Chapter Text
There was a woman who called herself kaa-san. She was larger than life in the way all mothers are, huge and looming and (sometimes) loving. Kaa-san was big but not strong, tall but not wide. She was thin in the way sick things are thin, too-little flesh wrapped around too many bones. She didn’t smile often (or at all, at me), but when she did it was for Hana-chan.
Hana-chan was big, but not as big. Big only to me, who was Small. Hana-chan smiled always, laughed bright and carefree, face sly and crafty and mischievous. Hana-chan made acquaintances easy and friends easier, played peek-a-boo with me when she saw me and made faces behind kaa-san’s back to try and make me smile. Hana-chan was fun and easy and devious. Hana-chan was a liar.
She lied to kaa-san, about kaa-san, to me and about me, to her friends and to strangers and to herself. Hana-chan lied the way some people laughed: freely and without thought. Hana-chan loved no one but herself, thought of no one before herself, and because of that I never smiled when she sought one of me.
There was a man. He was called Kotaro-kun by kaa-san. Tou-san by Hana-chan.
Had this been my first life, in my first language, I would have called him sir.
Kotaro was not a father. He was not a dad. He was barely even a parent. Kotaro did not love us. He tolerated kaa-san, tolerated Hana-chan, and tolerated me. Kotaro did not smile. He did not laugh, or play, or make faces through the bars of my crib. His voice was stern, rough, deeper than his slim frame suggested. It was harsh words and raised shouting and kaa-san crying at night in the nursery where no one but me could hear. It was Hana-chan’s fakest smiles, her fakest laughs, her most desperate lies.
Hana-chan lied the most to, and about, Kotaro. It was probably the smartest thing she’d ever done.
I was a boy called Tenko. This was notable only in the way I had not been a boy a year ago, in what I can only assume was a previous life I shouldn’t be able to remember. And it’s not remembrance, not exactly. I don’t remember faces or names or places, not yet; it’s just general knowledge and a sense of age that let me hold back the tears when Kotaro looms over the crib with that dark, flat scowl—seeing someone other than me, other than his son, someone he did not tolerate.
Kaa-san could repair broken objects if she pressed on them with all five fingers.
Hana-chan could hover a few inches off the ground if she concentrated hard enough. The first time she managed it, smiling a real smile and laughing a real laugh (Look, kaa-san! Look at what I can do! I’m flying!), was also the first time Kotaro lay hands on her with the intent to cause her harm.
Kotaro’s touch felt like knives in your bones.
Thoughts became easier as time passed. I wasn’t restricted to sentence fragments or long, uneasy spaces of time in which I couldn’t seem to hold a thought at all. I began recalling faces and names and places, even if my emotional attachment to them was gone. I no longer appeared to leap forward several days or weeks at a time without remembering a single thing that had happened. Retaining new memories gradually became easier.
Kaa-san brought home a dog.
His name was Mon-chan, and he was not like any dog I’d ever seen before. Small like a corgi but shaped like a pokémon, I’d caught myself almost calling him Yamper several times. Mon-chan, as I eventually discovered by overhearing Hana-chan and kaa-san talking about him, was one of those rare ‘quirked’ animals. Apparently he blew bubbles when he was excited.
I rolled the ball across the floor for Mon-chan, watching him scrabble after it with a happy slew of bubbles. Mon-chan was calm, and quiet, and loved to clamber into any open lap he could find. He avoided Kotaro with the sort of instinctive wariness I’d attribute to a prey animal facing a predator, which instantly made him the smartest person in this family.
I didn’t talk to Kotaro, or to kaa-san, or smile at Hana-chan’s increasingly-fake laughter or increasingly-desperate jokes. They weren’t my family. They didn’t love me. Kaa-san came closest, occasionally picking me up for a hug or giving me a tremulous smile, but the whole house stank of fear.
It wasn’t hard to see why. Kotaro hated a lot of things, but what he hated most was heroes. And here, in this life where you couldn’t look out of a window without seeing an advertisement for something with a hero’s face on it, that meant Kotaro hated a lot of things.
Hana-chan loved heroes. She huddled under the blankets and watched videos of them on her phone. She snuck into Kotaro’s office to use his computer to look up news on the Top 10 and scrounge for gossip. She spoke high and breathy and excited to kaa-san in the dead of night in the kitchen about what her hero name would be and what her costume would look like.
