#stab wounds that don’t close. a heart bleeds until you die. the scratch marks itch under the armour

[fairyfortalliance]

the imagery of no health regen…… wounded skin that doesn’t heal…. torn clothes….. burns…. scorch marks….. bite marks….. blood everywhere…… unraveling bandages…… oh…….

[madasthesea]

AU: Platonic Soulmates

(Warning: blood)

Tony sighs heavily, absently scratching at his wrist. The nanotech is fighting him tonight—everything he tries ending in another failure. He should probably just call it quits and go to bed, really. Pepper’s almost certainly already asleep, having long since given up on him.

Tony scratches his wrist again. Sleep doesn’t sound so bad, actually. Better than the frustration he’s currently experiencing.

Running his fingers through his hair, Tony reaches out to the holo-table, ready to turn it off. Out of habit, he glances at his hand.

The name wrapping around his wrist in royal blue ink had been jarring for the first few months. He would catch it out of the corner of his eye and flinch or forget it was there. Now it’s comforting, though, familiar. Just like the kid that it designated as his soulmate.

In the dim light, it takes a second to register that the color isn’t as strong as it should be, not as bright and solid.

Tony’s stomach drops and then he’s scrambling through the lab, nearly tripping on his stool as he flings himself toward the door.

“FRIDAY, call Peter, push it through. Give me a suit, now,” he gasps. Now, an hour ago, yesterday. How long had he sat there fruitlessly staring at nanobots while Peter had been...?

“Call connected,” FRIDAY announces just as one of the Iron Man suits closes around Tony. He hopes it’s his fastest one.

“Peter?” Tony snaps.

Silence. Tony strains his ears.

“FRI?” he asks, his voice breaking.

“The call is connected, boss.”.

“Peter, buddy, please.” Peter doesn’t answer, and, worse, Tony can’t even hear his breathing.

He can’t see the mark on his wrist while he’s in the suit, but he can feel it, itching and burning and demanding attention.

“What are his vitals?” Tony whispers, zooming over the New York skyline toward the blinking red dot of Peter’s tracker.

“His AI is malfunctioning, I can only get a heartrate. Forty-two beats per minute and slowing.”

So he is alive. Alive and bleeding out, probably in some dingy alley: The life leaching from him just like the color leaching from Tony’s soulmark.

When your soulmate dies the mark goes white. Like a scar. Never to recover.

“Full power to thrusters,” Tony chokes out. “And prep the Medbay or, or an ambulance, or... something. Anything.”

He’s closing in fast. He doesn’t bother slowing down, just crash lands, skidding into a dumpster and sending rats skittering. This is where his kid is, injured and unconscious and dying.

Tony claws at the suit until it opens, falling out gracelessly. He scrambles to the side of the prone figure, ignoring the sticky pool of hot liquid he kneels in. With shaking hands, Tony grasps Peter’s face, turning it toward him. In the dim lamplight, barely reaching the dark recesses of the alley Tony can see the blue around his wrist fading, practically flickering like a weak heartbeat. Like Peter’s heartbeat.

Peter doesn’t even groan, his eyelids don’t even flutter.

“Ambulance, FRIDAY.” The kid wouldn’t survive the flight back to the tower Medbay. He might not even survive the wait for the ambulance.

Tony’s heart is imploding. His vision is fading in and out. He can’t... he can’t...

By sheer instinct from years of running around with the Avengers, Tony finds his hands applying pressure to the gaping wound in Peter’s thigh. It’s deep and wide, but he thinks that by some miracle the femoral artery must have stayed intact, simply by virtue of the fact that Peter isn’t dead yet.

“Peter,” Tony says loudly, putting his entire body weight on the wound. He doesn’t have a belt on or he would do a tourniquet, and he won’t leave Peter long enough to find a suitable replacement.

“Peter,” Tony practically shouts. He presses down hard, almost purposefully digging into the wound just to get some reaction. Finally, finally, Peter whines in the back of his throat, his eyebrows beetling.

“Kid? Kid, you with me?” Peter doesn’t answer, but his face stays creased in pain. As much as Tony hates it, it’s better than the pale lifelessness of before.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, Pete, but you are not allowed to die. Do you understand? You can’t do that to me. You can’t.”

A siren pierces the quiet and tears of relief spring to Tony’s eyes.

“Ok, kiddo, just a little longer,” he murmurs. “Please, buddy, hold on for me.”

