Irusu (A BNHA x IT AU)

by Seroyonin

It started in the winter of 2004, after the death of Midoriya Izuku's little sister Eri, and it would end almost 16 years later, after Kaminari Denki made his six phone calls. After all, they had all promised that they'd come back. (An "IT" AU with *that* part removed) (Cross posted from Ao3) (Every trigger warning imaginable applies- seriously, proceed with caution)

33. Under the City

—1—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / IT

Something new had happened.

For the first time in forever, something new.

Before the universe there had been only two things. One was Itself and the other was the Turtle. The Turtle was a stupid old thing that never came out of its shell. It thought that maybe the Turtle was dead, had been dead for the last billion years or so. Even if it wasn't, it was still a stupid old thing, and even if the Turtle had vomited the universe out whole, that didn't change the fact of its stupidity.

It had come here long after the Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, and It had discovered a depth of imagination here that was almost new, almost of concern. This quality of imagination made the food very rich. Its teeth ripped through flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts and moving muds; against their will they contemplated endless gulphs.

Upon this rich food It existed in a simple cycle of waking to eat and sleeping to dream. It had created a place in Its own image, and It looked upon this place with favor from the deadlights which were Its eyes. Irusu was Its killing-pen, the people of Irusu Its sheep. That's how things had gone on, and how they were always meant to go.

Then... then... these children...

Something new.

For the first time in forever.

When It had burst up into the house on Neibolt Street, meaning to kill them all, vaguely uneasy that It had not been able to do so already (and surely that unease had been the first new thing), something had happened which was totally unexpected, utterly unthought of, and there had been pain, pain, great roaring pain all through the shape it had taken, and for one moment there had also been fear, because the only thing It had in common with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology of the macroverse outside the puny egg of this universe was just this: all living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit. For the first time It realized that perhaps Its ability to change Its shapes might work against It as well as for It. There had never been pain before, there had never been fear before, and for a moment It had thought It might die- oh Its head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and it had roared and mewled and bellowed and somehow the children had escaped.

But now they were coming. They had entered Its domain under the city, seven foolish children blundering through the darkness without lights or weapons. It would kill them now, surely.

It had made a great self-discovery: It did not want change or surprise. It did not want new things, ever. It wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again.

Following the pain and that brief bright fear, another new emotion had arisen (as all genuine emotions were new to It, although It was a great mocker of emotions): anger. It would kill the children because they had, by some amazing accident, hurt It. But It would make them suffer first because for one brief moment they had made It fear them.

'Come to me then,' It thought, listening to their approach. 'Come to me, little, wretched, children, and see how we float down here... how we all float.'

...And yet there was a thought that insinuated itself no matter how strongly It tried to push the thought away. It was simply this: 'if all things flowed from It (as they surely had done since the Turtle puked up the universe and then keeled over inside its shell), how could any creature of this or any other world fool It or hurt It, no matter how briefly or triflingly? How was that remotely possible?...

...And so a last new thing had come to It, this not an emotion but a cold speculation: suppose It had not been alone, as It had always believed?

...Suppose there was Another?...

And... suppose further that these- these children were agents of that Other?

Suppose... suppose...

It began to tremble.

Hate was new. Pain was new. Being challenged on Its purpose was new. But the most terrible new thing was this fear. Not fear of the children, that had passed, but the fear of not being alone.

No. There was no other. Surely there was not. Perhaps because they were children their imaginations had a certain raw power It had briefly underestimated. But now that they were coming, It would let them come. They would come and It would cast them one by one into the macroverse... into the deadlights of Its eyes.

Yes.

When they got here It would cast them, shrieking and insane, into the deadlights.

—2—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / IN THE TUNNELS / 2:15 P.M.

Todoroki and Sero had maybe ten matches between them, but Deku wouldn't let them use them. For the time being, at least, there was still dim light in the drain. Not much, but he could make out the next four feet in front of him, and as long as he could keep doing that, they would save the matches.

He supposed the little light they were getting must be coming from vents in the curbings over their heads, maybe even from the circular vents in manhole covers. It seemed surpassingly strange to think they were under the city, but of course by now they must be.

The water was deeper now. At some point, Iida had had to boost poor Kaminari onto his back- the water up to the small blondes waist, the resistance causing him to fall far behind the rest of the group.

"Thanks, Tenya," Kaminari had smiled, to relieved over the fact that he wouldn't accidentally be forgotten, lost and horrifically confused in that sewer, stumbling around until he either drowned, died of starvation, or was murdered by the bird he saw that day in the ironworks, to be embarrassed. He didn't even mind when Todoroki looked back at him and gave him an amused look. "You're like the father I never had." He grinned.

"So I've been told," Iida said softly, turning back to smile at him. His glasses had been pulled back down again, and hung lop-sidedly on his face, it made Kaminari giggle.

Three times dead animals had floated past: a giant rat, a calico kitten, and a bloated shiny thing that might have been a Red Fox kit. He heard one of the others (Bakugo, he was almost certain) mutter disgustedly as that one cruised by.

The water they were walking through was relatively placid, but all that was going to come to an end fairly soon: there was a steady hollow roaring not too far up ahead. It grew louder, rising to a one-note scream. The drain elbowed to the right. They made the turn and here were three pipes spewing water into pipe they were currently occupying. They were lined up vertically like the lenses on a traffic light. The drain deadended here. The light was marginally brighter. Deku looked up and saw they were in a square stone-faced shaft about fifteen feet high. There was a sewer-grating up there and water was sloshing down on them in buckets. His body trembled, he was freezing.

Deku surveyed the three pipes helplessly, pushing his drippy hair out of his eyes. The top one was venting water which was almost clear, although there were leaves and sticks and bits of trash in it- cigarette butts, chewing-gum wrappers, things like that. The middle pipe was venting gray water. And from the lowest one came a grayish-brown flood of lumpy sewage.

"Eh-Eh-Ejirou!"

Kirishima floundered up beside him. His hair was plastered to his face. His cast was a soaking, drippy mess, the loser's signatures now unreadable black smudges.

"Wh-Wh-Which wuh-wuh-one?" If you wanted to know how to build something, you asked Sero; if you wanted to know which way to go, you asked Kirishima. They didn't talk about this, but they all knew it. If you were in a strange neighborhood and wanted to get back to a place you knew, Kirishima could get you there, making lefts and rights with undiminished confidence until you were reduced simply to following him and hoping that things would turn out right... which they always seemed to do. Deku told Bakugo once that when he and Kirishima first began to play in the Barrens, he, Deku, was constantly afraid of getting lost. Kirishima had no such fears, and he always brought the two of them out right where he said he was going to. "If I g-g-got luh-lost in the Aokigahara forest and Kuh-Kiri was with m-me, I wouldn't wuh-hurry a b-bit," Deku told Bakugo, smiling. "He just nuh-nuh-knows. Yuh-Yagi says some people, ih-hit's like they got a cuh-huh-hompass in their heads. Ejirou's l-l-like that."

"I can't hear you!" Kirishima shouted over the roar of the water.

"I said wh-which one?!"

"Which one what?!" Kirishima had his aspirator clutched in his good hand, and Deku thought he actually looked more like a drowned bush baby (his eyes were certainly as large as one, anyways) than an eleven year old kid.

"Which one do we tuh-tuh-take?"

"Well, that all depends on where we want to go," Kirishima said, shrugging. Deku could have cheerfully throttled him even though the question made perfect sense.

Kirishima was looking uncertainly at the spewing pipes. They could fit into all of them, but the bottom one looked pretty snug. He yelped as what felt like a gallon of water rained down on him and Deku from above- they both sputtered and wiped water out of their eyes. The red leaf of a Japanese maple clung to Kirishima's long-ish hair.

Deku motioned the others to move up into a circle. "Where is Ih-Ih-It?" he asked them.

"Middle of town," Bakugo said promptly. "Right under the middle of town. Near the Canal."

Todoroki was nodding. So was Sero. So was Iida.

"Duh-Duh-Denki?"

"Yes," he said, nodding furiously from his place on Iida's back. Iida had to readjust him so that they both didn't fall backwards. "That's where It is. Near the Canal... Or under it."

Deku looked back at Kirishima. "W-W-Which one?"

Kirishima, sighing, pointed reluctantly at the lower pipe... and although Deku's heart sank, he wasn't at all surprised. "...That one."

"Nn..." Iida moaned unhappily. "That's a sewage pipe."

"We don't-" Kaminari began, and then broke off. He cocked his head in a listening gesture, and if Kirishima Ejirou looked like a drowned bush baby, Kaminari Denki certainly looked like a drowned puppy. His eyes were alarmed.

"What-" Deku began, and Kaminari scrambled higher up onto Iida's back so he could reach over and clamp a hand over Deku's mouth. Now Deku could hear it too: splashing sounds. Approaching. Grunts and muffled words. Shigaraki still hadn't given up.

"Quick," Sero said. "Let's go."

Iida looked back the way they had come, then he looked at the lowest of the three pipes. He pressed his lips tightly together and nodded. "Let's go," he said. "shower's exist for a reason."

Another gallon of water dropped on top of them, making them all jump. Iida crouched so Kaminari slide off of him safely. When his feet touched the ground the water was up to his belly button.

Deku led them to the pipe, grimacing at the smell, and crawled in. The smell: it was sewage, it was shit, but there was another smell here, too, wasn't there? A lower, more vital smell. If an animal's grunt could have a smell (and, Deku supposed, if the animal in question had been eating the right things, it could), it would be like this undersmell. 'We're headed in the right direction, alright... It's been here... and Its been here a lot.'

By the time they had gone twenty feet, the air had grown rancid and poisonous. He squished slowly along, moving through stuff that wasn't mud. He looked back over his shoulder and said, "You fuh-fuh-follow right behind m-me, Eh-Eh-Ejirou. I'll nuh-need y-you."

The light faded to the faintest gray, held that way briefly, and then it was gone and they were-

('out of the blue and')

-into the black. Deku shuffled forward through the sunk, feeling that he was almost cutting through it physically, one hand held out before him, part of him expecting that at any moment it would encounter rough hair and yellow lamplike eyes would open in the darkness. The end would come in one hot flare of pain as It walloped his head off his shoulders.

The dark was stuffed with sounds, all of them magnified and echoing. He could hear his friends shuffling along behind him, sometimes muttering something. There were gurglings and strange clanking groans. Once a flood of sickeningly warm water washed past and between his legs, wetting him to the thighs and rocking him back on his heels. He felt Kirishima clutch frantically at the back of his shirt, and then the small flood slackened. From the end of the line Kaminari giggled loudly at Sero: "I think we've just been pissed on by the Jolly Green Giant, Hanta."

Deku could hear water (or maybe it was more sewage) running in controlled bursts through the network of smaller pipes which now must be over their heads. He remembered the conversation about Irusu's sewers with his step-father and thought he knew what this pipe must be- it was to handle the overflow that only occurred during heavy rains and during the flood season. The stuff up there would be leaving Irusu to be dumped in the Teshio and the Yūbetsu River's. All the so-called gray water went into the Shibui, and if there was too much for the regular sewer-pipes to handle, there would be a dump-off... like the one that had just happened. If there had been one, there could be another. He glanced up uneasily, not able to see anything but knowing that there must be grates in the top arch of the pipe, possibly in the sides as well, and that any moment there might be-

-He wasn't aware he'd reached the end of the pipe until he fell out of it and staggered forward, pinwheeling his arms in a helpless effort to keep his balance. He fell on his belly into a semi-solid mass about two feet below the mouth of the pipe he'd just tumbled out of. His previously wounded chin flared as all sorts of city sewer gunk soaked inside. Something ran squeaking over his hand. Deku screamed and sat up, clutching his tingling hand to his chest, aware that a rat had just run over it; he had felt the loathsome, plated drag of the thing's hairless tail.