She’d capture so many villains, save so many people, become so famous that she couldn’t walk down the street without someone wanting an autograph. Lightfoot, she’d call herself. The Sneaky Hero! She could hover, after all, and if she didn’t touch the ground, she wouldn’t make any noise.
The first time she talked about her future career in heroism where Kotaro could hear her, he hit her so hard she had to stay home from school until the bruise on her jaw healed. Kaa-san had screamed, and cried, and fretted, but had not stepped in or stepped up. She fluttered over Hana-chan’s wailing form and pressed ice to the bruise, curling over her daughter and giving Kotaro her shoulder in case he struck out again.
“There is no such thing as a hero,” Kotaro had said. His voice was level, deep, threatening. I’d never heard anything like it, and all three of us had gone still in fear. “Those clowns you see on the news? Selfish. Do you think they’d care about you? Do you think they’d save you?” he’d demanded, eyes fever-bright in the dark kitchen. None of us had dared to move. “The only thing a hero cares about is fame. Money. Themselves. Did I raise a selfish child? An ungrateful wretch who cares only for herself?” Kotaro had stared at Hana-chan, as if he’d actually expected her to answer. When she finally twitched her head into a negative, he’d nodded back. “I didn’t think so. No child of mine will be a hero, Hana. Remember that.”
We had.
“Look!” Hana whispered excitedly, having sprinted out into the yard where I’d been throwing a ball for Mon-chan. Her hand shackled like a vice around my bicep, shaking me for attention. That was a habit she’d picked up (probably unconsciously) from Kotaro. I could only be grateful her quirk was hovering and not pain, like his. She had something in her other hand that she was hiding in the sleeve of her jacket. “I think it’s a picture of baachan!”
I stared at her somewhat dubiously. We’d all been treated to Kotaro’s rants on baachan before. Baachan was why Kotaro hated heroes, was why the very mention of them made his fingers curl into claws and reach for arms (where marks were easy to hide) and faces (where the pain hurt the most).
“I found it in his office,” she continued quickly, breathlessly, finally letting go of me before producing the image even as I was staring at her, aghast.
Hana was clever, and sly, and mischievous. But she was also eight years old, a compulsive liar, and (apparently) an idiot. Hana bore the brunt of Kotaro’s anger and abuse mostly because she just didn’t stop talking. She brought up heroes in everyday conversation, jabbered at kaa-san about her future career in heroism, used her quirk in plain sight where Kotaro could see her and grow furious.
I, in contrast, spent most of my time sequestered away in dark corners or outside with Mon-chan, where Kotaro was less likely to stumble over me and find something to get upset about. Kaa-san hadn’t picked me up in over a year. Kotaro had only touched me once, and that was to close his fingers around my shoulder like talons and shove me out of his way when I hadn’t been moving fast enough.
The spikes of agony had lingered for three hours.
A picture was thrust in front of my face, abruptly jarring me back into the present. Reluctantly curious, I peered at the beaming, black-haired woman crouched by a child who could only have been a young Kotaro. My lips ticked downward in a minuscule frown. Kotaro looked… happy. Smiling. Loving. And that woman, baachan…
I reached up a small hand to prod at the small spot beneath my bottom lip, the dark beauty mark the only bit of color on an otherwise pale face. Baachan had one in the exact same place.
Huh. I hadn’t known that kind of thing was genetic.
Apparently disappointed by my lack of reaction, Hana huffed and plopped herself down in the grass beside me, kicking Mon-chan’s ball into a roll when I made to reach for it. My fingers curled into my palm in reaction, something ugly coiling in my chest like a spring. Hana wasn’t being mean, not on purpose. She was just being a child, acting childishly to her younger brother because I was being boring.
I’d been an only child in my last life. I kind of missed it.
“What do you think baachan’s hero name was?” Hana went on, peering at the picture with a big cheesy grin—trying to match the one baachan was wearing, it looked like. “I bet it was something cool! Look at her cape! And those arms!”
I turned my head away, reaching out as Mon-chan trotted back with his ball. Hana kicked out with her foot and knocked it right out of Mon-chan’s mouth, making him yelp in alarm and skid backwards a few steps. I grit my teeth behind my normal blank expression (easier to hide the emotions of an adult on a toddler’s face if I just didn’t outwardly emote at all) and curled my fingers into fists again, hard enough that they began to ache.
