Well, that wasn't true. You didn't have a good reason to be standing in front of the door of Tomura's fancy new office at the PLF headquarters. You had reasons, but they made you feel stupid.
You frowned as you looked at Tomura through the glass wall. He looked busy, doing whatever he does on the computer. Probably something important—too important to be interrupted. You shouldn't have come here.
Turning on your heel, you walked down the hallway, freezing as he called your name, muffled through the glass. "I thought you were coming in?"
Fuck, he must have seen you. You should've been faster. Defeated, you spun around, opening the door to stick your head in. "What's up?"
He cocked his head, removing Father from his face. "Were you not coming to see me?"
Fuck, he looked really cute like that—hair gently tousled, his tie loose around his neck. He'd been wearing more suits lately, and it'd be a lie to say you weren't at least a little feral about how good he looked in them.
"I was," you admitted. "I was just bored, and I missed you and wanted attention. But you look busy, and I don't want to bother you," you trailed off, feeling embarrassed.
He blinked, looking more confused than before. "Huh? Why'd you think you'd be bothering me? Is that why you're not coming in? Come here," he pat his thigh.
You should've known better than to think he wouldn't read you like a book. He was too observant. Or maybe you were just easy to read. You sighed, stepping into the office and shutting the door behind you.
Despite his obvious desire for for you to sit on his lap, you leaned on the desk instead. "Are you sure I should be sitting on you?" You asked, trying—and failing—to ignore his pout. "You just got your cast taken off, I don't want to strain yourself."
"I'm fine," he grumbled, before tugging on your hands. Sometimes you were jealous of Tomura—He didn't have the self-doubt or internal shame you had about asking for things. Maybe it wasn't a rational thing to be jealous of, because it definitely had come to bite him in the ass before. This time, though, it worked in his favor—rolling your eyes, you tentatively sat in his lap as his hands wrapped around your waist.
"There we go," he smirked, looking all-too pleased with himself. Ever since he gained full control over decay, he'd been more touchy than normal. If you were in reach, he always had a hand on you—your's in his as you walked, one on your thigh when you sat next to him. Not to mention how handsy he'd been when it was just the two of you. It was nice, although it made his absence feel worse.
"Why didn't you come in? Tell me," he asked, squeezing your sides.
You should've known better than to think Tomura would drop the subject. He was particularly stubborn about some things. You sighed, wrapping your arms around his neck to stabilize yourself. "Again, I thought you were busy."
He cocked his head. "I wouldn't have minded."
You hummed in disapproval. "Easy for you to say. Remember when you snapped at me for bothering you at the bar?"
"Oh," he frowned, looking equally embarrassed and mad at himself.
"Yeah," you reached down to playfully poke him in the chest. "And I want an apology."
"Sorry," he said immediately, "I was an idiot back then."
"It's okay," you laughed, "You're smarter now." You leaned in to kiss him, happy that you decided to come here after all—even if it was to just get a little bit of attention.
it might take a while and it will take a lot of trust, but when you first finger tomura and use your strap, his skeptical face ends up whining and drooling into the pillows it fell into. from then on, it’s harder to convince tomura not to have one or two of your fingers curled up inside him. as soon as one hand starts to stroke him- tomura is tugging your other lower and lower until he’s guiding your finger to circle his entrance, mindlessly bucking his hips.
tomura can be such a brat about it too because he knows how bad it turns you on. so if he’s already gone so far as to put himself out there and you keep ignoring his advances? he’ll grumble and pout. soon enough he’s straddling your thighs and making you watch him touch himself, biting his shirt up past his chest so you can see the way his fingers tease past a nipple and down into his jeans, until you hear a wet squelch- had he been touching himself before this?- pushing in and out of him. it’s okay though! when you put him in his place (on your lap like a throne and impaled on your strap) he shakily bounces and grasps onto you, choking out whines about how he “can’t come like this” and “needs you to move”.
tomura instantly proves this false. because as soon as you tell him how pretty he looks all full of you and that he’s doing so good for you- he’s hiccuping, sinking down on your strap as fast as he can before spurting come all over his chest with a cry. it’s all tomura can do to ride it out, slump into the crook of your neck and babble “yours, yours, yours.”
i think tomura would like to sleep with his face either buried into your pillow or in your neck, that way your legs can get all tangled and he can climb half on top of you. However. feeling your arms wrap around his torso and pull his back to your chest tight, as close as physically possible makes him feel sooooo warm and like he’s melting and before he knows it his head is kinda fuzzy from how relaxed he feels and he can’t control the way his body twitches when you run your hands up and down his chest and across his tummy under his shirt
Hi anon, I'm responding to a screenshot of your ask and not the ask itself because frankly, I'm blocking you. I don't want to engage with someone who grossly misinterprets my words in such a way. And honestly, I found your ask to be incredibly insulting.
You assert that my interpretation of bnha is "trying to change the canon" simply because you do not agree with it, and while I understand that you are a victim of abuse, I need you to understand that your experiences do not validate your interpretation nor invalidate mine. I also find this to be incredibly presumptuous--you do not know me. You do not know my own experiences with abuse, nor the experience of anyone who interprets canon differently. Abuse isn't a monolith, and you saying that other interpretations of canon that don't align with yours and considers other factors is "minimizing abuse" is crazy to me.
i find that your interpretation reduces the villains down to abuse victims/perpetrators, and ignores what they stand for and WHY they're villains. While abuse is a large part of Shigaraki's backstory, it isn't his only reason for being a villain. Hero society has a bystander problem, it has a problem with quirk discrimination, it has a problem with throwing villains in prison with no hope for rehabilitation. I could go on and on. The villains represent these issues, and considering the reasons for violence in this society is not excusing it. Not sure where you got any of this from, because I never once said that any of their actions should be excused nor ignored--only that the reasoning should be factored.
In addition, your assertion that Midoriya "tried to reach out to adult Shigaraki and adult Shigaraki just said 'lol, no,'" is wrong, plain and simple. While Midoriya did extend a hand to Shigaraki, it was only because he saw the child inside, aka Shimura Tenko. Shigaraki rejected Midoriya BECAUSE of this. Because he knew Midoriya never saw him as a full and complete individual, with friends and goals and plans. Midoriya never once questioned the cycle of heroes and villains, or saw that there were systemic changes that needed to occur to stop it. His rejection of Midoriya was a choice he made after a lifetime of not being in control of his own life. These posts can explain it better than I can, but I suggest you read them. I think you're giving Horikoshi WAY too much credit here.
