#AKA MY MAGNUM OPUS | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

scary-grace · 3 months ago

Note

um and [pda]. for you know who of course. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for the prompt! Since I'm apparently incapable of answering these cute prompts normally, I'm going to extend my usual offer of a rewrite if you really aren't vibing with it. In any case, this is a part 2 to magnum opus, aka the serial killer Tomura AU. 10.8k, all the standard warnings for a fic about serial killers, Tomura being Like That. Dividers by @cafekitsune

videre licet

Six months after he kidnapped you, the Symbol of Fear's laid out his most gruesome crime scene yet - and this time, he's taken the victim's heart hostage. While the rest of the police force grasps at straws, you follow the clues Shigaraki Tomura left you, hoping to find the heart so his victim can be laid to rest. Tomura is hoping for something else. (cross-posted to Ao3)

The call this time came from four hours away. With the cops well aware of where you and the others are headed, you can speed, and you and the rest of the forensics team make the trip in a cool three hours and fifteen minutes. No one will tell you exactly why you’ve been summoned there, but you know. Monoma knows, Aizawa knows, Shinsou knows, Hagakure knows – but you’re the only one with a sick, guilty pit yawning open in your stomach. You know what you’re going to find when you get to the new crime scene, and you know why. For the last six months, Tomura’s been quiet. If you and the team are getting called outside your jurisdiction, it means he’s back.

It’s been six months since Tomura kidnapped you for a photoshoot, and you didn’t tell anyone what happened. You should have. You know you should have, and at the same time, you couldn’t. If you told them that Tomura had come after you, they’d take you off the case. You can’t let that happen, not when you’re the only one who knows where to look for the clues Tomura leaves, the clues that you have a bad feeling he’s been leaving just for you. You’ve tried your hardest to get everyone else inside his head with you, but they can’t or won’t – you’re not sure which. You couldn’t tell anyone. You have to stay on Tomura’s case.

Tomura’s case, which has gone six months without a new murder, until tonight. Why did he go quiet for so long? Why did he come back now?

“We treat this like any other crime scene,” Aizawa says as Shinsou parks the car. “Regardless of what we find.”

He’s never said that before. Whatever’s happening at this crime scene, you know it’ll be bad. Tomura’s savagery is unparalleled, matched only by his obsessive need to make himself known, heard, seen. Based on your conversation, the former serves the latter, but that’s not particularly comforting. When you’re looking down through your camera lens at another mutilated body, it doesn’t matter why Tomura does it.

“His motive’s changed,” Shinsou says, after you all have stared at the gutted corpse for a solid ninety seconds. “It’s sexual.”

You can’t stop the scathing noise that exits your mouth. “It’s not sexual just because the victim’s a woman.”

“This isn’t even the first female victim,” Monoma adds in. “One of the early ones was a woman, too. He treats them the same as he treats the others.”

“So he’s a bisexual sexual sadist. There’s no way he goes to all this trouble if he’s not getting off on it.”

That’s not it. You know it isn’t it. “No,” Aizawa says flatly. “There is a message he wishes to convey. Shinsou and I will retreat. The rest of you, catalogue the crime scene, and then we’ll search.”

Monoma sketches while you take pictures, and Hagakure follows behind you, dusting every possible surface for prints. You work your way inwards to the body from the perimeter of the site, noting the direction the victim’s wide-open, staring eyes are angled. He hasn’t done anything with the hands or feet this time. The victim’s hands are folded over her abdomen, and there’s something folded up between them. You zoom in, snap photos from every angle, and then call for the others.

“It seems he’s growing less subtle.” Aizawa pulls on gloves while Hagakure carefully separates the item from the victim’s hands. It’s a paper flower, clumsily folded out of what appears to be a copy of a court order. That fits Tomura’s MO – almost. Tomura leaves hints, but not in plain sight like this. And Tomura never leaves bloody fingerprints all over whatever clue he’s left.

You try to point that out, but no one listens to you. They’re all congratulating themselves over how all serial killers make a mistake eventually, how he’s slowing down and losing his touch. You’re the only one who’s looking at the body itself, the only one seeing that something’s wrong with the ribcage. “Look at this,” you say. Then: “Hey! He didn’t just open her up. He –”

You reach down with a gloved hand, and the victim’s sternum splits open at the slight pressure. Next to you, Monoma makes a strangled sound and yanks out his sketchbook, drawing fast with a heavy hand. You peel off your gloves and lift your camera again. No wonder Tomura left such an obvious clue. He wanted the team to focus on that. Not on the fact that the victim’s heart has been carved from her chest.

Tomura removes his victims’ organs not infrequently, but he leaves them at the crime scene, artfully and disgustingly arranged. The heart’s nowhere to be found, and although you follow the victim’s eyeline, the heart’s not there. What’s there instead is a message scrawled on a piece of paper, in Tomura’s handwriting. It’s yours if you can find it. He’s taunting you. That asshole. You turn the piece of paper over, only to find an instruction. An awful instruction. Start where we met.

Where the two of you met? You met in his basement. Or you met in the park where he chloroformed you. No way are you going back to either of those places. Tomura’s sending you on a scavenger hunt for a victim’s heart – and worse, he’s guaranteed that no one is going to help you look. You’re dead certain that the fingerprints on the court order aren’t his, but they’re taking up all of your colleagues’ attention, just like he must have known they would. If you’re going to go looking for his latest victim’s heart, you’ll be doing it alone.

So you’ll do it alone. Tomura’s other victims, as mutilated as they were, at least got to be cremated whole. This victim deserves the same, whoever she was. You remember Tomura’s instructions to look up, the one he left at multiple crime scenes, and do it of your own accord this time. Tomura watches his crime scenes somehow. He must have, in order to spot you, which means he’s probably watching now, waiting to see what you’ll do in response to his challenge. You nod a few times to let him know that you’re willing to play. It’s uncomfortably easy to picture his smile.

You show the note to the others, but they aren’t interested, except to tell you to go through the crowd photos from the previous crime scenes. “Start with the earliest one,” Aizawa says. “If he’s referring to his first encounter with the police, he won’t have been as skilled at hiding his trail. You might find him in the crowd.”