The medics arrived in a blur of red lights and shouted questions. They load Peter into the ambulance and Tony scrambles in with him. He sits at Peter’s feet, because that’s the only place an EMT doesn’t need to be. Aching to touch him, to feel that Peter actually is there, getting the help he so desperately needs, Tony reaches out his hand and wraps it around Peter’s ankle.

His soulmark is hard to see through the blood coating him nearly up to his elbows.

In the back of his mind, Tony remembers reading somewhere that the only thing worse than losing your child was losing your soulmate.

How can Tony survive losing both?

  Tony sits with Pepper in the waiting room and watches his mark like it was the only thing in the world that matters. Maybe it is.

He cleaned himself up once he got to the hospital and had been forced away from Peter, but the knees of his jeans are stained rust brown and there are streaks of blood on his t-shirt. Pepper had blanched when she’s seen him, but Tony hadn’t managed to force out any words of comfort.

May bursts into the waiting room eventually, looking frantic. Pepper goes to talk with her. Tony’s sitting with his head in his hands, but when they both come over, May reaches out and tugs his right hand into hers. Tony squeezes his eyes shut. She isn’t just offering comfort, she’s checking his mark. It’s the only source of news they’ll have until Peter’s surgery is done.

After a long moment, Tony looks up and meets May’s gaze. Her eyes are red, but she looks stalwartly back at him. On her neck, just above her collarbone, is her own soulmark, Benjamin Parker written in a cramped, messy hand. The letters are white now, like a scar. Like spider webs.

Tony decides then and there that he would rather cut his own hand off than have to face the reminder of losing the most important person in his life every single day.

For so long, Tony had thought he didn’t have a soulmate. If it wasn’t Pepper—or, heck, even Rhodey—it wasn’t anyone. And then the Accords fiasco had happened and he’d found himself sitting in a teenager’s room, clapping him on the shoulder and asking if he’d ever been to Germany.

Soulmarks appeared the first time you touched each other. Tony had felt the burning under the skin of his wrist and done his best to ignore it, grateful his jacket sleeve covered the skin. As soon as he’d left, however, he’d yanked up the fabric to see Peter Parker curving around his wrist like a bracelet in childish handwriting.

He didn’t tell anyone for months. In fact, he did his best to pretend it hadn’t happened. How do you casually say, “Hey, I met my soulmate that I didn’t think I had and, by the way, it’s a fourteen-year-old boy that I made fight Captain America?”

Pepper had been the first person to find out, after they got back together. Tony had tried to brush it off, but she had taken his face in her hands and looked at him for a long time before saying, “I don’t think the universe gets these kinds of things wrong, Tony.”

He’d disagreed, then. In fact, it had taken Peter almost dying (again) for him to wake up. He’d been standing in sickened horror as medics had cut away the Spider-Man suit so they could stitch up a gushing knife wound. And there on his chest, in the exact same place the arc reactor scar was on Tony, was Anthony Stark in blazing red.

It’d been a lot harder to deny after that. He’d sat Peter down and had a very short, awkward, and probably insufficient talk with him about it and somewhere between then and now, Tony realized that the universe had known exactly what it was doing when it decided that Peter Parker and Tony Stark were meant for each other.

Peter is... Peter is everything. He’s his lab partner, his best friend, his hero, his son all in one. He makes Tony more himself than he had ever been, than he had known how to be. He learned that he liked waking up early to dumb texts about people on the subway, he learned he preferred home cooked meals to ordering out, he learned that he liked to teach. He learned a new definition for ‘home,’ and it’s almost entirely centered on Peter’s laugh and the way his eyes look in late afternoon sunlight.

What he wouldn’t give to be there right now, he thinks. If he could click his heels three times and go home, he would be curled up with Peter’s head on his shoulder and Pepper’s feet in his lap and a single blanket draped over all three of them.

As it is, all he can do is stare at his wrist and pray for that familiar royal blue, that beautiful blue, to grow stronger.

It gets paler instead. The blue creeps away from the edges, fading and fading until it is suddenly, brutally gone.

May’s hand is crushingly tight around his.

“No,” Tony breathes, and it’s the only thing he can do, the only word he can think. No. No, no, no nononono.

It hurts. It aches all the way down to his bones and the stabbing, burning pain emanating from his wrist straight to his heart is so sharp Tony cries out.

