Pre-work thought, dug from the depths of discord (April of LAST YEAR fuck), free to a good home, lord knows if I'm ever gonna write it up eventually blah blah blah
Delusional hook up Ghost. He's a weirdo, and he disappears for weeks and months at a time, but he's a good lay and you're really cool with the arrangement. And one day you ask him to pick up food on the way to your place because you worked late and didn't have time to eat. He does it because why wouldn't he? That same night the condom breaks and you let him come inside a couple times, then ask for the money for the morning after pill and supplies to make the coming symptoms not quite so bad. He hands it over without a fuss.
The problem is that a month later, laying in his bed this time, he interrupts your afterglow with, "'M no good at this. Relationships."
Relationship??? You start wincing your way out of bed to find your clothes. Get dressed with a lot of hmmms and uh huhs and awwws as he tells you that he's in the military, he's got a difficult past, no one taught him to love, all the usual "I want a relationship without the responsibility" crap. He gets up to follow you as you make your way to the front door, like a pitbull at the pound, all muscles and sad eyes.
He's phenomenal in bed, so you don't block his number on the train home. But it's a near thing.
Along the blackwater coast of Romirro, people whisper about the Lemurians—the beautiful strangers said to emerge from the sea wearing human shapes. Legends say they come ashore seeking humans, whether as meal or more, no one knows for certain. What is certain, however, is that they always find the exhausted, the indebted, or the heartbroken first. According to folklore, the Lemurians never drag anyone beneath the waves by force. Instead, they court their chosen for months or years, until the sea begins to feel more inviting than the land ever was.
You think you know what is happening, then, when the most handsome man you've ever seen washes ashore after a storm.
This is your family's hardest year yet, and somehow, despite the unlikeliness of the tide, he's deposited along the shallow pools where you and your sister gather shellfish. Water pools too enticingly in the hollow of his throat, beads along his long lashes, glittering against his pale skin. You do not trust the look of him. But your sister is already halfway in love with him, and cannot bear to leave him behind.
So you take him home, hoping that you are wrong.
You nurse him back from the state the sea left him in, careful not to let your sister go too near. Her fantastical, romantic waxings in the warmth of your hut have you almost believing you were too quick to draw conclusions about him. She is a year younger than you, in ways that feel more like a thousand years sometimes, but the naiveté and idealism of her world view make you want to believe the world can like be that too. You hope she is right, and he is just a beautiful man.
But then he wakes, and you are all too certain he isn't.
His eyes fix too readily on you when he opens them, his attention too immediate and precise. He is too interested in you when he recovers enough to speak—and repeats your name in a way that makes a shiver slink down your spine.
He tells you his name is Rafayel, and he's been shipwrecked. When pressed, however, he cannot name his home port, the name of his ship, or any of his crewmates. The memory of what they were carrying is conveniently lost to the tides. He is too empty of anything except the sea, you think, and you watch him as closely as he watches you.
Your sister is entranced and enthralled with him. You should feel relief that his attention does not linger on her the same way hers lingers on him. But you cannot, with Rafayel inside your home, asking after you instead, your habits, your likes and dislikes. He's come ashore for something, you know, and you do not intend for him to find it in your home.
You watch him carefully, and when he is well enough, you cajole him outside with a request for help gathering shellfish. You lead him back down to the tidepools, a large bucket clutched in hand. You are apprehensive that he will catch on to your plan so you move slowly, try to turn back to him often, tipping your face up to his. You find yourself doing it almost too willingly, reluctant to tear your eyes away from him.
You turn your face up to his again as you make it to the tidepools, and Rafayel steps closer this time. His mouth lingers over yours, his body so close, the promise of something slipping between you. His eyes glint blue like the sea, and you almost forget yourself for a minute as his mouth lowers to yours.
It's half and accident when you overturn your bucket of collected rainwater between you.
But Rafayel's face changes immediately as he takes a shocked step back, and it's then that you know for sure.
Harbor folklore says Lemurians cannot pursue someone across running fresh water. And Rafayel stumbles back, long eyelashes fluttering as he stares at you in stunned disbelief. The tide laps angrily at his heels, suddenly growing discontent, roiling like a pot over the fire.
He says your name, sweet and entreating.
But you turn and leave before your small, freshwater stream can run its course into the sea. You will hang braided eelgrass across your door tonight, and burn peat in the hearth, so that he cannot get in again. You tell him as much as you clamber back up the shoreline to safety, tell him he is wasting his time on you.
But what you do not know is that once a Lemurian falls truly fond of someone, they become dangerously patient. He will wait, like the tide that keeps arriving, until the shore gives way grain by grain, and little by little slides into the waiting sea.
Nikolai who has you trained, well…. A little like a dog.
When he pats his thigh, you come rushing to take a seat.
When his hands are behind his back, that means he has a surprise— and he wants a kiss before he’ll give it to you.
But the one he uses most of all is when he cups his hands, making a V with his palms. That’s where he wants you to put your chin so he can hold your face and give you lots of kisses all over. Mandatory experience every time he goes away for week and every time he comes back.
an isekai romance but you're the comedic relief side character who was born in the book setting and remains in the book setting. you just want to know what the fuck is up with the main character's sudden + complete 180, and you won't rest until you get to the bottom of it.
and you were handling the investigation just fine on your own! until handsome prince shouto—the main love interest—crouches down behind you in the garden hedge and asks you what you're doing.
a shouto x reader coffee shop au except shouto is the barista and he makes the most atrocious coffee known to man but he’s so beautiful he draws in enormous crowds so they put him front of house anyway and you have no other nearby cafes to get your coffee at…
Ever since he was rescued by All Might from All For One, Shimura Tenko's led a charmed life - except that he's a beta, in a society where alphas are privileged, omegas are prioritized, and betas are an afterthought. But when Tenko finds himself investigating a series of designation-swaps that have devastated the lives of the victims, he comes face to face with the terrible truths at the heart of society's placid, inflexible structure, and the enigmatic villain who's bent on exposing it all. The one they call Love's Executioner - otherwise known as, you. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Reminder: this fic is rated E and labeled 'enemies to lovers' on Ao3. Proceed at your own risk. Lots of smut in this chapter.
Chapter 8
Fuck alphas. Forget alphas. This is what Tenko needs — your presence, your scent, your touch. You didn’t come here by accident. You came for Tenko, and the words slip out of his mouth as he crushes himself against you. “Don’t leave —”
“I’m not. I have to get you home.” You say that, but then you try to pull away. “Shimura, I’m sorry. I swear I didn’t —”
“I know.” Tenko knows you didn’t cause his heat. Knows you wouldn’t do that to him again. “If it’s your fault, it comes on fast. This was slow. Don’t leave —”
“I’m not.” You work one arm free of Tenko’s embrace and snap your fingers. A chorus of anguished howls rise up from the sidewalk as the alphas who cornered Tenko tip over the edge into heat. Burying his face in the side of your neck doesn’t block out the scents entirely, but it helps. “Come on. We have to go.”
Tenko wants to get home. Needs it. With you. But some impulse makes him hesitate, makes him turn halfway back to your victims, all of whom are in agony. “You’re going to leave them out here? If any alphas show up —”
“They’ll get exactly what they deserve,” you say. Your voice is cold. “I don’t care what happens to them.”
For the first time since Tenko met you, you sound like a real supervillain. It sends a chill down his spine. He feels sick. He’d feel sicker, except that if he’d fought back, like he would have had to, all four of them would be dead. They’re better off dealing with what you did, and with what they’d have done to Tenko — “Do you care?” you ask, and Tenko shakes his head. “Good. Let’s get you home.”
Knowing you’re here, knowing you’re not leaving, calms Tenko’s nerves ever so slightly. But it doesn’t do shit for his symptoms, and it doesn’t tamp down his pheromones, and halfway home, you lose patience with dragging him along. You pull him into an alley, and for a split second, Tenko thinks you’ll give him what he needs then and there — but instead you reach up with one hand and tap a headset hooked onto your ear. “I need a gate. You know to where.”
Whoever’s on the other end of it — your accomplice — says something in response. “I know what I’m doing. Tell on me if you have to,” you say. “Just give me the gate.”
Tenko sees purple mist drifting through the air, pooling around his feet. There’s something familiar about it, and not just because Tenko saw it in Overhaul’s compound. The ground falls away from beneath the two of you all at once, and you drop through the warp gate to land just inside the door to Tenko’s apartment.
Tenko can barely focus enough to get his feet under him, but once he does, he pushes you back against the door, just like he did the first time you were here. He buries his face in the side of your neck, slides his hands beneath your shirt. He needs you. He needs your scent, all over him, so anyone who so much as breathes near him will know that he’s taken. He’s not up for grabs. He’s with you.
“Shimura,” you say awkwardly. Tenko wishes you’d touch him. “I don’t think I’m the person you need right now.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not,” you say. “This isn’t like before. I could help when you were an alpha, but my body’s not — I can’t give you what you need. You should find an alpha.”
“I don’t want an alpha,” Tenko snaps, or tries to snap. His voice is rattling again, and an awful feeling is welling up inside him, making it hard to breathe or even think. “If you want to leave, just leave. Don’t make up some lie about how I can’t get through it without a knot.”
Are you going to push him away? Tenko feels you shift in his grip, and as much as he wants to Decay his costume and your clothes and drown in your scent, the thought that you want to leave feels like enough to stop his heat in its tracks. Tenko wants you here. He wants you to want to be here, with him, and if you don’t, there’s no point. Tenko tries to step back from you and finds that he can’t. Part of it is that he can’t pull away from your scent. And part of it is your arms coming up around him, keeping him close.
You aren’t leaving. “I’ll stay to help,” you say. “I might not have triggered this heat, but it’s still my fault. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“I know. What are your symptoms?” you ask. Huh? “You’re too far into it for me to switch you back without trouble, but you also aren’t fully in it yet. Depending on how you’re feeling, different things will help.”
“Headache. My body hurts. Everything is too loud or too bright — or the smells —” Tenko’s never been more grateful to be in his own apartment. “Not yours. Yours is good.”
“It’s still weird that you can smell me,” you remark. “What about arousal? Are you feeling any of that?”
“Uh, yeah.” It’s weird. Being close to you is calming Tenko down, but he knows it wouldn’t take much to tip him over into a pathetic horny meltdown. “Why?”
“It’ll get worse,” you say. Your hand shifts across Tenko’s shoulder blades. “You’re really tense. That’s not a surprise given that it started when you were in public and your friends sent you home alone.”
Tenko’s friends. Fuck. “I was supposed to tell them I got home safe.”
“You do that. I’ll start filling the bathtub,” you say. Tenko draws back far enough to give you a weird look. “Warm water helps people relax. All of this will be harder if you go into it scared.”
“I’m not — scared.”
“Most people are,” you say. Tenko blinks, and you wedge yourself out from under his arm. “Text your friends. I’ll be in the bathroom.”
Tenko means to send one text and follow you in, but his groupchat with his friends blows up the instant he sends the message letting them know he’s in heat and he got home. Midoriya has updates about the scene Tenko left. Twice is worried about him. Touya’s sent Tenko literal paragraphs about how to cope with being in heat and which of the sex toys in the box of omega essentials are the best. Toga and Spinner give thumbs-up to Tenko’s texts, and Magne starts listing off alphas she knows who can help out. Tenko doesn’t want an alpha. Tenko sets down his phone and heads back to the bathroom.
The lights are dimmer than usual. He didn’t know the lights did that. The air is warm and full of steam, and you’re sorting through Tenko’s bathroom cabinet. As Tenko watches, you take out a hair clip he never uses and close the door. “What’s that?”
“To put your hair up so it doesn’t get wet,” you say. “Do you want help with your costume?”
“I can do it on my own,” Tenko says. “Don’t look.”
He’s not sure why he doesn’t want you to see it, but the idea of you getting a good look at his new anatomy makes him cringe. He doesn’t even like looking at it on himself. Seeing it through someone else’s eyes sounds like a nightmare. Tenko knows you’ll see it eventually, and he’s fine with that — just not right now. He tells himself that until he can almost believe it.
You don’t look up until Tenko’s already settled into the warm water, a really embarrassing sigh of relief exiting his mouth. “I’ll clip up your hair,” you say. “Hold still.”
Tenko holds still, except for the stupid moan that sneaks out of him when he feels your hands in his hair. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m kind of immune to this stuff. At my old job I had to be.”
“You had a job?” Tenko can’t keep the shock out of his voice. “Doing what?”
“There are stabilization centers for people with irregular heats. A lot of people with irregular heats also start young — like, really young — so it’s safer for them to be in a secure facility.”
Tenko’s stomach lurches. “When you say stabilize them —”
“Nothing sexual,” you say. “Providing a secure environment that’s not overstimulating at all, explaining what’s going on and why, that kind of thing. First heats can be traumatic if they aren’t handled properly. The goal was to handle it properly.”
“And you did that,” Tenko says. It doesn’t square with what he knows about the rest of you — or does it. “Why?”
“I don’t have a designation. Some of the patients are scared of everybody while their heat is happening, and since I don’t have a physiological response to other people’s heats, they felt like they could trust me more.” Your hands slide from Tenko’s hair, and he misses them within seconds. “I’m going to get you some water. It’s easy to dehydrate during a heat.”
You come back with a water bottle, setting it in easy reach, then retreat to the opposite side of the bathroom. Somehow that strikes Tenko as weirder than you having a job. “Get in. Don’t you want to?”
“It’s possible to get through a heat without sexual contact,” you say. “I assumed that’s what you’d want.”
“Why?” Tenko’s used a lot of words to describe you. Clueless hasn’t been one of them until now. “I’m not a kid. Get in here before it gets cold.”
Something crosses his mind. “Unless you don’t want —”
He breaks off in a hurry, averting his eyes. You’ve just taken off your shirt, followed by your bra, and out of the corner of Tenko’s eye, he sees you getting to your feet to take off your pants. “I don’t care if you look,” you say, that odd flatness back in your voice. “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.”
Except there is. Bruises. And you’ve got at least two new scars. “What happened?” Tenko asks, as you sink down in the bathtub at the other end. “Hey. Who did that?”
“It’s my fault,” you say. You draw your knees up to your chest, resting your chin on them. “I made a mistake. Or three.”
“That’s nice. Not what I asked.” Tenko watches as you hunch down even further in the bathtub. “Who did that?”
You don’t answer. “Is Eri okay?”
Tenko wasn’t expecting that. He stares at you, speechless, as you avert your eyes. “I’ve been trying to keep track. Through the news. But they never mention her.”
“Because she’s a kid,” Tenko says, and you nod. “Me and Midoriya have gone to see her a few times. She has some messed-up designation stuff going on. I guess Overhaul kept trying to change hers.”
“He — what?” You look back, make eye contact, and misery flashes across your face. “I didn’t know. I only knew about the bullets. You have to believe me —”
“Nobody thinks it was you,” Tenko says. He was sort of surprised by that. “We have more data on your quirk than we’ve had for any villain, ever, so we know your swaps are complete. People you swap don’t get stuck between designations the way she is.”
“If —” you start, then break off. “She has a designation still. I might be able to swap it to one or the other.”
“I thought designation disorders were something society made up,” Tenko says, and you glare at him. “Sorry. But come on — you’re a supervillain. Why do you care?”
“She’s just a kid,” you say. You look away again. “No kid deserves this.”
For a supervillain, you’re really stuck on kids. Tenko wonders if you mean it. If you could help Eri. How the hell he’d swing that — although with you and your warp-gate friend, maybe all he’d have to do is tell you where she is. “We didn’t tell,” he says. “Me and Midoriya. They think Overhaul was just conducting designation experiments. They don’t know about how he made the bullets.”
Your shoulders slump ever so slightly. “Good.”
It’s quiet for a little while. Tenko’s shoulders are getting cold, so he sinks further into the bathtub, down far enough that his feet brush yours, even though yours are drawn up. The contact’s not a good thing for Tenko. As the last of the tension slides loose from his body, heat floods in to replace it. It’s quiet here. The lights aren’t as bright. He’s not out in the open and stuck in tight, uncomfortable clothes, and the only scents in this room are his and yours. You reach out to touch his knee and it takes way too much of Tenko’s self-control to keep his legs from spreading.
