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I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become - Carl Jung
When Touya sees the lighter fall out of the man’s pocket, he doesn’t hesitate. Six quick steps forward, one half-crouch down and the cheap plastic is in his grasp. He feels the lighter fluid slosh as he walks, fingers curled tight around it. He hurries to catch up to Fuyumi, who’s seen nothing and is now several steps in front of him, her longer legs putting more distance between them until she notices he’s lagged behind her and waits for him.
Dinner is, all too rarely nowadays, not a silent affair. Their father is not home, their mother tells them, and will not be back for two more days. Fuyumi chatters happily away about their day while he plays with his food, and his mother smiles softly as she feeds Natsuo who flails and dribbles food everywhere. She is getting a little round, and Fuyumi tells her that she hopes their little sibling still in her tummy is a girl. When they go to bed Fuyumi patters into his room and whispers to him that she’s glad, so glad that their father won’t be around so she can play with him at home instead of having to do her homework alone while he trains in the dojo. She giggles when she waves her stuffed bear’s paw against his nose.
Then they hear a car pull up, and they freeze. There is mother’s voice, then father’s, and he pushes Fuyumi a little and she’s off, giving him a frightened glance as she goes silently, but quickly back into her own room. He clicks off his light and burrows into his bed; he hears Fuyumi do the same across the corridor. Practices deep and even breathing, keeps his eyes shut as he curls into himself. Their father’s footsteps coming upstairs are heavy, always heavy, and he feels like the floorboards would splinter and break beneath his weight. Their mother is right behind him, her own footsteps almost swallowed up by their father’s. His heart pounds, pounds harder, until their father’s footsteps go past his and Fuyumi’s rooms, towards his parents’ room.
He doesn’t fall asleep, and when he lights up a flame, a very, very small one, on the center of his palm to check the time, his clock says 2.48am. Quietly, quickly, he tiptoes out of his room with the copy of his health reports he’s stolen from his mother’s files. He’s less worried once he makes it downstairs, growing more confident the further away he gets from his parents’ room. The dark doesn’t scare him in the slightest, not when the searing light of his own flames is what hurts him the most.
The playground is empty, and he walks over to the sandpit, crumpling the health records in his hand. He’s gone over them often enough already to know what they mean by heart. Unsuitable body. Use with extreme caution. Permanent health issues that may get worse with age with increased use.
He breathes in and flicks the lighter, placing the flame against the corner of the first page of the report.
It’s not true. It’s not true. He won’t let it be true. He can use his flames, if he just trains up his body, then he can do it, can use his fire just like his father wants him to. Then he won’t be so angry all the time, won’t talk to mom like that, will maybe, maybe even be proud of him.
The fire sputters; the paper is too thick, of too good a quality and there is too much air around to keep it burning through the whole stack. He tries again with the lighter, but it just doesn’t catch, and in the end he carefully, carefully, starts his own flames, a finger prick of blue. It catches far faster, and he jumps back as blue devours white and black, sends grey spiralling into the sky.
The lighter is still heavy with fluid, utterly unharmed. He skims his right forearm with his left knuckles, runs it from fingertip to elbow. At all the areas beneath his palm, it is over-warm.
He wonders what it feels like to burn without ever hurting.
He’s moving as fast as he can, every part of him hurts from the staples and the way they pull at his skin. When he makes it to the alley’s mouth where the crying came from, the hoodlums are all leaning over a boy who couldn’t be more than ten. There’s rope in their hands, and a gag. Kidnapping, he concludes, when he identifies the boy’s uniform. Ouzaki Elementary only allowed in students whose parents could afford their exorbitant fees.
“Hey!”
The distraction makes them back off, and his flames does the rest, burning a cerulean streak between them and the boy. “Run!”
The child doesn’t need to be told twice. He scampers off like a rabbit. The pain lances through him, burns on top of the burns he already has, and he doubles over. His flames falter, but they don’t die. He knows better than to let them die.
“You made us lose our meal ticket, kid. Fancy yourself a hero, huh?”
His mouth tastes of smoke.
“What? Lost your nerve now that the kid’s gone?” They sneer, and one of them holds out their hand, and he watches their nails lengthen and sharpen, like steel.
“Oi, we’re talking to you!” Nail guy snaps, and he slashes at his face. He stumbles back, and the strings of the face mask falls.
