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)

30. The Bullseye

—1—

MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN

"Okay, Skelly," Bakugo yawned, legs still kicked up on the poker table, hands behind his head. "Half and half's smoked all of his cigarettes and most of yours too... so let's just get this over with. Talk."

Sero glanced down at his phone. Yes, it was late: nearly midnight. 'Just enough time for one more story,' he thought, almost bitterly. 'One more story before twelve. Just to keep us warm. What should it be?' But that, of course, was only a joke, and not a very good one; there was only one story left, at least only one he remembered, and that was the story of the silver slugs- how they were made in Toshinori Yagi's workshop on the night of July 23rd and how they were used on the 25th...

"I've got my own scars," Sero said after a while, his tone was even... casual, despite the circumstances..."do you guys remember?"

Bakugo and Kirishima shook their heads; Deku and Todoroki nodded. Kaminari sat silently, his eyes bright and watchful in his sleep-deprived face. Sero frowned at his childhood best friend then... the expression was nostalgic... and it made him feel bad, though he wasn't completely sure why...

Sero stood up and lifted his tight shirt over his naval for the second time that week. An old scar in the shape of the letter 'T' showed there on his hip bone, as well as the shallower beginnings of an 'O'. Its lines were broken- his body had been way less muscular when that scar was put there- but its shape was identifiable.

The heavy scar depending upward from the cross-bar of the 'T' was much clearer. It looked like a twisted white hangrope from which the noose has been cut.

Todoroki frowned, and said: "The werewolf, right?... in that house on Neibolt street?... that's what did that to you, wasn't it?..." his eyes shifted subtly to the windows, as if to catch it lurking outside in the darkness.

"That's right," Sero nodded. "And you want to know something funny? That scar wasn't there two days ago. Tomura's old calling-card was; I know, because I showed it to a friend of mine, a bar-tender named Mihara Kiyoshi in Kyoto... But this one-" He laughed without much humor and began to tuck in his shirt again. "...This one just came back... Like the ones on our hands."

"Yep," said Kaminari as Sero sat down again. "The werewolf. We all saw It as the werewolf that time."

"Because that's how Kah-Kah-Kacchan saw Ih-It before," Deku murmured. "That's it, isn't it?"

"Uh-huh," Kaminari confirmed, nodding furiously, though he was no longer meeting Deku's gaze.

"...We were close, weren't we?" Todoroki asked. His voice was softly marvelling. "Close enough to read each other's minds."

"Ole Big Hairy damn near ripped your stomach open, Hanta," Bakugo said, and he was not smiling as he said it. He looked pale, almost sickly, as he ran a hand through his spikey blonde locks. "You nearly died."

"Deku saved you," Kirishima said abruptly. "I mean, Sho saved us all, but if it hadn't been for you, Deku-"

"Yes," Sero agreed. "You did, Deku. I was, like, lost in the funhouse."

Deku pointed briefly at the empty space in the room, a space Kaminari had originally planned to place an easy chair for a seventh member. "I had some help from Tenya. And he paid for it. Maybe died for it."

Sero Hanta shook his head. "Please don't say that, Deku."

"But it's t-true. And if it's yuh-your f-fault, it's my fault, too. Even after Himiko, and what was written on that r-re-frigerator, we all went on. It would be my fault m-most of all, I guess, because I wuh-wuh-wanted us to go on. Because of Eh-Eri. Maybe even because I thought that if I killed whatever k-killed Eri, I c-c-could-"

"...get some sort of closure?" Todoroki asked gently.

"Yes. Of course. But I d-d-don't think it was a-a-anyone's fuh-hault, Hanta. It was just the w-w-way Tenya was built."

"He couldn't face it," Kirishima sighed. His hair was almost completely black now, only the tips retained the red dye he'd been applying since his teenage years. He was thinking of Mr. Aizawa's revelation about his asthma medicine, and how he, an adult of twenty-seven years, could still not give it up. He was thinking that he might have been able to give up the habit of being sick; it was the habit of believing he had been unable to kick- though as things had turned out, maybe that habit had ended up saved his life.

"He was great that day," Sero said quietly. "Tenya and his birds."

A chuckle stirred through them, and they looked at the place where Iida would have been in a rightful, sane, world where all the good guys won all of the time. 'I miss him,' Sero thought. 'I miss his fretting... he really had acted like a parent that summer...' He said, "...You remember that day, Katsuki, in the barrens? When Deku, Kiri, and I shared the stories of our encounters with It for the first time?... we could all tell Tenya had seen it too... but he was scared, and you told him to stop acting like a spaz or- or something like that- and he- he actually yelled at you... Iida Tenya actually told you to shut up..."

"I remember," Bakugo said in a voice almost too low to hear. He tried his best to force the emotion out of his voice- tried to put himself into a headspace where he didn't sound and act so stupid.. He failed. No one said anything. "Damn four-eyes... he actually scared the shit out of me that day, you know?... I thought he was gonna snap and crack my neck or something."

"It hurts, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Bakugo, to all their surprise, admitted- to tired to keep up the facade... to hurt. "Of course it fucking hurts... We all stood out in the middle of a hail storm hugging each other for fuck's sake- except for shark teeth, or course, because he was busy being crippled- ...he was my friend... Of course it hurts."

Kirishima pulled Bakugo close to him unconsciously, expecting the shorter man to pull away almost instantly. He did not. "Go ahead, Hanta. Tell us about the last portion of July." Kirishima said softly.

Sero swallowed thickly and looked around at them, then nodded. "Alright, then. One more story... Just to keep us warm... Deku, you said your reason for moving forward was for closure... and if the two of us truly are responsible for Tenya's death, at least your excuse is better than mine." Sero said, laughing darkly... he licked his lips, and grinned wryly. "You see... somewhere along the way... I- I actually believed if I helped kill It... The universe might reward me."

"Y-yeah?" Deku asked, leaning forward curiously, "ruh-reward y-you with whuh-what?"

Sero laughed again, it was dark, cynical. "...I somehow got it in my head that if I helped kill the monster, my mom would finally love me."

(His head throbbed then, and Sero winced, reaching up instinctively to rub at his temples.)

There was a thunderstruck silence, Sero felt his cheeks heat up a little bit as five pairs of eyes stared back at him. He hated talking about this, admitting it... and most of all, he hated the pitiful looks they were all giving him.

"Oh, dude-" Kaminari started, but Sero held up a hand, signaling him to stop. Kaminari opened his mouth, but closed it soon after. He obeyed.

"Haha... yeah... I dunno, it was a pretty dumb idea... I mean, my mom didn't know what we were doing- none of our parents did- so I don't know why I ever thought it was a possibility... but um- I did." He played idly with his pocket zipper, before choking out the next part. "I really thought- I really thought that if we killed It, I'd go home... and she'd... she'd tell me she loved me... ha... it was just dumb kid logic I guess... but who knows? Maybe it would have worked, since we didn't actually kill It and all..."

(His head throbbed again, the smell of iron and decay filled his nostrils, before disappearing so quickly he was almost fooled into thinking he'd just imagined it.)

Sero paused, forcing back the stomach bile rising in the back of his throat. It had been happening off and on since Kirishima's turn, and was only getting more frequent as time passed. Sero squirmed, continuing to zip and unzip his pocket with shaky fingers, his other hand trapped between his thigh and the couch arm... he had an itch. A bad one. A terrible one. Since Kirishima had begun talking, inbetween the recurring memories, an urge had begun to clamber and clank around his subconscious. He wanted nothing more than to lock himself in the bathroom connected to Kaminari's office and expell everything he had eaten during that (large) reunion lunch. The need was clawing at him, screaming at him, tearing him apart- and as he stared at the dye stained shop towel around Kirishima's neck, he knew it was no coincidence.

"...as I'm sure you're all well aware by now, I was- I was bulimic then... It had started a year prior with calorie counting... it was a way to gain some semblance of control over my life and it- it escalated- and it was at it's all time worst towards the end of things... I'm honestly surprised I didn't drop dead from that alone... ahaha... heh..."

Kaminari patted his leg comfortingly, Sero smiled at him weakly, and ran a trembling hand through his messy locks, a cold sweat breaking on his brow.

"It- it was bad- but... um... moving on to the actual story part-" He cleared his throat and moved on, "-Deku and Bakugo had the idea of the bullets-"

"-No," Bakugo demurred, his tone was edgy- but also, almost, soft. "Deku thought of it first, and he got nervous first."

"I just started to wuh-wuh-worry-"

"-Doesn't really matter, I guess," Sero said, tone evening back out as he raised a hand to stop Deku. "The three of us spent more time in the library that July than I had ever spent in my entire life. We were trying to find out how to make silver bullets. I had the silver; four silver dollars that I found in the stuff my father left. Then Deku got nervous, thinking about what would happen if we had a misfire with a monster or whatever It was that time coming at as... And when we saw how good Shouto was with that slingshot, we ended up using one of my silver dollars to make slugs instead. We got the stuff together and all of us went down to Deku's place. Ejirou, you were there-"

"-I told my mother we were going to play Monopoly," Kirishima said, smiling weakly, also reaching up to pat Sero's leg. "...My arm was really hurting, but I had to walk. That's how pissed she was at me. And every time I heard someone behind me on the sidewalk I'd whip around, thinking it was Tomura. It didn't help the pain."

Deku grinned, thinking back fondly, "...And all the six of us did was stand around and watch you make the ammo... I think you r-really could have made sil-silver bullets, Hanta."

"...Oh, I'm not so sure about that," Sero said, although he and everyone else knew for a fact he could have. He remembered how the dusk was drawing down outside (Toshinori had promised them all rides home), the sound of the crickets in the grass, the first lightning-bugs blinking outside the windows. Deku, Bakugo, and Kaminari had carefully set up the Monopoly board in the dining room, making it look as if the game had been going on for an hour or more.

He remembered that, and the clean pool of yellow light falling on Toshinori's worktable. He remembered how dizzy he had been, how much his head had hurt. He remembered thinking to himself: 'Stop it-

—2—

JULY 23RD, 2005 / IRUSU, JAPAN

'-Hanta, you can't pass out. Not here. Not right now. You can't... not here... not during something so important...'