His face is burning up. His breathing shifts, and he knows you can see it. “How do you feel?” you ask. Your hand is still on his knee, fingers spread over his kneecap. “Shimura —
Tenko pulls away, gets to his knees, and across the bathtub, you extend your legs, fucking finally. Tenko crawls across the space between you, ignoring the water that slops out onto the floor, and straddles your lap.
He’s taller than you, especially like this. You have to look up to make eye contact. “I’m not an alpha,” you say.
“You think I’d do this if you were an alpha?” The thought of sitting exposed like this in some alpha’s lap makes Tenko’s insides crumple and twist, even as he discovers that it’s possible to notice slick dripping down his legs even in water. “You said you’d help —”
Your hands rise from the water to grip Tenko’s waist, then down to his hips, where your thumbs skim lightly over their arches. Tenko’s body jerks. You do it again, shifting to sit up in the bargain, and Tenko squirms as your legs brush against his inner thighs. “Stop it. Don’t tease.”
“I’m not.” Your hands glide upwards from Tenko’s hips, one stopping at his waist just below the water and the other continuing upward, outlining every vertebrae along Tenko’s spine. “I didn’t get to touch you last time.”
Tenko hears what you aren’t saying: And I wanted to. He’s pissed that you waited and not, all at the same time — pissed at missing out, too busy crumbling under your careful touch to be pissed at anything at all. When Tenko was in rut, he was rough on you. You aren’t rough on him. You’re gentle, deliberate, and all Tenko can do is stare down at your hands, making their way across his body above water and below it. Watching you touch him shouldn’t do anything for him, but seeing how intent you are on him is enough to make Tenko’s legs tremble. He’s so focused on your right hand, tracing over the curve from his waist to his hip, that he doesn’t notice your left until it’s curled around the back of his neck, guiding him down to you for a kiss.
Tenko’s dreamed about kissing you again. He didn’t dream about it like this, shaking in your lap and stupid with heat, but it’s better this way. He grasps your shoulders for balance, but he slumps down over you anyway, his hips twitching in search of some kind of friction. One of your legs bends beneath him, pressing up against his cock. Tenko grinds against you without hesitating, and it feels good. It feels so good, but it doesn’t help — all it does is intensify the need for more from you. More of you. What are you waiting for?
The words make their way out sideways, through clenched teeth. “Don’t tease —”
“I’m not,” you murmur. “Tell me what you want. I’m not going to act like I know.”
Tenko doesn’t know what to do with that. If you were an alpha he’d be knotted already, but the thought makes him want to slam his legs shut. What is he supposed to want right now, anyway? You tug him closer to you, press your lips against his throat, and Tenko lets his head fall back, exposing more for you. You won’t hurt him. Tenko knows that. And since he knows that —since you said you want to help — “Touch me.”
You don’t give him a hard time about where. The hand on his waist drifts downwards, past his navel and over his hip, until you can brush your thumb lightly against his cock. His clit. Whatever it is. Tenko doesn’t need to know that to know that your barely-there touch is the best thing he’s ever felt in his life. Your lips are against his throat and your hand is between his legs, and for a few seconds, all he can do is sink further into the sensation.
It’s only peaceful for a few seconds. Then the need turns urgent. Tenko’s body tenses, whines forcing their way out of his mouth, his hips jerking as he tries to force more contact with your hand. Your hand slips lower, fingers ghosting over his new anatomy, just shy of his entrance. Tenko spreads his legs wider. In case you didn’t get the message: “There.”
“Here?” Your fingers are closer to where he needs you this time, but you skip past so you can stroke his cock. Tenko’s no stranger to jerking off with his new anatomy, but he’s never gotten this close, this fast. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just —”
“Anything,” Tenko gasps. He needs something. He needs to come or he’s going to lose his mind, and he doesn’t know what to listen to — the desperation to feel you inside him or the hits of pleasure that rip through his entire body as you stroke his cock. “Please —”
Your free hand closes over his hip with surprising strength, keeping him still so he can’t disrupt the rhythm of your strokes or pull away. Something about that, about you taking over, snaps Tenko’s mind in half. Half of him is horrified at himself for the exposure in front of his enemy, for leaving himself so vulnerable. The other half is focused on how good it feels to come this way, responsible for none of it, you taking care of everything. Tenko’s body spasms out of his control, desperate gasps and moans tearing their way out of his mouth as you touch him through it — and keep touching him, the movement of your fingers changing from even strokes to steady pressure as your thumb teases his tip. It feels like there’s a flood of slick dripping out of him, enough to leave puddles on the floor if he wasn’t in a bathtub. It doesn’t matter where he is. Tenko forgets it all as he comes a second time.
You keep touching him until he stops coming, way after he’s lost track of how many times. The water’s barely lukewarm when he starts to regain awareness, finding himself slumped all the way forward against you, his body shaking too much to really hold on. You’re holding on for him, as steady as he isn’t. Your voice is steady, too, when you speak up. “How are you feeling?”
“I — I don’t know.” Tenko stumbles at the sound of his own voice. He sounds like he’s been screaming. Has he been screaming? He hopes not. “Weird.”
“Okay. The water’s getting cold, and you need to get comfortable, so we should probably get —” You break off. Tenko’s pulled it together just enough to tighten his grip on you. “I’m not leaving. I just think we should get out now.”
That makes sense. Sort of. It makes sense when Tenko filters out the need to be glued to you at all times. “Yeah. Okay.”
Getting out of the bathtub is harder than it should be. Tenko’s legs are shaking so badly that he can barely stand, and he’s leaning on you as you try to dry both of you off. He tries to help, but you tell him to focus on not losing his balance. With nothing else to do, he finds himself focusing on your body. Your scars. Last time you were here, he only noticed them once, only mentioned them once. This time, he reaches out to touch them. He traces over three of them before you jerk away from his hand. “Don’t.”
The feeling of rejection is instant and enormous. Tenko pulls his hand back, his breath catching and his eyes stinging, and you notice it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, under layers of fog, Tenko’s embarrassed with himself, furious with himself for getting visibly upset, or getting upset at all. The rest of him lets it show. If you see you’re hurting him, maybe you’ll stop.
Tenko sees you grit your teeth. “I want to be here, Shimura. I want to help you. But you don’t get to mess with my head just because you’re in heat.”
“I’m not messing with your head.” Tenko’s voice won’t stop wavering. “I cared last time. I cared the last time we fought.”
“Right. The last time when you tried to collapse my ribcage with your thighs.”
“I wasn’t —” Tenko’s face is heating up. When he’s sane again, thinking about this is going to make him want to kill himself. “You were just trying to get away. I thought you were doing it on purpose, to — turn me on. It was stupid.”
You don’t say anything. You’re just staring. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” Tenko says. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
You avert your eyes, wrapping a towel around Tenko’s waist and another around yourself. “I need to borrow some of your clothes. I don’t have anything but what I showed up in.”
“Yeah.” Tenko coughs. “The stuff you wore last time is in a box in my closet.”
You give him a weird look. “You didn’t put it back?”
Tenko decides not to answer that. He gets his feet under him and heads for the bedroom.
Once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. His bed, which is usually his favorite place to sprawl out, seems too empty, too open to be safe. Some stupid instinct is telling him to get in the closet, or under the bed, and he hesitates, clutching the towel around his waist. You draw up alongside him. “Do you want to make a nest?”
It’s so stupid. Tenko nods, cringing with embarrassment, but your expression doesn’t shift. “You used the couch cushions last time. Do you want those?”
That’s a start. Tenko goes to the living room. With the two of you, it only takes one trip.
While you find clothes to change into, Tenko tears apart his bedroom in the service of building his nest, just like he did last time. Blankets, pillows, a spare set of sheets. Clothes — mostly his, but also the ones you left in the bathroom, because they smell like you. Tenko knows it’s stupid to want them when you’ll be right there, but in case you leave. You could leave him at any second, if you decide he’s messing with you again.
Once Tenko’s happy enough with the nest, he puts on clothes. Loose ones, at your suggestion. Stuff that’ll be easy to get under or take off. He doesn’t want to take a water bottle with him into the nest, but you tell him he has to hydrate, and Tenko fills in a threat all by himself — or you’ll leave. You’re wearing the same shirt you had on the last night you were here as you climb into the nest beside him, giving a pointed glance at the water bottle. “Drink.”
Or you’ll leave. Tenko unscrews the cap and downs half of it, then sets it aside. He feels shaky and cold, his skin prickling and the hairs on his arms rising up, and that feeling of rejection swamps him again. Now Tenko knows that showing you he’s hurt won’t help, like it would with an alpha. He twists away from you and curls inwards, trying to keep warm.
He’s only trying by himself for a second. You’re right there, wrapping yourself around him from behind, pulling a blanket up over both of you. Tenko relaxes back against you on instinct, an instinct that grows stronger when your arm falls over his waist and holds on tight. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” you say. “I know how you feel.”
Tenko manages to scoff. “You could never know how this feels.”
“My whole life, there’s never been a place where I fit,” you say. Tenko listens for the familiar flatness in your voice, but it’s not there. “There’s no one in the world like me. I might not know how it feels to think you’re being rejected when you’re this vulnerable. But I know how it feels to be alone.”
It’s quiet for a second. “I didn’t say that so you’d feel sorry for me. Just so you’d know I wasn’t talking out of my ass.”
Tenko believes you. He also thinks there’s no way you understand how sad what you just said sounded. He hadn’t thought of it like that before. He’d thought of your lack of a designation as being whatever a female beta would experience, but even betas have shared experiences with alphas, with omegas, with each other. You’re scent-blind, so there’s a whole sense you’re missing, a whole layer of communication you can’t perceive. Tenko remembers being a kid, that feeling where everyone else was in on a joke they wouldn’t tell him. Then he tries to imagine that feeling as someone’s whole life. Not someone’s. Yours.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” you continue. “I know you didn’t mean it the way I took it. I’m sorry.”
“You say you’re sorry way too much to be a supervillain,” Tenko says, and you snort. He twists in your arms, trying to get a good look at your face, but as soon as he’s facing you, the urge to bury himself in your shoulder and breathe you in is overpowering. “This heat thing. You know more than me. What happens next?”
“You’ll rest for a little bit,” you say. “When you wake up again, it’ll be a little worse. And that’s how it’ll keep going until it peaks, and then the same way back down the other side.”
Tenko decides he needs more contact with you before he can sleep. He shifts over until he’s halfway on top of you. “It’ll be longer in your case,” you say quietly. “If you mean it about not wanting an alpha.”
Maybe you and Tenko can understand each other a little bit. He hears that same note of uncertainty in your voice, the one he felt when you pulled away. He tugs the neckline of your borrowed shirt aside and finds one of two scars he gave you, the one that could have been a mating mark in another life. Tenko presses his cheek against it, then bites down lightly, nowhere close to enough to break the skin.
If you were an alpha, you’d be all over him for that move. As it is, Tenko’s pretty sure he gets the point across. Your arms adjust around him, and you pull the blanket up to cover you both again, and Tenko settles in for a little sleep — just enough to get him through the next phase of his heat with his sanity intact.
Tenko lifts a weirdly shaped object out of the box of omega essentials his friends put together and holds it out to you. “Do you know what this is?”
You don’t look up. “Vibrator.”
“The last one was a vibrator,” Tenko says. You nod. You’re sprawled out on the bed, staring at nothing, while he uses the space between meltdowns to figure out what tools — or toys — the two of you have at your disposal. “And the one before that. Why are there so many vibrators?”
“A lot of people aren’t into penetration when they aren’t in heat. The vibrators are for getting off without it.”
You look like you’re going to fall asleep. Tenko pokes your shoulder with the vibrator he’s holding and you look up, eyebrows raised. “What?”
“People get off when they aren’t in heat?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?” you ask, and Tenko’s face heats up. He didn’t mean to bring it up, but you asked him how he touches himself one time while you were doing it, and he should have known you’d file it away to use later. “They do. All the time.”
“And the vibrators help,” Tenko says. You nod. “Have you used one?”
“I don’t go into heat.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t get off.” Tenko gets the satisfaction of seeing your face flush. “I knew it. Do they work?”
“I’ll show you,” you say, “on you. Not on me.”
Tenko wants to see it on you. He wants to see how you like to get yourself off, file it away himself to use later when you’re gone and he needs to think about something that will make him come instantly. “Now?”
“If you want.” You sit up and study the box of toys for yourself. “It’ll get you going again. You know that, right?”
“Right.” Tenko can feel it creeping back over him already — a little worse than before, just like you said. “Show me. Unless you don’t know how or something.”
You glance sideways at him and pick up one of the toys he’s already tossed aside. “Sit back. And spread your legs.”
Tenko wishes you hadn’t said that. He never really stops being wet around you, in heat, but when you tell him stuff like that, it gets a lot worse. He sits back on the pillows, shifting his legs apart, and you crawl up between them, stretching yourself out over him until the two of you can kiss. Tenko’s still pissed at himself for not kissing you more the first time you were here. He appreciates any chance to make up for lost time.
He hears a weird humming and sees that you’ve turned the vibrator on. “This what the first setting feels like,” you say, and you rest it against the back of Tenko’s hand. It’s gentle but insistent, and it feels like nothing much. “How does it feel — here?”
Tenko sucks in a breath. You’ve pressed it against one of his nipples, and it’s not nothing much any longer. Tenko can feel it traveling through his nerves, getting hung up in the pit of his stomach and building up tension, warmth. He should have put down a towel. They’re going to have to change the blankets. Again.
You notice, but you don’t say anything. You lift the vibrator away from Tenko’s chest, and the humming in his nerves remains, making it hard to breathe. Tenko kisses you, but your hands keep moving, the vibrator trailing down over his abdomen before dipping into the crease where his leg meets his hip. Your touch is so light there. Light enough to make him squirm, to make him wet, to make him need you even more than he already did.
It’s easier than it should be to forget you’re a villain. This is only happening to him because of you. But you’re good with Tenko. He needs you and you’re there, just like you are now, coating your hand with his slick and smearing it over the vibrator. “It’s good to start slow,” you say. The vibrator touches the base of Tenko’s entrance. Tenko almost closes his legs to hide the rush of slick as you shift the vibrator from one side to the other. “Too much?”
Tenko shakes his head, and the vibrator drags upwards, along his entrance. Once again, you shift it from side to side, making Tenko squirm. “More,” he says, and your eyes lift to his. “I need to feel you.”
“It’s a toy,” you correct. “It’s not me.”
For a supervillain smart enough to put the whole country on its heels, you have your moments of being really dumb. “You’re holding it,” Tenko says, and sucks down a shallow breath as the vibrator brushes against the tip of his cock. “You’re — ah —”
Tenko appreciates the novelty of it. How instantly intense it is. His back arches, forcing a moan out of his mouth, and you adjust the vibrator minutely, this way and that, like you’re trying to find the right frequency to make Tenko explode. Every so often you lift the vibrator away, drag it back over his entrance to collect more slick, and every time it’s away, Tenko squirms in agony. “More,” he demands. His legs are aching from being spread so far, even though it’s a position he’s wound up in multiple times a day since his heat started. “Now.”
“More like this?” You increase the pressure against his cock, and Tenko’s body seizes involuntarily, every muscle straining — until you lift it away. “Or more like this?”
You lighten up, and before Tenko can protest that it’s less now, the intensity of the vibration kicks up a notch. More like that. Tenko can’t even answer you. He’s gasping for air, his legs kicking helplessly, his hands clinging to your shoulders for dear life as you adjust the angle and pressure of the vibrator. It’s only seconds before he comes, but the instant he does, it’s too much. He can barely gasp out a plea to stop. You’re listening, like always, and as Tenko’s coming to the painful realization that one orgasm isn’t enough, you lower yourself until your head’s between Tenko’s legs.
He’s had fantasies about this. He has to warn you. “If you do that, I’m going to come all over your face.”
