#some fics are more complex/longer/time-intensive than others - in the way that making a five-course meal is more work than making a sandwic

[stillness-in-green]

The Remedy for Wrongs Is Forgetting (Revised)

I cleaned up and revised the fic I posted before for AO3, mainly by adding an extra 800 words to it.  For those who would like to read it there, you can find my AO3 link via my about page.  For those (like myself) who would just like to see it in the character tags, here’s the newly completed version, now featuring more highly vague references to Vigilantes canon and yet more details about how I imagine Shigaraki and Kurogiri’s pre-BNHA timeline.  

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He wakes to a harsh white light above him and a voice that reaches into his gut and says, Master.

What the voice actually says is, “Oh, you’re awake.  How marvelous.  Then it’s time for you to get started.”

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Kurogiri is, according to the Doctor, not intended for fighting, but for rather for defense, service, and discretion.  The Doctor’s experiments are taking up more of his time and growing more sensitive in nature.  He will not run the risk of being caught at this stage—and it wouldn’t hurt to have someone around who can ensure he’s eating.  Kurogiri is apparently something of an experimental model developed to serve the Doctor’s immediate needs and his streamlined functions compared to the Doctor’s other subjects made his construction comparatively simple.

“How do you feel about that?” the Doctor asks him with an intense stare.

Kurogiri considers the question.  The idea of helping people seems—correct.  A fact that curls up in his heart and rests there, warm and at peace.

“Lucky,” he answers.  “Like I’ve been given a purpose I already meant to pursue.”

The Doctor chuckles.

“I knew I’d picked a good one.”

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The Doctor shows him how to order food and look up recipes online, the basics of using any kitchen appliances he doesn’t already recognize, and some brief instructions about not mixing household cleaners.  He’s prepared a spartan bedroom in which he spends his resting hours.

Truthfully, he spends most of his time in the lab, watching Noumu being sculpted into existence from broken people, growth acceleration quirks, and a battery of audio-visual conditioning that sings with familiarity from the very first time he overhears it.  It’s comforting, in its way—a structure to lean on in the knowledge that he, too, must have been pieced together out of bewilderment and ruin.

They do say that art is an expression of pain, after all.

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The Doctor experiments on children.  This is a fact that sits, cold and hard, at the bottom of his throat.  Kurogiri tells himself, The Doctor experiments on everyone.

Somehow, it doesn’t quite feel the same.  Watching a wailing boy shy back from his mist leaves Kurogiri with an acute awareness of pain squirming over his shoulder, disembodied, disassociated, but inarguably present all the same.

It doesn’t, of course, stop him from carrying out his orders.  But the dreams he has afterward—dreams of white clouds and laughter, and a familiar curl of warmth in his heart—leave him privately grateful when the lab is back to housing only its adult monsters.

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The Doctor has a patron, it seems, a master of his own.  Kurogiri is told in no uncertain terms that All For One is now his highest authority, a man whose orders are to be heeded as one heeds the laws of physics.

All for One is broad-shouldered and celebrity-handsome, with an easy, roguish smile and sharp, bright eyes.  In photographs, he’s striking, but not, for the age of heroes, uniquely so.  In person, however, the man is a force of nature, cloaked in a power that enters the room before him and lingers after he leaves, palpable as the mounting pressure of a thunderstorm.

He is affable, and charming, and promising the man his service is the easiest thing Kurogiri has ever done.

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“You should see him trying to be good with kids,” the Doctor tells his patron as they amble into the kitchenette from the lab later that evening.  “He’s downright chatty!  It might even work, if it weren’t coming from—”  He breaks off to gesture at Kurogiri, who gives them a shallow bow and holds out a cup of coffee towards All for One.

“Hah.”  The man takes it, tipping it in Kurogiri’s direction in thanks, and sips from it with an appreciative gleam in his eyes.  “Well, good manners are a virtue.  Though, if you say he’s good with children…”

The Doctor quirks one heavy eyebrow at his patron, then the other lifts in realization as he begins to laugh.

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Shigaraki Tomura is a quiet, sullen child of ten or so, a bundle of nervous tics and resentful neuroses, but he is not afraid of Kurogiri.  It’s a pleasant change, and pleasant as well to have a place to exist outside the lab complex, though Tomura is a bit nocturnal for Kurogiri to see much in the way of blue skies.

He makes a project of cleaning up the wreck of a bar beneath the boy’s room.  He dusts and polishes, sweeps, takes stock, disposes of wine bottles with rotted corks, and wrangles the space back into presentability.  It takes the better part of a year—he’s only infrequently asked to watch Tomura, when All For One leaves on business he doesn’t deem fit for his ward’s attention, and much of the work of cleaning must be redone with each visit.

After three visits’ worth of circular exchanges and locked horns about basic upkeep, Shigaraki Tomura teaches Kurogiri how to steal.

