Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The park is scattered with families, the sun is shining, and Natsuo is cheerfully bitching about his premed classes, despite the fact that he scraped past his most recent disaster of a group project to continue holding his perfect 4.0. The whole day feels perfect, and peaceful, which is what probably should have tipped her off that something was about to go terribly wrong, because Fuyumi’s best days need about a 10% ratio of chaos—too much peace is usually the sign of a storm on the horizon.

The harbinger winds up being an admittedly adorable six-year-old girl who suddenly collides with her knees.

Fuyumi has a lot of practice not allowing herself to be tripped by small children, which is the only reason she doesn’t eat cement. It’s close, though—she pinwheels her arms and Natsuo has to grab her shoulders, keeping her from wobbling sideways off of the park’s winding walking path.

“Is this one of your students?” he asks, peering over her shoulder at the girl.

Fuyumi gives him a look of deep judgement. “I teach eight-year-olds, Natsuo.”

“…Is she too tall or too short?”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes, but the approach of a frazzled-looking woman with the same pink hair as the little girl stops her from actually giving her brother an impromptu lecture about the relative heights of children.

“Masako, what have I said about running off!”

“But she’s glowing,” Masako says gleefully. Confused, Fuyumi checks her arms—but she does not, in fact, seem to be glowing. A quick glance at Natsuo shows his eyebrows just as high as hers. “Mom, Mom, can I practice?”

“You’re not supposed to ask me, you ask them.” Masako’s mother looks up at them, her polite smile still looking hassled. “Sorry, I’m Sane Satomi. My daughter is very excited to practice her quirk now that we’ve figured it out what it does. Ah—you two are twins, I take it?”

Fuyumi blinks. She’s six years older than Natsuo, and she’s pretty sure that’s obvious in their respective builds. “…No?”

Masako stamps her foot. “Mom, he isn’t glowing, she is. Excuse me, Miss, can I practice my quirk on you?”

Fuyumi reacts instinctively to a child with a question and crouches down so she can speak to Masako at eye-level. “What is your quirk?”

“Pair Swap!” she announces proudly.

Satomi coughs awkwardly. “She, ah, body-swaps twins with each other. She’s very excited about it, but my husband and his twin are a little sick of it. Don’t worry about it, if your twin isn’t here her quirk is sort of a pain to undo…”

“Pleeeaaase?” Masako whines.

Fuyumi would be charmed, if she weren’t suddenly so sad. The day doesn’t seem as bright, suddenly, at the unexpected reminder of Touya. “I… don’t think I can help you practice,” Fuyumi says quietly. “I lost my twin a long time ago.”

Natsuo shifts uncomfortably next to her. Satomi gasps. “Oh—oh, I’m so sorry—“

Masako must misunderstand, because she lights up, excited. “Oh, I know! I can help you find them again!”

Her hands close over Fuyumi’s before she can protest, and the world flips upside-down until she’s suddenly somewhere else.

Dabi is chilling on the couch, pretending to be asleep, with all (or at least most) of the annoying League members out of his hair, when suddenly his brain does a vertical one-eighty and he isn’t on a couch at all. Instead, he’s crouched on a sidewalk in the middle of a park with a little girl holding his hands.

His usual reaction to this sort of shit—or at least, what his usual reaction would be if this shit happened to him on a regular basis—is to start roasting everything in sight. But the kid is less than four feet tall, and torching small children is the sort of shit Endeavor would do, so Dabi scrambles several feet back to a safe distance before igniting on instinct.

…Why does he feel cold?

He discards the question as interesting but not important, because there’s people around, people who can see him, except he stands and—immediately winds up flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. The sidewalk is even colder, which actually makes a little bit of sense, because he definitely just slipped.

On ice.

Besides the fact that Dabi doesn’t remember regular ice actually feeling this cold—he didn’t see anyone make it, and they didn’t actually attack him, just the sidewalk under him. Where did it come from? Where the fuck is he?

And, most importantly, is that person leaning over him with wide eyes actually Natsuo?

“Fuyumi?” Natsuo says, clearly concerned. “Are you okay? You hit the ground pretty hard.”

He’s looking straight at Dabi when he says that, and he also doesn’t look freaked out by Dabi’s general patchwork punk aesthetic, staples included. Dabi blinks in confusion for a moment, and then looks down at himself. Has he been covered in glitter or something to completely nullify the intimidation factor?

Dabi looks up again immediately, because there may be no glitter, but that is definitely not his chest. “What the fuck just happened.”

Natsuo jerks back a little in offended surprise. “Language! There’s little ears right over here, you yell at me about that all the time, Fuyu—“ He stops. Looks closer. His eyes go comically wide. “Touya?”

Dabi hasn’t heard that name in a solid decade. It makes his stomach lurch even harder than slipping on the ice did. “Uh.”

Natsuo’s jaw drops. “It worked? We thought you were dead!”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “What worked?”

Natsuo makes a sound like a fork caught in a garbage disposal, instead of talking like a helpful person. A woman Dabi doesn’t recognize steps forward, looking absolutely mortified, but she almost slips on the ice. Natsuo catches her arm and starts melting the ice away.

It’s kind of a lot of ice. Dabi stares. A big circle of it, and at the epicenter is… “Did I do that?”

The woman gives him a nervous smile, which Dabi supposes is its own kind of answer. “I’m so sorry about this. My daughter’s quirk is called Pair Swap, and it body-swaps twins. She saw your sister glowing, and I—I’ve told her she needs to ask, but your sister said she…” She drops her voice. “Lost you, some years ago, and my daughter didn’t understand what she meant. She said she’d help to find you, and…” She waves her hand helplessly.

“And I did!” the little girl announces. “The glow changed, so that’s her twin!”

“It actually worked,” Natsuo says, dazed. “Holy—“ He glances at the little girl and censors whatever he was going to say. Instead, he gives Dabi an incredulous sort of glare. “Did you seriously fake your own death?”

Dabi glares right back, climbing to his feet. His center of balance is off and his arms are weak and it’s weird. “It wasn’t that fake.”

At least he’s not the only uncomfortable one here—Annoying Mom looks like she wants to be anywhere in the world except in the middle of this family drama. Good. If the kid’s her daughter, Dabi’s labeling this as 60% the woman’s fault. “I—should I tell you now how to switch back?”

“It’s not just a time limit?” Natsuo asks.

Annoying Mom shakes her head. “I mean, there is a time limit, but the quirk will last for almost a week on its own, and I figured—“

“Other option,” Dabi says shortly. Natsuo gives him annoyed look when the woman laughs nervously, but Dabi doesn’t care; being polite is not exactly high up on his list of priorities.

“Right,” she says awkwardly, and clears her throat. “Well, unfortunately my daughter can’t just her quirk on your again, since the glow… changed. She’ll have to complete the link to let you go back. Where are you? Or, I guess, where were you?”

They need to find him. They need to find Dabi. Who is currently actually Fuyumi inside of his body. A minute and a half ago, he was in the League base, chilling with a bunch of murderers and assorted villains, and now Fuyumi is there.

He’s silent for too long. In his defense, endless internal screaming will do that to a man. Natsuo eyes him and says slowly, “Please, please tell me you’re at least in Japan.”

…Yeah, Dabi is neither confirming nor denying that shit. “A week it is,” he says flatly, and turns around to leave.

Natsuo makes a sound of deep offense. “Touya, where are you even going?”

Dabi doesn’t answer, partly because he isn’t sure he knows. But Natsuo clearly realizes he has no intention of stopping, and he freezes Dabi’s feet to the sidewalk before he gets more than ten feet away.

Dabi uses his quirk on instinct. Which, yeah, he should probably have thought through a little better, because all it does is make the ice thicker. A lot thicker. And it’s… cold.

He’s not used to feeling the cold. But clearly, he got Fuyumi’s fucked up quirk in the swap along with her body instead of his, and the two of them were all sorts of mixed up like that. She never got sunburns when they were kids. He wonders if she ever gets warm in the summer, or if she never notices it. It’d explain the frumpy pastel cardigan he’s currently wearing—well, it would explain the cardigan part, at least. He’s not so sure he can forgive being forced into pastel.

Dabi is still contemplating his frozen toes, wondering how the hell you melt that sort of thing with an ice quirk, when Natsuo jogs up to him. He doesn’t remove the ice immediately, oh no, little brothers are apparently too obnoxious for that; all Dabi gets is a chiding look, like he’s some sort of runaway child.

It’s… almost as effective as Fuyumi’s looks used to be, actually, which is impressive.

“Well, I got her number—“

“You sly dog, Natsu. Took what, ten seconds?”

“—so we can call her if you change your mind, oh my god.” Natsuo shakes his head. “It’s good to see you’re still a jerk, I guess. Anyway, you should. Change your mind, I mean, so we can call her and get this sorted out. What are you going to do, live Fuyumi’s life for a week? Have her live yours? What’s your life even like? I didn’t, you know, really think you had one. Since. You’re legally dead.”

Dabi doesn’t bother answering that flustered deluge of questions. He just glowers and silently points to his feet. Natsuo rolls his eyes but removes the ice. Dabi immediately stalks down the street, but Natsuo keeps pace with him.

“Look, I can see you’re grumpy and everything and clearly you didn’t want—“ Natsuo looks at the sidewalk intently. “Didn’t want to see us, or anything, but you’re here now. We can figure this out. You don’t have to hide from us, Touya.”

Dabi resists the ure to start laughing hysterically. Look at me, look at what he did to me, he wants to say, but. Well, he isn’t carrying any of his scars, and without them, he doesn’t know how to explain any part of the last ten years in a way that Natsuo—annoying little Natsuo that he used to play soccer with, playful happy Natsuo that used to help him make chocolate milk slushies in the summer—could ever understand. He doesn’t know how to make Fuyumi understand, either, but she isn’t here right now.

Natsuo isn’t looking at Dabi. He’s looking at Touya, the ghost of someone who doesn’t exist anymore. That hurts, but so does breathing sometimes, with his scars. He’ll get used to it.

For now, a smokescreen of complete and utter bullshit should keep Natsuo off the trail of anything Dabi doesn’t want him to know. Scattered with bits of truth, because Dabi is an expert like that. “If you make me even look at the old man,” he says carefully, pretending a concession, “I am going to turn him into an ice sculpture.”

Natsuo snorts. “Don’t tempt me.”

He probably thinks Dabi is exaggerating. Dabi is very, very much not exaggerating. But he doesn’t have the time or the desire to correct him—he’s going to be losing Natsuo as soon as possible. He has to get back to the League and the painfully civilian twin currently wearing his body before Fuyumi can do something stupid, like calling the police or getting herself hurt.

Fuyumi sits straight up on a couch she was not laying on a moment ago, and almost falls right off the edge. A momentary scramble later, she has herself stabilized, but she feels weird. She feels itchy. She feels warm.

Mostly, though, she feels confused.

There’s a man in a very strange mask and a top hat staring at her, head tilted to the side. “Are you feeling alright?” He looks familiar, but Fuyumi can’t place exactly why. It’s moderately concerning, but there’s a lot of things that are concerning right now, so she’s struggling a little with where to put that on her priority list.

Fuyumi blinks. Twice. “What… just happened?”

The man in the top hat tilts his head further to the side. She’s a little worried the top hat is in danger of falling off. “I didn’t see anything unusual, just that you sat up very quickly and look rather distressed. I didn’t think you were asleep…”

The disorientation of her sudden dislocation is steadily fading into the deep suspicion that whatever Masako’s quirk did actually worked. This isn’t her body, and this isn’t anywhere she’s ever been. Even though Touya is dead, and has been dead for ten years, somehow he’s here—or was, until about ten seconds ago, when suddenly Fuyumi wound up here instead.

“I’m… fine. I think.” She pauses; her voice doesn’t sound like hers, now that she’s paying attention. Does it sound like Touya’s? She doesn’t know. She thinks it’s a little too raspy, but the last time she heard his voice they were both fifteen. “Thank you for the concern,” she offers.

The man in the top hat actually removes his mask to give her a concerned look. While she’s puzzling over that reaction, someone else’s forearms land on the back of the couch next to her and she jumps, glancing at the man leaning over the back of the couch.

“Did you just say thank you? Did you get fucking brainwashed while we weren’t looking?”

The man who says it has light blue hair, red eyes, and chapped lips. He is also carelessly holding a severed hand, which only helps to identify him as the extremely wanted criminal that is the current ring leader of the maniacs who keep attacking her little brother’s class at school.

Fuyumi has no idea what a calm and rational response is supposed to look like in this case, but it probably isn’t what she does: she screams, jerks sideways, and falls off the couch while setting it on fire.

There’s a flurry of movement and swearing. Fuyumi finally recognizes the man in the top hat as Compress at about the same time he grabs her shoulders and pulls her away from the flaming furniture. Shigaraki Tomura, meanwhile, disintegrates the couch in order to starve the fire. It’s a very practiced reflex, she notices. The flames dissipate, leaving the air several degrees warmer than before.

“What the fuck, Dabi?” Shigaraki says, some unholy mixture of bafflement and rage coloring his expression and his voice.

Dabi?

…The fire was blue. The fire was blue, and that’s—that’s what Touya’s fire looked, looks like, but—that’s what Dabi’s fire looks like too.

Fuyumi looks down at her hands. They’re larger than they’re supposed to be, and there’s a clear line between regular, pale skin and the worst leathery burn scars she’s ever seen, and she sees Shouto’s face all the time. “I have staples in my hands,” she says blankly, even though they aren’t really her hands. She puts her hands on her cheeks, poking around tentatively, and yes, she can feel skinny bars of metal poking into her skin. She can feel the ache of the them holding her skin together. “I have staples… in my face.”

Shigaraki’s eyes narrow. “You aren’t Dabi.”

“I think I’m going to pass out,” she says faintly, and it’s lucky Compress is already holding onto her, because then she actually does.

Chapter Text

Fuyumi wakes up on a couch. For a moment, it’s some awful kind of deja vu, but when she bolts upright, Compress is waiting with his hands outstretched the way one might calm a skittish horse.

“Easy there,” he soothes. “Please don’t set anything else on fire, we only have so many couches.”

Fuyumi opens her mouth. Closes it. The couch she is on, upon examination, is not the one she woke up on the first time, which makes sense. It isn’t particularly high quality, either, but it is comfortable—it’d be a shame to destroy it on accident. “In my defense, I didn’t actually mean to light the first one on fire.”

“That is not particularly reassuring, but I will make a note,” Compress informs her politely.

Shigaraki leans over the back of the couch, thankfully with a lot less emphasis than he did last time. She’s expecting it this time—for a given value of expecting, honestly she had sort of hoped she’d hallucinated him the first time—so Fuyumi scoots away slowly, instead of making a mad dive for the ground. “You’re not Dabi. Who are you?” he demands.

Fuyumi wonders if he usually gets polite answers from blunt questions like that. Social rules are presumably different for villains, but Compress doesn’t behave like he was raised in a barn. “I’m—“

Wait. She can’t say Todoroki Fuyumi—she’s in the middle of the League of Villains’ base. Well, she supposes if they already know who Touya is—but do they know who Touya is? They keep calling him Dabi. Is that because he prefers it, because none of them can be bothered to use his real name, or because he’s hiding it from all of them? She has so many questions, and she’s a little scared of the potential answers.

