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Chapter Text

Droves of giggles ring out within the vicinity of the park, seemingly lifting up growing buds planted near a swing set, the tiny pitter-patter of feet clap into a sort of chaotically harmonic jingle. Childhood is something anyone who has ever been alive in the history of the universe would recognize, even if it was remarked in a more solemn tone, or closed-off, distant gesture. Even if it's something that you can only remember in tiny flutters that fly by, with no regard to your own person.

An absolutely enthusiastic person would report of the start of a fantastical world, inhabited with powers that used to be only seen in fictional comics, about the so-called glowing baby in Qing'Qing! Let's just say you couldn't give a rat's ass about how many different types of light the small babe could flow out, even if it did birth not only a new life, but an entirely revolutionized and evolved society.

In the midst of evolved masses of human kind, anti-quirk riots died down as the oppressors became the oppressed, a chain of sorts. It's like most of the world's view decided to follow a beacon and erase any remnants of the past with it: it's not like you could ever forget anyways, it wasn't your own choice, not when your father changed from a funny, strong-willed man into a laughingstock of a parental figure, bringing up any and all irritation at any mistake, since it's all he would think about, anyways. You'd think once nearly everyone in the local neighborhood quit talking to the quirkist bastard, he'd realize that the only one who cared about how much of an asshole he was was only the person looking back right at him in the mirror.

Your birth mother was not exactly the most angelic, stereotypical mom you could have asked for, but the comfort that came after the coldness exuded from her was something you had to look forward to. Past-tense, of course, as life goes on whether or not someone likes or asks for it. Soon enough the frosty exterior was all that was left, what she grasped onto with a grimace and clenched teeth, holding what was left of herself in an attempt to keep it all together.

Harmony, something that every person has once looked towards a semblance of balance, a sense of whole. Actually, let's assume that in this perfect world, you were raised into a family getting by with every march drummed into the hearts of any who had powers. Reputation was coin, and the currency of the time was emboldened by the "freak" mutations popping up within our oh-so normal and wonderful world! It's also what kept you breathing past the burnt bridges, tethered by naught but dust in the air that freely pulls the strings of the flaming pathways, one thing you wouldn't view as your world, even if it's essential to the new trends.

Either way, you tend to be an outcast, the outsider, the person who doesn't really believe that you should think that way just 'cause you were raised into it. You're your own person and so are ideas, they're not mutually exclusive, at least to you.

That's what you repeated to yourself as the temperature dropped further, and with it your will to keep trudging slightly further from the next rooftop to the next. Heroism is not only a staple of today, but a cushy and respectable job that will earn you stacks of green and keep you up higher than any other hard-working citizen, yet barred from the creme de la creme if you're not in the Top 100.

Any person, starting from a particularly juvenile age would be wondrously compelled to reach for the stars, climb the ranks to the top, all with your looks and quirk! We come full circle, bonded yet again by some core values that really just tend to stick, yeah?

'Like that'll fucking help me actually help people see that it's not all about the brand new, huh,' you think bitterly, creases beginning to appear as you furrow your brow in annoyance.

Even if you still were living with your parental figures near the end of Year 1 of Junior High, it didn't stop you from picking up some handy-dandy tricks or two from some... inspiring brass knuckles. Practically rushing over to slam your bedroom door and pounce onto your poorly working family computer, you'd boot up some good ol' grainy footage of a supposed quirkless vigilante that went by the name "Knuckleduster," giddily training your eyes on his technique that was hidden by his obvious brute force. You can't really remember what compelled you to slam ¥10,750 onto the counter of your nearest generic equipment store, startling the poor young employee with your hardened stare that held nothing but excitement. With that, you started brandishing your ghetto, yet quality brass knuckles attached to some durable motorcycle gloves, adorned with spikes not just for show.

That held the very start of your substantial career as a vigilante, breaking your thumb multiple times and nearly dislocating a shoulder with the first few trips to teach a mugger a lesson, only to become the one with the rugged and mugged face. Stares were pointedly pronounced at the comedic amount of medical wrapping surrounding your thumbs at least once a month during Year 1 of Junior High, only showering yourself with some unwanted attention from gossipers and know-it-all's trying to just shit in your metaphorical cereal.

On the bright side, had you not suffered some jeers from some dank alleys and equally unlikable peers at school, you wouldn't have learned how to properly throw a punch and keep your posture correct in certain situations! If you had just thought a little while longer about how to fight instead of trying to jump into some definitely illegal training, maybe? Nah, it was worth the money from some nasty individuals who always made you break their noses, absolute scum of the earth.

Getting back on track, wheezing from the effort to continuously skirt past chipped corners and loose footholds that would most certainly lead to your demise, not like you would mind, the scent of smoke begins to waft into your nose. Bloodcurdling screams soon follow with layers of pleas falling deaf to the cause's ears, burnt rubber-like smell emanating danger and horrors that someone shouldn't casually stroll into the middle of. But of course, you're you and you do you so; A) you calmly venture through a gallery of shady streets, letting your brain just halt for the time being, B) even though the pungent aroma continues to smother every single one of your senses, you stop just short of entering one foot into the space surrounding the arsonist, and C) immediately say a quip that is totally only chuckle-worthy.

"Ah, I get it now, getting a late night snack, yeah? Nothing like some meat on the barbie," is what's rolled off the tip of your tongue and it simultaneously makes you wish you had time to relieve yourself in a bathroom and makes a man with a definite punk-goth aesthetic with his two blue eyes pierce into your face.

Chapter Text

Never mind the absolute stench rolling off in distasteful waves from the heap of corpses burning into a puddle, the bright azure fire floods your retinas, only barely registering that the arsonist-slash-murderer hadn't taken his eyes off of you. In nearly any other circumstance, you wouldn't hone in on the tiniest details before rushing in and developing a stratagem during, yet you can't help but feel urgency in actually knowing who you're dealing with for once. Bathed in an aura running through various parts of his body, blue licked the tufts of his spiky black locks, patchwork burns becoming as violet as fine grapes that happened to be scorched once or twice, before being rolled into sand and abused overall.

Avoiding going any further than the top of his torso, a slight tinge of fear makes itself be known, of not being able to take your eyes off an absolutely demolished eyeball drooping into the fine ground paid by wonderful taxpayers. Multiple silver piercings glint in the fiery sight before your person, hashed together medical staples pulling whatever damaged skin the man had into a semblance of an actual face, barring the fact that he might as well have been Frankenstein's monster's rejected cousin.

His lanky form was accentuated by folds in his white shirt and rough around the edges overcoat, probably stolen from a Goodwill for all you knew; his demeanor was in the mold of some type of expression you actively chose to ignore yourself, something you hated to acknowledge once in a blue moon. Maybe it's a form of a fucked-up sixth sense that you had a broad hunch that people who have gone through some trauma could unfortunately recognize their fellow kindred spirits, however unwelcome it happened to be.

The look in his eyes at first glance would only reveal an intimidation factor, practically saying "You really want to fuck with me?", an unsavory amount of disdain filling his eyes, not particularly uncommon for actual murderers, you think. Yet your uncanny ability to see through projected walls and motives of others borne from your deep-seated trust issues reveal confusion, fear, and a hint of irritation of a rather short person interrupting the extermination of a treasure trove of evidence that would be lapped up by police.

"Any clue on why you're sticking around this time of night, shortstack?" was rasped out in a baritone tone pleasing to your ears, probably the one thing close to pleasing in every aspect of this situation you decided to create.

With a flick of his wrist, white-hot fury poured out of his palms, running down the very seams of his arms, causing steam to emanate from agitated burns on said appendages. Any trace of a human being was promptly smothered into the searing flames, leaving nothing but ashes in its wake. It's surprising how multitudes of dead bodies can simply turn into a small amount of ash residue marring the ground of the alleyway, in such a small amount of time. In a way, you feel a sick sense of astonishment and respect for the other's technique, however morally destitute the actions were. Getting rid of the bend of his knees, presumably to combat kick back from his powerhouse of a quirk, he lazily rose up into a slight slouch and tilted his head the tiniest bit.

"It's rude to not answer someone when they're talking to you, did your mother ever teach you that?", he once again drawled out in a bored tone, resting his hands into the relative safety of his black pockets, starting to make his way towards you.

Snapping out of your trance-like state, you make your once distant eyes focus onto your addressee's face and gather your thoughts into an acceptable bundle of words in response.

"I don't think she's in any shape to teach me manners, better less treat me like her child in this day or age," you reply casually, matching his composure to a tee.

The faintest bit of recognition and familiarity pools into his blue eyes for a small amount of time before being changed into his otherwise neutral composure. Before he can utter a single word, you decide to treat him as a human being, despite what others may be appalled at.

"So, why'd you burn them to a crisp? I'm seriously asking this time, fingers crossed," is uttered as a rudimentary olive branch to the criminal in front of you, your head gesturing to whatever was left of the people that crossed the black-haired man's path.

At this, he keeps himself together and does not react at for the time being, eyes narrowing at the established normalcy you brought to the table, however ironic it was. It seems as if he contemplates brushing you off was worth the effort and burning yet another body for only the alley to hold as a pile of black and greys, and he reminds himself of your stature, assuming that you are merely a kid who had probably seen some shit.

"They're false villains," he grunts out in confirmation to your question, swerving his hand nonchalantly to gesture as if they were nothing. "No conviction, no goals, nothing but sick fucks that did bad because they liked being bad." He steps further towards you near the head of the alleyway, returning his hand to the comforts of his pocket and swaggering casually.

The clicks of his heels cease to tap the ground ceaselessly once he's in front of your figure, bringing his head down to stoop near your level and look down before you.

"Is that all, or did you want to hear a monologue, kid?" is threatened out with his nicotine-tainted breath reaching your face, a taunt aimed to push a button, but then again, do you really mind if your buttons were pushed for the sake of knowing the truth? Not breaking eye-contact with the arsonist-murderer, you aim to please and so you don't really care about how dangerous the man is.

"Nah, nah, if I wanted that I could've just dragged my ass to the nearest rundown pub and asked some sad piece of work to tell me why his wife don't love him no more," you tutted, bringing yourself to the side of the man so you didn't block his exit but also being in a close enough range for him to not simply walk away.

"Let me guess, your father abuses you, right?" you add on to your verbal barrage, tilting your head in a form of mockery to match the man's, then wringing your hands to seal the deal, cracking your knuckles in the process. "I'm not just some dumb kid that drools at the word 'hero', and looks at anyone who does something remotely bad and screams 'villain,'" you get more up-close and personal with the blue-eyed criminal, making a point to not back down.

'Gotcha there, firecracker,' rings out in a pleasing sing-songy voice within your head, as you crack through the man's carefully crafted composure and cause him to sharply turn his head, widen his eyes, and bring his frame more ram-rod straight in the same lazy fashion he decides to show himself as. A hum is rang out in the dead of night briefly, seeing as he really had nothing to lose. What kind of older brother would he be if he crossed the line at killing children? Even if he did abandon his siblings in pursuit of torching his fuckhead of a father, there wouldn't be anything in store for him but more conflict when he tries to sleep at night.

"And it looks like you'd know how it is, wouldn't you?" is retorted back at you, the male not contemplating leaving any more as his interest was piqued, possibly in the most aggravating type of way. You make a show of moving your neutral lips into a bitter smile, not quite meeting your eyes but meeting the other's, cementing your point.

"Like you can talk, goth hobo," you snark back at him, momentarily moving your eyes to recognize truly how worn-down his entire being looks, along with his rags.

"Didn't think I would ever see the day where a kid stopped someone from burning corpses, just to try to be buddy-buddy," the declared goth-punk chuckles, his eyes becoming slits in the midst of his short bout of laughter, before fixing his eyes on you once again.

"I like to think there's too many people that love sucking hero-dick, y'know," you chortle out, your breath leaving you in some laughter as you double over shortly. Both of you find a moment of camaraderie in your jokes, your intent making itself known and the other finally recognizing your motives. It'd be a shame to do all that work and not open yourself up to a total stranger, in case all of it goes to waste and you can gain his trust. A rustle of clothes and the man pulls out an ancient flip phone out of nowhere, his black fingernails rapidly tapping its buttons and a resounding beep rings out within both of your surroundings.

"So," he says without looking up from whatever business is far more important than the matter at hand. "What exactly do you want, shortie?" the man shuts the device with one hand, bringing his focus back onto you. It's somewhat surprising that he cut your jib rather quickly, but it isn't something that annoys you so it really just serves to move things along.

"What's your name? I think I'd like to know who this crackhead of a dude is before me," you quip dramatically, earning you a giggle from your own belly and a smirk from him.

"I go by Dabi." is what he croaks out in his voice, turning away from you and finally resuming his stroll towards the end of the dank alleyway. Dabi stops himself before turning the corner, "Sure hope more B-list vigilantes would turn out like you, it'd make life easier," his decrepit loafers engulfed in ashes of the deceased moving out of your sight and along with it, the first meeting you would come to have with the notorious criminal.

Chapter Text

At first, it happened to be a blip in the grand scheme of things, a situation in which a man was a victim of circumstance, burned alive into whatever was left of his charbroiled remains. A truly despicable crime, with the gall to burn away any and all leads they could have had onto the culprit of the crime. Then came another pile of burnt remains singed to the bone, then groups coming in indescribable shapes, and then it all came to a head when there was no coincidence in sight.

The nighttime scenery couldn't change the utter truth that there was a serial arsonist coming into fruition, and god be damned if Detective Tsukauchi could not find him. He had various things piled onto his ever-growing plate that normally would have him running on empty into sleepless nights, working into the dawn of a new day in search of suspects, yet animosity was growing far too quickly for his liking.

Starting in the Osaka prefecture, nearly a 4 hour drive from his station in the Shizuoka prefecture, is where the terror started in Shinsekai. Dating back to 1912, the city was modeled after the most modern and chic streets that could be replicated to imitate Paris, opening a gigantic amusement park by the name of Luna Park. Its history of errant fires coinciding within a short amount of time caused the booming entertainment factory to shut down within 11 years.

It surely doesn't help that this serial arsonist is attempting to replicate such fires in a much larger scale, bringing human lives into stake and horrifying the locals with case after case slowly moving east to Kanagawa. As if the flames cremating the dead were sparking retribution, dragging more lives along their path.

Sighing, Naomasa ran his calloused fingers through his stringy hair, flinging them back as if they were curtains formerly casting a shadow on his face.
"Yet another one," he rhetorically said to himself, slamming the driver's side door shut and lifting his beige trilby hat up to his chest.

"Looks like this perp's not letting up anytime soon," Sansa stated, whistling at the already blackened area around the entrance of the alley they were deployed to inspect.

Of course, the further the villain moved east, the closer they were to the gallows, with Musutafu being the golden gates for the epicenter of heroism, with the likes of UA alumni patrolling and working towards investigating crimes. It didn't help that more heroes suited to the limelight of polls and rankings would shy away from such a gruesome case, with their one and only back up being none other than the underground hero, Eraserhead. When the stacks of paperwork grew too thick and were heavy enough to flatten his absent-minded fingers in the middle of his investigation, he immediately grimaced and shot a pleading look at Sansa while gritting out his alias.

The man himself, Aizawa Shota was utterly transfixed at the case in front of them, cautiously detecting slight details that the police may miss, keeping his foreboding presence in the background of his silent demeanor. He was currently viewing the scene from various differing perspectives, attempting to calculate motives, and look out for anything of vital importance. Scarf acting as an immediate capture weapon, rationality was imbued within every facet of his being.

Missing any key details could cost them dozens of more lives, in such a way that their bodies would lock up and be contorted through a disgusting act of singeing. While the occurrence rate of the criminal's appearances appeared to be haphazardly strewn, both of the middle-aged individuals knew there was far more to it than just that.

Bringing his hands to rustle his morning shade grit on his chin, Aizawa sniffed, "The man has a personal vendetta. All of the 10 victims were known to be involved in minor, petty theft, prostitution, or plainly nuisances to the areas they lived in."

The plain-faced detective shifted his attention to his ally, nodding in affirmation to his deductive reasoning, then making his way further into the alleyway before noting a minor discrepancy, if nothing more than that. Brick of usually maroon and dusty orange arrangements were dyed into a diverse amount of greys and blacks staining the infrastructure of the walls, the floor being no exception. The elongated and large radius of the crudely star shaped black area below their feet was tracking one set of loafers they had already ID'd as being stolen from a convenience store, size 11 belonging to someone of a tall male stature.

Despite the amount of deaths caused by this single man, they had not been able to pin him and identify him for only one reason; like a never-ending desert, one blindly reaches for an oasis even through the illusion-induced dehydration, much like there was no river to be found in this desert of casualties they arrived to. No evidence other than what can be obviously gathered, the most they can do for the moment is merely to attempt to locate the whereabouts of a person that has not been seen by a single witness, the only saving grace being the villain not trying to cover their tracks.

"He must be searching for a place of residence, or housing if his patterns are correct," Tsukauchi remarked clinically, his sights set on capturing and bringing the murderer to justice. Another shuffling of steps by his policemen dusting the ground in search of any other prints they could find, like hungry dogs with ribs protruding in absolute desperation. If the intensity of the crimes spiked, the severity of the scorn would rise against the Police Department once again, and in the wake of heroes they could not do much to abate the concerns people had against the inferior force.

"If that's the case, I'll increase the number of patrols I have set in the however miniscule chance I may find our culprit," Aizawa doted out, turning around to catch the concise report one of the underclassmen had created to summarize what they had undergone. Poor police trainees and rookies didn't stand a chance between Shota and his pursuit of consistent, logical information as he had come to know, and only set out the more experienced on the clock to work with them.

Slipping his yellow, geometric shuttered goggles snugly onto the bridge of his pronounced arched nose, Eraserhead swung his tan-white fabric to wrap around a phone line, swiftly dragging himself up further onto the rooftops with his practiced and seasoned momentum. A cacophony suddenly arose from the receivers all of the policemen had on their belts, crackling yells and shouts spouting directions to a new sighting of a more frequent vigilante escaping in progress.

"Sir! Sighting of Psyche 6 blocks down and on route are two patrolling officers attempting to not lose them!" one yelled from farther away, Naomasa noting the urgency may lead to further complications in their line of work. Fixing his beige trilby atop his crown and speedily walking in long, purposeful strides to his vehicle, his equally beige overcoat settled in further wrinkles with the new movement.

"Well, we aren't police for show, are we? Let's head down there," he replied authoritatively, no room for questioning incited by his serious tone of voice beckoning his men to follow his actions.

Chapter Text

Thrumming into your inner core was physical exertion, your more defined midsection thinning out fat and instead replacing it with muscle. It was somewhat hard for you to lose weight due to gaining muscle back just as easy, but you're pretty sure you have bigger things to worry about than exercise and hunger. Panning out the situation in one go, once you saw the rapist throttling a woman pleading for him to stop, you moved before you could think. Adrenaline surged into every fiber of your being, your muscles preparing to tense momentarily in order to gain a ferocious velocity. Leaping from the shoddy, creaky fire escape and tackling the man was just as exhilarating as dropping down from the sky, toppling the roaring winds screaming in your ears.