You shrug. “Better than you coming all over somebody else’s face.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t mind,” you say. You wrap your arms around Tenko’s thighs and tug him down on the bed, adjusting his hips to the right angle. A moment later he feels your tongue against him for the first time, and a shudder runs through his entire body. “I like how you taste.”
Your tongue is gentler than the vibrator by a long shot, but somehow Tenko feels even more out of control. If he hadn’t fantasized so much about exactly this, he wouldn’t be so thoroughly fucked right now. It’s like you read his mind. You can’t read minds, can you? If you could, you wouldn’t ask Tenko so many dumb questions. Like if he likes it. If it’s too much. Like if it was weird that you said you like how he tastes, after he’s done exactly what he said he would do and came all over your face. Like if he needs more. Of course he does. Always.
Tenko’s been in heat for three days so far, and as horrible as it is, he could have done a lot worse than you as far as someone to help him through it. In some of his saner moments, he’s gotten on Google and looked up what to expect from a heat partner, and what he’s found out is that alphas are apparently shit at it. All the articles had the same tips, or warnings: Don’t expect foreplay. Don’t expect aftercare — it’s nice to have, but not necessary. Don’t expect to have much of a say in how it goes, or any say. It might be the omega’s heat, but the alpha’s in charge. And don’t complain. Alphas will just go find an omega who doesn’t.
You’re nothing like that. Tenko feels safe with you. You’ve never asked him to touch you, or do anything for you —it’s all about him, what he likes, what makes him feel good. You make him feel good, or at least safe, no matter what insane and awful thing he’s feeling at a given moment. Omegas online make heat sound nightmarish. It would be worse than nightmarish if Tenko didn’t have you.
But he does have you — as much as he wants, and he barely has to ask. All he has to do is let you, let himself feel it, let himself look down at you between his legs and feel desire split him in half when you glance upwards and your eyes meet his. His hair is glued to his forehead and the sides of his neck with sweat and his eyes are leaking actual tears. His throat feels raw from all the sounds he’s making, none of which are anything close to as loud as the sound of your tongue lapping up his slick. Tenko can’t listen, can’t watch, can’t stop. He comes over and over again, and you never let him go.
You draw away just as it’s starting to hurt, and Tenko feels a surge of embarrassment when he sees slick dripping off your chin. You pull a towel out of the edge of the nest and wipe your face, then fold it over and start wiping at his thighs. You do this every time, like Tenko should have done when you were here during his rut, and like always, the shame hits hard. “Do you do this stuff to prove a point?” he asks, his voice rough and shaky as you set the towel aside and pick up a clean one, wiping away the sheen of sweat that covers him. “About last time —”
“I’d do this no matter what.” You shift closer to him in the nest, leaning forward to study his face, and that’s when he notices that your own face is flushed, that you’re breathing hard, too. You lean in to kiss him, once on the lips, once off to one side, over his birthmark. What you say doesn’t match the gesture at all. “You need water.”
“Wait.” Tenko stops you as you move to climb out of the nest. He’s seen that color in your face before, the unsteady rise and fall of your chest. “I want to see.”
“What?”
Tenko gestures at the pile of vibrators, and you shake your head. “No. You don’t want to see that.”
“Yes I do. You’re seeing everything.” Tenko’s stomach clenches when he thinks about it. “I didn’t get to last time. This time I want to see you come.”
“I can’t come.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.” You shake Tenko off and climb out of the nest, leaving Tenko twenty kinds of confused.
He hopes you know better than to think he’ll drop it, and when you come back with the water, he can tell you’re bracing yourself. “What do you mean, you can’t come?”
“I mean what it sounds like. Drink that,” you say.
“Only if you explain.” Tenko uncaps the water bottle and takes a sip or three. “Explain.”
“I just can’t.” You nudge Tenko to one side so you can pull the stained blankets out from underneath him, then pile them up with the towels. More laundry. Tenko’s water bill for this month is going to be ridiculous. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to anyway, since I’m not built like the rest of you. But —”
You trail off, staring at nothing. “The doctors — the ones you keep defending — spent fourteen years trying to fix me. I don’t even know half the things they did or why they did them, but I know they didn’t work. Even if something worked right at the beginning, there’s no way it works now.”
You always tell sad stories like they don’t matter. Tenko wonders if you know that makes it worse. “It’s broken,” you say finally. “That’s just how it is.”
It’s broken, you say, like your body isn’t yours. Tenko caps the water bottle and reaches for you. He’s naked, like he’s been since this morning when he woke up in flames and yanked off his clothes, but you’re still wearing one of his shirts. He pulls at the hem. “Take it off.”
“Why?”
“I want to see you,” Tenko says. “Show me.”
You draw back, out of his grip. “I need to do laundry,” you say. “Finish your water. I’ll be back.”
It still feels like rejection. It feels like that every time you pull away instead of giving yourself to Tenko the way he’s giving himself to you, and rejection feels like hell. When Tenko’s mind is clear of the fog, he knows it’s because you’re thinking clearly. You aren’t forgetting that you’re a villain and he’s a hero, that as soon as this is over he’ll be back to trying to bring you down; you remember, so you keep him at a distance. You remember, so you hide things. But not quite enough.
There aren’t many stabilization centers in Japan. Tenko looked it up the last time you went to do laundry. All of them keep employee records that they’d probably be willing to disclose if it meant catching you, and Tenko knows what you look like. As soon as he’s out of here, he can find out who you really are, or at least what name you’re hiding out under. And once your real face is out in the open, there won’t be anywhere for you to hide. Tenko will catch you, or some other hero will, and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.
Tenko doesn’t like that thought. Part of it is his stupid heat-clouded brain, whining about how being separated from you forever would be the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone, but the rest of it is something he’s been kicking around for a while. There are lots of things wrong with you. Your moral compass is fucked up to hell and back, but you still have one. You still have lines you won’t cross, mistakes you’re willing to fix, and you don’t kill people. And if Tenko’s learned anything from being designation-swapped twice, it’s that society is exactly as fucked-up as you are.
Society doesn’t bend to accommodate people who are different. It forces them to bend until they break, and Tenko’s pretty sure that’s what happened to you. You’ve done awful things, and you’re planning to keep doing them until someone stops you. But Tenko remembers his first fight with you, how you passed up chance after chance to swap him until he used Decay against you. In your view, the world hit first. You’re just defending yourself.
Maybe. Or maybe you want to punish the world for what it’s done to you, just like Sensei wanted Tomura to grow up to do. Tenko tries to think back to what Sensei used to say to him, what Sensei would do when Tomura panicked or threw up or cried. Whatever it was, Tomura didn’t like it. Tomura always — hid —
Tenko remembers that, then remembers something else, too — what happened the last time you went to do the laundry and didn’t come back. Shit. He struggles to his feet, yanks on a pair of sweatpants, and heads for the laundry room.
You’re there, just like he knew you would be. You left the door open this time, and this time you’re standing, leaning with both hands on the washing machine, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut. Not that it helps. You were crying last time. You’re crying this time, too.
Tenko touches your shoulder, and you flinch away without looking up. It hurts. You should know it’s him, know he’s not here to hurt you — and then the neck of your shirt shifts aside, and Tenko sees bruises. Fingerprint-shaped bruises, from all the times he’s death-gripped your shoulders over the past three days. “I hurt you again.”
“I told you I’d be back.”
“I came looking for you last time, too.” Tenko grasps your arm, a little lower down. It’s a relief when you don’t pull away. “Talk to me.”
“I’m not going to talk about how I can’t come.” The contempt in your voice stings, even though Tenko knows it’s not aimed at him. “Let it go, Shimura. You have enough on your mind without pretending to care.”
“I’m not pretending to care.” Tenko comes closer to you. “Are you pretending to care about me?”
“What makes you think I care?”
It should sting, but it doesn’t. You’re not as good at lying as you think you are. “Staying here with me is too big of a risk to take for someone who doesn’t care. I’m not pretending and neither are you.”
“Shimura.” Your voice isn’t flat. It’s never flat around him anymore. “You weren’t supposed to be so good.”
“I’m not,” Tenko says, startled. He doesn’t think he’s a particularly good person. Decent, maybe. After what he did to his family, decent is as good as it gets. But that’s not even the weirdest part about what you said. “What do you —”
You straighten up, turn to face him, and Tenko gets a split-second look at your face before you step forward into his arms. Not enough to tell him anything. Not enough to pull his attention away from you and how you’re pressed against him. Your arms wind carefully around his neck as your forehead comes to rest against his shoulder, and Tenko’s grip on you tightens on instinct. Not the omega instinct to cling out of desperation. Tenko remembers this one, and even now it carries an alpha tinge. He can see the scar on the side of your neck. He put it there. You’re his.
“Hey,” he says, and you nod against his shoulder. “Let’s go back. I’m tired and I don’t sleep as well when you aren’t there.”
That was maybe more than he should have said. Tenko wishes it wasn’t the truth. Wishes he hasn’t spent the last six months waking up in the middle of the night, reaching for the empty space at his side. Your voice is quiet, muffled against his skin. “Same here.”
Ever since he was rescued by All Might from All For One, Shimura Tenko's led a charmed life - except that he's a beta, in a society where alphas are privileged, omegas are prioritized, and betas are an afterthought. But when Tenko finds himself investigating a series of designation-swaps that have devastated the lives of the victims, he comes face to face with the terrible truths at the heart of society's placid, inflexible structure, and the enigmatic villain who's bent on exposing it all. The one they call Love's Executioner - otherwise known as, you. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Reminder: this fic is rated E and labeled 'enemies to lovers' on Ao3. Proceed at your own risk. Lots of smut in this chapter.
Chapter 8
Fuck alphas. Forget alphas. This is what Tenko needs — your presence, your scent, your touch. You didn’t come here by accident. You came for Tenko, and the words slip out of his mouth as he crushes himself against you. “Don’t leave —”
“I’m not. I have to get you home.” You say that, but then you try to pull away. “Shimura, I’m sorry. I swear I didn’t —”
“I know.” Tenko knows you didn’t cause his heat. Knows you wouldn’t do that to him again. “If it’s your fault, it comes on fast. This was slow. Don’t leave —”
“I’m not.” You work one arm free of Tenko’s embrace and snap your fingers. A chorus of anguished howls rise up from the sidewalk as the alphas who cornered Tenko tip over the edge into heat. Burying his face in the side of your neck doesn’t block out the scents entirely, but it helps. “Come on. We have to go.”
Tenko wants to get home. Needs it. With you. But some impulse makes him hesitate, makes him turn halfway back to your victims, all of whom are in agony. “You’re going to leave them out here? If any alphas show up —”
“They’ll get exactly what they deserve,” you say. Your voice is cold. “I don’t care what happens to them.”
For the first time since Tenko met you, you sound like a real supervillain. It sends a chill down his spine. He feels sick. He’d feel sicker, except that if he’d fought back, like he would have had to, all four of them would be dead. They’re better off dealing with what you did, and with what they’d have done to Tenko — “Do you care?” you ask, and Tenko shakes his head. “Good. Let’s get you home.”
Knowing you’re here, knowing you’re not leaving, calms Tenko’s nerves ever so slightly. But it doesn’t do shit for his symptoms, and it doesn’t tamp down his pheromones, and halfway home, you lose patience with dragging him along. You pull him into an alley, and for a split second, Tenko thinks you’ll give him what he needs then and there — but instead you reach up with one hand and tap a headset hooked onto your ear. “I need a gate. You know to where.”
Whoever’s on the other end of it — your accomplice — says something in response. “I know what I’m doing. Tell on me if you have to,” you say. “Just give me the gate.”
Tenko sees purple mist drifting through the air, pooling around his feet. There’s something familiar about it, and not just because Tenko saw it in Overhaul’s compound. The ground falls away from beneath the two of you all at once, and you drop through the warp gate to land just inside the door to Tenko’s apartment.
Tenko can barely focus enough to get his feet under him, but once he does, he pushes you back against the door, just like he did the first time you were here. He buries his face in the side of your neck, slides his hands beneath your shirt. He needs you. He needs your scent, all over him, so anyone who so much as breathes near him will know that he’s taken. He’s not up for grabs. He’s with you.
“Shimura,” you say awkwardly. Tenko wishes you’d touch him. “I don’t think I’m the person you need right now.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not,” you say. “This isn’t like before. I could help when you were an alpha, but my body’s not — I can’t give you what you need. You should find an alpha.”
“I don’t want an alpha,” Tenko snaps, or tries to snap. His voice is rattling again, and an awful feeling is welling up inside him, making it hard to breathe or even think. “If you want to leave, just leave. Don’t make up some lie about how I can’t get through it without a knot.”
Are you going to push him away? Tenko feels you shift in his grip, and as much as he wants to Decay his costume and your clothes and drown in your scent, the thought that you want to leave feels like enough to stop his heat in its tracks. Tenko wants you here. He wants you to want to be here, with him, and if you don’t, there’s no point. Tenko tries to step back from you and finds that he can’t. Part of it is that he can’t pull away from your scent. And part of it is your arms coming up around him, keeping him close.
You aren’t leaving. “I’ll stay to help,” you say. “I might not have triggered this heat, but it’s still my fault. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“I know. What are your symptoms?” you ask. Huh? “You’re too far into it for me to switch you back without trouble, but you also aren’t fully in it yet. Depending on how you’re feeling, different things will help.”
“Headache. My body hurts. Everything is too loud or too bright — or the smells —” Tenko’s never been more grateful to be in his own apartment. “Not yours. Yours is good.”
“It’s still weird that you can smell me,” you remark. “What about arousal? Are you feeling any of that?”
“Uh, yeah.” It’s weird. Being close to you is calming Tenko down, but he knows it wouldn’t take much to tip him over into a pathetic horny meltdown. “Why?”
“It’ll get worse,” you say. Your hand shifts across Tenko’s shoulder blades. “You’re really tense. That’s not a surprise given that it started when you were in public and your friends sent you home alone.”
Tenko’s friends. Fuck. “I was supposed to tell them I got home safe.”
“You do that. I’ll start filling the bathtub,” you say. Tenko draws back far enough to give you a weird look. “Warm water helps people relax. All of this will be harder if you go into it scared.”
“I’m not — scared.”
“Most people are,” you say. Tenko blinks, and you wedge yourself out from under his arm. “Text your friends. I’ll be in the bathroom.”
Tenko means to send one text and follow you in, but his groupchat with his friends blows up the instant he sends the message letting them know he’s in heat and he got home. Midoriya has updates about the scene Tenko left. Twice is worried about him. Touya’s sent Tenko literal paragraphs about how to cope with being in heat and which of the sex toys in the box of omega essentials are the best. Toga and Spinner give thumbs-up to Tenko’s texts, and Magne starts listing off alphas she knows who can help out. Tenko doesn’t want an alpha. Tenko sets down his phone and heads back to the bathroom.
The lights are dimmer than usual. He didn’t know the lights did that. The air is warm and full of steam, and you’re sorting through Tenko’s bathroom cabinet. As Tenko watches, you take out a hair clip he never uses and close the door. “What’s that?”
“To put your hair up so it doesn’t get wet,” you say. “Do you want help with your costume?”
“I can do it on my own,” Tenko says. “Don’t look.”
He’s not sure why he doesn’t want you to see it, but the idea of you getting a good look at his new anatomy makes him cringe. He doesn’t even like looking at it on himself. Seeing it through someone else’s eyes sounds like a nightmare. Tenko knows you’ll see it eventually, and he’s fine with that — just not right now. He tells himself that until he can almost believe it.
You don’t look up until Tenko’s already settled into the warm water, a really embarrassing sigh of relief exiting his mouth. “I’ll clip up your hair,” you say. “Hold still.”
Tenko holds still, except for the stupid moan that sneaks out of him when he feels your hands in his hair. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m kind of immune to this stuff. At my old job I had to be.”
“You had a job?” Tenko can’t keep the shock out of his voice. “Doing what?”
“There are stabilization centers for people with irregular heats. A lot of people with irregular heats also start young — like, really young — so it’s safer for them to be in a secure facility.”
