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ghoulical · 3 years ago

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Charlie: Hazard

An original Danganronpa character one-shot.

Word Count: 2,977 Warnings: Mentions of murder, implied stalking & sexual assault Summary: The Ultimate Psychologist pays a long-dreaded visit to an old enemy. Notes: Heavily inspired by Criminal Minds S7E22 “Profiling 101″, and Mindhunter.

Lena King. Ashley Harper. Rose Ballard.

“Charlie.”

Jamie Carter. Louise Sherman. Victoria—

“Charlie.”

A shrill buzzer bounced through the hollow walls. Charlie flinched in her seat and turned her head sharply to her right, when she found herself staring up at the man standing off to the side, a soft smile appearing across his aging face. Harvey looked tired today; his jacket was folded and wrapped around his arm, and his hat was pinned between his elbow and his side, leaving his clean-shaven head exposed. He took his time bending down to sit beside her, before gently touching her shoulder and averting his gaze from the expectant glint in her eyes.

“They’re bringing him out now,” he murmured, low enough that only the two of them could hear them, and not the seven other men scattered around the room they were currently in. Harvey stared at one of them now, the one standing in the far side of the room, beside a chain-link door that led into a hallway that she knew led further deeper into the complex. “Apparently, there was a stabbing in the yard early this morning. They’ve had the entire block on lockdown, keeping the prisoners isolated for now. I had to pull a few strings—let them know it was urgent.”

Charlie nodded and forced herself to lean back against the wall.

“Is that a new blazer?”

She immediately turned her head to look at him, suddenly frozen in place before her eyes flickered down to her attire. “No,” she muttered quickly, frowning. She sank down on the bench, staring straight ahead when she caught the man in the brown uniform standing across the room averting his eyes from them. She pulled her knees together despite her leggings and pinched the rib of her sleeve, as the school emblem patch suddenly felt heavy above her breast. “Mom’s using a new fabric softener.”

Harvey nodded thoughtfully, turning his gaze to match hers. “That boy you were with earlier,” he said instead, speaking in an even quieter tone now as he leaned slightly to his side, towards her. “He’s not coming over tonight or anything, is he?”

Her eyes immediately darted up to him, but he seemed to be ignoring her growing scowl. “Group project,” she muttered curtly, almost mumbling it under her breath. “He wants to mooch off my work.”

Harvey hummed lowly—in amusement, she thought, while trying to hide the scoff beneath it. “The spring formal is coming up soon, isn’t it?”

“Two weeks.”

He nodded. “Have you maybe thought about—”

She shook her head sharply. “I’ve… better things to do.”

Her eyes went over to the movement in her right periphery—one of the guards walked down the hall and stopped at the other side of the chain-link gate, then caught the attention of his colleague before they began speaking in equally hushed tones. Though her eyes remained locked unto them, she could feel Harvey’s gaze softening beside her.

“Such as?”

“College applications.” She turned back to him, twitching the corner of her lip. “Scholarships, internships, last week’s case report, the risk assessment—”

“All of which can wait,” he said gently, eyebrows arching upwards. “The applications aren’t due for another two months.”

“I want to get a head-start.”

“You have time, Charlie. We can assign someone else to do the risk assessment.”

“I want to.” She drew in a deep breath and stiffened her neck. He sighed and turned his gaze toward the right wall.

“What about that girl—what’s her name?” he murmured instead, then tilted his head down while pretending to reach back into the corners of his memory. “Uh, it was something with an ‘L’—”

“Leslie.” Her eyes flickered to the floor. “What about her?”

“Well, wasn’t she the one who—”

“Sir.”

She hadn’t realized something had appeared in front of them until she looked up and to the side. It was the man who was standing across the room, she quickly recognized, whose eyes she met briefly before he immediately averted his gaze back to the older man between them with a curt nod and squared shoulders. “The prisoner is ready for you, sir.”

Harvey thanked the man courteously, who took a step back as the police captain dusted himself off and slowly stood up from the bench, before turning around to face the younger woman who, in one swift, graceful motion, had stood up as well to join him.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Harvey asked, and from the peripherals of her vision, she saw the guard’s eyes growing wide, glancing unsubtly between the two parties before him.

“He wants me alone,” Charlie murmured, shaking her head once and offering Harvey a blank, feeble smile, which he returned with a mourning frown. “I’ll be fine.”

She might have dissuaded him if he didn’t know better, if she hadn’t grown up under his watchful eye the past few years. He heaved a brief arduous sigh and patted the back of her shoulder. “The guards will be standing outside—call them in, yell if anything comes up, and I’ll be right—”

“—Here.” She wouldn’t have it any other way. “I know. Thank you.”

The man in the two-tone uniform led her down the halls, past several turns, through several security gates, into a medium-sized room akin to a small cafeteria at first glance—no food stalls except for what looked like a small but closed, square window to the left side of the room, and the eight metal picnic tables spaced out evenly across the otherwise empty space, welded firmly onto the floor.

She continued inside the room, sitting down at a table towards the back, shoulders back and spine straight, paying little mind to the prison guard left behind at the entrance staring a hole into the back of her skull. Her eyes flickered over to the clock hanging above the closed window—eleven to five. Ignoring the growing perspiration in the back of her neck, she fetched a notebook and a pen from her leather messenger bag, buried between her textbooks and manila folders, that barely passed through the security checkpoint earlier; she placed them both side by side on the table in front of her, then placed her arms flat horizontally on the table, and waited.

Another buzzer blared down the halls, followed by metallic grinding. Someone shouted a command barely audible to her ears. She stared straight ahead at the centre of the table and took a deep breath.

The buzzer and the grinding stopped, leaving only heavy footsteps in their wake. She exhaled slowly, counting the seconds it took before all air was expelled from her lungs.

“Charlotte Beckett.”

She closed her eyes only briefly, before turning her head back towards the entrance. Led into the room by two prison guards was a tall man in a bright orange jumpsuit and handcuffs wrapped around his wrists; he was, if she remembered correctly, in his late thirties, and though his skin looked duller and his hair thinner, his cheeks seemed just slightly fuller than the last time she saw him. His charcoal eyes, same as they were when she first saw him across those train tracks, flared to life when she finally met his gaze.

“Charlie,” she murmured politely, watching the guards lead him to the other side of the table, but he quickly sat down on his own volition and lightly brushed the other two men away.

“I was beginning to think you forgot about me,” he said, stretching a thin smile across his wrinkling face.

She matched his gaze, doing all she could to resist tightening her jaw. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Russ Milburn grinned. Once, she had the perfect image in her mind of what she wanted him to be: crooked, yellow teeth, balding head, bushy moustache, maybe even a goatee. Once, she would have mistaken the man sitting opposite to her as her neighbour, or a middle school teacher, or someone from the construction crew working on the pavement just down the street.

“I’m glad. I mean, it would be a shame if we only stopped at two.” The handcuffs rattled softly when he shifted his weight on his seat and leaned forward by half an inch, eyes quickly flickering down her neck before he looked back up to meet her gaze. “How’s school? Came right after just to see me? I’m flattered, I really am.”

Her eyes panned down to her blank notepad, and she waited until the guards dragged the metal gate shut, trapping the two people in the room with each other, before panning her gaze back up to him and speaking again. “It’s not like I have much of a choice.”

“Choice?” His voice was suddenly louder and more pronounced than his usual raspy drawl, but then his lips stretched wider as he chuckled lowly, slowly to himself, each beat echoing through the vast empty space surrounding them. “What do you mean? Well, of course you did. I didn’t force you into this, did I? I gave you a choice, and you made yours,” he spoke quickly, all in one breath, then stopped himself for a moment to pause, to stare down at her, letting the quiet stillness slowly creep back into the room. “You chose this, Charlotte dear, didn’t you?”

She breathed deeply, barely making a single audible sound in the wake of his echoes still resounding from the brick walls around them. But never once did she break the stare, not even to glance at the clock in the wall behind him, or the tiny black spots fading out of view from the narrow rectangular window beside her.

But when she looked behind him, she felt like she was back in the room when she made her choice—Harvey standing across from her with the phone receiver in his hand, her mother sitting in the chair beside her wrapping her daughter’s hands in hers.

It’s your choice, Harvey had said. You can say no. It’s okay to say no.

“Charlie.” Her voice came out smoothly but softer than she imagined it to be, and she forced herself to blink, and found herself staring at the man in the jumpsuit again. “It’s Charlie.”

Milburn remained frozen still for another longer moment, as though deliberately letting her voice seep into his skull and his thoughts, before he finally leaned back just slightly, and offered her a despicable, amicable, smile. “Charlie.” The word easily rolled off his tongue, like a cat gently tossing an old ball of yarn across a carpeted floor. “Shame. Dan gave you such a beautiful name, hmm? Beautiful name, for a beautiful little girl. It’s a queen’s name—did you know that? Of course you did.” He let out a single fleeting chuckle, then hummed lowly to himself. “What about Lottie? I’ve heard people toss that one around. Never considered it, no?”

She shook her head gently, only once, and he nodded.

“You know, Charlie, I know it doesn’t seem like it.” He inhaled sharply and suddenly, rolling his shoulders on their joints and stretching his back out for as much as he physically could, handcuffs rattling increasingly underneath the table. Then, very quickly, he finally tore his gaze away from her, glancing first toward the door then out the window beside them. “But I do so enjoy our meetings, I really do. Nobody ever visits me anymore. Can’t help but get excited for this, you know?” He sighed expressively, and she thought she felt a draft slowly crawling its way back into the frigid space. He snapped his head back at her, pupils dilated. “Oh, I’m sorry, where are my manners? I should’ve asked—have you eaten today at all? Yes? No? You need to put some more meat on those bones. Stay away from all that load o’ crap on social media, let me tell you—”

“What’s her name, Russ?”

He froze, her soft voice surprisingly enough to break through his apparent trance but only for a moment—he blinked at her, and the sun outside was peeking through through the ashen clouds and the window sill just enough to illuminate the liminal space in his slate-tinted irises—then he suddenly snapped his head away and toward the door and their silent observers.

She remembered that look on their faces—the same look those other men had when Harvey first spoke to them about the terms of the agreement, and the federal agents in the same room as them; the same look that were no doubt on the agents’ own faces when they interrogated Milburn, and he was laying out the terms—the script they had to play along with.

“The mess hall’s been closed all afternoon—didn’t even get a chance to finish my breakfast, you know, before all that ruckus went down. And now we’re cooped up like pigeons in a hole. You know, there’s this diner just off Highway 97—best apple cobbler in town, trust me. They’ve got this homemade whip and ice cream—vanilla, of course. Been trying to convince Tom to spill the secret behind his recipe—six years, still no luck, that sonofabitch. It’s only ‘bout a half an hour drive from here—you should really stop by when you get the chance. Treat yourself for the big day, you know? Bet Mona will like it, too.”

“What’s her name?”

Thirty-two, he had told them. Thirty-two, in addition to the twelve they already knew about. And he remembered them, each and every single one of them all—their names, where it happened, where they were now. And he was more than willing to tell them, he had said, but only one each year—to keep them honest, he had said—on a day of his choosing, and only to one person.

Those were the terms—that was the stage. All that the rest of them had to do was play their parts.

“You should really go out more, you know. You’re young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t—don’t worry about all this crap about work, and those things in your bag, and you—Go out. Have fun. Don’t drink though—still another three years before we get there. But, like, I don’t know, go to the mall. Go shopping. You’ve still got that piano at home, too, don’t you? I know Dan was really proud of you for that one. Pick it up again. Can’t be that hard with all that muscle memory, right—”

“Russ.” He stopped, and time stood still. “Her name.”

She barely even realized how quiet her voice was until the echoes fell, and all that was left was her drowning in the silence she had unwittingly willed into existence to take their place, to suffocate the words permanently away from his head and his mouth.

Why did you do it?

That was always the question, wasn’t it? When she asked, Milburn never gave her his answer. But when Harvey asked, she gave him hers, all too willingly. They need closure, and I’ve had mine. Then she thought of her father, and what he would have said to him, had he been in her place. It’s part of the job.

Milburn stared at Charlie, and she at him, locked again in this endless stalemate—on this grand stage, this glorious script he had so meticulously orchestrated. He dangled the strings in front of her and she tied them around her wrists—she made her choice—so she would stand now centre-stage, in the spotlight he created, playing her part to the hollow theatre of lost souls and broken promises.

But the curtains behind his eyes were finally closing for tonight—he had taken the microphone back, and stared at her from across the table.

“She had long blonde hair, pretty hazel eyes—really pretty one, she was,” he said wistfully, softly, his voice barely a reminiscing whisper. “She worked at the soup kitchen downtown on Thursdays and Fridays. Sometimes she’ll take the bus to the library after six.”

She could almost see the images playing in his mind through his hollow eyes, and it was times like these when she wondered what would happen if she had been there, standing on the other side of the street, watching Milburn and watching the girls—the sisters, the daughters, the mothers. Would she had done something? What would she had done? Could she?

He closed his eyes. “Jennifer Hayes.” Her name spilled from his lips like honey and wine. “I buried her in Leelan Park, under an oak tree thirty feet south from the end of the path, twenty from the park bench, towards the fence.”

She breathed slowly through her nose as the pen in her hand glided across the surface of the notepad, his words inked into the page in surprisingly neat penmanship despite the haste. After she tucked the notepad and pen back into her bag, she looked up, and her eyes very briefly locked with his before she tossed her gaze toward the guards standing outside and began standing up. One of the men snapped out of his trance when he saw the signal and immediately launched himself towards the gate with the keys jangling in his hand.

Lena King. Ashley Harper. Rose Ballard.

She only finally felt herself exhale when she crossed the room, retracing her own steps from only fifteen minutes ago, barely registering the metallic dragging and the men brushing past her to march back toward Milburn—because all she could really hear was his voice, echoing after her image and clinging unto her shadow, even as she strode back up the hall, back to the rest of society.

Jamie Carter. Louise Sherman. Victoria Chapman.

“Happy birthday, Charlotte Beckett,” he said, the same way he did last year, and the year before. “I’ll be looking forward to our next meeting.”

Jennifer Hayes.

The same way he would for all the years that has yet to come.

#ghl: wcsb #danganronpa #danganronpa fanfiction #we've created something beautiful

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ghoulical · 3 years ago

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Rose Petals

Word Count: 756 Note: This was another thing that I wrote for a creative writing class about two years ago, and it was actually based on Averno--if you’ve been following the story, you can probably tell which speaker is whom. This is non-canon, because I know for sure this scene cannot take place ever, at any point of the canon, but it is a mild spoiler since this was meant to take place way further down the line compared to where it is currently now.

