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)

21. Todoroki Shouto Makes it Downtown

—1—

MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN

'Your hair is like winter fire,

January embers.'

Todoroki thought of these words as he walked solemnly down Ori road away from the community house. He had briefly stopped by and taken a swift look around before moving on- not really knowing where he was heading but continuing to walk anyways. Unbeknownst to himself or Sero Hanta that they had missed each other by only a mere thirty-seconds.

He had hidden that note in his bottom drawer, underneath his clothes. His brother might have seen it, but that was alright. The important thing was that his father never really looked through his clothes. If he had seen it, he might have looked at him with that bright, almost friendly, and utterly paralyzing stare of his and asked in his almost friendly way: "You been doing something you shouldn't be doing, Sho? You been doing something with some girl?- or- and don't you even let this be more than a thought- some boy?" And if he said yes or if he said no, there would be a quick flare of white-hotness across his face, so quick and so hard it didn't even hurt at first- it took a few seconds for the vacuum to dissipate and the pain to fill the place were the vacuum had been. Then his father's voice again, almost friendly: "I worry a lot about you, Shouto. I worry an awful lot. You trying to grow up on me, aren't ya Sho?"

His father might still be living here in Irusu. He had been living here the last time he had heard from him, but that had been... how long ago? Ten years?... Long before he had married Koji, anyway. He had gotten a postcard from him -not a plain postcard like the one the poem (if you could even call it a poem) that he'd received anonymously that summer of 2005- the night after school let out... it'd been placed hastily into his mail box... not mailed, placed... there were no addresses, just his name written messily on the front. He'd told his father it was a reminder from the school to pick up his summer reading book at the library.

No, the one his father had sent him had not been plain, it had showed the giant stone Kitsune statue which stood in the middle of Ukiyo Park. The statue had been erected sometime in the eighties, and it had been one of the landmarks of his childhood, but his father's card had called up no nostalgia or memories for him; it might as well have been a card showing the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Hope you are doing well and being good. Hope you will send me something if you can, as I don't have much. I love you Sho.

-Dad.

His father had loved him- Todoroki knew that- and in some ways Todoroki supposed that had everything to do with why he had fallen so desperately in love with Midoriya Izuku during that long summer of 2005- because out of all the boys, Deku was the one who projected the sense of authority he associated with his father... but it was a different sort of authority, somehow- it was an authority that listened. He saw no assumption in either Deku's forest-green eyes or his actions that he believed his father's kind of worrying to be the only reason authority needed to exist... as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined.

Whatever the reasons, by the end of their first meeting as a complete group in July of that year, that meeting of which Deku had been officially solidified as their leader and Kaminari Denki had joined the loser's club and completed the circle, he had been madly, head-over-heels in love with Deku. Calling it a simple schoolboy crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. He did not chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge, and he didn't pretend to hate him and call him names just to get his attention. Todoroki had simply lived with Deku's face in his heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache... He would have died for him.

It was natural enough, he supposed, for him to want to believe it had been Deku who sent him those two little, devotion-filled, lines of text that could hardly be called a poem... although he had never gotten so far gone as to actually convince himself it was so. No, he had known who wrote the poem. And later on- at some point- hadn't its author admitted this to him?... Yes, Kaminari had told him so (although he could not now remember, not for the life of him, just when or under what circumstances he had actually said it out loud), and although Kaminari's love for him had been almost as well hidden as the love he had felt for Deku-

('but you told him, Shouto... you told... him... that you loved him-' -But which one was 'him?' Up until this exact moment Todoroki had been absolutely sure that it must have been Deku he confessed to that summer- however, now, as he tried to look back on it, he couldn't for the life of him picture the face or voice of the person he was confessing to. He could hear himself confess- but that was it. The identity of the confessed-to remained an unformed blob in his mind.)

-it was obvious to anyone who really looked (and who was kind)- it was obvious in the way Kaminari was always careful to keep some space between them (while never, ever, having that much self-awareness of personal space with anyone else on the planet) in the draw of his breath when Todoroki touched his arm or his hand, in the way he carefully explained his jokes to him with a dusting of pink across his cheeks, never quite meeting his gaze. Dear, sweet, tiny, puppy-faced Kaminari...

