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It feels a little like being in a therapist’s office, Fuyumi thinks as she sits in the plush armchair across the desk. Not that she would know, having never been to therapy herself, despite the urgings of her friends, family, and at one point, the Musutafu police department (a low moment, one she doesn’t like to recall). But it feels, to Fuyumi’s limited experience, like a therapist’s office, if the therapist was a…mouse? Rat? A principal, and if the office was inside a school.
He even offered her tea.
“I’m having a…problem,” she settles on when Nedzu fixes his beady eyes on her and asks what brought her to his office. “It’s not really—it’s not your area of expertise. But I’ve gone other places, and no one else knows, and I’m reaching.”
He puts his tiny paws together, steepling them supervillain-style, and waits for her to go on.
She winces. “It’s…I think I’m being haunted.”
“Oho!” he says.
“She’s kind of a ghost,” Fuyumi explains. “I don’t ever really see her—well, I see her, sort of. Hints of her. Something white, like snow. But I hear her often. I thought maybe…. Well, I don’t know what I thought.”
She explains, in fits and starts. Nedzu’s a good listener: quiet, but with the occasional interjection to prove he’s still there. Her gaze flits around the room as she talks, alighting on the computer, the corner of the desk, the window, another thing, another thing, before wandering back to him, and then it’s off again. Every time she makes it back to him, though, he’s looking at her, steady, focused, smiling.
Fuyumi isn’t sure when it started. Maybe it never started, maybe it was just a coming-to, an emerging awareness. One day there was no haunting, and one day there was the ghost, as if she had always been. At the back of her classroom, on the train, under Fuyumi’s bed—she comes sporadically and never where Fuyumi expects her. Fuyumi feels like she’s losing her mind.
“She’s not always around,” Fuyumi says.
“Is she around now?” Nedzu asks. It’s the first real sentence he’s given since asking her why she’d asked her brother to bring her up here.
Fuyumi tenses. “No.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s not all in my head,” Fuyumi tells him in a rush, wanting to make sure this, at least, is very clear.
He lifts his eyebrows as if surprised. “I would never suppose such a thing!”
“It really isn’t,” Fuyumi insists. “I went to a medium. They said there really is a—a weird energy around me. And—and a paranormal investigator. She had this meter thing that…made a noise.”
Fuyumi feels, to sum it up, out of her depth. She is a teacher of elementary school students. In her free time, she grades homework, cooks, and cleans. She is, in her opinion, as unoriginal as unoriginal gets. She keeps her family together; she keeps her head down. She doesn’t dabble in the supernatural.
It seems, however, that the supernatural dabbles in her.
“I must have been hit by some quirk or something,” Fuyumi rambles, pressing a hand to her forehead, “but I just can’t remember anything like that happening. Surely I’d remember getting hit by a quirk? Or other people would have the same problem? But I’ve looked everywhere online and I can’t see anyone else talking about this. Oh—except about, er…”
She isn’t sure, actually, that she should say this.
But she’s getting desperate. “About Deku,” she admits. “And All for One. And the…um…sentience of quirks. But it’s not like that. It’s not—I know my quirk. She isn’t my quirk.”
Her eyes find Nedzu’s again. He looks unfairly calm. He’s tapping his toe beans on the desk.
“The thing is,” Fuyumi says, and then she stops. She arranges the words in her throat, holds them on her tongue. They don’t want to come out. She twists her hands together in her lap, twining her fingers over and under, squeezing until the skin goes blotchy. Her voice comes out quiet when she admits it. “The thing is, she’s always crying.”
“I see,” Nedzu says.
Fuyumi swallows the lump that rises in her throat. The ghost does other things, too—she slams doors and bangs cupboards, tears the curtains and pounds on the walls. But the crying is the worst part of it. Fuyumi can live with a ghost, but she can’t live with a ghost who shows up sobbing, especially if that ghost doesn’t have a clear schedule. Fuyumi’s nearly panicked at school a few times now. It gets overwhelming. She can’t tune it out. And it hurts her, physically, in her chest. It feels like grief, and Fuyumi has enough of that already.
