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One thing that everyone knew was that there were two types of hanahaki.
Well, most people knew that. Children didn't always, but children shouldn't have to deal with either kind of hanahaki, not really. They were children. Why would they need to?
But by the time you reached adulthood, near to everyone knew there were two types of hanahaki: progressive hanahaki and post-mortem hanahaki. Only progressive hanahaki was deadly, which was lucky for Shouta, because he'd had post-mortem hanahaki for the past fourteen years.
Post-mortem hanahaki was exactly what it sounded like: hanahaki for someone that was dead. Most people either got it or were the cause of it by the time they reached old age. Shouta had been young when his case started, but Oboro had been young when he died.
It was just a tragedy all around. That was what everyone said, that was how Shouta felt. Still, at least it wasn't progressive, he supposed, sometimes.
The marigolds were pretty, at least. They were his constant companion.
He tried not to let his students - or anyone else for that matter - know that he had hanahaki if he could help it. If it went public he might be seen as easier to defeat, that might lead to more villains actively seeking him out, trying to take him out. Alternatively, it might lead to villains trying to go easy on him because they thought of him as delicate.
That thought actually pissed him off more than the idea of being targeted. It was possible that he was not exactly the most mentally stable individual.
For his students it was a little different. He wasn't old, so he was always afraid that his students would think that he was dying. That they might try to meddle in his non-existent love life to try to save him, even though the person that he longed for was long since gone. He didn't want to expose that part of him, still tender despite all the time that had passed, again and again, so he just... didn't.
He kept quiet.
It felt like the simple solution. It should have been the simple solution. But in retrospect, he wondered... if it had been known that Eraserhead had had post-mortem hanahaki, would he have ceased to have it so much earlier?
~~~
Hawks was missing.
The number two hero, Hawks. Was missing.
Somehow.
Practically the entire hero underground was looking for him, while the Commission put out press releases that he was on a vacation, some kind of relaxing retreat. It was bullshit, in the sense that the Commission was very obviously talking out of their ass, but it also wasn't bullshit, in the sense that Shouta had been to Hawks's apartment and there had been exactly zero signs that Hawks had left of anything other than his own free will. The only odd detail had been that Hawks's cell phone had been in the trash can, but the fact that it was... in there, on the top, made it feel more like Hawks had simply decided not to take it with him, rather than him being prevented from taking it with him, wherever he had gone to.
If Hawks was in trouble now, it was because some kind of betrayal had occured, but Shouta wasn't certain that Hawks wasn't just hanging out with a friend and ignoring the world for a little while. Somewhat understandable, but why would he not tell someone that he was leaving? Why not take his phone?
Something did smell here, but Shouta wasn't sure that it was whoever Hawks was with now. In that respect, maybe it was better that he was the one who was going to find the hero - at least he hoped he was - because he had a feeling that heroes with closer ties to the Commission would drag Hawks back first and ask questions never, and he didn't know that that was the right move.
Why put the phone in the trash? That was such an odd detail to him. It suggested that Hawks didn't want anyone to follow him... unfortunate that Shouta was being paid to follow him, along with a lot of other people.
Still, if he got there first, and Hawks was actually fine where he was, Shouta would leave him there. Maybe he'd even help misdirect them away from the oversized bird hero.
But he had to find him first. Luckily, Shouta thought that he had a pretty good place to start.
~~~
Hawks's trail had been harder to follow than Shouta had expected. If he hadn't talked to Tokoyami to get some insights on his mentor, he didn't think that he would've been able to follow it at all. Whether that was a good or bad sign, Shouta wasn't sure yet, but he was sure that it was a sign, and one that meant that it was unlikely that another hero would come along and interrupt when Shouta was trying to talk to Hawks.
It was true. Shouta didn't run into any heroes here. Who he did find here, however, were villains.
The entire League of Villains, as a matter of fact. Going about their business without a care in the world, it seemed. He watched, shocked, as Shigaraki Tomura bought vegetables from a stand without any kind of disguise, and then afterwards had his cheek pinched by the stall's owner, who addressed him as 'Tenko-kun'.
