#slashbox

Their first dinner as Mr and Mrs. Shigaraki…..

Nezumi x Shigaraki Tomura

Part 1: The House Where Noise Lived

Nezumi was born on a humid summer night, in a hospital that smelled like bleach and old coffee. Her parents were not monsters in the beginning. They were just two people who were not ready.

Her father liked being seen as a “hard-working good man.” He wore that image like a suit he never took off. Her mother liked looking like the perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect everything. They looked very nice in photos.

Photos did not record the sound.

At home, the noise never really stopped.

Voices up. Doors slamming. Plates crashing. Her father’s voice like a thunderclap. Her mother’s voice like broken glass.

Nezumi was a quiet baby. Not because she did not have feelings, but because everything was already too loud.

She did not like being held wrong. She cried when lights were too bright. She flapped her hands or rocked when her body had too much feeling and nowhere to put it. She lined her toys up in specific ways. She echoed things from the TV because the way the characters spoke made more sense than the things her parents did.

They did not understand “autism.”

They just called it “difficult.”

When they fought, Nezumi would crawl behind the couch, hands over her ears, eyes shut tight. But she could still feel it anyway, every thud, every shout, every ugly word that hung in the air like smoke.

One day, when she was three, her mother ordered something that came in a big cardboard box. She unpacked it and tossed the box aside.

Nezumi crawled straight into it.

It was small and smelled like paper and dust, but it was hers. She pulled an old blanket and a stuffed animal in with her. She poked little holes so she could see the flicker of the TV outside.

When the yelling started, she dragged the box to the corner and climbed inside, knees tucked up, hands over her ears.

Cardboard walls did not stop the sound, but they made her world smaller. Manageable. Hers.

It became her castle. Her ship. Her hiding place.

Her parents joked about it to visitors.

“She loves that box,” her mother would say, laughing too loudly. “Such a weird kid, right?”

They never asked why she needed it.

⸻

The First Time She Disappeared

Nezumi was four the night her quirk woke up.

Another fight. She did not even know what started it. Money, probably. Or responsibility. Or her father’s ego. Or her mother’s resentment. She just knew the volume climbed and climbed and climbed until it felt like the walls themselves were yelling.

She dragged her cardboard box in front of the TV and climbed in.

The TV was showing some old cartoon. Bright colors. Silly voices. A world where bad things happened but were always fixed in twenty-two minutes.

Nezumi curled up, hands clamped over her ears so hard they hurt.

I don’t wanna hear this. I don’t wanna hear this. I don’t wanna be here. I wanna be in there. With them. Not here. Not here.

The thought came like a scream she could not get out.

Something clicked.

The flicker of the TV changed. The light leaking in through the cardboard slits grew brighter, sharper, more… real.

Nezumi opened her eyes.

The screen was not just in front of her anymore.

It was around her.

The cardboard walls dissolved into static, and suddenly she was somewhere in between.

Not quite in the cartoon.

Not quite in her living room.

But floating in a soft, gray hush where the shouting was gone.

It was not silent. There was the hum of signal, the buzz of electricity, a kind of fuzzy whisper that felt right against her skin.

If she concentrated, she could still see shapes of color and motion on the other side. Far away, like looking through foggy glass.

She stayed there until her parents’ voices went from full thunder to tired mutters to doors closing.

When her panic ebbed, she wanted to go back.

So she thought, home, but quiet, and the static folded around her like a blanket, then cracked open…

…and she was back in her cardboard box, in front of the TV, heart pounding, face wet with tears she did not remember crying.

Nezumi did not know the word “teleport.”

She did not know “quirk manifestation.”

All she knew was this.

When it got bad enough, the TV let her hide.

⸻

Growing Up In Between Channels

Nezumi did not tell her parents.

She was four. She already knew that anything strange about her was “annoying,” “embarrassing,” or “needs to stop.” A power like that would not be treated like a miracle. It would be treated like a problem, or a product, or something to control.

So she kept it secret.

She learned the rules of her quirk by accident.

• It only worked with analog stuff: old TVs, VHS players, radios with dials. Digital screens felt slippery, like there was nothing to grab onto.

