Fumikage Tokoyami: Life After UA
*We are fresh out of the chaos of the night prior when a sparring event had gone terribly wrong between Tokoyami and Carmilla. In this chapter we get a unique moment to hear from Dark Shadow, without Tokoyami’s direct involvement in the scene. It is not often the sapient has the chance to speak freely**
Empty beer cans clacked to the floor as Hawks’ hand smacked around on his coffee table, hunting for his phone. It had gone off several times in the span of what he guessed to be 30 minutes, but laziness and his stupor had prevented him from opening it, hoping it would self-resolve. He finally leaned off of the couch, pushing a half-eaten box Chinese food out of the way, grabbing his phone. Damn, he thought to himself, seeing 17 missed calls and messages on the home screen.
“Kiego here, what do you need?”
“Hawks, you gotta get down to headquarters.” It was the shaky voice of one of his admins. “We’re in medical with Tokoyami and that new bat partner of his. We are not sure what happened but they are both so banged up, we had to have them go straight to medical for surgery. Edge Shot has them on the table now.”
Hawks swam with hangovers and confusion, scrambling to his feet, looking for his pants, “Yea, ok. I am on my way”
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Both Tokoyami and Carmilla were on the operating room table, sedated under anesthesia, covered from the chest down with surgical sheet. They were positioned on the same long table, laying on their backs, with the tops of their heads almost touching, feet at opposite ends. Edge Shot, formally the Ninja Hero, now turned Public Agency Field Surgeon, was in the middle of them. He stood in upright, in red scrubs, hands by his side, with multiple tubing and threads reaching out as extensions of his neck, arms, and chest skin, with pin point needle heads, each under his perfect control. They were inserting, exploring, repairing and restitching any of the multiple wounds both patients had. Two separate needle holders, attached to tubing had cocktails of Propofol and Ketamine drawn up, dispersing them into the veins of Tokoyami and Carmilla, maintain thing them at a comfortable, but stable level of sedation.
Edge Shot worked meticulously, as he danced and orchestrated the multiple tentacles, letting his needle heads guide his way by what they saw and found. His eyelids almost fluttering shut at times, as he concentrated on seeing the anatomy through the small viewpoints of his working needles, directing them with his mind and twitching muscles.
Dark Shadow, seemingly unaffected by the sedation milled around the operating room table, tiding up surgical blankets and loose syringes. Edge Shot continued to working, seeing Dark Shadow looking up from time to time, watching him. He noticed two little twirling threads emerging from the sapient, and he realized, observing them spindle and weave through the air, that Shadow was trying to copy the movements of his treads and needles. Edge Shot laced one of them through the bats’ wing, making an interactant, through and through stitch. It was in a loop de loop motion, like a cork screw, and he watched as Dark Shadow followed, preforming the same maneuver on the end of the surgical sheet, in perfect note and symmetry. Edge got to the end of her wing, gathered the thread in his needle head and tied it off in a simple double under loop manner. Dark Shadow followed suit, creating a tight knot within their own purple twines, looking down at the blanket they had knitted themselves into with pride.
“You're very smart” Edge Shot said, arms by his sides, both hands behind his back, one holding the wrist of the other. Dark Shadow stopped their tinkering to look up. It was like a pigeon parked on a sidewalk bench looking to a bystander for bread, they tilted their dragon shaped head in confusion. Edge Shot rose his eyes to meet Shadow, his work from his threads and tubes never stopping, “Is that not, correct?
“I am not sure” Shadow said, floating in the air “No one has ever called me smart before”.
“Oh, is that so, how have they described you?”
“Well Fumi is the main one who describes me, he has called me powerful, loyal, rebellious and impulsive, but he has never called me smart.” Dark Shadow lowered themselves to the counter, tapping an empty glass medication bottle with its purple claws, rolling it side to side, making a game of stopping it before it reached the end of the table.
“Well,” Edge Shot began, “I think you’re smart, just watching you mimic me. Being smart isn’t about automatically knowing everything, it is about the ability to learn new things.”
Shadow, leaned in closer looking at the intricate work, “How did you learn all this?”
“I almost died saving Bakugo in the great battle with similar techniques, but after I healed, I decided to go into surgery, it took me years in residency, to not only learn everything about the human body, but also to train my quirk to obey me like it does currently.”
“Oh” Dark Shadow” interjected, “I know all about the human body, like everything about it. Where everything is at, what is connected to what, how it all works. I spend so much of my time in Tokoyami’s, I imagine they all must be pretty similar”
“You can see in there?” Edge Shot inquired.
“Yes”, Dark Shadow answered, “but not the way you see in here under light, I see with my dark energy, I can feel where everything is, so I don’t need eyes like you all do. It is a reason why I am so comfortable in pitch black”.
“That is quite the talent” Edge complimented. He un grasped his arms form behind his back, and reached over the heroes, moving the sheet down on Carmilla’s shoulder, exposing the very slight rise of her upper breast as he began to repair the inner most part of her wing that anchored into her armpit. Dark Shadow loomed over her, the tips of its beak right over her sternum, its head gleaming over her torso, and they slithered up and down slowly, from her face to her legs.
“You ok over there?” Edge Shot asked.
There was a long pause, finally Shadow answered, “I see why Fumi wants her.” Shadow retook in what he remembered Tokoyami doing the night before, looking at her shape, even under the surgical sheet they could place her silhouette. “She is interesting to look at and I don’t know why”
“It’s because she’s attractive, but she is sedated, so unless you have medical business to attend to you should probably give her some space”. Shadow, not truly understanding the reasoning, still complied with the request, leveeing themselves upward, creating some distance from her. Edge Shot offered still working on the surgical site, “…the reason you like her? Is it because Tokoyami likes her?”
