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In the dark, it doesn’t take long to become the only person in the world.
Voices echo down the length of the tunnel sometimes, muffled against the cacophony stuffing his head. If he focuses he can see the figures shuddering in the murky oval of light, drifting by the entrance but never drawing closer. That’s fine. He doesn’t need more noise anyways.
Time passes in the same manner that the melted stump of his left hand whittles away. Warts and pus crack apart the prosthetic plug, peeling away with the remains of metal and baked skin until there’s only grey lumps left where his hand cut off. When sensation pales long enough to feel like lucidity, he can scratch at it and the bits will gather beneath his fingernails, callused and sticky all at once.
The spiraling monotony of it all only breaks when he wakes to meat and tacky half-dried blood scraped across the stone ground, and a heft of bandages pinched clumsily around his hand.
It’s still warm, the gauze—an awkward scratch against the skin. Feels less awful than the itch stabbing up through his throat or the whispers grating his eardrums. Curling his unscathed hand around the knob of bandages, he tucks his hands close to his chest, like he’s shielding a flickering flame against the dark instead of blood and fever. It’s stimuli, if nothing else.
Then his palm itches.
Barely noteworthy at first, because every part of him demands a relief that he can't provide. But the itch builds, confident in its trappings until he starts picking at the edges, tearing through the strips, decay the fucking thing until he can dig his fingers in and smother the itch, pulling at the creases until his palm is flayed open.
When he stops screaming it’s with a jagged click of the throat, locking the itch back where it came from. An ache endures, regeneration working in oozing pulses around the fingernails that have splintered off and cemented in. He stays hunched over, clawing stiffly into the deadened hand the way pests like rats and spiders and people curl in rigor mortis, remembering how to breathe.
He unfurls his hands. Father stares back.
You DIE, Tenko sobs. When the cloud of viscera clears the hand is already bubbling back up, Grandma asks him not to cry and he's not, it’s just that his eyes have split and spilled. Grandpa swells up beside her at the wrist, offering to dry his tears. Dregs of light flicker distantly as he throws his living hand again, and in that moment of shadow Mother bursts forth, flopping over his shoulders with a wail.
The hole that Ujiko had drilled into his palm weeps, open and drooling. He rips at it again and again just so it stops gaping at the butchery, but the meat keeps burgeoning back up through the fractures until there’s enough of Hana forming to reach for his other hand.
Lashing out, he shoves them back and down and back and down. The pink pulp rots grey quick, only to flush again with new life as the regeneration picks up. Again he attacks, the ragged remains of his fingernails cleaving open muscle with the intent of just hollowing himself out, drip the voices out with the ichor. But the every gash just sags open, asking him in a wet gasp why, why is he sad, why is he doing this, don’t ever forget—
“—me! Shigaraki, can you hear me?!”
As if all his tendons had snapped one by one, Shigaraki slumps over the side, pulling in a long shivering breath. Suddenly, he’s hyperaware of the world outside the bounds of his body—the flakes and dust stinging at his skin, the shuddering echoes off the walls, the smell of must and decay. Exhausted, he jerked his left arm out of the mound of gore slopped across the stone, regeneration already knitting together the chunks of his arm where it peels away from the growths.
To the side, Spinner skitters down from where he’d clung against the tunnel ceiling, picking his way past the puddles of blood and sloughed off flesh until he hovers at Shigaraki’s side. “Are you. Um. Okay?”
Shigaraki grunts, keeping Spinner in the corner of his eye but otherwise not moving from his sunken position on the ground. Didn’t take long for Spinner to start squirming, unable to let things just lie. Eventually, he kneels down beside Shigaraki, pulling a blackened hand from his pocket. “Do you—want this?”
His grasp on it is awkward, like he’s never been able to hold a hand without it pulling away, or accidentally scratching it. But it's more mindful than how Shigaraki would handle it. He doesn't know if he wants to slap it across his face or throw toss it all the way to the other end of the tunnel, where it can’t seize anyone again.
Shigaraki takes the hand, settles it on his lap. Spinner’s hand lingers in the air, hesitant, before lighting down to brush against the side of his downturned palm.
For a split, savage second, Shigaraki wants to give the hand back. Shove it into his chest if Spinner’s so desperate to feel full. Give this silly sentimental creature exactly what he wants, so he can stop dragging these ghosts back and carrying them in his pocket, then jam his claws into his ears, scrape out the crumbling remains of his brain.
“Did you see them?” It’s a stupid question, and Spinner’s grimace confirms it. There’s no faces in the carnage around, no mouths or weeping eyes. Fingers are scattered about with all their brittle bones, but no hands whole except the one weighing down his thighs.
Spinner carefully rubs his thumb into the swollen, fleshy part of his palm, touch firm even as he shakes. This close, he can see blood and strings of skin splattered on his scales, and wonders how long Spinner helplessly watched as Shigaraki tore this wretched body apart. “Anything I can do?”
“Not really,” Shigaraki says. The itch is gone, at least.