v.

She'd only done something like this once before. Once. A long time ago… and that had ended with heroes on their doorstep and blood on her hands.

Now however, the night was quiet around her as she ran. Still and cool as crystal, tears swiping at her cheeks in an electrified numbness. Smooth and dark as a frozen ocean, the sound of waves lapping gently from the harbor. Though Eri wound herself through familiar streets, back toward the chokehold of Kai's arms, she felt for the first time a weightless, guiltless liberation. It shivered through her veins with the taste of salty air; prickled across her skin with the lingering weight of Mirio's arms, how they'd held her so safe and soft.

For the first time, Eri felt a stir of emotion so much more than simply fear – though of course, it continued to claw down her back. Fear, slinking: a muscled, black animal bored and hungry, warning her off with hissed alarms and snarling threats.

Eventualities. There were so many eventualities, and it had felt so wrong to see him. Mirio. To allow herself to sink into the foreign, hard shape of his chest which somehow seemed more familiar to her than home. So wrong. But so wonderful. It made Eri's heart unfurl in a shivering flutter to think of it. Lemillion, Mirio, had been so wonderful despite how his face had worn itself with pale lines and a harried exhaustion. Despite how his smile was different, his hands less steady than before.

Climbing through the kitchen window, propped open just as she'd left it, Eri held her breath in an attempt to preserve the illusion of Mirio's smell: a minty aftershave, something sweet underneath.

Tip-toeing along the corridors, down the long swoop of stairs, Eri resisted the crash of fear in her gut with thoughts of how he'd looked at her – like she was something beautiful, something precious. A flower. A star, or all the stars at once, when all Eri had ever felt was that she was the darkness in between.

No light outlined the door to Chrono's study as she passed it. All was dark through the basement hallways. Nothing stirred. Nothing recognised her as she snuck guilty and not-so-guilty through the shadows.

And upon reaching the washroom undisturbed, Eri sank into herself with a restrained relief. Chrono hadn't noticed she was gone. And Kai – Kai wasn't home yet, otherwise… No. Eri shook her head, banishing the thought and relishing, at least for the moment, the small rush of victory through her bones. It was frightening how addictive it felt. How every inch of her quivered to do it again. Begging. Longing. The vast, lonely night outside having been hers and hers alone – she'd breathed it in without anyone breathing down her neck, she'd looked it in the eye with nothing to watch her do it.

She wanted to feel that way again. Soon – and it would be soon, only a week away, and like a starstruck teenager Eri began to calculate the hours until she would see Mirio again.

She did so while she stripped herself naked in the washroom: twenty four hours multiplied by seven days. She did so while she scrubbed her skin clean of Mirio's smell and touch; she didn't regret removing him like this, because already he was imprinted upon her mind with the smoldering weight of an iron brand.

Climbing herself into the white pajamas, Eri tried but failed to quell the floundering speed of her pulse. Slipping herself into the fresh sheets of the bed, she willed sleep to come but instead remained wide awake and continuing to count, count, count how long it would be before she could repeat this night.

She heaved a sharp breath, and she smiled.

Her head on the pillow, her hand to her heart – Eri smiled a tight, close-to-painful smile as though she didn't know this would end terribly. Time passed her by like this, an unheard clock ticking out of ticks, and she held Mirio's face between her temples and the fresh, free breath of air in her ribcage.

But it couldn't last. Of course it couldn't.

Everything receded with a crash as the bedroom door softly shrieked open and closed again. That crushing, metallic sound of foreboding through the chemical-stained darkness, and by an electric sense of instinct Eri shot up to sit.

Was it that time already? She held the sheets to her throat. Was he home early? She lamented the wash of dread which replaced the night's splendor. And tensing all throughout herself, she listened to the familiar tap of feet along the floor. Coming close. Coming close, the black animal rearing itself inside of her once again as the golden eyes she couldn't see but could feel smoldered across her flesh like a furnace–

"Eri," Kai said, soft and severe. "You're awake."

There came the sharp smell of his soap and aftershave, something wet and pungent as he seated himself carefully on the edge of the bed. Eri imagined dews of damp in his hair and nape from the shower he must have just taken, and made herself almost gag. She tried to shrink into the pillows, to engrave herself into the headboard, but with each miniscule shift of her limbs Kai came closer still. A presence whose weight bore greater suffocating power than the shadows themselves.

"I couldn't sleep," she told him, and drew some fleeting comfort from the fact that it wasn't a lie. He hummed throatily, a cat's purr, and Eri pulled the sheet further against herself in a futile defense against nothing.