Tenko’s stomach lurches. “When you say stabilize them —”
“Nothing sexual,” you say. “Providing a secure environment that’s not overstimulating at all, explaining what’s going on and why, that kind of thing. First heats can be traumatic if they aren’t handled properly. The goal was to handle it properly.”
“And you did that,” Tenko says. It doesn’t square with what he knows about the rest of you — or does it. “Why?”
“I don’t have a designation. Some of the patients are scared of everybody while their heat is happening, and since I don’t have a physiological response to other people’s heats, they felt like they could trust me more.” Your hands slide from Tenko’s hair, and he misses them within seconds. “I’m going to get you some water. It’s easy to dehydrate during a heat.”
You come back with a water bottle, setting it in easy reach, then retreat to the opposite side of the bathroom. Somehow that strikes Tenko as weirder than you having a job. “Get in. Don’t you want to?”
“It’s possible to get through a heat without sexual contact,” you say. “I assumed that’s what you’d want.”
“Why?” Tenko’s used a lot of words to describe you. Clueless hasn’t been one of them until now. “I’m not a kid. Get in here before it gets cold.”
Something crosses his mind. “Unless you don’t want —”
He breaks off in a hurry, averting his eyes. You’ve just taken off your shirt, followed by your bra, and out of the corner of Tenko’s eye, he sees you getting to your feet to take off your pants. “I don’t care if you look,” you say, that odd flatness back in your voice. “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.”
Except there is. Bruises. And you’ve got at least two new scars. “What happened?” Tenko asks, as you sink down in the bathtub at the other end. “Hey. Who did that?”
“It’s my fault,” you say. You draw your knees up to your chest, resting your chin on them. “I made a mistake. Or three.”
“That’s nice. Not what I asked.” Tenko watches as you hunch down even further in the bathtub. “Who did that?”
You don’t answer. “Is Eri okay?”
Tenko wasn’t expecting that. He stares at you, speechless, as you avert your eyes. “I’ve been trying to keep track. Through the news. But they never mention her.”
“Because she’s a kid,” Tenko says, and you nod. “Me and Midoriya have gone to see her a few times. She has some messed-up designation stuff going on. I guess Overhaul kept trying to change hers.”
“He — what?” You look back, make eye contact, and misery flashes across your face. “I didn’t know. I only knew about the bullets. You have to believe me —”
“Nobody thinks it was you,” Tenko says. He was sort of surprised by that. “We have more data on your quirk than we’ve had for any villain, ever, so we know your swaps are complete. People you swap don’t get stuck between designations the way she is.”
“If —” you start, then break off. “She has a designation still. I might be able to swap it to one or the other.”
“I thought designation disorders were something society made up,” Tenko says, and you glare at him. “Sorry. But come on — you’re a supervillain. Why do you care?”
“She’s just a kid,” you say. You look away again. “No kid deserves this.”
For a supervillain, you’re really stuck on kids. Tenko wonders if you mean it. If you could help Eri. How the hell he’d swing that — although with you and your warp-gate friend, maybe all he’d have to do is tell you where she is. “We didn’t tell,” he says. “Me and Midoriya. They think Overhaul was just conducting designation experiments. They don’t know about how he made the bullets.”
Your shoulders slump ever so slightly. “Good.”
It’s quiet for a little while. Tenko’s shoulders are getting cold, so he sinks further into the bathtub, down far enough that his feet brush yours, even though yours are drawn up. The contact’s not a good thing for Tenko. As the last of the tension slides loose from his body, heat floods in to replace it. It’s quiet here. The lights aren’t as bright. He’s not out in the open and stuck in tight, uncomfortable clothes, and the only scents in this room are his and yours. You reach out to touch his knee and it takes way too much of Tenko’s self-control to keep his legs from spreading.
His face is burning up. His breathing shifts, and he knows you can see it. “How do you feel?” you ask. Your hand is still on his knee, fingers spread over his kneecap. “Shimura —
Tenko pulls away, gets to his knees, and across the bathtub, you extend your legs, fucking finally. Tenko crawls across the space between you, ignoring the water that slops out onto the floor, and straddles your lap.
He’s taller than you, especially like this. You have to look up to make eye contact. “I’m not an alpha,” you say.
“You think I’d do this if you were an alpha?” The thought of sitting exposed like this in some alpha’s lap makes Tenko’s insides crumple and twist, even as he discovers that it’s possible to notice slick dripping down his legs even in water. “You said you’d help —”
Your hands rise from the water to grip Tenko’s waist, then down to his hips, where your thumbs skim lightly over their arches. Tenko’s body jerks. You do it again, shifting to sit up in the bargain, and Tenko squirms as your legs brush against his inner thighs. “Stop it. Don’t tease.”
“I’m not.” Your hands glide upwards from Tenko’s hips, one stopping at his waist just below the water and the other continuing upward, outlining every vertebrae along Tenko’s spine. “I didn’t get to touch you last time.”
Tenko hears what you aren’t saying: And I wanted to. He’s pissed that you waited and not, all at the same time — pissed at missing out, too busy crumbling under your careful touch to be pissed at anything at all. When Tenko was in rut, he was rough on you. You aren’t rough on him. You’re gentle, deliberate, and all Tenko can do is stare down at your hands, making their way across his body above water and below it. Watching you touch him shouldn’t do anything for him, but seeing how intent you are on him is enough to make Tenko’s legs tremble. He’s so focused on your right hand, tracing over the curve from his waist to his hip, that he doesn’t notice your left until it’s curled around the back of his neck, guiding him down to you for a kiss.
Tenko’s dreamed about kissing you again. He didn’t dream about it like this, shaking in your lap and stupid with heat, but it’s better this way. He grasps your shoulders for balance, but he slumps down over you anyway, his hips twitching in search of some kind of friction. One of your legs bends beneath him, pressing up against his cock. Tenko grinds against you without hesitating, and it feels good. It feels so good, but it doesn’t help — all it does is intensify the need for more from you. More of you. What are you waiting for?
The words make their way out sideways, through clenched teeth. “Don’t tease —”
“I’m not,” you murmur. “Tell me what you want. I’m not going to act like I know.”
Tenko doesn’t know what to do with that. If you were an alpha he’d be knotted already, but the thought makes him want to slam his legs shut. What is he supposed to want right now, anyway? You tug him closer to you, press your lips against his throat, and Tenko lets his head fall back, exposing more for you. You won’t hurt him. Tenko knows that. And since he knows that —since you said you want to help — “Touch me.”
You don’t give him a hard time about where. The hand on his waist drifts downwards, past his navel and over his hip, until you can brush your thumb lightly against his cock. His clit. Whatever it is. Tenko doesn’t need to know that to know that your barely-there touch is the best thing he’s ever felt in his life. Your lips are against his throat and your hand is between his legs, and for a few seconds, all he can do is sink further into the sensation.
It’s only peaceful for a few seconds. Then the need turns urgent. Tenko’s body tenses, whines forcing their way out of his mouth, his hips jerking as he tries to force more contact with your hand. Your hand slips lower, fingers ghosting over his new anatomy, just shy of his entrance. Tenko spreads his legs wider. In case you didn’t get the message: “There.”
“Here?” Your fingers are closer to where he needs you this time, but you skip past so you can stroke his cock. Tenko’s no stranger to jerking off with his new anatomy, but he’s never gotten this close, this fast. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just —”
“Anything,” Tenko gasps. He needs something. He needs to come or he’s going to lose his mind, and he doesn’t know what to listen to — the desperation to feel you inside him or the hits of pleasure that rip through his entire body as you stroke his cock. “Please —”
Your free hand closes over his hip with surprising strength, keeping him still so he can’t disrupt the rhythm of your strokes or pull away. Something about that, about you taking over, snaps Tenko’s mind in half. Half of him is horrified at himself for the exposure in front of his enemy, for leaving himself so vulnerable. The other half is focused on how good it feels to come this way, responsible for none of it, you taking care of everything. Tenko’s body spasms out of his control, desperate gasps and moans tearing their way out of his mouth as you touch him through it — and keep touching him, the movement of your fingers changing from even strokes to steady pressure as your thumb teases his tip. It feels like there’s a flood of slick dripping out of him, enough to leave puddles on the floor if he wasn’t in a bathtub. It doesn’t matter where he is. Tenko forgets it all as he comes a second time.
You keep touching him until he stops coming, way after he’s lost track of how many times. The water’s barely lukewarm when he starts to regain awareness, finding himself slumped all the way forward against you, his body shaking too much to really hold on. You’re holding on for him, as steady as he isn’t. Your voice is steady, too, when you speak up. “How are you feeling?”
“I — I don’t know.” Tenko stumbles at the sound of his own voice. He sounds like he’s been screaming. Has he been screaming? He hopes not. “Weird.”
“Okay. The water’s getting cold, and you need to get comfortable, so we should probably get —” You break off. Tenko’s pulled it together just enough to tighten his grip on you. “I’m not leaving. I just think we should get out now.”
That makes sense. Sort of. It makes sense when Tenko filters out the need to be glued to you at all times. “Yeah. Okay.”
Getting out of the bathtub is harder than it should be. Tenko’s legs are shaking so badly that he can barely stand, and he’s leaning on you as you try to dry both of you off. He tries to help, but you tell him to focus on not losing his balance. With nothing else to do, he finds himself focusing on your body. Your scars. Last time you were here, he only noticed them once, only mentioned them once. This time, he reaches out to touch them. He traces over three of them before you jerk away from his hand. “Don’t.”
The feeling of rejection is instant and enormous. Tenko pulls his hand back, his breath catching and his eyes stinging, and you notice it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, under layers of fog, Tenko’s embarrassed with himself, furious with himself for getting visibly upset, or getting upset at all. The rest of him lets it show. If you see you’re hurting him, maybe you’ll stop.
Tenko sees you grit your teeth. “I want to be here, Shimura. I want to help you. But you don’t get to mess with my head just because you’re in heat.”
“I’m not messing with your head.” Tenko’s voice won’t stop wavering. “I cared last time. I cared the last time we fought.”
“Right. The last time when you tried to collapse my ribcage with your thighs.”
“I wasn’t —” Tenko’s face is heating up. When he’s sane again, thinking about this is going to make him want to kill himself. “You were just trying to get away. I thought you were doing it on purpose, to — turn me on. It was stupid.”
You don’t say anything. You’re just staring. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” Tenko says. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
You avert your eyes, wrapping a towel around Tenko’s waist and another around yourself. “I need to borrow some of your clothes. I don’t have anything but what I showed up in.”
“Yeah.” Tenko coughs. “The stuff you wore last time is in a box in my closet.”
You give him a weird look. “You didn’t put it back?”
Tenko decides not to answer that. He gets his feet under him and heads for the bedroom.
Once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. His bed, which is usually his favorite place to sprawl out, seems too empty, too open to be safe. Some stupid instinct is telling him to get in the closet, or under the bed, and he hesitates, clutching the towel around his waist. You draw up alongside him. “Do you want to make a nest?”
It’s so stupid. Tenko nods, cringing with embarrassment, but your expression doesn’t shift. “You used the couch cushions last time. Do you want those?”
That’s a start. Tenko goes to the living room. With the two of you, it only takes one trip.
While you find clothes to change into, Tenko tears apart his bedroom in the service of building his nest, just like he did last time. Blankets, pillows, a spare set of sheets. Clothes — mostly his, but also the ones you left in the bathroom, because they smell like you. Tenko knows it’s stupid to want them when you’ll be right there, but in case you leave. You could leave him at any second, if you decide he’s messing with you again.
Once Tenko’s happy enough with the nest, he puts on clothes. Loose ones, at your suggestion. Stuff that’ll be easy to get under or take off. He doesn’t want to take a water bottle with him into the nest, but you tell him he has to hydrate, and Tenko fills in a threat all by himself — or you’ll leave. You’re wearing the same shirt you had on the last night you were here as you climb into the nest beside him, giving a pointed glance at the water bottle. “Drink.”
Or you’ll leave. Tenko unscrews the cap and downs half of it, then sets it aside. He feels shaky and cold, his skin prickling and the hairs on his arms rising up, and that feeling of rejection swamps him again. Now Tenko knows that showing you he’s hurt won’t help, like it would with an alpha. He twists away from you and curls inwards, trying to keep warm.
He’s only trying by himself for a second. You’re right there, wrapping yourself around him from behind, pulling a blanket up over both of you. Tenko relaxes back against you on instinct, an instinct that grows stronger when your arm falls over his waist and holds on tight. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” you say. “I know how you feel.”
Tenko manages to scoff. “You could never know how this feels.”
“My whole life, there’s never been a place where I fit,” you say. Tenko listens for the familiar flatness in your voice, but it’s not there. “There’s no one in the world like me. I might not know how it feels to think you’re being rejected when you’re this vulnerable. But I know how it feels to be alone.”
It’s quiet for a second. “I didn’t say that so you’d feel sorry for me. Just so you’d know I wasn’t talking out of my ass.”
Tenko believes you. He also thinks there’s no way you understand how sad what you just said sounded. He hadn’t thought of it like that before. He’d thought of your lack of a designation as being whatever a female beta would experience, but even betas have shared experiences with alphas, with omegas, with each other. You’re scent-blind, so there’s a whole sense you’re missing, a whole layer of communication you can’t perceive. Tenko remembers being a kid, that feeling where everyone else was in on a joke they wouldn’t tell him. Then he tries to imagine that feeling as someone’s whole life. Not someone’s. Yours.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” you continue. “I know you didn’t mean it the way I took it. I’m sorry.”
“You say you’re sorry way too much to be a supervillain,” Tenko says, and you snort. He twists in your arms, trying to get a good look at your face, but as soon as he’s facing you, the urge to bury himself in your shoulder and breathe you in is overpowering. “This heat thing. You know more than me. What happens next?”
“You’ll rest for a little bit,” you say. “When you wake up again, it’ll be a little worse. And that’s how it’ll keep going until it peaks, and then the same way back down the other side.”
Tenko decides he needs more contact with you before he can sleep. He shifts over until he’s halfway on top of you. “It’ll be longer in your case,” you say quietly. “If you mean it about not wanting an alpha.”
Maybe you and Tenko can understand each other a little bit. He hears that same note of uncertainty in your voice, the one he felt when you pulled away. He tugs the neckline of your borrowed shirt aside and finds one of two scars he gave you, the one that could have been a mating mark in another life. Tenko presses his cheek against it, then bites down lightly, nowhere close to enough to break the skin.
If you were an alpha, you’d be all over him for that move. As it is, Tenko’s pretty sure he gets the point across. Your arms adjust around him, and you pull the blanket up to cover you both again, and Tenko settles in for a little sleep — just enough to get him through the next phase of his heat with his sanity intact.
Tenko lifts a weirdly shaped object out of the box of omega essentials his friends put together and holds it out to you. “Do you know what this is?”
You don’t look up. “Vibrator.”
“The last one was a vibrator,” Tenko says. You nod. You’re sprawled out on the bed, staring at nothing, while he uses the space between meltdowns to figure out what tools — or toys — the two of you have at your disposal. “And the one before that. Why are there so many vibrators?”
“A lot of people aren’t into penetration when they aren’t in heat. The vibrators are for getting off without it.”
You look like you’re going to fall asleep. Tenko pokes your shoulder with the vibrator he’s holding and you look up, eyebrows raised. “What?”
“People get off when they aren’t in heat?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?” you ask, and Tenko’s face heats up. He didn’t mean to bring it up, but you asked him how he touches himself one time while you were doing it, and he should have known you’d file it away to use later. “They do. All the time.”
“And the vibrators help,” Tenko says. You nod. “Have you used one?”
“I don’t go into heat.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t get off.” Tenko gets the satisfaction of seeing your face flush. “I knew it. Do they work?”
“I’ll show you,” you say, “on you. Not on me.”
Tenko wants to see it on you. He wants to see how you like to get yourself off, file it away himself to use later when you’re gone and he needs to think about something that will make him come instantly. “Now?”
