Archive of Our Own ^beta

He doesn’t set out to the USJ with the express purpose of racking up a body count. He considers it a nice plus, if he manages to take out some hero wannabe in his quest to kill All Might—just a thoughtless bonus that comes with the mission, should the circumstances line up to allow it. He’s looking forward to the fight up until All Might escapes with his life, and his mood quickly turns—that’s why, he thinks, when the hero student comes barreling toward him, he has no problem reaching right back.

He can only guess he thought he had a plan. The way the green-haired teenager had leapt at him, the contact they’d made through Kurogiri’s warp gate, the punch to Noumu earlier, he expects he just thought he had a fighting chance. Or, hell, maybe UA kids just get more and more suicidal by the years. Maybe it’s his divine right to throw himself into Shigaraki’s outstretched hand, and Tomura is just the instrument of violence he chooses to self-destruct with.

Regardless of the why, or of the how, turning his face, his head, his body altogether into dust, it doesn’t feel at all how Tomura expects. It’s not with a burst of satisfaction or a rush of dopamine or even, really, with any more interest than a stray curiosity at what exactly he expected, that he uses Decay on the hero student—it’s just with the impulsive intention of his five fingertips that he places on his shocked face that he chooses to turn him to dust. That simple decision: a settling of one hand on his freckled cheeks, obscuring his wide, startlingly green eyes in shadow before it lands and cracks his expression into pieces—it’s on a whim, without even a lick of emotion, that he kills the boy. 

He doesn’t stick around to watch the fallout. 

It’s after no small amount of patching up from Kurogiri that Tomura retreats to his room after the USJ raid. He wants to collapse onto his bed and forget everything about today—save for the one casualty, a nameless, useless high schooler too stupid to escape his reach, it has been such a massive failure. He doesn’t want to try again for a long time coming, he just wants to rest. He hits the lights on his way in and tosses himself onto the mattress, ready to slip into a dreamless sleep, until he’s gripped by the sudden disorienting feeling of being watched.

He groans in frustration and sits up. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting; Kurogiri, surely, coming in to insist they bandage some other bump or bruise from the fight. A call from All for One. Something mundane enough he can brush it off and sleep. But it’s none of those things—when he looks up and blearily opens his eyes again:

There, in the doorway of his room, stands the trembling shape of the dead boy.

It’s not exactly as he was in life. It still wears that ridiculous UA uniform, and a pair of red sneakers, but the rest of its appearance differs immensely. For one thing, there’s clear evidence of his demise: its face wears a crack starting from the center and branching out across it as it had when he turned to dust, lines scored into the skin glowing green from within, put together like a broken ceramic with a nightlight in the center. The only part of its visage unmarred by the deep scores of bright green light is his eyes—wider than humanly possible, blank as a doll’s—stark white in the dark. Even in the dark, the vision’s very essence seems to defy the lighting, appearing as if in daylight where it floats an inch off the ground and stares unflinching at him.

“I’m losing it,” he says to himself, watching as the shape twitches, comes back to itself, and blinks at him.

And then, it speaks.

“You..” it starts, in a voice that echoes, seeming to bounce around in itself and come out overlapping, jumbled, a dozen sounds all at once and still, somehow, the words are clear as ever as it says, “You killed me. Didn’t you?”

He balks. “No,” he denies petulantly—he’s startled into a lie before he can even think to question how this is possible. His eyes must be as wide as the figure’s, for how surprised he is at this intrusion, this, this manifestation in front of him. He’s never seen anything quite like it. He climbs out of bed and creeps carefully forward toward the glowing shape of the boy he remembers turning to dust not twenty four hours earlier. The only indicator its gaze follows him is its turning head, its white eyes focused on everything and nothing all at once—baffled, he steps toward it and swings, watching as his open palm slides harmlessly right through and hits the door jamb.

The vision of the boy flinches when he reaches for it, but as his fingers pass it by and meet the wall, it glances downward.

“You can’t hurt me like this,” it mutters, almost to itself, head snapping back up to look at him. The two white circles blink again, and then they narrow ever so slightly back at Tomura. “Can I hurt you?”

“You’re not real,” he accuses, as it moves backward where it floats. That’s answer enough, isn’t it? It isn’t real, so it can’t hurt him, because if it can that makes it something else. It frowns, and the cracks in its face crinkle with the expression.

“Who says?” it asks, and Tomura watches it ball a hand into a fist before swinging it right for his face—not only does its hand make contact, it slams into him, hitting him like a freight train and knocking him flat on his back. The various aches from today’s fight, bruises and scrapes and gunshot grazes alike, scream their dissent at his landing. He groans and reaches to cradle his nose, keeping half an eye on the startled look of the thing floating over him.

“What..” he breathes, one hand reaching to scratch distractedly at his neck as he looks up at it, “are you?”

“Well,” the vision hums, thoughtful, its white eyes flickering. It doesn’t move to hit him again—instead, it taps its cracked chin in thought, eerily human. “You killed me, and yet, here I am. I think.. that makes me a ghost. ”

So: the ghost.

He learns over the next day how it works. It can’t touch anyone else—Kurogiri enters to help him up, and he brushes him off when he watches him walk through the boy even as he swipes to try and grab him, too, tells him he just slipped trying to turn on the light—even if it tries. It doesn’t try again after the first time it hits him, which makes him suspicious, more than anything—he thinks if he were to haunt his killer, he wouldn’t stop until he tore him apart bit by bit, delivered some sort of divine justice in hands-on karma.

The boy was a hero, he guesses, so maybe they’re just that different after all.

He learns it can’t get very far from him, either. He heads out the next day before the sun rises just to go walking. He doesn’t like the idea of the ghost trapped in his living space--something about it haunting his resting grounds disturbs him far more than he’d like to admit. He doesn’t get enough sleep as it is. It doesn’t move to follow until he gets outside and he finds it trailing behind with a disgruntled expression.