“…I’m Dabi’s twin.”

Shigaraki folds his arms. His pinky fingers stay raised, which she supposes makes a lot of practical sense, but frankly looks ridiculous. Aren’t there gloves for that sort of thing? “Right. And you got the same identical scars and everything?” His voice drips with sarcasm.

“Oh!” Fuyumi waves her hands quickly, a little panicked. He’s right, that sounds so dumb when she just says it like that. “No, no, we’re fraternal twins. I don’t actually look like this, I got hit by a quirk, I don’t think she really meant to but I was glowing—“ Fuyumi stops, shakes her head, and sucks in a breath. She clasps her hands together and ew she can feel the staples. She unclasps them quickly. “…Let me try that again. There was a little girl that wanted to practice her quirk, which can body-swap twins. She said I was glowing, which means I must be a twin. She was really little, and I was trying to be nice, and you can’t just tell small children that someone they’re asking about is dead, so I was tactful and said that I lost my twin. Except then she got very clever and decided to… help me… find him.” She stares at her hands. Her stapled-together hands. Touya’s stapled-together hands? No, she’s the one moving them, and she’s the one that has to deal with the itchy existence of staples; they are definitely her hands for now. “This? This is not what I expected.”

Shigaraki stares at her for a very long time, but his arms are still folded and he isn’t trying to disintegrate her, so she is choosing to take that as a good sign. Positive thinking!

Brow furrowed, Shigaraki looks at Compress. “Is this some kind of practical joke?”

“Can you see Dabi pulling a joke that depends on him acting like this?” Compress asks, hands spread and shoulders raised in a dramatic shrug.

“But… since when does Dabi have a twin?”

“Since birth, I would presume.”

Shigaraki shoots Compress a dirty look.

Compress clears his throat. “Now, young man—“

“Woman. I’m his twin sister.”

Compress stares at her. She really wishes she could see his eyes through his mask. “…Fraternal indeed. Young lady, we can hardly go on calling you ‘Dabi’s twin.’ Could you tell us your name?”

Ah. Shoot. She was sort of hoping to avoid this for at least a little longer. She’d try moving away from Compress, but that would mean moving close to Shigaraki, and she thinks she’ll take her chances with the polite marble man instead of the angry man that can turn her to dust.

This is going to be a problem. They can’t know who Dabi is, because if they did, they would realize that they could literally just google her name. Therefore, not only do they not know he has a twin, they don’t know he’s a Todoroki. That is not information Fuyumi wants to spill to a group that has previously targeted one of her family members. But she can’t dodge the question when they asked directly, so she’ll need to find a way to be subtle—

“I am super not comfortable with telling you that,” she blurts out, panicked.

Or that. Just outright refuse the nice murderous villains asking you questions, bravo, Fuyumi, you’re brilliant.

Shigaraki’s scowl is thunderous, but Compress just chuckles politely. “Well, I suppose I can’t fault you for that. You really didn’t know the infamous Dabi was your brother?”

“Why would I have even considered it? My twin died a decade ago. I mean—look at this!” She extends her arms, showcasing the deep scarring that, on second thought, the villains must be much more familiar with than she is. “These are horrific. Do you think some of the burns are fourth degree? I mean, third is bad enough, I’m really surprised he survived—there’s paperwork. There’s paperwork that says he’s dead!”

They’d interned his ashes in a modest monument out on the estate. Except Touya is here, burned but hardly to ashes, and now she’s a little concerned about what those ashes actually were.

“Just tell us what your name is, already,” Shigaraki says abruptly. “I’m getting impatient.”

Compress turns his head toward Shigaraki slightly. Fuyumi desperately wishes she could read his expression, and not just Shigaraki’s. Is she being threatened? She’s probably being threatened. She goes further on the defensive, folding her arms stubbornly. “Do you know Dabi’s name? Family or given?”

“Of course we do, he’s part of the League,” he scoffs.

Fuyumi purses her lips. Which also have staples on them, really, this is getting ridiculous. But at least she’s dead certain Shigaraki is bluffing for information. “Right. Then you can tell me what it is, can’t you? Either of them?”

Shigaraki scowls harder and looks away.

Compress chuckles again, but this time he isn’t laughing at her, which is definitely a step up. “It was worth a shot. Clever, clever, young lady. We’ve been trying to figure out what his name used to be for some time,” he admits shamelessly. “Dear Toga is convinced he has a suitably tragic backstory, but I’m afraid we haven’t cracked it yet.”

He does, apparently, have a tragic backstory, but if they don’t know what it is yet, Fuyumi isn’t going to be the one to tell them. “Well, I’m not telling you mine if you don’t know his.”

“We do need something to call you, dear.”

Fuyumi sighs and unfolds her arms. Or tries to. “Ow! What—why are there so many staples. Give me a second, I think something got caught…”

She wrestles briefly with the sleeve of the plain white shirt she’s wearing, and her experience wrestling earrings free serves her well, because she gets her wrist free without losing a staple. Presumably those are important, even if they are ridiculous.

She huffs and checks the sleeve one last time for holes or loose threads before looking back to  “Okay, I mean, I guess I can make something up. Like… Dabi did. Ugh, that name is so morbid, really.”

Shigaraki snorts. Fuyumi does her best to ignore him and tries to think of something she’ll actually be okay with answering to.

Toushou, maybe. Frostbite. Ice to Touya’s fire, a frozen death to his cremation. She needs to base it off of Dabi’s name, obviously, since that’s the only think they know about her and is also the only thing she wants them to know about her… hmm. That actually means she shouldn’t mention ice at all, which disqualifies Toushou. Fire and ice has a particular connotation around those who have any connection to the upcoming generation of Heroes, and the people who have attacked her little brother’s class multiple times definitely qualify as having a connection there.

Really. If Touya wanted to know how Shouto was doing, he could have just called.

She taps her toes on the floor, thinking hard. When the idea comes to her, she mulls it over, thinking hard, before nodding and finally looking up. “Ihai. Call me Ihai.”

“Ashes?” Compress says thoughtfully.

“Cremation ashes,” Shigaraki points out. “You know, for someone who says ‘Dabi’ is morbid, I don’t think you’re doing any better.”

“I’m being morbid to match, not to be an edgelord.”

Shigaraki actually laughs. It’s short, and it sounds like it’s been startled out of him, but it’s definitely a laugh. The grin that follows might actually be scarier than his scowl. “Edgelord, god. At least having you around will be entertaining, I guess.”

Fuyumi doesn’t really know how to be polite to that, so she settles for honest. “I wish I could say I was looking forward to it.”

“Dabi got body-swapped with his twin sister,” Shigaraki says flatly to a room full of villains. “This is Ihai. Any questions?”

Fuyumi has never in her life wanted to be this close to this many people who have probably murdered someone, but this is apparently her life now. She’s sitting in the only chair, while Shigaraki is the only one standing, presumably because he’s in charge and possibly because he likes being taller than everyone else. Compress and the three new people are all squished together on the only couch left in the room.

She waves tentatively.

A hand shoots into the air—the blond teenage girl.

“No, you can’t stab her, she’s wearing Dabi,” Shigaraki says, not missing a beat.

The teenager puts her hand back down with a pout. The man with the gray and black mask leans forward in his seat. “Oooh, what’s Dabi’s real name then? Fuck off, we don’t want to know.”

Fuyumi blinks, taken aback. “I’m… sorry?”

“That’s Twice,” the teenage girl jumps in. “He argues with himself a lot, but usually the first thing he says is what you want to answer to! He’s my best friend ever, so be nice to him.” She grins with a lot of teeth.

“Aw, thank you, Himiko, I’m touched,” Twice sniffs. “You’re the worst.”

Her grin only widens. “And I’m Toga Himiko! But if you’re Dabi’s sister, then you’re practically family, so just call me Himiko!”

“…Okay, Himiko,” Fuyumi says slowly.

Himiko squeals loud enough to make Fuyumi jump and clutch a hand to her chest. Shigaraki heaves a sigh.

She doesn’t know what to do with either of those reactions. “I—am I not supposed to?” she says, not quite sure who she’s asking.

Shigaraki shrugs, which doesn’t answer her question. She has a lot of questions that aren’t getting answered, though, so she just adds this one to the steadily growing pile.

Himiko jumps to her feet. “I’ll do the rest of the introductions, since Shiggy’s being lame! Okay, so you met Compress and Shiggy already, but this is Spinner!” She waves toward the young man with a lizard quirk, who looks almost as bemused as Fuyumi feels. “He’s really cool and really likes Stain, so if you want something to talk about, just ask him about Stain and he’ll talk about him for hours.”

“Toga,” Spinner complains. Is he… blushing? “I don’t talk about him that much.”

“Yeah, you do,” Shigaraki says unhappily.

Himiko ignores their byplay with the cheerful air Fuyumi usually associates with people who are on something. “Aaaaand that’s everyone that’s actually, like, here-here. Since you’re wearing Dabi and Kurogiri is still in jail.” She sighs, but then perks up. “Oh! And Compress does magic tricks, I don’t know if he told you. He’s really good at them, he always guesses my card right!”

“I do,” Compress confirms bashfully, touching the brim of his top hat with two fingers.

“And Shiggy—“

“That’s enough,” Shigaraki interrupts her. “I think she gets the picture.”

“Oh, okay. Can I give her a tour?”

“No. Alright, Ihai—sure you’re not telling us your name?”

“Are you really that curious about Dabi’s name?” Fuyumi asks, because this is getting ridiculous.

Shigaraki shrugs, unrepentant. “Yeah. He’s a fuckin’ mystery turducken.”

“A what?”

“A… shit, what’s the quote. A mystery in an enigma?”

Shigaraki snaps his fingers demandingly at Compress, who obliges: “‘A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ Initially referencing Russia, but it does apply concerningly well to our resident arsonist.”

“Right.” Shigaraki nods firmly. “Like I said: a mystery turducken.”

“I’m familiar with the quote,” Fuyumi says slowly. “That wasn’t actually my question.”

“Anyway, I had a question about the quirk you got hit by,” Shigaraki goes on, ignoring her again. “How do we reverse it?”

And there’s the elephant in the room. “I don’t actually know?” She risks a glance sideways at Shigaraki’s face, which has flattened out into something she can’t read, and she continues hastily, “I didn’t ask, I didn’t think they would use it and I definitely didn’t think it would actually work, it was all very sudden.” She bites her lip, then immediately stops doing that, because staples. “…I’m sorry?”

Shigaraki grimaces. “Don’t apologize, hearing Dabi’s voice say sorry makes me feel like I’m hallucinating. Just… tell us who the quirk belongs to, and we’ll figure the rest of it out.”

Okay, this is something Fuyumi has to put her foot down on, villains or no villains. Actually, especially because villains. “It belongs to a kid. Dabi would have swapped there, so he can figure it out, I’m not telling you how to find them and throwing a child under the bus.”

“We wouldn’t hurt a kid,” Spinner says, in what she assumes is disgust—it’s hard to read his face. His folded arms a clearly disgruntled, though. “How could you think that?”

Fuyumi gives him an flat look, too incredulous to be nervous. “Maybe because the only thing I know about any of you is that you keep attacking the same group of school children? You kidnapped one, tried to kidnap more, have injured some of them, and I don’t know how many you were actually trying to kill!”

Awkward silence. Compress coughs. “Zero, for the record. We weren’t trying to kill any of them. Though I can see why you would be concerned, dear Ihai!”

Fuyumi decides to sit silent and let her skepticism show through. Hopefully it works as well wearing Touya’s face as it does her own.

“Bigger concern,” Shigaraki says, because apparently they have very different ideas of what constitutes a concern. “We don’t actually know that Dabi stayed put long enough to figure out what was going on. He’s a flighty bastard and he could’ve flipped out and taken off. If he did, you’re the one that has to find this kid again.”

Fuyumi takes a deep breath and opens her mouth to push back as hard as she has to—she is not letting a six-year-old girl get caught in the crossfire of this disaster—but then something occurs to her. “Actually, not necessarily. I was there with N—my younger brother. Our younger brother.”

Shigaraki stares at her. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dabi has multiple siblings?”

“We’re learning so much,” Himiko muses, one hand on her hip as she taps her chin. “So strange. I always thought Dabi was an only child.”

“Are you kidding me?” Spinner says in disbelief. “He totally has ‘asshole big brother’ vibes.”

“How many siblings does he have?”

“I’m not discussing our family at this time,” Fuyumi says loudly. “I’m just saying, my little brother was there, knows what the quirk was supposed to do, and Dabi will recognize him so I would think he’d also listen to him. They’ll figure something out.” Hopefully. Natsuo had better pull through for her, she doesn’t know how much faith she has in Touya’s critical thinking skills at the moment. “There’s no reason to stalk or otherwise disturb a child. The quirk might even wear off on its own!”

Shigaraki stares at her for a long, suspicious moment. “We’ll give him twelve hours to fix it,” he finally says, and Fuyumi heaves a sigh of relief. “After that, we’re revisiting this. Anyone have any other questions?”

“I do!” Himiko is off like a shot and standing over Fuyumi in the time it takes to blink. Her smile is wide but not exactly what Fuyumi would call friendly so much as out of touch with reality. “Dabi is so cool, are you cool too since you’re his sister? Do you like knives?”

“They’re… useful?” Fuyumi offers. She risks a glance sideways, but she is clearly not going to get any help from this particular crowd. “I only really use them for cooking, though.”

“What’s your favorite color? Your favorite food? Have you ever killed someone? My favorite color is red! Can you guess why?”

Himiko is half in her lap, loud, and cheerfully asking lots of questions, even if they’re ones that Fuyumi is mostly choosing to ignore. Fuyumi blames that—coupled with her own experience with younger siblings as well as many younger students—for how she absent-mindedly licks her thumb and wipes a speck of red sauce off of Himiko’s cheek.

It takes Spinner’s loudly whispered, “What the fuck,” for Fuyumi to realize what she just did. She freezes, but it’s too late.

Himiko hugs her with the speed of a snake strike, squeezing hard enough that Fuyumi can suddenly feel the staples in her ribs, because of of course there are staples on her ribs. There are stars in Himiko’s eyes. “I’m your little sister now,” she whispers. “No take-backs.”

“O…kay?” Fuyumi says, dazed. That’s… probably better than the alternative, right? Right? She looks around at the others for some sort of clue, but none of them are helpful. Twice is giving her two thumbs up—no, one thumbs up and one middle finger—Spinner looks scandalized, Compress has a hand flat over his mask, and Shigaraki looks like he wants to die, or maybe like he wants to kill them both; Fuyumi has no reference to tell the difference between those expressions.

Well, she’s clearly on her own, here, and Himiko is showing no signs of letting go anytime soon. Fuyumi pats her uncertainly on the head a few times. Her hand slows and then stops as she slowly realizes… “That was blood, wasn’t it.”

“Probably!” Himiko says cheerfully, muffled by the edgelord coat Fuyumi is still wearing.

“Ah. I…” Hmmm. Nope. Fuyumi would like off of this ride now, but she really isn’t sure if she can convince Himiko to let her go. Does she have fangs? She has fangs, doesn’t she. Fuyumi desperately hopes she doesn’t make a habit of biting her teammates—her heart can’t take that, and neither can her stomach. “Great. But. Why blood. Why?” She might be getting slightly hysterical, but she thinks she has a very good excuse.