He gets his first look at the fear on their faces from his face, then the cruelty masking their unease.
They’re trash. Worthless garbage that are a stain on the world. And stains like them should be cleansed.
His palm warms, and the cerulean that roars forth is louder and faster than their screams.
The broker jumps, and Dabi tamps down his smirk. Slinking around soft-footed and scaring people is becoming a new bad habit of his, and he can only hope that this helps him now, as he makes another, deliberately louder step into the dim light of the corridor.
“You get a kick out of scaring people, kid?” the broker says with an oily grin. Yet Dabi knows he’s wary – the shifting footstep, the tense yet steady hand that continues to turn the shiny brass key in his office door, locking it. Giran isn’t a fighter, but brokers never make themselves out to be fighters in the first place.
“I heard you were the recruiter for the League of Villains.” Dabi begins. “I want in.”
“Gonna need a little more than that for you to convince me, kid. League’s big time. I haven’t seen you around before this. Why don’t you start by taking off that mask of yours, huh? I like knowing the faces of my clients.”
“I doubt you’ll like knowing mine,” Dabi says coolly, and without breaking eye contact, pries off the black face mask. To his credit, Giran doesn’t scream. He does, however, take a step back in alarm. Dabi bares his teeth in a smirk and takes a step forward. Without the mask on, the smell of his burnt flesh is nauseous to weaker stomachs. “My good looks won’t make me lose out in the audition, now, will it, Mr. Broker?”
“Nah, you’ve got exactly the right looks for it.” Giran recovers with impressive speed, and that same oily grin tinged with unease. “But the right face isn’t going to get your foot in the door.”
Dabi’s fingers twitch at his side, but Giran jerks his head, a follow me, and climbs the stairwell to the roof. Dabi follows, seats himself on the empty barrel opposite Giran, next to a metal bucket. An empty ice bucket. Giran digs out a pack of cigarettes and offers him one. He takes a stick but declines the lighter, holding it in his hand. Giran eyes him but doesn’t comment, lighting up his own and exhaling a grey wisp between them.
“Let’s start. How’d you find your way here, kid?”
“I have my sources.”
Giran tries, oh, does he try to pry into him. He’s slick, Dabi will give him that, but Dabi’s better at staying silent and at deflecting. At last, Giran leans forward, his cigarette flaking ash onto the uneven concrete.
“So here’s the billion dollar question. Why do you want to join the League?”
“I saw the videos. Stain has a point.” He plays with the cancer stick in his hand. He had a speech prepared, but they’re gone now, words lost and blended into seconds then hours then days, refined so much that he doesn’t remember why he bothered to do so in the first place, before he came knocking. “Why are heroes, heroes? It used to mean something. It used to mean doing good in spite of the law. It used to mean having morals and sticking to them even if the whole world damned you for it. Yet everyday… these so-called ‘heroes’ aren’t heroic. They’re doing it for the fame, the money. There’s a fucking popularity contest, a Billboard Chart for rankings. They’re the fucking police, but with the PR of an idol, and it’s so easy for kids to get attracted to the shiny wrapper, want to be them, then it’s like an old-school idol factory all over again, only more lethal, since they’re licensed to kill, and they’re selling themselves as society’s weapons.”
Giran exhales a wisp of grey smoke. “Idol factory, huh?”
“A factory and a concert wrapped in one.” He shifts on purpose, let his long sleeves draw up and show the staples and scarred skin. Giran’s gaze lingers, flickers back to the cigarette he’s twirling in his fingers now before raising it back to his face. “Churn out the heroes and buy the media. Have the public eat up the performance and ignore all the behind-the-scenes blood sweat and tears that goes on to keep the show running. Doesn’t matter what the heroes are like off-stage, so long as they can keep the show running and keep giving the audience a few hours of entertainment, make them forget about the bodies and bones they’re standing on to see the song and dance.”
“I’ve heard worse speeches,” Giran says. “Stain took a sword to every hero that didn’t count as one. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to burn the factory down. And I’m going to burn every last piece of shit that’s masquerading themselves as a hero.”
“You think you have skills the League will want for that?”
