#it's his conscript that he made when he was a kid

[whales-are-gay]

college is so cool. everyone i talk to is a massive nerd.

[dashielldeveron]

soulmate trope | shigaraki tomura

Shigaraki’s route of soulmate trope.

"post-canon shigaraki? canon isn't even finished as of when this was posted on 4 january 2024!"

yeah. thank god. gives us time to write our own endings. and obviously i will be wrong about some things. i recommend you read at least one other route, preferably dabi’s, before reading this one. warnings: female reader. manga spoilers up to around chapter 390-411ish, based on language used by others to describe shigaraki and his trauma. bodily consequences to his trauma (some things are intended to read as AFO having forced an ED on shigaraki, but this is not made definitive). sexual content. stalking. gore (in a game). reader is experiencing a type of gifted kid burnout.

~28k

There’s a hentai book lying on your bed.

You’ve never seen it before.

Flipping through it, you winced at the positions the large-titted, ponytailed woman was manhandled into, and though you were frankly impressed that she managed to wear such intricate lingerie underneath her everyday business attire, the protagonist only just got home from work; let her decompress for, like, ten minutes before railing her against the window, please.

Whom did you know who would read volume four of something called GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK?

Unfortunately, you were burdened with knowledge about your friends’ sexual habits, and some of them, therefore, were already ruled out: Shinsou only read erotica because he preferred his own imagination to any images hentai or live-action could provide, and Monoma only read hentai in which the woman’s eyes had hearts in them to let the reader know she’s enjoying it—not to mention Monoma wouldn’t buy a hard copy of it, let alone a story that didn’t have more plot and character development to it. There wasn’t enough drool for Sero to be interested, and the male protagonist wasn’t enough of a twink for Kaminari to project onto, so whose was this?

Moreover, who the fuck would come all the way back to your old school’s campus to break into your room to leave it on your bed? (Shinsou would be your best bet for that part, but whenever he finished a patrol nowadays, he went directly to sleep, and his and Monoma’s flat was across town.)

You cat, Dango, jumped onto the bed, slithering up next to you and bumping her head on your elbow affectionately.

“Is this yours?” you asked her, and she sniffed the book before climbing into your lap.

You tossed the book aside to pet your cat with both hands, and you resolved not to think about it any longer, even though the cringy way the mangaka depicted the female orgasm was burnt onto your brain.

***

Hopping to put your heel back into a ballet flat, you held the phone between your ear and shoulder while you struggled towards the lift. “I’ve got to cancel on you, Ochaco,” you said, flipping the back of your blazer collar down and adjusting the lapels, “I’m, fuck—I’m not gonna be able to make it this evening, so just go without me.”

Uraraka sighed on her end. “Okay. I know a lot of us were excited to see you after so long—there’s a card Tsu’s made us all to sign, and everything—but we’ll manage. ‘Spose we’ll just have a routine night at the bar and reschedule when you can make it. I miss you,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure I can say the same for everyone.”

The elevator door slid open, and you entered. “All of you are so clingy. I’ve only been away from the agency for around two months, and you know where to find me.” You mashed the button for the ground floor. “In fact, it’s embarrassingly easy to access me.”

“Well, we’re very busy,” said Uraraka, “People are very eager to conscript us for missions, even if they really could be done by the police. U.A. alumni have somehow upticked in their popularity even more since we graduated—”

“Ochaco, I know. I was there. Allow me to weep for your success. I am playing the world’s tiniest violin.” You shifted your bag’s full weight onto your shoulder and exited into the commons. “But listen. I’ve got to go; I’m running late this morning. I couldn’t find my pantyhose even though I laid them out last night, and they weren’t in any of my cat’s usual hiding places. I had to turn my flat upside down and still never found them.” The outside doors slid open when you approached, and the harsh, morning wind upset your hair on impact. “Give everyone my love, O. Tell Todoroki to smile in his next interview.” Eyes darting across your surroundings for any witnesses, you shrank in on yourself and bit the inside of your cheek. “And tell everyone I’m sorry, okay?”

By the time you arrived at U.A.’s administration building, the wind had been joined by a light drizzle that would probably morph into a storm within the hour, a prediction compounded by a plethora of faculty umbrellas in and beside the stand by the sliding doors. The front office was gloriously vacant, though, so you were able to slip behind the front desk without someone rebuking you for being—you shook the computer mouse to wake it up, the clock popping up in the corner—seventeen minutes late.

(You’d graduated with the rest of the class six months ago, and you’d founded the all-girls agency uptown, with most of the women in the graduating class joining to form an instant powerhouse of the industry.

Founding an agency appealed to a good deal of graduates, but you were the only one to go the distance: you were the one to actually make the calls, fill out the paperwork, get aggravating shit done, and by the time to move into the building, it had pleased you to no end that Midoriya had asked you for help on kickstarting his own.

And then two months ago, you’d pulled off, frankly, what was supposed to be an impossible rescue. For the first time, you were getting enormous amounts of attention, from civilians, from press, from other heroes—and you were being followed, never having more than a moment to yourself—always being watched, either from well-wishers or nay-sayers—and sometimes, the analytical critic, eager to point out your faults in the rescue mission to try to drag you out of the hero scene.

You hated yourself for this, but they won.

Too many expectations. All sinking down on you, as if no other hero existed while the light shone in your direction. [And you hated yourself for even daring to consider this—what reprehensible audacity, but—but was this how All Might had felt?]

You’d had something next door to a panic attack when a convenience store, a regular stop in your weekly routine, filmed your reaction to how they’d auctioned off your signed receipt for over nine hundred thousand yen. Breaking their cameras, Shinsou had to escort you out of there in a rush and call Aizawa for help.

Sobbing into Shinsou’s phone on the soggy concrete of a darkened alleyway, you did something you never fathomed you’d ever do, something you could never see any of your friends ever doing, something that seemed as alien and unthinkable as sticking your hand into a pit of needles: you begged Aizawa to get you out of the hero business.

You’ve been handled with care and relocated into a surprising covert secretarial job in the U.A. admin, Nezu’s logic was that you’d adjust to one person needing you at a time, say, over email or at the desk, and if you only answered the phone with only a shortened version of your name, then no intruding civilian would be the wiser.

The job was easy, anyway. Paid well for what it was, but perhaps that was simply standard for U.A. Nowhere nearly as well paying or exciting as working as a hero, but you were adjusting into mundanity. Some days had stretches of hours in which you didn’t interact with anyone, sitting at the front desk without a task, and you even had a few days in which you’d gone in, piddled around at the desk for your whole shift without seeing another soul, and gone home.

Your friends were always so busy. The two times you’ve been able to meet with them contained nothing but conversation about hero work, or else everything was somehow tangentially related to it, and you found yourself unable to contribute to the conversation. Both times, you’d left early, a little overstimulated, leaving Shinsou to make your excuses.

And Shinsou, bless him. Not avoiding you on purpose. In fact, you knew he’d drop almost anything for you to hang out, but you knew his schedule and how little rest he got. So, it was more of a self-imposed boundary on your side, taking into account that he needed sleep more than he needed to spend time with you.

So, yes, some of it was directly your fault, but you were achingly, astonishingly lonely, with an ever-lowering threshold for tolerance of outside stimulation, ultimately feeling like you didn’t belong here.)

Pens aligned. Coaster. Check the school email for—good, no emails. No voicemail. Get out your planner and write your hours in it to look busy. Hey, your water bottle’s nearing empty; maybe you could go fill it or even waste time brewing coffee. But where’s your work mug? You probably left it on the cleaning rack next to the office sink. You should go check.

“Hey,” said Aizawa out of nowhere, ignoring how you jumped out of your own skin, “Good morning. Are you doing a specific job at the moment?”

You gripped the arms of your swivel chair to ground yourself. Is this a test? “I was about to take a moment to make some coffee,” you said, because never let someone in a position of authority know that you were doing jackshit, “Is there something I can help you with, Aizawa-sensei?”

Frowning, he dipped his chin into his capture weapon, still tucked closely to his neck to shield him from the wind, and he shifted his weight to one leg, his fingers tapping in a ripple on the reception desk. “You don’t have to call me that anymore.”

“I’m gonna,” you said, “How can I help?”

Please don’t need anything. Please don’t need anythi—

“Permission has just cleared for me to assign you a long-term task.”

Shit, you thought, internally wincing at how he used the term task and not mission, as if you’d be plunged into the ice-cold water of a panic attack at the word. The kid gloves that everyone handled you with somehow both ingratiated and insulted you.

“You’ll be paid for it,” Aizawa continued, “and it’s low stakes interaction, not even face-to-face. It’s all online.” Aizawa clasped his hands on the desk and hunched over the top of it, the ends of his scarf trailing down onto your keyboard. “You’ll recall moving some boxes into room 310.”

“Of course.” Early in your first month back at U.A., you’d helped clean out and move some boxes into 310 in the same hall that housed Aizawa, Eri, and now you—you’d unofficially dubbed it as U.A.’s drawer to shove social rejects. “Is someone about to move in?”

“He’s been moved in for a while,” said Aizawa, pulling his capture weapon away from his neck, “Keep all of this quiet. You’re allowed to know because I’ve advocated for you, because I trust in you and in your ability to do this well.” Aizawa paused, the silence dragging on much longer than usual. His eyes glazed over, as if considering how to phrase his next proposal.

You waved your hand, prompting him to continue.

His eyes focused again. “The new person is a ward of the school, but All Might and I are his primary—caretakers isn’t quite the right term, and nor is supervisors, so perhaps it’s better to—”

“No, I get it,” you said, “This person is an adult, but they’re not quite independent. Go on.”

Aizawa paused, brow furrowed just slightly as he scrutinised you again, but he nodded slowly after a moment. “I’ll allow him to introduce himself to you. He doesn’t need me to set up expectations. What’s important for you to know, regarding your own participation, is that he’s very new to the hero scene and is receiving his hero training later in life than usual. He won’t be attending class but will be trained personally by select U.A. faculty, mostly All Might, Nezu, and me.”

“Is he officially a student?”

 “On paper.” Something strange passed across Aizawa’s face, but you couldn’t name it. “Where you come in is his socialisation. He’s spent most of his life in disciplinary isolation. Because of the adults raising him, his instincts trend towards distrust and animosity.”

So, Aizawa wanted you spend time with him until he was no longer bad with people, like spending time with feral cats at animal shelters until they’re ready to be adopted. “So, he’s distrustful. Hostile. Angry,” you said, scratching the side of your head, “Is he—do you think he’ll bring up bad stuff I’ve done to use it against me?”

“He doesn’t know who you are, aside from someone trusted by U.A. with hero experience,” said Aizawa, shaking his head, “and you can choose what information you give him.”

“Does he,” you said, sucking in through your teeth, “Does this guy know about how you’re going about this? I think—wouldn’t he be insulted if he knew about how you’re socialising him like an animal?”

Aizawa looked over his shoulder at the empty office, but he bent farther over the desk and spoke softly, anyway. “Recently, when I was training him at night, he expressed that he never knows what to do when someone wants to talk to him after mission, whether it’s successful or not. He froze entirely when a senior citizen thanked him last week, and that’s when we decided something tactile needed to be done. Since he’s grown used to me, you’re the solution.”

Okay. A volatile man, someone who couldn’t go to U.A. at the average age but for whom Aizawa, Nezu, and All Might were making an exception, even going so far as to personally take him out at night to practise hero work.

Hm. Fishy.

But if the good, good men who took care of you wanted you take care of another misplaced person, then you’re going to do it to the best of your ability.

“I hope I can live up to your expectations,” you said, making a note in your planner, “What am I doing?”

“I need you to learn how to play a video game,” said Aizawa, “and I need you to be absolute shit at it.”

***

For you to help some loser with socialisation, he would be teaching you how to play some janky, twenty-five-year-old MMORPG called Cipherstone—and not even the current, polished version of it; you had to sign up for an account on the version preserving the game exactly as it was in 2007. Nostalgia reasons, apparently.

You nudged Dango out aside to check your bedside clock. The discord call would start in five minutes, and you were making your Cipherstone account, completely unable to come up with a suitable username.

“Don’t connect it to your other online accounts or your actual identity,” Aizawa had said that morning.

Dango’s tiny prance across your stomach was not helping, and you couldn’t use Dango in your username, because if someone knew about your cat (and hopefully no one did, because cats were not allowed in the dorms), then a Dango username could be linked back to the real you. You plopped your head back on your pillow, knocking against the headboard. What’s something that couldn’t be traced back to you? Slumping, you let your head fall to the side and sulked.

The hentai book peeked out from underneath a jacket on your dirty clothes chair.

GinsengTea

That username is unavailable.

Well. You couldn’t use your birthdate as added numbers. You kept typing.

GinsengTea69

That username is unavailable.

You’re not about to try Lustful Ballsack. Maybe if you put aside your secretarial propensity for being correct for a moment.

GinzengTea

Username available!

Oh, thank God. You sorted out your password and started customising your character, though you couldn’t do much with the negative six billion pixels you were dealing with, and oh, is that the noise discord makes for a call? You plugged in your earbuds and clicked the answer button.

“Hello?” you asked into the microphone on your earbud cord, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture of a rotund, cartoon mouse. Username Tenkopeito. Looks like he ran into the same spelling trouble you did.

“Greetings and salutations,” he said, his tinny, rasping, just-got-out-of-bed, gruff-from-lack-of-use voice striking you with about fifty psychic damage, “I am Aizawa-sensei’s pupil, here to teach you about the intricacies of Cipherstone. It will be my pleasure—”

“Cut that shit out,” you said, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture: actually, that mouse was so round because it had just swallowed an enormous piece of konpeito whole, with the little star spikes jutting out underneath its fur. “No one talks like that. You sound fake as fuck.”

“I see,” he said after a beat, tone deflating to sound resigned (and though he’d relaxed, it somehow sounded as if talking this way took more effort, like it physically strained his vocal cords). “Am I not supposed to be nice?”

“You weren’t exactly being nice. You were using a customer service voice—which is being polite, not nice. Not even kind. Politeness is usually some sort of put-on affectation of niceness, forced for the situation. I understand if that’s what you think you need to do when you talk to people as a hero, but in hero work, since the stakes are high, you need to be genuine, or at least sound like you are.” Dango crawled across your stomach again, but you lifted her off before she could settle into a loaf on your keyboard. “In the field, it’s often hard to be kind because of how involved you get as a hero; being kind takes effort and drains you emotionally. Kindness implies there’s some sort of reciprocity, some sort of ongoing relationship. You can choose to be kind if you want, but it may wear on you in the long run. What will probably be healthiest for you, on your side, is if you aim to be nice, meaning being honest in a gentle way, framing situations positively but realistically for listeners. The public doesn’t want to be lied to and told everything’s fine, but telling them the harshness of reality doesn’t go over well. Kills morale.”

“Holy shit.” He was scratching something close to his microphone—it must be a fairly good mic, since you could deduce short fingernails against a dry surface. “That’s…a lot.”

“It is. But you can do it. All it takes is practise, and that’s what I’m here for,” you said, moving Dango from your keyboard again, “And I didn’t mean to overwhelm you with all of that; it just came out—I, uh, I happen to know a lot about the way heroes present themselves.” Swallowing thickly, you ran your tongue over your lower lip. “Why don’t we begin with what you were saying before? But in the actual way you talk, please. You need to be comfortable in your own voice.”

His mic picked up the distant noise of slurping through a straw, against what sounded like the bottom of a metal cup, which clinked when he set it back down. “Have you played Cipherstone before?”

“Total newcomer. Though I’ve seen some screenshots in memes.”

“Cool,” he said in a way that was clear it was not cool, “I can’t add you to my in-game friends list until you get off Tutorial Island. Share your screen with me until then.”

All right. You can be bad at this. You can be so bad at this. “What’s a screen?” Not that bad, idiot! “I mean,” you said, fumbling, “How do I share my screen with you?”

The scratching grew louder. “Bottom left. Screen button. Right click. Share option.”

“Ah.” You should probably lure him into thinking you’re competent while there was a literal tutorial onscreen so that he would be more frustrated with you later. “Gotcha.”

For a few seconds after your avatar popped onscreen for the first time, nothing came through but the 8-bit tutorial music. “Is that what you look like in real life?” he finally asked.

“No,” you said, not exactly lying. The character had her hair down in her face (which you wouldn’t normally do when you were on patrol, since it could get in the way of physical hero work), and, hoping to endear yourself to this weirdo, you’d chosen the sluttiest shirt: while none of the horrible pixelated options showed any boob whatsoever, the poor rendering still managed to convey that the top was off-shoulder. Again, not great for hero work. “In real life, I’ve much, much more panache.”

Another silence, during which you assumed he was looking up the word. “So, you click on the screen to go where you want to walk, on either the overall game interface or in the mini-map in the corner. Your destination will show up—”

“Wait, what should I call you, screwboy?”

“—as a red flag,” he said, frown audible, his rasping voice screeching to a stop the way brakes are slowly applied to the wheels of a train. “Not screwboy.”

“I’m not calling you by your handle. Not only is it cringe, but you won’t have to answer to it anywhere else in your life. If you don’t want to give me your name, that’s fine. I could call you by your hero name, if you like; it’d help you get used to answering to it. But no, I’m not calling you your username,” you said, shoulders slacking once Dango finally settled in a ball at your hip, “Especially since you couldn’t even get the correct spelling of Ten Konpeito.”

“It’s—it’s not supposed to say that,” he said, sputtering with a groan coming in at the end, “It’s a play on my name, and including the n makes it harder to say aloud. I think these things through; I have to be aware of my public image and branding now; that’s the whole point of this stupid—my name is Tenko, you asshole.”

“Oh, you’re gonna call civilians asshole?” You clicked your tongue. “Bad. Bad and evil. Speaking from experience, people don’t like that.”

“Just fu—just click on the map.”

“Fine. But you can’t fool me with your medieval, point-and-click game,” you said, clicking to pick up a fishing net, “Incidentally, the oldest known fishing net is the net of Antrea, crafted of willow and dating back to 8300 B.C.”

Tenko paused. “What would be the socially expected response to that?”

Your avatar fished for shrimps. “Oh, usually people yell at me. Get mad for bringing up total non sequiturs. My friend Bakugou is fond of telling me that I’m a collection of those bottle caps with facts printed on the inside.”

“Would…would you like me to get angry? Am I supposed to? I was under the impression I was supposed to curb my anger. To be nice.”

Your inventory filled with shrimps.

“You only need one shrimp,” said Tenko.

“You’ll thank me when we have food later,” you said, continuing to fish for shrimps.

“It’s the tutorial,” he said, frown creeping into his voice, “You won’t keep any resources from it. You should go chop the tree down to light a fire.”

“Well, hell. I want my shrimps.” You clicked away from the fishing spot and onto a tree. “Nothing’s happening.”

Tenko cleared his throat. “You need to talk to the woodcutting tutor first. She’ll give you an axe.”

“I thought this game had magic,” you said, guiding Dango’s head away from blocking the screen, “Can’t I just get logs with magic?”

“No, it’s—you must want me to get angry. As a test.” Scratching. “Magic comes later. Not for getting logs.”

You interpreted that as a sign to make the rest of the tutorial go smoothly. You followed the instructions for a few silent minutes, proving to him that you could read, and when you reached the end of the tutorial, a wizard teleported you to the crossroads of a town centre.

“Ah,” you said, genuinely surprised as other players’ avatars, decked out in what must be high-level gear, dashed past, “I don’t know where I am.”

“You can turn your screen-sharing off now.” Tenko typed on what sounded like a mechanical keyboard. “I’m over here. I’ve got—by the fountain—white hair, all black clothes. I’m not—there you are.”

Dozens of other players were running past the two of you, the only bare, new players in the area. Tenko’s pixelated avatar waved at you. Cheeky bitch. He’s so poorly animated and so very 2007 that it gave no indication what he could look like in real life. But he’s chosen to have a black t-shirt as his default, so he has to be a slut.

You resisted the urge to ask to feel his pixelated bicep. “You don’t have any equipment. I thought you’ve played Cipherstone before?”

“My main account is max-ed out. I started a new account to grow at the same rate as you. Before anything else, notice where we are,” said Tenko, “We’re in the centre of the city of Renfield. Get familiar with it. Think of it as home. It’s where you’ll always come back to when you get lost.”

It’s a barely animated town centre, with a short path up the stairs to a castle door and a few market stalls split between fountains.

“I have no idea what that means, Tenko.”

“It means that—that,” Tenko said, and stopped.

You couldn’t stop grinning, biting at your lower lip to keep from laughing—he’d let out a flustered huff, sounding a little strangled, because you’d said his name for the first time—and, judging by how long this delicious silence was dragging on, Tenko was probably his given name, not the family name. Beautiful, really, that a guy his age (however old he was, but he’s at least the same as you, since he couldn’t attend U.A. at the usual time) could get this nervous over a woman calling him by his name.

Tenko recovered in a way that showed he didn’t: “It means that you are always able to cast one spell, regardless of magic level,” he said in a rush, “It is a homing spell that teleports you back to this spot, so even if you get lost, you can always get back to Renfield. You can teleport other ways, too, but that’s for another time, and I need a cup of coffee.” He inhaled sharply.

It's only the first day, so you should go easy on him. Let his moment of awkwardness go.

However, Aizawa gave you a mission.

Excuse you, a task.

“Do you plan on getting flustered every time a civilian calls you by name?” you asked, petting between Dango’s ears, “Or are you planning on avoiding as much publicity as possible by being an underground hero like Aizawa?”

“I don’t—they’re not going to—it’s different with you. I can already tell,” said Tenko (you froze, fingers curled into Dango’s fur), “because I’m going to have some sort of working relationship with you. I assume you’re here to stay.”

Putting it that way made your heartbeat throb around your ears. You decided you could ask directly. “Tenko’s your first name, then?”

“Yeah.” He must have covered his hand with his mouth, muffling his voice at first. “But people usually—people have been calling me something else.”

“Then I can call you something else, if you like,” you said, getting back to petting Dango behind her ears and resolving to treat him with the same tenderness—he must need it, since no one in his life knows him well enough to call him by his given name.

“No, I think you should,” he said a bit too quickly, “Call me that. Tenko. I’m tired of that other stuff. Click on something to keep from logging out, by the way. There’s a timer.” Mechanical typing noises. “No, Aizawa-sensei wants me to be better. Of all things, I need to learn to respond to my real name.”

You squinted at your screen, as if the methodical rise and fall of his avatar’s chest could betray how he was feeling. Something had to have happened to this guy to make him feel this way about such a basic part of his identity, to make other people avoid his real name so universally. Aizawa couldn’t’ve have assigned you this task just to socialise him; something else was unfolding here. How did you enter the equation? If you’re supposed to guide someone who’s also lost their direction in life, you’re a hell of a bad candidate.

But what if you fuck up Aizawa’s plan, whatever it was?

Your recent history is riddled with things going downhill. What if you somehow screwed over Tenko? You’d be dragging someone else down with you, down to…the beginning again, a humiliating re-start, back at your fucking school, when the rest of your friends were out living the dream you’d all crafted together, the dream that apparently could go on without you in it.

Well. Enough of that. Distract yourself. Distract Tenko, too. “Got it. I want a hat.”

“What?”

“I want a hat,” you said, clicking the space around the fountain for your avatar to walk, “My head is cold. How do we get a hat? Hats. You should get one, too.”

“Hats. Very well,” said Tenko, clicking to face you across the shitty fountain, “Do you want one that’s purely decorative or one that has some sort of stats? Decorative ones we can get within a minute, with good RNG, by killing goblins across the bridge. There’s a low chance we could get a low-tier wizard’s hat doing that, too.”

“Then it will be a pleasure killing goblins with you, Tenko.”

“Mm,” he said at the back of his throat, “First, we’ll need to obtain some sort of weapons, since bare-handed punching them will take forever. We could either talk to the melee tutor to get a temporary sword or start wi—actually, we should talk to the melee tutor. Melee will probably be the easiest fighting style for you right now, and it’ll be the simplest, since you won’t have to worry about running out of ammunition or runes.”

“Sure,” you said, leaning back in bed, “Do we go starboard or port?”

“You can just call them east and west, y’know. And we go north.”

To be obstinate, you clicked the opposite direction that Tenkopeito was going, and the moment you ran offscreen, Tenko spoke in a low, grumbling voice into his microphone. “No, don’t run away from me. Come back here.”

The rumble in his voice shot warmth straight to your lower stomach, the nature of the encounter between the two of you changing in a second. Your avatar kept running to her destination, your hand frozen and hovering above the tracking pad. You blinked, your throat drying. Snapping back into it, you ran back to Tenko, who seemed unaware of what he just did to you—and he almost negated your arousal in the way he kept talking about sword upgrades and something called RNG.

Uh.

“—now, it’ll take about ten minutes, but it’ll seem like two hours of hard labour. Follow me across the bridge. Follow—there’s a follow mechanic, if you’ll right-click on me.”

Oh, you’ll right-click him, all right. You needed to know more about Tenko—why you’ve been paired off, what Aizawa’s planning for him, what—a tinge of shame soured at the back of your tongue, because what currently gripped you were minutiae: more about him, what he looks like, what he likes, what he does for fun, if you’re…the sort of person he’d get along with in real life, if you hadn’t been forced together.

God, get over yourself. You spend two months away from men your age, and now, you’re thirsting over someone you don’t even know because he said one hot thing. You needed to be socialised—no, stop. This isn’t about you. Stop thinking about what his hands would feel like on you, what he’d sound like grunting into your ear as he ground against you—

“You’ve been quiet for a minute,” said Tenko, slashing the first goblin, “Are you all right?”

A very heroic question when you haven’t been thinking too heroically. The thought of his voice muttering against your neck still grasped you tightly. “I’m having—technical difficulties.”

***

Poking your head outside of your dorm/apartment door, you scanned the hallway for witnesses. You gripped the handle of Dango’s carrier, still hidden behind the door inside your dorm, and you nodded back at her when she meowed at you.

“I know, baby,” you said, listening for footsteps, “We’ll be outside soon enough. Gotta check for people, though.”

Okay, nothing coming. You shifted Dango’s carrier out of your dorm and pulled out your key, sticking it in the lock at the same time as a door opened down the hall.

Too fast—you had to prod her carrier back inside, your foot stuck in the crack between wall and door, just as—as Midoriya strode down the hall. Keys jangling. Civilian clothes (a Froppy hoodie, in fact).

“Oh, hello!” Midoriya only seemed to notice you once you were struggling to close the door despite the carrier being the way, and hopefully you thrust it fully inside swiftly enough for him not to catch the flash of burgundy. He trotted up to you, hands in the pockets of his worn cargo pants. “I didn’t think you’d be around. Do you not have work today?”

Dango meowed mournfully through the door, and you stepped in front of it. “It’s my lunch break. I’m going for a walk.”

Midoriya nodded, and he glanced over his shoulder back to the room he’d left. “Gotcha, gotcha. Good weather for it, especially after that storm earlier this week.” easy smile stretched across his face as he faced you again, but his gaze weighed down on you, as if the number one hero’s attention magnified your failures in comparison to his rise to the top—and the fact that he didn’t mean to pressure you only exacerbated the feeling.

“Uh,” you said, stuffing your keys in your backpack and setting it on the ground, as if you’re not waiting to go back inside, “May I ask what you’re doing here? Don’t you have better—aren’t you busy?”

Chuckling, Midoriya scratched the back of his neck (and oh, in that laughter, he was hiding something). “I make time. I’m just visiting,” he said, jerking his head back towards the end of the hall, “A friend. I want to take care to see him regularly. I didn’t know you lived on the same hall.”

“If you can call it living,” you said, and for some reason, Midoriya frowned, took a step closer to you, and said your name under his breath, eyes fucking wide and too damn concerned for your comfort. Fuck, you only meant to make a self-depredating joke, not make the situation serious. 

“You—you know that you can reach out to us. I mean that. If you’re scared you’re gonna burden any of us—”

You’d squatted down to go through your bag, just to have something to do, to have an excuse to not look him in the eyes. If you were going to cry—which you were not!—then the number one hero’s not going to get to witness it.

“—then reach out to me, at least. I’ve got time, or else I can make it.” Midoriya was kneeling next to you, and you kept your eyes on the inside of your backpack. “If it makes you feel less like you’re bothering any of us, I could check in with you when I come see my friend. I’d already be on campus. I wouldn’t be going out of my way.” He sighed to fill the space when you didn’t answer. “What are you looking for?”

“I can’t find my planner,” you invented, and, acting like you were upset, you zipped your backpack again. “I think I need to go back inside to locate it.”

He shifted his jaw, and he glanced down at your bag and back at you. “Come with me to the vending machines, at least?”

The new symbol of peace, asking to spend time with you. You didn’t deserve it, so you shook your head. “I don’t have much time left in my break. I think I’d better let you go.”

Shifting his jaw, Midoriya tilted his head at you, his eyes glinting. “All right,” he said slowly, “You know yourself better than anyone else. Do what you need to. Rest up.” He started walking backwards towards the stairs. “And I want to see you more—we all do. I’ll see you the next time I come around. Maybe the three of us could hang out?”

“Sure,” you said, shoving your key in the lock to let a thrashing Dango out of her misery.

***

“The church. It’s the one with the altar icon in the minimap.”

You clicked enough so that your avatar would backtrack. “How am I supposed to know that’s the church? Is that icon supposed to be an altar? It looks nothing like an altar. It looks more like a steaming cup of tea.”

“That’s fair,” said Tenko into his headset, “but this is the easiest quest in the game. How are you having this much trouble with it?”

