Trying to keep his head above water has never been something that actually bothered him. After all, he felt like he had drowned years ago. If swimming underwater and holding his breath in dark waters is what he was doing, at this point it had turned so natural that he never stopped to introspect or question himself about it.
It was as if life had taken a different flow. At first, it had hurt — the life that could have been ripped away from him in the way a merciless, giant wave hits the coast and destroys everything in its way. A feeling in his heart of feeling so lost, so helpless. If only someone had reached out a hand to him that day, he thought, and did never understand why he was just so unworthy; in the end, he concluded that society just tosses aside some people, and he just happened to be one of the left-outs.
Afterthat day, he had managed to remember it clearly as water, only that not with the same emotional charge as he once used to. Naturally, once the wave hits you, it stings once. Numbness comes after, his heart forced to grow colder, washed over any feeling that was not hatred or anger, to the point he had forgotten what it felt like (if he had once felt it.) The current had pulled him in close, dragging him to depths that, eventually, he had accustomed himself to swim in.
He has not even seen the water even swelling, that day. At least, when you are used to a dead calm, you do not expect it; it is not something one can see from underneath the surface. But, for sure, something had stirred inside him. It was annoying at first since, of course, what is unknown causes distress. What you cannot predict or control sweeps you upside down. That’s how you felt, to him. But all he knows is that, with time, he couldn’t just be without you. It felt like you brought him afloat like a kind of lifejacket thrown to him. He will not be able to place why he needs you so badly, why when he’s with you he feels like he doesn’t actually despise you as much as he despises pretty much everything; some things remain still for him to get into the swim.
What is undeniable is that you growing into him felt like a source of air he did not know he needed, as if he had held his breath for so long that he had actually learned to keep himself alive, or to live in a permanent drown — again, some things remain uncertain still. What he does know is that you brought a part of him to the surface, that having you side by side when you came to the League gave him a different taste of the usual saltiness of water he’s used to. Rather than that, you’re agua dulce. Fresh like the air that entered his system after a gasp when he made it past the surface, after a practically uncondensed life at the bottom of the sea.
With time, Tomura Shigaraki discovered the value of sometimes keeping one’s head above water. And to say that he wasn’t keen on the feeling, he would be lying.
