Archive of Our Own

The first time Koki Terumoto saw Tomura Shigaraki, he thought he was having a nightmare.

It was a reasonable conclusion, considering the circumstances. Koki had fallen asleep at his desk sometime after midnight, his history textbook open beneath his cheek and his notes scattered across the small surface of his dormitory room, and the last thing he remembered was attempting to understand an assignment about the reconstruction of Japanese society following the Final War. He had been reading about the League of Villains, actually, though not because he found the subject particularly interesting. His teacher had assigned a section on the social consequences of the war, and Koki had been working his way through it with the same miserable determination he applied to most things he didn't want to do.

He remembered the rain against his window. He remembered the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of someone laughing in the corridor outside his room. He remembered thinking that he ought to go to bed properly before his neck started hurting.

Then he remembered the man standing beside his desk.

White hair fell across a face that had become so familiar through photographs, news reports, and history lessons that Koki recognized him before he registered the impossibility of what he was seeing. The skin was pale, almost grey in the dim light of his desk lamp, and the red eyes watching him possessed an unpleasant, unnerving clarity. There was something wrong with the man's posture, too; he held himself like someone perpetually braced for a blow, shoulders drawn inward, one hand hovering near his neck as though he could no longer remember what to do with it.

Koki stared.

The man stared back.

For several seconds, neither of them moved.

Then the stranger glanced down at the textbook beneath Koki's cheek, read the title printed across the open page, and made a face.

"Seriously?"

Koki shot upright so quickly that his chair scraped against the floor.

The man flinched.

It was a small movement, barely more than a twitch through his shoulders, but Koki saw it. He saw the immediate tension in the stranger's fingers, the way his eyes narrowed as though he expected Koki to do something with the sudden movement, and then the expression vanished beneath an irritation so familiar that it almost made the whole thing seem ordinary.

"Do they seriously teach this shit to children now?"

Koki's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

The stranger looked at him again.

"Oh, don't look at me like that. It's a textbook."

Koki knew that face.

He knew it from photographs of a ruined city, from footage of heroes standing amid the devastation, from the historical accounts of a man whose name had become inseparable from the destruction of the world he had once wanted to destroy. He knew the pale hair, the red eyes, the terrible hands. He knew the expression, though it was different here, stripped of the monstrous grandeur that the media had given it.

He knew who this was.

Tomura Shigaraki was dead.

He had watched the recordings in class. He had read the accounts. His teachers had spoken about the Final War with the careful solemnity reserved for events that had changed the shape of the world, and Koki had learned about the villain who had brought Japan to the edge of destruction just as he had learned about natural disasters and historical tragedies. Tomura Shigaraki was a person who had existed, who had done terrible things, and who had died before Koki was old enough to understand any of them.

He was not supposed to be standing in Koki's bedroom, complaining about a history textbook.

"You're dead," Koki whispered.

The man blinked.

"Yeah."

Koki waited for him to laugh. For him to explain that this was a prank, an elaborate hallucination, a consequence of exhaustion and too much reading. He waited for the room to rearrange itself into something that made sense.

Tomura only scratched at his neck.

"Apparently."

Koki stumbled backward until the edge of his bed caught behind his knees. His Quirk stirred instinctively, darkness gathering at his fingertips in an uneven, restless flicker. He curled his hands into fists, trying to contain it, because the last thing he needed was to lose control in front of the ghost of the most dangerous villain in modern history.

Tomura glanced at his hands.

For a moment, something unreadable passed over his face.

Then he looked back at Koki.

"What's your name?"

Koki couldn't believe the question. "What?"

"Your name." Tomura tilted his head. "You know, the thing people call you. Usually when they're trying to get your attention."

"You know who you are, right?"

"Unfortunately."

"You're Tomura Shigaraki."

"Congratulations."

Koki's breath caught.

The man sounded so bored. There was no booming voice, no theatrical declaration, no threat of destruction. He was standing in a poorly lit dormitory room, wearing clothes that looked as though they had been slept in for several days, looking at Koki as if he were an inconvenience.

Koki found that more frightening than anything else.

He reached blindly for his phone.

Tomura watched him do it.

"If you're calling someone, tell them to bring food. I'm starving."

Koki dropped the phone.

It struck the floor with a crack that seemed impossibly loud in the little room.

Tomura looked at it.

Then at Koki.

Then, with a sigh that suggested Koki was already exhausting him, he said, "You people really are dramatic."

Koki ran.

He didn't remember opening the door. He didn't remember whether he had put on his slippers or whether he had left them behind. He only remembered the corridor stretching ahead of him, the harsh light overhead, and the sound of his own breathing becoming increasingly frantic as he ran toward the common room.

He found no one there.

The television was off. The kitchen lights had been switched off for the night, and the chairs surrounding the long dining table stood neatly pushed beneath it. Beyond the windows, rain washed the campus in silver, turning the distant buildings into indistinct shapes against the darkness.

Koki seized the edge of the counter and tried to breathe.

He was safe.

He was at U.A. High School. He was in the dormitory, surrounded by security systems, teachers, heroes, and people who would never allow a villain to wander into a student's room.

He was safe.

He repeated it until the words began to lose their meaning.

Then a voice behind him said, "You forgot your phone."

Koki turned so quickly that his shoulder struck the cupboard.

Tomura stood on the other side of the kitchen island.

He held nothing in his hands.

For a long moment, Koki could only stare at him, unable to understand how he had crossed the room without making a sound. Then he looked at the kitchen entrance, the windows, the hallway leading back toward the stairs.

There was nowhere else to go.

"Stay away from me."

Tomura's expression changed.

Not much. His eyebrows drew together, and his mouth tightened, and for one strange second he looked less like a villain and more like a man who had been accused of doing something he didn't understand.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're dead!"

"Yes, you've mentioned that."

"Then why are you here?"

Tomura opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Looked at the ceiling.

"Excellent question."

Koki wanted to scream.

Instead, he backed away until his spine met the refrigerator, and Tomura watched him with an expression that was becoming increasingly difficult to read. There was no satisfaction in his face, no pleasure at Koki's fear. If anything, he seemed faintly uncomfortable with the whole situation.

After a while, he looked away.

"Look, kid. I don't know what's happening any more than you do. If I did, I'd probably be somewhere else."

"Somewhere else where?"

Tomura shrugged.

"How the hell should I know?"

Koki stared at him.

The ghost stared back.

Somewhere outside, thunder rolled over the campus.

And in the kitchen of the U.A. dormitories, at an hour when every sensible person should have been asleep, Koki Terumoto began to understand that he was going to have a very difficult year.

He didn't know yet that the worst part would not be the haunting.

The worst part would be the day he stopped being afraid of it.

The next morning, Koki told himself that he had been hallucinating.

He told himself this while brushing his teeth, while pulling on his uniform, while making his bed with the mechanical precision of someone trying to convince himself that ordinary routines could keep extraordinary things from happening. He told himself this while walking down the corridor toward the common room, where several of his classmates were already arguing over who had finished the last of the milk.

He told himself this because the alternative was unthinkable.

Tomura Shigaraki was dead. Ghosts did not exist. And even if they did, there was no reason for one to appear in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy who had a perfectly respectable amount of homework and absolutely no interest in becoming involved in anything supernatural.

Koki was going to eat breakfast, attend his classes, and speak to his homeroom teacher about the possibility of getting an extension on his history assignment.

That was all.

He made it halfway through the common room before he saw the white hair reflected in the dark television screen.

Koki stopped.

His classmate beside him continued talking, unaware that Koki had gone completely still.

"—and I'm telling you, if he makes us do another three-kilometer run tomorrow, I'm transferring schools. I swear to God, I'm going to write the principal a letter—"

Koki turned.

Tomura was sitting on the kitchen counter, his legs dangling over the edge.

He looked at the breakfast spread with open disdain.

"What's that?"

Koki followed his gaze.

"Toast."

"That's toast?"

"It's bread."

"I know what bread is."

"Then why did you ask?"

Tomura looked at him.

Koki looked back.

For one extraordinary moment, they appeared to have forgotten that one of them was dead and the other was desperately trying not to lose his mind.

Then Tomura leaned forward and picked up a slice of toast.

His fingers passed straight through it.

The bread remained on the plate.

Tomura stared at his hand.

Koki stared at the toast.

Neither of them said anything.

Finally, Tomura sat back and muttered, "Well, that's fucking depressing."

Koki turned around and walked out of the room.

He made it to his first class before he began to panic.