Honestly, it feels like you're projecting a lot. I'm not sure where you got ANY of that from a text post saying that only calling Shigaraki "Tenko" strips him of any agency that he had in his final moments. At least, that's what I'm guessing this ask is about.
i think tomura would like to sleep with his face either buried into your pillow or in your neck, that way your legs can get all tangled and he can climb half on top of you. However. feeling your arms wrap around his torso and pull his back to your chest tight, as close as physically possible makes him feel sooooo warm and like he’s melting and before he knows it his head is kinda fuzzy from how relaxed he feels and he can’t control the way his body twitches when you run your hands up and down his chest and across his tummy under his shirt
tomura is glaring at you from the other end of the couch as he weighs the costs vs benefits of cuddling you in this heat. on one hand, he's touch starved and you take that itch away. on the other hand, he'd get really sweaty, and the salt in his sweat would make his scratches sting. decisions, decisions..
In a world shaped by data flows, hackers like Tomura and his League of Villains are swimming against the tide. When Tomura's kidnapped on the way back from the conbini, he assumes it's the cops, or some corporate asshole who wants him to work for free. What you want from him might be even worse.
for @deadhands69 's visual prompt event. cyberpunk/neon dystopia AU, Shigaraki POV, reader's gender assumed but not stated.
“Fuck, I’m locked out. It got me.” Dabi sits back from his console with a curse. “That thing is fast. What the hell?”
Of course it’s fast. It’s fighting for its life, and it knows it. Across the room, another error message sounds, and Tomura takes his eyes off his screens long enough to watch Twice’s console flash red. “It got me too,” Twice complains. “How many of you are still in?”
“Don’t ask me. I went down first.” Magne was the first casualty of this hunt, and that was so long ago that she’s had time to make breakfast, make lunch, and take a nap. “Either we’re losing our touch, or we should have charged that corporate asshole way more.”
“Should have charged him more,” Tomura says. His eyes are getting blurry. Is that a code sprite, or is he just losing his shit? He blinks hard, then gets a shot of adrenaline straight down his spine. “Fuck, I got it. Toga, Spinner — on me. Now!”
“You got it, Tomura-kun!” Toga’s the fastest one on the crew, the only one who can keep up with Tomura on a hunt like this. “Mister Compress, can you set up a snare?”
Tomura forgot about Compress. He always forgets somebody. “Already done,” Compress announces. “If you force it along the z-axis —”
Tomura’s already doing that. Toga’s flanking it from the other side, and Spinner’s cutting off its retreat. Nanosecond by nanosecond, they herd it into the trap Compress set for it. “That snare had better be strong,” Spinner grunts, like he’s working out instead of slamming commands down on his keyboard. “This thing is —”
The sprite figures out the trap about two seconds before it shuts. Fuck. It lunges at Toga, who holds her ground only because Spinner hops in to back her up, then turns on Tomura. “It’s bolting! Don’t let it get away!” Twice shouts, right in Tomura’s ear. “It’s trying to get under you —“
“Shut up!” Tomura throws up a temporary firewall, then drops a net, his fingers flying across the keyboard. GPT-232 charges at him, trying to shoot a pseudopod straight through his code, but Tomura’s ready for that. He collapses inwards on it, trapping the extension, then spikes a dataphage of his own straight through it. “Fucking die already —”
Most dataphages max themselves out way before they can consume an entire LLM, but Tomura’s dataphages are the best in the business. They could eat an entire server farm and still have room for more. GPT-232 doesn’t stand a chance. The code sprite vanishes off his screen and everyone else’s at the same time, and Twice lets out a war whoop — again, right down Tomura’s ear canal. He leans away, grimacing. “Don’t celebrate just yet. Twice, Dabi, reboot your screens and scan for source code.”
“Do we have to?” Dabi complains. “I’m tired.”
“You let a geriatric LLM kick your ass, and we had to do all the hard work. Scan for source code.”
Tomura should lean back and relax, too. They’ve been on this hunt for twelve hours, and he stood up maybe once the whole time — and that was just to stagger to the bathroom and take a piss. When was the last time he ate? Is that why his head hurts so much? Tomura should have charged way more for this job. Maybe after he’s done scanning for shreds of source code and gets something to eat, he’ll hack HSC’s bank accounts and extract an overtime fee.
“Halt the scan.” Kurogiri’s voice echoes through Tomura’s earpiece, same as everyone else’s. “GPT-232 is confirmed dead.”
“How do you know?”
“IM has it,” Kurogiri says, and that’s all.
If IM has it, then it’s been confirmed, not just by Tomura’s crew, but by everybody. Tomura can add another successful kill to his crew’s body count, which was pretty impressive even before this job. GPT and others like it might be ancient, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to catch. And as hard as a live-catch on an old AI might be, actually wiping one out is even harder. Most corporate hacking teams can’t do it. A multinational like HSC would never have contracted out to the League of Villains if they had another choice.
What Tomura and his friends do is technically illegal. More than technically illegal. Extremely illegal. In a world that runs on code, the creation of a dataphage is enough to earn a jail sentence, and actually using them is worth five years in offworld prison at least. That’s for a small target. For the kind of stuff that Tomura and his friends regularly hunt down, they’d be looking at twenty to life.
And Tomura gets it, sort of. When the laws about dataphages and hacking were written, every single system in the world was vulnerable. One out-of-control dataphage could have set the world back to the analog age, and nobody’s interested in that, not even freaks like Stain who won’t stop screeching about the corporatization of the mass-communicators, even though that ship sailed a generation ago. But things are different now. Now there’s a system that even Tomura’s dataphages can’t swallow, a system that fights back, a system that self-repairs from damage and gets stronger. Tomura has a hard time seeing why hacking should be worth a life sentence when the world can just fall back on IM.
But it’s rich people who write the laws, and rich fucks like the HSC can’t imagine a world where they aren’t on top. So they’ll prosecute every hacker they can catch, unless that hacker gets good enough for them to use. Tomura and his friends keep off the radar as a rule. They all burned their real identities a decade ago at least, so now they’re ghosts in the modern world’s vast machine. If someone wanted to find them, they’d have a hard time doing it. If someone actually went after them, Tomura’s got a dataphage or ten with their name on it. He’d still be in prison forever. But the operating systems his enemies run on would be gone for good, too. Data isn’t like energy. It can be destroyed just as easily as it’s created.
Kurogiri speaks up in Tomura’s ear again. “Payment’s just arrived from HSC. An extra payment has also been attached — a reward from the government, for the confirmed death of an A.I. engine.”
“How come they gave us that?” Tomura asks, suspicious. “Usually they keep that shit for themselves.”
“They keep the credit, officially. It makes them look like responsible corporate citizens,” Kurogiri says. Tomura rolls his eyes. “The fee, however, belongs to you. I added a rider to your most recent contract.”
Huh. “Thanks,” Tomura says, and Kurogiri hums. “How’d you get them to agree to that?”
“GPT-232 was beginning to present a serious problem for them,” Kurogiri says. “They were desperate. And based on the difficulty you and the others had in hunting it down, they weren’t incorrect about the threat it posed.”
“We didn’t take it seriously,” Tomura says. He pitches his voice to carry, to the tune of a bunch of groans. “We thought it was going to be the same deal as Cortexa and Anthropoid, and we were wrong. Next time we do more research before we try to run one of these things down.”