It was dark. The skies were a black, starless mist. A man sat on a park bench, dressed in black with a hood over his head, hands burrowed in the pockets of his jeans. He lifted his head when he heard noises to his left, and turned his gaze to see a figure approaching him—a young woman, he quickly realized, as she stepped into the dim cone of light emanating from a streetlamp nearby. Her hair had faded to autumn colours and grown a little since he last saw her, now barely reaching her shoulders, and he had never seen the tan trench coat she wore before tonight.

He turned his head back forward, watching in his peripherals as she approached the bench, sat down to leave a wide gap between them, and took out a cigarette.

He closed his eyes. “Is it over?” he asked, bowing his head down so when he opened his eyes again, he was staring at the ground in front of them, and she wasn’t in his view.

Something flickered in the corner of his vision—a small flame.

“It’s done.”

“Good.” He blew out a cold breath. “But is it over now?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“You know more about this than I do.”

“You’ve been in this longer than I have.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, inhaled deeply, then blew out the smoke as her fingers drew the accursed thing away from her face. “It is. She’s fine. She’s safe. You’ve done all you should have done.”

The man frowned. “Is she? Safe, I mean.”

“Can’t you tell?”

“You’re smoking again.” A long silence. “Are you going to give her back?”

“Not yet.”

“You said it was over.”

“So eager to get rid of me, are you?”

He blinked twice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.”

Once, she would have insisted that he did. Once, their conversation would inevitably spiral into an argument, drawn longer and longer until it had no end. But it did end, even though neither have acknowledged it. Just as the light from the nearby street lamp slowly began to glow brighter, it pulsed and dimmed the moment the silence returned, leaving them bathed in calming stillness.

When he turned his head only slightly to his left, he saw a ghost of a smile adorning her lips.

“So, what now?”

“What now?” She hummed, then took another long drag of her cigarette. “Now, you go home.”

“And what about you?”

“I can’t. You know I can’t.”

He nodded once. “What about her?”

She paused, deep in thought. “Take her home. Keep her safe. Make her happy. She deserves that much.”

He turned his head to look at her, not just from the edges of his vision, but fully in her direction, so she was all he could see now. She was staring at the lamp post, a thin film clouding her eyes. The corner of her lip twitched and she brought the cigarette back up to her mouth, only for her to suddenly pause, and wait. After a moment, her eyes fluttered down to her cigarette—no, to the ground in front of them, before she allowed her hand to drift back down to her side, like a rose petal falling off its stem, lingering just at the edge of the bench.

“Take her on a date. She likes movies, romantic comedies especially. Take her out dancing, or to a karaoke bar. She likes singing. She used to do that a lot with her parents.”

He tried to breathe. The smoke from the cigarette was nothing but a lifeless wisp now, as the cold night air burned through his lungs. “I’ll remember that.”

The woman nodded, and he could have sworn he saw her smile. She dropped the cigarette onto the cobblestone, then, without looking, crushed the butt with the heel of her boot before she leaned back, took a deep breath, and sighed deeply.

He turned his head back forward, closed his eyes, and waited.

After forever, he felt something warm brush against the back of his freezing hand. He opened his eyes and turned to face her.

She stared up at him, her eyes clear as the skies above.

“Is it over?” she asked.

He pressed his lips, and felt his chest burn. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s over.”

“Can we go home now?”

After forever, he took her hovering hand in his, felt the burn washed away into the moonlight, and smiled.

“Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go home.”

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ghoulical · 4 years ago

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Ren: The Saints, pt. 1

An original Danganronpa character one-shot.

Word Count: 4,100 Summary: The Ultimate Mixologist returns to her humble abode but finds herself confronted with an unpleasant revelation. Notes: Another "Ren Kagawa" with some similarities but a slightly different backstory in a different universe.

Shin-Sakae was abandoned after the Tragedy. It used to be lively once; streets bustling with conversations, affiliations and business transactions, with folks of all ages, shapes and sizes, from all sorts of different backgrounds and walks of life. The district thrived especially after hours when the sun had set and the skyscrapers glowed the skies above and the streets below them, and the crowds clustered together around buzzing neon lights like moths to a light bulb.

That was the memory Ren Kagawa held with an iron grip in her mind. It was the memory she had hoped she would return home to after everything was over and done.

Now, the streets were lifeless. Cars parked haphazardly across the roads, some with open doors, many with broken windshields and dented hoods. She glanced across the storefronts, peering in through the shattered windows, anticipating with bated breath for a glimpse of a single living soul in the area besides herself, though part of her was already expecting the disappointment before it came. Nothing for kilometres except destroyed properties, deserted buildings, dust and rubble. Even the birds seemed to have disappeared from this wretched place.

When she arrived home, however, her jaw fell agape, and her breath caught stuck in her throat. It was like witnessing a shining beacon of light amid glooming darkness; the wooden beams, the brick walls, even the potted bamboo and paper lanterns by the double front doors—though coated with a thin film of dust, everything was otherwise untouched—a glaring difference compared to her neighbours that was impossible to ignore, almost as though her home had escaped the entire Tragedy completely unscathed.

Well, at least it looked like it did.

Going on the tip of her toes, she reached into one of the paper lanterns above her and pulled out the set of spare keys—God knew where her original set had gone, considering everything—but as she went to unlock the doors, she noticed there was no need; bits of steel chain and padlock were strewn about beside her feet.

So much for getting her hopes up.

She nudged the door open, hoping to make as little noise as possible when she slid through the gap and entered the building before closing the doors shut behind her. A cloud of dust erupted in her face and she couldn’t help but cough, creating a sharp echo that broke the stagnant air in the darkened room. Despite the broken entrance lock, the building interior was largely as intact as its exterior. All the furniture was still in place; wooden chairs and bar stools sat upside down around the round tables and on top of the bar counter, and the area behind it was as bare and desolate as she remembered leaving it to be. Nothing broken, nothing robbed, nothing stolen—it was almost all too eerie. Too perfect.

Even the three crates of liquor she hid in the back room were still sitting idle beside the barren shelving units. Yoshinaga hadn’t picked them up, she thought, or maybe he never had the chance to, before the storm came down.

Her shoulders fell at the thought of the old man. She dragged one of the crates out to the main room, set it down in front of the bar shelves, and went over to the telephone to dial his number. Nothing. She tried to dial the business number. Nothing. She closed her eyes and sighed. This was the fifth time this morning, and maybe the fortieth-something time this entire week alone. Anxious was an understatement. A small part of her wanted to remain optimistic, though almost desperately so now. Death had become too much of a commonplace these days. She wasn’t sure if she could afford to face any more.

Maybe he just wasn’t home. Maybe he didn’t have his phone with him, had no way of contacting her. Even if he did, maybe he didn’t think she would try to reach out to him. Maybe he thought she was dead.

She wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. She thought she was, too.

She peered down briefly at the crate, then turned to look over her shoulder, toward the windows facing outside. With a quiet huff to herself, she found the small drawer in the corner of her bar station, opened it and retrieved the revolver inside to place it on top of the counter. Just in case, she thought. No one would have broken her locks just for the heck of it. It didn’t look like someone had trespassed her property, and she knew she left no cash anywhere in this building, but she could never be too sure, not after everything.

Turning back to the crate, she found a clean rag at the counter and picked up the bottle, giving the label a once-over. Bacardi, one of her favourites. She always loved a nice kiwi colada, or even a mojito sometimes, especially during the summer months, though she never had a lot of chances to make one considering the location and her usual clientèle. The rum was more often used on itself, with coke, or in a daiquiri here. Maybe if she worked at a hotel or a spa resort, she would have more of those opportunities.

Maybes and what-ifs. She set the bottle of rum on the shelf and her stare lingered for another second before she turned back down and moved on to the next. None of those here, not anymore.

She crouched down to reach for another bottle when she caught a glimpse of light from the corner of her eye and frowned. Her breath stopped when a sharp creak cut through the room, and in the same second, she spun around, reached for the gun and pointed it at the dark figure standing across the room from her, parallel to the muzzle of a pistol aimed straight for her head.

She blinked and when the blur in her vision finally disappeared, she found herself staring at a blanched face and a familiar pair of dark hazel eyes.

“Iida.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “You scared me.” She lowered the gun and relaxed her stance, swallowing hard. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting company.”

The man stood still on the other side of the room, arm stiff like a perfect Greek statue. “You’re alive.”

She lifted her head to look at him. “What?”

He stared at her, expression pale and blank like she had never seen before. Eventually, his arm slowly grew limp until the muzzle of his pistol was no longer glaring at her forehead. “You’re alive.”

Ren blinked again, then forced an uneasy smile as she set the revolver back down on the counter. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

His gaze briefly followed the motion of her hand. “Where did you get that?”

“Yoshinaga,” she said, swallowing the lump in her throat. “He said I would need it. Never did, thankfully, but bless the old man. He means well.”

Iida gave her a slow, hesitant nod before he finally fully lowered his pistol, and returned it to the hip holster barely peeking out from underneath his dark coat. “How long have you been here?”

“Maybe an hour.” She turned around to face the shelf, then reached down to retrieve another bottle to wipe down. “Bar’s closed today. And tomorrow, and probably the whole weekend, too. I’ll need to wax the floors before people can start puking all over it again.”

“You haven’t been open in months.”

She froze for a moment, then closed her eyes and blew out a slow breath through her teeth. “Yeah, well, things haven’t been easy these days. Sorry, but you’ll have to wait a bit more before I can make you your weekly Manhattan.”

The man stiffened, lips curving into a frown. “Ren, I don’t care about the drinks.” He blew a puff of air through his nose, his best attempt at a scoff. “I’ve been for almost two years now. Never once have I seen you take a day off.”

“Have you seen what it’s like outside?” Ren scoffed, shaking her head before turning around and nodding to the doors. “You honestly expect me to stay open in the middle of all that?”

The man kept his head still, only moving his eyes to the edge of his sockets as he cast a glance to the rest of the room. “I came here when I first heard the word.” A single gloved hand smoothed down a slight, almost unnoticeable crease on the side of his coat as he took two steps forward towards the counter. “People were rioting in the streets just outside, destroying everything in their path like bulldozers. And then I arrived here, and I noticed the doors were locked, front and back.”

Her face fell. She glared at him. “Wait. Were you the one who broke the locks?”

“I texted you,” he quickly said, and slowly took another few steps forward. “I called you. You never picked up, you never replied. I came back here, every day. I waited. I asked around. Nobody’s seen you since the riots first broke out. I tracked down Yoshinaga, asked him where you were. Said he didn’t know. That he never once heard from you since the riots.” He paused, inhaling deeply. “Five weeks later, it was all over the news. Students from the Ultimate Academy, kidnapped, smuggled, forced to participate in what they called a ‘Killing Game’.”

Her heart stopped. Her head began to spin, and she couldn’t breathe. The next thing she knew, the man before her had produced something else from inside his coat—an off-white rectangular object, which he placed flat on the countertop between them after finally taking the last three steps forward. When her eyes panned down, she realized exactly what it was.

Her acceptance letter.

Her scoff bordered on a heartless, lifeless, feeble chuckle. “You broke my locks, and you searched through my stuff?”

“Yoshinaga called me.” There wasn’t a hint of emotion as he spoke. She couldn’t tell if this was an interrogation, intervention, or something worse. “He told me where you went. Where you were supposed to be. He thought you were safe.” He gave a small, near imperceptible nod at the letter in front of them. “He heard the news the same time I did. I already came to the same conclusion before he told me over the phone.”

She could hear the buzzing of the LED lights above them. She tried to make a mental note to change them later this weekend, but her head was hurting too much. Like a hammer pounding too hard on a nail in the wall until it bent and became crooked, sticking out like a hideous tumour to join the numerous other hideous, crooked nails in her wall.

“I tried to track you down,” he finally spoke again after a moment of nothing but the buzzing from the ceilings. He cast his gaze off to the side, to the old wooden floorboards then to one of the many walls surrounding them. “It wasn’t easy. Some old acquaintances of mine owed a few favours, and I finally made good use of them.”

“Wait.” Her frown deepened. “What?”

“Usually I had to look down, but what few leads I had took me up the stairs instead,” he continued, voice monotonous and nonchalant, unaware of the souring look across her face. “I mean, every corporation has skeletons in their closets. Turns out the Foundation keeps their skeletons strapped underneath their blazers and leather chairs.”

“Iida.” She closed her eyes and leaned her hip against the shelf behind her, hoping it would keep the floor from tilting so much beneath her feet. “What—”

“I couldn’t find much." Ren cursed under her breath. She didn’t think he heard that either. “A few high-priority orders to transport a number of very important persons, all unnamed, plus some cargo. The rest of the details were classified, encrypted in their database. Asked an old friend of mine to try and give a go at it. Results were expected later tonight.” He paused, briefly glanced up at her, and let go of his breath. “I suppose those files weren’t needed after all.”

She felt like the hammer was pounding on the nail, again and again, harder into the wall in her head. She couldn’t tell if the ground really was shifting beneath her, or if it was just her stomach churning from the bitter feeling in the back of her tongue and throat. She forced herself to take a long, deep breath and shifted more of her own weight against the shelf. “Why?”

“Hm?”

She took another deep breath and blew it out slowly through her nose. “Why?” She peeled her eyes open, eyes staring distantly at the cabinets behind the bar. “Why did you… Why?”

He frowned. “What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“You did all that to track me down.” She slowly shook her head, still keeping her blurred gaze fixated on the floor. “Why?”

“I couldn’t stand here and do nothing when I knew you were out there. When I knew I could do something about it.” She heard his breath escaping through his lips. Before then, she didn’t think he could even breathe. “I couldn’t just sit here and wait for them to bring you back in a body bag.”

“You didn’t have to sit here,” she retorted back, scoffing. She held her face in her hand for a brief moment before taking another shorter, sharper breath, and finally turned her gaze up to stare at him. “And so what if they did? What if I disappeared off the face of the Earth? I make cocktails for a living. I’ve got a meaningless, glorified title to my name. That’s not a reason to do whatever it is you told me you did.” Her eyes glanced up to the ceiling, and she held back another scoff. “Someone paid you to find me or something? Because you’re making it sound like I was some high-reward contract. And I know that shouldn’t be the case because if it were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

It felt like watching a still frame, or a DVD on pause. When he finally moved, he merely shook his head.

“Then what is it? You didn’t have anything better to waste your time on?”

His response was immediate. “No. Not that.”

She made a sharp intake of breath and sighed. “Iida, those people… Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? The Foundation, the Academy, the people behind the curtains—”

“You forget who I used to work for.”

“The Shiraishi-kai are long gone.” He gave her a look, and she tried her best not to roll her eyes. “Officially, they’re long gone. Those people up those stairs? They’re still here, at the top of society—the top of the world. They can obliterate us into dust and sweep us under a Roomba in a blink of an eye. And you know this. I know you know this. You were risking more than life and limb, and for what?”

