"The girl." His master said, which made Shigaraki shake internally.
He'd been hoping that subject wouldn't be brought up. Truly.
"Let me make one thing clear, Tomura. She is not the objective of your mission." His Sensei spoke more sternly than he usually did, his little 'student' straightening at the tone. "But if she is to get in your way-if you do end up needing to take her in order to escape..."
"Yes? Sensei?"
His master waited before finishing. Because he knew even after that short time you were both under his 'care', Tomura's attachment to you was stronger than he'd anticipated.
And though he did hate you for leaving him, that hatred was born from love.
"We will let her live Tomura- if she is captured." Shigaraki let a sigh of relief leave his chest, but he shouldn't have.
His master wasn't finished speaking.
"However." He said. "If you do take her, if she does speak to you, if you end bringing her back and she escapes?"
Shigaraki held his breath again, but he shouldn't have.
His master was never going to say what he wanted to hear.
"Then you will kill her."
"... Why?"
"Because there's something she doesn't know. And if she finds out-our mission against these heroes-it will become nearly impossible to win, do you understand?"
"..."
"Tomura."
"... Yes... I understand."
***
The forest itself never had much of a voice before. Mostly it was a place with passive creatures like trees and wind and whatever frolicked beneath the soil.
However, you soon learned that things were quite difficult to hear unless you took the time to learn their language.
Turned out Happy wasn't 'not' letting you in at all. You were just trying to transfer your quirk into his nerve cells, trying to force his system to adopt your view of the world.
But everyone knows if you try to force someone to see from your point of view, it never truly leads to an understanding.
You'd stopped fearing yourself long ago. Noticed that everyone who had feared your darkness wasn't so blinded that they couldn't appreciate your light.
You'd stopped pushing away your power, stopped trying to bury it. Accepted its existence, even acclimated to its own little language.
Now it was time to foster its growth, to let it become its own sort of unstoppable.
Standing with your hand against Happy's bark, you let out a sigh, shut your eyes for what seemed to be the hundred thousandth time. The roughness beneath your hand was made of cellulose, a combination of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in varying quantities.
Feeling the interactions between the atoms, you let your quirk flow past, sense and hear the contents within it- the water flowing through its vascular system, the cells exchanging copious amounts of hormones in order to communicate from root to leaf.
The sounds from Happy's body were interrupted, however.
Because in your own body, the one that was currently unguarded with its eyes closed-it felt two familiar hands.
They spread out on your back from behind, flowed around your waist, till two arms followed and wrapped around you too-one across your ribs, the other across your stomach.
