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Himiko was three years old when her quirk came in.
It was too early to understand it, to have any control.
She was three and when she scraped her arm on the sidewalk she sucked on the wound until she was dizzy. She was three and when she was asleep with her mother, she could smell the iron under her skin and bit. She was three and roadkill was intoxicating in a way she didn’t have the words to explain.
She was four when she found the dead bird in the garden.
She cradled it in tiny palms and lifted it for her parents to see.
Her mother cringed back, eyes wide with shock. Her father’s mouth snarled.
“That’s disgusting!” he cried. “Himiko, did you kill that bird?”
“No, Daddy,” she said, because she didn’t, because she found it. “I thought it was pretty.”
Her mother gagged, and her hand slapped the bird from Himiko’s grasp. It hit the kitchen floor and skids, red smearing in a trail.
“That’s not pretty, Himiko,” she hissed. “That’s vile, disgusting. I cannot believe you killed that poor bird.”
“I didn’t—”
“You’re rotten, Himiko,” her father huffed. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
Himiko’s face twisted, tears leaking. You’re rotten. She imagined her insides moulding; she cried harder.
“Don’t give us that,” her father continued. “You killed that bird, now clean it up.”
Himiko did as she was told. She crouched by the bird, so pretty, and picked it up. She followed her mother’s direction to put it in the bin and then carefully wiped up the blood on the floor. It was when her parents turned away as she headed to place the kitchen towel in the bin that she darted out a tongue and licks.
Shivers raced down her spine.
She was not yet the monster.
The monster was a thing she never thought she’d be. She would be normal, like her parents wanted. They hated her quirk, the way she wanted blood in a way she didn’t understand – they wanted a daughter with something regular to her special. They got Himiko.
She tried her best, honest, but Himiko Toga’s best never was good enough.
The monster was an inevitability she thought an option. The monster was the same as puberty; a race against the clock to see who would come out the victor. Like puberty, the monster always won.
Himiko Toga resembled a regular middle schooler. She was intelligent, quick witted, pretty. She took care with the buns in her hair, and her fangs were cute and made her friends gush. She always did her homework on time, and she always ate her lunch with her friends, and she always went out to the mall or the arcades if she was asked.
Her quirk was something silly, or basic, and not much of a party trick. Officially, it was called Transform, but she always waved away demonstrations.
“The criteria to make it work is so ridiculous and specific that there’s no point,” she would tell people when they asked, a breezy hand waved as to pretend that it didn’t matter all that much to her. Like jumping on one foot for fourteen seconds and then clapping twice, people assumed. Not blood. Not drinking blood.
She dreamt of it at night, when all the pretence and lies were gone.
When Himiko was alone in her room, just her and her desires, she could do whatever she wanted. She could dream whatever she wanted.
Most nights, a red sparrow came to her.
It hopped about the skin of her stomach, and then would bend over, using its beak to carve out a hole in her flesh. Blood welled in the divot, but the bird would keep going, breaking through the layers of fat and sinew and muscle, until it had created a space in her stomach big enough to climb into.
The blood would be everywhere, pouring, leaking. A waterfall down her sides. The bird played in her intestines before settling.
She felt so warm and happy in these dreams.
Reality was less kind. When someone scraped their knee, or cut themselves in the kitchen, she would become transfixed. Staring. Knuckles white. If she didn’t run away, she wouldn’t be able to help herself; she would fall upon them, wanting to taste. Wanting to see.
At school, her classmates thought she was scared of blood. When someone got hurt, her friends would wind their arms around her shoulders and walk her away from the scent of it, thinking themselves helping.
And they were helping. They were also hindering.
The monster, however, knew it would come out eventually. It didn’t mind.
She developed her crush on Saito in a heartbeat.
First, she had none. Then he got in a fight with Yuuji and when he walked past her in the hall, bloodied and bruised, she fell for him. The crush bloomed instantly in her chest, petals unfurling around her ribcage.
Saito, she thought, awed and amazed.
She couldn’t get enough of him.
