Chapter Text
Six years had passed since Kaminari had been outed as the mole of U.A., and even though the League of Villains, the Paranormal Liberation Front, and the fragmented gangs that they’d birthed had long been neutralized, he’d somehow managed to evade capture. As it turned out, Kaminari could be quite dangerous when he wasn’t pretending to be limited by his quirk. It had reached a point where no agency could even be bothered to pursue him, not that he was a particularly vexatious criminal. He kept himself out of just enough trouble to be considered low-priority, only engaging with heroes when they cornered him. He seemed to be a fading memory for everyone who’d known him; everyone who’d felt the sting of his betrayal firsthand.
…But not for Shinsou.
After graduation, he joined the underground faction of the hero commission. He was rarely in the public eye, he appeared in no popularity polls, and was generally denied all of the glamor and recognition that most aspiring heroes coveted. He didn’t care, though. Fame wasn’t something he’d ever craved, but it seemed even more worthless to him now. Reputation didn’t matter. Glory didn’t matter. Kaminari was all that mattered; hunting him, catching him, making him answer for all of the hurt he’d inflicted…there was nothing more important than that. It was a cause that Shinsou had tirelessly dedicated himself to for years, studying his habits, learning to anticipate his movements, never being unaware of his whereabouts. He would wait for the right time, when he was convinced that Kaminari’s guard was completely lowered, and he would grab him. He would deliver the retribution that was so long in the making. It all sounded well and good in his mind.
The reality, however, was much more complicated. After spending a rainy night tailing Kaminari through alley after sketchy alley, Shinsou finally had him isolated so that if he were to let off any electricity, no one other than Shinsou would be harmed. The plan was to speak through his voice modulator, get Kaminari under his control, and apprehend him swiftly. Should the criminal not respond or force Shinsou into a fight, he would resort to brute strength and hope that simply outsizing and outmaneuvering him would be enough. Despite being mentally prepared for every eventuality, all of his meticulous planning was sent spiraling down the drain when Kaminari caught him skulking through the shadows from the corner of his eye. He apparently recognized his former classmate immediately, as his face quite literally lit up with a smile that was sickeningly nostalgic to Shinsou, stopping him dead in his tracks and emptying every thought from his head as if his own quirk had somehow been used against him.
“Shinsou! Long time no see!” Kaminari greeted him with all the warmth and familiarity of a close friend, effectively tearing open every scar he’d left Shinsou with. “Look at you—so sharp in your pro hero get-up. And you got taller too, huh? That’s no fair.”
Shinsou didn’t respond. He was too busy scrambling to remember what exactly he intended to do. Why was he here? What was he doing? What the hell was the plan? All this time he’d been expecting to confront a villain, but this was no hardened criminal, this was just…Kaminari.
“...Still a man of few words, huh?” Kaminari said, sulking his shoulders a bit. “And here I was hoping we might have a chance to catch up. I mean, you’ve been following me so closely for the past twelve blocks, I figured you must be dying to talk to me or something…” His gaze seemed to sharpen. “That is why you’ve been following me right—because you wanna chat? Surely it’s not ‘cause you’re gonna try something stupid.”
There it was. The slap in the face needed to bring Shinsou back to his senses. “I won’t if you won’t,” he answered, and Kaminari looked disappointed by his response.
“Man, that’s a bummer,” he pouted. “Had I known this wasn’t a social visit I would’ve made the chase more fun. Not that you would’ve been able to keep up with me for long. You are still a rookie, after all.” He tilted his head contemplatively. “Now that I think about it, you’re the only one from our class that I haven’t seen on the news. Seems like everybody else has gone and made a name for themselves. Hell, even I’m more famous than you… It’s kinda ironic when you think about it. You used to talk such a big game about being a better hero than the rest of us, but here you are, an unknown pro with nothing to show for your efforts.”
Shinsou didn’t react as Kaminari probably hoped that he would, because the hero’s staunch silence seemed to embolden him to take his ponderings a step further.
“So tell me, did you stick to the underground or do you just suck at your job? It’s gotta be one of the two.”
