meme

21

[000l]

[shrewreadings]

like to charge, reblog to cast.

[skeletons-can-draw-too]

The only ai I’ll accept as crazy or possessive

[scary-grace]

11. YOU CAN’T RUN FROM ME FOREVER (scarier prompts) if you are open to it for Shigaraki Tomura

Hi there, anon! When you sent this prompt, it lit my brain on fire, and produced a fic that's cleared 50k words -- and a fic that's much darker than what I usually write. Your call on whether it counts as scary or not. If you hate it, send me another ask with any kind of prompt, and I'll rewrite the fic for you!

Savior - a Shigaraki x f!reader fic

When you broke up with Shigaraki Tomura at the end of high school, you never expected him to stalk you for years, and when you and Chisaki Kai got married, you thought you'd finally broken free. But life with Kai turns quickly from a dream into a waking nightmare, and with every month that passes, you can feel your chances to escape dwindling. Almost out of time, with no good choices left, you turn to the one person who swore he'd never give up on you -- and hope he's less interested in stalking you than he is in saving your life.

AU - no quirks. Past (and future) Tomura x reader, present Overhaul x reader. Dead Dove Do Not Eat. Depictions of dubcon, domestic violence, and reproductive coercion (Overhaul). References to past stalking behavior (Tomura). Angst. Hurt/no comfort for the majority of the fic. If you find any of the above too triggering to read about, please go check out some of the other fics in the fandom! there are lots of them waiting to be discovered and loved. beta read by @threadbearsweater (thank you so much!!). dividers by @cafekitsune

Chapter 1

Before you got married, going out with Shigaraki Tomura was the worst mistake you’d ever made. Sometimes you try to reassure yourself that you were in high school, that high school is where people are allowed to make mistakes. But most people’s high school mistakes are little things – a bad outfit, a bad haircut, a bad grade, a speeding ticket or a broken curfew. Things parents yell over, and ground you over, too. They’re not the kind of mistake that follows you for the rest of your life. Short of getting pregnant and dropping out of school, dating Shigaraki Tomura was the biggest mistake it was possible for you to make.

He didn’t look it. They never do. He was quiet and kept to himself for the most part. The friends he did have were delinquents to a fault, who picked on most people but never on you. Nobody picked on you. You found out later that it was because of him, but not because he told you. Looking out for you wasn’t something Tomura expected you to be grateful for. It was just something he did.

And Tomura wasn’t bad, exactly. He was a perfectly typical high school boyfriend, the quiet almost-loner that girls like you think needs fixing, the kind of boy girls like you leave in the dust when you realize they won’t change. You stuck it out a lot longer than most, because you liked being with him and he treated you well – so well that your friends were jealous, even friends who’d never date him in a million years. But the two of you were never going to work long-term, so you broke it off the night before you moved away for university. It broke your heart more than you thought it would, but you told yourself it was the right thing to do.

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t, because instead of accepting it and moving on, Tomura followed you. He followed you for the next seven years.

He never threatened you or did anything to make you legitimately scared, but that also meant that he never did anything you could point to when you called the police. No angry emails or notes. No forced entry – the cops always assumed you forgot to lock the door or shut the window, no matter how many pictures you took of the door or window after you locked it. No stolen valuables, but when something turned up missing, you always knew who had it. You knew Tomura would give it back, whatever it was, if you asked – but then you’d have had to ask him, which meant talking to him. Stonewalling was the best you could do, even if it didn’t work. At least he wasn’t stealing your underwear.

You tried to hold it together, but by your third year at university, you were a wreck. Your grades crashed and kept falling, and you couldn’t tell anyone. All you could do was keep it together and hope no one noticed. Eventually, someone did.

You met the man you married in the tutoring center your senior year, when you were trying to salvage a chemistry class you’d failed as a sophomore and were in the process of failing again. Kai was a grad student, tutoring because someone made him, and he was better at it than everyone else combined. One night you were there late, almost to closing time. It was dark out, and even though Tomura had never threatened or hurt you, the idea of being followed through the darkness by something you couldn’t see terrified you. You panicked. Kai saw.

What is it? he asked in that dry, calm voice he always used to explain things you couldn’t grasp. Are you afraid of the dark?

No, you said. It’s just –

What?

You wouldn’t believe me, you said. Kai didn’t put up with excuses. You knew that already. It’s fine. You should go.

