Enough To Go By -- A Shigaraki X F!reader Fic

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

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

Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They said he died?”

“They don’t mention him at all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey!”

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

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

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

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

“Dead might be better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Turn that shit off.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📸 Self-Ship Photo Scavenger Hunt! 🎞

The idea of this is to appreciate little details/moments of your f/o! This works best with live-action F/O’s but any visual media is ok! Askers send you an F/O and an emoji and you have to…

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As a bonus, gush about the screenshot in the caption (you know you want to) - and please practice inbox karma if you can 😌

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

Enough to Go By (Chapter 2) -- a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

When the ER doctors ask you how you got hurt, you lie. You know you shouldn’t lie, know that Tenko’s dangerous, know that his quirk, whatever it is, is deadly on contact. Some part of you thinks you should be scared of the possibility that Tenko will come back to finish the job. But at the same time, you know you’re the one who chased him. You’re the one who wouldn’t let him go. If you hadn’t run after him, none of this would have happened.

This, it turns out, is a wrist that requires a specialized healing quirk to fix, and a bruised larynx that makes you sound like you’ve been deepthroating a lead pipe. “Whoever you’re protecting, you shouldn’t,” an old, sort of grizzled nurse says severely after the fifth time you’ve repeated your lie. “Another few pounds of pressure on your throat and you’d be dead.”

Tenko was fine with killing you, at least at first. You’re not sure what changed his mind, or why he let you go, and in spite of the fact that he gave you injuries severe enough for an overnight in the ER, you can’t help wondering what happened to him. The friend you knew was nothing like that. He got frustrated sometimes, like everyone else, but he was kind. And hurting people? He wouldn’t. His older sister did more playground fighting than he did. In fact, when you think about it – you close your eyes against the fluorescent lights in your hospital room and try to fend off the memory. You can’t quite do it, because it’s crystal clear. Tenko spent more time getting hurt than doing the hurting.

If Tenko and Hana got out the door first on school days, they’d wait outside your house on the sidewalk for you to come out, so you could all walk to school together. If you were ready first, you’d wait for them. One morning you were waiting, tapping your feet, fiddling with your umbrella because the weather looked like rain even if the forecast didn’t say so, when you heard voices. One raised grown-up voice and one small anxious one, from inside the house.

You didn’t want to eavesdrop, but you didn’t know how not to. Hana had a cold, so she was staying home. Tenko had wanted to say goodbye to her before he left, but their dad said no, and when Tenko stuck his head in the door anyway, his dad yelled. And was still yelling, over whatever Tenko was trying to say, until Tenko stumbled out onto the sidewalk, without a raincoat or an umbrella and scratching the skin around his eyes.

Or wiping his eyes, maybe. He started scrubbing at them frantically when he saw you. “Don’t look –”

You turned around, and as you did, you felt the first drops of rain. “Are you okay?”

“Hana’s sick.” Tenko sniffled. “I went in her room when I wasn’t supposed to.”

I heard, you almost said. But you didn’t. You just asked again. “Are you okay?”

“We have to walk or we’ll be late.” Tenko started walking, past you, and you followed him. The rain was falling harder, spattering Tenko’s shirt and his backpack. “It wasn’t supposed to rain.”

“Here.” You put up your umbrella and hurried to catch him, holding it over both your heads. You didn’t have a choice but to look at him now, and you saw how puffy his eyes were. “I bet Hana was happy.”

Tenko nodded. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and sniffled again, and when his hand fell back to his side, it brushed against yours. Tenko cringed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” you said. You linked your pinky finger with his. “I swear.”

Tenko’s finger hooked tighter around yours. “Only since you swore.”

He had a cold the next day, and so did you. You cried until your mom went over to his house to apologize for you getting Tenko and Hana sick. So this isn’t the first time you’ve lied to protect Tenko. It might just be the first time you’re getting away with it.