Throwing a well-placed punch into his solar plexus, the wind was knocked out of the assailant and you cracked his head on the pavement with a sickening crack.

"What fucking right do you have to do this shit, huh?" you growled under your breath, anger at the back of your head and taking the chance to instead let it fuel your lowering energy and patience in combat.

Wheezing and crawling away at a torturous looking pace, the would-be rapist coughed blood and managed to gain some control over his eyes, dazed and looking at Psyche.

"You... cough, son of a bitch," is the only warning that reached your ears before a maelstrom of nausea entered both your head and the victim's.

It was as if something was hammering away at the base of your cranium, chipping your actual human skull and going to town onto your brain, ants crawling over every single part of your body, the feeling of static spread from the tip of your toes and was rapidly spreading. You could barely hear the screams of the woman ringing into the night, going on about being good and that she wasn't doing anything bad, she swore, she wouldn't tell anyone about what happened. There was another slowly rising yell that came into fruition during this entire conundrum, not even recognizing the sound of your own voice.

Knees fall to the floor, palms with spiked brass knuckles keen on pressing into the ground as if they would pass through any moment now, hairs rise on the back of a neck, prickling all of your senses and overloading them. You can't think, what's my name, where am I, why does it hurt, why does it hurt, hurts so much: your vision fades and you black out, with it your quirk activates and everything in the street seemingly stops for the time being, but you can't focus on the task at hand, when you can barely pay attention for more than one second before darting your hands to the pincushion that was currently your head.

"SHUT UP! SHUT IT OFF, I CAN'T THINK, I'M GONNA," is gasped out and the swirling depths of your stomach give out whatever was tonight's dinner.

It pools at your feet and mixes into an almost strange amount of pinks and corals that you think you're bleeding before you think, 'Wow, looks like it was Salmon tonight.'

At the back of your mind, your anger is gone and with it resurfaces memories of bittersweet concoctions, oodles of conversations that struck into your being, and all of a sudden that is all you can think about. You're not in an alleyway anymore, your household reappearing before you in a flash and it flickers, so much so, that you stumble to regain balance when your eyes can't begin to cope. After all, how can they cope when you haven't nearly put in the effort yourself?

A person that has the face of your dad screams at you, battering your resolve within every ticking second that passes by, emotions surging up from the compartment you left them in. Respecting the quirked might as well have been a sin, as much as having one yourself, you are lone in the terrifying atmosphere of your family home with no exit in sight. What's worse was the silent treatment that followed, even if the physical pain left marks for all to see, the worst kinds were the ones you couldn't just exactly slap a bandage on and call it a day, now, could you? As the world revolved on its axis and moved on to greater and better things, your father couldn't help but stay rooted in one time period that he continually forces onto your head as much as an executioner would forcibly place a cloth onto someone's head.

He would never change, yet you were the one willing to change but also be your own person, but it still didn't change the fact that he would call you worthless, less than the dirt he walks on, and a bastard child. It's as if all the times he had been an temperamental, yet obnoxiously comedic father was thrown out the window, and with it came no more compliments, nothing but arguments, and disgust.

You throw your head back and howl in pain, nausea disappearing despite the stone in your stomach dragging the center of your being further down and down, and down. The woman's color changing quirk is erased and her tresses turn a natural potato brown, the man on the ground gags even harder to your interference clogging his senses, a taste of his own medicine. Distantly, tell-tale sirens draw their vibrations ever closer to their location, bringing red and blue lights to paint the corridors of stores and pierce a mental nail into your head.

"A-are you fine, you look like you're in a lot of pain, ah! Look at me now, I'm rambling and you saved me-" her prim and proper lips go on and on, it is all a cacophony to your ears at this point.

She continues to splutter apologies and her worries while she shambles over to your position in the street, setting a manicured hand onto your trembling shoulder, even as she herself undergoes a shock to her life.

Your hand quickly shoots out onto hers, pearly-white teeth set in stone into an open mouthed scowl, clinging onto her as if you were a dead man learning to walk among a cemetery. You're not sure if it's to reassure yourself that everything was fine or not, or to calm the kind woman down a notch, but it does the trick and she wordlessly shuts her glossed lips and clamps down onto your hand as hard as you are doing to hers. Sobs are strangled out of your throat and you can't help but feel as if she looks like your mother and then their faces are overlaid onto each other when you reopen your eyes.

They have the same facial expression, comfort radiating from every soft curve of their faces, warmth and feel-good memories are shuffled into your mind before being drenched into ice cold water. She's not even looking at you anymore, not even attempting to call any type of attention to her own child in the destruction of herself, all she can do is manage to live on autopilot, with you merely being in the background.

Strain is coursing through nearly every muscle string in your body, clenching and unclenching to keep yourself together, yet you're still not close enough to the gravel-filled streets for you to care at the moment. You can't tell if your amygdala and hippocampus just exist to spite your existence, but it's debatable. Numbers are churned through the gears of your mind struggling to receive the basic amounts of information, repeated patterns of numbers are spoken in the air softly, yet loud enough to overpower the attention you have focused entirely onto the mental wounds.

'1, breathe, 2, breathe, 3, breathe, repeat after me, you're doing good, keep going,' is all you can think at this point in time, lavender flooding your senses and the familiar pressure of another's hand on yours. The haze is lifted from your glassy eyes, finally meeting eye-to-eye with the victim you saved a few minutes ago. Expecting some sort of exclamation of reprieve from the woman, you focus on her button nose and her perfume before she can speak.

"Ever had lice? Man, they ruined the smell of lavender for me," is shakily spoken to her, a smile beginning to worm its way onto her plump lips, it being an acceptable attempt to shake off something awkward and definitely not a flashback, nope.

"You're Psyche, right?" she warmly asks while looking at the variety of grooves on your marble mask, made to imitate the Greek god, Eros. Coral nails gently pat the top of your head, sparkling orange eyes looking on in amazement to the thyrsus on the back of your jumpsuit, with patches of patterns detailing pine cones and tiny grapes littering your back.

It looks like someone up there must be on your side for once, as a crisp hallelujah escapes from your mouth and your eyes begin to have life's essence flowing through them again. "Yes m'am," you reply with an invisible tip of a hat in a comedic fashion, crinkling your eyes in joy.

"On a side note, you wouldn't mind not telling anyone what just happened, right? I don't got money, so please don't ask," is hopefully questioned with you moving your hands' palms onto one another. Surprise is spread onto the lady's features and with a dangle n' clink of her cutesy earrings, she hops in front of you and places her hands on her hips.

"I don't think you know who you're talking to, child," she cooed out with a flourish, lowering her hand down for you to grab onto and get on two feet instead of almost kissing the floor. "If I ask you for some hush money, I might as well have no children," she proudly declares with a harrumph and pats you on the back once you get up.

"Now, I may not know who you are and why you do this, but I sure as hell am not going to hoodwink you," the woman titters motherly, grabbing her fallen belongings from eating the dirt covering the street below them. As you begin to close your eyes in a cheery smile, your mind rings alarm bells as you spontaneously remember that there are police sirens looming and with them, presumably a hero to drag you down to jail, even if there has been no evidence of you ever using a quirk.

Tires screech and burn rubber into the consolidated concrete, filling the air with a striking smell of acidic formaldehyde and gasoline, bouncing to a halt when the three figures are spotted on sight and multiple cruisers follow. This isn't how you roll, you don't just end a crime and then bend over to let the police force to fuck you over, hell no. A dozen policemen scramble to make like eggs and come sunny-side up with the ends of their pistols aimed at your body. The man, the myth, the legend himself Detective Tsukauchi steps out of his own vehicle before dropping a megaphone out of it and flicks it on.

"Psyche, we have you surrounded, please do not resist as we wish to avoid any injuries and want to not harm you, please drop your weapons onto the ground and put your hands up for your arrest," rings out with hints of static in his voice from the speaker, he motions for his men to step down and temporarily cease fire.

It's time to make it or break it, now or never, insert another catchphrase in this sentence. All eyes on you, your brandished and oh so beloved spiked brass knuckles are gingerly raised into the air, the dearest detective seeming to forget that that was not your only ammunition to reload your good fight against crimes in more ignored locations in Japan, such as the slums within Yokohama. In a split second, hell is raised with the thyrsus being grappled hell for leather, sprightly legs dashing for cover as you brandish your inconspicuous weapon, stabbing for a feint towards Sansa before belting out tantivy to make your way to your haven, the rooftops.

A couple bullets mistakenly fire at your back once you slot the Mythological weapon back into its rightful place, recoiling back to cause a cursory catastrophe down below. Pants become your repeated war cry of survival as you dance among the rooftops and the night cloaks you into her sweet breast of shadow, nursing you well.

Chapter Text

Unceremoniously throwing yourself onto your bed with enough force to make your bed-frame cry out in agony, aches begin to surface all around your body, just another perk of being a vigilante. Pinpricks settle into the nape of your neck, pressing themselves deeper into your bone tired skin in an attempt to make themselves known. Escaping from the police force became a troubling task the moment you increased the amount of your own patrols, sinking your teeth further into the underbelly of Japan in an effort to not only eradicate pests from the underworld but understand other people's troubles as well.

Life was not a two-way road that was as bold as black and white, left or right, as most people vaguely understood the concept: from their journey to travel into this world, there are those who are the most fortunate to be suckling onto a silver spoon from the emergency room, trust funds anchoring in the near distance to keep their entire future a breeze in an exotic ocean, while others are thrust into poverty and chained to their birthrights that spell nothing but stress and discontent from the classist society we live in. Some fall smack dab into the middle of the two aforementioned extremes, dwindling not in numbers but the amount of those caught up to speed with how the system truly works to keep them enclosed, swiping away most, if not all information that could lead to a breadcrumb trail of their governmental deceit, white lies and corruption of power.

Bitterness swept from the back of your neck, tingling up your spine and bones, remembrance of how life can really fuck you in the ass. You were the farthest from complaining about your comfortable enough roof over your head, a satisfying amount of food stocked in the modern pantry, and a room to yourself within not the worst of neighborhoods. Sometimes dynamics are better left unseen and unexplored, as passerby cross your path in treks to school so do the loving families with caring personalities caring for their kin as if they were their lifeline, leaving a sour taste in the back of your mouth.

Never mind the countless number of times illusions drench your mind into dreamscapes, fulfilling the cracks within your being temporarily, for however sweet they are, they corrupt your expectations and stability evermore so. Life doesn't go the way nearly anyone realistically wants it to be, however tempting it may be to shatter your current life and escape to a utopia that might as well be a Trojan Horse in guise.

You supposed that was a major flaw of yours, continually scratching the bounds of your existence in the hopes of regaining any part of yourself anew or anything better than you have experienced or obtained for your well-being. Nails move back and forth, to and fro from their location on your scalp, the other hand grasping what was holding your mask together sturdily and unlocking its safety to let it drop into a clump on the floorboards. Heavy duty boots are tossed once their buckles are undone and along with it comes your prized jumpsuit, the various designs embroidered on it being lit up by the tiniest bit of moonlight shining through your blinds.

Thinking too much about things you would really rather compartmentalize once again, and beat into submission to forget mementos of the past, really takes the will out of you for the night. Thankfully, no signs of the allusive underground hero that happened to become a thorn in your side, no thanks to Detective Naomasa, you could sleep however more peacefully tonight. Curling up into your fleecy covers littered with adorable caricatures of kittens and comets, your knees come to lock into place comfortably at the top of your torso, your fetal position carrying your consciousness into a velvety coffin of slumber, bringing out on trays what you would irritably know as your unconscious self.

Coruscation flashes into the formerly static view thanks to your eyes being closed shut, a glance of blues entangling themselves within the arms of whites makes themselves known on the backdrop of black, your mind just beginning its bizarre picture show for you to ponder on breathlessly in the morn. Arms wrapped around your form cocoon around you, holding you into place and without having to tilt your head any further, the same striking purple burn marks held together loosely by silver are delivered to your optic nerve. Shock reigns your mind, as your thoughts gallop without a care for your own decency and it quickly comes to be out of hand.

You having a dream of Dabi holding you tightly against his skinny, yet somewhat built form, who would've thought? Far off in the recesses of your mind, the short-lived thought of you possibly having some sort of hormonal urge towards the man is quickly shaken off in a magnanimous flurry of emotions, cluttering the train of thought before it could add any more to it.

Your mind is having none of your refusal, despite your calls for it to 'Stop it, I'm not that horny, ok,' and you quickly find that your brain is really as much as a dick as Endeavor.

Whispers are lustily drawn into your ears and tugs from canines that mark your ear lobe make their way to the nape of your neck, hickeys sucked and bite marks appearing into lovely shades of purples and reds. Another movement and the man's arms caress your lower body, travelling from curved hips and stopping for a break at your waistline, only for his tantalizingly azure irises to find their target on your upper body. You're sure by now yelps are being unconsciously drawn from your lips by Dabi's incessant actions on your nipples, teasing you with suckles of the buds and flicks of breath to emphasize the air around them, further heightening the mood.

Even it is just something that would not happen in real life, most likely is remarked nearly silently, you can't help but at least savor the pleasurable moment in the hopes of arriving at even bigger prospects within the dream. With a lifelike smirk that would bring patchwork skin up to crinkle at his eyes, he lowers his head, travelling further down to your genitalia. Closer in proximity, his breath is dancing on the boundary between your thighs and what's between them, causing you to moan gently and watch dream Dabi as he does his magic. His nose is burrowed into the folds of your skin beside one of your thighs, directly next to your privates and it's slowly driving you crazy.

A chuckle rings out vibrations through your skin, his pierced tongue slithering its way out of the caverns of the man's mouth, about to touch home base, and then your alarm grates on your nerves and swiftly chucks you out of the wet dream. I believe in miracle-e-es, from where you come, you se-e-xy thing, sings into your bedroom and makes you grab your phone and let it have a fun ride straight to your luxurious, wooden floor that has exotic dust bunnies waiting for it. You really want to curse whoever is up there once again, as the big man, woman, or whatever it is really loves fucking with you and enjoyment of life.

Groaning in disappointment, your hands stretch to the sky as you grumble out your displeasure to absolutely no one but yourself, joints cracking in succession and your spinal cord relaxed without any tension. Silence greets you and shakes your hands marvelously as your feet travel on autopilot towards the pantry to ransack whatever you can gobble up in less than 10 minutes, no sign of any parental figures in lieu of a note stuck to the counter. Picking up a browning banana and peeling it without a care for the world, you also track the lettering inscribed onto the cheap yellow sticky note saying that both of them are already off to work and wouldn't be home until late into the night.

Another sigh makes its way past your lips, bounding down to grab a plastic water bottle from the bottom of the pantry's floor, and then shutting the squeaky door. Ambling your way to school is about to be another part of the start of your day, however unwanted it was, it was part of your routine established by the state and thus, you couldn't refuse if you didn't want any further setbacks in your education. Thankfully, your uncanny ability to not really give a fuck helps you wake up easily and live day-by-day in the coming weeks, as you barely have friends within school that you could casually talk to about the weirdest shit.

Like why does Endeavor happen to be a massive raging dick for absolutely no reason, All Might is in tandem with a Gorilla creepily smiling at a poor kindergardener through the plexiglass of a zoo trip, why does everyone feel that happy about seeing his stupid plastered grin so often? That sort of regular, jabbing humor is what really makes your personality shine through to a small crowd of people and you humbly accept your position as someone who doesn't even try to be funny that often. Dressing yourself and grabbing your materials in order to make it through the school day, you shuffle your keys out of your pockets and lock the front door with a simple flourish of your hand.

The trip to school wasn't that bad, with wandering, chirping birds delightfully bouncing from tree branch to tree branch in the hopes of acquiring a lucky female friend, nothing but the rustling breeze meeting your ears and hair, and your own footsteps resounding from the concrete sidewalk. Not something you could complain about, or even nitpick as it was pretty much all you could ask for in the beginning of your day. After a dozen minutes pass by in the wake of your somewhat muffled footsteps, you finally reach the front gates of your Junior High and are pleased to find that it's practically empty for the time being.

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Iwata Shiritsu Junior High School was the name of it, definitely outranking the likes of Aldera Junior High with their relatively caring educational partners, after school activities funded by some people higher up in the food chain, and kempt facilities that loomed high over the horizon. Round arches are pronounced and glittering from the charcoal and vibrant rose red paint set onto the base of the main school building, taking inspiration from one of the biggest hero high school's color schemes, Ketsubutsu Academy. It's not like you were actually interested into buying into the entire hero schooling biz in the first place, it just happened to be the closest and least ragtag of the schooling nearby your neighborhood, and then here you were.

As the saying goes, the early bird catches the worm, so you routinely rose from the dead to clamber on in your uniform shoes to rest and let some soft sunbursts to warm the surface of your face, looking at the clouds in some sort of bout to gain inspiration for writing a song in your trusty notebook. Dragging your feet to scuff the soles to commence your foolhardy actions of laying onto the ground in front of the entrance doors, your torso flops and ribs ping at a struck brick that slams into it, making you groan and just roll over so you lay onto your stomach.

Without a doubt, your cranky belly was doomed to growl and spit at you while class would be passing, and to that you mumble a cheers into the quiet air and let yourself stare off into the distance. You were never that entranced by the motions of vigilantism, more or less being tangoed into the joy of adrenaline rushes, swerving your frame until the exertion took its toll, you revelled in taking effort and then some more to keep fighting. Never remembering most of the ugly mugs you shoved into the ground, causing them to choke on their own words and simmer with their saliva and blood pooling at the back of their nasty throats, only focusing on the faces of the would-be victims to atrocious crimes.

Why, you ask? What good would it do you to keep your anger like magma flowing within the center of a crust filled volcano, to pace about and endlessly enrapture yourself within the qualms of criminal minds, their motives and what drove them to the matter? Philosophy was surely no pet peeve of yours, yet focusing on the past perpetrators did not help your peace of mind from overflowing and drumming more nonsense into your cranium.

In the time that has run its course, you hadn't noticed flocks of classmates and upperclassmen starting to make their way within the building, flowing in and momentarily stopping to glance a curious eye to whatever it was you were doing, and then enter to take their seats in their respective classes. Deciding to not waste any more time reflecting upon your own moral code and the why's and why not's, you bring yourself to brush the dust off your black and red tailored uniform and pick up your belongings. Slinging a maroon backpack onto the tops of your shoulders, you clear your throat and step towards your destination; homeroom, one of your more favored classes over the dull and monotonous readings of your English teacher scraping your nerves raw.

Since you had applied and made your case to the principal of this fine establishment, he hired a new professor for only one subject, Psychology. Normally only offered once students like yourself entered the magical realm of High School, the man decided to show mercy for your poor soul and others who enjoyed learning about the subject.

