#dabi fanfiction

[shiggybrainr0t]

dabi isn’t good at comforting people. aside from the fact that it was never really something he was given as a child up until now, he doesn’t have anyone he cares about enough to actually try. until you.

you’ve only been “dating” for a few months, and he’d rather die than admit it, but you’ve dug yourself a comfy little spot in his heart already. it’s the way you look at him, with understanding eyes. and the way you touch him with your soft fingertips-whether it be across his scars after you two have fucked or swiping a speck of dust off his coat.

dabi isn’t good at comforting people, so whenever you come home after work one day and your jaw is clenched and your hands are shaking, he’s at a loss. you don’t even look his way at where’s he’s sitting on your couch eating your snacks. you kick your shoes off and they land messily next to his (which he always lines up neatly because he thinks its a cute sight, his boots next to your smaller ones, like you live together or something).

whenever you stalk past him into the kitchen, he gets up for some unknown reason because he definitely wouldn’t have followed anyone else when they were this visibly upset. you’re standing in front of the coffee maker, jabbing at it aggressively whenever it doesn’t turn on. brows furrowed, he slowly comes up behind you and settles a hand on your waist.

“it’s not plugged in doll.”

“well why isn’t it?!”

you spin around at this, and dabi is horrified to see tears slipping down your cheeks. he’s never seen you cry before, and to see you reduced to tears is jarring.

he’s unsure, but he raises his hands to cup your face, using his thumbs to swipe away the tear tracks marring your pretty face. (because, he’s noticing, you’re still pretty even when you’re crying)

“want me to beat up the coffee machine for you?”

he’s relieved to hear you let out a wet chuckle, pushing your face harder against his hand.

“go change doll, and we can cuddle while you tell me about it.”

dabi isn’t good at comforting people, but he thinks it’s not so bad when it’s for you.

#You ever just have a bad day where even little things feel like big things #mat’s writing #dabi #dabi angst #dabi fanfic #dabi fanfiction #bnha dabi #dabi x reader #dabi x y/n #dabi todoroki #dabi x gender neutral reader #mha dabi #dabi headcanons #dabi fluff #dabi x you #dabi my hero academia #mha x reader #mha #my hero acedamia #my hero imagines #my hero academy fanfiction #my hero academia headcanons #my hero fanfic #my hero academia #my hero academia fanfiction

[dashielldeveron]

soulmate trope | dabi

Dabi’s route of soulmate trope.

"post-canon dabi? canon isn't even finished as of when this was posted on 30 july 2023!" to you. i know he's doing just fine. and obviously i will be wrong about some things. warnings: female reader. manga spoilers up to chapter 390: specifically about touya's body but vaguely about ~all of that~. sexual content. food mention/discussion. injury descriptions (burns) that aren't reader's. weeb slander. a note: part of the plot revolves around...analysing anime. i use hunter x hunter here, and if you are not into that, i have, to the best of my knowledge, included neither spoilers (aside from early story arc names) nor information that cannot be understood via context clues. additionally, there is a brief pokemon metaphor that also can hopefully be understood with context clues as well.

~27.7k

You’re being watched.

Or rather, you had the eerily intense inkling that you were being watched, or as if you were some sort of recently awakened sleeper agent—as if you were somehow the key to someone’s spying into U.A., even though the most secretive thing going on right now in 3-A’s common area was that Hagakure’s facial features were somewhat revealed by the drying face mask.

“Jirou,” you said, bookmarking your place, “Would you mind checking for—I don’t know, any kind of outside surveillance devices in here?”

Jirou bit the stem of the carnation she’d been about to weave into Yaoyorozu’s hair and shifted all the strands of the braid into one hand, and she tilted her head to jab the arm of the couch with her earjack. After a few moments, she unsheathed it, the hole in the couch sealing itself, and shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. What’s up?”

Furrowing your brow, you shoved your book between the cushion and arm of your chair. “I’m not sure. It’s—I have this weird feeling that someone’s looking at me. Or through me, really. Both? I don’t know how to describe it, but it feels like someone else is seeing what I’m seeing.”

“Do your eyes hurt, ribbit?” Asui asked from her spot on the floor, where she was sorting her m&ms by colour.

“No. More like I’m hyperaware of them,” you said, “But I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s watching all of this because of me.”

“What’s there to watch? It’s nothing but a Girls and Todoroki Night. There’s nothing worth seeing and or any big secrets being spilled. Well, spoilers for the New Year’s episode of Kamisama Kiss, but it’s been out for years already,” said Mina, gesturing towards the television, and Uraraka snatched Mina’s hand out of the air and laid it flat on the coffee table again, because she’s not done painting her nails, damn it. Mina sighed dreamily at the sheep whose wool fluffed enough to take up the entire screen. “What I wouldn’t give for my hair to have that much volume.”

“I guess you’re right,” you said, settling down into your chair, pulling Shinsou’s blue-pineappled blanket up to your neck (he was out on his bike, so he wasn’t attending this Girls and Todoroki Night [Shinsou and Todoroki were the only boys allowed, since their presence wasn’t obtrusive or contrary to the vibe. Additionally, Shinsou thought it was funnier if his name weren’t included in the title of these events]). “Y’know, in the manga, the New Year avatar isn’t a sheep. It’s a dragon.”

Mina blew on her hands as Uraraka rebottled the nail polish brush. “Whaaaaat?

“It was changed to a sheep to align with the year the episode was released,” said Todoroki, his thumb and index finger pinching his lower lip with his eyes glued to the screen, “I understand the change on a narrative scale, but I believe the dragon had more of a character arc than the sheep. The dragon didn’t think it was as appealing as other years’ avatars, and it had to learn to accept itself and accept others’ love for it. It was rooted in misunderstanding.”

For some reason, when you looked at Todoroki, you were doused with regret. Sharp and cold, followed by a splash of something more muddled: envy, maybe? Gratitude?

These…these feelings weren’t yours.

***

“I can’t believe I missed a Girls and Todoroki Night,” said Shinsou, grinning, his legs dangling off the dorm’s kitchen counter, “but alas! The night was calling, and I had to go out in it.”

“We will not spoil Kamisama Kiss for you,” said Todoroki. He was crouched in front of the oven, hands clasped as he stared through the tinted window at the browning potato wedges. “You will have to watch that episode on your own.”

“You should really read the manga,” you were saying as you scanned the inside of the refrigerator, looking for anything that might go well with the potatoes—ah, Aoyama’s got some bougie-looking sauce. Savoury, by the looks of it. “It goes farther than the anime covers, and it’s so sweet. The worldbuilding gets better, too.” You took out the bottle and gave it an experimental shake.

“Really?” Shinsou wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know; that villain guy isn’t very fun. Feels like too much time is wasted on him.”

Todoroki’s head snapped towards Shinsou at the same time you slammed the refrigerator shut. “No,” the both of you said at the same time, and you continued. “The anime hasn’t been quite as accurate in tone regarding that character, but he’s really wonderful, eventually. You really feel for what happened to him and for his past relationship to the main characters. Simple but effective job of deconstructing his villainy and granting him humanity.”

“Huh.” Shinsou propped his cheek on his fist, his ankle resting on his opposite knee. “I wonder how much nuance I’m missing because I’m only watching the anime.”

For a second, you felt as groggy as if you’d just woken up, your eyes focusing a bit more precisely, blurring the kitchen tiles for a moment before re-focusing, and it crept in again: the feeling that someone was watching you, that someone else was here.

“Hey, Shinsou, Todoroki,” you said, blinking several times, Aoyama’s brown sauce clutched in both hands, “Do my eyes look any different?”

Both of them looked you over. Shinsou shook his head. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’ve got—” You nodded towards Todoroki. “I have that same feeling from last night. Like someone’s watching. But Jirou said nothing was wrong.” Shrugging, you tossed the sauce to Shinsou and sat in front of the oven with Todoroki. “I guess Kamisama Kiss must bring out the voyeur in me. Or being voyeur-ed. Watched.” You crossed your legs at the same time Todoroki jolted because of a crushed peppercorn popping in the oven. “Maybe we should start reading manga alongside the anime so that we can judge how accurate they are. See how much character nuance is lost or preserved.”

Todoroki’s eyes bulged. “You have no idea how much that appeals to me. I desperately need to discuss the differences between the Hunter x Hunter 1999 anime, the 2011 anime, and the manga. Sero refuses to watch the 1999 version.”

Amusement. Condescension. Bubbling to the top of your consciousness.

Distinctly not yours.

Why would you be feeling these things in the face of something that sounded so wonderfully, uselessly pedantic? A project like Todoroki’s just proposed sounded like an absolutely ideal waste of time that would allow you to be more accurate than the vast majority of people when it came to plot, lore, and characterisation. Why would emotions you’d associate with making fun of someone pop up now? You didn’t want to make fun of Todoroki; you were enthusiastic about joining him in this pointless endeavour.

The timer on Shinsou’s phone blared, and he tapped it off, patting his pockets (?) for the oven mitt, which he spotted on the counter next to him. “Why would Sero refuse to watch the older version?”

Todoroki helped you stand and guided the both of you away from the oven. “To be fair, in the 1999 anime, the animators did take liberties with panel composition and brought in new angles and lines sporadically. Colours are also odd and inaccurate, and those are corrected, for the most part, in the 2011 version. More of the manga is covered, and the animation is smoother in the 2011 version as well.”

Why did you feel the distant sensation of laughing? Nothing about this has been funny, per se, but the…what was going on?

“Okay, I’ll bite,” you said, strangely heavy and hyperaware and surveying the tray of steaming potato wedges as Shinsou shuffled it to the stove, “I’ll do it with you, all this manga accuracy checking.”

“Me, too,” said Shinsou, shaking the over mitt off, “My suggestion is that we keep it to just the three of us, to prevent exhausting arguments, like we’d have in a big group the size of Girls and Todoroki Nights.”

“I can lend you the first few volumes,” said Todoroki, opening a cabinet to search for Aoyama’s sauce bowls, “After that, I have a link to high-quality scans I can send you.”

“Sounds perfect,” you said, reaching for a potato wedge that did not sizzle and screech as much as the others, “Should we watch the first episode tomorrow night?” When you retracted your hand at the burn, you felt your own pain and someone else’s sense of nostalgia.

***

You’d already been on the precipice of falling asleep during Present Mic’s lesson, but when a concentrated shot of fatigue pierced you, you set down your pen and reluctantly resolved to get the subsequent notes from Iida. God, couldn’t this wait until you were out of class? No one needed to see how terrible your own notes were. No one needed to see your drawings in the margins.

Burying your face in your hands, you dug the heels of your palms into your eyes, rubbing them as the lethargy kicked in, and you braced yourself for the uncanny sensation of being your own worst voyeur.

When you opened them, after the lightheaded dots blinked away, you weren’t in the classroom, instead entrenched in darkness. Well, wait—you groped around on your desk: physically, you still were upright in your desk at U.A., able to grasp your pen, set it down, able to faintly hear Present Mic, as if he’s in the next room over.

Blindly, you tapped Mina’s desk behind you, turning your head over your shoulder. “Do my eyes look weird to you?”

“No. Should they?” she whispered back—or maybe she said it at a normal volume, and the classroom had been so far removed the distance silenced her.

Biting the inside of your cheek, you faced the front again. Looks like you have to figure this out yourself, or else you’ll be sitting in pitch black for who knows how long.

A minute passed. Your eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes appearing—you’re inside. In a room with the lights off. Sideways, for some reason. One of the shapes was so rigidly rectangular that it had to be a shoji divider, and you were just trying to estimate its size when all of your mental facilities halted at a loud, rumbling groan.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” a scratchy, masculine voice said, “Must be my turn, huh?”

He flipped over, and barely cracked venetian blinds behind dark curtains just barely illuminated part of the scene: you were seeing this sideways because he was lying in bed, an out-of-place, opulent, Western-style bed in what you assumed was an Eastern-style room, judging what you could make out of traditional wallpaper and tatami flooring.

“Well, you’re not getting anything out of me,” he said, reaching for one of the many strewn pillows and hugging it—you lost half of your sight when his face sank into it (too dark for you to get a good look at his hands or arms), “Sucks for you, but I’m going back to sleep. Don’t care how curious you are. Not sharin’ anything with someone who can’t cook potato wedges right.”

No, get up. Get up. Say more right now. Who was he? It’s—it’s the middle of the day, anyhow; what is he doing asleep?

“Hah. You’re angry with me.” His laugh sounded more like a hiss, somehow. “Get used to it.”

He shut his eyes. After about a minute, the darkness faded, and Present Mic’s voice hit you at full volume, and you winced, clamping a hand down on your notes when the classroom came into view.

***

“You are not dropping out of school the semester you’re supposed to graduate,” said Aizawa, pinching the bridge of his nose, elbow digging into the puffy leather chair by Nezu’s desk.

“From my perspective, it does not appear you are a liability to U.A.’s security.” Nezu steepled his paws together, his pink toe beans preventing him from pressing them completely flat. “Simply seeing through each other’s eyes and feeling some of his emotions are no cause for the drastic security measures you are proposing. I believe that so long as you have some sort of indicator that either situation is happening, faculty can prepare for your temporary debility.”

“Don’t even think about abusing it to get out of class,” said Aizawa, propping his chin on his fist.

“You think I would? Shocked! Shocked and offended,” you said, “I’m gonna be in class; I don’t trust anyone else’s notes. I want my own interpretations of lectures.” You slumped down in your seat, tilting your head back to stare at the ceiling. “Principal Nezu, do you have an idea of why this is happening to me?”

“I do.” Nezu opened the top drawer in his desk to retrieve a stack of yellow-green papers, torn from a legal pad and crimped because of whatever was spilled on it. “Recovery Girl and Midnight have been analysing the results of Tainted Love’s quirk for some time now. The female rehabilitation centre with which Midnight works, Sakura Grove, has uncovered evidence of two other incidents that caused a soulmate bond with similar qualities to form.”

“What? No,” you said, letting a whine creep into your voice, “That means my soulmate’s a jerk. He was rude to me. He insulted my potato wedge recipe.”

Aizawa raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching upward as he crossed his arms. “You can’t expect there to be love at first sight, can you? Love is a choice. You work at it every day. You have to keep choosing it.”

“Yaoyorozu and Jirou were already dating when they got assigned soulmates,” you said, listing on your fingers, “Midoriya and Uraraka had been pining after each other for years—”

Aizawa scowled. “Stop that.”

“So, do you want me to report anything? Do you want me to duck out of class when he—checks in?”

“If you feel unsafe, let us know. Otherwise, it is of my opinion that you will be just fine,” said Nezu, and he reached for his paw-sized coffee cup to remove the melting stroopwaffle cookie off the top. “Report what you perceive as dangerous, but you deserve privacy. When you decide on your signal that the bond is active, please send an email to faculty members. Whether or not you inform your peers is at your discretion.”

***

So, of course, you told everyone.

Meaning no one batted an eye the next time the soulmate bond activated, which was in class. Feeling the exhaustion and the slight buzz from your soulmate popping in to watch through you, you made the phone call symbol, grabbed a marker from the whiteboard, and headed out into the hall, no questions asked.

“Hey,” you were saying, shoving your forearm against the concrete-block wall and popping the marker cap off with your mouth, “Good to hear from you. Didn’t know I could see through you, too. Excited to see how we’ll deal with that. This is my phone number.” You scrawled it across your arm, along with your given name above it. “If you can’t memorise it now, that’s fine. I’ll write it down next time, too, so you could prepare to have something nearby to record it with. I look forward to getting to know you.”

No strong emotions on his part. But he was there.

“Okay,” you said, and you turned to sink down against the wall to sit in the deserted hallway. “Some basic stuff: I’m a student at U.A., in my last year. I’m in that—uh, I’m in the class that’s gotten into a bit of trouble over the past few years. Midoriya, Bakugou, and all of them, if you watch the news. I’ve just ducked out of class with everyone.” You kept looking at your arm so that he could memorise it. “I don’t really wanna talk about my quirk, since that seems like such a boring, capital-A adult question, but I can tell you about it later, if you really want to know. Oh! I do not suck at making potato wedges. It was just a recipe that none of us had made before, and they were fine. They were good. I—”

And he’s gone, link severed.

Crossing your arms, you slumped against the wall. Did he choose to end it? Could he? He didn’t seem very receptive, so you wouldn’t put it past him.

***

You woke up from a nap watching through him play a video game, some non-discernible, first-person shooter. Again in the dark, but perhaps not in the same room. The windows weren’t open enough to let in enough light to tell.

Your soulmate never acknowledged you were there by gesture or word. Just played his stupid fucking game. You were trying to send him foul vibes of frustration and indignation, but he ignored you.

After a mere six minutes of the world’s worst Let’s Play, you decided you could be a little bitch as well.

***

“Oh! He’s here. Excuse me,” you said to Shinsou and Jirou, making the phone call gesture as you pushed yourself up from the lunch table, “I’ll be back in a moment. Please guard my gummies from Monoma.”

A flash of curiosity, finally, from your soulmate as he got the image of Shinsou and Jirou smirking to themselves and waving you off.

Once you were alone outside in the courtyard, you pulled out and unfolded the piece of pink construction paper, at this point every inch covered by doodles of flowers and increasingly shitty bulbasaurs. You tapped at the writing in the centre. “This is called a telephone number,” you said, “This one belongs to me. If you dial this number into a phone to call it, you will reach me. Then, we could have a conversation and arrange to meet up, instead of this unreliable, one-sided bond.”

You flattened your hand to smooth out the creases, halting midway when it struck you. “I’ve just realised you may be confused by this situation. Don’t worry; I am as well. But be assured, due to a quirk incident, we’ve been assigned soulmates. Yeah, I know they’re fake, but with this villain Tainted Love’s quirk, soulmates are real.”

He evidently was feeling like he wanted to walk straight into the ocean.

“I’m assuming you’re not a U.A. student, so—do you remember breathing in some sort of pink dust? Within about the past—I don’t know, two and a half years? That’s how long Tainted Love was active. She only got arrested about a month or so ago.” You couldn’t garner anything from him except for exasperation, so you continued. “And not, like, snorting a line of pink dust. It would’ve been in a dust cloud. A bit like fog. You would’ve noticed it.”

Staring at your phone number the whole time, you allowed him silence to think. Whatever he was feeling was very subdued, so you couldn’t really surmise what it was, but ten seconds before the bond broke, a livid, fiery ire consumed your whole body in the heat of recognition.

***

Shinsou, Todoroki, and you were all crowded around a laptop in Shinsou’s dorm to watch the beginning episodes of Hunter x Hunter the next time your soulmate spoke to you. He’d gone a couple of times ignoring you in silence, once outside on a walk during the day on a path uptown you didn’t recognise, and the other on some rooftop while playing on his phone and watching a meteor shower. Completely disregarding your attempts to give him your number or talk to him in real time.

It just figured that he bothered to spare you any information when you were trying to see what the next phase of the Hunter Exam was, so Todoroki and Shinsou paused the show for you and waited. With a stab of affection for your friends, you moved to the corner, waiting for your soulmate to say something.

And he was. Your soulmate knew more combinations of swear words and general filth than you’ve ever cared to consider, and you were almost impressed with the creativity of his vulgarity. Outside under the night sky, he was furiously ripping open some medium-sized, cardboard box as he stomped towards a carefully cultivated, lilypad-covered, manmade pond towards the back of a highly organised, traditional garden.

Eventually, non-profanity was added. “Goddamn fucking shit-ass fish and goddamn fucking shit-ass crusty motherfucking doctor can’t take care of his own goddamn fucking pet project.” Tips of his house slippers stopping at the pond only by way of running into the stone wall, he stumbled, growling in frustration, before regaining his balance and yanking out the plastic bag inside the remnants of the box. “Wants a goddamn gift for fucking Mom but can’t be arsed to do it him-fucking-self. Deserves every fish fucked into his respiratory system, clogging up his arteries to give himself a goddamn heart attack. And then I can’t be blamed for—” The plastic stretched, and he ended up tearing it in half above the water, pieces falling atop waterlilies. “Shit on a cuntbag. What the fuck. I don’t deserve this.”

He stretched to reach the waterlilies, cupping his hands to sweep the fish food off and into the water. And—the moonlight struck the gently rippling water, enough for you to see a flash of an orange koi tail break the surface tension, but not enough to see whatever was going on with his hands—not that he was doing anything strange with them (just picking shreds of plastic out of the water), but they somehow were strange. They moved stiffly and had some sort of bumps on them, but—does this guy live in darkness? You couldn’t tell anything about what his hands looked like aside from the shadowed bumps, which could be anything.

“I deserve a lot, but I sure as hell don’t deserve this.” He rounded the pond and punched a few buttons on a small, hidden, monitor, checking the pH of the pool and water levels. “Not my fucking job. Not my fucking job. Why do they think—why am I the one to do this shit. How come I can get in trouble with my fucking brother for him not taking care of his project.” He swatted at his wet bathrobe sleeve, pissed, and shook out some of the water. “Hey, you. I know you’re there.”

Back in the dorm, you jolted in your seat. In the distance, you could hear Shinsou ask what was wrong. “Nothing,” you said, sounding distant yourself, “He acknowledged me is all. Hasn’t done that for a while, so it felt like a fourth wall break.”

Your soulmate sat down on the edge of the pond, glaring out at the rest of the garden (wisteria heavy, vines swaying in the night wind). “Are you hot?”

You’d never wanted to be able to transfer direct words or actions to him so much, because he needed to be strangled.

“I’m not kidding.” He crossed his arms, covered by a dark bathrobe, sticking his hands in his armpits. “Are you hot? I don’t like the idea of being connected to some hideous fuckwad.”

Never mind. Now you have never wanted to be—

“This quirk shit isn’t gonna last long, but if you’re hot, you need to get on my dick before it goes away. I wanna see how it looks giving me a blowjob from your perspective.”

Kill. Destroy. Maim. Eviscerate, even.

“Ooh, watch out. We’ve got an uptight, prudish bitch over here,” he said, and he laughed—again, sounding more like a hiss than anything else. “Well, then. If you’re not gonna put out, then I’ve got no use for you. Don’t need anyone, especially not some goddamn lunatic who claims to be my soulmate. Too many people are interfering in my life, anyway. And to be honest, it seems like you’re dumb and irritating. I don’t like people like you.”

Maybe you’re soulmates because you’re destined to kill him on sight. Your soul, calling out for his to suffer extreme violence. He’d deserve it.

May all his potato wedges burn.

***

Monoma was at the next Hunter x Hunter anime viewing, because he’d been dying to know why you were wearing an actual and literal clown costume, wig and enormous foam nose included.

“I’m liking the new hero outfit,” Monoma said, flipping his hair back with a flourish, “but why are you wearing it during our off-hours?”

“Shove off,” you said, grinning as Shinsou tossed you a pillow to hold, “Did you bring your peach gummies?”

“I did,” said Monoma, sitting next to you on Todoroki’s tatami mats, and he pulled a massive bag of white peach gummies from inside his jacket, handing it to you to open. “May I ask if it’s seriously part of your new uniform, or—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Monoma,” you said, ripping open the bag at the notch, “I’m making a point.”

“Her soulmate,” Shinsou supplied, pulling up the next episode, “He wants to know what she looks like. So, she’s been dressing up in horrible, gawdy shit so that he can never really tell, even around mirrors.”

“He’s pissed,” you said, beaming, digging into the bag and popping a gummy into your mouth, “He wants me to stop playing around, but he was mean to me. Mean to me, unprovoked, and in a way that wasn’t hot. Tomorrow, I’m wearing a sheet and running around like a ghost. I will say nothing to him but boo.”

“I suppose that explains the influx of regular face masks you’ve taken to wearing during class.” Monoma scoffed, his incredulous, open mouth stretching into a grin. “You are impossible. If your humourless soulmate is worth his salt, then he should at least value the effort you’re putting into it.”

“Sero has sent me a message,” interrupted Todoroki, thumb swiping his phone screen, “He says that he has changed his mind and would like to join us. He’s started rereading the series and likes it more this time around.” Todoroki looked up and around his room, lips pursed. “There is not much space for five people. It is getter harder to see the laptop.”

***

The five of you started the Heaven’s Arena arc of Hunter x Hunter in Aizawa’s dorm apartment, seeing as he had the best television setup: for one, having an actual television instead of simply relying on his computer. His sound system held up, too, though you suspected Present Mic had something to do with that, instead of Aizawa’s own preferences.

You, Shinsou, Todoroki, Monoma, and Sero were scattered across Aizawa’s living room, all cosied under blankets and pillows and pointed towards his wall-mounted television, sitting on his cat-hair covered couch and armchairs, mugs and snacks on his coffee table, socked feet loose, and house slippers at the edge of the shag rug. The cats, Dango and Konpeito, chose to snuggle up towards Todoroki and you (beat that, Shinsou!), so you were careful not to disturb them from their slumber on your lap. No sudden movements, even when the tired dizziness of your bitch soulmate faded in.

“Spoilers for Hunter x Hunter, I suppose, even though it’s been out for decades,” you said under your breath, raising your hand to signal to the others that your soulmate was looking in. At your movement, Dango raised her head from her cocoon in your lap to yawn, her face nearly turning inside out, and she flinched, her pupils dilating, at the creak of the door.

Laden with groceries, Aizawa stepped into his own apartment, his brow furrowing at the sight of his students in his living room. “You have ten seconds to tell me what you’re doing here.”

“The fuck?” Sero whipped his head towards Shinsou and back at Aizawa. “Shinsou told us you were okay with it.”

“I said that he wouldn’t mind, which he can’t if he doesn’t catch us,” said Shinsou, bracing himself when Aizawa tugged at his capture weapon around his neck, “It’s my fault, Aizawa-sensei. Please don’t get angry at anyone else.”

Your soulmate seemed pleased that you were getting in trouble. Bastard.

Aizawa set his cloth bags on his kitchen counter, the insides shifting with the weight of the groceries. “Is this appropriate for Eri to watch?”

“Well, in general—”

A character onscreen chose that moment to seductively moan another character’s name, over and over again.

Aizawa winced, scrunching his eyes shut tightly. “Turn that shit off. Find another place to watch it.” Shaking his head, he unbagged the first of his groceries. “Shinsou, never bring anyone, including yourself, into my personal space again with express permission.”

“Damn it,” you said, reaching for the remote. You pressed the power button, watching the screen fade from the vibrant colours of Heaven’s Arena to black, with Aizawa’s living room reflecting back at you. Forlornly, you scratched the back of Dango’s neck, watching her mirrored reaction, before you realised what you were doing: giving your bitch-ass soulmate a clear view of your bare face. Eyes bulging, you gasped and bent over to hide your face, with Dango scurrying away at being disturbed.

The connection cut at the faint suggestion of intrigue.

***

YOU

hey i know we said we’d keep it small but. i think midoriya would really enjoy the battle analysis that the hxh characters are doing

YOU

bc they be doing some QUICK analytic work based on their opponents’ personalities

TODOROKI 💅🎏

Midoriya has been asking more questions than usual during our sparring sessions.

SERO 🧃🍊

ffs why isn’t he already in the group? should’ve thought of him

SHINSOU 💜🍡

want me to add him?

YOU

would that be okay, todoroki?

TODOROKI 💅🎏

There’s more than enough room at our new venue. We should invite him.

SHINSOU 💜🍡

why don’t you text him then? it’s at your place

MONOMA 🔇🎭

Midoriya CANNOT sit next to me

MONOMA 🔇🎭

I’d like to hear the onscreen dialogue instead of whatever he’s saying under his breath

MONOMA 🔇🎭

He CANNOT shut up

YOU

WHOMST won’t shut up??????

SERO 🧃🍊

don’t worry no one will sit next to you

MONOMA 🔇🎭

Good

MONOMA 🔇🎭

Wait

TODOROKI 💅🎏

Midoriya can attend! He’ll be a little late today, but I think we should wait for him, since it’s his first time joining us.

Startled by the waiter, you put your phone down on your notebook and accepted your coffee graciously. You shifted your laptop and notebook over so that you could cup the mug in front of you, its warmth seeping through the sides, and you took a tentative slurp. Interesting. You’ll finish it, but you won’t order this again.

You were killing time that Saturday by getting ahead on your work for Put Your Hands Up Radio: editing and fact-checking news segments that Yamada would read between songs towards the evening. Electing to get some sunshine on your skin before hunkering down with the group again to analyse some anime, you’d chosen to edit the articles outside at a café you’d discovered recently, one at which you hadn’t decided on a regular order yet and were shopping around the menu each time you came. Plus, if you’d stayed on campus, no doubt Shinsou or Monoma would’ve found you to distract you.

The café’s patio with scorching, cast-iron furniture and haphazard parasol installation led to most of its customers sitting inside, but that meant you had space to think, even with the hot groves of your seat imprinting patterns into your skin.

Your soulmate was probably being rude because he was scared, or perhaps he didn’t believe that Tainted Love’s quirk was legitimate. You’d have to assure him that it was, as you’d run through Nezu’s report with Midnight and Recovery Girl, fact-checking that. Either way. Some frustrated guy—living at home, apparently, and pissed about it—was paired out of the blue with some student at U.A. He might be scared that you were a creep.

Tainted Love’s team’s notes on her quirk that Midnight had confiscated explained that each soulmate bond, somehow, was moulded around the pair’s personalities and would fulfil a lifelong need. A lot of responsibility, it seemed, but if it were true—and other pairs proved it true—you would fulfil it naturally, and so would he.

So, even though your soulmate had been rude, you’d give him a chance. The soulmate bond existed for a reason. Plus, he might be a real-life tsundere, and wouldn’t that be fun to crack? To be the only one a rude, evil person was soft for was the ideal, wasn’t it? Someone so naturally cruel and heartless but learning to be kind for you—

Get a hold of yourself. He’s a real guy who will be in your life forever, not just someone you can throw away, like a celebrity/pro-hero crush. Treat him seriously.