And she feels bad—feels guilty, even—for hating the ghost a little bit. She shouldn’t think of the ghost as a burden on her shoulders, she tells herself, because the ghost is clearly experiencing some sort of emotional turmoil and probably deserves better than that. But she thinks it anyway.
“What I would like to know,” Nedzu says when she’s let the silence drift too long, “is what precisely you are looking for here.”
Fuyumi doesn’t have to think for that one, doesn’t have to search the room for answers. “I want her gone.”
“Aha! An exorcism.”
“Yes.” Her shoulders relax. “Yes, an exorcism. That’s exactly it.”
“I see.” He considers it. Then he says, completely chipper, “I don’t know a single thing about exorcisms! How exciting.”
“But you’re willing to help?” Fuyumi says, leaning forward. “I am sorry to bother you with this. It’s—I know it’s a lot.”
“Not a bother at all!” Nedzu says happily, rolling his chair over to the PA system. “In fact, I think I know just the thing.” He types in a number and lifts the phone.
“Hello, could you please send Tokoyami-kun to my office?”
“Oh—you don’t need to interrupt anyone’s class—” Fuyumi starts, but by then it’s already too late. Nedzu is chatting with whatever unfortunate teacher or staff member is on the other side, and some student is on their way, probably biting their nails to shreds over what the principal could want with them.
When the door opens, she gets to her feet to greet the student, and freezes, half out of her chair, as the now-familiar sound of her ghost sobbing drifts in from the hallway. It isn’t the wailing one might expect; Fuyumi thinks it might be easier to bear if it was. It’s a sad, quiet sort of crying, the sound of someone desperately trying to keep her tears silent and not doing a very good job of it. It’s more whine than caterwaul, more sniffle than outpouring. It’s just loud enough to be hard to tune out, and just quiet enough to lurk in the background of Fuyumi’s life.
“So it’s your doing,” the student says, and she forces herself to focus. She recognizes him—one of Shouto’s classmates—though not by name. “You have brought a specter of darkness to this place.”
“A spec—” Fuyumi stares at him.
The door shuts, cutting off her ghost’s hiccups. The silence that crashes over the room is empty and cold.
“Todoroki-san,” Nedzu says, voice as cheery as ever, “meet Tokoyami-kun. Tokoyami-kun, Todoroki-san.”
Fuyumi says faintly, “You’re in my brother’s class.”
He agrees. At Nedzu’s invitation, he takes the other chair.
“Tokoyami-kun,” Nedzu says once he’s dispensed more tea, “it’s my understanding that you have expertise in the paranormal? That perhaps you would have a solution for Todoroki-san regarding the, as you say, ‘specter of darkness’ in our presence? We are interested in the possibility of an exorcism.” He folds his paws on the desk and smiles expectantly at Tokoyami, who is doing an excellent job of not being put-out by this request, nor by Fuyumi’s presence here in the middle of the school day, nor by the sobbing which has moved to just outside the door and is audible again, although faint.
Tokoyami hooks a finger over his beak, thinking.
The sobbing slowly drifts away until Fuyumi can’t make it out anymore—although she tries, spine straight, ears straining against the sound-proofing of Nedzu’s office. It’s gone.
“No haunting happens without purpose,” Tokoyami says eventually. He sounds so sage, his voice so deep and thoughtful, that Fuyumi almost wants to take notes. “It may be that your visitor can’t depart without completing that purpose.”
Fuyumi curls her hands together in her lap. “What purpose?”
“It’s hard to say. You could try asking.”
“Asking,” Fuyumi repeats, feeling foolish. Because—of course. Months and months of putting up with this, and she has not yet done the obvious and asked the ghost what she wants. “Right, asking. That seems very simple.”
“Not particularly, no,” Tokoyami says, and proceeds not to elaborate.