Reaching your unassigned assigned seat in the lived in room, you plop yourself onto the chair and bring your song notebook to rest on the desk's oak top. Singing and songwriting had become an encouraging hobby of yours, although your voice happened to fall in the higher range in the likes of mezzo-sopranos and countertenors, your actual speaking voice greatly contrasted towards anything remotely pointing to your vocal range. More of a deeper voice for someone of your sex, it seemed as if your vocal chords decided to join in your clandestine rebellion against the norm and subtly be on your side.

Either way, it was a win-win situation and you weren't critical of your voice anyways, as long as one was on pitch and on time, anyone could sound good even if they could squawk like a chicken in this type of performing arts. Tapping your nimble fingers on the hollow tan desk, humming crept its way out of your throat to start joyfully stepping in tune to your set beat, an amalgamation of themes running through your mind to compliment the improvised song.

Guttural drawls and clanging guitar riffs in sync with pounding drum lines suited your listening tastes, while you preferred to sing more opera-esque and from the soul. Punk and alternative music was the equivalent of bounds of herbs containing catnip, you yourself being the cat feeding on its source, while yowling was better suited for a slower genre on your throat. Imagine hearing a cat attempting to sound off along with intense tempos, and you'll get the picture.

Back to the topic of education, you were pretty much the farthest from illiterate except for the tiniest exception being reading music, sue me all you want, but it's part of the reason you happened to be so captivated by it. The more you thought about it, it reminded you of a familiar face splotched with purple reminiscent of red cabbage, the thrums of bass lines and speakers feeding noise in high quantities.

Come to think of it, part of the reason Tsukauchi was further itching your fists to clock him where the sun doesn't shine was because of this newfound body burner who just happened to get a buzz out of dressing in such a gothic style. Now, you may make yourself known as looking for tomfoolery and creating shenanigans from your little quips, but you aren't exactly slow on the uptake, either. Taking into account the amount of conspiracy theory blogs you had dug tooth and nail to traverse through to even sniff the smallest whiff of travesty in Endeavor's ruin, you could say you knew a thing or two about the deranged and psychotic upbringing his family certainly had, one of your first clues to who the man may be.

Dabi's name doubtlessly came from the trenches of an old Japanese idiom that went along the lines of Cremate the Body, either referring to his jeopardizing firestorm of a quirk that devastated the corpses into nothing but small oxidation grains, or someone that is dead, plainly. Before the media could confer with Endeavor to cover up the disappearance of one Todoroki Touya with his status being deceased on paper, morsels of data made itself known into backup websites that refused to follow cease and desist notices from the number 2 dookie himself.

You couldn't help but put two and two together in the middle of the night, still living off of the high the conclusion you came to that fed your serotonin receptors to the very next day. The fact that heroism had itself ingrained so deeply within the roots of society and managed to clobber the 5 senses out of the morality instilled the line of work was worryingly realistic, if the mainstream media hadn't covered it up it would have caused shudders to reign upon the Hero Commission for years to come. Saddened, you let your face wear a frown as you continued falling down through the rabbit hole of information clacking the sides of your head akin to a bingo ball machine.

It's part of the reason why you don't normally watch in glee as a superpower boosted hijinks boom into the streets and let your eyes wander to more important things, like Psychology! Being honest with yourself is partly a flaw of your character, and so is the stars in your eyes when you read case studies about other people who have gone through unsavory events, haunting them for the rest of their lives. Fun, right? It's just human nature to be instilled in a sense of satisfaction for the motivations of others, along with the characteristics of their upbringings acting as colliding factors for the wrecking balls soon in their futures.

Professor Onigawara abruptly interrupted your thoughts, starting with the stable introduction of Freudian Concepts from the big shot himself, Sigmund, his psychoanalytic perspective on the broad subject ever interesting any time it's mentioned. The theory is majorly based on the three types of consciousness, the mentioned acting as the waterline for the tip of the iceberg that is metaphorically the human mind, unseen thoughts and urges that can be brought to the surface level surge from the preconscious level, and finally, the unconscious plane in which theoretically most of the action in the mind takes place.

Ego, Superego, and Id are their respective labels, with the extremes being the first and last: Primal instincts and emotions taking over any and all actions primarily make up the Id, fiercely underlying sexual tensions and imbued weaknesses of self being a large part of it, conforming and priming one's self to become clay to the mold of preconceived notions is the essence of the basis containing the Ego, like the marble mask you wear at night to protect your identity from prying eyes, it is a precaution to continue to live in the world while also disobeying and following various rules, and finally, the Superego.

Morality is the bridge connecting the gathered extremes together, principles attaching values that require higher order thinking, and the subjective terms to rule over Id and Ego is the Superego, quite possibly one of your favorite parts of the subject as a whole, other than the characteristics of Mental Disorders. The building blocks of your ideals are transfused into your nighttime work, representing as much of your values you try to.

Bite the hand that feeds you if it consequently takes from you too, don't blindly live without gaining the knowledge you seek.

The rest of the day passed in a blitz, unknown to your shitty sense of time and before you knew it the bell tolled, signalling the end of the day. You couldn't help but let your eyes follow a distinct head of hair that was indigo-mauve, wild and untamed locks spurting out in an imitation of a lion's mane, your classmate, Shinso Hitoshi. It had been the final few months of the 1st year of school and you had still yet to become close friends with him, even with your persistent attitude fretting at your same eye bags, he would just flip his hair like he was on a L'Oreal commercial and mutter, 'They're Gucci, and yours are Versace. Get on my level.' A bit of a dick move, but you'd take what you could scrounge up. Besides, it made your insides snap, crackle, and pop with a huge burst of laughter, so no offense taken.

"'Sup, eggplant?" is what you stifle out in the midst of your cackling, earning you a punch to your already sore shoulder. His even darker purple eyes trace your traitorous, goofy smile and he infectiously started chuckling as well.

"Nothing much, how about you, discount Eraserbitch?" Shinso drags out with a perfectly impetuous tone, deadpan face at the ready for a battle of wits that would most certainly lead to your throat being irritated.

Overly exaggerated shock fills your face, limbs starting to contort into the most fruity pose you could muster in your faux state.
"How dare you," is said with you looking more comedically disgusted all the while, backing away in preparation to lay your body to falsely faint.
"My ass will never be as thick as Eraserhead's and I'll never be claimed by a screeching, yellow cockatoo!" with your hands slapping your behind embarrassingly loud within the classroom, wiggling them while keeping your composure in your made up disgust.

Hitoshi's face crumples into a puckered face and he unsurprisingly chokes out an oh my god, leaning down to his knees for support in the face of your absolute tomfoolery. You fall victim to your own joke, screeches seizing your shuddering body in feral laughter that most certainly is self gratifying.

"You'll never let me live down the day, I didn't know he was dating an actual banana that screams into the radio!" tumbles out of his mouth, exasperated arms coming up in response for you rustling his jimmies.

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Clusters of dashingly delicate pink petals float around the two Junior High students, marooning them into a serene landscape, groups of some blooms aflutter in the wind as fast as a sparrow would flap its wings. With the ever rising peaks of the cherry trees' season, they puffed out many petite seeds covered by a sort of elegant, frail jacket of pale shell-pink and their mission to infiltrate every inch of the vast field you were in was succeeding. Crunching stems attached to healthily growing brushes caused you to wince in sympathy for them, even if you wouldn't exactly call yourself a gardener, you would be incensed to find precious plants to be haughtily stepped on by a couple of budding teens.

Nichibotsu was what the two of you deftly named your shrouded grove containing wonders to the eye's appetite, buds sticking precariously onto the ends of dark and light branches alike acting as decor for the natural eye candy, and cleverly named for its view of the setting sun that equally set your qualms at ease. Shinso was an interest of yours in a way, mischievously bold in the background of day-to-day life, concealing a bluntly carved nature that delves deeper into viewpoints themselves, and you wouldn't deny if someone said you happened to be enraptured with his principles. Nothing romantic sluggishly running its course like an obese caterpillar struggling to worm its way into the fragile thorn bush, of course, you would greatly call him your one and only close friend in this ludicrous, hypocritical world spinning on its axis.

Plopping yourselves into one of your more treasured nooks and crannies within the spanning field, beams of orange hues begin to gently hover over both of your beings, the faintest chirrups of crickets calling out into the silent atmospheric well created by the two of you. It was normal for you to traverse creeks, hike into various trails presenting piles of minerals and pebbles for your clumsy legs to promptly slip onto, and swiftly ride bikes into the near dawn with Hitoshi; if not for your unwavering will to befuddle the cold front of the male, you wouldn't have been able to climb even further on the slopes of your relationship, thank the stars. Speaking of them, they started to blip into a extraterrestrial tray of circular treats mixed into existence, courtesy of the Milky Way's universal batter frosting the dotted, shiny constellations that peeked out from under the wrappings of milky white clouds.

Awestruck, nearly shaking your head even if it had been a view that had been embedded into your mind from the months before, you slip your vision onto the lion's mane of violet staying in place next to you, meeting a pair of purposeful eyes with the intent to look at your person. A flash of embarrassment coddles your expression for less than a second, settling into a curve of your somewhat bushy brows and your mouth jumping youthfully up, dimples floating to the surface of your cheeks.

"What'cha cooking, good looking?" purrs into the air, without a doubt drawing the boy's redness to flush his face.

Groaning in response to your awful attempt of fabricated flirting, his eyes make like a pill bug and roll around momentarily in annoyance, attention coming back to your nearby form. Silence is uncontested in the domain in which you reside, it resting its laurels on both of your flexed shoulders and jeering loudly, however quiet it may be. This in turn causes you to further reach your eyebrow up the canvas of your forehead, confusion beginning to reign supreme in this unexpected moment of the evening.

You knew Shinsou Hitoshi to be the type of guy that doesn't hesitate to speak his mind, in spite of the growing opposition against his dry personality and unnecessary commentary concerning his "troubling" quirk, busting facades that were as crooked as the students attempting to mask their disgust against him. A crux of unknown origin had entered the room, unpleasantly settling itself into the recesses of your formerly at peace, state of mind.

"You know that if you let that small guy in your head continue to run like a broken record, nothin' will come of it," is said with a sincere tone of respect towards the other, not wanting to tick any unsatisfactory check boxes within his head. At that his head shortly wobbles unevenly in a desperate try to balance his kinesthetic senses being muddled with ever growing emotional discontent, a frown settling under his sharp nose.

"Yeah, I get it. It's just..." his hands are thrown lividly into the air with the crinkling of his nose, further frustration beginning to make itself known to the both of you.
"It's not as easy as it seems to really say it without it coming off the wrong way," his eyes travelling down to focus on multiple forests of three and five leaf clovers swinging in the absence of his hands in the dirt.

A barely stifled chuckle spurts out into the space, a hand shooting to tangle itself within his short purple locks, an offering to continue on while teasing him. "Come on, dude. It probably won't be as bad as you think, just say it out loud!" fancily springing yourself up to yell the last few words in an imitation of Present Mic's radio catchphrase. Laughter couples the two of your bellies together in harmony, animalistic snorts huffing out of each other's noses from the intensity of the actions.

Wiping happy tears from the corner of his bruised, purple under eyes, he exclaims, "Shut up, fine, I'll just say it and get it over with. I think I have feelings for you." Starting to realize the brevity and amount of emotional expanse your best friend must have exhausted in order to even say the words aloud, you rein in your thoughts ringing along to the resounding humming in your ears.

Darting your sight subtly from nearly every crinkle made in his equally black and red uniform, to the way he's making a dopey smile and the hesitation that is being sent off of his face in waves, you recollect yourself and begin to muster what could be an acceptable response to such a loaded yet casual sentence.

"I," starts without any impulsive necessity from the working neurons screaming inside of your brain that's reduced to incomprehensible mush, lamely being followed by your hands reaching into your hair for some sort of balance. "'M glad you like me that way, Hitoshi," is what slips out from your shivering tongue in an uncharacteristic fright of ruining a friendship and quite possibly cementing him taking it the wrong way.

More signs of jubilation begin to shimmer softly into the glints of his semi-closed eyes, honing in onto your posture and your relaxed nature, assuming that all is completely going well while your insides are only obviously screaming to you. He allows you to take some more time from staring at his alabaster skin, unnoticeably tanned in a manner that was presumably obtained from the joys of biking with him, continuously making you all the more nervous about how this would pan out.

"I love you, I really do, it's just that I wouldn't want to lie to your face saying that I feel the same way," you utter with the most confident posture you can maintain while having your nerves wracked, making sure to have a gentle curve of your lips and empathetic eyes for your friend to look at. At this he lies still for a moment on his elbows, dread starting to take over the formerly anxious tension within his shoulder blades, eyelids coming to blink slowly as if in a slow-motion cut so he can properly process whatever mess just occurred.

Oh, is all that escapes from his weary throat and you can practically feel the frog in his throat forming excruciatingly hoarse intonations by the last consonant in his brief exclamation. Waylaid upon the both of you are spreading cracks travelling through your spirits, seemingly dividing and partitioning at will what sort of trusting strings held the two of you in comfort just a couple of minutes ago.

"I understand, I shouldn't have assumed," Shinso says breathily, the evident glassiness forming onto the outer layer of his eyes showing his composure is daintily, and sadly falling apart with his bravado for his declaration. Your arms rapidly chuck themselves into his own in a tackle of sorts, not wanting to upset him any further yet also having the deep urge to comfort him in the best way you knew how to, a famous bone crushing hug of yours. His walls break down and he lets the floodgates release with tiny whimpers curdling from the back of his throat, clutching your back as a lifeline to staying slightly upright both emotionally and physically. Others had barely even gotten this close with the boy, only bypassing the category of acquaintance with him relationship-wise, only you had been the one to stick with him trying and true, all these months.

Sobs turn into wails and he allows himself to cry into your arms, lingering insects in the vicinity turning their antenna to the dramatic scene before them, turning their appendages robotically as if they were pointing at the situation at hand. You didn't mind if he cried in front of you, as one of your favorite sayings to him was bluntly put as, 'Look, I really don't give a shit and won't tell a peep, this is between you and me,' not having an explicit policy like most other people to never talk about bouts of depression if they happen in front of those you trust.

Looking back onto your determination to become closer with him in such an in-your-face manner, anyone could have assumed you were trying to court him if they happened to chance upon the two of you, with how hard-headed and stubborn you were acting as fences that surrounded any and all thoughts of your intentions being misconstrued as anything else but friendship. There were no other sounds for a while, only the accompaniment of the sun dutifully and gracefully drifting downwards towards the horizon in its blazing glory, cloaking the two of you in its slowly abating light source before dipping under the realm in which you could not see its round self anymore.

With a start, he lifts his ruffled amethyst head up to gaze into your eyes longingly, in an unrequited way that you couldn't help but feel empathy towards. A blurb squeaking ditzily within the black hole of your thought process shouts for you to do something about it before it becomes uncomfortable, another consciousness rebutting with how you should compromise in case your friendship is in tatters and unsalvageable. You decide to squeeze the two ideas together and kiss the top of his forehead in a platonic way, resting your hands on his shoulders in the arrival of your next few sentences.

"I know it's painful, something that you wish could happen but just isn't happening right now, but I promise you I'll still be here for you if you need me. I won't just abandon you like that, doofus!" you gingerly say to your beloved companion, trying to instill a sense of security within his tried and true state of being, glossing over potholes that may have started appearing in defense to your reaction beforehand. It's a shame you hadn't the heart to tell him the reason. You supposed you wanted to stay lovedrunk in the naiveté a little while longer.

Shinso cracks one of his dorky teethed grins, creases appearing at both ends of his mouth as a true smile starts to spread across his face.

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

Chapter Text

Unbeknownst to the two of you, scraggly alley cats were excitedly pawing at a pair of worn-down, black scuffed loafers trying to make their way any further without feline friends trapping his toes. Scratchy purrs reverberated in shaky tones within the depths of must gathering around all of the lonely street's occupants, candy cane curled tails joining scuba diver curved ones in pursuit of their smoky target; a man with an ever changing body temperature that ebbed and flowed towards both the chilliest, frozen iceberg and free, no expenses included human space heater with the habit of drawing his patchwork hands to clutch at an empty box of Seven Star's menthol cigarettes.

Dabi listlessly floundered around the furry clergy taking leaps and bounds to tamper with his normally smooth stride, clutching at the raggedy hem of his obsidian black jeans with gentle claws, however gentle a cat could be in a frenzy to make their way onto his body. It normally didn't bother him that much most nights on the streets, his fuzzy allies making groups to crowd around his form while he made his way further into the pavement, not admitting his soft spot for cats in the travels to get an odd job with odd hours involving arson.

The underground information trade was no joke, neither was Giran's seedy repertoire for getting any and all paid in full jobs done by the best of the best, no matter how much they looked like a raw scab on someone's genitals, case in point his own appearance.

Most people's reactions to his... particular aesthetic were met with jabs done to how he could be a full-time twink son of a bitch sucking dick for coin in cheap motels, his supposed enjoyment for crystal meth or black tar heroin gradually taking over his life until his ex-wife chucked bleach and violet paint onto his face, showing how shriveled his tiny balls were. Of course, a sweep of the hand later, their traps would be melded shut courtesy of his firepower to let patches of skin droop in boiling droves, silent screams accentuated by bulging eyeballs of nobodies who thought they were slick.

The thought of it made his mouth curve up and pull at his grey stitches all at once, pain coercing him to mold his features into a neutral expression in danger of blood seeping onto fresh wounds and old, mottled skin. Boys in blue had no idea what his motives were, not even the tiniest clue to where his macedoine plum scars were leading them to, amusement filling his very being to the very top of his spiked hair follicles. Even the man of the hour, Eraserhead with his tight ass black outfit clinging to his chiseled abs and allowing the folds in his clothing to cover his rounded cheeks, didn't lay a single dart in the middle of the board with all needles pinpricking nothing but the borders.

"Sure hope I got enough money to last me at least a week," Dabi mumbled out lazily, his stride untouched by the pussy cult surrounding him in a swarm, making pointed ears raise them in the direction of his honey-like voice.

He wasn't going back to living on the streets anytime soon, affording a rundown apartment building in one of the worst parts in Yokohama was the saving grace to his needs left long ignored from his familial situation. While he would rather not confirm nor deny the cluttered insults thrown at him when he met up with the broker for the very first time, it's true that when you're running on empty emotionally and there hasn't been a crumb of sustenance in your belly for a solid week and a half, banking on soiled water near the sewers filled to the brim with most likely lead, you get down on your knees and do what you can to survive.

It's as simple as that, as if they wouldn't do so the minute all their savings were gone in thin air, living quarters nonexistent, and family not a place you can afford to live with any longer. It makes him scoff in disbelief, the bunches of hypocrites they are with their counterfeit brand name clothing, showing off how really not well of they are in an attempt to make themselves known as "bigshots."