There was a history here, his could feel it, but he didn't know what, or who, or how.
Distracted, Shouta found himself trailing Shigaraki instead of stay on track, staying on top of trying to find Hawks. This felt like such a big opportunity, after all, he ought not to waste it. Right? It was Shigaraki Tomura!
Shigaraki Tomura opened something from his shopping bag and put it in his mouth, but Shouta couldn't see what from where he was. He wanted to get closer, but knew better than to risk it, so he hung back, watching... watching... watching...
The villian eventually walked up to a building in a warehouse district that was not, in fact, a warehouse. Many of the things around it were, but this building was not, and that was obvious just by looking at it. It was two stories tall, with a flat rooftop that showed signs of frequent use, including a certain amount of cheap furniture strewn about haphazardly, like whoever had used it last had left in a hurry. There was a set of speakeasy stairs that led down to a basement level, with rails made of iron twists that looked exotic and old. There was even a little shed, just barely visible down the alleyway, that didn't seem to be connected to the occupied building, but the door was open and he could see laundry hanging up inside, so he knew it must belong to the building with people in it.
Shigaraki Tomura took the speakeasy stairs down to the basement level, fumbled with his keys for a minute, and then let himself in, leaving Shouta staring at the building before him, agog. Was this... actually the League's base of operations? Had he actually found it while searching for Hawks?
He felt the need to explore. Confirm. Understand.
It was impulsive, he knew that. He didn't know what caused him to leap forward without telling anyone, landing on the roof of that building with no-one else even the wiser about what city they should be looking in - most search efforts were all the way up in Hokkaido, actually - but he felt like going back, getting someone else in on it... something about that felt wrong.
There was a tightness in his chest about it. He was actually worried for a moment that it was his hanahaki, because he'd heard stories about people claiming that sometimes their flowers would pull at them while still inside, but he dismissed the thought. Those were all cases of progressive hanahaki, and generally those pulls were meant to get the person moving towards the object of their affections, similar to the way a regular sunflower would turn towards the sun as it moved through the sky.
Still, he listened to it. He assumed it was a gut feeling, and those were usually worth listening to. Sometimes, people felt bad about things for good reasons. In this case, he assumed that if he told someone now and the Commission found out, they'd spook the League before any of them could be brought in. Which would be bad, obviously, so he nodded to himself and sidled towards the door leading to the building's interior.
The door opened. It wasn't locked? Something about that felt... it felt off, somehow. But Shouta shook his head and went inside, his curiousity and heroic spirit greater than his logical brain - or rather, given that logic is actually looking at a situation from above to determine which option provides the least negative consequence, emotionally, his logical brain had decided that satiating his curiousity was, at this point, the logical option.
Very helpful, that.
The top floor, once he got off the staircase, opened into a hallway that went the length of the building, with a staircase leading down at the other end. There were four doors on the right, and three on the left, some of them decorated and some of them completely bare, with one of them open to a bathroom while the others were all closed. Some of them had lights peaking out from under them, while others were dark.
Lots of space, here. He would hazard a guess that these were all bedrooms, but he wasn't sure that he'd ever seen a place with quite so many that wasn't a dormitory of some kind. Was this a dormitory of some kind? Hm...
Maybe he could try going into one of the rooms with the lights off. If there was no-one in there, it should be fairly simple to do so, and was likely to give him information about the League as people, which was important information to have about anyone you were trying to understand really. With that in mind, he made his way to the first room without a light - one with a singed handprint on the front of it.
He turned the knob and slipped inside.
He couldn't stay here long, in case the actual owner of them room came back, but... it looked like a bedroom. It was styled in a way that made Shouta think of Tokoyami and his 'mad banquets of darkness'. He still wasn't actually sure what that meant, but he was fairly certain that this likely qualified.
The only thing that really stood out different was the detritus, which seemed to consist of a good deal of Endeavor merchandise, all of it destroyed in some way. One example in particular was a doll who had had his eye gouged out, and several action figures that appeared to have been melted together.