“It was worth the price,” he said quietly. “At least, it would have been.”

“Was it?” She pressed her lips together. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.” Her head felt light, almost spinning. She closed her eyes, again, and sighed, again. “Who am I to you?”

She opened her eyes and caught him lifting his head to look toward her, but said nothing.

“Who am I to you?” she asked again, glaring back at him. “A bartender? No one is stupid enough to go through all that for a goddamn bartender. Either you’re the biggest goddamn fool in the world—and I know you’re better than this—or there’s something else to this.” Deep breath. “You know what? Better question. Who are you?”

He frowned. “What?”

“Who are you, Iida?” She nodded to the corner of the room. “You showed up here two years ago. Sat in the corner booth every single night without ordering a single damn thing, watching every single person in the room like a goddamn hawk, until I had to walk over there and ask, like a waitress at a diner.” When she took another breath, she could feel herself starting to shake. “We never spoke a single word to each other, but when Tsuji raised his voice when he was stumbling up to the counter, you were on your feet and flew across the room just to tell him off. And then you just never said anything about it since, pretended like nothing happened at all.” She gave a light shrug and shook her head. “I hate knights-in-shining-armour as much as the next person does, but tracking me down to a secluded location deep in the middle of some unknown woods to save me from a real-life Saw movie? Just because you could do it, that didn’t mean you had to. That’s the thing. There was no obligation.”

“There was,” he said. His voice was firm, but not persistent. Almost nonchalant, even. “I’ve told you this. I couldn’t just stand here and do nothing.”

“That’s heroism, not an obligation.” She spun around, crouched down, opened the cabinet before her, and scanned the rows of glassware. Nothing missing, she thought. Not even a single scratch or crack. “And you’re a mercenary, not a superhero.” She stood up and turned to face him again. “Who am I to you, Iida? A target? An informant?”

She caught his eye for a brief second before he turned his face away from her. “No.”

“Then what? A friend?” She didn’t mean to sound so mocking, but she was almost positive that wasn’t the answer. “Is that it? Because I’m the only one who’s willing to stick around in your miserable company?”

“No.” He sounded tired. He was never tired. She thought he was a machine once, but he was hanging his head now, short strands of dark hair falling over his forehead. A quiet sigh escaped his lips. “No.”

“Then what is it?” She drew in a breath through her teeth and raked her fingers through her frayed hairline. “Why? Why, Iida?”

“Because,” he breathed out, then paused, then lifted his head. His eyes were still staring at the floor beneath her. “Because fifteen years ago, I promised my little sister I would protect her. That no matter what happens, I would always, always, be there. For you.” There was a glint in his eye when he finally looked up at her and took a sharp, shaking breath. “And I broke that promise. I broke that promise when our mother died. I broke that promise when I left you with your father.”

Something sank in the pit of her stomach. A bitter feeling in the back of her tongue that she couldn’t spit out. “What?”

He was silent at first, lips parting slightly as though trying and failing to form coherent words. His shoulders were hunched forward, a sliver away from breaking his once-perfect posture. “I’ve… thought about how I should break the news to you,” he murmured, low enough that it almost sounded like a whisper. “I tried to think of a good conversation starter. Two years later, I’ve still yet to come up with anything good. Of course, I also happened to choose the absolute worst timing to finally tell you this.” He inhaled slowly, deeply, like he was at the edge of his lifeline. “But when I heard the news, I just couldn’t. I've lost you once before. I wasn’t going to lose you again.”

Heaving out a breath, he licked his lips and slipped his hands into his coat pockets, hanging his head solemnly, almost in shame. He wasn’t the first person to come here looking like that, like he had fucked up his entire life with a single foolish act. It was what drew those types of people here in the first place: to find solace in a crowd full of failures and mistakes, to drown themselves in the liquor until they woke up the following morning without a single memory of the night prior, or until they could never wake up at all.

But he was the first time to come in here with a confession that, at this point, her mind simply could not process.

“You’re lying.”

He lifted his head. “What?”

“You’re lying.” She shook hers. “You’re lying to me.”

He took a step forward. “You asked me who I was. Who you were to me. I told you.”

“You’re a contract killer.” She took a step back. “And former Yakuza. You’re practically a private investigator with a silenced pistol, and maybe even a sniper rifle hidden somewhere underneath that coat.” Scoff. “I’ve seen how you work, Iida. I’ve seen you asking around here. You could dig up the dirtiest secrets of the dirtiest bastards in this whole street if you wanted to.”

She could rarely see drastic changes in his expressions, but noticed his jaw stiffen as he turned his gaze down again. “I wouldn’t need to.” He took his hands out of his pockets and wrapped one around the other. “Would this convince you?”

He slid something off one of his fingers and leaned forward to place the object on the table, above the letter. His hand departed, revealing a silver ring, with intricate designs engraved all around the tarnished band, and a radiant-cut deep green gemstone.

Her eyes flickered. The hammer slammed onto the nail and pierced something in the back of her head. “Where did you get this?” she murmured, taking a step forward, then snapped her head up. “Iida, where did you get this?”

He didn’t look at her, merely staring at the ring he had placed on the table between them. “Our mother gave it to us before she died.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “One of the few things she had to her name after the bastard pawned the rest for booze and bets.” He took a slow deep breath and closed his eyes. “She had two of them. A pair. One of them, she gave to me. And the other…”

She hadn’t even realized her own hand had wrapped itself around the silver band around her left index finger until she felt his gaze piercing through her, and her fingertips grazed across the smaller gemstone resting cold above her skin.

“Did you kill him?”

“What?”

“My brother.” Her eyes flickered again, and her hand wrapped itself tightly around her finger. “Did you kill him? Went through his stuff so you could come back here and tell all this shit to my face hoping I’d believe you?”

“Ren—”

She took a step back. “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out.” The back of her hip hit the shelf behind her. She couldn’t look at him, refused to. She was only staring at the abandoned ring resting on top of the counter. “Now. Please.”

“Renako—”

The nail jammed itself into her brain and she winced. “Leave, Iida.” When she drew air into her lungs, she almost choked from how much she was shaking. “I’m not asking again. Leave.”

“Renako, I’m telling you the truth.” He began to lift his hand, stretching it forward toward her. “Ren—”

“Just leave me alone,” she whispered, bit down on her lip, and closed her eyes. “Please.”

It felt like forever before she felt anything else, heard anything else but the ringing in her head, drowning out the mumbling voices and echoing screams in the darkest recesses of her mind. She didn’t dare to open her eyes. She was too afraid of what she might see if she did.

“I’m sorry.”

Amidst the ringing, his voice was a quiet whisper, but smooth like a cup of hot chocolate or whipped cream. She didn’t hear anything else though, other than the soft thumping against the hardwood floor growing ever more distant, ending with a click, a loud creak, and a thud reverberating across the hollow room, leaving her drowning in silence once again.

She opened her eyes. The ring was still there, resting on top of her discarded letter, abandoned and alone. She moved forward, picked up the silver band, and rested it on her bare palm before she curled her fingers over the jewel, closed her eyes, and slid down the side of the bar until she was sitting on the hardwood with her knees close to her chest.

She leaned her head back against the cabinet behind her, unable to hold back her sobs as she breathed.

#ghl: wcsb #danganronpa #danganronpa fanfiction #we've created something beautiful

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ghoulical · 4 years ago

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Akira: Ordinary World

An original Danganronpa character one-shot.

Word Count: 2,145 Summary: A lone Ultimate Roboticist laments her present and future in a Tragedy-ridden world. Notes: This was based on a Danganronpa roleplay server I was on. I wrote this for myself and my friends from that server (in fact, the character Choki belongs to one of them), and I was proud of this piece, and I hope you will enjoy it as well.

“Miss Hoshi, you have an incoming message.”

Akira Hoshi leaned back from the hollow cavity of the prototype android before her and pushed her goggles up to her forehead. “Who is it from?” she called out, taking a moment to take a deep breath. Two seconds later, she frowned. “Alita, who sent the message?”

“Fourth Division Head,” the female voice replied. “Ultimate Doctor: Choki Buraddorei.”

The young roboticist froze. Oh. Another intake of breath, and she pulled her goggles back down over her eyes. “Accept message,” she replied quietly.

This time, it took three seconds before the voice returned. “Very well. Begin message.”

A low hum echoed through the room, quickly followed by a single muted beep. “‘Hi, Miss—Akira.’” A short pause. “’It’s me, your friendly neighborhood doctor. I hope this message finds you well.’”

Clink. A screw slipped from her grip and plummeted into an abyss. Akira blinked, her gaze trailing the object just a second behind, until her vision began to blur, and her fingers started to twitch.

“‘It’s been a while since we heard from you.’” A light cough. “‘I, uh, just wanted to let you know the meeting’s coming up soon. A week’s time, in fact. I heard the higher-ups have some big announcements to make. They want to make sure everybody will be there.’”

She took a deep breath and pulled her goggles off again, setting them on the top of her head, and placed the screwdriver in her mouth, in between her teeth, as her hands fiddled with the control panel in front of her. With a flick of her wrist, a mechanism hissed underneath her as the platform she stood on began to descend towards the four hollow tiles in the middle of the room, until the metal reconnected with the rest of the tiles, and several clicks indicated the mechanism locking into place.

“‘Ah, I have to go. Duty calls.’” But even as the glass barriers surrounding the four tiles lowered and disappeared into the floor, she could’ve sworn the ground beneath her was still moving. “‘Don’t be a stranger, okay? This line is always open if you need anything.’” She stepped forward, off the platform, and took the screwdriver out of her mouth, placing it gently down on the workbench nearby. “‘See you soon. Be well.’”

She stared down at the surface in front of her, unfocused eyes gazing across the disorganized space—wires, gears, screws, nuts, and bolts scattered on one side of the table, and a detached, disproportionately-sized mechanical arm on the other—then lifted her chin and stared through the translucent holographic screen hovering inches above the table.

Another low hum resounded through the room. “End of message,” the initial female voice announced, then paused. “Would you like me to reply to the message, miss?”

Akira blinked. “What? No. No.” She took another deep breath. “Delete it, please.”

Pause. “Very well.” A second later, three soft beeps echoed from the ceiling. “Would you like fish congee and tea for dinner, miss?”

Akira closed her eyes and nodded once. “That would be lovely, Alita. Thank you.”

“My pleasure, miss. It will be ready in approximately eleven minutes.”

Another low hum. Akira sighed, trying to suppress a yawn as she lowered her head to the table and rested it above folded arms, feeling a thousand pounds heavier than she was mere moments ago. When was the last time she had a good night’s sleep? Last week? Maybe the week before? Either way, it was a luxury she still couldn’t afford, considering she now only had seven, likely six, days to finish the prototype, and at least the first round of trials.

She should go. She had to, even if she didn’t want to—and she didn’t, but it didn’t matter. Attendance was mandatory, and she respected that, knowing the work they were involved in. It must be the presentations, some people had said. She had been doing them since she was fifteen, so of course, she had to be weary of them. She scoffed. Breakthroughs in the seventh division was a constant in their meetings, though not unsurprising to the others, at least not yet. It made her eager to show them—the ‘adults’, as she would say in her head—that she was more than capable of handling herself, without outside help or intervention.

Because if there was anything she hated about attending these meetings, it was the people.

She didn’t hate seeing them. She really didn’t. All things considered, it was good to see them doing well, perhaps not in perfect health, but otherwise alive, hence mandatory attendance. But too often during these meetings, Akira couldn’t bring herself to lift her head up from the papers in front of her, couldn’t tear her eyes away from her hands folded neatly on her lap, or her feet kept together underneath the table, or even allow her posture to slouch a little, to keep her shoulders from being too stiff like her own creations. And if her neck started to ache, she would lift her chin only for her eyes to wander, all across the table, everywhere around the room, anywhere but the people that surrounded her.

It was particularly worse for a select few. A small handful, really—three out of the total of thirteen—but it didn’t help that all of them, herself included, were in consecutive divisions. It also didn’t help that she was the furthest left to the leader of the Foundation, who sat at the head of the table, meaning she couldn’t completely avoid glancing her head to her right every now and then whenever the leader spoke, keeping those three in her peripherals still.

People tried to talk to her about it. She didn’t need help, she would tell them. She was alive. She was fine. Many others weren’t. The four of them escaped the island. Eight others didn’t. Many more lives were at stake. There was no time to waste, she thought, especially not on her, so she threw herself into her work. Work meant she wouldn’t waste days away in her room, glancing at the bottle of pills sitting at her bedside table, nor in the corner of her workbench. Work meant her mind was occupied with invisible blueprints, not invisible faces. Work meant she would return to bed and pass out from the exhaustion, and not be kept awake for days on end, fearing she would not wake up the following morning when she did fall asleep.

Work meant she could forget it all, even if it were only for another day.

A.L.I.T.A., bless her algorithm, did her best to keep the veil up—sort out correspondences, run numbers and trial tests, assist the roboticist in her countless projects to the best of her capabilities. Do the things that Akira couldn’t or shouldn’t do, often according to the A.I.’s own self-learned judgment. Sometimes, it was the things that Akira should be doing but didn’t, because even through all these years, A.L.I.T.A. had grown so much, yet so little, from her initial base programming as a caretaking service automaton.

“Miss Hoshi, your dinner is ready.”

Akira lifted her head up, wincing at the sudden glare of the desk lamp in front of her. Blinking rapidly, her eyes eventually adjusted back to the brightness of the sterile room, and her head turned to the clock hung high in the far wall across from her as she tried and failed to suppress another yawn.

She squinted. 19:10. “Thank you, Alita.”

“My pleasure, miss.” Sometimes, she wondered if it really was. “Would you like me to send it up to—”

“No, that’s fine. I’ll head down to eat.” She blew out a sigh and threw her head back, straightening her spine and stretching her shoulders as her hand reached up to rub her eyes. “Can you keep running those diagnostics tests in the meantime, please? I will need them by tonight if possible. If not, we can try tomorrow.”

“Of course, Miss Hoshi.”

“Thank you.” Her hand ran through disheveled silver strands as she started dragging her feet across the room towards the doors. They slid open with a light hiss upon her arrival, and almost immediately, her nose picked up the familiar scent of soy sauce and steamed fish, luring her towards the staircase beside her laboratory. Three steps down, her stomach started growling.

Less than a minute later, she sat behind the kitchen island, glazed eyes fixed into the empty surface of the pristine counter even as a metallic appendage extended from the ceiling with a near-inaudible buzz, and glided through the room until a steaming bowl of white congee dotted with green herbs appeared in front of her, with an aluminum spoon and a small cup of dark liquid sitting on either side.