Shinsou remained quiet, but inside, he was beginning to seethe.
“...The latter, huh? That’s disappointing. Although I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I mean, you did such a sloppy job following me and you’ve been standing there staring at me forever. What’s the matter? You can’t even arrest one lowly criminal on your own? Or,” his yellow eyes glimmered avidly, “could it be that you don’t wanna arrest me? Maybe you’d prefer to take the law into your own hands and rough me up a little before handing me over to the real pros—”
“No,” Shinsou interrupted. Despite how deeply he resented Kaminari, despite everything he’d done, he could never bring himself to hurt him. And in the moment, he didn’t care that saying so might worsen his situation.
And worsen, it did. The cat-like eyes that Shinsou had once found so endearing now seemed to brim with cruel delight. “Ooh, I get it… You’ve got a soft spot for me, don’t you? Why is that, I wonder? Is it pity? Do you feel sorry for the poor little hero-hopeful that was led astray? Maybe you think I was a victim of misfortune or something and you’re gonna try to show me the light again. Is that it?”
Kaminari laughed, and the palms of Shinsou’s hands began to sweat as he resisted the urge to ball them into fists. “I’ve got no hope left for you,” Shinsou glowered. “You’re a lost cause if ever there were one.”
“Liar,” Kaminari said bluntly. “If you really cared that little you would’ve put me down already, but you're holding out for some reason. Just not sure why,” Kaminari eyed him closely and thoroughly, skimming Shinsou’s braced form for several seconds before his face brightened with realization. “Don’t tell me… You’re still into me, aren’t you?”
Shinsou tried hard not to betray himself, but a single, involuntary twitch of his brow was all the confirmation that Kaminari needed. He laughed again, apparently finding the revelation gut-bustingly humorous.
“Wow, you must have it bad for me! No wonder you’re so terrible at this! After all these years, you can’t even bring yourself to overcome an old high school crush,” he taunted him. “As lame as that is, I gotta say, I’m kinda flattered! I mean, I always knew that you liked me, but I didn’t think that someone as distrusting as you was capable of feeling the deeeep shit—”
Shinsou’s carefully-maintained composure snapped. He grabbed Kaminari by the collar of his shirt and pinned his smaller body against the nearest building. “Fuck you Denki, I’m not your goddamn plaything!” He reined himself in just a bit before he completely lost control of the situation. Kaminari, meanwhile, watched him with wild amusement, and Shinsou’s brain couldn’t help but equate his visage with that of a hyena. “...How long have you known?”
Kaminari blinked innocently at him. “Hm? Known what?”
“Cut the crap,” Shinsou growled, his already-exhausted patience dwindling even further. “How long have you known that I…”
“That you…?”
“…”
Shinsou couldn’t bring himself to say the words, and his inability prompted Kaminari to laugh at him again. It was the same high, jovial cackle that Shinsou remembered, but there was no substance to it—no affection or warmth. It was purely wicked, ringing dark and hollow in his head. It was the same laugh that Shinsou had heard people direct at him when they thought he was out of earshot… and it was coming from Kaminari’s lips. That thought seemed to plunge an invisible knife into Shinsou’s chest, and the debilitating pain overrode all logic and sense. He wanted it to stop. He had to make it stop.
“Shut up!” Shinsou’s rage welled from inside him and it breached the surface by proxy of his quirk, silencing Kaminari and wiping his expression blank. With the horrible sound of his vicious laughter finally muted, Shinsou forced himself to breathe. He glared at the husk in his grasp while simultaneously cursing himself. It had been years since he’d surpassed the need for a response to trigger his quirk’s activation, but he still refrained from forcibly imposing it on people. Being able to do so scared him. Moreover, it would only add fuel to this particular fire.
He had half a mind to leave Kaminari in his current state and drag him to the nearest agency as he was…but not yet. He still had some grievances to air with his old classmate, some he’d force answers to and some he wanted to say while Kaminari was lucid so that he would remember—so that the words could fester in his brain for the rest of his miserable existence.