There was no merchandise of any other hero here defaced in this way, just Endeavor. Which was both somewhat more unsettling and more informative: the person that lived in this room only had it out for Endeavor. Why might be worth trying to figure out.
His scan of the room complete, Shouta dropped to the ground before the door in order to peer out the gap between the door and the floor. He did not want to open the door and find the League standing outside in the hall, waiting to catch him.
It was lucky that he did, because as he watched, someone came up the stairs, chattering to themself the whole entire time.
Twice. It must be.
The villain's two-toned voice was difficult to parse, especially from where Shouta was situated, but he went into a room beside this one, one that Shouta was then able to catalogue as the one that more likely than not belonged to him.
From there, Shouta managed to get back out into the hall and poke around more on this level. Unfortunately, it seemed that the rest of the rooms on this floor that were currently unoccupied were also always unoccupied, so that meant that, in order to get any more information, he was going to have to go downstairs.
Someone else would say that going down to the ground floor was an unnecessary risk, and that he shouldn't have done that. He would probably agree with them if he wasn't actively standing there, inside the home of the League of Villains. His gut told him that it was worth it, so he listened.
He listened, and he went downstairs, and almost on instinct slipped into the first room on his left. For some reason, he knew that he would find something here: in a room that looked somehow incredibly fancy and incredibly lived in at the same time.
Multiple towering bookshelves bracketed the room, and it smelled like paper and ozone in here. The chest of drawers was covered with knick-knacks and loose bookmarks, with designs so varied that it was difficult to get a sense of personality off of them. In the one bit of wall not covered by bookshelf or window, there was a floating shelf with what looked like scrapbooks wedged between bookends that looked like stylized clouds, mottled with pale blue-white and dark black-purple, but somehow in a way that looked classy. The closet door was open, showing a number of dress shirts and slacks inside, along with a good many vests.
Right. This must be the room of Kurogiri, the warper.
Wait, hold on just a moment - was there another door set into the back of the closet?
That. He needed to see what was in there. That was where his gut wanted him to go.
The door in the back of the closet opened noiselessly, and he slipped inside, closing it behind him. He needed to make sure he wasn't seen here, he was fairly sure of that.
The room was dark. Shouta couldn't see a thing, and while he didn't to risk it, he knew that he would need at least a little bit of light if he was going to find whatever he needed to here. He pulled out and turned on a flashlight from his belt pocket and -
What... what the hell?
There was a glass case directly in front of him, reflecting back some of the light from his flashlight, and holding a tattered, bloodstained, and very familiar hero costume. Blue fabric, red rope belt, a leather jacket hung up off to the side, and a pair of very weathered boots sitting off to the side.
Shouta swallowed thickly, uncertain what to make of this... bizarre appearance of things owned by someone he held so dear. Even stranger than the fact that these things were here at all, was the fact that they were in far from perfect condition - they looked like... like they had been what Oboro was wearing at the moment of his death. Like they had been taken off his corpse and then preserved here.
But why? What was... what was the point of any of this?
He looked around the rest of the room, hoping for answers and finding nothing but more questions. Everywhere in this tiny room he saw more things that looked unmistakably like they had belonged to Oboro. That stack of well-loved trashy romances and idiotic self-help books, with a couple tattered volumes of classic literature mixed in - those looked like the bargain-bin books that Oboro was always scavenging up, a voracious reader who would talk endlessly about whatever he'd gotten his hands on. Over there, the Monosystem game console that Hizashi had gifted Oboro for his 17th birthday - the exact on, with yellow paint (now rather chipped) on the back, wishing Oboro a happy birthday.
Some of the clothes Shouta remembered seeing Oboro wear outside of school, folding into a neat little stack.
Framed photos of himself and Hizashi and Nemuri, all of which looked like they had been taken by Oboro.
A copy of their first-year yearbook, leaning against the wall next to the little collection of video games.