“Don’t kick Mon-chan,” I muttered under my breath, too quiet for Hana to catch as she went on rambling about baachan’s herosona. Mon-chan crawled over to me with a whimper, ears tucked down and tail tucked in, obviously not sure what he’d done wrong to deserve being kicked.
I looped an arm around his neck and hugged him to my side, digging my fingers into his scruff in the way he liked.
“Shimura Nana…” Hana murmured under her breath, reading the name scrawled across the back in unfamiliar handwriting. “Hey, her name even sounds like mine!”
Instantly, my hand flew off Mon-chan and I held it way over his head where it couldn’t possibly touch him, not even on accident. My other hand, the one closest to Hana, curled into a fist so tight that all my knuckles cracked.
Because I knew that name.
Mon-chan hopped up after my hand with a doggy grin, and I quickly closed that hand into a fist too before he could make contact. I carefully rubbed his head with my wrist, angled awkwardly up and away, and then pushed him away a little with my elbow. I was moving so slowly, so carefully, that it was surprising Hana hadn’t taken the opportunity to mock me about it.
I kept my eyes on Mon-chan, ignoring her as she continued muttering under her breath.
Shimura Nana.
Our last name, apparently, was Shimura. That would have been great to fucking know before today.
My first name was Tenko.
Hana could levitate. She could float.
I carefully lowered my hands into my lap, shaking a little as I kept them fisted tight.
Mon-chan brought me his ball, panting happily. Notably, he approached on the far side of Hana, where her foot couldn’t reach him. I awkwardly bumped it away with the knee of one of my folded legs.
I was Shimura Tenko. I kept my hands closed tight as I watched Mon-chan chase after his ball, and wondered if I was going to wind up as Shigaraki Tomura, too.
I kept my hands closed into fists any time I touched Mon-chan. I tried not to pick up anything with more than three fingers on one hand. Every morning, before I left my room (kaa-san hadn’t come in to wake me up in person since I was two), I deliberately picked up a pencil and made sure to touch it with all five fingers.
Hana got caught with the picture of Nana. A desperate, trembling hand was flung towards me. “It was Tenko! He went in and got it out of your drawer!”
Kotaro turned to me with fire in his eyes and blades under his skin, ready to flay, to cut, to rend. I looked up at him, then at Hana, and closed my hands into fists.
I did not reach up to grab his wrist when Kotaro closed his hand around my head and threw me outside into the wet grass, spikes of pain lancing across my nerves like barbed wire. I did not try to pry his hand off or knock it aside. I kept my hands in fists and pressed them to my chest as I hit the grass face-first, screaming loud enough that if we’d had any neighbors they would have likely called the cops.
Mon-chan scampered outside after me, barking his head off as he circled my downed form with tiny bared teeth, all but spitting sparks at Kotaro, who scoffed and stormed back towards the house.
“Leave him!” Kotaro snapped at, presumably, kaa-san. “If he’s going to be a little thief, he can be treated like one!”
The door slammed shut. Mon-chan whined, licking at my face and neck and any exposed skin.
Trembling, I pushed my hands further under my body.
I pinched a blade of grass between the fingers of one hand, clumsily maneuvering them until I could grip it with all five. It crumbled into dust beneath them.
The crack of my knuckles as I tightened my fists even further was loud enough to scare Mon-chan into whimpering as he kept licking at my cheek and forehead. I curled up, knees to chest, and lay sobbing in the grass as the pain gradually faded. Mon-chan shoved his way into the circle of my arms, making my already shot nerves fry to hell and back, and curled up in a tight ball right beside me.
I kept my hands in fists, not daring to pet him even with my wrists or forearms.
I remember so little about this story, about this particular tragedy. Did the original Tenko kill Mon-chan tonight? Did he kill Kotaro by grabbing that godawful hand before it could cause him pain? The memories are hazy, but…
I kept my hands in fists. I didn’t touch Mon-chan.
Nothing died that night but a single blade of grass.
Kaa-san opened the door early in the morning, peering out at where I was curled up with Mon-chan, eyes bloodshot and terrified to fall asleep no matter how tired I was because what if I touched Mon-chan? I didn’t particularly care about kaa-san or Hana or Kotaro, but I loved Mon-chan.
It had been a very long, cold night. Every muscle was tight with stress, and even if the headache and nerve damage from Kotaro’s quirk had faded the memory of it remained. Mon-chan was probably the only reason I was even alive, sharing his warmth with me overnight and not budging an inch. The urge to just grab on and hug him for reassurance and comfort was nauseating in intensity.