...It had ended somehow, that difficult pre-adolescent triangle, but just how it had ended was one of the things he still couldn't remember. He thought that Kaminari had confessed authoring and sending the little love- (letter? Poem? Song? He honestly didn't know what to call it) He thought he had told- one of them- the he loved him, that he would love... him... forever. And somehow, those two tellings had helped save all of their lives... or had they? Todoroki couldn't really remember. These memories (or memories of memories: that was really closer to what they were) were hike islands that were not really islands at all but only knobs of a single coral spine which happened to poke up above the waterline, not separate at all but one piece. Yet whenever he tried to dive deep and see the rest, a maddening image intervened: the sparrowheads which came back each spring, crowding the telephone lines, trees and rooftops, jostling for places and filling the thawing late-March air with their raucous gossip. This image came to him again and again, foreign and disturbing, like a heavy radio beam that blankets the signal you really want to pick up.

He realized with sudden shock that he was standing outside of the Kleen-Kloze Washateria, where he and Iida Tenya and Sero and Kirishima had taken the rags that day in late June- rags stained with blood which only the four of them could see. The windows were now soaped opaque and there was a hand-lettered FOR SALE BY OWNER sign taped to the door. Peering between the swashes of soap, he could see an empty room with lighter squares on the dirty yellow walls where the washers had once stood.

'I'm going home,' he thought dismally, but walked on anyway.

His old neighborhood hadn't changed much. A few more of the trees were gone, probably birches felled by disease. The houses looked a little tackier; broken windows seemed slightly more common than they had been when he was a kid. Some of the broken panes had been replaced with cardboard. Some hadn't.

And here he stood in front of the apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street. Still here. The peeling white he remembered had become a peeling chocolate brown at some point during the years between, but it was still unmistakable. There were the rickety stairs that lead up to the front door of his old home.

("Boy, you better come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed?")

Todoroki shivered, hugging his arms across his chest in an X, cupping his elbows in his naked palms. A lazy breeze blew his hair back prettily, and fluttered his long dark coat.

'Dad could still be living here; oh yes he could. He wouldn't move unless he had to. Just walk on up there, Shouto. Look at the mailboxes. Four boxes for four apartments, just like in the old days. And if there's one which says TODOROKI, you can ring the bell and pretty soon there'll be the shuffle of slippers down the hall and the door will open and you can look at him, the man whose sperm gave you your partial redhead status and made you lefthanded. Go on up, Shouto. Ring the bell. He'll come and he'll be old, the lines will be drawn deep in his face and his teeth will be yellow, and he'll look at you, and he'll say "Why it's Shouto, Sho's come home to see his old man, come on in Shouto, I'm so glad to see you, I'm glad because I worry about you Shouto, I worry a LOT."'

He walked slowly up the path, and the weeds growing up between the cracked concrete sections brushed at his legs- tickling and sticking. He looked closely at the first-floor windows, but they were curtained off. He looked at the mailboxes.

APARTMENT 124 - SHOJI

APARTMENT 125 - VACANT

APARTMENT 126 - TOGATA

Todoroki's breath caught in his throat.

APARTMENT 127 - TODOROKI

'-But I won't ring. I don't want to see him. I won't ring the bell.'

This was a firm decision, at last! The decision that opened the gate to a full and useful lifetime of firm decisions! He walked down the path! Back to downtown! Back to the Shijima Hotel and Sauna! Packed! Cabbed! Flew! Told Koji to fuck off and get the hell out of the house that his fashion brand paid for! Lived successfully! Died happily!

He rang the bell.

He heard the familiar chimes from the living room- chimes that had always sounded to him like mini church bells: Ding-Dong-Ding! Silence. No answer. He shifted on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs from one foot to the other, suddenly feeling restless.

'No one home,' he thought, relieved. 'The curiosity has been dealt with. I can go now.'

Instead he rang it again: Ding-Dong-Ding! No answer. He thought of Kaminari's lovely little half-poem and tried to remember exactly when and how he had confessed its authorship, and why, for a brief second, it called up an association with freezing water. 'Why...?' Then, intervening, a mental picture of thousands of sparrowheads on phone lines and rooftops, all babbling at a white sky.

'-I'll leave now. I've rung twice; that's enough.'

But he rang again.

Ding-Dong-Ding!

Now he heard someone approaching, and the sound was just as he had imagined: the tired whisper of old slippers. He looked around wildly and came very, very close to just taking to his heels. Could he make it down the stairs and around the corner, leaving his father to think it had been nothing but kids playing pranks? 'Hey mister, you got Prince Albert in a can...?'...

