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scary-grace · 21 days

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Skin Hunger - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

There's no such thing as a good night at work when you work in the world's most infamous brothel for monsters, but your night takes a turn for the worse when you find yourself serving drinks to visiting half-vampire Shigaraki Tomura. You don't mean to catch his interest, and you don't mean to start a conversation. You definitely don't mean to get him drunk. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Chapter 1

The ringing of one of the dozens of bells on the wall in your boss’s office startles you out of the reverie you’ve fallen into. It isn’t much of a reverie – you were daydreaming about getting out of here, like always – but at the sound of the bell, you snap to attention. You know what a ringing bell means, even before your boss looks up at you from behind his desk and gives the order. “Suite Twelve needs a mop-up. Get to it.”

You check the floor plan out of habit, and your heart sinks. “Suite Twelve is still in use.”

“And? Clearly they aren’t ready to let the party end, and they’re paying by the hour.” Overhaul shrugs. “It’s not your concern. All you need to be concerned with is not interrupting, and we both know you’re capable of that.”

You bow your head. “Yes, sir.” The warlock looks away, back down to the grimoire he’s studying, and you risk another question. “Who was in there tonight?”

“That’s Chrono’s concern, not mine,” Overhaul says. “Why don’t you go find out?”

You know a dismissal when you hear it. “Yes, sir,” you say again, and you step out of Overhaul’s office, your glamour already settling over you.

A glamour is small magic, and as the lesser variety of half-fey, it’s all you’re capable of – but it’s enough to make your job easier, and to make you Overhaul’s go-to for dealing with disasters in progress. Other maids are obtrusive, no matter how hard they try not to be, and going into a room with a session in progress means risking their lives in addition to the worker’s. But your faint glamour allows you to slip in and out of the rooms unnoticed, clearing away the messes and the injuries. And the evidence. There’s always a lot of evidence. The patrons of the inhuman world’s most infamous brothel find themselves here for a reason, and it’s not because they’re careful.

You learned one side of the story in school in the human world, when you could pass as human, but Overhaul insisted that you learn the rest. You could recite it by heart by now. Humans have always outnumbered inhumans, but for thousands of years, the power held by inhumans – magic, physical strength, other natural gifts – was enough to allow them to act as they wished, without fear of retaliation. When human society advanced, that changed. The inhumans who could do so retreated to their own realms, but some inhumans are too intertwined with humanity to withdraw completely. Something had to be done to prevent their extinction.

The way Overhaul tells it, it was all his idea, two hundred years ago – creating a place for inhumans to satisfy their urges, contained away from humanity and outside of humanity’s control. You’re not sure if it was really his idea, but either way, it stuck. There are places like this one all across the world, in netherworlds and pocket dimensions, places where inhumans come to play or fight or fuck or feed. For some inhumans, in some cases, it’s all four.

Suite Twelve is on the fifth floor, and tonight it contains one of at least nine packs of werewolves. When you stop outside the door, you can hear them even through the soundproofing – human-sounding laughter and inhuman howls and the kind of noises that emanate from the rooms and suites every night of the year. It sounds like nothing you want anything to do with, but it’s the job. You raise your wrist, tapping your master rune against the locking rune on the door. It disables instantly, and you slip through the door without a sound.

You see instantly why one of the guests rang the bell for a clean-up. There’s a body on the floor – the body of one of the workers, a man you recognize only vaguely. He must be new. Then again, most of the workers aren’t here long enough for you to get to know them. You slip around the edges of the room, trusting your glamour, until you’re alongside the body. Legs askew, torso flayed open to the air, eyes wide and staring – sometimes the workers who die on the job have the luxury of an unexpected death, but this man saw it coming from kilometers away. Did he try to stop it? You lift one of his hands idly, checking for defensive wounds, and get one hell of a scare when his hand twitches in yours.

He’s alive. The worker is still alive, and your priorities shift in a heartbeat. This isn’t a corpse you can tip down the disposal trapdoor before you mop up the blood. Overhaul can heal any injury, even injuries as bad as this, which means you need to get the worker out of here and down to Overhaul’s study as soon as possible. But your glamour only covers you, and if the werewolves who mauled this guy half to death realize they didn’t finish the job, you’ll be in trouble, too. And there isn’t much time to solve the problem. If you wait too much longer, the worker will die right before your eyes.

