Chapter Text
The glow of that bright horizon is the most beautiful thing Shuichi has ever seen, the dust of Decay floating through the air, and everyone from Gigantomachia to Re-Destro seeing what he’d seen back at the Doc’s office. Seeing a glimpse of that Heaven and Hell that Shigaraki had invited them all to.
The one Shuichi wanted to see, more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.
Voices start up again, Re-Destro speaking and his people screaming and shouting for him to get help and all that, but Shuichi doesn’t give two shits. His body is moving the moment he saw the line break, determined to be the first one into the pit, before any of Re-Destro’s crazy minions got any ideas, and he goes sliding on his feet and hands down the embankment, skidding and getting dust and dirt everywhere, into the bloodied holes in his arms, into the folds of his clothes.
He can’t find it in himself to care.
From the moment the van had stopped he’s only had eyes for one thing, and he isn’t going to let stupid things like pain stand between him and their leader, half shredded and painfully past exhaustion days before they’d ever gotten here.
It is easier for him to find his footing than the two or three others that followed him into the pit. He hears one of them go down behind him, and he has the stray thought of how he was going to get Shigaraki back up the hill, but that was a problem for them both in the future, when Shigaraki wasn’t alone and exhausted and going to be surrounded by only just former enemies.
As he closes in, he can hear Shigaraki laughing, the choked awkward sounding one he’d make when he’d bested someone at a game, less manic and wild than when he’d sat in the back of the van after Overhaul.
He is wavering where he stands, and that wont do at all. The closer he gets, the more Spinner’s stomach drops, seeing the extent of Shigaraki’s injuries; his foot mutilated and bloody, one hand shredded, the other arm a mess of crackling skin and open fissures. And that was just the shit he could see.
What is left of Re-Destro isn’t anything he cares about, so he moves right past the bloody mess of a final boss and swoops in, announcing himself as he goes to help his leader stand.
“Boss-“ He starts, and Shigaraki turns to look at him, red eyes wide and awful for a moment before he blinks, once, and again, and he goes from on alert to his shoulders dropping, his expression shifting into something less wild.
“Good.” Shigaraki says. “I didn’t think friendly fire was on, but fuck if I knew.”
Spinner can’t help the offended squawk of sound that flies out of him, but it seems to strike Shigaraki as funny, and his grin makes it to his eyes and he’s just…
With his heart thundering in his chest, Shuichi actually moves to get Shigaraki some help, pulling at some of the stray cloth from his own costume to try and help staunch… some part of him, unsure where to start. He shakes out the dust and grime before trying to help, aware that there’s no way to make anything reasonably clean.
“You’re- you’re bleeding everywhere-! It- Did you get yourself? How-?”
He makes a choice and grabs at the wreck of Shigaraki’s left hand, wincing hard the moment he realizes what he’s looking at, and it doesn’t occur to him to worry about touching Shigaraki’s hands at all.
Shigaraki doesn’t answer him, just rolls his eyes, and stares past him at Re-Destro.
His expression twists into something more like the future king he is, his eyes overbright and chin up so he can look down his nose at the broken boss.
“Hey. President. You’ve got somewhere to get us fixed, right?”
Re-Destro almost stumbles over his words trying to explain that yes, they had medical staff, and Shuichi marks that off in his head, going back to ignoring him. He has more important things to worry about.
They’re gonna fix them up, he just has to make sure Shigaraki gets to the medic.
“You look like shit, too.”
He looks up from where he’s trying to tie off the gaping absence of half of Shigaraki’s fucking hand, to see that he’s looking right at him, cataloguing right in return. He doesn’t flinch at Shuichi’s work, which is worrying even with Shigaraki’s pain tolerance.
“I’ll live.” He says, and Shigaraki’s wreck of a right arm comes up. He used to worry when he’d see those hands anywhere near him, but instead of any actual harm, Shigaraki just flicks him in the side of the face. It makes him flinch entirely because he had not realized how wide the puncture he’d suffered was until Shigaraki went around poking him in it. Shigaraki talks over his shoulder at the President again.
