Touya X You - Blog Posts

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐒

𖤐 synopsis: in the dimly lit league of villains' hideout, an unexpected moment of vulnerability unfolds between you and dabi as you both share painful memories of your fathers.

𖤐 trigger warnings: dark themes, abuse (implied)

𖤐 pairing: touya (dabi) todoroki x villain! gender neutral! reader

the afternoon light filtered weakly through the boards covering the windows of the league of villains' current hideout. dust particles danced in the thin beams of sunlight that managed to break through, giving the otherwise dreary room a strange, almost ethereal quality. the abandoned building had become home for the past three weeks—not the worst place you'd stayed since joining the league, but certainly not the best either.

you lounged on the worn couch, your legs stretched across dabi's lap as he absently traced the scars on your arm with his fingertips. his touch was feather-light, careful not to press too hard against your skin. despite his rough exterior and the violent nature of his quirk, dabi always touched you with a gentleness that still surprised you sometimes.

the hideout was unusually quiet today. shigaraki had taken toga, twice, and spinner on some reconnaissance mission, while mr. compress and kurogiri were meeting with potential allies across town. it was rare to have the place entirely to yourselves, and the silence felt almost luxurious after days of toga's manic laughter and twice's constant contradictory chatter.

"what are you thinking about?" dabi asked, his deep voice breaking through the comfortable silence. his turquoise eyes studied your face with an intensity that used to make you uncomfortable but now felt like home. you shifted slightly, adjusting your position on the couch. "just enjoying the quiet, honestly."

dabi's lips quirked up on one side—the closest thing to a genuine smile he ever showed. "never thought i'd miss silence until i joined this circus."

you laughed softly. "remember when toga and twice had that three-hour argument about whether strawberry milk was better than chocolate?" "and then spinner threatened to duct tape their mouths shut?" dabi shook his head, the staples at the corners of his mouth catching the light. "i nearly burned the place down just to escape."

"but you didn't," you said, reaching out to push a strand of his dark hair away from his face. "because underneath all that brooding and those threats, you care about them."

dabi scoffed, though he didn't pull away from your touch. "i don't care about anyone in this league except you."

"mmm, keep telling yourself that," you teased, knowing full well how annoyed he got when you suggested he had a soft spot for the other members.

he rolled his eyes but didn't argue further. his hand continued its gentle exploration of your arm, tracing each scar with a reverence that made your heart ache. some were from your life before the league, others collected during various missions. dabi knew the story behind each one—just as you knew the story behind each of his purple scars that mapped out his body like a grotesque puzzle.

"this one," he said, touching a particularly jagged mark that ran from your elbow to your wrist, "still looks painful."

"it's not anymore," you assured him. "just a reminder of why we're here. why we're fighting." dabi nodded, understanding perfectly. every member of the league carried their own wounds—some visible, others buried deep beneath the surface. it was what united you all, in a way. the scars left by a society that had failed you.

"speaking of reminders," you said, sitting up a little straighter. "i found something yesterday when i was out." you reached into your pocket and pulled out a crumpled newspaper clipping. "thought you might want to see it."

dabi took the paper from your hands, his expression hardening as he unfolded it. it was an article about the number two hero, endeavor, speaking at some charity event about supporting children with difficult-to-control quirks. the irony was sickening.

"bastard," dabi muttered, his fingers tightening around the paper. small wisps of blue flame began to lick at the edges of the clipping. "still pretending to be a fucking saint."

you watched as the paper blackened and curled, turning to ash in dabi's palm. the blue flames danced across his skin but never extended to where his other hand rested on your leg. his control was impeccable—it had to be, after what he'd been through.

"i know you don't like talking about him," you said carefully. "but whenever you see anything related to him, you get this look in your eyes…" dabi's jaw clenched, the staples stretching his scarred skin even tighter. "what look?"

"like you're back there," you said softly. "back in that house with him."

for a long moment, dabi said nothing. the silence stretched between you, thick with unspoken memories and pain. you didn't push—you'd learned early in your relationship that pushing dabi only made him retreat further into himself. instead, you waited, giving him the space to decide whether to let you in or change the subject entirely. finally, he brushed the remaining ashes from his palm onto the floor. "what about you?" he asked, deflecting as he often did. "you never talk about your old man either."

you shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant despite the sudden tightness in your chest. "not much to talk about. can't miss what was never there."

dabi's gaze sharpened. "sometimes that leaves its own kind of scar." the observation caught you off guard. it wasn't often that dabi showed this level of perception about emotional matters—or perhaps he simply chose not to reveal it most of the time.

"i guess it does," you admitted. "but different from yours. my father just… wasn't around. yours was there in all the worst ways possible."

something shifted in dabi's expression then, a crack appearing in his carefully maintained façade. his eyes darted to the boarded-up windows, then to the door, as if ensuring you were truly alone before he allowed himself to speak.

"sometimes i think it would have been better if he hadn't been there at all," dabi said, his voice so low you had to lean in to hear him. "if he'd just fucked off and left us alone instead of…" he trailed off, his free hand clenching into a fist.

you placed your hand over his, feeling the tension in his fingers. "instead of what, dabi?"

he looked at you then, really looked at you, with a vulnerability that made your breath catch. in that moment, he wasn't dabi the villain, the man who burned heroes without remorse—he was toya, the broken child beneath all those scars. "instead of training me until i broke," he said finally, the words rushing out like they'd been trapped inside him for too long. "until i literally fucking burned."

you held his gaze, letting him see that you weren't afraid of his truth. "tell me."

and for the first time since you'd known him, dabi began to talk about his father—about endeavor, about enji todoroki. about what it meant to be the firstborn son of a man obsessed with surpassing all might at any cost.

"he married my mother for her quirk," dabi explained, his voice hollow. "it was never about love or family. it was about breeding the perfect weapon. and i was the first attempt."

you listened, your heart breaking as he described the "training" sessions that started when he was just four years old. how endeavor would push him for hours, demanding he produce hotter flames, maintain them longer, control them better. how his tiny body would shake with exhaustion, how his skin would blister and burn from his own quirk.

"my fire was hot—hotter than his. that's what he wanted," dabi said, a bitter smile twisting his scarred lips. "but my body couldn't handle it. not like his. i tried to tell him, but he wouldn't listen. said i was being weak, that i needed to push through it."

"he was wrong," you said firmly, squeezing his hand. "he was wrong about you."

dabi laughed, a harsh sound devoid of humor. "oh, i know that now. but back then? he was my father. my hero." the last word dripped with venom. "i thought if i could just try harder, be stronger, he'd finally be proud of me. that he'd finally love me." you felt a burning behind your eyes but forced back the tears. dabi didn't need your pity—he needed your understanding.

"what about your mother?" you asked gently. "did she try to stop him?"

a flash of genuine pain crossed dabi's face. "she tried. in her way. but she was… damaged. the more children she had, the more unstable she became. and he kept pushing her to have more, hoping the 'perfect combination' would eventually emerge." he paused, his gaze distant. "until shoto was born." you'd heard him mention that name before—his youngest brother, the one with both fire and ice. the "masterpiece" that endeavor had been striving for.

"once shoto came along with his perfect half-and-half quirk, i became obsolete," dabi continued. "still had to train, still had to meet his impossible standards, but without even the sliver of attention i'd had before. i was just… a failed experiment."

"so what happened?" you asked, though you had a sickening feeling you already knew the answer. the scars that covered so much of his body told part of the story, but you'd never heard him explain exactly how he'd gotten them.

dabi was quiet for so long you thought he might not answer. when he finally spoke again, his voice was distant, as if he were narrating someone else's tragedy rather than his own.

"i wanted to prove i wasn't a failure. that my fire was special—better than his, better than shoto's." his eyes glazed slightly, lost in the memory. "i pushed myself further than i ever had before. the flames were beautiful—so hot they turned blue. perfect control, just like he always wanted."

he held up his scarred hands, staring at them. "for about thirty seconds. then my skin started to cook." you swallowed hard, imagining a young toya engulfed in his own flames, screaming in agony.

"he watched it happen," dabi said, his voice now eerily calm. "stood there while i burned. i remember looking at him through the flames, waiting for him to save me. he just… looked disappointed. like i'd broken his favorite toy."

"dabi," you whispered, unable to find words adequate for such horror.

"i don't remember much after that," he continued. "i should have died. sometimes i think i did die, and whatever i am now is just… the ghost of toya todoroki walking around in this patchwork body."

you moved then, shifting to kneel in front of him, taking both his hands in yours. "you're not a ghost. you're here. you survived."

"did i?" he looked at you with those piercing turquoise eyes. "toya todoroki died that day. i made sure of it. dabi rose from those ashes."

you reached up to touch his face, your fingers gently tracing the stapled scars. "and dabi is who i fell in love with. but that doesn't mean toya isn't still in there somewhere."

he closed his eyes briefly at your touch, allowing himself a moment of vulnerability before the walls came back up. "toya was weak. he wanted his father's approval, his love. dabi just wants to watch him burn."

"and you will," you assured him. "when the time is right. the league will help you expose him for what he really is."

dabi nodded, some of the tension leaving his body as he focused back on the present, on the mission ahead. on the revenge he'd built his new life around.

"what about you?" he asked after a moment, clearly wanting to shift the focus away from himself. "you said your father was absent. what's that story?" you settled back beside him on the couch, respecting his need to change the subject while recognizing his genuine interest in your past. it was only fair—he'd shared his darkest memories with you.

"not nearly as dramatic as yours," you said with a small shrug. "he just… left when i was three. don't really remember him much at all."

"he ever try to contact you?” you shook your head. "birthday card once a year until i was ten. then nothing. my mother said he had 'commitments elsewhere,' whatever that meant."

"what was your mother like?" dabi asked, his hand finding yours again.

"tired," you answered honestly. "always working two or three jobs to keep a roof over our heads. she did her best, i think, but she wasn't really… present, even when she was physically there." dabi nodded, understanding.

"emotional absence can fuck you up just as much as physical absence."

"yeah," you agreed, surprised by his insight. "she never hurt me, never yelled or anything like that. but she also never really saw me, you know? it was like i was just another responsibility, another burden she had to carry."

"what about when your quirk manifested?" dabi asked. it was a natural question—for most children, the emergence of their quirk was a pivotal moment, one where parental guidance was crucial.

you laughed bitterly. "she was terrified. my quirk isn't exactly… family-friendly." your quirk—the ability to absorb and manipulate the negative emotions of others, turning them into a physical force—had first manifested during a particularly bad day at school when you were six. a bully who'd been tormenting you suddenly collapsed, screaming about the darkness crushing him. no one had understood what happened, but your mother had taken one look at your glowing eyes and known.

"she tried to help me suppress it," you continued. "said it was dangerous, that people wouldn't understand. that they'd think i was villain material." "self-fulfilling prophecy," dabi noted with a smirk.

"i guess so," you agreed. "by the time i was a teenager, i'd learned to control it well enough to use it selectively. started small—making bullies feel their own cruelty, making abusive teachers face their own insecurities." "vigilante justice," dabi said, a note of approval in his voice.

"it felt good," you admitted. "to finally use what everyone told me was a villain's quirk to help people who were suffering. but society doesn't see it that way, does it? using an 'evil' quirk makes you evil, no matter your intentions."

"this fucked-up hero society only sees in black and white," dabi agreed. "no room for the gray areas where most of us actually live."

you nodded, thinking about the path that had eventually led you to the league. "after my mother died, there was nothing holding me back anymore. no one to disappoint, no one to pretend for. i started using my quirk more openly, targeting people who abused their power—corrupt officials, violent criminals the heroes couldn't be bothered with, businessmen exploiting their workers."

"and that's when you caught shigaraki's attention," dabi concluded, having heard this part of your story before.

"yeah. found myself cornered by some pro heroes who didn't appreciate my particular brand of justice. thought i was done for until a warp gate opened up right in front of me." you smiled at the memory, despite the fear you'd felt at the time. "never thought i'd be grateful to see a bunch of notorious villains, but that day i was."

dabi's arm slid around your shoulders, pulling you closer to his side. "lucky for me they recruited you." his voice was gruff, but the sentiment behind it was genuine.

you leaned into him, resting your head against his shoulder. "do you ever wonder what would have happened if our fathers had been different? if your dad hadn't been an abusive monster, if mine had actually stuck around?"

"we wouldn't be here," dabi said simply. "you might've been a licensed hero, using your quirk to help people through the proper channels." "and you?"

dabi was quiet for a moment, considering. "i don't know. maybe the same. or maybe i'd have followed in the old man's footsteps anyway, become the next endeavor." he shuddered slightly at the thought. "sometimes i wonder if that flame is in my blood regardless of what he did to me."

"it's not," you said firmly. "you're nothing like him, dabi. your anger, your fire—it comes from a place of justice, not ego. you want to burn away the corruption, not become the number one hero."

he looked at you with a mixture of skepticism and hope, as if he wanted to believe your words but couldn't quite bring himself to. "maybe. or maybe i'm just as obsessed with destroying him as he was with surpassing all might. different goals, same fucking toxic mindset."

you sat up straighter, turning to face him fully. "no. there's a difference. he hurt innocent people—his wife, his children—to achieve his ambition. you've never done that. you've never hurt someone who didn't deserve it."

"tell that to the heroes i've burned," dabi said darkly.

"those 'heroes' prop up a system that abandoned both of us," you reminded him. "that lets people like your father abuse their children in the name of creating better heroes. that labels children as villains because of quirks they never asked for." dabi studied your face for a long moment before a genuine smile—small but real—curved his lips. "how did i end up with someone who actually believes in me?"

"because beneath all that anger and cynicism, you still believe there's something worth fighting for," you told him, leaning forward to press your forehead against his. "and so do i."

for a moment, you stayed like that, sharing breath in the dusty afternoon light of the hideout. two broken people who had found each other in the darkness, whose scars complemented rather than repelled each other.

"we're going to tear it all down," dabi murmured, his lips brushing against yours. "the hero society, the systems that failed us. and when i finally face him—when endeavor finally sees who i've become—i want you there with me."

"i will be," you promised, closing the distance between you with a gentle kiss. "until every false hero burns."

outside, the sun began to set, casting long shadows through the boarded windows. soon the others would return, bringing with them the chaos and noise that defined the league of villains. but for now, in this quiet moment, there was just you and dabi—two children abandoned by their fathers in different ways, who had found their own path to justice in a world that had never wanted either of you.

and if that path was stained with ash and marked by flames, so be it. some things needed to burn before they could be rebuilt.

side note: this is an old, but long drabble I decided to post because well- why not?

mutuals: @haikyuubby @https-bakugo @va-3 @lotusstarr @kitkat13001 @n3r0-5352

© 𝐊𝐄𝐍𝐙𝐃𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐒 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 —

ᱬ⛧ my villain ii ~ dabi

𖤐 part sum: eyes watched you from the shadows. the person responsible for what you saw on the news.

𖤐 pairing: dabi x pro hero! female reader

𖤐 part content: sfw - mentions of screaming and fire. implied stalking/watching. no other warnings.

𖤐 a/n: oh look, if it’s not part 2. on a roll today, what's wrong with me? i think it's time to introduce a key character in this work, one you're oh so familiar with. as always likes, comments and re-blogs are deeply appreciated!

𖤐 word count: 767

𖤐 links: series masterlist | 《 prev part | next part 》

Thick smoke clouded the skies as a tall figure watched on from the darkness of an alley nearby. A small smirk of what they could describe as joy, as close to joy as they could feel, tugged at their lips. This felt good, too good. The rush of the thrill that swirled in the pit of their stomach only added fuel to the fire they already felt.

It felt so good to finally be the opposite of what their despicable father had wanted for them. They were not destined to be some stupid little hero but to be one of the most feared villains in the country, if not the world.

That was increasingly evident the older they grew and the more they were pushed aside.

Flames raged wildly as shrill screams of both pain and anguish sounded from inside the slowly dilapidating warehouse. The flames had started growing bigger thanks to the fuel it was taking hold of.

Taking one last look at their handywork, the figure slinked further back as they moved onto the busy streets without anyone suspecting a thing. It was normal for the likes of them to be in alleyways, away from prying eyes at the best of times.

The bustle of their current location provided a nice, and somewhat gentle, hum to the figure. No one paid much attention to them as they continued on their journeys to wherever they were going, so they could easily walk free. Those who did notice them just gave them room, not wanting to be anywhere near them due to their looks. Something they'd grown numb to after the years.

A few moments later, a harsh bump on their arm caused them to stop their movements, turning to glare at the person who'd just knocked into them. They stood out from the crowd, so whoever it was couldn't have an excuse for doing what they'd just done. Maybe some fire would teach them a lesson. Of course, it would be out of sight and too late for anyone to see or care. The thought left their mind as quickly as it had come at the sound of the voice that rang out.

"Oh gosh, I'm sorry!". That voice. It was a voice they hadn't heard for such a long time. When they thought they could finally get over you, you somehow end up in front of them again. In the street, of all places.

A new emotion deep inside began to bubble slightly, one they had wanted to forget about for a long time. Of course, you had to be around and do this to them again. They truly hated you for that, yet admired you. After all these years, you still held a place in their almost non-existent heart.

So began their small game of watching you for the remainder of their evening or until they grew bored. whichever came first.

Wherever you went, they followed, keeping their distance whenever you stopped or talked to people you both knew a lifetime ago. They even went as far as hiding in the shadows as you entered the takeout shop that you both passed in your younger years.

It wasn't hard to see that time had been kind to you, treating you with gentle hands unlike them. They barely recognised the young woman in the window as he watched on. However, the more they watched, the more they saw the small mannerisms that made you you.

Mentally, they cursed themselves for leaving you like they did, but they had their reasons. They had to disappear, even if it meant breaking your heart.

The sudden ringing of their phone brought them out of their stare, a tut of annoyance passed their lips before they answered it. Whoever disturbed them better have a damn good reason to so do. "What do you want?".

The voice on the other end chuckled slightly before answering, in a rather amused tone, much to their displeasure. "Well, nice to speak to you too. I've got a proposition for you. Come to the usual spot, I'll be waiting".

Clicking their tongue, the figure rolled their eyes before shifting their gaze around momentarily, scoping out who was around and what would be the fastest possible route to get them there. "Whatever".

Turning their gaze to the shop again, watching as you took your food, bidding farewell to the shop assistant before you walked out, probably heading home where you would relax for the rest of the night. How typical of you.

"Oh, before I forget, I heard about what happened earlier. Great work, Dabi".

✎ tag list: [open - 2/15]

@dabislittlemouse @hawkwithsocks

© springismss 2025 - don’t repost, copy, translate, steal or modify.

ᱬ⛧ my villain i ~ dabi

𖤐 part sum: fast forward to the first day of your new career path, it's time to face the place you wanted to hate so much. later that night, you see something that leaves you with a feeling you're not excited to have.

𖤐 pairing: dabi x pro hero! female reader

𖤐 part content: sfw - small mention of ashes. no other warnings.

𖤐 a/n: here we are at the first part of this series! to be honest, this would have been longer, but when i got to the bottom, the rest of this part i had seemed like a jump and took away from this one, so that’s going to be the next part. hope you enjoy! as always likes, comments and re-blogs are deeply appreciated!

𖤐 word count: 731

𖤐 links: series masterlist | 《 prev part | next part 》

Gripping your bag, you took a shaky breath as you gazed at the building whose shadow loomed over you. A heavy realisation of what memories it held made your fight or flight kick in harder than it had on the days before where you were now.

Although you weren't a student, it was still pretty daunting. Letting the breath you held out slowly, you closed your eyes briefly before opening them, stepping through the gates.

You spent a good few years being a pro hero, enjoying what you did daily, until an injury you sustained during a mission changed your life. Knowing that you wouldn't be a pro any more, or at least for a good few years, you turned your attention to the next best thing, which led you to where you were now - outside the gates of UA High.

You were a part of the alma mater, and nothing made you smile more than knowing you'd help guide the newest generation of pro heroes that would step foot inside those walls. Not just any influx of fledgling heroes, but those who belonged to class 1-A of the prestigious hero course. A course you were all too familiar with.

Taking in a breath, you huffed it out as you raised your head, stepping forward to begin the new path in your hero career. Despite the inner battle you were having and the bubbling anxiety stirring in your stomach, you offered small greetings to the students you passed. It wouldn't be long until you got to know the students you would be teaching alongside a roster of other pros.

By the time it came for you to walk through the door of your home, you were exhausted. Which was an understatement. Whoever said teaching would be easier than being a pro clearly didn't have to deal with the next generation. One student seemed to be the reason for your state. A boy by the name of Katsuki Bakugou, a boy who was not only overly confident but seemed to look down on his classmates, especially the one you came to know as Izuku Midoriya.

"No one with an ego that big could ever become a hero. He needs to dial it down". You spoke out loud to no one in particular, but even then, you knew your words were a lie. You knew of one certain pro hero who was too prideful for his own good. The thought of it sent shivers down your spine.

Shaking your head, you rolled your neck before changing into something a little more comfortable, takeout in hand as you flopped down onto your sofa. With a click of the remote you reached forward to grab, the TV powered on and illuminated the room. You were thankful for this little piece of normality, even if it was for a few hours.

Flicking through the channels as you ate, you searched for something to watch, something that would help you wind down and be able to sleep a little better than you had been. It had only been a few moments, and you were ready to give up, switch the TV off and opt for a food-induced sleep until the news report that flashed up on the screen caught your attention.

Chalking it down to the pro in you, you turned the volume up before setting the remote to the side and watched what was happening. IT seemed to be some sort of disaster, caused by a villain, it was heard to tell with all the commotion behind the reporter.

"All that remains inside of this now burnt-out and once-bustling warehouse are scattered piles of what police can only assume are human ashes. They can't say for certain, but this looks like the work of someone with a fire quirk - possibly a new villain. We'll keep you updated as we know more. Back to the studio~".

Before the footage switched back to the reporters in the studio, you caught sight of something at the side. The small remnants of flames that were no doubt the cause of the damage. Flames whose colour looked oddly familiar to you, yet you couldn't quite place why.

Closing your eyes, you shook your head and tried to forget the slight niggling feeling you had in the pit of your gut. A feeling that you knew exactly who those flames belonged to.

✎ tag list: [open - 2/15]

@dabislittlemouse @hawkwithsocks

© springismss 2025 - don’t repost, copy, translate, steal or modify.

ᱬ ࣪𖤐 just some actor! touya thoughts after seeing a lot of actor au content over the past few weeks.

i may or may not have part 2 in the works already because this thought has me in a chokehold. i'm just a sucker for a bad guy in a performer role.

lowercase intended, female! reader and sfw! as always likes, comments and re-blogs are deeply appreciated!

word count: 1,376

links: bnha/mha masterlist | masterlist

actor! touya who enjoys his job more than anyone should. not only does he get to spend time with his family, he also gets to play a villain that’s a hit in everyone’s book.

actor! touya who spends several hours each day in the makeup chair getting in character. sometimes he doesn’t mind it, sometimes he does. after all, having scarred skin and staples glued to him can be a bit tedious at the best of times.

actor! touya who runs through his lines several times in front of the mirror and with his cast members, just to make sure he’s got the personality of dabi in those scenes down.

actor! touya who likes to post behind-the-scenes photos to his public socials, giving his fans a little insight into what he was doing and who he was with. smiling at the comments that he gets before locking his phone and placing it away.

actor! touya who's formed a close friendship with one of his co-stars, actress! toga. of course there were rumours around the two of them dating, but he laughed them off. she was more of a little sister to him.

actor! touya who’s grateful for her as she keeps him sane most of the time, along with the rest of the league cast. after all, they bring the term chillin' like a villain to life half the time.

actor! touya who, one day, overhears actress! toga on the phone to someone, the glee obvious in her voice. amused at how the blonde bounced on her feet before saying a quick goodbye.

actor! touya who, the same day after shooting some scenes for the league, meets you for the first time. he’s not going to lie, he thought you were part of the crew until he saw actress! toga to go up to you to hug you.

actor! touya who finds himself being pulled in your direction by his blonde co-star. who looks down at you as you offer a quick wave with a sweet smile “hi”. who smiles slightly and offers his own “hi”.

actor! touya who gets more used to you as the days go on, learning from actress! toga that the series you were currently working on was on a small break. who's intrigued to know that not only were you an actress yourself, but a makeup artist in your spare time.

actor! touya who, when he walks out of his trailer one day, sees you pacing back and forth not far from your friend. you’re talking on the phone to who he assumes is your agent, judging by the way you’re usually cheerful demeanour is a tad more serious now.

actor! touya who later finds out, thanks to his own agent, that you’d been cast in an upcoming horror movie trilogy as he had. who couldn’t wait to get to know you a bit better, without anyone else interrupting.

actor! touya who spends the few days he has off looking you up and your work. who has to admit that he's impressed at what he sees and what you've starred in, you've made a name for yourself from a young age.

actor! touya who wonders how he's just hearing about you, considering you've starred in some of his favourite movies and shows. who decided to take a look at your public socials to see what you've posted.

actor! touya who sees that you're just like him when it comes to your posts, you love to show off small snippets of your set life and the odd insight into your personal life. who knows that you'll have private accounts made for just friends and family.

actor! touya who'll just persuade actress! toga to give them to him, after all, you were friends after you met, and you would be working together, it would make talking to each other outside of the set easier when either of you needed to go over anything.

actor! touya who sends requests from his personal accounts once he knows your handles, who is surprised to see how quick you've accepted and send him a message. who can't help the smile that tugs at his lips once he reads the string of messages you sent, giving his own string of replies, leg bouncing in happiness.

actor! touya who spends time getting to know you, asking cliché questions which you always happily respond to, before asking your own. who can feel a weird feeling start to take over him as he looks at his phone, it's almost like he's waiting for your messages now.

actor! touya who, when you both arrive on set to start filming together, spends time reading lines with you. who offers his input where he feels like it's needed and accepts yours when you offer it as well.

actor! touya who starts to enjoy his job even more, knowing that he's going to work where you are. who tells himself that it's normal to feel, after all, you were both steadily becoming close friends.

actor! touya who ends up with your personal phone number after a shoot one day. who find himself texting you daily with the most random things he can, smiling when you match his energy back.

actor! touya who bites the bullet one day and asks you to spend time with him outside of the set. whose palms are sweating as he sees you've read the message and are busy typing back. did it get hot all of a sudden?

actor! touya who blinks several times when he sees you've responded back to his message. "of course i'd love to! just let me know where you want to meet!".

actor! touya who feels his heart skipping a beat or two when it comes to spending time with you. who feels like a kid all over again when you ask him questions. who stutters over his words trying to string together a coherent sentence. who smiles slightly when you tell him to breathe.

actor! touya who loves to posts pictures of what the two of you get up to to his own private socials, with captions that make zero sense to anyone other than you and him. who gets teasing comments off actress! toga who knows for a fact her male co-star is smitten, he's just too dense to realise it sometimes. who finds out through a conversation with her that you're single.

actor! touya who finds himself growing closer to you. whose touches linger a little longer than normal, and eyes that watch every move you make. who feels his heart beating in his chest whenever he thinks of you.

actor! touya who one day, when you're both finished shooting the final scene of the film you're on, asks if he can talk to you. who's tapping his foot trying to calm his nerves, as you nod your head.

actor! touya who, when you're both alone in his car, stumbles over his words before muttering out a quick "will you be my girlfriend?". who starts to regret his words the moment he sees you staring at him, brows furrowed slightly.

actor! touya who turns to face away from you before he embarrasses himself any further. who wonders why the hell he opened his mouth, it was clear you didn't feel the same way.

actor! touya who feels his hand being gripped and his body move before you kiss him quickly. who's now the stunned one as he sees you smile. who feels his heart race when you utter the words "of course i will, dummy".

actor boyfriend! touya who takes you to your favourite spot by the beach just as the sun sets. who takes a photo of both of you together before posting it to his private accounts. 'here's to our next project, the rest of our lives, my love @/itsherisms'.

actor boyfriend! touya who lets you take your own photo and post it with your own caption, 'from on-screen lovers to real life lovers, you'll be my favourite co-star for life @/toutodo'.

actor boyfriend! touya who feels like the luckiest man in the world as he puts his phone away, holding you close as you both stare out to sea. who spends the longest time just rambling on with you, holding you close as he sneaks in kisses between your words.

© springismss 2025 - don’t repost, copy, translate, steal or modify.

ᱬ⛧ my villain prologue ~ dabi

𖤐 pairing: dabi x pro hero! female reader

𖤐 content: sfw - no warnings to place here.

𖤐 a/n: no part summary as this is self-explanatory. tag list is open if you want to be tagged going forward, just comment to let me know. as always likes, comments and re-blogs are deeply appreciated!

𖤐 word count: 641

𖤐 links: series masterlist | next part 》

Dull chatter filled the air as a sense of excitement and nervousness hung almost heavy around the figures making their way up the path. It was the start of a new school year, and as always, the new students were still on cloud nine. One student in particular wore a proud smile as they looked up at the building in front of them. "Touya!".

At the sound of their name, they turned around just in time to see a flash of colour before they were on the floor. Looking up at the sky, they blinked a few times to give their brain time to catch up, trying to regain their bearings.

With a soft grunt, they lifted themselves to a sitting position and looked at their friend. "Really (y/n)? You couldn’t help yourself for one day, could you?”. Beaming brightly, you let out a laugh before nodding your head. “You know me Tou, I have to keep you on your toes”.

Standing, you brushed off your uniform and held out your hand, pulling your best friend off the floor. “Of course I know that, but I don’t want to explain why I need a new uniform on the first day to my old man”.

Letting out a hum, you nodded your head, squeezing the hand in yours briefly as you turned to look at the building. “On another note, can you believe we’re here? We’re part of the hero course at U.A!”. Turquoise eyes looked at you before looking at the building, smiling widely before they spoke. “Well, having a pro hero for a dad has its advantages”.

Rolling your eyes, you elbowed Touya in the side and smirked, hearing him cough slightly from the force. “Yeah, yeah, no need to rub it in, you know. You missed out though, the entrance exam was something else”.

Taking one last glance at your best friend, you both smiled brightly before walking up the path, gripping the straps of your bags as you stepped through the doors of your hero academy. Soon after, the first day of officially becoming heroes started.

Little did you know that your life would change drastically one day when you no longer faced the world as a duo.

"Did you hear? Touya Todoroki's gone missing".

"I heard he's run away from his monster of a father".

"I heard he's been kidnapped by an upcoming group of villains".

"I heard he just left, disappeared without a trace".

"Sounds about right, a freak like him could never have become a hero".

Curled up on your bed, you gripped your pillow as you sobbed. Throat sore and eyes swollen from the countless tears and yells. You refused to move, shouting to be left alone if anyone dared enter your room to check on you.

You hoped it was a lie, jealous people making everything up, but as the days passed, turning into weeks and months, the empty seat beside you in classes and no responses to your messages only added to your distress.

Touya was gone. Your best friend, your ride or die. The one person you could trust with your life had left you with no reason or explanation. You wanted him back, fuck what anyone else said.

No amount of wishing, hoping, wanting or praying brought the faintest hope that he was out there. It was almost like he’d disappeared and left no trace because he wanted to.

Despite the loneliness you felt, you tried to carry on as best you could, making sure to become the pro hero you both wanted to be so much.

However, in your near future, an event would happen that would bring your world crashing down once again, but not in any way you could ever possibly imagine.

Leaving you with more questions than answers for the person at the centre of it.

✎ tag list: [open - 2/15]

@dabislittlemouse @hawkwithsocks

© springismss 2025 - don’t repost, copy, translate, steal or modify.

ᱬ⛧ my villain ~ dabi | masterlist

𖤐 series sum: fate would have you back at the doors of the infamous u.a high after you become a pro hero, taking on the role of the newest teacher for the next generation of pros. fast forward one night, a run in with a group of villains had you questioning an event from your past. did those eyes look familiar? was it really him?

𖤐 pairing: dabi x pro hero! female reader

𖤐 series content: 18+ - mdni. contains spoliers if you're new to the fandom. p in v, language, teasing, dirty talk, cream pie, orgasm denial, possessive talk, implied/suggested multiple rounds, slight choking, bruising/marking, reader gets called various pet names, blood, weapons, torture, threats of violence, gore, general NSFW content. each part will contain its own warning if required, so be sure to check them out before reading.

𖤐 a/n: this is one of my oldest works, so it’s time for a refresh and a new look. written with a fire quirk reader in mind. this was originally written at a time the fandom believed dabi was touya, which we now all know he is. header images will also change with each chapter. lower case intended because i can't spot mistakes for the life of me. as always likes, comments and re-blogs are deeply appreciated!

𖤐 series word count: 2,139 (ongoing)

𖤐 links: bnha/mha masterlist | masterlist

⛧ are you ready to play with fire? ⛧

y e s ↴

☆ prologue ☆ part i ☆ part ii ☆ part 3 - coming soon

✎ tag list: [open - 2/15]

@dabislittlemouse @hawkwithsocks

© springismss 2025 - don’t repost, copy, translate, steal or modify.

contains: swearing word count: 1.2k

“miller's on your ass today.” 

you sighed, your gaze flickering from the beautiful, authentic sun setting over the city’s buildings to the blazing, sun-colored dork next to you.  

“i mean really—“ he pulled out a gummy bear— from what seemed to be his never-ending side pocket stash —and stuffed it into his mouth. “you’d think the divorce would give the old bastard a revelation or something. but noooo, he’s still a bitch.” his confident gossip bubbled down into a dramatic murmur as he eventually shrugged his shoulders. 

you sighed again, head dropping into your hands as it throbbed, too sc

rambled to focus on keigo's deep interest in your manager's love life. “i need a job.”

