#nowhere near by yo la tengo plays in his head when he sees u it’s fine

[ghostbeam]

charcoal artist!dabi x reader, first meeting, takes place before the other drabbles, he is a bit of a creep, his feelings sort of boarder on obsession, dabi is taller than you, suggestive language at the very end but it’s barely anything

He’s staring at you.

Eye’s flickering in between you and the spiral sketchbook in his lap. Concentrated, eyebrows furrowed, hand flying furiously across the page. You aren’t sure how you hadn’t noticed him before with his dark hair sticking in all different directions, black boots heavy on the grass, sapphire eyes piercing, lost in you, in the page. No one’s ever looked at you like this, you think. 

You’re trying to be discreet, looking back down at your book when you see his eyes rise from the page. You’re not retaining a single bit of information as you’re suddenly focused on what he might think of you, how much of you he’s noticed, if you’re sitting weird, if your face looks wrong while reading. You think he’s cute, pretty, almost delicate, all eyelashes. 

You turn the page, not having read the previous one, and then look back up at him. Except this time, your eyes meet. Your breath hitches. It’s a little bit electrifying, paralyzed by his stare like you’re the one who got caught instead of the other way around.

Dabi feels his jaw fall open slightly at the sight of you, staring straight at him. Had you seen him? Did you know? He watches you close your book, not even checking to mark your place. You stand up, still looking at him. Dabi feels his heart drop to his stomach. You’ll call him a creep. You’ll run away. 

“Can I see?” He doesn’t know how he hadn’t noticed you getting closer. You’re all he can focus on, but you’ve surprised him. Can I see? Dabi thinks about the first time he saw you, right under that same tree, some text book bigger than his body sat in your lap. He felt the breath knocked out of him like some lovesick sap, not like himself. He didn’t even know you, but god, he wished for you. He did, like some idiot standing in the middle of the walkway closing his eyes and wishing on nothing, wishing on, well, you. 

Standing in front of him now, he sees now more than he ever has before that you’re every piece of art he’s ever loved all wrapped up in one. One portrait of you would be enough to satisfy him for a life time.

Only that’s not true, because he hasn’t been able to stop drawing you. It’s not enough, to sit across from you and capture your likeness in strokes of black charcoal. Over and over and over again, your cheeks, and your hair, and your lips in a pout, and your eyebrows all pinched. He can’t get enough. It’s almost miserable, except it’s heaven. 

And now here you are, standing over him and looking at him expectantly. Part of him wants to hide it away, keep it for himself, but that’s not fair because it’s you. It really belongs to you, should be yours, but Dabi is nothing if not a little possessive. 

Standing this close to him, you can see all of him, the pink puckered skin that spreads over him in various spots, the bit of black around his fingertips, the sun shining in his eyes. God, his eyes are blue. Could that color ever be mixed, replicated, brushed onto a canvas and still make you feel the way looking into his eyes right now does? You don’t think it could, and you don’t see the point in asking the man who works with charcoal before you. 

“It’s me, right? You’ve been, um, looking over there, so I thought…” You speak, suddenly afraid that it wasn’t you he was focused on. The thought of him being lost in the scenery on the campus behind you suddenly makes more sense than him paying so much attention to you, but there’s no mistaking that his eyes were on you the last time you looked up. 

“It’s you.” He manages to speak, suddenly very conscious of the rasp in his own voice. “You—I’ve seen you sitting there. Couldn’t help myself I guess.”

It’s one way to explain it, definitely less creepy than the fact that he saw you and felt like he might die unless he could put you to paper. 

You hold your hand out, a little impatient, more out of excitement and a little nervousness than anything else. He stands up, and your struck with the fact that he’s much taller than you. He places the sketchpad in your hand, and you force yourself to look away from his face.

You fill the page, almost every blank space filled with your face in different expressions and your body sat in different positions. He had to have been sitting there for much longer than you though to have been able to draw all of these. It’s all you, but it’s him, this piece of him that he’s allowing you to look at, take a peak inside. You want to see more. You want all of him. You want to take and take and take, and not because he has you trapped in his pages, but because it’s not enough to know him through just these strokes and smudges. Even if he lets you keep this, you’ll look at it every day, this piece of his soul, and wish it was the real thing.

It’s the same way he’s felt about you for the past couple of days. 

“Do you have more?” You ask him, a little breathless. 

“Of you?” He asks, but he thinks that it was probably stupid of him to say. He feels exposed, but by his own words and the way you look at both the page and him like your seeing him in a way no one ever has before. 

“Anything.” You shake your head. “All of it. I want to see it all, you—you’re very talented.”

You clear your throat awkwardly, the excitement, the desperation beginning to feel embarrassing. The stunned look on his face makes you feel self conscious, and maybe you should just walk away or leave him alone. 

But he wants to show you everything. 

He writes his address across your palm with a pen he’s pulled from his back pocket. He has classes during the day on Mondays and Wednesdays, but he tells you that you can come by any other time. It’s strange, you think, for him to give you his address instead of his number. It feels fast, and stupid, to meet him at his place without knowing anything but his name. (Dabi. A name that feels like it was meant to fall from your lips, and he would agree). 

But he’s ripped out the page, placed it in your palms, and told you he’ll see you later, like he’s always known you. It’s not enough, to look at your face made from his hands in lines across a page. You want to feel them on you, over your skin, grabbing and taking, your want and his. With a piece of his heart in your hands, you decide that no matter how stupid, or fast, or intense it might be, you’ll go to him.

#dabi x reader #bnha x reader #LISTEN. I’m obsessed with him #he’s so weird giving u his adress instead of his number #nowhere near by yo la tengo plays in his head when he sees u it’s fine #GOD! #ghost.drabble #ghost.writes #finished this tonight am queing it for the morning idk man hiiiiii