“Giran and Toga at least need to get healed up. And this idiot. Probably the rest of them.” He says. “And we’re gonna need a place for the giant.”
In spite of himself, Spinner turns quickly, weeks of having the shit kicked out of them daily makes him feel the need to put himself between Shigaraki and Machia while their leader is down, but the giant monster of a man is just shouting happily, tears streaming down his huge face.
It is horrifying really.
“That’s never gonna not be weird.”
When he turns back Shigaraki is looking right at him and his grin is back, wide and gleeful.
He wobbles again, just a little, and Shuichi gives up on any kind of distance, taking Shigaraki’s arm over his shoulder to better hold him up.
“Come on- You need a medic and sleep.”
Shigaraki doesn’t seem too bothered by being manhandled, if anything he just shifts to make it easier for Shuichi to drag him.
“….Told you it was going to work.” He says, sounding pleased and bordering on loopy. Shuichi still has no idea how Shigaraki has managed to stay awake, let alone do everything he has, and he’s in awe.
They make it about four steps before Shigaraki’s foot goes out from under him, wincing hard through his teeth. He immediately lets go of Spinner’s shoulder to clench his fingers tight in a ball, the way he does when he doesn’t want to destroy what he’s near.
Shuichi doesn’t know what his limits are anymore (does he even have any) but his chest clenches because he knows how aware Shigaraki is of his quirk and he’s only really begun to notice the effort he makes constantly in the last month.
He doesn’t wreck things he does not want to. Not really. He has never seen that power go off accidentally. He means it. He has always meant it, even if he regretted it later.
Spinner manages to keep them both from hitting the ground, but only just, holding his leader up even as he shudders in what must be pain, breath coming out of him ragged and strained.
“…Shit.” Shigaraki says, finally, and doesn’t continue, though a tiny helpless sort of laugh spills out of him and doesn’t ever stop.
They sit there for a long moment, Shuichi taking his weight and letting him breathe.
He’s pale and still bleeding everywhere, and he’s got both his eyes closed, he’s tense all over and now that they’re close, he can tell Shigaraki is shaking, through his whole body, rattling his teeth and making everything about him feel unsteady.
He wont make Shigaraki ask for help.
“Come on.” Shuichi says, finally. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Shigaraki doesn’t complain when Shuichi finally gives up and just decides to carry him, which is enough of a sign of how terrible he’s got to feel. He doesn’t even shift much once Spinner collects him up.
He’s so much lighter than Spinner expects.
Lighter, and paler, and suddenly he remembers how many weeks Shigaraki has gone without sleep. How many hours he has been fighting and working and planning and taking care of everything.
Spinner can and has killed for this man, and he’s all too aware in that moment that he would endlessly do it again and again.
The shaking doesn’t stop, which is the most worrying thing, it’s through his whole body, making Shuichi move faster to get him some kind of proper help. Shigaraki is a dead weight in his arms and if he didn’t hear- feel -the ragged breathing at his throat he would be terrified.
He’s not sure how aware Shigaraki is, which is why he doesn’t and wont hand him off to any of the medics until they get to one of the ambulances arriving, only making it up the hill because ‘Machia loped forward to help, lifting them out of the pit (Which is terrifying. This is what terror feels like.) and then standing watch over them.
People get out of his way, some of that is the sheer terror Shigaraki managed to inflict on these people, but some of it is also the giant close enough behind them that he’s covering them in his shadow. Probably none of it is because of him, but he still glares at the lot like he could actually do a damn thing.
When he finally goes to hand off their leader he almost doesn’t let go, suddenly nervous about these doctor’s intentions, if they would try to get revenge for those they’d killed. The nearest medic says something reassuring, but the woman next to them who immediately starts trying to take vitals before he’s even set his leader down does more to actually calm his nerves. Spinner does as he’s instructed, laying him out on the provided stretcher, and he gets nervous again when Shigaraki reacts to none of it.