“you have two.” keigo retorted as he moved to cross his arms. 

“i need another one.” you massage your temples before letting your hands fall to your sides. 

keigo scoffed. “you’re really not making enough?” 

“not if i don't want to be drowning in student debt for the rest of my life.” you complained. 

keigo pressed his lips together and scrunched his nose. it was the face he made when he wanted to argue on but knew better than to. the back of his head hit the brick wall behind you two as he too, stopped to a sigh. “well, i hear there’s a new club down the block. LOVE, or something?”

“love? like the word?” your voice peaked as you looked at him. 

keigo's fingers twirled around the string from his waist apron. “something like that.” the blonde's eyes fell to the sunset. yours followed them. “a couple of guys in my historical art class were talking about going.”

“the hippie—?” 

keigo cut you off before you could finish your comment  “my point is,” he leaned closer— most likely for dramatic effect, “they’re probably hiring.”

it was your turn to press your lips together now. 

“bartending isn’t that bad.” keigo coaxed. you almost laughed at how fast he was able to switch his opinion on this idea. but keigo kept his eyes on the sun, like he was thinking about his plans for the future too. a better future. “plus the tips make it so worth it.” he titled his head toward you, shooting you a sly grin. he nodded his head, ‘yeah?’, as he nudged your shoulder. 

your cold façade cracked into a warm smile. keigo always found a way to cheer you up. it was stupidly ironic. “i’ll apply when i get home.” 

“and you swear we aren’t friends.” keigo scoffed and you showed no mercy when shoving his shoulder. he just laughed loudly. “midnight is doing pretty nice though. the regulars are cute and who knows, maybe miller will consider giving us raises.”

a chortle escaped your throat. “yeah. like shit.” your lips didn’t remain curled up for long. your eyes faltered to a determined degree, your mind sharp on your goal. you had always tried your best to fight for yourself, nothing about that would change. nothing would change. a high tension that you didn’t even realize you had dropped from your shoulder like anchors. you were secure. you were safe. 

keigo kicked a rock at the ground, “my shift ends in thirty so i should head in.” he pointed back at the door. you nodded your head, giving him a small wave as he turned to go back into the bar. 

the orange and yellow kissed hue from the sun tinted your face. you didn’t think about how long it'll actually take you to pay off your tuition. you didn’t think about the piles of homework you'd have to do when you got home. you didn’t even think about how you’d last the last half of this twelve-hour shift. 

you just closed your eyes and focused on the sunshine’s delicate mark on your skin. 

just a block down the packed city was LOV, whose grand opening last saturday had a total of twenty-three arrivals.

“told you this was a shit idea.” a gravelly voice opined as he flicked fresh ash from the window sill and let it fall onto the dirted path outside.    

a low voice snarled in response, bony fingers typing away on his computer. 

“don’t know why the old man—“

“shut up.” tomura snapped. 

touya just grinned, “whats got your panties in a bunch, boss?” he shook his head in amusement, a stupid grin unreasonably placed on his lip. “you had high hopes or something?”

“shut the fuck up.” tomura eyes didn’t leave his screen, they only squinted as he muttered something to himself and his fingers swiped across the mouse pad of his laptop. 

“god— are you like, virtually wired to the internet or something?” touya trudged over to tomuras set up, finding a comfortable spot on the back of his chair to rest his forearm on and inspect what tomura was so fixated on. 

touya (surprisingly) was stunned.

“what the fuck is that?”

his laptop displayed a website page for a bar named moonlight. the layout was impressive alone; the backdrop flashed photos of a variety of very satisfied customers at the bar. an animation of a sparkling star shot across the top of the site, lighting up the bars boldly displayed name. and even—

“shit.” touya voice dropped to a whisper, mouth hanging dangerously close to tomuras ear. “look at that. they even got an interactive menu.” he disclosed, treating it as a cherry on top of moonlight's enormous advantaged cake. 

“how the fuck are these bougie ass motherfuckers packed every. single. fucking night.” tomuras finger tapped rhythmically against his desk, seemingly mindless, but touya took notice.

touya pulled away, crossing his arms as he leaned up against tomuras desk. “we could use some better advertising.” he shrugged— acting as if he wouldn’t take huge offense if his comment wasn’t taken into consideration. luckily, tomura could recognize touya's snotty tone for what it really meant and couldn’t be bothered to push it. 

“yeah.” he sighed, elbows falling onto his desk as his hands found themselves tangled into his sea of unbrushed hair. “when you learn how to code, come back to me with that.” he taunted through gritted teeth.

touya rolled his eyes, even though he knew tomura couldn’t see. “whatever. we can’t be in the slumps forever.” scarred hands reached for his phone as he pulled up the website on his own. his feet led him to the back door, hand reaching for his coat on the rack. 

tomuras head peaked up at the sound of touya fleeting feet. 

“and where the fuck are you going?”

“out.” touya dismissed, eyes still glued onto his phone screen as he typed in the directions from the website onto his map app. 

tomura huffed out a heavy breath when the back door slammed shut. he leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms and legs far before settling back into his— what he swears is —not-so-horribly crooked posture. “fucking hell.” he muttered.

eventually his finger fell back onto his keyboard, clacking sound blending into the background noise once more. 

touya sneered on the other side of the door. his gait was confident as he followed direction of the rising moon. 

masterlist next

“here it comes, here it comes” | LCD soundsystem

✷ tomura shigaraki x touya todoroki x reader series

✶⋆.˚ gn!reader | no quirk/modern au

↳ symbol guide | ⏾ written | ★ smau

after getting a bartending job at a busy downtown bar, you find yourself caught between two complicated men— childhood friends with messy pasts and even messier communication. what starts as curiosity slowly turns into something more personal. as your nights grow more tangled and your walls start to crack, you’re left questioning what you truly want— and who you’re becoming in the process.

─── ⋆⋅ chapter guide⋅⋆ ───

one — new moon ⏾

two — meteor shower ⏾

three — double exposure ⏾

more coming soon…

comment to be added to current taglist : @s6rine @peachesvault @tlissablr @evilari111

not so little | t. shouto

✮ tags ; gn!reader, minor age-gap (4 years), sfw

✮ wc ; 1.3k

✮ a/n ; this is not the most original idea ever so sorry but i wanted to write my take on it

"Seriously," Touya leans on the door frame of Natsuo's room, self-satisfied smile on his face "You're crushing on...Shouto? Our Shou-chan?"

You cover your face with despair at your predicament. You can't believe you're actually telling either of them. It wasn't like you were planning too. In what universe would you even think to do that deliberately?

But Natsuo is frighteningly good at grilling you about things when you refuse to tell him. Ever since he found out about your crush, he made it his lifes mission to harass you about it. You were careful, damn it. You didn't even actually tell him, he used to his annoying deductive reasoning to figure it out. You tell Natsuo everything.

He knows about every weird medical problem you've ever had, every partner you've ever dated, and every weird fit of crying you've ever cried in your life. He's your confidant. Your best friend. So he knows there's only two sorts of crushes you couldn't tell him about.

If it was on an ex or if it was on one of his siblings. His first guess was Touya - but he figure you wouldn't be this embarrassed about that since you often wolf whistle at him when you're in the house.

Then he guessed Fuyumi, because you're still embarrassed by how pretty she is. When you said it wasn't her - he was briefly stumped before settling in a shocked silence.

"...Are you crushing on Shouto? Seriously?"

Your embarrassment told him he was right, and now you're sitting in his room and hoping the world will swallow you because you're crushing on your best friends little brother of all things.

In your defense, it wasn't always like this. You didn't see much of the youngest Todoroki at all growing up. He was in his dorms for most of highschool and Natsuo spent most of his early adulthood ducking his parents house entirely. You only met him properly when he turned twenty. They're only living together now for Touya.

You kind of wish they weren't - since it'd save you the trouble of being embarrassed twice. You've been seeing Shouto a lot recently, since you've been coming over to hang out with Natsuo.

Shouto is not the 16 year old boy you always made. He's 22 and he's got tall and lean muscle. He's polite but sweet and strangely - much funnier than you could've ever predicted. He's genuinely very kind but most of all - he's been very direct on telling you that he likes you.

You don't think anyones ever pursued you like this in your life. Both of your last relationships ended amicably but neither of them had been this...direct with you ever. Shouto is very direct, actually. Direct in telling you which honorifics to use, and telling you how nice you look, and saying he misses you often. You've been dismissive. Even you're not so desperate as to openly pursue your friends little brother.

But again, he's not so little anymore. He's taller than you now, and he's got lean muscle. He always smells great. He is incredibly pretty in the fairy prince kind of way. This is by far the worst crush you've ever had to endure in your entire life. You've tried to forget.

But just last week he walked you home after patrols, speaking casually and kindly and good god - what is with the broad-shoulders? When did that even happen?

You want to die. You want to disappear into a black hole. You want to scream and cry. Why you're crushing on a boy 4 years younger than you? Why is Todoroki Shouto of all people make your heart flutter?

"Seriously... I mean I knew he was flirting with you pretty brazenly but," Natsuo looks like he's holding back a grimace. If you weren't holding back tears, you'd hit him "...Shouto? Like...really?"

"Didn't know our little angel was such a casanova. Crazy world we live in."

"Neither of you are helping." You say exasperated. Natsuo leans back on his palms, sighing a little. "Do you think I wanted this?"

"It's not the end of the world," Natsuo offers thoughtfully. You give him a meaningful glare from the corner of his bed but he doesn't budge "I mean..I guess if I got to pick who he dated, you're not at the very bottom of the list."

You kick his side. "That's so backhanded."

"He doesn't want to admit you two are a good match," Touya says thoughtfully, unwrapping candy from his pocket. A habit he picked up trying to quit smoking "He'll be lonely if you date Shouto."

"Shut up, Touya."

You ignore both of them for a minute trying to get your bearings.

"You think we're a good match...?"

Touya laughs hard "Is that all you heard? Poor Natsu, already being abandoned."

Natsuo shoots Touya a glare.

"Touyaaaa," You drag, reaching over to tug on the bottom of his shirt "Elaborate."

"And feed your delusions?" He says, clicking his teeth "Fine. Only because it's funny."

Natsuo hmphs, and you look at him apologetically. You two will have to talk about it later. Touya rolls the candy in his mouth, pulling his shirt up to scratch at his abdomen.

"Dunno. You're like... probably one of the only people who's not gonna treat him weird cause he's a good little hero. That brat... it's probably best for him to date someone normal and civilian-esque. Not like being a hero is the most important thing in the world to him."

You flush a little. This is really, really bad. Natsuo gives you a disapproving look. You look back at him a little softer.

"I won't date him if he's off limits." You offer. Touya coos at you both.

"Well aren't you darling."

Natsuo groans, laying flat on the floor.

"Ugh. It's not like I can just say no. It's enough of a miracle that Shouto is showing interest in anyone. And if he misses out on true love, even if it's," He gives you a sideways glance and shakes his head "Even if it's with you then I can't actually stop it."

"I'll reject him if you tell me too."

"What kind of older brother do you take me for?"

"Yeah, what kind of older brother do you take him for?" Touya mocks, laughing to himself "Aren't you just a saint, Natsu?"

"Touya, I'm gonna throw you out of my room."

"Ooh, someone's mad."

Before Natsuo as a chance to come back, the sound of the door opening from the living room downstairs floats up. Shouto calls out. You feel your heart almost fall out of your ass. Touya, delighted, is the first to reply.

"Shou-chan, we're upstairs."

You make a gesture of violence towards Touya who replies by pretending to jerk off then giving you the middle finger. You don't have time to collect yourself before Shouto is upstairs. He's back from patrols and he's a little sweaty. You feel heat creep-up up your neck.

"Touya-nii, do you still—oh," Shouto smiles soft as he realizes "It's you. I didn't realize you were here."

"I came in after class."

"Alone? You should've asked me to walk home with you."

You flush. Touyas' snickering is not helping you at all.

"Isn't that out of your way?"

"It's fine. I do stuff like that a lot," You're almost disappointed until he tacks on "But it's you so it's alright."

You look up at him wide-eyed. He gives you the ghost of a smile. God you're screwed. Before you can reply, Natsuo clears his throat.

"Go wash up. You stink." He chides. Shouto immediately goes back to being a little brother, nodding his head.

"Okay. Then," He looks at you directly. You're so screwed "I'll be right back."

You wait until Shouto is finally down the hall, listening for the bathroom door to thump shut before falling back into Natsuo's bed. Touya breaks out into a fit of laughter as Natsuo sulks in the corner.

But all of it feels like white noise when you compare it to the sound of your heartbeat, thudding hard in your chest.

💜7 mins in heaven with Dabi: Pt. 5💙

Continuation of Part 4

Walking back to the table, you notice Hitoshi eyeing you suspiciously. Part of you felt guilty towards Hitoshi considering what the two of you did this morning, while the other part of you felt smug that you finally one-uped the most notorious player on campus.

Casually, you sit next to Hitoshi which was Touya's previous spot. Reaching across the table, you grab your bag and open it again to finish eating your donut. Tomura was now diagonal from you and was shooting you a questioning look.

"Where's Touya?"

"I saw him go into the restroom as I came out." The lie rolled off your tongue easily, not even batting an eye as you take a bite of your donut. It tasted even sweeter than before.

Hitoshi shifts next to you, moving slightly closer as you stared back at Tomura innocently. Yo and Keigo were on the other side of Hitoshi and Tomura respectively, lost in their own conversation. Tomura's gaze was calculating, which was starting to make you uncomfortable. You assumed he was the quiet stay-in-my-business type, but now you weren't so sure. Thankfully Keigo noticed you were back and spoke up.

"Hey, (Y/n), are youf doin' anyfin' tonight?" The question was muffled around a mouthful of donut.

"Nope. Just free-loading with this guy." Elbowing Hitoshi playfully, you spare him a glance seeing that he was already staring at you with a gaze you didn't quite understand.

Looking back to Keigo, your answer seemed to trigger his memory of what he walked into this morning. His chewing slowed and Hitoshi shifted next to you again also noticing Keigo's gaze.

"Riigghhttt..." Keigo swallowed, uncertain, "well I was wondering if you wanted to come to a party with us tonight? It's being held at the same place as before."

Memories from that night flooded your mind and you couldn't help but sigh. That's when this whole mess started.

"Why do I get the feeling all you do is party?" You teased Keigo instead, setting your donut down on the bag as you leaned back into your seat. Your hands found their way to your lap, accidentally brushing against Hitoshi's hand which was resting on his thigh. His other hand was visible on the table, playing with the lid of his coffee cup absently.

Hitoshi subtly moves his hand and brushes against yours again, the two of you having your hands next to each other under the table.

Holding back a shy smile, you bite your lower lip as Keigo rolls his eyes. "We're in college! Partying is part of the learning experience!"

Just then, a body slumps into the seat in front of you. Everyone turns and looks at Touya whose gaze was solely fixated on you.

You tilt your head slightly in question, innocent enough for everyone else at the table but the knowing glint in your eyes had Touya's eyes flashing.

Hitoshi's hand twitches against yours under the table.

A closer look at Touya and you could see the flushed glowing skin on his cheeks. Raising an eyebrow, you lift the hand not next to Hitoshi and break off a piece of your donut, biting into it slowly.

"Are you good?" Hitoshi asks, speaking up for everyone at the table. Touya never breaks his gaze from you.

"Never better."

His words were low and knowing, but you shrug nonchalantly and turn back to Keigo. "Sure, I'll go."

"Yessss!" Keigo pumps the air with his arm.

"Go where?" Touya asks, and you can see him still staring at you in your peripheral.

"Oh, I just invited (Y/n) to the party tonight!" Keigo explains before turning to scold Yo for sneaking two more donuts.

Touya hums from across the table, probably thinking the same thing you did. You couldn't help the blush that found its way to your cheek, but you busied yourself with the donut, not looking up at anyone.

"I'll go too," Hitoshi speaks up suddenly, removing his hand from under the table to lean back and stretch his hands above his head. Keigo gasps harshly and everyone else at the table turns to look at him in surprise.

"You? At a party?!" Yo gaps at Hitoshi, chewed-up donut visible in his mouth. Hitoshi grimaces in disgust and looks down at his coffee before looking to stare at Touya.

"Why not? It seems as though I missed out on these 'learning experiences.'"

Touya didn't say anything in return but met Hitoshi's gaze head-on, his stare cold and unwavering making an uneasy feeling settle in your stomach.

~*~*~*~*

Breakfast ended soon after that as classes were starting for a few people, including you.

You parted ways with Hitoshi after discussing class schedules and deciding on a place to meet so you two could both head back to his dorm before the party.

Class went by in a blur, a few people talking about the dorms that got shut down and the few scandalous roommate situations that had come up as a result.

You tried eavesdropping on a few conversations wondering if your name would come up. Hitoshi was a low-key person, but since he was close friends with some notorious people on campus, you weren't sure what to expect.

"I tried asking Touya if I could stay with him, but he didn't even pay attention to me!" A girl whined to her friends in front of you as you flipped a page in your notebook, pretending to take notes.

A few of her friends 'awed' in pity, trying to console her. "Well, you know what they say about Touya...you should've known he wouldn't go back to you."

One of the friends spoke up truthfully and another shot her a 'shut-up' look. However, the girl whining only sniffed and nodded her head solemnly.

"Yeah...I know. If only I could relive that night again..." she sighs dreamily. This time all of her friends echo her dreamy sign.

"We all do," they say simultaneously.

Yikes.

Your lips curl up in disgust and tune them out, not bothering to listen to whatever details they were going to relive.

Absently, you start doodling on the paper. Little hearts and flowers scattered along the border. Your mind wonders to this morning, before the coffee shop. Sure, discovering you had somehow managed to one-up Touya was surprising, but Hitoshi's coy smirk was lodged in your brain.

The sound of his voice when he called you 'kitten' or just the simple fact he gave up his room for you to sleep in for however long you needed.

Not to mention the almost-kiss you had. Lately, it seemed like you've had a few of those close calls which didn't settle right in your stomach. First with Touya and then with Hitoshi, but out of the two, you felt more drawn to-

Your phone buzzed twice in succession, snapping you out of your daze.

brainwxshed: hey

bvrnt.eros: hey

Are you fucking kidding me?

You look at both messages, torn between who to answer first or if you should even answer them at all. Touya was the troubled one and the one you weren't too happy with at the moment no matter how downright sinful he was.

Hitoshi on the other hand has done nothing wrong to warrant your anger. Putting your pencil down, you slouch lower in your seat and open your phone, tapping on Hitoshi's message.

you: hii

You see him typing, but your fingers itch to tap on Touya's message too.

Should I? What does he have to say? Is he going to talk about this morning? Is he-

brainwxshed: sooo about this party later...what should i expect? fuck that sounds so lame...

You smile fondly.

you: you don't have to go if you're uncomfortable. im not to big on parties either. I just went to one that one time.

And look at my consequences.

brainwxshed: im going if you're going. gotta protect my little kitten.

brainwxshed: *the little kitten.

Your face heats and you drop your phone on your desk, holding in a squeal. Butterflies erupted in your stomach as it did backflips. Asshole. You knew that wasn't a typo and he was teasing you again but you couldn't find it in you to be mad.

Rubbing your face with your hands, you pick your phone up and switch to Touya's message to hopefully calm down.

you: what?

bvrnt.eros: hm...you're cold, (Y/n). i think i should be the one mad at you for what you did to me this morning.

Yep. There it is.

you: not my fault.

bvrnt.eros: oh dollface...but it was. walking off like that and leaving me alone to take care of myself after you made me so fucking hard...

Conflicting emotions shot through you.

you: again...not intentional so it's not my fault.

bvrnt.eros: i don't think you understand the concept of sexting, let me explain-

Gritting your teeth, you go back to Hitoshi's message.

you: protection from...?

brainwxshed: hey, you never know. i've heard stories and one thing i know for sure is that college parties are never good☝🏻...and they're crowded.

you: ahh...is that why you never went to one?

brainwxshed: ...partially. but also, why go when i can watch studio ghibli films in my dorm and draw?

Just then another message popped down from Touya.

bvrnt.eros: so sexting is basically like dirty talk over text. i said you made me hard this morning and i jerked off to the thought of you in the donut shop bathroom and you're supposed to respond with something sexy to keep the conversation going.

Oh my-

Angrily you tap on the message.

you: im not stupid and im not sexting you.

bvrnt.eros: boooo 🍅

You tap back to Hitoshi's message.

you: that sounds nice actually. if you wanna stay in your dorm, i'll stay with you.

brainwxshed: stay with me? careful kitten~ we might end up like this morning~

Your face heats up again.

you: i have no idea what you're talking about.

brainwxshed: 'stay with me' and i can show you later~

Another message from Touya pops down

bvrnt.eros: soo...this party tonight is kinda like our anniversary hm? how should we celebrate 👀

With every message Touya sends, you feel more agitated. He's ruining the mood that keeps building between you and Hitoshi. You swipe his message away and return to Hitoshi's message.

you: are you gonna kiss me for real this time?

Or so you thought.

bvrnt.eros: ...fuck.

bvrnt.eros: dollface i would kiss you all over if you let me.

Fuck.

Your body went ridged seeing Touya respond to the message meant for Hitoshi. Realizing you sent it to the wrong person and adding fuel to the fire that you were so desperately trying to put out.

Do I tell him that wasn't for him? Will he know I meant to send that to Hitoshi? How do I respond to Hitoshi now?

Your fingers twitch over your keypad, panic rising inside of you. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck-

bvrnt.eros: im looking forward to tonight, (Y/n).

Your fingers frantically type out many different forms of 'no' and 'that wasn't for you' but couldn't find one to settle on and send. The fact that Hitoshi was also waiting on a response made you panic even more.

Calm down, (Y/n).

Locking your phone, you set it down and take a deep breath. Deciding not to say anything more and make it worse, you shakily put your phone down and tune back into the professor who was dismissing the class.

You had to meet up with Hitoshi soon anyways and you weren't sure you could even look him in the eyes. Guilt washes over you, not knowing what to do or how to fix this situation. Tonight was not going to be fun.

~*~*~*~*

You met with Hitoshi soon after.

He was smirking at you avoiding him, but you knew he probably thought you were embarrassed from the text conversation when in reality that wasn't the case at all. Maybe under different circumstances you might've been, but because you were so careless-

"I need to stop at my old dorm and get extra clothes," remembering the text from this morning about the repairs not being finished and since you only packed for today, you needed more clothes.

"Sure," Hitoshi nods as the two of you begin to walk to the South dorms. "So..." he starts, looking at you from the corner of his eye.

You gulp.

"So?"

Hitoshi smirks, shoving his hands into his pockets.

"So about earlier..."

"Earlier? What happened earlier?" Panic rose in your chest. Did he find out? Did Touya screenshot your message and send it to him? Oh God what if-

Hitoshi turns and cuts in front of you, a pierced eyebrow raised in concern. "The party. You never told me what to expect."

A heavy breath leaves you in a rush.

"Right. The party." Shouldering past Hitoshi, you try to calm down, opening the door to the South dorms, frigid air hitting you like a ton of bricks.

Cursing lightly, you walk faster to your room and fumble with the door, footsteps cautiously catching up.

"Um..." Throwing open the door, you let Hitoshi in as you go to rummage through your closet. "Well, there's going to be a lot of people and alcohol. Music can be expected too. Just typical college party stuff," you mouth off quickly, still rattled thinking that Hitoshi found out about earlier.

Hitoshi wasn't even paying attention, walking around your dorm room and observing the little trinkets and decorations you had. It's only been one night, but you did miss it here. You turn back to your closet and pack a week's worth of clothes just in case and shove them into a bag.

"I really hope they fix the heater soon. I don't want to overstay or anything," you comment absently, folding a pair of pants.

"I thought you liked staying with me?" Hitoshi's voice was low and closer than expected, making you jump. Well, that certainly didn't take long for him to bring that part of the conversation up.

It felt as though he was right by your ear and you couldn't find the courage to turn around. Shakily, you place the pants in your bag and sidestep before turning and walking to your dresser to pull out undergarments.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Hitoshi still standing there, probably confused, before slowly turning towards you again.

"I do! I mean, thank you, but still. A week is a long time," you explain, counting off a checklist in your brain. Now...what to wear tonight...

You hastily pull open the bottom drawer, finding a short black dress you've only worn once before.

"Okay, I'm finished." Turning to Hitoshi, you shove the dress in the bag and walk back towards the door.

"Let's go, I'm freezing." Smiling innocently, Hitoshi regards you with a thoughtful look, not saying anything as you two leave the room. Locking the door and exiting the building was met with silence.

Hitoshi seemed lost in his thoughts and didn't say a word on the way back to his dorm for the two of you to get ready.

~*~*~*~*

The party was already packed by the time you and Hitoshi showed up. He stuck close to your side, looking uncomfortable at the number of people in such a small space. You didn't blame him, also wanting to get out of here as soon as possible and hopefully avoid Touya.

Of course, fate has other plans for you.

"(Y/n) and Hitoshi, over here!" Keigo calls out loudly over the music. Cursing, you trudge over and avoid looking at the piercing blue eyes already next to Keigo.

A warm flush finds its way to your face anyway and you manage a small smile at Keigo. Tomura and Yo were off to the side talking while drinking some beers. You try to recall if you saw them at the previous party but the only thing you remember is woodsy musk, sandalwood, and cigarette smoke.

I need to get out of here.

"Perfect timing! We were just about to play spin the bottle truth or dare!" Keigo motions to the large group of people surrounding the area and they cheer loudly.

Nope.

You take a large step back holding up your hands. "Have fun!"

"Awh c'mon, (Y/n)," Touya teases across from you. "It'll be fun. Just like last time." After stressing the last part, he glances at Hitoshi smugly and another wave of guilt washes over you.

You grit your teeth and shake your head, anxiety creeping up your spine. To your surprise, Hitoshi only steps forward.

"I'll play."

Keigo cheers excitedly, pumping his fist. "Oh, dude, this is the best day ever!"

Tomura had stopped talking to Yo, who was still talking regardless if Tomura was listening or not, observing the scene in front of him. Uncomfortable wasn't even a strong enough word you'd use to describe the situation.

Touya looked calm and collected as Hitoshi walked to stand next to him, the two of them now staring at you expectantly.

Purple and blue stared at you hotly, warmth spreading across your cheeks as they had looks of longing. Both held heat and memories of almost-kisses, but only one of them had a false knowing of what you said earlier.

"Uh..." Not knowing what to do, the whole group of college students now eagerly waited for you to answer.

"GUESS WHO'S BACK, FUCKERS!" The door slammed open suddenly, a loud voice ringing loud over the music.

Everyone turned to the door and loud cheers rang out, cutting the tension. Your shoulders sag in relief seeing Touya and Hitoshi finally look away from you. You follow their gaze seeing a blonde-haired man wearing black joggers and a black sweatshirt grinning manically at everyone welcoming him back.

"Kat!" Keigo calls out, running up to clap him on the back. "Man, this day really couldn't get any better!"

Well, at least someone is having a good time.

Kat claps Keigo on the back too and walks over to the group in front of you. Yo groans, making Kat roll his eyes and flick him on the forehead.

Yo scowls and rubs his head. Tomura greets Kat with a small smile and nod, offering to get him a beer. Touya grins and steps up, ruffling the spikey blonde hair making Kat snarl as he swats the hand away. Hitoshi was last, dapping up Kat fondly with a muted, "Hey, bro."

Hitoshi turns to you and motions you over.

"Katsuki, this is (Y/n). (Y/n), this is Katsuki." You awkwardly smile, not sure if this was the right time to be meeting Hitoshi's roommate. Brother?

"Hey," Katsuki smirks, giving Hitoshi a look you didn't miss. Or Touya. "Hitoshi told me the situation already. It's cool if you still need a place to stay, but I'll need my room back."

The realization hit you suddenly and you risk a glance at Hitoshi who also had a small blush on his face, avoiding your gaze.

Seeing him blush made you blush more, awkwardly shifting your stance. Katsuki cackles at the sight of you and Hitoshi, but lays off the teasing, turning to Tomura who hands him a beer.

"So what are we doing?" He asks, biting the lid off with his teeth. Your mouth drops open slightly in awe as Keigo happily fills Katsuki in.

"Heh, spin the bottle, 'Toshi? What the hell happened when I was away?" Katsuki asks, shooting you another quick glance.

Hitoshi grumbles something you can't hear, making Katsuki smirk, and the both of them walk back to the circle. You go to follow and notice Touya's seething face once Hitoshi leaves your field of vision.

You quickly move away and go back to your previous spot, Tomura now standing next to you. "Are you okay?"

He whispered the question low, and you let out a huge breath you didn't know you were holding.

"No."

Tomura reaches out a hand, concerned, and you grab it shakily. He squeezes your hand and you squeeze it back, thankful for the reassurance.

"Right! So who wants to start?" Keigo announces to the large group of college students. A lot of cheers and drunken words rang out.

Tomura keeps a hold of your hand, tucking into your side as you stare at the damned bottle on the table. Touya and Hitoshi were back to standing next to each other across from you and if they were staring at you and Tomura holding hands, you couldn't find it in you to care. Though you were sure Tomura was staring right back without a care in the world.

"You're going to have to make a decision sometime." Tomura lays his head on your shoulder, murmuring solemnly. The question doesn't surprise you since you noticed his observation skills, so you were sure he had caught on long ago.

"...I know," you mutter back, still staring at the bottle unblinkingly. It was nice to have someone to talk to. You haven't told anyone of the situation going on and the drama that followed, so finding comfort in Tomura was reassuring and needed. Although unexpected.

"Do you have any clue which one?" Tomura asks, the both of you locked in your own world, watching Katsuki be the first one to spin.

Do I?

Honestly, it felt like you've been debating this question constantly for the past few days. Both made your heart race with excitement. Touya kept you on your toes but had a bad reputation and a cocky attitude to match. Hitoshi was unexpected in the way he welcomed you with open arms, but loved to tease you endlessly.

As of right now, there were no cons with Hitoshi but yet something still prevented you from committing fully.

"Not a clue," you finally admit, leaning your cheek on Tomura's head.

Tomura hums and the two of you watch Katsuki dare Yo to do a keg stand. Yo blanches as the crowd starts chanting his name in encouragement.

"Great. Now I'll have to deal with that later," Tomura sighs, annoyed.

Yo glares at a smirking Katsuki before flipping himself into a handstand, his shirt falling down making the crowd whistle and catcall him jokingly.

"Hm?"

"Yo. He's my roommate and cannot handle anything more than 2 beers," Tomura explains. "Which, Katsuki knows that."

You hum again and watch Yo stumble back down on his feet, looking green. Katsuki throws his arm around Yo's neck, saying something which only had Yo hiccuping in response.

"Your turn to spin, Yo!" Keigo exclaims excitedly.

Yo sways to the table and half-heartedly spins the bottle. It didn't spin very much and slowly made its way to you. You grip Tomura's hand tighter, watching the bottle stop.

Keigo cheers loudly.

"Truth or dare, (Y/n)?" Yo slurs, trying to focus his gaze on you.

"Uh...truth?" You whisper almost shyly, hearing the crowd boo.

Yo holds a hand to his chin to think. "Hm...who do you like more-"

"Dare!" You cut him off, not wanting him to finish that sentence. You were not going to risk that. People cheer at your change of heart.

"Okayyyy," Yo hiccups, "I dare you to do a 7 minutes in heaven with someone."

Yeah, no, that's completely better.

Keigo all but squeals, looking like he just won the lottery with how this night is going and Tomura squeezes your hand again tightly.

"Spin," Yo motions to the bottle, waiting for you.

The air seemed to crackle with electricity as you reached for the bottle, spinning it as hard as you could, praying it'd land on anyone but those two.

Touya and Hitoshi's gaze intensely watched the bottle, as the rest of the group cheered unknowingly at the tension. Your palms felt sweaty as anxiety loomed over you seeing the damned bottle slow as it towards Touya and Hitoshi.

It came to stop and the crowd 'ooh-ed' trying to figure out who it was pointing at.

"Is it...both of them?" Tomura murmured in awe, as Keigo whistled.

"Alright, I'll be the judge!" Keigo walked over to you and squatted down to see who the bottle was lined up with. "Oh wow...I've never seen this before. Ladies and gentlemen, it's split down the middle...we have a tie!" Keigo announces, hopping up.

The crowd gets hyped, all the girls shooting you a dirty look, but you really couldn't care because you were seconds away from passing out.

"Well, (Y/n)? Which one are you going to choose?"

~*~*~*~*

Touya's hitlist taglist:

@spaceisout @deputy-videogamer @magpiesworld @blahblahblahhhhhhhhhhhhhh @mod-hadagile @whokillednyx @ittybittywallflower @bubblewordsofsodapop @poopiepoopie123 @frontier-renegade @windex-princess-ami @yourfavoriteloover @ashash @shamefulwitch @allthingsleviackerman @97britt

🪼🧜‍♂️ life’s a beach, but let’s mer-make the best of it 🧜‍♂️🪼

[Mer!Dabi/Reader] [E]

Summary: There’s a new aquarium in town, and you (a graduating zoology major) are trying to land a summer internship there to gain some hands-on experience as you apply for jobs and research positions alike. Excited by the possibility, you decide to visit Universal Aquarium after your last final, taking a leisurely walk around to look at the types of fish you may get to work with, only to find that one of them is probably far, far beyond your paygrade…

… or where you are a degree-holding fish nerd who unknowingly begins to work at an aquarium that wasn’t originally created to be an aquarium, and you catch the interest of its sadistic, biggest-kept secret.