“You’re really freaking out over a little blood?” Shigaraki asks, like he’s talking to someone standing on a kitchen table to get away from a spider.

“Well, that would depend. Was it human blood?”

“I mean. What else would it be?”

Fuyumi flails as best she can without dislodging her new limpet. “Then yes, I am going to freak out! Human blood belongs inside people’s bodies, and stabbing people is illegal!”

Shigaraki stares at her blankly. “…And?”

Fuyumi laces her fingers together and puts her hands on top of Himiko’s head. She takes a deeeeep breath. “I see where our communication is breaking down,” she says very seriously. “Stabbing people is illegal. Things that are illegal are also things you aren’t supposed to do, and I have never done anything illegal in my life.”

She immediately has the attention of everyone in the room. Even Himiko relaxes her hold just enough to back up, tip her head to the side,  and stare at her in confusion. “You mean you’ve never stabbed someone?”

“I am a law abiding citizen!” Fuyumi throws her hands up in exasperation. “Dabi is the rebel of the family, and frankly he’s taken that much further than I ever expected him to! The burning and the franken-edgelord aesthetic—Ow!” Fuyumi’s hand flies to the corner of her mouth, and it comes away bloody with a bit of glinting steel. “Ow. What? Oh my god.”

That is a staple. There is a staple in her hand, that came out of her face, because Touya’s body is apparently actually falling apart, and he decided to deal with this by literally stapling himself together. And a staple just. Came out, and is in her hand. She touches her face again, but she isn’t gushing blood, at least; it’s already slowing down, so she’s just left with what looks like the leftovers of a sudden nosebleed and a staple that is supposed to be in her face.

“Ow. Why the fudge is he using staples?” Fuyumi demands. She is done with every part of today, and these staples are the next item on her list. “That cannot be sanitary—”

“Did she just say fudge?” Spinner whispers loudly to Twice. He looks horrified.

“She’s very polite!” Twice agrees. “She’s just fucking with us.”

“—and sutures exist! So do actual skin grafts! I swear I am going to push him into a river if he did this for the sake of his stupid aesthetic!”

Himiko giggles. “But this way he bleeds more!”

“That is not a good thing!” Fuyumi insists. “Blood is supposed to stay inside your body!”

“Then why not just lick it up again?”

Fuyumi puts her head in her hands. She doesn’t want to believe her brother willingly hangs out with these people, but she is starting to get the unwelcome, sneaking suspicion that he fits right in.

Chapter Text

Natsuo keeps up a lot better than Dabi remembers, but to be fair, the last time they interacted like this, Natsuo was nine. Now he’s a decade older, taller than Ddabi (unfair), and drinking the boba tea they picked up twenty minutes ago as obnoxiously as he possibly can.

On cue, Natsuo takes another sip, half full of air and loud. Dabi shoots him a glare. Natsuo’s tea is still half full; he’s definitely doing this on purpose. Dabi considers the pros and cons of knocking the tea to the ground—on one hand, no more boba. On the other hand, Natsuo might go buy a full one and start this shit all over again.

Dabi takes a deep breath. He is not going to light anything on fire. He isn’t. Not just because he physically can’t, right now, though admittedly that does help his fraying temper, but because annoying little brothers aren’t going to be what makes him loose his cool. Angrily, he goes for another sip of his own boba… and looks down at his cup in increasing rage.

He holds it out to Natsuo. “Unfreeze it.”

Natsuo smirks. “You know, technically you should be able to figure out how to unfreeze it yourself. That’s the quirk you have right now.”

“Un. Freeze. It.”

“Nasty temper you got there,” Natsuo observes, but he reaches out and melts Dabi’s tea with the tap of a finger before Dabi’s desire to strangle his little brother overrides his self-restraint.

“Nasty baiting habit you got there,” Dabi shoots back, and goes back to angrily drinking his tea. The boba is all weird now, half of them popped and the other half wilting from having been frozen and melted in quick succession. He sucks them up anyway, determined to finish his drink before he works himself into a temper and freezes it again.

When the boba’s gone, they keep wandering—Natsuo’s place is apparently halfway across the city, and he wants to take the time to chat or something before heading all the way back. Fuyumi still lives at home, which isn’t an option if Dabi wants to avoid Endeavor. Knowing she’s still there all these years later, like a bug frozen in amber, trapped and unable to free herself, makes Dabi’s stomach turn.

He makes a note anyway, because it’s useful that h knows where she lives right down to what door in what hallway and what outside window connects to her room. He… might have to pick some stuff up, before he takes off.

 Dabi has been keeping an eye out for somewhere he could disappear into a crowd if he needs to, but Natsuo doesn’t seem to be watching anything but Dabi. “So… where have you been?”

“Jumped on a cruise ship and became an exotic dancer,” Dabi deadpans.

Natsuo rolls his eyes. “Uh-huh. Really living the life, I see.”

“What can I say, I have my vices.”

“Really, though. Where were you?”

Dabi thinks about it. “You know how I trained with the bastard all the time?”

“Yeah?”

“Used it to become a fire-eater in the circus.”

Natsuo makes a sound that’s somehow both amused and disgusted; Dabi is impressed by his expertise in nonverbal communication. “I’d pay to see that. Actually, I’d pay for pictures, just to show Endeavor—he’d blow a gasket.”

“Yep, that’s me, desperately spending my life trying to give the old man a heart attack.”

“Sounds like you. I can’t believe I missed you so much.” Natsuo shakes his head, but he’s smiling faintly. “Fine, dodge the question, then. I’ll bug Fuyumi about it later. She’ll tell me.”

Dabi makes a face, but he chooses not to argue. Fuyumi’s presence, and knowledge, and general existence are all going to be their own set of problems real soon, but he can’t start to fix any of that so long as Natsuo’s glued to his side.

Natsuo stops sticking to him like a burr when they reach a handful of streets with too many crossways and not enough street signs, more focused on trying to figure out which way they’re supposed to go. Dabi lets himself fall behind, just a little—he’s still heading for the same corner Natsuo just turned around, at least for now, but he eyes the alleyways he passes. Every time he tries to slip away and fails will just make Natsuo watch him closer, but the faster he can get back to Fuyumi, the safer everyone will be.

There’s a fire escape set against a block of apartments that might not be a bad idea; no one ever looks up. He takes a step toward it, considering—

And jerks back just as quickly, as the Rabbit Hero: Miruko drops down to the pavement less than a foot in front of him and grabs him.

Dabi has had enough impromptu grappling practice with the League (well, with Spinner, fighting over who does the dishes when Kurogiri cooks, since the rest of the League of Idiots are disqualified from the sink duty for various reasons; for the record, Dabi has never lost) that he reacts instinctively: he hooks his elbows down around her arms and tries to throw her in a lateral drop.

Key word there: tries.

There’s a blur of limbs as the sky spins to places the sky is not supposed to be, until Dabi is suddenly not moving anymore. Disappointingly, Miruko is steady and upright instead of flat on the ground. Somewhat more surprisingly, Dabi is not on the ground either, which is usually how he likes to end his fights, except—

He’s not on his feet either, because Miruko is holding him in a princess carry.

“Hey, babe! Did you finally start on some self-defense? You shoulda told me, I can give you some pointers!”

Dabi is too struck with confusion and absolute mortification to even move for a critical handful of seconds. “…The fuck did you just call me?”

Miruko blinks at him. “…Babe? What, you want me to call you princess or somethin’? I thought you liked babe.”

Usually, Dabi takes care not to use his quirk in close-quarters grappling, because pain and long experience has told him what a terrible idea that is. It’s not any better of an idea in Fuyumi’s body with Fuyumi’s quirk, because she isn’t immune to her quirk, either, but Dabi is starting to consider it anyway.

“Holy shit, you’re really red,” Miruko says gleefully. “I can keep going! Cutie, sweetcheeks—wait, back up, did you swear at me?” She looks mystified, but not upset. “Man, your day must have been awful. Wanna talk about it?”

There’s the sharp, staccato sound of running feet, and Natsuo turns the corner. Dabi has never been so glad to see someone that he was trying to escape from less than two minutes ago. Natsuo takes in the scene, blinks, and immediately looks like he’s trying really hard not to laugh. And he’s not doing a very good job of that.

Scratch that. Dabi is not glad to see him, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to accept the metaphorical lifebuoy like a drowning man, provided Natsuo ever gets around to offering it.

“What did you do, trip?” Natsuo guffaws.

“She tried to throw me, actually!” Miruko corrects him proudly. “Babe, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were taking lessons—“

Dabi bristles like a wet cat, Natsuo’s presence breaking through the surreality and rebooting his sense of dignity. He refuses to take this shit from anyone, much less a Hero, and he is going to do something very unwise if someone tries to make him. “Put me down or I’m turning you into an ice statue.”

Miruko laughs, clearly not recognizing his words for the extremely sincere threat that they are, but she does put him down. Feet finally back on the ground where they belong, Dabi backs up and decides he will let her live. Temporarily.

…At least until he can get enough distance that she can’t immediately pick him up again.

“I guess you were probably saving it ’til you could surprise me? Miruko suggests cheekily.

And then. She winks.

Dabi will admit that, at times, he’s been a little bit curious about what Fuyumi has been up to. About her social life. About what she’s been doing. He is no longer curious. He takes two long steps to the side and places Natsuo—who is now red-faced from utterly failing to hold back his laughter, the fucking traitor—between himself and the she-demon. “Natsuo. Explanation, now.”

Natsuo has been his bratty little brother for too long not to recognize when he had better start talking for the sake of the continued health of his kidneys. He waves a hand at Miruko to draw her attention. “That’s not—“ He has to stop to laugh again, but then he finally manages eye contact with an increasingly baffled Miruko. “That’s not Fuyumi.”

Miruko blinks and gives Dabi a look of askance, which he avoids by hiding behind Natsuo—he never considered Natsuo’s height a good thing before, but today is providing a lot of firsts. Miruko’s nose twitches. “…She looks like Fuyumi.”

“Fuyumi got hit by a quirk two hours ago,” Natsuo says, wiping the tears from his eyes. He’s finally calming down, but Dabi can still hear the laughter in his voice. “Body-swaps twins. This is Touya, our brother.”

Miruko’s mouth drops open and her ears shoot straight up. “What! Since when does she have a twin?”

“Since birth,” Dabi supplies sarcastically. Natsuo elbows him. “Ow! What was that for?”

“We thought he died a decade ago, we don’t really like talking about it,”  Natsuo explains hastily, as if Dabi’s answer wasn’t perfectly true. “Fuyumi especially doesn’t like talking about it—it’s a long story. But he isn’t dead, so congratulations, you’re going to have three brother-in-laws whenever one of you gets around to popping the question!”

“What,” Miruko and Dabi say together.

Natsuo is in his element and clearly enjoying the chaos, the little shit. “You’re not subtle, Rumi, and Touya, maybe if you let us know you were alive, then you would know these things before getting picked up by your sister’s girlfriend!”

Miruko whistles low, setting her hands on her hips. “Okay, family drama time, I see.”

“No, not family drama time,” Dabi snaps waspishly. “Because I am leaving. Right now. Goodbye.”

Natsuo grabs his arm, and Dabi twitches. He has had enough of being grabbed today. Unfortunately, Natsuo got almost as many of stubborn genes from the family cesspool as Dabi did, and he’s actually reasonably ice-proof. “Touya, will you stop trying to run away—“

“I am not spending time with my twin’s girlfriend! Especially while I am wearing said twin’s body,” Dabi hisses at him. “I already want brain bleach, Natsu, and I am not risking more. There are things a man was never meant to know about his sister. Now stop being a bitch and make her leave.”

Miruko tries to hide a laugh as a cough into her fist. She doesn’t do a very good job. Zero subtlety, to go with his overall rating of zero out of ten, good job, Fuyumi. Why does his twin have to have the worst taste in romantic partners he would ever dare imagine? “Natsuo, can you have Fuyumi call me when they switch back?”

Dabi makes a face and prays to all that is holy that Natsuo doesn’t tell her about the week-long time limit. Getting harassed by Miruko in defense of his sister is not how he wants to go out. He still has to kill Endeavor, damnit.

Natsuo, in a rare fit of common sense, doesn’t mention it. “I mean, sure. She’ll probably call you anyway, but I will remind her.” He scowls at Dabi, who is slowly edging away from Miruko, but Dabi is firmly of the opinion that if Natsuo doesn’t want to be moved then he needs to let go of his arm. “I’ll see you later, Rumi. Ugh, I feel like a babysitter.”

“Babysitter?” Dabi demands, outraged. “Natsu, you’re acting like a goddamn parole officer.”

“Oh my god, have you been arrested?”

“Uh, no?” Dabi says blankly. He really doesn’t like the way Miruko’s ears just perked up. “I still have fingerprints, I’m pretty sure the bastard would have heard about it immediately if I’d been stupid enough to get”—don’t say caught, don’t say caught—“arrested.”

Miruko snorts. “Well then. Try not commit any crimes, you two, I’ll be annoyed if you give my girlfriend a rap sheet. See you later, Natsuo!”

Finally, the she-demon leaves, bounding away to complete her patrol. Natsuo hauls Dabi off in the opposite direction, still laughing. At least it’s mostly under his breath.

That… was probably the least violent interaction he’s had with a hero in over a decade. Dabi eyes that thought sidelong and decides not to mark it down as a success, on account of his shiny, brand-new emotional trauma. Fuyumi, why.

Fuyumi decides that Compress is her favorite of the resident murderous maniacs. He’s very polite when he brings her to the bathroom and helps her clean off her face, even reminding her to be careful of getting any staples caught on the washcloth, and he doesn’t laugh when she pokes herself in the tongue twice trying to put the staple back in.

Of course, he might be laughing at her silently behind his mask, but Fuyumi is going to give him the benefit of the doubt. If even he isn’t at least sort of sane, she probably won’t be for much longer, herself.

“Why don’t you let me do that,” Compress says smoothly, and takes the wayward staple from her fingers. He douses it in rubbing alcohol before moving to try putting it in himself, holding her chin gently to keep her face still.

His mask is still creepy up close, but she’s quite impressed by the workmanship and the attention to detail. It doesn’t seem to have eyeholes, but he can clearly see, so she focuses on the geometric design. Unfortunately, concentrating on the mask isn’t quite enough to distract her from how it stings when he gets the staple back in.

“Owww.” Fuyumi brings a hand up to her face as Compress steps away, poking gingerly at the staple. “Is that… secure?”

Compress shrugs. “I would suppose so. I’ve never actually seen Dabi taking care of his staples, and he’s never asked for help. I’m sure it’ll be fine; a little trial and error never hurt anyone.”

Fuyumi is pretty sure that’s an outright lie, and she emphatically does not want to be involved in any sort of trial and error involving staples and her skin, but she wants to deal with this alone even less. “…Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome!” Compress gives the impression he’s beaming, which is impressive considering the mask doesn’t have a mouth. “I must say, it’s strange to hear a thank you out of Dabi’s mouth.”