The medics start working immediately, and Spinner is left standing useless, covered in his own and Shigaraki’s blood, and the blood of all the people who tried to stop them, threats on his tongue about what he’ll do if they try anything.
He hovers, uselessly. Behind him, the giant hovers, tears still streaming from his smiling face every time Spinner looks back.
He’s watching them work to hook up lines and medical equipment he doesn’t understand when Twice ( ….a Twice?)full on barrels into the mass of people.
Like a flood, there are suddenly several of them, including an unmasked one that Spinner suddenly realizes is the real Jin and he starts towards all of them when he sees one carrying a limp Toga. The medics get there before he can- swarming.
Then he hears Mister shouting, not too soon after, half dragging a smoking Dabi.
Finally, another Twice appears with Giran.
They all made it.
They all look terrible, but they are alive.
He doesn’t have long to see how they are doing-
The ambulance goes to finally pack up with Shigaraki before he can think about it. As they start closing up the doors, Spinner opens them right back up, hopping up into the back, knives out. He’s not leaving Shigaraki alone with them, and ‘Machia apparently has decided to follow, lumbering beside the van.
Compress manages to catch his eye, and he salutes, dramatic as ever, even with the flock of people surrounding him. Spinner does in return, resisting the urge to check in.
Somebody has to stay with the boss and he’s not leaving Shigaraki’s side until he’s told to, but he watches the others through the back window, having to trust that they’ll be fine until he sees them again.
-
That first night, after they’d gotten the shit kicked out of them, the five of them had laid out in the dirt, miserable and bloodied and disgusting.
“We’re alive!” Twice had said into the dark, before following with. “Please just kill me now. Do it. I’m ready..”
Too tired to deal in his usual pretense, Sako had sighed heavily into the night, patting at Twice, maskless and gross as the rest of them, coat folded neatly under his neck.
Toga’s voice had joined in, calling it a sleep over as she’d sat brushing debris out of her hair. She and Twice argued cheerfully about if this was worth calling camping, their voices overlapping and sound constant between the two of them.
He’d looked over, to see Shigaraki staring up into the night, arms tucked under his head. He’d looked…calm? Relaxed? Whatever it was, he looked up like he could see what was ahead for them. Like he could read it in the trees over their heads, or the stars, eyes flickering back and forth.
He watched Shigaraki for a long moment, thinking about how he’d described himself, hollow and only filled with rage and lead. He knows what that emptiness feels like.
He knows.
Shigaraki catches him looking, their eyes meeting for a moment before Shuichi looks away in a flare of panic.
When he finally looks back, Shigaraki’s looking back up at the sky, grinning up at the stars.
-
The hospital is a mess, everyone takes off in different directions and Spinner nearly knifes a staff member who tries to stop him from being in the room as they try to put Shigaraki back together.
No one tries to stop him after that.
By the time they’ve started working on him in earnest, the final boss is being wheeled into another room, and he can hear Twice, which means that the others are probably here.
Spinner doesn’t leave, though he does stay out of their way, claws fidgeting as he tries to hold himself in a way that looks as threatening as he should be. The staff clearly are all good at what they do, talking over the top of each other and doing everything at once. One group seems to be focused on his hand, another on getting his foot back into place, others keep shouting about low blood pressure and-
….and he is absolutely and completely useless.
Spinner can tell that he himself is not doing fantastic, as adrenaline finally slows to a crawl, he begins to feel dizzy and tired, far too cold. None of that is enough to make him leave. He wallows in feeling awful and useless until he feels someone actually touch him, which frankly makes him jump out of his skin and lash out, knife in his hand and aiming for whoever decided to come up behind him.
Compress doesn’t seem bothered, his masked face tilting as he holds on to Shuichi’s wrist like he hadn’t tried to shank him. The empty dots of Mister’s eyes feel like they are judging him.
“I take it you have not left our dear leader’s side since we arrived.” He says, light and even.