You already tried that. Your first day at work after the kidnapping, you went over all the crowd photos with a fine-tooth comb, searching for the identifying features you remember – messy blue hair, red eyes, scratched-raw patches on the sides of his neck. There was nothing. Even from the beginning, he was too smart for that. By the time you came to one of his crime scenes –

It clicks into place for you all at once. Tomura’s mind doesn’t work the way a normal person’s does. To him, your first meeting wasn’t the kidnapping. Your first meeting is the first time he saw you. And if he’s watching his crime scenes, the first time he saw you is the first time you took pictures of one.

It’s a painfully long night at work, and there’s no rest for you even when you do clock off. You head straight to the first of Tomura’s crime scenes, long since cleared away. There’s a small memorial featuring a moldering teddy bear, which you can’t look at too long, and some graffiti that you’re not interested in reading. You walk to where the victim’s body lay and try to put yourself inside Tomura’s head. He wants to be noticed. Everything he does is in the service of getting noticed, of making sure that people can’t ignore him or what he wants them to see. And for a while now – at least a few crime scenes – he’s been trying to get you to notice him specifically. Not his crime scenes. Him.

You’re good at noticing things, but at this first scene, you missed something. You noticed the direction the victim’s eyes were looking, but you didn’t follow it, which means that whatever message Tomura left here went unnoticed. Maybe he wants you to find that message and get it out there, and then he’ll give back the heart. You call up your memory of the crime scene and follow the corpse’s empty gaze. Sure enough, there’s something tucked into a carved-away portion of the concrete wall.

It’s not the original clue. You know what kind of clues Tomura leaves, and this isn’t it, which means that he came back here at some point to leave something new. And he came back recently – the date on the receipt he left here is from three days ago. Did he already have the victim when he bought whatever this was? You and the others have had a hard time figuring out Tomura’s timeline. He does such a good job destroying the victims’ identifying features that it takes weeks to identify each one, and the longer it takes, the more likely it is that people’s memories of the last time they saw the victim alive will be too faded to use.

Whatever he’s planning, he started it in the last three days, which means his planning for it overlapped with the murder, if not the capture, too. You can’t decide which is worse – the thought that he had the victim already, and decided to carve out their heart to mess with you, or if he had the idea for the scavenger hunt and killed the victim specifically to set it up. Either way, it feels like it’s somehow your fault.

You’ve had dumber thoughts, but not in a while. You know there won’t be fingerprints on the receipt, so you take it with you bare-handed, studying it on the train. It’s a pickup receipt for something that’s already been paid for, and Tomura’s obscured the price, the transaction ID, the form of payment, and most of the letters in the name of the business. He’s good. You write out the number of spaces in the business’s name, fill in the letters you know, and start trying to guess what on earth Tomura bought.

Tomura bought coffee and a bagel, but he’s too wound up to eat them. Just like he was too wound up to sleep last night, or the night before, or the night before that. If he’s being honest, he hasn’t slept since he had this idea. Tomura needs you to hurry up and find all his clues, so he can finally get some rest. He got a little too used to getting some rest over the last six months. He needs to be careful, or he’ll lose his edge.

The high from his photoshoot with you lasted for weeks. Whole weeks where Tomura could look at the pictures you took of him, and the footage of you from the hidden cameras in the basement, and feel instantly calmer. He slept better at night, too. Killing people who deserved it and forcing everyone else to see the truth didn’t feel quite as urgent as it did before. The police were on it, as useless and corrupt as they are, and thanks to you, the whole world knows that Tomura has something to say. Tomura didn’t need to widen his victim pool for more crime scenes, more chances for the cops to figure it out. He could be selective, and make his crime scenes even more spectacular for you.

It was a great plan, until Tomura remembered that you’re only paying attention to him when he’s killing people. Six months where he doesn’t kill anyone is six months where you’re not looking at him, and once Tomura figured that out, he was so pissed at himself and so desperate to do something that he killed someone off his list on purpose, in a messy, ugly crime scene that you’d never associate with him. Then he got his shit together and started thinking about what he’d really need to do to recapture your attention. Something to give the so-called detectives a hard-on so they wouldn’t get in your way, and something to make sure that this time, you’d have to seek him out yourself.

You found Tomura’s first two clues already, and he told himself that he was going to wait to see you until you found them all – but then he had some stupid dream about you taking his picture again and knew he couldn’t wait that long. So now he’s here, staked out in the park across from the shop where he left the third clue, with a coffee that’s getting cold and a bagel he feels too nervous to eat, waiting to see if today’s the day you’ll come looking.

It’s not like Tomura hasn’t seen you at all. He’s been watching you since the second he brought you back to your apartment, carried you up the stairs and used your keys to unlock the door and took off his shoes and yours to carry you inside. He’d set the drone up already, so he could be in and out in five minutes rather than lingering, and he still ended up staying longer than he should have. He’s had that drone at your house, and there’s another one that follows the forensics unit to crime scenes so he can watch you work, and every so often he hacks into the CCTV cameras nearest your favorite places to hang out in case you’re there.

Tomura likes seeing you. Likes seeing you go about your day sometimes, even if he has to stop himself from adding new people to his hit list any time you come across somebody rude. But watching you through a camera isn’t the same thing as seeing you in person. And you taking photos of his crime scene isn’t the same thing as seeing him.

He forces himself to drink some of the coffee, and to eat some of the bagel, but his hands are shaking so badly that he ends up with cream cheese everywhere. Having cream cheese all over his hands turns out to not be the worst, because it attracts somebody’s off-leash dog over to him, and Tomura gets way too much satisfaction over being the better offer than the dog’s actual owner. He feels calmer by the time the owner finally lures the dog away, but it doesn’t last long. There you are, right across the street, walking fast with headphones in your ears and headed straight for the shop Tomura’s been staking out.

You look tired. Like you’ve been losing sleep over Tomura the same way he’s been losing it over you, which isn’t a thought Tomura should be having in public. He hides behind his coffee and watches you make your way into the store. He should have picked a better place to camp out than the park across the street. He wants to be closer. He wants to hear what you’re saying. And why shouldn’t he get closer if he wants to?

Because it’s stupid. Because you’re smart. Because you’re smart enough to guess that Tomura’s watching you, and you might be expecting to see him here. Tomura doesn’t let any of that stop him from crossing the street and sneaking into the store, browsing with his back to you while you discuss his clue with the shopkeeper.

“Can you tell me anything about the person who bought it?” you’re asking. “What else were they looking at when they came in?”

