I thought I told you to knock before opening doors. You scared me." You folded your arms against your chest.
"Well in that case, I won't give you my chocolates," Touya taunted as he walked over to you. He dropped his bag at the side of you Tenko wasn't on, making a loud 'thump' as it hit the wood floor.
"Chocolate!!" Touya smirked as you opened it and pulled out a heart shaped cookie with the kanji for love written in icing.
"Whatever, eat later. We've got rehearsal."
You look up at Touya while stuffing your face before looking over at Tenko, then back at your partner. "Already? It's not for another ten minutes."
Touya rolled his eyes and grabbed the bag before you could reach in for more sweets. "On time is late."
"Hey! Don't use my words against me, they sound weird coming from you." You wipe your hands against a handkerchief before moving to stand up. "By that logic, you're always late!"
Touya moved towards the door, beckoning you closer with the bag, "Here, doggy."
"Doggy..!?"
"If you spin around and bark I'll give you a treat." The two of you could hear him laughing as he walked out of the room with the bag.
You pout, "That Touya... doesn't he know dogs can't eat chocolates?" You shake your head and Tenko stands, pulling his backpack on. "I guess I'll... see you later then?"
It felt kind of awkward now, but Tenko didn't mind. He only wished that your time together wasn't cut short.
"Yeah."
"Can't wait." You grin and walk out of the dance practice room together. You wave as you go down the opposite side of the hall to catch up with Touya. In the distance Tenko can hear you woof.
As Tenko exited the performing arts building, he felt his phone vibrate. He opened it and saw a selfie of you with chocolate smeared on the side of your face, while trying to shove Touya's face out of the frame and seemingly getting the chocolate on his face in the process.
He grinned. He also couldn't wait to see you again.
×X×
"Chocolate? For me?" You gaped at the small bag of chocolates.
Tenko nodded, his eyes shyly peering up at you as you grabbed the bag and opened it. "There's only four. I made more but they… got ruined…"
"They're handmade?" Your face softened at him, making his heart flutter and his fingers flex at his sides in excitement. You took a bite of one and grinned wide, covering your mouth with your hand as you spoke. "This is really good, Tenko. I didn't know you could cook."
Tenko couldn't but he wasn't going to ruin the moment by speaking. He watched as you ate. The two of you were sitting side by side at his favourite outdoor table near your dorm. Last month, on Valentine's Day, the end of your conversation was a little awkward but thankfully it was gone the next time you guys saw each other. Once again, the two of you had hung out together a bunch of times. The biggest difference though was proximity. Tenko had noticed you getting closer and closer to him at every encounter.
"I finally received chocolates from someone. I'm really happy that it was you, Tenko."
He felt like he died and went to heaven. It would explain your presence. You just needed a halo.
"They're…"
Your eyes looking up from the bag made him nervous and he shook his head, deciding it was better if he didn't finish the sentence.
"They're what?" You ask, sensing his hesitation. "It's just me," you reassure.
"Just you..?" Just you? Just you?
You smile at him before looking down at the bag of chocolates with a pensive expression for a few moments. You look back up at him.
"Tenko."
"…Yes?" His voice nearly broke. Did he go to far? Did he?
"Even if your hair is always in your face, you're pretty cute." You reach out and brush his hair to the side, tucking it behind his ear. The warmth of your finger tips were no match for the heat flaring across his entire body at your sweet gesture.
You giggle and slowly lean in to his face. He doesn't move. He is frozen. You place a kiss on his cheek and he panics, moving further away in his chair with his hand coming up to hover over the site of your affection.
"Y-You kissed me…"
"I--I'm-- I'm sorry! I didn’t think you would be offended by it. Are you okay?"
"What about Touya!?"
You look at him with a puzzled expression. "What about Touya?"
"He's your boyfriend, isn't he!?"
"Huh!?" You sat up straight in your seat. "I don't have a boyfriend??"
"What?"
"You mean, this whole time you thought Touya was my--" A laugh escaped your lips for a brief second until you collected yourself, looking at him seriously. "Touya's my best friend. I mean… I did like him at one point but it was unreciprocated. Not that it matters, that's old news. I like you, Tenko."
The air left his lungs and he was pretty sure it wasn't going to come back anytime soon.
You liked him?
You?
Liked him?
Shimura Tenko?
Was he dreaming? Hallucinating this entire conversation? It was the only way any of this made sense.
"Here, eat some of these chocolates with me. They're really yummy. The perfect mix of sweet and salty." You pluck one from the baggy and lift it towards his lips. He stares into your eyes then down at the chocolate.
"I'd rather you eat them…"
You pout, "Okay, I won't force you."
You nibble on the chocolate and Tenko licks his lips at the sight.
"What?" You half-laugh. His eyes snap back up to yours.
"I like you, too."
"You do?" You look at him shyly. "I guess now would be a good time to tell you those chocolate cookies I gave you were the 'real feeling' kind?"
You've liked him for that long?
Without warning, Tenko leans in and takes your lips into a kiss. It's clumsy and awkward like him, but you don't shove him away. He can taste the salty sweet on your tongue as you kiss him back and though he wants to keep going, his lungs protested. He pulls back and the two of you stare at each other as he gathers his bearings.
"Was that your first kiss?" You ask.
He offers a small nod, "Was it that bad?"
"It's okay, we'll have plenty of time to practice."
Surprise filled him. "You want to d-do it again?"
You giggle, "Of course I do. So, as long as you're alright with it…"
"Right now? We can do it again right now?" He knew he sounded eager but he couldn't bring himself to care. He needed to feel the softness of your lips against his own.
"I like your enthusiasm." You laugh. "Let's do it when it's just us, okay? We're in public. I'm sure we can schedule in some more uninterrupted private sessions, right, Tenko?"
Tenko gulped, nodding since he didn't trust his voice at the moment.
You weren't disgusted by him, you wanted to kiss him. You wanted to be alone with him. You accepted him and all his faults.
You liked him.
Tenko, impatient as he was, could wait as long as you needed him to.
He loved you.
Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 4) - 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 4
You don’t see Tomura the next morning, but when you come home from work, Phantom is loose in the yard, and Hizashi is hanging out just beyond the fence, studying an empty jar. “I came to get this, since we’re out,” he remarks. He has sharp teeth, just like Himiko. “So, what happened last night?”
You play dumb for all you’re worth. “Something happened last night?”
“Of course it did. The vibes coming off this house are impressively horny,” Hizashi says, and you cringe so hard you’re surprised you don’t explode. “I’ve been there. Consequence of spending too much time embodied – you start feeling things a normal human body feels, and going incorporeal doesn’t make it go away. That was a nasty shock for me, too.”
You really don’t want to ask Hizashi any questions at all, but you’ve got one – and it’s a subject change, so you seize it. “Is it true that ghosts’ power levels are stagnant? Are you just stuck with what you started with?”
“That’s not what I thought you were going to ask.” Hizashi tosses the jar from one hand to the other. “I’m guessing you’re asking because of our sexually frustrated friend in there?”
“I’ll pay you to never say that again,” you say, and Hizashi laughs. “Yes. He said –”
“That he didn’t want to come here. I’d buy that, easy.” Hizashi glances over his shoulder at the house, then beckons you away down the block. You’re not sure how far you have to go to be out of Tomura’s earshot, but you stop when Hizashi does. “Here’s the thing. He and I are the oldest ghosts in this neighborhood, but we’re not the same kind of old. I chose to be here.”
“Why?” you ask. Hizashi stares at you. “Did you come here to hurt people?”
