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scary-grace · 3 months ago

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the new postmodern age (chapter two) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Written for @threadbaresweater's follower milestone event, and the prompt 'a day at the beach'! Congratulations on the milestone, and thanks for giving me a chance to write this fic.

dividers by @enchanthings

Before the war, you were nothing but a common criminal, but in the world that's arisen from the ashes, you got a second chance. Five years after the final battle between the heroes and the League of Villains, you run a coffee shop in a quiet seaside town, and you're devoted to keeping your customers happy. Even customers like Shimura Tenko, who needs a second chance even more than you did -- and who's harboring a secret that could upend everything you've tried to build. Will you let the past drag both of you down? Or will you find a way, against all odds, to a new beginning? (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapters: 1 2 3

Chapter 2

One of the dubious perks of living in a coastal town is fairly mild weather in the spring, but every so often it kicks up with a vengeance. The windows in your apartment are rattling with the wind and rain, and you keep getting power outage alerts on your phone. Your power is still on, along with about half the town’s, and the café has backup generators if anything goes wrong. But tomorrow’s the one day a week that the café is closed, anyway, so you’re curled up on your couch under a blanket, trying to make yourself read a book instead of scrolling your phone. It’s going all right, but when the phone buzzes on the coffee table next to you, you pounce on it with shameful speed.

It's a text from Tenko – Shimura. It’s from Shimura, who you’ve gotten into the bad habit of calling Tenko in your head. my power just went out

that sucks. You wonder if you should offer to help, but what would you even do? did you lose any files?

autosave. but the deadline’s tomorrow and my WiFi went down too. That still begs the question of why Shimura’s texting you about it. town still has power. can I hang out in the café and finish the project?

Now you get it. Shimura’s in hot water and he needs you to bail him out. It’s the kind of thing you’d do for a friend. A lot of things you and Shimura do are the kind of things friends do.

Not that you’re friends. You never see each other outside the café; you ran into him at the grocery store a few months after he started coming in and he pretended he didn’t know you. But inside the café, when it’s quiet, the two of you talk. You learned what he does for work – beta-testing computer games and identifying spots that need a patch – and he learned that you have basically no life outside your job, which he can’t judge you for because he doesn’t have one, either. When the two of you traded phone numbers, it was a work-related thing. Since the babkas have gotten popular, he texts on days when he’s planning on coming in, so you know to set one aside.

Except that’s not all he texts you about. He texts you about the most random things, in massive bursts between days of radio silence, and when he comes into the café again, he keeps talking about whatever it was like you’d been talking about it the whole time. It’s like he has no idea how to carry on a text conversation. Or how to have a friend.

You don’t have a great idea of how to have a friend, either. Let alone a friend you have feelings for. If Shimura was just your friend, you’d have texted back by now. Shimura texts again. I get it if you don’t want to come back into town when the weather’s shit. i would have asked about your place but I didn’t want to make it weird

Not weird. You answer without thinking too hard about it. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have power. You should probably come over now.

yeah. address? Shimura gives a thumbs-up once you send it. thanks.

You give him a thumbs-up, too. You’re already worried you’ve made a mistake.

The power’s still on by the time Shimura knocks on your door, which is one of your worries dealt with. You’ve changed out of your pajamas, and you moved stuff off the kitchen table and hid it in the hall closet so he’ll have a space to work. You’re feeling almost normal by the time you go to let him in, and he slinks through the door, looking like a drowned rat and shivering like a kicked puppy. “It sucks out there,” he mumbles. “My heat went out, too.”

“Mine’s still on. And I’ve got blankets and stuff if you want them,” you say. Shimura is still wearing his mask, but his hoodie is soaking wet, and when he takes down the hood you see that his hair is wavier than you thought. Or maybe it’s just the water. “The WiFi password is on the fridge. Make yourself at home.”

Shimura takes off his shoes and pushes his hair out of his face to peer at your apartment. “Nice place.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not. It’s not a mess and there aren’t holes anywhere. It’s nice.” Shimura gives you a look you don’t know how to interpret. “Thanks for letting me come over. Uh –”

He runs out of whatever he was going to say, but you’ve got no idea what he was going to follow up with. The two of you stand there for a second. Shimura’s hoodie is so sopping wet that it’s making puddles on the floor. “Okay,” you say finally. “Give me your hoodie and I’ll put it in the dryer.”

“You have a dryer? I drag my shit to the laundromat.”

You used to, but then you found out about all the petty things civilians do to make people like you feel unwelcome. Shimura hasn’t noticed because Shimura’s undercover. You wait while he peels off the hoodie. You’ve never seen him without it, barely seen him with the hood down, and beneath it, his clothes are just as oversized. His arms are bare and pale – and scarred. You wrench your eyes away, take the hoodie to the dryer, and take the opportunity to compose yourself along the way. You have a friend over. Normal people have friends over. You’re helping a friend. It doesn’t get more normal than that.

When you come back, Shimura’s hard at work at the kitchen table, laptop open and notebook at his side. You don’t want to distract him. You have a feeling the two of you are racing the clock with the storm and the power lines, so you sit down on the couch with your blanket and pick up your book. No way are you going to be able to read. When you’re at work, you have a million things to do. Right now, there’s nothing for you to do but watch Shimura.

He's focused on whatever he’s doing, typing fast but lopsided. It takes you a second to figure out what the problem is, but once you do, you’re startled – two fingers on his left hand are basically paralyzed. Maybe that’s why he wears the gloves. His hair falls to his shoulders, and although it’s black, there’s a flatness to the color that tells you it’s not natural, and that he did it at home. Maybe you should offer to do it for him when his roots start to grow out. You’ve never seen the lower half of his face, but apparently you didn’t need to in order to give yourself a crush on him.

You like him. You’re being silly about it. And you’re staring. You stick your face back in your book.

But it can’t hold your attention for long when he’s here, and when you inevitably look back up, you find Shimura already watching you. “What?” you ask.

“Get over here. I need your help with something.”

“I don’t game.”