But why? Why was there a hidden room inside a villain's closet, and why did hold so many items belonging to a dead hero student, one that had died over a decade ago by now? Why do this, why do any of this?
Shouta's feelings soured, and he flipped the flashlight back off and turned 'round for the door again, needing desprately to get out of here, get somewhere where he could safely have an emotional breakdown, but he knew that he was still unfortunately inside a villain's hideout, the kind of place where he could not let his guard down in the slightest, no matter how much he was beyond rattled.
He cracked the door slightly and peered out, only to have to bite back a curse. There were a couple of people standing in the doorway of Kurogiri's room and - wait a minute.
No, no, surely he was seeing things?
This didn't make sense. None of it did, but from where he was, he could see Hawks, of all people, talking to someone who, from behind, looked like Kurogiri if he wasn't made of mist, but merely had mist for hair atop his head. There was no way that Hawks didn't know that this was the home of the League of Villains, which only raised more questions.
And if Hawks was a defector, why had he vanished so... quietly, rather than trying to take out heroes on his way out?
No. Speculation time later. Shouta needed to listen now; perhaps these men would answer some of his questions themselves.
"Thanks again for letting me stay over with all of you," Hawks said.
"Really, you don't have to keep thanking me," Kurogiri shook his head, and wow his voice sounded different when not filtered through his mist, "You're one of us, Keigo. You know that."
Keigo? Was that... was that Hawks's name? Why hadn't Shouta known that? ...Why hadn't he been told that when he was instructed to look for Hawks? Sure, there was the possibility that it was a fake name, but now that he was thinking about it, Shouta realized that he hadn't been told any name for Hawks, which didn't actually make any sense, because obviously he'd be under a name other than 'Hawks' if he wasn't able to be found easily, by choice or not -
"Yeah, but still... I always feel like I'm not doing enough to earn my worth here, you know?"
"You don't have to earn anything here," Kurogiri shook his head, "And besides, even if you did, you've done plenty. Where else are we going to get a floor map of every Commission building in the country, anyway?"
"From your mom?" Hawks actually laughed slightly as he responded, but it sounded different from when Shouta had heard the man laugh in his presence or on television before. It sounded lighter, somehow.
"Oh, she probably could," Kurogiri waved a hand dismissively, and turned around into the room, a bright grin on his face. He looked... familiar, for some reason, but Shouta couldn't place it. "But it would take her an awful long time to be able to do it without suspicion. You've already brought us all of them! Thank you for that, Keigo."
Hawks smiled soft, but said, "Thanks, Shirakumo-san. I needed to hear that."
They continued to talk, but it felt buzzy in Shouta's mind as he latched onto that word, that name, that - it couldn't be!
Shirakumo-san.
He looked back over at Kurogiri's face, and now he tried to superimpose onto it the coloration of Oboro, blue and blue rather than purple and yellow. It was... all too easy, and it all - everything, it all - it all clicked into place, all at once.
The room Shouta was hiding in, it held Oboro's possessions from before, things that were his but were also artifacts of a life that no longer belonged to him, that had slipped away into the past. Something had happened, and Oboro...
Oboro was a villain now. Was that he'd never come home? Shouta had missed him so terribly... flowers in his lungs for fourteen years...
Shit. Flowers in his lungs that were about to begin to bloom aggressively, choking him to death, because despite everything, he still loved Oboro with all his heart.
~~~
He'd eventually managed to escape, to stumble home with all the knowledge that he'd acquired, but his head was still spinning. He'd learned a lot, and he further knew that he would have to act upon the knowledge that he had aquired soon. For... so many reasons. Fuck.
If nothing else, he needed to figure out what he was going to do about Oboro being Kurogiri before the flowers in his lungs killed him. That was... that was pressing, more so than he really wanted to admit. And worse, he thought that he knew what he was going to do, and it scared him.
Technically speaking, he had three options. The first of which was to do nothing, and let his flowers kill him sometime in the next six months. This was not a very appealing option, for several reasons, starting with the fact that it would end with him dying, which was less than ideal.