He let out a sudden sharp breath and had to tighten his throat because what wanted to come out was a laugh of relief. It wasn't his father at all. Standing in the doorway and looking out at him was a tall woman in her late seventies. Her hair was long and gorgeous, still almost completely inky-black with only the tiniest of silvery strands poking through. Behind her rimless spectacles were eyes as blue as the sky. She wore a purple dress of watered silk. It was shabby but still dignified. Her wrinkled face was kind.

"Yes, sir?"

"I'm sorry," Todoroki said. The urge to laugh had passed as swiftly as it had come. He noticed that the old woman wore an amulet at her throat. It was almost certainly real ivory, surrounded by a band of gold so thin it was nearly invisible. "I must have rung the wrong bell." 'Or rang the wrong bell on purpose,' his mind whispered. "I meant to ring for Todoroki."

"Todoroki?" Her forehead wrinkled delicately.

"Yes, you see-"

"-There's no Todoroki here," the old woman said.

"But-... huh?..."

"...Unless... you don't mean Todoroki Enji, do you?"

"Yes." Todoroki said, nodding a little to quick- making himself dizzy. "My father."

The old woman's hand rose to the amulet and touched it. She peered more closely at Todoroki, making him feel ridiculously young. Then the old woman smiled... a kind smile that was nonetheless sad.

"Why... I knew his wife and children were estranged... but, well... I never thought it was... Oh- I don't want to be the one who tells you this, a stranger, but your father has been dead for a while now..."

"But... on the bell... " He looked again and uttered a small, bewildered sound, his cheeks flushing the tiniest bit. In his agitation, in his subconscious but rock-solid certainty that his old man would still be here, he had read TOKUNAGA as TODOROKI.

"You're... Mrs. Tokunaga?..." he asked. He was staggered by this news of his father, but he also felt stupid about the mistake- the lady would think he was illiterate or something.

"Mrs. Tokunaga," she agreed.

"You... did you know my dad?..." his mind was reeling, and he felt even dizzier, having to grip the stair railing to keep from stumbling backwards. 'Dead? He- he's actually?...'

"Not well," Mrs. Tokunaga said. She sounded a little like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and Todoroki felt like laughing and crying at the same time. When had his emotions gone whipsawing so violently back and forth? The truth was he couldn't remember a time... but he was dismally afraid he would before much longer. "He rented the second-floor apartment before me. We saw each other, me coming and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Irino avenue... Do you know it?"

"Yes," Todoroki said. Irino avenue branched off from Lower Main Street four blocks farther down, where the apartment buildings were smaller and even more desperately shabby.

"I used to see him at the Market down on upper main sometimes," Mrs. Tokunaga said, "and at the Washateria before they closed it. We passed a word from time to time. We- oh honey, you're as pale as a ghost... I'm sorry. Come in and let me make you some tea."

"No, I couldn't," Todoroki said weakly, but in fact he actually felt pale, like clouded glass that you could nearly look through. He could use some tea, and a chair- in fact he could skip the drink if he could just sit down for a minute.

"You could and you will," Mrs. Tokunaga said warmly. "It's the least I can do for having told you such unpleasant news."

Before he could protest, Todoroki found himself being led into the gloomy kitchen of his childhood residence, which now seemed much smaller but safe enough- safe, he supposed, because almost everything was different. Instead of the scratched up oak-wood table with its three chairs, there was a small round table, really not much bigger than an endtable, with silk flowers in a pottery vase. Instead of the old Kelvinator refrigerator with the round drum on top (his father tinkered with it constantly to keep it going), there was a copper-colored Frigidaire. The stove was small but efficient-looking. There was an Amana Radar Range above it. Bright blue curtains hung in the windows, and he could see flowerboxes outside them. The floor, linoleum and wood when he was a boy here, had been stripped and replaced with vinyl planks that shined a pretty cherry-wood color in the filtered afternoon light.

Mrs. Tokunaga looked around from the stove, where she was placing a teapot. "You grew up here?"

"Yes," Todoroki said quietly, standing awkwardly in the kitchen's doorway. "But it's very different now... so trim and tidy... wonderful, really..."