He tried to stand up and rapped his head on the new pipe's low ceiling. It was a hard hit, and Deku was driven back to his knees with large red flowers exploding in the darkness before his eyes.

"Be c-c-careful!" He heard himself shouting. His words echoed flatly, tears welled. "It drops off here! Eh-Ejirou! Where a-a-are yuh-you?"

"Here!" One of Kirishima's waving hands brushed Deku's nose. "Help me out, Deku, I can't see! It's-"

There was a huge watery ker-whasssh! Todoroki, Sero, and Bakugo all yelped in unison. In the daylight, the almost perfect harmony the three of them made would have been funny; down here in the dark, in the sewers, it was terrifying. Suddenly all three of them were tumbling out. Deku clutched Kirishima against his chest in a bear-hug, trying to save his arm.

"Holy-fucking-shit, I thought I was gonna fucking drown," Bakugo moaned miserably, he was coughing. "We got doused- oh boy, a goddamn piss-shower, oh great, they ought to have a class trip down here sometime, Deku, we could get that bitch teacher we both hated to lead it-"

"And Miss Rika could give a health lecture afterward," Sero said in a trembling voice, and most of them laughed shrilly. As the laughter was tapering off, there was another loud yelp from above as Kaminari nearly fell on top of all of them, narrowly saved by Iida grabbing him around the waist and hauling him backwards.

Kaminari let out a shaking breath. "Haha... wow... you really are my dad, Tenya."

"It certainly feels like it." Iida responded, causing the other's to laugh once more, Kaminari joining them this time. The two of them hopped down to where the other's were, and it was about that time when Iida's breathing began to quicken, the reality of what they were doing beginning to settle in.

"Don't cry, dude..." Sero said, putting a fumbling arm around Iida's sticky shoulders. "You'll get us all crying- remember what Katsuki said? It's extra trauma for the kid's when the parents lose it-"

"-I'm alright!" Iida said loudly, still breathing heavily. "I-I'm alright... I just- I can... I can stand to be scared, but I hate being dirty like this, I hate not knowing where I am- just give me a s-second... just one second..."

"D-Do y-y-you th-think a-a-any of the muh-matches are still a-a-any guh-good?" Deku asked Sero.

"I gave mine to Sho, they were his in the first place, anyways."

Deku felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press a folder of matches into it. They felt dry.

"I kept them under my jacket," Todoroki said softly. "Under my shirt and arm... They might work. You can try them, anyway."

Deku tore a match out of the folder and struck it. It popped alight and he held it up. All six of his friends were huddled together, wincing at the brief bright flare of light. They were splashed and smeared with muck and they all looked very young and very afraid. Behind them he could see the sewer-pipe they had come out of. The pipe they were in now was smaller still. It ran straight in both directions, its floor caked with layers of filthy sediment. And-

-Deku drew in a quick hiss and shook the match out as it burned his fingers. He listened and heard the sounds of fast-running water, dripping water, the occasional gushing roar as the overflow valves worked, sending more sewage into the Shibui, which was now God only knew how far behind them. He didn't hear Shigaraki and the others- yet.

He said quietly, eyes wide and lamp-like in the newfound darkness, "There's a d-d-dead bob-body on my r-r-right. About t-t-ten fuh-feet a-a-away from uh-us. I think it m-might be Huh-Huh-Huh-"

"Himiko?" Todoroki asked, his voice steady but edging along the border of hysteria. "Is it Toga Himiko?"

"Y-Y-Yes. Do you want me to luh-light a-a-another m-match?"

Kirishima, with a trembling voice, said, "You've got to, Deku... If I don't see how the pipe runs, I won't know which way to go."

Deku lit the match with hands that shook. In its glow they all saw the green, swelled thing that had been Toga Himiko. The corpse grinned at them in the dark with horrid chumminess, but with only half a face; sewer rats had taken the rest. Her blonde space bun's were now a dirty dish-water brown and littered with candy wrappers, half-smoked cigarette's, and dead leaves. Toga's summer-school books were scattered around her, bloated to the size of dictionaries in the damp. Both of her leg's had been ripped off.

"Oh-" Kaminari said hoarsely, his eyes wide.

"I hear them again," Todoroki said. "Tomura and the others."

The acoustics must have carried his voice to them as well; Shigaraki bellowed down the sewer-pipe and for a moment it was as if he was standing right there.

"We'll get youuuuuu-"

"Well hurry the hell up then!" Bakugo shouted down the drain they had just come from. His ruby eyes were bright, dancing, febrile. "Keep coming, banana-heels! This is just like an olympic swimming pool down here! Keep-"

-Then a shriek of such mad fear and pain came through the pipe that the guttering match fell from Deku's fingers and went out. Kirishima's good arm had curled around him and Deku hugged Kirishima back, feeling his body trembling like a wire as Iida Tenya packed close to him on the other side. That shriek rose and rose... and then there was an obscene, thick flapping noise, and the shriek was cut off.

"Heh... Something got one of them," Kaminari said through a choked cackle, horrified, in the darkness. "something... haha... some monster... Deku, we've- hahahaha... we've gotta get out of here... please...heh..." he backed up into Sero, who pulled him closer.

Deku could hear whoever was left- one or two, with the acoustics it was impossible to tell- stumbling and scrabbling through the sewer-pipe toward them. "Wuh-Which w-w-way, Eh-Ejirou?" he asked urgently. "d-do you nuh-know?"

"Toward the Canal?" Kirishima asked, shaking in Deku's arms. Deku felt someone brush past him, and stand next to Kirishima. It took him only a moment to realize it was Bakugo.

"Yes!"

"To the right. Past Himiko... well- over her, really..." Kirishima's voice suddenly hardened, but it was artificial- a front- he reached behind himself and clasped one of Bakugo's hands in his own. "I... I don't care that much... She- She was one of the ones that broke my arm... Spit in my face, too..."

"Let's guh-go," Deku said, looking back at the sewer-pipe they had just slushed through. "S-Single luh-line! Keep a t-t-touch on e-each uh-uh-other, like b-b-before!"

Deku groped forward, dragging his right shoulder along the slimy porcelain surface of the pipe, gritting his teeth, not wanting to step on Toga... or into her.

So they crawled farther into the darkness while waters rushed around them and while, outside, the storm walked and talked and brought an early darkness to Irusu- a darkness that screamed with wind and stuttered with electric fire and racketed with falling trees that sounded like the death-cries of huge unimaginable creatures.

—3—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / IT

...Now, here they were, coming again. While everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear... that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have... but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by killing them.

Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its meat suit hadn't been able to kill the puppy-mechanic, but the puppy-mechanic would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send another meat suit, this one a male nurse who looked a great deal like the wretched light-bringer, with a bad pill habit to finish the puppy-mechanic once and for all.

The writer's woman was now with It, alive yet not alive- her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside- and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrified viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness.

Now the mind of the writer's wife was with It, in It, beyond the end of the macroverse; in the darkness beyond the Turtle; in the outlands beyond all lands.

She was in Its eye; she was in Its mind.

She was in the deadlights.

Oh but the glamours were amusing. The puppy-mechanic, for instance. He would not remember, not consciously, but his mother could have told him where the bird he had seen at the Ironworks came from. When he was a babe, only six months old, his mother had left him sleeping in his cradle in the side yard while she went around back to hang sheets and diapers on the line. His screams had brought her on the run. A large crow had landed on the edge of the carriage and was pecking at baby puppy-mechanic like an evil creature in a nursery tale. He had been screaming in pain and terror, unable to drive away the crow, which had sensed weak prey. His mother had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on the baby puppy-mechanic's arms, and taken him to Dr. Sunanda for a tetanus and rabies shot. A part of the little puppy-mechanic had remembered that always- tiny pup, giant bird- and when It came to the puppy-mechanic, the puppy-mechanic had seen the giant bird again.

...But when the meat suit husband of the light-bringer brought the writer's woman, It had put on no face- It did not dress when It was at home. The meat suit husband had looked once and had dropped dead of shock, his face gray, his eyes filling with the blood that had squirted out of his brain in a dozen places. The writer's woman had put out one powerful, horrified thought- "IT'S- IT'S FEMALE!?" -and then all thoughts ceased. She swam in the deadlights. It came down from Its place and took care of her physical remains; prepared them for later feeding. Now Midoriya Ochako hung high up in the middle of things, crisscrossed in silk, her head lolling against the socket of her shoulder, her eyes wide and glazed, her toes pointing down.

...But there was still power in them. Diminished but still there. They had come here as children and somehow, against all the odds, against all that was supposed to be, all that could be, they had hurt It badly, had almost killed It, had forced It to flee deep into the earth, where it huddled, hurt and hating and trembling in a spreading pool of Its own strange blood, creating a multitude of new dimensions and timelines within that sticky pool of mess.

So another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its neverending story, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Irusu, Its private hunting grounds.

It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years- adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face... and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?

It understood vaguely that these children had somehow turned Its own tools against It-that, by coincidence (surely not on purpose, surely not guided by the hand of any Other), by the bonding of seven extraordinarily imaginative minds, It had been Drought into a zone of great danger. Any of these seven alone would have been Its meat and drink, and if they had not happened to come together, It surely would have picked them off one by one, drawn by the quality of their minds just as a lion might be drawn to one particular waterhole by the scent of zebra. But together they had discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one- probably a child- who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the reason it kills.

...Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated.

It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed- but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the shibui or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother's back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shin your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner-something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuisse '14- and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in politics. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge.

It would call them and then kill them.

...Only now that they were coming, the fear had returned. They had grown up, and their imaginations had weakened-but not as much as It had believed. It had felt an ominous, upsetting growth in their power when they joined together, and It had wondered for the first time if It had perhaps made a mistake.

...But why be gloomy? The die was cast and not all the omens were bad. The writer was finally starting to crack, filled with an almost overwhelming amount of terror for his wife, and that was good. The writer was the strongest, the one who had somehow trained his mind for this confrontation over all the years, and when the writer was dead- possibly with his intestine's hanging out of his body, or maybe It would gouge out his eyes and stuff him down his stuttering throat, maybe it'd rip all four of his limbs off at once- when their precious "Deku" was dead, the others would be Its quickly.

It had fantasized about all their deaths- dreamed about them as It slept. It had alway's planned to use the meat suit from their childhood to kill the puppy... the bird had been a back-up in case meat suit didn't work out... the light-bringer would be ripped in half- right down the middle, separating his peculiar features for the first time. The loud-mouth nuisance who had hurt him in that house all that time ago- when he had nearly had the writer in his clutches- would get one of the eye's slimy tentacles stuffed down his throat until he either suffocated or his head exploded. It would kill the broken-armed one by giving him every disease on the face of the earth, and It would kill the bulimic by making him puke up his own stomach. It had had a plan for glasses, too, of course... It'd planned on using the dead boy's to drown him in prey waste... but... well, glasses had taken care of himself.

It wanted them to suffer.

It would feed well... and then perhaps It would go deep again. And doze. For awhile.

—4—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / IN THE TUNNELS / 4:30 A.M.