“I guess.. where you go, I go, ” it reports with a frown. “Lucky us. ”

“Shut up,” he snaps. He’s irritable, this morning, having slept poorly given his injuries from the fight the day before. The ghost problem is one he doesn’t want to think about, mostly because he has no idea where to start trying to solve it. There’s a creature born of one snap decision floating two steps behind him, and if it wanted, it could reach forward and choke him to death before anyone could figure what happened. What fairness is that? That he can’t even touch the thing so equipped to hurt him? That he’s completely, utterly powerless in the face of a vengeful, violent ghost?

“Where are you going? ” it asks, floating ahead, head swiveling as if in search of their destination. He rolls his eyes and lets that be his answer—somehow, the ghost isn’t all that deterred. “I think I used to go on morning walks, too. Do you do this a lot? ”

“You think?” he echoes lowly. “What, you can’t remember?”

He shrugs, turning those white eyes up to the pale sky. “A lot of it’s hazy, ” he says carefully. “I remember dying the clearest. ”

Tomura snorts. “Sucks,” he offers, even if there’s a spiteful little satisfaction in knowing that the sharpest thing in the ghost’s recent memory is his last act of failure.

“It did,” he recalls. His echoey voice grows distant. “It was like pins and needles, but without the numbness. Like if someone picked you apart atom by atom, and with each one, you feel it down to your soul until you lose enough of them you can’t feel the hurt anymore. ” 

Tomura stops walking, tilting his head at the chilling description. He’s never heard the postmortem report on his Quirk. “Really?”

The ghost bobs its head. “It was the most painful thing I ever felt, I think,” it admits. “And I think I felt a lot of painful things.”

“Huh.” He keeps walking, looking down at the sidewalk, at his red sneakers scuffing the ground. “Does it still hurt?”

It shakes its head. “I don’t feel much of anything now, ” it reports, frowning. “I feel like I’m supposed to hate you. That’s what comes easiest. I got.. confused, when you were asleep, and when you got back up everything sort of made sense again. Like, right, you killed me and I have to hate you or I’ll fall apart.”

Tomura raises his eyebrows. “Not very hero-like,” he rasps, as if it matters. The ghost’s frown deepens.

“I was a hero? ” it asks, sounding more lost than it has the entire conversation. “I don’t think that’s right. I’m… what’s the word? I was…” It looks down at its translucent hands before it seems to come to it. “Quirkless.”

“No, you weren’t,” Tomura mutters, squinting at the ghost. He remembers the boy rearing a fist back to put through his face, if not for Noumu stepping in. Him leaping far beyond anyone else could, right into Tomura’ outstretched hand, his five deadly fingertips. He balls his hand into a fist where it sits in his pocket. “Are you joking? You had a strength Quirk. Or—something stupid like that. You hit stuff hard. Not exactly rocket science, ghost.”

The ghost’s form almost fizzles, going wild around the edges of its shape before it stabilizes again. “Oh.” It grins and looks almost delighted at the news. “I did? ”

He huffs. “You tried to kill me with it,” he reports, scowling. Maybe it’s not all that fair to hold a grudge over, considering the boy hadn’t succeeded where Tomura had done the same, but he doesn’t think much of anything about this haunting can be qualified as fair. “I think I’d remember.”

The ghost nods. “That makes sense ,” it answers, oddly enough. “Something wants me to hurt you. I don’t think it’s all me, though. It’s like…” It twirls its hands, gesticulating, making a ball and pointing to its heart. “Something in here. In my soul.”

Tomura swallows. There’s something familiar in that—a deep-rooted, unexplainable hatred for something that opposes him, the kind of loathing that clouds logic and allows for a seamless carrying out of orders. If he’s being totally honest with himself, Tomura’s felt that every goddamn day of his life.

He doesn’t speak to the ghost the rest of the walk back to the bar, even at its prodding questions. He’s indulged it far enough.

Sensei calls him that morning, one constant that hasn’t been upended by his unwelcome shadow. The screen is lit up when Tomura gets back and it reads AUDIO ONLY as it always does, when All for One reaches out—Tomura’s never said so, but he thinks it’s because he’s been a little fragile since that fight, years ago, with All Might. Traveling to see him in person always seems to be too much of a hassle for what they’d get out of the conversation, anyway. 

“Do you know what, exactly, you achieved at the Unforeseen Simulation Joint, yesterday?” Sensei questions. He thinks for a second that he’s caught out; maybe Sensei will simply say, you’ve made everything worse. Now we have the ghost to deal with. and he’ll be furious, sure, but at least it won’t be Tomura’s problem anymore.

But no. What he actually says, at Tomura’s silence, is this:

“The boy you killed,” he reports—almost as pleased as he’s ever heard his master, a smile in his voice audible even over the speaker—“was All Might’s little successor. And wouldn’t you know it? That means you ended the line of that damned Quirk, One for All.”

He blinks. The ghost has gone deathly—ha—still in the corner of his vision.

“Tomura,” Sensei explains, gently, “you’ve just won us the war.”

The screen fades back to black shortly thereafter, and he’s glad for it, because it means when the ghost puts together exactly what was said he doesn’t have to split his attention between them. He’s still in disbelief at his luck—you’ve just won us the war—when it says, loudest it’s been so far, almost shrill, “I was All Might’s successor!”

Tomura winces at the volume, scowling. “Keep it down,” he barks.

“I had a Quirk! You were right!” it celebrates, floating up and down almost like if it were literally jumping for joy. “I had One for All, I was All Might’s student!”

“Yeah, key word: was,” he points out. Something doubtful is growing at the back of his head, and it has everything to do with the phantom in front of him, still very much alight even a day after its murder. Sure. He.. severed the line of successors. The Casper situation, that’s not a real problem—eventually, he’ll probably fizzle out on his own, and One for All will truly be gone. He doesn’t need to concern his master with this, just yet; the One for All heir will be gone before they know it, and everything will be right in Tomura’s world, again. “Past tense, ghost. You were All Might’s student, and now you’re dead. Maybe focus on that part.”