“I’m…being serious,” you said to yourself, pouting into your coffee. You hunched in your seat to drink from the mug without lifting it, and you slorped away the neck of the latte art swan the barista had so carefully poured. “He’s probably not even be a sexy sort of cold-hearted. He’s just a type of bitchiness I haven’t learnt how to handle yet.”

Those boys in the anime analysis group? You could play their types of bitchiness like the world’s smallest fiddle. They were all so easy to handle (especially Monoma because of his predictability; Todoroki gave you the most trouble due to his complete non sequiturs), and it was fun bouncing off the petty parts of their personalities. Your soulmate spun things differently, but you’d learn his inclinations in time. If not, it’s not worth your time trying to “fix” someone who has no redeeming vulnerability.

You sighed. Now that you’ve lost your editing groove, you might as well do some last-minute reading before watching the next few episodes tonight. Closing your laptop, you reached down into your bag to get the next volume of Todoroki’s manga, and your vision blurred over, dizziness incoming. Well, at least you’re sitting down.

You held the manga volume in your lap and waited for your soulmate’s line of sight to appear. If he were in a darkened room yet again, you could buy yourself a little treat. The café’s display case had some sort of new chess square that you’d been eyeing. And—shit, sunlight was coming through. No little treat for you.

Well, maybe you’ll get one, anyway. You slumped farther down in your seat, blinking as dappled, sunlight-covered pavement and an empty terrace outside a business across a busy street came into view—your soulmate jumped back off the road when a car whooshed by, and after that, he jaywalked, horns blaring in his wake.

He did a little hop to get on the opposite sidewalk, hands in his pockets, and peered past the iron fence into the window of the shop—a packed coffee shop; maybe you could at least learn his coffee order, because then you’d have some shred of information about him. But no, he unlatched the iron gate and wove his way through the cast-iron patio chairs and tables, and—

You’re staring right at you: sitting, legs crossed, not taking up space, stuff spread out over your table, and he’s gaining on you. You flinched, watched yourself flinch, and your gaze darted around until you were able to meet his (your) eyes (your head making minor, nervous movements you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t seen them), expression cautious, curling in on yourself on impulse. When you saw how, through an outsider, that made you look small, you made the effort to sit up and roll your shoulders back, elbows on the table. You watched yourself recoil at the heat of the iron, and you had to use his perspective to know where your notebook was so that you could rest your arms on it.

He brushed past your table’s open chair, instead yanking the table by the edge away from your lap so that he could stand closer to you and grabbing your face. He first cupped your jaw with his whole hand, pale skin and leather of a fingerless glove cold to the touch, and then, when he seemed sure you weren’t going to protest (his vision turned slightly to the left—he must have tilted his head), he narrowed his grip in little jerks of his hand, sliding erratically from gripping your jaw to just tilting your chin upwards towards him. He turned your head to the left and to the right before returning to centre to stare you down (you’d been pliant under his control, because the doubling of you watching you do things was throwing off your senses of balance and direction).

“Not as hard as you fucking made it out to be, huh?” His thumb rubbed over your chin. His nail was cracked. “Now, are you gonna stop acting like a little bitch, or are we gonna keep playing your stupid game?”

“First of all,” you said, fascinated by the way your lips curled in under your teeth to shape the consonants, and judging by where your soulmate was looking, he was, too. “It’s not an act. I am a little bitch.”

“No more of that hiding shit.” He tapped your cheek a little harder than he needed to with his middle two fingers. “Don’t know why you’d wanna hide this, anyway.”

You wouldn’t’ve said you winced at his rough touch, but you noticed enough of an aggravated microexpression around your eyes that you could tell you didn’t like it. “You’re doing the same. Hiding what you look like from me.”

“And I’m gonna keep doing it. You get nothing. There is no us. Soulmates don’t exist, and even if some hack fraud’s quirk has paired us off, I don’t need anybody, least of all you.”

“Well, maybe you don’t need anyone,” you said, your eyes dipping to see more of his hand (hot damn, we forgot we can’t see through our own eyes that quickly?) and then raising them to look directly into your soulmate’s—hyperaware of the way your eyelashes fluttered against your skin, of the slight pinch of your eyebrows, of the way the sun struck your cheeks, “but you could want someone.”

A sliver of a cool breeze wove its way through the patio, some of your hair swaying with it.

“I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want,” you said, lying, “but at the very least, we could communicate enough for this to be easy for us. Please let me give you my phone number, and please save it this time.”

His thumb inched up to press into your lower lip.

“Please,” you said, eyes dark but slightly glassy, letting your tongue tap the tip of his thumb, so lightly wetting it that it was as if you hadn’t touched it at all.

Your soulmate tilted his head again, lurching to the side as he shifted his weight to lean on the table. He knocked your pen onto the ground, and when you made the slightest movement to grab it, he pressed his thumb harder against you to still you, and he shook his head.

Your throat ran dry. Your (his) eyes honed in on the bead of sweat dripping down it and into your blouse. “Give me your name, then. A name, if you hate me that much.”

“It’s Touya,” he grumbled, and he closed his eyes in the moment before he kissed you, cold lips open before even touching yours (both rough, but his lower lip was much rougher for some reason). Blind, you startled back at the initial touch, but he held your chin firmly near his, sliding his gloved hand to your cheek as his tongue did into your mouth, pressing against the roof of your mouth and along your gums, alternating pressure where he pleased, not seeming to care what you did with your tongue—not that you were doing much at all due to surprise, but you at least had the mind to press your lips back, because while yes, his style was unorthodox, it still felt good. He laughed through his nose, once, when you slid your tongue against his, but when you raised a hand to cup his cheek, he pulled away before you could do more than graze him.

“Touya,” you said, and now that he was looking at you again, you—well, you looked kissed out, leaning towards him to chase that feeling, to encourage him to touch you again, and you looked fucking hot (the hell? It took a lot for you to think of yourself that way, and today hadn’t even been a good day for you, but now, freshly kissed, saying your soulmate’s name, you found yourself thinking you were pretty. Uh. Could this be what he was thinking instead of you? You couldn’t tell; it felt like it was coming from somewhere deep in your gut). “Touya. Let me write—”

You watched yourself grapple for your pen for a while. He huffed, crossed his arms, and bothered to look down where your pen was for you, and when he did, you finally grabbed it.

“Touya,” you said, uncapping the pen and hovering over your notebook, and you paused after the first stroke. “Touya spelled like that Todoroki Touya who released that Endeavor video during the war?”

The ink bled through the sheet of paper from being pressed in one spot for too long.

“Yeah,” he said eventually, voice rasping, “Spelled just like his.”

“Okay,” you said, bending over your paper and writing based on muscle memory, and under his name, you wrote your phone number for him again, with your name written beneath it, just to hammer it in. You ripped the page out of your notebook with some difficulty before passing it to him.

Touya scanned it and rubbed his thumb over your name, the leather of his fingerless glove catching on the uneven tear.

Cute. Nerd. “Do the gloves have something to do with your quirk?”

“What? No,” he said, crumpling the paper and stowing it in his pocket, and he kept his hands there, hiding them, “I don’t have a quirk.”

Okay, so Touya spoke in a rush and concealed evidence. Sounds like a lie. Monoma took that route on occasion, so the obvious thing for you to say was “Oh, so you wear them because of Naruto? Do you run like him, too?”

“Fuck off,” he spat, and you watched yourself grin: you’ve got him. “As if I had time to be a fuckin’ otaku.”

“Good to know,” you said, “So, all the manga re-analysis I’ve been doing with my friends is new to you? I hope you’re not planning on reading or watching any of the works that we’re covering, then. Unless you wanted to read along with us?”

“I don’t need that shit to scorch my brain.” For some reason, he winced, scrunching his eyes shut for a moment, and you waited in the dark for him.

“You have enough going on?”

He pried his eyes open, blinking blearily at you, still grinning, still smug. “Yeah,” he said, and he dug his left hand out to stare at the back of it, leather shining in the sunlight while he wiggled his fingers. He bent across the table to grab your coffee, fingers spidering over the rim to grip it, and he brought it to his mouth. “This is fucking awful; what’s wrong with you?” he asked after an audible swallow.

“It’s not my usual order.” Closing your notebook, you crossed your arms, staring down at you and feeling more and more like you’re in a dream. “You can either tell me what your quirk is, because I know you’re lying, or you could stay? For coffee? I’ll buy you something better.”

(You would have asked what’s up with his appearance that he didn’t want you to see or feel, but considering how early in your first official meeting it was, the question may be too insensitive, especially if he were born with it.)

Touya glanced over his shoulder, saw something you couldn’t, and set your mug on the iron table with a quiet clink. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and he spun around, taking the first step away.

You slammed a hand on the table purely on guesswork based on where he left your mug, and the sound of shaking iron and tinkling porcelain resounded, distant when you heard it through his ears, yet feeling the vibrations travel through your own arms. “Tell me your goddamn quirk, you daft fucker.”

Touya paused, and he turned back to you. “That’s more like it.” He sat on your table, at the place over your lap, and he reached out towards your face. You saw yourself lean back, eyes wide, but he simply dug his fingers into your hair at your hairline, scratching your scalp and digging his nails in enough to hear the movement.

(You saw yourself frown the moment you noticed his skin was colder than the glove.)

“Barking at me like that is how information is usually torn out of me. Makes me feel at home,” he said, a bit too cheerfully for your liking, “You can be trained to be a bitch towards me yet.”

“Touya,” you said, raising your head to embolden more of his touch, “Who’s—who’s been treating you like that? You don’t deserve it.”

“Shut up.” Touya laid his hand flat atop your head, the weight of it pushing down on you. “Sure, I lied. Said I didn’t have a quirk. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.” Your tongue swiped over your lower lip, and Touya’s gaze darted to it. “I want any scrap of you I can get. Everything I’ve already learnt I’ve filed away in my heart: your name, the way you speak, your hatred of your brother’s fish and living at home—”

The hand on your hand slipped to slap over your mouth. “Jesus Christ, stop noticing things about me. Freak. Goddamn.” Touya lifted his hand off of you, and based on his perspective, he ran it through his own hair. “So that you don’t go making your own intrusive observations, I’ll tell you about my quirk: I effectively don’t have one anymore. I used it a lot, and it fucked me up. So, for my own self-preservation, which I’ve been told I should value, I can’t use it anymore. Good enough for you?”

“Great enough for me,” you said, “I’ll take care not to talk about my quirk or hero course stuff too much. I don’t want you to feel left out.”

“Holy shit,” said Touya, and he broke eye contact with you to stare at his boots (scuffed, black, but new, so the scuffing must be intentional), blinking rapidly before pressing—probably—his thumb and forefinger against his eyelids.

Something was deeply wrong with this man. You needed him to kiss you again. You opened your mouth to ask him to, but wooziness and your dry throat called; the ripped page of your notebook you’d been staring at dripped back into your own perspective at a glacial pace. You heard the scuffle of his shuffling off the iron table and the grit of his boot against the concrete, and when you grappled for him in the dark, your hand clenched around nothing.

You rubbed your eyes until the vertigo passed, and when you opened them, Touya was gone.

***

Later that afternoon, you were scrolling through your phone on the end cushion of one of Todoroki’s couches in the living room in a poor effort not to gawk at everything. You expected some of it could be excused, since it’s your first time at his house, but good God, rich people were insane. This was the biggest, traditionally-styled building (estate?) you’ve been in since you toured a castle preserved from the Edo period—but it was apt, you supposed, since Endeavor had been acting as a sort of daimyo of his own.

Dormer gables. Hip-and-gable roofs, with golden shachihoko shibi cupping the corners—though instead of the customary sea monsters, if your eyes weren’t deceiving you, they appeared to be made for flame-swimming instead of in water. A recessed entryway, its wooden flooring tiles hand-cut in tiny designs to make you aware of the space, with brand-new guest slippers already provided before you could ask. Todoroki’s house (estate?) screamed business, or at the very least, don’t touch anything.

At least the living room in which you sat stiffly had a touch of clear modernity—and so it seemed that the inner rooms actually revealed that they were living in the modern age, but the barrier of traditional architecture to get to actual living space heaved a hyperawareness of outsider onto your shoulders.

Todoroki himself, bless him, moved around like the elegant austerity didn’t even occur to him. Waiting for Midoriya with the rest of you, he’d helped everyone spread out their notes and manga over the short table and floor, gathering blankets for everyone when it occurred to him that not everyone’s body tolerated temperature like he did (since the house was kept oddly cold), and, instead of offering tea, like he’d said his sister would expect him to do, he provided a peculiar but pleasant combination of snacks: cheap-ass cup noodles, strawberry chardonnay-flavoured cheese on soup crackers, old mooncakes that had been in the fridge for a month but he declared were still good, and gummy worms for Monoma.

The bitch even bought everyone a fancy little drink according to personal preferences—and no one had even requested them or informed him what to get, but he’d gotten everything right, regardless (you suspected he’d asked Shinsou for help).

“Thank you,” you said, turning over in your hands the poshest bottle of pink lemonade you’ve ever seen, “You’re a very gracious host, Todoroki.”

He slurped his own caramel frappe. “I’m very excited to have so many friends over at once.”

“Of course,” you said, your weight jostling on the couch cushion as Todoroki sat next to you, “I can’t believe we didn’t think of going off-campus to watch this shit earlier. There’s way more privacy here.”

“Our doors are always open nowadays,” he said, and when Sero tapped Todoroki on his shoulder to help open another package of cheese, he held up a finger to pause your conversation.

Smiling softly, you twisted off the bottlecap of your lemonade, holding it up to your nose to inhale that pressurised burst of lemon scent, and—oh, hey, you felt a little lightheaded as you did so. Two times in one day? That’s new. At least it was from your perspective this time, so you didn’t have to worry about knocking anyone’s drink over.

“Hey,” you said, snuggling down into the couch, your palm atop the opening of your drink (when Monoma shot you a questioning look with the phone call hand signal, you nodded, and he relaxed and leaned towards you, his teeth cutting into his lower lip as he grinned). “Funny how we keep meeting like this, yeah?” you asked, feeling soft and full of love for this fucker, and you reached towards the coffee table to set down your drink and grab a flower-shaped mooncake. “I guess I can stop hiding from my reflection now, sweet boy.” You made eye contact with yourself in the reflection of the Torodokis’ enormous flatscreen, and you held your mooncake up in a toast before biting into it. “Hope you’re well. You seemed stressed earlier. I’m currently—”

Your phone rang in your lap, and you narrowed your eyes at the unknown number before answering it. “Hello?”

“Where the hell are you right now?”

“Wow,” you said, chewing, “No greeting, even? No mention of how much that you miss my voice or my lips now that you’ve—”

“Just tell me where the fuck you are,” said Touya, at the same time that Monoma’s eyebrows shot to his hairline at the kissing implication, and he thumped Shinsou in the chest for him to look up from his phone.

“Does it matter?”

“I told you my quirk shit when I didn’t want to, so fucking tell me,” said Touya, sounding muffled and, again, like he stood near traffic.

Swallowing mooncake in a rush and choking a bit, you cleared your throat and said, “Fine. I don’t know why it matters that much to you, but I’m at a friend’s house. Our anime analysis group has gotten too big for the dorms, so we’re trying out his place.”

You had to ensure the call hadn’t dropped due to his long response time. “What friend?” he asked.

You raised a brow, though he couldn’t see you. “I doubt you would know—shit!”

Struggling to tear the plastic covering the cheese, Todoroki had accidentally slammed his elbow into your collarbone.

“Geez.” You winced at Todoroki and rubbed the spot. “No, no, I’m fine,” you said when he reached towards your collarbone, his fingertips already icing over, “You may want to go get a knife to open that, though.”

Nodding soberly, Todoroki lowered his thawing hand and rose from the couch, tossing the cheese to himself. “I’ll do that. Anyone need anything from the kitchen while I’m up?”

While the others answered, you spoke into your phone again, hand on your chest. “Sorry about that. I guess if you paid attention to the news last year, you’d know him: one of Endeavor’s kids, Todoroki Shouto.”

The soulmate connection started to trickle away, but Touya stayed on the phone. “Do you not have any other friends who have a place?” Plastic crinkled on his end, along with a car horn in the background. “Hell, the library downtown rents out portable TVs—”

“Why should I be at another friend’s house?” Touya wouldn’t be able to see the reflection of your self-satisfied smirk now, but surely he could hear it in your voice. “Jealous that I’m at the house of another man?”

Touya gagged into the speaker. “Someone’s full of herself. Don’t wait up for me,” he said, and he hung up.

You pulled your phone away from your ear, pouting at the call screen before creating a new contact.

“You didn’t tell us you’d met your soulmate,” said Shinsou.

“It only happened this afternoon,” you said, saving his number under Touya 🐠🚷 (the fish for the koi pond he hated, and the no pedestrians sign for his apparent propensity to jaywalk), “and I’m not sure what to make of him. I was hoping to form my own opinion before telling all of you.”

Todoroki perked up and tilted his ear skyward at the sound of the front door opening. “I’ll get it,” he said, standing, “I bet that’s my brother. He’s back four hours late from physical therapy; I hope everything’s okay.”

Your eye twitched.

(Todoroki had warned everyone before coming over that his family would probably be in and out. Less so Fuyumi and Natsuo, because Fuyumi had recently moved in with her significant other and Natsuo had his own place near campus, but more of his parents and Dabi. Well. Touya, now, but you had your own Touya to worry about.

You’d met Dabi. Twice, during freshman year. When he’d been a villain, instead of whatever was happening with him in recovery. Rather formulative experiences for you, ones you only permitted yourself to think about in the hollowness of lonely nights—but you didn’t need those memories anymore, because you had your Touya now.

Remember? You have your own Touya. You don’t need another.)

“Do you want me to carry that for you?”

Todoroki’s voice trailed behind boot scuffing and a sliding door, and in Dabi/Touya shuffled—hoodie yanked up (layered over a longer coat?), strings pulled firmly around his face, plastic bags from the convenience store down the street on his wrist, very determinedly staring at the floor as he strode past behind the couch instead of at the four of you strewn across his living room, ducking into the kitchen as soon as possible.

You’d barely seen him for five seconds, and your heart was going to beat out of your chest. Or maybe that was just the bruise forming on your collarbone.

Todoroki nodded after his brother, standing behind your place at the couch. “There’s no ceremonial introduction, I assume. That’s my brother, Touya. You’ve all,” said Todoroki, scratching the back of his neck, “met him before. But! If you’re nervous, we will not be seeing much of him. He doesn’t spend much time in the main house; he lives in the old-fashioned teahouse towards the back of the garden. Privacy, you know, even though we’ve got to keep him close.” Todoroki wetted his lips as he looked towards the emptied shrine on the far wall. “He shouldn’t be any trouble, but I may have to zip out on occasion to help him. Not all of his skin grafts are taking.”

The doorbell rang, and Todoroki started towards it. “That must be Midoriya. Sero, would you please pull up the next episode?”

When Todoroki stepped into the entryway to greet him, you couldn’t suppress your curiosity. “I’m gonna go pour this over ice,” you said, gesturing with your pink lemonade bottle, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Shinsou—the only one whom you’ve told about what happened with Dabi back then—shot you a crooked grin, but he distracted Monoma from noticing exactly what you were doing while you sneaked away down the hall.

His back was to you. Water flowed out of the kitchen faucet while he yanked his hoodie over his head and tossed it over the back of a chair, and he did the same with a longer, black coat—similar in shape to the coat he’d worn as a villain but not the same one. Maybe he’d grown accustomed to having the weight of it on his body, so what he wore now was a type of security blanket. While he ran a spoon under the faucet, he fumbled behind himself for his plastic, convenience store bag and fished out a pudding cup.

Backtracking a little, you purposely made your footsteps audible so that you wouldn’t startle him, and you entered the kitchen, shaking your lemonade for more noise to alert him of your presence.

His white brows pinched when he saw you, and he hastily shut the water off and scooted off to the edge of the counter while he put his stuff away, his movements rigid and close to his chest.

“Hi,” you said (oh, my God, you were talking to Dabi; holy shit), “Where do the cups live?”

Dabi blinked slowly, unable to look at you, and he peeled the lid off of his pudding cup. He glanced towards the door and back towards his stuff on the table, and he pointed towards a cabinet, his finger returning to his fist in a rush to get back what he was doing.

“Thank you,” you said, opening the one he’d pointed to. Oh. Fancy. Lots of choices. “I hope we’re not bothering you. We can—we can always leave, if you need us to. Or you could join us, if you like.” You turned around in time to see the flat of his tongue lick pudding off of the lid, stitches showing at the back of his tongue, and in the moment where he ducked his head, the tiny, unblemished part of his skin near the corners of his eyes blazing pink, your brain short-circuited.

(Dabi had been your first kiss.

During freshman year, in the week of that first round of internships, you’d been planted in Hosu City, around the time Stain closed his fist around the public consciousness. On a night patrol, your mentor had slipped into a restaurant that the yakuza frequented and stationed you in a nearby alley to watch for other yakuza incoming from the employees’ entrance.

An official sidekick had caught up with you—late forties, spandex, unrecognisable. You’d been terse in your replies, since he’d been essentially blowing your cover, but he couldn’t take a hint.

It’d only occurred to you that he’d been hitting on you when he’d propped an arm on the brick wall above your head to dominate your personal space, and an all-consuming dread had erupted in your stomach when he’d said, moving to take your chin in hand, “You know, you remind me a lot of my daughter.”

Before he’d been able to touch you, something rabid and ravenous about the size of a labrador had tackled him to the ground, the force knocking him almost two whole meters away, and the thing ripped into the sidekick’s chest, blood spewing—and somehow having the sense to cover his mouth to stifle the shouts.

In the moment you’d moved to get a better look at what was, in retrospect, a nomu, another figure had stepped between you and the sidekick, his own arm resting on the wall to keep you from getting closer.

“Hey,” Dabi had said, an easy grin stretching across his face, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about anything. Just testing some shit out for someone. So long as you don’t go making any noise, I’ll let you walk away.”

Dabi hadn’t made his villain debut back then, but even so, it hadn’t seemed like it was just testing something out for someone; this guy had seemed his own brand of dangerous. Your gaze had started to creep towards the source of crunching, but he’d tapped your cheek, making you look at him. “Nuh-uh. Keep your eyes on me. If you don’t know anything, I don’t have to kill you, do I?”

“I, I’m—” You’d steeled yourself somewhat, your hands clenching into fists at your sides. “I’m not just gonna let you kill a hero while I stand here.”

Again, Dabi had stopped you before you could take a full step, this time by gripping your jaw, letting it rest in his palm while his fingers dug into your cheeks. “Can’t call him a hero. Was comparing you to his daughter—didn’t you hear? And it looked like he was gonna assault you. Some guys aren’t meant to be fathers.” His syrupy gaze had fallen to your neck, and he’d squeezed your face. “Jesus, your heart is beating like crazy.”

“I don’t normally calm myself down to the sounds of someone getting maimed,” you’d said, blood splattering in the air behind him, “Oh! Fuck.” You’d scrunched your eyes shut and curled in on yourself, trying to block out the sound of bones snapping.

“Some hero you are.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you’d said, “You’re more of one than I am, tonight. Thanks—?”

“Dabi,” he’d said, and at the time, it had just been a name. When you’d pried open your eyes, he’d been smiling, mouth closed, head tilted at being called a hero. You’d smiled back, but at an enormously strident crack from behind him, you’d had a full-body jolt. “Fucking hell, calm down,” he’d said, his arm sliding from the wall to your upper arm, “For once, you’re safe with me.” Seeing you try to look over his shoulder again, Dabi had dragged you forward by the jaw to kiss you, closed-mouthed but hot, leaning into you, his mouth overwhelming you with hardly any effort on his end, and he’d kept kissing you, stroking your cheek with the back of his hand, until the nomu slinked into silence.

Dabi had broken off when the nomu scuttled farther down the alley. “Right.” He’d taken a deep breath. “You gonna tell anyone about me?”

You’d shaken your head, confused as to why he seemed more concerned about descriptions of him rather than descriptions of the murder. But he’d been nice to you. Had given you a hell of a first kiss. “I can say someone in the yakuza killed him.”

He’d roughly patted your cheek and dropped away from you, stowing his hands in the deep pockets of his coat. “His death isn’t worth reporting, but I’ll take it.” He’d spun on his heel, raising a lazy hand in a wave as he disappeared into the night. “You’d better hope you never see me again.”)

And now, here he was, hunched over shitty gas station snacks in his family kitchen, a spoon hanging out of his mouth while he stowed things away. His naturally white hair showed now, and…he seemed terribly shy. Dabi, shy. Fucking ridiculous. But, you supposed, there’s guilt and shame around, uh, doing what he did. And—and his body was horribly, horribly mangled and mottled. He might not think anyone should look at him.

Todoroki (Shouto, you supposed you should think of him as, since Dabi was a Todoroki, too) had mentioned not all of Dabi’s skin grafts were taking. It was obvious. He’d burnt up during the war, and while you’d heard Recovery Girl and Eri had worked on him, despite outside protests that he wasn’t worth it, he still was very clearly cobbled together.

He still had a lot of staples, though faded stitches filled in new gaps, and those that remained had been replaced with medical-grade staples that wouldn’t get infected. Patches of successful grafts left a waning diamond pattern, particularly around his neck. Very little purple, overall, but going by the scars, you could still tell where it had been. Based on his appearance, he shouldn’t be alive, let alone able to walk around.

But he scooted with such speed out of your way when you got ice out of the freezer. “But really, you could stick around with us, if you wanted to. No pressure, though, if you want to be alone.” Calmly. You were calmly popping ice out of a tray and letting them clatter into your glass. “We’re watching Hunter x Hunter right now, if you’re interested. Have you read or watched it before, either the 1999 or 2011 version? Do you have a favourite character?”

Dabi clutched his snacks and discarded clothes to his chest, almost at the door, with his eyes darting all around the kitchen except on you.

Yeah. Must be shy. You were one of the U.A. students who fought in the war, after all, even though you didn’t personally fight him in the end. Probably feels guilty about the whole thing. Shy could be refreshing, after those bitches in the living room and your cunning soulmate.

Finally, tentatively, Dabi shifted his belongings to his right arm, and he raised his left to pat his throat, swallowing so that his Adam’s apple bobbed.

“Oh,” you said, ice melting in your hand, “I’m sorry. Are you on vocal rest? Vocal cords messed up somehow?”

After a moment, Dabi nodded. He edged towards the hallway.

“Okay. I hope you feel better soon,” you said, and you poured your lemonade over the ice. “I’ve kept you long enough. Please go rest; I hope we don’t disturb you further.”

Before you finished, he’d already skibbled off, his house shoes slipping on the wood.

***

(The second time you’d met Dabi hadn’t been as hands-on, but it’d still left an odd impression.

It’d been in an urban jungle-type battle, after knowing his involvement the League but before his backstory reveal, and you and some classmates had been fighting a handful of PLF-aligned villains.

You’d slithered underneath a lean-to created by a partially collapsed building to catch your breath, along with shielding yourself from an explosion Bakugou had been building up. You hadn’t even known Dabi was in the group you were chasing, but he’d slinked underneath the same, protective ruins as you had, barely slipping underneath the cover before Bakugou’s explosion had shaken it.

Dabi had braced himself on the crumbling entrance, scrunching his face away from the explosion, and once it’d stopped, he’d noticed you were barely two paces away from him, sweat dribbling down your face the same as it’d been down his.

You still didn’t know if his startled, constipated expression had been of recognition or simple surprise to see someone else taking cover under something that could collapse and kill them. He’d taken in your U.A. gym uniform—your personal hero costume had been in repairs that week—and there’d been a couple of heavy seconds where neither of you had done anything besides pant and let sweat drip onto the rubble.

He'd slipped out first, since he’d been blocking the entrance, and you’d left soon after. You hadn’t been five steps out of the lean-to before someone on the PLF side had destroyed it, and in the privacy of your heart, you liked to think that Dabi had waited until you were out to raze it.)

***

You made it a habit to call Touya whenever the soulmate bond activated. Though he never initiated a call, he answered most of yours. What else was he going to do, if it were on your side, besides sit there in the dark? He continued to be hold information about himself like a miser clutching coins, but you found it refreshing to have a charismatic grouch of a pseudo-pen pal.

You’d closed the door of a library study room behind you as you called him this time, setting your stack of books on the table.

“You’re finally reading something besides manga? I thought your brain was gonna rot,” he said upon picking up.

You slung the strap of your purse over a chair. “No greeting? No admittance of missing the melodious sound of my voice?”

“Why in the hell would I do that,” he said over the screech of pulling out your chair.

“Because you missed the melodious sound of my voice?” You pulled out your notebook, flipped it to a new page, and fossicked around for a pen. Clicking the one you found, you reached for the first book in your stack, a rudimentary sign language dictionary, and you jotted down a list of common words as they came to you, such as thank you, help, and, of course, the all-important cat.

Touya clicked his tongue. “Are you seriously gonna make me study with you?”

You made the final stroke in the word pudding. “I don’t expect you to absorb the information. If you rather I read manga, I can go to that section for a while. Pick out a shoujo.”

“Get fucked with that otaku shit,” said Touya, and—he must have had his phone on speaker, because a couple of people were speaking to each other nearby about what must be the latest Assassins’ Creed, and the sound changed after some scrapes, with Touya sounding closer. “Why study sign language?”

“There’s someone in my life who recently became unable to talk all of the time,” you said, “and I’d like to help give him some way to communicate.”

“Just text him,” said Touya, “Well—never mind. Who’d wanna text you, anyway?”