“Oh, stop that,” you said, reaching his character in front of the priest, “It’s intuitive to you because you’ve been playing this for years. Do we kill this guy?”

“What? No. He’s going to give us each the key to a dungeon underneath the church.”

“How can he give us both a key if there’s only one?” You clicked through the dialogue with the priest, and a key appeared in your inventory. “Also, how accurate is this dungeon? Because if this is a broadly medieval game, then the dungeons will be closer to underground bathrooms rather than, like, creepy and wet with shackles and bones. That was popularised by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.”

“How the hell do you know that,” Tenko asked flatly, “Ne—never mind. It doesn’t matter. Follow me to the trapdoor outside.”

You did, and it was locked. “Are we allowed to do this?” you asked, clicking on the key and then the lock, “Will we get arrested for trespassing?”

“Wha—no. No, we’re supposed to in order to progress the quest. In fact, our characters do a frankly criminal amount of breaking and entering throughout the game and never get checked for it. Hey, don’t go down there without me.”

Your character had only just gone down the trapdoor, prompting a blackout loading screen, but you popped back up to the surface before you could get a good look around. Your character stood next to Tenko’s, still next to the trapdoor. “What’s the holdup? I thought the only step was to use the key on the door. Did I skip something?”

“No, I—huh,” said Tenko, cutting himself off with a tinge of frustration creeping into his voice, “I lost the key.”

Raising a brow, you tilted your head. “What? How’d you lose it?”

“I don’t know. It was in my inventory one minute, and now it’s not. I didn’t touch it.” His mic picked up light scratching. “You’re not supposed to be able to lose the key, but I guess I can go back to the priest to get another. You wait—”

“Hold up,” you said, brow furrowed, “I have it. It’s in my inventory.”

“The hell? Are you sure it’s not just your own key?”

“Positive. I have two of them now. Same key, right next to each other. Want me to share my screen?”

“No, I—I believe you.” Tenko took a moment. “I’m not familiar with this sort of glitch, where an item from one player’s inventory randomly transfers to another’s. This doesn’t even happen, in my experience, but maybe it’s because this is one of the earliest quests coded into the game. It’s twenty-five-year-old code at this point, and it might have glitched because we’re both trying to perform the same quest actions on the same game tick.”

“Sure,” you said, “So, what do I do? Do I drop the key for you to pick up, or?”

“It disappears if you drop it. Trade me. Right-click, trade option.”

Once the key was traded, the two of you went down the trapdoor and wove your way back into the underground headquarters of a low-level cult, vacant for the moment but with evidence of rituals on the walls and floors, particularly in front of their bloodstained altar.

“Okay, we’re in their headquarters,” you said, making your character walk up the aisle, “What now? Priest guy didn’t give us any instructions.”

His avatar followed you and sat on the only programmed-to-be-sittable seat in the pew, his black cape (that he stole from a highwayman’s corpse) folding under his legs. “Actually, he did. You just clicked through his dialogue.”

“Because you’re here to tell me what to do, Quest Man.”

“Click on the—” Tenko heaved an enormous sigh, microphone sparking. “You figure it out. What’s clickable in this room? What has examine text?”

You hovered your mouse over most of the room, and nothing popped up with the examine option, except for something on the altar. “It’s this weird-looking, severed hand, isn’t it? This thing standing up on a slice of wrist by itself?” Your character walked nearer to it, fingers splayed widely enough to hold an in-game apple. “Weirdest ring-holder I’ve ever seen.”

When Tenko didn’t say anything, you glanced towards his character, but he was still sitting on the pew.

“Is this whole quest a pun? Because it’s one of the easiest quests, so they’re giving us a lot of guidance, so it’s like they’re holding our hands to get it through?”

That broke his silence: he scoffed into the mic. “I doubt it,” he said, “You need to grab the hand for the quest to keep going.”

“Fine,” you said, clicking the hand, and the instant your avatar touched it, a zombie spawned from the altar and began to attack you. “Dude! Did you know that thing was gonna jump me?” you asked, clicking away a few spaces but turning around to stab at it with your stupid bronze dagger, “And you just sat there? You could’ve warned me.”

“I did, and the priest did, and the duke who gave us this quest did. That’s why we went and baked all those pies in your inventory, yeah? For you to eat during this fight?”

Your character kept missing hits. “Yeah, but—like! I didn’t know the fight would be now.”

“Hey, relax.” Tenko’s voice sounded muffled, like his mouth was smushed as his fist dug into his cheek. “It’s only a level 12, and you’re level 9. Not too big of a difference. With your armour and weapon, you out-level it.”

The miss sound effect spoke for itself.

“You’ll kill it eventually. You won’t always hit zeroes, so it’ll pass.”

Though your character dealt her first damage, you frowned. “That’s…that’s actually really good advice, Tenko. The stuff you just said would work well if you were trying to calm someone down—reminding people of reality and emphasising perseverance over luck or natural talent are some of the better ways to encourage people.”

“Is that so,” he asked flatly, trying to put off a yawn and failing, “I haven’t—I wasn’t thinking about hero work. Just thinking about the game.”

“Well, it was nice,” you said, “and it seemed like it came naturally. Mind if I ask if something caused it?”

He yawned again, but he must have leant away from the mic so that you wouldn’t hear anything besides the initial inhale. “Nothing special happened today, but I’m too tired to get irritated. Therapy took a lot out of me today.”

Therapy. Therapy. Okay, so he’s got an official diagnosis somewhere. The word today implies that it’s a regular thing, and for some reason, this session was more intense. Intense emotionally? Physically? What kind of therapy? Well, they offered cognitive behavioural therapy on campus, but considering his non-traditional student status, his might be outsourced. Plus, if you, a former hero but technically a civilian, are being implemented into his care plan without being informed directly—

“You usually don’t go this long without saying some inane non sequitur,” said Tenko, that same, strange scratching picking up on the mic, “Snap out of it. You’re gonna get killed by the easiest quest boss in the game.”

Making an undignified noise, you shook yourself and spam-clicked on a cherry pie for your character to eat until she was healed completely, and then you clicked on the zombie to attack again.

“Why’d you pause when I said therapy? Surprised I’d go? Think that sort of thing is below me?”

“Of course not,” you said, trying to seem like you were focused on the fight so that he wouldn’t get nervous about sharing personal information, “Therapy good. Therapy great. Everyone needs to go to therapy.” Since he appeared to be taking this casually, you could probably ask after the type without it seeming too intrusive. “What kind? CBT? That’s what—”

“You think U.A. would arrange for me to get my cock and balls tortured? That wouldn’t qualify as therapy for me, certainly, and there’s no way that U.A. would pay for—”

“Not fucking cock-and-ball torture, you muppet; cognitive behavioural therapy. The sitting-down-with-therapist-to-talk-about-your-trauma-and-restructuring-the-way-you-think-through-practise type. You fuckin’ pervert,” you said, grinning at his avatar onscreen.

“Good to know. I didn’t know the name for it.”

“It’s good that you made this mistake with me instead of with Aizawa-sensei.”

“He’s probably more inclined towards bondage. Congratulations on killing your first boss,” said Tenko, and you blinked in surprise at your character: you’d defeated the zombie while staring at him. It fell to the ground, dropping bones and some sort of arrows.

“Take those. Check to see if they’re iron or steel. All right, equip them in your ammo slot for now so that they don’t take up an inventory space.”

You did so. “Why didn’t it attack me with the arrows if it were holding them?”

“There’s no logic to it besides that arrows are on its drop table. It’s coded to attack by punching you in the face, which doesn’t involve arrows.”

“Sure. Now, let’s get out of the cult basement; I wanna bake more pies until we can make apple ones. Did you know that the first record of fruit pies was around 1600? That means these fruit pies are anachronistic, since this game pitches itself as medieval.”

“Is that…” The hesitance had you beaming, daring him to actually ask it. “Is that not medieval?”

“Tenko, get your head out of your ass. For reference, 1600 is arguably the year the Azuchi-Momoyama period ended and the Edo period began. The game frames itself as medieval European, and 1600 is hard Renaissance-slash-Early-Modern. That’s Shakespeare times, screwboy.”

Only silence on your headphones. Character still on the pew. You made your character walk over to his to perform the curtsy emote, and in real life, you frowned. “Did I go too far there? Bit too annoying? I’m really sorry if I’m bothering you with this sort of thing; my friends say that I—”

“Nothing’s wrong. I needed a moment,” came Tenko’s voice, quiet and steady, “I could hear you smiling, and it was—it was good.”

Inhaling sharply, you pressed a fist to your mouth. Great. Fucking fabulous. Goddammit, you hadn’t aimed for it to go this way, but were you now the one getting flustered at something as simple as—

“Do most people consider a long pause in conversation rude? Did I fuck up with that?”

“No! No, of course not,” you were saying, trying to recover but still startled at how he was able to flip the vibe of your conversations in so few words, words that seemed so casual to him but grabbed you by the throat/cunt, “Especially since you followed-up with a check-in of how it might be strange; a lot of times, people will be comforted by checking to see if something’s okay with them personally…”

Frowning, you trailed off when another avatar entered the cult’s sanctuary and strode up the aisle. You hovered over the new guy’s stupid frog mask to see his username was Venomothman.

“Fucking great,” grumbled Tenko, “Here comes someone else to break our immersion. Ignore him. I’ll go ahead and fight the zombie so that we can get out of here.”

“The zombie’s dead. You don’t have to fight him,” you said, as Venomothman sat directly on top of Tenkopeito, with both avatars glitching as they took up the same space on the pew.

Tenko made some sort of noise in the back of his throat. “No, I have to kill it, too. It’s like each of us is the only one doing the quest, so in your version, the evil has been defeated, but in my version—it’s this thing called an instance—”

Venomothman: wow a couple questing together

Venomothman: bet ur one guy on two accounts

Venomothman: roleplaying that he can get a gf

The new guy’s in-text chat appeared in yellow font above his avatar’s frog-faced head, and somehow, the boggly, green eyes made his words more irritating.

Venomothman: leave the basement sometimes ya incel

“Some people are assholes recreationally,” said Tenko, making his avatar stand to go to the altar as the clatter of mechanical typing came through the mic, “Let me get rid of this fucking scumba—wait.”

 Venomothman: ur doing too much work to stare at pixelated ass

“Would it be correct for a hero to insult someone online?”

You shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. “Eh. You’re not on duty, and you’re not under any persona connected with your public branding. I would say go for it, but since you’re trying to be better with people, you may want to practise.”

Venomothman: somehow this is even more pathetic than never knowing the touch of a woman at all

“Then I’ll shut him down. The shit-talking isn’t bothering me so much as his breaking our immersion in the game,” said Tenko, grabbing the hand on the altar to start his instance of the fight, “I’m trying to cultivate a particular experience for you, and he’s a fucker who won’t stop yapping. Give me a second.”

Venomothman: is this what does it for you??

Venomothman: why no response

Venomothman: hard to type with one hand, isn’t it, ******* shithead

You laughed through your nose. “Cipherstone censors the word fuck?”

“It censors fuck; it censors cunt,” said Tenko, avatar casting a weak air spell at the zombie, slowly, slowly draining its health, “Everything else is fair game.”

“Will it censor variations of cunt? Like, if I typed in cuntbag? Or—actually, let’s find that out later,” you said, tapping the buttons on your earbud cord to turn up the volume, “Let’s practise navigating difficult social interactions. What’s our goal here in this conversation? Is it to continue to engage?”

“No.” His spell missed, and the zombie landed a hit on his character, prompting him to eat half of a pie. “It’s to close the interaction. Therefore, I need to say something concise that invites no response, right? I’m assuming that a simple fuck off is unacceptable.”

“You’re getting better at this, y’know?”

“Is that condescension I detect?”

“Only a little.” You slumped back against your headboard and reached for the bottle of water on your bedside table. “Actually—no. No condescension. Genuinely, Tenko, you’re picking up on this stuff easily, and it’s impressive. You’ll be able to walk little old ladies across the street with style and flair in no time.” 

“Hilarious,” he said, voice restrained and tight at the mention of his name (too easy—he gives himself away aurally so freely; who knows what you could read off of him when you had a visual?), “I’m sure no one wants me touching them. Can I—hm.” He sounded like he was pressing his fist against his face somehow. “Why you keep bothering to compliment me? Most people bitch down to me like I’ve spat my own cum in their coffee.”

“Wha—how about because you deserve to be complimented? Listen,” you said, electing to brush over his vivid simile, “Silent admiration rots. By keeping in appreciation or gratitude, you’re not doing anyone any good. Kind regards are meant to be shared. Like, now, if I held back any positive thoughts concerning your growth, then you might not feel encouraged to keep going.”

“Like I’m gonna go around fucking complimenting ev—”

“I’m not saying you have to,” you said, “but consider trying it more often. See if anything turns out better. And be sure to be sincere about it—obviously.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Just consider it. So. What has he told us about himself based on how he’s insulted you?”

“He’s so low-level that it looks like he just created his account. His stats are even lower than ours,” said Tenko, speaking more quickly now that it was a subject he was more comfortable with, unequipping his wand to punch the zombie instead, “But he’s gone out of his way to get the frog mask.”

“His words, Tenko,” you said, unscrewing the cap and doing your fucking darndest to pinch your mouth from smiling at his slight hitch when you said his name, “I’m trying to get you to notice on whom he looks down and what that means for his personal social status.”

“Right,” he said a bit too quickly, a bit of a break in his voice on the word, “He’s debasing me for—oh, you’re brilliant. How the hell do you notice these things? He’s using basement dweller as insult, meaning he considers himself above that. Leave it to me.”

You muted yourself briefly to glug down water; you didn’t know how sensitive the mic was on your earbuds, but considering that you could catch onto Tenko’s occasional rustling of what sounded like plastic bags on his side or typing on his mechanical keyboard, as he was right now, you would prefer not to be emitting the same.

Tenkopeito: Your mom wishes you would come out of your room to talk with the rest of the family more often

You spluttered into your water bottle as the yellow text appeared above his head, and you unmuted yourself. “That is not what I meant for you to—”

“Was I being mean?” The mic caught the creak of Tenko’s chair as he leant back in it, and you could picture him defensive and pouting as he crossed his arms (and it struck you that you couldn’t imagine his face. Grimacing, you bit the inside of your cheek). “I wasn’t being rude. I could be so much crueller, but I thought this would be more of a devastating blow. Living on the same floor as your family isn’t the same as living in the basement, so I’m acknowledging his level of social power while still demeaning—”

Venomothman: i mean you right

Venomothman: lmao how tf did you know it was me

“I think we should log out,” you said, wiping the water off of your chin with the back of your hand and setting the bottle back on the bedside table.

Over Tenko’s microphone, you heard the shrill pitch of a custom ringtone and a startled but violent shuffle at the noise. “Hold on. I’m getting a call,” he said, voice coming through at a distance, as if he’d knocked his mic aside.

“Oh? Who is it?”

It took him a minute, but Tenko eventually replied, “A friend.”

That must be a damn good microphone, because you could still pick up on Tenko’s side of the conversation a few feet away. “Yes, hello?” he asked, a bit more brusquely than you’d heard him before.

“Oh. I didn’t,” he was saying, “How was I supposed to know that you’d—yes, that’s her. The one working with Aizawa-sensei.”

Very nice, you were thinking, as you unlocked your own phone to check your messages. Very good for him to have friends. Not that you would’ve pegged him as the absolute loner type, because he proved to be adaptable and quick on his feet, but since Aizawa’d recruited you for interpersonal help, you’d considered that he may not have friends. So, good on him for having at least one friend, it seemed, who cared enough to create an account on some stupid video game solely to annoy him.

“—cool of you to make an account to hang out with me. Stop fucking laughing; I am trying to be kind to you, shitstain. Okay. I don’t know. I haven’t been in contact with him in the past two days. I’ve been busy. Let me check.” Tenko leant back towards the mic to address you. “Do we have a schedule for the rest of the week? For instance, are we doing this again on Thursday?”

“I thought we were,” you said, scanning your room for your planner so that you could check your calendar, “Did something come up?”

“It’s not imperative that I go,” Tenko was saying into your ear, while you picked up your laptop to walk over to your U.A.-issued desk, “but another friend who’s been out of town will finally be back then. We might hang out.”

“Psh, go with your friends,” you said, delighted that he had more than one (fighting envy that it was so easy for them to meet up), “We can do this another time.”

“Understood,” Tenko said and backed away from the mic.

Venomothman: so have you sucked his dick yet

Tenko’s incensed shout of “Touya!” had you turning down the volume.

Venomothman: not to be the world’s worst wingman, but my dude is packing. and goes commando all the time.

Venomothman: and i would know. “i” sometimes “did” our “laundry”

You: what’s with all those quotation marks

Venomothman: and do you know the last time it was sucked? never

(Fucking hell. This Touya was walking you back into forbidden territory: the sexualisation of Tenko. After that first session, when you’d been turned on by his confident, rumbling voice as he’d given you an order, you’d felt guilty for sexualising him for the rest of the night. It was as if instead of friend-zoning him, you’d sex-zoned him, only able to see him as a sexual person/object. For the sake of your mission task, that felt unfair.

Or maybe you weren’t even sexualising him. Maybe your brain was appropriately interpreting what he’d done as sexual.

Whatever. Something in your gut was begging you not to see Tenko only through romantic or sexual lenses right now, and you couldn’t explain why.

And talking about Tenko’s apparently massive dick was not helping.)

Tenkopeito: Touya if you don’t ******* shut up I am going to tear off your other arm

Venomothman: no need, boss man

You heard Tenko sigh and say into his phone, sounding exhausted, “I’m not your boss anymore, Touya.”

Venomothman: no need, douchebag

***

Draped over the side of your bed, you dangled a shoelace in front of the gap in an attempt to coax Dango out from underneath. “Dango, sweetie,” you said, whipping the shoelace to the side, “Come out here so that I can look you in the eyes. Where is my planner, you whore?”

At a firm knock on your door, you shot up, dropping the lace. “Never mind,” you said, sliding off the bed, “Stay hidden.”

You opened your door on Aizawa, bare arm raised in mid-knock, wisps of hair plastered to his forehead by dried sweat, and a sweatshirt tied around his waist. He took two seconds to look over you before saying, “Get dressed. Civilian clothes. You have three minutes.”

Throwing on yesterday’s outfit, you rushed to follow Aizawa out of the dorm and off campus, nearly stepping on his heels while he wove through night pedestrians, pulling on his own sweatshirt to minimise skin contact once the crowd thickened.

You flipped up your coat collar to sneak a glance over your shoulder. “Is this a test?”

Aizawa combed his fingers back through his hair, gaze straight ahead. “Not for you.”

“Right.” You stepped more lightly, naturally falling back into patrol patterns: noting exits (narrow alleyways favouring the left side, underground into the subway station), checking vantage points (upper-storey windows in the resident buildings, non-industrial rooftops), honing in on light sources (yellow- and LED-tinted streetlamps, ambience from open businesses) and physical presence (close enough to brush shoulders with passerby [putting you on edge, because the slightest touch could be pivotal]). You had to consciously unclench your jaw, body flooded with stress it hadn’t felt in months. Swiping at the inner corner of your eye, you asked, “Does it have anything to do with the guy in the black hoodie and face mask following us?”

Aizawa laughed through his nose, once. “All right, then. What’s that ice cream place you and Shinsou went to all the time? Take us there.”

Bewildered, you changed directions to head towards Nekozawa’s, with Aizawa placing a hand on your shoulder to slow your pace, and by the time you pushed open Nekozawa’s glass door to the glowing, pink parlour, you were prepared to hold it open for your follower in the face mask. You watched his broad back as he ordered some ungodly, radioactive-blue ice cream with gummy bears before retreating to a table outside despite the dropping temperature, and Aizawa gestured you forward so that he could pay for the three of you.

Holding your ice cream, you hesitated at the door, swaying underneath the seasonal cat decorations dangling from the ceiling.

“Go on,” said Aizawa, retrieving the U.A. card from his wallet, “I’ve got to make a phone call, so don’t wait up. Don’t be too harsh on him; we’re here because he did a good job in the field today. Tailing you was extra practise.”

Nodding, you nudged open the door, bracing yourself at the cold, night air, and let it drift shut behind you as you approached the table, the farthest one from the pink lights.

Hood pulled up, Tenko bent over his blue monstrosity, face mask hanging by a loop over his left ear. Scuffing your boots on the concrete to announce your presence, you sat across from him, setting your cup on the cast iron before swinging your leg over the bench. You managed a cursory glance over what appeared to be a sketchbook before he closed it, and once he’d stowed it away, he swopped his spoon to his dominant hand to keep eating.

“You draw, Tenko?” To make him feel more comfortable, you kept your gaze towards Aizawa inside on the phone. “Do you think you’re any good?”

“Not yet. But I’m gonna be,” he said, clicking his pen and clenching it in his left hand, “I’ve got all these fucking artist’s gloves, so I might as well put ‘em to use.”

“Very nice,” you said, nodding, closing your eyes as you dipped your spoon into your ice cream, “But as a reminder, you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it. I love doing stuff I’m absolute shit at. It reminds me of medieval bestiaries. They didn’t know shit about animals, but, boy howdy, did they have fun illustrating them. Did you know a weasel used to be called a polecat?”

Tenko huffed, his face mask fluttering. “It really is you.”

“Of course it is,” you said, beaming, and for the first time, you looked at him.

Tension flooded your teacup of a body and overflowed into the saucer and onto the floor. Heightened by the cold, a vein on the back of your hand strained and pulsed visibly, and, jaw locking, you lunged over the tabletop to grab him by the shoulders, shaking him.

“What the hell is wrong with you‽” You climbed over the table, pushed his ice cream out of the way (he shot out a hand to save it from toppling off the table, and he ripped off his face mask to set it aside before it fell to the ground), and planted your foot on his thigh and your elbows on his chest, caging him in as you forced him flat on the bench. “Why the fuck are you using your real name in your fucking Cipherstone username, you fucking moron‽ People could fucking track you!”

The man who had been Shigaraki Tomura eyed your fists in his hoodie and then his cup of ice cream. “You didn’t have a problem with it before.”

“I—” This idiot! “I didn’t know it was you. There are a lot of Tenkos.”

“Then there’s my logic,” he said, hands dangling by his sides, making no attempt to touch you—you didn’t know if you appreciated it or not. “I thought you knew who I was.”

“No, I fucking—I would have given you advice that was more specific to you, over the spiel I was giving interns.” Releasing your grip on his hoodie, you sat back up and scooted over on the tabletop. Though you wanted to keep holding him, to hug him after all he’s been through, he probably wouldn’t want that. “I’m—sorry about tackling you. I, uh—fuck,” you said, and, grimacing, you slid his ice cream back to him and reached across for your own, pretending with everything you’ve got that it was perfectly normal that you were sitting on a table next to Shigaraki Tomura, who’s been teaching you to play a video game, who’s apparently living at the end of the hall, who’s decorated his door with Eri’s silver tinsel for Christmas, who’s banned from drinking caffeine, who could rest his fucking head on your thigh if he wanted. Normal. Yeah.

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” he said, fishing out a gummy bear like you hadn’t lunged at him, “Your reaction was reasonable.”

“It—it wasn’t, really,” you said, laughing nervously, “I wasn’t expecting you. I mean, no one knows what—what happened to you. Afterwards. It was really unclear.”

“It was that way on purpose,” said Tenko, “It was thought to be better to emphasise the total destruction of All for One instead of whatever happened to his leftovers.” He shifted a bear to his back molars to bite into the frozen gummy better. “Nezu-sensei decided it was better to keep it muddled for now.”

Muddled was a good way to put it. There’d been so much chaos at the end of the war that so much never was accounted for. You’d think that the location of Shigaraki’s body would be high on the list, but satisfaction was found simply in the splintered, spectacular remains of AFO. Shigaraki’s name wasn’t cleared, per se, but in the aftermath, Midoriya especially stressed that yes, Shigaraki committed atrocities, but he’d been abused, groomed, and literally bodily possessed by AFO to think that way. Didn’t excuse him, but wasn’t entirely his fault.

The locations of the other PLF members—well, the core of the League, really—were public, if not vague. Spinner was in the States at a rehab that specialised in heteromorph trauma; Toga was at a local women’s facility called Sakura Grove, and Dabi was living with his family—he must have been that Touya on the phone, holy shit.

So, here he was, sitting on the bench at the same ice cream parlour you visited with the same friends who fought him, hunched over in oversized, black clothes you suspected were Aizawa’s, broad shoulders and faded scars out of place in the pink lights, white hair pulled back in a blunt ponytail with his bangs flopping over his forehead, seemingly unbothered by the toe of your boot pressing against his denim-covered thigh.

God. He’s scratched at his neck so much that it looks like he’s been beheaded with a blunt axe.

Tenko’s eyes flickered up to you, their colour deepening to crimson in the tinted lights. “So. You’ve got questions.”

“Are you okay?”

Tenko swallowed with effort, scowling. “Don’t start with a hard one.”

“Right,” you said, throat drying, “Who knows you’re staying at U.A.?”

“Faculty and staff. My therapist. The police force. The ramen shop Aizawa-sensei and I go to. The intensive rehab I was at before. The top of the hero commission. Touya, Touya’s father, Spinner, Toga. Eri and Midoriya,” he said, tongue swiping over his lower lip, “You.”

Somehow both fewer and more than you’d figured. “What exactly…is the situation? Aizawa-sensei was vague.”

“Officially, I’m like Eri: a ward of U.A. My old rehab thought I was good enough to live off their campus, so I’m back here, where I can be watched by people capable enough to bring me down if I go crazy again,” he said, brow furrowed as he traced the side of his cup with his spoon, “I should resent that, but it’s not like I have anywhere else to go, especially somewhere as comfortable as this. This is fucking stupid to say aloud, but fucking—fuckin’ All Might is the closest thing I have to family now, along with Midoriya.”

“I’m not following.”

“My grandma was the holder of One for All before All Might had it.” He pointed at you with his spoon. “So you can make the connection from there. But it’s stupid; I’m stupid—” He was shaking his head and staring into his lap. “—because it’s like I have a brother in Midoriya and a goddamn father in All Might—and then Aizawa-sensei’s acting like a dad, too, to me and Eri, and Nezu-sensei? Nezu-sensei is so fucking cool,” said Tenko, dragging his hand down his face, “He’s got a driver’s license! I don’t even have one of those. And he can type fucking 210 words per minute with those little rat paws, and I’m still getting used to using all five fingers, fuck.”

Cute. You scraped the bottom of your cup. “Hey, I think you type well.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why it takes me so long to reply in the in-game chat function. Why I prefer communicating over voice call. Learning new habits, and shit.” Tenko stabbed his ice cream with his spoon. “Nezu-sensei has arranged for me to train as an aftermath-clean-up hero. I had been—” His fingers on one hand circled the thumb of the other. “—in discussion with him in rehab about what I could do, and we decided I could consistently help when there’s collapsed buildings after attacks; I could dust the wreckage so that we could find hostages or make it easier to clean up and rebuild, and Aizawa-sensei and All Might-sensei have been working with me to control what parts of what I touch gets dusted so that I could create pitfall traps for holding criminals. It’s…going. It’s going,” he said, curling his lips in his mouth to moisten them, and with narrowed, determined eyes, he took another bite of ice cream, the blue staining the inside of his lips.

“Tenko, that’s a really cool application of your quirk. I hope you can find more,” you said, tilting your head and smiling down at him, “but—I have to ask—aren’t you tired?”

Tenko rolled his eyes. “Of course. You’re part of the group ensuring I don’t have caffeine.”

“No, I mean,” you said, shaking your head, “I mean, you don’t have to be perceived as useful. You’re—you’re just fine if you wanted to rest. You’re worthwhile just as you, not as—as a job, as a, I don’t know, a redeemed hero or anything. You can just be Tenko.”

“I know. My therapist keeps reminding me. But one of the most vivid memories I have from when I was living in that house,” said Tenko, sneering, “is that I desperately wanted to be a hero and that I would pretend to be one a lot. While I’m aware that I can never atone for what I’ve done, if I did nothing but rest, I’d be alone with my thoughts. And with what I’m learning to do, as a hero, someday, someone might…need me. Need my help. I imagine that’s a good feeling.”

You sat back, leaning on your hands, the cast-iron pattern cutting into your palms, to survey him. “You’re very much re-writing my first impressions of you as my gaming buddy and as the post-war Shigaraki. You’re surprisingly well-adjusted.”

He snorted. “I shouldn’t think it’s surprising. I’ve had almost a year and a half in intensive rehab, and I’m still in therapy every day.” He started listing on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “I’m on antidepressants; I know where my next meal’s coming from and when I’ll get it; I consistently have a safe roof over my head, and I know my friends are getting that, too. I have mentors who care for me as a human person instead of as a tool. I get to stay in contact with my friends and get to make new ones,” he said, nodding curtly at you before quickly looking away, “I’m fucking away from that sadistic fuckface. He’s goddamn dead and burned away to nothing. That’s the main thing. Everything else is a bonus.”

Tenko sighed, bangs fluttering with the movement, his shoulders straining as he leaned onto both his elbows on the table. He sighed again and scooped the last gummy bear out of his cup, and you let the silence carry on while you finished eating.

“Long phone call,” Tenko said eventually.

An increasingly grumpy Aizawa was leaning against the glittery wall inside, phone between his ear and shoulder, and furiously scraping the inside of his ice cream cup.

“Yeah,” you said, “but it’s been good talking to you, Tenko. I really appreciate you telling me all of this.”