"We gotta be c-c-careful. I don't want to leave a muh-muh-mess. My dad'll be-" Deku spat out a series of half-noises that were almost painful to listen to- finally, he managed, "uh-upset."

Bakugo made a disgusted face, and shoved Deku somewhere behind him. "Fuck- You've gotta start carrying complimentary towels with you freckles."

Deku turned. Bakugo moved as if to hit him- but the two were separated by Iida sandwiching in between them before anything could happen.

"Can you two go five minutes without hurting one another?"

"Yuh-yes." Deku said, at the same time Bakugo said "No." Iida sighed, sounding almost like an exhausted father.

"I honestly don't know what I was expecting." Iida said finally.

Sero took very little notice of them. He was to busy trying not to upchuck stomach bile all over Toshinori Yagi's work desk. With shaky hand's and doubling vision, he lay out the implements and tools one by one in the light. Through the miserable haze, part of his mind was wishing that someday he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Not as difficult as making silver bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.

Deku had insisted that Sero make the slugs, just as he continued to insist that Todoroki would be the one carrying the Bullseye. These things could have and had been discussed, but it was only fifteen years later, telling the story, that Sero realized no one had even suggested that a silver bullet or slug might not stop a monster- they had the weight of what seemed like a thousand horror movies on their side.

"Okay," Sero said, wiping the cold sweat from his brow off with the back of his sweater-covered arm. He looked at Deku. "You got the molds?"

"Oh!" Deku jumped a little. "H-H-Here." He reached into his pants pocket and brought out a handkerchief. He put it on the workbench and unfolded it. There were two dull steel balls inside, each with a small hole in it. They were bearing molds.

After deciding on slugs instead of bullets, Deku and Bakugo had gone back to the library and had researched how bearings were made. "You boys are so busy," Nemuri had said. "Bullets one week and bearings the next! And it's summer vacation, too!"

"We like to stay sharp," Bakugo said. "Right, Deku?"

"Ruh-Ruh-Right."

It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds. The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet questions to Toshinori Yagi had taken care of that... and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only machine-shop in Irusu where such molds might be obtained was Kanazaki Precision Tools. The Kanazaki who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kanazaki Ironworks.

Deku and Bakugo had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice. 1500¥ in the form of coins and paper dollars bounced against Deku's hip on the ride over. When Deku asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Kanazaki Izanagi- who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket- asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Bakugo let Deku speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way- children made fun of Deku's stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.

Deku got halfway through the explanation he and Bakugo had worked out on the way over- something about a model windmill for next year's science project- when Kanazaki waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of 50¥ per mold.

Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Deku forked over only a small fraction of their earnings.

"Don't expect me to give you a bag," Kanazaki Izanagi said, eying them with the bloodshot contempt of a man who believes he has seen everything the world holds, most of it twice. "You don't get a bag unless you spend at least 500¥."

"That's o-o-okay, suh-sir," Deku said.

"And don't hang around out front," Kanazaki said. "Tell Yagi to get you a haircut, Izuku... and you need to stop putting product in your hair Katsuki. You're eleven not a thirty year old trying to broker a business deal."

Outside Deku said: "Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Kah-Kacchan, how guh-guh-grownups w-w-won't sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or muh-manga or m-maybe movie t-t-tickets without w-wanting to know what y-you want it f-for?"

Bakugo kicked a pebble into the road for no real reason at all. "Yeah, I notice."

"W-Why? Why ih-is that?"

"Because they think we're dangerous." Bakugo Katsuki said in a very matter-of-fact tone.

"Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so?"

"Yeah," Bakugo said, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Let's hang around out front, want to? We'll put up our collars and sneer at people and let our hair grow and dump gel and shit all over it."

"Sh-shut up," Deku said, laughing.

—3—

"Okay," Sero said, looking at the molds carefully and then putting them down. "Good. Now-"

They gave him a little more room, looking at him hopefully, the way a man with engine trouble who knows nothing about cars will look at a mechanic. Sero didn't notice their expressions. He was concentrating on the job.

"Gimme that shell," he said, "and the blowtorch."

Deku handed a cut-down mortar shell to him. It was a war souvenir. Toshinori had found it in a pawn shop twenty-two years earlier, and kept it around because he thought it was neat. There had been a time, when Deku was very young and Eri was still in diapers, that his step-father had used it to hold his beer bottle caps. After a slight health scare when Deku was seven he stopped drinking all together, and the mortar shell had disappeared. Deku had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.

Sero put the mortar shell into Toshinori's vise, tightened it, and then took the blowtorch from Todoroki. He reached into his pocket, brought out a silver dollar, and dropped it into the makeshift crucible. It made a hollow sound. His vision swam for a moment, before he was able to ground himself again- determined to get through this.

'You can't help kill It if you pass out while making the slugs. So stop it. Get a hold of yourself.'

"These were your father's, weren't they?" Todoroki asked.

"Yes," Sero said, his voice sounded hollow even in his own ears.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" It was Kaminari who was talking now, sounding strangely serious.

Sero looked at Kaminari and Todoroki and smiled. "Yes," he said. "It's fine. It's not like he died or something."

Todoroki and Kaminari smiled back. Sero felt his own widen a little... the strange, unconventional, little trio within the larger group of loser's grew a little closer that day.

"Okay. Here we go. No problem. Easy as pie, right?" Sero said, already feeling a lot better.

The other six nodded hesitantly.

Years later, recounting all of this, Sero would think: 'In any other town, a kid could of simply bought a propane torch.' But on that day in Irusu, there wasn't a single one to be found. However; Toshinori Yagi had a tank-job, and it made Todoroki nervous. Kaminari, who was standing with his shoulder practically pressed into the ribs of his much taller crush, could tell he was nervous, wanted to tell him not to worry, but was afraid his voice would tremble.

"Don't worry," Kaminari said to Sero, who was standing a little in front of Todoroki.

"Huh?" Sero asked, looking at him and blinking. Iida Tenya stood behind him adjusting protective goggles on top of Sero's head.

"Don't worry,"

"I'm not."

"Oh, haha... I thought you were. And I just wanted you to know that you can... can trust in your own abilities... because... you're great at this stuff... If you were... Worrying, I mean. Heh."

"Are you okay, Denki?"

"Fine," Kaminari muttered, flushing even more.

Sero raised his eyebrows but didn't question him, assuming his best friend had simply noticed that he looked a little sick. "Gimme the matches, Sho."

Todoroki gave him a book of matches. Sero twisted the valve on the tank and lit a match under the nozzle of the torch. There was a 'flump!' and a bright blue-orange glare. Sero tuned the flame to a blue edge and began to heat the base of the mortar shell.

"You got the funnel?" he asked Deku.

"R-R-Right here." Deku handed over a homemade funnel that Sero had made earlier. The tiny hole at its base fit the hole in the bearing molds almost exactly. Sero had done this without taking a single measurement. Deku had been amazed- almost flabbergasted- but did not know how to say so without embarrassing Sero.

Completely in his element, Sero was able to take on a leadership role strong enough to nearly rival Deku. He spoke to Todoroki with the dry precision of a surgeon addressing a nurse.

"Sho, you've got the steadiest hands. Stick the funnel in the hole. Use one of those gloves so you don't get burned."

Deku handed Todoroki one of Toshinori's work gloves. Todoroki put the tin funnel in the mold. No one spoke. The hissing of the blowtorch flame seemed very loud. They watched it, eyes squinted almost shut.

"Wuh-wuh-wait," Deku said suddenly, and dashed into the house. He came back a minute later with a pair of cheap Turtle wraparound sunglasses that had been languishing in a kitchen drawer for a year or more. "Better p-put these uh-on, H-H-Hanta."

Sero looked at them, stopping the steady steam of concentrated heat for a moment. "Why? Tenya already forced the workshop glasses on me."

"Those won't protect against the bright light you have to stare at constantly." Iida chimed in, and Deku nodded. "Put them under the workshop glasses. Please?"

Sero, smiling, rolled his eyes and did so. "Okay, dad."

"You look like a baby Neo." Kaminari snickered.

"Yeah, If Neo was starved out." Bakugo added. "And was a coward that took the blue pill."

"Fuck you, Trashmouth," Sero said, but he started giggling in spite of himself. The idea of him being Neo- even lame blue pill Neo- or someone like that was just too weird.

"...what's a "baby Neo"?..." Todoroki asked the group quietly, causing them all to laugh. Todoroki's cheeks flushed.

"You know- Neo. From the Matrix." Kaminari said.

"...What's a Matrix?"

"Oh no." Kaminari giggled furiously. "Oh no- and here I was, thinking you were perfect Roki."

Todoroki frowned. "I don't understand?"

While this was going on, Sero had resumed his blowtorching. Two minutes later he handed the torch to Kirishima, who held it gingerly in his good hand. "It's ready," he said to Deku. "Gimme that other glove. Fast! Fast!"

Deku gave it to him. Sero put it on and held the mortar shell with the gloved hand while he turned the vise lever with the other.

"Hold it steady, Sho."

"I'm ready, don't wait for me," Todoroki said, his cheeks still flushed from embarrassment.

Sero tilted the shell over the funnel. The others watched as a rivulet of molten silver flowed between the two receptacles. Sero poured precisely; not a drop was spilled. And for a moment, he felt galvanized. He seemed to see everything magnified through a strong white glow. For that one moment he did not feel like skinny little Sero Hanta, who wore sweatshirts to disguise his ribs and his spine, who had to make himself sick in order to feel like a real person again, who had a mother who drank her weight in alcohol every night and blamed him for everything wrong in her life; he felt like Thor, working thunder and lightning at the smithy of the gods.

And after only an instant, the feeling was gone.

"Okay," he said. "I'm gonna have to reheat the silver. Someone shove a nail or something up the spout of the funnel before the goop hardens in there."

Iida did it.

Sero clamped the mortar shell in the vise again and took the torch back from Kirishima.

"Okay," he said, "number two."

And went back to work.

—4—

Ten minutes later it was done.

"Now what?" Kaminari asked.

"Now we play Monopoly for an hour," Sero said, "while they harden in the molds. Then I force 'em open with a chisel along the cut-lines and we're done."

Bakugo looked uneasily at the cracked face of his Timex, which had taken a great many lickings and kept on ticking. "When will Inko and Yagi be back, Deku?"

