I Don't Really Know You But You Have My Full Support TvT

I don't really know you but you have my full support TvT

I apologize to all my followers for how mentally unwell I am about Sun's new voicelines in Help Wanted 2

Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 12) -- 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 10 Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Any workday when you don’t go to work and aren’t sick feels strange, but you only got three words into explaining why you wanted the day off before Mr. Yagi excused you. Now you’re running around to every nursery and garden shop in the city, asking which of their plants are invasive, and buying all of them, leaving a trail of environmentalists who hate you in your wake. You’re going to have to go out of town if you ever want to buy plants again, but you’ve got plenty of plants. Enough plants to power up Dabi, Nemuri, and Tomura to a truly ridiculous degree.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Keigo says when he sees you coming with the fifth oversized butterfly bush of the day. “He can’t control his consumption rate the way he used to.”

“Who cares? It’s not like I need to materialize.” Dabi is eyeing the new plant in a way that creeps you out. Four pots with charred-to-death trees are already sitting in Keigo’s front yard. “When my conjurer gets here, I’m going to burn him from the inside out.”

“Not a chance,” Nemuri says from across the street. She’s hanging out on your front porch, barely materialized. “He’s tortured two of my friends. I get to suffocate him.”

“Fuck you both. This is my neighborhood.” Tomura’s not materialized at all, but his voice echoes up and down the street. “He’s mine to kill.”

This has been going on all day. “You’re all pretty,” Keigo says, exasperated, which cracks you up. Your laughter sounds ever so slightly hysterical. “Whoever gets him first can do the honors.”

Keigo hasn’t heard the same legend Spinner has, then – that, or the idea of Dabi getting sucked back into the world between doesn’t bother him very much. As far as potential conjurer assassins go, you think Nemuri’s most likely to do the deed. She’s stronger than Dabi is, and unlike Tomura, she’s free to move around the neighborhood. Likely as not, she’ll deal with the conjurer, and the rest of you won’t have anything to do at all.

At least, that’s what you’re hoping. You believe everyone when they talk about how strong Tomura is. You doubt there are many ghosts who could go up against him and win. But you remember what Mr. Yagi said about conjurers drawing power from the world between through multiple conduits, and you remember what Aizawa said about who usually wins in clashes between ghosts and conjurers of equal or greater power. Tomura could face one ghost. Maybe even ten. But twenty, or fifty, or a hundred? You don’t see how it could work, and you don’t know how many ghosts Garaki has left to draw from.

As terrible as it feels to admit, you’re okay with sacrificing Nemuri. When it comes down to it, you’d sacrifice Dabi, too, although you wouldn’t like upsetting Keigo. It’s Tomura you don’t want to lose. He’s got a lot of strength, but he’s never used it. With that in mind, you find yourself going to Hizashi for help for the second time in the last twenty-four hours.

You find him ransacking your garden shed for makeshift weapons. He doesn’t notice you, and you take the opportunity to scare him for once, something you regret doing the instant you hear the earsplitting shriek he lets out. Inside the house, Phantom howls. “What do you want, human?” Hizashi snaps, red in the face. “Don’t you have more plants to buy?”

“Not right now,” you say. Nemuri told you to stop bringing them. She and Dabi are maxed out, and if you power Tomura up anymore he might blow up the house. “I know you’ve killed a conjurer before. Have you killed a ghost?”

Hizashi raises an eyebrow. “That’s a personal question.”

“Get over it,” you say, ignoring the affronted sound he makes. “Have you killed a ghost?”

Hizashi glances left, then right, like he’s checking for eavesdroppers. Then he nods. “Good,” you say. “I need you to teach Tomura how.”

“I know how,” Tomura says, indignant. You should have known he’d be listening. “They die the same way anything else does.”

“No, they don’t,” Hizashi says, pointedly avoiding your eyes. “If you try draining another ghost, it won’t work. You’ll just keep sucking up power from the world between, and once you exceed your capacity, you’ll blow apart. It’s a stupid way to die, which would be in-character for you.”

For once, Tomura doesn’t rise to the bait. “So I’ll send power to them. That way they’ll blow up instead of me.”

Hizashi looks surprised, but he shouldn’t be. Tomura catches on fast when he wants to. “Right, but it’s a weird feeling. It’s the opposite of what comes naturally to us. It’s not something you want to try for the first time in the middle of a fight.”

“Then I need somebody to practice on,” Tomura decides. He raises his voice. “Hey, idiot –”

“No,” Hizashi says as Dabi shouts back from across the street, calling Tomura something unrepeatable. “Dabi and Nem are both maxed out. You can’t use them.”