You were both standing up, backpacks slung over your shoulders. Kai sat back down. Try me.

You explained everything. It spilled out in a stammered wash of tears, your chest tightening until you could barely speak, and all the while Kai sat across from you, perfectly calm. He was going to tell you that you were crazy. You wanted him to. You wanted him to say you were out of your mind, that nobody would stalk you of all people for going on four years straight, and you’d use his reassurance that you were crazy to be scared to force yourself to walk home in the dark.

Kai, who never touched anyone, reached across the table. You thought he was going to put his hand on your shoulder. Instead he cupped your cheek, smudging away your tears with his thumb. His behavior is ridiculous, but I can’t fault the impulse, he said. I’d have a hard time letting go of you, too.

A warning bell rang distantly in your head, but the relief of being listened to, being believed, drowned everything else out. I’ll walk you home, Kai continued. He took his hand back. You don’t need to be scared of him as long as you’re with me.

And Kai was right, because Kai is always right, because the laws of the universe would bend and break before they’d do anything but prove him correct. You don’t need to be scared of Tomura any longer. Now, almost four years after you married Kai in the culmination of a whirlwind romance, you know that there are worse things than Tomura – and you married the worst thing of all.

Your cheek stings, and you keep your face pressed against the cool tile floor of the bathroom, knowing better than to try to rise. Kai looms over you, expression perfectly calm, barely a spark behind his eyes. “Go on,” he invites you. “Make another excuse.”

You shake your head, and he kicks you – not in the stomach, but hard against your hip. It’s one of his usual targets, and there’s a bruise still healing there from the last time you let him down. You whimper in pain. “Tell me how it isn’t your fault,” Kai continues as you cringe away from him. “I’ve been to the doctor. There’s nothing wrong with me. Are you really going to sit there and tell me it’s my fault you aren’t pregnant?”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” you whisper. Kai kicks you harder this time, and you slam both hands down over your mouth so you won’t cry out. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

Apologies are worth nothing when Kai’s like this. It doesn’t matter to him whether you apologize or not. He’ll stop when he thinks he’s made his point, and not before. The words sneak out of your mouth anyway. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry –”

“I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry.” Kai seizes your arm and the collar of your pajama shirt and hauls you upright, putting you face to face. “I want to hear what you’ll do to fix it.”

“I’ll exercise more, like the doctor said. And take the vitamins. I won’t forget.” Your voice rattles. “I’ll keep track of my cycle like I’m supposed to. I can fix it. Please let me fix it. I know I can.”

He studies you. You stare hopelessly in his eyes, searching for something, anything you recognize as human. But there’s nothing. Kai’s amber eyes are flat and pitiless, like always. “Good,” he says. He drops you abruptly, and you fall back to the floor. “Get dressed. I’ll drive you to work.”

Kai likes to drive you to work. He says it’s important for the two of you to spend time together. Maybe he thinks that’s true, but you only know the effect it has – it means you don’t have a car at work, that you’re dependent on him to get home, that you don’t have even a spare second to think or regroup. You have to do it under his watchful eyes, which is how you do everything. You can’t even put your makeup on to cover the red handprint on your cheek without getting feedback. “Do the other side, too,” Kai instructs. “It’s uneven.”

You do, your hands shaking. You make the mistake of glancing down at the negative pregnancy test still sitting on the counter and spill setting powder into the sink. “Next time, use the spray,” Kai says. “Hurry. You don’t want to be late.”

No, you can’t be late. If you’re late, Kai will be late, and you’ll pay for it – later, when you’re not expecting it, when you’ve made the mistake of thinking he’s let it go. You get dressed the rest of the way, pick up the workbag you packed last night, and hurry to the door. Or try to. Kai’s hand comes down on your shoulder with a bruising grip. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Your head swims with terror, and worse when you feel his hands wrap around your neck. But he’s not choking you – just putting a necklace on you, one he bought for you on your birthday a few weeks ago. “Make sure your idiot coworker sees that. I’m tired of hearing about how she thinks I don’t treat you well.”

Your coworker doesn’t mean any harm. She’s just joking, because you and she are friends, because she assumes your husband is the rational, normal man he appears to be instead of someone who took a joke about your work wife stealing you from him way too literally. You nod, and you force the words out of your mouth, the ones you know he’s waiting for. “It’s beautiful,” you say. “No one’s ever treated me like you do.”

