She Is A Total Monet!

Terzanelle, Tierce for short. You aren’t like the other characters. You’re better. Tomura likes your design — cute, but edgy and kind of frayed, and your ascended form leans more to eldritch monster than fairy princess — and more than that, he likes your attitude. He likes that you aren’t sweet and forgiving, that you’re not afraid to get violent to protect your friends. The other characters stick to killing demons. In Volume Three, you introduce yourself by killing a guy who kicks a dog. Which is exactly what Tomura would do if he saw the same thing. As soon as he read that chapter, he knew you were special. You get cooler with every chapter he reads.

There’s not much official merch of you, but there’s going to be more soon — they always make more when there’s an anime adaptation coming out. Tomura has all the official stuff, plus all the unofficial stuff that’s any good, including a stupid-cute chibi plush that sits next to his computer and a body pillow that lives under his bed whenever he’s not sleeping on it. He feels weird about hiding you. He also feels weird about how many times he’s washed the cover on the pillow. At some point he’s going to have to buy a new one.

Tomura would talk to people online about you more if any of them weren’t stupid, but most of them are. Most of them also haven’t actually read the manga, if the sheer idiocy of their takes is anything to go by. They’re fun to argue with sometimes. Tomura tells himself it’s practice for arguing with heroes and idiots who like them — they’re going to be just as overemotional, just as guilt-trippy, mostly impossible to reason with. He’s got an argument running right now, over on one of the few servers he hasn’t been banned from yet, and he just got a notification.

Tomura checks it and feels his face heat up, his blood start to boil. He left this asshole a solid response to their points. He cited his sources, for fuck’s sake. And how did they respond? bro quit caping so hard for tierce. she’s not gonna fuck you.

no shit. she’s fictional, Tomura shoots back. He rolls out of bed and heads to his computer. It’s easier to kick someone’s ass from there. is that really the best you can do? grow up.

don’t get all high and mighty. we all know you selfship with her. which is hilarious because you’re some weird dude and she’s canonically queer

according to what evidence? just because YOU’RE gay and want her to be gay too doesn’t make it canon. The thought makes Tomura feel sick. don’t come at me about canon. you’re the one who draws her with giant tits.

who are you, the fanart police? I can draw her how i want

yeah, sure, but it’s not canon. neither is her being gay.

homophobe

fuck off. i never said she couldn’t be bi. If you’re bi, Tomura still has a shot. Or he would. If you were real. Which you aren’t. This is stupid. there’s more evidence for her being bi than there is for her being gay or straight. you’d know that if you weren’t an illiterate biphobe.

woooow. The typing banner appears at the bottom of the screen, hovering for a while. the trailer just dropped. later loser.

Fuck. Tomura can finish fighting with this jackass later. He navigates to YouTube and refreshes his screen, and sure enough, there it is. ARS POETICA, Trailer #1. Tomura clicks on it and turns up the volume.

He doesn’t hate the theme song. That’s a good sign. The animation looks solid, too. Pretty fluid, which is promising, given how important the fight scenes are. You’re not in it as much as he thinks you should be, but on the forums everyone was speculating that Season 1 will only cover the first few volumes, and a lot of the stuff you do counts as a spoiler. The series is about to pick up a ton of anime-only fans. Tomura can live with that as long as some of them are decent artists and writers. He’s read almost all the fic that’s been written about you, and it’s such a wasteland that he’s this close to writing his own.

You show up in the latter half of the trailer, during a short-clips montage of the Poetesses in battle. There’s Sestina, Tanka, Villanelle, Madrigal, you. Ahead of the main character’s rival, right before Sonnet, the fucking main character. A grin breaks across Tomura’s face as he imagines half the Discord server losing their shit at you ranking above Madrigal, even though the goddamn narrative couldn’t be clearer about who the secondary protagonist is. He’s got a meme for this. He finds it, sticks it in the reactions channel, and plays back the trailer again.

You don’t have any lines, so he can’t form an opinion about your voice actor yet. He’s got the voice he imagines for you, but he could see someone going the other way with your character, making you slutty or making you shy. You aren’t either one. You’re perfect. They’ll get your voice right, hopefully, and then Tomura’s fantasies will have a ton of new material. So much new material that it’s going to be hard to fantasize about anything else, killing All Might included.

