Chapter Text
Izuku had always found solace in the internet. It was his first escape–something he discovered young, out of necessity rather than curiosity. At school, he never fit in. He was too quiet, too sensitive, too different. He faced relentless bullying; even when it wasn’t physical, it was still constant in its alienation, and at home, things weren’t much better. His mother, Inko Midoriya, loved him desperately, but she was unstable; her affection was suffocating one moment and absent the next, buried under waves of emotional outbursts and pharmaceutical fog.
Inko was manipulative; she expected Izuku to take care of her, to be her therapist, rather than allowing him to fulfill his proper role as her son. The internet had become his sanctuary, a place where no one yelled, no one hit, and no one looked at him like he was broken. It was there, in that digital anonymity, that the seeds of his strangeness began to take root.
For most of his early years, Izuku was led to believe that his father was working overseas. However, as he entered his teenage years, his mother decided he was mature enough to learn the truth. She revealed that shortly after he was born, his father abandoned the two of them. He hadn’t even wanted Izuku; he had told Inko to get an abortion, or he would leave.
She called his bluff and refused, and he was, in fact, not bluffing.
For a long time after learning the truth, Izuku harbored a deep resentment towards his mother. He often believed that if he had been raised with a father, or at least a male figure, his life would have been dramatically better. Inko took care of him, cooked for him, and cleaned—providing the bare minimum—but she was horrible emotionally. If she simply had a dreadful day at work, she would come home, drink, take her pills, and go to bed, leaving Izuku to fend for himself. During the height of his bullying, both physical and emotional, she never offered him the motherly support he desperately needed. Instead, she would turn the focus onto herself.
“Oh, I’m just such a horrible mother, aren’t I, ‘Zuku?” she would sob, head falling to rest in her palms as tears streamed down her face.
This dynamic warped Izuku’s understanding of relationships and what constituted a healthy bond. Throughout his elementary and middle school years, he endured relentless bullying. Raised without a father, living in a run-down apartment, and with a largely absent mother, he felt isolated. To cope with his tumultuous reality, he developed a fascination with true crime.
It started innocently enough. True crime had become a hot topic, with documentaries, podcasts, and dramatic retellings. Most people could watch a limited series about a grisly case and move on without giving it a second thought. But for Izuku, it didn’t stop there, and that was the problem. While his classmates were obsessed with games or celebrities, he found himself digging through crime scene archives, reading court transcripts in the dark, and listening to taped interviews of people who had committed unspeakable acts while he ate his morning cereal. He memorized their words—not because he admired them, but because, for once, someone was expressing thoughts that resonated with him—honest and raw. It wasn’t just mere curiosity; it was a form of comfort. It was the first time he heard someone speak and felt, deep in his bones, like they had spoken to a part of him that no one else could see.
It wasn’t only the killers that had caught his eye. At first, he had just wanted to disappear into the cocoon he had made for himself. Fictional villains gave him the comfort his mother never did. They were villains, monsters, those who were misunderstood or cruel, or both. He didn’t understand what about them felt so right until he had started following links in comment sections, until he stumbled onto forums that weren’t safe, or sanitized, or moderated.
One led to another, and then another.
It was when he found himself on gore forums that things started to shift. He told himself it was research, a dark curiosity about trauma responses and wound morphology—but that lie rotted fast. He wasn’t there to learn; he was there to feel. He fixated on the way deep incisions parted layers of dermis and subcutaneous fat, how muscle groups spasmed and separated under blunt trauma. He lingered on videos that captured the sounds of cartilage cracking beneath pressure, the sudden splatter of arterial spray when a carotid was breached. He watched with a kind of sacred focus, eyes locked onto ruptured abdominal walls, exposed intestines coiled like steaming ropes, the bloom of hematomas under pale skin. It wasn’t revulsion he felt; it was pure, utter awe. He imagined what those injuries smelled like in person: copper and bile, sweat and oxidized blood. Sometimes he’d close his eyes and try to reconstruct the scenes in his head, right down to the wet suction of the blade sliding between ribs. The grotesque didn’t repel him; it calmed him. It made sense in a way nothing else ever had.
Red became his favorite color, not for what it symbolized, but for how it moved. The way it spilled, and how it shivered over skin before pooling in silence.
There was one video that clung to him in a stronger complexity than the rest. A man lay crumpled on the floor, his trachea partially collapsed, forcing each attempted scream through a slurry of blood and mucus that bubbled up past his teeth. The sound—guttural, wet, and purely animalistic—reverberated in the walls like a drowning heartbeat. His arms spasmed as he tried to lift himself, fingers splaying across the tile slick with his own fluids, nails scraping uselessly against the floor. One leg dragged behind him—broken femur, maybe, judging by the unnatural twist—and his jaw hung loose, trembling. The skin along his chest had been flayed open in strips, exposing glistening pectoral muscle and the pulsing blue veins still clinging to the surface. It was horrifying. It was beautiful, how it exposed fragility—how easily the human body could be reduced to meat, how intimate that unraveling could be. Izuku watched it again and again. Not just for the suffering, but for the art in it—the collapse, the contortions, the unbearable poetry of someone realizing they were about to die, and trying to fight it anyway.