The blue jolts back and disappears, leaving nothing but thin, gossamer script. It looks so much like spider webs Tony would laugh if he could manage it around the piercing, ripping agony.

He has never thought too much about soulmates, but now he wonders how literal that word is. Are they one spirit in two bodies? Is Tony’s soul, right now, being shredded, torn asunder? It feels like it.

The words light up blue again, flicker, and die.  

Tony’s going to vomit.

They’re shocking his kid. His Peter. Trying to restart his heart. Trying to bring him back to life.

The blue fizzes back into existence and this time, this time, it stays that way.

May sobs in relief next to him, unclenching her fingers from around Tony’s so she can lift it to her face and cry.

Pepper, kneeling next to him unnoticed for the last two minutes, yanks Tony up and guides him to a garbage can just in time for Tony to make good on his promise and cough up bile.

A nurse comes and checks on him after that, but Tony ignores her, barely registering her murmur of, “His soulmate? Oh, that can cause very visceral reactions,” as if there was something quantifiable, something normal about having your world balanced on the precipice of complete and utter destruction.

  It takes them four hours to finish Peter’s surgery, another hour before he’s in a room. They almost stop Tony from going in, spouting that “family only” line Tony has heard so many times, but Tony’s at the end of his rope, so he just shoves his wrist in the RN’s face, who nods and bashfully steps aside.

Tony collapses in the chair by Peter’s bed, feeling like he’d just run up Mount Everest. He reaches up and takes Peter’s hand. The name around his wrist is a dark, stunning blue. For the first time all night, Tony can breathe.

  When Peter wakes up, Tony’s at his side.

“Hey, kiddo,” Tony whispers as Peter scrunches his eyes closed, his nose wrinkling up.

“Tony,” Peter slurs, turning his head toward the sound.

“Right here.” He stands and puts his hand on the center of Peter’s chest, right over his soulmark.  

Peter hums, smiling dopily, his eyes still closed. “’Is you.”

Peter’s hand comes up and wraps around Tony’s wrist, his fingers covering his own name on Tony’s skin. As always, a small rush of warmth accompanies the touch.

Tony laughs lightly. “You could see that if you opened your eyes, buddy.”

Peter makes an unhappy noise, but slowly opens his eyes.

“Hi,” he says.

Tony snorts. “Hey, kid. Good to see those eyes open.”

Peter grimaces. He looks around the room, frowning.

“How’d you know?” He asks suddenly, sounding slightly more lucid. “I... the suit was damaged. I passed out before I could call.”

Sighing, Tony sits on the edge of Peter’s bed. He gently adjusts Peter’s grip on his arm so that his mark is showing.

“Luckily, I have a very reliable alarm bell, right here.”

“Oh.” Peter runs his thumb over name again. “It was that bad?”

Tony’s stomach clenches, remember the feeling of desolation as he’d sat in the waiting room, watching as Peter flatlined.

“It was pretty bad,” Tony agrees. “In fact, I uh, had to blow our cover a bit. They wouldn’t let me in until I showed them my wrist.”

It is, technically, a secret. If Tony’s going out, he always wears a watch or suit jacket to cover the mark, knowing a single paparazzi shot is all it would take to change Peter’s life forever.

Peter bites his lip. “Think it’ll be a problem?” he asks, his voice small.

“Nah,” Tony says, leaning forward so he can brush Peter’s hair off his forehead. “Plenty of parents have their kid as their soulmate.”

Peter smiles, that smile that means home to Tony more than any building or city. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Nothing new.”    

[stillness-in-green]

Salt-Sweet Curse

A wild departure from my usual fandom interests, but what can I say - the villain drama in My Hero Academia is really doing it for me right now. For MerMay, and also for @codenamesazanka, whose post about this really inspired me, have some Shigaraki and Toga mermaid AU. 

Toga Himiko had a new target, and he wasn’t exactly her usual type. He walked around town slouched and hidden away in a black hoodie, just radiating ‘societal outcast,’ while she preferred people with more cheer. Killing someone who’d just die with an attitude like, “Yeah, it figures,” would be the absolute worst! Also, he smelled bad. Like, really bad. But she only knew that because she’d passed him by close enough to see the other thing, the one that caught her interest—his eyes were red. Really, true ruby red, and that was enough to have her tailing him for hours, because she wanted to know if his eyes really did match the color of blood as closely as she thought they would.