“The young man only came in to pay,” the shopkeeper says. “This wasn’t a purchase, but a repair. He brought the item in, made his specifications, and informed me that you would be by to pick it up.”

“The person with the receipt.”

“No, you. By your name,” the shopkeeper says. Tomura wishes he could see your face right now. You probably look surprised, even though you should already know that he knows your name. “Wait here a moment. I’ll bring it up to you.”

If you get bored and start looking around, Tomura’s screwed, but Tomura hasn’t lasted this long by freaking out for no reason. Just because he prefers to watch through drones doesn’t mean he can’t handle himself in public. He pretends to browse, keeping his back to you, fighting the urge to glance over his shoulder and see what you’re doing. That’s an amateur mistake. He can watch you as much as he wants later. Right now, he just needs to make sure you get his next clue.

Your voice is quiet when you speak up – quiet, and rattled with exasperation. “You’d better not have left me a murder victim’s jewelry.”

Tomura almost shits himself. You know he’s there. How do you know he’s there? Did you see him across the street before you came in, or did you expect him to be following you this closely? Why haven’t you called the cops yet? If you knew he was there, you’d have called immediately, which means you don’t know he’s there. You’re just talking to yourself. Tomura’s drones catch you doing that sometimes. You’re just not usually talking about him.

But now you are, and you’re thinking about him, too. And he didn’t leave you a murder victim’s jewelry – at least, not one of his victims’. Tomura stays put, trying to calm his racing heart, as the shopkeeper comes back with the clue. “The clasp and fastening on the locket have been repaired,” the shopkeeper says, “and the new picture has been included. Would you like it wrapped, or would you prefer to wear it out?”

Tomura can leave now. You’ve got the clue. He doesn’t need to hear your answer. “I’ll wear it out,” you say, and all of Tomura’s efforts to calm the fuck down go out the window in an instant. “Thanks.”

“That’s cute,” Hagakure says, leaning across the lunch table to examine the necklace a little more closely. “Where did you get it? It looks old.”

“Thrift shop,” you say, wishing for the billionth time that you’d taken it off. “I’m not sure it’s my style, though.”

“It’s a locket, right?” Monoma slurps his soda. “What’s in it?”

“Not sure. It doesn’t open.”

It opens, all right. One of the photos you took of Tomura is in it, and on the other side, there’s a pressed flower, one that you’re pretty sure has been there for decades. But Tomura wouldn’t have left the flower in there if it wasn’t important somehow, so you’ve spent the last couple nights going blind on the internet, comparing the tiny flower to picture after picture and trying to figure out what it is. You’d rather fixate on the flower than on the picture of Tomura, which unfortunately is a really good one – one of the best ones you took during the photo shoot six months ago. You wonder why he picked it.

Regardless of why he picked it, you’re treating both the photo and the flower as a distraction. Tomura might think he’s leaving you clues towards the heart, but he’s also leaving clues towards himself.

You had a feeling the locket was old, so you went to an antique dealer to have it looked at and found out that it’s close to seventy years old. The maker’s mark on the back of it is from an obscure but well-respected jeweler whose better-kept pieces go for quite a bit of money. All his pieces were numbered, the antique jeweler told you. If you’d like, I can look up who it was sold to first.

He gave you the owner of the locket, a man named Shimura who reportedly bought it for his daughter. You tracked down photos of the daughter, Shimura Nana, and found multiple photos in which she’s wearing it. You also found out that she was murdered, her case never solved, which means that Tomura did give you a murder victim’s jewelry – a murder victim whose death he can’t possibly have been responsible for, since he’s close to your age and wouldn’t have been born for another forty years. But that begged the question of how he got the locket in the first place. And who the locket actually belongs to. According to the articles you read about the murder, Shimura Nana was survived by her only son, Kotaro.

You looked him up, thinking you’d give it back to him once you figured out the flower clue, only to discover that the Shimura family’s bad luck didn’t stop with Nana’s death. The entire Shimura family was murdered twenty-five years ago, and their case was never solved, either. You’ve requested the original files from the jurisdiction where the murders occurred, working under the assumption that there’s some kind of connection. Tomura wouldn’t have had this locket if there wasn’t some connection to the family who owned it. You’re just not sure what it is. Or why he’d give it to you. Pieces of paper with clues scribbled on them are one thing. Jewelry looks suspiciously like a present.

“Hey,” Monoma says from next to you, and you snap out of it in a hurry. “Is that thing an evil amulet or something? You were checked out.”

“Maybe there’s a cursed spirit inside it,” you deadpan. Hagakure snickers. “No, I’m just tired. What were you saying?”

“I was just saying we’re having trouble with the fingerprints,” Hagakure says, and you nod. “Have you had any luck finding the heart?”

You shake your head. “I’m still looking.”

You get your big break with the flower after work when you discover that it’s a rare species of miniature orchid, something that’s only grown under specific conditions. The botanical gardens in Tokyo are the only place that has them. It looks like you know what you’re doing on your next day off.

Tomura’s never staged a crime scene in Tokyo, so you’re not sure why he’d send you here, but you go anyway. It seems like a weird move for him, given how many people are around, given how hard it’ll be to get a close look at whatever he’s left you. If he’s even left you anything. You wander the gardens until your feet hurt, inspecting the orchids every time the crowd parts enough for you to get close. There’s nothing. You thought he might have buried something in the plot where the orchids grow, but the earth’s undisturbed. Did you follow the wrong clue?

Maybe. Tomura will be disappointed, but it’s his own fault. He should have given you something less ambiguous to work from.

At least that’s what you think, until you stick your hand in your pocket on the train ride back and come out with a folded piece of paper that you don’t remember picking up. The first thing you see is his handwriting on the back of it: You’re getting warmer. When you flip it over, you see that it’s a movie ticket for tomorrow night. That’s your clue. You didn’t make the wrong guess about where to look. You were just wrong about where you’d find it, and a bolt of terror and anticipation runs down your spine.

Tomura was here. Tomura got close enough to you to plant this in your pocket, and you didn’t even notice. That’s why he picked the botanical gardens – not to send you on a wild-goose chase, but to give himself crowd cover, and to make sure you’d be so distracted looking for the clue that you’d completely miss him giving it to you himself. Tomura’s not just dangerous. Not just better than you thought he was. Tomura’s brilliant. And for some reason, he used that brilliance to plant a movie ticket in your pocket, for a theater in your town that’s showing exclusively Best Picture winners as a lead-up to the Academy Awards.