She closed her eyes. Her father’s voice would soon float down the hallway, barely audible enough for her to make out coherent words. The House would urge her to eat before the temperature dropped to twenty. After she was done, the House would usher her back to her room, per her father’s orders, and keep the door locked until daylight returned. She would work on her projects and settle into bed likely an hour after A.L.I.T.A. dimmed the lights after the clock struck ten. Then she would wake up in the morning, work on her projects some more until the House called her back down to eat, then the cycle would repeat. Over and over again, until the end of her days.

Except the voices never came. Her father, the House. When she opened her eyes, she was staring into the bowl of congee, sitting alone in the one-person kitchen, the only living soul in the entire thousand-square-feet compound. The outside world was still a desolate wasteland, her search-and-rescue prototype was still upstairs, and the meeting was still in seven days’ time.

Maybe her father was right. The outside world was a cruel world. There were too many bad apples for her to count, even with her toes. The Tragedy was no natural calamity, it was man-made. Four people made it out of the island, not because they survived, but because they were spared. Even the Foundation, she thought—the world’s beacon of hope—had one too many skeletons in their closet. Word travelled fast, even despite the roboticist’s isolation. Meetings were cordial, but discord and disagreement were not uncommon. The side of business Akira never had the chance to see when she worked for her father’s company, because he ensured she never did. These faces, the ones that would surround the oval table in a week’s time, could bear the brightest smiles, brimming with all the hope of the world, but she knew better now than to take them at face value.

Maybe her father was right. She was better off here, like this. Behind closed doors, within four walls. She didn’t need help, she told them. She lived like this her entire life. And everything was fine in this constancy. Everything was fine until the change.

But she couldn’t pretend the outside world didn’t exist, either. She knew good people once. She could count them with both hands. Jake. Kazuko. Kiyoshi. Her mother. Taka. Uncle Hideo. But there were more out there. Helpless masses. Mothers and children. The sick and poor. Good Samaritans with the potential to do good, even if they haven’t yet. People she could help—would help, with the work she was doing here.

She should go. She didn’t want to, but she had to. For them, she thought. For the ones who couldn’t protect themselves from the despair of the world. She would bear that burden, for now, for a little while longer, for as long as she could. It was the least she could do for them, for the people who fought and suffered and lost, and for the people she could count with the fingers on her hands.

“Alita.” A gentle hum emanated from the ceiling, and she blew out a slow breath. “Send a message to the Fourth Division Head.”

“Would you like to reply to the earlier message instead?”

The roboticist held her breath and blinked, then released a small sigh. “Yes, please.” Her hand crept up to the countertop and rested her fingers on the rim of her tea cup. “And Alita?”

“Yes, miss?”

“Do we still have that projector screen in the lab?”

“Of course, miss.”

She picked up the spoon beside the bowl and dipped it into the congee. “How do you feel about watching a movie while we work?”

It took the A.I. two seconds to respond. “Episode Four, Miss Hoshi?”

She hummed in confirmation.

“I will have it set up by the time you return.”

The corner of her lips twitched. “Thank you, Alita.”

“Always, Miss Hoshi.”

#ghl: wcsb #danganronpa #danganronpa fanfiction #we've created something beautiful

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ghoulical · 5 years ago

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Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover

Part 3 of Renegade, a My Hero Academia fan-fiction.

Word Count: 7,343 Pairing: Tomura Shigaraki x Female!OC Warnings: Minor harassment Summary: Ren’s mysterious client returns, but their light conversation takes a drastic turn, and she has to face the consequences of her actions, whether she wants to or not.

“Have you heard anything from Grubby yet?”

Ren didn’t always mean to eavesdrop on her customers, but sometimes, she just couldn’t help herself.

“No, haven’t seen him at all since last week.”

Sometimes, it was all too difficult not to.

“Bartender, another round here, please!”

She wiped her hands down with a spare cloth, threw it over her shoulder and scurried over to the other end of the bar, where the three loud men—villains, no doubt—waited for her arrival and their quick refill of golden nectar. With a small smile, she nodded and swiped the empty glasses from the bar counter, then sidestepped slightly to the right to hold one of the glasses at an angle underneath one of the faucets on the draft tower. The other hand reached up to hold down the handle, and she made sure to keep her eyes on the level of amber liquid pouring into the glass even as her ears paid their attention elsewhere.

“I heard he got caught in some trouble with a hero.”

“Grubby? No, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m not shitting you, man.”

“Any idea who the bastard is?”

She let go of the handle and slid the refilled glass over to the man closest to her, nodding at the feeble ‘thank-you’ he offered her, before she held another glass underneath the faucet and begin filling it with the same liquid.

“No clue, but I’ve heard rumors there’s a new hero in town, running around rounding villains up in the middle of the night.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Heroes don’t sleep, man.”

“It’s not the Number One Hero, is it?”

“I think we would know if All Might himself ever shows his face around here. No, I think it’s some B-rated hero or something. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him on the charts, too, in fact.”

Another full glass. No thank-you this time, though. Another client raised their hand and was calling for her from the other end of the bar. One more to go.

“What? A B-rated hero taking down Grubby? That’s impossible, dude.”

“Not impossible, man. Rumour has it this new hero’s got some kind of Quirk that can cancel out other Quirks—sure explains how someone like him can take poor ol’ Grubby down.”

Huh. That sounds familiar.

“That’s nothing but a whole lot of bull. There’s no way a Quirk like that exists. I mean, what’s the point of having Quirks then, if someone has an overpowered one just like that?”

Nope. It’s not impossible.

“What do you think, bartender?”

“Huh?” Ren forced herself to look up, only to immediately find herself being the center of attention of all three men sitting on the other side of the bar from where she stood, eyes staring at her in genuine inquiry. “What?”

“What do you think about what Archie just said here?” one of the men asked again, smirking as he nudged the side of the man sitting beside him, who grunted and scowled at the gesture. “About some B-rated hero running around with a Quirk-erasing… Quirk?”

She pondered their question for a moment—not the content of the question itself, but of how she should respond to it—until she heard the sloshing sound of liquid spilling out, forcing her to snap out of her daze to realize she had dispensed just a little too much beer into the glass she was holding onto. She quickly yanked the glass away from the faucet as her other hand released the handle, then pulled down the cloth on her shoulder to start wiping the sides of the glass, ensuring it was dry before serving it out to the last of the three men.

“What do I think?” She slung the cloth back around her shoulder as she passed the glass over to the man sitting furthest from her. “Does it matter what I think?”

“No.” Of course not. “But it does if it means we get to call out on Archie’s bullshit here.”

A round of boisterous laughter. All the red-haired bartender could offer, however, was a smile.

“Well, nothing’s impossible,” she replied, shoulder’s lifting for a small shrug. “I didn’t think you boys would come back here after what happened last Friday night, but colour me surprised to see you alive and back on your feet for another round of drinks, Archie. We’re always glad to have you back here.”

Another series of raucous laughter, still at the expense of poor Archie, who could do nothing more than scowl at his two friends, wince at the painful memory she abruptly brought up, and raise his drink in respect for the bartender’s perfect response.

“Kudos to you, bartender.”

“I’m here all night, boys. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” She tilted her head to the side at the other customer awaiting her service. “—I’ve got a job to do. Call if you need anything else.”

She left the three men to their own devices to tend to the lady sitting at the other end of the bar, who had been calling for her attention in the last two minutes. Their words continued to linger in the forefront of her mind even as she asked the middle-aged woman what she wanted to drink, correctly guessing the next order was going to be a martini, and pretending to be surprised at the request for both the olives and the lemon twist addition to her drink.

And even as her hands began to set in motion, reaching for a pint glass, the vermouth and the ever-essential gin to the well-beloved cocktail, she couldn’t stop the men’s conversation from distracting her mind just a little bit, almost causing her to forget she already added the gin into the mixture when she started to pour another two extra ounces into the jigger. Shaking her head did nothing but push the thought aside for a brief moment, as she finished making the cocktail before serving it to the lady with an extra warm smile in addition to the extra-extra drink she ordered.

She stepped back to allow the woman to enjoy her drink in solitary peace and quiet, and allowing herself to mull over her thoughts for a little bit as she leaned her hip against the back counter, folding her hands in front of her and keeping her gaze straight across the room to pretend as if she was still keeping a close eye on all the clients in the bar as the job required her to.

So, she sighed. Shouta’s in town. She couldn’t remember when she last saw her half-brother—well, she did see him on TV about a few weeks ago. She only caught a mere glimpse of him, however, standing at the edge of a row of heroes, almost invisible behind his more well-known colleagues—that was right she heard the creaking of the front door echoing off the bare walls of the apartment, signifying her father’s return from the shop, and forcing her to shut the TV off and scurry back to her bedroom before his shadow could even reach the living room.

Imagine how livid her father would be if he caught the sight of her own half-brother—his former stepson—on TV. She didn’t need to give him another reason to be mad at her, given he could come up with a dozen each day already.

She missed him. Of course, she missed him. She almost laughed when she first caught him on TV. He looked much, much older now—there was a slight stubble growing on his chin and underneath his nose, and his long locks of hair were unkempt, almost too reminiscent of their mother’s, as well as Ren’s if she hadn’t dyed it vermillion red a few months ago, right before she took up the job at the bar.

Pro Heroes should be well-compensated for their public service work, right? And yet, somehow, her brother could easily be mistaken for a lost homeless man—a black blur in the background amongst the abundance of colours on that TV news segment. Shouldn’t his aunt be reprimanding him for keeping such an unruly, unsightly appearance like that? Was he still even living with his aunt? Maybe not anymore.

How old was he now? Almost thirty, probably?

God, it had been so long since they last saw each other. Would he even recognize her now? Hell, what would he even think, seeing her like this? Ren herself scoffed at the thought: Shouta Aizawa, the Pro Hero who has helped countless of lives and thwarted villains for a living; and his little sister, Ren Kagawa, a literal nobody who was paid to facilitate the awful habits of the people she surrounded herself with on a nightly basis.

She took a deep breath and sighed. Reaching out to him was a terrible idea. She couldn’t imagine the look of disappointment across his face if he saw her like this. She didn’t want to even think of it.

She was still proud of him, though. Hell, who wouldn’t be proud to call him a brother, or even a friend, for that matter? She could imagine all the hurdles he had to jump through to graduate from U.A.—with a Hero License, for that matter, and yet, graduate he did indeed.

Maybe, if things were different back then—if she had persevered as much as he did, she might have had the chance to attend U.A., too.

Maybe. Maybe not.

“Kagawa-san.”

She looked up, breath catching stuck in her throat as soon as her eyes rested upon the familiar sight of greyish-blue curls peeking from underneath a black hood, attached to the same black sweatshirt he wore when she first saw him about a week ago. His head wasn’t bent down as much, allowing her to catch a glimpse of his piercing crimson eyes staring at her through his bangs.

“Shigaraki-sama.” She took a deep breath. Speaking of heroes… “You’re back.”

He stopped dead in his tracks, just as his hand was about to reach out to latch itself onto the bar stool, then tilted his head slightly to the side, eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. “Am I not allowed to, Kagawa-san?”

“Well, no—err, I mean—” She cleared her throat, hoping it would stop her from stammering so much. “You’re always welcome to come back, of course.”

Not that she could do anything to stop him, anyway.

He hummed as four fingers latching onto the bar stool right across from where she stood, then dragged it out before gliding over to sit right in front of her. “There is still business to discuss, Kagawa-san.”

“Of course.” Yoshinaga made it clear last week that this so-called ‘business’ was nothing she could nor should stick her nose into. Not this time, at least. “The manager is in his office right now. I can go call him for you if you want—”

“No, it’s fine,” the blue-haired young man murmured, waving a feeble hand at her before casting his tired glance off to the side. “Leave him be. The meeting’s not supposed to start for another half hour, anyway.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know if she should hold her breath or sigh in relief. “I see. Well.” She tried clearing her throat again, then closed her eyes before addressing him with a routine smile. “Can I get you anything while you wait?”

The three men from before had gone silent, it seemed; when she turned to face them, she caught Archie’s eye just as he was stepping off his bar stool, forcing the young man to freeze on the spot the moment their eyes met. When his friends loudly beckoned him to join them, he finally lifted his hand from the bar, revealing the money he had left to pay for the three men’s drinks, before he hopped off and scurried over to regroup with his friends as they headed out the door without a second glance back.

She felt her shoulders deflate as she turned her head back to face the blue-haired young man sitting before her, and tried not to stare when his free hand went up to start picking at his neck again.

“Maybe,” he murmured, almost to himself if his voice weren’t audible enough for her to hear. “But I think I’ll get something else for tonight.”

Not a Manhattan man, then. “Anything you have in mind?” she asked, words flying out of her mouth almost automatically.

He pondered her question for another moment, eyes gazing distantly at the rows upon rows of bottles lined neatly across the shelves behind her. “Heard from a friend that a whiskey sour’s pretty good.”

“Whiskey sour, huh?” Ren couldn’t resist smiling at his words. “Your friend has good taste.”

He hummed again, but didn’t offer her any further response as she picked up a jigger in one hand, and the bottle of lemon juice in the other. She kept her head down as she worked to make his drink—she had worked the job long enough that her hands moved on their own volition, not caring less about little spurts or spills from swinging a bottle too far or tipping a full jigger at too big of an angle, but as she poured the appropriate liquids into the shaker, she found herself physically trying to keep a steady hand, making sure she measured exactly the right amounts needed to make his requested drink.

Her eyes almost flitted up when she felt him frowning at her, as she cracked the egg open on the brim of the shaker and began separating the yolk, letting the egg white drip down into the shaker’s contents.

“What are you doing?” he murmured, voice laced with prudence but also masked fascination.

“Making you a whiskey sour,” she promptly replied, her eyes fixated on the egg, gently tossing the remaining yolk to the other half of the shell before discarding it.

She closed the top of the shaker, gripping it on one hand as she rocked it back and forth, all the while her left hand remained idle and awkward resting in front of her thigh.

“You mix a raw egg into it?”

“Just the egg white.” She bit down on her lip, feeling his gaze weighing down on her. She stopped and placed the shaker back on the table, opened it to drop a large chunk of ice into it, then replaced the cap to start shaking it earnestly the second time around.

“I’m not going to get sick from it, am I?”

She pressed her lips to a thin line. “You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

“I never said I didn’t.”

She almost frowned at his words, but he didn’t seem to pay any attention to the strange expression on her face, one she was positive she made instead of that frown.

“If I recall correctly,” she muttered, still keeping her head bowed down as her primary focus remained at the coldness beginning to spread through the metal and onto her hand, “the last time you were here, you were questioning my judgment on some things.”