He was a wily one, though! He must’ve clued in that he was being followed, because his shoulders had gone tight and hunched, and he kept looking over his shoulder, those gorgeous eyes scanning the crowd. She was a wily one, too, though, and his eyes hadn’t landed on her yet (though she wouldn’t hate it if they did—patience, Himiko-chan, patience).

She saw her chance when thunder rumbled through the open air, and the crowds of people paused and then resumed walking, all a two-step faster. The boy—older than her, but still not quite a man, she didn’t think—stopped at the mouth of an alley and looked up at the clouds. They were quite the picture, an impressionistic panorama in shades and strokes of grey, layers on layers. The darkest ones were piling in from the west, though, a haze of rain already visible on the horizon. She could see the consternation on the boy’s face, frustration visible even from her safe distance. He scratched at his neck and turned his head down, pulling his hoodie tighter and looking around. Didn’t you bring an umbrella today, silly thing? Toga giggled at the thought, her own umbrella pink and playful, still unopened over her shoulder.

Eventually, the boy headed for the bridge. How convenient! When he didn’t go up over the top, but rather down towards the riverbank, she even wondered if it was a call-out. Well, that suited her fine. He ducked up between the pylons and out of sight and she decided to give him a few minutes, watching the school kids and stray fishermen along the bank pack up and trail off towards home as the rain came in.

Once the embankment was clear, she gave her umbrella a spin, sluicing water in every direction, then closed it and tossed it to the ground. Right away, the rain began to soak through her hair and clothes, and she stifled a laugh as she ran down the slope towards the cover of the bridge.

In the dim and damp, she felt the weight of someone’s eyes—someone’s gorgeous red eyes—but the boy wasn’t immediately visible and she didn’t search for him. Instead, she made a show of examining herself with a disgruntled expression before wringing out her sleeves and kicking loose water off of her shoes. She shook her head and rubbed her ears, dislodging a bit of trickling wet, gave the pouring rain a half-hearted glare, and finally straightened her shoulders to start looking around.

Discarded bits of paper and cigarette butts littered the lee beneath the bridge, roadwork signs for the thoroughfare overhead stacked in haphazard piles in amongst the pylons. Graffiti slogans marked the cement walls on the opposite side of the river. The rain sounded a steady drumming, mixing in with the lapping of the river, and the air whispered cool and dark on her cheeks.

She turned, gaze scanning up the near walls, and saw him again at last, a black lump tucked up in the highest recesses of the gloom.

“Oh!” She raised a hand to her mouth in surprise, then her voice in greeting. “Hello, up there! I’m sorry; I didn’t realize anyone else was here!”

He didn’t move, features indistinguishable in the shadows.

“It looks like the rain’s gonna keep going for a while,” she called, and started up in his direction—no sense giving him a chance to turn her down. “Do you mind if I come up?”

If he responded, he didn’t do it loud enough to make himself heard over the rain, so she clambered up towards the upper recesses where the cement embankment met the underside of the bridge. The boy, she saw as she neared him, sat curled up with a ragged-looking backpack pulled up over his head, his arms wrapped around his knees, taking up as little space as possible.

Are you scared? she thought, and bit the inside of her lip, fighting back her grin.

“I said no,” he growled when she stopped a few feet away from him. His voice was hoarse, a groan like buckling metal.

“Oh—sorry, I couldn’t hear anything over all that.” She waved blithely at the downpour and gave him an apologetic smile, dipping her head in contrition. A drop of water squeezed out of a chink in the concrete above her, plopping down atop her head, which she ducked down further, twisting it to look up at him sideways. “Is it dry up there? I just need somewhere to wait until it dies down a bit.”

He edged away from her minutely as she closed the distance and plopped herself down beside him with no further fanfare. Up close, the stink hit her again—so profound it passed out of the realm of bad and into some farther territory of personalized, body odor so layered that she couldn’t even pick out the usual things like “sweat” or “blood” or “piss” or “beer.” He just smelled like himself—something sour and penetrating and old. She itched to ask him about it, but a schoolgirl like herself should be polite, so instead she rummaged in her pockets, fingers skimming over her switchblade to land on her cellphone.

