sophsiaaa

“Why can’t it happen?” Shigaraki asks. He made his usual half-hearted offer to help when he followed you in here, but he’s allergic to almost every cleaning supply you use, and he’s so bad at it anyway that it’s faster for you to do it yourself. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like out there?”

“I know what it’s like out there,” you say, miffed. “I went to school out there. I’ve probably spent more time out there than you have.”

A few full moons back, the question of how you both got here came up. Shigaraki was about as disconcerted to learn that you were born in Asylum as you were to learn that his master first got ahold of him when he was five years old. “Then you know what you’re missing,” Shigaraki says. He takes a sip of champagne, then grimaces, probably because it went flat hours ago. “Do you ever think about leaving?”

“Everybody thinks about it.”

“What about you?”

You focus on your work, giving yourself time to think of a real answer. The bloodstain you’re scrubbing out of the tiles has probably been here longer than you’ve been alive, and a lot longer than you’ve known Shigaraki Tomura. After seven months, you’re getting better at ducking his questions. You’re getting worse at deciding which ones to duck in the first place.

Shigaraki’s master has come to Asylum to feed on every one of the last seven full moons, and each time, he’s brought Shigaraki with him. Shigaraki’s master comes to feed on the handpicked victims Overhaul and Chrono have found for him, while Shigaraki’s supposed to feed on whoever he can get his fangs into, but you’ve never seen him drink blood while he’s here. He’s hungry, usually. He usually drinks at least a little alcohol. And when he’s not eating, drinking, or conspicuously not drinking blood, he’s following you around.

You’ve stopped asking why he does it, around the same time as he stopped making excuses for why he’s supposed to. The two of you have settled awkwardly into the truth, which seems to be that if you’re both here, you’d rather spend time together than separately. It’s embarrassing for you to admit that the only new friend you’ve made here in the two years since you left the human world behind is one of the guests. It’s probably about as embarrassing for you as it would be for Shigaraki to admit that the person he’s come the closest to feeding from here is you, and he didn’t even draw blood.

“You know, I really thought we were past this,” Shigaraki says. You look up at him. “It’s not a trick question. Do you think about getting out of here or not?”

“You asked if I thought about leaving, and I said I don’t like to think about things that won’t happen. That implies that I have thought about it, and come to the conclusion that it’s not possible.” You go back to scrubbing. “What are you really asking?”

“Why you think you can’t leave.”

“I can’t blend in anymore,” you say. You raise one hand and tap your ear. Shigaraki’s eyes track the motion. “Most half-humans can pass as human at least some of the time, but I can’t. If it’s not my ears that catch someone’s attention, it’s my eyes. If it’s not my eyes, it’s my skin. There are enough things about me now that are just – off. And the human world might not be like it was in the freak-show days, but it’s still not a good place for people like me.”

“If I’m following your logic, I shouldn’t leave my lair, either. Since I can’t hide being a half-vampire.”

“You can, though,” you say. “I didn’t guess until you smiled.”

For Shigaraki, the price of walking freely in the human world would be never smiling where anyone could see it. That doesn’t seem right. Based on Shigaraki’s expression, your answers aren’t answers he likes. “So if you’re not leaving, what’s the plan? Cleaning up after guests forever? That is how long you live, right? Forever?”

“In theory.”

“You’re going to spend forever doing this.” Shigaraki’s voice is dark with scorn. “No way.”

“Why do you care if I stay here forever?” you ask, stung.

“Because it’s a shitty way to spend forever.”

“And being a vampire isn’t?”

You say it without thinking, and you regret it the instant it comes out of your mouth. Shigaraki looks like you’ve slapped him. His next words come out through clenched teeth. “Why do you think I’ve been putting it off?”

“You can put it off?” you say blankly. “How?”

Shigaraki takes another swig of champagne. You don’t know how much is left in the bottle, but if he’s planning to finish it, you’ve got a problem on your hands. “I have to kill someone,” he says. “To become a full vampire. Pick a victim, drain them completely from life to death, and that’s it. Immortality, special powers –”

Derision drips from his words. “All for the low, low price of never seeing the sun again and dying if I go too long without drinking blood. Who wouldn’t want to be a vampire?”

You know Overhaul has surveillance in each guest area. You don’t know if Shigaraki’s master is watching, or if Overhaul would tell him. “Shigaraki –”

“Except if I don’t become a full vampire,” Shigaraki continues, talking over you, “then I’m mortal. Weak. I’m useless to my master, and he’s already getting impatient.”

He drains the rest of the champagne bottle, then lowers it. It slips from his hand and shatters on the floor, and he startles, looking down at the shards of glass and then up at you, the slightest guilt on his face. “Sorry.”

