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)

31. In the Watches of the Night

—1—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / CHARGEBOLT: AUTO BODY & REPAIR / 1:15 A.M.

When Sero Hanta finished the story of the silver slugs, they wanted to talk some more, but Kaminari told them he wanted them all to get some sleep. "You've had enough for now," he said, but Kaminari was the one who looked as if he had had enough; his eyes were tired and his face was pale. Todoroki thought he looked physically ill.

"But we're not done," Kirishima protested softly, sliding the stained shop towel off his broad shoulders. His hair had finished reverting back to black. "What about the rest of it? I still don't remember-"

"-Denki's r-right," Deku interrupted tiredly. "Either we'll remember or we w-won't. I think we w-will. We've remembered all that we nuh-need to."

"Right," Bakugo said. "We've been re-motivated, we have an idea on how to kill the fucker, we don't need the rest."

Kaminari nodded, smiling. He had a bottle of caffeine pills in one hand and a Red Bull in the other. "We'll meet tomorrow." Then he glanced at the clock. "Later today, I mean."

"Here?" Todoroki asked.

Kaminari shook his head slowly, cracking open a few caffeine capsules and pouring the powder into his Red Bull can. "...I suggest we meet under the bridge. Where Deku used to hide his bike."

"We're going down into the Barrens," Kirishima said, and suddenly shivered.

Kaminari nodded, knocking back his drink.

There was a moment of quiet while they looked around at each other. Then Deku got to his feet, and the others rose with him.

"You guys need to be careful," Kaminari said. "It's been here; It can be wherever you are. But this meeting has made me feel better." He looked at Deku, grinned, just like old times. "We can do this. I know we can. I believe in us. Don't you, Deku?"

Deku nodded slowly. "...Yes. I think it can still be done."

"It'll know that, too, I guess." Kaminari sighed, "It knows everything else... It'll do whatever It can to fuck us over."

"What do we do if It shows up?Hold our noses, shut our eyes, turn around three times, and think good thoughts? Puff some goddamn magic dust in Its face? Sing "Endless Rain"? What the hell do we do?" Bakugo asked crossly.

Kaminari shrugged uselessly and shook his head. "If I could tell you that, there wouldn't be a problem, would there? All I know is that there's another force- at least there was when we were kids- that wanted us to stay alive and to do the job. Maybe it's still there." He took another swig of his drink, and shivered at the instant rush. "I thought two, maybe three of you would be gone by the time we started our meeting tonight. Missing or dead. Just seeing you turn up gave me reason to hope."

Bakugo sighed, and looked down at his watch. "Fuck me, it's already a quarter past one."

"Beep-beep, Katsuki," Sero said, and smiled wanly.

"So what? I can't even say fuck anymore?"

"'No."

"Fuck you, Skelly."

"Beep-Beep." Sero repeated.

"You-"

"-You want to walk back to the Shajima with me, Katsuki?" Kirishima interrupted.

Bakugo paused, narrowed his eyes at Kirishima Ejirou for a moment, as if trying to read his mind. Finally, he said: "...alright."

Todoroki was putting on his coat, Deku was watching him from the corner of his eye. The garage seemed very silent now, shadowy, frightening. Deku felt the last two days catching up with him all at once, piling up on his back. If it had just been weariness, that would have been okay, but it was more: a feeling that he was cracking up, dreaming, having delusions of paranoia. A sensation of being watched. 'Maybe I'm really not here at all,' he thought. 'Maybe I had some sort of nervous breakdown, and Ochako checked me into The Meguro Counseling Center right across the hall from Toga Himiko. Her with her flies and me with my monsters, both of us sure the party is really going on and dressed to the nines for it, not in tuxedos or ballroom gowns, but in strait-waistcoats.'

"Deku?" Todoroki called quietly.

"Hm?" Deku blinked, yanked out of his downward spiral. "I'm sorry- what did you ask me?"

Todoroki frowned, concerned. "Hanta and I are going to stop by a convenience store he saw on main... for cigarettes... do you want to come?"

"Sure," Deku said, and then nodded. "Yuh-Yeah, sure... sounds g-good. I'm thirsty- I'll get a drink."

"Great." Sero smiled, and then turned towards Kaminari, pulling him into a tight side hug. "You wanna come too?"

"Ive gotta close up shop."Kaminari sighed, shrugging apologetically, smiling bashfully. He glanced briefly at Todoroki, who was standing close to Deku, and felt a pain which had dulled over the years slam into him with the force of a semi truck. A memory trembled, one of the few he'd lost from that early August of 2005, then floated away. "I'll see you guys tomorrow- er... later today-"

That was when Todoroki yelled, an airy, hurt sound in the stillness. The high, concrete, ceilings overhead picked it up, and the echoes were like the laughter of banshees, flying and flapping around them.

Deku turned toward him; Bakugo dropped his leather jacket as he was taking it off the back of his chair; there was a crash of glass as Kirishima's arm swept an empty beer bottle onto the floor.

Todoroki was backing away from them, his hands held out, his face as white as good bond paper. His eyes, deep in dusky-purple sockets, bulged. The unrealized breakdown from the reunion lunch finally bubbling over. "My hands!" Todoroki gasped. "My hands!"

"What-" Deku began, and then he saw the blood dripping slowly between Todoroki's shaking fingers. He started forward and felt sudden lines of painful warmth cross his own hands. The pain was not sharp; it was more like the pain one sometimes feels in an old healed wound.

The old scars on his palms, the ones which had reappeared in Tokyo, had broken open and were bleeding. He looked sideways and saw ebony-haired Kirishima Ejirou peering stupidly down at his own hands. They were also bleeding. So were Kaminari's. And Bakugo's. And Sero's.

"We're in it to the end, aren't we?" Todoroki whispered, looking around at them. He wasn't crying, but he was close- they could all hear it in Todoroki's voice, and it made their own fright that much greater. The sound of Todoroki's brokenness was also magnified in the garage's still emptiness; the building itself seemed to be weeping for him. Deku thought that if he had to listen to that sound for long, he would go mad. "God fucking help us, we're in it to the end." Todoroki whispered insanely, and a lone tear escaped from his ducks and trailed down the burn scar on the left side of his face. Todoroki wiped it off with the back of one shaking hand, and more blood dripped on the floor. "Blood... Why is it always blood?... I'm so sick and tired of blood..."

"Quh-Quh-hick!" Deku said, and seized Kirishima's hand.

"What-"

"Quick!"

He held out his other hand, and after a moment Todoroki took it. His mismatched eyes were still teetering towards the brink.

"Yes," Kaminari nodded, nodded so hard that his whole body moved. He looked dazed-almost drugged, his sunshine eyes to bright. "Yes, that's right, isn't it? It's starting again, isn't it, Deku? It's all starting to happen again."

"Y-Y-Yes, I th-think-"

Kaminari took Kirishima's other hand and Bakugo took Todoroki's. For a moment Sero only looked at them, and then, like a man in a dream, he raised his bloody hands to either side and stepped between Kaminari and Bakugo. He grasped their hands. The circle closed.

('Ah... Chüd... this is the Ritual of Chüd and the Turtle cannot help us')

Deku tried to scream but no sound came out. He saw Kirishima's head tilt back, the cords on his neck standing out. Todoroki's hips bucked twice, fiercely, as if in an orgasm as short and sharp as the crack of a .22 pistol. Kaminari's mouth moved strangely, seeming to laugh and grimace at the same time. Bakugo Katsuki's eye's rolled so far back Deku could only see the whites of his eyes. Sero Hanta's nose began to gush blood.

In the silence of Kaminari Denki's mechanic shop, doors banged open and shut, the sound rolling like bowling balls. In his office, paper forms flew in a windless hurricane. The skylights and windows on the three white garage doors shattered into millions of pieces and rained down on them from above. The overhead speakers began to scream music at them. In Kaminari Denki's office, his Toshiba desktop whirred to life and began to type:

hethrusts

hisfistsagainst

thepostsandstillinsistshesees

theghostshethrustshisfistsagainstthe

The keyboard jammed. The tower sizzled and uttered a thick electronic belch as everything inside overloaded. The shelf holding Kaminari's copies of Deku's manga crashed to the ground, taking the jacket designed by Todoroki down with it. On the other side of the garage, the Nissan Kaminari had lowered to the ground when he and Deku had first arrived began to blare its alarms. It's airbags blew, it's trunk and hood popped, it's emergency lights flashed.

Deku felt an exalting sense of power. He was dimly aware of the fact that the skin on his palms felt as if it were melting off, and that every hair on his body was standing up straight. The sense of force in the completed circle was incredible.

All the doors in Kaminari's workshop slammed shut in unison.

The grandfather clock behind Kaminari's desk chimed once.

Then it was gone, as if someone had flicked off a switch.

They dropped their hands, looking at each other, dazed, standing in shattered glass that glittered like freshly fallen snow. No one said anything. As the sense of power ebbed, Deku felt a terrible sense of doom creep over him. He looked at their pale, strained faces, and then down at his hands. Blood was smeared there, but the wounds which Iida Tenya had made with a jagged piece of Coke bottle in August of 2005 had closed up again, leaving only crooked white lines like knotted twine. He thought: 'That was the last time the seven of us were together... the day Tenya made those cuts in the Barrens. Tenya's not here; he's dead. And this is the last time the six of us are going to be together. I know it, I feel it.'

Todoroki was pressed against him, trembling. Deku put an arm around him. They all looked at him, their eyes huge and bright in the dimness, the poker tables where they had sat, littered with empty bottles, glasses, and overflowing ashtrays, a little island of light.

"That's enough," Deku said huskily. "Enough entertainment for one evening. W-We'll regroup in the morning."

"I remembered," Todoroki whispered, his tone was even again, dull. He looked up at Deku, his blue-grey eyes huge, his pale cheeks wet. "I remembered everything. My father finding out about you guys. Running. Tomura and Kurogiri and Twice. How I ran. The tunnel... the birds... It... I remember everything."

"Yeah," Bakugo said, rubbing his eyes, they had begun to burn again. "I do, too."

Kirishima nodded. "The pumping-station-"

Deku said, "Ejirou, you-"

"-Go back now," Kaminari said softly. "Get some rest. It's late."

"Walk with us, Denki," Todoroki insisted. "Please."

"No. I have to lock up. And I have to write a few things down... I won't be long. Go ahead."

"Lock up?" Bakugo said, looking at him incredulously. "Your fucking windows shattered- what does it matter if you lock the door or not?"

"I have to." Kaminari breathed, and when he turned to them, Deku felt a horrible chill rip through his body.

For the first time since Midoriya Izuku had known Kaminari Denki, there was no spark of humor in his eyes. Only a grave, horrified, seriousness.

"I have to... You... you've got to let me lock up..."

"O-okay." Deku whispered, nodding a little, tugging at Todoroki and Sero's sleeves. "Alright... let's go... luh-let him luh-luh-lock up..."

They moved toward the door, not talking much. Bakugo and Kirishima were together, Deku, Todoroki, and Sero behind them. Kirishima held the door for Bakugo, who murmured a half-hearted "I could of done that myself, shitty hair..." while shooting one last glance back at Kaminari and walking out onto the dirt path.

Deku felt Todoroki grip his bicep, and turned to him. His eyes reflected his own worry for Kaminari back at him. Todoroki paused, let go of Deku's arm for just a moment, and turned back towards the shop- he parted his lips to say something, hesitated, turned back around, and grabbed Deku's arm once more... his eye's now shiny with grief. Deku thought about how young Todoroki looked, how vulnerable... He was dismally, horribly, guiltily, aware that he might be falling in love with him again. He tried to think of Ochako but she seemed far away. She would be sleeping safely in their house in Tokyo now as the stars winked overhead.

Irusu's sky had clouded over again, and a low groundfog lay across the empty street in thick runners. Earlier up the street, a gas station's yellow light's called out to them, and Sero suggested they stopped for cigarettes there instead. Deku and Todoroki agreed, and the trio made their way up the road.

"It started before we were ready," Sero yawned, he was wiping the drying blood from his face.

"Would we eh-eh-ever have been r-ready?"

"You would have been." Sero shrugged simply, Todoroki nodded in silent agreement.

The pressure of Todoroki's body against his, the feeling of his arm hugging his arm, made Deku feel calm... grounded... guilty. He thought miserably: 'I loved you, Shouto... I love you. Denki loved you... he loves you. We loved you then... we love you now. We better, because it's starting. No way out now.'

He glanced behind and saw Chargebolt: Auto body & repair half a block away. Bakugo and Kirishima were talking on the dirt path, bathed in the light from the shattered windows. Kirishima was laughing about something. Kaminari was standing at the top of the steps that lead inside, watching as he, Todoroki, and Sero retreated down the road. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders were slumped, and seen through the drifting lens of the low fog, he might almost have been eleven again. If he had been able to send Kaminari a thought, Deku would have sent this one: 'It doesn't matter, Denki. The love is what matters, the caring... it's always the desire, never the time. Maybe that's all we get to take with us when we go out of the blue and into the black. Cold comfort, maybe, but better than no comfort at all.'

"My father knew," Todoroki said suddenly, startling him and Sero. "I came home one day from the Barrens and he just knew. Did I ever tell you what he used to say to me when he was mad?"

"What?"

"I worry about you, Shouto." That's what he used to say. "I worry a lot." He shook his head and shivered at the same time. "I think he meant to hurt me... I mean... he'd hurt me before, but that last time was different. He was... well, in many ways he was a strange man. I-" he trailed off.

Sero smiled at him softly, sadly, knowingly, and patted Todoroki's shoulder gently. Todoroki grabbed Sero's hand, squeezed it, didn't let it go. Sero didn't seem to mind.

'Sometimes I wonder if Hanta's the real competition,' Deku thought amusedly, laughing a little to himself. Sero and Todoroki looked up at him questioningly, but Deku only shook his head.

"...I wanted to love him." Todoroki said eventually. "My father, I mean... I wanted to love him so desperately... but I... I fucking hated him." His left hand bore down on Sero's right in a death grip, his arm tightened around Deku's own. "I-I hated him... so, so much..." he paused again, and smiled exasperatedly: "I never said that out loud before... I don't know why... I always felt like something bad would happen if I did... that he'd know I said it..."

"So say it again then." Deku smiled, they were in the gas station parking lot now, bathed in light, Todoroki's hair sparkled.

"No, I-"

"Aw, c'mon," Sero grinned, nudging him lightly. "I hated my mom. You hated your dad. I'm sure Kiri hated his mom too somewhere deep down- so say it."

"I hated my dad," Todoroki said, and suddenly began to get so angry both Deku and Sero flinched back. "I hated him! I was scared of him, I hated him, I could never be a good enough to suit him and I hated him, I did. I wanted to love him, but I didn't- I couldn't."

Deku stopped in front of the door and held him tight. Todoroki's arms went around him in a panicky grip. His anger flushed face burning against his neck. Sero, his hand freed, watched on for a moment. He felt a deep sorrow for his best friend Kaminari Denki, before disappearing into the warm glow of the gas station in search of peach-flavored cigarettes.

"We'd spent the morning down there," Todoroki said softly, "...playing tag or something like that. Something harmless. We hadn't even talked about It that day, at least not then... we usually talked about It every day, at some point, though. Remember?"

"Yes," Deku said. "At some p-p-point. I remember."

"It was overcast... hot. We played most of the morning. I went home around eleven-thirty. I thought I'd have a sandwich and a bowl of soup after I took a shower. And then I'd go back and play some more. My dad was supposed to be working, Natsuo was supposed to be at baseball practice... But my dad was there. He was home. He-

—2—

AUGUST 14th, 2005 / LOWER MAIN STREET / 11:30 A.M.

-threw Todoroki across the room before he had even gotten all the way through the door. A startled scream was jerked out of him and then cut off as he hit the wall with shoulder-numbing force. Todoroki collapsed onto their sagging sofa, looking around wildly. The door to the outside world banged shut. His father had been standing behind it.

"I worry about you, Shouto," Todoroki Enji said. "sometimes I worry a lot. You know that. I tell you that, don't I? You bet I do."

"...what-"

Enji was walking slowly toward him across the living room, his face thoughtful, sad, deadly. Todoroki didn't want to see that last one, but it was there, like the blind shine of dirt on still water. He was nibbling reflectively on a knuckle of his right hand. He was dressed in his guard uniform, and when Todoroki glanced down he saw that his regulation boots were leaving tracks on the carpet. 'I'll have to get the vacuum out,' he thought incoherently.
'Vacuum that up. If he leaves me able to vacuum. If he-'

-It was mud. Black mud. His mind sideslipped alarmingly. He was back in the Barrens with Deku, Kaminari, Sero, and the others. There was black, viscous mud like the kind on his father's shoes down there in the Barrens, in the swampy place where the stuff Bakugo Katsuki called bamboo stood in a skeletal white grove. When the wind blew the stalks rattled together hollowly, producing a sound like voodoo drums, and had his father been down in the Barrens? Had his father-

WHAP!

Todoroki Enji's hand rocketed down in a wide sweeping orbit and struck his face. Todoroki's head thudded back against the wall. Enji hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at him with that expression of deadly disconnected curiosity. Todoroki felt a trickle of blood running warmly from the left corner of his lower lip.

"You're growing up."
Enji said, and Todoroki thought he would say something more, but for the time being that seemed to be all.

"...What are you talking about?" Todoroki asked in a low voice.

"If you lie to me, I'll beat you within an inch of your life, Shouto," Enji said, and Todoroki realized with horror that he wasn't looking at him; he was looking at the picture over his head, on the wall above the sofa. Todoroki's mind sideslipped crazily again and he was four, sitting on pool steps with a blue plastic boat in his hand, the left side of his face smooth and unscathed. Natsuo and Touya were dunking one another under the water in the deep end, Fuyumi had her feet in the water and a book in her hands. Their mother was sunbathing in a lounge chair on one side of the patio, large sunglasses both shielding her eyes from the suns harmful rays and concealing the shiner their father had given her the night before. His father was standing on the step behind him, arms crossed over his chest.

"Put the boat down."

Four year old Todoroki looked up at his father timidly, confused. From the other side of the patio, Rei sat up.

"Huh?"

"Put the boat down."

He did.

"Stand up."

He did.

"Follow me." His father said, and began to walk towards the deep end of the pool. Todoroki followed him obediently. Natsuo and Touya had stopped dunking one another, Fuyumi put down her book.

Todoroki stood beside his father at the lip of the pool. The deep end was eight feet deep, the pool belonged to his aunt. Todoroki Enji put a hand on his youngest son's bare shoulder. Rei stood up.

"I have expectations, Shouto..." his father said, looking at the concrete instead of at his son. "Expectations none of your siblings have met."

Todoroki, being only four-years old at the time, had no idea what he was talking about. He blinked up at his father curiously.

"I want to see if you can meet them... do you think you can?"

"I dunno." Todoroki said simply.

"Let's see." Enji said, and shoved him into the pool.

When Todoroki had felt himself begin to fall, he had hitched in a breath to scream. Water forced itself down his airways, choking him, drowning him. He sobbed, completely disoriented, chlorine stinging his eyes. He couldn't swim, but even if he could, he couldn't tell which way was up and which way was down- so he struggled, flailing and kicking his limbs- desperate to break through the water's surface.

Finally, he did- but it was brief. He could hear screaming, and was just able to catch a glimpse of his mother hitting the concrete from his father's heavy backhand before he slipped back under again.

Todoroki's limbs ached and screamed, his lungs burned, his eyes stung. He was pretty sure he was crying. He broke the surface again, his mother's elbows and right leg were bloody and scraped, she was sobbing, screaming at Enji to help him- but he tuned her out, eye's trained on the pool.

Todoroki slipped back under again, but this time, he had the thought to use his legs to propel himself forward. He kicked, kicked, kicked, and to his relief he found the he was moving forward- he used his arms to gain momentum, and suddenly he was at the pools edge. He shot a small, shaky, hand out towards the ledge and scrambled for purchase.

Finally, mercifully, Natsuo's water-pruned hands clamped around his wrist and he yanked him up and out of the water. Todoroki flopped like a dead fish over the ledge and hacked the water out of his lungs- eventually throwing up the sandwich he'd eaten for lunch. Fuyumi, sobbing, rubbed his back soothingly.

Natsuo was yelling obscenities at their father, Touya was glowering angrily at the ground as he stood protectively in front of their mother- but Enji was smiling- grinning, really... he walked towards him, Fuyumi tensed, and moved so she was in front of him.

"Good boy." Enji said, and ruffled Todoroki's hair. Their eyes never met. A deep fear shot it's way through Todoroki's chest.

A few minutes later, Enji walked off, and his mother, still crying, scooped Todoroki up in her arms.

"I won't lie," Todoroki said, breaking out of his thoughts. "What's wrong?"

"I have expectations for you, Shouto." Enji said, his tone low and dangerous, "expectations your siblings haven't met."

"I know."

"Expectations are fragile... easily shattered... which is why I shelter you so much."

"I know." Todoroki nodded, thinking about all the treats, movies, music, and all manner of other normal childhood things he'd missed out on.

"Have you been down in the Barrens with a group of other boy's, Shouto?"

Todoroki's heart leaped; his eyes dropped to his father's mud-caked boots again. That black, clingy mud. If you stepped into it too deep it would suck your sneaker or your loafer right off... and both Bakugo and Deku believed that, if you went in all the way, it turned to quickmud.

"I play down there somet-"

WHAP! the hand, covered with hard calluses, rocketing down again. Todoroki cried out in pain, afraid. That look on his father's face scared him, and the way his father wouldn't look at him scared him, too. There was something wrong with him. He had been getting worse... What if he meant to kill him? What if-

('oh, stop it Shouto, he's your FATHER and FATHERS don't kill their KIDS)

'-he lost control, then? What if-'

"What have you been doing down there with them?"