If you had real magic, you’d apply your glamour to your voice and lull the werewolves into calmness, rendering them insensate to any noise the dying man might make as you drag him to the door, but you don’t have real magic. Charming seven werewolves is outside your abilities. Charming one dying man into staying still and quiet is within them. You whisper the instruction in his ear – stay quiet, stay still – and hook your hands under his armpits, dragging him across the floor and leaving a smear of blood in his wake.

There’s no way a party this large only had one worker with them. You force yourself to take a good look at the occupants of Suite Twelve, and in amongst the hulking, heavily-furred bodies of the werewolves, you spot human limbs, human skin. Strands of human hair woven through a wolf’s claws as it cups the back of the worker’s head. Human hands gripping one wolf’s shoulders, human legs hooked gingerly around its waist. At least three additional workers, and none of them are bleeding excessively. The part of you that’s human doesn’t like it, but the rest of you leaves without another look.

In the hallway, you call for help. Each floor of Asylum has a bouncer, hired specifically by Overhaul to deal with that floor’s usual patrons. “Rappa,” you call out. “Over here!”

Rappa’s footsteps are heavy as he comes down the hall towards you. “A fight?”

“Sorry,” you say. Even behind Rappa’s mask, you can tell he’s frowning. You’ve heard that when Overhaul hired him, he promised him a lot of fights to break up, but most of Asylum’s patrons are too frightened of the prospect of getting banned to fight much. “I’m supposed to mop up and the guy’s still alive. Can you take him to Overhaul?”

Rappa tilts his head, confused. “The boss can fix this?”

“If he gets to him in time.” You try to hold Rappa’s attention. It’s not easy. “I can’t get him there fast enough. You’re the only one who can save him.”

“He’s human. Why do you care?”

Your jaw clenches involuntarily, and you feel your glamour ripple. “I’m half-human,” you say. “So are you.”

Overhaul and his right-hand man are both pure human, extending their lives and augmenting their bodies with magic, but almost everyone else in Asylum’s management structure is a half-breed of some kind. Rappa is half-giant, and unlike you, he’s unambiguously proud of his inhuman heritage. Appealing to what he considers as the weak side of himself was a stupid move, but you’re getting desperate, and you try again. “If you help him, I’ll make sure you get the next fight, even if somebody else is in charge of the floor.”

You should have started with that. Rappa’s eyes light up. “Deal,” he says, and hoists the injured worker up, ignoring your requests to be careful. “Make sure it’s a good fight.”

You’ll get Rappa a fight to break up if you have to start one yourself, but you probably won’t have to. “It’s a full moon. All the fights are good.”

Rappa laughs and thunders off down the hall, leaving you to your actual job. You still have a mop-up in Suite Twelve, and possibly a worse one than you left, depending on what’s happened between your exit and right now. You call up your glamour again, confirming that it’s still intact, and tap the locking rune on the door to deactivate it once again. You might have saved somebody’s life, maybe, but that’s not your job here. Your real job is cleaning blood and bodily fluids off of every surface in Suite Twelve before they have time to set in. As the proprietor of the world’s oldest and most infamous inhuman oasis, your boss can tolerate a lot of things – but a mess isn’t one of them.

Most of the people who serve guests or work menial jobs in the oases are here as a last resort, and you’re no different. If you had somewhere else to be, you’d be there. You suppose you could have looked for work in another oasis, but when it comes down to it, you prefer the devil you know to the devil you don’t. You were born inside Asylum’s walls, the daughter of a worker and a faery guest, and although your mother scraped together the money to send you to boarding school in the human world, you’ve never had anywhere but Asylum to come back to. You coming back was a foregone conclusion. You could pass for human in childhood and adolescence, but in the last year or so, the truth’s begun to crawl its way out from beneath your skin. Asylum is your home. You can’t leave. And if you’re here, you might as well work.

No night in Asylum is easy, but full-moon nights are the worst, and the mop-up you’re called to do in Suite Twelve isn’t even close to the last task you’re called in to take care of. A patrilineal half-fey like you has next to no magical ability, but in Overhaul’s employ, you make use of all of it – glamour on your body to conceal you as you sneak in and out of the rooms and suites and hot springs, glamour on your voice to soothe tense guests until a bouncer or a member of Management can arrive to make amends more officially, spilling a drop or two of your own blood to distract an overwrought lich long enough to pry the worker it’s draining out of its grip. You get Rappa the fight he’s after – a brawl between two rival werewolf packs over a worker they both took a shine to – and as you’re helping clean up the mess, he gives you some news.