“It’s not about gameplay. It’s –” Shimura beckons to you impatiently, and you abandon your book and blanket to peer over his shoulder at the screen. “Something’s wrong with this stage. It looks like shit. I told the devs that, and they said I had to be more specific –”

“It’s the color saturation,” you say. Shimura looks up at you. “And the shadows are wrong. If the light source is supposed to be coming from above – like the sun – the shadows should be in different spots. Or there should be shadows, and there aren’t any. That’s why the character looks like – that.”

You glance away from the screen, at Shimura. “What kind of game is this?”

“It’s a dating sim. Shut up,” Shimura says. “I don’t get to pick what I test. What was that about the shadows?”

“They need to fix the lighting.”

Shimura looks irritated. “They’re gonna want specifics.”

“The stage looks flat because they haven’t added shading to match the light source,” you say. Shimura pulls up another document and types something into it. “Shading gives dimension. And the color saturation is too high. That’s why it looks like –”

“A fucking eyesore.” Shimura minimizes the document, then clicks a dialogue option to advance the game to the next screen. “Same problem here?”

You nod, but it’s not the only problem. “Is this supposed to be a schoolgirl sim? High school girls don’t talk like that.”

“How do you know?”

“I was one,” you say. You read the response to Shimura’s chosen prompt again. “This skews really young. Like, twelve or something.”

Shimura’s face twists with disgust. “How do we fix that?”

“Fewer exclamation points,” you suggest. Shimura writes that down. “Does it have to be high school girls? For this game?”

“They’re supposed to be college girls so it’s legal. The outfits are how the dev wants it.” Shimura rolls his eyes. “But he’s a pro hero, so it doesn’t matter that he’s a perv. Right?”

“I didn’t know there were pros making computer games,” you say. “I know a lot of them have side hustles, but – pervy dating sims?”

“Pervy dating sims. Sorry to burst your bubble.”

“I’ve been captured seventeen times and only twice by cops,” you say. “I don’t really have a bubble.”

“Seventeen times,” Shimura repeats. “I can’t tell if that’s a flex or not. Who got you?”

“Um –” You think it over. “Kamui Woods, back when he was field-testing that Lacquered Chain Prison thing.”

“That thing fucking sucks.”

“Tell me about it. Death Arms nabbed me at one point, but he dropped me when I turned him green.” You’re still proud of that one, even if you got in worse trouble for it than usual. “Endeavor actually caught me tagging something once. I would have been screwed, except I guess he was looking for a more high-profile case.”

“So he just let you go?”

“Yep.” You think back on the other times you got booked. “One time Fatgum got me. And then some work-study kids from Shiketsu High.”

Shimura snorts. “Kids got you?”

“My quirk’s not very dangerous,” you say. By that point you’d learned that turning people different colors could net you an assault charge. “And then it was Eraserhead. Four or five times. I can camouflage with my quirk and he could turn it off.”

Shimura nods. He’s clicking through screens on the dating sim. “What about you?” you ask. “Who caught you?”

“I only got taken into custody one time,” Shimura says. “I had run-ins with, uh – Eraserhead, Present Mic, Thirteen, All Might, Endeavor, Kamui Woods, Ryukyu, Miruko –”

Those are all big-name heroes. You have to wonder what Shimura did. “But I guess Midoriya’s the one who made it stick,” Shimura concludes. Midoriya? It takes you a second, and Shimura fills in. “The one with the stupid name. Deku.”

“Oh.”

Deku’s active hero career was fairly short, and all his fights were big ones. Shimura must have been working for somebody powerful before the war, or during it. Shimura’s shoulders stiffen, suddenly. “Forget I said that.”

“Okay,” you say. Maybe he’s embarrassed about getting captured by a student, even if you just told him you did the same thing. “If you forget I got arrested seventeen times.”

“Deal.” Shimura clicks through a few more screens, then curses. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What?” You peer at the screen, and Shimura blocks it. “Is it proprietary or something?”

“No, it’s porn,” Shimura says. He’s scowling. “There’s not one route in this game that doesn’t end with the player getting laid by three characters at once.”

Three seems like a lot, but – “Isn’t that kind of what dating sims are for?” you ask. Shimura shrugs. What little of his face you can see around the mask is flushed. “Wait, is this how you have to test them? Playing through every route?”

“And getting all the bonus cutscenes.” Shimura rolls his eyes. He glances at the screen. “Great. There’s audio.”

“What kind?” you ask. “You have to check if it works, right?”

“Maybe it’s background music,” Shimura says. He presses play.

It’s not background music. It’s exactly what you’d expect, and it’s painfully loud. Shimura scrambles to mute the game and pauses it two seconds after a shot of something anatomically improbable. “Let me guess – the lighting’s fucked up here, too. Right?”

“And the facial movements don’t match the audio,” you say. “Did the developers send you this before it was ready?”

“No, they’re just on a budget. This is as ready as it gets.” Shimura shows you a dialogue prompt. “Do women say stuff like this?”

“Um – no. Not as a first-time thing. If this is a first-time route.”

“It is.” Shimura groans. “I still have a quarter of the route left. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“The couch. I need your help with this and you only have one chair at your kitchen table.”

Your couch is sort of messy. You shift the blankets and pillows around to make room for two. Shimura props his feet on the coffee table, sets a pillow on his lap, and balances the laptop on it. “If you spot any more off-balance graphics, tell me. I already made a note about the dialogue.”

“Can you turn the brightness up?” You sit down next to him. The contrast shifts, and you wince. “The light’s wrong.”

“Again?”

“Yeah. Unless that love interest is supposed to give off light.” You don’t know anything about this game. Maybe it actually is about glowing college girls in high school uniforms who really like foursomes. “If she isn’t, that’s a problem, because she’s the light source for the whole frame. And if she is, there’s no shading, so it’s flat again.”

“Ugh.” Shimura rolls his shoulders. “This is gonna be a long night.”

It’s going to be a long night, but it’s also sort of fun. You haven’t hung out with a friend in a while, and it’s nicer than you remember. You decide you want hot chocolate, so you make a cup for Shimura, too, and you learn a lot more about making erotic dating sims than you ever wanted to know. By the third porn interlude, Shimura’s basically out of patience. “This is a waste of time.”

“You’re getting paid for it, right?” you ask. Shimura nods. “Is there something you’d be doing if you didn’t have to do this?”