She pulled it out and squinted at it, swiping the lockscreen away and pulling down the status bar to look at—and sigh at—the moisture warning. “Darn… Cellphone’s wet, too. Do you have one I could use to call home? I’m afraid to use mine when it’s wet like this…”

“No.” He clipped the word out like a snip of scissors. Her sidelong glance found a tight frown on his face—he was so thin, protruding cheekbones and a jawline so sharp it was a wonder it hadn’t broken his skin, and his hair was the color of an old man’s, gray-white, while still having a shaggy thickness that couldn’t be all matted grime. Two old, small scars marked his face, short cuts that lay over his right eye and the left side of his cracked, dry lips. Her heart skipped a beat—his eyes were just as red as she remembered.

Patience, Himiko-chan! Oh, but you’re making it so hard…! She racked her brain for the right thing to say—he was obviously some kind of runaway, maybe from home, maybe from the police, so the usual ‘So what do you do for a living?’s and ‘So where do you go to school?’s wouldn’t work.

“So…” She busied herself fiddling with the edge of her sweater. “How long do you think the rain’s gonna last? I can’t believe I forgot an umbrella today…”

“Too damn long,” the boy groused, eyes flicking out to the rain, and back to her again.

“Yeah.” She huffed a short laugh. “I thought maybe I could beat it home, but…

“So… Do you live around here?” she went on when he didn’t take the bait to ask where she lived or volunteer a story of his own. Such a puzzlebox! She poked at her cellphone screen, adjusting the lighting so she could better see the moving outlines of their reflections, the boy’s and hers.

“I live around,” he answered, voice flat, and oh, there was only so much stonewalling a girl could take!

“It’s just that,” she said hurriedly, stumbling a bit on the words. “Your eyes are so pretty.” He stiffened beside her—at the compliment? The forwardness? “I’ve never seen anything like them. And your hair’s white, too—are you albino? Is that too rude?”

He’d gone silent, an emotional shift Toga felt like a barometric drop, and was drawing back from her—dangerous, it felt dangerous, how exciting!

The next few seconds happened very fast.

“Can I take a picture? Smile!” She held up the phone in front of them, her thumb tapping over the screen to pull up the camera app. She grinned at the rictus of dismay and the flare of anger in his eyes; he uncurled from his hunch to reach over, faster than she’d been expecting, to grab at her wrist.

Her other hand, unnoticed, slipped down to her pocket again and closed on a well-worn lacquer handle.

“I don’t want to be in your fucking selfie, you—!”

His words cut off, his hand—chilly, so cold and it wasn’t even autumn yet—tightening reflexively as his eyes widened.

She giggled and hit the snapshot button on the phone, capturing his dumbstruck expression as he looked down at the knife between his ribs.

“What”—he wheezed, the breath rattling in his lungs—“the fuck.”

Toga pealed with laughter and pushed herself away from the swipe of his other hand. She left the knife in him and he didn’t try to get up, blood already soaking a darker circle through his hoodie.

“You know this doesn’t work, right?” he hissed, curling up around the wound.

“What, stabbing?” she drawled, cupping her cheeks with her hands. What a delightfully strange boy she’d found. “Stabbing works on everyone, silly.”

“…So you’re just a random psycho? Just my luck,” he mumbled, glaring up at her—those eyes, those eyes, she just had to know!

“Your eyes really are so, so pretty!” she cooed, ducking back in towards him, pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket. “How’d you ever get eyes like that? Your mother? Your father?”

He tried to bat her away, but with all the blood he was losing, there was no strength in his arms, at least not enough to stop her from pressing the cloth to his wound.

“What the hell,” he whispered, and coughed wetly. This close, she could smell blood mixed in with rainwater. “Gonna patch me up now?”

“You’re so snide even when you’re bleeding out,” Toga giggled. “That’s so unique. What’s your name?”

He gave her a disbelieving look and coughed again, the force of it rattling his thin frame. She pouted at his lack of response, wondering briefly if he had an ID she’d find when all was said, done and drank, but the wet heat at her fingertips wrested the thought away from her. Her breath hitched in excitement and she pulled her handkerchief away, the cloth now stained a dark, dark red, brighter around the edges.

She brought it up to her face, breathing in the smell—blood, yes, and something salty and stale, maybe some of his sweat, or a musk of fear that didn’t show on his face but couldn’t lie through physiology. She opened her mouth, extending the tip of her tongue, and—

He tackled her, out of nowhere, and there was his strength, sudden and desperate, like the dying man he’d been all along but was only just now thinking to act like. His hands wrapped around her wrists like claws, like wire cables, his breathing gone deep and guttural, and his eyes, when she looked up to meet them, shone bright and desperate and furious.

