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“Damn, this was easier than expected…” you mutter as you finally enter the innermost room of the vault complex. The pitch black doesn’t bother you. You are the pitch black.
There’s less than expected. A few crates made of roughly sanded wood planks and a safe in the middle. No cameras in here. It’s of no surprise. No one in their right mind would think that anyone can get through defences this tight. Truly, the bottom level of Tartaros is the backdoor of a McDonald’s compared to this.
The safe is smaller than you expected. But you know that things do not have to be big to be valuable. You concern yourself with it later and head for the crates. They are hammered shut but no nail driven deep enough can keep you out. You reach for it and near lovingly caress the splintering wood. It looks old. It feels old. The almost inch-thick layer of dust on top suggests that it has not been tampered with for a while.
You push against the material slightly. Your fingers squish, liquifying into thin vines of vantablack shadow. They spread across the surface as squiggly lines until they find a crack. That is all you need. Soon you’re pulling out a thin, crinkly piece of paper that is sadly not yen.
It’s an envelope. You turn it over curiously, pulling out the contents. It’s an official-looking document, yellowed from age, faded and crumpled from handling. Even with your sight, it’s hard to read what it says but you squint and make out a few sentences detailing— a birth certificate? Not like it’s unusual to keep such things in a vault but this is—
Two centuries old.
You try to make out the name. It is Japanese for sure but… Is it Misashi? Maybe Hisashi?
There are more, all with the same last name but the family name and DOB vary. Then you pull out one with a different last name. It belongs to someone named ‘Yoichi’, two hundred years dead. Same family name as the oldest papers. There is also the only death certificate with their name on it. They didn’t even hit thirty.
You hum with interest but decide to move on to the real price. You can’t blackmail anyone with a two-hundred-year-old birth certificate after all.
The safe is sturdy. Real sturdy. But as established, you need but a gap. And there is no safe without a gap. Everything has a gap. Rooms, vaults, prisons and even the law. You would know, you escaped all four.
You kneel in front of the contraption, checking carefully before touching any part of it. One can come across some nasty security systems in this day and age. But it seems that this, just like the crates, is from another, simpler time.
In many regards, you don’t even know how right that statement is.
You carefully trail the edges of the vault, feeling the bumps and inconsistencies of the pig iron. It’s rough, rusted and robust. There. You feel it, that minuscule space of darkness, a space just wide enough for the tip of your finger or your entire being.
You reach and reach, hand solidifying on the other side and palpating the inner mechanisms, looking for a lever or a gear you could start to temper with to open the thing. It’s old and (relatively) high tech but it clearly wasn’t made with tricky quirks like yours in mind.
And then— click.
The safe opens with a heavy, metallic groan. Even the sound comes off as aged. Almost pained. You shudder for some reason. It might not have had anything to do with the sound.
You pull the door all the way open, noting that even pulling the handle requires considerable upper body strength. You squint again to cut through the darker-than-dark darkness of the inside and are devastated to find there isn’t much hidden in it. Jack shit, if you want to be completely honest. No diamonds, no hero-grade support items, not even a stack of yen.
But there is a small box.
You hesitate but for a moment before taking it and examining closer. It’s small, rectangular and fits neatly in your palm. A jewellery box, an old-fashioned one. Your mood picks up. Jewellery. Old jewellery. Now THAT is worth something. You know you are not to take anything besides money— but a peek’s not gonna hurt anyone, right?
You shake the top and bottom half separate and pick up the item inside, nested on juniper green velvet. It’s a pendant, intricately made but only silver by the looks of it. Maybe platinum if you’re lucky. The chain is plain and thick, made to survive wear and tear that a necklace owned only for vanity’s sake would not. It has been worn too. A few links are crooked, damaged and even melted.
You turn your attention back to the pendant and notice that it opens. You pry it ajar with hurried excitement. You should be high-tailing out of here to collect your fee. This is just a bonus. But you can’t help yourself. You never could.
The inside holds only more disappointment. No fat gems, no secret codes, not even a damn picture.
Only a thin, fraying lock of off-white hair.
“What a load of bullshit…” you mutter, wholly disappointed. You infiltrated Japan’s most well-guarded private storage unit for this? You sneaked past dozens of guards and cameras, even disposed of some (both guard and camera) and then tediously squeezed and coiled and slithered your way through a labyrinth of underground tunnels and rooms to arrive here and stare at some hair.
Disappointment flickers into anger and you find yourself vehemently clicking the pendant shut. You press it up against the middle of your bare abdomen, letting the black tendrils devour it. You can still become thinner than a hairline with it inside you, folding darkness over itself again and again until it’s so dense, it nearly bursts. You’ll pawn the silver for what it’s worth and then burn the hair out of pure spite.
“ You should not have done that.”
You jump and spin around, searching for the origin of the sudden voice. At first, you see nothing, even with your sharp vision.
