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Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 13) - 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

Chapter 13

There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it, and you’ve never felt the oppressiveness and terror that everyone else seems to experience when they come near it. Not until the first streetlight goes out at the top of the street, a split second too late to conceal the shadow that slinks past beneath it.

“Shit,” Spinner hisses over the comms network. Atsuhiro stole the pieces of it, enough for every adult human in the neighborhood, on the search team’s way back. “What was that?”

“Get back from the window,” Magne hisses. They’re inside their house. All according to plan. “Stay down. This isn’t about us.”

“It’s about all of us,” Shinsou argues. He’s got a headset. Hizashi lost headset privileges on the grounds that he’s a ghost, and he’s in the house anyway. “If we just – there’s another one!”

Another streetlight goes out, on the other side of the street, just a second too slow behind the shadow that passes under it. You get a look at the shadow’s face, or where it’s face should be, before the darkness cloaks it. “That’s not Garaki.”

“No,” Aizawa agrees. “He brought reinforcements.”

“What are those things?” Jin’s mother asks, just as the light in front of Atsuhiro’s house goes out. “Tomura, do you know?”

Tomura doesn’t have a headset. Tomura’s dematerialized, and keeping his head down as part of the strategy. But your house has two former ghosts in it, and since Hizashi’s getting the most malevolent silent treatment ever, Eri speaks up, and Aizawa repeats what she whispers in his ear. “They’re like Shirakumo. But they like it.”

Keigo’s voice crackles over the headsets. “What does that mean?”

“The ghosts signed up for it.” Tomura’s voice is barely a whisper in your ear. “They let a conjurer make them his puppets. They’re too weak to do what they want otherwise.”

You convey Tomura’s message to the others, then ask a question of your own. “What do they want?”

“Guys, there’s another one. We’re up to six.” Spinner says what you’re thinking a moment later. “That’s one for every house in the neighborhood.”

Mr. Yagi was right – if one former ghost in the neighborhood is discovered, you’re all compromised, and you’re all fucked. A moment later, a voice rings out down the street. It’s not a voice you recognize. “Hizashi,” it calls out, and Hizashi freezes in place. “Touya. I know you’re here. Come out, and we can avoid any – unpleasantness.”

Everyone in your house glares at Hizashi, ordering him to keep quiet, but Keigo doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of backup. “My name’s not fucking Touya,” Dabi says. “Get out of my neighborhood.”

Hizashi opens his mouth to chime in and Aizawa slaps his hand down over it. “Suit yourself,” Garaki says. “Nomu –”

There’s a sudden crash, and you hear Jin’s mom scream into the headset – the thing in front of her house just took down her fence. But it’s only a warning shot. A second later there’s another, louder crash. “They’re going after your house, Aizawa,” Atsuhiro reports. “When they find out you aren’t there –”

They’ll come here, to your house and Keigo’s. “It’s time,” Aizawa says. “Nemuri, go.”

You’ve never see an unbound ghost flex its powers in public before, and now you know why – powered up with dozens of plants’ worth of life-force, Nemuri is blindingly fast. She knocks the ghost-thing away from Aizawa’s house so hard that it dents one of the doused streetlights, then bolts towards Garaki. Garaki’s ready for her. You don’t know how you know that, but he must be, or he wouldn’t be standing still.

“Wait for it,” Hizashi hisses. “Tomura, now.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Tomura snaps, and his influence crashes back down over the neighborhood with the force of a breaking tsunami.

Garaki staggers, gasping for air, but the effect on the monsters he brought with him is even stronger. The one attacking Jin and Himiko’s house stops immediately and lunges at the one Nemuri just knocked away from Aizawa’s front steps. You hear a harsh, heavy whoosh, followed by a shriek like metal on metal. A rush of wind blasts up the street, visible even in the dark, and you can see something flickering within it, fighting to get back where it came from. “That’s essence,” Hizashi mumbles. “Nice work.”

Tomura doesn’t answer. If you had to guess, you’d say he’s focused on keeping the pressure on the street. The two monsters are tearing each other to shreds, which means that Nemuri’s less outnumbered than she was before, and you’re pretty sure that the monsters parked in front of your house and Keigo’s are there to keep you from leaving. That still leaves two loose monsters, though. Both of them turn and run towards whatever’s happening between Garaki and Nemuri. You can barely see it. There’s no light on the street, anywhere, but there’s one place where the darkness is completely opaque. You don’t know what’s happening in there. You don’t think you want to.

The first sign that something’s going wrong is the cold that begins to spread, worse than anything Tomura’s ever generated, radiating out from the opaque patch of darkness and creeping steadily up the street. Your house and Keigo’s are farthest from the trouble, but ice begins to spiral over your windows, and when Spinner speaks up over the comms, his teeth are chattering. “What’s happening? Magne won’t say –”

You’re pretty sure Magne can’t say. Jin breaks into the comms, reporting that Himiko’s down for the count, and in your own house, Aizawa’s trying with increasing desperation to rouse Eri. Hizashi’s on his feet, still. He speaks through gritted teeth. “Nem’s in trouble,” he says. “I’m going out there.”

“Dad, no!” Shinsou grabs for him, but Hizashi moves fast. “Dad –”

Aizawa’s too focused on Eri to notice before it’s too late. He reaches out futilely to Hizashi. “Zashi, don’t –”

Your front door slams shut behind him. “You’re in the way,” Hizashi says to the thing in front of your house. “Move.”

“Idiot,” Tomura snarls, from everywhere and nowhere. A moment later, Hizashi seizes the monster and drags it into your yard.

Having passed the responsibility for the situation over to Tomura, Hizashi bolts into the street, and Tomura materializes in the front yard just as the monster starts to pick itself up off the ground. Tomura knocks it down again, then straddles it, pinning it in place. “What are you?” he demands. The creature snarls. “You can still feel pain. I’ll hurt you. What are you?”

The monster snarls again. You don’t see what Tomura does, but you hear it let out an agonized howl in response. “Nomu. We are – Nomu.”

It tries to fight free of Tomura’s grip. Tomura slams it against the ground. He looks tiny compared to the monster – the Nomu? – but it’s clear that he’s got the upper hand. “Tell me. How many does he have?” You still can’t see what Tomura’s doing to the Nomu, but it lets out an earsplitting screech. “Now!”

Whatever answer the Nomu gives, it’s not what Tomura wants to hear. He blasts the Nomu apart, then dematerializes, reappearing again inside the house. He’s barley breathing hard. “He’s got too many ghosts. They can’t win.”

“Then do something,” Shinsou demands of Tomura. “My dad –”

Tomura can’t do anything more than he’s already doing, and Shinsou knows it. You hear footsteps behind you and turn to find Aizawa heading for the door. You couldn’t stop Hizashi, but you can sure as hell stop him. You block his way. “Where are you going?”

“This is a fight between ghosts. I’ll be beneath their notice.” Aizawa puts his hand on your shoulder and shifts you firmly aside. “If they lose, we all do.”

He’s out the door before you can stop him, and across the street, you see Keigo sneaking out as well. If you had to guess, you’d say Spinner and Jin are heading out, too. Now it’s only you, Shinsou, Eri, and Tomura inside your house, and you can feel Tomura seething, the air crackling with his power. He wants to fight. You can tell he does. You just don’t understand why. He doesn’t care about the neighborhood or the people in it. Is he really that bloodthirsty? Or maybe it’s not that he’s bloodthirsty. Maybe he just cares more about this, about everything, than you’ve let yourself realize.

“You idiot,” he snaps suddenly, and you and Shinsou both jump. “Stay inside!”

He’s not talking to you. You race to the front window just in time to see Dabi emerging from the house. He’s never looked more frightening than he does right now, half-embodied, half made up of the same darkness that’s now swallowed up half the neighborhood. He strolls up to the Nomu guarding Keigo’s house like he doesn’t have a care in the world. The Nomu doesn’t move. “Are they talking?” Shinsou asks. “What are they saying?”

Before Tomura has a chance to answer, Dabi speaks out loud, his voice bright and full of fury. “You really are stupid, conjurer. Of all the ghosts you could have brought to kill me, you picked my brother.”

You didn’t realize ghosts could have brothers. Then you remember what Keigo said about his old house having multiple ghosts in it. “Nice to see you, Natsu,” Dabi says to the Nomu. “Go get my human.”

The Nomu – Natsu – turns and dives into the darkness, followed by Dabi at a more leisurely pace. You think through the battlefield as it stands now. Garaki is down to two Nomus on his side, and Nemuri’s getting a helping hand from Hizashi, Spinner, Jin, Aizawa, Dabi, Natsu, and Keigo. The fight has to be in the neighborhood’s favor now, doesn’t it? Garaki’s outnumbered, and no matter how much ghostly power he has, he’s still human. He can be killed like any human. It’s going to be –

Eri lurches upright, her red eyes wide and terrified. “Papa!” she screams. “No –”

Everything outside the windows goes completely black. If you couldn’t see into it before, you definitely can’t see out of it now. But you can see what’s inside of it, at least until the frost starts to spiral across the glass – Garaki advancing down the street, flanked by two Nomus. Nemuri’s nowhere to be found. Spinner’s injured, somehow. Jin is dragging him backwards, away from the fight. Aizawa is carrying Hizashi, who’s fully unconscious. The only people in any shape to do anything are Keigo, Dabi, and the Nomu. The fight’s narrowed down to three on three – a conjurer and two monsters versus one monster, one scar wraith, and one human. Suddenly you understand why Eri’s in tears, why Tomura’s materialized next to you with that look on his face. So much for the fight being even. It’s not anywhere close to even. They’re going to lose.

Garaki clucks his tongue, shakes his head. “Touya, you disappoint me.”

“It’s too bad. I was just living for your approval.” Dabi pushes Keigo casually behind him. “I’d highly recommend pissing off. Stick around and I might get angry. You’re not going to like it when I’m angry.”

“In your position, I’d be angry, too,” Garaki responds. “You’ve been a scar wraith for four years. Don’t you want your powers back? Isn’t this mortal form exhausting to inhabit? Wouldn’t you rather be free?”

You thought Dabi was trying to stall. Now you’re not so sure. “You could do that?” Dabi asks.

“Of course! If you doubt my abilities, just look at my Nomus.” Garaki gestures proudly. He tortured six people to create them, and he’s proud of them. “There’s no reason why the same process can’t run in reverse. I would have offered it to Hizashi, too – but it appears he’s a lost cause.”

“What did he do to him?” Shinsou asks in a cracked whisper. “He’s not dead. He can’t be dead.”

“The conjurer went after Aizawa and he took the hit instead. He’s coming around.” Tomura’s hands are clenched into fists at his sides, so hard his knuckles are white. “Idiot. They’re all idiots!”

Garaki is still talking. “I expected much better of Hizashi, truthfully. He was so eager to enter this world and play his part, and he threw it all away for a human. But you’re wiser, Touya. Step aside and I’ll help you reverse your mistake.”

He wouldn’t. There’s no way Dabi wants to be a ghost again that badly, is there? There’s no way he’d sacrifice Keigo. Is there? Dabi glances away from Garaki, over at Natsu. “What do you think, little brother? Should I take him up on it?”

The Nomu doesn’t answer. In Aizawa’s arms, you think you see Hizashi stir. “Nah,” Dabi says finally. “You can go to hell. Natsu, now!”

The Nomu moves at terrifying speed. It seizes Keigo and hurls him through the air, over the fence and into your front yard. Tomura swears under his breath and you watch as Keigo’s fall slows slightly, enough that he’s got time to turn and land heavily on his feet. But he’s not the only one in flight. Hizashi’s struggled to his feet, and he and Nemuri launch Aizawa together. Their throw isn’t as good. Aizawa crashes through the fence and sprawls out flat in the yard. Jin drags Spinner through the hole and both of them collapse.

They need help. You grab your first aid kit out of the hall closet and try to open your front door, only to find that it’s sealed shut. It doesn’t move even when you yank on it with your full weight. You turn to glare at Tomura, who glares back with his arms crossed. “It’s not safe.”

“I won’t leave the yard,” you say. “That’s your territory, isn’t it? Are you telling me I’m not safe there?”

Tomura’s expression darkens even further, but before he can respond, an ice-cold hand settles on your shoulder. “I’ll go with her,” Shirakumo says in that odd doubled voice. You forgot he was here. He hasn’t moved off the couch all day. “I can help.”

You don’t know how much help Shirakumo will be – the hand on your shoulder is shaking badly – but the front door unseals itself, and you leave without a backward glance. Once you’re in the yard, though, you’re temporarily paralyzed. Aizawa’s not moving, but Spinner’s the most visibly injured, and Keigo’s awake but stunned, like his landing might have been harder than you thought. You’d rather help Spinner or Keigo, but Aizawa’s the only one who’s unresponsive. He helped you when you first found out about Tomura. He’s done nothing to you other than be abrupt bordering on rude, and he’s like that with everyone except his children. Are you really going to let him lie there just because you and his husband despise each other?

Shirakumo heads for Aizawa, making the decision for you, and you hurry towards Spinner instead. Spinner’s bleeding from two stab wounds, one in his left shoulder and one in his right thigh, just above his knee. There’s a lot of blood. You pry open the first aid kit for bandages and gauze and press Jin into service bandaging Spinner’s leg, working on his shoulder yourself and doing your level best to ignore whatever’s happening outside the fence. Spinner groans in pain. “I have to get back out there,” he says. “They can’t do this.”

“We have to!” Jin agrees, determined. Then his face falls. “We can’t help. That’s why they made us leave.”