"N-N-Not until tuh-ten or ten-thuh-thuh-hirty," Deku said. "It's a double f-f-f-feature at the Uh-Uh-Uh-"

"Aladdin," Iida finished for him kindly.

"Yes. Thank you, Tenya. T-They'll stop in for a slice of p-p-pizza after. They a-almost always d-do."

"So we have plenty of time," Sero said.

Deku nodded.

"Then let's go in," Todoroki said. "I want to call home. I promised I would. And don't any of you talk. My dad thinks I'm at the Community House and that I'm getting a ride home from there."

"What if he wants to come down and pick you up early?" Kaminari asked.

"Then I'm going to be in a lot of trouble." Todoroki shrugged simply.

Kaminari frowned, and thought: 'I'd protect you, Roki.' In his mind's eye, an instant daydream unfolded, one with an ending so sweet he shivered. Todoroki's father started to give him a hard time; to yell and scare him and all that stuff (even in Kaminari's daydream he did not imagine how bad all that could get with Todoroki Enji). Kaminari stepped in front of Todoroki and told his father to lay off.

"If you want trouble, queer, you just keep protecting Shouto."

Kaminari Denki, usually an eccentric, social, jokester was like his mother in a lot of ways. He was blonde. He was short. And he wasn't quick to anger. However- if you did manage to piss him off, he could become a ravening tiger with a thirst for blood so quick it'd give you whip-lash. In his fantasy, he spoke to Todoroki Enji with great sincerity. "If you want to get to Roki, you'll have to come through me first."

Todoroki Enji starts forward... and then the steely glint in Kaminari's eyes stops him.

"You'll be sorry," Todoroki Enji mumbles, but it's clear all the fight has gone out of him- He's just a paper tiger after all.

"Somehow I doubt that," Kaminari says with a tight Gary Cooper smile, and Todoroki's father slinks away.

"What's happened to you, Denki?" Todoroki breathes quietly, but his heterochrome eyes are shining and full of stars. "You looked ready to kill him... I've never seen you that intense before..."

"Kill him?" Kaminari says coolly, the Gary Cooper smile still lingering on his lips. "No way, baby. He may be a creep, but he's still your father. I might have roughed him up a little, but that's only because when someone talks wrong to you I get a little hot under the collar. You know?"

Todoroki throws his arms around him and kisses him (on the lips! He kisses him ON THE LIPS!). "I love you, Denki." He says, and then Todoroki laughs. A pure, sweet, sing-songy laugh... a laugh that if heard around the world would bring upon world peace and cure all the diseases in the world... Todoroki Shouto's laugh.

Kaminari shivered a little, throwing this bright, terribly clear picture off with an effort. Bakugo stood in the doorway, asking him if he was coming, and Kaminari realized he was all alone in the workroom.

"Yeah," he said, starting a little. "I am, Kats. Sorry."

"You're going senile, Shortstack," Bakugo said as Kaminari hopped though the door, but he clapped Kaminari on the back. Kaminari grinned and hooked an elbow briefly around Bakugo's neck.

—5—

There was no problem with Todoroki's father. He had come home late from work, Natsuo told him over the phone, and fallen asleep in front of the TV, he woke up just long enough to get himself into bed, and passed out once again.

"You got a ride home, Soba?"

"Yes. Midoriya Izuku's step-dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home."

Natsuo sounded suddenly suspicious and big brother protective. "You're not on a date, are you, Soba?"

"No, of course not," Todoroki said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where he was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. 'But I sure wish I was.' "Dating's dumb. They have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home." That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that he could already feel the shame beginning to eat away at him.

"Alright," Natsuo said. "I just wanted to be sure... not that- not that I care... well, I do- but you know what I mean- it's just- If dad caught you going on dates at your age, he'd be mad." Almost as an afterthought he added: "I would be, too."

"Yeah, I know," Todoroki said plainly, still looking into the dining room. He did know; yet here he was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. He saw Kaminari looking at him nervously, and he sketched a smiling little half-wave at him. Kaminari blushed but gave him a wave back.

"Are any of your other friends there? Besides Izuku, I mean."

"Yes."

"That's good." Natsuo said, and Todoroki could hear the smile in his voice. "They're good for you, Sho. I'm glad you found them."

"I am too."

"I love you Soba."

"I love you, too." Todoroki said.

His brother paused briefly and added: "Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A girl named Toga Himiko. She's missing. Did you know her, Shouto?"

Todoroki closed his eyes briefly, pushing back the memories of Toga Himiko's death. "No."

"Oh... Well... goodbye, then."

"Bye."

He joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Iida was the big winner.

"Iida's are very good at making money," Iida Tenya said playfully, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. "So good that people accuse us of having dirty money."

"Let's get married Tenya. I need some of that Iida family luck." Sero said promptly, and everyone laughed. Sero was almost broke.

Todoroki glanced across the table from time to time at Deku, noting his clean hands, his green eyes, his freckles. As Deku moved the little silver shoe he was using as a marker around the board, Todoroki thought to himself, 'If he held my hand, I think I'd be so glad I'd probably die.' A warm light seemed to glow briefly in his chest and Todoroki smiled secretly down at his own clasped hands.

—6—

The evening's finale was almost anticlimactic. Sero took one of Toshinori's chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date. 925. In the other, wavery lines Todoroki thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty's hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Iida picked one up.

"Pretty small," he said.

"They look powerful to me." Kirishima said.

Sero found himself nodding. They did to him, as well.

"We're all d-d-done?" Deku asked.

"All done," Sero said. "Here." He tossed the second slug to Deku, who was so surprised he almost fumbled it.

The slugs went around the circle. Each of them looked closely at both, marvelling at their roundness, weight, actuality. When they came back to Sero, he held them in his hand and then looked at Deku. "What do we do with them now?"

"G-G-Give them to Shuh-Shouto."

"No."

Deku looked at Todoroki. His face was kind enough, but stern. "Shuh-Shuh-Shouto, we've been thruh-through this a-a-already, and-"

"I'll do it," Todoroki said. "I'll shoot the goddamned things when the time comes- If it comes. I'll probably get us all killed, but I'll do it. I don't want to take them home, though. Fuyumi and Touya are both visiting. My-

(father)

-siblings might find them. Then we'd all be screwed."

"Don't you have a secret hiding place?" Bakugo asked. "Shit, I got four or five."

"I've got a place," Todoroki said. There was a small slit in the bottom of his box-spring where he sometimes stashed cigarettes, manga, and, just lately, film and fashion magazines. "But nothing I'd trust for something like this. You keep them, Deku. Until it's time, anyway, you keep them."

"Okay," Deku said mildly, and just then lights splashed into the driveway. "O-oh no, they're e-e-early. L-Let's get out of h-here."

They were just sitting down around the Monopoly board again when Deku's mother opened the kitchen door.

Kaminari rolled his eyes and mimed wiping sweat from his forehead; the others laughed heartily. Kaminari could be really funny when he wanted to be.

A moment later she came in. "Yagi's waiting for your friends in the car, Izuku."

"O-O-Okay, M-Mom," Deku said kindly. "W-We were juh-just f-f-finishing, a-anyway."

"Who won?" Inko asked, smiling bright-eyed at Deku's friends. She'd of course known Bakugo Katsuki for his entire life, and she'd known of Kirishima and Iida for quite a while now as well. Sero, Todoroki, and Kaminari were new additions, but she knew each of them from their individual town scandals. She frowned for just a moment. 'Poor kids, I hope they had a good time.'

"Ten-Tenya wuh-wuh-won," Deku said. "Eh-Iida's are good a-at muh-muh-making duh-dirty m-m-money."

"Izuku!" She cried, horrified and blushing... she'd of course heard the rumor- everyone in town had- but she knew both of Iida Tenya's parents quite well (they both volunteered alongside herself and Mitsuki to work the community house events) and knew that they had come across their money honestly, and how much the rumor seemed to upset them. Inko had never heard her son say something like that before... and she fretted, thinking about Iida Tenya's feelings- But then she looked around at them, amazed, as they roared with laughter, Iida included. (Todoroki excluded, he was simply smiling behind his palm) Amazement turned to something like fear (although she would say none of this to her husband later on- to afraid of the implications of questioning it allowed- to afraid that Yagi might actually have an answer). There was a feeling in the air, like static electricity, only somehow much more powerful, much more scary. She felt that if she touched any of them, she would receive a walloping shock. 'What's happened to them?' she thought, dismayed, and perhaps she even opened her mouth to say something like that. Then Deku was saying he was sorry (but still with that foreign glint in his eye), and Iida was saying that was all right, it was just a joke they laid on him from time to time, and she found herself too confused to say anything at all.

Inko felt a shame-filled relief when the children were gone and her own puzzling, stuttering son had gone to his room and turned off the light.

—7—

JULY 25TH, 2005 / IRUSU, JAPAN

The day that the Losers Club finally met It in face-to-face combat, the day It almost had Sero Hanta's guts for garters, was July 25th, 2005. It was hot and muggy and still. Sero remembered the weather clearly enough; it had been the last day of the hot weather. After that day, a long spell of cool and cloudy had come in.

They arrived at 29 Neibolt Street around ten that morning, Deku riding Bakugo double on Silver, Sero on his blue Raleigh that had once belonged to Kaminari Denki. Todoroki came down Neibolt Street on his black and white BMX bike, his red and white hair streamed out pretty behind him. Kaminari came by himself on his own bike, and about five minutes later Iida and Kirishima walked up together.

"H-H-How's your a-a-arm, Eh-Eh-Ejirou?"

"Not too bad. Hurts if I roll over on that side while I'm sleeping. Did you bring the stuff?"

There was a canvas-wrapped bundle in Silver's bike-basket. Deku took it out and unwrapped it. He handed the slingshot to Todoroki, who took it with a little grimace but said nothing. There was also an Altoid's tin that he'd taken from his mother's at-home work desk in the bundle. Deku opened it and showed them the two silver balls. They looked at them silently, gathered close together on the balding lawn on 29 Neibolt Street- a lawn where only weeds seemed to grow. Deku, Bakugo, and Kirishima had seen the house before; the others hadn't, and they looked at it curiously.