"Just- just playing with them..." he whispered.

"I know one of the boy's you play with is the fag... you aren't one too, are you? You aren't sick? Because that'd certainly shatter my expectations, Shouto..."

Todoroki felt sick, really sick- his head swam, he felt like he was about to faint. "N-No-"

Enji's hand came down, not slapping this time but clutching. It bit into Todoroki's shoulder with furious strength. He screamed. His father pulled him up, and for the first time looked directly into his eyes. Todoroki screamed again at what he saw there. It was... nothing. His father was gone. And Todoroki suddenly understood that he was alone in the apartment with It, alone with It on this dozey August morning. There was not the thick sense of power and untinctured evil he had felt in the house on Neibolt Street a week and a half ago- It had been diluted somehow by his father's essential humanity-but It was here, working through him.

Todoroki Enji threw him aside. He struck the coffee table, tripped over it, and went sprawling on the floor with a cry. 'This is how it happens,' Todoroki thought. 'I'll tell Deku so he understands. It's everywhere in Irusu. It just... It just fills the hollow places, that's all.'

He rolled over. His father was walking toward him. Todoroki skidded away from him on the seat of his jeans, his multi-colored fringe in his multicolored eyes.

"I know you are one! And I know you've been down there," Enji said. "I was told. I didn't believe it. I didn't believe my masterpiece would ruin my expectations like this... Then I saw you myself this morning. My masterpiece with a bunch of boys- two of them were holding hands! One of them was the Kaminari boy! And I saw the way you were looking at one of them, Shouto! I saw! Not even twelve years old and you're looking at someone like that! Not even twelve!" This latter thought seemed to send him into a fresh rage; it trembled through his hulking frame like bolts. "Not even twelve years old!" he shouted, and fetched a kick at Todoroki's thigh that made him scream. Enji's jaws snapped over this fact or concept or whatever it was to him like the jaws of a hungry dog worrying a piece of meat. "Not even twelve! Not even twelve! Not even TWELVE!"

He kicked. Todoroki scrambled away. They had worked their way into the kitchen area of the apartment now. His workboot struck the drawer under the stove, making the pots and pans inside jangle.

"Don't you run from me, Shouto," he said. "You don't want to do that or it'll be the worse for you. Believe me, now. Believe your dad. This is serious. Hanging around with those types of boys, letting them do God knows what to you- not even twelve- that's serious." He grabbed Todoroki and jerked him to his feet by his shoulder.

"You're handsome," Enji said. "There's plenty of women out there who'd kill to be with a guy who looks like you. Plenty of pretty women- and you go and choose to let boy's soil you? You choose to act no better than a filthy whore?"

At last Todoroki understood what It had put in his father's head... except part of him knew the thought might almost have been there all along; that It might only have used the tools that had been there just lying around, waiting to be picked up.

"No. No, I haven't, I promise-"

"I saw you smoking!" he bellowed. This time he struck Todoroki with the palm of his hand, hard enough to send him reeling back in drunken strides to the kitchen table where he sprawled, a flare of agony in the small of his back. The salt and pepper shakers fell to the floor. The pepper shaker broke. Black flowers bloomed and disappeared before his eyes. Sounds seemed too deep. Todoroki saw his father's face. Something in his face that terrified him.

Now Todoroki felt guilt mix with his terror. Was his father so wrong? Hadn't he had-

(Bad)

-thoughts? Wrong thoughts? Weren't boy's supposed to date girls and girls supposed to date boys? Wasn't that why everyone tormented poor Kaminari so much? Wasn't that why Bakugo and Kirishima only acknowledge their relationship in the safety of the Barrens?

Until now, he had never seen it as wrong... he had assumed everyone else that was stupid and wrong... he'd even told Kaminari Denki that that day in December...

"Shouto?"

"We just play, that's all. We play... We... we don't do anything like... anything bad. We-"

"I've seen you smoking," Enji said again, walking toward him. "Only a certain type of people smoke, Shouto."

"I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!" Todoroki screamed at him as his father's hands descended on his shoulders. He was not pinching or hurting now. His hands were gentle. And that was somehow scariest of all.

"Shouto," he said with the inarguable, mad logic of the totally obsessed, "I saw you smoking... I saw you with that type... what am I supposed to conclude from that, hm?"

"Leave me alone!" Todoroki yelled at him. The anger flashed up from a deep well. The anger made a bluish-yellow flame in his head. It threatened his thoughts. All the times his father had scared him; all the times he had shamed him; all the times he had hurt him. "Just leave me alone!"

"Don't talk to your father like that," Enji said, sounding startled.

"I didn't do what you're saying! I never did!"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn't matter... The implications are to strong... it's not just me, you see... if other's found out, they'd talk... they'd talk about the implications of you hanging around that type... they'd talk about the implications of you smoking..."

"Shut up."

Enji's eyes widened, showing yellowed cornea all the way around the deep blue irises. "What did you say?"

"I said shut up." Todoroki's eyes were fixed on Enji's and perhaps his father saw the blazing anger there, the bright upsurge of rebellion. "Now, who told you?"

"Shouto-"

"Who told you we play down there? Was it a stranger? Was it a man dressed in orange and silver? Did he wear gloves? Did he look like a clown even if he wasn't a clown? What was his name?"

"Shouto, you want to stop-"

"No: you want to stop," Todoroki told him calmly.

Enji swung his hand again, not open but this time closed in a fist meant to break something. Todoroki ducked. His father's fist whistled over his head and crashed into the wall. He howled and let go of him, putting the fist to his mouth. Todoroki backed away from him in quick mincing steps.

"You come back here!"

"No," Todoroki said. "You want to hurt me. You can't do it anymore. It's making you do it, but you let It in."

"I don't know what you're talking about," his father said, "but you better get over here. I am not going to asking you again."

"No," Todoroki said.

"Don't make me come over there and collect you, Shouto. You're going to be one sorry little boy if I have to do that. Come to me."

"Tell me who told you," Todoroki said, "and I will."

His father leaped at him with such catlike agility that, although Todoroki suspected such a leap was coming, he was almost caught. Todoroki fumbled for the doorknob, pulled the door open just wide enough so he could slip though, and then he was running down the steps toward the street, running in a dream of panic, as he would run from Mrs. Tokunaga fifteen years later. Behind him, Todoroki Enji crashed against the door, slamming it shut again, cracking it down the center.

"YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW SHOUTO!" he howled, yanking it open and coming after him.

He ran down the gravel drive way, nearly tripping over his own feet, barely catching himself in time. Behind, his father howled again; the sound of an-

(You choose to act no better than a filthy whore?)

-animal. Todoroki looked over his shoulder and saw his father right behind him, reaching for him, grinning and grimacing, his blue eyes empty.

Todoroki bolted out into the street and felt his father's fingers skid down the back of his brother's letterman jacket without catching hold. He flew down the road, and this time did go sprawling on the asphalt, erasing the skin from both knees.

"YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW SHOUTO, AND MAYBE YOU'LL BE ABLE TO GO OUTSIDE IN TWO DAYS INSTEAD OF TWO WEEKS!"

His father came down street after him and Todoroki scrambled to his feet, holes in the legs of his jeans-

(Filthy whore)

-his kneecaps sizzling blood, exposed nerve-endings singing. He looked back and here his father came again, Todoroki Enji, guard of the crazies at Juniper Hill... But he wasn't in his eyes- the essential he who had pushed Todoroki Shouto into that pool and punched him in the gut and had done both because he had expectations and he worried about him, worried a lot... None of that was in his eyes now. Todoroki saw blank murder there. He saw It there.

So he ran. He ran from It.

Sato Rikido, with a bag full of groceries for his mother, looked up, badly startled. Thirteen year-old Togata Mirio and Amajiki Tamaki stood back from Togata's father's car, which they had been washing in exchange for 1500¥ each. Amajiki was holding a hose, Togata a bucket of soapsuds. Both were wide-eyed. Shoji Mezo looked out of his second-floor bedroom window. Hashimoto Michi, four-years old and playing with his trucks on the sidewalk, burst into tears as Todoroki, who had spent a patient morning that summer showing him how to tie his sneakers so they would stay tied, flashed by him, stumbling and bleeding. A moment later Todoroki's father passed, hollering at him, and Tetsutetsu, who would inherit his family's business, marry his first love, and move out of Irusu for good after It murdered his son fifteen years later, saw something terrible and inhuman in Todoroki Enji's face. He had nightmares for three weeks after. In them he saw Todoroki Enji turning into a spider and ripping off his face and gouging out his eyes.

Todoroki ran. He was perfectly aware that he might be running for his life. If his father caught him now, it wouldn't matter that they were on the street. People did crazy things in Irusu sometimes; he didn't have to read the newspapers or know the town's peculiar history to understand that. If his father caught him he would choke him, or beat him, or kick him. And when it was over, someone would come and collect his father and he would sit in a cell the way Jirou Kyoka's stepfather was sitting in a cell, dazed and uncomprehending.

Todoroki ran toward downtown, passing more and more people as he went. They stared-first at him, then at his pursuing father- and they looked surprised, some of them even amazed. But what was on their faces went no further. They looked and then they went on toward wherever they had been going. The air circulating in his lungs was growing heavier now.

Todoroki crossed the Canal, feet pounding on cement while cars rumbled over the heavy wooden slats of the bridge to his right. To his left he could see the stone semicircle where the Canal went under the downtown area. He cut suddenly across Main Street and onto Ori Road, oblivious of the honking horns and squealing brakes. He went right because the Barrens lay in that direction. It was still almost a mile away, and if he was to get there he would somehow have to outdistance his father on the gruelling slope of Up-Mile Hill (or one of the even steeper side-streets). But that was all there was.

"COME BACK HERE SHOUTO, IM WARNING YOU!"

As Todoroki gained the sidewalk on the far side of the street he snatched another glance behind him, the heavy weight of his red and white hair shifting as he did. His father was crossing the street, as heedless of the traffic as he himself had been, his face a bright sweaty red.

Todoroki ducked down an alley that ran behind Warehouse Row. This was the rear of the buildings which fronted on Up-Mile Hill: Eagle Beef, Kosher Meats. The alley was narrow and cobbled, made narrower still by the bunches of fuming garbage cans and bins set out here. The cobbles were slimy with God knew what offal and ordure. There was a mixture of smells, some bland, some sharp, some simply titanic... but all spoke of meat and slaughter. Flies buzzed in clouds. From inside some of the buildings he could hear the blood-curdling whine of bone-saws. His feet stuttered unevenly on the slick cobbles. One hip struck a galvanized garbage can and packages of tripe wrapped in newspaper fell out like great meaty jungle blossoms.

"YOU GET RIGHT THE HELL BACK HERE SHOUTO! I MEAN IT NOW! DON'T MAKE IT ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS, BOY!"

Two men lounged in the loading doorway of Eagle Beef, munching thick sandwiches, open dinnerbuckets near at hand. "Get out of here, kid, we aren't gonna throw you any scraps." one of them said mildly. The other began to laugh, which quickly turned into a startled 'ack!' As Todoroki Enji rounded the corner.

His father was gaining. Todoroki could hear his thundering footfalls and heavy respiration almost behind him now; looking to his right he could see the black wing of his father's shadow flying along the high board fence there.

Then his father yelled in surprise and fury as his feet slipped out from under him and he thumped to the cobblestones. He was up a moment later, no longer bellowing words but only shrieking out his incoherent fury while the men in the doorway scrambled inside and slammed the door shut.

The alley zigged to the left... and Todoroki came to a skittering halt, his mouth opening in dismay. A city dump truck was parked across the alley's mouth. There was not even nine inches of clearance on either side. Its motor was idling. Under that sound, barely audible, he could hear the murmur of conversation from the dumpster's cab. More men on lunch-break. It lacked no more than three or four minutes of noon; soon the courthouse clock would begin to chime the hour.

Todoroki could hear his father coming again, closing in. He threw himself down and hooked his way under the truck, using his elbows and wounded knees. The stink of exhaust and diesel fuel mixed with the smell of ripe meat and made him feel a kind of giddy nausea. In a way, the ease of his progress was worse; Todoroki was skidding greasily over a coating of slime and garbagey crud. He kept moving, once rising too high off the cobbles so that his back came in contact with the dump truck's hot exhaust-pipe. He had to bite back a scream.

"Shouto? You under there?" Each word separated from the last by an out-of-breath gasp for air. Todoroki looked back and met his eyes as he bent and peered under the truck.

"Leave... me alone!" Todoroki managed.

"You disobedient little bastard," Enji replied in a thick, spit-choked voice. He threw himself flat, keys jingling, and began to crawl after him, using a grotesque swimming stroke to pull himself along.

Todoroki clawed his way from under the truck's cab, grabbed one of the huge tires- his fingers hooked their way into a tread up to the second knuckle- and yanked himself up. He banged his tail-bone on the dumpster's front bumper and then Todoroki was running again, heading up Up-Mile Hill now, his T-shirt, jacket, and jeans smeared with goop and stinking to high heaven. He looked back and saw his father's hands shoot out from under the dump truck like the claws of some imagined childhood monster from under the bed.

Quickly, hardly thinking at all, Todoroki darted behind Kosher meats. This covert, too narrow to even be called an alley, was filled with broken crates, weeds, sunflowers, and, of course, more garbage. Todoroki dived behind a pile of crates and crouched there. A few moments later he saw his father pound by the mouth of the covert and on up the hill.

Todoroki got up and hurried to the far end of the covert. There was a chainlink fence here. He monkeyed his way to the top, got over, and worked his way down the far side. He scrambled across the street. He was now at the back of Irusu Elementary's campus. Todoroki ran up the manicured back lawn and around the side of the building. Todoroki could hear someone inside playing something classical on an organ. The notes seemed to engrave their pleasant, calm selves on the still air.

There was a tall hedge between the school and Taiko. He peered through it and saw his father on the far side of the street, breathing hard, patches of sweat darkening his work-shirt under the arms. He was peering around, hands on hips. His keyring twinkled brightly in the sun. Pocket full of wrapped coins bulging in his pocket.

Todoroki watched him, also breathing hard, his heart beating rabbit-fast in his throat. He was very thirsty, and his simmering smell disgusted him. 'If Deku were drawing me in one of his manga's,' he thought distractedly, 'there'd be all those wavy stink-lines coming up from me.'

His father crossed slowly to the School side.

Todoroki's breath stopped.

'Please no, I can't run anymore. Don't let him find me.'

Todoroki Enji walked slowly down the sidewalk, directly past where his youngest son crouched on the far side of the hedge.

'Shit- don't let him smell me, either!'

His father didn't- perhaps because, after a tumble in the alleyway and crawling under the dumpster himself, Enji smelled as bad as he did. His father walked on. Todoroki watched him go back down Up-Mile Hill until he was out of sight.

Todoroki picked himself up slowly. His clothes were covered with garbage, his face was dirty, his back hurt where he had burnt it on the exhaust-pipe of the dumpster. These physical things paled before the confused swirl of his thoughts- he felt that he had sailed off the edge of the world, and none of the normal patterns of behavior seemed to apply. Todoroki could not imagine going home; but he could not imagine not going home-

-He had to push that thought away because it made him feel weak and trembly, sick to his stomach.

Suddenly Todoroki went cold as a terrible question occurred to him. Was this happening to the others? Or something like it? He ought to warn them. They had hurt It, and perhaps now It was taking steps to assure Itself they would never hurt It again. And, really, where else was there to go? They were the only friends he had. Deku. Deku would know what to do. Deku would tell him what to do, Deku would supply the what next.

He stopped where the Elementary school's alleyway, the very one he and Sero Hanta had met up in on the last day of school, opened up to Taiko Street and peered around. His father was truly gone. He turned right and began to walk along Taiko toward the Barrens. Probably none of them would be there right now; they would be at home, eating their lunches. But they would be back. In the meantime, he could go down into the cool clubhouse and try to get himself under some kind of control. He would leave the little window wide open so he could have some sunshine, and perhaps he would even be able to sleep. His tired body and overstrained mind grasped eagerly at the thought. Sleep, yes, that would be good.

Todoroki's head drooped as he plodded past the last bunch of houses before the land grew too steep for houses and plunged down into the Barrens- the Barrens where, as incredible as it seemed to him, his father had been lurking and spying.

Todoroki certainly did not hear footfalls behind him. The boys there were at great pains to be quiet. They had been outrun before; they did not intend to be outrun again. They drew closer and closer to him, walking cat-soft. Twice was grinning, Kurogiri smirking, but Shigaraki's face was both vacant and serious. His hair was uncombed and snarly. His eyes were as unfocused as Todoroki Enji's had been in the apartment. He held one dirty finger pressed over his dry lips in a shhh gesture as they closed the distance from seventy feet to fifty to thirty.

Through that summer Shigaraki had been edging steadily out over some mental abyss, walking on a bridge that had grown relentlessly more and more narrow. On the day when he had watched Toga Himiko burn that butterfly alive, that bridge had narrowed to a tightrope. The tightrope had snapped this morning. He had gone out into the yard in his pajama's, and looked up into the sky. The ghost of last night's moon still lingered there, and as he looked at it the moon had suddenly changed into a skeletal grinning face. Shigaraki had fallen on his knees before this face, exalted with terror and joy. Ghost-voices came from the moon. The voices changed, sometimes seemed to merge together in a soft babble that was barely understandable... but he sensed the truth, which was simply that all these voices were one voice, one intelligence. The voice told him to gather up Twice and Kurogiri and be at the elementary school by noon. The voice told him he would know what to do then. Sure enough, the scar-faced cunt had come bopping along. He waited to hear what the voice would tell him to do next. The answer came as they continued to close the distance. The voice came not from the moon, but from the sewer-grating they were passing. The voice was low but clear. Twice and Kurogiri glanced toward the grating in a dazed, almost hypnotized way, then back at Todoroki.

"Kill him," the voice from the sewer said.

Shigaraki Tomura reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlays along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious object. Shigaraki pushed it. A six-inch blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm. He began to walk a little faster. Kurogiri and Twice, still looking dazed, increased their own walking speed to keep up with him.

Todoroki did not hear them, precisely; that was not what made him turn his head as Shigaraki Tomura closed the distance. Bent-kneed, shuffling, a frozen grin on his face, Shigaraki was as quiet as as mouse. No; it was simply a feeling, too clear and direct and powerful to be denied, of-

—3—

MAY 31st, 2020 / CHARGEBOLT: AUTO BODY & REPAIR / 1:55 am

-being watched.

Kaminari Denki set his broom and dustpan aside and looked across the shadowy scope of his workshops garage. He saw islands of light thrown by the hanging fluorescent lights; he saw scattered tools and forms fading into dimness; he saw the speakers hanging from the ceiling. Other than the trash bag of shattered glass, he saw nothing out of place.

All the same, he did not believe he was alone in here. Not anymore.

After the others were gone, Kaminari had cleaned up- something he wasn't particularly fond of doing most days- but he was on autopilot now, his mind a million miles- and fifteen years- away. He dumped ashtrays, threw away the empty liquor bottles, put down the Nissan's trunk and hood, fixed the deployed airbags, turned off the emergency lights. Then he got the broom and swept up the glass.

As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told- concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that Deku and Todoroki almost did. But there was more. It would come to them... if it allowed them the time. In 2005, there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly-their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street- and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August had come, and Shigaraki and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.

'...Maybe I should have told them...' he thought, readjusting the manga on his newly fixed shelving unit. But something spoke strongly against the idea- the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had bought flashlights and miner's helmets; he had the blueprints of the Irusu sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudly pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother's womb? Once you were falling, you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren't you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or the other.

'Shit... I dunno... my job was to get them here... and I did that- for the most part, anyway...'

Kaminari cleaned, neatened, thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and finally find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. He collapsed on the couch, his bottle of schnapps in his hand, and took a deep swig.

The image of Iida Tenya's severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Iida's bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on drinking. Five minutes later he jerked upright and whirled around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the concrete of the garage floor, eyes as glassy and avid as the eyes in the mounted head of a deer. There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.

'Got to get ahold of yourself, Denki. It's fine- you're fine.' He knocked back a couple of caffeine pills.

...But it was no use. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.

Being watched.

He put his schnapps down and got up from the couch. "Is anyone here?" he called, and his voice echoed back from the steel walls, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. "Deku?... Hanta?... haha..."

('Deku-ku-ku...Han...ta...ta...')

Suddenly Kaminari decided he wanted to go home. He would simply take the alcohol and caffeine pill with him. Yes- that's what he would do. He reached for it... and heard a faint sliding footstep.

He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else... at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.

The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The tiny hallway that lead to both his office and the outside world. In there. Someone. Something.

Moving quietly, Kaminari walked across to one of his work benches. The door leading into the passageway was being held open by a wrench he'd jammed underneath it, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Iida had come after all, if maybe Iida was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. 'I finally came,' Iida would say. 'It took me awhile because I had to pull myself out of a hole in the ground, but I finally came...'

There was another footstep and now Kaminari could see shoes for sure- shoes and ragged pantslegs-denim, with strings hanging down against sockless ankles. And, in the darkness almost six feet above those ankles, he could see glittering eyes.

Kaminari groped over the surface of the work counter and felt along the other side without taking his gaze from those moveless, glittering eyes. His fingers felt one corner of a small cardboard box- half eaten Mike and Ikes. Then slipped in an almost empty box of Trojan condoms- 100 count. He jerked his hand out of it, and his fingers happened on something that was metal and seized it. It was one of the ratchet wrenches his mother had bought him for Christmas. This particular ratchet wrench had a sharp end and a chrome finish... Kaori had gotten a lightning bolt engraved on the handle of each one, to match his shop's logo.