“They’re outnumbered. Nemuri burned up too much power and the cold killed a lot of the plants before she could.” Keigo waits until you’re finished bandaging Spinner’s injuries, then helps you and Jin pick him up. “Me and Aizawa were useless out there. All we did was distract them.”

He means Dabi and Hizashi, but there’s something turning over in your head. You’re not sure what it is just yet. You see Shirakumo carrying Aizawa up to the porch out of the corner of your eye. Next to you, Jin is shaking Spinner’s non-stabbed shoulder, panicked. “What about Magne and Atsuhiro? Why aren’t they out there?”

“Not their fight. I stayed in – long as possible.” Spinner’s face is beaded with sweat. “So maybe she’d come out. But –”

You don’t think the other ghosts are cowards. You know they’re tough, you know they care. But neither of them are the ones the conjurer is after, and their humans might as well be an afterthought. You don’t blame either of them for staying out of a fight they can’t win. When it comes down to it, it’s not your fight, either.

It’s not your fight. It’s also not your neighborhood, according to Hizashi – but you’re done with Hizashi’s bullshit. You’ve got your bracelets on, which means you’ll be hard to spot, and none of the ghosts still fighting in the street care enough about you to distract them from the fight. You won’t distract the neighborhood ghosts. But you can damn well distract the Nomus. Or the conjurer.

You’re alone in the yard now, except for Shirakumo. Shirakumo looks like he’s got an idea, too, and all you can do is hope that the human half of him is enough to hide his intentions from Tomura. The two of you make eye contact. Shirakumo raises one hand from his side and shows you a broken fencepost. If you bend down slowly to grab one of your own, Tomura’s going to figure it out, and he’ll stop you. You have to move fast. You crouch, seize a fencepost, and lurch across the property line.

A howl rises up from the house behind you, enough to set your teeth on edge and make every hair on your arms stand on end. Tomura’s furious, but he’s going to be even madder if you get hurt because you were standing there, doing nothing, instead of doing what you came here to do. You glance to your left and realize that Shirakumo’s already run off to help Hizashi and Nemuri deal with one of the two remaining Nomus. That leaves you and your fencepost to join the remaining fight. You’re the only help Dabi and Natsu are going to get.

Your fencepost has a broken end, jagged and dangerous, but you’ve got no faith in your ability to stab someone with it. You’ll be better off using it as a club. The question is who to hit. You creep along the sidewalk towards where Dabi and Natsu are facing Garaki and the remaining Nomu. While the fight between Natsu and the last Nomu looks pretty even, it’s clear to you that Dabi’s losing his. Tomura said Garaki has too many ghosts. Dabi’s only one, and only half a ghost in the bargain. You have the thought that his human side is protecting him from being blasted apart, but it can’t last forever. You can see the ghostly sections of his body, rippling, bulging, as Garaki pours more and more energy into him. Neither of them are paying any attention to you.

Good. You work your way behind Garaki, take a firmer grip on the fencepost, and swing.

It’s not your best swing. Some part of you is still wrestling against the thought of bashing another human being over the head with a piece of wood, and it’s really dark. But even your not-the-best swing collides with the side of Garaki’s head, producing a dull thud. He lets out a grunt of pain and turns Dabi loose, wheeling around to face you.

You swing again, but it’s even harder to hit somebody when you’re looking them in the eye. Your blow strikes his arm, and he staggers but doesn’t fall. Garaki is bald, your height or maybe shorter. He has a mustache, and his green-tinted glasses are cracked and lopsided. Blood is tricking down the side of his head from your first swing. He steps forward. You step back.

“Not so brave now, are we?” Garaki laughs, but he’s grimacing. You swing at him again, but he dodges it. His hand closes on your shoulder. “Have some of this.”

You know what’s coming, courtesy of Hizashi’s lessons this afternoon, and unlike Tomura, Garaki’s got no plans to be gentle with you. You lock your jaw against the screams that are dying to get out and squeeze your eyes shut. You don’t want to see the world between. You need to see what’s in Garaki’s head. You need to know, so you can warn –

You can’t see. Maybe you can. You can’t understand it – a void full of open, howling mouths, pain worse than anything you’ve ever experienced, hatred stronger than you can even fathom. It’s nothing like what you saw in Tomura’s mind. It’s hell. You keep your jaw locked as long as possible, but eventually you can’t hold it in a second longer. You open your mouth and scream until your throat bleeds.

Or maybe you don’t. A hand closes around your wrist and jerks you away, out of Garaki’s grip. The hand is cold and warm at the same time. When you open your eyes, you find yourself looking up at Shirakumo.

He’s not the only one who’s here. Nemuri’s here, and Hizashi, Hizashi steps into the space where you were standing and promptly decks Garaki, hitting him about twice as hard as your strongest swing of the fencepost. “That’s for making my friends cry,” he hisses, and hits Garaki again. “Hit it, Toasty!”

Every plant on the far side of the street bursts into flames at once, and Dabi plants both hands on Garaki’s back and shoves him hard. With the rest of the plants’ life-force on board, Dabi’s charged up with enough power to send Garaki flying, and there’s only one possible place he could be headed. You turn slowly, your entire body numb and frozen, just in time to see Garaki land in a heap in the middle of your front yard. Tomura’s on him a split second later.

You think it’ll be over quickly. If Tomura is as powerful as everyone says he is, it should be. But you think of how many ghosts you saw in Garaki’s head, of the fact that Tomura’s never faced a conjurer before, and fear like you’ve never felt in your entire life surges through you. You can’t help him. All you can do is watch.

The sphere of darkness Garaki summoned before starts to descend, only for Tomura to blast it apart seconds later. Garaki reaches out for Tomura’s shoulder, but Tomura dematerializes just enough that Garaki’s hand sinks straight through him. He raises one hand, reaching for Garaki, and Garaki’s hand rises to block him. There’s a clear six inches of space between their palms, but it’s clear that they’re both pushing as hard as they can.

Cold wind whips out from the space where the two of them stand, rattling your windows loudly enough that you can hear it from the street. Your teeth are chattering almost as loudly. Garaki’s face shows intense concentration, and so does Tomura’s. His free hand is scratching frantically at his neck, and he’s bitten into his lip so hard it’s bleeding. There’s a sudden lurch, and Tomura takes a step back. Then another step back. “Fuck,” Dabi mumbles, then calls out: “Hey, asshole! Get your shit together!”

Tomura plants his feet, stopping Garaki’s advance, but you’re not stupid enough to think he’s got the upper hand. In fact, he’s got the opposite. His right hand, the one pressing back against Garaki’s, is beginning to bend backwards, past the point where a living hand would break, where living fingers would snap like twigs. His physical form, still mostly embodied, is beginning to bulge and waver, just like Dabi’s did. If Garaki’s able to do this, his power level and Tomura’s must be nearly equal. Aizawa’s words flash through your head again: Conjurers are human. Humans don’t want to die.

You want to call out to Tomura, beg him to fight harder, but your teeth are chattering too hard to speak. Someone else does it for you. Hizashi grabs your arm, pulls you away from Shirakumo, and drags you towards the fence. “Hey, guess what?” he shouts at Tomura, his voice loud enough to be heard above the wind. “I lied about what ghostly power does to humans. It does hurt them. It hurts them a lot.”

Tomura’s eyes dart sideways towards you. Then he turns his head to stare, and takes another step back, giving up ground to Garaki. “Yeah, you heard me,” Hizashi continues, even though he’s breaking Tomura’s concentration. “You hurt your human, and she let you do it. But guess what? The guy who’s beating you hurt her a whole lot worse.”

Tomura snarls. “Oh, you want to kill me over that? I’ll believe that when I see it,” Hizashi spits, and suddenly you understand what he’s trying to do. “How are you supposed to kill me when you can’t even kill him?”

Tomura looks away from Hizashi, away from you. Back to Garaki, who was just starting to look confident. “You won’t win. I have the power of a thousand ghosts behind me! There’s nothing you can do that will – what are you doing? Don’t –”

Tomura’s free hand materializes and clamps down over Garaki’s face. The hand pushing  back against Garaki’s breaks through the space between them and seizes it in a crushing grip. Garaki howls, but not so loudly that you can’t hear Tomura’s voice. “A thousand ghosts?” he says, gleeful and savage. “There’s one less now.”

The wind roars up from behind you this time, still ice-cold, as Tomura draws his power inwards, forcing more and more of it into Garaki. He bends Garaki’s hand backwards until the conjurer’s wrist breaks, keeps pushing until his forearm snaps in two. “Where are your ghosts now?” he taunts. The smile on his face is terrifying to look at, but you can’t look away. “Without them, you’re just a human.”

“Wait,” Garaki chokes out. “Don’t –”

“You’re just a human,” Tomura repeats. “Humans die.”

You’ve watched Tomura turn things to dust before, but never a person. Garaki crumbles, the same as the wasps and the other insects and the plants. You hear a last gasp of air leave his lungs, choked with dust towards the end, and see his eyes go blank a second before they turn dull and dusty and pop from his skull. It’s over in less than two seconds. Garaki’s clothes crumple to the ground, empty. And after that it’s quiet.

Next to you, Hizashi breathes a sigh of relief. “That was close.”

“That wasn’t close at all,” Nemuri corrects. She’s only partially materialized. “It was over the instant he stopped messing around. What were you doing, anyway? You – watch it, Zashi –”

Hizashi leaps away from the fence with a yelp. Tomura’s right there, struggling to reach past the property line, his eyes fixed on you. “Give me my human.”

“You sure about that?” Hizashi asks. He gives you a little shake and keeps talking to Tomura. “You’re looking a little rough, my friend. Why not dematerialize and get some of that blood off your –”

“Now!”

Tomura’s voice isn’t particularly loud, but it still shakes the ground, and you feel Hizashi’s grip on your shoulder tighten with shock. He laughs it off, but you aren’t fooled. “One human, coming right up!” he announces. He picks you up and tosses you over the wreckage of the fence.

You’re not in any way prepared to catch yourself, but Tomura doesn’t let you hit the ground. Wouldn’t let you hit the ground. Maybe. He’s mad at you the instant he gets ahold of you, snapping at you even as his arms lock tightly around your waist. “You idiot! You’re just a human. That guy could have killed you! There are bugs under the house that are smarter than you are! Why would you even – what? What are you doing?”

You’re twisting in his grip, trying to get your arms free, and when you manage it, you wrap them around him, holding on as tightly as you can even though being this close to him isn’t helping your rapidly advancing case of hypothermia. “Are you okay?” you ask senselessly. “Your hand – your neck – are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Don’t be stupid.” Tomura shakes your shoulder with the hand you were asking about, the one Garaki bent completely back at the wrist. “My neck is fine. The scratches will go away once I dematerialize. Why are you acting so weird?”

You pull your hand away from his neck with an effort. It comes back smeared with blood, and you curl it into a shaky fist. “I was worried.”

“I said not to be stupid,” Tomura says. He shakes your shoulder again. “I had it right from the beginning.”

He didn’t. You know what you saw, and he didn’t. “You had it once you flexed,” Dabi says from just outside the fence. “You dumbass. Why did you think the guy who summoned me and the megaphone with legs would be weak? Give me back my human.”

You have a rule about not laughing at Dabi’s jokes, but ‘megaphone with legs’ as a description for Hizashi is too funny to ignore. You’re giggling weakly to yourself as Keigo emerges from your house, stepping through the wreckage of your fence to join Dabi on the street. He’s got one arm in a sling and a few scratches on his face, but otherwise he looks okay. “Was it just me, or was that way too close?” he asks the ghosts and the Nomu and Shirakumo still hanging out in the street. “If we do anything like that again, we need to fix – hey, watch the arm!”

Dabi’s grabbed him, not dissimilarly to the way Tomura grabbed you, and he plants an incredibly weird-looking kiss on him. You’ve never tried making out with Tomura while he’s half-materialized, and there’s a good reason. There’s – tongues. You can see them. Keigo puts his hand against Dabi’s face and pushes him partly back, but that doesn’t dissuade Dabi at all. He picks Keigo up and marches right back across the street, up their front steps, and into the house.

“Uh, goodnight,” you say faintly. The door slams shut.

“Is there a human saying for post-victory sex?” That’s Magne’s voice. She and Atsuhiro are making their way up the street. “Humans have the silliest names for the most disgusting things they do.”

“I think post-victory sex is about as descriptive as it gets,” Shirakumo says in that strange doubled voice. The other Nomu is still standing there, hands down at its sides, and Shirakumo turns to it. “Hey. Natsu, right? I think we probably need to talk.”

“He’s doing better,” Nemuri remarks to Hizashi as the two Nomus cross the street. “Did something happen?”

“They merged. Him and the ghost,” Tomura says. He’s still holding you, and you’re starting to get really cold. “They wanted to help more than they wanted to die.”

“Good,” Hizashi says after a moment. He looks relieved. “Can I have my humans back now?”

“I don’t want your humans.” Tomura doesn’t look up, but when you peer over his shoulder, you see Shinsou carrying Eri and helping Aizawa navigate the stairs at the same time. “If you even think about setting foot in my yard again, I’ll kill you and I’ll make it hurt.”

“Deal,” Hizashi says. He glances at you, still relieved even though Tomura’s just threatened to kill him. “I misjudged your human, anyway. She’s not so bad after all.”

