Chapter Text
The first picture is an innocuous one: just a shadowed figure slouched on a well-worn sofa, the main light source a phone aglow with a Clash Royale game.
The post by iluvthelov, with dabi_some_of_that_ash tagged, garners exactly 66 likes and a smattering of comments that range from shigagamer_23 threatening actual murder in a thread of replies that gets increasingly hyperspecific, to Xx_PrincessHimi_xX's musings on what kind of tattoo would suit Dabi best.
It's nothing much. It doesn't even attract a local news outlet's attention that the most wanted villain organizations in the country have now apparently gotten on social media—instead, it's brushed off as a joke or an imitation account.
Keigo only takes notice of it because the Commission has assigned him to track anything and everything that could possibly involve the League, which means he’s created no less than five burner social media accounts and has obtained an intimate understanding of the kinds of fifteen year olds that post wannabe League content. So the post shows up on his burner Instagram feed one day after a particularly long and bureaucratic day of work, and he barks a laugh when he sees it. It's so whimsical, and it doesn't even have any evidence that this really is the actual League, so he figures he doesn't have to write it into his weekly report.
Nevertheless, he presses the like button and brings the total count up to 67. If nothing else, it's amusing.
The second time, though. The second time, what is most assuredly A-rank villain Dabi's face is clearly visible in the photo, a side profile of him arguing with a figure whose visage is blurred and turned away from the camera, but who looks suspiciously like Shigaraki Tomura.
It's captioned "my 2 fav uncles <3" and garners 100 likes. Underneath the post are two comments: one from shigagamer_23 saying "im three years older than u ? brat", with a reply from dabi_some_of_that_ash that says “cut her some slack she dropped out of high school she doesnt know how to do math.”
The iluvthelov account is active fairly often, but has seemingly no set posting schedule. There’s at least two a week, but sometimes far more that post over the entirety of the next month. By their twelfth post, the account has garnered some media attention—impossible not to, what with it becoming increasingly obvious that the account isn't a fake one by some rabid LoV fan. For the most part, though, nobody pays it much mind, and it doesn't seem to be harming anyone, so he leaves it be.
It's actually kind of endearing, in a strange way. The League has always been eccentric, and the account is an intriguing insight into their less-murderous antics—perhaps it’s a PR attempt? Keigo decides he’ll at least keep an eye on it.
~~~~~
It's 8 p.m. when he finally arrives home to his apartment after what has been an absolutely downright awful day. For every villain Keigo had apprehended, two more had appeared in his path. Not that any of them came close to getting away from him, but the world seemed determined to keep him from finishing his shift on time. He’d been kept late by both their paperwork and a building that one of them had collapsed. Kicking off his cement-covered boots and shrugging his way out of his barely-salvagable hero costume, Keigo absentmindedly sends a few feathers out towards the kitchen to grab him a protein shake from the minifridge before he flops onto the couch and pulls out his phone, switching it off of silent.
Almost instantly, the device buzzes, a notification from Instagram popping up on his burner. He reads the caption from the preview first—"i gave him 1000 yen to do the Smolder"—and taps it with half-awake curiosity, taking a sip of his loser boy dinner as he does so.
And spits it out immediately.
There on the screen, in all of his smoldering glory, is Dabi, giving the camera a half-lidded glare, the neon bar lighting glinting off the rows of staples on his face and covering them in an iridescence that shimmers in just the right way for Keigo's jurassic bird brain to key in on. The shimmer juxtaposes the look he's giving beautifully; Keigo furiously doesn’t understand why murder and arson require bedroom eyes, but this time, his unique turquoise pupils have gained a novel green backdrop from the strength of the lights, and the combination is even more striking than usual.
The second photo is a much messier and slightly-blurry photo of Dabi flipping off whoever's holding the camera, but the first one is—
Well. It's fine.
This is fine.
There's no reason Keigo should find that so hot, pun intended.