Himiko started following him after school, started getting early to class so she could be the first to see him, started asking to sit at his table at lunch. Her friends sussed her out fast, thought it was sooooo cute that Himiko Toga had a crush.
She had a crush.
Yes.
That’s all it was.
Or, at least, that’s all it was until it wasn’t.
Until the monster came out. The monster that was Himiko Toga. The monster that brought a boxcutter to school and slit Saito in several directions and then crouched over his bleeding, dying body, to drink from him with a straw.
Ooooh yes, she thought, as she drank from him. This was a crush.
She hadn’t wanted to kiss him, or hold his hand. She had just wanted this, this taste, this feeling. The smell of it was intoxicating, the way his body shook before slumping into place was riveting.
She had wanted this for so long, had yearned for it. For the taste and the smell and the feeling. And at long last, it was hers. All hers. What she had always wanted…
A girl in her class caught them in the corridor; Himiko drinking up Saito’s blood through a straw and crying from the relief of it all. It was when she was almost full that she started crying from the horror of it – from the realisation that she had killed, that she had drank his blood, that she was the rotten creature her parents had been calling her since she was four and found that dead bird.
Disgusting, they would say to her when they found out.
Vile thing, they would hiss.
Himiko threw down the straw, grabbed the boxcutter, and ran.
She knew she had become the monster that had been lurking inside her when her parents took one look at her, blood smeared and crying and out of breath from the run home, and instead of rushing forward with concern and love, they reared back in revulsion.
She had known they would, but she had hoped they wouldn’t, so she came here anyway.
Perhaps it was just to have the experience of being yelled at. Of being screamed at. Of being kicked out of the house.
She slammed herself into her own room, grabbing her coat and a handful of clothes she could find. Her parents were on the stairs, stomping.
“Himiko! I told you to leave!” her mother shouted.
“I’m getting my bag!” Himiko cried.
“We just want you out!” her father insisted, desperate.
She shoved as much as she could into her backpack; the last of her pocket money, the most expensive things she owned so she could sell them.
Her parents banged down the bedroom door. She zipped up the bag, flung it over her shoulders, barged past them on the landing.
“Himiko!” her father shouted.
“I’m going!” she screamed back. The tears were still running. They hadn’t stopped since they’d started. Saito’s dead body floated around her mind, the taste of him on her tongue.
When she left the house, she ran.
Her parents stood at the doorway.
Rotten. Vile. Disgusting.
All things she’d thought of the monster inside, the thing she’d bottled up and shoved down for ten years, rolled around her mind.
When she ran away from her home, she didn’t look back.
Her face was on the news. Lovely, normal girl, everyone said of her.
They were so shocked to find out she was a monster. Perhaps her parents were the only ones who sounded like they’d known all along what they had been raising.
The streets were not a safe place. She learned fast and hard that she didn’t like it, that she wanted a place she could call home. If she begged for money, she was ignored or spat on or her feet trampled, and if she stole she would have to run for blocks to evade capture.
She swiped a generic school uniform from the washing line in a back garden and almost instantly people were kinder. They gave more coins; they weren’t so rude. Perhaps she would be a schoolgirl until she died. Perhaps the monster needed a short skirt and long socks and messy buns to get by.
Sometimes, she found people sleeping alone on the street, unprotected and vulnerable, and cut their throat with the boxcutter.
She drank, and she settled, and her body started changing shape.
Transform was not a quirk easily trained.
She had to do it a lot, and that meant a lot of blood.
It meant nightly hunts, and several trades for those she wasn’t looking to kill.
It meant slipping into unfamiliar skin and learning the new voice, the way the new limbs worked.
Himiko had been repressing this ability for a decade and so it didn’t come easy, not at first. But then, after a few months of trial and error, Transform became second nature.
Drinking blood became second nature.
The monster that was Himiko Toga got used to living on the streets, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it.
Himiko jimmied open the back window and climbed in, throwing her backpack into the dilapidated kitchen of the abandoned house ahead of her. She slammed the window back in place afterwards, coughing in the dust.