“I came here because I wanted to be people,” Hizashi says. You stare. “Ask him what it’s like in the world between and you’ll understand. But to answer your question, we don’t spend our whole existences at the same power level. There are two kinds of ghostly power. There’s what you get right at the start. Then there’s your potential. Conjurers – the worst ones, anyway – they want potential. That’s why they grab the youngest ghosts.”
His expression darkens, and your legs almost give out beneath you. Is this how Tomura makes other people feel? You’re surprised that anyone’s ever set foot in your house. Hizashi doesn’t notice what he’s doing to you, or if he notices, he doesn’t care. “Eri had low surface power but massive potential. Her conjurer bound her in the worst situation possible, figuring she’d have to tap into that potential to take control of her environment and make it her own. She found another way out, but your ghost didn’t.”
He glances back at your house. “Based on how strong your ghost is now, his potential was massive. He probably hasn’t even found his limit yet. What’s weird is that he hasn’t used it.”
“Did you use yours?”
Hizashi grins his sharp-toothed grin. “Why do you think it took them so long to burn my opera house down?”
You’ve wondered, every so often, what it would have been like to be haunted by Hizashi instead of Tomura. Now you’re pretty sure you’d have had a breakdown. Aizawa must have nerves of steel. “Anyway,” Hizashi says, “he’s not smart enough to tell a lie that big. He’s telling the truth.”
He tosses the jar at you and you barely catch it in time. “And whatever you did last night, don’t do it again. I can handle his mood, but it’s messing with the little ones.”
You cringe. The last thing you want is for Eri and Himiko to pick up on whatever Tomura’s doing – even if they do know all about sex from observing humans already. But you also don’t know how to fix this problem you apparently caused. “What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Ask Keigo,” Hizashi says, already walking away. “He’ll know.”
Keigo? You’ve talked to Keigo some, since he’s the only person in the neighborhood who’s actually in your age range, but it’s occurring to you now that you’ve never actually met Keigo’s ghost. You pull out your phone, considering texting him, but there’s no point when his house is across the street and his car’s in the driveway. You walk back to your house, retrieve Phantom’s spare leash from your car, and take her with you when you head across the street to knock on Keigo’s door.
Keigo answers it pretty fast. There’s a handprint-shaped hole burned in his shirt, still smoking faintly, and it draws your attention like a magnet. “Uh, what is that?”
“Ask Dabi,” Keigo says.
“Ask her damn ghost. It’s all his fault.”
“No, it isn’t. You can control your behavior, you just don’t want to.” Keigo rolls his eyes. “I saw you talking to Hizashi. I’m guessing he sent you?”
“Yeah. Can we talk?”
“Yeah. Just let me get my shoes. And a new shirt.” Keigo ducks back into the house, and you wait on the steps, wondering if you’ll get a glimpse of the former ghost who lives here. Keigo’s voice issues from within the house, but he’s not talking to you. “Don’t go out there if you’re just going to get into a pissing contest with the guy across the street. He could crush you with both hands tied behind his back.”
“He can’t cross that fence, and I didn’t give up my powers like an idiot. That means I can do whatever I want with his human –”
“He’d blow that house apart and come get you, and you know it.” Keigo reappears. “Sorry about him. He’s in a mood. Let’s go.”
“Hey, who said you could leave? I didn’t say you could leave! Get back here –”
“I’ll be back when I feel like it! Bye-bye!” Keigo waves and then slams the door. He hurries down the steps and you follow him. He doesn’t stop until you’re at the top of the street. “Sorry about that. I’m guessing you’ve got questions.”
You have a lot of questions. “Aizawa said Tomura was the only ghost left in the neighborhood.”
“He is,” Keigo says. “You know how ghosts have to want to be embodied more than they’ve ever wanted anything for it to work? Dabi tried to change his mind halfway.”
“Oh,” you say. “So that makes him half ghost?”
“It makes him a scar wraith. Half of him is permanently materialized, half of him isn’t, and most of the time he’s a total bitch about it.” Keigo crouches down to tie his shoes. “He lost half of his ghostly powers and picked up most of the downsides of being embodied. He’s going to be like that until he makes up his mind.”
“Oh,” you say again. “That’s, um – is that why your house is always on fire?”
“You got it.” Keigo straightens up again. “I know we got out of there in a hurry, but you’re not actually in danger from him. I just wanted to teach him a lesson. Like you do to yours when you leave.”
Is that what you’re trying to do? You don’t know if you’re trying to punish Tomura or just trying to figure out a game plan before you go back in. In this case it’s definitely the latter. “Hizashi says my ghost is, um –”
“Horny,” Keigo says. Your face heats up. He starts walking, and you follow him. “Yeah, they get like that sometimes. And they don’t like it. Usually they dematerialize to get away from feelings they don’t like, but it doesn’t work, and that pisses them off, too.”
Phantom stops to sniff a tree, and you let her for a second before tugging her along. “Why?”
“Maybe you don’t know, because you’re a girl –”
“Girls get horny too,” you say. This is maybe the dumbest conversation you’ve ever had, excepting the one you had with Tomura about why Phantom can’t have dead birds even though she really wants them. “Are you saying it’s because they have to do something about it? They don’t. They can just wait for it to go away.”
“Yeah, but waiting for it to go away is uncomfortable,” Keigo says. You’re not going to argue that one. Being horny when you don’t want to be is deeply unpleasant. “And ghosts suck at tolerating discomfort. Yours is pretty inexperienced with everything from what I’ve heard, so he probably doesn’t know what to do, and unless you want to leave a copy of The Joy of Sex lying around –”
“I don’t.” You shudder. “I don’t want him getting ideas.”
“Then you’re going to have to explain,” Keigo says patiently. You give him a pained look, and he sighs. “Tell him to materialize fully and get it out of his system. That’ll solve the initial problem.”
The thought of heading back to your house and telling Tomura he needs to masturbate makes you want to die. But you’re even unhappier about Keigo’s second sentence. “What do you mean, the initial problem?”
“Hizashi and Magne gave me the ghost sex talk when we moved here. Kind of late, but it helped, sort of.” Keigo rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “Once ghosts figure out how it works, they go one of two ways. Either they decide it’s gross and they’re not interested – that’s what Magne did – or they decide they’re really into it, which is what Hizashi did. And they can’t generate that feeling on their own the way people do, so they go after the people who made them feel that way the first time.”
That sinks in fast, but you’ve got no idea what to think or say or do about it. What comes out is the last thing you wanted to tell anyone. “I just held his hand. That was it! I was just trying to prove that there’s a difference between physical contact that hurts and stuff that doesn’t hurt because he won’t quit scratching his neck until it bleeds – and I’m pretty sure he hated it –”
“If he hated it, then you’re fine,” Keigo says. “Honestly, most of the adult former ghosts I’ve met aren’t into it even after they embody themselves permanently. Hizashi’s only like that because he spent enough time embodied to get used to it before he made it official. If it was a common thing Aizawa would have written a guidebook on it by now.”
Aizawa does have a lot of guidebooks. It took you a while to realize that most of the literature he sent you home with was stuff he’d written himself. “Although,” Keigo muses, “I guess Aizawa never hooked up with an actual ghost. He and Hizashi didn’t bang until after Hizashi was embodied.”
“So, um –” You can’t believe you’re about to ask this. “Did you, uh –”
“Did me and Dabi hook up before he fucked up his embodiment? Yeah,” Keigo says. You thought he’d be embarrassed, or proud. Instead he looks sad. “He didn’t use to be like this, or go by Dabi. His real name is Touya, and he was a lot, sure, but he wasn’t like this. I wouldn’t have gotten into it with him if he’d been like this the whole time.”
