I Made It With My Cult Of The Lamb Oc ✨

Happy birthday to me✨✨✨🎂🎂

thanks man

😂

I would love to hear more about Kurogiri being around when reader and Tomura 👉👌 From hearing them to maybe seeing Tomura come out with nothing on (would he?) to cleaning up after them....does Tomura ever talk to him about it? About how hot she is when they xxx or he tried xxx and she xxx or he wants to xxx and might order xxx to try out xxx with her? I can't help but think Kurogiri is somewhat proud that he's had this milestone in life and is connecting with another person (here I am blocking out how things started....which was horrible, but that's what it is now, soo....)

Similar question answered here, but yeah, you're basically right on the money.

As for Shigaraki talking to Kurogiri about MC, he does sometimes but in a very roundabout way. Definitely doesn't go into explicit detail with him the way he does Spinner, as he tries to keep Kurogiri at an arm's length.

...But he often fails lol.

He more often goes to Kurogiri for advice though, rather than to brag, again, in a very indirect way.

Shigaraki: My uh, my friend... He read that girls are into xxx and is wondering if that's true.

Kurogiri: Well, tell your friend that every girl is different, so while one girl may enjoy that, another may not. The best thing you can do-- I mean that your friend can do is just talk to her and see if that's something she'd be interested in. Communication is the most important part of sex.

Shigaraki: Yeah okay, I'll uh, I'll tell me friend that...

Opposites Attract - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your quirk lets you capture almost anyone with ease, and you can't believe you let Shigaraki Tomura escape. Shigaraki can't believe it, either, and according to the League, there's only one possible explanation -- you let him go because you've fallen in love with him. He decides to find out if it's true. You decide you won't fail to capture him again. You both get a lot more than you bargained for. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1

This was supposed to be your day off. It’s all you can think about, which isn’t a good thing, because you’re in the middle of a villain attack and using your quirk at all requires a significant amount of your focus – but it was supposed to be your day off, dammit. You’re supposed to be doing something fun. Going shopping. Getting a haircut, or mani-pedis, and going out for drinks with your friends at a place crawling with photographers. All the stuff young, single, female pro heroes are supposed to do. So what if you hate that stuff, and you were probably going to sleep all day, wake up at 5pm, make dinner, and marathon the Alien franchise until you fell asleep again? You could have gone out.

But instead you’re here, because Eraserhead caught himself another spinal fracture, and when the doctors threatened to tie him to the bed if he tried to leave before they were done fusing it, he called in a favor you owe him and made you supervise his first-year-class from hell on a field trip to the brand-new Kamino Memorial Park. Go to Kamino Park, they said. It’ll be safe, they said. There’s no way in hell the League of Villains will hit the place a second time.

Well, they’re hitting it, and they’re hitting it hard – and it was supposed to be your goddamn day off. You throw out your arm to stop the trio of students you’re shepherding to safety as three knives thud into the grass in front of you, and make yourself a promise: The next time Eraserhead asks you to do anything, you’re telling him to go to hell.

“Hey, um –” One of the students taps your shoulder, and you know without even asking that they’ve forgotten your name again. “We got our provisional licenses. We can fight now.”

“You can, but you won’t. Create a perimeter and protect the civilians,” you order. You’re not sure why the League of Villains is here, but there’s no way you’re feeding a bunch of kids back into the same meat grinder they escaped from a month ago. “Other pros are on their way, and so are the police. In the mean time –”

You flick your fingers, calling up a magnetic field, and the knives lift out of the grass, hovering in midair. “I’ll keep them busy.”

You consider taking the knives and sending them back the way they came, but unless you want to fatally wound Toga, you’ll just be handing her weapons back to her. You curl your hand into a fist, compacting them into useless wads of metal. You’ve already used your quirk to tear up the park, creating uneven, unsteady terrain that’s dangerous for anybody who doesn’t have a way to take the fight airborne. Now it’s time for you to do what you do best. You narrow your focus, sensing out the concentrations of suspended iron that represent the League of Villains, and once you’ve got them, you lock them down.

Most of them, anyway. One proves a little more difficult to grasp than the others, and you get moving, using one hand to pull rebar and wiring out of the ground. You need it to ensnare the three you’ve already captured while you chase the villain who slipped away from you. You secure Toga and Twice, but Dabi burns his way free, and Twice sends a clone after you. Since it’s a clone, you don’t feel bad about yanking every molecule of trace metals out of its body and turning it to sludge.

Dabi’s on his feet, but you’re a bad matchup for Dabi for a lot of reasons. He’s got a ton of extra metal in his body. He throws his hands out towards you, blue flames already flickering. You fix your quirk on the staples holding him together and start pulling them out.

“What the fuck?” Dabi snarls, recoiling. Blood is already beginning to ooze from the holes on his wrists. “If you think you can just take me apart –”

You yank out another two – one from each wrist. “Stand down. You’ll run out of those before I run out of power.”

It’s true. Your quirk is Magnetism, and using it is easy for you. Using it safely is something else, but you can yank out every staple in Dabi’s body without breaking a sweat or destroying any property. Not that you want to do that. “I don’t want to hurt you, so just –”

There’s a shift in metallic concentration just behind you, and you dive to one side, just in time to avoid Shigaraki Tomura’s hand as it tries to close over your shoulder. A Twice clone is after you, too. You take the staples you pulled out of Dabi and fire them through its eye and throat as you roll out of Shigaraki’s reach. The leader of the League of Villains laughs, low and raspy. “Killing somebody? That’s not very heroic.”

You hate it when villains banter, but you’re not letting that one stand. “That’s not the real Twice.”

You’ve got the real one, and now you’ve got Dabi, too – at least for a few seconds. Maintaining a hold on Dabi, Twice, and Toga at once is within your abilities, but doing that and trying to capture Shigaraki at the same time – and maintain the barriers you’ve set up – and stay sharp enough to bounce Shigaraki into midair if he tries to touch the ground and vaporize Kamino Memorial Park out from under your feet – all of that is testing your concentration. When you lose concentration while using your quirk, bad things happen.

Shigaraki reaches for you again. A hero like Eraserhead would retaliate physically, kick or hit back, but you don’t want to be anywhere near Shigaraki’s quirk. You draw back out of reach, taking a step back every time Shigaraki steps forward. “You’re an underground hero,” he says. “Didn’t you learn what we do to underground heroes from what happened to Eraserhead?”

“Yeah. He shook that off, and sent me to take care of his light work.” The longer you can drag this out, the better – you can hear sirens approaching, and you know that Yokohama’s other pros are on their way. “Isn’t this a little high-risk for you? Returning to the scene of the crime so you can – what?”

Shigaraki sneers at you from behind the hand. “What do you think?”

You really couldn’t care less. Someone shouts for you, and your concentration slips for a second too long. You have to decide who to let go of, and between the three you’ve restrained, Toga’s the least dangerous. You let your control over the iron concentration in her blood relax and focus on trying to restrain Shigaraki instead. He’s hard to get ahold of. His body’s iron concentration is less than it should be. You lock him down for a second, but you can’t get a grip, and he slips free, smirking. “I know who you are,” he says. “The Capture Hero – Skynet. Not much of a capture hero, huh? You can’t even hang on to me. Are you sure the villains you’ve bagged didn’t let you get them?”

“No, they just didn’t have anemia,” you snap. Shigaraki blinks. “You don’t have enough iron in your blood for me to manipulate.”

Anemia’s not uncommon, but you’ve never come across a case this severe in someone you’re trying to capture. His iron concentration is so low that you can’t hold him for more than a split second. That level of anemia is crippling, and the words fly awkwardly out of your mouth before you can stop them. “Are you, like – okay?”

“What?”

He’s stopped trying to grab you. You should capitalize on it, pull up more rebar and wire to hold him down, but your mind’s off on its own track. “Do you get headaches?” you ask. “What about dizziness? Do you get tired a lot?”

Shigaraki looks disconcerted. He nods – then shakes his head, snarls, and sinks back into a fighting stance. “Why do you care?”

“What about a rapid heart rate even when you’re not doing anything?” When he’s doing something, like he is right now, it’s got to be even worse. You two have been trading barbs for thirty seconds at most and he’s out of breath. “You need to take care of yourself. This isn’t healthy.”

“Shut up!” Shigaraki lunges for you, and you twist aside. You get a good look at his fingernails as his hand goes by. They’re pale instead of pink. “Why do you care? So you can capture me and keep your precious reputation?”

You’re actually a little insulted. “So you don’t die!”

Shigaraki stares at you. The hand reaching out for you drops, and you close the distance between the two of you to shove him hard, knocking him backwards. Once he hits the concrete, you’ll figure something else out. You can hold him until someone else gets here.

But someone else is here, and they’re not here to help you. Shigaraki tumbles directly into a warp gate, staring at you like you’ve lost your mind the entire way.

Damn it. You can’t grasp the warp villain – wherever his real body is, it’s a long way from here, and you’re at risk of losing Dabi and Twice now, too. You tighten your grip on them, but even as you do, you see another portal opening out of the corner of your eye. This one is in midair, threatening to swallow a group of civilians who decided that hiding behind the All Might statue was a better choice than evacuating like the students ordered them to. “The civilians, or my associates,” the warp villain rumbles, from everywhere and nowhere. “Your choice.”

It's not a choice. You release your grip on Dabi and Twice, both the iron in their blood and the metal and wire holding them down, and warp gates devour them both. The warp gate above the civilians shuts, decapitating the All Might statue in the bargain, and as quickly as everything began, it grinds to a halt.

“Skynet!” someone snaps from behind you, and you freeze. “You let them go?”

Miruko is Number Six on the charts, and she outranks you by a lot, but you still bristle at her tone. “The civilians –”

“If you’re not stopping villains, you’re not doing your job.” She looks pissed. You have a feeling that she’s only holding off on kicking you because it’ll look bad in front of everybody. “If you’d held onto them a second longer, I’d have been here, and –”

“We could have helped!” That’s one of Eraserhead’s students – the one with the spiky red hair. “If you’d let us help –”

“You’re just kids. Do you have any idea what Eraser would do to me if I had –” You trail off when you realize that whatever it is, Eraser’s going to do it to you anyway for even letting the kids near the League of Villains. “I was the senior hero at the scene. It was my call. If you did what I told you – which you did – you did the right thing.”

“You did the right thing,” Miruko says to the student. The police are here. The cars skid to a stop, and you feel the iron concentration in what’s left of the park shift. There’s a helicopter in the air, too. More people, more cameras. Miruko is glaring at you. “You’re the one who screwed up.”

Yeah, you did. You stare dispiritedly at the headless statue of All Might as Eraser’s class regroups around you, as somebody starts questioning Miruko – the new senior hero at the scene – about what went wrong here. A few thoughts spin through your head, mainly of the hell you’re about to catch from the press, the heroic establishment, and the HPSC. Shigaraki Tomura’s case of life-endangering anemia makes it in there, and so does a hit of frustration at the fact that you’re in trouble for choosing to save a bunch of civilians from getting bisected by a warp gate. But the main thing that’s on your mind is the same thing that’s been there since the first spurt of blue flames erupted over the park: This was supposed to be your day off.

“Well, that blew,” Dabi says as he picks himself up off the floor of the League’s new hideout. “Whose idea was this, again?”

He’s glaring at Shigaraki. Shigaraki glares back. “I didn’t hear you say we shouldn’t do it.”

“I said we shouldn’t,” Twice pipes up. He’s still got a piece of rebar wrapped around his ankle. “No, it was a great idea!”

It seemed like a great idea when Shigaraki thought of it last night – go to Kamino Park, rattle the heroes’ cages, show everybody that the League of Villains isn’t scared of anything and isn’t even close to down for the count without Sensei to guide them. Then again, Shigaraki was three cans deep into a twelve-pack Compress had lifted last night, so his judgment might have been off. Twice is still talking. “I mean, we scared the piss out of those civilians. Those hero brats were running scared, too! And did you see what Kurogiri did to that All Might statue?”

“No,” Shigaraki says. He looks at Kurogiri. “What did you do?”

“Over there.” Kurogiri points, and Shigaraki looks. The head of the All Might statue is sitting on the warehouse floor. “It would have been a shame to leave without a trophy of some kind.”

“It’s on the news,” Magne sings out. She opted out of mission, and now she’s watching it on the League’s TV, lifted last week by Compress, which is hooked up to their generator, which was also lifted by Compress. “And it’s not looking too good for the heroes. That little one’s in big trouble.”

“Good. She’s a bitch,” Dabi mutters. His hands are bleeding. “What was that quirk, anyway?”

“Magnetism,” Shigaraki says. He feels weird. Maybe it’s the quirk. “She can manipulate magnetic fields. Any metal, on any of us –”

“I didn’t have any!” Twice protests.

“Then she used the iron content in your blood,” Shigaraki says. You told him how you were restraining the others. Amateur mistake. Or it would be, if there was any way to not have iron in his blood – but that’s a problem, too. “She couldn’t grab me. She said I didn’t have enough.”

