Opposites Attract - A Shigaraki X F!Reader Fic

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.

very curious to see these answers so....

Rb for larger sample size

Drool would go all over me and fall from my mouth like waterfall if I would see this man standing in front of me right now

I'd moan and faint from him just existing there. He would send my heart in cardiac arrest from just poking me once and that's a fact.

My ass be saying no men can tell me what to do but if he told me to go down I'd lay on floor flat on my face

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

10 months ago

A new life for Tomura part2

Enough to Go By (Chapter 2) -- 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your voice sounds weird.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I had games to play.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you have to take care of them?”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

9 months ago

I just sped run reading you oc x Shiggy comic and shes so cute- I wanna try my hand at drawing her (if your ok with it ofcourse), and I was wondering if you have any information on her and also if you could tell me what she looks like colored ^^

Omg yes of course ! Well first she' like a huuuge simp ! She's a weeb too tbh ! Get flustered easy but is very very caring ! And even if we don't currently see it 'cause she's in her pijama she have an alt clothing style ! With color well she have red dyed hair and blue eyes, and a pale skin ! I'm so happy you fond her cute and like the story ! I would love to see the resultof your drawing ! Omg i'm so happy you asked ^^ sorry if the description is a bit short my oc is pretyy self insert aaaand yk describing soemone that is similar to you is sometime hard !

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flamme-shigaraki-spithoe

1 year ago

The # i can't 😭😂😂😂😂✋✋✋✋✨✨✨✨🤌🤌🤌