“What about Shirakumo?” you suggest. “If we could get rid of the ghost –”

“That ghost is my friend, and separating them like that could kill them both,” Hizashi snaps. He turns away from you and begins to pace back and forth in front of the shed. “If you really want to practice, you gloomy brat – not that you’ll need it, Nem will handle most of this before Garaki clears the top of the street – there’s only one way to do it. And you’re not going to like it.”

Tomura’s influence deepens, so dark and threatening that even you can feel it. “That’s not an option.”

“That’s your only option. You can’t practice on a live ghost, and there’s only one person on the planet you care enough about hurting to make this even slightly safe,” Hizashi says, and it clicks into place for you. “Ghostly energy doesn’t affect them the same as it affects us, and you need to get used to the sensation of discharging power.”

“I’ve done it before. When I fucked up the fence.”

“By accident. You need to do it on purpose.” Hizashi lowers his voice, and you can tell he’s trying to sound reassuring. “You don’t need to use a lot, and even if you overdo it by accident, it won’t hurt her. She’ll glow in the dark until it burns off, but that’s it.”

“No.”

“Yes,” you say. You’re not sure how much you trust Hizashi, but you’re damn sure that Tomura needs to know how to fight properly. “It’s fine. Let’s do it.”

“No!” Tomura’s voice is sharp and angry. “Don’t be stupid. I’ll use his human.”

“You don’t give a shit about my human,” Hizashi snaps. “I don’t trust you with him. To be honest, I don’t trust you with her. I don’t even trust you with that dog. But you need to learn, and if she’s okay with it –”

He breaks off midsentence. For a second you wonder if Tomura’s silenced him somehow, but then you see the way Hizashi’s making eye contact with empty space and realize that he and Tomura are talking. It takes you a second to grasp the implications, and once you do, unease uncoils in the pit of your stomach. Tomura changed the mode of communication. Whatever he and Hizashi are talking about, it’s not something he wants you to hear.

The silent part of the conversation ends when Hizashi shakes his head. “Tough shit,” he says out loud. “If you want to win against whatever’s coming here tonight, this is how it has to be.”

Tomura materializes slower than you’ve ever seen him do it. “Good,” Hizashi says. He looks to you. “Hold your hand out.”

You extend your hand and Tomura takes it. His hand is cold, like always, but it’s shaky in a way that makes you worried. “It’s okay,” you say.

Tomura won’t look at you. “Shut up.”

“It’s time,” Hizashi says. “Take the smallest amount of power you can and deliberately push it out. It’s going to feel unnatural to you, but remember, it’s not going to hurt her.”

Tomura’s eyes are closed, concentrating. You see Hizashi waving his hand in your peripheral vision, and you glance at him in time to see him mouth two words, then raise a finger to his lips. He’s sorry. He’s saying he’s sorry, and shushing you – and then a rush of cold sweeps over you, obliterating every thought and feeling in its path except one. Pain.

Hizashi lied. You know why he lied. You’ve got no idea how he successfully lied to Tomura, or if he lied at all and Tomura decided that learning to fight was worth hurting you. You decided it was, didn’t you? That’s why you volunteered. That’s why you feel like razor-sharp shards of ice are piercing through every last nerve in your body.

But that’s not the only thing you feel. Your own feelings might be gone, but in their place there’s something else – a vast, yawning emptiness, unfathomably deep and dark. Other emotions waver at its edge, confusion and hurt and fear, and slowly but surely they’re being dragged down into the black hole at the center of it all. Loneliness, or hopelessness. In Tomura’s world, they’re one and the same. That’s what this is, what these are. This is Tomura’s power. This is how he feels.

The cold dissipates suddenly, and you hear Hizashi’s voice addressing Tomura. “I’m guessing that’s all the control you’re capable of exerting. How did that feel?”

Tomura’s voice sounds strange. “You’re sure it doesn’t hurt her?”

“Definitely,” Hizashi says. You blink hard, trying to clear your vision. “Ask her. Go ahead.”

Hizashi’s at least a little bit of a sadist. “I’m fine,” you say before Tomura can ask. “Just a little cold.”

“Let’s go again,” Hizashi says, and you revise your assessment from “a little bit of a sadist” to “fully sadistic”. “One time’s a fluke. Let’s see if you can replicate it.”

It’s worse this time, because you know what’s coming. The pain is bad enough, but you’re afraid of seeing what you saw before – that glimpse into Tomura’s feelings rattled your mind more than you want to admit. You keep your eyes open this time, and instead of feeling, you see. You’re not seeing your world through Tomura’s eyes. You’re seeing through Tomura’s eyes, back into the world he came from. The world between.

