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The first time Tomura Shigaraki met Touya Todoroki, they were both nine years old and in elementary school.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" their teacher asked.
"I want to be a villain!" said young Tomura, oblivious to the weird looks he was getting from his classmates.
Heroes were for losers. His shitty foster dad didn't set a parental lock on TV, and he was always away. That, of course, meant that young and impressionable Tomura had watched all the stuff he shouldn't have, including movies about the cool anti-heroes, and TV series about how the heroes are actually the bad guys who perpetuate the oppressive establishment.
"Villains are bad people Tomura, you shouldn't want to be a villain," said the teacher.
She didn't understand. Heroes were the bad ones. No hero had ever come up to pick him up from the orphanage. Even his old dad had said that true heroes did not exist.
Thankfully, the bell rang and saved him from further scolding. As the classroom slowly emptied, the ever-serious boy with white hair walked up to him.
"I think villains are cool," he simply said, and the friendship between Touya Todoroki, a kid whose father believed only in the survival of the fittest, and Tomura Shigaraki, another equally fucked kid with equally fucked up father figure, was born.
Later that day, in the art class, Touya convinced him to drink paint water.
"That thing contains lots of chemicals. Maybe if you drink it, you will get superpowers like those guys in movies. Then you can be the greatest supervillain ever."
Needless to say, Tomura didn't get superpowers. Instead, he had to get his stomach pumped.
The first time Tomura Shigaraki met Himiko Toga was in middle school, and he was sitting in detention.
"Are you that guy that drank Gatorade from a Windex bottle just to get out of the class?" she asked him, turning around from her seat in front of him.
No. That was Touya, and the bastard had panicked because he had forgotten they had a geography quiz.
Tomura had aced the quiz because he was smart, unlike that idiot.
He got sent here because he was playing games on his phone during class. It wasn't his fault that everything was so tedious.
Still, it was an embarrassing thing to admit. So, he simply lied to look cool.
"Yeah," he shrugged.
"That's wicked!" she exclaimed, and the teacher tasked with watching over the little felons gave her a stink eye.
"Why are you here?" he asked just to spite the teacher more.
"Oh, I brought a knife to school and threatened to crave up some guys," she answered, and Tomura was impressed with the short girl and her maniacal grin.
"You should sit with us at lunch."
Maybe then he wouldn't have to listen to another one of Touya's gay crises alone.
"Sure thing."
And that's how Himiko joined their little band of misfits.
The first time he met Magne was when she sat with them at lunch, completely unprompted.
"Out of all the people in the cafeteria right now, you seem the least like assholes," she said and Toga squeaked in delight.
This was kind of a sad statement because they were definitely assholes, but they would never ever be that kind of assholes, and they quickly made room for her.
And that's how their little group grew from three to four.
They found Shuichi under their cafeteria table one day, playing games on the switch.
Out of respect for his fellow gamer, Tomura let him hang out with them.
(Totally not because those three other losers knew shit about video games, and Tomura desperately needed someone to talk to about all the side quests.)
Jin joined them in high school. He wasn't technically in their year, and Tomura wasn't sure the guy was even in their high school, but he sold the best weed in the entire area, so he was always invited to hang out with them in Touya's basement.
The thing was, Tomura wanted to destroy the world. The world had done nothing for him except hurt him repeatedly, kicking him while he was down.
Everything was horrible and everything hurt.
He hated his father, his foster father, his teachers, other people, and society itself.
The only people he didn't actively hate were currently sprawled across the ratty couch in Touya's basement. Touya's piece of shit father gave them the space to use because he could not stand to look at them, to even glance at his eldest son and his friends, and Tomura wanted to hurt the man very much.
Still, they made the space their own. Tomura had brought his state-of-the-art gaming system, and Touya had stolen Enji's credit card and bought them a fancy TV which of course didn't have any signal in the basement. Shuichi's contribution was the ugly armchair, and he refused to say where he had gotten it from, clumsily dodging the questions. Himiko had brought a Gerard Way body pillow which now occupied the special place on the couch that Jin and Magne had dragged from god knows which junkyard.