Izuku Midoriya was already standing at the front of the classroom when Koki arrived. He had a stack of papers tucked beneath one arm and a cup of coffee in his other hand, and he was talking to one of the students about an upcoming practical exercise. His hair was as unruly as ever, and there was a faint crease between his eyebrows that appeared whenever he was trying to remember three things at once.

He looked up when Koki entered.

"Morning, Koki. You're a little early today."

Koki stopped beside his desk.

"Mr. Midoriya?"

Izuku smiled. "What's up?"

Koki opened his mouth.

He thought about saying everything. He thought about telling his teacher that Tomura Shigaraki had appeared in his room the previous night and was now apparently haunting the dormitory kitchen, where he had attempted to eat a piece of toast and failed.

He thought about how Izuku had fought Tomura during the war, how he had tried to reach him, how he had stood at the end of a terrible story and done everything he could to give the boy buried beneath the villain a chance to be heard.

How could Koki possibly tell him that the man he had failed to save was now sitting in the common room, complaining about breakfast?

Instead, Koki swallowed.

"Have you ever been so tired that you started seeing things?"

Izuku's smile faded.

"Sometimes," he said carefully. "Why?"

Koki looked at the floor.

"Just wondering."

Izuku set his coffee down.

"Koki, are you sleeping okay?"

"Yes."

"Because if you're having trouble with the dorms or your schedule, we can-"

"I'm fine."

The words came too quickly.

Izuku stopped.

Koki could feel him looking at him, and the familiar pressure of being noticed settled over his shoulders. It was not an unpleasant feeling, exactly. Izuku was kind. He had never raised his voice at Koki, never treated his fear as an inconvenience, never made him feel as though his existence were something that needed to be explained.

That was precisely why Koki found it so difficult to speak.

Kindness was a strange thing when you had spent most of your childhood learning to expect the opposite. It made you want to lean toward it and run from it at the same time.

Izuku studied him for another moment, then nodded.

"All right. But if that changes, you can come talk to me. You don't have to wait until something becomes a problem before asking for help."

Koki forced himself to smile.

"Okay."

He took his seat.

For the next forty minutes, he did not look at the windows.

He did not look at the empty chair beside the door.

He did not look at the white-haired man who had appeared in the back of the classroom, sitting with his chin propped in one hand, watching Izuku teach with an expression Koki couldn't quite decipher.

He especially did not look at the way Tomura's face changed whenever Izuku laughed.

Because the ghost was not looking at Koki anymore.

He was looking at Izuku.

And for the first time since he had appeared, Tomura Shigaraki looked frightened.

Koki learned three things about being haunted during the first week.

The first was that ghosts did not appear to care about privacy.

Tomura followed him into the bathroom, stood outside his bedroom door while he changed, and once appeared directly behind him in a mirror while Koki was attempting to shave the faint, uneven line of hair that had begun growing along his upper lip. Koki had nearly dropped the razor.

Tomura had laughed so hard that he had to sit down.

The second was that ghosts did not understand personal boundaries.

Tomura read over his shoulder while he studied, interrupted conversations to make comments that nobody else could hear, and occasionally appeared at the foot of Koki's bed in the middle of the night to announce that he was bored.

Koki had started keeping a pillow beside him for the sole purpose of throwing it at the ghost.

It passed straight through him.

Tomura considered this the funniest thing that had ever happened.

The third thing Koki learned was that Tomura Shigaraki was not frightening all the time.

This was, in many ways, the most disturbing discovery.

The man in the history books had been a monster, a mass murderer, the leader of a group responsible for countless deaths. Koki had grown up hearing his name spoken with the solemnity reserved for people who had changed the course of history through terrible means. He had seen photographs of the destruction. He knew what Tomura had done.

But the ghost who followed him through the dormitory was not a history book.

He was petty. He was sarcastic. He had strong opinions about the quality of the cafeteria food, despite being unable to eat it. He complained about the music Koki listened to and insisted that the modern generation had somehow become worse at making decisions than the previous one.

He also seemed to have no idea what to do with himself.

Sometimes, Koki would find him sitting in an empty room, staring at the wall with an expression of profound exhaustion. If Koki asked him what he was thinking about, Tomura would tell him to mind his own business. If Koki left him alone, he would occasionally follow him into the next room anyway.

It was like living with a particularly unpleasant cat.

A cat that had once attempted to destroy civilization.

On the eighth day, Koki finally lost his patience.

"Can you stop following me?"

Tomura looked up from the windowsill.

They were in the dormitory common room, where Koki had gone to work on an assignment because he could no longer stand the sight of his bedroom. The late afternoon sun had turned the windows gold, and the room smelled faintly of laundry detergent and the instant noodles somebody had been eating earlier.

Tomura had been sitting on the windowsill for nearly an hour.

Koki had tried ignoring him.

He had tried asking him to leave.

He had tried going upstairs, only for Tomura to appear beside his desk a few minutes later, making a comment about the terrible handwriting in his notes.

Now Koki's pencil had snapped in his hand.

Tomura glanced at it.

"That's a bit dramatic."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. You have terrible handwriting."

Koki stood up so quickly that his chair scraped backward.

"Why are you doing this?"

Tomura's expression changed.

"What?"

"Why are you following me? Why are you here? Why won't you leave me alone?"

Tomura stared at him.

Koki could feel his heart beating in his throat. He knew he was shouting, knew that the noise would carry through the empty common room, but he couldn't seem to stop himself.

"I didn't do anything to you! I've never even met you before! I don't know why you're here, and I don't know what you want, and I'm sick of being afraid of you!"

The last words came out louder than the others.

Tomura went still.

For a moment, Koki thought he might become angry. He had seen the footage of what Tomura could do. He knew how quickly a situation could turn catastrophic when the man decided that something had displeased him.

But Tomura did not move.

He looked at Koki with an expression so unfamiliar that it took several seconds for Koki to recognize it.

He looked hurt.

Then he looked away.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Well. I'm sick of being here, too."

Koki stood frozen.

Tomura slid off the windowsill and walked toward the door.

Or tried to.

His body passed through it without resistance, and he disappeared into the corridor beyond.

Koki remained standing in the middle of the common room, his hands trembling, the broken pencil lying on the floor beside his chair.

He had wanted Tomura to leave.

He had wanted it so badly that he had spent the entire week thinking about little else.

So why, when the ghost finally disappeared, did the silence feel so much worse than his presence?

The first time Tomura asked about the old woman, Koki thought he was talking about someone else.

It happened on a Sunday afternoon, nearly three weeks after the haunting began. Koki had been sitting outside the dormitory with a book in his lap, attempting to enjoy the rare stretch of good weather between classes. The campus was quiet, most of the students having gone into the city or gathered in the common room to watch a film, and the air carried the soft, green smell of grass warming beneath the sun.

Tomura was sitting on the bench beside him.

He had been quiet for most of the afternoon, which Koki had learned was usually a sign that something unpleasant was occupying his thoughts.

Eventually, he spoke.

"Do you remember her?"

Koki glanced at him.

"Who?"

"The old woman."

Koki's stomach tightened.

He knew what Tomura meant. Everyone knew about the woman who had reached out to him after the war. Her actions had become one of the small, quiet symbols of the reconstruction, a reminder that the world could not rebuild itself through laws and infrastructure alone. It had been shared online by someone that filmed the occurrence and it had gone viral. Sometimes Koki saw her photograph in articles about the importance of compassion. Sometimes teachers mentioned her when they talked about the future of hero society.

He didn't like those conversations. They made his life sound like a lesson.

"Of course I remember her," he said.

Tomura looked out across the campus. "What was she like?"

Koki frowned. "You know who she is."

"I know what people say about her."

"Then why are you asking me?"

Tomura shrugged, but the movement looked strangely stiff. "Because you were there."

Koki looked down at his book.

He remembered the day in fragments. The noise of the city. The confusion of people moving through the streets. The awful, empty feeling of being a child who had no idea where he belonged and no reason to believe that anybody would help him find out.

He remembered the woman approaching him.

He remembered her voice, gentle without being condescending, and the way she had lowered herself to his height instead of speaking down to him. He remembered that she had not recoiled when his Quirk flickered in the air around him. She had not told him to calm down, had not asked what was wrong with him, had not made him feel as though his fear were an inconvenience.

She had simply asked whether he was all right.

And when he couldn't answer, she stayed.

"I don't remember everything," Koki admitted. "I was scared. I didn't really know what was happening."

Tomura nodded. "What did she say?"

Koki thought about it. "I don't know. Something ordinary, probably."

"Ordinary?"

