Chapter Text
They give him a baby.
He’s out of his head with the drugs. Something for the pain, something for the aggression, something for his quirk. He’s…
He doesn’t know when the cell in the basement turned into a small bedroom. A crazy, unhinged part of him, the part that lost its screws after the third week of endless torture, misses it. Misses the dripping pipes and the lack of stimulus, the way the smell of mold and mildew never grew bearable. The hours of silence and darkness that were a soothing balm on his fractured body.
This place… it makes his hands shake.
He can hardly see, vision blurring and doubling. His stomach swoops with nausea. Peripherally, he’s aware that he’s swaying in place, on his knees before his Master, a pathetic sight.
But the drugs, they’re making everything cyclical. There’s a splitting chasm in his head, a warping vacuum that drags away his every thought, twists the sounds he hears into the whispers of voices he’s long forgotten.
He’s forgotten something important, something to do with the smoke that pours from his hands, his mouth, his nose. That’s not supposed to happen. He’s wrong, there’s. There is something wrong with him.
He wants to cry, but the Master hates his tears.
“My servant.”
The voice comes from above him, a bid for his attention, but the Master must know by now that there’s none to give. Nothing that has been left whole after the Doctor’s meddling. He’s broken.
His Master must know that, because he’s merciful enough to guide the servant with his own gentle hands, fisting a handful of his hair and jerking his neck back.
The smile is terrible, it stretches across his handsome face too wide, pushes his features from porcelain to deranged.
“I have found a use for you after all.”
That’s good. That’s… a good thing. Useless servants are given to the Doctor, and the Doctor only knows how to break his toys. It’s good for him to be useful.
He shouldn’t dread it, a pit shouldn’t form in his stomach at the sight of his Master’s pleased grin. That’s a sign of disloyalty, and the punishment for disloyalty is severe.
Maybe the Master can read his mind, maybe his trepidation seeps from his skin like the smoke. The thrum of fear, the undercurrent of disgust. He is not the boy with the blue eyes. That boy died. He is a half-made thing.
But even monsters can only go so far with no motivation. The Master crouches before him, shifts his gentle hands from the servant’s hair to his face. He cups that fragile, pale skin, peers into the eyes of his creation.
“Do you want me to tell you your name?”
His breath catches.
It might be a test, a mind game, a trick to see how attached he is to the dead boy. To see if he clings to an identity that’s been peeled off his spine and left him flayed and raw. The Servant should say no.
Instead. Instead, he grapples through the fogginess of his own mind, tugging together thoughts that threaten to fly apart at the slightest change in the wind. The servant manages to get his lips to function, despite the drugs, despite the damage to his brain and body.
It comes out a raspy stutter, another flood of smoke coughed up his throat. It’s pathetic and All for One sneers in disgust, but he manages.
“Y—yess, Master.”
For a long moment, they stare. The Master has the most fearsome red eyes, rimmed in kohl, slanted like a fox’s. In comparison, the clouded, corpse-yellow eyes of his servant are like a rat’s, a bottom feeder. There’s no respect in that gaze, nothing to indicate that the servant is anything resembling a human being in All for One’s mind.
“Do you want to know your purpose, servant?”
All for One grips him by the chin, turns his face to the other side of the room, to the bed with the boy on it.
It’s a child’s bed, so small. The sides have railings so he won’t fall in his sleep, almost like a crib. The figure sleeping is covered in blood.
It’s a baby. It’s a baby, and his hair is the same pale blue as the servant’s.
“You exist to protect him,” The Master murmurs, close enough that his perfumed breath brushes against the servant’s neck, sending shivers down his spine. “That is your only purpose, Shirakumo Oboro.”
The relief is instant. Like a hit of an opioid, sinking into Oboro’s bones, so overpowering that he almost crashes onto his hands and knees.
All for One holds him up, pinching his face between his fingers, forcing his eyes to lock on the child.
“You will guard him,” He hisses, and Oboro feels the order fall into place. Feels it click into his soul as something else slips away.
Shirakumo Oboro… he can’t remember who that was, who he used to be before he became a warm corpse. It doesn’t matter, not now, not when his Master has commanded it and all the wispy voices in his head agree on one thing.