• She had to be touching the device to slip in. Fingers on the plastic, forehead on the screen, something.

• She could always get back out if she pictured where she had been. The living room. Her room. The cardboard box.

• The longer she stayed, the more her body tingled and the less she wanted to leave. That scared her, so she set little mental “timers.”

As she grew, the fights changed shape but never really stopped.

Sometimes they were screaming matches.

Sometimes they were cold, knife-sharp silences.

Sometimes there were holes in the walls.

Nezumi got good at reading the air, like checking the weather.

Voice tight? Shoulders hard? Eyes narrowed?

She went to the TV early, sat close, one hand resting on the side… just in case.

Sometimes she only slipped halfway, fuzzy around the edges, body still in the room but brain in the static. It made everything distant enough not to crush her.

Her parents never noticed.

They just thought she was “zoning out again.”

⸻

School: Another Battlefield

School did not save her.

Nezumi was the “weird kid” from day one.

She flapped her hands when she was happy or overwhelmed. She covered her ears when the bell rang. She liked to talk about one thing for a long time. She did not always get sarcasm. Sometimes she tripped over her words and echoed phrases the teacher said because they sounded “right” in her mouth.

Kids were efficient at finding “different.”

They whispered. Mimicked the way she talked. Hid her things. “Forgot” to tell her when the game rules changed. Laughed when she melted down because the fluorescent lights and shouting and scraping chairs became too much.

Teachers called home.

“She had an outburst again.”

“She needs to learn to be more resilient.”

“Maybe if she tried harder to make friends…”

Her father hung up the phone and glared at her.

“Stand up for yourself,” he snapped. “You let them do this, they’ll walk all over you.”

Nezumi stared at the floor.

“How?” she asked. “They don’t listen.”

He did not have an answer.

Her mother hissed at her while she scrubbed dishes.

“Why can’t you be like the other girls?” she said. “They don’t make trouble. They don’t cry because someone looked at them wrong. Do you know how embarrassing it is, getting calls from school all the time?”

Nezumi swallowed the words I’m not trying to.

At school, the only place she really liked was the library AV corner. They had old TVs on metal carts, dusty game consoles, ancient tapes. She would slip her fingers against the side of a TV, just enough to feel the static under her skin, and breathe.

Video game characters and cartoon teams always took in the odd one. The loud, the quiet, the strange.

They had arguments, sure. But in twenty minutes, or a cutscene later, they were hugging and going on an adventure again.

Nezumi wondered why real life refused to work that way.

Why could no one look at her and say, You’re weird, but you’re ours?

⸻

The Only Place That Felt Like Home

By the time Nezumi was a teenager, her safe places were simple.

• her cardboard box (upgraded several times, but still there)

• any old TV or radio she could touch

• certain game worlds she replayed over and over because they stayed consistent no matter what

When things got bad at home, she actually left for a while. She would step into the static of her old bedroom TV and curl up in that between-space until the air outside her body stopped feeling like broken glass.

Her parents assumed she was sulking.

They never noticed the seconds or minutes that vanished when she reappeared.

They did not know her quirk at all. They never took her to a doctor for it. To them, Nezumi was just “lazy,” “dramatic,” “high maintenance.”

The older she got, the more open their disappointment became.

“You should’ve grown out of this,” her mother muttered when Nezumi winced at the vacuum noise.

“Stop staring at the TV like it’s your boyfriend,” her father barked. “Go outside.”

But outside was loud.

Inside was hostile.

Only the screens welcomed her without conditions.

⸻

Graduation and the “Choice”

When Nezumi finally staggered across the high school graduation stage, the school’s special-ed coordinator pulled her parents aside.

“There are programs,” she said. “Based on her disability. Colleges that will take her with support. She has options.”

Options sounded like magic.

At home, over a stack of pamphlets, her parents circled the parts that mattered to them.

• “Scholarship”

• “Financial aid”

• “Government support”

Free college. The dream.

For them.

They did not ask what Nezumi wanted until the form needed a major.

“So,” her father said, pen in hand, “what are you going to study?”