“Is that so?” Kurogiri studies Shigaraki. “Did she say anything else?”

“Anemic.” It’s a weird word. Shigaraki scratches his neck. “She was weird about it. She wanted to know if I get headaches, or dizzy – or tired –”

The answer’s yes, which is why it was weird. It was weird that you knew. But the weirdest thing is what you said at the end. “She asked me if I was okay, and when I asked her why she gave a shit –”

“She answered you?” Magne mutes the TV, looking surprised. “What did she say?”

“What did I miss?” Toga skids into the warehouse before Shigaraki can answer. “I got away, but none of you came with me, so I went to the meeting spot alone. What happened?”

“The hero let us go,” Dabi grunts. “Shigaraki was just telling us about a little chat they had.”

“Ooh, you talked to her?” Toga sits down next to Twice on the ground, peering at Shigaraki. “What did she say?”

“She doesn’t want me to die.” Shigaraki feels his face contort behind Father’s hand as he says it. “Weird.”

“Weird,” Twice agrees. “Since when do heroes play mind games like that?”

It’s quiet for a second. “So she asked if you were okay and she doesn’t want you to die,” Dabi says slowly. “I don’t know, Shigaraki. It sounds kind of like she likes you.”

Shigaraki’s mind goes totally blank. “What?”

“You must have won her over,” Magne chimes in. “All that charisma you’ve got – how was a poor underground hero supposed to resist the leader of the League of Villains?”

You seemed like you were resisting just fine, until you couldn’t grab him. But it’s weird that you weren’t angry. You actually sounded like you were worried. Like you really cared whether Shigaraki has anemia, or whatever the fuck. Like you care if he’s okay. “Don’t be stupid. That’s not –”

“Come on, boss, don’t sell yourself short,” Twice says. “If you can seduce any hero you want, how come you didn’t seduce Miruko?”

“Ooh, Miruko’s so pretty!” Toga grins. “The other one’s okay, too. What was her name again?”

Shigaraki coughs, trying to make his throat feel less weird, but it’s not just his throat. It’s his face, too. “Skynet.”

“You said she was getting in trouble. I bet that’s why,” Dabi says to Magne. “They must have all figured out that she’s in love.”

“Shut up,” Shigaraki says. Nobody listens. He raises his voice. “Shut up! The mission was a success. Why aren’t we talking about that?”

“We are,” Toga says. Her grin’s devolved into a goofy, dazed smile. “You have to teach me how, Tomura-kun. If we make the heroes fall in love with us, it’ll be even easier to win! I want Ochako. No, Tsu. No, Izuku –”

Shigaraki stops listening. He picks himself up off the floor, hating the way his head spins, and makes his way over to Kurogiri. Kurogiri studies him. “Anemic,” he repeats. “The hero listed the symptoms of iron-deficiency anemia. Do you experience any of them?”

Shigaraki doesn’t answer. Kurogiri waits, just like he always waits, and Shigaraki figured out a while ago that the fastest way to make the itching stop is to answer the question. “Some of them,” he says. Kurogiri’s eyes tilt in the way that means he thinks Shigaraki’s full of shit. “Fine. All of them. So what?”

“Did she say anything else?”

Are you okay? “No,” Shigaraki says, pushing away the memory of how fast your expression shifted, how you went from focused on keeping Shigaraki’s comrades trapped and trapping him the exact same way to looking – worried. “That was it. Kurogiri, do you –”

“Yes, Shigaraki Tomura?”

“I mean, they’re just – they’re joking, right?” Shigaraki keeps his voice quiet. If any of the others hear this, he’s going to have to kill them. And maybe also himself, so he won’t have to remember that he thought about this at all. “There’s no way anybody – I mean, a hero – would like me. They’re kidding. Aren’t they?”

He wants Kurogiri to say yes. He wants him to say yes fast, and then to not pick on him for even considering it, and then to forget this ever happened. Instead Kurogiri thinks about it. “It is not impossible that they are correct,” he says. “Her behavior was unusual for a hero in her position. And it is likely that she knows more about you than you do about her. Perhaps she does have a certain – perception of you.”

“Great.”

“It could be,” Kurogiri muses. “She drew your attention to an issue that impacts your health, and therefore your effectiveness as All For One’s successor. And she chose to let you go. If the hero known as Skynet does have a soft spot for you, it has worked undeniably in your favor. It might behoove you to allow her to continue to nurse it.”

“Yeah, no.” Shigaraki shoots that idea down immediately. Any idea that makes him feel that weird is obviously a bad one. “I’m not going to track her down and say I’m not interested, but the next time I run into her, I’m saying it and you can’t stop me. None of you can stop me.”

He raises his voice, making sure everyone hears, and everyone looks up from whatever they’re doing. “Of course we can’t,” Magne says. “But you’re naïve if you think you can stop her. Nothing can stop a hero on a mission.”

“And nothing can stop true love!” Toga smiles at Shigaraki. “I believe in us, Tomura-kun! We can win their hearts together!”

The weird feeling multiplies. Shigaraki scratches hopelessly at the side of his neck and thinks about the remains of last night’s twelve-pack. Getting drunk again isn’t going to help, but it’s hard to imagine it making things worse.

Smut headcanons for my babygirls [Dabi & Shigaraki]

(PLEASE IGNORE THE TITLE–)

TW: Mentions of captivity, noncon, degrading

Reader has gender neutral pronouns with afab body

Toya Todoroki Dabi

-Alright, so Dabi sure does like his piercings, doesn't he? Ear piercings, nose piercings, I guess the surgical staples might count as piercings? You get what I'm trying to say. Anyway Dabi most certainly has a Jacob's ladder. Do with that what you will.

-He may or may not force you to get your tits pierced. He'll do it himself.

-I think he would be around 6 inches exactly, and he doesn't shave. He doesn't care about his hair being white down there, you ain't gonna tell nobody.

-He especially loves your thighs. Nibbling on the flesh, licking his way up until he reaches your cunt. Maybe some light burn marks, if you beg him. He loves it when you beg.

-Caress his scars during sex and he will melt.

-Sex drive is low. Surprising, right? He's a flirty scumbag but most of the time it's just to get a reaction outta you. He just wants cuddles. He's a big softie.

-Most of the time.

-I mean what do you expect? For him to burn and rape you every day? Hell no! My boy needs affection. You're the only person for him, and he will cherish you. His family didn't love him, so he gets that love from you.

-Now, while we're mentioning rape... Dabi isn't against that. He prefers it consensual but he won't hesitate if he's hot 'n bothered.

-No he does not use sex as a punishment.

-The pace differs if it's consensual or not. He'll be rough if you agree to it, it's what you signed up for. But if he's nonconning you, it will be the softest noncon. He'll have you ride him, hands on your hips as he so gently thrusts up into your wet pussy. Praise, praise, praise. He's so gentle.

-Now his aftercare is a little lazy. Grabs a cigarette from the pack on his desk, taking a long drag from it, and pulls you down with him so you can lay on his bare chest.

-Dabi's a villain but he doesn't want you to fear him. Until you try to run away, but that's a story for a different time.

"Hush, baby, shh. I'm not gonna hurt you, I'm just making you feel good, my flame. You'll thank me later. Please just enjoy it."

Tenko Shimura Tomura Shigaraki

-Shigaraki doesn't have any piercings, unlike Dabi. But you know what he does have? A collar and leash. He'll strap that pretty pink collar around your neck, and yank on the leash when you don't give him exactly what he wants.

-He's a tits man. He doesn't care how big they are, how small they are, he likes sucking on them. And biting them. And groping them. He likes tits.

-Shigaraki went through several body modifications while he was going through his procedure in season six, didn't he? Well along with his muscles, his dick also grew a bit in size, going from 5.7 inches to 6.3 inches. It's gonna take some time to get used to, but don't worry, he'll teach you how to take it.

-His hair down there changes colour along with the hair on his head. You know because he doesn't shave, either. He honestly can't be fucked doing it. Lazy ass.

-High sex drive. Very high sex drive. You can't blame him, man has probably never seen pussy irl. Very horny.

-Now... Similarly to Dabi, Shigaraki loves and craves your affection. Unfortunately though, Shigaraki is a lot more sadistic than Dabi.

-Which means yes, he will also rape you. But not gently like Dabi. He's rough, aggressive, dominant, he'll tie you down if he has to. He doesn't ask for consent either. He'll just get on top of you and decay your clothes, and you'll know exactly what's about to happen to you the moment you notice the bulge in his jeans.

-Sex is also used for punishments, though it's mainly used for more severe rule breaking, like attempting to call the police.

-He's very degrading. He likes to call you a variety of names, including slut, whore, pet, cumslave, etc etc.

-Dacryphilia fetish.

-But don't worry, it's not all bad. See, if you've read my previous works (mainly on Wattpad), you'll know that Shigaraki gets more sweet when you comply with his demands. Even if it takes months, years, to get used to his rules, he'll reward you if you're a good captive.

-Likewise, his aftercare is very good. Almost as if he wants to make up for the assault with affection. He'll get you a nice, cold glass of fresh water, and once you finish that, he'll carry you to the bathroom and bathe you. Then the rest of the night is spent in his embrace, and he always stays up for hours after you fall asleep. Just gently caressing and kissing your hair.

-He's sadistic and twisted but he still cares about you.

"Awh, are you crying? Don't like what I'm doing to you? Too fucking bad. I own every inch of your body, so scream for me bitch."

Author's Note: That feeling you get when you put lots of effort into a post but turns out it's really short :(

I’ve been obsessed with thinking about being Shiggy’s favorite cam girl 😩

he always tips big! Especially when you do whatever nasty thing it is he wants, like he loves to see you on your bed spreading your cute hole for him.

oh how he wants to fuck you so bad, will he pay enough to warrant a trip to his place?

this trope is so overused and so hot, god is ashamed of how many times i've searched for it.

trigger warnings: cam girl, masturbation

other: female reader

Shigaraki never understood why so many people would pay for cam girl content when you have infinite amount of all sorts of porn online. he was browsing late at night to rub one out and go to bed when he stumbled upon your page and decided to give it a go since the site was offering the first time for free.

you were attractive enough, a cute face, a nice figure and striking eyes looking right into the camera. as soon as he tuned in he kinda got it why so many simps were willing to pay for the smallest ounce of your attention. it wasn't anything spectacular, but who cared when you were real? you weren't just some porn actress acting by a script, you were an actual alive girl talking to your subscribers and it felt thrilling.

you skillfully ignored the pathetic npcs going off in the chat, typing "let's get married" and "wanna fuck" and greeted him along with new viewers cheerfully, grabbing Tomura's attention instantly. you were sitting on a bed cross legged wearing a pink tee shirt and pair of white, almost see through cotton panties what clung to your mound, perfectly outlining your pussy lips. the shirt was a tight fit, showing off two round lumps, pert nipples poking through making it clear that you weren't wearing a bra.

Tomura watched along with hundreds of others as you rubbed and played with your tits through the fabric, never fully undressing and just teasing like you were going to. he nearly sputtered when the camera caught the first slight darkening of the pure white cloth covering your cunt as he hurried to palm his cock. you moaned and hummed with pleasure as your trailed your manicured hands down and slid your panties off, revealing your plump butt and slick folds.

your glistening lips and a groomed patch of hair looked like they would be so soft and inviting to the touch it made Tomura grunt in unison with you as he jerked his flushed cock faster. you were moaning really loud now, flicking your fingers in and out of your seeping pink hole, not caring for looking seductive; you were hot as fuck even without trying.

he came hard in less that two minutes, your gentle voice and squelchy sounds sending him straight to incel heaven. jizzing all over his keyboard and cursing at you for being such a shameless slut, he tipped you $500 right after. it was sickly exciting to see your lovely fucked out face smile at him and say "thank you, ah-! grabbyhands14, i'm so lucky to h-have a fan like you!" while still panting, fingers rubbing your engorged clit furiously.

from that point on Tomura is hooked, tipping you every other time, requesting you to wear outfits of different decency (his favorite being a sultry UA school girl uniform) or stretch your lovely cunny with a hot pink jelly dildo he sent you to see just how deep it can go (and to hear your cute cries of pleasure and pain). he loves hearing you whine and squeal about how huge it is and how it won't fit as he sweet talks you into pushing it all inside.

"you're such a good girl, taking all of my gift so well with your greedy little pussy. it looks so beautiful split open and drooling like this. here's another $1000 if you make yourself squirt on it, angel."

you have no choice but to fuck yourself stupid on this fake girthy cock.

he eventually makes Skeptic ddox you and gains all of your personal info along with your home address, then abducts you through the black mist portal. don't get him wrong, he doesn't only want to have sex with you, he actually wants to get to know you better (if it's even possible with all of his internet stalking) and become a good boyfriend for you. and what Shigaraki Tomura wants he usually gets, so relax and enjoy your new life with your most loyal fan!

Bloodline

summary: Tomura Shigaraki teaches you a lot of things. part two of good girl cross posted to ao3 word count: 4.4k content: Tomura Shigaraki x female reader, established relationship, explicit content, AU - no quirks, strict parents, oral (m! recieving), vaginal fingering, creampie, rough sex, praise kink

Tomura Shigaraki teaches you a lot of things.