“I get it,” you say. You’ve had bad relationships before. “Do you think he’d go back if he embodied himself all the way?”
“Probably? I don’t think he’ll do that, though.” Keigo sighs. “They almost never decide consciously that they’re going to embody themselves. It happens because of how they feel. The little ones, they embodied themselves because they wanted to be with their families. They wanted to be seen and loved more than they wanted to be powerful. Magne jumped because Spinner didn’t have anybody but her, and as far as I can tell, she’s sort of surprised she did it. Hizashi did it on purpose, but Hizashi’s different – and from what he’s said, he’d probably have done it unconsciously at some point. He loves Aizawa that much.”
Now you get why Keigo looks so sad. “I bet Touya just got nervous,” you say. “I mean, it’s kind of a big decision, right? The biggest one they’ll ever make. And it’s not like he left. Even after you left his old haunt he stayed with you. That’s got to mean something.”
“Maybe.” Keigo smiles halfway. “A guy can hope, right?”
“Of course,” you say. Personally, you’re hoping for something different from Tomura.
You spend way too long pacing up and down the street after you say goodbye to Keigo, trying to work up your nerve. But eventually the weird tension from the house becomes perceptible to you even from outside it, and you remember what Hizashi said about the kids. You order yourself to suck it up, unlatch the front gate, and make your way inside. You can tell Tomura’s watching you, marking you closely, while you give Phantom a treat and some water. Once you’ve gotten her settled, you make your way upstairs to your room and shut the door. You can’t look at him while you have this conversation. You squeeze your eyes shut and speak up. “I know how to fix your problem.”
“What problem?” Tomura’s voice sounds tight and uncomfortable. “I don’t have a problem. You have a problem. You hung out with that guy across the street –”
“Because I needed help with you,” you say. It’s quiet for a second. “I figured out a solution to your problem. So you won’t feel the way you’re feeling anymore. I know it’s uncomfortable.”
“No, you don’t. Humans don’t feel like this.”
You manage to laugh at that one. “Humans feel like this all the time, Tomura. Half the dumb decisions people make in movies are because they feel like this.”
It’s quiet again. “How do I fix it?”
You bury your face in your head. “You have to materialize all the way. Then you have to touch yourself.”
“What do you mean, touch myself? You said I wasn’t supposed to scratch.”
“Not there.” You’re pretty sure your face is melting off from sheer embarrassment. “You know where that feeling is? The one you don’t like? You have to touch yourself there to make it go away.”
“Why?”
“It –” You chicken out. “You’ll figure it out once you try it. Go in the bathroom and shut the door.”
“Why do I have to go in there?”
“Privacy,” you say. There’s no way to tell him that you don’t want to have to clean ghost cum off the hardwood floors.
You hear footsteps down the hall, followed by the bathroom door opening and closing. “This is stupid,” Tomura says. You couldn’t agree more. “I’m doing it. It still feels – weird –”
That catch in his voice is something you really could have gone without hearing. “You don’t have to narrate,” you say. “You deserve privacy. I’m giving you privacy. I can leave the house –”
“No, don’t.” Tomura sounds pretty sure about that. “This was your idea. Don’t you want to – ugh.”
You don’t want to know what that was about. At all. You think about getting your headphones, except if you don’t respond when he talks to you, he’ll come looking to see why, and you really don’t want him to come talk to you in whatever state he’s in at the moment. Maybe it’s over already. Maybe he’s one of the vast majority of ghosts who think it’s gross and this will never happen to you again. You’re sure that’s it. It’s over already. It –
A low sigh echoes through the house, and you freeze in place. There’s a few uneven breaths, and then another sigh, followed by a sharper sound, somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. “What is this?” Tomura asks, his voice strained in an entirely different way than before. When you don’t respond, he says your name, followed by another one of those sharper sounds. “I don’t understand. Why – ah –”
You clamp your hands down over your ears, but it’s like your ears are attuned specifically to him. You can hear everything. Every ragged breath, every whimper, every needy, desperate moan, and suddenly you’re sure that you got the other kind of ghost, the kind that finds sex and lust fascinating instead of gross. You’ve made a mistake. Not just in telling him to solve the problem like this, but in sticking around to listen. Because listening to this, knowing that you touched his hand and turned him on so badly that it’s been permeating the neighborhood all day, is doing something to you, too.
Your face is flushed, but it’s not just from embarrassment. When you touch your wrist to feel for your pulse, it’s fast. And worse than all of that, you’re wet. Knowing it’ll make things worse doesn’t stop you from sliding one hand down the front of your jeans, recoiling when you realize just how wet you are. This is a disaster. You can’t let him know.
There’s only one solution you can think of. No time to get to the bed, or to do anything more than sink to the floor, unzipping your jeans just far enough to give your hand room to move. You shove the heel of your other hand against your mouth, because you’re not loud but you’ve never done anything like this before and you’re not sure what will happen. You squeeze your eyes shut as you brush your fingers between your legs, the sound you make muffled by your hand and drowned out by the almost-agonized moan that issues from the bathroom down the hall. “I can’t,” Tomura pants. “I can’t – stop – how does it stop –”
“You’ll know.” You think your voice is steady enough. How is he still going? The first time you masturbated, you were so wound up that you were done almost faster than you could think. And he’s a guy. “Just keep going.”
“Keep talking.” Tomura’s voice is just as raspy and ragged as his breathing is. It shouldn’t be hot. You shouldn’t find this hot. “Is this –”
He breaks off in a whine. “How it’s supposed to feel?” you ask. You increase the pressure of your fingers against your clit in spite of the fact that he’s clearly expecting you to talk and you don’t want him to know what you’re doing. “Like you’re going to fall apart, but it feels so good you don’t care?”
“Yeah. Ah –”
“Like that,” you say. You find yourself spreading your legs wider, giving more space for your hand to move. “Exactly like that, Tomura. Don’t stop.”
You’re telling him how to touch himself, but it’s all wrong. It sounds the same as what you’d be telling him to do if he was here, if the fingers slipping inside you were his. What is wrong with you? Thoughts flash through your mind, thoughts you shouldn’t have, and your breathing turns shallow and harsh. “Say something,” Tomura whines, begs. You picture what he must look like right now, face red and hair stuck to his neck and forehead with sweat, completely at the mercy of a body and a need, and crook your fingers, shuddering. “Come on. I need you. Don’t leave me. Please –”
“I’m here.” The strain in your voice would let anyone else know exactly what you’re doing, but Tomura doesn’t know – and even if he did, the sounds you hear tell you that he’s lost in his own touch, chasing his own high. You might as well not be here. All you are is a friendly voice, a guide in uncharted territory. “You’re doing great. You’re almost done, aren’t you? You know what you like by now. Do that, and keep doing it. Don’t stop until –”
The sound he makes is inarticulate and absolutely filthy. Your muscles clench around your fingers, and you rub desperately at your clit with your free hand. Without a hand over your mouth to muffle yourself, you’re reduced to biting your lip until it bleeds as you listen to Tomura shuddering through the first orgasm of his existence. And that’s what tips you over the edge, really – the thought that it’s his first, the thought that it’s because of you. Blood spills into your mouth as your hips jerk against your hands, your vocal cords straining with the effort of holding back the sounds you want to make. You can’t remember the last time you came this hard. All you want to do is sprawl out on the floor and go to sleep.