“On your decision to take up a job here,” Shigaraki corrected, his voice loose and unrestricted as he leaned his head against his fist again, elbow planted firm on the top of the counter. “Not so much on how you do your job itself.”

“Oh.” She picked up a chilled coupe glass from the fridge, then set it gently down in front of her as the other hand positioned the shaker above it, holding the cap firm with two fingers before she tipped it over, letting the liquid pour through the strainer and into the cocktail glass. “Well, I suppose this is another chance at either verifying that statement, or completely disproving it in a blink of an eye.”

She shook the metal container a bit to let the last drops fall into the glass before setting it aside, then picking up the bottle of bitters, dashing the brown liquid across the white foam forming on the surface of the cocktail. As a final touch, she used a toothpick and glided the tip across the line of bitters, creating a feather pattern across the foam—a nice artistic touch, should she say so herself—before gently picking the glass up and setting it down right in front of the villain.

“One special whiskey sour,” she said, finally turning her eyes up to meet his crimson orbs, as he lifted his head up from his hand in clear anticipation, “for one special man.”

One of the villain’s eyebrows lifted in genuine intrigue, before he tilted his head down to stare at the cocktail placed in front of him.

“Special, huh?” He made another short, soft hum, before he picked up the glass, exercising almost as much caution as she did—four fingers clutching the stem while the fifth remained dangling in the air—brought it over closer to his chapped lips. “Is it now? Or are you just saying that to make me feel special?”

“Can’t it be both?”

He tipped the glass and took a sip of his drink without another word, eyes closed and all, before placing the glass back down on the surface of the counter. Her eyes flitted back down when his eyes flew open, as soon as he finished ruminating on whatever he tasted in his mouth just now—could be good, could be terrible, depending on his own personal palette, though from her experience, whiskey sours were always a pleasant taste to even some of her more fickle customers.

“Not bad.” And yet, he winced, creating more wrinkles on his aged face, though less noticeable than he did the first time last week. “I guess I shouldn’t complain about the sourness when it’s on the name of the cocktail itself.”

“Did it change your perception of me at all, though?” she questioned, eyes briefly flitting up to him with some apprehension, but not enough to counter her curiosity for his answer.

“Does it matter that much to you,” he asked instead, his crimson eyes quickly finding hers as he glared deeply into her, “that I do not change what I think of you?”

“You said you trusted me, Shigaraki-sama.” She shrugged feebly, turning her head down to stare at her hands resting on the rubber mat on her side of the counter. “And I’m practically a stranger to you. I just want to know how that’s possible.”

“I know your name.” He shrugged, placing his head against his fist, but not so much leaning against it, bending his spine at just a slight expressive angle. “I know where you work, who you work for, and that you have an impressive knowledge and skill when it comes to what it is that you do. Is that not enough?”

He wasn’t wrong. She saw these situations in TV shows, like those awful soap operas, before—hell, even on real-life news sometimes. A villain could take advantage of even the smallest morsel of information—whatever leverage they could obtain of their desired target—and manipulate it to serve whatever nefarious intentions they could have.

In this case, Shigaraki could just inquire Yoshinaga about her private details—her cell phone number, her home address, which could spiral off into dangerous possibilities if she wasn’t careful with how she approached him now.

She almost shuddered when she finally realized exactly everything he spoke to her just seconds ago. Her eyes flew up almost impulsively, locking into his blood-red irises for a brief moment before he turned his own gaze away from her, down to the coupe glass pinched between his fingers.

“And no—for the record, you are just as skillful as I believe you to be,” he concluded, chapped lips curving into a small frown as he continued to stare at the pearl-white foam of his cocktail. “I don’t know what a whiskey sour is supposed to taste like, but I know what whiskey tastes like, and judging by its name, I’m guessing it’s supposed to be sour, so this fulfills my expectations from you.” He brought the glass back up to his lips and took another sip. A breath later, his frown twisted into a small, contented smile. “Surpassed them, in fact. Very well done.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Shigaraki-sama.” She looked down, one hand already fetching a dry white cloth, while the other picked up a wine glass and overturned it, before stuffing the cloth inside and wiping the glass around the rim. “About seventy percent of my clientele here is of the gender opposite to mine.”

Another small, curious hum. “And yet, you treat me differently than the rest of your patrons.”

“Do I?” Beside them, the middle-aged woman called the bartender softly, turning the latter’s attention briefly towards her. With a tight-lipped smile, the lady nodded to the cash she left beside the empty martini glass, covering the line of her gaze with a pair of sunglasses as she stepped off the bar stool and wordlessly headed back towards the double doors.

Ren nodded, setting the cloth and wine glass down, and kept her head down as she stepped over to the empty martini glass, retrieving it alongside the cash the lady had left behind. “How so?”

She walked over to the cash register—it still wasn’t too far away from where Shigaraki was sitting, considering he sat right in the middle of the bar, equidistant to both the lady and the three men from earlier, and just a few centimeters off from where she stood now, in front of the cash register. It was almost as if he was making sure she paid attention to him, and now only him, seeing as everyone else in the room had already left, and no new customers had wandered in since the minute Shigaraki did.

“Didn’t you say I was special?” the villain quipped, before he took one last sip of his drink. “Or do you really say that to all your clients?”

“You pique my interest.” She wasn’t lying. As dangerous as he was—as much as he triggered all the red alerts, and all the warning signs inside her mind—she couldn’t help herself but be intrigued by this strange, blue-haired villain. “About as much as I have piqued yours, I’m sure.”

He made another soft sound that, coupled with his sharp exhale, almost sounded like a condescending scoff. “You seem rather confident despite that fact.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

“I’m a villain, Kagawa-san.”

She blinked her eyes, trying to keep her focus on slipping the bills and coins into their appropriate sections.

“Look around you. Even people who don’t know me cower from my mere presence here.” He sighed, then breathed out a small chuckle. “Unfortunate for you, of course—it seems I’ve driven all your customers away.”

It was the least of her worries, she thought. If what happened last week were to repeat itself, she wasn’t going to linger too long here tonight, anyway.

“But, as I said before,” Shigaraki continued, folding his arm down against the table and shifting in his seat. She was almost positive he was leaning a little bit closer against the bar now, putting less proximity in the already-limited space between them. “You have awful judgement when it comes to determining which clients you should approach, and with how much caution.”

“I’ve dealt with villains before.” She shoved the cash register shut before returning to her post in front of him, picking up the cloth in one hand and another wine glass in the other. “I’ve had quite a few threaten me once or twice before, too.”

“You think I’m just another ordinary villain.” He frowned, almost mimicking her expression. “I assure you, Kagawa-san, I am much more dangerous than any other villain you’ve met here before.”

She believed him—she had little doubt that he was indeed as dangerous as he claimed to be, and as he appeared to be, too. Maybe she was a masochist, twirling fire batons while walking on a tightrope, talking to him like this. But, if her suspicions about his character—and about his Quirk, above all else—were indeed true, then there would be an invisible mattress right underneath the tightrope, ready to catch her when she would inevitably fall.

She just had to be careful not to drop the batons and set everything around her on fire once she does.

“Well, you’re not threatening me yet,” she murmured, keeping her gaze on the wine glass in her hands and careful not to break the fragile object. Subtle threats, maybe, but she wasn’t going to count them all—she probably couldn’t even count them with both her hands if she wanted to. “Until then, you’re a client who has recurring business with the manager. That alone is enough to spike my intrigue.”

“Is it because I look weak?”

Her frown deepened, making itself obvious without her explicit intention. “What?”

Her eyes flew up, and a low scowl was forming across his face, hidden under the shadows his bowing head casted over himself. “Thin and frail, like I’m about to fall at any second.” He lifted a lazed hand, middle finger brushing against the brim of the coupe glass. “Is that why you underestimate me?”

“Looks are often very deceiving.” She glanced back down, replaced the glass on the tray, and picked up another one. “A man can stand at ten feet tall with the build of a gorilla and skin of a rhinoceros, and yet, he can barely hurt a fly.”

“And me?”

“You, Shigaraki-sama—” She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “—the complete opposite.”

She had seen this in TV shows, too—read it in books when she was still able to afford them, and had time to read them without having it swatted away or thrown out without her knowledge.

It was the little people that kings should be afraid of. Sometimes, it was a wise old man who rallied his fellow survivors in a siege against their oppressors. Other times, it was the black sheep outcast, fueled with his own will, and often hatred or vengeance, who would rise up and rob the throne from right underneath the king’s nose.

Shigaraki was a man capable of great destruction, if he willed it to be. His hands told her as much.

Her eyes wandered to his hands as she thought of them, as her own remained still, with the cloth stuck idle inside the wine glass. “You never hold anything with all of your fingers,” she noted, eyes staring at his long, gaunt fingers peeking from the long dark sleeve of his sweatshirt. “If I have to take a guess at what your Quirk is, it has something to do with when you touch something with all five of your fingers.”

Then there were those lines beneath his eyes, making him appear at least ten, even twenty years older than he should be. Certain Quirks had significant side-effects on their users, even if it was just an Emitter Quirk—likely the case with Shigaraki as well, hence the wrinkles underneath his eyes, not to mention his deathly, pale yellow skin.

“I would say.” She took a deep breath as she forced herself to stare up at his deep crimson eyes, then exhaled it slowly, almost painfully. “Something along the lines of rapid deterioration or degeneration of everything you touch, with all five of your fingers?”

For a brief moment, all she could hear was the idle, but almost inaudible ticking of the clock in the far corner of the room, as well as the whistling of the wind outside the closed doors. She couldn’t hear her own breathing, nor the beating of her own heart as she remained standing frozen still, trying to ignore the anticipation and dread slowly creeping its way up her stiffening spine.

The villain took his time before she saw the slightest of twitches from his dark-clothed figure. His head bowed low enough that she had no means of seeing his expressions and facial reactions, much less decipher it and determine if she should be making a run for the doors at this exact moment.

All she could do was stand and wait, as her hands began to move again, wiping the wine glass around its brim before replacing it back on the tray.

“I’m impressed, Kagawa-san.”

Ren didn’t know what to expect from those words; when her eyes flitted up towards him, however, she caught a small glimpse of the curve of his smirk before he placed four of his fingertips around the brim of the emptied coupe glass in front of him, the little finger hovering just several millimeters above it.

“You were able to derive all that from meeting a stranger two times in the span of over one week?” She heard the click of his tongue, and her shoulders dropped. “You would have been a great battle analyst in another life, Kagawa-san.”

He lifted the glass up—an act that in itself would alarm the bartender considering how he was handling such a fragile item—but what she didn’t expect was his final finger made the lightest tap against the side of the glass, but that brief moment of contact alone was enough to cause the coupe glass to start cracking in his grip, before it shattered—no, disintegrated right before her eyes, all in a quickest blink of an eye.

The corner of Shigaraki’s chapped lips twitched. “That is, if you didn’t have such terrible judgment on people’s characters, as you do now.”

His hand hovered still above the bar counter, and all that was left of the coupe glass was a pile of microscopic glass shards, almost like ash, in a small mound right underneath it.

Ren blinked but didn’t avert her gaze from the ash pile for at least a good solid minute. She almost scoffed at the realization—at least she wasn’t wrong, she thought to herself.

“A simple ‘yes’ would’ve been sufficient, Shigaraki-sama,” she murmured, keeping her voice low as she crouched underneath the counter to retrieve a small dustpan and a spare cloth. When she stood back up, she tried not to wince under his burning glare as she moved to wipe the ash pile with the cloth into the dustpan. “You didn’t need to destroy one of our glasses to prove it to me.”

As much as she couldn’t anticipate his response to her apparently accurate assumption, her own response was something he did not expect either; his gaze continued to weigh down on her, watching her every movement as she tossed the remnants of his coupe glass into the trash bin underneath the counter, set the supplies aside and move to wash her hands in the sink beside her.

“The manager usually doesn’t take kindly to clients who mess with bar property,” she continued, though her voice grew almost monotonous, sounding more like reciting a memorized speech than making a witty remark. “But I have a feeling he will let it slide for you, Shigaraki-sama.”

Another brief moment of silence, as she felt the villain narrowing his crimson eyes at her—she couldn’t tell whether it was out of spite, irritation or intrigue, as she kept her head bowed down at a small angle, barely glancing at the blue-haired young man from the top peripherals of her vision.

“You’re not afraid of me?”

Her eyes flew up, studying the lines across his face but not quite staring him straight in the eye. “What do you mean?”

“I can kill you,” he seethed through a tight-lipped snarl, almost growling through his teeth as his expression furrowed. “I can touch your hand right now and kill you where you stand.”

“You could.” No, he couldn’t, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t need to.

She saw his jaw muscles tense, and his fingers curled inwards, forming a tight fist. “Then why aren’t you afraid of me?”

The bartender shrugged—maybe she shouldn’t have, since it probably added insult to injury, but she couldn’t help herself. “What’s there to be afraid of?”

“You’re not afraid to die?”

She took a deep breath and sighed. “I’ve gone past that months ago, Shigaraki-sama.” Her head tilted down again as she picked up the cloth and yet another wine glass. “If I was so afraid for my own life, I wouldn’t have stuck around as long as I have. We wouldn’t have even met each other last week. And besides.” She pressed her thumb around the brim of the glass. “Does it matter that I’m not afraid of you?”

“I’m a villain,” he snarled, almost slamming his fist down to the table. His curled bangs fell over his face, casting his features back in shadows. “Pretty little girls like you should be running for the hills at the mere sight of me. What kind of villain am I if I can’t instill fear to people around me with every step I take?”

“A villain who was forced into this life,” she replied, perhaps too quickly. She didn’t even put much thought into it—the words flew out of her mouth before she could even stop herself, like dashing bitters across or spraying absinthe into a cocktail just as the customer asked her not to. “A villain who wasn’t born in it, but had no other choice but to go through with it, because there was nothing else waiting for them on the other side of this sort of life.”

Yoshinaga berated her about this countless of times about this—well, more like a light scolding, admonished her for speaking her mind in a place she shouldn’t, especially considering the job. Villains were dangerous people, with dangerous mindsets and intentions. She should watch what she said to people, especially when the old man wasn’t around, because no one would be able to stop these brutish clients from doing any harm to her otherwise.

And maybe she did underestimate the blue-haired stranger in front of her, because she sure did not predict at all what was going to happen next.

“Why, you little—”

She couldn’t move—she didn’t, not when her eyes caught the briefest glimpse of a single pale hand launching itself over the counter and latching itself onto her wrist before yanking it up and forwards towards the villain. And yet, all she registered at that exact moment was the smooth surface of the wine glass slipping from her gentle grip, dropping a solid thirty centimeters down to the lower surface of the bar countertop.

