Chapter Text
You’ve always had a soft spot for strays. Maybe that’s why you became an ER nurse—from the first abandoned puppy you brought home as a kid to the patients you refuse to give up on even when it looks hopeless, you’ve never been able to turn a blind eye when something needs your help. Sometimes (times like this) you wish you knew better. It’s hard enough to take care of yourself these days.
Today’s shift was…what, 16 hours? 17? The 20-minute walk from the bus stop to your apartment building feels like it takes twice that long in the rain. God, you need a shower. And a decent night’s sleep, preferably for at least 12 hours. Tomorrow’s your day off, and you’re ready to take advantage of it the best way you know how: Netflix, soju, and your favorite vibrator. But tonight? As soon as you’re clean, you’re going to pig out on leftovers and collapse into the bed that’s the only halfway nice piece of furniture in your shithole apartment. You really do deserve a break; you’ve earned it.
Unfortunately, as usual, the universe has other plans.
You hear him before you see him: wheezing, choked breaths, like someone’s trying to breathe with an anvil on their chest. You’re not quite out of nurse mode so your mind starts trying to diagnose the issue before you even register what you’re hearing. Fluid in the lungs, possibly blood. That hacking isn’t good. Broken ribs? Definitely bruised. But probably not a puncture…
The breathing is coming from down an alley next to your building. It’s dark enough that you can’t see from the street what’s making the noise. And you’re not a fool, you know it’s a bad idea to walk down pitch-black alleys late at night, especially in this area—a neighborhood you’re living in by necessity, because it’s the only place cheap enough for you to get by. But the coughing…it just sounds so awful. It sounds like it hurts.
Your phone’s already in your hand with 119 dialed and ready to call (standard practice when you’re walking home by yourself), but you turn the flashlight on and shine it down the alleyway. “Hello? Anyone there?”
Nothing responds, but you can still hear the breathing. You step in a little deeper, swinging your light from side to side and looking over the heaps of trash bags overflowing from the dumpster. The raindrops make clicking sounds as they hit the plastic, and you can hear gurgling from a rain spout down the side of the building, but the wheezing doesn’t stop.
One more step. And then one more. You wish there was something you could do to make the splash of your rain boots in the puddles a little less loud. Something about this situation—the rain, the dark, the flat grey light from your cellphone, and that horrible hacking breath—it makes you feel like you’re walking into a horror movie. But you don’t stop walking.
The hacking is coming from a man propped up on the wall between a few XL bags of trash. The black outfit he’s wearing almost blends into the bags, but a mop of grey-blue hair gives him away. His head is slumped onto his chest, and if he’s conscious he doesn’t show it. “Hello?” you ask again, even less confident that you’re going to get a response.
No answer.
The smell of garbage is…ugh…hard to ignore, but on top of it is an oppressive stench of copper coming from the man passed out in the trash. You kneel down to get a better look and yep, he’s covered in blood. It’s hard to make out in the low light, but there’s a trio of long gashes in the man’s abdomen, cutting apart the skin and flesh so deep you can see traces of a slim layer of yellow fat between all the inky clotted blood. It looks like he was attacked by an animal. Or someone with an animal quirk. There are a lot of villains in this neighborhood.
And the coughing…definitely internal injuries. Whoever this guy is, he needs treatment. You hold up your phone to hit the call button on your pre-dialed 119—
“Don’t.” The voice is a growl, low and surprisingly firm despite the scratchiness. You jerk back and clutch your phone to your chest, caught off guard not just by the interruption but by the intensity of the face glaring up at yours.
His eyes are red. “You need an ambulance,” you tell him in your calmest nurse voice.
“If you try to call the police, I’ll—kill you,” the man says, but the threat is a little less threatening when he has to stop in the middle to retch blood onto his own chin.
You glare back at him but don’t call the emergency number. There are a lot of of reasons why he wouldn’t want to go to the hospital, but the most obvious one is probably true. “You’re a criminal. A villain?”
He doesn’t respond, choosing instead to keep glaring at you like you’ve committed some mortal sin against his ancestors by having the nerve to check on him and try to help him. Somehow it pisses you off. When you were getting your ADN, you once took a temp job doing health screenings at a local middle school and you would always get so annoyed at the kids. Didn’t they see you were just doing your job? Why is it so hard to understand that what you’re doing is for their own good?
Stupid kids. Stupid villain. “You’d rather bleed out and die?”
The man bares his teeth at you, and it’s a pretty disturbing scene considering how they’re covered in scarlet. “You think they’re going to save me? Think I’ll go to the hospital and get all my HP restored?”
He’s mocking you now. You only have a second to move out of the way before he spits off to the side. “I mean…that’s how a hospital works.”
“If you think I would—make it out of that ambulance alive, you’re—dumber than you look.” His voice is interspersed with coughs.
“Well, you’re not going to live if I leave you here.” You hold up your phone, ready to call the ambulance, but in a shocking display of agility the man lunges forward and grabs it out of your hand. “Hey, wait! Give that…back…”
Your voice trails off as your phone crumbles—literally crumbles to dust in the man’s fingers. Once he’s satisfied that there’s no way for you to call the cops, he slumps back onto the trash bags and closes his eyes, apparently exhausted from the effort.
