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
There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it. As summer ends and the neighborhood kids go back to school, it begins to feel like there’s something wrong with the neighborhood, too. Keigo and the others haven’t found Dabi’s conjurer yet, and with school back in session and two of the former ghosts in the neighborhood going to and from the same place five days a week, the likelihood that the conjurer will find the neighborhood before he’s found and killed feels higher than it should be. You’re worried about that, distantly. If Garaki comes here, it won’t be you he’s after.
You and Aizawa are monitoring any mention or recurrence of any of the aliases Tomura’s conjurer has gone by, but there’s no sign of him. It also seems to have been a long time since he summoned and bound a ghost. You got sick of running messages back and forth between Aizawa and Mr. Yagi, so you finally introduced them, and through a mix of Aizawa’s contacts, Mr. Yagi’s contacts, and former and current ghosts Hizashi knows, you were able to determine that nobody’s created a new haunt in at least a decade. “I don’t understand,” you said. “Did it go out of style or something?”
“It became too dangerous, most likely.” Aizawa turned to his copy of the map and began marking through former haunts, until the entire map was marked in red. “All of these were destroyed by Mr. Yagi and his master. Any conjurer summoning a ghost in this country over the past hundred years was taking a significant risk. Why would they do that when they could just leave?”
“Would they just leave?” You looked to Mr. Yagi.
“It’s possible,” Mr. Yagi allowed. “My master and I did our job well. Even if we missed one.”
“There was nothing to miss. In spite of his overall unpleasantness, Tomura has yet to truly harm anyone,” Aizawa said. Mr. Yagi glanced meaningfully at you. “That doesn’t count.”
You weren’t pleased with the characterization, but it wasn’t worth disputing. Regardless of what anyone in the neighborhood thinks about your relationship with Tomura, they’re at least pleased that it makes him easier to deal with and marginally more interested in helping the neighborhood defend itself. Tomura, meanwhile, notices less and less of what’s going on outside the property line. Most of his focus – all of his focus, really – is on you.
As far as you can tell, he stays incorporeal most of the day, conserving energy so he can materialize fully once you’re home. What happens when you’re home varies. Sometimes he follows you, marking your every move, asking questions about everything nothing, questions that lead and questions whose answers you can’t imagine he cares about. Sometimes he tries to help you with whatever you’re doing, because the sooner you’re done with it, the sooner you can focus all your attention on him. And sometimes he’s not interested in waiting for anything at all. Sometimes he follows you up to your room and pounces on you before you’re even finished changing out of your work clothes.
Today is one of those days, and Tomura’s gotten strategic. You wore a dress to work, with tights underneath because you’re paranoid about clothing malfunctions, and he doesn’t grab you until after you’ve taken them off. Then he pulls you away from your closet, pushes you down on the bed, and pushes your legs apart. This, or things like this, have happened enough that you can sort of keep your wits about you. “Tomura, the door –”
It shuts, keeping Phantom out. The two of you learned that lesson the hard way. Tomura pushed you down in the middle of the bed, but now he pulls you to the end of it, until your legs are dangling over the edge. They’re unsupported for only a second before he props them on his shoulders. It’s embarrassing that you’re so slow on the uptake, but when you figure it out, you sit partway up in shock, staring as Tomura grins up at you from between your legs. “What are you doing?” you ask weakly.
“What does it look like?” Tomura looks way too pleased with himself in the split second before his head disappears under your dress.
He’ll stop if you tell him to. Sometimes you do, and he always complains, but he never refuses. Your head is spinning, and you make one last effort to slow things down. “I can’t reach you from up here.”
His voice is muffled. “Wait your turn,” he says, and a moment later you feel an almost-experimental lap of his tongue against your clit. “I had to wait all day.”
The idea of a human man waiting all day for you to come home so he can throw you on the bed and eat you out is absolutely ridiculous. But Tomura’s a ghost, not a human. You’re not even sure where he got the idea of eating somebody out in the first place. “Have you –” you stutter as he licks again, slower and with more pressure than before. “Have you been watching porn?”
“What’s porn?” Tomura sounds thoroughly uninterested, which is a good thing for you. You don’t want to explain – well, at the moment you’re not good for explaining much of anything. Tomura’s hair tickles against the insides of your thighs, and his hands press eagerly into your hips. Your stomach lurches. “Stop moving. Why are you trying to –”
“The marks.” Your heart is hammering, your body torn between the impulse to lie back and spread your legs wider and the impulse to get up and run. “People will see them. They’ll see them and they’ll know –”
“I don’t care if people know.”
“I do. My friends – my boss –” It gets worse the longer you think about it. “I don’t want them to know what we do.”
Part of you wonders if you’re being ridiculous. You’re an adult, and if you were with a human boyfriend, everyone would assume you were having sex with him. Then again, if you were having sex with a human, you wouldn’t wind up with ghost handprints on your hips that your boss is going to see through your clothes. And Tomura’s not your boyfriend. “I only leave marks when I want to,” Tomura says. He emerges from under your dress, his hair messy and his mouth wet. “You have enough already. Nobody’s going to get confused.”
“So you won’t leave them here?” you ask, and Tomura shakes his head. “Oh. Um, thanks.”
He disappears under your dress again, and you lie back on the bed. The impulse to spread your legs wider is still there, and when Tomura runs his tongue over the length of your entrance before closing his lips around your clit, you give in without a fight. The house is alive around you, humming with electricity and creaking slightly in the early-autumn wind. It’s quiet in your room other than your own harsh, unsteady breathing and the increasingly obscene sounds emanating from under your skirt.
Tomura’s never done this before, so he doesn’t have any bad habits, and based on the direction his explorations take, he’s well on his way to developing good ones. Your entire body feels like it’s being tied in knots, knots that get tighter with every swipe of his tongue. You’re trying not to move, to arch your back or buck your hips. You’re worried that if he has to try too hard to hold you down, he’ll forget about his promise not to leave marks. But in your efforts to stay still, you completely forget about staying quiet.
At first it’s just quiet, desperate sounds leaving your mouth – little gasps, split up here and there with moans when he sucks on your clit or gives your entrance a long, slow lick that makes you wish for something, anything inside you. You could ask Tomura to finger you, and the thought sits fully formed on the tip of your tongue, only to disintegrate when he pushes your legs a little further apart and licks inside of you. The rush of heat that sweeps through you is almost overwhelming. “Tomura –”
“What?” He stops, which was absolutely not what you wanted to happen. You unclench one hand from the blankets on the bed to hit yourself in the forehead. “Am I doing it wrong or something?”
“N-no,” you stammer. You’ve gone from having to convince Tomura that his technique could use some work to having him ask on his own, which is really great for any time except now. “I just, um – no. You’re good. Really good. That’s why I said your name.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” you say, wondering why his voice sounds like that. “I don’t want you to stop. Tomura, please don’t –”
You break off in a gasp. Tomura was never the most methodical about this, but he’s thrown himself back into it with an absurd amount of enthusiasm. You feel like you might pass out. It’s hard to think, but you don’t want him to stop again, so you talk, struggling to breathe. “You’re so good at this,” you manage to say. “You’re doing so well. I don’t want you to stop. Tomura, please – ah –”
His grip on your hips tightens. You think you hear him whine. But his lips close around your clit again, teasing you with his tongue, and you lose the ability to focus on anything else. Unclenching your hands from the sheets feels impossible, so you bite your lip instead, managing to restrict the sounds you make as you come to a few desperate moans. In the past you’ve had to tell Tomura to stop or push him away to avoid getting overstimulated, but this time he lets you go in a hurry, emerging from under your dress and scrambling up onto the bed. His mouth and chin are wet and there’s an almost frantic look in his eyes.
“Tomura,” you say, puzzled and breathless. “Are you okay?”
“Tell me again.” Tomura’s mouth presses against yours, and you taste yourself on his lips. He speaks without pulling away. “I did it right. Tell me –”
Now you get it. “You were perfect,” you say, and Tomura presses himself against you, grinding against your thigh. “You did such a good job. You made me feel so good, Tomura. Nobody’s ever made me feel like you do.”
It’s not empty flattery, as much as you might wish it was. You sit up, rolling Tomura from his side to his back and undoing his pants. His cock springs free, and like always, you’re surprised at how big he is – but the few seconds you take to stare is too long for Tomura to wait. His hips thrust uselessly upwards, seeking your hands, and you oblige in a hurry, stroking idly while you look him over. His face is red, the color extending down his neck and beneath his shirt, and his blue-grey hair is glued to his neck and forehead with sweat. He has longer eyelashes than you thought he did. His eyes are dilated to the point where you’re shocked he can see. You’re sure you look like a mess right now. There’s no way you look anything close to this.
“You’re pretty,” you say without thinking. Tomura’s mouth falls open and a moan escapes him. His hips jerk frantically against your hands as you continue to stroke his cock, as you slide one hand between his legs to fondle him. “You’re so pretty, Tomura. And you make such pretty sounds, too. Listening to you the first time you touched yourself turned me on so bad. I kept imagining what you must have looked like – all sweaty and desperate and so, so pretty –”
Dirty talk never used to be your thing, and this barely counts, but the effect it has on Tomura is mesmerizing. He’s squirming on the bed, worse than you were by a long shot, his hands grasping the sheets or yanking at his shirt. You see his hand rise to scratch at his neck and you stop fondling him to pull it away. “You look even better than I imagined,” you say, holding his hand even as his grip tightens almost to the point of pain. “You look so pretty like this. And the way you sound – there’s nobody in the world who sounds as pretty as you do. You did so well for me just now. Are you close?”
The sound he makes in response is somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and you think, like you always do, that the two of you need to work out how to come at the same time. Touching him invariably winds you up again, and he’s too impatient to let you touch him first. “You’re so good, Tomura,” you say. You can feel the tension in his body increasing, the movements of his hips growing sharp and uneven, and you drag his hand to your mouth, speaking through his fingers. “You’re perfect.”
You usually try to contain the mess he makes with your mouth, but you’re slow this time, too busy watching him fight to hold onto his physical form in the face of an orgasm. Most of his cum winds up on your dress, although some of it ends up on your face. You can live with that, so long as you don’t have to change the sheets on the bed,
You wipe your face with your sleeve and lick your lips, working off a vague sense that it would be rude to wipe your mouth. Guys who want you to swallow get offended by stuff like that. “What does it taste like?” Tomura asks in that raspy, breathless voice that always winds you up.
“It doesn’t taste like anything.” You’re almost eternally grateful for that.
“What do you taste like?”
You cringe a little bit. “Not everything tastes like something else.”
There’s a pattern to things now. Tomura usually dematerializes for a while after the two of you are done, and you do whatever you need to do – showering, to start with – until he comes back. Then you negotiate about the rest of the night, Tomura wanting more, you reminding him that there aren’t unlimited supplies of life-force and doing more today imperils his chances for tomorrow. Most of the time you win. If the pattern is followed, he should be dematerializing right around now. You get up.
Or try to. Tomura grabs you and pulls you back. “Where are you going?”
“The same place I always go.” You try to peel yourself out of his arms, but it doesn’t work. “What? You’re not going to let me go?”
“No. You won’t let me go with you.”
“You don’t need to clean up,” you remind him. “You’ll be fine as soon as you dematerialize and come back.”
“I don’t want to.” One of Tomura’s legs hooks over your hip to hold you in place, another one of those weird things he does that reminds you he’s got no idea how straight guys are supposed to behave. “Don’t leave.”
You don’t want to deal with this right now. You need time alone after you and Tomura hook up to get your head screwed on straight, to remind yourself that this is insane and not normal, to keep it all in perspective. But your track record for getting away from Tomura when he wants to hold onto you is not good, and he’s never acted like this before. You let him pull you back onto the bed. At first he curls himself around you, almost like the two of you are spooning, but then he changes his mind, pushing and pulling at you until you realize that he’s after a complete switch in positions. “If you wanted to be the little spoon, you could just ask.”
“What’s the little spoon?”
“The person in the position you are right now.” You adjust your arm around his waist and press against him from behind. “This is called spooning.”
“Why?”
“Because it looks the way spoons look if you line them up properly in the drawer instead of just throwing them in.” You’re guilty of the latter, but in your defense, you’re usually in a hurry. Tomura makes a skeptical sound. “I’ll show you later.”
He’s cold, but you’re still overheated, and holding him like this helps you cool down. It would help you settle your mind if you weren’t still confused about why this is happening. You could ask Tomura, but when it comes to talking about how he feels, he’s a typical guy. It’s about the only thing about him that’s typical. Tomura doesn’t know what he’s supposed to want, and you have a feeling that he wouldn’t care even if he knew. He wants the things he wants, and while he’s not great at communicating them, you usually figure out where he’s going with it eventually.
It’s quiet for a while, and Tomura’s the one to break the silence. “Did you mean what you said?”
You don’t pretend you don’t understand what he means. “I meant it,” you say. You’re not an expert in praise kinks, but you’re pretty sure it doesn’t work if the praise is false. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”
Something odd happens to Tomura then – he shivers, or his embodied form fails for a moment, and you instinctively tighten your grip on him. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re pretty, too,” Tomura says instead of answering. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” you say. You need to shower, but you can shower later. You adjust your arms around Tomura again and close your eyes.
You don’t mean to fall asleep, but you were up late last night and early this morning, and this afternoon’s hookup wore you out more than expected. You don’t sleep for long, but Tomura’s gone when you wake up. You’re curled up around the space where he used to be. You wonder how long it was before he left, and why it’s okay for him to leave you when you’re not supposed to leave him. You hate how lonely it makes you feel.
But you shake it off, like you do any time you start feeling that way about a ghost that can’t understand human feelings, and proceed with the rest of the night. And the rest of the night goes exactly like it usually does. You shower, start the laundry, start making dinner – and Tomura shadows you, angling for a second hookup. He’s getting strategic about that, too.
“You like it when I use my mouth,” he says. “Better than my fingers.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” You focus on the food you’re trying to cook, reminding yourself firmly that you’re hungry, not horny. You turn the question around on him. “Which do you prefer? Handjobs or blowjobs?”
“Handjobs,” Tomura says without hesitating. You blink. “You still use your mouth a little bit. And you can talk.”
“The talking really does it for you,” you muse, even though winding Tomura up is the last thing you should be doing if you want to eat dinner any time soon. “Interesting.”
“It’s not interesting. I like your voice.”
That’s not what you expected him to say. You set down your knife so you won’t amputate your fingers and focus on him. He’s looking away, scowling. “You talked to me. I couldn’t figure out how to talk back at first, so I listened. I like your voice.”
“I like yours, too,” you say. Then you think about drowning yourself in the sink and ask a question before Tomura can get too smug about it. “How soon did you talk to me after you figured it out?”
“As soon as I figured it out.” Tomura won’t look at you. “I messed it up the first time and you ran away.”
“You got angry. I didn’t know what you’d do.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt you. Or Phantom.” Phantom’s been poking around by Tomura’s feet, pretending she’s not hoping he’ll drop some food. Sure enough, he steals a piece of the carrot you just sliced and drops it on the floor for her. “I helped you before. You knew that.”
“I didn’t know what you’d do when you got angry.” You don’t want to have this conversation again. “I still don’t know.”
“But you’re not scared of me.”
“I’m not scared of you.” You startle as Tomura’s arms loop around your waist, as his chin notches over your shoulder. “You figured out how to talk just so you could talk to me?”
“I needed to learn anyway,” Tomura says. There’s a pause. “Yeah, I did. So what?”
“Nothing,” you say. Tomura thinks you’re pretty. Tomura taught himself how to materialize and talk so he could talk to you. It’s a good thing he can’t see your face right now. You’re finding it hard not to smile.
Your phone rings from the living room, and you go to investigate it. It’s Aizawa, so you pick up. “What?”
“One of the unbound ghosts has gone missing,” Aizawa says. “When was the last time you ran the search for Garaki?”
“Last week,” you say. You run the search every week. “Do you want me to run it again tomorrow?”
“Tonight,” Aizawa says. “I’m coming with you.”
“No,” you protest. “I can’t go in after hours. Mr. Yagi –”
“Call him and ask.” Aizawa hangs up the phone.
“Asshole,” you mutter, and you go ahead and call Mr. Yagi. He picks up on the second ring. “Sir, Aizawa’s worried about something and he wants me to check the database again tonight.”
“Of course,” Mr. Yagi says at once. You grit your teeth. “Update me on what you find, if you find anything. Izuku’s working on generating a map for all the conjurers on the list.”
“And Aizawa wants to come with me,” you add. “That’s not policy, is it?”
“Technically, the database is public record,” Mr. Yagi reminds you. “Just make sure no one spots you.”
“Yes, sir,” you say. You hope he can’t tell that you were hoping he’d say no.
Tomura follows you as you change into your street clothes, clearly unhappy. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the office. I won’t be long.” You stick your head out the front door and realize that it’s gotten colder since the sun went down. You find a hoodie and pull it on. “Aizawa’s just being paranoid.”
“He’s outside,” Tomura says. You don’t question how he knows that. “You didn’t eat yet.”