The baby shifts, cries out in his sleep. All for One lets go of his face, lets him drop to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Oboro flops onto his stomach, cheek hitting the wooden floor with a slap, but his eyes remain on his Master.
The white-haired man kneels next to the bed, and all the breath is stricken from Oboro’s lungs.
He’s never seen All for One prostrate himself in any way, certainly not for something as mundane as rousing a child.
But he does. He kneels over the boy, bows at the waist to kiss his blood-stained forehead, shifts the tufts of hair to the side. It’s tender and gentle, without the same mockery he imbues whenever he touches Oboro.
Irrationally, insanely, he finds himself envious.
The Master doesn’t hear his mutinous thoughts, or they don’t bother him. All of his attention is affixed to the boy, to softly rousing him, coaxing him from sleep with more patience than Oboro thought him capable of.
“Tomura,” The man murmurs.
It’s his son, Oboro realizes, when the boy’s eyes fly open. Fox-eyes. Crimson. It’s his son, that’s who he’s protecting.
He should feel honored.
All for One rises to stand once more, this time with a boy on his hip.
Oboro can feel the gaze of Tomura, curious but fearful. He resists the urge to look back.
“Do you see this thing?” He says, nudging Oboro with his foot. “It is yours to command, my child. It will care for you when I cannot.”
“It’s scary,” Tomura says, burying his face in the neck of a man far more intimidating. “Why does it look like that?”
“It’s a monster I’ve raised from hell and tamed to be your pet.” There’s a teasing edge to All for One’s voice, the slightest bit of humor.
Oboro feels himself drifting, stuck in a sense of unreality. This is too far from the basement, too much all at once. He almost wants to go back to being a nameless, worthless thing.
But the prospect of the Doctor, of allowing that man to twist his bones into something more dead than alive, is not one he can ever wish upon himself.
“It’s not scary,” All for One says, lowering the boy to the ground. Proving that, despite his diminutive stature, Tomura can, in fact, walk. “It won’t hurt you, I promise.”
He lays there, listening to his Master. He doubts that he’d hurt Tomura if he could. The voices… They don’t like that idea.
“Is it… a playmate?” Tomura asks, so curious.
“If you want it to be.”
“Can it talk?”
All for One kicks him again, harder this time, in the tender place below his ribs. “Speak.”
“Yes M—Master,” Oboro says.
It shouldn’t feel like he’s rewarded for it, but it does, and he is. The Master gestures for him to rise again, and then pushes the boy into his arms.
He’s given a baby.
Tomura is warm in his arms, his skin rough and dry. Instinct has Oboro cradling the boy to his chest, hooking his chin over that slim shoulder. Despite his reservations, Tomura sinks into the embrace, fisting his gloved hands in the fabric of Oboro’s shirt.
They look the same, and that shouldn’t matter, but it does. Tomura looks like the boy who died, with his small face and his blue hair. He could pass for Oboro’s brother, the Master could be their father.
It pleases him, it soothes a sick need for order, to see it like that.
Tomura is his to protect. Of course he is, that’s what Oboro was made to do, the only reason he’s alive.
He looks up from his vacant stare, the weight of the child in his arms dragging him back to Earth. Back to the small bedroom, away from the cell in the basement.
He can’t be there anymore, even if he craves the release of death, because now he has a reason to live.
All for One meets his gaze, and for the first time in a while Oboro feels strong enough to hold it.
The Master peers down at him, the softness stripped from his face now that Tomura’s back is turned. He raises an eyebrow at his slave.
It’s a question and a command all at once, an order waiting for acknowledgement. Oboro tightens his grasp on the boy, clinging to sanity with the same grip.
“I’ll do it,” He says, and the words come out far clearer than he thought himself capable of. “I’ll protect him.”
The Master smiles again, smug, the cat that’s gotten the canary. He crouches before the two boys, one hand on Tomura’s shoulder and the other coming up to cup the side of Oboro’s neck.
The proximity makes Oboro want to cringe away, to put distance between himself and his Master, to fall onto his stomach before All for One and plead for mercy.
But the man does not punish him, he leans closer, squeezes tighter around the boy’s neck.
“Yes,” He says, and he doesn’t even need to layer compulsion into the weight of his words. This is one command that Oboro doesn’t even think of disobeying. “You will.”