“Sometimes, people put away their phones, Touya. Have you heard of it?” You drew a line down the half of your paper to make a new column, one sorting the words in groups—places, family members, requests, and the like.

“What are you getting out of it?” Touya must have scratched somewhere on his face, the sound coming over the phone. “You makin’ fun of him? Making him feel bad? If he wants to talk to you, he can just write shit down.”

“I think he might hate it because of how slow it is. And what if I luck out, and he knows sign already? Then half of my work is done for me,” you said, listing off all of the terms for family members, “Text-to-speech may be okay, but I don’t know. Still slow.”

“He probably doesn’t even want to talk to you,” said Touya, “let alone learn something for you. That’s a lot to ask for someone you ain’t fuckin’.”

You hummed and ignored him. You titled a new column Body, and the first word under it was burns. Followed by healing, surgery, hands, skin, hurt, and rest. For the first time in a while, Touya’s emotions were strong enough for you to feel, but you couldn’t name them. More like some pitiful, fearful soup, if anything, and other stuff you couldn’t put your finger on.

His voice still came in confidently derisive, though. “What kind of fucked up guy are you spreading your legs for, since those are what you’re writing down for his body? Seems like you’d be better off as a cocksleeve for someone else actually capable of fucking you.”

“Oh, rude! Rude!” Scowling, you set down your pen. “That’s rude to both me and him. I’m not talking to you anymore. Enjoy studying, asshole.” You flipped to a random page in the dictionary and started memorising, a bit too pissed to be productive for real, and you kept it up—if Touya were going to be here, then he’s not learning productive sign language, either. Try using marble and mare in everyday conversation, jackass.

Later, you caught yourself zoning out while staring at an entry, only shaking yourself out of it when Touya grumbled under his breath for you to turn the page already.

***

Todoroki paused the episode when the pizza arrived.

Moaning way too sensually, Kaminari stretched his arms above his head and arched his back. “My electricity is cooler than Killua’s, right? I have more swag than him?”

“No.”

“In your dreams.”

“Yikes.”

“Wrong,” said Shinsou, pelting him in the face with a popcorn kernel.

Kaminari picked it up off the floor and ate it mournfully. “I’m getting beaten by a fictional twelve year old.”

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you announced, pushing yourself up from your seat between Shinsou and Monoma (which was just as well, since they were comparing scans of the current manga chapter over your lap), and you set off with the intention going to the farthest bathroom to increase your chances of bumping into Dabi.

No such luck, even though you deliberately stomped your slippers as loudly as you could to try to draw him out. Sighing, you backtracked to a tiny bathroom you’ve used before, one that wasn’t as intimidatingly wealthy as the rest of the house and therefore actually felt like it was meant to be used, and you opened the creaking door onto an exhausted, shirtless Dabi trying to rub some sort of cream on the back of his neck, a massive jar open on the sink, blood seeping down his biceps at the strain around his staples.

Both of you froze. He took a quick glance to the gobs of cream on his hands and managed to kick the door shut from his seat on the closed toilet, but your foot caught in the door, which struck your nose and cheekbone, with you yelping and clutching the area.

“Sorry! I’m sorry,” you said through the crack in the door, shakily dragging your bruised foot out of it, “I didn’t know anyone was even in this side of the house. Are you okay? No, wait, sorry again—you’re bleeding; of course you’re not okay. I’m sorry.” You checked your nose for bleeding of your own, but nothing leaked out of your nose. “Can I—may I help with whatever you’re doing?”

No answer. But he hadn’t shut the door.

“Fine,” you said, and you spoke into the crack, only able to make out the granite on the near side of the sink. “I don’t know what’s going on with you nowadays, but I hope you’re doing okay. Or that you’ll be okay soon, at least. I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through, and I’m sorry you had to go through it. But I can grasp, I think, that having a bunch of your brother’s friends over can be intimidating and isolating. If nothing else, I’d like to get to know you better—or you could just get to know me better, if you don’t feel like sharing—so that having all of us over isn’t as terrible. I’m sorry we’re bursting into your life when you’re working out a lot of stuff in recovery—”

Dabi yanked open the door, brow furrowed, and instead of looking at you, he clamped his slimy hands on the sink and stood on his toes to arch towards the mirror, opening his mouth wide to breathe hot air onto it, teeth bared, as if he were roaring. In its fleeting fog, he traced out kanji, streaked with lotion and hidden by his left hand as he wrote, and he blew over it a final time before stepping back and jabbing at the message.

Stop apologising.

“Ah—oh,” you said, while Dabi squatted and rooted through the cabinet under the sink, “Okay. I’ll try. Thank you for saying so.” How do you talk to someone who was formerly 1) an S-tier villain and, more importantly, 2) your longest-running crush?

Dabi plopped a meagre first-aid kit on the counter and pointed to the source of bleeding on one of his arms, the inside bicep where two staples had come loose.

“I don’t know shit about first-aid,” you said, reaching for the kit anyway, “I know you have to keep pressure on it, and stuff, but—”

And so the first time Dabi looked you in the eyes was to shoot you an incredulous, suspicious glare that accompanied his snatching the kit back from you, clutching it out of your reach. Relaxing once it was in his hands, he hesitated a moment, shifting his jaw, before nudging the open jar of lotion with his knuckle, reverting to his fixed gaze on his feet.

“I can do that,” you said, heart racing, “You wanna—why don’t you sit back down?”

Not lotion, you noted, as Dabi pulled out disinfectant wipes and a roll of gauze near its end, burn cream. Aw. You dipped your first three fingers into it (heavy, roll-around slimy, like holding a frog) and hoped to God that your soulmate didn’t tune in during this. Touya didn’t like a lot of things you did, but he’d probably loathe your gawking over the scarred back of someone who wasn’t him.

Yeah, Touya would probably hate how you would hone in, laser-sharp, each time Dabi’s muscles flexed as he wrapped his wound, how the space between his shoulder blades with the tiny dent along his spine (well, his spine indented at the top of his back, where he was broader and still held muscle, and poked out towards his lower back as he bent over) held your focus far too long to be impersonal—and you got to touch it. You kept the contact to your fingertips, because as much as you wanted to flatten your hands to feel every moving tendon, you didn’t want to scare him. He’s probably not used to outside touch, and you shouldn’t come on too strongly, especially when someone else’s soul was fucking bound to yours.

But as your fingers smoothed over the marks around his shoulders where burns used to be, skin cold to the touch, as Dabi turned his head to the side just barely so that he could watch you out of his periphery, you found it hard to remind yourself that you already had a Touya. Can’t have two.

“I know it’s none of my business, but, uh, if you’re on vocal rest this often, I could—I could help you learn some sign language?” You scratched underneath your eye in a nervous gesture and smeared some of the burn cream on your cheek. “Nothing intensive. Only simple, everyday stuff, like—well. I don’t know what frequents your vocabulary. You don’t have to, but I’m offering. Just in case.”

In the mirror, Dabi halted in tying the gauze to glare up at you, his lip curling up in flash of a sneer.

“Okay, that’s cool. That’s fine. I can—I can leave a sign language book with your brother, if you—if you ever change your mind.” You nodded, just to have some sort of reaction he could see, and he tucked away the disinfectant wipes and tossed the empty roll of gauze into the trash bin. “Hey,” you said, noting how he’d only bled at his left arm, which was covered with mottled patches of skin, staples, and stitches, along with the faint diamond-pattern of skin grafts, while his right arm needed no medical attention, pale and unblemished without any sign of damage, “What’s up with—if you’re comfortable with sharing, why doesn’t your right arm have any scars? Was Recovery Girl able to heal that more effectively, or something?”

Holding your gaze in the mirror, Dabi raised his eyebrows, nearly vanishing under the drooping, white spikes of his hair, and he reached over with his left hand to rub his thumb over his right shoulder and curving down into his armpit.

He actually laughed (a laugh through his nose, yes, and one without the humming sort of vocalisation usually accompanying a laugh through a nose, but a laugh nevertheless) at how hard you jumped when he popped off what was apparently a prosthetic.

***

“If you hate gardening this much, why keep doing it?” you asked, once again trapped in Touya’s perspective late at night while he tended to a traditional, Japanese garden. You lay flat on your back in bed, hands and phone resting on your chest (laptop closed to the side. Your essay was due at eight o’clock in the morning. Would Present Mic accept late work due to soulmate interference?).

“Lots of dumb fucking reasons that all fold in together,” said Touya, shovelling gravel out of a wheelbarrow and into the man-made brook he was trying to shape, “One: my stupid fucking family has decided that doing this earthy shit would calm me down. Zen gardening, or whatever.”

“Oh, do you have issues controlling your anger, Touya?”

“Stop that. Two.” Gravel pittered off the shovel blade, falling into the trickling water with a series of tiny plops. “One of my brothers brought up how Mom always liked the garden but was stopped from taking care of it herself, and since I did some shit to—it’s not like I could’ve helped it; they were keeping stuff from her, too. Anyway, Mom’s fucking sad nowadays. Better, but sad.” Touya sank the shovel into the gravel to lean on it, tracking the flow of the water for a moment, twisting through the previous path currently being overtaken by moss and fallen stone. “And my brother thinks the garden being fancy again will make our mom happy, especially if I’m the one to do it. Dick. Saying if we hired people to do it, it wouldn’t be the same. Started with just the damn fish, but now the whole fucking thing’s my job. It’s fucking shit. It’s blackmail and family obligation and rent all at once. It’s a fuckin’ nasty trick.”

Touya dug into the wheelbarrow again. “And my fa—that guy had the nerve to suggest that I needed something to do during the day. As if I’m not busy enough.”

“During the day? Touya, I’ve only seen you garden at night.”

“Because it’s too damn hot outside all the time. And I don’t want anyone watching me. I’m no one’s business. But I bet they’d like staring out of a window at me, while I break my fucking body again moving all of these shitty rocks and shaping Mom’s fucking evergreens.” He shovelled with deep malice. “Did you fucking know that there’s goddamn symbolism in these shitty gardens? That you can’t just put things anywhere without it meaning something? Somehow ponds are supposed to be oceans. Rocks are supposed to be mountains. Forced perspective shit, paired with tenets of Zen and Shinto, and it’s the pettiest, most unnecessary bullshit I’ve ever had to deal with, and I dealt with a friend’s abominable driving for years. Never got any better at it, even though I got fucking motion sick.”

He knelt, and when two, fat glops of Touya’s sweat dripped onto the stone at the impact, you rather enjoyed the gentle wafting about your dorm room at the blades of your ceiling fan.

He must have felt your appreciation. “Stop that. I’m making a point. Look at this shit,” he said, gesturing to the brook and then up at the three-quarter moon, “I’ve gotta change the course of the water, because it’s better to face towards the moon to capture its reflection, and I’ve gotta make it somehow cascade or waterfall at some point over there.” He pointed far across the garden towards a flickering pair of stone lanterns. “How am I supposed to do that? I can’t even make it flow through gravel right. I might have to move some of the stepping stones again. I fucking hate those things. They’re too heavy for one person, and I’ve already had to rearrange them because some of them weren’t fucking weathered or natural-looking enough.”

“Sure. Death to aesthetics,” you said, blindly feeling around for a pack of gum you kept in your bedside table, “I’d come help you if I could, but somebody—”

“You’re not getting a location out of me, princess.”

You paused, hand on the knob of the first drawer, and a wide, smug smile broke across your face (Princess, Touya? You’re gonna call me princess? You sure you don’t care about me?).

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“I could feel it,” said Touya, flexing his fingers on his knees, “so shut up.”

Gloved hands clenched into fists, he glared at the brook, the gravel, up at the moon, and back into the water.

“You know, it looks like if you moved most of the gravel to one side, the water might flow the direction you need it to.”

“Who’s the one busting their ass here, me or you?” But he plunged his hands into the water, grabbed heaping fistfuls of rocks, and patted them onto the far side of the stone bed.

“Touya,” you said, feeling around in your drawer for the pack of gum, “Take your gloves off! You’re gonna ruin the leather.”

“Like I care.” He dragged more gravel underwater. “If I took ’em off, you’d see my hands.”

“Come off of it, Touya. I bet they’re perfectly fine,” you said, successfully grabbing gum and sliding your drawer shut, “Hands are often the most attractive part of a man.”

He paused, water flowing around his arms up to his elbows (he wouldn’t roll up his sleeves, either. Stubborn boy. He must hate whatever’s going on with him). “Not the dick?” He sounded like he was grinning.

“Not always. Some of them look like sad, sea creatures,” you said, unwrapping your gum into your phone’s speaker to annoy him, “It takes talent to have a pretty cock. Hands, however, can easily be lusted over because of what they’re capable of. Or what you know they’ve done.”

(Hee hoo hah, like burn down a city. You’re so normal about it.)

“Not how they look?”

“Appearance can help, but it’s not the whole cow,” you said, chewing while the flavour faded fast.

Touya scoffed, his fingers sinking into gravel. “You makin’ fun of me?”

What? “Of course not. Why?”

“Don’t say shit like that to get on my good side. I’m more than aware I ain’t got anything besides my shitty personality goin’ for me.” He cleared his throat. “That sign language guy got anything I don’t?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You sure seem obsessed with him,” said Touya, leaning more deeply into the water, soaking his hoodie even more, “even though he sounds pathetic. You tryin’ to fix him to make yourself look good?”

“Of course not. I know no one can fix anyone else. He has to choose to do that himself,” you said, “Not that there’s anything about him that merits fixing.”

Laughing (oh? hot), Touya scooped a handful of gravel out of the wheelbarrow to add it to the far side. “Yeah, you’re fucking obsessed with him. Am I not your soulmate?”

You rolled your eyes, even though he couldn’t see it (and…you…couldn’t see it). “You haven’t given me anything to obsess over, unless you want me to research gardening tips or how to breed carp.”

“I would love for you to be obsessed with breeding, sweet—”

“Oh, my God, you have to ease into that sort of thing, Touya.”

He pulled his hands out of the brook, drenched sleeves gushing water back into it. “D’you want me to start with how much I wanna suck on your perfect tits?”

“Touya,” you said carefully, shoving the gum to one cheek, “Is everything okay? You’re acting—strange.”

“What do you—”

“Where’s the blind hatred for me? Where’s the disdain?”

Sitting back on his knees, Touya shoved his leather-wet-dripping hands into the damp, double pocket of his hoodie with a muted slosh. “You think I hate you?”

“You’re that rude to people you don’t hate?”

Water seeped through the pocket and through his jeans, visibly darker in the moonlight and soaking his thighs. “Fuck off. I mean—what I mean is that I’m not used to people like you. Who don’t talk like me. Who aren’t mean to me back. Or who don’t seem to want anything from me. Didn’t know you really thought I was rude.”

You screwed up your face. “Who have you been hanging out with? What the hell is wrong with you? Spend time with people who like you, please?”

“No one likes me—”

“Get your head out of your ass, edgelord,” you said, sitting up in bed and holding the phone up to your mouth, “Newsflash, dipshit, it sounds like lots of people like you. Your brother, who wants to help you make your mom happy, in an easy, physical way that you’re more than capable of. Your mom, who sounds like she’s happier now that you’re back in her life. The rest of your goddamn family, who want you close by so that they can help you if you ever fucking accepted it. Your stupid friends who are into Assassins’ Creed.”

“Stop fucking noticing things about—”

“And me. I like you, dipshit. Get over yourself. You’re digging yourself your own lonely, self-deprecating hole, where I guess you’re at your most comfortable. But tonight alone you’ve shown in your garden that you fucking hate digging holes. They mean unnecessary work.”

Inhaling sharply, you threw your phone into the bedspread, but all that came through was a distant deer scare, bamboo hitting rock.

“Since when do you like me?” he asked, pushing on his knees to stand.

The artificial-yellow light from your lamp starting creeping in around the rim of your vision, blotting out parts of Touya’s silhouette in the moonlight. “I talk to you, don’t I? I wouldn’t even acknowledge the bond if I weren’t open to—we’ve been hanging out. You didn’t know?”

“Like I would know what that looks like,” said Touya, the walls of your room coming into view while Touya pulled his own phone out of his inner pocket, tapping the screen to see how long the call has lasted, “Like I would know how someone like you would behave when they like me.”

“Stay on the goddamn phone,” you said in the moment his thumb hovered over the end call button, the last thing you made out before fully sinking back into your dorm room, “If you don’t know what I—well, what does your love look like, Touya? What do you do when you like someone?”

“Sexually? Romantically?”

“Not necessarily,” you said, pissed to have the connection severed and sliding off of the bed to turn off the lights, “Just when you care for someone at all.”

“Gimme a minute,” came Touya’s voice, and after you flipped the lights and the ceiling fan off, you wandered over to your window, switched your phone off speaker, and held it to your ear as you stared up at the same moon Touya was under, and you waited.

“Right, I don’t know for sure,” he said after a while (but it sounded like he’d stopped dealing with the gravel to think about it), “but this is the only thing that’s coming to mind. Before I was living at home again, me and some friends didn’t have consistent sources of food. Don’t interrupt to say you’re sorry. But. So, whenever I’d, uh, buy stuff. From a store. I’d make sure I got some sort of snack for whoever I was with, even though we were all too proud to ask for shit. Didn’t really think about doing it on purpose. But I guess I did.”

“You are deliciously, delightfully, tender as fuck,” you said, clenching a fist over your heart, your boob jostling with the fervent impact (and it pleased you knowing that Touya would’ve laughed if he’d seen), and you kept talking over his sounds of disapproval. “And I am gonna cook for you. I am going to set you a table so vast that you’re gonna be eating off it for a long, long time. You’re never gonna be fucking hungry ever again, Touya.”

When he didn’t answer, you worried you said the wrong thing, but you stayed on the line, listening. Two minutes later, he hung up, and you could have sworn he cut off in the middle of a wet sniffle.

***

What can you cook? What were you good at cooking that actually constituted a filling meal?

Start small, you supposed.

Fuyumi kept the Todoroki kitchen much more well-stocked than the kitchen to which you had access, and so, with welcome permission, you headed over to the estate earlier than the scheduled viewing time to prepare, with Shinsou and Todoroki hanging out in the kitchen with you.

“Jirou says she can attend,” said Todoroki, thumb swiping across his phone screen, “Turns out her tipping point was stating the merits of studying Melody’s music powers. She’s asking if Yaoyorozu may attend as well?”

“It’s your house.” Shinsou was folding his napkin into an origami frog. “If there’s a need for excuses, you can always say Yao might like—I forget his name, but he’s that character in the Phantom Troupe whose hair looks like a mop? She might like analysing how his power lets him copy anything, even though it doesn’t have the same limitations like her quirk.”

“I will mention that,” said Todoroki, nodding sagely.

The plan was simple: with a captive audience of anime nerds, you could get feedback on your cooking until it was good enough for Touya (a small part of you still cringed thinking about how he reacted to your potato wedges). You would lure your friends into a state of complacency with your smaller dishes—baked goods, and the like—until there was no escape when you served them something more filling, like soups.

Today, you were making teeny little lemon ricotta pancakes (the recipe called for them to be regular-sized, but if you made them around the size of a potato chip, it would be more accessible to eat with fingers in the living room) that gave you the air of being fancy but were actually mindless to make, it turned out, and right now, you were stirring the stewing blueberry syrup that you’d decided would be a dipping sauce rather than drizzled over—the Todorokis had an excess of white furniture, and you would like to be invited to use their kitchen again.

“I think,” you said, once the syrup was behaving like syrup when you let it dribble out of the ladle back into the pot, “I’m gonna take some to your brother. I don’t want him feeling left out, if he comes through. He’s home right now, yeah?”

“He’s in his teahouse. It’s towards the back of the garden.” Todoroki got up from the table. “Do you want me to show you?”

“I’m sure I can find it, since it’s the only building not connected to the main one,” you said, but you did accept his help finding a tray and sauce cup for the syrup, and once it was set, you picked up the tray and strode with purpose towards the garden.

Walking through its seemingly-natural landscape while balancing food and liquids proved to be miraculously easy. Their hired gardeners must be doing insane upkeep to ensure its deliberate, natural-but-not cosiness. You made a mental note to ask Touya what some of the structures symbolised, like the recurring patterns of three rocks of different heights close together. He’d know, reluctantly, since he did stuff like this, and you considered his work to be superior to this, anyway.

In the blistering sun, you had to narrow your eyes to slits, regretting that both of your hands were full so that you couldn’t shield them from the light, and you found a gated, stone path to the teahouse. Clearly, it had once been slightly dilapidated but had since been worked on; another room had been latched on to the side to double its size, judging by the change in architecture styles, and the roof reflected sunlight a little too well for its polished, stone tiles to be less than a year old.

Bracing the tray, you took the steep step onto the neatly swept, bamboo engawa running around the edge of the teahouse, and you—was the door around to the side? Around the left side of the original part of the tearoom, two shoji panels had been spread to let in sunlight upon an empty room with an actual fucking sunken hearth, unlit, with one of the same fire-fish as on the estate’s roofs for the crank’s lever. Behind what would have been the seat of honour stood a dishevelled tokonoma, devoid of scrolls or incense burners but instead housing an unzipped backpack atop a long coat, its sleeves trailing onto the floor outside the tokonoma, with sticky notes taped to its inner wall. A red-tinted wood dresser had been pushed into the corner, tissues and hand sanitiser atop it and a single stack of books propped next to it.

A pair of boots was tucked inside the open shoji. Maybe he’s asleep.

At your first step inside, you jolted so hard you had to struggle to hold onto the tray—the floor had chirped at you. Dead ringer for a bird call. Tentatively, you took another step, and it chirped again, this time with a bit of a wheeze, more artificial-sounding.

You jumped and stumbled again at another wall sliding open, giving the impression that a flock of birds had flown inside, and Dabi poked his head through the gap (you could make out the gleaming pause screen of a gaming system in the newer room behind him). His face had relaxed when he’d seen it was you, but it pinched into a strange, unnameable expression when he saw what you were carrying.

“Hi,” you said, holding out the tray, “I’ve made too many snacks for the anime group today, so I thought you might like some? I can take it away, if you don’t want any.”

Since he probably didn’t know the amount of people attending nowadays, he probably didn’t recognise your lie. Dabi held up a finger for you to wait while he exhumed a short table and two floor seats from storage in the walls, and he waited for you to sit before he did, slowly, crossing his legs on the cushion, his joints creaking.

“They’re little lemon ricotta pancakes. Todo—Shouto told me you didn’t have any food allergies, so it should be fine. That’s blueberry syrup,” you said when he pointed at it. “I’m—I guess you could say I’m practising recipes for cooking for someone else. If you don’t like it, please let me know. I’ll make it better next time.”

Dabi fiddled with two of the tiny pancakes before selecting one, inspecting it in the sunlight, and dipping it into the syrup (you went a little crazy when it dripped onto his tongue stitches, but you managed to suppress it). As he chewed and swallowed loudly, Dabi’s eyes bulged, brow furrowed, and he, panicked, fumbled around for probably his phone, patting the pockets on his jeans. Hands pausing after slapping the empty pockets on his ass, he sprung up, grabbed a pen off of the dresser, and snatched a sticky note off of the inner wall of the tokonoma. He returned to the table and knelt half on the seat, scribbling furiously, and when he pushed the sticky note to you, under a crossed-out potting soil, sledgehammer, he’d written fuck you marry me NOW.

There’s a moment in which you forgot, a moment in which you laugh, head tilted back, flooded with endorphins at your long-time, pseudo-celebrity crush liking something you made to even joke about being in a relationship with you. You opened your mouth to make some joke about how you’d like to go on a few dates first, to have some sort of courtship, but you stopped at the first word: “Touya.” You cut yourself off, brow pinched. You can’t have two.

Not that…not that Dabi/Touya could ever genuinely like you, who fought against him and now witnessed his debasement, but in the far-flung chance that he could, you should clarify about your Touya.

“Touya,” you said again, this time sober and grim, hands folded on your lap, “I know you were only joking, but I was in a quirk-related incident a while ago, and it assigned me a soulmate. So, even if you could like me, I’ve got someone waiting. Presumptuous of me to say, I know, but. I want to treat you with kindness and not make you wonder, in the case it arises. Funnily enough, his name is Touya, too—”

Your phone rang loudly in your back pocket (you kept it on loud nowadays so you could easily feel around for Touya’s call, but it’d led you to awkward moments like this, too). Dabi scowled when you brought it out to silence it and dipped another pancake in the syrup, letting it absorb what it could to tinge it purple.

“It’s him, actually. Odd timing.” Lying flat in your palm, your phone flashed an incoming call from Touya. Leaning across the table, Dabi grabbed it out of your hands to answer it, put it on speaker, and lay it in the centre of the table while he ate his soggy pancake, shaking his head when you moved to undo all of that.

“Hey,” came a tinny, raspy voice that was very much not your Touya’s, “You’re the soulmate, right?”

Dabi shouldn’t have to hear this. Before you could tap the speaker button again, Dabi swatted your hand out of the way, gesturing for you to answer.

“Uh, yeah,” you said, shifting in your seat, “Who are you? Where’s—”

“Tell Touya he left his phone at my place the next time you see through him.” A repetitive, techno instrumental played in the background (video game music?). “At Shiiiiiiiimura’s place. Yeah.”

“I can do that, Shimura,” you said, unsure if you should hold out the vowel as long as he did, and perhaps you can take advantage of the situation for a brief moment, because Dabi was staring at your phone with a constipated sort of expression as he listened. “I can’t control when the bond activates, but I’ll let him know. Do you know what sort of food he likes?”

Shimura barked out a laugh, filling the room in a wide, cleansing way you wouldn’t expect from someone with his scratchy voice. “I heard your potato wedges are shit.”

You sputtered, “He didn’t even have any—”

Dabi ended the call, frowning, shaking his head, and tipping your phone off the table to gently bounce twice when it hit the tatami. He held up a tiny pancake and made a show of looking at it, at you, and back at it, and he shot you an aggressive thumbs-up.

***

Uraraka spent an entire patrol gushing about how she would fuck the author of Hunter x Hunter if she could, so she showed up to the next get-together, along with Asui, whom everyone already thought would be friends with the story’s protagonist if he were real. When you Aoyama caught you in the act of stealing one of his posh cookbooks, you explained the situation to him, and so he tagged along to taste what you were cooking, along with supplying some of the fancier ingredients you wouldn’t’ve known how to obtain. Then you’d asked Sato for advice on how to make the swirl in a strawberry swirl loaf not go to shit, and then the group had spent a few hours discussing the good relationships with animals that Hunters are inherently supposed to have, so Kouda was summoned for his opinions.

The long of short of it was that there were many more spectators than necessary to when Dabi strode into the viewing room, drenched in sweat from his walk back home, to pelt the back of your head with a two-pack of Sakeru cheese. As you rubbed the back of your head, pulling the cold plastic from between your shirt collar and skin, he at least had the decency to drop the single-wrapped fish bread into your lap.

“Hey, Touya,” you said, grabbing his hand before he could skitter away as usual (his wide eyes couldn’t decide to look at both of your hands or at your face), “I’ve set aside slices of both strawberry swirl bread and garlic bread for you in the kitchen. I recommend heating the garlic bread up so the cheese gets all melty again, but it’s good at room temperature, too. Thank you, by the way. For these.”

Nodding hastily, Dabi tore his hand away from your in two, spasming jerks, and he slithered into the kitchen.

Though the rest were watching the show, Shinsou was turned towards you, his head tilted with an incredulous sort of smile. You stuck your tongue out at him and crinkled open the cheese.

Dabi returned with both slices on a paper towel and stood behind you at the couch for a minute, watching the episode. Shifting his weight, he pulled out his phone. “This is garbage,” came a droning, text-to-speech voice from behind.

He stood behind the couch for three more episodes.

***

Through another moonlit, soulmate connection, Touya was failing to prod stray ducks out of the koi pond with the skimmer.

“They’re tenacious little bastards,” you said, sitting on the counter of the dorm kitchen and praying to God that the oven timer wouldn’t go off while you couldn’t see.

“Why. Won’t they. Move.” Touya nudged a duck with the flat of the skimmer, its width as long as the entire duck, and the duck kept gabbing to its friends. “I have no idea if ducks upset the chemical balance of the water enough to kill koi; I’ve never seen them in here before ten minutes ago. Goddamn.” He waved the skimmer over the water’s surface, filtering some debris, and he flipped it onto a duck, who remained vexingly apathetic at the new source of wet. “Tonight was gonna be easy; I was only gonna put up windchimes; I was gonna get to go to bed early. Now I—no, no, no, don’t—!”

One duck bit at the skimmer net, and having pierced it, the duck led the rest of them to the centre of the pond, where the skimmer couldn’t reach, no matter how Touya strained.

“I fucking hate birds,” said Touya, slamming the skimmer on the ground, “and I fucking hate fish. They’re not even good when they’re alive.” Seeming to have a change of heart, Touya picked the skimmer up and took care to lean it against the stone wall of the pond. “Tell me something good, won’t you?”

Does that imply you don’t have to work on any fish dishes? “You’ll be thrilled to hear that my little anime analysis group is almost through the Hunter x Hunter anime, probably. We got to the end of the 1999 version last night.”

Touya sat and splayed his legs on the koi pond stone, watching the moon’s reflection ripple as koi tails broke surface tension. “That’ll only make your process more streamlined, since you’re not watching two episodes covering the same chapters in conjunction anymore. The Chimera Ant arc takes forever, though. You’re not almost done.”

Groping around for your oven mitts, you smiled. “How do you know that, Touya? Thought you hated—”

“What are you going to watch next?”

Stupid boy. Shy boy. “Well, Sero is pushing for Pokémon since there’s so much of it.”

“God, no,” said Touya, leaning back on his hands, “Iconic, yeah. Fun, not really, because in the games, you’re the one getting to battle and bond with the things. It’s not fun to watch someone else get to do it.”