"Deku!" Bakugo shouted into the echoing pipe. He was moving as fast as he could, but that wasn't very fast. He remembered that as kids they had simply walked through this pipe- hell, Kaminari had been carried on Iida's back- which led away from the pumping-station in the Barrens. He was crawling now, and the pipe seemed impossibly tight. His hair kept wanting to fall into his eyes and he kept having to push it out of the way. He could hear Sero and Todoroki behind him.

"Fucking- Deku!" he called again. "Shark-teeth!"

"I'm here!" Kirishima's voice floated back.

"Where's Deku?" Bakugo shouted.

"Up ahead!" Kirishima called. He was very close now, and Bakugo sensed rather than saw him just ahead. "He wouldn't wait!"

Bakugo's head butted the small of Kirishima's back. A moment later Todoroki's arms butted against Bakugo's thighs, where Kirishima had left a multitude of dark purple hickey's only two hour's before. Bakugo had been having a lot more fun then.

"DEKU!" Bakugo screamed at the top of his lungs. The pipe channelled his shout and sent it back at him, hurting his own ears. "Wait for us! We have to go together, dumbass! don't you know that?!"

Faintly, bouncing around the pipes, Deku: "Ochako! Ochako! Where are you?"

"God-fucking-damn you, Deku!" Bakugo cried out angrily. His hair fell into his eyes again. He cursed, and slicked it back as best he could with an aggressive use of force. He pulled in breath and shouted again: "You'll get lost without Ejirou, you fucking asshole! Wait up! Wait up for us! You hear me, Deku?! WAIT UP FOR US, DAMMIT!"

There was an agonizing moment of silence. It seemed that no one breathed. All Bakugo could hear was distant dripping water; the drain was dry this time, except for the occasional stagnant puddle- one of which he accidentally placed a hand in now.

"Deku!" He rubbed his trembling, dripping, hand dry on a leg of his pants, and realized with a flare of hot anger that he was fighting tears. And then, he did something he thought he would never do- something he hadn't even thought was possible anymore- he cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed:

"IZUKU! WAIT UP!"

And, after a long pause, fainter still, Deku's voice came back: "...I'm waiting."

"Thank God for small fucking favors," Bakugo muttered. He smacked Kirishima's ass. "Go."

"I don't know how long I can with just one arm," Kirishima said apologetically, and Bakugo could sense his flush.

"Go anyway," Bakugo said, and Kirishima began crawling again.

Deku, looking unhealthy and drained, was waiting for them in the sewer-shaft where the three pipes were lined up like lenses on a dead traffic light. There was room enough here for them to stand up.

"Over there," Deku said. "Kuh-Kuh-Kurogiri. And Twuh-Twice."

Sero flicked on his zippo with the woman on it. They looked. Todoroki merely blinked at the remains of their childhood tormentors. The skeleton of Bubaigawara Jin- best known as Twice to the children of Irusu in 2005- clad in moldering rags, seemed more or less intact. What remained of Kurogiri was headless. Sero looked across the shaftway and saw a grinning skull.

'There it is; there's the rest of him... Should have left it alone, guys...' Sero thought, and shivered. Todoroki rubbed his arm soothingly.

This section of the sewer system had fallen into disuse; Bakugo thought the reason why was pretty clear. Irusu had finally joined the 21st century. Sometime during the years when they were all busy learning to shave, to drive, to fuck around a little, all that good shit, the Environmental Protection Agency had caught wind of what they were doing, and the EPA had decided dumping raw sewage- and even gray water- into rivers and streams was a no-no. So this part of the sewer system had simply moldered, and the bodies of Kurogiri and Twice had moldered along with it. Here were the skeletons of two boys in the shredded remains of tee-shirts and jeans that had rotted away to rags. Moss had grown over the warped xylophone of Kurogiri's ribcage, and over the eagle on the buckle of his belt.

"Monster got 'em," Sero said softly. "do you remember? We heard it happen."

"Ochako's d-dead." Deku's voice was mechanical. "I know it."

"You don't know that at all, Midoriya Izuku!" Todoroki said with such fury that Deku stirred and looked at him- violently reminded of that day in July- the day of the smoke hole- the day he had tried to keep Todoroki from going in there with them, "All you know for sure is that a lot of other people have died, most of them children." Todoroki walked across to Deku and stood before him with his hands crossed over his chest- now a mere two inches taller instead of the five he had been in 2005. His face and hands were streaked with grime, his peppermint hair matted with dirt. His face was flamed with anger, and he looked like he was about to light himself on fire. They all thought that he looked absolutely magnificent. "And you know what did it."

"I nuh-never should have t-t-told her where I was guh-going," Deku said, yanking at his hair. "Why did I do that? Why did I-"

Todoroki's hands pistoned out and seized him by the shirt. Blinking, Bakugo watched as Todoroki shook Deku violently.

"No more! You know what we came for! We swore, and we're going to do it! Do you understand me, Midoriya Izuku? If she's dead, she's dead- that's harsh, I know- but it's the truth... if she's dead, there isn't a damn thing you can do now... but there is something you can do about the clown! It's not dead! Now, we need you. Do you get it? We need you!" Bakugo was almost certain that Todoroki was about to slap him- but he didn't, instead he yanked Deku up by the collar so they were eye to eye, his mismatched irises blazing "So you stand up for us! You stand up for us like before or none of us are going to get out of here!"

Deku looked at Todoroki for a long time without speaking, and Bakugo found himself thinking, 'Dammit... Deku, Come on-'

Deku looked slowly around at the rest of them, then back up Todoroki: "But- I...I can't-"

This time, Todoroki did smack him.

The 'pop!' Sound his palm made when it connected with Deku's freckled cheek reverberated around the concrete space and down the pipes they had just crawled through- Deku reeled back and hit the wall, holding his cheek. He stared wide-eyed at the ground, and for one, petrifying, moment, Bakugo thought Todoroki might of actually broken him.

Finally, Deku looked up, an angry red hand print on the left side of his face, and nodded. "Eh-Ejirou."

"I'm here, Deku." Kirishima breathed, shaken up- he hadn't expected Todoroki to actually hit him.

"D-Do y-you still ruh-remember which p-p-pipe?"

Kirishima pointed past Kurogiri and said: "That the one. Looks pretty small, doesn't it?"

Deku nodded again. "Can you do it? With your a-a-arm broken?"

"I can for you, Deku."

Deku smiled: the weariest, most terrible smile Bakugo had ever seen. "Tuh-hake us there, Eh-Ejirou. Let's g-get it done."

—5—

IN THE TUNNELS / 4:55 A.M.

As he crawled, Deku reminded himself of the dropoff at the end of this pipe, but it still surprised him. At one moment his hands were shuffling along the crusted surface of the old pipe; at the next they were skating on air. He pitched forward and rolled instinctively, landing on his shoulder with a painful crunch.

"Be c-c-careful!" he heard himself shouting. "Here's the druh-hopoff! Eh-Eh-Ejirou?"

"Here!" One of Kirishima's waving hands brushed across the bridge of Deku's nose. "Can you help me out?"

He got his arms around Kirishima and lifted him out, trying to be careful of the bad arm. Sero came next, then Todoroki, then Bakugo.

"You got your lighter, Huh-Hanta?"

"I do," Todoroki said. Deku felt a hand touch his in the darkness and press the could surface of a zippo lighter in his hand, he felt the ornate design bulging on the side of it's otherwise smooth surface. "I don't know how much fluid is left, but Hanta's is practically new."

Deku said, "did you keep this under your arm, Sho?"

"Not this time," Todoroki said, and put his arms around him in the dark. Deku hugged him tight, eyes closed, trying to take the comfort that he wanted so badly to give. "Just in my coat pocket."

He released Todoroki gently and flicked on the lighter. The power of memory was great-they all looked at once to their right. What remained of Toga Himiko's body was still there, amid a few lumpy, overgrown things that might have been books. The only really recognizable thing was a jutting semicircle of teeth, two or three of them with fillings.

..And something nearby. A gleaming circle barely seen in the obsidian lighter's guttering light.

Deku took a few steps forward. On the ground was a thin band of diamonds, a one carat, pink, diamond shaped like a rose was sat in a rose gold base. He picked it up. "Ochako's wedding ring," he said. His voice was hollow, expressionless.

His movement caused the flame to go out.

In the darkness he put the ring on on top of his own.

"Deku?" Bakugo started. "do you have any idea-

—6—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / IN THE TUNNELS / 2:20 P.M.

-how long we've been wandering through the tunnels since we left the place where Toga Himiko's body was?"

"Nuh-no." Deku answered back, he got no reply.

Deku was sure he could never find his way back. He kept thinking about what his step-father had said: "You could wander for weeks." If Kirishima's sense of direction failed them now, they wouldn't need It to kill them; they would wander until they died... or, if they got into the wrong set of pipes, until they were drowned like rats in a rain-barrel.

...But Kirishima didn't seem a bit worried- at least, not about that aspect of their adventure under the city. Every now and then he would ask Deku to light one of their diminishing store of matches, look around thoughtfully, and then set off again. He made rights and lefts seemingly at random. Sometimes the pipes were so big Deku could not reach their tops even by stretching his hand up all the way. Sometimes they had to crawl, and once, for five horrible minutes (which felt more like five hours), they wormed their way along on their bellies, Kirishima now leading, the others following with their noses to the heels of the person ahead.

The only thing Deku was completely sure of was that they had somehow gotten into a disused section of the Irusu sewer system. They had left all the active pipes either far behind or far above. The roar of running water had dimmed to a far-off thunder. These pipes were older, not kiln-fired ceramic but a crumbly claylike stuff that sometimes oozed springs of unpleasant-smelling fluid. The smells of human waste- those ripe gassy smells that had threatened to suffocate them all- had faded, but they had been replaced by another smell, iron and decay, that was worse.

Sero thought it was the smell of the decapitated heads drippy necks. To Kirishima it smelled like the leper. Bakugo thought it smelled like the world's oldest kimono, now moldering and rotting- a very big one, big enough for a the woman-form of the Kitsune statue, perhaps. To Todoroki it smelled like his father's Cologne. In Iida Tenya it awoke a dreadful memory from his earliest childhood- of when his older brother, Tensei, had fallen down the stares and broken his leg- a compound fracture- the smell of pennies had been overwhelming. Kaminari thought of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest.

When they finally reached the end of the narrow pipe, they slithered like eels down the curved surface of another which ran at a diagonal angle to the one they had been in, and found they could stand up again. Deku felt the heads of the matches left in the book, and sucked in a nervous breath. Four. His mouth tightened and he resolved not to tell the others how close they were to the end of their light... not unless he absolutely had to.

"Huh-Huh-How you g-g-guys d-doin?"

They murmured replies, and he nodded in the dark. No panic since Iida's mini-anxiety attack, and no tears at all. That was good. He felt for their hands and they stood together in the dark that way for awhile, both taking and giving from the touch. Deku felt clear exultation in this, a sure sense that they were somehow producing more than the sum of their seven selves; they had been re-added into a more potent whole.

He lit one of the remaining matches and they saw a narrow tunnel stretching ahead on a downward slant. The top of this pipe was festooned with sagging cobwebs, some water-broken and hanging in shrouds. Looking at them gave Deku a passè chill. The floor here was dry but thick with ancient mold and what might have been leaves, fungus... or some unimaginable droppings. Farther up he saw a pile of bones and a drift of green rags. They might once have been workman's clothes. Deku imagined some Sewer Department or Water Department worker who had gotten lost, wandered down here, and been discovered...

The match guttered. He tipped its head downward, wanting the light to last a little longer.