“Somehow, I don’t think it’s the strangest thing about the situation,” Fuyumi mutters, a little rebelliously. She glares sideways at the mirror, and then away, just as quickly. She remembers Touya with vibrant red hair, and even if she understands very well why he must have decided to dye it, it’s still throwing her off.

So are the scars.

Compress is quiet, wiping the blood off of the sink with the now-stained rag. Quiet enough that all Fuyumi can hear are her own racing thoughts.

“I don’t know what to do,” she admits suddenly, because Compress seems at least a little bit sane and the words refuse to stay locked up. “I’m in a villain lair and meeting all sorts of people I didn’t exactly plan on meeting and I think I’m going to vibrate out of my skin. Which might be an actual concern and not a hyperbole, since half of it is apparently stapled on.”

Compress runs the rag under water and wrings it out, folding it neatly, and speaks carefully. “If you’re looking for a distraction, I’m not sure you’ll find one here, as I doubt you want to participate in any of our usual activities.”

“Criminal activity is a no-go,” Fuyumi agrees.

“Shigaraki always has his videogames, but honestly borrowing any of those might be a little hazardous to your health. We each have our own hobbies, but…”

Fuyumi stares at the scum at the bottom of the tub. “Where are the cleaning supplies?”

Compress blinks. “What was that?”

“I have to do something, I’m not doing villain stuff, I can’t do my work stuff,” Fuyumi rationalizes. “So… give me some cleaning supplies, and I’ll clean. This place is kind of a mess, anyway.”

“True,”  Compress admits with a sigh. “It’s difficult to hire a maid with our current… popularity. Well, I certainly won’t complain, if you’re certain that’s what you want to do.” His head tips to the side, evidence of a curious expression that she can’t see. “Will you need an apron for cleaning?”

The manufactured innocence in his voice sets off alarm bells primed by a mischievous little brother and too many adventurous students. “I will not be party to any criminal activities, including acquiring blackmail,” Fuyumi tells him primly. “All I want is something to do before my sanity slips and I start setting things on fire.”

Compress shows her the cleaning supplies much more hastily after that announcement.

Fuyumi decides to start in the kitchen. This is mostly because the kitchen is where the freezer lives, and she desperately wants an icepack—even a bag of frozen peas will do.

There is no back of frozen peas, but there is a surprising array of icepacks as well as a stack of plastic pouches filled with what she’s pretty sure is jam. They’re definitely not icepacks, they’re frozen stiff, but she frowns at them—she’s never seen jam stored like that.

It takes almost a minute of holding two icepacks against her face for her to remember that Touya got the exact opposite of her quirk, and is therefore all but immune to cold. Fuyumi thumps her forehead against the freezer door and glares at it.

…At least she doesn’t feel warm anymore?

She sticks her entire head in the freezer, just to see if maybe that will be more effective.

“Are you looking for something?” Himiko’s bright voice asks. Fuyumi jerks back to blink owlishly at her, but Himiko only beams, unperturbed. “If you’re hungry, you can have one of my blood pouches! They’re really tasty! But maybe use the ones in the fridge, first.”

Fuyumi looks at her. Looks at the suddenly terrifying stack of plastic pouches in the freezer, which are apparently not full of jam, but… frozen blood. For a long moment, she’s frozen, and she reflects that she’s never before hoped something had been stolen from a hospital rather than sourced more locally.

Himiko fidgets. “Caaaaaan I get a pouch, Ihai? You’re blocking the fridge.”

Mechanically, Fuyumi moves out of the way. Himiko opens the fridge, pulls a metal straw out of her back pocket, and stabs it into the pouch like it’s a Capri Sun. She takes a slurp, grins at Fuyumi again, and skips away.

Fuyumi stares blankly at the doorway. Then even more blankly at the crime scene of a freezer. Slowly, gingerly, like it’s going to chase her if she moves too quickly, she edges toward the sink. She’ll just… do the dishes or something.

She stops and looks at her hands. Specifically, the staples on her hands, and what are most likely technically open wounds. Do they count as open wounds? Close enough for bloodborne diseases, probably, and there’s apparently a lot of blood of suspicious origins around here.

Rubber gloves. She needs some rubber gloves. Then she’ll tackle the dishes.

Shigaraki is sitting on the couch on his phone when Fuyumi marches out into the living room, and she’s so exasperated she doesn’t even wonder if he’s going to dissolve her if she asks too many questions. Besides, this is an important question. This is a very important question.

“Why is it,” she asks pleasantly, “that of the thirty knives in the kitchen drawers, only six are actually meant for use in a kitchen?”

Shigaraki blinks up at her, faintly bemused. “Because we have other knives?”

Breathe, Fuyumi. Breathe. “But that drawer is for knives used for cooking.”

“It’s called a knife drawer, not a cooking knife drawer,” Shigaraki points out. “We put knives in it.”

“But it’s for kitchen knives. Knives that aren’t used to stab people.”

Shigaraki looks thoughtful. For one brief and shining moment, Fuyumi thinks he understands. “…You can use kitchen knives to stab people, though.”

Never mind. Fuyumi really should have guessed how this conversation would go. She puts a hand over her eyes and flatly says, “I am going to put the kitchen knives back into the drawer, and all of the other knives into a box. You can decide where to put them later.”

Shigaraki grunts and shrugs, going back to his phone. “Better to give ‘em to Toga. Most of them are probably hers anyway.”

Fuyumi doesn’t know what she expected.

“Twice, please help me move the couch.”

Twice jumps to his feet with the sort of energy that makes Fuyumi blink. “Sure thing! Move it yourself. What did you need it moved for? I don’t care, it looks awful where it is.”

“I’m vacuuming,” she explains, and pauses to lift her side of the couch at the same time as Twice. They shuffle it back until it meets the wall, and Fuyumi makes a face at the carpet that’s now been exposed. “This room really needs it. How long have you guys been living here?”

“About a month. None of your business.”

“I… see.” That’s not reassuring. But she can’t say it’s surprising, either, not when there’s still a scattered pile of dust steadily being ground into the carpet where the second couch used to be, before she accidentally set it on fire and Shigaraki had immediately dusted it. The carpet apparently used to be a solid color and isn’t actually supposed to look like one of those dappled color schemes, as she had thought when she had first pulled the vacuum out of the hallway closet.

She turns the vacuum on with the grim determination of a soldier loading a gun, and attacks the dust that used to be a couch, first. It takes four passes, and she’s surprised it wasn’t more. This poor vacuum is really being put through the wringer today.

As if on cue, it wheezes in protest. Fuyumi sighs, drags the trashcan in from the hallway, and starts to empty the bag. “Does Shigaraki just dissolve everything at the drop of a hat?” she bursts out. “This is the third time I’ve had to empty the vacuum, and I’m barely out of the hallway!”

Spinner, minding his own business and carrying a bag of chips out of the kitchen—she hopes that isn’t representative of the League’s eating habits as a whole, but he’s clearly barely out of his teenage years, so she’s still holding onto a sliver of hope on that front—eyes her like she’s going to bite him. Or, more likely, like he thinks she’s going to set him on fire. “I mean, he has a temper,” he mutters defensively. “And his quirk is really strong.”

Fuyumi stows the bag back in the vacuum and slams the casing shut, immediately regretting it as her hand helpfully reminds her she has bars of metal stuck in her skin that don’t like being banged around. “Then why doesn’t he wear gloves? There are all kinds of specialized gloves for five-point quirks, he wouldn’t even have to get them custom-made.”

“You sound a lot more like Dabi when you’re angry,” Spinner observes, which doesn’t answer her question.

She gives up. “I mean, I’m currently using his voice box, so why not.” Fuyumi goes to turn on the vacuum again, but then something occurs to her. She freezes. “…Spinner?”

Almost to the door, Spinner makes a sound of defeat. “What now?”

“For the love of all that is holy, please tell me I haven’t vacuumed up any people.”

Spinner freezes like a deer caught in the headlights, bag of chips held protectively to his chest as his eyes dart between her and the vacuum. “Uh.”

“Lie to me if you have to.”

“I, uh—“

“I’m sure there aren’t any people stuck in the carpet,” Twice says earnestly. “Shigaraki totally dusted someone in here. And he wouldn’t do that sort of thing in the living areas anyway, we have an alleyway outside. Think there’s enough dust in that trashcan to make a person?”

Numbly, Fuyumi holds the vacuum out to Twice. “Twice, would you mind finishing up in here? I’m going to go clean something that’s less likely to give me an aneurysm.”

“Of course, Ihai! Just die already.”

“Thank you. I’m going to… go now.” Fuyumi escapes to the bathroom, locks the door, and takes a minute just to focus on slow, deep breaths. She’s great. She’s fine. She definitely didn’t just clean up a dead body or four and oh fudge, was that illegal? Has she now done something illegal? What if someone finds out—

Wait, she’s in Touya’s body. Never mind. Even if it was technically illegal she’s sure he can handle the hit to his rap sheet. Vacuumed a villain’s lair isn’t even going to make it on there next to arson, kidnapping, and God only knows what else.

Feeling a little silly, Fuyumi shakes her head and dismisses that mess as the production of an overly stressed mind. She’ll just clean up in here for a while to cool off. Judging by the rest of the house, she’ll probably need to take everything out of the medicine cabinet and clean off the shelves (and possibly the medicine bottles themselves) before putting it all back in an organized fashion, but she can do that, that’s fine.

When she opens the cabinet, the bloodstains almost give her a goddamn heart attack.

“Why,” she says loudly, even though there’s no one here and she doesn’t want anyone to be. “No, actually how. How did they even—and how do they live like this.” She takes another few deep breaths and gets a grip on herself. Her cheek stings; she lifts a hand, finds more blood, sighs. Another popped staple, and she has no idea where this one went. Not that she particularly wants to stick it in her face after it’s been on the floor.

Fuyumi wants an ice pack so badly. No wonder the whole League seems to expect Dabi to be an asshole, she’s getting steadily more and more bad-tempered from stress and the constant low-level pain, and she’s only been in this body for a few hours. She hopes he’s enjoying his pain-free time.

She hopes he hasn’t gotten her arrested.

She sighs, gives the bloodstains in the medicine cabinet a reproachful look, and starts digging around for the hydrogen peroxide. There has to be some around here somewhere.

Chapter Text

The problem with trying to maintain a proper aura of mystery surrounding your actual identity with someone you grew up with is that there’s fucking nothing that’s safe to have a conversation about. Dabi solves this problem mostly by asking Natsuo about his own life, which is really interesting for the first hour and a half, right up until he starts getting into the nitty-gritty details of one of his nursing classes. After almost ten minutes of understanding less than forty percent of what’s coming out of Natsuo’s mouth, Dabi decides to ask about Shouto—skipping Fuyumi, because he knows Natsuo is enough of a brat to take the opportunity to tell him everything he knows about Fuyumi’s girlfriend aka That Bunny Bitch, and Dabi is not about to put himself through that.

Then Natsuo grimaces awkwardly and asks Dabi what he knows about all the attacks Shouto’s class has been targeted in this year.

“Shit was on the news, Natsuo,” Dabi says, scanning the street desperately for a distraction. “I heard about it.”

“Well, that’s been fucking him up, which I know even though I still don’t talk to him much,” Natsuo forges onward, oblivious to how Dabi is dying inside. “Especially since he’s actually been making friends this year? Fuyumi’s really excited about it, she keeps texting me anytime he mentions someone from school. Which was fine the first ten times, but it’s starting to get old.”

Dabi is actually starting to miss the ability to set himself on fire. One thing to promise himself he wouldn’t let his little brother get hurt, another for it to work—but in his defense, how was he supposed to predict that Shouto would actually make friends? He was a really awkward kid, even when he was tiny and adorable and physically capable of smiling.

Oh, thank god, distraction located. “Hey, should we stop for some food?” Dabi asks, pointing to a quaint cafe just a few buildings down that has outdoor seating.

“Sure, I don’t want to head to my place just yet,” Natsuo says agreeably. “Though you are coming to my apartment, Touya, going home would be a terrible idea.”

“Yeah, I know.” Kind of touching Natsuo would put him up on short notice after so long, but he’s also not going to be hanging around long enough for that to actually happen.

They get all the way up to the door before Dabi balks and backs up. Natsuo gives him a squinty-eyed look of suspicion. “I’ll save us a seat out here,” Dabi hedges. “Just get me whatever you get.”

Natsuo isn’t buying it. “You’re a picky eater and we both know it. You’re coming in there with me.”

Dabi sighs. “Natsu, I look like a chick right now. Some asshole grabbed my ass in the boba place and I took too long processing to actually react, but if that shit happens again I’m throwing down, and I don’t think either of us wants that happening in there. I’m not risking it.”

Natsuo makes a disgusted face. Dabi is equally disgusted at the thought of anyone groping Fuyumi, even though his little story is an outright lie. Hopefully, Natsuo’s little brother bullshit meter has been tuned to Fuyumi strongly enough that it’ll be rusty when it comes to Dabi. “Fine,” Natsuo relents. “But stay here.”

“Where would I go?” Dabi asks with an eye-roll.

Dabi waves when Natsuo looks through the window at him, but the start of the line inside isn’t quite visible from the window. The moment he’s out of Natsuo’s line of sight, Dabi moves.

There’s an abandoned hoodie slung over the back of one of the chairs, which is part of why Dabi picked this cafe as a distraction. He scoops it up without stopping and takes Fuyumi’s cardigan off as he walks, replacing it with the hoodie, pulling up the hood so it covers his distinctive two-toned hair, and ditching the cardigan in a covered trash can along the street. He’ll pay Fuyumi back later.

It’s a matter of long practice to lose himself in the crowd. He’s already a lot less recognizable than he’s gotten used to, so he keeps less of an eye on the people around him that might be staring and dedicates his attention to turning off Fuyumi’s phone, just in case she has some sort of location-sharing setup with Natsuo—or with her girlfriend.

Dabi takes care not to walk too fast or too slow—Fuyumi’s general build and appearance means he can walk a little brisker than usual and still pass it off as casual, but he doesn’t want to look like he’s hurrying. Neither does he want to be out on the streets for too long. He clocks each streetsign he passes, turns right once, and then slips into a cheap corner store to head straight for the cosmetics aisle. He doesn’t know enough about makeup to be able to use it for a disguise, so he passes over all of that to start comparing boxes of hair dye.

He squints at the box of the only black dye he can find marked as ‘temporary.’ It says it holds through five washes, but given the price on it, Dabi’ll give it maybe three before it starts really fading out. He brings two boxes of the dye and a pack of medical masks over to the front desk, well aware both of how damn suspicious this purchase looks and how little cashiers are paid to give a shit.

The cashier pops her gum as she scans his items and doesn’t even blink. Oh, to have the thousand-yard stare of a retail worker.

By the time he leaves the store, it’s safe to assume that Natsuo knows he’s gone. Odds are that he’s either already passed this way or is looking for Dabi in entirely the wrong direction. Still, Dabi keeps half an eye out for him, because this is clearly not Dabi’s lucky day. It’s a good thing that Dabi is heading for the last place Natsuo would expect him to go: the Todoroki house.

He won’t call it home.