He teaches you the secret tricks to win at mario kart online, he teaches you about the location tracker on your phone and how to disable it; your parents now being unable to watch your every move. And today he is teaching you how to fully take his cock down your throat without choking. 

“Relax, just like that,'' Tomura groans as he pushes deeper into your mouth. 

You have both been at this for a few minutes and you already feel the ache of your jaw as you try to accommodate for his size. Youve gotten this far before, able to take the head and a bit more, but never the entire length.

Feeling brave, you try to push for only a little bit more, before feeling the telltale jerk and gag as it hits the back of your mouth. Damn that gag reflex. 

“It’s okay,” he gasps, brushing your hair back with his fingers, gentle and warm, “you’re supposed to gag on it.” The grin on his face makes you wonder how much of that is true, but you’re eager so you don’t dwell on it.

Looking up at him with tears stuck to your lashes and drool trailing down your chin, you place a hand on his hip, pulling back a little so that you could stroke the remainder of his length with your other hand. 

The carpet was rough, digging into your knees as you adjusted your weight. You were going to figure this out by the end of the night. You were determined to. You sucked the head of his cock before pulling back to glide your tongue over the tip, tasting the salty precum before going in again.

This time you took his advice, relaxed as best you could and pushed past the uncomfortable sensation. Once you finally felt you were past that damned reflex it was easy to push forward. 

Moving your hand to the other side of his hip for better grip, you dove further and further. Trying to take him all the way to the hilt. 

“Ah, fuck…” you heard him groan above you, the hand in your hair gripping tighter. You could practically feel the restraint he had on himself to keep from fucking into your mouth. You weren't ready just yet. “That’s my girl,” he started, hand in your hair pushing you even lower, your nose brushing against the curly hairs on his pelvis. “Such a fast learner.” 

The grip he had on your hair never faltered as you strained to pull back, lack of oxygen becoming a little much for you. He relented, giving you a second to breathe before pushing your head back down, making sure you were comfortable before he brought his other hand to your head and snapped his hips forward. Resolve finally breaking as he fucked into your mouth, head thrown back and pace relentless. 

It was overwhelming, tears falling from your eyes from the sheer shock, but you wanted to be good for him. You wanted to show him you could take him, just like he knew you could. It didn’t matter if it was too much too soon, you would fight through it and adjust. Anything to make him feel as good as he makes you feel. 

You close your eyes, starting to enjoy the ride of him and allowing yourself to be used for his pleasure. When his hips slowed, you wondered if he was getting close. Looking up, you’re met with tomura’s red gaze peering back at you, and you can feel your slick wet your panties even more.

“My pretty girl,” he brings a hand to brush your hair back again. “Touch yourself.”

And you do. Legs parting as much as you could, ignoring the friction of the carpet on your knees, you trail a hand down, sliding between your panties and right onto that special spot that makes you see stars. 

Tomura is pleased by this, and you can’t help but moan around his cock. Watching as his head lolled back in pleasure gave you a sense of pride. Made you want to keep sucking him off, no matter how much your jaw started to ache in protest.

You relinquished control again, allowing him to grind into your mouth as he pleased, your tongue working under his gliding cock. His thrusts became more uneven and erratic, you knew he was close, so, you do what you can to make sure you come with him. Rubbing your wet clit faster with two fingers instead of one, the pleasure bubbling up inside as you near your end. You wished you had the angle to slip a finger into your entrance, but you don’t, it's alright. You‘ll make do with what you have.

Tomura takes both hands and grips your hair, giving a few more thrusts until he is pushing your head forward, making you take him all the way to the hilt leaving no room to back away or stop him. You feel the twitch of his cock as hot cum shoots down your throat. The sensation was one you were less than prepared for, but you do your best to swallow around his cock. 

You barely have time to think about the lack of oxygen the position grants you before Tomura is pulling you off of his cock and pushing you to lie on the floor. He spreads your legs, swiftly discarding your panties and taking two fingers, pressing them to your mouth. You take them in, coating them with saliva while maintaining eye contact. He huffs a laugh before taking them back and spreading your legs further apart. 

Your heart hammers against your chest in anticipation as he brings not one but both fingers to your entrance. His face focused and filled with want as he gives you one last glance. It makes you feel electric. 

He thrusts both fingers into your heat, the suddenness of it makes you moan, loud. His fingers are long and thick and it takes everything in you not to cum right away. You do your best to meet his thrusts with your hips, before he grabs you by the waist. 

“Stop,” was the only warning he gave you before putting one on your legs on his shoulder for better leverage. All it takes is a curl of his digits and you come undone. Bliss buzzing down to your bones as you ride out your high on his fingers. 

You look up and Tomura has that cocky smirk on his face and you don't know if you want to kiss it off or knock it off. You don't have time to dwell on it because your body is still reeling from waves of pleasure and Tomura is still pumping his fingers. 

The overstimulation is making you pull away, but his grip on your thigh makes sure you go nowhere. “C’mon, give me another one. I know you have it in you.”

Your body shakes as the sensations start to blend together, and you reach a feeble hand down to stop him. The aftershocks of your first orgasm quickly begin to build and build until you feel the coil of another threatening to push you over again. Tomura leans over your cunt, dropping a thick bead of spit right on your clit and rubbing the bundle of nerves with his thumb. 

This takes you over, your legs shaking and eyes rolling back as your second orgasm of the night wracks through you. “Yeah, that's it.” Tomura praises, fucking you through it with his fingers, wet noises filling the room. 

Your brain feels like mush as you fight to stay awake. Cumming feels nice, but you didn't want to sleep on the floor. Tomura believes you’ve had enough and takes his fingers out, standing up and walking to the en suite bathroom in his bedroom.

You hear the sounds of running water and battle once more to remain conscious. When he comes back you feel the warmth of a  washcloth cleaning you up and you’re grateful. 

He helps you to bed, legs feeling like jello and knees wobbling.

You felt like something fragile, like you would break at the slightest noise. The headspace you were in made you feel needy, like all you wanted to do was cling to him under the covers. And you did, your body meeting his as you can finally drift off to sleep in peace. 

—--

Something different was brewing under the surface of whatever you and Tomura shared. It was growing and it was hungry. It was something Tomura couldn’t quite place his finger on, but it was bubbling in the back of his mind and threatening to take him under. 

There was no time for him to dwell on whatever that thing is because right now? There was another problem staring him dead in the face.

“Ah, Tomura, hello.” The man speaks, breaking the uncomfortable silence between the two. Smile gracing his worn features, “what a pleasure to see you.” 

Tomura could think of a thousand other things that would be more pleasurable than having a meeting with his Father. 

“Father.”

His smile to others would come off as off putting, never quite meeting his eyes, but Tomura has grown to know it well. Even through the screen he could feel the waves of displeasure coming from the man before him. Previously sitting in the video chat waiting room, he could only wonder what reason this impromptu meeting was called for. 

“So I heard you have a new lady friend.” 

Ah. That's what this is about. Damn you, Kurogiri. Always a snitch. 

Tomura only shrugs, not seeing a point in discussing his private life. His father never interfered before, he doesn’t see why he should now. 

This seems to displease the man further, as he only purses his lips and tilts his head. Not an answer he was looking for. He decides to change tactics. “I didn’t know you wanted children, Tomura. And so soon!” 

His eyes narrow in response, unsure what game he was playing. “I don’t.”

The man before him smiles, light in his room shrouding his eyes in a shadow. “You're not acting like you don’t.” 

Tomura is quiet. He knew this father well, there was always a reason for his actions. Always a motive behind his intentions.

The man before him continues, voice lightly echoing through the screen, “Kurogiri tells me you’ve been more… active. You are free to do as you please, Tomura, but please remember that everything I am doing with this business is for you. If you expect to take over when I step down then I expect you to be a little more responsible.” 

He’s shocked, Tomura felt the familiar itch of his neck and fought to keep his hands from digging into the skin there. “How did you know that–?”

“You know Kurogiri takes out the trash. He buys things for you. It didn't take much to deduce you weren't using protection. Is she on birth control at least?” 

The silence gives him his answer. 

“Well that just won't do, will it?” he coos, knowing he has Tomura against a wall. “It’s alright Tomura.” He continues, solution on his tongue, sweeping the displeasure under the rug. “I will talk to the doctor and see if he can get you something for her. He will be in contact soon. I will check in again with you after.” 

There was no room for debate, no room for arguments. What he says is absolute and Tomura knows this. “Yes, father.”

—--------

The next time you meet, the air is different. Tomura is more reserved than he usually is. If you didn't know any better you would say he had been sulking. 

“What's your deal today?” you ask, flicking his forehead and biting back a smile at his halfhearted glare. 

He only shrugs, standing from his place next to you on the bed. “I have something for you.”

This piques your interests, eyebrow raised and smile dancing across your lips. “Oh? I thought you weren’t big on gifts.”

“I’m not.” He walks over to his desk, pulling out a package from one of his drawers, “but if we’re going to keep doing this like we are then you need to take these.”

He holds the case out to you, watching your eyes dart from his face to the package. “It’s birth control. We shouldn’t be reckless.”

“Oh, Tomura, no I can't take this.” you start, shaking your head, “and I can't bring this home to my parents, they would kill me. Where did you even get this from?”

“They won’t know. And my father is really good friends with our family doctor. You just take them once a day everyday and we can fuck without condoms with no problems.”

You frowned at the small box in your hand. “I don’t know. It sounds risky.”

“More risky than you turning up pregnant?”

“No, I guess not. Okay.”

His shoulders relaxed, tension leaving him. You went back to hanging out like normal.

—-----

“My parents have been getting more suspicious of Mina.” You say, falling onto the couch next to Tomura, over-buttered popcorn in your hand spilling a bit from the drop. 

“Oh, have they now?” 

You nod, taking a piece and popping it into your mouth. It was finally the weekend and Tomura promised he would watch this new thriller movie with you. 

“They say that it's not normal for me to hang out with a friend that much. Especially since they haven't seen her around as often.” you shrug, “they also aren't happy about my lack of location. I’m worried they’ll start snooping around my room next.”

Tomura places an arm over your shoulder, pulling you into his side and knocking more popcorn onto the couch in the process. Kurogiri will give you both an earful for the mess later.

“It’s fine. Worst case scenario we just lay low for a little bit. They can’t keep you under their thumb forever.”

He had a point, but you couldn’t ignore the pit forming in your chest. You didn’t want to have to sneak around all the time. There shouldn’t be anything keeping you from seeing who you wanted, whenever you wanted. You were an adult damn it. 

Especially not since you’ve started to feel… closer to Tomura these days. Before it was fun and things were done on a whim, but now? Now you felt sick at the thought of cutting him off. 

“If this movie blows, you owe me.” The rasp of his voice pulls you out of your thoughts. 

“It wont! The previews were really good.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He mumbled, playing the movie and reaching for the popcorn. You could only push your thoughts to the back of your mind, desperate to enjoy whatever you both had right now.

The movie was bad. It was cliche. Predictable. And Tomura was having the time of his life letting you know that. 

“And for her to go further into the house instead of just running toward the front door? Idiot.”

Your pride was too big to be put to the side. “Oh, yeah? Like you would have thought of that in the heat of the moment.”

He scoffed, “I would have.”

“Nuh uh.”

“Yes huh.”

You rolled your eyes, standing from the couch, relishing in the fact that Tomura was trailing behind you. Eager to talk about the movie and more into it than he let on.

“I’m just saying, you wouldn’t have had a chance unless you’re secretly some kind of murderer and know the tricks already.”

Tomura stopped, looking at you from across the kitchen island. “Who knows? Maybe I am. Maybe your parents are right about me.” 

You can’t bite back your scoff, placing the empty popcorn bowl in the sink and looking at him with a raised brow. “Oh really?”

He leans forward, palms pressing into the island counter. 

“Yeah,” he starts, a grin spreading along his face, “maybe I'm the big bad wolf they think I am.” 

You know that he’s trying to be intimidating, trying to tease you, but the drop in his voice only goes straight to heat between your thighs. You don't know what game he’s playing at, but you could take the bait. 

“Oh no,” you exaggerate, voice raising a few octaves, “that would just be terrible!” 

He takes a step to round the island counter, but you’re faster, dashing off into a sprint further into his home. 

The home was large, but you had been in it enough to know your way around pretty well. You took the familiar path to his room, (through the living room, up the stairs). After almost losing your footing on the stairs you vowed to never make fun of the horror movie girls who always seemed to fall at the worst time. 

Your breath was ragged as you continued, hearing Tomura’s steps behind you and steadily getting closer–

“Ah!” You cried, barely making it through the doors before being tackled to the floor, mercy not being shown as Tomura grabbed your hair, pressing you further into the carpet. “Okay, okay!”

He didn't let up, instead leaning forward, lips so close to your ear you could feel them, “I told you. The movie was bad, you owe me.”