You’re out of the ER at eight in the morning, and by nine-thirty you’re at work. You’re a medical assistant in a network of urgent care clinics that serve low-income people, uninsured people, or people who don’t want to risk going to a standard hospital. Your friends call your workplace Villains, Inc., and you’re not going to say you haven’t met your share – but you also meet a lot of people, and you think it’s good for you. Sometimes it feels like there are two Japans, sharing space in the same territory. One full of pretty, shiny heroes and happy, law-abiding civilians and uncomplicatedly evil villains, where everybody has a quirk and everybody’s always doing their best. And then there’s the other Japan, populated by everybody who doesn’t belong in the first one.

They say one in five people are quirkless, but you see at least fifty people a day at work, and the number of quirkless people on your side of Japan is a lot higher. Quirkless children have the school system to nominally protect them, but there’s no such system for quirkless adults. A lot of them are pushed to the margins, losing jobs to those with quirks, even if their quirk is useless for the jobs in question. Even when quirkless people can get work, it’s at a lower level than a quirked person could get. Your applications to nursing school were rejected, even though your grades matched the standard. You’re lucky that you’d already found an apprenticeship, in a workplace willing to sponsor your education and train you on the job.

You’ve been working here for two years, part-time as an apprentice and CNA in high school and full-time since you graduated. You’re a medical assistant now, which means you can do a whole bunch of things – take history, check vitals, draw blood, give vaccines. You have a specific exam room you work out of, and the newest workers, the ones still in high school, bring patients from the waiting room to you. From there, you figure out where to route them. To an exam room with a nurse or a physician, to the lab for blood tests, to Imaging, to the ER if their injuries or illness are too severe to be treated here. You’ve only had to route somebody to the morgue once.

You’ve just delivered your most recent patient to an exam room with a doctor, and you’re in the process of documenting it in the chart when a message pops up from one of your coworkers at the front desk. FOF. Can you handle it?

FOF – freak out front. You don’t love that acronym. How F are we talking?

Creepy-looking + mean. The new kid messed up, but not that bad.

You’re not in the mood for difficult patients today. Your throat is sore and your wrist is itching and the turtleneck you’re wearing to cover the bruises on your neck is a little too tight. But you’re the most senior medical assistant working today, and even if you weren’t, dealing with difficult people is sort of your specialty. You did a great job last night right up until you decided to chase after Tenko.

Nobody’s perfect, and you learned your lesson, didn’t you? You sigh, wincing at how it feels, and respond. Send them over.

You go back to your chart, trying desperately to finish it before the new patient arrives, and you’re just about to send it to your supervisor when the CNA knocks on the door. “Come in!”

The door opens and the patient steps through, shutting it behind them. “Just a second,” you say, deciding you’re going to finish your documentation if it kills you. “You can have a seat and I’ll be with you as soon as I just –”

“Your voice sounds weird.”

You almost choke on your own spit. You look up from your computer and find Tenko staring at you from across the exam room.

Between the fluorescent lights of the convenience stores and the shadowy darkness of the street, your encounter with Tenko last night had the sense of a fever dream or an acid trip – shiny around the edges, not quite real. Seeing him in broad daylight in your dingy exam room is unnerving beyond words. He looks even more like your best friend than he did before, but there are more differences, too – a scar over Tenko’s mouth, another scar over his right eye. Whatever skin condition he had around his eyes as a child, it’s gotten worse, so much worse that it’s obliterated his eyebrows and spread to his forehead. He’s wearing a black hoodie, maybe the same hoodie he was wearing last night. And he’s staring at you.

You thought there was no way he’d come back to finish the job. You thought you were safe. You thought wrong. Your voice comes out in an airless whisper, like you’re still sprawled on the concrete with his arm across your throat. “What are you doing here?”

“It says outside you have to treat everybody. Is that true?” Tenko’s voice is abrupt, bordering on rude, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your voice sounds weird. And that shirt is stupid. You wouldn’t sound so weird if the collar wasn’t –”

He’s reaching towards you, and you’re frozen, even as your mind screams at you to get out of the way. Tenko’s index finger hooks into the collar of your turtleneck and pulls it down. His eyes narrow at first, turning his expression sharp and mean. Then they widen once more, past where they were before, until he looks more like the Tenko you knew than you’ve seen yet. “Who did that?”

You don’t remember your best friend being this stupid. “Who do you think?”