As he entered high school, he began to seek out the worst footage that promised degradation, violation, and unfiltered agony. He needed to know if there was a line that he wouldn’t be willing to cross. Would he ever recoil? Would his stomach turn? Would something inside him scream to stop? He waited—hunted—for it, but that moment never came. Not even when the videos turned intimate, when the violence fused with something unmistakably sexual, it was in one particular forum, tucked behind a fake login wall, hidden behind sham disclaimers and dead links. That was when he found his first gore porn clip. It wasn’t polished or theatrical. It was raw, like a confession—shaky footage filmed in yellow light, where blood and semen pooled together in filthy mattress creases. The subject—a man, mid-thirties, bound and crying—didn’t scream in protest anymore; he only whimpered as a blade cut deeper into the soft fat of his inner thigh. The camera caught everything: the way skin curled away from the steel, the tendons twitching like live wire beneath it, the wet slap of flesh against flesh in between. His groin was smeared with viscera. At one point, the man tried to crawl away, dragging his ruined legs behind him like dead animals, but whoever was behind the camera laughed and pressed a boot into his back. The next cut showed penetration—slow, purposeful—into a wound that bled freely on his hip.
Izuku told himself it was disgusting, that it was performative, fake, and staged. That he wouldn’t watch it again. But he did. Three more times that night alone. Not for the sex, not even for the killing, but for the control . The stillness in the victim’s face once the panic subsided. The submission, the slack jaw, the moment the mind surrendered, even before the body. It wasn’t arousal in the traditional sense; instead, it was something more profound. Something spiritual. A sense that, for one fleeting moment, the chaos of life had been peeled back to reveal pure, unflinching truth. And that truth made Izuku feel more alive than anything ever had.
By the time the fourth viewing ended, his body was trembling—not in fear or revulsion, but something far more obscene. He sat hunched over in the dark, the flicker of his monitor casting pale blue light over sweat-slick skin. His thighs were sticky, his breath was shallow. He hated himself for it, or maybe he didn’t. Perhaps that guilt was just a leftover reflex, something he was supposed to feel but no longer truly did. His arousal wasn’t tied to the bodies themselves, not in the way most would think. It came from the helplessness, the ruin, the way a person could be reduced to flesh and nerves and blood, and still twitch when touched. It was the moment the victim gave up that thrilled him—the final collapse of resistance, the wide-eyed vacancy as someone realized there was no escape. That was the moment he came.
After his pulse slowed, he didn’t reach for tissues or to turn off the screen. Instead, he grabbed a razor blade from the drawer beneath his desk and pressed it beneath the lowest rib on his left side. A small, shallow incision. He watched as the blood began to bead up in perfect silence, then trail downward like it knew the way. He traced it with a fingertip, fascinated by how quickly it turned cold. Sometimes he’d carve just above the hip bone, sometimes into the meat of his thigh—soft, quiet places. Never deep enough to do real harm—just enough to remind him that he was made of the same thing as them . He wanted to feel what they felt. He wanted to be the one on that floor, bleeding out, used and broken. And more than that, he wanted to be the one holding the blade.
The shame came in waves, but he learned to let it pass. He told himself it wasn’t a sickness, but rather honesty. He was only uncovering something that had always been inside him—buried under fear, under shame, under the desperate need to be good. But good people didn’t jerk off to autopsy footage. Good people didn’t dream about fucking wounds. Good people didn’t cry while touching themselves, whispering apologies to imaginary bodies as they cut into their own.
Still, the weight of it lingered in his chest like smoke that wouldn’t clear. After every release, he would sit motionless, the raw sting of the blade still humming beneath his skin, waiting for the nausea to catch up with him. But it never truly did. He wasn’t disturbed by what he’d done—only frustrated that he couldn’t explain it. He’d attempted once when he was younger to find a name for what he was, but everything he found fell short. None of the words fit. He wasn’t just aroused by blood, or pain, or death—it was something else. Something more intricate, more intimate, something that didn’t yet have a name.
It was late at night on a Thursday, and he couldn’t sleep. As he often did in such moments, he decided to scroll endlessly through forums. He browsed until the sun began to peek through his blinds, clicking on the occasional video, watching before becoming bored and clicking off. Until something finally caught his attention. It was a link to some study, created by a woman who interviewed people who were attracted to those who committed heinous acts.
“Hybristophilia, also sensationalized in the media as 'Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome,' refers to a sexual fascination with individuals who commit crimes, particularly severe or notorious acts.”
The words had stared back at him, sterile and clinical—yet they might as well have been written in blood. Something inside him snapped into place, like a dislocated joint finding its socket. “This is me,” he thought, devoid of all guilt. A thrill surged down his spine so violently it made him shiver, like his body finally understood something his mind had been circling for years. He read it again, slowly this time, allowing each syllable to settle into the rawest parts of him. He wasn’t a mistake. He wasn’t broken. There were others—maybe hidden, maybe sick, maybe silent—but others like him. People who looked at the mugshot of a killer and felt their hearts flutter. People who read about bloodied knives and felt a thrum of arousal beneath their skin. People who watched grainy interrogation footage and imagined sitting across from the murderer, fingers laced, thighs trembling, begging to be chosen. He wanted to dive deeper, to strip the layers down to the marrow and become everything everyone feared he already was.
Despite everything, he yearned to make himself seen by others. He taught himself how to code, hoping it would impress his peers, but instead, it backfired spectacularly. Rather than gaining admiration, he became a larger target for harassment. Attempts to share his “killer trivia” online were met with disdain; he was labeled creepy, ignored, or even blocked. No matter where he turned, he seemed to attract name-calling and bullying like a magnet.
Things took a disastrous turn when someone discovered his notebook. Carelessly left tucked beneath the pages of a textbook during lunch, it contained not his worst thoughts, but a compilation of disjointed observations and copied notes about criminal cases. Scrawled diagrams of crime scenes filled its pages, margins bled with questions like “What were they feeling when they did it? Was it about control, or love?” But that didn’t matter; by the end of the school day, half the class had seen it.
They passed it around like a party trick, laughter mingling with whispers and curious stares.
“That’s some serial killer shit,” someone scoffed.
“He’s fucking obsessed, look at this!” another chimed in.