You gasp as he stands, pulling you up with him only to push you onto his bed. You were giddy with excitement, barely able to raise up before Tomura pushed you back down, reaching forward to take your shorts and panties off in one swoop. 

The cool air made you shiver as you sighed in relief. 

Tomura laughs, bringing a finger to your entrance and sliding it along your folds, “Did me chasing you really get you this wet?”

You could only whine as he pressed a finger inside, resistance minimal. 

“I guess it can’t be helped.” The drag of his finger was slow as he pressed the small of your back, knees sliding further apart and exposing yourself to him more. 

“T-tomura, please!” you cry, begging him to go faster. “More.”

“Oh? You want more? Is this not doing it for you? Could have fooled me.” He pulls his finger out, a whine on your lips before he smacks your ass, no doubt leaving a mark, and grabs your hair again. He presses your face into the pillow to muffle your cry. “Shut up. I’ll tell you when you can get more.” 

He slides two fingers in, the stretch making you bite a moan into the pillow below you. 

His pace is merciless as he fingers you, mocking his earlier slow pace. A punishment of some kind since you were so desperate for more. If you wanted more then he would give you more. 

You couldn't quiet your mewls as he met the spongy bundle of nerves inside and you could feel your inner thighs tensing in anticipation as you grew closer and closer to your end. It was so close you could taste it. 

And then there was nothing. 

Tomura was cruel. He was cruel, and evil, and so fucking mean and you wasted no time letting him know these things. Only to get a laugh in return. 

“What? Were you close?” He mocked, bringing his weight down onto your back to whisper into your ear. “Too bad.”

You felt it then, the press of his cock along your entrance and whined. Tomura was too good at this villain role he was playing and you couldn’t stop yourself from getting even more aroused from the denial. You could practically feel yourself dripping in anticipation. His cruel words sending arousal straight to your pussy.

The way he towered over you only made you more eager. Crowding your senses and sending you into overdrive as you struggled to think clearly.  As much as you wanted to press back into his erection you knew that would only make him drag it out longer. 

Tomura was currently gliding his cock between your folds, the head brushing your clit and finally giving you some kind of relief. You felt him press harder on the small of you back, bringing your hips flush with the bed as he fucked between your folds. His cock meeting your clit at every thrust. Tomura moaned at this, his erection pressed between your warm body and the soft sheets. 

“T-tomura,” you moaned, letting your head fall to the pillow below you, “I can't take it.” 

Seemingly done with teasing you and at the limit himself, Tomura listened. Backing away to line up with your dripping cunt. The pressure was relieving, a sign that you would finally get what you want. But he stops, expecting, “what do you say?”

You bite your lower lip, frustrated at needing to do more. “Please, please give it to me, Tomura.”

This satisfies him, the press of his cock finally entering you has you both sighing in satisfaction. His slow drags quickly turn into full blown thrusts as he pounds you into the bed. You feel lightweight.

Your brows furrow as your hand grips the comforter below, the pleasure was creeping up again and it was only a matter of time before the rope inside you snapped. 

You feel Tomura grip your hip so tight you know it’ll have a bruise when this is all over, and he leans forward. Lips in their familiar place by your ear, “yeah, take it. Take it like a good girl.” 

It was impossible to stop the whimper as you felt Tomura’s thrusts getting more erratic. The warmth of his chest is comforting as he crowds over you. Feeling Tomura come undone is almost as satisfying as your own undoing. 

The way he bites your shoulder to quiet his own groans leaves you breathless. The pain mixes with the pleasure and you can keep yourself from crying out. You squeeze your eyes shut as your release washes over you, gripping his bedsheets below for dear life as the wind is knocked from you and the erratic thrusts inside you reach a new high. 

Tomura’s deep groan is the only warning you get before you feel the familiar twitch of his cock and warmth spread across your insides. His hips stutter as he rides out his orgasm, placing gentle kisses and licks onto your shoulder. Trailing those kisses up your shoulder and onto your neck, warmth tracing along the areas. 

He drops his head onto your shoulder, giving himself a moment before pulling back and out of you. You shiver as the once full feeling leaves you, cum trailing behind and onto his sheets, now in dire need of washing. 

This part is always your favorite.

It's soft, it's slow and it's calm.

Like there's nothing else outside of this room. No responsibilities, no time limit on a relationship, nothing. It's just you. It's just him and it’s all you want right now. You let yourself relax in tomura’s cloudlike bed, eyes falling shut. You’re surrounded by the cozy feeling and soft smell of his scent on the pillow. 

You could feel the fuzz of sleep taking over your brain and fought desperately to keep it at bay. You knew once you woke up reality would be knocking on your door. 

Your worries dissipate as you feel warm fingers brush your hair. 

You turn towards him and meet ruby red. Tomura was looking at you. Tomura was looking through you. It sent heat to your cheeks as you looked back. You close your eyes, leaning into his gentle touch. Tomura was very touchy. Like his hands could make up for the things his mouth couldn't say. You didn’t press or pry, it didn’t feel like your place. 

Tomura has always had his own way of opening up when he needed to. 

So for now you just enjoyed the feelings, enjoyed the butterflies dancing in your stomach and the feather light touch in your hair. You feel the press of lips to your temple and don't bother to hold back your smile as you drift off to sleep.

—----

You're putting on your shoes when you notice it. A compartment in your overnight bag was opened. One that you swore you had zipped closed before heading over. 

“Hey,” Tomura calls, from his place at his desk and breaking your train of thought. He reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a packet. “I have your dose for next month.”

You’ve become very familiar with the small pack of birth control pills over the last month. “Oh,  thanks.”

Tomura hums, attention falling back onto his pc and the youtube video playing on it, “Yeah, give me the old package.”

You take the item from his distracted hand and begin rummaging through your overnight bag. 

You frown, “I'm looking for it. It should be in my bag, I swear I brought it with me.” You feel your anxiety spike as you empty all of the contents of your cream colored bag, going as far as to turn it inside out. No pills.

Shigaraki isn’t bothered. “You may have left it at your place. It's fine. Just bring it to me when you find it and I'll get rid of it.”

“No, that's what I'm worried about. I know I put them in here.” Your heart sinks, you don't think they would stoop as low as to go through your overnight bag, but you know better. Your father knows no boundaries. 

Fuck.

—----

You make it home a little after the sun has set and you thank the stars that the living room is empty on your arrival. 

Actually, the entire house feels empty on your arrival. Your abdomen feels full of lead as you trek through your dark home. Too dark for the time of day. 

You could turn tail and run now. Quit while you're ahead and avoid whatever may be waiting for you, but you know that’s an over exaggeration. There could be nothing wrong. You steel yourself and continue to your room. 

The strip of light pouring from underneath your closed door has your palms sweaty as you swallow your nerves. You push your bedroom door open to be met with

Nothing. 

It is as empty as your home and you almost kick yourself for being so theatrical. You huff a sigh as you place your bag down and walk towards your bed. You're not sure how it slipped your sight the first time, but now you’re close enough and cannot ignore the note placed on your neatly made bed.

A note, handwritten and from your parents, with your empty container of birth control pills placed on top of it.

Love Like Ghosts (Chapter 10) -- a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

You knew the empty house in a quiet neighborhood was too good to be true, but you were so desperate to get out of your tiny apartment that you didn't care, and now you find yourself sharing space with something inhuman and immensely powerful. As you struggle to coexist with a ghost whose intentions you're unsure of, you find yourself drawn unwillingly into the upside world of spirits and conjurers, and becoming part of a neighborhood whose existence depends on your house staying exactly as it is, forever. But ghosts can change, just like people can. And as your feelings and your ghost's become more complex and intertwined, everything else begins to crumble. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Chapter 10

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.

Sanctuary of Nightmares PT6

Platonic SB x Child Reader

Chapter Selection

Previous / Next

You were about to attempt to run away when you felt the grip of his hands encase you, causing an immideate struggle. You squirmed, kicked, punched, anything you could do to remove yourself from the sudden grip of the iron giant. You were far too blinded by your fear to even listen to him as he swiftly began walking, the clicks of not only his feet but other animatronics filling the air. There were faint words that made it to you. Such as 'calm down' and 'I'm not going to hurt you'. You didn't believe that of course. Especially as his hands pressed into the bruises on the side of your body creating a spike of pain as you moved. It was a while after this struggle when he finally set you down, your body leaving him as soon as he let you go. You attempted to run only to find that you were in some sort of small enclosed space you could faintly tell was an elevator. Absolute terror ran through your system as you turmed to stare up at the huge bear.

You had never expected these things to be so enormous.

You quickly pushed yourself into a corner, trying to keep your distance from him. He attempted to take a step closer but seemed to stop when that action earned a terrified squeak along with you crumbling to the ground in an attempt to get smaller, your head tucked in your knees as if what you couldn't see wouldn't hurt you.

These characters had been your sanctuary, your safe haven. They were the thoughts your mind wandered to when hoping for better things.

You could not have imagined them being this terrifing.

Each metallic and robotic sound only further increased your fear, the source of the noise unseen by you. Eventually you heard no sound at all, your body waiting for an attack.

"Please, please calm down. I swear I will not harm you I-"

"Let me handle this Freddy. I think I can help" a boy's voice suddenly cut off the animatronic, the sound too human to belong to any bot. Yet in your panic, you couldn't have known the difference. All you knew was that you wanted to leave, to get out of here! You wanted home, you wanted normal. None of this can be real, it can't be real it can't-

"Hey...can you hear me?" The voice spoke again, this time closer to you. It was cautious with a clear child-like quality held in it.

It was then that you listened, your racing mind slamming to a halt at the strangeness of hearing anything human. Your quiet sobbing slowed, your head slowly rising only to come face to face with a boy, one similar to who you'd seen earlier.

The emotional whiplash that came from your mind slowly registering that the boy was real was enough to allow your body to subconsciously catch its breath as your mind focused on him.

Once you were looking at him, your rivers of tears slowly stopping, he managed to give a faint smile. It wasn't a very convincing one, in fact he had absolutely no idea what he was doing or how he had stopped your panic. He had only volunteered to try because he was less threatening than the seemingly ten-foot bear.

"I-I'm...Gregory...this is Freddy. He's safe. He's one of the good guys!" The brown-haired boy who you now knew as Gregory explained, his voice switching between nervous and confident faster than you could think to react to it. Freddy gave a small wave when mentioned, though he kept his movement to a minimum as to not further scare you.

Despite his animatronic body not allowing for much expression, he stood almost anxiously, his eyes not diverting from you. His drooped ears helped to further show his own distress, though it was clear that he didn't entirely know how to help a child who was scared of him.

You looked between the two, debating your situation for a moment.

The last animatronic you thought was safe had terrified the living daylights out of you, not to mention attacked this kid. So you were a bit skeptical about the boy's words along with the bot behind him. But, dispite your continued apprehension, you felt a little inclined to believe the boy. He seemed to know a little more than you with his abilities to outmaneuver Moon and having been able to get close to the huge bear, not to mention that he was older than you. If there was anyone who you'd hope to help you in your current situation it would be an older human.

Before you could continue to process your current situation a loud sound startled you back into a defensive postion, your arms wrapped around your legs as they were pulled against your chest. Freddy, not wanting you to regress after Gregory had managed to calm you a little, was quick to address the noise.

"Do not worry! That was just the doors opening! It is nothing to be afraid of! Look" he spoke up before moving to touch the open doors as if to further show their safety.

"See! No danger! You are safe!" Freddy almost enthusiastically replied, his face holding what you assumed was a smile as if he was genuinely proud of partaking in the conversation.

You weren't sure what it was about his over-the-top display, but you found it rather funny to watch the massive bear that had seemed so terrifying only seconds before, move to show you just how safe a door was. The genuine way in which he did so also helped with the comedy of it. So, in spite of yourself, a small laugh escaped your lips, heavily contrasting with your tear-stained face. You quickly tried to muffle it though, afraid you might upset the bear.

The small laugh allowed Freddy to somewhat relax, his stiff posture loosening now that you were calming down a little bit.

Feeling the tense air alleviate slightly Gregory decided to but in again. After all, he wanted to get out of here and he wasn't going to do that of you all were just standing aroun.

"Uh look uh I know we just kinda met but we've gotta get out of here. The robots in this place have gone crazy and the security guard isn't gonna help us. Freddy says there are two ways we can go so I was gonna go to the fire escape. There probably aren't as many security doors there." Gregory explained before outstretching a hand towards you, offering to help you up.

"It's probably safer if you stick with us"

You stared at his hand for a moment, unsure if you should accept the gesture. It didn't take long for you to realize you didn't want to be alone in this place and take his hand. He pulled you up but didn't let go of your hand once you stood and neither did you with his. It seemed that you both were gaining some comfort in each other.

"I will guide you in the direction of the exit, though I will not be able to help you most of the way. It is probably best if you get a map" Freddy explained as he took a few steps out of the elevator. The two of you followed suit, though Gregory held a bit more conviction in his step than you.

"Well, then where do we-" his sentence was cut short by a blaring sound, one that greatly startled both you and him. You pulled him a little closer, afraid that if he went too far you'd lose him.