“I would’ve talked about it sooner, but I figured you knew who I was and didn’t want to address it,” said Tenko, tapping his fingers one by one on the table.

Pulling the collar of your coat closer to your neck, you frowned, hesitating on how to phrase it. You watched your breath cloud in the night air before settling on, “There’s an off-switch?”

Brow pinching very slightly, Tenko followed your gaze to his hand, with all five fingers coming to rest on the cast iron, and he tapped all five of them on it for emphasis. “Yeah. There always has been. All for One kept it from me. Power of belief kept me jittery and alert my whole life.”

“So long as you thought you’d destroy anything you touched, you would?”

He nodded. “That bitch.”

“Agreed. We should kill him.”

And Tenko laughed. Just for a moment, barely making any noise, but he smiled with his teeth, grin stretching across his face as he looked away and eventually closing his lips, the smile lingering for a few more precious seconds.

***

You closed your laptop to answer the phone at work, clearing your throat to ready your receptionist voice before you picked up. “U.A. University Administration; how may I help you?”

“I need you to fucking murder me,” Tenko spat through the phone, angry and panicked, “I need you to rip out my bones and suck out my guts through a straw. He fucking let me hold onto them, and I’ve fucking gone and lost such a fucking iconic piece of—”

“Tenko, please, take a breath,” you said, relaxing your customer service mode but clutching the phone to your ear, and after catching the eye of the woman with jars of strawberry preserves waiting to see Nezu, you slumped over in your seat so that she couldn’t see you over the desk’s overhang. “Tell me what’s wrong. We can fix it. Are you alone? Is everyone else busy? Do you need to come sit with me?”

“I—fuck,” he said, and you heard some deliberately slow breathing, but his voice still had an irate, twitchy edge afterwards. “During our practise patrol last night, Aizawa-sensei was talking about support equipment for me. I’d never given it much thought, because it’s always been just me and my hands. He leant me his Eraser Goggles for me to think about for my—and I don’t know where they fucking are,” he said, inhaling sharply on the last word, “I’d left them on my desk, but I’d taken them up to the roof to sketch them, and then I’d brought them back to my dorm—”

“And Aizawa-sensei must have swung by to pick them up since then,” you said, pushing yourself back to slide in your swivel chair to the back of the reception desk, “because he was here at the beginning of my shift to print something off, and the goggles are on top of the printer. Relax, Tenko.”

“Hooooooly fuck, you’re kidding,” said Tenko, audibly deflating, and you smiled to yourself as you slid their band around your wrist.

You kicked yourself back up to the front. “You’re okay. You’re not gonna get in trouble. I’ll bring them by at the end of my shift.” You sat up straight, and the strawberry preserves woman was shooting a concerned look in your direction. “I’m at work, though, so I think we’d better end the call soon. Anything else you need?”

Tenko hummed into the phone. “Not really. You can’t be that busy.”

You smiled again, feeling—feeling domestic, as if he were your boyfriend calling you during work hours. How strange, Shigaraki Tomura. How interesting. “Would you believe I was grinding in Cipherstone when you called?”

“And you don’t call yourself a gamer,” he said, clearing his throat multiple times, “What skills?���

“Woodcutting and firemaking,” you said, opening your laptop again, “Are you feeling under the weather? Your voice had a bit of a rasp there.” Sounded like his old voice for a moment.

“Further cementing that Aizawa-sensei’s right to be worried about you. He says your brain’s going haywire analysing any detail work you can get, because you’re not out in the field anymore,” said Tenko, clearing his throat again (?), “Am I your new project?”

“Tell me what’s wrong, lest I pick up some damn throat lozenges for you before I come home,” you said, and a voice in the back of your head screamed that that threat was extremely cosy and intimate, especially since you’re claiming both of you have a home in the same place—which, sure, you both lived on the same hallway, but so did Aizawa and Eri, and please shut up; Shimura Tenko needs a friend, not a lover right now. Besides, that stupid hallway wasn’t really home for either of you but was more like a temporary holding cell.

“Fine. I’ve been throwing up all morning.”

“Thank you,” you said, electing not to make a pregnancy joke, “Do you need to see Recovery Girl?”

“No, I’m used to it, and I’ve already talked to her about it. I threw up a lot out of anxiety and stress when I was growing up with All for One, and now I’m throwing up because my body can’t handle the amount of food it’s getting regularly, which is fucking ridiculous, since it’s still less than a normal person’s version of three meals a day.”

What. The fuck. How can he casually drop details of deep trauma like it’s nothing? How could AFO let a child keep vomiting out of stress for years and years and never interfere? Well. Yeah, he could. You supposed that Shigaraki’s voice, as you first heard it as the USJ incident, was the ultimate result of that heavy strain on his throat for years. Explains some things about his teeth back then, too.

God. If AFO weren’t dead, you’d strangle him. Keeping a child physically weak because he’d be easier to mould. It was known that AFO had been psychologically manipulating Shigaraki, but now that you thought about it, manipulating his physical growth would have served AFO, too, since he was planning to move into Shigaraki’s body.

And what did this guy do now that he’s got bodily autonomy? Oh. Just. Play some video games. Talk with his friends. Try out some new hobbies. Make crafts with Eri.

It’s a shame AFO didn’t have a grave, because you’d be skiving off work to drown it in acid.

“My stomach is killing me,” said Tenko, “I’ve got to hang up to drink something and go to sleep. Knock on my door when you get home. I want to start a new quest as soon as you finish work.”

Home. He’d said it, too. He probably didn’t mean it in the same, domestic way that you’d been entertaining, but it made your heart swell. “Okay, Tenko. See you then.”

***

His therapist had assigned him homework: go on a planned, public outing with a peer, and stay out for at least an hour.

It wasn’t exactly a picnic you were packing, you kept telling yourself, scooting behind Tenko to get to the spice cabinet in the dorm kitchen, because that’d be too close to a date rather than homework. But the two of you packed a meal to take, with Eri sitting on the kitchen counter while she nibbled at rabbit-cut apple slices, and she held the thermos of decaf tea in her lap until it was time to stow it away.

After a short train ride and a quiet walk through midtown, Tenko stopped you in front of the back gate to what appeared to be a restored, historical estate, judging by the golden shachihoko shibi on each corner of polished hip-and-gable rooftops of the extensively aristocratic—mansion? palace?—that you could make out in across the distance of its sprawling grounds, the immediacy of which was the excessively well-kept, traditional garden that you and Tenko were breaking into.

“Is this legal?” you asked as Tenko reached through the grate to unlatch the doorway.

“I have an in with the gardener,” he said, sweeping the gate open for you and gesturing brusquely for you to enter.

“No, that wasn’t a joke,” you said, taking the few steps inside, finding yourself planted onto a polished, level stepping stone, and staring down a squeaky clean tsukubai despite the thin layer of frost over the water’s surface as the whole bowl began to freeze, “You can’t be doing anything even vaguely illegal, Tenko.”

When you said his name, he closed his eyes, pausing for just a hair in his relatching the gate, before facing you and shifting the strap of his bag farther up his shoulder. “Prude. Yes, we have permission from the owner.”

He kept looking back over his shoulder at you as he led you through the gardens, hopping across stepping stones to pass over a carefully shaped brook that led to a tiny waterfall near stone lanterns, weaving through trellises with the wintry shells of wisteria vines and shaped evergreens. He tutted and rolled his eyes when you stopped at the waterlily-coated koi pond, its fish swimming and flicking their tails in the artificially heated water (for some, odd reason, what appeared to be a compact duck coop had been constructed near the pond’s edge, its wood new and un-bleached by the sun like the rest of garden décor). You’d been about to ask about it when Tenko had jumped out of his skin at the sound of a deer scare, bamboo tapping stone.

“Stop laughing,” Tenko said, cheeks burning (and you tried not to take too much pleasure in that, but you couldn’t help it).

“Oh, a sensitive boy, a delicate boy,” you said, grinning as you hopped onto the same stone as him, cool, clouding breaths mixing together in the proximity, and you yourself could feel heat rise to your face. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Good traits to have, actually. Means you’re feeling secure and comfortable in your surroundings, if you’re off-set that easily.” Feeling bold—it was the cold; it was how the proximity already flustered him; it was how his hands were full because of the bag; it was—whatever—you reached for his silly All Might scarf and re-tied the front, fluffing it up to cover more of his neck.

You made the mistake of making eye contact: full of caution, his eyes kept darting from your hands to your face, searching for something, his lips parted, otherwise completely fucking frozen.

Were you making him uncomfortable? You stilled, your fingers still in the fringe of his scarf, tension tightening in your chest and jaw (clenching).

Tenko noticed. And—and to this day, you can’t believe he fucking did this—he ran his tongue over his lower lip and lifted his chin, exposing more of his neck to you. He then was suddenly very interested in the koi pond, the ruddiness spreading from his cheeks to his ears.

Throat dry, you gave his scarf a final tug and patted it (?) to show (??) a job well done (???). “Yeah,” you said, smoothly, like a smooth person, like someone who adjusts scarves of hot, in-process-of-reformation villains on the regular, “Where are we going?”

Tenko spun on his heel and strode away, muttering what sounded like, “Right into my grave.”

You pretended not to hear it and let him lead you to the only building unattached to the main house: a small, traditional teahouse that had a recent addition to it in the back. The creak of the bamboo engawa when you climbed onto it was muffled underneath the bright pealing of windchimes strung across the covered porch. Tenko was already kneeling at the tearoom’s sunken fireplace inside, its handle carved into a fish, fiery as its kindling, and was unpacking the travel teacups from the bag as you closed the door behind you, shutting out the cold, enveloped by the comfortable heat trapped inside by the cushioned walls.

Tenko must have arranged for this space to have been prepared for you. A kotatsu with floor cushions was tucked near the fireplace, pre-heated, with two further space heaters in the unoccupied corners, cords trailing into what must be a hallway linking the traditional and modern rooms, the latter of which was shut off from view. Beside a red-tinted wooden dresser stood an oddly empty tokonoma, and instead of a scroll or painting, amidst bits of pieces of scotch tape hastily half-torn off the back was a shittily cut-out, paper heart.

Shaking your head, you took a step towards Tenko, and the floor chirped at you, freezing you in place.

“Yeah, I don’t know why they do that,” said Tenko, pushing on his knees to stand, “They just do.”

“These must be nightingale floors,” you said, crossing to the kotatsu, a bird under each step, “The chirping’s caused by the way the nails rub against the v-shaped clamps holding the floor together. Have you been to Nijō Castle in Kyoto? These are in the hallway—supposedly used as a security measure, but who knows.”

“You need a hobby.” Tenko ripped the paper heart from the back of the tokonoma, crumpling it in his fist. A shred of it remained under the scrap of tape on the wall, which he bent towards to scrape off with a blunt fingernail.

“I have several,” you said, easing down onto a cushion and unfolding your legs underneath the kotatsu blanket, the luxurious heat swaddling your legs and hips. You fought the urge to curl up underneath it entirely.

“How many of them involve getting your ass thrashed by me in Cipherstone?” Tenko retrieved the bag from the sunken fireplace before returning to the kotatsu, and he sat on your left, resting the bag between the two of you.

You took the thermos of decaf tea when he handed it to you. “Tenko, you’ve been playing that game for years, and I just began. Of course my ass is gonna be thrashed by—you know how the game works. You have all of this previous information about the game that I don’t have.”

Tenko scoffed and slid your teacup across the kotatsu’s surface.  “As if I could conceal any information from you. You’re too…eh.” He waved it off, shaking his head.

“I’m too what?” You unscrewed the thermos lid, and steam surged upwards, rising to caress the planes of your face.

“It’s been unfair of Aizawa-sensei to make me tail you,” said Tenko, leaning your way, all five fingers curled around his own teacup as he stretched across the tabletop. “I’d have a chance of success if it were anyone else.”

“I’ll give you that,” you said, pouring steaming, amber tea with slices of yuzu into Tenko’s cup, “You’re getting quite good at it, not that you were bad in the first place. But yeah, it’s a bit mean of him to test your tracking skills on me.” He’d never said to stop, so you poured until liquid almost overflowed at the rim.

He gasped at the heat but nudged his teacup back to his place at the table, unable to hold it in his palm anymore. “I think I would’ve preferred working with Hound Dog-sensei for that. He’s less detail-oriented. I could win, if it weren’t you.” Jutting out his lower lip, Tenko glared down at his tea for a moment before slumping in his seat to slurp at the tea without picking it up.

“Don’t feel bad about it. It was literally and actually my focus for hero work, profiling and detail shit and being aware of my surroundings. Information stuff. Infiltration stuff.” Setting the thermos on the far corner, you cupped your hands loosely around your teacup, appreciating the warmth and getting cosier by the minute.

Tenko was rooting through the bag for the other thermoses, full of sukiyaki for each of you. “It’s clear you’ve worked hard to hone your skills. Were you this talented as a student?”

You accepted the new thermos, fingers clenching tightly around it. “Uh. I think I may have been better back then. More focused. More passionate, anyway. I had to think about it really hard back then, make conscious decisions to notice things, and now I think I do it instinctively. I think I’m slipping because of that.”

“Hm,” said Tenko, tongue rubbing over his teeth behind closed lips, and he opened his mouth to say something but shut it, instead twisting off the cap to his soup thermos. He took the first sip of sukiyaki broth and—and was absolutely beautiful (you couldn’t make sense of it beyond that; he was a mess of details that you couldn’t fit together into a larger picture that made any sense: white eyelashes light against his cheeks as they fluttered shut, face muscles relaxed, scars overlapping with laugh lines, cracked lips becoming moistened by the soup, both hands cupped around his thermos like a child, no strain to his posture, baggy hoodie swallowing him up, kotatsu blanket yanked up to his hips to cover his crossed legs, scar on the corner of his mouth delicately shifting with his baffled smirk when he caught you staring, a strange pink rising to the tips of his ears). “What?”

Uh. Hm. You pinched the bridge of your nose and then moved to rub your eyelids. “What were you going to say about me?” you asked, and you withdrew your hand from your face to raise the soup thermos to your lips, taking a mouthful of noodles and the sweet, salty broth.

Tenko shook his head. “I’m trying to avoid thoughts that fall back into my old habits.”

“Try me,” you said, holding his gaze when he met it, “I won’t tell.”

Weary, he broke eye contact, and he fixated on fishing out a certain slice of green onion. “We needed someone like you back then.”

Back then? When he—oh.

Back in the League.

Though you attempted to hide your grin by taking a sip of sukiyaki, you caught his eyes flicker to it. “You would’ve taken me? You would’ve let me in?”

“Would you have joined?” he shot back, a bit too quickly.

“No,” you said, rolling your shoulders and settling down farther underneath the kotatsu, “Never. But since you shared something you shouldn’t’ve, I’ll do the same.” You set your thermos down to rub your eyes again—God, you couldn’t look at him for too long, lest your intrusive thoughts hand you your ass. “I thought about it. About joining you.”

You dragged your hand down your face, peeking between your fingers at a muted clink. Tenko was staring at you, something fucking unreadable in his scrounched eyes, and both hands lay five-fingered and flat on the kotatsu, steam from his open thermos fluffing up hair on one side of his head. “You’re not serious. You wouldn’t have.”

“Not in the way you think,” you said, tilting your head back, “but I often thought, in the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation Raid, what I could’ve done, if I’d known what I know now. And as the rest of the war was unfolding, I only wanted it more.”

Tenko blinked, slowly. “Tell me what you would’ve done.”

“Oh, you would’ve hated me, down to the dregs of my very soul,” you said, shifting to sit on your knees, “I would’ve started after your fight with Re-Destro, after the PLF was established. When you were letting allllllllll those heroes in, the sidekicks, the nobodies, anyone who seemed like they were with the cause. I would’ve infiltrated. Slipped in without notice. Hawks did, with the Commission, but I would’ve been going in as a free agent.”

“No one notices a U.A. student slide in between the masses. Re-Destro’s lackeys wouldn’t notice you at the door like I would. You get in,” Tenko said, taking his thermos in hand again but still engrossed in you, “What then?”

“There was a short period of time between the PLF establishment and your procedure, right? Around a month? That’s when I go. I worm my way into the good graces of some of the nine lieutenants—I’ve decided my pipeline would’ve been Geten to Toga to you. You’d just come out of an enormous battle, with Re-Destro and that city and Gigantomachia for a whole month. I heard you were bandaged up, on crutches, that you’d lost fingers that you regrew in that regeneration tank,” you said, eyes on his hands, one in a fist in his lap and the other around his thermos, five fingers pressing onto the grip but the pinkie finger hitched farther up than the rest, “That you’d given a speech and made your appearances regardless. That you’d pushed yourself to your limit and then broke yourself a little more. And you would’ve loathed me, because I would’ve come in, earned my way to your side, and I would’ve put my hand on your shoulder, slid it up your neck to cup your cheek to ask Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?” You smiled and huffed, shoving it down, and though his hard stare should’ve pinned you to your seat, you pushed on the corner of the kotatsu to edge yourself over to his side, a knee on his cushion. “I like to think that you’ve sighed, sulked a bit, reluctant to admit anything was wrong at all, because back then, you had no use for moonlight. But I would’ve made you look at me, taken you to a bed, made you lie down until your eyes fluttered shut and the tension swept through your body and left. And you would rest,” you said, finding yourself leaning over him very slightly, knees touching his, just enough so that he leant backwards just a fraction, “I would’ve made that month so soft for you. I would’ve taken care of you, when nobody was fucking paying attention to you in the way that they should’ve. I fucking—I wanted it.” You gripped the front of his hoodie, fist grasping more fabric than necessary to shake him. “I wanted it. I wanted to care for you. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know. And you were fucking alone, in an unfamiliar place, and it kills me to think about that.”

You ducked your head to wipe your watery eyes on your sleeve, taking a breath—and realising what you were doing. You loosened your grip, but before you could pull away, Tenko was cat-like quick to grab your sleeve—why won’t he touch you?

“I wouldn’t have accepted your help,” he said, quiet, controlled, holding you down with his eyes, hand shifting to curve under your sleeved wrist, signalling that you could escape at any time, “That was after the worst month of my life, fighting Machia, and I wouldn’t have accepted it. I had too much to do. I would’ve shaken you off.”

“No, you wouldn’t’ve.”

“I would’ve,” he said, a bare finger, featherlight, skimming over the tender, bare skin of the underside of your wrist (oh, wow), “I wouldn’t trust that easily in that short of a time. You’d have met me, and that’d be it. If you’d persisted, I would’ve ripped you to shreds and tossed you aside.”

“Tenko,” you said, both relief and tightness blooming from your wrist, “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

The hallway shoji slammed open, somehow rattling as it slid in its tracks and shook the walls, and you and Tenko scrambled apart, with you jolting backwards on your hands, grappling for your seat cushion, and Tenko banging his thermos on the kotatsu, hastily wrestling with keeping it upright as he flung his body to the side.

“Hey, fuck you, Touya,” Tenko spluttered out, elbowing himself upright as—as fucking Dabi strode inside, hands in the deep pockets of his black sweatpants. “You said you’d stay in the main house.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Touya, cool as you please, raising both of his hands in defence, “I had to ensure you’re not fucking in my bed.”

“What is—” Tenko clambered to his feet to cross to him, chirping with each stomp, and whisper-shouting once he’d corralled Touya into a far corner. “I said we’d hang out later today, Touya. You swore you’d stay inside and watch Naruto this afternoon.”

The polite thing to do would be to appear fascinated by the tea. You returned to your cushion and poured yourself another cup.

“Yeah, but I’ve been told I’ve got shit to do later. I’ve got to go to this fuckin’—fuckin’ family stuff. I don’t wanna get into it,” said Touya, at full volume, “and I wanted to check that your girl was real. Y’know, she looks nothing like someone who’d have GinzengTea as her username. Have you given it to her already?”

“Shut the fuck up. I was just about to do that, if you hadn’t interrupted, cockhead.”

“Cool,” he said, a bird-note as he shifted his weight, “I wanna see what she thinks.”

“Hell, no—”

“I helped pick ‘em out. Let me watch and have an ohagi, and I’ll leave,” said Touya, chirping towards you before he finished the sentence, and Tenko followed him, muttering under his breath.

Touya sat on the bare tatami next to you, joints cracking as he yanked the kotatsu blanket up his legs, shooting you a small salute and a concerningly charming smile. “Hey,” he said, tilting his head, eyes half-lidded, smile stretching to show more of his even, white teeth, “I’ve seen you before, yeah? When was the last time you laid eyes on me?”

Tenko pelted him in the chest with a plastic-wrapped ohagi, cutting off the ooze of charisma. “Show-off,” he said, nudging another sweetened rice ball your way.

You nodded but didn’t move to unwrap it, since you were still working on your sukiyaki. “I’m surprised you remember, Touya,” you said, the name feeling strange on your tongue, “It must’ve been years since I elbowed you in the tit.”

Eyes lighting the fuck up, you snapped towards Tenko when he laughed into his plastic wrap: still not loud, still not making any vocalisation with it, but releasing a heavy, sharp burst of air with a wide, open grin. He hunched over to hide more of it, using both hands to unwrap his ohagi—and in the moment he realised he’d been unwrapping it with only his pointer fingers and thumbs, he dropped the rest of his fingers onto the rice ball, still smirking to himself.

Biting your lip in your own smile, you turned back to Touya (you caught his moment of mild alarm at how thrilled you were when Tenko laughed—or maybe it was alarm at Tenko laughing at all—but Touya relaxed his eyebrows and shut his mouth the second you faced him again). “God, yeah, it must have been before that last battle that we’d met in a fight, and I’d gotten close enough to hit you, and…” You shook your head. “Actually, I don’t wanna talk about that stuff. It’s not who we are now.”

“That’s fine.” Touya nodded towards Tenko and took a bite of his ohagi. “Shimura, don’t you have something to give her?”

Shimura. That was his last name, you supposed, but wasn’t it odd that Tenko called Touya by his given name and that Touya called Tenko by his family name? Tenko didn’t make you call him Shimura. Well, you supposed that there’s only one Shimura now, and because of the number of Todorokis, it paid to be specific—

“Here.” Tenko set a flat box in front of you, flipping the buckle of his bag back over. “I was going to give it to you with more formality, but since this bastard showed up, I’m doing it like this.”

Biting the inside of your cheek, brow furrowed, you unpacked a pair of pale blue headphones, soft to the touch with a mesh headband so that your head wouldn’t ache.

“Noise-cancelling,” Tenko said, gabbling, frowning very slightly, “Rechargeable. There’s a detachable microphone so it can function as a headset. I wanted to do something good for you.” His eyes darted towards Touya, and they dropped to his ohagi’s bulging filling, seeping out onto the plastic wrap. “You need them, anyway. I’ve been sick of hearing you through those shitty earbuds; their sound is terrible, and when you said you’d lost your only pair—which I don’t fucking understand how you can lose those things, because they just fucking show up in my shit all the time, like a goddamn plague—I thought you needed something quality—just to make it easier on my end, obviously, so that I don’t have to tell you to yell into that shitty, built-in micropho—”

“Tenko,” you said, reaching over to place your tea-hot hand over the back of his, fingers curving with his along ohagi’s edge, “Thank you so much. I adore them. I’m really grateful that you would think of me.”

Tenko froze, the same as he had when you’d adjusted his scarf. Unable to look you in the eye, like a prey animal, stiff, shoulders tense, colour rushing up his neck to his face and ears again—but this time, he lifted his hand just a hair from his ohagi to press back into your palm, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Hoo, boy,” said Touya, startling the both of you when he slammed his hands on the kotatsu to push himself up, “I’ve had enough. I’ve had my little snack. I’m leaving.” Once on his feet, he stretched, pressing his hands to his lower back and arching it, grunting.

“Good fucking riddance, cocksucker,” said Tenko, rising and grabbing Touya by the elbow to haul him to the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Touya, dragging his feet, chirping slurred and confused by his movement, and when Tenko had him at the wall, trying to shove him out, Touya, smirking under your watch, whispered something to Tenko while forcing something into his palm. Touya ducked out as Tenko looked at what he’d accepted and, letting out a yelp, dusted whatever it was before he hurried back to the kotatsu.

(When you left the teahouse half an hour later, you discovered that he’d decayed only the wrapper and not the condom itself.)

***

“One moment, please. Nezu-sensei is in a meeting right now, but he’ll be out momentarily. Please take a number—yes, the ticket puncher when you first came in,” you said to yet another impatient and pissed client in the admin waiting room, packed to the gills with parents, press, vendors, potential sponsors, and, for some reason, Mt. Lady’s entire representative team. “By the door. If you’ll take a seat, we’ll be with you shortly.”

God, you could punt Nezu for this. Not that there was anything wrong with establishing a new, annual event for U.A.—a cherry blossom garden-set, competitive scavenger hunt coming up in the spring—but because of his casual comment that it would rise to the same importance as the Sports Festival, you were swamped with those eager to invest early. Unable to take a break, you had to work with your head bowed, desperately hoping none of these people recognised you and your failure, when all you wanted was to reply to Tenko’s messages on Cipherstone that morning.

Tenkopeito: You’ll like the next quest. You can pet a dog in it

Tenkopeito: Come over to my room this evening so that we can talk in person

Was he intending to speak with innuendo or with such sincerity that it cut right through you? Moreover, was he aware he was even doing it? Based on what you’ve observed, Tenko had no idea what he was doing to you, nor did he know how hard you were trying not to act on your attraction, though you weren’t even doing a great job of suppressing it.

It’s strange: Tenko evoked some strange, unnameable emotion in you like nothing else. You wanted to coddle him; you wanted to play stupid video games with him; you wanted to sweep his hair out of his eyes, and though you kept telling yourself that you didn’t, you wanted him to tell you how to touch yourself, how to touch him. You brushed it off. Another time. Perhaps never.

“Oh, hi!” Former pro-hero Ragdoll squealed your family name, making you jump in your seat. “It is you. I couldn’t tell from farther back in the line.” Fuck, Ragdoll would recognise you, since she and the rest of the Wild, Wild Pussycats trained Class A, and she specifically spent time with you on your tracking skills because of her Search quirk.

Don’t cause a scene. “Hello, Shiretoko,” you said, doing your best not to let your face be seen from over the reception desk’s overhang, “It’s good to see you. How can I help?”

When she beamed, she was as bright as ever. “Oh! The Pussycats want to offer our services for the scavenger hunt! We wanna get back into charity and civilian events now that we’re back from our mission for—but wait, you know all about that!” You didn’t. But her cheerful voice carried, and people were already turning towards Ragdoll, part of a hero team ranked in the top thirty. “I wanna hear more about what you’ve been up to! Since you left the hero business, no one’s known where you’ve been! Gosh, have you been behind this dreary old desk the whole time?” Ragdoll leant over the overhang, flicking at a loose strand of your hair. “I thought you were sent out on missions out of the country! Like, really important, top-secret stuff. It’s weird seeing you in an office, especially since I consider you a mini me. Why are you back at your alma mater? Did your agency not want you anymore?”

She wasn’t meaning to be cruel. Her loud, blunt sincerity, though, drew the attention of onlookers, and their flashes of recognition, subsequent judgment, and turning away made your chest tight. “I needed a break. That’s all.”

A thin, blonde woman in a burgundy overcoat leaning against the wall immediately next to the reception had been evaluating you, scanning you from top to bottom during the exchange. She didn’t bother hiding her curiosity, and when you shakily handled the rest of the conversation with Ragdoll, she turned to the short, softly featured man beside her. “You know her?” She hadn’t even tried to quiet her voice; it jolted you from Ragdoll, but you steeled yourself and continued printing off a schedule for her—and from the depths of your brain came the woman’s identity: Uwabami, the snake hero, one who usually flaunted her celebrity status but currently dressed down, without her hair snakes (a rattlesnake, a yellow king cobra, and a Japanese rat snake, which—shut up! You don’t need this information right now! Can you be fucking sane, please?).

Her sidekick—no, an intern, a student at U.A., some fuckin’ twink in the year below you, name escaping you at the moment—had some iota of tact when he looked you over, slanting his body away, as if he weren’t staring. “Yes,” he said, trying not to let you hear, “She’s my former senpai and nothing more to me. We didn’t run in the same circles. She’s the one who made that rescue a few months back, the one that got a lot of online backlash.”

“No, seriously,” Ragdoll was saying, “Why are you back at U.A.? Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

“My—” People behind Ragdoll in line were listening. Trying not to show it. Your throat ran dry, and you couldn’t think of a lie or a pleasant half-truth. “My flat was compromised. My address was leaked, and eventually, people were—look, Shiretoko,” you said, forcing the words out of your mouth, “I really don’t want to talk about this. Here’s the printed schedule. I’ll talk to you later.”

You slid the paper across the counter, and she took it, waving goodbye and still beaming.

“Is this what happens when a hero career doesn’t work out? They just shove you back where someone will take you? At any old office desk?” that fucking twink was asking Uwabami, “I can’t—it honestly scares me to think I could lose myself and be misplaced like that. It’s wasting talent, don’t you think?”

“How can I help you?” you asked the next person in line through gritted teeth.

When Uwabami lowered her sunglasses to glance over them, you inhaled sharply and swung your swivel chair so that you wouldn’t see her. “I don’t know about that. Maybe this dreadful administration office is where she’s meant to be.”

Biting his lip, he shifted his jaw and crossed his arms, slumping against the wall. “You’ll always have a place for me, right, Uwabami? I don’t want this to happen to me.”

“Yes, I can print you out a copy of the same schedule. If you’ll allow me a moment to print.”