That sounds stupid — Tomura getting distracted from his single purpose in life by his crush on a fictional girl. Tomura needs to get his shit together before Sensei finds out about any of this, or about how far it’s gotten. And maybe he already has. A notification pops up on the side of Tomura’s screen, letting him know that his preorder for Volume 13 — which was supposed to get here today — has been cancelled.

What the fuck? Tomura clicks on the notification, trying to figure out how it happened, but there’s nothing. It’s not a declined payment. It’s not a declined delivery. Just — canceled. The fuck. That’s the last thing Tomura wanted to happen today. He was going to watch the trailer, and then he was going to figure out what happens next in the story. There’s no way you’re dead. Sure, the last volume ends with you fully ascended, throwing yourself into battle against an Arbiter who looked way more invulnerable before you powered up, and sure, it hard-cuts into a completely black page — but you’re not dead. You can’t be dead, because if you are, Tomura’s going to lose his shit.

Tomura almost Decays his monitor in frustration, then orders himself to get it together. You’re not dead. It would make no sense for the story, and there’s no way they’d have killed two other less important characters right before you if they were going to kill you off. And it doesn’t matter that his order got canceled. He can just disguise himself and go buy one.

Right. That’ll help. Tomura watches the trailer for the anime one more time, then gets dressed, putting on pants and a shirt and a hoodie and a mask to cover the lower half of his face. He doesn’t tell Kurogiri he’s going out, because he doesn’t have to — Sensei will be able to see it. A trip to the bookstore. Maybe a stop at the conbini for food. It’ll be fine. Tomura will find out what happens to you next and then he’ll feel better.

He’s got his hand on the doorknob when a strange hum and pulse runs through the air. Sometimes Kurogiri’s warp gates feel like that — but before Tomura can get any further into that thought, he hears something. A jagged, staticky sound, somewhere between nails on a chalkboard and a tv on the fritz and the world’s rustiest zipper pulling open. Kurogiri’s gates don’t sound like that. They don’t make Tomura’s skin crawl.

It’s emanating from somewhere behind Tomura. He lets go of the doorknob and turns around, just in time to watch something — or someone — fall through his ceiling.

For a second he thinks he’s imagining it. Then you hit his desk, somehow missing his monitor and keyboard but taking out everything else in the process. Books, mouse, mousepad, box of tissues, figurines — it all hits the floor, and so does something else, falling from your hand and skidding across the floor towards Tomura. Tomura leaps backwards on instinct, way before he decides to risk a second look.

It’s a weapon. The faint light from Tomura’s monitor and the faint light seeping in through the cracked-open door catch and reflect off of one blade each.

A double-bladed scythe. Not the replica one Tomura has hanging on the wall across from his bed. That one’s human-sized, and this one looks exactly like it, except — “Holy fuck,” Tomura says, and across the room, you slide off his desk and crumple to the floor. “You aren’t — are you —”

Whatever you are, you’re not conscious. Your face is obscured by a white tragedy mask, spattered with blood, and your overlong limbs are swathed in ragged grey and black fabric. Your ascended form is canonically taller than your human one, and Tomura can definitely tell. You’d be way taller than him if you were on your feet, but you’re not. You’re not moving. Your chest barely rises and falls. As Tomura watches, pieces of fabric begin to disintegrate away from you. Your body begins to shrink back to a normal size, your hands untwisting from clawed talons into ordinary hands with blackened fingertips. Maybe the ceiling fell on Tomura and he died or something. Because there’s no fucking way his favorite character just dropped through a portal into his bedroom. What the hell kind of manga plotline is this?

The manga doesn’t skimp on the transformation scenes. They’re always drawn in detail, which means Tomura knows what it looks like when a Poetess sheds their ascended form, and it doesn’t look like this. You’re fraying at the edges, your ascended form peeling away until all you’re wearing is shreds of the uniform you were wearing when you went into battle. Tomura averts his eyes in a hurry. No matter how much horny fanart he’s seen — or bought — of you, looking at you in person feels different. He looks at your face instead, watching as a web of cracks spread across the blood-spattered tragedy mask until it crumbles away.

The same blood that was on the mask is on your face, too. And it is your face. Tomura’s seen people draw you in a realistic style, and they nailed it. Which is pretty unfortunate for Tomura, because you’re even hotter in real life. It’s a good thing you’re unconscious. He needs as much time as possible to get his shit together.