"Free map"

An automated sound spoke as it outstretched a map to the two of you. You both stood in shock for a moment, the sudden dip in precived danger greatly confusing the both of you. Slowly the shock left and Gregory grabbed the two maps. It was only after doing so that the bot turned away and an annoyed look grew on Gregory's face. With a grip still tightly held onto your hand, he turned away from the bot and handed you the extra map. You took it with a slightly shaking hand, a fact that you tried to hide He seemed more easily able to get over his shock than you so you were trying to stay calm, not wanting to upset him with feeings of fear that he wasn't experiencing.

He stared at you for an extra moment, his annoyed look softening as you took the paper. He took a deep breath, loosening his grip on your hand a little before he turned back to Freddy.

"Do you have another Fazwatch?" He asked the metal bear only for Freddy to shake his head.

"They are not meant to be given out often. You have my last one" Freddy explained, his own disappointment shown once again in his lowered ears. Gregory gave a simple nod in response before turning back to you.

"Then you just have to stay close okay? We're gonna get out of here together" Gregory spoke with confidence and a warning which you took very seriously. You gave a nod, showing that you understood.

"Okay, let's get moving"

The three of you started off on your escape. You picked up rather quickly on what to do as the two avoided the moving security bots, remaining as quiet as they could. Remembering to earlier when you had run into one of these bots you soon understood their purpose and the great necessity to keep away.

They were alarms. And with alarms came people, or more terrifyingly robots, looking to catch whatever had set them off.

However, there was no sign of whoever was supposed to be listening for that alarm nearby, so there was a bit of leeway on the volume level the three of you could produce

"What is your name?" Freddy asked as he tilted his head down ever so slightly to look at you. You stared for a moment, his giant size still ringing a few alarm bells. You tried to gauge the intention behind the question through Gregory, though he seemed mostly focused on walking rather than talking. So, not sure of what to do, you kept silent, your apprehension clear but your fear not as prevalent. Freddy's ears fell again, his eyes showing his sadness in how you didn't answer.

After a bout of silence, Gregory turned to you, slight confusion written on his face.

"Aren't you gonna tell him?" He asked, unable to see why you wouldn't. You quickly averted your eyes from Gregory, feeling the burn of words in your chest.

You never really spoke much. You'd been a quiet kid even before the world had beaten silence into you, so speaking didn't come very well to you. Most times you find it better to just keep your mouth shut.

However, in the presence of two sets of searing curious eyes, you felt entirely uncomfortable and a little cautious. You didn't want to upset them. After all, you didn't really know these two or their tempers. All you knew was that they were helping you, but that could always change.

So, even if you would have preferred not to say anything, you spoke.

"Y/n" you finally answered. Your voice was a soft sound, reminiscent of a whisper in the wind as it somehow reached their ears despite its incredibly low volume.

"What a great name. It is nice to meet you Y/n" Freddy spoke, his voice lowered into just above an actual whisper almost as if he was trying to match your voice but was unable to go lower than a certain point. You kept your eyes averted, hoping he'd just let everything fall back into silence. Luckily it did.

It wasn't very long until the three of you stopped in front of a place Freddy mentioned to be El Chip's. It was only once you and Gregory stood close enough for the door to slightly open that Freddy finally turned to get a better look at you, his eyes scanning, hoping for some type of profile.

He didn't get one, but what he did notice were your injuries. They were wrapped, likely because of his good friend Sun, but they wouldn't stay that way for very long, especially with you moving around so much.

"Gregory, I would like to raise a concern. I can not guarantee that this exit will be open and, while you may be equipped to deal with the consequences if that is so, I'm worried the Y/n may not be able to. Perhaps it's better if they stay with me until you are sure there is an exit" Freddy's voice stayed at the low volume it had been at earlier though it was now twisted in concern. Gregory turned between Freddy and you with a perplexed look, seemingly not understanding Freddy's words.

"What do you mean? They look fine to me!" Gregory responded, his tone almost sharp as he spoke. You felt his hand grip tighter onto yours only for you to wince and pull away from his grip, a shock of pain burning through you. He turned back to you with confusion that quickly turned to realization.

"Oh..." Was all he could say as he seemed to finally notice your bandages. His shock only held for a moment before you saw his face twist in slight anger, his mind spinning with possibilities.

How had this happened? No no, he knew why. Those horrifying bots! They hurt you! And it seemed pretty badly too, especially as he began to notice the other wrapped injuries. God how he hated these things! You were younger than he was! How could they do that to a little kid!? It's one thing to go after him. He's been on the street since he was six, but someone so sensitive? So small? At this point he wouldn't be surprised if they killed babies!

And it was that hatred, that growing seething hatred he had for those bots and what he'd perceived they'd done to you that caused his stubborn mind to begin to build with spite.

"That's even more reason they should stay with me! The faster we both get out the better" Gregory countered, his voice rising in intensity as he turned back to Freddy. Freddy was about to protest Gregory's decision but, upon seeing the seriousness in his eyes, decided better of it. He simply sighed, kneeling down as his eyes flickered between the both of you, apprehension found in the few features that could express emotion.

"I must warn the both of you: when you enter an area where you do not have a locator map signal, I will be unable to reach you. You can update your map at the security office. It is also best to locate any good hiding spots. The daycare attendant should have been released a few minutes ago and it is not safe to be roaming when he is around. Be safe..." Freddy cautioned, his voice anxiety latent. Gregory gave a firm nod, gently grasping your hand again before crouching under the door and into what was hopefully your path out of this place.

And to think just earlier today you had wanted nothing more than to be here...

- x -

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Enough to Go By (Chapter 8) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

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

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Chapter 8

“I can’t believe this is happening,” the high school student at the front desk says for the millionth time. “He must be so scared.”

“That kid? No way. He’s probably killed half the League already.” One of the nurses scoffs. “He’ll be fine. The heroes will handle this and put an end to that mess before you know it.”

You’ve been hearing versions of this conversation for the last three days, and you were bored of them on day one. It’s an effort not to roll your eyes. “But he got kidnapped,” the high schooler says again. “He probably doesn’t even know what happened to his friends, if they’re okay –”

“The other students are okay,” you say. “I heard two of them are still unconscious, but they think they’ll be fine. Their lungs were just more sensitive to the gas than the others’ were.”

“Was it really mustard gas?” the high schooler asks, and you shake your head. “How do you know?”

“A friend of mine,” you say. You’re not talking about Tenko. “He’s helping the heroes gather intel. He says it’s more like Midnight’s sleeping gas, but with a cumulative exposure effect.”

“The news said that kid was in high school,” a passing doctor says. “What are we doing wrong that kids in high school are turning to villainy?”

“It’s a problem with the villain, not with us.”

You can’t hold in the derisive sound you make, and all three of them turn to you. “What is it?” the doctor asks. “You don’t agree?”

“I just think it’s weird for people who see what we see every day to act like every villain is just born bad,” you say. Your colleagues stare at you. “Some of our patients feel trapped. A lot more of them feel helpless, or hopeless. Most of them have had hard lives, and no one’s helped them or saved them. If they feel invisible in their suffering, it’s not hard to imagine why some of those people lash out. Not even to hurt others. Just to be seen.”

You know what it’s like to feel hopeless, to feel invisible. To feel angry and know that your anger doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter in the first place. You turned that feeling inward, but most people aim it out. “People don’t become villains because they’re happy with their lives, or who they are. The way the world works makes a lot of people unhappy.”

“Young people – present company excepted – want everything handed to them,” the doctor says. He gestures at you and the high schooler. “If we had more people like the two of you, it would be a different story. You know how to work hard.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” you say. You’re not making your point well. You try again. “The villains who currently exist are the heroes’ job. It’s our job as a society to stop new villains from arising. The only way to do that is to make things better for everybody.”

“Of course,” the nurse says tiredly. She’s probably been working at the clinic longer than you and the doctor combined, and longer than the high schooler’s been alive. “When you figure that one out, honey, let me know.”

You’d love to. Really. Lately the difference between what you feel and what you think has been growing, so fast that it’s consuming every thought in its wake. Kazuo might be right from a legal standpoint that not stopping something isn’t the same thing as aiding and abetting it, but that doesn’t change how it feels. The attack on the training camp succeeded. The psychopathic student was kidnapped. Students were hurt. Pro heroes were hurt. One hero is missing. Moonfish, Mustard, and Muscular were all captured. And you knew it was happening ahead of time.

This time, you weren’t powerless to stop Tenko’s plans. You could have contacted UA and warned them that the location of their summer training camp had been compromised, that villains were planning an attack. You could have done it without endangering Tenko – he wouldn’t have even been there, and with Kurogiri’s protocol of warping everyone to and from the hideout, none of the others could have revealed his location if they were captured. You could have stopped this. Part of you wishes you had.

And part of you can’t stop picturing the look on Tenko’s face if he found out you betrayed his trust. The hurt you’d see there in the moments before he sealed it away. He’d probably kill you, and you’d feel so guilty that you’d probably want him to – but it’s not the fear of death that keeps you quiet. It’s the fear of losing him again, by your own fault this time. So you’ll take the guilt over the attack on UA’s training camp, the kidnapped student, the missing hero. You’d rather feel sick over that than hollowed out by losing your best friend.

You’re on the night shift, but it’s slow tonight, and when the high schooler turns on the TV in the waiting room, you don’t stop her. UA is having a press conference, with the principal and the two teachers who were there at the training camp apologizing for allowing the students to be put at risk again. You shouldn’t feel guilty, but you do, and you almost ask the high schooler to turn it off – but then the hero whose student was kidnapped starts defending said student, and you get annoyed. “That’s not what he’s like?” You mimic the hero’s flat, almost-affectless voice, then revert to your own. “Bullshit. That’s exactly what he’s like.”

“Huh?” The high schooler looks at you, surprised – or maybe offended. “That’s his teacher. He knows him better than you do. You’ve never met him.”

“I’ve met dozens of him. I know what they’re like.” You think of your siblings, the twins, the triplets. You think of the people who made your life hell until you made stronger friends. “You know who knows that kid better than his teacher? Everybody that kid has ever picked on. They only show who they really are to people who can’t hit them back.”

The high schooler is staring now. “I’ve never heard you say that much about anything before.”

You step out from behind the desk and head to the lobby for a little cleaning. “I only get one outburst per month. You can tune in next time.” In general, you’re not reactive – growing up, you weren’t allowed to react to anything – but ever since you found Tenko, you’ve found it harder and harder to hold in your frustration with the way things are. Your viewpoint doesn’t align with the League of Villains or with Stain, because you don’t think that dismantling the heroic system would automatically create a better world, but lately you can’t shut up about the things that are wrong.

Employment and housing discrimination against quirkless people and heteromorphs, and the total lack of anti-discrimination laws. The constant threat of violence, triggered so often by heroes pursuing nonviolent criminals, in situations where violence shouldn’t be necessary. The disinterest most ordinary people show in helping anyone, changing anything, because they expect heroes to do it for them. Things people who have power never see or think about. Things you’ve been living with since you were a child.

Seeing the heroic system come tumbling down won’t fix any of that. All it will do is put the privileged on the same level as you are, force them to play by the same rules you’ve had to follow. And some part of you thinks that would be a nice thing to see. After all, you’ve been playing this game your whole life. For once, you’d like to have the advantage.

The UA press conference is just concluding when you feel the first vibration, a low deep hum traveling through the air. A chill goes down your spine, and you look up from cleaning the air conditioning filter in the lobby to the high schooler behind the desk, only to find her already looking at you. The TV switches to breaking news with a blast of trumpets, announcing that All Might and various heroes have teamed up to rescue Bakugou of Class 1-A, but even as they’re announcing the good news, another vibration travels through the air. A moment later, a similar vibration travels through the ground. Somewhere in the distance, you hear a crash – an enormously loud sound, coming from just far enough away to avoid rupturing your eardrums. Not far enough to avoid rupturing anything else.

“Get down!” you shout, diving for cover, and the high schooler drops behind the counter just in time for the windows to blow apart, spraying glass across the lobby.

Now you can hear explosions. Or you could, if your ears weren’t ringing. When you look out the shattered windows, you see a sky that should be cloudy and dark blue turning unearthly purple and orange. As the ringing in your ears dies down, you hear screams, sirens, the whirring of helicopter blades. Something terrible is happening.

You struggle to your knees, then your feet, doing your best to avoid the broken glass. “Are you okay?” you shout to the high schooler. You hear a whimper from behind the desk, and a split second later, the phone starts to ring. “Can you grab that?”

No answer. You stumble through the glass, kicking piles of it aside, and find the high schooler crouched behind the desk, shaking. She doesn’t look hurt. Shell-shocked, sure, but not hurt. You aren’t seeing blood. You grab the phone. “Yokohama Free Clinic South. How can I help you?”

“This is Yokohama PD. Your building has been designated as an evacuation site. Please prepare to receive evacuees from Kamino Ward.”