“Of course, Kakeru,” Uwabami said, ignorant of how you were gripping a pencil so tightly that it could snap any second, “You’ll never be left behind.” But then she fucking stared you down, deliberately holding eye contact while you were at the printer, and she said, “You’ll never need a place to hide. I’ll make sure you don’t fail.”

“Hey, how about you shut up?” you hissed, ripping the printer-warm schedule from the tray and storming back to your current client to shove it into their hands. “Aren’t Japanese rat snakes supposed to be in hibernation this time of year, anyway?”

***

Someone in Mt. Lady’s group recorded it. Someone posted it.

wizardjenkins11: jesus christ who knew u.a. had its own island of misfit toys

emotionalsupportdynamightsweat: nice to see that she kept her snark, but what is she doing back at school?? don’t heroes have some sort of paperwork component to their work. why isn’t she still at an agency

blood-is-thiccer: lol ua’s the only one who’d take the bitch. she’s being rude as hell to an actual pro hero. lameass quirk anyway and ass flat as hell lmao she fucken deserved that guy lighting her mailbox on fire

LynchianTiddies: You’re encouraging domestic terrorism???

blood-is-thiccer: that’s not domestic terrorism

LynchianTiddies: Then what, pray fucking tell, is it??

blood-is-thiccer: wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: no but I get what that guy was saying about wasting talent tho. Out of everyone in that class a, she’s the only one not topping the fucking hero charts rn. She’s the only one who’s left hero work. What makes her weaker than the rest of her classmates? What happened to her to make her like this?

koiboi69: wouldn’t you quit if people were camping outside your house/work/grocerystore? And also FUCK, man, there’s no fucking need to say she’s fucking weak. that’s kicking her while she’s down

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: I’m not kicking her while she’s down. I’m stating facts and asking reasonable questions.

koiboi69: bro wouldn’t YOU feel down if you’d didn’t have a home to go back to??? going back to u.a. is like admitting defeat, like you couldn’t handle it on your own and need protection

mawatadaddysgorl: i love seeing updates on her bc it makes me feel so good about what i’m doing with my life

***

Uraraka and Shinsou texted you but couldn’t call, let alone come from across town. Aizawa was AWOL, and Dango was hiding under your bed, so you, blotchy-faced and damp, were crumpled on the floor outside of room 310, eating vending machine bullshit and waiting for Tenko to return home.

Exactly all the insecurities you’d been stuffing down for months and months, brought out to air in front of everyone. Instead of doomscrolling, you locked your phone and slid it across the hallway carpet, burying your face in your hands and stomach lurching to the thought that you might soon be plastered everywhere in sight, again. Another round of intensive laying low loomed on the horizon, especially now that your location was made public. Your little secretary job was good enough, and relocating elsewhere on campus would lead to more job training, which would be a bitch.

Where was Tenko? You needed him here to say something irreverent and vindictive. Something unhinged. Or you needed him to hold you, pull you into his lap, and bitch about the whole thing while watching a movie. Tenko had messaged you to come by after work, so why wasn’t he…?

The staircase door hissed open, Tenko pushing it with his back, reusable grocery bags on his arms, and—and wearing a cape? Who the fuck wears a cape casu—oh shit he’s in his hero costume.

You’d heard that he had one, designed by the same company that’d made Midoriya’s and Shouto’s, and the similarities were clear: a boxy sort of design due to thick fabric that still somehow hugged his chest, a minimalist utility belt, and sturdy, knee-capping boots, positively flaming scarlet in contrast to the dark greys of the rest of his jumpsuit. The most obvious connection with another hero, though, made your chest throb: his cloak fastened with the same clasp his grandmother’s had. His dust-blocking respirator lay around his neck for the moment, but what was most embarrassing for you was how your brain fucking wheezed like a boiling kettle at his bare arms, biceps bulging, every fucking inch of skin down to his fingertips completely on display like a goddamn slut.

Whore behaviour. Whore behaviour! You had to duck your head when he squatted next to you, because oh, now you could see the stretch marks on his upper arms, because he’d gotten large way too quickly to be healthy, and smell his fading Old Spice and sweat from being out on what must have been an emergency call, and he was setting his grocery bags aside, reaching out to graze your shoulder, and wow, he’d been complaining about how he didn’t have abs yet despite working out five days a week now that his stamina had increased, but that fabric clung to his lower abdomen, looking very, very flat.

Initially pinching the fabric of your sweater, he shifted his jaw and laid his hand on your shoulder. “Who am I dusting?”

“God, Tenko,” you said, trying to look anywhere but his arms, or his abdomen, or his fucking lips, but he was leaning so much over you that he occupied most of your line of vision, and the only way to avoid seeing anything besides wisps of white hair was to gaze at the popcorned ceiling. “You’re not supposed to do that anymore.”

“Oh, yeah? Who am I dusting?” He squeezed your shoulder, stretching his thumb out to rub at your collarbone.

“Unless you can dust everyone in the country, I don’t think decay will help.”

Tenko clicked his tongue. “I have been explicitly told not to do that,” he said, shifting to sit on his knees, “I have—” He dug into a grocery bag for a moment. “—this for you. You like this shit, right?” Tenko pressed a bottle of pink lemonade into your hands.

“Fucking. Fuck. I do,” you said, passing the condensation-coated bottle from one hand to another, chest tightening, blinking to keep the water levels low, “Thank you. You didn’t have to get me this.”

“I know that,” he said with a dismissive wave, and he paused, fists in his lap. “Would it help if I gave you a hug?”

(What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the—)

“Yeah,” you said calmly, like a calm person, and when Tenko opened his (muscular) arms, you crawled into them, wrapping your own around his back to rest between his shoulder blades. You rested your chin in a fold of his cape, cheek pressing against the side of his respirator, and you frowned as his embrace tightened, pulling you closer in a sloppy, unpractised sort of way, grounded by the steady rise and fall of his very solid chest.

(This felt…affectionate. Romantic, even.

But Shigaraki Tomura didn’t do romance, and you don’t—you’re not—you wouldn’t dream of being conceited enough to read someone’s perhaps thoughtless actions as flirtation, because why would someone be flirting with you? No one did that in general, and being U.A.’s humiliating problem child exacerbated the fact.

Moreover, why would the man who was Shigaraki Tomura, in the middle of his rehabilitation and re-discovery of self, even in the microscopic chance that he had the mental energy to experience romantic feelings, aim that romantic impulse towards you? It would make more sense if he liked someone he’d known for a while, like Touya or Spinner or Toga, and if his romantic feelings leant towards recuperative trauma-bonding, wouldn’t it be more apt to feel for someone at his rehab? His therapist, maybe? He’d idolised Aizawa before he’d met him, and even that would make more sense than latching onto someone as late in the process as you.

He’d gotten flustered when you’d tied his scarf, and Touya’s played terrible wingman. But still. You couldn’t know. You can’t read into this, even though reading into things had been your job, because—because no one would want you. You’ll have to…You’ll have to gather more evidence. You couldn’t be certain.)

Tenko hummed, chin digging into your shoulder, blowing strands of your hair out of his face. “I calmed a kid down earlier by hugging her. Is this working for you?”

(…oh.)

You sniffled and hid your mouth in his cape so that he couldn’t catch your pout. “That’s—that’s good that a kid allowed you to comfort her. What happened?”

“Pipes broke in an old apartment building in the Takoba district. The third floor collapsed under the pressure, and it trapped families in part of the building. I was called out to dust the rubble trapping them,” Tenko said, tapping his fingers high on your back in a ripple, “and they had me dust some other walls to help start the repairs. It was cool. And this one little girl who’d gotten out before the rest of her family was really nervous, and she was sticking to me, holding onto my cape. I was telling her that everything was gonna be okay, like you’ve taught me, and when I asked how she was doing, this fuckin’ kid extended her arms to me. So, I fucking hugged her. Picked her up so she could see what was happening better. It was weird, but it felt good.” Tenko sighed. “I hate how it wants me to be kind more.”

And fuck, fuck, that’s the last straw to this horrible day, and you’re crying, silently, controlling your breathing to keep Tenko from finding out, because goddammit, this idiot bastard man was surprisingly easy to love.

You buried your face fully in his shoulder, hoping he couldn’t feel any wetness through his costume, and you and Tenko sat in the quiet of the hallway for a minute, interrupted only by the A/C kicking in.

Tenko tried to part the two of you enough to look you in the face, but you doubled down, curling your fingers into the fabric of his jumpsuit and keeping your head bowed. Scoffing, he sat upright, making you follow his movements to stay hidden. “You gonna tell me what’s wrong yet?”

“Forget all that shit I’ve taught you,” you said, grumbling to his tits now that he’d changed positions, hating how stopped up you sounded already, “It doesn’t matter what you fucking do in the public’s eye, because there’s always gonna be someone who hates you. You can’t please everyone, so just fucking be yourself. That’s funnier, anyway.”

“Did you psychoanalyse some press member’s pathetic sex life, or something? Deduce an affair based on the way he knots his tie? Announce the state of his dick to the whole room because of the length of his pants?”

“Fuck off, Tenko. I’m not some pretentious-ass Sherlock Holmes bitch,” you said, pursing your lips and instinctively pulling back to glare at him—

And the moment you did, Tenko cupped your face in his hands, soft at the palm and strongly calloused along his fingers, keeping you facing towards him no matter how hard you tried to jerk away, struggling to stay upright. “You are crying.”

“No, I’m not,” you said, just as a falling tear touched his thumb. As you adjusted to his grip, your hands fell to his thighs, pressing against them in fists.

“Hm. Well, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, eyes on another tear trailing down the other cheek, “but you’re joining me to watch a movie with Eri. I got snacks on the way home.”

You sighed, taking in how big his hands were and how much of your face they encompassed, trying to memorise their feeling until they were snatched away forever. “I thought we were gonna start a new quest tonight. I was excited.”

Tenko balked and shifted into a sceptical grin. “You wanted to play Ciperstone tonight?” he asked, both thumbs rubbing your cheekbones and moving to swipe underneath your eyes.

You sighed again, shoulders heaving as Tenko released your face to flick tears off of his hand. “I didn’t want to be myself for a few hours.”

Tenko pushed on his knees to stand. “That’s actually related to what I originally wanted to talk to you about. Furthering the working-with-others mission,” he said, and he extended his hand to help you up. “What do you know about Dungeons and Dragons?”

***

“God fucking dammit!” Tenko slammed his palm to his forehead and leant back to balance on the kitchen chair’s back legs and then combed his fingers back through his hair, upsetting some strands from his ponytail. Groaning, he crooked his face your way, smushed his face against the chair back, and pointed towards his forehead, where a red splot was forming. “Hit me as hard as you can.”

“Being bludgeoned won’t change the fact that you rolled a three,” you said, nodding towards his d20, “I ignore his whining and continue to drain the fig tree to charge my spell.”

Behind the DM screen, Shinsou rolled his own dice, and once his eyebrows had shot up to his hairline, he turned to Midoriya. “I need you to roll two d12s and a d4.”

Tenko bolted upright, hastily sweeping his bangs out of his face. “Wait, what does Midoriya have to do with it? He’s across the fucking grove! He’s engaged in close-ranged combat.”

You turned away from Shinsou’s sly grin and towards Tenko, mouth nearly a straight line, yanking another cluster of grapes from the communal bowl, and shoving two grapes in his mouth. He pinched at his lower lip as he chewed, twisting and peeling at dead skin, frowning as he focused on his character sheet, scanning it for some sort of information he was forgetting and absentmindedly raising his knee to his chest, the heel of his foot propped on the seat of his chair (thank God his jeans were from Best Jeanist’s Moulded to Your Ass line: the denim strained with his muscles. Your eye twitched). In this particular morning, with the five of you squared off at Aizawa’s kitchen table, papers and dice strewn among grocery store bakery cinnamon rolls and coffee cups (Tenko’s was full of gatorade instead of coffee, much to his chagrin), as Tenko was throwing grapes into Touya’s mouth while Shinsou did math, the narwhal house slippers dangling off Tenko’s feet, it struck you that Shigaraki Tomura had become just some guy. One who went for walks to clear his head, who spent hours failing to do a kickflip on Present Mic’s skateboard, who used emoticons over emojis, who got nervous in fast food drive-throughs, who collected hero merch (of Aizawa fervently and Present Mic against his will), who was losing his sensitivity to foods like leeks and onions, a man who was growing more and more exquisitely mundane.

And goddamn, he’s clever and perceptive and patient and cheeky in a devastatingly attractive way, and he’s flustered easily, eager to do a thing correctly, and utterly, totally captivating in his endless discoveries of what it means to be alive.

You timed it so that the shudder and shock crossing his face could pass as response to Shinsou’s description of how Tenko’s enchanted crossbow bolt missed the Spirit Realm Necromancer entirely, instead sinking into the sacred Grand Oak and instantly shattering the tree as if it were glass, its elaborate root system holding up the floating grove splintering into thousands of tiny shards, the ground beneath your party’s feet crumbling at the slightest suggestion of the shifting of weight. But really he curled in his lips with a furrowed brow and stuttering breath when you reached underneath the table to graze the back of his hand, and when he forced himself to relax, shoulders slackening, frown fading, Tenko spread his fingers to cover more of his denim-clad thigh, which you took as a timid sort of consent. Biting the inside of your cheek, you eased your palm over the back of Tenko’s hand, lacing your fingers through his and going through the motions of reacting to Shinsou’s shattered earth. Neither of you looked at each other while Midoriya’s character suffered the Necromancer’s spell to increase gravity, each movement of Midoriya’s bulky, steel armour accelerating the fall of the floating grove. By the time each of you had had enough turns to land on solid ground, preserving little of the sacred grove but all surviving, Tenko finally squeezed your fingers back, curling his own to grip them more firmly, keeping your hand pinned to his thigh, steeling himself, sitting up straight, and proposing getting close enough to the Necromancer to drive a crossbow bolt directly into his skull.

Midoriya was already muttering to himself over the effectiveness of the action while Shinsou worked, and Touya irreverently flicked his dice at Tenko, chugging coffee with his other hand. “You plunge the bolt by hand into the Necromancer’s head,” said Shinsou, “but with your strength debuff still in effect, you only nick him.”

“I try stabbing it through his ear.”

“It goes through,” said Shinsou, nodding and running his hand back through his hair, which sprung back into place, “It doesn’t pierce the neocortex, so he can still summon another—“

“I stomp him to death with my hooves,” said Touya, picking at his teeth and running his tongue over the spot.

The rest of you turned to him slowly in various states of incredulity.

“You don’t have hooves, Touya,” you said, tilting your head at the same time Tenko rubbed his thumb over yours, prompting your breath to hitch and a strange warmth to travel through your body, making you feel dizzy.

Touya grimaced and reached for a cinnamon roll. “I take off my leather breeches and boots to reveal my hooves. I have been a satyr masquerading as a human this whole time.” He leant forward on his elbow, glaring at Shinsou and gesturing with his cinnamon roll. “I stomp him. To death. With my hooves.”

Tenko sneered, his teeth cutting into his lower lip, but he merely opened his mouth and closed it, poking his tongue into his cheek. “I suppose maiming a party member wouldn’t coincide with my character’s chaotic good alignment,” he said, heaving a huge sigh to—oh, that cunning rat bastard—to conceal how he flipped his hand over in yours to touch palms, weaving your fingers back together and squeezing again, planting them back on his upper leg, massaging between your knuckles with his thumb.

“What’d you just roll?”

“Nineteen,” said Touya, casting Shinsou a slice of his most charming smile.

Midoriya let out a little laugh as Shinsou bitterly plopped his head on his fist. “Fuck you, Touya. Congratulations. You clomp over to the Necromancer and stomp all over him. Stompy stomp stomp stompy stomp. It’s difficult to watch at the insane speed you’re going, so no one stops you from doing such a good job pounding him that he’s ground into dust. Bits of him drift away in the wind.”

Here Midoriya winced. “Weren’t we supposed to retrieve the soul crystal embedded in his gauntlet? We can’t get our reward from that Silver Age dragon rider if we don’t have it.”

“Correct,” said Shinsou, glancing down at his notes, “It has been stomped to smithereens. You can’t even make out what parts of the pile of dust were once flesh.”

Ready to bolt, Touya was getting up from the table and holding up his hands in defence, but before Midoriya could start a speech that would have been more apt for the number one hero to use on patrol rather than during a DND game, the door to Aizawa’s flat opened, and in he walked, covering his yawn with the back of his hand. He halted at the sight of the five of you around his kitchen table, taking in the scattered papers and remnants of breakfast before settling on your DM. “Shinsou,” Aizawa began, disappointment outweighing the exhaustion in his voice.

“You’re the only one with a table that could fit all of us,” Shinsou said, spinning in his chair to face him, “This dormitory doesn’t have a good common area like the student ones do. Would you really prefer us to—”

“We can find you a table; there’s plenty on campus.” Aizawa lifted his goggles over his head to set them on the counter. “Is this why Monoma kept slowing me down during patrol?”

“No,” you and Shinsou said, while Tenko said, “Yes.”

Aizawa actually smiled as he unwound his capture weapon from around his neck. “Look who’s the only one telling the truth.”

“Why would I lie to you, sensei?”

Touya smacked Tenko on the arm. “Suck-up.”

“You promise?” Tenko shot back, nose wrinkling with his grin.

“This coffee had better be amazing, because it’s the only thing keeping me from kicking you all out right now,” said Aizawa, rubbing a dry eye with the heel of his palm, other hand outstretched for someone to pass him a mug.

Tenko’s thumb bent inward to swipe the inside of your palm, a silent protest while he drank from his stupid little mug of gatorade, and when he noticed what was at the bottom, he flinched. It must have been Touya who’d put your dice in Tenko’s cup.

***

Following the video of you insulting Uwabami, you’re garnering an unnerving amount of attention again, but it’s clearly someone different than last time. Whoever your stalker(s) was this time around, they were careless and unsubtle—and this confidence to be careless left you jumping at the slightest sound when you were alone.

Furthermore, you legitimately couldn’t deduce your stalker’s motivations, because no clear message linked his actions. At first, you chalked it up to the dorm’s shitty dryer eating your bright blue thong, but when you couldn’t find your lip balm or trolley pass or eventually your favourite sweater, you concluded that something else was at play here, further cemented by more and more tiny things going missing—things that, if you were stalking someone, you would’ve selected as small enough not to miss.

But bizarrely, your stalker left shit of his own lying about. A phone charger appeared underneath your pillow; loose change and a travel pack of alcoholic wipes showed up in your bathroom sink. Hello Kitty band-aids, a hair clip that looked like one of Rumi’s ears, deep-moisturising hand cream, a tiny lizard keychain with a white hamburglar mask drawn on. You couldn’t wrap your head around it. What could your stalker be trying to say besides he could access your personal space with ease? Hoarding it all in the drawer with the GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK hentai, you were struck with the notion that this may have been going on even before the video.

God, you missed when this school felt more like home instead of a holding cell, back when Shinsou and Uraraka and the rest were all still living together with you, when you could simply turn the corner to the common area to demand who took your laundry detergent and get an answer immediately (you also missed taking Aoyama’s bougie food, though you suspected that towards the end he was buying extra specifically for you). You sent an email to Aizawa about the potential break in security, and he promised to monitor the situation, though there was no evidence of physical entry.

Evidence. It’s been on your mind.

Sure, Tenko’s done stuff that could be read as romantic: how he plops your hand onto his head to demand you play with his hair, how he hovers whenever Touya stands too closely to you, how he gets upset on your behalf when people glare at you in public.

(Tenko grabbed your elbow, breaking your focus on the clothing rank. “We’re going.”

“But we haven’t found you a red coat yet.”

He lifted the hangers from your arm and slid them back onto the rack, despite belonging elsewhere. “Don’t care. I don’t like the way the cashier’s looking at you,” he said, jerking his head their direction, and when you tilted your head to glance at them over his shoulder, Tenko tapped your chin twice, guiding you to look back at him. “You shouldn’t have to be on guard when I’m with you.”)

If you were reading into it—and you were—Tenko was being so careful with talking about the pro-hero scene around you that it was almost as if he’d gotten a mission task from Aizawa to distract you from anything that might make you feel bad about yourself.

(“I hear you’re causing a lot of paperwork for my old man,” said Touya, pulling out another floor cushion from the storage space in the teahouse wall, “He hates that you’ve had to dust so many structures near his agency. He’s a decrepit creature of habit, and now that his commute is different, he’s—”

“Hey, Touya, tell us what flower bulbs you planted this winter,” Tenko said abruptly, clamping the lid on the pot hanging over the sunken fireplace, “Tell us what your garden’ll look like in spring.”

You shut your book, even though you’d just opened it. “Wait, are you saying that Touya is the one who keeps this garden? That’s—”

“You like it, sweetheart?” Touya dropped his cushion next to yours, ignoring the way Tenko was glaring daggers into his back. “Think it’s impressive?”

“Holy shit; I thought we were in the back of some professionally restored historical site the first time we came here,” you said, smiling at how Tenko’s petulant stomps to his seat chirruped, even when he scooted his own cushion towards yours (adorable; you’d think he didn’t like you giving attention to anyone else).

“Well,” said Touya, propping his hands on the kotatsu so that he could get a better view of Tenko, “With enormous pride and a huge erection, I’m pleased to announce that this garden is all my hard work.”

“Stop that,” barked Tenko, jabbing a finger towards Touya, “Stop bringing up your cock.”

“I could talk about yours, if you want. His monster cock is excruciatingly leaky and so shaped.”

Groaning, Tenko clonked his forehead on the kotatsu’s tabletop before Touya could say anything else, arm still outstretched. He peeked out from underneath his bangs towards you, tension leaving his body at your burst of laughter.)

He’s also taken your comment about silent admiration to heart. Over the discord call (through very comfortable headphones), you’d made a dumb joke about not being able to play for long, and he’d shut up immediately. When you’d confessed to lying and hoping you’d scared him, he’d replied seriously: “I want to protect my time with you. I don’t like it being taken away. I feel better when you’re with me.”

You’d frozen in the middle of weaving bowstrings while his character continued stringing them onto bows. You’d never have gotten that sort of remark at the beginning of your relationship. Tenko must genuinely be listening to you.

Anyway. You decided in the event that Tenko was collecting evidence, too, that you would leave him some.

The first time you’d been in his room had been for a specific purpose, which was to help him rub in his new facial scar moisturiser (not to take them away, or anything, because Tenko wanted to keep them, claiming he wouldn’t recognise himself in the mirror if he didn’t have his scars—and you thought they were devastatingly attractive, anyway—but just to keep them hydrated enough not to itch), but now you were here just to spend time in the same space. You were reading on his bed (oh, hohoho, his bed), and Tenko was drawing in his sketchbook on his couch by the window. With his mouth pinched in concentration, he squinted down at his paper, swiping away eraser shavings with his artist-gloved hand.

Drawing by natural light. Tenko was in room 310 because of its wide windows. It had been his one request when U.A. was placing him.

AFO had deliberately raised him in a bedroom without windows. You’d kill him if he weren’t already dead.

Thankfully, AFO’s influence was absent from Tenko’s dorm: Naruto sheets from Touya, an old Nintendo DS on his bedside table with Nintendogs in the cartridge slot, Present Mic’s skateboard propped against the coatrack that held only a black hoodie, unfolded but clean laundry in a basket next to a dresser with prescription bottles atop it, a mirror that served more as a bulletin board of Eraserhead merch than as a way to check his reflection, red shoes by the doorway, books borrowed from everyone from All Might to Shinsou to the ramen delivery guy strewn across the room, on shelves, his computer desk, his rug. The thing Tenko’d had to explain to you was a therapist-assigned painting hanging over his desk: he’d painted a murky, purple-blue, abstract sort of thing, and you were strangely touched when he’d explained it was Kurogiri (and now that you were looking, among his bulletin board of Eraserhead, a few drawings of Loud Cloud were mixed in).

There’s a lot of people in Tenko’s life who care about him now, and you’re happy to be one of them. Setting your book aside, you got up to sit next to him on the couch.

He paused when you sank into the cushion next to—well, no, you were basically sharing the same cushion, especially since he unfolded his legs from underneath him so that you could get closer. You scooted over so that your shoulders touched (scandalous) and looked over his drawings.

He’s drawing your DND characters. While his sketches aren’t exactly good, you can clearly tell who’s supposed to be whom, and they’re fun to look at, so that’s all that matters. At the centre is your character, Ginseng—you named it after your Cipherstone account because why not—in the process of spell-charging. Your character relies on the traditional ritual of tea ceremonies, from the growing of the tealeaves to serving it, summoning whatever tools you needed, like the table and dishware, and if an enemy got caught by the conventions of politeness of the tea ceremony, they were trapped in it until they’d drunk their teacup dry. Tenko had drawn her early in the spell-charging process, with branches of tealeaves sprouting from underneath her skin, with her harvesting them from her forearm. It’s rather flattering, the way her determined expression lit up her face.

Next to Ginseng was Tenko’s character, Peito, also lifted from his Cipherstone character. He was sitting on the same log as Ginseng in the middle of camp, backs touching while he cut feathers as the first step in the fletching process. His carved-willow quiver leant against his knee-high boot, red even in a fictional universe. Peito’s hands were bare, five fingers pressed against his knife and arrows.

Further back in the camp (really just towards the top of the paper, since Tenko wasn’t good at foreshortening yet), Midoriya’s character, Jackrabbit, was holding up two hangers, one with his steel and the other with sleek, black leather armour. A nice touch, really, since Midoriya had swopped Jackrabbit’s primary armour to the more lightweight leather since the shattered grove incident, and wow, you could even tell it was leather based on the pencil strokes.

Seated nearby, Touya’s character, Granddaddy Slapkins, roared with laughter at him. His shoes lay next to him, his hooves out. For some reason, he’s not holding his pet duck; he’s instead cradling what looks like your character’s wild shape, a cat with the same chocolate-point markings as your real cat (your character’s shapeshifted form was just Dango, but Tenko didn’t know that. He still didn’t know Dango existed, because cats were still illegal in the dorms, and Tenko, that little brown-nosing shit, would probably tell Aizawa about her. Cute how he’s only a suck-up to Aizawa, though).

Your favourite detail, though, was how his character was smiling. Unabashedly. As if it were a no-brainer, as if doing anything else made no sense at all.

With a stab of affection, you nuzzled into Tenko’s shoulder, resting your chin there while he sketched loops of chainmail onto Granddaddy Slapkins’s shirt, and a shiver racked through him.

“Oh, are you cold?” you asked, sitting back up and heading over towards the bed, “Let me get your blanket.”

“Wha—no, I—sure,” said Tenko, setting his pencil on his sketchbook and the whole thing on the arm of the couch, eyes half-lidded as you returned with his throw blanket.

And without thinking, you moved on impulse, as if all higher orders of cognition had checked out for the night, because you behaved like you did in your head whenever you thought about Tenko: casually, intimately, and domestically. You wrapped the blanket around yourself and knelt on the sofa before swinging a knee over his lap, and you snuggled into his chest, clutching his shirt and nosing at his neck.

Your eyes snapped open.

(What the fuck?

If this had been a planned attack, then it would’ve been a thing of brilliance: casual, seeming to meet a physical need [heating a chill] in the name of physical closeness. But you fucked it. This wasn’t planned, and thus you don’t have a way out of it without otherwise betraying your romantically-motivated interior.

Thank fuck he’s frozen up, too. But how do you get out of this? God, you really shouldn’t be teaching him how to navigate interpersonal relationships when you get yourself into shit like this.)

You swallowed thickly, pulse pounding in your ears.

“I need your advice.” Tenko’s chest barely rose when he took his first breath since you climbed onto his lap. “What would be the socially expected response to this?”

“Uh. That depends on if you’re into it or not,” you said, forcing yourself to sit back in his lap to give him some space, “If you dislike it, then it’s to get me to get off of you, and if you welcome it, then, uh. Anything else.”

Tenko unclenched his fists at his sides and—a pause, shifting his jaw—he let his hands rest at a barely-there touch on your hips, dragging them upwards to your waist, applying enough pressure there for you to feel all ten fingertips through your shirt. “Is this,” he said, wetting his lower lip, and he couldn’t continue, instead swallowing saliva.

Gathering your nerve, you wove your hand through his hair to scratch at his scalp in the way he’d liked when you’d played with his hair, and at the familiarity, Tenko huffed, shutting his eyes tightly and pressing his forehead to yours in a rush, almost knocking them together. He took another breath, heat washing over your face, and you slid your other up hand to cup his cheek.

Tenko shivered again, and he clamped his hand over yours to keep it there. “Are you sure this is what you mean to do?”

He seemed receptive enough to it, but you couldn’t be certain. “Yeah,” you said, “If I’m reading it right.”

“But it makes no sense. I’ve got to be reading it wrong,” Tenko was saying, frowning, “No one would willingly like me—”

“For fuck’s sake, Tenko—”

Practically slapping your other hand to his cheek, you kissed him, pulling him closer, one of his hands still over yours with the other now gripping your waist as if he’d never let you go. Tenko grunted into it, surging forward to keep his rough lips (sticky from his freshly applied pineapple-beeswax chapstick) seared to yours. You felt, more than heard, his miniscule whimper at the back of his throat when he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue into yours, and you could hardly keep kissing him for smiling. But he needed a breath before you did, so you broke it, sensing he wouldn’t do it out of wanting to keep you nearby.

Panting, Tenko tried and failed to push your hair behind your ear in an attempt to be suave. “Now, I perceived that as romantic.”

“It was romantic, you muppet,” you said, thumping his chest with the back of your hand.

