Play Nice (Tomura Shigaraki x Reader)

Chapter 7 - Getting Steamy

This was a problem.

She laid sprawled out on her bed, the same place she'd been since she got home an hour ago, those four words running through her head on loop. Well, those words and:

"...You can tell me. If he bothered you, I mean."

Yeah. This was a serious problem.

Lately, she'd been looking at her situation like it was a puzzle game. Her character was stuck in an impossible situation, an impregnable fortress with no windows and only one door. However, the door was locked, and the key was absolutely nowhere to be found. The game mission was to find a way out.

She couldn't call anyone for help, there was no service in this room. She couldn't break down the wall by force, the whole thing would collapse on her if she did. The only thing she could really do was search the room for clues, work her way through the riddles, untwist the web that would lead her to the key and then get the fuck out of dodge. And if she was being honest with herself, she'd been doing a pretty shit job of actually looking. It was like she had just been moving the game camera around and not actually clicking anything. It wasn't even an option for her, the feature was disabled.

And after leaving Shigaraki's place the other day, shoulders loose and a strange warmth filling her chest, she immediately realized why.

This wasn't a puzzle game at all. It was a Dating Sim. And she wasn't even the player.

She was just a route.

An algorithm without the ability to learn anything about the protagonist or do anything outside of her three pre-programmed responses. And Shigaraki had been speed-running her route over and over again, memorizing her event triggers with each interaction until he could get himself to a Best Ending. After all, he'd already unlocked the eroge scenes.

In other words, she was totally fucked.

She groaned, staring up as if the cheat codes were going to magically appear in the popcorn ceiling. This sucked. The guy had already started this with a game-breaking advantage: her Dad's job in the palm of his hands. And the stat boosts were only growing more OP by the day.

She'd thought that she'd figured out all that she needed to know about him. That there wasn't a lot to figure out. He was a bitter, horny bastard that got off on her dependence on him, on holding power over her. He didn't actually give a shit about her.

But there was obviously more — of course there was more, she scolded herself. He was a human being after all.

And if she was ever going to shed her NPC status, stand on an even playing field with him, she needed to figure out what that more was. And fast.

Mirio popped into her head for a moment, the fact that her wonderfully handsome and stupid boyfriend just so happened to work for a Private Eye. But she yanked that spider's thread right out of her mind as soon as it entered.

Right, cause that was totally a conversation she could have.

"Hey babe, could you ask your boss to investigate the guy that's been sexploiting me for the last month behind your back?"

Fucking foolproof.

Her phone buzzed in her hand, pulling her from her spiraling thoughts. She forgot that she was even still holding it. She moved it to her eyeline to check the message.

Shithead

— New Message —

[wut pc mps do you have?]