But you can’t. You need to hide the evidence. You can’t let Tomura know what you just did. You zip and button your jeans, cringing at the slickness of your fingers, and leave your room, hurrying to the downstairs bathroom to splash water on your face. You get a glimpse of what you look like in the mirror and stare in horror. Your face is flushed and your eyes are dilated and there’s a drop of blood at the corner of your mouth that you smear away with the back of your hand. You look like a mess. The only thing that will save you is that Tomura doesn’t know what to look for.
His voice drifts through the house, still unsteady. “There’s a mess in here.”
“I’ll clean it later,” you say. “Since it’s my fault.”
The floor creaks once or twice, then stops, and you know Tomura’s dematerialized. It’s not a surprise. You can’t imagine how much energy he burned through, and sure enough, when you look out the kitchen window, you see a line of dead blackberry bushes along the back fence. Sex stuff takes more life-force than anything else. All the more reason for this to never happen again.
Tomura’s presence slips into the room, surrounding you like he does sometimes. Usually you shoo him away, or threaten to leave until he slinks off, sulking. Today you can’t. You coped okay with your first orgasm, but you were alone. You know you’d have felt weird if you hadn’t been, and if the person who talked you through it had ignored you afterward. You let him settle in, staring fixedly at the dead bushes along the fence. Only one or two are still alive.
Tomura’s voice rasps against your ear. “Do I have to do that every time?”
“There’s not going to be another time,” you say. “It’s my fault for touching you like that last night, and you told me not to do it again. So we’re good.”
“It felt good.” Tomura sounds sure about that. Your stomach twists. “It only felt bad because I didn’t know what to do. Now I know.”
“I’m still not touching you like that again. You said no. I can’t ask you to respect my boundaries when I don’t respect yours.”
“What if I take it back?” Tomura asks. The twist in your stomach is painful this time. “What if I want you to touch me?”
“Then it starts being about what I want,” you say. “And I don’t want to.”
It’s a lie. You’re lying. Another human would know you were, would know by the heat of your body and the flush in your cheeks and the heavy, painful sound of your heartbeat. “You don’t want to,” Tomura repeats. His presence slips away again, going to some place far enough that you can barely feel it. “I didn’t say I wanted it. Like I’d ever want you to touch me.”
His voice is the last thing to vanish. You want to stick your head under the faucet and drown. “Fine.”
There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it, and after the hand-touching incident and everything that followed, the atmosphere in your house feels worse than it ever has before. You don’t know where Tomura’s going, but there are times when his presence vanishes almost completely, and when it does, you can barely stand the emptiness he leaves behind. You never lived alone until you lived here, and you thought you loved it. Now you realize that you were never living here alone at all. Until now.
The jar of bugs start piling up on the front porch, and rather than letting them die, you let them go. You don’t tell the others to stop bringing them. Some part of you is hoping Tomura will come back, that you can go back to the way things were before, but you don’t need one of Aizawa’s guidebooks to tell you that it’s not happening. You rejected him. And if there’s anything you’ve taught Tomura about how humans work, it’s that no means no.
You start spending extra time at work. Sometimes you bring Phantom with you, with Mr. Yagi’s permission, and it makes you popular with your coworkers like you never were before. You still hate it, but it makes it easier to be at work. And it means you don’t have to go home until you’re ready.
At least, most days you don’t. But you woke up with a splitting headache today, and a sore throat, and because you weren’t coughing, you decided that you didn’t have an excuse to skip work. You leave Phantom at home and drag yourself into the office, and you get through four hours of your workday before Mr. Yagi spots you and sends you home. Your pleas not to go home fall on deaf ears, and you drive home slowly, struggling to keep your eyes fixed on the road in front of you.
When you get home, Phantom greets you anxiously. She knows you’re not feeling well, and when you sit down in the front hall to pet her, you realize that you’re going to have a hard time getting up. It doesn’t matter. You can take a break. You let your eyes fall shut.
When you wake up, it’s to grey, rainy, late-afternoon light falling over your face, the sound of Phantom whining in your ear, and a voice you haven’t heard in three weeks. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Tomura,” you mumble. You were hoping sleep would make you feel better, but it feels like your headache’s actually gotten worse. “I’m fine. Just wanted to sit down.”
“Don’t be stupid. And don’t lie.” Even the sound of Tomura’s footsteps across the floor hurts your head, not to mention Phantom’s whining. “You fell asleep on the floor. You’re making this weird face. You don’t look right. What’s wrong with you?”
He almost sounds worried. “My boss sent me home. He thinks I’m sick.”
“Are you sick?” Tomura asks. You think about lying, decide not to, and nod. The pain that splits your skull makes you want to throw up. “Can you fix it?”
You have cold medicine somewhere, and pain relievers, but you’d have to get up to get them, and you’re so dizzy. Maybe you should call somebody for help, but who would you call? Nobody in your neighborhood is going to set foot in your house, and you don’t have any friends from work. And all your old friends have started to slip away, courtesy of your new world, your new friends, your new life. Who do you have to call? Nobody. The thought makes you sad, and feeling sad makes you even more tired than before.
“Wake up,” Tomura snaps at you. Phantom whines and licks your face. “Stop it. Wake up!”
Phantom’s worried. Tomura’s mad at you. Somewhere in your clouded mind, it occurs to you that you need help. That maybe it doesn’t matter who you call as long as you call somebody. You pull your phone out of your backpack and get as far as unlocking it. Then your head starts to ache worse than before, a dull pounding that fills every crevice and corner of your skull. Everything feels hot and humid and awful. You shut your eyes again. Anything to make it stop.
You’re cold when you wake up again. Well, some of you is cold. There’s a small warm patch on your stomach, but the rest of you is cold. Not regular cold. Tomura’s cold. He’s materialized, completely or close enough, and he’s holding onto you awkwardly with one arm while Phantom rests her head on your stomach. You can hear Tomura’s voice. He sounds pissed. “If I knew what was wrong with her I’d say it,” he snaps at whoever he’s talking to. “She keeps falling asleep. She’s not supposed to be home yet. She’s too warm.”
“So she’s sick.” That’s Keigo’s voice. Is Keigo here? Why did Tomura let Keigo in the house? “And she’s sleeping a lot?”
“I said that already. Stop repeating what I already said.”
“What are her symptoms?” That’s Aizawa’s voice. It starts to dawn on you slowly what’s happening here, and you almost laugh. “Symptoms. You named some of them already. Fatigue. Fever. Is she coughing?”
“No.”
“Does her breathing sound different than it usually does?” Jin’s mom is talking. Now you know for sure. “Does she have a rash?”
“Her breathing sounds normal,” Tomura says. He’s on the phone. He somehow unlocked your phone, went into your text messages, and conference-called the entire ghost friends group chat. You’d laugh if you weren’t worried it would make your head explode. “What’s a rash?”
“It would be on her skin. Does her skin look like it usually looks?”
An ice-cold hand brushes over your cheek. “It’s too hot. Her face is red. The rest of it looks okay.”
“Check for bites. We brought over tons of bugs. If enough of them bit her –”
“Hitoshi, hang up the phone,” Aizawa orders. “You’re supposed to be at school.”
“You’re supposed to be driving,” Shinsou fires back. “You’re picking up Eri from school early because she’s sick.”
Eri’s sick. You claw your way out of semi-consciousness and grasp the phone. “Does she have what I have?”
“Oh, good. You’re alive,” Keigo says. “Your ghost was pretty panicked.”
“I wasn’t panicked. Shut up.” Tomura’s grip on you tightens. “Someone else is sick?”
“She fell asleep in class. She has a headache and a fever,” Aizawa says. He sounds unhappy. “When would she possibly have been exposed?”