“Good.” He cleared this throat. “Cool. Excellent,” he said, shifting underneath you (with difficulty, under the constricting denim of his Moulded to Your Ass jeans), “I want it to be, when it comes to you.”

“Thank God, I really want that, too,” you said, sighing, “but, like, I really don’t know if it’s ethical to pursue a romance this early into your recovery—”

“The fuck is wrong with you? I want it. I want you.” Frustrated, Tenko grabbed your hips in an iron grip and ground up into you, slowly, and that tight-ass denim let you feel precisely where in the drag of his hips his cock touched you, letting you feel the shift in pressure at his tip, down his shaft, to the first curve of his balls. “I thought I was alone. I thought no one else would ever be able to understand me, having fallen from what I was raised to be. Fallen,” he said, spitting, “Such a nasty word for what we’re actually doing: we’ve been reborn together. We get to build our lives back up together. We get another chance at it. I wanna spend mine with you.”

He strained his neck upwards to kiss you again, insistent, moving with confidence when he took your lower lip into his mouth but only nibbling on it once, despite being posed to bite down with vigour.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone else thinks of you and what anyone else thinks of me. I—”

“That’s not true,” you said, your turn to catch your breath, “You care so much about what Aizawa-sensei—”

“You know what I mean,” he said, shaking his head, hair falling out of his loose ponytail, “You think of me as me, and that’s all that matters. If you’re really that fucking worried about me getting into a relationship too early, go talk to my therapist. She says you’re good for me. A good influence, anyway.”

“Holy shit,” you said, mostly in reaction to how Tenko started trailing frantic, dry kisses down your neck, and, realising you should probably be doing something back, you rolled your hips, feeling awfully warm under the blanket.

He bucked back up into you, more out of desperation to keep you close over a need for friction but still giving you a taste of what it would be like to have him thrusting into you. “Fuck,” he said, almost grumbling, “I’d say fuck being ethical about it, because I’ve wanted you for a long time. I got hard when you shook me by the shoulders outside of that ice cream shop; I thought my soul was gonna leave my body when you adjusted my scarf. Hell, I—” He cut himself off, grinning in a way that, back before you knew him, you might have described as maniacal. “I wanted you back during the war. I saw you fucking elbow Touya during that battle, and the way you made him crumple to the ground was so fucking sexy. And you recovered from when he swiped at you so easily; you slipped around his attacks like it was fucking second nature. I thought it’d be cool to have you by my side, having you—” He realised what he was saying, and he relaxed, smile fading into a curious, pensive sort of look while he brought his thumb to your kiss-swollen lips. “And now I get to.”

You kissed the pad of his thumb, blinking slowly.

“So. Yeah,” he said, dropping his hand to your shoulder as he broke eye contact, a little red, “I think it’d be cool to be with you, even if we have to be careful.”

“That’s the thing, Tenko,” you said, biting the inside of your cheek as you gathered your thoughts, “I’m scared, because while I know that we should, because that’d be safe, I don’t want to be careful. Since I’ve quit being a hero, every single thing about how I’ve been living has left me feeling empty and alone, because it’s like I’m wandering through limbo. Everything screams that whatever I’m doing now is temporary, that it’ll pass, that I don’t truly belong in this situation, because I’ll find what I’m supposed to be doing later and my real home is somewhere down the line, but—fuck.” You rubbed your eye with your fist. “You, Tenko. You don’t feel temporary. You feel forever.”

Underneath you, Tenko stretched to pop a crick in his back, and he tilted his head to lie on the back of the couch. His ponytail had come loose, and his hair splayed against the fabric as he stared at you, one hand idly rubbing at your waist.

“Well. You’ve got to belong somewhere,” he said eventually, and he tapped all five fingers onto your thigh. “It could be with me.”

***

Dango was missing.

Incredible how the best evening of your life preceded the worst day you’ve had in years. You called out of work and spent hours scouring the dorm and then campus. A gruelling, miserable sort of day, anyway, grey and rainy and cold, and the campus was swarmed with people setting up for the scavenger hunt event later this month, populating the area with non-U.A. personnel and construction. Your cat was out in that mess, and you didn’t even know where to search first. It’s loud, scary, and wet, so Dango would most likely be hiding and not come when she’s called.

Had Dango escaped your flat? Had your stalker stolen her? Had she been confiscated by U.A.?

You couldn’t call any faculty for help; they’d get onto you for having an illegal cat on campus—and Hound Dog, the one who’d be the most help, might just scare her to death. Too early in the morning to call any of your friends, and you doubted they’d alter their busy schedules to help you out of a situation you should be able to fix yourself. But damn it, how come your own tracking skills only worked on people?

You shook yourself, coming out of your spiral the best you could, and you were close to hyperventilating. You sat down on a curb.

You found yourself calling Tenko, despite it being too early in the day for him to be out of training, filling with dread about never seeing your cat again and having to clear out her stuff from your room. Pulling your soaked jacket closer, you wiped at your nose and waited at the dial tone.

“Hey, I thought you couldn’t call during work. Miss me that much?”

The second you heard his strangely chipper voice, you started crying into the speaker.

He inhaled sharply, tone shifting. “Tell me who the fuck I’m stomping to death with my hooves.”

Ducking your head, you managed a smile but continued to fucking sob. “You don’t—don’t have to kill anyone, Ten—Tenko. I’ve f—fucked up.”

“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I’m on cam—campus,” you said, unable to speak for a full sentence without having to cut yourself off to keep bawling, ugly and loud and getting snottier by the minute, “It’s my fucking fault that I haven’t been ta—taking my stupid sta—stalker seriously, and I should’ve reported it, but—but I—goddammit!” The rain picked up again, coming down in rapid, fat drops, and, shielding your eyes, you rubbed your phone screen on your sleeve, not that it did much. “Sor—sorry. Rain got heavier.”

“Where on campus?”

“No, Te—Tenko, I’ll get up. I’m coming to you,” you said, sniffling and pushing on your knees to stand, wet and hungry and ready to crawl into your sock drawer to sleep for days. “I—I’m just so fucking pissed at myself, because my cat is fucking lost, and I could’ve sto—stopped it if I hadn’t been so secreti—tive.” Hands shaking, you yanked your soaked hood over your head and trudged towards your dormitory, and you kicked gravel, rocks scattering over the path, before losing your footing on it and nearly falling. Fuck this.

“You have a cat,” said Tenko, losing his fervent. “What’s it look like?”

“Beautiful.”

“I need more than that.”

“She fucking—I based Ginseng’s cat form on her, okay? She’s this enormously fluffy thing, mostly whitish with a brown face and legs, and it makes her look like she’s wearing a mask and thigh-high socks like God’s sluttiest little jester,” you said, knocking on your dorm’s mailboxes for luck out of habit as you passed them, “And you can’t tell Aizawa-sensei about her, because if she’s taken away the moment I find her, then I—”

“I have her,” said Tenko, “She’s in my dorm with me.”

You ran the rest of the way to his room, panting and absolutely disgusting by the time you got there, and when Tenko opened his door, there was Dango, loafing on the back of the couch and watching raindrops race down the window.

“What the fuck,” you said, dropping your wet coat and toeing off your shoes, “How the hell did she get in here?”

Tenko shrugged and hung your coat next to his hoodie. “Can she open locked doors?”

“I hope to fuck she can’t,” you said, and you rounded the couch to wrap your arms around that dear little loaf, and Dango jumped off the couch to crawl underneath it before you could fully hug her. “Oh, good. She’s fine. Acting like normal.” You sat on the couch’s arm, adrenaline evaporating to render you boneless.

“She was in my room when I came back from training. We ended early today, since Aizawa-sensei has something.” Tenko stooped to yank two bottles of gatorade from their plastic rings and headed towards the sofa to offer one to you. “She didn’t seem upset or hurt. She’s been sitting there, napping on and off.”

You accepted it and twisted off the cap. “So, who put my cat in your room?”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know,” you said, taking a shallow sip, careful not to overwhelm your agitated stomach, “They’d have to know about Dango in the first place, and I suppose my stalker would, since they’ve theoretically been breaking into my room.”

Tenko paused mid-sip, and he hastened to swallow. “Someone’s been breaking into your room?”

“Yeah,” you said, easing down the arm of the couch and onto its cushions, “I think. There’s no physical sign of entry, but my shit keeps going missing, and stuff that’s not mine keeps showing up. Let me tell you, I need some of that shit they’ve stolen; it’s hard to replace—”

Tenko touched your lips with three of his fingertips to quiet you, and he gestured for you to stay put while he scrambled over to his closet, where he stood on his toes to retrieve a wicker basket from the top shelf. He dropped the thing into your lap. “Are any of these yours?”

All of it was, missing things you blamed on everything from Dango to your stalker to your own forgetfulness: your favourite sweater, your trolley pass, lip balm, your shitty earbuds, your good pantyhose, your planner, your d10, and, among many smaller things, even that bright blue thong you’d lost in the wash (Well. It’s better to find your thong with your new boyfriend over finding them returned to your dorm coated in your stalker’s cum, you supposed).

“I was losing my goddamn mind,” Tenko was saying, “Stuff kept showing up. I thought it was a test at first—”

“I don’t have a stalker,” you said, absentmindedly rubbing the fabric of your thong between your fingers, “Your shit has been—you read that GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK shit? Tenko.”

“Oh, you have that?” Tenko scratched the back of his neck, but not in his self-harm way; it reminded you of Shinsou’s nervous habit more than anything. “Haven’t you read it? Isn’t that what you were naming your characters after?”

“Ah, ha, ha. Moving on. What is important, though, is why and how this is happening to us.”

“Yeah, I don’t…”

The two of you spitballed for a while, long enough for the both of you to finish your bottles of gatorade and for Tenko to start another, and neither of you came up with anything substantial.

“Hell with it,” said Tenko, standing to stretch, his movement disturbing Dango from her nap in his basket of clean laundry, “Let’s go ask Aizawa-sensei.”

Aizawa was not pleased when he discovered the both of you waiting in his kitchen, but he listened to the story, and when you were done, he stepped out of the room to make a phone call. When he came back, he looked even more exhausted than when he’d first come in.

“I’ve just gotten off the phone with Sakura Grove,” said Aizawa, wincing when his bones creaked as he sat in his chair, “Tenko, do you remember villain in-fighting within the PLF? In particular, I’m asking if you remember breathing in a pink dust cloud. It would’ve been in Deika City, in the month between your fight with Re-Destro and your body modification surgery. If our sources are accurate, you would’ve been with Touya.”

Tenko scrunched up his face. “Why would I have been—hm.” Frowning, he reached into the bag of popcorn you’d commandeered from Aizawa’s cupboards. “I know what you’re talking about. They were only letting me eat healthy stuff in the week before I went under. Touya was taking me to scrounge for something salty and shitty for me, because I couldn’t take it anymore. He started hitting on someone he thought was a waitress, and she—this is why I remember it—she compared the width of her hand to his thigh and said no thanks.”

“That’s Ito,” said Aizawa, sighing and crossing his arms, settling his chin into his capture weapon, “When did she use her quirk?”

“She shoved her hand on Touya’s face when he opened his stupid mouth again, and he passed out with swarming, pink particles floating around his head. She turned to me—and she must not have recognised Touya, but she knew me, because her face lit the fuck up. She never touched me, but I remember having to sneeze.”

“She never told you what her quirk did?”

“I woke back up in the PLF headquarters. I assumed whoever picked me up had killed her and that her death negated any effects.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why? What does it do?”

Aizawa let out a soft laugh, muffled through his capture weapon, and he jerked his head in your direction. “You tell him,” he said, snatching the bag of popcorn and heading towards his bedroom.

***

He’d been nervous about wearing a suit. They reminded him of AFO.

But you’d strayed away from dark colours and too much structure, so his light greyish-blue suit jacket stayed unbuttoned even as you leant across to the passenger seat to adjust his All Might tie for him (a Put Your Hands Up Radio tie had been offered, but Tenko had already closed his fist around the striped tie Midoriya would loan him). Part of his bangs had been pinned back to show off his annoyingly handsome face, especially in how his sharp, red eyes observed caught every movement of your terrible attempt to tie the tie based on the pictures Aizawa had sent you.

“We’re not gonna be late, are we?” Tenko drawled out, the corner of his mouth quirking upward, hand resting on the car ceiling as he angled his chest towards you.

“Shush; we are in the parking lot,” you said, looping the larger end. Or were you supposed to be looping the smaller one? “Besides, the world won’t end if we’re a few minutes late to my class’s annual reunion.”

A flimsy excuse for a party, one made because hero agencies needed some sort of named event as an excuse to dismiss your friends en masse. But it was spring again, and they were coming out of the winter blues, and they wanted to see you again, so, hey, why don’t we work something in around your schedule? If you can’t come to this date, then we’ll reschedule it until you can.

And, like. They knew. They knew Tenko was your soulmate. You suspected they all wanted to see what he was like now, too, because no one but Shinsou, Midoriya, and, apparently, Bakugou had known.

You undid the loose knot and tried again. “Are you nervous?”

“No,” he said, scrutinising the tacky balloons and streamers swaying in the night breeze outside of the otherwise intimidatingly elegant venue, “but those kids might be.”

“Those kids happen to be friends my age,” you said, “and I’m barely younger than you are. They know you’re coming. You’re fine.”

Tenko sucked in through his teeth, tapping the roof of the car one finger at a time. “The last time they saw me was as a thing. An object of destruction.”

“Well, they’ll definitely see you as a human person when I spill how you designed a unicorn DND character for Eri.” You pulled the fabric taut but kept it from lying closely to his neck (a boy didn’t like feeling constrained). “You know what? This tie is as good as it’s gonna get.”

He ducked his chin to examine its knot. “It’s shit.”

“It adds to your devil-may-care, reformed-bad-boy sort of charm,” you said, giving the tie a final smooth-down and poorly suppressing your smile when you felt his muscles through his shirt. “Mathematically, there are only 85 ways to tie a standard tie knot. I don’t believe we’ve reached any of them.”

“How do you know these things? You’re unbeliev—” Tenko jerked his face out of view of the window as Aoyama and Kouda, gesturing wildly, strode past the car and into the venue. “Listen,” he said, clearing his throat, “I know I don’t care and that you don’t care, but other people will. Your reputation is gonna plummet right into its grave if we’re out in the open together.”

You shook your head, letting your smile show. “So, I fucked part of a rescue job almost a year ago. So what. So I’m dating my soulmate. Am I supposed to do otherwise? Honestly, Tenko,” you said, curling loose strands of hair behind his ear, letting your fingers linger around his cheek and neck (he leant into the touch), “I don’t care. I would’ve chosen you even without the soulmate bond. You’re too endearing to pass by. You’re too…babygirl.”

Tenko had been guiding your hand to his mouth, and he snorted before it got there, warm air scattering in a short burst. “Don’t call me that,” he said, pressing his lips to the centre of your palm and waiting until you met his gaze to retract them.

A different warmth shot to your lower stomach, but you had to keep pressing, for the sake of the bit. “Oh, then what should I—darling? Honey? Pookie bear?”

He scoffed and nipped at your pinkie. “None of those are good.”

“Tenko.”

He breathed in, shoulders rising, eyes fluttering shut. Taking a moment to kiss the tiny bite mark on your finger. “Yeah,” he said, opening his eyes in a slow blink, catlike, “Feels good. Feels—like coming home.”

Beaming, you reached down to lace his fingers through yours. All five of them squeezed back. “Then let’s go.”

soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair, @tiredkittykat, @cheshireshiya, @90s-belladonna, @infjsnightmare

[kiivg]

Your Rook is ridiculously good looking. Like, I’m actually blushing and it’s all your fault

.The initial idea for him was Grave Robbing Pirate and honestly the beard options came through for me like nothing else. Guaranteed I was going to go for muttonchops/sideburns before I even knew what the CC looked like, but idk they looked a little patchy sometimes and that is NOT what Farid is about 👏 The whatever it is he has now is iconic for him, I tried making him as an elf but it was Cursed and Never-to-Be-Seen-Again. Also the balding ponytail? I saw it, and I was like yeah that’s it, that’s him, that’s exactly what I’m about.

.Also it is absolutely insane to me that he’s the first draft, I got him in one go with a little fine tuning once I figured out how the CC works. Especially considering how ugly Goddard turned out as the Inquisitor 😭😭 but now I HC he just sends somebody over in his place to act as a go between, ain’t no way he’s traipsing around with Morrigan lmao. I did make a crummy Blackwall Inq so I could get Dorian to call him Amatus 👹 Pavwall Canon UNLOCKED. (I wonder if you could make the Iron Bull tho?? Sans wide horns ofc.)

.Also, girlie, tysm!!!!!! I am ALSO very 👀😳🥴🤫🫡 about him, I’ve just started my third playthrough of him, I’m still tweaking little bits here and there as I go along. Which means ofc I’m going to be screenshotting him in every cutscene 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️.

.Edit tho I’ve changed his name to Farid now 😘.

.Some facts about my Rook, Farid Thorne, and his story below 💕🫡.

.His mother is Therasia Thorne, a Rivaini Dalish elf who left her clan for the calling of the sea, and he is an absolute mama’s boy. Will do absolutely anything she asks with very little, if any, questioning. He doesn’t know (and most likely never will) who his father is, as the man bought Therasia’s silence over their affair with two galleons and a frigate. On a side note, Therasia was known for seducing very rich men and getting pregnant in order to blackmail them. Most of the time the fathers would pay up, and there has only been one instance of the father agreeing to take the baby off her hands, her bluff was called and she regretfully left her son behind.

.He adores expensive textures, silk, dragon scales, gold, fine lace, alamarri sheep wool, phoenix feathers. If he wasn’t a career criminal turned conscript he would have been a tailor. He owns (or used to own) several dresses/robes that he would just lounge about in naked to feel the fabric against his skin. Doesn’t really think too much of leather though, it can be stiff and often chafes the skin, which is strange because he’s very much a rope man.

.He waxes most of his body hair off, and keeps everything nice and tidy. He also puts coloured powder in his open wounds to preserve the shape of them as they heal, true to his mother’s traditions.

.Has kept his face completely bare of tattoos (apart from the fish he got when he was fourteen) in an honour to his Dalish heritage; he knows he won’t ever get valaslin because he’s only a half-elf, but the prospect of it keeps his face bare.

.Is fascinated by machinery and spent a great deal of time perfecting his own tools. His own frigate was equipped with self made trident ballistas, each one would fire three harpoons (individually or all at once) secured with thick chains, crafted to hunt and bring down large game, dragons, and smaller fleeing ships.

.In tune with his love for crafting, he follows June, and not the Maker. Though he does keep this to himself and those he considers family. If asked he just says he doesn’t believe in the Maker, and refuses to elaborate.

.Absolutely fucks, big family kind of guy. He is one of nineteen children, and has nine of his own by five different women, though he assumes there’s more because he was very much a leave before the sunrise kind of guy. Now he’s matured with being in the Wardens and has been less of a dick about it all. Whether or not he’s got any chance of knowing those kids who knows 🤷‍♂️.

.Never told anyone about his past when he became a Warden, the only people who know are those who were privy to his conscription, and the higher up Wardens upon receiving his arrest and conscription reports. Most people know he’s a conscript however, he doesn’t shy away from that, and he’s had a dozen or more rumours spread about him within the order. Evka was the first person to say he was a good Warden and back him up, and I think that solidified him as a third wheel to her and Antoine.

.He was actually conscripted by order of my HoF Andrastopher Cousland, as a favour returned. Andrastopher wanted aboard his ship when the Inquisition was seeking out a new leader,(there was no way he was becoming a religious figurehead lmao) and he stayed there for a good six months or so before Zevran joined them, and another two months before returning back to Thedas. They… uh… yeah 🥴🤫.

.If he was a companion his questline would probably follow trying to kill his older brother Galo after receiving a plea for help from his sister in law Aadiyah. Turns out Galo is either a) helping the Antaam navigate the seas uncontested or b) capturing and selling slaves to the Venatori. The big question at the end would be whether to tell their daughter that he’s her dad or to let her believe Galo was her father considering he HAS just murdered him, and she has several siblings that Galo fathered too.

.His gift would be an ornamental smoking pipe or a hookah, his room would be an observatory, full of navigational maps and constellations, there would be a small tailors work bench on one side of the room complete with mannequin and a sewn outfit that would slowly complete over his personal questline. His bed would be a row boat full of pillows.

.His almost kiss scene would be him explaining that he’s no good, his past actions are very much coming to bite him in the ass, and that you should really stop flirting with him. Does he want you to stop? No. Is he going to lean in to try and kiss you? Yes. Is he going to remember that everything is playing out as it does before and pull away because he knows he’s not good enough for you? Yes.

.His romance lock in scene would be stargazing on the beach in Rivain, he’d point out a couple constellations, talk about his time seafaring (minus all the murdering and pillaging). You’d get the option to ask about a few different ones (leading to locking out of the romance) or a secret fourth one and he’d absolutely bullshit some made up romantic story that parallels him and you, and you’d call bullshit because YES it is bullshit, and he’d say something awfully sappy about making it “our constellation” and then 💋💋💋.

.The actual romance scene would be that he turns up completely naked in your room, he’ll ask if you want the Captain or the Warden, and you uh choose and uh ye a hh haha ahaaaaa 😳🥴.

[theflashjaygarrick]

Absolutely wild to me that with all of DC's reboots/retcons no one has had the sense to completely erase the Arisia incident (and no, I do not count Johns' whole 'Hal thought it was creepy but then learnt that her planet rotates differently so she is actually 200' nonsense. It's probably the biggest stain on the green lantern franchise (followed by the Kalmaku nickname thing) and genuinely there is no benefit to it existing.

But importantly I don't mean erase Arisia. She is a character with a lot of potential as a little sister with self esteem issues, a child who has been conscripted into a literal galactic army and is honestly just trying her best. She's adorable and had a lot of potential before Englehart made it so disgusting I stopped reading his green lantern comics my I own sanity. And I do feel like while it definitely did tarnish Hal and his reputation (and lets be real, probably should have done so for almost every green lantern in that era except John) Arisia herself was honestly a lot harder hit with being hated and erased. Which is how a lot of comic controversies - and even real life abuse cases can - go. I feel like she honestly deserves a second chance to be explicitly and overtly removed from that uncomfortable and unnecessary arc rather than just being pushed aside so people can write Hal as a space maverick male fantasy (when will Spectre Hal come back from the war).

But like imagine an Arisia year one with me (wherein the writers and the corps aren't creeps):

Arisia is a young orphaned alien girl who is still grieving when she has the responsibility and powers of a lantern ring thrust upon her. While still trying to get a hang of her new powers she is called into OA where she meets the other Green Lanterns. She begins training and becomes the (actual) little sister/kid of the green lantern corps. Crucially no one is weird about her. I would probably make it so that her home planet values really strong familial ties so that as an orphan she is desperately seeking out a family in the green lantern corps, which clashes with some of the other members who initially see the other corpsmen as work buddies at most. In this when Hal and her hang out its because he's her mentor and he radiates cool uncle vibes.

And honestly you could keep the ageing up with the ring idea but instead of making it part of a creepy romance arc it could be used to further explore her own anxieties. Maybe she feels overlooked as a kid so decides to make herself look older to feel more powerful when on missions, but it eventually it makes her feel more self conscious about what she looks like normally. Then it ends with her learning to embrace and find confidence in who she really is. You know, classic coming of age stuff. And after that Hal and Jon decide to introduce her to the Teen Titans so she can be around other heroes (roughly) her own age.

So she ends up on Earth for while where you could have a fun fish out of water dynamic whilst she explores earth life in San Fransisco. Not only is she a member of teen titans as their GL (or Teen Lantern as they probably insist on calling her). She can have a whole side plot about making friends in her civilian identity and wanting to be a normal kid (milkshakes, diners, roller skating, baby gay crushes) while also knowing that at some point she has to go back to OA and to her home sector. Back there she has to embrace this massive responsibility (honestly too big for someone of her age) that she didn't choose, but that was rather an inherited burden from her late father and duty as a member of the corps.

Ultimately it would be about finding confidence in your own heroism, a found family, and having fun coming of age moments. And rescuing a promising female character from being an embarrassing footnote in DC (and Hal Jordan's) history.

DNI INTERACT IF YOU ENJOY HAL AND ARISIA AS A COUPLE. I DON'T KNOW IF THESE PEOPLE ARE REAL BUT IF THEY ARE, LEAVE MY POST/BLOG ALONE.

[zalia]

maybe a weird ship to request but could you write cayde/crow for number 30 (for comfort)?

30. ...for comfort.

"They found more of those... statues on Earth."

Crow slumps down on the ground and leans his head back against the wall, eyes dropping closed.

"The creepy finalised ones?" Cayde asks, though he knows the answer. What other statues are they gonna be talking about right now?

"Mmm," Crow agrees. He sounds wrecked. He looks wrecked, dark circles around his eyes, lines of stress and grief on his face. Cayde knows he would probably look the same if not for, y'know, being made of metal. It's... sort of a relief honestly. Hell of a lot easier to hide what he's feeling as the hours creep on towards...

He glances out towards that distant coiling pillar of... of fuck knows what but it sure ain't good. Makes dread drip right down to his belly.

"Guardians this time," Crow adds quietly, and Cayde winces. "Frozen, finalised, and carved up. I don't know if it's a warning or if whatever is happening is leaking out, but–"

"But neither of those are a good option and we're running out of time," Cayde fills in.

He thinks back to that room in the Sacrarium, the simulation of the command centre in the old Tower. The one with the statues of... of them. Zavala, Ikora, him. The eerie stillness when that room had always been full of noise and movement and conversation.

"It's spreading," Crow says. "We need to make a move soon before it–"

As if on cue, one of those awful quakes runs through the world. The scream of the Traveller, the wash of dread, the echo of pain, of suffering that reverberates through the Light. Feels like he's being torn apart. Bet the Traveller is feeling it a whole lot worse.

In Crow's lap, his hands clench, and Cayde can see the way they shake. Cayde doesn't blame him – who isn't terrified right now? – but they need him together, functional. Maybe it's cruel to expect anyone to shoulder that burden, but if he's gonna be the Hunter Vanguard... got to get used to setting part of yourself aside.

He rises from the chair he's claimed – somehow the Pale Herat contains a replica of his office chair that is actually more comfortable than the real one, go figure – and goes to sit on the ground next to Crow, bumping their shoulders together.

Crow gives him a weak smile. "Sorry. I should be better than this."

"You're good. Ain't a single one of us who hasn't been terrified at some point, except maybe Ikora. And this is bigger than any of us signed up for."

"Pretty sure we got conscripted," Crow replies, and Cayde barks out a laugh.

"You got that right. Still... would you have changed it?" Would he? No. No, he likes Six. He doesn't remember a lot from Caydes one to five, but he knows that he's been making up for a lot. Knows that they screwed up real bad. And maybe he did too, but he thinks – hopes – that he's balanced the scales this time. Isn't that the Traveller's whole thing? Clean slate? The chance to be more than the baggage?

"No," Crow replies. "Got the chance to make up for a lot at least. Do things better."

Do things better. Yeah... yeah that.

Cayde drops an arm around Crow's shoulders, and the kid leans in against him. Feels natural. He hadn't expected that when he'd first seen Uldren-fucking-Sov drop through the portal, but weeks spent with only each other for company in an impossible place like the Pale Heart... things change.

"I don't remember being this afraid," Crow admits quietly. "Even when we fought the Witness... too much adrenaline to feel scared, but this..."

"It's the waiting that'll get you every time," Cayde agrees. "Wears you down. Makes you lose your nerve, question yourself."

He's always preferred action. Easier to deal with than letting himself think too hard about what he's doing. And sure, that had got him killed, but at least there hadn't been time to feel more than a flicker of fear.

"You'd think I'd be used to that by now," Crow replies.

Another one of those tremors. Fro a second, Cayde swears he sees the walls shift, warp into mismatched slabs of stone and he wonders if he looks down will he see it happening to him too?

Against his side, Crow has gone still and tense, wound so tightly that if he doesn't relax, he'll break. And they can't afford him breaking right now.

Cayde doesn't want to see him break, greater good be damned.

It's impulsive when he turns his head, leans in, presses his mouth against Crow's. Crow somehow tenses even more, but that's surprise, not that awful brittle tension. And then he softens, gasps against Cayde's mouth and clings to him like he's a rock and Crow is drowning.

It ain't the best kiss – no matter what people think, this kind of situation doesn't lead to the best sort of intimacy – but it's warm and careful, enough need and want to carry them through the pain-tremor.

Crow pulls away slowly, eyes bright, his fingers still curled in Cayde's cloak. "What is this?"

"Ask the hard questions, why don't you?" Cayde says, a touch of teasing. "It's... whatever it needs to be. You run with a pack, you learn to just take things as they are." But Crow had never had a pack, had he? "We live through this, then we figure things out."

Crow gives a breathless laugh. He's still pale... paler than he should be, but some of that awful terror is gone. "I guess you're right."

He leans in again, and Cayde grips his chin to draw him closer. He isn't sure this is the thing he should be doing, but hey, when you're facing the end of the world, he figures they can both be forgiven for being reckless.

Besides, there is a certain spiteful pleasure knowing that Uldren Sov would absolutely hate this.

[yanderes-galore]

good lord I need to see yandere concept for (f&h) Levi with younger sister! Darling soo bad. Perhaps they've been separated after Levi was conscripted by Eastern Union? They reunite in the worst way possible :p

Of course! Here's my thoughts on this idea :)

Yandere! Platonic! Levi with Little Sister! Darling

Pairing: Platonic

Possible Trigger Warnings: Female Darling, Obsession, Overprotective behavior, Murder, Abuse (You and Levi's father), Blood, War recruitment/Drafting, Levi is canonically a child soldier in lore, Drug addiction, Dubious companionship.