'The windows look like eyes,' Iida thought, and his hand went to the paperback book in his back pocket. He touched it for luck. He carried the book with him almost everywhere now- it was Dr. Soga Takako's Guide to Hokkaido Birds. 'They look like dirty blind eyes.'

'It stinks,' Todoroki thought. 'I can smell it-but not with my nose, not exactly.'

Kaminari thought, 'It's like that time out where the Ironworks used to be. It has the same feel... as if it's telling us to step on in.'

'This is one of Its places, all right,' Sero thought. 'One of the places like the Morlock holes, where It goes out and comes back in. And It knows we're out here. It's waiting for us to come in.'

"Yuh-yuh-you all still want to?" Deku asked, giving Bakugo Katsuki major deja vu.

They looked back at him, pale and solemn. No one said no. Kirishima fumbled his aspirator out of his pocket and took a long whooping gasp at it.

"Gimme some of that, shitty hair." Bakugo said.

Kirishima looked at him, surprised, waiting for the punchline.

Bakugo shook his outstretched hand at his boyfriend violently. "Don't be such a prude. We've kissed for fuck's sake, if I was gonna give you a disease it would of happened by now. So give it up. Let me blast off."

Kirishima hesitated, blushed, and then shrugged with his good shoulder- an oddly disjointed movement- and handed it over. Bakugo triggered the aspirator and breathed deep. "Needed that," he said, and handed it back. He was coughing a little, but his eyes were sober.

"Me too," Iida breathed. "Okay?"

So one after another they used Kirishima's aspirator. When it came back to him, Kirishima jammed it in his back pocket, where the nozzle stuck out. They turned to look at the house again.

"Does anybody live on this street?" Todoroki asked in a low voice.

"Not this end of it," Kirishima said quietly. "Not anymore. I guess there are still bums sometimes. Guys that come through on the freights."

"They wouldn't see anything," Iida said. "They'd be safe. Most of them, anyway." He looked at Deku. "Can any grownups at all see It? Deku?"

"I don't nuh-know," Deku shrugged. "There must be suh-suh-some."

"I wish we could meet one," Kaminari whined glumly, rubbing at his eyes, making him appear extraordinarily young to the rest of them. "This really isn't a job for kids, you know what I mean?"

Deku knew. Whenever the Hardy Boys got into trouble, Fenton Hardy was around to bail them out. Same with Rick Brant's dad in the Rick Brant Science Adventures. Hell, even Nancy Drew had a father who would show up in the nick of time if the bad guys tied her up and threw her into an abandoned mine or something.

"Sure as shit there ought to be a grownup along," Bakugo said, looking at the closed house with its peeling paint, its dusty windows, its shadowy porch. He sighed tiredly. For a moment, Sero felt their resolution falter.

Then Deku said, "Cuh-cuh-home a-a-a-around h-here. Look at th-this."

They walked around to the left side of the porch, where the skirting was torn off. The brambly, run-to-the-wild roses were still there... and those It had touched when It climbed out were still black and dead.

"It just touched them and it did that?" Todoroki whispered, horrified.

Deku nodded. "Are you guh-huys s-s-sure?

For a moment nobody replied. They weren't sure; even though all of them knew by Deku's face that he would go on without them, they weren't sure. There was also a species of shame on Deku's face. As he had told them before, Eri hadn't been their sister.

'But all the other kids,' Sero thought. Hado Nejire, Asui Tsuyu, that Katsuma kid, Hagakure Toru, Jirou Kyoka (maybe), Izumi Kota... even Toga Himiko. It kills kids, goddamit, kids!'

"I'll go, Deku," he said finally.

"yeah," Todoroki said quietly.

"Sure," Bakugo said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "You think we're gonna let you have all the fun, mushmouth?"

Kirishima smiled at all of them, and looked at Bakugo. "It wouldn't be very manly of me to let Suki go in there without me..."

Iida Tenya hesitated, but nodded.

Kaminari nodded his head furiously, standing on his tip-toes to throw his arm around Sero's shoulder's. "Hell yeah!"

Deku looked at them, his throat working, and then he nodded. He handed the tin box to Todoroki.

"Are you sure, Deku?"

"Sh-Sh-Sure."

Todoroki nodded, at once horrified by the responsibility and bewitched by his trust. He opened the box, took out the slugs, and slipped one into the right front pocket of his grey jeans. The other he socketed in the Bullseye's rubber cup, and it was by the cup that he carried the slingshot. Todoroki could feel the ball tightly enclosed in his fist, cold at first and then warming.

"Let's go," Todoroki said, his voice steady but a little higher than usual. "Let's go before I change my mind."

Deku nodded, then looked sharply at Kirishima. "Cuh-Can you d-d-do this, Eh-Eh-Ejirou?"

Kirishima nodded. "Sure I can. I was alone last time. This time I'm with my friends. Right?" He looked at them and grinned a little. His expression was shy, fragile, and quite beautiful.

Bakugo nudged him with his shoulder, "If you die, I'll kill you."

Kirishima rolled his eyes. "I know."

Bakugo looked at Kirishima for a long time, hesitated, and with one quick 'I'll kill you all if you say anything,' glare at the other loser's, gave him a quick peck on the lips.

Kirishima's face turned scarlet, and he turned away from the group, his heart beating wildly in his chest. He was smiling.

"Uh-Uh-under the p-porch," Deku said after a long silence. "A-All of you b-b-behind me. Then into the suh-suh-cellar."

"If you go first and that thing jumps you, what do I do?" Todoroki asked harshly, eyes narrowed. "shoot through you?"

"If y-you have to," Deku said simply. "But I suh-suh-suggest y-y-you try guh-hoing a-around, first."

Kaminari laughed wildly at this.

"We'll g-g-go through the whole puh-puh-place, if we have t-to." He shrugged. "Maybe we won't find be a-a-anything."

"Do you believe that?" Iida asked.

"No," Deku said briefly. "It's h-h-here."

Sero believed he was right. The house at 29 Neibolt Street seemed to be encased in a poisonous envelope. It could not be seen... but it could be felt. He licked his lips.

"You ruh-ruh-ready?" Deku asked them.

They all looked back at him.

"We're ready, Freckles," Bakugo said.

"Cuh-come on, th-then," Deku said. "stay cluh-close behind me, Shuh-Sho." He dropped to his knees, crawled through the blighted rosebushes and under the porch.

—8—

They went this way: Deku, Todoroki, Sero, Kirishima, Bakugo, Iida, Kaminari. The leaves under the porch crackled and puffed up a sour old smell. Sero wrinkled his nose. Had he ever smelled fallen leaves like these? He thought not. And then an unpleasant idea struck him. They smelled the way he imagined a decapitated head would smell after if left alone for a while: like iron and decay.

Deku had reached the broken cellar window and was looking into the cellar. Todoroki crawled up beside him. "You see anything?"

Deku shook his head. "But that d-doesn't m-m-mean nuh-huthin's there. L-Look; there's the c-coal-pile me and Kah-Kah-Kacchan used to get ow-out."

Sero, who was looking between them, saw it. He was becoming excited as well as afraid now, and he welcomed the excitement, instinctively recognizing the fact that it could be a tool. Seeing the coal-pile was a little like seeing a great landmark about which you had only read or heard from others.

Deku turned around and slipped lithely through the window. Todoroki gave Sero the Bullseye, folding his hand over the cup and ball nestled in it. "Give it to me the second I'm down," he said. "The second."

"Okay. I will."

Todoroki slipped down as easily and lithely as Deku had before him. There was- for Kaminari Denki, at least- one heart-stopping instant when Todoroki's faded grey and white striped button up rode up and Kaminari saw his flat belly- only seen due to the fact that he was so short, he only had to crouch underneath the porch, instead of crawl on his hands and knees like the other's.

Sero handed the slingshot down, biting back a groan as the strong smell underneath the porch made his stomach churn. He could feel the walls of his empty stomach aching, could feel the cold sweat beginning to bleed from his brown.

'Stop it... not now...' he thought to himself, begging anything and everything to keep him from getting sick. 'Please not now... I've been fine all morning...'

"Okay, I've got it. Come on." Todoroki said.

Sero turned around himself and began to wriggle through the window. He should have forseen what happened next; it was really inevitable. He clamped a hand over his mouth, his body lurched, but nothing came up. He heaved again, his body wracking, sweat beginning to stain his sweater. His head throbbed with every beat of his heart, and Sero felt his limbs weaken. He couldn't go through the window like this- his leg's wouldn't support him, he'd crumple as soon as his feet touched the ground.

"Hurry up!" Bakugo called from behind Kirishima.

"Are you okay, Hanta?" Kirishima asked him gently, concerned. Sero was able to keep his gagging quiet enough that most of the loser's couldn't hear, but Kirishima was directly in front of him.

'No,' "I'm- nn... I'm fine-" he muttered, his voice sounded far away in his own ears, and he suddenly felt exhausted- as if he hadn't slept for a thousand years. He couldn't do this- there was no way it would be possible with the state he was in. He opened his mouth to to tearfully tell Kirishima so, but paused:

A voice, an adult voice floated through his mind... but unlike with the other loser's, this one did sound like his own:

('Deku, you said your reason for moving forward was for closure... You see... somewhere along the way... I- I actually believed if I helped kill It... The universe might reward me.')

Sero blinked, his head throbbed worst than ever before. He smacked his lips together, the inside of his mouth suddenly tasted of lemon and liquid fire.

'...I somehow got it in my head that if I helped kill the monster, my mom would finally love me.'

Though it was only brief, Sero was reminded of that day in the washateria, when his head had started to hurt so badly that he had begun to-

(staple the past and future together)

-hallucinate... when he had told the other's that Deku would write manga about this summer one day.

('ha... it was just dumb kid logic I guess...')

Sero blinked, nodded to no one in particular, and pushed grimly with both hands. The dry heaving and gagging stopped as soon as his shaky limbs pushed him past the cellar window's wooden framing. Feet attached to two shaky legs hit the ground, and supported him. His head still hurt and his vision still blurred, but it was lesser now- duller.

'What the hell was that?...' eleven year-old Sero Hanta thought to himself, blinking around wildly.

"Y-Y-You okay, H-Hanta?"

"...Yeah." Sero whispered,
Still a little shaken up.

Deku laughed shakily. Todoroki smiled, and then Sero was laughing a little too, although it he didn't really know why any of them were.