“I’ll eat when I get back,” you say. You lift your bracelets out of the bowl where you keep your keys and slide them on, then tuck your keys into your pocket before turning to Tomura. He’s either pouting or sulking. “Don’t do that. I’ll be home soon.”
Tomura’s frown deepens and he dematerializes, which annoys you. It’s not like you wanted this to happen. “I was going to give you a kiss goodbye, but since you’re going to be like this –”
“I’m not.” Tomura materializes again, right in front of you, and pushes you back against the wall for a kiss. You feel an odd tingling where his hands touch you and get the sneaking suspicion that he’s marking you again, but it’s only on your shoulders, and it’s not like Aizawa will be able to see it. Tomura draws away. “Go.”
You leave, your head spinning a little bit, and find Aizawa standing just outside the fence. There’s a suspicious-looking bag slung over his shoulder. “We’re not breaking in,” you say.
Aizawa ignores you. He gets into the passenger seat of your car as soon as you unlock it, and the two of you drive out of your neighborhood in complete silence. You’re not pleased with this, and the bad vibes Aizawa’s giving off prove that Tomura’s moods aren’t the only ones that can affect other people. You don’t speak until you’re halfway there. “So what’s up with this ghost who went missing?”
“They haunted an apartment building that came down fifteen years ago. They’ve stayed in the vicinity of their old haunt,” Aizawa says. “We sent Keigo and the others to speak to them, to see if they’d seen or heard anything. There was no sign of them anywhere in the city.”
“Which means – what?” you ask. Aizawa doesn’t answer, and it pisses you off. “They could have just left.”
“A ghost like that doesn’t just leave.”
“Maybe they decided to,” you argue. “Or they could have embodied themselves. There are a lot of things that could have happened that aren’t ‘they got snatched by a conjurer’. Can ghosts even be killed?”
Mr. Yagi said they could, but he also didn’t tell you how. “They can,” Aizawa says shortly. “If they clash with a being of greater power – another ghost, or a conjurer – their spirit can be blasted apart and scattered. Each shred retains some small piece of consciousness, but there are so many that there’s no way to piece them back together.”
“Conjurers can do that?”
“They threaten it when binding unwilling ghosts,” Aizawa says. “Eri and Magne both report receiving that threat, although it’s doubtful that Chisaki could have carried it out, given how easily Hizashi defeated him.”
You never appreciate a reminder of how strong Hizashi is. It makes it harder not to be scared of him. “The worst a conjurer can do to a human is kill them,” Aizawa continues. “The worst that can be done to a ghost condemns them to eternal torment. Most ghosts are hesitant to confront a conjurer, and the fear remains even once they’re embodied permanently. We were surprised that Tomura was able to convince Atsuhiro.”
You were surprised, too. But you’ve got something else on your mind. “So it’s just a power game. They clash and the strongest one wins,” you clarify, and Aizawa nods. “What if they’re equally powerful?”
“Then it comes down to a test of will,” Aizawa says. “The stronger-willed of the two will win, and in ghost-conjurer conflicts, the conjurer is the stronger one.”
“Why?”
“They’re human,” Aizawa says simply. “Humans don’t want to die.”
It’s quiet again in the car. You make the turn into the courthouse parking lot and choose a spot that’s hard to see on the security cameras. Aizawa speaks again as you’re turning off the engine. “If you’re worried about Tomura, don’t. There’s no conjurer on the planet stupid enough to cross your property line.”
“I’m not worried about Tomura,” you say. You’re lying. “What’s in the bag?”
Aizawa unzips it, revealing – “A gun?” you squeak. “There are metal detectors. You can’t bring that in!”
“The metal detectors are on the way into the courthouse, not the public defenders’ office.” Aizawa zips up the bag again. “Conjurers are still human. It takes a lot of ghostly power to stop a bullet.”
You were already unhappy about this whole thing. Now it’s worse. You pull up your hood and get out of the car. “Just keep it hidden. Mr. Yagi told us not to be seen.”
The two of you sneak across the parking lot, keeping to the shadows. If anybody spots you, you look suspicious as hell. You unlock the door to the office, lock it again behind Aizawa and yourself, and sneak through the halls until you reach your cubicle. “I’m just running the Garaki search again,” you warn. “Then I’m out.”
“Fine.” Aizawa leans against the wall behind you, scanning the office.
He’s acting like he thinks someone’s in here, hunting the two of you. It’s making you uneasy. You ignore it as best you can and focus on the search, cross-referencing both identities and coming up with the same points of connection as always. Then, because you got dragged out here and you might as well be thorough, you focus on the city Aizawa’s worried about and run a library search for public records-adjacent documents – the kind of things that are publicly available, but aren’t considered national government property. When you run the wider search, something pops up that didn’t before; a business license, for a clinic in the same city. You draw Aizawa’s attention to it and he pulls out his phone to search. Meanwhile, you keep looking. You find a record of property taxes on the location of the clinic, paid by check. There’s a scan of the checks attached, with the same name over and over again – Garaki Kyudai.
Aizawa swears. “He’s not listed as one of the staff – he’s listed as the clinic’s founder. It’s been there for decades. Long enough to have summoned that ghost.”
“Why would he kill his own ghost? I thought they avoided killing conduits.” There’s a newspaper article, a recent one. You try to open it, hit a paywall, and start looking for a way around it. “Have you heard from Keigo and the others since they said they couldn’t find the ghost?”
“No.” When you glance back at Aizawa, he’s got his phone to his ear.
You get around the paywall and start reading. The article’s about the sale of historic old house in the city, one that’s been in the same family – the Ujiko family, fuck – for over a hundred years. It went on the market last week, by order of the last descendent of the Ujiko family, and – “Aizawa, I’ve got a picture of him!”
“Print it,” Aizawa orders. You do, in color, and meanwhile, whoever Aizawa’s trying to call picks up the phone. “Keigo, where are you?”
You can hear Keigo loud and clear, even though he’s not on speaker. “We’re on our way home. Can you give us a ride back from the station? It was supposed to be Jin’s mom’s turn, but it got kind of late.”
Aizawa glances at you. “Sure, but somebody has to sit in the back,” you say. You hop up to retrieve the article from the printer and come back. “Ask him if there was any sign of ghostly power in the city. Specifically in the neighborhoods. Um –”
You scan the article, pass the name to Aizawa, and wait. “No,” Atsuhiro says into the phone. “We found nothing, not even traces. Why do you ask?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll meet you at the train station.” Aizawa hangs up the phone and turns to you. “Garaki was there, now he isn’t, and a ghost is gone. We need to figure out where he went.”
“I’ll see if there’s a forwarding address.” You find the name of the realtor involved with selling the house, pick up your work phone, and make a call. It’s after hours, but a realtor selling a house this fancy might pick up.
Aizawa is tapping his foot, clearly impatient, while the phone rings twice, then picks up. You leap into the conversation first. “Hello, this is –” you check the article for the reporter’s name and borrow it as an alias. “I made an error in the article I wrote about the house and misquoted the doctor. Would you happen to know where I could get ahold of him to correct it?”
Realtors are a lot more gullible than you thought they were. You find a pen but not a piece of paper and end up scribbling the address on the back of your hand. It doesn’t look familiar, which is a good thing. “It’s not here.”
“We need to keep it that way. He’ll have to be lured even further away.” Aizawa slides the printed-out article into his bag. “For now, we need to retrieve the others.”
The two of you sneak back out to your car. You drive to the train station, sticking to the speed limit like your life depends on it, while Aizawa peruses the newspaper article for more details. “Garaki is older than we thought. At least old enough to have summoned Tomura – but he would have summoned Tomura before Dabi. It doesn’t make sense unless he lost a significant amount of power in the interim, which wouldn’t have happened if he was using Tomura as a conduit.”
“I don’t think it was him,” you say.
“The evidence is more compelling the other way,” Aizawa agrees, “but we can’t rule anything out.”
“If we can’t rule anything out, then we need to think about whether he’s Hizashi’s conjurer,” you say. You see Aizawa’s shoulders stiffen. “If he’s two hundred and fifty years old, he’s old enough to have summoned Hizashi, too – and since Hizashi wanted to escape the world between, he wouldn’t have had to try too hard.”
“Hizashi said no.”
“Hizashi said he doesn’t remember,” you correct. “If Garaki was his conjurer, too –”
“It’s immaterial.” Aizawa cuts you off. “If Garaki finds us, we’re all in danger. We’re almost to the train station, and we don’t have any solid conclusions. We shouldn’t tell the others until we’re sure.”
You don’t like this secret-keeping thing. “But you’re going to tell Hizashi.”
“And you plan to tell Tomura,” Aizawa retorts. You would if Tomura cared about this at all. “What happens in our respective households stays there. But there’s no reason to throw the entire neighborhood into a panic with news that Dabi’s conjurer is on the move.”
“Fine,” you say. “But we can’t sit on this for long. Two days and we’ll tell everyone what we know. Whatever we know.”
“Fine,” Aizawa says. He’s silent for the rest of the drive, until you pull into the train station parking lot and he sandbags you with this: “Keigo and I would be grateful if you encouraged Tomura to keep a lid on his – feelings. Dabi has next to no self-control, and Hizashi’s self-control, while impressive, is not up to this task. Some restraint on his part, or yours, would be appreciated.”
It takes you a second to interpret that one, and once you do, your face goes up in flames. Tomura’s apparently so horny that he’s making the two other non-asexual ghosts horny enough that their partners are asking you for help. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I, um – I’ll see what I can do.”
Aizawa leans his seat back and closes his eyes. “Good.”
The silence in the car after that is extremely awkward, and you’re grateful when Jin, Keigo, Spinner, and Atsuhiro all pile into the car. Rather than one person sitting in the back, all four of them squeeze into the backseat, with Keigo sprawled out across the other three’s laps. Spinner wants to tell you about the day’s events, Atsuhiro wants to sleep, and Jin wants to go to McDonald’s. Jin is the loudest one. You pull into the drive-through.
As much as you’re tempted by the fast food, you have food at home, and you’ve sort of lost your appetite. Fear over the threat of the conjurers, discomfort at the idea of withholding information from the rest of the neighborhood, and the sheer cringe of being told to make your ghost less horny will do that to you. It’s a relief to drop everyone off at their respective houses, Aizawa in particular, and pull into your own driveway.
The first thing you notice when you open the front door is the smell. It smells like food cooking, and it doesn’t smell burnt. Did Tomura let somebody else in the house to cook something? He must have, and the evidence gets stronger when you hear footsteps through house towards you. But when you look up, there’s no one there except Tomura, and Phantom trotting at his side. “Take your bracelets off. You’re supposed to take them off when you get to the neighborhood.”
You know that. You just forgot, because you were busy trying to convince Jin to let you stop the car before he got out. You slide them off your wrists and drop them into the bowl with your keys. “Did you let someone in the house?”
“Why would I let somebody in the house?” Tomura looks annoyed that you’d even consider it. “You had to leave before you were done cooking, so I finished it.”
“You – what?” You’ve heard terrible things about ghost cooking from everybody whose ghost gave it a shot. Even the embodied ones aren’t very good at it. “How?”
“I’ve seen you make it. I did what you do.” Tomura catches your wrist, fingers closing around the same spot where the bracelet was and pulling you along. “Come on.”
You were making soup before you left. It’s kind of hard to mess up soup, but then again, you’ve heard stories from Shinsou about Hizashi managing to mess up instant noodles. The kitchen looks sort of like a bomb went off in it, but none of the ingredients scattered around look wrong for the soup you usually make. When you peer into the pot on the stove, nothing strikes you as immediately wrong. “Are you going to try it?” Tomura asks impatiently. You pick up a spoon and dip it in. “Well?”
Your ghost can cook. Somehow you got the only ghost in the neighborhood that can cook – or at least the only ghost who can copy what their human did exactly enough that there’s little difference in taste. You retrieve a bowl and a ladle and fill it up, then switch off the burner and put a lid on the pot to trap the heat in. Tomura follows you as you head for the kitchen table. “I did it right,” he says. You nod. Your mouth is too full to talk. “I know how to make other things, too.”
You’re not sure you trust him with anything more complicated yet, or maybe at all. “Maybe we can work on it together. It’s probably boring for you to just stand there and watch me.”
“Watching you isn’t boring.”
That’s not what you were expecting him to say. “Oh.”
It’s quiet for a little while. Phantom comes to nap at your feet and you keep eating your soup, thanking your lucky stars that you skipped the fast food tonight. “I wish I could taste things,” Tomura says out of nowhere. You eat another spoonful of soup, burning your tongue in favor of displaying your shock. “I’d be better at it if I could.”
“Not necessarily. I can taste things and the things I cook still aren’t very good sometimes.” You’ve heard Aizawa theorize that the fact that former ghosts have tastebuds is what gets them into trouble with cooking – they judge taste by the strength of the flavor, and they can’t distinguish between flavors that are good and flavors that are bad. You focus on Tomura. “This is really good, though. Thank you.”
Tomura looks pleased with himself. “I know.”
You eat a second helping of the soup and put the rest away for lunch tomorrow, and then, even though it’s later than usual, you decide you want to watch something before you go to bed. It’s less that you want to watch something and more that you want to hang out with Tomura a little longer, but there’s no way you’re telling him that. The two of you settle onto your usual couch cushions, and Phantom hops up into her spot on the middle one, getting comfortable. You pass the remote off to Tomura. “I don’t care what we see. You pick.”
Tomura gives you a skeptical look. “You hate what I pick.”
You hated it when you thought it was giving him ideas. There’s no point now that it turns out he can get ideas all on his own. “Not tonight I don’t.”
Tomura’s always a bit like a kid in a candy store when he gets ahold of the remote. You watch the light flicker across his face as he scrolls through show after show and finally settles on the last thing you were expecting him to choose. “You don’t want to watch that,” you say.
“It says it’s a disaster movie. I like those.”
He does. One time you made the mistake of watching Twister and then had to spend the rest of the night explaining how tornadoes work – and then showing him videos on YouTube when he realized you didn’t know what you were talking about. “This isn’t that kind of disaster movie.”
“The ship sinks, doesn’t it?” Tomura doesn’t wait for your answer before he presses play on Titanic.
The two of you get through the opening of the movie in the usual fashion. Tomura keeps asking you questions, missing part of the movie while you answer, and then asking more questions about what he missed. It takes him a little bit to grasp the framing device. Ghosts don’t have the same sense of time as people do, and you have to explain why the same character is being played by two different actors a few times before he gets it. And then he’s confused, confused to the point where he makes you pause the movie. “Why is this happening? When is the ship going to sink?”
“We can fast-forward to that part,” you say, probably a little too eagerly. “Do you want to do that?”
“I want to know why this is happening.” Tomura gestures at the screen. “Do you know? Or is this like the tornadoes again?”
He’s never going to let you forget about that. You sigh. “All this stuff is happening because the filmmakers want the people watching the movie to care about the characters. To understand what they want and want it, too.”
“Why?”
“So it matters to you when the ship sinks with all these people on it.”
“How many people are on it?”
“Uh – around two thousand.”
“Two thousand?” Tomura looks floored, probably because he’s never seen a group of people larger than forty or fifty. “How many of them die?”
You probably know a little too much about this shipwreck for comfort. You were kind of a weird kid. “About fifteen hundred of them. Give or take a few.”
“How do they die?”
You should have known Tomura was going to fixate on the body count. “Let’s just fast-forward to that part.”
You’ve been fast-forwarding for about two seconds when Tomura stops you. “Go back.”
“Why?” you ask. Tomura gives you that dumbest-person-ever look. You hate that look. “Why do you want to watch all the boring stuff?”
“To see if they can make me care about it.” Tomura settles back onto his couch cushion, looking smug. “I bet they can’t.”
Now you get it. He’s decided it’s a game and he wants to win. You rewind back, resigning yourself to a whole lot of explaining over the next hour and a half.
But you don’t have to explain quite as much as you thought you were going to. Some of the things you thought Tomura would fixate on are nonevents, because he was summoned and bound to the house in the same era as Titanic sank. He’s not confused by the lack of phones or the weirdly elaborate clothes – when you look at the clothes he materializes in, the shirt and pants are similar in style to what some of the characters wear in the movie. After extracting some assurances from you that the movie’s going to go into lots of detail about how the ship sinks, Tomura starts asking other questions, usually about the characters. And sometimes he doesn’t have questions. He has opinions.
“That one is stupid. I don’t like him,” he says of one character. You ask him why. “She’s scared of him. I can tell. He gets in her space when she doesn’t want him to and he grabs her and pulls her around. You had to tell me that stuff, but he’s a human. He should know already.”
“He does know,” you say. “He wants her to be scared of him.”
Tomura looks like the thought’s never crossed his mind, which is ridiculous, given that he’s a ghost who was summoned specifically to haunt and terrorize people. “Aren’t they supposed to get married?”
“Yeah.” You unpause the movie and up the volume. The last thing you want is for Tomura to start asking questions about marriage.
You were worried Tomura was going to have a bunch of questions about the love story, but he keeps mostly quiet on that front, which is a relief for you. He also doesn’t spend a bunch of time talking about how stupid it is, which is less of a relief. Most of his annoyance is focused on the characters for caring about the diamond necklace that keeps getting passed around, because it’s a rock and it’s stupid that humans care about rocks that much. The only question he asks about the love story serves as yet another reminder that ghosts don’t understand humans very well. “Why do they treat that one that way?”