You can’t grasp it, not all the way. Trying feels like it’s twisting your mind apart. There’s no light, no direction, no up or down or left or right; no landmarks to work from, no wind to push in one direction or the other – but you can feel at the same time that there are features, structures, humming cities that you can perceive but not see. The world between is empty and boiling with life at once, a different kind of life than you can grasp, a different kind than you can understand. If you wanted to understand it. You don’t. All you want is for it to stop.

“Ease off,” you hear Hizashi say, and the world between disappears from your sight. Tomura’s all that’s in your field of vision now. “Was it easier this time?”

Tomura nods, but he’s looking at you. “We can stop now. I know how to do it.”

“One more time,” Hizashi says. He’s getting off on this. He has to be. “Prove to me that you’ve got it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” Tomura’s grip on your hand tightens, and it happens again.

You shut your eyes this time. As much as you don’t want to see into Tomura’s head, you’d rather look at anything but the world between. This time, when you’re pulled to the edge of the void, you see that it’s not quite as empty as you first thought. There’s a light flickering somewhere down in the darkness. No, two lights. Two tiny lights, small enough to mean almost nothing. But when the other feelings fall into the void, it’s the lights that swallow them. And the lights grow brighter with every scrap of confusion or fear they consume.

You focus on the lights with all your strength, clenching your jaw against the agonized howl that wants to escape. It’s not much protection from the cold and pain, but it’s enough. Enough that when it fades and you open your eyes again, you can tell Tomura that it doesn’t hurt and make him believe you.

Hizashi, pleased with Tomura’s success, heads across the street to teach Dabi the same lesson. He brings you with him. Ostensibly your job is to convince Keigo to let Dabi practice on him, just like Tomura practiced on you, but you’re pretty sure Hizashi has an ulterior motive, and once you’re over Keigo’s property line, he proves you right. “Personally. I don’t give a damn whether Dabi learns this or not. You can’t go back over there until I’m sure you won’t give the game away.”

“So he didn’t know,” you say. “You lied to him.”

“So did you,” Hizashi points out. “I’m glad someone around here can see the big picture.”

You see the big picture, all right. Hizashi pretends his big picture is protecting the neighborhood, but in reality, he’s just like Tomura – except there are three people he really cares about instead of just one. He’ll do what he has to do to keep them safe, and keep himself safe in the bargain. Keigo may not have heard the story about what happens if a ghost kills their own conjurer, but Aizawa and Hizashi have, and Hizashi wants to make sure the duty of killing Garaki falls to anybody but him. If convincing Tomura to torture you and convincing you to keep quiet about it is what it takes for that to happen, Hizashi will do it.

You don’t realize you’re glaring until Hizashi comments on it. “Don’t look at me like that. You could have said no.”

“And then what? Let you push him into a fight he doesn’t know how to win?” You shake your head. A flash of the world between spins through your vision and you almost throw up. “If I tell him what you did, you’re dead. You know that, right?”

Hizashi doesn’t respond to your threat. “How about I tell you what he and I talked about, hmm? We’ll call it even there.”

You really want to know. Besides, there’s no reason you can’t break your promise to Hizashi later. “Tell me.”

“He’s more aware than you give him credit for,” Hizashi says instead. “Not that much more aware, granted, but enough. Enough to tell that the way you feel about him is a lot different than the way he feels about you.”

Your stomach clenches. “That’s not what I asked.”

“He wanted to know if discharging power into you would let you know what we’ve all known for months,” Hizashi says. “I told him of course not. Human minds can’t comprehend us, we’re too complex, all that jazz. I told him not to worry, because there’s absolutely no way that the human girl could possibly find out how much he feels about her.”

Hizashi scoffs. “He knew I was lying, of course. I asked him why he was so spooked – clearly you’re not opposed to it, or you wouldn’t spend so much time having obnoxiously horny ghost sex with him – and he gets quiet all of a sudden. He’s not very bright, your ghost, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. You see him as a – what do humans call it? A friend with benefits. He sees you as the only thing in his entire existence that’s ever made him happy. And he thinks that if you find that out, you’ll leave.”

For a moment, your hatred for Hizashi feels strong enough to wipe him off the map. You swallow it with an effort. “So naturally, the first thing you do is tell me the exact thing he didn’t want me to find out.”

“If he embodies himself permanently, we’re fucked,” Hizashi says flatly. “That won’t happen if you leave.”

“You’re fucked? Your conjurer’s dead after tonight. That just leaves his. We don’t even know if his is coming back.”

“You’re not that naïve. You’ve read the same research as I have,” Hizashi says. “His conjurer’s coming back one of these days. He might be planning to punish Tomura, but he’ll take the rest of us down, too. If we don’t have a ghost to stop him.”

“You think Tomura will keep protecting the neighborhood if I’m gone?”