That’s not entirely accurate.  The act itself is simple enough, their quirks being what they are.  It would be more correct to say that Shigaraki Tomura teaches Kurogiri how to choose to steal.

They make an exploratory foray into the drug store two blocks down at three in the morning.  Kurogiri, on edge from the departure from the spaces he’s permitted to be in, stands at the counter, mindfully keeping a dark portal swirling in front of the security camera, and watches the boy work.  He shuffles down the dim aisles, plucking snack foods, sugary drinks, magazines and toiletries off the shelves and depositing them into a shopping cart, two fingers of each hand always carefully raised.  At the front of the store, the glass cases containing alcohol, tobacco products and video games—and thankfully Tomura is only interested in the latter—present Decay not even a whisper of difficulty.  When he’s finished, he pushes the cart with all its ill-gotten gain back through a portal to the bar and gives Kurogiri a grin of triumph and satisfaction—the closest thing to a real smile Kurogiri has yet seen on his scarred face.

“See?  Easy.”

It leaves Kurogiri in quite a thoughtful frame of mind and he and Tomura alike bask in the glow of All For One’s warm, proud laughter when he returns and listens to the story over the bar’s first official drink.

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The Doctor, when Kurogiri returns, snorts at the tale and says with a tsk, “You’ll spoil him.”

“Shall I refrain next time, then?” Kurogiri asks, tilting his head.  He hopes not—he’s come to a tentative arrangement with Tomura about the boy decaying his rubbish in exchange for meals that take longer than three minutes in the microwave.

“The little brat’s not my project; so long as you’re following All For One’s wishes for him, I don’t care how you treat him.”  The Doctor waves one hand as he stands from his desk and turns towards the darkness of the lab.  “Now come along; you know how the work piles up when you’re away.”

“Of course.”

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Five years later, when All Might crushes All For One’s skull, all of Kurogiri’s arrangements collapse.

The Doctor works night and day, electric with his terror of being discovered, of losing his patron.  He snaps and barks, refusing more than the most basic nutrition.   On one particularly fraught occasion, when Kurogiri tries to pull him away from the sixteenth straight hour of staring at his computer combing through his archived research, he snarls a word that Kurogiri doesn’t even have time to consciously register before the blackout fells him where he stands.

Shigaraki Tomura takes it even harder, dissolving as Kurogiri watches into a seething, rancid, rabid creature fueled by spite and fury.  He claws his skin until blood runs freely, mutters and paces and screams demands.  His bedroom descends back into squalor; one evening after Kurogiri makes him particularly angry, he decays every single bottle of alcohol at the bar, leaving behind a reeking mess staining the shelves and pooling on the floor.

Kurogiri—who’s sent reeling by a nauseous wave of déjà vu every time he so much as looks at All For One’s bandaged head and still form—rededicates himself to his core principles of defense, service and discretion, and does what he must to keep the other two alive.

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All For One stabilizes, though he’s weaker.

The Doctor stabilizes, though he’s more paranoid.

Shigaraki—stabilizes, though he’s considerably less stable than he was before a few months prior.

Kurogiri recalibrates to the new normal.  It’s something like stability, he supposes.

                                         --------------------------

“Kurogiri, I need you to look after Tomura,” All For One says, not long after he regains consciousness.  “Indefinitely.”

The Doctor opens his mouth—The work piles up when you’re away, Kurogiri remembers—but Kurogiri is already nodding his assent.

“Of course, sir.”  Helping Shigaraki Tomura will not be easy, but Kurogiri appreciates projects and the thought—helping someone—rekindles a little of the old glow, a forgotten sense-memory from whatever lost soul he was before being reborn.

“He’ll complain about the babysitting, you know,” the Doctor says, but his earlier protest has already subsided and his tone is one of resigned acceptance.  All For One chuckles, then hisses in pain.

“Yes, I’m sure he will.  Nevertheless.  My timetable has just gotten more pressing.”

“That’s the broken ribs, old friend.”  The Doctor sighs.  “Kurogiri, go and pack your things, what you have of them.  All For One and I have some private matters to discuss.”

“Of course, sir.”

                                         --------------------------

He warps into the bar that night.  Broken glass litters the floor and dust has begun to build up on the bar once more.  The door to Tomura’s bedroom upstairs hangs open; sounds of video game violence crack and burst through the silence.  Dancing light filters down the stairs, glittering and gleaming in the shards of broken bottles.

In its own way, it’s beautiful, unintended art in the expression of pain.  But there’s such a lot of work to do, too, to make such craft sustainable.

Kurogiri sighs, turns on the lights, and gets to work.

#boku no hero academia #my hero academia #kurogiri #shirakumo oboro #shigaraki tomura #all for one #ujiko daruma #my writing #ficcing #bnha spoilers #bnha