“And we take piss breaks on a schedule,” Spinner mumbles. “I don’t feel good.”
“It’s always somebody.” Dabi heaves a big, dramatic sigh. “Who’s gonna hit the conbini for some Azo?”
“Not it,” says Tomura, alongside everybody else. He grits his teeth. “Come on. Seriously? It was Spinner’s turn, and he’s sick. Somebody has to.”
“Not me,” Toga says. “I went last time.”
They try not to send the same person out two times in a row if they can avoid it. Tomura nods impatiently. “I can’t go,” Dabi says. “It’s raining out there. It’s bad for my skin.”
“It’s bad for my skin, too,” Tomura snaps. “It’s fucking acid rain. It’s bad for everybody. I’m not letting you off the hook just because —”
“Twice can’t go either,” Toga chips in. “He’s scared of thunder. And lightning.”
Tomura wishes that wasn’t a valid excuse, but the last time they sent Twice out in a storm, he panicked, and they all had to go out looking for him. He’s fine most of the time, but in real weather, he’s a security risk. That leaves — “Magne. Compress. One of you go.”
“Can’t,” Magne says. “We haven’t put our faces on.”
For Magne that means makeup. For Compress, a cyborg, that means switching out his face plate, which takes a while and looks disgusting to watch. Tomura’s options are dwindling. No, not dwindling — they’re gone. Either he goes or he makes Toga go again, and he’s not making Toga go again. Which means he’s the one who has to make the conbini run. In the acid rain. “You all fucking suck, by the way. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”
“Thanks,” Spinner mumbles. “I owe you.”
Now Tomura feels like an asshole. It doesn’t last, though. The instant he opens the door and smells the distinctive scent of acid rain melting steel and concrete, he stops feeling guilty at all and goes back to being pissed.
He’s steeling himself, trying to force himself out the door, when Toga sneaks up behind him. “Tomura-kun,” she singsongs softly. “Since you’re already going out —”
Tomura shuts the door. “What?”
“Can you get me a pinup?”
“Didn’t Magne just get you one?”
“It wore out. I watched it a lot,” Toga says. Tomura’s never met anybody who goes through pinups faster than Toga does. In the time it takes anybody else to wear one out, she can wear out three. “Please? I helped a lot with this kill. And we got paid way more than usual.”
She did help a lot. And she went out last time, without bitching anywhere near as much as the rest of them do when it’s their turn. And as far as stupid stuff Tomura’s friends want him to buy, the pinups are at least cheap. Cheaper. “Which one do you want?”
“Ochako,” Toga says, a shy smile crossing her face. Like Tomura thought. She hugs him. “Thank you!”
“Which one do you want?” Tomura asks, patting Toga’s shoulder awkwardly until she lets go. “Another from that one where she’s a spy?”
Toga shakes her head. “The one where she’s the Architect. She’s so hot in that one.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Tomura says. Then he thinks about it for a second. “Hang on. Nobody knows what the Architect really looks like. Didn’t she get a whole new face?”
“That’s the rumor,” Toga says, and shrugs. Now that Tomura thinks about it a little harder, he's not even sure if the Architect's a woman. “This one’s about her when she’s young. And if she looked even a tiny bit like Ochako, she was really cute. And smart — but she’s probably still really smart, even with a new face —”
“Got it,” Tomura says. He pulls up his hood and steps out into the rain.
Tomura and his friends live on one of the lower levels of Tokyo Megacity, but somehow the rain always finds its way down. He can hear it sizzle as it hits the pavement. Ordinarily the streets are crowded, but the rain keeps people indoors. The only people out here are the idiots like Tomura and the people who don’t have a choice. The hosts and hostesses are out hunting for customers, as if there’s anybody on the lower levels who can afford that kind of thing. There are a few religious nutjobs preaching about how IM is a false messiah or some shit. Tomura’s heard IM called a lot of things by the company that owns it, but he’s pretty sure it’s never claimed to be here to save the world.
Some people think it did, though. Tomura’s just old enough to remember what the world was like before IM, and he remembers what it felt like to log in for the first time. First logins to IM drove some people crazy, but IM always felt comfortable to Tomura, in a way that meatspace or even other conduits didn’t. IM feels like home, and Tomura’s not the only one who feels that way. When he hacked his ID chip to erase his identity, he left his IM credentials intact.
The clerk at the conbini might be clocked in, but they’re locked in on something in IM, to the point where Tomura could probably boost half the store before they noticed. He pays anyway, rolling his eyes at the price of the pinup — more than Spinner’s meds, for an actor in a movie Tomura barely remembers — and spends a second hanging out in the doorway, waiting to see if the rain will stop. No such luck. Tomura pulls up his hood again, noting where the reflective fabric is starting to thin, and steps out into the street.
It happens when he’s halfway down the block, out of range of the conbini’s security system, still not within sight of the fixed-position CCTVs. The first hooded figure steps out to block Tomura’s path, and when he tries to step around it, someone else grabs him from behind. A set of hands clamp down over his face, holding his jaw shut with icy fingers, and when Tomura tries to shout for help anyway, a hand closes around his throat. What the fuck? Tomura’s mind is way behind the rest of him. He doesn’t realize he’s being kidnapped until he’s already been shoved into the van.
Inside the van, his kidnappers loosen up on his throat, and Tomura yells for help. They don’t cover his mouth again, which means that either this van is soundproofed or they don’t think anyone’s going to care. Maybe both. These guys aren’t the cops. If the cops had found Tomura, if they were arresting him, there’d be media everywhere. They’d publicize the hell out of it. Whoever this is, they’re not looking for credit for Tomura’s capture. But if they’re not looking for credit, what the fuck do they want?
It doesn’t matter. Tomura’s hands are free, so he yanks down the hood of the nearest one — only to recoil back a second later. He’s not looking at a person. He’s looking at a droid.
That tells him who’s after him. Someone rich. Only rich people can afford human-looking androids, and only fucking trillionaires could afford the kind that move fluidly enough to pass as human. Still, if whoever this is wanted Tomura, they should have sent a human to catch him. Tomura knows how to deal with these. He slips his hand into his pocket, pulls out a dataphage, and sinks it into the exposed circuitry at the side of the android’s neck.
The fact that it’s exposed is weird. Usually those are armored. Fluid spurts out of the puncture, but that’s not what Tomura’s after. As soon as the dataphage hits this robot’s CPU, it’s game over. Tomura turns away and palms another dataphage. He’s got more droids to take down.
But the androids he stabbed isn’t done yet. It seizes Tomura’s wrist, twists it until he drops the dataphage, then locks it down at his side. What the fuck? Tomura’s dataphages are top-tier. Even with offsite data storage, this robot should have been dead fifteen seconds ago. Which means it’s not a robot. It’s not a robot. It’s a puppet. Somebody’s driving this thing manually.