“Overhaul patched up the human you rescued,” he says, and for a brief moment, you feel better. “He’s already back to work.”

Feeling good doesn’t last. Good things don’t last in Asylum. You take a brief moment to wash your hands in the water of a hot-spring, then wander off to Room 309 on the demon floor. There’s been an orgy going on since the full moon broke the horizon in the farthest-eastern human time zone, and demon cum stains something awful.

You’ve heard from guests who’ve visited other oases that those oases have off-hours, but Asylum doesn’t. Asylum serves creatures of the night, so as long as it’s daylight somewhere on earth, Asylum will be open to receive them. When you asked Overhaul why, he pointed you towards the dictionary definition of the word ‘asylum’ – a place of refuge, a safe harbor. Then another book levitated off the shelf and dropped at your feet, shedding dust. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

You remember looking at it, confused. “Sir?”

“The other definition of the word,” Overhaul said. “They’re all mad here.”

It was a misquote, and you think the original is more accurate. We’re all mad here – Overhaul for building this place, the guests for coming to it, and you, for staying here instead of going somewhere, anywhere else.

The demon mop-up takes forever. By the time it’s done, you smell like smoke and sulfur, and there are still six hours left in the night. Chrono sends you to change into a clean uniform, then corrals you as you’re coming out of the servants’ quarters with wet hair. “Change of plans. You’re needed in the lounge.”

“What?” You know how to tend bar, sure – but not on a full moon night. “Why?”

Chrono doesn’t answer you, and you should know better than to ask questions. “Man the bar for the rest of the shift. You’ll receive instructions from Overhaul or myself if you’re needed elsewhere.”

You nod and set off, but Chrono grabs your arm again. “Change out of that uniform first. You’re front of house for now. Dress like it.”

The front of house uniform isn’t all that different than the uniform you wear on a nightly basis – just tighter and more modern, and with a mask of some kind over it. The higher-up somebody is in Overhaul’s organization, the more elaborate their mask is, but front-of-house wears simple half-masks, enough to match the aesthetic but not enough to obscure the face. You grab a simple black one on your way out of the servants’ quarters, tying it behind your head with a ribbon as you step into the lounge.

It’s empty, as usual. You’re not even sure why Overhaul keeps it open – most of Asylum’s guests don’t come here to drink, and the ones who do can order it brought to their rooms directly – but it’s been here as long as Asylum’s been standing, and just like the rest of Asylum, it’s never closed. Whoever was in charge before Chrono called you in left sort of a mess. Eight or nine dirty tankards, a sticky spill on one corner of the bar counter, and a solitary pickle balanced on top of an empty bottle of vodka. Given what you’ve been cleaning up all night, it could be a lot worse.

The cleaning goes quickly, and then you move on, filling out the restock sheet Chrono’s left for you underneath the ledger where you’d write guests’ orders, if there were any orders. An hour in, Room 512 calls for drinks – one Corpse Reviver, one Zombie, and three El Diablos – and you’re still working on them when the server arrives to bring them up. “Hey, make it snappy, huh? They’re not in a mood to wait.”

“I’m working on it.” You set down the El Diablos and start pouring shots of rum for the Zombie. “Is whoever’s in 512 actually undead, or do they just have a weird sense of humor?”

“Door number two. It’s one of those laughing demons.” Setsuno’s been working here at least as long as you have, but he looks unsettled behind his mask. “You know, the kind who want a performance.”

“I’m guessing the workers ordered the drinks, then?” You wait for Setsuno to confirm it. “Do you know which is the guest’s?”

“The Corpse Reviver,” Setsuno says. You strain the Zombie one-handed and go fishing for the components for the last drink. “Why?” “Are the workers holding up okay?” you ask. Setsuno looks blankly at you. “Did they seem scared or panicked at all?”

“Oh. Yeah. The youngest one looked pretty spooked.” Setsuno holds out his hand and the first four drinks fly from your end of the bar to settle onto his tray. “Are you going to be done with that last one any time this century?”

“Almost.” You’re trying to decide which of the components of the drink will be easiest to hide a glamour on. The gin? The Cointreau? The Lillet blanc? They’re all strong flavors, but demons aren’t easy to trick. It needs to look like a mistake, so that if you’re caught, it’ll reflect on you and not the workers. “Just a second –”

“Hey,” Setsuno protests, as you pluck a maraschino cherry out of a jar by the stem and wrap a glamour around it. “Does the boss know you’re putting spells on the guests?”