Several years of reckless teenage rebellion put themselves to good use: Dabi know where all the creaky floorboards are, he knows how to get in without a key, and he knows exactly how long to pause, utterly silent, before he determines that Endeavor isn’t here.

Dabi has no idea what he’ll do if Endeavor shows up before he gets the hell out of dodge, but that, like a million other potential issues coming closer every moment, is a problem for a hypothetical future Dabi.

Fuyumi’s closet is a lot messier than he remembers. He knows so little about how she’s changed since they were fifteen, other than that girlfriend of hers. What does she even do now? He should have asked Natsuo—and then he almost knocks over a box of drawings and written pages clearly created by children, and he answers his own question: teacher.

It’s just as well Dabi isn’t hanging around and has no intention of trying to actually lead her life for a week, because him in a classroom full of kids would be an abject disaster.

He hunts down a backpack on an upper shelf in the closet and empties it onto her bed before refilling it with a week’s worth of clothes that Dabi is actually willing to wear. The pastels are easy to dismiss, but Fuyumi also has way too much kahki and not nearly enough black in the pants department. Why. Ugh, he’ll settle for regular jeans for a few days if he has to.

There aren’t enough black tops, either, but Dabi still squints at the lone black tank-top Fuyumi owns for a good few minutes before gingerly setting it aside. He can’t actually tell from a hanger how low that neckline goes and he has no intention of experimenting to find out. He’ll settle for the t-shirts and long-sleeved shirts.

There’s only a total of four black tops. He gives up and adds a few earth-toned shirts to the pile—better than pastel, at least.

Then it’s socks, a pair of gloves if he needs to avoid fingerprints, her deodorant, thankfully plain underwear, and… Dabi squints suspiciously at her underwear drawer. Then down at his chest.

He risks turning her phone back on for two quick minutes just so he can google how many times a person can wear a bra in a row, because good god he has never needed nor wanted to know that before in his life, and cannot imagine guessing something like that accurately. Dabi squints dubiously at the answer he gets, but—well, what the hell would he know about it? He gingerly adds another bra to the bag. If he’s wrong, Fuyumi can deal with this shit when he actually finds her.

Then the packing’s done, and it’s time for the part that’s bound to be even worse. But—it’ll be fine. He and Fuyumi are siblings. They’re twins. And it’s not like Dabi’s being a perv, he’s gay, and he’s just being practical, anyway. He can’t go skulking around the streets he intends to go down looking like a primary school teacher.

Dabi takes a deep breath, braces himself, and changes into into black slacks and a black turtleneck as fast as he physically can.

He shudders a little. He misses his body already, staples and all.

He picks up a dark blue hoodie and pulls that on over his head, puts up the hood, hooks a medical mask around his ears. It’s stuffy, but at least is isn’t overwhelmingly warm; Fuyumi’s quirk takes care of that. He slings the packed backpack on over his shoulder and sneaks out the back, since nobody’s home yet and that will be less suspicious to any potential witnesses than taking the window would be.

Last stop, right on the edge of the run-down parts of town that most heroes don’t bother patrolling: a shabby convenience store where no one asks pointed questions and doesn’t care if someone locks themselves in the bathroom for a concerningly long time.

Dabi almost walks straight into the men’s restroom before he remembers to check himself. He hesitates, almost going in anyway, and then sighs. He’ll be less conspicuous in the women’s restroom, and it can’t be that different. All he needs is a sink, anyway. He walks in to the other restroom, pulls off his hoodie, takes the box of dye out of his backpack, and eyes his reflection in the mirror.

Fuyumi isn’t going to like this. But that’s why he bought temporary dye, and he’s doing her a favor by not bleaching out the crimson streaks first, even if he really should. He has to be unrecognizable, not just to casual passerbies who won’t see him except for a couple seconds out of the corner of their eye, but to the League, who will undoubtably have a hundred questions and whose sense of boundaries are a little sketchy on a good day. But between the dye, a medical mask, different clothes, and a different posture, no one should recognize him as a Todoroki, provided Fuyumi hasn’t already spilled her guts.

Dabi grimaces and leans down to get his hair wet. He’s already been gone too long, and this is going to be a fucking disaster, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do everything he can to avoid the biggest potential problems.

Fuyumi tries not to think too hard about where all the bloodstains came from as she finishes putting the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink back together. It’s frighteningly comprehensive, but that doesn’t surprise her at this point—she just organized their medicine cabinet, and she knows at least one of those hand-written labels on a few of the pill bottles are for controlled substances. She has no intention of digging any deeper, well aware that she would probably regret knowing what people who expect to get stabbed every once in a while keep on hand for painkillers.

There’s a shuffle and a murmur of surprise from the living room as the main door to the base opens and closes. Fuyumi starts listening automatically despite herself.

“Hey! Hope I’m not late!” That’s a new voice, but one she knows she’s heard before. Fuyumi runs through her mental list of League members, but she didn’t think they were missing anyone. Even if they were, she’s not sure why they would sound so familiar. “I picked up some fried chicken on the way because your idea of meal options are kind of sad—“

Recognition clicks. Fuyumi slowly puts down the first aid kit.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Shigaraki demands.

“Uh, there’s a meeting?” says the Number Two Hero, Hawks. “Did you cancel it without telling me?”

“Alright, who the hell forgot to text him?” Shigaraki sounds pissed.

“All of us?” Compress suggests. “To be fair, contacting him is usually Dabi’s job.”

“Text me? What about?”

Fuyumi takes this as her cue to yank open the bathroom door and assess the situation herself. Unfortunately, it does appear to be Hawks standing in the middle of the living room: he has the right windswept hair, the right self-assured smirk, and of course the unmistakable wings. He’s even still in his Hero uniform.

Hawks turns to Fuyumi and doesn’t look at all perturbed at the sight of a villain who has tried to kill multiple Heroes multiple times. In fact—he checks her out. Which means he’s checking the villain Dabi out. Fuyumi already desperately wanted to go home but at this point her standards are low enough that she will also accept being literally anywhere but here.

“Hey Dabs,” Hawks says with a grin, eyes sparkling with humor. “What did you forget to tell me this time?”

He has a nickname for her brother. For Dabi. Fuyumi can’t even formulate a response for him, so instead she looks to the other League members. “What,” she enunciates carefully, “the fuck?”

“I thought you didn’t swear,” Spinner says warily.

“I am making an exception,” she hisses at him. “Because, and I reiterate this.” She shoves her hands in Hawks’ direction, encompassing the absurdity of the situation and also every one of the hundred questions she suddenly has. “What! The! Fuck!”

“What, what’s going on?” Hawks asks, exhibiting the astounding intelligence of a hero in the top ten, clearly thrown by getting yelled at by someone he’s supposed to know. Fuyumi doesn’t know if she can actually start vibrating in incredulous rage, but she gives it her best shot.

“That’s not Dabi,” Shigaraki says bluntly. “He got body-swapped with his civilian twin sister.”

“He has a twin sister?” Hawks looks almost offended that he didn’t know this before—and then the rest of the sentence processes and his face drops before going frighteningly blank. “Did you say civilian?”

“Good luck threatening her into silence, we still don’t know her name,” Shigaraki gripes. “We’re calling her Ihai for now.” Hawks stares at him in horror, but Shigaraki doesn’t look up from his phone game.

Fuyumi breathes in deep, counts to ten, and then lets it go. She’s tempted to hold it longer, like until she passes out and can pretend none of this is happening, but sadly she is probably going to be the one dealing with the concussion that would cause, so she bravely resists the urge. “I don’t even want to know,” she finally decides. Hawks. In the League of Villains. She genuinely has no idea how to handle this, and at this point the only answer to that is… not to, apparently. “The first aid kit is organized, and if you get blood in it again just remember you’ll have to clean it yourselves next time. I’m just… going to be in the kitchen, pretending that none of you are completely insane, and doing something I can actually cope with right now.”

She marches through the living room, stubbornly ignoring the existence of everyone in the room, and firmly shuts the door behind her before heading toward where the mixing bowls are stored. If she cooks, she can just cook, and not have to deal with bloodstains or dust or Heroes who are on much friendlier terms with a pack of villains than they have any reason to be.

It takes all of a minute for a certain annoying traitor bird to slip into the kitchen after her with a charming grin that’s only a little forced around the edges. “Hey, uh—Ihai, was it? I realize this is probably a bit of a shock—“

Fuyumi straightens up and slams the mixing bowl on the counter. “Hawks, is it true that you don’t actually feel the pain of your feathers being destroyed?”

Hawks stumbles over his words and stalls out. “…Yes?”

“Good.” Fuyumi clasps her hands together and smiles until she feels the staples start to pull at her cheeks. “Because I’d hate to hurt anyone, but if you aren’t out of this kitchen in the next ten seconds, I’m lighting every one of your feathers on fire.”

Friendly expression frozen on his face, Hawks wordlessly slinks out of the kitchen. Fuyumi nods to herself, mollified, and starts examining the ingredients in the cupboard for ideas.

“…That was terrifying,” Hawks says blankly, with a door safely between him and the woman wearing Dabi’s body. “She’s a civilian, isn’t she? Why is she terrifying?”

“I think the stress might be getting to her,” Compress says delicately.

Shigaraki snorts, still playing that stupid game instead of helping Hawks do damage control. “She’s Dabi’s sister, we should’ve known she’d eventually snap.”

“Took all of four and a half hours,” Spinner mutters.

“What’s she in the kitchen for, though? Didn’t she already clean it? She probably did a terrible job,” Twice says.

“A thousand yen says she’s a stress baker,” Spinner says.

“No bet,” Compress sighs.

Dabi’s voice—or rather, Ihai’s—comes through the kitchen door, frazzled rather than terrifyingly calm as it had been a few moments ago. “Does anyone have allergies or other dietary restrictions?”

Hawks gives the rest of the League an horrified look he only hopes can express half of the incredulity he’s feeling right now. Dabi has a twin sister? Weird, but fine. She’s a civilian? That lies somewhere between inconvenient and disastrous, but it’s not actually surprising. But baking?

This is the sort of psychological warfare he just wasn’t prepared for when going into this mission.

“She cleaned the whole house in three hours,” Spinner hisses. “She’s a menace, and she doesn’t even do anything illegal.” He looks haunted; Hawks shoots a glance at Twice, but Twice just nods solemnly in agreement, which clears up absolutely nothing.

Compress clears his throat and calls to the kitchen, “No, Ihai dear, I’m sure whatever you make will be delicious. We appreciate your concern!”

Silence. No angry muttering, no passive aggressive insults. Really, really not Dabi. Hawks has no idea what to do with that information, but amuses himself with the mental image of Dabi skulking around in a woman’s body and scowling at everything that moves even vaguely in his direction. He wonders if Dabi can still set things on fire—what’s Ihai’s quirk, anyway?

He can work with this. He can. He just needs to be a little more flexible than usual until he figures out all the nuances of what’s going on.

Hawks goes to sit down and abruptly stops. “Wait,” he says, frowning as he looks over the living room one more time. “What happened to the other couch?”

Chapter Text

All the mixing bowls and utensils are cleaned and drying, there’s Crème Brûlée chilling in the refrigerator as an experiment, and the sesame cookies have cooled down to edible temperatures—Fuyumi’s tongue still hurts from when she tried to taste-test one and forgot she isn’t heat-resistant at the moment, but at least she’d remembered to use oven mitts to take the pan out of the oven. She shovels the cookies onto a plate, then stares at the door for a long moment trying to decide if she is now capable of looking Hawks in the eye without throwing the plate in his face. She comes up with a solid probably, so it should be safe to leave the kitchen.

Spinner and Twice have apparently run off sometime in the last hour and a half, but unfortunately the others are still there—what do villains usually do with all their free time, usually?—and Hawks is still there, perched on the arm of a couch. Fuyumi has the sudden, intense urge to push him off, and wonders if Touya’s obnoxiousness is somehow inherent to his body, or if she’s really having that bad of a day.

Scratch that, it’s definitely that it’s a terrible day. She can’t believe the idiot is off and consorting with villains. She’s seen him get six feathers caught in a blender and whine about it to Rumi, he just doesn’t seem like villain material. But Fuyumi reluctantly supposes that if anyone should have been able to predict his sudden moral decay, it would probably be his best friend, who Fuyumi is currently dating, and Rumi clearly didn’t see it coming either.

Fuyumi puts the plate on the coffee table. The poor plate is immediately subjected to four suspicious looks.

“It’s not poisoned?” Shigaraki says slowly.

She has had it up to here with these villainous lunatics. “Why would I poison it?” she demands. She realizes the obvious answer a moment later, and puts a hand over her eyes as she adds, “Better question, why would I know how to poison baked goods?”

“I thought that was part of learning how to cook?” Shigaraki says in confusion.

Compress and Hawks turn to join her in staring at Shigaraki in consternation and no small measure of alarm. “I realize you’re already banned from helping with the meals for lack of skill,” Compress says delicately, “but I think we may need to extend that ban to forbid drink preparation as well.”

Himiko giggles at them. “Shiggy is terrible at making tea, anyway!” She reaches for the plate to dig a sesame cookie out of the middle.

“I am not—hey, drop that, we still don’t know it’s not poisoned!“ Shigaraki objects.

“Then Ihai can just eat one,” Himiko points out. She holds the cookie out for Fuyumi instead of trying to eat it herself. “If she refuses then we can throw them away, but if she eats it then we know we’re safe. Right?”

The others look thoughtful. Fuyumi rolls her eyes, but she takes the perfectly normal, not-poisoned cookie from Himiko and takes a decisive bite. “Ta-da!” she deadpans. “Not poisoned.”

“Technically,” Shigaraki says, “she’s still in Dabi’s body, so she could be poisoning all of us, including him.”

Fuyumi is going to strangle someone, and that someone is going to be Shigaraki Tomura. No jury would convict her. “I am currently in Dabi’s body, and I don’t know when I’ll be leaving,” she reminds him. He does not look like he considers this a compelling argument; she shakes her head and simply gives up. “Eat them or don’t, I don’t actually care. Feedback would be nice if you do, I got that recipe off the internet. Also, who stocks your cabinets? They’re filled out with actual, useful ingredients, and from the sound of it, none of you can cook.”

“Kurogiri used to stock the cabinets, but he was captured, I’m afraid,” Compress says wistfully. “But! As a matter of fact, Dabi can cook quite well. I’m afraid we depend on him rather a lot when it comes to eating anything other than take-out.”

“He makes really good curry,” Toga adds helpfully.

That gives Fuyumi pause. “…The green curry or the orange curry?”

Toga blinks at her. “The orange one?”

“Okay.” Fuyumi thinks about that, and nods. “That’s probably the recipe we learned together, so if someone is willing to go shopping I can make that.” It’s been ten years, so Touya might have tweaked it, but—it was Mom’s recipe, and they learned it together. He probably hadn’t. She hopes he hadn’t. “I can make homemade ice cream mochi, too, if someone picks up some more rice flour and a few flavors of ice cream. Strawberry and green tea, maybe? I’m… assuming no one wants me to go to the grocery store, or to leave the house in general.”

“You are extremely recognizable,” Compress points out, not quite apologetic.

Fuyumi touches her cheek, fingers brushing against the staples there, and can’t do much else but nod. Though she has to wonder… “Who isn’t recognizable, around here?”