Goddamnit…! For a second, you can only stare blankly at the pile of dust that used to be your $300 smartphone. And then you’re seized by something, maybe not hatred but an annoyance so strong you can feel it in your throat, and you decide right then and there that this villain is not going to die. You’re going to save him. Out of spite.
You’re not sure how you manage to half-carry him from the alley to your apartment, but you do. You’re lucky it’s ass-o-clock at night and no one’s in the lobby or the elevator, or you’d definitely be getting some looks trying to lug a maimed body around. What would you say if someone did call the cops? Don’t worry, don’t worry about it officer, it’s just my friend drank a little too much, oh those wounds? We were at a costume party, haha…
But no one sees you, and no one calls the cops. The man is unconscious the whole time you’re carrying him, and by the time you have him laid out on a shower curtain on your living room floor his breathing is a little bit shallower than it was before. You’ve got your tools—nothing fancy, just some gauze and closures and antiseptic from your personal first aid kit. It’s not much, but it’ll have to be enough.
“Let’s get to work, asshole,” you tell the unconscious body in front of you, and you crack your knuckles.
///
The day after you pick the villain out of the garbage, your body decides that it’s not going to let you sleep in no matter how much you need it. You can tell because the huge windows in your bedroom—the only saving grace of this apartment, honestly—are depositing golden-pink sunrise light over everything you see when you open your eyes, including the villain’s face. Which is about six inches away from yours.
“You smell like death,” you tell him sleepily. He doesn’t move.
He’s…probably in his early twenties, you think, but it’s hard to tell because of all the wrinkles. His hair is on the longer side, and it’s striped with rusty brown smears from his blood. Again, you notice how red his irises are. Have you ever seen someone with eyes that color before? You’re pretty sure you haven’t.
“You slept for a long time,” the villain says, finally moving back so he’s not breathing into your mouth.
“Yeah, I was tired. From saving your life.” You sit up and rub your temples. “I’m thirsty…”
Before you can finish your complaint, the villain is holding a glass of water out to you in an awkward 4-fingered grip.
“Um, thanks, I guess.” You suck down the water and immediately feel better, enough that you realize how wrong it is that he’s up and moving around and probably undoing all your hard work. “You should be lying down.”
“The floor hurt, and I was bored.”
“Lie on the couch then. You can watch TV. But first—“ He’s sitting on the edge of your bed next to you, and you make him lie down flat so you can look at the injuries. They’re not nearly as bad as they looked last night—no walk in the park, but at least you won’t have a corpse in your apartment in a few hours.
When you’re done inspecting him, he sits up and asks you for a shirt. You had to cut his off, not that it was any great loss. The thing was shredded. Him pointing it out is the only thing that makes you really realize he’s shirtless, so you give him an oversized pajama shirt of yours. It has the name and motto of your old high school on it, and the villain reads it out in a half-mocking tone when you hand it to him.
“Beggars shouldn’t be choosers,” you snap. “You should be grateful.”
“I am grateful,” he says, putting the shirt on. “But I don’t understand.”
“I mean, you need a shirt, right? It’s cold—“
“No. Not that.” He’s staring at you again, and you find it difficult to maintain eye contact. “Why you didn’t leave me where you found me last night.”
There’s a lot you could tell him, all of it a little bit true. You were curious. You believed him when he said he wouldn’t make it out of the hospital alive. You couldn’t leave him alone the same way you can’t leave abandoned puppies alone. You wanted to prove to him that you were right, and that being stubborn wouldn’t get him what he wanted. But you don’t say that. “You killed my phone, so you owe me a new one. And I can’t get that back if you bleed out.”
He’s looking at you like he doesn’t believe you, and you fidget under his gaze until he sighs and says, “Whatever.”
You have to let him lean on your shoulder when he walks back to the living room to lie down on your couch. How the hell did he even get to your bedroom by himself? You really didn’t think this through—what are you supposed to do with an infirm possible villain who can barely walk unsupported without opening his injuries back up?
But that’s a problem for tomorrow you to deal with. Today, you’re content to set your laptop up on the coffee table so the two of you can watch TV in…oddly companionable (if you’re not imagining it) silence. It’s almost the lazy day off you were daydreaming about before you got yourself into this mess, and the atmosphere is so relaxed that before you can really decide whether to force the man to go to the hospital or turn him out on the street (or…?) you’re dozing off on your couch like there isn’t a potentially dangerous stranger lying beside you with his head just a few inches from your lap.
When you wake up, your problem is solved for you. He’s gone, and it’s like he was never there—except you’re down a cellphone and a pajama shirt, and your shower curtain is drenched with blood. You wrap it up with the rest of the soiled medical supplies and toss all of it in a dumpster a mile away from your building without knowing exactly why.
///
It’s not the last you see of him, but somehow you had a feeling that was going to be the case.
