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scary-grace · 3 months

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Enough to Go By -- a Shigaraki x F!reader fic

Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Chapter 1

You had a best friend when you were little, just like almost everyone, and the two of you were as different as two people could be. He was a boy and you were a girl. You were the oldest of four, and he was the youngest of two. His family was rich because his dad was some kind of business genius, and your family was – not. You and your best friend had exactly two things in common. First, you lived across from each other on the same street, him in a big new house and you in one that had been falling apart since before your parents were born. And second, and maybe most important, neither of you had a quirk.

It was okay for your best friend. He still had time. People in his family got their quirks when they were two or three or four or maybe even six, like they were supposed to. But everyone in your family is born with theirs. Your family’s quirks do different things, but they’re the same type of thing – powering up or watering down or just changing some part of somebody else, and they’re active until the person’s old enough to turn them off.

You hated being home. You had one younger brother who could turn your hearing up and down, one younger sister who could turn your color vision on and off, and twin baby brothers who could make you throw up whenever they wanted to. Going to school, or going across the street to play in front of Tenko’s house with him and his big sister and his dog, was the closest things ever got to normal for you.

Tenko wanted to be a hero. You knew he’d be the best hero, because he was a hero already, even without a quirk. Nobody was every left out when you and Tenko played at school, because Tenko could make everybody feel included, and you spent so much time trying to placate your siblings that you knew how to make sure everybody had fun. But for everybody to have fun, people needed to be there. Tenko was the one everybody believed in, the one who made everybody feel important. When you spent time with Tenko, you felt like you belonged. Tenko was already a hero, even as a kid. You knew he’d be amazing at it when he grew up.

Only he didn’t grow up, your best friend. You walked home from school together one day, said goodbye and crossed to your opposite sides of the street, and when you looked out your window the next morning, Tenko’s house was gone.

A villain did it. That’s what everybody said, and you didn’t know what else it could be, because Tenko’s house was in ruins, like a giant had smashed it with its foot or someone had blown it up from the inside. You raced across the street without your shoes on, right into the middle of what was left, and even though your parents spent money they didn’t have on a specialist whose quirk let them wipe memories right out of your brain, you still have nightmares sometimes about what you saw. Tenko’s big sister Hana was dead. His dog was dead. His mom and his grandparents and his dad were dead. But he wasn’t there, so you made yourself believe he was alive.

And some part of you kept believing, even after the foundations of an apartment building were laid over the spot where Tenko’s house used to be, even after your family moved away. Your youngest younger siblings, a set of triplets born after you moved, thought Tenko was your imaginary friend because of how much you talked about him. And even once you stopped talking about him, you never quite stopped thinking about him. Your best friend, who wanted to be a hero. Who would have been the greatest hero the world had ever seen.

Everyone else forgot him, forgot him so cleanly that you almost wonder if it was a quirk. But you remember your best friend – small things, weird things, like how he’d sometimes get so excited he’d almost cry. His All Might impression, which was so bad it almost worked. His dry skin and the way he’d scratch his neck. You wonder what happened, why he wasn’t found with his family. You wonder a lot of things.

“Everybody loses touch with their neighborhood kids,” Hirono says when you say something about it, while you and your friends are getting drunk in Kazuo’s backyard one weekend. “You’re not special.”

“Don’t be mean,” Yoshimi protests. “Her friend died. That’s different!”

“She just said he didn’t die. She thinks he’s still alive,” Sho says. He whistles and rotates one finger by his ear. “Cuckoo.”

“There should be a podcast about this,” Mitsuru says seriously, and Hirono and Mitsuko laugh at him. “No, there should! Five people confirmed murdered and a kid goes missing – and it’s never solved? That’s podcast material.”

“It’s newsworthy,” Kazuo says, his voice as expressionless as it always is these days. “Have you looked it up?”

“Yes,” you say. Too many times, probably. “The articles don’t say my friend went missing.”

“They said he died?”

“They don’t mention him at all.”

“Ooh. Spooky.” Sho makes a UFO noise, and Yoji, Yoshimi’s on-again, off-again asshole boyfriend, throws in some spiritfingers to go with it. “Maybe he’s imaginary after all.”

“Or maybe you do have a quirk,” Yuichiro, Mitsuko’s latest too-innocent boyfriend says earnestly. “Your family’s all status effects, right? Maybe you made everybody else forget him.”

“Why would I do that?” you ask blankly. You’re a little drunk. “He’s my best friend.”

“I thought I was your best friend,” Kazuo says. Kazuo’s also a little drunk. “You don’t have a quirk. I would know. I know everything.”