The ghost physically wilts and its edges go sort of fuzzy again before it speaks. “Still,” it mutters. “I was someone. That’s something.”

“Did you know my name?” the ghost wonders, once, when it’s just them in his room as it so often is.

Tomura scoffs. “No,” he responds. Isn’t that obvious? He didn’t care to kill this specific high schooler in these specific circumstances. He was just.. within reach. Even he can admit it was pure, blind luck that the one casualty just so happened to be the holder of One for All. Even in his discussions thereafter, he’s not sure he ever heard the name, and if he had he didn’t care enough to keep it in mind. “Why would that matter?”

The ghost crosses its arms. “It mattered to me,” he says. It comes out childishly. “It was Izuku. Izuku Midoriya. I was fifteen.”

“So you had a name. Good for you, ghost,” he shrugs. He’s irritable, today, and the ghost’s insistence Tomura learn his name—as if he’ll be around much longer, as if it’ll become necessary to know. It grates on this ever growing anxiety he has that his haunting will become a long term problem, and the only one he can lash out toward over it is the ghost, himself.

“Izuku Midoriya,” he repeats, looking down. “You know, you’re very obviously a puppet for your master, but I still call you Shigaraki. It’s only fair that you use my name, too.”

Well. He doesn’t have anything to say to that.

It’s unceremonious how Midoriya figures it out. It’s a day like any other where he floats aimlessly around the base a few steps behind Tomura, muttering under his breath, when he very suddenly goes, “Oh. This—it was my Quirk, huh.”

Tomura whirls to face him. “Your Quirk was One for All,” he points out. The ghost shakes his head.

“One for All users, a lot of them had other Quirks, I think. It’s a stockpiling thing. It’s like a raw strength, and it adds to whatever you put it with.” He blows out a breath. “I think I was never really Quirkless, at all. It was just one we had no way of knowing until I died. A Quirk that would let me get revenge on whoever killed me—probably on a time limit, and really conditional, but a ticket to take you down, too, if I so chose. And then, paired with One for All—I just… stuck around. That’s insane.”

He raises his eyebrows and pretends it’s with a polite disinterest he considers that petrifying concept. A Quirk designed to trap a killer—a self-destruct button, his fate decided the second he reaches to grab the teenager with all five fingers, only dashed because he doesn’t have the guts to hurt him in return. “That’s why you can only touch me, then,” he adds. “And it probably means you're stuck here because you’re too chickenshit to try and take me out. Wow. One of us has some really bad luck.”

Izuku frowns. “Yeah,” he agrees, looking carefully back at him. “I think it’s both. I.. don’t think luck has ever been on either of our sides.”

“I’m not sure All for One has any ideas about how to get rid of me,” Midoriya tells him, one day, after a particularly one-sided call he could tell was going to become a topic of discussion once it ended. “Doesn’t that worry you? Even I’m trying to think something up for us, and he doesn’t even care.”

“That’s because he doesn’t know about you, genius,” Tomura snaps. It’s the wrong thing to say; the ghost blinks those wide, empty eyes back at him in undisguised shock before it responds.

“I thought he knew!” he blurts. “I mean—I guess I never heard you tell him, but he just seems to know everything about One for All, I thought…” He shakes his head like he’s physically clearing it and asks, tentatively, “ Aren’t you… going to tell him?”

Tomura drums three fingers on his knee, tilting his head. “Why bother?” he asks, trying too hard to sound flippant. “You’re dead enough now it doesn’t really matter, and you’ll be gone, eventually, anyway.”

"… You don’t want him to know about me,” the ghost realizes after he’s done speaking. He scowls. “Why not? He might know how to get rid of me, you know, he’s kind of the expert on all things One for All. Or—well, you know him better than I do. Are you worried his solution might be the one we already came up with?”

He bares his teeth at Midoriya, swiping uselessly through his translucent form where he floats too close to his face. It gets him to back up some, but not much else. “You,” he hisses, “don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did I strike a nerve? ” His face splits with a grin that stretches the cracks in it. “I wouldn’t be too worried. He cared enough to call you, once you killed the right high schooler. Maybe he’d care enough not to get rid of you to make sure I’m gone.”

“You are gone,” he barks. “You’re dead, Izuku Midoriya, you are a ghost and I’m the only person in the world who can hear your fucking blathering. It doesn’t matter, if I tell him or not, because you’re dead to the whole world out there, anyway.”

The ghost hums his dissent. “If it didn’t matter, you would’ve told him,” he sing-songs, ducking when Shigaraki throws a glass off the bedside table across the room at his head. “That’s something, Shigaraki. That’s a crack in your devotion.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Tomura hisses venomously. Midoriya shakes his head, and ridiculously, inexplicably, there’s something mournful in his echoey voice.

“That’s the sad part,” he laments. “Somehow, I think I’m the only one who does.”

He leaves the sports festival running to keep an eye out for kids with cool Quirks. It’s indulgent, really, because if everything goes according to plan with killing All Might, he won’t need a lot more recruits, but the ghost insists he keep it on after the first time he sees it on the screen in Tomura’s room.

“I would’ve liked to have been there,” Midoriya says. Tomura thinks it’s more to himself, than anything, and doesn’t bother with a response. A lot of what the ghost says is in a murmur only he can make out, and he thinks lately it’s because he’s been remembering more about his life, especially with the festival going. It’s almost like being around a real person, for how much is coming back to him.

Tomura busies himself watching a blond haired boy blast his way through the obstacle course, soaring high over the mines buried beneath the ground he doesn’t even touch. “Look at him go. They’ve all grown so much since I met them! Are you watching? ”

“If you’re going to get all sappy about your class, I’m turning it off,” Tomura mutters. Midoriya falls quiet again, and they watch until he can’t help himself from commenting on it again, which is all of a few blessed minutes of silence. He doesn’t bother with actually turning it off—he’s keeping an eye on the boy with the explosion Quirk and the fire in his eyes. That’s something, he thinks. He has to watch that one.