He clutched it with feverish strength and stared into the shadowy hallway.

There was another step... another. Now the ragged denim pants were visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was lanky, but hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure's posture was almost ape-like.

"Who are you?"

There was no answer. The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.

Although still afraid, Kaminari had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Iida Tenya, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn't Iida Tenya, who had finished growing at a staggering six foot three.

The shape took another step, and now the light from the globe closest to the passageway fell across the beltless loops of the black jeans around the shape's waist. He could see the hem of a ratty black hoodie.

Suddenly Kaminari knew. Even before the shape spoke, he knew.

"Why, it's the faggot," the shape said. "Been throwing rocks at anyone, invert? Want to know who poisoned your fucking dog?"

The shape stepped forward. The light fell on the face of Shigaraki Tomura. It had grown thin; the skin had an unhealthy hue, and seemed to flake off in patches; his lips sickeningly split and chapped. His glittering ruby eyes sat in deep, purple, hollows. It was the face of a twenty-nine year old man who'd been shoved off the edge long ago... But it was also the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Shigaraki's clothes were still green with whatever bushes he had spent the day hiding in.

"Aren't you ganna say hi, fruit?" Shigaraki asked, his matted light blue hair falling into his eyes.

"Heh... hi, Tomura..." It occurred to him dimly that he had not watched TV for two days, and he had not even read the paper, which was a ritual with him nowadays. Too much going on. Too busy.

Too bad.

Shigaraki emerged from the corridor between Kaminari's office and the front door and stood there, peering at Kaminari with his crazy, wide, eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted teeth.

"Voices," he said. "You hear voices, fag?"

"Haha?... which voices are those, Tomura?..." He put both hands behind his back, like a schoolboy called upon to recite, and transferred the ratchet wrench from his left hand to his right. The grandfather clock, given to him only a couple of years before, ticked solemn seconds into the smooth pond of garage silence.

"From the moon," Shigaraki said. He put a hand in his pocket. "Came from the moon. Lots of voices." He paused, frowned slightly, then shook his head. "Lots but really only one. It's voice."

"Did you see It, Tomura?"

"Yes," Shigaraki said. "Frankenstein. Tore off Kurogiri's head. You should have heard it. Made a sound like a great big zipper going down. Then It went after Twice. Twice fought It."

"Did he?"

"Yep. That's how I got away."

"...You left him to die?... haha... ha..."

"Don't you say that!" Shigaraki's cheeks flushed a dull red. He took two steps forward into the garage, the closer he got, the younger he looked to Kaminari. He saw the same old meanness in Shigaraki's face, but he saw something else as well: the child who had been brought up by crazy Shigaraki Senior on a good farm that had gone to shitshack shambles over the years. "don't you say that! It would have killed me, too."

"It didn't kill us."

Shigaraki's eyes gleamed with rancid humor. "Not yet. But It will- unless I don't leave any of you for It to get," He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In it was a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlay along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious object. Shigaraki pushed it. A six-inch steel blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm and began to walk toward Kaminari faster.

"Look what I found," Shigaraki said. "I knew where to look." Obscenely, one red-rimmed eyelid drooped in a wink. "The man in the moon told me." Shigaraki revealed his teeth again. "Hid today. Hitchhiked a ride tonight. Old man. Hit him. Killed him, I think. Ditched the car. I heard that voice. I looked in a drain. There was these clothes. And the knife. My old knife."

"You're forgetting something, Tomura."

Shigaraki, grinning, only shook his head. He was scratching furiously at his neck, causing patchy skin to float towards the ground.

"We got away and you got away. If It wants us, It wants you too."

"No."

"Uh-huh. Maybe you yo-yos did Its work, but It didn't exactly play favorites, did It? It got both of your friends, and while Twice was fighting It, you got away. But now you're back. I think you're part of Its unfinished business, Tomura. I really do."

"No!"

"Maybe Frankenstein's what you'll see. Or the Werewolf? A Vampire. The Clown, Ooh! Ooh! Maybe you'll see what It really looks like, Tomura! We did. Want me to tell you? Want me to-"

"Shut up!" Shigaraki screamed, and launched himself at Kaminari.

Kaminari side-stepped and stuck out one foot. Shigaraki tripped over it and went skidding over the floor like a shuffleboard weight. His head struck a leg of a poker table where the Losers had sat earlier that night, telling their tales. The table folded in itself and collapsed, bonking Shigaraki hard on the head. For a moment he was stunned; the knife hung loose in his hand.

Kaminari went after him, went after the knife. In that moment he could have finished Shigaraki; it would have extremely easy to have planted the sharp wrench handle with his shop's logo engraved into the handle in the back of Shigaraki's neck and then call the police. There would have been a certain amount of official nonsense, but not too much of it- not in Irusu, where such weird and violent events were not entirely exceptional.

What stopped him was a realization, almost too lightninglike to be conscious, that if he killed Shigaraki, he would be doing Its work as surely as Shigaraki would be doing Its work by killing Kaminari. And something else; that other look he had seen on Shigaraki's face, the tired, bewildered look of the badly used child who has been set on a poisonous path for some unknown purpose. Shigaraki had grown up within the contaminated radius of Senior's mind; surely he had belonged to It even before he suspected It existed.

So instead of planting the chrome handle into Shigaraki Tomura's vulnerable neck, he dropped to his knees and snatched at the knife. It twisted in his hand- seemingly of its own volition- and his fingers closed on the blade. There was no immediate pain; only red blood flowing down the first three fingers of his right hand and into his scarred palm.

He pulled back. Shigaraki rolled away and grabbed the knife again. Kaminari got to his knees and the two of them faced each other that way, each bleeding: Kaminari's fingers, Shigaraki's nose. Shigaraki shook his head and droplets flew away into the darkness.

"Thought you were so clever!" he cried hoarsely. "Fucking loser cowards is all you were! We could have beat you in a fair fight!"

"Put the knife down, Tomura," Kaminari pleaded quietly. "I'll call the police. They'll come and get you and take you back to Juniper Hill. You'll be out of Irusu. You'll be safe."

Shigaraki tried to talk and couldn't. He couldn't tell this stupid sod that he wouldn't be safe in Juniper Hill, or Tokyo, or the rainforests of Timbuktu. Sooner or later the moon would rise, bone-white and snow-cold, and the ghost-voices would start, and the face of the moon would change into Its face, babbling and laughing and ordering. He swallowed slick-slimy blood.

"You never fought fair!"

Kaminari barked laughter. "And you did?"

"You sick-minded fag!" Shigaraki screamed, and leaped at Kaminari again.

Kaminari leaned back to avoid his blundering, awkward rush, overbalanced, and went sprawling on his back. Shigaraki struck the other table, rebounded, turned, and clutched Kaminari's arm. Kaminari raised the ratchet wrench around and felt it stab deep into Shigaraki's forearm. Shigaraki screamed, but instead of letting go, he tightened his grip. He pulled himself toward Kaminari, his matters light-blue hair in his eyes, blood flowing from his ruptured nose over his chapped lips.

Kirishima tried to get a foot in Shigaraki's side and push him away. Shigaraki swung the switchblade in a glittering arc, and all six inches of it went into Kaminari's thigh. It went in effortlessly, as if into a warm cake of butter. Shigaraki pulled it out, dripping, before stabbing it in again, and again- laugh-sobbing all the while.

With a scream of combined pain and effort, Kaminari shoved him away in an upswing. He struggled to his feet but Shigaraki was up more quickly, and Kaminari was barely able to avoid Shigaraki's next blundering rush. He could feel blood pouring down his leg in an alarming flood, filling his shoe's. 'Fuck- fuck- he got that artery that you aren't ever supposed to let anyone get- he got me bad... blood everywhere. Blood on the floor... Shoe's are ruined, and I really liked them... I only got them a month ago-'

Shigaraki came again, panting and puffing like a bull in heat. Kaminari staggered aside and swept the chrome wrench's handle at him again. It tore through Shigaraki's ragged shirt and pulled a deep cut across his ribs. Shigaraki grunted as Kaminari shoved him away again.

"You dirty-fighting faggot!" He wailed. "Look what you've done!"

"Drop the knife, Tomura," Kaminari panted.

There was a titter from behind them. Shigaraki looked... and then screamed in utter horror, clapping his hands to his cheeks like an offended old maid. Kaminari's gaze jerked toward the poker table. There was a loud, vibrating ka-spanggg! sound, and Iida Tenya's head popped up from behind the desk. A spring corkscrewed up and into his severed, dripping neck. His face was livid with greasepaint. There was a fever spot of rouge on each cheek. Great orange pompoms flowered where the eyes had been. This grotesque Iida-in-the-box head nodded back and forth at the end of its spring like one of the giant sunflowers beside the house on Neibolt Street. Its mouth opened and a squealing, laughing voice began to chant: "Kill him, Tomura! Kill the faggot, kill the invert, kill him, kill him, KILL HIM!"

Kaminari wheeled back toward Shigaraki, dismally aware that he had been tricked, wondering faintly whose face Shigaraki had seen at the end of that spring. Iida's? Kurogiri's? His father's, maybe?

Shigaraki shrieked and rushed at Kaminari, the switchblade plunging up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. He was a being of pure rage and hatred.

Kaminari back-pedaled, and the leg Shigaraki had stabbed buckled under him almost at once, spilling him to the floor. There was hardly any feeling at all left in that leg. It felt cold and distant. Looking down, he saw that his military-green corduroy's were now a deep black.

Shigaraki's blade flashed by in front of his nose, and just managed to nip the bridge. A thin sheet of blood trickled down Kaminari's face.

Kaminari stabbed out with the ratchet wrench his mother had gifted him as Shigaraki turned back for another go. Shigaraki ran into it like a bug into an electrical trap. Warm blood doused Kaminari's hand. There was a snap, and when he drew his hand back, he only had the top of the wrench. The handle was in Shigaraki's stomach.

"Gaaah! Dumbass faggot!" Shigaraki screamed, clapping a hand over the protruding jag of Logo'd handle. Blood poured through his fingers. He looked at it with bulging, unbelieving eyes. The head of the end of the creaking, dipping jack-in-the-box squealed and laughed. Kaminari, feeling sick and dizzy now, looked back at it and saw Twice's head, a human champagne cork wearing a Nippon-Ham Fighter's baseball cap turned backward. He groaned aloud, and the sound was far away, echoey, in his own ears. He was aware that he was sitting now, sitting in a pool of warm blood... his own. 'If I... If I don't get a... what... the thing... the thing I'm supposed to wrap around my leg... if... if I don't get it there I'm gonna die here...' He giggled a little in defeat. 'I really... don't- don't wanna die in Irusu... I really don't wanna die because of Shigaraki fucking Tomura... I really don't wanna die without... without seeing Hanta...again... Roki again... Even- even if he's chosen Deku... I don't care... I just wanna see him... I just wanna make him laugh... just once...'

"Gaaaaaaaaaah!" Shigaraki screamed. Still holding his bleeding belly with one hand and the switchblade with the other, he staggered away from Kaminari and toward the door leading to the outside world. He wove drunkenly from side to side, progressing across the echoing main room like a pinball in an electronic game. He struck one of the easy-chairs and knocked it over. His groping hand spilled a shelf of sockets onto the floor. He reached the door, straight-armed it; and plunged out into the night.

Kaminari's consciousness was fading now. He worked at the roll of electrical tape which had been knocked off some surface during the struggle with fingers he could barely feel. At last he got it to separate from the roll. He put it around his bleeding leg just below the groin and cinched it tight. Breathing heavily, he shakily moved both tape ends to one hand, and carefully flipped on his belly. He groped at the counter and pulled himself up, and slipped- crashing to the floor with a loud cry, drenching himself in his own blood.

Finally, painfully, he pulled himself to his knees, and began to crawl his way over to his office. His cellphone was on his desk somewhere. How he was going to reach it, he didn't know- all that mattered right now was getting there. The world wavered, blurred, grew faint behind waves of gray. He stuck his tongue out and bit down on it savagely. The pain was immediate and exquisite. The world swam back into focus. He became aware that he was still holding the ragged half of the ratchet wrench, and he tossed it away.

Finally, after an agonizing thousand years, Kaminari made it to his office desk. He got his good leg under him and pushed himself up, clutching at the edge of the desk with the hand that wasn't holding the electrical tape tight. His mouth was drawn down in a trembling grimace, his eyes slitted. At last he managed to get all the way up. He stood there, storklike, and groped the cellphone over to him. With bloody fingers, he unlocked his phone and dialed the number for the hospital. He closed his eyes as the phone began to ring... and then they bugged as the voice of Pennywise the Clown answered.

"Howdy faggot!" Pennywise cried, and then screamed laughter as sharp as broken glass into Kaminari's ear. "What do you say? How you doing!? I think you're dead, what do you think? I think Tomura did the job on you! Want a balloon, Denki? Want a balloon? How you doing? Hello there!"

Kaminari's eyes turned up to the grandfather clock and saw with no surprise that Iida Tenya was leaning against it. This Iida the 6'3 adult Kaminari had seen photo's of while rifling through his social media. He was dressed in a silver work shirt, held together by orange puffballs instead of buttons, a pair of black slacks, and expensive loafers- Water- 'bath water,' Kaminari thought nauseatingly- trickled down his body, soaked through his hair, his clothes... The Iida-imitation pushed his glasses up his nose with a hand attached to a gushing wrist, simply watching- observing the scene before him as if Kaminari were one of the birds the real Iida had loved oh so much that summer of 2005...

Suddenly, not-Iida smiled at him and said: "Didn't you hear, Denki?... all faggots go to hell."

The clock began to strike.

Kaminari lost his grip on the desk. He swayed for a moment on his good leg and then he fell down again. The cellphone bounced from his hand and slid across the floor. It was becoming very hard to hold onto the tape ends now.

"Come on down, Denki!" Pennywise cried brightly from the newly cracked smartphone. "COME JOIN TENYA IN HELL! IT'S ONLY FAIR, AFTER ALL, YOU'RE THE REASON HE'S THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! SO COME ON DOWN DENKI! COME ON DOWN!"

"...If... If there's anyone there," Kaminari croaked, "...a real voice behind the one I am hearing, please help me. My name is Kaminari Denki and I'm at Chargebolt's... and- Im pretty sure I'm bleeding to death... haha... If you're there, I can't hear you. I'm not being allowed to hear you... please help... I really don't want to die in this stupid fucking town..."

He lay on his side, drawing his legs up until he was in a fetal position. He took two turns around his right hand with the tape and concentrated on holding it as the world drifted away in those cottony, balloon-like clouds of gray.

"Come on down! Come on down, Denki! Come on down!" Pennywise screamed from the cellphone. "COME ON DOWN YOU FRUITY LITTLE COCKSUCKER! COME-

—4—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / TAIKO STREET / 12:20 P.M.

-here," Shigaraki Tomura said. "Come here, you little scar-faced cunt."

Todoroki reacted instantly, turning to run. It was a quicker reaction than any of them had expected, and he might actually have gotten a running start... but for his hair. He'd let it grow a little longer that summer... Shigaraki snatched at it, caught part of its peppermint flow, and pulled him back. He grinned into Todoroki's face. His breath was thick and warm and stinking.

"How are you?" Shigaraki asked him. "Where ya going? Back to play with your asshole friends some more? I think I'll cut off your nose and make you eat it. You like that?"

Todoroki struggled to get free. Shigaraki laughed and shook Todoroki's head back and forth by the hair. The knife flashed dangerously in the hazy August sunshine.

Abruptly a car-horn honked- a long blast.

"Here! Here! What are you boys doing? Let that one go!"

It was an old lady behind the wheel of a well-preserved 1980 Ford. She had pulled up to the curb and was leaning across the blanket-covered seat to peer out the passenger-side window. At the sight of her angry, honest face, the blank, dazed look left Kurogiri's violet eyes for the first time and he looked nervously at Shigaraki. "What-"

"Please-" Todoroki gasped out. "He's got a knife-"

The old lady's anger now became concern, surprise, and fear as well. "What are you boys doing? Leave him alone!"

Across the street- Todoroki saw this quite clearly- Okumura Adachi, grown-up son of Police Chief Okumura, got out of the lawn-chair on his porch, approached the porch rail, and looked over. His face was as blank as Twice's. He frowned, looked into Todoroki's eyes, folded his paper, turned, and went quietly into the house.

"Let him be!" the old lady cried shrilly.

Shigaraki bared his teeth and suddenly ran at her car, dragging Todoroki after him by his winter-fire hair. He stumbled, went to one knee, was dragged. The pain in his scalp was excruciating, monstrous. He felt some of his hair rip out.

The old lady screamed and cranked the passenger side window frantically. Shigaraki, still roaring, stabbed down, and the switchblade skated across glass. The woman's foot came off the old Ford's clutch-pedal and it went down Taiko Street in three big jerks, bouncing up over the curb, where it stalled. Shigaraki went after it, still pulling Todoroki along. Kurogiri licked his lips and looked around. Twice pushed the Nippon-Ham fighters baseball cap he was wearing up on his forehead, looking confused- almost as if he didn't know how he'd gotten there. They were both pale and sweaty.

Todoroki saw the old woman's pinched, frightened face for one moment, and then saw her pawing at the door-locks, first on the passenger side, then on her own. The Ford's engine ground and caught. Shigaraki lifted one booted foot and kicked out a taillight.

"Get outta here!"

The tires screamed as the old lady pulled back out in the street. An oncoming pickup truck swerved to avoid her; its horn blasted. Shigaraki turned back toward Todoroki, beginning to smile again, and Todoroki hiked one sneakered foot directly into his balls.

The smile on Shigaraki's face turned into a grimace of agony. The switchknife dropped from his hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. His other hand left its nesting-place in the tangle of Todoroki's hair (pulling once more, terribly, as it went) and then he sank to his knees, trying to scream, holding his crotch. Todoroki could see strands of his own copper and ivory hair in one hand, and in that instant all of his terror turned to bright hate. He drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked a remarkably large glob of spit onto the top of his head.

Then Todoroki turned and ran.

Twice lumbered three steps after him and then stopped. He and Kurogiri went to Shigaraki, who threw them aside and then staggered to his feet, bo-legged and in horrific pain; it was not the first time that summer that he had been kicked there.

He leaned over and picked up the switchblade."... on," he wheezed.

"What, Tomura?" Twice asked anxiously.

Shigaraki turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Twice fell back a step. "I said... come... on!" he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Todoroki.

"We can't catch him now, Tomura," Kurogiri said uneasily. "You can hardly walk."

"We'll catch him," Shigaraki panted. His upper lip was rising and falling in an unconscious dog-like sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. "We'll catch him, all right. Because I know where he's going. He's going down into the Barrens to be with his asshole-

—5—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / THE SHIJIMA HOTEL AND SAUNA / 2:00 A.M.

-friends," Kirishima said.

"What?" Bakugo looked at him. His thoughts had been far away. They were walking back from Chargebolt: auto body and repair together, virtually silent, lost in their own little worlds. He had caught only the last word of what Kirishima had said. A block ahead, the lights of The Shijima shone through the low ground-fog.

"I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then." Kirishima repeated. "Before you guy's... I just wasn't confident enough I guess... so I didn't really have anyone."

"Well, It's not like I was ever on the top of anyone's friends list, either." Bakugo snorted dismissively, "except for maybe Deku's, but he was less a friend and more the kid brother I hate and I only want to see at family gatherings."

Kirishima rolled his eyes, and nudged Bakugo. "Shut up, you two were close. It was obvious."

Bakugo rolled his eyes right back, but didn't protest. They fell back into a comfortable silence.

As they walked, Kirishima observed the beads of moisture in Bakugo's platinum blonde hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus about his head. In 2005, they had been the same, average, height- but as adults, Kirishima was an entire six inches taller. Kirishima smiled a little at that.

Bakugo's red irises met his own.

"You're staring."

Kirishima flushed a little. "I'm sorry."

"I don't think your husband would appreciate that very much." There was a hint of something in Bakugo's voice, and Kirishima was almost certain it was hurt.

"I don't think Echii would appreciate much of anything that I'm doing right now." Kirishima responded. Bakugo raised his eyebrows up at him and stopped in the middle of the white-washed parking lot.

"What?" Kirishima asked him.

"Echii's a really stupid name." Bakugo said simply, hands stuffed in his pockets, light glinting off the silver buttons and zippers on his jacket. "Prissy."

Kirishima felt his face heat up a little, feeling embarrassed, but not really knowing why. "I see you're as rude as ever."

"It's kinda my branding, and all."

"I've noticed."

"How'd you even meet someone with a name like Echii?" Bakugo asked, and began to push through the front entrance of the Shajima, Kirishima had to sprint to catch up. The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very traditional Japanese. It was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV.

"At the gym." Kirishima said, and Bakugo barked laughter, causing Kirishima's face to flush brilliantly- shame coming down on him in waves. "Why are you laughing?..."

"Just- the thought of you at a fucking gym... I mean- you're a personal trainer so you practically live in one- but- fuck... I dunno... I guess I'm still thinking about when you used to blast off..."

"Oh... Yeah... I guess you weren't around for my high school rebirth." Kirishima pushed the second-floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly- excitement? nervousness? guilt? all of the above? Oh yeah sure, and a kind of almost insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He hadn't even realized he hadn't asked Bakugo what floor he was staying on- nor did he notice Bakugo hadn't called him out on it. "Some girl in my middle school... she saved a friend of her's from being mugged right in front of me... I had gotten there before her... but... you know me, I got scared, I- I couldn't breathe... I was so ashamed that I decided that I couldn't be like that anymore... So I went home, dyed my hair- my mother had a heart attack talking about how I was going to get cancer from the chemicals, you'd of found it funny I think- and just- turned my whole attitude around... I guess..."

