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Uraraka pressed her lips together into a thin, tight line and turned away from the half-eaten body slumped in the corner. She didn’t have time to think about lives that were beyond saving, only ones that still had a chance, if any. Unlike Deku, whose eyes were wide and filled with desperate tears, she knew well enough that not everyone could be saved when death hung so heavily in the air.
And here, it was smothering, stronger than the veil they’d created to shield the building.
A few steps ahead of her, Todoroki was silent, as he had been since they’d entered this oppressive place. She was confident in her own abilities, having spent the past five years using them and training herself on her own in a small country town, but he was something different. It was like he’d been raised by the shinigami he conjured from the shadows. Whereas Deku was full of energy and almost overbearingly positive, Todoroki was strong and quietly determined. Almost cold, but she didn’t think that was right.
She watched as he surveyed the room, getting a feel for the curses that had made their home in this rundown apartment complex. She’d lost count somewhere after thirty, but Todoroki would probably come up with an exact amount. It was like nothing frazzled his distant nature, but her hackles were raised, every nerve alight in her body. Something was terribly wrong with this place. Curses were drawn to negative energy, but this was wrong on every level.
The last time she ever felt something close to this had been when she was eight. Multiple accidents had occurred at her parents’ construction sites, to the point where they’d been forced to shut down for almost a month. Her mom had been a nervous wreck and her dad constantly gone from working a second job just so they wouldn’t go bankrupt. The energy in the air had been thick with tension and darkness, especially whenever she found herself on site while her parents desperately tried to finish the job.
She’d seen curses before, although her parents had thought she was just being a child. A demon in an alley, a monster in a friend’s closet. Kids said the craziest things. Uraraka was starting to believe that many of those claims were from children that had curse energy that was slowly oppressed by society as they got older. Her parents had liked to joke that she had a healthy imagination, but she’d been scolded multiple times at that construction site for making outlandish claims of scary monsters.
When it later was found to be a dumping ground for a serial killer twenty years prior, well, she could at least say that some sort of beast had been haunting that area, and not just the few that a jujutsu sorcerer by the name of Todoroki Enji had exorcised.
The Todoroki currently walking ahead of her wasn’t the same one but his youngest son. It had been eight years, but Uraraka could still remember the small, sullen boy trailing after his father during the exorcism so long ago. He wasn’t that much different now: still quiet, still moody in a sense, still intense. She wasn’t sure he even remembered her, but it was hard for her to forget the way he’d said, “You see them too,” before he vanished into the dark.
She did see them then – and she felt them now, fighting the urge to shiver again. She wasn’t that eight-year-old little girl anymore.
Deku jogged to catch up with Todoroki, tightly gripping the cursed cleaver in his right hand. “Hey, are you just gonna leave that person behind?”
“We’re not leaving anyone behind as long as you keep up,” Todoroki stated flatly.
“But that guy’s mom–”
“That guy’s mom should remember her son as he was the last time she saw him,” Todoroki cut in, his voice as cold as ice, “not the dissected remains that he is now.”
Uraraka bit her lip but said nothing when Deku’s shoulders dropped and he slowed down to let Todoroki stride ahead of him. This wasn’t the first body he’d seen. There had been at least one at the construction site when they were kids. If his father hadn’t even hesitated to bring his young son to such a terrible scene then, who knew what else he’d witnessed? Probably more than she and Deku combined, and she was at least more aware than Deku.
A few minutes later, they found themselves in a large room that didn’t make sense for an apartment building. It must’ve been incomplete Innate Domain twisted by curse energy to fit the curse demon’s desires. Random doors decorated the walls, and her eyes jumped over the few bodies of people that had unfortunately tried to escape their apartments and fell to their deaths. The curses must’ve loved that, if they were capable of such feelings.
Disgust crawled up her spine, and Uraraka gripped her hammer harder, eyeing a moving shadow out of the corners of her eyes.
When she opened her mouth to alert them, Todoroki said, “You see it too, don’t you?” and she blinked.
The memory of a young boy with two-toned eyes staring at her hollowly popped into her mind’s eye, but before she could even think to say something, a curse leaped to attack Deku from behind. Had he not suddenly rolled out of the way, as if sensing the demon, he would’ve been decapitated. It landed with a thud, shaking the ground, only to be penetrated with multiple curse-imbued nails knocked into him by her hammer. The curse staggered, letting out a pained warble, and then exploded.
Deku popped upright, spinning around to face the now empty space and clinging to the cleaver with both hands. “Was that–?”
“No,” Todoroki interrupted. “We won’t get a warning next time.”