The confidence is annoying, or it would be, if it wasn’t true – and if you didn’t know just how badly Kazuo’s quirk has ruined his life. “Maybe not,” Ryuhei says speculatively. “You only know what you know to know, you know?”

You try to parse that for a second, then give up. Mitsuru is wheezing with laughter. “Come on,” Ryuhei says, annoyed. “You know what I mean. Kazuo only knows the answers to questions he knows to ask, right? What if he hasn’t asked the right question?”

Kazuo’s quirk is called Search Engine, and it’s not an overstatement. He can ascertain anything he asks about, and if the questions aren’t hyperspecific, he can take in vast amounts of information. Too much information for even the smartest person to sort through and interpret without going crazy under the strain. He was going to be a hero, but UA High pushed him too hard, and something went wrong in his head. The smartest guy you know, who used to be funny and kind and should be changing the world for the better right now, is instead drunk in his parents’ backyard, still trying to figure out where his emotions went. You haven’t seen Kazuo care about anything in two years.

But you can see him thinking about what Ryuhei said, trying to wrap his mind around a question. “Don’t,” you say, and he looks at you, puzzled. “If I had a quirk, I’d have had it when I was born, just like the rest of my family.”

“Your family has some funky quirks,” Yoji says. You have a feeling you know where he’s going with this, and you’re not wrong. “Isn’t one of your cousins a villainess?”

“She barely counts,” Hirono says. “What could they even charge her with if they caught her? Possession of a video camera and bad taste in men? They could charge Yoshimi with that, too.”

“Hey!”

Sho and Ryuhei join in on the ribbing, and you lean back against the steps. Kazuo rises from his chair a little unsteadily and comes to sit by you. “You never mentioned this friend of yours before.”

“It never came up.” You glance sidelong at him. “Why? Are you jealous?”

“No,” Kazuo says. He hiccups. His alcohol tolerance has always been weirdly low. “I’m surprised you never asked me to find him. Maybe I could.”

“I know.” If Kazuo ever recovers from what UA High did to him, the government will be all over him. He could find anything, anyone – but like Ryuhei said, he has to know what questions to ask. “I think I’m scared of what you’d find. I don’t want him to be dead.”

“Dead might be better.”

You almost choke on the sip of vodka you just took. “Excuse me?”

“If he died, he died,” Kazuo says. No shit. “If he’s still alive, he’s been missing for fifteen years. During my work-study, I assisted in the search for several missing children. Nothing good had happened to the ones we found alive.”

You hadn’t thought about that, what it would actually mean if Tenko is still alive, and your brain supplies you instantly with a list of terrible things that could have happened to your best friend. Your imagination is pretty vivid. Your stomach turns. “I don’t want that,” you say. “I just want him to be okay.”

“Sometimes dead is better,” Kazuo says again. And then he’s quiet.

You try to get back into the mood of the party, but what Kazuo said sticks, and you’re kind of mad at him about it. The old Kazuo wouldn’t have said something like that, or else he would have put it more gently. You miss the old Kazuo. Thanks to a villain fifteen years ago and UA fucking High, you’re now short two best friends.

Kazuo’s a good guy, but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t drawn to him because of who he reminded you of. You have a soft spot for dark-haired boys who want to be heroes. If Tenko hadn’t gone missing and the two of you had gotten to grow up together, you probably would have wound up with a big, stupid crush on him, the supercharged version of how you felt about Kazuo. But a relationship between the two of you wouldn’t have worked out, for the same reason your relationship with Kazuo didn’t work. Being a hero comes first. Being a hero always comes first with guys like them. You probably wouldn’t like them as much if it didn’t.

Getting drunk at Kazuo’s is a typical Friday night pastime among your friends, and usually everybody sleeps over. Everybody usually includes you, but you have to work tomorrow, which means you have to go home. Sometimes you and Kazuo still fool around when you’re both drunk, and you want to avoid that, too. You drink a glass of water and start sobering up while the others are still sorting out places to sleep, and then you tell them all good by and head out, taking three trains in a loop around the city to give yourself even more time to sober up before you have to walk home. You don’t live in the nicest neighborhood. You need to be alert.

When you finally get off the train at your stop, you realize you’ve got another problem. You’re hungry, and you won’t have time to cook when you get home if you want to sleep at all tonight. The all-night convenience store a few blocks up from your apartment is beckoning to you, and you give in without a fight. You’ll pick something to eat, eat it in the store for one last period of sobering-up, and walk the rest of the way home.

You feel a little better with a few bites of food in your stomach, and you’re pretty sure you’re not going to throw it up later. You hang out in the corner of the shop, a good spot to people-watch from if there were any people in here but you and the owner. The TV behind the counter is blaring the news about some villain attack, somewhere – two dumb-ass middle schoolers, one sludge villain, one can of whoop-ass opened by All Might. What else is new.