“How long have you known?” Shinsou repeated, grateful that Kaminari was oblivious to the desperation in his voice.
“…I always knew…” Kaminari answered tonelessly. “…From the beginning…Since the first time we spoke…I always knew you liked me…”
That was all Shinsou felt he needed to squeeze out of him. He freed Kaminari from his quirk and he returned with a gasp, blinking at Shinsou in confusion and amazement. For the briefest moment, he looked like the person Shinsou remembered.
“Damn, Hitoshi,” Shinsou winced as he invoked his first name, “I guess you got stronger after all!”
“That whole time you were playing everyone for fools, when you were planning to throw us all to the wolves…you knew?” Shinsou soldiered on, not wanting to dwell on the topic of his quirk.
“Oops. So much for being tight-lipped, huh?” Kaminari said with false regret, smirking nastily. “Yeah, I knew all along. For someone whose entire schtick revolves around trickery, you kinda suck at hiding your emotions. Still, you ended up being the most entertaining part of the whole operation! I think there for a while I stopped caring about my mission altogether because you were just too much fun! You were sort of like my…how should I put this?” He paused to think for a moment before his eyes lit up with an epiphany and his hand grasped Shinsou’s that still clung to his collar. “You were my passion project."
Shinsou’s body became rigid with tension, and anger seemed to radiate from him in palpable waves. “You’re disgusting,” he sneered.
Denki ran his fingers along the hand that still grasped his shirt, and Shinsou had to overpower the urge to abruptly pull away. “Yeah, maybe, but you’re the one who’s still hung up on me. Why else would you have spent years psychoanalyzing and tracking me?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I told you, you’re my special project! Do you really think I’d drop you so easily? Besides, the hero commission hasn’t exactly been safeguarding their personnel files. Y’know, times of peace making people lazy and whatnot. Everything you do, everywhere you go…anything I wanna know about you is pretty much at my fingertips these days.”
“Fucking creep—”
“Says the literal stalker,” Kaminari sneered. “Don’t you dare act all high and mighty with me when you’re no better. For someone who was so adamant that they weren’t a bad guy, you’ve got a pretty nasty streak in you. I mean seriously, what kind of hero uses their station to carry out their own personal grudge match? That’s pretty selfish, Hitoshi. But then again, you’ve always been selfish.”
“Bullshit,” Shinsou growled, attempting to hide just how shaken he was by the accusation. “Wanting retribution for pain that you caused other people is hardly selfish—“
“You’re lying again!” Kaminari snapped at him. “Stop pretending that you’re here on anyone else’s behalf! No one asked you to come after me, you assigned that mission to yourself! You don’t care that I hurt anybody else, you care that I hurt you! You’re taking advantage of your oh-so-precious hero title so you can get retribution for yourself!” Kaminari glared at him with naked hatred, punctuating himself with one final utterance of the word, “Selfish.”
“I’m not,” was the only pathetic objection that Shinsou could muster. “I’m not…I’m not selfish. I’m not taking advantage—”
“The hell you aren’t,” Kaminari scoffed. “Just because you don’t use your quirk to do bad things doesn’t mean you can’t still be as awful as a full-fledged criminal. You’re going bad, Hitoshi. You’re turning into the villain that everybody assumed you’d become, all for me. You’re wrapped so tight around my finger that you can’t even see how far you’ve fallen from that pretty little pedestal you wanted so badly. But I’ve got news for you, friend,” he craned his neck forward as far as his position would allow. “You’re. Too. Late.”
Shinsou tightened his grip on Kaminari’s shirt, fearing that he might try to wrestle himself free at any moment. “Fuck does that mean?”
“It’s too late for you to decide that you don’t wanna be a hero!” Kaminari retaliated. “It’s too late for you to change your mind now! You made your bed, now you can lie and rot in it for all I care!”
Shinsou was given no opportunity to respond, because contrary to his words, Kaminari seemed to care a lot, as he continued yelling until he seemed on the brink of hysteria.