“I can steal someone’s blood,” Toga suggests. “Then I’m really not recognizable.”

“Please don’t do that,” Fuyumi says faintly.

Compress coughs. “Well, I can go, if I remove my mask and top hat… sometimes Twice can go… I’m convinced that Shigaraki could go without raising the alarm if we got him cleaned up a little—“

“Cleaned up?” Shigaraki demands, insulted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“And Hawks can always detach his feathers to hide his wings, which would throw off almost all of his fans!” Compress finishes brightly, determinedly avoiding Shigaraki’s confused outrage.

Hawks doesn’t pipe up in support or defiance of this statement. Fuyumi’s never heard him be quiet for this long; she eyes him suspiciously. He looks… wilted. “You’re suspiciously quiet. Nothing to add?”

Hawks eyes her right back, wary. His wings are half-curled around his shoulders and right up against his ears. “…Are you going to yell at me again?”

“I didn’t even yell.”

His wings mantle up a little higher, and Fuyumi finally identifies the posture as stress. She’d feel guilty, normally—but she thinks in this case it’s safe to say that he brought it upon himself, and considering his sudden descent into villainy, she’s also not going to feel guilty about maybe twisting the knife a bit.

She folds her arms, levels him with her best big sister stare, and puts on her teacher voice. “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

Shigaraki snickers, and she swears she hears Compress join in, but it’s a little hard to tell over Himiko’s loud cackle. Hawks looks like he wants to sink into the couch and disappear, but considering how many of Fuyumi’s current problems that would solve, she would welcome it.

The shadows are starting to stretch into evening when Dabi turns down a narrow, out-of-the-way street and finds some scummy lowlife blocking his way. He’s surprisingly tall, missing two teeth, and grinning like an absolute asshole. He’s barely a mile from the League’s base and doesn’t have time for this, but the Scumbag doesn’t have to take a step before Dabi is already automatically scoping out how much distant he’d need to torch him. Habit, what can he say?

“Hey, sweetheart,” Scumbag calls. “I don’t think this is the part of town a girl like you should be wandering around alone. Something could happen.”

Dabi stares. Is he stupid? No one walks up to fucking Dabi and calls him—

Ah. Right.  It should not be this easy to constantly forget what body he’s wearing, but Dabi is going to go ahead and blame the lack of staples constantly pulling at his skin for the blissful ability to forget. He looks like a chick right now, and while he has zero opinion to offer on the relative attractiveness of woman in general and certainly not on his sister, he doesn’t think Scumbag here has particularly exacting standards anyway.

It’s still weird and unsettling, and it takes Dabi a moment to find any way to respond. “Uh. No thanks?”

…Because that’s intimidating, in Fuyumi’s voice. This is gonna be a whole thing, isn’t it.

Scumbag is still grinning. That’s just… fucking creepy. It’d be creepy on a good day, but now he’s in Fuyumi’s body, and oh god, this is why he doesn’t talk to any of his siblings anymore: when anyone at all fucks with them, he gets the absolutely irresistible urge to throw down, and that didn’t pan out so well against Endeavor.

Of course, Scumbag here isn’t exactly Pro Hero quality.

Scumbag comes at him with a knife and that lecherous grin and Dabi doesn’t even flinch before setting him on fire—trying to set him on fire, fuck—Fuyumi’s quirk activates instead, and Dabi dives to the side before spinning back to face Scumbag.

And stares at the profile of a the ugliest ice statue he’s ever seen in his life.

Well. Not exactly an ice statue. Scumbag’s clearly frozen, though, frosted over like some sort of fucked up sugary pastry. Dabi squints at it, dubious, and reaches out to poke the wannabe rapist in morbid curiosity. He hisses at the cold, shaking out his finger. Yep, definitely frozen.

…He’s gonna have to do something about this, isn’t he. The alleyway’s still empty, for now, but obvious evidence of quirk usage is not how one keeps a low profile.

Ugh. Fire might be flashier overall, but it’s so much easier to clean up. It’s a good thing he brought those gloves, because not only does he not want to risk fingerprints anywhere, Fuyumi’s lack of cold resistance would be really frustrating otherwise. Dabi purses his lips and stares at the Scumbag Statue. He really is obnoxiously tall—wait, no he isn’t, Fuyumi’s just fucking short.

This is going to be a pain in the ass.

It takes him almost twenty minutes to haul Scumbag over to a dumpster and awkwardly lift him over the lip of it—twenty minutes and a lot of huffing and puffing. Scumbag still frozen solid when Dabi can finally slam the dumpster lid shut and slump against the side, which is seriously inconvenient on the evidence front. It’d be so useful to know how to unfreeze shit right now, but that might be a bad idea anyway. There’s all those articles he vaguely remembers about how people can survive being cryogenically frozen, if only in specific circumstances that Dabi knows fuck all about, and he doesn’t have a knife on him if the guy somehow survives. Hell of an oversight, but it’s not like he’s used to being even sort of disarmed. He could take Scumbag’s knife, but—no, actually, he can’t; it got frozen along with the rest of him, and he’s not in the mood to lose fingers to frostbite.

Well, fuck. He hopes he didn’t just give Fuyumi a criminal record—she’s going to be mad enough at him as it is. But he was careful about fingerprints, ice quirks aren’t exactly rare, and Scumbag didn’t seem like the kind of man who would be missed for a good long while. It’s fine.

Dabi goes on his way whistling. He decides to avoid any other particularly bad streets he’d usually take, though.

Twice goes shopping according to Fuyumi’s very specific list, and Shigaraki spends a solid four minutes before letting him leave just listing what he is not allowed to buy—the list is mostly snacks, and reading it off makes Himiko pout. Fuyumi can smell a story there, but it’s self-explanatory enough that she doesn’t bother asking.

Besides, she has more baking to do.

The League seems content to ignore her, for now, whether for fear that she’s going to poison the next batch of baked goods, concern that she’s going to set them all on fire, or an apparent lack of regard for either option. She revels in the temporary peace, and when Twice gets back and she directs him where to put all of the groceries. He’s quite sweet, or at least his main personality is—Fuyumi wouldn’t want to meet his secondary in a dark alley, but frankly there’s no one in this house she would want to meet down a dark alley.

The peace is broken by a pounding knock on the door.

She stiffens. Twice opens the door into the living room and pokes his head out. “Boss, should I get that?”

“You’re just… just going to open the door?” Fuyumi asks in alarm. That seems like a terrible policy for an infamous group of villains—but then again, she doesn’t exactly get the impression that any of them are evil masterminds.

“Nah,” Shigaraki says casually. “Twice’ll have a clone do it.” Fuyumi gives him a sideways look of question, even as Twice obligingly forms a clone of himself and they immediately start arguing over who’s actually supposed to open the door. “Twice isn’t too recognizable, compared to some of the rest of us, and if he gets stabbed his clone’ll just dissolve,” Shigaraki explains.

“Ha!” Twice says—presumably the original Twice. “See, you have to open the door, boss says! Go and get stabbed, asshole.”

The Twice clone flips off his original, but he shuffles over to the door, opening it just a crack. “Hellooooooo?”

“If my twin managed to barbecue my body in the past six hours and none of you intervened, I’m stabbing you all in your sleep,” says a female voice very flatly.

“I think it’s Dabi!” Twice calls to the rest of them, very unnecessarily.

Fuyumi’s heart trips over in her chest. For all that she’s sort of acclimatizing to the fact that Touya is Dabi—and who is she kidding, she’s not acclimated at all—she is definitely not prepared to see her twin in person. In her person? Face to face, she means. She has no idea how she’s going to react to seeing someone else wearing her body, even if it’s her own long-lost twin. She has no idea how he’s going to react to seeing her.

And, she realizes with an unpleasant sinking feeling, Hawks is still in the room. Hawks, whose best friend she’s been dating for months. Hawks, who is going to recognize her in a heartbeat even if none of the others do. This whole house of cards is only moments from crashing down, and she’s frozen, only able to watch for the inevitable oncoming train—

Except, she realizes, as her villainous asshole of a twin brother walks in wearing her body, Hawks isn’t going to recognize her at all.

“What did you do to my hair?”

Chapter Text

“It’s temporary dye,” Dabi says hastily, because holy shit he forgot what Fuyumi was like when she was mad. It’s weird, staring at his own face, watching his own cheek bleeding because she popped the staple out by shouting. He hopes she doesn’t set something on fire—he’s really not sure he trusts his ability to put it out, after his quirk display in the alleyway. “It’ll be gone after a couple washes.”

Or at least faded; you can never tell, with the cheaper brands. It’s not permanent, is what he’s saying, and he did the best with what he had—getting back here ASAP was a lot more important. He can only hope they don’t already know his identity. As long as Fuyumi has the sense God gave a squirrel and kept her cards close to her chest, they should be fine, but after meeting her girlfriend, Dabi isn’t sure he trusts her common sense any more than he trusts her taste in partners.

“It had better be!”

Dabi rolls his eyes and shoulders past Twice’s double. “Hey, at least I didn’t bleach it first,” he says. “Really, you should be grateful.”

He should probably have expected the throw pillow that comes flying in his direction. Dabi ducks on instinct, and Twice’s clone makes a cut short gahhk sound as he’s hit in the face and stumbles into the wall.

“Oi, what the hell?” He stands back up to his full height—a grand total of 5’3” at the moment, but hey, can’t have everything in life—to glare at Fuyumi, as well as the rest of the League of assholes who are looking between them in bemusement like this is some sort of reality show-turned-tennis match.

That’s bad enough, but then his eyes settle on Hawks, who should not be here, and who rightfully looks like a deer in the headlights. When Dabi warily looks back to Fuyumi, her glare is a lot more potent than he expected it to be, especially filtered through his own fucked up face.

“Oh, yeah, I have questions,” she says, words dripping with sugary poison. “Starting with the staples and wrapping all the way back around to the oversized chicken!” She brandishes an arm towards said chicken, who mostly looks resigned to his fate at this point. To be fair, even when she was fifteen, getting chewed out by Fuyumi would do that to a person. “I have been meeting all sorts of people today, Dabi, and honestly I would really, really like to stop.”

“Well, at least we can agree on that.”

“Oh, have you been meeting people you’d rather not? Our brother, perhaps? I’m pretty sure the rest of my associates—“

“I met your fuckin’ girlfriend, and I am beyond done with today after that,” Dabi snaps. “N—little bro was there long enough to tell her I wasn’t you, but also: I had. To meet. Your girlfriend. Your taste sucks, Y—“ Fuck, he can’t call her Yumi, not if she hasn’t already told them her first name. “—you idiot.”

Fuyumi scoffs. “My girlfriend is amazing and I won’t stand for slander. In fact, I choose to take your disapproval as a sign I’m doing something right. Also, how did you run into her? She’s…” She flounders, clearly searching for an appropriate euphemism for on her Hero patrol that she can actually say around a bunch of villains. “…busy.”

“It wasn’t planned,” Dabi says in disgust. He stalks over to the couch and glares at Compress until he scoots over enough to let Dabi sit his ass on the opposite arm of the couch from Hawks and put his feet up on the cushion. Compress shoots him a dirty look; Dabi remains unrepentant. His shoe has nothing worse than anything else this couch has seen before, honestly. “She saw me, thought I was you, and dropped by to say hi. Bitch snuck up on me, I may or may not have lateral dropped her on reflex.”

Fuyumi frowns at him, looking lost. “Lateral dropped?”

“A lateral drop is a wrestling move,” Compress supplies readily. “Sort of like a suplex, which you’ve probably heard of? Ah—I’m sure your girlfriend is fine, it isn’t harmful, really—”

Fuyumi’s face goes blank as she continues to stare at Dabi. He’ll confess that he’s trying to get her a little mad, a little off-balance, if only so they can focus on the actual issue rather than the mortifying clusterfuck that has been his day, but he realizes he went about it in exactly the wrong way.

A grin tugs at Fuyumi’s mouth. Dabi understands with a jolt of clarity that everyone who mocks him about the staples is right—he looks like an asshole when he smirks. “You mean you tried to lateral drop her,” Fuyumi says slyly.

Dabi hates his entire life. “Shut the fuck up, you have no muscle definition.”

Fuyumi hums. “I’m sure that’s the problem here. …She laughed at you, didn’t she?”

Dabi glowers. “She’s a bitch.”

Fuyumi laughs at him. Laughs. At. Him. “I hope,” she says, much more cheerful than she was two minutes ago, “that your little encounter was excruciatingly uncomfortable for you.”

She’s talking about the whole Hero thing they’re carefully leaving out in front of the League, but Dabi decides then and there that he will to anything in his power to prevent her from learning about the fucking princess carry. “Well, you got your fucking wish, and if I never see her again it’ll be too soon,” he snaps.

Fuyumi rolls her eyes. There’s a delicate ding from what Dabi identifies as the kitchen timer, and she straightens up, suddenly attentive. “I’ll be right back,” she tells the room the large, and disappears into the kitchen.

Dabi is still trying to process that when Spinner pokes his head into the room. Great, a full head count and a full audience: just what he wanted. “I heard someone new. Is Dabi back?”

Toga nods very quickly. “They were arguing, did you hear them? They’re just like real siblings.”

Dabi would like to snap that that would be because they are real siblings, but frankly he has other priorities. Like—“What the hell is she doing in the kitchen?”

Everyone immediately looks to Compress. Considering that is how they tend to react to information that’s going to make Shigaraki suddenly want to decay things, Dabi is not exactly reassured.

“She’s been stress baking,” Compress says grandly, gesturing to the piled-up plates of cookies and brownies on the table. “And Twice went out to get the ingredients for your orange curry recipe, she said she knows it? So soon she’ll be stress cooking, I suppose…”

One question answered and about twenty more to ask. Dabi doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this. “Stress baking? And you’re eating it? Did none of you consider that she might have poisoned it?”

“Would she?” Compress asks curiously.

“You’re all a bunch of paranoid psychopaths,” Fuyumi calls through the closed kitchen door. “Most people don’t know anything about poison, I hope you realize.”

Dabi pauses, gauging the League’s reaction to that—mostly shrugs, as it turns out. This whole exchange doesn’t say good things about Fuyumi’s functional sense of self-preservation, but Dabi has a niggling suspicion that it also doesn’t say good things about them.

“No, she wouldn’t,” Dabi concedes, “but you guys still really should have checked.”

“We did!” Toga assures him. “I asked her to eat one of the cookies and she thought we were being silly about it but she did anyway. These are safe. You should have one!”

She shoves a sesame cookie in his face and he bats her hand away. He doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of eating while guarding his current face. “Maybe later. Oh—and what the fuck happened to the other couch?” There really isn’t room for all of them on the one they’re currently crammed onto; Toga is perched on an end table that is definitely not meant to hold her, and Spinner is hovering awkwardly like he can’t decide between leaning against the wall or just standing. “Did Shigaraki freak out again?”

“Fuck you, no.” Shigaraki actually removes a hand from his phone just to flip Dabi off, which Dabi is counting as a small victory. “When your sister first swapped, we thought you were having a bad trip or something. Then she saw me, screamed, fell off the couch, and lit it on fire. I had to dust it so it didn’t light the whole fucking base up.”

“Do we have a video of that?” Spinner says, with way too much interest.