It wasn't much, but it was theirs. They were all weird people and Touya kicked their asses in Monopoly and Magne forced them to do quizzes in stupid teenage girl magazines she liked and Himiko painted their nails hot pink and spilled the polish on the couch and Jin played the most headache-inducing music known to man and Shuichi shook the coke bottle a little too much and it sprayed all across the ceiling.
One day Magne brought some acrylic paint and they all got stupidly high, and now they had a badly drawn giant lizard, a disturbingly detailed mutilated corpse, a giant magnet, a huge blue flame, a piece of abstract art nobody understood, and a pair of realistically drawn hands all up on their (Touya's?) walls.
They were all weird people but they were his.
All hell broke loose when Touya brought Takami with him one day. He had asked them earlier if it would be okay if he brought someone new to their trauma dump slash hanging-out nights, and they all agreed thinking he would bring a cardboard cutout of Heatchliff/Hamlet/his new high school literature hyper fixation.
So, Touya's excitement caught them all off guard. The guy almost spilled his (too expensive) beer all over the Clue board as soon as his phone rang, and practically ran out of the basement.
Touya didn't even run in their gym class. He only walked slightly faster when he was in danger of missing the bus.
Nobody expected that he would bring back freaking Keigo Takami in the flesh.
Everybody and their mother knew who Keigo Takami was, and even Himiko turned down her pop-punk I-am-surprised-the-singer-still-hasn't-been-cancelled music and stared at him right as walked down into their (Touya's?) basement.
The thing was, Keigo Takami had been dealt a shitty hand by life. Amazing grades and conveniently good looks apparently meant nothing when you were dirt poor. Takami senior's gambling debts were the talk of the town, and Mrs. Takami's inability to hold a job was not exactly a secret.
It was a tragedy really, in another life Keigo Takami could have been the prom king and the star of every high school sports team known to men, but, in this shitty one, his one shot at popularity was ruined by the ratty clothes, a dollar store shampoo, and five odd jobs he had to pick up just to survive.
At least Tomura had money to compensate for his shitty father figures.
Takami's frankly insane workload only contributed to his general elusiveness. The guy was too fast for his own good, constantly jumping from one job to another, and Tomura didn't know how Touya even managed to meet the guy.
"Nice to meet you guys. Touya told me a lot about you," Takami flashed them his best guy next door smile, and Tomura could already see Himiko and Jin were smitten.
Magne stood up and shook hands with him.
"He can stay," she proclaimed satisfied that Takami didn't flinch at the firmness of the handshake.
"I hope he told you good things about us," Shuichi said from his corner of the basement.
"Only the best," Takami winked.
Touya was melting into a puddle next to Takami, looking like a lovesick fool. This automatically made Tomura extremely wary of Takami because Touya only fell for the worst of the worst. Just last year the guy had a crush on Kai Chisaki out of all people. And that's not even taking into account his frankly disturbing taste in fictional characters.
So, right off the bat, Tomura concluded that something must be seriously wrong with Takami. The guy had an appealing backstory, he would admit that much, but Touya liking him was a serious red flag.
Others seemed charmed too. Fuck.
Well, this was going to blow up in their faces.
"You must be Tomura, Touya told me you are grumpy," Takami smiled at him, and he felt like a ray of sunshine burned him across the face.
This was going to be worse than he thought.
A week passed, and now Takami sat with them at lunch. He seemed to fit into their little misfit group seamlessly, the charming bastard he was.
When Tomura had asked him where he had spent his lunch breaks before joining them, Takami shrugged and replied that he had usually just gone to the library to study.
That was really sad and Tomura didn't have the energy to be pissed at him during lunch.
Tomura's trusty car had died at GameStop parking lot, and he didn't want to call an Uber because it would be an uncomfortable affair, and he hated the awkward small talk.
(He also maxed his credit card)
So that left him with three options.