“If you want.” You sit up and study the box of toys for yourself. “It’ll get you going again. You know that, right?”
“Right.” Tenko can feel it creeping back over him already — a little worse than before, just like you said. “Show me. Unless you don’t know how or something.”
You glance sideways at him and pick up one of the toys he’s already tossed aside. “Sit back. And spread your legs.”
Tenko wishes you hadn’t said that. He never really stops being wet around you, in heat, but when you tell him stuff like that, it gets a lot worse. He sits back on the pillows, shifting his legs apart, and you crawl up between them, stretching yourself out over him until the two of you can kiss. Tenko’s still pissed at himself for not kissing you more the first time you were here. He appreciates any chance to make up for lost time.
He hears a weird humming and sees that you’ve turned the vibrator on. “This what the first setting feels like,” you say, and you rest it against the back of Tenko’s hand. It’s gentle but insistent, and it feels like nothing much. “How does it feel — here?”
Tenko sucks in a breath. You’ve pressed it against one of his nipples, and it’s not nothing much any longer. Tenko can feel it traveling through his nerves, getting hung up in the pit of his stomach and building up tension, warmth. He should have put down a towel. They’re going to have to change the blankets. Again.
You notice, but you don’t say anything. You lift the vibrator away from Tenko’s chest, and the humming in his nerves remains, making it hard to breathe. Tenko kisses you, but your hands keep moving, the vibrator trailing down over his abdomen before dipping into the crease where his leg meets his hip. Your touch is so light there. Light enough to make him squirm, to make him wet, to make him need you even more than he already did.
It’s easier than it should be to forget you’re a villain. This is only happening to him because of you. But you’re good with Tenko. He needs you and you’re there, just like you are now, coating your hand with his slick and smearing it over the vibrator. “It’s good to start slow,” you say. The vibrator touches the base of Tenko’s entrance. Tenko almost closes his legs to hide the rush of slick as you shift the vibrator from one side to the other. “Too much?”
Tenko shakes his head, and the vibrator drags upwards, along his entrance. Once again, you shift it from side to side, making Tenko squirm. “More,” he says, and your eyes lift to his. “I need to feel you.”
“It’s a toy,” you correct. “It’s not me.”
For a supervillain smart enough to put the whole country on its heels, you have your moments of being really dumb. “You’re holding it,” Tenko says, and sucks down a shallow breath as the vibrator brushes against the tip of his cock. “You’re — ah —”
Tenko appreciates the novelty of it. How instantly intense it is. His back arches, forcing a moan out of his mouth, and you adjust the vibrator minutely, this way and that, like you’re trying to find the right frequency to make Tenko explode. Every so often you lift the vibrator away, drag it back over his entrance to collect more slick, and every time it’s away, Tenko squirms in agony. “More,” he demands. His legs are aching from being spread so far, even though it’s a position he’s wound up in multiple times a day since his heat started. “Now.”
“More like this?” You increase the pressure against his cock, and Tenko’s body seizes involuntarily, every muscle straining — until you lift it away. “Or more like this?”
You lighten up, and before Tenko can protest that it’s less now, the intensity of the vibration kicks up a notch. More like that. Tenko can’t even answer you. He’s gasping for air, his legs kicking helplessly, his hands clinging to your shoulders for dear life as you adjust the angle and pressure of the vibrator. It’s only seconds before he comes, but the instant he does, it’s too much. He can barely gasp out a plea to stop. You’re listening, like always, and as Tenko’s coming to the painful realization that one orgasm isn’t enough, you lower yourself until your head’s between Tenko’s legs.
He’s had fantasies about this. He has to warn you. “If you do that, I’m going to come all over your face.”
You shrug. “Better than you coming all over somebody else’s face.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t mind,” you say. You wrap your arms around Tenko’s thighs and tug him down on the bed, adjusting his hips to the right angle. A moment later he feels your tongue against him for the first time, and a shudder runs through his entire body. “I like how you taste.”
Your tongue is gentler than the vibrator by a long shot, but somehow Tenko feels even more out of control. If he hadn’t fantasized so much about exactly this, he wouldn’t be so thoroughly fucked right now. It’s like you read his mind. You can’t read minds, can you? If you could, you wouldn’t ask Tenko so many dumb questions. Like if he likes it. If it’s too much. Like if it was weird that you said you like how he tastes, after he’s done exactly what he said he would do and came all over your face. Like if he needs more. Of course he does. Always.
Tenko’s been in heat for three days so far, and as horrible as it is, he could have done a lot worse than you as far as someone to help him through it. In some of his saner moments, he’s gotten on Google and looked up what to expect from a heat partner, and what he’s found out is that alphas are apparently shit at it. All the articles had the same tips, or warnings: Don’t expect foreplay. Don’t expect aftercare — it’s nice to have, but not necessary. Don’t expect to have much of a say in how it goes, or any say. It might be the omega’s heat, but the alpha’s in charge. And don’t complain. Alphas will just go find an omega who doesn’t.
You’re nothing like that. Tenko feels safe with you. You’ve never asked him to touch you, or do anything for you —it’s all about him, what he likes, what makes him feel good. You make him feel good, or at least safe, no matter what insane and awful thing he’s feeling at a given moment. Omegas online make heat sound nightmarish. It would be worse than nightmarish if Tenko didn’t have you.
But he does have you — as much as he wants, and he barely has to ask. All he has to do is let you, let himself feel it, let himself look down at you between his legs and feel desire split him in half when you glance upwards and your eyes meet his. His hair is glued to his forehead and the sides of his neck with sweat and his eyes are leaking actual tears. His throat feels raw from all the sounds he’s making, none of which are anything close to as loud as the sound of your tongue lapping up his slick. Tenko can’t listen, can’t watch, can’t stop. He comes over and over again, and you never let him go.
You draw away just as it’s starting to hurt, and Tenko feels a surge of embarrassment when he sees slick dripping off your chin. You pull a towel out of the edge of the nest and wipe your face, then fold it over and start wiping at his thighs. You do this every time, like Tenko should have done when you were here during his rut, and like always, the shame hits hard. “Do you do this stuff to prove a point?” he asks, his voice rough and shaky as you set the towel aside and pick up a clean one, wiping away the sheen of sweat that covers him. “About last time —”
“I’d do this no matter what.” You shift closer to him in the nest, leaning forward to study his face, and that’s when he notices that your own face is flushed, that you’re breathing hard, too. You lean in to kiss him, once on the lips, once off to one side, over his birthmark. What you say doesn’t match the gesture at all. “You need water.”
“Wait.” Tenko stops you as you move to climb out of the nest. He’s seen that color in your face before, the unsteady rise and fall of your chest. “I want to see.”
“What?”
Tenko gestures at the pile of vibrators, and you shake your head. “No. You don’t want to see that.”
“Yes I do. You’re seeing everything.” Tenko’s stomach clenches when he thinks about it. “I didn’t get to last time. This time I want to see you come.”
“I can’t come.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.” You shake Tenko off and climb out of the nest, leaving Tenko twenty kinds of confused.
He hopes you know better than to think he’ll drop it, and when you come back with the water, he can tell you’re bracing yourself. “What do you mean, you can’t come?”
“I mean what it sounds like. Drink that,” you say.
“Only if you explain.” Tenko uncaps the water bottle and takes a sip or three. “Explain.”
“I just can’t.” You nudge Tenko to one side so you can pull the stained blankets out from underneath him, then pile them up with the towels. More laundry. Tenko’s water bill for this month is going to be ridiculous. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to anyway, since I’m not built like the rest of you. But —”
You trail off, staring at nothing. “The doctors — the ones you keep defending — spent fourteen years trying to fix me. I don’t even know half the things they did or why they did them, but I know they didn’t work. Even if something worked right at the beginning, there’s no way it works now.”
You always tell sad stories like they don’t matter. Tenko wonders if you know that makes it worse. “It’s broken,” you say finally. “That’s just how it is.”
It’s broken, you say, like your body isn’t yours. Tenko caps the water bottle and reaches for you. He’s naked, like he’s been since this morning when he woke up in flames and yanked off his clothes, but you’re still wearing one of his shirts. He pulls at the hem. “Take it off.”
“Why?”
“I want to see you,” Tenko says. “Show me.”
You draw back, out of his grip. “I need to do laundry,” you say. “Finish your water. I’ll be back.”
It still feels like rejection. It feels like that every time you pull away instead of giving yourself to Tenko the way he’s giving himself to you, and rejection feels like hell. When Tenko’s mind is clear of the fog, he knows it’s because you’re thinking clearly. You aren’t forgetting that you’re a villain and he’s a hero, that as soon as this is over he’ll be back to trying to bring you down; you remember, so you keep him at a distance. You remember, so you hide things. But not quite enough.
There aren’t many stabilization centers in Japan. Tenko looked it up the last time you went to do laundry. All of them keep employee records that they’d probably be willing to disclose if it meant catching you, and Tenko knows what you look like. As soon as he’s out of here, he can find out who you really are, or at least what name you’re hiding out under. And once your real face is out in the open, there won’t be anywhere for you to hide. Tenko will catch you, or some other hero will, and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.
Tenko doesn’t like that thought. Part of it is his stupid heat-clouded brain, whining about how being separated from you forever would be the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone, but the rest of it is something he’s been kicking around for a while. There are lots of things wrong with you. Your moral compass is fucked up to hell and back, but you still have one. You still have lines you won’t cross, mistakes you’re willing to fix, and you don’t kill people. And if Tenko’s learned anything from being designation-swapped twice, it’s that society is exactly as fucked-up as you are.
Society doesn’t bend to accommodate people who are different. It forces them to bend until they break, and Tenko’s pretty sure that’s what happened to you. You’ve done awful things, and you’re planning to keep doing them until someone stops you. But Tenko remembers his first fight with you, how you passed up chance after chance to swap him until he used Decay against you. In your view, the world hit first. You’re just defending yourself.
Maybe. Or maybe you want to punish the world for what it’s done to you, just like Sensei wanted Tomura to grow up to do. Tenko tries to think back to what Sensei used to say to him, what Sensei would do when Tomura panicked or threw up or cried. Whatever it was, Tomura didn’t like it. Tomura always — hid —
Tenko remembers that, then remembers something else, too — what happened the last time you went to do the laundry and didn’t come back. Shit. He struggles to his feet, yanks on a pair of sweatpants, and heads for the laundry room.
You’re there, just like he knew you would be. You left the door open this time, and this time you’re standing, leaning with both hands on the washing machine, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut. Not that it helps. You were crying last time. You’re crying this time, too.
Tenko touches your shoulder, and you flinch away without looking up. It hurts. You should know it’s him, know he’s not here to hurt you — and then the neck of your shirt shifts aside, and Tenko sees bruises. Fingerprint-shaped bruises, from all the times he’s death-gripped your shoulders over the past three days. “I hurt you again.”
“I told you I’d be back.”
“I came looking for you last time, too.” Tenko grasps your arm, a little lower down. It’s a relief when you don’t pull away. “Talk to me.”
“I’m not going to talk about how I can’t come.” The contempt in your voice stings, even though Tenko knows it’s not aimed at him. “Let it go, Shimura. You have enough on your mind without pretending to care.”
“I’m not pretending to care.” Tenko comes closer to you. “Are you pretending to care about me?”
“What makes you think I care?”
It should sting, but it doesn’t. You’re not as good at lying as you think you are. “Staying here with me is too big of a risk to take for someone who doesn’t care. I’m not pretending and neither are you.”
“Shimura.” Your voice isn’t flat. It’s never flat around him anymore. “You weren’t supposed to be so good.”
“I’m not,” Tenko says, startled. He doesn’t think he’s a particularly good person. Decent, maybe. After what he did to his family, decent is as good as it gets. But that’s not even the weirdest part about what you said. “What do you —”
You straighten up, turn to face him, and Tenko gets a split-second look at your face before you step forward into his arms. Not enough to tell him anything. Not enough to pull his attention away from you and how you’re pressed against him. Your arms wind carefully around his neck as your forehead comes to rest against his shoulder, and Tenko’s grip on you tightens on instinct. Not the omega instinct to cling out of desperation. Tenko remembers this one, and even now it carries an alpha tinge. He can see the scar on the side of your neck. He put it there. You’re his.
“Hey,” he says, and you nod against his shoulder. “Let’s go back. I’m tired and I don’t sleep as well when you aren’t there.”
That was maybe more than he should have said. Tenko wishes it wasn’t the truth. Wishes he hasn’t spent the last six months waking up in the middle of the night, reaching for the empty space at his side. Your voice is quiet, muffled against his skin. “Same here.”
Ever since he was rescued by All Might from All For One, Shimura Tenko's led a charmed life - except that he's a beta, in a society where alphas are privileged, omegas are prioritized, and betas are an afterthought. But when Tenko finds himself investigating a series of designation-swaps that have devastated the lives of the victims, he comes face to face with the terrible truths at the heart of society's placid, inflexible structure, and the enigmatic villain who's bent on exposing it all. The one they call Love's Executioner - otherwise known as, you. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Reminder: this fic is rated E and labeled 'enemies to lovers' on Ao3. Proceed at your own risk. Lots of smut in this chapter.
Chapter 8
Fuck alphas. Forget alphas. This is what Tenko needs — your presence, your scent, your touch. You didn’t come here by accident. You came for Tenko, and the words slip out of his mouth as he crushes himself against you. “Don’t leave —”
“I’m not. I have to get you home.” You say that, but then you try to pull away. “Shimura, I’m sorry. I swear I didn’t —”
“I know.” Tenko knows you didn’t cause his heat. Knows you wouldn’t do that to him again. “If it’s your fault, it comes on fast. This was slow. Don’t leave —”
“I’m not.” You work one arm free of Tenko’s embrace and snap your fingers. A chorus of anguished howls rise up from the sidewalk as the alphas who cornered Tenko tip over the edge into heat. Burying his face in the side of your neck doesn’t block out the scents entirely, but it helps. “Come on. We have to go.”
Tenko wants to get home. Needs it. With you. But some impulse makes him hesitate, makes him turn halfway back to your victims, all of whom are in agony. “You’re going to leave them out here? If any alphas show up —”
“They’ll get exactly what they deserve,” you say. Your voice is cold. “I don’t care what happens to them.”
For the first time since Tenko met you, you sound like a real supervillain. It sends a chill down his spine. He feels sick. He’d feel sicker, except that if he’d fought back, like he would have had to, all four of them would be dead. They’re better off dealing with what you did, and with what they’d have done to Tenko — “Do you care?” you ask, and Tenko shakes his head. “Good. Let’s get you home.”
Knowing you’re here, knowing you’re not leaving, calms Tenko’s nerves ever so slightly. But it doesn’t do shit for his symptoms, and it doesn’t tamp down his pheromones, and halfway home, you lose patience with dragging him along. You pull him into an alley, and for a split second, Tenko thinks you’ll give him what he needs then and there — but instead you reach up with one hand and tap a headset hooked onto your ear. “I need a gate. You know to where.”
Whoever’s on the other end of it — your accomplice — says something in response. “I know what I’m doing. Tell on me if you have to,” you say. “Just give me the gate.”
Tenko sees purple mist drifting through the air, pooling around his feet. There’s something familiar about it, and not just because Tenko saw it in Overhaul’s compound. The ground falls away from beneath the two of you all at once, and you drop through the warp gate to land just inside the door to Tenko’s apartment.
Tenko can barely focus enough to get his feet under him, but once he does, he pushes you back against the door, just like he did the first time you were here. He buries his face in the side of your neck, slides his hands beneath your shirt. He needs you. He needs your scent, all over him, so anyone who so much as breathes near him will know that he’s taken. He’s not up for grabs. He’s with you.
“Shimura,” you say awkwardly. Tenko wishes you’d touch him. “I don’t think I’m the person you need right now.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not,” you say. “This isn’t like before. I could help when you were an alpha, but my body’s not — I can’t give you what you need. You should find an alpha.”
“I don’t want an alpha,” Tenko snaps, or tries to snap. His voice is rattling again, and an awful feeling is welling up inside him, making it hard to breathe or even think. “If you want to leave, just leave. Don’t make up some lie about how I can’t get through it without a knot.”