You turn back to face Kai and see him nodding, satisfied. No matter how many times you say those words to him, he never hears what you really mean. He thinks about himself in comparison to Tomura, your loser of a high school boyfriend who could never get a job like Kai’s job, never make the kind of money Kai makes, buy the kind of gifts Kai can buy. You think about Kai in comparison to Tomura, too. Tomura stalked you for years. Kai might kill you one day. There’s no comparison at all.

The drive to work isn’t quiet like it usually is, because Kai always goes back to asking human for a little while after he beats you. You’re familiar with the cycle. He never apologizes, never pretends it won’t happen again, but he acts the way he used to when the two of you were dating. You both know it’s fake, but sometimes it amuses him to play the part of a good husband in private as well as public. You might as well go along while it lasts.

“I’ve been asked to represent the company at a conference in Dubai next month,” he says, and you smile at him. Your cheek hurts. “I’ll take you with me. Where else should we visit while we’re in the region – Istanbul, or Cairo?”

You’ve dreamed about visiting both of them. You’re also convinced that they’d be great places for Kai to kill you, dump your body, and blame it on the locals. But you know he won’t do that. There’s a specific image Kai is cultivating, and until that image requires him to be a widower, he needs you. “Istanbul,” you say.

“Hmm. I favor Cairo,” Kai says, and you freeze in your seat. It’s either freeze or flinch, and Kai hates flinching more. “Why not both? We might as well travel now. It’ll be more difficult after the baby is born.”

“You don’t want our baby to be a world traveler?” You keep your voice light, playful. “Think how far ahead they’d be by the time they went to school.”

“Only an idiot would expose an infant to the kind of pathogens present on an airplane,” Kai says. “Neither of us are idiots. We’ll have plenty of time to travel once our child receives a full course of vaccines.”

“Of course,” you say. “I shouldn’t have forgotten. I just got too excited about it. Us traveling as a family.”

“Yes,” Kai says. His hand leaves the steering wheel to settle on your thigh, and you force your muscles to relax. “This month was a setback, nothing more. Next month we’ll succeed.”

He’s let it go for now, at least. You allow the relief to carry you the rest of the way to work.

Kai’s been playing the good husband since you got in the car, but once he reaches your office building, he kicks the performance into overdrive. He parks the car in a no-parking zone, comes around to your side, and opens the door for you, hand extended to help you out. It looks like a grand gesture, but you know why he’s doing it – if he kicked you too hard, it’ll show when you step up onto the curb. Sure enough, you stumble, and Kai steadies you, setting you back on your feet. “Careful,” he admonishes. “The nurses at the urgent care are busy enough without adding you to their list of patients.”

“I’ll be careful,” you promise. You’re conscious of eyes on you – so many eyes, always. As the heir apparent to the biggest pharmaceutical company in the region, Kai’s a local celebrity. His comings and goings are always an event, and you know your role by heart. “Do I get a kiss goodbye?”

“It’s appalling that you think you need to ask.” Kai cups your cheek with hideous gentleness and kisses you in full view of everyone in your office who’s standing by a window, like he’s a soldier going off to war trying to give you something to remember him by. As if you needed anything else. “I’ll be back at five pm, precisely.”

He lets you go, and you head to work, turning back just once to wave at him. He’s still there. You know from experience that he won’t leave until you enter the building.

Once you’re inside, you duck into your cubicle and sit down as quickly as possible. The fewer people see what your walk looks like right now, the better. Emi, your work wife, flops down on your desk. “Saw you and your hubby making out,” she says, and pops a bubble of gum. “You guys are gross. When Shouta finally realizes I’m the one for him, it’s payback time.”

Emi’s had a crush on Aizawa Shouta from the security division for as long as you’ve known her. Most of the people in the office think she’s insane for liking him, given how scary he is, but you’re on her side. You know what scary looks like. You know that Aizawa, who’s gruff and grumpy but never cruel, isn’t it. “How’s it going with Shouta? Any progress?”

“Little bit. He lets me eat lunch with him now instead of walking away.” Emi sighs dreamily. “We’re going to have five kids. I’ve already picked out their names.”

“Five is a lot. You’re going to have to grow an extra arm.”