"Yeah." He shifted on the bench. "She asked if I was hurt. She asked if I had somewhere to go. I think she told me that I didn't have to be afraid of her."

Tomura's fingers curled against his knees.

Koki noticed the movement. "What?"

"Nothing."

"..Okay?”

The afternoon sun slipped behind a cloud, leaving the campus in a softer, cooler light. Somewhere beyond the trees, a group of students shouted at one another over a game, their laughter carrying through the open air.

Tomura watched them.

"Did she take your hand?"

Koki swallowed. "Yeah."

Tomura nodded slowly. "And you went with her?"

"Yes."

"Just like that?"

Koki frowned. "What do you mean?"

Tomura's expression had gone strangely distant.

"I mean, you didn't think she was going to hurt you? You didn't think she wanted something from you? You didn't wonder why she was helping you?"

Koki stared at him. "I was a kid."

Tomura's mouth twitched. "Right."

He looked away again. For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Then Tomura asked, very quietly, "Did you ever wonder what would've happened if she hadn't stopped?"

Koki felt the question settle somewhere beneath his ribs.

He had wondered, of course. Everyone wondered about the lives they might have lived. He had thought about it on difficult days, when his classmates complained about things he would have once given anything to experience. He had thought about it when he woke from nightmares, when his Quirk frightened him, when he caught himself reacting to kindness as though it were a trap.

He had imagined different versions of himself.

Some were happier. Some were lonelier. Some were angry enough to frighten him.

But he had never imagined the answer sitting beside him on a bench.

"I don't know," Koki said.

Tomura nodded. "Me neither."

Koki looked at him.

Tomura was staring at his hands, his expression unreadable.

Then he stood up. "I'm going inside."

He walked away without waiting for an answer.

Koki watched him disappear through the dormitory doors, and for the first time, he wondered whether the ghost had been following him because of something that happened after the war.

Or because of something that had happened long before either of them had met.

Koki began researching Tomura Shigaraki that evening.

He told himself that he was doing it because he needed information. If the ghost was going to continue haunting him, surely it was reasonable to understand who he was. Koki had spent enough time frightened of a face in his bedroom; he wanted facts, something solid to hold onto when the rest of the situation threatened to become incomprehensible.

He started with the official records.

There were photographs of Tomura as an adult, footage of his confrontations with heroes, reports detailing the destruction caused by his Quirk. There were accounts of the League of Villains and the people who had followed him, some out of loyalty and others out of desperation. There were interviews with survivors who spoke about the terror of watching their homes disappear beneath his hands.

Koki read all of it.

He read about the war. He read about the casualties. He read about the people who had lost family members, the children who had grown up without parents, the communities that had been forced to rebuild their lives from almost nothing.

He thought about the woman who had saved him.

He thought about Tomura standing in his bedroom, looking bored.

He thought about the way the ghost had asked whether she had taken his hand.

Eventually, he found the records of Tenko Shimura.

The boy in the photographs looked nothing like the man Koki had been seeing. His hair was dark, his face softer, his eyes wide with the particular vulnerability of a child who has not yet learned that the world can be cruel. Koki stared at one photograph for a long time, trying to reconcile the little boy on the screen with the ghost who had complained about his handwriting.

He read about Tenko's family.

He read about his Quirk manifesting.

He read about the day his life had fallen apart.

The details were difficult to process. There were things Koki had never imagined happening to a child, things he had never expected to encounter in a history lesson. He read about the fear, the confusion, the way Tenko had been left alone after the worst day of his life.

He read about the people who had passed him in the street.

He read about the woman who had hesitated.

And then he understood why Tomura had asked about her.

Koki sat back in his chair.

His room was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioning. Beyond the window, the campus lights had come on, illuminating the paths between the dormitories and the distant training grounds. His textbook lay open on the desk, forgotten beneath a growing collection of printed articles and handwritten notes.

He felt sick.

He had known that Tomura had suffered. Everyone knew that the villain had been manipulated by All For One, that his childhood had been shaped by cruelty and neglect, that the person he became had not appeared out of nowhere.

But knowing something and seeing it were different things.

Koki had spent his entire life trying to understand why people had treated him the way they did. He had tried to find the explanation that would make it hurt less, the reason that would allow him to believe that what had happened to him had not been his fault.

And now he was looking at a boy who had asked the same questions and received answers that had destroyed him.

There was a knock at his door.

Koki flinched so violently that his pen fell from his hand.

"Hey," Izuku called from the other side. "It's me. Are you awake?"

Koki scrambled to gather the papers.

"Yes!"

"Can I come in?"

Koki looked at the desk, at the photographs, at the printed accounts of Tomura's childhood.

"Just a second!"

He shoved everything into a drawer and crossed the room, opening the door before Izuku could knock again.

His teacher stood in the hallway holding a small stack of assignments.

"Sorry to bother you so late," Izuku said. "I was going through the history papers, and I noticed you haven't submitted yours yet. I wanted to check whether you needed more time."

Koki stared at him.

Izuku's expression softened.

"Hey. Is everything okay?"

Koki wanted to tell him.

The words were right there, caught somewhere between his throat and his chest. He wanted to say that he had been reading about Tomura, that he had found the records of Tenko Shimura, that the ghost of the man who had nearly destroyed Japan was sitting in his bedroom and asking questions about a woman who had saved Koki's life.

He wanted to tell Izuku that he was frightened.

Instead, he looked at the papers in his teacher's hands.

"I'm sorry. I'll finish it tonight."

Izuku studied him.

"You don't need to apologize. If you're having trouble with the assignment, we can work something out."

"I'm fine."

The answer came automatically.

Izuku was quiet for a moment.

Then he sighed, not impatiently, but with the tired understanding of someone who had heard those words too many times from people who weren't fine at all.

"Koki, you know you don't have to earn the right to ask for help, don't you?"

Koki's throat tightened.

He looked away.

Izuku continued gently, "You don't have to wait until you're completely overwhelmed. You don't have to prove that you're struggling enough. If something is bothering you, you can tell me, even if you don't know how to explain it yet."

Koki stared at the floor.

For a moment, he was no longer standing in the doorway of his dormitory room. He was a much smaller child, standing in a place where asking for help had never seemed like a sensible thing to do. He was remembering the way fear could settle into the body until it became indistinguishable from ordinary life.

He was remembering that the world had once been full of people who had looked at him and decided that whatever was wrong with him was not their problem.

Izuku was still waiting.

Koki forced himself to look up.

"Thank you, Mr. Midoriya."

Izuku smiled, though there was still concern in his eyes.

"Of course. Get some sleep, okay? The assignment can wait until tomorrow."

He turned to leave.

Then he paused.

"And Koki?"

"Yes?"

"If you ever need to talk about anything, you can come to me. Not just schoolwork. Anything."

Koki nodded.

Izuku walked away.

Koki closed the door and leaned against it, his eyes burning.

He stayed there for a long time, listening to the footsteps fade down the corridor.

Then a voice behind him said, "He's good at that."

Koki closed his eyes.

Tomura was sitting on the edge of his bed.

"At what?"

"Making people feel like they can tell him things."

Koki turned around.

The ghost was looking at the closed door.

For once, he didn't seem irritated or bored. He looked almost wistful, though the expression was so fleeting that Koki might have imagined it.

"Did he help you?" Koki asked.

Tomura's face changed.

The question had been simple. Koki hadn't meant anything by it. But the moment the words left his mouth, he understood that he had touched something he wasn't supposed to.

Tomura looked at him.

"No."

Koki swallowed.

"But he tried."

Tomura laughed, and the sound was so bitter that Koki wished he had never asked.

"Yeah," he said. "He did."

Then he looked away.

"And that was the problem, wasn't it?"

The nightmares began getting worse after that.

Koki had always dreamed about his childhood, though he rarely remembered the dreams clearly enough to describe them. Sometimes he woke with the impression that someone had been shouting. Sometimes he found himself sitting upright in bed, his hands clenched in the blankets, his heart racing as though he had been running.

He had learned to live with it.

He had learned to get up, wash his face, drink some water, and wait for the feeling to pass. He had learned that if he focused on the small, ordinary details of the dormitory room, the present would eventually become more convincing than whatever his mind had dragged out of the past.

But now Tomura was there.

And somehow, having a ghost beside him made the nightmares harder to ignore.

The first time Koki woke from one with Tomura watching him, he nearly fell out of bed.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he demanded, his voice hoarse with sleep.

Tomura blinked.

"What?"

"Why are you just sitting there?"

"You were making noise."

