Chapter Text
Waist deep in winter, spring and its pungent pink drool always seem as lost to time as the days themselves, but with the evenings leaving the curtains cracked longer minute by minute she doesn't feel quite so opposite a time zone. A cup of thick ginger-honey tea sits grasped between Dabi's palms anyway as he watches the the fluorescent bulb outside the window flicker on amidst a deep white ceiling still dry with hibernation. When he takes a sip his mouth twists in a grimace-- too hot. If only its sweet spot could be fed to the roots themselves.
In the bedroom, the blinds are drawn but still thin enough to throw pale threads over Tomura's hair and the expanse of his back, forever mottled yet baroque in its composition. Carved with intent otherwise vague to prying eyes-- bled mutely across the gaudy ceiling in the chapel in Howl Barrow Dabi can't seem to escape-- yet as beautiful and more as the writhing bodies surrounding. The salvation itself Dabi must be seeking. He must be-- why else would he go?
His right ear is ringing again. He tugs hard at the steel in his ear until it fades.
Despite the cherubim that grace him, Tomura's figure hides from the shallow wash of the morning and Dabi both when he nudges the door open and steps inside, but the faded shadows of rustled sheets crumbling from his face as he unearths himself and glances over are worth it. "None for me?" He questions, looking pointedly to the shogayu still cradled in callouses. Dabi has the audacity not to look sheepish because when he opens his mouth he says, "You get the first half." Tomura's obsidishiny spines relax again, and Dabi sits on the edge of the bed and hands him the tea. Tomura blows on it and his face is neutral as the season when he takes a sip. It always is. It would show in more than his mouth if he wasn't.
He doesn't say to, but while Tomura forgoes speech in favor of slurried zing, Dabi stakes himself to his feet once more and trudges to the window to unravel all the yarn strung through and quilt the room in light finally going yellow. The earth may have not gotten the memo about LEDs yet, but there were worse things to miss. Its inhabitants did enough of that to allow just a few lightyears of wiggle room. He jimmies the pane open just enough to fit his arm out and lights a cigarette with his thumb to the end. The silence spreads thinner than gingerthread and Tomura swallows it down. He watches Dabi take a drag punctuated only by the passing clouds reflected in his eyes; Dabi sucks the smoke down and watches the world outside.
It is a sprawling, concrete thing-- one might call it urban, and that wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but urban implies a sort of ladder, a sort of somewhere-to-go-from-here. Like there is another highway to traipse along, or there will be, there's construction plans for some year some years from this one so where you stay now is fine-- because they can only postpone so many times, right? Because your life will raise itself on its hind legs and continue the trawl for something more soon enough. Because there is somewhere out there for you to flourish within that will decloak itself and beckon you closer someday. Yes, that sounds right.
Or it just sounds like something he's heard before in church; maybe Salacus Fields, the handful of times he's gone. But Dabi has lived here twenty some rotten years and only ever backed away from whatever poison-fenced ideal this place has tried to sell him. He's witnessed too many curtain calls for him to shell out the shekels, and he's only human; you ask any vodyanoi, any cactacae or garuda-- if you ever managed to track one down-- they would have screenplays tenfold to share. If you weren't turned away at the door.
Dabi isn't a naïve teenager anymore even if his fury has persisted. This country is as good as dead.
His lungs choke smog-full but he doesn't cough. He can't feel the hot spit on his tongue anymore but that's alright, because if he's lucky, if it's a good day and he combed in enough honey and he's lucky, Tomura will thermoprobe his mouth for him with a proboscis just as sweet. If it's a good day. If there is no ginger left at the bottom of his cup.
There is a soft clink as Tomura sets his drained mug on the bedside table, because you get the first half is emberspeak for wake up, I made you tea. Wake up with me.-- and it would really be so dog-brained if he weren't fluent by now, so he sets it aside, finished and poured to his stomach just as stupidly, and draws near to the window where Dabi leans.
The stick's only half finished but he flicks it away the second Tomura joins him and meets his bagged eyes with his own; ones he will never be able to truly comprehend the color of much less what they see, because Dabi exists solely in the physical plane-- despite his fiery halffraction-humanity, unfitting and unnatural-- and Tomura does not. Tomura is nowhere near that incapable. He is no Weaver, and, to tell the truth, he is no slake moth, contrary to what his ambiguous shape would have you believe-- all Tomura is is Tomura, and he may not crawl amongst aesthetic-obsessed and worldweb-sculpting arachnids nor prod his tongue through the eyeballs of and into the pulsing brains of anything sentient enough to dream, but he exists extradimensionally regardless. He has never met the grubby hands of any biothaumaturge and never felt even the slightest smell of kin resemblance in his sharp furs, but he is here; against all thought logic and odds, he is here.
But Dabi couldn't care less about any natural law Tomura lives fugitive to simply for daring to walk this crummy planet. He just wishes he could make sense of what swirls within his eyesockets when he looks at him.