“No,” he snarled, pinning her arms to the grass. She laughed, delighted.

“Yes!” she cheered in reply and raised one foot to kick them into a roll down the hill. They tumbled together, and in the tangle of his body and the ground, she managed to get a hand on her knife and wrench it loose. He cried out, short and sharp, and then they spun to a stop at the edge of the lee, the raindrops hard and heavy where they gathered, ran and fell. He cursed and jerked away from her, scrabbling backwards towards shelter, and she was left with the knife, which wouldn’t have long before the rain washed it clean.

She wasted no more time, bringing the blade to her mouth and carefully, exquisitely carefully, wrapping her lips and tongue around the metal. Oh. Ohhhh!

The usual taste of iron hit her mouth first, laving over her tongue like juice from a burst peach, but there was more there, more, a salt like sweat, like brine, like nothing she'd ever tasted in blood—that smell from before, was that this saltiness, his blood and not his sweat at all?

I'm going to keep you, she thought, delirious, nicking her own tongue in her haste to suck down more of his flavor and moaning at the taste of his blood of mingling with her own, brackish copper and red iron. I'm going to drag you off somewhere and keep you, I can't get enough of this, oh, why’d I go for the ribs first, oh please don't die from that!

The sound of cloth ripping brought her back to herself, and she found a dull and distant pain waiting for her, swelling in her ankles and her feet. She looked down at herself hazily—Did I twist something going downhill? That would suck!—and blinked, slow and owlish, at the sight at her shoes, bloated like the store had overstuffed them with paper.

And then the pain grew sharper, knifing up through her legs. She gasped in shock, dropping her knife and curling up on herself, patting at her knees, hunting for broken bones, red cuts, anything at all to explain why her ankles felt like they were breaking, feet twisting in on themselves like wilting flower petals.

The boy laughed, low and harsh, and she looked up at him, eyes wide. He stared back from under the lip of the bridge, ruby eyes bright and hateful, and an enormous fish tail, dull silver and speckled with red scales, lashed in the flensed remains of his jeans.

“Congratulations. Now you’re cursed just like me.”

And then the red hurt in her legs rose in a song like the swing of a knife, and she had no ear for any other melody.

When the pain finally receded, she looked up to find the boy giving her a long, narrow stare. He looked from her and her new tail—her new tail, her new tail—up to the empty road atop the embankment, and came to some unspoken decision.

“We can’t fix this here,” he told her bluntly. “Come on.” And then he slipped off his backpack, his hoodie and the unspeakably stained shirt beneath it, cramming them both inside the backpack. Reshouldering it, he began dragging himself down to the riverbank. His fins flipped and flopped as he shifted the bulk of his tail one heave after another, his gaze fixed on the dancing surface of the water. A trail of blood smeared the grass behind him, thinning and running in the pouring rain that slicked his hair to his skull and almost, almost drowned out the pained hiss of his breathing.

So I guess stabbing really doesn’t work?

She didn’t hesitate. The pain still lingered in her new extremity, but that was nothing, really—not compared to the ruby-eyed boy who’d just changed her in a way more profound than any of her previous crushes, and whose surface she’d clearly only just scratched, judging by his sudden turn-around from actively rebuffing her to inviting her to follow him. And there was all that weird talk about her “just” being a random psycho—as opposed to what? So who knew how many more delicious secrets he could be keeping?

It wasn’t like she was going to get up and walk somewhere else, anyway.

She picked up her knife, folded it back into its casing, and tucked it carefully into her bra, where it pressed a reassuring two inches of cold solidity against the curve of her flesh. She looked thoughtfully at the mess where her lower half was just a minute ago—burst shoes (no wonder it’d hurt so much) and just shreds of her knee-socks, but her skirt had just rucked itself up about her waist and was maybe salvageable. She unfastened it and tried to slide it down, flexing the curve of her tail—bright yellow with two curving arcs of red like blood spray, and very beautiful, for all that he called it a curse—but the tail was so long, much longer than her arms, and she couldn’t quite sit upright anymore, and—

A splash sounded from the river, nearly swallowed up by the rain, and then the boy barked at her, “I said come on!”

Toga sighed and followed. Probably this’d be easier in the water.

