Chapter Text
The days after the war came and went slower than he would have thought possible. He hadn’t even been allowed to get up for a while, or really move at all. He’d undergone operations, they said. It wasn’t safe. He wasn’t sure they cared about his safety at all, really. It wasn’t until one of those stupid hero brats wanted to talk to him that they let him do much of anything.
He was moved to a more standard hospital room the day he was supposed to come visit. The windows were much bigger, looking out on the city. The destruction was a lot more jarring now that he was mostly back in his right mind. He could pick out who had been where, the trails his huge path had left, buildings scorched and turned to ash, dusty craters all across the skyline.
He really hoped they were all okay.
His new room had a bathroom too, one with a door, even if they still made someone stand inside to watch him like they had been doing. It wasn’t like he had thought about offing himself in there or anything until they’d put the idea in his head. That was the worst part, he thought. No matter what he did, anywhere they took him, there were at least one or two people watching his every move, ones who didn’t hesitate to let him know they were willing to kill or restrain him. He was just glad to have an actual bathroom to himself, complete with a mirror above the sink.
He looked like shit. More than usual, anyway. He hadn’t really gotten the chance to properly look at himself in quite a while, not since back at the mansion with all those quirkist fucks in the MLA. He was covered in bruises and scrapes, and he was so wrapped up in bandages he almost couldn’t see any of the scales poking out from underneath. The bandages around his head made him nervous too with all he’d heard about what they’d had to do to leave with any sort of brain function left, but they wouldn’t tell him anything specifically. Any attempts to peek were met with security grabbing at his wrists or kicking at his ankles.
He’d see the damage soon enough, he reasoned. He doubted it’d be the worst scarring out of everybody, big as he’d been for the whole thing.
He wasn’t particularly eager about their meeting in the first place. He was even less eager when they set up a whole damn table for whatever talk he was about to be forced to have, and when one of them sat down very seriously in front of him. “I know stress has been a problem for you lately. We’re going to let you know a few things before you speak to Mr. Midoriya. You need to control yourself around him, or we will have to knock you out.” It gave the same impression as when he’d get lectured in school by some teacher telling him to just power through all the bullying. He took it with a lot less seriousness.
“I don’t want to talk to him. You can knock me out now, I’d be thrilled.”
He made a face. “Don’t you want to hear about your teammates?”
He couldn’t really say anything to that. He did, desperately, but he didn’t want them to know just how worried he was about them all. He could make a few assumptions. Dabi had been talking about killing himself, and he’d apparently lost his fight, which could mean bad things. They had to have defeated All for One somehow, unless he ditched. Kurogiri had warped off somewhere last he saw. Tomura was just about as unbeatable as his mentor. That just left Toga up in the air, but he didn’t really know anything.
He seemed to take his silence as agreement. “Again, please try to keep yourself calm. I’ll read through the status of everyone.” He pulled up a paper, and that was some form of hope, even if it was annoying that all of it had been forgotten so quickly he couldn’t remember who’d lived or died. Someone had lived. Someone besides him. “All for One: deceased.” That was a breath of fresh air. It sounded unreal, like he’d tricked everyone again somehow, but at least he was gone. “Touya Todoroki: alive and in custody.” He was almost giddy with it all. That was a shock too, Dabi had seemed to be one foot through death’s door since the day they’d met. “Kurogiri: deceased.” That was less encouraging. He barely knew the man, but Tomura had loved him, in his own sort of detached way. He wondered how much of his death was his own fault for dragging him into the fight. “Himiko Toga: deceased.”
“What?” he interrupted at that one. He tried to take a deep breath, he could feel his new quirk bubbling under his skin, tearing slightly at his bandages already. God, that was unfair though. She had only been seventeen. That couldn’t be right. She’d had Twice’s blood. It had probably just been a clone, and she’d slipped off somewhere.
“Don’t interrupt me, please. Tomura Shigaraki: deceased.” And then he just flipped back the page. Like he hadn’t just sent Shuichi’s very fragile sense of stability crumbling.
“How?” he asked. He was amazed the words came. The statistics were bleak. Him and Dabi, and no one else.
“That’s why Mr. Midoriya is here to see you,” he said carefully. “He was the one to end the fight. Shigaraki’s own quirk was really the thing to kill him in the end, but Mr. Midoriya insisted he talk to you, something important. We’re not sure what, but I will warn you, if you threaten him or any harm comes to him at all—”
“I know.” Unlike killing himself in the bathroom, which honestly was sounding better by the second, he had already been thinking of all the ways he could kill the brat long before he’d even been through with speaking.
“Very good. In that case, we’ll be bringing him in now.”
He thought it was kind of a stupid plan, pissing him off and then dragging some kid in here, but then again they hadn’t cared about dragging kids into it when he’d been ten stories tall, incapable of rational thought, and armed with a weapon at least as long as a grown man. The time it took for the man to leave and get him did not help him settle at all. Enough to sink back into the disassociated trance he tended to operate in lately, but he could still feel everything like it was boiling just under his skin. He couldn’t let them see him like that. His dignity was all he really had left.