It would do.
Winter was around the corner and she had no interest in spending it like she had last year; moving from place to place, suffering in the cold while her image was still fresh in everyone’s mind from her mid-year murder.
But an abandoned house could provide shelter, and if she acquired enough blankets and layers, it could probably provide warmth, too. The only issue was her skirt and socks, which she would have to trade out, which meant finding an alternate option.
Himiko wandered through the house, checking the gross bathroom and the boarded up windows of the living room.
She slowed as she went. It was all a little… odd.
The house was abandoned, deserted. She’d been watching it for a while; no one going in or out.
But there was toilet paper in the bathroom. There were broken marks in the dust trails of the floor. There was trash on the staircase.
Himiko pulled out the boxcutter and started up the stairs, keeping her feet to the outer edges to avoid any unnecessary squeaks. She’d been in a few fights since the whole homeless thing had started, but she was still smaller than most of her opponents – she had to be swift and certain the moment danger arrived.
It arrived in the form of a man, asleep on the floor in the bedroom.
Himiko slowed further, creeping across the room. An asleep victim felt cheap but a whole lot safer than an awake, fighting one. But as she drew close, boxcutter poised, the sleeping man said, “Don’t even fucking think about it.”
One bright eye appeared from behind the ruffle of dark hair and the black heavy sleeve of his coat. His arm moved from across his face, and Himiko’s eyes widened as he revealed the sickly purple scarring on his face, curving around his jaw and under his mouth. Dried muscle, raw and bare.
His eyes darted to the boxcutter. “What are you planning to do with that, huh?”
Himiko swallowed. There was something terrifying about him, more so than almost anyone she’d met in her 18 months on the street.
She thought about her options, then slowly stood and stepped away.
“Nothing,” she told him. “I was planning to do nothing.”
“Right,” he agreed. “Now get out of here.”
Himiko hesitated. “W-well, I would.”
“Go.”
“But, you see, it’s cold outside. And I’ve been staking this place out for a while, so I’ve missed my chance at finding another place to hide out for winter.”
The man blinked at her. “Go away.”
“What if I just stayed in another room?” she suggested. “I’ll keep to myself – you won’t even know I’m here! I’ll even get my own toilet paper!”
The man growled, like he was going to lurched after her, but as she bounced of the room, calling, “Thank you!” over her shoulder, he didn’t chase after her. And he didn’t kick her out when she settled herself in the other bedroom.
The monster dreamt of the red sparrow burrowing into her stomach.
The monster lived in the empty bedroom of a mould-ridden house.
She stole joggers for her legs and a thick coat in a hideous green for her torso. She already had a sleeping back, so she added a blanket she took from a victim (sans blood) and thick socks from a thrift shop without security cameras.
She shoved cardboard through the back window to line the floor and more of it to cover the windows.
Her housemate, whose name she found out to be Dabi, commented on none of this. He had no blankets and no sleeping bag. He had no warm socks or extra layers. He slept in trash and sometimes bottles of alcohol. He occasionally appeared with a sandwich from some sub shop a few blocks away, and told her that he had fixed the plumbing on the place, which was why the water worked and the toilet flushed.
He'd been in the house for the better part of the year; he had no possessions at all.
Himiko and the monster that was Himiko felt bad for the guy. She stole another blanket, found a victim on the streets who had a sleeping bag and a coat big enough for him to wear on top of his long, raggedy black thing. She wondered where he got his cool boots from; they looked expensive.
When she presented him with these things, he merely blinked at her.
“For keeping warm,” she repeated, placing them down a few feet away from where he was sprawled on the floor like normal. “Winter’s already here, Dabi.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are,” she allowed, even though she was sure he wasn’t, “but this is just to help!” She gave him her most winningest grin, and then skipped out, back to her room.
It was cold in there too.
It was cold everywhere.
It was nearly Christmas, or maybe Christmas itself, or maybe even Christmas had been and gone – dates didn’t mean so much to her right now – when she couldn’t sleep. She was shivering in her blankets and coats and extra layers and thick socks. It wasn’t enough.