You didn’t trust Hizashi very much before today, and now you don’t trust him at all – but you think you’ve got a handle on what he’s like, which means his comment makes absolutely no sense. He doesn’t like you. He sees you as a threat to his family’s safety because he thinks you could compromise Tomura. Why would he say that he misjudged you in front of another ghost, knowing that Tomura can probably tell if he’s lying? If he wasn’t lying, but if he wasn’t lying, why did he change his tune about you?

The question’s a little too much for you to answer right now. Your brain is still scrambled and you’re freezing cold. Tomura refuses to put you down until Jin’s mom, who’s coming over to retrieve Jin, realizes your lips are blue and makes him do it. You stagger into the house under your own power, peel off your shoes, and head straight upstairs to your room. You get under the blankets fully clothed and curl up into a ball, trying to stay warm. There’s no way you’ll be able to sleep until the shivers die down.

You hear the front door close and lock like it’s coming from a long way away, then footsteps up the stairs. Tomura drops Phantom on the bed and she snuggles against you over the covers. It helps, sort of. You sneak one icy hand out to pet her ears, only to bump against Tomura’s hand doing the same thing. “You feel cold like me,” he says. You make some kind of awful, teeth-chattery noise of agreement. It’s quiet for a second. “I hurt you. You let me. Why?”

“You had to learn.” You don’t want to talk about this. “I was fine afterward. What the conjurer did was way worse.”

“I hurt you. Are you scared of me again?” Tomura sounds miserable. “You’re scared again. You’ll leave.”

“Not scared,” you mumble. “Not leaving. I just wanted to help. I wanted to make sure you won, and I wasn’t sure you could.”

You’re hoping that doubting his strength will set him off on bragging about how tough he is, so he’ll forget all about this. But you’re not so lucky. You spent all of tonight’s luck somewhere else. “I don’t understand,” Tomura says. “You let me hurt you for the neighborhood?”

“Don’t be stupid,” you say, just in time for it to occur to you that you’ve never really let on that you’re concerned with anything but the neighborhood as a whole. “I let you to make sure you won. I didn’t want something bad to happen to you.”

“So I could keep protecting the neighborhood.”

“No,” you say, too fast and too sure. “So I could keep hanging out with you.”

There’s probably a better way to say it. A more honest way to say it. If you were a ghost you’d be one hundred percent busted, because you’re lowballing this to a ridiculous degree. You want more stupid movie nights where he spends the entire movie asking questions and you have to rewind it and watch it again. You want more moments where you spy on him playing with Phantom, more moments where you watch him try to understand humans and succeed a little more each time. You want to teach him how to cook more things, not so he’ll cook for you but because he likes to know how things work and how to do them right. You want more makeouts and hookups and moments where he stays close to you without either of you understanding why.

You want to keep hanging out with Tomura, sure. You want that because you love him.

“That’s what I want,” Tomura says, surprised. “Wait, do you –”

“We agree. We don’t need to talk about it anymore.” You curl up into a tighter ball around Phantom and look up at Tomura. “Are you staying or what?”

Tomura looks even more surprised than before. “You said I don’t get to stay on your bed at night.”

“And you don’t listen. I know where you are even when you’re dematerialized,” you say. “You might as well do it embodied. And outside the sheets, so I don’t freeze.”

You can tell Tomura’s confused, but he hops onto the bed anyway, sprawling out on the other side. “It wasn’t hard to kill that conjurer,” he says. “I could do it again.”

For some reason, that’s when it clicks for you – the reason Hizashi doesn’t hate you anymore, the reason he was relieved. His problem with you is that you’re a reason for Tomura to give up being a ghost. The only way to give up being a ghost is to completely drain a human being and take their place, and it only happens if the ghost wants to be human more than they’ve ever wanted anything else in the whole world, in all of time. Tomura completely drained a human being tonight. If he was going to embody himself permanently, this was his chance. And he didn’t.

You knew he wouldn’t. You’ve always known that. You’ve known forever that loving Tomura would mean loving him as a ghost and nothing else. It’s best this way. The neighborhood stays protected. Hizashi stops hating you. This is how it’s supposed to be.

“Hey.” Tomura shakes your shoulder, then touches your cheek. “What are these? Are you crying?”

“Humans do that sometimes to relieve stress,” you say. You’re amazed with the steadiness in your voice. “It’s fine.”

“Mm.” Tomura sounds skeptical, but he doesn’t argue with you. He edges closer to you, drapes one arm around your waist and presses against your back. All you can feel through the blankets is the faintest chill. “You can be the spoon this time.”

“The little spoon,” you correct. “You’re the big spoon.”

“What if I don’t want to be a spoon?”

“Then find a different way to snuggle.” You don’t want him to do that. You want him to hold you like this until you fall asleep, and when a vaguely aggrieved silence falls, you know you’ll get your wish. “It’s not so bad.”

“Idiot,” Tomura mumbles. “Go to sleep.”

You close your eyes, sandwiched between your ghost and your dog, not quite cold and not quite warm. It’s almost comfortable. Maybe you should fall asleep like this every night.

If you ever sleep again. When you wake up in the middle of the night, frozen with incomprehensible terror from a dream of the world between, you’re not sure you’ll even dare to close your eyes.

“It’s not easy to talk about, but…”

Autistic!Tomura Shigaraki, QPR, GN!Reader, Discussions of Pain

The whole time you’ve known him, you’d never describe Tomura as someone who really complains. He’ll frustratedly talk about games levels that he’s stuck on or how hot it is, any little thing that doesn’t really matter, but if something is really, genuinely bothering him, he keeps it to himself.

It’s really hard for him to talk about the things that bother him, especially if the kind of help he needs is something he’d have to talk to a stranger about. You understand that he’s had a rough time with professionals, so you’ve never pushed him on it.

You were getting started on breakfast when he says he wants to talk to you sometime about something important. “It doesn’t have to be now, or even today, but just…. Sometime. Is that okay?” He’s clearly very nervous bringing it up, and you can tell it’s important to him. He doesn’t look at you when he says it, but that’s not unusual for him.

It ends up being almost a week later when Tomura approaches you again to finally sit down and talk. He fidgets with his phone, likely with notes of what he wants to say. He takes a deep breath before he starts.

“It’s not easy to talk about, but I don’t want to be in pain anymore… I just don’t know how not to be…”

You sit quietly, just listening to him talk for the longest time. He’s done a lot of reading and tried to figure out what’s been happening to his skin his whole life on his own but he just can’t do it. He’s tried soothing creams, numbing creams, anti-inflammatory gels, everything, anything, but they just makes it hurt more or make it hurt differently. He’s tired. Tired of waking up in the middle of the night unable to stop scratching. He tried wearing gloves to bed, he’s tried trimming his fingernails super short, he’s tried anything he could think of. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t causing open scratches all over his body all the time.

“It’s hard to take care of a body that burns and bleeds when you’re just trying to clean and care for it.” Tomura says, kneading the bottom hem of his hoodie with his hands.

There are the beginnings of tears welling in his eyes as he’s clearly frustrated and embarrassed at not being able to solve it on his own.

Eventually he gets quiet, and lays back. He takes a breath, before continuing. “I don’t even know if it’s a real itch at this point. I’ve thought about it being some kind of nervous tic, or compulsive behavior, maybe a mix of a few things, I’m just….”

The tears roll down the side of his face, but he wipes them on his hoodie sleeve.

“… I don’t want everything to hurt anymore.”

You ask if you can give him a hug, and he says yes. He sits up so you can wrap you arms around him for a moment. That seems to help soothe him, if only a bit.

It’s definitely a long road ahead, but you tell him that you can help advocate for him and be there to support him if he wants to find someone to talk to about these kinds of problems. He looks nervous at that, but you assure him that you can start as small as he needs to. He visibly relaxes, laying back down. He looks up at you, and pats for you to lie down next to him.

You lie back with him, just sitting there in silence for a little while. You know it’s not a lot, but just having you in his corner seems to make his whole disposition a little more hopeful.

As a small/medium boobs girlie this hurt xD

Kingly snuggles.

Dont repost

Do you think we can get a little snippet of shigaraki and spinners drunken conversation about mc? 🫣

Ummm, YESSS?!?!

(Side note, this ended up being a lot more poignant and plot-relevant then I expected so I'll probably clean it up a bit and make it an official half chapter or something.)

“She’s too good for me.”

“That’s true.”

“She should be with Mirio.”

“Oh fuck that!”

“No, she should!”

“Shigaraki.”

Iguchi and Shigaraki laid on the floor, bodies in different directions but heads side by side. They’d long abandoned their controllers, their drivers stuck against a fence and parked in a patch of grass mid-Moo Moo Meadows respectively, as they became far too engrossed in their conversation and intoxication to proceed. If Iguchi had been still holding his controller though, he would’ve promptly thrown it at his friend for the way he was talking.

“It’s true, it’s true! They have so much more in common!” Shigaraki whined, genuinely whined.

“Like what?” Iguchi demanded.

“They both swim. They both have muscles. They’re both pretty…”

“All superficial stuff, man—”

“—and their brains aren’t all fucked.”

“Have you seen the way she laughs during horror movies? I don’t know if that’s entirely true.”

“I’m fucking serious, Spinner. You know me. You know I’m never gonna get better. Not really.”

Iguchi frowned. Because that wasn’t true. He’d seen such amazing improvement from Shigaraki in the last couple months, such a vast development of care, self-awareness, and empathy. He’d come a long long way.

But also, it wasn’t entirely untrue either.

There was something fundamentally broken inside of Tomura Shigaraki. Something that went beyond the warped way he’d been raised and lessons he’d been taught, beyond the abuse and trauma he’d suffered as a child. This was something that had to do with the way he was wired, the way he was born and how he felt things. Iguchi was similar in a lot of ways. And it took a certain level of medical intervention and SSRI’s to get him to a point where he could even start to function. He’d needed serious help, Shigaraki needed serious help.

Iguchi couldn’t say any of that to him though. He couldn’t recommend therapy or medication or support groups, it’d all be rejected, just as it had been many times before. Because even if Shigaraki wanted it, that was a help that All for One would never allow him to find.

So, Iguchi back-tracked to a more fixable problem.

“You’ve said it yourself, Shigaraki. They’re not right together. He stifles her,” Iguchi said, “Even if she’s trying to make things work with Mirio right now, it’s not gonna last forever. She’s a smart person, she’ll know to throw in the towel eventually.”

Shigaraki snorted, “And then what?”

“And then you make your move.”

He shook his head, “No. No even if they break up, I don’t think I can.”

“What’re you, stupid?!” Iguchi demanded, the vodka redbulls shoving his fuzzy irritation to the forefront, “Why the hell wouldn’t you give it an actual try then?!”

“Cause she’s too fucking good for me!” Shigaraki drunkenly wailed.

Iguchi groaned, sitting up so he could take a LARGE gulp of his drink. Shigaraki often made him feel like he needed a drink, but he was testing his nerves now more than ever with this woe as me schtick. Especially since he knew that Shigaraki was gonna pursue her in some stupidly roundabout way anyway.

“She deserves someone healthy. Someone who’s not gonna hurt her,” he turned to look up at Iguchi then, “You should date her.”

Iguchi choked on his drink.

“W-What?! Me?!” he coughed and sputtered.

“Yeah. You guys have way more in common anyway. You like to game and workout. Your parents are both normal, but like, weird, you know?” Shigaraki looked back down to the carpet at his eye level, getting to the real point, “And you’d be good for each other. To each other. Better than I’ve ever been to either of you.”

“That could never happen.”

“Nah, nah, I think she’d go for you! You may be ugly, but she doesn’t care about stuff like that.”

“Dick! That’s not what I meant!” Iguchi snapped with an angry blush, wondering if he should even bother to comfort this bastard after saying something like that.

But then Shigaraki looked up at him with that childlike curiosity of his, and Iguchi couldn’t help but continue.

“I mean that I’d never do that to you. And neither would she.”

Shigaraki snorted, “Why? I’d do it to you.”

Iguchi cocked a brow at him.

“You sure about that?”

Shigaraki’s eyes narrowed, in a way that was clearly meant to be challenging, but was really more poutlike in his whiney drunken state. 

When Iguchi didn’t back down like he expected, Shigaraki just rolled over onto his side with some grumpy grumbling of something like “you don’t know. You don’t know what I’d do.”

Iguchi just chuckled and grabbed Shigaraki’s solo cup, filling it with water this time rather than vodka. 

“...I’m gonna miss those skirts of hers when she goes to college.”

“She wears skirts in her day to day too, doesn’t she?” Iguchi asked, waving the cup in front of Shigaraki’s face.

“They’re not the same,” Shigaraki whined, leaning forward to take a sniff, shaking his head when he smelt the lack of alcohol, “They should make those skirts mandatory at Todai!”

Iguchi nudged him with it insistently, “Yeah. Yeah they should.”

“I’ll get Sensei to do something about it!”“If you remember to do that after this, I’ll wear one of those skirts.”

I kinda messed up but i think it's still great ! I hope 😂

Can you do saison one shigaraki x youtuber reader ? A smut pls with a yandere shigaraki

Being a youtuber was fun! You got to play games, review new games and meet new people! Normal people right? Youtube was fun at first until you got emails and messages. They started off normal 

“Can you review Mario.”

And they got worse and worse

“The park you live by is nice…”

“Do you always order milk tea and macarons at Sakons cafe?”

“You slept till 2:00 pm! You're so cute when you sleep.”

“I saw you at Moki Mall today, you wore a pretty skirt and purple panties! You're so cute y/n…”

You knew whoever it was had your address, that's how they were sending you gifts. They always came with notes. You remembered everyone

A pack of cookies

“To y/n I tried baking you cookies but I ended up burning them so hopefully these will make up for it.”