The knowledge that I wouldn’t ever be able to do that again, not safely, had almost made me throw up.
But those long, awful hours had at least given me time to think. To plan. To struggle to remember the details of a tragic backstory I only remembered because I’d liked Shigaraki’s character design enough to go snooping around.
Fact. I knew the original Tenko killed his dog, his parents, his sister, and (maybe?) destroyed his entire house when his quirk manifested.
Fact. Original kid-Tenko hadn’t needed to touch things to decay them. That had come with trauma(?) and a bucketload of repressed memories of the event in question.
I didn’t have that fun handicap, which meant my quirk was likely on a hair-trigger and ready to massacre my entire family at a moment’s notice. Again, while I didn’t have any attachment to the human members of the Shimura family, there was still Mon-chan.
And Mon-chan mattered.
I’d spent longer than I’d like to admit going over Shigaraki’s actions and my assumptions of his personality with a fine-tooth comb. I wanted to know if any of his character was genetic, if the sociopathy or psychopathy were something I was going to be able to avoid. Considering how much I utterly did not give a shit about my family’s potential deaths, it was looking unlikely. I’d scoured my recent memories of them, trying to dredge up some kind of emotional response other than apathy. I’d known I didn’t love them, but it had been an abstract sort of knowledge. I hadn’t had the perspective necessary to really look at how I felt and put it into words.
When I compared my feelings for my family versus the ones for Mon-chan, though, it became very fucking obvious that I was more than a little twisted in the head. Great. Excellent. Because that’s just what I need on top of a quirk that may or may not be the metaphysical equivalent of constantly holding a live hand-grenade.
I didn’t have a lot of options. I needed control of my quirk to make sure Mon-chan was safe, but I’d have to practice with it in order to do that and practicing meant putting Mon-chan in danger. It was a vicious cycle with no end.
As much as it should bother me (but didn’t), the easiest solution would be to lock Mon-chan out of the house and use my family as practice. If I targeted Kotaro first there’d be almost no threat to my personal safety, especially if I could manage to kill him without kaa-san or Hana noticing. It wasn’t like my quirk left a lot of evidence if I could use it fast enough.
Of course, plotting my family’s deaths was a lot different than actually carrying them out. I could daydream about it all I wanted, but I didn’t know if I had the balls (which I had now, hilariously enough) to go through with it.
Plus there was Mon-chan to consider. I couldn’t reasonably provide for him as a four-year-old orphan, and who knows what kind of home he’d get sent to if I managed to get him to a pound? Were there pounds in Japan?
That decided it. I couldn’t risk leaving Mon-chan without shelter or easy access to food and care, which meant I had to avoid killing my family while he was still here.
As kaa-san hesitantly called for me come back inside, I couldn’t help the slight upward tilt of my lips as I stood, bracing closed fists on my knees for balance. I wonder what they’d say if they knew the only reason they got to live through the night was because I didn’t want to upset our dog?
If my laugh, rusty and unused as it was, startled kaa-san, she was kind enough not to mention it.
I was six years old and officially ‘quirkless.’ This wouldn’t have been possible if my family had given two thirds of a damn and actually paid me the most minute amount of attention. But, luckily (or unluckily) for me, no one in this house could stand to look at me for more than three consecutive seconds for a variety of fun reasons, so my weird quirks (ha) went unremarked upon.
If I never picked up anything with more than three fingers, well kids will be kids right? If I was always careful to only pet Mon-chan with my wrist or forearm and always kept my hands closed, well I’d always been a little freak. If I seemed to ‘misplace’ a truly momentous amount of pens and pencils, well, kids are always losing things.
So. ‘Quirkless.’ I wasn’t taken to a doctor, of course, because that would bring up uncomfortable questions like why does your son have facial scars and what’s all this nerve damage I’m seeing? But because I wasn’t floating or fixing things or (visibly) causing anyone pain, Kotaro wrote me off as a loss and turned the entirety of his vitriol onto Hana.
Stupid, stupid Hana, who refused to let go of her hero dream despite how badly suited for it she is and how much shorter her lifespan is going to be if she keeps pushing him.
I, of course, ‘couldn’t’ be a hero and thus Kotaro didn’t give a single shit about my existence in his house. I was like an ottoman, or an otherwise mostly-ignored piece of furniture you might trip over once in a while.