✨CHAPTER 3 UP NOW✨

featuring this lovely new artwork:

OUR MOURNING GLORY ┊ TODOROKI TOUYA

synopsis: everything born in his body will eventually outgrow it. his love for you should be no different.

tags: GN reader, hanahaki au, strangers to friends to lovers, falling in love, requited unrequited feelings, quirkless reader, villain dabi, vomiting, hanahaki as a chronic illness, quirkless discrimination, lack of self worth, hurt + comfort, mild body horror, morally ambiguous reader, first kisses, very hopeful ending (<- I prommy lol)

wc: 5.4K

A/N: now with lovely cover art from momo! thank you so much!

Dabi really fucking hates doctors, has since he was a kid.

They’re too sterile. The strong antiseptic smell burned his sinuses and being surrounded by entirely white walls set him on edge. As though he had been deposited into a liminal space where time does not exist. A cacophony of suffering, incessant beeping, wheels rolling on old gurneys, echoed footsteps, all coalescing into prickly white noise.

Finding a place that would actually treat him was a hell in and of itself. Bigger hospitals and university medical centres weren’t viable options, given how beefed up security usually was. Seedy back-alley places existed in the areas he liked to haunt, but even the thought of stepping foot into one gave him sepsis.

Quirkless clinics were rare. Most that existed ran out of funding— the government saw no reason to care for a dying species. If you didn’t have a quirk then you had it bad. Citizens were legally required to have it listed under a disability on their medical records, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to be turned away in the emergency room because of it.

Dabi almost walked away that first night. As bad of a guy as he is, there was something inherently wrong about infringing on space that did not belong to him. But you had stepped out into the street for a break, jacket pulled close to your chest, took one look at the blood dried to his cheeks and rallied him inside.

He finds himself back here again, for the nth time. Today makes it an entire year since he met you, and ten full months since he coughed up that first bud. A mild inconvenience turned into an invasive bloom.

“…Hanahaki is a serious disease. It is a condition where vine-like buildup in your airways forms into buds, eventually flowering into…”

Morning glories. Buds of deep-blue, trumpet-shaped blossoms and leafy stems. The delicate petals taste surprisingly bitter, with a bite that lingers in the fissures between his molars after it has been ground into thin paste and swallowed. He had long since gotten used to the astringency— drying his throat, twisting his stomach.

“…At best it causes severe breathing difficulties and discomfort. Worst case scenario, it can be fatal…”

In the beginning he thought it would pass. Dabi has endured sickness all his life and a cough wasn’t about to stop his long laid plans. But it worsened, mutated into something he could not control. He remembers sitting in your bathroom on the toilet lid, the little blue burgeon rolling in the shallow of his palm. It’d been covered in bloody mucus, but still a pip, still harmless.

Any sane person might have been afraid at that moment, realising what fate awaited them. Dabi, however, felt oddly resigned. One in one hundred million. Of course this would happen to him. Death clung to him everywhere he went.

“Dabi, are you listening?”

Doctor Tereda had been the one to stitch him up back then. A quack with a near useless cell activation quirk and glasses lenses thick enough for a bullet to bounce off. You’d dragged him into her office, sat him on the bed with surprising strength, and she attended to him no questions asked.

Dabi tried not to make a habit of visiting one place too often, but between your pleading eyes and his rapidly worsening health, he ended up back in her office more times than he cared to.

He makes a noncommittal sound.

“As a medical professional I must strongly advise you to talk to the individual these feelings have bloomed for,” Terada says. Dabi does not like the sympathetic pinch in her brow. “That is the least invasive option”.

Prying open his chest and baring himself to you seems pretty damn invasive. “Not happening,” he mutters airily.

There’s a sense of satisfaction when her frown strains with frustration. Her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose. “Your case is incredibly advanced. It may be your only chance to tell—”

“You got something wrong with your ears?” he interrupts. The stitches beneath his eyes sting, pulled taut by his glare. “I said no”.

Tereda sighs and turns to her screen, pushing her frames back up. The keyboard clicks under her fingers. Every computer here was ancient, their systems totally outdated, but they made do.

“You have two more options. The best results are produced if both treatments are done together,” she explains. “First is surgery. You’ll be put under general anaesthesia and the disease will be removed along with some surrounding tissue in the lungs for biopsy. Memories of the loved one are usually lost”.

Dabi slouched to feign disinterest, betrayed by the restless bounce of his knee, “And?”

“Your second option is to attend an interpersonal psychotherapy programme,” she lifts her hand to silence him before he can interject. “This is highly recommended to patients after surgery to prevent relapse. But you can do it regardless, as it is helpful in reducing your symptoms, and while the disease becomes chronic, it is more manageable”.

Dabi’s jaw shifts as he grits his teeth, pulling at the staples by his mouth, “Calling me fucking crazy now, eh Doc?”

“No,” she replies cooly, schooling her features into something kinder. “As people we underestimate the influence our mental well being has over our physical condition. Hanahaki disease is rare, yes. But over a quarter of all cases are found to be psychosomatic”.

Dabi laughs dryly and brings a fist down hard, smoke squeezed from between his knuckles marred the desk with black. “So this is of my own making, is that what you’re saying?”

“This isn’t something you plant into yourself, Dabi. It isn’t your fault and I could be completely wrong. I’m not all knowing, I’m just a doctor,” a smooth hand is placed over top of his own in effort to comfort, “But torturing yourself will only feed it”.

He scrambles to his feet, the chair legs scraping piercingly across the tile, and snatches his fist back to hold behind his back. The doctor levels him with a sad, soft look, her upper body still leaned across the table.

“If you leave this as it is it will only hurt you. It is already hurting you,” Tereda continues critically. “We can mitigate this, Dabi. Before it kills you”.

That unearths some ill-gotten memory from the recesses of his brain. A film strip he replays often in solitude; the day Endeavor sat him down and told him he shouldn’t use his quirk anymore. At first it was a fatherly suggestion, unnaturally low and soft. “You should stop. It’s hurting you, Touya,” as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

That never made sense to him. In training they used to focus on fire, usually— on intensifying his flame power— but on occasion they would spar. Between poor footing and wrong steps, Endeavour always reprimanded tears and quick surrender.

“But it hurts…”

“Strong heroes fight through pain,” he said. “The world does not stop just because you are crying. Get up! Or are you weak?”

Touya took it to heart, back then. Clenched his chubby little fists tight and got to his feet with a wobbly snarl on his damp, swollen face.

Young minds are impressionable and his own had already been moulded by the very hands on his shoulders. Endeavour’s fingers had held on tight, dwarfing Touya’s frame; heat soaking through his shirt from those searing palms and the sting of old wounds had been enough to keep him grounded in reality. You should stop this. It’s hurting you.

Those words festered and ate away at his soul like an infection. Giving up was against everything he knew— and against everything Endeavor told him a hero should be. It was not an option he was willing to take, and so Touya trudged forward, just as he was taught.

Eventually Endeavour’s words evolved into demand. He became furious. Touya became accustomed to long sleeves and learned how to treat burns alone. Hands made for saving left oval shaped bruises and finger painted the entire family.

How do you abandon something stitched into the very fabric of your being? Being the Number One hero was his hereditary purpose. His father gave up on him so readily but Touya would have rather died than surrender when it got tough. Giving it up would be dying all the same.

Pain was a toll necessary for growth. He grew until his ambition and greed swallowed him whole. And now, there was you. A garden of weeds in his lungs. You were rooted into the capillaries and harvesting his yearning. Every time he coughed it felt like self immolation; a cruel cycle he can not stop repeating.

Hanahaki discriminates. It happens to those who feel deeply, people whose hearts are hemmed by the ones they love. Dabi is selfish but more than that he is lonely, and you’re the one good thing he has in this shit hole.

Accepting the surgery would just be another loss. A surrender. It wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things; Dabi is going to die either way. A walking corpse. Skin, esophagus, tear ducts, tissue— his fire burns all of it. Deep within him, eating away at his soft insides like dry grass. And what withstands that heat are the seeds you have unknowingly sown.

There is something disturbingly satisfying about carrying a piece of you to the grave with him, flowers proliferating around the earth that houses him. Call him twisted. It isn’t as if he’s unaware he’s got a few loose screws— he also has no desire to get better.

The silence is broken by the quiet scratch of pen to paper. Doctor Tereda offers a thin smile and slides a prescription across the table, signed and ready to be collected. “Here. This should help with the pain for at least a week or two. We know how easily you burn through medication so… don’t take too long to make your decision,” she hesitates before shaking her head. “And go to the emergency room if your breathing worsens”.

Dabi eyes her suspiciously, grabbing the slip and shoving it into his coat pocket. Worrying at his lower lip he offers her a short nod, the ‘thanks’ implied.

As he turns and makes his way toward the door, Dabi pauses just before turning the handle. He doesn’t look back as he mutters, “Keep this to yourself, yeah? That means no putting it on my records”.

Tereda hums curiously, “No one else has access to your records”.

He scoffed, turning his wrist and pulling the old door to demonstrate his point; a groan reverberates throughout the room as it opens, “Yeah right. This is hardly a fine establishment”.

“I resent that!”

Dabi strides through the familiar corridor toward the waiting room, ignoring Tereda’s indignant shout. He wasn’t off the mark about how shoddy the place is— atleast, in comparison to other medical centres. The building is small and narrow. It was built during the pre quirk era and handed off to the quirkless by the government to honour their status. The whole thing stank of ridicule and it pissed him off the more he thought about it.

You’re exactly where he expects you to be. Sitting pretty at your desk, twiddling your thumbs, keeping watch over the empty space and quietly mumbling some melody from Mount Lady’s latest hair care advert over the unremitting whirr of the fan above.

A laugh bubbles in his chest, drawing your attention, and it chokes him in effort to smother the sound. You are alarmingly predictable. There, plain as day on your computer screen, are his supposedly secure medical records.

Dabi pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum as he violently coughed. You’re talking to him now, on your feet and rubbing along his back. A viscous lump of petals forces its way into his throat and he feels his quirk react. Still, you don’t pull away.

“Deep breath,” God, that’d be nice. “You’re okay. I’ll get you some water,” Don't go.

You stop and let him drag you back by the wrist. He rights himself on his feet and forces the flowers down. “I’m—” bile stings the back of his mouth and he gags, turning his face into his coat collar to hide a grimace.

Dabi exhales and it sounds so thin. “Fuck. I’m fine. Don’t start,” he croaks, hardly convincing. Rooting through his pocket, he shoves his prescription slip forward to distract you, the paper crumpled into a small ball. “Doc gave me a prescription. It’s just a chest infection”.

He lingers and observes as you unwrinkle it. You’re careful to smooth out each corner and wrinkle. The tension swells as the silence stretches. He tempers the urge to snatch it back.

You squint at him, “A dosage this high for a chest infection?”

He shrugs and reaches over his head to yank his coat hood forward. “Doctor’s orders”.

After a beat, you relent and glance over to give him an exasperated smile, “Whatever. As long as it helps clear your lungs. You freaked me out last night with all that wheezing”.

You begin switching off your monitors, patting down at your pockets for the keys. To synchronise with the end of your shift, Dabi purposely chose the last appointment. That was another thing he has been doing a lot— trying to fit his life around yours.

“Watching me sleep now, perv?”

“Yeah. I love when a guy sounds like a punctured squeaky toy, really gets me worked up,” you drawl, falling in line with him after turning off the lights and checking the locks. Tereda would close up the rest.

You brought a tonal shift to his life he couldn’t have anticipated; enough that he regularly spent nights crashing on your couch to wait out the bad weather. There was something about you from the beginning that he couldn’t put a finger on. Nothing as simple as your attractiveness— you had a good heart, but not by society's standards, much like Twice.

A quick internet search would pull up listings of buildings he had burned and the trail of bodies left in his wake. But it didn’t matter. Villain, vigilante, hero, a person is a person, even him.

That first meeting, winter settling in, you admitted to him you were quirkless. A shitty olive branch effort, he’s sure. That whole instinctual radar that comes with being a misfit in this world. You left a strong impression. He recalls how he gave you the name Dabi, cackling harshly as if he were leaving you with a ticking time bomb, and you simply said: “Maybe I’ll see you again. Hopefully without all the blood, next time”.

He latched on and desperately wanted to hate you for it. Yet your arm is linking through his once again, pressed close to his side as the rain hammers down onto the empty street, and everything he can’t bring himself to say has taken root in his windpipe.

“Wanna come up?”

“For coffee?” he swipes his tongue over his teeth, raising a suggestive brow. Your offer is as innocent as it always is, and the sight of you flustered is as welcome as ever.

“Tea, actually,” is your poorly veiled response.

Dabi knows he’s getting too comfortable. You might be quirkless but you’re not stupid. Infact, at times you’re unsettlingly perceptive; his only mercy is that you are too nice to pry.

He should tell you ‘no’. Giran could probably set him up. He might even get away with crashing at the bar. Instead he says, “Not like I’ve got anywhere else to be”.

Your apartment building is nothing to write home about. Slightly run down, maintained by residents rather than their pig landlords. It stands shorter than the neighbouring buildings, the entire right side eaten by withered wisteria. Nobody bats an eyelid at his appearance in a place like this.

Inside is a mirror of the outside. Unremarkable in every way, yet he feels remarkably at home. You go in first, kicking off your shoes without bothering to line them up, waddling to the narrow linen closet in the hallway. You’ve managed to cram a dryer right beneath the shelves, since there was barely any space elsewhere.

“I can grab you something to wear while I put our stuff on a spin”.

The rain sticks to his forehead, thin streaks of black dye running down his temple. Grinning, you hand him an old towel, already stained and fraying at the hem, “You look harmless like this. Like a wet cat”.

He pats carelessly at his face while shucking off his coat. The nerves are long dead and it’s painless. You squawk when the heavy fabric hits the genkan floor with a wet slap. “Dabi!”

“That’s what you get,” he rolls his neck and bends to untie his boots, the towel thrown over his shoulder. “Harmless. I burned down a money laundering front just a few hours ago”.

“I saw it on the news. You’re such a dickhead,” you laugh, heading into the kitchenette. “There was no good reason for you to melt the asphalt of that entire city block”.

A smile works its way onto his face. Gross. “Can’t have them mistaking me for a good guy”.

“You are a good guy”.

“You’re delusional,” he shoots back, an unbearable fondness swelling in his chest. The pressure is the worst part. Spools of vine and leafy green pierced into lung tissue, stems squeezing through his rib cage.

You’ve been staring at him for too long. That sweet smile hasn’t wavered. Dabi clears his throat, first to dispel the awkwardness he feels and then again as a stray petal sticks to his throat. It brushes against his tonsils and he quickly covers his mouth.

“Sure you’re okay?” your voice is quiet, testing the waters.

A fingernail catches on a staple by his chin as his hand drags down his face, answering on an exhale, “Fine. Stop asking. Didn’t you say something about tea?”

“Can’t help it,” you huff, shutting the overhead cupboard with too much force. "You’re not a good liar, you know”.

Dabi gives a dismissive wave and heads over to the couch. The distance is barely four strides but he manages to unbuckle his belt, jeans unbuttoned and falling loose around his hips. Kicking them off with little to no grace, your eyes are heavy on his back as he pulls his shirt over his head and throws it at the laundry pile tucked away near your bathroom.

The quaint studio can barely house you, never mind him. Dabi was always small for his age but here it feels like he could stretch and touch every wall.

You’re moving in his periphery, following his lead and gradually revealing swaths of bare skin. You’ve seen him half naked before, in the clinic, but never the reverse. Dabi swallows thickly, ignoring the intimate atmosphere he unintentionally created. The kettle is electric and he takes comfort in the loud gurgling sound that comes with it, fixing his gaze on the blank TV screen.

“You can turn it on, you know. You are allowed,” you coaxed, voice warm and teasing. You’ve rummaged through the pile of clothes and found a hoodie that falls below your hips. “Or are you just going to sit there with your dick out?”

“You fucking wish,” he objected, reaching for the remote. Is it? His eyes fall to his lap. No, it isn’t.

He slouches, reclining into the cushions as some old rerun of Mighty Man plays. “Hey,” idly picking at a loose thread, he asks, “do you get many people come through with hanahaki?”

That gives you pause, and immediately he regrets asking. It’s hardly a common question. Hell, a good percentage of the population thought it to be an old wives tale, even in the wake of quirks. There was no plausible excuse as to why it would be on his mind.

Cautious in your approach, you stop by the couch with a steaming mug cradled in your hands. He sees those naked thighs, soft and uniquely yours. “Is… is that why you’ve been coughing?”

“No,” Dabi scoffs. In one forceful yank he rips the seam open and watches the foam innards spill out. You linger, weight shifting between your feet, and irritation prickles under his skin. “Who the hell do you think I would be chucking up flowers for? Not like I’ve got friends”.

Your shoulders lose tension and he tries not to think too hard about it; he doesn’t want to know. He feels his own airways clear at the sound of your laughter, “I dunno. Stain, maybe?”

Pursing his lips, he sucks back the copper from between his teeth, “Fuck you”. You try to smile. You pass his tea and he forgoes the handle. The warmth of the mug seemed to seep into his bones and ease the ache.

“Right right. Big bad villain. I forgot you’re supposed to be an empty husk without a heart,” you teased, sitting unnecessarily close and burying your feet beneath his thigh, careful not to touch his staples. The hoodie slips and pools around your hips. Dabi’s throat constricts as his body goes rigid. “Ah shit. Are my toes cold? Want me to grab a blanket?”

Forcing himself lax he clicks his tongue and tastes iron, grip tightening on his mug as he brings it to his lips. “Doesn’t matter. I run cold anyway”.

The tea is soothing. Sweet for a ginger tea— brown sugar, maybe. You must’ve boiled it for his sore throat. Molasses swirl on his tongue. They wash down the blood and clean his palette. A smooth, mellowed out aroma fills his senses and overpowers the delicate anise fragrance lingering at the back of his throat.

You concede, tucking your knees under your chin and regarding him with that look again. The one that feels as if you’re reading him like a page in a book. He has never been the type to worry about appearances but when it’s you he can’t help wondering what you think of him.

A cartoonish explosion fills the room with streams of orange and yellow as the episode comes to the halfway point. The light paints your silhouette gold, reflecting in your irises as they retract from the brightness.

Taking another gulp, he winced at the sharp twist in his chest. Two weeks was generous and Tereda knew it. He’s already vomiting full flowers. Corpses make for fertile soil, apparently. He read that somewhere online while he searched for information on morning glories; you are fast growing and frost tender.

A soft note breaks the silence and your toes start to wriggle. “I can hear you thinking. What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?”

Despite what you thought, he was a good liar. To those around him but most of all to himself. This is when he should retaliate with a biting comment and keep the equilibrium. He would, if not for the wave of heat that rolls through him at your words, and how obviously you felt it displace the air.

Dabi can lie. His body can not.

“Just that thing you said earlier, about being an empty husk,” he begins, bringing the warm mug to rest against his sternum, incognisant to the ring of heat stinging his skin.

Your expression wanes with regret and he hates it. “I was joking—”

“If you say sorry I’ll burn your couch to a crisp,” he fumes. Vulnerability made him defensive. Angry. It felt like cold air blowing on exposed muscle. “Didn’t ask for a meaningless apology”.

Deep in the cavity of his ribs another bud unfurls. Your patience with him is not endless but it is more than he deserves.

“Then what are you asking?”

Nausea curdled in his stomach. He feels it climb his gullet. “Guess I wondered what you really thought”.

“About…?”

He snarls, hackles raised. “Do I have to spell it out?”

A few beats pass. Your answer comes in a gentle murmur. “Well, our capacity to hate reflects our capacity to love. So, yeah. I do think you’ve got a pretty big heart. It’s just a bit bruised up”.

“Jesus,” he mutters. The worst part is you’re being entirely honest. His knees spread as his hips shift, the after credits begin to roll and reflect off the sutures around his thighs. It reminds him that he is half naked, literally and figuratively. “Forget I said anything. I need a smoke”.

“No smoking,” you bat lightly at his shoulder. “Not until you’re better. If I catch you I’ll kill you before that cough does”.

And isn’t that fucking hilarious.

Pressure prickles behind his eyes that he can never relieve. There’s a florid mass in his thoat; his pulse is thrumming now, singing in his ears. He needs to throw up.

You shout after him as he stumbles over toward your bathroom. He slams the door behind him, hears you curse as his ceramic mug hits the floor and breaks. This isn’t romance, or a fairytale. It isn’t like it is in the movies.

Lifting his fist, he brings it down hard on his sternum. The force barrels him over and he retches. Sour, viscous threads of saliva drip from his mouth into the toilet bowl, but nothing more comes up.

You’re banging at the walls. “Dabi, open up!”

Dabi lurches again, forcing a deep cough and watching a few small heart shaped petals dance in the air as they free fall. Again, collapsing to his knees, he can taste your ginger tea. He vomits a clump of bloomed morning glories, wrinkled and smooshed into a misshapen ball. Blood muddies the water.

Another knock, this one somewhat pitiful. There’s a soft noise that sounds like you’re sliding down the door. “Please don’t make me break this open. My landlord will kill me”.

Trembling. Dabi reaches his fingers into his mouth and feels around the teeth to dislodge what was left. Settling back on his feet, his hand uncurls like a slow sprouting shoot and reveals another morning glory in the shallow of his palm.

Colour streaks across his vision, filled with hazy undulations. White noise drowns out the frantic tone of your voice. Mouth hung open, Dabi inhales until his lungs bloat, and keeps it held until the lights begin to fade.

His consciousness tips from one dream to another. When he wakes up on his back surrounded by soft, freshly washed sheets. A sigh escapes his lips as he turns into the downy pillow beneath his head. It smells like you.

Fingers comb through his hair, pushing the bangs away from his forehead. It’s then that he notices the mattress dipped towards the weight of another.

Dabi squints, prying his eyes open. You’re laid beside him. At first he considers that he’s dreaming, but you feel so real. Your thumb strokes over his cheek in a tender back and forth motion, “You comfy?”

“Better than the couch,” he rasps. There’s an awful taste in his mouth. Intermingling mint and copper. “Did you brush my teeth or something?”

“I rinsed your mouth out,” you admit bashfully. Now that he’s looking he notices your eyes are red. Puffy like you’d been crying. Your smile fractured as you added, “I had to make sure nothing else was stuck”.

Realisation creeps in slowly. It’s gentle with him, like you are, acclimating him to reality. Just like that— you know.

“How’d you get me in here?” he deflects.

You prop yourself up on your elbow and reach to trace the topography of his scarred chest. His breathing stutters and your fingers stop right over his heart.

“Might’ve pulled a muscle or two but it wasn’t so hard. You weigh almost nothing,” you reply. Quiet, as though you were afraid to break the illusion. “Kinda concerning but it seems you have bigger stuff to worry about already, huh?”

Eyes falling closed, he inhales, counting to three. He replies on the end of a long exhale, “Didn't want you to know”.

“Tereda does?”

Dabi nods and the movement knocks his brain loose. He hisses at the throbbing pain. You take him into your palms with a frown, “You hit your head on the way down. You’ll have to come in with me again in the morning”.

“Fuck that,” he groans. You tap at his temple and pout your lips, glaring disapprovingly. “You can’t make me”.

“I can and I will,” his eyes widened at the crack in your voice. Tears gather along your lash line and you sniff harshly, “You could have died, Dabi. And now you might have a head injury. How the hell could you not tell—?!”

“Alright, alright. Shit,” uncharacteristic of him, Dabi let himself have this. His hand cups round your neck and brings you down into his bare chest. He hushes you softly, running his palm down the length of your spine, wrapping you in a clumsy embrace. “Don’t cry about it”.

You settle into the crook of his neck, nose bumping his jaw as you turn to speak, and he suppresses a shudder. “Don’t cry about it,” you repeat mockingly. “You really have no idea, do you?”

“Enlighten me”.

Frustration bursts, and you lift your head to look at him. You’re so close. “I care about you, idiot. I don’t want you dead on my bathroom floor! Sue me!”

Dabi cracks a crooked smile. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me”.

“Who is it?”

And he sours, his stare fixed on the ceiling above. “Does it matter?”

“It matters,” you lean over him until all he can see is you. “…Is it me?”

There’s an echo in his ribs; a phantom knife’s twist. Sure, Dabi is a good liar, he thinks. Touya never was. Touya wore his heart on his sleeve. He was terrible at concealing his hurt. Dabi tries to find the words and comes up short.

The silence is answer enough. Your mouth wobbles and you nestle back into his neck before he can see you cry in earnest. “You are so fucking stupid, Dabi”.

Despite the seriousness he laughs, tucks his nose to your crown and tightens his hold around your waist. He’s only ever imagined what your weight would feel like pressed against him like this. Maybe he’s imagining it, but his lungs are lighter.

“What did Doctor Tereda advise you to do?”

He pouts where you cannot see it. He doesn’t want to think about that quack right now. “She told me either I get the surgery and go to therapy, or I get the symptoms to calm down with therapy on its own”.

“Of course you’d…” you huff. “She didn’t tell you to talk to me?”

“That too,” he shrugs, grinning at the warning press of your teeth to his throat. It’s disturbing how comfortably you both fell into place. A soft kiss replaces your bite, and he holds his breath.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” you tell him, kisses trailing up his jugular to his cheek, unperturbed by the scar tissue and metal in his skin, or the tremors rumbling through his body. “I’m sure there’s no way in hell I can get you to agree to therapy. So instead I’m going to take you out on a few dates and see how your symptoms change”.

Dabi’s mouth opens for air and your lips brush, stealing his breath. “What the fuck?” he says. “Why?”

There’s no point, he wants to tell you. It won’t change a thing.

“Because I want you to believe me,” you murmur, nose knocking his own. Inexplicably drawn to you, Dabi tilts up to align your mouths again, barely a kiss. “If you die it won’t be because of me. And I atleast want you to go out knowing that I love you too”.

The swell in his throat is different this time. He has never been so glad about his inability to cry. Dabi grins, wide and all teeth, pushing the staples in his cheeks up by his eyes. “There’s something really wrong with you, you know that?”

“No kidding,” you laugh. “Guess we make a good pair”.

thinking about Dabi getting off on the fact that you think he’s no good for you. you tell him you can’t get involved with people like him but that only makes him want you more. you’re naive, it’s cute, and it has him yearning to ruin you. you don’t even know what you want. you say he’s no good but still end up underneath him every other day begging for more…

omg wait wait, imagine- he’s got you on the edge of an orgasm, thrusting at a brutal pace and hitting your sweet spot in the best way. then he’s all like “say i’m no good,” and you whimper out a “y-you’re no good for me,” just for him to go “yeah that’s right. i’m no good. and that’s why you can’t stop cumming on my cock right?” 🙃

it lives where i live

part 2 is here! this was a difficult one to write because there’s so much i want to say and i have no idea how to say any of it. but this is an important one and i hope you enjoy it :)

wc: 3.4 k. cw: angst, unintentional self-harm (touya scratches himself in his sleep), injury (scratch), blood (scratch), reader is not well mentally, gn reader, no pronouns used 

read part 1 here

There is a warmth against your cheek when you stir, creeping up to heat the skin of your forehead as you stretch and squirm—fighting the lure of just a few more moments of sleep. Blinking slowly, you study the beam of light peaking through the sheer curtains—the way the little refraction cuts through the otherwise dark of your room.

For a moment, in the light, you forget.

But when you roll to your side—away from the light, looking to the door—you feel everything with a force that leaves you breathless.

Despite the weight of it all, you push up off your bed to sit, head hung a little as you take in a few deep breaths. The house is quiet, but you didn’t expect anything else. Your eyes burn a little, and you wait for the tears to come. When they don’t, you sigh—there’s nothing good to come from crying, anyway.

You stand and move to the door, opening it quietly and distantly wondering when you started moving around like an intruder in your own home. There’s a heat that comes with the thought—it curls in your stomach, slithering around the other feelings you’ve been holding there, and you shove it down, down, down, because you don’t want to be angry at him. Because he’s been through enough.

You don’t listen to the thought that tells you: so have you.

When you walk down the hall, the bathroom door is open, and Touya’s bedroom door is not. He must have woken up before you, if he slept at all. You don’t imagine you’ll see him today—at least not during the day. You fight the urge to hover outside his door, ear crammed to the wood to try to hear him breathing.

Keep reading

A "Nonstop Nut November 2022" Production

Pairing: Vampire!Dabi x Reader

Warnings: Dubcon/noncon themes, “sacrificial lamb” scenario + fear play, vampire feeding + bloodplay, aphrodisiac usage, mind break, injury + pain play, (slight!) bondage, dom/sub dynamics, cucking (indirectly), (forced!) voyeurism, pet name usage, humiliation, light! description of death + murder (twice)

Summary: Years after a great war breaks out between your homeland and another nearby kingdom, your father has died in battle, and your family has been displaced from the village you used to call home. The village you find yourselves relocated to is shady, the people in it even moreso, and you struggle to maintain good faith about staying here – especially after you start to witness your younger, adopted sister making friends, and these other girls gradually start to vanish. You’re certain the townspeople are keeping something from you, but your mother refuses to acknowledge your fears, saying you’re ridiculous, paranoid, too young to understand anything – until a priest from the village comes to your home and sits your mother down to ask something of her, something that shocks you to your core. The priest wants your sister, the sweet soul who was recently promised to a boy from your homeland, only just having reached her seventeenth summer, and having just become a woman. Disgusted, afraid, and absolutely revolted when your mother agrees, however much she wavered, you insist the priest takes you instead, going so far as to promise that you will do whatever he wants of you. And when you’re dragged from your home without so much a second of hesitation from your mother, you’re delivered to a stone slab outside the village, where you’re roped up and offered to some kind of demon as a sacrifice. A vampire who goes by the name Dabi.

A little girl stares up at you with delighted, innocent eyes, and you can’t help but grin down at her pretty face, her pale flesh alight with the midday sun filtering in through the leaves above you.

She reminds you of warm summers, of the safety you always felt in your father’s arms at her age, and you can’t help the way your heart aches and yearns to feel that way again; you’ll never re-experience your youth, so you feel you can settle for watching the youngster experience hers, for holding her hand and walking with her through the woods. This much, you’re happy to do.

“Will mama like this one?” the little girl asks you as she holds up a wildflower, pink and slightly wilted, its stem crushed from the force of her little hands on its delicate green length. You don’t have the heart to tell her that mama would probably throw it out, so you nod.

“I think it’s very pretty.”And then you smile, and she giggles, as you say, “Just like you are.”

“Would you… like to have it?” she asks you, and you nod eagerly.

“Of course – but isn’t it for mama?”

She shrugs her little shoulders, and her eight-year-old form looks even smaller as she looks down at her feet, poking out beneath the layers of her skirts, and she says, “Mama doesn’t need to know I gave it to you.”

Your heart yearns for her youthful innocence, your sister’s kindness overwhelms you tremendously, and you make to kneel before her with a tender look on your face, holding your hands out to take hers as you softly say, “You’re a sweet little thing, you know that? I’m lucky you’re my little sister.”

She giggles, nods cutely, and reaches a hand up to stroke your cheek as she says, “You’re sweet, too. That’s why this flower should be for you.”

“Oh, Eri,” you say softly, and the ache in your heart swells and pounds in your chest as you let out a soft, broken chuckle, “Thank you.”

The little joyful thing she is, Eri tucks the flower behind your ear, her hands warm and her kindness lighting a fire within you. You would always look into her eyes as she smiled at you and see someone else’s child, the baby that had been left on your home’s doorstep one night and raised thereafter as your mother’s, but now you see her eyes glowing with something familiar, something you used to think was rare and not meant for you; Eri smiles at you with love.

Your arms wrap around her little shoulders to hug her lovingly without consulting you about the motion, but you’re glad they do, and you hold her there for a minute. She hugs you back with weak arms, but you’re happy to be in her embrace. You’re happy to embrace her as your family.

It’s as a warm tear slides down your cheek that you break from her embrace and clear your throat to whisper, “Let’s go back home, Eri. Mama must be worried, hmm?”

“Wait!” she presses, and you pause before straightening up, while Eri reaches for your hair – and you nearly start to cry as she slips the flower in her hand behind your ear, giggling adorably as she looks at it and says, “There – all done.”

The journey home is filled with elated giggles from Eri as you tell her stories about other little girls, fictional ones that walked this same path to grandma’s house only to grapple with wolves, to share porridge with bears, to enter homes made of delightful, rare candies and lived-in by an ugly witch. The autumn leaves fall around you, and the smells of the woodsy wonderland around you fill you with elation as you watch Eri skip around and smile, the beauty of her youthfulness filling you with elation in turn.

That elation doesn’t last past the moment you step into your home.

Your mother, usually a proud and self-assured woman who stands with her back straight and her chin held high, her entire body buzzing with confidence and positivity, is slumped over a table and weeping, a letter grasped in one hand. Eri sees this scene and nearly runs forward to hold your mother herself, but you stop her with a hand on her shoulder and whisper a soft, “No, let me.”

You approach her slowly while Eri backs her way toward the next room, and your mother’s sobbing makes your heart ache as you take a seat beside her.

“Mama,” you whisper, reaching for her hand, “What’s happened? Why are you crying?”

She doesn’t hear you, and if she does, she just refuses to acknowledge your questions. You gulp down the bubbling fear, the growing anxiety, that builds its way up your throat, hot like fire. The letter, you realize as you glance at it from your seat, is marked with the local militia’s seal. Your father, the only man who has ever meant anything to you, had left home when he was conscripted into the army.