Bakugo was silent for a long time. Kirishima tapped his foot anxiously, not really know what else to do. Finally, Bakugo said: "Good for you."

"Wuh?" Kirishima blinked.

"Good for you." Bakugo shrugged.

"...Thank... you?..."

"I like your black hair better, though."

"There it is."

Bakugo shrugged again, the gesture said: 'Sorry, but that's how I feel.' It made Kirishima's smile widen.

They were outside the elevator now, in a small tiled corridor. A dimly lit long hallway stretched out in both directions in front of them. The walls were half dark paneling, half floral wallpaper, the flooring was creaky maple. Kirishima pulled his room key out of his pocket (the back of his hand bumped against his inhaler as he did so) and twiddled it- Bakugo pulled out his own. It seemed his room was on the second floor as well.

Kirishima opened his mouth to say goodnight, instead he said: "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Bakugo's head jerked up, his shoulders tensed a little. Kirishima swallowed thickly.

"What the hell? Why do you want to know?"

Kirishima shrugged faintly, not really knowing why himself. The question had popped into his head out of nowhere, and had erupted out of his throat against his will. He scrambled for an explanation, and finally came up with a weak one: "You brought up my husband... so..."

Bakugo narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously, disbelievingly. Slowly, he said, "Not a boyfriend, no... I sleep around occasionally..."

"Oh..." Kirishima felt-

(Jealousy)

-a strange emotion shoot through him. "With who?"

"Guests on my show, mainly."

"...The celebrities and politicians you verbally abuse on live radio?"

"I told you all at lunch they get off to it."

Kirishima nodded, looked away, tensed. The reunion lunch felt like it had been a thousand years ago. "Right..."

"Why are you asking me all this?- and don't give me that shit about me bringing up your husband- you're over here asking about who I sleep around with, why?"

Kirishima's face was almost as red as his hair once was- his heart was racing, mind reeling, mouth dry. He took a step back into the hall. "I-I..."

"-Do you want to have sex or something?"

"WHAT!?- NO-" Kirishima took several more steps back, shaking his head furiously. His hair was beginning to come out of the bun, floating around his face. "I-I'm- I'm MARRIED-"

Bakugo shrugged, and took a step forward. "Marriage hasn't stopped people before-"

"-Beep-Beep Katsuki." Kirishima said, swallowing, averting his gaze- knowing that if he looked at Bakugo right now-

"-Ugh- don't start with that shit- just answer my-"

"BEEP-BEEP KATSUKI!"

Bakugo was even closer now, he looked extremely-

(Alluring)

-annoyed. Kirishima felt his mind slip. He imagined pressing their bodies together... imagined sucking hickey's into Bakugo's neck, chest, thighs... imagined the noises Bakugo would make... he let out a shaky breath.

Bakugo opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by Kirishima pushing him up against the wall. Bakugo's word's died in his throat, looking up (the fact that Bakugo had to look up to meet his eye made Kirishima's body shiver with pleasure) at Kirishima with wide, surprised, glittering eyes. His lips were slightly parted, his cheeks were a pretty shade of pink, his breaths came out in pants that mingled with Kirishima's own.

"Just shut up, Katsuki..." Kirishima breathed, "For once in your life, just shut up..."

Kissing Bakugo Katsuki was both foreign and familiar. When they had "dated" in 2005, they'd only share quick pecks to the cheeks and lips. The kiss they shared now, in 2020, was much more mature, much more adult. It was deep, experienced, heated, aggressive. Bakugo's hips pressed against his own, pulled back, pressed again. The second time, Kirishima grabbed a fistful of his blonde hair,

They pulled away, panting. Kirishima was acutely aware that his pants felt tighter. He let go of Bakugo's wrists, and led him down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place, not Bakugo's.

'Cheating. Cheating on my husband.' Kirishima tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time.

Kirishima's keycard rattled in the scanner of room 13, so hard it refused to take it. Eventually, Bakugo did it for him.

The door opened. They were inside. Bakugo looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Kirishima took him in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness- the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with a triumphant seamlessness. He kicked the door shut clumsily with one foot and Bakugo laughed- really laughed, not the same exasperated one he'd uttered in the elevator- his warm breath into Kirishima's mouth.

"I really do like your black hair better..." Bakugo whispered, eyes half-lidded.

Kirishima smiled, and then without really knowing why, he placed his hand on the left side of Bakugo's chest. Kirishima could feel his heartbeat below that firm, tough, leather jacket- racing like an engine.

"Your heart-"

"My heart."

They were on the bed, still dressed, kissing. Bakugo's hand slipped inside his shirt, then out again. Bakugo traced a hand down the length of his torso, paused at his waist... and then that same hand slipped lower, tracing down the stony thickness of his cock. Muscles he hadn't been aware of jumped and fluttered in his groin, and he was dimly aware that Echii, not once in all the years that they'd been together, had gotten him this worked up. Kirishima broke the kiss and moved his body away from Bakugo's on the bed.

"What the hell?"

"Got to stop for a minute," he gasped, embarrassed. "Or else I'm going to shoot in my pants like a kid."

Bakugo snorted softly, and looked at him. Kirishima could clearly make out the hurt in his voice now. "Is it that?... Or are you having second thoughts?..."

"Second thoughts," Kirishima laughed weakly. "I always have those."

"I don't."

"Believe me," Kirishima whispered, and leaned down to kiss Bakugo's neck. Bakugo shivered, and Kirishima had to pull away again. "I know."

Bakugo gave him an annoyed look. His jacket was halfway off, his red Osaka radio shirt rode up his stomach, exposing his flat and muscular belly. Kirishima wanted to kiss it. "Will you just shut up and get your dick out?"

Kirishima felt it twitch a little, "Geez, you're crass..." Their lips touched and he began to tear of Bakugo's jacket. One of Bakugo's hands went to the back of Kirishima's neck and held him closer while the other loosened the elastic on Kirishima's sweatpants, then pushed them down. For a moment they only stared, wide-eyed and wanting at one another, and then Bakugo was unbuttoning his own pants.

"You look- wow... I..." Kirishima stuttered out, taking in Bakugo's unclothed, flushed, body. He was lean and muscular, his erection lay heavy on his belly, his nipples were pert. Kirishima's cock twitched again.

Bakugo looked away, embarrassed, "just- are you going to fuck me or not?"

Kirishima slipped his fingers in his mouth- it wasn't his preferred choice of lubrication, but it was the only option they had. They prepped. Kirishima's knees almost gave out when Bakugo took him in his mouth and gave him a few hearty sucks.

"Hnn... con- condom..." Kirishima mumbled, dazed, eyes glazing over. "We don't have a- we don't have a condom..."

"I don't care." Bakugo said, wiping spit from his chin, and laying back down on the bed. "I want this, you want this... so just- just do it..."

As Kirishima slowly entered him, Bakugo arched his back gently toward the thrust of his sex like a seasoned veteran. Kirishima panted.

"Beautiful... so beautiful..." Kirishima said, smiling between his bare shoulder blades. Bakugo hid his flushed-face from him. They began slowly and Kirishima felt sweat begin to flow out of his skin as Bakugo quickened beneath him. His consciousness began to drain downward, becoming focused more and more strongly on their connection. Bakugo's grunting moan's grew louder as Kirishima reached around and began to stroke him in time with his thrusts.

"I... I want to be at the top of your friends list, Ejirou..." Bakugo whined in between each bout of blinding pleasure.

"You are." Kirishima whispered from above him, making Bakugo arch his back again. "Haah... o-of course you are..."

Bakugo felt his climax coming. He moved toward it, working for it, never doubting that it would come. His body suddenly stuttered and seemed to leap forward, not orgasming but reaching a plateau far above anything he had reached with any of his other suitors. Bakugo became aware that this wasn't going to be just an orgasm; it was going to be a tactical nuke. He was almost afraid... but his body picked up the rhythm again. He felt Kirishima's long length stiffen inside him, his whole body suddenly becoming as hard as the part of him inside himself, and at that same moment Bakugo climaxed-began to climax; pleasure so great it was nearly agony spilled out of unsuspected floodgates, and he bit down on the bedsheets to stifle his cries.

"Oh my God," Kirishima gasped, and although he was never sure later, Bakugo believed he was crying. He pulled back and Bakugo thought he was going to withdraw from him- he tried to prepare for that moment, which always brought a fleeting, inexplicable sense of loss and emptiness, something like a footprint- and then Kirishima thrust forward strongly again. Immediately, alongside Kirishima's first, Bakugo had his second orgasm, something he hadn't even known was possible- but, well, they were in Irusu after all...

Kirishima pulled back again, and this time he did leave him. The empty feeling took hold, and made Bakugo whine softly in protest. Kirishima flopped onto the bed next to him, while Bakugo turned over on his back with shaky legs, panting.

Kirishima watched Bakugo from the corner of his eye. Bakugo's body was toned and lovely. His hair was was messy and ruined- sex hair. Kirishima thought he would want him again before morning, and that feeling of guilt came again, tempered only by the guilty comfort of knowing that Echii was miles away. 'Put another round in the juke-box,' he thought. 'This tune is called "What He Don't Know Won't Hurt Him."...' But it hurts somewhere. In the spaces between people, maybe.

Bakugo got up and headed towards the attached bathroom. Kirishima stared at his naked thighs, thinking back to his earlier fantasy about littering them with hickey's. He got up too. Bakugo held the shower door open for him.

Bakugo pressed against him, his body warm, his legs cool. Kirishima held him, aware of the differences- his body was longer than Echii's, and fuller at the buttock and chest. But it was a welcome body. The warm water rained down on them soothingly from above.

And for that one moment, everything was okay.

—5—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / ROOM 05 / 2:15 AM

Deku was also sharing his room that night- but unlike Kirishima Ejirou, he wasn't cheating on his spouse- at least, not physically. There was certainly a case to be made that he was cheating emotionally.

Todoroki Shouto lay in his arms, head resting on Deku's broad chest. Deku was combing his fingers through his hair, feeling guilty and miserable, but also content to stay like that forever.

They had ended up in Deku's room after arriving at the Shijima, Sero and Todoroki having replenished their tobacco stocks, Deku now with a Diet Coke. They'd waved goodbye to Sero, who'd made his way to the elevator to head up to bed, and Deku had invited Todoroki back to his own. He didn't want to be alone.

If Todoroki had refused and gone to his own room on the north side of the first-floor hallway, he would have seen the message-light on his phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given him a message to call his brother Natsuo (after Natsuo's third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Irusu police when that day's light finally broke. But he agreed and went to Deku's room- as things had perhaps, been prearranged.

"I hate my husband, too." Todoroki said, breaking the silence.

Deku looked down at him, stopping his hair stroking.

"I didn't know it- not completely, anyway- until tonight," Todoroki said. "Oh, I knew it- somewhere- all along, I guess. He hits and he hurts. I married him because... because my father always worried about me, I guess. He had expectations. And I guess I married Koji because he had expectations and worried too. Koji worried a lot. And as long as someone was worrying about me, I'd be safe. No- more than safe. Real." Todoroki looked at him solemnly. His hair was windswept. He'd taken off his long coat, revealing a simple white T-shirt underneath... just like old times. "But it wasn't real. It was a nightmare. Being married to Koji was like going back into the nightmare. Why would a person do that, Izuku? Why would a person go back into the nightmare of his own accord?"

Deku sighed, said, "The o-o-only reason I can f-figure is that p-people go back to f-f-find thems-s-selves."

"But the real nightmare's here," Todoroki said. "The nightmare is Irusu. Koji looks small compared to that. I can see him better now. I loathe myself for the years I spent with him... You don't know... the things he made me do, and oh, I was happy enough to do them, you know, because he worried about me... because he had expectations... I'd cry- I never used to do that, but now I do- and- and sometimes there was so much shame- so much- self-hatred-"

"Don't," Deku said quietly, and put his hand over Todoroki's. Todoroki held it tightly. His eyes were overbright, but the tears didn't fall. "Everybody g-g-goofs it. But it's not an eh-eh-exam. You just go through it the b-b-best you can."

"I guess... but- how do I move on from needing that?" Todoroki asked softly, "it's... it's all I've done since I left Irusu... I just search and search for a replacement for him- how do I stop myself from doing it again?..."

Deku thought about this, thought about it with a real and deep seriousness. But the odd little mnemonic -he thrusts his fists, and so on- had begun to circle back, breaking into his thoughts. It had been a long day. Kaminari's call and the invitation to lunch at The House of Blue Leave's seemed a hundred years ago. So many stories since then. So many memories, like photographs from Eri's album.

"...I don't know." Deku finally answered, looking down at Todoroki. Todoroki seemed to deflate, and dropped his gaze. Deku rubbed his back apologetically.

He thought of Ochako then, and realized he missed her. He latched onto the feeling as he gazed out the window into the cloudy night sky.

'I should be at home with her.' He thought silently to himself, he was combing his fingers through Todoroki's hair again. '...But instead I'm in Irusu with Sho...'

He sighed, Todoroki glanced up for just a moment, before looking away. Deku pulled the cover's over the two of them. He missed his wife, he loved his wife, but he didn't- couldn't- be alone... not now... not tonight. He settled into bed, and pulled the slightly taller male flush against him. He could feel Todoroki's heart thumping calmly against his chest.

'It should have been Denki with you, Sho,' Deku thought drowsily. '..I think that was the way it was really supposed to be. Why wasn't it Denki?'

'...Because this was how it was then and how it is now, that's all. Because what goes around always comes around. I think Bob Dylan said that... And maybe it's me now because Denki's the one who's supposed to see you home.'

Todoroki wriggled against him, not in a sexual way- only wanting his warmth. Todoroki was already half asleep himself. His happiness here with Deku, after all these years, was real. Todoroki knew that because of its bitter undertaste. There was tonight, and perhaps there would be another time in the morning. Then they would go down in the sewers as they had before, and they would find their It. The circle would close even tighter and their present lives would merge smoothly with their own childhoods; they would become like creatures on some crazy Moebius strip.

Either that, or they would all die down there.

Todoroki turned over. Deku slipped an arm around his waist. Todoroki did not have to lie awake, wondering if the hand might clamp down on his thigh and pinch.

Curiously, as he drifted, Todoroki found his finale thought wasn't about Deku- but was about Kaminari, and those little line's of text he had written him all those years ago... 'your hair is like winter fire, January embers...'

He smiled softly to himself. Sweet, cute, puppy-faced Kaminari...

As always, Todoroki saw brilliant wildflower patterns as he crossed over- masses and masses of them nodding brightly under a blue sky. These faded and there was a falling sensation- the sort of sensation that had sometimes snapped him awake and sweating as a child, a scream on the other side of his face. Childhood dreams of falling, he read in his college psychology text, were common.

But he didn't snap back this time; he could feel the warm and comforting weight of Deku's arm, hugging his waist. Todoroki thought that if he was falling, at least he wasn't falling alone.

Then he touched down and was running: this dream, whatever it was, moved fast. He ran after it, pursuing sleep, silence, maybe just time. The years moved fast. The years ran. If you turned around and ran after your own childhood, you'd have to really let out your stride. Twenty-five, the year he had dyed his hair completely white (faster). Twenty-one, the year he had fallen in love with a soccer player named Shimamoto Katsuro who had damn near raped him after a campus party (faster, faster). Sixteen, getting drunk with Touya and Natsuo after escaping their tyrant father. Fourteen... eating lunch in the bathroom all by himself... twelve...

faster, faster, faster...

He ran into sleep, chasing twelve, catching it, running through the barrier of memory that It had cast over all of them (it tasted like cold fog in his laboring dreamlungs), running back into his eleventh year, running, running like hell, running to beat the devil, looking back now, looking back-

—7—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / THE BARRENS / 12:40 P.M.

-over his shoulder for any sign of them as he slipped and scrambled his way down the embankment. No sign, at least not yet. Todoroki had seemingly ditched them.

Todoroki looked under the rickety bridge, hoping to see Silver heeled over on his side, but Silver was gone. There was a cache of toy guns which they no longer bothered to take home, and that was all. He started down the path, looked back... and there they were, Twice and Kurogiri supporting Shigaraki between them, standing on the edge of the embankment. Shigaraki was horribly pale. He pointed at Todoroki. Kurogiri and Twice began to help him down the slope. Dirt and gravel spilled from beneath their heels.

Todoroki looked at them for a long moment, almost hypnotized. Then he turned and sprinted through the trickle of brook-water that ran out from under the bridge, ignoring Sero's stepping-stones, his sneakers spraying out flat sheets of water. He ran down the path, the breath hot in his throat. Todoroki could feel the muscles in his legs trembling. He didn't have much left now. The clubhouse. If he could get there, he might still be safe.

Todoroki ran along the path, branches whipping even more color into his cheeks, one striking his grey eye and making it water. He cut to the right, blundered through tangles of underbrush, and came out into the clearing. Both the camouflaged trapdoor and the slit window stood open; music drifting up. At the sound of his approach, Sero Hanta popped up. He had a cigarette in one hand and one of his silver dollars in the other. He'd been playing heads and tails with himself out of pure boredom.

Sero got a good look at Todoroki and cocked his head in a very Kaminari Denki-esq. fashion. Under other circumstances it would have been almost funny. "Sho, what the hell-"

Todoroki didn't bother replying. Behind him, and not too far behind, either, he could hear branches snapping and whipping; there was a muffled shouted curse. It sounded as if Shigaraki was getting livelier. So he just ran at the square trapdoor opening, his hair, tangled now with green leaves and twigs as well as the crud from his scramble under the garbage truck, bounced behind him.

Sero saw Todoroki was coming in like a speeding bullet train and disappeared as quickly as he had come out. Todoroki jumped and Sero caught him clumsily, just able to keep him from face planting.

"Shut everything," Todoroki panted. "Hurry up, Hanta- They're coming!"

"Who?"

"Tomura and his friends! Tomura's gone crazy, he's got a knife-"

That was enough for Sero, who had already learned what Shigaraki was capable of doing with a knife. He dropped his cigarette, stamped it, and shoved the coin in his pocket. He pulled the trapdoor shut with a grunt. The top was covered with sods; Tangle-Track was still holding them remarkably well. A few blocks of sod had gotten a little loose, but that was all. Todoroki stood up and closed the window. They were in darkness.

The two sat in silence. They were both on their knees. With sudden horror Todoroki realized that Bakugo's IPod (Kaminari had been able to fix it, to all of their delight) was still playing somewhere in the blackness: X Japan was singing out "ENDLESS RAIN."

"Hanta... the music... they'll hear..."

"Shit-"

He bunted Todoroki with one bony hip, causing them to both wince. Todoroki heard the IPod fall to the floor. "The dream is over. No matter how many times I repeat voiceless words The grey wall stands so tall And reflects the feelings of passed days to my dream. Until I can forget your love." Toshi informed them through the IPods speakers as they scrambled to find the device. Sero was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly there was a crunch... and silence.

"Oh shit," Sero said. "I just crushed it, Katsuki's gonna-"

"Shhh!"

He quieted. They sat together, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined the slit window. One of these three was wide enought to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. Todoroki could only beg they wouldn't see it.

Todoroki could hear them approaching. At first he couldn't make out the words... and then he could. He scooted a little closer to Sero.

"If he went into the bamboo, we can pick up his trail easy," Kurogiri was saying.

"They play around here," Shigaraki replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. "Sako Atsuhiro said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here."

"Yeah, they play guns and stuff," Twice said.

Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Todoroki's upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced his belly. Sero hitched in a silent breath, waiting to see if they would guess... or if they knew already and were just playing games.

"They got a place," Shigaraki was saying. "That's what Sako told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club."

"I'll club em, if they want a club," Kurogiri drawled. Twice uttered a thunderous heehawing of laughter at this.

Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn't have that kind of give.

"Let's look down by the river," Shigaraki said. "I bet he's down there."

"Okay," Kurogiri said.

Thump, thump. They were moving off. Sero let a little sigh of relief trickle through his clamped teeth... and then Shigaraki said: "You stay here and guard the path, Jin."

"Okay," Twice said, and he began to pace back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Sero and Todoroki looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Todoroki became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse- a sweaty, garbage stink was rising as well. 'That's me,' he thought dismally. In spite of the smell, he moved closer to Sero, finding his presence comforting. Before that summer, Sero Hanta had been the closest thing he had had to a friend, and he appreciated him greatly for that. He made a mental note to tell him that one day.

"...I'll club em if they want a club," Twice said, and chuckled. "...Club em if they want a club... That's good... Kurogiri can be really funny when he wants to be..."

Todoroki became aware that Sero's thin upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment Todoroki thought Sero was starting to cry, and then he got a closer look at his face and realized Sero was actually struggling against laughter. His grey eyes, leaking tears, caught his, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, Todoroki could see his face was pink with the strain of holding it in.

"Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby," Twice said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Todoroki heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it... but not the added one hundred something pounds of Twice's weight.

'If he doesn't get up he's going to land on top of us.' Todoroki thought, and all at once he began to catch Sero's hysteria. It was trying to boil out of him in rancid bray's. After a long, hard, terrible day, he was at his wits end.

"Shhh," Sero whispered, barely holding back his own giggles. "Shh-"

Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.

"Will it hold?" Todoroki whispered back, the threat of laughter dissipated in an instant.

"It might, if he doesn't move around to much," Sero said, and a moment later Twice switched positions. The cap creaked. Todoroki thought he was going to have stroke. Sero's eyes bugged.

Then, faintly, they heard Shigaraki yelling Twice's name.

"What'?" Twice bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Sero and Todoroki. "What, Tomura?"

Shigaraki yelled something back; Todoroki could only make out the words bank and bushes.

"Okay!" Twice bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Sero's lap. He picked it up wonderingly.