You remember seeing posters advertising Silence of the Lambs and wonder if Tomura’s really that much of jackass. Or if he forgot what happens to the serial killer at the end of the story. You didn’t have plans tomorrow night, anyway. It looks like you’re going to the movies.

Tomura shouldn’t be here. At all. He’s already taken way too many risks, and he doesn’t even like this movie. He had to buy a ticket in order to plant your next clue, and since it didn’t matter which seat he was in – since he wasn’t staying – he picked one two rows behind yours. But then he sat down. Sat through six or seven previews. Put up with idiot couples in his row and the row between your seat and his. It’s your fault Tomura’s still here, because you haven’t shown up yet. As soon as he knows you’ve made it, he can leave.

You slip into the theater just as the lights are dimming, when it’s too late for Tomura to get out without causing a scene. Now he’s going to have to sit through an entire movie in a theater, and as bad as Tomura is at sitting still through movies he’s actually interested, he’s going to be even worse at sitting through fucking Titanic. He wishes he’d had the idea to send you to the movies last week instead. Then you could have watched Silence of the Lambs.

It's three hours of Tomura’s life that he won’t get back, but so what? He’s got things to think about. Based on how badly the press is freaking out about his most recent murder and the fake fingerprints he left all over the scene, he’s got their attention, so now he needs to capitalize on it. He’s spent enough time screwing around on the lower tiers of his list, figuring out how to stage a crime scene for maximum impact. Now it’s time to go after the lying hypocrites who let this happen.

Who to start with, though? Tomura doesn’t want to bite off more than he can chew by tackling his biggest target too soon, but if he starts with the others and his main target catches on, the bastard will beef up his security and make himself all but inaccessible. Tomura needs to get him second, maybe. Or third. And he needs to be careful. His targets might not be able to put the pieces together, but Tomura knows you can, and you’ll be the one taking pictures at his crime scene.

Most of the couples sitting in the same row as Tomura are making out, like Tomura’s wandered into some bullshit PG-13 orgy by accident. Your row isn’t much better, but at least the seat to your right is empty, so you can get an armrest to yourself without picking up an STD. You got popcorn and a soda, which is what Tomura should have done if he was planning to stay, and you don’t look like you’re hating the movie. It’s hard to tell when Tomura can’t see your face.

Tomura wonders what movie you’d have picked, if you were the one buying the tickets. You can probably handle a horror movie, given what your job is, but Tomura’s willing to bet that you don’t like them. He doesn’t like them, either, and he can handle blood and guts even better than you. What other kinds of movie are there, really? He can’t picture you being into romcoms or something stupid like that. Tomura doesn’t think he’s ever watched a romcom. He’d put up with one if you wanted to see it.

This movie’s not a romcom. The more time Tomura spends paying attention to the movie, the more annoyed he gets, until he finally gets up and leaves in the middle of some stupid car sex scene, not caring about how much of a scene he makes. He’ll hang out outside the theater, make sure you leave with the clue, plant it on you if you didn’t find it, and go home.

You’ve got the clue with you when the movie lets out close to midnight, and Tomura watches you – but he’s not the only one. The guy from the concession counter is still here, even though Tomura watched him clock off an hour ago, and he stops you partway to the doors. Tomura drifts a little closer, close enough to hear that this guy wants to know why you were going to see a romance movie all by yourself on – Valentine’s Day? Is it really fucking Valentine’s Day? You shoot back that you’re only in it for the shipwreck and shrug him off, but Tomura sees you glance back over your shoulder as you step out onto the street. The guy from the concession stand doesn’t wait more than a few seconds before he follows you.

Fucking amateur. Tomura tells himself that’s why his blood’s boiling. Watching another criminal, one who’s not even good at it, always bothers him. If the concession stand asshole knew anything, he’d know he’s already blown it – you’re wary of him, and you’ll be watching out for him, and you’ll change your behavior to minimize his chances to get you alone. If Tomura was this creep, he’d find a new target. This creep keeps following you. Tomura doesn’t think twice about following him.

He memorized the grid of streets around this theater, just in case he had to make a quick getaway, and he knows exactly where to be. When the creep walks past the alley, so intent on following you that he doesn’t question whether anyone’s after him, Tomura grabs him and yanks him into the darkness. It’s not how Tomura likes to deal with people, but it’s how he learned to do it, and there are some things it’s not possible to forget.

The creep is bigger than Tomura, heavier than Tomura, and he must have been serious about whatever he was planning to do to you, because he’s got a knife. He takes a swing at Tomura that scores across Tomura’s ribcage, then grabs Tomura by his shoulder and throws him against the wall of the alleyway, hard enough to rattle Tomura’s teeth in his skull. But victims have fought Tomura before. Stronger victims, in better shape, with actual training. He’s killed cops and former soldiers. This guy is nothing.

It gets messy, and Tomura gets hurt, but he wishes he had time to drag this out. He wants this guy to suffer, and he wants to leave you a pretty crime scene, one that’ll tell you exactly what Tomura did for you. When Tomura knocked you out to bring you back to your apartment after you took his picture, he could tell that you didn’t believe him when he said he wouldn’t kill you. He’s not going to kill you. Killing for you, though – Tomura’s got no problem with that.

He guts the creep with his own knife, his sleeve wrapped over his hand so he won’t leave a fingerprint, and steps back to admire his handiwork. It’s not his best, but you’ll understand. And if you don’t – you’ve got his last clue now. Tomura can explain it to you when he sees you in person.

Tomura’s last clue is straightforward – a location, a time, and a warning that you’ll never get the heart if you tell anyone or if you don’t come alone. How badly do you want the victim’s heart? Really badly, and after Tomura’s led you on an unhinged scavenger hunt halfway across Japan, you’ve got no interest in backing down. Maybe he’s gotten distracted setting this up for you. Maybe he’ll make a mistake, and you can find a way to bring him in.

When you get to work the morning, the Shimura files are in a carton on your desk, but before you can even lift one out, a call for forensics goes out, summoning you to a murder scene downtown. Aizawa’s off for the day, so Shinsou’s running the show. Monoma’s off, too, which means it’s just you and Hagakure, and you’re going to have to sketch the scene in addition to photographing it. You have time for a longing look at the Shimura files before you’re hustled out the door.