“We don’t need him to actively protect the neighborhood. He does it just by being here and being a ghost,” Hizashi says. “How he feels about it is irrelevant.”

You fight to keep your temper in check, trying to match Hizashi’s cold calculations with your own. You replay all your interactions with Hizashi, all the times he’s scared you on purpose, all the times he’s deliberately made you uncomfortable, all the times he’s tried to provoke Tomura into acting like the kind of ghost he’s supposed to be. “You’ve wanted me gone since I moved in,” you say. “This is why, isn’t it?”

Hizashi does you the minor courtesy of not lying to you. “When you lasted longer than three weeks in that house, I saw the writing on the wall. Shou said I was being ridiculous, but I know ghosts like yours. I was a ghost like yours. All the power in the world doesn’t matter if there’s nothing you want enough to use it. And once you do, it’s over.”

He looks at you without a hint of remorse in his face. “My family is on the line here, and I’ll do anything to keep them safe. You wouldn’t understand what that means.”

Your stomach lurches. “Shut up.”

“I did some research of my own. Your backstory’s not tragic, it’s just pathetic. Mommy and Daddy didn’t love you enough, and nobody else liked you all that much, so you move in here and act like you belong.” Hizashi laughs, cold and cruel, and you feel your eyes well up. “If you think anyone here will miss you, you’re wrong. We were all happier when that house was empty.”

Some part of you knows Hizashi is lying. Most of you knows it, because if you were in his spot, you’d probably do the same thing – pinpoint the problem and do whatever you had to in order to get rid of it. Most of you knows that somewhere underneath this cruelty, Hizashi’s scared shitless. His conjurer’s gunning for him, he’s lost most of his powers, and his family’s in the line of fire. Knowing all that doesn’t change how it feels to hear him target every last one of your deepest insecurities, every agonizing thought you’ve ever tried to push aside. You’re one wrong move away from bursting into tears on Keigo’s front lawn.

You hold it together. It takes everything you have, but you do. “Did it feel good to get that off your chest?”

“It’s not personal,” Hizashi says, which puts the final nail in the question of whether ghosts are capable of lying. “I’d say good luck out there, but you survived here long enough. You won’t need it.”

Someone calls out to you from across the street, and you look over to find Aizawa on your porch. “We need some plants kept in reserve, in case the ghosts burn through more power than expected. Are there any nurseries you haven’t checked?”

“A few,” you say. Aizawa’s eyesight isn’t great. There’s no way he’ll be able to see the look on your face. “I’ll go right now.”

“We’ll Venmo you,” Hizashi says, patting your shoulder. If you thought you could get away with it, you’d break his hand. “I’ve been doing lots of gardening these days. I know plants aren’t cheap.”

“Thanks.” You force the words out around a smile, hop Keigo’s property line, and head for your car at high speed.

You make it out of the neighborhood. Quite a ways out of the neighborhood. You make it at least halfway to the next nursery on your list before you start crying too hard to drive. You pull over, put your hazard lights on, and double over with your head against the steering wheel. Your head hurts and you’re freezing cold and your stomach turns every time you think about what you saw in Tomura’s head – and worse every time Hizashi’s words sink into your chest. You’ve never felt this sick in your life. You want to die.

Your phone is ringing. You don’t care who it is, but whoever it is keeps calling, and when you pick it up to silence it, you see that it’s Aizawa. You text him, trying not to sound like you’re a) crying yourself to death and b) plotting the murder of his husband. I’m busy.

Tomura wants to talk to you. The phone rings again. This time you pick up. “Hi.”

“What did he do?” Tomura’s voice is full of cold rage, and your heart sinks. “I saw your face and I felt what he’s feeling, so I want to know what he did. That way he’ll know why I’m killing his human when I do it.”

“No,” you say. Your voice sounds awful – not calm and collected like you want to be, but sick and miserable and lonely. Like you got your feelings hurt exactly as much as Tomura thinks you did, which isn’t great when you’re trying to convince Tomura that it’s fine. “Tomura, don’t. Please. It’s not worth it.”

“He wants you to leave me. He made you leave.” Tomura sounds like he’s pacing. You try to pinpoint where he is in the house, but can’t. “I can take away his human, too.”

“Please don’t,” you say again. You just wanted to cry yourself out in peace. Why couldn’t you just do that? You grit your teeth and make a threat you never wanted to make again. “If you hurt Aizawa or the children to punish Hizashi, I am never coming back to that house.”

“He made you leave –”

“He can’t make me do anything.” Your voice wavers when you think about what Hizashi said, but you repeat yourself anyway. “If you hurt Aizawa or the children, I’m never coming home.”

