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There is something glistening in the darkness, invisible to most naked eyes; just a slim shedding of light glinting off the moon’s pale light like a weak flashlight in the darkness. Upon further inspection, there is nothing visible in the alley to reflect the light which appears reflected. It’s… peculiar, to say the least. It sends chills up Katsuki’s spine and raises the hairs on the back of his neck and activates his fight or flight response.
He leans himself against the brick wall to one side of the alley and lets out a heavy breath to steel himself. He himself had seen there is nothing in the shadows there to sparkle as he thought to have seen. Fists bunched in his pockets, gripping onto the fabric inside his pants, sweat and sizzle despite his supplemental attempt at calming himself.
A soft giggle raises the hairs again, and a sudden, harsh chill sends goosebumps shooting up his arms. He shoves his fists deeper into his pockets and scoffs, pushing himself off of the wall and towards the sidewalk. He’s got much better things to do than stand around waiting for his paranoia to go away.
Another giggle sounds beside him, much closer than the last time. Chills run up his arms again. The phantom pain of being stabbed in the bicep accompanies his discomfort this time, however, and Katsuki freezes in place at the sensation.
He takes a deep breath and moves to step forward. Another sensation of being stabbed pierces through his shoulder from the back, and he is forced to grit his teeth and breathe even deeper.
“Deku, if you don’t quit it with that stabbing shit, I’m going to blast you to kingdom come.” He speaks the words into the dark emptiness of the sidewalk like there is someone beside him, even though there clearly is not.
Or… is there?
Another giggle sounds. In front of the deep-breathing boy appears another, slightly younger one. A bright, wide grin stretches over the bottom of his face, and tight, dark green curls frame his face in its entirety. A phantom trickle of blood drips from the crown of his head, down his face, his neck, and his black gakuran to the shadow-obscured sidewalk in an intermittent dripping and dropping.
His gray sock-covered feet appear as though they don’t make contact with the ground. In his hand, he holds a knife.
“Sorry, Kacchan,” the floating boy speaks. His voice sounds like a million symphonies of end-of-life screams and the interpretation of a banshee’s cries. It floats and flickers just as he does, splintering at the edges and creaking like a wooden door. It is light and airy, but simultaneously carries the metal of a thousand knife angels.
The boy seems to twist and move in the air even without touching the ground or the wall of the building to his left until he is in what appears to be a comfortable lounging position on his side in front of Katsuki. He hums and spins the knife he holds around his fingers like a bored student might a ballpoint pen. When Katsuki begins moving forward, he passes through the boy in a soft shroud of smoke and fritzing television static.
The boy giggles again and doesn’t appear in front of Katsuki for the remainder of his walk back home. Katsuki grunts as he swings open the door and only blinks when he spies the floating boy sitting on a barstool across the room.
“Welcome back, Ground Zero,” says a creature past the boy, standing and waiting behind the bar. Purple smoke shakes and fizzles similar to the boy’s form when Katsuki passed through him, and bright, glowing streaks of yellow simulate eyes in the place where his face should have been.
Katsuki grunts again and slams the door. The boy at the bar raises from his seat and into the air before floating towards the entrance to the building and the boy who just entered.
“What took you so long, Kacchan?” he asks, still grinning wide and bright. “You get lost on your way home, stupid dog?” He follows his questions with another bright, high-pitched giggle; nails on a chalkboard; precious china breaking against kitchen tiles.
Katsuki shoves his hand in the boy’s face, and it disappears around his wrist. The rest of his form flickers and his head rounds, warping and twisting around the blow as though to cushion his fingertips. He removes his hand and shoves it back into his pocket and walks to the right, towards a plain-looking living room and a dark, waiting doorway to the left of the T.V.
The boy pouts and crosses his arms once his face has returned to normal. He watches Katsuki walk away from him and through the doorway towards the rest of the building with squinted eyes. He hums and returns to his seat at the bar, knowing Katsuki will come find him if he needs anything.