You and Levi already had quite a tough life with your parents.

Your father was a drunk and the main reason you both ended up homeless.

When you were both young, your father killed your mother in front of the both of you.

Ever your father drank himself into an early grave, Levi tasked himself with caring for you.

Since your family has fallen apart, your big brother was the only one there for you.

Even when you two were taken away to St. Domek's Orphanage... Levi refused to leave his sister's side.

The staff there was never the best with the kids, leaving Levi to remain as your only family and protector.

There were always rumors of mistreatment and orphans going missing.

You and Levi were 12 and 13 respectively when you entered the orphanage.

Taking care of you was a big deal for him.

Even at such a young age he worried what could happen to a young girl like you in a place like this.

Levi would never leave your side if he could.

You mean too much to him.

As the only family for one another, Levi often clung to you.

It was as though it was the two of you against the world.

Right up until he was drafted for the Eastern Union.

It was war that tore you from him.

Levi wasn't sure what happened to you when he was forced to leave you.

He was left to suffer through war as a child who lost his childhood.

But where were you?

No doubt suffering your own hell.

Maybe you got adopted, maybe you waited until you were old enough to leave....

In a life like this, naturally you get involved with the occult.

Maybe you did leave Prehevil eventually in the end.

But fate managed to drag you back.

You remember your brother, how could you not?

You both may have been young, yes...

Yet you couldn't forget how he looked... even now.

When you went on that train back to your hometown, you weren't expecting to see your brother again.

Far as you know, your brother died at war.

However... when that train stopped at Prehevil and you were forced to see the hell your home became...

You saw your brother right there with you.

You both couldn't believe it when you saw one another.

He's learned the art of firearms while you've learned your own set of skills.

You two originally just... stared in disbelief.

There's no way this is real... right?

Yet that voice, now much older and more tired...

You knew it was him when you heard your name come from him.

In this concept you're both around 18/19.

It's been many years since you two last saw each other.

Admittedly, despite the situation, you were excited.

Levi too was relieved to see you alive and mostly well.

Even if he himself isn't doing the best.

Levi, for pretty much all his life after losing you, has trouble getting close to others.

The only person he's ever been close to is you.

Even now he sticks beside you like when you were young.

Levi wants to leave his past behind, but you're the only good part of it.

When he flees into the city, he urges you to follow.

It's almost like when you were kids... just more monsters.

Levi would keep trying to avoid the other contestants, wanting to keep you and himself out of harm's way.

Even now your brother loves you, just happy to have you back.

He hates that you are so concerned over his drug addiction.

Yet he also feels oddly warm to see you still love him.

I feel seeing you after so long makes him protective.

Yes, war has made him nihilistic.

But you're just about the only thing he cares about now.

It feels... strange to see your childhood home in ruins.

You wish you were both able to meet under better circumstances.

But funnily enough...

You feel nothing much has changed in terms of the bond you two share...

....

Well... not until later.

I imagine Levi would react similarly to the other things I've written for him.

He's overprotective and now views himself more as a weapon for you to use.

Hasn't that been how it's always been?

Him protecting you?

The Moonscorch scenario would make sense too.

After all, Prehevil is where the two came from.

It would make sense if you died here too.

Levi would do anything for his little sister.

He's sorry he couldn't protect you most of your life.

But now he can.

I imagine Levi gets a bit paranoid, worried other contestants will take you away from him for good.

Imagine Levi not caring if he has to shoot someone to protect you.

He's been through war, seeing their blood splatter to protect you is a fine price to pay for him.

He doesn't care much about making friends.

Really all he needs is you.

In his eyes, you also need him.

Independent or not, Levi still sees you the same way he saw you all those years ago.

A young girl who hasn't seen what he's seen.

Levi never wants to part from you.

Not after he's found you...

So, if one of you dies... or is about to Moonscorch...

Levi will be there.

After all, he doesn't think he can ever leave your side now.

Maybe he locks you in a room to Moonscorch with him by the time of the third day.

Or maybe you get mortally wounded, and he'd be forced to make a decision.

Till death do you part... although he'd probably find a way to follow you then too.

It doesn't matter what happens...

He'll always be by your side...

Even in death if it must happen.

[toms-cherry-trees]

Story Of Us|| John Shelby x Reader

Summary: Love is not always ideal. It comes hand on hand with grief

Word Count: 4000

Warnings: Infant/maternal death, grief, teen pregnancy, angst

Author’s note: Nothin to see here, move forward to the story. This took me 2 hours to write and I didn’t proofread one bit

John had always lived in a dilemma. Ever since his dad walked out on them, he tried to get approval from his family, the one thing he never received as a child.. But he only ended up being scolded. When he had to crack the news that he had knocked up Martha, both being just fifteen years of age, Polly hit him across the head with a wooden spoon, and Arthur had to hide him from Martha’s father, who had come for him with a musket.

John and Martha knew they were too young, but they were in love the way only teenagers can be, and the only way they would be allowed together was this. With a baby and the obligation to marry to preserve Martha’s honour. They were wed three months after the musket incident, Martha dressed in a borrowed white dress which did little to hide her rounded bump, and John stuffed in one of his father’s old suits, hastily tailored by Polly. Only the groom’s family was in attendance, since Martha’s father had kicked her out of the house.  

Four months later a boy had been born in John’s own bed; a squirming, chubby thing with the most powerful lungs in the whole of Birmingham. Two more babies came in quick succession, another boy and another girl.

And then came the war.

In the time between their rushed marriage and 1914, John had managed to make more or less a living for himself. He had gotten his own home, being able at last to move Martha and the kids out of the cramped quarters of the family home. And they had a young girl from the area helping Martha rear the kids. Life seemed as perfect as it could get until the war struck and the war office came looking for them. Even though the conscription was voluntary at first, it would only be a matter of time before they came and dragged them out of their homes by their feet. John tested his luck as much as he could, even after Tommy and Arthur had already joined the front. But he had started to get dirty looks whenever he left the house, and one morning he woke up to his doorstep filled with chicken feathers. So he went, and left Martha with the kids and the nanny to hold up the fort in his absence.

None of them could know for certain how long they would be away, and it was worrisome to think it could be years before they returned, if they ever did, while the women in their lives were left to fend for themselves. Being granted leave to go home was a privilege mostly reserved for officers, and with John’s explosive nature and cockiness, he spent many months penalised without leave. The first time he managed to go home, in the second half of 1915, Martha and the kids had thrown themselves at his legs and his neck, unwilling to let him go.

In the two weeks he spent in Birmingham, he left Martha with child yet again. The news arrived with delay, as they do when you receive mail in the battlefield, and even more when said letters are heavily monitored by the officers. The letter had been sent a month and a day before it made it into his hands, but the news were not any less joyous, although tinted with a pang of guilt of not being there to support his wife. But John played his part, behaving like a good soldier for once in order to receive leave in time to see his newborn. They estimated the date for the first half of May 1916, a glorious spring.

But the thing is, letters carrying bad news move just as slow and delayed as the good ones. Even slower so, since the war office ordered anything that could tamper with the soldiers’ morale and spirits to be suppressed. John made the entire journey home, on truck, ship and train, only to find Martha had passed 4 weeks before his arrival, alongside their newborn girl. Polly had intercepted him on the train station, having seen him descend from the platform on her way from the market. The toothy grin tugging on his lips slowly fell into a frown as Pol grabbed his arm and practically tugged him into an alley to give him a resumed version of the events, but John didn’t want to hear. He didn’t care how, or why, or when. He only knew, as the ground swayed beneath his feet, that his sweet, lovely wife had left this world without him by his side, and had taken their babe with her to not be alone. Leaving John, aged 22, with a broken heart and 3 young children in the middle of a never ending war.

Polly and Tommy, who also happened to be on leave at that time, had made arrangements for everything after Martha’s passing. Polly had wanted to take in the children herself, to keep them under her wing. But when she even tried to take them out of the house, they clung to their nanny’s skirts like a lifeline, refusing to even step an inch away. Pol understood quickly that having just lost their mother and being in permanent threat of also losing their father, she couldn’t rip them away from the only stable person in their lives. So the girl, having grown deeply fond of her wards, moved into the home full time to look after them in every way a mother would, since the children had grown to love her like one.

When John returned home, he expected to find a gloomy and deserted place, with the hearth cold and empty and lamps out, much like he felt inside his own head. But of course reality rarely matches the expectations, whether good or bad. The children were laughing, playing with some wooden figurines on the carpet. Aged seven, five and three, they were already a force to be reckoned with, being able to mess a room in the blink of an eye. Yet here they were, playing happily under the caring gaze of their nanny. The four of them were startled by his arrival, with the kids scrambling over each other to jump into his arms, knocking over a chair and a side table, sending a vase with daisies crashing down. Home sweet home.

~

That night, after the kids were put to bed, John sat near the fireplace, nursing a glass of whiskey in his hands. Martha always warned him when the drinks began piling up on the table and his head; her voice whispering in his mind kept him from bringing the liquid to his lips, no matter how desperately he craved the numbness only spirits can provide.

You walked out of the kitchen, untying the apron from your waist. Most of the house chores were neglected during the day, since every waking hour was filled with rearing the little Shelbys. The oldest, David, would be starting school very soon, but you didn’t see how that would come to be, since he refused to be away from you for long. The youngest, Sarah, spent most of her day perched on your hip, although at 2 years of age she was already getting too heavy to carry. Theo, who had just turned five, acted as middle children often do, keeping mostly to himself and showing himself to be independent.

You hadn’t noticed John sitting there, since he was slumped on the floor, his head propped on the sofa and his legs splayed before him. His boots were nowhere to be found and his shirt discarded aside, leaving him only in undershirt. You would have just walked past him if he hadn’t called your name.

“(Y/N)?”

“Yes Mr. Shelby?”

“Sit here for a little bit”

Perplexity was not quite the word to describe what you felt, but it came close enough. You had never been afraid of your boss; he and Martha had offered you a job when you most needed it, and they even treated you as a friend, since you were only a year younger than them. You were the one who mediated between them when things got tense, as often happened when very young people were thrusted abruptly into adult life; resentment inevitably building up on the grave of robbed childhood and dreams. And you were the one who took the kids out of the house when they inevitably made peace with each other.

But the situation had changed; the wife dead, the husband away, and you had basically become owner and lady of the home in the meantime, forced to step up for the babies you had known nearly since the cradle. Perhaps taking attributions that didn’t belong to you, but everything done with the best intentions in your heart.

You sat in the armchair farthest away from him, your body perched on the very edge of the seat and your legs laced at the ankles.

John doubted his words, still swirling the whiskey in the glass. Not a tear had left track on his cheeks, but the corners of his eyes were reddened, like those of a man who had learned, either willingly or by force, to hold back emotions.

“Were you here when…when Martha…” The phrase was left hanging in the air

“Yes I was. I had been staying full time already, in case the baby came at night”

Silence. Words slowly dawning on his mind fogged by barely contained grief.

He swallowed thickly “What happened?”

You closed your eyes and breathed in slowly. You knew he would eventually ask, but you hoped he wouldn’t ask you. The desire to know something could turn almost morbid the longer the answer was denied, but you didn’t want to give the grisly details with the wound so fresh, so you hoped he would content with the shortened version.

“The baby came too early, more than a month. And then it got stuck, and the labour dragged on for too long. The girl was….born sleeping. She named her Katie. And then Mrs Shelby caught an infection” You stopped there, hoping the vague narration would be enough explanation so you could avoid the more sensible details.

John nodded slowly, his gaze only fixated in his whiskey glass “Did she…did she say anything? Before she…”

“Mr. Shelby…” You protested, not believing him ready to hear it all

“Just say it!” The words came a lot more harshly than he intended, but they had been dropped and couldn’t be taken back.

You nodded and looked down at your lap, fidgeting with your apron “She told me to look after her babies. And to look after you. She told me we should not be sad for long, because she hated sad faces and life was sad enough as it was and her loved ones had to live happy lives on her behalf. She only asked…she asked that we made sure her kids never forgot about her” Your lower lip trembled. Holding her hand as life slipped away from her had been traumatic for you as well; like watching your own older sister die under your watch.

Your last words broke something inside John. At first, barely perceptible, his lower lip trembled and his eyes glazed while he pondered over his wife’s last words. Then all of a sudden the floodgates opened, tears coursing freely down his cheeks as sobs racked his body. The glass fell and shattered, and you, always acting on maternal instinct, tried to pull him away from the carpet so he wouldn’t land his hand on the shards. But in the brief second your hands touched him, John clung to your waist in the same fashion his eldest son did when he had a nightmare. The force of his embrace pulled you down on the floor, his head burrowed on your lap and his fingers digging on the fabric of your blouse. You had no words to console him, for sometimes, there is no real consolation. So you did the best you could, which was letting him cry out his sorrow and anger in the same apron that had wiped his children’s tears; while you rubbed soothing circles in his back. John cried it all out until his tears had run dry and his frantic heartbeat stilled. Crying is usually followed by drowsiness, and before you knew it your boss had fallen asleep on your lap, soothed by the faint scent of lavender on your clothes. You didn’t want to move him and disrupt the feeble stillness of peace, so you sat there all night, your head perched on the sofa and your hand on his back, dwelling on the creaking of the fire in the hearth.

~

It couldn’t be helped, the way the bond you and John had of mere friendship morphed into something else. Ever since Martha’s passing, John had managed to squeeze pity out of the war office, being granted leave more often than others to see his children. In the meantime, you took marvellous care of them, and they loved you maybe even more than they loved him.

The way he became drawn to you may seem rushed, but it came from a place of grief. A man with his heart in tatters, finding comfort in the arms that hugged and cuddled his children. Every time he returned home on leave, his barely retained sorrow spilled out the second he crossed the threshold of his home and the memories came crashing like an avalanche. Instead of getting better, he seemed to slowly grow worse. Could it be the grief, could it be the war, seeing his children more grown and mature every time he came, or a mixture of everything, but each leave it became harder to enter his home, and at the end it became harder to return to the front.

John spent many hours of his day locked in his bedroom, splayed on his bed accompanied by a whiskey, inhaling the fading scent of lotion on Martha’s nightgown. More than once you had to threaten to break in through the window in order to coax John into coming out and eating. The children barely noticed his behaviour, far too accustomed to his absence by now, but it pained you to see him miss out on every precious second he could spend with his family, knowing well it could be the last. Not wanting to be mindless of his pain, you gave him a few days to settle and then forced him out of the shell. No one would be called to dine until he came to sit with you all; you would go out to shop alone, making him watch the kids; if one of them had a nightmare at night, you knocked on his door and made him go and lull them back to sleep. You knew it was hard for him, but this is what Martha would have wanted. She wanted John to carry on living, and that he would do, with you behind to support him.

But you never expected to catch feelings in the process. Never had you thought about him as any more than your boss and friend, not before Martha and certainly not after. But looking after him, being his strength at home, even more so than his blood family, it is hard for feelings to not get tangled in the middle. You were the one who saw him sob his eyes out over a picture in the middle of the night: the one who bandaged his hands when he beat the wall in a fit of rage over the unfairness of life, and the one who kept that little family up and running.

On one of his last leaves, in October of 1918, he had, for the first time, sat with all of you for dinner on his first back home without threats or begging. As you served the stew, John cleared his throat to call attention “Tomorrow we are going out. It is a little surprise, but I promise we will have fun”

The children jumped in excitement. It had been far too long since they had all gone out as family, and the prospect of a day out with dad was the best outlook ever. You smiled as you poured a glass for John “What time do you need the kids ready, Mr Shelby?”

“Everyone ready at 10, and I mean everyone. You are coming with us of course, it is a family day”

Your breath hitched in your throat and heat rose to your cheeks, but you just nodded, hiding your shyness behind your glass. The next day the five of you went to an apple orchard, right on time as the sweetest fruits were being harvested. The children ran rampant across the field with wicker baskets, collecting dropped fruits which they would be able to exchange at the end of the day for candy. John and you followed closely behind, both in silence but enjoying the sounds of nature and the laughter of the kids. The autumn leaves crunched beneath your feet making a most delicious sound. For a day, you could all pretend that war had never happened and life was more or less normal. At the end, the children dropped the apples in big wooden troughs, and in exchange were given toffee apples. John bought you two pints of cider which you drank together, sitting under a tree while watching the children play with other kids and trying to sneak more candied apples from the stand

“Look at that, David stole an apple” Far from being outraged, you found the situation amusing “He is your son alright”

John chuckled “Are you insinuating I am a thief, Miss (Y/N)”

“Martha told me all the tales of your youth, Mr. Shelby. Stealing candy is one thing, but stealing liquor from a bar is an extraordinary prowess” You smirked

John’s demeanour dropped ever so slightly at the name, but he was quick to pick himself up “I miss her. She should be here watching the children grow. There should be a toddler here with us, and another baby on the way”

“Missing is part of grieving” You patted his hand “It means you lived and loved. Even if you stop grieving you’ll never stop missing”

John pondered over your words, staring at the bottom of his pint “Thank you for being here…if you hadn’t been here, we would all have fallen apart. I would have fallen apart but you glued me back together out of your pure stubbornness so I would be there for me kids” John squeezed your hand “You have saved us all”

You chuckled “Saviour is a bit too far I’d say. But I am glad I could be of help. You are a good man John, and you deserve good things” It dawned on you a second too late that you had called him by his first name. The apologies were already piling in your tongue but John laughed it out “Seven bloody years it took you to call me John”

You could only join in on his infectious laughter, feeling the worries flutter away. It had been a while since he last laughed, and you took it as a sign of his healing. The rest of the evening went in a blissful blur, with you two sharing bites of an apple while he picked fallen leaves off your hair, and having to haul all three kids home in your arms, them too tired to walk. John surprised you with having stuffed his coat’s wide pockets with apples, and you surprised him in return with a homemade apple pie.

You enjoyed every day of his leave, dreading the moment he would once more part. The children had, now that they were older, come to resent his absences, and it always broke them a little to have him return only to leave, perhaps forever, over and over and over again. But one the last day, right before being due to leave, John arrived back after being out all morning, loaded with parcels and gifts. He had received news from the war office to not return to his post, for truce would be called in less than a week. The men would return home and the nightmare would be over.

“Tonight we celebrate like never before!”

Everyone received presents that day. The children received toys, John sent gifts for his aunt and siblings, and he even bought you a new dress. That night you feasted like you had never before, the evening topped with a marvellous store bought cake and the children falling asleep earlier than usual, stuffed with turkey and cake. After they were put to bed, it was only John and you before the fire, passing back and forth a bottle of champagne. The day was for joy and celebration and all boundaries had been torn down. You two were laughing just for the sake of laughter and the relief of having survived hell.

“So what happens now, once the Shelbys are back on track?” You inquired curiously “Business as usual?”

“I reckon men will be eager to vent off steam and enjoy the things they missed out. I promise the den will be up to the beams with patrons. Future is looking bright” He took a swing of the bottle, foam trickling down the side of his lip. You reached up to wipe the liquid with the back of your hand. John eyed you curiously before bringing up a far different topic.

“Have you thought about getting married?”

You did very poorly in hiding your surprise “Me? Married? Why do you ask?”

He simply shrugged “You are a lovely young lady, in the prime of your life. Surely don’t you plan on spending the rest of your days taking care of other people’s kiddos?”

A smirk tugged on your lips “Are you planning on firing me, Mr. Shelby?”

“Wouldn’t dare to, love. Just wanting to know if someone is knocking at your heart”

Oh someone was knocking at your heart at the very moment. Your heartbeat hammered your ribs, ready to escape off your chest out of your mouth. “No one is, Mr. Shelby”

Those words had barely made it out when his lips came crashing into yours, his warm hand cradling your jaw, the other placed in the middle of your back and pulling you close. His lips were soft and gentle, and his hands kept a firm grip on you. Your own hands came to lay on his chest, feeling his fluttering heartbeat under your touch. The kiss seemed to last forever and nothing at the same time. When he pulled away you were out of breath, but also wanted to keep going until time ended. When John broke the kiss, he remained close enough to lean his forehead on yours.

“I didn’t screw it up, did I?” A boyish grin played on his lips.

“Not one bit, not at all” Your index traced the side of his jaw, feeling the muscles tense as his smile widened

“So you won’t mind it I test my luck again” And just like that, his lips once more came onto yours, this time both hands on your waist as your arms came around his neck. It was funny, but in that moment you knew, after just one kiss, that you never wanted to kiss any other lips but his, nor feel any other hands’ on your waist or your hair.

You knew his grieving had not come to an end, and he would continue to love his first wife to the end of his days. But that did not mean he did not have space in his heart for you, nor that he would feel for you any less. It only meant he had lived, and would continue to do so with you.

[allwormdiet]

Interlude 7

Hi Miss Militia, sorry your superpower is just being a living weapon

No dancing around on this one, huh, just straight into the meat of it

Is Kovan our first dead kid/teen in this story? I feel like the child violence is steadily increasing over time. Vista, the ABB conscripts, Dinah, now this.

Also this shit is brutal

Fuck.

Sometimes you just have that sudden, instinctual understanding that something bad is nearby. Not usually something so devastating as a pit trap or landmine, but just that moment of the hindbrain screaming at you that something's not right.

Hey fucker, you sure showed up early, huh

So. Fucked up geometric crystalline entity that exists in multiple overlapping states or realities at once. Piece of it comes off and impacts her, bada bing bada boom she has powers and, conveniently, no recollection of the vision.

Ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who know better, cosmic horror has entered the chat, and it's giving out free goodies to unsuspecting participants

Crystal Superpower Cthulhu legitimately looked at this child and was like "oh I know how to turn the circumstances of your trauma into a superpower! I'm just going to give you Gun."

This feels a lot more on the nose than it's been for everyone else so far, but what do I know

Yeah here we go

"Good news, you never have to sleep again. Bad news, your brain will be on at all times and when you try to shut it off you will remember the worst day of your life in fucking IMAX quality"

Also feels very appropriately sinister that nobody can remember Crystal Superpower Cthulhu except in dreams of their trigger event, if you can even call it a dream.

Wow! Even more reason to doubt the Wards program, huh? They just dropped this kid into that life without her say-so and that cooked her for however long it took to graduate, at which point she obviously became a lifelong member.

Miss Militia is fully in it, huh? That's the kind of indoctrination you straight up can't pry yourself out of unless you have a damn good reason to suspect that's what's up, and it sounds like she never got that reason.

Yeah of course she's a dutiful little daughter and student and soldier. What else has she got? Not even the other kids from her hometown. Fuck me. Isolate and steep in the propaganda.

Oh no. Oh no she believes the American Dream exists. Oh Hana I'm so sorry, they just made that up to sell houses in the suburbs.

...Fuck, that's just it, isn't it. Hana was a victim of the grinding machinery of empire, and that was the pressure cooker situation that made her trigger. And now she's a component of a different, larger empire, grinding more of its targets into the same fuel that she almost became, but she doesn't even see it.

She didn't have a chance.

Speaking of chances. Hana, do you want to live in a world where God favors Kaiser as much as he favors you? Like that's just the problem of evil times a hundred.

Oh hey you two

Colin you have got to be careful what you wish for, man, you live in a world where superpowers are built off of fucking monkey's paw logic

Pity.

Haha uh oh

This is the first time we've heard Case 53 used, yeah? Same as Newter and Gregor? Hmm.

Now this is kind of an interesting conversation, having to figure out what the hell to do about what junior members you can or else have to give away

Okay so they know Shadow Stalker is trouble

...How much do they know beyond that, and how have they been dealing with her? Because I don't think it's working, and at least one person is just straight up not doing their job

I'd love to feel sorry for Armsmaster in this moment, but my dude is in desperate need of some fucking humility, and honestly I'm not sure he was ever meant to be in a leadership position. He just doesn't have the temperament for it.

So, first off, insane that the Endbringers are keyed in enough to human civilization to know what hurts most for them to target

Second off: Coil you stupid fucker your gun jumping on the Empire accelerated the entire city into apocalypse! Arrogant bastard wants to run Brockton Bay so bad that he just tripped and dropped his little city diorama all into a trash can full of rotting fish. Fucking jackass.

The Endbringers can bring media response into consideration for their attacks?? What the fuck kind of operation are these kaiju running?

Oh god fucking dammit.

Armsmaster is going to try and get his glory by killing an Endbringer.

Current Thoughts

Somebody needs to tell these people the genre of story that they're in for real. This isn't gritty sci-fi, this isn't something about the power of faith, this is about an alien intelligence using Earth and humanity for purposes that are, at best, utterly ambivalent to the ongoing existence of either of those things.

Also I feel a lot worse for Miss Militia but it seems like she hasn't reflected on like, any of her baggage beyond the most surface level stuff of "boy I'm sure fucking glad I'm not in that village anymore"

[unhonestlymirror]

I like it when I receive hate anons.

Mostly they do it because I publicly criticize hetalia artists who spread russian propaganda. I believe that it's the sign that deep inside, they understand that what they are doing is wrong, is bringing no good. Let me explain on the example.

When my mom was the same age as me now, she had to flee her home and her parents to another country with another language, having no money, no property, no real estate, only a baby in her womb - because she spoke Belaruthian, not russian. It happened when Lukashenko has gained power, thus, a few years before first chapter of hetalia was published. It took mom long enough to become a functional person again, and of course, such repressions has left her with irreparable psychological damage.

A few weeks before February 2022, when russia was already gaining troops at the border, I suggested for us to go somewhere for a while. Many people like me were anxious for their loved ones enough to go closer to Western border or even abroad, but many people didn't want to believe there would be war. They didn't want to give up on their homes, on environment, on connections, on everything they have gained so far. It was especially difficult for my mom to accept, who had to build her new home from zero. Till the very last day, she was really angry, REALLY mad at me for saying there was gonna be a war, that was not a reaction of a normal person. She denied any news, any voyages, she closed her eyes and ears, she called me any insults possible, she literally believed evil America was exaggerating everything to kill people's spirit - and at the day I woke up from missiles and explosions, she said "It is nothing, you just imagined that." She quickly gave up on any logic and reasoning, she was ready to put her whole family into a mortal danger if it meant she could have lived in her little peaceful world for a little longer. I'm saying it without any judgement. Only a terrifyingly cruel person may say leaving your home is easy. Three days later, she accepted the reality and we went to the west. Nevertheless, the fact that we weren't killed back then like some of my coursemates is really a miracle.

And this is the same mechanism which works in people's heads whenever they commit crimes against humanity. As long as their little world is not questioned, is not scattered, as long as they believe what they do is a right thing to do - they are ready to crucify, rape and burn people alive. This is the mechanism which made Christianity work, this is the mechanism which made nazism and communism work, and this is also the mechanism which makes people still draw hetalia soviet siblings, countryhumans and other bullshit. As long as they believe they are doing no harm by simple drawings, they are gonna continue on this (and do harm).

And the fact that some people's feelings are put in chaos because of me saying, "Glorifying mass murderers is bad" means these people are more susceptible to change among the hopeless. They are more likely to question their actions, and their morals are more unstable. Which means, if I make enough mantra-like posts about moral basics, it's gonna be remained somewhere in their cortex. Repetition is the mother of learning. Actually, that's what reading good books should do, but I know kids nowadays don't like reading that much.

One of anon hater sent me something like, "Imagine to believe that Hidekaz Himaruya is responsible for the war😂" - actually, he is. For many years, he has been selling hetalia to russia, he still does, in fact - and russia has been spreading hetalia to the western countries who did business with russia. This is why this manga is more well-known in Belarus and Ukraine than in, e.g., Lithuania and Estonia. But of course the main consumer still remains to be russia. Back then in 2010s, his main audience was 10-15 years old, nowadays it's already of conscription age, and many of them go to kill and rape Ukrainians and Belaruthians because we are "russia's sisters abducted by evil west". Because one Japanese retarded who spreads his manga worldwide cannot be wrong! He's a foreigner and known in America!

Thus, yes, Hidekaz Himaruya, as a propagandist paid by russia, is partially responsible for russians committing genocide, he is responsible for the deaths of my pets and he's responsible for my mom having to go through all this nightmare all over again, for my grandma's tears, and he is also responsible for my father aging 30 years just in 5. That man is responsible for so many miseries my family has to go through - and let me tell you, we're not in the worst, actually. 90% of Eastern Europeans who know about hetalia desire for public Himaruya's "decapitato". I will shake the hand of whoever gets enough guts and money to kill him.

And the fact that people attack me with hate anons simply means they are terrified. They are terrified to be put in one basket with Really bad stuff, and denying you are in the "Really bad stuff" club is, of course, easier than accepting that you, your friends and hundreds of people around you support Really bad stuff. But believe me, no matter how they defend each other and their "ideology", they are gonna be called "Guys Who Did Really Bad Stuff" 10-20 years later in history textbooks because that's how the things always end.

However, it's never late to realise you were wrong, to quit of a bad habit. It is never pointless to educate people, to repeat that bad stuff is bad, as much as it's never pointless to repeat that smoking and drinking alcohol is bad for your health. My feelings are not hurt if a patient of mine gets angry for the "quit smoking trash" prescription, same goes for hate anons. If there's hate, there's hope.

[always-outlander]

Outlander 7x04 Spoilers & Easter Eggs “A Most Uncomfortable Woman”

Lallybroch

Jemmy is older! New actors and actresses have arrived and two years have passed. They are fixing up Lallybroch and restoring the inside. My question is how are they affording all this?

The preview at the end of the opening credits shows a desk which is very important for the Bree and Roger storyline.