Fuyumi doesn’t have much experience with Shouto’s classmates, other than Midoriya and Bakugou, of course, who have individually reached levels of unhinged that she for a long time has believed impossible for any of their classmates to replicate. She’s rethinking that stance now. She’s beginning to wonder, in fact, if all of Shouto’s classmates are a little bit crazy. Something must have been in the water seventeen years ago.
“Not simple?” she nudges, uncertain.
“Well, the asking is simple,” he says. “But you may find it difficult to fulfill the specter’s needs. They can be intense. It can feel that they’re asking too much of you, that they require too much patience and too much attention. It can feel like being sucked dry.”
“Right,” Fuyumi says. She flits her gaze over to Nedzu and finds him beaming at Tokoyami, apparently unphased by the disclaimers. “That—that makes sense.”
“Please do let us know how it goes,” Nedzu says, as if the conversation is finished. Fuyumi blinks at him and realizes it must be—he’s getting up and trotting to the door to let her out, and Tokoyami likewise is rising, brushing off his uniform.
“Right,” she says again, uselessly. She gathers her bag and gets to her feet. “I’ll be in touch?”
“May the universe favor you in your quest,” Tokoyami says.
It strikes Fuyumi that this was one of the weirder conversations she’s had in her life, and she lives with Shouto. “Thank you,” she says. “You as well.”
She lets Nedzu usher her out.
The hallway is quiet and empty—no ghost in sight. As Tokoyami heads back to class, Fuyumi stands alone between the white walls, feeling off-center. Asking, she thinks. She could try asking. Of course.
She straightens her bag on her shoulder, shakes her head to clear the conversation, and starts home, alone.
The ghost does not appear that day, nor the next. Nearly a week passes, and Fuyumi has begun to wonder if she’s reverse-Beetlejuiced this situation somehow, when as she’s making dinner she hears it: a quiet sniffle coming from the genkan. She suppresses a sigh—the timing, once again, could not be worse—and turns off the stove, wiping her hands on her apron.
She braces herself with a deep breath in and out before she pads out of the kitchen, arching her neck to see.
The ghost is sitting on the step into the house proper. As with other times Fuyumi’s tried to make her out, she’s hard to get a grasp on. She lacks a certain solidity that regular humans have—there’s a liquidity to her, a stretchiness. It reminds Fuyumi of the sheen on a bubble. She is there and not there, she is clear and not clear. As always, what registers to Fuyumi’s eyes is a white, glossy blur. Not transparent, but not crisp around the edges, either. The ghost is not bound by shape.
Fuyumi approaches quietly, trying not to startle her. The crying is softer today, all sniffles and heaving breaths, like the ghost is trying not to be heard. Fuyumi isn’t sure where to start, but she thinks the ghost is young, maybe the age of her students, so she decides to take it like she would take a difficult conversation with one of them. She slips up and sits on the step next to the ghost, not looking at her.
“Hello,” she says softly.
She feels a little self-conscious. It would look, if someone was in her apartment, as though she were talking to herself.
The ghost sniffles in response. And then, to Fuyumi’s shock, she whispers, “Hi.”
Fuyumi swallows back the surprise. It’s her job, in situations like this, to be mature. She has to put aside her reactions and be an adult first, a human second. She knows this, because it has been this way for her since she was a child.
“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” Fuyumi asks, hugging her arms around her knees. She doesn’t look at the ghost when she speaks—doesn’t want to spook her, which feels backward for more reasons than one.
The ghost shifts slightly and sniffles again. “I don’t know.” Her voice is so quiet Fuyumi can barely hear it, almost as if she’s trying not to be heard at all. “I’m tired.”
Fuyumi glances over at that, surprised, and catches a glimpse of something more solid, something almost red, in the white unknowable. When she blinks, it’s gone.
“I’m tired,” her ghost says again, shrinking in on herself, “and I’m scared.”
“Of what?” Fuyumi asks, matching the whisper.
Her ghost makes a soft whimpering noise. “I don’t know.”
Fuyumi understands better now what Tokoyami meant when he said it would be difficult. Talking to her ghost feels a little like rolling a boulder up a hill, except she can’t see the top, and down here it seems that there will be no end, that it will be her and this for eternity.