“They’re not spells.” Overhaul knows. In fact, he encourages it – your weak glamours, applied here and there, put the brakes on problems that would otherwise require management’s intervention before they can begin. You drop the cherry in the glass and hold it out to Setsuno. “Here. Let me know if they need anything else.”

“Will do.” Setsuno glances around the lounge and sighs. “Man, I wish I had this gig. It’s a nice spot for a break.”

“You’re telling me. I used to nap here when I was little.”

Setsuno stares at you. “What?”

You shouldn’t have said that. You cringe, and Setsuno takes a step closer – but then another order unfolds itself on the bar counter, and you turn away, thankful for the distraction. When you look up again, there’s a different server waiting, and you breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not that you’re ashamed of growing up here. You just don’t want to spread it around.

Overhaul has strict rules about birth control amongst Asylum’s female workers, but with so much magic in play, things happen sometimes. Usually it results in an abortion – the workers, most of whom are human, want nothing to do with a half-human child – but every so often, a worker decides to keep the baby. The consequences of that depend on the inhuman parent. Werewolves, for instance, treat children they’ve sired with a worker the same as they’d treat children they sire with their mate, and no parent wants their child growing up in Asylum. Workers who get knocked up by werewolves usually leave, becoming part of the pack��s orbit as they raise their children. Workers who get knocked up by demons, on the other hand, typically go into hiding. Demons like their children. A little too much.

Faeries aren’t common guests at Asylum, which means your mother knew who your father was, even though she never told you. Overhaul knows, too, but you’ve never asked him. It doesn’t matter. Faeries as a rule look down on half-fey, and if you ever tried to visit a faery realm, you’d be thrown out at best and enslaved at worst. Only some inhumans are capable of siring or bearing children, and of those species, faeries are among the most disinterested. The only inhumans who take less interest in their half-human offspring are the inhumans least likely to come to Asylum.

You’ve just sent off yet another order of drinks, this time to a siren in Room 129 who really wants his worker to loosen up, and you’re in the middle of adding an instruction to the restock sheet when someone barks a question at you from the other side of the counter. “Does this place have WiFi?”

Guests have been asking you questions since you were old enough to talk, but in the twenty-three years you’ve lived in Asylum, you’ve never heard anybody ask that. You look up from the restock sheet and find the guest in question staring back at you. “What?”

“WiFi. Do you have it?” The guest brandishes a smartphone at you. A really nice smartphone, in a pale hand with dry skin and ragged nails. “Do you even know what WiFi is?”

“I know what it is. We don’t have it,” you say, and the guest swears. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try to use your phone in here at all. The flux field will fry your battery if you don’t turn it off.”

The guest’s eyes narrow slightly. The skin around them is dry and itchy-looking, and his irises themselves are red. He powers off his phone and glances around the lounge, eyes lingering on the light fixtures, on the faucet, on the scrying mirrors that act as a security system and the locking runes on the doors. “Nothing in here is electric,” he says. “It can’t be, if the flux field’s strong enough to fuck up my phone.”

You nod. “You should tell people that when they come in,” the guest says. He looks at his powered-off phone, grimacing. “This was new.”

“If you haven’t been in here long and you haven’t been using it, it should be fine,” you say. The guest doesn’t answer, just tucks his phone into his pocket and crosses his arms over his chest, and the silence goes from neutral to awkward in roughly seven seconds.

It’s the kind of situation you’d bail out of instantly anywhere else – you spend enough time being uncomfortable at your job that you’ve got no patience for discomfort in other situations. But you are at your job, which means you have a built-in conversation topic. “Can I get you a drink?”

“What?”

“A drink.” You gesture at the bar, and the guest’s eyes track your hand. “We have everything.”

“You don’t,” the guest says, and then orders champagne. You’re pretty sure every bar on the planet has champagne. “How do you know I can pay for it?”

“They opened up a tab on you when you came through the door.” You find a bottle of champagne and the correct glass – Chrono saw you pour it into a wine glass once and gave you hell – and pour. “And they gave you a passkey. Show it to me?”

He has it looped around his wrist. You copy the symbol into the ledger and write down the order and the price. The guest is leaning across the bar to watch you, getting much closer than you’d like, and he makes a surprised sound when the order you’ve written melts from the page. “Magic,” he says, and you nod. You’re not sure why he’s so surprised. Then: “You’re charging that much for a glass of champagne? This had better be the best champagne in the world.”

“You tell me.” You slide the glass across the bar and watch as he raises it to his lips.