You give up on the stain and hurry over, shooing him back from the broken glass. He tries to help you anyway, and you warn him off again, more firmly this time. “Stay back. I’ll do it.”

Shigaraki stays back from the glass, but stays close to you. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he says. “He wants me to do it. He says he’s patient, but he’s getting tired of waiting. I was supposed to do it here.”

“At Asylum?” You stop what you’re doing to look at him. “When?”

“The first time we were here,” Shigaraki says, and something lurches in your chest. “Your boss said I could have anyone in a maid’s uniform –”

And Chrono made sure you were in the bar, not wearing one. You didn’t know Overhaul had said that. Shigaraki is still talking. “And instead of killing a human servant I got drunk in the bar with you. We keep coming back, and I keep not doing it –”

“Because you’re hanging out with me,” you say. “Shigaraki, if this is getting you in trouble –”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Hmm?”

“If I thought about leaving,” Shigaraki says. You keep looking at him, but he’s not looking at you – and he’s scratching again. “You’re supposed to ask if I’ve thought about leaving, so I can tell you –”

You catch the glint of a scrying mirror out of the corner of your eye and slap your hand over Shigaraki’s mouth. “Stop talking.”

Shigaraki’s mouth moves against your palm, setting off a weird buzz. “How come you’re always trying to shut me up?’

“Because I might not be the only one listening.” You leave your hand there for longer than you should. You know it’s longer than you should, because you wait long enough for the hair on your arms to stand up. “Be careful what you say in here. The walls have eyes and ears – and mouths, if you’re in the wrong room.”

“How come you haven’t taken me to see that?”

“I only get sent to clean up there if Chrono’s mad at me.”

Chrono’s been mad at you a lot recently. Everyone you work with thinks that’s why you’re avoiding him, but it isn’t – he’s mad because you’re avoiding him, and you’re avoiding him because you don’t want it to come down to sleeping with him or keeping your job. Like you told Shigaraki, you don’t have anywhere else to go. You know you can’t avoid him forever, just like you can’t stay here forever. But you’re immortal. You’ve got time to put things off.

Shigaraki doesn’t. Shigaraki’s mortal, still – and right now he’s inordinately trashed on champagne, again. You finish cleaning up the glass, decide that the pool deck’s as clean as it’s going to get, and turn to Shigaraki. “Come on. We need to find somewhere for you to sober up.”

“Can’t you use a glamour on me?”

“It’ll stick better if you sober up first,” you say. “It only holds as long as you don’t do anything to break it.”

He’s not making any effort to get off the floor. You hold out your hands and he takes them, swaying on his feet once he’s upright, blinking like his vision’s gone blurry. That’s – not good. You have a spot in mind to stash him while he dries out, but you might have a hard time getting him there. “Can you walk?”

“What if I can’t? Will you carry me?”

“We’ll definitely get caught.” You palm your master rune and glance around at the bathhouse. Asylum’s guest rooms don’t usually come with shortcuts, but you’ve gotten lucky sometimes with bathhouse rooms. “There might be another way out of here. Hang on.”

No passageways on the floor, in the walls, or on the ceiling. You go so far as to check underneath the bench Shigaraki was sprawled out on. There’s nothing there, but as you’re straightening up, you catch a glimpse of something at the bottom of the bath, flickering through the water. You straighten up, cross to the bath, and wade down the steps into the water. Shigaraki watches. “What are you doing?”

You don’t answer until you’ve ducked beneath the surface and confirmed your hunch. “We can sneak out through here. There’s a passage down there and I’m pretty sure I can make it open out somewhere else.”

Shigaraki doesn’t look happy. You can’t tell if that’s nausea or the idea of going in the water. “Wait, can half-vampires cross running water?”

“This isn’t running water.” Shigaraki levers himself upright, only to slump back again. “I can’t swim.”

“You won’t have to swim,” you promise. You beckon Shigaraki forward. “Let’s go. We don’t want to be here when the next guests come through.”

Shigaraki’s hesitant on his way down the steps and into the bath. He’s tall enough to stand if he keeps his chin tipped upwards, but you’re treading water, and your uniform is heavy when it’s wet. You dive beneath the surface and tap your master rune against the tiles at the bottom of the bath, and the passageway opens, sucking you and Shigaraki down into it without warning.

It’s a short trip, and the two of you splash down in a chamber lit not by gas lanterns, but by bioluminescent lichen and mushrooms growing on the walls. The pool you’ve landed in is warm, and shallow enough that both of you can stand. You head for the edge of the pool, and so does Shigaraki. “Where are we?”

“In the foundations, I think.” You find a rock to sit on, and Shigaraki sits down next to you on it. “When Overhaul built this place, he had to build the features that would fuel things like the hot springs. After he cast the spells to keep them from fluctuating, he got rid of most of the foundations – but I guess not all of them. I had no idea this was here until today.”