A necklace

“I hope you enjoy this. I wish my hand was around your neck instead.”

Panties.

“I think these would look cute on you.”

Sex toys.

“I hope these make you feel as good as Icould make you feel.”

No matter how many times you moved he found you. 

 ˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥

“Well everyone thank you for watching this youtube video I'll see you next time!”

That's when it happens as soon as you end the video you feel someone wrap their hand around your throat.

“Scream and I'll kill you.”

Shigraki said, chuckling.  

“I'm so happy to see you Y/n, we're finally meeting in person!”

You could feel yourself shake.

“Don't tremble, you might make my index finger slip.”

You attempted to keep yourself from shaking. Shigaraki began to explore your room pulling you along using his hand as some sick collar. He led you over to your bed.

“Sit N/n.”

You slowly sat down. He happily looked down at you.

“P-please let me go, I won't tell-”

“This is almost like a game! The main character goes through all the levels to save his princess!”

He said giggling 

“And now finally, I'm here at the last stage, where I get my big reward…”

His red eyes gazed at you. Did he think this was all a game? That you were a prize? His princess? 

“Well princess you're finally in front of me!”

He placed his hand on your cheek, turning your face to look at him. He gently kneeled so his face was inches away from your face. He softly kissed your lips. As anyone would do, you pulled away. 

“That's not fair! I went through all these levels for you! Just let me make you feel good!”

Tomura pushed you back onto your bed, placing himself between your legs. He quickly placed his lips on your neck. He held your wrists  and pulled away. 

“Don't struggle, I would hate to kill you!”

“I'll do what you want, just dont kill me…!”

Shigaraki seemed happy with that response pulling away from you for a second.

“I wanna taste you…”

“I-i'll let you!”

Tomura smiled quickly, placing his face between your legs. Yu allowed Tomura to decay your panties. 

“It's so pretty…”

You attempted to look away from him. He placed a soft kiss on your clit and began licking your pussy.  He was sloppy with his tongue yet all he wanted to do was explore the “bonus” level he'd unlocked. You placed your hand over your mouth attempting to silence your small moans. It wasn't long before you came. Your body did it against your will. 

Tomura allowed your liquids to flow down his throat. It was sour and bitter yet he savored every drop. He slowly pulled away.

“I let you do what you wanted… You'll leave now?”

He smiled.

“Were not done just yet, princess.”

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.

Enough to Go By (Chapter 7) - 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 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Chapter 7

Kurogiri snatches you from the alleyway behind the clinic. You’re ready for it, or as ready as it’s possible to be when you don’t know what Tenko’s planning. When you reappear, you’re not in the bar – instead you’re in the hallway outside Tenko’s room, and the door to his room is open. He looks pleased to see you. The hand’s already down off his face.

“You’re here. Good,” he says – but his expression shifts from anticipation into something sharper almost instantly. “What is it? Are you –”

This has been the worst twenty-four hours you’ve had since the night you first saw Tenko again. Between the visit with your family and the news about Kazuo and your encounter with Tenko’s master, you don’t have it in you to pretend. You take an unsteady step closer to him. “Can I, um –”

“What?” Tenko asks, but some part of him must know, because his arms lift from his sides, opening to leave space between them. You take another step closer, until you’re well within the space, and you know when he realizes, because he takes a sharp breath. “Yeah, you can. Go ahead.”

He hugs you back too tightly, but you’re probably hugging him too tightly in the first place. He can’t decide where to put his hands. He keeps trying different spots, but no matter where he touches you, it’s never with more than three fingers down. For your part, you keep your hands still on his back, resisting the urge to run them over his shoulder blades or along his spine. He’s really thin. Almost malnourished thin. No wonder his wounds take so long to heal.

You let your head fall against his shoulder, let your eyes fall shut. “What happened?” Tenko asks. He adjusts his grip on you without fully letting go. “Why do you look like that?”

His master said not to tell Tenko – no, advised you not to tell Tomura. But he also said he’d have no further dealings with you. You don’t know where Kurogiri is, what Kurogiri might say, so you speak as quietly as you can, your mouth just below Tenko’s ear. “I met your master.”

Tenko stiffens. “What?”

“Kurogiri took me to him. I thought he was taking me to you, but –”

“What did he want?” Tenko asks. His voice is tense, already going flat. “What did you tell him?”

“He wanted to know how I knew you. I told him about how we met last year, when you came to the clinic.” You feel Tenko’s shoulders relax slightly at that. “I used the right name. I don’t –”

“Here.” Tenko pulls away from you, but only long enough to pull you through the door to his room and shut it behind you both. “What else did he ask?”

“About my quirk. He said he’d give me one, but he changed his mind.” You try to remember, but it’s hard verging on impossible. All you can think of is the hand closing over your face, the enormous figure looming over you. “He said I was your game piece, not his. What does that mean?”

You look up at Tenko. Tenko’s expression is somehow grim and calculating at the same time. “He says everything’s for me. Everything should be as I want it, so he won’t take you away,” he says. Then, almost to himself: “But he was suspicious. If he finds out –”

“Finds out what?”

“Here.” Tenko pulls you closer than before. This time you feel his chapped lips against your ear. “I was supposed to say goodbye to my old name. When he gave me my family to wear.”

His family to wear. His family – the hands. You almost throw up. Tenko keeps talking, faster now. “I didn’t think about it. I hadn’t in years, until – and I feel different when I hear it. Different than I’m supposed to. I want the same things, but more things. I don’t know how to say it.”

“You’re not supposed to be Tenko anymore.” You feel him nod. “You feel more like that when you’re with me.”

Tenko nods again. “You always know how to say it right.”

“I know you,” you say. His grip on you tightens. “You’re in trouble with him because of me.”

“No.” Tenko’s index finger taps a pattern on your back. “I feel better when you’re here.”

That doesn’t mean he’s not in trouble. It just means he cares about it less, or he’s less worried than you are. “Just be careful with my name,” he continues. “Call me Sensei’s name around everyone else, even Kurogiri. When it’s just us, like right now –”

“Tenko,” you say, and he nods. You feel a little better, maybe. You don’t know for sure. And you know you’ve been hugging him for way too long. You step back. “Sorry about this. I –”

“Don’t,” Tenko says. “I told you. I don’t mind.”

The two of you look at each other for a moment. In your peripheral vision, you can see that the room’s even cleaner than it was the last time you were here. The coffee table still has a pileup of games on it, but there’s also an open energy drink can sitting there. With a flower sticking out of it.

You fixate on the flower. “Where’d you get that?”

“I found it,” Tenko says, but he can’t hold your gaze, which means he’s lying and he probably stole it. “So you wouldn’t get confused this time.”

“About whether it’s a date?” you ask. He nods without looking at you. “Okay. It’s a date.”

“It’s a date right now,” Tenko corrects. “The new members of the League will be here at midnight. Do you have a disguise?”

“I think so.” You’ve been carrying it around in your bag, since you don’t have a way to predict when Tenko will call for you. “Do you want to see it?”

He nods. You fish both pieces of it out of your bag and put it on, situating the veil over your face and peering at Tenko through the filmy fabric. “Can you see my face?”

“Not really.” Tenko tilts his head, studying you. “What is it?”

“My friends and I dressed up as vampire brides last Halloween, but I went a little too hard on the bride part,” you say. “I was going to use a mask, but it was hard to breathe, and I couldn’t see very well. And the veil covers my hair, too.”

Tenko nods again. “What’s the crown made of?”

“It’s supposed to look like thorns.” You cringe a little bit. “Hirono made me wear it with the costume, and I still needed something to hold the veil in place. Does it work?”

Tenko comes closer. A lot closer. “Not at this range,” he says. You’d have to agree. If you can count his eyelashes through the veil, he can definitely see your face. “I’m not letting any of them that close to you or me. You can take it off now.”

You lift the crown off, and the veil after it, and Tenko takes them from you, setting them down on the end of the coffee table next to the hand he usually wears on his face. They look unbelievably weird laid out next to each other – like the costume pieces they are, things the two of you can take on and off whenever you want to instead of symbols of what Tenko already is, what you’re getting yourself into. “The others won’t be here for a few hours,” Tenko says. “Do you want to play a game?”

“Do you need to do anything to get ready for the meeting?” you ask. “It sounds important.”

“The plan’s already done. I’ll tell you about who will be there, but we don’t need anything else. Just –” Tenko lifts his head as if to scratch at his neck, then lowers it again. “I don’t want to think about it right now. I’ve thought about it enough. Can we –”

“Yeah,” you say at once. “Let’s just play.”

You play Call of Duty again, starting off in co-op mode this time. You were so worried that your skills would atrophy that you made Ryuhei and Mitsuru play with you until you got better, something Tenko remarks on right away. “I can’t believe you practiced.”

“I wouldn’t be much of a sidekick if I stayed dead weight,” you say. “Don’t worry. It won’t last long.”

The two of you still have a ways to go before the intermediate levels, and with the pressure off, Tenko starts telling you about the allies he’s collected. Mostly guys – for whatever reason, there aren’t a lot of female villains. The two women are Hiikishi, who goes by Magne, and Toga, who goes by Toga. Magne’s an adult with a serious record, and Toga would have a serious record if she was an adult, which she isn’t. “Seventeen?” you say, startled. “She’s just a kid.”

“She’s a Stain fan,” Tenko says. He rolls his eyes, then takes out an entire group of enemies advancing on the two of you without looking at the screen. “So are two of the others. One of them’s got a fire quirk. He’s an asshole. The other one – he’s hard to get a read on. Keep an eye on him.”

“I can do that,” you say. You see a solitary enemy sneaking up behind Tenko’s character, adjust your viewpoint minutely, and shoot them before they can shoot him. “Who else?”

Toga apparently isn’t the only kid who’s taking on a life of villainy. There’s another high school student, too, and you think about what Kazuo said, about the question of whether the creation of new villains can be prevented. Two of the other new allies fall into the category of those Kazuo said would be drawn to violence regardless. You recognize both names from the news, and you’ve listened to enough true-crime podcasts at Mitsuru’s behest to know that at least one of them is supposed to be behind bars. “Did you break them out?”

“Kurogiri’s doing that,” Tenko says, unworried. “They’re the distraction. Compress will be doing the real work.”

“Compress?”

“We were lucky to find him,” Tenko says. There’s a nasty grin on his face. “You’ll hear more about him when we go over the plan. We – dammit.”

The two of you leveled up while you were talking, and there are twice as many enemies as before. You decide to drop the line of questioning and focus on the game. Playing with Mitsuru and Ryuhei, you never got through the first of the intermediate levels. Tenko’s better than they are by a long shot, but you’ll need all your wits about you to avoid dragging him down.

You and Tenko play in silence for the most part, working together as a team, and you notice the two of you shifting closer together as the game continues, moving from your separate corners of the couch to the middle of it. You’re paying attention to the game, but every so often your mind drifts – to the flower in the energy drink can, to the fact that this is apparently a date, to the fact that Tenko let you hug him and hugged you back. If this is a date, if he keeps calling it a date, there must be something he wants from you that’s more than this, more than whatever the two of you are doing right now. You could ask what it is. Part of you doesn’t want to know.

You and Tenko clear one or two intermediate levels, but on the third one, you know the two of you are in deep trouble. You’re low on health already, courtesy of getting dinged a few times on the level before, and your skills, while improved, aren’t good enough to let you hold your own. Tenko’s having to protect you, just like you were worried he would, and in the process, he’s taking damage, too. Despite that, courtesy of Tenko’s skills and your weird accuracy, the two of you progress to the end of the level. Almost.

“Come on,” Tenko hisses. He’s two seconds away from disintegrating his controller. “We can make it.”

No, you can’t. Not both of you. But if Tenko can get through, he can get to a save point, and you can finish the level later. If you both die, you have to go back to the beginning. With that in mind, it’s an easy choice. You maneuver your character between Tenko’s and the enemies sneaking up on him from behind, and shoot as many of them as you can before they overwhelm you. Tenko turns to stare at you in horror. “You died?”

“You didn’t. Go!”

Tenko swears, shoots the enemies you couldn’t kill, and clears the level at speed. He saves his progress. Then he turns on you. “What happened?”

You point at the screen, which is showing a slow-motion replay of your character getting absolutely shredded by enemy fire. “You were blocking for me?” Tenko looks unhappy. “Idiot. We could have won.”

“I was slowing you down too much,” you say. “I could help you get through, so I did. Now you don’t have to start over.”

“But you do.”

“I’m the sidekick. It’s okay,” you say. You’re not sure why he’s looking at you like that. “And even if I wasn’t your sidekick – there’s no way I’d let my best friend lose.”

Tenko doesn’t say a word in response. Instead he sets his controller aside, then lifts yours out of your hands and does the same. You’re sitting really close together right now. He said this was a date. You make eye contact with Tenko, or try to. He’s not looking into your eyes. He’s looking at your mouth.

He’s being really obvious. You wonder if he knows. “Have you kissed anyone before?”

“Yeah. You.” Tenko doesn’t look away from your mouth. “Don’t you remember?”

For a moment you don’t. But then you remember the picture of the two of you on Valentine’s Day, and what happened after the picture was taken – you taking the valentine from him, planting a poorly-aimed kiss half on his mouth and half on his cheek, and promptly running away. You’re surprised he’s counting that. But you would count it, too, if it was the only thing you had to count.

“I remember,” you say. “So this is going to be our second kiss.”

“Who said I was going to kiss you?”