Midoriya hasn’t tried with any sort of genuine conviction to hurt Tomura since the first time he’d hit him, right at the start, but tonight, he’s thrown out of bed as if by a force of nature and torn upright.

“What?” he fumbles to ask, startled by the ghost’s urgency. He looks wrong, even in the dark; his outline blurs and shifts like it doesn’t remember it’s own shape, the only concrete thing the vicious green cracks behind those vacant white eyes. The light within him pulses erratically and very nearly winks out a few times as they just stare at one another. “What, Midoriya?”

“They’re doing something,” he warbles. “I can feel it. You said he didn’t know about me. You said that.”

“Sensei?” Tomura’s lost, and the ghost is in no state to explain anything to him, where he fizzles unnaturally. “What? I didn’t tell him. What are you even talking about?”

Midoriya flares indignantly. “He’s doing something to me,” he sobs and his fingers ache where they dig into Tomura’s arms, “it feels like he’s taking a piece of my soul, Shigaraki.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?” he asks and the ghost’s eyes narrow almost to slits. 

“You’re right,” Midoriya realizes, and they blow wide, again, before he suddenly releases Tomura, “I’m here on One for All’s terms, which means he can’t have it.”

The flickering stops as quickly as if a switch had been flipped—his misshapen form snaps back into shape and he looks, again, just like the dead boy that’s been haunting Tomura all this time, save for the disturbed expression he still wears that distorts the cracks. It’s dead quiet in the bedroom.

Tomura blinks at him. “..Did it work?” He hesitates to ask, given how violently Midoriya had woken him moments before, but the ghost breathes a shaky sigh and nods.

“Yeah. Whatever.. All for One was trying to do, it failed.” Midoriya wrings his hands. 

“What—“ Tomura clears his throat. God, he’s only just woken up. “What… was he trying to do? Get rid of you?”

The ghost drags his hands down his face, and it’s despairingly that he reports, “I… don’t know. And I really, really don’t want to find out.”

He ends up spending a lot of time alone. It’s by virtue of trying to communicate with Midoriya; the new recruits in the League aren’t overly fond of his muttering, and Midoriya gets more and more chatty the longer Tomura fails to engage him. The walks become a much more frequent thing—he’s starting to lose it, trapping the two of them in the walls of his room to talk. 

Sometimes Midoriya suggests places to go. They’re usually not all that feasible—it wouldn’t do to be seen in a very public place, and he doesn’t like to go very far from home, either, but today the ghost is dead set on visiting somewhere he refuses to describe.

“Come onnn, ” he whines, tugging on Tomura’s arm where he walks at a leisurely pace being led by Midoriya. He rolls his eyes at the insistence.

“Don’t rush me,” he mutters, swatting uselessly at the ghost’s hand in his jacket. 

“We have to get there before sunrise, ” Midoriya insists. “I want to see it come up, you have to hurry.”

He snickers, dragging his feet. “I hope we miss it.”

Midoriya rallies. “You don’t mean that,” he dismisses. “It’s just over here, come on.”

Tomura finally comes up on Midoriya’s mystery destination, and as he’s pulled, stumbling, over the last hill, he comes to realize it’s a beach. 

It’s a beautiful white beach, and it’s empty, completely devoid of any passerby who might’ve had the same idea about visiting this early in the day. He can see why Midoriya had rushed him so much, just as the sun starts to creep up over the horizon; it paints the dark blues and greys of the sea bright red as it breaches the line of the water, and the whole strip of sand starts to light up pink as the sun rises over the waves. Red and orange streak across the early grey and Midoriya sighs, content, at the brightening of the morning sky.

“It’s a beach,” Tomura bothers to state the obvious. The ghost nods.

“You never stop to watch the sunrise on the walks,” Midoriya points out, scratching the back of his head. “Um—I trained here. I think. All Might and I cleared this, it used to be covered in trash, and it took forever to get it all off, but we finally did it the day of the entrance exam for school. And now you can see the sunrise. I just… wanted to show you.” Midoriya’s empty white eyes are impossibly wide as he stares out over the horizon. “I never got to show anyone else, before…”

For once, Tomura doesn’t feel inclined to finish the sentence and thrust the circumstances of Izuku’s death back in his face. He’s swaying, slightly, where he floats, and there’s just something fragile about the look on his cracked face that he doesn’t feel entirely like ruining just yet. He wonders which of his friends he might’ve taken here if he weren’t a ghost.

“It’s… nice,” he tries, begrudgingly. Midoriya smiles.

“I hoped you’d think that,” he admits. “I don’t think you’ve seen a lot of nice things, Shigaraki. I’m glad you got this one.”

Predictably, Midoriya isn’t all that pleased when he wants to meet Katsuki Bakugou. It’s after he’s sent out the Vanguard Action Squad that he’s forced to retreat to his room—the ghost grows irritable and starts physically pulling him down the hall so they can speak, and it’s with no small amount of judgment from Kurogiri he excuses himself.

“What—“ he starts in a hiss, surprised when he cuts him off entirely.

“If you hurt him,” Midoriya starts, and he’s eerily calm where his words come out through gritted teeth. His white eyes bore into Tomura. “I’ll kill you. I don’t care. I won’t let you hurt him. I’ll kill you, first.”

He’s not planning to hurt Bakugou. Far from it, actually—he identifies with the fury he’d seen from him in the sports festival, and he wants to hone that how his master had honed Tomura’s, but he resents the idea Midoriya thinks he could truly stop him from something he puts his resources toward so he grows combative nonetheless at the accusation.

“You’d die, too, ghost,” he points out. That’s the entire thing, isn’t it? His existence is justified by his inability to pull the trigger on Shigaraki. He’s a revenge-shaped ghost of a boy who refuses to take the revenge his Quirk offers him. If he hasn’t killed Tomura by now, surely, he’s never going to; or, so he thinks before he answers as gravely as he’s ever heard the ghost’s echoey tone.