It took her longer than she’d have liked to get there, and clearly longer than the boy liked, from the way his eyes kept darting between her and the embankment and periodically up to the bridge. She was excited, and her arms weren’t weak, but the tail was heavy and unfamiliar. When she finally reached the edge, the boy planted one hand against the bank and reached out of the water to wrap his other hand firmly around the base of her tail. Unceremoniously, he dragged her in.

She yelped a laugh, startled but unfazed by the cold, and let herself sink. She was a mermaid now, and she’d seen enough cartoons to know how that worked. Down here she’d be able to get her skirt off better, and maybe look at the boy’s wound again, taste it in the water of the canal, see how blood smelled when she breathed in through—

She didn’t have gills. She realized that as her lungs expanded, foolhardy and confident for their very first mermaid breath, bringing water surging up her nose and down her windpipe, heavy and cold and tasting like lead.

She thrashed in the water, arms flailing—the boy was nowhere in her reach, but she smacked an arm against the bank and clawed at it, dragging herself halfway out of the water again, choking, gagging, instinctive tears of panic blurring her vision. The rain went on drumming down against her shoulders, leaving her sweater a sopping wet weight against her back, and the water she heaved up on the shore tasted, at last, a little, like a curse.

By the time they stopped for the day, a long and exhausting swim later, the boy’s wound had mostly closed, a red welt between two of his ribs. She had no clue how long it had taken—all her attention had been used up just figuring out how to swim and steer with one huge new muscle in place of her legs while also getting her breathing down such that she just came up for air when she needed it.

“It’s not here to turn your life into a sparkly magic fairy tale,” the boy told her when she complained about the learning curve. “It’s a curse.”

“How do we fix it?” she asked, curled up on the low, silty shore next to him. His backpack and her skirt and sweater hung over a tree root curling out from the bank and down to the water—not really out of the water to dry, just enough so they didn’t float away. Above, the clouds had started to clear off, and the sunset turned all those chiaroscuro grays into scarlet and gold and deep iris-purple.

“Hell if I know,” he said, brisk and derisive. He was even thinner without the hoodie, all sharp edges and dark hollows, like a pencil sketch. “If you didn’t want to get caught up in it, you shouldn’t have sucked my blood off your knife, you freak.”

“Your blood was delicious; it was totally worth it.” She grinned at his expression and rolled onto her back, stretching and swishing her tail back and forth in the shallow depths. “But I was talking about what you meant before. Back in town, you said ‘We can’t fix this here.’ So where do we fix it?”

“…The sea,” he allowed with a grunt after a few sullen beats. “You have to submerge in the sea.”

“And what triggered it to begin with?” she asked, curious.

“The rain,” he answerd, rolling his eyes. “But any water’ll do it, when you’re on land.”

“Wait, but what about when I need a drink?”

“Get used to booze.”

“I’m underage,” she pointed out gamely, though something nagged at the back of her mind.

The boy snorted, sharp and more bitterly sarcastic than she’d ever seen on a human face—insomuch as you could really call him human. “Yeah, you’re gonna have to get over that pretty quick, too.”

“What does that—wait, any water—is that why you smell so bad?” The words came out in a delighted shriek as she rolled onto her front, propping herself up on her elbows. “Because you can’t bathe?”

He scowled at her, but she was beginning to think that was just his default expression, disdain clear in the angle of his chin and the little scrunch of his nose.

“It is, isn’t it?” She dissolved into laughter, shoulders shaking. “Do you even try, like, body spray or baby powder or something? Maybe just wiping the grime off sometimes? Changing clothes once a week?”

“Yeah, see how well that works around the six month mark,” he sneered. “Or the six year mark.”

Her eyes went round as she took in the enormity of the thought—oh, this was going to take some work. But then, maybe she could just try the youkai life sometimes, living in deep rivers and picking off cute boys from the countryside—she’d never even met a cute countryside boy, only seen them on TV. That could be fun.

“Hey, what’s your name?” she asked, focusing back in on her companion. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to start calling you Stinky, just so you know.”

He snorted again, eyeing her sidelong, but after a moment—and oh, she couldn’t wait until she’d dug into him deep enough to figure out what he was thinking when his eyes went all hard and calculating like that—answered her with, “Shigaraki.”

“I’m Toga Himiko,” she told him with a broad smile. “Let’s be friends from now on.”