“Bet he’s one of those freaks who’d fall in love with a mass murderer and try to be their pen pal,” a third added, eliciting more laughter.
Curled tightly on the cold, hard floor, he pulled his knees close to his chest, seeking solace in the embrace of his arms. Each breath came in shaky gasps, a storm of panic swelling inside him, as shadows of despair closed in. The realization hit him like a punch to the gut: he was more alone than he had ever felt, ensnared in a world that not only failed to understand him but reveled in the cruelty of mocking the very thoughts that gave him a sense of existence.
It spread quickly after that. People avoided him even more in the hallways, and teachers watched him differently. His desk became its own little island–no one dared to sit near him unless they had to. He stopped bringing his notebooks to school, but the damage had been done. The word freak clung to him like a second skin.
At first, he told himself they didn’t understand. That was his excuse– misunderstood. But eventually, he started to wonder if they were right. What was he supposed to say? That those pages mean something to him? That he didn't write them for shock value or to be edgy, but because it was the only time he ever felt like he was being honest?
He’d never been able to talk to people, not really. They either spoke over him or looked through him. But the people in those case files–the killers, the outcasts, the ones everyone called monsters–they didn’t lie about what they were. They didn’t pretend to be good. They understood isolation. They’d lived it, breathed it, and molded it into something they could control.
Society had no place for people like them, or like him.
And deep down, he began to think: maybe the reason they made sense was because they were the only ones he was ever meant to understand.
He eventually learned to stay quiet, to keep to himself, and pretend as though he didn’t exist. If he “forgot” he lived, then so would everyone else.
Throughout it all, he fixated on many different criminals, multitudes of crimes ranging from arson, all the way to mass murder. He kept notebooks on each person, and they would be filled to the brim with information: patterns, names, appearances, personalities, anything Izuku could learn about them. Eventually, he would lose track of them, it seeming as though they fell off the face of the earth—existence wiped clean from the internet, the only remnants of them that were left behind being Izuku’s notebooks.
Izuku had continued his life as usual, quiet and unassuming, just another face in a crowded city. But beneath the surface, nothing was normal. He kept searching, always searching, for someone new to fixate on—another criminal, another name, another mind to study.
He didn’t do it for entertainment. It hadn’t been curiosity in years. By now, it was something close to a ritual; it was a need. It gave him something the rest of his life didn’t: focus. Purpose. When he was unraveling someone else's darkness, the chaos inside him went quiet, and for a little while, he could breathe.
It was more than escapism; it was survival. Izuku needed someone to watch, to understand, to fall into, not out of pity or admiration, but because their brokenness mirrored his own. Their violence was something that felt familiar. Their isolation echoed his.
Every new fixation became a lifeline. He could go days without eating properly, hours without speaking to anyone, but if he had someone to follow, to understand, then it all felt justified. Like he wasn’t just wasting away in anonymity. Then he was studying, preparing. Belonging to something, even if that something was monstrous.
And deep down, maybe that was the real reason. Because obsession, for Izuku, was the closest thing he’d ever known to love. In those moments spent lingering in the shadows, as he pieced together the fractured lives of others, he felt an ephemeral connection–an understanding that eluded him in his existence. The flicker of a light never meant to be seen, a spark of recognition that reminded him he was not alone in his darkness.
With each fixation, he developed a meticulous ritual, a roadmap of their actions, tracing them like a detective weaving through a complex web of deceit and pain. He scribbled notes in tattered notebooks, mapping not just their choices but the echoes of their suffering, the moments that had led them to the brink. This obsessive dance was not about moral judgment; it was a desperate search for clarity amidst his chaotic thoughts.
As days turned to weeks, the line between infatuation and obsession blurred, each twisted path drawing him deeper into the labyrinth of the human psyche. Something was intoxicating about it—something that whispered at the edges of his mind, promising understanding if only he followed it far enough. The world outside faded away; it became mere background noise to the stories he believed he was meant to uncover.
And that’s when he found himself stepping into the familiar sanctuary of the morgue. The sterile atmosphere enveloped him like an embrace, wrapping him in a shroud of stillness where time seemed to lose its meaning. The morgue was always too quiet in the mornings, a low hum reverberating like unseen breath lurking beneath the sterile surface. Izuku found comfort in that stillness. The soft echo of his boots against the cold linoleum, the flickering hiss of fluorescent lights overhead, and the muted thrum of refrigeration units enveloped the space like a haunting lullaby. He no longer craved the clamor of life—the relentless rush of city streets, the raucous laughter of coworkers at vending machines, the polite exchanges about dinner plans, or the fickle weather. None of it grounded him like the chilling embrace of the dead.
Each drawer he opened, each waxen visage revealed, was more than a mere case number or a timestamp of death. They were enigmas—cryptic stories etched in pallid skin, buried under bruises, hidden behind stiff jaws, and beneath discolored fingernails. Izuku had always approached his work with a meticulous nature, but over the years, it had morphed into something deeper, an unsettling fascination. It wasn’t just the analytical process of uncovering cause and method; it was the unvarnished intimacy of the dead. In their stillness, they offered truths, their silence unburdened by pretense. There were no evasions, no flinches—only the cold finality of existence, which he gently unraveled with his gloved hands and a reverence that hovered like a lingering specter.
After four years in the morgue, the scent had become all too familiar—an acrid cocktail of sweet rot and disinfectant, a metallic tang of blood intermingled with the chemical bite of formalin. The odor clung to him long after he showered, saturating his clothes and skin like a second identity. Few dared to linger near him; even Shinso Hitoshi, who prowled the graveyard shift, exchanged only a handful of dry jokes and the occasional shared cigarette when their shifts overlapped. But Izuku welcomed the distance. He inhabited a quieter realm, a sanctuary woven with the secrets of the dead. The living demanded too much, spoke too loudly, loved too messily. Compared to them, the dead were hauntingly clear, their silence echoing with stories he was compelled to unveil.