"Good?" He asks, scratchy. Tomura nods mutely and his headspines quiver just enough for Dabi to notice. "Sweet." He murmurs. Dabi's shoulders slump, and he flicks his gaze to the city again thinks only a micron hysterically, ain't any slake-moth, but.
Tomura stares intently at his side profile because he isn't and slake-moths don't have ears good enough to hear those souls they eat. But Tomura isn't anywhere near that incapable. Not heeding any wishful volume, Dabi thinks, you don't need a tongue in here to know.
And he doesn't need to glance over to see the grin hooking Tomura's lips up and apart, all kettle-wet and tic-gnashed and human-horrible teeth. Instead he wriggles his numb arm back in through the cracked pane and wrenches it closed again, all while his tetanic staples in dire need of a polishing spark sibilant out of the seams that zigzag haphazard across his face-- torn, but since mended-- or as mended as it could ever be. Tomura's mouth rips wider and it's too obvious to be anything but affection. Or hunger. He's never passed up a chance to suck the heat from Dabi's fingers-- not even once.
But there will be plenty of time to dine and digest later when Tomura's really awake. The day is one thing, and though early morning and late evening are all that accompany him to bed, it's only when the Ribs gulp down the tattered sunlight that his wings' razor-knife teeth, those seablack quills comparable to all of nothing in their glossy inkiness, retract back into the furry mouth of his down. Only when the sky has fallen in routine defeat to the viney darkness wound burred around its orangepink halfheartedness, when the leftovers found still trudging down cramped cobblestone walkways consist only of coin-janglers and girls swallowing the desperation hard from their eyes to bloom a something to pause a passerby in their flush-- at that frenzied and drowsyblind time is when Tomura hunts. He'll suck down every last crumb Dabi throws across the table and drain his glass with all the composure of a Parliamentary advisor-- that is to say greedily, or perhaps fervid-- and he'll polish the china itself too, but the foodstuffs Dabi lives off do all of goose eggs for him. Objectively speaking, Dabi is far lesser in species, and his diet exhibits such accordingly. Objectively speaking, Tomura needs more. The wax glimmer his spines drool has to come from somewhere. There has to be something that's chemickizing the pigment that spills from the inside of his wings.
Dabi went with him once-- but only once, because Tomura's wings aren't just for show, and there's only so many places he can drift through without some fool thinking him a handsome ware; or even stupider, pocket money. They traveled along the muddy backstreets towards Dog Fenn shrouded by night and navy green cloaks clasped at their necks and torsos with flintlocks at their waists and stilettos buried in Tomura's dense neckfur. They did not live closeby so the quiet trek took a far larger portion of the escapade. Beneath the battered trains lumbering back and forth some sixty precarious feet above them, Tomura moved as if he were a specter rather than a whatever-he-is-or-may-be, his thin legs and small, chitiny paws hovering mere half inches above the wet roads that grew more and more unkempt the farther they got from Spit Hearth, where their apartment sat stout and waited aimlessly for their return.
By the time they'd arrived the moon had already crawled up the stairs to lie out its infancy surrounded by white stars that might have been visible were they twenty miles south of New Crobuzon rather than stalking along its outskirts. As opposed to the journey there, the reason they'd come in the first place was finished so swiftly that the timing was too negligible to account for-- and so, just as soon as they stepped in, they turned on their heels and vanished again, leaving the fickle legend of the moth-reaper intact for then. Tomura flicked the stray ivory from his tongue and lapped up the spinal fluid that had spattered across his proboscis when it had wiggled in between the old man's brittle vertebrae through the hole his claw had punctured, and Dabi had dug his fingernails hard into his palms to keep from doing something stupid, like grabbing Tomura by his neckfur and sucking the leftovers off himself. He hadn't ever tasted the inside of someone's spine, still hasn't, but something'd struck him like a quill to his cord, and it'd been so obvious that it wouldn't matter either way. He'd always needed an excuse to kiss Tomura; always a reason to offer his own saliva too. He still does. Tomura didn't bring him along again for convenience and also, so as to not impede his focus-- later, two-thirds through what Dabi would call sex and Tomura would call consumation, he'd narrowed his eyes at him and hissed that it was supremely difficult to hunt properly with Dabi utterly reeking of arousal. Dabi had countered that he always smells like that and Tomura didn't try to argue. Probably 'cause he couldn't.
But Dabi didn't try to change his mind because with what his mind runs away with when he's horny, he can kinda understand the distraction. At least he's still got the image of Tomura plucking a hole in a man's back and sucking the life out of his brain to beat it to whenever.
But anyways.