“We brought over some bugs last night,” Shinsou says. “Maybe it was then.”
“It could have gone the other way, too,” Jin’s mom says. “Kids get sick a lot easier than adults.”
“Good point. Maybe Eri got it first and brought it –”
“But Shinsou isn’t sick. If Shinsou lives with her and isn’t sick, how come –”
“I don’t care,” Tomura says loudly. “I don’t care about your sick kid. I want to know how to fix my human.”
Tomura’s making a great first impression. You’ll be doing damage control with Aizawa later, once you feel less like a puddle of body aches and sweat. “If she’s got what Eri’s got, it’s probably the flu,” Jin’s mom says. “She should have cold medicine on hand. Most people do. Pain relievers for the headache and body aches, cough drops if she has a sore throat. And she’ll need to eat. Do you know how humans eat?”
“I’m not stupid. I know how food works.”
“Don’t cook,” Aizawa, Shinsou, and Keigo all say at once. Keigo keeps talking. “You’re not embodied. You don’t have tastebuds. Whatever you end up cooking is going to be –”
There’s a scuffle on Keigo’s end of the line. “It’s going to be fuck awful,” Dabi announces, and Shinsou snickers. “Go ahead and poison your human. See if I care.”
“The next time you even look at my human I’m going to disintegrate your ugly face.”
“My ugly face? Have you seen what you look like? I’m surprised your human hasn’t gone blind.”
Tomura snarls. “At least I never set my human on fire –”
“You’re both pretty,” you mumble, and Keigo cracks up laughing. “I’m not that sick. I can heat up a can of soup in the microwave.”
“You’re so stupid. You fell asleep on the floor,” Tomura snaps at you. “You can’t do anything. I’m going to have to drag you everywhere.”
“No one made you touch me,” you protest. “If you weren’t here –”
“Well, I am here. So shut up and let me –”
“If you two are going to have a domestic, hang up the phone first,” Hizashi says loudly. You didn’t realize he was there. You jump, and your head collides with Tomura’s chin. He swears and so do you. “One of us will stop by later to make sure neither of you are dead. Goodbye.”
There’s a click as he hangs up the phone. Shinsou hangs up a second later. Jin’s mother hangs up after promising to bring over some food, and Keigo stays on the phone a little longer. “I’ll drop by in an hour or two, like Hizashi says. Can you promise not to kill me if I set foot in the house?”
“The only person I’m going to kill is your idiot ghost.”
“Cool,” Keigo says. You can hear Dabi arguing in the background that it’s not cool at all. “Bye.”
He hangs up the phone, too. Now it’s just you and Tomura and Phantom, piled up on the couch in the living room. You don’t remember getting to the living room. Tomura must have dragged you, like he said. You thought he was so mad at you that he was never going to show himself again. Apparently not.
“What’s a domestic?” Tomura asks after a while.
“A fight,” you say. “Just another word for fight.”
“Then why didn’t he just say a fight?”
You really don’t want to get into this right now. “A domestic is a kind of fight. The kind couples have. He was making fun of us by pretending we’re a couple.”
“I don’t like him,” Tomura says after a moment. “I can kill him for you.”
“Don’t do that,” you say.
“He scares you.” Tomura scratches at his neck with the hand that’s not gripping your shoulder. “If I can’t not scare you, I might as well be the only thing that does.”
Maybe you’re just sick and stupid, but you don’t hate the sound of that. “That’s kind of sweet.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Tomura says. He slides out from behind you and drops you onto the couch with a thud. You see a patchy flush on his face before he turns away. “I’m getting your medicine. Stay there.”
You’re not really in a position to go anywhere. You scratch behind Phantom’s ears with a shaky hand and close your eyes again.
When you wake up, you find that Tomura’s turned your medicine cabinet inside out and brought you absolutely everything. Sorting through it is the first laugh you’ve had in a while, and once you’ve got a double dose of painkillers on board, you’re willing to risk it. “Why did you bring this?” you ask, waving a box of band-aids at him. “You’ve seen me use these. You know they’re not for this.”
“How am I supposed to know that? You use stuff that’s not for the stuff you’re using it for all the time.” Tomura snatches the band-aids away and picks up another box. “What are these?”
“You definitely didn’t need to bring those,” you say. “They’re condoms.”
“What?”
It figures. He didn’t know male from female until Hizashi told him, but he clearly has certain associations with condoms, and he doesn’t like them. Probably because of all the movies you didn’t know he was watching with you. “Relax. Does that box look open to you?”
“No,” Tomura says, inspecting it from all angles. “If it’s not open, why do you have it?”
“In case I need it,” you say. “I don’t need it right now.”
In fact, you’re having a hard time imagining that you’ll ever need condoms again. You can’t exactly bring anybody home to hook up with, not with Tomura constantly lurking around, and you like sleeping in your own bed too much to spend the night at anybody else’s house. Beyond that, if you ever wanted to get serious with anybody, you’d have to explain about your house, about Tomura. There’s no way to explain that. No way to explain him in a way that won’t end any relationship instantly. Maybe it’s just that you’re sick, but you find that you don’t mind the thought.
You choose a box of cold medicine and swallow a dose of it, then pop a cough drop into your mouth to soothe your throat. Tomura watches you the entire time, only partially materialized. “Does that taste good?”
“No. It numbs my throat so it hurts less.”
“What do you do when things hurt?”
You were going to try to fall asleep again as soon as you’re done with your cough drop, but Tomura’s in a mood to talk. And as much as you hate to admit it, you miss talking to Tomura. “There are different kinds of hurt, for people. If it hurts physically, like this does, I can take medicine. I can put ice on a bruise or use a heating pad for cramps. There are ointments that have numbing agents in them, same as the cough drops. There are lots of things to do when something physically hurts.”
“If something hurts my body, I can dematerialize,” Tomura says. You wish it was that easy for you. If you could evaporate right now, you’d do it in a heartbeat. “What about other kinds of hurting?”
“Um –” You break off, trying to wrap your head around it. “Emotions hurt sometimes. The bad ones, usually. Being sad or angry or lonely or scared – all of those can feel like they hurt. They can hurt a lot.”
“How do you make them go away?”
“You can’t,” you say. Tomura’s expression darkens. “There’s not medicine that fixes feelings, at least not all the way. You just have to live with them until they stop. Or until you get used to them.”
“That’s stupid,” Tomura says.
“You’re telling me.” You close your eyes. “I guess talking about them helps sometimes. Not for everybody, not all the time, but it can make you feel less alone.”
“I didn’t hate being alone before,” Tomura says. You open your eyes and find him scowling, his face flushed. “Now I do.”
You want to remind him that he’s the one who pulled away, that he’s the one who left, but there’s no point. You roll over instead, facing the back of the couch, and the words slip out of your mouth before you can stop them. “I missed you.”
You couldn’t have picked a dumber thing to say. Tomura’s got the emotional maturity of a frat guy – he gets mad easily and takes “no” poorly and makes you explain your boundaries five billion times before he even thinks about respecting them. Telling a guy like him that you missed him is a one-way ticket to being mocked for being needy and clingy and pathetic. You can already feel your eyes burning in anticipation of being humiliated.
But Tomura’s not a human man. He’s a ghost. The rush of air filling a previously occupied space tells you he’s dematerialized, but the cold settles around you, and his voice rasps in your ear. “I missed you too. Idiot.”
“You’re the one who left,” you answer. “You’re an idiot, too.”
You’re expecting him to slip away again. Instead the cold spot envelops you more securely than before. “Shut up.”