He uses his foot to kick the bucket down, roll it to a clanging stop between them. Giran frowns at him, and he lifts his hand, lets blue crackle forth and do the talking for him. For the second time in their meeting Giran backs away, but Dabi knows his point has been made. The concrete between them crumbles, and with it, the bucket falls through the newly empty hole through the roof into Giran’s office, melted steel spreading in a mercurial puddle on his carpet.
“I don’t know, Broker,” Dabi whispers. “What do you think?”
Either the bird underestimated him, or the bird seriously thinks he can pull one over him. Regardless of which, this is a chance of a lifetime. Unexpected. Unprecedented. Did the hero really think going around with Endeavour in public was something he’d let him get away with so easily?
All-Might had that much trouble with the other Noumu in USJ, Todoroki Enji won’t survive this one.
He watches crimson flames and crimson feathers swirl into an inferno before High-End is bodily dragged to the sky, and crimson turns to sapphire, and even he, from his safe distance, feels the heat as both High-End and Todoroki Enji falls.
Todoroki Enji survives.
“Ujiko,” he drawls, “send me down there.”
Easy enough to deal with them now. The bird doesn’t have feathers left, and Todoroki Enji would already be on his knees if not for the bird holding him up. They’re talking – medical help for his injuries, most likely, and he steps out, speaks up.
“Hold up for just a minute.”
They turn towards him. The bird’s too far away for him to see his expression clearly.
“A lot of things went beyond my expectations.” Todoroki Enji’s hand is pressed over his wounded eye.
“But well.”
They are staring.
“It’s nice to meet you, I guess? Endeavour.”
Todoroki Enji pants, still winded. “I caught wind that you were here, you see…”
“You are the one who murdered Snatch… The League of Villains’ Dabi!”
He doesn’t recognise him. Well, his vision must be bad now with the heat and High End’s hit earlier. No matter.
He spreads his arms, and hellfire blazes around them, a cage of his own making.
4.5
Geten drags Hawks in, his wings frozen stiff from ice and a heavy, unbalanced weight that makes him trip and stumble. He’s a far cry from his usual stylised messiness: hair dishevelled, hero suit grey with soot and dust, the smell of burnt things clinging to him like a second skin.
“He’s been a double agent all along,” Re-Destro, Yobarashi, Yotsubara, whatever his name is, proclaims with all the oiliness of a used-car salesman. Dabi withholds his snort while Re-Destro rattles off a full list of Hawks’ crimes as a spy. After he brought Hawks to meet the executives of the Paranormal Liberation Front, only morons would believe that Hawks was sincere. The only one of their top brass that Hawks hasn’t met in person is Shigaraki, and he wonders what the hero thinks of their leader now, as Shigaraki towers over him, crimson gaze assessing the hero, his attack on the Hero Commission headquarters a bellowing success, with all objectives achieved.
For a brief moment their gazes connect, brown-gold with blue, before Hawks looks away and swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing. His lips are pressed together, jaw set. Re-Destro’s rambling finally ends, and Dabi notes the irritated twitch of Shigaraki’s mouth.
“They used you,” Shigaraki breathes, in the same tone he used when talking about accepting Overhaul’s offer. “Unforgivable.” Mr. Compress’ nudges Dabi, and he gives a sharp jerk of his head. The mask obscures his face, but they haven’t spent a year with Shigaraki without knowing their leader. He’s sure that Compress is smiling beneath his mask. He feels a smirk tugging at the edges of his lips himself.
“Dabi, melt them.”
He steps forward and crouches down. Hawks, who had screwed his eyes shut once Shigaraki started talking, is breathing shallowly. He puts his hand to the ice and calls his flames, watches the ice turn to steam under his touch. He can’t see Hawks’ expression, but his feathers ruffle as feeling returns to them. He melts them inwards to out, and when the last of the ice sublimates Dabi caresses the length of Hawks’ primary feather to reassure him. He slinks back between Compress, who is watching Hawks, and Spinner, who is watching Shigaraki watching Hawks. Hawks flutters his wings.
“Can you still fly?” Shigaraki asks.
“I – yeah.”
“Show me.”
Geten splays his hand out immediately, ready to turn Hawks into a frozen chicken. Dabi notes the action with a scoff – Hawks wasn’t stupid, he can’t take all of them in an enclosed room in a close-combat fight. He flaps his wings as he regards all of them. For the second time, their gazes meet, before Hawks tears his eyes back towards Shigaraki and he lifts himself up a foot into the air.
