A/N: College is kicking my ass.

Gacha is kicking me in the ribs when I fall.

Send help.

"I'm not wearing the tie."

"If you want to work in this club, you wear the uniform. That includes the tie."

"I don't see those two unconscious girls wearing any ties."

"Their tits are bigger than yours, so they get more leeway. Now stop checking them out and keep cleaning."

"Yeah, well…! My dick is probably bigger than both of theirs combined, so… wait, does this new job thing mean having to talk to people? Because I'm not good at that."

"You're not? Damn, had me fooled."

Rolling my eyes, I gave the rope binding a large chunk of ruined building one last tug, before looping my tail underneath and blinking away. Reappearing in a desert, I dropped the cargo from about halfway between the sand and the clouds, leaving it to be found by a civilisation that would consider my current one ancient.

I gave myself precisely three seconds to enjoy the wind rushing through my hair, before sending myself back to the club. Junior yelped, shooting me a dirty look as I touched down right beside him and sprayed the sand I'd accumulated everywhere like a dog drying itself off.

"I told you, somewhere other than the desert!"

"Terribly sorry," I drawled in the most droll tone I could manage, leaning one hand against my hip as I curled my tail around the thinnest portion of a collapsed pillar. "Would you like to carry this shit out of here?"

A raised middle finger was my only reply. With a snort, I was dragging the pillar into some nondescript wilderness, dropping it onto the skull of a Beowolf that looked at me funny. Its horrified screaming was still echoing in my ears when I arrived back at the club.

On the plus side, I was almost done clearing out the large trash. Dust thick enough to be considered another layer of foundation was still caking the floor, but everything aside from one corner could be easily remedied with a stiff breeze.

Not bad for about five minute's hard work.

Ending up on Junior's doorstep had been quite the lucky break for me. Junior might have disagreed with that sentiment, considering the current state of his nightclub, but he'd found himself with a mountain of work that needed doing right after his number of available employees had been drastically reduced. I couldn't have planned a more convenient situation if I'd tried.

Even so, I would have liked to see how effective his trained army of tie-wearing monkeys would have been at getting this place back into working order. I was only constrained by the need to prioritise the shit that had people buried under it; walls and doorways were pleasantries that meant nothing to me.

I could tell that Junior agreed with me. Even as I accidentally swung my tail into the side of his head and he swore viciously, the appreciation was positively pouring from him.

He wasn't quite as thrilled when I did it a second time and made him drop the goon he was carrying. The rubble in the far corner of the club was already being sorted through by yours truly by the time he was reaching for his rocket launcher. He was probably crazy enough to fire it off, too; the place was already fucking ruined.

Silence mostly pervaded the room as we worked. Our only soundtrack was some bass beat from further down the street, and the occasional groaning from the party people on the floor. Junior didn't so much as acknowledge me, too busy trying to get his unconscious men situated and accounted for. I toiled quietly in my corner, doing my best to roll all the remaining crap into one easy pile. All this jumping from one place to another was starting to make me dizzy.

Half a minute later, a gruff cough shattered the relative peace that had settled. I broke from my thoughts (I wonder, if I make a ball out of all this dust and throw it at him, would he shoot me), poking my head over the small hill I'd constructed out of the finest materials gauntleted fists could break.

"Hmm?"

"Teleporting is your Semblance, huh?" Rude, he wasn't even looking at me. "Must come in handy."

"Uh, not really." One of the broken glasses on top of my shifted in the breeze of my breath. I had to cross my eyes to focus on it, lest I wreck the synergy of my work even further in my attempts to fix it. "It was the first Semblance I got from the people that killed themselves on me, though."

Something thumped onto the ground, sending vibrations up my tower and dislodging the careful work I'd put into the glass. Annoyed, I refocused on Junior… only to be distracted by the goon that was sprawled out at his feet. Junior's arms weren't raised, but his palms were upturned from when he'd been carrying him.

The man groaned, before rolling into a patch of broken glass I'd yet to clear. I winced, but before I could get the chance to warp over and help him, the ground beneath his back gave out.