"So?"

"So I looked."

Koki pressed both hands against his face.

He was exhausted. His head hurt, his throat felt raw, and the room was too dark to distinguish anything beyond the vague shapes of his furniture. He wanted to go back to sleep. He wanted to be alone. He wanted, more than anything, to stop feeling as though every part of his life was being watched by someone who knew exactly how frightened he was.

"Just leave me alone."

Tomura didn't answer.

Koki lowered his hands.

The ghost was sitting on the floor beside the bed, his knees drawn up, his fingers curled against his palms. He looked strangely small in the darkness, stripped of the height and menace that had made him so frightening in the history books.

For a moment, Koki wondered how old Tomura would have been if he had lived.

He had never thought about it before.

He had always imagined Tomura as an adult because that was the person the world remembered. But the man sitting beside his bed looked young. Too young to have become a historical catastrophe. Too young to have spent his life carrying the weight of so many dead people.

Koki looked away.

"What were you dreaming about?" Tomura asked.

"Nothing."

"Right."

Koki's jaw tightened.

"I said nothing."

Tomura nodded.

"Okay."

The silence that followed was unbearable.

Koki pulled the blanket up to his chin and stared at the wall, trying to convince himself that if he closed his eyes, the ghost would disappear. He waited for Tomura to make another sarcastic remark, to tell him that he was being dramatic, to do something that would allow Koki to hate him again.

Instead, Tomura spoke quietly.

"I used to have those, too."

Koki didn't move.

"The nightmares," Tomura clarified. "When I was little."

Koki swallowed. "What happened?"

Tomura was quiet for a long time. "I don't remember all of them."

Koki turned his head slightly.

Tomura was staring at his hands.

"Some of them were about my family. Some were about things that happened after." He scratched at his neck. "Sometimes I dreamed about things that hadn't happened yet. Sometimes I dreamed about things I wished hadn't happened at all."

He paused.

"I used to think that if I stayed awake long enough, I'd be able to stop them."

Koki's throat tightened. "Did it work?"

Tomura laughed softly. "No."

The answer was so ordinary that Koki didn't know what to do with it.

He had expected something else. Some grand declaration about suffering, perhaps, or a bitter joke about the uselessness of hope. Instead, Tomura had admitted that he had been a frightened child who tried to outrun his own dreams and failed.

Koki looked at him. "Are you still having them?"

Tomura didn't answer immediately. Then he said, "I don't think ghosts sleep."

Koki stared at him. "That's horrible."

"Yeah."

For a while, neither of them spoke.

The room was quiet. The rain had stopped, and the campus lights cast pale shapes across the floor. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed, followed by the muffled sound of footsteps.

Koki lay back against his pillow.

Tomura remained on the floor.

Eventually, Koki's breathing began to settle. The tightness in his chest eased enough for him to close his eyes, and the darkness behind his eyelids became less frightening than it had been a few minutes earlier.

Just before he fell asleep, he heard Tomura speak again.

"You don't have to tell me what happened."

Koki's eyes opened.

The ghost was still looking at his hands. "I mean, if you don't want to. You don't have to explain it just because somebody asks."

Koki stared at him for a long time. Then he turned onto his side, facing the wall. "Okay," he whispered.

He fell asleep before he could hear Tomura's answer. And for the first time in weeks, he did not wake again until morning

The confrontation happened on a Thursday.

Koki had spent the day feeling as though something was wrong with him. He couldn't concentrate during lessons, couldn't answer questions without second-guessing himself, and couldn't shake the sense that everyone around him was looking at him a little differently.

Nothing had happened.

That was the problem.

He had woken from a nightmare, gone to class, eaten lunch with his classmates, and returned to the dormitory in the evening. His life had followed the same ordinary pattern it always did, and yet he felt as though he were standing on the edge of something terrible.

Tomura had been unusually quiet.

He had appeared beside Koki during breakfast, followed him to class, and spent most of the afternoon sitting on a windowsill overlooking the training grounds. When Koki asked him what he was thinking about, he said nothing. When Koki asked whether he was planning to disappear again, he told him to stop asking stupid questions.

By the time Koki returned to his room, his patience had worn thin.

He dropped his bag beside the desk and turned toward the ghost.

"Do you think I'm going to become like you?"

Tomura looked up.

For a moment, he seemed genuinely confused.

"What?"

"You heard me."

Tomura sat up straighter.

Koki could feel his hands beginning to shake, and he hated it. He hated that his body reacted to his own thoughts as though they were threats. He hated that he couldn't ask a question without feeling as though he were about to be punished for it.

"Do you think I'm going to become like you?" he repeated. "Because of my Quirk, because of what happened to me, because of the way I grew up? Do you think I'm going to end up hurting people?"

Tomura stared at him.

Then he stood.

"I don't know."

Koki laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. "Of course you don't."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know! Something!"

"Something like what?"

"That I won't become a villain!"

Tomura's expression hardened. "How the hell would I know that?"

Koki flinched.

The words struck harder than they should have, and the momentary silence that followed made them seem even crueler.

Tomura seemed to realize it, because his expression changed almost immediately. But Koki was already speaking, his voice rising with every word.

"You're the one who keeps following me! You're the one who keeps looking at me like you know something about me that I don't! You keep asking about my childhood, about the woman who saved me, about whether I remember what happened, and I don't understand what you want from me!"

Tomura said nothing.

Koki's eyes burned.

"Do you think I'm going to end up like you? Is that why you're here? Are you waiting for me to become a monster so you can tell yourself that you were right about the world?"

Tomura went very still.

For several seconds, the only sound in the room was Koki's breathing.

Then Tomura said, very quietly, "You think that's what I want?"

Koki couldn't answer.

Tomura looked away.

"I don't know why I'm here," he said. "I don't know why I can see you, or why you can see me, or why I keep ending up in this stupid room when I'd rather be anywhere else. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, and I don't know what happens if I stop following you."

He looked back at Koki.

"But I am not waiting for you to become a monster."

Koki stared at him.

Tomura's voice grew rougher. "I know what I did. I know what happened to the people who got caught in it. You don't have to remind me."

"Then why do you keep looking at me like that?"

Tomura opened his mouth.

Closed it.

His fingers curled against his palms.

"Because you remind me of something I can't stop thinking about."

Koki's anger faltered.

"What?"

Tomura looked toward the window. "That it could've been different."

The words were so quiet that Koki almost didn't hear them. He stared at the ghost, trying to understand what he meant.

Tomura laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Don't look at me like that. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me."

"Then what are you asking?"

"Nothing!"

His voice cracked through the room.

Tomura looked startled by his own outburst. He stood there for a moment, breathing out of habit, his shoulders tense, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Koki's head.

Then he looked away.

"I don't want anything from you," he muttered. "I just-"

He stopped.

Koki waited.

Tomura pressed a hand against his neck. "I just want to know what it would've been like."

The room seemed to grow smaller.

Koki could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning, the distant voices of students in the common room, the sound of a door closing somewhere down the corridor. Ordinary things. Safe things.

And yet the ghost standing in front of him looked as though he had just admitted something unforgivable.

"What what would've been like?" Koki asked.

Tomura stared at him. "Being you."

Koki couldn't speak.

Tomura laughed softly, almost bitterly.

"Having somebody stop. Having somebody look at me and decide that I was worth the trouble. Having somebody take my hand before I had any reason to hate the world."

He looked down.

"I don't know what I would've become. Maybe I would've still turned out awful. Maybe I would've made all the same mistakes. Maybe I would've hurt people anyway." His mouth tightened. "But I would've liked to find out."

Koki felt something inside him give way.

He had spent weeks being afraid of Tomura, afraid of the darkness that seemed to follow him, afraid of what the ghost might mean for his own future. He had imagined that Tomura was there to judge him, to warn him, to remind him that the line between a frightened child and a terrible adult was thinner than he wanted to believe.

He had never considered that Tomura might be afraid, too.

Not of Koki.

Of the life he would never know.

Koki sank onto the edge of his bed.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Then Koki whispered, "I'm sorry."

Tomura's head snapped up.

"Don't."

"But-"

"Don't apologize to me for being alive."

Koki's eyes filled.

Tomura looked away, his jaw tight.

"You didn't take anything from me. You didn't do anything wrong. Somebody helped you. That's good." He swallowed, his voice becoming rougher. "That's how it's supposed to work."

Koki wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

"Then why does it feel so awful?"

Tomura looked at him.

For a moment, he seemed to have no answer.

Then he sat down on the floor beside the bed, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up in front of him.