It was the third body this month that made something stir deep within him. Not in a professional sense; that part remained clinical and detached. He cataloged the cause of death, noted the consistent trauma patterns, and registered the unmistakable signs of pre-mortem torture masked with surgical precision. But beneath the overhead lights and his steady hands, a different sensation began to uncoil in his chest. Each body was unique—different builds, distinct features—but the handiwork was hauntingly familiar. He recognized the patterns first; the police were still drawing blanks. An exact angle of incision near the clavicle, the deliberate nick of the carotid allowing for a slow and agonizing bleed. It was meticulously intimate—a signature not of pride, but of pure obsession.
Izuku hated the part of himself that marveled at the precision—that cataloged not just the injuries, but the artistry. It wasn’t professional, nor was it normal. But it was honest.
He shouldn’t have felt a thrill; he knew that. This was murder. Serial murder—three victims in three weeks, each one arriving with that same sickly sweet scent of iron mingled with cigarette smoke, each marked with a violence that felt almost artistic in its precision. Yet as he pulled back the sheet on the third body, a thrill coursed through him that ran deeper than mere professional curiosity. His fingers hovered just above the wound, a slight tremor betraying something he dared not name. Whoever had committed this act was trying to convey a message, and Izuku was desperate to decode it.
The media had picked up the story. A catchy name would soon adorn the headlines—something sensational, something that would feed the public’s insatiable appetite. But to Izuku, he was already someone, not a phantom or a faceless monster. He hadn’t seen his expression or heard his voice, yet he felt a particular closeness to him. In the precision of a cut, in the perfect way the skin was left exposed, he could almost envision the killer’s breath, imagining his hands at work. He found himself thinking of him as “Kacchan,” a childish name he couldn’t quite place.
In his childhood, there was one boy in particular who always found him—loud, cruel, and strangely unforgettable. Izuku never spoke his name anymore, but the echo of it still stung. It didn’t make sense, not really. It was a name from long ago, blurred by memory, once tied to a boy with clenched fists and a voice sharp enough to flay skin. Izuku hadn’t thought of him in years, not since the bruises faded and the fear calcified into fascination. The boy's real name was lost behind the wall his trauma had built. But something about the killer’s work stirred those same feelings: the meticulous cruelty, the control, the way it made his stomach twist with dread. “Kacchan” wasn’t a name. It was a feeling. One that he hadn’t outgrown.
The headlines screamed of a killer on the loose. Still, the authorities had no bodies to tether the hysteria to—only rumors, missing persons, and a vague pattern that never quite solidified. Families searched, begged, and pleaded, but without corpses, there were no real investigations—only theories stacked like dry tinder. Officially, nothing connected the disappearances; they were shuffled into categories of drug overdoses, suicides, or tragic accidents. The police were chasing specters, their hands tied by paperwork that told them nothing was amiss. When the bodies did turn up, they arrived cloaked in lies—deaths listed as natural, or accident, with no autopsy to betray the truth. To the system, they weren't victims—they were merely paperwork to be filed.
But Izuku knew better. The victims did appear, just not to them. They arrived at the morgue with crisp documentation, signed by shaky hands, and cheap notaries listing the causes of death that didn’t match what lay beneath the skin. Some were labeled as natural causes, others as self-inflicted wounds, but all bore the same tell-tale signs: bruises that told stories, incisions that defied logic, and silence from anyone who might’ve cared. The death certificates were expertly forged, just convincing enough to slip through the cracks, and by the time anyone noticed the inconsistencies, the cremation paperwork had already been filed.
Izuku found himself lingering longer after his shifts, trapped in a cycle of endless paperwork. Filing and re-filing the same reports, he hovered near the cold drawers, lost in thought as he studied the old wounds etched in his memory. He began to sketch the incision patterns in the margins of his notes, tracing them over and over until the paper grew fragile and thin. It was more than a mere fascination; it was admiration. The killer was meticulous, deliberate, and unnervingly controlled. There was no chaos in these murders, no frantic disarray—just a chilling, quiet intent. And God, that did something to him.
He kept his thoughts to himself, of course—never confiding in Hitoshi or the reclusive coroner Tokoyami Fumikage, who always seemed to avoid his gaze. Not even in Toga Himiko, with her eerie, gleaming smile that lingered far too long to be comfortable in the embalming room. They wouldn’t understand. How could they? This wasn’t about violence; it was about the twisted artistry behind it. Someone out there was orchestrating these deaths with the precision of a maestro, and Izuku craved to be the sole audience, the only one who truly comprehended the haunting symphony at play.
As the nights unfurled, stretching longer and more isolating, he found himself quietly, shamefully wishing for another body to arrive—another message, another opportunity to feel the connection to this enigmatic figure. To understand him.
On a dreary Tuesday morning, the fourth body arrived, draped beneath a black vinyl sheet. An ID dangled limply from one pale toe, swaying like a weak apology. The city had slicked under the weight of the rain the night before, droplets clinging to the surface of the body bag, glistening like ominous tears. Izuku met the gurney in the freight elevator, a clipboard held tightly against his chest, his damp hair curling around his temples. His heart lurched as his eyes scanned the transport form, tightening upon reading the listed injuries—thoracic trauma, partial evisceration, exsanguination. Despite it all, the cause of death was listed as a simple cardiac arrest. He swallowed hard, his throat dry and tight, fingers gripping the clipboard just a bit too fiercely. Each detail drew him deeper into the abyss, a dance with the darkness that surrounded him.