"Do y-y-you nuh-know where w-w-we are?" he asked Kirishima softly.

Kirishima pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. "Canal's that way," he said. "Less than half a mile, unless this thing turns in a different direction. We're under Up-Mile Hill right now, I think. But Deku-"

The match burned the tips of Deku's fingers and he let it drop. They were in darkness again. Someone- Deku thought it was Sero- sighed. But before the match had gone out, he had seen the worry on Kirishima's face.

"W-W-What? What ih-is it, Kuh-Kiri?"

Kirishima licked at his lips nervously, "...When I say we're under Up-Mile Hill, I mean we're really under it. We've been going down for a long time now... Nobody'd ever put sewer-pipe in this deep. When you put a tunnel this deep you call it a mine-shaft."

"Well, how deep do you figure we are, Shitty hair?" Bakugo asked.

"Quarter of a mile," Kirishima said, searching for Bakugo's hand in the dark, finding it, giving it a squeeze, and letting go again. "...Maybe more."

"Mm..." Todoroki grimaced.

"These aren't sewer-pipes, anyway," Iida said from behind them. "You can tell by that smell. It's bad, but it's not a sewery smell."

"I think I'd rather smell the sewer," Sero said. "It smells like-"

A scream floated down to them, issuing from the mouth of the pipe they had just left, lifting the hair on the nape of Deku's neck. The seven of them drew together, clutching each other.

"-gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu-"

"Tomura," Kirishima breathed. "Holy- he's still coming."

"I'm not surprised," Bakugo said. "some people are just too damn stupid to quit."

They could hear faint panting, the scrape of shoes, the whisper of cloth.

"-youuuuuuuuu-"

"Cuh-Cuh-Come on," Deku said.

They started down the pipe, now walking double except for Sero, who had, at some point, ended up at the back of the line: Deku and Kirishima, Bakugo and Iida, Todoroki and Kaminari.

"H-H-How fuh-far b-b-back do y-you think Tuh-Tuh-Tomura ih-his?"

"I couldn't tell, Deku," Kirishima said apologetically. "The echoes are to bad..." He dropped his voice. "did you see that pile of bones?"

"Y-Y-Yes," Deku said, dropping his own voice.

"There was a tool-belt with the clothes. I think it was a Water Department guy."

"I guh-guess s-s-so."

"How long you think-?"

"I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know." Kirishima closed his good hand over Deku's arm in the darkness.

It was perhaps fifteen minutes later when they heard something coming toward them in the dark.

Bakugo stopped, frozen cold all the way through. Suddenly he was in that dream again, poking his eye out with that needle- and then he was looking at the crawling eye with the tentacles on the screen, wracked with terror. He listened to that squelching, shifting movement- closing in on them, closing- and to the whispering branchlike sounds that accompanied it, and even before Deku struck a match he knew what it would be.

"Fuck!" he screamed, knowing he shouldn't say it aloud, but also knowing he was powerless against his own mouth: "It's that goddamn crawling eye!"

For a moment the others were not sure what they were seeing (Todoroki had an impression that his father had found him, even down here, and on a similar vein, Sero had seen a quick flash of his mother, stumbling drunkenly through the dark as she had been doing the night before), but Bakugo's cry, Bakugo's certainty, froze the shape for all of them. They saw what Bakugo saw.

A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel's crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Deku's guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.

It stared at them with blank, feverish cupidity.

The match went out.

In the darkness, Deku felt those branchlike tentacles caress his ankles, his shins... but he could not move. His body was frozen solid. He sensed It approaching, he could feel the heat radiating out from It, and could hear the wet pulse of blood wetting Its membranes. He imagined the stickiness he would feel when It touched him and still he could not scream. Even when fresh tentacles slipped around his waist and hooked themselves into the belt loops of his cargo shorts and began to drag him forward, he could not scream or struggle. A deadly sleepiness seemed to have suffused his whole body.

Todoroki felt one of the tentacles slip around the cup of his right ear and suddenly draw noose-tight. Pain flared sickeningly and he was dragged forward, twisting and panicking silently in the dark, as if an old-lady schoolteacher were giving him an out-of-patience come-along to the back of the room. Iida and Bakugo tried to back away, but a forest of unseen tentacles now wavered and whispered about them. Kaminari put his arms around Todoroki's waist and tried to tug him back. Todoroki clasped his hands with panicky tightness.

"Denki... Denki, It's got me..." Todoroki was dissociating- going into that safe-place of grey static he'd created in his mind... trying to think of someplace calm... someplace nice- someplace not underneath the city being dragged away by a tentacle-y eyeball.

"No It doesn't!... Wait... I'll pull!..."

Kaminari pulled with all his might, and Todoroki cried out as pain tore through his ear and blood began to flow. A tentacle, dry and hard, scraped over Kaminari's shirt, paused, then twisted in a painful knot around his shoulder.

Deku thrust out a hand, and it slapped into a gluey yielding wetness. 'The Eye!' his mind screamed. 'Oh God I got my hand in the Eye! Oh No! Not the Eye! My hand is in the Eye!'

Deku began to struggle now, but the tentacles drew him forward inexorably. His hand disappeared into that wet avid heat. His forearm. Now his arm was lunged into the Eye up to the elbow. At any moment the rest of his body would come against that sticky surface and he felt that he would go mad in that instant. He fought frantically, chopping at the tentacles with his other hand.

Kirishima stood like a boy in a dream, hearing the muffled screams and sounds of struggle as his friends were being pulled in- to his left, Sero Hanta's ankle was grabbed and he was yanked towards the eye along the ground, clawing desperately for purchase on the concrete- Kirishima sensed the tentacles around him but none had actually landed on him- at least, not yet.

'Run home!' his mind commanded him quite loudly. 'Run home to your mom, Ejirou! You can find the way!'

Deku screamed in the dark- a high, despairing sound that was followed by hideous squishings and slobberings.

Kirishima's heart thudded once, he turned his head. 'It was trying to hurt Deku.'

Then, somewhere close by, he heard Bakugo utter a loud cry- there was a thud as something- presumably Bakugo's body- was slammed into a wall.

Kirishima's paralysis broke wide open- 'It was trying to hurt Suki!'

"No!" Kirishima bellowed- it was a full-blown roar. One might never have guessed such a warrior-esq. sound could issue from such a thin chest, Kirishima Ejirou's chest, Kirishima Ejirou's lungs, which were of course afflicted with the most terrible case of asthma in Irusu. He bolted forward, jumping over questing tentacles without seeing them, his broken arm thumping his own chest as it swung back and forth in its soggy cast. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out his aspirator.

('acid- that's what it tastes like- acid- acid- battery acid-')

He collided with Deku's back and slammed him aside. There was a watery ripping sound, followed by a low eager mewling that Kirishima did not so much hear with his ears as feel with his mind. He threw himself in front of Bakugo, who was laying half-dazed on the ground, a sheet of blood running down the side of his face. He looked up at Kirishima blearily.

The eye turned. Kirishima raised the aspirator

('-acid. it's acid if I want it to be- so eat it- eat it- eat-')

"-BATTERY ACID, YOU PIECE OF SHIT BASTARD!" Kirishima screamed, and triggered off a blast. At the same time he kicked at the Eye. His foot went deep into the jelly of Its cornea. There was a gush of hot fluid over his leg. He pulled his foot back, only dimly aware that he had lost his shoe.

"FUCK OFF! GET OUTTA HERE! GO AWAY! GET LOST! FUCK OFF!"

He felt tentacles touch him, but tentatively. He triggered the aspirator again, coating the Eye, and felt/heard that mewling again... now a hurt, surprised sound.

"Fight It!" Kirishima raved at the others, whipping around. He had his arm's up in a somewhat awkward power-pose, not even feeling his broken arm anymore. "It's just a fucking Eye! Fight It! You hear me? Fight It, Deku! Kick the shit out of the sucker! Katsuki, I know damn well you can fight- it's the reason why I'm so goddamn in love with you- so stand up and beat the shit out of it! Hanta, on the first day we met! I watched you collapse in the Shibui, covered in blood, and get up and smoke a cigarette like it was a regular Tuesday! Tenya, you were amazing on Neibolt street when you shoved Deku out of the way! Do that shit again! Shouto you once told us you could kick all of our asses if you really wanted too, and you can! So use that strength to your advantage! Denki, we all know that you're a scrappy piece of work, so stop panicking for Shouto and actually DO SOMETHING USEFUL! Christ you fucking pussies I'm doing all the work AND I GOT A BROKEN ARM!"

Deku blinked wildly in the direction of Kirishima's voice and, in an almost iffy-gesture, slowly pulled his arm out of the eye. Deku felt his strength return, and then slammed his hand, fist-first, back in. A moment later Kaminari was beside him. He ran into the Eye, gasped with surprise and disgust, and then began to rain punches onto its jellied, quivering, surface. "Let him go!" he yelled. "You hear me? Let Roki go! Get outta here!"

"Just an Eye! Just a fucking Eye!" Kirishima was screaming deliriously. He triggered his aspirator again and felt It draw back. The tentacles which had settled on him now dropped away. "Suki! Suki! Get it! It's just an Eye!"

Bakugo stumbled forward, unable to believe he was doing this, actually approaching the worst, most terrible fucking monster in the world. But he was.

He only threw a single weak punch, and the feel of his fist sinking into the Eye- it was thick and wet and somehow gristly -made him nearly throw his lunch up in one big tasteless convulsion. A sound came out of him-glurt!- and the thought that he'd actually puked on the Eye caused him to gag violently again. It was only a single punch, but since he had created this particular monster, perhaps that was all that was necessary. Suddenly the tentacles were gone. They could hear It withdrawing... and then the only sounds were Kirishima's panting and Todoroki's sharp breaths, one hand to his bleeding ear.

Deku struck one of their three remaining matches and they stared at each other with dazed, shocked faces. Deku's left arm was running with a thick, cloudy goo that looked like a mixture of partially congealed eggwhite and snot. Blood was trickling slowly down the side of Todoroki's neck, and there was a fresh cut on Kaminari's cheek. Bakugo touched the tacky blood on his temple.

"A-A-Are we all ruh-ruh-right?" Deku asked hoarsely.

"Are you, Deku?" Iida asked.

"Y-Y-Yeah." He turned to Kirishima and hugged the slightly taller boy with a fierce intensity. "You suh-suh-saved my luh-life, Eh-Eh-Ejirou."

"It ate your shoe," Todoroki commented bluntly.

Kaminari uttered a wild laugh, and leaned heavily against Sero. "It did, Ejirou! It really did! Isn't that too bad?"

"I'll buy you a new pair of Keds when we get out of here," Bakugo said. "How'd you do that?"

"Shot it with my aspirator. Pretended it was acid. That's how it tastes after awhile if I'm having, you know, a bad day. Worked great."

"Christ you fucking pussies I'm doing all the work AND I GOT A BROKEN ARM!" Bakugo said, shaking his head. "Now that- that was attractive, shitty hair... you're gonna have to start saying shit like that more often."

"I hate it when you call me shitty hair- I put up with it, but I don't like it."

"Yeah, I know," Bakugo said, hugging him tightly, not caring about potential teasing from the other's- for now, at least. "but somebody has to toughen you up, shitty hair. When you stop leading the sheltered existence of a child and grow up, you're gonna realize the real world isn't this easy."

Kirishima looked at Bakugo for a long time after that, a strange look on his face. Bakugo opened his mouth to make some smart-ass comment, the shock of what had just transpired already fading, bringing back their regularly scheduled Bakugo Katsuki, when Kirishima suddenly grabbed a fistful of his blonde hair and slammed their lips together.