It’s quiet for a moment. “Why do you care so much about them?” Tomura asks. It occurs to you that Tomura’s got Aizawa’s phone, that Aizawa’s probably sitting there listening to you try to talk Tomura out of killing him. “Why don’t you want to pay him back?”

“Because it’s not their fault,” you say. You’re pretty sure Aizawa wasn’t in on Hizashi’s little torture session, and you know for sure the kids weren’t. “They’re good people, Tomura. They’ve been kind to me, and even if they weren’t, they don’t deserve to die because Hizashi mouthed off.”

“He made you cry,” Tomura says. It’s quiet for a second. “I didn’t know you did that.”

You always cry in the shower when you cry at home. You’ve been doing that since you were little, and the memory of Hizashi’s taunt – Mommy and Daddy didn’t love you enough – blasts apart what little composure you’ve gained. You press your hand against your mouth, trying to stifle your tears. Tomura snarls, and you force yourself to speak. “Please don’t do what you’re thinking of doing. It won’t fix anything. It will make me feel worse if you do.”

“Fine.” Tomura’s voice is still icy. You wish you could drive home, drag him into the passenger seat, and drive around until he’s calmed down. You’re scared of what will happen when you hang up, and worse when you hear his voice, speaking to Aizawa. “You’re only alive because that’s what my human wants.”

“Understood.” Aizawa’s voice is steady, and when he speaks again, it’s clear that the phone’s back in his possession. “Go get the plants and come back. Everything here is fine.”

“Um –” You cough into your elbow, make some kind of godawful snuffling sound into your sleeve. “I’m sorry. About Tomura. That’s not okay. He shouldn’t –”

“You have as much control over Tomura’s behavior as I do over Hizashi’s.” Aizawa’s voice takes on a dangerous note, and for a split second you actually feel bad for Hizashi. “Get the plants and come back, quickly. The children’s bus is here, and it’ll be dark soon.”

You cough a few more times. “Right. I’ll hurry,” you say. Something occurs to you. “If he starts acting scary, get out of there. I’ll deal with it when I get back.”

“I’m past the property line. My husband and I need to have a conversation.”

Whatever conversation the two of them are about to have, you don’t want to be anywhere near it. You hang up the phone, blink a few times to clear your vision, and switch your hazard lights off before pulling back onto the road.

You do your best to calm down before you get to the nursery, but you know you look like you’ve been crying your eyes out anyway. There’s nothing you can do about that right now. You browse through the nursery, searching for plants you know are invasive, choosing the largest and healthiest ones, trying to focus on the task at hand. But Hizashi’s words hit home, as much as you didn’t want them to. Even thinking about hitting him with a shovel doesn’t make you feel much better, and the longer you dwell on it, the worse it gets, until you’re sniffling and wiping your eyes again in the middle of the tropical plants aisle.

“Are you all right?”

It’s a man’s voice. You’ve always been a little wary of men who approach crying women in public. “I’m fine,” you say blindly. “Um. Everything’s fine. I just –”

“Here.” The man, whoever he is, pushes a handkerchief into your field of vision, and you seize it, just to avoid wiping your eyes and nose on your sleeve. “You can keep that. I have plenty.”

“Thank you,” you say, and mean it. And then you feel like you’ve got to explain yourself. “I really am fine. I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

“That makes everything more difficult,” the man agrees. You peer up at him and discover that he’s around the same age as Mr. Yagi. The same height, too. “I doubt that’s all it is, though. Whoever made you so upset ought to feel ashamed of himself.”

You have a few problems with that statement, mainly with the assumption that you’re upset over a man, even if it’s true. But this man is being kind to you. You’re not immune to kindness. “That’s quite a lot of plants you’ve got there,” the man continues. “Are you a gardener?”

“I’ve got a garden. I don’t know if I can call myself a gardener,” you say. “What about you?”

“Oh, it’s been many years since I was settled enough to have a garden,” the man says, and laughs. “But I’ve planted many trees. It’s always interesting to check back and see what they’ve grown into. Some of them are magnificent. Others need a little – assistance.”

“I’ll remember that if I ever get into planting trees.” You wipe your eyes again, then glance down at the mess you’ve made of the handkerchief. “I really am sorry about this.”

“It’s no trouble. And it’s yours. If we should ever cross paths again, you can return it to me then.” The man inclines his head, then starts off down the aisle, heading for the saplings at the far end. You add one more plant to your wagon and make your way to the cash register.

You feel better after meeting the man. If a stranger thinks you’re worth being kind to, then it’s easier to believe in the kindness of your neighbors, who actually know you. By the time you reach the neighborhood again, the puffiness around your eyes has mostly gone down, and you feel ready to confront Hizashi. You’re not sure what you want to say when you confront him. “Fuck off” feels appropriate, but some part of you also wants to remind him that Tomura’s more than able and more than willing to return whatever insult Hizashi levels at you towards his own family. But that’s shitty. You know it’s shitty. You’ll be better off telling Hizashi the truth: This is your neighborhood, too. And you’re not leaving.