It’s a good thing you’re unconscious? What the fuck is wrong with Tomura? You’re in bad shape. There’s blood on your face and on what’s left of your clothes, and whether it’s yours or not, Tomura knows what happened to you in the last panels of Volume 12. He doesn’t want you to stay unconscious. He needs to wake you up. And he needs to be careful about how he does it, or you might kill him. You’ve been fighting a war against the Arbiters, and all of them are men. Tomura doesn’t want you to think he’s out to get you.

He needs to wake you up, and he needs you to stop being half-naked in his room. Tomura goes looking for a clean blanket, can’t find one, debates finding a towel, and finally just strips off his hoodie. It’s oversized. If he arranges it right, it covers everything he’s not supposed to be looking at. And then he’s not sure what to do. How is he supposed to wake you up?

Some stupid part of his brain is saying to kiss you. If he fell through the ceiling into your room and you woke him up from unconsciousness by kissing him, he’d be hyped to the point where he’d probably pass out again. Then again, you’re his favorite character, and he’s a guy. It’s probably different for a girl, and Tomura’s life isn’t a fucking fairytale. Tomura reaches for your hand instead.

There’s a lot of stupid discourse online about your hands and whether they’d be creepy and offputting in real life, but Tomura’s kind of an expert on creepy and offputting hands, and your blackened, claw-nailed fingers don’t even register. Your hand is warm. Your fingers are callused but still soft, and for a moment, when they wrap loosely around Tomura’s palm, Tomura thinks his heart might actually stop.

Then your grip tightens. Your eyes fly open. You yank your hand free of Tomura’s and scramble backwards, colliding with his desk. You try to get up, but you stagger, and Tomura’s hoodie falls down. Tomura’s face heats up in a flash. He looks away.

“Look at me,” you say. The voice Tomura imagined for you in his head fits almost perfectly. He’s read fics where you’re bossy, and it’s always hot, but for once in his life he and his dick can both agree that this isn’t the time to pop a boner. “Who are you? Where are we?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Tomura asks. He’s being careful with which part of you he looks at. He’s not into feet, but yours are cute. Your ankles, too. And your calves, and your knees —

You seize his chin and tilt his face up to meet your eyes. Tomura’s pretty sure his whole face goes up in flames. “I’m asking the questions here,” you say. “Who are you? Where are we?”

“Japan,” Tomura says, and for a moment, your expression relaxes. “Not the same Japan you’re from.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean —” Tomura doesn’t really know a good way to put it. “I can answer better if you stop touching me.”

You hold on. “Who are you?”

“I’m Shigaraki. Tomura. Shigaraki Tomura.” Shigaraki Tomura, otaku dumbass. All Tomura can do is pray that the energy surge from whatever portal you fell through shorted out Sensei’s cameras. “And you’re Tierce.”

You let go of him, maybe in shock. Or maybe not — your face has gone ashen under the spray of blood, and you’re losing your balance. You fall back against Tomura’s desk, hard, then slump sideways to the ground. Tomura reaches out to you on instinct and you snarl at him. “Don’t touch me. How did I get here?”

“There was a portal. You fell through it.” Tomura points up at the ceiling. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“How do you know my name?” you demand. “What else do you know about me?”

“Uh —” Tomura doesn’t know where to start, really. Has he fantasized about you showing up in his bedroom? Yes. Were you freaking out and maybe injured in those fantasies? Definitely not. “You know how I said this isn’t your Japan? I said that because I know you from a manga.”

You look blankly at him. Tomura knows you know what manga is. He’s seen panels of you reading it. A running joke is that you’re either reading hardcore horror manga that gives the students nightmares or the kind of shojo fluff that even they find hard to swallow. But since he knows you read manga — “I think you got isekaied.”

“Isekai?” Your expression turns from confused to sickened, despairing. “No. I can’t. I didn’t — don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not! Wait here.” Tomura backs away from you, keeping his hands in full view, and pulls Volume 12 off his shelf. He holds it out to you, but you won’t take it. Finally Tomura just starts flipping the pages. “Look. Here’s the last chapter. How much of this do you — remember —”

Now you want the book. You flip through it faster than Tomura did, your fingernails scratching against the pages without tearing them, and when you hit one page, you freeze. Tomura risks coming closer and peers over your shoulder. He has a bad feeling, and he’s right. You’re looking at the page where Triolet dies.

