The bar is quiet, empty except for the two customers chattering and the clinking of glasses like a back tape. It's blue noise drowned in strawberry syrup and cherry wine, Kurogiri's favorite. He can drown himself in it too, pouring sweet drinks for them when they come over, tripping over air and slurred words, laughing. Kurogiri must've been like that too, once, laughing with someone, he had friends once, in the before, when there was a before.

Kurogiri is half-dipped in dry wine and lemon juice, maybe something more like absinthe, the green blood in his back corner, he turns to the kids on the barstools drinking strawberry milk and peach soda respectively. Kurogiri wonders why the scene is so familiar like he's watched it over and over, on loop, a record.

"Hey, Shouto?" Izuku asks when he puts down his cup of soda. He isn't shaking, today. It's nice out, warm, the kids on the block aren't dying. Kurogiri wonders when summer will rot out this year, styrofoam houses blowing into snow when cold comes in. He hopes not, but winter has a way of making people cruel.

"Yes?" Shouto says quiet. He is something like a travesty, Kurogiri can't help but think. He's all tired eyes and hate; it's eating his up, making him worm food. He's going to die like this, bright and bitter and bleeding rage from every scar. Kurogiri knows. He's bleeding too. Somewhere in him is an open wound, spilling Gin right out. Sour. He wonder's if the alley cats will swallow his spoiled insides up, or if he'll be noting but motionless mist, sitting in one place, a bad fog.

"Why don't you ever use your fire-side?" Izuku must know why, of course he does, he can see it in the way Shouto flinches and holds his breathe like a dying wish, but he wants to hear it, even if it's a lie, he wants to know for sure. Kurogiri watches the way absinthe eyes rake over Shouto's half finished strawberry milk.

(Shouto' s gaze hardens, he takes a deep breath. Ozone crackles around them, his hands start to hurt. He tells Izuku about it, like it's some sort of dagger in his chest, an open wound spilling out. He tells Izuku about a screaming in the hallways that only stopped when his eldest brother, Touya, died. He tells Izuku about warped reflections and mothers that hate their children, about fathers with angry, angry eyes and sisters that blend into the wall like their made of shadows, about how the oldest haunts the same hallways he was screaming into. Shouto tells Izuku a story about a marriage that went up in smoke; that disappeared in the scratches in the closet. Shouto tells Izuku about how everyone knows which floorboards are creaky and which ones are not; how they know who someone is by the weight of their step. About how nobody screams anymore but you can still hear crying down the hallway. He tells Izuku why he doesn't use his fire.

Something must break in him when Izuku doesn't care, fractures like a hand grenade in the desert. Kurogiri wonders what triggered that kind of apathy, the one that makes heroes into monsters and sheep into wolves. The kind of emptiness that makes fate cruel.)

"B-but, then― wh-what if there- there's a v-villain y-y-you can't b-beat with j-just your i-ice?" Kurogiri wonders if Izuku even thinks of the way fire has to crackle against burning skin, that smell, it takes up a whole room. The way it makes buildings fall and rubble crush the people under it, Kurogiri thinks that weight sits heavy on his suit, a stain of something. He remembers the strangest things, coughing up blood when he doesn't have a mouth, crying when his eyes are just barely there, "W-wouldn't not using your left side make things w-worse? A-and even if you didn't u-use it, uncon-uncontrollable f-fire is m-more d-destructive th-than con-controlled fl-flames."

"I―I guess I never thought about it." Shouto sounds like his throat is closing up, Shouto must be good at this part by now, Kurogiri thinks. Ignoring the panic and the fear, he makes it angrier than it is, makes it hate. Shouto hates his father, hates his purpose, his very being, a whole half of himself because a woman on the edge of insanity told him he looked like the monster that crawled out from each of their beds,

"Well, i-it's your quirk, Shouto-san."

And Kurogiri knows that Shouto would never admit that was the best hug he'd ever had in his entire life. Kurogiri knows because Izuku is warm and kind and beloved. Kurogiri thinks that it's obvious though, from the way the whole room gets warmer, slowly still. It edges on the grieving part of summer.

__

Hana is made of rotting flower stems, not the pretty, blooming parts. She's cut off from the rest, killing the part that everyone fawns over. Saitou-sensei says that she should try to get her feelings out, and she's never been all that good with words, Rei-chan says that painting helps her concentrate but Hana doesn't like the way that the paint sticks to her hands after, the way if she uses red and black she can still see it, so vividly. She's been in here since she was eighteen, he brain is all scrambled and her adopted family says they want her to be better but-

Hana doesn't think that's in the cards for her.

She's a bad person, killing the pretty parts because its all she can do, rot away at the floorboards and watch winter come back. It's still warmer, now, but she wants to be one with the cold, she thinks that little kid in her head hated the cold. He'd cry when- it's her fault, really. The doctors tell her that her father was unstable and controlling, suffering from the abandonment of his own mother that he never got over, grief turning into violence but- Hana was angry then, too.

Even when she was small and cute and likable she was like this, turning away the blame and shirking it on other people, that little boy who hated the cold- she can't remember his name, the doctors all say they'll tell er if she really wants to know but she doesn't- she doesn't. It'll rot away his memory too, that little boy who got locked outside with the dog, that little boy who hated the cold, who said to her one bright spring afternoon When I'm a hero I'll save you from this house, who smiled, loud and white and crumbling . She wonders, softly, slowly, like dry-rot and black-mold, if she never interfered, would the problems have sorted themselves out.

