Tomone

The air around you tastes dusty and uncomfortably warm, every breath you take poisoning the cramped space around you. You close your eyes against the darkness and curl up even tighter, trying to find some place in your memory that’s happy enough to die in. Happy’s not something you get very much of, but there’s one thing that comes close, maybe. Two weeks or less in an apartment that wasn’t yours, wearing clothes that belonged to someone else, falling asleep at his side and waking up in his arms. That memory is soft, warm, safe. You bury yourself in it as your chest goes tight and the walls sink closer.

You aren’t expecting a rescue, but the wreckage crumbles away from around you, fresh air flooding in. You open your eyes in shock and find Tenko Shimura crouched over you. “Are you hurt anywhere?” he asks. There’s no spark of care or familiarity in his eyes when he looks at you. “Did you pass out or hit your head?”

You shake your head. You had a hard landing when the floor fell out from beneath you, but you never lost consciousness. Tenko asks you another question, something that’s lost in the noise of approaching sirens, in the sounds of people calling for help. When the police get here, Tenko will take you to them. They’ll interrogate you until your mind snaps, if it ever does, and then they’ll get started on destroying everything you’ve worked for since stepping into the spotlight. No matter what happens next, it’s all over.

Tenko Shimura helps you to sit up, leaves his hand at the small of your back to steady you. He speaks so quietly that you have to lean in, close enough that his mouth is pressed against your ear when he speaks. “I didn’t see you.”

“What?”

“I didn’t see you. You were never here. It’ll be a long time before anyone here starts thinking about chasing villains,” Tenko says. “If you can walk and if you go now, they won’t follow you.”

You stare up at him. Your eyes are burning, from the clouds of dust or something else, and Tenko Shimura averts his in the same moment as you realize that he’s shielding you from sight with his body. “If you’re going to go, go,” he says. “I have other people to save.”

Somebody else might think he’s being cold. You’re smart enough to know that this is better than you deserve. You sit up, away from the support of his hand, and get to your knees, then your feet. Tenko rises along with you, steadies you when you stagger. “Go,” he says again, but his hands are still on you. There’s barely distance between you as it is, but he pulls you closer still, and his lips press against your forehead. “You’ll be okay. Go.”

You pull away from him and bolt, turning your ankle as you stumble through the wreckage. It doesn’t matter. You don’t stop until you’re twenty blocks away from the site of the accident, in the middle of a busy square. The billboards that usually carry ads are playing the news instead, all about the bombing, all about the rescue. Tenko’s everywhere, comforting the injured, saving lives. Knots of jealousy tie themselves into your stomach as you watch the way he handles them, treating them with the same gentleness as he handled you. It spills over into your eyes, and in spite of all your efforts as a so-called supervillain, you’ve never had a disguise better than this. People notice monsters. No one notices someone crying in the street.

But even through your tears, there’s something you can’t miss, something that helps ever so slightly. Tenko Shimura might be agonizingly gentle on everyone he rescues, but out of the dozens he helps, you’re the only one he kissed.

It’s already going. There’s nothing but pitch-darkness outside your window, but for the last few hours, you’ve been seeing lights, flickering somewhere out there in the deep. You assumed it was something bioluminescent at first, but it seems too big for that, and so you’ve written it off as a hallucination. Your mind is closing up shop, so it’s giving you a light show first. Fine. You might as well enjoy it. It’s better to look at that than think about just how empty and scared and alone you are. How awful it’s going to be to die down here. How much you wish the water had flooded all the way into your cabin so you could get it over with.

The lights are getting closer, flashing blue and green and pink, the way the aurora borealis looks in pictures you’ve seen. You always wanted to see the northern lights. You tilt your head against the porthole, watching, getting a little more lightheaded on every breath, until a shadow passes over the porthole and scares you off your bunk and into the freezing water that’s chest-deep in your cabin.

You scramble back onto the bunk, swearing and half-soaked, and when you look back out the porthole, your lights are gone. Your heart sinks, like it doesn’t know it was supposed to stop hoping days ago, and you curl up into the corner of your bunk, arms wrapped around your knees even though the lower half of your body is soaking wet. Your eyes are beginning to blur with tears. They’re the warmest thing you’ve felt in days as they slip down your cheeks, but even through them, you can’t fail to see that something’s outside your window. No, not something. Someone.

You wipe your eyes, blinking hard to clear your vision. Oxygen deprivation leaves it speckled with black dots, but those aren’t enough to obscure the creature at your window. You see long, pale hair, drifting around a face that looks human – enough. A face with pale, sunless skin and iridescent scales scattered around the cheeks and brows, only highlighting the brilliance of the creature’s crimson eyes. It raises one hand, webbing visible between its fingers, and presses it against the glass.

You come closer, matching your hand against the creature’s through the glass. It tilts its head, studying you, and you see four jagged rows of gills opening and closing along the side of its neck. Its ears are pointed, webbed at the elongated tips, and your dying mind provides the word. Mermaid.

Or merman. Mer-something. Whatever it is, it leans in a little closer, until its mouth is pressed almost against the glass. With its lips parted, you can see how long its canine teeth are, how there are more of them in its mouth than there should be. Maybe you should be glad it’s not in here with you. It could eat you. Some part of your mind that’s both saner and crazier than the rest points out that if it eats you, you won’t die alone after all.

You hold the mer-thing’s gaze, study its face. Its eyelashes are long and tangled, and it’s got no eyebrows. There’s a scar over its mouth and one over its eye, and then it has a birthmark at the corner of its mouth. The last feature seems too human for something like this, but you like the picture it paints. “Pretty,” you say, and flinch at the sound of your own voice. The mer-thing flinches, too, pulling back from the glass. A surge of panic hits you. “No, don’t go. Please –”

It's gone. You see a flash of the lights again, enough to understand that your mer-thing is the source of the lights you’ve been watching, before it vanishes completely, and there’s nothing outside your window but blackness once more. “Don’t go,” you whisper again, uselessly. “I don’t want to die alone.”

The emergency lights that have kept your room and the corridor outside illuminated are beginning to flicker and fade. You’re amazed they lasted this long, and sickened to imagine what it’ll be like in here once they’re gone. But even as they fade, new lights replace them – softer lights, alternating pink and blue and green, coming up from under the water. Coming closer. The still-sane, half-crazy part of you tells you to stay back, but you lean forward anyway, peering over the edge of your bunk and closer, closer. Close enough that when the mer-thing’s head breaks the surface of the water, the two of you are almost nose to nose.

You don’t care if it wants to eat you. You’re so relieved to see it, to see another person, that your eyes well up with tears again. “Hi,” you say, your voice shaking. “You came back.”

One hand raises from the water and brushes over your cheek, collecting the tears. The mer-thing’s hand is warmer than you thought it would be, but before you can lean into it, it pulls away, bringing its hand to its mouth to taste. You see its eyes widen, and its mouth opens again, lips moving awkwardly as a deep, raspy voice issues from its mouth. “Like the sea.”

“Salty,” you say. He looks blankly at you. Maybe he doesn’t know what salty is – he’s probably never tasted anything different. “Thank you. For coming back. I didn’t want –”

“To die alone,” the mer-thing repeats in that raspy voice. “You won’t.”

Then he seizes you by the front of your shirt and yanks you into the water.

You have time for one breath of air, but the cold knocks it out of you, and you thrash desperately, trying to find the surface. The mer-thing’s grip on you is warm but iron-hard. He holds you in place one-handed, then grips your chin with the other, looming close enough to kiss. The pressure he exerts against your jaw forces your mouth open, and the mer-thing seals his lips over yours. And then he breathes out.

Liquid rushes down your throat, pours into your lungs, and your mouth falls opens in a silent scream of agony. It’s not seawater, whatever it is. It doesn’t burn like you imagine seawater would, and it’s warm. You fight against the mer-thing, shove weakly at him, as your body shudders and strains to expel whatever it just inhaled. You keep expecting dark spots to fill your vision again, for the pain in your chest to grow until it wipes your mind and turns everything black and senseless for the last time. But it doesn’t. The pain stays where it is, no worse, no better. Your lungs continue to shudder in rhythm, expanding and contracting minutely against the liquid that’s filled them. Your heart is still beating when the mer-thing draws away.

You try to surface, but he holds you down. “You don’t need that,” he says. His voice sounds the same underwater as above it. “I gave you air.”

It’s not air. Whatever’s inundated your lungs, it’s not air, and you’re not breathing – but you’re not drowning, either. You look at him questioningly, the saltwater stinging your eyes, and the mer-thing speaks again. “The water is heavy out there. Too heavy for you if you were empty. Now you won’t die when we go out.”

Out there? You shake your head frantically, and the mer-thing gives you an irritated look. “You said you didn’t want to die. I’m helping you. I can take you up.”

Up. The surface? You’ve been down here for three days. If he swims you up to the surface, you’ll die anyway – decompression sickness. You keep shaking your head, and this time, the mer-thing just ignores you. “What I gave you won’t last the whole way. Your body will absorb it and you’ll need more. I won’t know, so you have to tell me.”

How? Your lips form the words, but you can’t speak. “Tap me or something. I don’t care,” the mer-thing says. “And don’t let go. If I lose you out there I won’t find you again.”

He understood you. Maybe he can read lips. How did he find you? Where did he learn to talk? What is he, exactly? “It doesn’t matter what I am,” the mer-thing says impatiently. “My name’s Tomura. Do you want to get out of here or not?”

The water’s too cold. I’ll die.

“What I gave you will keep you warm. When it runs out I’ll give you more.” Tomura looks you over. His expression shifts ever so slightly. “Hold onto me. Tight.”

Your chest aches. Your mind is still screaming with the need to surface, to breathe in even the stale, almost-toxic air that you’ve been choking on for three days. But you’re underwater now, not breathing, not drowning. This thing – Tomura – says he’ll take you up. If you stay here, you’ll suffocate. If you follow him out, you might drown. You might die under atmospheres of pressure, because whatever he breathed into your lungs isn’t enough to save you. You might freeze to death. He might take you up too fast, and you’ll die of decompression sickness. No matter what you choose, there are a dozen ways you could die. But if you go with Tomura, at least you won’t die alone.

He swims out of the ship with you clinging to his back, your arms wrapped awkwardly around his chest and your legs clamped around his hips – or where his hips would be, if he were human. Instead of shifting into legs, his body melds into a tail, pale like his skin and covered in iridescent scales like the ones dusted across his cheekbones and forehead. There are strips of bioluminescence along his flanks, and fins sharp enough to slice through your clothes if you’re not careful with them. Tomura swims fast. You have to hang on tight if you don’t want to be left behind.

As cold as the water was within the ship, it’s colder on the outside, and when the pressure kicks in, it’s even worse than the jolt you felt as the ship struck the seafloor. Your chest seizes and you cough, and some of the liquid that Tomura breathed down your throat bubbles out in a gasp. Tomura must feel you shudder. He twists in your grip, putting you face to face, and this time you’re ready. When his lips seal over yours, you breathe in.

Tomura doesn’t shift you to his back again. He holds you against his chest as he begins to swim upwards, or at least the direction you think is upwards. In the blackness, it’s hard to tell. “Hold tighter,” he says in your ear, and you adjust your grip. “This will take a while.”

How long?

He shrugs, a motion you feel rather than see. “Never done it before.”

You don’t know anything about whatever Tomura is, but it seems odd that he’s never gone deep. You always thought that the bioluminescent fish were deep-sea fish. How deep down were you, anyway? You don’t think you have to go that deep for light to be unable to penetrate the water. You ask, and Tomura laughs, a low, rippling sound that makes your skin crawl. “We don’t come down here. That’s how deep.”

We don’t come down here. Then why did he come down here? You don’t feel like you can ask about any of it – what he is, why he’s here, why he came for you. A shiver runs through you and your grip on Tomura tightens involuntarily. His tail flexes, the bioluminescent strips lighting up, more pink than blue this time, but he doesn’t speak. Not for a long time, long enough for your lungs to absorb what he gave you. You know it’s happening, because the pain in your chest begins to ease, and the cold rushes in to replace it. You tap Tomura’s shoulder.

“Already?” Tomura looks surprised. “You need to calm down. Your heart is beating too fast.”

I’m scared. “Why?” Tomura asks. You feel like it should be obvious, and your lungs are beginning to contract, caught by the cold and pressure. You tap Tomura’s shoulder again, more urgently this time. “Sorry.”

His hand cups your face, gentler this time, probably because you’re already parting your lips. You’re closer to him this time than you were before, and you feel the pulse and shudder that overtakes him, a moment before he exhales. This time, it takes him a moment longer to pull away. “Stay calm,” he orders. “If your heart beats any louder, everything will be able to hear it.”

You don’t ask about that, either. You lean against Tomura’s shoulder, watching his gills flutter open and shut as his pale hair drifts past your face. The only light you can see is from him, still pretty even now that you know its origin. You wonder what the point of it is, if he’s not supposed to come down here. To draw in prey? To let others know how to find him? For something else? It doesn’t matter. He won’t tell you even if you ask him.

Time slips away from you as you ascend, broken up only by taps of Tomura’s shoulder and his lips closing over yours, staying a little longer each time. Your eyes can’t adjust to the darkness, so you close them, but even with them shut, you’re aware of the emptiness around you. How there’s nothing for thousands and thousands of kilometers. There’s no escape from the knowledge, eyes open or closed, so you keep them open, and you study Tomura’s face as you rise together. You thought he was pretty when you saw him through your window, and you still think that – more so, the longer you look at him, whether his crimson eyes are open or closed. At first they’re closed, and you would say he’s swimming blind if you didn’t see the way his ears twitch and flick, responding to things you couldn’t hope to sense. Then his eyes open, and they stay locked on yours, unblinking until it’s time for him to lean in again.

The water never grows clearer. There’s no light but his, and when your heads break the surface, it catches you completely by surprise. You try to breathe on instinct, but your lungs are full, and your body heaves in agony, fighting to expel what Tomura gave to you. Your body doesn’t want to let it go. Even with air, real air, brushing against your lips, it’s like you’ve forgotten how. You cough and thrash, and your limbs are so leaden from the cold that you’d sink instantly if Tomura wasn’t there to hold you up. He’s pulling you sideways through the water, swimming fast, and by the time you’ve remembered how to breathe again, he’s pushing you up onto a rocky outcropping, rough with barnacles and slimy with seaweed.

“They’ll find you in the morning,” he says. You turn your head and look up at the sky, finding stars that seem almost too bright after the darkness beneath the sea. “Don’t tell them. They won’t believe you.”

You can’t imagine anyone believing you without seeing him, and maybe they wouldn’t even if they did. You turn back to look at him and find him halfway underwater already, sliding back into the depths. “No. Wait –”

He’s almost hesitant as he hauls himself partway onto the rock beside you. The hand that touches your cheek seems as though it has less webbing than before – or maybe you’re just imagining it, trying to fit him back into the reality that’s supposed to be yours. “Do you need more?”

You shake your head, even as your lungs wrestle with the salt-tainted air. There’s something you should say to him – thank you – but the words don’t feel like enough. There aren’t words in any language that are enough. Tomura leans down to you one last time, and this time, your lips meet in something that can’t be described other than as a kiss. This time, it feels as though Tomura’s breathing in.

He draws away slowly, slipping back into the water centimeters at a time, until all you can feel is his hand against your cheek, and all that’s visible are the strands of his pale hair and his eyes, just above the surface. He lifts his chin one last time to speak. “Don’t come back,” he says. “It won’t be safe.”

You can’t imagine ever setting foot on a boat again. Ever walking on the beach. Ever breathing in air that tastes like the tide again, after you’ve spent so long with the ocean inside your lungs. You nod, and you watch as Tomura vanishes below the surface. His fingers brush across your lips, and then he’s gone, as though he was never there in the first place. As though you were always alone, from your cabin in the sinking ferry to the rocks beneath the clear, cold night.

Sometimes you can convince yourself it’s a dream. On the fishing boat that spots you and the Coast Guard helicopter that picks you up from the rocks, in the hospital bed where they scrape salt-crust off your skin and untangle strands of white from your hair. It must be a dream, because if it really happened, you’d remember the darkness instead of the flickering lights. You’d remember the fear instead of the relief. You’d remember something other than crimson eyes on yours, and the press of lips against your own would be a nightmare, not a source of comfort.

“It’s not going to be fun anyway, because I don’t want to do it.” Tomura shoves the piece of stationary back towards Toga. “Find somebody else.”

“Nope! Remember last year? You didn’t do it, and then you were mad all twelve days because everybody got gifts but you,” Toga says. She pushes the paper back towards Tomura. “Come on. It’s easy. Just put things on your list – not too expensive – and somebody who gets your list will leave them for you! Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“No,” Tomura says. Toga scowls at him. “I have to go shopping for somebody, too.”