You fall asleep like that, and when you wake up, it’s to the sound of the fire alarm going off. Tomura’s watched you cook plenty of times and probably should know better, but apparently when you mentioned sticking a can of soup in the microwave, he took it literally. You should be pissed. You probably will be, once the cold medicine wears off. But at the moment, when you’re dizzy and sleepy and feverish, all you can think to do is be pleased that he tried at all.
Enough to Go By (Chapter 2) -- 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
Chapter 2
When the ER doctors ask you how you got hurt, you lie. You know you shouldn’t lie, know that Tenko’s dangerous, know that his quirk, whatever it is, is deadly on contact. Some part of you thinks you should be scared of the possibility that Tenko will come back to finish the job. But at the same time, you know you’re the one who chased him. You’re the one who wouldn’t let him go. If you hadn’t run after him, none of this would have happened.
This, it turns out, is a wrist that requires a specialized healing quirk to fix, and a bruised larynx that makes you sound like you’ve been deepthroating a lead pipe. “Whoever you’re protecting, you shouldn’t,” an old, sort of grizzled nurse says severely after the fifth time you’ve repeated your lie. “Another few pounds of pressure on your throat and you’d be dead.”
Tenko was fine with killing you, at least at first. You’re not sure what changed his mind, or why he let you go, and in spite of the fact that he gave you injuries severe enough for an overnight in the ER, you can’t help wondering what happened to him. The friend you knew was nothing like that. He got frustrated sometimes, like everyone else, but he was kind. And hurting people? He wouldn’t. His older sister did more playground fighting than he did. In fact, when you think about it – you close your eyes against the fluorescent lights in your hospital room and try to fend off the memory. You can’t quite do it, because it’s crystal clear. Tenko spent more time getting hurt than doing the hurting.
If Tenko and Hana got out the door first on school days, they’d wait outside your house on the sidewalk for you to come out, so you could all walk to school together. If you were ready first, you’d wait for them. One morning you were waiting, tapping your feet, fiddling with your umbrella because the weather looked like rain even if the forecast didn’t say so, when you heard voices. One raised grown-up voice and one small anxious one, from inside the house.
You didn’t want to eavesdrop, but you didn’t know how not to. Hana had a cold, so she was staying home. Tenko had wanted to say goodbye to her before he left, but their dad said no, and when Tenko stuck his head in the door anyway, his dad yelled. And was still yelling, over whatever Tenko was trying to say, until Tenko stumbled out onto the sidewalk, without a raincoat or an umbrella and scratching the skin around his eyes.
Or wiping his eyes, maybe. He started scrubbing at them frantically when he saw you. “Don’t look –”
You turned around, and as you did, you felt the first drops of rain. “Are you okay?”
“Hana’s sick.” Tenko sniffled. “I went in her room when I wasn’t supposed to.”
I heard, you almost said. But you didn’t. You just asked again. “Are you okay?”
“We have to walk or we’ll be late.” Tenko started walking, past you, and you followed him. The rain was falling harder, spattering Tenko’s shirt and his backpack. “It wasn’t supposed to rain.”
“Here.” You put up your umbrella and hurried to catch him, holding it over both your heads. You didn’t have a choice but to look at him now, and you saw how puffy his eyes were. “I bet Hana was happy.”
Tenko nodded. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and sniffled again, and when his hand fell back to his side, it brushed against yours. Tenko cringed. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” you said. You linked your pinky finger with his. “I swear.”
Tenko’s finger hooked tighter around yours. “Only since you swore.”
He had a cold the next day, and so did you. You cried until your mom went over to his house to apologize for you getting Tenko and Hana sick. So this isn’t the first time you’ve lied to protect Tenko. It might just be the first time you’re getting away with it.
You’re out of the ER at eight in the morning, and by nine-thirty you’re at work. You’re a medical assistant in a network of urgent care clinics that serve low-income people, uninsured people, or people who don’t want to risk going to a standard hospital. Your friends call your workplace Villains, Inc., and you’re not going to say you haven’t met your share – but you also meet a lot of people, and you think it’s good for you. Sometimes it feels like there are two Japans, sharing space in the same territory. One full of pretty, shiny heroes and happy, law-abiding civilians and uncomplicatedly evil villains, where everybody has a quirk and everybody’s always doing their best. And then there’s the other Japan, populated by everybody who doesn’t belong in the first one.
They say one in five people are quirkless, but you see at least fifty people a day at work, and the number of quirkless people on your side of Japan is a lot higher. Quirkless children have the school system to nominally protect them, but there’s no such system for quirkless adults. A lot of them are pushed to the margins, losing jobs to those with quirks, even if their quirk is useless for the jobs in question. Even when quirkless people can get work, it’s at a lower level than a quirked person could get. Your applications to nursing school were rejected, even though your grades matched the standard. You’re lucky that you’d already found an apprenticeship, in a workplace willing to sponsor your education and train you on the job.
You’ve been working here for two years, part-time as an apprentice and CNA in high school and full-time since you graduated. You’re a medical assistant now, which means you can do a whole bunch of things – take history, check vitals, draw blood, give vaccines. You have a specific exam room you work out of, and the newest workers, the ones still in high school, bring patients from the waiting room to you. From there, you figure out where to route them. To an exam room with a nurse or a physician, to the lab for blood tests, to Imaging, to the ER if their injuries or illness are too severe to be treated here. You’ve only had to route somebody to the morgue once.
You’ve just delivered your most recent patient to an exam room with a doctor, and you’re in the process of documenting it in the chart when a message pops up from one of your coworkers at the front desk. FOF. Can you handle it?
FOF – freak out front. You don’t love that acronym. How F are we talking?
Creepy-looking + mean. The new kid messed up, but not that bad.
You’re not in the mood for difficult patients today. Your throat is sore and your wrist is itching and the turtleneck you’re wearing to cover the bruises on your neck is a little too tight. But you’re the most senior medical assistant working today, and even if you weren’t, dealing with difficult people is sort of your specialty. You did a great job last night right up until you decided to chase after Tenko.
Nobody’s perfect, and you learned your lesson, didn’t you? You sigh, wincing at how it feels, and respond. Send them over.
You go back to your chart, trying desperately to finish it before the new patient arrives, and you’re just about to send it to your supervisor when the CNA knocks on the door. “Come in!”
The door opens and the patient steps through, shutting it behind them. “Just a second,” you say, deciding you’re going to finish your documentation if it kills you. “You can have a seat and I’ll be with you as soon as I just –”
“Your voice sounds weird.”
You almost choke on your own spit. You look up from your computer and find Tenko staring at you from across the exam room.
Between the fluorescent lights of the convenience stores and the shadowy darkness of the street, your encounter with Tenko last night had the sense of a fever dream or an acid trip – shiny around the edges, not quite real. Seeing him in broad daylight in your dingy exam room is unnerving beyond words. He looks even more like your best friend than he did before, but there are more differences, too – a scar over Tenko’s mouth, another scar over his right eye. Whatever skin condition he had around his eyes as a child, it’s gotten worse, so much worse that it’s obliterated his eyebrows and spread to his forehead. He’s wearing a black hoodie, maybe the same hoodie he was wearing last night. And he’s staring at you.
You thought there was no way he’d come back to finish the job. You thought you were safe. You thought wrong. Your voice comes out in an airless whisper, like you’re still sprawled on the concrete with his arm across your throat. “What are you doing here?”
