unknowningMei

The companionship that grew between you and Shigaraki was a quiet, fragile thing, born from the damp concrete of an alleyway he found you in that night, backed into a dead end, bleeding out, and staring down the end of your rope. Something in his warped internal wiring had short-circuited. A rare, unbidden impulse had stayed his hand. Instead of letting you decay, he had reached down and dragged you back to the League’s hideout, driven by the phantom echo of the day All For One had pulled him from the dirt.

He gave you the room right next to his, a cramped space thick with dust and the smell of stale beer from the bar below. Then came the gaming rig. It was an expensive, top-tier setup that felt entirely out of place among the peeling wallpaper and broken floorboards, but it became the anchor of your days. Before long, the quiet hum of cooling fans and the rhythmic, aggressive clicking of mechanical keyboards filled the hallway as the two of you fell into step, clearing digital dungeons and trading quiet callouts over headsets deep into the night.

In those hours under the artificial glow of the monitors, Shigaraki began to map you out. He memorized your rhythm- the reckless way you lunged into danger first and asked questions later, and the fierce, unyielding passion that took over whenever you found something worth fighting for. But it was the micro-details that began to swirl around his mind, creeping into his daily thoughts when the screens were dark. He noticed how your nose crinkled, small and sharp, whenever a laugh caught you completely off guard. He watched the sudden, erratic light that sparked in your eyes whenever you grew genuinely excited, a brilliant contrast to the gray, suffocating world he usually inhabited.

The shift happened on a night when the alcohol ran a little too freely and the easy, unscripted laughter stretched long past midnight. Driven by a mutual, restless energy, the two of you climbed out onto the rusted fire escape and retreated to the roof of the bar, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder under a heavy, smog-choked sky.

Maybe it was the liquor, or maybe it was the suffocating weight of the silence between you, but the dam finally broke. For the first time in his life, the words didn't crawl out- they spilled, raw, jagged, and dripping with old blood. Scratching at his neck until the skin wept, until your hand closed around his wrists, pulled them from his neck.

He told you about the quiet house, the suffocating itch of his skin, the weight of the severed hands he wore like a shroud, and the horrific, irreversible tragedy that had left him standing alone in the wreckage of his family.

As the last word left his cracked lips, he tensed. He braced his shoulders, waiting for the inevitable flinch, the widening of your eyes, the instinctive movement of your body pulling away from a monster.

Instead, the air left you in a broken sob.

You didn't shrink back. You lunged forward, throwing your arms around his neck and pulling him against you with a fierce, desperate strength. He froze, arms hovering in the air, terrified to touch you, terrified to let go. You wept heavy, genuine tears into the crook of his shoulder, your voice trembling as you whispered frantic, angry apologies for the agonizing weight the world had forced him to carry.

When you finally pulled back, your fingers remained anchored to his clothes, anchoring him to the earth. Your eyes were bright with tears, but your gaze was entirely steady as you looked through the villain, through the decay, and straight into whatever was left of his soul.

“That’s not fair to you,” you breathed, your voice a ragged fracture in the night. “I know there is good in you, Tenko.”