"How kind..." Mrs. Tokunaga said, and her smile made her younger. It was radiant. "I have a little money, you see. Not much, but my late husband left me some after he passed... Once I was a girl in Sweden, my mother was Japanese but moved there for work... we came back to her home country in 1942... I was about eight then... we had very little money when I was growing up... which is the best way to learn it's value, no?"

"Yes," Todoroki nodded solemnly, he fiddled uncomfortably with the sleeve of his jacket.

"At the hospital I worked," Mrs. Tokunaga said, and it was only now that Todoroki heard the stilted nature of her Japanese. "Many years- from 1952 to 1987 I worked there. I rose to the position of head nurse... All the keys I had... My husband invested our money quite well. Now I have reached a little harbor. Look around, sir, while the water boils!"

"No, I couldn't-"

"-Please... still I feel guilty. Look, if you like!"

And so he did look. What had once been his parent's bedroom was now Mrs. Tokunaga's bedroom, and the difference was profound. The room seemed brighter and airier now. A large cedar chest, the initials RG inlaid into it, breathed its gentle aroma into the air. A gigantic surprise-quilt lay on the bed. On it he could see a gorgeous woman in a blue kimono, kneeling down and dipping her hands in the water, imitating the art style of ancient Japan. It was quite beautiful.

Fuyumi's room had been turned into a make-shift art-studio. Half-finished paintings were strewn around on wooden easels. A black tarp covered the entire expanse of the floor, covered in splatters of paint. Every square inch of the walls were covered in art- wether it was hanging canvases or scenes painted directly onto what had been mint-green walls when Fuyumi stilled occupied the room.

His eldest sibling, Touya's, room had gone through yet another change. Instead of the simple bedroom with guitars hanging on the walls and some-what raunchy posters of models on the doors, or the trophy room displaying their (late) father's and Todoroki's own sporting achievements, it had been turned into a reading room of sorts. A day-bed was pushed underneath the large window that looked out over the Barrens, large, white, bookshelves lined both the east and west walls, crammed with books. A round light fixture hung from the ceiling, casting the room in a cozy yellow light that made Todoroki fill warm.

His own room had become a sewing room. A purple Singer machine stood on a wrought-iron table under a pair of starkly efficient Tensor lamps. More imitations of ancient art hung on one wall, a picture of a former Prime Minister (Todoroki couldn't for the life of him place which one it was) hung on another. A beautiful breakfront stood below the picture of the unnamed Prime Minister- it was filled with books (Most likely spilling over from what had been Touya's room) instead of china, but seemed none the worse for that.

Natsuo's room was simpler- seeming to function as a guest room. A small cot with simple bed dressings was shoved into the corner under the window where Natsuo had once kept his stereo. A small desk and chair with a fax machine was set up next to the closet, the same curtains from the living room fluttered in here as well, and matching light-blue rug sparkled in the middle of the room.

He went into the Jack and Jill bathroom last.

It had been redone in a rose color that was too low and pleasant to seem gaudy. All of the fixtures were new- stainless steal and crazily reflective- and yet he approached the sink feeling that the old nightmare had gripped him again; he would peer down into that black and lidless eye, the whispering would begin, and then the blood-

He leaned over the sink, catching a glimpse of his scarred face and mismatched eyes in the mirror over the basin, and then a warped version in the sinks faucet, and then he stared into that eye, waiting for the voices, the laughter, the groans, the blood.

How long he might have stood there, bent over the sink, waiting for the sights and sounds fifteen years gone, he didn't know; it was Mrs. Tokunaga's voice that brought him back to reality: "Tea, sir!"

Todoroki jerked back, the semi-hypnosis broken, and left the bathroom. If there had been dark magic somewhere down in that drain, it was gone now... or was sleeping.

"Oh... you really shouldn't have-"

Mrs. Tokunaga looked up at him brightly, smiling a little. "Oh sir, if you knew how seldom company calls these days, you'd not say so. Why, I put on more than this for the man from the Ashikawa Hydro who comes to read my meter! I'm making him fat!"

Delicate cups and saucers stood on the round kitchen table, a clean bone-white with blue trim. There was a plate of small cakes and cookies. Beside the sweets a pewter teapot chuffed mild steam and pleasant fragrance. Bemused, Todoroki thought that the only things missing were the tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off: auntsandwiches, he'd thought them, always one word. Three main types of auntsandwiches- cream cheese and olive, watercress, and egg salad.