Surely, surely, he tells himself, clenching his protein shake so hard that his talons leave slight dents in the plastic, surely it's just the staples. He’s drawn to shiny things, something that’s always annoyed the Commission and doesn’t always make logical sense, and there’s plenty of things about his quirk that don’t make logical sense, so surely this is another one of them.
It's definitely just the staples, and not the slight wisps of smoke rising from Dabi's face—particularly his cheekbones, which makes the glinting of the staples all the more interesting, since parts of them are slightly obscured. It’s definitely not the way the stark lighting illuminates parts of his face and casts the rest in deep, mysterious shadow, giving a better detailing of his facial features than any evidence video had before. Definitely not that look in those eyes, as if he's some sort of. Prey.
Usually, that’s not something that Keigo ever experiences feeling. With his mutation, he’s an apex predator—he’s nearly undefeatable if he gets the jump on someone, he has hundreds of knives strapped to his back that can each individually go hundreds of kilometers per hour, and he has so few natural fear responses that the Commission workers had actually taken him to a psychiatrist when they got him to see if that was normal. He’s normally the one doing the hunting, not the one who's being hunted, and he definitely—he definitely wouldn’t like it if someone made him feel that way. What is wrong with him?
He's about to chalk it up to general tiredness when he notices the like count.
Eighty thousand.
It would appear that this isn't just a him problem, in that case.
Well, then.
Keigo quickly swipes out of the app and sets his phone away for the night, unwilling to let those two images take over his mind any more than they already have.
~~~~~
Over the course of the following month, the LoV account only continues to gain traction at seemingly exponential rates.
A city news station discovers the account and runs a short story about the League of Villains' newest… PR tactic? Keigo’s still pretty sure it’s a PR tactic.
From there, the frequency of the posts only increases, as if the person behind the account is being fueled by all the attention—a possibility that's very likely, considering the fact that this must all be one big marketing scheme to make the League seem more down-to-earth and endearing in the public's opinion. Keigo almost feels silly for falling for it that one time. But he knows their strategy now. He won't let it happen anymore.
At least, that's what he tries to tell himself. The self-talk works for the next five posts, none of which really cause as much of a public uproar as the one of Dabi, and then—
When he gets a minute to take a breather at his agency one day in between shifts, he slumps in his desk chair and pulls out his phone.
And immediately throws it across the room.
He always checks his social media accounts before his shifts, and he hadn’t taken his phone out since the start of it this time, but he’d forgotten to close Instagram, and—
Dabi was the first thing on his feed, pictured mid-stretch, the edge of his shirt riding up slightly, his head tilted all the way to one side to reveal a jagged line of staples down his neck and disappearing into the collar of his shirt. It's just a picture. It shouldn't be as hot as it is, and Keigo shouldn’t have memorized it within a fifth of a second.
But the rush of blood suddenly roaring through Keigo's ears is undeniable.
It's the staples, he tells himself firmly. It's the staples. Don't be stupid. It's the staples.
Knowing that it's the staples does little to nothing for him this time, however. This whole situation is irrational as is, and he's mature enough to admit that the staples were a flimsy excuse to begin with. He may be a bird, he may find his eyes drawn to things that spark and glimmer slightly more than the average human, but that doesn't instantly make him find them attractive.
He finds Dabi attractive.
He finds Dabi—attractive?
"What in the world," he mutters to himself.
He picks his phone back up, hoping that a second look will reveal Dabi's ultimate unattractiveness. Maybe it was just the whiplash from seeing such an unexpected sight.
So he swipes back into the app, but the universe grants him no such luck.
He spots the caption he hadn't read the first time around: "local old man has creaky joints, more at eleven." Despite himself, Keigo chuckles. It's stupid, it's funny, their PR tactics are working, but it's also fine, because this won't stop him from doing his job as a hero.
Whatever. So what, if a villain is objectively attractive? Keigo's a hero. He's objectively attractive. Surely there are some villains who see his promotional materials and have miniature crises. All's fair in love and war, they say.