“Another one?” Hitoshi’s voice drifted from the hallway, his tone slow and smoky, like the air after a fire.
Izuku didn’t look up right away. He remained focused on the body bag, his heart racing as if it might vanish if he blinked. “Yeah,” he finally murmured, his voice low in tone. “Same MO. He’s getting bolder.”
Hitoshi stepped into the room, rubbing the back of his neck. His wrinkled uniform carried a faint scent of menthol, and the shadows under his eyes seemed to be more prominent than usual. “Or maybe he’s just getting better at hiding his tracks,” he said, his tone deceptively casual given the grisly subject at hand. “The city’s crawling with freaks, but this one... he’s got rhythm.”
The word hung in the air, settling in Izuku’s chest like a heavyweight. Rhythm. Yes, that’s what it was. Each victim felt like a note in a haunting melody, a beat in a song that only he seemed attuned to. Izuku finally understood that someone—Kacchan—was the one orchestrating this, not only with violence but with cunning. He wasn’t just killing; he was erasing and ensuring that nobody would ever find the remains. And Izuku, whether he admitted it aloud or not, had become the final stop in that chain.
Nodding absently, he started wheeling the gurney toward the intake room, ignoring the way Hitoshi’s gaze lingered on him a moment longer than necessary.
Inside the examination chamber, the overhead lights buzzed softly as they warmed up, casting pale yellow halos on the sterile tile. Izuku rolled the body onto the steel slab, his movements quiet and practiced. His fingers traced the zipper with an unexpected tenderness, as if afraid to disturb a restless spirit. Slowly, he peeled the bag open, revealing the man—late twenties, lean—gazing vacantly at the ceiling, his mouth slightly open to reveal bloodied teeth. A deep incision marred the skin beneath his ribs, the edges unnaturally smooth. After admiring for a moment, Izuku quickly grabbed a cloth and placed it over the man’s face, spraying it with disinfectant to prevent any airborne pathogens from escaping.
Leaning closer, Izuku breathed in slow, measured rhythms, his fingertips hovering just above the gash. “You took your time with this one,” he whispered, his words laced with a grim fondness. As he adjusted the man’s arm, tightening the focus on the ligature marks on the wrist—thin, parallel lines—he made a mental note.
“You held him down first. Waited. Watched. Listened.”
A sharp, sing-song voice broke through the tension. “Midoriya!” Izuku looked up to see Himiko leaning against the doorframe, her hands tucked playfully into her lab coat pockets. A mischievous grin curled her lips, her eyes sparkling with twisted delight. “You’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes! Writing poetry to the dead again?”
He offered her a thin smile, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Just being thorough,” he replied, feigning nonchalance.
Himiko stepped closer, her gaze flicking to the body, her joy tempered by curiosity. “They say this guy was a salaryman. No record, no vices. Just stepped out of his apartment one night and.. poof! Gone.” Crouching beside the gurney, her chin propped up on her knuckles, she leaned in, her demeanor playful yet tinged with darkness. “Do you think it’s the same guy?
Without hesitation, Izuku replied, a bit too quickly, “I know it is.”
She looked at him, one eyebrow arched. “Sounds like you’re rooting for him.”
He turned back to the body, swallowing the flush rising in his cheeks. “I’m not. I just… want to understand him.”
Himiko’s eyes sparkled with something unreadable. “You always want to understand the monsters. You think if you crack them open the right way, they’ll tell you a secret.”
Izuku didn’t answer. Instead, he removed his gloves before reaching to grab a fresh pair. The morgue’s air grew denser as he snapped the latex into place with an absent-minded precision born of ritual. This one wouldn’t be embalmed—the paperwork made that clear. The family had opted for direct cremation, no viewing, no ceremony, no delay. That meant a different sort of preparation: less decorative, more practical. Still, Izuku approached it with the same methodical care he reserved for all bodies, honoring a silent pact with the dead. They had given him their last stories; the least he could do was ensure they left the world clean.
No autopsy had been ordered—according to the forged documents, there was nothing suspicious to find. Just another tragic case swept under the rug, destined for ash.
So, he began by undressing the body, carefully snipping away the remnants of bloodied clothing with stainless steel shears. Each slice through fabric released a faint, coppery tang, mixing with the scent of alcohol wipes and antiseptic spray. His gloved hand moved with ease, folding each piece and placing it into a biohazard disposal bin. He grabbed a modesty cloth and placed it over the cadaver's bottom half. The body was lean, limbs stiffening now with the onset of rigor mortis, but Izuku worked around it, gently rotating the wrists, easing tension from the joints so the form would lie appropriately on the prep table. With each movement, he kept his eyes sharp and his breath shallow.
Using a clean cloth soaked in a disinfectant solution—one part phenol, two parts isopropyl alcohol—he began wiping down the body, starting at the shoulders and working his way down in long, careful strokes. He cleaned thoroughly, mindful of fluid leakage or lingering traces of decomposition. Though this man hadn’t been dead long, Izuku checked every orifice with professional detachment, ensuring there was no purge fluid, no blockages, nothing that might disrupt the burning process. He gently rolled the body to one side, inspecting the back, and wiped down the skin again, noting faint signs of post-mortem lividity near the hips. The purple-blue marbling of blood settling was soft, blooming like ink beneath the skin. He paused for a moment, fingers pressing lightly over one patch, then moved on.
Himiko had already vanished by the time he lifted his gaze, and that was perfectly fine with him. He relished the solitude that enveloped him in that quiet space, where the weight of the past lingered in the air. Surrounded by the lifeless forms, he found comfort in their unyielding honesty. Each injury etched into their skin narrated a haunting tale, revealing the struggles and stories of the lives they once lived. With every scar and bruise, he pieced together fragments of the man who had been, each body offering him precious insights into a narrative long forgotten.
