Archive of Our Own ^beta

Himiko only had a few things left from her life Before.

Her old school uniform, a handkerchief, a couple of hairclips. A cute keychain attached to a dull key-knife, her too-small shoes, and a photo from a Polaroid camera.

She’d had more initially. Himiko wasn’t stupid — she’d brought her backpack with her when she’d run away. The bag had been stolen early on in her escape, back when she’d barely known how to hold a knife without injuring herself in the process. It had been quietly devastating, so she kept careful track of the things she had left. 

The polaroid was old and crumpled and starting to fade from sun exposure. She’d used her thumb to make a heart in one corner, but it had long since faded from pretty bright red to muddy red-brown. Himiko rarely took it out of her skirt pocket for longer than a handful of seconds before she’d shove it away from prying eyes and hands.

Two children, the younger one barely old enough to hold himself up on chubby, wobbly legs. The older child, a little girl, had a wide, fang-toothed smile. Her arms were wrapped around her brother’s shoulders, pressing their cheeks together. 

Two months later, she wouldn’t be allowed to touch him.

A year after that, she wouldn’t even be allowed in the same room as him, most days.

Himiko didn’t remember her brother very well. There were few things — how much she loved him, how much he’d trusted her, how much that made her want to hurt him. She remembered how nice his blood tasted, and how loud he’d screamed, even though she’d laughed to try and show him it was okay. 

She also remembered shy smiles and tiny waves from across the dinner table that she wasn’t allowed to return. After she proved she could be good, Himiko had been a silent fourth body at their dinner table for years, smiling and laughing at exactly the right time but never speaking unless she was spoken to and certainly never speaking to her brother. 

She took the stories he told her parents (not her, never her, she just happened to be there) and retold them to herself when she got lonely, inserting herself into them as if she’d joined. If her brother spent the day playing at the park, she imagined teaching him to ride his bike. If he got a good grade on a big test, she pretended that she’d helped him study. If he got picked on at school, she’d imagine what she would do to the bullies.

Himiko remembered her brother slipping notes underneath her bedroom door, even when she wasn’t allowed near him at all. His drawings were so cute — mostly scribbles, but sometimes she could almost make out the characters she liked. His notes were almost illegible, but she diligently translated his sloppy handwriting into legible characters on the back. She even sent him some back, but those stopped because she used the wrong kind of red and her parents got mad and she didn’t understand why.

Red was her favorite. She just wanted to share it.

He still left her pictures and notes for a while after that, but Himiko wasn’t allowed to reply Under Any Circumstances without her parents seeing it first. Her parents didn’t like any of her messages, so he never got them, and eventually his own messages slowly stopped. Himiko never knew if it was because she didn’t reply, or if their parents made him stop, or maybe he’d just stopped caring. She wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to find out the answer. 

Himiko and her brother lived in the same house until she left, but they might as well have had completely different families. She never heard her parents call her brother abnormal . He’d certainly never been locked in his room for long stretches like Himiko was. He was loud and obnoxious and didn’t have many friends, but at least he wasn’t crazy like her. 

After she left, her parents had made a big deal about it on the news. They made sure everyone knew that Himiko was a freak . She was dangerous . She’d even attacked a baby, a baby, and giggled when she did it. The world would be better off without her in it. Their family certainly was.

She kept the article folded up in her skirt pocket with the polaroid. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d pull it out and laugh at their faces in the attached picture, pinched and sad and terrified. Like they hadn’t done anything wrong. Like Himiko hadn’t done everything right, until she couldn’t anymore.

The article hadn’t even mentioned her brother. Himiko had no idea whether he thought she was a demon like everyone else did.

She loved him so much it made her heart ache, and her teeth hurt, and her eyes water; she loved him so much that it would break her if he hated her too.

The good part about dying young was that she’d never find out. 

Despite what people expected when looking at him, Vlad King was good at being stealthy when he wanted to. Which is why when Neito heard the gravel under his heavy boots as he crossed the rooftop, he knew it was on purpose. If he didn’t want Neito to know he was coming, he wouldn’t have.

“Monoma.” Vlad’s voice was low, rough. Whatever he had to say was going to be bad. Neito tilted his head to indicate he’d heard him, but otherwise kept his gaze on the world beyond UA’s walls.

Vlad sighed heavily, stepping forward to rest his arms on the railing, so Neito could see him in his periphery. He looked like he’d aged a decade over the last two years. All of the teachers did.

“I’ll come back to the party in a minute,” Neito said after the silence between them stretched on for too long. The rest of his class was celebrating the end of the war, or the long-overdue official end of their first year of hero school. He was fairly certain Itsuka had said it was the former, but then Togake had said it was the latter, and Neito didn’t think it mattered enough to ask for clarification.

“Do you want to?” Vlad asked, and Neito frowned when he realized the question was entirely sincere.