“Yeah. I’d be talking to you about something other than this dumb game.” Shimura hits the skip button five times in a row. “What were you doing when I texted?”

“Trying to read.” You point out the book on the coffee table and Shimura inspects it. “I used to read a lot when I didn’t have a phone, but it’s hard to get back into it when the phone is right there. That’s why I texted back so fast.”

Shimura’s frowning behind his mask. “Why didn’t you text me first?”

“To ask if your power was out and invite you over?” you ask, puzzled, and Shimura’s frown deepens. “I’d text you more if I thought I could get away with it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Um, just that I’m not sure how much you want to talk,” you say, “and I don’t want to annoy you. That’s it.”

“You know what’s annoying? That.” Shimura clicks through a few more screens. “We can’t talk at the café because you’re busy. You never ask to meet up when you aren’t busy. When else are we supposed to talk?”

“Shimura –” You must have missed something, somewhere. Some little detail that makes all of this make sense. The lights in your apartment flicker, and your stomach jolts. “I think the power’s going.”

“Shit.” Shimura starts typing faster, splitting his screen between the game and the document where he’s been making corrections. “Shit!”

“If the internet goes out, I can use my phone as a hotspot,” you offer.

“The signal won’t be strong enough. I have to send so many fucking screengrabs.” Shimura’s fingers fly across the keys. “If you want to help, start praying that the electricity holds out long enough for me to get this done.”

“I’ll pray,” you say. “I don’t want to be responsible for you losing your job and going back to a life of crime.”

Shimura laughs at that, raspy and sharp, and keeps typing. You watch as he clicks through stages, skips cutscenes he’s already played, hits a key on his keyboard that generates screengrabs of any stage he’s found an issue with, all while typing into a note document at the same time. He’s fast. You’ve never seen him work this fast in the café, but then again, you’ve never really gotten to observe him in the café, either. You’re always busy. Too busy to talk – at least not as much as Shimura wants to talk. He wants to talk to you more. Has he really been waiting for you to make the first move?

The lights flicker again, the room going dark for a split second before brightening up again. Shimura’s no longer typing – instead he’s watching a file upload to a server, progressing a few megabytes at a time. You switch from facetiously praying to actually praying. Your power only needs to hold out long enough for Shimura’s upload to finish.

The entire status bar on the upload turns green, and a checkmark appears, confirming it’s complete. A second later, your power goes out, plunging your apartment into near-total darkness.

Shimura breathes a sigh of relief. “That was close,” he says, and shuts the lid of his laptop, making the darkness complete. “Now I don’t have to return to my life of crime.”

“Good,” you say. “I’d be sad not to see you at the café again.”

He said he wanted to talk to you more, so it’s probably safe for you to say you’d be sad not to see him. Your eyes haven’t adjusted enough to make out more than Shimura’s shape in the darkness. “I looked up the NCRA thing. You could have gone for job training. Why’d you decide to open up a coffee shop?”

“I didn’t just want to make money.” You got asked this same question when you applied for the NCRA in the first place. “People always told me that I was selfish, because all criminals are selfish, so I wanted to make something for other people. I wanted to be able to give other people something I didn’t have when I needed it.”

Shimura sets his closed laptop on the coffee table with a quiet thud. “You really seized the day with this stuff, huh?”

“I didn’t want to live the way I was living before,” you say. “It was either stop living or try something else.”

“Did you think it would work?”

“I didn’t know,” you say. “I wanted to find out.”

That’s what it was, more than anything else. You told yourself you’d go one day at a time, that at the end of each day you’d decide if it was worth trying again tomorrow. At first it was out of spite. The early days of the NCRA were filled with detractors, people who thought criminals and villains deserved to rot in prison or worse, and every day you went without violating your probation was a day you spent pissing them off. But soon it was more than that. You worked on names for the café, too focused on finding the right one to pretend it didn’t matter. You taught yourself to use an espresso machine, and you wanted the chance to use it. You put your first mural up and started planning the next one. Without meaning to, surviving out of spite became surviving for yourself.

“Yeah,” Shimura says after a second. “I want to find out, too.”

Something about his tone of voice captures your attention. You turn to face him, turning on the flashlight on your phone, but the brightness makes you flinch. You lower it partially, and Shimura’s hand comes up to force it down the rest of the way. “Don’t,” he says. “I have to take off my mask.”

Anticipation puts a twist in your spine, and as your eyes readjust to the darkness, you see Shimura unhook one side of his mask, then the other, lowering it away from his face. You’ve never seen the lower half of his face before. “Why did you take it off if you don’t want me to see?”

“Because I want to kiss you and it would get in the way.”

You thought your crush on Shimura was going nowhere fast. You didn’t think there was any chance he’d want you, too. His gloved hands settle at your waist and stay there, shifting you closer to him. You feel his breath against your cheek a moment before his lips, dry and cracked, meet yours.

It’s a quick kiss. Quick, and tentative. He draws back, but he doesn’t go far. You can still feel his breath against your skin, and when you lean forward again, he kisses you a second time. A second time melts into a third, a fourth, blending so seamlessly into each other that you lose count. Kissing Shimura doesn’t set you on fire, but you can’t remember another time where you felt curious like this. Where you’ve wanted to see what another kiss will do, rather than losing patience and pulling away.

The power doesn’t come back on, and just like the darkness emboldened Shimura to take off his mask, it emboldens you to unfold your hands from your lap and touch him. His kisses grow more insistent as you run your hands along his back, when you rest them against his shoulders, fingers uncurling along the length of his collarbones. Shimura’s hands don’t leave your waist, but his grip on you tightens. It tightens further when you run your fingers along the side of his neck.

You’ve seen him scratching there, so it’s not hard to imagine it’s a sensitive place. You draw back from kissing him and press your lips against it, and Shimura speaks, his voice even raspier than usual. “Did you like me this whole time?”

“Huh?”

“Did you like me this whole time? You gave me free stuff when I came in.”

“I gave you discounted stuff,” you correct. You kiss his neck again. Shimura stirs discontentedly under your hands and mouth. “You were a new customer. I wanted you to come back.”

“You saved a pastry for me the day that hero showed up,” Shimura says. “Did you like me then?”