“Turn that shit off.”

The voice is raspy, and it’s coming from the far corner of the store. So there’s somebody else in here after all. You rise to your tiptoes and peer over the shelves to spot the speaker. They’re wearing a black hoodie with the hood up and browsing for energy drinks, and apparently they have a real problem with what’s on TV – which means the proprietor has a real problem with them. “Got a problem with heroics? Or does seeing real heroes just remind you what a bum you are?”

“Fuck off,” the guy in the hoodie says sharply. “You’ve got more in common with me than you do with them. If you were there, you think you’d run in to help? No. You’d wait for a hero, because you’re useless and pathetic. At least I don’t walk around pretending to be something I’m not.”

Hoodie guy sort of has a point, even if you don’t like how he’s phrasing it. Hoodie guy also sucks at reading the room, because after that little back-and-forth, he yanks an energy drink out of the case and a package of sour candies off a shelf and heads up to the counter. The proprietor laughs in his face. “Get out of here. If you think I’m selling even a stick of gum to you, you’re out of your mind.”

Hoodie guy’s shoulders tense. “You’re so desperate to defend All Might that you won’t take my money? He’s not gonna fuck you.”

You must be a little more drunk than you thought, because you have to clamp your hands over your mouth to stifle a laugh. But there’s nothing funny about the situation that’s unfolding in front of you. The proprietor’s looking increasingly pissed, and Hoodie Guy’s hands are out of his pockets, open and twitching at his sides. You don’t know what either of their quirks are, but you’ve got seven siblings. You know what it looks like when a situation’s about to spiral out of control.

“I said get out,” the proprietor spits. He shoves the drink and the package of candy back across the counter, hard enough that they fall off and roll across the floor. Hoodie Guy’s hands begin to lift from his sides, and you step out of your corner. “You want to start something? Go ahead. The cops will be here so fast –”

“Not fast enough for you,” Hoodie Guy hisses. His hands are all the way up, reaching over the counter.

You scoop the snacks off the floor and duck into the scant space between Hoodie Guy and the counter. You elbow him a bit by accident and he stumbles, swears at you. You ignore him and focus on the proprietor. “Hi. I’m still hungry. Can I get these?”

The proprietor squints at you, nonplussed. Behind you, Hoodie Guy’s gotten his feet under him, and if it’s possible, he’s extra pissed. “Get out of my way.”

“You don’t want this kind of trouble,” you say, ignoring Hoodie Guy. He’s the instigator. You need him to shut up so you can handle this before it escalates. “I know you don’t. You want him out of here and he wants his snacks. If you don’t want his money, mine’s just as good.”

You’re conscious of Hoodie Guy looming over your shoulder. He’s not all that much taller than you, but he’s standing a little too close. You take your wallet out, and that seems to settle the issue. “You’re lucky your girlfriend’s here to help you out. That’ll be ¥1800.”

You pay up and collect the snacks. When you turn away from the counter, Hoodie Guy’s right there, and you get your first good look at his face – or at the life-sized model hand clamped over his face. That’s – weird. You can’t see his expression, but his tone of voice is unmistakable. “If you think –”

“I know, I know,” you interrupt. “You’re not gonna fuck me.”

It’s not a joke you’d make sober, but with the proprietor calmed slightly down, you have to knock Hoodie Guy off his game somehow. It works. He makes a weird, strangled sound, and you grab him by his sleeve and tow him out the door.

He lets you do it, which is a surprise, and you let him go as soon as the doors close behind you. You hold out the snack and the energy drink. “Here.”

You can’t see his face, but you can see one red eye, peering out at you through the fingers of the hand. “It was pretty stupid of you to get in my way.”

“It was pretty stupid of you to go up to the counter. If you’d stormed off he wouldn’t have chased you.” You’ve seen Sho use that tactic before – needle a store owner until they want him gone more than they want to check his pockets. “Just take this, okay?”

He raises one hand and scratches at his neck. There’s something familiar about the motion, and the scarred, scraped-raw patch of skin there. Maybe you’ve seen something similar at work. “Either you used some kind of quirk or you got lucky. Which is it?”

“Neither. I have seven siblings and I’m good at toning things down.” You’ve wished for a quirk that lets you affect others’ moods more than a few times. You had to learn your de-escalation techniques the hard way. “Do you want these or not?”

He’s still scratching, and something’s pulling at the back of your mind, harder and harder. “Seven siblings,” he says slowly. “That’s three more.”