“I can rely on you for negative reviews of everything.” Oven mitt? Oven mitt. Now, where’s its pair? “You want a pokémon, Touya? Which ones?”

“You are such a fucking child—”

“You want a pikachu, don’t you?”

“Hell, no,” Touya spat, “None of that cliché shit. Pikachu isn’t even that good. I—” Cutting himself off, he hunched forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his gloved hands together. “You’ll shit on me for it. Forget I said anything.”

“Should I let you make fun of me first?” You slipped on the other mitt. “I’m cliché as hell. My top choice is either a certain starter or an eevolution.”

“No, I—”

“All right. How about you tell me your favourite as a kid and the one you would choose now?”

“You’re pushy as hell. When I was a kid, I wanted a Ninetales. I was—my mom had read enough for me to know about traditional kitsune,” said Touya, and he ducked his head to stare between his legs (crotch unfortunately hidden in shadow), “and Ninetales is immune to fire. It can use it and not burn up, and it’s not affected by outside fire attacks.”

The memory of rubbing burn cream across Dabi’s shoulders and how delicate his skin looked surfaced. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone. “You scared of being burned, Touya?”

Touya kicked the stone beneath his boot, scuffing it. “Just seems like it’d be neat.”

“Perfectly reasonable,” you said, wrapping your muppet-y, mitted hands around the oven handle in preparation for whenever it would go off, “and a perfectly logical pokémon to latch onto. It’s fairly popular. I don’t see how I’m supposed to make fun of you for that.”

“Sure.” Touya bent farther to re-tie his bootlaces. “I like my current choice for a dumb as hell reason, though. Shiiiiiiiimura,” said Touya, yanking the laces tightly (and he dragged out Shimura’s name, too. Was that the proper pronunciation?), “was trying to hype us up for something stupid we had to do that some of our friends were scared of. Shimura’s teacher—’scuse me, abusive fucking manipulative shithead of an adoptive father—wanted him to make a speech to show leadership, or some bullshit. Instead, Shimura pulled out his phone and showed us someone’s video of playing one of the early Pokémon games, for the battle at the end to win the game. And to defeat the last boss’s toughest Dragonite, the player used this…this fuckin’ weak-ass, all-around insignificant pokémon picked up from the beginning of the game, and it fuckin’ won. It won against the toughest opponent, and—and Shimura was saying, oh, the Venomoth is us, and we can win against our big-ass enemy, oh, ho, ho—”

“Excuse me. A Venomoth? You only use them temporarily at the beginning of the game, when you don’t have anything cool yet. They fucking suck.”

“See, you’re making fun of me. I’m not going to say anything else.” Touya leant back on his hands again, this time crossing his legs to prop his ankle on his opposite knee.

“No, I’m—I’m sorry. Sorry. First impressions. But you’re convincing me. Go on. I’m listening.”

Touya flicked water towards the ducks. “Are you gonna keep insulting—”

“I won’t! I won’t,” you said, sliding off the kitchen counter to stand directly in front of the oven, “So, Venomoths. I hear they’re fantastic.”

Touya rolled his eyes, and it was cute, you thought, how you had to follow the motion, seeing the moon at the upwards roll and back at its reflection in the pond. “Yeah. I bet Shimura’s forgotten all about it, but it stuck with me. Not immediately—at the time it was stupid, and to be fair, it’s still stupid. But now that I’m back here, living at home, it’s—it’s stupid. It’s, like, if that stupid fucking bug can defeat a goddamn dragon, then I can tend the garden. I can keep that stupid tsukubai clean. I can hang out with my brother. I can fucking—” He cut himself off again, this time striking the water hard enough to splash one of the ducks (it quacked at him with disdain and simply swam a couple of centimetres away).

“Do what, Touya?” The oven timer started beeping, and you tensed. “Hold on; don’t say anything. Don’t say—I have to concentrate; I’m getting stuff out of an oven.”

Touya stirred the pondwater with his ring and middle fingers while you blindly approximated the logistics of getting the tray out of the oven, and by standing at the oven’s side inside of reaching into it from the front, you were eventually able to remove the tray and rest it on the counter above it—you’re not going to bother feeling around for the pot holders.

When you sighed in relief once you’d closed the oven again, Touya asked, “What are you cooking?”

“Strawberry cheesecake muffins,” you said, frowning in the tray’s general direction, “They’re supposed to have a marbling effect, and I’m supposed to be putting on some sort of streusel-type sugar on top right now, but I’m not gonna risk it. I hope they’re done. You have to trust the recipe’s bake time with cheesecakes exactly, so I’m hoping it’s the same for—”

“I am gonna make you come so hard,” Touya was saying in a strained sort of way as he ran his hands down his face, “I am gonna fuck you so hard that you leave in a permanent dent in my mattress. I am gonna hold you and kiss the back of your neck and make you cry out as you gush around my fingers. You’re—you’re so fucking per—I am gonna take care of you back.”

“Cool.” Right, so bake the muffins again at some point. “Do you have any food allergies?”

“I’m allergic to you not saying anything hot in response to what I just said.”

Sure, Touya. “I’m also gonna make you this really sexy tomato soup with what the recipe calls a grilled cheese top. It’s got cheesy bread cut into chunks that coat the surface so that you can’t even see the red, and it melts into the soup—”

“Stop, I can only get so hard—”

“Show me your cock, then.”

“No,” said Touya, deliberately looking at a trio of fish convening near the pond’s surface, their o-shaped mouths blorbing and blobbing underneath the water towards Touya’s waving fingers, “I meant—well, first, you are gonna make that soup, pl—please—but I meant that—I mean.” He twirled his finger under the water, and the koi were fascinated. One of them kissed his finger. You were feeling a similar impulse—and perhaps that’s what prompted Touya to continue. “I came the first time someone stuck their tongue in my mouth.”

It occurred to you that anyone could be walking by the dorm kitchen to overhear. Now that the muffins were out of the oven, you elected to turn off the speaker setting to hold you phone to your ear. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I was sixteen and insane with hormones, and it hadn’t been long since I’d woken up from—well. When someone kissed me with tongue for the first time, I came in my pants. Taken completely by surprise that someone was even kissing me, that someone could even want me when I look like—and then that. We were outside, on a public bridge, during the day. I haven’t seen that fucker since.”

You had been contemplating whether it’d be worth fumbling around for a knife to ease the muffins out of the tray, but all cogs stopped at Touya’s story. “Why are you telling me this?”

“So you’ll tell me something back. I already told you some embarrassing shit about pokémon and shit, so you have to embarrass yourself back. You’re the one who brought up cocks, anyway. So—so you have to share something back,” said Touya, allowing a fish to rub up against his hand in a pseudo-sort of petting it, “Something about when you were young and stupid.”

“And preferably sexual, right? I know what you’re about, you shy, baby boy.”

“Ffffffuck that.I ain’t shy—”

“You won’t show me your face, Touya. You’re scared for me to see it. Shy boy.”

Touya scratched along the side of the koi like it wanted, and another nudged the back of his hand to be scratched, too. “Fuck off.”

“I’ve only told one other person about my first kiss,” you said, moving to sit on the counter again, “Wanna hear that story?”

“Fine,” said Touya, and he pulled his hand out of the pond, flicking water off his fingers and into the open, mournful mouths of the koi he’d been petting. “You had better be about to tell me about seeing through me at that coffee shop.”

“Come off of it, Touya; isn’t it better for me to have outside experience and still choose you regardless? My first kiss was way before that,” you said, hoping how pleased you were at his mild possessiveness was being transferred to his side of the bond, “and I didn’t even know the guy’s name at the time. And it was—it could’ve turned really bad, really quickly. Because my first kiss was with Dabi, before he made his villain debut.”

“Do—huh?” Touya shook his head, causing you to wince and steady yourself at the dizziness. “Beg pardon? Beg your fucking pardon? I didn’t—know that that Dabi guy went around kissing people.”

“He did at least once. It was back in freshman year, and I was out at night during my hero internship.” Getting comfortable on the kitchen counter, you crossed your legs and leant against the cabinets to support your back, exhaustion kicking in. “Some older sidekick hit on me in what was an exceedingly creepy way—he made it pseudo-incestuous by saying I reminded him of his daughter. In retrospect, the interaction could have gone much, much worse, if Dabi hadn’t inadvertently rescued me—scratch that, it may have been intentional, looking back, because he��d said stuff about the sidekick being a shitty father, and now he’s, uh, let us know about his own dad.”

It took Touya a moment. At least he wasn’t shaking his head anymore. “Are you saying Dabi burnt some guy to death in front of you, and you still kissed him?”

You sucked in through your teeth. “Not exactly. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was testing out a nomu, and that ripped the other guy to pieces. And—this is gonna sound wild—I think Dabi may have kissed me to comfort me? I know it was a distraction from the gore and from getting a good look at the nomu, but I think he may have also done it to calm me down. It was—oddly sweet.”

Touya gripped the edge of the stone wall, his fingers dipping into water (but not deep enough to remoisten his leather gloves) and koi swarming. “What did the nomu look like?”

Even though you couldn’t see it, you held your phone away from your ear for a second to shoot it an incredulous look. “Wha—Touya, weren’t you going to ask if he were a good kisser, or something?”

His knuckles popped when he clenched his fingers and asked flatly, “Was he a good—”

“You’re better.”

“Thanks,” he said, not sounding like he cared about that at all, letting a koi drag his hand into the water by biting his finger, “What did the nomu look like?”

“God, I don’t fucking know. That wasn’t important to me. I, uh—it was around the size of a good-sized dog, like a golden retriever or a lab. I don’t—I guess it walked on all fours,” you said, wondering why the fuck—oh, the dizziness must not have come only from Touya shaking his head, because it’s sweeping over you again, waves emanating from the bond. “Now that I’ve seen other nomu, I can recognise that its head looked whacky because its brain was exposed, and I think its skin was more green-tinged than the others who had that navy-black colour going on. Honestly, Touya, I wasn’t—”

Through the phone came such a strident, alarming crack that you halted mid-sentence to listen for it again. It’d come from Touya’s side, clearly, but nothing in his line of vision betrayed its source, although—and you would not have noticed this if you hadn’t been scanning his environment for any hint—something that looked like split glass frosted the inside of Touya’s fist before he unclenched his hand a second later, any illusion of something there melting into the water.

But something was wrong. “Touya?”

“You still see that Dabi guy when you watch anime at Shouto’s house, yeah? Stay on the line,” he said, darkness of the bond fading drabbling at the edges of his vision from your perspective.

“I am,” you said, uncrossing your legs, “I do.”

“What do you think of him? Ugly fucker, isn’t he?” Touya fell still as a duck approached him as it navigated through the water lilies, and Touya’s outstretching his hand to its head was the last thing you saw before the bond gave out. “Still as pathetic as he was in the war? Think he should be in prison?”

“Negative reviews of people, negative reviews of television, negative reviews of potato wedges—so cool, bro. Now say something true and beautiful.”

“Answer me, damn it.” A disgruntled quack.

“You’d better not be strangling that duck.”

“You think so little of me? Do you want me to put the duck on the phone?”

“I don’t think it could sit comfortably,” you said, pushing yourself off the counter and walking to the knife drawer now that you could see, “I see Dabi every once in a while when I’m at Todoroki’s house. He’s shy. I don’t mind. It’s not my place to assume anything, but. I don’t think he’s doing okay, since it seems like he’s spent a good part of his life wanting someone to look at him, to pay attention, and now he’s getting that in a way he probably didn’t anticipate, and I want him to be okay. I think I’d like to help him get there, if he’d let me. But I know I’m nobody important to him, and that’s fine.”

“Sounds a lot like pity,” said Touya, and when you made a noise of protest, he kept going. “Or maybe you’re fucked up enough that you like him? From when he kissed you?”

You couldn’t exactly tell your soulmate that you’ve been suppressing naïve, celebrity-crush-type feelings for someone else. “Well,” you said, grimacing as you slid knife edge between a muffin and the tray and started to remove it, “He’s very babygirl-coded.”

***

TOUYA 🐠🚷

looked it up. definition of babygirl does NOT help

TOUYA 🐠🚷

incidentally

TOUYA 🐠🚷

what should a guy wear to impress someone

YOU

a guy? or you specifically?

YOU

because i am, of course about to suggest the golden standard of rolling up thy sleeves to thy elbows, but you won’t even showing your fucken hands asldkjfa;

TOUYA 🐠🚷

gloves necessary.

TOUYA 🐠🚷

but think formal. formal setting.

YOU

why are YOU going to a formal event?

TOUYA 🐠🚷

have to. blackmail/family obligation/rent.

TOUYA 🐠🚷

open to suggestions. about style more than brand, because if I go too expensive, my dad will think I’m making him pay a lot as sabotage.

YOU

and here i was about to recommend that you go skinny-dipping in a vat of liquid gold

TOUYA 🐠🚷

you just wanna see my cock, don’t cha

YOU

what makes you think I’D be invited to some shitty formal event

TOUYA 🐠🚷

I’m betting you’d hear about it on the news

YOU

i think i’d be more interested in what food is provided

TOUYA 🐠🚷

…

TOUYA 🐠🚷

no, I shan’t say

YOU

is this a cum joke

TOUYA 🐠🚷

but seriously. what should I wear. assume I will do something awful and evil and that you will see the outfit on the news when I get arrested.

YOU

touya, how would i recognise you. idk what YOU even look like. not that it matters, i guess. all that matters is that you wear something that fits you well. you don’t need to impress me; you’ve already won me over

TOUYA 🐠🚷

i what

TOUYA 🐠🚷

wait what do you MEAN it doesn’t matter

YOU

does it help get it through your thick head if i tell you that you are also babygirl-coded? perhaps not even coded but genuinely babygirl??

TOUYA 🐠🚷

it does not.

***

Adjusting your lace shawl, you gripped Shouto’s arm as the both of you furtively sneaked away from the hordes of pro-heroes, industry workers, and flashing press to slink back to the enormous table of hors d'oeuvres to see how many of them you could pack into your purse and his strategically planned inner coat pocket, sewn into the inside of his lapel for the occasion.

When Shouto had invited you to this ghastly awards ceremony for Endeavor, he’d claimed his motivation was that so he could talk to you about how the 2011 Hunter x Hunter anime was wrapping up, since he (flatterer!) said you had the best interpretations of certain characters, unlike some of your classmates, and Shouto tempted you with how you could stake out whatever posh food they had for you to try to recreate later. So, you’d dug out the dress you’d only worn to All Might’s official retirement party and agreed to attend.

Those present were a strange conglomeration of people, since the public opinion of Endeavor has been odd and tenuous lately. Essentially, the handful of attendees you knew were busy ingratiating themselves to people you’ve never seen before but they evidently were acquainted with, so those with whom you could hold an actual conversation with were scattered and few.

However, you didn’t even need to bring a book, because once you and Shouto had settled at a back table with both of your plates stacked with the most variety you could fit on them, he deadass pulled out his anime analysis notebook, which was starting to resemble Midoriya’s quirk analysis notebooks in terms of extensiveness and insanity, with lines crossing several pages to connect ideas. As you discussed where the two of you thought the characters were going, you had your own notebook—a new one, this one for recipes, and whenever either of you thought one of the appetizers was interesting, you wrote it down.

You were chewing on what Shouto had informed you was a water chestnut when the chair on your other side was pulled out with a screech against the tile, and Todoroki Touya plopped into it, his legs hardly having the time to spread before swiping a piece of candied salmon from your plate. The instant he bit down into it, his nose scrunched up.

“It’s fish, Touya,” said Shouto, dipping his own crudité in a tiny bowl of raspberry vinaigrette, and he passed his napkin to him. Touya spat the salmon into it, bunched it up, and edged it underneath the edge of your plate.

On your list, you wrote no fish! at the top, but before you even lifted your pen from the paper, you froze. The list wasn’t for this Touya; it was for your Touya. You crosshatched it out, trying to remember if your Touya had ever said anything about liking fish. He’d said he hadn’t, right? He didn’t like them alive, at the very least.

Shouto chomped down harshly, the crunch of raw celery distinct even through his closed mouth. “What brings you over here, Touya?”

He already had the text-to-speech function pulled up on his phone, and he held a parmesan palmier between his teeth as he typed. “People were asking Natsuo and Fuyumi about what they’re doing with their lives. It was only a matter of time before they got to me. Don’t wanna hear anyone else describe the nothing I’m doing. At least I know you guys are too busy talking about nerd crap to shit on me.”

“Oh, sweet boy,” you said, pursing your lips, “You’re in recovery. That’s enough. You don’t have to do anything to be worthwhile.” Wait. Fuck. You don’t talk to this Touya this way. Reel it back.

Crumbs fell from his mouth to the tablecloth. “The hell is wrong with you?” he typed.

Yeah, reel it way back. You elected not to respond, instead biting with difficulty into a brie/fig/prosciutto crostini and not being able to taste any of it.

“Would you like to discuss some so-called nerd crap with us?” Shouto arranged his notebook father across the table to be more in the middle of the three of you. “I know it’s been a while since you read Hunter x Hunter, but it’s been on hiatus so long that there’s not much new information that you need to know.”

“Hey,” you said, rushing to swallow, “You’ve read this before? How come you haven’t been sitting in to watch stuff with us?”

Touya shot Shouto a dark look, tongued a chunk of palmier into his cheek, and furiously typed on his phone. “I’m not interested in that shit anymore. It’s for kids.”

Shouto looked taken aback. “This is news to me. Do I have permission to take your manga volumes out of the house, then?”

“Fuck you,” Touya had already typed while Shouto was talking.

You bit back a smile. You’ve been borrowing a former, major villain’s manga? Cute. “But if you read it a while back, that means you’ve had more time to think about the characters,” you said, resting your elbow on the back of your chair as you shifted to face him, “Most of us are absorbing the story for the first time. It’d be cool to hear what you think.”

That parmesan palmier had looked good. Trusting this Touya on his taste, you wrote it on your list to investigate later, while he typed his response.

His expression fell flat enough to match the robotic tone. “Do you just want to hear me project my daddy and mommy issues onto the characters in the Zoldyck family?”

“No, Touya,” you said, laughing, “You have valuable things to say across the board, and I want to listen.” You almost nudged his knee with yours, but you had to stop yourself, something dark swirling in your chest. This wasn’t your Touya. You’re not allowed to.

His eyes flicked down towards the movement, but he didn’t comment. Shifting his jaw, he slipped off his white tuxedo jacket to drape it over the back of his chair, and for some reason, his gaze kept darting to you while he rolled the sleeves of his button-down up to his elbows, but he tried to give the appearance of being very focused on whatever skewered meat and pineapple was on the rim of your plate.

You were frowning. Fuck this. Fuck him. Touya was probably one of those guys who knew their effect on women, so he would know about the rolling-sleeves-to-elbows move. And fucking hell, was it effective for him, because the way he’s lost a lot of weight but was currently gaining it back made the tendons in his forearms much more noticeable when they tensed and strained, and the asymmetry of the burns and scars up his left arm in comparison to the smoothness of his prosthetic right only made him even more horribly, horribly attractive, and you were pissed about it, only getting more furious as he wrapped his tongue around the base of the first pineapple chunk and used his teeth to maneuver it off of the stolen skewer, hooded eyes staring you down. This Touya can act like a fucking slut, sure, but your Touya won’t even show you his goddamn hands.

“Hey, watch out.” You scratched your forehead in an attempt to conceal how enraged you were. “I’ve already had one of those. That lump at the end is an overly-breaded coconut shrimp. So—fish—be careful,” you finished lamely.

Touya’s hands and mouth were full with the skewer. Unable to type on his phone, he shifted the skewer to his left hand, flattened his right, and tapped his left wrist with it—the JSL sign for thank you.

You nodded and didn’t think anything of it for a moment, but when it hit you, you seized up and stared at him, chest swelling, proud and confused and frozen. Getting a little lightheaded, actually, but oh, God, who wouldn’t at the sight of Todoroki Touya, quiet and subdued but still suave as fuck, sitting so close to you in a freshly dishevelled white tuxedo that fit like it was custom-made for him, smelling so, so good and smiling with his perfect teeth (how are they that good when he was with the League for so long?), leaning towards you to steal your food and showing that he’d been paying attention to you, that he’d taken the JSL book you’d left with Shouto, that he’d thought about you when you’ve been apart and cared enough to try to learn something new with you, and you were going to kiss him; he deserved it; you were going to grab that stupidly adorable face and—no, that lightheadedness was also stemming from the soulmate bond activating.

Nausea swept through you for more than one reason. If your Touya discovered you were fighting the urge to kiss someone else, let alone the other Touya, then—you didn’t know. You didn’t know how you’d ever recover. Please let this be from your perspective, so he can’t feel your feelings, please.

“I have to go,” you said, pushing up on the table to stand, not even bothering to flash Shouto the soulmate hand signal. You had to get away. No matter if it were from your perspective or his, distance would help you suppress your fucking shameful crush on your friend’s older brother.

Good God, you were crossing the streams, you noted and fumed as you escaped onto a vacant alcove. Because they have the same goddamn name, your brain has been conflating the two of them. Shut up. You’re only allowed to have one Touya. Two would be greedy and dismissive of the soulmate bond in the first place.

Vertigo struck you so severely that you had to brace yourself against the nearest column, but you swopped to the balcony railing because you could grasp it and put most of your weight on it, and because your brain was swimming, you hand to get on your knees to wait for it to pass. “No, you can’t,” you said, trying your hardest to push thought of that Touya out of your head in case your Touya could feel them, “You can’t—that one doesn’t need to be in a romantic relationship right now. He’s working on himself. It’d fuck him up.” And ohhhh, you left your phone at the table, so you couldn’t call your Touya, and fuck, you didn’t want him to feel confused or betrayed because you weren’t calling him—

“Whose future are you deciding, here?”

Your Touya. He was here?

You opened your eyes to the sight of the balcony and the garden below, thank fuck. Okay, you could work with this. You could work with this; he’s not supposed to be able to feel—

His voice came from close behind you, as if he were leaning on another side of the column. “What’s got you feeling this guilty?”

Holy shit holy shit, has the bond evolved? Can feelings be felt from both sides regardless of perspective? “Hey, Touya.”

“Don’t turn around,” he said, even though you’d made no movement to.

“Can you see?”

“Only through you, angel. Otherwise, I’m in the dark.” With the sounds of clothes shifting, Touya must have crouched behind you, joints cracking. A fingerless-gloved hand brushed down your arm, and he moved your lace shawl out of the way to stroke your bare skin. Your mind was already going haywire at your betrayal, and his cold, gentle touch was not helping. “What’s wrong, hm?” He adjusted himself again behind you so that he could wrap his other arm around your waist, pulling you back into him, and his cool, rough lips pressed against the curve of your neck as he rested his head there.

You were going to cry. You’ll do it. For real, this time.

“Did that Todoroki Touya guy bother you? I saw him sitting at your table.”

God, no, he brought up whom you were trying to avoid, and you cringed, hating yourself as Touya’s hand sank down your arms to entwine his fingers with yours, rumpled shirtsleeves grazing your bare skin and leather gloves curbing the maximal skin-to-skin contact.

“He’s so fucked up that I wouldn’t be surprised if you hated him,” Touya was saying into your ear, “I could grind him into a pulp for you. He’d deserve it, wouldn’t he, for what he did to everyone? And I was burning up with jealousy from across the room; someone as pretty as you shouldn’t have such a hideous thing by your side.”

You made a noise from the back of your throat. You didn’t know, and you especially didn’t need the one person you were trying to hide your internal conflict from while you were actively trying to work out the internal conflict. First things first, you supposed. “Touya’s not fucking ugly.”

Your Touya snorted against your neck, hot air washing down the hollow of your throat. “I forgot how twisted you are. But there’s no way you could actually like him, right?”

“I can’t,” you said, releasing the balcony to clench your fists on your knees, “I can’t like him. He needs to discover who he is as an individual before he finds out how he functions in a relationship. He doesn’t need romance—or me, at this point in his life.”

“Interesting,” he said, more clearly now that his mouth wasn’t muffled against your skin, “Sounds like you think something’s wrong with him. Like he’s not whole. And isn’t he broken? You’d have to be, if you pulled the shit he did, burning cities to the ground and murdering—”

“Shut up,” you said, hunching in on yourself, “You’re don’t know. You’re believing what other people have told you about him. You’re just—you’re just like people who talk about that nerd shit you hate without checking the source material. They’ll talk about certain characters in terms of false narratives they’ve crafted, and they’ll talk about them for so long that the false information becomes conflated with the characters, with everyone thinking the wrong stuff is real. I—fuck.” You winced, but he was listening, his free hand winding around your neck to adjust the migrant clasp on your necklace to the back of your throat. “I know my ideas of Touya stem from propaganda, but I want to learn about him from him. Just based on what I’ve seen, there’s so much out there that’s wrong—it’s even subconsciously perpetuated in his own home, since the shrine where his family mourned him is still there. And I hate it. I hate it, because he seems so lovable, but so are you, and I hate myself because I want to love only you, because you’re my soulmate, and I’m so, so, so goddamn terrified that you’re gonna reject me and leave me alone forever now that I’ve betrayed you. By feeling stuff for someone else.”

You were crying. You were crying, nose stopping up, and Touya kissed your throat, over the clasp of your necklace. “Rejection’s a bitch. I know that,” he said under his breath, “So, I’m not gonna do that to you, even if…” He trailed off, instead latching his mouth to your neck again, letting his tongue flick over your skin once, as if it were an afterthought. “You really like him?”

“I’m scared that I do,” you said, taking a corner of your shawl to daub at your tears.

“The only thing to do is feel it out, I guess.” Touya settled at last, shifting weight and moving his legs so that they’d be on either side of you, and his left arm joined the other around your waist to hold you close. “Or let it die, if you want. The soulmate bond doesn’t matter in the end. You don’t have to love him or me.”

“But Touya,” you said, sniffing, dying to look back at him but restraining yourself, “I do.”

***

Later that night, you were researching how to make little cheese balls that were shaped like pumpkins like they’d had at the awards ceremony when you felt the familiar wooziness. Funny. It’s not often that the bond activates twice in one day. You closed your laptop and set your notebook aside, waiting for the slow, drowsy fade into Touya’s eyes.

Tonight, it’s a jarring, instantaneous slam into his perspective, and you felt like you’d been knocked about in the baggage rack of a train. You threw out your hands to balance yourself, even though you hadn’t been physically moved, and the queasiness made it hard to concentrate, blackness blotting at the edges of your periphery.

But the darkness of Touya’s bedroom wasn’t helping, with only partially drawn curtains letting in moonlight, and—and oh, my God, he’s flat on his back in bed, tousled bedsheets, cock out, and it’s so pretty, unfairly pretty, thick as hell but thicker at the head than the base, blushing deep pink, leaking onto the faint lines of re-developing abs and a vaguely red trail of hair, and—

The hand touching it has skin grafts.

“—ugh, darlin’, fuck, you know what I’m gonna—gonna do to you, angel?” Touya was muttering to himself, too caught up to realise you were there. “You don’t—you don’t know what you do to me.”

You’d registered his pubic hair as vaguely red because, now that you were staring, only the very tips of the untouched hair trailing down his stomach were red, with what he’d probably shaved at some point lower on his body snowy against whatever unburnt skin could still grow hair. He’s gripping himself at an angle that doesn’t make him rub against a strand of load-bearing staples on his upper thigh (did someone say load?), connecting a stretch of familiarly burned skin to a healing graft, diamond-speckled and twitching with his cock the closer he drew to orgasm (from the back of your mind surfaced a questioning thought of if he’d advocated for healing his hands first, since staples would hinder smooth masturbation). His prosthetic arm lay unattached at his side.

“Hahh, I wanna,” said Touya, drawing in a ragged breath, “wanna make a mess outta you, y’always too put together, too fuckin’ pretty for y’own damn good, fuck.” He rubbed his thumb over his tip, the skin there giving everso slightly at the pressure, with another bead of precum swelling before it dripped onto his stomach. “Gonna find wha—whatever I can do to make you fuckin’ whine, and I’m gonna, hah, follow that sound for the rest of my goddamn life, and, oh—fuck, fuck, how, how sweet you’d feel wrapped around me, how much I don’t fuckin’ deserve—”

He cut himself off to take a deep, stuttering breath, and you saw the gates of heaven in the way his chest surged forward when he arched his back, lines of burns and scars carved into his skin like a roadmap. And Touya moaned for you, and you didn’t know how much you’d needed to hear both Touyas do that until now, but before he could finish the first syllable of your name, you were lurched out of the bond and back into your room, just as abruptly as it had begun.

Your hands were shaking as you tied your shoelaces, aware of the leak into your underwear when you bent over, and you dashed to the nearest train depot, navigating in fervent, distant buzz all the way to the Todoroki estate. You must have appeared sufficiently crazy, because the only vacant seats on the train were next to you.

(In your heart of hearts, you had known.

If you’d put it into words, consciously, where both Touyas overlapped, it would’ve been too hard to bear if they’d been different people, which was, regardless, the most logical situation. Getting excited for your soulmate to be your former crush and then being disappointed when it wasn’t him felt like a betrayal to your soulmate. You hadn’t wanted to set yourself up for disappointment or betrayal, because you shouldn’t feel guilt when you look at your soulmate. Someone who holds your heart in his hand should never be second best to you. Touya’s had enough of not being enough in his life.

Surely the random chance of a stranger’s quirk wouldn’t be so kind to give you whom you’ve been wanting. You haven’t allowed yourself to hope.)

You didn’t even go in the front door. You clambered over the garden wall and berated yourself for not recognising Touya’s garden earlier, even though you’ve usually been around the kitchen and living room when you’re here. It took you longer than it could’ve to get to his teahouse, because you were deliberately staying on the garden path instead of walking on his hard work, but you didn’t even take off your shoes at the entrance, the nightingale floors chirping out in the night as you surged towards his bedroom door.