“So we die,” he responds, and it comes out, more than anything, ringing with truth. “I’ve done it once. It’s not so bad.”

“I didn’t say I was going to do anything to him,” he backtracks. Midoriya’s form crackles in defiance.

“And you’re not going to,” he commands. It’s almost staticky, the frayed edges of his ghostly voice where all the weight of emotion presses itself forward. “Call your team off , Shigaraki, or I promise you, this time, we’ll go down together.”

He laughs at the threat, and that’s all it takes for Midoriya to lunge at him; he shouts in surprise as the ghost grabs him by the shoulders, his grip bruising, his white eyes impossibly empty, the cracks in his face flickering with an intensity Tomura’s never seen from him. For a moment as he’s attacking him, he thinks he looks like what an actual specter does, something out of a nightmare as his edges blur and lose the distinctly human shape. The cracks stay apparent even as his form falters—they flare emerald and then go dangerously dark, and he thinks of Midoriya describing something at his center subsisting him, the urge he always holds to hurt Tomura back and how it was a feat not to indulge it, most days.

Ah. Maybe he meant it, he realizes, as Midoriya sends them both crashing to the ground in a completely one-sided fight. Tomura tries to kick back at him, but his foot slips right through his form as if he were swiping at thin air. His form shakes like a bad projection but his grip is incredibly real where his hands wrap around Tomura’s arms, and he has half a mind to start shouting for Kurogiri before the ghost’s form flickers, again, and his fingertips… sink in.

“What—? ” he breathes, and Midoriya seems to all of a sudden understand what’s going on because he gasps and then, he dives fully into Tomura’s body.

He becomes abruptly familiar with another soul being crammed into his form. That’s the best way he can think to describe it; Midoriya disappears completely as he slips under Tomura’s skin, and his soul feels exactly as the ghost always looks. It crackles with that verdant lightning as it shoves Tomura’s aside, and it’s with a sinking feeling of helplessness as he realizes with the intruder, he’s lost the ability to move his body entirely. He tries, and tries again, but his fingers won’t so much as twitch as he tries to call them to attention. The chest of the body he inhabits but no longer controls heaves with exertion and maybe a little with panic, though he can’t tell whose.

What, he tries to say, and doesn’t manage to speak aloud, did you do to me?

His vocal cords—except they’re not his, really, because he’s not the one telling them to say anything at all and yet he can feel them vibrate as the ghost seizes control—hum as Midoriya answers. It sounds all wrong, in his—their—voice, but what he actually confesses is, “I don’t know. I—I just wanted you to stop so badly, and it—it was like it just… hit me, how to make you. I actually think… I might be possessing you.”

Their body rolls sideways and sits back up, and he’s forced to watch as their gaze takes back in their surroundings in a brand new light. “I possessed you,” Midoriya repeats, still sounding shell-shocked even as he makes them get clumsily to their feet. “Right. Okay. I’m.. going to stop you, now.”

It’s revolting, with what ease Midoriya dismantles the operation. He stumbles back into the main room and waits in silence, with rapt attention, for the Vanguard team to return to the bar, all while Tomura struggles to disconnect himself from the feelings Midoriya bears so openly on his soul. He can feel the resonating anxiety he has, waiting to speak as the group returns piece by piece, and it’s nauseating the sheer joy that slams into him at the sight of the hero student.

And then, Tomura finds, Midoriya actually does enact a plan.

“Kurogiri,” Midoriya rasps as soon as the other members of the League settle with their capture, and it’s disorienting that he should sound exactly like Tomura when he says it, “Change of plans. I want to show him the Noumu. He’ll understand that kind of power, best.”

That’s not going to work, Tomura hopes. He’ll know it’s not me. That’s Kurogiri.

Kurogiri ripples in surprise. “Are you certain?”

Midoriya glares from behind the hand on their face. “Did I stutter?” he hisses, as he scratches the flaking skin on their neck, and it’s apparently exactly that easy to get Izuku Midoriya and Bakugou alone and away from the rest of the group. Tomura groans in their head.

They step through, and Tomura finds himself hoping the hero student is stupid enough to lunge at them and bring this to a fight. He isn’t. He stands a good few feet away, calculating, his dark red eyes going between them and the vats of liquid containing Noumu on standby. It’s something of a juxtaposition—his tense suspicion is nothing at all like the raw, buzzing joy building In Midoriya’s heart, so pervasive it reaches even Shigaraki. He’s not certain he’s ever been half as happy to see someone, as Midoriya is, now.

“Do you know how Shigaraki’s Quirk works?” Midoriya asks, seemingly out of nowhere.

The third person is a really nice touch, he snarks. Midoriya rolls their eyes. 

"My Quirk, I mean?” 

Not the nicest question, if you two were friends. He can’t imagine anyone in their little class has forgotten how, exactly, Midoriya was made to fall apart, and he’s proven right a moment later.

Bakugou’s tears his gaze away from the pods around them and makes a sound like hot water sizzling, a tch between his teeth. “You turn shit to dust,” he bites, with a great, threatening show of teeth. “Like how I’m about to pulverize your dumb ass.”

Midoriya puts his hands up and hurries to finish out the point. “Right, I turn things to dust when I put all five fingers down,” he continues, and steps backward once so he’s next to one of the pods. “But, uh, you see—Quirks are connected to the soul more than the body, and, this is kind of hard to explain, but it’s not just Shigaraki’s soul in here right now, and it’s… definitely not him in control. Just—Watch."

Midoriya holds a hand out at their side and presses five fingers to the pod containing a Noumu. Tomura almost expects the glass to crack and crumble away, and Bakugou almost shouts, but he stops, because… nothing happens at all.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he asks, eventually. “That it’s not just your soul? What are you talking about?”