“Three more than what?” you say, puzzled. And then it clicks.

You have seven siblings now. When you lived across the street from your best friend, you only had four. And now you get why the scratching looks so familiar, why there’s so much scar tissue in the place he’s clawing at – because he’s been scratching that same spot for a decade and a half. It doesn’t matter than his hair is grey-blue instead of black, that his eyes are red instead of grey. It doesn’t even matter that he’s got a creepy hand stuck over his face. You know who you’re looking at, and the surge of joy that overtakes you is like nothing you’ve ever felt before.

You’d keep it to yourself, ordinarily. But tonight you’re a little drunk, and you can’t hold it in. “Tenko,” you say, and he freezes like he’s been struck by lightning. “You’re alive!”

Tenko stays frozen until you reach for him, at which point he bolts, and you really shouldn’t follow him – but you’re drunk and it’s your best friend and he’s alive just like you knew he was, so you chase after him. He was a little clumsy when you were kids. You were always a little faster on your feet, but his legs are longer than yours now, and he keeps you at a fair distance until he trips.

It’s sort of your fault he trips. He’s looking back over his shoulder, checking where you are, and he’s not watching his feet. It’s a bad fall. He sprawls out, the hand over his face dislodging and bouncing across the concrete, and you hear him cursing under his breath in a voice that carries a familiar strain. You’ve heard that before. You do what you did back then. You run to his side and drop to your knees, hands outstretched to help. “Tenko –”

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!” Tenko lashes out with one hand, and instinct tells you to get out of range. The hand he lashes out with looks wrong – hurt, maybe, in the fall. His other hand is up over his face, covering it the same way the model hand was. “Father – I need – where –”

Father. You wonder if Tenko knows what happened to his father – but he’s feeling around on the concrete with the maybe-broken hand, and you realize what he’s looking for. “It’s over here,” you say. “Stay there. I can –”

“No.” Tenko lunges past you, seizes the hand, secures it over his face. Then he turns on you, and the hatred in his eyes sends a bolt of pure terror down your spine.

He knocks you onto your back. You know some self-defense – like any girl, like any person without a quirk – and you kick and thrash, arching your back, trying to throw him off. Some part of your mind is still spinning, because it’s Tenko, your best friend, who wants to be a hero – and it’s Tenko, his forearm coming down across your throat and half his body weight leaning onto it. You cough and sputter, and Tenko raises his other hand, all five fingers outstretched. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll kill you fast. Lie and it’ll be slow. Who are you?”

You don’t know how he expects you to answer with his arm over your throat. Dark spots are beginning to fill your vision. You shove at his arm, and his hand closes around your wrist. His grip is hot and dry and shaking, and a split second after he’s touched you, the burning starts. It’s like his hand is dipped in acid, like it’s clawing through your skin one layer at a time, and you scream in pain. Or you try to. He increases the pressure on your throat and chokes the sound off. “Don’t touch me,” he snarls. “And don’t scream. Who are you?”

You manage to rasp out your name, and you see Tenko’s expression shift. “We went to school together,” you gasp. “I lived across the street from you. We played together. You were –”

You black out for a second, and the pressure on your throat lifts slightly. “What?” Tenko spits. “I was what?”

“My best friend,” you whisper. Your eyes well up, tears running down your face when you blink. “I missed you so much –”

Tenko stares down at you for a moment longer. Then he recoils away from you, up onto his feet and back five or six steps. He’s cradling his wrist. You roll from your back to your side and gasp for air. There’s a rattle in your breathing that tells you your windpipe’s damaged, and when you blink the tears and spots from your vision to stare at your wrist, you see that your skin is raw, bloody and oozing. There’s the outline of all five of Tenko’s fingers, his thumb and middle finger joined, rotted into your skin.

“Go,” Tenko says. You look numbly up at him and see his face twisted behind the hand. “Now.”

Your wrist – his hair – his eyes – Tenko has a quirk now. An awful quirk. “What happened to you?” you ask helplessly. “Where did you go? Are you –”

“Go!” Tenko snaps at you. “Before I change my mind. Run!”

You scramble backwards and collide with something. The energy drink and the package of candy, which you dropped when you ran to help Tenko after he fell. The sight of them makes you want to burst into tears again. You don’t want to take them with you. You bought them for him. Without looking his way, you pick them up and set them on the ground between the two of you, pushing them towards him so he knows who they’re for. Then you force yourself to your hands and your knees and your feet and run for your life, away from the best friend you now know you’ve lost for good.

You didn’t want Tenko to be dead, and he isn’t. But Kazuo was right, too. Maybe dead would have been better. Anything would have been better than this.

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