"Oh-" Iida said, "um-"

Kaminari whistled, causing Sero to giggle and Todoroki to smile in amusement behind his hand. Deku grinned.

Kirishima yanked Bakugo away from him. Bakugo was blinking, wide-eyed, almost confused.

"Man, I love you." Kirishima grinned, the unbridled confidence from earlier still coming off him in waves.

"...what?..." Bakugo blinked, his voice uncharacteristically small.

"Well- um- keep that aspirator thing handy, Ejirou..." Iida said, feeling bad for interrupting, but knowing they needed to get a move on. "...We might- we might need it again..."

"You didn't see It anywhere?" Sero asked, the brief moment of warmth already beginning to evaporate into thin air. "...When you lit the match?"

"Ih-Ih-It's g-g-gone," Deku said, and then added grimly: "...But we're getting close to It. To the pluh-hace where Ih-It stuh-stuh-stays. And I th-think we h-h-hurt Ih-hit th-that time."

"Tomura's still coming," Iida said. His voice was low and hoarse. "I can hear him back there."

"Then let's move out," Kaminari said, unlike the other's, he was still grinning.

'I'd kill for that level of sunshine-y-ness.' Todoroki thought, smiling softly to himself.

They began to move out. The tunnel progressed steadily downward, and that smell- that low wild stench- grew steadily stronger. At times they could hear Shigaraki behind them, but now his cries seemed far away and not at all important. There was a feeling in all of them- similar to that feeling of skew and disconnection they had felt in the house on Neibolt Street-that they had progressed over the edge of the world and into some queer nothingness. Deku felt (although he did not have the vocabulary to express what he knew) that they were approaching Irusu's dark and ruined heart.

It seemed to Kaminari Denki that he could almost feel that heart's diseased, arrhythmic beat. Todoroki felt a sense of evil power growing around him, seeming to enfold him, certainly trying to split him off from the others and get him alone. Nervously, he reached out on either side of himself and clasped Deku's hand and Kaminari's. It seemed to him that he had to reach too far, and he called out softly: "Hang onto hands- It's like we're moving away from each other."

It was Iida who first realized he could see again. There was a low, strange radiance in the air. At first he could only see hands- his, clasping Sero's on one side and Bakugo's on the other. Then he realized he could see the words on Kaminari's muddy T-shirt and the smudged ':)' Sero had written after his name on Kirishima's cast.

"Can you guys see?" Iida asked, coming to a stop. The others stopped, too. Deku looked around, first aware that he could see- a little, anyway- and then that the tunnel had widened out amazingly. They were now in a curved chamber easily as big as the Zepp concert hall in Sapporo. Bigger, he amended as he looked around with a growing sense of awe.

They craned their necks back to see the ceiling, which was now fifty feet or more above them, and held up by outcurving buttresses of stone like ribs. Nets of dirty cobweb hung between them. The floor was now stone-flagged, but overlaid with such a drift of ancient dirt that the quality of their footfalls had never changed. The up-curving walls were easily fifty feet away on either side.

"Waterworks must have really gone crazy down here," Kaminari said, and laughed uneasily.

"Looks like a cathedral," Todoroki said softly.

"Where's the light coming from?" Sero wanted to know, his eyes darting around wildly- almost excitedly- at the curious room. In fourteen years time he'd design an art hall with an interior just like this.

"Coming r-right out of the w-w-walls, looks l-like," Deku said.

"I don't like it," Iida said.

"Let's guh-go. T-Tuh-Tomura'll be breathing d-d-down our nuh-necks-"

A loud, braying cry split the gloom, and then the ruffling, heavy thunder of wings. A shape came cruising out of the dark, one eye glaring- the other was a dark lamp.

"The bird!" Sero gasped. "Look out, it's the bird!"

It dived at them like an obscene fighter-plane, Its plated orange beak opening and closing to reveal the pink inner lining of Its mouth, plush as a satin pillow in a coffin.

It went straight for Kirishima.

Its beak raked his shoulder and he felt pain sink into his flesh like acid. Blood flowed down his chest. He cried out as the backwash of Its beating wings blew noxious tunnel air in his face. It wheeled back, Its eye glaring malevolently, rolling in Its socket, blurring only as Its nictitating eyelid jittered down momentarily to cover the eye with tissue-thin film. Its claws sought Kirishima, who ducked, screaming. They razored through the back of his shirt, cutting it open, drawing shallow scarlet lines along his shoulderblades. Kirishima yelled and tried to crawl away but the bird wheeled back again.

Kaminari broke forward, digging in his pocket. He came out with a one-blade Buck knife. In the panic of the eye (more specifically, in the panic of Todoroki being taken) he had forgotten all about it. As the bird dived on Kirishima again, he swept it in a quick, tight arc across one of the bird's talons. It cut deep, and blood poured out. The bird banked away and then came back, folding Its wings, diving in like a bullet. Kaminari fell to one side at the last moment, slashing upward with the Buck knife. He missed, and the bird's claw hit his wrist with such force that his hand went numb and tingly- the bruise that later bloomed there went most of the way to his elbow. The Buck flew into the dark.

The bird came back, screeching triumphantly, and Kaminari rolled his body over Kirishima's and waited for the worst.

Iida, taking a deep breath, walked forward toward the two boys huddled on the floor as the bird returned. He stood, very tall and somehow trim in spite of the dirt grimed into his hands and arms and pants and shirt. The bird uttered another squawk and sheared off, bulleting by Iida, missing him by inches, lifting his midnight-black hair and then dropping it in the buffeting wake of Its passage. He turned in a tight circle to face Its return.

"I believe in scarlet tanagers even though I never saw one," he said in a clear voice. The bird screamed and banked away as if he'd shot at it. "same with vultures, and the New Guinea mudlark and the flamingos of Brazil." The bird screamed, circled, and suddenly flew on up the tunnel, squawking. "I believe in the golden bald eagle!" Iida screamed after it. "And I think there really might be a phoenix somewhere! But I don't believe in you, so get out of here! Get out!"

He stopped then, and the silence seemed very large.

Deku, Bakugo, and Todoroki went to Kaminari and Kirishima; they helped Kirishima to his feet and Deku looked at the cuts. "Nuh-not d-d-deep," he said. "But I b-bet they h-hurt like h-h-hell."

"It tore my shirt to pieces, Deku." Kirishima's eyes were bright with pain-filled tears, and he was wheezing again. The bellowing barbarian's voice was gone; it was hard to believe it had ever been there. "What am I going to tell my mom?"

Bakugo pulled him close and mussed up his hair- comforting him in his own way. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there, sharky. Give yourself a blast."

Kirishima did, inhaling deeply and then wheezing.

"That was great, dad!"
Kaminari told Iida, shaking him, causing his glasses to fall slowly down his face with every jerk of his body. "That was just awesome! You saved us!"

Iida was shivering all over. "There's no bird like that, that's all. There never has been and there never will be."

"We're coming!" Shigaraki screamed from behind them. His voice was utterly demented. He was laughing and howling now. He sounded like something that had crawled out of a crack in the roof of hell. "Me and Jin! We're coming and we'll get you little punks! You can't get away!"

Deku shouted: "G-G-Get out, T-T-Tomura! W-W-While there's still tuh-tuh-time!"

Shigaraki's response was a hollow, inarticulate scream. They heard a hustle of footsteps and in a burst of comprehension Deku understood Shigaraki's whole purpose: he was real, he was mortal, he could not be stopped by an aspirator or a bird-book. Magic would not work on Shigaraki. He was, to put it bluntly, too stupid.

"C-C-Come oh-on. We guh-gotta stay a-a-ahead of h-h-him."

They went on again, holding hands, Kirishima's tattered shirt flapping behind him. The light grew brighter, the tunnel ever huger. As it canted downward, the ceiling flew away above until they could barely see it. It now seemed to them that they were not walking in a tunnel at all but making their way through a titanic underground courtyard, the approach to some cyclopean castle. The light from the walls had become a running green-yellow fire. The smell was stronger, and they began to pick up a vibration that might have been real or might have been only in their minds. It was steady and rhythmic.

It was a heartbeat.

"It ends up ahead." Todoroki said suddenly. "Look. It's a blank wall."

But as they drew closer, antlike now on this great floor of dirty stone blocks, each block bigger than Ukiyo Park, it seemed, they saw that the wall was not entirely blank after all. It was broken by a single door. And although the wall itself towered hundreds of feet above them, the door was very small. It was no more than four feet high, a door of the sort you might see in a fairytale book, made of stout oaken boards bound with iron strips in an X-pattern. It was, they all realized at once, a door made only for children.

Ghostly, in his mind, Sero heard Nemuri reading to the little ones... they leaned forward, 'will the monster be bested... or will It feed?'

There was a mark on the door, and heaped at its foot was a pile of bones. Small bones. The bones of who knows how many children.

They had come to the place of It.

The mark on the door, then: what was that?

Deku marked it as a paper boat.

Iida saw it as a bird rising toward the sky- a phoenix, perhaps.

Kaminari Denki saw an insane face- that of crazy Shigaraki Senior.

Bakugo saw an eye being poked by a needle, filling with blood.

Todoroki saw a hand doubled up into a fist.

Kirishima believed it to be the face of the leper, all sunken eyes and wrinkled snarling mouth-all disease, all sickness, was stamped into that face.

Sero Hanta saw a decapitated head, it's neck bloody and dripping.

Later, arriving at that same door with Twice's screams still echoing in his ears, alone at the end of it, Shigaraki Tomura would see it as the moon, full, ripe... and black.

"I'm scared, Deku," Sero said in a wavering voice. "do we have to?"

Deku toed the bones, and suddenly scattered them in a powdery, raiding drift with one foot. He was scared, too... but there was Eri to consider. It had ripped off Eri's arm. Were those small and fragile bones among these? Yes, of course they were.

They were here for the owners of the bones, Eri and all the others- those who had been brought here, those who might be brought here, those who had been left in other places simply to rot.

"We have to," Deku said.

"What if it's locked?" Kirishima asked in a small voice.

"Ih-It's not l-locked," Deku said, and then told them what he knew from deeper inside: "Pluh-haces like this are n-never luh-luh-locked."

He placed the fingers of his right hand on the door and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, incredibly strong, incredibly potent now.

One by one they passed through the fairytale door, and into the lair of It. Deku-

—7—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / IN THE TUNNELS / 4:59 A.M.

-stopped so suddenly that the others piled up like freight-cars when the engine suddenly comes to a panic-stop. "What is it?" Sero called.

"Ih-Ih-It was h-h-here. The Eh-Eh-Eye. D-Do you r-r-remember?"

"I remember," Bakugo said. "Ejirou stopped it with his aspirator. By pretending it was acid. He said some funny stuff..." he paused, turning to Kirishima "...then you kissed me- we'd kissed before but- that one was more real- more passionate."

"I also told you I loved you," Kirishima added, flushing heavily, smiling fondly. "Twice. And all you had to say was 'what?'"

"That's because I was flustered..." Bakugo mumbled absently, surprising them all- it seemed that Bakugo Katsuki truly had matured in the years between- at least somewhat. "...but I love...d you too. I just didn't know how to say it without flushing like a fucking idiot- and my ego was already damaged from that goddamn eye..."

Kirishima paused for a moment, his lips parted. He wanted to kiss Bakugo again, badly... but knew he couldn't. Not now- not in front of everyone else... and shit- especially not in front of Deku- not after what had happened to his wife- so instead, he continued on, that feeling of guilt blooming in his chest once more.