Tomura’s tried remote piloting before, and it felt like it was going to break his brain. What the hell? He’s been playing it cool — mostly, he thinks — and all at once his desire to do that evaporates. “Who are you?” he shouts into the android’s blank face. “What the fuck do you want?”
The android doesn’t answer. It buckles him into his seat, while another guards the windows and another drives. They’re working on different tasks, but in some sense they’re moving in sync. Tomura has a lot of time to watch them as the drive to nowhere continues, and the longer he watches, the more he’s sure. They aren’t just being remote piloted. They’re being remote piloted by the same person. Who can do something like that? The cognitive load must be unreal. And why is Tomura so sure it’s a person? It could just as easily be an AI — but Tomura’s spent most of his adult life hunting AIs, and they love to hide by pretending they’re human. This doesn’t feel uncanny like that. It’s a whole different kind of uncanny. Tomura hates it.
The drive lasts for six hours, which is five hours more than Tomura was prepared to handle in a car. The ride is smooth, but he gets carsick anyway, and the androids are right there to tend to him, one bringing a cold cloth to cover the back of his neck, another coming up with an airsickness bag, another holding out a dose of dissolvable anti-nausea pills. Like they were prepared for this somehow.
Whoever did this knew where Tomura would be. They knew he’d counterattack with a dataphage, which is why they’re remote-piloting the androids instead, and they knew enough to know that he gets carsick. Tomura’s pretty unnerved at the whole kidnapping thing, but this might be worse. How did his kidnappers learn so much about him? And how did they learn it without Tomura even knowing he was being watched?
Tomura doesn’t have a clue that they’re close to arrival until the car abruptly stops. An android unbuckles his seatbelt, another pulls open the door, and Tomura barely avoids being picked up and carried out of the car. He’s unsteady on his feet as he steps out into a long, dark hallway, the path lit only by small LEDs on either side. The air is frigid, and before he can so much as shiver, an android’s covered his shoulders in a warm coat. It points down the lit pathways. For lack of anything better to do, Tomura starts walking.
Why is it so fucking cold? As Tomura settles into his surroundings, he hears each of his footsteps echoing, telling him that the room he’s inside is gigantic. He also hears a strange buzz in the air, and beneath it, a low hum. Servers. There are servers here — giant ones — and the air temperature is like this to keep them cool. Most server farms use distilled water, fucking over everyone else to offer their rich customers premium data speed, but whoever this is took a different route. Environmental conditioning. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of places left on the planet that can produce this kind of cold. And Tomura’s pretty sure that the corporations own most of them.
So his kidnapper’s corporate. Great. Why hire him to do something when they could kidnap him and get it for free? It doesn’t matter. Once Tomura’s friends figure out that someone took him, they’ll be on the case, and Tomura hopes whichever jackass thought this was a good idea enjoys having their assets held for ransom. It’s weird that whichever corporation did this thought that wouldn’t happen.
Somewhere up ahead of him, he hears a door hiss open, sees a pale light emanating, and picks up the pace. The room he enters is better lit than the server cavern, but while Tomura had a frame of reference for a server farm, he’s got no frame of reference for this. The closest he can get is that it looks like — roots, spreading across the walls and the floor, emanating from a dark corner of the room. They’re silvery, pulsing in the light, and Tomura’s mind fills in the better description. Not roots. Nerves.
“You look cold.”
The voice emanates from the dark corner, and Tomura almost jumps out of his skin. “I am cold. It’s fucking cold in here.”
“It’s for the servers.” The voice isn’t a guy’s voice, but that’s about all Tomura can get from it — not age, not accent, nothing. “They run off an unimaginable amount of power. I’m not wasting any energy on heat.”
“You stuck your server farm in an icebox. Nice work. I guess you think being environmentally conscious makes up for being a soulless hypercorp the rest of the time,” Tomura says. You laugh oddly. “Don’t fucking laugh at me. Either you’re government or you’re corporate, and if you were government, I’d be offworld by now. So why don’t you cut the bullshit —”
“I’m not corporate. And I’m not the government.” You move, but the darkness moves with you, keeping you fully in shadow as you make your way around the room. The nerve-markings in the floor go dark as you pass them. “Right now we’re beneath the Arctic Circle in a pressurized habitat. There’s a mile of seawater above us and another twenty meters of sea ice above that. Who do you think I am?”
Not corporate, but powerful enough to kidnap Tomura with no consequences. Not government, but influential enough to park your server farm in the Arctic Ocean. This server farm is massive. Even the old AIs, the ones that helped cook huge swathes of territory as they sucked up all the water in the area, didn’t need this much processing power. Not corporate, not government, with a massive server farm Tomura’s never even heard of? The answer occurs to him in a flash, and he bursts out laughing.
“What?” you say sharply. “Is something funny?”
“Yeah,” Tomura says, struggling to breathe. “You’re the fucking Architect. I’ve got a pinup of you in my bag.”
“A pinup.”
“Yeah, from that biopic. A friend of mine is into it,” Tomura says. “She’s into the actress, mainly. Since nobody knows what you really look like.”
Nobody knows what you look like, but everybody knows about the Architect. Your parents were crazy rich, but they wanted something money couldn’t buy — a biological kid of their own. When your mom finally got knocked up, they thought they had it, but then the truth came out. You had some kind of fetal defect, something in your brain that was missing, and you weren’t going to survive. But your parents didn’t get crazy rich just by being born that way. They quantum-leaped nanotechnology and merged it with biohacking to create the missing piece of your brain, one that would merge with the rest of you and grow with you. You were born part human, part machine. There’s nobody else like you.
But that had consequences. Your brain works differently than everyone else’s, forging pathways that shouldn’t exist, making you not just smart, but creative, too. You and Tomura are the same age. When Tomura was twelve, he was learning how to smash code. When you were twelve, you invented the Incredible Machine.
Everyone calls it IM, and it’s everywhere. Tomura saw an article one time calling it an operationalization of the collective unconscious, and as far as he can tell, that’s exactly what it is. It connects everything and everyone, not an artificial intelligence but a conduit through which everything — emotion, memory, thought, self — can flow. Tomura read another article saying that only someone like you could create IM, that your own mind-machine synthesis is what proved it was possible. However you did it, you changed the world — or destroyed the old world, and built a new one. That’s why they call you the Architect.
Some freaks treat you like a god. Some people treat you like freaks treat every famous person. You don’t go out in public much. Last Tomura heard, you lived in one of the orbitals, some exclusive haven nobody can get into without a pedigree going back three generations. The last place he would have expected to find you is here.