Three seconds after looking at the scene, Shinsou declares it as a copycat of the Symbol of Fear, and you have to admit that it doesn’t look like Tomura’s work. The body’s barely been gutted, the limbs haven’t been removed or rearranged, and the victim’s eyes look like they’ve had thumbs jammed into them. This wasn’t Tomura, even if it did happen only a few blocks away from the theater you were at last night. Tomura must have been there to plant the clue, but there’s no way he left after you did. Tomura doesn’t strike you as a movie type, but of all the movies he could possibly sit through, you don’t think Titanic is anywhere on the list.

It’s not Tomura’s work, but something still feels odd to you as you sketch the scene and pick up your camera to do your real job. Hagakure is dusting for prints, and Shinsou’s thinking out loud, the way Aizawa never does. “The victim’s been partially eviscerated, but that likely occurred postmortem, due to the lack of blood spatter. The true cause of death appears to be strangulation with a rope or some other object, which is not present at the scene. The killer must have taken it with them.”

You keep snapping photos, starting at the victim’s feet, then working your way upwards, trying not to trip on Hagakure in the bargain. Shinsou’s still talking. “The victim’s phone and wallet are missing. Combined with the short distance between the scene and the victim’s workplace, it’s likely that this was a crime of opportunity.”

“His workplace?” you repeat. “How do you know where he works?”

“Nametag,” Shinsou says, and you take a picture of it. “He worked at the theater a few blocks away.”

The victim’s face is a distorted mess, but you remember the name on his nametag. You made sure you remembered it, because the vibe was off when he stopped you on your way out the door, and you took the slow train home just to ensure that you’d be surrounded by people for as long as possible. He creeped you out last night, and he’s dead this morning. That can’t be a coincidence. You need it to be a coincidence, because if it’s not –

“Detective! Look!” Hagakure is bent over the victim’s right hand. “He must have fought his attacker. There’s hair in his hand.”

The strands of hair she’s lifting from between the victim’s fingers with tweezers are longer than you remember, but it’s been six months since you last saw Tomura. That’s enough time for his hair to grow. They have his hair now. They’ve got his DNA. “Check under the fingernails on that hand,” Shinsou is saying to Hagakure. “I’ve got skin fragments here, too.”

“Over here!” The officer who called in the body is beckoning to you, and you make your way over. “Blood spatter. Think it could be something?”

You’re not a detective, just a photographer, but the distance between the blood spatter and the body is significant – and it’s pointed in the wrong direction. The victim would have been trying to move out of the alley, back towards the street, but the blood spatter is close to the other end of the alley. Tomura left it when he was escaping, which means Tomura’s injured, which means that the police now have his skin, hair, and blood attached to an open murder case. This was a stupid kill for Tomura to make. Why would he take this kind of risk?

For you.

The thought is horrific, but once it’s in your head, you can’t shake it loose. It clings to you through the rest of the crime scene documentation, and it’s in your head as you upload your photos and write your report back at the station. It’s still there when you finally get to sit down and read through the Shimura file, documenting the annihilation of an entire family. Shimura Nana was murdered almost fifty years ago, and twenty-five years after that, her descendants were murdered, too. Shimura Kotaro, his in-laws, his wife, and his children.

No. Not his children. His daughter was murdered, but not his son. His son, five years old at the time, went missing, and has been missing ever since. You flip through the file one-handed, looking for more information about Shimura Tenko. With the other, you wake up your computer and navigate to the missing persons database. Shimura Tenko is in there, sure. Shimura Tenko’s listed as presumed dead. His profile is bare-bones – no photo, no last known place or last known sighting, no information about any search that was conducted. There’s nothing in the file, either. Did anybody go looking for this kid?

No. Even when you dig up newspaper articles about the murder, Shimura Tenko’s barely mentioned. If people were looking for him, they stopped looking fast. You think of Tomura’s obsessive need to be looked at, of his insistence on drawing attention to the failures of people who are supposed to protect others, and feel sick to your stomach. This can’t be it. This can’t be who he is, where he came from. So what if the locket you’re still wearing belonged to his grandmother? So what if he risked his mission to kill somebody who bothered you? So what if he went six months without killing anybody after somebody looked at him just once? You’ve seen what Tomura’s capable of. There’s no way this is where he started.

There’s a school photo of Shimura Tenko somewhere in the file. You stare at it for an hour, searching for Tomura in the few details you can see, but it’s been more than twenty years since this photo was taken. If you’re right about this, Tomura’s your age, and you don’t look anything like your old school pictures, anyway. And it’s not like you have anything to compare to. You’ve never actually seen Tomura’s face.

He'll be watching you when you go to pick up the heart. Maybe you can find a way to get a message across to him. Knowing who he is won’t make him any easier to catch, but maybe if you let him know you’re looking at him, you can buy a little more time.

You’re almost here. Tomura checks his tablet screen, flipping through drone camera after drone camera to make sure you’re alone, sends one final message, and sets it aside. His nerves hum in anticipation, not quite the same way they do when he’s about to execute a planned kill. Tomura planned this from the beginning. You were always going to end up here on this rooftop, and he was always going to be waiting for you. Tomura just wasn’t expecting to be such a mess.

He's got a black eye and a split lip and scratches on his hands, and he was going to put on clean clothes, but his stupid washing machine broke. The best he can say for his clothes right now is that they aren’t bloodstained, but that’s not going to last – the cut on his ribs keeps opening up, and the bandage he put on it won’t stay in place. Tomura’s not sorry he killed the creep who was after you. He’s just pissed that he got himself beaten up in the bargain.

He hears your footsteps on the stairs, fishes the hand out of his coat pocket, and settles it on his face, wincing like an idiot. He was going to sit down, but if he sits down, he’s going to grimace standing up, and he doesn’t want you to know he’s hurt. Tomura leans back against the wall instead, arms crossed over his chest, as you appear around the corner.

Tomura’s mouth goes dry. He liked carrying you to his workshop, watching you sleep and then wake up, but this is better. You’re wide awake, and you came to see him purposely. You’ve got a backpack, like Tomura’s got a backpack, and your camera bag is slung over your shoulder. You’re still wearing the locket Tomura left as the second clue, but when you see Tomura, you rock back a step in shock. “Hey,” Tomura says, and his voice cracks. “You made it.”