He was a little satisfied to see him. The last time he’d seen the hero-in-training up close and in person, he’d been an entirely different man. He looked beat to hell now, half of his face scarred, a patch of his hair missing, and almost as covered in bandages as Shuichi was. He wasn’t nearly as happy and bright either, looking very serious as he sat down in front of him.
He wouldn’t meet his eyes. It was insulting, to be honest. He could kill his friend, he could have the audacity to come marching in here like he was innocent in all of this, and he couldn’t even look him in the eye. He couldn’t even respect him as a kid, intimidated by him. He was only four or five years younger than him. They could have gone to school together.
“How have you been?” he finally asked, sort of looking up at him at least.
“Shitty.”
“Be polite,” the doctor snapped, standing over them like an overbearing babysitter, which didn’t make any of this any better. “Please excuse him. We talked to him about being on his best behavior. His mind’s still not entirely intact, he’s been having dissociative spells, regression, the like. He’s coming to though, slowly but surely.”
“I’m sorry, that sounds terrible.” Bullshit. It was all bullshit. He hated this little asshole more by the second.
“He was in the process of becoming a full-fledged nomu, as his body was unable to withstand multiple quirks,” the doctor continued to explain. “Thanks to the great strides in our research though, we just barely managed to halt that process before it progressed too far.”
Deku nodded like he understood, even if he still looked uncomfortable about the whole thing. It was pissed him the fuck off. His fake concern for Shuichi’s situation, avoiding anything important being talked about, not getting to the point at all, and he didn’t look like he felt sorry about any of it. “Pretty shameless of you to strut in here like this, murderer,” he bit out, ignoring the doctor’s sigh.
“I’m not here to deny that. Only to deliver Shigaraki’s parting words.”
He still didn’t look sorry at all. He was meeting his eyes now, and somehow that was worse. “Here to kick a guy while he’s down? You’re one sick bastard, you know that? I don’t want to hear you gloat about killing him.”
He ignored him, carrying on completely unphased. “‘If Spinner survived, tell him this’. You survived, so here’s the message. ‘Even to the bitter end, Tomura Shigaraki fought to destroy’.”
It hurt. It made it real, somehow, and somehow even less real too. Tomura was dead. They were talking about him like he was dead, going on about last words and bitter ends. “Shigaraki told you to say that?”
“Yes. To you, Spinner.”
“Me?” He was a little ashamed of how his voice broke slightly, the reality of everything settling in. “Toga and Dabi too, yeah? And Compress? Kurogiri? I know Dabi lived too, don’t think you can lie about that.”
“No. Only you.”
This was all so fucked. He hated Tomura a little for that, and he hated himself for hating him. Why would he do that? Spinner hadn’t earned anything from him, especially not his very last words, the way Midoriya told it. “Shigaraki was…” It was worse now, his voice trembling like he was about to start crying. He was. He was starting to cry. “...my shining hope. He said, he said we’d destroy everything. He turned Deika City into a crater.”
He wasn’t sure why it was all pouring out like this. He couldn’t let them see him like this. Even if it was only sparing Dabi now from knowing they’d liked each other, or sparing himself, he had to try. It came out anyway. “He represented me. My voice. When I was oppressed for who I am, I was ready to give up on life… I was just some stupid heteromorph, after all…”
He was growing now, towering over the other slightly, and the doctor was watching him tensely, but he couldn’t stop it. Everything was at a boiling point inside of him, and that stupid look on the hero bastard’s face was making him want to kill him. He couldn’t think about his past like that. It was behind him, he told himself that, it was nothing now. That wasn’t the point of any of this. Still, his clothes tore, his bandages fell aside, his head crushed itself into the ceiling. “He gave a guy like me a dream to cling to. He gave me hope for things to change, I dreamt I could be somebody!” he continued, picking him up with no more difficulty than he would a bag at his normal size.
“You don’t have to put up with this from him, let me subdue—!”
Shockingly, even as the doctor reached for the taser kept on his belt, Midoriya shook his head, fighting an arm out of his grip to signal him to stop. He didn’t have time to process it, didn’t even have time to fear the consequences, to put the kid back down in his chair. His head was filling with cotton again, his quirk and anger fighting against him uselessly. “Tomura Shigaraki was my hero!” he sobbed. “He… he was a gamer! When I was a shut-in video games were all I had! And he… he liked my faves!”
It was stupid, he knew. All of this sounded so stupid. So shallow. He could hardly hold himself together, he could hardly hold a thought together at all. It was all just so unfair. He was all alone like this again, even after everything, and his own body and mind was betraying him now, and it had all been for no reason at all. The boy fell out of his hands as he cried, his grip loosening as they shook. “He was… my very first friend!” he gasped.
Eventually his anger gave way to overwhelming sadness, and he began shrinking back down. Midoriya waited patiently, his hand resting cautiously on one of his huge fingers. He waited a minute before he spoke again, still looking at him almost as blankly as Shuichi’s mind felt, even if a little more concerned than he had seemed at first.