That hadn’t stopped him from hurting me, though. Hana kept up her fucking habit of blaming me for everything she did wrong in life, and while Kotaro had to know it was all bullshit he never passed up the chance to torture his defenseless quirkless son.
Prolonged exposure to his quirk had some… interesting side effects. It hurt less every time he used it, but, well... it made my nerves wrong. I developed a fucking bitch of an itch under the skin of my throat that flared up when my emotions (any emotion) got too high, which was all the time since I existed in a perpetual frothing rage only barely capped by my desire to let Mon-chan die of old age. I stopped registering minor aches and pains, and had actually broken a toe once and not even noticed until I’d been walking on it for almost a week. It was still kind of crooked from healing back in wrong. In the wake of Kotaro’s quirk, regular pain just wasn’t comparable anymore.
Every time Kotaro raised his hand to me, flayed me open under my skin with his fucking torture quirk, I looked him in the eye and thought to myself you live on borrowed time. I don’t know what that expression looked like, exactly, but it was apparently bad enough that he’d taken to covering my entire face every time he reached out just so he wouldn’t have to see it.
I was six years old, and my hair was going white from constant stress.
I was six years old and littered with scars from wounds I hadn’t noticed getting until they were too old to treat without scarring.
I was six years old and hadn’t touched another human being without pain in two years.
I am a boy called Tenko.
It is looking increasingly likely that, one day, I’ll be a man named Tomura, too.
I keep my hands curled into fists.
The ache in them is the only pain I can still feel.
School is not a place I’d expected to wind up in for a second time. I’m honestly impressed with myself that I’d managed to go this long without slaughtering my family, or grabbing Kotaro’s fucking hand and disintegrating it into its component atoms. My resolution to save Mon-chan aside, I’d 100% expected to slip up at some point and dust at least one member of my family.
But that hadn’t happened, so here I was. Elementary school. As a ‘quirkless’ kid.
I watched as a small horde of screaming children converge upon the playground, firing off baby quirks and puffing out tiny chests and forging a rudimentary hierarchy of ‘coolness.’ I watch as the teacher takes them aside and, gently motioning towards me, implores them to ‘be gentle’ with me since I’m ‘quirkless’ and ‘can’t play as rough as you.’
I watch as the embers of pity spark into derision. I can almost physically feel their thoughts rearranging into oh, that kid’s not Like Us. He’s different and bad and ugly, sensei said so!
The playground transforms into a swarm of hyenas, backlit by sulfur and brimstone and dramatic lighting.
Ah, I realize suddenly with a small smile. There’s no Mon-chan to protect, here.
Just me.
My smile widens into a tooth-baring grin, broad enough that my entire face aches with it. The entire population of students takes a single collective step back in alarm.
Hello, practice, I croon mentally.
My laugh, when it cracks out of a throat that hadn’t spoken a single word in years, sounds remarkably frightening.
Hana’s hand closed around my arm, yanking me through the door and into the living room with zero regard for the fact that she was four years my senior and therefore should probably be a bit more gentle with her fragile baby brother. Mon-chan, having glued himself to me since That Night and notably chilly towards Hana now, bared his tiny teeth at her but didn’t otherwise react negatively.
Kotaro had used his quirk on Mon-chan only once. It had been enough for the dog to learn better.
It had also been the first time my quirk activated without me physically touching the thing I wanted to decay, but luckily I’d managed to reel it in before more than the outermost edges of Kotaro’s sleeves had crumbled away. He hadn’t noticed.
“Look,” Hana whispered shrilly, still shaking me by the arm as she produced a crumbled magazine I didn’t recognize. Probably one of kaa-san’s, or from one of her ever-rotating batch of school friends.
I dutifully looked, if only so she’d let go and stop touching me.
The familiar grinning face of All Might beamed back from the cover, glossy and wrinkled.
Oh. Right.
I’d honestly forgotten that he was a thing, having more important things to concern myself with than the actions of previously-fictional superheroes. It wasn’t like we were encouraged to talk about current events in this mausoleum of a house.
“Doesn’t he look familiar?” Hana was demanding under her breath, letting go and fishing around for a familiar (hated) image of Shimura Nana. Had she stolen it again? After what Kotaro had done to me last time? I took a large, unsubtle step away and angled myself so she couldn’t grab me like that again. Ignoring that, she put the two images side-by-side and proffered them towards me with an eager face.