"Oi!" Bakugo called down. "Shark teeth needs help, okay?"

"O-O-Okay." Deku and Todoroki took up positions below the window. Kirishima came through on his back. Deku got his legs just above the knees.

"Watch what you're doing," Kirishima said in a querulous, nervous voice. "I'm ticklish."

"Ugh- will you all just hurry the hell up?"

"Beep-Beep, Katsuki." Sero said absently.

Todoroki got Kirishima around the waist, trying to keep his hand away from the cast and the sling. The two of them manhandled Kirishima through the cellar window like a corpse. Kirishima hissed out once, but that was all.

"Eh-Eh-Ejirou?"

"I'm good," Kirishima said, "Totally manly. No big deal." But large drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and he was breathing in quick rasps. His eyes darted around the cellar.

Deku stepped back again. Todoroki stood near him, now holding the Bullseye by the shaft and the cup, ready to fire if necessary. His mismatch eyes swept the cellar constantly. Bakugo came through next, followed by Iida and Kaminari. Both of the latter moved with a smooth grace that Sero deeply envied. Then they were all down, down in the cellar where Deku and Bakugo had seen It only a month before.

The room was dim, but not dark. Dusky light shafted in through the windows and pooled on the dirt floor. The cellar seemed very big to Sero, almost too big, as if he were witnessing an optical illusion of some sort. Dusty rafters crisscrossed overhead. The furnace-pipes were rusty. Some sort of duty white cloth hung from the water-pipes in dirty strings and strands. The smell was down here too. A dirty yellow smell. Sero thought: 'It's here, alright. Definitely.'

Deku started toward the stairs. The others fell in behind him. He halted at their foot and glanced underneath. He reached under with one foot and kick-pawed something out. They looked at it wordlessly. It was a white clown-glove, now streaked with dirt and dust.

"Uh-uh-upstairs," he said.

They went up and emerged into a dirty kitchen. One plain straight-backed chair stood marooned in the center of the humped hillocky linoleum. That was it for furniture. There were empty liquor bottles in one corner. Sero could see others in the pantry. He could smell booze- wine, mostly- and old stale cigarettes. Those smells were dominant, but that other smell was there, too. It was getting stronger all the time.

Todoroki went to the cupboards and opened one of them. His strangled gasp was piercing in the still silence. A blackish-brown rat tumbled out almost into his face. It struck the counter with a plop and glared around at them with its black eyes. Backing away, not even thinking about what he was doing, Todoroki instinctively raised the Bullseye and pulled the sling back.

"NO!" Deku roared.

Todoroki whipped his pale terrified face toward him, eyes wild with fear, his facial muscles as relaxed as ever. Then he nodded and relaxed his arm, the silver ball unfired-but Sero thought Todoroki had been very, very close. Todoroki backed up slowly, ran into Sero, tensed. Sero put an arm around him, tight.

The rat scurried down the length of the counter, jumped to the floor, ran into the pantry, and was gone.

"It wanted me to shoot at it," Todoroki said in a disturbingly detached voice. "Use up half of our ammunition on it."

"Yes," Deku breathed. "It's l-l-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh-Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuh-shoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you l-lose puh-hoints."

"I can't do this, Deku," Todoroki said, his eyes were still wild- wavering towards insanity, but his expression remained dissociative. It disturbed Sero immensely. "I'll mess it up. Here. You." He held the Bullseye out, but Deku shook his head.

"You h-h-have to, Shuh-Shouto."

There was a mewling from another cupboard.

Bakugo walked toward it.

"Don't get too close!" Iida barked. "It might-"

Bakugo looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.

"A litter." Bakugo sounded ill, didn't even try to mask it. "Biggest litter I ever saw... anyone ever saw, probably." He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. "There's hundreds of them in there." He looked at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. "Their tails... they were all tangled up. Knotted together." He grimaced. "Like snakes."

They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. 'Rats,' Sero thought, looking at Deku's pale face and, over Deku's shoulder, Kirishima's greenish one. 'Everyone's scared of rats. It knows it, too.'

"C-C-Come on," Deku spoke finally, sounding a little strained.

"Here on Neibolt Street, the fun never stops." Kaminari whispered in a low, some-what amused, voice, smiling at them all weakly. They all tried their best to smile back, only some of them succeeded.

They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Todoroki's and Kaminari's were heeled over on their kickstands. Silver leaned against a stunted maple tree. Sero's lay dead in the grass. To Sero the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding... these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.

There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner- Beer bottles.

In the other corner, wet and swelled, was a digest-sized porno magazine. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Sero, nor did it embarrass him that the other's had noticed him glance at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman's skin and moisture had humped the cover in ripples that became wrinkles on her face. Her salacious wink had become the leer of a dead whore.

(Years later, as Sero recounted this, Todoroki suddenly cried out, startling all of them- they were not so much listening to the story as reliving it. "It was her!" Todoroki said, looking at them all widely. "Mrs. Tokunaga! It was her!")

As Sero looked, the young/old crone on the porno cover winked at him. She wiggled her fanny in an obscene come-on.

Cold all over, yet sweating, Sero looked away.

Deku pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Sero, almost as long as a freight-car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside -

'Oh, but that was outside,' a new voice spoke inside his mind. It was a jocular, squealing voice, and Sero realized with sudden numbing certainty that he was hearing Pennywise Itself; Pennywise was speaking to him on some crazy mental radio. 'Outside, things always look smaller than they really are, don't they, Hanta?'

"Go away," he whispered.

Bakugo turned to look at him, his face still pale, his eyebrows knitting together. "Oi, you say something skelly?"

Sero shook his head. The voice was gone. That was an important thing, a good thing. Yet-

(outside)

-he had understood. This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Irusu, one of the many, perhaps, from which It was able to find its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong. It wasn't just that it seemed too big; the angles were wrong, the perspective crazy. Sero was standing just inside the door between the parlor and the hallway and the others were moving away from him across a space that now looked almost as big as Ukiyo Park... but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and-

Kaminari turned. "Hanta!" he called, and Sero saw alarm on his face. "Catch up! We're losing you!" He could barely hear the last word. It trailed away as if the others were being swept off on a fast train.

Suddenly terrified, he began to run. The door behind him swept shut with a muffled bang. He yelled... and something seemed to sweep through the air just behind him, ruffling his shirt. He looked back but there was nothing there. That did not change his belief, however, that something had been.

He caught up with the others. He was panting, out of breath, and would have sworn he had run half a mile at least... but when he looked back, the parlor's far wall was not ten feet away.

Kaminari grasped his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

"You scared me, man," he said. Bakugo, Iida, and Kirishima were looking at Kaminari questioningly. "He looked small," Kaminari said, sounding frantic, and weakly defensive. "Like- like he was a mile away..."

"Deku!"

Deku looked back.

"We gotta make sure everybody stays close," Sero panted. "This place... it's like the funhouse in a carnival, or something. We'll get lost. I think It wants us to get lost. To get separated."

Deku looked at him for a moment, lips thin. "Alright," he said. "We a-all stay cluh-cluh-hose. No s-s-stragglers."

They nodded back, frightened, clustered outside the hall door. Iida's hand groped at the bird-book in his back pocket. Kirishima was holding his aspirator in one hand, crunching it, loosening up, then crunching it again, like a ninety-eight-pound weakling trying to build up his muscles with a tennis ball.

Deku opened the door and here was another, narrower hall. The wallpaper, which showed runners of roses and elves wearing green caps, was falling away from the spongy plaster in draggling leaves. Yellow waterstains spread in senile rings on the ceiling overhead. A scummy wash of light fell through a dirty window at the end of the hall.

Abruptly the corridor seemed to elongate. The ceiling rose and then began to diminish above them like some weird rocket. The doors grew with the ceiling, pulled up like taffy. The faces of the elves grew long and became alien, their eyes began to bleed.

Iida groaned miserably and clapped his hands to his eyes.

"Ih-Ih-hit's not ruh-ruh-ruh-REAL!" Deku yelled at him, gripping his shoulders.

"It is!" Iida screamed back, his small closed fists plugging his eyes underneath his glasses. "It's real, you know it is, I'm going crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy- I can't-"

'Wuh-wuh-WATCH!" Deku cried at Iida first, and then at all of them, and Sero, his head reeling, watched as Deku bent down, coiled, and suddenly flung himself upward. His closed left fist struck nothing, nothing at all, but there was a heavy crr-rack! sound. Plaster dust puffed from a place where there was no longer any ceiling... and then there was. The hallway was just a hallway again, narrow, low-ceilinged, dirty. But the walls no longer stretched up into forever. There was only Deku, looking at them and nursing his bleeding hand, which was floury with plaster-dust. Overhead was the clear mark his fist had made in the soft plaster of the ceiling.

"N-N-Not ruh-ruh-real," he said to Iida, to all of them. "Just a f-f-false f-fuh-face. Like a Huh-Huh-Huh-Halloween muh-muh-hask."

"To you, maybe," Iida said dully. His face was shocked and horrified. He looked around as if no longer sure where he was. Looking at him, smelling the sour reek coming from everywhere, blanketing them, consuming them... Sero, who had been overjoyed at Deku's victory, got scared all over again. Iida was close to cracking up. Soon he would go into hysterics, begin to scream, perhaps, and what would happen then?

"To you," Iida said again, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "...But if I'd tried that, nothing would have happened. Because... you've got your sister, Deku, but I don't have anything." He looked around-first back toward the parlor, which had taken on a somber brown atmosphere, so thick and smoggy they could barely see the door through which they had entered it, to this hall, which was bright but somehow dark, somehow filthy, somehow utterly mad. Elves capered on the decaying wallpaper under runners of roses. Sun glared on the panes of the window at the end of the hall, and Sero knew that if they went down there they would see dead flies... more broken glass... and then what? The floorboards spreading apart, spilling them into a dead darkness where grasping fingers waited to catch them? Iida was right- Iida's intuition was always right- Shit, why had they come into Its lair with nothing but their two stupid silver slugs and a fucking slingshot?

He saw Iida's panic leap from one of them to the next to the next- like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Todoroki's eyes, dropped Kirishima's mouth into a wounded gasp, made Bakugo dig his nails into his palms so deeply they began to bleed in the shape of crescent moons.