"Because you know what it means," he said.

Koki stared at him.

Tomura looked at his hands.

"You know what it means to be a kid who needs help. You know what it feels like when nobody wants to give it to you. And now you know that somebody could've helped me, too."

He paused.

"And you don't know what to do with that."

Koki's throat tightened.

"No," he whispered. "I don't."

Tomura nodded.

"Me neither."

They sat together in the quiet room, neither of them knowing what to say next.

Outside, the sun disappeared behind the buildings, and the first lights of evening came on across the campus. Koki watched the darkness gather at the edges of the window, thinking about the woman who had saved him, about the boy who had been left behind, and about the life he had spent so many years trying to justify.

He had always thought that the worst thing about his childhood was that nobody had helped him sooner.

Now he understood that the worst thing might be that he had spent so long believing he was the sort of person who didn't deserve help in the first place.

And Tomura, sitting beside him, seemed to understand that better than anyone.

After that night, something changed between them.

It wasn't dramatic. Tomura didn't become kinder, exactly, and Koki didn't stop being afraid of him. They still argued about stupid things. Tomura still complained about Koki's handwriting, and Koki still threw pillows at him when he appeared in the middle of the night.

But they stopped pretending that the other person was the problem.

Koki began talking to Tomura about things he had never told anyone else.

Not everything. Some memories remained too difficult to put into words, and some feelings were so tangled that he couldn't separate them from the fear that accompanied them. But he started telling Tomura about the little things: the way he sometimes felt uncomfortable when people stood too close to him, the way he struggled to accept gifts, the way he occasionally found himself wondering whether the people who cared about him would still care if they knew everything about his past.

Tomura listened.

Sometimes he offered a comment. Sometimes he told Koki that he was overthinking things. Sometimes he simply sat beside him, staring at the wall, until Koki ran out of words.

It was not a perfect arrangement.

There were days when Tomura said something cruel without meaning to, and days when Koki became so overwhelmed by the ghost's presence that he asked him to leave. There were moments when Tomura's bitterness surfaced unexpectedly, when he spoke about the world with a hatred that made Koki remember exactly who he had been.

Koki did not excuse those moments.

He did not tell himself that Tomura's suffering made everything he had done acceptable. He had read too much about the war to believe that. He knew there were people who would never recover from what Tomura had taken from them, and he knew that understanding the man did not mean he had to forgive the villain.

But he began to understand something else, too.

Tomura had not been born as the person the world remembered.

He had been a child once. A frightened, angry, lonely child who had needed someone to help him and had not received that help when it mattered most.

That did not erase what he had done.

It simply meant that the story had begun long before the world learned his name.

One afternoon, Koki found Tomura sitting on the floor of the common room, watching a group of students play a board game.

They were arguing over the rules, laughing so loudly that someone in the kitchen shouted at them to keep it down. One of the students had lost spectacularly and was accusing everyone else of cheating, while another insisted that the entire game was rigged.

Tomura watched them with an expression of profound disbelief.

"What are they doing?"

Koki glanced up from his homework.

"Playing a game."

"Why?"

Koki stared at him.

"Because it's fun?"

Tomura looked back at the group.

"They're terrible at it."

"They're not playing to win."

"Then what's the point?"

Koki laughed before he could stop himself.

It was a small sound, brief and unexpected, but it seemed to surprise both of them.

Tomura turned toward him.

For a moment, he looked almost pleased.

Then he ruined it by saying, "You have a weird laugh."

Koki threw his pencil at him.

It passed through his shoulder and struck the wall.

Tomura grinned.

For the first time since the haunting began, Koki forgot to be afraid.

He forgot that the man sitting beside him had once brought the world to the brink of destruction. He forgot that Tomura was dead, that he was not supposed to be here, that their conversations had begun in fear and confusion.

He saw only a person who had made him laugh.

And later, when Koki was alone in his room, he found himself thinking about that moment with a strange, uncomfortable ache in his chest.

Because he had begun to care.

Not in the way he cared about his classmates, or Izuku, or the people who had helped him rebuild his life. This was something different, something he didn't know how to explain. He cared about the ghost because he had begun to see the person beneath the history, and because he knew what it meant to be a child whose pain had gone unnoticed.

He cared about Tomura because he could see the boy who had once existed.

And he was terrified of what that meant.

Izuku noticed the change before Koki did.

It happened during a practical lesson, when the students were working in pairs to practice controlling their Quirks under pressure. Koki had been doing well until one of his classmates made an unexpected movement, causing the darkness around Koki's hands to surge outward.

The exercise was harmless. Nobody was injured. The instructor called for a pause, and Koki immediately began apologizing.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"

"Hey, it's okay," his classmate said. "You didn't hit anyone."

"I should've been paying attention."

"It happens."

Koki nodded, but he was already backing away.

He could feel the familiar panic rising in his chest, the awful sensation that he had done something unforgivable and was about to be punished for it. He knew, intellectually, that nobody was angry with him. He knew that his classmates were simply waiting for the exercise to resume.

But his body didn't seem to understand.

He left the training area before anyone could stop him.

Izuku found him sitting on a bench outside the building, his hands clasped so tightly together that his knuckles had gone pale.

"Koki?"

Koki looked up. "Sorry, sir."

Izuku sat down beside him. "You don't have to apologize."

"I lost control."

"For a moment. It happens."

"Not like that."

Izuku was quiet.

Koki stared at the ground. "I don't know what's wrong with me."

The words came out so softly that Izuku almost didn't hear them.

Then Koki looked at him, and Izuku saw the fear in his expression. It was not the fear of a student who had made a mistake during training. It was something older, something that had been there long before Koki had ever set foot inside U.A.

Izuku knew that look.

He had seen it in other students, in people who had grown up believing that the worst thing they could do was inconvenience someone else with their pain. He had seen it in himself, once, when he had been so desperate to become a hero that he had forgotten he was allowed to be a person first.

"Koki," he said gently, "what happened to you wasn't your fault."

Koki's eyes filled.

"I know."

"Do you?"

Koki looked away.

Izuku waited.

Eventually, Koki whispered, "I don't know how to stop being afraid of it."

Izuku's expression softened. "Of what?"

Koki swallowed. "Of becoming someone terrible."

For a long moment, Izuku said nothing.

Then he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

"I think a lot of people are afraid of that," he said. "Especially people who've been hurt. Sometimes, when something terrible happens to us, we start believing that it must have changed us into something we don't recognize. We become so frightened of what we might do that we forget to look at what we're actually doing."

Koki listened.

Izuku continued, "You made a mistake during training. That doesn't make you dangerous. It doesn't make you a bad person. It means you're learning, and sometimes learning is uncomfortable."

Koki wiped his eyes.

"What if it's more than that?"

"Then we deal with it when it happens."

Izuku turned toward him.

"You don't have to figure out the rest of your life today, Koki. You don't have to prove that you're a good person every second of every day. You just have to keep making choices, and when you make a mistake, you take responsibility for it and try again."

Koki stared at him.

It sounded so simple when Izuku said it.

It sounded like something he should have known already.

But there was a difference between understanding something and believing it, and Koki had spent so long believing that his life depended on being good enough that he didn't know how to imagine anything else.

Izuku seemed to understand that, because he didn't push him for an answer.

He simply sat beside him until Koki's breathing settled, and when the bell rang, he walked back to the training grounds with him.

Tomura was waiting outside the building.

He looked at Izuku.

Izuku walked straight through him.

Koki stopped.

Tomura watched his former opponent disappear down the corridor, his expression unreadable.

Then he looked at Koki. "He hasn't changed much."

Koki stared at him. "You knew he couldn't see you?"

Tomura shrugged. "I had a suspicion."

Koki felt something cold settle in his stomach. "You've been following him, too?"

"Not exactly."

"What does that mean?"

Tomura looked away. "It means I've been here."

Koki stared at him, suddenly remembering the way Tomura had watched Izuku during that first lesson, the strange expression on his face, the way he had looked frightened when he realized who was standing at the front of the classroom.

"Why?"

Tomura's jaw tightened. "Because I wanted to know."

"Know what?"

Tomura looked at him. "Whether he was still the same person."

Koki swallowed. "And is he?"

Tomura was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Yeah." He looked down at his hands. "That's the problem."

Koki didn't understand what he meant.

Not yet.

The truth came out on a rainy evening in November.

Koki had been sitting at his desk, attempting to finish an essay, when Tomura appeared beside the window. He looked more exhausted than usual, his shoulders drawn inward and his fingers restless against his palms. He had been like this for several days, disappearing for hours at a time and returning with an expression that suggested he had seen something he wished he could forget.