The next step was placement into the cremation container. Izuku slid the transfer sheet beneath the cadaver, bracing his legs and slowly shifting the body’s weight with care. There was something intimate about this part—an awareness of how vulnerable the dead were. No matter how violent their end, this stage always felt the most human. With a heave and a slight grunt, he settled the form into the simple cardboard box, the bottom lined with an absorbent pad to catch any remaining fluids. The container was unadorned, marked with only a printed tag tied securely around the man's wrist and mirrored in the digital registry.
Before closing the lid, Izuku took one last look. The face was calm now, eyes closed, mouth gently set. He didn’t need to sew it shut—cremation skipped such cosmetic steps—but still, he adjusted the jaw slightly so it rested naturally. No one would see him again, but something in Izuku needed the final pose to feel respectful. He pulled the lid down and sealed it with packing tape in a tight crosshatch, then applied the cremation authorization documents to the exterior. They fluttered slightly as the overhead vent clicked on, the mechanical hum of the furnace already preparing for its next task.
He wheeled the container toward the chamber, pausing outside the heavy metal door of the retort. The crematory unit loomed like a waiting mouth—steel gray, silent, and ancient. Opening the hatch, Izuku checked the internal temperature. Eight hundred fifty degrees Celsius and rising. Standard for a full adult body, and efficient enough to complete incineration within two hours. As the final step, he verified all identifying paperwork once more, comparing wristband, box label, toe tag, and cremation form before logging the entry into the burn registry. The system beeped softly in confirmation.
With a muted breath, Izuku raised the casket lift and positioned the cardboard casket on the loading table. He pushed the button on the cremator and watched as the door opened. The mechanical whirring of the machinery filled the room as the casket slid into the retort. The door closed with a final click, followed by a hiss of pressurization. Orange lighting enveloped the room as the box burst into flames immediately. The burner flared to life behind the thick insulation, a low roar flooding the room. He stood for a moment longer, eyes fixed on the sealed chamber. Not with grief or mourning, but with a strange, solemn ache—something unnameable that throbbed behind his ribs.
Later, in the flickering quiet of the records room, Izuku spread his autopsy reports across the metal desk. He laid them out side by side—the bruises, the incisions, angles of entry. They all lined up like a map, each one pointing to something just out of reach. His eyes moved over the patterns with surgical focus, green irises gleaming beneath the cold white light. He ran his finger along the edge of the latest photo, tracing the cut like a lover’s cheek.
The door softly creaked open behind him, and without needing to turn around, Izuku knew it was Himiko again. Her footsteps were light and playful, almost as if she delighted in breaking the stillness that had settled in the room. She sidled back in as if she had never left, her presence swirling through the air like tendrils of smoke. “Still here, huh?” she teased, her voice dripping with mock sweetness. “Waiting for someone to bring you flowers? You should know better than to waste your time on that!” A mischievous grin spread across her face, making it clear she savored every moment of his discomfort.
Izuku kept his gaze fixed on the cremation registry, the final digits of the entry flickering slowly into place. He didn’t respond; instead, he moved with the slow, mechanical precision of someone whose hands had become accustomed to the somber ritual. The cool, sterile air of the morgue wrapped around him, heavy with the scent of antiseptics and loss. Himiko drifted closer, her presence a stark contrast to the grim surroundings. The hem of her off-white coat brushed against his side, and he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, juxtaposed against the chilling atmosphere. Her striking, yellow, cat-like eyes locked onto his face, gleaming with an unsettling curiosity.
“If I killed someone like that,” she said, her tone deceptively soft yet laced with an underlying sharpness, “would you look at me the way you look when you’re thinking about him?”
Her question sliced through the stillness, striking deeper than she probably intended—or perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing. Izuku’s spine went rigid, the air around them thickening, as if the very walls of the morgue were closing in. For a moment, he was no longer standing in that sterile room surrounded by echoes of the dead; he was twelve again, crouched behind the grimy, graffiti-laden dumpsters of the school gymnasium. The damp asphalt beneath his knees was slick from earlier rain, a bitter scent of wet earth and rotting refuse filling his nostrils. He could feel the cold bite of fear clawing at his chest as a pair of older boys loomed over him, fists balled tight, their sneers sharpening their cruel faces into masks of malice. His backpack lay discarded on the ground, a forgotten burden. While one of the boys ground a sneaker into his shoulder blade, pinning him down like a wounded animal, vulnerable and exposed.
“Fucking freak.”
“Why don’t you lie down with the corpses already?”
“Bet you’d like that, you sick little pervert.”
He hadn’t screamed, not that time. Instead, he found himself transfixed by the puddle forming near the drain, contemplating how long it would take for the water to carry him away if he just melted into it. Would he simply cease to exist?
The low hiss of the crematory door locking back into place grounded him back into reality. The final click echoed through the room, and the hum of the burner resumed behind the heavy metal. Izuku blinked, the fluorescent lights buzzing softly above him. He straightened his shoulders, trying to dispel the tension from his wrists. “You wouldn’t kill like this,” he said, his voice steady and measured. “You’d be loud. He’s not loud. He’s… patient.”
Himiko laughed, a crooked grin spreading across her face. “Oh, come on! You make me sound like some kind of amateur.” She stepped back, her fingers dancing along the counter, tapping a rhythm of her own. “But fine—he’s your little ghost-boy, not mine. Just saying, you’re a bit obsessed. That look in your eyes? Not normal.”
He ignored her taunting, focusing instead on aligning the cremation label, though it was already perfectly straight. Her voice clung to the air, sweetly chaotic. “You’re in love with a ghost,” she teased, the words light but heavy in his chest. “It’s cute, in a pathetic kind of way!”