“The job was to break in and take naught, is that not right, Anthrax?”
You say nothing, swallowing. There is no way someone could have followed you in there and there’s no place to hide inside this cramped room. You checked every nook and cranny. You’re good at your job, after all. You might even go so far as to say the best.
There’s a chuckle. It doesn’t come from any distinct direction but every at once. If you had hair, it would be standing on end. Maybe the pendant was coated in a hallucinogen? That could be a due punishment for your hubris, you guess. But you don’t think that’s the case. You have no proper veins for poison to travel in.
You decide that silence is the best defence and slowly inch towards the nearest wall of which you know there’s a tunnel behind.
“I’ll ask politely once.”
You book it. It’s not a conscious decision, more of a deeply ingrained criminal instinct telling you to get the fuck outta here.
“If you put the pendant back, I’ll end you swiftly,” the mysterious voice continues, unperturbed.
You reach the wall and spare no time for easing into the transformation. You press against it, flattening and spreading out in all directions, becoming something that can hardly be called ‘corporeal’. You feel a weapon embedding into the bare concrete where you stood but a millisecond ago. Your desperation increases and you unfurl yourself to cover nearly the entire east wall.
And in the corner, you find a gap. You don’t hesitate. You spin yourself into a hair-thin thread of pure darkness and push through, feeling the pendant also transforming with you, becoming something impossible. But such is the nature of quirks and it’s best not to question them. You’d be a rather shitty thief if you couldn’t actually steal anything after all.
You bulge out on the other side, dripping down the wall before you manage to remake a hand. And then an arm and a shoulder. You push yourself fully out, arriving on all fours. You instantly spring up, gunning for the end of the hallway. There should be another door two corners further down and then you’ll find a ventilation shaft and—
“Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance.”
Something moves in the dim darkness of the corner you were just about to round. Stumbling, you automatically back away into the opposite tunnel. It’s fine, this route is longer but you can still make it if—
This intersection wasn’t here before.
You come to a screeching halt, head whipping back and forth between the two identical hallways. Both dim and bare, filled with nothing but stale, dry air and decades’ worth of dust.
A laugh gurgles behind you, rolling over the tunnel like a wave, crashing into your back, now slick with cold sweat. You toss a mental coin and head right. Fuck this. You just need to find a ventilation shaft or even a pipeline and you’re golden. Fuck this job. Whoever leaked the info will be sorry.
There comes another random corridor that didn’t exist before. Then a room you definitely did not see on the plans. You swear you can feel the very earth moving, sliding, toying with you. Must be the adrenaline. The laugh is ever reverberating in your ears as if its owner doesn’t even need to breathe to go on forever.
Then, there’s a dead end where a door should be. You confuse at first, almost overriding the terror but only until the disjointed voice calls you out again. It jounces against the walls like a rubber ball, aggressive yet so, so smooth.
“Do you think you can elude me in my own domain, little mouse?”
You crash against the blank wall, de-solidifying mid-air and squeezing through the very pores of the foraminous cement. It hurts but you’d rather take this hurt than the hurt that sadistic laugh promises you.
“Getting desperate now, are we?”
Even if you had a mouth to answer with, you couldn’t wouldn’t. Maybe you should drop the pendant and hope that they are satisfied letting you go after spooking you a bit. But a stubborn, villainous part of you, the part that gets you into trouble over and over again, the part that made UA into nothing but a daydream nightmare, says you should keep it. Just to show that fucker.
The wall you’re currently inside explodes. Your disjointed pieces fly all over the place. You have no mouth to scream with but you do so inside the prison of your mind. You gather the largest piece of you, the heaviest, most corporeal part where you hid the necklace and roll towards it like a spiral of ants.
A foot comes down to squish you but you hide in the shadow of a piece of rubble. Your spacial awareness is struggling. There are too many changes, too much movement and too few sensory organs to take it in with. You need to get your pieces together right now but you can’t when every subtler than a twitch movement is answered by something sharp embedding into the place where a part of you was a moment ago. Whatever the quirk of this fucker is, it’s bad.
Okay then. You didn’t want it to come to this but they leave you no choice. You go in for the offence.
You send a sneaky tendril slithering up one of the pant legs of your assailant, lighter than air and deeper than black. You distract them by wiggling in the shadows, obvious but fast enough to avoid getting full-on stabbed by— also a black tendril?
Your -as of now nonexistent- head wants to split from the effort it takes to be in multiple places at once but you manage to climb the opponent, reaching the very edge of the collar of their coat. You wait for them to release another, now slightly manic laugh that’ll be their undoing.
“Oh, I like the ones that have a bit of fight in t—“
You swallow your disgust and leap into their mouth like a leech. Their laugh becomes a choke. They double over while the entire hall shakes and crumbles as if it is part of them. No matter, you force yourself deeper down their throat, finding their larynx and pushing into their trachea, swelling in the darkness like a fat, bulbous spider.