“Uh.” Shuichi says dumbly, and looks off to where they are clearly still nowhere near done.
He can’t.
Compress sighs, and shrugs his shoulders, which finally makes Shuichi notice he was missing his prosthetic.
“What’d they-“ He gestures as he puts the knife he’d tried to stab his friend with away, his worry for Shigaraki on hold, to worry about Sako and the others instead.
“They tell me I should have a new hand by the end of the night. We’ve made some friends in high places! Finally.”
Compress tilts his head again, sounding positively chipper, and Shuichi fights the urge to roll his eyes.
Atsuhiro, seeming to sense his irritation, removes his mask. He looks tired, but he’s smiling wide enough to reach his eyes.
“I’ll make sure he’s right and ready for center stage again as quickly as they can make him. You go and get cleaned up.”
He doesn’t want to leave, and it must show on his face, because Compress pops his mask away and uses his now free hand to gesture off into the hall. As if summoned, Spinner is immediately grabbed by no less than five Twice clones.
There is little he can do in the face of Compress and the minor swarm of Twices that he’s suddenly flooded with, as he’s dragged off, complaining all the way, Compress waves cheerily at him and takes his place at the wall.
The rest of the League has convened in a larger room, it might be a whole section of an ER. It’s a big wide room with separating curtains and multiple beds. Original Twice starts shouting from across the room the moment he enters. Jin looks like he’s vibrating with energy, properly cast already, and his mask up over his mouth enough for him to be fork fed by one of his own doubles. It paints a weird as hell picture but Twice has never been much for normal.
“Spinner! They’re getting us hooked up with the good stuff! What took you so damn long!”
Giran’s asleep, probably hooked up to the good drugs himself, completely out and somehow not bothered by the fact that there is yet another double sitting about half a foot from him, staring.
The most alarming thing in the room is the fact that it looks like Twice either hasn’t, or wont, get rid of whatever doubles survived the fight, all of them up to varying tasks or staring at the nurses trying to do their jobs.
Toga is hooked up to more machines than makes him comfortable, and Spinner shakes off his own swarm to go check on her, having missed most of what happened to the brat. Dried blood has been wiped off her face, but sticks around the edges, around her ears and in her hair. She’s got some mask over her face for oxygen. His claws hover for a moment, unsure if he can touch her, but the Twices clearly don’t have his reverence for whatever treatment she’s getting, as one of them seems to be hell bent at brushing the blood out of her hair.
“They said I could.” The double says
“I said I’d kill them if they didn’t let me!” says another.
“They said she’s going to be okay.”
“She is going to die.”
Touching her is clearly not going to break her, so he lays his hand over the back of hers for a moment and squeezes, curling his claws around her fingers. There is blood under her nails too. It’s everywhere. Poor kid.
She had better be okay or Twice isn’t the only one who is going to raise hell.
“That crazy bitch is going to be more mad she wrecked her coat than that she nearly died.”
Spinner turns to glare in the direction of Dabi’s voice, and flinches once he gets a good look at him.
“Shit, Dabi.”
Dabi waves him off, though one half of the skin on his face seems partly disconnected, showing damaged muscle underneath. And his teeth. Not for the first time, he has no idea what is holding that walking corpse together.
He’s got an ice pack on the back of his neck, like that’s going to do much of anything, and though smoke is trailing out from him, Spinner can’t tell from where. His coat’s off, showing how rail thin he is, and how much of him is grafted back together.
“Are you gonna let them….” Spinner gestures. There is a flap of skin hanging off of him. Dabi knows what he means.
“Once they actually get me a fucking stapler, Twice can do it.”
Dabi is sitting on a chair, not a bed, and looks about as happy to be here as Spinner is. He wants to tell Dabi to let someone help, some actual medical professional, but the look on Dabi’s face tells him
how well that would go over before he even tries.
“I took the others out. Spinner, they melted!”
“It’s fucking gross”
“It was badass!”