They trembled on the brink of flight, Deku's warning to stay together almost forgotten. They were listening to gale-force panicwinds blowing between their ears. As if in a dream Sero heard Nemuri, reading to the little ones, saw the kid's lean forward in mystified wonder: would the monster be bested... or would It feed?

"I don't have anything!" Iida Tenya panicked, gripping at his hair and crouching to the floor. He seemed very small, almost small enough to slip through one of the cracks in the hallway's plank flooring like a human letter. His glasses hit the floor, and a lens popped out, clanking across the wooden planks musically. "You've got your sister, but I don't have anything to keep me grounded in reality! Nothing at all!"

"You duh-duh-duh-do!" Deku yelled back. He grabbed Iida and for one horrifying moment, Sero felt sure he was going to bust him one and his thoughts moaned, 'No, Deku, please, that's Tomura's way, if you do that It'll kill us all right now!'

But Deku didn't hit Iida. (And when he had time to reflect on this moment, Sero remembered what kind of person Deku really was, and how that wasn't even a possibility) He reached behind Iida for something on the floor, and thrust it into his chest.

"What are you-!?" Iida screamed, confused, and near tears. The others stood stunned, shrinking away from Deku, whose eyes now seemed to actually burn. He wore an expression so intense Iida felt as if he'd die of freight right then and there- an expression he would not hold again for another fifteen years, when he warned his wife of the consequences of following him home.

"You've guh-guh-got your b-b-bi-bir-bir-"

He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out like cables, his adam's apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Sero was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Midoriya Izuku; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Deku? Had any of them? 'Oh Deku, say it, please, can't you say it?'

And somehow, Deku did. "You've got your BUH-BUH-BUH-BIRDS! Your BUH-BUH-BIRDS!"

He thrust the thing- the bird book- into Iida's chest again. Iida took it, and looked at Deku dumbly. Tears glimmered on his cheeks. He held the book so tightly that his fingers were white. Deku looked at him, then at the others.

"Cuh-cuh-home on," he said again.

"Will the birds work?" Iida asked. His voice was low, husky.

"They worked in the Standpipe, didn't they?" Todoroki asked him gently, kneeling down to rub his back.

Iida looked at Todoroki uncertainly, and leaned into his touch. Seeming to calm down a little more. He nodded slowly.

'Shouto really is our light.' Sero thought, but before he could truly reflect on what that meant, the thought was gone.

When Iida was standing again, Bakugo clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, Four-eyes," he said. "Don't you know how hard it is for kid's to watch their parent's have a mental breakdown?"

"Heh," Iida laughed shakily, and wiped tears from his face with the heel of his left hand. "Sorry, then... for the added trauma..."

"As long as you use your family's dirty money to pay my therapy bill's," Kaminari grinned up at him. He was squatting, a red-handled screw driver in one hand, Iida Tenya's broken glasses in the other. After a few moments of fiddling, he returned the screwdriver to the flap pocket of his tan cargo shorts, and replaced them with a pair of pliers. "There we go!" Kaminari chirped after a bit, presenting Iida Tenya with his fixed glasses. "I'm better with car's admittedly, and you'll probably wanna get some new one's anyway, but these should last ya long enough to get through the rest of the day at least."

"Thank you, Denki... I sincerely appreciate it." Iida sniffled, and slid the glasses on. They were somewhat lopsided, and looked quite silly- but as Kaminari had said: it'd get him through the fun house.

Kirishima turned, and his eyes widened, he gripped his inhaler tightly in his fist. "That big room. The one we just came through. Look!"

They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, nor any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.

"Come oh-oh-on."

They turned away from the black and walked down the hall. Three doors opened off it, two with dirty white porcelain doorknobs, the third with only a hole where the knob's shaft had been. Deku grabbed the first knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. Todoroki crowded up next to him, raising the Bullseye.

Sero drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Deku like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress's yellow hide. Outside the room's one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.

"There's nothing-" Deku began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.

"Shut it, Deku!" Bakugo shouted. "shut the fucking door!"

Deku slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. "Come on." He had barely touched the knob of the second door- this one on the other side of the narrow hall-when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.

—9—

Even Deku drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Sero felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big- The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Los Angeles stormdrains. He could not have run even if that buzzing rugose horror had splintered the panels of the door and begun caressing him with its great hairy legs-

-But there was something else familiar about that noise- something that didn't come from a horror movie, something... something almost comforting...

(He could have sworn he felt the house throb in angry protest)

The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Deku fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only a purple scar below his nose.

"Shoot it, Shouto!" Sero heard Kirishima gasp out. He was only dimly aware of Kirishima's hacking gasps, "Shoot it through the door, shoot it before it can get us!" And the sun fell through the dirty window at the end of the hall, a heavy feverish weight.

Todoroki raised the Bullseye like a boy in a dream as the buzzing scream rose louder, louder, louder-

-But before Todoroki could pull the sling back, Kaminari was shouting: "No! No! Don't, Roki! Don't shoot it!" And incredibly, Kaminari was laughing- and not his hysterical, horrified, laugh- but genuine 'someone just told the funniest goddamn joke in the entire world' laughing. He pushed forward, grabbed the knob, turned it, and shoved the door open. It came free of the swollen jamb with a brief grinding noise. "It's a mooseblower! Just a mooseblower, that's all, something to scare the birds!"

The room was an empty box. Lying on the floor was a tin can with both ends cut off. In the middle, strung tight and knotted outside holes punched in the can's sides, was a waxed length of string. Although there was no breeze in the room- the one window was shut and indifferently boarded over, letting light pass only in chinks and rays- there could be no doubt that the buzzing was coming from the can.

Sero felt his eyes widen, and his own laughter bubbling up in his chest: 'That's right! Mooseblower's! That's why it sounded so familiar!' He and Kaminari had been helping Kaori make the little bird scaring devices for as long as he could remember.

Kaminari walked to it and gave it a solid kick. The buzzing stopped as the can tumbled into a far corner.

"Just a mooseblower," he said to the others, smiling almost apologetically. "We put 'em on the scarecrows. It's nothing. Only a cheap trick. But I'm not a bird." He looked at Deku, not laughing anymore but smiling still. "I'm still scared of It- I guess we all are- but It's scared of us, too. I think It's scared pretty bad."

Deku nodded. "I-I do, too," he said.

They went down to the door at the end of the hall, and in the newfound silence, Sero found that he could hear the tools jangling in his best friends pocket. It was a surprisingly comforting sound, and he focused in on it as he watched Deku hook his finger into the hole where the doorknob's shaft had been. He understood that this was where it was going to end; there would be no trick behind this door. The smell was worse now, and that thundery feeling of two opposing powers swirling around them was much stronger. He glanced at Kirishima, one arm in a sling, his good hand clutching his aspirator. He looked at Todoroki on his other side, white-faced, holding the slingshot up like a wishbone. He looked at Kamianri again, his oldest and bestest friend-his brother- and thought about how nice it would be to be back at Kaminari farm's right now, helping Kaori can jellies and jams.

Kaminari might have heard his thought, because he turned toward him and offered him a lopsided smile. Sero smiled back.

Deku pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom... but something was wrong with it. 'Someone broke something in here.' was all that Sero could think at first. 'Not a booze bottle... what?'

White chips and shards, glimmering wickedly, lay strewn everywhere. Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Bakugo Katsuki joined him.

"Somebody must have had a really bad case of food poisoning," Kaminari said, and Kirishima and Sero began to giggle and nod their heads. Iida was smiling a little, but it was less out of amusement and more out of relief that Kaminari could still crack jokes. Iida felt that he might lose it again if Kaminari Denki become so scared he couldn't make joke's at inappropriate times- and he didn't think Deku would be able to scare him back into the sanity realm if that happened.

Only Deku and Todoroki remained grim.

The white pieces littered across the floor were shards of porcelain. The toilet-bowl had exploded. The tank stood drunkenly at an angle in a puddle of water, saved from falling over by the fact that the toilet had been placed in one corner of the room and the tank had landed kitty-corner.

They crowded in behind Deku and Todoroki, their feet gritting on bits of porcelain. 'Whatever it was,' Sero thought, 'it blew that poor toilet straight to hell.' He had a vision of Shigaraki Tomura dropping two or three of his M-80s into it, slamming the lid down, then bugging out in a hurry. He couldn't think of anything else short of dynamite that would have done such a cataclysmic job. There were a few chunks, but damned few; most of what was left were wicked-looking slivers like blowgun darts. The wallpaper (rose-runners and capering elves, as in the hall) was peppered with holes all the way around the room. It looked like shotgun blasts but Sero knew it was more porcelain, driven into the walls by the force of the explosion.

There was a bathtub standing on claw feet with generations of grimy toe-jam between each blunt talon. Sero peeked into it and saw a tidal-flat of silt and grit on the bottom. A rusty showerhead glared down from above. There was a basin and a medicine cabinet standing ajar above it, disclosing empty shelves. There were small rust-rings on these shelves, where bottles had once stood.

"Why the hell are you getting closer to it, you fucking idiot!?" Bakugo said sharply, and Sero looked around.

Deku was approaching the mouth of the drainhole in the floor, over which the toilet had once sat. He leaned toward it... and then turned back to the others.

"I can h-h-hear the pub-pumping muh-muh-machinery... just like in the Buh-Buh-harrens!"

Todoroki drew closer to Deku. Sero followed him, and yes, he could hear it; that steady thrumming noise. Except, echoing up through the pipes, it didn't sound like machinery at all. It sounded like something alive.

Th-Th-This is w-w-where It cuh-cuh-hame fr-from," Deku said. His face was still deadly pale, but his eyes were alight with excitement. "This is w-where it cuh-hame from that d-d-day, and th-hat's w-w-where it a-a-always comes fr-rom! The druh-druh-drains!"

Bakugo was nodding. "We were in the cellar, but that isn't where It was- It came down the stairs. Because this is where It could get out."

"And It did this?" Todoroki asked.

"Ih-It was in a h-h-hurry, I th-think," Deku said gravely.

Sero looked into the pipe. It was about three feet in diameter and dark as a mineshaft. The inner ceramic surface of the pipe was crusted with stuff he didn't want to know about. That thrumming sound floated up hypnotically... and suddenly he saw something. He did not see it with his physical eyes, not at first, but with one buried deep in his mind.