He’s got to be some kind of inhuman, or part-inhuman – no human makes it through the door as a guest, unless they’re packing some heavy magic. You’d say he was a magic-user of some kind, a warlock or an occultist, except he was too surprised by the flux field and resultant lack of WiFi to be someone who works with magic regularly. Half-demon, maybe. He has blue-grey hair to go with his red eyes, worn long enough to brush his shoulders and slightly too tousled to have done it purposely. His clothes are formal – white shirt, black vest, black pants, black tie. The look should come with a suit jacket, but it doesn’t. Guests don’t exactly show up to Asylum in their pajamas, but it’s rare to see one come in dressed to the nines.

The guest finishes half the glass of champagne and sets it down on the bar. He glances at you and you raise your eyebrows. “Well?”

“Pretty good,” the guest says. “Still not worth what you’re charging.”

“It’s an import,” you say. Technically, everything’s an import when it’s coming to a pocket dimension. “And it was good enough for you to drink half of it.”

“Not much else to do.” The guest takes out his phone, scowls when he realizes it’s powered off, then sits down at a barstool. “What’s with the mask?”

“It’s part of the uniform,” you say. Your usual uniform is a hideous old-time maid outfit, but the front-of-house uniform is sleeker, and the mask is just the icing on the cake. You like how you look in this much more than you do in the other uniform, but that lasts only as long as it takes you to remember that guests like you in it, too. “Everybody has one.”

“Why? It’s not like it hides your face.”

“I don’t know. The aesthetic, maybe?” You have your own pet theory – something about Overhaul being older than you think, and picking up his germophobia during the Black Death – but you don’t know for sure. “It’s the boss’s thing.”

“Yeah, no kidding. He looks like a fucking toucan.”

You almost choke on thin air, and while you’re struggling not to laugh, the guest keeps talking. “I was supposed to stay with my master – to learn – but he kicked me out. What am I supposed to do around here?”

“Find a room and watch,” you say. It’s the guest’s turn to choke. Unfortunately for him, he just took a sip of champagne. “You can tell which ones are okay with it. Look for a green rune above the door.”

That’s all some guests come here to do – you can’t count the number of times you’ve seen a demon drop the entry fee without blinking and spend the entire time indulging their voyeuristic dreams. “I didn’t come here to watch strangers fuck,” the guest says, coughing. He picks up the champagne and downs the rest of it, then shoves the glass back towards you. “I came here to learn.”

You pour another glass one-handed and mark it in the ledger with the other. “Learn about what?”

The guest doesn’t answer, and when you slide the glass across the bar to him, he seizes your wrist. You jerk back, and his grip tightens, but he doesn’t pull you forward – just holds you in place, the fingers of his other hand pressing down over your pulse. “Not a lich,” he says. You plant your feet and yank your hand back again. This time you pull free. “Too strong to be a human. If you were a wolf you’d be howling at the moon right now. What are you?”

“What are you?” you retort. “You first.”

“Guess.”

You don’t have time to guess. Two more orders alight on the edge of the bar, and you get to work, mixing two Mai Tais for one and pouring eight blowjob shots for the other. “I’ll guess for you,” the guest says. “Half-demon.”

“Nope.” You glance at him while you shake the can of whipped cream. “Half-demon.”

“Try again,” the guest says. He takes a sip of his second champagne. “Mer?”

“Do I look like a mermaid to you?” You’re not even going to guess that for him. Half-demon was your best guess. Half-giant is out – he’s not tall enough, and no giant, half or otherwise, would ever call someone else ‘master’. You fall back on a guess you ruled out earlier. He could be a magic-user who’s just really bad at it. “Warlock?”

“Not a chance,” the guest says. “Shapeshifter?”

“If I was, I wouldn’t tell you,” you say, and he snorts. “You’re not a shapeshifter, are you?”

“I wouldn’t tell you, either.” The guest takes another sip of his champagne and props his chin in his hand to study you as you set the blowjob shots down at the end of the bar for the server to pick up. “I’ll give you one more guess. If you don’t get it by then –”

“You’ll what?” You see a smirk cross the guest’s face, his lips pulling back from his teeth, and then you see it. The word flies from your mouth before you can stop it and turns you into one enormous, cringeworthy cliché. “Vampire.”

“Half-vampire,” the guest corrects. His smirk grows. “I can’t believe you didn’t guess. That one was easy.”