Emi laughs. “What about you? Have you and Kai had the talk?”

“About kids?” Your cheek stings. Your computer pings and gives you an excuse to look away. “Not yet.”

Windchimes sound over the loudspeaker, signifying the official opening of business, and Emi blows a kiss to you before ducking back into her own cubicle. As soon as she’s gone, you turn to the locked door in your desk and open it to check on your supplies. You’re almost out. You have a little over a month to figure out how to get more.

Kai thinks he has you under control, and for the most part he’s right, shamefully so. But since you went off birth control, since the two of you started trying for a baby, you’ve been keeping a stash of Plan B at work. Every time you and Kai have sex, you take one within three days.

When Kai brought up trying for a baby, you knew instantly what it meant. If you have Kai’s baby, you’ll guarantee that he won’t kill you, but you’ll wish he would, because you’ll lose every scrap of freedom you’ve managed to cling to. You’ll have to quit your job, which you’ve only kept this long because it suits him to project the image of the young power couple, both decidedly going somewhere in life. The baby will be the only excuse he’ll ever need to keep you tied to the house, to him. And if threatening you ever stops being enough to keep you in line, he’ll have someone else to threaten instead.

You’re terrified that it’ll work, and at the same time, you’re scared it won’t work at all. The bottom line is that you can’t have a baby with Kai. You’ve been sneaking morning-after pills for months now, well aware that you’re running out of time. At some point Kai will get suspicious. At some point he’ll suggest fertility drugs, artificial insemination, IVF, and then you’ll have only three ways out, none of them good. Kill Kai. Try to leave him, which means he’ll kill you. Or kill yourself, make it stick this time, and be done with all of it for good.

There’s one more thing in your locked drawer, other than the Plan B. Something that was waiting for you at work, when you got back after your suicide attempt three years ago, in a plain envelope with your name written in handwriting that triggers only a faint shadow of the anxiety it used to. Tomura didn’t send a letter. Just a picture of the two of you hanging out in Toga’s backyard, with a message scrawled on the back. You can’t run from me forever. I know you don’t want to. I’ll wait.

It’s the last message you ever got from Tomura. If he’s stalked you since, he’s left no trace. And on days like today, when you’re hiding bruises and battling a headache and sick to your stomach with terror, you almost wish he would. At least then someone would see what was happening to you. At least then you’d feel a little less alone.

You knew Kai was being too nice about the Dubai thing, but it’s not until you’re packing for the trip that you understand the full scope of the disaster. The trip lasts for seven days – three in Dubai for the conference, two in Cairo, two in Istanbul. It maps almost exactly onto the point in your cycle when you’re ovulating. And neither Plan B nor any other form of emergency contraception is going to be easy to get while you’re abroad. You spend the night before the trip in a panic, then the morning of the trip talking yourself down. When Kai notices that you’re anxious, you tell him you’re just worried about the flight.

“What about it?” he asks. “The airline has an excellent safety rating.”

“They all do until something happens.” It’s easy for you to summon up tears. “It’s just – things are going so well, and whenever that happens it means something’s going to go wrong –”

You remember sharing the same set of worries with Tomura one time, except it was about something silly – your lines in the school play, or maybe a presentation you had to do. You remember how he shrugged. Yeah, it might go wrong, he said, and you protested, indignant. I still love you, though.

“Nothing will go wrong,” Kai says, perfectly calm. “Everything will go as planned. And if it doesn’t –”

He doesn’t need to finish that sentence. You know exactly who he’ll blame.

Everything does go as planned – the ride to the airport, the always-fraught stumbling through security, and the settling into the airline’s VIP lounge with two hours to kill. Kai orders drinks. One for him and one for you, which is strange, because he’s been harping on you not to drink since you stopped taking birth control. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. I know for a fact that you aren’t pregnant right now.”

You don’t want to be pregnant, so it shouldn’t sting – but somehow it does. “I guess I should enjoy it while I can,” you say. “Thank you.”

The drink is pretty. It comes in a pretty glass, with a flower garnish, and you take out your phone and snap a picture with it, even though you haven’t had social media to post it on in years. But as the shutter clicks, a idea pops into your head. You set your phone aside, take a sip of the drink, and glance at Kai. “I’m thinking about redownloading Instagram.”

He’s just taken a sip, too. He coughs. “Excuse me?”