It's only after Dabi's routine gut-pickling that Tomura pipes up with today's plans. "I need you to deliver it." He explains, tone just as routine as the brown-paper twine-tied package he retrieves from his neckfur. Just like there always is, a name is pasted in the corner in Tomura's hopeless chickenscratch script, bare of any postage sans the syllables themselves-- Futsuto, it tells. A bit of an odd name in Dabi's humble opinion-- isn't it kinda saying something to have waved your kid off to nothing but common mediocrity?-- but he supposes he can't really judge. It's not like his own parents gave him this name. Maybe this same-as-always something-or-other is running from something too.
He scrubs the musings from his head before Tomura can get a whiff. It's the same primfold-wrapped good Tomura sends him off with every Fishday afternoon; there's nothing more that he could possibly wonder on by now.
Still, when he slouches into his boots and creaks towards their door more secured by Dabi's rusty pyroturgy than actual locks-- and Tomura's very existence, but it's not like he's inked into the lease-- he glances back. Just to shed a solitary drop of faux hesitance, still cradling the package fast in his warm hands. Still mimicking the Fishday from last week, and the week before, and the one before that, and all the parallel lines that feel as if they'll spill sludgy down the calendar forever. But nothing needs to change anyway.
Tomura's gazing out the window again, the elbow of his uppermost arm perched on the decrepit sill and his chin rested in his smooth palm. The two beneath are crossed with their miniscule bristles vibrating minutely-- not trembling, just listening-- while the two below that have their forked and bony hands folded patiently in his lap. He looks out upon the stone houses and slug-gummy, stout temples that spread out before him with a neutral and barely dull expression-- yet Dabi gets the feeling as if he's searching for something. He still can't make sense of those eyes lensing whatever it is that pours into the sinkholes in his head, but when you live with someone long enough, aren't you bound to sniff up some of what lingers?
While the foggy light outside traces every individual strand of his white hair and fur with pale brushstrokes, Dabi laces up his boots and heaves the heavy door open. See you, he mumbles silently just before crossing the threshold. Tomura rubs his flat and fuzzy nose over wriggling tissue of his consciousness in return. Be safe.
Skulkford is not all that long a walk from Spit Hearth what with their fraternal proximity to The Crow, and though a handful of minutes dredged away in Perdido and a few more rattled along the Sud line railway would surely still be more efficient and less of a burden, Dabi strays from a passchip. No cabs either regardless of any lower profile, because even now-- Dabi is paranoid about his face. Even mottled and discolored and adorned with material both anatomic and not, the odd jut of his cheekbones juxtaposed with his round jaw that was chipped out of him persists. At least that vigilance comes in handy avoiding the militia that somehow still feel the need to slither around here. Subterraneans my ass.
He slinks down a certain narrow passageway until that familiar trapdoor comes into view, buried amongst the moss trimming where the wall meets the slick concrete. Dabi crouches down and presses rough fingertips to it and swallows a forcefully relaxing breath as the metal warms beneath them, but before it can disform or even discolor it clicks unlocked. While blowing on his now stinging hand, he glances around the alleyway still despondent with lack of life sans the spongy stuff smushed under his soles-- so he wrenches the thing open and shimmies in feetfirst. The door swings shut behind his head and fastens as if he'd never been there to begin with.
The hallway burrowed beneath is lit just as dingily as the last time he dropped by, but the familiar steps he takes towards his destination have always been comforting somehow, some kind of feeling like that of returning home-- one nowhere near close enough to touch shoulders to that of the padlocks that only crumbs of his youth had escaped. Thank Jabber for sickness, I guess, he muses aimlessly as he pads down the corridor. Just before the end, the second door from the last one on the left, the one with the frosty edges and nothing like a window to peek through, Dabi halts and bangs a hammer fist on the steel. Dreams too, for that matter. It sounds louder than should be necessary but the fucker inside's always got some kinda quake-resistant earmuffs on or some shit.
No voice greets him in lieu of a peephole but Dabi feels their body heat through the door when they step into his boundary. He doesn't bother saying anything either-- instead, he just tosses the package into the rusty basket welded to the wall just beside and stalks off again. The half-deaf inside shoves their bridge down and grunts as the cell spits them out to retrieve the box, and just like last week and the week before, they pause to bore holes into the receding back of Dabi's shabby cloak. And the reverse hasn't budged either-- the curiosity is parasitic, because there are only so many people who know of Tomura, and there are hardly any that know Tomura. He wants to know who could be this consistent. Who this silent and secretive squirreled away customer is; just to see if it's anyone he might recognize. Just one look.
The cave freezes shut behind him again. Dabi whistles away any neural whining raspy and croaky and lifts the trapdoor instead to climb back out to the world of the landdwellers. The outside air, no matter how sticky and damp and stinking, is oddly refreshing.
What he does listen to is the sudden pigeonpecking of his stomach at its knitty lining when it whines at him, so he moseys off in search of a meal to scrounge for his tripe-- and like an effervescent dream, the trip and the box and its recipient all fade from his thoughts like the young group of vodyanoi kicking their squirmy legs in the River Tar. As if the blackish coalwater was all they'd ever wanted. As if they'd never known anything else.