“I thought you knew everything about this place.”

“Not quite,” you say. “More than Overhaul, though. I’ll probably know all its secrets by the time I’ve been here forever.”

You don’t mean it to come out the way it sounds – bitter, frustrated, angry. Even though you and Shigaraki are as close as you can get to being friends given who you are, he’s still a guest, and you’re still a maid. Silence falls between the two of you, and you’re searching for a way to walk it back when Shigaraki speaks up again. “What if you didn’t have to?”

“What?”

“What if you didn’t have to stay here forever?” Shigaraki’s red eyes, strangely illuminated in the light of the glowing plants, are intent on your face. “What if you could leave? Would you?”

“I can’t leave, so it doesn’t matter.” You were hoping not to come back to this argument. “Can you drop it?”

“If you could,” Shigaraki presses. “If you could, would you leave?”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere,” Shigaraki says, like everything you said while the two of you were still in the bathhouse suite never happened – “With me.”

You stare at him. For a second you’re stunned into silence, but then you remember. “You’re drunk.”

“Yeah. I was too chicken to say it sober.” Shigaraki’s face is flushing, deeper than alcohol alone could cause. “You don’t have to spend the rest of your life like this. You can come with me and do something that matters.”

“Like what?” You brought him down here to sober up, but now he seems drunker than before. “Shigaraki, stop it. This isn’t how it works.”

“Says who?” Shigaraki’s hands grasp your shoulders, and you freeze. “Your boss? My master? They don’t get to make the rules. We do.”

You’ve had seven full moons to observe Shigaraki, and you’ve never seen him get this intense about anything. He’s practically vibrating, and while you can’t call the light in his eyes madness, it’s too close for comfort. “The world doesn’t care about us. So we should change it. Don’t you think?”

If you knew what to say, you’d say it. You look helplessly at him, and he leans closer, lowers his voice. “There are more of us than there are of them,” he says. Us? He must mean half-breeds, and he’s probably right, but why is he talking about it like it means something? “They can’t stop us all.”

He’s close enough that you can smell the champagne on his breath, the dry scent of his skin and the ever-so-slightly softer scent of whatever he uses to wash his hair. Not blood. You’ve never smelled blood on him. “So? What do you think?”

“Ask me when you’re sober,” you say. “Then I’ll know you mean it.”

You’re hoping he forgets. You think there’s a decent chance he will, and then you’ll be off the hook, because you don’t want to think about what he’s asking any more than you have to. Sure, he’s right. Sure, every inhuman species except the werewolves treats their half-human children like trash. And sure, there are more half-humans than there are true inhumans, but the number of true humans in the world dwarfs you all. It would be nice if some things could change. But you don’t think that one half-vampire and one half-fey can do anything about it.

You can’t do anything about it. But maybe you could leave.

You shove the thought away, hard. Your heart is racing. Shigaraki smiles at you, unworried, almost carefree. “If I mean it? I do.” One of the hands on your shoulder shifts, tracing the edge where the human skin of your shoulder meets the fey skin of your arm through your uniform. “But I can wait.”

His touch is ridiculously light, but it draws all your attention. You remember him asking about the other patches of fey skin on your body, about whether he could see them, and your mind floods with the thought of how that same light touch would feel around the edges of the other seams. You order yourself to pull it together, but not before your face flushes, and not before Shigaraki notices. He looks up from your shoulder. “What?”

Before you can answer, or more likely, dodge the question, there’s a tiny splash, followed by a sharp whistle through the air. You and Shigaraki lurch apart, just in time to miss one of Overhaul’s messages. It’s for you. You peel it open with a shakier hand than usual. Bring the half-vampire Shigaraki Tomura to Room 237 at once.

“What is it?” Shigaraki asks. “Are you in trouble?”

Someone is. You don’t think it’s you. “You’re being summoned,” you say. “Let’s go.”

The message said “at once”, but you detour to change into a dry uniform before you bring Shigaraki to Room 237. If he’s soaked, that’s one thing, but it can’t look as though you were involved at the same time. Room 237 is in use, but the door is ever so slightly ajar, and when you raise one hand to knock, it swings the rest of the way open. Chrono’s standing there. Past him, you can see an unconscious figure sprawled on the bed, chest rising and falling rapidly. And past even that, in the far corners of the room, is something – else.

“Come in,” Chrono invites, and Shigaraki steps forward. You couldn’t glamour away his wet clothes, but you at least concealed the fact that he’s drunk. That’s all you can do. You turn to go, and Chrono catches your arm. “You, too. Come inside.”

