“Mei-chaaaaaaaan…” Himiko Toga calls out, in a singsong sort of voice. Seemingly to nobody.
She’s nowhere to be seen, but Hatsume is definitely in the workshop.
She always was. For as much as Toga liked to drag her places, nothing ever made her girlfriend as happy as work-dates. She was often wrapped up in constructing her babies , to the nth degree. (Oftentimes foregoing sleep in favor of work. On those days, Toga would invariably find her dead tired on the concrete floor of the workshop, and would lay down beside her, gently nibbling at the nape of her neck as she slept.)
The sound of metallic rustling and the familiar smell of smoke flood Toga’s senses, and she takes that as the prelude.
“Himi-chan!”
Mei came sprinting out after her, half-covered in grease, and sweat. Toga didn’t mind. Such was typical, by any stretch. She smells like she’s been hard at work. She knows Mei’s work makes her happy, so that alone is enough to satisfy her.
Scooping her up easily, Mei spins her around, rather frenetically. The energy is to be expected, given all the crumpled up and discarded Monster cans littering the floor of the workshop. She tilts her head down, and places a kiss on Toga’s lips, making her chuckle, madly, but gleefully still. Toga returns the gesture of affection with a nipping kiss on the cheek, and Mei responds by squeezing her a little harder.
Wheezing, Toga smiles, gratified by the attention.
“YOU HAVE TO SEE MY NEW BABIES-” Mei says frantically, leaving little room to argue. Grabbing Toga by the hand, she drags her across the shop, to the source of the smoke and rattling. Toga reacts noncommittally, happy just to be touched, and happy that her girlfriend is so excited. Her mind is elsewhere, however.
Pushing away a once-red, now blackened curtain, Mei steps forward with a flourishing jazz-handsy gesture, revealing a number of pulsating, smoke spewing gear pieces. Suction seemed to be the common motif. Dense, lightweight containers mounted to backpacks, made to contain as much liquid as possible while slowing the wearer down as little as possible.
An automated, rocket propelled syringe, that admittedly looked as if it would put a hole through whoever the next subject of Toga’s infatuation would be (perhaps by design, considering that Mei didn’t seem to realize how jealous she could be). A sort of miniature pump, so powerful that it rocked the table it was displayed on.
Toga wasn’t entirely paying attention, more focused tracing her bitten nails over Mei’s muscular arm, scar-latticed, likely from frequent accidents. Her veins, so perfect and close to the skin…
She was snapped back to attention by a slight explosion. The pumping mechanism petered itself out, and sputtered to a noisy stop. Mei blushed, and quickly scrambled over to distract from it.
“SOOOO…I’ve been thinking about your Quirk,” She began, in the entrepreneurial way she had about her when she spoke about her own inventions. The gleam in her eye. The cadence. It was so arresting. Toga genuinely believed Mei could sell water to a drowning man. “And the equipment you’ve got right now, is sorely lacking.” Her eyes twitched as the crosses rotated slightly, zeroing in on the attentive, but incognizant Toga.
“So I’ve been thinking about what I can do to improve on it-” She cut herself off, deep in thought. “The first of my ideas was…THIS BABY-” She turned partially around, whipping out a mechanized dagger and holding it proudly in front of Toga’s face.
Toga’s attention suddenly returned, in full. If there was one thing that Mei knew she fancied, (aside from the obvious, on account of her near constant affirmations of love) it was knives.
“Hm? Hmmm?” She wielded it in example. As it came over Toga’s head, she reached up for it, giggling, and Mei had to raise it up just barely out of reach. “It’s a rocket powered knife with a blood reservoir built into its hilt. I was thinking about maaaaaybe replacing the rocket fuel with air compressors…y’know, just to make sure it doesn’t overpenetrate. You wouldn’t want to-”
“I LOVE IT!” Toga shrieked in excitement, already itching to try it out. Her fidgety hands tensed, longing to hold it.
“Now,” She turned her attention to the rest of the contraptions. “I know that your shapeshifting ability is a little inconvenient because you can’t exactly carry around replicas of everyone’s gear, sooooo…I’ve found a way to combine the most important support items from the people you usually work with, so if you need to copy them, you’ll have access to all their little toys!”
She begins flying through her resources, talking endlessly about all of her intriguing inventions and the thought she’s put into them. Taking Toga by the waist she guides her forward and sits her down on a stool, strapping a small breathing mask onto her face, which becomes a voice replicator, which becomes quad engines, which obviously inevitably becomes little wrist mounted grenade gauntlets, fitted perfectly to her dainty wrists.