You don’t meet a lot of vampires, and there’s a good reason for that. Vampires are bad for a business like Overhaul’s. You’ve heard there are oases that cater specifically to vampires, and you’ve heard that some vampires still like to hunt in the wild, and regardless of what you’ve heard or haven’t heard, you know you’ve seen exactly two vampires in your entire life. Both came uninvited. Both left quickly. And neither of them were turned loose to wander Asylum unsupervised.

Overhaul and Chrono must know there are vampires here. If you needed to know they’d have warned you, and if it comes to a fight between you and a skinny half-vampire who’s had two glasses of champagne, they must like your chances. Still – “A half-vampire,” you repeat, loud enough that the server who’s come to retrieve the Mai Tais can’t fail to hear. “What brings you and your master here?”

“Same thing that brings everybody else who comes here.” The half-vampire finishes his champagne, and before he can ask, you fill it again. “You know. Needs.”

If this half-vampire and his master are here to get their needs met, why is he down here with you while his master talks to Overhaul? Did Overhaul know they were coming? The half-vampire is watching you over the rim of his glass. “You meet weirder needs here. Don’t make that face.”

“I’m just wondering – why here?” you ask. “I know there are vampire-specific oases –”

“Those? They’re just blood banks.” The half-vampire shakes his head. “My master has better taste than that.”

You don’t like the word ‘taste’ in the context of drinking other people’s blood, and your mask isn’t anywhere near enough to conceal your grimace. The half-vampire isn’t paying attention. He’s drinking champagne, talking between swallows. “This place isn’t our first choice,” he says. “Our old arrangement fell through last month.”

“What happened?”

“Why do you care?”

“I want to know,” you say. You do. You don’t meet many vampires, let alone half-vampires who like champagne and are in a chatty mood. “What happened to make us the better offer?”

“The guy who runs the old place grew a conscience.” The half-vampire rolls his eyes. “Apparently it’s more honorable to hunt down screaming humans in the wild than it is to buy one who signed up for it.”

You wish you could say you were horrified to hear that people sell themselves to vampires, but the workers at Asylum sell themselves to all kinds of inhumans. The only difference is that the outcome of an encounter with a vampire can only be death. “So he stopped selling to your master?”

“Yeah. Something about upsetting the natural way of things.” The half-vampire finishes his third glass. You don’t refill it until he nudges it towards you, at which point you fill it to the brim. “My master can’t hunt like he used to. Not for the kind of humans he wants, but he can pay whatever it takes to get them. How much of a conscience would you say your boss has?”

You don’t even have to think about it. “Absolutely none.”

“Then I guess we’ll be seeing each other again,” the half-vampire says. “My master has an appetite. Shigaraki Tomura.”

“What?”

“Shigaraki Tomura. That’s my name.” The half-vampire – Shigaraki Tomura – takes another sip of champagne. “What’s yours?”

“You still haven’t guessed what I am yet.”

“I gave you a big hint. You owe me a hint, too.” Shigaraki looks interested. He’s leaning forward on his elbows, studying you. You wonder if he can tell that he’s making you uncomfortable, and if he can tell, if he cares – or if it’s something he wants to do. “A hint, or your name. Your choice.”

If you were anything other than the type of half-human you are, it would be easy. For most people, inhuman or otherwise, names mean nothing, and neither do lies. The rules for half-fey are blurry. You don’t want to find out what they are while dealing with a vampire. Because of that, you fall back into proper customer service. “Our names don’t matter at Asylum, Shigaraki-san. To us, it’s all about the guest.”

“If it’s all about the guest and I’m a guest, you should answer my question,” Shigaraki says. He’s smirking again. “Since you tried to sneak out of it, I get to pick what you tell me. And I want your name.”

“Why?” You can see that the question throws him, so you let it stand, and top off his glass of champagne in the bargain. “It makes sense for me to know your name, Shigaraki-san, but you’d have no use for mine.”

“Says who? I decide what I have a use for.”

“Why?”

Shigaraki takes another sip of champagne. “Why what?”

“Why would you have a use for it?” You sound like you’re bantering, but you want to know. Need to know, more accurately. “Most guests don’t concern themselves with the existence of servants.”

“If that’s true, then you shouldn’t wear these.” Shigaraki taps his own cheek, drawing attention to a scar over his right eye. It takes you a second to realize that he’s referring to your mask. “It makes it look like you’re hiding something. Like what you are. Or your name.”

“I’ll tell you my name,” you say, and you give Shigaraki a few seconds of triumph before you add the condition, “after you tell me why you want it.”