All Might’s wide signature grin was a dead match for Nana’s.
I shrugged back at her, utterly uncaring. So what if All Might smiled like Nana? It wasn’t like smiles were trademarked or anything. She scowled at my lackluster reaction, face contorted in familiar disdain. My eternal silence around my family was just one spoke on the wheel carrying us all downhill, but one that Hana never really understood. She knew I could talk (the teachers at school would have complained, otherwise), but she seemed personally offended that I refused to.
“Whatever,” she scoffed derisively at me, turning to give me the ‘cold shoulder.’ “Not sure what I expected a crusty little moron like you to think about it anyway.” Then she stomped away with a huff, head held high and illicit photograph clutched in one hand.
I grit my back teeth, tucking my head down so the ragged strands of white-streaked hair would hide my face again. I wasn’t… a very pretty child. Whether it was my lack of appetite, some kind of dehydration aspect of my quirk, or just unfortunate genetics, I was definitely… unappealing. I had deep bags beneath my eyes and wrinkles upon wrinkles marring ashy, scarred skin. I’d stolen some chapstick from kaa-san’s bathroom so I could combat the constant chapping of my lips at least, but there wasn’t much I could do for the rest of me.
Keeping my hair long and my head down at least hid my face, even though everywhere I went I could physically feel the judging eyes on me. ‘Crusty moron’ was probably the kindest thing I’ve been called recently.
Mon-chan whined and bumped his snout against my leg. I brushed him on the head with my wrist and skulked off towards my room, my most cherished family member hot on my heels. I carefully shouldered the door open (I never risked closing it all the way; the doorknobs in this house were almost impossible to open without using a full hand) and pulled myself into the chair by my makeshift desk as Mon-chan scrabbled up onto the bed and made himself at home with a happy burble of bubbles.
I couldn’t help smiling as I looked over at him, at this happy little creature that I loved and that loved me. I turned back to the desk and the collection of items cluttered there, absently brushing away a pile of dust with the side of my hand.
Since I’d decided it was too risky to kill my family while I was this young, I’d had to find other ways to learn the ins and outs of my quirk. Like in that story I vaguely recalled from my last life, touching anything with all five fingers was nonnegotiable. I could control the speed at which things decayed if I focused, but they would decay regardless and the effect did not stop until the entire item was destroyed.
I can only be thankful that my family is so fucking oblivious that they didn’t really notice when I routinely had to steal gloves from them so I didn’t just decay through my bed in the night. Removing three fingers on each glove kept me from accidentally wrecking my sheets or blankets, but I still tended to unintentionally crumble them now and then when I got unlucky. And, if I focused hard enough, I could decay through the gloves even with them on. Which, unfortunately, meant they weren’t reliable enough to use during everyday life while I was even slightly conscious.
Decaying at long range wasn’t something I felt safe practicing with Mon-chan in the same building, but discreet testing at school had at least taught me what the sensation felt like and revealed why that aspect had probably been repressed by either trauma or outside influences.
Because it wasn’t controllable. If I got too angry, too emotional, my quirk lashed out. I could stop the effect with a supreme concentration of will (unlike physical contact, the ranged part of my quirk seemed slightly less instantly fatal), but doing so left me with a massive migraine that made Kotaro’s quirk seem like light tickling. Letting it run its course didn’t hurt at all; in fact, decaying things gave me a headrush unlike anything else I’d felt in either life, a sort of wild euphoria that was probably going to cause me problems when I hit puberty later on.
My only way to effectively get through my days without accidentally-on-purpose just murdering everyone I saw was to gain an iron hold over my emotions and reactions. I already had plenty of practice at outwardly controlling my emotions from my sad excuse of a childhood; my poker face was a thing of legends. But learning to feel emotions and not inwardly react was a lot harder.
I still crumbled a lot of shirt sleeves and shoelaces, but I hadn’t touched skin yet so these instances were mostly blamed on a classmate of mine that could remotely disassemble small objects.
Ideally, no one would ever find out that I could use my quirk at range. I wasn’t delusional enough to believe no one would figure out my quirk at all, but the ranged aspect was something I felt would be beneficial for me to keep in reserve. I didn’t exactly recall much from the story my life was based on, but I knew enough to guess that—should certain patterns hold—I was going to wind up a villain.