Jamie and Claire on the road

Why are these two SO CUTE?! These two have done a wonderful job conveying elements of their younger selves. Ian is worried about Arch Bug following him around and it is beginning to haunt him.

William!

William and his cousin are in Wilmington discussing the excitement of the looming war and their eagerness to partake. William has been assigned to a post in New York. We get a horrific fire ship scene from the books which in all honesty made me cry in the books. It’s just as horrific in the show but thankfully they made it less gruesome visually than described. This is the first scene where Williams honor is in display and he does the right thing.

Captain Richardson assigns William as a messenger through to great Dismal Swamp/Town. The names he’s instructed to deliver the notes to are Samuel Cartwright, Henry Carver, Joshua Harrington. In the books, he’s also given the name Washington (!!!). After that assignment he is to travel to New York to meet with the rest of the men. Book readers know that he has a bit of an adventure and detour before that happens, however.

While in the forest Williams horse is spooked by a snake and he falls and is injured by a stick through his arm. In the books this poor guy is constantly lost, constantly being heckled, constantly complaining. He wanders through the woods for days before he is uncovered by Ian and Rollo. The scene between Ian and William was one of my favorites of this episode, and Young Ian is easily one of my favorite characters.

While they switched up some minor details, the shows version of this encounter is still very insightful into Ian’s time with the Mohawk, and William asks him questions about the Mohawk’s thoughts on showing fear or distress. He himself is trying to be brave while injured and Ian tells him of the death song. when thinking about what he would sing, William calls himself by his full name, then at one point says ‘William James’ and you can tell Ian is having very complicated feelings about it. William James was the name Jamie had given to him as a child in Helwater, his secret papist name. I loved this detail in both the show and books. Jamie is still having an impact on him, even without him realizing it.

Book on Time Travel

Roger is writing a book on time travel for Jemmy and Mandy, documenting all they know about it. He discovers that the musket ball is gold and mull over asking Jemmy about it. Jemmy claims pixies took a clock apart and Roger and Bree know he’s lying.

Bree is interviewing for her new job at the Hydro plant with a very frustrating man who completely underestimates her abilities. This was actually a great scene for her to show off her brains. I think most people have forgotten just how smart Bree is. She gets the job but comes home to a distraught Roger who feels like he’s failing to support their family in the traditional ways. Their experience going back in time has shaken his beliefs of God, and he has felt like he is breaking his promise to Jamie and Claire to provide for her and their kids.

Jemmy continues to behave strangely and tells Roger and Bree there’s a nuckelavee in their yard. They have a discussion about his powers and his believe in magic and how to foster that while still keeping it a secret.

Wilmington

Cornelius Harnet reappears and is tied back into the war by a blackmail. He conscripts Jamie to go to Fort Ticonderoga in New York. I love the scene we get from the season preview where Jamie states that he wants to fight for his family and because he couldn’t ask for anyone else to fight in his place. Claire can provide him with the confidence that this is a war they will win.

I think Sam has been outstanding this season. He has done a great job of subtlety in his acting. Ian wants to fight for the land too, and be a part of the change for the Indians. Claire promises she will go with Jamie and provide her medical expertise.

When in Wilmington Tom plants a mighty kiss on Claire which shocks her to near silence. Tom acknowledges the fire and that her and Jamie are not dead as he believed. He admits to placing the obituary in the papers as he could not leave flowers on her grave. He calls Claire A Most Uncomfortable Woman and admits he has only loved two woman, his wife and Claire. The loving of her has led him to his salvation, but the loving of her will bring him no peace while she lives. He absolutely knocked this scene out of the park.

Tom asks if Jamie knows about his feelings towards Claire, and Claire has a very awkward conversation about his love towards her. Tom tells her how he escaped with his mind and literacy, and was employed as a secretary thanks to his ability to write. Tom also heard that Allan had left the Ridge but Claire omits to tell him the truth of that matter.

Jamie & Claire

I have to crack up over Jamie and Claire discussing the kiss and Tom’s love for her. This scene was great at providing a moment for them to reconnect, while also adding some humor. The moment between them in the window was adorable. They also touch upon her hair turning white, coming into her full power one day, and have so many call backs to previous seasons. I loved them bantering over her sticking her with needles and the two of them having jealousy over others. There’s also a mention of Laoghaire, whom we know we will see again later this season when Jamie and Claire make it to Scotland.

The Hunters

We finally set eyes on Denzel and Rachel Hunter, who Ian delivers William to and they attempt to save Williams arm. William stating he’d rather die than amputate his arm was a parallel to Jamie wanting to die rather than remove his leg. They do not have to amputate but William ends up passing out at the idea of it.

Ian and Rachel have their first scene together and I can immediately see how she’s interested in learning more about Ian. They have chemistry which was very important. He asks Rachel to give William some money and keep the rosary beads.

Likewise you can immediately tell that William has a crush on Rachel. He attempts very much to flirt with her and Rachel for her part does entertain it. William has healed and Rachel tells William that Denny is choosing the side of Independence. They have essentially lost their place in their family and will now ride to Fort Ticonderoga on suggestion of a Samuel Cartwright whom William Carrie’s a letter for. William intends to go with them and we end the episode with Jamie and Claire’s arrival to Fort Ticonderoga. In the books this took them months to get to, so once again the storyline is being condensed greatly. In one episode they went from Wilmington to New York.

Preview of Episode 5

Jamie becomes more involved in the fight (very reminiscent of him at the table informing Charles Stuart before Colloden). A preview of the fort when it comes under attack. We got a snippet of Ian when he returns and sees Rachel again, and in the future, Bree begins her job at the plant.

Final Thoughts

The beginning of this episode I’m finding that the editing is at times clunky, and once again the speed in which we go through these scenes feels like they are just checking them off for the sake of it. For jamie and Claire to begin this episode in Wilmington and end it in New York is incredibly fast. Bree and Roger have aged up children, so that’s a large expanse of time the viewer has to adjust to. It’s a necessary evil of course (the books truly go on forever), but definitely something I notice each new episode that passes.

I love Charles’s take on William thus far, he’s far more likable than book William, and once again… JOHN BELL! He’s the stand out for me.

[intothemultifandom]

– 𝐆𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 || 𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 (𝐝𝐚𝐬)

SUMMARY: Your brother always knew you were a good kid. PAIRINGS: Lee Chun-ho x sister!Reader ; minor Kwon Il-ha x f!Reader WARNING/TAGS: Canonical character death; Angst; Descriptions of violence AUTHOR NOTE: Takes place during Episode 5: "Maesong City University"

1.8k words

You were a good kid.

Truthfully, Chun-ho expected you to be harder than you were. With Eomma dying shortly after your birth, Appa skipping town not long after and him just starting his mandatory conscription by the time you were left with Harabeoji, Lee Chun-ho expected you to be a lot more angry and disobedient when he returned to take you with him.

Kids who didn't have parents to discipline them often were, he'd heard.

But Harabeoji was, well, Harabeoji.

"I may be old, but don't forget I raised your Eomma," Harabeoji smiled, eyes warm as you shuffled at his side, eyes darting between the two men curiously.

You'd spent nearly your entire childhood with him–longer than Chun-ho had anticipated–but he'd been offered a more permanent role with the military, one that meant staying a lot longer to plan taking you in and raising you with military benefits, and Harabeoji hadn't minded your extended stay.

Chun-ho may have inherited your Eomma's face, but you had her mature and easy-going spirit.

Raising you was easy, Harabeoji told him whilst you packed, because you were a good kid. Something Chun-ho got to see for himself overtime. In your spare time you liked drawing, listening to lofi music and reading.

When you were with Chun-ho, you liked testing out new recipes for the two of you to try, asking him about anything interesting happening at the base and joining him to watch the sports movie he'd play after a long day, nestling into his side to watch, too.

You hated bean sprouts, horror movies and washing the dishes but didn't mind drying so long as the space between you was filled with idle chatter.

Of course, like any other siblings you two had your fair share of arguments, too.

Sometimes you played your music a little too long into the night. Chun-ho was guilty of tracking muddied boots into the apartment, and you didn't understand why he'd wanted you to drop judo as an extra curricular, didn't understand the way the floor gave way beneath his feet the day you came home, face bruised and swollen.

But like Harabeoji and like Eomma, when you got upset with something Chun-ho said or a new rule he imposed you didn't yell or break things like Appa used to do (and Chun-ho, before conscription straightened him out) but would instead act rationally. Disappearing from Chun-ho's side before returning when you calmed.

You studied hard, joined extracurriculars that challenged you (as you'd defended judo), kept yourself surrounded with good people and updated him on anything he missed when he was gone.

Above all, you were happy.

Never lamenting on Eomma's passing or Appa's abandonment or faulting Chun-ho for his own shortcomings.

Truly, when Harabeoji said raising you was easy, he wasn't kidding.

Chun-ho was grateful.

Grateful that you'd grown up so normal and healthy, and that in your time together he got to see you come into your own hobbies and interests.

Grateful that you were always so easy with him, although convincing Harabeoji to let you join your class in mandatory training was anything but.

Chun-ho knew what the training was for, as prettily disguised as the government made it be with their promises of CSAT credits in lieu of early admission.

He knew just how dangerous and life-threatening the Spheres really were and had already proven to be, with Young-Hoon's needless death marking the beginning of the end.

Which is why when the Spheres finally attacked Sungjin High School and your platoon was forced to evacuate, Chun-ho was infinitely more grateful that you were right there with him.

Always at his side, even when at times he wished you weren't.

Admittedly though, in the aftermath of the chaos, of the bloodshed and massacre, the realisation that there were still things he hadn't known about you was something Chun-ho did not expect but something that crept up on him during the long nights spent overseeing your platoon.

In the two months your platoon stayed waiting in the downtown Sungjin Military base, Chun-ho learned that Kim Yoo-jung and Jo Jang-soo were perhaps two of your closest friends. Always the first to gravitate toward you during trainings and during lunch.

Though Yoo-jung could get overwhelmed at times with her role as Class President, Jang-soo seemed to be your other half, your main confidant—a constant in a class that seemed to shift around you.

One such force was Yeon Bo-ra, a spirited girl who was all sharp glares and sharper words and everything Chun-ho expected you to be once upon a time.

The past two months may have been hard on everyone, but you'd endured it with the surety of someone who had your family close by. A luxury not everyone had, as Bo-ra liked to point out.

Surprisingly, as often as Yoo-jung and Jang-soo came to your defence against Bo-ra during one her tirades, it was the natural ease that existed between you and Kwon Il-ha that had Chun-ho more intrigued into your place amongst your peers.

One night during dinner Il-ha had given you his bottle of water, hands brushing against yours longer than what was necessary.

It was there that Chun-ho realised that there was something, something more, between you and the usually hot-headed boy.

Your cheeks, usually pale, had been flushed as you accepted the bottle with an appreciative smile. Falling back into your conversation with Yoo-jung all the while Il-ha watched you with the kind of calm and attentiveness Chun-ho hadn't seen in him until then.

It had been a brief interaction, one your brother couldn't place exactly at the time, but the sincerity was there all the same, lingering in the space between you.

Chun-ho hadn't expected it, but seeing you with a first crush, teetering on the edge of something more–well, Chun-ho considered it a small mercy, all things considered.

Even if the War seemed endless and bleak, seeing you just be a kid was something your brother would always cherish. Now more than ever as he stands in the long abandoned classroom of Maesong City University, ready to die.

The room your brother's trapped in is quiet.

Where your platoon waits in the Seolbong Building across, is not.

Somewhere out there, in the desolate campus building, the mechanical and otherworldly whirring of the Spheres looms closer.

It had been risky, luring the Spheres in the neighbourhood to Maesong City University so they could blow them up with the bombs they'd made from dynamite and depleted uranium. But it had to be done.

And as this War had shown him, the kids in your class–yourself included–were made of stronger stuff.

In spite of the danger, of the fear and uncertainty he was sure you all felt, your class carried on, sticking together and covering each other when it mattered most.

As your Commanding officer, it was a humbling development but as your brother, it was reassuring and relieving all in one.

Knowing you were across from him, safe as you could be surrounded by your friends and platoon, Chun-ho felt nothing but calm serenity. And then–

"–Sir please," So-yeon's voice crackles through the device, wet and choked. "You promised."

The sound of her voice, so young and so scared, drags him back to reality — to the stifled quiet of the abandoned classroom where he almost falters.

But then the rational side of him wins out, and your brother thinks about your class and of you, of how you're somewhere in that room with So-yeon, and reminds himself that just like your class, he can be strong, too.

Firmly, he presses down on his mic.

"I'm sorry I can't protect you until the end as I promised," Chun-ho says, finding his voice.

"And for dragging you into this war as an adult. At first, I thought you were disobedient kids. But now that I think about it, I'm so grateful and proud of you all."

Through his walkie, Chun-ho can hear the raw grief and sorrow of your platoon. Different voices whimpering, crying and begging him to change his mind; but he can't, and he won't.

Quietly, he calls your name. Blinks away his tears as he listens to movement on your end, before a quiet voice rasps:

"Oppa?"

In your next life, Chun-ho resolves to tell you more often how much you mean to him. Resolves to spend his next life making it up to you everyday for leaving this way.

There's so much Chun-ho wishes he could say, but time is a privilege he doesn't have so your brother settles for something shorter, something only you'll understand.

"You have been the best sister I could have asked for. And the time we had together, it was glorious. So live well, okay?"

It's not goodbye, but Lee Chun-ho is confident those are the words that will bring you the most comfort right now. The words that will give you the strength to do what the others can't do in this moment.

And he's right.

In another life, Kim Yoo-Jung would've stepped up to initiate the bomb as Class President. And if not her, than Sergeant Kim as your brothers' second in command.

But in this life, you're here.

And because you've always been a good kid, you press the button in Yoo-jung's place.

And your brother? Well, your brother closes his eyes, and smiles.

Chun-ho's latest pick is playing on the TV. It's an American move: McFarland USA, or something like that.

You're tucked into his side, all warm and lazy contentment and outside, there is the quiet patter of rain.

"Oppa?" you ask, when the movie reaches a lull.

"Hmm?" he replies, tilting his head toward you.

In the next few months, you'll be taking the CSATs. Graduating high-school before making your way into the big wide world. It's a scary thought, daunting really, but you're confident that whatever you do your brother will support you.

There is one thing you'd like to know, though.

"What if I still don't know what I want to do after school?" you ask, hesitant.

Your brother blinks, as if momentarily surprised, before his face relaxes. "I think by the time CSATS are done, you'll have an idea of what you want to do. You're the smarter one between us, so you'll be fine."

"You think so?"

Chun-ho smiles, playfully knocking your knees with his.

"I know so," he repeats, sure and confident.

"And if you're still unsure, don't focus too much on what everyone else is doing and think about what you like. Sometimes, the best thing we can do in life is find what we love and follow it to glory."

"Is that you how feel about the Military?" you can't but press, curious.

Chun-ho lets out a quiet laugh, eyes soft and gentle as he takes you in. "Not just the Military," he says, something meaningful in his tone, right before a bang resounds from the TV.

"– Now shush, it's starting to get good!"

[therealbeachfox]

The Crime Alley Kid Saves Christmas!

[[A semi-noncanonical tale of that time Conrad got conscripted into a bunch of bullshit he didn't sign up for, and his Boss With Benefits didn't fare much better.]]

Twas the night after Christmas, and all through the Nest Not a creature was stirring, except for one guest. While the wind howled outside, blowing snow to and fro A certain hench worked by computer screen glow When up from above, there rose such a clatter He shot from the chair to see what was the -UNGHHPH!-

     There was a sound not unlike a rapidly approaching motorbike, but before Conrad could even process the impossibility of that scenario he was no longer standing up from his chair, but instead embedded into the far wall of the Nest’s main chamber. His head bounced off hard enough to send explosions of light across his vision and he was certain that the metal paneling had crumpled slightly from the impact of his body.

     He cursed from the pain, but all that came out was a gurgling squeak. He couldn’t breathe either. A heavy pressure was wrapped tight around his throat and keeping him a good foot off the ground to boot. A steel beam wrapped in a leather jacket if his fumbling attempts to grab it were anything to go by.

     Someone was speaking to him, but his brain refused to make sense of the words. His vision was starting to clear, though. Details began to filter through the piercing brightness of the Nest’s overhead floodlights. A shock of black curled hair. Sunglasses? Sunglasses. Inside. At night. Ear-piercings that caught the light and glinted like daggers into his eyes. A snarling face. Black leather jacket. Blue shirt with a yellow and red pattern he couldn’t quite process.

     The steel beam wrapped around his throat lifted him another inch and shook him, which just made the no oxygen problem even worse. No helping it. Conrad swung his legs forward and slammed his boots against the gut of whoever was pinning him to the wall.

     It was like trying to kick through a concrete wall.

     Conrad swung again, further this time, bending himself almost double to wrap his legs around the arm pinning him in place. He managed to keep his grip for almost a full second before something grabbed his entire body and slammed him flat against the wall. His arms and legs went flat against the wall, spread out and pinned like he was strapped into-

Momentary panic. Memories of a soundproofed room with walls of alternating black fabric and mirrors. So many different angles to see himself from. Strapped down across a giant X, every whip welt displa-

Just a moment of panic. He barely noticed either the flash of memory or stuffing it back down into it’s box in the back of his mind.

     Conrad squinted his eyes and fought through the headache to get a better look at his assaulter. The symbol across the guy’s chest was the first thing to flicker into focus.

     Oh.

     Oh no.

     “You need to get down here, Rob!” Superboy called over his shoulder. Because that was Superboy, floating(!!) a few inches off the ground and pinning Conrad in place with a single finger against his forehead. Somehow. “You’ve got an infestation in your Nest!”

     Wow. Rude. Superboy should count himself lucky that he had a weak spot for pierced punk boys in leather who could kick his ass. Although… He scanned the floating kid up and down and frowned. “Weren’t you older than me?”

     Superboy’s head snapped back to him, black eyebrows furrowed in anger. “What?”

     Conrad tried to gesture between the cape’s face and his own, but his fingers barely twitched. Shit, he used his hands a lot when talking, didn’t he? “When you first showed. You were older than me. By at least a year or two. But now you look…” he let the rest of his thought drift into silence. The stormy expression Superboy was giving him would’ve been unnerving even if it wasn’t coming from someone who, Conrad was near certain, could shoot lasers from his eyes.

     He coughed and broke eye-contact as he caught motion from the staircase in his peripheral. Red Robin was coming down the stairs, frowning at a slim pane of black glass that looked stupidly expensive. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no sign of an intrusion, just a couple of pings from-” He looked up, and the faintly glowing white eyes of his cowl widened slightly before he facepalmed. “Goddamit, Con.”

     “What?” Conrad exclaimed in perfect synchronicity with Superboy. Con blinked in surprise as the other boy glared back.

     “I can’t deal with this right now. Con, keep him there, we’ll figure out…” Red Robin trailed off as he took in the over-screen of the Robin-computer or whatever he was calling it. He stood like that for several seconds before turning towards them with enough force it left his cape swirling around him. “Con, what the hell is all this?”

     “How the hell should I know?” Superboy asked.

     “Pretty sure he’s the one keeping me here.” Conrad replied at the same moment. The two of them returned to exchanging bewildered-slash-suspicious glares.

     Red Robin gave a sigh that was all Batman while massaging his temples. “Oh for… Conrad, also known as Con, meet Superboy, also known as Kon-El. Kon-El, my truest friend and companion, meet Conrad, some guy my brother’s banging. Who somehow broke into my stronghold while I was out.”

     “You gave me the keys ‘in case of emergency’! And you weren’t answering your bat… pager.. thing when I was trying to get permission!” Conrad tried to explain in a way that didn’t come off too much like he was trying to convince an older sibling they shouldn’t sell them out to their parents over some infraction.

     “Wait, which brother?” Superboy asked over him. “Because that hair’s not nearly red enough for Nightwing, and I know Batman would never let someone his age anywhere near Ro-”

     Conrad wheezed as the pressure around his throat slammed back full force. Superboy was close enough their noses were nearly touching. All he could see was the other kid’s eyes. Piercing unnatural blue, with bright red pinpricks glowing in the center of his pupils. Where did his sunglasses go? “He’s fucking Red Hood?!”

     Oh god, Superboy was choke-pinning him against the wall with his lips close enough to kiss. “I wished on a monkey’s paw when I was 15.” he choked out, muscles straining against whatever force was keeping him immobile. “It’s the only explanation for this.”

     The last came out more gurgled whine than actual words, but that was apparently enough to earn his release. Gravity returned with a vengeance, and the very familiar sensation of landing ass-first on cold hard ground shot up his spine. Conrad made the executive decision to just stay there for a quick bit. Partially to massage at his throat and catch his breath, mostly to come off as utterly nonthreatening and not worth the bother of slamming up against anything else.

     “What the fuck?” Superboy was a foot off the ground and several feet distant by the time Conrad could look up.

     “When you first showed up,” Conrad hacked out, “you were older than me. You’re allowed to have fantasies about people older than you! But now you’re younger-” Conrad broke off and shook his head firmly. “You know what? No. I’m not even asking. Not my business, I don’t need to know. Now or ever.”

     “Kon-El got decanted ahead of schedule and one of the side effects was a lack of aging until we figured out how to get that kickstarted. He’s been alive for about six years, is about 17 physically, and mentally…” Red Robin trailed off and waggled his hand with a shrug.

     Conrad bit back an exasperated sigh. “I just said I wasn’t going to ask.”

     “Okay, why are we telling one of Red Hood’s mooks my tragic backstory? And why is he here?”

     “Because Red Robin gave me a key!”

     “Con! Kon! Focus. Conrad. What. Am I. Looking at?” Red Robin pointed firmly at the screen which was currently taken up by a map of the greater Gotham metropolitan area. Specifically, he was pointing at the dozens (two dozen and three, supplied the part of his brain that sounded vaguely like his mother and never shut up) of routs that crossed, looped, and spread across the breadth of the city.

     Con bit his lip and debated. This was something that was almost impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t had to live on the streets as a kid, even before you brought in all the… side details.

     But Red Robin was a Bat. Perhaps the most Bat’esc Bat aside from the original. Con might not get dangled off a building during the process, but he’d still get interrogated a dozen different ways until he gave up every detail. Better to just bite the bullet.

     “Okay,” Conrad pulled himself off the floor and squared himself into his most ‘I am a professional and am delivering a professional report’ stance. “Before I start, I just need to say: I promise I am not fucking with you or making anything up. I know how it’s going to sound, but-”

     “Oh my god, dude, I spent last week having a fistfight with a version of me made out of sentient crystal that was trying to take control of the world’s beetle population. Just spill it, already!” Red Robin placed a hand gently on Superboy’s shoulder and lightly pushed him down until his feet were against the ground. Unreadable mask eyes turned back to him.

     “Please. Just tell us.”

     Con took another deep breath. “Okay, so. There’s this, um, care package… thing that homeless kids get around this time of year. Sweaters, cold-weather gear, snow-rated sleeping bags and shit like that. But it didn’t show up this year and we-”

     “Oh &*#$ me, it’s a Santa thing!” Superboy exploded, suddenly two feet off the ground again. “I swear to whatever gods Krypton had, I’m going to go full Grinch if they pull this shit ever again.”

     Red Robin ignored him and stepped forward closer to Conrad. “Santa’s presents weren’t delivered to the homeless kids in Gotham, so you’re trying to arrange deliveries of those supplies yourself. Thus…” He waved at the screen. “this whole thing to hit every location in Gotham in the minimum amount of time. Right?”

     Conrad just stood there with mouth slightly agape for a second. Not at Red Robin figuring out what was going on just from examining the map and getting a sentence of setup. He was a Robin. Robins were smart. It was the Santa thing that’d clotheslined him. That’d always been the hardest part of the sell, even with the BossJason. He’d never once encountered easy acceptance of it from anyone over the age of maybe twelve. It took a light throat-clearing from Red Robin to snap him out of it. Superboy was up in the rafters now, mutter-ranting to himself. Red Robin was ignoring him, so Conrad did as well.

     “Right. Um. So, this actually happened once before about-”

     “Four years ago, when nothing showed up until late February, middle of March.” the vigilante inserted.

     “Early February, but… yeah. We were lucky it was a mild winter that year or it could’ve been… Real bad.” Conrad shrugged off the echoes of dread from that long month that still lingered. “It’s something I’ve always tried to have a plan for in case it ever happened again. So when Christmas morning arrived with no deliveries...”

     Red Robin nodded decisively. “Kris Kringle was abducted by forces unknown into a splintered off timeline tangent two days ago.” He said like he was just filling Con in on a few extra details about a shoplifting plan. “The elves didn’t contact us until yesterday; just hours before deliveries should’ve started.” The wrinkle of his nose showed just what Red Robin thought about that particular choice. “Most of the team’s followed the abductors into the timeline splinter, but a few of us stayed here to try and get Christmas deliveries taken care of.” He gave a rueful snort, looking back up at the big screen. “We’d come down to use the Nest’s mainframe to calculate our optimal routs. Guess you had the same idea.”

     That was. A lot of information. Conrad shoved most of it on the back-burner to process when he had the time and focused on the important pieces. “I really just needed the Nest’s databases.”

     Red Robin turned back to him, head tilted slightly, featureless white eyes watching. Conrad hurried to elaborate. “Hood’s got a lot of supplies saved aside for things like this, and if it was just the Alley kids we needed to look out for it’d be more than enough, but we’ve got a whole city to cover.” He waved his hand at the map like the vigilante didn’t realize just how fucking huge Gotham was. “I tried getting information on which companies or warehouses would have cold weather gear in stock that we could ..buy,” there was barely a millisecond of stumble over the quick word substitution, “on my own, but no one’s publishing their exact stock figures online and I don’t know how to acquire that kind of information directly from their systems.

     “I tried asking Oracle for help,” that is, he’d turned on his webcam and mic, loaded up an empty Zoom call, and asked for the ghost-in-the-machine’s help every five minutes for an hour “but I don’t have any direct way of contacting them and my signal flares went unanswered. I pinged your…”

     “Batpager.” Red Robin supplied the moment it looked like Con was struggling with the word. “Just call it the Batpager. Most of us do.” The faint undercurrent of exhaustion in his voice suggested that he himself was not one of them.

     “Batpager, but I you were busy... with elves?”

     “Rabble-scabble frigging elves.” Superboy muttered as he slowly drifted back down into the conversation. “Zap us away from Christmas dinner with demands, then refuse to let us use any part of their mission control setup-”

     “Because lil’Lobo tried to set it all on fire with a flamethrower.”

     “Which brings me to my next complaint of why was lil’Lobo brought on in the first place!”

     “They were pretty liberal with their definition of ‘Young Justice Members’ when casting the summons, it looked like.”

     “He hasn’t been on the roster for years,” Superboy continued like Red hadn’t even spoken. “I don’t think he was even with us the first time we had to fill in!” He stopped, furrowed his brow, and turned to Red. “Was he?”

     “Dude, I don’t even know. My memories of those three months are completely shot.”

     This was a situation Conrad was comfortable in. The guys in charge had gotten distracted by a conversation/argument about shit he had no knowledge of. He just had to hang out and be part of the background until they circled back around to him. Normally, this would’ve been the part where he also turned all the audio into static until he heard his name, but HoodJason kept being real insistent about not doing that anymore, so he didn’t. Instead, he just focused on the name lil’Lobo.

     Lobo sounded like a mirror-inverse of Lupu, honestly. That combined with the lil’ gave Conrad the vivid mental image of a mirror-universe version of one of his cousins. Evil. With a goatee. God, evil Caleb with a goatee and a flamethrower. He could see it all a little too well, honestly. Mirror-flipped so his skin was super white and his body was super jacked. Hair so faintly brown it was nearly white? Or still a dark brown, just with blue-highlights where it caught the light? Some sort of meathead asshole just barging through things without a second thought about anything. Fucking terrifying.

     “Anyways,” Red Robin broke into Superboy’s ranting, making Conrad snap back to attention. “You couldn’t get in contact with anyone, so you broke into the Nest.”

     “You gave me a key!” Conrad’s explanation was getting a little more strained with each repetition.

     “For emergencies.” Red Robin replied.

     Conrad’s expression went blank. “We have blizzard conditions expected within the next 36 hours,” he said evenly. He wasn’t going to shout at a Robin. Definitely not when they had someone next to them who could punch through his spine. “with as much of five feet of snow and temperatures down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Kids will die without cold weather gear. Even if every shelter threw their doors open, there aren’t enough beds across Gotham to house more than maybe a quarter of us. Them.” It’d been almost three years, and it still took effort to remember he wasn’t one of them anymore. No longer homeless, definitely no longer a child.

     “Kids are going to die from this and there’s not much shit I can do about it; but I can make sure that the death toll is in the low dozens instead of the low hundreds. I know it doesn’t count as an emergency by Bat standards – there’s no one to punch to make it stop – but it counts as one to me. And all I needed was information on where in Gotham additional supplies were located so the volunteer runners could pick up shit between stops. It was going to be a quick in and out. I’d only been here about half an hour and would’ve been gone in another twenty if you hadn’t shown up.”

     Red Robin frowned and moved to the keyboard. A flurry of quick keystrokes and electronic blips and the symbols on the map Conrad had put down to mark warehouses and army surplus shops where additional gear could be acquired lit up. Con watched as the younger man tracked the various routs, seeing which ones passed by one of the restock points and which didn’t, which ones were sent out with all the gear they’d need and their paths verses the ones who’d be getting most of their supplies along the way.