He opens his mouth. “And don’t lie,” you add. “I’ll know if you lie.”

“Witch.”

“No,” you say. You’re surprised he didn’t guess that sooner, but he’s still wrong. “What? You don’t want to know my name anymore?”

“I want it,” Shigaraki says. He picks up his champagne and drains the glass in one swallow. You refill it partway before he stops you. “I don’t see why I should have to tell you. I’m the guest. If it’s about what I want –”

“I’m giving you what you want,” you say. “You just have to give me something in return.”

Shigaraki watches you over the rim of the glass, and you look back. You’ve heard that full vampires can exert control over others through prolonged eye contact, but the same is supposed to be true of fey, and you’re not feeling inclined to do what Shigaraki wants you to do. He glances away from you first, takes another sip of champagne. You don’t look away, and when he looks back and makes eye contact again, you see his face flush.

That’s – weird. The words leave your mouth before you can think better of it. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t look at me,” Shigaraki snaps. He stares down into his glass, and you busy yourself putting away the almost-empty bottle of champagne.

You hear the whistle of something moving at high speed through the air and barely whip your head sideways in time to avoid the wing of Overhaul’s messenger slicing into your cheek. You don’t like spilling blood on the job, especially not when there’s a vampire nearby. The messenger flies past you, then comes back around, and this time, you catch it in midair. Shigaraki’s noticed it, too. “Origami?” he repeats. “Is that part of the aesthetic?”

You shrug. Almost everything travels on paper in Asylum – orders, bills, memos, contracts, and messages. Each type of communication comes folded into a different bird, but the only person who uses paper cranes folded from purple paper with gilded edges is your boss. The crane unfolds in your hand and you read the message in Overhaul’s cramped handwriting. Find the half-vampire Shigaraki Tomura and return him to my study. His master is ready to depart.

You’re about to look like the world’s most efficient employee. You tuck the paper into your uniform and turn to Shigaraki. “Your master’s ready to leave. If you’ll follow me, I’ll escort you back to him.”

“Great.” Shigaraki drains his glass of champagne, gets to his feet, and nearly tips over. He has to grab the bar to steady himself, and even then, it barely works. “What the hell?”

You make your way around the bar, waiting to see if he’ll straighten up on his own. You wonder if he’s faking it, but given how skinny he is, how much champagne he drank, and how quickly he drank it, it’s not a stretch at all that he’s pretty drunk. It’s clear when he straightens up that he’s still dizzy, and you duck in to support him. “Here. Lean on me. If your master’s anything like my boss, he won’t like being kept waiting.”

“What did you do to me?” Shigaraki mumbles as he slings one arm over your shoulders. When you wrap your arm around his back, you can feel his ribs through two layers of clothing. “You said you weren’t a witch. You lied.”

You have to laugh at that. “This isn’t magic. You’re just drunk.”

“Vampires don’t get drunk.”

“Humans do,” you say. “One of the downsides of being half-something else.”

Shigaraki makes a noise, but you can’t tell if he’s responding to what you said or to being drunk in general. You hustle him through the hallways as quickly as you can manage. Overhaul hates having to give the same order twice, and you can feel the unfolded message fluttering in your pocket, trying to fold itself again and tattle on you that the task isn’t complete. The faster you move, however, the more it seems like Shigaraki’s trying deliberately to obstruct you. More and more of his weight falls against you with every step.

You’re strong enough to carry him, but it starts to bother you. “If that champagne made your legs stop working, I really need to know about it so I don’t poison any more guests.”

“I’m conserving energy.” Shigaraki hiccups, then groans. “My master can’t find out. He’ll be pissed.”

There’s no way Shigaraki’s master isn’t going to find out. If you let go of him he’s going to go face-first into the floorboards. “How pissed is he going to be?”

Shigaraki doesn’t answer, but the way his shoulders tense tells you everything you need to know. You’re almost to Overhaul’s study. The door’s open, and you can see the weird light leaking through, the kind that means someone’s using magic. Inspiration hits. You shift Shigaraki so he’s leaning against the wall, shove him until he stands up mostly straight, and call up every ounce of glamour you have.

It’s not much, and it won’t hold long, but as long as Shigaraki manages not to say or do anything too weird, it’ll keep his master from noticing how absolutely plastered he is. Shigaraki stares at you as the glamour settles over him, clearly confused. “What –”

“It’ll hold until you’re by yourself as long as you keep your shit together,” you say. You pull him upright again, shifting position so it seems more like you’re escorting him than like you’re dragging him along. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

“Why?”