“I didn’t do that,” Tenko says, but his eyes dart to one side, the way they used to do when he knew he was wrong. A second later he changes his tune. “You made me do it. If you hadn’t chased me –”

You shouldn’t have chased him, but he didn’t have to choke you and burn the skin off your wrist. You look Tenko over and change the subject. You don’t want to argue. You don’t want him to get mad. “Aren’t you missing something?”

He gives you a puzzled look, and you mime a hand covering your face. “Father,” Tenko says. He calls it Father? That’s – weird. “He’s here.”

He unhooks his finger from your collar, reaches into his hoodie pocket, extracts the hand, and secures it over his face. It should look ridiculous, but instead it’s terrifying. “I can’t wear him in daylight. Master says he’s too recognizable yet.”

None of those words make any sense, and you’ve lost your ability to speak. “It says you treat everybody here. You have to. Right?” Tenko asks. You nod wordlessly. “So treat me.”

“Um –” You get the syllable out of your mouth, watching Tenko’s shoulders stiffen at the sound of your voice. “Do you have your intake form? They would have given it to you when you checked in.”

Tenko’s mouth twists. “The brat at the front desk didn’t give me anything. She said she could fill it in herself, since she knew I was here for dermatology.”

You think back to your coworker’s message. You’d say the new kid messed up pretty bad. “I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have made that assumption.”

“You did too. Didn’t you? I bet you thought I came in here for help with my disgusting skin.”

“No,” you say. “I think you’re probably coming in for your wrist.”

It’s the only thing that makes sense to you, short of him tracking you down to finish the job, and when he’s reached for you or taken the hand out of his pocket, he’s used his left hand. If your memory’s correct, Tenko’s right-handed. “It looked like you hurt it when you fell,” you continue. Tenko stares at you. “Are there any other issues you’d like us to investigate while you’re here?”

Tenko shakes his head. Okay. Nineteen-year-old male, here for suspected injury to wrist. What’s next in your exam workflow? A process you run through at least a hundred times per week has exited your mind completely. You glance around the room uselessly and your eyes land on your blood pressure cuff. “Okay. I’m going to take your vitals.”

“Why do you need those?” Tenko looks suspicious. “Stay away from me.”

“I need your blood pressure, your pulse rate, and your pulse oxygen level. None of those are invasive tests.” Not usually, anyway – given how Tenko reacted the last time you came anywhere close to touching him, you’re pretty sure that pushing the point here could get you killed. “Or just the pulse oxygen. That goes on your finger.”

You take it out, only to remember about Tenko’s quirk. Tenko notices your hesitation. He sneers behind the hand. “Don’t worry. It only works with all five fingers.”

Good to know. You clip the pulse oxygen monitor onto his middle finger and turn back to your computer. Even without looking at his wrist, an x-ray is standard protocol, and you need to get Tenko into the queue right away. The less time he spends here, the less danger everybody else is in. It might be too late for you already.

“What do you think?” Tenko asks. You look at him. “The quirk.”

“You’ve got one.” You’re not really sure what else to say.

“And you don’t. Still?” Tenko raises his eyebrows. You nod. “And you still don’t care.”

“No,” you say. “I never cared about not having one. Only about how people treat me.”

“I bet they treat you like shit,” Tenko says. He sounds gleeful, but his expression doesn’t match his tone of voice. It’s weird. “If I ask you why you’re here instead of some fancy clinic on the nice side of town, you’ll probably lie and say you love it here. But you’re here because nowhere else will take somebody who doesn’t have a quirk. Isn’t that right?”

“I do like it here.” You aren’t lying. The pulse ox monitor beeps and you take it back from Tenko, recording the reading on your computer. “And I’m here because nowhere else will take me. Let me see your wrist.”

Tenko’s had his other hand in the front pocket of his hoodie this whole time. He draws it out slowly and extends it towards you. You’re not qualified to diagnose anything, but you can see that it’s bruised and swollen, and the skin is hot when you touch it. Tenko hisses as your fingers make contact. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to see if there’s an obvious break.” You shouldn’t – he’ll be headed to Imaging no matter what – but you don’t want anyone else to come into contact with Tenko unless they have to. Tenko’s wrist is swollen to the point that you can barely feel anything beneath it. “Were you resting this last night? Or using it?”