“Kamino Ward?” You fumble the clinic’s disaster preparedness binder out of the desk and start flipping frantically through it. “Our windows are gone from the shockwave that just came through. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Is the building still standing?” The officer on the other end doesn’t wait for confirmation. “The first evacuees should be arriving within minutes. Once the hospitals are full, the remaining casualties will be directed to you.”

“What? We’re an urgent care, not a mass casualty –” The line goes dead and you stare at it in horror. The rest of the night shift, doctors and nurses and techs, are just emerging from the back of the clinic. You turn to look at them and try to convey the information as quickly and efficiently as possible. “Evacuees from Kamino Ward are coming here. Once the hospitals are full, the casualties will be coming here, too.”

“What’s happening in Kamino Ward?”

“Look.” The high schooler’s voice is almost as shaky as her hand as she points to the TV. You do as she says and everything gets worse in a heartbeat.

Kamino Ward is gone. It’s a smoking crater, ringed by the ruins of buildings, and in the center of it all stand a collection of small figures. Half your thoughts come to a stop on the buildings, on how many people must be trapped in the wreckage. The rest are with the group of people in the crater. Wherever the news feed is coming from, whoever’s filming zooms in until you can see their faces. All Might’s there. So is Tenko’s master. And so is Tenko, him and the rest of the League, everyone who wasn’t captured after the attack on the training camp – alongside the student they kidnapped.

LIVE: All Might fights unknown villain, the scroll at the bottom of the screen says. Kamino Ward leveled. Rescue efforts underway.

Two of your friends live in Kamino Ward. Your mind floods with emotion, the leaks in your defense mechanisms coming from a dozen different sources. Worry for your friends, panic about the evacuees who are about to descend on your clinic and the casualties that are sure to follow, terror that the fight will break from Kamino Ward and come to you. Fear for Tenko, who’s right there in the middle of it all. Shame over the fact that when you realized he was there, your fear for him drowned everything else in a split second.

But you don’t have time for worry or panic or shame or fear, because you can hear voices in the street. People are coming here, looking for shelter, and there’s glass all over the floor of the lobby. “We need to clean this up,” you call out to the others, even as you run for a broom. “We have to hurry.”

Somebody yanks the broom out of your hands and passes it to one of the CNAs. The doctor forces the disaster preparedness binder into your hands instead, only for one of the older nurses to snatch it away. “Put her on triage. We need to keep them calm and we need to move fast.”

You’re good at those two things when the lobby is full. Not when an absurd number of people are being directed your way. You pull the blinds over the glassless windows, hoping it’ll stop people from seeing them as entry points to the building, and prop open the door, stationing yourself just inside it. When you see the crowd coming down the street, led by an overwhelmed-looking police officer and two minor heroes from the area, you take a deep breath and do everything you can to clear your mind.

“Get a list of who’s here,” the nurse who took the disaster preparedness binder hisses in your ear. “Uninjured to the right and left, injured to the front.”

“Got it,” you say. Someone drops a pile of nametags and a permanent marker into your hands. That’ll work. One of the heroes has jogged ahead to meet you, and you square up. “Get everybody in a line. Keep families together. We’ll take care of the rest. How many do you have?”

“A hundred, plus or minus twenty. Some fell behind.”

And those are probably the injured ones. “Go back and pick them up,” you say. “We’ll handle this.”

The hero conveys your instructions to the others, and a line begins to form. You address the first person in line – a grey-haired man, carrying what looks like either a grandchild or a random kid. “Family name, first initial,” you say. Iwamura K, granddaughter Iwamura T. “Injuries?”

None. You peel off the stickers, apply them to each evacuee’s arm, then herd them inside. “Next?”

Your handwriting gets worse and worse with every nametag, but you’re moving fast. You screw up the system you were supposed to implement almost immediately. Uninjured evacuees go to the right side of the lobby. Injured ones go to the left, where the other nurses are waiting to triage them more effectively. All the while the air vibrates with distant blows and you vibrate with it, your mind teetering between focusing on the tasks at hand and worrying about your friends, about Tenko. You’re scared that one of your friends will come through the door on a stretcher. You’re scared that Tenko won’t come back at all.

The phone rings somewhere behind you while you’ve still got dozens of people in line, and a moment later, the high schooler shouts to you. “The teaching hospital’s full and the route to Yokohama General is cut off. They’re directing casualties here.”

Fuck. When you find out who cut off the route to the city’s biggest, most modern hospital, you’re going to break your foot off in their ass. That goes double if the guilty party is Tenko’s master. You start hustling people into the building at top speed, trying to think of which entrance will be best to direct the ambulances to. The rear entrance, probably. Somebody else will have to take care of that. You’ve still got people coming through the door.

The closer to the back of the line you get, the more damage the evacuees are working with. The last few are covered with dust, their clothes torn, their bodies already bruising. You try to ask them what happened, but your words are drowned out by a collective gasp, followed by dead silence from inside the building. The TV is still going, the words tinny and distant, but you hear the first person who speaks up loud and clear. It’s a kid. “Mama, what’s wrong with All Might?”

The noise comes back up immediately, leaving you with no idea what’s happening, no idea if All Might’s been defeated or killed, no idea whether the fight’s shifting, heading this way. You hear ambulance sirens wailing, getting louder with every passing second, and someone yanks your arm. You turn to find one of the medical assistants. “Go to the back. They want you helping with the ambulances.”

You don’t want you helping with the ambulances. You’re good under pressure, but not that kind of pressure. Not the kind where someone will die if you screw it up. You try to reason with yourself as you weave through the lobby and head down the hall, aiming for the back doors. You’re not running point on any of these cases. Your job is to assist the doctors and the nurse-practitioners. They’ll tell you what to do. You just have to do it. It’ll be fine. You think that, and keep thinking it, right up until you put on your mask and gloves and turn around to find yourself facing a patient whose legs have been crushed below the knee.

It’s awful. There’s blood and sinew and tissue everywhere, and sharp fragments of bone emanating from the exposed kneecap. Bitter saliva floods your mouth and your stomach turns, threatening to upend itself, but you grew up with siblings who could make you vomit on their command. You learned to resist them, and this – you clench your jaw and step forward. “How can I help?”

“Pinch off the femoral artery on the left side.” The doctor’s face is pale. The patient is unconscious, must be unconscious, because otherwise you can’t imagine the doctor saying what he says next. “We’re in hell.”

You’re not given to dramatic statements, but as the time wears on, you start to agree with him. You lose track of which patients you’re seeing. It’s all you can do to remember to switch gloves between patients. Your scrubs get sprayed with blood, but you can’t change them. There’s not time. The site commander for whatever’s happening in Kamino Ward sent your clinic twelve patients who should have gone to Yokohama General. You can’t save them. Your job is to keep them alive long enough to transport them to the people who can.

It’s a task you fail once, twice, three times, five times. One of the nurses, someone who worked somewhere else before coming here, tells you that the patients wouldn’t have made it anyway, but it doesn’t help. Even with the EMTs of the ambulances staying to lend a hand, there aren’t enough hands, not enough eyes to spot the signs of someone crashing and not enough mouths to call out a warning. You lose five, stabilize seven. If this goes on much longer, you might lose them all.

News of what’s happening in Kamino Ward trickles back slowly. All Might’s deflated, or decrepit. Skeletal. Disfigured. All Might’s getting an assist from the Number Two hero – Hiro will be thrilled. All Might’s winning. All Might’s won, but the League of Villains has escaped. All of them except their backer – All For One.

All For One. It’s not a villain name you’ve heard before, but you’re pretty sure that’s Tenko’s master. Whoever he is, wherever he came from, he was strong enough to hurt All Might, to nearly kill All Might. If he could do that, what the hell does he need Tenko for? What’s going to happen to Tenko with his backer gone? Where is the League going to go? You’re pretty sure they can’t go back to their hideout – it was where they were planning to take the captured student, and if they and the student wound up in Kamino Ward, something went wrong. Where’s Tenko now?

That’s not your problem right now. Your problem is your patients, and whether or not any of them will still be alive by the time the route to Yokohama General reopens. You throw yourself back into work. Back into hell.

Relief eventually arrives in the form of basically every off-duty staff member – all of them who don’t live in Kamino, that is. You stay in the mix, not wanting to be the first one to call for help. You’re not that tired, anyway. You just got on shift at six. You have a long way to go before –

“It’s seven am. Get out,” your supervisor says, and you stare blankly at her. Seven am? That can’t be right. It was midnight two seconds ago. “This patient’s stable, and the route to Yokohama General is finally open. Transfer them and go home. With all the repairs we’ll have to make, we can’t afford to pay you overtime.”

Transfer, then home. You transfer the patient, who hasn’t been conscious once since they arrived in the clinic with a skull fracture wide enough to see their brain through, to the waiting EMTs, and then you go looking for a change of clothes. There isn’t one. You’ll be wearing this home. You wade through another crowd of people to clock out, then step out onto the street. The trains probably aren’t working, but that’s fine. It’s not that far. You can walk.

The sky is still purple and orange. Clouds of smoke are billowing up from whatever happened in Kamino Ward, and you can smell it, along with gasoline and ozone and who knows how many other acrid stenches. You check your phone as you walk and find frantic messages from your friends, everyone trying to confirm that everyone else is alive. You tap out a message confirming that you were at work and you’re fine. Then you put your phone away and trudge the rest of the way home.

After the noise of the clinic, unabated for hours upon hours, your apartment building is weirdly quiet. At this time of day people should be up, getting ready for work, getting their kids ready for school, but instead it feels like time’s stopped. Maybe they left. Maybe they’re in an evacuation shelter somewhere. You don’t know. You unlock the door to your apartment and step inside – and freeze.

Your apartment should be empty. It isn’t. Your apartment is full of people, and you’ve met them all at least once before – Spinner, Dabi, Magne, Compress, Twice, Toga. Kurogiri. Tenko. No, Tomura. They’re all staring at you, just like you’re staring at them.

Toga’s the first one to speak. “So that’s what you look like,” she says, smiling. “I knew you were cute!”

“Don’t scream,” Tomura says. You shut your mouth and shake your head. He looks you up and down, frowning. “Whose blood is that?”

“At work. I was at work. We got some of the casualties from – from Kamino –” You’re stammering. You’re making approximately zero sense. There’s only one question that matters. “What are you doing here?”

Nobody answers you. Dabi’s mouth contorts into a sneer. “No wonder you wouldn’t show your face before. You’re a fucking civilian.”

“Yeah, she’s a civilian. That’s why her place is safe to stay at,” Tomura snaps at him. He turns back to you, the frown still present behind the hand. “Is all that blood somebody else’s?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” You don’t feel fine. You feel numb, but your heart is racing so fast that you’re worried you might faint. “Did anybody see you? Or hear you?”

“Kurogiri delivered us right to your living room,” Compress says. “We’ve been quiet. Most of us.”

He’s aiming a dirty look at Magne, who glares back. “It hurts,” she snaps. “If somebody stabbed you in the chest –”

Your stomach lurches. “Stabbed?”

“I hit my face on that giant hero’s face. Do you hear me complaining?”

“You were stabbed?” You step around Tomura and cross the room to where Magne’s sprawled in one of your armchairs. “How long ago? Is it still bleeding?”

“Not with a knife,” Magne says. With what, then? “Boss’s daddy forcibly activated my quirk with his hideous little tentacles.”

There’s nothing about that sentence that you don’t hate. “The same thing happened to Kurogiri,” Spinner adds. He’s leaning against the wall. Grimacing. “A hero messed with him first, though.”

The answer to the question of why they’re here finally clicks in your overworked, exhausted brain. You’re the team medic, and they’ve all been hurt. They need you to do the same thing you’ve been doing all night, when all you want to do is peel off your bloody clothes and go to sleep. Instead, you need to triage. “Okay, who took an injury that knocked them out?”

Hands go up – Magne, Dabi, Kurogiri. Compress might have a facial fracture, based on the way his mask is askew. Spinner’s ribs hurt, but he never lost consciousness, and he’s not bleeding from anywhere. Twice, Toga, and Tomura are all beaten up but otherwise fine. You point them in the direction of the freezer so they can put together some ice packs, then turn your attention to the group who passed out.

Of the three of them, Dabi was unconscious the longest, and his injury was a head injury. He threw up when he regained consciousness, although thankfully not on your floor or your couch. He reports a splitting headache, and when you shine the penlight from your keychain in his eyes, you see that one of his pupils isn’t reacting normally to the light. That’s not a good sign. “Do you remember what happened immediately before the blow to the head?”

“Why do you want to know? So you can make your story sound better for the cops?”

“No, I’m testing your memory. It’s an indicator for the severity of the concussion. Track my finger with your eyes.” You observe his eye movements. It could go either way. “What happened before you were struck?”

“The damn kid turned us down. Who does he think he is?” Dabi scoffs. “Shigaraki told Compress to turn him loose, like a fucking moron, and then the fucking heroes broke through the wall. One of them kicked me and that’s all I remember.”

“Kicked you in the head?”

“That’s right.” Dabi groans. “Fuck off with that light in my face.”