“Why didn’t you decide to start breaking the rules years ago, huh? Why couldn’t you have started doing all this shit back then? Why did you wait til now to stop caring?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Shinsou finally asked, bearing the weight of his forearm down on Kaminari’s chest to restrain him.
“Why didn’t you come with me?!” Kaminari shouted, his expression morphing into some twisted combination of grief and rage.
Shinsou stared blankly back at the villain who glared at him so vehemently. “Go with you…?” He echoed.
“All of the hurt and the hate that came with doing what I did—you let me go through all of it alone! You made me do it all by myself!”
“I didn’t make you do anything!”
“You did!” Kaminari barked, and his hand constricted tightly around Shinsou’s wrist. “I always thought that I wouldn’t care if everybody resented me. They didn’t matter. I would just leave them behind with the rest of the hero crap, but you… When I met you, I started caring. You weren’t like the others. You lived with suspicion every day of your life. No matter how many times you showed everyone how good you were, they always looked at you differently. I saw it every day, and I know you did too…but you were stronger for it. It made me think that maybe—maybe—you could be the same as me…that you’d want to run and hide with me when I finally shattered their whole pretentious facade and that you’d be happy to see it all gone. I thought that living like this might not be so bad if I were doing it with you, because you already knew what it was like. I thought that you liked me more than everybody else, enough that you’d leave every single one of them behind for me…but I was wrong.”
A cacophony of thoughts buzzed inside Shinsou’s head as if it were a beehive, each one coming and going so quickly that he hardly had time to perceive them. “‘Liked’ you…?” He finally repeated. It sounded so trivial when he said it like that. The weight of what he’d felt for Kaminari had been so much greater than that, and Kaminari probably knew it. “...You’re right. I did. More than anybody else, I ‘liked’ you. I ‘liked’ you so much that I probably would have dropped everything to help you. I ‘liked’ you so much that I would have gone to hell and back for you…and yeah, I ‘liked’ you so much that I might’ve ditched every dream I had of becoming a hero if you’d asked me to.”
Kaminari maintained his stony expression, but the intensity of his eyes had started to falter. In fact, they appeared almost mournful, but there was no way to know if it was authentic or if the criminal was putting on a performance for him.
“...Are you seriously telling me that all I had to do was ask?” he surmised. “Would that really have changed anything?”
…No.
The answer came to Shinsou immediately, but he couldn’t say it out loud. It still hurt too much to think that he and the one person he’d ever ‘liked’ were inevitably bound to walk diverging paths.
“...Thought so,” Kaminari concluded, taking Shinsou’s prolonged silence as a reply. “Like I said, I used to think that we were the same underneath all the costumes and cliché shit…but I guess we really are as different as two people can be. Maybe there’s some truth to all that ‘opposites attract’ crap.”
“...Maybe,” Shinsou agreed quietly. “Still, you’re the one who chose to put us on opposing sides.”
“And you chose a broken, boring society over me,” Kaminari retorted. “However much you liked me, it just wasn’t enough—”
“Stop with that word, Denki,” Shinsou said firmly. “You know damn well that I loved you.”
“Now how would I know that?” Kaminari asked, appearing genuinely wounded. “You never said it, and you certainly never did anything to show it.”
“You never gave me the chance.”
“Didn’t I, though?” There was a slight crack in his voice that nearly made Shinsou’s heart fracture in turn. “Someone who loved me wouldn’t have wanted to see me suffer all alone like I did.”
“You really think that I was fine watching you send everything up in smoke?” Shinsou countered, easing his hold on Kaminari’s shirt. “You think I didn’t want to go with you? Not a day goes by where I don’t think about how different things would be if I had… You made me suffer alone too, y’know. You gave me an impossible choice knowing that I’d be the only one faced with consequences regardless of what I decided.”
There was a flash of remorse in Kaminari’s otherwise-stagnant expression, and his pupils flitted over Shinsou’s features as if to look for any visible signs of deception to contradict the earnesty of his words. He slowly reached out to weave his hand around the capture-weapon coiled around Shinsou’s neck and used it to tug him closer until their faces were separated by thin centimeters. The rain had created a reflective sheen on Kaminari’s skin, but through it, Shinsou could faintly discern the dusting of freckles along his cheeks. They’d never been very prominent, and they’d faded in the years since Shinsou had last seen him up-close, but they were still there. Something in that realization made Shinsou’s chest ache unbearably.