“You’re here,” you say. Tomura doesn’t know how to read the look on your face. “You promised me the heart.”

The heart. Right. That’s how Tomura got you to play in the first place. He knew you wouldn’t be able to leave even the most useless victim to be cremated in pieces, and he knew you’d keep looking, because that’s what you do. “It’s on its way.”

“It’s not here?”

“It’s on its way,” Tomura repeats. Your stare turns accusatory in a hurry. “Look, if you walked up to the police station holding somebody’s heart in a cooler, they’d get suspicious of you. I’m doing you a favor.”

“They’re going to be suspicious of you. Your DNA is all over the crime scene from this morning.”

So you found that one. Tomura’s stomach clenches. “It doesn’t matter. They’re not going to find it anywhere else.”

“They still have it,” you say. “Where’s the heart?”

“I said it’s on its way. You don’t trust me?”

“You tricked me,” you snap. “I’m leaving.”

“No.” Tomura swallows down a surge of panic. He could get ahold of you, stop you – if he hadn’t gotten hurt. His injuries won’t slow him down much, but it’ll be enough, especially since he doesn’t want to hurt you. “I’m having it delivered to the police station, but I’ll cancel it if you leave. Do you want it to get there or not?”

“I want proof,” you say. “Do you have package tracking?”

Tomura takes out his phone, unlocks it, holds it out to you. You’d have to come closer to him to take it, and you won’t. “If you were just going to ship it the whole time, why did you do this?”

Don’t you know? You should know, just like you knew what Tomura meant by his crime scenes, just like you know how to make him look human when you capture him on film. When you speak again, your voice is quieter, anguished. “Why did you kill that guy for me?”

You do know. Tomura feels the knots in his throat and stomach relax slightly. “Why do you think?”

“He was never going to get to me,” you say. “I was in a crowd the whole way home. Nobody’s that stupid.”

“He was,” Tomura says. “Did you want me to just sit there and do nothing?”

“I didn’t want you to do anything!” You look upset. Why are you upset? “I don’t understand.”

You don’t understand, but you came prepared, probably. All this stuff you brought with you in your backpack is probably for transporting the heart safely – except for one thing. “If you don’t understand, why did you bring your camera?”

“I thought you might have left something for me to look at,” you say. It’s quiet for a second. Tomura waits, fixated on the slightest flutter of your eyelids, the way your chest rises and falls. You look up and make eye contact. “But I think you did.”

It’s a good thing Tomura put the hand on. His face turns red so fast that he’s surprised he doesn’t combust. “I’m not leaving until I know the package got delivered,” you say. Tomura nods and gives himself a headache. “And while we’re waiting, I could always take your picture.”

“I brought your camera,” Tomura says. You brought it up first, so he doesn’t feel weird about saying it. He lifts it out of his backpack and hands it over to you, watching as you deftly adjust the settings. “Is the light okay?”

“I’ve worked with worse,” you say. “Don’t worry. I’ll make you look good.”

You said the same thing last time. It was dumb last time, too. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“You have seen it,” you say. “Last time, I – um, I’m pretty sure you liked the pictures I took.”

Tomura liked them. He’s also pretty sure that’s not what you’re referencing. “I’m not going to do that just because you’re taking my picture.”

“Okay.” You take a test shot, then another, and if Tomura hadn’t gotten beat to shit last night, he’d already be ordering himself to calm down. “Do you care if I pose you more this time?”

Posing him was where you got him into trouble last time, but again – beat to shit. “No. It’s fine.”

You want him to sit down in a specific spot, in a spot that’s catching faint afternoon sunlight. Tomura sits cross-legged at first, and you take a few pictures like that, but then you tell him to get comfortable. “Just move when you feel like moving. I’ll take care of everything else.”

At first Tomura does what you said, shifting this way and that, but when he sees how tightly you focus in on everything he’s doing, he can’t resist experimenting a little bit. He draws his knees up and sits forward, ignoring the protest from the cut on his ribs. The pictures you take aren’t of the places he’s expecting. He’s expecting you to take a bunch of shots of his arms wrapped around his knees, but you’re ignoring them. You’re taking a lot of pictures of his face.

Tomura’s not great with eye contact. Eye contact through a camera lens isn’t much better. “Should I make different faces or something?”

“Most of these aren’t of your whole face. Here.” You show Tomura the pictures you’ve taken so far, and he sees photo after photo of his eye, visible through the fingers of the hand. His hair, which he hasn’t cut in forever but did try to brush, and the way it falls over his cheek and his shoulder. A couple shots have zoomed in on the back of his neck, the angle of his jaw to his neck to his shoulder. “What do you think?”

Tomura thinks it’s like his dreams. He’s thinking how weird it is that you see him like this, that you can take a photo of a part of his body that he scratches raw more often than not and make it look normal. “You have really nice features,” you say. Tomura looks away from you in a hurry. “But you’d be worth looking at no matter what.”

Tomura’s stomach twists. “I was wondering,” you continue. “Last time I wouldn’t let you, but this time – I think it might be nice to get some shots of your face.”

“Of my face? So you can tell the police what I look like?”

“This is your camera. You’re not going to let me take the film with me.”

“And I’m supposed to think that will stop you?” Tomura asks. His heart is beating so hard that he’s giving himself a headache. “You could draw me. I’ve seen your crime scene sketches.”

“If you’ve seen my crime scene sketches, then you know I couldn’t draw a person if my life depended on it.” Your voice is softer. Tomura can almost picture you smiling. “It’s okay if not. But if you wanted me to –”

Fuck it. Tomura pulls the hand off his face before he can lose his nerve and looks back at you. He sees your eyes widen in surprise, then worry. “Tomura,” you say, “what happened?”

“What?” Tomura’s expecting you to explain, not to reach out to the side of his face that the creep slammed against the wall. “Don’t. It’s fine.”

“You got it fighting that guy. For me.” You set the camera down. Your hand forms to the curve of Tomura’s cheek, then jerks away. “It’s warm. Hang on –”

You leave, but you’re back a second later, crumpling a single-use ice pack to activate it. Tomura’s expecting you to hand it to him, but you hold it to his cheek instead, and he can’t resist tilting his head against it. “Do you just keep this stuff around?”