“I was talking to my supervisor,” you say. “About promotions. She said that when upper management is looking to hire, they check on candidates’ social media to see what their personality is like. If I want to get promoted –”

“You’ll no longer be able to work once the baby is born.”

“They don’t need to know that. And in the meantime, I should try to make as much money as possible, right?” Your mind is screaming at you to shut up, to walk it back, but you keep talking.  “I wasn’t doing anything strange on my old account. If I post a picture or two every week, it’ll at least look like I’m active.”

“I suppose,” Kai says. He takes another sip of his drink. “My account serves a similar function, after all.”

You’re featured on Kai’s account a lot. Most of his rivals for the top spot have messy personal lives, and Kai’s veneer of domestic bliss gives a leg up. “Still,” Kai continues, “I’m surprised to hear you bring it up. Aren’t you concerned?”

“About?’

“Your ex.” Kai’s eyes narrow slightly. “You took down your social media because of him. Aren’t you worried about attracting his attention?”

“He hasn’t done anything in three years. He’s lost interest by now,” you say. “And even if he hasn’t – you always told me I didn’t need to be afraid of him while I’m with you. I should finally start taking your word for it.”

Kai looks pleased. You reach for your drink, but he lifts it out of your hand and sets it back on the table. Then he takes out your paper boarding passes and fans them out, revealing the first-class stamp along with the destination. “Now take the picture,” he instructs. Oh. You pick up your phone. “If you’re curating your image, always consider what lies in the background. This looks sophisticated. Your first photo looked cheap.”

Sometimes Kai reminds you of Hannibal Lecter. You snap a few photos, then come up with an idea. “Hold your hand out,” you say. He extends it across the table to you, and you take it with your left hand. Kai raises his eyebrows. “So my ring’s in the picture. It’s sophisticated, too.”

“Yes,” Kai agrees. “It also says you’re taken.”

You nod. Your heart is hammering, and you draw your hand away from Kai’s before he can feel your pulse. You redownload Instagram, then give Kai your phone, letting him choose the photo from the several you took and edit it to his satisfaction. He adds the tags, too, but leaves the caption for you.

What do you even caption it? That depends on why you’re posting it, and even you aren’t sure. Finally you tag Kai’s account and type a caption that sounds fun, maybe. Flirty, but it’s okay, because you tagged your husband. And a little bit of something else, something you don’t want to look at head-on. Run away with me.

Kai’s personal phone pings and he consults it. “The caption is rough, but passable for now. You’ll do better next time.”

“Yes,” you promise. Your hands are shaking.

The flight goes well, but that’s not to say there’s no turbulence; a particular patch of unstable air over the Indian Ocean scares everybody except you and Kai out of their seats. Kai’s not easy to rattle, and you’re so rattled from everything else that it doesn’t make much of an impact. Once the air smooths out, the other passengers fall back to sleep quickly. Kai stays awake, and alert. “What is it?” you ask.

“The bathrooms are empty. We should take advantage.”

That makes as much sense to you as anything else. It’s not until you’re up there, opening the door to one, that you figure out what Kai actually meant. As tiny as airport bathrooms are for one, they’re smaller for two, and you have no idea how Kai expects the two of you to have sex in here after he’s yanked you into the one he just opened. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

“Use your imagination.” Kai shuts the door. The click of the lock is unbearably loud.

You don’t have a clue where he got the idea that the two of you should join the Mile-High club in the middle of an eleven-hour flight. Then again, you don’t usually know where Kai gets his ideas for spicing up your sex life. This one feels far enough out of his usual zone to be the result of something he heard or something he read. Kai likes things clean and orderly, and he doesn’t like to be rushed – and he doesn’t like needing too much active participation from you to make something work. You can’t imagine why he thinks fucking you in an airplane bathroom is a good idea. You’ve never been more uncomfortable in your life.

And that’s it, you realize. Your discomfort is what’s getting Kai off here, the fact that you clearly don’t want to do this but are putting up with it anyway, just because he said to. He likes the reminder of your obedience, and you think he probably likes to forget where it comes from. Either way, he’s into it, and you’re as bent as it’s possible to be over the sink while he makes quick work of your clothes. You catch a glimpse of your own face in the mirror, see the resigned, vacant look in your eyes, and squeeze them shut.