Are you going to push him away? Tenko feels you shift in his grip, and as much as he wants to Decay his costume and your clothes and drown in your scent, the thought that you want to leave feels like enough to stop his heat in its tracks. Tenko wants you here. He wants you to want to be here, with him, and if you don’t, there’s no point. Tenko tries to step back from you and finds that he can’t. Part of it is that he can’t pull away from your scent. And part of it is your arms coming up around him, keeping him close.
You aren’t leaving. “I’ll stay to help,” you say. “I might not have triggered this heat, but it’s still my fault. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“I know. What are your symptoms?” you ask. Huh? “You’re too far into it for me to switch you back without trouble, but you also aren’t fully in it yet. Depending on how you’re feeling, different things will help.”
“Headache. My body hurts. Everything is too loud or too bright — or the smells —” Tenko’s never been more grateful to be in his own apartment. “Not yours. Yours is good.”
“It’s still weird that you can smell me,” you remark. “What about arousal? Are you feeling any of that?”
“Uh, yeah.” It’s weird. Being close to you is calming Tenko down, but he knows it wouldn’t take much to tip him over into a pathetic horny meltdown. “Why?”
“It’ll get worse,” you say. Your hand shifts across Tenko’s shoulder blades. “You’re really tense. That’s not a surprise given that it started when you were in public and your friends sent you home alone.”
Tenko’s friends. Fuck. “I was supposed to tell them I got home safe.”
“You do that. I’ll start filling the bathtub,” you say. Tenko draws back far enough to give you a weird look. “Warm water helps people relax. All of this will be harder if you go into it scared.”
“I’m not — scared.”
“Most people are,” you say. Tenko blinks, and you wedge yourself out from under his arm. “Text your friends. I’ll be in the bathroom.”
Tenko means to send one text and follow you in, but his groupchat with his friends blows up the instant he sends the message letting them know he’s in heat and he got home. Midoriya has updates about the scene Tenko left. Twice is worried about him. Touya’s sent Tenko literal paragraphs about how to cope with being in heat and which of the sex toys in the box of omega essentials are the best. Toga and Spinner give thumbs-up to Tenko’s texts, and Magne starts listing off alphas she knows who can help out. Tenko doesn’t want an alpha. Tenko sets down his phone and heads back to the bathroom.
The lights are dimmer than usual. He didn’t know the lights did that. The air is warm and full of steam, and you’re sorting through Tenko’s bathroom cabinet. As Tenko watches, you take out a hair clip he never uses and close the door. “What’s that?”
“To put your hair up so it doesn’t get wet,” you say. “Do you want help with your costume?”
“I can do it on my own,” Tenko says. “Don’t look.”
He’s not sure why he doesn’t want you to see it, but the idea of you getting a good look at his new anatomy makes him cringe. He doesn’t even like looking at it on himself. Seeing it through someone else’s eyes sounds like a nightmare. Tenko knows you’ll see it eventually, and he’s fine with that — just not right now. He tells himself that until he can almost believe it.
You don’t look up until Tenko’s already settled into the warm water, a really embarrassing sigh of relief exiting his mouth. “I’ll clip up your hair,” you say. “Hold still.”
Tenko holds still, except for the stupid moan that sneaks out of him when he feels your hands in his hair. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m kind of immune to this stuff. At my old job I had to be.”
“You had a job?” Tenko can’t keep the shock out of his voice. “Doing what?”
“There are stabilization centers for people with irregular heats. A lot of people with irregular heats also start young — like, really young — so it’s safer for them to be in a secure facility.”
Tenko’s stomach lurches. “When you say stabilize them —”
“Nothing sexual,” you say. “Providing a secure environment that’s not overstimulating at all, explaining what’s going on and why, that kind of thing. First heats can be traumatic if they aren’t handled properly. The goal was to handle it properly.”
“And you did that,” Tenko says. It doesn’t square with what he knows about the rest of you — or does it. “Why?”
“I don’t have a designation. Some of the patients are scared of everybody while their heat is happening, and since I don’t have a physiological response to other people’s heats, they felt like they could trust me more.” Your hands slide from Tenko’s hair, and he misses them within seconds. “I’m going to get you some water. It’s easy to dehydrate during a heat.”
You come back with a water bottle, setting it in easy reach, then retreat to the opposite side of the bathroom. Somehow that strikes Tenko as weirder than you having a job. “Get in. Don’t you want to?”
“It’s possible to get through a heat without sexual contact,” you say. “I assumed that’s what you’d want.”
“Why?” Tenko’s used a lot of words to describe you. Clueless hasn’t been one of them until now. “I’m not a kid. Get in here before it gets cold.”
Something crosses his mind. “Unless you don’t want —”
He breaks off in a hurry, averting his eyes. You’ve just taken off your shirt, followed by your bra, and out of the corner of Tenko’s eye, he sees you getting to your feet to take off your pants. “I don’t care if you look,” you say, that odd flatness back in your voice. “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.”
Except there is. Bruises. And you’ve got at least two new scars. “What happened?” Tenko asks, as you sink down in the bathtub at the other end. “Hey. Who did that?”
“It’s my fault,” you say. You draw your knees up to your chest, resting your chin on them. “I made a mistake. Or three.”
“That’s nice. Not what I asked.” Tenko watches as you hunch down even further in the bathtub. “Who did that?”
You don’t answer. “Is Eri okay?”
Tenko wasn’t expecting that. He stares at you, speechless, as you avert your eyes. “I’ve been trying to keep track. Through the news. But they never mention her.”
“Because she’s a kid,” Tenko says, and you nod. “Me and Midoriya have gone to see her a few times. She has some messed-up designation stuff going on. I guess Overhaul kept trying to change hers.”
“He — what?” You look back, make eye contact, and misery flashes across your face. “I didn’t know. I only knew about the bullets. You have to believe me —”
“Nobody thinks it was you,” Tenko says. He was sort of surprised by that. “We have more data on your quirk than we’ve had for any villain, ever, so we know your swaps are complete. People you swap don’t get stuck between designations the way she is.”
“If —” you start, then break off. “She has a designation still. I might be able to swap it to one or the other.”
“I thought designation disorders were something society made up,” Tenko says, and you glare at him. “Sorry. But come on — you’re a supervillain. Why do you care?”
“She’s just a kid,” you say. You look away again. “No kid deserves this.”
For a supervillain, you’re really stuck on kids. Tenko wonders if you mean it. If you could help Eri. How the hell he’d swing that — although with you and your warp-gate friend, maybe all he’d have to do is tell you where she is. “We didn’t tell,” he says. “Me and Midoriya. They think Overhaul was just conducting designation experiments. They don’t know about how he made the bullets.”
Your shoulders slump ever so slightly. “Good.”
It’s quiet for a little while. Tenko’s shoulders are getting cold, so he sinks further into the bathtub, down far enough that his feet brush yours, even though yours are drawn up. The contact’s not a good thing for Tenko. As the last of the tension slides loose from his body, heat floods in to replace it. It’s quiet here. The lights aren’t as bright. He’s not out in the open and stuck in tight, uncomfortable clothes, and the only scents in this room are his and yours. You reach out to touch his knee and it takes way too much of Tenko’s self-control to keep his legs from spreading.
His face is burning up. His breathing shifts, and he knows you can see it. “How do you feel?” you ask. Your hand is still on his knee, fingers spread over his kneecap. “Shimura —
Tenko pulls away, gets to his knees, and across the bathtub, you extend your legs, fucking finally. Tenko crawls across the space between you, ignoring the water that slops out onto the floor, and straddles your lap.
He’s taller than you, especially like this. You have to look up to make eye contact. “I’m not an alpha,” you say.
“You think I’d do this if you were an alpha?” The thought of sitting exposed like this in some alpha’s lap makes Tenko’s insides crumple and twist, even as he discovers that it’s possible to notice slick dripping down his legs even in water. “You said you’d help —”
Your hands rise from the water to grip Tenko’s waist, then down to his hips, where your thumbs skim lightly over their arches. Tenko’s body jerks. You do it again, shifting to sit up in the bargain, and Tenko squirms as your legs brush against his inner thighs. “Stop it. Don’t tease.”
“I’m not.” Your hands glide upwards from Tenko’s hips, one stopping at his waist just below the water and the other continuing upward, outlining every vertebrae along Tenko’s spine. “I didn’t get to touch you last time.”
Tenko hears what you aren’t saying: And I wanted to. He’s pissed that you waited and not, all at the same time — pissed at missing out, too busy crumbling under your careful touch to be pissed at anything at all. When Tenko was in rut, he was rough on you. You aren’t rough on him. You’re gentle, deliberate, and all Tenko can do is stare down at your hands, making their way across his body above water and below it. Watching you touch him shouldn’t do anything for him, but seeing how intent you are on him is enough to make Tenko’s legs tremble. He’s so focused on your right hand, tracing over the curve from his waist to his hip, that he doesn’t notice your left until it’s curled around the back of his neck, guiding him down to you for a kiss.
Tenko’s dreamed about kissing you again. He didn’t dream about it like this, shaking in your lap and stupid with heat, but it’s better this way. He grasps your shoulders for balance, but he slumps down over you anyway, his hips twitching in search of some kind of friction. One of your legs bends beneath him, pressing up against his cock. Tenko grinds against you without hesitating, and it feels good. It feels so good, but it doesn’t help — all it does is intensify the need for more from you. More of you. What are you waiting for?
The words make their way out sideways, through clenched teeth. “Don’t tease —”
“I’m not,” you murmur. “Tell me what you want. I’m not going to act like I know.”
Tenko doesn’t know what to do with that. If you were an alpha he’d be knotted already, but the thought makes him want to slam his legs shut. What is he supposed to want right now, anyway? You tug him closer to you, press your lips against his throat, and Tenko lets his head fall back, exposing more for you. You won’t hurt him. Tenko knows that. And since he knows that —since you said you want to help — “Touch me.”
You don’t give him a hard time about where. The hand on his waist drifts downwards, past his navel and over his hip, until you can brush your thumb lightly against his cock. His clit. Whatever it is. Tenko doesn’t need to know that to know that your barely-there touch is the best thing he’s ever felt in his life. Your lips are against his throat and your hand is between his legs, and for a few seconds, all he can do is sink further into the sensation.
It’s only peaceful for a few seconds. Then the need turns urgent. Tenko’s body tenses, whines forcing their way out of his mouth, his hips jerking as he tries to force more contact with your hand. Your hand slips lower, fingers ghosting over his new anatomy, just shy of his entrance. Tenko spreads his legs wider. In case you didn’t get the message: “There.”
“Here?” Your fingers are closer to where he needs you this time, but you skip past so you can stroke his cock. Tenko’s no stranger to jerking off with his new anatomy, but he’s never gotten this close, this fast. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just —”
“Anything,” Tenko gasps. He needs something. He needs to come or he’s going to lose his mind, and he doesn’t know what to listen to — the desperation to feel you inside him or the hits of pleasure that rip through his entire body as you stroke his cock. “Please —”
Your free hand closes over his hip with surprising strength, keeping him still so he can’t disrupt the rhythm of your strokes or pull away. Something about that, about you taking over, snaps Tenko’s mind in half. Half of him is horrified at himself for the exposure in front of his enemy, for leaving himself so vulnerable. The other half is focused on how good it feels to come this way, responsible for none of it, you taking care of everything. Tenko’s body spasms out of his control, desperate gasps and moans tearing their way out of his mouth as you touch him through it — and keep touching him, the movement of your fingers changing from even strokes to steady pressure as your thumb teases his tip. It feels like there’s a flood of slick dripping out of him, enough to leave puddles on the floor if he wasn’t in a bathtub. It doesn’t matter where he is. Tenko forgets it all as he comes a second time.
You keep touching him until he stops coming, way after he’s lost track of how many times. The water’s barely lukewarm when he starts to regain awareness, finding himself slumped all the way forward against you, his body shaking too much to really hold on. You’re holding on for him, as steady as he isn’t. Your voice is steady, too, when you speak up. “How are you feeling?”
“I — I don’t know.” Tenko stumbles at the sound of his own voice. He sounds like he’s been screaming. Has he been screaming? He hopes not. “Weird.”
“Okay. The water’s getting cold, and you need to get comfortable, so we should probably get —” You break off. Tenko’s pulled it together just enough to tighten his grip on you. “I’m not leaving. I just think we should get out now.”
That makes sense. Sort of. It makes sense when Tenko filters out the need to be glued to you at all times. “Yeah. Okay.”
Getting out of the bathtub is harder than it should be. Tenko’s legs are shaking so badly that he can barely stand, and he’s leaning on you as you try to dry both of you off. He tries to help, but you tell him to focus on not losing his balance. With nothing else to do, he finds himself focusing on your body. Your scars. Last time you were here, he only noticed them once, only mentioned them once. This time, he reaches out to touch them. He traces over three of them before you jerk away from his hand. “Don’t.”
The feeling of rejection is instant and enormous. Tenko pulls his hand back, his breath catching and his eyes stinging, and you notice it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, under layers of fog, Tenko’s embarrassed with himself, furious with himself for getting visibly upset, or getting upset at all. The rest of him lets it show. If you see you’re hurting him, maybe you’ll stop.
Tenko sees you grit your teeth. “I want to be here, Shimura. I want to help you. But you don’t get to mess with my head just because you’re in heat.”
“I’m not messing with your head.” Tenko’s voice won’t stop wavering. “I cared last time. I cared the last time we fought.”
“Right. The last time when you tried to collapse my ribcage with your thighs.”
“I wasn’t —” Tenko’s face is heating up. When he’s sane again, thinking about this is going to make him want to kill himself. “You were just trying to get away. I thought you were doing it on purpose, to — turn me on. It was stupid.”
You don’t say anything. You’re just staring. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” Tenko says. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
You avert your eyes, wrapping a towel around Tenko’s waist and another around yourself. “I need to borrow some of your clothes. I don’t have anything but what I showed up in.”
“Yeah.” Tenko coughs. “The stuff you wore last time is in a box in my closet.”
You give him a weird look. “You didn’t put it back?”
Tenko decides not to answer that. He gets his feet under him and heads for the bedroom.
Once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. His bed, which is usually his favorite place to sprawl out, seems too empty, too open to be safe. Some stupid instinct is telling him to get in the closet, or under the bed, and he hesitates, clutching the towel around his waist. You draw up alongside him. “Do you want to make a nest?”
It’s so stupid. Tenko nods, cringing with embarrassment, but your expression doesn’t shift. “You used the couch cushions last time. Do you want those?”
That’s a start. Tenko goes to the living room. With the two of you, it only takes one trip.
While you find clothes to change into, Tenko tears apart his bedroom in the service of building his nest, just like he did last time. Blankets, pillows, a spare set of sheets. Clothes — mostly his, but also the ones you left in the bathroom, because they smell like you. Tenko knows it’s stupid to want them when you’ll be right there, but in case you leave. You could leave him at any second, if you decide he’s messing with you again.
Once Tenko’s happy enough with the nest, he puts on clothes. Loose ones, at your suggestion. Stuff that’ll be easy to get under or take off. He doesn’t want to take a water bottle with him into the nest, but you tell him he has to hydrate, and Tenko fills in a threat all by himself — or you’ll leave. You’re wearing the same shirt you had on the last night you were here as you climb into the nest beside him, giving a pointed glance at the water bottle. “Drink.”
Or you’ll leave. Tenko unscrews the cap and downs half of it, then sets it aside. He feels shaky and cold, his skin prickling and the hairs on his arms rising up, and that feeling of rejection swamps him again. Now Tenko knows that showing you he’s hurt won’t help, like it would with an alpha. He twists away from you and curls inwards, trying to keep warm.
He’s only trying by himself for a second. You’re right there, wrapping yourself around him from behind, pulling a blanket up over both of you. Tenko relaxes back against you on instinct, an instinct that grows stronger when your arm falls over his waist and holds on tight. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” you say. “I know how you feel.”