“Can I help?”
“No.”
Be patient, Fuyumi reminds herself, because it would be easy to snap. She is her father’s daughter as much as she is her mother’s, and as equipped as she is with her mother’s composure, she is so with her father’s temper.
“Sometimes,” Fuyumi says, fixing her gaze ahead again, “when I feel scared, I find it’s nice to just sit with somebody. Would you like me to sit with you? We don’t have to talk.”
Her ghost doesn’t answer. Fuyumi has almost begun to think her ghost has left entirely, vanished in the way she tends to do, when suddenly she feels skinny, strong arms wrap around her waist. Whatever doubts she might have had before about her ghost’s solidity are gone now—her chest presses into Fuyumi’s side, trapping her arm. She holds Fuyumi so tight Fuyumi can feel her little heart beating in there, so fast. Fuyumi turns into the hug and pulls her ghost closer, squeezes her in, rests her chin on top of her head. Her soft hair tickles Fuyumi’s neck.
Her ghost starts to cry again, and the tears soak into the shoulder of Fuyumi’s shirt, slipping cold and slow down the arc of her collarbone. The worst part is how quiet they are—her chest is shuddering, but no sound comes out. Fuyumi thinks she’s holding her breath.
“Let it out,” Fuyumi murmurs, and draws a big circle into her ghost’s back with the palm of her hand. “Let it out. It’s okay.”
For one fleeting moment, Fuyumi wishes her mother was here. And then she remembers crying like this, alone, huddled up in the corner of her room, trying desperately not to make a sound, and the thought is gone.
“Let it out,” Fuyumi says again, like a mantra. “I’m here.”
She isn’t sure how long they sit there, their arms locked around each other so tight there are no gaps between one and the other, but eventually, her ghost sniffles in a way that suggests the end, and she withdraws from Fuyumi’s arms, pulling back and pushing up a pair of glasses to scrub at her eyes.
In that moment her ghost is clear, and Fuyumi doesn’t know what she’s looking at. Delicate, bony arms. Shaggy white hair with red streaks. An oversized T-shirt that Fuyumi recognizes—she had one just like it, as a kid. She wore it all the time, until the night that Mom left. She couldn’t stomach wearing it after that. Months later, as she was cleaning her room, she found it, ripped it to shreds, and threw it away.
“But you’re…” Fuyumi says.
Her ghost lowers her hands from her eyes—her steel gray eyes, puffy and red from crying. It’s a face and an image Fuyumi knows well from looking at herself in the mirror, trying to smooth her features back to normal, trying to get herself presentable.
“Oh,” Fuyumi says. “Oh.”
It’s all she can think to say.
The pale chin of her ghost—Small Fuyumi, her younger self—starts to tremble. “I’m sorry,” she says, eyes filling with tears again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
Fuyumi pulls her into her arms again, hugs her tight as she stares frantically at the wall over her ghost’s head, trying to make sense of this in her brain. “You have nothing to apologize for,” she murmurs, searching the entry of her home for answers. It doesn’t offer any except this: Fuyumi is being haunted by her childhood.
Small Fuyumi sobs, nice and loud, and breaks down all over again.
What was it, exactly, Tokoyami had said? Fuyumi drags it back up in her mind. No haunting happens without purpose, he had said.
All right—Fuyumi’s smart. She can guess what it is her ghost needs.
She tightens her arms around herself.
“Let it out,” she says firmly. “You can. You’re safe here.”
“I wanted to thank you.” Fuyumi tucks her hair behind her ears. It’s been a few weeks since she realized that her ghost was, in fact, some strange, eerie, inexplicable manifestation of her childhood self, and once again she’s dragged Shouto into escorting her into his school—this time so she can talk to Tokoyami. “You were right, about all of it.”
“Ah.” Tokoyami ducks his head. “It was nothing.”
“No, really,” Fuyumi insists. “It’s been much better, since then.”