You put the penlight away and think through your options. “I’m going to give you some medicine. Over-the-counter NSAIDs –”

“What?”

“Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,” Tomura says. You glance at him, surprised, and find him smiling slightly from behind the hand. “Acetaminophen or ibuprofen. They’re over the counter. You can get them without a prescription.”

“I know what over the counter means,” Dabi snaps. “I didn’t ask you. I asked the medic. Do you have some?”

“Yeah. Acetaminophen’s best for this. The bottles are opened, but I’m going to go get them – Twice, will you come with me and watch me get them?” you ask. Twice looks startled. “You can watch me and tell Dabi that I’m not tampering with the pills at all.”

“I’m not that fucking paranoid,” Dabi says. But he doesn’t tell Twice not to follow you.

You’ve been wondering if Twice remembers you. So far it seems like he doesn’t, but something jogs his memory as you come back with the bottles. “I knew I’d seen you before,” he announces loudly, and you shush him alongside Compress, Toga, and Tomura. “You stitched up my mask!”

“Did the stitches hold okay?” you ask. “I know it was a little rushed.”

“Barely,” Twice says. Then: “They were great! Lasted until Giran hooked me up with a new one.”

“You’ve met her before?” Compress asks, suspicious.

“Sure thing. If she’d showed her face, I could have backed up the boss and said she was all right!” Twice sounds cheerful. He slaps you on the back and you nearly spill acetaminophen tablets all over the floor. “Nicest nurse I ever had. No screaming, no calling the cops. Just stitched my mask and gave me the good drugs and sent me on my way!”

“He got the good drugs?” Tomura says, incredulous. “Why didn’t I get those?”

“You behaved. Sort of.” You need to get into the kitchen, but Toga and Tomura are both there, holding bags of ice to their various scrapes and bruises. “Can one of you fill a glass of water? The cabinet to the right.”

Tomura does it – with warm sink water – and hands it off. You head back to Dabi, drop a double dose of acetaminophen into his hand, and order him to drink the whole glass of water with it. You’ll hit him with the same dose in six hours, if they’re still here in six hours. It won’t do anything good for his liver, but if he’s in too much pain to rest and starts trying to do things, his liver will be the least of his worries. You order him to hold still, eyes closed, and focus on Magne and Kurogiri.

Your friends got you a stethoscope as a gag gift a while back, but the stethoscope is real, and you know how to use it. You listen for any irregularities in Magne’s breathing and heartbeat, then tell her to go into the bathroom and check for bruising on her torso – at which point she whips off her shirt. “Check for yourself.”

“Agh, no!” Spinner twists the other way, but not before you see his scales flushing. “Don’t do that!”

“Or at least give some warning,” Twice says. Then he gives a thumbs-up. “Looking good!”

“Put those away. There are children here,” Compress says.

“It’s okay.” Toga is staring avidly. “I don’t mind.”

“You should. We’re the League of Villains, not the League of Perverts.” Spinner is still facing away. “Are you done yet?”

“Are you done yet?” Magne asks you. You’ve been studying her torso and the series of bruises on it. “Well?”

“Nothing that suggests internal bleeding. You’re good to go.”

She pulls her shirt back on. “I hope you all enjoyed that. I won’t be doing it again.”

“Don’t,” Spinner says. “Please.”

You commandeer one of the ice bags Toga made and hand it to Magne, then turn your attention to Kurogiri. Kurogiri’s going to present a problem, and both of you know it. “What do you have in the way of internal organs?” you ask. “Heart, lungs, digestive tract –”

“Everything, but it will not be possible to listen to. This is in the way.”

“He can take it off,” Tomura says. “Kurogiri. Go somewhere else and show her.”

You’d say the bathroom, but Kurogiri’s a lot taller than you are. There wouldn’t be room. You go to your bedroom instead, leaving the door slightly cracked so you can listen to what’s happening in the living room and intervene if it gets too wild. Kurogiri shrugs out of his waistcoat, followed by his shirt, leaving nothing but a pair of pants and a swirling cloud of mist. Then, as you watch, the mist begins to peel back, revealing a body underneath it.

It’s pretty clearly a human body. It looks like it’s been stitched together out of multiple other bodies, but all the requisite parts of a human body appear to be present. So is the metal neckpiece of Kurogiri’s costume. Above it, though, there’s a face. It’s a young face. Younger than you, younger than Tomura, and it looks back at you with enormous yellow eyes. Its mouth moves, and the strange doubled voice issues from it. “Hurry up. I can’t do this for long.”

You conduct a quick physical exam. Unlike Magne, Kurogiri has actual puncture wounds. One actual puncture wound in his ribcage, and when you listen to his breathing, there’s a whistle on that side that shouldn’t be there. “You’ve got a punctured lung,” you say. “It might repair on its own. If there’s anyone else who can –”

“The doctor will perform the necessary maintenance,” Kurogiri says. That means zip to you, except that the doctor’s apparently willing to treat everybody except Tomura. “Is Shigaraki Tomura safe in your company?”

You look up into that young face, see the shadow of human eyes within the yellow ones. “He is.”

“Tell him where I have gone, and that I will return shortly.” Kurogiri vanishes.

You go back out to the living room and deliver the message, then check in with Compress and Spinner about their injuries. Compress won’t let you look under his mask, but does a self-exam under your direction and somewhat confirms your diagnosis of a cheekbone fracture. He gets NSAIDs and an ice pack. Spinner has a rib out of place. You need to put it back in.

He’s not making it easy. “Stop tensing up,” you say. “Every time you do that while I’m trying to put your rib back, the likelihood of a muscle tear goes up. That’s a lot harder to fix than a dislocated rib.”

“It hurts. I’d like to see you try it!”

“I haven’t had the privilege.” The temper you swear you don’t have is doing its best to break out of captivity. “Okay, here’s the deal. I have some vodka in there. You’re going to drink that while I check on the others, and then we’ll handle your rib. Okay?”

“Sure,” Spinner says, surprised. “You lift the bottle down from the top of the refrigerator and hand it over. “Thanks.”

Twice has mostly bumps and bruises, as well as complaints about the fact that Spinner got alcohol but he didn’t. You shoo him off to share with Spinner, then check in with Toga. Toga’s really interested in your scrubs. “How many people’s blood is on there?” she asks eagerly. “You’re so lucky. All that blood everywhere – doesn’t it smell good?”

“It just smells like blood to me. But my sense of smell probably isn’t as good as yours.” You look Toga up and down. “Did you get hurt anywhere?”

“No.” Toga keeps studying you. “Can you get some blood for me? If everybody’s already bleeding –”

“Sorry,” you say, and she pouts. “I’d get caught. Plus, don’t you want those kids’ blood? Blood from some random patient of mine probably won’t help much.”

“No,” Toga agrees, “but it would taste good.”

“I’ll take your word for it. You’re good to go, also.” You watch as she skips off to join Spinner and Twice, then turn your attention to Tomura. You saved him for last on purpose, hoping you’d get a chance to talk to him, and now that you have one, you don’t know what to say. “Um –”

“Don’t.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.” The fact that you don’t know either is immaterial.

“It was probably going to be some kind of pep talk. In your evil shrink voice,” Tomura says, and your mouth twitches. He notices, and a moment later he’s mimicking you. “Tomura, this could be a lot worse. You could have gotten everybody captured instead of just Sensei. The kid you handpicked to join the League of Villains blew Father’s hand off your face, but at least you’ve got a face, right?”

The joke occurs to you, and you’re so tired and overwhelmed that it comes out of your mouth with zero edits. “That’s one more face than Sensei has.”

Tomura coughs. “What?”

“Also, you missed part of what I was going to say,” you say, seizing the momentum and running with it. “Well, what you were going to say. You were going to complain about All Might winning, and I was going to say that he didn’t really win, because he leveled Kamino Ward and I spent all night trying to keep the people in those buildings alive, and mostly failing –”

“Wait, what?”

“And then,” you say, wishing you hadn’t said a word about your job, “I was going to remind you that everybody saw All Might’s scarecrow form. So nobody’s going to want him to fuck them now.”

Tomura’s expression contorts to a degree that looks painful. “That’s – not – funny,” he grits out.

“I mean, when we talked about rendering All Might unfuckable, I thought it was just a pipe dream,” you say. Tomura’s shoulders are shaking now. You don’t know what else to do but keep going. “But this is proof. The sky’s the limit. Anything is possible. I mean, if you can set up a situation that takes All Might from fuckable to unfuckable in a split second, then you can do anything you want to do.”

Tomura is staring at you, speechless and twitching like he’s caught in an electric fence, and even though you think there’s a nonzero chance you’re going to get killed over this, you can’t resist. “How’s that for a pep talk?”

“It sucked,” Tomura says, and then he bursts out laughing.

You’re proud any time you can make him laugh, and this is no exception. At first he’s just laughing. Then his breathing starts to hitch, and you realize that the laughter’s tripped another circuit in his brain – one he probably doesn’t want the others to see. “What the hell are you two laughing about?” Dabi demands from the couch. “Let the rest of us in on it.”

“Yes,” Compress agrees, “we could use something to laugh at.”

“Inside joke. You wouldn’t understand.” You catch Tomura’s sleeve and tug him down the hallway, out of sight of the others. His laughter is sounding less and less like laughter with every passing second, and he’s clawing at his neck with one hand. You keep your voice quiet, trying above all not to drop into the conflict-resolution voice. “No. Tenko, don’t. That’s not going to make things better.”

“I really fucked up.” His voice, already raspy, cracks in a way that sounds painful. “Things were supposed to – I’m not ready. I haven’t learned. He was supposed to teach me. I can’t –”

Something tells you that right now’s not the time for a joke. You think Tenko might be crying. No, you know it, and he knows you know. “Don’t look.”

You remember that from forever ago. He never wanted you to see him cry. You turn your back, as much as it hurts you to do it, and as soon as you do, his arms come up around you. His hands are curled into fists, shielding you from his quirk, one balled up against your shoulder and the other balanced over your hipbone. Something thuds against the floor behind you and you glance to one side, a jolt running through you. There’s the hand he calls Father, discarded.

Tenko’s body shakes, strongly enough to rattle you both. He’s taller than you, but not so tall that he can’t duck down and press his face into the curve of your neck and shoulder to muffle himself. After a few seconds, it’s clear that it’s not enough. You feel his mouth meet your skin. A moment later, his teeth.

It stings, and you will yourself not to flinch. You remember the few times you actually saw Tenko cry instead as opposed to just hearing it when you were kids, remember seeing him shove his fist into his mouth to stay quiet, but both his hands are occupied holding you. You wonder if he even knows he’s biting you. Or how hard he’s biting you. His breath is hot against your skin. So are his tears, and you stand there, not flinching, letting your best friend take what he needs from you. He let you hug him the last time you saw each other, when you were upset over something as small as meeting his master. Over something this big, he can have this as long as he wants.

When you cry, your tears usually stop quickly. It’s a skill you developed on purpose. But Tenko’s take a while to trail off, and it’s a little while after that before his mouth lifts away from your skin. He doesn’t mention the bite, and neither do you. He keeps holding you close. “What were you doing tonight, again?”

“Forget about that,” you say. “It’s not important.”

“Say it again.” Tenko’s hand drifts from your hip halfway under your shirt, three fingers resting against your stomach and his index finger raised. “Please.”

You try to think. “Um, I said you had one more face than your master has –”

This time Tenko snorts. “After that.”

“I said you’d say All Might won, and I’d say he didn’t, because he leveled Kamino Ward,” you continue, “and I spent all night trying to save the people who were inside those buildings –”

“That’s it!” Tenko stiffens. One hand grabs your wrist and pulls you around to face him, and you see wild excitement in his face. “You didn’t blame me for those people getting hurt. You didn’t blame my master. You blamed All Might. My plan – turning people against heroes – what you said about making them choose wrong – it worked!”

“It worked,” you say, bewildered. “Ten, I’m not exactly the common denominator here. Everybody else –”

“The ones who worship the ground heroes walk on – they were always a lost cause,” Tenko says. You won’t argue with that. People like your parents and siblings will never listen. They won’t even try. “It’s people this system hurts who will see what I’m doing. People like you. You –”

He breaks off, looking at you, grinning with tear tracks down his face. You remember this look, too. Except when you were five years old, you never saw it in the split second before he kissed you. His mouth fits against yours, messy and enthusiastic with blood on his lips, blood that could be his – or yours, depending on whether his bite broke the skin. Tenko pushes you back against the wall and keeps kissing you, only breaking away for air when he has to. You wrap your arms around him, since he can’t touch you safely, and try to deliver a reality check. “Tenko, I’ve known you forever. If I understand you –”

“Then I don’t need anybody else to,” Tenko says. “Everyone else can get behind us or get out of my way.”

He kisses you again, but before you can really get into it, Magne calls out from the living room. “Are you two done fucking yet? Spinner’s got the hiccups.”