She closed her eyes on instinct when she heard the sound of the impact—the shattering of the glass as it sprayed across the area—and only opened them again when the room was plunged in silence once more, and the softest of gasps echoed right in front of her.

She expected to meet Shigaraki’s crimson eyes the moment she did, but instead found them wide open, pupils contracted as he stared not at her, but at his outstretched pale hand, and all five of his fingers that were wrapped tight around the smooth, fair skin of the bartender’s own wrist.

A breath of air choked out of his chapped lips, and for the first time since he held her, she could feel his grip around her limb—the cold temperature of his touch, and how much strength he put into his grip, despite his gaunt appearance, enough so that she had little doubt there would be a mark or even a bruise forming if this lasted a few seconds longer.

“What—” His raised eyebrows knitted together, forehead furrowing as though the moment had just now registered into his mind as well. A single finger lifted off her skin as he directed his gaze back to her, his crimson irises and black pupils searching hers, as though they could tell him exactly why he had yet to reduce her into a mere pile of dust and ash since at least five seconds ago. “What—what are you—”

“Tomura Shigaraki.”

Both their heads turned towards the door at the sudden deep voice that appeared in the room with them. Ren hadn’t realized another figure had stepped into the room, but blinked when her vision focused in on the black blur standing in the other side of the room, close to where the doors were.

It looked like a man, but was in fact a mere semblance of one—a humanoid shape standing tall and stiff in the other end of the room, possessing just a number of features that typical humans possessed. Where their head should be was a literal dark blue—a dark purple flame that seemed to ignite from a strange metallic structure surrounding where the neck should be, bare of facial features except for two long, narrow yellow slits glowing through the purple mist and extending upwards, reminiscent of a pair of eyes. Neck down, however, was a perfect gentleman’s suit—white shirt, dark green vest, black tie, dark trousers and black shoes, almost too similar to the bartender’s own uniform.

The bartender herself did not realize her wrist had been freed from its near-death grip until it fell down before her, as she straightened her back almost on impulse at the sight of the newcomer, not even minding the glass scattered all around the countertop.

“I have been looking for you,” the deep voice spoke again, and it seemed to echo from the depths of the dark mist in the suit. The neck brace twitched, but Ren wasn’t sure if the mist’s glowing yellow eyes were staring at her or the blue-haired man standing in front of her. “Had I known you were already here, I would have—”

“Well, here I am, Kurogiri,” the blue-haired villain scowled, jaw tensing as he finally leaned back from the counter and from the bartender, though not without shooting another brief crimson-eyed glare in her direction as he stepped off the bar stool and stood up completely. He stuffed his pale hands back into the pockets of his sweatshirt, then turned to the side to face the black mist in the suit. “Is it time already?”

The mist and its neck brace tilted downwards almost imperceptibly. “We are still five minutes early.”

“Kagawa-san.”

Her breath hitched, and her saliva caught stuck in the back of her throat as Shigaraki turned his head back to the bartender, all semblance of whatever emotion in his eyes gone in a single instant—in its place was instead a face of softened features, baring just the few neutral wrinkles in the skin underneath his eyes, with hooded eyelids and muted crimson eyes.

“Would you mind calling your manager for our scheduled meeting?” he murmured, all emotion also dissipated from his low voice, as if what happened mere moments ago never occurred at all.

“That won’t be necessary, Shigaraki-san.”

A familiar voice entered the room now, along with the screeching of curtains being parted to her right. When she turned her head towards it, Yoshinaga was moving forward, eyes flickering between the two people standing by the bar, then finally to the dark figure standing near the front door.

“I am here now,” the old man announced, folding his arms behind his back as he addressed his two guests. “Let us begin soon, yes?” A small hint of a frown took over his lips as he turned to his sole employee. “Kagawa-chan—”

Ren took a deep breath as she bent down to retrieve the spare cloth and dustpan once again. “I’ll clean this up first before I go,” she muttered, audible enough for her employer to hear her without turning to look him in the eye as she spoke to him.

As she stood back up and began brushing the large chunks of glass into the dustpan, the old man’s footsteps drew closer and louder. She made sure not to leave even the smallest shard left on the countertop before throwing it all out to the trash bin and discarding the supplies, and that was when she felt the old man’s hand on her shoulder.

“Here.”

She frowned as she finally looked toward him, and was about to ask what he was doing when she felt something being pressed against the palm of her right hand. With furrowed eyebrows, she looked down and brought her hand up, and found a few coins now resting in the center of her hand.

“For tonight and last week,” Yoshinaga mumbled lowly as his hands departed from her. “Get yourself a nice bowl of udon on your way home, all right? The one I usually buy for us is just down the street, but take a right instead of a left on your usual path home. It’s right beside a tofu shop—you can’t miss it.”

Her frown deepened. “Yoshinaga-san—”

“Have you tried the curry udon? A good kick from that spice is just the thing you need for this awful weather.”

“Yoshinaga-san, the glass—”

“Don’t you worry about it.” He patted her back, but when her eyes tried to meet his, she noticed his gaze was off to the side, almost as if he was glancing past her shoulder at something behind her. “Can you come in early tomorrow afternoon? I heard there’s a big corporate event happening tomorrow noon, about a couple blocks from here, and I can really use the help.”

“I—” Her head fell down as she stared at the coins in her hand. Five 100-yen coins—it was still more than the weekly allowance her father would give her, until he stopped giving her any money at all after she received her first paycheck.

She closed her fingers around the coin, stuffed them in her back pocket, and turned back up to smile at the old man. “Thank you, Yoshinaga-san.”

The old man nodded, patting her in the arm. “Remember to call if—”

“If there’s any trouble, yes.” She bent down to retrieve her coat and bag, all the while trying to ignore the many pairs of eyes staring in her direction right at this very second. “That goes the same to you, too, Yoshinaga-san.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” the old man chuckled. “Despite how I look, I can assure you I still have many years ahead of me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ll be fine.” She buttoned up the coat and clutched the strap of her bag close to her as possible. “Be careful on your way home, Kagawa-chan.”

“I will,” she nodded, managing a small smile as she went around the bar, keeping her head bowed down to avert the gazes of the two people she had to walk past in order to get to the exit.

Five more steps, she thought to herself. It was strange—she always dreaded whenever it was time she had to head home, but for the first time since she started working here, her eyes were focused on the path towards the doors, yearning for the breath of fresh air outside this suffocating room that she desperately needed to keep herself from passing out, right here, right now, five steps away from the doors to her temporary salvation.

Four, three, two—

“Good night, Kagawa-chan.”

She stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand was loosely wrapped around the handle, but her grip tightened as soon as she heard the low voice calling out to her, and didn’t miss the light change in tone at the mention of her name.

For a split second, she could almost feel the ghost of his hand wrapped tight around her wrist as she kept her gaze forward, and slowly pushed the door open.

“You, too,” her voice called out, but it was already muted by the howling wind that greeted her outside the bar doors. "Shigaraki-sama."

#ghl: renegade #renegade #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #my hero academia fanfiction #bnha #mha #tomura shigaraki #shigaraki tomura

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ghoulical · 5 years ago

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A Tall Dark Stranger

Part 2 of Renegade, a My Hero Academia fan-fiction.

Word Count: 8,313 Pairing: Tomura Shigaraki x Female!OC Warnings: Minor mentions of harassment Summary: Several months into her new job as bartender, Ren discovers that maybe the job demands much more from her than she ever bargained for.

Maybe she shouldn’t have taken up the job after all.

Of course, realizations always came later than they should have. It was no different for Ren Kagawa—in her case, the realization came after she noticed the bar was almost alwaysfrequented by the lowlife of Yokohama City—it was a hotspot for the denizens crawling from underbelly of the city she had grown to know, but had yet to love.

Villain. It was such a simple word, but crude. A generalization that, not unlike its counterpart, invited all sorts of stereotypes, as the rookie bartender eventually came to realize later in her career. But as with most of society, Ren fell for that stereotype—it was what made her have second thoughts about keeping her job at the bar in the first place, until she had to be talked out of her own prejudices by none other than her own ever-generous employer.

“You’re here early.”

The red-haired young woman greeted the old man standing by the back of the bar with a small and curt smile as she flipped back the hood of her coat. “Not like there’s anywhere else I need to be, anyway.”

Yoshinaga spared her but a brief glance before his attention went back to the handful of bottles inside the small wooden crate in front of him. “School, perhaps? That’s what most kids your age should be doing, yes?”

She encircled around the bar, taking off her shoulder bag before stashing it in the cabinet underneath the first counter. “You and I both know that’s not where I belong.”

“Do you belong here, then?” he asked, without turning around to look at her this time. “This is not a place for innocent children like you.”

She almost scoffed out loud as she began taking off her coat. “You and I also know that I’m anything but innocent. And besides, you were the one who chose to take me in.”

“You told me you needed a distraction.” His croaking voice was a bit distant, only because his attention was being split between the bottles and their conversation. “Speaking of which, would you be so kind as to help me sort these out before we open for the night?”

“Sure.” She took off her coat and stashed it inside the cabinet alongside the rest of her meager belongings. She frowned as soon as her eyes rested upon the unfamiliar bottles she was just assigned to. “New shipment?”

The old man hummed in confirmation. “The list’s right there. You know what to do.”

She moved to take his place, eyes briefly glancing to the palm-sized streak of paper cast off to the side before turning back to the case of bottles. She picked up one of the bottles and twisted it around—the label was written in English, as with the other bottles, she soon realized. There were translations scribbled down on the list, but one could only do so much after dropping out of high school when the curriculum just barely scratched the surface of English studies.

“Some fancy stuff we’ve got tonight, huh?” she murmured—an off-handed remark, before she began scanning the sheet of paper for the letters she read off the label.

“A new office space had just opened up around the corner,” Yoshinaga replied, his voice growing distant and softer. When she turned to her side, she frowned as she just caught the sight of the frail old man disappearing through the black curtains, voice echoing from the back as he went around. He re-appeared where she had entered earlier several seconds later, with a winter coat of his own in his hands as he started to put it on. “It might invite a few new high-class clients in to fill up the extra space during Friday nights. I’m sure you can manage them just fine without much problem.”

“You’re heading out?” She felt her shoulders fell, and a sinking feeling settling in her stomach.

He must’ve heard the uneasy tone in her voice as he turned around the moment she spoke, a gentle gaze coming from the hardened grey eyes of her aging mentor and—dare she say it—father figure.

“It’s a Tuesday night,” he sighed, but not at her. “There shouldn’t be a lot of clients coming in tonight. I have some errands to run, but I will come back here as soon as they are done. It shouldn’t take long.”

She never even told him about the apprehensions rising in the back of her mind, but she didn’t have to, because he was there when it first happened: one of the rougher, burlier patrons—villains—making some inappropriate comments towards her, likely because she was a young female who looked far too vulnerable to be working in a place such as this, and stretched his arm out—quite literally, for that was apparently his Quirk—forcing her to cower away to the back of the bar the moment she saw him reaching for her.

Yoshinaga—bless his soul—stepped in just in time, his own hand reaching out to intercept the path of the stretching limb and causing it to bounce off to the side, before the older man went to berate the brazen fool, tossing out a few unkind remarks of his own before threatening to toss the villain out into the cold, harsh streets of the rough neighborhood they happened to be located in.

Of course, the indecent act also invited a few scowling glares from some of her better clients—some of them villains themselves, she noticed and later realized—who did not take too kindly to such unbecoming behavior.

That was what made her stay—the fact that maybe, even despite whatever illegal activities they got up to outside of these walls, not all of them were as bad as they seemed to be. On the other hand, maybe they were just paying back the welcoming service she gave them. Maybe out of necessity at first, but out of habitual hospitality more recently. Nevertheless, it was a nice thought, even if it wasn’t true.

Then again, she was well-aware of the villains’ general lack of inhibitions—they were villains because they used their Quirks in public, an act illegal in itself here, never mind the damage done to lives, property, and so on and so forth that made them characteristic villains. People with that sort of attitude usually didn’t pair well together with alcohol intoxication, and that was exactly what this job invited.

Fortunately for Ren, her Quirk could help protect her against most of these unwanted situations, but it could only do so much, and it was most certainly useless against the disgusting perverted rats that would come crawling into this bar every now and then.

“Call if there is any trouble,” Yoshinaga assured, securing his coat around his thin, bent frame. “I will be back as soon as I can.”

Ren reluctantly nodded, watching the old man as he headed for the front door, bidding him safe travels just before he put his hand on the door. Yoshinaga waved back toward her before heading out into the coldness of the fast-approaching winter clouding the streets outside, leaving her alone in the silence of the bar, with nothing much to do other than sorting out the new bottles sitting in front of her.

Part of her could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that Tuesday nights were usually slower nights, meaning she could handle tending the bar alone without much problem at all. Unfortunately, the new shipment could only do so much to keep her busy; it took her about half an hour at most to finish sorting them out, and by the time an hour had passed, she was chewing on her bottom lip, staring at the far side of the wall with her palms planted flat against the bar, idle and itching to do something other than cleaning more glasses that were already pristine clean, or cleaning floors that were barely trampled on since she left work just the night before.

She casted a glance over to her right, where the counter bent towards the left to form a little nook pressed against the brick wall. She didn’t know when Yoshinaga first installed the LCD television sitting there on the nook. All she remembered was coming in on a Monday after he insisted she took the weekend off—something she did with great reluctance, too, but could not protest against—and her eyes immediately landing on the sudden sight of the television already sitting there, screen dark as midnight. It had been a slow night that day, too, but she failed to find the remote to the TV, nor could she even find a single button on the damn thing that could turn it on.

When she finally asked Yoshinaga about it, he told her it was important, yet she need not worry about it too much for it was ‘nothing she should ever be concerned about.’ When she questioned exactly what it was used for, if not for watching normal cable television, she was interrupted with the arrival of another customer, and was unable to inquire about it any further.

Most people knew better than to just go along with it—the demographics of her clients, the mysterious TV, and the only ever occasional unspecified errands her employer ran, including the ones tonight. She should know better than to go along with it, but who was she to question suspicious activities and secret motives, especially those of the one person she respected more than anyone else on this goddamn planet?

Well. She took a deep breath and sighed. Almost everyone.

But it was clear as daylight that she was indebted to the old man. He did give her the job—gave her a distraction, as he reminded earlier—when she was sure no one else would. After all, what did anybody in these parts would want to do with a high-school drop-out with absolutely no skills whatsoever?

With a heavy sigh, she lifted her palms off the surface of the counter, turned around and faced the bottles she arranged in the back—the ones she just organized, in addition to the current selections. She wasn’t allowed to drink—bartenders weren’t allowed to drink on the job, not to mention the fact that she was still underaged. It didn’t mean she had never tasted alcohol, however—Yoshinaga told her she needed to know the cocktails she was making if she was going to tend the bar here. She had her own favorites, knew which ones tasted better than others, and she definitely knew which ones she personally wanted to avoid at all costs.