She’d had several nights like this: ones where she was certain, without a doubt, that she wouldn’t make it until morning.
Even the monster wouldn’t be able to save her from this.
When the tears started running down her face, she cursed them aloud. For daring to make her skin colder, for sapping the warmth from her cheeks. She bundled up deeper, her head inside the sleeping bag, and shook.
The door creaked open. Himiko stilled.
For a moment, there was complete silence, and then heavy footfalls across the room. A shifting sound, a settling, then a presence at the wall near to her head.
Very slowly, Himiko peeked out of her sleeping bag. In the dark, she could see the outline of Dabi. In his lap were the stack of things she’d gotten him: the coat and the blanket and the sleeping bag. He unfolded them and draped them over the top of her.
She sniffed.
He asked, “How old are you?”
“S-sixteen,” she whispered.
Dabi angled the sleeping bag and the coat and the blanket over her body. It wouldn’t be enough, she knew, but it was kind, and that mattered to her.
Dabi hummed. “I was only a little older than you when I started out on the streets alone.”
“Y-yeah?” She curled in tighter, the extra layers and the gravel of his voice soothing her shivers. “How did you deal with winter?”
She could see his smile in the dark.
“I have cold resistance,” he said.
“Oh, fucking hell,” she muttered.
Dabi laughed. It sounded rare. “Yeah. Nice gesture though, kid.”
“So you’re just… fine?”
“It’s a bit chilly, but I don’t mind it. And if I do…” He paused, then there was light. Blue in shade, flickering from his hand. It was small, soft, and Himiko instantly felt the warmth radiating from it. Her eyes widened; she shifted closer to him.
“You have fire too?”
Dabi’s exposed muscle on his jaw and undereyes looked almost black when his lips curled up. “Mom had an ice quirk, Dad had a fire one,” he replied. “Got the worst of both, but I suppose for times like this, they come in handy.”
The fire flickered out and Himiko whined.
“Please,” she said. “Just a little longer?”
Dabi sighed, but the flame came back to life. Himiko curled closer, by his side but not touching, relishing in the warmth.
“Himiko, right?” Dabi asked. Sleepy, warm, Himiko hummed yes. “Like from the news?” She hummed again. “That’s kinda metal,” he said. “Don’t kill me and drink my blood, yeah?”
“You’re so warm,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The next day, hand burned red, though he wouldn’t talk about it, Dabi left the house and came back with a small pit that he could light. They moved into the same room. They told each other about their parents, and their lives before the streets, though Dabi’s felt heavily redacted, like his real name.
Other than their histories, they had very little in common, but Himiko didn’t mind.
It was nice to have a friend again.
To have someone that didn’t mind how she was, who maybe even liked the monstrous parts of herself.
One night, the two of them sat side by side as a small fire flickered in the bedroom, Himiko covered in every layer available other than the blanket that she had forced upon Dabi, because he didn’t look comfortable (she made him take off those boots too, he really needed to experience sleeping without them on), Himiko asked, “Do you think I’m bad?”
“In what way?”
“You know, morally? Because of all the people I hurt?”
Dabi hummed. “I think if you’re bad, you’re only bad because society made you that way.”
Himiko considered this, curled deeper into her blankets. “I think I’m bad all the way to the middle.” Rotten to the core, her mother had once said.
“So what if you are?” Dabi replied. “Who cares? Be bad. Be terrible. Be the biggest most intolerable nuisance who ever lived and kill everyone who tells you that you’re wrong to do it. What does it even matter?”
Himiko felt warmer than ever. She wanted to drink Dabi’s blood. She wanted to become him. She wanted to walk around in his body and be part of it.
She wouldn’t, because he had asked her not to. Because she had agreed not to kill him. But she wanted to—not desperately, not overwhelmingly. Just want. Just nice, simple want.
Some time in March, after it started to warm up naturally and a notice appeared on the front door that the building was scheduled for demolition in early summer, Dabi climbed through the back window and into the kitchen, where Himiko was setting out the bounty of onigiri and Doritos she’d swiped from a konbini.