“I’m not in love,” Izuku muttered under his breath. His thumb smoothed down a curling corner of the printout as if that could hold back the weight of her words. “I just want to understand him. I want to see what he sees, what he feels when… when he does it —when he opens someone up.” He paused, wrestling with his emotions. “I want to know if he’s like me.”
For a fleeting moment, silence enveloped her, the playful facade slipping. Then she laughed, a soft sound that felt both affectionate and unnerving. “Careful, Izuku,” she sang, her tone teasing and sharp. “Keep peeling yourself open like that, and one day, you’ll look inside and find nothing left.” Her coat flared out as she spun on her heel, footsteps echoing as she gracefully exited the room. “But hey, I’ll be right here when that happens. Can’t wait!”
The door clicked softly behind her, and the morgue surrendered once more to its oppressive silence. Izuku found himself alone again, the distant roar of the retort a low, unsettling whisper through the vents. This silence no longer offered solace; it clawed at him, a disquieting itch beneath his skin. He sank slowly into the cold metal desk, spreading the autopsy reports before him once more like a nervous offering, his gaze heavy and unyielding. The photographs lay side by side, fragments of a gruesome puzzle, each bruise echoing the last, each incision a note in a dissonant melody he was beginning to grasp, even as he shivered at its implications.
He lingered at the desk long after the paperwork was filed, fingers hovering over the photos as if they might reveal their secrets if he waited just a bit longer. The overhead light cast a pallid yellow glow, pooling like sickly sanctity around the laminated images. No one had asked him to take these pictures—no one even knew he had taken them. The fourth body still bore warmth when he stealthily recorded his observations, the pulse of life lingering just a heartbeat longer.
Technically, his job ended with preparation: cleanse the body, disinfect, dress, or contain. For cremations, there was even less—no cosmetics, no embalming, no final goodbyes. Just a series of mechanical steps: strip, cleanse, seal. Families wouldn’t come to witness the dead facing the flames; nobody would observe his clandestine work. And that small, dim loophole became the narrow window through which his obsession gestated, blossoming into something grotesque in its secrecy.
When it came time to choose a path, Izuku didn’t think about ambition or legacy—he thought about access. Forensic pathology felt like the natural progression of his obsessions, a socially acceptable disguise for his compulsions. It allowed him to be close to the aftermath to touch what others would only read about. He had studied, earned his degree, graduated at the top of his class, and even undergone two internships at university morgues where seasoned coroners guided him through the tangled web of real cases. Yet, when the job market turned frigid and inhospitable, Izuku found himself in the funeral industry instead—practical, stable, and hauntingly silent. But his hands, restless and yearning, craved more than mere cosmetics and wilted flowers. They sought answers, aching to unearth the truth lying beneath layers of decay.
So he began conducting his own examinations, only on the bodies destined for direct cremation—never emblamed, never viewed, merely hastened along from life to flame. He approached his task with the precision of a surgeon, meticulous and professional, never damaging what he couldn’t mend. By the time the lifeless husk was surrendered to the furnace, all traces of his forbidden curiosity were reduced to ash. The paperwork would read “external inspection only,” a simple lie. But Izuku understood, deep in the recesses of his mind, that he was the solitary keeper of the shadows that lurked beneath the silence, the only soul who knew what secrets the dead honestly held.
He pulled one of his private files from beneath the desk—a thin, maila folder hidden away behind the dust-laden grief counseling brochures that nobody ever bothered to take. Inside was a collection of truths that the official reports failed to convey: photographs capturing the lifeless faces, sketches rendered in dark, chaotic strokes, and his frantic notations scrawled in a fine, looping script. Each victim was assigned a section, marked by date and tagged with a number corresponding to the order in which they arrived. The most recent—Number Four—had sprawled across the most pages. That body had spoken the clearest.
In this corpse, he noted a disquieting shift in the placement of the wounds. Subtle, nearly imperceptible. But Izuku had become intimately acquainted with the patterns of the others—he had traced each incision obsessively, more times than he could bear to remember. The first three bore a uniformity, each incision sharp and cold across the clavicle. But this one—this one curved downward, sank deeper, and culminated in a small, sinister hook. Not a mistake. No, that was a calculated mark, an interrogation etched into flesh. To Izuku, it felt like a question, like a deliberate shape meant to be observed.
Maybe it wasn’t just a flourish. Perhaps it was a message. Izuku had sat with the thought, hands trembling over the sketch like it might burn through the page. What if this wasn’t meant to confuse, but to invite? A test, a challenge, a call for something more. The hook wasn’t a mistake—it was a prompt.
He reached for his sketchpad, the one he kept locked away behind the breakroom cleaning supplies, where the scent of bleach hung heavy in the air. His pencil moved with delicate care, outlining the wound as he remembered it—every centimeter, every hesitation of the blade. When he finished, he stared down at it, his breathing shallow. There it was again—that eerie curve. It was like a finger beckoning him closer, an invitation whispered only to him, as if unveiling secrets of a sordid truth that had waited patiently in the silence.
Beneath the drawing, he inscribed one word in small, measured script.
“Hello.”
The morgue felt heavier after that. Not colder—just denser, as if the air had thickened around him. The hum of the refrigeration unit was muted, swallowed by the beating hush of his pulse. He folded the paper with care, tucking it back into the folder and pressing it flat. He had been noticed—acknowledged—and now the conversation had started.
He lingered there for what felt like an eternity, breathing in the dim stillness, his hand resting over the closed folder as if he could summon the warmth of the body through the paper. His thoughts spiraled, each one tightening like flesh stitched too hastily over bone. He needed to revisit the wound. The photographs alone would not suffice. Next time, he would dissect the fascia with more care, tracing the blade’s path with his scalpel to map every shift in pressure. If the incision curved, it meant that something had changed.