In retrospect, it seemed strange how she ended up here of all places. And to think she should have a personal vendetta against alcohol in general…

Her train of thought was interrupted, however, by the sound of the door clicking open, the gust of air that rushed in, and then the door swinging back shut followed with a set of heavy footsteps against the hardwood floor. She took a deep breath, pushing the unwelcome thought to the back of her mind, before turning around to face the client who had just entered.

“Ah, Oshiro-sama.” She clapped her hands together, before folding them in front of her as her eyes followed the brute of a man dragging himself over to the far side of the bar—his usual seat. “Nice to see you here tonight. How’s the weather out there?”

“Cold,” the man grumbled curtly under his breath, head not even turning to look at her.

Her smile lingered. Despite his apparent discourtesy, Oshiro had always been a man of very few words—she figured it was side-effect of what she could only assume was a mutant-type Quirk, but she was never one to pry too much about other people’s Quirks, especially mutant-types, in fear of accidentally offending someone if she inquired just a little too much.

But if the man was ever irritated by her occasional chatter, he sure never acted upon it. In fact, she dared say he was rather fond of her, considering the large tips he always left for her despite

“What’ll it be tonight, Oshiro-sama?” she asked, taking a spare cloth and wiping her hands down with it, slowly approaching the other side of the bar.

“The usual.”

A cold bottle of cheap beer. Despite the new shipment coming in, some of the regulars were just going to be content with the same old poisons. “Coming right up.”

Without much surprise, she stopped in her path and immediately twisted on her heel, turning to face the bar fridge underneath the back counters, then crouching down to retrieve his drink. It was right at that moment when she heard the familiar sound of the door opening and closing again, also accompanied with a loud rush of wind to announce the client’s arrival, as if the noise of the door wasn’t enough to alert her to it.

Unlike last time, however, the footsteps that followed were almost inaudible—in fact, they were hardly footsteps at all, as all she heard in the silence of the room was the sound of something being dragged across the hardwood floor. Clearly, it wasn’t Yoshinaga—as old as the man might’ve been, he might as well be healthier than she was, with more than enough energy to carry him through to his nineties.

The sliding against wood drew closer and closer until it stopped, right at the other end of the bar from where Oshiro was sitting. She waited until she heard one of the wooden chairs being dragged out of its place before standing up with the beer bottle in hand, closing the fridge door shut with her elbow then placing the bottle firmly down on the counter.

She spared the newcomer but a glance over her shoulder; whoever it was, they had their head bowed down, thus allowing her to catch a glimpse of a pale hand reaching up to pull back a black hood, revealing a mop of unruly greyish-blue hair, with bangs long enough that she couldn’t even take a peek at their face.

She couldn’t recall any of her regulars having blue hair, or at least, one of this shade. Must be new, then.

“Good evening,” she called out in a soft but warm voice, lips stretching as she uncapped the beer bottle with a light, satisfying pop. “What’ll it be for tonight?”

She strode over to where Oshiro was sitting, handed him his drink, then turned back to the new patron.

“Sir?” She frowned when her inquiry was once again met with silence, then strode over to her new customer with slow, even steps. The man had a rather slight figure, much slighter than Oshiro and almost as thin as she was but no doubt taller than her, judging from how tall the bar chairs were. “Anything you want to get? Anything at all?”

For a moment, her voice seemed to snap him out of whatever daze he was in, as he briefly lifted his head from the hand covering his face and hummed. “I don’t—” His face fell again as he raked a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”

The bartender cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

She glided forward, approaching where the stranger sat on the bar, then placed her palms down on the edge of the surface. She could take a closer look at him now—she could see that his skin, in fact, had a more deathlike pallor, and it was stuck to the bones, making him look gaunt and thin. His long, thin fingers now rubbed against the side of his neck, right at the edge of his collarbone. There were bandages peeking out from underneath the cuffs of his long-sleeved, black V-neck shirt, ending where the visible veins in the backs of his hands began.

“First time here?” she asked at first, studying his reaction. Given the lack thereof, however, she added, “First time at a bar, then?”

The stranger looked up, holding his head up longer this time, enough for her to catch sight of the piercing red pupils staring back at her from his upper peripherals, and the visible wrinkles underneath his eyes, making him appear much, much older than she was sure he was. There was something about the gaze that unnerved her—something about those small red pupils, that did not burn with annoyance, but rather filled with dimmed embers of exhaustion.

“I came here to meet your manager,” he murmured lowly, before his gaze drifted, and his head leaned against the back of his hand with his elbow planted firm on the surface, bowing low enough that his bangs shrouded his face from her view once more.

“Ah.” She glanced to the side, checking to see if Oshiro needed her attention, which he no doubt didn’t. “The manager is out running some errands, but he should be back any minute now.” She hoped so, at least. “Might I suggest you order a drink while you wait?” This seemed to elicit some attention from him—he raised his head again, offering her a brief, harmless deadpan glare. “Hey, I’m just doing what I’m being paid for.”

Not to mention the fact that she couldn’t let him linger long without ordering anything. Considering his slight figure, his somewhat irritable attitude thus far and discounting the wrinkles underneath his eyes, she was starting to doubt whether she could even serve alcohol to this man at all.

But, to her relief, he did seem to consider her offer for a moment, before his other hand went up to start picking on the other side of his neck. “I’ll have anything, then.”

Ren cleared her throat in a feeble attempt to disguise her cough. “Anything?” The corner of her lip twitching up to form a pretend scowl, though it bordered on a smirk. “That’s no fun.”

“Hmm?” Her response seemed to intrigue him now—his eyes fleeted upwards again, and she could feel his gaze following her as she bent down, retrieving a chilled glass from the fridge beneath the counter. “How so?”

She resisted the urge to smile as she straightened her back and turned his back to him. “What a person orders tells me quite a lot about who they are.” Her eyes scanned the row of bottles in the furthest rack in the counter. She was going to memorize the selection soon—cocktail recipes were next, just because there was so much more to it than remembering which liquors and ingredients were needed for each one, but she was making some progress within the four months she had been working here. “For example, an Old Fashioned tells me that you either know your alcohol, or you’re just a wannabe prick.” She picked one of the bottles up from the rack, uncapped it, and poured some into the chilled glass in front of her. “Gin and tonic means you’re a boring old man, a Manhattan means we’ll get along just fine, and bourbon—” She replaced the bottle before picking up the glass, turning around, and placing it in front of the stranger with a smile. “—is for someone who’s been through quite a lot of shit.” She waited until he realized what she was doing and turned his glare back to her again, her smile remaining unfaltering. “Someone like you.”

She took another close look at him. There was a scar running through his right eye, and another, smaller one across the left corner of his chapped lips. She always thought scars added character to a certain individual, not to mention the stories they held within them.

She couldn’t help but wonder how he got his, but it sure seemed that the bourbon was a perfect first pick for this unfortunate soul sitting before her.

“So.” While the other hand still picked on the skin of his neck, the other raised a single index finger, and began tracing the rim of the glass she’d set down in front of him. “Are you some kind of smart-ass, hmm?”

“No.” She leaned back, tilting her head to the side. Four months with a full-time job forced her to interact with villains more than the average citizen—it was going to take more than that to scare her off. “Just observant. Not a lot going on within these walls, but it sure invites an interesting crowd.”

She almost heard him scoff as his gaze drifted down to his finger encircling the edge of the glass. “There’s nothing interesting about me.”

“Oh, no, that’s impossible.” She walked backwards until her hip bumped against the back counter, leaning her weight against it as she crossed her legs one in front of the other, arms folded in front of her. “Folks who come here always have stories to tell.” And she was always eager to hear these stories, whether they were meant for her to listen to, or otherwise. “And besides, no one’s less interesting than me—trust me.”

She heard another hum from him. “A pretty little girl like you,” he murmured, “should be in school—not here, surrounding yourself with filthy miscreants and low-lives of society. There should be something there, right?”

Did he just call her pretty? “I’m flattered.” She was no stranger to compliments from bar patrons, though, especially from men, only because of her gender and not so much her own appearance. It was usually just harmless flirting, mild harassment at most. With Yoshinaga around, they usually knew better than to cross the line. “But the same goes to you, buddy.” She nodded at his hands. “They’re rough, but not because of age nor experience. Other than your face—which isn’t an insult, by the way, ‘cause you don’t look too bad yourself—you don’t look a day past twenty. I should’ve asked you for your I.D. before giving you that bourbon, but that would just be hypocritical, now wouldn’t it?”

After all, serving alcohol to minors was the least of their problems here in the bar, considering their clientele. Then, there was the mere fact that the sole employee here was a minor, but no one else was checking her age, and no one else seemed to make note of it, or at least made a fuss about it.

Not until now, anyway.

It seemed that it was just now brought to his attention that she had just served him a drink, despite the idle finger leaning still against the rim of the glass; the stranger then picked up the glass with four of his fingers, with his fifth digit hanging loose in the air without discomfort—out of habit, perhaps?—then brought it close to his chapped lips. After a moment of pause, the man then threw his head back and downed the entire shot in one go, waiting until all the amber liquid had slithered down the glass and into his open lips, before setting it gently back down on the countertop between them.

“Not bad,” he muttered, but followed up with a small cough almost immediately afterward, one that pulled Ren’s own lips to a small, unintentional smirk. She didn’t miss the small twitch in his narrowed eyes, too. “I expected worse.”

“I prefer on the rocks myself,” she said with a tilt of her head and a quirk of her lips. When she noticed his frown, she pursed her lips and resisted the urge to smile. “With ice. Don’t tell anyone I said that, though. As much as my nose has been dulled to the smell of alcohol-laced vomit, the taste buds tell a different story.”

His eyebrow twitched. “There’s a difference?”

“It dilutes the alcohol,” she quickly answered, “so it won’t burn as much going down the throat. To me, it’s really just a matter of personal preference—there’s really no right or wrong way to go about it—not to me, at least.” She sighed as she pushed herself off the counter and approached the bar again. “Anything else I can get you? Something to pass the time with—something to savour a bit longer, at your own pace maybe?”

Shots were a bad idea in the case of important meetings—she had witnessed and figured out as much, though she had no idea what reason this young man had for meeting with Yoshinaga. Still, shots were the last thing she wanted to serve this mysterious stranger before her, because even she knew the limits—how far she could push the boundaries to a man’s patience before things could turn sour.

He might look about just as old as she was, but those hands, and those red eyes—the shiver crawling down her spine just from staring into them a second too long told her he was not one to mess with.

“I came here to meet the manager,” the stranger reminded, and Ren pressed her lips to a thin line. “Not to drink.”

“One drink can hardly make you drunk.” She turned around to avoid his gaze, and started chewing on one side of her bottom lip as she considered doing her usual routine—cleaning glasses like the typical idle bartender—just so her hands had something to do. “Depending on your tolerance, several can make you tipsy, at worst. If not, then, we serve mocktails, too, you know—non-alcoholic drinks.”

She glanced over to Oshiro. The brute was just sitting there, eyes staring hard at the wall opposite to him as he occasionally picked his bottle up and tipping it towards his mouth. She closed her eyes, pursed her mouth, then turned back to the blue-haired stranger.

A few moments later, he responded with a short hum, then followed it with some more silence. Then, “A Manhattan, was it?”

She couldn’t resist raising her eyebrows at his words. A Manhattan means we’ll get along just fine.

She stood there for a second or two, stunned in silence and disbelief, only snapping out of her daze when she noticed the slightest movement of his head lifting up again, quickly giving him a single courteous nod as soon as he did.

“One Manhattan, coming right up.”

She sidestepped over to reach for a pint glass before spinning around to snatch the small bottle of bitters on the back counter. Her hands worked almost on their own accord—she added in the bitters, then the sweet vermouth and the rye, all without spilling a single drop on the countertop. She scooped some crushed ice into the glass before retrieving a bar spoon, dipping it into the caramel-colored liquid before stirring it.

“I’ve never seen you around here before,” she murmured offhandedly, before her eyes glanced up to find the stranger’s crimson eyes gazing distantly at the glass in her hands—no, he was staring only at her hands, almost as if he was caught in some kind of stupor from the circling motion that was starting to tire her hands just the slightest bit. At least I’ve got something to do. “Come around these parts often?”

It took him a second longer than expected to reply. “Not usually, but I know my way around.”

She nodded firmly, gaze drifting back downwards to the glass in her hand. “Can I ask what the meeting’s about?” She knew she had to be careful with this—not a lot of people were fond of a complete stranger sticking their nose into other people’s business, but it felt like walking on a tightrope when it came to sticking her nose into villains’ business, and for good reason, of course.

However, this was Yoshinaga he was talking about, and he specifically asked to talk to her manager, meaning whatever this meeting was about would most likely be about the bar itself, rather than something personal.

With eyes focused on her hands, she stopped stirring the drink once she felt the glass was cool enough, then took out the bar spoon, holding it still between her fingers. She crouched down to retrieve a chilled coupe glass from the fridge, then reached over to fetch the small jar of cherries, scooping one out with the spoon and setting it down on the center of the coupe. She then strained the cool, stirred liquid into the glass, before picking it up by its stem and carefully setting it down in front of the blue-haired stranger.

She almost didn’t notice he hadn’t answered her question until she turned to face him again, eyes cautiously watching to see if he had anything to say about the cocktail she just served him.

“How long have you been working here?”

Her stomach dropped. “A few months,” she quickly answered with a frown, then tilted her head ever so slightly. “Why are you asking?”

“Hm.” She froze, having no idea what to make of such an impartial response to her questions. “Yoshinaga never told me he had an employee. And so young, too.”

She held her breath at the tone of his voice. There was something odd about it, as if he was calculating something in his mind—it was as though he had something else planned beforehand, perhaps something involving Yoshinaga, and it sounded as if her apparent employment here disturbed those plans, or perhaps even ruined them.

She sure hoped not, because it didn’t look like this blue-haired, crimson-eyed stranger took kindly to disrupted plans.

“Looks like he trained you well, though,” the man then remarked, hand reaching up to hold the coupe glass by its fragile stem. “I wonder if he will be training you in some things other than bartending, though.”

Her right hand found her left forearm as she rested both limbs in front of her. Something other than mixing drinks? she wondered, even more confused now than she was before.

Instead of immediately drinking the cocktail, however, he tapped the side of the glass with his right index finger, leaning his chin against his left fist with both elbows planted firmly on the surface of the bar. “Aren’t you scared working here?” he then asked, voice distant as his gaze was focused on the glass before him. “This is a bad neighbourhood, you know. A lot of fighting going on in the streets—a lot of villains running around making a mess at every corner of the block. Don’t you get scared coming to work everyday to a place like this? Always in the company of villains like this?”