I could try and be a hero, I guess. Kotaro would certainly try and kill me if I dared to, and heroism would be… difficult with a quirk like mine. Not impossible, but I definitely had a ‘villain’s quirk.’
Villainy, on the other hand, could only be enhanced by a quirk that killed with a touch. Not to mention my clinical apathy regarding human life (I’d yet to find a human that I cared enough about to not seriously consider the benefits of using them as live quirk practice) was almost tailor-made for my future career as a supervillain.
I carefully picked up the little handheld game system I’d filched from the school’s lost and found a few days ago, slowly shifting my grip on it with both hands and keeping my middle fingers raised off its surface as it powered on. It was like a weird, sideways version of a Gameboy made by a brand I didn’t recognize, and it was a great way to train myself to only touch things with four fingers per hand. The distraction gameplay provided made multitasking extremely difficult; so far I’d managed not to accidentally destroy it but there had been a lot of close calls.
I remember I’d loved video games, in the life Before. That seems to have held true as Tenko, too. Maybe it was the fantasy aspect of it—I certainly preferred role-playing games to any other kind, ones that let me decide the way the story went depending on my choices. The little handheld didn’t have anything fancy on it (it wasn’t like I could go out and buy new cartridges for it), but I knew it was only a matter of time before I was old enough to go out and buy things for myself.
I couldn’t wait.
I lasted ten years. A full decade without a single slip-up, a decade full of Kotaro’s sadistic punishments, of Hana’s malicious lies, of kaa-san’s averted face and avoiding eyes. Mon-chan had passed away the night before, peacefully in his sleep as he curled up in bed with me, and I’d closed my eyes and carefully pet through his fur one last time with open hands.
When I opened my eyes again, I reverently gathered his ashes together in a tiny box I’d stolen from kaa-san that had likely once held jewelry, but that would now hold something infinitely more precious. I carefully put the box in the pocket of my sweater, resolving to find some way to secure it shut once I had the time.
I went about my day as normally as I could, watching my family with sharp eyes hidden behind my by now dull white hair for their reaction to Mon-chan’s absence.
There hadn’t been any.
I’d always been the one who filled Mon-chan’s food dish, who let him out to use the bathroom and who refilled his water bowl. I’d been the one Mon-chan wanted to sit with and play with and sleep beside. But I’d at least thought these people would have fucking noticed that he was suddenly gone.
Couldn’t they feel the hole his absence left? Couldn’t they sense the cloud hanging over this house without his happy little bubbles?
Kotaro didn’t once up look up from his newspaper. Hana was chattering on obliviously to kaa-san about something inane and useless, as usual. Kaa-san herself refused to turn her head in my direction, focusing entirely on Hana instead.
My knuckles cracked as I flexed them, carefully splaying my hands out over my thighs with index fingers lifted.
“Mon-chan died last night,” I said in a break between her jabbering. All eyes turned to me, mostly with surprise that I’d spoken at all. My voice was a low, rasping tenor, throaty with disuse and trembling on the edge of violence.
With flat hilarity, I realized this was the first time kaa-san had actually looked me in the face in years.
“Didn’t realize the mutt was still around,” Kotaro replied noncommittedly, returning to his paper with a roll of his eyes. I breathed through the spike of rage, watching with sharp red eyes as the corners of the paper crumbled away.
“That’s what you have to say?” Hana demanded, not of Kotaro, but of me. She stood from her seat and slapped the table with her palms, face a rictus of disbelief. “The first words you say to this family and it’s about your stupid dog?”
My jaw ached with how hard I was clenching my teeth. I don’t know what I’d wanted from them, exactly. Sympathy, maybe. A word of kindness and remembrance for Mon-chan. Acknowledgement that he’d spent the past ten years keeping these fucking disgusting people alive with his very presence.
That fucking itch started burning beneath my jaw and around my throat, and almost reflexively my hand reached up to claw at it in irritation. The itch had started as a response to something going wrong with my nerves after one of Kotaro’s little sessions, but over time (as the damage reversed itself) it had become almost purely psychosomatic. A little bit of a relief, too, because my hands always trembled on the edge of pain when I went too long without using my quirk on something—and while my skin was immune to the decay (thank fucking God), my quirk still activated when I touched myself. The relieving of pressure in my knuckles and fingertips was worth the mild scarring and occasional wound when I forgot that my inability to feel pain meant I’d keep scratching long past the point where I should have stopped.