He’s really stuck on this. “Why do you want to know?”

“I couldn’t tell if you liked me or not. I thought you did, but I wasn’t sure.” Shimura’s head tilts, exposing more of his throat, but you’re more interested in his shoulder, partially revealed by the neck of his oversized shirt. “I want to know when.”

“It would have been when I saved the pastry for you, except you were kind of a dick that day,” you say. Shimura snorts. “After that. But before your birthday. I meant it when I said I’d go to your party.”

“You’d be the only one.” Shimura’s hands leave your waist, sliding beneath your shirt. He’s still wearing his gloves, but his exposed fingertips are rough. “Next year.”

He’s thinking way ahead. How do you feel about that? “Yeah,” you say, edging closer to him. “Next year.”

Part of you feels crazy for this. You’re crazy for making out with Shimura on your couch, yanking off his shirt and letting him unhook your bra, tangling your hands up in his hair and tugging it ever so slightly and feeling a sharp stab of desire when he gasps against your mouth. The rest of you doesn’t care. There will always be something within you that doesn’t evaluate risk quite right, that doesn’t care about the aftermath when something you want is right in front of you. Shimura is the first thing you’ve wanted in so long that’s got nothing to do with the faultless new life you’ve been trying to build. You want him, and some part of you will always be bad at saying no to what you want.

An alarm goes off on Shimura’s phone and scares the two of you apart. You’re closer to it, and when you grab it, you notice two things right away. First, that Shimura’s alarm is labeled “go to sleep, moron”. Second, the time. “It’s two am.”

“Shit.” Shimura lifts the phone out of your hands and silences the alarm. “You need to wake up in three hours.”

“The café’s closed tomorrow.” You’re sort of touched that he remembered how early you have to wake up on workdays. Your heart is still beating too fast. “Do you need to go?”

“The streetlights are still out.” It’s pitch-dark outside your window. “Can I crash on your couch?”

“You could,” you say. “The bed’s more comfortable, though.”

“Yeah, no shit. It –” Shimura’s head snaps up. “Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah,” you say. “I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t done here.”

“Me, either.” Shimura stands up, and so do you. “Let’s go.”

Your apartment is tough to navigate in the dark, even for you, and Shimura bumps into every obstacle you know about and a few more you didn’t think would be a problem. He swerves to avoid the edge of your kitchen table and walks straight into the corner of the hallway that leads to your bedroom and the bathroom. “Fuck!”

“Back up a few steps,” you say. Shimura backs up. “Take two steps to the left. No, your other left.”

Shimura curses again, quieter. “Either this place is a fucking labyrinth, or –”

“You got so wound up you walked into a wall,” you say. Shimura snorts. “You’ve never been here before, Shimura. Take it easy.”

“Tenko.”

“Hm?”

“It’s Tenko,” he says. You get the faintest hint of butterflies in your stomach. “We made out for three hours and you invited me back to your bedroom. Quit it with the Shimura thing. I’ve been using your name the whole time.”

“Okay. Tenko.” You step forward until you’re right in front of him. “Hold out your hands.”

He holds them straight out at shoulder height and narrowly avoids smacking you in the face. You take them both and pull them down, noting how badly Tenko startles. “You’ve been using my first name, but you don’t want to hold my hands?”

“I don’t get why you want to hold mine.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” you say, puzzled. You take one step back, and another, and another after that, until your back hits your bedroom door. “Like you said, I asked you to stay over.”

“I asked to stay over. You said –”

“I remember.” You can’t believe you did that. You don’t regret it, but you’re a little floored. “I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t want to hold your hands, too.”

Tenko steps forward, crowding you against the door, and kisses you without letting go of your hands. It feels different than the earlier kisses, not frantic or heated, not light or uncertain, not slow or deep or inexorable. This feels like a movie kiss, the kind at the end of a romcom where everything and nothing’s been resolved. Your life has never been a movie. There’s every chance that this is a mistake. But you don’t mind setting it aside for a little while, from now until you fall asleep. You keep kissing Tenko in your lightless apartment, and you don’t let go of his hands until it’s time to open your bedroom door.

You’re not hungover when you wake up, and when you think about it, you’re not actually confused. You know why it’s warmer in your bed than usual, why you feel like that, why the first thing that hits you is uncertainty, anxiety. Shimura came over last night, because the power went out in his apartment and he still had work to do. The power didn’t go out in your apartment until after his work was finished. And you shouldn’t be calling him Shimura in your head, because sometime between the couch and your bedroom, he told you to call him Tenko – and then he gave you a lot of chances to get used to saying his name.

Your face goes up in flames at the memory, but there’s no stopping it, and there’s no relief in waking up. When you turn your head, you see Tenko asleep on his side, the shadowy scars on his back interrupted here and there with scratches you left. It’s the scratches more than anything that hammer it home to you, more than the fact that you’re naked or the soreness between your legs. You slept with Shimura Tenko last night, and you let him come inside you, and you didn’t pee after sex like you’re supposed to do. You didn’t even clean up. What did you do?

You sit bolt upright in a panic, and beside you, Tenko stirs. “Too early,” he mumbles. One hand reaches out for you, closes three fingers and a thumb around your forearm, and yanks you back down. “Sleep.”

“I don’t usually sleep late,” you say, trying to keep your voice steady.

“I don’t usually sleep.” Tenko’s halfway back to it already. You glance at the hand holding your arm and realize that it’s ungloved. You’ve never seen Tenko without his gloves. “Don’t ruin it.”

You’re ruining his sleep by getting up? How? The question is answered when he flops back against you, forcing you into the role of the big spoon whether you want it or not. You know he doesn’t sleep well. You’ve seen dark circles under his red eyes, and he wouldn’t have set a two am alarm that calls him a moron for staying awake if going to sleep was easy for him. Tenko’s a guest, and your friend – maybe – and whatever else he is or isn’t, you slept with him last night, and he slept over. Maybe you should just be grateful that he didn’t flee the scene. You’ve heard guys do that the morning after. It’s not something you’ve seen before, because nobody you ever slept with before stayed the night. They wouldn’t have, even if you’d had a place to stay.