“Because he’s poor and they’re not,” you say. “They think you should marry your own kind.”
“They’re both humans. That’s the same kind,” Tomura says. “Humans are humans. It’s stupid.”
“Humans divide ourselves up by all kinds of stupid things,” you say. When you think about it, it’s a really long, really pointless list. “We kill each other over a lot of that stuff, too. Or we have in the past. People say this stuff is old-fashioned, but a lot of them still feel this way. They don’t say it like that, though. They’d say those two don’t have enough in common. Their life experiences are too different. That kind of thing.”
“Humans are stupid,” Tomura says. He looks weirdly unnerved. “The ship had better sink soon.”
The scene changes and you breathe a sigh of relief. “Yep. Right now.”
The disaster portion of the movie clearly lives up to Tomura’s expectations. He shuts up for the most part, focused on the screen. You have to admit that the movie does a good job of laying things out: Ship sinking, ship sinking fast, not enough lifeboats, water too cold, et cetera. You don’t have to explain anything at all. You’ve seen this one enough times that you don’t feel guilty zoning out, but you don’t realize you’ve fallen asleep until Tomura starts shaking your shoulder. “Why are they staying behind?”
You squint at the screen. “Women and children first.”
“Why?”
“I don’t really know,” you say. The rationale behind that was never clear to you, and if you can’t figure it out, there’s no way you’re going to try to explain it to Tomura. You don’t want a repeat of the tornado thing. “This is basically the only shipwreck in history where they did that, though. On most wrecks men took all the boats and the women and children drowned.”
“You’re a woman.”
“Yep.” You remember imagining how you’d escape from Titanic as a kid, then running the same thought experiment as an adult and realizing that you probably wouldn’t. “Anyway, I don’t know why they did it like that instead of the other way.”
“It’s stupid,” Tomura says. You flop over the arm of the couch and decide to forget about it.
You must be really tired, because you fall back asleep in spite of the noise from the movie. The next thing you wake up to is Phantom crawling onto your lap – or Phantom, still mostly asleep, being dropped onto your lap by Tomura. At first you’re confused, but then you feel the cushions shift as Tomura settles into the spot Phantom was in before. He’s moving quietly, trying not to wake you up, but you wake up anyway. “What –”
“Nothing. Shut up.”
You roll your eyes, and catch a glimpse of the screen in the process. The ship’s vanished. “The good part’s done. Want me to turn it off?”
“No,” Tomura says. Phantom makes herself comfortable in your lap. “Go back to sleep.”
He’s acting strangely. You pretend to go back to sleep, keeping your breathing even and your eyes mostly shut, alternating between watching the screen and watching Tomura on the cushion next to you. He’s still focused in spite of the fact that the ship’s already sunk. He usually gets focused at some point when he’s watching a movie, but this time, his expression’s different than the usual interest. He looks unhappy, but if he’s unhappy, why wouldn’t he let you turn it off? Why is he studying the screen like his existence depends on the outcome of this barely-a-disaster move? You let him think you’re asleep through most of the wrap-up, and take your time waking up when he starts shaking your shoulder again. “What does this mean?”
It’s the last scene. “Her ditching the necklace?”
“No. This stuff. Why is she on the boat again? It sank. And she’s not old anymore either. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh,” you say. Suddenly you understand why he’s confused. “I guess it wouldn’t make sense to you. Ghosts don’t die.”
Aizawa told you they do, but he also called it eternal torment, not death, so you’re going to go ahead and assume that dead for ghosts and dead for humans are two separate concepts. Tomura looks pissed. “She’s dead?”
“She’s a hundred and one. Humans aren’t supposed to live that long.” You were faking sleep too convincingly, and now you’re actually tired. You smother a yawn. “This part – she’s dead. She died in her sleep. This is her meeting everybody again in the afterlife.”
“Is that what happens?”
You’re way too tired for this. “We don’t know. People don’t,” you say. You have a feeling ghosts might, but if Tomura knew, he wouldn’t be asking this question. “Some people think it’s like falling asleep. You’re just gone, forever. Other people think it’s like in the movie – when you die, you see everybody you love who died before you, and you’re all together forever. But like I said, we don’t know. And I don’t think about it too much. It’s probably the sleep thing, anyway. The other way would be too nice.”
You’re rambling. “Does that make any sense?”
Tomura dematerializes. That makes twice in one night. “Okay. Good talk.”
You switch off the movie before the theme song can really kick in and weigh your options. You could boot Phantom off your lap and head upstairs for the night, or you could twist around and fall asleep on the couch. You choose door number two, stopping just long enough to pull your phone out of your pocket and set an alarm. You got a text from Aizawa about two seconds ago, too: When I asked you to address the situation, I didn’t mean to do it like this.
You don’t know what ‘like this’ means, and you’re too tired to care. You set your phone screen-down on the coffee table and go to sleep.
friends please do this picrew with me
just gonna tag a bunch of folks is this how starting a tag game works 🤔
@sunkingwrites @aquadenks @strawberrystepmom @tired-biscuit @medusashima @opportunity-strikes and also anyone who wants to!
also also you don't have to i am just procrastinating on writing a report
Your fingers brushed ever so softly against his own, careful not to touch all five. His rough, dry, and calloused hands felt so different compared to your own. But you loved them. You loved him. You smile as your thumb softly presses slightly into his wrist. Yes, even his wrists were pretty to you. So thin, so delicate. People would normally not spare a passing glance at him, if they had not already known who he was. He was so, unlike someone to be feared. A frail, skinny twenty something year old man. A shut in. A "freak".
But no, he was so much more than that. If to no one else, than to you. He was to be respected, never underestimated, to be feared. And yet, from the very first day you met him, you never did fear him. If anything, you did feel that respect, you never underestimated him in anyway, you admired him. Soon that admiration would grow into something stronger. And before you knew it, here you were. In his dark room, in his bed. Playing with those dangerous hands of his.
"You're fucking crazy. You know that?"
Oh how you loved the sound of his voice. Some would be turned away from the rasp, the roughness of his voice. But not you. You look up from his hand. "Am I?" You grin. "How so?" He looked at you, the light from his tv screen reflecting off of his ruby eyes. He gave you a look, the kind of look that said, you should already know. "Just look at what you're doing right now."
"What? I'm just doing what I always do." You say before turning your attention back to his hands. His flat rough palms brushed against yours, intertwining your fingers with his longer ones. He was always careful not to use his fifth one on you.
"I could kill you. Dust you within seconds."
"Mhm. I know."
"Then stop."
"Why should I?"
You could hear his annoyed huff from above you. You giggled and moved your hand away from his. "If you really want me to stop, I will. Do you want me to stop?" He said nothing. You put your hand on top of his. "That's what I thought."
"You're crazy."
"So I've heard." You chuckle. "I know very well what you are capable of Shiggy." That nickname, coming from anyone else would have been an insult. "I just, want to do this."
"Why?"
You look up at him with a grin, bringing his hand up to your cheek. "I like your hands." You could have sworn you saw a bit of pink dusting his cheeks, but his blue locks were in the way. "But, they're not the only things I like about you."
"I like, your hair." You lean in closer to him. "Your eyes." You brush some of his hair out of his face. "Your scars." You gently swipe your thumb against his scar on his lip. "Everything about you, is so perfect Shiggy."
He couldn't take much more of this. He hid his face in your neck, making you laugh lightly. "It's true." You assure him.
And it was. Never once have you lied about his beauty. And that's exactly what it is, beauty. You felt him wrap his arms around you tight, you move your arms around him as well. Petting his tangled blue hair.
"I love every part of you. But your hands, are my favorite."
"That's a crazy thing to say."
"Well, I am crazy, according to you." You joke. "Yeah, still true." He tells you before pulling back from you. You take his hands again. "So pretty." You murmur.
You loved his hands. You loved him. Every inch of him.
And he felt the same about you. Your touch was so...soothing. Your touch made him feel alive. Your touch made him feel something again. He was addicted. He never wanted to let you go. He wanted this all the time. He wanted your touch all the time.
He needed, your touch.
(Sorry, this one is short. I might get into making more Shiggy stories, idk yet. Hope you enjoy anyway~)
who's the worst bnha yandere? in your opinion
Shigaraki Tomura x darling
TW: NSFW, noncon/dubcon, f!reader, Shiggy being gross
fem reader
It’s easily Tomura.
Tomura because he doesn’t care about the most basic of human needs.
Forgets to feed you. And when he does – it’s always some half-eaten burger, sub or burrito. He doesn’t give two shit if you’re vegan or vegetarian. Shit – he doesn’t even care if you’re allergic. If you don’t want it, you can starve.
Doesn’t give you clothes. He rarely bothers getting himself new clothes, do you think he’s gonna do you any better? No. Wear his dandruff-riddled, old-sweat-seeped hoodie – or wear nothing.
Something else you miss is proper housing – even if it’s just a room with a bed and a toilet. You’ve learned that even that is too much to ask for.
You never stay in the same place for long – needing to switch bases regularly in order to remain low. Never anything he’ll have to pay for, of course – a pick of the litter abandoned office buildings, hotels, and empty homes.
If you’re lucky enough to find a place with running water, you stay longer. If not, you’ll have to make do for a couple of days – worst case was a little over a week. You still shudder thinking about it.
He’ll keep you in any room he can lock from the outside – only sometimes blessing you with an actual mattress and not some old moldy sofa or a thin blanket on cold floors.
One time, you stayed in some old mansion one of the league members had found. You suspect they killed whoever lived there before – seeing as the entire house was properly furnished and clean when you all infested the place.
Not that you got to explore much – Tomura kept you locked in the master bedroom on the third floor – the one where you most definitely would have broken both legs if you tried escaping through the window.
It had been one of the nicer places. One with working hot water and clothes for you to change into – albeit shamefully, sending prayer and thanks to the owner who was no doubt dead and rotting. You were even able to find a stockpile of fresh towels and linens you changed after a week had gone by.
But as the weeks turned to more weeks, they’d all run out – and you began hoping you’d move on to the next place soon. Even with the risk of it being someplace cold and dusty, it would still be a fresher slate.
The nice mansion had gone bad after a month or so – you’d lost track of time.
Thankfully, you’d been able to air out the dank smell of armpit, ass, and feet – and were allowed to take a shower whenever you weren’t handcuffed to the bed – often able to lure Tomura to join you if only for the sake of washing the stench of decay, dandruff and dickcheese off him.
But even so, Tomura isn't the most hygienic type. Managing keeping him halfway decent was troubling enough.
It’s way tougher to keep the room tidy with Tomura’s ill habits of keeping half-eaten food lying around – empty cup noodles and other street junk, beer bottles, and sour energy drinks – along with bloody piles of worn-out clothes, dirty holey underwear, and soggy condoms.
You were driven to the point of disgust that you’d asked him whether he could do you the simple favor of finding and bringing you the house cleaning supplies so you could wash the place yourself.
Oh… how funny he’d found that little comment...
“Too filthy in ‘ere for yah, is it? Too gross for the pretty princess?”
It hadn’t been the first time he’d made you lick the floor. Face down, ass up – with his bare foot placed heavy and clammy against your teary cheek – two of his fingers stuffing your cunt, and the other two inside your ass – while he sits at the edge of the bed, spitefully stroking his hard dick to the degrading view.
“Tch – such a filthy bitch, and you complain about the scenery?” He sneers – pumping both your holes. “Didn’t know I was fuckin’ such a spoiled cunt.”
You cry at the crass stretch his digits make – but you know better than to fight him when he’s pissed. You only regret forgetting how it’s never been a good idea for you to do much of anything other than nod your head and smile pliantly – open your mouth wide for his tongue, spit, cock, and cum or otherwise keep it shut.
Per request, you keep it open wide, tongue out on the hardwood floor – tasting the grouts of lint and dirt and God knows what – stale and salty on your tastebuds. Or maybe it was the tears gushing from your eyes – soaking your face where you sobbed.
“Tch – shut up.” A hand replaces the foot on your face – dragging you up with a fist in your hair. Pulling his fingers from your holes with a sloppy shlick – before promptly pushing all four digits inside your mouth. “If you wanna clean somethin’ – you can start with this slutty mess.”
You gag at the threat as he shoves all but his thumb down your throat – wiping off your slick, then giving your face a mean slap with the same, now spit-coated, hand – before pulling you up from the floor by your hair and ushering you onto his lap to straddle him.
He wipes the rest of your drool off on his erect cock – standing proudly with a thick flow of creamy pre leaking from his slit.
He doesn’t waste much time before lining up with your puffy pussy-lipped hole and making you sink down on him.
You croak at him going in raw – always feeling extra violated without the thin rubber protecting you from catching his germs as he pushes all his veiny girth inside you until giving your womb a cummy kiss.
“What’s the problem, slut? Don’t like riding dirty dick?” He huffs, starting to rut against you in no clean tempo. He snickers at your grimace, still holding your hair in a tight pull as he angles your face to his to kiss your tight-lined lips – feeling you cringe even more. “Don’t worry. I’ll let you clean it after I fill this and the other hole up with filth.”
You whimper at the dark promise – and he wipes his tongue across your sorry expression from chin to temple.
“I’ll do you up nice and nasty – so you won’t feel so out of place anymore~”
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
There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it, and lately it feels like the thing that’s wrong with your house is you. You’re constantly uneasy, at work and at home, to the point where Phantom glues herself to your side and cries when you try to leave. Tomura hovers. You can tell he wants things from you – more touches, more kissing, more sex – but with half the neighborhood out hunting conjurers, the insect deliveries have mostly dried up. Most of the time, mustering up a voice and a set of hands is the most he can do.
The conjurer hunt is on. Keigo’s taking time off from work, and whatever Spinner and Jin usually do during the day, they’ve put it on hold. Every morning, you or Aizawa or Jin’s mom gives the three of them and Atsuhiro a ride to the train station, where they get on separate trains, each taking a different route to the same destination. They’re checking cities and towns off the list, one by one, starting close to home and working their way outwards. They get back later and later every day.
Jin’s mom doesn’t like it. Magne doesn’t like it. Dabi especially doesn’t like it, given the clouds of smoke that are constantly billowing from Keigo’s house, and eventually you and Hizashi are dispatched to deal with it. Hizashi’s there for the intimidation factor. You’re not sure why you’re involved. “You’re close with Keigo,” Hizashi says with a shrug, when you ask him. “Hard to tell, but Dabi’s not thrilled with how things have been going there lately. Knowing you and Keigo might talk about him might make him behave a little better.”
“Oh.”
“That’s the theory, anyway,” Hizashi says. He bangs on the door with a closed fist. “Open up, Toasty. We need to talk.”
“Fuck off.”
“No can do. You’re about to get the fire department called on you,” Hizashi says. “How are you going to explain that one to your human when he gets home?”
“Like I’d know. He’s never here.” Dabi’s face appears in the front window, and a moment later the door cracks open. “He saw his first chance to get away from me and bolted.”
You can’t stop the incredulous laugh that sneaks out of your mouth. “He’s out there hunting your conjurer. What about that says he’s trying to get away?”
“I didn’t ask him to do that.”
“No, he volunteered.” Hizashi leans hard against the door and shoves it open. “You’re acting even dumber than the guy across the street, and that’s really saying something.”
“Hey,” you say listlessly. “Don’t talk shit about my ghost. He came up with the plan.”
“The plan that might get my human killed,” Dabi says.
“The plan that might save your ass,” Hizashi corrects, flicking Dabi in the forehead and ignoring the smoke that starts to leak into the air. “Enough with this little fit you’re throwing. Things are this way with your human because you made them this way. Your human treats you different than she treats her ghost because of you. If you want any of that to change, you need to get it together.”
“I’m not embodying,” Dabi says. “You can’t make me.”
“You can do better even if you don’t embody yourself,” you say. Dabi makes a disparaging noise. “Not lighting the house on fire would be a good start.”
“Why do you do that, anyway?” Hizashi is fully inside Keigo’s house now, and even though you know it’s going to drive Tomura up the wall, you follow him in. “Oof, this place smells. Have you ever heard of air freshener?”
You survey the front room of Keigo’s house. It’s messy. There’s a basket of laundry sitting on the couch, unfolded but clean as evidenced by the used dryer sheet sticking out of a sock on top. While Hizashi continues to hold forth on the odor of the house, you investigate further, checking out the kitchen. It’s also messy. There are clean dishes in the dishwasher and dirty dishes in the sink, and based on the state of the stove, Keigo’s been living on instant noodles, frozen vegetables, and not much else. You think of the time you were sick, of Tomura’s clumsy but well-intentioned efforts to help, and feel an unexpected wave of sadness.
It crystallizes into resolve a moment later. You head back to the front room and target Dabi directly. “Get in here. You’re going to learn how to do the dishes.”
“What?”
Dabi sounds baffled, and Hizashi is hooting with laughter. You raise your voice to be heard over him. “You want things to be better with Keigo, you have to do stuff,” you say. “Just not burning down the house isn’t enough. You have to help out. Don’t just say you want things to change. Make them change.”
