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DREAMS
When he dreams, there’s only one that matters.
They’re playing queen and her knight—Hana always gets to be Queen Nana, because she’s a girl and it’s only fair. It doesn’t feel very fair to Tenko, but he knows if he cries hard enough, eventually she’ll give in. Today he plays the knight anyways. Hana says knights are very brave, the queen’s knight the bravest of them all.
Queen Nana was killed a long time ago, so Tenko thinks her knight must not have been so brave after all.
In his dreams Hana is always small, preserved just how he last saw her, while Tenko is still himself, not the dream but the dreamer, so tall he has to hunch to clack their sticks-turned-swords together.
“I don’t want to do this again,” Tenko begs, but Hana never hears him. She’s administering to her queenly duties, an old blanket tied around her shoulders like a cape. They’re in the woods beside their family’s cottage, at least half a day’s ride outside of town. Or so he’s told. Tenko’s never been.
It keeps them safe, Father tells them, though he never says from who. Only that the world is a wicked place, though Tenko can’t think of anything that’s as wicked as the sting of Father’s hand across his face. It must be very bad, he decides, if he can’t even imagine it. If even Father is afraid.
It means they don’t receive many visitors, so when the dog starts to bark wildly, they stop and listen. When it’s cut off with a yelp, they freeze. Hana meets his eyes.
“Go,” she says, the game forgotten. “Tenko, go. Run.”
She’s already turned back toward the cottage. Tenko grabs her by the arm. “No!” He cries. “I’m going with you.”
Hana shakes him off. There’s shouting coming from the cottage now, and the cold sound of steel. “I’m your queen,” she says sternly, and even in the ratty old blanket, a crown of daisies on her head, she almost sounds like one. Except for the way her voice shakes. “You do as I say, knight. And I say you run.”
Tenko fights against the pull of the dream, but it’s like the flow of a river, always true to its course. He trips through the woods, his face streaked with tears, gasping for breath every time he falls. His palms come away bloody when he hits the ground, dirt making his fingernails dark. He runs, and he pretends he doesn’t hear the screams behind him. He runs, and he pretends like he can’t smell the smoke. He runs.
He runs until he can’t anymore. His legs give out from under him, throwing him forward. A tree root catches him and he tastes blood where his teeth cut into his own tongue.
That’s where Sensei finds him; kneeling in the dirt, his teeth red with blood and the air choked with thick, dark smoke. Even in his dreams, Tenko remembers the smell.
“Come with me,” Sensei says, his voice soft and dark, like a shadow over the moon. His hand is so big, it’s all Tenko can see.
Tenko takes his hand, and Shigaraki Tomura wakes up.
*
LEGENDS
Giran’s recruits leave a little to be desired.
They leave a lot to be desired, really, but Shigaraki is trying to manage his expectations. He can practically hear Sensei chiding him. Life is not a song, and neither is war. If you wait for valiant knights and fierce soldiers to build your army, you’ll die waiting. And Shigaraki is sick to fucking death of waiting.
Still, he didn’t anticipate a priest.
Maybe because Giran has been fairly reliably until now, as far as back alley information brokers with a fondness for chewing expensive tobacco go. Twice refuses to take off his helmet, even though it looks like it’s been cleaved down the middle and welded back together at least twice (is that where the name is supposed to come from? Shigaraki has never bothered to ask) already. Spinner insists on letting his fat, wall-eyed lizard ride on his shoulder, whispering secrets in his ear, and Magne lets herself care about them far more than she should. But they’re good fighters. They’re loyal.
Nothing about Dabi is loyal. He dresses in a tattered cloak, the hood pushed just far enough back to show his ruined face in the tavern’s smokey lamplight. He looks like a corpse given life, his body scarred so many times over that parts of him have stopped being skin and simply turned to horror. In the city they call them Burned Men, priests of a foreign god. Shigaraki doesn’t trust anyone who would worship something so untouchable, and he trusts a Burned Man least of all. Whatever his faith gives him in return, it isn’t enough.