The door creaked open behind him once more, a sudden rush of light flooding the room as all-too-familiar footsteps approached, carefree and unhurried. Himiko’s voice danced through the air, laced with playful suspicion, and a wave of irritation washed over Izuku, causing his shoulders to tense. He had nothing against her personally, but the constant interruptions in his workspace were beginning to wear on him.
“Still haunting the fridge, Izuku?” she teased, leaning casually against the wall with her arms folded beneath her lab coat, a coffee stirrer chewed absently between her lips. Her playful banter always seemed to lighten the atmosphere, yet today it felt more like a disturbance. “You missed the breakroom again. Fumikage brought those weird sugar-free donuts. I thought you liked those,” she added with a casual shrug, her words pricking at the corners of his annoyance and drawing him reluctantly back into the present.
Izuku didn’t turn as he carefully slid the manila folder back behind the brochures, wiping his hands on a clean towel. “I was just finishing up some documentation,” he said quietly, clearing his throat. “Didn’t realize how late it was.”
“That’s interesting,” Himiko replied, her gaze locked on him. “You’ve been saying that a lot lately.” She stepped closer, eyeing the now-pristine table where the last cremation forms sat in perfect alignment. “Didn’t realize the time. Didn’t hear anyone. Didn’t see anything.” Her voice dipped, playful yet sharp. “What are you really doing in here all day?”
“Just paying attention to the details,” Izuku retorted quickly, a hint of defensiveness in his tone.
Himiko grinned, her tongue flicking against her canine. “Right, details. You get a bit fuzzy when you talk about them. The dead, I mean.” She walked over to the refrigeration drawers, tapping one lightly with her wine colored nails. “I don’t mind it, you know. It’s kind of cute—like watching a puppy bury its favorite toy over and over.”
“We’ve discussed this, Himiko. I just like to be thorough,” he replied, steadying his voice.
Before she could respond, the hallway lights dimmed slightly as another figure entered the room. Fumikage stepped into view, his lab coat buttoned up to his neck, gloved hands tucked behind his back like a solemn procession. His eyes flicked between the two of them, unreadable as ever.
“Midoriya,” he finally spoke in his gravelly, measured tone. “I reviewed the reports on the fourth subject. You marked thoracic trauma as primary, yet you didn’t mention the subcutaneous deviation around the mesogastrium.” He paused, the silence stretching. “Was that an oversight?”
Izuku’s stomach clenched—not from fear, but from something more complex: pride. He had noticed the deviation, and even Fumikage acknowledged it clinically, which validated what Izuku had already suspected. “I noted it in my personal records,” he replied, maintaining his composure. “It didn’t seem relevant to the cremation log.”
Fumikage regarded him for a moment too long. “That isn’t protocol,” he said, his voice firm. “Any abnormality, regardless of its relevance, should be recorded.” His gaze sharpened slightly. “Have you been performing additional examinations?”
The room felt charged with tension. Himiko tilted her head slowly, her smile fading as something more serious crept into her expression. Izuku didn’t blink; he swallowed hard, then replied in an even tone, “Only what’s necessary. Sometimes, cremation cases arrive with undocumented trauma. I can’t verify everything without a closer inspection.”
There was silence. Fumikage nodded once, though his eyes remained fixed. “If your inspections exceed mortuary protocol, I’ll need to be informed,” he said. “Even for direct disposals.”
“Of course,” Izuku replied, voice smooth now. “I’ll update the files before the end of the shift.”
They left soon after—Himiko smirking as she walked backward out of the room, and Fumikage retreating into the paper-pale hallway like a shadow sinking beneath a door. The second the door clicked shut, Izuku exhaled, one long, fraying breath. He pressed his palm flat against the cabinet, steadying himself.
He wasn’t worried about being caught—at least, not really. What he had done was vital, even sacred. The official reports painted a shallow picture, glossing over the deeper truth that pulsed beneath the surface like fragile veins. This wasn’t just for him; these bodies were not mere statistics. They were messages, embodying a ritual that unfolded specifically for him, each step marked like pages turning in a grim book written in blood.
The room fell silent after their departure, as if something essential had been scraped away. Izuku stood still, his hand pressed against the cabinet, his thoughts tightening in on themselves. He could feel the weight of their gazes. They were watching him now—Fumikage’s lingering look had made that clear—but it didn’t matter. He should have been afraid of termination, of exposure, of the slow unraveling that would follow if anyone truly understood what he’d done. But fear had stopped mattering once the silence returned. The thought of losing access haunted him more than any consequence.
He returned to the desk, unfolding the sketch once more, his eyes tracing the arc of the incision. The wound still hummed under his fingertips, vibrating with significance. Kacchan was deliberately leaving clues meant to be seen. The thought surged like fire in his veins: he knows someone’s watching him. Perhaps he even wanted to be watched. Maybe he was waiting for Izuku to respond.
After a fifth body arrived, the morgue fell quiet. Days passed, then a week, with no sign of another delivery. The paperwork still came through—dozens of deaths, cremations scheduled and filed with mechanical operation—but none bore his signature. No bruises in the right places, no cuts curved just so. It was as if the killer had vanished, or worse, begun hiding the bodies in a way Izuku couldn’t trace. The silence was suffocating. Had he gone underground? Or had he realized someone was watching—had he realized Izuku was watching? That thought haunted him most of all. The fourth body had left behind a question, a hook drawn in flesh, and now there were no answers, no replies. Izuku scoured the logs obsessively, fingers trembling over intake reports that led nowhere. It was unbearable, this pause. He didn’t need another body because he enjoyed the violence—he needed one because the silence was beginning to scream.