You lie back down and wrap your arm loosely around Tenko’s waist, turning your head and pressing your cheek against his shoulder. There’s scar tissue under your cheek, just like there was on his neck, just like there is on his back and his arms. Something horrible happened to him. You don’t have the first clue what it is, but it’s in his past. He’s here. You close your eyes and do your best to fall asleep.

When you wake up again, there’s light slanting through the window, and your ceiling fan is on. The power’s back. Tenko’s here, awake, but he must have left at some point, because he has his mask on again. He’s also got his phone in his ungloved hand, scrolling away at something. His other hand, still gloved, rests on your bare back. Not doing anything, not starting anything. Just – there.

You clear your throat. “You’re still here.”

“Where else was I gonna be?” Tenko gives you a weird look. His bedhead is absolutely horrendous. “I don’t have a new project yet and it’s your day off. So we can hang out.”

You think through what you were going to do today. It wasn’t much. Mostly errands – laundry, picking up a prescription. But you’d planned to do something fun, too. “Want to go down to the beach?”

“The beach?” Tenko sounds like he’s thinking about it. Then he shakes his head. “Too many people.”

“On the main beach. I go to a different one. It’s a lot quieter over there.” You look up at him. “After a storm like last night’s there should be tons of good stuff washed up. And if you want we can come back here to hang out afterward. Or go to your place.”

“My place is gross,” Tenko says. He grimaces behind the mask. “I mean – I’m not gross. It’s gross. Everything has a hole in it. And I don’t have, like – I don’t decorate. It’s not –”

“It’s okay,” you say. “We don’t have to go there today.”

“Some other time,” Tenko says. “I have to clean.”

“I’d have cleaned if I’d known you were coming over.”

“This place is clean.” Tenko’s fingers tap a pattern on your back. “Fine. I’ll go to the beach with you. If anything bites me I’m leaving.”

“We’re not getting in the water. It’s still too cold,” you say, laughing. “But sure. Fine. You’ve got a deal.”

“I’m serious. If something bites me –”

“I’ll protect you.” You sit up as he scoffs, leaning in to kiss his cheek over the mask. “You agreed to try it. It’s the least I can do.”

You can tell Tenko’s frowning when you draw back. “We had sex last night and I get a cheek kiss?”

“I’m not making out with you through your mask.”

“Close your eyes, then.”

You do. You’re not sure why Tenko’s so insistent on only taking off his mask when you can’t see his face, but you don’t have a problem respecting that boundary as long as he still kisses you every so often. Just like last night, you feel Tenko’s breath against your skin before his lips meet yours – but while last night you had curiosity, now you have memories, and heat floods through you as you kiss him. When Tenko pulls you down into his lap, you don’t argue with him. He's already half-hard, and he hisses sharply when you shift against him. It’s all too easy to imagine his expression.

You saw shadows of it last night, and you remember something else, too. “Did you make me close my eyes so I wouldn’t call you pretty again?”

“Not pretty,” Tenko mumbles. “You’re weird.”

Maybe, but you’re not wrong, and you also know it’s not a mood killer. A few more kisses and Tenko’s hard again, his hands grasping your hips and pulling you down towards his cock. No condom, again. You didn’t have one last night, and you’re still not on birth control, but – you sink down on him for the second time in twelve hours, and your thoughts flutter uselessly alongside your eyelids. You had your period a week ago. You’re not going to get pregnant. It’s – fine –

It’s so close to noon that you can barely call it morning sex, but if this thing with Tenko keeps up, morning sex is a strong contender for your favorite kind. Or maybe you just like riding him. Maybe both. It’s slow and easy, and Tenko leans back against the headboard, letting you do most of the work. He has one request, though. One thing that’s odd. “My right hand. Hold it down.”

You curl your fingers around his wrist and pin it to the headboard, and his hips jerk sharply. “Yeah. Don’t let go.”

His right hand’s immobilized, but his left stays on your hip, fingernails digging in as you increase your pace. With your eyes closed, with nothing to ground yourself but Tenko’s touch, it’s all too easy to lose yourself. You come on his cock in a rush of pleasure that leaves you gasping, and Tenko’s wrist strains in your grip as he loses control seconds later, a low moan wrenching itself out of his mouth. He’s shaking beneath you, and when he speaks, his voice is a wreck. “This was a bad idea,” he says, and your heart plummets. “Now I’m too tired for the beach.”

You laugh breathlessly. “I bet we can rally,” you say. “Let me know when it’s safe to open my eyes.”

Even once Tenko’s put his mask back on, he doesn’t want to let you out of his lap. You get up anyway and stagger to the bathroom, catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror on the way. You definitely look like you had sex twice in the last twelve hours. You don’t look half as anxious as you feel. You vaguely remember telling yourself not to worry about what this means last night, but you and Tenko are going to have to talk at some point, because not knowing what’s going on is stressing you out.

You have to kick Tenko out of bed when you get back from the bathroom, because not changing the sheets is also stressing you out. So is not having very many choices in the breakfast department, even though you had no idea he was coming over and even less of one that he’d spend the night. You can provide coffee, at least – the espresso machine you learned on is still in your kitchen at home. You upgraded the café’s as soon as you possibly could.

You don’t have the usual flavored syrups here, but you mix two cappuccinos instead. Tenko pulls his mask to one side and tries a sip. “This is good,” he says, surprised in a way that should offend you but doesn’t. “Next time I’m ordering one of these.”

“Instead of the mocha?”

“Instead of the coffee.” Tenko takes another sip. “I found frozen waffles in the freezer. Can I eat those?”

“Yeah. The toaster’s over there.”

You discover a few seconds later that Tenko wasn’t actually planning to defrost the waffles before eating them, and you spend a little while being appalled before you show him how to toast them properly. The two of you eat standing up in the kitchen and finish your coffee, and Tenko plugs in his laptop while you switch out the laundry. “I can leave this here, right?” he asks when you come back to the living room. “We’re coming back after?”

“Yeah.” You watch as Tenko leaves his backpack but pockets his phone and keys. “Let’s go.”

Your anxiety was held at bay for a while, when you had things to do, but now it’s just the two of you walking side by side down the street, and you’re agonizing about whether to hold his hand. Tenko’s hand brushes with yours once, twice, before you lose patience. “Do you want to hold hands?”