Option number one: walk nine miles with all the games and streaming equipment he had bought. Somebody could rob him. Also, it was all heavy and Tomura skipped every gym class he could.
Option number two: use public transport. Significant danger of sweaty people pressed all close in overcrowded bus like sardines in a can. Worse than Uber. Just no.
Option number three: call someone to pick him up. This seemed like the best option. But who? There weren't that many people Tomura talked with on a regular basis.
His piece-of-shit foster father was out of the question.
Kurogiri and Atsuhiro were working.
Himiko didn't have a driver's license. Shuichi, on the other hand, did have a driver's license, but he thought all the stop signs were merely suggestions. How he had gotten his hands on a license, nobody knew. Jin failed his driving exam four times already. Magne had a swimming club practice.
That process of elimination, unfortunately, left him with Touya.
Touya wasn't a bad driver per se, but he got motion sickness easily and usually drove so slowly that you could walk beside his car. He also played his atrocious playlists. It was agony.
He knew what he had to do, but he didn't know if he had the strength to do it. The hardest choices required the strongest wills.
With a heavy heart, he dialed Touya's number.
"I'll be there in five," the edge lord said, and Tomura knew something was wrong.
It usually took Touya at least twenty-five minutes to drive to the center of their small town and that's if the stars aligned and all the traffic lights were green.
But Touya, to his credit, arrived in exactly five minutes, driving Enji's stupidly expensive car he probably took without asking, and Tomura thought that god perhaps stopped hating him.
He put his stuff in the truck and walked up to the passenger seat.
"That seat is reserved," Touya simply said.
The bastard looked nicer than usual, his hair freshly dyed, and his officially licensed The Misfits shirt was actually clean.
Tomura had an idea where this was going and he didn't like it.
"For the ghost of your dignity?"
"No, for Keigo. I promised to pick him up after he is done with his tutoring job."
Takami was Touya's math tutor, Tomura had learned. That's how they met, after Enji had hired Takami in a desperate attempt to stop Touya from failing trigonometry and embarrassing the Todoroki family name even further (something Touya actively strived towards with glee). Tomura was frankly surprised that Enji had hired Takami because Enji didn't exactly hide the fact that he hated poor people, but he was probably that desperate.
Tomura didn't really care that Touya was failing trigonometry, but he had offered him his notes a couple of times and the bastard was too lazy to even copy them.
The thing was, Tomura was ninety-three percent sure that Touya was failing it just for the drama.
"I've known you for eight years now, and you banish me to the back seat that easily."
"Stop whining and be grateful I even came to pick you up."
Couldn't argue with that.
Still, he decided to give him the silent treatment and spam the secret group chat that Toga had made about Touya's love life.
It was called Touya's Angels <333 for fucks sake.
The backseat of Enji's fancy car was clinically clean, missing all of the signs of life Tomura got used to while driving with Atsuhiro and Kurogiri. Enji's Tesla was the newest model, but Tomura knew for a fact that he never rode in it with his family.
ヾ(＾∇＾) Ask him about Keigo!! ╰(✿´⌣`✿)╯♡
No.
Pretty please? (,,◕ ⋏ ◕,,)
He wasn't speaking to that dirty ass traitor. What happened to bros before hoes?
"Tomura?"
He looked through the car window and feigned interest in the urban scenery.
"Tomura?"
The city sure was an ugly sight. All that human filth and grimy buildings filled him with-
"Tomura, I swear to god, if you continue to act like a fucking five-year-old child I'm going to kick you out of my car and then your bitchy ass can walk-"
That threat did invoke fear in Tomura's heart, for Enji's car was pretty comfortable and warm.
"What is it, Touya dearest?" he said in the sweetest voice imaginable.
Touya didn't take the bait.
"Do you think I look … good?" his tone was surprisingly hesitant.
That was a stupid question because, for one, Tomura couldn't see how he looked from the back seat, and for two, Takami wasn't going to care about that. He had observed the bastard over the last two weeks and he could confidently say that Takami was just as infatuated with Touya as Touya was with him.