It was rushing toward them, moving at express-train speed, filling the throat of this dark pipe from side to side; It was in Its own form now, whatever that might be; It would take some shape from their minds when It got here. It was coming, coming up from Its own foul runs and black catacombs under the earth, Its eyes glowing a feral yellowish green, coming, coming; It was coming.

And then, at first like sparks, he saw Its eyes down in that darkness. They took shape-flaring and malignant. Over the thrumming sound of the machinery, Sero could now hear a new noise-Whoooooooo... A fetid smell belched from the ragged mouth of the drain-pipe and he fell back, coughing and gagging.

"It's coming!" He screamed. "Deku, I saw It, It's coming!"

Todoroki raised the Bullseye. "Good," he said simply. His voice cool.

Something exploded out of the drainpipe. Sero, trying to recall that first confrontation later, could only remember a silvery-orange shifting shape. It was not ghostly; it was solid, and he sensed some other shape, some real and ultimate shape, behind it... but his eyes could not grasp what he was seeing, not precisely.

Then Bakugo Katsuki was stumbling backward, his face a scrawl of terror: "The Werewolf! Deku! It's the fucking Werewolf!" And suddenly the shape locked into reality, for Sero, for all of them. Bakugo's It became their It.

The Werewolf stood poised over the drainpipe, one hairy foot on either side of where the toilet had once been. Its yellow eyes glared at them from Its feral face. Its muzzle wrinkled back and yellowish-white foam seeped through Its teeth. It uttered a shattering growl. Its arms pistoned out toward Todoroki, the cuffs of Its high-school letter jacket pulling back from Its fur-covered arms. Its smell was hot and raw and murderous.

Todoroki's eyes widened. Sero grabbed the back of his jacket and yanked so hard that the seams under the arms tore. One clawed hand swept through the air where Todoroki had been only a moment before. Todoroki went stumbling backwards against the wall. The silver ball popped out of the cup of the Bullseye. For a moment it glimmered in the air. Kaminari, quicker than quick, snatched it and gave it back to him.

"Shoot it, Roki," he said. His voice was perfectly calm; almost serene. "Shoot it now. I know you can do it. I believe in you."

The Werewolf uttered a shattering roar that became a flesh-freezing howl, Its snout turned up toward the ceiling.

The howl became a laugh. It lunged at Deku as Deku turned to look at Todoroki. Iida, materializing from somewhere behind Sero, shoved him aside and Deku went sprawling.

"Shoot It, Shouto!" Bakugo screamed. "For fuck's sake, shoot It!"

The Werewolf sprang forward, and there was no question in Sero's mind, then or later, that It knew exactly who was in charge here. Deku was the one It was after. Todoroki drew and fired. The ball flew and again it was off the mark but this time there was no saving curve. It missed by more than a foot, punching a hole in the wallpaper above the tub. Deku, his arms peppered with bits of porcelain and bleeding in a dozen pieces, uttered a surprised gasp.

The Werewolf's head snapped around; its gleaming yellow eyes considered Todoroki. Not thinking, Kaminari side-stepped in front of him as Todoroki groped in his pocket for the other silver slug. The jeans pockets were too tight. He had donned them with no thought of provocation; it was just that, like the shorts he had worn on the day of Toga Himiko and the refrigerator, he was still wearing last year's model. His fingers closed on the ball but it squirted away. He groped again and got it. He pulled it, turning his pocket inside out and spilling 15¥, the stubs of two Aladdin tickets, and a quantity of pocket-lint onto the floor.

The Werewolf lunged at Kaminari, who was standing protectively in front of him. Its head was cocked at the predator's deadly questing angle, its jaws snapping. Kaminari's eye's widened in horror but he stood his ground, determined.

...But Kaminari Denki was tiny. So tiny that it'd take only one swipe of the werewolf's claw to tear him to ribbon's. To spill his guts cross the floor...

"I'll kill you!" Kaminari yelled at It, his eyes wide. Grinning, fearful, but also fiercely determined. "Do you understand me, tubguts?! I'll fucking you! You aren't going to hurt him!"

The werewolf pounced.

Sero felt his body beginning to move before his brain even fully processed what he was doing. There seemed to be no room in his reactions now for terror- he felt a clear-headed sort of anger instead, mixed with bewilderment and a sense that somehow time had come to a sudden unexpected screech-halt. 'Denki, you idiot' he thought, 'It'll kill you much faster then it'll kill Sho! He's the one with the weapon!'

Sero snagged his hands in tough matted hair- 'the pelt,' Sero thought, 'I've got Its pelt' and he could feel the heavy bone of Its skull beneath. He thrust at that wolvish head with all of his force, but because he was such an underweight boy, it did no good at all. If he had not stumbled back and struck the wall, the thing would have torn his throat open with its teeth.

It came after him, Its greenish-yellow eyes flaring. It growled with each breath. It smelled of the sewer and something else, some wild yet unpleasant odor like rotten hazelnuts. One of Its heavy paws rose and Sero skittered aside as best he could. The paw, tipped with heavy claws, ripped bloodless wounds through the wallpaper and into the cheesy plaster beneath. He could dimly hear Bakugo bellowing something, Kirishima begging Todoroki to shoot it, shoot it! Iida Tenya joining him soon after... But Todoroki did not. This was his only other chance. It didn't matter; he intended that it be the only one he would need. A clear coldness he never saw again in his life fell over his sight. In it everything stood out and forward; never again would Todoroki see the three dimensions of reality so clearly denned. He possessed every color, every angle, every distance. Fear departed. He felt the hunter's simple lust of certainty and oncoming consummation. Todoroki's pulse slowed. The hysterical trembling grip in which he had been holding the Bullseye loosened, then firmed and became natural. He drew in a deep breath. It seemed to Todoroki that his lungs would never fill completely. Dimly, faintly, he heard popping sounds. Didn't matter, whatever they were. He tracked left, waiting for the Werewolfs improbable head to fall with cool perfection into the wishbone beyond the extended V of the drawn-back sling.

The Werewolfs claws descended again. Sero tried to duck under them... but suddenly he was in Its grip. It jerked him forward as if he had been no more than a ragdoll. Its jaws snapped open.

"Bastard." Todoroki breathed softly, his own steadily calm voice echoing in his mind.

Sero thrust a thumb into one of Its eyes. It bellowed with pain, and one of those claw-tipped paws ripped through his shirt. Sero pressed himself flush against the wall, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain down his chest and stomach. Blood gushed out of him and splattered on his pants, his sneakers, the floor. The Werewolf threw him into the bathtub. He thumped his head, saw stars, struggled into a sitting position, and saw his lap was full of blood.

The Werewolf whirled around. Sero observed with that same lunatic clarity that It was wearing faded Levi Strauss bluejeans. The seams had split open. A silver and orange snot-caked bandanna, the sort a train-man might carry, hung from one back pocket. Written on the back of Its black and white high school jacket so much like Todoroki Shouto's own were the words IRUSU HIGH SCHOOL KILLING TEAM. Below this, the name PENNYWISE. And in the center, a number: 13.

It went for Deku again. He had gotten to his feet and now stood with his back to the wall, looking at It steadily.

"Shoot it, Shouto!" Bakugo screamed again.

"Beep-beep, Katsuki," Todoroki heard himself reply from roughly a thousand miles away. The Werewolf's head was suddenly there, in the wishbone. He covered one of its green eyes with the cup and released. There was no shake in either of his hands; he fired as smoothly and naturally as he had fired at the cans in the dump on the day they had all taken turns to see who was the best.

There was time for Sero to think faintly 'Oh, Shouto, if you miss this time we're all dead and I don't want to die in a bathroom.' There was no miss. A round eye- not yellow but dead black- suddenly appeared high up in the center of Its snout: Todoroki had aimed for the right eye and missed by less than half an inch.

Its scream- an almost human scream of surprise, pain, fear and rage- was deafening. Sero's ears rang with it. Then the perfect round hole in Its snout was gone, obscured by freshets of blood. It was not flowing; it gouted from the wound in a high-pressure torrent. The blood drenched Deku's face and hair. 'Doesn't matter,' Sero thought hysterically. 'Don't worry, Deku. Nobody will be able to see it anyway when we get out of here... If we ever do...'

Deku and Todoroki advanced on the Werewolf, and behind them, Bakugo cried out hysterically: "shoot It again, Shouto! Kill it!"

"Kill It!" Kaminari screamed.

"That's right, kill It!" Kirishima chimed in.

"Kill it, please just kill it already!" Iida cried from somewhere on Sero's left.

"Kill it!" Deku yelled, his mouth drawn down in a quivering bow. There was a whitish-yellow streak of plaster dust in his hair. "Kill It, Shouto, don't let it get away!"

'No ammo left,' Sero thought incoherently, 'we're slugged out. What are you talking about, kill it?' But he looked at Todoroki and understood. If he hadn't known himself so well, he would of almost been fooled into thinking he'd just fallen in love with Todoroki Shouto. Todoroki had pulled the sling back again. His fingers were closed over the cup, hiding its emptiness.

"Kill It!" Sero screamed, and flopped clumsily over the edge of the tub. His jeans and underwear were soaked against his skin with blood. He had no idea if he was hurt badly or not. Following the original hot sizzle there hadn't been much pain, but there sure was an awful lot of blood.

The Werewolf's yellowish eyes flickered among them, now filled with uncertainty as well as pain. Blood poured down the front of Its jacket in freshets.

Midoriya Izuku smiled. It was a gentle, rather lovely smile... but it did not touch his eyes. "You shouldn't have started with my sister," he said. "send the fucker to hell, Sho."

The uncertainty left the creature's eyes- It believed. With lithe smooth grace, It turned and dove into the drain. As It went, It changed. The Irusu High jacket melted into its pelt and the color ran out of both. The shape of Its skull elongated, as if it had been made of wax which was now softening and beginning to run. Its shape changed. For one instant Sero believed he had nearly seen what shape It really was, and his heart froze inside his chest, leaving him gasping.

"I'll kill you all!" a voice roared from inside the drainpipe. It was thick, savage, not in the least bit human. "Kill you all... kill you all... kill you all... " The words faded back and back, diminishing, washing out, growing distant... at last joining the low throbbing hum of the pumping machinery floating through the pipes.