“AREN’T THEY JUST SPLENDID?!” Mei inquires, with a forceful sort of passion.
Toga nods, enthusiastically, swinging her feet.
More than anything, she was thrilled with how accepting Mei had been up to this point. Of her Quirk as well as the resulting…proclivities. She had been well conditioned by the reactions of others to abhor her powers as well as her bloodthirst.
Even with Vlad-sensei’s ever-helpful tutelage, Toga still found that her Quirk was difficult to accept as heroic. Others found it depraved. And she was often hard-pressed to argue. Needless to say, every time she’d dated up to that point, her blood drinking had strained things.
After all, it takes a special kind of crazy to be a willing party in something so taboo. Luckily for Toga though, she found that in Mei, she’d met her match.
Toga, mind always swimming in intrusive thoughts, succumbs to one, standing from the stool and launching herself into Mei’s strong arms. She hugs her tight, and kisses her with a sort of possessive ferality that Mei can’t help but find adorable. The two fall to the floor in a heap, giggles and whispered or muffled praise abound.
Pinned down under Mei, Toga whispers something into her bosom, wrapping her arms around the girl’s waist.
“I love you too, Himi-chan ,” Mei answers, having perfectly understood.
Toga digs her nails into Mei’s hips, and she can feel the exact moment when the skin breaks.
Mei turns board-stiff, and winces sharply, but noticeably, smirks.
“Thirsty?”
Simple question. Simple answer in theory. But so much more behind it.
Toga agonizes over it, a week’s worth of thoughts passing through her mind in a moment, but ultimately, with goosebumps running down her back, she nods meekly.
Mei shifts her weight, laying down and rolling Toga on top of her, who giggles sharply.
Shaking and uncertain, Toga searches in Mei’s telescopic eyes for a sign that it’s okay. That she’s safe. That doing this is safe to begin with. Mei responds with a firm, grounding squeeze of the hand. Toga bares her teeth, slicing her own tongue as she runs it over the incisors.
As she plunges down for the neck, Mei catches her, and lifts her head back up so that they may meet each other’s gaze. Toga looks spooked, but something in Mei’s eyes is just reassuring enough.
“Use my baby,” She said, handing Toga the blood-draining knife. “Just be careful-”
Toga nodded, feeling the weight of the thing in her hand, as it became heavier and heavier under the pressure of her self-doubt. Her inability to trust her impulses.
Only after a suggestive little nod from Mei did she bring the knife down, with surgical precision.
She hesitated, unsure of where to place the incision.
“Don’t worry, I’ve been cut a bunch in here, it won’t be the first or the last or the worst. Go for it.”
Not the first.
Toga’s eyes are drawn back to Mei’s arms. So muscular and tanned and vascular. Thick, gorgeous veins. So full of life. She had to resist the urge to crack her open. To drink her dry.
Taking the sharp edge of the blade, she makes a short but deep cut along the pit of the elbow, nicking a vein. Immediately blood begins to rush from it, at breakneck speed.
From the moment that she lays eyes on the blood, all her pretensions of safety and fears of injuring her beloved seem to fly out the window. She’s consumed instead, by a scorching sensation in her chest.
The scorching burns a dark red.
It's full of rage – her rage. Her anger, Her frustration, Her love.
Nothing quite hurts like love.
It bleeds out of her heart and materializes into a sharp blade that stabs back at the source.
She licks along her fingers, around the wound, between them, curiously exploring with her tongue and lapping up what lay inside. The great rush of life that poured from her. And it tasted divine. She’d always preferred to drink from the vein. It was wilder. Meatier.
Broad licks across the skin inside, suckling desperately, like she was dying of thirst. The burning reaches a crescendo, as she savors the frantic torrents of blood pooling from Mei’s arm. Delicious and alive, pulsing on her tongue and down her throat like a second heartbeat.
As she drank from the wound, careful not to bite, even in her state of animal ravenousness, she couldn’t help but picture in her mind, a scene wherein she loses her composure. What little of it she has.