Coming up with a gift list is bad enough. Waiting around to see if he’ll get presents – or even one present – from whoever got stuck with him is worse. But Tomura watched all of last year, saw all the effort everybody else put into their presents. Special hiding places, special wrapping paper. Last year Dabi got into an arms race with his younger brother and started leaving actual riddles for the person he was giving gifts to. Tomura’s not going to do any of that shit. Whoever he gets is going to be disappointed.

“I’m not doing extra shopping,” he says to Toga. “I’m out.”

“I’m organizing this year,” Toga says. So? “What if I get you somebody with a really easy list? Somebody normal who’s not going to ask for anything weird and who’s not going to get mad if you don’t set up a scavenger hunt.”

Tomura thinks about his friends, then his coworkers. “There’s absolutely nobody like that who works here.”

“Yes there are. You just don’t know about them, because they don’t do anything to annoy you,” Toga says. Her smile starts looking a little sharp around the edges. “Write the list.”

The sooner Tomura writes it, the sooner this will stop happening. He picks up the pen, sets it against the piece of paper, and hits an instant snag. “I don’t want anything.”

“Yes, you do,” Toga says. Tomura thinks about it, then writes something. Toga grabs the pen out of his hand and crosses it out. “No. It has to be a gift. Something you wouldn’t buy for yourself. Something nice.”

“For under ¥4000?” If Tomura wants something, he usually just buys it. “This is stupid.”

 “If you don’t have specific things you want, just write down things you like,” Spinner suggests on his way past with a stack of copies. “Like say – video games, dogs, candy, energy drinks –”

“I’m not letting him put energy drinks on his Secret Santa wish list,” Toga says. Spinner shrugs and keeps walking. “That’s not a bad idea, Tomura-kun. Write the kind of things you like, and then your Secret Santa can find things like that for the right price.”

Fine. Tomura gets the pen back from Toga and writes: video games, dogs, candy – “More specific,” Toga instructs. Tomura scowls and adds parentheticals. “See, that’s perfect! Was that so hard?”

“Yes.” Tomura lets Toga have the list, then takes it back again a second later. “I need to add something.”

It’s only a sentence, and Toga reads it out loud, looking all kinds of skeptical. “I hate the cold, so I don’t want any let-it-snow shit. Wow, Tomura.”

“You said to be specific,” Tomura says. “Are we done?”

“Yes!” Toga folds Tomura’s list into a quick origami heart, then tucks it into her pocket. “This will be fun! You’ll see. You won’t regret it.”

She leaves without the stupid Christmas pen. Tomura tosses it after her and flops forward on his desk, regretting it already.

Tomura’s not a good person. On his best day he’s lazy and on his worst he’s an unapologetic asshole. The most redeeming feature he has is the fact that better people than him want to be around him for some reason, and it’s not because he’s good-looking or ambitious or rich. Since birth Tomura’s been a disappointment. That’s not the same thing as being a murderer, and as many good reasons as Tomura has to hate the house he grew up in and the family who lived there with him, none of them are enough to make him kill them all.

He doesn’t remember what he was doing the night of the murders, except that he spent part of it in the hospital. He doesn’t remember confessing, which he apparently did, and when he tries to think about any of it, he gets a splitting headache and the kind of nausea that means he’s gotten hosed down in his cell eight times since he arrived three weeks ago. Tomura’s trial is a blur, too. The only thing that’s clear in his head is the memory of you – you, and your hands clasped tight around his, holding on so hard that Tomura thought his fingers would break. Your hands are smaller than his. Your hands were strong. Your hands are warm.

Thinking of you is one way to warm up, but it comes at a cost. A shiver runs through Tomura from his fingers up, and he lurches upright on his cot to hide the motion. A split second later, the lights in his cell go on, so bright that he’s blinded for a second. He raises his hand to shield his eyes, and a guard barks at him over the intercom. “Inmate 230385, return to the rest position immediately.”

“I just sat up,” Tomura says. “Is that illegal or something?”

“Return to the rest position.”

“Why?”

“Return to the rest position or corrective action will be taken.”

Corrective action? Tomura’s already on death row. What the hell do they think they can do to him that will make a difference? Take him out of his cell, probably. And put him somewhere colder. Tomura’s blanket slid down when he sat up. He hitches it back up and lies down again.

He doesn’t need to cause trouble. He’s not going to be here long. He’s got appeals pending, and there’s no way the judge who hears the next one will be as stupid as the one at his trial. Tomura’s not going to die here. Sooner or later, he’s going to get out, and when he does, nothing anyone said at the trial will matter. His friends will still be there, and so will you. Tomura just has to hold out until then.

He stares up at the ceiling and tries not to shiver. It gets easier when he remembers the warmth of your hands around his, the last time he saw you. Tomura thinks about that, about you, and it helps. But even your memory can’t quite keep out the cold.

two

Someone’s coughing. Tomura can’t tell which cell they’re in, but they’re making a hell of a lot of noise, and it’s ripping at Tomura’s nerves. He didn’t use to have such a problem with noise, but the death row is so silent most of the time that Tomura can hear the other inmates breathing in their tiny cells. No one gets to talk unless spoken to by the guards, and the guards never speak to anyone unless it’s to correct someone. Tomura’s been on the receiving end of corrective action more than a few times by now. It’s usually not worth it.

Tomura knows it’s not worth it, and still, the urge is there. He wants to say things. He wants to ask questions – like why he’s not allowed to make phone calls or write letters, what’s happening to all the phone calls and letters that he knows are coming for him. He doesn’t want anything to do with the other prisoners, but if he needed to talk to them, he’d want to know the option was available without risking the loss of his exercise period or getting his meals reduced from three to two per day. Tomura’s heard there are worse punishments. If he’s going to get one of those, it’s not going to be for trying to talk to someone.

Still, the coughing sounds like it’s killing whoever’s doing it – but before it kills them, it’s going to kill Tomura, because he can’t take this fucking noise. He can’t say a word without permission, but this asshole gets to hack out a lung with no consequences at all? Fuck that. Tomura clenches his jaw, trying to hold in the howl of frustration. He clamps his hands over his ears so he won’t have to hear it any longer. They need to stop. No one cares, and it’s driving Tomura insane – more insane than the silence, more insane than the cold. Shut up, he thinks at them, whoever the fuck they are. Shut up, shut up –

“Shut the fuck up!” someone else explodes from somewhere further down death row. “Just die already!”

“Inmate 113019, this is a verbal reprimand for speaking out of turn. If you continue –”

“Yeah. Go for it! Put me in the protection cells! At least then I’ll be away from this fucking noise –”

The coughing takes on a weird, wet note that it hasn’t had before, something that makes Tomura’s skin crawl. It’s drowned out almost instantly by the sound of the guards’ footsteps down the hall on their way to lower the hammer on 113019, whoever he is. Whoever he is, he puts up a fight. Tomura hears heavy thuds, curses, a burst of sound that might be sobs or laughter, and somewhere in the middle of it, the coughing comes to a complete stop. It doesn’t start up again, and once the guards drag 113019 away, the cell block is dead silent once more.

Two minutes ago, all Tomura wanted was for it to be quiet again. Right now, he can’t help wondering why the coughing stopped so suddenly. Right now, he misses the noise.

three

There’s frost on the ground, and Tomura can see his breath. His teeth are chattering, and he’s shivering too hard to walk. He shouldn’t be outside. But he gets one exercise period per day, and it’s the only time he gets to spend outside his cell. The only time he gets to see the sky and breathe air that hasn’t been recycled thousands of times until it tastes old and stale. It doesn’t matter if it’s below freezing. If Tomura has a chance to be outside, he should use it.

He forces himself to take even steps on his way around the tiny exercise yard, and at the same time, he lets his mind wander – back to you, because it’s easier to think about you out here than it is in his cell. He doesn’t want to imagine you in there with him. Out here, it’s easier. He can pretend the two of you are meeting up to go for a walk, like you did on your first date. He can pretend you’re just around the next turn.

After the first time you ran into each other, Tomura didn’t think he’d see you again. Which was stupid. You worked at the library on campus, and he needed to use the library, so of course he was going to see you. And every time you saw him, you talked to him until you had to go do something else – like renew someone’s checked-out book, reserve them a study room, schedule a session with a tutor, find a source they really should have been able to find on their own. At first Tomura took those interruptions as his cue to leave. Then he started waiting through them. Then he started coming by even if you were busy, waiting however long it took for you to have time for him.

Tomura hadn’t meant to ask you out, exactly. He just told you that he wanted to talk more sometime when you weren’t busy, and you suggested taking a walk together. Worked for him. Except for the part where it was really cold, even though the sun was out and the air was still, and the part where Tomura handles the cold the same way cats handle being sprayed with a hose. He was shivering before the two of you made it halfway around campus.

You noticed. Are you okay?

Fine, Tomura muttered, and you gave him a skeptical look – but you didn’t argue. You always knew how to call him on his bullshit, right from the beginning. Aren’t you cold?

I run kind of warm, you said, and you held out your hands. Here.

Tomura knew it didn’t mean anything, but his stomach still twisted, and his hands were shaking from more than the cold when he settled them in yours. Your hands were warm, just like you said they’d be. Warm, but not sweaty, and before Tomura could say anything, you folded his hands together, with yours on either side. You’re freezing, you said. I can keep you warm, but we should probably go inside.

Yeah. Tomura was glad you were holding his hands that way. Any other way, and he’d have latched on tight, refusing to let go. Sorry. This was a dumb idea.

Not really. A walk is a decent first date.

A first date. You wanted it to be a date, and you thought it was a good one. Tomura’s face somehow managed to heat up without making the rest of him any warmer. If I ask you to get coffee with me right now, can that be our second date?

You smiled. That made Tomura feel warmer, almost as warm as your hands felt around his. That works for me.

You always kept Tomura warm, and not for the first time, Tomura wonders what’s happening to you out there. Where you are, what you’re doing. If you found somewhere to live, because you can’t pay the rent in yours and Tomura’s apartment alone. If you’ve got your job still, because Tomura was pretty sure you were going to lose it for calling out so many days to sit with him during the trial. If you’re okay without him.

Tomura’s not okay without you. That’s why he has to be careful where he thinks about you. Not inside, when he can’t escape the fact that he’s been in prison for three years already. Only out here, in the cold, when he can think about what it’ll be like when all this is over. A guard shouts at Tomura that it’s time to come inside, and Tomura picks up the pace. One more circuit around the tiny yard. A few more seconds walking with you.

four

Tomura closes his eyes and listens to the quiet tapping against the bars of the cell beside his. It’s taken him four years in here to learn Morse code, and now that he knows it, he can talk to the other inmates on death row – the ones he feels like talking to, which is basically no one. The person next to him is all right. He calls himself Kurogiri. Tomura doesn’t know why he’s here.

Nobody knows why Tomura’s here, either. On the rare occasions anyone gets to talk to anyone else, they have better things to do than go over what bullshit twist of fate led to their death sentences. Convictions don’t matter when they’re all waiting on the same punishment. All that matters is time – how much time they’ve spent in here, and how much more time it’ll take for this to end. It says something about this place that four years after he was sentenced, Tomura’s still the newest one on the block.

Not for long, though. That’s what Kurogiri’s saying. Tomura taps out a response. H-o-w k-n-o-w?

G-u-a-r-d-s. Kurogiri has some kind of in with the guards. He’s never said what it is, and Tomura’s never asked. K-u-n-i-e-d-a o-l-d c-e-l-l.

So far in Tomura’s time here, only one inmate’s died, and it wasn’t in an execution. The inmate who was sick during Tomura’s second winter here died of whatever he had, and the guards didn’t find him in the cell until the next morning. By that point the smell of death was everywhere, and instead of letting the inmates move somewhere else until it was gone, the guards left all the vents open to flush it out. They let in the cold, too. It took Tomura two weeks to get warm.

He wonders if anyone’s going to tell the new guy what happened to the last person who lived there. Then again, nobody’s told Tomura what happened to the last occupant of his cell. He doesn’t want to know. Kurogiri is tapping out another message, and Tomura listens idly. Y-o-u o-k?

Tomura double-taps – shorthand for yes. W-h-y?

There’s a long pause. A really long pause. Tomura’s in the process of repeating himself when another prisoner responds from down the hall. C-h-i-c-k-e-n-s-h-i-t. T-e-l-l h-i-m o-r I w-i-l-l.

W-h-a-t? Tomura asks. His stomach is clenching, nausea welling up like he hasn’t felt in months. It’s hard to get scared in here. Nothing ever happens. T-e-l-l –

F-i-r-s-t a-p-p-e-a-l d-e-n-i-e-d. Kurogiri answers so fast that Tomura can barely decipher it. O-n-l-y f-i-r-s-t o-n-e. O-t-h-e-r-s –

Tomura’s not listening anymore. He manages to roll sideways off his bed before he throws up, but that’s it. The nausea that overtakes him is too powerful for him to do anything but vomit on the floor, then dry-heave once his stomach empties itself completely. The other inmates are laughing at him, calling out even though the guards are already on their way. The same inmate who always gets dragged out for talking is the loudest. “You’re getting off easy, kid! You killed seven people, but you only have to die once.”

“There are more appeals,” Kurogiri says. His voice is soft, almost comforting, completely at odds with the sound of Tomura’s cell door scraping open, drowned out almost entirely by the rush of cold water spraying from the fire hose, dousing Tomura and the mess and everything in his cell all at once. “You don’t need to worry. The process has already begun –”

“I didn’t know.” Tomura’s voice is hoarse, and his mouth tastes so awful that the sensation of air rushing over his tongue makes him retch again. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

The other inmates jeer at him, pointing out that they did tell him, but they must know that’s not what Tomura meant. Tomura should have heard that news from a lawyer, from an administrator, from a doctor – from somebody important. Not from a bunch of murderers. What if that hadn’t been his first appeal? What if it was his last one? If all his appeals fail, how is Tomura going to find out? Is anyone going to tell him, or is he just going to wake up one morning and find out it’s his last day on earth?

Tomura tries not to think of you in here, when things get bad. But he lets himself this time, just this once. Just to imagine that someone’s here who loves him, someone who cares that he’s sick and lonely and terrified. Someone who could tell him that it’ll be all right. Someone he’d believe. But when his skin is crawling with cold and disgust and terror so strongly that he can’t help but try to scratch it away, it’s hard to imagine that even you could make him feel better.

five

Tomura’s never gotten a letter from the outside. Never gotten a letter from you or any of his friends or whichever lawyer is handling his appeals – or even from Sensei, who spent the entire trial testifying against him so he could “learn his lesson”. Tomura thinks Sensei owes him an explanation, given that Sensei’s testimony put him away. The person he described as committing the murders sounds nothing like Tomura, because Tomura didn’t do it. He wants to hear what Sensei has to say about that. If Sensei thinks he’s learned his lesson yet.

It’s the lack of contact from you and the others that worries him more. He thought for sure he’d hear from you, from Spinner, from Toga, from Twice. Dabi’s not the letter-writing type, and Magne and Compress were newer additions to the group, but Tomura thought they’d maybe write at least once in five years. He’d call and ask, but he’s only got some of the phone numbers memorized, and what if you’ve changed them? It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t get visits or phone calls anyway.

It feels like a punishment, but Tomura can’t figure out what he did. He acts up the standard amount for a death row prisoner, enough to lose his exercise period or get his food restricted or have his cell tossed and lose anything he’s managed to keep in there. Nothing that deserves no phone calls for five years. Five fucking years. It’s not until the newest inmate starts acting up that Tomura gets a real answer.

He knows the name of the guy in Kunieda’s old cell only because the guy keeps insisting on being called by it, no matter how many times the guards correct him for speaking out of turn. When he’s not picking stupid fights with the guards, Chisaki is bitching about how this prison compares to his last prison, and everybody got tired of it within six weeks of his arrival. Tomura doesn’t have anything to compare this prison to. Before this, he’d never spent even a night in jail.

As summer turns to fall turns to winter and the temperature inside the cell block drops to just above freezing, Chisaki calms down. For a week, then another week, then an entire month. Did he get religion or something? Tomura’s seen that happen to at least one prisoner by now, but from what he can tell, it usually takes longer. To go from fucking around constantly to not fucking around at all is a big shift. It’s weird.

One day, while he’s huddled up in his cell under his stupidly thin blanket, Tomura hears voices filtering in from the exercise yard. His cell has vents that let in the cold, and apparently also give him the chance to eavesdrop. He’s never had a chance to eavesdrop before, but that’s because no one ever talks.

Of course it’s Chisaki talking. He’s somehow gotten permission from one of the guards to speak up, and he’s getting straight to the point. “My behavior for the last month has been exemplary. In my previous prison such a record has resulted in the renewal of privileges which were previously removed – such as the opportunity for visitors. When will that be restored?”

Whichever guard he’s talking to laughs awkwardly. “Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

Tomura’s interested, too. He listens closer. “You were in maximum security before, but it’s – different here,” the guard says awkwardly. “Once a sentence is finalized, no contact is allowed with the outside world.”