His skin would have made itself new if only they let it. Don't cry, don't pick on it, you only make things worse Te-

She doesn't want to know his name. Hana's going to kill that boy in her memory, like he killed her, and she deserved it back then.

"Rei-chan, how ome when you paint it looks nice and when I paint it looks like-" she points to the mess of purple wisteria and rotten lavender on a white nothingness. The roots are browns and black and spoiled and the petals are falling apart.

Rei-chan's painting is a field of bluebells and a sakura tree with a swing. There's a boy on in, he's small, swarmed in his t-shirt. He looks like he belongs there. "I- I like to- my son died, my eldest, when he was very young. It was my fault, I couldn't speak to him, he felt he didn't belong and he- took his life in trying to.. get someone to look at him." She puts downs the paint brush and Hana can see the stillness, then. "I never did, his father didn't either and- nobody else really understood him, his quirk was very unstable and.. sometimes I like. I like to think he's happy, wherever he is now. He liked autumn best, because he could finally stop wearing sweaters. He would- when he was younger he would." Her hands are shaking, her voice wavers. "I like to think he's happy, playing again."

"That's depressing." Hana says, for lack of anything better. "He kind of reminds me of my-my. Uh," Hana lets out some choked out imitation of a laugh. "just, uh, nevermind. It doesn't matter."

Hana thinks if she says it out loud, if its real like that, she might just rot whatever memory of this boy Rei-chan has left, and wouldn't that be something?

Yeah. Hana should stop talking, she might spiral again and that's what got her admitted into this prison in the first place.

"It doesn't matter."

__

"Miko-chan get your crusty blood bags away from the rest of the food, not all of us are immune to blood borne diseases and we can't afford hospital visits!" Tomura screeches from the cramped little kitchen behind the bar. 

Kurogiri's bar works a little something like this:

There's the whole bar area, and then there's a little door that goes behind the bar in which there is a sink, a stove, a fridge, and a run down little table with too many chairs for how small it is and a giant crack that Tomura swears isn't visible with a tablecloth on and was also not his fault, then there are stairs. Stairs that lead to two bedrooms. One for Kurogiri and one for Tomura. That's not the main focus here, the main focus here is that they have a small fridge and as much as Miko-chan is in fact the little sister he would kill for, he kind of also wants to kill her, currently.

Because of the aforementioned blood bags on his container of yakitori sticks and fried rice. He fucking loves yakitori sticks and fried rice, very good combo, ten out of ten, would recommend except he wouldn't because then he'd have to share, but there's currently a blood bag and as such they might be inedible. He's still going to eat them, food poisoning be damned. Because he loves yakitori sticks and fried rice.

He's just not going to touch the blood pouch bags on top.

This is when Miko-chan decides to walk in like she didn't maybe poison his yakitori sticks and fried rice. "Wassup Tomu-chan?"

"Get your virus spreading blood off of my food before I slaughter Miko-chan."

"You wouldn't dare."

"I would dare. Get your blood off my food."

"Well, maybe, if you weren't so weak, you could do it. What're you, afraid?"

"Afraid of food poisoning?" Tomura stresses.

"Miss me with that gay shit."

"What gay shit- personal health? Himiko you're literally pansexual."

"Miss me with that gay shit."

"Himiko I'm asexual and aromantic—I do not do gay shit—"

She looks at him one more time, taking out her pouch and stabbing a straw into it like some sort of demented horror movie Cool-Aid. Tomura shudders violently in disgust at the visual. "Miss me with that gay shit."

"I wont hesitate." Tomura decides on, making a big deal out of pulling his left glove off. Slowly. "Bitch."

It's then when Dabi pops his gay little head in. "That's kinda sexist Tomura. Women aren't bitches"

Oh, oh no. He doesn't like the way that smile forms on Himiko's face. "Yeah, Tomura, that's kinda sexist, you saying you don't respect women?"

"No, I respect woman plenty, I respect Izu-chan's mother- whoever she is, and Pop☆Step." They take a moment, to honor Pop☆Step's name, a breathe, a thank you to her very existence. "I just don't respect you."

"Well I'm sorry I'll never be enough for you Tomu- chan!" She says dramatically. Sipping obnoxiously on her blood pouch. "However will I live knowing you don't respect me, mayhaps this is the end, should I leave this cruel, merciless world in which Shigaraki Tomura, bitchless extrordinare, does not respect me, for however will I live."

She falls back in Dabi's direction, expecting him to catch her. He doesn't, he sidesteps, and she falls to the ground with a comical thud.

"Now what to do with the body." Tomura says at Dabi.

"I'm not helping you hide that thing." Dabi says promptly, and then leaves. To where? Tomura has no-fucking-clue, bit has the faintest whiff of thought that it's bummblefuck, Saitama .

"Yo, wake up brat." He says, poking her. She whines.

"Nooooooo!" She says. "Goodbye.. cruel.. world."

"Uh huh." He says. "Look, I'm going to step on you, on this nice new sweater you stole, in three, two-"

She, miraculously, survives. Gets up, without any noticeable wounds, and blows a raspberry at him.

Tomura sighs.

Why is this his life now?