“Do a lap,” Shigaraki directs him. Hawks obeys, his wings curving awkwardly as he circles the cramped space, before he lands gingerly back at the same spot right before Shigaraki.
“Doesn’t look like he’s injured,” Mr. Compress observes. Twice chimes in vehemently.
“That’s a good thing! Those bastards! They left him behind!”
“They won’t even take care of one of their own,” Spinner says, disgust curling his lips. Toga grins widely, playing with her knife.
“So, Tomura-kun…”
“I won’t forgive anyone who manipulates people like that.” Shigaraki rasps. Dabi resists smirking, though he notes that Re-Destro’s face has gone stiff beneath his smile.
“So we’re keeping him, right?”
Shigaraki’s reply is directed at Hawks.
“They used you and threw you away even though you’re one of their best, even though you played by all their rules and did all they asked you to do.” Shigaraki holds his hand out. Hawks’ gaze darts to those outstretched fingers, up to Shigaraki’s face. Dabi wonders what he sees in those crimson eyes.
“What do you want to do, Hawks?” Shigaraki prompts.
When Hawks grasps Shigaraki’s hand, the smile that stretches Dabi’s mouth wide is genuine.
5.
There is ash and smoke in the air, in his lungs, and it’s hard to breathe as he runs as fast as he can up the stairs, chasing Compress’ heels, Spinner right behind them. He doesn’t grab so much as shove Spinner up before him as they reach the rooftop, blasts his flames at the noumu lunging for them and turns the stairwell into a furnace. The noumus shrieks are a hellish symphony, and he keeps up the superheated blast of blue and white, uses it as both weapon and shield. How many has he killed? How many are still standing, while the League and the Heroes wage war against the MLA and All-For-One?
“Dabi!”
He backs away from the stairwell’s entrance while keeping up his inferno, and he spares an increasingly blurry glance at Spinner and Compress, both kept aloft by a violet-haired girl who’s screaming something too soft for him to hear over the crackle-snap-roar of his own fire, then it doesn’t matter because something crashes into the building and he is thrown off the sides of the railing with rubble pelting him all over.
He is weightless, and he dimly hears Spinner screaming his name, and it is too bright, the sun is in his eyes and he shuts them, thinking so this is how I die?, heart sinking, hopes beyond hope that Shigaraki finishes what he’s sworn to do and dusts All-For-One to nothing, and fuck, it’d be nice to see that happen for himself, another shitty abuser destroyed by his own victim who’s crawled out of the depths of hell to get sweet, sweet vengeance; he doesn’t believe those kids will be willing to go the whole way with it, powerful quirks or not, they were still hero wannabes at heart -
There’s so much he hasn’t done yet, and he’s still got all this time till he falls to his death from one of the highest buildings in Tokyo ablaze from his own fire, feel his stomach crawl its way up his throat as he tries to use his fire to slow down his descent, enough time to contemplate every shitty regret he’s had, starting from mother to Fuyumi to Natsuo and maybe Shouto to, hell, the League and Hawks –
Something slams into his side, and pain erupts as he gasps, bile up his throat and in his mouth, and he falls down faster, whatever weight next to him sticking to him before he registers that it’s an arm around his waist, then his stomach swoops as he’s forcefully made to change course, giving him whiplash, and he clamps his mouth shut before he loses it and throws up as he forces his eyes open.
The world blurs in snatches of blue and grey and black and – red, familiar, eye-catching red. With that shock, an inhale, and with that inhale, the distinct, comforting musk of feathers rushes him amidst the lurch and drop of his body, a ragdoll at the mercy of the breakneck speed gravity was forcing onto him. As always, he digs deep and finds the strength to claw and cling, shuts his eyes again and hopes.
They both yelp and groan, bodies slamming into each other with every crack of branches against their combined weight, bark splintering around them and cutting into flesh. He falls on top of leather and flesh – has no choice, with that arm clamped tight around him. When the hold loosens, he rolls onto his front, gulps in a breath before he starts retching onto solid, safe, ground.