“What?” Chisaki demands. “Why not?”

“It’s policy. Contact with the outside world causes distress for condemned prisoners and their families and has no practical benefit. I – no, stop –”

Shouting erupts in the yard, and Tomura cringes away from the vents, his eyes burning. It’s not a punishment. It’s not a punishment, which means it can’t be lifted, which means that even if you and the others have been calling and writing letters, you can’t get through. Tomura will never get those letters. Tomura can’t write back. When Tomura saw you in the courtroom after his sentencing wasn’t just the last time he ever saw you, it’s the last time he’ll ever get to talk to you. And he didn’t know it. If he’d known it he would have said –

The noise from the exercise yard is so intense that the rest of the cell block can hear it, too. They’re doing what they usually do, any time someone shows weakness, and because they’re shouting at Chisaki, who’s bought himself a one-way ticket to the protection cell for the next month, no one notices as Tomura sinks down in the corner of his cell and scratches his neck until it bleeds.

six

Somebody’s death sentence gets reduced to life, and the cell next to Tomura’s opens up. Rather than leaving it open, leaving Tomura alone, the guards move fucking Chisaki into it. It’s not bad enough that Tomura has to rot in here until one of his appeals is successful and gets him out of here – he has to listen to Chisaki’s bitching and whining, too. And eventually Chisaki breaks the cardinal rule, the one rule that keeps everybody on death row even sort of sane. He picked up Morse code faster than Tomura did, and one day he taps out a question aimed at Tomura. W-h-a-t d-i-d y-o-u d-o?

He signs off with the last two numbers of his prisoner number, like Tomura’s confused about who’s sending this dumb message. Tomura doesn’t bother with identifying himself by tacking the last two digits of his ID on the front of his response. f-u-c-k o-f-f.

D-i-d y-o-u d-o i-t?

f-u-c-k o-f-f. Not for the first time, Tomura wishes he could all-caps a message without banging on the bars loudly enough to attract the guards’ attention. Morse code really needs a shift key. W-h-a-t d-i-d y-o-u d-o? Y-o-u f-i-r-s-t.

Silence. Of course. Chisaki can dish it out, but he can’t take it for shit. Tomura settles into the quiet, not hoping to enjoy the break so much as get through it without making himself feel worse. Downtime is bad for Tomura these days. He spends too much time thinking. Too much time getting angry. Too much time figuring out how he got here.

He knows Sensei set him up. It had to have been Sensei, because Sensei was in charge of Tomura when Tomura was fifteen, and Sensei kept hinting that Tomura should try to reconcile with his family. Tomura only agreed so Sensei would leave him alone about it. He’d meet them, deal with whatever happened, see if he could talk Hana at least into staying in touch and sending him pictures of Mon, and get out of there. It was going to be a bad night no matter what. At least Sensei agreed to go with him.

But something went wrong. They never made it there, at least not in Tomura’s memory, because Tomura woke up in the hospital. He’d blacked out or passed out or something, and as soon as he was borderline lucid, Sensei gave him the news. Tomura still remembers the weird way he delivered it, like he was telling Tomura they were having something gross for dinner instead of telling him that his entire family had been murdered. Tomura didn’t react the right way, either. He was supposed to meet his family. Now he wasn’t going to. He laid back down and went under again.

They used that, at the trial, seven years later. The fucking prosecutor asked Sensei a bunch of questions about how Tomura responded to the news, and Sensei told them how unsettling it was that Tomura didn’t care at all about his family dying. Tomura’s lawyer wouldn’t let him get on the stand to explain his side. They’ve already decided you’re guilty. Don’t make it worse.

They were going to kill him. Tomura knew that by then. There was no way to make it worse than it was already going to be, and if he was already guilty, he might as well have told the truth. What little of it he remembers.

Chisaki is tapping on the bars again at a pace Tomura couldn’t keep up with if he wanted to. His fingers are too fucking cold. W-e a-r-e-n-t d-i-s-c-u-s-s-i-n-g m-e.

No, they’re not discussing anybody. Tomura’s done with this. Screw the guards – he taps with emphasis. F-U-C-K O-F-F.

“You want to know what he did? I’ll tell you.” Prisoner 113019 laughs from across the hallway – the same one who always laughs when something bad happens to someone else. For the first time since he got here, Tomura prays for the guards to get here fast. “The little rat bastard’s a mass murderer. Greased his entire family.”

Tomura doesn’t know how 19 got ahold of that information, and right now, he doesn’t care. He just wants the guards to get here and shut him up. “His body count is higher than mine, and he won’t even own up to it like a man,” 19 continues, gleeful. “You’ve heard him talking in his sleep. He says he’s innocent.”

“Shut up,” Tomura says. His voice sounds awful, and he realizes all at once that he can’t remember the last time he spoke. It doesn’t matter if he talks now. They’ve only got one protection cell, and 019 is going in it. “You don’t know what you’re talking about –”

“And not only is his count the second-highest on death row,” 019 continues, ignoring Tomura, “he’s a sadist, too. Maybe his family deserved it – they’d have to for raising something like him – but there’s no way his dog had it coming.”

“Shut up!” Tomura explodes. His voice cracks, and he can feel his face contorting, eyes squeezing shut and jaw clenching tight. He’s not going to cry. He can’t cry here. “You stupid fuck. I didn’t do it!”

Death row erupts in laughter, just in time for the guards to arrive. Sure enough, they head to 019’s cell first, but two guards break off to drag Tomura out of his for a talking-to, also known as getting beaten up in places that won’t show. Tomura’s been in here long enough, knows how it works here well enough, to be almost thankful for a reason to feel pain. If anyone sees him, they’ll think his eyes are watering because he just took a baton to the ribs. Not because he misses his dog.

Tomura didn’t mention his family’s deaths to you for a while. He didn’t want to see you react, because he knows how people react to stuff like that – like Tomura’s just a tragic backstory with an ugly face, like everything he is can be described by the worst things that ever happened to him. He didn’t bring up his family, but he mentioned Mon, and you asked. Tomura told himself to answer like a normal person. He ended up crying instead, and you didn’t laugh or look at him differently. You just reached for his hand and –

A blow to the hip knocks Tomura off-balance, just in time for another hit in the stomach to double him over, and Tomura crashes sideways to the floor. He sprawls out, pinned with a guard’s knee on his back, as 019 marches past, flanked by four guards, and still leering down at him. Something snaps in Tomura’s head. He reaches through the guards’ legs, seizes 019’s ankle, and yanks his leg out from underneath him.

“I’m awake,” you say, and you blink away the tears. “Come in.”

Even at eighteen, Chihiro still hesitates before she steps across the threshold, but once she’s made the choice, she throws herself onto the bed with abandon. “We got half a meter. That’s even more than the forecast said.”

“And we’ve still got power. Lucky us.” You wipe your eyes, just in case, and turn to face her. “Good morning, kiddo.”

“How long do I have to be kiddo? I’m almost done with high school.”

“Okay, you’re right,” you compromise, even as your throat tightens. She’s never met her father, never will, but the tone in her voice when she’s putting her foot down reminds you painfully of him. “What should I call you instead?”

“My name. You’re the one who picked it out.” Chihiro’s dressed in her pajamas with a hoodie thrown over them, and you can see her phone lighting up through the front pocket. “Don’t you like it anymore?”

“I love it,” you say, “Chihiro. Did you sleep okay?”

She nods. There’s something on her mind. You can tell by the way her brow furrows, and the way her mouth thins tells you that she’s planning to keep it quiet. Or that she’ll try. Chihiro has a hard time keeping her feelings inside. She and Tomura have that in common, but while you always gave Tomura space to figure out how to say what he needed to, you always let Chihiro know you’re aware, and listening. “What’s going on up there, Chihiro, my daughter who’s almost done with high school?”

She rolls her eyes, but a smile is pulling up the corner of her mouth. Her smile’s always been a little lopsided, but so has yours. “There’s only one morning of the year you ever sleep in,” she says. “The first time it snows. And then you’re different all day – not mad or depressed or anything. Just different. I was wondering why.”

“I’m sorry,” you say at once. “I’m not upset with you. It’s not anything you did. You could never do anything that would –”

“I know, Mom.” Chihiro’s crimson eyes are intent on your face. “It’s one day. You get to be weird if you need to. I just wanted to know – is it because of him? My dad?”

When she was little, you’d lie, and tell her the snow is so pretty that you can’t help but get emotional about it. There was a while where she didn’t ask. But she’s old enough now that you can admit it. You think. “Yeah,” you say. Your voice is steady. You’re proud of that. “This is around the time of year when I first met him. It brings back memories.”

“Good ones?” Chihiro settles into the pillows the way she used to when she wanted a bedtime story. “Tell me.”

You hesitate. “Not the gross stuff,” Chihiro clarifies. “I don’t want to know about that. Kaori’s mom tells her all about that stuff. And she bought her a vibrator for her birthday.”

“Huh,” you say after a second. “That’s sex-positive of her.”

“You’re being nice. What do you really think?”

You think she reminds you of Tomura. He never let you duck behind the niceties; he always wanted to know your real reaction. “I think it’s weird. Especially if Kaori didn’t ask.”

“She definitely didn’t. She’s really shy.” Chihiro grimaces. “I’m glad you’re not weird like that.”

Not weird is a good thing. Maybe. “You know I’m here if you need to talk about –”

“No, Mom. Gross.” Chihiro buries her face in the pillow. “Tell me about my dad.”

“Okay,” you say. “Your dad. He, um – there was something about him. I never met someone like him before, and I haven’t since. He told the truth about stuff, even if it wasn’t pretty, and he said what he thought even if it was a bad time. One time we went on a double date with one of his friends and their new boyfriend, and the first question out of your dad’s mouth was whether the boyfriend had drawn his facial hair on.”

Chihiro wheezes. “That’s awful,” she says, but she’s laughing – just like you were. “Had he, though?”

“We never got an answer,” you say, and Chihiro laughs harder. “Your dad could be a jackass sometimes, even to people he liked, but when it really mattered, he’d –”

Kill for them. You swallow the words. “He was there for people when they needed him,” you say instead. “He was always there for me. Even if he didn’t know the right thing to say, I could count on him to listen. And he never gave me a hard time for standing up for myself. Not even when we argued about things.”

You were sort of a pushover early on. You were worried that saying no would make you difficult, and being difficult would make him want to leave. It wasn’t how you were most of the time, or how you’d been before you and Tomura got together, and he wasn’t scared to call you out. You remember the grin on his face the first time you really put your foot down about something, set a boundary and held it. I knew you were in there somewhere, he said. This is how I like you.

That was something you loved about being with Tomura: You were good for each other. You made each other better. “It sounds like you were happy,” Chihiro ventures, and you nod. “Do you think you’d have gotten married sometime? Did you guys want kids?”

Married, maybe. Your friends and his all used to joke that the two of you were the old married couple of the group, but while you talked about the future, you almost never talked about marriage to go with it. Not until it was almost the end, and you never made it to the discussion, any discussion, about having kids. Your pregnancy was catastrophic because of what happened before it, but even if it hadn’t been, it would have raised a lot of questions that neither you nor Tomura knew how to answer. “We were really young,” you say. “I was only twenty-two. We hadn’t had that talk yet. But I think we’d have talked about it if –”

“Yeah.” Chihiro’s voice is muffled by the pillows. “Did he know about me? Before he died?”

Your stomach clenches in a tight, guilty cramp, one that’s been getting steadily worse over the years. “I didn’t find out until after he was gone.”

“Oh.” Chihiro’s voice goes small and wavering. “Do you think – um – do you think he would have liked me?”

There’s no way to know. That means what you say next isn’t technically a lie. “He would have loved you,” you say. Her shoulders shake, and you rest your hand on her back to settle her, the same as you’ve done since she was a baby. “Just like I do.”

Chihiro turns her head to look at you, her eyes glassy with tears. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. Everything’s okay.” You rub her back in slow circles. “Ask about him whenever you want. I’ll always try to answer.”

“Do you miss him?”

Other than your daughter’s ragged breathing and your own steady, shallow sips of air, there’s no sound in the world. When you open up the blinds, you’ll see an empty snowfield, unmarked by human footprints for a little while longer. Footprints in the snow will be filled in by the next storm or melted away in the thaw, but the marks Tomura left on you are indelible. There will never be room for someone else where he stood, because he’s still standing there, somewhere you can’t reach.

Sometimes you’ve thought, selfishly, that it would be easier if he really was dead, just so you wouldn’t have to cope with knowing that he’s still out there, knowing exactly where he is with no way to get to him. You’ve let Chihiro think he’s dead. You tell yourself it’s easier for her this way. It’s better that she doesn’t know what really happened to Tomura. The fact that you know is bad enough.

“Mom?” Chihiro asks, and you realize you never answered her question. “Do you still miss my dad?”

You still love him. That’s the same thing. “I do,” you say. “Every day.”

Chihiro cries herself out, and then it’s time to get moving. Her school has a late start, not a snow day, and you still have to go to work. You make a special breakfast anyway, play the music you and she used to dance to when she was little, and soon your daughter’s smiling again. Chihiro doesn’t have trouble being happy, not like you and Tomura both did. Still do, probably. Your depression was just that, but the sheer weight of Tomura’s past regularly threatened to crush him, and you doubt the nineteen years he’s already spent in prison have done anything to improve things.

But Chihiro knows how to be happy, and you know, because she tells you when she’s not. You’re not naive enough to think your teenager tells you everything, but she knows she can talk to you. And she does talk to you, getting steadily back to herself as you eat breakfast and clean up and get ready, her for school, you for work. Then the two of you crunch your way to the car and start digging it out of the snow. The snowplows must have been out last night and early this morning, because the road doesn’t have much in the way of accumulation. You’ll have to be careful of ice.

You’re both a little sweaty under your winter coats when you get in the car at last. “I’m already gross,” Chihiro complains. “Why can’t we get a garage or something?”

“Where would we put it?”

“In your room,” Chihiro says. You snort. “Or in mine. Since I’m going to uni soon.”

Your heart sinks whenever she says that, but you’ll be damned before you let it show. “You’ll still need somewhere to stay when you come back,” you say. “Maybe we don’t really need a kitchen.”

Chihiro rolls her eyes. “What? You’re not planning to turn my room into, like, a sewing room or something once I go to school?”

"No," you say. "My parents did that when I went away. I hated it."

Looking back, you took it way too personally. They weren’t saying they were done with you, or that the place you’d grown up wasn’t home anymore. You were just hurting, and looking desperately for a reason why. Coming back on school break to find your room cleaned out was a good one. “I’m not going to do that,” you say to Chihiro.“Even when you live somewhere else, you’ll always have a place with me.”

Chihiro glances sideways at you. “Kaori’s mom is freaking about her moving away.”

“Kaori’s mom freaks out a lot,” you say. You and she should have bonded, because you’re the only single moms in this small town, but Kaori’s mom makes you nervous. “How does Kaori feel about it?”

“Her mom will be fine. She’s not worried.” Chihiro pauses for a long moment. “I am, though.”

Your grip on the steering wheel goes white-knuckled. “About Kaori’s mom?”

“About you,” Chihiro says. You reach a stop sign, come to a full stop, and turn to look at her. There’s a stubborn set to her jaw that’s all too familiar. “Kaori’s mom is crazy. But Kaori’s mom has a life. She goes out some nights and her friends come to visit and she has parties and hobbies —“

“I have hobbies,” you protest.

“Yeah. Your hobby means you hang out in the house all day,” Chihiro says. “You can't carry your sewing machine and all your fabric to a craft party. Maybe if you learned to knit or something —“

“I’m not going to knit.”

“Something,” Chihiro says firmly. “Something that means you’re not alone all the time. I’m excited to go to uni. I’m worried about what’s going to happen to you when I leave.”

You’ve fucked up, big-time. “Chihiro, I understand why you —“ No, you don’t. All you understand is that you were stupid to think your damage didn’t show, awful for making Chihiro think she has any responsibility for your mess of an internal life at all. “It’s not your job to make sure I’m okay. I can take care of myself.”

“It’s not about taking care of yourself,” Chihiro fires back. “It’s about being happy. You want me to be happy, right?”

“Of course I do,” you say. “I love you.”

“I love you, Mom.” Chihiro says it bluntly, unashamedly. “So I want you to be happy, too.”

You don’t know what to say. It’s quiet, and it keeps being quiet, until a car pulls up behind you and honks its horn. You refocus on driving in a hurry. With you distracted, Chihiro pushes the point. “You barely even talk to people, Mom. Kaori’s mom thinks you hate her because you never say yes when she asks to hang out.”

“I don’t hate her,” you say. Chihiro’s skeptical look skewers you to the seat. “Look, she’s just not — it’s complicated.”

“No it’s not,” Chihiro says. “Next time she asks to hang out, say yes.”

No. “What if I sign up for an art class at the community center instead?”