Whines are dragged on into the brisk nighttime air when his form finally reaches the destination of a set of moldy-grey stairs, steps leading him to welcome them to the last stop of the journey they can follow him to, his front door. Yeah, yeah, see ya later cuties, is drawn out of his pierced lips, blowing an imaginary kiss towards the feline clique he had outside of his door, dangling his keys in front of them before thrusting them into the rusty bronze lock situated on the barrier between the outside world and his humble abode. Shutting the door quickly to not catch any pristine, white whiskers in the motions of the creaky hinges, he starts to proceed with his customary lock and chain, bolting it for a safe measure and then sighing in relief for his aching feet.

Convenience store shoes weren't usually manufactured with the highest quality soles to protect his feet from wandering blisters popping up between his heels and toes, a real thorn in his side considering how much he had to travel each time Giran contacted him on his Mesopotamian Era Nokia phone. Even thinking about how old the device was made a groan start to build up behind his voice box, consciously stifling the noise to instead focus on dropping most of his clothes on his carpeted flooring to comfortably display his naked torso and covered lower body with his pants.

Air conditioning was a luxury he could definitely not afford this time of year, as his sagging landlord raised the prices through the roof whenever there was a possibility in the late-springtime to deceive some young tenants, not today satan. Not today, he whispers to himself, raising his arms to place them at the base of the back of his neck, stretching his triceps delightfully in place of actually throwing his body into bed and not crawling out until he has enjoyed a thoroughly long coma. Only 2 and a half more years until your baby brother gets chucked into a state-of-the art hero school forcibly by your father's hands, a traitorous voice in the back of his head pours tangy, rotten milk with clumps of sour dairy, ruining his barely relaxed mood.

He chooses to ignore the damned statement in his mind, instead focusing on anything other than the fact his youngest brother would reach even further courtyards containing gruesome torture methods, all at the control of father dearest. In its stead, the man's mind also chooses to focus on the literal child vigilante he had met one night a month ago, time passing as if nothing monumental had ever occurred in their interesting chat. The person was rather peculiar to him, someone who put on the mask of illegal hero to only turn around and respect his bony buttocks skillfully charring bones to a crisp?

'Ridiculously needed in this world,' is what comes to his bubbling mind, staring out the window of his tiny apartment building window to catch the enthralling sights of a deteriorating brick wall. Dabi lunges towards the shoddy cabinets contained the holy grail to all his needs, iced hot soba that was just missing a bit of microwaveable heat and ice cubes drooping into the warm water of his china bowl.

With that he stirs the noodles as enthusiastically he can get, slamming it into the aforementioned cooking appliance to clock it into its incubator for a total of 45 seconds, any longer and the delicacy would become far too soggy for his liking. Drumming his fingers on an inexpensive granite countertop, he thinks to the fact that that was the first time anybody other than the information broker had treated him like an actual human being and not an indispensible no-name that could drop off the face of the earth without a dime to their body.

It's surprising what years of emotional abuse compounded with fists striking his prepubescent body could do to you, a flick of the wrist and his own father could have beaten him halfway up to Sunday with various blacks and blues seeping into his skin. The mere act of kindness bestowed upon him by you was something that stuck with him for a long time after the fact, even if it happened to be weeks back in time.

He wondered how long you would be able to drudge along roads filled with manure and muck of mankind's design before losing any nuts and bolts that kept your unusual beliefs together, before prejudice took over any unbiased thought processes you held and that the next time you would come to meet him, you would immediately look on in disdain, gritting your teeth in total disgust to the human being he was.

Then again, the way you drilled through his metaphorical walls with ease denote the former being a complete excuse for insecurity on his part, from his first impression you had quickly come to know how he ticked, even if your ways were unknown to him. Quirks weren't everything these days, despite what the overbearing motherload of media may come to say along with aggressive advertising tactics set up by the Hero Commission to recruit child soldiers more often than not.

Maybe the next time the two of you met, it wouldn't be as corpse-filled with an acrid stench filling the air to both of your dismays, and general hijinks would ensue, a glimpse of a white-haired boy tugging ceaselessly on the back of his t-shirt filling his eyelids for only a moment before disappearing into the void. He shook it off as if there was a particularly incessant mosquito carrying malaria trying to plug its miniature needle into his eggplant, burned pieces of skin. Those times were gone and far, far away in the past no matter how much he longed for them. It wouldn't ever be that way again, not now or ever with how his life was treating him so far.

"I'm really that far gone, huh?" he lamely says into the empty air carrying naught but dust particles around his makeshift kitchen and living room. Suddenly flushing his tastebuds endlessly with bundles of slippery soba noodles seems healthier than carrying on with his thoughts and himself alone, slurping filling the once quiet room and steam gingerly rising from the porcelain bowl in his hands.

No one ever mentioned how overthinking was basically the start of ruining your life, he thought incredulously that if it wasn't taught in middle school by some honky-tonk uninformed teacher, then everyone may as well fuck themselves over their own counters using only their anxiety to shove further up their ass. 'What a life I'm living,' echoes into his now empty head, the punk man once again choosing to fix his eyes on his target of delicious takeout.

Chapter Text

It had all started with a simple look around of a particularly shady premises located within the southern docks in Yokohama, all brushed off to your parents as a nice weekend trip with some imaginary girls you had managed to become close friends with, relief flooding the tips of your shoulders when they bought the suspicious excuse. You had never brought any girls over to your house and never mind the fact that you tended to sway towards the more ambiverted slot of the social spectrum. Dealing with real classmates in an attempt to be able to get away with your vigilantism would surely be the cause of a pounding headache, one of those types that made you regret ever waking up and just overall debating ways how to escape.

Hitoshi was a different story in its entirety, sometimes you swore you could feel scarlet strings wrapping around his miscellaneous appendages around his body that turned to follow you, as if your bodies were puppets masterfully minded to by someone behind the puppeteering. Slinging your Eros-lookalike marble mask on, you had prepared yourself for a usual on the clock beat down of bottomfeeders that had stayed in some areas for far too long, swinging your body to wiggle out any tension within your being through keeping your limbs hanging loosely with your calculated movements.

Of course, all done after taking multiple detours and connecting trains from the Tokaido Line, Mishima Station, and all the way to the Shin-Yokohama station followed by the one in Kannai. It was a whopping 2 and a half hour trip that increasingly grinded your gears as deplorable mothers and fathers allowed their children to flail about freely, screaming and shouting for the dumbest things and by the end of it, you were more convinced about the topic of abortion. More towards the parents, to schedule themselves an extremely late, 1,500 week appointment with one of the few knives you had stashed away in your casual faux leather boots, your toes curling in irritation and vessels certainly blowing up to the point you were sure some kid in the background was commenting about the person with big lines coming out of their arms, mama look!

Nothing could stop you from slapping on one of your dearest tank tops that had made you squeal in glee when your eyes caught its sleeves in a supermarket, a small moment of stillness with a sense of purity within the memory, something that had been long gone from your person, seemingly out of your reach and snatched away from a spitting mouth angrily going on and on about this and that.

A broken down sign lead your steadfast soles to Hanahaki street, the name being nothing to scoff at, as it happened to turn the tables on its given name and actually have a fair number of steadily growing bamboo shoots, orchid wisteria flowers that shivered in your presence, and a makeshift gardening establishment if you weren't mistaken. One good look at the place would reveal just about nothing of the activity reported in such a location, yet as you broke the barrier between the entryway of the block growing closer towards you, the darling plants were just a front to a nasty personality hidden inside.

Light hitting the sides of your head radiated purely neon red as your steel-toed boots came to a stop between the junction of a 4-way intersection, tits flashing in the nearby vicinity and causing a gaggle of men to ogle at the breasts out in the open, your sights being set on a rumored prostitution ring involving abused women and unfortunate children. On the left side of the building was a seemingly ordinary, pristine and milky white pharmaceutical clinic open 24 hours with its gleaming beams shooting powerful lights to inform and burn any passerby's retinas for the time being, empty and filled to the brim with medical supplies and items of practical use in day-to-day life.

You certainly weren't just going to stride up to the built like a brick wall bouncer, full of shit and wearing your prominent vigilante get up and expect to get generously welcomed in and free drinks on the house, not like you actually enjoyed most alcoholic drinks. What can you say, you live for meaningful hedonism that isn't that wasteful to any others on the planet, much unlike the drunkards who were peeping and pressing their visible eyeballs into the thighs of an obvious minor attempting to make their way home, which just happened to be in this shithole. With investigating comes preparations, taking the form of a worn-down sparkly, glitter filled Hello Kitty backpack that you had happily snatched from the school's lost and found, making a gal's day certainly shittier but a vigilante's way of life far easier.

In it were clothing that were tight fitting and promiscuous to show off your form, no matter how jarring it may have been to see yourself in what could possibly pass off as an immortal, appalling gas station bathroom with the stench of household detergent bleaching the air. Whatever fantastic escapades that may have involved rockets of fecal matter exploding into every corner of the dinky tiles of the floor was not known to your mind, only the thought of wanting to explode every thriving bacterial colony just on the thin toilet paper holder alone.

Hacked off booty shorts were fitted to the utter dismay of your lower half of your body, as the amount of cling bestowed upon the produced pair of pants clung like super glue to your buttocks, and you were sure that if this situation wasn't solved sooner than later, stitching would unravel and explode into your vicinity and allow wandering eyes to feast upon your sweaty bottom. Matching the shorts that could definitely be seen as a "slutty" type of style was a surprisingly comfy crop top that had your name on it, as it had emblazoned on the top thank you, cum again in the manner of how inexpensive oriental takeout bags would look like.

The look was topped off with you going into your outstanding A-game to look the part of the menagerie most likely wildly throwing themselves onto crotches inside of the nightclub, striking bold black eyeliner tracking the curves of your eyes and mysterious looking occult-styled golden earrings in the shape of a snake eating its own tail, ouroboros. It reminded you of the neverending cycle the world has gone through, ends of eras and new ages standing out before oblivion waited in the shadows for them to lay down and roll over into its otherworldly maw.

Smacking your lips after having dabbed a bit of lip gloss to accentuate your plump mouth, you made a move to strike a pose in front of the water plagued and dotted mirror that had seen unspeakable horrors occur in the restroom, your socks making themselves clear as day that you forgot one of the most vital items within your mission of undercover espionage; 3-inch platform creepers that you cheerfully had bartered with a goth in Iwata Shiritsu High for, an art of yours you would never get tired of as when you had casually stepped on over to the upperclassman, he had not expected you to respectfully inquire about a taste that had been silently looked down upon within the school scene.

Thankfully, your doting persuasion had led him to show you to his black-infested closet with a myriad of lace poking out of hangers, intricate designs layering sleeves, and his collection of platform shoes, until you had been able to come to agreement that in exchange for the pair you had to create a quote on quote, 'gothic song that had the inspiration of Evanescence and the oomph of My Chemical Romance.'

You hadn't questioned about his request and neither did he, so it was a win-win situation on both ends and you had cheerfully climbed your ways to this bathroom in the first place. The entire outfit was something that left you in confident surprise of how well it had came to look on your figure, even though the legality of the situation was a tiny detail tossed behind in the muck filled dumpster next to the bright lime green garbage can in the front of the clinic. Even the makeup you usually only saved for special occasions was sprung out, in the disbelief of your acne prone pores screaming bloody murder towards the concealer spread under your heavy undereye hollows, genetically predisposed from your just wonderful father of the year.

Deciding that caking your face in makeup was an experience you had never wanted to stumble into again thanks to your hands, or a Don Quijote employee's unwavering hands instilling the intense fear and dread you had already come to know as a birthday cake being baked into your skin, with powdery makeup not suiting your skin type absolutely drenching your natural texture with a ridiculously bumpy wasteland that may as well be called a no man's land, you zipped up your backpack.

One of the two poor, unsuspecting medical clerks roaming around the vicinity was drawn towards the sound of you slamming the door closed oh so gently and immediately blanked at the completely different person clacking their soles onto the tiled floor. You couldn't exactly blame her, she had no idea the total transformation you had planned to undergo for your secretive work in the strip club, no one could expect that from a teenager in a bomber jacket littered with minute grapes and dashingly cute pine cones in a tribute to the Greek god, Dionysus. Gladly shaking your head at your last minute effort before entering the public store, you felt that your mask was safely secured within the confines of the nylon and polyester blended schoolbag, a huge white cat's cartoonish and simplistic doll eyes looking on into the distance behind your back as if it were watching out for any threats.

The perpetrator on the bounty list of yours went by the name of Hirohito Fuse, if his occupation was dumb enough to match his wits about spreading his actual name into the egregious stomach of the criminal underworld, you had a feeling this would be an open and shut case within the hour of scoping out the place. Moving your hips back in forth in a practiced motion you had done so tirelessly pacing in front of your bathroom mirror all the way in Musustafu, you presented your voluptuous front eagerly to all the wanton and greedy eyes that were slurping up the tiniest motion from your body.

Stopping your waving hips right in front of the bouncer, you skipped the velvet roped line that was clearly moving in proper order before you swaggered up and cut the line, seemingly not bothering most of the men waiting, it seemed as if it was an absolute treat you stayed for them to impress their eyes over your succulent revealed flesh. The bouncer was definitely the no-nonsense type of guy with dark chocolate skin that glowed in the night time aura of the crimson lights, rough around the edges but handsome to the eye, in your opinion.

"I've been looking forward to this night," you slurred vivaciously into the brims of dimmed pilot sunglasses, brims leaning down with the look of neutrality and professional confusion by your unrecognizable face. You made a move to walk past his wrinkle free, prim and proper black dress slacks that shimmered with a satiny texture in the lighting within the area, strutting your stuff casually as you could in an undercover mission and a burly arm thoroughly wrapped itself around your shoulders and turned you around.

"I don't think I've seen you here before, much less your name being on this list, so why don't you stand that tight ass over here for a second so I can move along with business as usual," was intonated as a matter-of-fact command, quickly dismissing your presence as he shoved you off to the side without a care in the world.

"Hmm, I think Mr. Fuse would be mad if I didn't get to meet with him off the record like he said I had to," you played innocent to the bouncer's attitude and instead instilled a sense of authority within your words, as if you actually had a... "meeting," of sorts with this sexual deviant. "He don't want me to be written down 'cause he tells me 'the police is on our asses again, we can't take no more risks around here,'" gradually exaggerating the amount of exasperation you had with the supposed man's words.

At that the man straightens his posture and bows deeply towards the ground, nearly thunking his proper curly hair into the floor, begging for your forgiveness.

"Please accept my greatest apologies, I would never want to keep the Boss waiting for a new shipment to come," he apologizes into the cracked sidewalk, bending up normally once again to meet your eyes with respect oozing from every inch of his trained body. He waves you into the fire and brimstone emanating from the hell being unleashed in the club, your platform shoes heavily stomping the charcoal and mahogany wood panels on the floor, only the smells of intensely moving women and alcohol perforating your nostrils.

Chapter Text

Club atmosphere never failed to settle into the weights on your petite shoulders and pummel any sort of tension you had before delving into the literal hormonal bog that was the place. Amps and speakers seemed to be tuned to the maximum efficiency to delightfully destroy anyone's virgin eardrums, waves upon waves simmering along with vibrations in the air and making their distortions known, tuning into every crevice you currently had available to sync to the heavy bass beat. The tangy scent of Whiskey Highballs topped with equally sour Limes being tastefully placed on the rims of salted beer glasses filled the entrance, a swivel of your step to the right and modern deco tiles spoke to your soul, apparently as much as the group of young women who were gulping down far too many Umeshus to be impossibly intoxicated, one of the ladies in her form-fitting dress palmed the geometric tiles as if they were whispering to her how to find the meaning to life.

You couldn't help the giggle that bubbled listlessly out of your throat with no permission sought from your being, remembering how you expertly embarrassed yourself by staying up until 2 am with the only three things keeping you awake being delicious, buttery popcorn, a 5 hour energy drink you spiked with some truly bitter coffee, and the tell-tale convulsions your heart thumped faster than usual. If you were going to do a low-stakes mission, why not drag a little fun out of it, anyways?

Making your way past the cluttered, high populated bar stools pumped to the brim with drunken conversations and people of either sex, you decided to swim directly into the densely populated dance floor, feet shuffling from the front of the crowd being unreliable at best. Breaths skirted around your bare neck, enamored with the drunken stupor they had drank themselves into, a woman thrusting out her pert chest into the arms of a man who was eagerly dancing along the edges of her black bust coverings. You shook your head as to not hone into the wrong places at the wrong time, you could people watch others that were proceeding to act dubiously in public later, not when there were innocent people at risk of your failure.

At that you made sure to brush away any prolonged contact of the cramped space as if you were passing through regularly, looking over taller heads that arranged themselves at irregular intervals, forming a swarm of swaying bodies in the midst of the dance floor. To your utter dismay, when the step of your black platforms reached the fringe of escape from the frenzy happening in waves behind your form, a hand managed to plaster itself to the small of your back, knuckles flexing in a way you were sure you could feel the smile on the person's face even from the feel of their fingers.

"Now lookie here, a cutie tryna leave so soon?" was asserted without question to you, the unknown individual wearing a disgustingly saccharine smile decorated with an arrangement of sharp teeth, his head being nothing but spines and spikes that would undoubtedly pierce without issue into someone's flesh.

You knew by the way he presented himself, from his casual demeanor, his inviting posture that he would not give up until he was rewarded with what he sought being directly placed into his hands, nothing that couldn't be handled by your ineffable personality.

With the look in his sultry eyes being challenged by your increasingly intense nature surrounding your figure, you whipped yourself around to meet the older male and stepped up promiscuously only to edge in a hint of menace onto your expression, weaving an inconsolable web that drove your strings further to wrangle in the other.

"Oh, it's nothing personal," was drawn out tiredly from your shining lips, your hands reaching to clamp themselves onto the taller's shoulders in a show of affection, "I just have to run by Fuse for a bit to drop something off, y'know, business, amiright?" A chain draped around his neck fluttered with the movement of his head making its way closer to your sickly-sweet face, a surprising amount of understanding and minor disappointment filling his being behind his confident front, recognizing him to be a decent guy and not a creep who happens to not take anything in the dictionary other than "yes."

"Alright, I get you, just don't hang around his cronies for too long, they really got a nasty attitude," the young man made himself known as Soga, a regular patron to the place if you had ever seen one.

Kugizaki's brownish-maroon spiked hair bounces with the fiery pep in his step to resume his trek onto the dance floor, disappearing into the mass of bodies swerving their hips and swinging their arms to the thrumming tune being played by the Disc Jockey that was moving to the rhythm of her own song, neon additives flooding the area above her platform transforming into bright colors and shapes to add to the flavor of the music.