A low whistle echoed from the hole as I jumped over and cautiously poked my head into the enclosing darkness. Even with my eyesight, I couldn't see through the thick curtain of shadows, which left me with nothing to do but wait for whatever noise may return.

Five heartbeats later, a loud crash echoed up from the cavern. The building shook violently with the impact. One of the few light fixtures that had managed to weather the initial storm came undone, and would have come down right on top of my head if I hadn't moved to the side and let it fall through the hole.

I looked back up towards Junior, doing my best to ignore the crescendo of shattering glass, twisting metal, and agonised groaning. It was difficult to tell if my new boss had even noticed what had happened, seeing as he was still staring at me with an expression I wasn't anywhere near equipped enough to identify.

"...Do you think he's going to be ok?"

XxX

"So you kill people, and steal their Aura."

"No, people kill themselves on me, and then they give me their Aura."

"That makes no sense, kid."

"It would make perfect sense if you'd stop trying to call me a murderer."

I couldn't have made my annoyance any more clear in my voice if I had tried. With my tail flicking irritably behind me, I got back to work making sure the blonde girl was laid out on an unbroken chunk of the bar counter, warping in and out of the room in a bid to make her current accommodations more comfortable. I'd knocked her out, so I should have been the one to take responsibility.

Junior had elected to roll his eyes and wave a hand in my direction when I'd told him what I was doing. He wasn't paying me much attention, disappearing behind the bar for minutes at a time and only reemerging to stare at me with furrowed brows. If it wasn't for the continuous sound of papers rustling, I would have thought he was pouring himself drinks back there.

I was halfway through suturing together a flower crown, because I was starting to get bored and adding another blanket to the pile I'd already found might actually suffocate the girl, when Junior's head came back up from behind the counter. This time, the rest of him followed, bringing along a folder that he was already flipping through before he even had his feet under him.

"So, kid." I had to blink a few times to tear my attention away from the folder. My tail was still flicking from side to side in unison with the pages. The hole in the floor rumbled dangerously as Junior edged his way around it. "You- uh, do people... kill themselves on you often?"

My tail stilled, before coming up behind me to scratch at my chin. How often was often, I had to wonder. Was this something that tended to happen to people? Was I actually the leading cause?

"Probably…" I tilted my head to the side, doing my best to run whatever statistics I could come up with, "...more than the average person with a sharp tail, if I had to guess."

"Yeah, I'll bet." Junior snorted, and damn near fell into the hole when the ground at his feet almost crumbled under the sudden movement. For a moment, I considered jumping over there to try to steady him, but given how ironic it would be if our current conversation led to that particular tragedy, I decided to trust him to save his own life.

Miraculously for a man his size, he managed to dance out of the way of danger, his arms pinwheeling in a vague attempt at balancing him out. I pretended not to notice anything, opting instead to finish up my flower crown and slip it over the girl's head while he sorted his shit out.

Eventually, he lunged to the side, hurling the file into the air as he rolled to safety. It could have just been my sensitive hearing playing a trick on me, but I could have sworn I heard some sort of rumbling howl coming from the pit. Abruptly, it cut itself off, and the small vibrations that had been running through the building came to a sudden stop.

I shot a glance at Junior, watching him climb to his feet and brush the dust off his dress shirt. He didn't seem overly concerned about what had just happened, not even sparing the ruinous floor so much as a blink as he reached out and caught the file. Twisting it around, he presented me with a picture of a man atop a sprawling wall of text, his tone entirely bland as he said, "Was this guy one of them?"

Holy shit, that had been cool. What had he even said to me? I wasn't paying attention after that little display. What could possibly be in that hole didn't even concern me as much as it should… alright, that was a lie, it concerned me a lot. But still, sick moves.

...What was the question again? Oh, right, where was I on the night of the murder. Manslaughter. Extremely assisted suicide. What are you, a cop?

I studied the picture for a moment, trying to figure out where I'd seen that smug grin before. The picture's quality wasn't all that great, blurry in all the wrong places and too far away for any sort of positive identification to be made, but there was… something about those eyes. I'd seen the conviction behind them before, even if it had been older and far more sinister.