She presented it with a flourish. “Ta daaa,” she sang. “Not as good as the haul I found for your birthday, but still pretty good!”
Dabi looked amused at the presentation on the counter, and took the onigiri when she gestured for him to dig in.
It was nice having a friend. She had missed it.
“Spoke to Giran,” he told her. Giran was a c-rank villain and a full-time broker; he set up villains with their minions and minions with villains to work for. After they’d watched the Hero Killer Stain on the news in a diner a few days prior, Himiko hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the guy.
Partially because his power also involved blood and tasting it, but also because he was doing something so cool with his power: telling heroes to go fuck themselves if they weren’t good enough. Dabi had liked this too and even gone on a short tirade about heroes who didn’t deserve the mantle; so he’d gotten in contact with Giran and arranged the meeting.
“He’s down to meet you,” he said around a mouthful of rice. “And then if you’re appropriately villainous I guess he’ll introduce us to whoever was working with Stain.”
Himiko clapped her hands, jumping on the spot. She’d moved back to skirts and socks and now she was going to do villainous things! This was so much better than being homeless or faking being perfectly good.
She was bad – not all of her, but a lot of her. And Dabi was bad, too.
Maybe even a monster.
They’d been with the League of Villains for a month when she found herself alone in the bar with Tomura Shigaraki. The league were cool and lovely and great villains. They were also becoming her best friends. Dabi, of course, was her solid favourite, but Spinner was so silly with his swords and Mr Compress so funny with his masks and Magne so delightful with her telekinesis that threw Himiko around the room. Twice was probably her new bestest friend in the whole world though, which she apologised to Dabi for profusely, to which he said, “We’re not even friends, Toga,” which Himiko knew was a lie to spare everyone’s feelings.
But Shigaraki, their leader, kept them all at an arm’s length. Kurogiri, too, was there to follow Shigaraki, not play Jenga in the evenings.
Still, they sat side by side, and Himiko kicked her feet and sipped at her soda, watching Shigaraki drum his dangerous fingers on the counter.
Eventually, he asked, “Why did you drink that kid’s blood?”
Himiko jerked sideways in surprise. She took a moment to steady herself. Then she said, “I had a crush on him.”
Shigaraki scoffed. “So it was your way of courting him?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what it was, silly. But I did it because I liked him so much. And that made drinking his blood more special.”
“So you only drink the blood of people you like?”
“No, I drink to satisfy the urge a lot,” she admitted, “but transforming into people is really hard unless I like them. Everyone I practiced on I had to get to know before killing them so I would be able to take their shape.”
Shigaraki watched her carefully.
“So, if you drank my blood—”
“It would be hard to transform into you,” she said. “But Dabi’s let me drink his blood now and I was able to turn into him. And Twice, too, I think I could do.”
Shigaraki nodded slowly, amused. “You’re a bit of a freak, huh?”
She glared at him. “Am not.”
“You are,” he said. “But it’s a good thing. A great thing. You were kicked out of conventional society because you were too great for it, too other. And now you’re here, with us, and you’re going to use that thing that separated you from the norm to help burn it down.”
She took a careful sip of her soda, thinking on this.
“You deserve a world where you can do whatever the fuck you want,” Shigaraki told her. His words thrummed inside her chest, hungry. “That’s the world I’m building.”
She kept her breathing steady. “That sounds like a great world,” she told him.
The monster that was Himiko Toga tore through the heroes and the civilians, through the great and the innocents. She was just becoming. Potential swarmed her.
One day, Dabi burned down her abandoned childhood home, and she felt warm and satiated, watching it burn. Only then did she feel a release. Did she feel the door unlocking inside her, creaking open, and revealing all the awful things that she had always wanted to do.
They were monsters, all of them. Every last one of their precious league.
“We’re gonna do whatever the fuck we want,” she told Dabi as the two of them walked away. “And I want to do a lot of terrible, rotten things.”