When you get back, though, you realize there’s no need to confront Hizashi at all. Aizawa’s already doing it, or something similar. They’re both on Keigo’s lawn, standing a few feet apart, voices too quiet to hear from your side of the street. Hizashi looks mulish, defensive, sulky – just like Tomura looks sometimes, when he’s accepted that you get to be mad about something but still thinks it’s stupid. If Aizawa looked at you with the same expression he’s aiming at Hizashi, you’d run for your life.

“Hey,” someone hisses as you get out of your car. You look up and find Shinsou staring at you from the other side. He looks alarmed. “What the hell happened? My dads are fighting. I’ve never seen them fight. Dabi’s been texting me updates and he says they’re fighting about you!”

Dabi’s an asshole, and also a liar. You have a feeling that Aizawa’s upset less because of what Hizashi said and more because of Tomura’s reaction to it. But Aizawa’s clearly not worried enough about Tomura’s reaction to keep his kids away from the shelter provided by the house. Shinsou came down to talk to you from the porch. Eri’s still up there, on the swing, and she’s playing a game with somebody. At first you think it’s Nemuri. Then you see Nemuri up the street, talking to Magne, and you realize that Eri’s playing a game with Tomura.

You need to check on that. You need to check on that immediately. You skid around Shinsou and book it up the steps, only to find Eri sitting in the swing and Tomura sitting on the ground, a collection of facedown cards spread out between them. You recognize the cards. In fact, you’re pretty sure this game came from inside your house. It was one of the few things you managed to rescue when your parents downsized while you were in college. “Uh, is that the Rainbow Fish matching game?”

“It’s so pretty,” Eri says, smiling up at you. “Toshi won’t play with me but Tomura said he would.”

Tomura looks sort of like he’s regretting it. “How come it’s still your turn?”

“If you make a match, you get to try again. And you keep trying until you don’t get one.” You study Eri’s pileup of cards. She’s really good at this. “So it’ll be your turn when Eri misses one.”

In talking to you, Eri lost focus. She misses her next match, and Tomura promptly racks up eight matches in a row. You cringe, wishing he’d let Eri win like adults are supposed to do with kids, but Eri’s more pleased with the result than he is. “I knew you’d be good at this,” she crows. “You got the shells and the rainbow fish –”

“That’s not hard. There are ten of them.” Tomura looks sort of pleased with himself, and you wonder at how quickly he’s calmed down. Maybe it wasn’t actually that quick – you were gone for about an hour – but his control over his temper is shaky at best. You’d have expected to find the entire house vibrating with fury, not to find him sitting quietly and playing a kid’s game with the youngest ghost in the neighborhood, who also happens to be the daughter of the ghost who pissed him off in the first place.

He looks up at you. “Are you going to watch?”

“I have to move the plants.”

“I’ll move the plants. Me and Keigo,” Shinsou says hastily. Keigo pops up next to him, looking like he’s been through a war. You don’t even want to know what it’s like inside Keigo’s house right now. “You stay here.”

Shinsou clearly doesn’t trust Tomura’s unusual calmness any more than you do. You nod in thanks and settle down next to Tomura on the porch, only to hop up again to retrieve Phantom when she whines from inside the house. You hold her in your lap so she won’t run through the cards and scatter them, scratching her ears and watching the game. Eri and Tomura are playing with equal amounts of seriousness, which looks unbelievably funny. The two of them look enough alike with their grey-tinted hair and red eyes that they could almost be siblings. Eri’s pleased whenever Tomura gets a match, and after a few rounds of being congratulated every time he finds two of the same card, Tomura congratulates her on a match in response. It’s not much of a congratulations, but Eri beams at him like he’s just handed her a gold star.

Eri wins by one match, and although you’re worried he won’t, Tomura offers her a grudging congratulations. “Nice game.”

“Do you want to play again?” Eri asks eagerly. “I bet you’ll beat me this time.”

“I’ll play with you, Eri,” Himiko calls from outside the fence. “If Tomura lets me in.”

You think Tomura will say no, but it turns out that Tomura’s so desperate to get away from the Rainbow Fish matching game that he’ll say yes to just about anything. “That game is stupid,” he mutters once you’re both inside and out of earshot. “You actually liked that?”