“Do that, too,” Chihiro says. You grimace. “You want me to be happy. I’ll be happy if I know you’re talking to other people and doing stuff that’s not in the house. I don’t want to come back on a school break and find out you’ve only been talking to the trees or something.”

She pauses. “I guess you can talk to them a little. As long as you don’t start thinking they talk back.”

“Got it.”

You drop Chihiro off at school less than a minute before the bell rings, but she still makes you get out of the car and hug her. She hugs really tight. She got that from you. Tomura used to complain jokingly that you were a boa constrictor in a girlfriend suit. You kiss her forehead and send her on her way, then get back in the car and drive to work, feeling even worse than you did when you opened your eyes to a snowy silence this morning.

Chihiro’s wrong about Kaori’s mom. It is complicated — not because you hate her, but because she’s the nosiest person in town, and because you’ve got a lot to hide. You didn’t mean to have a lot to hide. It was just something that happened, and as the years since Tomura’s conviction have unfolded, you’ve gotten steadily more attached to the lie. It’s not about you. It’s about Chihiro, who shouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that her father’s a convicted murderer awaiting execution in supermax prison, who shouldn’t have to deal with people looking at her differently. It’s about Chihiro. It’s not about you.

Or so you tell yourself. But there’s a reason you fled from Tokyo in the aftermath of Tomura’s sentencing, why you cut off contact with his friends and yours, why you dyed your hair and changed your phone number and nuked your social media along with every email address you ever had. People hated Tomura. And because you were with him, they hated you, too. It didn’t matter that you knew nothing. That the murders he was accused of committing took place before you met him. Even if you’d dumped him the second he was arrested, you’d have been called stupid for not seeing it all along. You couldn’t hack it. You were headed for a breakdown at high speed. But you would have stayed, if Tomura hadn’t told you to go.

The last time you spoke to him was after his sentencing, as they were taking him away. You seized his hands, already cuffed, his wrists chafed raw, and for a split second, he held on so tightly that one of your fingers broke. Then he looked up, hopeless fury in his eyes. Get out of here. Don’t come back. I don’t want you to watch.

You thought he meant he didn’t want you to watch him being shoved into an armored truck for transport, but when your letters came back unopened, when he refused to let you visit or even call him, you realized the truth. He wanted you gone, just as completely as he was gone from you. That moment in the courtroom was the last one you’d ever have with him. And that was what tripped the breakdown at last. You were throwing up too much to overdose and you were too chicken to try another way, so you went to the doctor to figure it out so you could kill yourself with your chosen method. You just wanted anti-nausea pills. The doctor did bloodwork, made you give a urine sample, and gave you a diagnosis.

“Hyperemesis gravidarum,” he said, and you looked at him blankly. “You’re pregnant.”

He expected you to get an abortion. Everybody and their mother probably expected you to get an abortion. If Tomura had been there, if your accidental pregnancy had been something the two of you were dealing with together, it probably wouldn’t have even been a question. And for any other pregnancy, it would have been the only viable option in your mind. But when you thought about it, about this pregnancy, your mind rejected the idea so violently that you threw up again. You couldn’t get rid of this baby. You needed it. Looking back, you know your reasons were terrible. You had a kid so you wouldn’t be alone. So you’d keep some memory of Tomura close to you always. So you’d have a reason to keep getting up in the morning, a reason to eat and sleep and exercise, a reason to find a new job in your new town and work hard at it. So someone would need you. So you could do something with your agony at losing Tomura, grab it with both hands and twist it back into love. Deciding to have the baby was the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. And raising Chihiro, loving her, is the most important thing you’ll ever do.

She’s right about you. You do live for her. And if that means signing up for a pottery class at the community center and agreeing to grab tea with Kaori’s crazy mom so she won’t worry, that’s what you’ll do.

You work in the combined billing/records/HR department at your town’s medical clinic, with occasional ventures to the front desk when a receptionist is out sick. You spend a lot of time staring at the computer, a lot of time on the phone, and very little time talking to your coworkers — but you’ve been here for seventeen years, longer than almost anyone else. You were working here before some of your coworkers were out of primary school.

Dr. Kawada is your age, though. He greets you as you walk in. “Glad you made it. Anybody who lives past the town limits is staying home.”

“They should. The roads are terrible even with the plows out.” You hang up your coat, then sit down and power up your computer. “How many patients do you think we’ll get?”

“We have a ton of cancelations already,” Keiko, the nurse-practitioner, reports. She would be the one to make it in — Kawada would crawl here with his teeth if he had to, and she’s his wife, so of course she tagged along. “And there was a call for you, bright and early.”

“For billing? Somebody must have been losing sleep.”

“Not for billing. For you,” Keiko admonishes. “I forwarded it to your phone. It seemed kind of urgent.”

You log into your computer, then decide to check the message while you’re waiting for it to perk up. The voice on the other end of the line is completely unfamiliar. “Hi there. My name is Midoriya Izuku, and I’m a lawyer with the —" There’s a really loud sound on the other end of the line, completely obliterating whatever he was about to tell you about the organization he’s part of. “Due to confidentiality I can’t share much over the phone, but it’s really important that I get in touch with you! Please call me back to arrange a meeting —“

You hang up and delete the message. You don’t like lawyers, and this guy sounds like he has prosecutor written all over him. Or else he’s a reporter lying to you about his credentials to trick you into giving him a quote. The twenty-year anniversary of Tomura’s conviction is coming up, and there were articles at the ten-year mark, too. You’re more concerned about how this Midoriya Izuku got your number in the first place. You’re not easy to find. You made yourself tough to find on purpose.

It’s a quiet day at the office. Almost all the appointments are canceled, which means that the walk-ins get seen almost immediately, and you have time to start on your end-of-the-year reports. And time to talk, because Keiko and Dr. Kawada are in talkative moods, and you’re the best and only target. “How’s Chihiro?” Keiko asks. “Has she picked a school?”

“Not yet. Still weighing her options,” you say. And then, because you’re tired: “She’s worried about what will happen to me once she leaves.”

“Tell her not to worry. We’ll take care of you!” Dr. Kawada says with a grin. “What’s she worried about, anyway? You seem fine.”

“I am fine. But I’m signing up for an art class so she’ll stop worrying that I’m going to wither away alone,” you say. Dr. Kawada snorts. “How I’m doing isn’t her responsibility. She didn’t ask to be born and I didn’t have her so she could take care of me.”

“Nobody thinks that,” Keiko says. She gives you a weird look, but then she changes the subject. “Hey, but even once she moves out, you don’t have to be alone! Me and Shogo know lots of people we want to set you up with!”

You’re pretty sure your face goes dead white. “What?”

“I mean, I know you haven’t been seeing anyone since you moved here —"

“Because it’s not about me anymore. It’s about Chihiro.”

“Yeah, but if it’s about Chihiro, shouldn’t you want her not to worry?” Kawada’s not helping. You feel like you might be sick. “I moved here right around when you did and I’ve never seen you date anybody. Things must have gone down real bad with your ex —"

“Shogo!” Keiko swats him, mortified, then looks at you. “Sorry. He should know better.”

“Chihiro’s dad isn’t my ex,” you say. “He’s — gone.”

It’s the same trick you’ve been pulling on Chihiro since she was old enough to ask, and it works on adults, too. Kawada backs off, chagrined. “Sorry,” he says. There’s an awkward silence. “I’ve known you for seventeen years. How did I miss that?”

“I don’t like to talk about it.” You don’t even like thinking about Tomura, but every winter, it’s unavoidable. Every winter the sadness curls up around you, and although time is supposed to heal things, it’s never gotten any easier to throw off come spring. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“Yeah,” Keiko agrees. Her eyes are sad. “Still. Tell Chihiro not to worry. We’ll keep an eye on you.”

You force a smile, force your eyes to brighten. “Thank you.”

It’s the clinic’s slowest day in a while, and you spend a lot of it screwing around on the computer. You sign up for an art class, one that meets the same night as Chihiro’s choir practice, so you can pick her up on the way home. You google therapists, too — maybe she’ll feel better if she knows you have one. And maybe you need one. Chihiro’s your daughter, the most important person in the world, the one you’d sacrifice everything to care for. Caring for her takes up most of your thoughts, distracts you from the pain of losing Tomura. Once Chihiro goes away for school, there won’t be anything left to keep your sadness at bay.

Tomura’s been on death row for nineteen years. They could execute him at any time, and you’d never know until his name was released by the government. During his trial, when you realized the death penalty was on the table, you looked up how it would happen. It still haunts you sometimes. You don’t want to think of Tomura with his neck broken, his eyes open and staring, dying with feet chained together and his hands bound behind his back. You want to remember him before it all went wrong. Back when you still believed he was the best thing that ever happened to you.

You met him at university, on a day when the campus was iced over. Your on-campus job started early, which meant you had to make your way to the library on paths that wouldn’t be de-iced for another hour. Tomura had an early class. He was headed the opposite way from you, and you were both so focused on not slipping and falling that you walked headlong into each other and fell on your asses anyway.

Your backpack slid from your shoulders, and the papers Tomura was carrying scattered across the path. Fuck, Tomura said, with feeling, and you laughed. What’s so funny? You fell down, too.

I know, but — An image popped into your head and set you off all over again. We look like we’re in a cartoon. Except without the stars and planets around our heads.

No stars and planets? I want a refund, Tomura said, and cracked a smile that opened up a split in his lower lip. Damn it —

Here. You retrieved your fallen backpack and a packet of tissues, then started gathering the papers Tomura had dropped. Sorry. It looked like you were in a hurry to go somewhere.

Comp-Sci building. I’m never signing up for a 7am again. Tomura’s phone buzzed, and he yanked it out of his pocket. And now it’s canceled. Motherfucker. I have to walk all the way back —

Maybe not all the way, you said, and he looked at you. I work at the library. It’s definitely open. You can hang out there until they get the paths salted.

Tomura looked at you, the tissue still pressed to his bloody lip. You didn’t know his name yet, didn’t know anything about him, but there was something you liked about his face. Something you liked about how he still got in on your joke, even though he was pissed about the fall. Something about the fact that he hadn’t gotten up yet, even though you’d gathered all his papers and were holding them out for him to take. I’ll level with you, he said after a second. I’ve never been to the library.

I get that a lot, you said, and you stood up. The plan was to hold out your hand to help him up, but you moved too fast, and your feet slid out from under you again. You managed to hang on to Tomura’s papers, but you went down hard. Fuck!

Tomura didn’t ask if you were okay. He just lifted the papers out of your hands, set them aside, and helped you sit up with hands that shook ever so slightly. I’m surprised you swore, he said, and you raised an eyebrow. You look like the type who says fiddlesticks instead.

Fuck off, you said, and he laughed. Making him laugh felt like an achievement, one you were proud to win. Looking back, that was when you knew you were in trouble. Maybe we should just crawl to the library.

It’s cold. Walking’s faster. Tomura got shakily to his knees, then his feet, and you copied him. I bet we can make it.

He stumbled twice on the way there, and you stumbled once, but neither of you fell again. You were leaning on each other to balance, more contact than you ever made with guys you weren’t dating, and nothing about it felt tense or awkward. It was just the only thing that made sense to do.

And that’s how everything was with Tomura. It just made sense, and you were so happy — and you think Tomura was, too. You fought sometimes, sure, but everyone does. Sometimes you didn’t know the right thing to say, but neither did he. He had a rough past, and you didn’t push him to talk about it. You just let him share what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and towards the end you had something close to the whole picture. It just didn’t have the murders in it.

No. You don’t want to think about this. You know what you believe about this, and going in a circle won’t help solve anything. You decide to redirect your feelings of frustration by looking up the lawyer who called you. Sure enough, he’s a prosecutor— or he was. Looking at the profile on his law firm’s website, you’re not sure what he does. He was in the news a year or so ago. Some case involving the yakuza.

The two of you stand nearly still, switching between heavy eye contact and glances at each other’s bodies. Both growing more flustered by the minute. It’s as good of an invitation as you’re going to get: after what feels like too long, you break the tension by stepping towards him. Pulling him tightly into your arms before smashing your lips into his with the force of months of longing. There’s a momentary pause as he adjusts to your touch before he kisses you back. You would feel a little bad being so rough with his already cracked skin, but he makes no attempts to pull away. Your combined spit softening his chapped lips as the kiss deepens.

A creak echoes down the hallway, he yanks you into his room - decaying your towel in the process.

“Fuck,” he exclaims under his breath while staring you up and down. 

You’d ask if he likes what he sees, but his facial expressions and the tent growing in his sweatpants already gave him away. Your lips find his again as you shove him back on his bed, climbing over his lap. Immediately, you yank off his sweatpants and underwear. You’re already naked so it’s only fair.

You notice the way he presses into you. Back arching, hips jumping in response to your touch. His arms pull you close as he grinds you against him. Palms pressed hard into your shoulder blades with his fingers tightly tucked into fists. He increases the friction, sliding your wetness over his length as you get more and more turned on. 

One thing you hadn’t correctly predicted: you’re not the one in control here. You half assumed he’d be a little clueless about sex. That he’d cream in his pants from a light breeze but here he is, completely naked dragging you over him and you’re about to reach an orgasm first. 

“Just like that, I’m gonna cum,” you exclaim, breath staggering while you grip his hair harder.  He groans at the pull, but continues moving his hips into you in an almost calculated way. Shaking legs and pussy fluttering around nothing, you feel yourself release against him.

“What the fuck,” you moan into his neck while catching your breath, “didn’t think you had that in you.” 

“I guess you’ll have to pay more attention,” he grins before rolling you onto the bed. Quickly, he moves to a box on the shelf over his desk, pulling out a smaller box.

“You just keep those around?” you ask, eyeing the condom he’s putting on. Even more surprises.

“Uh, not quite,” he mumbles, paying more attention to the task at hand. “The rest of the league got me these as a joke when you joined, I just never threw them out.”

How did everyone notice your crush but him? It seems like they tried to tell him but he regarded it suspiciously, assuming everyone was just fucking with him. 

Doesn’t matter, you decide, he definitely knows now.

Seeing him, all of him fully, in front of you takes your already jagged breath away. Fully clothed, Tomura is beautiful. This is overwhelming. The light mist of sweat coating his skin makes the glow from his monitor reflect off the curves of his muscles. Every scar and scratch looking like it was perfectly placed, even if you know the extent he goes to to keep most of them covered on a daily basis. You cup his cheek, brushing your thumb lightly over his tender skin while he moves back over you.

“This is okay, right?” he double checks as he presses his tip into you, still dripping from earlier.

“Yeah,” you stare down, watching as he slides further in. 

“Look at me.” 

He doesn’t have to tell you twice. Instantly, you bring your gaze up to meet his. Blood red eyes stare back into yours, watching your expression shift as he inches deeper into you. Prior to this, he’d always looked away when your eyes lingered too long. Now, you feel like you could get lost in him. He’s everything you see, feel, and hear. Even the subtle smell of him surrounds you.

The mood shifts as you begin passionately kissing again. Before you know it, he’s pounding into you relentlessly, every thrust buzzing through your body. 

Making the same face as earlier, he knows you’re close. He tries to maintain the pace, but as soon as you’re clenching around him, he's done for. Your orgasms peak simultaneously as he slams you harder into the bed. Legs wrapping around his back, shoving him as deep as he can go. 

“Fuck, y/n,” he groans into your ear before you both become a puddle of bodies on his bed.

A few minutes later, he looks so peaceful. His eyes closed, breathing steady. You’ve never seen him so relaxed.

Quietly, you whisper, “I’ll be right back with some towels and water, stay here.” Taking some of his clothes to replace the towel he dusted earlier, you shuffle out the door. 

Yeah, he thought to himself, he could definitely get used to your attention.

You’ve been learning things about Shigaraki, though. It’s unavoidable, when you’ve spent more than a month having dinner with him once a week or more, and when he’s clearly not trying to play a part in front of you. You’ve learned that while he knows a lot about heroes, there are things that interest him other than utterly destroying hero society. He likes video games. He speaks some English and made you critique his grammar when he found out you were fluent. He’s curious about things – when he found out that you grew up somewhere else, that you only came to Japan so you could go to UA and didn’t really mean to stick around this long, he spent an entire night quizzing you about what it’s like in your home country. Not just the heroes. Everything.

The news called him a man-child, and he isn’t, but there’s something deeply wrong with him – or something went deeply wrong with him, given the number of tiny or innocuous things that flip some weird switch in his head and make him start clawing at his neck. His friends are important to him. His table manners are a mess, although they’re improving. He always wants to discuss, or debate, or argue about things. You couldn’t tell if he was trying to refine his arguments or if he just liked trying to get a rise out of you. Two weeks into this whole thing, you asked.

Shigaraki gave you a weird look over the meal that night – an Italian recipe you were sure he’d hate, but that he tore into the same as he does with everything else you cook. “I don’t like arguing,” he said. “I want to know what you think, so I can figure out why you think it. I can’t convince you if I don’t understand.”