You love all the students, but you’re extra close to Sonnet and Triolet. Sonnet you get shipped with. Triolet is like your little sister, and you’ve already got a serious dose of sister trauma after watching your older sister die. You still remember something, even though the headmistress wiped your memory. Is that in this volume? No, it was in volume 10 — but it flashes back to it here. The splash of blood drying across your face is Triolet’s, and it’s in the same place as your older sister’s blood was when you were just a kid.

When Volume 12 came out, people were assholes about it, about you. Most of them said you had no reason to go crazy like you did, to use your ascended form and your full powers even though you can’t control them. Tomura was on your side, like he’s always on your side, but he’s starting to think that it had consequences. Your powers are canonically lethal when released, even in small doses. Unleashing all of them like you did, at one target — and then the black page — Tomura’s pretty sure you didn’t get isekaied by somebody else. You ripped a hole in your own dimension and fell headfirst into Tomura’s.

What happened afterwards? Tomura really needs to get ahold of Volume 13 and figure it out. Volume 12 falls from your hands. You draw your knees up to your chest, wrap your arms around them, and turn your head away. “Hey,” Tomura says. You don’t stir. “Tierce? Uh, Terzanelle?”

You don’t answer. When Tomura shakes your shoulder, you don’t lash out at him again, but your total lack of a response might actually be worse. Your skin is clammy and cold, and Tomura sees scrapes and bruises all over you, maybe from the battle, maybe from your fall through his ceiling. What is Tomura even supposed to do? Most of the Tierce fic he’s read has you comforting the reader. Not the other way around.

Maybe the stuff you’d find comforting is the same stuff you do for other people. You took care of the students after the school was attacked in Volume 6. Tomura doesn’t need to refer back to it to know what to do, not when he’s got the entire manga basically memorized. He leaves you alone for a second and calls for Kurogiri.

Kurogiri shows up right away. It’s hard to shock him, but he double-takes at the sight of you in the wreckage of Tomura’s desk. “Don’t ask,” Tomura says. “I need some stuff.”

“Such as?”

Tomura has your character sheet memorized, too. He rattles off your favorite food, favorite drink, favorite stim toy — he always thought it was weird that the sheet included that, but maybe it’ll help — and your favorite color. “She needs a blanket,” he continues, and Kurogiri nods. “And clothes.”

“What size?”

Shit. Tomura glances back at you, realizing that your character sheet never specified height or weight for your regular human form, even though it went out of its way to mention that your ascended form is taller than Sensei. “Just get it big. Too big is easier to fix than too small.”

“Would she not rather have clothes that fit?”

“Girls don’t like tight stuff when they feel bad,” Tomura says. Kurogiri’s giving him a really weird look, but a lot of Ars Poetica fans are girls, so he’s spent a lot of time interacting with them online. They argue just as much as guys do, just about different stuff. Tight clothes being the opposite of comforting is one thing they can mostly agree on — that, and that taking a bra off after a long day is better than sex. Are you wearing a bra? Do you need one? Tomura was trying so hard not to look at you that he didn’t check.

“Shigaraki Tomura,” Kurogiri prompts. “Was there anything else?”

Tomura has to stop thinking about your breasts. “Only get soft stuff. But it can’t be heavy. It’s too warm in here anyway.”

Kurogiri reaches over and turns on the fan. “I will adjust the thermostat as well,” he says. “I’m aware that you said not to ask, but — that is her, yes? Your favorite character?”

“Yeah,” Tomura says. He’s still way too giddy about it given that you’re in bad shape and you probably haven’t ruled out killing him. “That’s her. I’m just going to go — uh —”

What is Tomura going to do? He’s being yanked back towards you like you’re a magnet or something, but he also doesn’t trust himself not to act like a creepy loser. Maybe he should get you a first-aid kit so you can clean up your injuries. You probably don’t want him to help you. Tomura has a lot of questions he wants to ask. He just doesn’t know where to start. Or if you even want to talk to him at all.

Kurogiri brings the blanket first, in your favorite color. Tomura brings it over to you, trying to make noise so you won’t be caught by surprise. You don’t look up or reach for it, but you’re shivering, so Tomura shakes it out and unfolds it around your shoulders. After hesitating for a second, he tucks it in a little tighter.

Nothing. You’re pretty far gone. Tomura can relate, even if he’s not sure how, and if he were you, he’d want the blood off his face as fast as possible. It’s already starting to dry. Tomura finds a clean tissue somewhere, spits on it to get it wet, and starts trying to wipe the blood off your forehead. He wants you to move, or say something, but you don’t. You sit there, still and silent, and Tomura doesn’t know what to do except keep going.