"I-I duh-don't thuh-thuh-think We'll suh-see anything we saw b-b-before," Deku said after a silence. He flicked on the lighter and looked around at the others. Their faces were luminous in the glow of the flame, luminous and mystic. And they seemed very young. "H-H-How you guys d-doing?"

"We're okay, Deku," Kirishima said, but his face was drawn with pain. Deku's makeshift splint was coming apart. "How 'bout you?"

"Oh-Oh-kay," Deku said, and extinguished the flame before his face could tell them any different story.

"How did it happen?" Todoroki asked him, touching his arm in the dark. "Deku, how could she-?"

"B-B-Because I muh-hentioned the n-name of the town. Sh-She c-c-came ah-hafter m-m-me. Even wh-when I was d-d-doing it, suh-suh-homething ih-hinside was t-t-telling me to sh-sh-shut uh-up. B-But I d-d-didn't luh-luh-histen." He shook his head helplessly in the dark. "But even if sh-she came to Uh-uh-Irus-hu, I d-d-don't uh-hunderstand h-h-how she c-could have guh-hotten d-d-down h-here. If Tuh-Tuh-Tomura dih-didn't b-b-bring her, then who d-did?"

"It," Sero said simply. "It doesn't have to look bad, we know that. It could have shown up and said you were in trouble. Taken her here in order to... to fuck you up, I suppose. To rip out our guts. Cause that's what you always were, Deku. Our guts."

"...Koji?" Todoroki said in a low, almost musing voice.

"W-W-Who?" Deku filled the space with a dim glow once more.

Todoroki was looking at him with a kind of desperate honesty. "Koji. My husband. He knew, too. At least, I think I mentioned the name of the town to him, the way you mentioned it to Ochako. I... I don't know if- if it actually registered or not... He was pretty angry with me at the time."

"Fuck, what is this, some kind of drama where everybody turns up sooner or later?" Bakugo asked.

"Not a drama," Deku said, sounding sick, really sick. "...a show. Like the circus. Sho here went and married Shigaraki Tomura 2.0. When he left, why wouldn't he come here? After all, the real Tomura did."

"No," Todoroki said softly. "I didn't marry Tomura. I married my father."

"If he beat on you, what's the difference?" Kirishima asked, and felt terrible when Todoroki's eyes stuttered away from him.

"C-C-Come around me," Deku said. "Muh-muh-move in."

They did. Deku reached out to either side and found Kirishima's good hand and one of Bakugo's hands. Soon they stood in a circle, as they had done once before when their number was greater. Kirishima felt someone- Sero, he figured, not knowing how he knew, just that he did- put an arm around his shoulders. The feeling was warm and comforting and deeply familiar.

Deku felt the sense of power that he remembered from before, but understood with some desperation that things really had changed. The power was nowhere near as strong- it struggled and flickered like a candle-flame in foul air. The darkness seemed thicker and closer to them, more triumphant. And he could smell It. 'Down this passageway,' he thought, 'and not so terribly far, is a door with a mark on it. What was behind that door? It's the one thing I still can't remember. I can remember making my fingers stiff, because they wanted to tremble, and I can remember pushing the door open. I can even remember the flood of light that streamed out and how it seemed almost alive, as if it wasn't just light but fluorescent snakes. I remember the smell, like the monkey-house in a big zoo, but even worse. And then... nothing.'

"Do a-a-any of y-y-y-you rem-m-member what It really w-w-was?"

"No," Kirishima answered immediately.

"I think... " Bakugo began, and then Deku could almost feel the answer on the tip of Bakugo's tongue, he leaned toward his voice, early-

"...Dammit." Bakugo hissed, his hand clenched angrily around Deku's own out of habit, "no."

"No," Todoroki said.

"Nope." That was Sero. "That's the one thing I still can't remember. What It was... or how we fought It."

"Chüd," Todoroki said. "That's how we fought it. But I don't remember what that means."

"Stand by m-me," Deku said softly, "and I-I'll stuh-stuh-hand by y-y-you guys."

"Deku," Sero said. His voice was very calm. "something's coming."

Deku listened. He heard dragging, shambling footsteps approaching them in the dark... and he was afraid.

"Oh-Oh-Ochako?..." he called... and knew already that it was not her.

Whatever was shambling toward them drew closer.

Deku flicked open the ornate-patterned lighter.

—8—

IRUSU / 5:00 A.M.

The first wrong thing happened on that late-spring day in 2020 two minutes before official sunrise.

To understand how wrong it was one would have to know two facts that were known by Kaminari Denki (who lay unconscious in the Irusu Home Hospital as the sun came up), both concerning the Irusu Community House, which had stood next to the library on Ori road since 1923. The community house was topped with a grey-wood paneled clock tower. There were clock-faces on all four sides of the base, and the clock itself had been constructed and shipped from Switzerland in the year 1921. The only other one like it stood somewhere in the New England part of the United States.

Monoma Mari, an engineer who lived on West Broadway, donated money to restore the clock to it's former glory- 1,755,000¥- in 2015. Mari could afford it. Her late son, Neito, had spent a great deal of his summer's at the community home doing all manners of activities... and she wanted the future children of Irusu, as well as her only granddaughter, to enjoy it just as much as her son had.

From the time of its installation in 1923 until May 31st, 2020, even while it was under renovation in 2015, that clock had faithfully chimed each hour and each half- with one notable exception. On the day of the explosion at the Kanazaki Ironworks it had not chimed the noon-hour. Residents believed that Yanagi Masa, who had run the community home at the time, had silenced the clock to show that the community home- a place which specialized in children and family activities, was in mourning for the dead children. Yanagi never disputed this notion, although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.

Nor did it chime the hour of five in the morning on May 31st, 2020.

At that moment, all over Irusu, old-timers and life-long residents opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could put their fingers on. Medicines were gulped, false teeth put in, pipes and cigars lit, coffee and breakfast were started.

The life-longs stood at watch.

One of them was Aizawa Shouta, now in his early forties- having, amusedly, been 27 the year he had told Kirishima Ejirou the truth about his asthma. He had moved out of Irusu that same year, but ended up coming back for reason's he himself couldn't really explain...

He walked to the window and looked out at a darkening sky. The weather report the night before had called for clear skies, but his gut told him it was going to rain, and hard. He felt worry, deep inside him; and in some obscure way he felt threatened, as if a poison were working its way relentlessly toward his heart. He thought randomly of the night the Hitosashi nightclub had been burnt down... he remembered the screams, the smell of burning flesh, the blaring of sirens- how he'd run into the fire at twelve year's old and dragged eighteen year-old Kaminari Kaori out- a foreign, adult voice, not quite his own, screaming to him that she in particular had to be saved- with her sister and her sister's girlfriend running along behind him.

"What was it that she was mumbling about?..." he yawned, wiping at his tired eyes, "...something about a clown with no eyes..."

That kind of experience left a person feeling kind of warm and lazy inside, like everything was... was somehow confirmed. He couldn't put it any better than that, even to himself. Experiences like that left a person feeling like he maybe might live forever- but for now, he was worried.

"Those kids," he said with a yawn, looking out his window, unaware he had spoken. He was stirring cream and sugar lazily into his coffee now, "What is it with those kids? What have they gotten themselves into this time?"

Shuzenji Chiyo, seventy-seven, who had been in the Ureshi Yotte when Moriyama Jo decided to go to town on the bartender, bouncer, and both waitresses in 1961 with an axe, awoke at the same moment, sat up, and let out a rusty scream that no one heard. She had dreamed of Moriyama, only Moriyama had been coming after her, and the axe had come down, and a moment after it did Shuzenji had seen her own severed hand twitching and curling on the counter.

'Something's wrong,' she thought in her terror-muddied mind, frightened and shaking all over. 'Something's terribly wrong.'

Shimano Yori, who had discovered Toshinori Eri's mutilated body in December of 2004, who's own son had been murdered that spring and found by a grade eight class, and whose daughter had discovered the first victim of this new cycle earlier in the spring, opened his eyes on the stroke of five and thought, even before looking at the clock on the bureau: 'The Irusu Community Home's clock didn't chime the hour... what's wrong?' He felt a large ill-defined fright. Mr. Shimano had prospered over the years; in 2001 he had purchased The Shoeboat, and now there was a second Shoeboat at the Irusu mall and a third up in Sapporo. Suddenly all of those things-things he had spent his life working for- seemed in jeopardy. 'From what?!' he cried to himself, looking at his sleeping wife. 'From what, why are you so goddam antsy just because that clock didn't chime?' But there was no answer.

He got up and went to the window, hitching at the waistband of his pyjamas. The sky was restless with clouds racing in from the west, and Shimano's disquiet grew. For the first time in a very long time he found himself thinking of the screams that had brought him to his porch nearly sixteen years ago- the thing that had kicked off the worst year of his life- to see that writhing figure in the yellow rainslicker. He looked at the approaching clouds and thought: 'We're in danger. All of us. Irusu as a whole... grave danger.'

Chief Ishihara, who really believed she had tried her best to solve the new string of child-murders that had plagued Irusu, stood on the porch of her house, thumbs in her uniform's belt loops, looking up at the clouds, and felt the same disquiet. '...Something's getting ready to happen. Looks like it's going to pour buckets, for one thing... But that's not all...' She shuddered... and as she stood there on her porch, the smell of the bacon her husband was cooking wafting out through the screen door, the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk in front of her Shinrinyoku street home and, somewhere just over the horizon from Ukiyo Park, thunder rumbled.

Ishihara shivered again.

—9—

IN THE TUNNELS / 5:01 A.M.

Deku held the lighter up... and uttered a long trembling despairing screech.

It was Eri wavering up the tunnel toward him, Eri, still dressed in her blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. Her white hair was stained a dirty-brown color- streaked with mud, blood, and who know's what else. Dead leaves, sticks, and trash clung to her hair like disgusting bow's. Eri's face was white as cheese and her once sparkling ruby irises were now a chalky pink. They fixed on Deku's own.

"My... boat!..." Eri's lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. "I can't find it, Deku... I've looked everywhere... and I can't find it and now I'm dead and it's your fault! your fault! YOUR FAULT-"

"Eh-Eh-Eri!" Deku shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping apart- he couldn't take this- he couldn't comprehend what he was seeing-

Eri stumble-staggered toward him and now her one remaining arm rose toward Deku, the bloated hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty, purple, and grasping- the tips of her finger's pruny.

"Your fault," Eri whispered, and grinned. Her teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. "You sent me out and it's all... your... fault."

"Nuh-Nuh-No, Eh-Eh-Eri!" Deku cried. "I dih-dih-didn't nuh-hun-nuh-know-"

"Kill you!" Eri cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Deku could smell her now, could smell Eri rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small girl's guts.

Eri's teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from her eyes and dribble down her round cheeks... and the lighter went out- it had run out of fluid.

Deku felt his friends disappear- they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off because Eri was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had sent Eri out to die and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal- oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only Eri, running out into the receding flood with her paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.

"You deserve to die for killing me, big brother..." Eri whispered. She was very close now. Deku closed his eyes, accepting his fate.

Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Sero had his own lighter in his hand- the one with the woman surrounded by roses engraved in the side.

"Fight It, Deku!" Bakugo shouted from somewhere just out of site. "For fuck's sake! Fight It!"

'...What are you doing here?' He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn't run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own sister?