“No”. Dark Shadow hissed sharply, shifting its posture squarely with Edge Shots, “Fumikage may share his emotions with me when he feels desire for someone, but I can like or dislike a person all on my own. And I said she was interesting to look at, I never said I liked her. She’s mean. I am trying to tell Fumi that, but he’s not listening”
Edge Shot rose a hand in a symbol of amity, seeing the frustration rising in Shadow. “I understand, it sounds like things went south fast with you all last night”. He had now finished with her and moved to focusing more on Tokoyami’s beak injury. “Can you hold his mouth open Shadow?
“Sure”, Shadow used two clawed hands to separate the top and lower jaws of his partner, and they could both see the crack and the small hole in his upper palette. “We may have to plate that Edge Shot said, allowing his threads and needles in Tokoyami’s mouth to begin work. They swam around in the tight space, like small fish in a tank going plucking after bits of food; removing any debris and cleaning out the edges of the break. Dark Shadow watched intently.
“He may have trouble speaking for a few days” Edge informed Shadow.
“It’s ok, I don’t need him to physically speak to hear his thoughts or talk to him. He’s talking to me all the time, even when he is in front of the other heroes, but you all never know. We speak inwardly to each other when were in public, so Fumi doesn’t look like he is talking to himself. The only two people he will talk out loud in front of, with me not formed outside of him are Hawks, and a long time ago Tsuyu.”
Edge shot used his human hands, to constitute a putty like substance in a small mixing bowl, to form a paste like bonding agent. “What is that like, constantly connected?” Edge asked, genuinely curious.
“It’s like being trapped in a cage!” Shadow barked, leaning forward, fastening a wide black clawed hand on the surgical table. Holding onto Tokoyami’s beak with the other
“Whoa, easy, don’t shake the table” Shot said. He could tell instantly that Shadow had been thinking intently about this, waiting for someone to ask the question.
“I have to experience everything through Fumi, and Fumi himself doesn’t even want to experience it. I mean, he does, but he won’t let himself because he is too worried about managing me. But when he limits himself, he limits me. We do the same thing every day, the same routines. Crime has dropped so much in the past years, and even this current case, with the medical supply robberies is lame. It’s so boring flying over hospitals, we certainly don’t get to fight like we use to.” Shadows one free hand was now in the air, gesturing as they were talking as if he were human.
“I can lie very dormient for long amounts of time, on the other side, and wait for Fumi to request me. I can almost become invisible to him; we have practiced it so long. But when Fumi has anything novel, anything exciting, I feel his emitter quirk start to rile me up, and then I get reprimanded for responding to his feelings. The other side in the shadow realm is very boring, there are other shadow energy holders, but they are not attached to a human the way I am through Fumi’s emitter quirk. Many of them were humans long ago, but now they are dormient and trapped there. They can’t move in and out of the world like I do. When Fumi was younger, he let me do much more, but as he gets older, he has become more controlling with me.” Shadow was now squirming back and forth, rambling on in the conversation, growing slightly in size and voice.
“I want to do everything, but Fumi won’t let me because I feed off of him. He won’t let himself eat food that is too tasty, be too excited, he won’t date, he won’t do anything because of me. I get constantly restless. I get bored…I GET VERY BORED.” Shadow, felt like a weight was coming off their own shoulders just being able to talk about this, without consequence of Tokoyami trying to stifle them or cut them off.
Edge Shot, listening patiently continued his work, taking a small triangle shaped spatula, and smoothing out the putty base he had form in the roof of Tokoyami’s mouth. It was satisfying for Dark Shadow to watch and without asking Edge Shots permission, he formed the same spatula and entered it into his hosts’ beak. Shot against typical protocol, let his hand drift to the side, allowing Shadow to run the spatula smoothly across the roof of Tokoyami’s mouth, filling the putty into the cracks with precision. Afterall, they did know Tokoyami’s anatomy best. Edge watched as Dark Shadow gently nestled the bird head in his other hand, growing its palm in side to fully support the weight as the shadow figure worked. He could tell the Shadow cared deeply for their master, he could also tell that Shadow was totally taken with the task of repairing the crevasse, completely trapped in a flow state.
After completion, Shadow leaned back and held Tokoyami delicately by the top of his beak, show casing it and looking toward Edge Shot for approval. The platting was completely flushed with the slight curve of the cleft and if not for the color change, you could barely tell where Tokoyami’s palate stopped and the sealant began. “It’s really good” Shot said, impressed “As good as I could have ever done. We will have to keep him under for a few hours to let it cure, tape his tongue down so it doesn’t lean against it and ruin the contour.”
“Do you do this kind of stuff often?” Shadow questioned, still admiring his work.
“All day every day,” Shot laughed, to the question. Shadow looked at him. Edge Shot had aged, tanned skin, starched over a matured male face. Shadow could feel an emotion that they had recognized in Fumi with Hawks. Was it attraction? No. It was admiration. Shadow swelled both inwardly and externally with the compliments and interest Edge Shot had bestowed on them.
“Wow” Shadow looked envyingly, “I bet I’d never get bored with you”.
“Hawks!” Shadow squealed with elation, placing Tokoyamis head softly on the table and extending its self towards him. Shadow swam eagerly along Kiego’s pant legs, like a house cat rubbing against its owner.
“Shadow!” Hawks said reaching down, then looking up and taking in the sight with both Tokoyami and Carmilla on the operating table, Edge Shot turned with his needles and threads prompted in the air and scattered around him. “Shadow, what the hell happened?”
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