That’s another thing about Shigaraki, one that disquiets you even more than the fact that he’s trying to lure you over to his side: He doesn’t lie. Or at least, he doesn’t lie to you.

You’d lie to him, though. You’d lie if he asked you why you’ve been buying extra food in case he shows up, why you’ve been letting him in. You tell yourself that you’re working an angle, trying to raise the iron concentration in his blood high enough that you can capture him with ease the next time you face him in battle. It’s a good excuse, but it is an excuse. You just don’t know what it’s an excuse for. Shigaraki’s a villain, no question about it, but he’s also a person. A person you’d maybe be friends with if things weren’t the way they are.

But things are the way they are, even if you can pretend to be allies for now – allies, because you’re both interested in seeing the Shie Hassaikai going down in flames. Sir Nighteye’s built a coalition of minor heroes from around the country, all of whom are based out of towns and cities with Hassaikai presences, and all of you are supposed to rule out the bases in your town as possible locations for the creation of quirk-canceling bullets or the confinement of small, tortured children. Of all the minor heroes, you’re the one with the misfortune to be based in the same town as the Nighteye agency.

Nighteye agency is a daylight agency. They take the day shift watching the Hassaikai house. You take the night shift, which means your schedule is unavoidably screwed. You don’t get home until four am most nights, and when you do, you’re not well-equipped to withhold information from Shigaraki. Luckily, Shigaraki doesn’t seem all that interested in withholding information from you.

“I met up with Overhaul yesterday,” he says. He used to get here just as you finished cooking; now he shows up when you’ve barely started. “He’s unhinged. He’s got this crazy plan to destroy society –”

“Which differs how from your crazy plan to destroy society?”

“He wants to go back to before quirks developed,” Shigaraki says. “I just want to tear apart the corrupt system you’ve devoted your life to.”

“Yeah, because that’s so much better.” You roll your eyes and decide to play devil’s advocate. “A world without quirks might be a fairer world. With the way things are right now, a person’s whole life is determined by what quirk they got – or whether they got a quirk at all.”

“And before, your whole life was determined by how much money your family had,” Shigaraki fires back. “That’s any better?”

“There were ways to make more money, at least.” You stir the soup you’re making. “I’m guessing Overhaul’s not trying to make a fairer world.”

“No, he just wants to put the yakuza back on top.” Shigaraki rolls his eyes and steals a raw mushroom out of the pile you’re about to add to the soup. Part of you wishes Kurogiri hadn’t blocked you on Instagram. You’d love to flex your ability to get Shigaraki to eat vegetables on him. “Are you and the other establishment puppets still trying to find his hideout?”

“Maybe.” You activate your insurance policy to stall him as he goes back for another mushroom. “Why?”

“You’re right.”

That one takes you a second. “Wait, it’s here?”

“That’s right. You owe me.” Shigaraki’s smiles always look just a little insane. “That’s not even the only present I got you.”

You’re going to hold off on calling Shigaraki’s intel a present until you can figure out a way to feed it to Nighteye without revealing where you heard it. “Since when do you get me presents?”

“I’m supposed to.” Shigaraki gives you a weird look, like he’s not the weird one for being a villain and giving presents to a hero. “But you have to answer my next question before you get the other one.”

You decide you don’t really need that second present. “Ask.”

“Why’d you name yourself Skynet?” Shigaraki asks. “Skynet’s a villain.”

“You watched Terminator?” You try to keep your voice from brightening, but it only works partway. You love old sci-fi, but nobody ever wants to watch it with you, because nobody else can put up with imagining a world without quirks. “How many of them?”

“There’s more than one?” Shigaraki looks surprised for a second. Then he refocuses. “Answer my question. You’re a hero. You picked your name way before you met me. Why’d you name yourself after a villain?”

“It was my second choice,” you say. “My first choice was Magneto.”

“Magneto,” Shigaraki repeats. “What’s that?”

“A character from a comic book. The ones before there were quirks.” You remember being so excited that there was a character with powers like yours. “But he was, um, not the best guy –”

Shigaraki smirks. “He was a villain, too?”

“In a manner of speaking,” you hedge. Magneto was a complicated guy. “My homeroom teacher knew about him and vetoed the name. So I fell back on Skynet. It sounds cooler anyway.”

You got away with it for a while, but then someone complained to the school. By then it was too late to change it, and even if it hadn’t been, it was a hill you were ready to die on. Shigaraki looks skeptical. “Did you really name yourself after a villain just because it sounded cool?”

“No,” you say, a little offended. “I don’t really know why I did it. And I don’t know why you’d only watch the first Terminator movie when the second one is better.”

It’s quiet for a second. You wonder if Shigaraki’s going to push the point, either to call you out for being dumb in your choice of code name or to look for a meaning that isn’t there, some kind of proof that it’s possible to turn you. “I’ll level with you,” he says finally, “I fell asleep in the middle of it.”

He actually looks wary, like he thinks you’re going to kick him out for falling asleep during a movie you like, instead of all the billions of legitimate reasons why you could and should kick him out. “No kidding. You’re so anemic that you could probably fall asleep standing up,” you say. Shigaraki rolls his eyes. “It’s worth watching all the way through, though. And the second one. The rest of them suck.”

“Yeah?” Shigaraki reaches into the inside pocket of his coat, pulls something out, and slaps it down on the counter. “Present number two.”

It’s a three-count box of microwave popcorn. You look down at it, then up at him. “You don’t have any,” Shigaraki says. “You need it for movies.”

“I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore. Not much time on my hands.” You’re starting to get the sense that you’re missing something. “Um –”

“You have time right now,” Shigaraki says. “I have one and a half Terminator movies to watch. And now we have popcorn.”

He can’t be saying what you think he’s saying. The problem is, you have no idea what else he could be saying. “We also have soup.”

“So we’ll eat that first, and then we’ll have popcorn.” Shigaraki shrugs. “Come on. It’s not like we can go to a theater, so this is the next best thing.”

Why would the two of you be going to a movie theater together? You’d be friends with him, sure, and movies are a friend activity – but they’re a big-group friend activity, not one-on-one. Going to the movies with just one other person is suspect. Really suspect. If this was anybody other than Shigaraki Tomura, you’d assume they were suggesting that the two of you go out.

But it’s Shigaraki Tomura, so you know he’s not asking you out. And you’re never going to turn down a Terminator rewatch. “I’m not starting the movie in the middle. We’re going back to the beginning.”

“Fine.” Shigaraki steals another mushroom. You dump the rest into the pot. “I’ll watch it again.”

The two of you eat the soup on the couch, and you discover five seconds after pressing play that Shigaraki is a movie talker. Or maybe he isn’t – he just reacts to things out loud, and there’s lots to react to, starting with the fact that this movie’s from the 1980s and therefore older than All Might is. “Where did you even find this thing?”

“My grandma was a movie buff. She said quirks made them boring.”

When you were younger, you thought she was just being edgy, but now you think she’s sort of right. There’s a quirk for everything, theoretically, so any conflict in a movie can be boiled down to wondering which quirk would solve it, and that’s not very interesting to watch. Shigaraki doesn’t start picking on your grandma, which is a relief. He focuses on the movie again, and so do you. You can’t tell if he likes it or not.

“I don’t remember this part,” he announces abruptly, just before the start of the police station massacre. “She saw that thing get up after Reese shot it ten times. She should believe him.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t,” you say. “If I dropped out of the sky and told you that there was a robot from the future wearing a skin suit and hunting you down to prevent you from fathering the person who overthrows the machines – see, look at the face you’re making. You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Only one part of it sounds stupid,” Shigaraki says.

“Which part?”

“Which do you think?”

“Robots in skin suits from the future,” you say. It’s really hard to stop yourself from adding “duh”.

“Maybe to you,” Shigaraki says, which makes no sense. On-screen, the T-800 drives a truck into the front of the police station. “Damn. That’s one way to do it.”

You really hope you don’t turn on the news one day and see that the League of Villains has driven a semi-truck into the HPSC’s headquarters. And you’re still trying to figure out what’s less believable to Shigaraki than robots in skin suits from the future. It’s not until a lot later in the movie that it clicks. You didn’t think Shigaraki had that component in his personality, but apparently he has just enough of it to think about the prospect of knocking somebody up and decide that it’s not going to happen. You could see him being pretty picky about girls, but if he gets far enough in his plans, he’ll be able to afford being picky. That’s probably it. The other idea, the one that says he’s so insecure that he can’t imagine anyone wanting to sleep with him, falls squarely into woobification territory, and you eject it from your mind as usual.

Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t have game. You could see somebody going for it, somebody who likes banter and a bit of a challenge, somebody who’s not into true romance and fairytale endings. If Shigaraki acts around the right villainess the way he acts around you, he probably won’t have a problem.

You clear away the soup bowls and make one bag of popcorn, dumping it into a big bowl and setting it on the couch between the two of you. “Thanks for bringing this.”

“Yeah.” Shigaraki doesn’t look away from the screen. He’s been quiet for a while, slumped back against the couch, and suddenly he sits bolt upright. “You’re kidding me.”

“Hmm?”

“He’s the father,” Shigaraki says, like he’s on a soap opera or something. You snicker in spite of yourself. “Shut up. The father of the resistance leader. Now I get it.”

“Okay,” you say, wondering what he’s talking about now. “There’s a sex scene coming up. We can skip it if you want.”

“No.” Shigaraki fishes a few pieces of popcorn out of the bowl. “It’s fine.”

When you named yourself Skynet, you didn’t expect that you’d one day find yourself watching an extended soft-focus sex scene, complete with dramatic hand holding, with an aspiring supervillain sitting on the couch next to you. Your life has taken some weird turns. You feel the need to reassure Shigaraki that the gunfire is going to start up again any second now, and get the weirdest look of the night in response. “Do you think that’s all I care about or something?”

“I know it’s not,” you say, deliberately ignoring all the handholding on the screen. “I just – I mean, these are always really awkward to watch with other people. Maybe I just think it’s awkward. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.”

“This shit makes you nervous?” Shigaraki nods at the screen, takes an actual look, double-takes, and glances the other way in a hurry. “Cute.”

Cute? What the hell does that mean? You decide you don’t want to know, and the promised gunfire has kicked up again, so you focus on that, hoping Shigaraki will do the same. You’re sort of offended by the whole characterization of events – you being afraid of sex scenes, which you aren’t, and you being cute, which you also aren’t. You’re not afraid of sex. You’re so not afraid of sex that you’ve actually gone out and had sex. More than once. It’s not the sex scene. It’s more who you’re watching it with.

And that’s weird. Why would watching a sex scene with a villain make you nervous?

You stick your hand into the popcorn bowl, devour a handful of kernels, and reach back in for more. This time, your fingers brush against Shigaraki’s, and you recoil so hard it’s a miracle you don’t fall off the couch.

That was rude. No way to spin it otherwise. You have to apologize. “Sorry.”

“You’d be stupid not to react like that,” Shigaraki says. He doesn’t look offended. “I’m paying attention. Don’t worry about it.”

You’re going to worry about it. You’re not putting your hand back in the bowl until his hand is somewhere else.

The first movie ends with Sarah Connor driving off into the storm, and you press mute over the too-loud credits music. You glance at Shigaraki. “Thoughts?”

“Not bad,” Shigaraki says. “You said the second one is better?”

You nod. “Let’s watch that one,” Shigaraki decides. He tips the popcorn bowl towards himself, then lets it slide back. “We need more of this.”

You get up to make another bag. Shigaraki stayed on the couch while you made the first one, but this time he comes over, lingering next to you, close enough that you’d be worried if you didn’t have four separate insurance policies wrapped around his wrists and ankles. If he comes after you, you can glue him to the ceiling in a split second. “I don’t Decay everything I touch,” he says. “I know how to make it safe.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’ll show you.” A challenging note enters Shigaraki’s voice. “Don’t kill me.”

You’re just wondering what he expects you to try to kill him over when his thumb and forefinger close around your left wrist, lifting your hand from your side up into full view. He keeps it upright with three fingers around your wrist, then raises his other hand. Both his wrists have shackles around them. You can throw him out the window if you want to. Why aren’t you doing it? Shigaraki matches his other hand up with yours, lacing your fingers through his one at a time while leaving his own extended. His hand is open. The only person holding onto anything is you.

You, and if you try to get out before he decides to let go, you risk making contact with all five fingertips. You leave your hand where it is and try to slow your heart rate down. “What is this?”

“Somebody had to do it.” Shigaraki shrugs, but he looks way too pleased with himself. Not smug. You wouldn’t call this look smug. It’s just – pleased. “I told you it was safe.”

Nobody had to do it. What the hell? Your hand is starting to shake. That hand, and the other one, and there’s popcorn popping in the microwave and rain rattling against the window and Shigaraki so close to you, too close to you. You’re panicking. You can’t panic. When you panic, you forget about how dangerous your quirk is, how you can barely control it, how disastrous it would be to let it loose to get yourself out of this. You can’t panic. You have to calm down.

You have to, but it’s not happening, and worse, Shigaraki notices. He lets go of you, but he doesn’t step back, and his hand comes lightly down against your shoulder, index finger raised. “I should have warned you before I tried it,” he says. You nod, looking everywhere but at his face. “I’ve been practicing. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know for sure. And I thought you were probably tired of waiting.”

What is going on? You need a second to figure that out, a second where Shigaraki’s not right here watching you, clearly expecting a response that’s not the one you’re having. The microwave beeps and gives you an excuse. “Go sit down. I’ll bring this over.”

His hand falls away from your shoulder, and he heads back to the couch. You take the popcorn out of the microwave, burning your hand on a drip of fake butter and doing everything in your power not to scream.

You’re not scared of him. You’re clear on that, at least – in spite of your temporary freakout, containing Shigaraki is still well within your abilities. You check him over with your metal sense, confirming the presence of your insurance policy. You’re not scared of him. You’re scared of what just happened, what it means. It means that you and Shigaraki have very different ideas of what’s going on here. You’ve maybe had different ideas this whole time.

You thought you were a restaurant and a source of entertainment and maybe you’d be friends in another life. Shigaraki thought – something else. Bringing presents something else. Going to the movies something else. Holding hands something else. He’s not just here for the free food. He likes you. And based on his comment about you being tired of waiting, he thinks you like him too.

What do you feel for him? You care, obviously – probably too much, given who you are and who he is. You’d want to be friends if the two of you were ordinary people. When you were thinking about whose type Shigaraki is, it somehow escaped your notice that you were describing yours. How does the thought of him hooking up with some villainess actually land with you? You test it out and a dent appears in your refrigerator door with a dull thud. You smooth it out in a hurry. Not well.

You need to get back over there. You scoop up the bowl of popcorn and settle back down on your side of the couch. Shigaraki looks up at you, and your stomach twists at his expression. He looks so – “How bad did I fuck up just now?”

“It was just a surprise.” A big surprise. The mother of all surprises. A surprise so massive that you nearly tore the endoskeleton out of your apartment building trying to cope. “I kind of thought hand stuff was off the table.”

That’s not wrong. It’s what you’d have thought, if you’d thought about it at all. “I didn’t want it to be off the table,” Shigaraki says. He looks away. “That’s why I practiced. I just – what was I supposed to do? Everything I can think of takes hands.”

That’s a problem. You make the executive decision not to make it your problem right now. “Um – we can sit closer together.”

Shigaraki perks up slightly. “How much closer?”

“Like –” You sit down on the middle cushion, popcorn balanced in your lap. Shigaraki edges closer to you, a few centimeters at a time, until the two of you are side by side, pressed together from shoulder to hip. “Like this.”

“My arm’s stuck.” Shigaraki works it free, fingertips tucked away inside a fist, then drapes it across the back of the couch, where it slides onto your shoulders in short order. You laugh. “What?”

“That’s kind of a move,” you say. You feel insane. “People usually do it as a yawn-and-stretch thing, but this was a lot subtler. Very smooth.”

“It wasn’t a move,” Shigaraki says. You glance up at him and see a flush creeping down his neck. “Are we watching this movie or not?”

“We’re watching.” You summon the remote by the batteries inside it and press play. Shigaraki’s arm wraps a little more tightly around you. If you turn your metal sense on him, you can feel the meager iron concentration in his blood shifting through his body, faster than usual. His heart rate is elevated. “This one’s even better than the first one.”

The Shimuras’ house is pretty on the outside, fancy on the inside – but dark. All the curtains are drawn, and the lights aren’t bright enough to compete with shadows. It doesn’t look like the kind of house that a five-year-old lives in. You don’t know a lot of people with five-year-olds, but you’re pretty sure that five-year-olds are messier than this. There should be toys around. Or kids’ books. There should be brighter colors, better lights, maybe an open window or two. It can’t be good for Tenko to have things this dark.

What do you know? You’re not a parent. Then again, you’ll be the one responsible for Tenko for the next three months, so maybe you can make a few changes around here. You bought a book on developmental theory to read on the train, but instead you ended up watching TikTok videos until the 5G vanished. Maybe you’ll start reading it tonight after you put Tenko to bed.