My mind flashed back to over a decade ago, back when I had watched the first person I'd seen in months simply disappear from right in front of me. This man had looked at me before, back when I was young and confused and still tripping over memories of a past life that I couldn't have possibly been sure that I had lived.

Even so, I was pretty sure about this one. It was difficult to forget the first time you ever stole a Semblance, after all.

"It is... entirely possible that he died in my general area." Aside from the eyes, he seemed pretty unassuming. The monsters I'd gotten use to had glowing eyes and coarse fur. That tired grin of his, the way his eyebrow was raised ever so slightly at the camera, it all seemed like an expression that I could easily wear. "Uh, should I leave?"

"No no, stay, I insist." My reluctance didn't seem to phase Junior one bit. He'd been getting better at just rolling with things throughout the course of the conversation. As he flicked the paper over and tucked the picture back into its place, I had to wonder where all this adaptation was coming from.

"See, this right here," Junior leaned against the bar, a few paces away from the girl, and waved the file carelessly around his shoulder. "is Ube Vanta. Had a bad habit of preying on children and using lethal force on Hunters. Nobody ever managed to catch him, he'd teleport out every time they tried."

He glanced to the side, his face twisted into a grimace. "Real crafty bastard, right up until he fell off the grid altogether a little over a decade ago."

I tracked my eyes over the folder as Junior tossed it carelessly back behind the counter, idly trying to figure out if I had ever seen anything that contained more pages. The only thing that might have beaten it was the photo album I'd gotten from that burning village, but that would require some precise comparisons to figure out.

Maybe if I asked nice enough, Junior would let me borrow it.

Too bad I'd already teleported behind the counter and was flicking through it before I could even think to ask.

You try controlling impulses when travel time was cut down to nothing.

"If that's all he did," It wasn't all he did, not by a long shot, but reading and understanding were two very different things, "why is this file so big?"

Junior huffed, keeping his arms crossed over his chest as he turned to look at me. He made no move to take the folder back, but I still lowered it anyway, intent on actually listening to what he had to say.

"It's this big because he was a nobody. He had nothing to his name, no training or special weapon or specifically impressive strategies." Powerful shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. "He was wanted for over twenty years and all he had to keep him ahead of the law was his Semblance. He could be anywhere and do anything, and for a while nobody had the means or the opportunity to take him down. Bastard was even good enough at sensing Aura to see everything coming."

Except a tail to the chest. I remained steadfast in my attempts to not make a sound, even though an inappropriate giggle was threatening to escape. Actually, wait, no, this folder was filled with horrible shit. Screw it.

I used the flatter side of my serrated tail to hide my mouth as I laughed. Unfortunately for me, my tail wasn't wide enough, which just meant that I looked like a bit of a moron. Still, there was only Junior there to see me, and he didn't seem to be paying too much attention.

In fact, he was still just standing there, looking up at the clear night sky through one of the shattered windows.

"To be honest with you, there's a pretty big part of me that thinks you're lying, but I don't-"

I smacked myself in the head with my tail before he could even finish speaking, the noise making Junior jump and tense up. How could I have forgotten that I didn't actually have any proof beyond the Semblance? Man, thinking about it like that, it was a miracle and a half that Junior had even given me the time to say my piece in the first place.

"Ahhh, right, yeah, I get it." I tossed the folder over my shoulder, then lunged for it with my tail when I realised how dickish that move would have been. I don't know how I managed to actually catch it before it hit the ground, but my best guess was the culmination of all my childhood dreams finding a four-leafed clover. "Hang on, I know where his body is. Give me a second."

So long as he hadn't been eaten by Grimm, then this Ube guy would still be stinking up My Place. I hadn't been back there since leaving it the first time, not with the brand new corpse smell, but finding my way back there would be a breeze.

Somewhat literally.