"Fight It!" Todoroki was screaming. "Deku, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please-"

Eri was less than five feet away now. She suddenly stuck her tongue out at Deku. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Deku screamed again.

"Kill It, Deku!" Kirishima shouted. "That's not your sister! Kill It while it's small! Kill It NOW!"

Eri glanced at Kirishima, cutting her chalky-pink eyes that way for just a moment, and Kirishima reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Deku stood mesmerized, watching his sister come toward him, Eri again after all these years, it was Eri at the end as it had been Eri at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of Eri's yellow slicker as Eri closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on her red-rubbers and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker Eri's body was made of them, as if the feet inside Eri's boots were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-girl, that was it, that was Eri, she was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.

-Dimly he heard Sero scream-

(he thrusts his fists)

"-Deku, please Deku-"

(against the posts and still insists)

"We'll look for my boat together," Eri said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down her cheeks. She reached for Deku and her head cocked sideward, her teeth peeling back from those fangs.

(he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)

"We'll find it," Eri said and Deku could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight. As Eri's mouth widened, the corner's of her mouth tearing open with a grotesque ripping sound, he could see things squirming around inside there. "It's still down here, everything floats down here, we'll float, big brother, we'll all float-"

Eri's bloated claw-hand closed on Deku's neck.

(HE SEES THE GHOSTS WE SEE THE GHOSTS THEY WE YOU SEE THE GHOSTS-)

Eri's contorted face drifted toward Deku's neck.

"-float-"

"He thrusts his fists against the posts!" Deku cried. His voice was deeper, hardly his own at all, and in a searing flash of memory Bakugo remembered that Deku only stuttered in his own voice: when he pretended to be someone else, he never did.

The Eri-thing recoiled, hissing, Its hand going to Its face in a warding-off gesture.

"That's it!" Bakugo screamed deliriously. "You've fucking got It, Deku! Get It! Get It! Get It!"

"He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts!" Deku said again. He advanced on the Eri-thing. "You're no ghost! Eri knows I didn't mean for her to die! And so did my parents! They knew it wasn't my fault but I alway's thought they hated me for it! I was so sure of it! But I was wrong, do you hear me!?"

The Eri-thing abruptly turned, squealing like a rat. It began to run and ripple under the yellow slicker. The slicker itself seemed to be dripping, running in bright blots of yellow. It was losing Its shape, becoming amorphous.

"He thrusts his fists against the posts, you son of a bitch!" Midoriya Izuku screamed, half-crazed "-and still insists he sees the ghosts!" He leaped at It and his fingers snagged in the yellow rainslicker that was no longer a rainslicker. What he grabbed felt like some strange warm taffy that melted under his fingers as soon as he had closed his fist around it. He fell to his knees. Then Sero gasped as the flame on his lighter went out, and they plunged into darkness once more.

Deku felt something begin to grow in his chest, something hot and choking and as painful as hot coals. He gripped his knees and drew them up to his chin, hoping it would stop the pain, or perhaps ease it; he was dimly thankful for the dark, glad that the others couldn't see this agony.

He heard a sound escape him-a wavering moan. There was a second; a third. "Eri!" he cried. "Eri, I'm sorry! I never meant for anything b-b-b-bad to huh-huh-happen!"

Perhaps there was something else to say, but he could not say it. He was sobbing then, lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, remembering the boat, remembering the steady beat of the rain against his bedroom windows, remembering the medicines and the tissues on the nighttable, the faint ache of fever in his head and in his body, remembering Eri, most of all that: remembering Eri, his little sister in her yellow hooded slicker.

"Eri, I'm sorry!" he cried through his tears. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm suh-suh-SORRY-"

And then they were around him, his friends, and Sero didn't light his lighter, and someone held him, he didn't know who, Todoroki maybe, or maybe Sero- hell, maybe even Bakugo like on the day he showed him Eri's photo album- They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

—10—

IRUSU / 5:30 A.M.

By 5:30 it was raining hard. The weather forecasters on the Ashikawa radio stations expressed mild surprise and tendered mild apologies to all the people who had made plans for picnics and outings on the basis of yesterday's forecasts. "We're sorry about the cancelled plans, just one of those odd weather patterns that sometimes developed with startling suddenness- no one could of predicted this."

On HBN, meteorologist Fusē Momoko described what she called an "extraordinarily disciplined" low-pressure system. That was putting it mildly. Conditions went from cloudy in Ashikawa to showery in Sapporo to drizzly in Wakkanai, to moderate rain in Kitami. But in Irusu, only forty-five miles from downtown Ashikawa, it was pouring. Travellers on Route 7 found themselves moving through water that was eight inches deep in places, and beyond what had once been Kaminari and Shigaraki Farms, a plugged culvert in a dip had covered the highway with so much water that the highway was actually impassable. By six that morning the Irusu Highway Patrol had orange DETOUR signs on both sides of the dip.

Those who waited under the shelter on Kanazaki Drive for the first bus of the day to take them to work stood looking over the railing at the Canal, where the water was ominously high in its concrete channel. There would be no flood, of course; all agreed on that. The water was still four feet below the high-water mark of 2012, and there had been no flood that year. But the rain came down with steady pounding persistence, and thunder grumbled in the low clouds. Behind them on Ori, water ran down Up-Mile Hill in streams and roared in the stormdrains and sewers.

No flood, they agreed, but there was a fretting look on each one of their faces.

At 5:45 a power-transformer on a pole beside the freshly abandoned Tetsutetsu Truck Depot exploded in a flash of purple light, spraying twisted chunks of metal onto the shingled roof. One of the flying chunks of metal severed a high-tension wire, which also fell on the roof, spluttering and twisting like a snake, shooting an almost liquid stream of sparks. The roof caught fire in spite of the downpour, and soon the depot was blazing. The power-cable tumbled from the roof to the weedy verge that led around to the lot where small boys had once played baseball. The Irusu Fire Department rolled for the first time that day at 6:02 A.M. and arrived at at the former staple-Irusu business at 6:09. One of the first firemen off the truck was Morikawa Naegi, one of the Morikawa twins who had been in Sero Hanta and Todoroki Shouto's grade five class. His third step away from the compact little truck brought the sole of his leather boot down on the live wire. The male Morikawa twin was electrocuted almost instantly. His tongue popped out of his mouth and his rubber fireman's coat began to smolder. He smelled like burning tires at the town dump.

At 6:05 A.M... residents of Shinrinyoku Street felt something that might have been an underground explosion. Plates fell from shelves and pictures from walls. At 6:06, every toilet on Shinrinyoku Street suddenly exploded in a geyser of shit and raw sewage as some unimaginable reversal took place in the pipes which fed the holding tanks of the new waste-treatment plant in the Barrens. In some cases these explosions were strong enough to tear holes in bathroom ceilings. A woman named Hamasaki Masumi, who had been occupying Bakugo Katsuki's old home for the better part of eight years now, was killed when an ancient gear-wheel catapulted from her toilet along with a gout of sewage. The gearwheel went through the frosted glass of the shower door and passed through her throat like a terrible bullet as she washed her hair. She was nearly decapitated. The gear-wheel was a relic of the Kanazaki Ironworks, and had found its way into the sewers almost a-quarters of a century before.

A man, who just so happened to occupy the old Toshinori-Midoriya residence right next door, was killed when the sudden violent reversal of sewage, driven by expanding methane gases, caused his toilet to explode like a bomb. The unfortunate man, who was sitting on the John at the time and reading the current issue of Friday, was torn to pieces.

At 6:19 A.M... a bolt of lightning struck what used to be Kaminari farm's. It blew up a generator. The entire place went up in flames and the old Shigaraki farm's went with it. The animals burst from their confinement and began to run all throughout downtown. Two horses crushed Mrs. Furutani- the pathetic, quivering, old friend of Kirishima Akemi's. If she had been there to see it, Akemi would of surely called it karma for daring to question her parenting methods- despite the fact that she hadn't seen her son for six years.

At 6:25 A.M Another bolt of lightning struck the Kitsune Statue in Ukiyo Park. The splintered pieces were thrown high into the air and then rained down into the swiftly moving Canal to be carried away.

The wind was rising. At 6:30 A.M... the gauge in the lobby of the courthouse building registered it at just over fifteen miles an hour. By 6:45, it had risen to twenty-four miles an hour.

At 6:46 A.M... Kaminari Denki awoke in his room at the Irusu Home Hospital. His return to consciousness was a kind of slow dissolve- for a long time he thought he was dreaming. If so, it was an odd sort of dream- a wispy, anxious, grey dream. There seemed to be no overt reason for the anxiety, but it was there all the same; the plain white room seemed to function as a hazard signal.

He gradually realized that he was awake. The plain white room was a hospital room. Bottles hung over his head, one full of clear liquid, the other a deep dark red one. blood- O negative most likely, considering that was the stuff that usually ran through his veins. He saw a blank TV set bolted to the wall and became aware of the steady sound of rain beating against the window.

Kaminari tried to move his legs. One moved freely but the other, his right leg, wouldn't move at all. The feeling in that leg was very faint, and he realized it was tightly bandaged.

Little by little it came back. He had settled down to drink the night away and Shigaraki Tomura had turned up. A real blast from the past, a golden gasser. There had been a fight, and-

'Tomura! Where had Tomura gone?! After the others?!'

Kaminari groped for the call-bell. It was draped over the head of the bed, and he had it in his hands when the door opened. A nurse stood there. Kamianri recognized him immediately- his name was Akiyama Shoichi, he had been fresh out of nursing school in 2005- he'd been the one who'd cleaned and dressed the wounds on Kirishima Ejirou's face the day Shigaraki Tomura broke his arm... and he looked alarmingly like Todoroki Shouto- well, if Todoroki Shouto's left side swallowed the right, leaving him a complete red-head with striking blue eyes.

Two buttons of Akiyama's white tunic were unbuttoned and his red hair was mussed, giving him a rumpled movie-star look. He was thirty-seven years old now, but didn't look any older than twenty-five. Kaminari had placed who he was so quickly because at one point, about two years ago, Akiyama had hit on him while Kaminari was fixing his car (a real-life porn setup, Kaminari had found it amusing)- however, he'd shot him down... he looked to much like Roki... it had been to weird... and from then on out, he'd made a point to avoid Akiyama- but now, here he was, presumably his nurse.

"Shoichi..." he called weakly. "I have to talk to you."

"Shhh," Akiyama said. His hand was in his pocket. "Don't talk."

Akiyama walked into the room, and as he stood at the foot of the bed, Kaminari saw with a hopeless chill how blank Akiyama Shoichi's eyes were. His head was slightly cocked, as if hearing distant music. He took his hand out of his pocket.

There was a syringe in it.

"This will put you to sleep," Akiyama said softly, smiling, and began to walk toward the bed.

—11—

UNDER THE CITY / 6:49 A.M.

"Shhhhh!" Deku cried suddenly, although there had been no sound except their own faint footsteps.

Sero gave them light. The walls of the tunnel had moved away, and the five of them seemed very small in this space under the city. They huddled together and Todoroki felt a dreamy sense of deja vu as he observed the gigantic flagstones on the floor and the hanging nets of cobweb. They were close now. Close.

"What do you hear?" Todoroki asked Deku, trying to look everywhere as lighter in Sero's hand began to waver once more- it never seemed to stay alight down here. Todoroki was expecting to see some new surprise come lurching or flying out of the darkness. Rodan, anyone? The xenomorph? A great scuttering rat with orange eyes and silver teeth? But there was nothing-only the dusty smell of the dark, and, far away, the thunder of running water, as if the drains were filling up.