"Five more minutes," Sero said in a low whisper. "That's all it would have taken."

There was a silence. Finally, unaware he was going to say it at all, Todoroki said: "Thank you for being my friend, Hanta."

Sero blinked, confused. "...you're welcome?..."

"I mean- I mean before this summer... thank you for being there... behind the school with me." Todoroki explained, he felt embarrassed.

"Oh!" Sero said, nodded, smiled. "Yeah- no problem... I didn't realize you considered us friends then... not- not that I don't like it- I'm glad you did."

Todoroki smiled at him softly. "I don't think you realized how happy you made me when you told me to have a nice summer."

"I'm glad it made you happy," Sero said, and patted Todoroki's arm. "Though I'm sorry the summer wasn't happy what-so-ever."

"It's alright, it wasn't your fault."

"Eh. That's debatable."

"How so?" Todoroki asked, pulling his knees up to his chest, and resting his arms on his knees.

Sero sighed, he looked tired... confused... skinny. His eye's were glazed over, like that day in the Klean Kloze. "It's just... everything started to happen when I fell into the Barren's on the last day of school... Deku say's he thinks that was the start of it all."

"Huh? When did he say that?"

Sero blinked, his eye's went back to normal. His head throbbed. "Oh... I-I... I don't- I don't know... sometime..."

They sat without saying anything for a little while. Todoroki felt safe. The images of his father's face and Shigaraki's knife seemed less vivid and threatening in the clubhouse, sat next to his first real friend.

"The others were coming back," Sero said suddenly, sitting up straight with alarm. "What if they get caught?"

Todoroki straightened up as well, aware that he had almost been dozing. Deku, he remembered, had invited Kaminari Denki home to lunch with him. Bakugo was going to go home with Iida and Kirishima and have sandwiches, with the promise of bringing back snacks. They would be arriving soon, totally unaware that Shigaraki and his friends were in the Barrens.

"We've got to get to them," Todoroki said. "Tomura's not just after me."

"If we come out and they come back-"

"Yes, but at least we know they're here. Deku and the other guys don't. Ejirou can't even run, they already broke his arm."

"Dammit," Sero sighed. "I guess we'll have to chance it."

"Yes." Todoroki swallowed and looked at his watch. It was hard to read in the dimness, but he thought it was a little past one. "Hanta..."

"What?"

"Tomura's really gone crazy. He was going to kill me and the other two were going to help him."

"Aw, no," Sero said. "Tomura's crazy, but not that crazy. He's just..."

"Just what?" Todoroki asked. He thought of Shigaraki and Toga in the automobile graveyard in the thick sunshine. Shigaraki's blank eyes.

Sero didn't answer. He was thinking. Things had changed, hadn't they? When you were inside the changes, they were harder to see. You had to step back to see them... you had to try, anyway. When school let out he'd been afraid of Shigaraki, but only because Shigaraki was bigger, and because he was a bully- the kind of kid who would grab a firstgrader, Indian-rub his arm and send him away crying. That was about all. Then he had engraved Sero's hip. Then there had been the rockfight, and Shigaraki had been chucking M-80s at people's heads. You could kill somebody with one of those things. You could kill somebody easy. He had started to look different... haunted, almost. It seemed that you always had to be on the watch for him, the way you'd always have to be on the watch for tigers or poisonous snakes if you were in the jungle. But you got used to it; so used to it that it didn't even seem unusual, just the way things were. But Shigaraki was crazy, wasn't he? Yes. Sero had known that on the day school ended, and had willfully refused to believe it, or remember it. It wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to believe or remember. And suddenly a thought- a thought so strong it was almost a certainty- crept into his mind full-blown, as cold as October mud. 'It's using Tomura. Maybe the others too, but It's using them through Tomura. And if that's the truth, then Sho's probably right. It's not just Indian rubs or rabbit-punches in the back of the neck during study-time near the end of the schoolday while Mrs. Seki reads her book at her desk, not just a push on the playground so that you fall down and skin your knee. If It's using him, then Tomura will use the knife.'

"An old lady saw what they were trying to do to me," Todoroki was saying. "Tomura went after her. He kicked her taillight out."

This alarmed Sero more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Shigaraki could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sightline. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like, "Why don't you quit that?" and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner... and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was at least five feet tall.

If Shigaraki had gone after some old lady, he had gone above that sight-line. And that more than anything else suggested to Sero that he really was crazy.

Todoroki saw the belief in Sero's face and felt relief sweep over him. He would not have to tell him about how Chief Okumura's son had simply folded his paper and walked into his house. He didn't want to tell Sero about that. It was too gross.

"Let's go up to Taiko Street," Sero said, and abruptly pushed open the trapdoor. "Get ready to run."

He stood up in the opening and looked around. The clearing was silent. He could hear the chuckling voice of the Shibui close by, birdsong, the thum-thud-thum-thud of a diesel engine snorting its way into the trainyards. He heard nothing else and that made him uneasy. He would have felt much better if he'd heard Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and Twice cursing their way through the neavy undergrowth down by the stream. But he couldn't hear them at all.

"Come on," he said, and helped Todoroki up. He also looked around uneasily, brushing his hair back with his hands and grimacing at its greasy feel.

Todoroki grabbed Sero's wrist, and forced Sero's thin finger's to hold onto the end of his letterman jacket sleeve- hoping it'd be enough to keep the two of them together. Cautiously, they pushed through a screen of bushes and headed toward Taiko Street.

"We'd better stay off the path." Sero whispered to him.

"No," Todoroki said, "we've got to hurry."

Sero nodded reluctantly, "Alright."

They got to the path and started toward Taiko Street. Once Sero stumbled over a rock in the path and-

—8—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / IRUSU ELEMENTARY / 2:15 AM

-fell heavily on the moon-silvered sidewalk. A grunt was forced out of him, and a runner of blood came with the grunt, splatting on the cracked concrete. In the moonlight it looked as black as beetle-blood. Shigaraki looked at it for a long dazed moment, then raised his head to look around.

Taiko Street was early-morning silent, the houses shut up and dark except for a scatter of nightlights.

Ah. Here was a sewer-grate.

A balloon with a smiley-smile face was tied to one of its iron bars. It bobbed and dipped in the faint breeze.

Shigaraki got to his feet again, one sticky hand pressed to his belly. The faggot had stuck him pretty good, but Shigaraki had done him one better. Yessir. As far as the invert was concerned, Shigaraki felt like he had done the job, and done it damn well.

"Kid's dead," Shigaraki muttered, and made his shaky staggering way past the floating balloon. Fresh blood glimmered on his hand as it continued to flow from his stomach. "Kid's all done. Greased the sucker. Gonna grease them all. Teach them to throw rocks."

The world was coming in slow-rolling waves, big combers like the stock footage that played on the ward TV whenever a guard forgot to turn it off.

('Killed that fucker... iced him... stupid faggot... rot in hell...')

...and Shigaraki could- Shigaraki could- Shigaraki could almost...

('feel the reality of the world. "Pipeline." Chantays. Remember "Pipeline'? "Pipeline" was pretty much okey-dokey. "Wipe-Out." Crazy laugh there at the start. Sounded like Toga Himiko. Fucking psycho bitch. Got greased herself and as far as I')

-he was concerned that was a-

(-fuck of a lot better than okey-dokey, that was just FINE, that was JUST AS FINE AS PAINT-)

(-okay Pipeline shoot the line don't back down not my boys catch a wave and-)

(shoot)

(shootshootshoot)

(a wave and go sidewalk surfin with me shoot)

(the line shoot the world but keep)

-an ear inside his head: it kept hearing that ka-spanggg sound; an eye inside his head: it kept seeing Twice's head rising on the end of that spring, eyelids and cheeks and forehead tattooed with rosettes of blood.

Shigaraki looked blearily to his left and saw that the businesses had been replaced with a tall, black stand of hedge. Looming above it was a narrow, gloomy, brick building. Not a window shone light. The Irusu Elementary Shigaraki and the Loser's had attended had graduated its last class in December of 2010. It had closed its doors that summer in favor of a much bigger and much more modern building over by memorial park. Whatever walked in Shigaraki's old stomping grounds now walked alone... and only by permission of the chattering women's club that called itself the Irusu Historical Society.

He came to the walkway which led up to the front door. It was barred by a heavy chain from which a metal sign hung: NO TRESPASSING. THIS ORDER ENFORCED BY THE IRUSU POLICE DEPT.

Shigaraki's feet tangled with one another and he fell heavily again- whap!- to the sidewalk. Up ahead, a car turned onto Taiko Street from Main. Its headlights washed down the street. Shigaraki fought the dazzle long enough to see the lights on top: it was a police car.

He crawled under the chain and crabbed his way to the left so he was behind the hedge. The night-dew on his hot face was wonderful. He lay face down, turning his head from side to side, wetting his cheeks, drinking what he could drink.

The police car floated by without slowing.

Then, suddenly, its bubble-lights came on, washing the darkness with erratic blue pulses of light. There was no need for the siren on the deserted streets, but Shigaraki heard its null suddenly crank up to full revs. Rubber blistered a startled scream from the pavement.

'Caught, I'm caught!' his mind gibbered... and then he realized that the police-car was heading away from him, up Taiko Street. A moment later a hellish warbling sound filled the night, coming from the same direction. He imagined some huge silky black cat loping through the dark, all green eyes and silky flexing pelt, It in a new shape, coming for him, coming to gobble him up.

Little by little (and only as the warbling began to veer away) he realized it was an ambulance, heading in the direction the police car had gone. He lay shuddering on the wet grass, too cold now, struggling-

(fuzzit cousin buzzit cousin rock it roll it we got chicken in the barn what bam whose barn my)

-not to vomit. He was afraid that if he vomited, all of his guts would come up... and there were five of them still to get.

'Ambulance and police car. Where are they heading? The mechanic shop, of course. The fruit. But they're too late. I greased him. Might as well turn off your siren, boys. He ain't gonna hear it. He's just as dead as a fencepost. He-'

But was he?

Shigaraki licked his peeling lips with his arid tongue. If he was dead, there would be no warbling siren in the night like the cry of a wounded panther. Not unless the fag had called them. So maybe- just maybe- he wasn't dead.

"No," Shigaraki breathed. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the sky, at the billions of stars up there. It had come from there, he knew. From somewhere up in that sky... It-

(came from outer space with a lust for Earthwomen came to rob all the women and rape all the men say Frank don't you mean rob all the men and rape all the women whoth running this show, thilly man, you or Jesse? Twice used to tell that one and that was pretty much)

-came from the spaces between the stars. Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire...

He closed his eyes, shivering and holding his arms crossed on his belly, and he thought: 'The sod is dead. Someone heard us fighting and sent the cops to investigate, that's all.'

'Then why the ambulance?'

"Shut up, shut up," Shigaraki groaned. He felt the old baffled rage again; he remembered how they had beaten him again and again in the old days- old days that seemed so close and so vital now- how, every time, when he believed he had them, they had somehow slipped through his fingers. It had been like that on the last day, after Twice saw the scar-faced cunt running down Taiko Street toward the Barrens. He remembered that, oh yes, he remembered that clearly enough. When you got kicked in the balls, you remembered it. It had happened to him again and again that summer.

Shigaraki struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the deep dagger of pain in his guts.

Kurogiri and Twice had helped him down into the Barrens. He had walked as fast as he could in spite of the agony that griped and pulled at his groin and the root of his belly. The time had come to finish it. They had followed the path to a clearing from which five or six paths radiated like strands of a spider-web. Yes, there had been kids playing around there; you didn't even have to have eyes to see that. There were scraps of candy-wrapper, the wispy remains of shot off cherry bombs, red and black. A few boards and a fluffy scatter of sawdust, as if something had been built there.

He remembered standing in the center of the clearing and scanning the trees, looking for their baby treehouse. He would spot it and then he would climb up and the scar-faced cunt would be cowering there, and he would use the knife to cut his throat and stand over him as he bled out, not leaving until he stopped twitching.

...But he hadn't been able to see any treehouse; neither had Twice or Kurogiri. The old familiar frustration rose in his throat. He and Kurogiri left Twice to guard the clearing while they went down the river. But there had been no sign of him there, either. He remembered bending over and picking up a rock and-

—9—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / THE BARRENS / 12:55 P.M.

-heaving it far down the stream, furious and bewildered. "Where the fuck did he go?" he demanded, wheeling toward Kurogiri.

Kurogiri shook his head slowly, his dark purple hair falling into his eyes, sweaty. "don't know," he said. "You're bleeding."

Shigaraki looked down and saw a dark spot, the size of a 5¥ coin, on the crotch of his jeans. The pain had withdrawn to a low, throbbing ache, but his underpants felt too small and too tight. His balls were swelling. He felt that anger inside him again, something like a knotted rope around his heart. That scar-faced cunt had done this.

"Where is he?" he hissed at Kurogiri.

"Don't know," Kurogiri said again in that same dull voice. He seemed hypnotized, sunstruck, not really there at all. "Ran away, I guess. He could be all the way over to the train yard by now."

"He's not," Shigaraki said. "He's hiding. They've got a place and he's hiding there. Maybe it's not a treehouse. Maybe it's something else."

"What?"

"I... don't... know!" Shigaraki shouted, and Kurogiri flinched back.

Shigaraki stood in the Shibui, the cold water boiling over the tops of his sneakers, looking around. His eyes fixed on a cylinder poking out of the embankment about twenty feet downstream- a pumping-station. He climbed out of the water and walked down to it, feeling a sort of necessary dread settle into him. His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal flow.

Low humming came from the pumping-station, and beyond it he could see a pipe jutting out of the embankment over the Shibui. A steady flow of sludge pulsed out of the pipe and ran into the water.

He leaned over the cylinder's round iron top.

"Tomura?" Kurogiri called nervously. "Tomura? What're you doing?"

Shigaraki paid no attention. He put his eye to one of the round holes in the iron and saw nothing but blackness. He exchanged eye for ear.

"Wait..."

The voice drifted up to him from the blackness inside, and Shigaraki felt his interior temperature plummet to zero, his veins and arteries freezing into crystal tubes of ice. But with these sensations came an almost unknown feeling: love. His eyes widened. A clownish smile spread his lips in a large nerveless arc. It was the voice from the moon. Now It was down in the pumping-station... down in the drains.

"Wait... watch..."

He waited, but there was no more: only the steady soporific drone of the pumping machinery. He walked back down to where Kurogiri stood on the bank, watching him cautiously. Shigaraki ignored him and hollered for Twice. In a little while Twice came.

"Come on," he said.

"What are we gonna do, Tomura?" Twice asked.

"Wait. Watch."

They crept back toward the clearing and sat down. Shigaraki tried to pull his underpants away from his aching groin, but it hurt too much.

"Tomura, what-" Twice began.

"Shhh!"

Twice fell obligingly silent. Shigaraki had Camels but he didn't share them out. He didn't want the cunt to smell cigarette smoke if he was around. He could have explained, but there was no need. The voice had only spoken two words to him, but they seemed to explain everything. They played down here. Soon the others would come back. Why settle for just the cunt when they could have all seven of the little cocksuckers?

They waited and watched. Kurogiri and Twice seemed to have gone to sleep with their eyes open. It was not a long wait, but there was time for Shigaraki to think of a good many things. How he had found the switchblade this morning, for instance. It wasn't the same one he'd had on the last day of school; he'd lost that one somewhere. This one looked a lot cooler.

It came in the mail.

Sort of.

He had stood on the porch, looking at their battered, leaning, box, trying to grasp what he was seeing. The box was decked with balloons. Two were tied to the metal hook where the postman sometimes hung packages; others were tied to the flag. White, yellow, blue, green, grey, red, orange. It was as if some weird circus had crept by in the dead of night, leaving only this sign.

As he approached the mailbox, he saw there were doodles on the balloons- little doodles of the faces of the kids who had deviled him all this summer, the kids who seemed to mock him at every turn.

He had stared at these apparitions, gape-mouthed, and then the balloons popped, one by one. That had been good; it was as if he were making them pop just by thinking about it, killing them with his mind.

The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Shigaraki walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn't get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, he felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular package inside. He pulled it out. SHIGARAKI TOMURA, HOKKAIDO, IRUSU the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts: MR ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE.

He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.

His adoptive father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his white hair looked greasy. Shigaraki knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father's breathing, watching his father's horsy lips purse and pucker with each breath.

Shigaraki placed the business-end of the switchknife against his father's scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Shigaraki kept the knife like that for almost five minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade's neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him- it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.

Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Shigaraki and so he pushed the silver button. There was a click inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Shigaraki Senior's neck. It went in as easily as the tines of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.

Senior's eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Shigaraki's knee and squeezed convulsively. Shigaraki didn't mind. Presently the hand fell away. The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Mr. Shigaraki was dead.

Shigaraki pulled the knife out, wiped it on the dirty sheet that covered his father's pallet, and pushed the blade back in until the spring clicked again. He looked at his adoptive father without much interest. The voice had told him about the day's work while he knelt beside Shigaraki senior with the knife against his neck. The voice had explained everything. So he went into the other room to call Twice and Kurogiri.

Now here they were, all three, and although his balls still ached horribly, the knife made a comforting bulge in his left front pants pocket. He felt that the cutting would begin soon. The others would come back down to resume whatever baby game they had been playing, and then the cutting would begin. The voice from the moon had laid it out for him as he knelt by his father, and on his way into town he had been unable to take his eyes from that pale ghost-disc in the sky. He saw that there was indeed a man in the moon- a grisly glimmering ghost-face with cratered holes for eyes and a glabrous grin that seemed to reach halfway up Its cheekbones. It talked

("We float down here, Tomura. We all float. You'll float too.")

all the way to town. "Kill them all, Tomura," the ghost-voice from the moon said, and Shigaraki could dig it; Shigaraki felt he could second that emotion. He would kill them all, his tormentors, and then those feelings- that he was losing his grip, that he was coming inexorably to a larger world he would not be able to dominate as he had dominated the playyard at Irusu Elementary, that in the wider world Ana and the faggot and the stuttering freak might somehow grow larger while he somehow only grew older-would be gone.

He would kill them all, and the voices- those inside and the one which spoke to him from the moon- would leave him alone. He would kill them and then go back to the house and sit on the back porch with his father's rifle across his lap. He would drink one of his father's premium's. He would listen to the radio, too, but no baseball. He hated baseball. He would listen to music instead. Everything would be good then; everything would be perfect then; everything would be okey-fine then and anything which might come next would not matter. The voice would take care of him- he sensed that. If you took care of It, It would take care of you. That was how things had always been in Irusu.

...But the kids had to be stopped, stopped soon, stopped today. The voice had told him so.

Shigaraki took his new knife out of his pocket, looked at it, turned it this way and that, admiring the way the sun winked and slid off the chrome facing. Then Twice was grabbing his arm and hissing: "Look at that, Tomura! Look!"

Shigaraki looked and felt the clear light of understanding burst over him. A square section of the clearing was rising as if by magic, revealing a growing slice of darkness beneath. For just a moment he felt a jolt of terror as it occurred to him that this might be the owner of the voice... for surely It lived somewhere under the city. Then he heard the gritty squall of dirt in the hinges and understood. They hadn't been able to see the treehouse because there was none.

"We were standing right on top of them," Kurogiri muttured, and as Sero Hanta's narrow head and shoulders appeared in the square hatchway in the center of the clearing, he made as if to charge forward. Shigaraki grabbed him and held him back.

"Aren't we gonna get them, Tomura?" Twice asked as Sero boosted himself up, and turned around to look into the hole in the earth.

"We'll get them," Shigaraki said, never taking his eyes from the hated skinny-boy. Another ball-kicker. 'I'll carve you up good, Ana. The last day of school will look like child's play.' "don't worry."

The sickly boy was helping scar-face out of the hole. Scar-face looked around doubtfully, and for a moment Shigaraki believed he looked right at him. Then his mismatch eyes passed on. The two of them murmured together and then they pushed their way into the thick undergrowth and were gone.

"Come on," Shigaraki said, when the sound of snapping branches and rustling leaves had faded almost to inaudibility. "We'll follow them. But keep back and keep quiet. I want them all together."

The three of them crossed the clearing like soldiers on patrol, bent low, their eyes wide and moving. Twice paused to look down into the clubhouse and shook his head in admiring wonder. "I was sitting right on top of them..." he said.

Shigaraki motioned him forward impatiently.

They took the path, because it was quieter. They were halfway back to Taiko Street when scar-face and Ana-boy, Ana holding onto scar's sleeve,('So maybe the hussy's son isn't the only fruit in the bunch after all' Shigaraki thought in a kind of ecstasy), emerged almost directly in front of them.

Luckily, their backs were to Shigaraki's group, and neither of them looked around. Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and Twice froze, then drew into the shadows at the side of the path. Soon Sero and Todoroki were just articles of clothing seen through a tangle of shrubs and bushes. The three of them began to pursue again... cautiously. Shigaraki took the knife out again and-

—10—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / SHIGARAKI GETS A LIFT / 2:30 A.M.

-pressed the chrome button in the handle. The blade popped out. He looked at it dreamily in the moonlight. He liked the way the starlight ran along the blade. He had no idea exactly what time it was. He was drifting in and out of reality now.

A sound impinged on his consciousness and began to grow. It was a car engine. It drew closer. Shigaraki's eyes widened in the dark. He held the knife more tightly, waiting for the car to pass by.

It didn't. It drew up at the curb beyond the former elementary school's hedge and simply stopped there, engine idling. Grimacing (his belly was stiffening now; it had gone board-hard, and the blood seeping sluggishly between his fingers had the consistency of sap just before you took the taps out of the maples in late March or early April), he got on his knees and pushed aside the stiff hedge-branches. He could see headlights and the shape of a car. 'Cops?' His hand squeezed the knife and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed.