“You’ve been staring at my mouth for the last minute and a half. I’m not sure what else you could be doing,” you say. Tenko’s face turns red, which means you’re right, but he still doesn’t make a move. “Did you change your mind?”

“No.” Tenko shakes his head. “I don’t know where to put my hands.”

“Don’t do anything with them for now,” you suggest. Your heart is beating faster. “Let’s just try it and see how it goes.”

He’s leaning closer now, shifting position to close the gap even further. The flush in his cheeks is darker than before. “I’m not going to be good at it.”

“Hey, I was pretty bad at Call of Duty last time,” you say. Tenko starts to argue that kissing and Call of Duty have absolutely nothing in common, and you cut him off. “You know how I got better? I practiced.”

Tenko finally tears his eyes away from your mouth. “You wouldn’t have had anything to practice if I hadn’t taught you how. You should kiss me.”

“I kissed you the first time,” you say. “It’s your turn.”

It’s quiet for a second. “Fine,” Tenko says. He leans in and you tilt your head to the proper angle and your lips meet for the first time in fifteen years.

You really don’t want to count the kiss when you were five as your first kiss, but Tenko’s counting it, so you sort of have to. His lips are rough against yours, not in pressure but in texture, and you’re careful as you kiss him back. Careful for a whole host of reasons. His hands are curled into fists on his thighs, and you don’t want him to move without thinking. You don’t want him to pull away, either, which is what he’ll do if you go overboard. It’s not the hottest first kiss you’ve ever had, but it’s the most intense by far. The fact that your lips are the only point of contact makes it even more so.

You’re trying to be careful, but you’re not careful enough – Tenko’s lower lip splits, and you taste blood. You sit back in a hurry. “Sorry. I didn’t mean –”

“I don’t care.” Tenko closes the gap between you again, presses his lips against yours a second time. “Do you?”

“I don’t want to stop kissing you,” you admit. You feel Tenko’s lips curve into a smile, spilling more blood onto yours. “But you have to let me make it up to you.”

“How?”

You unfold your hands from your sides and raise them, setting them on Tenko’s shoulders. Tenko freezes. You risk dragging your thumbs slowly across his collarbones, too prominent just like his shoulder blades and vertebrae are, and see his eyes fall half-lidded. A slow shudder runs through him, shedding tension in its wake. “Do you mind?” you ask.

“No.” Tenko kisses you again.

Kissing Tenko is – strange. It’s not bad. Definitely not bad, and definitely not something you want to stop doing, but still, it feels strange. Part of it is the taste of his blood on your lips, the almost-starved ridges of his shoulders and spine under your hands, the fact that you can touch him but he can’t touch you. And part of it is the missing piece of time, those fifteen years where you would have known each other if this hadn’t happened to Tenko – whatever this was. It feels almost like a blink. When you look back in your memories, you’re little kids, linking pinkies on the way to school. Now you’re kissing on the bed in Tenko’s room with Call of Duty paused in the background. Or making out. If the total lack of daylight between your mouth and Tenko’s is anything to go by, you graduated to making out already.

You can’t get your tongue involved without tasting even more of his blood, but the sound he makes and the shudder that runs through him when you swipe your tongue across his lower lip to clear it away makes it almost worth it. His fists are no longer resting on his thighs – now they’re on yours, fingers uncurling and curling again. You dare to slide one hand upward, tracing the back of his neck, and Tenko groans, shudders. The thought comes to you, again, that you should be careful with him. He’s so thin, so shaky under your hands. If you push him too far, he might break apart.

Tenko’s trying to talk without disconnecting his mouth from yours. That’s not going to work. You wrap your arms around his neck so he knows you’re not going anywhere and sit back. “What is it?”

“I want to touch you.” Tenko’s eyes are locked on yours this time, and the hunger and desperation you see there takes you by surprise. “I don’t know how to make it safe. I don’t want –”

Something happens to him then. You don’t know how to describe it. Something flashes behind his eyes, and his shoulders tense beneath your hands, muscles turning so rigid and brittle that they feel as though they could shatter. “It’s okay,” you say quickly. You shift closer to him without asking first, halfway into his lap, trying to give him some of the contact he wants without getting his hands involved. “You could go slow. Or be careful. Or if you had gloves –”

Tenko’s eyes light up. “Wait here.”

You shift out of his lap as requested and he gets to his feet, heading for one corner of the room. You take a second to get composed.  You can still taste Tenko’s blood on your lips, and when you raise your hands to touch your cheeks, they feel hot. Kissing him feels good, is good – but you’ve always liked your makeouts a little more hands-on, and once Tenko’s able to touch you safely, you can’t vouch for how well you’ll behave yourself. Are you really the only one who’s ever kissed him? He must be a quick study. Even with his blood on your lips, you’re already missing the heat of his mouth on yours.

Tenko’s back a moment later. He has a pair of gloves on – gloves that are missing the first three fingers. It takes all five to activate his quirk, which means you’re safe, and he still has the chance to touch you directly. He hesitates before he sits down again. “Do you really want –”

“Yes.” You catch his hand – it’s safe to do that now – and pull him down beside you. He makes a startled sound, which you immediately muffle in a kiss. It’s cute, but there are sounds you like better. “I want you.”

You were going to be more specific with what you wanted – I want you sounds heavy as all hell when the two of you have only just gotten physical – but Tenko doesn’t give you the chance. He wraps his arms around you tightly, so tight that it’s almost hard to breathe, but he doesn’t hold you that way for long. Soon enough his hands are roaming across your back from shoulder to hip, freezing briefly when they encounter your bra through your shirt, all while he deepens the kiss to an almost unsustainable degree. It’s like he’s trying to steal the air out of your lungs.

Tenko’s hands seize your shoulder, your hip, and grip hard. You don’t like being handled roughly, but held – that’s something different. You swallow a gasp and press closer to him, almost in his lap again. His grip on you tightens further and he pulls you the rest of the way. Your lips unlock from his in the move, coming loose with a slurping sound that would probably make you cringe under other circumstances, with someone else. As it is, you seize the opportunity to catch your breath.

Tenko looks up at you. His fingers are pressing deeply into your skin, hard enough to bruise through your clothes. His chest rises and falls rapidly, pressing against your own, and his red eyes are wide, pupils dilated. When you shift, trying to get settled in his lap, he sucks in a sharp breath. “Hold still.”

You’re comfortable now. You don’t mind. You look at him, studying the small things, the ones you remember from before. The tousled, slightly messy texture of his hair. His eyelashes, always a little longer than you expect them to be. The birthmark at the corner of his mouth, which you lean in to kiss lightly. You’ve always wanted to do that. Half the reason your first kiss was so messy was because you couldn’t decide whether to aim for the birthmark or his lips.

When you draw back, you see a surprised look on Tenko’s face. “You like that?” he asks. You nod, and a strange expression flickers across his face. “My grandma had it too.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“My other one. I saw in a picture.” Tenko’s thumb moves in slow circles over your hip, like he’s rubbing a worry stone. You don’t think he even knows he’s doing it. “She was a hero.”

“Really?” You didn’t expect him to say that. He nods. “You never told me.”

“I was going to.” Tenko’s eyes shift away from yours. “I found out that day.”

That day. It takes you a second to parse that, but once you do, your blood runs cold. The question balances on the tip of your tongue, a question you’ve been asking yourself for fifteen years, a question you know you shouldn’t ask him. You don’t need to know what happened. You saw what happened. All you need to know is that he’s here.

“Hey,” you say softly. Tenko won’t look at you, so you reach out, cupping the curve of his cheek, turning him back to put you face to face, if not eye to eye. “I’m glad you told me now. Better late than never. It would have been good to know for our games.”

Tenko scoffs at that. “We used to play some stupid games.”

“I liked them,” you say. “I like any game I play with you.”

Tenko’s been avoiding eye contact, but now he looks at you, and your breath catches. You can’t let him look at you like that. You’ll say more than you mean to. “Do you want to keep talking?” you ask. “Or do you want to make out some more?”

For a second you think Tenko will opt for talking. He looks like he’s thinking about it. Then the hand on your shoulder shifts to wrap around the back of your neck, and he drags you down for another kiss.

This position seems like it works for the two of you. The difference in your heights is perfect for it, and it gives you a little more control over the kissing while giving Tenko the chance to put his hands wherever he wants. He keeps them well clear of anything too forward, and eventually he finds a place he likes for both of them – one on your lower back, beneath the hem of your shirt, and the other around the back of your neck. It keeps you close, as if there was any chance you’d pull away.

You’re kissing too deeply to talk, except for once, when Tenko pulls away to make eye contact. “No more dates with heroes.”

You only went on that one date with Sugimura. After the night on the rooftop in Hosu, you had to accept that your feelings were elsewhere. “None for you, either.”

Tenko snorts. Then, almost as an afterthought: “No more with anybody.”

“You’re trying to lock it down already?” you tease. “It’s only our second date.”

“I don’t care.” Tenko’s expression is serious. “I don’t want another sidekick. You shouldn’t want another –”

He trails off, searching for the word. The word that follows naturally is ‘hero’, but you understand why he won’t use it. “I don’t want that,” you say. “You can lock me down. As long as I get to lock you down. It’s only fair.”

When you’ve had talks with guys about exclusivity in the past, they’ve looked vaguely annoyed. Tenko actually looks pleased with the thought. Not that that stops him from ribbing you about it. “You’re the one with seven siblings. You don’t like sharing?”

“I hate it.” you say, and he laughs. “You would, too, if you were me.”

Tenko smirks. He leans back from you without loosening his grip. “Go ahead, then,” he says. “Lock me down.”

He really shouldn’t challenge you like that. It gives you ideas. You lean in like you’re going to kiss him again, diverting at the last second to kiss the side of his neck, and Tenko’s complaints about how you don’t get to lock him down if you won’t even kiss him evaporate in seconds. You keep kissing him anyway. He wants you to lock him down? Fine. You’ll make sure everybody who looks at him knows that he belongs to somebody, even if they don’t know who that somebody is.

His neck is sensitive, and he’s not the quiet type. As high as his pain tolerance supposedly is, he’s almost absurdly sensitive to pleasure, and you like the idea of making him feel good a little too much. You know it’s working when Tenko’s grip on you changes, when he starts scrabbling for purchase on your back or your hip rather than holding tight, but even better than that is the unsteady sound of his breathing in your ear, the little noises he makes. You like it when guys are vocal. After one sound that crosses the line into a moan, you stop, and speak without lifting your mouth from his skin. “Locked down enough for you?”

“Fuck,” Tenko mumbles. You draw back to look at him and find his face flushed. “Maybe a little more –”

You kiss his mouth this time. You’re getting used to the taste of blood.

You don’t hear footsteps in the hallway or hear the door open, but you absolutely hear Kurogiri’s voice issuing from the doorway. “Shigaraki Tomura. It is nearly midnight.”

You pull away from Tenko, but not completely enough – there’s a rope of saliva stretching between your lips and his, which you deal with by leaning in to kiss him again. Tenko’s clearly embarrassed by Kurogiri’s presence, but that doesn’t stop him from kissing you back before he pulls away. “Knock next time,” he snaps at Kurogiri. “Are they here?”

“I will retrieve them shortly. Once the two of you are presentable.” Kurogiri apparently doesn’t trust the two of you not to go back to making out. He stands in the doorway, watching as you scramble out of Tenko’s lap and Tenko gets to his feet. “So the date went well?”

There’s that syntax shift again. “Shut up,” Tenko mutters. “Don’t act like you didn’t break my rule. You took her to Sensei. You’re lucky I don’t kill you.”

“If his orders contradict yours, my instructions are to follow his,” Kurogiri says. Tenko’s head snaps up. “I thought you were aware.”

“Now I am.” Tenko straightens his shirt and settles the hand over his face. He turns to face you and you wince. “What?”

You’ve seen the sketch of him from the USJ incident. It’s been all over the news for the past few weeks. “The hands for your neck – you might want them. There’s, um, evidence.”

“Evidence?” Tenko repeats, puzzled. Then his face turns red around the hand. He hurries to the far corner of the room and lifts a set of hands out, quickly securing them around his neck. “Can you see it now?”

You shake your head. “It is well hidden,” Kurogiri remarks. He looks to you. “Your disguise?”

You forgot about that. You collect the veil and crown off the end of the coffee table and secure both over your head. “I will retrieve the others,” Kurogiri says. “But first, the two of you.”

Warp gates open beneath your feet and Tenko’s, and when they close, you find yourselves in the bar again. Kurogiri himself vanishes, and Tenko settles into his usual seat. You stand there awkwardly. “Where do you want me to be?”

“Sit here.” Tenko taps the bar, and you scramble up. “Watch everybody. Keep an eye on the Stain fans. Act like you already know the plan. I should have told you already. I just –”

“You had other things to think about.” Your veil hides your face better than the hand hides Tenko’s – your face can flush until you’re practically glowing and no one will be able to see it unless they’re right up close. “How will I know if you want me to step in?”

“You’ll know when, if you need to. I trust you.” Tenko looks left, then right – then down at his hands. “Fuck. I can’t wear these. They’ll –”

“Here.” You hold out your hands for Tenko’s, and when he extends them, you peel the gloves off and tuck them away. With the model hands on and all ten fingers exposed, he’s different. You’re not sure how to quantify it, but you know it’s there, and it prompts a question. “Should I call you Shigaraki or Tomura?”

“Shigaraki,” he says, and you nod – but then, as the first warp gates begin to appear, he changes his mind. “Tomura. You’re different than they are. They should know from the start.”