Touya lay facing the window in his very Western bed that took up most of the room—and much of his bedroom was like that, with his modern belongings scattered across other outdated furnishings, clean but cluttered, thought it startled you to open the door onto a Naruto poster taped in the space designated for a hanging scroll.

You only had time to absorb poster and lived-in before you saw the face of God in how Touya stretched and groaned in bed, arching his back and holding it until his back popped (a little too fixated on his moonlit nipples, like seeing them would fix you, flip you back to your factory settings). “Natsuo,” he said, coming out of his groan, eyes scrunched shut, “Don’t say you’re here to make me re-hang the windchimes. I spent all day tracking how air flows through the garden.”

You sat at the foot of his bed, mattress dipping slightly, still in your coat and shoes and hesitant to spread dirt, but the need to be near Touya, even if it were through blankets, consumed you. Hands folded behind his head, Touya cracked open an eye at the weight, and he froze.

You hadn’t prepared any confession on the train. You’d been too focused on the memory of his thighs. So, what garbled nonsense that came out of your mouth was “I figured your dick would be pierced.”

Touya appeared to snap back into reality, and he sat up in bed, pulling the blankets up to cover more of his bare chest (mourning for his nipples. Inconsolable about it, even) and quite obviously tried so hard to be chill (the way his leg started jiggling underneath the covers and how he wouldn’t look you in the eyes for more than a couple of seconds gave him away, though). “Is that what they say about me?”

You folded your hands in your lap, bent over for a swift escape in case he wanted you to leave “Jirou conjectures that you have a Jacob’s ladder.”

“Just what I need. More holes in my body.” He ran his tongue over his lower lip—much more scarred than the upper one, clarifying some things about kissing him. “Don’t know how to take that a bunch of kids who resent me talk about the state of my dick. You a part of that crowd?”

“I was shown a picture of what was advertised to be a very realistic dildo,” you said, scooting your ass farther back onto the bed now that he wasn’t going to send you away, “It had many, many piercings. It wasn’t as thick, if that makes you feel better.”

“It does not,” said Touya, brow pinched. He brought his legs up to hug them to his chest, but he must have changed his mind, instead just letting them block your view of him, hiding behind the cover of the lumpy comforter.

You waited for him to elaborate. His tuxedo was thrown over a wicker trunk, bowtie tossed onto a kotatsu, even though it wasn’t cold enough outside, with his gaming controller next to it and an open can of black tea. Two floor seats were haphazardly tucked underneath the kotatsu’s blanket, the one facing the TV flatter and duller than the one nearer the door. His only bookshelf had the illusion that it was constantly being added to, with the first shelf arranged neatly and the rest completely shoved together, the lowest one still mostly empty—your sign language book lay horizontally on it.

He should’ve said something by now, right? Antsy, you shifted your weight, staring down at your shoes. To have something to do, you slowly took them off, lining them up with Touya’s house slippers (with seahorses on them?) next to the bed, and you swallowed your pride to break the ice. “I’m glad it’s you, by the way. Very glad.”

Touya grunted and draped an arm over his knees. “Did you know?”

“I will be generous and say not really,” you said, shuffling off your coat to hang on the bedpost, “I didn’t permit myself to make the connections.”

“Eh.” He shrugged with one shoulder—the left one, the natural one. He’d reattached his prosthetic in the meantime. “There are around one hundred Touyas in Japan, according to the last census.”

“Sounds like a prepared statistic,” you said, holding back that the name frequency has probably plummeted in the last few years, “I’m serious, though. I wanted my Touya—soulmate, you, Touya—to be Todoroki Touya. So badly.”

He covered his mouth, thumbing at his lower lip and simply staring at you. In the moonlight, his eyes were as fucking bright blue as—well. As his flames. More things were clicking into place.

“Really, Touya,” you said, desperate for him to believe you, “I liked you as the stranger in the alley, and I liked you as Dabi, and when my soulmate seemed to share some traits with the other Touya in my life, I didn’t give myself permission to think about it. Because I was growing fond of the you that spoke to me, that I was getting to know, and while my feelings for the other you were being rekindled, too, I wanted to love the soulmate you more, because it's become fucking evident to me that I was made to love you, even without this soulmate stuff. You’ve been scattered throughout my life, anyway. It just happened to speed things up, since it forced you to talk to me. Otherwise, you’d probably still be at the point where you’re the brooding-older-brother figure who isolates himself in his room when his brother’s friends are over.”

Touya was frowning, but you waited it out entirely this time. “You saw…all that,” he eventually said, gesturing down himself, “and you still want me?”

Biting back a smile, you lifted your knees to the bed, moving slowly to gauge his reaction before getting closer to him. “I saw you decapitate someone, and I still want you.”

“You’re insane,” said Touya, tensing up as you neared him but twitching into a nervous grin, eyes falling to your boobs, away to the window, and back to your face.

“Correct,” you said, and you knelt next to him, taking all of your restraint to keep from reaching out the final few centimetres to run your hands down his chest. “Don’t you need someone a little insane, though?”

The comforter fell a few inches down his chest, and you throat ran dry at the long line of fading stitches and staples.

You raised a quivering hand to his face, and it’s strange: both of you flinched in the moment your fingertips felt the tiniest bit of body heat emanating from his cheek, and it’s strange: it’s the first time you’ve felt any heat come from Touya at all, and it’s strange: you could see yourself so clearly waking up next to him every day, putting your chin on his shoulder while he picked out fruits at the grocery store, feeding the koi late at night together while you lured the ducks away, watching his eyes soften in the same way both when he sinks his teeth into something you’ve baked and his cock deep into you while he cradled you closely to his chest, but at the moment, it might be too much for you—and perhaps Touya as well, judging by the nearly incomprehensible, jumbled sort of expression—if you even touched his face.

Perhaps the prospect of romance was too much for him at this point in his life. The last thing Touya should be feeling about that was guilt.

“I don’t mind being on the backburner while you figure things out,” you said, returning your hand to your lap and trying very hard not to look at his nipples, “I’ll wait for whatever you need to do. I’ll—”

“No,” said Touya, shaking himself out of whatever spiralling dive he’d been leaning into, “Hell, no. No fucking—” He snatched the hand you’d almost touched him with and clenched it hard, smushing your fingers together (startled by the physical contact, even though he’d initiated it), and after a flash of frustration at his prosthetic arm, he passed your hand to his left. “You’re fucking sticking around. You—you don’t just look at me; you see me, in such a different fucking way than anyone else, and you did it immedia—it took my family so long to look, and you—you’ve been watching. Been paying attention. It’s all I’ve ever—” He frowned, rolling his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “It’s good to have you around while I dig myself out of this hole,” he said, squeezing your hand harder but glaring outside through the window, “I wish I had known you sooner.”

“I’m here now, and I want to get to know you better. I want to hear more about you, things that are true,” you said, “and don’t start with anything self-deprecating, Touya. The next time the bond lets you see through me, I’m gonna show you what you look like through my eyes. And I’m not lying to you when I say you are so very, very pretty.”

Grunting, Touya fidgeted in bed, the covers slipping down to his stomach, drawing your hand closer to him, with your body leaning in to follow his pull. “Shit,” he said, “Don’t say shit like that right now.”

“Touya, I am gonna tell you how gorgeous you are until you believe it, and that starts now.”

“Not tha—well, yes, that, but I—” He sucked in through his teeth (also sucking in through a tiny hollow in his cheek caused by a loose staple, with a faint, wheezing whistle) and threaded his fingers through yours, pulling your hands towards his shoulder so that you loomed over his chest, “I have a hell of a refractory period now. It’s fuckin’ hard for me to get hard a lot, and you saw me; I just—” Inhaling sharply, he jerked his hand away from yours and frantically started wiping it on the blankets.  The new skin around the tips of his ears bloomed pink. “I haven’t washed my hands.”

“Touya,” you said, “Like I care.” You took the hand he was trying to hide in the folds of the blanket and licked up his palm, holding eye contact and relishing the way the blush spread to the untouched skin around the corners of his eyes. “I want all of you. Both sides you’ve shown me, and more. So long as it’s real. So long as it’s you.”

“All right. First step is getting on top of me,” said Touya, and, palm wet, he took your hand again, and he tugged on it, guiding you into his lap, other hand sliding down the thigh you swung over him. “Makes it easier to talk, y’know. To look at you.”

“Oh? Are we starting with your tragic backstory? If you’re taking requests,” you said, sliding your hand up and over his shoulder to run your fingers over his collarbone (jutting out from under both burnt and new skin), “then I’d like to hear your perspective of when you first kissed me.”

Touya lift his prosthetic hand to your cheek, just as cold and strong as his real one, and he placed his thumb at the corner of your lower lip, tip breaking the seal of your lips to press in just barely. “Actually, I think we’ll start with this pretty mouth of yours.”

***

Iida was shouting and gesturing from the living room that you only had fifteen minutes before the episode viewing was scheduled to start, and Shinsou shut him up by reminding him that Tokoyami had to pick up Ojiro and Hagakure from the floristry across town and that they’d start watching whenever they started watching, so chill out, Iida. Go help Mina pick the bugles out of her hair, or something.

You and Touya crouched together in front of the oven, staring through the glass at the rows of potato wedges—the recipe he claims his mother made when he was five, but surely a woman as sensible as Todoroki Rei wouldn’t put that much fucking cayenne pepper or paprika or chili sauce or—listen, it was a lot.

“C’mon, pretty boy, tell me something else true about you,” you said, nudging his shoulder with yours while you made eye contact with him in the oven’s reflection.

“Hm,” he said, scratching the underside of his chin with a bare hand (the gloves lay folded back on the teahouse dresser), “I hate fish.”

(Here you sighed dramatically, because you obviously already knew this. His loathing was intensified at the moment, though, because he’d had to get up and leave you in the middle of the night last night because the koi pond monitor was blaring at a stupid clog in the filter.)

“Tastes fuckin’ gross dead. Bitch to take care of livin’.”

You pushed on your knees to stand, and you held out a hand to help him up. “Enough with the negativity, dickhead. Tell me more about what you like.”

“Besides you?” He took your hand and grinned, putting all his weight into it as you strained to lift him, and when the oven timer beeped and you’d shot a few choice words his way, he had mercy and stood up by himself. He grabbed the oven mitts and tossed them to you, and while you removed the tray from the oven, he ran his hand through the sharp, white spikes of his hair, inadvertently wiping specks of paprika into it.

You set the tray on a cooling rack. “C’mon, Touya. No need to be so cheesy.”

“I can be worse,” he said, winding his arms around your waist before you could even take off the oven mitts, cradling you close to him, no room in between, and he propped his chin on your shoulder. “I can even incorporate—you call me cheesy; you’re the one who called me pretty boy not a minute ago.”

Blindly, you raised a hand to run it back through Touya’s soft, soft hair, and you gently bumped your cheek against his. “I am not being cheesy by simply stating the truth. You’re gorgeous, Touya.”

“Bet I’d look even better throbbing inside you.”

“Please follow a logical flow in conversation like the rest of us,” you said, and when you couldn’t grasp the spatula you were reaching for, Touya grabbed it for you, scraping up some of the first row, having to release you during the process.

Leaning on the counter to face him, you flinched at the heat before pinching a potato wedge between the tips of your fingers, but Touya held one like it was completely cool. It had almost touched his tongue before he paused and waited for your reaction to his recipe.

His potato wedges were bad. Too crunchy on top because of the odd broil time and not-fully-ground peppercorns and too soggy and soft underneath, especially in the part where it’d stuck to the tin foil and peeled off, and the combination of spices didn’t quite mesh together well. With a sliver of quiet triumph, you swallowed a bite of potato wedge decidedly worse than the ones you made.

But Touya was looking at you, eyes brimming with hope despite his otherwise carefully cultivated cool exterior, watching, waiting for you—and it was Touya, after all; Touya was the one who cooked these—made them for you, deliberately, on purpose—and so that made what words were about to come out of your mouth true and beautiful.

soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair, @tiredkittykat, @cheshireshiya, @90s-belladonna, @infjsnightmare

#bnha #dabi #dabi x reader #dabi/reader #dabi imagine #dabi fic #mha #dabi headcanons #dabi fanfiction #dabi fanfic #soulmates #soulmate au #soulmate #dash it all

[dabislittlemouse]

I was thinking about a lil challenge with Dabi in bed , like~ this time you two just kissing but not touching! Who's first touch then lost game and Dabi thought that's could be fun💨 but now can't help his growing erection ---

ALL FUN AND GAMES

➛ Word count: 1.5k

➛ Contains: Dabi x fem!reader NSFW, creampie, MDNI +18

➛ A/N: Writing this was so hard only for the fact that I turned myself on and I couldn’t resist any longer LMFAOO.

Reblogs would be appreciated!

Dabi’s first thought when you brought up this fun little game to play that night was that he’d lose instantly. How could he ever resist kissing you but not touching you? Only the sight of you drove him wild. He’d devour you in seconds, making the game end immediately. But on the other side, he thought it would be fun to watch you squirm in your place, teasing you until you couldn’t take it anymore and end the game. 

This would definitely be fun. 

“Alright Y/N” he smirked. “You doomed yourself with this one. I’m not keen on losing y’know..” 

“And neither am I..” you said confidently, preparing yourself to resist as much as you could on this challenge. “You think I’m that thirsty over you to lose? This is gonna be easy”

Dabi laughed, he knew what you meant wasn’t to offend him but a bratty way to tease and rile him up. And it definitely worked, the mischievous grin on his face making it known that there was no turning back from this.

“Alright then, sweetheart..let’s start this shall we?” he whispered, getting closer until the tip of your noses touched together. You gulped nervously, feeling your face heating up as you nodded. Without wasting any second, his lips pressed softly against yours. He was taking his time, slowly tasting your lips and humming in your mouth. You felt your heartbeats getting faster along with a pool of butterflies forming in your stomach as well. Fuck, this was already getting hard. The bastard was a good kisser, he knew how to drive you absolutely crazy with just a few kisses and no touching at all. His half lidded eyes were glued on yours, the little sighs you’d let out had him smirk on the kiss, now deepening it and using his tongue. The wet muscle brushed past your lower lip, before sliding in and intertwining with yours. 

“Mmm.. you good there..?” he mumbled between kisses, not giving you time to breathe or talk at all as he continued kissing and invading your mouth with his tongue. 

“I’m..mmmhm f-fine” you tried to back away from the kiss to catch your breath a little, the room was suddenly getting smaller, the air was warmer and your hands were sweating. You were dying to touch him, you wanted to climb on his lap and grind your wet aching cunt on his thigh to feel some pleasure, to run your hands through his toned chest and hair. “Dabi..”

“What is it doll, y’like it when I kiss you like this huh? Or maybe.. you want this tongue to be somewhere else.. ” he chuckled, noticing the way your thighs squeezed together. The rules of the game never mentioned that talking wasn’t allowed, so he had to take the chance. 

“Mmmh yeah? Is that what you want? Fuck-” Dabi groaned, feeling his pants getting tighter from the growing erection. The sounds you were letting out, the little sighs and whimpers as he teased you, were driving him insane, almost making him cum right there in his pants. “I bet that slutty cunt of yours is drenched, I can smell it. M’dying for a taste~”

“God-” you tried breaking the kiss but his teeth bit your lower lip hard enough to prevent you from backing away and keeping you in place. “You damn bastar-”

“C’mere..” 

His mouth crashed against yours again, now the kiss getting rougher and deeper as he was literally eating your mouth and grunting with each kiss, making you squeal in your seat as your nails digged in your thighs. Purposely Dabi brought his body closer to yours, but he still didn’t touch you, nor did he let you back away. 

A fucking menace.

You could already feel the heat his body radiated, the scent and steam coming off him got you even more soaked. Your body was inches away from his, it was hard as hell to continue this game any further now.

“Y’wanna touch your man so bad huh..” he murmured. “.. c’mon, I’m all yours pretty girl~”

Fuck this game.

Your hands instantly grabbed his coat and pulled him closer while you shifted on his lap, still not breaking the kiss.

“That’s my girl..” he chuckled, taking pride in winning the game and making you lose so easily. His hands cupped your asscheeks, squeezing them as he moved your body to grind against his hardened crotch. You moaned softly in his mouth, relishing the pleasure, the heat of your cunt could be felt even with your clothes on. The way you were clinging on his body and trying to take his clothes off made it hard for him to not pin you down and fuck you into oblivion.

“Eager aren’t we..” he smiled, removing his coat and shirt and throwing you down to the bed. “Spread those pretty legs for me… there you go”

He licked his lips at the sight of your soaked panties. “Damn.. some kisses was all it took? I thought ya weren’t thirsty f’me..” 

“Shut up” you scoffed, covering your flustered face with your hands. “C’mon Dabi..” You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him closer.

He’d usually make you beg for it, but this game had edged him enough to the point he couldn’t waste time anymore. He unbuckled his belt, whipping out his hardened pierced cock, precum already leaking down and making you drool at the sight. Your panties were almost torn from the way he aggressively took them off you like a starved man.

“Tell me you want this..” he whispered, placing kisses and bites on your neck as the tip of his cock slid against your wet folds, making your legs tremble. “C’mon baby..” He sounded needy, the game took a toll on him as well. 

“Please.. I want this” you whined, getting impatient as each second felt like hours. “Fuck me..”

With a low groan he placed his cock right between those puffy folds, sliding it slowly, agonizingly as the warmth of your velvety walls welcomed his grith inch by inch. “Shit.. always so tight f’me”

Filling you up completely, you could feel his cock twitching inside of you, his hands kept your legs spread wide as he started his thrusts, pushing inside, stretching you out and going deeper. You began clenching around him faster than you imagined, already feeling that knot on your stomach ready to explode from how long you were edged until now. Dabi cursed between his teeth, he wasn’t going to last long either from the deathly grip your cunt had on his cock. 

“Shit babe.. y’killing me here, oh fuck-” he groaned, slowing his pace for a moment before slamming it right back in with more strength, hitting the deepest parts of you while you moaned loudly in response. And he did that over and over again, fucking you stupid, going faster and rougher until he slowed the pace again. You whined in frustration, looking up at him through furrowed eyebrows while he gave you a smug grin.

“The game’s still on dollface, but now whoever cums first loses..”

“You jerk-ah fuck!”

A particular hard thrust had your head spin and your eyes roll at the back of your skull, making you see stars. Dabi rested his face at the crook of your neck, while your nails dug into the purple flesh of his back. You were breaking and falling apart on his cock, and he was enjoying every second of it. Now he was drilling into you, the sounds of sloppy thrusts and skin slapping together now getting louder along with your moans as well. His earth-shattering pace had the twitching in your core grow more and more. 

“Look at that slutty little face..” he growled, looking at the way your eyes crossed and your mouth fell open. “Cum for me, slut.. fuck yeah that’s it-”

You clung to him the moment orgasm hit you, shocks of electricity going through your body as he felt your sweet cunt gushing and creaming around his cock. 

"That's a good girl." he moaned, following right after as he came deep inside, coating your insides with white pearly cum and groaning loudly in your neck. Your body kept twitching as his seed leaked down your sore cunt, but the fire in you still wasn’t perished. You could go for a few more rounds from the way this man lit you up.

“2 points for me..loser” he mocked, resting on top of you but still not pulling out. 

“Oh shut it..” you giggled, feeling embarrassed at the way you were always the first to break and give in to the temptation. 

“Wanna go for a few more rounds baby? Maybe you’ll get yourself some points..” he said with a low seductive voice which had you clench slightly around him again. You didn’t respond but he already got the answer.

“I’ll take that as a yes..” he grinned.

This was going to be a long night.

#B.writes #dabi x reader #dabi smut #dabi x you #dabi x y/n #touya todoroki x reader #toya todoroki x reader #dabi #touya todoroki #mha dabi #dabi fanfics #dabi fanfiction #bnha smut #mha smut

[emotionalsupportemoboys]

SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR

Just an idea I wanted to get out of my head. A quick Dabi x F!Reader where he gets the (mostly) happy ending that he deserves, god damn it. I may expand on this at some point, we’ll see. Contains vague spoilers for chapter 390.

1.2k words

You’re watching the coverage and you see the moment when Touya’s badly charred body hits the ground. You were supposed to stay away, to remain in the flanks supporting the fight, but you book it to his location; Endeavor and all the others be damned.

The Todoroki family looks on in stunned silence as you drop to your knees beside him, crying his name and begging him not to die. He can’t see you, but he can hear you, and he croaks a single, pained word, “…Doll…”

Your heart shatters.

He was your world and you were watching it slowly slipping away.

You plead for him to hang on while searching for a place to lay your hands. Even in his fractured state of mind, he knows what you’re doing and he’s afraid that you might take a lethal toll on your body by using your quirk to heal him. It probably wouldn’t even be enough to save him, you were bitterly aware of that, but it wasn’t going to stop you.

“Don’t.”

“I have to try, Touya! I love you! I love you so much! Please don’t leave me!”

He knew this. You’d told him countless times before, but even so, he’s grateful that these are the last words he ever hears. Knowing that he was truly loved tempered the pain of failing to accomplish his goal. He just wished that he could stay to love you longer, to give you the normal life that you deserved.

You pour every ounce of yourself into keeping him alive and the chaos around you eventually fades to black.

. . .

It feels like everything is over in an instant.

His eyes flutter open and he briefly experiences the same sights and sounds from the battlefield before realizing that he was somewhere else; in a brightly lit, sterile room. He didn’t recognize this place, but you were sitting beside his hospital bed, fast asleep while upright in a folding chair.

He’s so relieved to see you that bloody tears well in his eyes before spilling over onto his cheeks. You looked different, healthy, and no longer war-torn. How much time had passed?

He’s not entirely sure what he’s expecting to see when he looks down at his hands, but the fact that he has both is startling enough. It takes some effort for him to move his tired body. He touches his face and finds smooth skin where scars and staples had once been. Was he dreaming? Was he dead?

He quickly decides that he didn’t mind either option, so long as he got to stay with you. He watches you sleep for what feels like an eternity before finally reaching over to take your hand.

You were solid. Real. Warm. Familiar.

“Doll?”

You wake to the sound of his hoarse voice and, for a second, you’re half convinced you must be hallucinating.

“Touya?” Your heart leaps inside your chest. You’d been praying for this moment for so long, having fantasized about it so many times that it almost didn’t seem real.

You throw yourself at him, pulling him into a fierce hug, which he reciprocates as best he can.

“Don’t cry, Doll,” he says softly while rubbing your back.

“You’re one to talk,” you sniffle, having noticed the crimson tears on his face. “Fuck, I love you so much, I’m so glad you’re awake.” You start sobbing in spite of yourself, “I missed you.”

He clears his throat, getting choked up as he squeezes you tighter, “I love you, too. More than anything.”

You enjoy each other’s company for a while, holding each other in comfortable silence, just as you always had. This man was your best friend, your lover, your fucking soul mate. You could have sat with him in silence until the end of time and it would have been more than enough just knowing that he was still breathing.

“How long was I out?” He asks quietly, expecting you to say a few weeks, or maybe a couple months.

You pull back to look at him wearing a sad smile, “Three years.”

“What!?” He blinks at you in shock.

You nod while squeezing his hand, “Just like Sekoto Peak.”

He probably shouldn’t have been surprised, it made sense considering his previous experience, though he was in much better shape this time around. His body looked damn near brand new, but he did still have some scarring on his torso, which would forever serve as a reminder of the pain and suffering he’d endured.

Over the course of the next few days, you explain how you’d found the best healers who’d survived the war to work on him. You also gently break the news about the villains losing and Endeavor still being alive, though he’d long since retired after issuing an apology to him and their family. You assure him that his efforts hadn’t been completely in vain, as society had made some changes for the better over the last three years, and the PLF was still working underground.

He takes his time processing all of this information, not quite sure how to feel. You help him through it, rarely leaving his side.

. . .

One week later, you walk into his room and sit on the bed to take his hand. He’d been doing well. You could see him slowly starting to envision a future for himself for the first time in years and you believed it was time to press forward.

“Touya, there’s someone very special who I want you to meet.”

He looks at you curiously, and with a bit of apprehension.

You smile fondly, “I think you’ll like him. He’s a lot like you.”

He narrows his eyes, but agrees to this meeting.

You step out and return a few minutes later carrying a small boy on your hip.

Touya knows as soon as he sees him.

His heart stops, his blood runs cold, and his stomach lurches. He tells himself that it couldn’t be possible, but there was no denying what was right in front of him, and the timeline added up.

“Mama!” The toddler says sweetly, beaming while tugging on the front of your shirt. He had a mop of white hair and big, beautiful blue eyes, just like his father.

He was the most precious and yet utterly terrifying little thing that Touya had ever encountered in his life. He stares at him in awe while fighting back tears.

You move to sit in the chair beside the bed and the boy suddenly takes notice of Touya. It’s rather endearing how the two gawk at each other.

“Touya, this is Seiko,” you say softly while ruffling his messy hair.

The look of pure love and devotion on your face as you gaze at your son—his son—makes his heart swell. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he struggles to keep his emotions in check.

“The Sweepy Man,” Seiko says while pointing at Touya. “Mama, he ‘wake.”

“Yes, baby. He was asleep for a long time, but he’s finally awake. Do you wanna say hi?”

Suddenly shy, Seiko hides his face against your neck before mustering the courage to peek at the so-called Sleepy Man, whom he’d been visiting every day since birth. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Touya’s voice cracks as a single crimson tear escapes from the corner of his eye, yet he finds himself smiling. “Hi, Seiko. I’m…I’m your dad.”

#my writing #dabi #touya todoroki #todoroki touya #dabi angst #dabi fluff #mha #bnha #dabi fanfic #dabi fanfiction #dabi drabble #dabi oneshot #mha fanfic #mha fanfiction #bnha fanfic #bnha fanfiction #league of villains #league of villains fanfic #dabi x reader #touya x reader #touya todoroki x reader #dabi x you #dabi x y/n #touya todoroki x you #mha 390 #dabi mha #touya x you #dabi x female reader #soft dabi #dad!dabi

[kimkaelyn]

The one in which you and Touya were childhood best friends turned sweethearts, and your reaction to Dabi.

warnings - heavy angst, grief, and manga spoilers

Touya Todoroki had been your everything. He was your first friend, your first crush, and your first kiss.  You were his number one supporter, always cheering him on, even after his family gave up on him becoming a pro hero. You were there when Shouto was born, and you were there to comfort Touya after he tried to kill him. You would apply burn cream and ice after every burn and bring bento boxes full of food to Sekoto Peak after he had been training for hours. You were there for every up and down, waiting to help him get back onto his feet and keep training harder and harder.

And at the end of it all, you were the last one to see him alive.

You refused his invitation to the top of the mountain that day- “Finals are coming up Touya and I need to study. You should be studying too”. He had tried to get you to come anyway, but you put your foot down. You two got into a heated argument over it, ending with you both stomping away in different directions.

You had seen the raging wildfire from your window and were instantly overcome with grief. You tried to go to the forest, calling out for your best friend, but you were stopped by Endeavor- his father- of all people. Once you informed him that his oldest son was inside the burning inferno, you were left alone.

A part of your soul died with Touya Todoroki that day, but life goes on. You adopted the Todoroki’s habit of not acknowledging trauma and carried on with your life like nothing had happened- at least on the surface.

It was difficult, you had your bad days, but you also had your good ones. On the especially hard days, you tried to remember the happy memories you had of him and reminded yourself that he wouldn’t want you to waste the day by being sad. ‘Touya would want me to move on and be happy’, you would remind yourself.

After ten years, you were better. You had managed to overcome your grief and move on with your life, but all your hard work had come crumbling down when you saw Dabi’s broadcast.

“My name is Touya Todoroki, the oldest son of the number one pro hero.”

Your entire world had halted on its axis as soon as the words left his mouth. You just stared at the broadcast, your frantic heartbeats the only sound you could hear aside from the confession that kept replaying like a mantra inside your head.

For the next couple of months, you didn’t outwardly acknowledge that your best friend- your first love- was a villain. That the friendly and hard-working adolescent that you knew was a serial killer.

You were amongst the evacuees when you saw the broadcast of the fight from a TV inside an abandoned store window. You dropped your backpack that contained everything that you could quickly grab from your apartment to the payment in shock as your brain tried to process what you were witnessing.

Touya- Dabi- and Endeavor battling it out in the middle of the city, and then Touya being engulfed in an inferno.

“Mom!” A familiar female voice called out from somewhere behind you. You turned in time to watch Rei Todoroki race towards the growing fireball, with Fuyumi and Natsuo following close on her heels. You did not hesitate to follow suit.

“Touya!” You heard the Todoroki’s yelling as they reached the impending explosion. You watched in awe as they activated their Frost Quirks, trying to cool their oldest son and brother down.

“Touya!” You yelled as you reached the wall of heat. Your clothes started to singe as you got closer.

“Y/N!” Fuyumi called out to you when she saw you. “What are you doing?! Get away!”

“No! Not before we stop Touya!”

“Y/N are you insane?” Natsuo swore.

“Y/N, get away!” Rei said to you as you continued to approach. “Your body cannot handle the heat!”

“And yours can?” You retorted. “Touya!”

“Touya! Big bro snap out of it!”

“Touya, stop!”

“Touya!” You screamed out before strong arms pulled you through the swelting wall of flames. You yelped as the flames licked at your skin. You managed to see the familiar face of Dabi through the smoke. You called out to him, “Touya! Stop, you are hurting me.”