Suddenly, searing hot pain takes over every one of your senses. Fire. It burns, it burns so much. You are a thing of the night, of the cold dark, and this blistering heat eats you alive. You might have even made a noise, instinctually collecting enough of yourself to form a mouth while that piece of you, once a hand or maybe a foot, burns.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like it when they fire back?”
The voice is like termite-ridden wood tossed over a fire. It sizzles and pops while you burn. You sizzle and pop and burn with it. You are the termite. The smoke mixes with the concrete and dust particles making it even harder to breathe while heaving from pain.
You collect, knowing very well it’s a horrible idea but you need to feel whole. Complete and grounded otherwise you’ll dissolve into shadow permanently.
“Ah! There you are, little mouse.”
You roll over, cradling what was a hand, looking your attacker in the eye for the first time. He’s tall, incredibly so, and dark. Not darker than you, that’s not possible, but somehow he feels like he is. Except for his hair. And his eyes. Red like beads of blood. They curl into upturned half moons of joyous crimson light.
You scoot back, pressing your hand against your chest. Glancing at it, it presents a sickly ashen grey. You were never any colour other than black before. When you try to disperse again, hasty and uncoordinated, it remains solid and white like Binchō-tan. Fuck.
“What’s wrong, little mouse?” he asks again, almost kind.
You open your mouth, trying to form words you do not know the purpose of yet. He waits, seemingly patient. But you know that look. You have gotten similar looks before even if the disrelish in this one is so well veiled, you only recognise it on instinct.
“I— I’m—“
“Sorry?” the man guesses.
You nod.
“You don’t seem very sorry,” he replies, “Neither for attacking me nor for stealing from me when I explicitly contracted you not to.”
You try to make sense of the words through the pain and panic. “Y-you… you were the one w-who—“
He only nods. He holds a hand out, fingers gesturing impatiently a few times. You know what he wants. You do not dare to hesitate to unfold the pendant and toss it to him. You do not want to come any closer to touch him.
“My utmost thanks,” he says and you know he’s mocking you with that somehow, “You did your job decently. Here.”
He reaches into the many folds of his coat and you tense.
But he only tosses a credit card at your quivering feet. A luxury card. One you can use anywhere without ever getting traced. It’s the highest hero-grade invention there is, pattern stolen straight from Shield Industries. How the fuck did he come in possession of such a thing? But then again, if this is his vault complex then—
You swallow and carefully reach out for the card, ready to pull back if it turns out to be a trap. But he does nothing, just stares with that ever-present glistening white row of teeth on full display. You like it even less than the Symbol’s awful boasting grin. And that is quite a feat to achieve.
“W-who— who are you?” you dare ask while swallowing the card.
He just smiles. Tilts his head. As if your question is somewhat silly.
Suddenly, you no longer need an answer.
The slightest of twitches in the shadows of his coat and you decide. You gnash your teeth and grab your brittle wrist and twist. There’s no point in trying to describe the pain. The only point is to make you completely incorporeal again so you can flee. Wiggle away in the cracks and holes like the vermin he says you are.
You aren’t fast enough. Something pierces your back before you can flow around it. It strikes flesh that has not known real harm for years. You seize up, fingers digging into the broken concrete, trying to drag you towards an inviting, gaping dark opening in the wall’s structure but it’s too late.
You watch, baffled and terrified as your own thin threads of vantablack slowly start to flow into your body. They travel up your fingertips and then your arm, revealing pale, ashen grey flesh like your injured hand. Only this skin is alive and it is yours. It’s the most horrid thing you’ve ever seen. You trash and struggle uselessly as the black slowly leaves you through the puncture wound in your back.
You’re left naked and trembling on the ground. Defenceless and quirkless.
“P-please,” you try to plead for there’s nothing else you can do, “ I’m sorry, I’m sorry I stole I— I didn’t know! I gave it back, I’ll say nothing I promi—“
“Shhhhh.”
Your mouth glues shut on its own. Not that you could say anything that’ll help. You flop onto your back, fingers searching for a chunk of rubble, a sharp piece of rebar, anything, even though you know it’s useless. You are useless without a quirk. And even with it, you are useless against him.
“Who am I, you ask?”
He raises his hand, the subtle freckles expanding on the pale skin into splotches of vantablack until his entire arm is covered in your quirk.
“Actually, you might be one of the few people on this earth to truly know. For a little while.”
“B-but you s-said—“
“You didn’t think I was just going to let you walk out, did you?”
You— you didn’t think you’d get caught. You thought your plan airtight, your execution flawless, and your quirk invincible.