So he’s planning to make your status distinct from the others, right from the beginning. You don’t know if that’s a good idea, but before you can protest or push back even slightly, the first of the allies Tenko’s gathered step through the portals, and you fall silent. Unless something goes horrendously wrong, you’re going to stay that way for the duration of the meeting.

The first two villains to arrive are also the youngest – the girl, Toga, and the boy who named himself Mustard, after the gas. Next up is the fire quirk-user, notable because of his patchwork skin and the staples holding the living tissue to the dead. You stare from behind the safety of your veil. You have no idea how his body is holding together. It shouldn’t be possible.

Next is a heteromorph, green-skinned and purple-haired, wearing a Stain mask. He must be the one Tenko – no, Tomura – said was hard to get a read on. The one you’re supposed to watch.

Magne arrives, followed shortly afterwards by a masked man – Compress, definitely, because the two men who arrive last are the murderers Kurogiri must have just broken out of prison. They scare you in a way the others don’t, and you’re so wary of them that you almost miss the arrival of the last villain. And you really shouldn’t miss his arrival. After all, he’s the only villain here who you’ve met before.

“Twice?” you say, startled, and Tomura looks up at you. Luckily, everyone else is still getting their bearings, and at least you said it quietly. “Sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Tell me later,” he says, and then he faces the other villains.

You’re not sure what he’s going to say, where he’s going to start, but in spite of the hands and the crew of monsters he’s assembled, all you can see is your childhood friend when he speaks. He sounds like he always did, laying out the details of the story before the game begins. “The heroes have regained their confidence. Because they dealt with Stain, they think it’s all been solved. I know that at least a few of you have questioned the effectiveness of what the League’s done so far. So have I. So we’re going back to what worked last time. We’re going to attack UA.”

Your stomach lurches. No wonder Tenko didn’t tell you. He must have known you wouldn’t approve. “They’ve tightened up security since your last attack,” Toga pipes up. “I took a look around, like you said. Nobody noticed me, but the whole campus is locked up tight.”

“Good work,” Tomura says, and Toga grins. Her incisors are sharp. “Toga’s reconnaissance confirmed my conclusion: UA is impregnable for now, which is why we’re not attacking the school itself. They’re running a summer training camp at a remote location, with significantly less security. That’s where we’ll hit them.”

“Them,” the fire quirk-user repeats. “Not All Might.”

“Not yet. We need to level up before we take him on.” Tomura’s shoulders are tense. “Hitting the camp, threatening their precious students – if the heroes can’t even protect their own kind, they can’t claim to be capable of protecting everyone else. Besides, that’s not the only reason we’re going there. You all are a good start, but we’ll need more allies if we want to win.”

“Why do you need more?” Mustard asks. “You’ve got us. We’re not good enough?”

Based on the belligerence, this is a sore spot. If Tomura can’t navigate it, you’ll step in – but somewhere beneath the hands, Tomura’s still the kid who knew how to make everybody feel included. “We can’t fight a war on just one front,” he says. “You and the others will win the strategic battle by destroying UA’s sense of superiority. And while you’re doing that, Compress and Toga will collect what we need to win the PR battle as well.”

“Indeed,” Compress agrees. “Are there other students you’d like me to capture, Shigaraki? Or are you interested only in the victor from the Sports Festival?”

The explosion kid. You remember him – the one who was so batshit berserk that he had to be muzzled and chained to a pole for the award ceremony. Tomura wants him for the League? “Use your discretion,” Tomura says. “He’s the priority. If you see others who are better suited to us than to the heroes, take them, too.”

“And I’ll get the blood,” Toga chimes in. Everyone turns to stare at her. “My quirk lets me turn into the people whose blood I drink! I can make myself look like a student, and I can say anything I want.”

Like a living deepfake. You knew Tomura was smart, but this is verging on diabolical. “What about the rest of us, then?” Muscular asks. There’s a sharp smile on his face, and just like Tomura, he’s tense. “Are we supposed to just stand around?”

“There will be pro heroes present,” Tomura says. “Mustard will incapacitate the students, but the pros will be more difficult to handle.”

“Difficult? For me?” Muscular scoffs and takes a step forward. “Just because an underground hero handed you your ass doesn’t mean I’ll have a problem.”

“If Eraserhead cancels your quirk, you’ll be in the same spot as me,” Tomura says shortly. He gets to his feet. Not good. “If you think I’m that easy to defeat, try your luck.”

It looks like Muscular wants to. Tomura’s hands are open at his sides, rising slightly, and just like you did in the convenience store last year, you speak up. “Both of your records speak for themselves,” you say, and Muscular turns to stare at you. “Tomura recognizes that the pros pose a threat to the success of the plan. And he recognizes that you’re well-equipped to handle them. That’s why you’re here.”

It’s quiet for a second. Muscular doesn’t step back into line, and neither does Tomura – but neither of them make a move, and when Tomura speaks again, Muscular doesn’t interrupt. “If you haven’t been given a more specific assignment, your job is to sow chaos,” he says. “Dabi, Spinner, Magne, Muscular, Moonfish – deal with the pros. If you have the opportunity to kill them, do it, as slowly or as quickly as you’d like. If not, keep them out of the way.”

“What about the students?”

Moonfish sounds like he’s speaking through a mouthful of razors. It makes your skin crawl, but Tomura doesn’t flinch. “The focus needs to be on the heroes and their failings, not on a bunch of dead kids. If that happens, that’s all anyone will talk about,” Tomura says. “Hurt them. Don’t kill them. That goes for all of them – except one.”

“Which one?”

“Midoriya Izuku.”

“No.” The green-skinned heteromorph speaks up for the first time. “Not him.”

Tomura turns towards him, incredulous, and the heteromorph keeps talking. “Stain spared his life. He recognized him as a true hero. I won’t subvert Stain’s will like that.”

A joke pops into your head – Stain’s not gonna fuck you – and you clench your jaw shut. “Stain’s will?” Tomura repeats. “Stain lost.”

“His ideas still live,” the heteromorph – Spinner, you think – says. “Are you following in Stain’s footsteps or not?”

You see Tomura’s shoulders tense again and realize that you’ve got approximately three seconds before he blows his top. “Stain and Tomura share a belief that hero society is rotten to the core,” you say. “The fact that the only examples of true heroes Stain could find are All Might and a fifteen-year-old illustrates the decay. Don’t you think?”

You’ve put Tomura and Stain on the same conceptual level, and you’ve put Spinner on the spot – and most importantly, you’ve contained Tomura for the time being. “I guess,” Spinner says after a second. “I still don’t think –”

“If you’re worried about following in Stain’s footsteps, follow them by killing false heroes,” Tomura interrupts. “There will be plenty to choose from at the training camp. Don’t concern yourself with Midoriya Izuku. Act as your ideals demand.”

Tomura glances around the room. “That goes for all of you. Use what methods you’d like. Act as you see fit, so long as those actions don’t imperil our common goal. Disrupt the camp, disable any pro heroes who get in your way, kill them if you want, and assist Toga and Compress in completing their objectives.”

It’s quiet. You can tell Tomura’s waiting for an argument, and when one doesn’t come right away, he picks one. “Does anyone have issues with their assigned role?”

“I have an issue,” the fire quirk-user says. Dabi, you think. The one Tomura said was an asshole, and when he points one finger at you, you decide you agree with Tomura’s assessment. “What’s your role? Who are you?”

“Yeah,” Muscular says. “What’s under that veil? And why do you talk so much?”

“She’s our medic,” Tomura says. “She’s trustworthy.”

“She’s hiding her face.”

“So am I,” Twice pipes up. “And Compress. Shigaraki, too. Besides, it’s good to have a medic! If the medic’s good.”

You owe Twice for having your back, even if he doesn’t know you. Dabi doesn’t look convinced. “What’s your name?” he repeats.

“You get her name when I get yours,” Tomura says. “My alliance with her existed before the League did. She’s trustworthy.”

Toga squints at you, then takes a few steps closer. “I like your costume,” she says. “You look like a bride.”

“I can’t see your face at all,” Magne says. “Hopefully it’s cuter than the veil is.”

“I hope so, too,” you say. Magne laughs.

Tomura doesn’t like that. You can tell. “Kurogiri, bring the maps,” he orders. A warp gate opens in the middle of the room, disgorging a map taped to a rolling whiteboard. “I don’t know your quirks as well as you do. We’ll devise this attack plan collectively.”

Tomura wasn’t in school long enough to learn what a pain in the ass group project are, but given that villains don’t like being bossed around, it’s not the worst strategy. You hang back, physically and verbally, steering clear of Dabi and Muscular and only stepping in when the temperature needs to be turned down. You’re the least powerful person in a room full of people who think nothing of throwing their weight around. In some ways, it’s just like being at home with your family.

Tomura asked you to watch, and you start piecing together an understanding of the group’s dynamic. The most stable individuals in the group are Kurogiri, Magne, and Compress, all by a long shot. The most easily dysregulated is Mustard, and while you think Dabi and Muscular can probably control themselves, you also think they’ll choose not to. You have a pretty good grasp on Twice from your previous meeting. Moonfish doesn’t say enough for you to be able to tell, but he also doesn’t start fights, and Toga’s a dark horse. So is Spinner.

Spinner’s hard for you to figure. He’s got no criminal record, but unlike Toga and Mustard, he’s old enough to have collected one. He’s probably the biggest Stain fan of the group, the only one who pushed back against Tomura on ideological grounds, but he’s also something of a team player. His role in the attack gets settled early, and he shifts to the outskirts of the group. After a few minutes psyching yourself up to do it, you slide down from the bar and join him.

He glances over at you, then double-takes. “You look like a ghost in that thing,” he says. “It works, though. I’d hide my face if my face mattered.”

“How do you mean?” you ask. “You’re joining the League of Villains. Your face is about to get pretty famous if you don’t cover it up.”

Spinner laughs, but there’s a rueful note to it. “I’m not exactly breaking hearts by turning to a life of crime. At least this way I’m doing something with my life.”

Weird and weirder. “What were you before this? If it’s okay for me to ask.”

“Only if it’s okay for me to ask how long you’ve known Shigaraki.”

You think about that. “Does ‘a long time’ count as an answer?”

“That depends. Is it months or years?” Spinner asks. You don’t know if you should answer that, and Spinner can tell. “I know I pissed him off earlier. You shut it down pretty fast. I figure either it’s your quirk or you just know him really well.”

“It’s not my quirk,” you say. You think back to the first time Tenko told you his new name. “Less than forever, more than a year.”

“I was a shut-in,” Spinner says, answering your question without responding to your answer to his. No wonder he’s got a record. It’s hard to get a record when you don’t leave your room. “That video of Stain’s is the first thing I ever saw that made sense. If you all have the same goal as Stain did, then I’m in the right spot.”

You nod. Someone is raising their voice in the group, and you key in – but it’s just one of the versions of Twice, getting excited about something. Spinner glances curiously at you. “You sure you don’t have an alias or something?”

You shake your head. You might be at a meeting of villains, wearing a disguise, listening to them plan to kidnap one high school student and traumatize the hell out of a few more, but picking out a name for yourself feels a little far. If Tomura thinks you need a name, he’ll probably give one to you.

The meeting breaks up two hours after midnight. You missed hearing the date the attack will take place, possibly on purpose, and when the group splits, leaving just you and Tomura and Kurogiri, you don’t ask what it was. Kurogiri pours drinks for you and Tomura. You sit down at the bar next to him, and he speaks without looking up from his glass. “What did you find out about Spinner?”

“He was a shut-in before. As long as you can tie your goals to Stain’s, he’ll follow along,” you say. Tomura nods. “How did the rest of it go?”

“I’m leaving some of the on-site planning to them. I’m not there to give orders, so they need to be able to adapt.” Tomura takes a sip of his drink. “Dabi’s a pain in the ass, like I thought, but I’m giving him temporary control of a Nomu to use during the fight. That should keep him quiet for now.”

He’s thought of everything. “You’re good at this stuff,” you say. “You barely needed me.”

Tomura looks up. “Yes, I do.”

It’s quiet for a little bit after that. You and Tomura drink, you staring down into your glass and Tomura staring at you, until you look up at the clock behind the bar and realize what time it is. “I have work in the morning. I have to go home.”

“Stay.” Tomura catches your sleeve with three fingers, but a small portal opens, depositing your bag a few feet away on the bar. “Kurogiri can take you to work from here.”

“I can’t show up in yesterday’s clothes. And I need to sleep. So do you.” You’re right, and Tomura knows it. He scowls anyway. He’s never happy when you leave, but right now he looks unhappier than usual. “What is it?’

“Once the attack happens, I can’t bring you back until things settle down.” Tomura’s looking unhappier by the second. “The brat can’t see you until I know he’s with us.”

“Oh,” you say. You wonder how long that will take. “That’s okay. I understand.”

“It’s not okay,” Tomura snaps. “It’s – take that thing off. I need to see you.”

You take it off quickly. “Kurogiri,” Tomura says. “Turn around.”

“I will return in five minutes.”

Kurogiri vanishes, and once he does, Tomura lowers the hand from his face, pries the other two from around his neck, and just like that, he’s Tenko again. “It’s not okay,” he repeats. “I need you with me. I feel different when you’re here.”

“Different than what?” you ask. He must think it’s a positive change, or he wouldn’t want you to stay. Tenko doesn’t answer. “Send Kurogiri to get me as soon as it’s safe, Ten. I’ll be waiting.”

You see his eyes light up ever so slightly, but it fades fast. “You’ll forget.”