“So, um –” you start, as Mrs. Shimura leads you up the stairs. “Can you tell me a little bit about what Tenko’s like? I mean, obviously I’ll ask him, but –”

“Oh, we can tell you!” Mrs. Shimura’s voice is bright. “He’s –”

“After you meet him,” Mr. Shimura interrupts from behind you. “Wait here.”

You pause, and Mr. Shimura slips past you to join Mrs. Shimura up ahead. They duck into a particular room, and you can hear them talking quietly. In the meantime, you take stock of your surroundings. The Shimura house is sparsely decorated, but on the wall opposite from you, there’s a family portrait hanging. It’s a good one. Mrs. Shimura, Mr. Shimura, and two children. The boy, the smaller one, must be Tenko. But there’s another one. A girl.

She doesn’t look that much older than Tenko. Is she old enough to go on a European tour with her parents, or is she staying with somebody else? If she’s staying with somebody else, how come Tenko isn’t staying there, too? Before you can really wind yourself up over something that’s none of your business, Mr. Shimura steps out into the hall, followed by Mrs. Shimura, who’s carrying Tenko. He must not be very heavy – she’s beckoning you forward with one hand.

“He’s a bit shy,” she says, apologetic. You have a split second to realize that something’s off about the kid’s position in her arms before she steps forward, fully into the light. “This is Tenko, our son. Say hello.”

You can’t say anything at all. All you can do is stare, because Tenko’s not a little boy like you thought he’d be. Tenko’s not a boy at all. Tenko’s a doll.

“A doll?” Manami asks. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” you hiss into the phone. It’s a big cordless phone, and you’ve got it pinned between your ear and shoulder as you pack and unpack your suitcase over and over again. “A big, creepy doll. Why would I lie about this?”

“I mean, I don’t think you would,” Manami says. She sounds bemused more than anything else. Maybe you need to say “creepy” again, with more emphasis. “How big is it?”

“Like, kid-sized. They put it on the bed at night.” You can’t think of the whole bizarre ritual Mr. and Mrs. Shimura demonstrated for you without feeling like you’ve lost your mind. “They have a daily routine for it – I’m supposed to wake it up in the morning, and take it out of its pajamas and put it in its clothes and make it breakfast –”

“Why do you have to make it breakfast? Dolls don’t eat.”

“I know dolls don’t eat. Everybody and their mother knows dolls don’t eat! Even little kids only fake-feed their dolls.” You want to scream. “But they want me to make it breakfast. And play music for it. And read aloud to it – and make it lunch and dinner and read it a bedtime story like it’s a real kid. I’m even supposed to give it a goodnight kiss.”

“But it’s not a real kid,” Manami says. You hit your head against the bedpost, producing a hollow thunk. “Why do they have you taking care of a doll like it’s a real kid? Do they even have real kids?”

“They do. Did.” You wouldn’t let the Shimuras leave without giving you an answer about that one, and because they really wanted you to stay and look after their creepy doll for three months, they didn’t screw around. “Two of them. Tenko – the one they named the doll after – and an older girl named Hana. They both died in an accident seventeen years ago.”

“Oh, that’s awful.” Manami sounds like she’s tearing up. You probably would have teared up, too, if the Shimuras hadn’t told you that after they’d handed you the creepy doll they named after their dead son. “They lost both their kids at once? I would go crazy too.”

“That’s the thing. They didn’t,” you say. “Not all the way. There’s only one doll.”

“That’s kind of weird,” Manami admits. “Why wouldn’t they make one for Hana too?”

“It gets weirder. Hana has a shrine. I’m supposed to take care of it.” That’s the least weird part of your job. If all you were doing was taking care of shrines to the Shimuras’ dead kids, you’d be perfectly happy. “They don’t have a shrine for Tenko. And the only picture they have of him is in this big family portrait on the wall.”

“Huh,” Manami says slowly. “Rich people are weird.”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” you ask, exasperated. “Rich people are weird?”

“They are. Poor people wouldn’t make a life-sized doll of their dead kid and pay somebody to take care of it like it’s alive,” Manami says. You think she’s probably right. You’re poor, and if you had a kid who died, you – well, you don’t know what you’d do. You definitely wouldn’t do that. “Does it look like him?”

“Yeah. Creepily like him.” When you were racing upstairs to drop the doll on the bed and lock it in, you were unnerved enough to stop by the family portrait and check. “And creepily accurate, size-wise. Like, if you didn’t look too hard, you’d think he was real.”

“He is real,” Manami says, and you almost drop the phone. “I mean, the doll is real.”

“Right.” The doll is a little too real for your taste. “I think I meant alive.”

“That’s creepy,” Manami says, and you breathe a sigh of relief. You called her looking for validation, and you got it. You should have expected her to ask for details first. You would have. “What are you going to do?”

“I can’t stay here,” you say, but even as the words leave your mouth, you know they aren’t true. “I can’t leave, either. I need the money. And I need to be – away. For a little while at least. Until everybody forgets.”

“Until he forgets,” Manami says. Your ex-boyfriend, everybody. He’s so popular in town that they might as well be the same thing. “He came around last night looking for you. Danjuro told him off.”

You were already on edge over the doll thing, but that piece of news soaks you in an instant cold sweat. “Did he say anything?”

“Danjuro or Keigo? Danjuro would never,” Manami says, offended. You try to pace your breathing, praying you won’t hyperventilate. “Keigo said he was just worried about you, because he didn’t see you come to work yesterday – and when he asked everyone said you’d quit – so he thought he’d stop by –”

“Fuck.” If you could go back in time and give your past self one piece of advice, it would be to send the town’s youngest police chief in history packing when he asked if he could buy you a drink. That one bad decision spiraled into a nightmare you’re still struggling to escape. “I don’t understand. What is it going to take to make him stop?”

“You’re doing the smart thing. Going away, letting things die down,” Manami says. “I know this new place is creepy, but you picked it for a good reason. They’ll pay you cash, so Keigo can’t trace your cards. It’s a small town off the map, so it’ll be hard for him to find –”

“And I’m supposed to spend all day playing house with creepy Tenko, so no one will be able to tell him they saw me.” You’ll wear a disguise if you have to go out into town. Now that you know Keigo’s still looking for you, you need to be even more careful. “I just wish I wasn’t stuck here. And I wish it was a real kid.”

“Real kids pee their pants and cry,” Manami says practically, and you manage a wheeze of laughter. You knew talking to Manami would make you feel better, even if nothing has changed. “Trust me. You’re better off with the doll.”

You might be better off with the doll than a real kid, but for the first week or so of your stay in the Shimura house, you neglect doll Tenko in a way that real Tenko would never have let you get away with. Real Tenko probably wouldn’t have put up with being locked in his room all day, or being fed breakfast at two pm because you stayed up late and slept in later the night before. And real Tenko definitely wouldn’t have tolerated being schlepped around feet-up because you don’t like having his scary porcelain face so close to yours.

Then again, real Tenko probably didn’t like listening to classical music at max volume, either. Real Tenko’s also been dead for seventeen years. It’s probably safe to stop worrying about what real Tenko would think of how you deal with his freaky little homunculus counterpart.

Whenever you’re not conspicuously ignoring Tenko’s schedule, you’re getting to know the rest of the Shimura house – and outside it, the Shimura estate. It’s beautiful, so beautiful that you have a hard time imagining how anything in Europe could measure up, and when the weather allows it you spend a lot of time outdoors, poking around on the trails that cover the property and watching whatever animals wander by. The animals here aren’t very scared of people. The Shimuras probably don’t allow hunting on their property, and based on what the mailman does when he stops by every afternoon, nobody in town likes coming near the property for too long.

One person does, though. The Shimuras let you know that somebody comes by to deliver groceries – and bring your payment – once a week, and you’re coming back from a walk on a grey, foggy day when you see him. He’s balancing four grocery bags in one arm and trying to unlock the door with the other. You hurry forward. “Here, let me get that. I’m sorry.”

“I rang the bell.” The delivery guy’s face is completely concealed by the pile of grocery bags he’s toting. “No answer.”

“Yeah, I was out for a walk.”

“I thought you were supposed to stay inside. You know, since Tenko’s allergic to the air the rest of us breathe.” The delivery guy steps through the door after you unlock it, then drops the bags on the kitchen table and looks around. “Where is the kid, anyway? He’s usually attached to Mrs. Shimura at the hip.”

“He’s, uh, taking a nap.” You look the delivery guy up and down, noting blue eyes and spiky white hair, along with some burn scars and a ton of facial piercings. “I’m sorry, they didn’t tell me your name.”

“It’s Touya.” He holds out a hand to shake, and you copy him as you introduce yourself. “Yeah, Mrs. Shimura mentioned that someone new was coming, but I wasn’t sure you’d still be here. They’ve tried out a lot of nannies, but Tenko’s kind of picky. Or so I hear.”

“Are you making fun of me?” you ask. Touya’s eyebrows lift. “We are talking about the same Tenko here, right?”

“The d-o-l-l? That’s right,” Touya says. You give him the weirdest look you can manage on short notice. “Yeah. The Shimuras get pissy if we don’t talk about him like he’s real, so we all got in the habit. You will, too, if you’re here long enough.”

“We,” you repeat. “How many of you are there?”

“Me and my siblings. The Shimuras hire us to do stuff,” Touya says. “The weekly deliveries are usually my thing, but Fuyumi or Natsuo might fill in sometimes, since they can drive, too. Fuyumi helps with their garden in the summers and Natsuo does maintenance shit. I won’t bring the brat out here until it’s time to chop firewood. One of these days I’ll get lucky and he’ll lose a limb.”

You think Touya’s joking. You’re not sure. “Which one’s the brat?”

“Shoto. My baby brother. Daddy’s favorite.” Touya scoffs. “He gets all the pocket money he wants. He doesn’t even need to work, but does he let that stop him? No. He makes me drag him out here anyway –”

Touya breaks off, glances at you. “Do you have siblings?”

“Yeah.” You have siblings the same way the Shimuras have kids, but you don’t bring that up unless you’re forced to. “I’m the oldest. I’m guessing you are, too?”

“That’s right.” Touya runs a hand through his hair, spiking it up even higher than it was before. “Not that I care too much about your backstory, but you must have something really shitty going on to make this the better offer.”

“Yeah. You could say that.” You’re not too interested in Touya’s thoughts on your backstory, either. You collect the envelope with your pay and sort through it quickly, confirming that it’s all there, then look up at Touya. “Do I need to tip you or anything?”

“Twenty percent is customary.” Touya doesn’t let that crack stand for very long. “No. The Shimuras might be off the wall, but they pay well for everything – grunt work like what I do all the way up to caring for their precious little boy.”

There’s a thud from somewhere upstairs, and you jump out of your skin. Touya startles, too, but he recovers faster. “Sounds like the monkey just fell off the bed. You should probably go check on that.”

“Yeah. It was, uh – nice to meet you,” you say. Touya snorts. “See you next week.”

You don’t actually think Touya would steal your money, but you take the envelope with you when you race up the stairs to the second floor, and drop it on your bed before hurrying into Tenko’s room. You spend as little time in here as possible. It’s like a time capsule, frozen on the day the Shimuras decided to replace their dead son but not their dead daughter with a photorealistic porcelain doll, and it gives off some of the worst vibes you’ve ever felt.

You leave Tenko in here most of the time because looking at him creeps you out, and in spite of Touya’s joke about monkeys on the bed, he’s exactly where you left him. What’s fallen over is a mostly-empty bookshelf, and there’s something behind it – a little alcove in the wall, with a pile of old, dusty toys. Action figures, mainly, along with a single plushie. You go to investigate, and discover that while you’re not much of a comic-book fan, you recognize almost all the action figures. They’re from Adventures of All Might, a cartoon your brother used to watch. It’s been off the air for ten years at least. What are toys from a show that old doing in a five-year-old’s room?

The answer occurs to you, and to your displeasure, it makes you even more uncomfortable than the question. This isn’t a five-year-old’s room. Shimura Tenko died when he was five years old – seventeen years ago, when Adventures of All Might was on the air. If Tenko was alive, he’d be about as old as you are. The thought weirds you out so badly that you nudge the action figures to the side and pick up the plushie.

Getting a decent look at the plushie first involves violently shaking the plushie until the dust comes up in a big cloud. Underneath the dust, the plushie’s dog-shaped, or more accurately, corgi-shaped. There’s a piece of yarn around its neck, with a cardboard tag hanging from it. You hold it up for a look and somehow manage to decipher the handwriting of a long-dead five-year-old. “Mon,” you say out loud. “That’s a good name.”

It's a good name, but thinking about it makes you miserable. A big, creepy doll might be all that’s left of Shimura Tenko, but Shimura Tenko was a real person – a little kid who liked cartoons and handmade a collar for his plushie, who’d be your age if he’d had the chance to grow up. Your eyes are stinging from the dust. You spend a few more seconds brushing it away, then carry Mon over to the bed and set him down beside Tenko.

You’re surprised at how much less unsettling the sight becomes now that you’ve added a toy to it. It’s improved enough that you feel okay spending a little longer in Tenko’s room, righting the bookshelf that fell and arranging the action figures on top of it, before you go downstairs to put away the groceries.

The Shimura house is old. Old houses make noises – weird noises, a lot of the time, and that’s just something you have to live with. You’re good at living with it most nights, but tonight, as the first really big storm of autumn rages around the house, the noises you hear sound less like old-house creaks and groans and more like footsteps. And voices. And laughter. No matter how hard you try to distract yourself, you can’t.

You tried to call Manami, but the phone lines are down, and while you haven’t tried the lights, you’re pretty sure they’re out. All you can do is huddle up in bed, the door to your room barricaded, mumbling to yourself like an actual lunatic. “This is fucked up, this is fucked up, this is so fucked up –”

You’re fucked up. You think something’s haunting this place? The ghosts of a five-year-old and his seven-year-old sister, who didn’t even die in here? Some haunting. It’s your overactive imagination putting you through hell, and you’ve got proof – your shitty ex-boyfriend Takami Keigo is very much alive, and your mind’s been telling you that one of the laughing voices belongs to him. If you were faced with a choice between a living Keigo and a ghost Keigo, you’d pick the ghost in a heartbeat. Ghosts can’t stalk you when you try to take a break from the relationship and enlist the entire town, police force included, to their cause. And you could probably exorcise him, which would be a lot easier than whatever you’d have to do to get rid of real Keigo for good.

The sounds get weirder, and they’re coming from all over the place – the ceiling above you, the hallway, the rooms on either side of yours, even inside the walls. Maybe you’ve got rats or something. You’ll ask Natsuo about that when he comes over tomorrow to clear leaves out of the gutters and branches off the roof. It’s fine if there’s rats tonight, right? You can take a rat in a fight. Probably even ten rats. You’re not going to get eaten alive by rats. Ghost Keigo could be dealt with. Rats can also be dealt with. It’s just your imagination. You need to get it together.

It's just past three in the morning, and you think the getting-it-together is going okay, when a particularly big gust of wind rattles the house. There’s a colossal bang from somewhere, but only one. The windows are shaking in their frames, producing an odd, warped sound, and somewhere beneath it, there’s another sound, a sound that’s got no place in this house. Someone’s crying. It doesn’t take much or any stretching of the imagination to convince yourself that it’s a kid.

You decide instantly that you’re not going to waste time trying to talk yourself out of it. You’ll go check on Tenko, confirm that Tenko is in fact still a doll and not a real boy, and then you’ll go to bed and sleep in as late as you damn well please.

The wood floors in the hallway are cold beneath your feet, but it’s only a short walk to Tenko’s room – and then you have to double back, because you don’t have a flashlight and the lights are out. You’re already spooked and already frustrated by the time you open the door to Tenko’s room, and when you open the door, you’re ready to be mad. You click on the flashlight, raise it, and pan it over the room. And then you freeze.

Tenko’s room is trashed. Multiple shelves have been overturned, toys and books spilling everywhere, and the curtains over the boarded-up window hang in tatters. The shade’s off the lamp on the nightstand, and the dresser drawers yawn open – or else they’ve been pulled free and scattered across the room. The sheets are askew on the bed, the bed itself shifted at a weird angle. Tenko is nowhere to be found.

“Tenko?” you say hesitantly. You pan the flashlight again, and for a split second, you see a shadow crouched atop Tenko’s bed, far too big to be the doll. You don’t need to see any more than that. You drop the flashlight and scream.

The storm drowns out your scream, and you run out of air eventually – and then you’re tired of it. Screaming’s not doing anything to help, and if the shadow was going to kill you, it would have done it by now. You crouch down and feel along the floor until you come up with the flashlight, which still works. You check the bed first, but there’s no shadow there. There never was. The only things in this house are you and Tenko, and neither of you was up on the bed like a gremlin five seconds ago. You keep looking for Tenko. He has to be in here somewhere.