“It’s not just Shigaraki’s soul,” he corrects, “Because if it was, he’d have turned that to dust, that’s how it works. I’m.. possessing him, I think, and I really want to explain, Kacchan, but I need you to not freak out.”

They both freeze.

Did you mean to say that? Tomura wonders. Midoriya gives a slight shake of his head in time with the sinking of his stomach, enough anxiety there for the both of them.

“What… did you just call me?”

“See, this is the part where I was like, I need you to not freak out, and then I guess because you’re you and I’m me you’re going to do the exact opposite—" Midoriya laments, and he reaches to take the hand off their face, setting it incredibly gently aside. “Which I should’ve anticipated, but, you know—"

“That’s not your name to use,” Bakugou bites. Tomura can see his hands spark in his restraints. “That’s not—"

“Right,” Midoriya agrees amicably, “It’s Deku’s, right?”

Tomura almost has it in him to admire that the kid doesn’t immediately laugh in Midoriya’s face. He goes very, very still, eyes going between his discarded Father’s hand, Midoriya’s still raised fingers, and their face, whatever it’s doing. From the rapid beating of their heart against their ribcage, he guesses it’s nothing good.

“How do you know that?” Bakugou asks, but there’s a hopeful little tint to his eyes that betrays what he’s come to believe, a shake that doesn’t seem to surprise Midoriya in the slightest. 

Tomura thinks they may have never figured out Midoriya could possess him, if he had threatened anyone else, but it’s in the complete understanding of his friend that he feels resonating within Midoriya’s soul that tells him Bakugou specifically was a line he never should’ve crossed. Midoriya—with his soul crammed alongside Tomura’s, stuffed into a chest that hardly has room for even his heart, if he still has one, he can feel each of his emotions pouring over as each hits him so deeply. 

There’s so much love in Izuku Midoriya’s heart, pulsing with every beat as he smiles at Bakugou. He half wants to let him lead the body around and see if he’s like this with everyone he knew in life just because Tomura’s never felt anything quite as warm and genuine as what pulses from Midoriya’s center with every moment longer.

“You know how I know, Kacchan. It’s me.” Midoriya says, and it stings their cracked lips, the smile he speaks through. Somehow, even if it’s Tomura’s voice he uses, it sounds nothing like him. “It’s Izuku. Sorry it’s been so long.”

“How?” he demands. His shoulders sag with the weight of emotion that Tomura can’t even begin to read in his face, something poignant and deep and far too personal for him to try and read, given all he’s already taken from the two of them. 

Still. He can feel the echo of Midoriya’s hurt as he explains—over freeing Bakugou from the restraints, sitting down on the floor of the Noumu warehouse, his heart tugging at the edges of Tomura’s voice as he explains how, exactly, it’s possible to be here speaking to him right now. 

It’s not a happy story. Midoriya speaks of a Quirk he inherited from his idol, and died with a week later—he doesn’t tell Bakugou, as he had Tomura, about the uniquely agonizing experience of turning to dust, but he does describe coming back together and being rebuilt around the Quirk no one knew he had. He tells Bakugou about how he’s been tethered to the person who killed him all those weeks ago, and about how he can tell, recently, he’s starting to slip.

“I know this is a lot,” Midoriya finishes, and Bakugou laughs like it’s the understatement of the century. Tomura would be inclined to agree. “But I think I can.. restore All Might’s power. Sort of. Or—I think I can give it back so he can pass it on, again. That would turn the tide back in his favor against Shigaraki’s master. So I know it’s too early, again, but we have to say goodbye. For good, this time. I need you to get All Might here and I need you to stay safe, Kacchan.”

“You could give it to me,” Bakugou insists. “One for All. If it’s like how you say it is, I could take it, Deku.”

He shakes their head. “They killed me for One for All, even after I trained for it, and learned about it, and grew into it. It didn’t matter. They killed me and it’s almost gone, and I still have to find what I’m looking for, here, so I can’t afford to argue it any more. I need for you to send All Might and for you to stay safe, Kacchan. That’s all I can ask.”

“I hate you for this,” he bites. The pale light of the lab would hide his tears if not for how he reaches to scrub his face free of them when he gets, torturously, trembling, to his feet. “You should be here. You should get to stay. I shouldn’t have to lose you twice.”

“We don’t have time to say everything we should be able to say. But—for what it’s worth, I’m really glad it was you, ” Midoriya whispers. “ That I saw before it ended. I’m really, really glad it was you I got to see again. Thank you.”

Bakugou leaves. Midoriya gets to work. He goes from vat to vat and peeks in, turns dials, flips on lights. He seems to know exactly what direction he’s drifting toward even if he doesn’t check each individual Noumu, and Tomura guesses it has something to do with whatever part of himself he’s looking for, in here, because he can almost feel the same tug toward the creature they finally end on. 

It’s in a glass tube, and Midoriya flicks a switch that lights up it’s grotesque body in all its glory. It’s by far the smallest Noumu Tomura’s ever seen, and he’s not sure it’s alive, even, where its eyes stare vacantly forward. 

“This one,” Midoriya breathes. It looks like any other Noumu, to him, but it startles Izuku so badly to see that he can almost feel him lose control of their body as his soul flares and goes haywire. “Look. Look, Shigaraki, I told you, he did something to whatever was left of me. The Noumu, they’re like… a body built around a piece of a soul, but mine’s woven with One for All. That’s the Quirk your master can’t take—that’s why it didn’t work, that night I woke you up. This one comes from me.”

How do you know? he wonders. It just looks like any other Noumu.

Surprise wells in Midoriya at the question. “You can’t tell?” he asks, mournfully. “It has my eyes.”

Midoriya presses their face to the glass and stares forward at the vessel, and up close, confronted with the creature itself, Tomura realizes that he's right. The pair of eyes on this Noumu stare straight ahead—unblinking, unseeing, unfeeling—dully, vacantly, and above all, without an ounce of life behind them. He remembers how bright and shiny they’d been the day Midoriya died, and it feels wrong to even try to draw a parallel between those and… this. 