Your heart aches, but this is something you can fix. “Let me show you something.”

The last forty-eight hours have been chaos, and you’ve spent most of it miserable, terrified, drunk, hungover, or making out with your childhood best friend on his couch. But somewhere in the middle of that, you managed to get into one of the two boxes you brought home from your parents’ purge and take something out. You couldn’t bring yourself to wear the locket, but you tucked it into your bag along with your disguise, and when you put your disguise away, you fish it out.

Tenko looks suspicious. “Who gave you that.”

“My parents, probably. That’s not the important part.” You close your eyes and struggle to come up with an explanation, one that doesn’t make you sound obsessed or insane or too invested in this, in him. “I found this in a box in my parents’ house. There was a lot of stuff in there about you and me.”

“Like what?”

“Pictures,” you say. “A birthday gift from you. The valentine you gave me. I put all that stuff in there when I was ten and taped it shut.”

“Why?”

“My parents were taking me to get my memory wiped the next day, so I really would forget.” You see Tenko’s eyes widen. “I hid that stuff from them, but I saved it for me. So even if the memory wipe worked, I could open it up and remember you again.”

You open the locket and hold it out for Tenko to inspect. You see his expression twist. “I never forgot about you,” you say. “When we saw each other again, that’s why I reacted that way. I always hoped you were alive. If I didn’t forget you in fifteen years, a few days or weeks or months isn’t going to make a difference.”

Tenko’s jaw is clenched. The tendons in his neck stand out, and his hands are curled into fists at his sides. You were trying to help, but it looks like you’ve made it worse. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I shouldn’t have –”

Tenko seizes you and yanks you into his arms. “Shut up,” he mumbles, his voice muffled by your shoulder, or maybe your chest. “How am I supposed to let you leave now?”

“You have to. It’ll be okay,” you say. “I did promise not to go on any dates with heroes.”

It’s quiet for a second. Your arms are around Tenko, and you feel his shoulders shake. “That’s not funny.”

You know that particular note in his voice. It makes you feel better. “Don’t laugh, then.”

Tenko snorts, hugs you closer and tighter. Then he lets you go. “Next time you’ll stay,” he says.

“If I have the next day off, sure,” you say, and Tenko smiles slightly. “We never got to have sleepovers before.”

It’s true. You asked and so did he, but your parents said you were too young, even though neither of you would have been farther from home than right across the street. You see Kurogiri reappear out of the corner of your eye and know you’re out of time. “Be careful,” you say to Tenko. “Come find me as soon as it’s safe.”

“I will.” Tenko gets to his feet. “Turn around, Kurogiri.”

“Believe me, there’s nothing going on over there that I want to see.”

One of these days you’re going to ask Tenko why Kurogiri’s like that, why he seems like he’s two people in one. Not tonight. There isn’t time. You have time for one more kiss with Tenko, but that’s all – and the instant the two of you separate to take a breath, Kurogiri warps you away, dropping you back in your apartment. Your bag lands on the couch next to you. You still have the locket clenched in one hand. There are still a few drops of Tenko’s blood on your lips.

You lick them away, feeling twenty kinds of insane as you do it. Your mind is crowded with dozens of questions, thoughts, images, memories, all of them demanding to be addressed at once. You kick off your shoes, move your bag to the floor, and lie back on the couch. Your eyelids are heavy the instant you’re horizontal, and by the time it occurs to you that you should let go of the locket or at least put it somewhere safe, you’re fast asleep.

TvT my first oneshot i hope its not that bad my english is so poor

A friend of a Friend

Tomura shigaraki x reader

You came to see your online friend in a dark alley, he didn't came alone and its going to change the plan of the night.(English is not my first language)

NSFW warning: dubcon, bondage, somnophilia ,anal (a little), cum play, chocking kink, cru words. (Tell me of i miss something)

A friend of a Friend.

You were walking in a dark alley as you were about to finaly meet your online friend.

To be completly honest you couldn't wait. He was kinda grumpy sometime but most of a time were a sweet shy cinnamonroll. You were a very known streamer and you actually have a lot of creepy fan so the place of the meet up wasn't the most exiting one. You tried to stay calm until your friend arrive. It was the first time you meet one of your online friend irl and you were sadly only thinking about your safety. Not that you were wrong through...

When you were about to get back home thinking that he will probably never come, you saw two man coming. They were in the darker part of the alley so you couldn't see there face.

You realise fast enought that they might be a danger. You were quirkless. Plus your friend was supposed to came alone so it couldn't be him.

You are a foreigner, you'r nit jappanes and you defenetly don't know this city. Still you instinct tell you to walk fast in the opposit way... Stess and apprention were almost suffocating you as you wish to not have a panic attack at this moment and fall like those stupid girl in horror movies.

It was too late when you realise that this path was a close one. You face the mans that were still following you...well that were following you because you weren't actually shute they did it could have been in your head. The enormous amout of horror game could have somehow affect your way of seeing things ?

The two man's footsteps were the only sound in the alley. Your breath was heavy but silencious as you try to make yourself as small as possible not wanting any problem but ready to deffend you life.

When the first man appear your muscles immediatly relax as you reconise is face. He smile at you looking kinda amused by your réaction.

"Shuishi you bastard you scared the shit out of me !"

You laught as you hug your friend. 

His body was tensing as he was obliously not used to physical touch. The stress rapidly hit you again as you saw red eyes scanning your body in a way that make you shiver. You let go of your friend and you look at the second man your eyesbrow narrowed in an annoyed expression.

"Who is that ?"

You can see the second man slightly flinching and your friend awkwardly thinking of an awnser.

"That...uh that is Tomura !"

He knew you were a foreigner so how could you know his identité right ?

"Ookay ?"

You respond to him obviously nit satisfief of his respond.

"He kinda like your vidéo and he is the great gamer i told you about !"

Your expression soften a little as you give him your hand for a handshake

"Hi then ! I'm really happy to know you ! Thanks for looking at my content ! It really help."

He look at your hand with an awkard expression like you were the most weird things on earth. You were begining to feel insulted but he finaly respond as he shake your hand his pinky up.

"Hi then...no problem, whatever."

You look at him as awkwardly but you were actually kinda amused. He look shy and his voice sound so cutely weird too ! But you inner you was insulting you for thinking that like, litteraly nothing tell you that he is gonna be your type so what are you feeling all mushy ? You should really calm yourself...

Your friend Shuishi clear is troath and the man with crimson eyes's hand immediatly leave yours.

You could barely see the rest of his face because of his mask and his hood but you can see some white hair comming out that were shining in the light of tge moon contrating with the darkness of the place.

Shuishi then propose you to go to a coffee. It sound weird at night but you agree. When yiu arrived you saw that it also do snacks. You were happy to arrived because Shuishi and Tomura were not tge type to talk a lot on the way. Of course you and Shuishi had some talk after all it was you guys meet up but he was kinda shy and you were having a hard time with Tomura's eyes scanning. You can almost feel it crawing in your skin and passing throught your clothes.

He, on his side were litteraly eye fucking you. He's been watching your live since the begining. Even your vidéo that were less popular. You had became his obsession. More then once he through of kidnapping you and here, on of the vilains of his groups just give you to him in such an easy way. It had been hard persuading Spiner to let him have her but hell nah he doesn't regret anything. 

The little group enter in the coffee, it was empty if it wasn't for the worker. We could see how tired they were just by looking at them and you almost felt bad for making them work this late.

You just look at Shuishi but he wasn't looking at you. He simply walk to a table right next to a big window. You natutally sit next to the lezard man. You were kinda confused when tomura choose to sit right in front of you when the most logical part for him would be to sit next to the Window in front of Shuishi.

When the waitress came taking order they both take a back coffee but your friend also take a donut. You deceide to take a donut and a hot chocolate with a hint of coffee.

As you were waiting Tomura went to the bathroom, you used this occasion to talk to your friend about him.

"Shu ! Why did you bring him ! You know that i'm not comfortable with strangers ! Especially him ! Did you see how he looked at me ?"

You were speaking in an hushed tone as you couldn't stop pinching your thighs.

"Come on, can't you force yourself a little ? Just try giving him a chance. Yes Tomura is..special but i'm shure you two could get along pretty well."

You sigh and close your arms. 

"Fine...but if he act too weird you'll make him leave right ?"

He look annoyed but he nod.

"Fine."

Before the conversation have the time to go any futher you saw the blue haired man coming back. You gave him a small smile and you could swear you saw him blushing a little.

You began to feel uneasy again but Shuishi start talking about vidéo game. It was the hobbies that you three shared. For the first time you have a real talk with both of them. For the first time, you just realise, Tomura had talk. His voice was cracked but someway soft. You were feeling better now, he was kinda cool and, a real good playet from what you were hearing.

The waitress arrived with your and the other's orders. You couldn't help but smile happily at the sight of your donut.

You look at Tomura and you couldn't stop yourself from wondering about why he still have his hood on. Some people have mask so its more commun but most of the time when they arn't outside people take their hood of.

Tomura frose at your words. Did you somehow revonised him ? Why were you staring at him so hard ? He instinctivly start scratching his neck furiously. It make you looked away whitch doesn't stop him from continuing. He saw you tock a big hungry bite and coudle help but immagine your lips and your cheeks wrapped around his cock. He can feel his pants becaming too tight to his liking. He grunt at the feelings but rapidly control himself as you look at him once again.

You were happily eating as you hear a weird nose. You look up at the man that were in front of you and you eyes widened as you saw his hood off. It had been puld back by his hand when he wzs scratching himself. You couldn't help but close your thighs at the sight. Many would be disgusted by his features but you find them alluring. You often find men classic and enven basics but him, with all his features he was defenetly your type.

Spiner caught you looking at his friend and couldn't help but smile as he hope that you'll like Tomura and that he won't have to force you to be by his side.

You finish eating and you look at shigaraki drinking his coffee as you have a huge of booping his nose that were currently block against the coffee cup.

It really gave you mixed up signal. A part of you were uneasy and wanted yo ran away but the other was already having a huge crush on him.

Tomura looked at Spiner with a cold gaze indicating him that it was now time to let him have you. It didn't gave a lot of time to the lizard vilains to imagine a lie to let the two of you alone.

You were, on your side trying to chose if you like him or not and the yes was becaming to win. You see that Spiner was about to talk so you quickly interupt him. 

"Spiner can i talk to you please ? In private.."

Shigaraki looked sad almost like a lost puppy but it quicky turn to an annoyed and angry cringy face that make you block on him for a second.

Spiner nod while having an eyes on shigaraki to make shure that his boss isn't ready to break.

Once you two were outside of the coffee, you let your stress take ahead of yourself.

"-Oh Shuishi ! I have a big problem with your friend !"

You saw him flinch at your final words.

"-Come on y/n i ask you to at least try..i-"

You don't let hil time to finish.

"-That's not the problem ! Shu, i have a crush on him ! I said no crush on tha viewer !"

The next sentence was a terrible excuse but you couldn't accept that the reason you doesn't want to have a crush on him was that he is the définition of a freak.

Shuishi couldn't help but laugh at the situation. He was also relief. Now it was his job to lead you to accept your attraction to his boss.

"Really ? Well hum i'm not the best with those things but i think that you should tell him anyway !  I think that you two would do a pretty good duo ! And it won't hurt you to try would it ?"

He saw you thinking of it and he was happy to saw you considering it.

"Maybe.."

You said as you could help but imagine you with him.

"But if he reject me its your fault ! "

You always were the type to be direct about your love 'cause you didn't see the point of hiding it for too long.

You two came back in the coffee and you were a blushing mess. Your stomac was tingling as you felt butterfly. One day you saw onlinr that often its your body that feel thrilled...you didn't even know if it was true or another fake information but it made you thinks of the song "inferno".

Here you felt like it was true as you body fight the urge to be with him and to ran away.

He was starting to get impatient but you came right before it was too much.

He was about to ask Shuishi to get the fuck out again but you stand right in front of him and say like it was the most easy things in the world

"Oi !  I have a crush on you ! "

He vent all red from the tip of his toes to the head.

"The hell ?!"

He say without really thinking if it.

On your side you were determined, after all we only have one life !  But his réaction really wasn't making things easy.

"So..hm.."

You try as you start to get embarrassed. What if Shuishi was wrong ?  Usually the lizzard man doesn't say things he's not shure of but what if he was wrong this time ?

"Okay. I think you'r hot too."

The voice of Tomura cut your through with these words. You slightly blush at his words. You didn't really say that he was hot and he doesn't really confirm his feelings for you but it was a good start that allowed you a little bit of relief.

"Thanks hmm..i don't hm..what's next ? "

You asked as you were nit used to this type of things. You already had a relashionship in the past but it was in hight school so its been a while for now on and, having a crush as an adult probably is a lot defferent but him, he act like a teenager as he blush hard as he take your hand.

"You can come to my place ?"

This time your were the one that blush as you feel a tingling sensation in your cheek. He blush when he take your hand and then asked you to come to his house ? Who the hell is he ?!

On his side Spiner was looking at the two of you while feeling quite uncomfortable.

"Yea he's not wrong, you two really need to get a room.."

///

That's how you end in this situation, entering in a bar full of vilains in a town you didn't know with a stranger you have a weird crush on and an online friend that you saw for the first time. You could see that almost every one in here were looking at you and you couldn't help be feel goosebum as their gaze wasn't friendly. A man with a weird smoke quirk great you and your "companion".

"Hi, you should be y/n. I'm hapoy to meet you."