Neito loved a good party, but he didn’t really feel up to celebrating. He’d made an appearance for just long enough that Itsuka wouldn’t complain before slipping away to the rooftop. He needed a few minutes before he could be the person they expected him to be. Neito Monoma had become more and more of a mask over the last year. He wasn’t quite ready to put it back on yet.

Whatever Vlad had come to talk about couldn’t be good, but it was better than being surrounded by his classmates and pretending to be… well, to be himself. 

Neito shook his head.

“Well, in that case,” Vlad pushed away from the railing, turning to look at Neito properly, “do you mind coming to my office? I’ve got something to give you.”

Vlad’s office in the dorms was small. It had been a study room originally, though it hadn’t stayed one for very long. Having an office in the dorm was more practical than having his students walk all the way back to the school building for meetings or discipline, so he’d quickly had the study table replaced with a desk and a comfortable set of chairs. The office had an open door policy — if the door was open, you were welcome to enter freely, otherwise you had to knock first — and he kept lap desks in case a student wanted to work on their homework there.

Neito knew there was also a cot stashed nearby, in case he needed to stay the night. Neito thought it made sense; while Aizawa may have been content to crash in a sleeping bag on the floor at all hours, Vlad King had a bit of dignity.

Miraculously, despite the fact that the office door was just off the common room, no one seemed to notice them. Or maybe they did, but felt the incredibly strange, heavy vibes coming off of Vlad’s entire being and wisely decided to steer clear. Neito wasn’t sure either way.

Neito settled stiffly into one of the chairs, pressing his palms to his knees (like a proper gentleman, he reminded himself in some echo of his mother’s scolding) to keep from fidgeting with his fingers. Vlad kept looking at him with a mix of pity and concern, and it was making him nauseous.

“Did something happen to my parents?” he asked, the words falling out of his mouth before he made the conscious decision to let them. It had been the thing he’d been dreading since the start of this, that his parents would die and then he’d have no one left.

“Now that they’ve closed the case, Toga Himiko’s things are being returned to her family.”

No .

“Your parents didn’t want anything.”

No.  

“It was all going to be tossed.”

God, let them be wrong.

“But Detective Tsukauchi thought you might want this.”

Vlad pushed a polaroid across the desk. Neito felt all of the air leave his lungs.

He’d suspected. Of course, he’d suspected. He hadn’t known exactly what his sister’s quirk was, but that had hardly mattered. He knew it involved blood, and it made her, for lack of better word, crazy. He knew that she’d run away after she attacked a boy at her school, and he remembered hearing his mother on the news calling her a demon child. Neito would have been stupid if he didn’t suspect that the teenage villain with a blood quirk was his sister. It wasn’t even difficult to draw a line from Copycat to Transform, really. 

But even though he’d suspected, Neito didn't know. As things grew more serious, he’d shoved his suspicions to the side. He couldn't fight the villains effectively if he was worried he was related to one of them. Even when they were face-to-face, when he met eyes that looked alarmingly like his mother’s, he couldn’t let it be true. 

Toga Himiko was not his sister. She couldn’t be.

Monoma Neito had never had a sister.

Neito’s chest hurt.

“Monoma, I realize this is difficult, but I need you to breathe.” Vlad’s voice was a lot closer now, and Neito looked up from his knees to find him crouched on the floor beside him. It was only then that he realized he’d been hyperventilating.

It took a concentrated effort for Neito to force air into his lungs, and even more effort to get his fingers to relax their grip on his knees. When he’d wrestled himself down from his panic attack, he returned his attention to his teacher.

“Sorry, you were saying?” he asked. 

Vlad looked like he very much wanted to address the panic attack, but he knew Neito wouldn’t let him. He never did. Instead, the man slowly got to his feet and returned to his desk.

“Your sister,” Vlad started, but Neito cut him off.

“I don’t have a sister,” he said, resolutely ignoring the picture on the desk. “I don’t have any siblings. I’m an only child.” It was a statement he’d made many times over three years, but it had never felt more rehearsed. He remembered practicing the words in front of the mirror when they first moved, so he wouldn’t slip up if anyone asked. He never had, and his parents had been so proud of him for it.

Vlad looked sad now. “We both know that isn’t true, kid,” he said. 

“No,” Neito said, firmly. “I don’t have a sister.”

Even before the move, his parents had pretended she’d never existed. After the move and the name change that came with it, they’d made it clear. The Monomas had always been a family of three. Neito was a Monoma now, which meant that he was an only child.

“I understand that this is hard to accept,” Vlad said in a voice that was gentle and not at all comforting. Vlad wasn’t gentle; he was kind and protective, but he was not gentle. The fact that he was now meant that Neito was visibly not normal and he needed to do a better job of pretending. “It was certainly a shock for me to learn. But the DNA test was a match. Your sister was Toga Himiko.”