Nezumi had thought about it for years. About the way toys in shows were always the first friends, the first comfort object. About the way kids on playgrounds shared stuffed animals and characters from games like passports to a better world.

“I wanna make toys,” she said. “For kids like me. Soft ones. Ones that don’t make scary noises. Sensory toys. Stuff that makes them feel less alone.”

There was a beat of silence.

Her mother’s lip curled.

“That’s not a real job,” she said. “That’s a hobby.”

Her father snorted.

“You get a free ride and you wanna waste it on toys?” he said. “Be serious. Law school. Accounting. Something that pays.”

Nezumi’s chest tightened.

“I don’t want that,” she said. “I’d be bad at that. I want to do something that makes kids feel safe.”

“You can’t even stand up for yourself and you wanna make ‘safe’ for others?” her father snapped. “Grow up.”

“You’re not a child anymore,” her mother added. “Stop acting like you live in a cartoon.”

The argument escalated. Voices climbed. Words got meaner.

At some point, Nezumi stopped hearing them.

Her gaze drifted to the old bulky TV in the corner. Her fingers itched to touch it. To slip away into the static and never come back.

I could go, she thought, wild with hurt. I could go so deep into the signal that I forget this house ever existed. I could blur out and just be noise.

But something inside her whispered back: If you do that, you won’t just leave them. You’ll leave you too.

Nezumi did not want to disappear.

She just wanted to live somewhere that did not hate every part of her.

So instead of stepping into the TV…

She grabbed a backpack.

She shoved in clothes. Her old handheld console. A worn stuffed toy. A small portable radio she had rescued from the trash.

Her parents were still yelling when she walked down the hall.

Her father shouted after her.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Nezumi did not look back.

“Somewhere quiet,” she said. “Somewhere that’s not here.”

Then she left.

⸻

The Night Everything Changed

The city at night was a different kind of loud.

Neon glares. Car engines. Drunk laughter. Sirens in the distance.

Nezumi stuck to the back streets, clutching her backpack straps, trying not to flinch at every honk and shout.

She did not have a plan beyond away.

She found an alley near an old electronics shop and sat against the wall, hugging her knees. Her fingers rested on a portable TV she had scavenged along the way.

She thought about slipping inside, just for a bit, just to calm down.

She was mid-thought when footsteps approached.

Too heavy. Too many.

Nezumi looked up.

Three guys. Older. Laughing the way people did when they knew someone was cornered.

“Hey there,” one of them said. “Got lost, sweetheart?”

Nezumi froze.

Her brain pinged between options: run, hide, slip into the TV.

But her hands were shaking so bad she could not focus. The alley was narrow; they blocked the only exit. Their eyes looked her up and down in a way that made her skin crawl.

“Wallet,” another said. “Phone. Bag. Might let you keep your shoes if you’re polite.”

“Or we’ll take something else instead,” the first one added, grin turning ugly.

Nezumi’s stomach dropped.

Her quirk reacted to her terror, the screen at her side flickering violently, but she could not make her fingers commit to the motion to dive.

Hands grabbed her arms. Fingers dug into her hoodie, her backpack, her skin.

“Don’t,” she choked out. “Please, I’ll give you my stuff…”

One of them slammed her against the wall, and she saw stars.

It was the wrong kind of loud all over again. Different voices, same helplessness.

For a split second, Nezumi thought: I should’ve just disappeared.

Then a hand that was not theirs grabbed the nearest guy by the face.

Blue fire bloomed.

The man screamed, thrown backward against the alley wall.

Everything went white-blue for a second.

Nezumi squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them again, someone stood between her and the other two.

Pale skin. Patchwork staples. Fire in his fingers. Bored, furious eyes.

Dabi.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” he drawled, cracking his neck. “Pick on someone who isn’t clearly three bad seconds away from a meltdown.”

One guy ran.

The other swung.

Dabi dodged lazily and knocked him out with a single burning punch.

The alley stank of singed garbage and fear.

Nezumi slid down the wall, shaking, heartbeat loud in her ears. Her fingers spasmed against the side of the little TV. It flickered, her outline glitching, her body blurring for a fraction of a second.

Dabi saw it.