“I’d really prefer if there was some leftover hair, or something,” he reports as he steps back and starts pawing at a compartment on the side of the tube containing the creature. It turns up empty—he wrenches the next open and frowns when all it contains are wires and chips. “Even the dust, I think, would work, but All Might used hair when he gave it to me, so I don’t really know if…”

Somewhere in feeling Midoriya’s visceral horror at the Noumu, Tomura’s lost the thread of what, exactly, he’s trying to achieve here. He makes a noise of frustration and smacks the tube with a hand rather than answering, and, inexplicably—right at eye level, a divet in the machinery slides sideways and outward like a DVD player.

Inside, pressed neatly into a plastic sleeve, is a pile of dust. Midoriya sighs once in relief as he wrenches it from its resting place and tears the bag open.

That’s—it’s—

“It was my body, once,” he confirms. “I have to give One for All back. All Might’s coming, and this is my DNA, and my soul has enough left in it to consent to its return. Sorry, Shigaraki. I promise you can have your body back when I’m gone, okay? But I have to do this.”

Whatever train of thought he’d been headed down comes to a screeching halt.

When you’re gone? he thinks, realization dawning on him. You didn’t mean Bakugou wouldn’t see you again. You meant you’d be gone, for good this time.

“One for All is what’s keeping me here,” Midoriya explains, as he unceremoniously dumps the bag of dust on the ground and starts sifting through it. It’s disturbing, with what little care he treats his earthly remains. Even Tomura thinks he’d be a little less clinical with it. “I’m giving it back to All Might, so.. in theory, that makes me disappear. Even for you.”

Tomura is glad he’s not in control of their expression, right now, because the face he’d be making is far from pleased and he doesn’t know how to start dealing with the fact that, I don’t want you to.

Midoriya frowns and pauses where he’s spreading the dust that remains from his death—his murder —across the sticky tile beneath their hands. “I thought you wanted me gone,” he says. “I wasn’t going to kill you, and that’s the only other way to get rid of me. I thought you’d be.. I don’t know, happy? Or—as happy as you get, really?”

I changed my mind, he tells Midoriya. I don’t know. There are a lot of annoying people. At least you were…

And this is ridiculous. Because Tomura murdered Midoriya without a second thought back when they met, and now, having had him floating frustratingly by his side all the time, he’s sort of realizing that… he’s a good kid. Midoriya is the kind of boy who wouldn’t kill the villain that turned him to dust—even given every chance, every incentive, to do so, resisting that even as it went against what his Quirk and his soul were begging him to do. He’s the kind of kid whose revenge shaped ghost has room to resemble.. something else, irregardless of for what reason that it persisted, and it’s occurring to him that’s because he was a hero.

For a couple months, there, it was like Tomura knew a real hero.

I don’t want you to go, he repeats.

"I’m sorry,” Midoriya offers, as their fingers close around something in the dust. He holds it up to the sickly light of the lab, and wouldn’t you know it? It’s a single strand of green hair. “I can feel it. I don’t have long. I’d stay, if I could. I know you need someone to help you out of this mess. It just.. can’t be me.”

It’s after a great fight that All Might finds them. They can hear it nearby, and feel the force of it shake the building, but luckily enough, nothing comes down around them.

“I hope he won,” Midoriya whispers when it all falls quiet again.

He probably didn’t, Tomura points out, bitter. Things like this don’t usually work out nicely, Midoriya. Your hero probably isn’t coming.

But the universe must just be determined to prove Tomura wrong at each and every turn, because Midoriya sighs, relieved, as a bony figure slips in the entrance. It’s so quiet. He can’t imagine this is how most happy endings, go—the pro limps inside and falls to his knees in from of them, and Tomura can see he’s already weeping, silent tears drawing lines in the blood stuck to his gaunt face.

This is All Might? Tomura thinks, He doesn’t look like much. He can tell by how Midoriya’s consciousness vibrates and beams at the sight of him that he disagrees.

“Hi,” Izuku says, weakly, in the voice that’s so ill-suited for someone who cares as much as him about everything. “It’s good to see you one last time, All Might.”

“Is it really you, my boy?” Yagi Toshinori’s voice rumbles deep in his chest as he asks, and Tomura can feel tears sting in their eyes.  

“As me as it was on the rooftop,” he answers achingly. The reference is lost on Tomura, but he can feel the swell of Izuku’s soul at each memory, and he cringes back from the warmth he contains. “Or on that awful beach. Or.. I guess at the USJ, too, but um, that wasn’t… my finest moment.”

The lines of the hero’s face harden. “That never, ever should have happened to you,” he says gravely. A hand reaches to rest on their shoulder. “I should have..”

“It’s okay,” Midoriya assures him. He touches All Might’s hand where it rests on them, and Tomura can feel the pulse of appreciation he feels for the hero on the ground in front of them. “I know you did your best. I’m sorry I couldn’t be your successor, All Might. I really did want to be, but, um… I have to give it back, now.”

Yagi goes very, very still.

“Give it back?” he repeats. “Young Bakugou—he mentioned One for All, but I… didn’t dream he knew what he was talking about. What do you mean, give it back, my boy?”

Midoriya holds out the strand of hair and All Might’s eyes go impossibly wide at the sight of it. “Déjà vu, right?” he sort of laughs. “You’ve got to find a new student. Maybe, um.. someone a little older, this time. I don’t think I really knew what I was getting into with One for All.”

“Young Midoriya,” he breathes. “I..”

“Go on,” he encourages. All Might’s hands shake violently where he reaches to take it from Midoriya. “It’ll be like I’m still there, in a way. One for All and I have gotten really close over the course of all this.”

He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry, my boy. I can’t even tell you how badly I wish I could’ve done more for you. This isn’t fair to you.”

“It’s okay," he repeats as All Might swallows the offering, “I forgive you, okay? Oh—for what it’s worth, I think Shigaraki’s sorry, too.”