“Like a man,” Hizashi says, still cackling. “This is what real men do.”
Dabi looks skeptical. You weigh the risk of the statement you’re considering, then decide to hell with it. “Tomura knows how to do all this stuff already.”
It’s quiet for a second. “If your useless virgin of a ghost can do it, so can I,” Dabi states, which sets Hizashi off again. “Teach me how.”
You’re tempted to tell him that Tomura figured it out on his own, but you also don’t want Keigo to have to deal with some of the mistakes Tomura made. “Let’s start with the dishwasher.”
After the dishwasher, you go through proper dishwashing technique, stressing the importance of cleaning up whatever mess gets made in the process. “It’s not helping if there’s still a mess afterward,” Hizashi advices from the kitchen table, where he’s going through Keigo’s record collection. “Shou and me went through that with cleaning the litterbox. It was bad.”
Dabi bitches his way through the dishes, but you think he’s grasped the basics. After that, you move onto laundry – or rather, Hizashi moves on to laundry, because you get a brief flash of what Tomura will do when he finds out you’ve been touching Keigo’s and possibly Dabi’s underwear and decide you don’t want to deal with that. While they’re working on it, you head back across the street to retrieve a spare air freshener from your house. Tomura pounces on you the instant you step through the gate. “What are you doing over there?”
“Trying to teach Dabi some life skills so Keigo doesn’t have to live in a dungeon,” you say. Tomura’s more materialized than he’s been in a while, just slightly more than insubstantial as he tangles himself around you. “I should be done soon.”
“You’re not going back.”
“I’m going back,” you say.”
“No, you’re not!”
“I am, and here’s why. Keigo is my friend. He’s trying to help everybody. You don’t care about everybody, but I do, and I don’t think my friend should have to live in a house like that with a ghost that treats him that badly.” You dig up an air freshener, plus a scented candle, ignoring Tomura’s attempts to reel you back in. “The only reason Dabi’s going along with it is because I told him that you know how to do this stuff already.”
It’s quiet for a second. “He’s not better than me,” Tomura says.
“You’re better than him. Keigo and Hizashi didn’t have to come over here and teach you how to do the laundry.” You head for the door. “I’ll be back soon.”
Tomura entangles you again, because Tomura’s an asshole, but he lets you go before you reach the gate. When you get back to Keigo’s house, Dabi and Hizashi are there, with a pile of folded laundry between them and identical weird looks on their faces. “What did you say to him?” Dabi demands. “He’s so full of himself –”
“Yeah, I haven’t experienced this level of concentrated smugness in a while,” Hizashi notes. He gives his head a shake, then shrugs it off. “You got the goods?”
You hand off the air freshener and the candle. “Light this up and start praying. I’m not sure how much of a dent it will make, but it’s better than nothing.”
You’re not really sure how well your lessons and Hizashi’s have stuck, and you’re not sure how Keigo’s going to feel about the fact that you were both in his house, bullying his ghost. You don’t even have a chance to warn him, since you’re not the one picking he and the others up from the train station tonight, and you find yourself watching anxiously from your front window as Keigo trudges up the stairs and into his house. “What are you worried about?” Tomura asks. “You did him a favor. He should thank you.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten into their relationship like that.” The idea of someone trying something similar on you and Tomura makes you almost as uncomfortable as the idea of raising the topic of you and Tomura in a formal relationship. “He might be mad. I’d understand if he was mad.”
“He should be grateful,” Tomura says. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. “I’ll make him thank you if he doesn’t.”
It’s Keigo’s number. You gulp, unlock your phone, and start reading the texts.
Keigo: so uh
Keigo: hypothetically
Keigo: did you go to my house while I was gone and replace Dabi with Hizashi in disguise
Keigo: because like
Keigo: the laundry got folded
Keigo: the kitchen is clean
Keigo: when I got inside he stole all my clothes so he could put them in the washing machine
Keigo: nothing is on fire except a SCENTED CANDLE
Keigo: what did you DO
Tomura is reading over your shoulder, and as he reaches the end of the text string, he bursts out into raspy laughter. Something twists in your chest hard and painful enough to knock the air out of your lungs. You don’t think you’ve ever heard Tomura laugh before, and you’re almost angry with yourself for how much you like how it sounds. “What’s funny?”
“He stole his human’s clothes.” Tomura snickers. “If I tried that on you you’d leave and never come back.”
You’re temporarily frozen with horror at the thought, but you break out of it by force to text Keigo back. Sorry. Me and Hizashi went over there because the house was a little too on fire, and when we saw what a mess it was we decided to try to help out.
So you did it, Keigo texts back. He’s saying he did it.
We told him what to do, but he did most of it, you explain. Sorry.
Don’t be sorry. Just like – how? He never does this shit. I have to beg him not to cut my brake lines and burn down the house.
You’ve got theories, but nothing definitive, you glance at Tomura, wondering if he knows, but either he doesn’t or he’s not telling. I’m not sure, you text. He really stole your clothes?
Two seconds after I got inside. I barely shut the door in time. Keigo texts again while you’re trying not to have a thing over Tomura’s renewed laughter. I would have texted you about it sooner except I was naked and it would have been weird.
Now you’re laughing, but Tomura isn’t. “He owes you now. You should make him do something.”
“I’d say we’re even.” You laugh-react to Keigo’s text and put your phone away. “He and everybody else here helped me a lot when it came to you. I want to help them out, too.”
“Him telling you things isn’t the same as you dealing with his bastard scar wraith all day,” Tomura says. “You did more. He owes you.”
“That’s not how it works,” you say. “People help each other for a lot of reasons. It’s not usually just so the other person will owe them. Is that why you help me sometimes?”
You regret the question the instant you ask it – enough that you take it back, out loud. “Sorry. Don’t answer that.”
“I –”
“Don’t.” You know you’re not handling this well. You just don’t know what else to do.
Realizing that you’ve got feelings for Tomura has been a disaster on every possible level. You thought admitting it to yourself might make things easier, but instead it’s unlocked a whole new circle of hell – one where you want things from him that you’ve got no business wanting, things you know he can’t give you, things he wouldn’t give you in a million years. Not being able to touch him at all makes it worse. You’ve never thought of yourself as being touch-starved, but there’s not really another word for it. You miss the cold. You miss him. And it’s pathetic, so you do everything you can to not think about it. The last thing you want is for someone to ask.
But apparently you’re not hiding it as well as you think you are, because Mr. Yagi takes one look at you the next morning and motions you into his office. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” you say, but it comes out watery and awful. “I’m fine, sir. It’s just, uh –”
What should you say? That it’s the time of the month? If you say that, Mr. Yagi will run for the hills, and you shouldn’t lie to him. “It’s ghost stuff,” you say, and Mr. Yagi nods sagely. “Things in the neighborhood are – hard right now.”
“I have something that might help,” Mr. Yagi says encouragingly. “Izuku’s completed his review of the files you’ve collected, and he’s hoping to present his findings to you in person.”
“Oh,” you say. “Um, okay. I don’t know if the neighborhood –”
“You’ll come to our neighborhood,” Mr. Yagi says. You blink. “This evening, for dinner. Izuku will present his findings to you and you can eat a meal in a place that isn’t so obviously haunted. Inko tells me that constant observation wears on a person.”
You’re so used to it by this point that you barely notice. It’s the explanations that start to wear on you. Lately Tomura’s been interested in what you’re eating, and you’ve been stuck trying to describe taste to someone who can really only grasp texture. It would be nice to go one night without having to explain that lettuce tastes like green but salmon doesn’t taste like pink. Mr. Yagi raises his eyebrows. “Well?”
“Thank you, sir,” you say. “I’d like that.”
“Excellent!” Mr. Yagi beams at you. “You have my address from the office party two years ago, yes? We haven’t moved.”
“Um – you might need to send it again.” You have a bad habit of deleting your old texts.
Mr. Yagi sends you his address and you add it to his contact in your phone. And while you’re in your contacts, you realize that there’s a contact you’re missing – and a ghost who’s going to have questions when you don’t show up after work. You still haven’t gotten around to getting Tomura a phone, which means you’re going to need someone to go talk to him. Somebody he’s not going to try to kill. You’d send Spinner or Keigo, but they’re both on the mission, and introducing Hizashi into the equation is a recipe for disaster. If you ask Shinsou for help, Hizashi and Aizawa will murder you. That just leaves –
Wondering what in the hell you’re doing, you text Magne for the first time ever. Hi. Would you be okay letting Tomura borrow your phone for a second?
You’re not entirely sure what Magne does during the day. Whatever her job is, it’s remote work – but it must be a slow period, because she texts you back right away. What does he need it for?
I won’t be back until late and I need to let him know.
Magne sends you a truly bizarre collection of emojis. That’s so cute! What time should I bring it over?
Noon, you say. Thanks, Magne. I owe you one.
A little bird name Himiko tells me you have a Sephora credit card. I’ll be expecting a top-tier birthday gift.
The ghosts don’t have real birthdays, so they celebrate either the day they were summoned or the day they were embodied. You’re not sure which one Magne picked, but Spinner definitely knows. You’ll ask him. You got it.
Your lunch break starts at noon, and your phone rings from Magne’s number at approximately 12:02. “You’re on speaker,” Magne shouts at you. Then: “I’ve got your human on the phone! She wants to talk to you. Let me in the yard!”
“Just throw it,” Tomura shouts back.
“This is an iPhone! I’m not throwing it anywhere!”
“I don’t care what kind of phone it is. You’re not coming in my yard.”
“Tomura,” you call out, trying to simultaneously be loud and keep any of your coworkers from overhearing this nightmare, “go up to the fence and borrow the phone from Magne. And don’t run away with it. Otherwise I’m going to have to buy her the entire Sephora franchise for her birthday.”
Magne cackles at that, but when she speaks, she’s not talking to you. “There you are! It’s a shame you’ve been hiding in that house all this time. You’re much cuter when you’re – you know, all there.”
“I’m not cute,” Tomura says. You’re smiling to yourself for about three seconds before he speaks up again. “My human said I’m pretty.”
Based on the cacophony on the other end of the line, Magne’s phone mission picked up an audience. Or maybe she gave it an audience. You can hear Hizashi cackling like a goblin, Shinsou snorting with laughter, and some squeaky little Eri giggles, which would all be really funny if it was happening to anybody else. Tomura’s on the same page as you are about it. “Why are you laughing?”
“She’s not wrong,” Himiko says from somewhere in the offing. The whole neighborhood is there, apparently. “You’re really pretty, Tomura! It’s only funny because boys usually say that to girls, not the other way around.”
“Honestly, we should use it the other way around more often,” Hizashi says. He projects his voice at a volume that makes your ears start ringing through the phone. “I for one could stand to be called pretty at least four times a day.”
He’s speaking so loudly that Aizawa can probably hear him from their house at the top of the street. “Dad, that’s gross,” Shinsou complains.
“I think it’s nice,” Eri chimes in. “I like being pretty. My hair and my eyes look like Tomura’s, so Tomura must be pretty, too!”
“Okay,” you say loudly, trying to regain control of the situation, “my lunch break’s not forever, and I really do need to talk to Tomura, so –”
“Of course! Shoo, shoo!” Magne hopes into action. You’d better start saving for Magne’s birthday gift yesterday. “Here. The phone. I’ll be in my house. Just shout when you’re ready to give it back!”
“I’ll just throw it. That’s faster.”
“He won’t throw it,” you say. Magne makes some kind of agreeing sound and leaves. Tomura must have the phone now, but he’s not saying anything. “Are you there?”
“Am I supposed to say you’re pretty?”
You facepalm with the hand that’s not holding the phone. “No,” you say. “Not unless you think so. I said you were pretty because that’s what I think. And that’s not why I called you.”
“Why did you call me?”
You brace yourself. “I won’t be back until later tonight. Later than usual. I wanted to let you know.”
“Why?”
“I’m meeting someone who has information. About the second conjurer.”
“Who?” Tomura’s voice darkens so abruptly that a chill goes down your spine. “I don’t need you to tell me. I’ll find them. I’ll –”
“It’s my boss’s son. He’s fifteen. He’s been looking at the same documents I have, except he actually has time to read them.”
It’s quiet for a second. “You could have said it was a kid,” Tomura says reproachfully, and you almost laugh. “Your boss the ghost has a kid?”
“I don’t really know how that worked.” You don’t want to know, either, and you really don’t want Tomura asking questions about it, so you change the subject fast. “I’m going over there after work and I’ll be back when I can. Are you okay to feed Phantom, or should I ask someone to –”
“I’ll do it. She’s our dog.” Tomura cuts you off. “Don’t be stupid. And be careful.”
You’re tempted to point out that being careful is most likely rolled in with not being stupid, but you keep your mouth shut. A moment later Tomura speaks up again. “Come back fast. I miss you when you’re not here.”
“I will,” you say, trying not to implode. “I, um – I miss you too. Please don’t throw Magne’s phone.”
“Fine.” Tomura hangs up. You need to get Tomura a phone. You also need to teach Tomura phone etiquette, like not hanging up without saying goodbye. Except he said he missed you, which – what was that? Was it a guilt trip? Tomura’s never tried to guilt-trip you before, and he’s not subtle in general. If that’s what he was doing, you’d see it coming a mile away, which means that this wasn’t a guilt-trip. In fact, he took the news that you won’t be back until later fairly well. The weird feeling you’re getting is because it was a normal conversation. The kind of conversation you’d have with a boyfriend who wasn’t crazy. Most of your boyfriends have been crazy.
Tomura isn’t your boyfriend. You’re being weird. You text thank-you to Magne again, drop a line to Spinner to ask when Magne’s birthday is, and head back inside to grab your lunch. It’s a nice day. It might be nice to eat outside.
At least that’s what you think, until Nakayama drops down on the bench next to you. “Who was that on the phone?”
“None of your business.” You grit your teeth as Nakayama pops open a salad in an excruciatingly loud plastic clamshell package. “You were eavesdropping?”
“Nobody used to call you,” Nakayama says matter-of-factly. “Honestly, you seemed like the type who’d bang your boss.”
You almost choke on your sandwich. “But now Mr. Yagi seems kind of like your dad. Not in a daddy way, just a literal dad,” Nakayama continues. “So who was on the phone? Why do you miss them?”
“No one. Go away.”
“Is it your boyfriend?” Nakayama asks. “I’d say that to my boyfriend if he was clingy. Is your boyfriend clingy?”
“It’s not my boyfriend,” you say. You’re pretty sure your face is on fire. “Don’t you have anywhere else to be? I thought – uh, I thought you and Woods from the DA’s office were a thing.”
“We are. But he was being judgy about one of my cases, so I ditched him for today.” Nakayama crunches down on a bite of salad. “I’m surprised you knew that! You don’t usually care about office gossip.”
You don’t. But you’re desperate to get out of this conversation without having to think or talk any more about Tomura. “I pay attention, but I’m sort of behind, I think. Can you catch me up?”
Nakayama grins at you around a mouthful of lettuce. “I thought you’d never ask!”
Asking about gossip is going to be your new go-to for avoiding talking about your personal life with your coworkers. Nakayama talks straight through lunch, and afterwards you throw yourself into your work, doing everything you can to avoid thinking about Tomura and what Tomura said and what the actual hell is happening there. You end the day a half-day ahead of your inbox, and you duck out early, swinging by the store to pick up some flowers to bring as a gift for your hosts. And then you sneak into another store, to pick up something for someone else.
You’ve been to Mr. Yagi’s house before, but it was a while ago. The neighborhood you’re driving through feels mostly unfamiliar. The houses are medium-sized, but on big lots, and you know from your homebuying exploits that this much space costs a ridiculous amount of money. The land one of these houses is built on probably costs as much as your property and your house put together. The last time you were here, you remember thinking somewhat uncharitably that Mr. Yagi must have family money. You’re even more confused now that you know he’s a ghost.
Mr. Yagi’s house is yellow with green trim, bright and pretty. It feels friendly when you walk up the front steps, and the doorbell’s ring somehow sounds cheerful. Mr. Yagi opens the door, smiling. “Come in! What are these –”
“For you,” you say. Your parents might not have been very affectionate, but they made sure you had manners. Mr. Yagi accepts the flowers. “Thank you for hosting me.”
You take off your shoes and make your way into the house after Mr. Yagi. The rest of the house feels just as friendly as it looks. Whatever’s being cooked smells really good, and Mr. Yagi’s wife smiles at you though a cloud of steam when you approach to ask if you can help. “I have it under control. And I have my assistant,” she says, elbowing Mr. Yagi lightly. “Go out to the backyard, if you’d like. Izuku’s waiting.”
You make your way through the house and onto the back porch, which overlooks a garden about ten times as pretty as yours. You can’t help feeling a surge of envy, which is only partially helped by reminding yourself that this garden’s had a lot more time to grow than yours has, and that this family doesn’t have to worry about buying delicate or expensive plants for fear that a ghost will get impatient and kill them in order to materialize fully. The only shadow in the garden comes from a large, lush shrub with purple-green leaves that’s resisting every effort made by Mr. Yagi’s son to extract it from the ground.
You come closer. “Do you need help?”