“Mama,” you whisper, but it comes out scratchy, distressed, “Mama, where’s Papa? What’s happened to him?”

Still, not a word. Your vision becomes steadily more bleary as you stare at the flimsy piece of paper under your mother’s hand, and as you hiccup, the realization hits you hard and dread sets in. You reach for it, slowly, and as you do, you fight the desire to claw at your throat and scream at the top of your lungs. It’s a thick letter, writing scrawled on paper that is unrefined, rough. The script is nigh close to illegible, but you can make out enough of it to fuel the tears that pour from your eyes next.

Your father is dead, and your family will be forced to relocate to a village south of the kingdom border for the purpose of safety.

"Eight years," you say with a scowl on your face as you tend the kitchen, kneading the dough you'd prepared for dinner as your mother watches from the doorway. "It's been eight, almost nine, years of just you, and me, and Eri, all of us suffering – and you're still mourning, Mama, you've been mourning since the day the letter came."

She stares blankly at your hands, at the motions you make as you press into the dough, fingers between bits that poke out and protrude before you pull them back and do it all again. She just waits, wordlessly, for something. For what, you don't know. You scoff, though, as she just blinks away your concerns.

"When are you going to be a mother again?" you ask her this seriously, with eight years of resentment behind your (e/c) eyes aimed right at her, and she doesn't react at all. "I'm sick of being the only one who cares for her – she's a child, Mama, and she needs you as much as she needs me. More, in fact!"

As much as you wish she'd say something, anything, she just watches you knead the dough, and you sigh. It's disgusting, really, that she forces you to do so much and simply watches like an onlooker. You raise her child, care for yourself, tend the gardens and the livestock – and she watches, she attends the local church on weekends like she's expected to. But no more than that.

"Eri received a letter yesterday," you finally say with a soft sigh, "from that family we knew… before Papa…"

She doesn't stir, you don't know why you still expect her to.

"Kota has asked for her hand, Mama," you say. "He wants to marry her, and she… wants to marry him – so I've sent word that we'd be happy to allow him to court her."

You think, for a moment, that you hear your mother gasp. But she just lets out a sneeze, and you sigh. Of course, she didn't even care about that announcement. Why would she?

The town bell rings, then, a sound you're all too familiar with, and in robotic fashion your mother moves to grab her shawl from the dining table, and you watch her make her way out of your home without a word. She has never given up on religion – you suppose you should be grateful, but if anything the knowledge fills you with resentment.

It's when she returns, with strange men and women at her side, when she thinks you're asleep but really you're just sat at Eri's bedside watching her breathe slow and steady so that you feel alive, that the past eight years of trying to keep your family safe come crashing down in your lap and you can do absolutely nothing to pick up the pieces.

"We need Eri," a voice, hushed in the dead of night, says to your mother in the main hall, "a sacrifice must be made for the safety of our townsfolk."

It's strange, watching the eight years of your life you'd spent in the run-down village of suspicious men and quaint women trickle down the drain all at once with one painful realisation – strange, but not altogether unwelcome. You'd felt disappointment before, felt your hope and your optimism gripped within your chest and crushed all at once, and this was not the same.

No, it didn't hurt nearly as much to walk in and interrupt the awful conversation taking place in your own home as it did when your father had died in the war and left your family with no choice but to relocate here. It didn't hurt nearly as much as when your mother decided she would no longer be a mother to you, nor to your sister. Frankly speaking, it didn't hurt nearly as much as you felt it should've.

"You can't have her," you say softly, smoothly. With a shake of your head and a warning glare at your blank-faced mother, you go on, "You can't have her for your disgusting ritual – she's betrothed, she has a life ahead of her, and I won't have it. You can have me."

"You must understand, we need someone young and supple, or the One will not take her," the village priest says to you, his eyes as old and evil as he himself. "It must be a vir–"

"Me, or no one," you insist, scowling. You can feel spittle flying from the cavern of your mouth as you say, "Me, or there is no ritual – because I will burn your godforsaken church to the ground while you pray in it if you lay a single finger on my sister."

You watch the old man gulp, the bob of his Adam's apple in his throat giving away his fear of you suddenly, and in his cowardice you see the look of the stupid baker boy, the look of this priest's own pathetic son, as stupid and as easy to manipulate as he himself. And then as he nods and accepts your bargain, you feel a weight fall off your shoulders.

Your sister will be safe if you do this. You're certain of it, certain that the village will back off of her and pick off her friends instead – the way they had done before. Your mother always called you crazy, but as you lock eyes with her once more and for the first time in years she shows a sign of emotion, you see it in her old face.

You've never been crazy. Always been right. There truly was something off about this village.

The priest's hands clasp around yours before you can even think to speak to your mother, and when you avert your eyes from her to see him, he's grinning like a madman at you, teeth on display in a sickly Cheshire cat smile. You can tell, just that easily, that you're in for something awful, a kind of fate reserved for those who deserve no more than to be punished, truly.

"Your sacrifice will not be forgotten," the old man says, and you have a feeling he isn't speaking to you at that moment – rather, his words are aimed at your mother.

"Blessed be the fruit!" one of his goons, a woman in the corner whom you recognise as the mother of a missing girl, yells excitedly.

"May the One guide us!" the rest of the group, in unison, chant thereafter.

Your skin is clammy and cold as you're finally tugged along, out of your own home and into the dead of the night. The streets are cold, and the lamps guide you down a path toward the outskirts of town. And as you step, more and more townsfolk join in the parade, parents and elders all chanting their stupid ritualistic babble into the night until you finally come upon your destination at the center of the cornfield.

"May the One guide your soul to heaven above," the priest finally says as he takes a step aside and gives you a view of what stands before you, "and may He proffer the fruits of His mercy and grace to the Earth below."

With a gulp and a frightened but brave step forward, you approach the stone slab laid out at the centre of the field, and you in your night dress finally accept your fate. This is a sacrifice – you wouldn't be going missing, disappearing, mysteriously vanishing, never to be seen again. You will be dying, all for the pathetic beliefs of this town's mad religion.

You're still processing your fate when your hands are bound before you, and you simply follow blindly as you are dragged toward the slab, laid down on your back atop its cold surface by the men who'd thought to grab you first. There's no use in fighting it – not when the alternative would be your sister in your position. No, you'd rather it be you.

You watch, with teary eyes and in absolute silence as the chanting townsfolk take to tying your bindings down to the hooks on the slab, rendering you motionless. And you feel the bile rise in your throat as the priest comes upon you, standing dead in the centre of his cult's act of repulsive, blind faith.

"The One will like this one," he states, and his Cheshire cat grin is back as he reaches down to stroke your cheek, "she has some fight in her, that youthful ignorance he so adores."

"The girl is the fruit of our labour! Give thanks to the One!" the cult chants, and your teeth clench as you stare hatefully up at the priest who simply chuckles at your aggression.

"The hour of the One is upon us," he says to you, and you swallow down your hatred as he steps back to announce to his cult, "Let us depart! And let the One have his sacrifice!"

The group silences, and they step into a line to retreat from your body as the priest gives one last yell before you're left alone, roped up in a field with no particular reasoning.

"Blessed be the fruit!"

The tears stream from your eyes, but you barely notice them. You feel numb, feel nothing – at least, that's what you're telling yourself as you shut your eyes.

The feeling of being watched comes suddenly, and it hits you hard as a brick to the face – and it doesn't go away. Really, it m akes your heart race and your eyes shoot open, your body bristling with sudden and overwhelming terror. You don't know when you might've fallen asleep, but it couldn't have been long ago. Regardless, your flesh bristles with fear as you fall into a complete panic.

"Is someone there?" you're not sure why you would bother to yell, why anyone would bother to answer, but if there's a chance you'll be safe, you'll take to desperate bargaining. "If you're out there, please…come and untie me! Please!"

Nothing. Not a sound in return. But you still feel eyes on you as you begin to sweat, the prickling panic filling your pores.

Your arms jolt of their own accord, and you gasp at the sting of rope as it catches on your flesh. You'd forgotten in the rush that you were bound – but that realisation doesn't stop your body from thrashing, because suddenly you're filled with the fear and adrenaline of prey, and you're whimpering for help from someone you're not even sure really exists, not even sure intends to help you rather than harm you.

It's dark, but you're grateful there's an assortment of candles not too burnt out that they can still light up the clearing, especially when you finally hear the snap of a twig in the maze of crops you're surrounded by.

"H-hello?" you whimper out, your voice a squeak and your heart beating in your throat as you struggle against your bindings. "Who's there?"

No response, once again. But this time you feel different – the panic sets in deeper, and fear starts to course through your veins. This doesn't feel normal, and you don't feel the slightest bit safe. Your body is trembling, and your arms struggle more than before to escape your binds – but the knots around the rope are too tight, and no matter how hard you tug, or how hard you pull, you only serve to burn your wrists with the rope.

"Please, just – help me! Help me and… and I'll repay you!" you yell helplessly, feeling your cheeks grow warm and your nose start to run as you sob. Reality sinks in fast, however, when you hear a voice, finally.

It starts with a chuckle. A dark, low chuckle that reverberates through and then fades within the wide openness of the clearing, and your sobs start to get louder in the instinctive fear that cools the blood that runs through your veins, turning icy with terror. You stop struggling against the rope, though, praying that the intruder is kinder than the laugh they'd let out was.

"P-please, help me," you finally whisper, desperate and afraid and hoping for just… an ounce of mercy, pity? You aren't exactly sure.

Instead of a chuckle that reverberates through the clearing, this time you hear a soft laugh, so soft it might be an uneven breath – and the source stands right beside you suddenly, with red eyes aglow and a smirk that tells a devilish tale of intentions no better than those of the priest who'd landed you here.

"The ropes," you whispered, panicked, pathetic, "untie the ropes, please!"

"Why would I do that?"

You aren't sure, honestly, what you had been expecting from a stranger amongst the crop fields – kindness, pity, perhaps just naiveté? – but in the glint of mischief in the darkened eyes of the white-haired man above you, you recognize none of those qualities. Instead, you see yourself in the reflective surfaces of those orb's, you see fear and you see shame.

Had you not volunteered for this fate, had you not been willing to die for your sister before?

As the ropes above your head suddenly fall free from the stone beneath you, albeit still binding your wrists, confusion adds itself to the long list of your emotions in the moment. Was he freeing you? No, not with the smile on his face – really, the wicked way his lips curl upward in the moonlight says you are caught in his web.

But his hands still reach for the ropes at your ankles, still untie the bindings as he scoffs and chuckles at your rigid posture despite the leeway.

"Did you not ask for freedom?" the stranger asks you, and he laughs, "Did you not pray for mercy, for a hand to guide you to safety?"

"Why did you free me?" you whisper, voice hoarse and throat suddenly burning, aching with the aftermath of your yelling before. Shameful.

"To give you a headstart, little rabbit," his lip quirks up evermore, a tilt upwards in a snarky, devilish way as he says, "To give you a chance to survive me."

"What?" – you're confused, rightly so, and he laughs at it before you say, voice hoarse and body trembling from the cool night air that suddenly overcomes you, "Why would I need to run from you?"

Your question doesn't really need a verbal answer, because the moonlight suddenly begins to dim as the clouds pass over above you, a storm brewing as you lay. As the darkness overcomes the clearing, the night sky paints itself with the colours of the witching hour, and the man above you changes before your eyes from man, to something far, far from it.

His hair, stark white before, blackens from the roots. The darkness spreads, shadows taking over his jaw and his under-eyes, a cyan tint in his eyes that makes him evermore menacing – and as he laughs again, his teeth grow and sharpen, catching the glint of lightning as he flashes you a smile. You don't want to chance a look down again once you've already glanced down at his blackening, clawed hands.

The churches preach of demons that stalk the unwary, that prey on the wicked and on the innocent – the sight before you is no different from the image the priests would paint in your head of one before. A particular demon, one your prior village priest had proclaimed himself a hunter of, proudly so. The thing that this village worships, the thing you're sure you were meant to be a sacrifice for.

The One, as the priest had called him.

"You're… a demon!" you sputter helplessly, whimpering in fear, "A-a vampire! Godless and merciless, a monster!"

"You can call me Dabi, if you'd like," the devilish male says to you. And he chuckles as he shrugs, which would be enticing to watch if he wasn't horrifying, "Your priest likes to call me The One – you like that one, hmm?"

He laughs as he watches you roll off of the stone slab, away from him, and listens to the hitch in your breath as you fall to your knees. He can smell the blood the second you scrape one knee against the ground beneath you, and he breathes in your scent delightedly as he ignores your retreating form. You won't get very far, after all.

"Oh, what perfect prey," he chuckles as he stands and waits, silently counting off the seconds.

You reek of dread, of adrenaline and of terror – and he turns his head to chuckle as you stumble, the scent of you wafting off your form heavy and hard.

"What's the matter, doll?" his voice booms across the clearing, and you turn your head in horror at the excited grin that crosses his face, exposing his teeth to your view. "You're fallin' all over the place, like a newborn fawn…"

You gulp, unsure of what you're thinking as you open your mouth to respond with a hushed, frantic, "Please – don't hurt me."

He crosses the distance between your bodies in an instant, and your heart sinks to your diaphragm in realisation before he even speaks another word – you can't escape him, won't escape him, because at that speed he'll have caught you in a single stride. You're hopeless as he clutches the ropes that bind your wrists and gives your limp form a tug.

"Now, now," he tuts, the devilish glint in his eyes unyielding, "I thought you had a little more fight in you, huh?"

"Please, don't –"

"Ah, tut tut tut, doll," he hushes you, a low chuckle reverberating through him as he lifts you, up and up and up until you're dangling before him by his clawed hand gripping the rope around your wrists that dig into your flesh and force cries of pain from your swollen lips, "don't beg – it's unbecoming, hmm?"

"You're hurting me," you whimper, and you'd cry if your eyes weren't already dry enough, "Let me go, it hurts!"

Your body trembles at the sound of his bellowing guffaw as he dangles you higher and higher in the air, so you can barely stand on your tip-toes – and you cry out pathetically the longer you're up there, the pain you're in amplifying by the second.

"That's it," he coos, and you gasp as his other hand goes to caress your cheeks, squeezing your face 'til your lips are mushed together, and you can't make a peep without your sounds being garbled. "That's how you get what you need, doll. Demand it."

You'd spit on his face if you weren't mortified, if you weren't weak and useless under his grasp – as you have this thought, you start to curse yourself inwardly, and he starts to lean in toward your neck. His teeth, sharp and animalistic and ready to tear your flesh, are far too near your throat and far too quickly at that. If only you were stronger, smarter, better —

"Let her go!" a voice, familiar to you but only in the back of your mind, calls out as your assailant presses his lips to your throat, and you cry out as his teeth break skin

A slick, hot liquid seeps down the flesh of your neck before a mass of warmth coated in it trails along your throat, and as the voice repeats its call, the vampire – this Dabi – chuckles, and the sound reverberates through you as the slick substance drips down, down your clavicle and into your skin. His saliva, you realise with horror as he continues to lave away at you with his thick, hot tongue, is what it is.

You want to yell, to stop him, but your limbs become useless quickly as his saliva takes effect on you – vampire venom, after all, is a known aphrodisiac. It's been sold by witches as such for centuries.

A loud thunk resounds through the clearing then, and Dabi drops you carelessly from his grasp, like a sack of potatoes at market, so you hit the ground. Your body aches all over from the fall, but as you watch his head turn to find the source of the noise, of the pebble that you realise had knocked him in the head – and even you're a little shocked by the sight that graces you there, bravely aiming a second pebble at the vampire's head.

"L-leave her alone!" the priest's boy, someone your age and who'd offered you fresh-baked bread rolls free of charge many a hungry night before, yells at your captor – and if he didn't look ready to piss his pants, you might be honoured he'd thought to come to your rescue.

"You've a death wish, then?" Dabi asks the question with a smirk, but his voice betrays his immediate annoyance with the priest's son. He offers you a look, one with a quirked brow and a toothless grin, of amusement and says, "Is this your alternative to death, then? A man with a weak arm and an even weaker bladder?"

Against your will and against your better judgement, his voice in that tone makes your core throb, and your mouth water – you ignore your body's unwanted urges, however, and shake your head. Truth be told, you'd never have picked the baker boy simply out of disdain for his family's closeness to the church, their bloodline defiled by its very existence.

"Get away from here, you monster! Stay away from our home, from our women!" the boy yells, and you yelp as you feel Dabi claw at your bindings once more, tugging you to the epicentre of the clearing once more until you're stood up before the altar.

"You reek of the priest, boy," Dabi sighs before he stands before you, staring down at your face while he scoffs out a soft, "Go back home."

You quiver as clawed hands grip your shoulders, and your flesh burns wherever his darkened, black fingertips and claws trace over the fabric of your white nightgown – from your waist that prickles with delight and gooseflesh, to your breasts where your nipples harden pathetically. Dabi chuckles, dipping down to lave his tongue over your lips without a word of disagreement from you, and he chuckles at your compliance.

"Oh, you're behaving so well for me now," Dabi notes, and he smirks as he runs his clawed fingers down your jaw, "Tell the baker boy to go home."

"Yes…" you sigh, and then your head lolls over to face him and you spit a harsh, "Go home, boy… go home to your stupid father."

"Good girl," he whispers, and your mind is numb and your body is like clay in his hold – mouldable, pliant. "No use fighting when you're already mine."

"No use fighting…" you whisper in agreement, eyes clouding over, and your mouth stays open just enough that Dabi slips his tongue between your teeth and kisses you in a way no one ever has before – it's a slow, passionate dance between his lips against your own, and his tongue adventuring round the cavern of your mouth, all while his clawed hands grasp and mould around every part of you that he can touch.

The baker watches in horror, falling to his knees as he hears you moan and whimper in this monster's grasp – once, he had begged his father to let him marry you, he had wished he could have you in this way. It aches in every bone of his body to watch you share such a lewd moment with someone who isn't him.

"So you won't go?" Dabi asks, quirks up a brow without even glancing at the boy now, and he laughs. He says a simple, "Fine. Then stay where you are."

It's as a clawed hand tugs your night dress up to your knees that you manage a small, whimpered, "No!" – this makes the boy flinch, and he tries to turn his head in shame, to look away, but his body suddenly feels heavy. His blood weighs more than ever before, and he can't move.

"No?" the vampire chuckles, pressing on and hiking the fabric around your hips, exposing your lower half to the elements and catching the scent of your sweet centre on the wind, "But we're just getting started, doll…"

You gasp, breath catching in your throat as his lips find your neck and hover dangerously over your jugular, and his clawed index finger carefully, softly, traces a path over the mound of your core. You've barely been dosed with his venom, and yet its effects have left you pliant, soaked through – he feels this with a chuckle as he taps his digit to your slit, and immediately his finger is wet with the juices that flow from you like a fresh peach.

"Just getting started, and you're already soaked," Dabi coos against your throat, and then he groans as he sinks his teeth into you.

It should hurt, at the very least like a thousand pinpricks stabbing into the flesh of your throat at once, but each fang sinks into your flesh like a pleasant, orgasmic, featherlight kiss – and you whine like a bitch in heat at the feeling, sinking your fingers into the flesh of his upper arms that dip and flex with every motion he makes for support. You cry out his name, pathetic, and Dabi groans as his fangs part from your bleeding throat so his tongue and his lips can take their place and drink as he bleeds you dry.

It's painful for the priest's boy to watch, and every second wounds his ego more – he can't tell what makes his heart ache more, the way you mewl for the monster, or the way his body prickles to life with pleasure at the sound of it.

Dabi's index finger finds the pearly bud of your clit while his tongue laps at your blood and he chuckles into your flesh as you shiver familiarly – like your body's felt him on your skin a thousand times or more, and liked it – at the soft touch he gives it, and then as he retracts his finger so that just his claw taps against the bud you shiver once more. He finds you fascinating, arousing. He smirks.

Next, he dips that same digit a little further down your slit, to trace the shape of the hole of your cunt and just barely offer you relief from the pulsing within your core, from your growing need, and you squirm beneath him, whining. Your fingers falter for a moment in their grip on his arms, and he sighs with delight as you moan for him at the slightest intrusion of his digit within the cavern of your pussy.

"Oh, you like that, don't you?" Dabi coos into your throat, "You're a filthy whore, aren't you? Oh… you desperately need me to touch you, don't you?"

The baker boy whimpers pathetically at the sound of it as you cry out a loud, "Oh, please… touch me inside! Dabi, please!"

"You must be so disappointed," Dabi coos at the baker boy, glancing devilishly over his shoulder as he presses a digit inside you, listening to your keening whine in his ear as he continues, "that this isn't you touching her body, that you can't have her like this, hmm?"

"Please… she deserves better than —"

"Shut up," Dabi commands, and the baker boy immediately complies despite the words he desperately wants to say bubbling up inside him. "She's so tight down here, God – and she's so hot inside. The perfect little toy."

You whimper as you arch your back, whine as Dabi lifts you so you're seated on the altar, and keen as he dips a second clawed digit into your cunt, stretching you out and groaning at the feel of you clamping down around him. It's heaven, and he wants to relish in it as he dips his head down to drink from your throat once again.

"Dabi!" you call out his name like you're begging for salvation, and he chuckles at it. He forces your head to loll to the side, your eyes shut but your face in full view of the stupid boy who'd come to your rescue. "Oh, Dabi, please!"

"Look at her," Dabi says with a cackle, licking a lewd stripe up the other side of your neck and sinking his fangs lightly into the supple flesh there, too, "she's begging me for more. This will never be you."

"Please!" You're calling out below him for nothing in particular, just begging at this point to be used the way he wants to use you, and Dabi obliges easily as you lay there and let him drain you of your lifeblood and your willpower, "Dabi, please – 'm yours, so use me! More, more, MORE!"

"God, you probably wish you could bury your pathetic cock deep inside her, don't you?" Dabi chuckles at the priest's boy, unashamedly stretching your cunt open and stepping back to look at his handiwork. "I'm gonna fuck her real good now – and then I'll finish her up, and y'know what I do to 'em when I'm done?"

The priest's boy, in fact, does know the answer to that one. "You'll bury her under the crops," he says, deadpan, "to fertilise them for the rest of the season."

Dabi laughs at that, nodding, "You do know something, huh?" And then he falls silent, glaring at the boy, and says, "Now, be quiet – or I'll kill you first."

You've never been touched before – let alone been fucked. So, when Dabi's thick cock prods at your entrance and then bullies its way into you, even just his tip, it doesn't matter that you're wet – your cunt aches at every inch that he sinks into you until he's sheathed himself inside. His cock is big, and he doesn't make it easy for you to take it.

"Hurts!" you yell, but you whimper out a desperate, "So good!"

Tears slide down your cheeks as the vampire wickedly chuckles down at your confusion, grinding his hips into you so his navel bumps into your clitoris with every single thrust of his cock, and absorbing your hiccups and sobs of pained pleasure with delight in his devilish eyes – and when you whimper out that he needs to be gentler, he barks a laugh into your face.

"Gentle? Don't forget why you're here," he chides you. "You're mine – so take it. Take my cock –" he fucks into you harder and faster, and the slick from your cunt messes all over your thighs as he does, "– like the sacrificial lamb you're supposed to be, without complaining!"

The baker boy sobs as he watches, despite Dabi being able to control his movement. He can't run away, can't avert his eyes – but he cries from watching you, cries from hearing you. And as Dabi turns his devilish eyes to glance at the boy, he tugs you up by your bindings and turns your body to face away from him.

Your back hits the hard, cool surface of his chest as his hand closes around your cheeks, and his cock sheaths itself inside you still. From this angle, the baker boy can see everything – from your cunt, slobbering all over Dabi's girth, to your tits, popping out from the confines of your nightdress with the effort of his harsh fucking.

And from this angle, Dabi has access to all his favourite spots to drink you dry from.

His teeth sink into your shoulder as he fucks his cock into you all over again, and you scream out at the pleasure of it as he hits all the right spots inside you while his lips suckle the red from your body like a lamb from its mother's teat – except this drink is deadly to one of you, and it's not you.

All the while, his eyes cross over your body and lock onto the sad, little baker boy's – and if he could laugh without wasting the delectable, sweet drink on his lips, he might, for the boy looks distraught and broken. Dabi would love nothing more than to make him feel worse. So he does.

He tosses you to the ground and listens to you whine in pain, and laughs as the sound is replaced by the whimpers of someone whose respite was stolen from their grasp, and he cackles as the baker's boy tries desperately to free himself from Dabi's telekinetic hold to save you.

"It's no use, stupid boy," Dabi explains with a smirk as he kneels behind your form, drags your body upward so he can free your flesh from the confines of your tattered, bloodstained nightdress, and he laughs as your naked flesh trembles in the cold of night, and the loss of so much blood that makes you so much paler than you should be. "She'll beg for more, until she dies from the blood loss – and you're stuck where you are, until I loose my grasp on your body. My magic is stronger than your pathetic love for her."

"She's not your toy!"

"And she's not your property, hmm?" Dabi coos, and you mewl as his huge hands cup your breasts and he tugs your body toward him so you lean your back on him, and he angles you so he can lick a stripe up your ribcage before grazing his teeth along the side of your breast, "Unless you paid for her?"

"I… didn't."

Dabi laughs, and you squeak out pathetically as his sharp teeth sink into your breast mercilessly, and the baker boy's eyes water as he watches in fear the way you lose yourself in the vampire's grasp. He knows you won't survive, knows you won't make it til dawn, but a part of him is thick with hope that he, himself, might. Maybe he can outlive your captor, stake his heart and –

Dabi practically moans, and the baker's eyes go wide at the sight of your hand wrapping around the vampire's girth, stroking his cock in his lap and whimpering as you beg him for more of it, for more of him – "Please, just a little more, I'm so close, just give me some more —"

"Greedy," Dabi coos into your flesh, and the baker gulps as he realises just how much blood you must've already lost. "Let's show the priest's boy just how good I can make you feel, then, hmm?"

You're on all fours in a moment, mere inches from the baker boy's face, and he looks on in horror as Dabi's cock slots itself right back between your folds and he fucks into you until you quiver and shake, screaming like a pig at just how good you feel with his venom running through your veins and his length inside you – but his eyes drift between your flesh, draining of colour, and Dabi's, slowly turning more and more… humane, persé.

"So good!" you cry out, "Please, Dabi! Use me more! All of me is yours!"

Your cunt quivers around his thick girth, and Dabi groans out as he fucks you stupid, listening to your noises and your squeals, but watching the stupid boy intently all the while, waiting for the fire in his heart to die. Surely, the boy's courage will waver when he watches you cum? Surely, the boy will realise there is no saving you, and accept that your fate is either death or eternal damnation?

"Stop it," the boy whispers, and his eyes are red as the tears streak down his face, but he has not lost his will to save you – typical, Dabi thinks, as all men of the age seem to believe damsels in distress should be rescued.

"Harder! Dabi… oh, faster!" you cry out, but your voice has weakened and your volume wavers as you yell, and as Dabi leans in close to the skin of your back for another bite, another drink as his cock sinks deeper and deeper into you with every thrust, he catches a whiff of a scent he knows all too well, sitting right beneath your flesh. The scent of disappointment.

"Cum for me," he orders you, as he rests a hand hard on the flesh of your shoulder, and his eyes turn harsher in the sight of the boy before the two of you.

"I-I c-can't…"

The boy can see the reason why, too.

"You're dying," he whispers to you, hoarse and pathetic, "please – make him stop!"

"It's time to cum," Dabi presses, his other hand drifting down to draw soft, slow circles around your clit as your weak arms drop and your form falls to the sandy ground, shivering in the wake of his touch, "don't waste my time."

But you give out one last loud cry, before your breath turns ragged and your chest begins to heave – you have nothing left to give, and Dabi can sense it. He growls out, annoyed, and reaches for your neck the second he unsheathes his cock from you, and speaks in a low, demonic growl.

"Pathetic, weak mortal woman," he chides you, and his eyes return from cyan to red as he speaks, "I was wrong to suspect you'd be able to change anything, to give me any more than the rest – you are as useless as every other sacrificial lamb before you."

"Please," you whisper, voice broken and hoarse, but you've no clue what you're begging for – and he rolls his eyes this time, before he stands up, bringing your pathetic, limp form with him. He carries you like you weigh naught but an ounce.

"You disappointed me," he says to your body, floppy and weak as your eyes flutter shut and your breath grows gradually weaker, as he walks you back to the altar, and the baker's eyes go wide at the threat of what he may watch the vampire do to you. "I had higher hopes for you than for the last few."

"Stop it!" he yells.

"But that's hardly anything new – they always disappoint me," Dabi continues, and your eyes slide shut, fluttering for a moment.

"Don't do it! Not to her!"

Dabi chuckles, and he glances over his shoulder as his hand begins to tighten around your neck, ready to pop your head clean off your shoulders as he says, "What will you do to me if I ignore you, boy? Bake me some bread?"

"I-I'll…" he starts, in retaliation, but nothing comes from his lips but a string of sobs as a crack! fills the clearing. He stares in horror at your corpse, and how the vampire callously disposes of you in two parts, filling a hole with your remains.

"Now," Dabi sighs, dusting off his hands on his shirt as if he's done measly yardwork, as his eyes cross the clearing to offer a glance at the whimpering baker boy, "It's your turn, yes?"

It's been a good four hundred years now, since Dabi felt the draw of a soul that might be able to handle his curse and share it with him, and not once since has he felt the same way. It's been enough time of roaming the world and learning new skills that Dabi has become wary of things he didn't know he would need to, things he never thought about in the old times. He knows about climate change, about Einstein, about the rise and fall of Twitter, and about the declining popularity of Dracula in fiction. But that isn't what intrigues him anymore.

Now, he's in New York, and he's thinking about his next move. A vampire in the city that never sleeps – ironic, isn't it? Dabi, for one, believes it simply must be as he pulls up a seat at the bar and orders himself a bourbon on the rocks.

He knows the city is looking for him, knows that he's been branded a sicko and a serial killer, but he wonders if your ilk have ever considered that he isn't simply a monster; he has to eat, he has to sate himself somehow – and so what if he kills a few of your kind in the process? He's just doing what you humans do with your livestock.

He sips the bourbon, it stings, makes him nauseous. It must be watered down; high quality bourbon never burns, but he could care less as he glances down at his bruised knuckles and the bloodstains on his dress shirt. Any sane person would've turned him away at the bar the moment he sat down – he looks a mess, like he's already been to three pubs and started five bar fights in one night – but this place is run down. It's cheap. They need the customers, and can't afford to turn even the questionable ones down.

"Another," he calls toward the bartender as he tugs the glass to his lips and chugs the liquid down like a chaser, and the barman nods quickly as Dabi watches him, reaches behind him for the bourbon in question, and stands before his questionable patron with the bottle again.

"More ice?" he asks Dabi as he pours the drink, the man who's covered in scars and the marks of the aftermath of his escape from another of his gruesome kills without so much as an ounce of concern at his appearance, and Dabi shakes his head.

"No – I need the bourbon, not the ice," he clarifies, and his cyan eyes burn into the barman's as he says it, offering a sly smirk as he drops enough cash on the counter to pay for another few drinks after this one. He'll be drinking for a while.

"Yessir," his bartender affirms, and without so much as another word, continues to serve him without fail.

Dabi feels curious, watching the youngster work his way around the counter. He's diligent, careful, knows when to stop his customers before they've hit their limits, and the vampire is incredibly fascinated by it. He's never seen a man like this one. And he's seen a lot of men.

The barman has a few distinct features about him – blond hair, fair skin, amber eyes – but perhaps the most notable of these features, to Dabi, is his scent. His smell is inviting, with the same effect on the vampire that a steamy cup of hot chocolate might have on a human, calling him in with sweet notes and a musky undercurrent.

Dabi starts to wonder if this is the one he'll devour next – until the door dings, a new entrant in the pub giggling as she presses her cellphone to her ear and chats away with someone. Her scent wafts through the room, and Dabi can taste it as it curls around him, wraps tendrils around his throat and creeps into his nostrils slowly, teasingly, making him drool and his fangs drip with venom.

It's her that he wants now, and he decides quickly as he chugs down the rest of his bourbon so that the sting accompanies the burning sensation of his unholy gaze on your flesh, and he watches her every move. He watches the way she slings her pretty coat over the back of a barstool, the way she gracefully sits down. He admires every inch of her confidence, because he can tell she works hard to be able to show it off.

She's sweet, too, he can tell from the way she smiles as she speaks to the person she's calling, a real, true people-pleaser. That will come in handy later, if he chooses her. He likes her smile. He likes the way she giggles. God, he loves the way she flexes her fingers across the specials menu and makes an order for something cheap, something to take the edge off the day she's had.

He could take the edge off her just as easily.

He waves the barman over before he has the chance to offer her a card machine to make her payment, and with a charismatic chuckle, he tells the man that her drinks are on him. And then, dramatically, he drops a few more crisp bills on the bar. He's lucky the barman doesn't question the blood spattered on one note, not his intentions with the woman.

He walks over to her with a smirk, devious as he takes the seat beside her this time, and she giggles as she ends her phone call to lock eyes with him. And his eyes nearly bulge out of their sockets as soon as she speaks, when nearly four hundred years worth of memories wash over him like some insane realisation.

"Hello there," she says, enunciating every syllable carefully and grinning like a Cheshire cat, "Dabi."

"So you survived after all," the demon chuckles, reaches for what he now notes is your neck, and caresses the flesh tenderly, warmly, like an age-old lover might. "I never knew – but perhaps I should've, hmm?"