The part of him wanted to respond something in the vein of You look like you crawled out of the dumpster and he would usually say just that, but Touya was his (best) oldest friend and this was clearly important to him.
So, he made an active, conscious choice that went against his evil nature.
"Yeah. Too good for Takami actually."
He still didn't trust Takami. There had to be something wrong with that guy and, dammit, and Tomura is going to figure out what.
"That's bullshit, but I appreciate the sentiment, " Touya snorted with laughter.
"You ask for my humble opinion and then you shit all over it."
"There is nothing humble about you and you know it," Touya sounded relaxed again.
Takami was waiting for them at the parking lot, wearing Touya's Dead Kennedys t-shirt, and his face immediately lit up the moment he saw Touya through the car window.
Yeah, Takami didn't care in the slightest if Touya looked presentable. He was just happy to see him.
Just as Takami entered Enji's stupid overpriced car and Touya smiled all disgustingly and called him Kei without any shame whatsoever, something horrible crossed Tomura's mind.
I think Takami is Touya's sugar baby.
His phone proceeded to blow up.
Takami and his perfect eyeliner were well on the way of becoming a fixture in their sorry lives and Tomura didn't like it.
They were spending their free period outside together (well some of them were skipping class but that's neither here nor there). Touya was smoking his stupidly expensive cigarettes because of course he was and others were mooching off him.
"Are you really Touya's sugar baby?" Himiko just had to break their bliss.
"Well, I can be," the bastard winked. No shame whatsoever.
Touya started choking on the cigarette smoke, and Jin, the angel he was, just patted his back while Magne and Shuichi burst out laughing.
Tomura couldn't believe he willingly hung out with these people.
Enji had some political gathering in his house and he didn't want his campaign donors to see his eldest son or his "freak" friends anywhere near the house.
Tomura wanted to crash the party. He wanted to scream at Enji, he wanted to scream at his own piece of shit foster father, he wanted to destroy Enji's house brick by brick.
But, it was also Touya's house, and Touya wanted to let it go for now. Tomura was ninety-nine percent sure that Takami had talked Touya out of burning the entire thing down but alas, he had no proof.
So that's how they all ended up in the parking lot behind the local convenience store on a fine Saturday evening (it was one in the morning).
Jin was pushing Himiko around in a shopping cart as fast as he could while Shuichi and Magne were sitting in the corner getting high. Somebody had brought a portable speaker and set up a playlist consisting of only Five Nights at Freddy's fan songs. Tomura didn't even know who had done it.
They had paid some homeless guy to buy them copious amounts of alcohol and Tomura was currently smashing the empty bottles against the pavement edge. That mindless destruction seemed to calm him down.
Touya was playing with his lighter. He was burning random shit he found in the trash can while Takami was sitting on the pavement, in his ratty jeans, completely mesmerized by flame.
"If your boy toy is so into arson, I'm surprised he didn't let you burn down the house."
Touya looked confused at that.
"I didn't want to burn down the house."
"You're letting Enji get away with this?"
"I'm not letting dear dad get away with anything. I just have a plan. I'm going to expose him the moment I'm out of that house. Burning the whole thing down would just paint me in the bad light."
That was a surprisingly coherent train of thought.
Himiko giggled as Jin pushed the shopping cart next to them. Takami quickly sprang to his feet and helped her get out.
"You should dance with me!" she appeared to still be dizzy from the shopping cart ride.
"As the lady wants," Takami said and took her hand. Even though they were both dizzy and a little drunk, they moved graciously.
"They are good dancers! Not fair! I wanted to dance!" Jin was getting sad and Tomura didn't like it when Jin was getting sad. Damn, all this alcohol sure made him emotional.
"You should dance with Touya. I know for a fact that he had ballroom dancing lessons."
"No way. He is going to step on my Doc Martens. And I don't dance."
That last part was added in haste and Tomura suspected that Touya would sing a different tune if Takami asked him.