“Shigaraki told me he needed to be a hero to you all,” he said slowly, gently. “The league of villains held a special place in his heart. And I’m sure he felt the same way about you as you did him. Which is why I think he wanted to let you know.”
It hurt. It hurt so badly. He’d gotten caught up in it all, like he always did. And just like always, he’d stopped thinking about any consequences, the reality of the situation they were in. Like everything else, he’d been to slow and stupid to realize he was only making things worse. If he’d been just a little smarter, a little more aware, a little less hesitant to jump in, he might have been able to save his friend. His hero.
He was getting up. Was that all he’d had to say? That was it? “You bunch… You’re gonna keep fighting, right?” Shuichi asked, making him pause. “Sooner or later, I bet you’ll forget all about Tomura, and the league. It’ll all just be a fond memory for you to look back on, your first real fight. Well, I’m gonna write a book. One about Tomura Shigaraki, the symbol of fear, and how the league of villains lived to destroy. A book that’ll stick it to all of you heroes forever and ever. The past never dies, and I’ll spin the tale of Tomura Shigaraki.”
He wasn’t sure how serious he was being. He still couldn’t think straight, he still felt like he was throwing a temper tantrum about all of this, like he was ready to say about anything to make him have some sort of remorse. Still, it hurt when he turned around, still dead serious, and said, “Make it a comic book.”
Was he making fun of him? This fucking asshole . “Shut the fuck up.”
“No, I’m serious. I’ll help you. I won’t ever forget. I don’t want anyone to forget either. I want to help you.”
The doctor looked almost as distressed as Spinner did. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. This meeting was hard enough to organize, that’d be—”
“I’ll handle it,” he said firmly. “I’ll sort the whole thing out. But I really think it’s a good idea.” He was already halfway out the door, and that had been the first thing to make him look even slightly pleased with himself. He had to be joking though, because it didn’t stop him from leaving. Self-righteous prick.
It was quiet once Midoriya was gone. He felt like shit, and it certainly didn’t help that the doctor was on his ass in a second to scold him. “You’re very lucky, you know, he shouldn’t have let you manhandle him like that, you brute!”
“Sorry.” He wanted to tell him to shut up, to demand to be alone for just five fucking minutes to process all of this, but he really was lucky he wasn’t in trouble as it was. He didn’t want to push it, especially when he was already following all of that with a request. “Could I see Dabi? If someone else is there? Anybody can watch us, I just want to talk to him.”
“Absolutely not,” he said firmly, guiding him back to that stupid hospital bed. “I already need to work out the logistics of… of whatever that was with everyone involved. Not to mention you’re both criminals, and you need to be questioned, especially since he can’t be. And any visitors need to be permitted by the Todoroki family first.”
“What do you mean he can’t be? Why not?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. You’re the only one we have, really, Sako Atsuhiro hasn’t had anything useful to tell us for weeks now. You’re only to be told what concerns you. Not to mention doctor-patient confidentiality, and just how angry Endeavor would be with everyone here if any of that wasn’t cleared by him first. Trust me, it’s better not to know.”
None of that sounded very good. He hadn’t really had the chance to ask about anything with Dabi’s family, it had only been a month or so since he’d revealed it to everyone, and he’d spent most of that time helping Tomura, trying to adjust to his new quirks, dealing with Skeptic’s bullshit about him being a leader for people with mutation quirks, and trying to keep tabs on the other two while they were running off doing who knew what. It was like everything else, he’d wasted too much time on things that never really mattered, and now it sounded like Dabi had been fucked over as much as their dead teammates.
He’d gotten off easy. It settled somewhere inside of his stomach, heavy like he’d swallowed lead that was slowly poisoning his blood. He had been the luckiest out of everyone, somehow. All because he was as useless as he always was, a guy following the masses with nothing in his heart.
The city’s destruction was more hopeless now as he looked down at it all. That had been their last impact on the world? It all seemed so useless, disorganized, pointless. It was already being cleaned up and built over, just as he’d thought. Everyone would forget this soon enough. Whether it took months or years, it would evolve into the exact opposite of the future Shigaraki had promised. The country that pushed them all to such lengths would carry on as it always had, their murderers would be called heroes, and any sense of their humanity would be bulldozed over in the name of having a clear right and wrong. The skyline would remain sickeningly intact.
His suggestion sounded stupid to his ears already, especially when that hero kid had made fun of him like that, but he had to. He had to . If he was the only league member who could carry it on, or even if things with Dabi weren’t as bad as they sounded and he could do something too, it was only right. He had to do something to make it up to all of them, to keep some version of them alive in the world. What else could he do? He was no writer, but he was nothing else in particular either. It was the same as anything else. He’d tried to become Stain, he’d tried to become Tomura, now he would try to embody the whole league at once. Maybe he could pretend he’d died along with them. Spinner. It had no use as a villain name anymore. He’d be a story spinner instead.