Flashes of memory flicker in his cold eyes, of a midnight he'd arrived in that village to collect his due, another virgin in the dark of night – but instead he'd been greeted by ash and fog, the village burned to a crisp with not one survivor. The bones of the villagers who'd worshipped him so, painstakingly arranged in an eternal freeze-frame of what must've been the most torturous massacre by arson in the time period.

"You really showed them not to play god, didn't you?" he coos, and as his thumb toys with your chin, you grimace.

"They deserved worse than they got from me," you huff, tearing yourself from his grasp, "As did you."

And he chuckles, watches how your (e/c) eyes sparkle with vengeance and your body brims with the blood from a fresh kill pumping through your veins, giving your undead corpse life so that you may present yourself to him that way. It's then that a cocky grin graces his lips and he shows you his fangs.

"I never did get your name."

"You never asked," you spit under your breath, and he sees the way your body gardens with a hostility he admires. "You were otherwise occupied with my body."

"Four hundred years," he sighs, and a playful smirk graces his lips, "and you've just now tracked me down. Has your anger kept you warm through all those winters?"

"Anger?" you scoff, baffled by his nonchalance. You stand, and your eyes burn into his skull as you glare into his turquoise orbs, "Anger has never warmed me – it's only ever been the hope for vengeance that's kept me warm at night, Dabi."

"And the fire," he jests, and you frown tremendously at the statement.

He's not wrong, of course – you can remember waking, the night your body had returned to life with a shuddering gasp, only for every inch of your flesh to burn with an immense desire for vengeance, an immense hatred for the people that had put you in the ground. And after clawing your way out from your grave, you'd risen to exact that vengeance.

You had a list: The priest, the vampire, but most of all, the mother who'd let it happen.

With naught but your hatred to guide your movements, you'd made for the town on wobbly legs. It was dark out, cold, but you paused for nothing in your journey, until you found yourself in the square, and with a lit torch in-hand, you exacted your revenge on the townsfolk, burning them all in their pathetic church, where they were holed up celebrating their fertile land.

You hadn't stopped there, either, not when they'd wronged you so terribly. And not when a thirst, a hunger, overcame you at the scent of blood and flesh.

You'd sought out your mother, the woman who was hiding in a room, praying to the monster that had put you in the ground. You could hear her chanting, her sobbing, her whimpering. It disgusted you, terribly, so much so that you tore through the home you'd once called your own and picked her up with your bare hands and threw her to the floor, screaming into her blanched face and demanding an apology, and when none came…

Her blood had sated your first thirst. Her body burning, your second.

"And," you say, eyes slitted and body hot with anger, as you lock eyes with Dabi, "the fire."

When you reach forward with one hand, grasping onto the vampire's thigh, he barely takes note and scoffs at what he assumes is your promiscuity – you fit in with the modern age, that he believes wholeheartedly, naively. Your form is perfectly complimented by your outfit, by your makeup, by your aura, and you fit perfectly in the little pub.

"What do you say, we get out of here?" you ask him, and he chuckles but fails to note the look on your face, the look of a woman with a plan.

"Sure thing," he says, voice low and sultry. "Wanna redo our last night together, hmm?"

You laugh like he's told you a joke, and you nod, a mischievous smirk gracing your features as you agree – but really, your stomach twists in disgust as flickers of the last night you'd spent with him flit through your vision. Why you would laugh sincerely, why you would agree excitedly, you don't know – and you don't understand why he doesn't even question your lack of hesitance.

"Let's go, hmm?" he suggests.

And he stands up in a moment, reaching out for your hand to tug you along. Just like that, you follow the monster out of the bar. You're patient, letting him lead you down an alleyway and giggling like a little girl as he pushes you against a wall with the strength of five men, so hard your skull beats against brick but you don't flinch at the impact.

"Oh, you wanna play rough?" you tease him as he hikes one of your legs up his side, a hand delving under your skirt, and he nods as he presses warm, well-fed lips into your throat.

"Fuck, yeah," he huffs, and you giggle at the lust that burns primally in his eyes and in his breath as it hits your throat.

"Okay," you coo, and you grin as he retracts his head to stare down at you, your hands tenderly reaching up to grasp his jaw on either side with animalistic claws that lengthen as your eyes shift in colour, glowing neon under the pale moonlight. "Then let's play rough, hmm?"

He smiles down at you, and you can barely believe he's the same man, no, the same demon he was before – but it doesn't matter, not really. Not when your cold heart suddenly beats again with a force like no other, with a purpose like none before.

"You're beautiful," he tells you, and he's serious. And you flinch from the sound of the words rolling so smoothly off his foul, sinful tongue.

You smile, and you mouth an insincere "thank you" before you pull his head to his chest and twist, violently and urgently with the strength only a demon could manage, until you hear the click of his spine from the pure force of the motion. And then you pull, hard and fast, until you hear the rest of his body flop to the ground, and your eyes flick up to the head of the monster that you hold in your hands.

"Four hundred years," you say softly as you eye the cyan orbs that stare lifelessly at you. "I stalked you for four hundred years, Dabi…"

You chuckle, and a relieved tear slips from your eye as you grip onto his hair with your right hand, dropping the head to your side where it dangles pathetically, and you step back to admire the limp pile of limbs that the rest of him has become on the ground underneath you. It's a pathetic sight, seeing the object of four hundred years of rage finally fallen to ruin.

"What perfect prey you were," you say, smiling.

Artfully, you swipe a bloody hand over the spot of your neck where the monster had kissed you, leaving it smeared with the fruit of your vengeance as you giggle, and you walk away leaving his body behind. The scent of him, a predator and a monster, wafts around you and filters through your lungs, smells of relief and of freedom.

After all, if you have his head, he'll stay dead as a doornail until you put him back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

bunny's taglist: @bihwhatever2 @mssuguru @feral-creep @thechroniclesofawriter @xsmilesx @kat-sukiii @kageyama-i-want-tobiors @obeythemasters @aeanya @softkao @ccoralineee @blaize-hewwo

if he's a serial killer, then what's the worst that could happen to a girl who's already hurt?—

dabi x reader

wc: 9.5+

warnings: 18+, ATTEMPTED SEXUAL ASSAULT, explicit/crude language, reader is not doing well, angst, dabi is bad at feelings, also yandere by accident?

if he's as bad as they say, then i guess i'm cursed, looking into his eyes, i think he's already hurt—

The two of you hadn’t even been friends, not really.

It had been by some ridiculous coincidence that you attended Shizuoka Private School at the same time, in the same class and had the same peers. There was always an idiotic smile on your face; it made you seem so damn friendly that the other kids fought over you at lunch—who would you sit with today? But you sat with them last time! When was it my turn?

Even then you were pulled in different directions.

The two of you hadn’t been friends, only classmates. Sometimes he sat with you, sometimes he didn’t; more often than not he spent his time outside, counting out his breaths so he didn’t burn his stomach or his hands or his face—which is pretty fucking funny, in retrospect—but you talked to him, just like you did everyone. It wasn’t anything special.

A smile and a wave. How’s it going, Touya? Sure are working hard!

An offering, some of the leftover rice in the bento your dear mommy made you. Ugh, I’m so full! You need the energy, want it?

A chin perched on your knee, pulling them close to your chest as you watched him. That’s super cool! I bet you’ll be even better than your dad!

So fucking sweet. So fucking idiotic.

(He didn’t think that then. Nah, not back then.)

It always made you throw up, using that quirk of yours. Underneath the tree, the one in the front of the fence on the side of the school, he’d told you,

“You can be my sidekick! I’ll get them with Prominence Burn, and you get ‘em with Mind Freeze!”

There was blood in your teeth when you responded. “We’ll get the bad guys together!”

It’s not until after everything that he realizes what the problem is, not until you take that job in the hospital and put needles in veins and take temperatures and clean up shit that he realizes you can’t take it. Something about it ruining your own neurological whatever; if you had tried to be a hero, you wouldn’t have made it to your late-twenties. Brain would have ate itself, or something.

(In retrospect, he guesses that’s a good thing. If he ever ran into you out there, if he had to turn your bones to ash in an alleyway while you wore some cheesy spandex, you might not have recognized him—but you would have figured it out just before he carbonized you. You would have probed his mind all different ways, found everything out, even those things he shoves behind the door in his head.)

(Of course he could do it, smite you into fucking nothing, absolutely, no problem.)

Somehow you got blessed with good parents, the kind that supported whatever path you wanted, the kind that only exists in the movies. They said things to you like, “only if you want to” and “you can be just as much of a hero without your quirk”—which was a load of shit and you knew it. He knew it, too.

Those kids by the fence were supposed to be partners.

In retrospect, it’s pretty fucking funny. Every last bit of it.

The two of you hadn’t even been friends, not really, but you lit incense for him at least once a year. Most of the time on his birthday (he wasn’t sure how you figured that out; the idea that you went to his house to ask Enji was horrifying), but sometimes you wouldn’t show up that day. Sometimes you did it at Christmas, sometimes on Valentine’s Day. Sometimes on any random Saturday of the month.

Sometimes you showed up for a few weeks in a row.

So fucking sweet. So fucking idiotic.

Who the fuck even are you, anyway? Acting all sad and heartbroken because some kid from your class went and got himself incinerated to Hell. Acting like you cared, as if those conversations under the tree ever really meant anything. As if the future was ever gonna be up to him, as if he had any say. Acting as if you could ever do the Hero Thing, as if you had any say. As if the blood on your lips didn’t stain his when he kissed a girl at age ten, for the first time.

Grow up. Kids say shit they don’t mean all the time.

And without him, you had—grown up. After a while you stopped talking about him, stopped saying, “Oh, my friend Touya,” as if he was still there, waiting for you at the front of the school. You were an honor student, every year, and your parents bought you a car when you started high school. A normal one, not U.A. No one had figured it out yet, that your bouts of illness and fatigue, the Twice-sized migraines you got were all due to that quirk of yours, but you knew something was wrong. Even then.

Somehow you got blessed with good parents, the kind that paid your way through college, the kind that bought you a stethoscope as if you were gonna be some hot-shot doctor. So fucking stupid, in a world of quirks; someone could do what would take you hours, in seconds, but you still chose that job. Because you still wore that idiotic smile and people still flocked to you and you wanted to please everyone, just like always.

Yeah, he knew where you lived, but it’s not like he was a creep.

When he managed to unscramble his brain enough to use it, it was easy to find you. You lived in the same house you always did and he’d been over once, as Touya, and the curtains covering your windows were still pink, still had stars on them, when you were ten and when you were eighteen. Those parents of yours had to make a big ol’ deal of you moving out, to some shitty apartment closer to the hospital, closer to downtown, so it wasn’t hard for him to follow that moving truck.

And you still had those fucking curtains. Why wouldn’t you throw them away? Move on. Grow up.

To his complete horror, you kept a photo of him in the third drawer in your kitchen, the same photo Enji stared at. It was pathetic, all of it, how you kept him around and in your space. Sometimes you would open that drawer and see it and act surprised, as if you hadn’t put it there yourself, and you would say something stupid like, “How’s it going, Touya?” before grabbing what you needed and putting him back in the dark.

The two of you hadn’t even been friends, not really, and it was all so idiotic.

When one of your nurse friends asked about the picture, you told them everything. About the bento boxes and the tree, about the Hero to your Sidekick, about the one and only time he felt like a kid, in someone else’s home, while he watched some girly movie about a witch and her broomstick and a cat.

“—and my mom made me salmon, but he hates fish, so we threw it at a car in the school parking lot.”

Hates. As if he was still alive. As if you still cared. As if you could tell he was sitting against the wall in your dark bedroom, listening to every sip of that beer you took.

The worst part of it all was that you walked to and from work, like a big fucking fool. Mom and Pop bought you a car for a reason, stupid, and if you wanted to stay in shape so bad, you could just join a fucking gym, like the rest of the world. But no. You insisted, even when that cunt from the hospital cafeteria offered to drive you himself. “Fresh air is good for me,” you told him, which was a terribly lame response—one fit for you.

So fucking stupid, trying to be so perfect all the time.

The way you curled your hair and the careful hand you used to put on your makeup. If a bum on the street asked you for money, you’d come back from a coffee shop across the road with water and a sandwich, maybe even throw him a bill or two. People stopped you to ask for directions and you gave them, sometimes you would pay for the person in line behind you at some takeout place. If litter was on the ground, you’d carry it to the nearest trash can.

They told you that if you’d tried to do the Hero Thing, you’d be dead by twenty-three, and yet there you were, holding open the door for four people in a row with that smile, playing the good guy.

Grow up.

There were plenty of other women in his life better than you, women that understood his motivation, his rage, ones that left the door unlocked when he needed to get his rocks off. Some of those women had pierced nipples and wore spandex—not the cheesy kind—and let him do the whole BDSM thing because they liked it just as much as he did. They didn’t expect anything of him, they didn’t talk about him like he was still there or pretend to care. They liked him, Dabi (most of them, anyway, some of those fucking bitches couldn’t get over his appearance, but he didn’t care about them).

He didn’t care about any of that, least of all you. Least of all the skimpy dress you wore when that cafeteria cuck finally got your number, finally got the balls to take you out. Who cares that he brought you flowers and that you kissed him for it? It’s not some big, grand deal that a man took notes from a shitty romance flick to impress you. He didn’t care at all, because he was balls-deep in a girl he’d picked up at the bar, and it wasn’t some big deal that he pretended it was you moaning his name.

Yeah, you were kinda attractive. Whatever.

The two of you hadn’t even been friends, not really, and it wasn’t a big deal he watched you after that twelve hour shift you always pull. The walk home in the first place is dumb, but it’s nearly 3am and you’re stumbling on your feet (it’s your third night in a row, because, of course it is). The alleyways gets real dark, he knows this, and all it takes is for him to tip his head down and breathe in his nicotine for you not to notice.

There’s blood on your scrubs and you look tired, a different kind of tired than the one you usually wear, a sad-tired. All the mascara is gone from your eyes. Probably lost some poor bastard in the ER because you didn’t have a quirk that mattered, not in your profession, and now you’re crying because you’re soft.

People die. Touya did. Grow up. Throw away the picture.

It’s all so boring and lame, weariness eating at the edges of his own eyes, but he isn’t ready to go back to that shitty motel room he’s living out of. Toga is on his last damn nerve at the moment and Shigaraki is messing around with some losers, so he doesn’t care, not right now. The motel bed is broken and it creaks when he moves and he’s fucking over it, so that’s why he leans against the wall when you walk by, why he closes his eyes and lets the cigarette smoke swirl into the sky, and it’s why he doesn’t follow right behind you, not yet.

One would think he’d be familiar with the sound of a tire iron against a skull, but that isn’t really his style, so it’s only when you start coughing that he realizes something is weird. When he rounds that corner and looks down the sidewalk, the last thing he sees is the curtain of your hair disappearing into an alleyway too far from him.

“Fuck.”

He almost says your name out loud, he almost calls it out, but someone actually has the nerve to grab you right out from underneath him, so he’s shoving his hands in his pockets and hurrying down the sidewalk. The first thing he sees is one of your teeth (he kicks the other one and it clicks down the concrete, skittering over the curb and into the street) and then he sees the tiny pool of blood you’d spit up when you hit the ground.

Dabi isn’t some fucking pussy, so he really isn’t sure why it happens so slowly, why he lets it go so far. By the time the sound of your cries reach him, some fucker already has your scrub pants around your ankles and he’s slotting himself up against your ass, but you’re too out of it to really realize what’s happening. Blood is pouring over your eye and half your face is already bruised and knotted from where the metal struck you, but you’re awake.

Which is why he thinks this idiot hit you where he did, nowhere truly lethal, because some guys like when girls squirm.

You’re just moaning in pain, lying there while he looks at you in shock (someone is really doing this to you? Just out in the street like a fucking tool?) but you’re trying to drag yourself away, pretty nails scraping against the pavement without any real effort. When the alleyway begins to glow blue, you look up at him, and he sees the fear in your eyes when you meet his.

It’s ugly, but it’s over soon.

That alleyway fucking stinks now, with the smell of melted skin and hair and it’s too smokey for either of you to breathe. For some reason, you aren’t even screaming, which is absurd, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone attacks you, idiot. Your entire face is covered in ash and dirt and blood, sticking to the sweat pooling from you, and you’re still just rolling around like a headless chicken.

And for a moment, he isn’t really sure what to do.

For a moment, he has some idiotic thought, about gathering you up in his—

Nah, fuck that, he won’t even finish it.

There is a hospital up the street, your hospital, and they would probably find you soon enough. If he leaves right then, as you try and fail to reach for your pants, he could even run up there and call out about a woman in the alleyway. People flock to you; they love perfect, little, you, and they’ll find you. They’ll call the doctor with the quirk you don’t have and they’ll heal you. They’ll take care of you.

The two of you weren’t even friends, not really, but he won’t forget the way he felt when you used that shitty quirk of yours on him. As if someone was reaching in through his ears and his nose and poking around, trying their damndest to touch his brain with their fingers, and then it’s like a switch is turned on, one he didn’t realize was turned off.

Just before you vomit enough blood to knock you out, you gasp and reach a shaking hand out to him and then you say it. You say his name.

You say, “Touya, please.”

And then he has no choice but to entertain that fucking thought from before, because you’ve used that quirk and you’ve unlocked that door in his head and he’s the kid by the fence, under the tree, all over again.

At best, he should have left you for someone to find. Possibly should have left you for dead because he’s not ready yet, not for the big reveal. There is a timeline he’s working with, one that will hit Enji the hardest, and tonight isn’t the night for it to all start. You know the incense you’ve been burning has been for nothing, that the picture in your drawer is about as stupid as he’s always thought it was, and you know that Touya isn’t dead.

And no one is supposed to know, not yet.

Yeah, he knows where you live, but he can’t exactly climb the steps to your apartment with you, half-dead and covered in your own blood and grime, in his arms and expect none of the do-gooders in your building not to call the cops. The motel is gross, but it’s in a bad part of town; this sight sure isn’t the worst they’ve ever seen, will ever see.

Maybe he’ll get lucky and you’ll just die in this creaky bed. Then he can blame the blood stains and the smell for the reason he needs to change rooms. Nothing about you seems alive, except for the pulse racing in your neck, for the heartbeat in your chest that nearly comes out of your skin. For once in your life, you aren’t wearing that fucking smile, not looking with those bright eyes or batting your eyelashes. For once you’re finally quiet.

Dabi has patched himself up enough times to do this, but he hardly has anything with him that can help whatever the fuck is going on with you. Will you die from the wound to the head? Have a concussion? Are you gonna puke blood all over the sheets, like he wants you to? After he pulled your pants up, your underwear were still on and intact, no blood on your thighs, so he doesn’t think that asshole actually got anywhere with you.

It’s kinda pissing him off, how long it took for him to do anything.

Not that he cares.

The towels in the motel are shitty and scratchy. The water is lukewarm and never cold, but he wets a hand towel all the same and tries his best to wash the blood off your face, off your mouth and your neck. There is probably blood in your teeth, just like there always had been, but he’s not about to pry your lips open and brush them with his only toothbrush, so you’ll just have to figure that out whenever you wake up.

There is a sorry excuse for a first-aid kit under the leaking sink and thank fuck you’re knocked out, because he’s got to cauterize that wound on your forehead (you still stir a little bit and tears escape your closed eyes), but he puts a somewhat sticky band aid over it.

In retrospect, it’s pretty fucking funny; your perfect little face, finally marred.

When there is nothing left to do but wait for you to wake up, he just stares at you. For a long time. Longer than he’ll ever admit, even to himself. Because he hasn’t been this close, not since the tree or that time he sat next to you in your living room, while you shared onigiri and watched that dumb movie. Enji didn’t even know—he’d been too busy with Shoto to realize he hadn’t gone outside to train. He’d been too busy to realize Touya had slipped out of the yard and down the street, into a girl’s house for the first and last time.

When he thinks about you, sitting beside him and touching the white of his hair, with your soft hands and your shy little face, he leaves to go get water from the store around the corner. There’s hardly any money in his pockets, but he uses it all to buy as many bottles of water he can, and when he gets back, you haven’t moved an inch.

“Are you dead yet?” He doesn’t look at you when he asks, only sets the water on the wood-chipped table by the door and waits. It’s nearly 5 in the morning and he’s dead tired, but he just sits on the ground and waits some more. About an hour goes by and he checks your pulse again, just to be sure.

He’s half awake when your fingers start twitching, when you start whimpering in your sleep. The bed creaks when you shift on your back, moving your legs in discomfort as you start rolling around again, just like you did in the alley. When your eyes finally open, you blink at the ceiling for a long time (he doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath), before touching your head gingerly. At the first feel of the band aid on your forehead, tears immediately well up in your eyes and you let out a gasp, looking away from him and to the shitty bathroom.

Dabi is sitting beside the mattress on the ground, looking at you when you turn your head to him. Maybe you should scream, if you had the energy, maybe you should do what most people do when they see him and his fucking skin, the staples holding him all together. But you’re a big idiot, so you don’t. You only scan his face and look into his eyes (and he’s a man now and not a fucking kid, so he stares back), blink at him, just like you did the ceiling, and you don’t say anything for a long time.

It looks like there are a million thoughts running through your head and it’s pissing him off.

“Say something,” He spits, “Don’t just fucking stare at me like that.”

“Touya.”

“Don’t call me that.” No one has, not since the Hero and Sidekick days, not since Shizuoka Private School, not since Sekoto Peak. “And don’t ever fucking poke around in my brain again!”

"Am I dead?"

So fucking idiotic. "Unfortunately for me, no."

Your head is so heavy that when you try to sit up, it just lolls back on your shoulders, looking like it's gonna fall off and onto the sheets. After a minute of trying, you give up. "Are you dead?"

All your words are slurring. Maybe you are dying, after all.

"Unfortunately for me, no."

"Where am I?"

And you're still not screaming or freaking out, even though you'd been nearly whacked to death, nearly raped into the concrete. Even though a kid from your class—one you weren't even friends with—is alive right next to you, looking like someone left him in the oven too long.

Does he tell you where you are? Chances are, if you survive this thing, you'll report him to the police since you're such a goody-goody. A wannabe hero and all that. Once, he'd seen you carry an empty fast food bag for three fucking blocks because every trash can you found before then was full. Fucking pathetic.

On the bed, you're still shifting your legs and twitching. It doesn't seem like you realize it.

"Are you alright in there?" Maybe if he hits you upside the head, you'll stop. "'Cause you almost got your brains knocked out."

More tears. The skin on your forehead is real tight with that knot and your brows only pull down a hair. A big, fat pout. "What? What happened? Where am I?"

The scrub top is tucked into your pants because he'd been in a hurry to yank them up your legs, but you don't seem to notice. There's a good chance you don't even remember getting whacked, and the last thing he wants to do is pretend he cares enough to console you. So fucking soft, you'll definitely start crying if he tells you what nearly happened to you (seriously, what the fuck was he doing? Supposed to be some badass and it took him a solid six seconds to act. So annoying), so he won't.

"Some guy stole your purse."

That's not true, it's behind the toilet.

"What? Where is he?"

Dabi snorts and his eyes relax into an unimpressed stare. "Oh, well after he bludgeoned you, I thought I'd entertain a game of Shogi with him—where the fuck do you think he is? I lit him up like the Chinese New Year."

"Oh." Is all you say and then you're quiet. When he looks up from the stained carpet and back at your face, your eyes are closed and he snaps his fingers until you reopen them. "Am I dead?"

"No, now quit askin'."

Your equilibrium must be way off, because you try to raise your hand to touch your face but it just waves around near your right ear like you're drunk off your ass. When you try to sit up again, you manage it, but you still sway back and forth.

He still has no idea what to do. Finish the job already? Put you out of your misery?

The bed creaks every time you lean back and you swivel around dumbly to look down at it, down at him. That perfectly curled hair of yours is a wreck, all tangled in the back like some sort of bad sex hair, and in the light of the barely rising sun, he can see parts of blood he missed. You don't smile that smile, so he doesn't know if it's in your teeth. Probably is.

Maybe you aren't gonna croak right then, because you look at the door, the chipping paint on the walls, the who-knows-what colored stain on the carpet. You look at the water on the table, at the shitty desk, the flickering light outside the bathroom. Then him.

"Can I have some water, please?"

Please.

Oh, shut the fuck up.

Dabi gives it to you anyway, even unscrews the cap for you like some kind of gentleman, like some kind of hero you or he could never be. Half of it spills out of your mouth and runs all down your shirt, like you have no idea how to work your lips anymore. When it dribbles down your chin, he can see it's pink.

Every time you blink your eyes, they get heavier and heavier, one closing and opening before the other.

Maybe you are really dying, right there in some shitty motel room with the ghost of a kid you kinda knew. Those parents of yours will probably lose it, maybe your mom will even off herself when they find your body, decaying on this creaky bed. But he'll be long gone by then. And he doesn't care.

In retrospect, it's pretty fucking funny. Touya will come back and you won't.

It takes you three attempts to stand, holding yourself up with a weak hand on the bed. The second attempt has you nearly falling on your face back into the mattress, ass all up in the air like it had been in the alleyway. When you take an unsteady step forward, he jumps up, just in case you're faking it and are gonna make a run for the door.

But you don't, you just look at him and say it again. "Touya."

"Don't call me that."

"Am I dead?"

It takes him three steps to cross the distance between you and him, and he grabs your face in his hand, squishing your cheeks together and making you look at all the burnt parts of him. "I wouldn't be here if you were dead, you idiot. Stop asking."

More tears. That pout again.

Oh boo fucking hoo, he's being mean. Grow up.

Thoughts are flashing in your eyes again but you're not saying anything, you might not even know how to anymore. He shakes your face a little before letting go and you stumble into him, like the grip of his hand had been the only thing keeping you upright.

"I miss you."

The two of you hadn't even been friends, not really, not at all. The tree had been cut down, Shoto was the hero he was supposed to be, and you were fucked up, dying out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing is how it was supposed to be.

Maybe if he cared about anything other than himself, he would be worried about you, drooling like that because you can't keep your mouth closed. Maybe if he cared, he would give a shit about seeing your face up close and he would admit he's been watching it for too long, seeing how it changes and gets prettier every year, seeing the woman you grew up to be. Maybe if he cared, he would even say something stupid, like that it meant something to him that he meant something to you. Maybe he'd even smile, let you touch him, maybe he'd even bury his face in your neck and tell you he missed you, too.

But Dabi doesn't care, not a bit.

So he holds you at an arm's length, face twisting into that crazy snarl he gets sometimes. Miss, like he was still alive. Like you were the dead one, imagining it all in whichever layer of Hell you ended it up. What a load of shit.

"Get off me!"

When he steps back away from you, you catch yourself on the wall, turning so that your back is leaning against it. Your eyes close again, but he can see that they're rolling behind your lids, even as you slump down to the ground. All the blood left on you has dried and it comes off in flakes when you itch at your hairline, at your jaw, underneath your chin. There is dirt and maybe some leftover skin, a little bit of gravel, all embedded under your nails and pressed against your neck, which you finally seem to realize.

"I'm...disgusting."

"Yeah."

That pretty little head of yours looks like it weighs a ton, but you raise it so your eyes can meet his, and, he's not close enough to tell, but is one of your pupils dilated? That band aid is hardly clinging to your forehead and at the touch of your fingers, it just gives up, falls off and into your lap. It stretches between your fingers and you look at it like you've never seen one before.

"I don't feel good."

No fucking shit. That first aid kit has a small package of expired Acetaminophen—whatever the fuck that is—and he gives it to you, though you choke while trying to swallow it.

It takes you another few attempts to get to your feet, but you finally do and he steps out of your reach again. "I need to shower."

A laugh actually barks out of him. "This water'll probably poison you."

Maybe your ears are clogged with blood or something, because you just repeat yourself. "I'm gross, I need to take a shower, please."

Please.

Fine, if you want to die with a yeast infection, go right ahead.

Dabi has seen your tits before—not on purpose—but you don't know that, so he tries to be a gentleman and at least act like he's not looking when you peel that dingy scrub top off, when you nearly fall down trying to get out of your sports bra.

He does look when you ask him for help, though.

There is no way you can stand up by yourself in the fucking shower, and you want this UTI so damn bad, so he just runs a lukewarm bath. The water splutters and comes out at all different kinds of pressure, but you don't slip when you step in, so he just leaves you to it.

Maybe you'll drown in there—though this shitty tub isn't really big enough for you to do that—and it will all be over painlessly. Then he won't have to hold a pillow over your face or burn your flesh off while you scream and writhe.

No problem, he could absolutely do it.

Maybe he'll just come back and you'll finally be done twitching, looking as peaceful as you do when you sleep, underneath that blood-tinged water.

After it happened, Dabi wanted to kill you. Like actually kill you. A whole lotta people, everyone he knew, really, but you were somewhere near the top of the list.

Maybe because you made him feel something once, maybe because the little charm bracelet you gave him was the first thing that turned to ash at Sekoto Peak. Maybe because, if he couldn't rise up and do the Hero Thing, then he didn't want you to do it, either.

(Which, in retrospect—)

There wasn't gonna be any big show, no flames or anything, just him and his hands. It lulled him to sleep most nights, out there on the street, thinking of the ways he would do it. He planned to slip through those pink star curtains of yours and wake you up—because he wanted to see the light leave your eyes—and then he'd wrap his hands around your throat and squeeze until your eyes fucking popped. Maybe he'd even kiss your gasping lips again.

There was a time when he wanted it so bad, that it was almost hard to distinguish that desire from reality. Some days he would wake up and he wouldn't think about shoving his thumbs in your eyes, because, he'd already done it, hadn’t he? They'd already buried you, the world had already moved on without perfect, little you. Dabi sure had, Touya sure had.

Guess that's why you're still alive (well, somewhat) in that bathroom and he's just sitting against the door, waiting for the sound of you to start gurgling or something. Somehow he just forgot to kill you, became too wrapped up in a plan for Enji. If he pictures that list in his mind, you were number 4 or 5, but he'd never made it past the first name.

It kinda pisses him off.

There hasn't been any sounds, none. Not even of you moaning or crying, no water splashing as you drowned or even washed yourself. Just silence, from the minute you sat down in that tub. It's been at least 30 minutes and that lukewarm water must finally be cold, but you haven't said anything. You've got to be dead. You've got to be.

Maybe he can cross your name off that list, after all.

The scene from the alleyway keeps replaying in his mind and he's finally figured out why it makes him feel so sick: if he had followed behind you in the first place, you wouldn't have gotten whacked. And if you hadn't gotten whacked, he wouldn't have needed to bring you back to his base of operations here, in the fucking decaying motel room, and you wouldn't know he was alive. There would be no chance for his plan to be ruined because you'd be at home, in bed or actually taking a shower or something, and things would be safe. His plan would be safe.

That's why the sight of you there, bloody and beaten, half naked on the ground, makes his stomach hurt and twist in all different ways.

That's why the sight of you in here, disoriented and fading, blood hemorrhaging in your brain, makes him nervous.

That's why. No other reasons.

Still doesn't explain why he hesitates with his hand on the door, thinking of seeing you naked with far away glassy eyes, but, fuck it, Dabi doesn't have time to figure that out, too. Now he's got to get rid of your body, throw it in the dumpster out back or something before people start to notice you've gone missing.

When he opens that door, his lungs seize up as he looks at you.

But after a few, still moments, your still-filthy head swivels to look at him and he breathes (in disappointment, damn it).

"What the fuck?" He says, but your expression doesn't change. "I thought you needed a bath."

There is still a layer of dirt and grime on your chest and face, all the places the water didn't rise to meet because you didn't sink down underneath it. It's been a big fucking waste of time, leaving you in there, because now it's after 6 and you're as wrinkly as a fucking raisin and still alive and he still doesn't know what to do.

"I do." When you swallow, it sounds like your throat is as dry as his skin. Probably left your mouth open this whole time, just staring at the peeling paint on the wall.

"Then why didn't you take one?"

"My arms are heavy."

"Mother of—fuck!"

So fucking stupid. So fucking idiotic. The water is an ugly color, similar to the stain out on the carpet, and he reaches his hand right down in between your legs to pull the plug. It's the first time he's felt the water being cold and, so close to you, he realizes you're shivering. Teeth chattering, shoulders shaking, lips turning a little blue, all because you'd just sat in the damn tub for too long.

"Get the fuck—stand up." Though he says it, he knows you aren't gonna do it, so he just puts his hands under your armpits and hauls you to your feet. The second he lets go, you nearly tumble sideways out of the tub and he doesn't want to clean up anymore blood, so he stops you from bashing your head on the tile.

But he should have let you, oh boy, he should have let you do it. Then he wouldn't be in this stupid situation anymore.

This fucking situation, where he's standing in a grimy tub as water swirls around his feet, as you dampen all of his clothes with your pruned body. Dabi has been in a lot of bad situations, but this one takes the fucking cake.

"Like taking care of a fucking baby," He mutters, and he's looking at the shower-head and the knobs, he's looking at the water draining in the tub and feeling the coldness seeping into his socks, into his skin from his wet clothes.

It's fucking pointless now, might as well.

The rings of the shower curtain rattle when he pulls it closed, the water is lukewarm when it sprays him directly in the face and he jerks back, blinking it out of his eyes as you sigh against his chest. It doesn't stop you from shivering, but the little bit of heat against your back has you curling, arching like a cat and nearly purring at the warmth of it.

It's pathetic.

Almost as pathetic as him standing fully clothed, holding up a half-dead girl in the shower, some girl from his class. One he wasn't even friends with.

"Touya."

"I said don't call me that."