“It’s Dabi now, sweetheart.” He said in a low voice as he wrapped his arms around you. You could practically feel the hatred dripping from his tongue. “What? Y/N, did you think I would stop my rampage about I saw you again, like some lovesick puppy?” He chuckled as he brought himself impossibly closer to you. You didn’t know if the scent of burning flesh was coming from you or him. “The Touya that you knew died ten years ago on Sekoto Peak. Again, it’s Dabi now, and Dabi doesn’t know you.” He whispered into your ear before lighting his entire body on fire.

remember to like, comment, and reblog!

#touya todoroki #todoroki #todoroki touya #dabi #dabi x reader #dabi x you #bnha #bnha fanfiction #toya todoroki x reader #touya todoroki x reader #dabi fanfiction #todoroki toya x reader #todoroki touya x reader #here it is my first fanfiction for bnha #my hero academia #my writing

[candycandy00]

Trending Topics - A Dabi x Reader Fanfic

I intended to post this on Saturday in honor of Dabi's Dance being animated but I finished it earlier than expected and I have no patience so I'm unleashing it to the world now, a few hours early lol. I hope everyone enjoys!

Smut. 18+. Rough sex. Creampie. Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Oh yeah, spoilers for Dabi's Dance!

Dabi leans back on the couch and holds his phone up to his face. “Let’s see what everyone has to say about my old man now,” he mutters, opening various social media apps to see what the general public’s reaction to his shocking video was. He could already imagine the outrage over the abuse allegations, the anger over the number one hero raising a violent murderer. He could also imagine the fanboys who would defend Endeavor no matter what, who would go to online war with the detractors who were horrified by Dabi’s video. All of it would be amusing to read through. Dabi will enjoy the online chaos. So he grins wickedly as he opens Twitter.

The names Dabi, Endeavor, and Todoroki Touya are already trending. Naturally. But then Dabi notices a few other “trending topics” that catch his eye. “#Dabisofine”, “#Touyasohot”, and “#SteponmeDabi” are all trending. Surprised and curious, Dabi begins clicking through some of the posts. After a few minutes, he sits up from the couch and stares at the screen incredulously. The tweets flashing by his eyes are definitely not what he expected the result of his video to be.

“OMG Dabi is so fucking hot! How have I never seen this guy before?”

“Okay Touya is definitely the sexiest Todoroki. Just look at him!”

“All I can say is, Dabi can light a fire in my panties any day!”

“Y’all… the things I would let Todoroki Touya do to me…”

“I want Dabi to rail me until I can’t walk.”

Dabi isn’t sure what to think about this. On one hand, he’s a little mad that his big dramatic reveal has been overtaken by posts like this. There’s even a long thread of posts and replies arguing over whether or not his dick has staples in it (it does, and the urge to tell them so wells up within him for a brief moment before dying away). But on the other hand, he feels… flattered? He’s never once thought of himself as sexy or even remotely good looking. All that scarring, all those burns… he felt like Frankenstein’s monster.

Years ago, he’d pretty much resigned himself to never having a lover. Who would want to even touch someone who looked like him? But it didn’t bother him all that much. After all, he was so focused on his revenge, he didn’t really have time for romance anyway. He’d shoved any thoughts of sex or love far away into the back of his mind. Of course he has hormones. He’s human, after all. Occasionally he even has urges, but he takes care of those himself.

Now though, reading through these tweets, those urges he’d shoved down are resurfacing. Out of curiosity, he clicks on the profile of the person who made that last tweet about wanting him to “rail” them. There are pictures of a very pretty young woman who looks to be in her early twenties. He also finds more posts about him.

“God, Dabi is so fine. Those scars really do it for me.”

“I wish I could feel that skin. All over me. I don’t care if he’s a villain.”

“Endeavor is a fucking monster. How could anyone treat such a beautiful person so badly?!”

Then more pictures of the woman. One of them in particular catches Dabi’s attention. It looks like she’s standing on the balcony of an apartment. In the background, he can see a restaurant sign straight across from her that he recognizes. Also in the background are several plants in colorful pots, sitting around her balcony.

Dabi rereads her tweets, then comes to a decision. He grins as he heads out the door.

*****

You hum to yourself as you water your potted plants on your balcony, then check your phone. There are tons of notifications from Twitter. Your posts about Dabi, Todoroki Touya, are getting a lot of likes. They’re also getting the attention of some seriously pathetic Endeavor fans who are trying, and failing, to justify the hero’s behavior. Some of them are just outright saying it’s all a lie, that Dabi’s video is just a phony hit piece. You can’t believe how naive they are, or maybe they’re just willfully ignorant. Either way, you’re already running through arguments and points in your mind that you can shoot back with as you step back into your apartment, leaving the glass door to your balcony open.

You step over to the sink and pour yourself a glass of water, still scrolling through replies with one hand, completely absorbed in your phone. A sudden sound, like a heavy thud, comes from your balcony as you’re walking back toward the door, about halfway through your small living room.

You look up from your phone and see Dabi himself standing just inside the door. He gives you a grin and says, “What was it you want me to do again? Rail you until you can’t walk?”

The glass of water slips from your hand and crashes on the floor. You don’t even look down at it. Your eyes are glued to this extremely sexy villain standing in your living room. One who has apparently read all the pervy tweets you made about him. Your mouth falls open, but you have no idea what to say.

He takes one step closer. “Or did you want to feel my skin all over you? Well, here I am.”

“Oh my God,” you finally manage to say, still staring at him. “Is this really happening?”

He tilts his head to the side, his hair falling over one bright blue eye. “That’s up to you.”

You slowly step closer to him, as if he’ll disappear if you approach too quickly. He’s gorgeous, but he’s still a villain. You don’t want to upset him. But damn, you really want to touch him. Maybe just ask for permission?

“Can I… touch you?” you ask.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he says, his grin showing his teeth.

You take one more step, effectively closing the distance between you and him. You reach out one hand and gently touch the side of his face, feeling the spaces where the scarring and healthy skin meet, your fingers grazing over the staples and piercings. You watch his expression, but it remains unchanged. Clearly, he’s not bothered by this.

“You’re so beautiful,” you say in a quiet voice, the words slipping out before you think them through.

Something shifts in his eyes. For a split second, the playful deviance vanishes and something else, something heartbreaking, takes its place. But then he grins again and says, “Look who’s talking.”

Does that mean he thinks you’re beautiful too? You feel a blush creep into your face. “Are you really here to rail me?” you ask.

“Do you really want me to?” he shoots back.

When you answer, your voice is more breathless than you expected. “More than anything.”

He reaches behind him and pulls the door shut, then follows you to your bedroom. As soon as you enter the room, you begin pulling your clothes off. Dabi watches you, not yet taking any of his clothing off. You feel like you’re doing a strip tease, with his eyes following your every move. It’s making heat spread through your body.

When you’re completely naked, you approach him and tug at his jacket. He lets you slide it off his shoulders and drop it on the floor, then he pulls his shirt over his head. You’ve seen him shirtless in the video, but nothing compares to seeing that lovely two-tone skin in person. Dabi’s eyes shift to the floor for a moment. Is he self-conscious about the scars? It seems ludicrous to you, especially since he was willing to show them off to the world in the video. But maybe showing them to someone in person is different.

You can’t help yourself, you have to touch him. You press both hands to his chest and slide them down, gingerly feeling the staples and the different textures of his skin. “It’s amazing,” you whisper.

His eyes shift back to you, and there’s an unreadable expression on his face. Not exactly embarrassed. Not exactly proud. It’s something like surprise, like no one has ever touched him before. “You have a scar fetish or something?” he asks, the playful tone seeming like a mask for whatever he’s actually feeling.

“I don’t know if I’d call it a fetish. I do like scars though. They’re unique to the person who carries them. They tell a story.”

He’s looking into your eyes now as your hands slide down to unbutton his pants. “And what story do mine tell?”

You meet his gaze and say, “One that’s very painful, I can imagine. I’d love to know the whole story someday. For now, I just think they’re mesmerizing to look at, and they feel incredible to the touch.” By this point you’ve pushed his pants down to his ankles, and he steps out of them. He’s not wearing underwear, and you can see all the glorious lines of scarring and staples across his thighs and hips. His cock is unscarred, but there are a few staples in it. You wonder about their purpose, but don’t ask.

Your hands run down his body, over his abdomen, moving around him to brush over his well-toned ass, and then you take his cock into one of your hands and lightly stroke it. It’s been growing harder by the moment, and the motion of your hand is speeding that process up.

Dabi sucks in air through his teeth, his eyes closing and opening slowly like a cat’s. Once he’s fully erect, he reaches down and pulls your hand away. “You’ve been looking me over this whole time. I think I should get a turn.”

With that, he suddenly picks you up and carries you to the bed. The feel of his bare skin on yours sends shivers through your body, and you miss the feel of it when he sits you down on the mattress. You scoot back to give him room, and he gently pushes your legs apart. He hovers over you, his eyes moving all over you, his hands finally reaching out to grope your breasts. His hands are firm and warm as they knead the plump mounds, then he scoots back slightly and leans forward, so that his head is positioned close to your groin.

Dabi uses his fingers to spread open your flesh and look at what’s inside. Then he leans even closer and runs his tongue along the inner folds, tasting your arousal. When his tongue hits your clit, you arch your back and moan. Dabi looks up at you with that unreadable expression again, like he’s just now understanding how much you really want him.

Then he grins again, because he’s discovered your weak spot. His tongue traces circles around your clit, making you squirm beneath him, wanting him to hit the bullseye again. He finally has mercy on you and closes his lips around the sensitive nub, sucking on it before running his tongue over it again. He even lightly grazes it with his teeth.

You cry out in pleasure, running one hand through his soft white hair and using the other to grip the sheets beside you. What name should you call out? Dabi? Touya? You’re not sure, so you so you stick to moans and wordless cries as he absolutely devours you. When you cum, it’s like a tsunami has hit your body, rocking it with wave after wave of rippling pleasure. Your whole body tenses up, your toes curl, and your hand in his hair tightens.

After a few seconds, your body relaxes, and Dabi pulls away, licking his lips. You feel weak, but you see the raging erection between his legs and know you can’t rest yet. He still hasn’t done what he came here to do. You reach for him, placing your hands on his scarred shoulders and pulling him toward you. You want, no need, him inside you. It’s an ache you felt the moment his video started. When you saw that body, those glowing blue eyes, that expression of carefully contained rage and pain… you wanted him like nothing before.

He lingers on top of you, not doing anything, just watching your face. Why is he hesitating? You try to pull him closer, but he’s not budging.

“Please,” you whimper, spreading your legs further apart, giving him the easiest access you can, “do it!”

Desire and lust seem to flame in his eyes. He wants to, you know it. But he waits. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do,” he says, his voice husky and low. Oh, now you see. He wants you to beg for it. Well, you can certainly do that.

You raise your hips from the bed and rub you drenched pussy across the underside of his cock. “Please, I want you inside me! Please fuck me!”

That seemed to do the trick. He smiles as he positions himself just right, then shoves his cock all the way in. He’s so much bigger than you expected, filling you up completely. As he pulls out a few inches, the staples scrape your insides in such a delicious way, you can’t help moaning again. He begins a rhythm of thrusting in and out, slowly at first and then picking up speed. You look up at him, and he’s thrown his head back, his eyes closed, his hands gripping your thighs.

He’s definitely railing you now, but it’s not enough. You might be able to walk tomorrow. In a panting voice, you cry out, “Harder!”

He opens his eyes and looks at your face, sees the lusty desperation there, and suddenly thrusts in so hard that you imagine his cock has entered your womb. His hands move to your waist, where he holds you steady as he pounds you into the mattress, every thrust feeling like it might just break your bones.

You love it. This is what you wanted. This man, this gorgeous, pained, scarred, unique person, being so deep inside you. One of his hands moves to your breast, where he roughly squeezes it. You’re going to be covered in bruises when this is over, but you’ll look at each one with joy.

Your hands are above your head, holding onto the brass headboard for dear life. Dabi moves his hand from your breast down to your clit, where he rubs it, hard enough to make you wince. You were already so sensitive from the earlier action, you cum again on the spot, your body convulsing with your orgasm.

Dabi doesn’t let up, continuing to fuck you as hard as he can as you tremble under him, tears falling from your eyes. You let go of the headboard and lift your weak, shaky arms to wrap them around his neck. To your surprise, he moves his hand from your sore clit and uses it to hold your head up, closer to him, his fingers intertwining with your hair in a gentle fashion. It’s an intimate gesture you didn’t expect from him, even as he rails you as promised. Finally, he cums inside you, filling you with hot sticky fluid, his grip on your waist tightening but the hand in your hair remaining soft. When he’s done, he pulls out and falls onto the bed beside you. You want to cuddle up to him, but you’re not sure how he would react to that. You just met. It’s not like you’re in a relationship.

After a few minutes, your naked body has cooled slightly, so you pull a sheet over the both of you. You reach over to the nightstand to get your phone and ask, “Would you mind if I take a picture of us?”

He looks over at you and says, “What, as a souvenir?”

You blush a little as you answer. “Yeah.”

He scoots closer to you and says, “Sure.”

You hold the phone up, pointing the camera at your faces. It’s obvious the two of you are topless, but you make sure the bottom of the image cuts off just before your tits are shown. You snap the picture and smile as you look at it. “Thanks,” you say.

Dabi gets out of bed and begins putting his clothes back on. “Are you gonna post it?”

You look up at him. “Hmm?”

“The picture. Are you gonna post it on Twitter?”

“Do you mind if I do?”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t bother me.”

You smile and open Twitter, add some comments and hashtags, and post the photo. Dabi pulls on his boots and says, “I better go. If I found your place from looking at your pictures, I’m sure the heroes can too.”

You suddenly regret posting it. “Wait, does that mean you can’t come back here?”

He looks at you with that unreadable expression again. “Do you want me to come back?”

“Of course I do!”

There’s a small notebook and a pen lying on your nightstand. Dabi picks them up and writes something down. “Here’s my number. Call me and we can meet up somewhere.”

You feel an incredible sense of relief. You can still see him. You can call him, maybe even get to know him for real. You take the notebook in your hands and cradle it, as if it’s a treasure. “Thanks,” you say.

Dabi shrugs again, rubbing the back of his head casually. “No problem,” he says back, seeming just a little awkward about it. “See you around then.”

He leaves through the balcony door, and you start humming happily to yourself again as you head for the shower.

*****

Once Dabi gets back to the hideout, he pulls out his phone and checks Twitter. There’s a new post by his new favorite user. There’s the picture of the two of you. Beneath it is a caption, as well as some hashtags. As he reads it, a grin spreads across his face, and then he breaks out into laughter.

“Got railed by the hottest Todoroki! Best day ever! #Dabisofine #Yesithasstaples #Villainsdoitbetter #EatshitEndeavor”

#Dabi x Reader #Dabi x You #Dabi Smut #Dabi #Touya Todoroki #Todoroki Touya #Dabi Fanfiction

[arvandus]

Touch Chapter 15 - Past and Present

Pairing: Dabi x Fem!AFAB!Reader

**18+ ONLY - MINORS DNI**

OVERALL FIC WARNINGS: Soft!Dabi, Fem!AFAB!Reader with a fictional backstory, fanon version of past events (I started this before the canon stuff dropped), manga  spoilers, canon deviation, drug abuse/withdrawal (with inaccuracies since it’s outside of my experience and relies on research and imagination), violence, heavy angst, past trauma/abuse, anxiety/panic attacks, PTSD, hurt/comfort, pining, slow burn, eventual emotionally charged SMUT,  all characters will be written with complexity (i.e., no  one-dimensional/hateful representations). *please pay attention to specific warning tags within each chapter!*

CHAPTER WARNINGS: Reader has a panic attack (described in detail); explicit violent thoughts; friendly reminder that this fic has a fanon-based backstory for Dabi and a fully-fleshed out backstory for Reader (think OC without a name/face); multiple uses of Y/N (sorry, couldn’t really be avoided this time).

Chapter Songs: All The King’s Horses by Karmina (Reader)/The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails (Dabi)

Part 1   Part 14

Chapter 15: Past and Present

Dabi felt like an idiot. A complete and utter dumbass.  It had happened so fast, so suddenly.  He hadn’t thought about the consequences of what he was doing when he pinned you onto his mattress in an attempt to wipe the smug grin off your face.

But as soon as he was over you, it was as if his mind went blank, the inner voices that criticized and warned falling unexpectedly silent.  All that had mattered in that moment was the look in your eyes, the feel of your skin beneath his palms, and your voice...

The way you’d said his name, as if you wanted him, needed him...

Dabi had always known you were attracted to him; you were never very good at hiding it. He could tell in the way your gaze became bashful as you touched his scars on his face.  He could tell in the way heat rolled off your body whenever you flushed hot in response to his close proximity, his own quirk-sensitive skin fine-tuned to temperature changes in the environment.  And of course how could he forget how flustered you got when he’d opened his door, fresh out of the shower that one night.

Dabi knew; he always knew.  He never really understood it, but that part didn’t matter, because it was fact.  It was why he enjoyed flirting and teasing you so hard early on, just to see you fluster beneath his gaze.

But physical desire was one thing. The way you had pleaded his name was another entirely.  It had nearly unraveled him from the inside out, your soft voice pulling at an invisible loose thread within his chest. It was more than just wanting; there was longing, as if you were begging him for something only he could give you.

So, for the briefest of moments, he let himself hope...

But then your phone rang, and then later you had left before he’d so much as had a chance to speak.  It was obvious you were running away, and it stung him to the point of dumbness, the simple goodnight falling from his lips while his mind screamed for him to stop you.

Maybe he’d assumed too much too quickly.  He’d felt a crashing wave of relief at your explanation for the birth control pills, but now his doubts had returned full force.  After all, it may not have been your only reason.

Maybe you were involved with someone else, and your quick exit the night before was fueled by guilt, guilt at allowing yourself to get caught up in the moment.

Or maybe, the attraction between you two wasn’t enough.  After all, you’d gotten to know him well enough now to see him as the hot mess that he was.  It was no surprise to him that you wouldn’t want to get involved beyond the precarious friendship you’d built.

Either way, your actions spoke volumes, and the defeat settled heavy on his chest.

Sleep was hard to settle into last night as it always was.  Dabi’s mind replayed the events over and over, partially to obsessively decipher the meaning of it all, and partially to avoid drifting off into the nightmares that would undoubtedly plague him.  He had half a mind to go knock on your door demanding answers; he was tired of guessing, he was tired of the uncertainty.  And most of all, he was tired of the distraction, of the way you occupied his thoughts. He just needed to know.

But he never did.  Maybe it was pride that kept him locked up behind his bedroom door, refusing to buckle first.  Or maybe it was cowardice, his refusal to come face to face with the very real possibility that you didn’t want him, not really.

He should be used to rejection; it was written through every page of his life, so this time should feel no different.  But at the same time, it was the rejection that had broken him in the first place. So, if he showed up on your doorstep, vulnerable and exposed and you refused him...

Dabi shoved the thought away. He didn’t want to entertain the possibility.  Besides, last night had been enough of an answer, right?  It told him everything he needed to know.

So, he stayed in his room, his mind replaying the sound of his name on your tongue over and over again, letting it torture him in the hopes that it would follow him into his dreams where you’d be waiting for him.  He let the memory of what had almost happened play out in his mind as he finally allowed himself to indulge, relieving his frustrations with the grip of his hand in the silent solitude of his room.

He had to fulfill his needs twice before sleep finally claimed him, only to wake up later in the night to sweating skin and wordless whispers haunting his ears from dreams he couldn’t remember.

Now, Dabi sat on the train with you in silence, the railcar slowly rocking back and forth as it moved along the tracks.  Your quirk once again coated him like a whisper, his mind eased slightly by your pills, as his nerves hummed quietly beneath the surface of it all.  Neither of you had brought up last night’s events, and while the air between you wasn’t uncomfortable like it used to be, there remained an undercurrent of awareness that neither of you wanted to breach; at least not here in public, under the watchful eyes of strangers.

Dabi was once again wearing his hoodie; it was still damp from the night before, and the feel of it along with its musty odor annoyed him.  But it was the only one he had, his wardrobe limited to what he was able to find in trash bins and homeless shelters, and the occasional donation from Giran when the old man finally took pity on him. 

Dabi increased his body heat just enough to warm the cotton fabric in an attempt to help it evaporate faster in the cool, damp air, but the action only made the humidity inside the hoodie worse, causing his unscarred skin to sweat and his healing wound to itch.

He wiggled his shoulders slightly in an attempt to alleviate it, and you glanced at him.

“You okay?” you asked.

“Itchy,” he replied.

If Dabi had a choice in the matter, he would have worn his usual stitched jacket.  But as soon as you’d told him where you were going – into the heart of Musutafu – he knew such a trademark piece would get him caught in an instant.  So, begrudgingly, he’d donned his disguise from the day before, complete with sunglasses and a mask to cover his scarred skin.

“It just means it’s healing well.”

“It needs to heal faster.”

You gave him a soft smile, and the pounding in his chest skipped.  “At least you only need to have your bandage checked once a day instead of twice like before.”

So you’d said that morning when you had treated him.  Dabi was glad that his healing wound would soon be a thing of the past, and so too would his reliance on your pills.

“How much longer ‘til we get there?” he asked.  His leg bobbed its usual rhythm.

“Two stops away,” you reassured.

“I don’t like how central your source is.  It’s too dangerous.”

“Sometimes it’s better to be right under the heroes’ noses,” you replied.  “Besides, normally it’s not an issue.  Compress and I pass off as perfectly normal citizens.”

Dabi humphed and sank back into his seat with his hands shoved deeper into his hoodie.

Compress.

Dabi still wasn’t convinced you two weren’t involved.  The selfish part of him didn’t want to care; he wanted to take you anyway, make you his; put an end to any possible involvement with a press of his lips against yours.

The selfish fantasy soothed his moodiness.

A few minutes later, the automated female voice rang out through the railcar, interrupting his daydreams.

‘Now approaching Musutafu City Hall and Cultural Center.  Next stop: Hero Commission Headquarters and Hawks Agency.’

“This is our stop,” you announced as you stood.

Dabi followed you silently like a protective shadow as you exited the railcar into the underground space.  His presence behind you made the hairs on the back of your neck and your arms stand on end, a constant awareness of him.  And yet, at the same time, that acute awareness made you feel safe. He was watching over you.

You had forgone your usual medical bag that you had, keeping it locked away in your room with the exception of a few of your pills that you kept in your pocket, just in case.  Instead, you kept the bare minimum on you, your fake ID provided by the League and cash in one pocket, and your burner phone in the other.  It made traveling easier; you didn’t have to worry about losing items or being pick-pocketed, especially with Dabi behind you, protecting your rear.

It was a Saturday, and the streets and sidewalks were busier because of it.  You and Dabi passed through crowds of people unnoticed as billboards, signs, and moving pictures covered the tall buildings that towered above your heads.  It wasn’t long before you were once again entering the familiar building of Yatsumoto’s residence. Only this time, it was a new front desk clerk – a young lady with a warm smile and trusting eyes.  You announced your arrival and a moment later were granted access to the elevator.

“Nice place,” Dabi commented as he eyed the locations of the cameras.  You smiled, appreciative of his perceptiveness.

"He does well for himself," you replied.

You both stepped off the elevator together, and you knocked on the door.  A moment later, Yatsumoto answered, ushering the two of you inside.

“You’re early,” he commented.

“We were in the area,” you lied.

In all honesty, it was Dabi who had pressured you out the door, eager to finally get his hands on his medication.

Dabi watched the man who you seemed to know so well with distrusting eyes.  He was attractive. Unfortunately.  Dabi half-wondered if this was who you were involved with.  He wouldn’t be surprised... he seemed like your type, or at least someone he’d picture you with.  Handsome, well-off. He seemed to like you well enough, based on how he smiled at you and how he addressed you.  It made Dabi’s skin crawl, and he subconsciously stepped forward to position himself slightly ahead of you.

You caught it instantly, the undercurrent of tension, the change in Dabi’s behavior. If you didn’t know any better, you’d call it protective at best, and jealous at worst.

The possibility almost made you laugh out loud in disbelief. For Dabi to be jealous, he had to care about you enough to want to lay claim to you, to consider you his.  And that mental picture did not meld with how you viewed yourself when it came to Dabi.  Sure, you knew he was attracted to you, and you knew the two of you had a connection that was ever-changing.  But you certainly didn’t see any heartfelt confessions of love or promises of commitment coming from scarred lips any time soon.

No, Dabi seemed more the ‘friends with benefits’ type.  And friends with benefits didn’t get jealous. Or, at least they weren’t supposed to.

Either way, there was nothing to be jealous of.  There was nothing between you and Yatsumoto. Not anymore, at least.

As you and Yatsumoto exchanged words, Dabi’s eyes scanned the space. It was neat, organized.  Nothing that would imply a stash of high quality, very expensive drugs on the premises.  Dabi wondered if he had a second, secret location that he pulled from as needed, or other handlers that fulfilled his orders from government facilities.

Yatsumoto stepped away into another room to grab the order, and you waited patiently.  Your eyes locked with Dabi’s, and you looked away quickly.

Dabi stared at you a moment longer before looking away as well.

“You two are close, huh?” he commented.

“We’ve known each other for a long time...” you replied.

Dabi didn’t respond; instead, he let his feet begin to take him where his gaze wandered.

“What are you doing?” you asked suspiciously.

“Nothin’,” Dabi replied.  “Just checking it out.”

“Nosey...” you accused.

“Curious,” Dabi corrected.

“They mean the same thing.”

Dabi smirked at you beneath his mask, but you couldn’t tell.  He made his way slowly to the nearby table that had papers stacked on it, his fingers drumming the surface as they itched to peek at their contents.

Yatsumoto came back, a small bottle in his hand.

“Got it,” he announced, his keen eyes on Dabi.  Dabi stepped away from the table nonchalantly to stand protectively at your side.

“Thank you,” you replied.  You took the bottle from his hand, and Dabi read the contents on the label.

His temperature shot up in anger.

“What the hell is this?” Dabi demanded, snatching the bottle from your hand before you could stop him.

Yatsumoto bristled.  “What are you talking about?  It’s what she ordered.”

“Bullshit, the dosage on this isn’t right.”

“Stop,” you whispered at him harshly.  You reached for the bottle, but Dabi held it out of your reach.

“How much are you charging her for this?”

“Half of what I charge everyone else.” Yatsumoto replied with narrowed eyes.  “And I don’t appreciate the accusation you’re making.”

“Stop!” you repeated, your voice louder, more insistent.

Dabi ignored you, though.  His eyes were set on Yatsumoto, and any moment now you expected the sunglasses to melt off his face.

“I’m not accusing you of shit. I’m telling you outright that you’re ripping us off.”

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but you gotta lotta nerve.”

Panic was drowning you, filling your veins with ice as you watched them bicker back and forth.  The longer it went on, the more certain you were that Dabi was effectively burning the only strong bridge you had that made you even remotely valuable to the League.  Lose Yatsumoto, and you lose... everything.

“Dabi, STOP!!” you finally yelled.

The sound of his name made him freeze and stare at you.  Even with most of his face covered, you could see the shock and incredulity in his expression.

You froze, wide-eyed.

You’d used his name. His Villain name, the one that was plastered on wanted posters and shown on the late-night news.

“Dabi??” Yatsumoto’s voice made you turn and look at him.   His eyes were wide behind his glasses, the color of his cheeks drained. “I need to speak to you.” He glared at Dabi.  “Alone.”

You followed Yatsumoto into his bedroom where he promptly slammed the door. You winced at the sound; your arms crossed over your chest.

“Dabi??  Dabi?? As in Dabi from the League of Villains?? Damn it, Y/N!”  Yatsumoto’s hands were in his dark curls as he paced.  “Is that who you’re involved with??”

You swallowed. “Yes.”

Yatsumoto pointed an accusatory finger at you. “I thought you were smarter than this.  Damn it, you are smarter than this.  What the hell are you doing?”

“Why does this shock you?” you replied angrily.  “You have an entire undercover operation here that you’re raking in MILLIONS of yen on.  Are you telling me that you don’t sell to villains?? Do you really sit here and vet everyone that comes through?”

Yatsumoto’s jaw clenched tight.  “That’s not the point.”

“Like hell it isn’t,” you replied.

“This isn’t like an organized crime syndicate like the M.L.A. or the Yakuza.  They have rules.  At least the M.L.A. would have made sense since I know your stance on quirk suppression.  But this... this is something else entirely.”  Yatsumoto began pacing again. “This is The League of fucking Villains.  They are the most wanted group out there. They allied themselves with All For One, who nearly defeated All Might, for fuck’s sake.  They attacked high school students and abducted a fucking kid.  And you’re okay with all of this??”

“You talk about them like they’re the Boogie Man.  They’re not.”

“They are!” Yatsumoto shot back.

“They’re not!” you insisted.  “I’ve spent time with them, Yatsu.  I’ve gotten to know them.”

Yatsumoto shook his head as he stared at you, his disgust evident on his face.  “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”

“Don’t.” your voice wavered.  “Don’t say that. I’m still me, Yatsu.  I still care about people. I still want to help people.  And right now, I’m helping him.” You pointed at the closed door where Dabi stood on the other side.  “Do you know what his quirk does to his body? How much pain he’s in all the time?”

“Did you know that he’s a murderer?” Yatsumoto shot back.  Your jaw clenched to the point of aching.  “Did you know that he burned up a group of street thugs not too long ago? It was all over the news.”

“It was self-defense.”

“It was a slaughter.” Yatsumoto shot back.  “They could only identify them by their dental records.”

A chill went down your spine, but you pushed it away, struggling to ignore it.  You didn’t want to think about it... not right now, not with Dabi...

“You’re such a hypocrite,” you whispered.  “The League aren’t the only ones who have blood on their hands.  Where did the old receptionist go, huh, Yatsumoto?  You said you took care of it... where is he now?”