Uraraka let out a breath, ignoring the fog that puffed in the air in her face. “They’ll want to split us up, so we have to be–”
A sudden tug on her ankle caused her to cry out. She nearly dropped her hammer in response, but then Todoroki grabbed the head, keeping her from being dragged through the floor via a muddy portal. For the first time, she saw fear in his eyes, his face so open and terrified. Her grip slipped on the handle, and she sunk further into the portal, another curse grabbing hold of her other ankle.
Todoroki gritted his teeth. “Don’t let go.”
Uraraka tried to pull her other arm free of the portal. “I can’t–”
And then something grabbed her wrist and tugged her under, Todoroki’s scream of, “Uraraka!” echoing in her mind as she fell through the darkness.
*
Despite the expressionless veil over his face, Todoroki was familiar with fear. For as long as he could remember, it had been a strange companion, always hiding in the shadows along with curses and other monsters. The difference was that he’d learned to live with it, unlike most people, to the point where he didn’t think about it much, even when he was afraid. He pushed it to the side, pretended it didn’t exist, and did his job.
Except he couldn’t shove it aside now. The fear that resided in him now threatened to choke him, filling every crevice of his body, almost rendering him incapable of doing anything. It wanted to swallow him whole and pull him under into the abyss. Fear wanted him almost as much as the curses in this damn domain wanted him, and he was just barely keeping it at bay.
If not for Deku screaming, “Go save her!” he might have let that Special Grade curse slice him into tiny pieces. But here he was, furious tears burning the corners of his eyes, running and running and trying not to think about how he’d lost one friend and left the other to face a curse he had no chance of surviving against.
This is your fault, a voice in the back of his mind seethed. You’re still too weak.
Todoroki skidded around a corner, just barely avoiding the demons nipping at his heels. Before, only his panting breaths and feet slapping against the ground echoed in the hallway, but now, he could hear a muffled voice in the distance. Angry, fierce, and a little bit scared. Uraraka – she was still alive, but the shout, “Put me down!” didn’t inspire much hope.
He clapped his hands together to conjure another one of his shinigami without stopping. It burst to life, a phoenix made of fiery feathers, the tips of its wings grazing the concrete walls. They entered a cavernous, dark room, the phoenix shinigami swooping high into the air while he ran to the center of the room where a massive curse demon was holding Uraraka upside down by the ankle. It turned toward him, its mouth still wide open with Uraraka dangling above it, and let out a loud, guttural sound.
“Hang on!” Todoroki yelled.
“To what?” Uraraka shot back frantically.
The phoenix shinigami swooped down not a second later and sliced through the curse’s arms with its burning talons. The curse cried out, and Uraraka shrieked as she fell. He made it just in time, catching her in his arms, but the speed and her weight threw him off, and they crashed to the ground together, a mess of pained limbs and bruised bodies.
As they pushed themselves up, Uraraka grunted, “Thanks, but I had it under control.”
“I can tell.”
Todoroki wasn’t lying. Around them, the room was littered with curses, their bodies battered in or filled with holes. She’d put up a hell of a fight on her own before that larger curse managed to snag her. The side of her face was covered in blood from a cut over her right eyebrow, one sleeve of her jacket torn off and her tights ripped with more blood seeping into the thin material, but that didn’t stop her from standing upright and facing down the curse that nearly ate had her for an afternoon snack.
“Where’s Deku?” Uraraka asked.
“Dealing with that Special Grade on his own. He thought–” Todoroki didn’t want to say what he thought. Just because he was the vessel of perhaps the most powerful curse didn’t mean he would survive this. That demon might just take its chances rather than deal with him – or take control for good.
Concern flashed in Uraraka’s eyes, but it vanished quickly, replaced by determination. “Then we better hurry up and deal with this so we can go save him. We can’t leave him behind.”
She was right. They couldn’t leave him behind. No matter what Todoroki had said before, he couldn’t bear the thought. He was the one that had asked for Deku’s life to be spared, so that life was partially his responsibility now. Uraraka caught his eyes and nodded. She wasn’t that little girl anymore, shivering covered in dirt in a dark hole she’d fallen into at a construction site, surrounded by curses that wanted nothing more than to devour a child with inherent curse energy.
You see them too.
He’d been surprised. As from Touya and the children of the jujutsu sorcerers his father worked with, he hadn’t met another kid that could see curses. He’d thought it was some sort of family thing, but there was a girl who by all means should’ve been dead by the time they found her. He thought she was weak, but that strength simmering inside of her must’ve been there back then too.
Uraraka swiped the blood out of her eyes. “You boys are so troublesome.”
As if that was the problem here. Nonetheless, something about her attitude put him at ease despite the situation. His shinigami’s cries pierced the air, circling above the curse as its lumpy arms grew back. Todoroki let out a breath, that old fear crawling back to the recesses of his mind. It would never leave him, but he could live with it, so long as he wasn’t alone.