"Perhaps you should take some of your pills."

"No," Eri objected quietly. "No, I was just… Just…" She had to stop talking. He'd suspect something. "How was your meeting?"

There came a sound like a sigh, and the mattress groaned in muted relief as Kai stood once again.

"A waste of time," he said, his silhouette prowling in odd shapes as he paced. He took off his shirt and discarded it to the side so that Eri could glimpse a shape both muscular and frightening through the darkness. She squirmed. She shivered. She shuffled onto the cliff-face edge of the mattress so that half of her was practically balanced in shadowed space. Kai slipped himself into the other side of the bed, and said, "I'm considering sending Chrono next week in my stead."

Eri's heart plunged. The bright image of Mirio crackled across her vision. "Oh."

"What did you do this evening?"

"Umm… I painted for a while after dinner."

"And?"

"And I read."

"Do you still have enough books to keep yourself busy?"

Somehow, Eri couldn't bring herself to say that she had more books around the house than she knew what to do with. "I might need a new one soon."

Another hum. "We'll go in the morning then. But you should sleep now." In slinking slowness, a familiar five-fingered weight, Kai's hand was against her hip. Pulling lazily, making Eri taste the illusion of blood upon her tongue as he murmured, "Come here."

Without a choice, without the strength to hold herself at the mattress's edge any longer, Eri twisted herself along the bed into Kai's arms. The hard warmth of his skin oozed across her back. She could feel the muted graze of his breath through the bedtime mask down her nape. This was the way things were now. After so many years of being handled by him like a tool or toy, Eri should not have shuddered nauseously to have had him so close. Even if he held her gently like this, his touch still wasn't kind – the way his fingers stroked at her throat; how his heartbeat aligned itself with hers in a mocking throb. It wasn't like the way Mirio had held her just hours before.

How long had it been since Kai had touched her for something more than her quirk? Eri couldn't remember.

She couldn't remember when he'd told her to stop calling him Overhaul, or when she'd realised that he'd started to leave his fingers lingering for just a little longer than usual in the small of her back. She hadn't known why it was that his eyes had started to darken in stormy glows whenever he looked at her, or what it had meant when he'd started to graze her arms with his fingertips as though he were running them down porcelain. Trembling. Testing.

Those same fingers ran themselves over hers now, but paused in their wanderings. "Where's your ring?" Kai questioned.

Eri swallowed. "I forgot to put it back on after my bath. It's in my jewelry box."

"Go put it on."

Suddenly sore in inexplicable stiffness, Eri slipped herself from the bed and made for the dressing table. She opened the box, the shrill hollowness of Swan Lake tinkling into the morning's darkness – a haunted accompaniment for haunted nights.

Nights such as the first time Kai (back then, still Overhaul) had come into Eri's bedroom back in Russia (the windows barred, the door hung with several locks to which only he had the key). He'd opened the music box for reasons Eri still couldn't understand. Then he'd snaked the clothing from her body. He'd pulled his mask down from his mouth and kissed her neck. And because he'd touched her so many times before, because that time had only been different because she'd been naked and he'd been naked and there was no one else around to see, Eri had done what she'd always done and shut her mouth. She'd shut her mouth and listened to a ghostly ballet suite while what had been done was done.

It had felt like she would be sick onto the pillows when he'd put his fingers between her legs. And it had felt like her insides were being torn to shreds every time he'd moved. But still, Eri had stayed quiet until he left in a breathless, trudging relief. Swan Lake echoing out in tinny struggle.

No one batted an eye when she became his wife some months later. Not even Eri herself.

And no one found it strange that their story was nothing like the romance novels. Not even Eri herself.

And Eri only assumed that sex and power were exactly the same thing, and that it was only natural that Kai wanted her for both.

Taking her ring and shutting the music box with a special hatred, Eri returned to bed and climbed herself back alongside Kai. He brushed his fingertips through her hair. He held her wrists as though to sleep was to be imprisoned, his own fingers ringless in a reminder that Eri was his and he not hers. That she was only something which could 'belong' to somebody else and not somebody who could have anything 'belong' to her.

In the few remaining hours of darkness, Eri tripped between suffocated waking and a shallow unconsciousness – and through it all, she tried to pretend that Kai's arms around her were not Kai's at all, but Mirio's.

A/N: Next chapter's going to be something a little (a lot) more lighthearted. Not that I really think anything in this sort of situation could be called lighthearted as such, but hey - Eri's got to have survived thirteen years of Overhaul's shittiness somehow... :/

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