I ignored kaa-san’s half-hearted attempt to get me to stop scratching, her voice neither assertive nor sincere enough for me to pay it any mind. Hana thought the habit was gross, and never passed up an opportunity to scoff at me or mock my (lack of) physical appeal. I doubt Kotaro even knew I had scars on my neck at all.
I considered the three of them as they bickered and drank and clicked chopsticks against bowls, still idly scraping my nails against the side of my throat.
Should I? I wondered casually, drumming my other hand against my leg in a way that ensured I didn’t accidentally lose my pants. I should, I decided.
Mon-chan was gone, after all. There was no reason to suffer these… these people anymore.
I let my hand drop to the tabletop, index finger raised. “Hey, Kotaro?” I called with a wide, tooth-baring grin. He looked up sharply, already scowling at the disrespect. “Guess what, dipshit?”
Kotaro stood from the table, hands flexing in warning as his expression twisted darkly. “What d—”
“Turns out I’m not quirkless after all,” I cut across him, grinning, red eyes wide and manic as I dropped my index finger to the table and—taking hold of the rage and the hysteria and the years of agony—pushed.
The table disintegrated in a heartbeat, cracks of black webbing jackknifing in all directions across the kitchen floor and walls and snapping up the legs of Kotaro like a shattering glacier. He didn’t have time to do more than shout in alarm and a brief spike of pain before my hungryhungryhungry quirk whipped up his torso to his throat and he spilled across the floor in a tide of ash and bone and blood. Those hands—painpainpain make it stop please dad sir Kotaro FATHER—tumbled to the floor in a rain of dust, miraculously intact even as my attention was splintering, torn between the heatwave of pleasurepleasuregoodyesmoremoremore and the hunger yawning cavernously behind my sternum like a maw full of knives.
Kaa-san screamed, more in alarm than fear, things progressing too fast to let something like fear exist, before the hungry lines of decay took her at the edges and unraveled her like someone pulling on a loose string. She came apart messy, in pieces, dropping to the ground in segments of shattered red and white and black even as her limbs continued to decay from the outside in. I watched as skin ate away into muscle and tendon and sinew and bone and dust, rapidly spilling across the cracking, destroyed remnants of a still-collapsing kitchen as my quirk pushed for moremoremore.
I laughed, high and loud and happy, as Hana screamed and tried to run for the door, only, there was no door, no floor, no walls no ceiling no house and my decay caught her at the ankles and cut out her legs from beneath her, dragging her into the web of deStrUCtion I was sinking into the foundation.
She crumbled like a collapsing sandcastle.
I kept laughing, standing even as the chair decayed out from beneath me, hands outstretched into claws as my quirk ate and ate and ate and ate and took and destroyed and more moremore—
The house buckled around my standing figure, crumbling into dust before the debris could so much as touch me. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, arms still spread wide, as it rained ash and ruin across the ruined cornerstones.
I grinned, feeling my quirk eat through concrete and bedrock and hit dirt, and then, then, pulled. My quirk settled, coiling up behind my bones and beneath my skin like a contented cat, black spiderwebs of decay splintering away into nothing even as the last of the house finally collapsed into a pile of sawdust to my left.
I breathed in, slow, steady, and let my arms drop to my sides. I opened my eyes to a wasteland of black and grey; nothing remained of the house or the porch or even the nearest group of trees. A ring of dead earth surrounded me where my quirk had eaten the grass and started on the dirt before I’d pulled it back, and absently I wondered how far I could really go. Could I tunnel through the world? Could I break the very planet into particles to be swept away on stellar winds?
I decided that if I ever was about to die, I’d take the opportunity to find out.
With a twitching half-smile, I stepped up to where my family had been, looming over all that was left of them. I didn’t need a thousand hands like the original Tomura. I didn’t need the ones from kaa-san or Hana or even Nana. I bent down to delicately lift the curled, claw-like hand of Kotaro from the ground with three careful fingers.
“Did you see it, Father?” I asked the hand, grin inching wider. “Did you see what I can do?”
Kotaro’s hand, obviously, did not respond. But that was all right.
I carefully placed the hand in the large front pocket of my sweater alongside Mon-chan’s ashes.
It wasn’t like he’d have done so even if he were alive.
Shimura Tenko is dead.
Long live Shigaraki Tomura.