“Dabi, Dabi, Touya –”
When he can squash the dizziness down to look up, Keigo’s crawled up to him with worried eyes, suit streaked with soot and half his feathers gone, one wing bent in a way that it shouldn’t. He broke a wing to break their fall. “’m fine,” he gets out weakly.
For whatever reason, Keigo laughs, giggles hysterically while Dabi looks at him like he’s lost his head. Dabi pushes himself up and touches Keigo on the arm warily. Keigo shakes his head and leans in close, wraps an arm around Dabi’s neck, cradling the back of his head and seals the height gap between them.
The taste of bile is still clinging to his mouth, but Keigo tastes of ash and blood, and he cannot bring himself to care, not about Mustafu being levelled to nothing nor the League and Heroes who are throwing their all at All-For-One, doing anything, everything to bring him down.
We’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive -
+1.
“We saved him for you.”
Toga rocks on her heels. Twice has his arms crossed next to her and Giran, for once, not giving his dual-sided opinion about anything.
“Dabi…?” Mr. Compress trails off.
Keigo’s wings are all a-flutter, restless, ever moving. It’s not easy on him, and it’s like watching a living, breathing definition of anxiety right before his eyes. Keigo’s gaze keeps shifting back and forth. From disgust – directed at Endeavour – to relief – at any member of the League – then worry – at Dabi. He knows what Keigo wants him to do, which is why he avoids meeting his gaze at all.
Todoroki Enji with his broken limbs and weak, sputtering fire burning red and orange. His gaze rests squarely on Dabi, as if after all this time he’s still having trouble reconciling Touya with Dabi. It twists a sneer onto his face, and he raises his hand. Hellfire blue eyes shifts towards actual the actual hellfire blazing in his palm.
“Dabi, if you want to do it, do it now. The heroes are going to come soon.” Spinner, somewhere behind him. Shigaraki is behind him too, but their dear leader hasn’t said a word.
Now that the choice is right in front of him, it’s so much to just savour it.
“Remember Snatch, Todoroki Enji?” He crouches down so that they’re eye-level. “That Sand Hero I killed.” Technically, that he and Compress, but who cared? “He asked me before I did him in if I ever stopped to think about the families of the trash I murdered.” His voice drops to a whisper. “Well, I couldn’t. Because the thought of mine alone drove me crazy.”
“I could burn you,” he says. “Give you a taste of how it feels like to hurt like this, all the time, give you a taste of how I felt when you made me burn.”
Todoroki Enji tries to speak, “Tou –”
“You don’t get to say that name, scum.” He says sharply, and the pain that crosses Todoroki Enji’s face makes him even more furious. “I could burn you,” he repeats, “but you’re not worth my flames.”
And he extinguishes his fire. Slides his hand into his pocket, to draw out the one souvenir he’s swiped ages ago from Ujiko’s lab and kept on himself. As always, Todoroki Enji is slow and sluggish to understand, but when recognition dawns, the panic that blows his eyes wide is saccharine. Finding a vein is so easy, after years of methodically stabbing himself with morphine and other types of drugs to keep himself going. He takes off the needle cap and plunges the syringe in slowly, makes it as painful as possible. A few seconds, maybe longer, to plunge the quirk-erasing drug in and for the barrel to empty, but those seconds are ones he will relish for a lifetime.
“There we go,” Dabi whispers, as Todoroki Enji’s weak fire grows smaller, even weaker, until they die out completely. He removes the syringe and tosses it carelessly onto the ground, stands up and crushes it beneath his boot. “But don’t you worry. The real heroes will be here soon. Bye-bye, Flame Hero Endeavour. Tell Shouto he’s doing a better job than you are for me, will you?”
He turns his back on Todoroki Enji, meets Shigaraki’s gaze. Shigaraki shrugs and turns as well, and it’s the unspoken signal for all of them to start walking. He hears Toga humming before she skips forward past him to latch onto Spinner, hears Twice and Giran’s heavy footsteps behind him. Hawks bumps shoulders against him, and when he glances at him there’s worry in those gold-brown eyes. He brushes the back of his hand against Keigo’s.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him,” Keigo murmurs.
“It’s not because of you.”
“I know.” Keigo wraps a wing around his shoulder. “I’m still glad.”
Dabi nods and laces their fingers together.
His icy hand, the frigid palm that never gets hot no matter how much fire he uses, pressed against Keigo’s own palm, is warm.