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It had started fine. Eri was learning well how to control her quirk, and her mental and physical health had improved drastically compared to when Shouta and the others had gotten her out of Overhaul’s suffocating grip.
It was fine.
Until it wasn’t.
She had gotten very comfortable with being able to use her quirk, apparently too much so. She had forgotten she still needed to exercise caution, with a quirk like hers. Blood was everywhere, she wouldn’t stop screaming, and no one could get close to her or they’d share the same fate. Shouta was beginning to panic too, and that feeling only skyrocketed when Eri bolted away and off of U.A. grounds. They tried to stop her, to catch up, but she had spent years hiding from men who would actually hurt her if they caught her, and she was small and smart, and it didn’t take long for her to practically vanish. Shouta’s head filled with static and he nearly choked on his breath, being saved from what felt like falling out of existence by Midoriya grabbing his arm. They needed to find Eri, fast.
Tomura was not having a good day. It was, in fact, really fucking shitty. Dabi didn’t show up to their break-in mission to steal information from U.A. so they couldn’t do it, the shithead, and for some reason, everyone had been particularly all over him today. He had opted to take a walk, rather than killing all of his colleagues. He was walking down an alley, spotting a dumpster that looked like it would make a pretty good seat for a short rest, when he heard crying. A kid, from the sounds of it. He huffed, curiously peaking around the dumpster's other side and finding a small child crying. A little girl, to be exact. She had a single horn that was faintly glowing, and internally Tomura bemused that a little girl would probably love to have a quirk that resembled a unicorn. He doubted this kid was very mentally occupied with that, though, given that she was also covered in blood and sobbing her eyes out. Ha, he’d been there.
“Hey.”
The girl startled, scrambling away from him dramatically, to which he rolled his eyes.
“Calm down, I’m not hurting you.”
“But I’ll hurt you !!” She bawled out, and fuck, she sounded just like him when he was a kid. Was he really that annoying?
“Quirk accident, huh?
“How did you—”
“It’s pretty obvious. I’ll be fine, just stop using your quirk.”
“I can’t— ”
“But you can, though.”
She blinked at him. He could see the cogs turning in her brain, and her brows furrowed, and slowly the glow encasing her horn faded away. She looked distraught.
“See? That easy. I envy you, y’know,” Tomura grumbles.
“Why…?”
“Because you can turn yours off.” He says simply, hoisting himself up and plopping onto the dumpster before pulling a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his jacket pocket. She seems to consider this for a moment.
“You can’t?” She asks genuinely.
“Nope.” He lights his cigarette and holds it in his mouth, putting the pack away. Just to make a point, he grabs a piece of trash that didn’t make it into the bin he was sitting on, placing all five fingers down and letting her watch in fascination as it crumbles into nothing.
“What’s yours?” She just stares. “Your quirk, what is it?” He takes a drag, swallowing to ease the throat dryness that follows.
“Oh,” she murmurs, “I make things go backwards.”
“Like telekinesis or something?” He raises an eyebrow, and she shakes her head.
“No, I make things go back. It can be back to how they were before something, or, uhm, uh, evo–, evolutionar-ee-lee.”
Huh.
“That’s pretty cool. You hurt someone with it, right? Can’t you just make them how they were before?”
Her jaw drops and he snorts, what a dumb kid. He takes another drag.
“You should get back to your family, kid, just fix whatever happened, you’ll be fine.” She’s about to respond, but in all his bitter glory, Tomura cuts her off. “You’re so lucky, y’know that? I would’ve killed to be able to just fix what I did at your age.” He glares at her, and she fidgets anxiously. He softens a little and shrugs. “But, to be fair, I would kill for most things.” At that, her expression and stance get more wary. She met him, a random guy dressed in all black, in a shady ass alleyway, what the hell was she expecting? He scoffs. “Don’t look at me like that, I helped you.” His tone is bitter. He mentally assures himself it’s because she’s annoying and not because kids looking at him like he’s a threat makes him feel sick.
“Sorry. Uhm, my name is—”
“Don’t care, kid.” He takes a final long drag, before snuffing out his cigarette on the dumpster, putting it back in his pack, and hopping back onto the ground. “Get out of here.” He says finally, and begins his walk back to the League’s current not-so-great hideout. He stops when he feels a tug at his shirt.
“I, uhm, don’t know how to get home.”
Tomura isn’t sure he could roll his eyes harder, how on earth is that his problem?
“Then figure it out.” He says flatly, nearly beginning to walk again, but then she gives him a look. She’s scared, and her red eyes look so much like his, and he knows what it’s like to be stranded and soaked in someone else’s blood and—
“Fine.” He snaps, hooking her hand with two fingers and walking in the opposite direction as before, tugging his hood a little further down his face. After getting over a brief moment of surprise, the girl holds onto his two fingers and his pant leg with her other hand tightly, sticking close, and it pulls horribly at something in him. He decides to shove that into his mental vault, letting out a hard breath.