Your experience with men is limited. You dated a guy or two in college, but your constant paranoia about Tomura scared them off, and you and Tomura only got farther than third base a handful of times. It was never scripted, always awkward, because you didn’t have a clue what you were doing – and at the same time, it was good. Good because it wasn’t a performance, because you weren’t playing a part, because it wasn’t about anything except feeling how you felt. That was another reason it took you so long to break up with Tomura. When the two of you were together, you felt good.

There’s something twisted and wrong about thinking about the guy who stalked you while the guy who might kill you someday fucks you from behind, but you have to think about something. Kai expects a certain performance from you, given the effort he’s putting into being kinky and spontaneous, and you can’t do it off the top of your head. So you come up with some memory of Tomura, try to pretend you’re there instead of here, while Kai’s thrusts shove you hard enough against the sink to leave bruises on your stomach and hips.

“Look at yourself,” Kai hisses in your ear. His hand brushes against your neck, and even the suggestion of it spurs you to look up. “Look. Who else would do this for you?”

He’s doing it for you? You could almost laugh if you weren’t so sickened by your own reflection. You can make the right faces, mimic the moves he likes with the scant space you have, but you know what Kai really wants from you. Noise. You would almost rather he choked you to death right here than that he forces a single sound out of your mouth. There’s nothing he can make you feel that’s worth it. Not even your memories are enough.

But Kai doesn’t leave things to chance. He sinks his teeth into your shoulder, and you cry out before you can stop yourself. Your husband doesn’t try to stop himself either – he pins you against the sink, fucking you fast and hard until he comes inside you. “No one else would do this for you,” he pants in your ear, as undone as he ever gets. “Don’t forget that.”

Kai never makes the comparison to anyone but Tomura, because in his head, he’ll always win. And you know he’s right. Tomura wouldn’t have dragged you in here. If the idea had come up, it would have been as a joke. You wouldn’t be in first class, you’d be in economy, and you’d have woken up with the turbulence and gone back to sleep.

Kai pulls out. You’re dully surprised that he manages it, given how little space the two of you are working with. “Clean up,” he orders. “I’ll be waiting.”

Cleaning up takes a while. Kai’s cleaned up, too – when you get back to your seat, the entire row smells like hand sanitizer. He looks you up and down and nods in approval before he lets you into the window seat. Your phone, which you left screen-down on your seat and connected to the plane’s WiFi, is inundated with notifications, almost all of them from Instagram. People from high school, from college, from the life you had before this one, all excited to see you back, most of them asking for a life update. Asking about the ring, about the husband – about the drink, in one case. But once you clear those notifications away, there’s one last banner glowing up at you. From your period tracker, informing you that you’re ovulating as of today.

As the Dubai trip unfolds, it starts to feel like you’re leading three separate lives. One where you’re Kai’s arm candy with a brain, an integral part of his power-couple image. One where you’re putting up with his attempts to get you pregnant at least twice a day and talking about how excited you are for a baby that hasn’t been conceived. And one where you’re a normal person, posting photos of your vacation on Instagram.

You do a lot of scenery posts. A lot of food posts. If there’s a photo of you, Kai’s usually in it. You’ve been getting DMs from old friends, and the comment sections of your photos get a little lively. Your favorite ones are probably the ones where Emi tags Aizawa, who you didn’t realize had an Instagram until now, and demands to know why he never takes her anywhere this nice. Kai sees you smiling while you read one and comes over to investigate. “No wonder she makes so many ridiculous comments about me. Her partner can’t measure up.”

“They’re not actually dating,” you say. “She likes him, and he’s either gay or dumb about it. I think she’s just having fun.”

“Fun,” Kai repeats. He scoffs. “You should set a higher bar for friends.”

You heart-react to Emi’s comment once his back is turned, then go scrolling through y our notifications. There are a few usernames you haven’t seen yet, although you know they’re still active. If none of them interact with you, you’ll know it hasn’t worked.

Kai is busy during the day in Dubai, and you try to make good use of the time. You spent a lot of time trying to hunt for emergency contraception, a lot of time trying to see the things you want to see, and the rest of the time you’re on Instagram, messaging your old friends, queuing photo posts with meticulously crafted captions that call back to inside jokes from your high school days. The captions won’t make sense to Kai. He didn’t know you back then. The person whose attention you’re trying to capture did.