“You’re the Architect,” he says again. You hum in agreement. “What —”
“Your name is Shigaraki Tomura. Birth name Shimura Tenko. Parents Kotaro and Nao, both deceased. Sister, Hana, also deceased.” You speak quickly and precisely, laying out details Tomura wouldn’t admit with a gun to his head. “Raised by Shigaraki Zen as his ward and heir, but you struck out on your own when you turned twenty. Now you head up the hacker collective known as the League of Villains. Law enforcement considers you small-time, but I’ve seen your coding structures and read the postmortems on the AIs you’ve killed. They only think you’re small-time because you haven’t hit a major target.”
You pause for breath — or maybe just pause. You’re looking at Tomura. “I’m not going to ask how you found that out,” Tomura says. “I want to know why I’m here.”
“To see if you want to make the big-time,” you say. “I have a target for you.”
“Some competitor of yours?” Tomura has a hard time thinking of who that might be. In the eighteen years since IM was launched, nobody’s even come close to you. “Sorry. I don’t help rich people fuck over other rich people. Or help them fuck over startup engineers. Find some other asshole —”
“I said it was a big target,” you interrupt. “What’s the biggest target you can think of?”
Tomura laughs. “Hire somebody else to kiss your ass. You know damn well it’s IM.”
You nod. And then you go quiet. A drop of cold sweat rolls down Tomura’s spine. “You can’t be serious. You want my crew to hack IM.”
“I don’t want you to hack the Incredible Machine,” you say. “I want you to kill it.”
Enough to Go By (Chapter 36) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic
Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)
links to all chapters here
Chapter 36
They’ve got seven targets to hit, and they have to hit them almost simultaneously. While Tomura was sitting with you, everyone came to the conclusion that they need to grab the targets that can run away first. “The submarines,” Spinner explains to Tomura, when Tomura asks why they’re in an empty hangar and what the hell your ex is doing here. “It’s gone dark on purpose, which means we can grab it first without anyone knowing. Kurogiri needs precise coordinates to —”
“I know,” Tomura says. Kurogiri’s expression is visible beneath the mist, which means he’s more like the person he used to be than usual. “Can you move something that big? A nuclear submarine isn’t small.”
“Not usually. But I have some help from Saintess,” Kurogiri says. He opens his hand and reveals a syringe. “Her amplified version of Trigger should do the trick.”
Tomura forgot you did that. “They might have killed her, but they can’t stop her,” he says, and Kurogiri nods. The rest of the strike team isn’t in on the secret, and they must like you — Tomura sees a lot of angry looks on people’s faces. “Let’s finish the job. For her.”
“I have the coordinates.” Your ex holds out a piece of paper, and Kurogiri injects himself with Trigger before reaching it. “When each one arrives, we must react quickly. If the sailors are able to man the gun turret —”
A massive warp gate opens, drenching Tomura and everybody else with seawater, and a moment later, the submarine slides through, settling on the floor with a thud that Tomura feels in his bones. He spots the gun turret — unmanned, because these assholes were underwater a second ago — and decides not to screw around. He steps forward and slaps his hands down against the hull, activating Decay.
The hull crumbles, spilling everything that was inside it onto the floor of the hangar. Equipment, food stores, water tanks, beds. People. “Secure them,” Re-Destro orders, and a member of the strike team with a quirk called Freeze-Tag leaps into action. “Everyone else, disable the communications equipment and ensure that the weapons are disarmed.”
Right. The weapons. Tomura can see the missiles stored where the tail section of the submarine used to be — Trident missiles, according to the security briefings you and him have been reading. Short-range. “How close was this thing?”
“Closer than the others.” Your ex is brandishing another piece of paper at Kurogiri. “The next one. Quickly.”
The second submarine shows up, this time with an even bigger splash of water. It’s big enough to knock Tomura off his feet, and by the time he’s on them again, at least a couple hatches have popped open. Toga kept her feet better than Tomura did. She stabs the first soldier who reaches the turret, then jumps clear, and Tomura sends the first submarine the same way the second one went. More Trident missiles. A thought crosses his mind. “Are all the submarines American?”
“Yes,” your ex says. “The aircraft carriers are French and British, and the land-based silos are in Russia and China. The Freedom Alliance’s nuclear powers opted to share the responsibility of a first strike.”
So Tomura’s going to piss all of them off at once. Or in quick succession. “Get the next submarine.”
The third submarine is about twice as big as the others, and the water displacement that comes with it takes even longer to drain. “Hurry!” Skeptic orders. Tomura’s not sure why Skeptic’s here, except that he’s part of Intelligence. “Disrupt their communications, or they’ll warn the others!”
Tomura’s got Radio Waves, which will cook Skeptic’s gear, too. He’s pretty sure they need that. He activates one of his speed quirks instead, hurls himself into the side of the submarine, and Decays it. Usually he doesn’t try to rush Decay along, but this time, he pushes it to its limit, and the submarine doesn’t crumble so much as evaporate. More soldiers. More missiles. Tomura and Kurogiri – and your ex – have just turned Japan Nova into a nuclear power.
Maybe Tomura would be gloating over this, if it hadn’t happened because of this. Tomura should have done this the day the war started. He turns to your ex. “Now what?”
“Can you swim?”
“Huh?”
“I’ll go with him,” Spinner says. He grabs onto Tomura, tight. “They’re going to drop us in the water next to the carrier. All you have to do is —”
They weren’t kidding about moving quickly. Another warp gate engulfs them, and the next thing Tomura knows, he’s in the water. The waves are high and moving quickly, and one washes Spinner away from him. One moment, Tomura’s on the surface. The next, he’s sinking fast.
He was supposed to learn to swim in kindergarten. Hana told him all about it, and you too, because you were there. Tenko went to the pool sometimes with his family, and he didn’t like the way the water made his skin sting — but you were excited, because you’d never been to the pool and because you got to pick out a swimsuit of your own, so Tenko was excited with you. He never learned to swim. Did you end up learning? Maybe you can teach him. What happens to you if he drowns? Tomura flails for the surface, but it’s getting further away. His lungs are starting to burn, and he feels his heart rate increasing —
A hand closes around his arm and hauls him upward, and as soon as Tomura’s head breaks the surface, he twists around, looking for Spinner. “This plan fucking sucks —”
“The carrier’s moving faster than we thought,” Spinner says. He won’t let Tomura turn around. “Sorry. I can’t let you grab me. We have to get over there — Kurogiri —”
“This isn’t going to work,” Tomura snaps. “Put me on the deck.”
“What?”
“Put me on the deck,” Tomura snaps. “Now.”
“It’s too exposed,” Spinner protests. “There are people up there. If one of them has a gun — they’re military, they all have guns — what about Saintess —”
“They’d have to be faster than me.” A wave splashes up into Tomura’s mouth, and he spits out water. Super-Regeneration can save him and you from a gunshot. Not from drowning. “Get me up there. Now.”