“Do you know what you live around?”
“I live at U.A.”
He freezes. Oh, for fucks sake. Of course, she lives with the hero brats, of course . Why should he ever have hoped his life would be easy? He was trying to do something nice for once! Why can he never have it easy?! Whatever, it’s fine, he just won’t go. He’ll stop right here, and let the stupid kid get lost and die or something, and—
He feels her grip tighten, and she looks up at him with genuine concern.
Fuck.
Shouta is pretty certain he’s losing his mind. The other Staff at UA elected to have a meeting about the situation, a damned meeting. It lasted a solid fifteen minutes at least, which means it actually took around thirty minutes because they were in disarray and had to set up a meeting, which it’s actually been around forty minutes now that they’ve suited up. and who knows where Eri could be now? He felt like he was going to explode. It took every single fiber of control in his body to not tell everyone there to shut up and go after the poor kid already every step of the way, and his leg was sore from how aggressively he’d been bouncing it during those fifteen whole minutes they could have been in action. When they were finally ready he was out of the door in record time, practically racing to find the girl who was practically his child at this point and—
And there she was. Just outside the gate, holding the hand of a stranger. He was baffled, and paused briefly. He recognized that figure. The clumpy shaggy blueish-grayish hair, the posture, the height and wiry frame, and then they leaned down and said something to his child and he heard the rasp, the scratchiness. He knew exactly who that was. Rage flooded his veins, and he was about to ask what the hell Tomura Shigaraki wanted, when Eri simply let go of his hand and ran over to Shouta, open-armed and eager for a hug. He gladly gave it to her, subtly checking her for any bombs or other things of that sort, and finding none.
“Sh-” Midoriya started, taking a step towards Shigaraki, and Shouta held a halting hand out and gave him a sharp look. He looked eager to argue, but he looked back and forth between the villain, Eri, and Shouta’s disapproving glare a couple of times, and he seemed to understand that conflict was not a good choice right now. They would have to question Eri and check her for any trackers or other gadgets Shigaraki seemed to have an endless supply of, but regardless, they needed to just accept this small victory, however strange it was.
Shouta watched with an uneasy feeling as he let a terrorist walk away in silence.
It had been a few months since the incident with Eri happened. Strangely enough, the heroes found not a single trace of anything untrustworthy on Eri’s person, and she described Tomura Shigaraki as “a little weird but nice”. Shouta had been completely baffled, and it had kept him extremely on edge ever since, especially with how quiet the League of Villains had been recently, but he supposed he couldn’t complain. It was just so odd.
His patrol route was different today, as a new underground hero had recently joined the ranks and he was scooted over a tad to make room for the extra nighttime surveillance. He kept more on guard and looked around more corners and crevices than usual, not knowing all the ins and outs of this area yet.
A couple of hours in, he saw someone sitting on a very high-up roof ledge. That was never a good thing. With a deep breath, he steeled himself and switched mental gears, still staying alert but keeping himself out of combat mode. He swiftly climbed up to the top, and the stench of cigarettes reached his nose. Maybe he was lucky and this was just a late-night smoker who lived in this apartment complex and liked the sky.
As he stood up onto the roof, just about to approach the person, a knife came shooting at him. He barely deflected it in time, it was very unexpected and horrifyingly well-aimed for his vitals. He looked over to the figure, and it took him a moment, having only ever seen Shigaraki in full-coverage, baggy clothes, but he connected the dots once the villain turned his head to look at him.
“Eraserhead,” he rasped, “patrol route change, hm? How unfortunate for me.” Did he know Shouta’s patrol route? What else did he know?
As he gets closer, he registers a disturbing view. Shigaraki was in a tank top, rather than his usual hoodie or baggy long-sleeve, and his arms were coated in scars without an inch to spare. It was mostly from self-destruction, which he had a new, fresh layer of, made more apparent by the bloodied razor next to him. The next thing Shouta noticed was the source of the smell, a cigarette the man was nearly finished with, and after that, it was the hickeys, bruises, and burns on him. Then, how disturbingly thin the man was, and finally it was the cloudy, not-all-there look in his eyes as he stared out into nothing. Shouta had never seen him without the dismembered hand on his face, and he looked aged, but also so young. He felt a pang of sympathy despite himself. Shigaraki takes a drag from his cigarette.
“Tomura Shigaraki,” he addresses in kind, “you are a strange man.”
That gets him a small, airy laugh.