“When I was a kid.” You were good at memory games, and you liked how pretty the cards were. But you’ve got a bigger problem than what Tomura thinks of a card game you played as a kid. “Why are you so calm? On the phone –”

“I don’t mess with other people’s humans. I’m not like him.” Tomura’s voice takes on that icy note again. He’s glaring out the front window. You wonder if he can hear what they’re arguing about. “You said it would make you feel worse if I hurt them. And last night you said you were scared the first time because you didn’t know what I’d do when I got angry. Me getting angry makes you feel worse. So I stopped.”

“Just like that?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Tomura says, insulted. “The kid said she knows how it feels to want to hurt people who make her human sad, so I asked her what she does to not kill everyone who makes her human sad. She said she has to do something else. So we played that stupid game.”

You’ve been searching for the right word to describe the scene you just watched unfold. “It was cute.”

“I thought I was pretty.”

“You are,” you say. “But that – you playing a game with her – was cute.”

Tomura’s nose wrinkles. “What does that mean?”

“It means –” Now that you think about it, cute is hard to define. “It makes you feel nice to look at. Warm. Happy. People react to babies that way a lot. Or dogs.”

“So that’s what it was,” Tomura says. You look questioningly at him. “The thing that happened when I saw you and Phantom. Cute.”

He’s talking about the day you moved in. You didn’t even know you had something in your house, much less what it was, and you thought Tomura was just as indifferent as you were. But what he just said – that means he wasn’t. And that means this all started a lot earlier than you thought it did. Hizashi’s words drift through your head, not his insults but something worse: He sees you as the only thing in his entire existence that’s ever made him happy.

Fine. If that’s how it’s going to be, you’ll take it. This is the only place in your entire life that’s ever felt like home.

“Hey,” you say, and Tomura looks at you. “Do you have enough energy stored up to stay materialized?”

“Yeah. Why?”

He probably thinks you’re angling for a hookup, but that’s not what you want. You step forward, closing the space between the two of you, and wrap your arms around him. The two of you are close in height. Your forehead is level with his chin, so you turn your head to the side, resting it against his shoulder. The same place he rested his head all of last night, until the sun came up and you set off on your mission to buy every invasive plant within twenty miles of here.

You’re expecting Tomura to complain, and you’re ready to fire back that it’s your turn, but he keeps quiet. His arms wrap around you in return, and the two of you stand there, each of you holding tight to something that could vanish easily from your grip, as the sun sinks and the neighborhood drowns in dusk, then sunset, and finally full dark.

52 notes View Post

flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

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

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

Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They said he died?”

“They don’t mention him at all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey!”

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

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

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

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

“Dead might be better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Turn that shit off.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

247 notes View Post

flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

10 months ago

A new life for Tomura part3

10 notes View Post

flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

Dry tears on my cheek

Emptyness in my heart

Its all dark in here,

When it was all soft and warm

The sheets smelling like you, soft like silk

Red eyes watching for one last prayer

My heart singing your name with loyalty

My head light as snow

It all vanish in a new dark room.

Mine.

In the cold bed of an empty room

Me and my momory already blur

It was just a dream.

star stickers and best efforts.

「 tws + notes: no tws, unedited, hurt/comfort but 100% not at all, reader is mildly mean when nervous LIKE A BAD DOG /ref and most definitely written self-indulgently by accident, sun is mildly condescending, they r each others best supporters, mentions of a customer being rude but rly nothing crazy, sun uh... he's an interesting fella, BIGGG dialogue chunks im sorry im sorry 」

「 gn!reader, can be platonic or romantic <3 」

↳ ft. the daycare attendant/sun/sundrop

author's note: my wip title was literally just "the one where you're yelled at" :p but... hiiii!!! obligatory return to fnaf real quick becuz,,, no, i still havent gotten into the ruin dlc but YES i do love sun's personality in help wanted 2..... if this is ooc u can erm. shove me into wet concrete. (。﹏。) aaannywayz!! missed this!!! missed this so much!!!! ( ╯□╰ ) sorry for not valentine's day posting,,, scandalous ik since im lit rally Called Valentine. but oh well. enjoy! or dont. if you dont im sorry please request fnaf stuff so i can Fix That /srs

if you weren't relying on this job to put food on your table and a roof on your head, you’d burn the freddy fazbear’s mega pizzaplex to the ground for a piece of pocket lint and a pat on the head.

maybe it’s a bit dramatic to say that— you're paid well, you like your mostly robot coworkers, and most of the time (emphasis on most and not always) the work is manageable enough.

the customers are another story.

sun notices the minute you walk in the daycare. you look like you're a minor inconvenience away from murder— which naturally, makes him feel inclined to prod a little.

“well, someone’s awfully sulky today!”

while you’d typically crack a smile at the upbeat jester animatronic, his enthusiasm in the face of your misery is grating. there’s no energy left in your body to banter with him— you were using most of it to drag your feet over to the shoe caddy, toolbox in hand to fix up its shelf, now hanging askew due to a busted bracket.