This is his conquest, his war, his birthright. He won’t be upstaged by a fairy tale.
“I have no interest in your burning god,” Shigaraki hisses, narrowing his eyes.
Dabi only smirks in return, the movement contorting his burned flesh. “My god has no business here,” he says. “Only me.”
Behind him, the blood-letter girl bounces on the balls of her feet, watching them like a vulture watches a battlefield.
“I have no interest in you either.” He moves fast, his hand splayed. He’s not like a knight, whose sword needs to land true, or an archer, who has to pull back the bowstring. All he needs is all five fingers to find flesh and that’s it, the song is over. Adrenaline sings through his veins at the very thought.
It all happens in a moment. His hand outstretched, blue fire on Dabi’s fingertips, and cold racing up his arm. Shigaraki blinks, and it’s not a decaying priest he sees. It’s black mist.
He spits like a cat and yanks his arm back, out of Kurogiri’s magic. Dabi’s eyes are wide, staring at where his elbow ends in a disc of black mist. One of Toga’s knives is stuck in the wall, and she only looks disappointed that she didn’t draw blood.
“Do not be hasty, Shigaraki Tomura,” Kurogiri says, his face obscured by the dark mist of his magic. Bold of him to lecture. They say that his magic is so powerful that it consumes him a little more every year, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Sometimes Shigaraki questions Sensei’s trust in him. If he’s so powerful, he thinks, Kurogiri should be able to save himself. “Our new friends might prove useful to our quest.”
Doubtful, but if Kurogiri is saying it, it means Sensei thinks it. Shigaraki takes a reluctant step back, his fingers curling safely into a fist. “We shall see about that.”
*
ARMIES
The island is far from any shore he’s ever known, but standing on its rocky cliffs, Shigaraki Tomura feels like a king.
He lifts his head and the sea breeze combs through his tangled hair, grown long and matted with sweat. On the streets, far from the kingdom his grandmother left him, they call him the beggar king, and begged he has. Begged to live, begged for Sensei’s respect, begged for an army.
He’s done begging.
He screams--it feels like the only thing to do in the moment, the only way to unleash the wild energy that is trapped in his chest, chipping away at his ribcage the way a hurricane peels back roofs. He screams until his voice gives out and his lungs ache and for once he doesn’t want to dig his fingernails into his neck until it bleeds. Around him, the rocks roil and crack as his magic sinks into their foundation and breaks them apart. Around him, the world collapses.
When the dust settles, the world is different. He’s different, and not just because of his bleeding and mangled hand. His old soldiers stand behind him, watching, and the new ones before him. They’re watching too, but there’s something different in their eyes. Fear. Respect. Curiosity.
He’s not what they expected, nor what they bargained for. They’ve never seen anyone like him before. Maybe such a creature simply doesn't exist.
The air quivers like the heart of a thunderstorm as Gigantomachia lands on the ruined earth. The dragon spreads his wings wide, but somehow he’s not as large as the day Shigaraki first faced him, a beast with sulfurous yellow eyes and a bristling mane of spikes. The dragon doesn’t look impossible anymore, though he’s still just as red, a collar latched around his neck that glows with sickly, electric magic. He doesn’t look like Sensei’s lost pet.
Shigaraki’s lips peel back from his teeth, a furious smile. Gigantomachia looks like his.
“Where do we go?” Gigantomachia says, his voice half rain, half thunder. “My king?”
My king. No more beggar. No more orphan, dreamer, or fool.
“We go,” Shigaraki rasps, his voice ruined but victorious, “to war.”
*
CONQUERORS
The air tastes like blood, or maybe that’s just the red smeared across his teeth.
His homeland isn’t what he expected it to be. The air is dry and cool, making his skin itch, but he doesn’t let his fingers claw bloody furrows in it anymore. He wears a thick fur ruff to keep his hands away, and to hide the scars. He doesn’t want his people thinking about the past and the marks it left across him. He only wants the future.
He wants what is due to him.