His head snapped toward her, eyes narrowing.

“You just flicker?” he asked. “That a quirk or am I concussed?”

Nezumi gulped.

“Q-quirk,” she admitted. “Sorry. It just… does that when I’m scared.”

He stared.

“You apologizing for existing?” he scoffed. “Wow. You are broken. My favorite kind.”

He took a drag of a cigarette Nezumi had not even seen him light, then crouched a few feet away, giving her space.

“You homeless?” he asked, voice casual but eyes sharp.

Nezumi hugged her backpack.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “As of tonight.”

“Ran away?” he pressed.

She nodded.

Her voice came out small.

“My parents… hate me,” she said. “They hate my brain. They wanted me to be someone who likes courtrooms and fluorescent lights. I just wanted to make toys.”

A choked laugh slipped out that was basically a sob.

“I ran away and almost got…”

“Almost got what?” Dabi asked, and his tone went cold at the edges.

Nezumi swallowed.

“Hurt,” she said quietly.

His jaw tightened.

He stood up fully, flicking ash away.

“What’s your quirk?” he asked, more businesslike now. “That flicker.”

Nezumi wiped her eyes.

“Analog Transport,” she said. “I can hide in old TVs. Radios. Screens. I can ride signals. Go between places. I’m still learning. It’s… not very cool.”

Dabi snorted.

“Babe, you literally ghost-glitched in front of me,” he said. “That’s extremely cool. Creepy, but cool.”

He tilted his head.

“So. You got anywhere to go? Friends? Grandma in the countryside? Some support program?”

The answer was no to all of it.

Nezumi shook her head.

“Just me,” she said. “And the static.”

Dabi clicked his tongue.

“Tch. Figures.”

He looked at her for a long moment, weighing something.

Then he jerked his chin toward the mouth of the alley.

“I know people who don’t flinch at weird quirks,” he said. “Or autism. Or crying. Or hiding in boxes. They do flinch at abuse, though. And they set things on fire for fun.”

Nezumi blinked.

“Heroes?” she asked, hopeful and horrified at the same time.

Dabi barked a laugh.

“Not even close,” he said. “Villains. The League.”

Nezumi’s stomach flipped.

“Villains?” she stammered. “But I’m not… I don’t wanna hurt people, I just…”

“Nobody’s asking you to blow up a hospital on day one,” he said dryly. “I’m saying we’ve got a roof. Food. People who know what it’s like to be the ‘problem child’ with a quirk that scares more than it cheers.”

A small smirk tugged at his mouth.

“And a boss who gets very, very attached to strays,” he added. “Especially the glitchy ones.”

Nezumi clutched her TV tighter, mind racing.

“Why me?” she asked. “You could just leave. You already helped.”

Dabi shrugged.

“Because I just watched you blink in and out of reality like a haunted broadcast and apologize for taking up space,” he said. “And for some reason that pisses me off.”

He held out a hand.

“So?” he asked. “You wanna keep trying your luck with freaks like those guys, or you wanna come meet some freaks who will at least cut them down for you?”

Nezumi looked at his hand.

At the empty alley.

At the little TV still humming under her fingers.

She thought about going into the static and staying there forever.

She thought about cartoon teams and game parties and the way they reached out to the weird kid and said, You’re with us now.

Nezumi took his hand.

Her quirk buzzed at the contact, like it recognized danger and safety at the same time.

“Okay,” she whispered. “But… if I’m scared, can I hide in your TV?”

Dabi snorted.

“You can hide in whatever you want, Slashbox,” he said. “Just don’t disappear on us without saying goodbye.”

“Slashbox?” Nezumi echoed.

“You like boxes and you slash through channels,” he said. “It fits. Now come on. Let’s go introduce you to the boss before I change my mind.”

He tugged her gently toward a warp gate she could not see yet.

Nezumi’s heart pounded.

For the first time, the loud was not just fear.

It was possibility.

Behind her, the little portable TV crackled once, then went dark.

Ahead of her, a new signal waited. Dusty couches. Static-filled screens. Broken people who might actually look at her and say:

You’re weird.

You glitch.

You’re ours.

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Give me names….