You hit the brakes, or try to. Chrono’s surprised you. He pulls you in, shutting the door and throwing the room into deeper shadow. The hairs on your arms and the back of your neck are rising. You don’t want to be here. You want to run. You need to run, but Chrono won’t let go of your arm, no matter how much you pull – and now the thing in the corner is speaking, its voice deep and cold. “Tomura,” it says, and Shigaraki’s spine goes rigid. “It seems my meal was too much for me. Be so kind as to finish it.”

You feel like you’re going to be sick. Chrono tightens his grip on your arm to the point of pain. “Make Overhaul heal her,” Shigaraki says. “Then you can finish another time.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do. Too much of her soul already belongs to me,” Shigaraki’s master says. The feeling of sickness wells up stronger than before. “I know you’ve been abstaining, and I certainly admire your commitment to taste, but you are unwell. Human food can only do so much. You need blood to sustain you, and this – I’m certain you’ll quite enjoy it.”

An enormous hand emerges from the shadows. One sharp finger presses against the unconscious woman’s neck and blood spurts out. Shigaraki’s body jerks. You see his hands curl into fists at his sides. “Hurry now,” his master says. “This was quite expensive. Don’t let it go to waste.”

Shigaraki steps forward. His knees hit the side of the bed, and he crawls onto it, his body obscuring the victim’s almost completely. You don’t see his teeth sink into her neck, but you know it’s happened by the way their bodies seize as one, his falling forward against her, her head falling back as her back arches to meet him without ever regaining consciousness. You’ve seen your share of unspeakable things at Asylum, and the only thought in your mind as you watch the victim writhe beneath Shigaraki in her death throes should be horror. It should be horror, but it isn’t. It’s – jealousy.

Not for what’s happening to her. You’d wish that on no one, not even your worst enemy, but jealousy for everything else; for the way he’s pressed against her, the way they seem to move in unison, the hideous intimacy of it all. Death and sex go hand in hand so often in this place, and yet they’ve never been so closely intertwined. The victim’s hand jerks weakly upwards in a last grasp for help, and Shigaraki catches it, holds it down, without pulling away from her throat. The sick, shameful, guilt-ridden fury that rises up within you gives you the strength to pull your arm free of Chrono’s grip at last.

He reaches for you, but you’re faster than he is, and you know Asylum well enough to evade him, slipping into a secret passage just behind the door. From there it’s sidestep after sidestep, taking you high into the upper reaches of the brothel, as far away from Room 237 as possible. No one can chase you here. Even if they knew where you were, you could get away long before they reached you. You could stay in Asylum forever, if you wanted, and no one would ever lay eyes on you again.

But no matter how far you run, some part of you will still be trapped in Room 237, still watching Shigaraki drain the last few drops of blood from a victim who was already gone, still seething with jealousy. No matter how you try to shake the thought off, it clings to you. Shigaraki will drink from thousands over the course of his life as a vampire. Scenes like the one you saw tonight will play out thousands of times, that twisted intimacy unfolding over and over again. More intimacy of any kind than you’ll ever have with him.

You hadn’t realized you wanted it so badly. You hadn’t realized you wanted it at all, but now you do – and now it’s too late.

You shirk your duties until the full moon dips below Asylum’s false horizon, and once you’re certain Shigaraki and his master are gone, you come back to face whatever punishment Overhaul sees fit to levy. But Overhaul doesn’t seem to know. He commends you flatly for keeping Shigaraki out of any expensive varieties of trouble and goes back to tallying the night’s earnings, leaving Chrono responsible for dealing with you.

“Instructive, wasn’t that?” Chrono says to you, almost smugly. “The sight of a vampire feeding often provokes intense emotions. Perhaps we should sell tickets.”

You clench your jaw, but the question escapes anyway. “Why did you make me watch?”

“I know you’ve grown fond of the master vampire’s brat,” Chrono says. “Experience has given me certain advantages to share with you, such as the knowledge that nothing will ever matter more to a vampire than its pursuit of blood. Did you think Shigaraki Tomura cared for you? He will always care for his meals more.”

Of course he will. Why wouldn’t he? There’s nothing you could offer that would compare to that. “Does the knowledge wound you?” Chrono inquires. “You need not answer. I can see it.”

“Then why ask?” Your voice is dull.

“If it wounds you deeply, I apologize,” Chrono says. “Perhaps you’ll allow me to comfort you.”

You hear what he’s actually offering, and some part of you that still has the capacity for anger and betrayal is furious with him. Some part of you feels more hatred for him than for anyone in your entire life – for destroying the only friendship you had in order to corner you into giving in to him. That piece of you rebels. The rest of you is too numb and hurt to care. Maybe this will fix you, comfort you, distract you. You’ll feel something different, if nothing else.