“No,” Izuku says, out of breath. “I don’t want to chop it down, but it has to go. It’s invasive.”
“Oh,” you say. “Did you know that when you planted it?”
“We think it was mislabeled,” Izuku says. “Or I read the label wrong, or something. I don’t want to kill it, and I think I can get it out alive, but we can’t plant it anywhere else.”
Something occurs to you. “If I help you get it out alive, can I have it?”
“Dad said you have a garden, but why would you want – oh!” Izuku breaks off suddenly, grinning. “Based on the size of this bush and its relative age compared to the lifespan of similar plants, it contains about ten years of life energy! Ghosts usually burn through energy between forty-eight and fifty-five times faster than living things, depending on their power level, and Dad said your ghost is extremely strong, so if we assume a consumption rate of seventy times faster than a living thing and if you take this tree and he uses it, that should give him roughly two weeks of complete embodiment. Longer if he stays incorporeal sometimes.”
You can only stare at him. He keeps talking. “When Dad was still a ghost, he went through life-force really fast. Mom says he kept wanting to do things for her – like hold the door open, or pull out her chair so she could sit down, or carry her groceries. One time her car got stuck in the snow and he picked it up and carried it for her. Oh, I guess that’s another thing! If a ghost is exceeding the physical abilities of their embodied form, the consumption rate doubles. What kind of things does your ghost like to do?”
“I have a dog and they like to play together,” you say. There’s no way you’re bringing up the rest of it with a fifteen-year-old. “How did you find out about all this stuff? Is there an equation or something?”
“Sort of! I can show you if you want. Of course, it’ll be approximate, since there’s not a great way to measure power levels and you kind of just have to vibe it, but it should tell you about how much complete materialization time you’ll get. What kind of things does your ghost usually drain?”
“Small plants. Weeds or mushrooms, and sometimes blackberry bushes,” you say. “And the people in the neighborhood bring us bugs for him to use.”
“He must be conserving power really well if he can get complete materialization from insects,” Izuku says excitedly. “Do you think there’s any way I could meet him? I haven’t met a real ghost in ages, and one that powerful –”
“Izuku,” Mr. Yagi says warningly from the porch. “That ghost isn’t safe for most people to interact with. And his reaction to you would be difficult to predict.”
“He’d know I’m not a threat. He could read it off my aura,” Izuku says. He looks at you and explains before you can ask. “I’m half-ghost. Mom got pregnant with me before Dad embodied himself full-time.”
Your first thought, as incredibly stupid as it is, is that you might need your box of condoms after all. Your second thought is that you really didn’t need to know that much about your boss’s sex life. Then you remember that Mr. Yagi can see Tomura’s marks on you and decide that it’s even. “Um, what does that mean? Being half-ghost.”
“Like being an embodied ghost, but I didn’t have to drain anybody,” Izuku says. “I can see other ghosts, and feel what they feel. I need to blink, but my eyes still do the thing Dad’s eyes do, so I have to wear contacts. And sometimes when I dream I can see into the world between.”
You sit there with that for a moment. Izuku looks to Mr. Yagi. “Once I get the butterfly bush out, she’s going to take it home so her ghost can use it. Did you know he’s only been using bugs?”
“I didn’t,” Mr. Yagi says. He glances at you, and you will your face not to flush. “We’ll all work together to dig up the bush after dinner. It’s time to wash up.”
You follow Mr. Yagi and Izuku into the house, feeling like you handled things well. It’s not until you’re washing your hands that it occurs to you that Izuku, who’s half ghost, can almost certainly see Tomura’s goddamn handprints all over you. It takes you way too long to muster up the courage to do anything but bolt directly out the door and drive until you run out of gas. But you make it out to the table and sit down, avoiding everyone’s eyes. You’re sitting with two ghosts. They can see the handprints. They know. You’re screwed. There’s no way they’ll let you have the butterfly bush now.
Mr. Yagi’s wife reaches across the table and pats your arm. “It’s all right,” she says, and you look up to find her smiling. “I’ve got them, too.”
You can’t see handprints on her, but she must have them, if she was involved with Mr. Yagi before he was embodied. You’ve never met anybody other than Keigo who was involved with their ghost when it was still a ghost, and you feel yourself relax a bit, just like you do when you and Keigo hang out. You manage a smile in response, then pick up your utensils and start eating. The food tastes really good. And it’s nice to know that you’re not going to have to spend twenty minutes explaining why cheese comes in different shapes, colors, and sizes without becoming something other than cheese.
You have to explain other stuff, though. Izuku has questions. “How many ghosts are in your neighborhood? Are they all adults or are some of them kids? Was your house built before the rest of the neighborhood or is it just the only house with a ghost in it?” He uses the pause provided by your answers to inhale half the food on his plate, then jumps back into the breach with even more questions. “Dad said there was a scar wraith. Have you met him? Scar wraiths are technically half-embodied ghosts, right? How many of his powers does he still have? Which of the former ghosts on your street is the most powerful? Do you think my dad could beat Magne or Atsuhiro or Hizashi in a fight?”
Mr. Yagi chokes on a sip of water. “I won’t be fighting any ghosts in that neighborhood. My ghost-fighting days are long over.”
“You used to fight ghosts?” you ask.
“Yes,” Mr. Yagi says. “That’s what I was summoned for.”
You want to ask. You really, really want to ask, but you don’t want to pry. Mr. Yagi’s wife finally elbows him. “Just tell her, Toshi.”
Mr. Yagi sighs. “When we first spoke of this, I mentioned that some conjurers don’t bind ghosts. Rather, they form mutually beneficial alliances – sometime simply to extend their lives, sometimes in an effort to do good. The conjurer who summoned me was named Shimura Nana. She hoped to do good, and I wanted to help her. Together we pursued evil conjurers and unquiet ghosts, ending their reigns of terror wherever we could.”
He glances guiltily at you. “I believe we once crossed paths with Hizashi, from your neighborhood. My master judged there to be greater threats than him.”
Hizashi wouldn’t like hearing that. Maybe you’ll tell him the next time he tries to scare you for kicks. But there’s a different question you’re considering. “How do you kill a ghost?”
“We’ll get to that,” Mr. Yagi says. “In any case, as the years passed, my master and I came into contact with the same conjurer over and over again. He was interested not in short-term havoc, but in long-term destruction, and he chose his ghosts accordingly. Many of the worst ghosts my master and I faced had been captured by him – taken as children, isolated for decades, their power growing unchecked until it outgrew the haunt containing it.”
Unease twists in the pit of your stomach. You’ve heard a story like that before. The one you were told was about Eri, but when you consider the details – the length of time, the complete isolation – it sounds like someone else, too. “These ghosts had no chance to make a bargain with their conjurer,” Mr. Yagi continues. “It was likely never explained to them why they had been imprisoned in this world. Many ghosts are curious about the human world, initially, and form opinions once they’ve been allowed to explore and interact with it. By the time this conjurer’s ghosts are allowed to interact with the world, they’ve grown to despise it as a prison. They destroy everything in their path, until they’re stopped.”
“Dad stopped a lot of them,” Izuku says.
“His master called it merciful,” Mr. Yagi’s wife – she’s told you to call her Inko – says. She looks troubled. “I don’t know about that.”
“There aren’t any left in the country. My master and I made sure.” Mr. Yagi folds and unfolds his napkin. “Ghosts may not approach the world with the same view of mortality as humans do, but it still takes time to create such a violent, hateful ghost. We were certain we’d found them all. And then –”
Suddenly you’re certain you know what he’s going to say. “You found my house.”
“It has every hallmark of our enemy’s work,” Mr. Yagi says. “An immensely powerful ghost, firmly entrenched in a house that can barely contain it. How long has he inhabited that house?”
“A hundred and ten years.”
“That fits!” Izuku says excitedly. He gets up from the table and bolts down the hallway, coming back a moment later pushing a wheeled whiteboard that you’re pretty sure disappeared from the conference room at work. “So! Thanks to the map Mr. Aizawa made, and the list of identities you found, I’ve been able to track where this conjurer’s been over the last two hundred years. A lot of the haunts have been destroyed, but nothing gets built there again, so they’re easy to find. The conjurer starts out way to the north, two hundred years ago. He binds a ghost to an old temple, and sixty years later, the ghost breaks out. Did you get that one, Dad? Do you remember?”
Mr Yagi nods. “Okay,” Izuku says. “Seven years later, he’s right here. Just a little ways south. This time the ghost is in an abandoned palace. That one only lasts twenty years before the haunt gets destroyed, and Dad gets that one, too. Seven years after that, the conjurer goes big and summons a ghost to haunt this entire mountain range by binding different parts of it into different caves and cabins –”
It would take an idiot not to see the pattern that’s emerging. The conjurer moves steadily south, spending seven years in each location – no more, and no less. In each location he leaves behind a haunted house with a lonely ghost, a ticking time bomb that won’t go off until long after everyone’s forgotten it was there. When he reaches the border, he turns around and heads north again, still spending seven years in each location. “Why seven years?” you ask. “If he’s worried about being caught, shouldn’t he switch it up?”
“Summoning and binding ghosts take time,” Inko says. “If it’s not done well, the ghosts can get out. And this conjurer doesn’t want his ghosts to get out.”
Yeah, no kidding – if they can get out, they won’t go crazy like he wants them to. Izuku keeps going over the map, seven years and a few miles at a time. Then he stops. “Here there’s a big gap,” he says. “In distance and in time. He doesn’t show up again until fourteen years later, and he’s way too far north. Plus, his name is wrong. You were right about how he steals names from people he knew in his previous identity to build the new one, but his name in the new town isn’t related at all to the last one.”
“It’s an insult to my master,” Mr. Yagi says. The scowl on his face is way too scary for your liking. “Shimura Tenko.”
You remember that name from the files. “So what happened? Did he just take a break?”
“After ninety years of doing the same thing? No way,” Izuku says. He opens his mouth, closes it, and turns to Inko. “Mom spotted it. Mom should say.”
Inko smiles at him, then turns to face you. “Look at the space that’s missing,” she says quietly. “There should be a haunt somewhere here.”
You look at the spot she’s circling on the map and your heart sinks. “We’re not the only city around here,” you say hopelessly. “It could be any of those –”
“We checked. There isn’t.” Izuku is bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “The guy my dad fought is the same guy who summoned your ghost. And it took him a while. Either your ghost really fought or really tried to escape, because the conjurer never spent more than seven years anywhere else. He spent fourteen years here.”
Your heart is racing. You look to Mr. Yagi. “How did you and your master not find him?”
“There was nothing to find,” Mr. Yagi says. “Every other haunt became a place of violence and terror, the instant the ghosts began to attain their full power. There were incidents, accidents, mysterious deaths – things that signal the presence of a ghost. There was no such thing in your house.”
No, there wasn’t. You checked. If there had been any sign of trouble, you wouldn’t have bought it. “What I don’t understand,” Inko says, “is why your ghost didn’t turn out like the others. From what Toshinori says, your ghost radiates malevolence to such a degree that no one’s stayed long inside the house. The isolation is what’s supposed to drive them crazy, and that would make him more isolated, not less.”
“That’s a weird move for a ghost with a lot of power,” Izuku agrees. “Especially given what all the other ones did. Obviously ghosts have different temperaments, like people do, but if all the others destroyed their haunts and he didn’t –”
He trails off, and Inko doesn’t try to fill the gap. They’re both looking at Mr. Yagi, so you look at him, too. It’s a while before he speaks, and when he does, he’s avoiding your eyes. “Initially, Tomura wouldn’t have had sufficient power to harm anyone. Once he did, it seems he made a conscious decision to use his powers to deepen his own isolation rather than wield them against others. He’s undeniably malevolent, but not particularly hostile. As far as any of us can tell, he’s never attempted to break out of his haunt, much less wreak the kind of destruction one might expect from a ghost in his position. In the eyes of his conjurer, he represents a failure.”
Even though failing at this is exactly what you should want for Tomura, you still don’t like hearing people talk about him that way. “What does that mean?”
“It means that Tomura’s conjurer is likely to return at some point,” Mr. Yagi says, “and attempt to turn Tomura into the symbol of terror he was meant to be. My understanding of Tomura is limited, but based on the available evidence –”
He gestures awkwardly at you. “The fastest way for his conjurer to do that would be to remove you from the picture.”
“Wouldn’t Tomura just kill him?” Izuku asks. “I mean – if someone hurt me or Mom, that’s what you’d do, right?”
“Yes,” Mr. Yagi says, “but this conjurer is too cunning to make it easy. He’d likely kill her far from the neighborhood, which would force Tomura to destroy his haunt to pursue him. Tomura would likely leave immense destruction in his wake as he chased the conjurer. Which is what the conjurer wanted him to do all along.”
You feel like you’re going to be sick. You imagine the house blowing apart from the inside, just like the fence did; or worse, you imagine it crumbling, falling apart in a wave of dust that billows out, consuming everything in its path. He already looks down on the neighborhood. If he found any way to blame them for your death, he’d wipe them off the map. And then he’d move on to everything else.
No. Tomura wouldn’t do something that crazy just for you. You’re out of your mind. “I’m not that important to him,” you say. “I’m not – he’d kill the conjurer to punish him, maybe. He wouldn’t go on a rampage. Why would you say that?”
Mr. Yagi doesn’t answer. He looks uncomfortable. “Even if he succeeded in killing the conjurer, it wouldn’t bring you back,” Inko says softly. “He’d still be loose in the world, still angry, still destructive, with no one to aim his anger towards. Haven’t you ever been so angry that you didn’t care who you hurt?”
You have. You don’t want to admit it, but you have. “So have I,” Inko says, which is hard to imagine. “But you and I are human, with societal expectations that make it unlikely that we’ll act on those feelings. Ghosts don’t have that. They follow their feelings. They don’t see consequences until it’s too late.”
“You’re wrong,” you say. Your jaw is clenched, your hands curled into fists out of sight. “I believe you about all of this – who his conjurer is, and why it happened, and all of that. But you’re wrong about what will happen if his conjurer kills me. He doesn’t care enough about me for the rest of it.”
You see Mr. Yagi and Inko trade a glance. Izuku is staring, too, waiting to be let in on the secret. “Perhaps we’re wrong,” Mr. Yagi says. “Even so, no one wants you to be hurt. With that in mind, we have a gift for you.”
“Toshinori’s master made these for me, back when Toshi was still a ghost,” Inko says. She pulls back her sleeves, revealing narrow bracelets on each wrist. “They hide the traces of ghostly power. When Toshi and I met, he and his master were still battling the conjurer. Wearing these kept me from being noticed and used against him.”
You hadn’t known that. Now you understand why Mr. Yagi is so certain about what Tomura will do if you’re killed – it’s what he would have done, or wanted to do, if he’d lost Inko. “My power’s faded enough that it’s almost undetectable,” Mr. Yagi says. “My master would be pleased if the bracelets went to someone who needed them.”
You argue. Of course you argue. A lot, in no small part because going to Mr. Yagi’s house for dinner and coming back with his wife’s jewelry on is going to convince everybody at the office that you’re sleeping with him. Once you lose that part of the argument, you switch tactics to arguing that something that fits Inko’s wrists is going to be too small for yours, only for Inko to tell you, completely straightfaced, that the bracelets are magic and can grow or shrink to fit whoever needs to wear them. You sit there with that for a moment, chagrined, before she bursts out laughing and tells you to try them on first. You do. They fit perfectly. Maybe they’re magic after all.
You help Inko with the dishes while Izuku piles up paper after paper after paper on the counter for you to take home and review, including a list of six possible names Tomura’s conjurer could be going by at this very moment. Then all of you head to the backyard to extract the butterfly bush. It’s a four-person job for sure. You have no idea how Izuku thought he was going to do it himself.
Inko insists you go home with leftovers, then sends you home with more food than you can carry. You thank her and Mr. Yagi and Izuku with a little more emotion than you usually display – for the food, and for their help. “I’ll bring this back to the neighborhood,” you say. “It’ll clear things up. Now we have a better idea of what to watch out for.”
“If you need assistance at any point, let me know,” Mr. Yagi says. “I do have some experience in this regard.”
“I will,” you say. “I’ll see you at work, sir.”
You’re still feeling too many things as you drive home, the still-living butterfly bush taking up the entire backseat of your car and enough food for two nights of dinners in the passenger seat. It takes you a while to name the feeling as hurt – hurt for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the absurd kindness Mr. Yagi and his family showed to you. It’s an old hurt, one you’ve lived with for a long time; the feeling of observing a happy family and realizing all over again how empty your childhood was. But now there’s a new kind of hurt added to the pile. Not the hurt of wanting something you didn’t have, but wanting something you won’t get.
Inko was you, once upon a time. Human, in love with a ghost, in the line of fire. But it worked out for her. She’s happy. She has a son and a husband who loves her and a garden whose biggest problem is an invasive plant her son accidentally planted in it. That’s never going to be you.
Even if you wanted that, and you’re not at all sure you do, knowing you can’t have it makes you sad. You drive the rest of the way home with a weird lump in your throat, trying to clear it before you get home. You can’t explain this to Tomura. He won’t understand.