The large, swirling, dark purple man behind the bar reaches for a glass in the sink and rinses it under the faucet. Blue, liquid soap creates suds on the inside of the cup, and he scrubs it all over. He rinses it again, the water stream steaming as it comes into contact with the metal basin of the sink, before wiping it dry with a dishrag. The glass is set onto a shelf behind the man with ease, and then the cycle is repeated. Rinse and repeat, as some might say.
But the process of cleaning glasses, while inherently useful, is quite boring to be the witness of. There are so many other things the boy could be doing right now! Right? He lays the side of his face against the pristine counter and lets out a heavy breath. His hands twist and slide along the knife he somehow always holds, cutting new wounds and sealing them up without a moment in between.
He’s sure there are lots of things he used to enjoy doing, like arts and crafts or reading or playing video games, but his memory of such trivial things evades him now. All he knows is that Katsuki’s actual name is Kacchan, and that Kacchan deserves to be stabbed, for some reason. He isn’t exactly sure why the urge to rip and tear into the boy is so… ingrained into his being, especially since he can’t remember a time other than this, with him floating and stabbing and giggling and them talking like long-time friends he can’t remember meeting in the first place.
It probably isn’t as bad as it could have been, but with no control to relate it to, what’s the point in wondering?
The man behind the bar hums like he does, sometimes, at a frequency most people appear to ignore or be unable to hear. He stretches out his smoky arm like a puppet under strings, and several swarming masses of black and purple mist explode against the far wall of the building like a succession of supernovae dying and coming to life as a new species entirely.
And then people begin to step through the swirling masses. The boy recognizes a few of them–most of the people entering the room from wherever they were live in this place with Kacchan, so of course he knows some of them; it’s practically his business to–but a few of them come as very unfamiliar faces.
A bloodied person holding onto a large block of cement or something similar stumbles into the room with a strained expression on their face. Purple smoke scoops them up and transports them somewhere unseen and unknown to him. A man with a gentleman’s attire enters through another portal alongside a person in a gray and black full bodysuit and a girl about Kacchan’s age wearing a uniform he’s sure he’s seen on a cartoon someone put on the T.V. a few weeks ago.
The most peculiar ones come in the form of a man with dark hair and rough patches of purple skin tightly holding the neck of someone about Kacchan’s age. His hair is purple and upturned similar to the bartender’s form, but a shade much lighter, more like lavender than royal purple. His face screams words.
I am scared, say his pinched brows.
I am frightened, say his shaking knees; shaking hands.
Please save me, say his pupils in pinpricks; the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
He hums and turns fully to witness the playing-outs before him. His eyes move without his permission to the left as Kacchan reenters the room in such dark and different attire than what he wore on his walk home he needs to blink heavily to get used to it. The black, metal faceguard isn’t anything new. That part of his outfit was added to it about last week, probably in preparation for whatever is happening now. The utility belt and combat boots are also regular additions to his… costume? Either way, the “newness” comes in the form of a bright, gray knife carefully sewn onto the back of his hooded sweatshirt.
It makes the boy smile. Talk about a call-out!
He grins in Kacchan’s direction to show his acknowledgement, but the boy only rolls his eyes and readjusts his faceguard to better cover his skin. He giggles and brings his knees up to his chest, tucking his feet against the barstool.
Shigaraki walks in after Kacchan. The people grabbing onto him–transparent and staticy as all get out–are always a source of discomfort for him. They sneer and shoot verbal jabs and kick and swear at the man they hold so tightly on to. It confuses him and causes him to feel uneasy. They’re always so loud. And if they don’t want to be with Shigaraki, why don’t they just let him go?
“You bastard!” they shriek in tandem, voices high and low; a symphony of screaming ghosts and the pain and gore they harbor. “Let us go! Let us go! Let us go! Let us–”
He pokes his index fingers into the wells of his ears and hopes he can still hear the proceedings in front of him even with their intrusion.
“Shinsou Hitoshi,” Shigaraki says to the boy in the black-haired man’s chokehold, eyes bulging and chest still heaving. “Welcome to our home base.”