The two of you stand in silence for a while, your cheek against his chest, his hands under your arms. The front of his hair has flattened against his forehead and every now and then, a dark drop of water drips down on your nose and leaves an inky trail. Dabi has this thought, a scary one, that a lot of things are going to come clean in this shitty shower.

The giant sighs you heave are the only way he knows you aren't dead. And you're a fucking liar, because those oh so heavy arms of yours are raising, he can feel your hands at his hips, dragging up over his tightened stomach and at his chest. Then you loop your feather-light arms around his back and shuffle just a bit on your feet, like the two of you are just hugging, like friends.

"Why’re you wearing clothes?"

Dabi snorts and rears his head back, but you don't look up at him. "Because I've got a massive hard on and you're not in there"—he taps his finger against the top of your sopping wet head—"enough for me to fuck."

That's not true, he's not the slightest bit aroused by you.

In this state, at least; okay, so yeah, maybe he didn't look at your tits on purpose, but it was in the spank bank now. Get over it.

The last thing he wants is to be naked with you, anywhere near you. Maybe if he cared about something other than himself, he could admit that the very idea terrified him. Not even in this failing state of mind would you laugh at him, or be grossed out or scared. You'd probably still put your hands in his hair, still touch his face, put yours against his chest.

And no one has ever touched him that way, not the way you would.

"Then don't." You say, like it's the simplest thing in the world.

"Yeah, so," For some reason he feels awkward now, thinking of it all and it's so stupid. "I'm not taking my clothes off."

That knot is still budding on your forehead, so your brow still doesn't pull down very far when you look up at him. A big pout is on your lips, though. "No, I—I mean, then don't take them off."

"Yeah...I'm not gonna."

"Wait," One of your hands leaves his back to rub at your rolling eyes. Maybe he should keep talking to you; it makes you use your brain and maybe it will pull you out of this state.

Not that he really wants that, of course.

"No, I meant, you don't have to have sex with me."

"Yeah, I'm not gonna." Fuck, he knows you got your brain turned upside down, but you can't comprehend anything, it seems. You must realize you're having a hard time making sense because you give a little sigh, like you're giving up, and just wrap yourself back around him, a little closer this time.

The two of you are both soaked, no matter how far he tries to lean out of the water, and he wonders if you can feel the texture of his skin underneath his wet clothes. For a moment his brain shuts off, just like yours is currently doing, and he wonders what you think of him like this. Doesn't really matter though, he tells himself, you're going in the dumpster all the same.

The water from the shower-head is starting to get a little colder and he's not perfect, little Shoto, doesn't know how to use the fire for anything other than killing and melting, doesn't know how to use it just to warm you up. There's no telling how much time has passed with the two of you just standing there, like idiots.

"Gotta wash my hair." You say.

"So, wash it." He says.

"My arms are heavy."

"You're so full of shit."

Dabi thinks, he thinks, that he feels your lips shift against his shirt, like they're curling into a smile because you know you're a liar, too. And you must be using your quirk or something (though he doesn't feel any fingers in his nose or ears, not like before) because he does what he shouldn't and would never do, which is bend around you and grab the snot green bottle of motel shampoo that's sitting in the corner of the tub.

Eucalyptus, it says. That's all.

It should be called Push Over or Pathetic, maybe Burnt Idiot, Not Really Friends, Sorry I Looked At Your Ass, Too.

Maybe Nervous.

When he dumps all of it onto your hair and starts digging his fingers against your scalp, you tilt your head enough so that he can see that smile of yours, the bloody one.

"I'll wash yours," You say, with copper breath and dark red gums.

When he kissed you under the tree, your breath smelled the same. He had been so afraid then, of a multitude of things: getting caught by his teacher or his dad, classmates seeing, messing up or embarrassing himself, you, mostly you. There were other kids in his class he talked to, sure, but none of them sat outside with him when he trained on his own. None of them shared their rice and threw salmon at cars or held his hand while he turned his face—red as his fucking hair—at the grass because he couldn't look you in the eye.

Sometimes Enji kissed his mother. Sometimes she looked like she liked it. Back then, he thought maybe you would, too. He didn't know he had blood on his bottom lip until he got home and Enji asked him about it, until Rei inspected it like he'd bit it by accident. But he couldn't tell them, didn't tell them that all of it, every moment with you, had been on purpose.

Dabi feels a lot like he did then, when you smile at him.

“Ain’t none left.” For some reason, it croaks out of him, like he’s the one with the issue keeping his mouth closed. Maybe blood is still in your ears because you don’t answer, you only keep your face titled towards him as he massages your scalp, lips open just slightly with closed eyes. As if to prove it, he throws the tiny, empty bottle back towards the corner of the tub and it clatters, loudly, the way all things do in the shower. When you open your eyes and look at him, unfocused and half-lidded, he thinks maybe he could fuck you in this bathroom, if you wanted him to.

He hopes you don’t ask.

There isn’t any soap on your hands, but they leave his back to go into his hair. A ghost of a laugh puffs out of your lips and into his face, like it’s the funniest thing in the world, you, pretending to wash his hair while he washes yours.

A bunch of idiots, the both of you.

“Stop,” Dabi tries to yank his head away from you, but you sway a little bit. You don’t push him, though because you’re a goody-goody, and when you run a hand across your face, there is a light gray smudge over your nose. All his hair dye is washing down the drain, lightening him up, making him Touya again. The soap washes off one of his hands as he rinses it directly under the water and he wipes the smudges from your face, a little rough, too rough, so rough that your head easily moves from the left to the right with each swipe of his fingers. Underneath his hands, you’re really soft. Too soft.

The walls of the shower are closing in on him and that sick feeling is building in his stomach again, the one that swirls every time he thinks about what could have happened to you in the alleyway if he’d waited another stupid fucking minute. Such a baby, so fucking soft, what that kind of aggression would do to you. How it would impact you. How it would impact him. That dopey, bloody smile wouldn’t appear on your face for a long time, he might not have even seen it again before everything with Enji finally went down.

It’s probably too drying for your face, but he uses the shampoo to wash yours, rubbing against the blood stains on your chin and your neck. They come away easily, the texture from his hands perfect for scrubbing it all away.

The way he can finally be of use to you, as a fucking loofa.

“Touya,” You say again, but he doesn’t correct you this time. “Am I dead?”

That sick feeling builds, really builds, until it feels like he’s holding his breath (he probably is). There is a settling wave that washes over him, just like the cold water from the shower-head, and he realizes, holy fuck, you’re dying.

Right there in his arms. Blood is probably pooling in your brain, killing you every moment that he waits. The hour he spent watching you writhe on the bed, the 30 minutes he spent outside the bathroom, the few blocks it took to get from the alleyway to the motel room. The time he’s wasting here with you, now. All of it is just him, opening that dumpster, digging a deeper hole to put you in. The star curtains will come down, the cafeteria fucker will drive himself to work alone, the homeless guy will shrivel into nothing, and litter will fill the streets.

Just like the doctor said; if you tried to do the Hero Thing, you’d be dead by twenty-three.

When he’d unscrambled his brain enough to think straight, he planned to take Enji down. Since then, he’s lulled himself to sleep with the idea of it, the downfall of Endeavor, and, if he lets you go, it will just be the downfall of crazy, batshit insane Touya. All of it will crash and burn with him. It’s probably too late for you anyway, too much time has been wasted, and it would all be for nothing.

All the fucking pain, all the rage and the planning, all the blood and sweat and tears would swirl down a shitty motel drain like his hair dye. And you’d end up in that dumpster all the same.

“No,” He answers, tipping your head back so the shampoo can wash out of your hair, off your forehead and chest. There’s more words in his mouth, like not yet and almost and i’m sorry, but his throat feels all croaky again, so he doesn’t say anything.

Dabi only has one change of clothes. Water is dripping off him and all over the floor when the two of you step out, when he wraps that shitty towel around you and rubs up and down your arms, like some kind of idiot out of a romance movie. He even runs it over your head a few times, hair getting all ruffled up, and he grabs the spare sweater by the bed when you smile lazily at him.

He wonders how much time he has. Maybe if he knew, he would say something. But he doesn’t, so there’s no fucking point.

The air in the motel room is stuffy and has never been cold, but, drenched in shitty, piss-water, it chills him to the bone. Now he’s the one shivering while you lay back down on the bed, creaking and shit, and he just stands over you and watches you blink, one eye at a time. One of your pupils is definitely dilated.

The two of you hadn’t even been friends, not really, but you fix those fading eyes on him and open your arms, inviting him to lay with you.

(When he came over to watch that movie, he’d been nervous, but you had a blanket on your lap and you opened it to him, patting the space beside you with that smile until he felt comfortable enough to scoot closer to you, to share that blanket.)

He wonders how much time he has, but he’s got no fucking idea, so he just does it.

Yeah, he’s soaking wet and you’ve just put on his warm sweater, but this is his first chance, his last chance, to be this close as the man he grew up to be. He’s just Touya and you’re just you, lying in a shitty motel, waiting for the end. There’s a vision in his head, of you and him, of what might have been. There isn’t a mark on him, all smooth skin and soft, just like you, and you’re lying in a motel room, the both of you, naked. Maybe you’re still young, in high school, hiding from his parents just like he had been that day under the tree. Maybe you’re adults, this age, getting away for the weekend, away from the Hero Thing.

It’s a disgusting thought, one that has his lips curling down, one that has him choking on the ugliness of it all. It’s no use wanting like that, when your body is getting quieter and quieter, when you try to say his name again but can’t get the words around your lips. Maybe you’ve forgotten it.

When you're silent for a long time, he lifts his head from where he’s buried it in your neck, but your mouth is open, staring at the ceiling.

“Finally,” He pants, “Finally you’re fucking dead. Finally you’re out of my fucking hair and my life.” When you don’t respond, he snaps his fingers in front of your face. “Hey!”

But now you’re just a corpse. Now he’s just clinging to the body of a kid he used to know, one from his class, one he hadn’t even been friends with.

The picture he sets up is one from the hospital website, your employee picture. At some internet cafe, he’d printed it off, paid the extra change just to get it in color, and he’s lighting the incense (and his cigarette) with the blue tip of his finger. There are a bunch of pink flowers around this place, though most of them are fake, and he can sit out in front of the grave without a hood on. It’s so far at the back that someone would have to want to come back there to find him, which is why he’s sitting there in the first place.

Dabi isn’t really all that interested in the cigarette; he’s just leaving it between his lips, letting the smoke swirl in front of his face, letting the ash fall into his lap.

“How’s it going?” He grunts, just like you would say.

Every time he thinks of you in that shower, his stomach hurts again. How close you’d been, how real you felt under his fingers. The smudge of his hair dye across your face, claiming you in a way, like you were his. As if you’d always been, ever since Shizuoka.

Maybe he’s got it all wrong, maybe he’d always been yours. Every time he sat in the tree outside your window, every time he slipped through it, every time he followed you after work, lingering back like an ugly shadow. All that time, he’d always been yours. In the shower, in the bed, breathing you in as you died.

Always yours.

It’s a big, fat weight that should be lifted from his shoulders. Now he’s back with the League, that plan for Enji is in motion, and he doesn’t have to make up an excuse to Twice about why he’s gotta slip out at night, why he’s gotta head across town, why he suddenly wants takeout. There’s no following anymore, that’s been given up. And yet, now he feels like he’s got too much time on his hands, too much space in his chest. Scars on his body feel too rough, there is an insecurity he can’t beat back anymore, he spends too much time thinking about the what-if’s, which is too dangerous for a man in his profession.

It’s all making him soft, just like you had been. It feels like a fucking sickness.

Toga notices, because she’s so love-drunk on everyone that she can read his face as plain as day.

“Ooooh, you’re thinking about a girl!”

Yeah, maybe, but it's still annoying; he’d always been thinking about this girl, Toga wasn’t special for just now figuring it out.

Sometimes he wishes he’d gotten that sweater back. Not because it was comfortable or fit over his chest just right, but maybe because it might smell like you. Or the Eucalyptus shampoo. He’s a pathetic piece of shit, thinking crap like this, but it feels like a somewhat sticky band aid has fallen off, like that door in his head is open just a crack. Like it’s stuffed with too much stuff to get closed again.

It’s a fucking sickness, seriously. All those years away, too many steps behind, had kept the germs from him, made him feel like he was immune to it all, to your charm.

(That’s a load of shit, truly; he’d followed you for 11 fucking years after all. Dabi wasn’t immune to squat.)

The grave is so far at the back that someone would have to mean to come find him and he hears the footsteps far before they reach him, which should send him running, but it doesn’t. His hair is still white because he hadn’t found the energy to re-dye it, and if Toga says one more fucking thing about it—

There isn’t a blanket to hold open, no need to pat the space beside him; you sit so close, you’re nearly on his lap.

“How’s it going, Touya?”

Okay, so yeah, maybe he’d run out of that motel room like a man possessed, cradling you in his arms and whining like a fucking pussy, but whatever.

That doctor with the quirk you don’t have loves you, just like all your little nurse friends do, and they must have dropped everything for you. Not that he stayed inside or anything, just had to yell a little and lay your body on the front desk before hauling ass back outside, but you were knocking on the motel room door that night. Looking for him, actually looking, with focused eyes, pupils that were the same size.

The scar on your head was small (which is a load of shit; just a little bitty one? Come the fuck on) and shaped a little bit like a strike of lightning against your skin. Probably needed to stay home and in bed for a few days, not make any sudden movements or flip the light switch on too quick, but you were standing there, in that sweater, before he’d fallen asleep.

No, he didn’t fuck you.

He would’ve though, if you’d asked. Kinda wished you had.

Dabi has seen you twice a week for 11 embarrassingly long years, but you’ve seen him for half a day. There’s a lot for you to understand, a lot of things to catch up on, which he thinks is why you hadn’t gone to the police. Not such a goody-goody after all; when he’d told you that, you looked confused and a little hurt.

“What makes you think I’d give you up so easily?”

He doesn’t really mention it after that.

There are a lot of things you don’t understand, a lot of things you won’t understand. Lots of things he won’t tell you, but you’ll be there. Yeah, he knows where you live, and yeah, you said you’d leave the door unlocked (probably shouldn’t though).

You’ll be there whenever he decides to show up, or rather, he’ll be there, for you, whenever you want him. Because he’s yours.

Always has been.

and yes, now i'm here with you and i would like to think that you would stick around—

dabi x reader

wc: 11k+

warnings: 18+, explicit language, angst, dabi is really bad at feelings, referenced sexual content, referenced alcohol and substance use, dabi is just a bully, reader has a quirk

< < < part one | HOME PAGE

The first thing you need to know about Dabi, not Touya, is that he isn't your friend.

Okay, so yeah, you know he's alive. Doesn’t mean he’s gonna pop in and out of your apartment, joining you for dinner or bringing you flowers or something equally as humiliating. Not that you ever say anything about it, but he knows you want him to come around more, can tell by the little frown on your face whenever he insists he has to leave. The towel in your linen closet practically has his name on it, the couch always made up with a suspicious amount of pillows and a casual throw blanket (which is embarrassing—you couldn’t be more obvious). It makes him uncomfortable, seriously.

That's why he’s been such a good little boy and hasn’t come around that often (doesn’t even follow you anymore), maybe has stopped by when seeing you was an itch he just had to scratch. Dabi can count the number of times he’s knocked on your front door on one, scarred hand of his because it’s awkward now, you knowing his death was a ruse. Those beady little eyes of yours, always fixed on him, running over the ridges of his face like you were cementing the sight of him to the inside of your lids, like you were trying to peek through the gaps in his skin.

Gross.

It’s been six weeks since he’d seen you last, in the dark of your apartment as you moved around, cleaning up the mess he’d made. Sometime after 3:23 in the morning, he’d conveniently showed up, just as you were microwaving food you ended up offering him (even if it had been for yourself), and he’d fallen asleep in the middle of the painfully uninteresting recount of your shift. With his mouth all open, drool dripping down the side of his lips, head thrown back against the couch—the simple sound of you must have woken him up only a handful of minutes later. The lights had been turned off, that blanket over his lap, and you were in the kitchen, washing out his cup and plugging your laptop into its charger.

It had been a little nostalgic, him getting to watch you through lidded eyes, without you knowing.

When the light from your bathroom flashed in the hallway, just before the lavender smell of your body wash overwhelmed the entire place, he’d finally slipped away. Nearly busted his ass jumping out the window.

The second thing you need to understand about Dabi, not Touya, is that he’s a big fucking liar.

And if you keep asking him stupid questions, (where do you live? what do you do for a living? are you busy tomorrow? how’s your mom doing? ), he’s gonna get real fucking mad, and he’s gonna keep lying. For some reason, you don’t seem to believe he’s a door-to-door vacuum salesman—fuck knows why you can’t buy that—or that his mom changed her name and moved out of the country, works as a prostitute in Germany.

“That’s the last I heard of her, swear.”

The look you’d given him had been laughable, the deadpan expression on your little sunshine face. “I’m serious.”

Yeah, he knows, you always are. But, get this smarty-pants, he ain’t gonna fucking tell you, so stop asking.

The only questions you don’t ask him are the important ones, the ones he can tell you really wanna know, and that pisses him off even more somehow. Come on, sweetheart, just fucking ask already, why do you look like that now? why aren’t you a hero, like you wanted to be? since when did you become such a fucking asshole? That look in your eyes, the one you always fix him with, must be disgust or something, because it makes his rugged, burnt flesh crawl.

Sometimes you sit across from him at your kitchen table, as he tries not to devour the leftovers in your fridge like the starved animal he is, and tell him all about the stupid shit he already knows. Your brainless friends, why you work at the hospital, how many classes you’re taking online in the spring, what your favorite movies are—Dabi just grunts in response like this is all news to him and, if he’s feeling really soft, he’ll even ask a few pointed questions to keep you rambling.

“We should go to the cinema together, on my next day off.” With your chin in your palm, you’d said it under the dim light of your kitchen, smiling a little when he started choking. Water sloshed out of your glass when you slid it to him.

“Sounds great, doll, I’ll make sure to wear my Sunday best.”

“I’m serious—tsk, Dabi.” The free hand, the one not holding your head, reached across the table to slap lightly at his unmarked skin when he’d made a face and mocked you. “You don’t wanna go out with me?”

Whatever way you’d meant it, why you phrased it like that, and the little puppy dog look in your eyes: it all made him just start choking again. Stupid questions, all the damn time—which is why he needs you to understand he’s not your friend, which is why he can’t keep coming around your apartment. Awkward. Gross.

Don’t imply shit like that.

Another thing you need to know about DabiNotTouya, is that he’s not going to talk about it. In fact, don’t even bring up that day in the motel. As far as he’s concerned, it never happened. The little scar on your head has always been there, he would know.

Now he really wishes you’d give the sweatshirt back, though, because the first time he’d come to your apartment after the whole ordeal, you’d opened the door with messy hair and it draped over your body. What the fuck you were thinking, answering the door in such tiny shorts, is totally beyond him, but everytime he thinks about you rolling around in your bed, the fabric of his clothes rubbing against your tits, it gives him a really unfortunate boner.

It had that day, also, which is why he'd slipped out your bathroom window after starting the shower, leaving that fucking towel on your sink. Embarrassing, the reactions of the male body (because it didn't really have anything to do with you in particular—men get hard all the time).

There is still a little knot on your head, one that probably won’t ever go away, and—apparently—another blow to your brains like that could be instantly fatal. Dabi doesn’t really care, honestly, because if you get whacked in the middle of the night again, you deserve it—for walking home so late. If he had any money, he’d probably buy you a pink, sparkly little helmet just to rub it in your face. Maybe even dress you in some elbow pads, shin guards, give you some idiot-proof armor.

But then you might think the two of you are friends, so it’s a good thing he doesn’t have a cent to his name.

It’s been six weeks since he’d seen you last, since the smell of lavender made him shudder and ache, and he knows by now that you’ve seen the broadcast.

For some goddamn, stupid, motherfucking reason, you keep trying to get in contact with him—on his burner phone. Of all those movies you chatter about, none of them must be crime documentaries or gang related, because you call him by his stupid name in the fleeting little texts you send him, probably have Touya with little emojis saved to your contact list. Three times he’s screened a call from you—once in the middle of the day, another early in the morning (probably after you finished your shift), and the last, right before he’d started fucking celebrating.

By the time he realizes that it really is you, standing near the bar of the club he’s been in, almost 48 hours have passed since he’d hit ‘ignore’. Dabi has no idea how much alcohol he’s downed at this point, no idea what substances are making his bloodstream fucking sing, so when he thinks he sees your little sunshine face looking at him, he just assumes it’s an illusion.

(Here’s something Dabi doesn’t want you to know: sometimes he thinks about you. In the dead of night, when he showers, in the middle of conversations with Spinner—he thinks about what you must be doing at that exact moment. Somewhere, out there in the city, scrunching up your nose because you’re frustrated or smiling so wide because you’re laughing, doing your damndest to be a hero at work, sweating with all your effort. Thinking about him in return, wondering what he’s doing, worrying about it. Smiling and getting all hot, thinking about his hands on your body under that shitty water.)

(That last part is bullshit; you don’t remember anything from that day, had told him as much, just that the motel room seemed familiar and that’s why you’d shown up there after the hospital. Because something about it promised the sight of a kid you used to know, one from your class.)

There is a tight, little cat girl on his lap and she has been for hours, blowing smoke in his mouth, whispering filthy shit in his ear, but he’s been thinking about you—again—and pretending it’s your fingers popping the button on his jeans. It’s been relatively easy; the club is packed and so fucking loud, even though his head is pounding, he can close his eyes and pretend anything he wants.

That the blaring noise reverberating in his skull is just sounds from the movie on the screen, that the theater is empty—just the two of you sitting in it, somewhere at the back—and the weight on his lap is from you. You must be a little kinky, licking the hoop in his ear like that, and you giggle when his hips jerk as you slide your hand down the front of his pants. It’s so fucking hot, to be with you like this in an empty movie theater, because he’s wanted it for what feels like a goddamn eternity and now he can drop the act and sigh your name as you—

“What?”

The cat girl keeps purring, even keeps her tail wrapped around his leg when she pulls back to look down at him. It’s clear the name has been lost to her, because she doesn’t look pissed, just confused—as if she genuinely didn’t understand what he said—which only kills the new high he’d been chasing. Dabi is drunk as shit and he can feel his dick go limp under her hand, just as the rush of disappointment and reality rise up in him like a stomachache.

He can still see your face though, as if it’s watching on a couple feet from him, but all the sunshine has set on it. There isn’t a pout on your lips, but they’re open just a bit, brows furrowed and, oh fuck, your eyes. There is no puppy dog look in them, not even the kind you send him in the quiet of your apartment—they’re just wide and big and sad. Like you’re the one with the gaps in your skin, like they’ve been ripped open.

It makes his body cold all at once (which is fucking weird), this feeling like he’s a piece of shit boyfriend that’s ghosted the woman of his dreams for days, and now she’s caught him with a cat girl on his lap. As if she’s been trying to get ahold of him after the demons of his past had been revealed to the entire world—probably because she genuinely cares or something—and she’s even gone so far as to track him down in the dingiest of places. And she’s looking at him like she’s put her heart on a platter and given it to him, just for her ugly motherfucker, sorry goddamn excuse of a boyfriend to throw it on the ground and stomp it to bits, because he doesn’t know how to do anything but ruin.

The woman of his dreams knows she doesn’t deserve that shit, which is why she turns on her heel and begins to leave.

“Gettha’ fuck off’a me.”

By the time he manages to get to his feet, the girl is on the floor and hissing at him, but Dabi doesn’t care, because he’s busy doing what he’s always done—chasing you down, too many steps behind. Every one he takes is unsteady and he’s blinking rapidly with how hard he’s trying to focus, on the sight of your yellow dress, on the shine of your hair in the neon lights, of the curl of your little fist. It seems like all the substances in his system surge in his bloodstream, come up his throat (and go back down, as he stops and leans against someone so he can swallow), and nauseate him with every body he pushes through.

It all gets drowned out, though, by the anger he’s inherited from the man he despises most in this world—when someone grabs you by the arm and halts you in your tracks.

Of course it’s some big fucking guy, a tree trunk of a man that could crunch you in his fingers if he wanted to, pick his teeth with your bones.

(Look, Dabi totally has an eight pack—and he could show you, if you don’t believe him—but he’s not even half as wide as Enji. Fucking Natsuo has broader shoulders than him, and every muscle in Touya’s body is lean, probably a little malnourished. He’s never come across a fight that required his fists alone and that, coupled with the fact that you’re standing in the middle of a crowded club, when he can’t decide which vision of you is the real one, makes for a big fucking problem.)

Something comes out of his mouth, something completely unintelligible, but it’s lost along the music as he tries to close the distance between the two of you. Just as he starts to shout something again, you completely stun him; that fist uncurls, flattens out into a firm palm, and it slaps across the face of the man grabbing onto you. It actually gives Dabi a bit of a chub, makes him smirk as he sways back into the body behind him and mutters something that sounds like “fuck yeah”.

But then you’re getting backhanded into the floor and Dabi is launching his wiry body through the air before red finishes settling in front of his eyes.

If the two of you will ever stop getting into situations like this, when your precious, stupid little life is on the line, he doesn’t know—but he sure as fuck would like to. This is different than the time in the alley, because he’s the one on the ground, getting the shit knocked out of him, but he’s batshit insane anyway, so he just laughs the whole time. It’s like armor, this sick craziness he can wield, and though it’s dented and broken and dull, it still makes that tree fucker look nervous. Somehow he manages to get the upper hand once, manages to maneuver his lithe body on top of the guy, but then he realizes you’re screaming his name and grabbing for him.

It stuns him again, when his elbow rockets back and hits you square in the nose, when he watches with wide eyes as tears well up in yours, as blood starts spurting down over your lips.

And then staples are coming loose in his face as knuckles crack across his cheek.

Maybe you already know this about Dabi and Touya, maybe you don’t: sometimes, that fire of his burns so hot, it makes his skin peel away from his bones. The burning pain and sting of it all is starting, welling up in him like an ugly vice when he’s finally had enough of this little game, but then something pricks in his neck and it’s like a bucket of water has been dumped over him.

The flames die out in his hand so fast, it makes his head spin, and Dabi somehow manages a breath before he looks back at you, before a cold panic sobers him up when he sees the club owner with a gun pointed at your chest. It almost makes him piss himself, but a little tack just comes out the end of the barrel and he watches your lips form around an 'ow’ before you tug it out of your skin. A loud groan of relief is released from his mouth at the realization you haven’t been shot to death before his eyes and it even makes him forget about the fight, until a heavy hand is twisting in his hair and his feet are dragging across the dance floor.

The quiet night air almost hurts his ears with its silence, the cold nips at his sweaty face as the concrete rushes up to meet him. More staples come loose with the bust of his head against the ground and he can’t tell what on him is blood or perspiration, maybe some of it is even alcohol or his vomit. It makes him think of how disgusting you’d been in that motel room, almost makes him laugh at the irony of it all—how the two of you always end up like this. The night sky is empty, much plainer than the walls of the club had been, but that somehow just hurts his head as a myriad of colors and shapes swirl in his vision.

The only thing he’s sure of is your face leaning over his, that the look in your eye isn’t as sad as it once had been. It’s a good thing he’s already on the ground, because it might have knocked him to his knees, and he says something questionable that only makes you shake your head.

“Touya,” When you sigh, a bead of blood drips from your nose, down your chin, and onto his lips.

The trek back to you apartment is fucking awful and damn near impossible.

At one point in time, during his youth, Touya had been shorter than you. Not by a lot, but it didn’t matter, it was just as embarrassing, and there is some kind of juvenile glee he gets now that his frame is towering over yours (even if he's still not as tall as his younger brother). Despite the blow to his skull and the fear you were gonna get blasted to Hell, there is still so much crap swimming in his head, he doesn’t care that the two of you are touching; your arm is wrapped around his thin waist, his is draped over your shoulders as you help him stumble down the sidewalk.

Blood is staining your little dress, turning the white flowers red, but you hug him close regardless. Sometimes he steps too wide or unsteady and it takes all your effort to keep the two of you upright, him on the inside of the sidewalk, away from the streetlamps, and it makes him laugh as you grunt his name.

Out there, in the night, it feels like the two of you are the only ones in the world, like the only ones in a dark theater. Something warm spreads in his chest at that thought, that maybe this is even romantic, but then he just starts sputtering out a cackle again because holy fuck, is that embarrassing.

Dabi doesn’t even realize you’ve stopped and are standing a little in the street, that his mouth is against your hair as he mutters, “I’m tall, huh?”

“Yes, Dabi, you are tall.” You sound a little annoyed with him, but it doesn’t bother him as much as it should. At least not for the moment.

When you raise your hand a little and wave it around, he thinks you’re trying to get his attention and he grunts at you, slouching down further, breathing in the smell of your shampoo, and it’s only then that he realizes a car is pulling up in front of the two of you. Dabi whips his head back so fast, his stomach lurches.

“Come on, get in.”

“What’re ya’ doing?”

With a huff, you try to usher him into the cab. “I can’t carry you all the way home.”

“’m not gettin’ in that fucking thing.”

The driver swivels around in his seat, glancing between the two of you, probably wondering what the hold up is. Even drunker than shit, Dabi wants to ask what the fuck you’re thinking, if you’re even thinking at all, as he instinctively tries to slink back into the dark. That feisty hand of yours latches onto his at lightning speed to stop him.

This is something he thought you already knew about him, that he can’t just go waltzing around in public, as if his face hadn’t been blasted all over the television, as if he wasn't a known and wanted criminal. There are a lot of choice words forming on his tongue, ones that he wants to say because he knows they’ll hurt your feelings, but you’re already slipping in the leather seats, tugging him hard enough that he nearly hits his head on the roof of the car.

The minute you can, you buckle his seatbelt and give the driver your address, even lean all up against him as his entire body goes rigid.

“Relax,” You try to tell him, but he absolutely does not do that.

First of all, Dabi hates seeing the streetlights pass him by like that, especially with his head reeling, and it makes him feel sicker than he already does. Yellow and black, yellow and black, yellow and black, lights and then darkness; it’s a damn nightmare for his headache. Second of all, why the hell are you so cramped up on him, anyway? Blocking him in, shoving your shoulder against his chest, trapping him like the cab is speeding to the hospital, so you can check his crazy ass into the nut house.

Fucking traitor.

For a brief moment, he looks down at your face, tries to read the tired sheen in your eyes, watches the gentle way you dab at your nose, to see if he can find any truth to this theory. There is a small bead of sweat at your temple and his eyes narrow at it suspiciously. If his heart wasn't beating out of his chest at the fear of being in a public cab, a lot of accusations would start flying, but if he opens his mouth, vomit will probably come out and get all in your fucking hair. If he needs to use that to distract you so he can escape in the near future, then he better hold onto his guts.

The glare he's sending you must be burning a hole in the side of your face, because you angle it up at him, get even more in his personal space, blow your minty breath on his lips as you ask him if he's alright.

And then things start spinning again, start making him feel warm like before. As if the darkness of this backseat and the flash of the streetlights are all just scenes in the movie, the ambiance in the theater, and the two of you are the only ones that exist. Only two tickets got sold for the showing of this crap—something girly and cheesy, something about a witch and her broomstick and a cat—and the whole room is dark enough that you can’t see the burns on his skin, the gaps in his face.

Dabi is such a fucking pussy, so he slurs something like, "oh, shit," as you stare at him like that.

But then the cab driver flips around in his seat with a surprised gasp and you’re shoving yourself even further into him, pressing the back of your head into his face and holding up your hands.

“Please keep driving.”

All Touya smells is lavender, all he feels is the warmth of your back against his chest. It’s too warm. When he shifts his head, the tip of his nose bumps against the shell of your ear and he thinks about you in that shower again. The copper of your breath, the faraway look in your eyes. How easily you'd let him hold you like that, even looking like he does, even after so much time. For some crazy reason, the muscles in Dabi's hands twitch and his fingers tighten on the fabric of your ruined dress.

“I know what you’re thinking, but please keep driving and I’ll pay you extra not to say anything to anyone.”

You stay like that for the remainder of the ride, only looking back at his face once, nose brushing against his as you check his eyes to make sure he’s alright—and the whole action sends his stomach into his fucking throat. One of your hands pats his, the one fisted in your dress, and your fingers even run over his knuckles softly, in a way that makes him want to lean his head back and pass out in this cab.

Or die. The plushy, sick softness of it all makes him want to just fucking die.

Another thing: Dabi can only do this like this, if you're wondering at all. Can only be quiet like this, can only touch you like this, when he can't feel your eyes on his face. If you're not looking at him, maybe you don't know. Maybe it's like before, when he could sit in the dark of your bedroom and count your quiet breaths as you slept, when he could close his eyes and pretend that it would be normal for him to crawl in with you, if he wanted to.

When you fish a (probably) outrageous amount of money out of your purse and toss it to the driver, he just keeps his head down, partially in shame, because his anger had come and gone so fast after you'd just looked at him, and partially because his neck is fucking tired. After you push him out of the cab does he realize the two of you are not in front of your apartment building, that you lied about your address just in case.

The walk up the block is a little less painful and Dabi doesn’t let you touch his hands this time, just wobbles around on his own.

It takes longer than it should for him to get up the stairs; every time he starts to fall, a reflexive laugh comes out of him as he throws his arms in the air, and you have to plant your feet into the ground, push your back up against his in order to further him along.