“I don’t—” Wait. Always in the company of villains? Is he— Was he talking about himself?

She quickly glanced over to where Oshiro was sitting, only to find that the brute had already disappeared from his seat, and all that was left was the empty beer bottle and some cash sitting right beside it.

She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, struggling to find her breath and the words caught stuck in her throat as she wandered over to the other end of the bar to quickly dispose of the bottle and swipe up the money Oshiro had left behind to input it into the cash register.

When did Oshiro even leave? How come she didn’t even notice he had already left?

That means—

Looking up from the cash register, her eyes fluttered over to the blue-haired stranger sitting just a few metres away from where she stood. So, he is a villain. Maybe she should’ve anticipated as much, with his all-black clothing, the pale skin and the red eyes. She couldn’t say she was surprised, but…

She made a quick scan of the room, eyes finally landing on the door to the far left, then swallowed hard. They were alone here—just her and the blue-haired stranger, engulfed in a silence so loud, you could hear a pin drop. The faint whistle of the seasonal wind outside was barely audible through the doors and windows, and it didn’t seem that anyone else was coming in here soon.

Tuesday night, she scowled to herself, returning her focus back on the cash register as she finished stashing the money, then found herself meandering back to the side of the bar where the stranger sat, finger still idly tapping the side of the glass, the caramel liquid it held still remaining untouched.

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

Her eyes flitted back to him. “I mean, sometimes,” she muttered, lifting her shoulders ever so slightly as she placed her hands behind the bar, palms facing down and fingers pressing close together. “A girl’s got to be careful everywhere she goes, you know? You get used to it over time, though.”

“You’re not scared of what people can do to you?” He lifted his head ever so slightly, enough for her to catch a glimpse of his crimson eyes once more. “It’s a dangerous world out there, with some dangerous Quirks out in the playing field, you know.”

She was always scared of what people could do to her because she was a woman, but when it came to the question of Quirks, she could breathe just a little bit better than most. “I’m aware of that.” She never bothered telling people about her own Quirk, though, not unless they asked her about it, and even so, she would describe it as vague as possible—leave as many things to the imagination as possible. She learned long ago it was much better this way; what was the point of having this Quirk if everybody knew about it? “But, people do what they gotta do to get by, you know? I’m no different than the rest of society out there.”

“Are you, now?”

As her frowned deepened in her confusion, he finally decided it was time to have a taste of the cocktail she had set down in front of him, picking the glass up with four of his fingers, fifth finger noticeably sticking out again as he brought the glass to his chapped lips, before taking a small sip of the cocktail.

He made a face when he set it back down on the surface of the bar again. This time, the urge to smile wasn’t even there.

“People like this stuff?” he asked—fortunately for her, more puzzled than offended, if anything.

“There’re worst things you could’ve ordered.” Like a Mojito, for example, though she hated it only because it was a little bit more complicated than most, but considering her clientele, not a lot of people ordered it that often. Then there was also the Bloody Mary, which was not only complex, but had a combination of ingredients that sent shivers down her spine just thinking of having to make one, much less drink one herself.

“Well,” the stranger continued, staring down at his drink for a moment before bringing it back up to his lips, “you have poor judgement when it comes to employment opportunities, but I’ll trust you this one time with this drink.” Then he took another sip, and as he forced himself to swallow it down, he didn’t wince as noticeably this time around. “It’s not so bad, actually.”

She didn’t want to question what he meant by her apparent ‘poor judgement’ about ‘employment opportunities.’ She had been asking that question to herself for the longest time—she didn’t need this mysterious stranger to send her back into another spiral of doubts and anxiety. At least, not tonight.

“I can get you something else, if you want—”

“No.” He took another, longer sip of his drink this time before setting it back down on the countertop. “No, this is just fine. I mean, we are getting along, aren’t we?”

She took a deep breath and held it for a second before exhaling softly. Part of her felt like it was a mistake to make that statement earlier. What-ifs and could-haves. She couldn’t take it back now, could she?

If only her Quirk was rewinding back time. Maybe that would be just a little bit more useful than the one she already had, especially in times like these. What-ifs and could-haves.

“And good thing, too.” He tilted his head to the side, leaning his cheek against his fist again as though boredom had once again settled within him. “Your manager sure is taking his time with those errands—”

She almost jumped when the loud noise of the door being opened, once again paired with the howling of the seasonal wind, disrupted the tranquility of the room, bouncing off the walls and echoing through the near-empty space even more so as the door was thrown shut. She felt her shoulders stiffening as she recognized the familiar sight of Yoshinaga’s slightly bent figure standing by the doorway, though the old man himself had yet to notice the two people by the bar, his gaze instead fixated on the floorboards in front of him, mouth moving imperceptibly as though grumbling inaudibly to no one but himself.

Ren drew in a sharp breath. “Yoshinaga-san—”

“Yoshinaga.” Her smile faltered when the blue-haired man’s voice cut through her own, even more so when she noted the odd tone of his droning voice. The stranger then lifted his head again, turned his neck at the smallest angle, as his crimson pupils wandered to the corners of his eyes. “We were just talking about you. You’re late.”

Late?

“Shigaraki-san.” The old man inhaled sharply as his eyes flew up and immediately found the blue-haired man sitting by the bar. Ren noticed the sheer look of surprise across the old man’s face, before the latter’s attention quickly shifted over towards her, but only for a split second before he immediately averted his gaze away, bowing his head down just slightly to stare at the floor again. “I wasn’t expecting you until later tonight.”

The mysterious blue-haired stranger—Shigaraki, as her employer had evidently called him—didn’t bother turning his gaze over his stiff shoulder at the old man. Instead, he picked up the glass in front of him, holding it at his eye level with his fifth finger sticking out as before, keeping still like that, as if pondering on the old man’s response—or rather, what he should make of it instead.

“Well.” He tilted his head down again, his blueish bangs covering the direction of his gaze, but Ren could briefly feel his glare piercing through her before he brought the glass to his lips and taking another short sip of his drink. “I came here to remind you about the proceedings for tonight, but it seems that you didn’t even get the memo that Master has left for you—the one about moving up the time of the meeting?”

Ren’s eyes went back to her employer, whose face paled for a brief moment—an expression she had never seen on him before tonight—before he cleared his throat and started smoothing down the creases of his shirt.

“Ah—I see,” the older man stammered with a small nod, even though there were no means for Shigaraki to see it. “It appears that I have made a mistake then—the fault is no one else’s but my own.”

A strange sound came from the stranger’s mouth—a soft chuckle, one that almost made the hairs along her arm stand up in attention. “No matter,” he murmured, voice low but loud enough for all three in the room to hear. “Your sweet little bartender here has been keeping me company while we waited for you.”

She felt herself stiffen at the nickname he had so casually given her. What have I done?

“Ah—yes.” Yoshinaga turned his head up to look toward Ren, his wrinkled forehead furrowed. “Kagawa-chan, feel free to take the rest of the night off. We’ll be closing early tonight.”

Immediately, she forgot all about the current topic of conversation between the two men—hell, she even forgot all about the mysterious stranger sitting at her bar. All she felt was her stomach dropping as the realization of her mentor’s words settled within her, and the bile quickly growing in the back of her mouth as all the blood rapidly began draining from her face.

“What?” Her shoulders fell, hands falling flat against the edge of the bar counter. “Yoshinaga-san, you know I can’t—”

“I know.” The old man circled around the bar, sparing a quick glance in Shigaraki’s direction as he beelined straight towards her. He didn’t stop as he caught her by her shoulders and started pushing her back towards the corner of the bar, almost as if he was taking them both out of the other man’s earshot, only speaking once he was sure the two of them were not being eavesdropped. “I was under the impression that things would proceed differently tonight.” He then spun her around to face him, and she could almost immediately see the additional lines stretching across his aging face. “Alas, it was my mistake, and for that, I deeply apologize to you.”

“Yoshinaga-san—”

“It is for your own good, Ren,” he asserted in a rather hushed tone, especially when he mentioned her name—likely for her protection, she later realized. “I know it doesn’t appear that way for now, but I assure you, this is what’s best for you right now.”

Peering over his shoulder, she could see the stranger, Shigaraki, still remaining where he had been sitting for the past half hour or so—how long had it even been since he first got here—face pointed at the shelves and racks lined up against the back wall behind them. His fingers were still lingering along the base and stem of the glass, all save for the fifth finger, and she could’ve sworn she saw his red pupils in the peripherals of his eyes as soon as she looked toward him, forcing her to turn her attention back to Yoshinaga standing in front of her.

“Who is he?” she asked as she faced the old man with knitted eyebrows, folding her arms in front of her. “He said he came here to meet you. How did you two know each other?”

For the first time since she’s known him, Yoshinaga seemed to be at a loss of words—his lips parted slightly several times, before sighing heavily with a few rapid blinks of his eyes. “Ren—”

“What are you hiding from me? You said we don’t do business with villains.”

“Ren, you’ve been serving villains almost every single night—”

“You know what I’m talking about, Yoshinaga-san.” She let out a heavy sigh, shoulders falling as she allowed her gaze to wander. “Not that kind of business.”

“Kagawa-chan.”

He weakly raised both his hands and placed them on either side of her shoulders. He did this once before, just a few months back—it was when she first asked him for longer shifts, and he instead started asking about her home life. No—in fact, he had deduced it, even though she didn’t spare a single detail about what her life was like outside these walls. Maybe it was just written all over her face. Maybe she should’ve known better.

“This is for your own good, all right?” She looked back up at her mentor, the old man, and felt another sigh leave her breath. When she tried to avert her gaze away again, he followed it, almost as if he was forcing her to look at him still. “But if anything happens, call me—call me the second anything goes wrong, understood?”

“I can’t—” She tried to shake her head, allowing her arms to fall to her side. “Please, I don’t want to—”

“This will just be for tonight.” His hands gave her shoulders a slight reassuring squeeze, and before she realized it, one of them reached up as if to pat her head, but stopped short midway up, before quickly retracting back and falling back down on her shoulder again. “You will have your normal shifts tomorrow.”

Even without looking, she could almost feel Shigaraki’s red-eyed glare leering in their direction. She swallowed hard, and, without glancing over Yoshinaga’s shoulder, she leaned down and spoke low enough that only the two of them could hear. “Who is he, Yoshinaga-san?”

“An important client,” was all he offered, lips briefly pressed to a thin line before he turned towards the back counter, hands now lingering at the edges of the surface as his eyes leered across the bottle racks. “But he is someone you shouldn’t concern yourself with,” he whispered back. “At least, not right now.”

Not right now? She was all too tempted to look back in Shigaraki’s direction. Yoshinaga was scared—no, he was anxious around the younger man. It was strange to see him like this—the old man barely even bat an eyelid at all the rambunctious clients that had ever came and went around here, regardless of how much these men, often villains, would glower, tower or even threaten the two bartenders. Hell, the tables would turn the moment someone so much as leered in Ren’s direction with the slightest hint of malicious intent, and said ruffian would be lucky if Yoshinaga didn’t just kick them out of the bar right then and there.

But this—whoever this Shigaraki is, or rather, whoever their Master is; Ren didn’t even think there was anyone above Yoshinaga when it came to this establishment. The old man always said that he was her sole employer, because he was the one who owned this bar, and all his older regulars recognized him and told her as such, too.

Had he been working for somebody else this entire time? Had she been working for someone else this whole time?

“For as far as it concerns you—” Her eyes fluttered back to her mentor, and he offered her a gentle, reassuring glance before he turned back to the bottles and trays of glasses, nudging them just the slightest bit from their previous positions. She knew what he was doing—it wasn’t like he ever complained about her organization, as he did nothing but the opposite. “—you’re only working for me. You are just a bartender here—nothing more, nothing less.”

She didn’t want to be anything more, and she had a feeling she didn’t want to be anything less here, either. Then again, what was more and what was less sure seemed nothing but relative at this point.

“Now.” He turned back to face her, folding his hands behind his back. “I will see you back here tomorrow afternoon—or perhaps even earlier, if you would like an extra shift to make up for tonight.”

“I—” She took a deep breath and sighed. There was no weaseling herself out of this—his decision was final. “—would appreciate that, thank you.”

“All right.” He spun himself away from her, turning his attention back to the bottles again. Come in at two, then. We’ve got another few more cases coming in tomorrow—I would really appreciate your help in getting them sorted out.”

She inhaled deeply again, then exhaled all at once. There was nothing she could do about this, she realized. Maybe I shouldn’t have…

What-ifs and could-haves.

Without looking back at either of the two men, she spun around and bent down to retrieve her belongings from the bottom cabinet. She stood up straight as she put the coat back on, before hurling her bag over to the surface of the counter, skimming through its contents to make sure she had everything with her. Of course, she did—other than her phone, she hadn’t taken anything else out of the bag tonight, but she wanted to extend her time here for as long as she could, even though everything else was telling her she really shouldn’t.

From the corner of her eyes, she saw Yoshinaga turning around to stand beside her, still sorting out glasses and keeping his hands busy even though he didn’t need to. She drew in a sharp breath as she zipped her bag shut, stashed her phone in her coat pocket, and slung the strap of her bag around herself.

“Stay safe out there, Kagawa-chan.”

She turned her head to Yoshinaga, giving him a small nod, a smile and mouthing a silent ‘thank you’ to him. She could see the guilt written all over his face, and the apologetic look in his eyes as he watched her walk across the length of the bar to exit through the other side, all the while trying to avoid drawing in the attention of the single remaining client still sitting at the bar where she last left him, fingers still clinging onto the outer surface of the coupe glass in front of him.

The old man did his best for her. He tried to help her as much as he was allowed to—employing an underaged minor should be frowned upon, but evidently, the society outside was always more pre-occupied with other matters far more important than some minor handling alcohol. For that, she was still indebted to the old man, even if tonight’s affairs made her start to question his affiliations.

Even if she should’ve seen this coming all those months ago.

With her head bowed down and eyes trained at the floorboard beneath her feet, she began to head towards the exit without another word, and she almost made it out unscathed until she heard one last voice calling out to her, and it wasn’t Yoshinaga’s.

“Good night, Kagawa-san.”

She almost stopped dead in her tracks as her palm pressed flat against the wooden door, and the sudden rush of coldness from the autumn wind outside almost overwhelmed the feeling of his crimson eyes piercing into the back of her skull.

“Good night, Shigaraki-sama.”

#ghl: renegade #renegade #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #my hero academia fanfiction #bnha #mha #tomura shigaraki #shigaraki tomura

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