Tenko manages to scoff. “You could never know how this feels.”
“My whole life, there’s never been a place where I fit,” you say. Tenko listens for the familiar flatness in your voice, but it’s not there. “There’s no one in the world like me. I might not know how it feels to think you’re being rejected when you’re this vulnerable. But I know how it feels to be alone.”
It’s quiet for a second. “I didn’t say that so you’d feel sorry for me. Just so you’d know I wasn’t talking out of my ass.”
Tenko believes you. He also thinks there’s no way you understand how sad what you just said sounded. He hadn’t thought of it like that before. He’d thought of your lack of a designation as being whatever a female beta would experience, but even betas have shared experiences with alphas, with omegas, with each other. You’re scent-blind, so there’s a whole sense you’re missing, a whole layer of communication you can’t perceive. Tenko remembers being a kid, that feeling where everyone else was in on a joke they wouldn’t tell him. Then he tries to imagine that feeling as someone’s whole life. Not someone’s. Yours.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” you continue. “I know you didn’t mean it the way I took it. I’m sorry.”
“You say you’re sorry way too much to be a supervillain,” Tenko says, and you snort. He twists in your arms, trying to get a good look at your face, but as soon as he’s facing you, the urge to bury himself in your shoulder and breathe you in is overpowering. “This heat thing. You know more than me. What happens next?”
“You’ll rest for a little bit,” you say. “When you wake up again, it’ll be a little worse. And that’s how it’ll keep going until it peaks, and then the same way back down the other side.”
Tenko decides he needs more contact with you before he can sleep. He shifts over until he’s halfway on top of you. “It’ll be longer in your case,” you say quietly. “If you mean it about not wanting an alpha.”
Maybe you and Tenko can understand each other a little bit. He hears that same note of uncertainty in your voice, the one he felt when you pulled away. He tugs the neckline of your borrowed shirt aside and finds one of two scars he gave you, the one that could have been a mating mark in another life. Tenko presses his cheek against it, then bites down lightly, nowhere close to enough to break the skin.
If you were an alpha, you’d be all over him for that move. As it is, Tenko’s pretty sure he gets the point across. Your arms adjust around him, and you pull the blanket up to cover you both again, and Tenko settles in for a little sleep — just enough to get him through the next phase of his heat with his sanity intact.
Tenko lifts a weirdly shaped object out of the box of omega essentials his friends put together and holds it out to you. “Do you know what this is?”
You don’t look up. “Vibrator.”
“The last one was a vibrator,” Tenko says. You nod. You’re sprawled out on the bed, staring at nothing, while he uses the space between meltdowns to figure out what tools — or toys — the two of you have at your disposal. “And the one before that. Why are there so many vibrators?”
“A lot of people aren’t into penetration when they aren’t in heat. The vibrators are for getting off without it.”
You look like you’re going to fall asleep. Tenko pokes your shoulder with the vibrator he’s holding and you look up, eyebrows raised. “What?”
“People get off when they aren’t in heat?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?” you ask, and Tenko’s face heats up. He didn’t mean to bring it up, but you asked him how he touches himself one time while you were doing it, and he should have known you’d file it away to use later. “They do. All the time.”
“And the vibrators help,” Tenko says. You nod. “Have you used one?”
“I don’t go into heat.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t get off.” Tenko gets the satisfaction of seeing your face flush. “I knew it. Do they work?”
“I’ll show you,” you say, “on you. Not on me.”
Tenko wants to see it on you. He wants to see how you like to get yourself off, file it away himself to use later when you’re gone and he needs to think about something that will make him come instantly. “Now?”
“If you want.” You sit up and study the box of toys for yourself. “It’ll get you going again. You know that, right?”
“Right.” Tenko can feel it creeping back over him already — a little worse than before, just like you said. “Show me. Unless you don’t know how or something.”
You glance sideways at him and pick up one of the toys he’s already tossed aside. “Sit back. And spread your legs.”
Tenko wishes you hadn’t said that. He never really stops being wet around you, in heat, but when you tell him stuff like that, it gets a lot worse. He sits back on the pillows, shifting his legs apart, and you crawl up between them, stretching yourself out over him until the two of you can kiss. Tenko’s still pissed at himself for not kissing you more the first time you were here. He appreciates any chance to make up for lost time.
He hears a weird humming and sees that you’ve turned the vibrator on. “This what the first setting feels like,” you say, and you rest it against the back of Tenko’s hand. It’s gentle but insistent, and it feels like nothing much. “How does it feel — here?”
Tenko sucks in a breath. You’ve pressed it against one of his nipples, and it’s not nothing much any longer. Tenko can feel it traveling through his nerves, getting hung up in the pit of his stomach and building up tension, warmth. He should have put down a towel. They’re going to have to change the blankets. Again.
You notice, but you don’t say anything. You lift the vibrator away from Tenko’s chest, and the humming in his nerves remains, making it hard to breathe. Tenko kisses you, but your hands keep moving, the vibrator trailing down over his abdomen before dipping into the crease where his leg meets his hip. Your touch is so light there. Light enough to make him squirm, to make him wet, to make him need you even more than he already did.
It’s easier than it should be to forget you’re a villain. This is only happening to him because of you. But you’re good with Tenko. He needs you and you’re there, just like you are now, coating your hand with his slick and smearing it over the vibrator. “It’s good to start slow,” you say. The vibrator touches the base of Tenko’s entrance. Tenko almost closes his legs to hide the rush of slick as you shift the vibrator from one side to the other. “Too much?”
Tenko shakes his head, and the vibrator drags upwards, along his entrance. Once again, you shift it from side to side, making Tenko squirm. “More,” he says, and your eyes lift to his. “I need to feel you.”
“It’s a toy,” you correct. “It’s not me.”
For a supervillain smart enough to put the whole country on its heels, you have your moments of being really dumb. “You’re holding it,” Tenko says, and sucks down a shallow breath as the vibrator brushes against the tip of his cock. “You’re — ah —”
Tenko appreciates the novelty of it. How instantly intense it is. His back arches, forcing a moan out of his mouth, and you adjust the vibrator minutely, this way and that, like you’re trying to find the right frequency to make Tenko explode. Every so often you lift the vibrator away, drag it back over his entrance to collect more slick, and every time it’s away, Tenko squirms in agony. “More,” he demands. His legs are aching from being spread so far, even though it’s a position he’s wound up in multiple times a day since his heat started. “Now.”
“More like this?” You increase the pressure against his cock, and Tenko’s body seizes involuntarily, every muscle straining — until you lift it away. “Or more like this?”
You lighten up, and before Tenko can protest that it’s less now, the intensity of the vibration kicks up a notch. More like that. Tenko can’t even answer you. He’s gasping for air, his legs kicking helplessly, his hands clinging to your shoulders for dear life as you adjust the angle and pressure of the vibrator. It’s only seconds before he comes, but the instant he does, it’s too much. He can barely gasp out a plea to stop. You’re listening, like always, and as Tenko’s coming to the painful realization that one orgasm isn’t enough, you lower yourself until your head’s between Tenko’s legs.
He’s had fantasies about this. He has to warn you. “If you do that, I’m going to come all over your face.”
You shrug. “Better than you coming all over somebody else’s face.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t mind,” you say. You wrap your arms around Tenko’s thighs and tug him down on the bed, adjusting his hips to the right angle. A moment later he feels your tongue against him for the first time, and a shudder runs through his entire body. “I like how you taste.”
Your tongue is gentler than the vibrator by a long shot, but somehow Tenko feels even more out of control. If he hadn’t fantasized so much about exactly this, he wouldn’t be so thoroughly fucked right now. It’s like you read his mind. You can’t read minds, can you? If you could, you wouldn’t ask Tenko so many dumb questions. Like if he likes it. If it’s too much. Like if it was weird that you said you like how he tastes, after he’s done exactly what he said he would do and came all over your face. Like if he needs more. Of course he does. Always.
Tenko’s been in heat for three days so far, and as horrible as it is, he could have done a lot worse than you as far as someone to help him through it. In some of his saner moments, he’s gotten on Google and looked up what to expect from a heat partner, and what he’s found out is that alphas are apparently shit at it. All the articles had the same tips, or warnings: Don’t expect foreplay. Don’t expect aftercare — it’s nice to have, but not necessary. Don’t expect to have much of a say in how it goes, or any say. It might be the omega’s heat, but the alpha’s in charge. And don’t complain. Alphas will just go find an omega who doesn’t.
You’re nothing like that. Tenko feels safe with you. You’ve never asked him to touch you, or do anything for you —it’s all about him, what he likes, what makes him feel good. You make him feel good, or at least safe, no matter what insane and awful thing he’s feeling at a given moment. Omegas online make heat sound nightmarish. It would be worse than nightmarish if Tenko didn’t have you.
But he does have you — as much as he wants, and he barely has to ask. All he has to do is let you, let himself feel it, let himself look down at you between his legs and feel desire split him in half when you glance upwards and your eyes meet his. His hair is glued to his forehead and the sides of his neck with sweat and his eyes are leaking actual tears. His throat feels raw from all the sounds he’s making, none of which are anything close to as loud as the sound of your tongue lapping up his slick. Tenko can’t listen, can’t watch, can’t stop. He comes over and over again, and you never let him go.
You draw away just as it’s starting to hurt, and Tenko feels a surge of embarrassment when he sees slick dripping off your chin. You pull a towel out of the edge of the nest and wipe your face, then fold it over and start wiping at his thighs. You do this every time, like Tenko should have done when you were here during his rut, and like always, the shame hits hard. “Do you do this stuff to prove a point?” he asks, his voice rough and shaky as you set the towel aside and pick up a clean one, wiping away the sheen of sweat that covers him. “About last time —”
“I’d do this no matter what.” You shift closer to him in the nest, leaning forward to study his face, and that’s when he notices that your own face is flushed, that you’re breathing hard, too. You lean in to kiss him, once on the lips, once off to one side, over his birthmark. What you say doesn’t match the gesture at all. “You need water.”
“Wait.” Tenko stops you as you move to climb out of the nest. He’s seen that color in your face before, the unsteady rise and fall of your chest. “I want to see.”
“What?”
Tenko gestures at the pile of vibrators, and you shake your head. “No. You don’t want to see that.”
“Yes I do. You’re seeing everything.” Tenko’s stomach clenches when he thinks about it. “I didn’t get to last time. This time I want to see you come.”
“I can’t come.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.” You shake Tenko off and climb out of the nest, leaving Tenko twenty kinds of confused.
He hopes you know better than to think he’ll drop it, and when you come back with the water, he can tell you’re bracing yourself. “What do you mean, you can’t come?”
“I mean what it sounds like. Drink that,” you say.
“Only if you explain.” Tenko uncaps the water bottle and takes a sip or three. “Explain.”
“I just can’t.” You nudge Tenko to one side so you can pull the stained blankets out from underneath him, then pile them up with the towels. More laundry. Tenko’s water bill for this month is going to be ridiculous. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to anyway, since I’m not built like the rest of you. But —”
You trail off, staring at nothing. “The doctors — the ones you keep defending — spent fourteen years trying to fix me. I don’t even know half the things they did or why they did them, but I know they didn’t work. Even if something worked right at the beginning, there’s no way it works now.”
You always tell sad stories like they don’t matter. Tenko wonders if you know that makes it worse. “It’s broken,” you say finally. “That’s just how it is.”
It’s broken, you say, like your body isn’t yours. Tenko caps the water bottle and reaches for you. He’s naked, like he’s been since this morning when he woke up in flames and yanked off his clothes, but you’re still wearing one of his shirts. He pulls at the hem. “Take it off.”
“Why?”
“I want to see you,” Tenko says. “Show me.”
You draw back, out of his grip. “I need to do laundry,” you say. “Finish your water. I’ll be back.”
It still feels like rejection. It feels like that every time you pull away instead of giving yourself to Tenko the way he’s giving himself to you, and rejection feels like hell. When Tenko’s mind is clear of the fog, he knows it’s because you’re thinking clearly. You aren’t forgetting that you’re a villain and he’s a hero, that as soon as this is over he’ll be back to trying to bring you down; you remember, so you keep him at a distance. You remember, so you hide things. But not quite enough.
There aren’t many stabilization centers in Japan. Tenko looked it up the last time you went to do laundry. All of them keep employee records that they’d probably be willing to disclose if it meant catching you, and Tenko knows what you look like. As soon as he’s out of here, he can find out who you really are, or at least what name you’re hiding out under. And once your real face is out in the open, there won’t be anywhere for you to hide. Tenko will catch you, or some other hero will, and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.
Tenko doesn’t like that thought. Part of it is his stupid heat-clouded brain, whining about how being separated from you forever would be the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone, but the rest of it is something he’s been kicking around for a while. There are lots of things wrong with you. Your moral compass is fucked up to hell and back, but you still have one. You still have lines you won’t cross, mistakes you’re willing to fix, and you don’t kill people. And if Tenko’s learned anything from being designation-swapped twice, it’s that society is exactly as fucked-up as you are.
Society doesn’t bend to accommodate people who are different. It forces them to bend until they break, and Tenko’s pretty sure that’s what happened to you. You’ve done awful things, and you’re planning to keep doing them until someone stops you. But Tenko remembers his first fight with you, how you passed up chance after chance to swap him until he used Decay against you. In your view, the world hit first. You’re just defending yourself.
Maybe. Or maybe you want to punish the world for what it’s done to you, just like Sensei wanted Tomura to grow up to do. Tenko tries to think back to what Sensei used to say to him, what Sensei would do when Tomura panicked or threw up or cried. Whatever it was, Tomura didn’t like it. Tomura always — hid —
Tenko remembers that, then remembers something else, too — what happened the last time you went to do the laundry and didn’t come back. Shit. He struggles to his feet, yanks on a pair of sweatpants, and heads for the laundry room.
You’re there, just like he knew you would be. You left the door open this time, and this time you’re standing, leaning with both hands on the washing machine, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut. Not that it helps. You were crying last time. You’re crying this time, too.
Tenko touches your shoulder, and you flinch away without looking up. It hurts. You should know it’s him, know he’s not here to hurt you — and then the neck of your shirt shifts aside, and Tenko sees bruises. Fingerprint-shaped bruises, from all the times he’s death-gripped your shoulders over the past three days. “I hurt you again.”
“I told you I’d be back.”
“I came looking for you last time, too.” Tenko grasps your arm, a little lower down. It’s a relief when you don’t pull away. “Talk to me.”
“I’m not going to talk about how I can’t come.” The contempt in your voice stings, even though Tenko knows it’s not aimed at him. “Let it go, Shimura. You have enough on your mind without pretending to care.”
“I’m not pretending to care.” Tenko comes closer to you. “Are you pretending to care about me?”
“What makes you think I care?”
It should sting, but it doesn’t. You’re not as good at lying as you think you are. “Staying here with me is too big of a risk to take for someone who doesn’t care. I’m not pretending and neither are you.”
“Shimura.” Your voice isn’t flat. It’s never flat around him anymore. “You weren’t supposed to be so good.”
“I’m not,” Tenko says, startled. He doesn’t think he’s a particularly good person. Decent, maybe. After what he did to his family, decent is as good as it gets. But that’s not even the weirdest part about what you said. “What do you —”
You straighten up, turn to face him, and Tenko gets a split-second look at your face before you step forward into his arms. Not enough to tell him anything. Not enough to pull his attention away from you and how you’re pressed against him. Your arms wind carefully around his neck as your forehead comes to rest against his shoulder, and Tenko’s grip on you tightens on instinct. Not the omega instinct to cling out of desperation. Tenko remembers this one, and even now it carries an alpha tinge. He can see the scar on the side of your neck. He put it there. You’re his.
“Hey,” he says, and you nod against his shoulder. “Let’s go back. I’m tired and I don’t sleep as well when you aren’t there.”
That was maybe more than he should have said. Tenko wishes it wasn’t the truth. Wishes he hasn’t spent the last six months waking up in the middle of the night, reaching for the empty space at his side. Your voice is quiet, muffled against his skin. “Same here.”