"Sit down," said Mrs. Tokunaga "sit down, sir, and I'll pour you a cup."

"Oh... you really don't have-"

"-Oh but I do! I do!" Mrs. Tokunaga smiled, "Like I said, I don't get much company these day! Please let me wait on you- I won't see my brother's and sister's until Christmas!"

"Oh... um... Alright, if you insist..."Todoroki broke eye-contact with the woman, and bit his lip, still feeling quite awkward.

"I do!" She chirped happily. "Now, tell me- are you married?... because I can't imagine a pretty thing like yourself being single."

"I am." Todoroki said, and lifted his ungloved hand, showing off his simple sterling-silver wedding band. Koji had bought it for 500¥ at a pawnshop the day they went down to the courthouse.

"It's simple." Mrs. Tokunaga said, but she was smiling. She grabbed his wrist lightly, and pulled his hand closer, getting a better look. "But it's nice- I hope you don't take offense-"

"No," Todoroki said, "not at all." But for some reason he felt a feather-touch of unease: there was something in the old woman's smile that had seemed a little... what? Unpleasant?... False?... Knowing, even?... But that was ridiculous, wasn't it? He pulled his wrist out of her grasp, and clasped his hands politely in front of himself on the small table's surface.

"I love what you've done to the place."

"Do you?" Mrs. Tokunaga asked, and poured. The tea looked dark, muddy. Todoroki wasn't sure he wanted to drink it... and suddenly he wasn't sure he wanted to be here at all.

'It did say Todoroki under the doorbell,' his mind whispered suddenly, and he was frightened.

Mrs. Tokunaga passed his tea.

"Thank you," Todoroki said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. He tasted. It was fine. 'Stop jumping at shadows,' he told himslef. "That cedar chest in particular is quite wonderful..."

"An antique, that one!" Mrs. Tokunaga said, and laughed. Todoroki noticed that the old woman's beauty was flawed on only one score, something that wasn't common at all in Japan. Her teeth were very bad- strong-looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.

'They were white... when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.'

Suddenly he was not just a little frightened. Suddenly he wanted- needed- to be away from here.

"Very old, oh yes!" Mrs. Tokunaga exclaimed, and finished her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Todoroki -grinned at him- and Todoroki saw that the woman's eyes had changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer jet-black with strands of glittering silver.

"Very old," Mrs. Tokunaga reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Todoroki from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. "From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed?"

"Yes." His voice came from far away, and a part of his brain yammered: 'If she doesn't know you've seen the change perhaps you're still alright, if she doesn't know, doesn't see-'

"-My father," she said, pronouncing it 'fadder,' and Todoroki saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The amulet was now a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. "His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love his joke, my fadder."

She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress. The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her ringers were claws. She grinned at Todoroki. "Have something to eat, dear." Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.

"No, thank you," Todoroki heard his mouth say in a steadily calm, cool, composed tone. The words did not seem to originate in his brain; rather they came out of his mouth and then had to travel around to his ears before he was aware that he had even spoken.

"No?" the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.

"Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, sir, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!"

"I ought to go," Todoroki heard himself say in that same polite voice- the voice of someone who had just eaten their full at a fancy dinner party and had to leave due to work in the morning. There was no strength in his legs. His hands were still clasped in front of him. He was dimly aware that it was not tea in his cup but sewage, dirty, disgusting, sewage- a little party-favor from the tunnels under the city. He had drunk some of that, not much, but a sip. Huh. Wow.

The woman was shrinking before Todoroki's eyes, thinning; it was now a crone with an apple-doll's face who sat across from him, giggling in a high, squealing voice and rocking back and forth.

"Oh my fadder and I are one," she said, "just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly, because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Irusu really dies. You knew that before; believe it now."

In slow motion Todoroki gathered his legs under him. As if from outside he saw himself standing up, pushing his chair in, and returning his hands to the clasped position in front of his lap. He saw himself backing away from the table and from the witch with an eerily calm expression on his face as his mind screamed incoherently with disbelief and horror. Disbelief because he realized for the first time that the neat little dining-room table was not made of wood, but of white-chocolate fudge. Even as he watched, the witch, still giggling, her ancient yellow eyes slanted slyly off into the corner of the room, broke a piece of it off and stuffed it avidly into the black-ringed trap that was her mouth.