“can it, sunny, i don't wanna hear it.” you mutter, more venomous than you intend it to be. he doesn’t even blink at your grumpiness. instead, he happily holds up the shelf while you inspect it and grab a new bracket to secure it.

at least he’s trying to make himself useful. you think to yourself.

his faceplate tilts slightly, staring at you with that ever present grin. his staring isn’t really helping, but you don’t fault him for it. you’ve gotten used to his antics by now. “woke up on the wrong side of the bed?” sun questions.

you shake your head.

“got yelled at by a customer— now, if you could please just drop the topic—” you sigh exasperatedly, not even bothering to finish the sentence as you sit down cross legged in front of the shoe caddy, slumping slightly in defeat.

much too persistent for his own good, sun decides that inquiring even further about the incident that seems to have you beat down is a good idea. “what’d you do?”

you consider feigning offense as he insinuates it’s somehow your fault. but you don’t. you just shrug it off.

“my job.”

“ah, they do hate it when you do that.” he tuts.

“it wasn’t even that big of a deal,” you mutter, getting the bracket in place and marking it, “this one kid just so happened to walk up to the arcade machine i was putting an out of order sign on. i felt bad, so like, obviously, i hand the kid a few tokens, apologize politely, explain— and you’d think it’s all good right?”

you pause mid-ramble as you fix up the shelf. in all your misery, you forgot that you don’t even know exactly what caused the shelf to collapse like this. you consider asking.

sun leans in just a bit too close, interrupting your train of thought as you stare at the shelf. when you glance at him, he gives you a little nod.

go on, he seems to say wordlessly. he’s waiting silently for you to continue your story. it’s never not unnerving when he’s quiet.

“...anyways, uh... the kid’s dad came by and got mad or something. didn’t understand why i couldn’t just let him play one game since it looked perfectly functional— keep in mind, this is the arcade machine that literally kept eating up tokens only to not function, and shocked kids when it did— so i kept trying to explain why i couldn’t exactly do that. but for some reason, it was such a big fucking deal—”

“language.” he chides.

“...fricking deal. of course, i had to be berated for it. i offered to grab them more faz-tokens as compensation and i thought the problem was solved... and then i checked and saw he still left a bad review. definitely gonna hear about that from management.” sun hands you a tool as you continue to speak.

“but now i’m upset, i’m definitely in trouble, and my face hurts from the whole customer service smile i was holding that entire conversation. like seriously, i don’t know how i’m expected to do that 24/7.” you stop at your last remark and stare at sun and his unchanging expression. “...my bad.”

the awkward silence only lasts for a moment, thankfully. you’ve spoken your piece— sun decides to speak his.

“you did your best.” he says simply, as you finally fix the shelf into place. he pats you on the head and doesn't even hide his amusement when you sulk.

“i know that tone, sunny, you're making fun of me—”

“poor thing.” he continues, grinning brightly as he makes a show of patronizing you. sun’s hand continues to pat the top of your head gently, like he would when consoling a child. or when greeting a dog. has he,,, ever seen a dog before? probably not.

you groan and manage to shove his arm away.

“i do mean it though,” he continues, his tone still lighthearted— but notably more earnest as he notes your expression. sun helps you put your tools away neatly back into the toolbox, even though it really is just a one-man job.

“you tried your best,” sun closes the toolbox with a flourish and a click, “...and for that—!”

with a dramatic flick of his wrist, bells jingling as he does, sun produces a gold star sticker from… somewhere. he holds it up for you to see.

and then gently presses it onto the tip of your nose.

“to my favoritest human employee here! and my bestest of friends!” it’s hard to bite back a smile at those words. even if his little show of empathy and affection is much too theatrical for your current mood.

“whatever.” you shrug a little, unable to stop the corners of your mouth from twitching into a little grin. standing up and grabbing the toolbox, you give him an awkward thumbs up.

“thanks. and uh… sorry. for being mean. i guess.”

sun shakes his head dismissively, bouncy and bright as ever. “oh, don't mention it!”

something about his seeming lack of offense towards your prickliness makes you feel even more guilty. still, he gives you a wave as you head out, “bye-bye”-ing happily as you walk away, sticker stuck to your nose and smile on your face like an idiot.

you decide you’ll find a way to make it up to him later. you figure he deserves that much for putting up with everything.

meanwhile, sun is taking mental notes on more stuff to break of whenever you’ve been away for too long. just in case, of course. maybe you’d have more interesting customer encounters to rant about. and hey, you could use the company, couldn’t you?

— reblogs always appreciated!

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

10 months ago