They’re sitting on a park bench in the shade on UA’s campus, in view of the building but far enough away that there aren’t many people around. Shouto’s hovering down the way, probably not eavesdropping but it’s hard to say with him, and disguising it as hanging out with Midoriya, who is extremely nosy and is definitely trying his best to overhear the conversation. Fuyumi likes Midoriya, insane or not, and finds she doesn’t mind this.
“She hasn’t left,” Tokoyami observes.
“No,” Fuyumi agrees. Small Fuyumi hasn’t been around today, but yesterday she was, and she was in a mood a bit like a maelstrom. Fuyumi doesn’t think Small Fuyumi will ever actually leave, and if she does, it will be a slow exit, like her entrance—there, and then fading, and then gone. “But I don’t mind so much anymore. You were right about asking her what she needed.”
He dips his head.
“I’m not sure where she came from,” Fuyumi admits. “No one else seems to have experienced anything like this. I’m at the point where I’m considering time travel.”
“The darkness does not often explain itself,” Tokoyami says.
Fuyumi blinks at him. “Right.”
He surveys her, sighs, and says, “A big change in your life probably invited her in.”
There is one such change Fuyumi thinks of right away, but she doesn’t let herself go deeper—it’s still too painful—and she certainly won’t mention it with Shouto in earshot. She doesn’t think Touya is the reason anyway.
Fuyumi moved out not long after the war, and she thinks the new home was the start of it. In her own apartment, Small Fuyumi had space to spread out. And maybe, Fuyumi wants to flatter herself enough to think, Small Fuyumi felt safe enough there to come out of hiding.
“It’s likely,” she says instead of explaining all that. “Sometimes she doesn’t feel real to me. It’s hard to…have faith that it’s not just all in my head.”
“She’s definitely real,” Tokoyami says. “She has a distinct disrupting presence in the fabric.”
“Right,” Fuyumi says. It is a relief to hear him say it. She has found it difficult, at times, not to dismiss the ghost as a figment of her imagination, and every time she has to bring herself back to trusting in the ghost’s solidity.
“Huzzah!” Nedzu says, popping up out of nowhere. Fuyumi screams and isn’t proud of it. Tokoyami jumps, his feathers fluffing up, and down the way, Shouto and Midoriya snap to attention.
“Goodness,” Fuyumi says, clutching her heart. “Hello.”
Oblivious to any panic he might have caused, Nedzu says, “I’m pleased to hear that you’ve found a resolution.” He pulls himself up between them on the bench, his little legs sticking straight out in front of him. “And was it simple after all?”
Fuyumi has to think about that one—it both was and wasn’t. The initial part, the asking, yes, simple. But every day after that has brought its own complications and struggles. Small Fuyumi can be tiring and overwhelming, and Fuyumi doesn’t always have the right answers or the right questions. It’s an upkeep that, while inconstant, requires flexibility and patience, two traits that Fuyumi doesn’t always have available.
“It can be,” she settles on finally. “I hope it will be, one day.”
That’s the scariest question of all: if it will ever come to a close. Small Fuyumi is holding so much that it feels terrifying to even start to address it all, a towering pile of baggage to open and sort through. Fuyumi doesn’t know where the end is, or even if there will be one, but Small Fuyumi is her ghost, and she’s going to hold out for her until there is nothing more to find. She owes this to Small Fuyumi. She owes this to herself.
It is not a chore or a tedium. It’s her life and her health.
“I can’t thank you both enough,” Fuyumi says, bowing her head. “It’s been difficult, but so much clearer lately. No one else could really figure out what was going on.”
“No, no,” Nedzu says, waving her thanks away. “No trouble at all.”
Fuyumi straightens again. “It’s true also that…there might not be answers for everything. It just is.”
“It just is,” Tokoyami agrees, nodding seriously.
Fuyumi would never have thought that something like this would come for her, that she, of all people, would be haunted, let alone by her eleven-year-old self. But it has come, and it is hers to heal from, and she is taking it the only way she knows how: one step at a time.