“...You won’t believe me if I try to apologize, will you?” Kaminari asked, speaking quietly as if he didn’t want to be overheard.
“Probably not.”
Kaminari frowned at that. “...And if I told you that I loved you, too? Or that I still do?”
“I’d say that you’ve never done anything to show it,” Shinsou bantered, finding it so easy and finding the subsequent pout on Kaminari’s face so satisfying.
“...Well this is just heartbreaking for both of us then, ain’t it?” The villain jabbed quietly, once again reviving Shinsou’s memory of the Kaminari that he’d known.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Kaminari very nearly smiled, but stopped himself at the last second. His gaze darted from Shinsou’s mask, to his eyes, and back again. “...You really want me to prove it, huh?”
“It’d be nice.”
It killed Shinsou that his own mind was so attuned to Kaminari’s that he knew exactly what he was thinking. The hands that grasped his scarf drew him closer still, and Kaminari craned his neck to seal the distance between them. His eyes fluttered closed, and he pressed his lips to Shinsou’s mask, precisely where his mouth would have…should have been. Shinsou allowed it, fighting the urge to throw his mask to the ground and kiss him back as he so badly wished he could—as he regretted not doing years prior. But he couldn’t. Like Kaminari said, it was too late. His decisions were made. His road was paved before him. If he were to turn back now, then he would prove to be every bit as selfish as Kaminari had accused him of being. So he remained still, keeping his eyes open and honed intently on Kaminari, knowing all too well that his sweetness could turn to aggression at any moment.
It never did, though. Kaminari eventually pulled away, but only slightly, and he reopened his eyes to meet Shinsou’s unwavering stare. “...So how do you wanna do this?” he asked, still speaking in a hushed tone. “Are you gonna try to brainwash me and make me go quietly, or would you rather let off a little steam and fight it out properly?”
Shinsou scanned his features. In spite of the teasing nature of his words, he could find no devious expression to match. He slumped his shoulders, sighing into his modulator before releasing Kaminari from his hold, and Kaminari did the same. Assuming that Shinsou was preparing to engage him, sparks started to fly from his hands. Shinsou, however, remained motionless, unintimidated by the electricity crackling from the villain’s body.
“...Get out of here,” Shinsou said, sounding utterly exhausted.
Kaminari scrunched his brow but said nothing, probably out of fear that Shinsou was feigning mercy while lacing his words with the influence of his quirk. But he’d done no such thing. He was suddenly too drained to even attempt to apprehend Kaminari. He just wanted him to leave—to retreat into the shadows and spare Shinsou the agony of ever having to see him again. Kaminari, realizing that his opponent was making no effort to impede him, glanced over Shinsou’s shoulder before bolting past him. Shinsou didn’t even turn to watch him go. Instead, he listened to his running footfalls splash against the wet pavement, hearing him pause several feet away.
“...Come with me?” he heard Kaminari call from behind him. “I’m asking this time. Last chance.”
Shinsou blinked slowly at nothing. It was nice to pretend that he had any choice in the matter, but he and Kaminari both knew what his answer had to be. Shinsou gave no vocal reply, only shaking his head without looking at Kaminari. The silence that followed seemed to drag on endlessly, and Shinsou was relieved when the sound of footsteps resumed only to gradually fade from his earshot.
When he was certain that he was alone, Shinsou wriggled free of his mask and let his head fall back, welcoming the raindrops that battered his fully exposed face.
Well that couldn’t have gone any worse, he thought defeatedly, even though he knew it wasn’t true. He and Kaminari could have come to blows. Kaminari could have killed him. Kaminari could have told him that he hated him—that he’d always hated him, and that any contrary belief Shinsou held was just a testament to his weakness and naivety… Yeah, it could have been much worse.