Tenko’s eyes widen over his mask, and he doesn’t answer you, but a moment later, his hand closes awkwardly over yours. You haven’t held hands in a while. You don’t think this is how it’s supposed to work. But you’re holding hands with Tenko. That’s what you wanted. Everything’s fine.

“Why did you move here?” Tenko asks, as the two of you pass the street that leads down to the main beach and keep walking. “Out of everywhere?”

“It was strongly suggested by my probation officer that I get out of the city,” you say. “He thought I’d be less likely to fall back into my old ways if I was in a small town, since I’d actually know the people whose buildings I was defacing.”

“Didn’t you get busted for tagging your own house?”

“Yep.” Looking back, it was an incredibly stupid move. Your parents were already at the end of their rope with you. You should have known they’d cut you loose. “And I’d always wanted to live near the ocean, so it worked out. What about you?”

“I needed somewhere out of the way,” Tenko says. “It didn’t matter where.”

“And you got here five years ago?” You keep walking past the second beach access road. The road to your beach is a lot more out of the way. “We must have gotten here around the same time, then.”

“I was first. I’d been here three months when you started renovating that building.” Tenko’s eyes seem far away. “It was good timing. People were starting to ask questions about me, but then they switched over to you instead.”

“Glad I could help.” You feel funny about the fact that you were running interference for him, four and a half years before he ever set foot in your café. “And I’m glad you picked this place for a fresh start.”

“People like me don’t get fresh starts,” Tenko says. You’re about to point out that as a person without a record, all he has to do for a fresh start is move, but he speaks before you can. “I’m glad I ended up here, too.”

You’ll take it, even if you have a lot of questions about everything else he just said. The two of you walk in silence for a little while. It’s a cloudy day, with only faint sunbeams sneaking through, and the wind carries a faint chill even though it’s officially summer by now. “What should we do when we get back?” Tenko asks.

“We aren’t even there yet.”

“Yeah, but I want to know what I have to look forward to,” Tenko says. You roll your eyes. “You don’t play games. Do you want to learn?”

“Maybe,” you say. “I’m not going to be good at it. I’d slow you down.”

“You’ll get better fast if I’m the one teaching you,” Tenko says. “There are lots of different games. I can teach you to play any of them. Except dating sims.”

“You don’t like playing dating sims?” You fake surprise, and it’s Tenko’s turn to roll his eyes. “Do you have to test a lot of them?”

“I test whatever people send me. That’s why it’ll be easy for me to teach you,” Tenko says. “They’re all the same underneath. I haven’t played one in a long time that was actually a challenge.”

His grip on your hand relaxes slightly, his fingers sliding through yours to lace them together. “I used to really like games. It sucks.”

You squeeze his hand slightly. You’ve been there, or somewhere like it. It took you a long time to get back into art after you joined the NCRA. “Have you ever thought about making one? A game?”

“Like the kind I’d want to play?” Tenko seems to perk up for a second. Then his shoulders slump. “Nobody else would want to play it.”

“It sounds like you’ve got an idea, though.” You nudge him lightly with your shoulder and he stumbles. Oops. “Want to tell me about it?”

He hesitates for a while. A really long while. Then: “It’s mystery and horror, but not jump-scare horror. There are monsters, but they aren’t the real problem – or the ones you see aren’t the ones you should be worried about. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, the player character – it’s all going to be second-person – wakes up in a room they don’t recognize with no memory of how they got there. You can remember some things about your life, but how you got from where you’re supposed to be to stage one of the game is a total question mark. So there are two initial objectives. Figuring out what the hell is going on and getting the hell out of there.”

“Okay,” you say. It sounds stressful. “How do you do that? In the game.”

“You have to find a way out of the building first.” Tenko looks surprised that you’re still asking questions. “And that’s easy enough, so then –”

For a game he thinks no one else would want to play, Tenko’s put a lot of thought into it. He’s still talking about it as the two of you make the turn onto the beach access road – about the storyline of the game, the twists and reveals he’s thought of, the need to tweak the design and color palette to make everything seem just slightly off. The question of music or no music, and if music, what it should sound like. You like hearing him talk about something important to him, something he’s excited about, even if the concept of the game is giving you heart palpitations. You don’t think there are many things that make Tenko happy. You’d like to be one of them.

You get down to the beach at last, and just like you were hoping, it’s basically deserted. The tide is on its slow, steady way back in, but the beach is strewn with logs and twists of seaweed and kelp, and you’re willing to bet that there’s some sea-glass lying around in the debris along the high-tide line. Tenko studies it, significantly less ambivalent than he was a second ago. “When you said there’d be more stuff, I didn’t think you meant trees.”

“A storm can dredge up all kinds of things,” you say. “And last night’s storm was pretty bad. Come on.”

Tenko lets you pull him a little closer to the water, until you’re both walking on hard-packed sand. You get distracted by the debris field almost immediately, and you let go of Tenko’s hand without thinking so you can search for sea-glass more efficiently. Tenko’s tone of voice makes it clear he’s amused. “So this is like a scavenger hunt for you?”

“I guess.” You come up with a brown piece, followed by a green one, both of them old and smooth. “I want to make something for the café. I’ve been collecting it since I moved here.”

“Five years and you still don’t have enough?”

“The idea for the project keeps getting bigger,” you admit. Tenko snorts. “You can go on ahead if you want. I don’t want to slow you down.”

“I want to hang out with you.” Tenko crouches down next to you on the sand. “This is fine.”

You find multiple pieces in the time it takes him to find one, which he offers to you. It’s a pretty piece, sky-blue and frosted over, but you shake your head. “You found it. It’s yours.”

“I found it for you,” Tenko says, but you notice that he pockets it. And that he keeps looking.

The two of you wander from debris field to debris field, the tide inching up behind you. You’re comfortable with the silence – it’s how it usually is when he’s at the café, after all – but beneath the veneer of ease, questions are eating at you. Questions you don’t know how to ask or how to answer. Your crush on Shimura Tenko is intense, but it’s never been something real. It was just proof that you were getting back to normal, that you could live a life not dominated by the need to prove to the rest of the world that criminals are people, too. You never expected your crush to turn into sleeping with him, him staying the night, him wanting to hang out the next day – and even if you had expected it, you’d never have expected it to happen so fast.