-
When he was a kid, he’d been a great climber. Ropes, climbing walls. He’d been great at it. Sure it had been his quirk. Of course it was.
Some of the other kids thought it was cool, kids are simple like that, most of the time. Easily impressed.
But then there were a couple kids who got jealous. They were louder.
The teachers listened.
He was given gloves to disrupt his quirk.
It made something as easy to him as walking was difficult.
So, he worked to get better. He worked and worked, climbing and getting stronger until even with the gloves he could carry his own weight.
Teachers, other students, they’d say he was finding a way around the gloves. That because his quirk was heteromorphic, the gloves didn’t work.
But no one said anything when Hidaki-Kun used his scope eyes in baseball, or when Mirai was able to write in English because of ‘Translation’.
No one said a thing.
No matter what he said, he failed Physical Education that year.
-
Spinner and His Twice swarm finally manage to track down one of the nurses to get them a stapler, and then she immediately seems to panic once she realizes no one has actually taken a look at him yet.
It occurs to him that he hurts, and that his wraps are a destroyed mess of blood and dirt, and that he is still bleeding in parts when he moves wrong.
Twice and the Nurse bully him into a bed immediately. Her clawed fingers start unraveling the cloth along his arms, the fur on her shoulders and neck clearly bristling in irritation at him being, in her words, ‘difficult’.
As one of the Twices runs off, medical stapler in hand, he wishes he’d not cared, so he could have stayed in the room with everyone instead of by himself with a collection of clones.
But then he is never that lucky, is he?
When they get there, the medics are awkward, most of them look at him with a mild terror, like they don’t know what to do for him.
That isn’t new.
He has to talk them through how to stitch his skin so it wont bust open again, has to explain in what ways he is and isn’t different. His skin is thin between his scales and going straight through them isn’t an option, it’s like sewing through a fingernail, he explains. His skin rolls inward, and if it isn't stitched right it wont heal well. Years of ‘accidental’ injuries, and having to repeat the same things over and over again have made it a speech, prepared and easy to rattle off.
One of the medics, a man with wide yellow eyes and a smile he immediately hates makes a joke about calling a veterinarian. He probably doesn’t even think about it, pulling out sutures and looking around like he’s expecting to get a laugh.
At least he doesn’t think about it until a Twice yanks him backward by his elbow, pulling the guy off his stool so hard he cracks into the ground with a thud.
Twice keeps yanking until something dislocates.
He just watches as multiple Twices shove the asshole out of the way, and out of the room, leaving the rest of the medical staff quiet and going about their jobs as quickly as possible. The original nurse huffs under her breath, a small fanged smile tugging across her mouth.
That ends that type of joke permanently before they even got off the ground, everyone acting in a terrified professionalism that is far better than before.
Even now, even after everything, he had been ready to just laugh it off and continue on like it didn’t hurt, or make him feel less, but Twice isn’t, and wont.
Another dupe leans on Spinner’s good side, and makes fun of how trashed his costume is, and hovers over what the staff is doing, like a mother hen.
Having friends really is somewhat novel, and it makes smile like a psycho the whole time they are stitching up his arm and his neck and his face.
It takes longer than it should, as it always does but eventually it is over and he is sore and doesn’t feel great but at least he no longer has open holes in his skin.
When he finally convinces them to let him go back to the room with everyone else, Dabi is no longer in his chair, curled up in a miserable looking ball at the foot of Twice’s bed instead of taking one of the spares.
Aside from the doubles following him around, there are only a couple left in the room.
Spinner watches Twice, his eyes flickering from one double to another over and over again, like he is checking.
“We’re okay.” Spinner says, finally.
Twice, the original, mutters to himself about needing to be there, and is quickly cut off by the one holding on to Spinner.
“Why’ve you got to be so creepy?”
Spinner reaches out and tugs Twice’s mask back down the rest of the way.
“I’m gonna go watch the Boss. You’ve got these guys. You’re gonna keep ‘em safe. Not like they can do it themselves right now.”