And he is. You find him behind the door, Mon-chan in his arms, his knees drawn up to his chest. “Hi, Tenko,” you say, like a crazy person. “Did you get scared?”

He doesn’t answer, of course. Because he’s a doll. He’s a doll, and you’re crazy. Knowing that doesn’t stop you from looking around at the wreckage of the room, thinking about how scary it would be to have to go back to bed in here if you were a kid. Thinking about how you used to be scared of lightning and thunder – maybe still are. “If you’re still scared,” you start, “do you want to stay in my room for tonight?”

Five minutes later, you’re setting a line of pillows down the middle of your bed, leaving one half for you and one half for Tenko. And Mon-chan, because you felt less weird about inviting a doll to sleep in your bed if the doll has its plushie, too. Once you’ve got Tenko squared away, you block the door again. “It’ll be daylight soon,” you tell yourself. Then, to Tenko: “We’ll fix your room up and everything will be fine.”

Tenko’s eyes are open. His eyes are grey, like they are in the family portrait, with long lashes. You reach out and close their lids carefully. The chances that you’ll be able to get to sleep are slim, but they’re zero as long as you’ve got a doll staring at you.

“It’s weird, right?” you say anxiously as Natsuo scans the mess in Tenko’s room. Most of the Todoroki kids don’t come inside the house, but you managed to lure Natsuo inside by mentioning the really loud bang you heard last night. “The wind couldn’t have done this.”

“Not with all the windows boarded up, yeah.” Natsuo looks wary. “You sure you don’t sleepwalk or anything?”

“Never,” you say. “I just – it was like this when I came in.”

“This is creeping me out,” Natsuo says, but he doesn’t look away. He’s looking around the room. “Where’s Tenko?”

“I moved him. In there.” You nod toward your room. “Things got wild in here last night. I kept thinking I was hearing voices, or laughter – or kids crying –”

You sound like a lunatic, again. Why does everything that happens to you make you look and feel crazy? “Have any of the other nannies mentioned things like that?”

“No,” Natsuo says, backing away from Tenko’s room. He glances into your room again. “Hey, Tenko. What – wait, you found Mon-chan? I remember that thing.”

“Huh?”

“That used to be his favorite,” Natsuo says. “When he was alive.”

You didn’t get much sleep last night. You’re a little slow. “Wait, you knew him?”

“We all did. Hana, too.” Natsuo starts down the hall, aiming for the stairs to the third floor. “They’re the richest family in town, and our shitty bastard of a father only wanted us to associate with the best. We all played together.”

You wish somebody had told you that earlier. “What was he like?”

“I don’t really remember,” Natsuo says with a shrug. “I was four. Touya would know better. You should ask him.”

He disappears up the stairs, and you chase after him. You don’t spend a lot of time on the top floor – it’s the master bedroom, and Mr. Shimura’s study, and a lot of stuff you feel like you shouldn’t get involved with. Natsuo doesn’t seem to have the same problem. “The attic’s open,” he calls. You climb the last few steps. “I bet the thud you heard was the trapdoor coming down.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.” The trapdoor and ladder look heavy enough to produce the sound. “Can you fix it?”

“I’d have to climb up in there.” Natsuo looks really wary now. Out of the three older Todoroki siblings, he’s the one who’s least comfortable with coming into the house. “How about you climb up and look at the hinges? I’ll tell you what to look for, and I’ll come up if there’s anything wrong.”

You don’t want to go up in the attic, either, but you also want to make sure this doesn’t happen again. You nudge past Natsuo and climb the ladder into the musty dimness of the attic. Dimness, not darkness – there’s a skylight, the first window on the upper floors of the house that’s not boarded up completely. The attic itself is cluttered and dusty, but there aren’t any cobwebs that you can see. Small favors.

You crouch down by the trapdoor. “Okay. What am I looking for?”

Natsuo tells you, but even without his instructions, you probably could have figured it out. One hinge has been completely sheared away, dangling by one barely-there screw. Natsuo climbs up to study it with you, frowning. “This doesn’t look like metal fatigue. And the wood’s still in good condition. I don’t understand why it would just break.”

“I don’t know,” you say. “Can you fix it or not?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. “You have to stick around, though. I’m not staying up here alone.”

“Fair enough.”

While Natsuo works, you investigate the rest of the attic, trying not to sneeze and create a dust storm. At least half the attic is taken up by objects labeled as belonging to “Mom”, but they’ve been there way too long to be referring to Mrs. Shimura. You blow some dust off of a big picture frame to see what’s inside and find yourself looking at a poster that could be from a circus. The background is black and yellow and grey, the lettering ornate but still legible. Psychopomp, Medium, Illusionist: See the Spectacular Shimura Nana!

The next picture frame in line has a picture of Shimura Nana herself, and it’s immediately clear to you where Mr. Shimura got his looks from. Shimura Nana is gorgeous, dark-haired and grey-eyed with a bright, almost cocky smile on her face, and there’s a birthmark just below the corner of her mouth that looks familiar. When you think about people who can talk to the dead, you don’t think of them as looking this happy.

You carry both picture frames back to Natsuo. “Did you know their grandma was a magician?”

“No.” Natsuo glances at the frames, then flinches, almost dropping his screwdriver. “Shit. If I were you, I’d get out of here.”

You raise your eyebrows, and Natsuo gives you an exasperated look. “Somebody who could talk to the dead used to live here. The people who own this place have a doll that they treat like their dead son. And last night something trashed their dead son’s room. Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? This place is haunted.”

“Don’t say that. I have to live here.”

“It’s gonna be haunted whether I say it or not.” Natsuo gives you a weird look. “Is it just the money thing? There are other ways to get money.”

“It’s not just money. I have to stay out of the way,” you say. “There’s this guy – my ex – he’s a cop –”

Natsuo’s mouth turns down at the corners. “I get it,” he says. “Our piece-of-shit old man is a cop. Our mom couldn’t get away, either.”

Your stomach drops. You know cops talk to each other. “Please don’t tell your dad that I’m –”

“Are you kidding? I barely talk to him. No way am I telling him that.” Natsuo says. He glances at you. “I get why you feel like you have to stay here. This place is still haunted.”

“Yeah,” you admit. You don’t know what’s haunting it – Tenko’s ghost, his sister’s ghost, his grandma’s ghost, or all three plus however many ghosts Shimura Nana summoned to hang out with her – but you have the same thought you had last night, and this time, you say it out loud. “I’ll take my chances with the ghosts.”

You get Tenko’s room reordered, and when the next storm comes, it doesn’t get trashed again. Then again, you go and grab the doll from the room the second you hear the first clap of thunder – not because you really think there’s a scared five-year-old ghost haunting it, but just to be safe. That same night, you retrieve Tenko’s schedule from where you abandoned it a month ago and read over it. Again, just to be safe.

It’s not that bad of a schedule, really. It’s not that weird. Most of it just involves moving Tenko from place to place around the house. You’d probably want a change of scenery, too, if you were a ghost haunting a doll. You don’t mind playing him music, but you play stuff you like, at a volume that’s a little less than earsplitting. You don’t mind reading aloud, so long as you’re reading your own books, and editing out the parts that aren’t kid-appropriate on the fly. And because he’s just there, and he’s not going to give you any feedback, it’s okay to think out loud.

At first it’s just whatever thought pops into your head, but as the days slip past in the second month of your stay at the Shimura house, you find that you’re getting into some stuff you haven’t talked about with anyone. And then, one day when you’re in the kitchen making your own dinner and setting out a plate for Tenko that you’ll inevitably throw away, you find yourself talking about something you swore you never would.

“I used to be a big sister,” you tell him. “Not like you and Hana. A bigger sister. My brother was five years younger than me, and he was my parents’ favorite, right from the start. That always used to confuse me. They liked him better even before he did anything.”

Confused is downplaying it. You were hurt. You still are, when you scratch the surface even a centimeter down. “I wanted to be a good sister, but it seemed like everything I did was wrong. I played too rough, or else I wasn’t playing with him at all. I didn’t share my toys, or I gave him toys he wasn’t supposed to have – and when I took them back, he’d always yell. And then my dad would yell. And I’d cry. But my brother was crying, too. And my mom always went to him.”

You glance back over your shoulder at Tenko. He’s sitting and waiting, like always, expression still and remote. You can’t look at him and say this next part. “When it happened, I was nine,” you say. “He was four. I was playing marbles, and he kept trying to grab them from me. He could talk by then – a lot – so I made a deal with him. He could pick any marble he wanted to play with, and let me have the rest of them. So he picked one – this big shooter, my favorite. Right out of my hand.”

The echo of your nine-year-old self’s anger still echoes through you, made all the more sickening by what happened next. “I tried to get it back, and he stuffed it in his mouth so I couldn’t. And then he started choking.”

You couldn’t get it out. You tried, screaming for help the whole time, but nothing you did made any difference. Nothing your mom did made any difference, either, and your baby brother was blue by the time the ambulance got there. Your parents didn’t blame you. You thought they were going to. You expected them to. But in their version of the story, you were barely there. You were their only kid again, and they couldn’t afford to hate you. Your brother grabbed the marble and swallowed it, and choked, and died. You just happened to be there. It wasn’t your fault.

But it was. You were the one who offered any marble he wanted. You should have known he’d pick the one you were holding – one that was too big to fit down his throat, one he’d try to keep away from you at any cost once he had it. You’re the one who couldn’t save him, and thinking about it doesn’t even make you cry. You’d say it makes you feel sick, but sick is too small of a word for the hollowness inside you. The place where you used to be a sister. The place where you used to be good.

“Today’s his birthday,” you tell Tenko, dry-eyed. “You’d be twenty-two like me if you were here for real, and he’d be seventeen, and I never told anybody that I gave the marble to him until just now. I don’t even know why I told you. I guess I thought you should know that it’s a good thing you’re not a real kid. Because I really don’t have great luck with those.”

You set Tenko’s plate down in front of him, knowing the food won’t be touched, then turn away to fill yours. When you turn back, the entire plate is gone.

You’ve gotten comfortable with the fact that the Shimura house is haunted. As comfortable as it’s possible to be when you don’t know exactly what’s haunting it. You put up with weird sounds at night, and with things being moved around, and you put up with some of your stuff going missing – but a whole plate of food vanishing because you turned around for two seconds? Nope. Not a chance. “Put it back.”

“He knows.”

You almost drop your plate, then tighten your grip. You’re losing it, officially, but you’ll be damned before you drop a bunch of food all over the floor. If you’re going to the mental hospital, you’re going well-fed. “I didn’t hear anything,” you say aloud. “I’ve just been talking to myself. That’s it.”

You stuff one bite, two bite, three bites of food into your mouth, and something speaks again. “Your brother. He knows.”

It’s not a little kid’s voice. Not the voice you’d imagine for Tenko as a ghost – but it doesn’t not sound like Tenko. It keeps talking. “He knows you tried to save him. And it matters that you tried.”

“How do you know?” Your voice rattles around the question, and there’s no answer. The strange voice doesn’t speak again, and the plate doesn’t reappear. “Please –”

“He knows,” the voice says. “He’d forgive you. If there was anything to forgive.”

The hollow place inside you has been there so long that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have anything there. When something floods backs in, it hits with such violence that it drives all the air from your lungs. You shove your plate to one side and double over, gasping for breath. Your eyes burn and your throat closes, and before you know it, you’re crying.

You don’t really cry. Keigo always said something was wrong with you, that you didn’t show your feelings and he wasn’t sure you even had them. Crying feels awful. The headache it generates is all-encompassing, and you put your head down on the kitchen table and shut your eyes, waiting for it to stop. It seems like it’ll never end, and somewhere amidst the pain and embarrassment and relief, you find a shred of hate in your heart for Keigo. You never cried in front of him? He never made you feel anything worth crying about.

When the crying stops, the headache remains, and you sit up, rubbing at the crick in your neck. You must have fallen asleep; it’s dark outside, and the kitchen’s gloomy along with it. Not gloomy enough, though. Not so gloomy that you can’t see Tenko’s plate sitting back in front of him, wiped perfectly clean. The glass of water you poured for him is empty, too. And something clicks into place in the back of your head, only slightly warped by the headache.

Hana has a shrine. Hana’s shrine has offerings on it. Maybe the food you leave for Tenko is an offering, too. “Did you like this?” you ask. Your voice sounds awful. “I can make it again sometime.”

You have to start paying more attention to what Tenko eats, if he eats any of it. It’s the least you can do, after what he told you today. Even if it isn’t true, even if the ghost haunting the Shimura house decided to tell you a lie, this is the first time you’ve ever been able to think about your brother without feeling like you’re the one being choked to death. That’s worth a meal or two, in your opinion. You might actually need to learn how to cook.

You clear Tenko’s plate away, and on an impulse, lean down to kiss his forehead. “Thank you,” you say. It feels weird to be kissing a doll, especially when you’ve been skipping the goodnight kiss so religiously, but this is a special occasion. “I feel better now.”

“Wow, have you lost it,” Touya says, laughing. He drops the groceries on the far end of the kitchen table, well away from where you and Tenko are eating lunch. “You know he can’t eat, right? He’s a doll.”

“I know. But he’s dead, so it’s like – an offering,” you say. “Since he doesn’t have a real shrine.”

“Yeah,” Touya remarks. He opens the fridge and starts shoving things in haphazardly. “Real nice piece of work on his dad’s part.”

That reminds you of something Natsuo said a while back, something you’ve been meaning to ask Touya about. “Your brother said you all knew the Shimuras. That you played together. Is that true?”

“Yeah. My assclown father and their assclown father both fell out of the same assclown tree.” Touya shuts the refrigerator, then opens the freezer. “We’d play together sometimes. Go to the birthday parties and shit. Hana went to the same school as me and Fuyumi. That’s about it.”

He glances sideways at you. “Natsuo said you were going to ask. What do you want to know?”

“What were they like?”

“Hana – she was cool. Nothing threw her off, and nothing kept her down. Everybody liked her. Even my shitheap father, which is really saying something.” Touya shuts the freezer, too, and turns to face you. “Tenko, though – he was kind of a crybaby. Everything made that kid cry. Didn’t matter if it was good or bad. If he had a feeling for longer than two seconds, there went the waterworks.”

You didn’t have a real idea of Tenko’s personality in your head. You had what Mrs. Shimura told you – shy, sweet, playful – but you threw out most of what she said on principle because she was saying it about a doll. “He was a lot,” Touya continues, “but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. It makes it kind of hard to believe the official story about what happened.”

“The official story,” you repeat. “The Shimuras just said it was an accident.”

“Yeah, they would.” Touya leans back against the kitchen table. “Both their kids drown in the well on the same day? Better be an accident.”

Your stomach lurches. “They drowned?”

“Both of them.” Touya pats his pocket, then comes up with a pack of cigarettes, followed by a lighter. “There are three schools of thought about what happened, and they all start with the well cover. I can take you out to look and prove it, but trust me when I say that thing’s a bitch – 20kg at least. The first school of thought says that Tenko got the well cover open and fell in, and when Hana heard him calling for help, she ran to help and fell in, too. And they both drown in there.”

You don’t understand why they need more than one school of thought. The first one is awful enough. “The second school of thought says somebody else opened the well cover and both kids fell in – and in that case, the question is who? The third one says that Tenko opened it himself and pulled Hana in after him. Guess which one the Shimuras went with.”

“They think he opened a 20kg well cover so he could drown himself in it and decided to take Hana with him, too?” You can barely believe it. You can’t imagine ascribing that kind of malice to a little kid. “I mean – I never met them, obviously, but – I don’t think he would –”

“I did meet him, and I don’t think so either. None of us do,” Touya says. He glances around the kitchen, his eyes lingering on Tenko for a second before drifting back to you. “Something really fucked up happened here. Fucked up things happen in the house I grew up in all the time, but not like this.”

He’s frowning. “My dad plays favorites, but he’s indifferent to the rest of us. Hana’s dad hated Tenko. You could tell.”

“How?”

“Because Hana wasn’t scared of him. Tenko was.” Touya lights his cigarette and takes a drag. “I wouldn’t spend too long thinking about it, if I were you.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to not think about it,” you say. You wish you’d asked what happened to Tenko and Hana sooner. “Is that why they’ve only got the one shrine?”

“Couldn’t tell you.” Touya shrugs, then heads over to the pantry to start unpacking the dry goods one-handed. “I can tell you this, though. When they went down into that well to get the kids out, they only found one body. And it wasn’t his.”

As if this couldn’t get more horrible. Picturing the children’s bodies floating together in the cramped quarters of the well is bad enough, but picturing just Hana, knowing that Tenko’s lost somewhere in the depths, never to be found – your skin crawls. You start unpacking the dry goods alongside Touya, trying to get through it quickly so he’ll leave. You need to be alone to think about this. You can’t talk to Tenko about it while someone else is here.