It’s not nice, to lie to heroes, he thinks bitterly. Midoriya huffs a laugh. 

“You’ll be kind to him when I’m gone, right?” he asks, in the raspy, strained voice of the man who killed him his first week of high school. He thinks of his impossibly wide green eyes, how they’d shattered beneath his fingertips, and how in all his time haunting Tomura he never got the green back. “I think he needed saving a long time ago. It wasn’t fair, how any of us happened to each other. We should all be sorry."

How any of them happened to each other? He wants to laugh at the ‘we’. Midoriya’s crime against him—what is that? His failure to carry out the threat? Not to cash in the revenge he was very well owed, by rights of fate, of whatever damned creator shaped him too softly and placed him in Tomura’s warpath? It’s not fair, what he’s done to Izuku Midoriya, and he’s too stupid to have seen it until now.

“If…” He clears his throat, and he looks at them— really looks at them, like he can see right through the skin down to the soul and is noticing Tomura in here for the first time. He shrinks back from the attention. “If that’s what you ask of me. I’ll be kind to him, young Midoriya.”

Please don’t leave me here with them. I don’t want to do this alone.

“Can you do something else for me?” he asks. Their lip trembles. 

“Of course. Anything.”

Midoriya smiles. It feels sad—Tomura doesn’t think their face knows how to smile like Midoriya used to. He doesn't care much to learn. It won’t matter after he’s gone. “Will you thank Kacchan for me? And, um—my mom, if you could tell my mom I love her very, very much. And Aizawa-sensei, I’d like him to know—Can you thank him—? And my classmates—oh, there’s so many people. I loved everyone so much, All Might. Can you just make sure they know that? I loved them.”

You can’t go, Tomura tries once more. He wonders if Midoriya’s been feeling what his soul’s felt, too, if the terror gripping him is obvious to the ghost with every passing second. You can’t. I don’t know what will happen when you’re gone.

“I’ll tell them,” All Might swears, and it must just become too much to bear without an embrace because he abruptly pulls their body into his bony, bloody arms and just holds them right there. Tomura tries to recall a time he’s been held so carefully, and comes up blank. The gratefulness, the appreciation of the gesture—he’s not sure it’s all Izuku’s. “I’ll make sure, my boy. Is there anything else I can do?”

Midoriya sighs into his shoulder, and Tomura feels their eyes close like he’s just trying to be in this moment as much as he can before he goes. He’s thinking of how he described dying, the first time. It’s the most painful thing I ever felt, I think, he’d said and Tomura had thought way back then, Lucky you, to never have hurt so badly. Now all he can think is he knows exactly what he meant when he said it was like being torn apart, atom by atom, as Izuku’s soul starts to give. “Oh,” Midoriya breathes, and it shakes their ribcage a little less than it might’ve a minute ago. “And I love you, All Might. Remember that, too, okay?”

Please don’t go, he thinks as hard as he can, as Midoriya starts to peel away like the tide from his rotten, rocky shore. 

“I love you so much, my boy,” All Might returns, squeezing them encased in his arms, his face wet on their shoulder. He holds them with the deceptive kind of strength he wouldn’t expect, from a form as fragile as how he looks, as Yagi Toshinori. What good does any of it do, he wonders, if we can’t make Midoriya stay?  

What use is any of this if it never ended in justice for Izuku Midoriya? How has Tomura bastardized the force of fate so badly that this comes to its conclusion with him sitting here with All Might and Midoriya dead on his own? He thought at the start of all this, it wasn’t fair, to be haunted by the echo of the impulsive murder of a teenager. That’s laughable, now—the unfairness in it all is Midoriya is dead, and Tomura remains, and he’s completely powerless to change it.

I am, he tries to tell Midoriya, panic holding onto every fiber of their splitting being at the idea he can’t even get this to him, in his last, flickering light. Sorry. I’m so sorry.

It’s a moment too late. It always is, when it comes to Midoriya, isn’t it? The boy he killed too early. A goodbye he didn’t know to expect. A loneliness champing at the bit to fill the space Midoriya’s shape will leave, all too soon—he doesn’t know where a soul goes, when it leaves, but Izuku’s flares green to blinding white and he thinks he’s too gone to respond at all, for a second, that maybe he never got to tell Midoriya he’s so truly, genuinely sorry he killed him, but just as he almost winks out of Tomura’s perception entirely it feels like his heart whispers back, just barely audible, I know.

Not it’s okay. Not I forgive you. Just this: I know. It’s still so much more than he should be allowed, and he’s left with a profound, rotten emptiness as his soul slides back into place. His fingers twitch, when he twitches them. His eyes blink when he tells them too. Despite all his protests, Midoriya has surrendered control and disappeared into the ether, and Tomura has never felt so lonely in his life.

“He’s gone,” Tomura reports. His own voice sounds wrong after so long letting Midoriya use it to communicate things so profound, the kind of inspiration and kindness Tomura’s voice had never had before and never will again. He’s too aware of his hands at his sides where Yagi holds them— him, where his arms wrap around one body, one soul, no more Midoriya—and the five-finger death sentence returned to him at the loss of the other soul’s nullification. It’s like a weapon has been thrust back into his grasp before he’s ready to hold it again. All he has to convince him not to turn All Might to dust is the memory of Midoriya’s heart, glowing as it leaves. The I know. “He’s gone, All Might.”

“Alright,” he rumbles. He doesn’t let go just yet, and it makes Tomura’s chest ache in a way he hasn’t felt in a long, long time that he holds on knowing full well what he’s capable of. “But young Midoriya, he told me to be kind to you. So I.. think I’ll give us a minute like this, if that’s alright.”

Tomura gives what would almost count as a laugh, if not for how the emotion choking him up stretches it thin, and in the minute All Might gives him, he imagines a world where it doesn’t take the bloody sacrifice of a fifteen year old boy to get him a single moment in the arms of a hero. 

He thinks it’s the kind of world Midoriya would’ve liked him to see, too.