“I had games to play.”

Tenko’s a gamer now. Huh. “That’s probably why it’s so sore. And so swollen. No more gaming with that hand until it heals.”

“You’re not a doctor. Don’t tell me what to do.”

“The doctor’s going to say the same thing.” You glance away at your screen, checking your position in the Imaging queue. There’s a chest x-ray ahead of you, with a sick kid, and those always take a while. “I’m going to get you some ice for this. It’ll help with the x-rays if the swelling goes down. Stay here.”

“No.” Tenko gets to his feet, pulling his wrist out of your grip, grimacing as the motion jars the injury. “You think I don’t know what you’ll do? You’re just dying to go to the cops.”

“I had a chance to go to the cops. Last night, when I went to the hospital for this.” You gesture at your throat, and Tenko’s expression twists behind the hand. “I didn’t go then. Why would I go now?”

Tenko stares at you. You hold his gaze. You’ve never lost a staring contest in your life, and you’re not planning to start today – and after a long moment, Tenko averts his eyes. “You can go,” he says shortly. “But I won’t use it unless you get some for your neck.”

Does he feel guilty? Is that why he’s saying that? You decide not to think about it too hard. He’s your patient right now. If this is what it’ll take for him to ice his injury, you’ll happily slap a bag of ice on your throat.

But once you’ve brought the ice back, and you’re holding yours to your throat while Tenko applies his gingerly to his wrist, you’re out of other things to do. It’s just you and your best friend, who tried to kill you last night, sitting in a room together. Tenko still has the hand over his face. Your wrist is still itching. Before last night, when you still had the luxury of imagining what it would be like to meet Tenko again after all this time, you didn’t imagine it would be like this. It makes you sad.

You’re expecting silence until Tenko gets called back to Imaging, but to your surprise, Tenko speaks up. “Your parents had three more kids,” he says. You nod. “Why?”

“To be fair to them, they thought they were only having one.” You don’t like being fair to them about this, given what happened afterwards, even if there’s no way they could have known. “It was triplets, and they were pretty sick. They got the same kind of quirk as the rest of the family, so they made us all feel how they felt. Which was – bad.”

Tenko doesn’t say anything. You shouldn’t be talking about your family, not when his family is dead. Does he even know what happened to his family? You’re not going to ask. “Sorry.”

“Did you have to take care of them?”

“What?”

“The stupid triplets. Did you have to take care of them, too?” Tenko glares from behind the hand. “I remember you always had to before. You never stayed as long as you wanted to.”

“Oh,” you say, startled. “No, um – I had to get home. I wanted to.”

“My birthday party. Your mom came to get you early and you said you weren’t crying but you were.” Tenko is still glaring at you, and you find yourself shrinking back in your chair. “I remember. Don’t lie.”

“You didn’t remember last night,” you say, but he must have remembered something, or he wouldn’t have spoken up when you mentioned how many siblings you have. “Tenko, what –”

“That’s not my name. Anymore.” Tenko scratches at his neck lefthanded. “Master gave me a new one. Tomura.”

“Tomura,” you repeat. “Is that what I should call you?”

Tenko – Tomura? – keeps scratching, clawing up red scrapes in his skin. Then his hand falls back down. “Tenko. You should call me Tenko.” He averts his eyes from yours again. “You knew me before.”

Before what? You can’t decide whether to ask, and Tenko makes the decision for you. “I knew you before, too. When you were a kid whose parents wouldn’t let her stay long enough at a birthday party for a fucking piece of cake.”

“You brought me some. The next day.” Your voice is small. “I remember that. It was the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.”

Tenko’s shoulders stiffen. “That’s pathetic.”

“It was the nicest thing back then,” you say. “Nicer stuff has happened since then.”

Has it? It probably has, but right now your mind is full, all your memories of Tenko flooding to the forefront. There aren’t many. Not nearly enough. Three years at most – your memory is good enough to pick up some things from when you were a toddler, and you and Tenko met when you were barely old enough to speak full sentences. But you talked. You always talked. You talked to each other about everything. Right now it feels like there’s nothing in the world you could say to each other, and it breaks your heart.