“Spinner,” Dabi says levelly, “I’m gonna need you to remember that this shit isn’t permanent, and one day soon I will be very capable of crisping you again.” He takes satisfaction in Spinner’s cringe, and eyes Shigaraki again. “Please tell me she hasn’t set anything else on fire.”

“She threatened to set me on fire,” Hawks offers.

Dabi squints at him. “Bullshit. She’s way too soft to do that on purpose.”

“I mean, she did ask me if I felt pain when my feathers were destroyed, and then she said she didn’t want to hurt anyone, and then smiled really really wide and threatened to set me on fire. So. I was… convinced.” Hawks looks almost as disturbed as Dabi feels. Fuyumi did that? Fuyumi? Damn. Still waters indeed. Hawks shrugs sheepishly and admits, “I think seeing me here was kind of the end of her rope. She started stress baking right after and has barely come out of the kitchen since, and I’m sure as hell not going in there.”

“Wow, you’re a fucking coward. Color me surprised.”

“Look, you want me functional on a general basis, but I am pretty sure your sister wants exactly the opposite.”

“I stand by by what I said.” Dabi frowns at the room in general, because he’s slowly realizing it’s not just the missing couch throwing him off. “What the fuck happened to the carpet? It’s, like, a solid color now?”

“Apparently that was dust from Shigaraki’s quirk,” Compress says delicately. “Your sister also stress cleans.”

“I helped!” Twice announces.

Dabi hopes like hell Fuyumi hadn’t worn an apron, because if there’s pictures he’s going to be obligated to roast someone for it. Wait, do they even have an apron in the base? He might be safe. Might. “Stress baking, stress cleaning—what the fuck did you guys do? She’s not usually… high-strung.” She’s always been more mentally stable than their mother, at the very least.

Dabi might have a skewed idea of what constitutes ‘high-strung,’ actually.

“Gee, I wonder why I would be stressed.” Fuyumi comes out of the kitchen holding a plate of cupcakes, hip-checking the door with the sort of restrained violence that sends it banging into the wall next to it. Dabi is kind of impressed she managed to make that look violent, especially while holding cupcakes. “It’s not like I wound up in a villainous lair with absolutely zero warning or anything. Anyway, the cupcakes aren’t poisoned either, and if we’re going to have the whole conversation who exactly I would be poisoning by testing it again, you might as well let… Dabi over here eat one instead.”

“Pass,” Dabi says. The cupcakes look good, but he more important things to worry about, like hiding his face. “I’m not going to try to eat that through a mask. Hey—“ He jerks his chin at Fuyumi, not willing to give her any sort of nickname of his own just yet. “You seem to be settling in, for… some value of settling.” He eyes the baked goods dubiously. “Did you give these idiots any identifying information?”

“Obviously not.”

“Including your quirk?”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes. “I was including that under the obviously.”

Dabi nods, more relieved than he’s willing to show. If she’d told them her last name, they’d have been on him like fucking piranhas the second he got through the door, but any clue she might have given them could’ve led to them figuring it out later. He still can’t take off the mask, but at least his identity’s still safe for now. “So what name are you using?” It had better not be Frostbite, or Snowflake, or whatever stupid ice-themed name he knows went through her head, that counts as identifying information—

Fuyumi puts the cupcakes down on the coffee table and gives him a long, unreadable look. “Ihai,” she says shortly. “You know, the stuff ‘Cremation’ leaves behind.”

Funny how, even without her quirk, Fuyumi can make a whole room freeze solid.

By the time Dabi has managed to unfreeze, Fuyumi is back in the kitchen, and he hesitates for a long, damning moment over whether to go after her or run the fuck away. He knows he can’t, not when that would leave her with the League, but he wants to.

He thought he’d managed to escape the awkward, inconvenient emotions when he ditched Natsuo. He thought the hard part was getting here unseen. There weren’t any awful conversations he had to have, before, because he had a ready-made mask to wear in front of Natsuo and even Miruko. They couldn’t see his scars; they hadn’t really known anything about where he went or why he stayed gone; they didn’t know him because Touya doesn’t exist anymore, and he could keep repeating that to himself until he convinced himself it was true. But it’s different with Fuyumi, and he doesn’t know why he didn’t see that coming.

It’s always different with Fuyumi.

“I’m gonna be right back,” he says awkwardly into the frozen silence, and follows his sister into the kitchen.

Fuyumi angrily pulls a mixing bowl and the rice flour out of the cupboard to start putting together the mochi. She’ll have to scoop out all the little balls of ice cream, and then let it chill for hours before it’s ready to eat, so it won’t even be done until late tonight or tomorrow morning, but that’s fine. Nothing’s ever done when she wants it, and nothing’s ever where she last looked for it, so at this point it’s not like she can be surprised—

She should really just start cooking the curry, but there’s a lot of chopping to be done for that, and she isn’t sure she trusts herself with a knife right now.

The door creaks open, and Touya ghosts silently into the kitchen. Fuyumi firmly ignores him. She hadn’t meant to say that back in the living room, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t mean it. With her breath in his lungs and his life where she didn’t know he had one, she’s been wearing down like a frayed thread for hours now, and frayed threads—well, they snap.

She’s been fraying for a lot longer than a few hours, if she’s being honest.

“Hey, Fu—Ihai. Ihai.” Touya stops and sighs, frustrated. “Do I really have to call you that?”

“Do I have to call you Dabi?” Fuyumi retorts, short and clipped.

“It’s my name.”

He sounds so angry. Every word he’s said since he got here has sounded angry. “Why?” she says. Her voice sounds angry too, but more than that, it sounds cracked apart, a shattered teacup with edges that don’t quite fit together anymore. Why did you change?

“I had to—“ Touya looks back at the door and lowers his voice to an angry whisper. This is a terrible place to have such a personal conversation; the walls aren’t thick enough to hide them, but they’ll make do. They grew up with enough practice in keeping quiet. “I had to change it, and you know damn well why. And I didn’t mean—I wasn’t going to leave anything behind. I was… cremation. There wasn’t supposed to be anything left of me.”

“There was always going to be something left of you,” Fuyumi whispers. Touya looks away. “They gave us your ashes. What were they really?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I didn’t leave anything.”

“You left me.”

Touya pulls off the medical mask covering the lower half of his face in sharp, rough movements. Seeing her own face, her own mouth a sharp downward slash of frustration, is like looking in a mirror of all the expressions she’s buried too deep to find. “I was a little low on options. What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to come home!” Fuyumi’s eyes itch, burning with the start of tears, but her vision doesn’t blur.

“Look at me,” Touya hisses at her suddenly, grabbing her wrists and twisting them, exposing the angry, mottled purple of what she can only hope are grafts, the punctures of the staples. “Look at these scars. Do you think this was an accident? Where do you think they came from? Where could they possibly have come from?”

Fuyumi has spent ten years not knowing, and six hours unable to even think about it. They gave her his ashes, and there was only one quirk in the family that could burn that hot. But Touya isn’t ashes, he’s here, and that means—Fuyumi sobs, the burning in her eyes turning into pain.

“Do you think I didn’t know what would have happened to me if I went back?”

The pain spikes. Fuyumi jerks her hands out of his grip to press her fingers against her eyes. Her eyelids feel like sandpaper, and the burning isn’t abating. “Ow. Ow, what—” It comes out on another sob, and Fuyumi drops into a crouch, one hand braced against the lower cabinet doors.

“Oh, fuck, did you find the eye drops?”

“Eye drops?” Fuyumi manages. “What’s—what’s wrong with your eyes? They hurt.”

“They’re a saline solution, nothing special.” She feels Touya’s hands dig through the pockets on his own jacket, until his fingers close around something small. He braces a hand on her shoulder. “Just look up and keep your eyes open.”

She puts a hand over his and tilts her head up. Opening her eyes is an exercise in pain, but she waits, and trusts that he of all people would know how to fix this.

The eye drops make her blink reflexively, another scrape of sandpaper, but two drops each and her eyes stop burning. The relief that makes her release a shaky breath, but that breath just turns into a sob. Something drips down her cheek—the excesses saline solution, only pretending to be the tears she realizes should already have fallen.

“My tear ducts are melted shut,” Touya mutters, quick and quiet like that isn’t the most horrifying thing Fuyumi has heard in a day already full of too many horrifying revelations. He tucks the eye drops back in his coat—her coat—and pats the pocket, not quite meeting her eyes. “Unfortunately, it turns out you need those things for shit other than crying. If your eyes get itchy, just put a drop in each eye, it’ll keep ‘em moist and shit. Do it every few hours at the least.”

Great, she can’t cry. Fuyumi can feel the desire to—she can feel the vice around her lungs, the tightness in her throat, and the burning in her nose—but she can’t cry. Usually she hates to, usually she’d rather keep that pain private and quiet, but not even being able to hurts in a way she doesn’t know how to express.

“I don’t understand what happened to you,” Fuyumi confesses, voice thick. “I’m always in pain, now, and I, I heard you screaming that night, T—“ She stops. It isn’t safe for her to say his name.

“Dabi,” he corrects her, the most gentle she’s heard him since the day he died. “I’m Dabi now.”

Or maybe she can say his name. It just isn’t the one she remembers her brother by. “Dabi,” she whispers. “…I heard you.”

Dabi wipes away the saline on her cheek with a careful thumb, but he doesn’t say anything.

His hand is gentle on her cheek, fingers warm. Fuyumi can’t remember ever feeling someone’s body heat, even as a child, but now it’s a comfort she didn’t realize she was craving. She tilts her face into his hand. It startles him; she feels his fingers suddenly go cold, and he starts to pull away, but she grabs his wrist without having to look, pressing his hand against her cheek.

Cool, getting colder with nerves, and even if they’re going to have to have some seriously awkward conversations later if they don’t have them now, Fuyumi desperately needs an ice pack. “Ice me,” she says seriously.

Dabi looks at her like she’s lost her mind, which—okay, fair, but it’s all his own fault.

“You have my quirk right now,” she elaborates. “Ice my face.”

“What?” he whisper-shouts. “No. I’m not using your quirk in here—“

“Your staples hurt,” Fuyumi hisses back at him. “The icepacks in the freezer are useless, I can’t even feel them. I don’t know if I’d want to use them, anyway, considering they share space with the stack of frozen blood pouches.” She takes in a shaky breath. “Look. It’s been a really long, really awful day, and my face hurts. Please make it hurt just a little bit less.”

Dabi relents, and carefully lets the cold spider across one side of her face. Fuyumi sighs in relief, letting her hold on his wrist loosen as her skin cools and finally stops buzzing with that low, aching pain.

“I don’t want to call you Ihai,” Dabi confesses quietly.

I don’t want to call you Dabi, she wants to say, but she’s starting to think that isn’t fair of her. If it was ever just a code name, it isn’t anymore. “I know. But I think you’re going to have to, at least for now. Use it remember not to leave me behind this time.”

Dabi doesn’t respond, but he lifts his other hand to frame her face of his own volition and lets her own ice quirk bring her some measure of relief.

It’s not just the ache from the staples that eases. It’s the buzzing anxiety of the past several hours, wondering where her twin was and what was happening, wondering if she’d see the end of the day. She lets her eyes close, letting down her guard until she doesn’t feel anything but the cupboard against her back and her twin’s hands on her face. He’s careful with her quirk, and more than that, he’s gentle. That he can still be gentle with her… She knows that whatever led him here, it didn’t completely erase who he was.

Maybe it would be easier if it had, but Fuyumi isn’t looking for easy. And maybe she wasn’t looking for her twin, either, a decade after having lost him for good—but for better or for worse, she’s found him, and she’s not letting go again.

Chapter Text

When Dabi finally coaxes Fuyumi up off of the floor, he helps her finish off the mochi dough and put it in the fridge for safekeeping. It’s not like they’d be ready to eat in time for dinner, anyway, so she can make them later if she wants.

There’s a lot of things he could say about their little heart-to-heart, but he elects to say nothing at all. He’s not prepared for it right now, and he’s clearly going to have plenty of time for it over the next week, if these first twenty minutes are any indication of how the rest of their swap is going to go. Fuyumi is finally starting to look more settled and focused, and he has no intention of the assholes in the other room finding out what he looks like when he would be crying if only he could.

He starts helping her make curry, instead.

It’s a lot faster with two pairs of hands—well, three, sort of, in that Fuyumi lets Toga help them cut the vegetables and meat. It’s more than Dabi would usually let the little knife nut do, but at least Fuyumi doesn’t seem scared of her and also has the sense not to let her anywhere near the actual stove or the spices.

Compress follows Toga through the door, despite the fact that last time he was in the kitchen while Dabi was cooking curry, he accidentally dumped enough salt into the pot that not even Shigaraki would eat it. He pokes around asking leading questions and kibitzing their cooking until Dabi is about three seconds from hunting down a lighter to set him on fire in absence of his quirk, but Fuyumi puts her foot down and demands he either help or get the hell out of the kitchen.

Compress slinks sheepishly back out to the living room and Dabi grins to himself behind his mask. At least they don’t think Fuyumi’s a pushover.

When it’s ready, Dabi bullies Spinner into setting the table with a reminder that, in the absence of his fire, Dabi would have to get creative with his threats, and no one wants that. Spinner is still sulking and moving at a snail’s pace, but he is moving, and Dabi has way too much practice coralling these assholes—he’ll be done at just about the same time the curry is.

Compress gets a suspicious glare when he reenters the kitchen, but he’s radiating innocence and pointedly avoiding the pot, so Dabi doesn’t have to go after his fingers with a knife. Yet. “Ah, Dabi, I feel that you should be informed that Shigaraki is hereby banned from drink making in addition to his ban on meal preparation—“

“No shit,” Dabi says, confused why Compress feels the need to tell him this. “Have you tried his tea? There’s a reason I make you do it.”

Compress tilts his head. “…That would have been nice to know. This ban was implemented because he thinks poisoning is a necessary part of learning to cook.”

“I mean, he grew up a villain. That’s just fucking practical.”

“Please don’t make me regret letting you cook with me,” Fuyumi sighs from the stove. “Someone put a potholder on the table, I’m about to—ow.”

“Stop burning me, you idiot,” Dabi gripes, walking over to shoo his twin away from the curry. “How many times have you done that?”

“Oh, shush. This is the first time, I just forgot to let the cookies cool earlier before trying one—“

“Well, I have enough burns without you forgetting you’re not fireproof, so stop that.” Dabi pauses and then gives the curry pot a speculative look. “Can I seriously just pick the pot up without the handles, and it’ll just…”

“Barely feels warm,” Fuyumi assures him. “I’ll get the potholders.”

“Identity clue number one,” Toga announces. “Ihai is fireproof.”

Dabi rolls his eyes and smirks behind his mask. That’s one of the only clues they’ll find completely fucking useless—their jackass of a father had never bothered testing Fuyumi’s quirk enough to figure out that little gem, and Fuyumi wisely had not volunteered it. They and their mother are the only ones who know, unless she’s told their little brothers sometime in the last decade.

Still, he has a reputation to uphold. “No trying to guess. Everyone, sit down or I’m going to wind up dumping this shit over your head.”

“Can you reach that high?” Shigaraki asks.