Koki had stopped asking where he went.

Tonight, however, Tomura spoke before Koki could return to his work.

"Do you remember what I asked you about the old woman?"

Koki set down his pen. "Yes."

Tomura stared through the glass. "She saw me, too."

Koki felt the room go still.

He had suspected it, of course. The questions, the strange way Tomura reacted whenever Koki mentioned the woman, the sadness that had settled over him whenever he spoke about being a child.

But hearing him say it was different.

"What?"

Tomura rubbed at his neck.

"Back when I was little. Before all of it." He paused. "I was walking around, and she saw me. I think she asked if I was okay."

Koki couldn't breathe.

Tomura's voice remained strangely flat, as though he were reciting something he had repeated to himself so many times that the words had lost their meaning.

"I was dirty. I was scared. I didn't know where to go. I think she thought I was just a lost kid."

He laughed softly. "Which I was, I guess."

Koki stared at him. "What happened?"

Tomura looked away. "She hesitated."

The word hung between them.

Tomura continued, "She thought about helping me. I could tell. She looked at me, and then she looked away, and she kept walking."

Koki felt as though the floor had shifted beneath him.

"But she-"

"I know what she did for you." Tomura turned toward him. "I'm not blaming her. I don't even know if she remembers me. She was a stranger. She saw a child in trouble, and she didn't know what to do. Maybe she was scared. Maybe she thought somebody else would help. Maybe she had somewhere to be."

He shrugged, but the movement was stiff. "It doesn't matter."

Koki stared at him. "How can you say that?"

Tomura's expression hardened. "Because I don't know what would've happened if she stopped. Maybe I'd still have turned out the same. Maybe somebody else would've hurt me. Maybe I'd have made all the same mistakes anyway."

He looked at the floor. "But she didn't stop."

Koki felt tears gather in his eyes.

Tomura laughed, a quiet, terrible sound.

"And then years later, she saw you, and she did."

The room was silent except for the rain against the window.

Koki couldn't think.

He had known that Tomura's childhood had been tragic. He had known that the world had failed him, that the people who should have protected him had not done so. But the thought of the same woman standing before both of them, the same hand reaching toward one child and withdrawing from the other, was almost too much to bear.

It made the distance between their lives feel impossibly small.

One moment.

One decision.

One person stopping when someone else kept walking.

Koki pressed his hands against his face. "I didn't know."

Tomura looked at him. "I know."

"I didn't know that happened to you."

"I know."

"I didn't-"

"Koki."

Tomura's voice was quiet.

Koki lowered his hands.

The ghost was watching him with an expression that made his chest ache. "You don't have to apologize."

Koki swallowed. "But you-"

"I know." Tomura looked away. For a long time, he said nothing. Then, almost too quietly to hear, he added, "I think about it sometimes."

Koki waited.

"I think about what would've happened if she'd stopped. If she'd taken my hand. If she'd asked me where I was going and waited for me to answer." His fingers curled against his palms. "I think about whether I'd have become somebody else. Whether I'd have been happy. Whether I'd have had friends, or a family, or a place to go home to."

He stopped.

Koki could see his jaw working.

"And then I think about you."

Koki's eyes burned.

Tomura looked at him.

"You got to have those things. Not all of them, maybe. Not the way other people did. But you got a chance."

Koki couldn't speak.

Tomura's expression twisted. "And I hate that I'm jealous of a kid."

The admission was so quiet, so painfully human, that Koki felt something inside him break.

Tomura looked away.

"I don't want to be. I don't want to look at you and think about all the things I never got to have. You didn't do anything wrong. You don't deserve to feel guilty for being alive."

He laughed without humor.

"But I do. Sometimes. And I hate myself for it."

Koki sat very still.

He had spent weeks trying to understand why Tomura had appeared in his life, why the ghost had followed him through the dormitory, and why he had asked about the woman who saved him.

Now he understood.

Tomura had been looking at him and seeing the life that might have existed if someone had reached out a hand before it was too late.

And Koki had been looking at Tomura and seeing the person he was terrified he might have become.

Neither of them had chosen this.

Neither of them knew what to do with it.

For a long time, Koki couldn't find the words. Then he whispered, "I wish someone had helped you."

Tomura closed his eyes.

Koki continued, his voice trembling.

"I wish somebody had stopped. I wish somebody had looked at you and realized that you were a child who needed help. I wish you hadn't had to go through all of that alone."

Tomura's shoulders shook once.

He turned away.

Koki had never seen him cry. He wasn't even sure ghosts could cry. But something about the way Tomura held himself made Koki believe that he was fighting against something he had spent his entire life refusing to acknowledge.

"I know," Tomura whispered.

Koki wiped his eyes. "I don't know what else to say."

Tomura laughed softly. "Neither do I."

They sat in silence as the rain continued falling against the window.

And for the first time, Koki understood that there were some tragedies that could not be made better by understanding them.

He could understand Tomura's pain. He could recognize the frightened child beneath the villain. He could wish that somebody had helped him, wish that his life had been different, wish that the world had given him the chance to become someone else.

None of that could change what had happened.

None of it could bring back the people Tomura had killed, or give him the childhood he had lost, or turn the man sitting beside Koki into someone who had never hurt anyone.

Understanding was not forgiveness.

It was not absolution.

It was simply the terrible knowledge that the person who had done so much harm had once been a child who needed help, and that the world had failed him long before he became someone the world needed protection from.

Koki looked at Tomura. "I'm glad she stopped for me."

Tomura nodded. "So am I."

Koki's throat tightened. "But I wish she'd stopped for you, too."

Tomura didn't answer.

He only looked out at the rain, his expression so unbearably tired that Koki wanted to reach for him, even knowing that his hand would pass straight through.

And for the first time since the haunting began, Koki understood that the ghost was not asking him to make anything right.

He was simply asking to be remembered as someone who had once been a boy.

After that conversation, Koki began to change.

Not all at once. There was no sudden transformation, no morning when he woke up and discovered that his nightmares had disappeared or that the past no longer hurt. He still flinched when people shouted. He still struggled to accept kindness without wondering what it would cost him. He still had days when the thought of becoming a hero felt like trying to climb a mountain with his hands tied behind his back.

But he began to recognize the difference between fear and truth.

When his Quirk became difficult to control, he stopped treating it as evidence that he was a bad person. When someone offered to help him, he tried to accept the offer without immediately searching for a way to repay it. When he woke from a nightmare, he reminded himself that he was in his own bed, in his own room, surrounded by people who would come if he called for them.

Sometimes, he even believed it.

Tomura noticed.

"You've been less annoying lately," he remarked one evening.

Koki looked up from his homework.

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I know."

Tomura stared at him.

Then he laughed.

It was a small, startled sound, as though he hadn't expected Koki to answer that way. Koki found himself smiling, and for a while they sat together in the ordinary quiet of the dormitory room, with the rain tapping against the windows and the faint sounds of students moving through the corridors.

It was almost peaceful.

Almost.

Because even as Koki began to feel more comfortable in his own life, Tomura seemed to grow increasingly distant.

He appeared less often. Sometimes Koki would go an entire day without seeing him, only for the ghost to reappear late at night, sitting on the windowsill with an expression that suggested he had been somewhere far away.

Koki tried not to worry.

He told himself that Tomura was simply becoming less interested in haunting him. Perhaps he had found another place to go. Perhaps ghosts could get bored, or tired, or distracted by things that Koki couldn't understand.

But the truth was that Koki had begun to depend on him.

Not in the way he depended on Izuku, or his classmates, or the people who helped him navigate the ordinary difficulties of being a teenager. Tomura was not a substitute for those relationships. He could not give Koki the comfort of a hand on his shoulder or the reassurance of someone sitting beside him when he was frightened.

But he could understand certain things without needing them explained.

He knew what it felt like to be angry at the people who had hurt you. He knew what it meant to wonder whether the person you became had been shaped by things you never chose. He knew the awful temptation to believe that the worst things that had happened to you were the only things that mattered.

And Koki had begun to understand him, too.

He had begun to see the man who complained about toast, who laughed at stupid jokes, who sat in empty rooms because he didn't know where else to go. He had begun to recognize the small, ordinary pieces of Tomura that had survived everything else.

He didn't want to lose those pieces.

One evening, when Tomura had been absent for nearly two days, Koki found himself standing in the empty classroom where he had first seen him.