You could ask for clarification. Instead you ignore him. So far tonight he’s asked you multiple questions you don’t want to answer, and even though this is the one that’s least likely to get you in trouble, it’s the one you’re most likely to lie about. Shigaraki’s head, which he was holding up under his own power until two seconds ago, tips sideways until his cheek is resting against the top of your head. “You don’t smell like a witch.”

“That’s because I’m not a witch. Stand up straight.” You’d also like him to quit sniffing you, but you’re not going to win that one. You reach out with one hand and knock on the open door. “Sir, I’ve brought the half-vampire, as you requested.”

“That was fast.”

The voice that responds isn’t Overhaul’s. Shigaraki jerks out of your grip and stands upright, your glamour clinging to him, while you tense every muscle in your body, trying to hide the shiver that runs through you. Most inhumans leave some sort of calling card of their presence – a scent in the air, a shift in the temperature of a room, a momentary change in the light or shadows. You’re used to that. But the aura emanating from the vampire who must be Shigaraki’s master is intense enough to crawl under your skin, and it’s ice-cold. Barring two things you don’t think about, it’s the worst feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life.

Overhaul is responding to the master vampire. “The staff at Asylum are well-trained,” he says. “Shigaraki Tomura, welcome back. I trust you enjoyed your self-guided tour of our offerings.”

You linger outside the door, unsure of what you should do, but then Chrono sticks his head out into the hallway, spots you, and gestures sharply for you to leave. You don’t need to be told twice. You hurry back down the hall, down a set of stairs, and through a staff-only shortcut until you’re back at the lounge, with five drink orders folded into the shape of swans bobbing up and down at the end of the bar for your attention. You’ve finished all five and two more besides before the chill begins to seep out of you.

There’s nothing about what happened tonight that you’re comfortable with. Wire to wire, it’s been one of the worst full moons you can remember, and it doesn’t improve when Overhaul and Chrono step into the lounge at the end of your shift. Overhaul sits; Chrono stands. “Explain yourself.”

You could ask for clarification. You could do that if you wanted to spend the next decade paying for it. “The half-vampire came to the lounge. I thought it would be best to keep him there instead of letting him wander around.”

“How did you keep him there?”

You hesitate, and Overhaul steps in. “He was covered in your glamour when he came in. I want to know if we undercharged his master.”

Your face goes up in flames. “I didn’t – no,” you say. “I got him drunk.”

Overhaul coughs. Chrono’s shoulders shake briefly, the way they do when he’s trying not to laugh. You reach behind the bar and produce the mostly-empty bottle of champagne, followed by the ledger. Overhaul peruses the ledger while Chrono continues the interrogation. “If all you did was pour champagne, why was he wearing your glamour?”

You could get away with not answering Shigaraki’s question. Not answering your bosses isn’t an option. “He said he was going to get in trouble. I didn’t mean to get him in trouble, so I thought –” You can’t see Chrono’s eyes, but you can see Overhaul’s, and Overhaul’s looking at you like you’re out of your mind. “I thought if I put a glamour over him, his master might not notice.”

Overhaul doesn’t say anything. Neither does Chrono. An echo of the shiver from the master vampire’s aura runs through you. “Did his master notice?”

“His senses are too dull to hunt for himself. They’re certainly too dull to capture a glamour as weak as yours,” Chrono says. “Shigaraki Tomura escaped detection, at least while on the premises. And it seems he now owes you a favor.”

“No,” you say without thinking. “It was my fault.”

Chrono scoffs, then returns his attention to the bottle. Overhaul focuses on you. “Does he know what you are?”

You shake your head. “Good,” Overhaul says. “Next time, save your glamour for yourself. He and his master will return at the next full moon.”

Your stomach lurches. “They’ll be back?”

“The offer the master vampire made was quite lucrative. It would have been unwise to refuse,” Chrono says. “Serving vampires en masse is bad business, but on a limited basis – very profitable.”

You don’t even want to know – but you’ll find out. You’re dead certain of it. You grew up here, and you know where to listen to hear every secret told within Asylum’s walls. And even if you didn’t, even if you put your hands up over your ears and walked away from anyone who spoke of it, you know exactly who you’ll hear it from – the half-vampire Shigaraki Tomura, the next time he steps into the lounge with a bad attitude, a useless smartphone, and a list of questions you’re already dreading being asked.

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