He sees the battlefield as if through broken glass, fractured. Spinner’s blades flash like lightning against a druid, his skin covered in tree bark. Toga looks like she’s taking part in a dance more than a battle, though she’s not herself. The only reason Shagaraki can tell that it’s Toga at all is because there are two of the same wide-eyed girl, one with her mouth set in grim determination while the other grins like a wolf. Dabi is locked in battle with the winged knight--the spy, the traitor. Just the sight of him makes Shigaraki’s blood boil, but he doesn’t have time for petty revenge. Dabi’s fire will have to be enough. He has older scores to settle.
The ground is slick and bloody beneath his feet, but Shigaraki doesn’t stumble as he crosses it. The battle twists and rages around him, but seems to flinch out of his way, like even in the chaos, they know that he’s deadly. Like a scorpion, all it would take is a touch.
There. He locks eyes with King Toshinori. He looks pathetic now, more skeleton than man. Is this the man that defeated his Sensei? That replaced his grandmother? That the world forgot him for? Shigaraki used to think the throne was made weaker by Toshinori’s common blood, but now he sees the truth. The weakness wasn’t in Toshinori’s blood, but the fact that there’s more of it outside of him than in. Even here, on a battlefield where he doesn’t belong, the false king holds a bloody handkerchief limp in one hand. He’s broken.
Is that why his eyes look so damnably sad?
“Tenko.”
Shigaraki stops short, his eyes going wide. He can’t hear Toshinori’s voice over the chaos, but he can see the way his lips, speckled with blood, move. He knows that name, he knows the shapes the syllabes make.
“Shimura Tenko.”
Do you remember? His dreams whisper.
Yes, he remembers. He remembers his sister, his mother, his father, a life. He remembers everything that was taken from him.
He remembers what can still be his.
He raises his hand, all five fingers splayed.
And a knight leaps in front of him in a flash of green hair and silver steel. Midoriya, the king’s pet knight. This isn’t the first time they’ve met, but it will be the last. Someone--Twice? It’s hard to tell--tries to intervene, but Shigaraki waves them away.
Midoriya is fast, his face screwed up in fierce determination. He has heart, but that’s not enough.
Shigaraki sold his heart a long time ago for something more. Power.
Shigaraki catches Midoriya’s sword in his good hand and the blade cuts into the soft meat of his palm. There’s a heartbeat where they stand locked, breathing heavily, the battle raging around them.
And then the sword begins to decay.
*
CROWNS
When he dreamed, he used to dream of a home.
A castle made of white stone and gold. A throne with red velvet. A crown made for his grandmother’s head. His sister was there, because his sister is always there, and for once, the storm inside his chest lay still and quiet. For once, he was able to breath.
He should have known that dreams were best left to the sleeping.
Toshinori gets away, and Midoriya with them. Shigaraki’s scouts tell him that they’re forming a resistance far to the north. The false king’s health is worse than ever, but even that is not a true victory. He’s already their martyr.
Shigaraki stands before the throne and stares up at it. It was built for someone bigger than he is; someone stronger, better, more. For a moment, his resolve wavers.
“Your Majesty.”
Shigaraki’s head twitches, and he remembers that he’s not alone. His original soldiers, at least what’s left of them, stand on the plush carpet behind him, looking just as small and careworn in the grand castle. Your Majesty. Even now, Dabi sounds insincere when he says the words, but he is saying them. That means something. The fact that they’re here means something.They’re all watching him expectantly.
“Well?” Dabi prompts. “What’s next?” His eyes look hungry, like a dog starved until it’s forgotten how to be satisfied. Outside, the defeated city waits with its breath held, asking the same question. They pray that he’ll be merciful. That he’ll be kind.
Shigaraki’s hands tremble. They forget so easily.
He ascends the steps to the throne slowly, his tattered cape trailing behind him. On the seat waits a crown. Shigaraki takes it in his hands and holds it tight, until the delicate goldwork bites into his hands. Until he bleeds.
He looks back at his soldiers and finds Dabi’s eyes.
“Burn them,” Shigaraki breathes. “Burn this city until it begs.”