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Perhaps it’s something deeper than the scars, sometimes. Beauty is only skin deep, and you of all people are excruciatingly familiar with that fact, so it’s not a huge surprise (to you, at least) when you don’t shy away from four fingers that are only a pinky away from reducing you to the ashes you were practically born from. Tomura, ever the embodiment of a caged animal, rarely trusted himself to leave his room without his gloves nowadays, but somehow you think that’s alright-- if you were to be the only one for the rest of time to see him with his fingertips bare in a show of fucked up intimacy, you think that’d be fine. With you, at least.
The way he rasps your name late at night (or early in the morning?) is the only solace you allow yourself when you get in, for lack of better term, one of your ‘moods’. Tomura doesn’t ever call you by the one you were born with, no matter how many times you insist it’s fine, that he’s earned that right; it scares you, but maybe he’s finally gotten a handle at picking apart your brain from the few words you throw his way. God knows you’ve been doing the same fucking thing. But tonight, you feel grateful for the simple syllables rolling off his tongue like it physically pains him to voice them. Everything sounds that way in his throat after midnight-- you wonder if your vocal cords sound any different, too, but you’ve never used them enough in the first place to tell the difference. You don’t mind, and you don’t think Tomura does, either, from the way he startles like a frightened cat when your baritone shatters the paper-thin silence.
Contrasting your quiet voice filling the room with a one-sided conversation you both could’ve lived without, Tomura is wordless when he turns off the handheld device he’d been mashing the buttons on and leaves it on the floor where he’d been sitting, a mistake he’s sure to regret in the morning when you stumble around in the darkness later in search of the door and inevitably crack the screen. He’s always been too fickle with his belongings, but then again, maybe that came with Decay-- you couldn’t get attached to everything you’d end up destroying in the end, right? You feel like you should huff out a laugh at that, at the poetry of his world-destroying and your self-destruction twining together like this in some sick twist of fate, but Tomura is beside you now, pushing your bangs back and forcing you to meet his eyes. You’ve never liked eye contact, truth be told, it just makes you antsy, but something nags you in the back of your mind that if you look away now, you’ll regret it, later. So no matter how much you hate it, your gaze remains interlocked with his, in a lazy game of a staring contest.
He doesn’t lean in. You don’t either. That’s something reserved for people a little less bent than you two.
You don’t know how long he holds you there, like a bug caught cupped between his palms and held away from the outside world, but at some point he lets his hand drop to the sheets on the bed, pinky raised, pinky always raised. New sheets wouldn’t be that hard to steal, you think. You’d sooner produce a department store from your pockets alone than ask him to hold back like he always forces himself to, consciously or not. You don’t think that’d rub him the right way, though. His Sensei had probably ingrained it far too deeply for you to dig out anyway, even if he was locked away for the rest of the foreseeable future right now. There’s a lot of things All for One has done to Tomura that you can’t reverse. Just another parallel, you suppose bitterly.
Tomura doesn’t speak when you hook your arm around his shoulders and let yourself fall backwards onto the lumpy mattress, the pillow beneath your head still a slight bit damp as you pull him down with you. He makes a vaguely irritated noise into your chest, but you know better, positioning yourselves so you’re facing each other with him cradled in your arms like a worn stuffed animal you never outgrew, though Tomura isn’t resigned to a chokehold for the rest of the night-- you handle him much more carefully than something held together by needle and thread. Absentmindedly you wonder if amending the phrase to ‘needle and staples’ would qualify you for that category, but Tomura reaches one arm under yours and balls the back of your shirt into his fist as he grasps at you. No, you decide, it wouldn’t. You have something much better than pointless fluff trapped in you, anyway
Sometimes you think about your siblings, your mom. Sometimes you think about your dad, too, though those times are a bit more commonplace, if only to reanimate your hatred and resolve. The former is one that’s a bit tougher to grapple with-- it’s not pretty, but a plastic bag with a powdery substance lining the bottom is all you can do to not lose what mind you have left. Giran never lets you get low enough to worry about it, though. You don’t think you should thank him.
At some point, Tomura tugs himself out of your hold and sits up on his side. You make a soft, distressed noise, one way too intimate to go without mentioning, but Tomura is nothing if not good at blocking out reality, so he acts as if he doesn’t notice. His irises, shining and dark like a predator that’s sniffed out fresh meat, are colored so vividly red that for a moment you wonder if you’re dreaming. You can feel his breath on your face, a warm, wet exhale that smells like stale gummy worms Kurogiri had all but forced down his esophagus earlier at his resistance to anything else. You crack a smile, at that.
The only window in the room is one behind his back, a thin one towards the ceiling that doesn’t allow much light in during the day and even less so during the night. The moon finds a way, though, dripping a pale halo over Tomura’s bluish hair as it pools in his collarbones and over his shoulders. You entertain the thought of tangling your fingers in it and tugging for a moment, because this feeling is so bone-shakingly tender that it makes you want to vomit. You settle for toying with the split ends. Tomura glares at you like he wants to comment on it, like he knows what you’re doing, but he keeps his mouth shut. Only seconds later he’s pushing your hand away, and the gesture leaves you feeling like you’ve been burned in a totally new way, if that’s possible. He catches your gaze again, daring you to look away. For the second time that night (morning?), you hold his too. “It itches.” He murmurs, and his hands twitch on the last word.
You allow yourself your first real smile that night, even if it pulls a little painfully at the staples along your cheeks. Already you can feel blood welling up at the juncture between scar and skin around one. Sliding out of bed, you throw on the jacket you’d left crumpled in a pile on the floor earlier by the door as Tomura shrugs back into a hoodie, flipping the hood up. You move to grab the doorknob, to be the chivalrous one for once, but Tomura’s hand on your wrist stops you (pinky raised, pinky always fucking raised). When you look over at him, he does not look like Shigaraki Tomura, leader of the fearsome League of Villains, successor to All for One. He just looks… smaller, somehow. His eyes have taken on a glaze of something you can’t quite put your finger on, but you will, soon enough. You paint your face into a feral grin, one you know will comfort him despite the protesting that would occur should you ever tell him that. “Don’t worry.” You croak. “I know just the thing.”
Already, you can smell something burning.