Tenko’s face turns bright red. He scrambles to pick up the hand, and you head down the hall ahead of him. “If we were fucking, it would take a lot longer than that,” you say, and Magne lets out a low whistle. You turn to Spinner. “Sorry about the hiccups, but we can use those. Stand up, over here. And hold your arms out like this –”

Spinner does it, grimacing. You observe the timing of the hiccups for a few more minutes, then step in and apply the necessary force, popping the rib back into place. Spinner lets out a small yelp that would be more problematic if any of your neighbors were around, then lowers his arms. “Is it done?”

“It’s back in place. Feel better?”

“Yeah,” Spinner says. Then he hiccups. “Fuck it. No.”

“We can fix that, too,” you say. “Follow me.”

Tomura comes back while you’re feeding a spoonful of sugar to Spinner, instructing him to hold it under his tongue until it dissolves. He fixates on the two of you. “What are you doing?”

“Curing the hiccups.” You direct Spinner to sit down, then focus on Tomura. “What else do you need?”

“Food,” Toga says, to general assent. “Do you have food?”

“Not enough for this many people,” you say. “But we can order in.”

Five pizzas at nine in the morning isn’t the weirdest delivery order you’ve ever placed, and it’s also not the most expensive. You have a coupon, and the members of the League of Villains are surprisingly willing to pitch in – although Twice and Compress try to give you counterfeit at first. Tomura calls them on it, and they pay up in real money, after which Compress gives you a quick and unexpected lesson in how to spot counterfeit currency.

“Obviously, none of that holds if it’s a copy of Twice’s,” he says at the conclusion of the explanation, “but it’s much easier to tell with Twice’s currency. Observe –”

He drags a nail across one of the coins Twice gave you, at which point it collapses into sludge on your kitchen table. “That’s the problem with Twice’s stuff,” Toga says. “It doesn’t hold together long.”

“It looks great while it does,” Twice protests. Then: “I’m a failure!”

Toga and Magne both console him, which is weird to watch. Weirdly supportive. You didn’t think villains were supportive of each other – but why wouldn’t they be? Villains are people, just like anybody else. They have enemies. It makes sense that they’d have friends, too.

Kurogiri’s return from the doctor is poorly timed – it happens right as the pizzas arrive, and it takes every ounce of people skills you possess to prevent the delivery driver from carrying the pizzas inside for you. Kurogiri goes immediately to check in with Tomura, while everyone else tears into the pizza like they’re starving. It’s all you can do to retrieve a piece or two for Tomura. You’ve sort of lost your appetite. The last time you remember having one was last night, before everything went to hell.

You come back to Tomura and Kurogiri in the kitchen. They’re strategizing, and Tomura takes the plate from you with one hand and pulls you into the conversation with the other. “This can’t be our base,” he says to Kurogiri. “It’s too much of a risk for all of us, her included.”

“What if it were to act as something of a way station?” Kurogiri suggests. “It will likely be some time before we can establish a base with some of the creature comforts we are used to. Perhaps if we were to come here for things like showers, or laundry –”

“I don’t want them alone with her.”

“I’m not here for most of the day,” you say. “I’m at work, or running errands, or with my friends. As long as you aren’t seen and you don’t run my water bill through the roof or eat all my food – or steal my stuff – it’s fine with me.”

“Having access to a place like this would improve morale,” Kurogiri continues. His eyes tilt towards Tomura. “It would also give you an excuse to visit that no one would question.”

“I don’t need an excuse to visit. I can do what I want,” Tomura says. It’s quiet for a second. “Fine. If you’re okay with it –”

“I’m okay with it.” Your phone buzzes and you check it, hoping it’s Sho or Hirono, but it’s neither – just work, telling you that you’re not on until tomorrow morning, instead of tonight like you were supposed to be. “How long do you think you’ll be staying this time?”

“Until dark,” Tomura says. “We have to lay low for a little while. Then we’ll move.”

“I would recommend getting some rest,” Kurogiri says. “After eating that.”

“I don’t need to rest.” Tomura picks up the pizza and takes a messy bite.

On your first date, such as it was, Tomura said that villains argue like kids do. Based on what happens after the pizza’s consumed, they fall asleep after they’ve eaten like kids do, too. They hold off sleep long enough to fight over sleeping positions, but none of them go after your bed, and when Tomura starts yawning, you take the empty plate out of his hands. “My room’s darker. It’ll be easier to sleep there.”

You feel yourself relax the instant you shut your bedroom door behind the two of you. The other villains might be friendly to you, but you only trust Tenko, and to a lesser extent, Kurogiri. Tenko, paradoxically, tenses up. “I don’t need a bed. I sleep standing up.”

“Standing up?” you repeat, baffled. “How?”

“So I don’t destroy it. Once I touch something with all five fingers, it’s gone.” Tenko looks at the bed, almost longingly. “And I don’t have gloves.”

“I’ve got some,” you say. Tenko looks at you, surprised. “I took yours with me when I left last time.”

They’re folded on your dresser. You bring them over, and Tenko pulls them on, a moment before he knocks you backwards onto the bed. You give him a few seconds, then put your forearm against his chest to push him back. “Whatever we’re doing, I’m not doing it in bloody clothes. Let me get changed.”

“Fine,” Tenko complains, and shifts slowly to one side to let you up. At least he doesn’t ask you if he can help.

If you were alone, you’d shower, but you don’t want to risk being that vulnerable with an apartment full of villains. You change into your regular pajamas, the kind you’d wear if you were sleeping by yourself instead of in the same bed as your best friend, who’s a guy, who’s into you. You’re pretty sure Tenko’s not going to try for sex tonight. Not with his level of experience. And not after the day and night he’s had.

When you step out of the bathroom, changed for bed, Tenko’s sitting cross-legged on your bed, pretty clearly lost in thought. The hand is resting on your nightstand. “Hey,” you say, and he looks up.

He looks you over slowly, color coming up in his cheeks with every second that ticks past. Your pajamas aren’t particularly revealing, so you’re not sure what he’s getting excited about – but then his eyes fasten onto something and his gaze sharpens. “What the hell is that?”

You look blankly at him. “On your neck. It’s –” Tenko realizes what it is in the same moment as you realize what he’s looking at. “Fuck. Why didn’t you say something?”

“You were trying to stay quiet. I wanted to help.” You take a step back as Tenko rises from the bed and comes closer. “It’s not a big deal. It just looks –”

Tenko’s fingers brush over it and you wince in spite of yourself. “It looks worse than it is.”

Tenko steps past you, headed for the bathroom. The light switches on, and a moment later you hear him rummaging through the cabinet above the sink. “You’re a nurse. You don’t have band-aids in here?”

“The first-aid kit’s under the sink,” you say. Then something occurs to you. “This isn’t a first-aid thing. It’s just a bruise.”

“You’re not looking at it. I am.” Tenko comes back and drops the first-aid kit on the bed next to you. When you reach for it, he shoves your hand away. You reach for it a second time with the same result. “Stop. I did it, so I’m fixing it. Hold still.”

You sit there, bemused, while Tenko fumbles through the first-aid kit, trying to figure out what to use on a bruise that isn’t bleeding. “You could always kiss it better.”

“That’s lame,” Tenko scoffs. Then he leans in and does it anyway, lightly enough that it doesn’t sting. Your face flushes, a flush that only goes down once he’s come back with what feels like half a tube of Neosporin. When he speaks up again, his voice is quieter. “Why did you let me do that?”

“I didn’t let you,” you say. “Was I supposed to punch you or something?”

“Yeah. Or say ‘hey, don’t fucking bite me’. That would work, too.” Tenko sounds more than a little sarcastic, but it fades fast. “I don’t know how to do any of this. Not that out there –”

He gestures towards the door, the hallway, the League. “Or this in here,” he says, gesturing between the two of you. “You’re going to have to show me how. At first. Then I can pick it up as I go.”

“How to do what? Put a band-aid on a bruise?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Tenko says. You figured you probably earned that one, but you’re going to make him say it anyway. “Be – with somebody. Master never – it’s not like I’d ever do what my parents did – or that happy-ending bullshit on TV – I don’t know. And I figure you do, since you’ve got condoms in there.”

You weren’t expecting that. “Are you slut-shaming me?”

“What? No.” Tenko gives you a weird look. “There were, like, two missing. And they’re basically expired.”

“You counted?” You look at Tenko, and he snaps at you to face front again, his face turning red. “Don’t do things like that. It’s weird.”

“Look at that. You already taught me something.”

You’re tempted to retort that Tenko shouldn’t need to be taught not to snoop through your bathroom cabinet, but then you remember that Tenko wasn’t raised like you or anybody else you know. Tenko was raised by villains, and proper socialization doesn’t appear to have been a priority. It hasn’t taught him much about first aid, either. He’s peeling open the biggest band-aid in the kit, touching all kinds of stuff he shouldn’t be touching, before lowering it gingerly down over the bruise. “You’re already good at this part,” you tell him.

“What part is this?”

“Aftercare.”

Tenko’s heard the term before. You can tell by the way his ears turn red. He presses down the bandage at the edges, then sits back. “Next time, tell me not to bite you.”

“See? You can teach me stuff, too.”

Getting into bed is weird. Sure, you both made jokes about sleepovers the last time you saw each other, but this time there’s a bed – and thanks to Tenko’s snooping, you’re both well aware that there’s a mostly-full box of condoms somewhere in the offing. You get under the covers, and after a moment Tenko copies you, fully dressed. He doesn’t stay there too long. “This is too warm.”

“You can sleep outside the blankets. Or take something off.”

The rustling tells you that Tenko’s opted for door number two, most likely with his shirt. “Now what?”

“We sleep,” you say. You decide to save cuddling as a concept for another time. You close your eyes and within seconds, you’re asleep.

You wake up to your phone buzzing on your nightstand, and Tenko tossing and turning in a restless sleep on the far side of the bed. When you flip your phone over you see notifications from the group chat. A whole pileup of them. Hirono and Sho must have finally checked in. You unlock your phone to respond and your heart goes still in your chest.

Kazuo: They didn’t make it.

Kazuo: Sho’s building came down. He died instantly.

Mitsuko: fuck you

Mitsuko: if you don’t quit fucking around

Kazuo: Hirono was trapped in the wreckage. Once she was extricated, she was sent to Yokohama General and died there ninety-eight minutes ago.

Mitsuru: and you’re just telling us now???? what the fuck

Kazuo: We had to notify their families first.

Yoshimi: we’re their family

Yoshimi: what are we going to do

Ryuhei: Sho’s family treated him like SHIT, why do they get to know before we do??

Ryuhei: what the fuck

This isn’t on Kazuo. Whoever else it’s on, it’s not on him, so you wade in, your vocal cords tied in a knot. It’s a good thing this isn’t happening in person. Your friends already saw you cry once this year, and they need someone to be calm. I know Kazuo let us know as soon as he could. And Ryuhei, you’re right – we love them more.

*loved.

You look at Mitsuko’s addition, feeling sick to your stomach. Love. It doesn’t go away. It never goes away. If anyone knows that, you do. We should be together right now. Kazuo, are you okay to host tonight?

Kazuo doesn’t send anything more than a thumbs-up, which is how you know that whatever feelings he has left are hurt by how everyone’s treating him. What’s he been doing all night? Using his quirk. Identifying victims. You’re overcome suddenly with the need to see him, to give him one of those hugs he always stands awkwardly in but never pulls away from. He’s your friend, too. Your friend who’s never hurt you or dragged you into the middle of his disastrous crusade against society. A crusade that just got two of your other friends killed.

Your breath hitches in your throat, and beside you, Tenko stirs, sits up. “What?” he asks, but you don’t answer. Can’t answer. You’re too busy jamming your fist in your mouth, a move you didn’t realize you learned from Tenko until right this second. “Who are you talking to?”

Notificaitons come up – your friends, setting a time to go to Kazuo’s – and you power off your phone and shove it away. You’ll get there early. You need to talk to him first, tell him that you get it as much as anyone can, that you’re sorry he was forced into this position, sorry he was the one who had to say it. Sorry because this is your fault. If you’d told UA ahead of time what was happening, then the student wouldn’t have been kidnapped. Then there would have been no fight in Kamino Ward that led to hundreds, maybe thousands of casualties. If you had just –

“What is it?” Tenko shakes your shoulder. “Hey. Take that out of your mouth and talk to me. What –”

You pry your fist from between your teeth. “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you not to say anything.” You can’t sit through his justifications, his arguments for why it’s All Might’s fault, when all you care about is your friends and what happened to them. If they knew what was happening. If they were scared. “Two of my friends died in Kamino Ward tonight. I just found out.”

“I –”

“Don’t say anything,” you say. “Just –”

You turn to face Tenko, wrapping your arms around him, burying your face in his shoulder. The two of you have been through the hugging procedure enough times now that he knows what to do in response. He hugs you back, hauls you closer. His skin smells like sweat and smoke, but yours smells like blood, and you know already that you’ll be tearing the sheets off the bed, throwing them away, getting rid of the evidence. But it doesn’t matter how much evidence you get rid of. You can’t hide the truth: This happened tonight because of what Tenko did, and what you didn’t do.

You made this bed, you and Tenko. At least you get to lie in it together.