The room was dark. The desks were neatly arranged, the windows reflecting the lights of the corridor, and the air smelled faintly of chalk and cleaning products. Koki stood in the doorway for a long time, feeling ridiculous.

Then he said, quietly, "Tomura?"

Nothing happened.

Koki swallowed.

"I know you're probably not here."

He looked at the empty desks.

"But if you are, I wanted to tell you something."

His voice sounded strange in the quiet room.

He had rehearsed the words in his head all the way across campus, but now that he was standing there, he couldn't seem to make them come out properly.

"I don't think you're going to hurt me," he said eventually. "I mean, I know what you did. I'm not pretending that didn't happen. But I don't think you're here because you want to hurt me."

He paused.

"I think you're here because you're lonely."

The words hung in the air.

Koki looked down at his hands.

"And I think I am, too. Sometimes."

He laughed softly, embarrassed by his own honesty.

"I don't know if that's why you're here. I don't know if any of this makes sense. But I wanted you to know that I don't hate you."

The room remained silent.

Koki stood there for another minute, then turned toward the door.

"Goodnight, Tomura."

He walked back to the dormitory alone.

He did not see the ghost standing in the corner of the classroom, watching him go.

He did not see the way Tomura's face changed when he heard those words.

And he did not know that, for the first time since he had died, Tomura Shigaraki wished he could have stayed.

Winter came to U.A. gradually.

The trees along the paths lost their leaves, the mornings grew colder, and the students began arriving at class with their hands tucked into their sleeves and their scarves pulled up over their noses. The dormitory common room became a gathering place for anyone who wanted to escape the cold, filled with the smell of hot drinks and the sound of people arguing over films.

Koki found himself enjoying it more than he expected.

He began spending more time with his classmates. He joined them for dinner, complained about assignments, and occasionally stayed up too late playing games in the common room. He still had difficult days, but they no longer felt like proof that he was failing at being alive.

He began to understand that recovery was not a straight line, that a bad day did not erase the progress he had made, and that he could be frightened without allowing fear to make every decision for him.

Tomura watched all of this from a distance.

Sometimes he sat in the common room, listening to the students talk. Sometimes he followed Koki to class and stood near the windows, his expression unreadable as Izuku explained a lesson. Sometimes he appeared at the foot of Koki's bed and said nothing at all.

Koki stopped asking why he was there.

He had begun to understand that some questions did not have answers.

One night, shortly before the winter holidays, Koki woke from a nightmare and found Tomura sitting beside his bed.

The ghost looked different.

Not physically. His white hair was still tangled, his skin still pale, his red eyes still shadowed by exhaustion. But something about him seemed less solid, as though the darkness around him had begun to swallow his outline.

Koki sat up. "Tomura?"

The ghost looked at him. "Hey."

Koki rubbed his eyes. "How long have you been there?"

"Not long."

Koki stared at him.

Tomura looked away.

For a moment, Koki felt the familiar fear rising in his chest. He had seen enough strange things during the haunting to know that something was wrong, and the thought of Tomura disappearing without warning made his stomach twist.

"Are you okay?"

Tomura laughed softly. "That's a stupid question."

"Answer it anyway."

The ghost looked at him. For a long time, he said nothing. Then he whispered, "I don't think I'm supposed to be here anymore."

Koki felt his heart sink. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

"Tomura."

"I said I don't know!"

The words came out sharply, but the anger faded almost immediately. Tomura looked down at his hands, his fingers trembling.

"I think I've been here too long," he said. "I don't know how it works. I don't know why I came back, or why I could see you, or why you could see me. But I think I'm supposed to leave."

Koki stared at him.

"No."

Tomura looked up.

Koki's voice trembled.

"No, you can't just-"

"Apparently, I can."

"That's not funny."

"I wasn't trying to be funny."

Koki swallowed.

He wanted to ask a hundred questions. He wanted to know where Tomura would go, whether he would disappear completely, whether there was anything Koki could do to keep him here. He wanted to ask whether ghosts were afraid of dying, whether there was anything waiting for Tomura after this, whether he had been alone all this time and was about to become alone again.

But the words wouldn't come.

Tomura watched him for a long moment.

Then he said, quietly, "I'm sorry."

Koki's eyes filled. "Don't."

Tomura gave a small, sad smile. "Yeah. I thought you'd say that."

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Then Koki reached toward him.

He knew it was pointless. He knew that his hand would pass through the ghost, that he would feel nothing but cold air, that the gesture would change absolutely nothing.

He reached anyway.

His fingers passed through Tomura's shoulder.

The ghost looked down at the place where Koki's hand had been.

For a moment, he seemed to forget how to speak.

Then he laughed softly, though the sound was so fragile that Koki wished he hadn't.

"Still can't touch anything," Tomura murmured.

Koki wiped his face. "I know."

Tomura looked at him. "I'm glad you got to live."

Koki's breath caught.

The words were simple. Almost ordinary. Tomura said them without ceremony, without trying to make them sound meaningful, as though he had been carrying them around for a long time and had finally decided to let them go.

Koki began to cry.

Tomura looked away, his jaw tight.

"I mean it," he said. "I'm glad she stopped for you. I'm glad you got to come here. I'm glad you got to have people who care about you."

He swallowed. "I'm glad you got to find out."

Koki couldn't speak.

Tomura smiled, and for the first time, there was no bitterness in it.

"Don't waste it, okay?"

Koki nodded desperately.

"I won't."

Tomura looked at him for a long moment.

Then, very quietly, he said, "Good."

The room fell silent.

Koki watched the ghost sitting beside his bed, trying to memorize every detail of his face. The uneven fall of his hair. The tiredness in his eyes. The way his fingers curled against his palms, as though he had never quite learned how to let his hands rest.

He wanted to say something beautiful.

Something that would make the moment easier to bear. Something that would give Tomura a reason to stay, or a reason to go, or some assurance that the time they had spent together had meant something.

Instead, he whispered, "I wish I could've known you before."

Tomura's expression changed.

For a moment, he looked so young that Koki could almost imagine him as the boy in the photographs, standing in a world that had not yet decided what he would become.

"Me too," Tomura said.

And then he was gone.

Not in a burst of light, not in a dramatic display of supernatural power. There was no sound, no wind, no final message written across the walls.

One moment, he was sitting beside Koki's bed.

The next, the space was empty.

Koki sat there until morning.

The following weeks were difficult.

Koki had known that Tomura might leave, but knowing something was going to happen did not make it easier when it finally did. He found himself looking for the ghost in places where he had once expected to see him. He glanced at the windows during lessons, half expecting to find a pale figure sitting on the sill. He caught himself saving things to tell Tomura, only to remember that there was nobody beside him.

The silence felt different now.

Before, Koki had been frightened of the ghost's presence. Now he was frightened of the absence.

He didn't tell anyone what had happened.

He wasn't sure how to explain it, and he didn't know whether anyone would believe him. Even if they did, he couldn't imagine trying to describe the strange, uncomfortable grief of losing someone who had never really been there.

Tomura had been dead long before Koki met him.

Koki had known that from the beginning.

And yet, somehow, he missed him.

He missed the arguments, the sarcasm, the way Tomura had made ordinary things feel less lonely simply by being there. He missed having someone who understood certain kinds of fear without needing it explained. He missed the strange companionship that had grown between them, built out of shared pain and the uncomfortable recognition of two lives that might have been different.

Most of all, he missed the boy who had existed before the world learned to fear his name.

Koki had never met that boy.

But he had spent enough time with the ghost to understand that he had been there.

And that was what hurt.

Because Tomura had not been born as the man who destroyed cities. He had been a child who needed help, who had been frightened and lonely and desperate for someone to tell him that he mattered. Somewhere along the way, he had become someone who hurt others, someone whose suffering had turned into something terrible.

Koki could not change that.

He could not save Tomura retroactively, could not return the years he had lost, could not undo the things he had done.

He could only remember him.

And, slowly, he began to understand that perhaps remembering was enough.

Not enough to make the tragedy acceptable. Not enough to make the people who had died come back. Not enough to give Tomura the life he should have had.

But enough to refuse to let the world reduce him to the worst thing he had ever done.

Enough to remember that there had once been a child beneath the hatred.

Enough to grieve him.

Enough to keep living.

Spring arrived before Koki was ready for it.

The trees along the campus paths began to blossom, their pale petals catching in the wind and collecting along the edges of the walkways. The mornings grew warmer, the students began spending more time outside, and the dormitory common room filled with the familiar noise of people who had survived another winter of exams.

Koki found himself changing in ways he had not expected.