The cups, he saw, were white bark that had been carefully looped with blue-dyed frosting. The ancient paintings and the picture of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were creations of nearly transparent spun sugar, and as he looked at them, Hideki Tojo stuck out his tongue and the ancient samurai dropped a wink.

"We're all waiting for you!" the witch screamed, and her fingernails scrabbled over the surface of the fudge table, drawing deep scars in its shining surface. "Oh yes! Oh yes!"

The overhead lights were globes of hard candy. The wainscotting was caramel taffy. He looked down and saw that his designer boots were leaving prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was wafting nauseatingly through the air- forcing itself down his airways- suffocating him.

'Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel- it's the witch- the one Fuyumi and Touya used to read to me and Natsuo that always scared me the worst because she ate children-'

"You and your friends!" the witch screamed, laughing. "You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven's hot!" She screamed laughter, and Todoroki walked to the door, moving slowly- as if he were simply leaving his home to do this weeks grocery shopping. The witch's laughter beat and swirled around his head, staticky- both far away and to close all at once. Todoroki closed his eyes. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when he came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.

"I worry about you, Shouto... I worry a LOT!"

He turned, swirls of red and white hair floating around his face, to see his father staggering toward him down the hallway, wearing a black and flaky version of his old guards uniform and the gaping skull amulet around his neck. His father's face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his red beard patchy and dead, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.

"I beat you because I was JEALOUS of you, Shouto. You were all I EVER wanted to be. You were better then those putrid mistakes you call siblings! You still are! I built you up to be a star and it made me JEALOUS when you achieved it- I BEAT YOU BECAUSE I LOVED YOU... I wanted... I wanted to get the oven hot...I BEAT YOU BECAUSE I HATED YOU... I wanted to throw you in that oven... all nice and hot... I BEAT YOU BECAUSE I WANTED TO KILL YOU... and eat you... kill you... eat you..."

Finally, his calm facade broke. Todoroki let out a shuddering half-noise as he grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a platform that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far below, dim, seeming to swim in his vision, he saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from the market on upper main.

'I have to get out there,' he thought, just barely coherent. 'That's reality down there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk-'

"Won't do you any good to run, Shouto," his father-

(my fadder)

-told him, laughing. "We've waited a long time for this. This is going to be fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES."

He looked back again and now his dead father was not wearing the patchy guards outfit but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a tag hanging out collar, marking the sale date as June 24th, 2005. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.

"Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race," it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the steps after him. "The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women... rape all the men... and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!"

It began to do a mad shuck-and-jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Todoroki felt no wind. His legs tangled with each other as he made his way down the stairs backwards and he spilled to the pavement, missing the last five steps. His back hit the ground hard, and he felt his teeth clamp together so hard he was worried they might crack. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.

The clown came toward him again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Todoroki only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere deep inside that he must wake soon, this couldn't be real, had to be a dream-

-He realized that wasn't true a mere moment before the clown's crooked, long-clawed fingers grabbed at the top button of his coat. It was real; it could kill him. As it had killed the children.

"The sparrowheads know your real name!" He screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to Todoroki that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain... and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been his imagination, and he certainly had no idea why he had said such a crazy thing, but it bought him an instant of time.

He was on his feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: "Why don't you look where you're going, you stupid scar-faced cunt!" He had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had nearly splattered his remains all over the road when he bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then he was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, bow-legged, a hot stitch in his side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.

The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but he saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken, a large CONDEMNED sign across what had once been Asui Tsuyu's bedroom window.

'Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?'

But his back was skint up, his jacket was handing off one shoulder and smeared with dust, one of the buttons missing. One of the gloves he'd taken off at lunch and shoved into his coat pocket was lying in the middle of the street.

And there was chocolate on his fingers.

He rubbed them on the bench next to him and, taking a quick look around to make sure there weren't any vehicles around, rushed into the street for his glove. His face was hot, his back cold as ice, his eyeballs seemed to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of his heart.

'We can't beat It. Whatever It is, we can't beat It. It even wants us to try- It wants to settle the old score. Can't be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here... just leave.'

Something brushed against his calf, light as a cat's questing paw.

He jerked away from it with a startled yelp. He looked down and cringed, one newly-gloved hand against his mouth.

It was a balloon, blue as his left eye. Written on the side of it in dull grey were the words 'THAT'S WIGHT, WABBIT.'

As he watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.