The mood sticks with you all the way home, but when you pull into your neighborhood, you feel it inexplicably lift. It’s just past sundown. Hizashi and Shinsou are in their garden, laughing about a misshapen eggplant they’ve been growing. Himiko is on the front porch of her house, painting Jin’s nails, while their siblings scribble profanity they probably learned from Spinner onto the sidewalk in chalk. Spinner and Keigo are hanging out in front of Spinner’s house, talking something over with Magne. And your front lawn might be dead as a doornail, but all the lights are on inside your house.
You park in the driveway and start ferrying things up to the house. The door swings open before you can even think of unlocking it, and Phantom races to greet you, barking and whining until you set the leftovers on the porch swing and crouch down to greet her. She licks your face, slurping the way she does when you’ve been sweating or crying. This time it was the latter.
When you turn to retrieve the leftovers, they’re gone. Inside the house, you hear the refrigerator open and shut. “I can carry that stuff,” you say to Tomura. “Don’t burn through too much energy.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Tomura’s down to a pair of hands as he drifts onto the porch, hands that seize your wrists and refuse to let go. “What are these?”
“I’ll explain,” you say. “I still have stuff to bring in.”
You bring in your purchase from the other store, knowing Tomura won’t look inside it unless you give him a reason to be suspicious, then devote your attention to wrestling the butterfly bush out of the backseat. Tomura eyes it suspiciously. “Where are you going to put that?”
You stop just before you remove it. You know from experience that once something leaves the car in the driveway, it’s fair game. “My boss and his family gave it to me,” you say. Tomura’s suspicious expression cranks up a notch. “It’s for you.”
Tomura blinks. “I’m going to bring it in. Don’t touch it yet,” you say. “I need to talk to you first.”
Tomura waits as you drag the butterfly bush in its pot into the yard, then up onto the porch, then through the door. He keeps quiet until after you’ve shut the door. “Can I have it now?”
“No,” you say. You’ve got a not-insignificant suspicion that Tomura is going to jump you the instant he’s fully materialized, and you don’t want to try to have this conversation while he’s trying to make out with you. But now he’s waiting, clearly impatient, and all at once you forget what you were planning to say. “Um –”
“Did they give you that tree just because they had it?”
“No,” you say, startled. “I asked if I could have it. I wanted to see you. My boss’s son, he said you could probably get two weeks of full materialization out of it, but I think there’s a good chance he underestimated your power level, and –”
The butterfly bush crumbles to ash so quickly it’s hard to imagine it was there in the first place. Tomura’s feet hit the floor, and a moment later, he jumps you. Literally jumps you – he’s taller than you are, but he tangles himself around you until both his feet are off the ground. He’s solid, and heavy, and you’re not at all prepared to take the weight of a fully embodied ghost. You collapse backwards, barely managing to tuck your chin and avoid smacking the back of your skull against the floor. Tomura takes the change from vertical to horizontal completely in stride. Whatever he’s planning, it’s not impeded by the fact that Phantom is racing in excited circles around the two of you.
You’re worried he’s going to kiss you, or go after your clothes the way Dabi’s apparently made a habit of doing to Keigo. Instead Tomura stretches out on top of you, apparently unconcerned with where his elbows and knees are going, and buries his head in your shoulder. Or your neck. He can’t seem to decide which one he prefers.
You put up with a few seconds of ghost cuddling before you ask. “Tomura, what are you doing?”
“Saw it in a movie.” A puff of cold air hits the side of your neck. “Wanted to try.”
“In this movie you saw, were they on the floor?” you ask, exasperated. “If we’re going to keep this up, we’re moving it to the couch.”
“I don’t want to move.”
“Tough luck. I don’t want to cuddle with you on the floor.” You roll him off of you, get to your feet, and book it to the living room, flopping down on the couch a split second before Tomura flops down on you. “Here’s fine, though.”
Tomura gets comfortable again, complaining under his breath, but once he’s settled, he goes quiet and still. “You’re like a weighted blanket,” you say nonsensically. “I didn’t think this was going to be the first thing you did.”
“I want that later. I want this now.” Tomura goes quiet again for a few moments. “Those things your boss gave you are strong. I didn’t see you until you were here. Why do you have them?”
It occurs to you why Tomura might be concerned. “They’re for hiding me when I’m out there. From other ghosts. Or conjurers.”
“You went there to find out about conjurers,” Tomura says. You’re surprised he remembered that. Or surprised he asked about it. Or both. “Did you?”
“About one of them,” you say. “The last name on Aizawa’s list. My boss thinks, um – he thinks that one might be yours.”
“Mine,” Tomura repeats. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” you say. You don’t want to get into the rest of it – the conjurer’s MO, whatever made Tomura different, what Mr. Yagi’s afraid will happen if – when – you die. Not when it’s calm like this. Not when you feel like you’re breathing for the first time in weeks, in spite of the fact that you’re currently being flattened by a ghost. “But my boss and his wife met when he was still a ghost. Someone made the bracelets so other ghosts and conjurers couldn’t find her.”
“Why would they care about someone else’s human?” Tomura sounds like the concept’s never occurred to him. “Just get your own.”
You knew you were right about this. You tell yourself that being right is a relief. “My boss loves his wife. He loved her even when he was a ghost. The best way for somebody to hurt him was to hurt her, and somebody really wanted to hurt him. So she wore these. To be safe. And now his powers have faded, so she gave them to me.”
It’s quiet again. “I don’t like that I can’t see you,” Tomura says.
“I’ll take them off once I’m in the neighborhood,” you say. “So you’ll know I’m there.”
Tomura makes an indistinct sound you can probably read as agreement and makes himself comfortable again. When it becomes clear that he’s not moving any time soon, you wrap your arms loosely around him. Tomura makes another indistinct sound. “What are you doing?”
“Holding you,” you say. “People do that.”
“Weird.” Tomura doesn’t stir. After a few minutes of lying there, one of your hands resting between his shoulder blades and one on the small of his back, you cautiously sneak one hand up to fiddle with the ends of his hair.
It’s tangled. There’s only so much you can do one-handed, but you get to work anyway, strangely comforted by the texture of it between your fingers. Tomura lifts his head slightly when you tug at one of the tougher knots. “Why are you doing that? It’s just going to get tangled again the next time I dematerialize.”
“I can fix it next time, too.” Maybe with a brush. “Do you care?”
“No.” Tomura answers fast. “It’s – nice. A lot of it is nice.”
You wonder what ‘it’ is in this case. Being corporeal? Being in physical contact with you? The physical contact you’re initiating? It doesn’t really matter. It’s all physical sensation to him, some good and some bad, and you’re the person who provides it. Tomura doesn’t care about you beyond that. It makes sense that he wouldn’t worry about you the way Mr. Yagi worries about Inko. The way any other ghost in the neighborhood worries about their human.
You’re not upset about it. You’ll take what you can get. And if what you can get is a few minutes cuddling on the couch before your ghost decides he’d rather make out, that’s still more than you expected when you came home tonight.
shig keeping count how many times he can make you cum before you're shaking and sobbing from overstimulation
“It really is cute how sensitive your little body gets after your fifth orgasm, you know.” He trails his hands lightly down your stomach, your tummy muscles clenching in anticipation and agony. Your knees are trying to jerk shut to prevent him access, but the binds around your ankles keep your legs splayed. Your chest rises and falls in erratic rhythm, breath only barely returning to you after your last dive over the edge.
“Don’t- Please don’t!”
Some of the tears beading on your lashes slip down your cheeks as you slam your eyes shut. You can’t take anymore. Physically, you can’t. Yet, you can feel his pinkie finger tracing little figure eights up your leg and every muscle in your body clenches in protest. It doesn’t matter how much you buck and hiss against his treatment, the frame of the bed never gives way to your tantrum.
He cocks his head with all the feigned innocence of a child who pretends they don’t know they’ve done wrong. “What’s the matter? I thought this was supposed to feel good?” The cold, sarcastic tone to his voice breaks the facade if nothing else does, but the callous way his nails dig into your thigh is a close second.
He sees you flinch and tremble as he slowly draws closer to your apex and his lips tick in a sick sense of satisfaction. There’s a practiced sort of patience in his actions, the way he comes near enough to your overstimulated heat to make you imbed your fingernails into your palms until your knuckles turn white only for him to withdraw over and over without ever allowing you to relinquish the sense of dread it brings when he does. The second he’s seen that you’ve formed some sense of calm around his wandering fingers is when he strikes.
“I can’t! Seriously, I can’t!”
He gives you a derisive look of sympathy and you know it means nothing. He doesn’t want to hear you beg. If he did, he would have accomplished his goal hours ago. Truth be told, you’re not entirely sure what he wants. The only thing that you know is that there’s such a thing as too much pleasure and he has perfected exactly how to weaponize that against you. You’re strapped down, at his mercy, and he looks far from bored.
He’s gaining something from this, surely some sadistic urge is being filled, because he hasn’t even taken off his clothes. This hasn’t even begun yet and you’re sick in the knowledge. He’s molding you like a ball of play-dough, squeezing and squishing until you’re malleable enough for him to want to play with. Judging by the way he’s still skirting the edges of your thighs and showing no signs of moving from his sitting position beside you, you’re not broken enough to be any fun yet.
You’re rubbed raw, legs chafing with a tacky trail leading from where he found his way inside you before to where his hand dances tenderly around your pebbled nipple. Every grace of his fingertips across you pimples your flesh and makes you acutely aware he’s just toying with you. He drives the point home by scratching up your hip, little red welts raising over skin as your leg jerks instinctively from the pain despite the fact that you know you can’t break free.
“It’s actually impressive. This long and you’re still so responsive.” He muses, poking and prodding at your chest like a specimen. “I thought you would have gone numb a long time ago.”
He punctuates his sentence with a none-to-gentle pinch on your breast. You can’t bring yourself to tell him that’s not entirely how it works, not when you can practically see the wheels turning in head turning as he contemplates how he wants to torture you next. His pupils are dilated as they run over your exposed form and you’re not entirely sure whether its with arousal or sheer curiosity. With him, it’s anyone’s guess.
“Please, I can’t take it!”
His hand finds its way between your legs again, cupping and stroking with one finger so lightly that normally you likely wouldn’t even be able to register it, but in your hypersensitivity, your thigh muscles twitch and a wail of agony bubbles in your throat.
“Aw, baby can’t take it anymore?”
He leans in, leaving one hand to coax your already overindulged pussy, the other softly caressing your cheek. It’s a warning sign, a crocodile lazily observing its pray before snapping shut its jaws. His heavily lidded eyes scan your face, sides of his lips curling into a deceptively delicate smile. Your head lulls into his hand, and even though you know the dangers, you fall into his trap.
You regret it as quickly as you do it, and you cry out in a mixture of devastating bliss and torment as his finger plunges back up inside your sore walls, stimulating the overworked nerves with the pads of his fingertip.
“Why don’t we find out just how much you can really take?”
Shigaraki Tomura x Reader
CW: Smut, Minors DNI, I will block your ass. Exhibitionism, being filmed, spanking with a toy, nipple play, degradation.
AN: I tried to keep it pretty GN, if I missed something let me know. Because of this, I don't mention a hole specifically, so use your imaginations <3
~Darling XOXO
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who remains faceless the entire time he's on camera. He's the leader of an entire army, he can't have his entire being called into question because he likes the attention.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who started this whole thing because he saw far uglier men on porn sites raking in hundreds of thousands of yen and for what? He knows he's better looking than at least half of them, and who ever complains about extra money?
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who holds that ideology but really, he loves the attention. He's such an attention slut that you throw enough money at him on stream and he'll do anything.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who loves edging himself on stream because it's just a special kind of torture. Stroking up and down the shaft of his cock and watching it twitch with ever drag of his hand. Thumbing over the head just to collect the bulb of pre-cum already dripping out only to slather it in a slow circle and watch as the light sheens off of it. Reaching his other hand to squeeze his own balls because it feels so good and this is for him and him alone. Everyone watching is lucky that they get to experience such a thing.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who is originally adamant on not bringing you on until Dabi makes a comment about how much more viewers money two person streams bring in. While Dabi was talking about two women streams, Shigaraki is already taking this idea and running with it.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who teases the idea on stream for weeks just to garner his audience's opinions. He watches as the numbers start rolling in when he starts moaning about fucking you're tight little hole and leaving you a dripping mess for their pleasure.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who reads every single comment he gets, about how people are blowing their loads to just the thought of watching anyone get fucked by his cock, whether it's them or not. People volunteering themselves, even if he knows nobody will ever reach your level.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who's disgusted by the idea at first, but soon realizes what this mean. This isn't just a way to make money, or get all the attention he was deprived of as a child, no.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who realizes this is a way to stake a claim. This is a way to absolute ruin his little whore in all the ways he's ever dreamed of and to send a message to everyone who's debauched enough to lose their shit over him of all people.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who knows this will be a message that he's better than them in every single way. He has an army, he's the most wanted villain in Japan, he's dangerous and lethal, and yet he's still getting laid more than they are. That he has this perfect little cum sleeve waiting for him at the drop of a dime.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who grows so hard at the thought on stream he's nearly breaking his thirty minute edging streak at the thought of absolutely wrecking you on camera and leaving you to moan his name for everyone to hear. Because he's the only one who gets to talk to you like this. He's the only one who gets to touch you like that. He's the only one who gets to fuck you and leave your whole gaping for his cock and his cock alone, after all, he's worked so hard to carve out a spot in you for his dick alone. For him to fuck and sully and leave flooded with his cum.
☾ Camboy! Shigaraki who doesn't need much more convincing after that.
Your head hurts.
His fingers are threading so close to the roots of your hair that a small part of your brain is firing off a number of warning signs that he could kill you then and there. The red flags are numbed and buzzed out by the euphoria of simply having him there. You can barely find yourself caring about his hands when the delicious stretch of his cock is filling you all over again. When the sound of his balls clapping against your ass cheeks is ringing in your ears over and over again.
When your eyes are focused on the lens of the camera in front of you. The red light is haunting in the sense that you know exactly what's being broadcasting. An audience of thousands, maybe more, is watching you get your back blown out with heavy drops of cum already dripping down your thighs.
Your back is arched nice and pretty for Tomura, with his one hand pinning you by your head and the other is too busy holding your hips, the only thing saving your life being the arch of his own pinkies to keep them from touching your delicate flesh. Sweat is coating your skin in an uncomfortable layer, but you can't even find it in yourself to care.
There's a chime and the sound effect of coins falling, and you whine out as the vibrators taped to your nipples light up once again. They buzz happily against your sensitive nubs and your entire body scrunches as you keen and shudder. The hand in your hair pulls slightly in a warning.
"Naughty slut." He hisses, low and deep and it sends your entire nervous system into a tizzy. "Gonna cum? I didn't say you could do that."
"'m sorry-" You gasp out, fingers tightening their gasp on the sheets beneath you. "Not gonna cum." You swear thought you can feel that neither of you truly believe that.
Tomura grants you a sliver of relief and stops moving.
The hand on your hip leaves and you're almost tempted to look back, but that's against the rules. So you don't.
You do let out a yelp of shock, or maybe pain, as the stiff surface of his paddle rockets against your awaiting ass cheek. You groan and clench and you can hear Tomura let out his own noise as the paddle lowers to rest it's cool face on the burning flesh of your ass.
"That's my good cum sleeve."
There's another chime and the returning noise of coins falling. The vibrators you hadn't even noticed had turned off come to life again. The paddle swings and your entire body clenches as euphoria runs through your veins, quickly followed by the shame of disobedience which ruins your orgasm before it can even finish.
Right after you feel the rush of warmth as another load of cum fills you more than you thought possible.
Another chime has you crying out in agonized glee.
Yay team pokemon fire✨✨✨ma fav is Blaziken idk how to say his started in english
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
There’s something wrong with your house, but you knew that when you bought it. Right now the thing that’s wrong with your house isn’t the ghost who haunts it, but the fact that said ghost is on day five of an extended sulk. With every day closer to your departure, Tomura’s gotten mopier, and no matter how many times you explain to him that you’ll only be gone for two days, it doesn’t seem to stick.
It’s Friday morning, and you’re leaving directly after work, which means you have to say goodbye to Tomura this morning. He’s not making it easy. “Someone else can go. Aizawa can go,” he complains. “I don’t see why you have to.”
“I’m the one who started looking into this. And Aizawa has kids to look after.” You finish packing your bag and zip it up. “Are you sure you’re okay to watch Phantom? Spinner said he would –”
“I know to feed her and play with her and let her out. I’m way better at taking care of our dog than Spinner.” Tomura is scowling worse than before, and you feel slightly guilty. You like hearing Tomura say that Phantom is both of yours, but that’s not a good enough reason to wind him up. “Why do you have to stay away that long?”
“It’s going to take me six hours to get there. I won’t be there until midnight tonight. I’ll take all of Saturday and some of the next day going over the documents, and I’ll be back late on Sunday.” You pick up your bag and start down the stairs. “I don’t like being away, either. I like it here.”
“Then don’t leave.”
“I have to.” You set your bag down by the front door, then crouch down to say goodbye to Phantom. You haven’t left her alone for this long in a while, and you’re going to miss her. If it wasn’t for Tomura, there’s no way you’d take this trip.