He still had nightmares. He still struggled with his past. There were days when he felt as though he were carrying something too heavy for his age, something that would remain with him long after he graduated from U.A.

But he no longer treated those feelings as evidence that he was broken.

He began talking to Izuku more often. Not about everything, and not always in ways that made sense, but enough that his teacher gradually learned which subjects were difficult for him and which kinds of support he needed. Sometimes they talked after class, sitting in the empty classroom while the afternoon light moved across the desks. Sometimes Izuku simply walked with him back to the dormitory, talking about ordinary things until Koki felt ready to speak.

One afternoon, Koki asked him about Tomura.

He did not mention the haunting. He did not tell Izuku that he had spent months talking to the ghost of the man who had nearly destroyed Japan, or that he had come to care about him in a way he still couldn't fully explain.

He only asked, "Do you ever think about him?"

Izuku stopped walking.

For a moment, his expression became so distant that Koki wished he had never asked.

Then Izuku nodded. "Yes."

Koki looked down. "What do you think about?"

Izuku was quiet for a long time.

"I think about the person he was," he said eventually. "And the person he became. I think about the people who were hurt by what he did, and I think about the boy who might have had a different life if someone had reached him sooner."

He paused.

"And I think about how I couldn't save him."

Koki swallowed.

"Do you regret trying?"

Izuku turned toward him.

"No."

The answer was immediate.

Izuku's expression softened.

"I regret that he had to suffer for so long. I regret that nobody helped him when he was a child. I regret that so many people were hurt before anyone understood what was happening to him." He looked toward the campus, where a group of students were gathering beneath the cherry trees. "But I don't regret trying to reach him."

Koki listened.

Izuku continued, "I don't think helping someone means you can always save them. Sometimes you can only do what you can, and you have to accept that it might not be enough. That doesn't make the attempt meaningless."

Koki's throat tightened.

He thought about Tomura sitting beside his bed, telling him not to waste his life. He thought about the ghost's tired smile, the way he had looked at Koki as though he were seeing something he had once wanted for himself.

He thought about the woman who had stopped.

"Do you think he knew?" Koki asked.

Izuku looked at him. "Knew what?"

"That you tried."

Izuku's expression changed.

For a moment, he looked as though he had been asked a question he had spent years trying not to answer.

Then he nodded slowly.

"I hope so."

Koki looked away.

He did not tell Izuku that he knew Tomura had.

He did not tell him that the ghost had watched him teach, that he had listened to his voice in the classroom, that he had looked at Izuku with an expression Koki had never been able to understand until much later.

He simply walked beside his teacher, carrying the knowledge that some things did not need to be said aloud to be true.

Years later, Koki would remember the haunting in fragments.

He would remember the first night, when he had seen a dead man standing beside his desk and thought that his life was about to end. He would remember the arguments, the strange conversations, the way Tomura had complained about toast and laughed at his handwriting. He would remember the night they talked about the old woman, and the terrible, ordinary sadness of learning that the same hand had reached for one child and not the other.

He would remember the way Tomura had looked at him before he disappeared.

Most of all, he would remember the things Tomura had taught him without ever intending to.

That pain did not make him dangerous.

That fear did not make him weak.

That being saved did not mean he had to spend the rest of his life proving that he deserved it.

Koki would still have difficult days. He would still carry the memories of his childhood into adulthood, and there would be moments when the past returned so suddenly that he could barely breathe. There would be nights when he woke from nightmares and had to remind himself that he was safe, that he was no longer the child who had been left alone, that there were people who would come if he called for them.

But he would learn to live with those memories.

He would become a hero, not because he believed he had to repay the woman who saved him, and not because he wanted to prove that he was nothing like Tomura Shigaraki.

He would become a hero because he wanted to be someone who stopped.

Someone who noticed.

Someone who understood that a frightened child did not need to be perfect to deserve help.

And sometimes, when he passed a child sitting alone in the street, or when he saw someone struggling to ask for help, he would remember a ghost with white hair and tired eyes.

He would remember that the difference between their lives had not been goodness or badness, strength or weakness, destiny or fate.

It had been a moment.

A hand reaching out.

A person deciding not to look away.

And he would stop.

Every time.

The last time Koki visited the old woman, he was nearly grown.

He had gone to see her during a break from his studies, carrying a small gift he had spent far too long choosing because he had never been particularly good at buying things for people who mattered to him. The gift was wrapped in plain paper, tied with a ribbon that had come loose during the journey, and he was so nervous about presenting it that he nearly forgot to knock.

She opened the door with a smile.

"Koki," she said, delighted. "Look at you."

He smiled back.

"Hello."

She invited him inside, and they spent the afternoon talking about ordinary things. She asked about his studies, his classmates, and whether he was eating properly. He told her about U.A., about the difficulties of training, about the strange and wonderful experience of learning how to live alongside people who had become his friends.

She listened with the patient attention he remembered from childhood.

When he finished speaking, she reached across the table and took his hand.

"I'm glad you're doing well," she said.

Koki looked at their hands.

He had thought about this moment for years. He had imagined telling her everything, explaining how much her kindness had changed his life, how he had spent so long wondering what would have happened if she hadn't stopped that day. He had imagined asking her whether she remembered the other boy, the one who had been frightened and alone, the one she had passed in the street.

But now that he was sitting across from her, he couldn't find the words.

Instead, he asked, "Do you ever think about the children you couldn't help?"

The woman's expression changed.

For a moment, she looked very old. "Yes," she said quietly. "I do."

Koki swallowed.

"Do you think about the ones you didn't notice?"

Her hand tightened around his. "Sometimes."

He looked down. "I think about them, too."

The woman was silent for a long time.

Then she said, "I wish I could have helped more people."

Koki felt his throat tighten. "Me too."

She looked at him, and there was something in her expression that made him think she understood more than he had told her.

"I hope you know," she said gently, "that you never had to do anything to deserve being helped."

Koki's eyes burned.

He thought about the child he had been, the frightened little boy who had learned to expect the worst from the people around him. He thought about the ghost who had sat beside his bed, who had asked what it would have been like to have someone stop for him, who had looked at Koki as though he were living proof of a life that might have been.

He thought about Tomura Shigaraki.

For a moment, he could almost see him sitting in the chair beside the window, his white hair falling across his face, his fingers curled against his palms. He could almost hear the dry, sarcastic voice, the complaints, the quiet admissions that had cost him so much to make.

He could almost hear him saying, Don't waste it.

Koki took a breath.

"I know," he whispered.

And this time, he believed it.

He stayed with the woman until the afternoon light began to fade, talking about his future and the life he hoped to build. When he finally left, she walked him to the door and held his hand for a moment longer than necessary.

Koki stepped outside.

The air was cool, and the street was quiet. Somewhere nearby, a child was laughing, the sound bright and careless in the late afternoon. Koki stood on the pavement for a long time, listening.

Then he looked down at his hands.

They were his own. They had always been his own.

For years, he had been frightened of what they might become, of what he might do, of the possibility that the darkness inside him meant something terrible about who he was. He had spent so much time trying to prove that he was not the person he might have become that he had nearly forgotten to discover who he actually was.

He thought about Tomura.

He thought about the boy who had been hurt, the man who had hurt others, and the ghost who had wanted to know what it felt like to have someone come back for him.

He thought about the woman who had stopped.

And then he began walking.

He did not know what the future would bring. He did not know whether he would always carry the same fears, whether the nightmares would ever disappear completely, whether there would be days when the past returned so suddenly that he felt like a child again.

But he knew that he had a future.

He knew that he could make choices, that he could ask for help, that he could become someone who stopped when others kept walking.

He knew that he was allowed to live.

And somewhere in the quiet space between the boy he had been and the man he was becoming, he carried the memory of a ghost who had never gotten the chance to find out who he might have been.

He would remember him.

Not as a monster.

Not as a warning.

Not as the man who had nearly destroyed the world.

But as a boy who had once needed someone to stop.

A boy who had been frightened and angry and lonely, who had wanted a hand to hold and a place to go home to, who had spent his life becoming someone the world feared because nobody had taught him that he could become someone else.

Koki could not save him.

He could not change what had happened.

But he could refuse to forget that Tomura Shigaraki had once been a child.

And perhaps, in the end, that was the only thing left to do.

To remember the boy beneath the name.

To grieve the life he never got to live.

And to keep walking, carrying the knowledge that the world had once failed someone who might have been saved, and that the next time a frightened child needed help, Koki Terumoto would be there.

He would stop.

He would reach out his hand.

And he would not look away.