Relief reverberated through out your finger tips, spreading to the level-headed upper area of your body already focusing your eyes on the prize, Hirohito's backstage hangout and the pleading, pink veiled and strained eyes of his victims being allowed to be treated as a means to an end for monetary profit in exchange for soul crushing experiences. Little did you know that a certain slim male, occupied with angel dust powdering his nostrils and giving way to his psyche to go wild, caught a glimpse of your figure entering the metaphorical lion's den.

Unbeknownst to the traditional hero society, villains like him actually do feel pain and remorse. High amounts that cripple his stability for days on end, mementos of the days past drumming their guilt into his overworked mind, in fact. To the point in which he would pipe down and push away the glass pipe he had in the corner of his underwear drawer, forgoing the packet of grassy weed stashed in the ratty cabinet, hopping from club to club in the most seedy clubs in Yokohama, his eyes set on seemingly angelic powder that was his crutch.

Now to this you might say, 'Hey, Dabi, what the fuck are you doing, man?' That's precisely what he asked himself when he staggered into the club at its prime time, locals walking in strides to clamber on into the life saver the joint was.

One good look from the foreign bouncer revealed his immediate VIP card into the place, as the regulars hushed with the entrance of his glinting silver piercings and shoddily done staples, dragging his feet in unusually better luxury shoes that he had gleefully accepted as an involuntary gift from a rich faker. For once in his life, he wasn't wearing whatever the alley cat dragged back in with raggedy holes fluttering in lackluster air conditioning, black Versace safety pin hoodie hanging onto his skinny torso and his nondescript black shades that he had nabbed from a dollar store awhile back.

He was renowned by now in the area as his signature alias, although that didn't stop some people from letting their pride get ahead of them and nick him "Frankenstein." Seriously, everyone knows by now that's the goddamn mad scientist's name, not his test tube semen creature that got baked in nature's natural lightning microwave. Back to the point, being accredited with any sort of dealings involving Giran's name earned him a heavy reputation.

This he eagerly took advantage of, as his usual latent suicidal ideations came back to float in the shallows of his mind and foil any plans of him actually having a somewhat pleasant evening, even if he disliked the stereotype of villains taking syringes to their veins and pumping them full of drugs, he wouldn't let himself be a hypocrite.

Dabi wouldn't call himself a heavy user, more or less taking Cocaine as a quick pick-me-up whenever any ambient noise suited itself to irritating every nerve in his body, yadda yadda, other mental health issues he spat on and quashed every other day. It just happened to be one of his least favorite solutions to the issue at hand, a mixture of soothing iciness and subtle flames making its way into his mind, his supposed twin clamoring on about his health and how he couldn't leave himself this way before fracturing and leaving nothing of note behind in its place.

Hell, he didn't even know the hack that owned the club in the first place, even if the dude had set up a group of frightened, yet professional employees to welcome him into "their humble family." 'Whatever the hell that meant,' ran through his racing head, reaching his hand up to hold his head in place from the hyperstimulation that was beginning to settle in. Once he had thrust his wad of bills towards the blonde lackey of the owner, she hadn't even counted all of the green bills before he had started to already open the baggie and construct neat lines to snort.

With the swift inhalation of the snow racing its way into his bloodstream to disperse like a cackle of meth heads doing acrobatics in the night, intense euphoria begin to hit him in waves, crawling over the entirety of his brain as if it were a white veil giving way to feelings he had forgotten he could even experience.

Long fingers shook slightly from the viewpoint of his dilated pupils, cyan blue irises suddenly giving into the absorption of the coke: surroundings feeling as if they were blasted into his senses from millimeters away, the drift of a passing waitress holding whiskeys in her hands, how the conversation between the couple a few stools away from him was delving into near lovesick territory given the place they were in, and the swinging legs that were making their way into the back room were belonging to that vigilante you had surely known from now two months back.

The scarred man's temperature rose to unfathomable heights at the thought, throwing his slick metal chair off to the side before settling it harshly in place with a rough nudge of his Louis Vuitton's, snatching his cheap sunglasses off the counter and stuffing his nearly empty plastic bag into his black jeans. Every nerve of his was on fire, concentration gradually building with each step towards the direction you had headed off to and he swore he could smell wisteria nearby, even through the conglomeration of the partygoers pheromones, perfumes, and colognes filling the air.

"I don't remember there being somethin' coming so soon, but hey, I'll take whatever I can get!" heartily clapped into the air, said voice belonging to an unexpected face attached to the role he plays within the scenario.

Hirohito turned out to be the younger looking owner of the place, the entirety of his persona actually being rather heartfelt for someone who was enough of a dolt to have their government established name be their calling card within the criminal underground. Surrounding his rather casually dressed civilian outfit, that had a conventional tracksuit jacket tied around his waist and indigo-purple striped flannel on his chest, were dozens of folders differing in sizes and colors of the rainbow sandwiching him into the plush velvet cushions of his sophisticated futon couch. Accumulating within your mind with the dozens of anecdotes you had already collected throughout your brief run through the premises was suspicion, some intel that had been graciously sent to you by a blackmailed perpetrator not slotting into place with the deets.

You had plopped yourself exuberantly onto a surprisingly comfortable armchair with energy god knows you haven't had for years, setting the now crinkled cartoon bookbag bedazzled with rows of glitter beaming alongside it in a miniature disco light show to lean on your side. "About that, it turns out we had a little extra in our warehouses and we'll be sending 'em over right about now," you tittered facetiously, clapping your hands together in a small show of delight, adjusting your posture to be in line with the persona you had undertaken.

A tilt of your head and you innocently peered out from under your eyelashes towards the brash young adult, flippantly rolling a tuft of hair attached to the rather high quality wig secured onto your being, "'Less that's something ya could really do without today, what with all the hungry dogs in blue sniffing around, just give me the word."

To your satisfaction, the other had quickly risen his arms as if he was pushing an unseen boulder away from his being in terror, hastily bringing any doubts to rest that had been lingering in the near distance, far and fleeting away from the entirety of your consciousness. "No, no, that's all fine in my book, just as long as there isn't much... attention brought about our customers."

Confirmation seeding itself greedily into the floor of the building, roots spread far and wide to wrestle themselves into the tiniest crevices of any care you had, The Cask of Amontillado flashing into your mind; this disservice of a human seemed to have no bloom of remorse located in his soul, wine caskets and stone walls acting as the building blocks of a bloody grave filled with desolation and cruelty, a line running from one of your ears to the next declaring punishment without impunity. At that your non-dominant hand snickered in disbelief, worming its way into the vicinity of your childish backpack, clutching onto your weapon of choice and snapping it on as your prized accessory snugly fit onto the grooves of your knuckles, detached temporarily from your protective gloves. You lifted your leg to rest onto your opposite knee, a smile fixed in place that was steadily becoming more of a grimace by the second, an oh, is that so being recited.

"I guess you won't mind this, won't 'cha?" rose into levels of contention accompanied by contempt, an inexplicably smooth motion of kicking off from your pedestal made of silk and swinging into prime form, spiked brass knuckles slamming into Fuse's jaw and undoubtedly knocking some teeth out in a home run of fury.

Blood spurted out in a crimson ooze from a small crevice of his slightly agape lips, stammering in shock with the beginnings of a juvenile connect the dots game coming into play within his mind, body finally catching up to his mind and scrambling to lean against the farthest arm of the futon for support.

"You waltz up in here, acting like this... I don't think you know who I am and exactly what I do," Fuse strangles out of his throat, sleeve coming up to wipe away fruitlessly at the splash damage you had inflicted.

"Oh, on the contrary Mr. Floozy Fuckface, you got no dice!" you struck out in a feint towards his figure at the other end of the tasteless furniture, drawing an entire line into the lining of the black cushions and smashing a direct hit into his ankles with the help of your powerful legs.

What you didn't expect, however, is for the goddamn pricey seat to have literal pounds of white particles rushing out into the open, flooding both of your senses with an intensity that you had yet to experience ever in your life. Judging by the way your brain was booting itself into a maelstrom of inexplicable power, energy, and rapid fire thoughts that set your joints ablaze with an intensity you would compare to rubbing layers of Bengay paste onto your eyeballs to wreck your senses, this was most definitely angel dust.

"You're joking. COCAINE," you yelled to splice some distance between your voice and the dust that had still yet to settle.

"Out of ALL the places you could've hid it, preferably your ass, you shoved it into the couch? Come on," and somehow the calling of your voice must have some sort of tune to speak to fellow crackheads, as Dabi strolled feverishly into the room and staggered to a halt when the idiocy of the situation hit him.

"Looks like I wasn't just imagining the bugs crawling on my skin after all, when the hell did you get here, shortie?" he lamely said with his signature drawl, flapping one of his hands in an attempt to waft away the small clouds of pure white drugs that floated happily in the air with no respect towards any person in the room. Exasperation draped over your darkened glare, darting your immediate displeasure to the punk male, ensuring your fingers came to cinch the bridge of your nose.

"Gee, I dunno, maybe when my father loved someone very much, y'see, they do a special hug-" you were instantaneously interrupted by the charging of footmen battering the previously pristine walls with bullets from a gun quirk of the lot, rolling and taking cover behind the outrageously tacky triangle table, dragging the patchwork man behind the sofa.

Lizard scales glared viridian in the now slanted, shoddy light fixture thanks to the smoking bullets that crushed into its base, a grunt sounding off in the near distance before the lifeline you had placed the pierced man was unceremoniously flung into the roof, creating a hearty dent that rattled the room's upper infrastructure, cracked off pieces of the wall plaster dropping like flies onto your uninvited companion's most certainly untreated burns. A raise of an eyebrow later, a gigantic burst of flames crackled into existence, flaying off a clumsy reptilian arm that had failed to leave its trajectory, the stench of burnt flesh and cauterized wounds stinging your nose while he continued on as if it was a day-to-day occurrence in his life... which wasn't entirely inaccurate.

"So, you mind continuing what you were saying, hero?" he goaded disrespectfully as much as a fire user could do while hosting a murderous campfire of his own within the room, shooting long tendrils from his equally gangly, scarred mulberry arms.

With a scoff, you brushed off as many cocaine clumps that gathered onto your backpack as you could, whipping out a canister of dubious legality, pulling out the genuine metal pin with a little elbow grease and locked eyes with a newcomer that was surrounded with the overpowering scent of floral fragrance.

"Hero, huh? As far as I'm concerned, you lot are going straight to the slammer," the voice seemingly commanding all of the scaled grunt's attributes to excruciatingly be ripped off into the air and levitate towards the mere direction of the well-built stranger, any incoming bullets slobbering at the chance to pierce through muscle and painfully clock into a calcium structure being arranged in a flowing halo above his head, torturous cries coming from one of Fuse's men that had a semi-automatic rifle for an arm.

Chapter Text

In the nanoseconds that proceeded, one could say the newcomer's presence emanated a presence that consequently drew every single person's nerves taut, as if they had gleefully chipped in their handiwork of ripping intestines out through their mere existence. You could say that it was the very antithesis of ubiquity, yet eyeing down this mishmash of predatory nature concealing his burly figure with a retro themed, dark burgundy jumpsuit you would expect an old-school mechanic to prance around in, stifled cackles rose out of your traitorous throat. It's as if a metrosexual stereotype made a terribly clashing baby with someone who lived, breathed, and slept with exercise coating their muscles with sweat, a gnarly ass giant that had no clue on how to mesh any sort of style presented to them, giving up and throwing the towel before eyeing a disastrous mannequin assemblage and looking no further.

Apparently the white haired man's priorities were set onto disastrously trashing any sort of spotless area within Fuse's backstage hangout, as he pointedly ignored your snarky nonsense in favor of pummeling a mostly likely underpaid grunt, his cries akin to the thrashing of a plump child rocking their cradle, you didn't blame him. Watching just the mere action of the unknown man's quirk continually ripping apart any evergreen, lustrous scales being regenerated by his body was sickening, the squelching ripping sounding off into the overall ruckus of the scene, screaming pink flesh being separated from their proper place in weakening, bloody tethers.

The other lackey of the man of the hour had not fared as well as his partner either, bullets from his arms galloping out of the vesicles of veins seemingly at random, reconstruction rates betraying his lowly and weeping pain tolerance being used against him, ammo being reduced to spitting out of his bloodstream in rapid-fire movements like maggots would if squeezed out from external pressure.

To say the least, shit was going down and thankfully not towards the two of you acting like bootleg ragdolls; spurts of white-hot flames petering out to rest on the qui vive, callused pale palms allowing them to stand guard while his fleshy mind computer stalled in comprehending what was unrolling before both of your eyes.

Hesitation bled out of your body to make way for your fingers to grip your unlabelled canister and make haste to chuck it over towards the looming figure in the near distance, rashly diving to take cover and for Dabi to duck as well, motioning for him propel air into his lungs before your practical riot control agent set in spontaneously. It was one of your greatest feats as of yet, containing the abbreviated United Kingdom's PAVA spray in a canister in which it could burst free from its DIY enclosure, yet illegally containing juiced up percentages of its namesake and synthetic capsaicin within its container.

It didn't help that you hadn't the time to freely illuminate your gothic ally on how this mixture was not, in fact, flammable and he could wreak havoc as much as he giddily wished on the room's inhabitants.

Nearly all at once did total calamity strike, dirtily slamming itself into the presumed underground hero's scarred forehead that was no stranger to what you had set loose, blistering pain set into the ignorantly slow guards joining Hirohito in waterfalls of tears bulging out of their searing eyes, shortened breaths straggling as much as an out of shape asthmatic choking their already stressed lungs into oblivion.

Surely they noticed by now through their nails grasping at the floorboards in agony that it was very effective, even more so to the point that it had upped the lethality of the blend due to the cocktail of alcohol and sweet cocaine within their systems, you and your partner in crime at the moment shielding your faces in a blind race to the exit of the premises, lest your secret weapon backfire and ultimately incapacitate the two of you.

Raucous chortles breathed out in tandem with the hearty weight of strain pressing down upon them, the man's broad frame clapping slowly before gripping a white bottle in his tool belt. Running chaotically down his face was the niche antidote to your presented trade, milk white fluid flowing and dampening locks that seemingly blended with the settled colloid.

A sort of dangerously malicious look usurped his facial expression, one of his golden canines coming into view alongside the dispersed particles floating around the room, "Don't think you'll get rid of me that easily, eh?"

Clicking his tongue, he made no room for any second thoughts as he started off in a mad dash towards the direction your figures blindly headed, wrapping a freakishly gory wreath of scaly flesh around the grovelling reptile man and delicately marched the halo of high caliber bullets around the respective quirk user, his gunmetal arm shivering in tandem with his body. With both of your eyes blinded and temporarily shielded from the blast of highly illegal chemicals, two sets of legs veered and slid squeakily against the friction from tiles, stumbling towards the backdoor entrance usually available to Fuse's hired men.

Thunderous bullets began to whip into the corner of the hallway, telltale bloodcurdling screams being the monstrous entourage of this merciless man, who had expertly began using the downed criminals quirks as their main projectile infantry.

Dodges leapt out of your very muscle memory, ingrained to the bone even when all was left were the not-so subtle cues of whistling roaring towards your direction, managing to get the low caliber bullets to only graze an arm or two, misdirecting to the best of your ability the ones that did manage to nearly clip Dabi in his torso with tactile hits from hard steel ingrained within your spiked knuckles. Unfortunately, this virtuous sacrifice led to your precious brass knuckle's attachments to falter and the hardened steel being able to withstand the redirection, but not without heavy cracks surfacing upon it, some gleaming pieces sadly already bouncing into debris on the ground.

With one final shove towards the hinges of the rusting door, the fire-user grabbed you from the back of your shirt to aid in the process of your messy exit, shoving your torso out of the way from another waves of speeding gold blobs from entrenching themselves within your most vital organs, two at least making your exposed lower calf shudder in horror silently.

Skittering painfully across the notably marked concrete ground, it graciously gifted you with delightful road rash, with unexpected rocky pests clinging onto some of your skewed limbs adding to the injuries you had already gained.

Straining your head to glance at your temporary comrade in arms against this quite possibly insane underground hero, he was doing no less better than you were currently, gasps corrupting any stable airways he had left thanks to the consequences of your incapacitation gas colliding with the snow already in his system.

Before either of you could defend yourselves against the relentless onslaught caused by such a petty criminal's arrest, constellations forcibly formed into your sight, blinding lights grinding tumultuous wails in the vicinity, sporadic neon colors flashing towards your retinas even though you were sure you had closed your eyes.

The first thing Daisuke Fujiwara had set out to accomplish this evening was the undetectable infiltration of the establishment, posing as the stubborn bouncer with darling brown dreads traipsing down towards his shoulders on the back of his head, normally tan and noticeably darker skin tone being subdued into an even more intense shade of brown. A friendly walk down the road with a former villain that was straying from her rehabilitation parole and he was slipped into disguise for the occasion, acting in character for the security he was to effortlessly imitate in order to maintain his eyes on the prize.

He had always maintained his gardening complex near the beginning of Hanahaki street, keeping any new zygotes attempting to stir up any pots in the healing neighborhood in check, with his embroidered flowery apron or not. The moment he had noticed this uncanny figure dance casually to the place's doors had him reeling his cloaked caramel eyes into any signs denoting a new minion, surprising his inner self when he instantly recognized the most tidy act of deception he had seen since working with the likes of Eraserhead, your act encapsulating an airheaded supplier with enough self-respect to dig into Hirohito and not giddily lick his behind.

Trailing behind your figure in the manner of a passing employee with dwindling patience and will to live, he had slowly peeled the electromagnetic film sticking onto his form, a receptive illusion-based power that allowed him to shrug it off at will, crackling medium-length braids disappearing into nothingness as his shaven undercut takes its place. Pristine blank hair was accompanied by assertive almond eyes that swayed to and fro with his every move, pocketed hands digging into spacious geranium pockets to only clutch at his sheathed hunting knife.

As soon as his gaze caught onto a speed walking scarecrow patterned with silver stitches and purple markings, he had known his operation included unforeseen variables that could range from murderous backup all the way to genuinely good meaning detective work from someone in the police force.

What he hadn't expected was for the air to arch tantamount to parted seas violently settling in ripples beside the pathway set in stone, or in this case, practically shifting the reality surrounding their accomplice-slash-arsonist and Fujiwara being no exception to the bending of the scenery. All he had done was fire up his trusty quirk and tug at the supposed supplier's quirk factor, at which a switch in his mind had been flipped and his entire being languished at the scant action, the black haired murderer's palms alighting yet failing when his ally had fallen.

It was as if the person's inner core sapped at his own once he had enacted his superpower, even though there was no metaphorical hook in sight, biologically, nowhere where he could drop his anchor and become the meister of their own abilities.

'Don't tell me...' echoed into his head before he could hang onto any semblance of the current terrain, as if their very presence lingered and thrust upon them their otherworldly corporeal form.

Stomach lining wept at the state of its entrails, injuries burning as much as the bolstering red heat stepping confidently towards his fallen body, it had been far too long in which he had felt his intestinal acid swelter within the throes of his taste buds.