On the second floor landing, you say the line, you say, “Dabi, I’m serious,” when he pushes back against you, which only expels an exaggerated, exasperated groan from his throat, and then he lets you lean him against the wall while you unlock your front door. The couch isn’t made up and that surprises him, almost makes him a little mad, makes him instantly come to the conclusion you’d had company over, but he slumps down on it all the same. He starts to make a half-hearted inquiry about who you fucked on the cushions he’s sitting on when he realizes you’re not even next to him, that you’re piddling around in your kitchen. The absence of you gives him a small bit of reprieve and he tries to get himself the fuck together.

“Are you hot?”

When he opens his eyes—that he hadn’t realized he’d closed—you are holding an ice pack against his forehead, using some of the wetness to wipe at the blood there. There are two dried, crimson rings around your nostrils and a small, budding bruise right at your cupid’s bow, one that is just a little indigo in the shitty light of your apartment. The skin of his jaw is rough and he’s so caught up in looking at your swollen lip that he doesn’t realize you’re touching him there, doesn’t register the pressure of your fingers right away, but he smacks your hand away when he finally does.

“‘m fine, don’t touch me.”

The look you send him is surprisingly irritated and, now that the stillness of your apartment is shrouding him in peace, he can feel the laxity in his cheek when he grins. The staples are still in his face, just stretched out too far, so he tries to dig his fingers into his mouth to pinch them back together, but you stop him.

“Your hands are dirty!” You cry, like a little bit of bacteria is gonna kill him.

Get this, smarty-pants, a lot of things have tried to kill him, it ain’t gonna be some germs that take him out.

"Don' touch me."

With a sigh, the ice pack drops to your lap, eyes traveling over his face in that too-studious way you always do. Dabi has this urge, to grab the loose part of his cheek and pull at it so you can see his skin stretch, see all his ugliness up close, but the look in your big, Bambi eyes tells him you can already see it, without even trying. Your tongue comes out to lightly run over the puffiness of your lip, which grabs his attention (and you totally do that shit on purpose), and the absence of the ice on his forehead makes him realize just how hot he's running, like the heat is on in your apartment or something.

"You mad at me?" He doesn't know why he asks, maybe because some part of him thinks it's funny—he's seen your face for 11 years and none of your weak anger has ever been directed at him—and because some part of him really wants to know. If it's this easy to get under your skin, then you're in for a rough ride, princess.

Almost instantly, you open your mouth and start shaking your head, but, after a moment of looking at him, you close it and sigh—as if you actually might be. It makes him sputter out a silent laugh.

"No, Touya, I'm not mad at you." Is what you say, and it's so soft and distracting that he doesn't care when you put that ice pack on his forehead again. “I just—” It looks like you’re sad, ashamed even, the way you stare down at the couch cushions. “I wish I knew, that—I just wonder if there was something I could have said or done to—”

The broadcast, him, you’re talking about him; Dabi is drunker than shit, but it’s still sitting at the forefront of his mind, that fucking hilarious look on Enji’s face, how Shouto’s voice had gone hoarse from yelling so hard. All the dirty laundry in the Todoroki family, aired out for the world—you included—to see.

Whatever the hell you’re trying to say pisses him off.

“My bad,” Dabi rolls his eyes and knocks your hand away again, because you apparently don’t know anything about personal space. “Sorry I didn’t stop during our games of pretend to tell you my dad was a total fuckstick.”

The ice pack goes to your lip as you slump into the couch, looking defeated (which is funny), and you bring it away from your mouth two times like you’ve got some kind of rebuttal, but it just ends with a shake of your head. When you look at him again, Dabi realizes you’ve seen him without a shirt on, over the television, which is what he’d wanted, but you’re looking at his neck and his ears and his hands, and you must be envisioning what you saw then, wherever you were when it came across the screen.

“Say something,” he mutters, feeling perspiration drip down the back of his neck, “don’t just stare at me all stupid like that.”

A flat, unamused look flashes over your face just before you shift your body completely in his direction, laying your head on the couch to look straight at him. It makes his lips curl, especially the little smile on your annoying face. “Do you remember that game of tag we used to play? When I would touch you—”

And Touya would have to stand stone still, wherever he was, only could start moving freely again—out of your Mind Freeze—if he successfully completed a dare of your choice (and they were all stupid: "do a cartwheel” or “hang upside down in the tree” or “run three times around the playground”). If he caught up to you during the game, touched your arm or leg, you were forbidden from using it for one full round, because it was “burned”.

Embarrassing.

“No.” His eyes are on the hole in his jeans, the small one right above his knee. “I don’t ‘member any’a that shit.”

“Hmm,” There is a smile on your face, he can tell without even looking at you, because you’re always so fucking obvious. “I remember—always winning, of course.”

It’s bait and he’s not that stupid. Nice try, smarty-pants.

“Doesn’t really sound like the you I ‘member.” Dabi risks a glance out of the corner of his eye, sees the lump on your lip darkening a bit, sees the way your cheek squishes against your hand when you tuck it between your face and the couch. “Couldn’t even use your quirk without losing your guts.”

The small kick against his shin isn’t accidental.

When you shift a little closer to him, he sits back, further into the cushions. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing you don’t remember, then.” You make a teasing sound as you stick your tongue out at him.

The long-sleeve he’s wearing is sticking to him, clinging to the textured skin of his back. Sweat drips down behind his ears and it’s not from the ice pack—which has melted down to water—like he had originally thought. It’s fucking burning up in this apartment of yours, what the fuck? If he closes his eyes, he can almost envision it’s crawling all over his skin, that blue fire, peeling back all the layers of his stapled face.

It’s almost like you’re waiting to see it, looking at him like that. Like you’re waiting to see what hides in all the ugliness, in the meat of his muscles and the char of his bones.

“You know,”

Maybe if Dabi didn’t feel like he was melting into a puddle of human goo, he would feel a bit cold as you start saying this soft bullshit.

“You were the first boy I ever had a crush on.”

A sick fucking freak, that’s what you are. Waiting on his reaction, trying to dissect the way sweat is drenching him, watching every breath he tries to pant out. It must be why you’ve got the heat on—it must be—trying to trap him and force him to come out of his skin, to see all the hatred that’s kept him burning all these years. What you want with it, what you want him to say to that, he has no clue.

It’s like you’re using that loser, piece of crap quirk of yours, digging your fingers into the staples just to pull them out, just to see him unfurl into pieces.

Dabi feels hot, like really hot. Hot like he does when his skin burns, hot like he had hugging Shouto, hot like he had at Sekoto. Hot like he had under that tree.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” You sigh, finally turning your face away to close your eyes, furrowing your eyebrows as you run your tongue over that swollen bruise on your lip again. “I lit incense for you, too, at the grave.” The words come out a little stuttered, a little different, like you’re the embarrassed one. “One thing I realized about death is that—well, of course it’s never easy, it always hurts, but there’s something about being a kid and—and one day your friend just stops showing up to play.”

There is a faraway look on your face, staring absentmindedly at the television, as if you’re remembering. The little version of you he’d known comes to his mind, the one he tagged, the one he kissed (or kissed him, really), and he tries to imagine you on the playground alone.

It’s never been something he’s thought about, never something he had the luxury of thinking about. A few weeks had passed before he screwed his head back on right, before he found you again, and you must have figured it out by then.

Maybe if Dabi cared about anything other than himself, maybe if he could cry, his eyes would be a little swollen right about now.

“At school, they never told us, you know, no one. Even after the paper came out, even after we asked about it, no one would say anything. It was—” One of your hands goes into your hair and you tug at it, like the memory still stresses you out or something. “—frustrating. And the entire time, we’re all just waiting, stuck as kids no one listens to, just trying to find out what happened to our friend and if—”

To his absolute horror, your voice cracks.

“I just wanted to know if you were coming back.”

Out of the corner of his eye—because he’s sure as fuck not going to look at you—he can see you wipe your tears, hears you sniff up a bunch of snot. The spot beneath his palm on the couch has gone dark with his sweat, he can feel what’s gathered in the collar of his shirt. If he still dyed his hair, it would be running down his face, the way your mascara is.

“It had a monumental impact on my life, being young and losing you like it.”

There’s one last thing you need to understand about Touya. If you peeled back the layers of his skin, took all his staples out, dug through all the ugliness—

“It still does have a monumental impact on me, you did in the alleyway that day. You do now.”

—there’d be a little version of you, standing under a tree, blood on your lips.

It’s buried so far in there, in the tendons and hot blood of him, you’ll probably be stuck there forever. Not even his own hands could dig it out, no matter how hard he tries, or has tried. It’s a curse, a terrible, sweaty sickness. A chink in the crazy armor he thought he’d forged.

It’s his only weakness, the only thing that could ruin him. Maybe it already has.

There’s a question simmering on his tongue, one he’s always had, and Dabi can feel himself fucking losing it, so he tries to cling onto the only emotion that makes sense. “Then how did you find out?”

When you swivel your head to finally look at him, you see the mess he’s melted into and sit up in a hurry. “Touya, you’re—I think you should get in the shower.”

Before you can spring to your feet, he’s beaten you. Fists clenched, the answer he already knows, all the emotions he’s tried to bury—all thrumming in him like the headache behind his eyes. “How did you find out what happened?”

“We can have this conversation later, after you cool off.” You step toward him and he steps back, until he’s slipping against the wall. “Take your shirt off, it’s soaked, Touya, we—”

This time, when you reach for him, he grabs your hands in his and squeezes, wants to turn your fingers to ash under his palms with how pissed off you’re making him. Rage is twisting his face the way it always does, the way he hadn’t wanted you to see once. “Answer my fucking question. Now.”

“I asked Enji.” It’s obvious that you’re saying the wrong thing, he can see the way awkward regret is blooming on your face (there’s a bitter part of him that is giddy about that—welcome to his world, where saying the wrong thing is only natural). “They wouldn’t tell us what happened, I had no choice! I cared about you, I deserved to—”

“You’re crazy!” Dabi shoves you—hard, because you fucking deserve it—and his hands fly to his damp hair. “What the hell is wrong with you? Asking him? Why the fuck would you do that?” The tone of his voice is hysterical, almost two octaves higher than it usually is, and panic makes you sweat. Another wave of heat rolls over him and almost makes him heave.

“You were my friend, Touya, what else was I supposed—”

“Fuck! You’re nothing but’a huge problem for me, you know that?”

Everything Dabi has ever needed to be, everything he has the chance to be, comes crashing down at the simplest bat of your stupid fucking eyelashes, and it’s finally driven him insane.

Did that mean Enji knew? Or Shouto?

Only days ago, when he’d shown them the man he’d become—how heartless and bitter, how strong and unbreakable—did they watch on with that stupid look, knowing what had happened underneath that tree? Did they know the fucking weakling, the fucking coward, he had once been in your mere prescence?

Wrapped around your stupid finger, turning red and dreaming about you at night, imagining himself—fuck—imagining all the things the two of you would be when you were older.

Rei had to keep popping out kids for a man that forced her into a fake, bullshit marriage; Touya didn’t know what love was, wouldn’t know it if it slapped him in his stupid, chubby face, but there was something he had felt at school, when he saw a girl, when she played tag and talked about their future as heroes—there was something that felt real good about that.

It was distracting, you were (still fucking are), and the last thing he needed during all his training was a damn girl to steal his mind to other possibilities, to other futures—but you had regardless.

And Enji wasn’t supposed to know. Not then, not now, not ever.

“We weren’t friends! We were never friends, I—I hated your annoying ass.”

Finally, he hurts your stupid feelings; your nostrils flare and another flat look tries to shine over the sadness in your eyes. “You don’t need to talk to me like this.”

“Fuck, you were pathetic!” The laugh he lets out is all Dabi, all crazy and furious and fire. “I should have killed you, just like I wanted to!”

“Touya, stop.”

Dabi takes a step towards you, another one when you back up from him, and grabs the front of your shirt. Any minute now, it’s going to burst into flames and maybe, if he’s lucky, you’ll fuck out of his life forever. “I wanted to dig your eyes out with a spoon while your parents were sleeping. I wanted you to scream and cry and—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“—while you asked me why, why, why me? so I could finally tell you how much I hated you.”

It only infuriates him more, the look on your face, which isn’t as scared as he wants it to be. Which isn’t really scared at all.

“I daydreamed about it every day, I fucking jacked it to the thought of your dead, rotting body laying six feet—”

“I’ve been inside your head.” Your hands come to wrap around his, which prompts him to yank them back. “In the alleyway, trying to find out who you were. I know, Touya, I know that you’re lying, so please,” with a sigh, you squeeze your eyes shut, “stop talking to me like that.”

Every part of you is sick and soft and quiet, from the look on your pinched face to the shaking hands that reach for him again, and Dabi realizes it is something he has never known. What does all of it even mean, anyway? The tone of your laugh when he makes an ugly face at you, when he mocks the stupid questions you ask, when he rolls his eyes at your fucking implications. All of you, every last piece of you, has always been a mystery to him, one he wasn’t able to leave unsolved.

When he yells at you like this, you’re supposed to turn away and you are supposed to cry. When he raises his hands to strike you, to burn you into fucking nothing, you are supposed to be afraid, you are supposed to fear the scorch of his flames against your skin, the ones that will turn you into him. When he ignores your calls and doesn’t come around as often as you want him to, you are supposed to get it. You are supposed to know you’ve been replaced—by a cat girl, one that is more talented than you, one that fucks better—and he is supposed to turn away and forget you existed.

But none of that ever seems to fucking happen.

“What?” His voice has gone hoarse, “You don’t know anything.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Though he’s the one with the fist raised, though he’s the one with sweat slicking his hair to his neck, though he’s the one that’s put that bruise on your lip, an apology is evident in every word you speak. “I just wanted to know who you were, I didn’t mean to see it all.”

The only response he gives you is the thunderous beat of his heart in his chest, the wide-eyed look on his ugly mug.

“I wanted to tell you and talk to you about it, but you come around so rarely and you never answer when I—” You shake your head, “I’m not blaming you, I’m sorry. But then everything happened and—” In the black screen of the television, he sees how trapped he looks when you gesture to it. How small he looks. How Touya-like he looks. “—and I just never got the chance to, before now.”

Every thought he’s ever had about you makes him sway on his feet. Every lustful thought, every remembrance of the jokes you’d told him as kids, of the games you played, of the looks you’d given him. Every horrible thought he’s ever had about you—sincere and in an attempt to stuff his feelings back down his throat. All the wanting he’d ever done, for the future, for the past, for now. It’s all laying out in front of him, between the space on the carpet between the two of you. Like he’d vomited it all up. Like you’d peeled back the layers of his skin and dug it all out of him.

“You’re full of shit.”

“No, Touya, I’m—” Frustration flashes over your face again and you rub at the crease between your eyebrows, dab at your nose, tongue the bruise on your lip. “I would never lie to you, I need you to know that.”

“Yes you are,” Pressing himself further into the wall behind him, he whispers, “Yes, you are lying. I know you are.”

“What makes you think I’m lying about this?”

“In the alleyway, that wasn’t the first time you’ve ever put your fingers inside my brain.” The first time he’d met you, at that fucking private school, when you told him about your quirk, he hadn’t believed you. Some kind of mind game bullshit? How was that fair? A nobody-girl, one that wasn’t even from a prominent family, like Touya was, would rise through the ranks as a Pro in no time flat, with an OP quirk like that.

When he asked you to tell him what he was thinking, to prove it, you’d gone quiet, flinched a little, and told him that the burns on his shoulders were hurting him. It was the first day he’d met you, wearing a school uniform, one that covered him up in a way that hid it all—from his teacher, from Enji, from a nobody, smarty-pants girls like you; there was no way for you to know that kinda shit.

Whatever he wants to say next doesn’t come out, not even when he opens his mouth and gasps like a dying, stinking fish. Maybe if Dabi could cry, he would be.

If you could read his mind in half a second, in the alleyway, to know, then how did you not know then? In the classroom, peeking inside his mind, knowing about the burns and somehow not knowing about it all. About Enji. About the Hell he was living.

It all seems to dawn on you, all your petty, stupid fucking lies, and you take a step forward. “I didn’t know back then because I didn’t know how to use it yet. I—I still don’t! Because I can’t, Touya!”

“It doesn’t make sense, no matter what you say. Because you’re lying.”

“If I had known what you were going through, don’t you think I would have—” For some reason, you start crying, like you’re the victim here. Like you’re the one with the gaps in your skin and the burns on your body and the hate in your stomach. Like you’re the one that fucking lost it. “I didn’t know how to use my quirk back then, in order to see more than what you were thinking. I cared about you, I still do! If I had known—”

“Shut up!” Dabi raises his hands, curls them in the way he does when he wants to burn everything around him. He grabs you then and he doesn’t care about the gentle way you’re touching him, doesn’t care about the hands on his or the breath on his face when he drags you closer. “You’re a liar!”

“You’re burning up, you have to calm down!” Still, you aren’t scared of him, just trying to wipe the sweat pooling all over his face and neck. Pleading and crying, just like he wants, but the worry dancing in your eyes isn’t for yourself.

“I’m going to kill you, right now!”

You can’t know. You can’t know all the things he’s thought about you. You can’t know him like that because no one does, not even Dabi knows all the things about Touya like that.

“If you don’t calm down, you’re going to roast yourself alive, Touya, you’re overheating!”

“Right now, I’m going to do it! Just like I’ve always wanted!” He’s going to shove his thumbs in your eyes, he’s going to snap your pretty little neck, he’s gonna cut you up—just like you’ve done to him. Hands on your jaw, fingers cradling your face: he’s ready.

Any minute now.

Any second, he’s going to finally do it.

They’ll close that movie theater down. No one will ever go there again. It will all be reduced to ashes.

“Touya, please.”

Any moment now. He can do it, no problem. Absolutely no problem.

But your fingers cradle his face, and then you push them up his nose and in his ears and everything gets cool, just for a little while. Just enough that he can finally lean his head back against the couch you’ve made up for him, just enough so that he can finally sleep.

The first thing Dabi knows when he wakes up is that he’s in your bed (it takes him a long time to figure this out—what with the migraine and sour taste in his mouth and all that), and he knows this because the mattress is way too soft to be his, there are too many pillows all around him, and your smell is invading every piece of him.

The second thing he knows is that he’s wearing the sweater again—and that you must have put it on him, which means you’d seen—and then that the sheets are a little damp from all the towel-wrapped bags of ice near his neck, his hands, his thighs. It all comes painfully flashing back to him, the night before, and it’s a testament to how tired he is—seriously—because he doesn’t really do anything, just lays there like a dead, stinking fish.

There are two piles of sheets balled up on your floor, stained with blood, stained with (what is obviously) his vomit, and he can faintly hear your washer banging across the apartment. For a minute, he wonders if this is how you felt, laying for 30 minutes in that bathtub—somehow alive, but feeling like death—fading in and out from the world around you, thoughts coming and going like the breeze from the ceiling fan above him.

Today, whatever time it is (late afternoon, maybe?), Touya is too exhausted to put up the act.

It’s embarrassing, the way he wraps his arms over his face and breathes you in, the soft little groan he lets out when the smell of lavender subdues his headache for a moment. His tight jeans are still on, though they’ve been unbuttoned, zipper down, and—with all the wiggling he’d done in his sleep—they’ve come down uncomfortably around his ass. It takes a long time before he moves his arms, before he pulls them back on right and rolls out of bed.

The idea of you makes his stomach hurt, so he doesn’t go there just yet.

Peeking out of your room, there is no sign of anyone else in the apartment, and Touya quickly pads across the hall and into your bathroom, leans against the door when he closes it and holds his breath, just in case you’re gonna pop out somewhere.

It’s hard to meet himself in the mirror, always is.

Somehow, the burns under his eyes look worse, darker, and two of the staples in his cheek are more crooked than usual. Part of his hair is flattened against his head and the other parts are wild, a little crimped and folded, and running a hand through it all doesn’t do a fucking thing, which makes him snort. It’s strangely domestic, the rugged sight of him in your bathroom, wearing a sweater that was originally his, that he’d seen on you, that you’d put back on him.

The bristles on your toothbrush are stained pink, but he brushes the sour taste of puke out of his mouth anyway—no, he’s not gonna tell you about that.

When there’s nothing left to do but face you, Touya wonders what else you’ve seen in this crazy head of his. In between the time since you’d read his mind in the alleyway and last night, he’d worried about you, thought about the future the two of you were supposed to have. He’s wanted you, and a date at the cinema, jacked off to the thought of your tits under his sweater (and a bunch of other things, honestly), cursed himself for being such an asshole by ignoring you, and hated you. Every part of you he couldn’t understand, every part of you he wanted to.

That laptop of yours is open, the headset around your neck as something dull and boring drones on quietly, and you look at him for a long time before hitting your spacebar, before taking off the headphones and standing up to approach him.

The bruise on your lip has fully settled and it’s ugly.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” You’re whispering, which is nice for his headache. When he shrugs, you turn back to the table and grab a piece of buttered toast from your plate, the piece that isn’t bitten, and offer it to him.

And he’s too tired to fight, so he just takes it and moves around you, away from the way you’re looking at him—soft, like fucking always—and slumps down on your couch. It’s been made up, with the blanket and the pillows; you must have slept on it last night.

The toast crunches real loud, gets crumbs all over him that he swipes onto the carpet, and some are clinging to your cheek when you eventually come to sit beside him. Dabi thinks it’s too close, Touya thinks it’s too far away, and all three of you just stare at the empty television screen. Out of the corner of his eye, you’re opening and closing your mouth, sighing quietly, and it almost makes him laugh, it would if it didn’t require so much effort.

Then the apologies start.

“I’m sorry for knocking you out like that.” All the words are still whispered. “I don’t know if you remember,”—he does—“but they shot us with suppressants, at the bar, and you were overheating.”

Suppressants. That Yakuza fuck.

It makes you sound real small and sad, with your Bambi eyes and sunset face. “I was afraid you were gonna cook yourself alive, so I—”

“‘s’fine.” Touya grunts, and you just nod in response.

“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it earlier, I should have made time to find you.” The huff you let out is a little bitter, too harsh for someone like you. “I did it just fine yesterday, I should have tried harder before then.”

None of this really means anything to him, so he shifts a little bit—cringes—and looks at you. “How did you find that place?”

“You’ve been there before,” Even though it’s all out in the open, you seem shy about admitting it, which is real fucking hilarious. “It’s the second place I looked.”

The image of you, in that yellow dress, wandering down streets and sidewalks, looking in the places he hangs around, makes him want to throw up. What the fuck are you thinking? Another blow to the head will kill you, stupid, so why are you walking around like a ripe little peach, around people that would love to take a bite?

(There is a small, uncaged part of him that feels warm about it, that makes Touya feel like he did at school with you; the idea that you had searched high and low, slapped guys that grabbed you, tried to talk to him about his embarrassing fucking feelings—it all makes you seem like a mystery again.)

You’re quiet after that, thoughts flashing over your face as you lightly touch the bruise on your lip, and it pisses him off suddenly. All of his memories and daydreams, all of his fears and wants and desires, all of his plans and secrets have all been strewn out before him like a disemboweled pig, and you get to sit quietly with all your own feelings.

“Tell me what you’re thinking. Now.” When you raise your eyebrows at him, his face scrunches up like that of a child, like it probably did back then. “I deserve to know.”

Because you’re an annoying little goody-goody, you just shrug.

“I think that’s fair.” You shift to face him, the way you had last night. “I’m thinking that I’m still worried about you overheating. I’m thinking that I’m tired, that I’m upset with myself.” A frown pulls on your lips. “I’m thinking that...you’re going to leave, and I’m worried you won’t come back this time.”

Not in some you’re-gonna-die-out-there kinda way, but in some you’ll-never-talk-to-me-again kinda way. It’s as plain as day on your face and he, Dabi, thinks it’s good that you feel that way, that you should. Because he, Dabi, shouldn’t ever speak to you again because he’s been compromised, he’s been found out. All the secret inside shit you aren’t supposed to know has come to the surface—in fact, you dived into that water to find it yourself—and, by the rules of the street, he shouldn’t come around you again. He should kill you, actually, to prevent anything from happening to him or his mission.

“I’m thinking that I regret not trying to find you sooner, when we were kids. I maybe could have done it, I don’t know,” You shrug again and it becomes obvious how tired you are. It must have been a long night, for the both of you, after you’d finally shut him up. “But I’m also thinking there is no use regretting, because it won’t change the past. I’m thinking that,” Bambi eyes, big and worried and sad and gentle. “I just have to keep trying, for the future.”

For once, he doesn’t know what to say. Or think. Or do.

Because nobody has ever tried for him, for Touya, not like you have.

A little chuckle comes out of you, brings his eyes back to your face, and he’s surprised to find it a little shy. “I’m also thinking that it’s a little silly for me to be sad, because I should have known there were other women in your life, after all this time.”

And that confuses the hell out of him, makes him roll his eyes and shake his head—painfully—as he tries to figure out what the fuck you’re talking about.

“What?” It’s absurd, really, this idea that he’s the kinda guy worried about other women, that he’s the kinda guy that has a multitude of them stored in his back fucking pocket or something. Toga? He wouldn’t call her a woman, more like a noisy little brat that could go to Hell, for all he cared. “What other women?”

The smile on your face wavers, like you want to drop it into a frown, but you hold it steady. “I don’t know, just, whoever. Like the one from last night.”

Are you kidding?

Your stupid ass quirk has reached into the recesses of his mind and broken open that seal, spilled his guts all over the floor of your apartment and cleaned it up with your sheets, and you still think—

“The cat girl? I don’t even—I couldn’t tell you her name if my life depended on it.”

“Oh,” The laugh you let out is a little surprised, but your face still looks pinched and upset. “I don’t—uh—I don’t know if that’s better or worse, actually.”

“There are no 'other women', smarty-pants.” Touya scoffs and leans closer to you, sneers in your face so you fucking get the point. “Use that brain of yours, Miss College Classes, there ain’t no one else, just—”

When he cuts himself off, you raise your eyebrows, lean closer to him in response—which sends him back to the other end of the couch. “Just?”

This is so stupid, makes him cross his arms in annoyance as a wave of embarrassment heats up his whole body. “If you wanna know so damn bad, just read my mind again. You seem to have a real affinity for that!”

“Touya,” You chide, “I’m serious. Just—?”

Here’s one last thing to know: he isn’t going to say it. Absolutely not. If you wanna cough up blood and dig through the gaps of him to find out, be his fucking guest, but he is not going to say it. Not even if you scoot closer, not even if you put your hand on his—not even if he lets you—and certainly, not even if you run your tongue over that bruise on your lip.

You do that shit on purpose and he knows it.

“Get out of my face.”

But you don’t.

It makes his head crane back, the way your minty breath hits his lips again, the way your nose nudges his like it had in the cab, and—even though any and all thoughts from last night are painful—it has the same fucking effect. Everything about you is soft and touchy, your fingers over his cheekbone, your eyes watching him, your lips on his.

Touya hasn’t ever done anything softly, doesn’t even know how to, but he tries. Because he’s too exhausted to put up the act anymore, too eager for this to finally happen, too distracted to care about the gaps in his skin. He tries because he’s been ready to cross this boundary with you for a long time, too long, maybe because the two of you did that day in the motel. Touya tries for you because you’re the only one that tries for him.

When he pushes his lips back in response, a little breath comes out of your nose and fans across his face, makes him stop pulling his head away from you so he can move his chapped lips against yours, so he can nip lightly at your bottom lip and so he can dig one of his hands into your hair. A little sigh of relief is exhaled between the two of you and he moves in closer, presses his lips a little harder, so he can lick into your mouth, the hand on the back of your neck pulling you into him. The metal in his tongue must surprise you, because a little sound squeaks out of you; it isn’t one of arousal or pleasure, but just the mere fact that your lips are slotted together, that you’re making little noises against him, finally gives him the energy to nearly push you back into the couch.

“Ow,” The word murmurs around his lips and he pulls back instantly, eyes wide and zero-ing in on the purple bruise marring your face.

It’s fucking hilarious; he’s finally getting the chance to kiss you, for the second time in his pitiful life, and—of course—your lips would be too tender for him, with the injury he gave you. Fucking great. So fucking funny, in retrospect.

If he backs out now, he might lose his wits and jump through your window again, so Touya just adjusts his head and presses another kiss into the corner of your mouth. It makes you laugh, how hard he tries not to smash into that bruise, and he keeps pressing his lips to yours, keeps licking into them, digging his fingers into your scalp, even as you say his name.

“What?” He grunts, finally pulling away from you when you laugh again. Your hands follow him, lay gently on his cheeks—and he lets you, even if it makes him sweat a little—and settle your forehead against his.

You press another soft kiss to him, just to be a fucking tease and pull back when he chases you. “No other women?”

“Does it look like I’m—”

“Touya!”

“No, damn it!” As annoyed as he’s trying to sound, one of his arms is wrapping around you, pulling you closer to him as one of yours goes behind his neck. It makes him a little tense, the unfamiliarity of it all, like you’re gonna dig your nails into him or choke him out when you get the chance. But your eyes are big and wide and shining with something that embarrasses him, shining the way they always do when you look at him.

And you better not fucking tell anyone about the little kiss he gives your bruise.

“Ain’t no one else but you.”

The smile you give him makes him pull back his head, or he tries to, but you keep your forehead against his, and give his nose a little kiss in return. It makes him groan—in embarrassment and not because he likes it—so he presses another kiss against your lips, lets it get a little passionate and heavy, hands running from your back to your thighs, from his hair to his chest, before he purposely nips at your lip again. All this cutesy shit makes him queasy, but it’s the first time he’s seen you really smile since he’d been in your apartment, since before last night, since six weeks ago, when you let him fall asleep on your couch.

And for some reason, you look just about as happy touching him.

“You aren’t gonna leave and never come back?” Even through all the sugary sweet kissing, he can hear the concern in your voice, can feel the heat from the burn in your eyes against his own.

It makes him laugh, actually; get this, smarty-pants, he tried that shit for 11 years. It didn’t work then and it sure as Hell isn’t gonna work now, not when he’s touched you like this, not when you’ve seen the inside of his skin the way you have.

And, come on, you should know better than to ask a stupid question like that.

random bf texts!!

touya todoroki x reader

just silly little domestic-y texts teehee ^.^

cw’s!!: gn! reader, loverboy touya, not canon compliant!! (he’s in rehab and is staying w his family :]), he threatens to burn down the house. hehe.

Reblogs and comments are appreciated

Blue

Dabi angst fic, not really proof read, doesn’t contain any strong topics aside from strong hatred.

Cold. Cold was all you felt, a feeling you had almost forgotten. Forgotten how cruel it was how it was as it enveloped your bruised and beaten body. Snowflakes fell from the dark, chilly sky as wind weaved through the buildings.

Sitting atop the snowy ground you were leaning against the hard mossy brick of the LOV building a shadow cast along your face as you held your body together despite the pain from the burns and bruises. With labored breathing you raised your head to look at his face. Turquoise eyes stared back, the way they looked at you made the snow beneath your feet feel almost warm in comparison.

You had predicted this day long ago and knew it was only a matter of time before it came. You had played your role for the league you had performed admirably, it earned you praise among them. Now that you had done your part you were to be disposed of because you were no longer of worth.

You knew this was coming, you knew you wouldn’t be around for too long, you were almost hyper aware of it. Yet you cracked just a bit, you let yourself smile a little too genuinely at his snide comments and rude remarks, relished a bit too much at the feeling of his rough and burnt skin. Relaxed a tad bit more than you should have at the familiar burnt smell from him.

Doomed from the beginning, you knew that you were and no matter how many heinous crimes you committed, no matter how much blood you covered your hands in... You found yourself to be unable to rid yourself of the human feeling of love despite society seeing you as no longer human.

Though on this snowy day in January, you remembered why you should have ridden yourself of this emotion. Giving a cold-eyed appraisal of the situation, he stepped forward though you could not bring yourself to even uselessly try pushing back farther into the wall. Your body ached and started to go numb starting from your legs. The wounds ached a bit more when he squatted down to your eye level.

You knew you were fighting back tears finally met with the despair of death you both had cruelly tormented others with. His hand reached out to caress your face, his touch was disgustingly gentle, quite different to the harsh and hot hands he had beat you with just a few seconds earlier.

Staring back at him with red watery eyes you were sure you looked pathetic for someone who was infamous for being such a cruel and powerful villain. Everything you had once felt for the black-haired man before you were nothing more than a wistful memory. All that was left was a very bitter feeling that seemed to bubble over in the moment. Gathering what little strength you had left you spat at his face the glob landing on his cheek, his eyes flashed for a split second with amusement.

The hand he had placed on your cheek swept over a wound to collect the blood which in turn made you hiss in pain. “You really don’t know when to knock it off do you?...Always hated that about you, you know?” His croaky voice that you once enjoyed filled you with nothing but abhorrence now, your eyes were no longer teary, instead they stared into his cold ones with malevolence.

Not that you cared anymore but you still found yourself searching for an inkling of emotion in his lackluster eyes, but you found nothing.

The slightly warm palm that had been held to your cheek without moving much had begun to heat up slowly but surely. He started talking once more his tone casual not befitting the current situation at hand “hey you had that really dumb nickname for me...What was it again...Oh...Blue.” It was a nickname you had given him when you first joined the league, and you did not know his name.

Everything you had done led right up to your demise but what you regretted most was letting that emotion even if it was just a little. You should have known a man like himself lost the ability to love another long ago leaving only the hollow shell where a soul once resided. Perhaps it would have made this moment less bitter, perhaps if he loved you in return, it could have been bittersweet.

His hand continued to heat up while his other hand stroked your hair. It was in an almost mocking manner like he was trying to comfort his partner after a grueling day. Even as his hands heated up to an excruciating degree he did not cease his action.