And if he did, it couldn’t be Toga, because then Neito had failed to save her two, three, maybe even a million times over. If it was, Neito had maybe never had a chance of saving her at all.

If it was, then his sister was dead.

Neito stared down at the polaroid on Vlad’s desk. The children in the picture had no idea what was coming for them. Innocent, pure, safe. He was jealous. Neito couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt safe. Every time he closed his eyes, he was back in the middle of a fight.

“I wanted to be wrong,” he said finally. Tears pressed insistently at the backs of his eyes. His hands shook in his lap. “I couldn’t— I didn’t— I wanted to be wrong. I didn’t want it to be her. I needed to be wrong.”

“I understand,” Vlad said, carefully. “Would you like to talk about it?”

Neito shook his head, but the words spilled from his lips without his permission. “I’m supposed to be a hero, but I couldn’t even save my sister. Not from us, not from herself, not even from our parents.” The last word came out on a sob, even as Neito tried to hold it back. 

“Monoma.” Vlad’s voice was firm enough to cut through the ringing in Neito’s ears. He was back on the floor again, only now Neito was too, and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there. “Come on, you’ve got to breathe, Monoma.”

Neito curled in on himself. He choked on the next sob, gasping for breath that didn’t seem to be coming. His hands found their way to his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw stars. His chest was filled with fury and despair and guilt all at once. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think beyond how he’d failed her, failed her, failed her.

“What good am I as a hero if I couldn’t even save my sister?” he said between gasping sobs. He hated this. “I should have done something! I didn’t do anything!”

“You were a child!” Vlad said sharply, prying his hands from his eyes. “A child! Nothing that happened to her was your fault, kid. You were a child.”

“So was she!” Neito said. All of the feeling seemed to bleed out of him as quickly as it had come. He slumped backwards against the chair he’d slid out of. The next time he spoke it came out as a whisper. “So was she.”

Vlad’s grip on his hands changed from holding them back to cradling them with one hand, while his other came up to rest on Neito’s shoulder. “She was,” he said, quiet now. “I’m so sorry, Neito.”

Neito didn’t know what to do with the grief sitting heavy in his chest. He knew what Himiko had done; he knew she was a villain. She’d nearly killed him before he’d even been old enough to go to preschool. She’d nearly killed half of his class, let alone 1A; she had killed an unfathomable number of people, seemingly with no remorse. 

He remembered blood and pain and screaming, and her hands carding through his hair. He remembered not being scared, because his big sister was there. He remembered the sounds: whispers of “ it’s okay baby brother, you look so cute, I love you so much, it’s okay,” and then grown-ups yelling and his sister crying and sirens wailing, and then nothing at all. 

He also remembered sad eyes and locked doors. He remembered how her smiles seemed so strained on the rare occasions they’d been allowed to interact, how they’d become so much brighter on the even rarer occasions they’d spoken directly. 

Neito had kept the notes she’d given him stashed in the back of his closet for over a decade. He never knew why she’d stopped returning them. He’d kept giving her notes and pictures long after she did, even after their parents tried to stop him, even as it had gotten harder and harder to evade their notice, until finally his mother put a stop to it altogether. 

He remembered her fading more and more, and then the attack at her middle school and then —

And then she was gone.

Maybe Neito was supposed to hate his sister. He would understand if anyone else did in his place. But he couldn’t. He hated the things she’d done, the fear and death and devastation she’d had a hand in creating, he hated the monstrous movement she’d been a part of, but he couldn’t hate her. Not entirely. 

Maybe it would be better if he could.

“Can I…I’ll take that picture, please,” Neito said, finally looking up at Vlad with red eyes.

“Of course,” Vlad said, letting go of his hands to reach for the Polaroid without getting up entirely. 

Neito took the picture with shaking hands, letting himself drink in the details. It was fading, crumpled and soft like it had been handled too much, and there was a dark heart-shaped thumbprint staining one corner that Neito was nearly certain was blood. He smoothed it out against his knee as carefully as he could before slipping it into the pocket of his shirt. 

“Thank you, sir,” he said quietly.

Vlad was frowning. “Of course. If you’d ever like to talk about — about anything — I’m here. You know that.”

“I know.” Neito pulled himself to his feet, jostling Vlad’s hand from his shoulder. “I think I’ll go to bed. Have a good night, Sensei.”

“Have a good night, Monoma.”

When he returned to his room, Neito pulled a binder from the back of his closet. It was filled with the handful of notes and pictures his sister had given to him as children, each carefully protected by a sleeve protector, and sorted in his best estimate of chronological order. After a moment of digging through his desk drawers, he found a new one to slip the photo into. He snapped the sleeve protector into the very front of the binder, in front of a childish crayon drawing of a little brown bird surrounded by a heart. 

He stared at the two children in the picture for a long time before going to bed. 

He mourned for them, and for who they’d become.