“I brought it for the heart. I wasn’t sure what kind of packaging it was going to be in.”

“I kept it on ice,” Tomura says. He’s not an amateur. “What are you doing?”

You’re digging in your backpack again, coming up with a first-aid kit. “There was blood spatter at the scene this morning, leading away from the body. Where else did you get hurt?”

Tomura must have screwed up that crime scene even worse than he thought, and he doesn’t care at all. As long as he’s extra careful with his other crime scenes, it’ll be fine. The weirder part of this is that you’re helping him. You’re not just taking his picture. You want to help. Why?

Tomura decides it doesn’t matter. “He pulled the same knife I gutted him with,” he says, and your eyes widen slightly. “He got me in the ribs.”

“Is it still bleeding?” you ask. Tomura can feel it dripping down his torso. He nods, and although he should have seen what you say next coming from a mile away, it still catches him completely by surprise. “Take off your shirt.”

The cut on Tomura’s ribcage is jagged, deeper in some places than others, and it’s too wide to stay closed without help. The bandage he’s slapped over it is hanging on by a thread. “You should have gotten stitches,” you say nonsensically, trying to avoid the old scars you can see on his torso, or the fact that you can almost count his ribs. “How big was this knife?”

“Big.” The Symbol of Fear watches you, eyes wide and face flushed. He’s still holding the ice up to his cheek, and you see the offensive wounds on the backs of his hands. Shinsou assumed that the killer used a ligature, but based on those, you’re pretty sure Tomura strangled the victim by hand. The victim must have clawed them to pieces trying to get Tomura to let go. “He had a knife, and he waited an hour after his shift to make sure he saw you leave. I had to do it.”

Tomura thinks all his murders are justified. You know that. This is the first time you’ve found yourself fighting the urge to agree with him. “Like you had to kill the others?”

“Someone had to,” Tomura says. He grimaces as you pull the edges of the wound together with a steri-strip. “Did you figure out who the last one was yet?”

Shinsou and Aizawa tracked down everyone whose name was in the court order Tomura left in the victim’s hands. Only one of them went missing recently, and a couple of DNA samples from family members later, you had a positive ID. “She was a child welfare worker. Not your usual type. A real –”

“Bleeding heart,” Tomura fills in, and you groan. “Come on. That was funny.”

“No, it isn’t. What you did to her wasn’t funny at all.”

“She had it coming.” Tomura’s voice turns cold. “Go look at her cases. There’s not one time she didn’t place the kid back with their fucking family.”

You remember something in the Shimura file, something about concerning behavior in the Shimura children, behavior that hinted at something going wrong at home. “What I did to her was over fast, and it only happened once,” Tomura says shortly. “She had it a lot easier than the kids she threw away.”

“I’m not defending that,” you say. Tomura gives you a skeptical look. “I’m not defending her. Almost everyone you’ve killed has done something awful. But there are ways to punish them that aren’t –”

“Like what?” Tomura waits for you to answer, but he doesn’t wait long. “She hurt people who nobody else gives a shit about. Do you think anybody’s going to stand up and defend them? They don’t even want to look.”

You don’t know what to say. “I got tired of waiting for people to open their eyes. They’ll see when I make them see. When you make them see.”

This is why Tomura won’t kill you. He needs you and your photos, or he thinks he needs them, to spread the word, to take his vision and transmit it to the world. It doesn’t matter to your coworkers why Tomura does what he does, but it matters to you. Tomura wants to send a message to the world. He wants to teach the world a lesson. “If they saw,” you start, as you carefully apply another steri-strip. “If you knew they’d seen. Would you stop?”

“They’ll never see.”

“But if they did,” you say. “Would you stop?”

“I’ll stop when it does,” Tomura says. He closes his eyes.

So, never. Why would he? Tomura has power as the Symbol of Fear, so much power that he’s not scared of leaving DNA evidence, that he’s not scared of you seeing his face. If he really is Shimura Tenko, a kid no one cared about when it counted, why would he ever give up the chance to force everyone to care about him? To watch him, to hang on his every word and move, to devote themselves to understanding him at last? Tomura won’t stop. He’ll never stop. But maybe he’ll pause.

Only one way to test. “I thought you might have stopped,” you say. You apply one final steri-strip, then put a bandage down over it. Then you reach for the camera. “Six months without a crime scene is a lot.”

“I was lulling you all into a false sense of security.” Tomura startles when you snap the first picture. “I wanted to see what you’d do when you thought it was over.”

“I never thought it was over.” You take another picture. Golden hour’s in full swing, and the light is perfect as it scatters across Tomura’s body, gilds his eyelashes and his hair. “You’d been busy. Did you take a vacation?”

“No.” Tomura scoffs. His face is flushed, and it’s spreading, down his throat and over his scars until his collarbones are dusted pink. You can’t help taking pictures of that, either. “No. I wanted. I –”

He squirms slightly, even though you aren’t touching him – as if your gaze through the camera lens is something physical, something as tangible as your hands on his skin. It doesn’t stop when you lower the camera. It gets worse. You remember this from last time, and you tell yourself that’s why you’re reaching out to him. You’re trying to recreate the same conditions as before, the ones that led to the six-month pause in his murders, trying to give him what he’s looking for through a different mechanism. It’s not because you know what happens next. It’s not because you want to see it again.

Tomura shudders when you touch the uninjured side of his face, trace over his jaw. You pause with your fingers at his throat, feeling his pulse racing, and force yourself to remember that he choked someone to death less than twenty-four hours ago, that he’d think nothing of closing his hands around another person’s throat. Then you move on to his collarbones, more deeply flushed with pink. The light is beautiful. You’d take pictures if this wasn’t so much –

“More,” Tomura breathes. “Don’t stop.”

You run your fingers lightly along his sternum and remind yourself what it would have taken to carve out someone’s heart. A scalpel to cut through skin and fat and muscle. A sternal saw to crack open the chest, a rib spreader to pry it apart. His hands, the one scratching at his neck and the one clawing for something to hold onto, would have been covered in blood. Human hearts are smaller than people think. He could have held it in one hand.

Tomura’s chest rises and falls rapidly, but it’s not until your hand slips past his sternum to rest on his abdomen that a sound leaves his mouth. You reach for your camera, needing to capture the look on his face, but Tomura’s hand closes around yours, holding on painfully tight. His grip is like iron, even as his hand shakes, and you recoil at the same moment as your heart skips a beat. How far are you planning to go here, with him? He’s a murderer. He’s done such awful things. You can’t hide from them. You’ve seen them up close.