“It says outside you have to treat everybody. Is that true?” Tenko’s voice is abrupt, bordering on rude, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your voice sounds weird. And that shirt is stupid. You wouldn’t sound so weird if the collar wasn’t –”
He’s reaching towards you, and you’re frozen, even as your mind screams at you to get out of the way. Tenko’s index finger hooks into the collar of your turtleneck and pulls it down. His eyes narrow at first, turning his expression sharp and mean. Then they widen once more, past where they were before, until he looks more like the Tenko you knew than you’ve seen yet. “Who did that?”
You don’t remember your best friend being this stupid. “Who do you think?”
“I didn’t do that,” Tenko says, but his eyes dart to one side, the way they used to do when he knew he was wrong. A second later he changes his tune. “You made me do it. If you hadn’t chased me –”
You shouldn’t have chased him, but he didn’t have to choke you and burn the skin off your wrist. You look Tenko over and change the subject. You don’t want to argue. You don’t want him to get mad. “Aren’t you missing something?”
He gives you a puzzled look, and you mime a hand covering your face. “Father,” Tenko says. He calls it Father? That’s – weird. “He’s here.”
He unhooks his finger from your collar, reaches into his hoodie pocket, extracts the hand, and secures it over his face. It should look ridiculous, but instead it’s terrifying. “I can’t wear him in daylight. Master says he’s too recognizable yet.”
None of those words make any sense, and you’ve lost your ability to speak. “It says you treat everybody here. You have to. Right?” Tenko asks. You nod wordlessly. “So treat me.”
“Um –” You get the syllable out of your mouth, watching Tenko’s shoulders stiffen at the sound of your voice. “Do you have your intake form? They would have given it to you when you checked in.”
Tenko’s mouth twists. “The brat at the front desk didn’t give me anything. She said she could fill it in herself, since she knew I was here for dermatology.”
You think back to your coworker’s message. You’d say the new kid messed up pretty bad. “I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have made that assumption.”
“You did too. Didn’t you? I bet you thought I came in here for help with my disgusting skin.”
“No,” you say. “I think you’re probably coming in for your wrist.”
It’s the only thing that makes sense to you, short of him tracking you down to finish the job, and when he’s reached for you or taken the hand out of his pocket, he’s used his left hand. If your memory’s correct, Tenko’s right-handed. “It looked like you hurt it when you fell,” you continue. Tenko stares at you. “Are there any other issues you’d like us to investigate while you’re here?”
Tenko shakes his head. Okay. Nineteen-year-old male, here for suspected injury to wrist. What’s next in your exam workflow? A process you run through at least a hundred times per week has exited your mind completely. You glance around the room uselessly and your eyes land on your blood pressure cuff. “Okay. I’m going to take your vitals.”
“Why do you need those?” Tenko looks suspicious. “Stay away from me.”
“I need your blood pressure, your pulse rate, and your pulse oxygen level. None of those are invasive tests.” Not usually, anyway – given how Tenko reacted the last time you came anywhere close to touching him, you’re pretty sure that pushing the point here could get you killed. “Or just the pulse oxygen. That goes on your finger.”
You take it out, only to remember about Tenko’s quirk. Tenko notices your hesitation. He sneers behind the hand. “Don’t worry. It only works with all five fingers.”
Good to know. You clip the pulse oxygen monitor onto his middle finger and turn back to your computer. Even without looking at his wrist, an x-ray is standard protocol, and you need to get Tenko into the queue right away. The less time he spends here, the less danger everybody else is in. It might be too late for you already.
“What do you think?” Tenko asks. You look at him. “The quirk.”
“You’ve got one.” You’re not really sure what else to say.
“And you don’t. Still?” Tenko raises his eyebrows. You nod. “And you still don’t care.”
“No,” you say. “I never cared about not having one. Only about how people treat me.”
“I bet they treat you like shit,” Tenko says. He sounds gleeful, but his expression doesn’t match his tone of voice. It’s weird. “If I ask you why you’re here instead of some fancy clinic on the nice side of town, you’ll probably lie and say you love it here. But you’re here because nowhere else will take somebody who doesn’t have a quirk. Isn’t that right?”
“I do like it here.” You aren’t lying. The pulse ox monitor beeps and you take it back from Tenko, recording the reading on your computer. “And I’m here because nowhere else will take me. Let me see your wrist.”
Tenko’s had his other hand in the front pocket of his hoodie this whole time. He draws it out slowly and extends it towards you. You’re not qualified to diagnose anything, but you can see that it’s bruised and swollen, and the skin is hot when you touch it. Tenko hisses as your fingers make contact. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to see if there’s an obvious break.” You shouldn’t – he’ll be headed to Imaging no matter what – but you don’t want anyone else to come into contact with Tenko unless they have to. Tenko’s wrist is swollen to the point that you can barely feel anything beneath it. “Were you resting this last night? Or using it?”
“I had games to play.”
Tenko’s a gamer now. Huh. “That’s probably why it’s so sore. And so swollen. No more gaming with that hand until it heals.”
“You’re not a doctor. Don’t tell me what to do.”
“The doctor’s going to say the same thing.” You glance away at your screen, checking your position in the Imaging queue. There’s a chest x-ray ahead of you, with a sick kid, and those always take a while. “I’m going to get you some ice for this. It’ll help with the x-rays if the swelling goes down. Stay here.”
“No.” Tenko gets to his feet, pulling his wrist out of your grip, grimacing as the motion jars the injury. “You think I don’t know what you’ll do? You’re just dying to go to the cops.”
“I had a chance to go to the cops. Last night, when I went to the hospital for this.” You gesture at your throat, and Tenko’s expression twists behind the hand. “I didn’t go then. Why would I go now?”
Tenko stares at you. You hold his gaze. You’ve never lost a staring contest in your life, and you’re not planning to start today – and after a long moment, Tenko averts his eyes. “You can go,” he says shortly. “But I won’t use it unless you get some for your neck.”
Does he feel guilty? Is that why he’s saying that? You decide not to think about it too hard. He’s your patient right now. If this is what it’ll take for him to ice his injury, you’ll happily slap a bag of ice on your throat.
But once you’ve brought the ice back, and you’re holding yours to your throat while Tenko applies his gingerly to his wrist, you’re out of other things to do. It’s just you and your best friend, who tried to kill you last night, sitting in a room together. Tenko still has the hand over his face. Your wrist is still itching. Before last night, when you still had the luxury of imagining what it would be like to meet Tenko again after all this time, you didn’t imagine it would be like this. It makes you sad.
You’re expecting silence until Tenko gets called back to Imaging, but to your surprise, Tenko speaks up. “Your parents had three more kids,” he says. You nod. “Why?”
“To be fair to them, they thought they were only having one.” You don’t like being fair to them about this, given what happened afterwards, even if there’s no way they could have known. “It was triplets, and they were pretty sick. They got the same kind of quirk as the rest of the family, so they made us all feel how they felt. Which was – bad.”
Tenko doesn’t say anything. You shouldn’t be talking about your family, not when his family is dead. Does he even know what happened to his family? You’re not going to ask. “Sorry.”
“Did you have to take care of them?”
“What?”
“The stupid triplets. Did you have to take care of them, too?” Tenko glares from behind the hand. “I remember you always had to before. You never stayed as long as you wanted to.”
“Oh,” you say, startled. “No, um – I had to get home. I wanted to.”
“My birthday party. Your mom came to get you early and you said you weren’t crying but you were.” Tenko is still glaring at you, and you find yourself shrinking back in your chair. “I remember. Don’t lie.”
“You didn’t remember last night,” you say, but he must have remembered something, or he wouldn’t have spoken up when you mentioned how many siblings you have. “Tenko, what –”
“That’s not my name. Anymore.” Tenko scratches at his neck lefthanded. “Master gave me a new one. Tomura.”