“You were right,” Tenko says. You glance at him. “No people. It’s not as bad.”

You nod. “I’d come back if you wanted to,” Tenko says. He tilts his head, studying you. “Do you want to?”

“Do you want to do all this again?” you ask. He gives you a weird look. “The whole sex, sleepover, hang out the next day thing?”

“That’s what people do, isn’t it?” Tenko’s giving you an even weirder look now. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about –” The distress is building beyond what you can handle. You force yourself to take a deep breath. “What we are. To each other. After that.”

He’s not giving you a weird look anymore. He’s looking at you like you’re the dumbest person he’s ever met. You feel like the dumbest person anybody’s ever met, ever. “Like, are we friends with benefits, or –”

“You said you like me,” Tenko cuts you off. “I like you. Do you think I just – with anybody? I’ve been here for five fucking years. Do you know how many people have my phone number? One. The day that hero showed up, I never would have come back, except –”

His hand comes up, scratching his neck with gloved fingers. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t like you. Why do you think it took me so long?”

It? What is he talking about? “I do like you,” you say. “I really like you. I just didn’t think anything would happen. Or happen that fast.”

“Hooking up like that was your idea,” Tenko says. You don’t want to own up to that, but it’s true – he was the one who kissed you, but you were the one who suggested heading back to your room. “Do you wish we hadn’t?”

“I wish I’d been better prepared,” you admit. Tenko blinks. “If I had condoms things wouldn’t have been as messy.”

“I like it messy.” Tenko states it so plainly that you feel your face heat up. “We’ll get condoms. You can stop freaking out whenever you want.”

“I’m not freaking out,” you say. “I just –”

The scream comes out of nowhere, cutting off a thought you didn’t have a prayer of articulating properly. “Help!”

It’s a kid’s voice, high-pitched and splitting with fear. You can’t identify where it’s coming from, and there’s not even a question of what you’ll do. You and Tenko trade a glance, then rocket to your feet. Tenko takes off down the beach. You head back the way you came. “Keep yelling!” you shout to the kid. “Let us know where you are!”

The kid keeps yelling, getting steadily less coherent. They must be closer to you than to Tenko, because their voice is getting louder. You veer closer to the water’s edge, your heart in your throat. The water’s already rushing up around the logs the storm left behind, up to your ankles and getting higher. The kid’s scream takes on a new urgency. “Hurry! The waves –”

You skitter around a log, giving it a wide berth to avoid the deeper pool of water beneath it, and find the kid, halfway trapped under another log and struggling to keep his head above water. He spots you, opens his mouth to scream again, and catches a mouthful of seawater from the wave that’s just rolled in.

You duck down beside him, hoisting his head and shoulders up, buying time. You suck down a breath and let loose a shout of your own. “Tenko! Over here!”

It seems like an eternity before he appears around the side of the log. He looks at the kid, then at you. “What the hell happened?”

The kid is crying too hard to answer, but it’s not hard to guess. “He must have been climbing on the log, and it rolled over on him.”

“What were you doing out here alone?” Tenko demands of the kid. The kid doesn’t answer, and Tenko’s red eyes flash with rage. “Who was supposed to take care of you? Why aren’t they here?”

“Hey,” you snap. This isn’t helping. “I need you to call emergency services. Tell them we’re at Fourth Beach and there’s a kid in trouble.”

Tenko pulls out his phone and dials, while you try to strategize. The tide is coming in faster now. Even if emergency services gets here at their top speed, there’s a good chance the water will have already covered the kid’s head. Based on the way he’s panicking, you don’t think he has a quirk that lets him breathe underwater, and you have a fleeting thought about heroes before remembering that you’re in a rural town. There are no heroes here. You and Tenko are going to have to get him out yourselves.

Your quirk is worse than useless for this. You don’t know what Tenko’s quirk is, or if he even has one. Tenko shoves his phone in his pocket and hurries back to your side. “They said they’re coming.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes.”

The kid doesn’t have ten minutes, and all three of you know it. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” you say, trying to keep your voice calm. “When the next wave comes in, we can use its momentum to roll the log forward and pull him out from underneath it.”

“It’s huge,” Tenko says. “That won’t work.”

“It rolled from him stepping on it,” you say. “We can do this.”

Tenko doesn’t argue with you. He turns to watch the waves, looking for a likely one, while you explain the situation to the boy. He’s going to have to hold his breath while you and Tenko push the log, and then one of you – probably you – will pull him out. He starts to protest, but then Tenko calls out that a wave’s coming up, and the boy switches to sucking down air instead. Good. You hold him up until the last possible moment, then get to your feet. You take up a position at Tenko’s side, set your feet as firmly as you’re able to in the shifting sand, and shove hard at the log as the wave washes up around it.

You think you feel it move, a little bit. But then the water recedes, and you scramble back to the kid, and as soon as his head breaks the surface, he howls in pain. “My leg!”

You must have rolled the log back on it – or forward, or something. “We need a bigger wave.”

Tenko shakes his head. He looks like he’s going to be sick. You can hear sirens in the distance, but they’re too far away. The kid is screaming, clawing at your shirt, and you struggle to comfort him, promising that help is coming, promising it’ll be okay. It doesn’t work, or else what happened to his leg in your failed attempt to move the log is worse than you thought, because his eyes roll up in his head and he goes boneless in your grip. You shake him, terrified, desperate to keep his head above water as another wave crashes against your back. He’s going to die. A kid is going to die while you’re holding him, and there’s nothing you can do.

You can’t look at his pale, slackened face a second longer. You look up instead, and that’s when you see the solitary crack running across the log’s surface.

It wasn’t there before, and now it’s not alone. One crack turns into a dozen, and dozens more, spreading and colliding with each other until the log simply crumbles away, leaving nothing in its place. Nothing except Tenko on the other side, both hands outstretched – and ungloved.