Dabi resists the urge to dump it on him on purpose out of pettiness, but he’s outgrown the constant need to prove himself. Usually. “You got a complaint about my height, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Hey, Ihai, why are you so fucking short?”

“One of us had to be down-to-earth.”

Dabi scoffs and shoulders past a sniggering Shigaraki to put the curry on the table.

“Ihai’s taller than me!” Toga offers.

“You’re seventeen, you’ll grow,” Twice counters. “You’ll be a midget forever.”

“Is that a clue? That Ihai’s short?” Spinner asks.

“She’s 5’3”, that’s average height for a woman,” Hawks refutes, perched on his chair like he’s going to fly away any second. “Doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

“How do you know my height?” Fuyumi asks suspiciously.

“I have a good eye for detail.”

Fuck. Hawks is the one Dabi’s actually worried about having enough resources to figure it out, or even just the luck—he bumps elbows with Endeavor often enough to potentially catch on if either of them are unlucky enough to say the wrong thing. “What did I say about the speculation?”

“But we’ll get to see Ihai’s face when you take the mask off for dinner.” Toga claps her hands together and grins smugly at him. “Then maybe we’ll see her again later, and we’ll all know!”

Fuyumi looks briefly panicked. Amateur. Dabi sweeps a quelling glare around the table and says, “No, you won’t.”

Toga tips her head to the side curiously. “Then how are you going to eat?”

…Dabi has not thought it through that far quite yet, but he’ll figure something out. “Sit the hell down, all of you, you’re going to give me gray hair and I just dyed it.” Fuyumi twitches at the reminder, but the action draws Hawks’ and Spinner’s eyes and Dabi is absolutely willing to use her as a distraction. It’s for their mutual benefit, anyway.

“If you can take off your glasses, you can use the top of one of my masks and hide half of your face that way,” Twice offers. “Stay the hell away from my costume.”

“Thanks, I guess, but I need these glasses to see,” Dabi points out. “Speaking of—Ihai, your eyesight is fucking awful.”

“I don’t need to take that from a man who has staples in his face,” Fuyumi says firmly. “We all have our crosses to bear.”

As everyone starts in on the curry, Dabi is left to figure out how to protect his identity without looking like an idiot while trying to eat. He winds up leaving the mask on his face and just shoving it up and holding it there with a hand covering what the mask normally would. Fuyumi’s glasses keep it from going over his eyes, so while it’s obnoxious, it’s workable, and much better than the alternative.

“You look stupid with your hand over your mouth like that,” Spinner observes.

Dabi shuffles his chopsticks to be able to flip him off with the same hand. “Does my hand look stupid like this?”

“Oooh, you should paint your nails,” Toga says excitedly, reaching across the table to grab said hand and making his chopsticks drop to the table. Dabi rolls his eyes at her customary complete disregard for personal space. “We can have a girl’s night—“

“Not a fucking girl.”

“I meant a person’s night. Or something. You can paint them black!”

Dabi thinks about it for one lightning-fast second, but even if he wouldn’t mind having black nails—it’d be punk as fuck, in the absence of most of his usual accessories—he would never recover from having allowed Toga to win an argument. Especially not this argument. He pulls his hand away so he can pick up his chopsticks again. “No, fuck off.”

Toga pouts at him for a grand total of about two seconds before having a visible lightbulb moment and turning to Fuyumi with a grin. “Hey, Ihai—“

“Don’t you dare,” Dabi snaps. Then he remembers that telling Toga not to do something is next to useless unless you’re willing to back it up with force, and he glares at his sister instead. “You are not allowed to paint my nails.”

Fuyumi eyes him. Then her gaze wanders up to his hair—that is to say, her hair, which currently looks nothing like her hair at all. “It’ll be temporary,” she says sweetly, because siblings are the fucking worst.

Spinner snorts. Dabi flips him off again without looking.

“We still have an actual important discussion to have.” Shigaraki cuts through their banter like the wet blanket he always is when he plays at being a leader. “Dabi, why haven’t you fixed the quirk yet?”

Dabi grimaces and pokes at his curry. He’s surprised they haven’t asked until now, but he didn’t exactly have urgent news on the matter. “There’s two ways for the quirk to reverse. First one is getting Ihai, in my body, back to the kid and having her activate the quirk again. There are… obvious issues with that.”

“The fact that you’re a wanted criminal, and even if the kid doesn’t recognize you, no sane mother is going to send her child off alone and she definitely will?” Fuyumi suggests, dry as a desert.

“Yeah.”

“What’s option two?”

“…It wears off in a week or something.”

Fuyumi drops her chopsticks and her jaw. “A week? Or something?”

Dabi ignores the varied, incredulous reactions of the League and turns to Fuyumi to shift into placating mode, if only so she doesn’t actually set something on fire. Again. He already misses having more than one couch. “Hey, it’s fine. I know it sucks not having options, but the League isn’t really planning anything for the next week anyway—“

“I was planning things,” Fuyumi says, a little hysterically. “I have a girlfriend. I have a job. And for the record, you are absolutely forbidden from trying to perform my job, especially after what you did to my hair.”

Dabi rolls his eyes. “Believe me, I have no intention of trying to do your job.” He’s not good with small children on a good day; too used to terrifying them. Besides, Fuyumi probably knows all their names and favorite colors or whatever teachers need to know about their students, and Dabi knows precisely none of that with no desire to learn. “But I have your phone, so tomorrow you can email them and let them know you’re having a family emergency.”

“But—they—I’m—gaaaaah.” Fuyumi puts her head down on the table, thankfully before she becomes coherent enough to give away any clues about her job. She stays there for just long enough for Dabi to wonder if he should pat her shoulder or something, and then she sits bolt upright again just as Toga is gearing up to poke her. “This is fine! A week? I can handle a week. Here. With all of you. In the wrong body. This is fine.”

“You don’t sound fine,” Twice says dubiously. “Suffer with the rest of us, bitch.”

“Call my sister a bitch again and you won’t be talking for the rest of the week, Twice.”

“Sorry, Dabi! It’s a dumb insult anyway.”

Toga starts tapping Shigaraki incessantly on the shoulder, despite his attempts to shrug her off. “Are you seeing this? This is adorable, look, he’s a protective big brother.”

“We don’t actually know if he’s older than her or not,” Shigaraki says crabbily, batting her hand away with his thumb curled into his palm. Toga doesn’t immediately pull away, because she has she self-preservation instinct of a drunk lemming, but Dabi isn’t about to intervene in something that annoys Shigaraki that much.

Also, it’s keeping attention off of Fuyumi before she can lose her cool. Dabi’s had several hours to get used to the idea of a week like this, but she was probably still holding out hope that this entire nightmarish situation would reverse any minute.

“I’m older,” Dabi tells them, if only because he has to set the record straight on this right now, before Fuyumi gets any ideas in her head of trying to steal that pedestal from him. This is identifying information, technically, but he is not willing to cede his hard-won position as the eldest sibling for a paltry thing like operational security. “Only by a couple minutes, obviously, but I am older.”

“Clue number two!” Toga crows.

“Three. Two is that Ihai dyes her hair,” Spinner argues.

“Dying her hair should probably be the first clue we know, since they mentioned it first,“ Hawks puts in.

“Dabi dyed her hair, maybe Ihai doesn’t dye it? Oooh, maybe he dyed it back to the original color?” Toga loses her focus and almost pokes Shigaraki in the eye; Shigaraki finally loses his cool and he and Toga dissolve into a high-stakes slap fight. Twice and Compress hastily intervene to prevent any potential dusting.

Dabi takes the time to keep an eye on Fuyumi, determinedly ignoring Hawks keeping an eye on him.

When he’s pretty sure Fuyumi isn’t going to dissolve into hysterics if someone nudges her the wrong way, Dabi says, “For the record, Ihai, you’re gonna be fine. You’ve clearly already terrorized the rest of these assholes into compliance.”

Fuyumi looks at the slap fight on the other side of the table and then back at him. This is compliance? her expression says, but she just rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “Yeah, only one asshole left,” Fuyumi snips, and kicks him under the table.

“I thought you were terrorizing him during your talk in the kitchen?” Compress asks.

“What? Why would she scare me?” Dabi demands, insulted. Which, okay, Fuyumi was a little alarmingly pissed off when she saw what he did with her hair earlier, but Dabi was not scared. And even if he was, there’s no reason anyone in the League would ever have to know about it. “You guys are just wimps.”

“I’m not terrorized either, but I can be bribed with cookies,” Toga informs Fuyumi brightly.

“Oh, that reminds me!” Fuyumi exclaims, pushing her chair out to stand. “I made a Western dish for desert, give me about ten minutes and I’ll have it out. I’ve never made it before so I’m curious if it actually worked.” She disappears into the kitchen.

Spinner gives Dabi a look that clearly asks what on earth is wrong with his sister. Since the answer, as far as Dabi can tell, is nothing, we’re the weird ones, he just glares right back.

“This is called Crème Brûlée,” Fuyumi says, passing out a small dish to everyone. “I don’t know if anyone here has had it before, but it takes a long time to make so I sort of focused on the challenge. I have no idea how well it actually turned out, so I guess we’ll all figure that out.”

Compress lifts his mask away from his face for just long enough to take a careful bite, humming in delight. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had Crème Brûlée, but this is quite good, I assure you. Nicely browned, as well! I admit, I didn’t realize we had a butane torch in our kitchen, much less one that was functional.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t see one either.”

“Then how…?”

Fuyumi holds up a finger and bites the lip of her tongue, concentrating, to produce only a lick of bright blue flame. There’s two failed dishes in the kitchen she’d burned before figuring out how to maintain only a small flame, but she’s very proud of herself for figuring it out. “Like this!”

Dabi’s mouth drops open in offense. “Goddamn it, Ihai, you can’t use my quirk for cooking.”

Shigaraki starts cackling as Himiko’s eyes are sparkle in amusement. Compress is doing his oh-so-subtle cough into his fist, which Fuyumi is starting to consider as just how he laughs, because it’s deliberate, showy, and disguises absolutely nothing.

“I needed practice,” Fuyumi protests. She eyes Hawks. “It’s be a real shame if I burned something I didn’t mean to.”

Hawks, already halfway through his Crème Brûlée, blinks like a deer in the headlights, wings mantled up defensively. Fuyumi feels sort of bad for scaring him—except no, actually, she doesn’t feel bad even a little bit. She smiles at him for full effect.

Hawks takes another bite of Crème Brûlée, presumably so he doesn’t have to try to defend himself. Twice leans over and pats him on the shoulder, stage whispering to him, “It’s okay, I think she’s really a softy. We’ll have roast chicken by this time tomorrow.”

“Thanks Twice,” Hawks manages. He swallows his mouthful of desert. “That’s… helpful. Hey, actually, I need to get back to maintaining my Hero cover. I can come by again tomorrow, does anyone need anything?”

Dabi snorts. “Still can’t believe you’re scared of my goddamn sister, but go on, run away, little birdie.”

“I like my feathers where they are,” Hawks protests. “Also, fuck you, I do have to run a patrol tonight.” He starts wolfing down the rest of his Crème Brûlée while standing from his seat.

Fuyumi settles herself into her seat and starts on her own desert while doing her best to ignore all of that. He’s still running around like a Hero just to keep a cover, ugh. She fantasizes briefly about telling Rumi about this and watching her kick his feathered ass—possibly after burning all those feathers off herself, because he’s exponentially more dangerous the more of those he has available.

At least when Hawks leaves she won’t have to think about him for a while. She can whisper-yell at Dabi later for corrupting a Hero, though she doubts he’ll see it her way, especially if Fuyumi was right about seeing Hawks checking her out while thinking she was her brother.

Himiko pushes her chair back and showily tiptoes out of the kitchen after Hawks has left. She’s back less than thirty seconds later, hurrying in and hopping into her seat, vibrating with energy. “Okay, he’s gone!” She slams her hands on the table, earning Fuyumi’s immediate attention and alarm. “Ihai, you seem really stressed about Hawks being here, but don’t worry, he’s still a Hero. He’s just sneaking around here because he’s trying to be a double agent.” Himiko frowns to herself thoughtfully. “Wait, triple agent? Um, one of them, I forgot how those work.”

Dabi chokes on his spoon. Fuyumi is glad she hasn’t actually tried to take a bite yet, because she suddenly has many, many other questions—that cannot mean what it sounds like.

“Okay, first of all,” Dabi says, “There’s still a solid 20% chance he’s actually trying to defect to villainy—“

Himiko, Twice, and Spinner all immediately start snickering like schoolchildren. Compress hides his mouth behind his hand, despite the fact that it’s already hidden by the mask he’s already replaced; neither do much of anything to hide how his shoulders are silently shaking.

Shigaraki just outright laughs in Dabi’s face. “You mean there’s a 20% chance he won’t do anything because he thinks you’re hot.”

“—Second of all, how long have all of you known this.”

Cue collective eye-rolls from all around the table.

Fuyumi’s brain finally reboots enough for her to say, “Wait, you’re saying—let me get this straight.”

“There’s nothing straight about this, but continue,” Compress says politely.

“Hawks is a double agent reporting back to the Heroes,” Fuyumi says. A collection of nods; Dabi just looks disgusted and doesn’t respond, but she is going to assume that means the same thing but with more contrary reluctance. “All of you know this, and have probably known for a while.” Nods again—even from Dabi, who looks extremely put out about it. “And you’re not… doing anything about it?” Mixed responses, but mostly shrugs. “Why?” she bursts out.

“Well,” Compress hedges, “we aren’t doing anything particularly villainous at the moment—“

“Dabi’s walked into four door frames in the last month and it’s fucking hilarious,” Shigaraki says shamelessly.

Fuyumi slowly turns to look at her brother. Most of his face is still covered by the mask, but she can see the creeping red of his blush despite his expression of absolute rage. “I have not, you fucking liar.”

“I have it on video!” Himiko announces with a wide grin.

Dabi’s attention snaps toward her. “Delete it. Delete it now.”

Fuyumi’s head is spinning. If Hawks is a double agent—triple agent, whatever—then he would do something if the villains were an immediate threat. And Fuyumi doesn’t have to rat him out to Rumi, either, and pit her against her best friend. It could be a trick, but Fuyumi frankly isn’t sure Himiko has that much subtlety in her entire person, and she doesn’t think Dabi would go for a story like this.

And as for the League of Villains… Fuyumi watches the byplay between them: Dabi snarling at a smugly grinning Himiko, Shigaraki and Spinner jeering at him, Twice cheering on Himiko, and Compress observing them all like an indulgent uncle. This club of disasters is a collective menace to society, true, but they aren’t nearly as much of one up close.

They are also clearly the closest thing Dabi has had to a family in a decade, spats and annoyances and all.

…Okay. Fuyumi can respect that. She’s been handling them for six hours already, even half-believing they’d try to kill her when this was all over, but if they’ll tolerate a triple agent in their midst just because Dabi likes him, there’s nothing they’ll be willing to do to her. She can handle this.

But first, something much more important—Fuyumi leans forward over the table to say, very seriously, “Himiko, I desperately need you to send me a copy of that.”

“Don’t you dare,” Dabi snarls.

Himiko claps her hands together and beams. “Of course, Ihai! I knew we’d be just like family!”