But you see this, too. You see vulnerability alongside viciousness, loneliness alongside rage. Someone who knows what it’s like to be forgotten, someone who would do anything to stop it from happening again, someone who doesn’t make mistakes – except when he’s making them for you. The thought sweeps through you in a hot, painful flood. You can’t tell anyone about what happens here. That means it doesn’t count. You know just as well as Tomura does – if no one sees, it’s like it didn’t happen at all.

You turn your hand in Tomura’s with an effort, one he resists until he realizes that you aren’t trying to make him let go. His eyes fly open when you lace your fingers with his, and for a moment you’re holding his gaze, seeing more than he wants you to see, seeing everything. Then his phone starts buzzing, and whatever tension lies between you dissolves into awkwardness. This isn’t why you’re here. You pull your hands away, and Tomura reaches for his phone. “It’s delivered,” he says. “Look.”

There’s a photo of the package, left on the steps of the police station – a cooler, with a barely-legible message written on it in black marker. Who’s heartless now? A question occurs to you. “Would you have given it back if I hadn’t played your game?”

“No.” Tomura sits up and pulls on his bloodstained shirt. “It was for you.”

“And this.” You touch the locket around your neck. “Do you want it back?”

“Why would I want it back?”

“It’s a family heirloom,” you say, and his shoulders stiffen. “Don’t do that. Did you think I wouldn’t look?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Tomura says shortly. “It won’t help you find me. I don’t care.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” you say. “I think you wanted what you’ve always wanted.”

Your phone starts going berserk, too. You don’t even have to look to know it’s from work, to know that you’re being called in because the heart’s been found, because there’s yet another development in the serial killer case of the millennium. Tomura’s on his feet now, looking away from you. “You don’t have a clue what I want.”

It’s not much distance between the two of you on the rooftop. You aren’t crossing any lines you haven’t crossed already when you step forward and wrap your arms around him from behind. You know how strong he is, but he’s so thin, his vertebrae too prominent when you’re pressed against his back. His breathing catches. “What are you doing?”

“You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you,” you say. His breathing hitches again, and you squeeze your eyes shut, forcing yourself to recite what he’s done, even as you speak up again and prove just how pointless you’ve rendered it. “I can’t look away.”

Your phone starts ringing, and you ignore it. Work will call back again. It’s more important that you make this lesson stick. Tomura doesn’t try to pull away from you, and you don’t let him go. You stand there together until the last scraps of the golden hour have faded away.

Tomura examines his body in the mirror. He tells himself he’s checking on the last remnants of his bruises, on the healing knife slash across his ribs, but really, he’s looking for what you see when you look at him. What made you take so many pictures, the kind of pictures Tomura can’t look at without feeling dizzy and hot. What made you touch him like that, hold him that way. Tomura can’t see it yet. But maybe he will, if he keeps looking. He has to find what it is that makes you want to look at him, that makes it so you can’t look away.

Giving the heart back to the cops threw them for a complete loop. Nobody in the department mentioned anything about you being the reason Tomura gave it back, and that’s fine with Tomura, but the press is having a field day trying to figure out why he’d remove someone’s heart just to give it back. Why he took this heart and not somebody else’s. What he wants them to see this time. What it says about him that he’d do something so –

Not good. Good isn’t the word. There’s not a word for what Tomura is, and the sooner everybody remembers that, the better. Tomura’s already got the beginnings of his next crime scene in his head, and all he has to do is decide whose illusion of safety he wants to shatter – Detective Aizawa’s illusion that he can protect his team, or his brat apprentice’s illusion that his mentor can’t be torn down to his level. He’s leaning toward the apprentice – he doesn’t like his attitude, or the way he’s talked to you, and when you see what Tomura’s done, you’ll –

You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you.

No. There’s nothing in Tomura’s reflection to draw you in. Whatever magic you work with your photos, there’s no evidence of it in what Tomura sees in the mirror. He knows the kinds of things you can do with your camera. You take hideous things and make them striking, you take horrible things and turn them beautiful. Turning Tomura into something worth looking for is probably nothing to you. So how come your voice is in his head like that? You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you. Is there any way that could be true? I can’t look away.

There’s a way to find out, and Tomura feels the plan tugging at his thoughts. He could set up another game for you, one without any body parts at the end of it, one that doesn’t have anything to do with his mission or his murders. Something for you to find, because you like finding things, and maybe you’ll like finding Tomura at the end of it. Maybe he could get you another movie ticket, to something he won’t hate this time, and he could sit next to you instead of two rows back. If you want to see him. If you weren’t lying.

Bodies don’t lie. Tomura’s well aware of every tell that reveals disgust or fear. He can spot every crack in a person’s resolve, dig his fingernails in and pry it open to get to the terror beneath, and that’s how he knows you aren’t scared of him at all. There are parts of what happened on the rooftop that he can’t think about without squirming and parts that yank on him like magnets, pulling him back to the memory. Your fingers interlaced with his, your gaze steady on his face, your arms wrapped around him and your body pressed against his back. No one’s ever held Tomura like that. He’s never been that close to someone he wasn’t actively murdering. Not since before.

And you were so warm, not the damp, panicked sweating of somebody whose adrenaline reserves are running dry. Just warm. Just close. Tomura wasn’t anywhere close to done when you pulled away, and he knew even before you left that he’d kill to feel like that again. Anybody would.

But Tomura doesn’t have to, according to you. He’d be stupid to believe it, when it’s the only way it’s ever worked, and he has crime scenes to plan. He’s going to kill your boss, or your coworker, and the crime scene’s going to be a masterpiece, a work of art in real life as well as through your camera lens. Maybe he’ll set up a game for you to go with it, body parts or no body parts. Either way, you’ll have to come looking for him again. It’s the only way to make sure.

Still, though – I can’t look away. Every time Tomura passes by the mirror, every time he finds himself looking at the photos you took of him, every time his drones follow you to somebody else’s crime scene and he sees his locket around your neck, he wonders if you might not be telling the truth. You don’t have to kill someone to make me see you. Tomura hears your voice in his head, remembers the brush of your fingers across his skin, and wonders what it would be like to find out.

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