You say nothing, just stare at the floating wisps of your quirk escaping through the tips of his fingers. It looks different on him, almost like smoke instead of the inky liquid of your making. He sports an expression one would when shopping for fish in the marketplace and finding a particularly appealing specimen. He breathes in as if he was tasting the aroma. He sharply releases the breath and his eyes flash purple for but a second. Your purple. You don’t care what colour your eyes are now. You want your quirk back.
“I admit, I was going to let you enjoy your success a little longer. But then you went and robbed me. I really do disrelish being robbed, little mouse.”
Somehow, you gather enough terror to urge you to get up and run. The naked soles of your feet slap awfully wet and loud on the raw concrete. It’s been a while since you made this much noise moving.
There was no door where you crashed through but now there is and you desperately wretch it open. You stumble in the dark without the aid of your natural night vision. You trip on something. A nail dislodges on your foot but the pain is drowned out by the sheer existential dread.
You fall. Something bruises your side and your breath gets caught between clamped teeth. You stumble like a newborn calf, skinning a knee or maybe a palm or perhaps a temple, it all blurs together into one suffocating blanket of pain and terror.
The laugh never ceases.
You scrape yourself off the floor, clambering behind whatever cover you can find. There’s no way you will find your way out of this place like this fast enough. But maybe, just maybe, if you’re quiet enough, if you’re still enough, he might—
“No use hiding away, little mouse.”
You press both hands against your mouth to keep a traitorous sob from escaping. Your broken nails dig into the pouch of your cheeks. You feel tears rolling over the back of your hand. A deep, velvety red glow ignites in the doorway. It flashes and twitches like hand-held lightning. You don’t even try to figure out what sort of quirk it might be. Or what happened to its wielder.
“Pspsps,” he mocks you, stepping into the room slowly, unhurriedly. You shake in your entirety. The hole in your back and your bruises ache and bleed, smearing all over your grave hiding place. “Time to come out little mouse. The kitty-cat is awake~”
Each breath feels less than the last. Your lungs feel like popping. You stop breathing altogether when you hear his steps stop just at the edge of the crate.
Please.
“There you are.”
You scream without restraint, seeing the blood-red joyous half moons pierce through the darkness and you.
You try to get up and run but the wood planks against your back suddenly begin to move . You kick out in blind terror, breaking a few rotting pieces of wood. The crate you were hiding behind twists and twists into a jagged toothed mouth. The wood is soft and moist, merely scratching skin before you break it off. But something spills out of the cursed innards of this man-made monster.
Hands. Severed, pale, dead. There must be hundreds of them. Some have scars, some have fingers missing, some have rings.
Your stolen voice curbs into silent soprano and then snaps when one of them grabs your ankle . You crabwalk back, prying the horrid thing off.
This is a nightmare. You’re in a nightmare or maybe already in hell, having died when that tendril pierced you. This can’t be real.
He just laughs and laughs while you cry and try to swat the swarm of hands away using a jagged piece of rotting wood.
“Should have kept your hands to yourself, huh?”
You don’t respond to the belittling tease. You’re trying too hard not to faint. Or maybe you would be better off falling unconscious. Anything to end this torment.
The dust and rot of this wretched place clings to the back of your throat. It dries your mouth and stiffens your tongue. You taste your own demise in it, appalling, pathetic and insignificant.
He makes a sudden movement in the neon strobe of the red lightning and the hands retreat, starting to circle you like packs of five-legged vermin. He steps on the remainders of the wooden crate, silencing its pregnant groans.
You wail, soundless for you have no more cords to make them with. You raise your hands in some pleading motion. No prayer of any known religion but universal across the globe. Animals would plead like this to their butchers if they had hands to do so with.
He kneels before you, red eyes blinking. “Oh poor soul,” he says with a smile, “Look at you, grovelling like a coward.”
You nod, frantically. You are a coward. You will plead, you will bow, you will do anything just to live. Anything, you say without words and he seems to understand.
He tilts his head and reaches a hand out. You freeze but do not dare to move away. His fingers are cold on your cheek. He smooths, almost gentle. You close your eyes so you do not have to see him smile, cold like the moonlight over the tundra.
“I think I might have some use for you yet,” he coos.
You hold your breath back. Even your galloping heart seems to stop in anticipation. You feel him wipe away a blood and dust-stained tear.
“But not alive.”
Your eyes round out. ‘No, please…’ you mouth.
He pats the side of your face, tender before he grips it, hold becoming firm. You give up the remainders of your dignity and break out in renewed silent wails. Somehow, you manage to break the quirk and cry out once more.
“H-help! Help somebody, anybody, h-heroes help please—“
“There are no heroes here.”
Before you could scream, thick, smokey blackness fills your mouth. You taste your own quirk, bitter like soot and ash, lonely like starless nights. You choke on tears and blood and darkness. You feel it climbing down your throat, into your lungs, up your nose, your eyes, your ears, needle thin maggots of smoke pushing through to your brain.
Your last thought is that you would have been better off quirkless.