"I sent you a ride, Tomura," the voice whispered. "Sort of a taxi, if you can dig that. After all, we have to get you over there to The Shijima pretty soon. The night's getting old."

The voice uttered one thin bonelike chuckle and fell silent. Now the only sounds were the crickets and the steady rumble of the idling car. 'Sounds like cherry-bomb mufflers,' Shigaraki thought distractedly.

He got awkwardly to his feet and worked his way back to the sidewalk. He peeked around at the car. Not a cop car: no bubbles on the roof, and the shape was all wrong. The shape was... old.

Shigaraki heard that giggle again... or perhaps it was only the wind.

He emerged from the shadow of the hedge, crawled under the chain, got to his feet again, and began to walk toward the idling car, which existed in a black-and-white Polaroid-snapshot world of bright moonlight and impenetrable shadow. Shigaraki was a mess: his hoodie was sticky with blood, and it had soaked through his jeans almost to the knees. His face was a pale blotch under a matted mop of hair.

He reached the curb and peered at the car, trying to make sense out of the hulk behind the wheel. But it was the car he recognized first- it was the one his father always swore he would own someday, a 1958 Plymouth Fury. It was red and white and Shigaraki knew (hadn't his father told him often enough?) that the engine rumbling under the hood was a V-8 327. Available horsepower of 255, able to hit seventy from the git-go in just about nine seconds, gobbling hi-test through its four-barrel carb. "I'm gonna get that car and then when I die they can bury me in it," Senior had been fond of saying... except, of course, he had never gotten the car and the state had buried him after Shigaraki had been taken away, raving and screaming of monsters, to the funny farm.

'If that's him inside I don't think I can take it,' Shigaraki thought, squeezing down on the knife, swaying drunkenly back and forth, looking at the shape behind the wheel.

Then the passenger door of the Fury swung open, the dome-light came on, and the driver turned to look at him. It was Twice. His face was a hanging ruin. One of his eyes was gone, and a rotted hole in one parchment cheek revealed blackened teeth. Perched on Twice's head was the Nippon-Ham fighter's baseball cap he had been wearing the day he died. It was turned around backward. Gray-green mold oozed along the bill.

"Twice!" Shigaraki cried, and agony ripped its way up from his belly, making him cry out again, wordlessly.

Twice's dead lips stretched in a grin, splitting open in whitish-grey bloodless folds. He held one twisted hand out toward the open door in invitation.

Shigaraki hesitated, then shuffled around the Fury's grille, allowing one hand to touch the V-shaped emblem there, just as he had always touched it when his father took him into the Sapporo showroom when he was a kid to look at this same car. As he reached the passenger side, grayness overwhelmed him in a soft wave and he had to grab the open door to keep his feet. He stood there, head down, breathing in snuffling gasps. At last the world came back -partway, anyhow- and he was able to work his way around the door and fall into the seat. Pain skewered his guts again, and fresh blood squirted out into his hand. It felt like warm jelly. He put his head back and gritted his teeth, the cords on his neck standing out. At last the pain began to subside a little.

The door swung shut by itself. The domelight went out. Shigaraki saw one of Twice's rotted hands close over the transmission lever and drop it into drive. The bunched white knots of Twice's knuckles glimmered through the decaying flesh of his fingers.

The Fury began to move down Taiko Street toward the Ori intersection.

"How are you, Jin?" Shigaraki heard himself say. It was stupid, of course- Twice couldn't be here, dead people couldn't drive cars- but it was all he could think of.

Twice didn't reply. His one sunken eye stared at the road. His teeth glared sickly at Shigaraki through the hole in his cheek. Shigaraki became vaguely aware that ole Twice smelled pretty ripe. Ole Twice smelled, in fact, like a basket of potatoes that had gone bad.

The glove compartment flopped open, banging Shigaraki's knees, and in the light of the small bulb inside he saw a bottle of Wild Turkey, half-full. He took it out, opened it, and had himself a good shot. It went down like cool silk and hit his stomach like an explosion of lava. He shuddered all over, moaning and then began to feel a little better, a little more connected to the world.

"Thanks," he said.

Twice's head turned toward him. Shigaraki could hear the tendons in Twice's neck. The sound was like the scream of rusty screen-door hinges. Twice regarded him for a moment with a dead one-eyed stare, and Shigaraki realized for the first time that most of Twice's nose was gone. It looked like something had been at his nose. Dog, maybe. Or maybe rats. Rats seemed more likely. The tunnels they had chased the little kids into that day had been full of rats.

Moving just as slowly, Twice's head turned toward the road again. Shigaraki was glad. Ole Twice staring at him that way, well, Shigaraki hadn't been able to dig it too much. There had been something in Twice's single sunken eye. Reproach? Anger? What?

'There is a dead boy behind the wheel of this car.'

Shigaraki looked down at his arm and saw that huge goosebumps had formed there. He quickly had another snort from the bottle. This one hit a little easier and spread its warmth farther.

The Plymouth rolled through the intersection and made its way towards up-mile hill... at this time of night there was no traffic; all the traffic-lights had changed to yellow bunkers splashing the empty streets and closed buildings with steady pulses of light. It was so quiet that Shigaraki could hear the relays clicking inside each light... or was that his imagination?

"Never meant to leave you behind that day, Jin," Shigaraki said. "I mean, if that was, you know, on your mind."

That scream of dried tendons again. Twice looking at him again with his one sunken eye. And his lips stretched in a terrible grin that revealed gray-black gums which were growing their own garden of mold. 'What sort of a grin is that?' Shigaraki asked himself as the car purred silkily up Ori Road. 'Is it a forgiving grin? An old-pals grin? Or is it the kind of grin that says I'm going to get you, Tomura, I'm going to get you for running out on me and Giri? What kind of grin?'

"You have to understand how it was," Shigaraki said, and then stopped. How had it been? It was all confused in his mind, the pieces jumbled up like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had just been dumped out on one of the shitty cardtables in the rec room at Juniper Hill. 'How had it been, exactly?' They had followed Ana and scar-face back to Taiko Street and had waited back in the bushes, watching them climb up the embankment to the top. If they had disappeared from view, he and Kurogiri and Twice would have dropped the stalking game and simply gone after them; two of them were better than none at all, and the rest would be along in time...

...But they hadn't disappeared. They had simply leaned against the fence, talking and watching the street. Every now and then they would check down the slope into the Barrens, but Shigaraki kept his two troops well out of sight.

The sky, Shigaraki remembered, had become overcast, clouds moving in from the east, the air thickening. There would be rain that afternoon.

'What had happened next? What-'

A bony, leathery hand closed over his forearm and Shigaraki screamed. He had been drifting away again into that cottony grayness, but Twice's dreadful touch and the dagger of pain in his stomach from the scream brought him back. He looked around and Twice's face was less than two inches from Shigaraki's; he gasped in breath and wished he hadn't. Twice really had gone bad. Shigaraki was again reminded of potatoes going quietly putrescent in some shadowy shed comer. His stomach roiled.

He remembered the end suddenly- the end for Twice and Kurogiri, anyway. How something had come out of the darkness as they stood in a shaft with a sewer-grating at the top, wondering which way to go next. Something... Shigaraki hadn't been able to tell what. Until Kurogiri gasped out, "Frankenstein! It's Frankenstein!" And so it was, it was the Frankenstein monster, with bolts coming out of its neck and a deep stitched scar across its forehead, lurching along in shoes like a child's blocks.

"Frankensteinl" Kurogiri cried, "Fr-" And then Kurogiri's head was gone, Kurogiri's head was flying across the shaftway to strike the stonework of the far side with a sour sticky thud. The monster's watery yellow eyes had fallen on Shigaraki, and Shigaraki had frozen. His bladder let go and he felt warmth flood down his legs.

The creature lurched toward him, and Twice... Twice had...

"Listen, I know I ran," Shigaraki said. "I shouldn't have done that. But... but..."

Twice only stared.

"I got lost," Shigaraki whispered, as if to tell Twice that he had paid, too. It sounded weak, like saying 'Yeah, I know you got killed, Jin, but I got one fuck of a splinter under my thumbnail.' But it had been bad... really bad. He had wandered around in a world of stinking darkness for hours, and finally, he remembered, he had started to scream. At some point he had fallen- a long, dizzying fall, in which he had time to think 'Oh good, in a minute I'll be dead, I'll be out of this-' and then he had been in fast-running water. Under the Canal, he supposed. He had come out into fading sunlight, had flailed his way toward the bank, and had finally climbed out of the Shibui less than fifty yards from the place where Auyoma Yuga would drown fourteen years later. He slipped, fell, bashed his head, blacked out. When he woke up it was after dark. He had somehow found his way out to Route 2 and had hooked a ride to the home place. And there the cops had been waiting for him.

...But that was then and this was now. Twice had stepped in front of Frankenstein's monster and it had peeled the left side of his face down to the skull- that was as much Shigaraki saw before fleeing. But now Twice was back, and Twice was pointing at something.

Shigaraki saw that they had pulled up in front of The Shijima Hotel and Sauna, and suddenly he understood perfectly. The Shijima was the only real hotel left in Irusu. Back in '05 there had also been the Eastern Star at the end of Main, and the Traveller's Rest on Omagari. Both had disappeared during urban renewal (Shigaraki knew all about this; he had read the Irusu News faithfully every day in Juniper Hill). All the hotels that had popped up afterwards weren't real- not really- not in the sense that The Shajima was.

'That's where they'll be,' he thought. 'Right in there. All of them that are left. Asleep in their beds, with visions of sugarplums- or sewers, maybe- dancing in their heads. And I'll get them. One by one, I'll get them.'

He took the bottle of Wild Turkey out again and bit off a snort. He could feel fresh blood trickling into his lap, and the seat was tacky beneath him, but the whiskey made it better; the whisky seemed to make it not matter.

"Look," he said to Twice, "I'm sorry I ran. I don't know why I ran. Please... don't be mad."

Twice spoke for the first and only time, but the voice wasn't his voice. The voice that came from Twice's rotting mouth was deep and powerful, terrifying. Shigaraki whimpered at the sound of it. It was the voice from the moon, the voice of the clown, the voice he had heard in his dreams of drains and sewers where water rushed on and on.

"Just shut up and get them," the voice said.

"Sure," Shigaraki nodded. "sure, okay, I want to, no problem-"

He put the bottle back in the glove compartment. Its neck chattered briefly like teeth. And he saw a paper where the bottle had been. He took it out and unfolded it, leaving bloody fingerprints on the corners. Embossed across the top was The Shajima's logo.

Below this, carefully printed in capital letters:

MIDORIYA IZUKU - ROOM 05

TODOROKI SHOUTO - ROOM 10

KIRISHIMA EJIROU - ROOM 13

BAKUGO KATSUKI - ROOM 16

SERO HANTA - ROOM 22

Their room numbers. That was good. That saved time. "Thanks, Twi-"

But Twice was gone. The driver's seat was empty. There was only the Nippon-Ham fighter's cap lying there, mold crusted on its bill. And some slimy stuff on the knob of the gearshift.

Shigaraki stared, his heart beating painfully in his throat... and then he seemed to hear something move and shift in the back seat. He got out quickly, opening the door and almost falling to the pavement in his haste. He gave the Fury, which still burbled softly through its dual cherry-bomb mufflers a wide berth.

It was hard to walk; each step pulled and tore at his belly. But he gained the sidewalk and stood there, looking at the two-floor wooden building which, along with the library and the Aladdin Theater and the elementary school, was one of the few he remembered clearly from the old days. Most of the lights on the second floor were out now, but the frosted-glass globes which flanked the main doorway blazed softly in the darkness, haloed with moisture from the lingering groundfog.

Shigaraki made his laborious way toward and between them, shouldering open one of the doors.

The lobby was wee-hours silent. There was a faded rug on the floor. The ceiling was a huge mural, executed in rectangular panels, which showed scenes from Irusu's logging days. There were overstuffed sofas and wing chairs and a great fireplace which was now dead and silent, a birch log thrown across the andirons- a real log, no gas; the fireplace in the The Shajima was not just a piece of lobby stage dressing. Plants spilled out of low pots. The glass double doors leading to the new addition bar and restaurant were closed. From some inner office, Shigaraki could hear the gabble of a TV, turned low.

He lurched across the lobby, his pants and shirt streaked with blood. Blood was grimed into the folds of his hands; it ran down his cheeks and slashed his forehead like warpaint. His eyes bulged from their sockets. Anyone in the lobby who had seen him would have run, screaming, in terror. But there was no one.

He made his way to the arch on the far side of the room. A hallway stretched parallel on either side. Directly across from the archway was a tiled corridor, housing the elevator.

Shigaraki looked down at his stomach, then down at the paper. He remembered that back in the old day's, rooms 01-12 made up the bottom floor, while rooms 13-24 took up the second. There were more of them on the second floor... and with how his stomach was feeling... well, three were better than two.

The elevator doors opened as soon as he pushed the UP button. There was a faint hum of machinery as the elevator began to rise.

He slumped against the rear wall of the car, eyes half-closed. The hum of the elevator was soothing. Like the hum of the machinery in the pumping-stations of the drainage system. That day: it kept coming back to him. How everything seemed almost prearranged, as if all of them were just playing parts. How Kurogiri and Twice had seemed... well, almost drugged. He remembered-

The car came to a stop, jolting him and sending another wave of griping pain into his stomach. The doors slid open. Shigaraki stepped out into the silent hallway (more plants here, hanging ones, spiderplants, he didn't want to touch any of them, not those oozy green runners, they reminded him too much of the things that had been hanging down there in the dark). He rechecked the paper. Kirishima 13. Bakugo 16. Sero 22.

'Might as well start from the bottom and work my way up.'

Somewhere on the south side of the hall, a door shut. Shigaraki jumped, wheeled around, but saw no one... it seemed who ever it was, they had just missed one another. His heart stilled.

Shigaraki started toward Kirishima's room, running one hand along the wall for support, leaving a faint bloody track on the wallpaper portion as he went (ah, but he stepped away whenever he came close to one of the hanging spiderplants; he wanted nothing to do with those). His breathing was harsh and dry.

Here it was. Shigaraki pulled the switchblade from his pocket, swashed his dry lips with his tongue, and knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again, louder this time.

"Hm... 'Suki?... you come back for your jacket?..."

Sleepy. Good. He'd be in his pajama's, only half-awake. And when he opened the door, Shigaraki would drive the switchblade directly into the hollow at the base of his neck, the vulnerable hollow just below the adam's apple.

"Bellboy, sir," Shigaraki said. "Message from your spouse." He had formed the word 'wife' in his mouth, but something- It- had taken control of his vocal chords. He waited, coldly alert. He heard footsteps- then they paused.

"My... spouse?..." He sounded alarmed. Good. He would be more alarmed in a few seconds. A pulse beat steadily in Shigaraki's right temple.

Kirishima was quiet for a long time, a very long time. Shigaraki felt his stomach throb.

Finally: "What... did they say?..."

"I don't know, sir. I was just told you needed you to call."

There was another pause, then a metallic rattle as Kirishima fumbled with the chain. Grinning, Shigaraki pushed the button on the switchblade's handle. Click. He held the blade up by his cheek, ready. He heard the thumb-bolt turn. In just a moment he would plunge the blade into the skinny little creep's throat. He waited. The door opened and Kirishima-

—11—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / THE LOSERS ALL TOGETHER / 1:20 P.M.

-was with Iida and Bakugo, just coming out of the Ori Road Trade, each with an armful of snacks. Bakugo and Iida had bomb pop's.

Kirishima was having trouble keeping up with them. Iida, the tallest of their group, had naturally longer strides, and Bakugo Katsuki was a notoriously fast walker. Kirishima had to sprint as quickly as he could, which was not, in truth, very quickly, just to keep up. One arm was immured in a red plaster cast, he had his share of snack foods in the other.

"Stop lagging, shark teeth!" Bakugo called and Kirishima broke into another stumbling sprint, falling into stride beside them for only a few moments.

"Do you want me to carry that stuff for you, Ejirou?" Iida asked. He still had on the glasses Kaminari Denki had fixed for him on Neibolt street, they sat crookedly on his face.

"I can carry it," Kirishima said, a little out of breath, and nodded at Bakugo's bomb pop. "Gimme some of that, Suki."

"Your psycho mom wouldn't approve, Sharky." Bakugo said. He began to eat faster. He had just gotten to the blue part, his favorite. "Germs and shit- hell, maybe even cancer too."

"I'll chance it," Kirishima said, and then added teasingly. "Don't be such a prude, we've kissed for fuck's sake, if you were gonna give me a disease-"

"-Oh my god, fine- fuck-" Reluctantly, Bakugo held his bomb pop up to Kirishima's mouth... and snatched it away before Kirishima even had a chance to get a lick. He shoved the rest into his mouth, and gave him a 'I win!' grin. Kirishima kicked him in the shin.

"Ow- asshole."

"Beep-Beep Katsuki."

Bakugo glowered at him, but didn't say anything more, wiping the sticky remains on his shorts.

"You can have the rest of mine, if you want," Iida said. "I'm still full from lunch."

"Thank you, Tenya." Kirishima smiled, shifting the snacks so they were being held underneath his good arm. He grabbed the popsicle from Iida gingerly.

The three of them were walking along companionably enough now, headed up toward Taiko Street and the Barrens. Irusu seemed lost in a deep hazy afternoon doze. The blinds of most of the houses they passed were pulled down. Toys stood abandoned on lawns, as if their owners had been hastily called in from play or put down for naps. Thunder rumbled thickly in the west.

"Oi- why'd you take his popsicle? You haven't been kissing Iidad, have you?"

"-I told you to stop calling me that, Katsuki-"

"No, Katsuki," Kirishima said. "I just know Tenya. He's tidy. He probably has the least germs out of any of us- me included."

Iida's cheeks went a little pink as he rubbed the back of his neck, smiling softly.

"That's a real weird thing to say."

"Is not."

"Is."

"Is not." Kirishima sighed, smiling. Bakugo could be so difficult sometimes... but that made him all the more alluring. Looking around the abandoned street, he reached for Bakugo's hand. He expected Bakugo to pull away and glare, but instead he squeezed back. Kirishima felt his heart flutter.

"I guess everybody's asleep," Iida said softly after a moment of silence, looking around. Kirishima and Bakugo did as well. Their breaths seemed to echo back to them in the eerie stillness.

Bakugo tossed his empty bomb pop wrapper and popsicle stick nonchalantly into the gutter. "Ew- fuck, you're right. You ever see it so quiet? What, did everybody go to Sapporo for the day?"

"H-H-H-Hey you guh-guh-guys!" Deku suddenly shouted from behind them, making the three of them jump. "Wuh-Wuh-hait up!"

Kirishima turned, delighted as always to hear Deku's voice. He was wheeling Silver around the corner of Ori and Main, outdistancing Kaminari, although Kaminari's bike was almost brand-new.

Deku rolled up to them doing perhaps twenty miles an hour, the pokemon cards clothespinned to the fender-struts roaring. Then he back-pedalled, locked the brakes, and produced an admirably long skid-mark.

"And here I was hoping a car would come around the corner and mow you down right here." Bakugo sighed, shaking his head. "I guess today just isn't our day, huh?"

"Buh-Beep-Beep Kacchan," Deku said, kindly dismissive.

Kaminari rode up beside him a moment later, panting a little. "Have you guys seen Hanta or Roki?" Sweat stood out on his face in little drops. "Geez, Deku- How fast does that bike go, anyway?"

Deku laughed. "I d-d-don't nun-know, e-exactly. Pretty f-f-fast."

"I haven't seen them," Iida said. "They're probably down in the barrens."

"Yeah, they're probably chain smoking their way to chemo-therapy as we speak."

"Buh-buh-buh-"

"Beep-beep, Kacchan- yeah yeah," Bakugo said for him, annoyed, and they all laughed.

They started toward the Barrens again, Kaminari and Deku pushing their bikes. Conversation was brisk at first, but then it lagged. Looking at Deku, Kirishima saw an uneasy look on his face, and he thought that maybe the quiet was getting to him, too. He knew Bakugo had meant it as a joke, but it really did seem that everyone in Irusu had gone to Sapporo for the day... to somewhere. Not a car moved on the street; there wasn't a single old lady pushing a carrier full of groceries back to her house or apartment.

"Sure is quiet, isn't it?" Kirishima ventured, but Deku only nodded.

They crossed to the Barrens side of Taiko Street, and then they saw Sero and Todoroki, running toward them, shouting. Kirishima was shocked by Todoroki's appearance; he was usually so perfect looking, his hair always washed and glittering. Now he was streaked with what looked like every kind of gluck in the universe. His eyes were wide and wild. There was a scratch on one cheek. His jeans were caked with who the hell knows and his T-shirt was torn.

Sero fell behind him, puffing, looking like he was about to pass out.

"Can't go down in the Barrens," Todoroki was panting. "The- The-... Tomura... Kurogiri... they're down there somewhere... the knife... he has a knife..."

"Sluh-slow down," Deku said, taking charge at once in that effortless, almost unconscious way of his. He glanced at Sero as he ran up, crouching when he finally stilled, narrow chest heaving.

"Sho says Tomura's gone crazy," Sero gasped. "Say's he's lost it."

"Shit, you mean he used to have it?" Bakugo asked, and spat on the ground.

"Sh-Shut uh-up, Kuh-Katsuki," Deku said sharply, and then looked back at Todoroki. "Teh-Tell," he said. Kirishima's hand crept into his pocket and touched his inhaler. He didn't know what all this was, but he already knew it wasn't good.

Forcing himself to speak, Todoroki managed to get out an edited version of the story- a version that began with Shigaraki , Kurogiri, and Twice catching up to him on the street. He didn't tell them about his father- he was desperately ashamed of that.