“Tomura,” you repeat. “Is that what I should call you?”
Tenko – Tomura? – keeps scratching, clawing up red scrapes in his skin. Then his hand falls back down. “Tenko. You should call me Tenko.” He averts his eyes from yours again. “You knew me before.”
Before what? You can’t decide whether to ask, and Tenko makes the decision for you. “I knew you before, too. When you were a kid whose parents wouldn’t let her stay long enough at a birthday party for a fucking piece of cake.”
“You brought me some. The next day.” Your voice is small. “I remember that. It was the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.”
Tenko’s shoulders stiffen. “That’s pathetic.”
“It was the nicest thing back then,” you say. “Nicer stuff has happened since then.”
Has it? It probably has, but right now your mind is full, all your memories of Tenko flooding to the forefront. There aren’t many. Not nearly enough. Three years at most – your memory is good enough to pick up some things from when you were a toddler, and you and Tenko met when you were barely old enough to speak full sentences. But you talked. You always talked. You talked to each other about everything. Right now it feels like there’s nothing in the world you could say to each other, and it breaks your heart.
Your computer pings, snapping you out of it and giving you something else to fixate on. “They’re ready for us in Imaging. I’ll walk you.”
“What, you think I can’t walk by myself?”
“I want to keep an eye on you,” you say, and Tenko scoffs. “Come on.”
He takes the hand down off his face and tucks it away again before exiting the exam room. He pulls his hood up, too, shuffling along at your side too close to be a shadow. You pass more than a few of your coworkers, all of whom give you pitying looks. They feel bad for you, but they don’t know enough to feel bad for the right reason. It makes you angry, just like it made you angry to hear Tenko’s father shout at him, a useless anger that felt too large for your tiny body. You couldn’t protect him then, and he wouldn’t let you do it now, but the urge is there, as insane as it might be. He almost killed you last night. And here you are wanting to save him.
The x-rays go quickly. A few different angles, and then you and Tenko stand there while the doctor on shift interprets them. “No fracture,” he reports. “Just a bad sprain. We’ll send you home with a brace to wear. Just take it easy for a few days.”
Tenko jerks his chin downwards. It would be charitable to call it a nod. The doctor makes a quick note in his chart and turns away, trusting you to dig up a brace and conclude the visit. Tenko won’t ask, so you will. “What about for pain?”
The doctor turns, raises an eyebrow. “The patient didn’t ask.”
“The patient wouldn’t have come in if it didn’t hurt.” You’re insane. You must be, to help someone who hurt you, except you’re not thinking of last night, you’re thinking of today – of your best friend, who’s not your friend anymore, but remembers you enough to be angry on your behalf. Who brought you a slice of birthday cake the next day because you couldn’t stay long enough to have one. “What would you recommend?”
“Ice it at least three times a day, and double up on NSAIDs,” the doctor says finally. “The OTC brands will be fine. If you rest it properly it should be healed by next week. Is there anything else?”
You glance at Tenko. Tenko shakes his head. “Feel better soon,” the doctor says. “Come back for a follow-up if anything worsens.”
Tenko trails after you as you retrieve a brace from the supply cabinet. “What the hell were all those acronyms?”
“NSAIDs – nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,” you explain. “Things like ibuprofen and acetaminophen. OTC means over the counter – things you can buy without a prescription. Any convenience store should have them.”
You find a brace in the correct size and turn to find Tenko already holding out his arm. It surprises you, to the extent that you freeze for a moment, but then you snap out of it and secure the brace around his wrist. It’s simple to avoid his quirk, now that you think about it. All you have to do is make sure all five fingers don’t touch you at once.
Tenko grimaces as you fasten the last of the Velcro straps on the brace. “It’s tight.”
“It needs to be tight to support your wrist,” you say. “If it hurts, loosen it a little bit, but not so much that it slides. Do you have questions about anything else?”
Tenko shakes his head. “He didn’t say I couldn’t play games.”
“He said you had to rest your wrist,” you say. “You can play point-and-clicks. With your other hand.”
Tenko snorts. “I’m not playing point-and-clicks.”
“Better than nothing.” They’re the only type of video game you’re good at. Sometimes you and your friends make a drinking game out of them, doing a shot every time you find a clue or solve a puzzle. “If there’s nothing else, I can go ahead and walk you out.”
It’s quiet for a second. Tenko is looking at you, and you look back, unsure of what else to do. Part of you wants him gone as fast as possible, but it’s a smaller part of you than it should be. The rest of you wants your best friend, who remembers the things you don’t talk about, who saw you through the smile you knew to paste on even at five years old. You want to find out what happened to him. You want to know where he’s been. You want to know if he knew you were here, if that’s why he came to this clinic instead of any of the others. You want to know if it’s going to be another fifteen years before you see him again.
For a moment you think Tenko will say something, will come up with something else to stretch this out. Instead he glances left, then right. “Which way do I go to get out of here?”
“I’ll walk you out,” you say again. You lead him down the hall to the door that opens onto the street, fighting the lump in your throat. There’s a spiel you’re supposed to give to patients as they leave, but you can’t get it out of your mouth.
Tenko stands there a moment, then pushes the door open lefthanded, and something inside you snaps loose. You catch his sleeve and he turns to stare at you, a sneer already beginning to twist his features. You’ve got maybe three seconds before he hurts you again, and you have to use them wisely. “I won’t ask about the rest of it. I’m not going to follow you again,” you say. “I know we won’t see each other after this. I just need to know. Are you okay, wherever you are?”
You’re expecting him to mock you, but instead the sneer falls from his face. He looks like himself again, the part of him you knew best. He doesn’t ask why you care, and you realize it’s because he knows. He knew last night when he let you go instead of killing you. You’re his best friend. Of course you care.
“Yeah. I –” Tenko coughs, clears his throat. His voice is back to its usual rasp when he speaks. “I’m okay.”
You know he’s lying. You think he might know that you know, too. But he pulls his arm away slightly, not yanking it from your grip but making it clear that he wants to leave, and you let him go.
The door swings shut behind him, and you turn and head back to your exam room, working on documenting his visit in the chart until your eyes go blurry. You didn’t sleep at all last night. You won’t sleep well tonight, either. You know already that you’ll be up late into the night, retracing every second in your head, trying to figure out what went wrong. Trying to guess what happened. Wondering, like you always wonder about Tenko – if he’s alive, if he’s all right.
You have answers to the first two questions now. Other than that, the things that keep you up tonight will be the same as they’ve been since you were six years old. Other than the scar around your wrist and the bruises around your throat, nothing’s changed at all.
My heart is breaking in a million pieces because Tomura thinks he can destroy the world and go back to the League, but he doesn't know that most of them are either dead or terribly hurt.
He doesn't know Twice died because he refused to betray them. Tomura doesn't know that Mr. Compress sacrificed himself to save him, doesn't know about the way that Compress screamed he loved the League as he went down. He has no clue about what AFO did to Spinner in Tomura's name, the way Dabi explained so perfectly to Shouto the LOV and their philosophies because he always paid attention even if he said he didn't, Tomura wasn't there to witness Toga's breakdown over not being able to use the Dabi's flames or his decay even if she loved them so much.
At his absolute worst, even once the worst of his own past is over, the thought of them keeping him going.
He wants to destroy the world for them.
His League of Villains.
They love him so much. He loves them so much.
They can only imagine it, but they. don't. know.
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18+, minor don't interact with the 18+ contentTomura shigaraki's biggest simpArtist, writter
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