“Says the hero on duty who isn’t arresting me right now.” His tone is strangely playful. Shouta wants to disagree, but he simply huffs, because Shigaraki isn’t exactly wrong. He finds himself sitting next to a villain who has tried to kill him and his students on multiple occasions. it feels surreal, but he’s never experienced a villain he could’ve sworn he had a good read on acting so unexpectedly, and after he deliberately brought Eri safely back to the heroes, Shouta didn’t know how to feel. Shigaraki smirked at him as if he knew what he was thinking, and held out his cigarette, probably with two or three more hits on it, which Shouta took after a moment of hesitation.
“I didn’t expect you to be so friendly.” The hero says genuinely, taking a long, solid drag and then stubbing it out.
“I’m really high and just got my brains fucked out, and I’m also probably in shock from blood loss.” The man provides bluntly.
“ Ah. ” Is all he can respond to that slightly jarring information with, “yeah, you should probably do something about that. You’ll bleed out at the rate they’re going.” Aizawa gestures to the very deep and heavily bleeding cuts on Shigaraki’s arms.
“Nah, I’m not human enough for them to kill me.”
Shouta is about to point out that being incredibly immoral doesn’t make you immune to blood loss, but he then considers that the villain might be talking literally.
“Metaphorically?”
“No,” Tomura says simply. After a few moments of being stared at incredulously, he elaborates with: “The freak that makes the nomus experiments on everything that breathes—and everything that doesn’t, for that matter—and I’ve breathed around him a lot.”
The hero blinks. He supposes that makes sense. The image he has of Shigaraki in his mind only seems to get more complicated.
“Why did you help us? With Eri, I mean. She said you were kind to her; why?”
At that, he pauses, and then just shrugs.
“Felt like it, I guess.”
“...Why are you even a villain, Shigaraki? You seem to—” He’s cut off by the man in question waving a hand around in front of his face and shushing loudly. He tenses, unsure if Shigaraki will try anything, but he notes that the man has artist’s gloves on and likely can’t use his quirk through them. That’s clever, he acknowledges to himself.
“Pump the breaks Mr. Investigator, I’m not in the mood. Chill out.”
Shouta sighs and gives a resigned nod, he supposes asking a country-renowned villain to do much more than be civil with him is pushing it. Allowing the villain to turn his attention back up to the inky black, he decides to join him, gazing up at the few stars they could see through the light pollution of the large city. Time passes, both of them just sitting there, before Aizawa flinches as he’s grabbed. Shigaraki climbs onto his lap, grabbing his face and leaning in. Shouta is taken wholly off-guard, he has no idea where that even came from, and he almost doesn’t respond in time to stop whatever the hell this is. But, as soon as his mind catches up he’s shoving the other man off of him and standing up.
“What th—” The hero stops when he’s interrupted by the villain bursting into downright cackles where he lies on the ground . Tomura laughs so hard Shouta can see tears building in his eyes, and he’s completely lost.
“Oh, fuck, I wish you could’ve seen your face , oh my God.” Shigaraki wheezes out between laughter.
“What are you doing?” The hero finishes this time, tone harsh.
“I felt like it. I was curious what would happen.” He says, fighting giggles as he speaks, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to try and randomly make out with your enemy. Aizawa shakes off the shock, groaning to himself. Trying to interact normally with Tomura Shigaraki of all people was a horrible idea.
He walks away from the manic villain, disturbed and agitated with himself. He’s about to climb off the roof of this building, to leave Shigaraki with his deranged thoughts, but the next words he hears stop him in his tracks.
“You know, you used to be my idol.” Shouta turns, facing him again, he’s sitting up now. He’s grinning like a freak, but the nails scratching harshly into his neck betray his distress.
“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep without the dumb scarf I made for cosplaying you for years. I was convinced, I was so, so stupidly convinced, that you would save me.”
“Save you from what?”
“My Master. Myself. All the people who had taken advantage of me. Maybe just my itch. Who knows? I was a weird fucking kid. I was obsessed with it, though. You aren’t like the other heroes, Eraser, you don’t do it for fame, for attention. You really try, you really care. You and your incredible quirk that could make it all stop, you could make my itching go away and make my quirk stop working and you could free me.” He huffs, “The fantasy always got stuck at the part where you carried me away from it all, though. I couldn’t decide if I would kiss you or not. I really wanted to, it would be the first time I’d kiss someone because I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure if you would like that or not.”
The hero stared at him, nausea pooling in his stomach and bile rising in his throat.
“Didn’t matter in the end though, ‘cause you aren’t actually very different. None of you care about people like me. I gave up on it, eventually.” He waves his hand like he was just telling an old high school story. “Anyways, just thought that was kind of funny, but you don’t seem very amused, so… I’ll see you around?”
“...Yeah.” Shouta choked out, and with that, finally broke eye contact with the man in front of him, every word of his little monologue had felt like a punch in the gut, and he was disgusted beyond words. He felt like he had lost. They never fought this entire interaction, but he lost.
He never wanted to encounter Tomura Shigaraki, ever again.
He threw up on the way home.