The second option was to get a flower removal surgery, which meant that, while he would no longer be afflicted by the ailment, he would also forget Oboro entirely - forget that he was Kurogiri, forget that he had been the love of Shouta's life for nearly half of it, forget even that he had ever gone to school with someone named Shirakumo Oboro. And Oboro had shaped Oboro so much, with Oboro scooped out of his life... would Shouta even be Shouta anymore?
Finally, the third option was to throw caution to the wind and seek Oboro out to confess. Something that he never thought that he'd be able to do, and gods it was beyond complicated now. Shouta was a hero, and Oboro was a villain, and that meant that Shouta would have to sacrifice his integrity as a hero to pursue him, but he didn't care, because it was Oboro. Because it was everything that Shouta had wanted for over a decade. And with this chance in front of him, he knew that he had to take it.
Everything was about to change, in a way that couldn't be taken back. Everything was about to change, and Shouta knew that the only way for that change to be positive was to throw caution to the wind and ride the change to a better life. And he was going to do just that, of that he was certain.
He just needed a plan, a way to talk to Oboro peacefully without breaking into his house again - although maybe if he got desperate - no that was a foolish train of thought. He was sure that he could figure out something at least a little bit smarter than that...
~~~
Technically, this was a little bit smarter than showing up at Oboro's house unannounced. Shouta was strolling the market street where he'd first spotted Shigaraki Tomura, dressed in civilian clothing, and poking around with the stall owners as he shopped a bit.
"Do you know where I can find Shirakumo Oboro?" he asked a woman running a stall selling honey, "We went to high school together, and I was hoping to get back in touch with him."
The woman looked him up and down, and he wondered oddly how he looked to her. He looked odd to himself at the moment, because he'd chosen to dress... like he had in high school. Less mourning clothes and more like he was genuinely too lazy to put together more complicated outfits. His shirt had a funny deadpan pun on it, and over it he wore a novelty hoodie with paw-print aglets and bright colors.
"I'm not sure, dear," the woman said after a moment, evidently deciding that Shouta wasn't a threat, "He and his son come around every so often to shop, though, and that gaggle of friends they've got. Lovely young man, Shirakumo-san. I'm sure you'll run into him if you hang around long enough."
Shouta thanked her, and bought a tube of flavored honey from her as a snack while he continued to walk about the street. Something about this made the woman smile knowingly, but he didn't know why.
Now, he did technically know where to go. He'd been that way before, he'd pinned it on his maps application in his phone, pinned it on a physical map in his house, burned it into his mind with a needy fervor that he'd never felt before. Was this really what it normally felt like to have progressive hanahaki? Shouta felt the need to apologize to a couple of former students. He hadn't realized how... all consuming it was.
But despite knowing where to go, he didn't want to show up without reasonable explaination for how he knew where to go... right?
Or... did it not really matter, given that he already knew that Oboro was there, and he didn't really have a good reason to know that?
A cough. A marigold sitting in the palm of his hand. The flowers that were killing him also gave him strength to know that he had to do this. No time to bother with dilly-dallying when there was a beautiful boy at the other end of the journey. And if he was disturbed that Shouta had broken into his house... hopefully, that wasn't a deal breaker.
If Shouta had to get the surgery, he didn't know who he'd be after. He didn't know who he was without the memory of Oboro curled around his heart. The risk was worth it... he hoped.
The way there looked different in the middle of the day. It was easier to look around, and see what other things there were in this area. There wasn't much, but Shouta found himself mentally noting every restaurant and storefront he saw - if things went well, he would be spending a lot of time in this area moving forward.
He reached the building, the one that before had been an opposing monolith, the base of the League of Villains. It was still that, but it was something more now, too. Something that took his breath away and left him in awe.
This was Oboro's home. Oboro lived here, Oboro was inside, Oboro was somewhere that he could find.
It was now or never. Shouta descended the speakeasy stairs and knocked on the door.
He heard shuffling within.
The door cracked open.