He doesn't let you the time to process his words and tge fact that he already know you tgat he turn to Tomura like Spiner doesn't even exist.

"Its a pleasure to see you back Tomura shigaraki. Can i do Anything.."

He was cut of by a sharp no from the blue haired man. The bartender just nod and start cleaning his glass again finaly asking Spiner if he wanted something to dring.

You were still a little lost when Tomura grab your hand.

"Come on"

He lead you to his room and sit in his bed his hand still wrapped around your wrist his pinky up.

"What are you waiting for ?"

He asked in a cold tone.

He wasn't doing it on purpose, he just felt to much and not enought at the same time. It all were unreal. He doesn't knew what to do too and he was also feeling sick with appreantion. His gaze was focus on your wrist were his fingers were in contact with your bare skin. It was so soft in contrast to his rought one. So easy to break that he wanted to touch you more before he might see it break apart. 

You sit right next to him and he wish that the bed would have your sent after you will be gone.No. He won't let you go. Ever. Never. His heart fluter when you finaly talk.

"What do you want ?"

It was so simples words. So simple but they have so much hiding sense to Tomura when you said them. For him it was a consent to be more intimate.

"I want to touch you.."

He said with is voice shivering in a cracked tone. As his eyes finaly meet your and open wide at your smiling one. He wanted to keep them. If you were to die he would keep your eyes for him forever.

"Go on"

You sait as you cutely bite your lips and smile once again. Your smile was warm but somehow shy. He also wanted to bite your lips. Master had told him that he can have everything he want. And you told him to "go on" so he didn't asked before doing it.

Your heart skipped a beat as he pull you closer and almost hit you with his lips in a small peek before bitting your lips. He felt weird. He clearly wasn't experiznced. You already have kiss soemone before so you wanted to lead him. 

You let a little noise of pain when his tooth broke the skin but he didn't bite too hard so you didn't really complain. You gently pass your hand throught  his hair as he let a loud grunt at the feelings. He was also very vocal during the kiss and even with your attemps on leading him to a gently one he ignore them and continue bitting you until you open your mouth to complain. It was a big mistake and he used it to pass his tongue in your mouth. The surprise make you lose you balance and you fall on top of him. You were surprise to feel his chest toned. He looked quite skinny not that it was bothering you. His grip on your wrist didn't loose and he only let you go once he was satified with his firsy kiss.

You had spit all around your mouth and he looked quite amused. The tatse of your own blood replace the taste of his mouth and you cringe at the sensation as you wipe your mouth. He couldn't help be grin proudly at the sight.

"Was that your first kiss ?"

You asked curiously. It wasn't mean or at least yiu didn't meant to be but it wipe his smile away as dark blush appear on his cheek ear and nose once again you wanted to boop him.

"Yes ! Do you have a problem with that ?"

He asked with a shame hid under some fake anger. She can see his embarassement easily so you try to cool him down.

"No of course not ! It was just..sloppy ?"

He laugh at the word you used

"I like it that way"

He simply said.

You open your mouth in a O as you deceide not to say anything about about that and the fact that here it was more then just sloppy and that he almost wet half of your face.

You just smile and try to figure out what to do next. You never don't even know if you really wanted to go any futher. You never really had done anything sexual before. You only had pump your old boyfriend's dick but you didn't do anything more as you didn't felt comfortable. But in some weird way with him you felt better about it. It wasn't plan in any way it was just caught  in the moment, in the feelings and sensation.

He  grin again and he asked

"do you ever fucked soemone ?"

You blush hard at the sudden question, he really wasn't like most people isn't he ? Talking about that you start to realise that he was hard. And not just a little. You wonder if it was the kiss that make him like this. It was only through his pants so you couldn't see everything but he was shure big. Your mouth water at the sight and you hear him chuckles as you quickly look away in shame.

"Hey i asked you a question..eager arn't you ?"

He laught once again and his hand grab your shirt. It quickly deseaper and some ashed fall on the bed. 

"Hey !"

You complain, even if it wasn't a shirt you especially like it was still one of your shirt ! You start feeling exposed as he was now able to see you in your bra only. He quickly remove it and you instintly hid your breast under your palm.

Even without really seeing them Tomura could already feel himself being close. The sight was mesmerizing.

"You'r beautifull."

He simply say as you felt weak under his piercing eyes that were trying to memorise every detail of your upper body. 

His cock was painfully hard at this point and he couldn't help but grunt as his pants was suddently was to tight. In a second your skirt and short were off as he almost ripped them. You didn't have time to complain before he used your surprise to grab your breast. The contact between his rought hand and the soft skin of your boobs make you shiver and his head fall back.

"T-Tomura ? Are you okay?!"

You asked as yiu saw him eyes closed in the matrest twitching a little. You look at him to check him out and your eyes widened at the sight of the extasic expression on his face. The smile he had was almost scary and his red eyes looked almost dark with his pupil that growed as the orgasme hit him. He just came in his pants.

A twisted part of yourself find it cute but the rest was a bit desapointed. His hand was still holding on your breast and when he finaly calm down it start massaging you. It almost hurt as he was shurly doing it for himself more then for your pleasure but you still couldn't help but be exited by it. You wated more then just that ad you truly hope that he can be able to last longer. 

He spend at least for minutes just touching your breast as you were waiting for him to get bored. He only stopped when you hide your face on the crock of his neck and start sucking on his skin. He pass a lot of time scratching himself so your saliva on his wound almost burn at first. It cought him out of gard and his body tense. Feelings your bare skin against him as you were glue to him to the point of sucking his neck was a lot of physical contact and intimate one with that. He didn't know how to react to it so he just let you do as you wanted almost scared that of he were to move you would stopped. His mind were screaming him to take charge but he was too caught in the moment. The feelings of your tongue exploring each of the scars of his neck was driving him crazy. You slowly took his pants down and you quickly did the same for the rest of his closed feeling more in power now that you'r not the only one nacked. He feel too hot in that moment. His usual cold skin was in total contrast to your hot one and the heat was almost keeping him from breathing as your hand brush against his twitching cock. The tip was red and a bit inclaned in a way that was perfect. Yiu never really find dick beautifull but if you had to admit that his was a work of art. They were some veins that run and twitch at your touch. At the base some rare blue body hair were almost making a ring around his proud member as his balls were seeming full of semen under it. You gave him a few pump at it was the only things you were really experiznced about and you look at his face for his reactiong and the look was priceless. She gave him some more as you felt yourself wetting your panties at the through of him slaming into you.

He rapidly come once again white smemen splashing on the matress and your hand. He didn't have warned you 'cause he was scared that you may have stopped. He couldn't help his wicked smile as he saw your angelic hand ruined with his cum. He swear he could have come again when he saw you licking it of your fingers. He almost felt jealous of your fingers. Alsmost because he doesn't wanted to come again if it wasn't on you. Plus he was scared to not be able to hold back in you. Even your gently hand felt so much better then his own so he could only imagine how your pussy would. 

You were already wet but he knew he had to prepare you. I want you to enjoy it so that you'll be willing to do it again with him. He spit on one of his hand and pull your panties down with the other. He look qt you to see if you were ready and your blushing and shy face immediatly make him hard again. A huge smile spread on his face making his lips even more shaped as he spead your legs. The sight was alluring. Your wet hot sex right in front of him ready for him to touch as he wanted.

He slowly put a finger in that cought a moan out of your mouth and give him the encouragement to continue. He start moving it in at first not really knowing how to do so but he quickly start understanding what feels good and what don't and you quickly start feeling incredibly good. He had another fingers in, always trying to put in deeper even if it was already deeper then you ever reach alone. He's a very quirck learner when he put in the effort. You start seeing star and mewing when he add a fird one.

"Please..Fuck Tomura that's good.."

You moan as you hold onto his arm that were holding you up onto him.

He didn't stop smiling as he were moaning from time to time at how you felt on his finger while imagining how it would be on his dick.

"Freaking tight..do you ever ?"

He asked as he was fucus of how he was streatching your pussy.

"No.."

He felt even happier when he learn that he was your first.

"Good."

He simply say as his fingers start to speed up making you clench on him. You start to  feel the usual tingling sensation in your stomac that arrived when you were about to cum. The speed of his fingers making you see start but he stopped right before you came.

"No !~ !"

You moan as laught cruely.

"What ? Don't you want the real things ?"

He said pumping his dick as some tears start glowing in the corner of your eyes.

"Its not fair..you already came twice.."

He smile again at you moue.

You position yourself on his laps and take a deep breath before looking at him with appreantion. He also look a bit unshure but he let you in command for now on only.

You slowly but yourself in front of his tip as you pray for him to actually fit.

You slowly go down and your face cringe in pain as you felt like you were being cut in two. It hurt so bad tears was already falling on your cheek.

Tomura on his side were already in pure bliss. It was so warm and so soft but also so tight he was seeing some spot of light in the dark room that were his.

You finay sat on his dick having it tataly in. All of your muscles were tense whitch honestly didn't help much for feeling better. You stay like this for a minute before he came again. You throught that ut was already the end before yiu felt him imediatly hzrd again.

"Fuuuck !"

He almost scream as a dark chuckles come out of his troath. He put his hand on your thighs and put you uo then down forcing you to bounce. You yelp at the pain and he grunt in satisfaction. A small sensations of pleasure finaly coming in your pussy help you relaxed a little bit.

He does the process again and the pleasure spead even futher. The pain wzs still there but this time you moan along with him. After some bounce you finaly relax as he change position a sadistic smile on his face.

"You know what pet ? I think this is a little bit too vanilla yo my liking..don't you thinks ? After all, slut like you that fucked on the firt day like it rought huh ?"

He laught and trust real hard this time making your eyes roll back and your grip on him tighent.

"Oooh yes ! You like that when i call you a slut don't you hmm ?"

You hated to feel this good and that he was completly right about you. 

"Please Tomura..just.."

You moan as he was still pounding hard. You head feelings light as your legs closed around him for some stability.

"Please what doll ? Scream it ! I want the whole league to hear you be such a big vilains slut especially Spiner ! The wall are so small.."

He's laught is now mental, his smile too but it only make your arrousal worse. You did as he said too desperate to feel him, to feel how hood he can make you.

"Please break me !"

He put his hand around your troath now deceiding of the amount of breath you needed.

"That's it, you'r a good girl arn't yuh ?"

You could really respond with his hand around your troath like this. You never knew it was one of your kink before but it just felt right now that he does it.

You doesn't even remember how easily he could kill you of he lost his self control, you were feeling like you were in a buble and exept him and the pleasure and pain that cloud yoir mind you couldn't feel or think of anything. You can feel the skin of your neck breaking under his fingertips. No one even him realise how your "quirkless" body resist to the deadly touch of five of his finger. You two were too extasic to realise that you couldn't be affected by his quirk.

You moan his name to make him know that you were closed whitch he honestly already know with how tight you were while twitching around his cock like a vice.

"Fucking hold it you cum dump slut ! Wait until i cum !"

He said as he slap the fat of your ass with his free hand.

You was crying like a baby at that moment your whole body trying to stop yourself from dysobeing him as he wzs pounding in you at an inhuman speed.

He let a final guttural grunt as he came along with you. You past out in the process leaving him your unconsious body. Nit that it will stopped him of course, this man have an incredible stamina.

When you finaly whoke up the next morning, your body wzs sore, cum was still driping out of your pussy and you also had so new on your belly and your face. You also were tied up to the edges of the bed. At first you were scared and lost but when a sting of pleasure hit you, you look down to see a Tomura with big dark circles under his eyes sucking in your tits and bitting it gently. Your belly and other boobs were full of love bite and other trace of owning. He great you with a big smile as he finaly stop and kiss you passionaly but still in a sloppy way. Your whole body but more especially your cunt hurt badly. How many time did he used you like this ?! The whole night ?! You also just realise that you two didn't used any condom.

"Tomura ?!"

You scream when he end the kiss, you were about to ask some explaination but the warm loving smile he gave you lake you blush incredibly hard.

"Hii my beloved pet ! Do you enjoy your night ? Because i shure do thanks to you ! Now i'll give you a reward~"

He looked at your with hungry eyes that make you want to hide. Sadly in the position he toed you in you were completly at his mercy.

He moved until his head was right in front of your clit and he start licking it like a kitten. You were incredibly sensitive from the night you past so the simple act make you cry a little. His rought lips were just si perfect against your abused cunt that every kiss felt like heaven. You were desperatly trying to move or close you legs but you couldn't and the act just make him laught witch cause you even more pleasure as it vibrate. Your arrousal were dripping on the bed as he moved down his pretty long tongue intering your hot sex as his nose was teasing your clit.

You were babeling about how much it was and that you couldn't take more but you couldn't talk properly. He laugh and try yo tease you even more.

"What ? I can't understand darling, do my pet want more ?~"

He wrap a hand on your neck and force it forward as he put a finger in your ass making you yelp at the intrusion. He oush it deep enought to touch the wall that is between your pussy and ass appling some pressure to your wall and make shure tgat his tongue can easily hit your g spot.

His attack rapidly made you cum desperatly as your wall body were twitching. You could barely take you breath with his hand around your troath. He kissed you again before finaly let you take a proper breath.

"You did so well doll, now lets just rest all right ? I'll clean you up after"

He smile and pass out on top of you. You were still panting. You realise that he let you tied up so you couldn't move but just wait untill he whoke up to free you. He was happily resting on your chest. It was kinda scary to know that he had abused you the whole night , but at the end of the day it wasn't this bad after all..after it was now your new life. Your new life by his side.

5685 words

Flamme.