“One more thing,” Touya says under his breath. “Natsuo told me and Fuyumi about the thing. Dad cornered Fuyumi on it and she caved. So –”

So now a cop here knows that you’re hiding out from another cop. Your hands shake so badly that you drop the bag of rice you’re trying to put away. “Keep it together,” Touya warns. “We fucked up but we’re fixing it. The brat’s going to keep his ear to the ground, and we’ll keep an eye out. You should get as much advance warning as you need.”

“Okay,” you say. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank us,” Touya says. “Just think about what you’re going to do when the Shimuras get back.”

Right. You can’t stay here forever. It’s not like the Shimuras are going to let you keep taking care of Tenko when they’re here to do it themselves. Your expenses here are zero. By the time they come back home, you’ll have saved a lot of money, enough to do – something. Like get out of the country and never look back. Or hire someone to put a hit on Keigo so you never have to look over your shoulder again. Either way, you’ll be getting out of here. And you won’t see Tenko – or hang out with his ghost – ever again.

The thought shouldn’t make you sad, but it does. But nothing could possibly make you sadder than the thought of the Shimura kids trapped in the well. No matter how they got there.

Some part of you knew it couldn’t last – the part of you that’s familiar with the kind of guy you almost married, the one who always gets what he wants and can’t take no for an answer. Some part of you always knew Keigo would find you. But you weren’t prepared for what it would feel like to actually see him standing inside the kitchen of the Shimura household, surrounded by grocery bags and wearing a self-satisfied grin. You’d stammered out a question about what he was doing here, and Keigo smiled at you. “The police chief here’s a good guy. He let me know that his kids handle some of the work around here, and I offered to bring the groceries by so we’d have a chance to talk alone.”

He’d nodded meaningfully at Tenko, who you were holding. “We are alone, right? That’s just a creepy doll.”

You said yes, if only because you didn’t want Tenko anywhere near whatever you and Keigo were going to talk about. And now you’re in your room, under Keigo’s watchful eyes, packing up to leave.

The door to Tenko’s room is closed, but you’d be crazy to assume that his ghost couldn’t hear you no matter where you are in the house. “I can’t just leave,” you say for the millionth time. “This is my job. I made a commitment.”

“To take care of a human child. Not a doll.” Keigo is smiling, but his eyes are hard and glinting. “Getting out of here with me is the sanest thing anybody in your position can do. He’ll be fine.”

“No,” you say. Keigo raises his eyebrows. “They’ll be back in a month. Let me finish doing my job, and then I’ll come back.”

Keigo shakes his head. “I’m worried about your mental health. When I talked to the police chief here, and he told me his kids were helping you take care of a porcelain doll in a big house with boarded-up windows, I got even more worried. And I don’t want to be the one to break this to you, but the Shimuras were never planning to come back.”

“What do you mean?” you ask. Keigo reaches into his back pocket and produces a letter – one that’s clearly been addressed to Shimura Tenko, and one that’s already been opened. “Hey. You can’t just open people’s mail.”

“If it’s linked to illegal activity, I can do whatever I want.” Keigo slides the letter out of the envelope and clears his throat. “Dear Tenko, We are heartbroken to tell you that we will not be returning home. We can no longer live with what you have become. The girl is yours – the girl. That’s you, right?”

You can’t think of who else it would be. Keigo keeps reading, projecting his voice. “The girl is yours. She is yours to love and care for. May we all be forgiven. Yours, Mother and Father.” He lowers the letter, raises his eyebrows. “They’re sacrificing you to the memory of their dead son. You know, the one who was so sick and crazy he drowned himself just so he could drown his own sister?”

“That’s not what happened,” you say. Keigo laughs at you. “Shut up! You weren’t here –”

“Neither were you,” Keigo says. “I’ve read the police reports. The statements from the parents –”

“The ones Touya’s dad took?” You remember Touya and Natsuo comparing their dad to Tenko’s dad, and not in Mr. Shimura’s favor. “Sure. I guess they have to cover up for each other, or none of them would get away with it.”

“Okay. That’s it.” Keigo lifts the last pile of clothes out of your arms, drops them unceremoniously into your suitcase, and zips it shut. “The sooner you get out of this house, the better. We need to be far away from here by the time it comes out.”

“By the time what comes out?”

“This isn’t just the Shimuras’ goodbye letter, it’s their suicide note. Their bodies were recovered yesterday.” Keigo looks almost gleeful in the always-dim light of the Shimura house. Or maybe you really are just losing your mind. “Lawyers are going to be all over this place any day now. Let’s go.”

He pulls the suitcase off the bed with one hand, then grabs your arm with the other. “Come on. Don’t make this so difficult –”

“Give me the letter,” you say hopelessly. “I want to read it to Tenko.”

“You want to read a letter to a doll.” Keigo looks skeptical. “What’s that going to do?”

You invent something on the fly. “Closure.”

“Closure?” Keigo repeats. “Huh. I guess if it keeps you from fixating on this the way you fixate on everything else, sure. Go read the doll his parents’ suicide letter.”

Despair keeps your footsteps heavy as you make your way across the hall into Tenko’s room. You settled him on the bed with Mon-chan, like always, and you sit down on the end of the bed, the same as you do when you read him a bedtime story. “Tenko,” you start. “Um, I have to go. And I have something to tell you. I feel like you should hear it from me and not somebody else.”

You lay out the situation carefully, fighting back tears. “I’m sorry to leave like this. I don’t want to, but Keigo’s here, and he says –”

“Don’t want to?”

You haven’t heard the ghost’s voice since it talked to you about your brother. “I don’t want to,” you say. “Keigo says I have to.”

“Don’t make me sound like a dictator. I want what’s best for you,” Keigo says from the doorway. “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

“No.”

That was audible. Keigo should be able to hear it. “Keigo, did you hear –”

“You talking to yourself? Yeah.” Keigo grabs your arm, yanks you sharply away from the bed. “You went crazier than I thought in here, huh?”

“No.”

This time Keigo hears it. You can see it in his face. A split second later, the lights go out.

Keigo’s grip on your arm tightens. There’s a crash from somewhere else in the house, and his grip tightens further. He drags you out of Tenko’s room through the darkened house. “Did you plan this or something?” he asks you as you stumble down the stairs after him. “It’s a good show. If you put this much effort into making our relationship work –”

“NO.” The lights in the front hall switch on, revealing something standing dead center in the hallway, between you and the way out.

Keigo curses and rocks back a step, but you know instantly what you’re looking at, who you’re looking at. “No,” Shimura Tenko says. “No means no.”

Tenko doesn’t look very much like the doll anymore. His grey eyes are red, and his black hair is white, but you recognize his features. They’re the same ones from the doll, from the family portrait, from your memories his parents and the poster you saw of his grandmother. He’s thin, almost skeletal, his hands and limbs spiderlike. He looks filthy, and his clothes are ragged. If you’d had a nightmare of what might haunt this house the first night you moved in, it would have looked exactly like this.

You’re looking at Shimura Tenko. Shimura Tenko’s supposed to have been dead for seventeen years. You don’t know how or why he’s here, but you know one thing, one thing that’s been true since you realized the Shimura house was haunted: You’d rather take your chances with a ghost. “I don’t want to leave,” you say to Tenko, ignoring Keigo when he orders you to be quiet. “I promised I would stay.”

Tenko’s crimson gaze shifts from you to Keigo. “She stays,” he says in that strange, not-quite-human voice. “You leave.”

Keigo laughs. “Sorry, I don’t think you get it. We’re leaving. You’re staying right where you are.”

He starts down the hall again, your efforts to fight free barely making a skip in his stride. The front door opens a crack behind Tenko, and you can see a white-haired someone peering through. One of the Todorokis, maybe Touya or Natsuo who promised they’d warn you if they saw Keigo coming. Touya points at you, beckons. “I’m going to tell you this one more time,” Keigo is saying to Tenko. “Get out of the –”

Tenko lunges at him. Keigo lets go of you. And you run straight out the front door, down the front steps. Past the Todoroki siblings. As far and as fast as your legs will carry you, until you trip on something, hit your head on something else, and black out on the ground.

Smoke stings your nasal passages, and you wake up coughing. Someone is breathing raggedly next to you, and someone else is shaking your shoulder. “Come on,” Natsuo is saying under his breath. “Come on, come on –”

“No, be careful, she hit her head –” Fuyumi is patting your hand. “If you can hear us, we need you to wake up. It’s Tenko.”

Tenko, the doll? No, Tenko the – whatever he is. The thing that’s alive. The thing that’s real enough to challenge Keigo to a fight. You sit up with the worst headache you’ve had in maybe your entire life and look around. The grounds of the Shimura estate are eerily backlit, and when you glance over your shoulder, you see that the Shimuras’ house is in flames. “What – happened?”

“Tenko killed the cop,” Natsuo says. You look blankly at him. “Touya said we should burn down the house to hide it, and we thought Tenko understood. But then he went back inside.”

“He won’t come out,” Fuyumi says. “Touya’s been yelling for him, but he’s not responding. If we don’t get him out soon he’ll die. If he won’t listen to Touya, then –”

“Maybe he’ll listen to you,” Natsuo says. His expression twists. “He used to be normal. What happened to him?”

You don’t have a clue. Tenko’s alive. Somehow, some part of him – something that looks like him, or is him, or answers to his name. Tenko’s alive, and Keigo is dead, and that’s so difficult to process that your mind skips straight past it. Or tries to. Tenko is alive, and Keigo is dead because Tenko killed him, and for some reason Touya thought it was a good idea to try to burn down the Shimura house. You squeeze your eyes shut and try your hardest to compartmentalize. You can’t stop the house from burning. You can’t bring Keigo back to life. But there is someone alive in there. You can do something about that.

You get to your feet unsteadily and turn back towards the house. The top floor is in flames, light flickering behind the boarded-up windows, and although there’s smoke flooding the grounds, the lower floors of the house look clear of fire. It’s safe for you to go in. Safe enough. You duck past Touya, who’s been hollering up at the windows for Tenko to get “his creepy man-spider ass” out here, and in through the front door. And from there you have no idea what to do.

If you knew anything about who Tenko really is, you’d know where to look. The habits of doll Tenko tell you absolutely nothing. When he’s moved, or been moved, there’s no rhyme or reason to where he’s ended up – except for one time, the first time the doll ever moved from the place you left it. You climb the stairs, turn down the hall, dart past your room. The door to Tenko’s is open, the room itself trashed all over again. The only thing still in place is Mon-chan, sitting on the bed.

You grab it, in case it helps. Then you turn back to the place you found Tenko last time, and sure enough, he’s there. Right behind the door. But while doll Tenko could conceal himself perfectly in the space, the real Tenko is too tall and gangly. Even hunched in on himself with his knees drawn to his chest, there’s an elbow sticking out of the shadows in one spot, a foot sticking out in the another. His red eyes stare out blankly through the tangle of matted white hair. He’s not moving except to cough.

You’re coughing, too. It’s hard to speak. “Tenko, come on,” you say. “It’s not safe anymore. It’s time to go.”

“Dead.” His voice sounds even less human now. “They left me.”

His parents. “That doesn’t mean you have to stay here,” you say. “You don’t have to die because they did. You can come with me.”

There’s blood on Tenko’s hands, on his clothes. It’s smeared on the lower half of his face, draining from his nose and from a cut on his forehead. You pull your sleeve down over your hand, reach forward, and wipe it away, clamping down on the shiver that runs through you when he turns his head against your hand. “Come with me,” you say again, and he shakes his head. “Okay. Then move over.”

Tenko looks up, startled. “I said I didn’t want to leave you,” you say. “I meant it.”

You were wondering, all this time, if you’d know you’d finally lost your mind when it happened. The answer is yes, and the magical thing about losing your mind is that you don’t care all that much. The ex-boyfriend you were running from is dead. The house you were staying in is burning to the ground. You’ve spent the last three months taking care of a doll in a house you thought was haunted by a ghost, only to realize that everything you’ve been doing for the doll, you’ve been doing for the man it was modeled after, too. The world is upside down, twisted, backwards. Nothing and everything make sense right now.

“Either we both go,” you say, coughing harder now, “or we both stay. It’s up to you.”

You pull your hand back from wiping at his face and hold it out for him to take. He looks at it, then at you, and you wonder what he’s thinking. You wonder if he’s even scared of dying, if dying matters to something like him, whatever he is. If he really is Tenko, he’s died once before already, hasn’t he? Is it any harder to die again? Whether it is or not, Tenko doesn’t seem interested in finding out. He takes your hand, lets you pull him to his feet, and then yanks you out into the hall himself.

The air is thick and grey, and the flames are catching up, but Tenko’s fast as he drags you down the hall to the stairs. You stumble over a body at the base of them and make the mistake of looking at the face. Or what’s left of the face. Tenko doesn’t let you look for long. He pulls you past Keigo’s body to the front door and shoves you out of it – and then, before he can retreat, Natsuo and Touya seize him by his arms and yank him out after you.

The four of you tumble down the steps, landing in a heap in the driveway. Tenko is coughing, a wet, horrible sound, and while you’re able to get to your feet, he barely moves. You and the Todorokis have to drag him away from the house, down the driveway until all you can see of the house is the pillar of flames billowing up from the roof. You stop to catch your breath, and the others stop, too. You and Fuyumi, Touya and Natsuo, and Tenko sprawled on the ground between you.

It’s quiet for a second. “Wow,” Touya says to Tenko. “You’re even weirder-looking than I remember. And you reek.”

Fuyumi smacks him. Natsuo’s got bigger things to worry about. “What are we going to do with him?” he demands. “If that’s even him. If it’s some kind of monster that’s bad enough. If it’s him, he’s been dead for seventeen years – and he just killed a guy!”

“That guy was a fuckweasel,” Touya says. He glances at you. “Right?”

You don’t want to say yes. “He wasn’t a very nice guy,” you say, and Touya snorts. “I was scared of him.”

“And you’re not scared of that?” Natsuo demands.

“He’s not a that,” you say. “He’s –”

You don’t really know what. Tenko bleeds red like a human. Based on the way Tenko was yanking you around, he’s really strong. He’s so thin that he’s almost a skeleton, and he smells like he hasn’t showered in seventeen years. But whatever he is, he’s alive. That’s where you’ll start from. “He’s Tenko,” you say finally, for lack of a better way to phrase it. “I don’t know what his deal is, but I’m not scared of him right now. If I do get scared, I’ll deal with it then. I’m not leaving him here.”

“No one thinks we should do that,” Fuyumi reassures you. “We just need to think of where to put him. I know a place.”

It’s quiet for a second. “No,” Touya says suddenly. “He’s not staying at my place.”

“Just for tonight,” Fuyumi urges. “We can sneak him in now – Dad won’t be back for hours, he’ll be coming to investigate this – and clean him up before we figure out what to do with him.”

“She can stay there, too,” Natsuo says, nodding at you. “If Dad comes by, she can answer the door, and Dad will be so thrilled at the idea that you’re having straight sex that he won’t bother you for a week.”

Touya snickers at that. “Fine,” he says to Tenko. Then, to you: “You can borrow some of my clothes for him, but I’m not helping you give him a bath.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” you say. The idea of giving doll Tenko a bath felt so weird that you never did it. The idea of giving adult Tenko a bath is less weird but still something you aren’t looking forward to. You can hear sirens in the distance. “We should go now.”

Tenko’s semiconscious as you and the Todorokis load him into Touya’s car. Nobody wants to sit in the back with him, but someone has to, so you and Tenko have the backseat to yourself while all three Todorokis jam together up front. Tenko buckles his own seatbelt, but as soon as Touya pulls onto the main road, he unbuckles himself and crawls across the backseat towards you. You retreat, but there’s only so far you can go. “Uh –”

“Guys, he’s climbing on her!” Natsuo’s keeping an eye on you. “Leave her alone!”

Touya meets your eyes in the rearview mirror. “Need me to pull over?”

You shake your head. Tenko’s settling into the seat next to yours, and he buckles himself again before twisting sideways to face you. He looks awful, and somehow worse than that, he looks scared. You can’t tell if it’s a childish fear or not. Tenko hasn’t left his house in seventeen years – it wouldn’t surprise you if he was agoraphobic. And if you’d just left the only home you’d ever known in flames behind you, you’d be scared, too.

And you remember what Tenko said to you, after you told him what happened to your brother. He probably wasn’t talking to your brother from the beyond. But if the story Touya and the others believe about how Hana and Tenko ended up in the well is true, Tenko knows how it feels to have an older sister who tried to save him. Maybe it’s still okay for you to believe that your brother, wherever he is, feels the same way, too. Tenko didn’t have to give you that, but he did.

You open your arms slightly, and Tenko collapses forward into them, his spiderlike hands grabbing fistfuls of your shirt and hanging on tight. He’s too tall to hide his face in your shoulder, like he seems to want to do. His mouth ends up pressed against your ear instead. “I’m not a doll anymore,” he says. His voice is roughened with smoke, but there’s a softness to it, incongruous enough to make your skin crawl. “I can take care of you, too.”