He scares the shit out of you the first time he visits (over time, that’s how you’ll start to think of his little unannounced drop-ins: visits. Like you’re being visited by a ghost or something). You’re coming back from another grueling shift in the ER, so tired you think you might be sleepwalking, and what do you find when you come in your apartment but a strange white-haired man sitting on your couch eating dry cereal out of the box and flipping through one of your books?
You nearly piss yourself.
He doesn’t seem surprised, which makes sense, considering he’s a villain and he’s probably used to pulling this dramatic entrance thing on people. He certainly doesn’t seem the least bit threatened when you brandish the mini canister of pepper spray on your keychain and demand that he tell you how he got in if he wants to retain the power of eyesight.
“It was unlocked,” he says.
“It was not unlocked,” you reply, rolling your eyes. You may be sleep deprived, but you’re not careless. Never careless.
“Whatever. Calm down. You’re not going to use that on me.”
He’s right, but you don’t want to admit it. If he wanted to do something to hurt you, he could’ve done it that first night. And you’re too tired to really put up a fight, so you just put the cap back on the pepper spray and flop down next to him on the couch. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He looks at you curiously from between his shaggy bangs, like you’re the one intruding in his home and not the other way around, then reaches out to hand something to you. “Here, payback.”
It’s a cell phone—not a smartphone like the one he destroyed, but a flip phone circa the 2000s, the kind that forces you to press “9” four times to get the letter “F”. You stare at it for a second, then look back at the villain. “Are you kidding? Did you get this from a museum?”
“Take it or leave it.” His feet are propped up on your coffee table, but you can’t make yourself care. Actually, it looks nice…him stretched out with an odd look of comfort on his lanky form.
You lean back on the couch and kick up your feet next to his. “Fine. Thanks, I guess.”
He shrugs.
“How are your wounds healing?” Why are you trying to make conversation with this guy? He’s…a villain, right? Not that you’ve ever received affirmative confirmation of that fact, but the hesitance to call the police and the breaking and entering are pretty good tells. But…it might be weird, but since you picked him up that day, you’ve felt a kind of kinship with him.
Alone. Abandoned. No place to go. No one to save him. It’s not a pretty comparison, but you can’t deny it rings true.
Maybe that’s why you pick up strays.
“They’re fine,” he tells you after so long a pause that you’ve almost forgotten your question. “Doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
You take a long look at him, at his posture—he’s relaxed, but his abdomen is crunched a little bit, curled in on himself so subtly that even you wouldn’t have noticed it if you weren’t looking. It’s not your problem. He’s an adult, and you’re sure he could be seeking real medical attention if he really needed it. You’re in no way obligated to perform some kind of checkup on this arrogant dick who literally broke into your apartment to give you a shitty phone and eat your cereal. The sensible thing to do is to tell him to forget that you live here and hopefully never see him again.
His head tips back to rest on the top of the couch, and he holds your book up to read. At this angle his long hair is out of the way of his face, and you notice among the deep-set creases in his skin a pair of wide scars across his right eye and on the corner of his lips. They’re pale and faded—old, then—but they look off to you, and after a while of snatching glances at his face you realize it’s because they’re healed badly, extraordinarily badly, the kind of healing that you don’t see very often because it only occurs when a stubborn patient tries to let a particularly nasty injury heal on its own. The part of you that isn’t sensible wonders how old he was when he got those scars.
Has he learned his lesson?
You doubt it.
“Lie down,” you sigh. “Let me see the cuts.”
Which is how you find yourself examining this annoying villain again, checking on his injuries and giving him recommendations for care like you’re his personal nurse or something. It’s not a role you enjoy playing, but at least he takes it without complaint, and you start to wonder if maybe this is why he broke into your apartment in the first place. If anything, he looks calmer when you’ve flipped up his shirt and prodded at his wounds, his eyes closing slowly and freeing you of that scarlet-red gaze.
He’s like a cat, you think, and then you shake your head and remind yourself that it’s a terrible idea to think of this man—this grown man who is probably a great danger to you and others—as a wild animal you’re trying to domesticate.
When he finally leaves (only after you drop a couple dozen unsubtle hints about how long you’ve been at work and how exhausted you are), you take a moment before you sink into bed to look at the flip phone. It’s no nicer than your original impression, but as you scroll through the screens you notice that it’s factory-new, except for one thing: there’s a contact programmed in, a phone number with an area code you don’t recognize listed under “T”. And you don’t want to be curious…
…but you are. Shocking.
Down the rabbit hole it is, you decide. So you text him.
///
[You: 12:03 AM]
> Hey it’s (Y/N)
> (the girl whose apartment you broke into)
> What does T stand for?
[T: 12:07 AM]
> What do u think
[You: 12:09 AM]
> ??
[T: 12:09 AM]
> My name
> Dont you know who i am
[You: 12:10 AM]
> Are you famous?
[T: 12:10 AM]
> You dont watch the news do u
[You: 12:11 AM]
> Not really
> What’s your name then
[T: 12:12 AM]
> …
> Didnt u say u had to sleep
[You: 12:15 AM]
> Oh yeah
> Whatever I guess
> Good night
[T: 2:34 AM]
> Its Tomura
> Dont look it up
[You: 8:02 AM]
> Ok
> I won’t
> Tomura