There is a hellhole and there is hell.

She knows the difference.

Hell is something terrible, it is bruised skin and crying eyes. It's darting eyes and plastic friends that steal your soul from the gouge in your body. It's selling your identity for a chance to fit in, to stop being isolated. Hell is hurt and numb.

Then there is a hellhole. Deep and infinite black as the inky sky that swallows the skull whole. Fangs biting into human flesh and hunger eating away at whatever bone and skin that shatters around purple fingers. Cold wraps around you like a blanket, but it's far more comforting than the home you were in before. Cracked bones and split lips―fractures and fractions of fractions of happiness at your disposal. Bitter and burning, you like the cold better than the heat; you like the taste of all blood but your own so you swallow it up. Licking your sharp-teeth-fangs clean of any crimson at feeling as your bones mold. You waste your breath but you'll never plead again. You're so tired.

.. Himiko is so, so tired.

_

There is a boy across the street telling a story to a woman with two missing teeth and only on good arm. She's covered in rags―or something similar, maybe. Dark fabric wrapped around her like the night around stars, holding her gently. Himiko watches him. He's a tragedy, she thinks; skin strung on bone.

He's worse off then her, she thinks.

_

The boy is doing it again, he's always alone.

_

The boy brought a man with him this time. It's winter now - the woman is scared of the man (Himiko thinks he's covered in scars. She wonders how much he bled, wonders if it hurts, if it smells sweet, like cotton candy or soda). She's shaking―from fear or the cold or some twisted mix of both. Sprinting adrenaline through her lungs and racing oxygen through her veins -- Himiko can smell it. It's wonderful, really.

The boy―Green mutters something and the scary man holds a hand out. She takes it and her body quells - she looks at the scary man and she must decide he's not as scary as she thought, because her lips lilt in a smile. Small and nervous but a smile (she mutters out thanks, maybe, the not-scary-scary man takes off his too small jacket and gives it to her―his arems are lined with purple and silver holding it to sickly white).

She wonders if his blood is as sweet as he is. Iron dripping red and cold―blue saccharine like something out of a fairytale. Dipped in crystal sugar and slipping down her throat, holding her lungs breathless.

Himiko knows something.

She loves the boy who reads stories and smells like tragedy and sorrow stripped of his body. A poison blade wretched wildly in her heart and she loves him (but she is not in love with him, and it makes all the difference). As the others love him; he's bitter skin and cotton candy insides splattered over organs. He's made of fear and self-loathing so potent it breaks away his lungs and steals whatever food is left in him and gives it to the earth.

The man―he is covered in scars. Black-violet with silver and spite holding him together. Gunmetal daggers make up his smile and salt-ocean skies mud with his pupils. He's pretty, Himiko thinks. Gold-tinted stars spill like sand between his sutures.

Green Boy's made of ink and murky waters, the boy of swamp tides and puke. Of the scars that bloom like flowers over his skin, stardust and supernova hath destroyed his human skin away until he is nothing but a dark age in humanity. Blood sewn to his body like a marionette's strings―she wonders what would happen if she went to him and cut it away. Took his life from his hands and watched the terror and joy and pain and ease fade from his eyes as the air fades from his lungs. Ashes drip from his hands and his sleaves like the man with patchwork skin.

He never looks at her. Himiko is okay with that, she's not pretty to look at, she knows.

_

Someone taps her shoulder. Her entire body jolts and she drops her breakfast-lunch-dinner in one―a dead pigeon. Himiko let's out a hiss that's downright feral, but when she looks at the man, and she does look at him, he doesn't respond. In all of his pasty-skinned glory. He's tall, super tall; like the man made of silver spite and patchwork skin. But he's not like them. He's like a ghost.

"Hey," He says. "are you.. do you wanna―just.. do you need someplace to stay or," The man picks on his lips. "uhg. I have a bar, it's safe, you can come with me if you want."

Himiko picks herself up and starts running away. Like hell she's ever going to sleep out in a bar with that creep―who knows what he'd do to her. She's not dumb.

"W-wait―dammit! Dabi and 'Zuku said you need a place to stay, 'cuz you sleep on the streets but you don't have a group!"

That gets her to stop. Dabi was what the green one called patchwork. She thinks at least―her sight dwindles sometimes, it's hard to think when your heads shot full of cotton. "I don't know who you are. I don' know what you wan' but leave me out of it."

He's so warped and twisted his hands are falling apart and his head is split wide open. "Please.. "

The voice around her creaks and turns like some sort of rusted faucet. She watches him, watches the violent look in his eyes he's trying so hard to cover. The twitching of his gloved fingers and the way he's wrung, all gnarly and wiry. Stick-thin bones and paper-laced eyes; blood spills from his loose like a hope. She's never been good at hoping, hoping gets you killed once-twice-thrice over. Nobody is kind without reason.

"No," She says. And she runs so hard so fast she wondeds if her world will fall apart under her worn down soles. She finds somewhere else to sleep for the night. She's never going back there.