Spinner keeps arguing, but Kurogiri warps them both, and the instant Tomura’s feet touch the deck, he drops to his hands and knees. It’s a good thing, too. There’s a plane headed his way. Decay spreads across the deck like an acid spill, devouring everything in its path, including the patch of runway the plane’s wheels are a split second away from lifting off of. This time, Tomura doesn’t restrict himself to just the hull of the ship. He Decays everything nonliving along with it, sending every person onboard plunging into the sea right alongside him.
He never hits the water. Kurogiri warps him from midair right to the deck of the second aircraft carrier, and Tomura gets his hands down before the rest of his body’s even emerged from the gate. This time, he keeps his head up. This time, he sees the faces of the Freedom Alliance’s soldiers as they realize just how fucked they really are.
By the time he lands back in the hangar, ready for the next round of the mission, Dabi’s there. And Dabi’s pissed. “Didn’t they tell you not to take prisoners? How many of these assholes are we going to let live?”
He’s pointing at the sailors from the submarine. Most of them are still paralyzed, but someone’s dragged the captain away, probably to interrogate them. Tomura doesn’t give a shit about prisoners, but he knows you wouldn’t want them dead — yet. “Forget them. We’ve got targets to hit. Where next?”
“Toga has been moving people into position around both installations,” Re-Destro says. “Would you like Gigantomachia to accompany you or one of the other teams?”
“Me,” Tomura says. He trusts Machia a hell of a lot more than he trusts the Nomu. The Nomu were made on Sensei’s orders, but Machia’s loyal to Tomura. “How much time do we have?”
“Skeptic is monitoring communications. The Alliance just realized that they’ve lost contact with the carriers. They still don’t know about the submarines.” Your ex looks like hell. He’s gone way over his limit. You’re going to be pissed. “From the time the order to launch is given, you’ll have less than five minutes to destroy the silos.”
Something brushes against Tomura’s ear. He flinches, glances over and finds Toga trying to put a headset on him. “Be careful,” she says quietly. Then, even quieter: “She’s waking up.”
As if Tomura needed another reason to do this fast. He activates one of his speed quirks and zips out of the hangar to where Gigantomachia is waiting.
Machia almost didn’t survive the last battle of the first war. He’d sworn allegiance to Tomura and to Sensei separately, and when you broke Sensei’s hold on Tomura, Machia’s loyalty split, too. He barely fought. The heroes almost killed him. If he was any easier to kill, he’d have been dead, but the battle ended in time, and Machia went north along with the rest of them. Before the second war started, Tomura went to visit him every other day.
They’ve got some things in common, him and Machia. They were both Sensei’s tools. Sensei experimented on both of them. And they both know what it’s like to have Sensei inside their heads. Sensei passed his quirk to Tomura, but he implanted a chip in Machia’s brain stem. You were the one who took it out.
Does Machia even know why this is happening? “They told you, right?” Tomura asks. Machia looks at him. “What we’re doing and why?”
“I told him we’re killing the fuckers who want to kill us,” Dabi says. He tosses something at Tomura. “Here. Take this. Machia, open up —”
“Don’t feed him that before you tell us what it is,” Tomura says. “What is it?”
“It’s Trigger. Liquid formulation,” Dabi says. “We have to move fast, so everybody on the strike team who can do it safely is juicing up. The rest of us can do it by injection.”
But Tomura can’t, because of Super-Regeneration and your original quirk. And Machia’s skin is rock-hard. “Do you want it or not?” Dabi asks. Tomura pops the tab on the pouch and drains it. “That’s what I thought. Machia —”
Machia just eats the whole pouch, which isn’t great, but he’s probably eaten worse things. “This new stuff isn’t the worst. It doesn’t make people stupid like the American version did,” Dabi says. “Saintess hooked us up from beyond the grave.”
So Machia doesn’t know that you’re still alive. Tomura needs to remember that most people don’t, and he needs to get moving. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
Your ex pops up again, looking even worse than before. “You and Machia are going to a silo on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It’s more lightly defended but more difficult to destroy. Don’t think about sparing lives. Bring the mountain down.”
“Works for me,” Tomura says. Machia growls. “What about once it’s done?”
“Kurogiri will transport you back here.” Your ex sways on his feet, his eyes going out of focus for a second. I’ll brief you on the conditions at the next site before sending you out.”
“The fuck you won’t,” Tomura says. He grabs your ex by the front of his shirt and pulls him into whispering range. “If she wakes up and finds out I let you give yourself an aneurysm, she’s going to kill me. You gave us what we need. Take a nap before you kill yourself.”
He doesn’t wait to see if your ex listens. He turns back to face Machia and taps his headset. “Kurogiri —”
“Brace yourself. Transporting in three — two —”
It’s fucking freezing on the Kamchatka Peninsula. By the time Tomura’s feet touch the snow, he’s already shivering. The mountain looms over him, taller than he or Machia, and for a second, Tomura hesitates. It’s a fucking mountain. A big one. How is he supposed to — and then the Trigger kicks in, and Tomura drops to his knees, both hands on the ground.
He’s not doing it on purpose. He’s never taken Trigger before, and he’s not ready for the way it amplifies everything at once, taking quirks that he had a handle on and spinning them out of his control. The quirks he’s supposed to be using unconsciously make themselves conscious in a hurry. Tomura feels like he can’t move without unleashing something. Or a lot of things.
And so what if he does? They wanted to kill you. They almost did it. They’re here manning a fucking nuclear missile silo, so they can bomb a country full of people they’ll never see as anything but vermin. The Freedom Alliance started this war. Tomura doesn’t need to hold back. He needs to make them pay.
He’s already in the right position. Tomura activates Decay on a single thought and turns it loose.
He leaves living things alone for the most part, just so he doesn’t have to keep track of what Machia’s doing, and watches as Decay spreads across the ground, crawling up the side of the mountain. It’s fast, but Machia’s faster, already gouging chunks out of the slopes, digging in to get to the silo inside. Lightly defended doesn’t mean undefended. Weapons emplacements are coming to life, guns designed to take out aircraft locking in on Machia. They haven’t even noticed Tomura yet.
Their fucking funeral. Tomura leaves Decay to spread, activates a speed and a strength quirk at the same time, and covers the distance from sea level to the first weapons emplacements in a single jump.
He hasn’t killed anyone face to face in a while, and the soldiers who die in the first emplacement never even see what kills them. The second group does, though. Tomura knows they recognize him, just like you must have known what was about to happen before the bomb went off. Tomura gives them a split second to be terrified before he lunges at them.
He takes the guns out with a single swipe of his hand, but with Trigger flooding his system, all the soldiers have to do is brush against Tomura in close quarters for Decay to consume them. Nothing that touches Tomura survives. With every step he takes, the ground crumbles away beneath his feet. Even when the soldiers see him coming, even when they flee, there’s nothing they can do. Tomura isn’t a demon lord, or a Symbol of Fear. He’s destruction and death itself. Thanks to you.