The house seemed to settle with a heavy sub-audible thud. But it wasn't settling, Sero realized; in some strange way it was shrinking, coming back to its normal size. Whatever magic It had used to make the house at 29 Neibolt Street seem bigger was now withdrawn. The house snapped back like an elastic. It was only a house now, smelling damp and a little rotten, an unfurnished house where winos and hobos sometimes came to drink and talk and sleep out of the rain.

It was gone.

In Its wake the silence seemed very loud.

—10—

"W-W-We've guh-got to g-g-get ow-ow-out of this p-place," Deku said. He walked over to where Sero was trying to get up and grabbed one of his outstretched hands. Todoroki was standing near the drain. He looked down at himself and that coldness disappeared in a flush that seemed to turn all his skin into one warm stocking. It must have been a deep breath indeed. The dim popping sounds had been the button's on his shirt. They had popped off, each an every one of them. The striped shirt hung open, exposing his chest and stomach to the damp air.

"Kah-Kah-Kacchan," Deku said, his usual kindness returning to his tone in an instant. "Help me with Huh-Hanta. He's h-h-h-"

Kaminari joined him before Bakugo could. The two of them got Sero to his feet. Kirishima had gone to Todoroki and put his good arm awkwardly around the scar-faced boy's broader shoulders. "You did great," he said, and to everyone's combined horror, tear's began to roll silently down Todoroki Shouto's face.

"Hey- wait-" Kirishima whispered, eyes widening "Don't cry Shouto- please-"

Sero took two big staggering steps to the wall and leaned against it before he could fall over again. His head felt light. Color kept washing in and out of the world. He felt decidedly pukey.

Then Deku's arm was around him, strong and comforting.

"How b-b-bad ih-ih-is it, S-struh-string bean?" He asked him softly.

Sero forced himself to look down at his stomach. He found performing two simple actions- bending his neck and spreading apart the slit in his sweater- took more courage than he had needed to enter the house in the first place. He expected to see half his insides hanging down in front of him like grotesque udders. Instead he saw that the flow of blood had slowed to a sluggish trickle. The Werewolf had slashed him long and deep, but apparently not mortally.

Bakugo eventually did end up joining them. He looked at the cut which ran a twisting course down Sero's chest down to his left hip bone, then soberly into Sero's face. "Fuck. Damn thing nearly ripped your guts out, Skelly."

"No shit, trashmouth," Sero said, smiling weakly.

He and Bakugo stared at each other for a long, considering moment, and then they broke into hysterical giggles at the same instant, spraying each other with spittle. Bakugo punched Sero's arm harshly, but not unkindly. "We beat that fucker, Hanta! We beat It!"

"W-W-We dih-dih-dih-didn't beat It," Deku said grimly. "We got l-l-lucky. Let's g-get out b-b-before Ih-Ih-It d-d-decides to come buh-back."

"Where?" Kaminari asked.

"The Buh-Buh-Barrens," Deku said.

Todoroki made his way over to them, still silently crying, his de-buttoned shirt swaying lazily as he walked. "The clubhouse?"

Deku nodded.

"Your shirt." Iida mumbled quietly, cleaning his crooked glasses- a nervous tick he'd developed over the course of that summer. "it's ruined."

"It is." Todoroki said, tossing the end up in the air uselessly, "My dad's going to kill me if I come home like this."

Deku glanced up at Todoroki, and the blood came into his own face, all in a rush. He turned his eyes away hastily. Kaminari saw this from the corner of his eye, and felt a flower of knowledge bloom with a touch dismal momentary jealousy in his mind. In that instant, that one bare second, Deku had become aware of Todoroki in a way that only Kaminari had before.

Bakugo snorted a little, and made some smartass comment about Todoroki popping the buttons off on purpose. Kirishima elbowed him with his good arm.

"I think it looks good," Sero joked tiredly, finding the feeling of sticky blood clinging to his skin familiar, his new normal. "Makes you look like a warrior."

Todoroki threw his head up, shaking his tangled hair in a peppermint storm. He was blushing now, seemingly having noticed Deku's reaction, but his face was lovely. "Thank you, Hanta."

"Huh-here," Deku said. He pulled the T-shirt portion of his layered top over his head, mussing up his sticky hair even more. The dark-colored three-quartered sleeve shirt underneath's neck was wider, exposing his lightly freckled collar bone. "S-so your duh-dad doesn't geh-geh-get mad."

"Thank you, Deku," Todoroki said, and for one hot, smoking moment their eyes locked directly. Deku did not look away this time. His gaze was firm, adult.

"W-W-W-Welcome," he said.

'Good luck, Deku,' Kaminari thought solemnly, and he turned away from that gaze. It was hurting him, hurting him in a deeper place than any Vampire or Werewolf would ever be able to reach. But all the same, there was such a thing as propriety. The word he didn't know; on the concept he was very clear. Looking at them when they were looking at each other that way would be as wrong as spying on the girl's locker room. 'If that's the way it is... If you're who he chooses... I guess I can accept that.' And he could. But it didn't make it hurt any less.

Deku's dark green t-shirt was a little to short for Todoroki's torso, exposing a sliver of his mid-drift whenever he took a step, but it would get him home.

"L-L-Let's guh-guh-go," Deku repeated. "I duh-don't nun-know about you g-guys, but I've h-h-had ee-ee-enough for wuh-wuh-one d-day."

Turned out they all had.

—11—

An hour later and they were in the clubhouse, both the window and the trapdoor open. It was cool inside, and the Barrens were blessedly silent that day. They sat without talking much, each lost in his own thoughts. Todoroki and Sero passed a Marlboro back and forth. Kirishima took a brief snort from his aspirator. Kaminari fiddled with the pliers in his pocket.

"You look like a kicked puppy, blondie." Bakugo said, and that was all.

Sero kept expecting the mad interlude in the house on Neibolt Street to take on the hues of a dream. 'It'll recede and fall apart,' he thought, 'the way that bad dreams do. You wake up gasping and sweating all over, but fifteen minutes later you can't remember what the dream was even about.'

But that didn't happen.

Everything that had happened, from the time he had forced his way in through the cellar window to the moment Bakugo had used the chair in the kitchen to break a window so they could get out, remained bright and clearly fixed in his memory. It had not been a dream. The clotted wound on his chest and belly was not a dream, and it didn't matter if an adult could see it or not.

At last Todoroki stood up. "I have to go home," he said. "I want to change before my siblings gets home. If they see me wearing someone else's shirt, they'll ask me a load of questions I don't have the energy to answer right now."

Deku was looking at Todoroki gravely.

"I'll return your shirt, Deku."

He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn't important.

"Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it?"

"N-No. I-I'll just suh-say I got huh-huh-hot and left it in thuh-thuh Barren's. Th-they won't be huh-happy but they wuh-won't do anything more than t-tell me to be m-more careful nuh-next time."

Todoroki nodded, bit his underlip, a boy of eleven who was tall for his age and simply beautiful.

"What happens next, Deku?"

"I d-d-don't nuh-nuh-know."

"It's not over, is it?" Todoroki sighed.

Deku shook his head.

Sero said, "It'll want us more than ever now."

"More silver slugs?" Todoroki asked him.

"Don't know. Maybe." Sero shrugged.

Todoroki turned to Kaminari then, and the small blonde boy found he could barely stand to meet his glance. 'I love you, Shouto... just let me have that. You can have Deku, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it'll be enough.'

"I saw what you did," Todoroki said softly, and Kaminari nearly groaned- because he could hear it- he could hear the apologetic notes in Todoroki's voice. This was a rejection. It was over. Todoroki Shouto had made his choice. "Thank you, Denki... it was very brave of you..."

"No problem... happy to be of service..." Kaminari trailed off vaguely, shrugged, smiled. He could not say what he felt, wasn't even able to begin forming the words to get his feelings across- that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn't. The Bird had looked different in some ways... ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf- he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, had smelled it rotten breath, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its yellow eyes. These things were... well... they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. Sero's silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn't killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.

'Power...' Kaminari thought, looking at Todoroki. It was okay now; Todoroki's eyes had met Deku's again and they were looking at each other as if lost. It was only for a moment, but to Kaminari it seemed very long.

'It always comes back to power. I love Todoroki Shouto and so he has power over me. He loves Midoriya Izuku and so Deku has power over him. But -I think- Deku is coming to love Roki too... Maybe it was Roki's face, how it looked when he had shook back his hair. Maybe it was the tears Shouto had shed. Maybe just the way Shouto looks sometimes when the light is right, or his blue-grey eyes. Doesn't matter. But if Deku's starting to love him, that mean's Shouto's starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there's Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can't fly or see through walls. Parent's have power over children. Bosses have power over employees. Everyone has some... except maybe for little kids and babies.'

Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.

"Denki?" Sero asked, looking back at him. "You alright? You look like you're about to cry."

"Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs."

Deku and Sero were looking at him closely.

"I was wondering where that power came from," Kaminari said at last.

"Ih-Ih-It-" Deku began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful, vague expression drifted over his face.

"I really have to go," Todoroki said. "I'll see you all, huh?"

"Sure, we'll see you tomorrow, Shouto." Iida smiled, waving.

"Yeah," Kaminari whispered, trying his best to smile, to put back on that familiar jokey tone of his. "We're going to break Ejirou's other arm."

They all laughed. Kirishima pretended to throw his aspirator at him.

"Bye, then," Todoroki said, and boosted himself up and out.

Kaminari looked at Deku and saw that he hadn't joined in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Kaminari knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Deku was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on long horror movie binge at Bakugo Katsuki's house. His mother would announce to him that one of their horses were expecting. There would be time to eat as many Manju bun's and slices of pie and ice cream bar's as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch playing catch with Sero. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his best friend's chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on because at eleven he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.

...But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them: The power of the silver, the power of the slugs- where does power like that come from? Where does any power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?

It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question, perhaps the only question. It had some real shape; Sero had nearly seen it. He'd told him so on one of those rainy afternoons while playing catch on the porch. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn't it true that power, like It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Todoroki Shouto looked at Midoriya Izuku and the way Midoriya Izuku now looked back.

'What, exactly, was power anyway?'

—12—

Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.