I had to take a moment to visualise it. The trees surrounding a stone structure that I'd built on a slow day, tall enough to gaze upon the grotto that I'd never really remembered to explore fully. The tree trunk that had hidden a few pilfered items. And of course, the body that I'd left behind, belonging to the asshole that had started this entire clusterfuck to begin with.

"Don't you fucking dare-"

I blinked back to reality, and then out of it. Junior had been stretching an arm out towards me, the image seeming to warble before me, until it broke and a jagged treeline replaced it.

My Place hadn't changed much in the years since I'd abandoned it. From a brief inspection, I couldn't see any signs that someone had been here since me. Why people would leave such a prime piece of real-estate on its own for so long was beyond me.

Well, I mean, not really. In fact, there was a very good reason at my feet, lying prone in clothes that used to fit a lot better than they did now.

The massive Ursa that was staring at me in outright confusion also didn't help.

The bear wasn't really any of my concern. I nodded to it, just once, in acknowledgement. After a moment, it nodded back, falling down onto all four paws and ambling out of the clearing with no particular haste.

Ursa could be cool sometimes. Typically they were the Grimm that would live long enough to actually learn about the world around them. Had it been a Beowolf here to greet me, I probably would have killed it out of spite.

Seriously, fuck those guys.

"All right buddy," I nudged Ube with a foot. One of his hands fell off. "Up and at 'em."

Being the kind of guy that would prey on children, Ube didn't seem to feel like cooperating. Typical criminal scum, probably. With a grumbled curse, I curled my tail around one of his legs, trying to ignore the way it gave way beneath the miniscule pressure I was applying.

An exhale and a pop later, I was back in the nightclub.

With the grace of a swan, I landed on my feet, only wobbling on the uneven rubble for a moment before finding my balance again. With the grace of a corpse, Ube hit the ground face first and rolled, making two full rotations before he bumped into an overturned chair and was forced to stop.

With eerie precision, his skeletal grin fell directly onto Junior. The man, standing a little to the left of where I had left him, let out what I could only describe as a gurgling rattle. Actually, that could have been the hole in the floor. We would have to patch that up sometime soon.

Tail swishing behind me, I flopped back onto the ground, tapping out a random rhythm with a few fingers. Ice sprouted out of the ground with every impact, nudging Ube into a sitting position with far less precision than what could have been possible. I could argue that it was just a result of me not using ice nearly as much, but in reality I just didn't really care that much.

"You know, if you ask me," I mused, poking at Ube with a broken chair leg my tail had found, "I'd say the years have been kind to him."

A harsh slap echoed behind me, startling me out of the patterns I'd been carving into the ice. I whirled around, chair leg held out before me like a sword, only to see Junior, hands clasped behind his back as he stood tall and stared me down.

An angry red mark, about the same size as his hand, stretched out across one side of his face.

"Uh, boss?" The remaining glass held in the stylish frames adorning his face crumbled away. I could see the corner of one eye twitching, now that my vision wasn't being obscured by his tinted lenses. The stare never abated. "You alright?"

Slowly, a smile bloomed across his face. It was a lovely sight, all full of teeth and shuddering muscles and the glint of bewilderment in his eyes. I smiled back, though even with all the effort I put into it, I couldn't even get close to the amount of pearly whites that he was showing off.

Not that I really had any pearly whites to show off. Oral hygeine wasn't typically a priority in the wilderness, nor did the package deal come with dental. At least I could use my tail to shave, sloppy as it was.

"Yeah, great." Junior was quite good at talking through his teeth. Maybe he got a lot of practice? "I figured out what I'm gonna do with you."

I perked up at that. Finally, something else to do!

"Oh, neat! What is it?"

Junior drew in a breath, somehow finding a way to straighten his spine out even more. Before he could expell all that air and maybe drain some of the purple that had crept into his face, something shuffled on the ground behind me, followed by a drowsy, female voice.

"Ugh, the hell hit me… Hey Junior, what-"

The scream that erupted was almost loud enough to knock my hearing out. It held on for dear life, just barely managing to make it through, and I couldn't really complain about it whatsoever, because it was all my fault.

"IS THAT A BODY!?"

...Whoops.