Sensei tried to make Tomura into his monster, but it’s the compound you made that’s given Tomura the power to destroy a mountain in the space of a few minutes. It was you first, and then Tomura’s friends, too, who gave him something worth fighting for. You were the one who made Tomura believe there was something about him worth saving, because you never stopped trying, and you never asked him to be anything but what he is. The Freedom Alliance is lucky you survived, because if you hadn’t, Tomura wouldn’t be coming for their first-strike capability. He’d be coming for all of them, soldiers and civilians, the air they breathe and the ground they walk on. If they’d taken you away from him, today would have been their last day on earth.
But you’re alive. You’re waking up. The sooner Tomura gets this done, the sooner he can go back to you. When there’s nothing left of the mountain but rubble, Tomura taps his headset. “Kurogiri —”
One site left. It’s almost over. Tomura and Machia are the first to arrive at this one, and it only takes him a second to realize that they should have dealt with this one first. Maybe the one inside the mountain was the toughest to crack, but this one’s a real military base. They’re already on alert. And they’re on top of it enough to have anti-aircraft guns pointing at Tomura two seconds after he lands.
They’re fast, but Tomura’s faster. He leaps out of the way, gets his feet back under him, and bolts for the base’s outer wall. This time, he doesn’t bother with Decay. When he’s got this much power behind it, Air Cannon is enough to blast through concrete. Once he’s through the wall, he catches up to the rest of the team, who Kurogiri dropped inside the base instead of outside it. Magne is yanking soldiers away from their stations with her quirk, pulling them into the sheets of flame Dabi’s emitting. Spinner’s strength quirks would let him fight hand-to-hand, but he’s grabbed a weapon, and he’s laying down cover fire like he’s playing Call of Duty. Machia’s there, taking heavy fire that he barely seems to notice, and shielded behind him, Tomura takes a second to get a good look at his surroundings. He sees low buildings, barbed wire, beat-up trucks and soldiers. Nothing that looks like a missile silo. “Where —”
“It should be over —” Spinner points, then swears. “Fuck, they’re launching —”
The fuck they are. Tomura fires off another blast from Air Cannon, but it’s not enough to do more than dent the side of the missile as it begins to emerge from the launch tube. “Keep them off me,” Tomura shouts at Spinner and the others. He activates every quirk he can think of and bolts towards the missile.
Tomura hears gunfire, but either it misses him or Super-Regeneration is boosted so far that he doesn’t even feel it. The missile is rising fast, faster than Tomura’s moving, faster than he can stop it. If it gets away from him, he might as well Decay the fucking planet and get it over with. “Machia!” Tomura shouts. “Machia, help!”
Machia’s smarter than he used to be, without Sensei’s voice burrowing through his head. He picks up something big — a truck, or maybe a tank — and hurls it into the air. He misses the main body of the missile, but he clips a stabilizer and one of the boosters, and the missile’s flight wobbles, beginning to spiral off-course. Tomura’s relieved for only a second. Then he thinks it through. “What happens when that thing hits the ground?”
He sees panic flash across Spinner’s face. Magne’s, too. Fuck. They both tap their headsets in unison, and Tomura does the same. “Get us out of here, Kurogiri —”
Except their headsets are dead, because one of the quirks Tomura activated was fucking Radio Waves — but maybe he can reactivate it again. Tomura activates it in sharp bursts, then longer blurs of static, hoping Kurogiri is listening. He’s being as clear as he can, and he’s pretty sure hero students like Kurogiri used to be learn Morse code. S-O-S.
Kurogiri’s listening. The warp gates swallow them all — Spinner and Magne, Dabi and Machia, the rest of the strike team, even a few enemy soldiers who are too close. Tomura’s the last one to go. Tomura’s tracking the missile’s path as it speeds towards the ground. He doesn’t see what happens when it hits.
He hears about it, though. The instant he touches down in the hangar, Skeptic is already shouting. “Do any of you want to tell me why my sensors just picked up a nuclear blast?”
“They were launching it,” Spinner says. He’s bent double, breathing hard. “What were we supposed to do, let it land?”
“You were supposed to destroy it. You do realize they’re going to blame us?” Skeptic doesn’t just look pissed. He looks terrified. “We had some goodwill because of what happened in Tanohata, but now that we’ve nuked somebody —”
“We didn’t nuke anybody,” Magne says. She looks pale. Tomura sees beads of sweat standing out on her forehead. “Everybody knows we can’t do that. That’s why they pointed nukes at us in the first place.”
“She’s right,” Dabi says. He looks even worse than Magne and Spinner. “If you picked up that blast, so did everybody else. Either they have to admit that we got through their defenses and stopped them from launching, or they have to pretend it was some kind of accident where they bombed their own base. No matter which one we pick, they come out looking worse.”
“The mission was a success,” Re-Destro says. His giant form is starting to deflate. It says something about how fucking chaotic the battle was that Tomura didn’t even see him. “We crippled their first-strike capability, and as far as our losses —”
He sways on his feet, then topples sideways, falling against Machia, who’s sitting there with glazed eyes. “What the fuck?” Dabi demands, but he’s losing his balance, too. Spinner goes to catch him and they both fall. Tomura’s barely there in time to keep their heads from hitting the concrete. “What’s — happening —”
“The Trigger is wearing off,” Toga says. She draws up alongside Tomura and pulls Dabi away. “You should probably all lay down.”
Tomura helps Spinner down to the floor. Spinner blinks up at him. “How come you’re fine?”
“Super-Regeneration,” Tomura says. He can feel the drug’s effects fading — or at least he doesn’t feel like he’s going to explode if he lets up on controlling his quirks for a second — but he doesn’t feel dizzy or anything. “Take me back to the hospital.”
Toga nods, but of course Re-Destro has something to say about it. “Grand Commander, I’m not sure it’s good for you to —”
“Did I fucking ask?” Tomura snaps. “Take me back to the hospital. I want to be with her.”
“Let him go,” Magne says from the floor. “He’s going to spend the rest of his life without her. If he wants to sit with her before they take her body away, let him.”
Re-Destro’s a decent actor. So is Magne. Someone needs to tell Tomura who knows the truth and who doesn’t, so he doesn’t say something to the wrong person and blow the whole thing. “I’ll take you back,” Toga says. She helps Dabi lay down, then straightens up. She’s getting good with her Warp quirk. Tomura only has to spend a few seconds with his mouth full of sludge before he’s back at the hospital.
Toga’s dropped him just outside your room, and your room’s being guarded. Twice and Compress and Chronostasis are all outside, and Inada is leaning back against the door, arms crossed over her chest. Tomura doesn’t like that. At all. “You left her alone?”
“Toga said you were coming. We thought you’d want privacy.” Inada steps forward and hugs Tomura, hissing into his ear. “I’m watching her intentions. She doesn’t want to die. I’m so sorry. I loved her too.”
She pitches her voice to carry on the last two sentences, tearing up, and Tomura pulls away. He notices that Twice looks like he’s been crying, too. “You guys can go,” he says. “I can take care of her now.”