When he was finished Deku stood silent for a moment, hands in his pockets, chin down, Silver's handlebars leaning against his chest. The others waited, throwing frequent glances at the railing that ran along the edge of the dropoff. Deku thought for a long time, and no one interrupted him. Kirishima became aware, suddenly and effortlessly, that this might be the final act. That was how the day's silence felt, wasn't it? The feeling that the whole town had up and left, leaving only the deserted husks of buildings behind.

Bakugo was thinking about the picture in Eri's album that had suddenly come to life.

Todoroki was thinking about his father, how pale his eyes had been.

Kaminari was thinking about the bird.

Sero was thinking about the decapitated heads, and a smell like iron and decay.

Iida Tenya was thinking of bluejeans, black and dripping, and hands as white as wrinkled paper, also dripping.

"Cuh-Cuh-Come oh-oh-on," Deku said at last. "W-We're going d-d-down."

"Deku-" Sero started. His face was troubled. "Shouto said Tomura was really crazy. That he meant to kill-"

"Ih-It's nuh-not theirs," Deku said, gesturing at the green dagger-shaped slash of the Barrens to their right and below them- the underbrush, the choked groves of trees, the bamboo, the glint of water. "Ih-Ih-It's not their pruh-pruh-hopperty," He looked around at them, his face grim. "I'm t-t-tired of b-being scuh-schuh-hared by them. We b-b-beat them in the ruh-rockfight, and if we h-h-have to beat them a-a-again, we'll duh-duh-do it."

"But Deku," Kirishima whispered, "what if it's not just them?

Deku turned to Kirishima, and with real shock Kirishima saw how tired and drawn Deku's face was- there was something frightening about that face, but it wasn't until much, much later, as an adult while redressing after Bakugo Katsuki's late night departure, that he understood what that frightening thing was: it was the face of a boy driven close to the brink of madness, a boy who was perhaps ultimately no more sane or in control of his own decisions than Shigaraki was. Yet the essential Midoriya Izuku was still there, looking out of those haunted, scarified, eyes... an angry, determined Midoriya Izuku, but Midoriya Izuku all the same.

"Well," he said, "whuh-whuh-what if it's nuh-nuh-not?

No one answered him. Thunder boomed, closer now. Kirishima looked at the sky and saw the stormclouds moving in from the west in black thunderheads. It was going to rain a bitch, as his mother sometimes said.

"Nuh-nuh-how I'll t-t-tell you what," Deku said, looking at them. "None of you have to guh-guh-go w-with me if you d-don't want to. That's uh-uh-up to you."

"Fuck that," Bakugo said "I'm coming. I've been wanting to kick Tomura's ass again since the rock fight."

"I'll go too," Sero said.

"Okay," Kaminari said with a quick, sad, glance at Todoroki. "Sure."

Todoroki and Iida agreed, and Kirishima last.

"No, shitty-hair," Bakugo said. "You're sort of a cripple right now- it's not happening."

Kirishima looked at Deku.

"I w-w-want h-him," Deku said, and Bakugo glowered dangerously. "You w-w-walk with muh-muh-me, Eh-Eh-Ejirou. I'll keep an eye on yuh-you."

"Thanks, Deku," Kirishima said. Deku's tired, half-crazy face seemed suddenly lovely to him- lovely and well loved. He felt a dim sense of amazement. 'I'd die for him, I guess, if he told me to. What kind of power is that?.. If it makes you look like Deku looks now, it's maybe not such a good power to have.'

Thunder boomed again, close and loud enough this time to make them jump and huddle closer together. The wind was picking up, rattling trash around in the gutter. The first of the dark clouds sailed over the hazy ringed disc of the sun, and their shadows melted away. The wind was cold, chilling the sweat on Kirishima's uncovered arm. He shivered.

Deku looked at Iida and said a peculiar thing then.

"You got your b-b-bird-book, Tenya?"

Iida nodded, and tapped his hip pocket.

Deku looked at them again. "Let's g-g-go down," he said.

They went down the embankment single- file except for Deku, who stayed with Kirishima as he had promised. He allowed Bakugo to push Silver down, and when they had reached the bottom, Deku put his bike in its accustomed place under the bridge. Then they stood together, looking around.

The coming storm did not produce a darkness; not even, precisely, a dimness. But the quality of the light had changed, and things stood out in a kind of dreamlike steely relief: shadowless, clear, chiselled. Kirishima felt a sinking of horror and apprehension in his guts as he realized why the quality of this light seemed so familiar- it was the same sort of light he remembered from the house at 29 Neibolt Street.

A streak of lightning tattooed the clouds, bright enough to make him wince. He put a hand up to his face and found himself counting: One... two... three... And then the thunder came in a single coughing bark, an explosive sound, a sound like an M-80 firecracker, and they drew even closer together.

"Wasn't any rain forecast this morning," Sero said uneasily. "The news said hot and hazy."

Kaminari was scanning the sky. The clouds up there were black-bottomed keelboats, high and heavy, swiftly overrunning the blue haze that had covered the sky from horizon to horizon when he and Deku came out of the Toshinori-Midoriya house after lunch. "It's coming fast..." he said, sounding dreamy and awestruck. "...Never saw a storm come so fast..." And as if in confirmation, thunder whacked again.

"C-C-Come on," Deku said. "L-Let's put th-th-the snuh-snuh-snacks in the cluh-cluh-clubhouse."

They started along the path they had beaten in the weeks since the incident of the dam. Deku and Kirishima were at the head of the line, their shoulders brushing the broad green leaves of the shrubs, the others behind them. The wind gusted again, making the leaves on the trees and bushes whisper together. Farther ahead, the bamboo rattled eerily, like drums in a jungle tale.

"Deku?" Kirishima said in a low voice.

"What?"

"I thought this was just in the movies, but... " Kirishima laughed a little. "I feel like somebody's watching me."

"Oh, they're th-th-there, all r-r-right," Deku said matter-of-factly.

Kirishima looked around nervously and held his portion of the snacks flush against him. He-

—12—

MAY 31ST, 2020 / ROOM 13 / 3:05 A.M.

-opened the door on a monster from a horror comic.

A gore-streaked apparition stood there and it could only be Shigaraki Tomura. Shigaraki looked like a corpse which had returned from the grave. Shigaraki's face was black with anger and horror. His right hand was cocked at cheek-level, and even as Kirishima's eyes widened and he began to draw in his first shocked breath, the hand pistoned forward, the switchblade glittering like silk.

With no thought- there was no time; if he had stopped to think he would have died- Kirishima slammed the door closed. It struck Shigaraki's forearm, deflecting the knife's course so that it swung in a savage side-to-side arc less than an inch from Kirishima's neck.

There was a crunch as the door pinched Shigaraki's arm against the jamb. Shigaraki uttered a muffled cry. His hand opened. The knife clattered to the floor. Kirishima kicked it. It skittered under the TV stand.

Shigaraki threw his weight against the door. If Kirishima hadn't been in such a haze, he'd of been able to hold Shigaraki off. He'd been a mess of guilt and post-sex glow- he had momentarily allowed himself to forget where he was.

Kirishima was driven back; his knees struck the bed where Bakugo's leather jacket still lay and he fell on top of it. Shigaraki came into the room and swept the door shut behind him. He twisted the thumb-bolt as Kirishima sat up, wide-eyed, his throat already starting to whistle.

"Okay, wheezy," Shigaraki said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the floor, hunting for the knife. He didn't see it. Kirishima groped on the nighttable and found one of the two bottles of Perrier water he had ordered earlier that day. This was the full one; he had drunk the other before going to Chargebolt's because his nerves were shot and he had a bad case of acid-burn. Perrier was very good for digestion.

As Shigaraki dismissed the knife and started toward him, Kirishima gripped the green pear-shaped bottle by the neck and smashed it on the edge of the nighttable. Perrier foamed and fizzed across it, flooding out most of the pill-bottles that stood there.

Shigaraki's hoodie and pants were heavy with blood, both fresh and semi-dried. His right hand now hung at a strange angle.

"Goddamn loser," Shigaraki said, "teach you to throw rocks."

He made it to the bed and reached for Kirishima, who still hardly realized what was happening. No more than forty seconds had elapsed since he had opened the door. Shigaraki grabbed for him. Kirishima thrust the ragged base of the Perrier bottle at him. It ripped into Shigaraki's face, pulling open his right cheek in a twisted flap and puncturing Shigaraki's right eye.

Shigaraki uttered a breathless scream and staggered backward. His slit eye, leaking whitish-yellow fluid, hung loosely from its socket. His cheek sprayed blood in a gaudy fountain. Kirishima's own cry was louder. He got off the bed and went toward Shigaraki- to help him, perhaps, he wasn't really sure- and Shigaraki lurched at him again. Kirishima thrust with the Perrier bottle as if with a fencing sword, and this time the jagged points of green glass punched deep into Shigaraki's left hand and sawed at his fingers. Fresh blood flowed. Shigaraki made a thick grunting noise, the sound, almost, of a man clearing his throat, and shoved Kirishima with his right hand.

Kirishima flew back and struck the birch-wood desk underneath the room's lone window. His arm twisted behind him somehow and he fell on it heavily. The pain was a sudden sickening flare. He felt the bone go along the fault-line of that old break, and he had to clench his teeth against a scream of agony.

For the second time in his life, Shigaraki Tomura broke his arm.

A shadow blotted out the light. Shigaraki Tomura was standing over him, swaying back and forth. His knees buckled. His left hand was dripping blood on the front of Kirishima's shirt.

Kirishima had held onto the stump of the Perrier bottle and now, as Shigaraki's knees came completely unhinged, he got it in front of him, jagged base pointing upward, the cap braced against his sternum. Shigaraki came down like a tree, impaling himself on the bottle. Kirishima felt it shatter in his hand and a fresh bolt of grinding agony shuddered through his arm, which was still trapped under his body. Fresh warmth cascaded over him. He wasn't sure if this batch was Shigaraki's blood or his.

Shigaraki twitched like a landed trout. His shoes rattled an almost syncopated beat on the carpet. Kirishima could smell his rotten breath. Then Shigaraki stiffened and rolled over. The bottle protruded grotesquely from his midsection, capped end pointing toward the ceiling, as if it had grown there.

"Gug..." Shigaraki said, and said no more. He looked up at the ceiling. Kirishima thought he might be dead.

Kirishima fought off the waves of faintness that wanted to cover him over and drag him down. He got to his knees, and finally to his feet. There was fresh pain as his broken arm swung out in front of him and that cleared his head a little Wheezing, fighting for breath, he made it to the nighttable. He picked his aspirator out of a puddle of carbonated water, stuck it in his mouth, and triggered it off. He shuddered at the taste, then gave himself another blast. He looked around at the body on the carpet- could that be Shigaraki Tomura? could it possibly be? It was. Grown old, his hair more gray than blue, his body now lanky and skeleton-like, it was still Shigaraki. And Shigaraki was dead. At long last, Shigaraki Tomura was-

'Gug," Shigaraki said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for holds which only Shigaraki could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Kirishima shrinking back against the wall, and tried to get up.

He opened his mouth and a stream of blood gushed out. Shigaraki collapsed again.

Heart racing, Kirishima fumbled for the hotel telephone and succeeded only in knocking it off the table and onto the bed. He snatched it up and dialed 0. The phone rang again and again and again.

'Come on,' Kirishima thought, 'what are you doing down there, jacking off? Come on, please, answer the fucking phone!'

It rang again and again. Kirishima kept his eyes on Shigaraki, expecting him to start trying to gain his feet again at any moment. Blood. Shit, so much blood.

"Desk," a fuzzy, resentful voice said at last.

"Ring Midoriya's room," Kirishima said. "Quick as you can." With his other ear he was now listening to the rooms around him. How loud had they been? Was someone going to pound on the door and ask if everything was alright in there?

"You sure you want me to ring?" the clerk asked. "It's ten after three."

"Yes, do it!" Kirishima nearly screamed. The hand holding the phone was trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm. Had Shigaraki moved again? No; surely not.

"Okay, okay," the clerk said. "Cool your jets, my friend."

There was a click, and then the hoarse burr of a room-phone ringing. 'Come on, Deku, come on, c-'

A sudden thought, gruesomely plausible, occurred to him. Suppose Shigaraki had visited Deku's room first? Or- he felt horror strike his chest- Bakugo's?... Sero's? Todoroki's? Or had Shigaraki perhaps paid a visit to Chargebolt: auto body & repair? Surely he had been somewhere else first; if someone hadn't softened Shigaraki up, it would have been Kirishima lying dead on the floor, with a switchblade growing out of his chest the way the neck of the Perrier bottle was growing out of Shigaraki's gut. Or suppose Shigaraki had visited all the others first, catching them bleary and non-functioning, as Shigaraki had caught him? Suppose they were all dead? And that thought was so awful Kirishima believed he would soon begin screaming if someone didn't answer the phone in Deku's room.

"Please, Deku," Kirishima whispered. "Please be there, man."

The phone was picked up and Deku's voice, uncharacteristically timid, said: "H-H-Hello?"

"Deku," Kirishima said... almost babbled. "Deku, thank God."

"...Kiri?" Deku's voice grew momentarily fainter, speaking to someone else, telling the someone who it was. Then he was back strong. "W-What's the muh-hatter, Ejirou?"

"It's Shigaraki Tomura," Kirishima said. He looked at the body on the floor again. Had it changed position? This time it was not so easy to persuade himself it hadn't. "Deku, he came here... and I killed him. He had a knife. I think... " He lowered his voice. "I think it was the same knife he had that day. When we went into the sewers. Do you remember?"

"I r-r-remember," Deku said grimly, but not surprised at all by the news of their uninvited guest. "Kiri, listen to me. I want you to-

—13—

AUGUST 14TH, 2005 / THE BARRENS / 1:55 P.M.

-g-g-go back and tell Han-Hanta to c-come up h-h-here."

"Okay," Kirishima said, and dropped back at once. They were approaching the clearing now. Thunder rumbled in the overcast sky, and the bushes sighed in the rising breeze.

Sero joined him as they came into the clearing. The trapdoor to the clubhouse stood open, an improbable square of blackness in the green. The sound of the river was very clear, and Deku was suddenly struck by a crazy certainty: that he was experiencing that sound, and this place, for the last time in his childhood. He drew a deep breath, smelling earth and air and the distant sooty dump, fuming like a sullen volcano that cannot quite make up its mind to erupt. He saw a flock of birds fly off the railroad trestle and toward the train yard. He looked up at the boiling clouds.

"What is it?" Sero asked.

"Why h-h-haven't they tried to guh-guh-het u-us?" Deku asked. "They're th-there. Eh-Eh-Ejirou was ruh-hight about that. I can fuh-fuh-heel them."

"Yeah," Sero said. "I guess they might be stupid enough to think we're going back into the clubhouse. Then they'd have us trapped."

"Muh-muh-maybe," Deku said, and he felt a sudden helpless fury at his stutter, which made it impossible for him to talk fast. Perhaps they were things he would have found impossible to say anyway- how he felt he could almost see through Shigaraki Tomura's eyes, how he felt that, although on opposite sides, pawns controlled by opposing forces, he and Shigaraki had grown very close.

Shigaraki expected them to stand and fight.

It expected them to stand and fight.

And be killed.

A chilly explosion of white light seemed to fill his head. They would be victims of the killer that had been stalking Irusu ever since Eri's death- all seven of them. Perhaps their bodies would be found, perhaps not. It all depended on whether or not It could or would protect Shigaraki- and, to a lesser degree, Twice and Kurogiri. 'Yes. To the outside, to the rest of this town, we'll have been victims of the killer. And that's right, in a funny sort of way that really is right. It wants us dead. Tomura's the tool to get it done so It doesn't have to come out. Me first, I think- Shouto and Katsuki might be able to hold the others, or Denki even, but Tenya's scared, and Hanta's so underweight it wouldn't take much. And Ejirou's got a broken arm. Why did I lead them down here? Dammit- why?-'

"Deku?" Sero called anxiously. The others joined them beside the clubhouse. Thunder whacked again, and the bushes began to rustle more urgently. The bamboo rattled on in the fading stormy light.

"Deku-" It was Iida now.

"Shhh!" The others fell uneasily silent under his blazing haunted eyes.

He stared at the underbrush, at the path twisting away through it and back toward Taiko Street, and felt his mind suddenly go up another notch, as if to a higher plane. There was no stuttering in his mind; he felt as if his thoughts had been borne away on a mad flow of intuition- as if everything were coming to him.

'Eri at one end, me and my friends at the other. And then it will stop-

(again)

-again, yes, again, because this has happened before and there always has to be some sacrifice at the end, some terrible thing to stop it, I don't know how I can know that but I do... and they... they...'

"They luh-luh-let it happen," Deku muttered, staring wide-eyed at the ratty pigtail of path. "shuh-Shuh-Sure they d-d-do."

"Deku?" Todoroki asked, pleading. Iida stood on one side of him, tall and neat in a blue polo shirt and khaki's. Kaminari stood on the other, looking at Deku intensely, as if reading his thoughts- in fact, Deku knew he was.

'They let it happen, they always do, and things quiet down, things go on, It... It...'

(sleeps)

sleeps... or hibernates like a bear... and then it starts again, and they know... people know... they know it has to be so It can be.'

"I luh-hih-luh-l-l-l-"

'Oh please oh please- he thrusts his fists- please- against the posts- let me get this out- the posts and still insists- oh please oh please OH PLEASE LET ME BE ABLE TO TALK!-'

"I l-led you d-down huh-here b-b-b-b-because nuh-nuh-noplace is s-s-safe," Deku said. Spittle blabbered from his lips; he wiped them with the back of one hand. "Uh-Uh-Irusu is It. D-D-Do you uh-uh-understand m-m-me?" He glared at them; they drew away a little, their eyes shiny, almost thanotropic with fright. "Eh-Irus-hu is Ih-Ih-It! Eh-Eh-hennyp-p-place we g-g-go... when Ih-Ih-It g-g-g-gets uh-us, they w-w-wuh-hon't suh-suh-see, they w-w-won't huh-huh-hear, they w-w-won't nuh-nuh-know." He looked at them, pleading. "duh-don't y-y-you sub-see h-how it ih-ih-is? A-All we c-c-can duh-duh-do is to t-t-try and fuh-hinish w-what w-w-w-we stuh-harted."

Todoroki saw Chief Okumura's son getting up, looking at him, folding his paper, and simply going into his house. He thought of how his brother Natsuo, who in fifteen year's time would taking a nasty beating in an effort to protect his little brother who he loved more than everything in this world, had walked right past him that morning on the way to baseball practice- as if he wasn't even there. 'They won't see, they won't hear, they won't know. And my father-'

(Filthy whore)

-had meant to kill me.'

Kaminari thought of lunch with Deku. Deku's mother had been off in her own dreamy world, seeming not to see either of them, reading a novel while the boys made sandwiches and gobbled them standing at the counter.

Bakugo thought of Iida's neat but utterly empty house. Iida had been a little surprised; his mother was almost always home at lunch time. On the few occasions when she wasn't, she left a note saying where she could be reached. But there had been no note today. The car was gone, and that was all.

"Probably went shopping with Tensei," Iida had said, frowning a little, and had set to work making lunch for himself, Bakugo, and Kiri. Bakugo had forgotten about it. Until now.

Kirishima thought of his mother. When he had left for the barrens that morning there had been none of the usual cautions: 'Be careful, Ejirou, get under cover if it rains, Ejirou, don't you dare play any rough games, Ejirou.' She hadn't asked if he had his inhaler, hadn't told him what time to be home, hadn't warned him against "those rough boys you play with." She had simply gone on watching her soap-opera story on TV, as if he didn't exist.

As if he didn't exist.

A version of the same thought went through all of the boy's minds: they had, at some point between getting up this morning and lunch-time, simply become ghosts.

Ghosts.

"Deku," Iida said harshly, "if we cut across? Through the train yard?"

Deku shook his head. "I don't thuh-thuh-hink s-s-so. We'd g-g-get c-c-caught in the buh-buh-bam-b-b-boo... the quh-quh-quick-m-mud... or there'd b-b-be ruh-ruh-real p-p-p-pirahna fuh-fuh-fish in the Shuh-shuh-Shibui... o-o-or suh-suh-homething e-e-else."

Each had his own different vision of the same end. Sero saw bushes which suddenly became man-eating plants. Todoroki saw flying leeches like the ones that had come out of that old refrigerator. Iida saw the mucky ground in the bamboo vomiting up the living corpses of children caught in there by the fabled quickmud. Kaminari Denki imagined small Jurassic reptiles with horrid sawteeth suddenly boiling out of the cleft of a rotten tree, attacking them, biting them to pieces. Bakugo saw the Crawling Eye oozing down on top of them as they ran under the railroad trestle. And Kirishima saw them climbing the train yard embankment only to look up and see the leper standing at the top, his sagging flesh acrawl with beetles and maggots, waiting for them.

"If we could get out of town somehow... " Bakugo muttered, then glared at the sky as thunder shouted a furious negative from the sky. More rain fell- it was still only squalling, but soon it would begin to come down seriously, in sheets and torrents. The day's hazy peace was now utterly gone, as if it had never been at all. "We'd be safe if we could just get out of this fucking town."

Todoroki began: "Beep-b-" And then a rock came flying out of the shaggy bushes and struck Kaminari on the side of the head. He staggered backward, blood staining a red streak through his blonde hair, and would have fallen if Deku hadn't caught him.

"Teach you to throw rocks!" Shigaraki's voice floated mockingly to them.

Deku could see the others looking around, wild-eyed, ready to bolt in six different directions. And if they did that, it really would be over.

"Han-Han-Hanta!" he called.