Toxic!Price who’s been… suspiciously pleasant ever since he started seeing you. Polite. Patient. Even says please and thank you. The lads are side eyeing it, but no one dares question it in case whatever spell you’ve cast wears off. Maybe your pussy really is just that fucking good it domesticated him.
Well. Yes… but also no.
Your pussy is phenomenal, sure, but so are the little antipsychotics you’ve been quietly stirring into his morning coffee.
Toxic!Price who’s been… suspiciously pleasant ever since he started seeing you. Polite. Patient. Even says please and thank you. The lads are side eyeing it, but no one dares question it in case whatever spell you’ve cast wears off. Maybe your pussy really is just that fucking good it domesticated him.
Well. Yes… but also no.
Your pussy is phenomenal, sure, but so are the little antipsychotics you’ve been quietly stirring into his morning coffee.
started thinking about a genshin x breaking bad au because scara's VA pat pedraza posted a pic of him with giancarlo (gus' actor), and then i drew a normal amount of it
As the end of the world approaches, you spend your days decrypting soulmate puzzles and giving other people a shot at happiness. When you find your own name on a stranger's arm, you have a choice to make. Your soulmate makes a different one. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Shigaraki x f!reader, soulmate AU, hurt no comfort, angst, major character death. Not quite a total downer ending (maybe). Part 2 of 8 of the Galileo AU.
Finding one’s soulmate used to be difficult. The world is vast, after all, and air travel wasn’t invented until way too recently to be any good. People found ways, though. You’ve read up on it, for your own reasons and because it’s interesting, and discovered that people used to crowdsource the puzzles on their arm, paying to put them in newspapers or have them printed on posters and telegrams that circled the world in the hopes that someone who looked at the puzzle would see the solution. There’s only one solution per puzzle, although sometimes people have more than one puzzle. And solving a soulmate puzzle could take a lifetime. It's supposed to be difficult.
That surprised you, when you heard about it, because solving yours was easy. As soon as you were able to read, you looked down at the tangled web on your forearm and learned that your soulmate’s name is Shigaraki Tomura.
Your quirk is called Decryption, and it lets you break any code. Apparently soulmate puzzles qualify as codes, and not particularly complicated ones. It takes you a few minutes maximum to solve one and give someone the means to find their soulmate and live happily ever after. There are worse ways to use one’s quirk, and unfortunately, those are the ones you got stuck with. You’d have happily spent all day identifying soulmates. Instead the government swallowed you whole, and you spent your entire life to this point breaking enemy ciphers and turning your home country into the most powerful information broker in the world. They kept you walled up inside a bunker, working most of the day, every day. And then, one day, they just let you out.
No one told you why — just gave you back a set of civilian clothes you outgrew by the time you were fifteen and the information to access the bank account where your salary had been deposited and turned you loose. You didn’t even have a phone. You were confused at first, and it had been so long since you’d been outside, around people, that it took you a while to realize how strangely people were acting. It wasn’t until you saw a newspaper that you learned the truth: The world was about to end.
Meteors. A meteor shower, featuring multiple meteors ranging in size from football stadium to small European country — too many to stop, and even one strike would destroy life on Earth. Quirks didn’t matter. Even with the singularity approaching, there was no quirk strong enough to save humanity. People had tried. Died trying, when effort of using their quirks stopped their hearts. By the time you were released, the end of everything was assured. Humanity had a little less than a year.
The first thing you did was look up your soulmate, but a search of his name turned up nothing. Not a single result. Shigaraki Tomura doesn’t exist. You spent a few days or so being mopey and sad about dying alone before realizing that most people were going to do the same thing — and them, you might be able to help. Now you work most of the day, every day, reading soulmate puzzles and giving people the chance to find their other halves (or thirds, or quarters) before it’s too late.
People pay you what they can afford, not so much in money these days, but in necessities they’ve hoarded. You try to be fair about it, not taking everything if you can avoid it. You split their last chocolate bar with someone before solving their puzzle; you spend an afternoon snuggling with someone else’s dog before returning it to its owner. At the end of the world, you try to live the life you missed out on. As much of it as you can get, minus the piece that will be missing forever.
Today begins like any other day. You wake up at dawn, so you don’t miss the sunrise. Then you drink a cup of coffee made from a bag of fancy beans someone traded you in exchange for their puzzle and eat some breakfast — whatever fresh food people traded you the day before, plus a frozen waffle or two. Breakfast is your biggest meal of the day. Once your day starts in earnest, you don’t have time to eat.
The line is already forming when you get to work. You check in with your security guard, a tall woman named Cate whose blonde hair is beginning to show its dark roots. She’s always looked familiar, but you’ve never placed her. “How long have they been out there?”
“I shooed off the ones who tried to camp out overnight,” Cate says. “It was too cold for that. The hotel down the road put them up for us.”
“Thanks.” A few weeks ago, someone froze to death waiting in line through the night, and every time you think about it, you feel sick to your stomach. “Okay. Send the first one in.”
At first you were nice about it, making conversation with each person; now your goal is to get through as many as possible, as fast as possible. They offer you what they have. You accept. Then they pull up their sleeve, revealing their forearm, and you solve their soulmate puzzle in five minutes or less. Usually less. A lot less.
There are a few that are complicated, usually because of scars. Or if someone’s lost a limb and the puzzle’s reappeared on a different one. Once you get a good visualization of the puzzle, it’s solvable. Sometimes there’s a translation delay — you have to see the puzzle in person to solve it, and people come to you from all over the world. And sometimes you get someone who’s got the answer already — they just don’t want to hear it.
“But she’s dead,” the teenage boy in front of you says, like you didn’t hear him the first time. “In the food riots. It can’t be her. Read it again.”
You look down at his forearm again, watching the symbols rearrange themselves into a name. “The name hasn’t changed,” you say. “I’m sorry.”
The boy’s eyes well up. “I didn’t know,” he mumbles. “I didn’t know, and she’s gone —
”
You’ll all be gone soon, but you know better than to remind him of that. “It sounds like you knew her, though. Were you guys close?”
“Yeah.” The boy chokes down a sob. “She was my best friend.”
Then he has it easy. You know better than to say that, too. “If you two were best friends, then you spent most of your lives together. Even if you didn’t know you were soulmates. Did you treat her like your best friend while she was alive?”
“Yeah.”
“Then she knew,” you say. “Maybe not that you were soulmates, but she knew she was loved. That counts for a lot more than you think it does.”
The boy buries his face in his hands. Cate steps forward, ready to shoo him out, but you gesture for her to wait a second. You don’t like sending people back out in the street like this, even if it means other people have to wait. You wait for a minute or two before the boy speaks up. “Do you think we get to try again?”
“Hmm?”
“After we die. Do we get to try again?”
“Like, reincarnation?” You shrug. “Maybe. If it helps to think about it like that, you should.”
It does seem to help him, even though you’re all going to be dead in a few months and reincarnation on a lifeless world will be just as pointless as everything else. It helps him enough that he leaves in one piece, and while Cate screens the next customer, you try to shake off the encounter. Reincarnation. The thought of it has always filled you with dread. Without knowledge of your past lives, the only thing reincarnation would be is a chance to make the same mistakes over and over again. You’d rather not.
Cate ushers in the next customer — or customers, plus a translator. It’s unusual to see a couple. They’re walking hand in hand, the woman pulling the man along ever so slightly. She has blue skin, blue hair, and blue eyes, her expression bright and anxious. The man following her has dark hair and grey eyes, and he looks like he wants to be anywhere but here.
The man holds out something to barter with — a game system. You nod in acceptance even though it’s useless to you and gesture for them both to sit. “How can I help you?”
“We need our puzzles solved,” the woman says. “Both of us.”
“Are you sure?” you ask. “I’ve seen this blow up relationships before. If the names don’t match, it might be better not to know.”
“They’ll match,” the woman says confidently. “Me first.”
She pulls up her right sleeve and shows you a clear, unblemished puzzle. A ridiculously easy one. It shouldn’t be this easy. “Shimura Tenko,” you read aloud, and the woman breathes an audible sigh of relief. “Is that what you were hoping for?”
“That’s him,” the woman says, smiling. She hugs the man with her and he hugs her back; then she gets to her feet. As she does, her left sleeve pulls up, and you see something there — a healed skin graft, exactly the size and shape of a puzzle. She has two. Why would she cover one up? “I guess we don’t need to read yours, Ten. I feel so much better already.”
“I still want to see mine,” Shimura Tenko says. “It looks weird.”
“I can take a look at it,” you offer. “You’re here already.”
“Ten, come on,” the woman says. “We figured it out. Don’t make her look at it.”
She turns to you, speaking with a conspiratorial air that the translator struggles to handle. “His puzzle looks kind of spooky. Everybody who looks at it is creeped out. Even I don’t like seeing it.”
“Maybe you could wait outside,” you suggest. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“Yeah. Wait outside, okay? I’ll be there in a second.” Shimura smiles at the woman — his wife or his girlfriend or something. “I’ll be there soon.”
The woman leaves smiling, and after a moment, Shimura dismisses the translator, too. “I speak English,” he says. It’s accented, but a hell of a lot better than your Japanese would be. “We can talk like this.”
“You guys seem well-adjusted,” you say. Shimura raises his eyebrows. “You know. For the fact that we’re all going to die soon.”
“We can’t change it, so no point in dwelling on it,” Shimura says. “I’d rather enjoy the time I have. Is that what you’re doing?”
“Huh?”
“Do you like doing this?” Shimura asks. His grey eyes are piercing as he studies you. “Is helping strangers find their soulmates really how you want to spend the end of time?”
“It’s not the end of time,” you say. “Just of us.”
It’s quiet for a moment. “Sorry,” you say. “The government had me locked up in a bunker breaking codes until six months ago. My social skills aren’t the greatest.”
“I get it. Not the bunker thing, but — it can take a while to bounce back,” Shimura says, very politely not mentioning that you don’t have a while, and neither does anybody else. “The kid who was in before us — he came out talking about reincarnation. You believe in that kind of thing?”
“I didn’t tell him I believed in it. Just that he should, if it makes him feel better,” you say. It’s hard not to roll your eyes. “There won’t be a planet to reincarnate onto.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be our planet. It could be somewhere else,” Shimura says. You shrug. “You hate that idea, don’t you?”
“I’m already serving time for my last round of mistakes,” you say. “I don’t want to add in more.”
The sentiment lands heavily between the two of you. Oddly. “Your puzzle,” you say finally. “What’s weird about it?”
“See for yourself.” Shimura pulls up his sleeve.
You see, all right. Shimura doesn’t have one puzzle. He has two.
But not two side by side, indicating two different soulmates. One right on top of the other, which you’ve only seen once before, and you know what it means. Just like someone who’s desperate for their soulmate to be someone else can sometimes manifest a second, false puzzle, a person who’s changed so irrevocably that they’re no longer the person their soulmate was made for will see their puzzle turn grey and dead — and another puzzle, some say their true puzzle, will write itself over it.
Shimura and his wife or girlfriend or whoever aren’t quite as well-adjusted as you thought. Neither of them are with their real soulmate. You’d bet all the money you have that the woman’s real puzzle is under that skin graft, just like you know the greyed-out puzzle on Shimura’s arm was never solvable to begin with. And when your quirk unscrambles the second puzzle, you see the name of Shimura’s real soulmate.
It’s yours.
But that can’t be right. Your soulmate is Shigaraki Tomura, not Shimura Tenko. Shigaraki Tomura doesn’t exist. “Did you ever have another name?” you ask Shimura, even though you know it’s stupid, even though you know it’s wrong. “Like —”
“Yeah. For a little while, I think. I don’t remember what it was.” Shimura’s been studying his arm with you; now he looks up, makes eyes contact. “Why?”
“Sometimes it can confuse things,” you say. “On your soulmate’s side.”
Shimura nods. “Can you read it? Does it say a name?”
“Yes.”
“Is it hers?”
You hesitate a second too long to lie. “Whose is it?” Shimura asks.
“If I tell you,” you start. Then you lose your nerve. You feel like you’re going to be sick, and it takes all the strength in your body to swallow it down. “If I tell you, will it change anything?”
Shimura looks blankly at you. “What?”
You lay out what you understand of the situation, quickly and quietly. “The two of you are happy together, mostly. You’re comfortable. But there’s this nagging suspicion that while you’re happy together, you aren’t soulmates. You figured there’d be time to work it out, but then the news came out about the meteors, and there’s not time any longer.”
Shimura doesn’t say a word. He watches you. “Your girlfriend’s real puzzle is covered up. She wants it to be someone else so bad that she put a skin graft over it, and all that wishing manifested a false puzzle. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”
“How do you know it’s false?” Shimura asks.
“It’s too easy,” you say. “The real ones are more complicated. People are complicated. Soulmates are complicated. Love might feel easy, but it’s always complicated on the inside. You’re not her soulmate.”
“And she’s not mine, so —” Shimura trails off. “Are you going to tell me the name?”
“Will it change anything?” you ask. “Imagine I tell you. What are you going to do when you leave here? Walk out that door, break your girlfriend’s heart, and tell her that her mark’s wrong, and you’re supposed to be with some stranger? That’s some Call Your Girlfriend bullshit, and I —”
“Fucking hate that song,” Shimura says, his voice mapping perfectly onto yours. You want to scream. “I couldn’t do that to her.”
You know. It’s why you didn’t tell him; you know him. “And it’s not just you and your girlfriend,” you say. “How do you think your soulmate would feel, finding out that you know who she is and you’re still going to spend the end of days with somebody else?”
Shimura’s expression twists. “I can’t do that to her, either.”
“Either way, someone gets hurt,” you say. Your voice is dull. “Do you want to hurt the person you know, or the person you don’t?”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody!” Shimura snaps.
“That’s not how it works,” you say. You’ve been holding Shimura’s forearm this whole time. You force yourself to let it go. “I can tell you your soulmate’s name, if you ask me again. But if it won’t change anything, you’re better off not knowing.”
“That’s your professional opinion.”
“Yeah. I do this a lot,” you say. “If it won’t change anything —”
“It won’t,” Shimura says. He stands up, the sound of his chair scraping back across the floor painfully loud. “Thanks for telling it to me straight.”
Something about that hurts. You don’t know why it hurts, why it feels so much worse than everything else in this conversation, but the instant the door shuts behind him, you burst into tears. You couldn’t tell him. Of course you couldn’t tell him the damage was already done. You were doomed the second you solved his puzzle and revealed your own name, and even if you’d told him the second you realized it — it wouldn’t change anything. Your soulmate walked away from you without hesitating. Why do you feel like you deserved it?
You don’t know. You sob yourself dry, face buried in your hands, and once your head is aching and you’ve run out of tears, you call for Cate and tell her to bring the next one in.
You try not to think about him, as the world winds down towards its end. You do, though. You wonder if he’s happy with his choice, if he’s glad he stayed with his girlfriend to the end. If he ever wondered who his soulmate actually was. Whose puzzle held his name. You can’t decide if you want him to be happy or not. Is not caring if you’re miserable as long as your soulmate is happy what you’re supposed to do when you love someone? You didn’t have the chance to love him. He never gave it to you.
You looked for him. You’d have found him if you could. He’s the one who said no. It wasn’t you — this time.
This time. That thought sticks with you, all the way to the last day, when the approaching meteors are bright and visible in daylight, speeding closer at thousands of miles per hour. It wasn’t you this time.
You don’t know what that means, and at the end of it all, you’ve got nowhere to go, no one to wait with. You make your way down to the beach. The tide’s out, leaving flats of wet packed sand, and you pick up a piece of driftwood to draw in it. First you draw your puzzle, the one you’ve had the answer to as long as you can remember. Then you draw Shigaraki Tomura’s puzzle beside it. They look good together, you think. Maybe you would have been happy with him.
You’ll never know. You lie down in the sand between the two puzzles and keep staring upwards as the sky brightens. Death rushes down at you, and in the seconds before a meteorite hits the ocean ahead of you and everything vanishes into ash and fire, you think of reincarnation again. A single flicker of hope, amidst the end of all things.
