Haunting For Beginners - A Shigaraki X F!Reader Fic

Haunting for Beginners - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

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

Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that what the price is reflecting?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomura likes that. He likes that a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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