Your computer pings, snapping you out of it and giving you something else to fixate on. “They’re ready for us in Imaging. I’ll walk you.”

“What, you think I can’t walk by myself?”

“I want to keep an eye on you,” you say, and Tenko scoffs. “Come on.”

He takes the hand down off his face and tucks it away again before exiting the exam room. He pulls his hood up, too, shuffling along at your side too close to be a shadow. You pass more than a few of your coworkers, all of whom give you pitying looks. They feel bad for you, but they don’t know enough to feel bad for the right reason. It makes you angry, just like it made you angry to hear Tenko’s father shout at him, a useless anger that felt too large for your tiny body. You couldn’t protect him then, and he wouldn’t let you do it now, but the urge is there, as insane as it might be. He almost killed you last night. And here you are wanting to save him.

The x-rays go quickly. A few different angles, and then you and Tenko stand there while the doctor on shift interprets them. “No fracture,” he reports. “Just a bad sprain. We’ll send you home with a brace to wear. Just take it easy for a few days.”

Tenko jerks his chin downwards. It would be charitable to call it a nod. The doctor makes a quick note in his chart and turns away, trusting you to dig up a brace and conclude the visit. Tenko won’t ask, so you will. “What about for pain?”

The doctor turns, raises an eyebrow. “The patient didn’t ask.”

“The patient wouldn’t have come in if it didn’t hurt.” You’re insane. You must be, to help someone who hurt you, except you’re not thinking of last night, you’re thinking of today – of your best friend, who’s not your friend anymore, but remembers you enough to be angry on your behalf. Who brought you a slice of birthday cake the next day because you couldn’t stay long enough to have one. “What would you recommend?”

“Ice it at least three times a day, and double up on NSAIDs,” the doctor says finally. “The OTC brands will be fine. If you rest it properly it should be healed by next week. Is there anything else?”

You glance at Tenko. Tenko shakes his head. “Feel better soon,” the doctor says. “Come back for a follow-up if anything worsens.”

Tenko trails after you as you retrieve a brace from the supply cabinet. “What the hell were all those acronyms?”

“NSAIDs – nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,” you explain. “Things like ibuprofen and acetaminophen. OTC means over the counter – things you can buy without a prescription. Any convenience store should have them.”

You find a brace in the correct size and turn to find Tenko already holding out his arm. It surprises you, to the extent that you freeze for a moment, but then you snap out of it and secure the brace around his wrist. It’s simple to avoid his quirk, now that you think about it. All you have to do is make sure all five fingers don’t touch you at once.

Tenko grimaces as you fasten the last of the Velcro straps on the brace. “It’s tight.”

“It needs to be tight to support your wrist,” you say. “If it hurts, loosen it a little bit, but not so much that it slides. Do you have questions about anything else?”

Tenko shakes his head. “He didn’t say I couldn’t play games.”

“He said you had to rest your wrist,” you say. “You can play point-and-clicks. With your other hand.”

Tenko snorts. “I’m not playing point-and-clicks.”

“Better than nothing.” They’re the only type of video game you’re good at. Sometimes you and your friends make a drinking game out of them, doing a shot every time you find a clue or solve a puzzle. “If there’s nothing else, I can go ahead and walk you out.”

It’s quiet for a second. Tenko is looking at you, and you look back, unsure of what else to do. Part of you wants him gone as fast as possible, but it’s a smaller part of you than it should be. The rest of you wants your best friend, who remembers the things you don’t talk about, who saw you through the smile you knew to paste on even at five years old. You want to find out what happened to him. You want to know where he’s been. You want to know if he knew you were here, if that’s why he came to this clinic instead of any of the others. You want to know if it’s going to be another fifteen years before you see him again.

For a moment you think Tenko will say something, will come up with something else to stretch this out. Instead he glances left, then right. “Which way do I go to get out of here?”

“I’ll walk you out,” you say again. You lead him down the hall to the door that opens onto the street, fighting the lump in your throat. There’s a spiel you’re supposed to give to patients as they leave, but you can’t get it out of your mouth.