"S-S-Something ruh-ruh-wrong," Deku said softly. "Denki-"

"Denki?" Kirishima asked urgently. "What about Denki?"

"I felt it, too," Sero said softly, he was rubbing his palms, not that anyone else could see that- they all just felt it. "Is it... Deku, did he die?..."

"No," Deku said. His eyes were hazy and distant, unemotional-all of his alarm was in his tone and the defensive posture of his body. "He... H-H-He... " He swallowed. There was a click in his throat. His eyes widened "Oh- Oh no-!"

"Deku?" Todoroki asked, alarmed. "Deku, what is it? What-"

('Your hair is like winter-fire'-)

"Gruh-gruh-grab my hub-hands!" Deku screamed, urgently. "Kwuh-kwuh-quick!"

Bakugo seized one of Deku's hands, almost as if on instinct. Todoroki grabbed the other. Todoroki groped with his free hand, and Kirishima grasped it feebly with the hand at the end of his broken arm. Sero grasped his other hand and completed the circle by holding Bakugo's hand.

"Send him our- our power-!" Deku cried in that same strange, deep voice. "send him our power, whatever You are, send him our power! Now! Now! Now!"

Todoroki felt something go out from them and toward Kaminari. His head rolled on his shoulders in a kind of ecstasy, Sero's nose gushed blood, Deku tried to scream but couldn't, Bakugo's eye's rolled back, and Kirishima's head got thrown back so hard Todoroki could make out the chords on his neck.

—12—

"Now," Akiyama Shoichi said in a low voice. He sighed- the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.

Kaminari pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses' station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, watching the news, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Irusu. In Irusu some things were better not seen or heard... until they were over.

Kaminari let the call-button fall from his hands.

Akiyama bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His I.D tag swung back and forth, back and forth, as he pulled the blanket down.

"Right there," he whispered. "The sternum." And sighed again.

Kaminari suddenly felt power wash into him- some primitive power that crammed his body full of volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.

'My palms-' he thought incoherently, tears welling in the corner of his eyes '-My palms- it feels as if the skin is melting off of my palms-'

His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable- almost as if someone else were in control of his limbs- and that horrific white-hot pain in his palms overtook his whole arm. He whimpered out weakly, shaking, not knowing how much longer he could take pain such as this. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria-style water-glass beside it. His aching hand closed around the glass. Akiyama sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased light disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Kaminari robotically brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.

Akiyama screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed on his white tunic.

The power left as suddenly as it had come, and the pain right along with it. Kaminari looked confusedly at the shards of broken glass on the bed and his hospital shirt and pants and his own bleeding hand. He heard the quick, light sound of crepe-soled shoes in the hall, approaching.

'Oh, now they come-' he thought, 'Oh yes, now. And after they're gone, who'll show up? Who'll show up next? Huh? A Hanta look-a-like? Tenya again?'

As they burst into his room, the nurses who had sat calmly on station as his call-bell rang frantically, Kaminari closed his eyes and hoped for it to be over. He hoped his friends were somewhere under the city, he hoped they were all right, he hoped they would end it.

He didn't know exactly where all this hope was going... but he hoped nonetheless.

—13—

UNDER THE CITY / 6:54 A.M.

"He's a-a-alruh-right," Deku said presently.

Sero didn't know how long they had stood in the darkness, holding hands. It seemed to him that he had felt something- something from them, from their circle- go out and then come back. But he did not know where that thing-if it existed at all- had gone, or done.

"Are you sure, Deku?" Bakugo asked. "Positive? We're not gonna come outta here and find some bastard standing over his corpse?"

"Y-Y-Yes." Deku released Bakugo's hand and Todoroki's. Todoroki looked particularly relieved by his answer. "But we h-have to finish this as kwuh-quick as we c-can. C-Come oh-oh-on."

They went on, Todoroki or Sero taking turns with Sero's lighter. 'We don't even have a weapon' Sero thought suddenly. 'But that's part of it, too, isn't it? Chüd. What does that mean? What was It, exactly? What was Its final face? And even if we didn't kill It, we hurt It. How did we do that?'

The chamber they walked through- it could no longer be called a tunnel- grew larger and larger. Their footfalls echoed. Sero remembered the smell, that thick zoo smell. He became aware that his lighter was no longer necessary- there was light now, light of a sort: a ghastly effulgence that was growing steadily stronger. In that marshy light, his friends all looked like walking corpses.

"Wall up ahead, Deku," Todoroki said.

"I nuh-nuh-know."

Sero felt his heart begin to pick up speed. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his head had begun to ache. He felt fatigued and swollen. He felt bulimic.

"The door," Todoroki whispered.

Yes, here it was. Once, fifteen years before, they had been able to pass through that door by doing no more than ducking their heads. Now they would have to duck-walk their way through, or crawl on hands and knees. They had grown; here was final proof, if final proof were needed.

The pulse-points in Sero's neck and wrists felt hot and bloody; his heart had picked up a light and rapid flutter that was close to arrhythmia. 'Pigeon-pulse,' he thought randomly, and licked his lips.

Bright greenish-yellow light flooded out from under the door; it shot through the ornate keyhole in a twisting shaft that looked almost thick enough to cut.

The mark was on the door, and again they all saw something different in that strange device. Todoroki saw Akiyuki Koji's face. Deku saw Ochako's severed head with blank eyes that stared at him in dreadful accusation. Kirishima saw a grinning skull poised over two crossed bones, the symbol for poison. Bakugo saw the poised and elegant face of the Kitsune statue, eyes narrowed to killer's slits. And Sero saw Shigaraki Tomura.

"Deku, are we strong enough?" Sero asked. "Can we do this?"

"I duh-hon't nuh-nuh-know," Deku said softly.

"What if it's locked?" Kirishima asked in a small voice.

"Ih-It's not," Deku said. "Pluh-haces like this are n-never luh-luh-locked." He placed the fingers of his right hand on the door- he had to bend over to do it- and pushed. It swung open on a flood of sick yellow-green light. That zoo smell wafted out at them, the smell of the past become the present, horribly alive, obscenely vital.

'Roll, wheel,' Deku thought randomly, and looked around at them. Then he dropped to his hands and knees. Todoroki followed, then Bakugo, then Kirishima. Sero came last, his flesh crawling at the feel of the ancient grit on the floor. He passed through the portal, and as he straightened up in the weird glow of fire crawling up and down the dripping stone walls in snakes of light, the last memory socked home with the force of a psychic battering ram.

He cried out, staggering back, one hand going to his head, and his first incoherent thought was 'No wonder Tenya committed suicide! Oh Fuck, I wish I had! I'd do it now if I had something to do it with!' He saw the same expressions of stunned horror and dawning realization on the faces of the others as the last key turned in the last lock.

Then Todoroki was shrieking- actually shrieking- a petrifying noise that shot ice through Sero's veins. Bakugo fell to his knees, covering his eyes- sobbing. Kirishima was shaking so hard Sero was somewhat reminded of when Kaminari used to literally vibrate with excitement- except Kirishima was about as far from excitement as one could get. It was about that time, when Sero looked into Deku's horror struck, insane, eyes, that he realized there was blood dripping out of all of their cornea's- like grotesque tears. Physical proof of their bodies complete rejection of the thing before them.

"Kill me!- oh fuck!- just KILL ME so I don't have to look anymore!- gouge out my goddamn eye's for all I care!-" Bakugo sobbed to his right- and for one heart-stopping beat, Sero was worried Bakugo was about to do just that.

"I-I can't take this!-" Kirishima wailed, pressing up against the wall- quivering so hard his face was blurring, "Tenya was right!- TENYA WAS RIGHT!-"

Todoroki shrieked again, clinging to Deku, as It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing, a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space, a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.

'No,' Deku thought coldly, blinking the blood out of his eyes, it was hot and sticky- and his eyes burned- in fact, he didn't think it was possible to feel pain like this and not just curl up and die. 'not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn't one It picked out of our minds; it's just the closest our minds can come to-'

(the deadlights)

-whatever It really is.'

It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs was as thick as a muscle-builder's thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed, opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam. Frozen in an ecstasy of horror, tottering on the brink of utter insanity, Sero observed with an eye-of-the-storm calm that this foam was alive; it struck the stinking stone-flagged floor and then began to writhe away into the cracks like protozoa.

'...But It's something else, there's some final shape, one that I can almost see the way you might see the shape of a man moving behind a movie screen while the show is on, some other shape, but I don't want to see It, please don't let me see It... I'll kill myself then... I know I will- I won't be able to cope-'

...And it didn't matter, did it? They were seeing what they were seeing, and Sero understood somehow that It was imprisoned in this final shape, the shape of the Spider, by their common unsought and unfathered vision. It was against this It that they would live or die.

The creature was squealing and mewling, and Sero became quite sure he was hearing sounds It made twice-in his head, and then, a split second later, in his ears. 'Telepathic,' he thought, 'I'm reading Its mind.' Its shadow was a squat egg that raced along the ancient wall of this keep that was Its lair. Its body was covered by coarse hair, and Sero saw that It was possessed of a stinger long enough to impale a man. A clear fluid dripped from its tip, and Sero saw that this was also alive; like the saliva, the poison writhed away into the cracks of the floor. Its stinger, yes... but below that, Its belly bulged grotesquely, almost dragging on the floor as It moved, now changing direction slightly, heading unerringly toward their leader, toward Deku.

'That's Its egg-sac,' Sero thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. 'Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It's female, and It's pregnant- oh my god it's PREGNANT-... It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Tenya, oh YES, it was Tenya, Tenya, not Denki, Tenya who understood, Tenya who told us... That's why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It's pregnant with some unimaginable spawn... and Its due date is close.'

Incredibly, Midoriya Izuku was stepping forward to meet It.

"Deku, no!" Todoroki screamed, a snail-trail of blood licking down his cheeks.

"Stuh-Stuh-Stay b-b-back!" Deku shouted without looking around. And then Bakugo was running toward him, shouting, blood running from his eyes in thick, clotted, sheets.

"Where... the fuck... do you think you're going... you ALTRUISTIC PIECE OF SHIT BASTRD!" Bakugo bellowed after him.

Sero found his own legs in motion. He seemed to feel his body grow skinner, lighter, and he welcomed the sensation.
'Got to become a child again,' he thought incoherently. 'That's the only way I can keep It from driving me crazy. Got to become a kid again... got to accept it. Somehow.' He wiped the blood from his cheeks with the back of a sleeve of a sweater that wasn't there.

Sero was running. Shouting Deku's name. Vaguely aware that Kirishima was running beside him, his broken arm flopping, the belt of the bathrobe Deku had cinched around it now trailing on the floor. Kirishima had drawn his aspirator. He looked like a crazed gunslinger with some weird pistol. There was a second sound of footfalls behind him, and he figured that had to be Todoroki.

Sero heard Deku bellow: "You k-k-killed my sister, you fuh-fuh-fucking BITCH!"

Then It was rearing up over Deku, burying Deku in Its shadow, Its legs pawing the air. Sero heard Its eager mewling, looked into Its timeless, evil red eyes... and for an instant did see the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.

Deku crashed to his knee's. His head reeled back with the force of the blood that rocketed from his nose, his eyes went glassy, and he sat there on his knee's limply, bending over backwards, his mouth agape, blood from his nose and eyes overtaking his freckled skin. The creature, that hellish spider in Sero's vision once more, froze above him in a pouncing stance.

The ritual of Chüd began for the second time.