You’re aware of just how insane this is. Tomura vanished out of your life three years ago, and the best thing you can hope for him is that he’s moved on, found something else to do, found someone else to love in a healthier way than he loved you. So what if Tomura left you that picture? He can’t have meant it. He wouldn’t wait for you, not when you married somebody who’s as different from him as it’s possible to be. He wouldn’t wait for you. Who would?

And even if he did wait, even if this does work, what you’re doing is still incredibly far-fetched. Have you really given up on saving yourself so completely that you’re trying to get someone else to do it for you? You don’t think so. You just know that Tomura’s good at watching. Good at picking up details. You want someone to watch what happens to you, no matter what it is, and know the truth.

At night you go out to dinner or drinks with Kai and his colleagues. You know what part to play, almost well enough to put the whole thing on autopilot, and when you’re not answering questions about your career goals or telling someone how proud you are of your husband, your mind is sipping off in a thousand directions, hoping that one holds a way out.

You’ve done your research about domestic violence, and you know your position is better than the position a lot of people find themselves in when they start trying to leave. You have a degree, you have work experience, you have a credit score, and best of all, you have your own money set aside, a quarter of each paycheck going into an account with nobody’s name on it but yours. You and Kai had a fight over that account a couple months after the wedding. You call it a fight because it was the first and last time you held your ground and won, as well as the first and last time he actually knocked you unconscious. It’s the only time either of you ever went that far.

You have money. That puts you in a stronger position. And for right now, for as long as possible, you don’t have a kid. If you want to leave Kai, now’s the time.

It looks possible on paper. In practice it’s not. There are too many moving parts, too many times where things would have to go exactly right, and Kai’s the only person who has that kind of luck. Even if you got clear somehow, Kai could find you. He’d find you through the lawyers when you tried to divorce him, or he’d find you all on his own, and once he did, it would all be over. He’d kill you and get away with it, or worse, he’d find a judge, wave your extensive history of paranoia and your past suicide attempt in front of their face, and get legal guardianship over you in a heartbeat. Leaving Kai won’t work, not unless you leave him without the ability to come after you again. He’s too smart to get caught in the act of abusing you, so you can’t trust the law to protect you from him. That only leaves one option. And that option is unthinkable.

So here you are. You do exactly what Kai wants you to do for the entirety of the Dubai leg of the trip, and he buys you a pair of earrings that cost more than the downpayment on your house. You’re wearing them as you get on the plane to Cairo. He insisted.

Kai has an itinerary in Cairo, like he does everywhere, but because you haven’t messed up yet, he’s made sure everything you want to see is on it. He steers you through the city with an arm around your waist, effortlessly confident in the way that made you fall for him, before you knew what it meant. And he’s more lenient with you than usual, too. If you get tired, if you need to stop for water, if you take one look at a crowded market and panic a little bit, Kai indulges it. It takes you a while to figure out why. He’s been giving a hundred and ten percent at the task of knocking you up. Too much stress and it might not stick.

His indulgence continues through Istanbul, and because you go above and beyond to please him, you’re able to convince him to take the picture. Just one picture, of just you, inside the Blue Mosque, the place you were most excited to see. Kai gives instructions like he’s directing a photo shoot, about where you should stand and how you should angle your face to best catch the light, and instead of getting one picture, you get three. One where you’re smiling. One where you’re looking up in awe. And one where you’re glancing back over your shoulder, the neckline of your shirt pulled aside, the faint shadow of the bite mark visible beneath it.

Kai doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. He wants to post the pictures on his instagram, but you talk him out of it, compromising by giving him photographer credit in a caption Emi promptly calls out as “simping”. You embed the photo in the middle of a three-photo post before you leave the hotel, and you don’t check the notifications until the plane back to Tokyo has reached cruising altitude. The instant you do, your heart stops in your chest.

You’ve been waiting, hoping, but nothing prepares you for what it feels like to see it at last. togachan817 has liked this.

Himiko’s had that same handle since high school, and you never blocked her, not even when you realized she was feeding information about you to Tomura. You’d thought the two of you were friends, and you’d been too hurt to do anything but deactivate your account. And you’re glad you never blocked her. Now she’s seen your post. You know she’ll tell Tomura. And now it’s out of your hands.

Which of the photos did she like? You tap the notification, and the center photo appears. The one where you aren’t smiling. The one with the bite.