"Touya. Don't even think about giving up, it is not an option," was roared out by one man's voice he thought he would never hear in person again. Scratch that, it was far too gratifying to even grace the beast with a status that would denote he had the choice of free thought, considering how much he used it in moral terms.

It was a dead name, a small cinder that had been wiped out the moment he had lost control in one of the most nightmarish moments of his life, boiling fair peach skin tainting itself into mauve, bubbling burnt flesh at the hands of virtual instinct. Once he rose his cyan irises enveloped by accents of howling yellows, mandarins, and crimsons that flickered violently, he knew it was the past.

His hands gripped the foam-like consistency of the training mat his sperm donor had insistently installed for the greater good, and the supposed regimen that was to take place behind traditional shoji dividers, also being coated in flame retardants. Dabi swore he could feel the acid reflux that was never meant to be in the present rise up, gagging slightly when the disgusting taste of vomit plagued his mouth. It wasn't the first time this had happened due to his parental figure's own will, but it surely was the worst night of his life.

"I'm guessing that's also what you told mom when you beat her into submission, probably raped her to make even more of us, yeah? Probably's an understa-" the taste of iron flooded his senses, his jaw screeching as if it were a wild animal cornered with nothing but fight or flight being its company, making his head drop once more to the floor.

You couldn't feel anything anymore, it was all numbed to the point you swore your body deemed itself to be capable of taking a syringe to your own neck and putting you under anesthesia. Whatever you had been birthed with in that infernal hospital room, it inflicted nothing but pain around you, including yourself. Ignoring its incessant existence was a breeze as long as you didn't allow your hands to lose control of the reins controlling it, acting as if it never inflicted mental gashes within your psyche was all swell and simple enough. Yet, there is always the contrary facing your embittered expression when you least expect it, flashes of bolts ringing out of its restrained cage striking out well into the realm of possibility, of something you could never ignore. Don't you think it's time to finally come to terms?

Chapter Text

Torrential outflows reigned supreme throughout the area submerged by your quirk, tendrils of vast indignation scrawling shrieks within still air as if it was an artistic masterpiece filled with rage, your vision being hazed over with nothing but red. Distantly, you had caused two other figures succumb to the startlingly hallucinogenic effects wily creating the most horrific moments of their life in their present day mind, impenetrable and personalized live wires roaring with laughter at the extremes in which they tried to convince their very brains to snap out of it. After all, how could their lives not be smothered if their minds chose to wallop themselves in a blind panic? All you could focus on was the internalized wrath you had compartmentalized for nearly years upon years of your life, an unreal figment of your father wilting in your ceaseless bombardment of animalistic screeches and merciless fists practically slamming his ribcage in.

None of it was real anyways, every single surfacing memory clipping the severed patience that was rotting to its very pits: all of the times your parents had fought as silent as a mouse drugged up on multiple syringes of steroids, cantankerous bites ripping off even its supposed stronghold meant to confine it, a male's booming yells charged at the opposite sex, strangled chokes slipped out of the harried grip on her throat, the countless number of times any sort of familial attribute was destitute in the movements and gestures articulated by the members of your family, when you had attempted to reach your youthful, little grubby hands to make them connect again only for both your mother and father to pin the blame onto you. Grappled into a vice, your countenance, done away with twice your doubtfulness, fear that had been instilled within you at the earliest ages you could remember had manifested at last.

Unhindered scissors in the unwavering form of tensely coiled limbs cut through the barrier of the memories of times past, driving them to pierce through the interdimensional barriers adoringly made by a part of you that you just couldn't ignore. Strife still lining the harsh edges and contours making up your face, you managed to find your footing on crumbling, worn down cement that made a resounding thump in your arrival. You could feel it working its damned magic, memories that were foreign and most definitely didn't belong within your headspace wrangled their way in stubbornly, views of inflamed righteousness and scorched tatami mats darted into mind.

Near death experiences and war raging in the background, either familial based or wrought systematically through the ever flowing tides of war, bawls coming from not only babies cocooned in cloth but also full-fledged teenagers and adults in fright. At the very least your instinctively clenched fingers faltered, especially when you noticed Dabi's body shaking with contractions and tremors, unseeing but blinking eyes still attempting to focus on something that just wasn't there.

Odd colored childish jingles and animations begin to resurface to the shore of your shuddering thoughts, remembering the various amounts of lessons you had burned into your mind about seizures; be mindful of the victim's body, your hands comfortingly pressed his quivering body onto his side to the best of your memory, cushion their head in order to shield them from damage, you slipped off his baggy Versace hoodie in favor of folding it quickly and placing it under his head. Any agitation that had flooded formerly visible veins was outsourced in the endeavor to not witness a human being, not just a villain, suffer anguish alone at the hands of a tonic-clonic episode.

Your hands nearly broke the sound barrier with how frantic you had been to place an index and pointer finger on his clammy wrist, without restraining him in any sort of way, counting the radiant amount of heavenly heart beats that quenched your fears with heightening hopes. Next, your sights were set on bringing your cheek to rest near his seemingly stopped breathing, grateful for the hot air that traveled onto it after an anxiety-inducing moment of it not remaining in his body at all. From afar, you could barely recognize the catalyst for the disaster proceeding to happen in front of you moving, ever-so-slightly managing to wiggle his limbs out of the nerve wracking funk that they were in.

"You're here with me, you're resting well, you're doing fine, baby," reassurances being whispered softly to not only the man himself, but a sort of calming mantra to help ground yourself in the situation and not become distracted with your own unimportant, impertinent worries.

Even as you were comforting the outcast of the Todoroki family, you allowed your stance to shift to the right, creeping a pointed look at the white haired man clambering back up to one foot, now matching your set of hawk eyes with a receding amount of confidence.

"If Dabi wasn't having a grand mal seizure right now, I would gladly beat your ass to the moon and back, but right now, I just want you to either sit there and think about what you've done," purposefully gesturing to the entirety of the backroads and piercing his lowering guard further, "Or, you could, y'know, actually act like a hero and standby."

A grunt was shot out in resigned confirmation, his crouched broad form reaching for some sort of contraption in his back pocket, electronic numbers gently illuminating the back alley in an already sparse environment. Seconds felt like hours to the two of you that now had a verbal truce in place, as you were sure any upstanding individual person carrying the moniker of hero would not dare to leave someone to convulse on the ground, even if it was to capture an unknown suspect. The other man had now been tastefully dubbed "Fuji" by your sharp tongue, a sort of childish payment for acting so rashly in response to a situation that was as fragile as fine china dangling over the edge of a steel countertop.

"I would call him Jiji, but he's too much of an ass to be called an old fart, so I would think you'd come up with something better," you absentmindedly rolled of your wavering tongue, three minutes having already passed by and he still hadn't come to from the seizure, you didn't want to call an ambulance for someone who would undoubtedly resist at the very notion.

Fuji had rapped his beefy fingers on his plain black and white pocketwatch, regularly inspecting the metaphorical hourglass that had come to be once the man's episode had seemingly ended, sand clumps dropping into the depths of a sandcastle dipped in the waters of drowned souls. His morals had begged for him to be rooted in place in the hopes for the black haired man's recovery, even if the intensity of the crimes he had committed had garnered his attention to his pager that had various police contacts and his former understudies, including Shota. Infuriation would have surely coated every facet of his being had he paged him after the fact, so he had forced his weighted hands to switch from laying onto his bent thighs or simply tap his brooding fingers into morse codes without thought.

As soon as he had even flexed his lower jaw to enunciate the start of a fatalistic sentence, the other man had wistfully rose from the dead, cracking joints popping in relief from the primal reaction of moving far too fast for his state, before vocally protesting and letting his torso plop onto the ground. It was as if lightning buzzed within his otherworldly stitches, silver glints of accosted life lingering around his mottled burns, all held together by the will of the unknown. A gasp rose from your mouth, hands coming to shy just a small distance away from the punk's body reorienting itself back to the present, due to raging electromagnetic currents within his pleading brain.

"He's, he's... ALIVEEEE!" cackled breathlessly from your throat in a gross imitation of Victor Frankenstein victoriously howling in the presence of his creation, causing both of the men present with wildly differing styles to agree on this one thing, rolling their eyes.

Apricot colored top lip coming to part from his pierced and scarred violet one, he coughed and spat viscous globs of saliva to his side, casting a weary look towards your tomfoolery. "And here I thought you called me baby," wiggling one of his charcoal black eyebrows in mocking manner, a small smirk starting to widen at your antics.

You animatedly tugged at your faux head of hair, ripping the pastel ginger wig off of the fishnet cap, snatching it off of your actual head of hair and began dying inside.

"You do NOT get to quote me on that you... you... emo Grimace!" was thrown back at him, relinquishing any groves of fear that had been growing at a startlingly high rate, flinging your hands around his entire wardrobe choice. He only resorted to winking teasingly at you, wallowing in the amount of suffering he was causing you gleefully.

A sigh rose out of Daisuke's drained throat, clearing his throat harshly as if he was the Junior High substitute teacher that had been joyously presented with a classroom full of young adults flinging manure over the mass expanse of the room. "Hardy har har, now back to the matter of arresting you two," observing more prominently the declared fast-food chain mascot with dangerous firepower, although he had half a mind to also keep an eye on the person who had managed to whip out a riot control gas and clunk it against his now bloodied upper-eyebrow.

Static rigidity somehow paradoxically flew into the realm of possibility of the trio, making the now recovered criminal and presumed accomplice to stonily stand their ground with the severity of the ancients, the crowning achievement of consequences that conflict with ever present realities that have yet to be achieved. Compare the scene to the heavy magnitude of earning a beating from helicopter or ruthless parents, and you have art on par with elite Renaissance paintings.

"Ahahaha, you see, it's really just a big misunderstanding," you attempt to make your case by breaking through the stone-cold confinements of pressure molded around your figure, "The world's not as black and white as it is, Mr. Fuji, so I'd appreciate it if you could stop towering against us like that." Referencing his mountainous demeanor compiling his temperance, height difference, and his ideals all in one go, a surefire attempt of scrounging some crumbles of leniency through your immature profile.

Unsurprisingly, this merited an unimpeded stroke of unenthused leg strokes from him, cracking the back of his neck casually as he could before preparing himself to detain them, trying to snag an invisible rope in the blue-eyed man's quirk factor before being met with absolute failure. This time you had succeeded in clamping a hand onto your mouth before you had attracted undeniable attention from him, before your laughter broke completely free from your belly and spurted out uncontrollably.

"You really think that's gonna work? I thought underground heroes had more sense than that, chin up. Incoming!" interrupting your persevering vitriol jabbing at the hero was the swinging of the heavily rusted hinges announcing more trouble.

Shockingly, it seemed that the quirk meister did indeed have some sort of heart present in his being, as he rolled and dragged your companion along with him, away from the current berserkers attacking their past positions. None other than the dirt beneath your shoes, Fuse was rolled out on the back of his most treasured bodyguards and low-rate mercenaries, granting the three of you a particularly slimy face and not from who you would expect.

Apparently your uncertainty of the intelligence you had received was a godsend in this case, as his own lackeys threw him against the other side of the alley wall and acted as if they hadn't trashed their leader to the garbage. Hordes of unnameable figures approached, varying amounts of archetypes already plastered within some of their false bravados, yet nearly all of them were leaning on hand-to-hand combat as their weapons of choice, with the exception of a few holding splintered bats.

"No use for him now, we just gotta follow the boss's orders," one in the middle of the cluster of grunts declared, brandishing his own wrist and dramatically flourishing for the entrance of something to happen, if quirks had been working. Perplexed shrugs prevailed among the crowd, any of those with crudely based mutation quirks making their way towards the shortest figure of the bunch, which just happened to be you, what a treat!

At this you nonchalantly check your nails, preening at an nonexistent manicure smugly, before clocking in some well-timed punches towards a certain muscle-bound giant's nuts, damaged spikes still wreaking havoc onto his poor balls. 'Not so poor when he could have not rushed me,' echoed in a sing-songy attitude all the while you reflexively toppled two other nasty women who wanted a piece of you, flinging their bodies towards your discarded weave.

"There goes 16,000 yen, who else is gonna pay up? You?" your body crawling onto the back of a lanky lackey only having one freaky eye, using your momentum to crash your heavily weighted platforms into his spine.

In the near distance, Dabi was far too preoccupied with dancing proficient circles around the crooks who didn't get the message, ensnaring pounces in bursts that drove substantial impact to the bone, having an impromptu team-up with Fuji. It was as if they stepped in practiced movements as a duo partaking in a dance fulfilling macabre, grapples engaging in quick head smashes around the other's maroon jumpsuit, white hair acting as the headpiece of morbidly primal attacks he unleashed, the two of their fighting styles akin to a wolf and a boar; primitive charges not without the booming might of a insufferable, tusked swine and howling fists inflicting a morbid amount of damage towards the near useless cat's paws.

You were sure if your group didn't up the ante soon enough, the actual cold-blooded authorities would be alerted and be able to ascertain their whereabouts, driving you to bellow ferociously at the waves of lackeys and make them suffer just a little bit more than usual, for once. Even if your usual for the scum of the earth was quite grisly, downright unforgiving in fact, you were sure that if you allowed yourself to be further blinded by the distraction set in place, the true perpetrator would run off scot free. Trampling a couple of heads in the process, you were able to fling yourself into the air to catch a visual of the medical clinic down the street, catching some fodder that hadn't gotten the memo of the rest racing inside.

"Oh loverboys, think we can ditch this en masse and greet the doctor down the road? I think we caught a live one," you cooed whimsically, slamming your benefactors that let you spring off of them into the pavement, squelching sounds of blood following soon after.

You wouldn't openly admit it in a straightforward manner, but you had your own reasons to believe that having better strength in quality infused numbers would aid you much more than, say, frolicking into the ransacked clinic on your lonesome and getting your face smashed in with no backup.

Breaking his opponent's fighting stance, he crouched down into a rapid leg-swipe and straightened his back after landing a few more well-placed blows, whistling a descending note in the air. "Looks like a do-gooder wants to do some more, why the hell not. After all, might as well repay you for what you did back there, baby," swaggering his somewhat built, upper half of his body in the absence of his hoodie towards you, finding the time to grab the cloth and sling it over his shoulder.

It looked like the underground hero was more than willing to stay rooted in place on his shady battlefield, rushing back into the now cleared hallway filled with cluttered unconscious bodies with the only word slipping out of his mouth being evacuating. He had already paged the local police department, setting the two of you off with a blaring time limit counting down in both of your minds, adrenaline already overtaking and abating any unwelcome anxieties that happened to aim themselves as deterrents. All that was left to do was cautiously throw yourself through a crystalline, yet shattered window and take cover behind the nearest shelf in your quarter of the room.

The smell of igniting flames set your nostrils aflame with the warmly strange smog accompanying it, shooting your head to the side and catching your partner in crime's pearly-whites shimmer in excitement. It seemed your damned ability had worn off for the time being, unknowingly causing a ruckus that rippled all throughout the sea of patrons in the club, its range being particularly widespread for an erasure quirk. A near silent exchange of back in business was traded between the two outlaws, it being the emergence of a whirlpool spreading from his now steaming palms, noxious gases filling the air as flurries of whites, blues, and differing color gradients swirled into life.

Chapter Text

Once a myriad of searing plumes combusted into erratic hues of aquamarine, ultramarine, and canvas white, the calm before the storm had been brutally murdered. Any inhabitants nearby, hired men or mere civilians alike, halted in awe while the reflections of flames swung over the globe of their eyeballs, taking the initiative to dart in a mesmerizingly deadly fashion; slithering up the now seared black columns of the clinic maliciously, swerving around the entirety of the establishment until all of the flaming columns connected to make what Hephaestus would lovingly declare a cradle of forged fire. Smog perforated the formerly virgin white walls of the building, taking great lengths to circulate even faster and clog squishy pink lungs that gave no resistance to its presence, invading airways as if it were a robber darting their figure through various hallways and rooms to take and take, giving nothing in return to his victims but grief.

You yourself could begin to feel the settling of smoke particles giving way into your pattern of breathing, silencing to the best of your ability a few coughs that threatened to roll out and alert any possible enemies.

After Dabi had entranced with his sweltering hot entrance, the two of you made way to stride deeper into the depths of the room, the male shrugging his form in his usual lethargic stroll while you skipped casually with the passionate merriment of a child, dissimilar attitudes able to simultaneously set someone on edge and make them unnerved. Some goons such as one with a hair quirk, made obvious by the almighty volume of hair sitting on the top of her head, were already licked amorously by the male's fire, attempting to somehow slap the burning heat out of her tresses unsuccessfully.

Others, however, were steering clear from them and delving further on into the somewhat large floorplan, bowing to their knees quickly to show their respect towards their superiors and jetting off far, far away from them. A duo stood guard in front of the emblazoned EMPLOYEES ONLY door that seemed to be trembling in fear from either party, thanks to the bozos who had hurriedly dashed in from before.

The psychedelically dressed male looked to be obsessed with neon colors, clashing extremes that overall would make any normal upstanding citizen's retinas bleed, just a little bit. Dragging your eyes to his tie-dye tee that had some obscure pre-quirk era cartoon depicting an anthropomorphic cow and and chicken, the behind of a devil with the shape of a fat lima bean mooning its behind, you decided you had seen just about enough to get the gist of it.

Beside him was a classily dressed woman fitted in a crimson jumpsuit, dressed to the nines in her chin-length haircut with glistening jewels hanging from both of her ears, even standing in 3-inch high heels that matched the clinic's walls before your pal had livened up the place. Heaving his body forward in star-crossed anticipation, neon boy over here let his eyes dance at a spectacularly high speed over the punk male next to you, the inferno boxing all of them inside of the joint, and your figure.

"Huuuuh? You freaks are the ones that lit this place up?" tilting his head to the side as if to cast another wild cursory stare towards you two, a smile started to spread wider on his face.

"Sachihiro, don't get me started," the one who had outed her partner threw an exhausted stare right into the back of his head, practically causing the man to become impossibly happier, mirroring the happy-go-lucky front you had shown just moments before.

"Mao, join in, and just..." Sachihiro suddenly leaped unnaturally high into the air, his feet bulldozing back down to powerfully create small craters on the ground. "Have..." he eerily bounced back as much an insanely hyperactive child or man whose system is not clean from drugs, causing you to loosen your body and get into fighting stance while the blue-eyed man merely rushed to throw a blue-hot punch. "SOME FUN!" a catastrophic series of events followed: as soon as the crazed man had even uttered the start of his sentence, a shockwave consisting of volatile colors fluctuated around everyone in the room, strangely enough not changing the actual surroundings, causing you to yelp in surprise when you kissed the ground due to your ankles being disorientated, Dabi's trajectory being comically veered away from the opposing pair as if he were in a gag skit.