Tenko stands there a moment, then pushes the door open lefthanded, and something inside you snaps loose. You catch his sleeve and he turns to stare at you, a sneer already beginning to twist his features. You’ve got maybe three seconds before he hurts you again, and you have to use them wisely. “I won’t ask about the rest of it. I’m not going to follow you again,” you say. “I know we won’t see each other after this. I just need to know. Are you okay, wherever you are?”

You’re expecting him to mock you, but instead the sneer falls from his face. He looks like himself again, the part of him you knew best. He doesn’t ask why you care, and you realize it’s because he knows. He knew last night when he let you go instead of killing you. You’re his best friend. Of course you care.

“Yeah. I –” Tenko coughs, clears his throat. His voice is back to its usual rasp when he speaks. “I’m okay.”

You know he’s lying. You think he might know that you know, too. But he pulls his arm away slightly, not yanking it from your grip but making it clear that he wants to leave, and you let him go.

The door swings shut behind him, and you turn and head back to your exam room, working on documenting his visit in the chart until your eyes go blurry. You didn’t sleep at all last night. You won’t sleep well tonight, either. You know already that you’ll be up late into the night, retracing every second in your head, trying to figure out what went wrong. Trying to guess what happened. Wondering, like you always wonder about Tenko – if he’s alive, if he’s all right.

You have answers to the first two questions now. Other than that, the things that keep you up tonight will be the same as they’ve been since you were six years old. Other than the scar around your wrist and the bruises around your throat, nothing’s changed at all.

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

🤌

let’s be so real for a moment... i hate to see shigaraki characterized as a heartless bastard by the fandom.

i feel like a lot of people in the mha fandom completely disregard the fact that shigaraki is actually really nice and tolerates a lot shit, especially from his colleagues. i wouldn’t characterize him as heartless. what he is, though, is angry and traumatized and has lived his entire life having no one to give a single shit about what happens to him.

i feel like shigaraki’s distant aura throws people off a lot but it’s blatant he does care but can’t regulate his emotions appropriately for his age ... because he’s traumatized and his inner child hasn’t had a single chance to ever heal from what he endured (and is still enduring.)

trauma does a lot to an individual, especially trauma stemming from ones childhood. you are constantly refused a safe place to grow and develop properly like other children your age.

traumatized children grow up into traumatized adults, but that bruised inner child doesn’t go away. their ghost just lingers deep within and yearns for gentle healing.

Let’s Be So Real For A Moment... I Hate To See Shigaraki Characterized As A Heartless Bastard By The

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

Narilamb

Narinder asking the lamb for flowers but when he bring them proceding to refuse them because he didn't really expected him to find them(and risk his life while doing so) and because he think it make him "weak" but he secretly love the fact that he did even if he act all angry like a tsundere

NSFW tomura shigaraki

That man is a feral beast in heat, Tomura shigaraki, a man that would eat you up until you pass out because if the overstimulation he force you to take.

Tomura Shigaraki's hunger of you that never stop even after a whole night of make out session.

Tomura Shigaraki who will offer you as a gift a collar with his name on it so that everyone know who you belongs.

Tomura shigaraki that would tries all your holes over and over again his hand wrap arround your little neck as a prove of domination.

Tomura Shigaraki's dick who pound into you deliciously, matching your gummies walls perfectly, hiting you sweet spots with ecstasy.

Tomura Shigaraki's big palm that would lift your numb and tired body as ge pound into you forgetting is frustration and totaly for for his pleasure.

Tomura Shigaraki's talented fingers that would, at the first try find tge perfect way to make you cry of frustration and pleasure.

Tomura Shigaraki's fingers that would hit all the right spot of your inside, that would rub you clit in a way that no one have ever, in a way that no one would ever be able to.

“It’s not easy to talk about, but…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

Ok so we all write about big horny go getter Shigaraki, but what about sexually repressed, pent up Shigaraki

Bitch you K N O W I had to write it now

He’s trying not to look. He really is. Honest. No, really.

You’re frantically flouncing around the kitchen in nothing but a tank top and shorts -your “sleepwear”- at 2 am, desperately searching for something. He doesn’t know what. He wasn’t listening (truthfully, he couldn’t focus) when you asked him about it. Instead he went on autopilot, shaking his head while pretending he wasn’t lasciviously leering at the sight of so much of your skin on show.

Afficher davantage

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