Sero looked at him, bouncing anxiously on his heels. "Deku, we gotta run. They-"

Two more rocks flew out of the bushes. One struck Iida on the upper thigh. He yelled, more surprised than hurt. Todoroki sidestepped the second. It struck the ground and rolled through the clubhouse trapdoor.

"D-D-Do you r-r-ruh-remember the f-f-first duh-day you c-c-came d-down here?" Deku shouted over the thunder. "The d-d-d-day schuh-hool l-let ow-out?"

"Deku-" Bakugo shouted.

Deku thrust a shushing hand at him; his eyes remained fixed on Sero, pinning him to the spot.

"Sure," Sero said, miserably trying to look in all directions at once. The bushes were now wavering and dancing wildly, their motion nearly tidal. "Sure, yes- why?"

"The druh-druh-drain," Deku gasped out. "The p-p-pumping-stuh-hation. Thah-that's where we're suh-suh-hupposed to g-g-go. Take us there!"

"But-"

"Tuh-tuh-take us th-there!"

A fusillade of rocks whizzed out of the bushes and for a moment Deku saw Kurogiri's face, somehow frightened, drugged, and avid all at the same time. Then a rock smashed into his cheekbone and it was Kaminari's turn to keep Deku from falling down. For a moment he couldn't see straight. His cheek felt numb. Then sensation returned in painful throbs and he felt blood running down his face. He swiped at his cheek, wincing at the painful knob that was rising there, looked at the blood, wiped it on his grey cargo shorts. His hair whipped wildly in the freshening wind.

"Teach you to throw rocks, you stuttering asshole!" Shigaraki half-laughed, half-screamed.

"Tuh-Tuh-Take us!" Deku yelled. He understood now why he had sent Kirishima back to get Sero; it was that pumping-station they were supposed to go to, that very one, and only Sero knew exactly which one it was- they ran along both banks of the Shibui at irregular intervals. "Ih-ih-hit's the pluh-pluh-hace! The w-w-way ih-in! The wuh-wuh-wuh-way to It!"

"Deku, you can't know that!" Todoroki protested.

He shouted confidently at him- at all of them: "I know!"

Sero stood there for a moment, wetting his lips, looking at Deku. Then he struck off across the clearing, heading toward the river. A brilliant bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, purplish-white, followed by a rip of thunder that made Deku reel on his feet. A fist-sized chunk of rock sailed past his nose and struck Sero in the back. He yipped with pain and his hand went to the spot.

"Yeah, Ana!" Shigaraki cried in that same half-laughing, half-screaming voice. The bushes rustled and crashed and Shigaraki appeared as the rain stopped fooling around and came in a downpour. Water plastered his light-blue hair to his forehead, it ran in his eyebrows, down his cheeks. His grin showed all his teeth. "Teach you to throw r-"

Kaminari had found one of the pieces of scrapwood left over from building the clubhouse roof and now he threw it. It flipped over twice and struck Shigaraki's forehead. He screamed, clapped one hand to the spot like a man who's just had one hell of a good idea, and sat down hard.

"Ruh-ruh-run!" Deku hollered. "A-After Han-Han-Hanta!"

More crashings and stumblings in the bushes, and as the rest of the Losers followed Sero Hanta, Kurogiri and Twice appeared, Shigaraki stood up, and the three of them gave chase.

Even later, when the rest of that day had come back to Sero, he recalled only jumbled images of their run through the bushes. He remembered branches overloaded with dripping leaves slapping against his face, dousing him with cold water; he remembered that the thunder and lightning seemed to have become almost constant, and he remembered that Shigaraki's screams for them to come back and fight seemed to merge with the sound of the Shibui as they drew closer to it. Every time he slowed, Deku would shove him forward.

'What if I can't find it? What if I can't find that particular pumping-station?'

The breath tore in and out of his lungs, hot and bloody-tasting in the back of his throat. A stitch was sinking into his side. His lower back sang where the rock had hit him. Todoroki had said Shigaraki and his friends meant to kill them, and Sero believed it now, yes he did.

He came to the Shibui bank so suddenly that he nearly plunged over the edge. He managed to get his balance, and then the embankment, undercut by the spring runoff, collapsed and he went tumbling over anyway, skidding all the way to the edge of the fast-running water, his shirt- another one of those thick hoodie/T-shirt things- rucking up in the back. His left arm scraped painfully against a rock, drawing blood.

Deku, who had been hot on his heels, wasn't able to stop in time and ended up tripping over him. He splashed into the Shibui a few feet ahead of Sero, coming down hard on an even bigger rock than Sero had. Deku, now sporting a busted chin, got his arms underneath himself, and pushed himself up. Deku was standing in record time, yanking Sero up with him. His chin gushed blood down his neck and stained the collar of his shirt.

The others burst out of the bushes which overhung the bank one after the other. Bakugo and Kirishima were last, Bakugo with one arm slung around Kirishima's waist, his dripping blonde hair pushed back from his forehead so he could see.

"Wuh-Wuh-Where?" Deku shouted.

Sero looked first left and then right, aware that the time was suicidally short. The river seemed higher already, and the rain-dark sky had given it a dangerous slate-gray color as it boiled its way along. Its banks were choked with underbrush and stunted trees, all of them now dancing to the wind's tune. He could hear Kirishima sobbing for breath.

"Wuh-wuh-where?"

"I don't kn-" he began, and then he saw the leaning tree and the eroded cave beneath it. That was where he had hidden that first day. He had lost consciousness the second time and when he woke up he had heard Deku and Kirishima. Then the big boys had come... seen... conquered. "Ta-ta, boys, it was a real baby dam, believe me."

"There!" he shouted. "That way!"

Lightning flashed again and this time Sero could hear it, a buzzing noise like an overloaded Lionel train-transformer. It struck the tree and blue-white electric fire sizzled its gnarly base into splinters and toothpicks sized for a fairytale giant. It fell toward the river with a rending crash, driving spray high into the air. Sero drew in a dismayed gasp and smelled something hot and punky and wild. A fireball rolled up the bole of the downed tree, seemed to flash brighter, and went out. Thunder exploded, not above them but around them, as if they stood in the center of the thunderclap. The rain sheeted down.

Deku thumped him on the back, awaking him from his dazed contemplation of these things. "Guh-guh-GO!"

Sero went, splashing and stumbling along the verge of the river, his hair hanging in his eyes. He reached the tree- the little root-cave beneath it had been obliterated- and climbed over it, digging the soles of his boots into its wet hide, scraping his hands and forearms.

Deku and Bakugo manhandled Kirishima over, and as he stumbled off the tree-trunk, Sero caught him. They both went tumbling to the ground. Kirishima cried out.

"You alright?" Sero shouted.

"I guess so," Kirishima shouted back, getting to his feet. He fumbled for his aspirator and almost dropped it. Sero grabbed it for him and Kirishima gave him a grateful look as he stuffed it into his mouth and triggered it.

Bakugo came over, then Iida and Todoroki. Deku boosted Kaminari up onto the tree and Iida and Bakugo caught him coming down on the far side, his long blonde hair plastered to his head, his khanki-tan shorts now cardboard brown.

Deku came last, pulling himself onto the trunk and swinging his legs around. He saw Shigaraki and the other two splashing down the river toward them, and as he slid off the fallen tree he shouted: "Ruh-ruh-rocks! Throw rocks!"

There were plenty of them here on the bank, and the lightning-struck tree made a perfect barricade. In a moment or two all seven of them were chucking rocks at Shigaraki and his pals. They had nearly reached the tree; the range was point-blank. They were driven back, yelling with pain and fury, as rocks struck their faces, their chests, their arms and legs.

"Teach us to throw rocks!" Bakugo shouted, almost enthusiastically, and chucked one the size of a hen's egg at Kurogiri. It struck his shoulder and bounced almost straight up into the air. Kurogiri howled. "We kicked your asses in a rock fight once, and we can do it again!"

"Whoo!" Kaminari screamed, laughing manically- as if he were having the time of his life. One of his rocks got Shigaraki hard in the knee, causing it to buckle. "That'll teach you to call my mom a hussy!"

They retreated until they were out of range and huddled together. A moment later they climbed the bank, slipping and stumbling on the slick wet earth, which was already honeycombed with little running streamlets, holding onto branches to stay upright.

They disappeared into the underbrush.

"They're gonna go around us, Deku," Iida said, pushing his crooked glasses up on his nose.

"That's oh-oh-okay," Deku said. "G-Go on, Huh-Hanta. We'll fuh-fuh-follow y-you."

Sero trotted along the embankment, paused (expecting that Shigaraki and the others would burst out into his face at any moment), and saw the pumping-station twenty yards farther down the streambed. The others followed him to it. They could see other cylinders on the opposite bank, one fairly close, the other forty yards upstream. Those two were both shooting torrents of muddy water into the Shibui, but only a trickle was coming from the pipe sticking out of the embankment below this one. It wasn't humming, either, Sero noticed. The pumping machinery had broken down.

He looked at Deku thoughtfully... and with some fright.

Deku was looking at Bakugo, Iida, and Todoroki. "W-W-We g-guh-hotta get the l-l-lid oh-oh-off," he said. "H-H-Help m-m-me."

There were handholds in the iron, but the rain had made them slippery and the lid itself was incredibly heavy. Kaminari moved in next to Deku, and Deku shifted his hands a little to make room.

Sero could hear water dripping inside- an echoey, unpleasant sound, like water dripping into a well.

"Nuh-nuh-NOW!" Deku shouted, and the five of them heaved in unison. The lid moved with an ugly grating sound.

Sero grabbed on beside Bakugo and Kirishima pushed with his good arm.

"One, two, three, push!" Bakugo chanted. The lid grated a little farther off the top of the cylinder. Now a crescent of darkness showed.

"One, two, three, push!"

The crescent fattened.

"One, two, three, push!"

Sero shoved until red spots danced in front of his eyes.

"Stand back!" Kaminari shouted excitedly, his entire body vibrating, eyes even brighter in the stormy weather. "There it goes, there it goes!"

They stood away and watched as the big circular cap overbalanced, then fell. It dug a slash in the wet earth and landed upside down, like an oversized checker. Beetles scurried off its surface and into the matted grass.

"Uck," Kirishima said.

Deku peered inside. Iron rungs descended to a circular pool of black water, its surface now pocked with raindrops. The silent pump brooded in the middle of this, half-submerged. He could see water flowing into the pumping-station from the mouth of its inflow pipe, and with a sinking in his guts he thought: 'That's where we have to go. In there.'

"Eh-Eh-Eh-Ejirou. G-Grab on to m-m-me."

Kirishima looked at him, uncomprehending.

"Like a puh-puh-piggy-back. Hold on with y-your g-g-good ah-ah-arm." He demonstrated.

Kirishima understood but was reluctant.

"Quick!" Deku said, wanting to be kind, but not having the luxury. "Th-Th-They'll b-b-be here!"

Kirishima grabbed on around Deku's neck; Iida and Bakugo boosted him up so he could hook his legs around Deku's midsection. As Deku swung clumsily over the lip of the cylinder, Sero saw that Kirishima's eyes were tightly shut.

Over the rain, he could hear another sound: whipping branches, snapping twigs, voices. Shigaraki, Twice, and Kurogiri. The world's ugliest cavalry charge.

Deku gripped the rough concrete lip of the cylinder and felt his way down, step by careful step. The iron rungs were slippery. Kirishima had him in what was almost a deathgrip, and Deku supposed he was getting a pretty graphic demonstration of what Kirishima's asthma was really all about.

"I'm scared, Deku," Kirishima whispered.

"I-I-I am, too."

He let go of the concrete rim and grabbed the topmost rung. Although Kirishima was nearly choking him and felt as if he had already gained forty pounds, Deku paused a moment, looking at the Barrens, the Shibui, the racing clouds. A voice inside- not a frightened voice, just a firm one- had told him to take a good look, in case he never saw the upper world again.

So he looked, then began to descend with Kirishima clinging to his back.

"I can't hold on much longer," Kirishima managed.

"You w-w-won't have to," Deku said. "We're almost duh-hown."

One of his feet went into chilly water. He felt for the next rung and found it. There was another below that and then the ladder ended. He was standing in knee-deep water beside the pump.

He squatted, wincing as the cold water soaked his his cargo's, and let Kirishima off- wincing for him more- he was wearing thin athletic shorts. Deku drew a deep breath. The smell wasn't so hot, but it was great not to have Kirishima's arm wrapped around his throat.

He looked up at the cylinder's mouth. It was about ten feet over his head. The others were grouped around the rim, looking down. "C-C-Come on!" he shouted. "Wuh-one at a t-t-time! Be quick!"

Todoroki came first, swinging easily over the rim and grabbing the ladder, and Iida next. The others followed. Bakugo came last, pausing to listen to the progress of Chappie and the dumbfucks. He thought, from the sound of their blundering progress, that they would probably pass a little to the left of this pumping-station, but almost certainly not by enough to make a difference.

At that moment Kurogiri bellowed: "Tomura! There! Trashmouth!"

Bakugo looked around and saw them rushing toward him. Kurogiri was in the lead... and then Shigaraki pushed him aside so savagely that Kurogiri skidded to his knees. Shigaraki had a knife, alright, a regular pigsticker. Drops of water were falling from the blade.

Bakugo glanced into the cylinder, saw Deku and Iida helping poor Kaminari who, being only 4'4, ended up in thigh deep water, off the ladder, and swung over himself. Shigaraki understood what he was doing and screamed at him. Bakugo, laughing crazily, slammed his left hand in the crook of his right elbow and stuck his forearm skyward, his hand fisted in what may be the world's oldest gesture. To be sure Shigaraki got the point, he popped his middle finger up.

"You'll die down there!" Shigaraki shouted.

"Prove it!" Bakugo shouted, laughing. He was terrified of going into this concrete throat, but he still couldn't stop laughing. "Prove it shit-for-brains!"

Shigaraki slipped on the wet grass and went sprawling on his butt less than twenty feet from where Bakugo stood, his feet on the top rung of the ladder bolted to the inner curve of the pumping-station, his head and chest out.

"Nice going, banana-heels!" Bakugo shouted, delirious with triumph, and then scooted down the ladder. The iron rungs were slick and once he almost fell. Then Todoroki and Iida grabbed him and he was standing up to his knees in water with the rest of them in a loose circle around the pump. He was trembling all over, he felt hot and cold chills chasing each other up his back, and still he couldn't stop laughing.

"You should have seen him, Shitty hair, clumsy as ever, still can't get out of his own fucking way-"

Shigaraki's head appeared in the circular opening at the top. Scratches from branches and brambles crisscrossed his cheeks. His mouth was working, and his eyes blazed.

"Okay," Shigaraki shouted down at them. His words had a flat resonance inside the concrete cylinder, not quite an echo. "Here I come. Got you now."

He swung one leg over, felt for the topmost rung with his foot, found it, swung the other one over.

Speaking loud, Deku said: "W-When h-h-he guh-gets d-d-down cluh-hose e-e-enough, w-w-we all gruh-gruh-grab h-him. P-P-Pull h-him d-d-down. Duh-Duh-Duck him uh-under. G-G-Got i-it?"

"Yes, brilliant! We'll drown the fucker like the diseased little sewer rat he is!" Bakugo cackled, trembling from the cold.

"Got you," Sero said with a mock salute.

Iida nodded and looked toward Kirishima, who didn't understand what was going on- except it seemed to him that his boyfriend had finally lost it. Bakugo was laughing like a loon while Shigaraki Tomura -the dreaded Shigaraki Tomura- prepared to come down and kill them all like rats in a rain-barrel.

"All ready for him, Deku!" Kaminari grinned, he was vibrating excitedly again.

Shigaraki froze three rungs down. He looked down at the Losers over his shoulder. His face seemed, for the first time, doubtful.

Kirishima suddenly got it. If they came down, they would have to come one at a time. It was too high to jump, especially with the pumping machinery to land on, and here they were, the seven of them, waiting in a tight little circle.

"Cuh-cuh-home oh-on, Tuh-Tuh-Tomura," Deku said pleasantly, kindly, hands behind his back like a school boy about to give a presentation. "Wuh-wuh-what are you w-w-waiting for?"

"That's right," Bakugo chimed in, giggling. "You like to beat up kids, right? Come on, Tomura. Let's go- I'll fucking kill you."

"We're waiting, Tomura," Todoroki said dully, almost bored. "I don't think you'll like it when you get down here, but come on if you want to."

"Unless you're chicken," Sero added. He began to make chicken sounds. Kaminari joined him at once and soon all of them were doing it (minus Todoroki, who just looked at them all confused) The derisive clucking rebounded between the damp, trickling walls. Shigaraki looked down at them, the knife clutched in his left hand, his face the color of old bricks. He put up with perhaps thirty seconds of it and then climbed out again. The Losers sent up catcalls and insults.

"O-O-Okay," Deku said. He spoke in a lower voice. "W-We've guh-got to get ih-ih-into that druh-hain. Quh-quh-quick."

"Why?" Todoroki asked, but Deku was spared the effort of an answer. Shigaraki reappeared at the rim of the pumping-station and dropped a rock the size of a soccer ball into the pipe. Sero yelped and Iida pulled Kirishima against the circular wall with a hoarse yell. The rock struck the pumping machinery's rusty housing and produced a musical bonggg! It ricocheted left and struck the concrete wall, missing Kirishima by less than half a foot. A chip of concrete flicked painfully against his cheek. The rock fell into the water with a splash.

"Quh-quh-quick!" Deku shouted again, and they crowded around the pumping-station's inflow pipe. Its bore was about five feet in diameter. Deku sent them in one after another (a vague circus image- all the big clowns coming out of the little car- passed across his consciousness in a meteoric flash; later he'd use the line in a manga titled 'Black Water Ridge.') and climbed in last, after ducking another rock. As they watched, more rocks flew down, most striking the pump housing and rebounding at crazy angles.

When they stopped falling, Deku looked out and saw Shigaraki coming down the ladder again, as quick as he could. "G-G-Get h-h-him!" he shouted to the others. Bakugo, Todoroki, and Kaminari floundered out behind Deku. Bakugo leaped high and grabbed Shigaraki's ankle. Shigaraki cursed and shook his leg as if trying to kick away a small dog with big teeth- a terrier, perhaps, or a Pekinese. Bakugo grabbed a rung, scrabbled up even higher, and actually did manage to sink his teeth into Shigaraki's ankle. Shigaraki screamed and pulled himself up quickly. One of his loafers came off and splashed into the water, where it sank with no ado at all.

"Bit me!" Shigaraki was screaming. "Bit me! Cocksucker bit me!"

"Yeah, now you caught the cocksucking disease," Bakugo flung at him.

"Bash them!" Shigaraki was raving. "Bash them, bomb them back to the stone age, bash their brains in!"

More rocks flew. The boys backed into the drain again quickly. Kaminari was struck on the arm by a small rock and he held it tight, wincing, until the pain began to abate.

"It's a standoff," Iida said, he'd pushed his glasses up on top is his head, like how most people did with sunglasses once the sun dipped back behind the clouds. The front of his ebony hair stuck out around the intruding object like thick, wet, weeds. "They can't get down and we can't get up."

"We're not s-supposed to get up," Deku said quietly, "and y-y-you all know it. W-We're nuh-hot e-ever supposed to g-g-get up a-again."

They looked at him, their eyes hurt and afraid. No one said anything. They knew. They all felt it.

Shigaraki's voice, fury masquerading as mockery, floated down: "We can wait up here all day, you guys!"

Todoroki had turned away and was looking back along the bore of the inflow pipe. The light grew diffuse quickly, and he could not see much. What he could see was a concrete tunnel, its lower third filled with rushing water. It was higher on him now than it had been when they first squeezed in here, he realized; that would be because this pump wasn't working and only some of the water was exiting on the Shibui side. He felt claustrophobia touch his throat, turning the skin there to something that felt like flannel. If the water rose enough, they would drown.

"Deku, do we have to?"

He shrugged. It said everything. Yeah, they had to; what else was there? Be killed by Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and Twice in the Barrens? Or by something else- maybe something worse- in town? Todoroki understood his thought well enough now; there was no stutter in his shrug. Better for them to go to It. Cleaner. Braver.

Bakugo said: "What was that ritual you told us about, Deku? The one in the library book?"

"Ch-Ch-Chüd," Deku said, smiling a little.

"Chüd." Bakugo nodded. "You bite Its tongue and It bites yours, right?"

"Ruh-ruh-right."

"Then you tell jokes."

Deku nodded.

"Funny," Bakugo said "I can't think of a single one."

"Me either," Kaminari said. The fear was heavy in his chest, almost suffocating. He felt that the only thing keeping him from just sitting down in the water and giving up- or just going crazy- was Deku's calm, sure presence... and Todoroki. He felt he would rather die than show Todoroki how afraid he was.

"Do you know where this pipe goes?" Iida asked Deku.

Deku shook his head.

"Do you know how to find It?"

Deku shook his head again.

"We'll know when we're getting close," Bakugo said suddenly. He drew a deep, trembling breath. "If we have to do it, then let's go."

Deku nodded. "I'll be f-f-first. Then Eh-Ejirou. Huh-Hanta. Sho. Duh-Duh-Denki. Ten-Tenya. You luh-last, Kah-Kacchan. E-Everyone k-k-keep one h-h-hand on the shuh-houlder of the p-p-person in fruh-fruh-front of y-y-you. It's gonna be d-dark."

"You coming out!?" Shigaraki Tomura shrieked down at them.

"We're gonna come out somewhere," Sero muttered. "I guess."

They formed up like a procession of blindmen. Deku looked back once, confirming that each had a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. Then, bending forward slightly against the rush of the current, Midoriya Izuku led his friends into the dark where the boat he had made for his sister had gone almost a year before.