Part of him is still freaking out over you being real, you being here. Kurogiri saw you, too. Recognized you. Tomura knows it’s not a dream. But you’re not a character anymore. You’re a real person, and you’re not acting like you do in the isekai fanfiction Tomura’s read — you’re reacting like a normal person would react to waking up in somebody else’s world. Reacting like somebody that something bad just happened to. In your spot, Tomura would probably —

The thought interrupts itself. Tomura frowns, and while he’s trying to reorient himself, you speak up. “You can stop.”

Your voice is quiet, rough. It sends a chill down Tomura’s spine — or maybe that’s from the warmth of your breath against his wrist. “Huh?”

“You can stop,” you say again. “I don’t need someone to take care of me.”

You’ve said that in the manga before. Tomura can probably name every panel where you’ve said it, because people like taking screen grabs and captioning them “me when I lie.” He’s not going to lie and say he hasn’t thought about how he’d respond if he heard you say it, but none of the responses he imagined feel like the right one. Tomura can imagine saying it, too. What would he want to hear?

He defaults back to some x reader fic where you comfort a person you just rescued from a chaotic apparition. “Okay. I’m here, though. So you might as well let me.”

You don’t say anything else, but you don’t swat his hand away. Tomura goes back to wiping blood off your face, trying not to have an orgasm over the fact that you’re real, that you’re here, that you’re letting him touch you. There should be way more fics about getting to comfort you. It’s nice. Nice to know that he’s helping someone for once. Nice to feel like —

Kurogiri comes back with clothes for you, and food. Tomura’s gotten the blood off your face by then. He sends Kurogiri for a first-aid kit, then spends a while facing the wall while you change clothes. When he looks back, you’re dressed in oversized sweatpants and a big shirt — and over that, you’re putting on Tomura’s hoodie. Nope. “You should eat something,” Tomura says, standing up. Standing up was a mistake. “I have to — go.”

“Where?”

“I have to, uh — take care of something.” Right now. It’s urgent. “I’ll be right back.”

Back in five seconds or less, probably. Tomura locks the door of the bathroom down the hall and shoves his hand down his pants.

He’s always felt kind of weird about jerking off to you. Weird in a way it’s not for other characters he’s been into. Tomura’s into you about eighty times worse than he’s been into anybody else, but every time he tries to jerk off to you, it doesn’t work. It works, but it doesn’t work, because every five seconds Tomura questions himself about it. Would your voice sound like that? How would your hands really feel? Are you insecure about the stuff the fandom thinks you’d be insecure about, the stuff Tomura would make sure he paid attention to? Jerking off to you never felt satisfying, because he never had the details. And now he does — enough of them, at least, because he barely manages to get his pants pulled down in time to avoid getting cum all over them.

Tomura leans back against the door. He feels better. He also feels like an asshole. You’re having a really shitty day, and you don’t really know where you are, and he left you in his messy room so he could go jerk off to you. Tomura’s acting like an S-tier, grade-A creep. Exactly like the kind of Tierce fan he hates.

Fuck. Tomura needs to get it together. He washes his hands, makes sure his pants are zipped, and heads back to his room.

You’re not where he left you. You’re on your feet, turning Tomura’s room upside down like you’re looking for something. You aren’t looking at Tomura’s collection of Ars Poetica merch, but you’ve definitely seen it, because most of it is scattered across his bed. Figures, keychains, plushies. Doujinshi included. The only thing you haven’t found is the body pillow.

You’ll get there soon if he doesn’t stop you. “What are you doing?”

You turn to face him, and Tomura feels a jolt straight down his spine. People who don’t like you in the fandom say you’re inconsistent, that you’re normal one second and nightmarish the next, but Tomura always found it easy to believe – and he was right. But there’s something different about actually looking at it, seeing the coldness in your eyes, seeing the way your clawed hands shift at your sides. It’s spooky. Tomura’s not looking at some soft, sweet magical girl who loves everybody and wants to save the world. He’s looking at –

A monster. The instant Tomura has the thought, he hates himself for it – but he doesn’t have to have it for long. “The artifact,” you say, and you close the distance between you and Tomura in a single step, shoving him through the door and pinning him back against the opposite wall. “Where is it?”

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