"I'll dance with you, Jin," Magne piped up.
Everything seemed to be perfect, too perfect, and suddenly, as every single thing in Tomura's sad life, it all came crashing down.
They heard a police siren.
Somebody called the cops on them.
Everybody froze and Jin turned down the speaker and Tomura started to plan how they were all going to scatter-
"Let me," Takami was the first to speak up. His whole demeanor changed, gone was the flirty and charming boy next door, and in front of them stood a serious young man with weary eyes.
Before anyone had a chance to speak, he walked up to the police car and started talking with the cop who just exited.
"What is he doing?" Shuichi broke the silence that followed.
"Oh, he is probably blackmailing the cop," Touya smiled all mysteriously, that bastard.
"He will get arrested. I hope he gets arrested," Jin said.
"You can't be serious," Magne added.
"He is ruthless. Just wait and see."
They stood around awkwardly for five minutes, all ready to flee at the slightest hint of trouble (well, all except Touya who was as relaxed as ever) when Takami returned.
"We can continue, all is good," Takami simply said as the police car drove away.
This guy singlehandedly talked the cop into leaving them alone. He was impossible.
"What was that?" Tomura demanded to know.
"Cops come to my house often, I know how to talk to them."
Touya started laughing at that while the others (including Tomura himself) just stared at Takami.
"What dirt did you have on him?"
"Nothing. I just mowed his lawn a couple of times during the summer."
"Sure thing."
Then it finally came crashing into their heads.
"HOLY SHIT KEIGO BLACKMAILED A COP FOR US!" Himiko screeched (Tomura was glad, for silent Himiko indeed made him sad).
"You're my hero," Shuichi whispered and that weed must really be hitting him by now.
"Come dance with me! Don't do it, you are a horrible dancer!" Jin grabbed Keigo by hand and Magne turned on the music.
"You are doing tango with me next, birdbrain!" Touya yelled after them and Tomura started laughing.
Smashed bottles lay forgotten.
He didn't want to go home. Instead, he called Kurogiri and Atsuhiro and stayed with them for a night, in the tiny apartment they owned, above their bakery.
It felt more like a home than his own house ever did.
They were back in their basement and Keigo betrayed Jin in Risk after pretending to be his ally.
Touya's youngest brother knocked up a couple of times, and Touya actually left to talk with him, which would have been an unimaginable thing just a couple of months ago, but now it was reality.
"They kicked me out for playing dirty," Keigo sat next to him. That was bullshit, betrayal was a crucial part of the game. They all cheated anyway, Tomura knew for a fact. Keigo was just too much of a threat so they banished him to the couch of shame.
Tomura was banished a long time ago for flipping the table.
"My mother tried to sell me for meth once, " Keigo said completely unprompted.
"Why are you trauma dumping all of a sudden?"
He was taking after Touya. They were both bastards who deserved each other.
"I'm trying to bond with you."
"And you choose to trauma dump?"
Well, they did have trauma dumping nights.
"You don't like me," he shrugged his shoulders.
That was not true. At least not anymore. He was still confused by him, but Keigo had proven that he belonged to their little group. Tomura just didn't know how the guy had the energy to put on a mask after everything he had been (and still was going) through. He didn't understand why.
"Aren't you angry at the world?"
He had to understand.
He had to understand how to be less angry.
"Of course I am."
That answer confused him even more.
"Then why don't you want to destroy everything?"
Keigo smiled at that.
"Because I want to improve the world. Make it better for people like me," he looked at those idiots still playing risk, " for people like us."
Perhaps he should redirect his anger. Perhaps he should start planning like Touya.
Perhaps there was something in that.
"My foster father basically kidnapped me," he started just as Touya and his youngest brother kicked the door down, holding a bunch of pizzas and chatting loudly.
Magne brought her acrylic paint again and Keigo added a set of beautiful red wings to their wall.
He also accidentally spilled the red paint across the floor, and now Touya's basement looked like a crime scene.
He was an idiot, but he was theirs.