Tomura didn’t follow you down the stairs, and you hear his voice echo through a house that already feels a little too empty. “I won’t have anybody to talk to.”
You thought about that, too. You thought about it and decided that not talking to Tomura for two days wasn’t something you were prepared to tolerate. “Can you come down here? I’ve got something for you.”
Tomura’s footsteps are slow, almost reluctant, as he makes his way down the stairs. “What is it?” he asks. You don’t answer – you’re too busy searching through your hall closet for a bag you stashed there months ago. “If you want me to kiss you before you leave, just say that. Don’t act weird and –”
He stops talking when he sees the bag you’re holding out. “It’s a present,” you say. “Sort of. Open it.”
Tomura’s not very good at opening presents. He shreds the bag, followed by the box, and a charger cable and a pair of headphones fall out and clatter to the floor. He avoids dropping the main event, if nothing else – the smartphone remains in the palm of his hand, and he stares at it suspiciously. “This is for me?”
“We can set it up really quick right now.” If you were smart, you’d have done this last night, but last night you were busy – not with sex, which would have at least been fun, but with trying to snap Tomura out of his over-the-top bad mood. You beckon him closer and he hovers over your shoulder as you start the process. “See, this is your profile. What do you want to set your name as?”
“My name.” Tomura watches as you set it. “Now what?”
You adjust his phone so it’ll always be on battery saver, hook it up to the WiFi so he won’t burn through all your data, and mute all his alert sounds. “Now we’re going to get you some contacts. People you can call or text if you need to.”
You probably spent a lot more time than necessary thinking about whose numbers you should give to Tomura. You ruled out Dabi’s and Hizashi’s instantly – the last thing you want to do is give Tomura the ability to start fights with either of them whenever he wants. Giving Tomura Keigo’s number is risky, but you’re pretty sure Dabi doesn’t know Keigo’s passcode. Tomura gets Aizawa’s number, and Spinner’s, and Jin and Jin’s mom. Jin’s mom, after pleading from Himiko and significant hesitation, agreed to let you add Himiko’s number to Tomura’s phone. You add the other ghosts, too, even though Tomura doesn’t really need a phone to talk to any of them. Last of all, you add Mr. Yagi.
Tomura doesn’t like that. “I don’t want him on my phone. Get rid of him.”
“You don’t ever have to call him,” you say. “It’s just in case.”
“In case what?”
You don’t really know. Tomura makes an irritated noise. “I want Izuku’s number.”
“You can’t have Izuku’s number. Even I don’t have it.” You wouldn’t want it, honestly. Giving Izuku unlimited opportunities to text you or Tomura feels like a stunningly bad idea. “Okay, that’s everybody. Only text them if it’s important, not to start fights. I don’t want to have to fix the fence again.”
“I know,” Tomura says, annoyed. He studies his phone, then looks up at you. “Where are you? Are you in here?”
“I’ve been texting you all the contacts.” You tap your number. “This one is me. You can name me something if you want.”
You show him how to edit the contact, then watch with a little too much interest as he selects a name. He hesitates for a long time, then looks at you. “What am I in your phone?”
“Um –” You added him as a contact already. You hold out the phone for him to examine, and he studies it like he’s reading a textbook. “It’s just your name. Tomura. See? I thought about adding the ghost emoji, but that would have been silly. I can add it if you want.”
Tomura shakes his head, then sets your phone aside and types your name into his as your contact. Which is fine. Except then he adds a display name – My Human. “Hey,” you complain. “Don’t do that. I used your name.”
He smirks. Part of you wants to change his display name to something like “my asshole ghost” to return fire, but before you can say anything, Keigo honks his car horn and hollers from outside. “Hey, if we’re going, we need to go now!”
“We’re going!” you shout back. You pick up your bag and your work backpack and race out to his car. You’re about to get in when you realize you haven’t said goodbye to Tomura yet. And that you’re missing your phone. “Shit –”
“I have your stupid phone.” Tomura’s on the other side of the fence. You reach for it, but he holds it just out of range. “I want a kiss first.”
“I was going to kiss you anyway,” you say. You lean across the property line, grasp his shoulder to pull him closer, and kiss him goodbye. You don’t stop until Keigo honks the horn again.
You’ve been in relationships before, but none of your exes ever insisted on a goodbye kiss when you had to leave for more than a day, let alone a goodbye kiss in full view of the entire neighborhood. You’re a little giddy on the drive to work, and Keigo, to his credit, doesn’t rib you too much about it. “He knows you’re not going off to war, right?”
“He knows.” You slouch down in the passenger seat. “He’s been moping all week. Did Touya do that?”
“When I was gone for too long, Touya broke out of the house,” Keigo says. Your jaw drops. “He and a bunch of other ghosts haunted this old-style family compound, and each of them was confined to a specific area. He broke out of his and into somebody else’s. You can guess how that went. So that ghost broke out of their assigned haunt, and then –”
You remember what Keigo said about ghost fights. “How many ghosts were there, total?”
“Six.” Keigo winces. “I moved pretty fast after that.”
Dabi sounds like he was a lot to deal with even back when he was Touya. A terrible thought occurs to you. “You don’t think Tomura would –”
“You told him where you were going,” Keigo points out. “And you got him a phone so he can talk to you. When it was me I just dipped for a day or two. I had no idea Touya was going to take it like that.”
“So that was kind of early on for you guys?”
“I guess.” Keigo sighs. You’re at a stoplight, and he hits his head lightly against the steering wheel. “Anyway, that one was on me. If he’d been a normal roommate I would have told him where I was going. So I think you’re probably fine. But we’ll let you know if anything weird starts happening.”
You’re hoping it won’t. You change the subject. “Thanks for giving me a ride. Parking in the station lot for two days was going to be expensive.”
“No problem. I was headed this way anyway,” Keigo says. “It’s better that you’re taking the train than driving. Less expensive.”
“It’s harder to track, too,” you say. “I don’t think anybody’s watching, but – still. Better safe than sorry.”
“Definitely,” Keigo agrees. He merges onto the highway and floors it to a speed he swears the cops don’t pull people over for. “Nobody wants a repeat of last time.”
You’re hoping to avoid it. That’s what this trip is about. When you shared the idea with Mr. Yagi and Aizawa, they both approved, although they both suggested that they should go instead of you. You held your ground. Even fifteen years after his embodiment, Mr. Yagi has a reputation among ghosts, and Aizawa’s carrying around Hizashi’s marks with no conjurer-forged bracelets to conceal them. Besides, you’re the one who found the asylum, who found Shigaraki Yoichi. Since there’s basically nothing else you can do to help, you want to see this through.
But that doesn’t mean you’re looking forward to the trip. In fact, your dread of it increases throughout the day, until you’re dragging your feet along with your suitcase as you walk to the train. Some part of you knows the dread is irrational, but it’s hard to shake, and it’s got nothing at all to do with conjurers, asylums, or ghosts. The city nearest to the asylum is the one your parents moved to, after you went to college and they sold the house you grew up in. And you and your parents have an agreement to check in whenever you’re in the same city as they are. When you texted them to tell them you’d be there for the weekend, they told you to cancel your hotel reservation and invited you to stay with them.
It’s been over two years since you last saw them. Last time it was awkward, and it was awkward the time before that, too. Your parents’ ambitions for you included a college degree and financial independence, and once you hit those milestones, it was clear at least to you that they have no idea what to make of you. But turning down their offer of a place to stay would have made things worse, and besides, hotel rooms are expensive. Saving money is worth an awkward weekend at your parents’ new home. You’ve never been there before.
You doze on and off on the train, waking up at every stop and checking your phone. Tomura hasn’t texted you, but then again, why would he? He existed in the house alone long before you were even born. Maybe he’s figuring out that he likes the peace and quiet, too.
The thought doesn’t sit well with you, and you’re crabby for the rest of the ride, although you do your best to shake it off once you arrive. The meeting with your parents will be difficult enough without you being irritated at the ghost in your house at the same time. It’s just past eleven-thirty as you make the short walk to your parents’ house from the station, your stomach growling the entire way. You’ll have to order in from somewhere once you’re settled for the night.
Their house is in a small new development, multiple homes clustered around a large central courtyard. You step through the gate and make your way across it to your parents’ front door. You check your phone one last time, ordering yourself not to be disappointed when you see that Tomura hasn’t reached out. Then you raise one hand and press the doorbell.
The door swings open almost immediately, and your father smiles at you in a way that gives you pause. He reaches out and lifts your suitcase out of your hand, then pulls you into the house and into a hug shortly afterward. For lack of anything better to do, you hug him back.
He’s smaller than you remember. More frail, and there’s more grey in his hair. How old are your parents now? Pushing seventy – they had you late, and you’ve always had the impression that you were sort of an accident. “It’s been too long,” your father says to you. He waits while you take off your shoes, then beckons you further down the hall. “Come along. We held back dinner so we could eat together.”
That doesn’t sound right. You rarely ate with both parents at once when you were a kid; family mealtimes were no one’s priority, and you ate with whichever parent was in the house at dinnertime, or you ate alone. “Why?”
Your father gives you an odd look. “It’s been too long,” he says again, as if the distance is all your fault, as if they couldn’t have reached out just as easily. “And it seems you’ll be very busy this weekend. This might be the only time we can catch up.”
“I have a lot to do,” you admit. Your father sets your suitcase down just inside the door of a room and continues down the hall. You can smell food cooking. “Thank you for waiting for me.”
Your mother is busy in the kitchen, but when you go to help her, she waves you off, under instructions to wash your hands and get settled. “I’m making your favorite,” she tells you, and smiles. But then you see the smile waver. “Is it still your favorite?”
“I make it all the time,” you say. “It never tastes quite like yours.”
Tomura’s observed you working on the recipe more than once, and he always makes fun of you for changing it each time. No matter what you change, you can’t make it taste right, but maybe – “If you won’t let me help, can I stay and watch?”
“Of course,” your mother says. “It’s been too long.”
You wish they’d both stop saying that. If they wanted you to talk to them more now, they should have talked to you when you were a kid. Hizashi’s words pop into your head, like they do every so often: Mommy and Daddy didn’t love you enough. Maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they just didn’t know what to do with a kid once they had one.
Your phone makes the sad chiming sound that tells you it’s running low on battery, and you dig up your charger and plug it in, leaving it balanced on the corner of the kitchen counter as you watch your mom cook. Watching her, it’s easy to see where you went wrong in the recipe, or where you went wrong by following the recipe – there are spices your mom uses that are nowhere to be found on the ingredient list. You didn’t watch her cook very often as a kid. Maybe you should have asked if you could help.
The three of you sit down to dinner, and it’s beyond weird. The family dinners you remember were full of silence, but it’s been over two years since you last saw your parents, which means there’s a lot to talk about. You’re not sure how to talk about your life now, so you ask your parents about theirs, and hear that your dad’s retired but your mom is working part-time teaching English at a local middle school. They like their neighbors a lot. In fact, they want you to meet their neighbors tomorrow night. Apparently the neighbors have been asking about you.
“We told them a little, but you’re so busy that we haven’t talked in a while,” your mom says. Now you get why they invited you to stay here. Not knowing what your only child is up to looks pretty bad. “How have things been for you? Are you still working in the public defenders’ office?”
“What about law school?” Your dad takes a sip of his drink. Sometime in the last three years, your parents got sort of into fancy wine. “Are you still planning to go back?”
“Yeah. Money’s still an issue. I had a hard time saving with how high my rent was.” You try your own wine, but you don’t know enough about wine to know if it’s any good. “I bought a house, though. So I guess that’s new.”
It’s quiet for a bit. When you look up from your plate, you find your parents staring at you with their jaws dropped. “You bought a house?” your mother repeats. “You can’t afford law school. How can you afford a house?”
“I didn’t have enough for law school. I had enough for a downpayment,” you say. “My mortgage payments are cheaper than my rent was.”
“That’s hard to imagine. Is it in a good neighborhood?” your dad asks. “If it isn’t – what’s funny?”
Your neighborhood, being good. “There are five other houses besides mine. Three of them have families in them. They’ve been really nice to me, mostly. We all get together sometimes.”
“What for?”
Strategy sessions. Ghost fights on the sidewalk. Conjurer ambushes that end with half the street wrecked and some of you injured. “Just regular stuff. I went to one of the kids’ parties last weekend. I brought Phantom. She was a hit.”
“Who?”
“My dog,” you say. “I’d just gotten her the last time we talked. Don’t you remember?”
“She sent us a picture,” your dad reminds your mom, while you tamp down your frustration. “Is someone looking after her this weekend?”
“Yeah. My –” The stumbling block of how to describe Tomura temporarily breaks your brain. “A friend.”
You covered it well, you think – but you weren’t fast enough. “What kind of friend?” your mother asks, way too interested. “A special friend?”
“God, Mom. No.” You imagine the look on Tomura’s face if he heard someone refer to him as your “special friend” and experience a brief but powerful urge to crawl into a vent and die. “A friend. Really, I could have asked anybody in the neighborhood. They’re all really – nice.”
“A house,” your father muses. “In a good neighborhood. You must have a lot of friends over.”
You can’t tell if he’s needling you or not. He knows you’ve never been the type to have a lot of friends. “It’s kind of a ways out from where everybody else lives. Most people don’t like driving that far.”
“Oh, so that’s how you could afford it.”
You could afford it because it’s so goddamn haunted that nobody else wanted it, and the only reason you kept it is because the ghost who haunts it let you stay. “I don’t mind. I’d rather drive than have roommates and a landlord.”
Your father nods sagely. Your mother’s on a different track. “What about dating? Is there anybody special?”
“No,” you say, lying your ass off. “I’m not seeing anybody.”
Your phone starts ringing on the counter, but you ignore it, and so do your parents. “I don’t want to rush you, but you ought to get a move on, don’t you think?” your mother presses. “You’re going to be twenty-seven soon. If you don’t hurry up, all the good ones will be gone. Don’t you want to settle down?”
“I’m as settled down as I’m going to get,” you say. Your phone starts ringing again, and you ignore it again, even though you’d almost take a telemarketer over this conversation. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You’re not disappointing us if that’s what makes you happy,” your dad says, and you’re impressed for about two seconds before he ruins it. “Are you sure that’s what will make you happy? What about –”
“What about kids?” your mother breaks in, looking honestly distressed. “Don’t you want kids? You’d be such a good mom –”
You would possibly be the worst mom on the planet. Your phone starts ringing again. “Are you going to get that?” your dad asks.
You should. Three calls in a row means it’s important, but this line of questioning from your parents is pissing you off, which means you’re not in the mood to do anything you should be doing. “Nope.”
“I’ll get it,” your mom announces. She picks up the phone and gasps. “Who’s Tomura?”
Your stomach drops like you’ve been kicked off a building. “Nobody,” you say. “He’s –”
“I knew you had a special friend!”
“He’s not a special friend!”
Your mom brandishes your phone, triumphant. “Then why is there a heart next to his name?”
He wouldn’t. He – you stare at the screen of your phone, and sure enough, there’s Tomura’s name on the caller ID, complete with an obnoxiously red heart emoji. You’re going to kill him. You seize the phone, accept the call, and press it to your ear. “What?”
Tomura sounds unfathomably sulky when he answers. “You got me the phone so we can talk while you aren’t here. Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I’m having dinner with my parents. It’s rude to pick up the phone at dinner.” You’re conscious of your parents staring at you with identical gleeful looks on their faces. “Just like it’s rude to call somebody three times in a row. What was so important?”
“You didn’t call me all day.”
“You didn’t call me, either,” you point out, trying not to lose your temper. If he had called you, you’d have noticed his little edit to his contact and gotten rid of it. “Is everything okay?”
“It’s fine. Phantom ate and everything.” Tomura’s quiet for a second. “You have parents?”
“Yesh,” you say. Did you tell him that’s who you were staying with? You don’t remember. “I’m staying with them, not at the hotel. They invited me.”
Tomura swears under his breath. You can hear him rustling around, but you’re not sure what he’s doing, and the longer you give your parents to prep for their interrogation, the worse it’s going to be for you. “Can I call you back in a little bit? I do want to talk to you. I just – can’t right now.”
“How long is a little bit?”
“I don’t know,” you say hopelessly. Why does it matter? It’s not like he’s going to fall asleep. “I will, though. I promise. I miss you.”
The words leave your mouth before you can really think them through, but it’s the truth. You do miss Tomura. You miss him extra right now, and you’re not looking forward to falling asleep without his presence lurking somewhere in the room. When you wake up from nightmares of the world between, he and Phantom are the only things that make you feel better. “I miss you, too,” Tomura says. Then he hangs up the phone.
You set it aside, then turn back to face your parents. “So,” your mother says, grinning, “who’s Tomura?”
Your ghost. The reason why you don’t date anymore. The reason why you’re as settled as you’re ever going to be and the reason why your parents aren’t getting grandkids and the reason you’re here at all in the first place. There’s no way to explain him that your parents will understand, so you pick the one thing they will understand, even if it’s sort of wrong. “My boyfriend.”