     “You have the usual districts divided up further into…”

     “Gang territories. Most homeless kids are hooked into one street-kid gang or another. It’s almost impossible to stay alive and not snatched up by CPS or unmarked vans without support. Kids age out as quick as they come in, so the territories and numbers and even names of the gangs are always in flux, but I do my best to keep track of ‘em. I’ve no idea how to track down whatever kids are running independent, so I’ve got to focus on using the gang leaders as the point of contact to drop shit off with. There are a few groups,” He gestured to the larger circles centered around the Tricorner Tunnels access and the plaza around “Simon’s Church” on the southernmost island as examples. “where there’s more of a joint gathering spot for all the local street kids, so those drop-offs are a lot more straight-forward.”

     “And you’ve got each path here making no more than five dropoffs-”

     “The runners are gonna have to roll some diplomacy and spend time convincing them the gear isn’t some sort of trap, so we can’t be rushing people. I’m just glad so many volunteered to help.”

     “Each route has a bare minimum of turns or side-streets required-”

     “Needs to be easy to remember without having it written down. Not everyone can read that good.”

     “Though there’s some weird changing around with the streets and notes about times that I don’t quite get…”

     “Enough people’ve got work that there’s going to be the usual traffic. Plus, we almost always have someone pulling shit at the Steel Gables bridge in the first few days after Christmas, so we can’t rely on that being open.”

     “And the neighborhoods on each side of it are getting taken care of by routes that follow the shoreline. There’s just…”

     “Twenty-seven routes. We had sixty-odd volunteers and I wanted there to be at least two riders on each route so they could back each other up in case of trouble. A few of the least experienced I tripled up with an old wolf because there was overflow.”

     Red Robin shook his head slowly before turning back to look at Conrad. “And you set up the algorithm for this in just thirty minutes?”

     Conrad blinked again, eyes darting over to Superboy for a second (he was still scowling at him, damn) then back. “Ah. No. I… Don’t know how to do that. I already had the rough routes plotted out, then once I knew where supplies were located I just had to tweak things to account for them.”

     “And you just… what, did that by hand? In half an hour?”

     Conrad didn’t like that tone of voice. It wasn’t Red’s fault, he’d just heard it too many time from assholes (parental and otherwise) growing up. The ‘Pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about and are too stupid to even realize it’ voice.

     He might be being unfair to Red. Probably wasn’t even what that voice meant coming from him. It was an effort to keep his hackles from rising, though.

     “I had most of the routing already mapped out, but the adjustments for supplies, yeah. I was going over everything to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes when, um,” he rubbed at the growing bruise around his throat distractedly, “you arrived.”

     Red Robin was giving him the exact same look that Jason had many times at the start of their relationship. Like he was trying to pull up Conrad’s source-code for a deep dive to figure out exactly what was going on in there. He tried not to shift under the attention.

     “So how did you plot the original routes?” He asked in a mild voice that Conrad did not trust in the slightest.

     “It’s just something I work on in my head during downtime while security guarding. I update it as the various kid gangs change, that sort of thing. It’s just back burner shit.”

     “So you worked all of this out in your head.” Red Robin continued in the same mild voice. Conrad nodded cautiously. “Then you reworked it to account for having to hit up places to restock. Also in your head. In half an hour.”

     Conrad took a deep breath. He was pretty sure he knew where this was heading. He let it out in a slow exhale and nodded again. Red Robin made a small hmm of interest and turned back to the map.

     Superboy landed with the faintest sound of sneakers against floor and slid around to break Red Robin’s line of sight. “You alright there, birdbrain? You’re doing that squint thing at the corner of your eyes you do whenever you’re upset someone’s done a smarts thing you couldn’t.”

     “He does it in his head.” Red Robin said in a quiet even voice.

     “That’s what he says…” Superboy gave Conrad a dubious look over Red’s shoulder. It wasn’t a glare, at least.

     “It’s the prototypical NP-Hard problem, arguably what computer programing was invented to solve, where even the best quantum-exact algorithm can’t do better than 1.8 to the n’th power. And he’s just… ‘doing it in his head’.”

     Now it was a glare. And he’d been doing so well. Conrad just shrugged helplessly back.

     “Alright.” Red Robin snapped out of whatever disassociation he’d been in between one moment and the next making both Conrad and Superboy jump in surprise. “Kon,” he helpfully pointed at which of the two of them he meant, “grab the portable computing setup and the mega-atlas from Reference. I’ll get what the elves gave us onto the system so we can actually look at it and grab arctic gear for the three of us. Con,” this time the finger was pointing at him, “call whoever you need to and let them know you’ll be out of town. Hopefully just for a few days. Assuming lil’Lobo hasn’t burned everything down by the time we get back.”

    “Where did he even get that flame-thrower?

     “Uh, sure thing, boss.” Conrad answered instinctively, already pulling out his phone. “What exactly should I be telling them?”

*****

     “ So let the guys know we don’t need the volunteer riders after all; I’ll sort out getting everything back to the supply caches when I get back, sorry for that too. And let Elina know she’s on the line for keeping the gremlins in line for a few days. I think that’s everything. Again, I’m real sorry about this, Boss, but at least it's gonna be a way more cost-effective way to get all the Gotham street kids bundled up for the year. And the rest of the world’s street kids, too .” (‘and every other kid!’ someone shouts in the background) “Sure, and also that , I guess. They’ve promised to get me flown back once I’ve worked out a usable flight plan for,” a small sigh, “the entire world. I’m just hoping that by the time we get up there, the others would’ve already rescued Santa. Fingers crossed. Love you, babe. Stay frosty! And sorry again, Boss. ”

     The message ended with a beep. Jason looked up to Bruce from where he stood over the table with hands braced on each corner, his phone resting between them. “So yeah. Care to explain exactly why I woke up to a phone message telling me Tim shanghaied my boyfriend because of Santa Claus?”

     “When was this call made?”

     Jason blinked at the ice cold growl in Bruce’s voice. The man was still in the very exact way he got whenever he was keeping himself from vibrating in place. “Really don't think that's the thing to focus on, Bruce.” The man growled in response. Jason resisted rolling his eyes. “Three hours ago.”

     Bruce – no, it was solidly Batman now, cowl or no – strode away without another word. Jason cursed and hurried to catch up. Whenever he was in this state, Batman’s grim stride tended to outpace anything slower than a quick jog from Jason. He followed the asshole across the main floor of the cave to the matted black cases where he kept his ‘specialized equipment’. Jason didn’t know what he expected to get pulled out, but a flip-phone that looked like it was made out of glittering ice and colorful tinsel was not it.

     The entire world except for him had gone insane, then.

     Batman had flipped it open and was already growling at whoever was at the other end by the time Jason caught up. “No, what I’m asking, Merrytwinkle, is why I had to find out my mentor had been kidnapped fourth-hand?” Jason couldn’t help the utter disbelief that crossed his face. Batman just held up a hand towards him. Though he did stick up one finger, then curled his thumb in the ‘one moment’ signal that’d developed between them back in the early days.

     Jason was not going to dwell on the fact he still remembered it.

     “It doesn’t matter if they’re the only other people in existence with experience running the Sleigh if they never got any training for it!” Another moment of silence during which Batman shook his head and shot Jason a ‘can you fucking believe this asshole?’ glare. Jason nodded back, brain spinning too fast to do anything else. “No, Merrytwinkle, that actually makes it worse.”

     Batman’s nostrils flared at whatever ‘Merrytwinkle’ was saying. His lips thinned and jaw set and Jason nearly groaned out loud. The idiot on the other end had hit one of the Do Not Touch buttons. Everything was about to get Batman’ed up.

     He was still listening, but Batman’s attention turned towards unlocking and flipping open storage cases from the Specialized rack seemingly at random. His free hand flashed a series of quick signs that had Jason already moving before he’d consciously translated them into “Collect contents. One for each of us. Time critical.”

     “No, I’m already on my way. If I arrive and find nothing but ice-flows, I wont hesitate to force my way through the Normalcy Shield. … Yes, that’s exactly what would happen, which is why it’s not going to be up when we arrive.”

     Jason didn’t recognize half the stuff he’d pulled out of the cases, but it was easy to tell where they were supposed to be equipped. Batman had already stalked off to Outfitting. There was nothing left in him to be surprised when the old man returned with arctic gear that matched both their current uniforms. The extra fur padding across his chest was even stained red with a scrawled bloody bat.

     Batman snapped the phone shut and shoved it into one of his belt pouches as he strode past Jason towards the plane. Jason followed without even being directed to. Only the smallest part of him could make the effort to be pissed about it.

     The engines were firing up as Jason hauled himself in, locking and sealing the doors for takeoff by muscle memory alone.

     “Okay, old man.” he said as he dropped down in the copilot seat, only slightly disquieted to discover a winterized version of his helmet already waiting for him on the console. “What, respectfully, the fuck is going on here?”

     Batman glanced over at him, and Jason would swear there was the slightest hint of a smile on the asshole’s lips. “What else? We’re going to save Christmas.” The faint smile vanished under the much more familiar scowl, “And those little bastards can just try to stop us from doing it.”

     Jason groaned as he let the G forces of their takeoff push him back into the seat. He shouldn’t be here. He should be home. Or at headquarters. Planning shit. Prepping his holdings for whatever bullshit was going to get sprung for New Years like it did every year. Not in a supersonic jet with a possibly insane problematic father'esc-figure on the way to face off against non-existent children's stories.

     Conrad was so fucking lucky he was hot.

[teecupangel]

This is because @ma-du who tagged me on this post with the idea:

Everything is the same, but the gang is reborn as Marvel characters

I am going to assume this means that the characters' personalities stay the same, it's just that they have been reborn to live the lives of Marvel characters (Assassins versus Templars plot optional XD)

Alright.

First of all, we’ll focus on MCU characters because having the ability to choose from the entire Marvel roster will… well… it would require more research that would probably take too much time XD

Also, I will primarily be using Phase 1~3 MCU characters (focusing on the Avengers with some exceptions) because the post did have Infinity Saga MCU characters (yeah, that’s the main reason why).

Alright, let’s give everyone some new problems!

Desmond: Moon Knight. Okay, he’s the main reason why I said ‘with some exceptions’. I mean… come on. Come oooonnn. Oh course, Desmond will still suffer thru the Bleeding Episodes which would lead him to be the AC equivalent of Moon Knight. Not to mention, just imagine the absolute fuckery he will suffer thru when he meets up with the reincarnated versions of his ancestors while he still have his ancestors in his brain as the Bleeding Effect. Instead of Khonsu though, I suggest we go for Ra (for the sun irony) or, if you wanna stay in the Greco-Roman mythology that was strongest in Desmond Saga, may I suggest Minerva (to make Minerva suffer with him) or Dionysus?

Altaïr: Doctor Strange, hands down. Used to be an arrogant overachiever? Taken down a peg by some kind of tragedy? Still a bit of an asshole but now has an entire subject he could spend the rest of his life studying and be the top expert still? Becomes leader of a secret-ish organization trying to protect the world in what amounts to a short time all things considered? OP powers with a lot of glowing gold accents AND holds an OP artifact? Altaïr is, hands down, the nearest Doctor Strange we will have on this list. Sidenote: Malik gets Wong’s job of being the usually annoyed dude that has to keep Altaïr from bending the rules too much. The Sanctum Masters are the Rafiqs of Damascus and Jerusalem + Kadar. Karl Mordo will have to be Abbas (sorry Karl Mordo) while Al Mualim would either take the Ancient One (if we plan to keep him good in this one) or Kaecilius.

Ezio: Iron Man. He comes from a rich family with lots of connections, is actually smarter than people usually assume he is, flirts a lot but also carries a torch for a specific person in his life, and a tragedy in his life changed him. Of course, his father wasn’t a dick to him (up to you if we gonna kill Giovanni and Maria off for drama), Federico gets reborn as Happy (who is still Ezio’s brother but preferred to be his security officer), Claudia is still his sister but has Pepper Pott’s job (although, everyone in Auditore Industries knows it’s really Claudia who takes care of the everyday operation, Ezio is the inventor and the face of the company, Claudia is the shadow queen) and Cesare gets to be Justin Hammer. Petruccio can be the kid in Ironman 3 or he's just living his life as the third Auditore child who has cool 'toys' to help his weak body that his brother made for him.

Ratonhnhaké:ton: We can go for Hawkeye/Ronin, the normal human who can keep up with everything that’s happening (also, he would make a good parental figure for the Frye twins). Also, even if we call him ‘normal’, we all know he could kick everyone’s ass thru sheer determination and stubbornness alone. Another option would be Black Panther but I kinda want Adéwalé to be Black Panther?

Haytham: … is it weird I kinda want him to be Nick Fury? Like… he’s the all-time suffering man in charge who doesn’t actually have any authority over any of the superheroes he ‘conscripted’? I just want Haytham to suffer while, for once, not being on the other side.

Edward: Okay… I mean… I know there would be a Phase 1~3 character that would work for him, the easiest would be making him part of the Asgardian family drama but, may I suggest a non-MCU character? Daimon Helstrom. Because Edward’s actor Matt Ryan is sooo good as Constantine that I will always think of him as Constantine. Helstrom is the nearest Marvel equivalent to Constantine and he’s also a free agent type which works well with Edward’s character for most of Black Flag. (plus I got “canceled after a good season 1” deja vu with Helstrom as I did with Constantine). If you really want him to be part of Phase 1~3, Antman (Scott Lang) would work with Jenny taking the place of the daughter Cassie.

Shay: If Haytham is our Nick Fury, Shay gets to be his Maria Hill (second-in-command, normal human that can kick so much ass, and… that tight outfit) or Phil Coulson if you wanna go down the route of Shay doing his own thing.

Arno: Spider-Man because I think Ezio mentoring him would be a nice touch and… his first love Élise being a Templar is kinda similar to how Liz was the Vulture’s daughter. Still thinking about who his Ned should be though.

Evie and Jacob: Look, we’re talking about twins here so I’m pretty much obligated to make Evie and Jacob Wanda and Pietro. Although, this time, Jacob’s not gonna die. XD

Bayek: Steve Rogers (no, he will not be called Captain America, think of a more ‘universal’ superhero name) because he’s an all-around good guy, his default weapon in AC promotional images has him using a shield, and he started out as a man who just wanted to do what was right and protect his people that got sucked into the overarching plot because of a tragedy. Also… Aya as a badass normal human like Peggy Carter, hhhmmm?

Kassandra: You know, I was thinking that Kassandra could be Steve Rogers with Alexios becoming Winter Soldier. (Which I think would still work, we’ll just have to change Bayek into someone else…) But Kassandra has to be Captain Marvel, right? The OP powers and “not to be a lesbian but oh my god oh my god” vibes she gave off just made her suited to be Captain Marvel more.

Eivor: She’s gotta be reborn as Thor, right? Like… sure, Odin is right there but Eivor’s love for fighting and her loyalty to her people feels more like Thor than Odin. (Let’s not make AC Odin reborn as MCU Odin. I’d even go for Varin to be reborn as her father again or even Sigurd to have a bit of arrogance at this point)

Basim: Look. We all know Basim’s gonna be reborn as… Korg. Of course, I’m kidding. He’ll be reborn as Loki as we all expected. XD

Clay: Deadpool. He’s supposed to be dead, his mind got shattered after receiving his ‘superpowers’, and… he’s the only person in this cast other than Desmond that actually remembers who he was before. His whole ‘knows about the fourth wall’ shtick is connected to the fact that he still has access to the Calculations and that’s actually what broke his mind… again.

[mksbigg3stfan]

Ling's life before FMA started is pretty vague, but there's things we can assume based on China's influence on the creation of Xing. FMA takes place in the early 20th century, probably sround 1910s to 1930s. The country Xing was based on, China, was at that time a revolt by a group of revolutionaries against the Qing Dynasty. The imperial system was ended, and put in its place was the Republic of China.

However, FMA follows a history where the Dynasty continued. So, what exactly is the Imperial system?

Chinese society was split into five categories, or classes, which were Nobility and the "four occupations." The highest class was Shi, or the gentry, then the Nong, farmers, Gong, craftspeople, and Shang, the Merchants.

Farmers were the base of China's economy and viewed as vital to their country. They provided cotton, food, and silk, along with many other consumeable goods. A large portion of the food they harvested went to Landlords, local Nobles, or was given out to the empire itself. Farming communities produced goods needed by the government, and if not, they were conscripted for public projects.

As a result of the massive area and amount of people, direct rule from the Emperor was not possible. The Emperor relied on civil servants to carry out his orders, most of which were members of the gentry. What was important to this class was literacy, since the Chinese government basically ran on paperwork. Both the nobles and Shi did not perform manual labor but could become painters and poets.

Laws and punishments were harsh to maintain power for the upper classes. A crime could lead to a criminal's entire family being executed. Their society was based on Confucian Principles, so it was the people in power's duty to lead the people well. ("While people should obey their rulers, the rulers should work to benefit their people."). The family structure was meant to have each member treat all the others with a mutual respect for their contributions to the family.

That same ideal applied to the family, where male heads were supposed to "govern wisely," and the rest of the house should obey. Women were expected to be subservient, and there had been only one female empress. Noble women were often involved with power struggles, but they worked mostly out of sight.

Because of these values, the more powerful a man was, the more likely he was to have many concubines besides his wife.

(Now I can talk about one of my favorite guys....😼😼😼)

Ling was probably one of the many sons caused by the Emperor having many concubines. Since he was probably an imperial concubine's son, Ling most likely had a very isolated life where he was forever fighting for his father's approval. Noble, or gentry classes, are filled with much cutthroat, inner fighting, where Ling's half siblings almost absolutely had attempts made on his life by assassins or tried to destroy his reputation.

At first, Ling seems to be laid back and carefree, but he actually takes his position as a prince very seriously. He tells Mei Chang that when he becomes Emperor, he is going to reunite their families and protect them. Ling has prioritized Lan Fan's and Ed's lives over his own, despite Ed having a lower status than him and Lan Fan being his body guard.

He is absolutely prepared to die for his cause. For his whole life, he has been completely aware that any one of his many half siblings could take his place, undo all his progress, and send him back to nothing.

The drive that he has led him through the desert, making the long, grueling joirney to Amestris. Since the people of Amestris don't know of his social status, he is able to act like a normal kid his age for once and become friends with Ed.

If anything is wrong, please let me know !!! ( ﾟεﾟ；)

Sources:

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/chinese-rev#:~:text=In%10October%20of%201911%2C%20a.and%20ending%20the%20imperial%20system

https://www.unm.edu/~toh/china/age-of-empire.html#:~text=Tye%20Structure%20of%20Empire.%2C%20and%20shang%20(merchants)

[phanfictioncatalogue]

10k Masterlist

A Bullet or Two for You (ao3) - IsEmilyReal

Summary: Daniel Howell is conscripted into the British Army at 19. At 24, with the help of a little hot metal, he meets a man who changes his perspective. Maybe hospital isn’t so bad after all.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (to change a life) (ao3) - croissantbleu (orphan_account)

Summary: Dan Howell is a rising star in theatre, Phil Lester is an actor acclaimed by the audience and the critique. They both get a role in the same play.

a rose by any other name (would smell as sweet) (ao3) - truerequitedlove

Summary: Dan and Phil are finally able to foster a child, and a shy teenager shows up at their door with long messy hair and an averted gaze.

Beach Baby (ao3) - fictional_fangirl

Summary: Phil meets a mysterious boy on the beach on his family holiday. You know the rest.

Blurry Stranger (ao3) - phantropolis

Summary: Set in August of 2015, Phil is invited to his high school’s reunion. Afraid of being the only single one in attendance, he convinces Dan to accompany him as his fake ‘boyfriend’ for the week. It’s only when Phil allows his best friend into his childhood life and begins to see him in a romantic light that actual feelings start developing - but it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be reciprocated.

Boyfriends Without Benefits (ao3) - iihappydaysii

Summary: There’s only one real bed on the tatinof tour bus and Phil’s willing to share it with Dan. The problem? Dan’s in love with Phil and Phil has no idea.

Class A Klutz (ao3) - bokeae

Summary: Dan’s an asshole who stars in high quality films and Phil’s just a clumsy idiot who has bad timing.

closer to where I started (ao3) - dizzy

Summary: An onstage accident at a convention leads to a week of stress, nightmares, and evaluating life choices for Dan and Phil.

Daydreams - placingglaciers

Summary: Nothing like a Christmas-in-July party can’t fix for two shy office crushes!

do you believe in magic? (ao3) - darkesthorizon

Summary: Dan discovers a meadow of flowers where fairies made of flowers can grant you one wish. But there's a catch: your wish has to be pure. What does that even mean?

Falling In Love With The Enemy - doomedhowell

Summary: punk!phil gets dared by Chris to ask rich!dan out. They hate each other and Phil doesn’t want to do the dare but he loves challenges. He only has two weeks until the deadline to make Dan fall in love with him.

I’d Rather You Were There - howthemoonsuitsthenightsky

Summary: When war breaks out everyone wants to sign up, well, almost everyone. 

i know what to feel when you decide (ao3) - danhoweiis

Summary: it was the weekend, 2 days after the date with his boyfriend. it was perfectly rational and normal to dream about kissing your best friend, right?

well that's what phil tried to convince himself anyway.

aka the one where phil has a boyfriend that isn't dan and dan tries his best not to be a jealous little bitch.

it’s no good (unless it’s real) (ao3) - blueshirt

Summary: The first time it happens is an accident.

(Or, the one where Dan accidentally starts reverse-dating Phil in the midst of executing a foreign tour, sharing the world’s tiniest mattress, and generally failing at Amish table-making.)

kids II (ao3) - waveydnp

Summary: It’s a strange feeling to be falling a little deeper every day and not be allowed to let anyone else see.

Lester’s Bail Bonds (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: Dan Howell is a flight attendant who gets caught smuggling illegal money for his boss. When he gets arrested, he meets bail bondsman Phil Lester, who gets him out of jail. Being threatened on both sides by the cops and by Dan’s terrifying boss, Dan and Phil develop a plan to double-cross both parties, take the boss’ money, and run away together. Will they be able to pull off the heist?

Losing everything and falling in love (ao3) - ironicallyrad (snakedolls)

Summary: After arguing between who should go buy milk, Dan finally gives in and heads out. It's not until after 40 minutes that he's out, that Phil receives a call from the hospital saying his best friend is in a coma. Phil has to go through the struggle of possibly losing his best friend and then helping him recover as he falls desperately in love.

Of Paparazzi and Succulents - bontanistlester

Summary: Actor!Dan is running away from a mob of fans when he runs into a flower shop. There, he meets a quirky florist who has an absurd liking towards succulents, seeming to think they have feelings of their own.

Raise your arms and hold (ao3) - danfanciesphil (thejigsawtimess)

Summary: Phil’s only requirement for a new flat was a balcony. The view was just a bonus.

Ready Player Two (ao3) - jonsaremembers

Summary: Their paths diverge for a time.

Sacrilegious (ao3) - TheUKAmazingDan

Summary: Dan Howell was a good kid. A Catholic, growing up in Mass and youth group. But, after meeting Phil Lester, his life drastically changed, turning the quiet and meek boy into a wild child.

The Literal Other Half (ao3) - Nefertiti1052 (Succubusphan)

Summary: Dan arrives at Manchester University and feels a bit lost, luckily he gets an upperclassman as a tour guide and mentor of sorts. Coffee dates, friends and a lot of laughter finally enter his life - along with love.

the rest can wait (ao3) - waveydnp

Summary: dan's year at manchester university

the sun a souvenir (ao3) - deletable_bird

Summary: It took Dan a record-breaking eleven times of being in the same physical space as his current crush before he managed to speak a word to him.

To Dwell on Dreams (ao3) - carltzmann

Summary: Dan and Phil meet at the Mirror of Erised.

unashamed, wide open for joy (ao3) - queerofcups

Summary: Dan laughs a little and says, “Oh, I, ah. I make videos. For people. Online.”

“Oh!” Phil says, sounding a little surprised, but not put off. He laughs quietly, almost to himself, and says, “I do too, actually.”

It turns out, “I make videos for the internet” can have multiple meanings.

unequivocally yours (ao3) - lyricallyharley

Summary: dan has many fears, his biggest one being the supernatural. how can he be scared of something he doesn’t believe in? and where do fears actually come from?

whatever we need (ao3) - animad

Summary: Dan does something drastic to break a habit but they try to make the most of it.

what you won't say out loud (ao3) - seabright

Summary: All in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Wishing For The Stars (ao3) - thatsthephan

Summary: A Prince!Phil Servant!Dan AU that was a lot of fun to write and has a lot of fluff in it:)

You are Not Sleeping on The Goddamn Floor (ao3) - pepelovesme

Summary: Dan and Phil's 2009 meeting reimagined. Dan is curious, they talk sexuality. Smut ensues.

you'll find me waiting here for you. (ao3) - commonemergency

Summary: Walking down the streets of London is like walking down a ghost town, missing people posters filled the streets along with trash and cars. They’ve had many discussions of relocating somewhere safer, somewhere with more possibilities of food and other resources, but it’s hard letting go of the place that shaped you. or Dan and Phil (+ two lesbians) vs. a post apocalyptic world.

[comicaurora]

So, you mentioned on the podcast that you were watching some classic-era Gundam.

For the season(s) you've watched, assuming you're not planning on suddenly taking the plunge and making a Universal Century Detail Diatribe, would you mind sharing your opinion so far? Universal Century can be a bit divisive, but I always enjoy seeing people's opinions on it. I have mixed feelings on some of the decisions made, myself, but in the grand scheme of things I enjoy what I've seen so far. (Especially Unicorn, but that's not really classic era.)

Also, I'd like to reccomend watching (or reading!) Gundam The Origin, since it acts as a really good, pretty, (and in the anime's case, short) prequel series to the original.

It's interesting! I've watched the compilation movies for 1 and 2 and most of 3, and I can't tell if they lost the plot after 1 or if the writers were being really, really scathing in a subtle way.

1 was incredibly blatant about how Amuro is a traumatized kid who got strongarmed into being the gundam pilot and using it to kill people, something that he clearly absolutely hates - and it's pretty overt that the Federation Force is more than willing to mulch up as many child soldiers as they want in order to win. The movies, and I assume the show they're compiled from, go out of their way to show that there are sympathetic young people on both sides of the conflict that just want to be free of this war, and there are also right bastards on both sides that are willing to be very callous with the lives of others. You can, of course, always identify who the compassionate people are by how pretty they are, and all the right bastards by how grotesque they are. It's pretty unsubtle about that being the core of the narrative, and they really twist the knife at certain points, like when Amuro's mother is horrified and ashamed at him self-defense-killing a Zeon soldier that was actively menacing her refugee camp, and Amuro concluding that she doesn't love him and he truly has no family to go back to.

By 2, things have gotten a little confusing, and I'm inclined to assume this is because the compilation movies had to make some cuts that would've made the character arcs flow a little more smoothly. Amuro decides to leave the whole war behind, which makes sense, but he takes the gundam, which doesn't. They introduce this thread that Amuro is extremely attached to the gundam and very proud of his ability to pilot it, and he has an actual breakdown when he learns that other members of the crew are now trained in its operation and can use it just fine, if not quite as skillfully as he can. It seems like there was a bit of a lurch from "Amuro has been unwillingly dragged into this nightmare and is forced to fight again and again despite his extremely obvious PTSD" to "Amuro refuses to let go of the giant robot that tethers him TO this nightmare," and while it's very interesting in the implications, it doesn't exactly flow cleanly. In fact, this is where there seems to be a bit of a shift from "war is bad" to "wow! cool robot." Amuro goes from PTSD-catatonia every time he destroys an enemy mobile suit to counting them during fight scenes, which is kind of a chilling indicator of the mechanized horror he's becoming accustomed to - assuming that was on purpose and not just a broad defanging of the story to do more Cool Robot Fights.

But the thing is, there's this subplot sometime around 2 or 3 involving a bunch of actual toddlers that have been hanging around on the ship - because it started as a refugee vessel escaping the destruction of a colony, so there's a lot of women (who are now conscripted pilots, of course, and shockingly badass for the era it came out in) and children onboard, and they've been stuck on the front lines running from Zeon with almost no ground support because the Federation likes throwing the gundam at things too much to care about a handful of six-year-olds potentially getting mulched. But throughout this little arc, the kids are finally on track to getting rehomed on Earth by the military - something that the kids are unhappy about because they've got a whole Found Family thing going, but Amuro approves of them leaving, saying "little kids shouldn't see people killing each other," which aligns very firmly with how he is a kid who hates all the killing he's stuck in.

Except then the happy ending is that the six-year-olds get to stay on the warship because they recently helped out with bomb disposal and "they've seen things you guys can't imagine, they don't want to leave!" And this is either really losing the plot or absolutely brilliant spiteful writing on the part of the creative team, because as I understand it, executive meddling was pushing them to include newer, flashier, more colorful giant robots (weapons of war and untold suffering that our teen hero has been trapped in by a mechanized war machine that has effectively enslaved him for his talents) to push toys to the exact age demographic of those chipper six-year-olds. It's almost like the teenage child soldiers are turning out to directly face the camera and saying "what's the difference between forcing us onto the front lines and letting these precocious youngsters keep flinging themselves into the crossfire? Gotta sell more gunplas, right?"

So if that was on purpose, I really liked it. If not, it's kinda hearbreaking to see the show gradually start pulling its punches in favor of turning the Oops All Babies warship into a heartwarming found family situation.

Also they started really banging the "newtypes are the plot now" drum in 3 and once everyone started getting psychic powers I kinda lost steam tbh