They step aside. Tomura almost knocks on the door before he remembers you’re supposed to be dead. Then he can’t figure out how the handle works, even though he opened this same stupid door earlier today. Finally he fumbles it open, squeezes through the smallest possible space, and shuts the door behind him. You’re sitting on the bed cross-legged. No IVs in your arms. No oxygen tube taped to your face. You look so normal, so much like you did the last time Tomura saw you awake, that he wonders for a second if this whole day was just a bad dream. A stupid nightmare he’s just waking up from now.
But there’s still dried blood in your hair. There are new scars on your arms, and there’s a bandage still wrapped around your hand where one of the IVs went in. And you’re looking at Tomura the way you did that first night outside the convenience store, like it’s been decades since you saw him and you’ve spent every one of them hoping you’d see him again.
“Are you —” His voice sounds stupid. Tenko clears his throat. “Is it all fixed? Are you okay?”
“They did a portable scan on me to show me what was wrong. I fixed the rest of it myself,” you say. “The structural damage, anyway. The nerves are more complicated. I don’t know how to fix those yet, so it’s going to —”
Hurt, Tenko thinks you were going to say, but he’s tired of being apart from you. He crosses the distance between you and pulls you into his arms, lifting you off the bed just long enough to lie down on it himself. He pulls you over on top of him, but that’s not close enough. There’s not a way for him to get close enough, and his hands are shaking, and it’s getting harder and harder for him to breathe. “It’s okay,” you say at once. Your voice is soft, steady. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay, Tenko —”
“It’s not,” Tenko says. “You almost died. When I found you, I couldn’t find a pulse at first.”
“Because you don’t know how to take a pulse,” you say. “I’ll show you. It’s easy.”
“I found it eventually,” Tenko protests, but he lets you take his hand and guide it, two fingers against your wrist, then against your throat, just under your jaw. Your heartbeat is steady, but slow. “Why is it slow?”
“I lost a lot of blood, and I can’t make new blood with Overhaul,” you say. “Otherwise — you’re here. I’m happy, and I feel safe. That’s why it’s slow.”
“You shouldn’t feel safe. I let this happen to you.” Tenko thinks of every way he fucked this up, a list that gets longer with every second he spends thinking about it. “What I did today — I should have done that from the beginning. The second you told me you were worried about it. If I’d done that as soon as we were finished terraforming —”
“We’d have been condemned. More people would have sided against us, because we’d really have attacked first.” You’re trying to calm Tenko down, because you always do that, and it almost always works. Tenko can feel himself falling back into the same pattern as before, the one where you give him reasons to live and hide the fact that you want to die. “Twice and Compress told me what was happening, and Mitsuko showed me the official statements — and All Might’s message — and the stuff happening online. The Freedom Alliance really blew it. If they were going to lose the moral high ground, they should have done it over someone more important than —”
“Shut up,” Tenko snaps, and you startle. “No one is more important than you. The Freedom Alliance didn’t try to kill Re-Destro. They didn’t go after Dabi or Toga or Spinner. They didn’t even come after me. This whole media shitstorm — they knew that was coming, and they decided it was worth it as long as they got to kill you. You’re the smartest person I know. What the fuck is it going to take to get this through your head?”
You recoil, shaking your head. Tenko shouldn’t be angry. Why is he so angry with you? You’re both alive. Neither of you are hurt. The Freedom Alliance is at least temporarily fucked. Everything’s supposed to be fine. Tenko lowers his voice, trying to sound calmer. “Why do you still think you don’t matter?”
“That’s not what I think,” you say. “We don’t need to talk about this now. There’s – other things – we should talk about.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Tenko says, and you look relieved. For about two seconds. “How about the miscarriage? Were you ever going to tell me you were pregnant?”
For a second, Tenko sees how you really feel about it. You’re upset. You’re scared. You feel sick and hurt, just like Tenko felt when he found out, except you feel stupid, too. Then your expression shuts down. “That’s not important.”
“I think it’s important. Now that you’ve had two of them.”
“It’s not important right now,” you say. “We’re fighting a war. It’s just escalated. Even if you’ve destroyed their first-strike capability for now – and it should have eliminated two out of five, the UK and France don’t have much else – they’ll rebuild it, and we’ll be right back where we started. If we don’t have something in place by then – and I had this idea –”
You’re talking fast. Tenko doesn’t like interrupting you, but he doesn’t have a choice. “Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because it doesn’t!” It takes a lot to make you angry, but Tenko sees your jaw clench, feels your shoulders tense up. “It’s not like we were – trying or something. It’s not like that’s something we want –”
“How do you know that when we never talk about it?” Tenko snaps. “I love you. I tell you everything. And all you do is hide. Do I do something that makes you think I don’t care? Do you not want to tell me things? Do you think I can’t help?”
“No,” you say. You look away, and Tenko sees new scars on your neck. “I’m scared it won’t matter to you.”
Because you think you don’t matter to him. How the hell did Tenko miss this? “Hey,” Tenko says, but you won’t look his way again. “I don’t get how you can still think that after all of this. Maybe I don’t need to get it right now.”
“We don’t need to do any of this right now,” you say. Your shoulders shake slightly. “I didn’t think you’d be mad at me.”
Tenko didn’t think so, either. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t even know if it’s you he’s really angry at, or all of this. At the world that made you and him like this. At the people who won’t just leave you alone. But even if it’s you he’s angry at – “I love you all the time. Even when we’re fighting about something. I don’t want to fight with you, but I’m not going to let this go. You said you didn’t want to live in the new world if I wasn’t in it. I don’t want to live in it unless you’re here.”
Your shoulders shake again. You still won’t look at Tenko, but you shift closer to him, and he hangs onto you, tight. He doesn’t know how this whole faking-your-death thing is going to work long-term, because he can’t picture ever letting go of you again. “Okay,” you say quietly. “I can’t – can we stop now? For now? Please?”
Your voice breaks slightly on the last word. “For now,” Tenko says, and you nod. “You said you have an idea for how to keep us safe. I want to hear it.”
“It’s not that I think I don’t matter,” you say. “I just – I know what matters. I’ve known my whole life. It’s not people. It’s not even heroes. It’s quirks.”
Sensei thought so. Idiots like Bakugou think so, too, and they aren’t the only ones. Tenko’s seen the news coverage, seen the way people write about you when you haven’t killed hardly anyone – like a monster, like a mad scientist, because you take people’s quirks away. He nods, and you keep talking. “I don’t think we need a nuclear bomb to deter people. All we need to be able to do is threaten what they really care about. The deleter compound is the only thing we have that they don’t. And I think –”
“I think you’re right, but we don’t have enough,” Tenko says. “What do you need to make more?”
“We don’t need to make more of it,” you say. You take a deep breath and let it go. “We just need to make a bomb.”
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
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