"It's an emitter! Don't count on your ey-" grateful for your instincts screaming for you to clench your teeth, spit flew out of tiny gaps in your teeth, your body rocking back due to the force of the punch. The worst part was that you couldn't even tell which of the pair had clobbered you particularly hard on the jaw, nearly driving it out of its rightful place if you hadn't gritted your choppers.

"Gee, I wonder why?" the only other downed person sarcastically drawled, Endeavor's hardcore abuse finally coming handy with how easily he was able to get on his own two feet again.

You grumbled an incomprehensible jab and closed your eyes, looking as crazy as someone who had "rightfully" claimed to be the resurrection of Jesus H. Christ and prophesied that the world would end due to prehistoric Mayan tablets proclaiming such nonsense, discarding any nausea that had risen through the back of your head. The sightseeing going on in your mind's eye wasn't as pretty either, with it being jumbled geometric lines running along in the space and flashing colors denoting moving shapes, if they could even be called shapes, swerving to and fro with some simply cycling through normally.

Maybe to your partner-in-crime, you lost the last of your marbles jiggling in your hollow head, but you were trying to figure out the personification of rainbow-colored barf's power, attempting to piece together what information you could gather at a moment's notice with your life-or-death gamble. After all, you wouldn't go all in on black if you had a chance to rig the roulette.

Unobserved by your eyes was the samba dance that had her heels clapping systematically onto the floor, Mao rhythmically making her way with long bouts of shuffled feet making sounds parrot back to everyone in the room, hands clapping together while she jumped, aiming to slam her body weight onto the shirtless male.

"It takes two to tango, and I have a feeling you're going to break a leg," she smiled venomously, striking her pointed heels onto his bare flesh to tastefully create gruesome holes on his back, a pained grunt ringing out in the air. Tactically gripping her ankles in a vice, taxing her upper-body enough to cause it to slump lower from his grasp, he was throwing her a reasonable distance away from him while also leaving the heels inside his back.

Dabi unabashedly ran the back of his hand against some wayward blood, wiping any traces of it against his body and only serving it to be smeared on a greater area of his torso, a primitive show of war paint glazing his strife visually. "It's sad, really," loafers the color of the night sky dragged themselves sluggishly on the tiled floor, embers starting to erupt at his sides were maddened and ballistic, rage acting as the fuel to their fire.

"That wasn't even the tango, lady."

Guttural shrieks erupted from her drooping lips slimily plopping onto her burnt flesh, calcium deposits etched into the very bone and nerve endings connected to her perfectly white teeth were scorched to oblivion, gruesomely eradicating any traces of her oral cavity and porcelain throat. It looked as if though her companion had shied away from completing his counterattack to the gothic man's brutal blow, pupils dilating as his brain undoubtedly struggled to retain any remnants of composure.

Steam flied from the very seams keeping his mulberry, burnt flesh whole, cyan orbs shining a dangerous neon parallel to the tantalizing strobe lights that had run through the end of the room as if they were daring for more fight inside of his dwindling faith, something to challenge him for the time being before he would scatter him across the ground as if he were broken glass to be shattered.

In his traumatized state, you had managed to regain your bearings without having to tear out clumps of hair on your head in frustration to see through his quirk-induced haze; you hauled your ass without the use of your nonplussed sense of direction over to them, tracing the flashing geometric shapes in your mind to their bodies.

Fingers clamped around the bob of an adam's apple that seemed ripe for the picking, strangled noises breathily made from the crushing of his wind pipes, your legs wrapped around Sachihiro's midsection to anchor your grip on his neck while his hands scratched at you.

It was as if you startled a drowsy bull by gripping him by his ivory horns, consequently making him struggle tirelessly against your restricting hands, pulling out all the stops in kicking you off its rightful flesh and bone.

"My idea of fun is not having to deal with your bullshit on a Saturday night!" you intonated in clear frustration in part from your blaring headache and the ever looming sirens in the back of your already irritated mind screaming "the police are coming".

Intermittent fits were bucked through like a true horserider, with your black-haired friend seeming content with watching the frantic movements the pesky man had been making for about ten seconds before he slumped into your hold, sending your back to painfully slam against the hard white tiles of the clinic but not hindering your grasp on his carotid arteries in the slightest.

The only other breathing person in the room parted his pierced bottom lip as if to speak, but you only interrupted him with a single raised finger in response, stating that it may take at least another minute or so to be in the clear.

Once the mental counter had reached the minute that desirably knocked him out for the time being without any brain damage taking hold, you kicked his dormant form off of your chest, wiping any rubble that had roughed up your take-out bag styled graphic shirt.

A silent nod to each other led your wondrous duo to depart from the cauterized corpse of the now retired dancing villainess and the other who had a quirk that made your vision act as if you were looking into a kaleidoscope, certainly matching how choppy his entire demeanor and mood was overall. "Coming through," the eldest Todoroki brother said to add insult to injury to the downed man, kicking his head out of his way.

Once you had reached the door, it was visibly apparent that any evidence of the clerk or doctor being stationed there was destroyed or teleported away with some sort of dark, murky goo coating various towering filing cabinets, desks, and whatnot.

What was left behind would scar any well-meaning, curious child for the rest of their lives, cylindrical tubing running across entangled wires that were unplugged without care, the contents being something even the most hardened would never want to see on a weekend. Viscous radioactive looking fluids raced across the confines of the tubes, engorged wrinkly brains being exposed to the horror of anyone with sight, bulging eyeballs inhumanly staring off into the distant wall of the backroom, perhaps even more terrifying was the fact that one haphazardly shoved in the corner was still gurgling in a gruesome imitation of a newborn child.

Gags made themselves clear on the stance of the situation in the back of your throat, pushing them down towards from whence they came in an attempt to keep yourself calm and collected at the travesty in front of the two of you. The blue-eyed male simply gaped without a single word to be uttered from his vocal chords, gaze travelling from the assortment of slime infested hatches containing what looked like hellspawn.

No sentences were needed to illustrate the thoughts running through two heads, as the unintelligible squawks of what could crudely resemble a deformed and extremely hideous duckling made it clear, higher order thinking wasn't needed at the moment.

Nope, not when an atrocity was being held behind closed doors, the supposed "prostitution ring" being more accurate to the name of human trafficking to make whatever abomination the creature was supposed to be. Your eyes met his and it allowed you to regain some semblance of camaraderie and normalcy within your frozen soul, daring to force your legs to move purposefully to meet the thing. As you further reached the monster, it maintained eye contact, although only with one eye, as the other was far too interested in whatever the grainy, white wall had to offer for it.

"This..." you anxiously stuttered out, uncharacteristically staging a stony countenance on your face, letting your palms rest against the glossy glass of the container. You turned your head towards your fellow criminal, "We need to leave. Immediately. Whoever did this," you flexed the fingers laying on top of the test tube, earning some demonic-sounding chirps from the being. The sounds of flashing sirens rudely barged into the horrifying moment, crashing any sort of leniency you had for taking your sweet time observing the creature.

"Come on," the goth nodded his head towards the backdoor exit of the clinic, breaking whatever trance-like state had wreaked havoc upon the room. Scampering through the roughed up, metal door, it was made clear that a striking patrol car's rear end was waiting for them on the other end of the pathway, birthing fresh alarm bells to clank like they were collared on a patterned cow.

Much to your chagrin, your presences had not gone unnoticed by the law enforcement sent into the area, a booming shout of hey roaring to life and announcing your whereabouts, leading Dabi to clamber onto a neighboring rooftop with you mimicking his actions. Flaring lights of the red and blue variety stormed the streets as the single police cruiser had turned into multiple, leading some ground units to follow suit.

Sweat trickled down your brow and evaporation flew out of his damaged skin in the aftereffects of his quirk, sprinting across rooftop to rooftop in search for a way to escape their pursuit. Realization dawned onto his face whilst he flung his battered torso across another gap, drug-riddled mind catching up to any reasonable thoughts that had stirred long enough in his cranial cauldron.

"Why the hell are you following me?"

Wind lashed out ruthlessly against your weary eyes, your body being tired to the bone after all of the action and the fright that had accompanied what was supposed to be an "open and shut case". "Dumbass, if we split up who's gonna plug those holes in your back? Your daddy, Endeavor?"

Shocked at the exact choice of words you had wrought upon his already tarnished being, it soon turned into the motion of his furrowed brows in the absentminded choice to respond genuinely, all thanks to the copious amounts of cocaine still in his system and the night's events.

Chapter Text

Honesty is the best policy, they said while shimmying their hips with no care towards the fragile child hung mid-air due to the force of his esteemed and congratulated father, medals clinking around a throat that did nothing but spew vitriol and no measly awards making their way onto him for enduring. A prodigal son is the namesake in which he was branded forevermore, searing hot iron branding him as a virtuoso chosen to be wrung through the wire, vomit-inducing fists buffeting his worn chest and wracking pitiful frogs from his throat.

It turns out being beaten half to death wasn't as bad as it was made out to be, until Enji had come upon his little brother puffing his chest up proudly like a baby penguin: blue, red and yellow blankets wrapped around his chubby cheeks in an offbrand imitation of All Might, roaring triumphantly on top of Touya's faux fainted chest while Fuyumi jumped up from her pillow prison of doom and joined him boisterously, a picturesque moment in time that had all but been mutilated to shreds once his brobdingnagian hands had come to cement themselves onto his already bruised shoulders, barring him from ever seeing his siblings.

Lagging behind even in a momentary lapse of judgement to meet his mother's eyes was met with a death sentence, Rei's soothing aura of ice that met the proportions of a sugarplum fairy gingerly twiddling her ballerina flats on a make believe land existed no more, what had once granted him nothing but an oxymoronic amount of warmth and comfort had truly been razed to the ground, genuine disdain filling her features when met with his pleading eyes. Enji Todoroki, otherwise known as the eminent human flamethrower Endeavor, held no mercy in the depths of his tarnished and muddied soul.

There was no mercy behind closed doors, no signs of the cool composure he had kept up in front of awestruck kids that held no amount of experience in the subject of what goes on behind a hero's mask, his searing fists wielding a temperature not even close to mirror his ice cold exterior in front of flamboyant, flashing lights and cameras.

Any other person would expect magma stirring heavily inside the caverns of his being, threatening to erupt with the expulsion of its molten rage from years upon years of ruthless "training". That wouldn't be the case, considering it all came to a boiling point on January 11th when an amniotic sac swam as if it were an all-knowing, primordial jellyfish holding the secrets of the unknown. At the crisp age of 3 a bell tolled and rampantly whispered his fateful role within the household, a sneeze emitted from Shouto's button nose shot out an assortment of icy-blue fractals across the floor, broiling a toy he had gripped in his left hand to a blackened puddle of ooze.

The magnum opus that his father had craved for countless years had been brought into this world flawlessly, even managing to present his quirk a year earlier than the average child, scooping him into his dumbstruck state of temporary gratitude; clear globs lit the wicks of his tear glands, a vigorous smile booming laughter at the discovery.

Soon enough, he was thrown to the side as if he were just another piece of revolting manure on the bottom of his boot, in favor of his darling masterpiece at the age of 10. Rei's impassioned cries for him to hold off for at least a couple of more years were heeded, even if only to the bare minimum of one year, it seemed as if Endeavor was to genuinely train him and not beat him to a pulp like he was. That is, until he got just a little more older.

Soon enough, he was forbidden from fawning over his tiny younger brother who he affectionately dubbed "shortcake", comparing his split red and white hair to a strawberry shortcake he had only heard of through classmates, unable to cross his father's dietary restrictions. Daddy dearest's scornful face was imprinted into the back of his closed eyes, as if everyone in his family had him being hit over and over again erased from their minds, marking the time when teenage angst settled in.

His twin was the archetypal sort of people-pleasing girl that craved any sort of admiration, especially if it came from father, skipping to the beat of her own played drum in line with the disciplined child quartet he had accomplished to have, jumping at any sort of prestige she gained at school and turning to only see his burly back turning away from her. The old him had taken the beatings in stride and felt a sick sense of accomplishment in enduring the hardships that were wrongfully burned into his head, the old him didn't feel his insides rearrange themselves mentally and writhe in place on particularly lonely nights, he never had to worry about starving to death in the middle of nowhere without any person to give a rat's ass about him.

Hissing rang out from a boiling stove kettle, shouts of terror lifting their mother away from them, never to see them again in a sanitarium. Dabi ran away from the palatial traditional Japanese mansion tainted with the morbid hair-raising cries, tasting nothing but numb taste buds in the back of his mouth tingling with pain, and out came the reanimated corpse of the eldest son of Enji Todoroki, into his reincarnated life.

"You look just like her," a breathy noise permeated the atmosphere, "So... weak, and cold," a booze-filled mouth rasped onto his neck, the sound of a clinking belt being unbuckled clumsily.

All of it rushed back to him in a single snap of the neck, cyan-eyes becoming unfocused with the blur of time that should have irrefutably ended ticking eons ago, teeming angst that was locked away in a place that he once called home. The shouts of someone or something near him simply seemed so far away, when he was rooted in place in his bed after a nasty argument with his parental figure. Snaps clicked and reverberated continuously past the rush of wind, ringing in his ears already far too occupied with keeping his entire body tensed like a spring being coiled in steampowered machinery, gears clashing onto each other making like forks scratching plates horrendously.

"You can't just keep running!" was nimbly ignored with the sweep of his thundering soles pounding the unrecognizable, unbearably monotone rooftops again and again.

Grief spurted out in dribbles from the clenching of his heart, barely aware of the instinctual urge to pump out any sort of glossy coating onto the whites of his eyes, even when there was no room for any tear glands in his eyes, not after his life had been forged into existence by his own hands. Detached and strung out, he finally snapped out of his fragmenting reverie: long fingers coming out to clasp his baby brother's tiny hands yet he failed, shards disintegrating into nothingness and becoming one with the void, no mercy being given for the wronged man who had not come to terms with his floodgates free from oppression, another figure screaming for his attention but taking it into their own hands, shoving him away from his dream-like position.

You let out a strained cry in the effort to rely on your teeth clamping onto your bottom lip, turning your head to a distinct hole driven into your flesh, bile rising to have pleasantries with your tongue and stomach acid swathed your already swarmed senses. Subsonic combustion arose into the air, metal and blood meeting each other in a warm embrace due to the gift of deflagration expelling a clean bullet into your shoulder. Turning one's back on the grievous injury, you stood your ground with a guilty grimace and gripped Dabi's shoulders in your last ditch effort to get him to realize the case at hand.

"I'm sorry for being a piece of shit, and I will make it up to you in whatever way you want, but if we don't skedaddle right about fucking now-" another shot was fired towards your two figures, graciously deciding to take pity on both of your horrid states and bounce off the nearby grimy fire escape, imperceptible red strings of fate crossing along your shaky leap towards yet another man that would change lives as well.

Opaque tendrils swooned from impregnable mystic dragons borne from mist, streaming tails lashing around Jin Bubaigawara's upper torso and kissing parts of his head in their departure to the heavens above, a pleasure to behold and to watch them float out of his nicotine-filled cancer stick absentmindedly. He supposed that the moment red velvet curtains laced with venomous satin had parted and let the maestro compose what would become of his life, the man's trusty fountain pen had slipped from his sweaty yet focused fingers, obsidian ink spitting all over curved, concise lettering masterfully detailing how exactly fucked his life would end up to be.

Sort of poetic, really, since he lost his original self he can't tell if he's merely an impostor standing in place for the real him. Only his other self would gently run his words across his back as if it were a spring onsen rushing spirituality in waves, and even then Jin had no amount of evidence that told him the other him was a byproduct of the original he had stolen, nothing but a parasite through and through.

Once the psychiatrist his parents hired had uttered the simple words, multiple personality disorder, bags of various belongings were kicked to the curb as if they were nuisances, his body along with them. Labels had ruined his entire life, the real you's life too, dribbled into the nooks and crannies on his neck, drenching him in disgust just as his mother and father had been when they threw him away like a piece of garbage.

So color him surprised when he had been frantically tipped over by a rush of two bodies slamming into his apartment building, fresh off the mint Mevius One's 100 box clattering onto a mossy crack of the flooring, and for the first time in years his thoughts weren't followed by an echoing voice of his. Bewilderment trailed off of his slightly agape mouth, prominent lines infused from the splitting of his head folding in tune along to his eyebrows, but for once he didn't question why the unconscious globs of his being burned with the intensity of being awakened in a lava lamp. Jin immediately jumped up to his feet, generic slippers slapping with a floppy sound, and he rushed every fiber of his being to make his way over to the absolute strangers making wonderful love with the grimy asphalt on the roof.

Sirens clamoring in sound waves colored red, white and blue flashed across the neighboring apartment buildings, orders being sounded as clear as day to the law enforcement attempting to catch up to his fallen parkour hotshots, and he knew what he had to do. Without having to think twice, he lifted the both of them to their feet even when there were incoherent mumbles being brought from the Hot Topic connoisseur dead on his feet, slamming the metal door behind them and frenetically barricading the entrance with a broom kindly abandoned by a forgetful janitor.

At least the people on the lam knew better than to ask pointless questions that would needlessly sap his already fried patience, cordially stepping in time behind his long strides, not suspiciously going at breakneck speeds but speed walking his way casually to his messy flat (and even if the black haired one was suspiciously in a daze, he didn't notice).

He nearly had heart palpitations when his sweat-slicked fingers brushed his pocket only for no keys to be in sight, a stifled cackle following soon after, the only confirmation he needed to know he had been pickpocketed was when the person in the risque attire jingled his keys in their fingers. A small gimme that, and his humble abode was presented to the lovely criminals that he had just invited to his home, leftover cardboard pizza box riddled with grease stains applauding their arrival and the rather tiny amount of space he had to himself was cheering.

"Just have one question," you inquired with the raise of a brow and your index finger pointing to the skies. "Are you usually this naive or are you gonna get a move on in skinning our bones?"

The half-dead goth raised his head in synchronized movement to yours, the two of you directing your stares towards your perturbed savior adorned with repeated stitches from the top to the bottom of his forehead. A scratch of his bristly chin accompanied by a questioning hum soon followed, his snow-white hair further accentuating his sickly pallor, contradictory gibberish muttered under his breath. This only served to step onto Dabi's miniscule amount of patience, a sigh coming into fruition with the straightening of his spine and audible cracks resounding in the room, his mostly unmarred hand landing on one of his knees.

"You need a little more time, princess? Or you need a dictionary?" was sarcastically said with the flourish of one of his skinny but long hands, spotlight coming to rest on Bubaigawara.

Chapter Text

Chants decorated with saintly colorations of stained glass splatter a charlatan who is presumably alone in his blank cavern, tousled snow-white hair being besmirched by tainted hands, the staircase of sewn stitches on his forehead making way for another impostor in the midst. Wrongly assuming there was silence to be enjoyed was a sin in of itself, a bitter taste of languish dribbling off of the damned black steps in disconcerting globs, no Hail Mary to be sought in a feverish prayer of instinct. The Wheel of Fortune chortles in gluttonous spins ticking a pure white arrow of fate further in dizzying motions, blinding lucent lights flashing much how voracious hired escorts would slip through your hands as if they were see-through, just close enough to touch and reap the benefits but by then the gyrating circle has ceased to swivel on its tempting axis.