Something twists in the back of your mind, but the kid is free now, and the tide is still coming in. You start dragging him up the beach, trying to get clear of the high-tide line. A quick glance at his leg shows you that it’s broken, badly, but you can’t worry about it now, or get lost in the fact that it’s your fault. The two of you make it onto dry sand just in time for a trio of paramedics to race down the beach, carrying a stretcher and pursued by five or six terrified people. “What happened?”

“He got – stuck,” you manage. Your teeth are chattering. You aren’t even that cold. “Is he going to be okay?”

The paramedics have questions for you, even as they shoo you out of the way. Did he swallow water? Yes. Did he breathe water in? You don’t know. How long has he been unconscious? A minute, maybe less. Time feels uneven, unreal. You don’t have a clue what’s going on, and you stand blankly off to one side, unsure whether you’re supposed to stay or go. Maybe you can go. Everybody knows where to find you if they have questions, and you’ll calm down faster if you and Tenko can –

Tenko’s not standing next to you. You look up and down the beach, but you can’t see him anywhere.

Maybe emergency services scared him off. He booked it pretty fast at the sight of Present Mic. You pull your phone out of your pocket to text him, but your phone’s dripping wet and unresponsive. Now you really need to get home, and maybe Tenko’s there already. He saved someone’s life. If he’s freaked out even slightly as much as you are, you want to be with him.

But something is nagging at you as you speed-walk back through town, something about Tenko’s quirk. You never asked what it was, but the gloves were enough for you to infer that it had something to do with his hands. And maybe he doesn’t feel all that comfortable with it. You wouldn’t either, if you had a quirk like that. The way it looked, how fast it moved – it was almost like –

You stop dead in your tracks on the side of the road. Tenko’s gloves. His red eyes. His dyed hair and scarred face and mangled hands, and a quirk that lets him destroy things he touches. Even their initials are the same. Shimura Tenko, and. And. Your mind won’t let you finish the thought. You won’t let yourself jump to conclusions like that. You need to be sure. You force yourself into motion, back to a speed-walk. Then into a run.

Back at home, you drop your phone in a bowl of rice and sit down at the kitchen table with your laptop without bothering to change out of your wet clothes. You haven’t been a criminal in half a decade, but you still know how to search the internet like one. This isn’t dark-web level, and it’s not illegal, but you could raise red flags, and if you’re right – you connect to a VPN, open a web browser you’ve never used before, set your cache to empty every five minutes, and type in your first query.

‘shigaraki tomura quirk’ gets you a long list. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the first page you click on to find the quirk you’re thinking of, and when you read the description, your heart sinks. You navigate away from the webpage and type in a new prompt. ‘shigaraki tomura decay’ gets you more pages analyzing the quirk itself, all of which feel unnecessary and unhelpful. You know what Decay is. You need to know what it looked like. You modify the search. ‘shigaraki tomura decay video’.

YouTube has nothing, courtesy of aggressive content moderation. You dig a little deeper, finding lesser-known, sketchier hosting sites, and the first video that pops up is of the destruction of Jaku City, at the very beginning of the war. It happens so quickly – too quickly to see anything except the way the buildings implode into nothing. You need an up-close view, so you modify your search, scrolling past video after blurry video until you find one tagged as part of the Deika City massacre.

The quality looks okay. You click on it and find yourself watching a group of people thundering up a street, headed for something just out of frame. A moment later, whatever it is ducks through the corner of the frame. A pale hand rises up, making contact with the face of one of the people in the group. And then you see it. Cracks spreading across their face, just a few at first, and then they spread so rapidly that the person simply falls apart where they stand.

You just watched a snuff film, but that’s not what makes you recoil. What Shigaraki Tomura did to the person in that video is the same thing Tenko did to the log on the beach. It’s the same quirk. They’re the same man.

Tenko’s hair is dyed, and it’s not dyed well. You never asked what his natural color is, but you’re betting it’s white, which is why there’s no way he can get someone else to color it for him. If he walked into a salon with white hair, red eyes, no eyebrows, and a scar over his right eye, there’s not a person in Japan who wouldn’t recognize him instantly.

You type in another query: ‘shigaraki tomura face’. It turns up a lot of photos of him with the signature hand over his face, but you get at least one without it, and the reason why he wears a mask all the time becomes clear in an instant. No eyebrows – happens. Plenty of people have red eyes. But add in the scar over the left side of Tenko’s lips, a scar you ran your thumb over last night, and the birthmark Shigaraki has just below the right corner of his mouth, and he’d be unmistakable. No matter how many bad dye jobs he did on his hair.

You shut the lid of your laptop with shaking hands and sit back in your chair. Shimura Tenko, your regular customer, who slept over last night, who you like and who likes you, is the same person as Shigaraki Tomura, an unrepentant supervillain who’s been dead for five years. It doesn’t make any sense. If Shigaraki had survived the war, he’d be in maximum-security prison for the rest of his life, not beta-testing video games and hanging out in your coffee shop. Shigaraki Tomura is dead. You met the hero who killed him.

Or did he? You remember thinking how odd it was that Deku kept referring to Shigaraki watching what he was doing, wishing he could talk to him. You remember what he said when Spinner asked about Shigaraki’s ashes: There was nothing left of Shigaraki Tomura. But somebody else walked away from that fight, and he’s got Shigaraki’s quirk – and the only time you’ve seen him use it, it was to save someone’s life. You can’t say for sure, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling as hell. You know who Shimura Tenko is. And you’re halfway convinced he used to be Shigaraki Tomura.

You fish your phone out of the bowl of rice to check if it’s working yet. It isn’t. You’re going to have to wait a little longer to reach out to Tenko. His backpack and laptop are still here. He’ll be back for them, probably tonight – and if not, you’ll see him at the café tomorrow, and you can give it to him then. And when you see him again, you can sort this out. There’s nothing else you can do right now.

You tell yourself that, make yourself believe it, and spend the rest of your one day off every week getting your chores done. And even though it’s been an exhausting twenty-four hours, even though there’s nothing you can do, you still toss and turn through the night, thinking about Tenko. Worrying about him. Wondering who he was before this, and wondering at how little it matters to you.

#shigaraki tomura x reader #tomura shigaraki x reader #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki x you #shigaraki tomura #x reader #reader insert #coffee shop rehab fic #man door hand hook car door #a bisquared production

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