He gestures towards a recliner beside the couch and the boy is placed there like a stray kitten by the scruff of its neck. He notices the boy seems to breathe easier now that he’s out of reach of the other man. Shinsou coughs until he is sure he will hack out a lung before curling in on himself and closing his eyes.
He can barely make out the airy words of the boy from across the room and over the ghosts’ insistent shouting. “Maybe if I just close my eyes and imagine myself waking up, I’ll open them and be back home.”
Shigaraki sits on the corner of the couch furthest from the boy, leaning his back against the armrest to face him properly. He hums and says, “I’m afraid that won’t be the case, young hero. This is real.”
Shinsou opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Great. Thanks for the input. Now, I want you to call off your cronies–actually, how about you call them all here to sit and wait to be arrested patiently–and let me borrow your phone.”
Shigaraki turns towards the man with patchwork skin behind the couch and he gasps at the sight of his dull, white, sightless eyes. “Hey. Call everyone here.”
The man subtly shifts from foot to foot and tugs on the sleeve of his leather jacket. “Uhm, boss? Are you, uh… are you sure about that? I mean, it’s just the kid’s quirk, right?”
“You will do as I say!” he yells, and the ghosts at his back yell with him.
Curious, he unplugs his ears. The ghosts have gone silent amidst the young boy’s control. Interesting! He thinks, Is it possible he could command someone to commit a crime and then forget about it afterwards? That would be the perfect deniability!
When the rest of the people who previously walked through the portals–along with a few others–are all within the confines of the main room of the bar, Shigaraki fishes deep in his pocket and pulls out his cellphone. He unlocks it without being prompted to and hands it to the kidnapped boy without protest. The ghosts still remain silent.
The boy takes it thankfully and with trembling hands and quickly types in a phone number he’s obviously memorized.
“Hey, Eraser.” He pauses. “Yeah, I’m f-fine. Yes, I’m sure. I’m using Shigaraki’s phone. Yeah, I did. …Thanks. So, you’ll…? Awesome. Sp-Splendid. Cash money. See you soon. Yeah, okay. Alright. …I know. Bye.”
Shigaraki takes his phone back gingerly and slides it back into his pocket. Shinsou blinks and surveys the villains around him with wary eyes. He thinks he hears the boy whisper out something rhyming with “What the cluck”, but being so far across the room does have its consequences.
He floats towards the nervous, shifting group of people and lands beside Kacchan, putting a hand on his right shoulder. The boy glances in his direction very briefly, freezing a moment later.
He just can’t help himself! He removes the knife from the boy’s side and sighs, staring at Shinsou, appearing scared out of his wits and likely on the path to having a panic attack.
Ah, those were always the worst, he thinks, moving towards the boy before he can question how he knows what a panic attack is or what it looks like.
He places his hands on Shinsou’s shoulders and stares him in the eyes, even though he’s 97% sure the boy has no chance of ever seeing him. It’s a peculiar thing, that. Kacchan has always been the only person able to see him. When it comes to dogs, cats, and most other animals, they react to him like they would any other, subfrozen-temperature humans.
That’s exactly why, when Shinsou’s eyes lock onto his own, a sense of dread overtakes his form before he can tear his hands away.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?” the kidnapee asks, clearly freaking out a lot less than he is.
“I-I–” he tries to speak, but the words become lodged in his throat before he can come up with the right thing to say.
Distantly, he thinks he hears Kachan yelling. Something about letting him go! or what the hell did you do?
It’s all Izuku can do to hold himself together, as all of the pieces slide back into place, some fraying at the seams, some missing large chunks or full gaps appearing between them altogether.
Let go of him! He thinks he hears Kacchan yell again, but it’s hard to determine what’s happening when he’s just so far away.
He needs… he needs something to bring him back to Earth–something to settle his fizzling atoms back into the fuzzy afterimage of a dreaming, wish-full boy long dead and long gone and replaced by something more sightless and dreary. He needs…
Midoriya Izuku died on a rainy day in April after being told by his best friend to jump off the roof. He dies again in the brainwashed hold of a kidnapped hero student.
Who knew ghosts could die twice?
Izuku opens his eyes.
…Maybe they can die three times.