“That is—”

“What? Different?  Oh, because it matters to you.  It protects you. That’s what this is all about, right?  It’s about covering your ass.  You make it sound like it’s because you care, like you’re morally above them, but in reality, all you care about is yourself and your goddamn drug empire.”

“The empire that you’re a part of, that you depend on.” Yatsumoto corrected. 

He stared at you a moment longer, before finally sitting on the end of his bed.  The fight that had been in him deflated slightly and his shoulders slumped.

“You’re right...” he finally said as he rubbed at the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “I have to protect myself and my assets.  And The League... the risk is too high with them. They’re too reckless.  The last thing I need is for it to get back to me. Why them, Y/N? Why not someone else, anyone else?”

“I... I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Yatsumoto’s tone softened.  “That’s a lie and you know it.” He pinned you with a familiar, warm gaze.  “You always had a place here, remember?”

You looked away.  “You know that wouldn’t have worked out.”

“Why not?”

You looked up at him and tilted your head slightly.  “You know why.”

Yatsumoto stared at you for a long moment before looking away, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah... yeah, I guess you’re right. But why the League? Why not the Meta Liberation Army?”

Your mouth opened and closed a couple of times before finally finding your voice.  “The League can give me something the Liberation army can’t.”

Yatsumoto furrowed his brow.  “And what’s that?”

You stared at the closed door, knowing Dabi was listening intently on the other side.

“My brother.”

Shock crossed Yatsumoto’s handsome features.  “Your brother is in Tartarus.”

“I know.”

“No one leaves Tartarus.”

“I know.  But he said he could do it if I helped the League.”

“Who said that?”

You gave Yatsumoto a long stare, allowing him to put the pieces together. There was only one villain strong enough to make such a brazen promise.  Yatsumoto’s grey eyes widened behind his glasses.

“Wait, you mean—”  Yatsumoto’s voice lowered.  “You met him?”

“No, not directly. But he passed the message on to me through one of the League members.” 

“Was this before or after All Might beat his ass at Kamino?”

“After.”

“So, he’s able to communicate with the outside world even though he’s locked inside Tartarus?”  Yatsumoto let out a low whistle and ran his fingers through his hair.  “This is bigger than I thought. You’ve really got yourself in deep.”

Tears brimmed your eyes.  “I have to try, Yatsu.  He’s been in there for so long...”

Yatsumoto put a comforting arm around you, and you leaned into his hold.  “I know. But... it’s Tartarus.  All of hero society would have to collapse before Tartarus would fall.”

Your expression hardened as you stared blankly ahead of you.  “Yeah… I know.”

Deep down, a loathsome, unforgiving part of you wanted that.  It wanted to tear it all apart.  The entire barrel of apples was rotten, so better to dump them out and start over.

Yatsumoto slowly removed his arm from your shoulders and stared at you.  For the first time, he seemed... scared of you, and you realized that maybe…

Maybe you and Dabi weren’t so different after all.

But this desire for violence was one thing you didn’t want to have in common with him.  You put your head in your hands, confused.

“I just... I hope it doesn’t come to that,” you whispered. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I just want my brother back.”

Yatsumoto stared at you long and hard before looking away again.  “I don’t think it’s something you have much control over. Unrest has been building for a while now.  Eventually it’s going to bleed into all of hero society, and when that happens, there’s going to be casualties.”

Your eyes brimmed with tears as you stared at your friend. “I—”

A knock at the door cut your words short, followed by Dabi opening the door without waiting for an invitation.  He leaned against the door frame, his arms crossed as he stared down at you before pinning Yatsumoto with a narrowed gaze.  His glasses were off his face and his face mask pulled down to his chin now that his cover had been blown.  Yatsumoto stiffened at the sight of him.

“You ready, doll?” Dabi asked. “Or are ya gonna chat all day?”

You took a breath and blinked away your tears.  “I’m ready.  I’ll be there in a minute.”

Dabi gave you a long, lazy look before stepping away again, his arms behind his head as he stretched.

Yatsumoto eyed him as Dabi walked out of his line of sight.  “I don’t trust him.”

You chuckled.  “I don’t think he trusts you either.”

Yatsumoto eyed you again, and you could see the hesitation in his posture.  “Are you sure you’re okay with him?”

You smiled as you stared at Dabi’s back.  “I’ve never been safer.”

You stood up to follow Dabi, but Yatsumoto grabbed your wrist.  You turned to look at him.  He stared up at you with concern.  “I mean it, Y/N.  Be careful with him.  Please.  You already know what he’s capable of.”

You hesitated, unsure of how to communicate how certain you were that Dabi would never hurt you.  But you knew whatever you said would be futile, so you opted for cooperation.

“I will,” you reassured.  “I promise.  So does this mean you’ll keep helping me out?”

Yatsumoto sighed and scratched the back of his head again.  “To be honest, I don’t really want to.  But I don’t think I have much choice at this point.  I don’t need the League coming after me because I’ve refused to supply them.”

“They wouldn’t...” but your words faltered, swallowed up by uncertainty.  You thought they wouldn’t, but you couldn’t say for sure, and that realization brought a new kind of discomfort.

Yatsumoto tilted his head at you knowingly.  “Yeah. Exactly.”

“I’m sorry...” you muttered.

Yatsumoto placed a hand on your shoulder.  “Don’t worry about it.”

You walked out from under his palm and made your way over to Dabi.  His posture relaxed slightly once you were next to him again, safely within his reach.

You held out your hand.

Dabi stared at it.

“What?”

“The pills.” You pinned him with a look. “Hand ‘em over.”

He let out an annoyed sigh and took the bottle out of the pocket of his hoodie and put it in your hand.

“You think I wouldn’t notice?” you whispered to him teasingly.

Dabi raised an annoyed eyebrow at you.  “Just like you thought I wouldn’t notice you lowered my dose?” he shot back.

You raised your own eyebrow at him in return.  Without speaking, you opened the bottle and counted the contents onto the table.  The amount matched the prescription and you put the pills back in, satisfied.  It wasn’t just to make sure Dabi didn’t take any; it was to make sure you were getting what you paid for.  You trusted Yatsumoto completely, but you knew Dabi didn’t, so the action was more to ease his own nerves.  You pulled out the cash from your pocket and counted out the bills into Yatsumoto’s open palm.

“Here you go, as we discussed.”

You bid your goodbyes to Yatsumoto as you left, Dabi following behind you in silence with his disguise back in place.

As soon as you were back in the elevator, Dabi let loose the question that burned at his tongue.

“Why did you order a smaller dose?” he demanded.

“Because you’ve been on mine for a couple weeks, so going back to the amount you were taking before would be a very bad idea.”

“Tch.” Dabi frowned and looked away.  “I don’t need you making those kinds of decisions without me, you got that?  That’s not your call to make.”

You stared at him in reproach.  “Actually, it kind of is. I refuse to be responsible for you overdosing.  Again.”

“Yeah? And what if they don’t fucking work?  What then? All this would be just a waste of fucking time.”

“It’ll still work,” you reassured. “You know that, right?  They’re extended release, so they’re meant to last longer than your originals.”

Dabi liked them even less.

“Whatever…” he muttered.  “Nice blowing my cover, by the way.”

You sucked your cheek.  The elevator dinged and the doors opened.

“I know. I’m sorry,” you replied.  “But maybe next time when I’m telling you to stop, you’ll listen.”

Dabi buried his hands deep in his pockets.  “Maybe next time you’ll give me a heads up. I wouldn’t have thought he was taking advantage if you’d told me what you did.”

He had you there.

“You’re right.  I’m sorry.” You finally said.

Dabi glanced at you out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t say anything. Your lips pressed together in frustration, his lack of reciprocal apology for his behavior making the resolution feel incomplete.  But you held your piece for now as you made your way out of the parlor and into the street.

As you stepped out, you noticed a yatai across the street, pictures of yakitori on the side of it.

“Are you hungry?” you asked.

Dabi followed your gaze.  “Yeah.”

“Come on, I’ve got a little money left over.”

Ten minutes later, and the two of you were tucked in an alley away from the bustling crowds as you ate.  Dabi’s mask was pulled down to his chin again as he ate the chicken off the skewer. The sour mood of before was lightened thanks to your meal, and you decided to extend an olive branch.

“How’re you doing?” you asked around a mouth full of food.

Dabi swallowed.  “It’s too bright outside.”

You stared up at the overcast sky, grey clouds low with the promise of more nighttime rain.

“Do you need me to touch you up with my quirk?” you asked.

Dabi shook his head.  “I’m fine, doll. Just a little uncomfortable.”

The nickname he used for you had become one of the many ways you gauged Dabi’s mood, the term of endearment coming up only when he was comfortable and at ease.  Hearing it now gave you a little bit of the comfort you needed, letting you know he had let go of his frustrations from earlier.

You looked out at the passing throngs of people.  There were a wide variety of ages, looks, attire... they milled along, unaware of your watching.

“Dabi...”

“Yeah?”

“Say everything works out the way we want, and we come out on the other side... where do you see yourself?”

Your question was so left field, that Dabi had to do a double take.  “What??”

“Like, what are your plans if we win?”

Dabi fell silent, the truth trapped behind tight lips. He didn’t have the heart to tell you that he didn’t have plans for after.  He’d never planned on living past his confrontation with his father.

“I don’t know,” he said evasively.

“Well, when you think of a happy life, what do you picture?” you looked at him.  “Toga wants to be able to love how she wants.  Twice just wants to be around people he cares about. Shigaraki... well...”

“Let’s not think about what Shigaraki wants,” Dabi replied.

Destruction.  Destruction, and nothing else.  The thought had never bothered Dabi before, because he’d never planned to live long enough to see the totality of it all anyway.  But now...

He watched you as you watched the people passing.

“What do you want?” you continued.  “To live alone at the top of a mountain? To stay with the League?  Find a stable job?” 

You watched as a child ran by you, a balloon in tow, and you smirked.  “A house and kids?”

It was a joke, of course; you were already sure of the answer.

Dabi choked on his last bite of yakitori, coughing and clearing his throat.  “Oh hell no,” he replied adamantly.

You laughed at him.

“No kids, not ever,” he continued.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” you chuckled.

“Fortunately, that’s something I’ll never have to worry about.”

You finally tore your gaze away from the crowds and looked at him as he tossed his skewer into a trashcan and put his mask back into place.

“Fun side effect of my quirk being incompatible with my body is that I’m shootin’ blanks.”

“Wait, seriously??”

 “Sperm don’t do well with heat.  Might’ve been fine if my body was fire resistant, but… y’know…” He smirked. “Little swimmers never stood a chance.”

“Oh…”

“C’mon, little doctor.  Didn’t you learn about the birds and the bees at your fancy school?”

You rolled your eyes.  “Of course we did. I guess I just never thought about it, is all.”

You were both done eating so you began walking down the street towards the train station.

“Does it bother you?” you asked.

Dabi scoffed.  “Of course not. It’s a damn blessing.”

“Yeah, but this is like... you never even had a choice.”

“Even if I did, I would have gotten myself snipped by now anyway.  All it did was save me from a very painful recovery period.”

“Good point... so no white picket fence for you. What would make you happy then?” you asked.

The blue of Dabi’s eye caught yours behind his sunglasses as he glanced at you while you walked. He was quiet for so long that you wondered if he even had an answer.  But finally, he replied, “Justice.”

You waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.  It didn’t matter; you didn’t need him to.  You already had enough information to fill in the blanks, thanks to the little bit of digging you did through old news articles on your phone yesterday while you were stuck waiting for Dabi to answer your calls.

It had shocked you to your core when you’d confirmed what you had suspected, but by now you’d adjusted to it.  There was a certain poetry to it all, between your history and his all being tied to the same man, and it only served to deepen your empathy for him.

You knew Endeavor was his father, you knew who he really was.  And with that information, while you didn’t have the full details of his story, you had enough to understand why he wanted to bring his father down.

All you had to do at this point was hear it from Dabi’s own lips, to confirm what you already knew.  For now, though, his lips remained sealed, and you didn’t press the issue further.  Instead, you changed the topic.

“So,” you prodded, “How much did you hear earlier with Yatsumoto?”

Dabi gave another side glance at you.  “Some of it.”

You stared at him.

“Okay, most of it.”

You couldn’t help the smug grin that pried your lips apart.  “I thought so.”

Now that it was all out in the open, Dabi had no reservations in asking all the questions that had piled up over the past couple of weeks. 

“So, your brother’s locked up, huh?”

“Yeah...” you replied.

All the pieces were finally falling into place.  Dabi had always wondered how someone like you ended up with the League of Villains.  Now it made perfect sense.

“What did he do?” Dabi asked as his eyes following the sudden mass movement of the people around him. No doubt a popular hero showed up nearby...

He waited for your response, but it never came.  He looked next to him, but you weren’t there.

Panic ran hot through Dabi’s veins until he saw you frozen in your tracks thirty feet behind him. Your eyes were wide with fear, and even from this distance he could see the way your chest heaved as if you were gasping for air.

Dabi followed your gaze, and then he saw it... across the street, three buildings down, stood Endeavor surrounded by a crowd of civilians.  Cameras flashed and phones were held high in the air to get pictures with the new number one ‘hero.’

Dabi’s blood instantly boiled, his heart rate tripling in his chest as his quirk itched at his fingertips.  A giddiness filled him, every nerve ready to spring into action.

He was right there.  Finally.

He felt the pull of all his hatred, his pain, focalize into a single point on his father’s face in the distance.  It was a face that was burned into his memory with every insult he received, with every punch he had to endure, despite the additional years added to the old man’s face since he’d last seen him.  It was almost as if no time had passed at all, the fire of rage burning as bright as it had on the night he’d committed himself to bringing him down.

All he had to do was go to him.

But something nagged and pulled at the back of his mind, forcing his focus away from the man ahead, from his past, his future.

Dabi looked back at you.  Your hand was clutching your chest and you looked ready to faint, your skin sheened with sweat.  Dabi stood rooted, torn between his zealous wrath and you, trapped and vulnerable. He wanted to yell at you, to tell you to hide, to take cover.  But he knew just by looking at you that you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself.

Damn it, why did this have to happen now??  What was wrong with you??

Dabi recalled the scar across your back, remembered how you’d reacted to seeing Endeavor’s face on the television that one night, every nerve in your body tense.  And now, it looked as if you were seeing the devil himself.

It was the nail in the coffin, verifying what Dabi had already suspected.  His father, his dear old dad, the number one hero, had given you that scar. You, a harmless civilian.  The reality didn’t surprise him. It was just another skeleton in his father’s closet.  Instead, it made the anger and hatred in his veins burn hotter still, the vengeance twice as strong as it had been a moment before. The need for retribution stretched beyond just himself; now that retribution included you as well.

He wanted to beat his father’s ass, tear him limb from limb, watch him cry and snivel and beg for mercy as Dabi threw his flames back in his face until the flesh burned away. He wanted you to watch, to see how weak the old man was, to see that he’d never be able to hurt you or anyone else ever again.

Black smoke began to flavor Dabi’s tongue, his hands burning hot within his gloves that began to bubble and peel.  Dabi stepped forward, ready to act, and yet... something in him hesitated.

On the brink of eruption, he forced himself to reason, assessing the situation.

It’s not the right time, not with all of these people here and other heroes close by.

And not with you frozen on the sidewalk, at risk of getting struck by his flames.

You’d already been burned by one Todoroki. He refused to let you be burned by another. That was his father’s legacy etched into your skin, not his.

It would never be his.

He had to get his father alone, without you nearby and when Dabi had more than just his weak, broken body to face him.

His father’s words rattled in his skull, mocking him.

You’re not strong enough.

It took every ounce of strength for Dabi to turn his back on his father and go to you, a growl gurgling low in his chest at the frustration of it all.  The first step was the hardest, turning on his heel, putting his target behind him.  But with each step it became easier, his frustration being forced to the backburner as his steps quickened into a sprint towards you.

“Hey,” Dabi called as soon as he reached you.

You didn’t respond; you couldn’t.  Fear had a tight grip on your throat, your brain so consumed by it that you couldn’t even hear Dabi’s voice.

Dabi grabbed you by your shoulders.  “Hey!”

 Still, you didn’t respond, your eyes glued beyond Dabi, across the street.  It was like you weren’t even here with him, your breaths gasping, your eyes wide like a frightened animal.  He cupped your face in his hands and turned your face towards his.

“Look at me, look at me.”

Dabi’s eyes found yours, but it made no difference.  You began to hyperventilate as your heart pounded with such strength you were sure it’d burst from your rib cage to land at your feet.  You could feel your world spin beneath you.  All of your senses were thrown into hyper awareness, like a scared rabbit catching the scent of a predator you couldn’t see.

But you could see.  You could see the red of his hair, his broad shoulders well above the crowd.  And if you could see him, then he could see you. All he had to do was look in your direction…

There was a crushing weight on your chest, and you knew that any moment now, he would get you, hurt you, kill you.  You were dying, you realized; the life was squeezing out of your lungs with each shallow breath, your vision blurred.

All you could see was red and orange flames, angry blue eyes.  You heard the sound of screaming that sounded like your voice, yet it wasn’t, because you couldn’t produce words, you couldn’t even breathe.

You barely registered the feeling of Dabi’s hand holding yours, of the tug on your arm. It brought forth the ghost of a memory, of a different hand dragging you down winding back streets.

‘Go! RUN!’

It wasn’t Dabi’s voice in your head.  It was your brother’s, loud and frantic.

You don’t remember running. You don’t even remember moving.  One moment you were standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at the man who’d ruined your life, to leaning against a hard wall behind a dumpster.

You sank down to your heels, your knees drawn up as you covered your ears. Your panicked breaths ripped themselves out of your chest until your lungs ached and your face was streaked with tears.  Your entire body shook, ready to flee as soon as you could get your damn legs to work.

I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe...

The mantra ran through your head in a loop.

He’s coming... I’m going to die...

The faint recognition of warm, rough skin on your hand cut through your fog just enough to allow your other senses to pick up your environment.

“Y/N...” the voice was deep, familiar.  “Y/N, you’re safe now.”

You shook your head. It was a lie. He was coming. He would find you, and then it would all be over...

The hand cupped your cheek, and dark bangs and blue eyes came into your field of view, framed in a black hoodie.  You shied from them at first, the blue so familiar, so dangerous.  But your vision focused when you heard his voice again, familiar and safe. And his eyes... they weren’t filled with fiery fury like you remembered.  They were clear, shallow pools of aqua, black brows drawn together as they searched for you, finding you, trying to save you from the dark waters of your memories.  But the waves of trauma were great, huge swells that dragged you under with each beat of your heart against your rib cage and burning of your lungs.

Dabi stared at you, watching you fall apart in front of him, as an unwelcome sense of helplessness drowned his chest.  Familiarity pulled deep from his mind, old memories rising to the surface.  He’d seen this before...

‘Touya...’

The memory of his mother’s face, her hair fallen forward as she shook and gasped. This very thing had happened so many times, especially towards the end...

‘I’m here, mom.’

He’d learned how to respond, how to help. Memories sharpened, bringing forth experience like an old guidebook that had been lost but whose pages had been memorized.

Dabi moved on instinct. He took your hand and placed it against his chest.  You could feel the warmth, feel the cotton of his shirt where he’d unzipped his hoodie.  “Feel my heartbeat,” he said.

You could feel it, slow and steady.

“Focus on the feeling. Right here.”  He tapped his hand over yours to the rhythm of his heart that pounded strong beneath his sternum.

You forced yourself to focus on it.

“Good. Now count them.”

You couldn’t get your body to move, couldn’t get enough air in your lungs to speak.

“Count,” Dabi repeated.  His heart vibrated beneath your palm.  “One...”

Your mouth shaped the word, but there was no sound. ‘One.’

“Two...”

“Two...” your voice now carried on the smallest breath.

Now, with your voice coming back, you counted together in unison as Dabi helped your body slowly release the fear that had a chokehold over you.

“Three... four.... five....”

Dabi kept his hand over yours, while his other cupped your cheek again, making you look into his eyes.

“Eight... nine... ten.”

Your world came back into focus, and with it came the great cresting wave of emotion.  It rolled through you now, your body shuddering like it was sloughing a second skin, and fresh sobs fell from your throat.

“Dabi...” you whispered. You wrapped your arms around him, burying your face into his chest. He held you tight against him as your sobs became heavy, your body purging the marathon of stress it’d just endured.

Your senses came back full force, everything around you sensitive and raw.  The feel of Dabi’s hand on your back, the heat emanating from him, the musky moist smell of his hoodie mingling with the distinct smell of smoke.  You felt safe, protected, as long as Dabi continued to hold you, his body surrounding you like a barrier against the world.

When you finally calmed down, you realized that you were both on the ground, with Dabi’s legs bent on either side of you as you leaned against him.  You sat up just enough to look at him, tears still stuck to your lashes and wet on your cheeks.  Dabi’s eyes took in every inch of your face.  You were so close now that you could feel his breath on your skin, see the details of his irises.  The band-aid still covered his cheek, the skin beneath it purple where it had bruised from the torn staple.

Dabi’s thumbs wiped away at the tear tracks on your cheeks as he finished his inspection of you.

“You okay?” he asked.

You nodded and straightened up.  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

A mild, numb sense of shock settled over you as you watched him stand up and dust the dirt from his jeans.  He extended his hand out to help you up, and you took it gratefully.

“How did you... where did you learn to do that?” you finally asked as you brushed off your own clothes and adjusted your jacket.

Dabi put his sunglasses back on and placed his mask over his mouth.  “My mom used to get panic attacks,” he replied.

You stared at Dabi for a long moment.

You nearly jumped out of your skin when a new, unfamiliar voice spoke in your periphery.

“Hey, is everything okay here?”

You spun to come face to chest with a tall man with spiked white hair and grey eyes.  He had a strong jaw that was familiar in its shape, but you couldn’t immediately place it, too dazed still from your panic attack.

“What??” you asked dumbly.

The man looked from Dabi to you, his brow furrowed in concern.

“I wanted to see if you were okay. I saw you across the street, it looked like you were having a panic attack.”

You glanced at Dabi, and immediately noticed how rigid his posture became, how he was practically holding his breath as he stared at the man in front of him who was a head taller than him. You waited to see if Dabi would answer, but he fell strangely silent.

“I’m okay,” you replied, giving the stranger your best smile.  You locked your fingers with Dabi’s and leaned into him; you realized his gloves didn’t feel right, and you glanced down to notice the damage on them for the first time.

Had he used his quirk??

No. If he had, you’d both be caught by heroes by now.  But it had come close...

You cleared your throat, realizing you’d gotten briefly distracted. 

“I just don’t do well with big crowds,” you lied.  “He helped me through it.” 

You patted Dabi’s chest and gave him an affectionate glance, playing the role of the sweet girlfriend.  Anything to try to soften his rough edges and aloof behavior that was making him look more suspicious by the second.

“Oh, okay.  Well, I’m glad you’re okay now. Do you need anything?”

This guy was nice, just another Good Samaritan.  So why did it seem like Dabi wanted to run?

“No, I’m okay, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

Something in Dabi snapped.  “She said she’s fine.”

The man turned and stared at Dabi, and for the briefest moment, it felt like time stood still as they looked at each other.  There was something in the air, an energy that you couldn’t place. You watched with bated breath, waiting for something to happen. But the moment passed, and the man put his hands up and backed off slightly.

“Hey, no need to get mad.  I was just checking.”

Dabi turned and looked at you, and his hold on your hand tightened.  “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” you replied.

Dabi brushed by the white-haired man, pulling you with him.  “Thanks for the help,” he said gruffly without so much as a glance.

You had to practically jog to keep up with Dabi as he whisked you away down the sidewalk, the man left standing behind you to watch your retreat.

As soon as the two of you had entered the train station, Dabi slowed to a stop and leaned against a concrete column.

“What was that about?” you asked, looking back over your shoulder.  The man didn’t follow, but you half expected him to.

“Nothing.” Dabi replied.  “Train’s here, let’s go.”

He led you by the hand into the railcar and picked out a couple of seats towards the back where he could have a clear line of sight of anyone who came in or out of the train.  Dabi didn’t relax until the doors had closed and the train began to move.  Then he slumped into his seat and leaned his head back against the wall behind him, his eyes closed behind his sunglasses.  He still held your hand but he hardly noticed, his mind racing.

That was close. Too fucking close.  He’d managed to keep away from his family for literally years, and now, today of all days, he managed to see not one, but two Todorokis.  Dabi didn’t startle easily. But coming face to face with Natsuo was not something he had ever considered a possibility until ten minutes ago.  At first, he feared that he’d recognize him, even with his face nearly entirely covered and his hair dyed.  He was eternally grateful when his brother’s grey eyes showed no signs of recognition.  But then Dabi had to open his stupid mouth…

It almost stung when his own brother hadn’t recognized his voice.  But then again, how often did people keep an eye out for ghosts?

Dabi was yanked from his thoughts when he felt the weight of your head on his shoulder.  He opened his eyes and looked down to see you resting against him as you gazed ahead.  That’s right… you’d gone through an ordeal yourself.  He was sure you were feeling fatigued now in the comedown. 

Dabi stared at the crown of your head and the intrusive thought of planting a kiss on the top of it invaded his mind. He shoved it aside.  Instead, he subtly pulled his mask down just enough for his nose to peek out above. Instantly, the smell of your hair drifted up and he inhaled gently, letting the scent of you calm him as he leaned his head back against the wall.

As the train moved, Dabi felt the slow creep of his nerve pain and drug withdrawal return.  He suppressed the small pangs of pain that ran along his body; he didn’t want you to know, he didn’t want you to worry. You had enough on your mind.  Besides, you were close to home, and you finally had his pills. Eagerness and relief filled his chest, allowing him to breathe easier through the discomfort.  He’d waited for so long, what was a little longer?

The train finally reached your stop, and you sat up begrudgingly.  You expected Dabi to let go of your hand, but he didn’t. Instead, he led you out of the railcar and into the late afternoon. Once you were on the sidewalk, he casually put his arm over your shoulders, his hand hanging lazily over the edge.  You glanced at him, surprised by the gesture, but he didn’t return your gaze, his mind deep in thought as he kept his eyes ahead of him.  You could tell he was thinking about something, because of the way his brows were pulled together.

So, you leaned into his hold, enjoying the closeness and the warmth, even though your mind was screaming internally as your heart floundered in the gray area of whatever this was.  Nothing had been said outright about last night; but each day, each moment, brought more and more dismantling of barriers.

And yet, so much was still left unsaid.

His arm left your shoulders once you approached the back entrance of the old run-down hotel, his hand finding yours again as he took the lead up the stairs.  But as Dabi began to take the steps up, you halted, frozen in your tracks.

The tug on Dabi’s arm made him stop and turn to face you.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

You stared up at the building with a mixture of relief and trepidation.  You couldn’t entirely put into words why you were hesitating going in.  A part of you wanted to.  While the building wasn’t much to look at, it spoke of home, of familiarity. And right now, familiarity was what you needed.

But it also spoke of isolation, of separation from the world around you.  With its run-down façade, old single-pane windows and leaky pipes, it spoke of a place forgotten, a place haunted by ghosts.  And in a way, that’s how you felt; a ghost, existing unseen in hero society, swept under the rug when you no longer fit their perfectly cut box.  You were all ghosts, here; nightmares created by others, hiding away to find solace in each other’s loneliness.

“I... I don’t know...” you whispered.  You looked at the ground with a frown.

Dabi stepped towards you.  “You don’t wanna go in?”

You shook your head silently.  Your answer surprised Dabi; when his mother had her panic attacks, she always sought a safe place after to recuperate. He had assumed that meant you’d want to go back to the hideout.

So, did you not feel safe here? That possibility bothered him.  Maybe that friend of yours had gotten into your head earlier...

Dabi’s jaw clenched.  He hated that guy.

He turned around and came back down the steps towards you.  You let go of his hand and crossed your arms over your chest protectively, and Dabi shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Where do you wanna go?” he asked.

“I dunno...” you confessed with a shrug.  You didn’t have a plan; it was all just feelings.

Dull pain bloomed across Dabi’s neck and he rubbed at it subconsciously. You saw.

“My pills and my quirk are wearing off, aren’t they?” you asked.  “We should get you inside.”

Your steps up the stairs were heavy, filled with resistance.  Dabi watched you as guilt chewed at his bones.

“I thought you didn’t want to go in,” he said.

“I’ll be fine,” you replied. “I’m just... in a weird place right now.”

“How about you just give me a couple of my pills and then we can go somewhere else.”

You smiled at his effort to try to find a solution that worked for both of you, but you shook your head. “I don’t want you going out there on your first dose.  I’m not sure how your body will handle getting back on it again.  Yesterday you lost hours, remember?”

You reached the top of the step, your hand on the doorknob.  You hesitated again, staring at the worn, dented metal.

Dabi sighed.  You were right, of course. Again. You were always right.  The last thing either of you needed was Dabi high off his ass in the middle of the city with you in tow, vulnerable and scared.  Dabi chewed on the inside of his cheek, feeling a ring with his tongue. 

A solution popped into his head, a solution he didn’t like.

“Give me your pills,” he said.

Your hand fell from the doorknob, and you turned to look at him with surprise.  “What?”

“Give me your pills,” he repeated.  “We already know they work okay.”

It wouldn’t fix it completely; Dabi would still feel the pain.  But it’d be muted, dulled. He could manage that for a few hours.

You hesitated with your lip caught between your teeth.  Dabi eyed the action intently.

Dabi joined you on the last step in front of the door.  “C’mon, doll.  Trust me for once.”

Let me take care of you.

Your gaze was pensive as you weighed the pros and cons.  “Okay,” you finally breathed.