//
…the taste of ambrosia on her tongue overwhelmed her senses as the muscle beat helplessly against her lips. Like dark, liquid gold, straight from the tap. Toga was aware, on some level, of Mei’s gasping, her body convulsing uncontrollably. She climbed on top of her, to hold down her restless limbs, and sunk her teeth further into the frantic heart. Warm, sumptuous blood pulses over her lips, her tongue, down the back of her throat. Life itself- rich, filling, utter ecstasy. Mei’s blood, utterly filling her. Replacing her own. Making her less and less of herself, and more and more of that which she loved…
Toga drank, and drank, and drank. Took her for all she had. Drank until the heart was a shriveled, battered, husk of a thing, held in her clenched fist.
//
She shook off the horrible visage, and wide-eyed, dropped the knife, scampering away from Mei, who continued to bleed. Tears streamed down Toga’s cheek, as she tried to forget what she had imagined.
Shaking more pervasively than she typically would, Toga scrambles through the workshop, knocking over various tool cases and experimental contraptions searching for a first aid kit, or a bandage, or some tape. Anything that she can use to heal the damage that she’s done. The blood, though, is on her hands and smeared all over her face and neck. She can hardly think.
Fumbling through a first aid kit in the far corner of the room, she finally finds a thick, wide bandage, and races it back towards Mei, knees knocking together as she runs.
“N-no need for all the fuss-” Mei says, attempting reassurance, but voice much weaker than she’d intended. “I’ve been cut before y’know…”
Toga simply shushes her, cleaning up the still bleeding gash with hydrogen peroxide and a bit of gauze. Mei hisses when it makes contact with her exposed flesh.
Laying the bandage in place and wiping up the blood still on her arm, Toga finally has a moment’s respite, and thinks to run her hand through Mei’s thick dreadlocks, and massage her scalp. Upon remembering however, that her hands are still stained with blood, the fire returns.
She wants to move, but she can't. Not in the way she wants to. She feels her bones follow her muscle as it strains, but her body is limp. It moves on its own, out of the deepest subconscious of her mind.
She wants to bend over right now and lick the bloodstains off the greasy workshop floor. Or worse, reopen Mei and finish what she nearly started. Her mind races a million miles a minute until…
“Himiko-”
Mei interrupts her spiraling, hand cupping her cheek. Her voice still wavers, and she’s gaunt as a sheet of paper, but she seems alright otherwise.
Toga stands, and walks off to the side. She isn’t ready to forgive herself. For this, she imagined, she’d go home and slap herself, or something worse, like she would as a girl. When her parents chided for her impulses. Chided for her Quirk.
She stops, considering everything that’s transpired, holding back tears.
She stands there, back to Mei, for what feels like forever. Contemplating whether she should stay or leave. Whether she’s being too hard on herself, or whether she deserves this. Whether she can trust herself around her love, or whether she’d be better off just disappearing again.
“I love you.” Toga blurts out.
Toga turned to look at Mei, who immediately scrambled over to meet her, the sudden balance shift nearly knocking them both over again. Bumping noses, Mei held her gaze.
Slowly, Toga’s blank expression shifted to a genuine smile, knife-sharp and wicked. Her crazed eyes lit up as she hugged Mei tighter, her grip crushing and infrangible. She laughed maniacally, rocking the both of them, overtaken by glee. Her sudden laughter continued as she pressed her cheek to Mei’s, smearing a bit of blood between them and dying Mei’s pink hair crimson.
“So…d'ya like my baby?” Mei manages, rather enthusiastically considering her pallor.
Something in Toga’s face twitches. They’re so close together that Mei can feel it.
“Don’t worry, you’re still my all-time cutest baby, Himi-chan .”
Toga shifts, moving to straddle her, settling into her lap. With her arms wrapped around Mei’s neck, she hangs back and giggles, fitfully, smiling like a Cheshire cat.
She draws the knife out from under her sweater, having already found a spot to hide it (she’s very skilled at hiding knives), and opens the full reservoir, knocking it back like a shot glass.
As she fiddles with it though, she manages to accidentally hit an unsuspecting little button, disguised as a rivet.
With that, the knife took off flying, darting around haphazardly before skewering another one of Mei’s babies. Toga simply looked on in wide-eyed amazement.
She leans in close, kissing the corner of Mei’s mouth with wine red lips, before drawing back and licking her cheek, with a slow, languid wetness.
“I really need to get rid of that rocket attachment.” Mei mumbles under her breath.
“It’s perfect!” Toga retorts, voice uncharacteristically dark, and even. Full of intent.
Full of something . Some strange facsimile of love. Of envy, maybe. Lust.
Lust in the becoming, as well as being. In being here, with her.
The sum of all, and by them, enraptured.