Oh, how you resented him.

But oh, how you resented yourself more for being a fool.

His vile smirk was the last thing you saw before your body went up in a hot flash and your vision was taken over by one color.

Blue.

Touya Todoroki X Reader

✮⋆˙ I Am Here ✮⋆˙

‼️Genuine trigger warning. ‼️ If you have a hard time with people lashing out and if panic attacks trigger you, Do Not Read.

masterlist

Does Dabi get the chance to be happy and normal? It’s after the war and he was taken back in. He really doesn’t deserve it. or so he thinks.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

The world was healing. Slowly but surely, people were rebuilding their lives, picking up the broken pieces, and shaping them into something better. The war had left scars on the land, on the people, on their souls but even scars could fade with time. Dabi, or how he’s been going by since he got back, Touya, wasn’t sure if his ever would.

He watched from a distance as his family talked and laughed together. It was strange. Foreign. A sight he never thought he’d see. Natsuo nudged Shoto, who rolled his eyes but didn’t pull away. Rei placed a gentle hand on Endeavor’s arm, and even though he still looked guilty, even though he knows she shouldn’t even go near him, he let her. And then there was you.

You fit into the Todoroki family like you had always belonged. You stood beside Fuyumi, laughing at something she said, your eyes bright with warmth. You were always like that light, warmth, love. The things Touya had never believed in. The things he had never thought he deserved. Until you.

You had been his contradiction. A pro hero who should have seen him as nothing but a villain, yet you had looked at him like he was human. You had never made excuses for him, never pretended he hadn’t done terrible things, but you had seen him. And because of you, he had started to believe, just for a moment, that maybe he wasn’t beyond saving. That maybe he could be more than destruction.

But that was back then. Now, everyone was moving on. You were happy, smiling, growing. And yet, he wasn’t. He felt stuck, caught between his past and a future he wasn’t sure he had a place in. Watching you get along with his family should have made him feel… something. Hope, maybe. Comfort. Instead, all it did was remind him of how much he didn’t belong.

Years of resentment didn’t just disappear. The hatred, the anger, the loneliness. he had fed off of it for so long. Letting go of it felt like losing a part of himself. How was he supposed to just sit with them, talk with them, pretend like there weren’t decades of pain between them? And yet… he wanted to.

He wanted to be what you had been for him. A reason to believe in something better. He wanted to learn how to be a part of this family, to see if love could exist here the way it had existed with you. But it was terrifying. What if he wasn’t capable of it? What if, in the end, he was still the same broken, angry person who would never fit?

His hands clenched into fists. Maybe it was okay if he wasn’t moving on as fast as everyone else. Maybe it was okay if healing took time. Because at least now, he had a reason to try.

Touya wasn’t sure how long he stood there, watching from a distance. The laughter, the conversations, the warmth it all felt like something happening in another world, one he had no right to step into. But then you saw him. Your smile didn’t falter, didn’t hesitate. It was the same as it had always been steady, real. You said something to Fuyumi, and then, without a second thought, you started walking toward him.

Touya considered leaving. It wouldn’t have been hard. Just turn around, disappear before you could reach him. But his feet didn’t move. he was just tired of running. You stopped in front of him, tilting your head slightly, studying him the way you always did, like you were waiting for him to say something. But when he didn’t, you just sighed and reached out, grabbing his wrist with an easy familiarity.

“Come sit with us.” It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t a demand, either. It was just you, offering him a choice.

He scoffed, looking away. “not sure if i’m wanted”

The world was healing. Slowly but surely, people were rebuilding their lives, picking up the broken pieces, and shaping them into something better. The war had left scars on the land, on the people, on their souls but even scars could fade with time. Dabi, or how he’s been going by since he got back, Touya, wasn’t sure if his ever would.

He watched from a distance as his family talked and laughed together. It was strange. Foreign. A sight he never thought he’d see. Natsuo nudged Shoto, who rolled his eyes but didn’t pull away. Rei placed a gentle hand on Endeavor’s arm, and even though he still looked guilty, even though he knows she shouldn’t even go near him, he let her. And then there was you.

You fit into the Todoroki family like you had always belonged. You stood beside Fuyumi, laughing at something she said, your eyes bright with warmth. You were always like that light, warmth, love. The things Touya had never believed in. The things he had never thought he deserved. Until you.

You had been his contradiction. A pro hero who should have seen him as nothing but a villain, yet you had looked at him like he was human. You had never made excuses for him, never pretended he hadn’t done terrible things, but you had seen him. And because of you, he had started to believe, just for a moment, that maybe he wasn’t beyond saving. That maybe he could be more than destruction.

But that was back then. Now, everyone was moving on. You were happy, smiling, growing. And yet, he wasn’t. He felt stuck, caught between his past and a future he wasn’t sure he had a place in. Watching you get along with his family should have made him feel… something. Hope, maybe. Comfort. Instead, all it did was remind him of how much he didn’t belong.

Years of resentment didn’t just disappear. The hatred, the anger, the loneliness. he had fed off of it for so long. Letting go of it felt like losing a part of himself. How was he supposed to just sit with them, talk with them, pretend like there weren’t decades of pain between them? And yet… he wanted to.

He wanted to be what you had been for him. A reason to believe in something better. He wanted to learn how to be a part of this family, to see if love could exist here the way it had existed with you. But it was terrifying. What if he wasn’t capable of it? What if, in the end, he was still the same broken, angry person who would never fit?

His hands clenched into fists. Maybe it was okay if he wasn’t moving on as fast as everyone else. Maybe it was okay if healing took time. Because at least now, he had a reason to try.

Touya had spent so many years convinced that warmth wasn’t meant for him. That love was something distant, a thing he could only witness from the outside but never hold. But there you were right in the middle of it, smiling, laughing, belonging. And it hurt. Because it should’ve been him.

He should’ve been the one sitting at that table, the one making his mother smile, the one who could joke with his siblings like they hadn’t spent years with an ocean of silence between them. But instead, it was you someone who hadn’t grown up in their house, who hadn’t carried their burdens.

And somehow, you made it look effortless. Touya thought he could handle it. Thought he could ignore the sharp ache twisting in his chest, the way his fingers curled into his sleeves like he could claw his way through the feeling. But then your eyes found him.

Even from across the yard, even with the voices and laughter around you, you saw him. And without hesitation, you excused yourself and walked toward him. He should’ve looked away. Should’ve turned and left before you could get too close. But you were always good at pulling him in.

“Hey,” you said, stopping in front of him. The way you looked at him was so unbearably soft, so tender, it made his throat tighten. He swallowed, glancing past you at the scene behind you. “…You’re doing good with them,” he muttered.

You tilted your head. “With who?”

He huffed out a dry laugh. “My family.”

You didn’t say anything right away, just watching him like you were waiting for him to say what was really on his mind. like always, he caved under your gaze. “They like you,” he said, voice quieter this time. “Better than me, probably.”

The words felt bitter, heavy. He hadn’t meant to say them, but once they were out, he couldn’t take them back. Your brows furrowed, and before he could pull away, your hand found his wrist. Your touch was warm, grounding, and he hated how much he leaned into it.

“Touya,” you said, voice gentle but firm. “That’s not true.”

He scoffed. “Isn’t it?” His gaze flickered toward the table, toward the people who had spent years without him. “I don’t even know if they want me here.”

Your grip tightened. “They do.”

He let out a slow breath, staring at you. “And how do you know that?”

You smiled, small but sure. “Because I do. And if I do, then I know they do, too.”

Something in his chest cracked. He didn’t know how you did that. how you always knew what to say, how you could make him believe in something better, even when everything inside him screamed that he shouldn’t.

“…You’re annoying,” he muttered.

You grinned. “And yet, here you are.”

He sighed, long and slow. The weight in his chest didn’t disappear, but it felt a little easier to carry with you standing there, holding onto him like he was worth something.

“Come sit with me,” you said, voice quieter now, more personal. A request just for him. And this time, he let you lead him forward. “I think you’d be surprised.” Your voice was soft, patient. You always had too much of that when it came to him. He wanted to argue, to push you away like he had done a thousand times before. But he didn’t. Maybe it was because he was tired. it was because, deep down, he knew you wouldn’t stop until he at least tried. it was because a part of him wanted to believe you were right. With a heavy sigh, he let you pull him forward. The conversation stilled slightly as the two of you approached. He could feel the weight of their eyes on him. his family, the people he had spent years hating, resenting, fighting. His shoulders tensed on instinct, waiting for something to go wrong. But nothing did.

Fuyumi was the first to speak, her voice light but careful. “Touya, do you want anything to eat? We made enough for everyone.”

He almost laughed at the absurdity of it. A dinner invitation, like this was normal. Like he was just some estranged brother finally coming home. He hesitated, glancing at you. Your fingers were still wrapped around his hand, a quiet anchor.

“…Yeah,” he muttered, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Sure.”

Natsuo smirked slightly, but there was no malice in it. “Guess miracles do happen.”

Touya rolled his eyes but didn’t snap back. The tension in his chest eased just a little. You smiled at him, giving his wrist one last squeeze before letting go. The absence of your touch made something inside him twist, but he ignored it. This wasn’t easy. It wasn’t comfortable. But maybe it didn’t have to be.

————————————

days weren’t always easy, there’s always a breaking Point. You could feel it before it happened the way the tension in his body coiled too tight, his breathing coming in sharp, uneven pulls. It was like standing beside a storm, knowing the winds were about to tear through everything in their path. Touya had been unraveling all day.

It started with the small things. His hands shaking when he thought no one was looking. The way he flinched at casual touches, like his own body didn’t know how to exist in this space. How his words had grown quieter, like he was sinking further into himself. You had been here before. You knew the signs. So when night fell and the house was quiet, you didn’t leave him alone. You sat beside him in his room, letting the silence stretch between you. Not pushing, not forcing just being there.

But then his hands went to his head, fingers digging into his hair as his breathing hitched, and you knew it was starting. “Touya,” you murmured, reaching out slowly, carefully.

He let out a sharp, ragged breath, shaking his head. “I—I can’t—” His voice broke, and then it all came crashing down. He folded in on himself, arms wrapping around his body like he could hold himself together, but it wasn’t working. His shoulders trembled, his breath came too fast, too shallow.

“Hey, I’ve got you,” you whispered, placing your hands over his. “You’re okay. Just breathe with me, alright?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head violently. “I don’t— I don’t know how to do this,” he gasped. “I don’t know how to be here.” His voice cracked on the last word, and it hit you like a punch to the chest.

You moved closer, gently pulling his hands away from his hair before he could bruise himself. “You don’t have to figure it all out right now,” you said softly. “Just stay with me. Just for this moment.” His body shook, his breaths ragged and uneven. He looked lost. Broken. And it killed you.

And then the door creaked open.

“Touya—?”

Shoto.

Touya’s entire body went rigid. His breath hitched, and the raw vulnerability in his expression shattered into something unreadable. Panic. Shame. Fear. Shoto froze in the doorway, eyes wide with uncertainty. He hadn’t meant to intrude. He had probably just been checking in, but it was too late.

Touya ripped himself away from you so fast it nearly knocked you back. He stumbled to his feet, fists clenched so tightly his nails dug into his skin.

“Get out,” he rasped, voice wrecked.

Shoto didn’t move. His gaze flickered to you, then back to his brother. He took a hesitant step forward. “Touya, I—”

“Get out!” Touya roared, voice cracking under the weight of it. His breathing was harsh, erratic, like he was barely holding himself together. His entire body was trembling, and you could see it that look in his eyes. He was spiraling. You stood quickly, placing yourself between them before things could get worse. “Touya, look at me.”

He didn’t. He just stared past you, chest rising and falling too fast, hands shaking like he didn’t know whether to run or lash out.

“They don’t want me here,” he whispered, voice breaking apart. His gaze was unfocused, distant. “They never did. I should’ve just—” He cut himself off, but you knew what he was about to say. I should’ve just stayed gone.

Shoto’s expression twisted, something like hurt flashing across his face. “That’s not true.”

Touya let out a hollow, bitter laugh, but it sounded more like a sob. You turned back to him, slowly reaching for his hands. “You’re not alone in this,” you said softly. “I promise.”

For a moment, he didn’t move. His hands twitched, fingers curling slightly like he wanted to believe you. But the storm inside him was still raging, and you weren’t sure if he could hear you over the roar of it.

Shoto took another step forward. “Touya—”

“Stop saying my name like that! YOU have no rig by to be using my name like that” Touya’s voice cracked, and before you could stop him, he stumbled back, pressing his hands to his head. His breathing hitched, and then his knees buckled. You caught him before he could hit the ground.

“Touya, breathe,” you pleaded, holding onto him tightly. His body was shaking so badly it scared you. “Just stay with me. I’ve got you.”

His fingers clutched desperately at your arms, like he was trying to ground himself in something anything. And then, finally, finally, he let himself sink into you. You looked up at Shoto, who still stood frozen in the doorway, conflict and concern written all over his face.

“Give us a minute,” you murmured, your voice steady but gentle.

Shoto hesitated, then nodded, stepping back and quietly shutting the door behind him.

You turned your attention back to Touya, running a hand through his hair as he buried his face against your shoulder. His breath was uneven, but it was slowing, bit by bit.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he whispered, voice hoarse, exhausted.

“I know,” you murmured. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”

He didn’t say anything, but the way he clung to you told you enough.

You held him tighter, whispering quiet reassurances into his hair.

Touya didn’t move for a long time. His breathing was still uneven, his body still trembling, but he didn’t pull away. He just stayed there, curled against you like he was afraid to let go.

You kept running your fingers through his hair, slow and steady, grounding him. “I’m here,” you murmured, voice soft. “I’ve got you.”

His grip on your shirt tightened. “I don’t—” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

You pulled back slightly, just enough to see his face. His eyes were red rimmed, unfocused, still swimming with emotion. Still hurting. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now,” you said gently.

He exhaled shakily, looking past you. “I’m never gonna be what they want.”

Your heart twisted. “You don’t have to be anything for them. You just have to be here.”

He scoffed, but there wasn’t as much heat behind it. “Yeah? Shoto doesn’t even want me here.”

You sighed. “Shoto’s just awkward. You know he’s already bad at approaching people in general.”

Touya let out a breath, something that wasn’t quite a laugh, but not as bitter as before. “That’s not fair. He tries.”

You raised a brow. “So now you’re defending him?”

He frowned slightly, but you could see the shift. The way his hands weren’t shaking as much. How his breath wasn’t quite as ragged.

“He just, he’s got a lot of shit to figure out too, alright?” Touya muttered. “It’s not like this is easy for him either.”

You couldn’t help it you smiled. Because there it was. He cares. Touya caught the look on your face and immediately scowled. “What?”

You shook your head, amused. “Nothing.”

His frown deepened. “That was not a ‘nothing’ face.”

You just kept smiling, squeezing his hand. “I’m just glad you’re here.” His breath hitched, and for a moment, he looked like he was about to argue. But then he exhaled, letting himself lean into you again, just slightly.

“…Yeah,” he muttered. “Okay.”

He just sat there, pressed against you, his breath slow and uneven but gradually steadying. The weight of everything still hung heavy between you, but the worst of the storm had passed.

You didn’t rush him. You didn’t try to force him to talk or move before he was ready. You just stayed there, one hand resting in his hair, the other loosely intertwined with his fingers. Eventually, his grip tightened.

“…You always do this,” he muttered, voice quiet, hoarse from earlier.

You hummed. “Do what?”

“Stay.” His fingers twitched in yours, like he was trying to put more words to it but couldn’t.

You smiled softly, pressing your forehead against his temple. “Of course I do.”

He exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

His shoulders tensed. “You. This. Us.” He pulled back just enough to look at you, blue eyes searching yours, raw and unguarded. “I was a villain. I hurt people. I” He swallowed hard. “I hurt you.”

Your heart ached, but not for the reasons he probably thought. “Touya,” you murmured, cupping his face in your hands. He stiffened at the touch but didn’t pull away. You brushed your thumb along the rough, scarred skin of his cheek. “I know who you were. But I also know who you are.”

His breath hitched. His hands curled around your wrists, holding you there, like he was afraid you’d slip away.

“You love so much,” you whispered. “Even when you try not to. Even when you don’t realize it.”

He let out a shaky exhale, leaning into your touch despite himself. “I don’t know how to be what you deserve.”

You smiled, soft and certain. “You already are.”

His eyes widened, and for a second, something in them cracked open something vulnerable, something real. Then, slowly, carefully, he pressed his forehead against yours. His hands slid up to cup the sides of your face, fingers trembling slightly, like he was still afraid this wasn’t real.

“…I love you,” he murmured, the words barely more than a breath.

Your chest tightened. Not because you doubted it, but because you had always known. Even when he was fighting it. Even when he thought he wasn’t capable of love at all.

You smiled, tilting your head just enough to brush your nose against his. “I love you too.”

He let out a shaky breath, something between a sigh and a laugh. Then, without another word, he closed the space between you, pressing his lips to yours gentle, uncertain, but there.

And for the first time in a long time, Touya let himself believe in something good.

The Next Step

The morning was quiet.

The house had settled into a strange kind of peace—the kind that only comes after a storm. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t fixed. But it was something.

You stood off to the side of the courtyard, watching as Touya—Dabi—approached Shoto. His movements were tense, like he was forcing himself forward before his instincts could tell him to run.

Shoto, for his part, had been lingering outside as well. He had been expecting this. You could tell by the way his posture straightened when he noticed Touya walking toward him.

You stayed back, letting them have their space.

Touya shoved his hands into his pockets, shoulders stiff. “Look, I—” He sighed, tilting his head back like he hated every second of this. “I was a dick last night.”

Shoto blinked, clearly caught off guard by how fast that came out. “You were upset,” he said simply.

Touya huffed. “That’s not an excuse.” He kicked at the ground. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

Shoto studied him for a moment before nodding. “Okay.”

Touya’s eye twitched. “Okay?”

Shoto shrugged. “I accept your apology.”

Touya stared at him, as if waiting for something else—for Shoto to fight him on it, to dig into him like their father would have. But he didn’t.

And that was probably more jarring than anything.

You watched as the tension in Touya’s shoulders lessened, even if just slightly.

“…Alright then,” he muttered.

Shoto hesitated before glancing your way. “Did they put you up to this?”

You grinned, resting your chin on your hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Touya rolled his eyes, shoving past Shoto. “I’m going inside before this gets any more sentimental.”

You clapped your hands together, stepping forward before he could escape. “Actually, I was thinking we should go get ice cream.”

Both brothers froze. Shoto blinked at you, as if trying to process whether he heard you correctly. Touya turned back slowly, brow furrowing. “What?”

“Ice cream,” you repeated cheerfully. “You know, that sweet, frozen treat people eat when they need to cool off? I think we all deserve some after last night.”

Touya’s nose scrunched. “That’s what?” He glanced at Shoto, who looked equally at a loss. “girl i swear to god-”

You shrugged.

Shoto shifted awkwardly, clearly not opposed to the idea but also not sure how to respond. “…I like ice cream,” he said after a long pause.

Touya narrowed his eyes at him. “You would.”

Shoto frowned. “What does that mean?”

Touya just sighed, rubbing a hand down his face. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s just go before you start making this worse.”

You beamed, throwing your arms around both of them before they could protest. “Great! My treat.”

Shoto stiffened slightly at the sudden contact, while Touya made a noise of protest, trying to wiggle out of your hold.

“…This is already worse,” he muttered.

You only grinned wider.

——

The three of you stood in front of the ice cream display, the cold air from the freezer fogging up the glass as you debated your choices. “This place has too many options,” Touya muttered, staring at the menu like it had personally offended him. “Why do people need this many flavors?”

Shoto, scanning the choices with an alarming level of concentration, replied, “Variety is good.”

“Not when it makes decisions harder.”

You hummed, tilting your head as you leaned into Touya’s shoulder just slightly. “What, having trouble picking? Want me to decide for you?”

Touya scoffed, but he didn’t move away. “Like hell I’d trust you with that.”

You smirked. “Come on, I’d pick something good.”

“You’d pick something ridiculous.”

You gasped in mock offense, nudging him with your hip. “I would not.”

He gave you a dry look. “I can literally see you considering the weirdest flavor here.” You grinned but said nothing, because he wasn’t wrong.

Shoto, still deep in thought, finally spoke. “Pistachio is good.”

Both you and Touya turned to look at him.

“That’s a weird choice,” Touya said bluntly.

Shoto frowned. “No, it isn’t.”

“Who even gets pistachio?”

“A lot of people.”

Touya made a face, crossing his arms. “Sounds fake.”

You laughed under your breath, barely stopping yourself from leaning into him again. He was still stiff in public, but the way his arm was just barely brushing yours told you he didn’t mind.

“Well, I think I’m getting cookies and cream,” you said, glancing back at the menu. “What about you, Touya?”

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “I dunno. Maybe vanilla.”

You gave him a look. “Vanilla?”

“What’s wrong with vanilla?”

“Nothing,” you said, clearly lying. “It’s just… safe.”

Touya rolled his eyes. “Not everything needs to be crazy like you”

“Boring,” you teased, bumping his arm lightly.

Shoto, seemingly ignoring the entire exchange, suddenly said, “We should have gone somewhere that serves soba.”

Both you and Touya turned to him again. Touya stared. “What?”

Shoto looked completely serious. “Soba is good.”

Touya let out a sharp laugh, shaking his head. “You’re a freak.”

Shoto didn’t even flinch. “You just ordered a boring flavour.”

“…Tch.” Touya clicked his tongue but had no argument.

You chuckled, stepping forward to finally place your order. “Alright, alright, let’s get our ice cream. And maybe next time, Shoto, we’ll take you to a soba shop instead.”

Shoto nodded, as if that was the best idea he had heard all day.

Dabi x Reader | Hawks x Reader

°❀.ೃ࿔ Knowing how to Find Them °❀.ೃ࿔

teehee i have issues… my other works - masterlist

synopsis: Between hero catcalling, banter, and some very suspicious shoulder to shoulder proximity, one thing is clear: Y/n otherwise known as pro hero Lumine has a type, and it’s problematic.

you let the cool night air settle over your skin as you gazed at the city below. The hum of neon lights, the distant chatter of people, the occasional wail of sirens, it was all background noise to the quiet moment you had carved out for yourself. Well, semi quiet. Dabi stood a few feet away, leaning against the rusted railing, cigarette dangling lazily between his fingers. The soft glow of the embers flickered against his scarred skin, casting sharp shadows across his features. He exhaled a slow curl of smoke, blue eyes watching you through the haze, unreadable.

He was close enough that you could feel the occasional brush of his presence, subtle things. The way his arm ghosted yours when he shifted, how his voice dipped just a little lower when he spoke, like this was some shared secret neither of you were acknowledging.

“You’re quieter than usual,” Dabi murmured, flicking the ash off the end of his cigarette. “That big hero life finally breaking you down?”

You huffed a soft laugh, tilting your head. “Nah. Just enjoying the moment. Kinda nice when you’re not actively trying to burn me alive.” Dabi smirked, amused. “Give it time.”

Before you could shoot back a reply, movement in the sky caught your attention a blur of crimson and gold slicing through the night, wings illuminated by city lights. With a wicked grin, you cupped your hands around your mouth and called out, “Damn, Hawks! Lookin’ good up there! Show me what those wings can do, baby!”

Hawks, mid flight, visibly stuttered in the air. His wings faltered for half a second before he caught himself, twisting in your direction. Even from here, you could see the slow smirk pulling at his lips.The moment the words left your mouth, With a flick of his fingers, one of his feathers shot toward you. fast, but not actually meant to hit. It whizzed past your face, stirring your hair before circling back to him.

“Lumine, you flirt!” he called out, amusement lacing his voice as he swooped lower. “Calling for me from the rooftops now?” he called back, voice dripping with amusement. With an effortless flick of his wings, he shot downward, landing in a graceful crouch before standing to his full height. He tucked his feathers in smoothly, golden eyes locking onto yours first then, slowly, sliding to Dabi.

And just like that, the amusement in his expression cooled.

“…Okay.” Hawks’ posture shifted, subtle but there his wings twitching slightly, muscles tightening just enough to be noticeable. His sharp gaze flickered back to you, his smile still in place but lighter now, more calculated. “So. Why are you hanging out with this guy?”

Dabi, who had been watching this entire exchange with an expression of increasing boredom, let out an exaggerated groan. “Oh, great. The chicken landed.”

Hawks ignored him completely, his focus still locked on you. His voice was light, casual, but his eyes? His eyes were searching tracking, assessing.

“hmmm it really is a nice night,” he pointed out, head tilting slightly. “you’re not fraternizing with the enemy now?”

You rolled your eyes. “Relax, Bird Boy. I’m just hanging out.”

“…With him?”

“Yup.”

Hawks let out a slow breath through his nose, like he was trying to process that without reacting. Then, as if deciding to take another approach, he took a single step closer, his shoulder nearly brushing yours. “Y’know,” he mused, voice dipping into something smoother, more coaxing, “you could’ve called me if you wanted company. I would’ve been here in seconds. Way better company, too.”

Dabi let out a scoff, unimpressed. “Wow, subtle. Real smooth.”

Hawks shot him a side glance, then turned back to you, golden eyes half lidded, lazy with amusement. “What, I’m not allowed to be worried about my favorite pro hero?” His voice softened slightly, just enough that it felt personal, like he was directing it just to you. “Seriously, Lumine. What’s the deal?”

Dabi shifted beside you, taking another slow drag of his cigarette, exhaling the smoke in a way that almost curled toward you before dissipating. You felt the faintest brush of his fingers against the back of your hand so fleeting it could’ve been mistaken for nothing at all. “You really need to raise your standards,” Dabi muttered.

You arched a brow at him. “i’m not sure if you’re any better”

Dabi shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Hawks let out a slow chuckle, running a gloved hand through his windswept hair. “Wow, that’s crazy. Exact same thing I was about to say.”

You exhaled, shaking your head. “You guys are exhausting.”

Hawks leaned in just slightly, voice dropping low enough that Dabi wouldn’t hear it over the city noise. “You good?”

You glanced at him, surprised by the sudden shift in tone. His eyes weren’t just sharp now they were searching, careful, like he was looking for something beneath the surface. It wasn’t teasing anymore. It wasn’t playful. He was checking in. The corner of your mouth twitched up, but you kept your voice casual. “I’m fine, Kei.”

Hawks held your gaze for a beat longer, then exhaled, his easygoing smirk slipping back into place. “If you say so.”

Dabi watched the exchange with a blank expression before finally tossing his cigarette to the side, crushing it under his boot. “Alright, that’s my cue. I’ve hit my quota for annoying hero interactions tonight.” He stretched, rolling his shoulders before glancing down at you. Then, in the most casual, unbothered way possible, he reached out, fingers briefly ghosting over your wrist before stuffing his hands into his pockets. Just enough contact to be noticed. Just enough to linger.

Hawks’ wings flared, just slightly. Dabi smirked looking at his reaction. “Try not to let Bird Brain here talk your ear off.”

With that, he turned and disappeared into the shadows as easily as he’d arrived. Hawks let out a slow exhale, dragging a hand down his face. “You really know how to pick ‘em, huh?”

You grinned. “That’s how i got to know you”

Hawks just shook his head, eyes flickering to where Dabi had vanished. And then, almost too quiet to hear. “…Don’t let him pull you under, Y/n.”

watching as Dabi left, his sharp eyes lingering on the spot for a moment longer than necessary. His wings twitched slightly, a small, restless movement, before he finally turned his attention back to you. You could see it in his face he wasn’t just brushing this off. The usual playful glint in his eyes had dulled, replaced by something softer. More serious.

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Y/n…”

That alone was enough to make you pause. He rarely said your name like that. like it was weighted, like he was choosing his words carefully. He took a step closer, his voice dropping just slightly. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

You raised a brow. “Uh, we were just hanging out? You act like I got caught committing a crime.”

Hawks frowned, his golden eyes scanning your face, searching. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” His voice was quieter now, almost gentle. “Why are you hanging out with Dabi?”

You exhaled through your nose, leaning against the ledge. “I dunno, Kei. It’s not that deep. I just… got used to him, I guess. We cross paths a lot, and sometimes, I don’t feel like fighting. So we talk.”

Hawks didn’t look convinced. He stepped even closer, his warmth pressing against your side. “He’s dangerous, Lumine. And I know you can handle yourself. hell, you’re stronger than half the heroes I know but that’s not the point.”

There was something about the way he said it, the way his voice softened at the edges, that made your chest tighten just a little. You forced a smirk, bumping your shoulder against his. “What, you worried about me?”

Hawks didn’t laugh. Instead, he reached out and flicked a loose strand of hair away from your face, his gloved fingers barely grazing your skin. His touch was light, fleeting, but it left warmth in its wake.

“Of course, I’m worried about you, dumbass,” he muttered, his brows furrowing. “You matter to me, okay? And I know you. when you let people hang around, there’s always a reason. So, what’s the reason?”

You swallowed, caught off guard by the sincerity in his voice. Hawks was always teasing, always throwing out quick witted remarks and playful jabs. You looked away, focusing on the city lights instead of the concern in his eyes. “I don’t know,” you admitted after a pause. “I guess… I see something in him.”

Hawks’ wings drooped slightly. “Y/n—”

“Not like that,” you sighed. “I know he’s a villain. I know he’s done terrible things. But sometimes, when he’s not being, y’know, Dabi. he’s just some guy who’s been hurt one too many times. And I don’t think he ever really had someone in his corner.”

Hawks’ lips pressed into a thin line. He didn’t look angry, just… sad. Like he understood exactly what you meant, and that only made this worse. After a long silence, he huffed out a breath and shook his head. “You always do this,” he murmured, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Always finding strays.”

You smirked. “You say that like I didn’t find you first.”

Hawks let out a soft chuckle, tilting his head. “Yeah, but I’m a catch.”

You rolled your eyes, shoving him lightly, and this time he actually laughed. But the concern never fully left his face. “Just… promise me something,” he said, his voice quieter again. “Be careful. I don’t want to lose you to someone who doesn’t deserve you.”

Your heart stuttered in your chest, but you played it off with a grin. “Damn, Hawks. If I didn’t know better, i’d say you were in love with me”

He clicked his tongue, stepping back with a smirk, but his wings stretched slightly like he was reluctant to leave. “Tch, don’t get cocky.” But then his expression softened again, his golden eyes warm as they met yours. “…Just don’t make me worry, okay?”

You gave him a lazy salute. “No promises.”

Hawks let out a long suffering sigh, but he smiled anyway. “You’re the worst.”

he took off into the sky, leaving you alone with nothing but the fading sound of flapping wings and the lingering warmth of his touch. He had been gone for a while now, but you could still hear his voice in your head.

“Just don’t make me worry, okay?”

You sighed, resting your elbows on the ledge, staring out at the skyline.

“You’re brooding.”

You didn’t flinch at the voice, just smirked to yourself. “Didn’t know you were still lurking.”

Dabi strolled up beside you, hands shoved into his pockets, the faint smell of smoke and ash clinging to him. “Didn’t know you’d still be here,” he shot back, mimicking your tone. His voice was that usual mix of amusement and disinterest, but the fact that he hadn’t just left after Hawks showed up said enough.

You exhaled through your nose. “Guess we both like rooftops.”

Dabi snorted. “Guess so.”

Dabi watched you for a moment, his smirk still in place but his expression a little softer now. He leaned in slightly, closing that small space between your shoulders just enough to make it noticeable.

Finally, he spoke. “So. You and Bird Brain, huh?”

You rolled your eyes. “If one more person says that”

Dabi smirked, exhaling a slow curl of smoke. “Relax, Y/n or should I say Lumine since we’re supposed to be enemies,” he drawled, stretching out your name like it was a tease. “Just saying, he sure seemed invested in whatever this is.”

You scoffed. “He’s nosy.”

Dabi chuckled. “Oh, I know that. But he’s also jealous.”

You turned to him with a deadpan stare. “Really?”

He shrugged, smirk still in place. “Yeah. But I get it. I’d be jealous too if I had to watch someone else get all your time.”

That one caught you off guard. You blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “Dabi”

He cut you off with a lazy wave of his hand. “Relaxxxx, I ain’t about to start writing love letters or anything. Just making an observation.”

You chuckled, shaking your head. “Right. Sure.”

He leaned in slightly, just enough that his shoulder did brush against yours this time. “I do have to give you credit, though. Takes guts to flirt with the guy who’s actively trying to arrest me.”

“Hey,” you defended, “he’s my friend”

Dabi snorted. “Yeah, yeah, I noticed.” He tapped his fingers against the ledge, then glanced at you. His smirk softened just slightly, like he was debating whether to say something. After a beat, he nudged you lightly with his elbow. “You know, if Bird Brain ever gets too annoying, I do have ways to make him shut up.”

You raised a brow. “By setting him on fire?”

“Exactly.”

You snickered, nudging him back. “Yeah, let’s not.”

He hummed in response, then tilted his head toward you, blue eyes glinting. “You sticking around, or what?” You considered it. Hawks would definitely have a few choice words for you if he found out you spent even more time with Dabi tonight. But, you weren’t in a rush to leave. For a villain he always felt like a hero to you.

You shrugged. “Guess I am.”

Dabi let out a mock sigh. “Tch. Guess I’ll allow it.”

You shot him a grin. “How generous.”

He rolled his eyes but didn’t move away. The city hummed below you, but up here, it was just the two of you, shoulders barely brushing, the night stretching on ahead.

You: no, YOU'RE looking at him respectfully. i'm objectifying him to filth we're built different

Dabi: *so unbelievably disgusted*

love