Dabi grinned.  “Atta girl. C’mon, I gotta change my clothes first. I hate this fucking hoodie.”

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Chapter 16

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#Dabi x reader #Dabi x you #Touya x reader #Touya x you #soft dabi #dabi fanfic #dabi fanfiction #dabi #touya todoroki #touya #dabi slow burn #slow burn #pining #angst #hurt/comfort

[tsumuswifey]

Winter's Child (Prologue)

I finally caved. I'm writing a Dabi fanfic. Here's the prologue<3 I'm not really sure how many chapters this'll be, but probably a decent amount. If you read this when this was an OC it has now been changed to x reader lmao.

On the eve of your thirteenth birthday, you dream of the boy for the first time. 

It’s cathartic, in a way. Your lungs expanding for the first time in a long while, a sort of relief you thought was long lost. 

And the boy; he’s familiar, but you can’t quite figure out why.

When you think hard enough, bits and pieces of something try to fit together. What that something is, you aren't sure. But it feels like it could be a different life.

He’s knelt down, carefully picking a bundle of myosotis, every move calculated in such a way that it makes you feel safe.

You take a step further into the field, your gaze wandering over everything. A pale blue farmhouse lays just a little ways down the hill, and close to it, a barn and silo. A couple of goats graze in the fencing behind the yard, some clearly older than others. A mare chuffs loudly, and takes off into a steady gallop across the yard, its tail swinging back and forth. The entire scene feels like coming home after a long day. Down in the yard, next to the house, is a large sycamore tree. A worn tire swing lazily drifts in half circles on one of the sturdier branches, and you get the feeling that you have played on that swing before.

A memory flashes in your mind, but as quick as it comes, it is gone even quicker. You are left with the feeling of a warm pair of hands on your shoulders, laughter echoing through the hollow parts of your bones.

Your gaze drifts back to the boy. His white dress shirt has been rolled up to his elbows, the back of his shirt slightly untucked from his green school slacks. He swipes the hair from his eyes, the white such a strangely comforting sight for you. He doesn’t seem to notice that he isn’t alone; not until you accidentally step on a twig.

For the first time since you've arrived in this field, the boy looks up, and your eyes lock.

Touya.

It’s like an echo of a past that you cannot remember. The name resounds through your mind, over and over until a dull ache forms in the right side of your skull. It’s where the hippocampus is located, where your memories should have been stored safely. But as hard as you think, you cannot come up with why you know that name.

Touya. It’s his name, and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but when you opens your mouth to say it, nothing comes out.

Touya, you try again.

There’s hope gleaming in his eyes, and he says something, but all you hear is ringing; as if your head is submerged in water. He stands for the first time, and you realize that he is tall, and his shoulders are broad, and he’s beautiful, but…

It’s like the dream shifts into something sinister.

The air is still, like the calm before a storm. And, now that you think about it, the birds are no longer singing. The flowers, too, are duller than when you first arrived. Like a fawn being watched by a hunter, you shrink in on yourself, wishing you could wake up.

Something is off. You feel a chill run up your spine, and you can’t shake the feeling that your being watched by someone.

Touya’s eyes snap toward the farmhouse. 

His whole demeanor changes. In hurried movements, he closes the space between him and yourself, something akin to fear etched across his features. He holds out the bundle of flowers for you, nodding his head in a take them gesture.

You reach out, your hand brushing against his as you grab the flowers.

You look up again, looking into Touya’s blue eyes. You want to ask him who he is, why you feel as though you have known him your entire life. But before you can, the scene begins to fade, and you wake up.

Curling up in the warmth of your blanket, you sigh in contentment. You don't recall having a dream, don't remember the boy with kind eyes. But when you sit up, sheets pooling round your waist, a voice echoes through your mind. 

How strange, you think. For some reason, you smell flowers. But that’s not the strangest thing. Three words burn into your memory like a brand.

Forget me not. 

#touya todoroki #dabi #todoroki #dabi fanfiction #touya todoroki fanfiction #dabi angst #mha dabi #bnha #mha #my hero academia #dabi x reader #touya todoroki x reader

[his-lune]

☾ dabi masterlist ☽

-`♡´- key -`♡´-

angst (a) ;; fluff (f) ;; smut (s) ;; crack (c)

☾. one shots

ᯓ★ coming soon...

☾. series

ᯓ★ coming soon...

#dabi x reader #dabi x reader imagines #dabi x reader oneshot #dabi x reader fic #dabi x reader fanfiction #dabi imagines #dabi fanfiction #dabi fic #dabi oneshot #todoroki touya x reader #touya x reader #touya x reader imagines #todoroki touya x reader imagines #todoroki touya x reader oneshot #todoroki touya oneshot #todoroki touya imagines #dabi masterlist

[kleftiko]

❦ TITS, ASS, OR THIGHS?

cw: mature, fem!reader

JJK VERSION | BLACK CLOVER VERSION

—shigaraki

hardcore tits man. big tits? squeeze them into a tube top. medium? push up bra galore so they can sandwich his face. tiny? your nipples through a small tee has him DROOLING. man just loves himself some tits. wants to suck on them like the mommy issues man he is.

—hawks

ass is his favourite pillow. i know because of his wings, he probably sleeps on his stomach—so ass pillow. easy. aside from that? tight dresses. you’re going out? he’s standing behind you like a bodyguard to scare off everyone and waiting for you to back your ass up into him when you dance.

—aizawa

thigh highs and a skirt are the perfect frame for the art that is your legs. garters? lace? fuck it just have those pretty things squeezing the life out of his head. he would die a happy, happy man. he wants his fingers digging into them when he drives too, slowly going higher.

—dabi

smacks your ass like a drum. doesn’t even look up when you scold him for hurting you, just admires the jiggle. leaves bite marks when you fuck too. i mentioned before that his favourite position is doggy and i was RIGHT. shameless pervert too, just loves ass.

#mha x reader #mha aizawa #mha headcanons #mha fanfiction #mha imagines #mha takami keigo #mha hawks #mha shigaraki #mha smut #mha x you #hawks fluff #hawks x reader #hawks smut #shigaraki imagine #shigaraki smut #shigaraki x reader #aizawa x reader #aizawa smut #aizawa headcanons #dabi x reader #dabi smut #dabi headcanons

[shiggybrainr0t]

you only smile like that when you’re drinking

warnings: drinking, blood, self harm (it’s shiggy scratching)

it’s not hard to find dabi in the haze of smoke and rambunctious men and women surrounding you. you just follow the lingering smell of burnt flesh to the bar, and find him right where you knew he’d be-slumped over the sticky bar side with his hand loosely around a glass wet with condensation. a heavy feeling takes over you as he turns around quickly, like he could sense your presence.

your heart contracts whenever he sees you, because he smiles so big you’re afraid the staples on his cheeks will split. you rarely see that smile, so carefree and unburdened by his life’s mission of destroying everything he once loved. you quicken your pace to him as he cheerfully calls your name, drawing unwanted attention to yourself from the people surrounding him.

when you reach him, he pulls you into his arms clumsily, making you recoil at the sharp smell of liquor that surrounds him like mildly priced cologne. pulling back to look at him more closely, you frown when you notice drying blood under his nose. you lick your thumb and wipe at it, and the sudden thought that you act more like a mother than a girlfriend sometimes hits you.

dabi laughs loudly, before proudly stating “he hit me first but i hit back harder. I burned him a little-“ seeing your frown deepen he hurries on, gripping at your hips tightly. “I only burnt him a little! I didn’t kill him, because I know you don’t like that. I did good, yeah?”

he leans forward to nuzzle his face into the crook of your neck, the barstool he’s sitting on having him at the perfect height to do so. you push him upright, and help him off the barstool, knees almost crumpling when you have to support his body weight.

“let’s get you home.”

“hmmmmm, our home~”

you don’t reply to that, but dabi is too out of it to notice. the run down bar where the league stays at is thankfully only a short walk away. whenever you reach the broken door, dabi finally seems to notice where you’ve taken him and he makes a confused sound.

“this isn’t home.”

he means your apartment, where you’ve already cleaned out all of his stuff and taken it to the headquarters earlier that evening, toga and twice watching you come in and out somberly.

“it is for tonight, dabi.”

“no, no- not dabi. not with you. ‘m touya with you. I love you.”

if you called him touya any time other than when he was drunk, you’d be afraid that he would burn everything you own. but drunk dabi is the most honest dabi.

dragging him inside, it’s only shigaraki sitting at the bar. he glances at you from under his hood, and gives you a nod before turning back around. the scratching sound of him going at his wrist is the somber music that guides you down the hall to dabi’s room, the room he hasn’t slept in for months.

dabi falls to the bed, failing to notice the boxes littering the room. before you can stop him, he pulls you down into his arms, once again engulfing you in the smell of hour old alcohol and sizzling flesh. he’s warm, but he always is whenever he holds you. his grip borders on painful when you try to get up.

“where are you going? we always sleep together. stay with me. stay, stay, stay-“ his rambling gets slower and more drowsy the longer it goes on, and soon enough he’s asleep. you brush hair out of his face tenderly, stroking the locks fried from being dyed so often, before kissing him on the forehead and walking away. shigaraki isn’t at the bar whenever you leave.

when dabi wakes up the next morning, his head is pounding and he doesn’t remember what happened the night before. he goes to rub his eyes and winces whenever his fingers hit his sore nose. he looks around for you, comfortable in the fact that you’re never far.

it’s only when he sees the multiple cardboard boxes in his room that his heart starts to pound. his mind hasn’t caught on yet, but he knows something isn’t right. the first box he opens has a polaroid you took of the two you on a night months ago on top of raggedy sweatshirts. you’ve got your face smooshed up against his, and dabi looks disgruntled but he remembers the warm feeling he had whenever you turned to kiss him on the cheek.

as he opens the other boxes, he finds all the personal items he had slowly brought over to your apartment. he finds the stuffed teddy he broke into a claw machine to get for you whenever you couldn’t win it and clutches it tightly in his fist. everything is here- except the most important thing. you.

a cold shoulder at closing time,

you were begging me to stay ‘till the sun rose.

strange words come on out of a grown man’s mouth when his mind’s broke.

pictures and passin’ time,

you only smile like that when you’re drinking.

#title and lyrics at the end from #Zach Bryan’s I remember everything #mat’s writing #dabi #dabi angst #dabi fanfic #dabi fanfiction #dabi headcanons #dabi x reader #dabi todoroki #mha dabi #dabi my hero academia #bnha dabi #dabi x you #touya x y/n #touya headcanons #mha touya #touya todoroki #mha #touya x reader #bnha touya #my hero acedamia #my hero academy fanfiction #my hero imagines #my hero academia headcanons #my hero academia fanfiction #mha x reader #my hero academia #angst

[roosaurusrin]

The Dragon (was also a child once)

Category: Gen

Rating: T

Description:

They see Shouto. They see Shouto held hostage by one of the most notorious villains in all of Japan. Then they see him.

“Touya.” Natsuo swallows.

“Yes.”

(Or - Touya gets trapped in a dreamworld quirk by his siblings, and none of them can wake up until they all reawaken their inner child - in the most literal sense.)

#bnha fanfiction #bnha fanfic #dabi fanfiction #my fanfic stuff #I'm writing again rip

[dabislittlemouse]

can we talk more about touch starved dabi?

'*•.¸♡ touch starved Dabi ♡¸.•*'   

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ The first glimpse of Dabi makes you believe that he is a person who hates being touched, getting pissed off at the slightest tap on the shoulder or when anybody gets too close to him. Which is true, Dabi hates it a lot, gets annoyed easily when someone touches him. And you’ve noticed that too, so you figured it’s best to keep distance whenever you’re around him and not touch him. He is like a feral cat which won’t let you pet. Though you were dying to.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ But one day as you two were sitting in the balcony, as usual smoking and looking at nothing in particular but the darkness outside, you noticed he was almost falling asleep, leaning against the wall and slowly closing his eyes. You shifted a bit closer to him just in case he’d fall over as he was asleep; which he did. He ended up leaning on your shoulder instead, it had been a long tiring day, and he was drained out of energy. You tried your best to not squirm in your seat as the man slept quietly next to you. Without thinking twice your hand places itself on his hair, just as you expected; it was soft and fluffy, you’ve been dying to run your hand through those raven spikes of his. Gently you caressed his hair, making sure to not wake him up. A soft sigh escaped his lips, making you flinch in surprise as you noticed that his eyes were open now, holding a soft expression on his face as his cheeks just above his scars seemed to be more tainted in pink than usual. A “huh” escaped his mouth as you apologized for doing what you did, but all he did is simply put your hand back in his hair. “C’mon, don’t be sorry. It felt nice, alright?” he says with a handsome sleazy grin, as if trying to distract you from the fact that he was actually blushing.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ It didn’t take too long for you to realize that Dabi actually liked being touched, but not from anybody; just from you. He’d give himself too much sometimes, just a simple placement of your hand on his chest or shoulder made his heart flutter on his chest and his face heating up, it was so nice to feel your tender touch on his burnt aching body. You figured that what made him almost squirm was the way you’d gently trace the part when his healthy skin met the burnt one, the way you caressed his hand with your delicate fingers, doing circular motions on his palm, and sometimes he’d just grab and squeeze your hand instead, bringing it on his lips to kiss it.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ Oh, hugs with him are the best. Dabi loves your hugs, so much, they give him a sense of safety and comfort which he could never find anywhere else. He loved the contrast of how good your soft skin feels against his marred one, how nice you smell, he keeps you pressed against his body and doesn’t let go for once, and if you dare try to move and go away he’ll huff and pout. You better cuddle him real nice too, gently caressing his back and kissing his forehead, and the man will be sweating.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ Dabi is like a feral cat which nobody ever showed love and tenderness to, ready to bite and hiss whenever someone gets too close. But once he has a taste of what it feels like to have someone love on you and touch you so softly, he’s completely addicted. <3

#B.writes #tried to do a kinda different writing style this time #dabi #touya todoroki #mha dabi #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #mha #bnha #todoroki #dabi x you #dabi x reader #dabi headcanons #dabi x y/n #bnha x reader #mha x reader #mha fanfiction #bnha fanfiction #dabi fanfiction

[emotionalsupportemoboys]

M A S T E R L I S T

M H A F A N F I C S

Something to Live For [Dabi x F!Reader]

Angst & fluff occurring after ch. 390 of the manga

Lie to Me [Dabi x F!Reader] Pt. I

Pregnancy angst

Lie to Me [Dabi x F!Reader] Pt. II

Pregnancy angst, smut, & fluff

To Keep You Warm [Dabi x F!Reader]

Showering with Dabi smut

An Egg in the Nest [Hawks x F!Reader]

Pregnancy angst

Shark Week [Hawks x F!Reader] Pt. I

Hawks comforts you while you’re on your period smut

Shark Week [Hawks x F!Reader] Pt. II

Hawks helps get rid of your cramps smut

Not the Wings [Hawks x F!Reader]

Impact play and pegging Hawks smut

Living the Dream [Hawks x Dabi x F!Reader]

You stumble into the MHA universe

Early Bird [Hawks x Dabi x F!Reader]

Hero & villain threesome smut

The Sky Is Falling [Hawks x Dabi x F!Reader]

You, Hawks, & Dabi experiment with edibles smut

Keep Your Enemies Closer [Dabi x Hawks]

DabiHawks angst & smut

M H A D R A B B L E S

I’d go to hell for you [Dabi x Reader]

Toxic relationship angst

Let me help you [Dabi x F!Reader]

Injured Dabi angst

M H A H E A D C A N O N S

Hawks

SFW & NSFW

Dabi

SFW & NSFW

I do not give permission for any of my writing to be reposted, recorded, continued, or altered in any way. All characters © to their respective creators unless stated otherwise.

Banner: @cafekitsune

#last updated 6/18/23 #mha masterlist #masterlist #dabi fanfiction #dabi fanfic #hawks fanfiction #hawks fanfic #dabihawks #dabihawks fanfic #dabi x reader #dabi x you #dabi x y/n #hawks x reader #hawks x y/n #hawks x you #dabi x hawks x reader #hawks x dabi x reader #dabi #hawks #touya todoroki angst #touya todoroki x reader #keigo takami x reader #keigo takami #takami keigo #hawks angst #hawks fluff #dabi fluff #dabi angst #dabi smut #hawks smut

[withabroken-heart]

REASONS NOT TO END IT ALL:

1) all the unreleased songs from your favourite artist

2) all the dogs and cats waiting to be loved by you

3) GOTTA OUTLIVE THE HATERS

4) THE HATERS GONNA BE HAPPY IF YOU DIE

5) potatoes. boil them, mash them, fry them up till golden and crispy

6) we got 2 more fnaf movies to go

7) dr. pepper

8) you have so many hugs left to give and get

9) you might eat your favourite meal tomorrow

10) keep telling yourself “not today.” one day you won’t have to.

please, REBLOG + ADD MORE REASONS!

#bsd dazai #bsd x reader #bungo stray dogs x reader #bungou stray dogs dazai #bsd chuuya #bungo stray dogs dazai #bungo stray dogs fanart #bungo stray dogs manga #bungou stray dogs #bsd fyodor #bsd atsushi #bsd rp #bsd akutagawa #mha x reader #mha fanfiction #mha bakugou #mha dabi #mha fanart #mha deku #mha oc #mha spoilers #mha #bnha hawks #bnha x reader #bnha dabi #taylor swift #taylornation #the tortured poets department #bsd fanart #the legend of zelda

[candycandy00]

Hii <3 I saw that your requests are opened so I thought I might request a Dabi x reader one shot

I’m obsessed with slow burn so maybe if you could do a female reader who recently joins the LOV, and Dabi liking her from the second he laid eyes on her. The reader notices he definitely has something for him and keeps teasing him/being a menace , she never gives in when he teases her back, and Dabi kinda enjoys doing the chase, but one day he can’t wait any longer, he has to have her ( u can also include some smut, & preferably dom dabi)

Please let me know if you need more details for this, and also take your time and don’t rush ^^^

Smut. 18+. NON-CON. Let me repeat: NON-CONSENSUAL. RAPE. Please avoid this fanfic if things like that bother you!

You knew it the moment Dabi laid eyes on you, when you were being introduced as the newest member of the League of Villains. The way his blue eyes moved over you, the way his lips parted slightly as he stared at you, he looked like he wanted to swallow you whole. You didn’t say anything at the time. After all, you didn’t know this man at all. But the more you were around him, the more you realized that you were attracted to him as well.

And so the game began.

It started out fairly tame. You teased him a little here and there. “Accidentally” dropping something and bending over to pick it up when he was right behind you. “Forgetting” to button the top three buttons of your shirt so that your lacy bra was on display when you ran into him. “Unintentionally” leaving your sexy little nighty in the dryer when you knew it was his turn to do laundry, so that he would have to bring it to you. It was quite fun, actually, watching the heat build in his eyes with every little stunt you pulled. Then, after you “bumped into him” in the hall and ended up pressing your breasts against his chest, he apparently caught on to the game, and began playing it himself.

One day it was standing up from the couch and stretching his arms above his head, making sure his shirt rose up to show his abdomen while he side-eyed you. Another day it was brushing past you in the kitchen, in such a way that you definitely felt a large bulge through his pants. And then there was the time he pretended to think he was alone in the room and took off his shirt to add fresh staples to his chest, knowing full well that you were still there, watching. The smirk on his face when he “noticed you” said it all.

The game was fun, and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t get excited whenever he paid attention to you, or did something deliberately sexy to get your attention in return. But despite all the innuendo, despite all the flirting and “accidental” touching, nothing has actually happened between the two of you. You’re not really sure what you want to happen. You’re attracted to Dabi. You’d like to get closer to him. But you don’t want it to be just about sex. You’d like to get to know him as a person, maybe even start a relationship. But who knows what he thinks? What he really wants? And every time Dabi has come close to making an actual move on you, you’ve pulled away. Because the truth is you’re actually a little shy about these things. Almost every time you’ve done some sexy thing to tease him, you’ve immediately went to your room afterward to hide how much you’re blushing.

Now, you find yourself and Dabi alone at the hideout. He’s been looking at you all day like he wants to devour you. And you’re feeling playful, so you decide to begin the next round of the game. You get a popsicle from the freezer and sit down on the opposite end of the couch from him. You open the frozen treat and begin licking it in a very suggestive fashion, gently pumping it in and out of your mouth, letting your lips drag across it and your tongue lap at the tip of it. You can feel Dabi’s eyes on you without turning to look at him. You just keep looking forward, at the tv, ignoring him as you suck on your popsicle.

Minutes tick by without a word passing between you. You’ve finished the popsicle and you’re waiting for him to retaliate. Will he perhaps spread out on the couch, letting his leg drape over your lap? Will he say something suggestive just to see if you blush? All the possibilities are exciting.

You can’t help yourself. You have to steal a glance at him to see what he’s up to. You try to be nonchalant as your eyes slide over to him, but what you see when that happens freezes you to the spot. Dabi is staring at you, making no attempt to be coy or subtle about it, and the look in his eyes is so intense that it’s almost frightening. It’s enough to make you wish you hadn’t glanced over, that you could still pretend you didn’t see it. Now that your eyes have met, you feel like you have to say something, anything, to break the tension. There’s a strange feeling at the pit of your stomach, a sense of danger coming from Dabi, an instinct to flee this situation immediately. But it has to be your imagination, right? After all, you two have been playing this game for months now.

“What is it? Did I get melted popsicle on my face or something?” you ask, trying to be casual and airy, desperate to change the mood in the room.

Dabi doesn’t reply to your question. His eyes are still fixed on you, and then suddenly he scoots across the couch and is right up against you. The move feels more hostile than his usual flirty teasing, and you’re immediately on edge, trying to scoot away from him but having no room to.

“Trying to run away?” he asks, an entirely joyless grin breaking across his face. “After working so hard to get me riled up?”

That’s when you glance down and notice the bulge in his pants, so big that it’s threatening to burst through the fabric. In the kitchen a few weeks ago, the sight had turned you on. Right now, it’s terrifying. You shake your head. “No, I… I don’t know what you mean.”

“Really?” he asks, and there’s a hint of anger in his tone. “You have no idea?”

You decide lying isn’t going to work, so you try honesty. “Okay, so I’ve been teasing you a little. You’ve been teasing me too. It’s fun, right?”

The grin disappears from his face, and he’s looking at you with something like contempt. “Yeah, at first. But I’m done playing. All that teasing had to lead somewhere, right? You didn’t think you could just get me worked up over and over again and then keep running away, did you?”

A wave of fear washes over you. The things he’s saying, the way he’s cornering you on the couch, the way he’s looking at you, they’re all triggering alarm bells in your mind. You start to get up from the couch, to get out of this situation, but Dabi grabs your arm and pulls you roughly back down. “What the hell, Dabi?” you ask, angry now as well as scared.

“You can’t keep doing this. You can’t be a tease forever. You want me, I can see it every time you look at me. Why do you keep pushing me away?”

You stare back at him, thinking over your answer. Yes, you do want him. You’ve been fantasizing about him fucking you almost from day one. You’ve even masturbated while thinking of him. But this is different from what you imagined, and just because you fantasize about something doesn’t mean you’re ready to have it happen. You’re scared, and that fear is outweighing any arousal you felt just minutes ago. “I… I’m just… not ready for this sort of thing,” you admit. “I do want you, but I want to get to know you first. I want to-”

Dabi suddenly cuts you off by pressing his lips to yours. His tongue forces its way into your mouth, one of his hands is gripping a fistful of your hair to hold your head in place, and the other is holding onto your arm so tightly it hurts. You don’t struggle, you know there’s no point. Dabi is much stronger than you, and your quirk is more suited to support and information gathering than combat. And the passion and heat from the kiss is making you feel a little lightheaded. There’s a part of you that wanted this all along, wanted to be kissed by him.

He breaks away and looks you in the eyes, studying your reaction. Whatever he sees there encourages him to keep going. He reaches down and pulls up the bottom of your sweater, then pulls it over your head, leaving you in your bra. When he reaches around to unhook it, you panic and draw back, shoving yourself against the side of the couch. “Stop it!” you say, but Dabi doesn’t even seem to hear you. He gets both hands around your back and works at the clasp until your bra is unlatched, then he jerks it free of your body and tosses it on the floor.

Reflexively, you cover yourself with your arms, but Dabi grabs both your wrists and holds them back so that he can look at you. You blush crimson and look away from his face in embarrassment. Then, he lets go of your wrists and unbuckles his belt, opening his pants and pulling his fully erect cock free. “Since you seemed to like sucking that popsicle off so much, why not try it on me?”

Your eyes shift to his face in shock, but he’s smirking at you the way he always did when he was teasing you. Only this time, he’s not teasing. You glance down at his cock, standing straight up, imposing, a few staples here and there. For a moment, you’re not sure what to do, but then it occurs to you that if you pleasure him like this, he might not take this any further. Besides, you’ve thought about sucking his dick too many times to count. How bad could it be?

You slide off the couch and onto your knees in front of him as he spreads his legs and give you room. You look up at him, still hoping that this is somehow all a bad joke and he’ll tell you to stop. But he doesn’t, and you just want this to be over with, so you lean forward and lick the tip of his cock. You run your tongue all over it, then close your mouth around it. You expected it to smell bad, but the only scents you can identify are the faint charred smell that always accompanies Dabi and the strong-smelling body wash he tries to mask it with. You continue sucking him off, praying that he’ll cum soon and be satisfied. You’ve never sucked a dick before, but you’ve seen enough porn to get the basics right. Dabi is grinning as he watches you, one hand resting on your head. After a few minutes, he suddenly presses your head down, forcing his cock as far in as possible, and cums down your throat.

You choke and gag, but he doesn’t release you until he’s completely emptied himself in your mouth. When you do get to pull away, you’re coughing and spitting, but nothing is coming out. You already swallowed it all. You had no choice. But at least it’s over now. You wipe your mouth and stand up, one arm covering your breasts. Without a word, you turn to go to your room to clean up and get another shirt, but Dabi grabs your arm.

With a sinking feeling of dread, you look back at him. He’s still got that dangerous, intense look in his eyes as he says, “It wouldn’t be fair if I don’t return the favor.”

You try to pull your arm free but his grip is too firm. “No, I don’t want you to,” you say, panic rising in your voice. Dabi ignores your protests and jerks you back toward the couch, throwing you onto your back. Before you can even try to sit up, he’s pulled your shorts and underwear down your legs and over your feet, leaving your completely naked. You shriek and clamp your legs shut, but his hands on your knees force them apart. And then his head is between your thighs, his fingers spreading you open and his tongue lapping at your clit. You’re still wet from a few minutes earlier, when you were eating the popsicle and imagining what Dabi would do to tease you in return.

He glances up at you, grinning again. “If you really don’t want this, why are you drenched down here?”

You don’t answer him. Why bother? He wouldn’t understand or believe you anyway. His tongue is wet and warm, the stitches in it making just the right friction against your clit. You’ve dreamed about Dabi eating you out for months. But this is wrong. It’s all wrong. You imagine this must be what death row prisoners feel like when they’re eating their last meal. It’s everything they wanted and the food is delicious, but the circumstances surrounding that meal probably ruin it.

Oh no. You’re going to cum. You can feel it. You try desperately to suppress the feeling, to ignore the sensations, but you can’t. Dabi’s tongue and teeth keep grazing over such sensitive spots, and you can’t stop yourself. You gasp and arch your back as you climax, gripping the couch cushion beneath you. Dabi stops and stares at you, watching you tremble as your orgasm passes.

“Felt good, didn’t it?” he asks, looking smug.

You close your shaky legs. “Please, just let me go. Isn’t this enough?”

“No, it’s not,” he says in a cold voice, wrenching your legs apart again. You look down just in time to see his cock, fully hard again, shove all the way inside you. The shock of it takes your breath away for a moment. You can’t even scream. You just stare at him in horror.The pain is blinding, even though you were wet. But of course it is.

Dabi pulls out and looks down, mild confusion on his face. There’s a thin layer of blood coating his cock. “Seriously? You’re a virgin?”

You turn your face away, tears dripping from your eyes.

For a few seconds, he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move. Then, you hear his voice say, “Sorry, but I can’t stop now.” And then he thrusts back into you, as roughly as before. You cover your face with your hands as you cry, from the pain, from the humiliation, from having your first time taken in such a horrible way by someone you would have given it to freely if he had just went about it a different way.

Dabi keeps pumping in and out of you, seemingly not caring at all how much it hurts you. After a while, he reaches up and pulls your hands away from your face. “Look at me,” he says, his voice low.

You do as he said, and meet his eyes. He’s looking down at you through his bangs, his blue eyes almost glowing. Ah, those beautiful eyes. The first thing about him you were so attracted to. Seeing them now only makes you feel even worse. He holds your gaze as he continues raping you, apparently wanting to watch the range of emotions on your face, probably somehow still convincing himself that you actually want this. You’re crying and trembling, but you don’t look away from him. There’s so much more he could do to you. Burn you. Maim you. Kill you. And so you go perfectly still, until he finally cums inside you.

When he’s done, he stands up and buttons his pants. He looks back at you, sprawled on the couch, blood and cum pouring out of you, too sore and weak to even close your legs, shaking with sobs. There’s a strange look in his eyes now, almost… apologetic? Is that pity? Guilt? At this point, you don’t even care. You’ll never forgive him for this. An hour ago, you were sure you were falling in love with this man. But he just destroyed every romantic daydream you’d ever had about him. You don’t even want to look at him.

He mumbles something, you don’t catch the words, and then he slips off his coat and drapes it over you. After that, he leaves the room, leaves you alone on the couch. It’s finally over.

#Dabi x Reader #Dabi x You #Dabi Smut #Dabi #Dabi Fanfiction #tw: rape