Dabi must not be fully out, because he flips Spinner off, and Twice just looks up at him with those giant masked eyes and his stretched out in a grin.
“I’ve got this, nobody is gonna get in.”
“This room is open for business! Everybody get into the pool”
Spinner leaves the room before being dragged into the conversation, the clingiest double following him. Back in the Boss’s room, there is another Twice, glaring at the Doctors and letting Compress
lean against him, half asleep.
“Mister, My turn.”
Compress takes a while to get up, popping every bone in his body and taking his sweet time.
“Everything has been alarmingly calm, to be honest, but I could hear the racket you all were making.” He turns and looks down at his dazed looking Twice clone who oozes into non- existence as they watch, and Spinner looks back for his own, to see it also melting.
Hm. That’s a problem for someone else.
He side steps the ooze so it doesn’t end up in his shoes. A medic nearly slides in the mess of the one by Sako's feet.
“Do you think he finally allowed himself to give in to exhaustion?” Compress says, and his mask appears from a marble rolled between his fingers, sliding back in place. This one is one of the more decorative, a wide smile and one all seeing eye.
“Maybe Dabi convinced him to sleep.” Spinner answers and looks through the smaller collection of staff at work.
Shigaraki looks small, and terrifyingly pale. Lines run in and out of him, a bolted contraption hooks around his leg to make it stay in place, and his arm is bandaged up to his shoulder. Like with Toga, there has been an effort to clean him up, but his hair is still wild, and pale around his head, and dirt and blood still stand out against his skin. He’s silent, and his face is still and Spinner can’t help but think how wrong that feels. He’s trying to take in what all the machines are doing and what all has happened since he was gone when Compress starts chattering to him again.
“They said they are going to move him. He’ll get some big ridiculous private room while he isn’t even awake to enjoy it. Watch.”
Compress sounds entertained by the idea and both of them hover until the staff makes to actually move.
He gets moved just a bit down the hall, and Mister is right, it’s big and has disgustingly nice chairs and huge windows and fancy wall paper and all Spinner can imagine is Shigaraki trying to disintegrate the ugly opulent drapes.
Spinner sits down in one of those big stupid chairs, and the next thing he knows, he wakes up with a hospital blanket shoved in around him and Atsuhiro is gracefully draped over the chair on the opposite bed side, with his coat, hat, and vest all hung nicely on a peg.
The room is dark, and there is a quiet, constant beeping sound telling him that Shigaraki is alive, and he is well, and he is nearby.
He tries to stay awake.
Even itchy, and in his gear, and covered in enough grime to stain the blanket they’d dropped on him, he can’t do it.
He wakes again when the nurse comes to check on them all, and only just manages to stop the impulse to attack the unknown in the room.
Spinner watches as she works, and she turns a fanged smile to him on her way out.
It feels fake.
It feels like the rug is going to be yanked out again.
It feels like they didn’t really win.
It feels like they’re not really being taken seriously but…
But.
He smiles back.
-
“What is the grand plan, once the monster has been slain?”
Sako’s question hadn’t come from nowhere. Really they’d all been thinking it.
Shigaraki didn’t seem bothered in the slightest.
‘First, we’re not killing him, we’re adding him to the party.” He’d said, gesturing with the hand his ginger ale was in, not stopping what he was doing for a moment. “Then, once we get him, the doc is ours too, and all he’s been working on.”
He paused then.
Even though Spinner and the lot of them are watching him, it took a second to realize that Shigaraki was looking right at him, calculating as ever. His expression was hard to read, even with all the experience he’d been getting at the time.
He was not sure what he did to get the attention, but before he could decide what to do with it, Shigaraki continued, attention shifting back down to the food they had shoved at him.
“Then we get started on the fun part.”
Toga took that as reason to cheer, and Twice joined in being loud, and before he knew it, conversation moved on.
He thought about that look, every so often.
Trying to figure out what Shigaraki had been trying to see in him.
At the time, he didn’t know why it mattered so much.
But it did.
It did.