Soon enough the man in the mirror would reflect his true self and not deny nor wallow, shards multiplying in the distance collecting colossal glass fractals paving the way for a beacon of light, there was no need for Mary when there was Fatima.

It was as if a chime resonated within the oddball of a man that was stuck into a mind-numbing muttering spree, an apparent shiver ran down his spine and suddenly his semi-slouched back straightened with the ring, wordlessly fondling his baggy pockets for something that he struggled to reel in. Curses spat from Jin's throat, causing his Adam's apple to bob into a shark-infested barrel and swing itself back up, unadulterated fear seeping into his bones. His stony-blue eyes sank into the sea along with his dashed hopes, staring at the two of you blankly before abruptly erupting into a cacophony of noise.

"WHERE'S MY MASK? I KNOW WHERE IT IS!" he panicked and hurriedly searched the premises on the surface level, Dabi's own blue eyes darting from place to place in a trance, all the while you realized a faint burning sensation was swaddling your entire body in a red-hot mantle.

Surprisingly cool breaths rose out of the black-haired man's throat, a single lit flame acting as if it were a pert bud sitting atop of his index finger, the accomplice to the invigorating nicotine scent being a scuffed cigarette nabbed from his fall. "Chill, weirdo. I'm sure you left it on the roof," he expertly drawled as if the boys in blue hadn't been chasing them in the first place, unconcerned puffs flowing out of his leisurely drags.

"Gee, sure am regretting taking in a dude who's a necrophiliac's best wet dream," is accompanied by wayward thuds of countless items making peace with the floor and cabinets being thrust open in tandem. "Actually, more like a living blue waffle shitting all over the place, unlikely you'll piss nowhere around here anyways," house slippers pointedly turning to the human sexually transmitted disease, who had merely met his hardened gaze and blown another kiss of smoke into his eyes.

Scarlet swept through the contours aching and pleading for some sort of respite, essentially rolling down your lower bicep until it was able to nosedive into shoddily cleaned carpet, drops plopping around each other and spreading in a sort of a macabre paint splatter.

You couldn't utter a word when whatever was sustaining the barrier between agony and complacence quivered into retirement to let it loose, as an orchestrated rallentando let its conductor chug with a wave of his arms and let the racket be off the rails, strums of nerves being filed down into blunt pains causing your teeth to chatter ever-so-slightly.

Your voice box was far too preoccupied coping with the amount of throbbing fire searing any words that had been stored in your frozen cords, knees threatening to buckle but whatever remained of your headstrong spirit had made its mind and made its last stand.

Pettily squabbling in the distraction of his own impending fear, incomprehensible lines were thrown at the violet-patched male fruitlessly in the looming shadow of anxiety taking root in his mind, neither paying much mind to the other person in the room until they raspily spoke, "Hey, maybe that closet'll have it..." A gust of exhalation afterwards, "Sure have lots of pins n' needles on the carpet," is nonsensically giggled with your subtly shaking form focusing on unusual glints concealed by an ajar door.

The contradictory man's head bobbled momentarily before he cartoonily locked onto the said door and rapidly swung it open, revealing that any hints of dread that used to cling onto him were washed away, a sewn mask with a split at the junction of the nose having anything below his eyebrows black and the other halve being a cool gray.

"Hey and what would ya'know!? I got my baby back! You lost it here, bub," twinkles appeared in the white holes for his mask like a million dollar smile was grooving behind it, his body twisting to meet your pale-faced form sweating missiles from your resting place oozing blood. "Ohhhh, shit. That's just fantastic!"

You couldn't gather much energy to do much else but keep your finger crackling into place as thunder would, quaking to and fro from its shaky position and wearily clamp your teeth in a horrifyingly saccharine open mouth smile, lines of tiny veins supplying your intensely bit lower lip with pooling red of lifeblood like a crude fountain.

It finally garnered the elder Todoroki's scatterbrained attention span thanks to the ever-piling effects of narcotics and stimulants, a Mevius One 100's cancer stick free-falling from the disquieting facial expression gluing him in place, limbs booting up from a complete shutdown to rush over by jumping above the couch through sheer muscle memory.

Light-peach fingers deftly gripped the white stitching connecting short sleeves on your shoulders, catching your out-of-character whimsical expression with dilated pupils and hardening his countenance. "This," gesturing his hand towards the wide array of burgundy blooming further into a dashing spider lily, "Is going to hurt like hell," was mumbled before he ripped the already ruined gag t-shirt and striking shrieks from your bustling innards. A hissing noise slipped from the gaps of the patchwork man's teeth, clicking his tongue, "Houston, we have a problem."

"Didn't expect to have someone die on my carpet ticked off the good ol' bucket list... totally knew about it! Man, they grow up fast these days!"

"Loving the commentary over here, genius, but could you actually help them instead of throwing more one-liners?" pearlescent cyan eyes rolling themselves in a show of mock composure, as his tick of biting his lower lip gave him away.

Instantaneously, Bubaigawara whipped out yellow-ochre measuring tape aged by slight wear and tear, moving about in a flurry of movements that made Dabi's spiked tufts swish in tune to the air. "Just a little bit of this, no more of that," copping a feel in what would otherwise be known as inappropriate dick move, hadn't he moved quickly and efficient after uttering a sorry, not sorry, completing whatever he had sought to do in the heat of the moment.

"Voila!" wisps of smoke began to arise out of nowhere along with sludge quickly rearranging itself into the exact features you had, plus a bullet wound that had seemingly halted in its ferocious endeavor to bleed your veins dry. "This fucking sucks!"

Without looking up from his shabby handiwork of attempting to tighten a bulky blanket, the goth slammed his now bloodied hands onto his ratty slacks in frustration. "Damn it, this won't do." As soon as he even saw the slightest motion grinding itself near the injury in your shoulder, he grit his teeth in a roundabout way and made his scorching presence known towards the other man, "And just what the hell do you think you're doin'?"

Zooming as fast as his legs could take him, he zanily waved his hands and mimed a bullet in a laughable attempt to get his point across, "Adoy, taking the bullet out, genius." Angling his fingers in a childish display of zig-zag lines, in a show of demonstrating the trajectory of the gun's fatal and cruel mistress, "It doesn't take Einstein to know that if we don't get it out, they're gonna live!"

An obviously irritated grunt later and the dual personality owning individual's body was held sky-high, an annoyed sneer held in place along with plum indentations and silver staples were the exhilarating vista that the unwilling passenger was greeted with, nimble yet surprisingly robust hand clutching the hem of Jin's shirt. "Are you dense? Life ain't what Hollywood makes it all to be little man, and if you take that bullet out they're as good as dead, capiche?"

Understanding dusting its motherly powder onto the other man's face, a rather silent agreement is made when the echo chamber is out of his mind's reach, no other double making its way to launch another quip, even if just for a moment.

The exact replica of you had rewound itself back into its gelatinous coagulation of goop on the sobbing carpet fibers, sudden depression soaring away from the formerly sky-borne man causing him to lift his spirits and make a mad dash towards the abnormal glint that had caught his eye, finding vital tubes coming from a deflated sac and more from where that came from in a white and red box that had a cherry plus sign printed on it.

"You're lucky your lover pointed out the goods! Not that lucky if you ask me," he announced jauntily, dropping the minimalistic case at the other man's feet, making himself comfortable in a criss-cross applesauce position and casting an expectant look at him.

"You know I can hear everything you're saying, right?"

Chapter Text

At the mere sound of your gritty voice, Jin and Dabi immediately locked eyes with your droopy eyelids, buzzing pinpricks sadistically roaring towards countless parts of your body, your retinas having a well-timed game of peek-a-boo with blurriness fogging your lens.

"Shit, nearly scared me half to death there," the black haired man muttered with a click of his tongue, patting the ratty bristles of the carpet beside him absentmindedly until his fingertips latched onto the first aid kit, unlatching its contents and letting out a low whistle.

"Looks like we're lucky this freak hit jackpot, it's a trauma kit," he rummaged through the unorganized clear tubes denoting themselves as urethral catheters, multiple sponge-like prep pads and packets reeking of a distinct alcoholic hospital smell before finding a rubbery buckled item. Bubaigawara sat as patiently as a two year-old preschooler high on crystal meth would, quite literally twiddling his thumbs and fidgeting all the while the suspense was killing him, emotively reacting to each and every item the patchwork fiend had graciously sifted through.

Practiced feats of a polished manner were transpiring with each and every adjustment the goth had allocated to the medical instrument before he lifted it to a dimly lit ceiling light, the other man's covered facial features exaggeratingly twisting and turning with each gear in his head clicking into place, finally absolving the mulberry scarred man's actions with a low oh. Adeptly wrapping the tourniquet above your shoulder joint, he watched your face for any signs of anguish as he tightened the windlass as if he were wrapping a secure wire around mounds of dense clay, grimacing subtly to your increased tremors and the various salty drops of sweat dripping down your figure more than before his helping hands.

At some point the latex buckled tool was wound around enough times to which you started letting numerous cries of pain escape your shivering windpipes, a sharp edged intake of breath stabbed your already withering resolve and you screamed, "FUCK! Why do-agh! Does... that hurt, so damn much?"

Shushing you for a brief moment, his stapled hands persevered in the smarting spasms he evoked in his actions, going around with the black tourniquet once more and granting him another instinctive feral noise from you, hissing slipping from the gaps of his teeth in an empathetic display.

"Alright, now that that's done..." was uttered in a seemingly robotic manner as if stopping life-threatening bleeding was an everyday occurrence of the sort, securing the windlass with another pinch and a throb above your shoulder joint, taking a white sticky note left in the kit and marking it after a glance of an oven's ultramarine digits denoting the time. Thanks to his quick thinking and reaction time, your arm that had effortlessly taken the bullet and decorated its flesh-colored home inside your shoulder had been pressed until it was white, a grisly gradient of blanc darkening to the usual skin tone it normally harbored and the sickly scent of ichor lessened as it was pressured enough to be clotted substantially.

"How are you so levelheaded doing that? Wow, what a pussy," the dual-personality owner asked in a somber tone, as if he had already had the foresight to look into the scarred man's past that revealed all that he had lived through.

His occupied and calm countenance faltered at his line of questioning, cyan blue irises beginning to spin into an unstoppable wheel of the sky until his still figure's consciousness fell into a spiral that he had become all too familiar with, sizzling echoing in the openings of his ear canals whispering of times he wished he could forget and then he wasn't bound on his knees to the carpet in the apartment. Touya was drifting as far as the human eye could reach, an invisible pull plunging him into a kaleidoscopic dimension that was patched and bound by sewing needles going through the motions with red thread, a basic color that seemed to haunt him for all of his life.

A feeble attempt to turn his head back to take a gander at the opening he had fallen from greeted him with a circular hole steeled with flesh-pink muscle strands holding its visibly throbbing opening, an entrance wound he had touched on your body and not some sort of hallucination that held his being in its cold, dead hands. He would have called it a prison if its embrace wasn't regrettably comforting in the process of displaying a sadistic slideshow of horror in the family in which he belonged to long ago, murmurs of Todoroki acting as if they were as magnificent as cooing doves christening a holy matrimony in all their splendor.

That's the thing, being out of body was paradoxical as it was by itself in concept, comfort and repulsion laid waste to the interdimensional construct created by defective neural pathways strung along in his hippocampus and amygdala, direct clashing contrasts defining most of his dead livelihood and his present self. Had he grown the urge to snag a peek at some wayward locks drifting towards his previously black eyebrows, he would have gagged at the noxious maroon color they presented in their wretched glory. Endeavor had raised him so well, that at any question at his abnormal rationality towards something that would even panic the experienced if but for a moment, would irrefutably send him back to this broken record of a psyche on repeat.

It's hilarious, even, to realize that most of his childhood memories both horrid and heartwarming were barely there in his cracked think-tank of a noggin, steam emanating from a nozzle in his floating reverie had begun to cling onto his skin like lice, that his composure of his metaphorical being in his own damn mind was just a hair's length away from being thrown into a boiling pot and in danger of being shielded like most of his past like an eclipse. Disassociation reared its nonexistent corporeal body and gifted him with the enraged frame of a bulky red-haired man clenching his fists over a trembling and terrified woman, her snow-white hair frazzled beyond belief as if goosebumps had begun spreading onto her scalp as well.

"Oh," is all he could muster in a laughable imitation of Jin's earlier statement, his mottled purple skin being a thing of the future and what replaced the revolting display was pristine peach, as he dumbly recognized the two people as his birth mother and father. It was as if the events were as clear as day and not muddled by any traumatic defense mechanisms his mind had set in place to numb his composure to his neutrally set gait, and the intensity of emotional clarity was even more overwhelming, shivers running down his spine coated with an intoxicant courtesy of the misery he was experiencing.

While the visual aspect of the past being brought back to life and screened in front of him was undoubtedly opaque, cotton was in his ears and he felt like a kid again, covering his ears so tightly without the use of his tense hands, effectively muffling the sounds he refused to hear. It wasn't until he was brutally shoulder-checked aside by his own father had he snapped out of his haze, vision settling on the angry handprint making itself home onto Rei's cheek, her audible sobbing in the background with his younger brother's shrieks and whimpers. It was the last time he had laid a single finger on her face, for she was wrongfully imprisoned in a ward to be "nurtured" into society and isolated from her own flesh and blood, the children she had made.

A swig of a glass bottle and a gulp later, he was transported into daddy dearest's firm grip and the repulsive scent of fermented starch lingered from the other's breath, heartbeat skyrocketing along with his breathing pattern, acting like a rabbit forced into a corner by none other than the big bad wolf. Thrown onto his father's bed, he wished he hadn't remembered and that it was all just a gigantic whopping lie, just a false memory that had nothing to do with whatever he had endured in his past. He'd be lying to himself, plain and simple.

Now the disgusting miasma of alcohol was exhaled unceremoniously onto his younger face, Dabi was a figment of what else would come to be of him, Touya Todoroki wasn't killed yet and he was being molested by his own kin, his supposed father.

"So cold and fragile, Rei," he whispered softly and caressed his shaking cheek, his wide hand coming to rest under his chin and forcing him to daintily point his neck in submission, laying his neck bare. "I could never be angry at you for so long," a chuckle resounded and he pressed his forehead against his and stared almost kindly if he wasn't currently committing pedophilia, incest, and an amount of other fucked up crimes.

Him, Endeavor, committing a crime? What utter nonsense and unruly blasphemy, senseless media hounds and foolish lambs know not the scope he graciously protects them from. Armed marauders, arson, assaults, terrorism, the works. Enji Todoroki is nothing but a hero, nothing more, nothing less.

He wished that he'd forgotten and it was nothing but a delusional fantasy brought upon by his abusive upbringing, yet the too-real sound of rustling clothes and unbearable warmth being bestowed onto his lower regions were no figment of his imagination. Enji and Endeavor's personas combined in his drunken stupor and created the monstrosity of a human being that spread his legs, it wasn't his fault, he reassured himself. How long, however, did his family look past all of the fire and brimstone that created scars on his body and his younger brother Shoto? How long had they merely turned their heads when their father decided to beat them into the ground as a punishment? No difference was made this accursed night, the night in which his innocence was laid bare and completely slaughtered and mauled ravenously, traumatizing him for years to come.

Touya remembered when his father pressed him into the mattress and for the very first time, he had felt how it meant to be used and branded from the inside and out by his hands, as a Todoroki he knew he purposefully allowed his face to scrunch into a wretched pucker in response to the pain, but he kept quiet. Just like his mother had taught him to, like his sister and his brother, in the Todoroki household there was an unspoken rule that was never to be broken, lest you bow to the unthinkable consequences. Todoroki Touya snapped out of his stupor once the bastard started moaning, there was no doubt about it, the man was not only consciously raping him but inconsolably going through with it. Cyan flames burst into ignition with white accenting their ardor and efforts, a hypnotic-like banshee cry resounded in the kickback and the towering figure had been unsympathetically kicked away from the smaller.

That was the day Touya Todoroki succumbed to the fire and a new life was born in his death, he was never good at keeping quiet anyways. He had the scars to prove it.

"TOUYA!"

Water splashed refreshingly onto his sizzling face, the culprit being your hand weakly holding a cup of water left discarded on the ground, disassociation spell being broken by being called something he was just a moment ago, no, a long time ago. He looked past your injuries and away from the context of the situation and realized that he was the one who had been injured. Something he once thought irreparable, made clearer by the cooling splatter of water that sank into his remaining pores, he wasn't okay. Having to resort to cocaine wasn't a simple pick-me-up that allowed him to relax and it wasn't something that he did purely for symptomatic reasons. Dabi did it because he never wanted to deal with having become who he was because of Touya.

You dragged yourself over to Dabi, even when there was still an IV tube sticking out of one of your veins, thanks to Jin helping you find your skittish tree branches in your wrists. Even when there was a hypertonic saline solution making sure you wouldn't further go into hypovolemic shock, you mustered the strength to move to the obviously unwell man's side and softly rest your hand onto his head. You brushed your hands into his scalp without any further thought put into the actions, aiming to relax his figure even the slightest empathetically.

"It's okay to not be okay. Sounds cheesy as all hell, but that's the truth to it." He caught your eyes and leaned into your touch as if he was a little kid, despite his outward appearance of a punk man who didn't give a single fuck about anything.

"You can't keep running away from yourself forever, Touya. It's fine if you want to be called Dabi because of everything you've lived through, but you can't keep quiet." If he still had tear ducts, perhaps a drop or two would have threatened to escape by now, but alas, he had to make do with his strangled expression.

"Let it out," and faint gasps of depression bubbled out of the broken man's throat before rising in frequency and loudness, sobs now wracking his anguished face and stressing his already pulled taut skin, you held him in a gentle hug and sat with him.

Bubaigawara seemed conflicted as always in interrupting the two of you, but he still went forward with his decision to speak, "It's been ten minutes already," he made a motion towards your fastened tourniquet. "You can take it off, I'll bandage it for you," no duplicitous voice following any of his statements with his stony face.

Jin then grabbed the nearest blankets and pillows, essentially creating a blanket fort for the three of you and stirring oatmeal in a pot of sweet cinnamon and vanilla, serving everyone in preparation for spending the night with people he'd now call his friends. He placed himself at the other man's opposite side and wrapped his arms around him as well.

"You looked like you needed it, friend."

Chapter Text

Hey y'all, hope you've gathered by the title that I'm not continuing this. Really enjoyed writing this, but I think I'll work myself up to a huge slow-burn project when I practice more on one-shots.

Hey, this time there'll be guaranteed smut with those!