You stagger off to bed forty-five minutes later, feeling like you’ve been run over by a train. Your mom had lots of questions – about where you met Tomura, how long you’ve been seeing him, what he looks like, what he does for a living – almost all of which you had to lie about. You’re going to have to remember all those lies later, too. Your dad was more concerned about why you’d lie about having a boyfriend, at which point you lost patience a little bit and said that the conversation the three of you just had about it was all the reason you needed. Then your mom said she wanted to meet him, and you decided it was time to start clearing the table.
They have a guest room, which is where you’re staying. You get ready for bed, go inside, and shut the door before checking your phone again. You’ve got messages from Tomura – and from Keigo. You open Keigo’s first and grimace when you see what it says. The lights in your house are going berserk right now. If he’s trying to get ahold of you, you should pick up the phone.
Keigo sent a video, too. In it, the lights inside your house are flickering wildly, and the entire property seems to be surrounded by some kind of weird, wavering forcefield. Great. You check Tomura’s texts next. He wants to know where you are. Why you haven’t called him. Then there are a few texts of him winding himself up over reasons why you haven’t called him, externalizing a thought process you would have kept to yourself if it killed you, before it occurs to him that something might have happened to you. At which point the phone calls started. You dig your headphones out of your backpack, put them on, plug them in, and call Tomura back.
He picks up halfway through the first ring, and you start talking first. “I shouldn’t have gotten mad. I just wasn’t planning to tell my parents about you, and because you called me when you did – and because you put that emoji in your display name – they found out.”
“Why does it matter if they found out?” Tomura asks. “Why don’t you want to tell them about me?”
You almost point out that you said you weren’t planning to, not that you didn’t want to, but Tomura knows what you really meant. He knows you better than you think he does. “You’re hard to explain,” you say. “To people who don’t know about ghosts. It wouldn’t make sense to them.”
“Why not?” Tomura’s climbing the stairs. You can hear them creaking under his feet. “You’re my human. Not the kind of human Spinner and Jin are. The kind Aizawa is.”
“The kind Keigo is,” you correct. Tomura makes an irritated sound. “Aizawa and Hizashi are married.”
“So what? You’re that kind of human. That’s not hard to explain.”
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe you’re making this more complicated than it needs to be. “I told my parents you’re my boyfriend. I hope that’s okay.”
“Boyfriend,” Tomura repeats, like he’s never heard it before – but when he speaks up again, it’s clear he’s got a handle on what it means. “If that’s what you have to call it so people understand, fine. As long as they know you’re my human.”
You could probably play off Tomura calling you his human as a cute nickname or something, but you’d really prefer not to have to do that. “If I tell people you’re my boyfriend, they’ll understand for sure.”
“Good.”
There’s some rustling around on Tomura’s end of the line. “What are you doing?” you ask. “Where are you?”
There’s a prolonged silence, which means Tomura’s somewhere he thinks he’s not supposed to be. There aren’t many options left these days. “You’re on the bed, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. So what?” More rustling. “It’s weird that you’re not here. I hate it.”
“I don’t like it, either,” you admit. When you close your eyes, it’s easy to picture Tomura stretched out on your side of the bed, taking up the space you usually would, head resting on your pillow. “Maybe there won’t be as much to go through tomorrow as I thought and I can get home tomorrow night instead.”
“The sooner you come back, the better.” Phantom’s collar rattles in the background of the call, and you know she’s jumped up on the bed with Tomura. “Spinner came over. He said I needed a game that wasn’t Rainbow Fish, so he gave me one and taught me how to play it. It’s – Pokémon?”
“He gave you something to play it on, too, right?” You need to thank Spinner. “What do you think of it?”
“It’s okay. The music is weird.” Tomura’s voice fades for a second, and you can hear Phantom slobbering into the microphone. “It was more fun before he left. I don’t like playing games alone.”
“You can ask him back over. I bet he wouldn’t mind,” you say. “Which starter did you pick? Fire, water, or grass?”
“Fire,” Tomura says. You could have guessed that. “My rival had water, though. I should have picked grass.”
“If you picked grass, your rival would have picked fire.”
“So they always pick the one that can beat yours?” Tomura sounds honestly pissed at the unfairness, and it makes you smile. “That’s stupid.”
“It would be boring if it was too easy,” you say. Tomura complains under his breath. “And they can’t beat you if you build a good team. I used to play that a lot as a kid. I can help if you want.”
“I don’t need help,” Tomura says. “You can watch if you want.”
“That sounds nice.” You imagine sitting next to Tomura with your head on his shoulder, letting the goofy Pokémon music lull you into a doze. It’s a weirdly relaxing image. You find yourself swallowing a yawn. “Sorry –”
“Go to sleep. If you don’t you’ll be slow, and then you’ll have to stay the extra day.” Tomura sounds annoyed, but he sounds annoyed any time you have to end an interaction before he wants it to end, so you’re used to it. What you’re not used to is what he says next. “If you have one of your nightmares, don’t just lay there doing that weird shivering thing. Call me.”
You lie there for a moment, stunned. You’ve never mentioned the nightmares to him. You never breathed a word. “How did you know?”
“I know what sounds you make in your sleep. When you’re having a nightmare they’re wrong.” Tomura’s quiet for a moment. “Don’t just lay there. Call.”
Your throat feels tight. “Okay.”
Tomura hangs up. You pull your headphones out of your ears, set your phone down on the nightstand, and squeeze your eyes shut. You don’t need to cry. There’s no reason why your eyes should well up.
You’re in your parents’ house. It’s a new house, but it feels the same as the old house. Even though your parents listen now. Even though they care about what’s going on in your life – for their own reasons, sure, but they care – your family is still the same way it’s always been. Quiet. Distant. Sterile. Your parents have seemed happier the last few times you’ve seen them. You’ve never admitted it out loud, to anyone, but you think they’ve been happier since you moved out, because you moved out. And that was okay with you. The last time you went back to visit, it was fine.
It’s not fine anymore – not because they’re different, but because you are. You remember Tomura saying once that he didn’t care about being alone before, but he does now. You didn’t let yourself care about the way your family was before, but you can’t stop yourself from caring now, because now you know how it feels to actually belong somewhere. You belong at your house. You’re wanted at your house. You make someone happy by being there. Somebody misses you when you’re gone, tells you to hurry back, tells you to call if you’ve had a nightmare. There’s probably something fucked up about the fact that the only person you’ve ever felt at home with isn’t even human. But you know what it means to feel at home now. Being away from that is hard. Harder than you want to handle.
You scramble for your phone, and it starts ringing in your hand. Tomura’s contact, with its stupid heart. You jam your headphones into your ears and accept the call, and for a moment you and Tomura are just talking over each other. The gist of it is pretty clear, though. You were about to call him, just when he decided to call you. “Um –”
“Stay on the phone while you’re sleeping. That way I’ll hear. And I can wake you up.”
Your heart lifts even though it shouldn’t. “How are you going to wake me up?”
You picture Tomura shrugging. “I’ll just yell.”
“Don’t yell.” The only thing that would be worse than having one of your nightmares is waking up from one to the sound of Tomura hollering in your ear. “If you hear me start to have one, hang up the phone and call me back. I’ll hear it ringing and it’ll wake me up.”
“Yelling is faster.”
“And it’s scarier,” you say. “You’d know if you slept.”
“Ghosts can’t.” Tomura’s quiet for a moment. “I wish we could.”
That strikes you as weird. It strikes you as weird any time Tomura talks about wanting to do one of the few human things materialized ghosts can’t do. “Why?”
Tomura doesn’t answer. “Fine. I won’t yell. Go to sleep.”
“Tomura –”
“Go to sleep,” Tomura says again. If you try to talk anymore, he’ll just ignore you. You hear Phantom snoring in the background and tell yourself that it’s time to sleep. You shut your eyes.
Somehow knowing that Tomura’s there on the other end of the line, knowing that he’ll wake you up if you start having one of your nightmares of the world between, helps you fall asleep. You think you hear Tomura whisper something as you drift off, but there’s no way you heard him right. It has to be a dream. At least it’s a better dream than the ones you’ve been having lately.
Okay but I love your hcs, especially since it deals with villains after winning the war which I think is so interesting. Like a imagine being shigaraki's darling but instead of being kidnapped or in process of being kidnapped, your his virtual crush. He met you on an international server and darling practicing their Japanese tried their best to befriend him. No one had wanted to be his friend before so he was hesitant but soon a friendship developed and it was so comforting, outside the screen he had villain missions, failures, strings of poverty or homelessness, and societal rejection. But in game he had darling and their fun civilian antics, jabs, wins together, it's like a home he never had and when the leauge gets money he can finally have the time to text and to call and realize his crush on darling. But he won't kidnap them yet, he's busy and there is a whole war to win first but when does the first thing he'll do is to send darling over to him. Now imagine darling, they have a internet pal who can sometimes get weird or dip out for life reasons but nothing to weird, playing with them is fun and when they start texting or voice calling you both get closer. Sometimes you hope their safe because you heard Japan as a lot of dangerous villains and their a little silent but it's alright. It's only not when tomura shigaraki the one you've only seen in still news photos, the one who took over Japan as a bringer of chaos knocks on your door, claiming to be that friend you've talked to all this time
OMG i just love your idea, especially the fact that you both met online. i really liked your idea as it was so I just added some details + what happens when shigaraki takes reader away. i do think that everything happened before the attack of the USJ, shigaraki played a lot of MMOs because he had nothing else to do.
(y/un = your username)
word count: 1098 tw: obsessive behavior, clingy behavior, kidnapping, confinement, yandere, possessive behavior
✤shigaraki would be a really strong player and he is in one of the strongest guilds in the game. he plays a DPS character and he mostly plays solo, except in endgame because he can't play without a support (that's why he joined a guild). his username would be something a bit corny like DecayKiller (im sorry for this but I can't imagine him with anything different 🥲)
✤he changes support every time because he finds people annoying, that is until he met you.
✤this would be the first MMO you played, although you weren't used to it you were quite the good support and you quickly earned a good reputation which allowed you to join shigaraki's guild. after some days, he sent you a party invite and you started doing some dungeons.
✤at first you thought it was a one time thing just like with other supports but for some reason he asked you to play with him whenever you logged in. for some reason he grew quite fond of you without you knowing why.
✤you eventually added each other on discord and started to talk everyday. "DecayKiller" wasn't the most talkative person but you always found a subject to talk about with him.
✤you both would meet twice a week or more to play and to voice call together. it became a ritual and you both were really happy to spend time with each other. at first he wanted to speak english with you because he didn't want to bother you but when you told him you were learning japanese you almost always spoke in that language.
✤there was a lot of things you liked about "DecayKiller": his honesty, you didn't know a lot of people who would speak that frankly to you, the way he laughed, it wasn't often so you see this as a precious thing, the way he would sometimes be childish although he acted so mature and his voice, it was a bit hoarse and you honestly thought he sounded very hot (not that you would ever tell him).
✤everything went like that for a while until the league really started to get to work. you would meet less often, which made you kinda sad to be honest. you missed those days where you would spend hours talking together.
✤but "DecayKiller" would make sure to talk to you a lot even if not voice calling, he also made sure you could voice call at least three times a month. everything stopped when the paranormal liberation war broke out.
✤you were very worried because you had no sign of life from "DecayLord" for almost 3 months, especially since you heard the villains conquered japan. you could only send messages to him, hoping that he would respond. but he never did.
✤you had lost hope when you heard someone ringing at your door, you thought it was a delivery man and you opened the door. only to find one of the most infamous villains lately : shigaraki was here.
✤you took a step back, terrified when you saw him only to bump into someone else behind you.
"don't make this complicated y/un, we'll have a lot more time to talk."
✤you recognized "DecayKiller" 's voice as you felt a west tissue pressing against your mouth, making you fall into a deep slumber.
.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
✤you woke up to someone playing with your hair, your head pressed against what felt like a male's chest. it took a while for you to wake up and to realize the situation you were in, when you remembered what happened in front of your house you got up in a hurry, trying to figure out where you were.
✤the chest you were lying on earlier was none other than shigaraki's.
"don't move too suddenly the drugs aren't out of your system yet."
✤he grabbed your wrist and pulled you back against him. you were absolutely terrified and you tried to say something, without success. you waited for a bit before looking right at him, that's the first time you've seen him that close. after a while you finally managed to utter a word.
"w-why ?"
"because i wanted you. i always did. i waited to have you and when i could, i took you."
✤you bit your lips, nervous. you both stayed in like this in silence, only with him playing with your hair. you took your time looking through the room when you realized your right feet was chained to the wall.
✤the chain was quite long but not enough for you to reach the door of the large room, which looked like it was part of a penthouse but you had no way to be sure. shigaraki saw that you noticed the chain because he started talking again.
"this is only for a while, i want to make sure i can trust you. you'll be free to roam around the apartment after his, there isn't much to see outside."
✤you could only stare at your foot in despair as shigaraki kissed your forehead, keeping you against him.
.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
✤life with shigaraki isn't as horrible as you thought it would be. he would bring video games that you can play together. you would even play the MMO you used to play together, offline of course.
✤one of the good side would be that you would always eat nice food together. you weren't sure how but he would always bring you a variety of different food, each always tasty.
✤if you like cuddles, you'll love shigaraki because he is always all over you. he never leaves your side outside "work". when he does go to work he is always grumpy at the thought of leaving you and you find this strangely cute.
✤the bad side about all of this is the isolation and shigaraki's lack of patience. when shigaraki is not here you don't have anything to do or anyone to see, which can be quite oppressive. and although shigaraki told you he would wait to trust you you can see he get quite eager to be able to do more things with you.
✤he wouldn't try anything without you agreeing but the more you "test his patience", the more grumpy and almost mean he can get. it's in your best interest to get closer to him, if you want to live comfortably that is.
✤by the way forget about escaping. I mean, this man rules over a whole country far from your own, you can't get away from him. you'd better get used to this lifestyle or else... well good luck.
bnha: their partner has an oral fixation (part 2)
PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4
Dabi | Tomura | Shouta
more smutty bnha headcanons no one asked for but i’m writing them anyway because it’s fun.
obligatory mdni, 18+ content. you will be blocked.
tags: fem!reader, oral fixation (obv), oral sex, rough sex, fish hooking mentioned, facials mentioned, finger sucking, unintentional hand & finger kink
Dabi
i hope you love sucking dick and getting face fucked, cause he loves it too. any time, anywhere, as many times as you want. at least once or twice a day if not more. also he loves painting your face if you don’t swallow.
lets you cockwarm him at night if it helps you fall asleep. he’d never admit it, but it helps him fall asleep too. he’d also never say that he’s got a tiny soft spot for how sweet you look with his dick in your mouth while you lay in bed.
he might make you beg or tease you a bit if you’re bratty, but you both know the second those needy doe eyes come out, your head’s getting shoved into his lap. he thinks it’s even better when you’re standing and he gets to grab you by the hair and pull you down to your knees.
finger fucks your mouth just to see you drool and make you blush, and makes you look him in the eye when he does it. might even do it when his friends are around because he doesn’t give a fuck, he wants you to be a pretty mess, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
you can bet your bottom dollar he will fish hook you when he fucks you from behind because, “you look so pretty like this, babydoll. i can’t help myself.”
Tomura
he thinks you’re insane for playing with his hands as much as you do, and he loves it. you think you might be insane too, but you’re with Shiggy for fuck’s sake, of course there’s at least a little part of you that likes the fear of being turned to dust when he’s got that beautifully wild, sadistic grin on his face.
might like to taunt you with the fear, but would never actually harm you.
enthusiastic about it in the beginning because god do you look so fucking slutty and needy, but the more he sees that you genuinely care about him, the more afraid he is of hurting you. wears specific gloves that cover his pinkies because you’re special to him because it makes him less anxious.
your love and tenderness with the part of him that has only ever destroyed, only hurt people and hurt them bad, is painful and he doesn’t handle it well. he pushes you away a lot, but you’re patient with him, knowing he’ll always come back.
once admitted that you make him itch a little less, but refuses to think of the ramifications of what that means about his feelings for you.
lets you give head whenever you want. enjoys it a lot when he’s playing video games and he gets to ignore you no matter how enthusiastic you are. will occasionally grab you by the hair and use you as a way to get off.
Shouta
man’s busy and so are his hands - grading, case work, lesson planning, training, taking care everyday life - so they’re not something you go for often, but you don’t mind so much. you appreciate any moment you can share with him, especially if he’s curled up next to you or in your lap.
occasionally puts his hand towards your lips in bed at night without thinking; so much of his life is on autopilot out of necessity that sometimes he doesn’t think twice.
most of his appreciation for your fixation comes out in sex; he loves the blissful look you get with his finger(s) in your mouth while you ride him, and he loves how hard it makes you cum.
loves to give head, so you get the luxury of his lips on your body frequently, which in a roundabout way satisfies your craving.
likes receiving head, but mostly because of how much you enjoy it. sure, it feels fantastic, but he appreciates the intimacy of it more.
came up because you point blank asked if it was okay. he shrugged. “why not?” which quickly became, “oh. we’re doing this again.”
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18+, minor don't interact with the 18+ contentTomura shigaraki's biggest simpArtist, writter
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