With that, he securely zips his phone back into his pants pocket with a very large inhale and gets back to work.
~~~~~
The next time he sees Dabi's annoyingly good-looking stupid stapley face is not on social media, but rather, splashed across the top of a news story that a college-age woman is reading at the table across from him in a local cafe. He’s just committed arson of an entire warehouse of goods, and is giving a security camera that he’s apparently aware of a lazy smirk against the flaming backdrop.
Keigo accidentally takes too big a gulp of his scalding-hot coffee and chokes as it burns its way down his throat. A few other patrons, including the aforementioned college student, glance his way, but eventually leave him be and return to their own tasks.
But Keigo's mind is racing. He's on his second cup of coffee, it's 10 a.m., he's finally alert and awake—
And now, finally, he understands what the League is trying to do.
This isn't a PR tactic. It's psychological warfare.
And Keigo one hundred percent refuses to fall for it. Nope. No sir. No way whatsoever.
Right then, his phone dings with a message from his handler. Need you to come in. Emergency assignment just dropped.
With a sigh, he files away this revelation for later.
Only to learn when he finally arrives at the Commission headquarters that his mission is to infiltrate the League, pretend to be a double agent, gain as much information as he can, coexist in close quarters with Dabi, and not go insane—easy peasy, right?
This is made substantially better (worse) by the fact that the League definitely does not trust him, and as a result, Keigo is forced to spend the first few days running around doing stupid tasks for Dabi while the villain gauges his “commitment level.”
It sucks. He's learning absolutely none of their strategies, not a whisper about their plans, not even their ridiculously (in)effective psychological warfare tactics.
~~~~~
So, High-End happens.
And Keigo—look, Keigo is really, really pissed with Dabi, now. So when he meets with Dabi in an alleyway afterwards and shoves a feather-blade up to his neck, demanding an explanation, he doesn’t focus on the pretty way the dim light flickers on his stupid fucking goddamn staples, and he doesn’t focus on the smirk, and he doesn’t get distracted by the. Bedroom eyes. Again. Or the way he smells like smoke and millions of dollars in property damage.
When Dabi gives as good as he gets during Keigo’s admittedly stronger-than-expected tirade (he has to take this bullshit out on someone), and Keigo stops paying attention to what he’s saying for a few seconds to watch the way the light hits Dabi's eyes, he’s pretty sure there’s something wrong with him.
And when he gets home from whatever that was and sees iluvthelov’s post captioned “tbt when we mogged overhaul”, and the third picture is a photo taken from the ground looking up at Dabi, who is standing on top of the League’s truck, one of his heavy boots hanging over the roof of the truck as he cackles with fire in his eyes, well—
Keigo admits that having a fleeting thought about wishing he was the truck probably no longer has anything to do with staples.
He’s fairly certain the Commission needs to take him off of this mission, but it’s way too late for that. So he’ll probably just go insane instead, and cry in his cold shower.
~~~~~
Keigo, again, is also willing to admit that he’s kind of a hypocrite.
He has his own social media account, of course, like any normal hero. And, yeah, he’s pretty objectively attractive. The Commission chose a media darling as their personal hero plaything for a reason. They went to no uncertain lengths teaching him how to wield his charisma and charm to maximize PR and followers, and with his target demographics—well.
He does, in fact, post a few shirtless workout photos on occasion.
Not that it’s his choice, really. He’s never gone out of his way to be marketed for thirst potential (his costume was rather bulky for that, what with his flight requirements), and he only posts as much as the Commission requests him to. It’s just a part of the game that is the popularity polls, and he always tries to make his captions on them funny, at least, to make up for the fact that there’s only so many pictures he can take of his abs, or his wingspan, or that the Commission takes of his eyes, before it starts getting really, really boring. But he does his best with what he’s got, he really does.
So today, when the rain’s been coming down horribly all afternoon and he’s lost his jacket and gotten his compression suit sliced up in a villain fight thanks to his feathers getting weighed down, he doesn’t think much of it when he snaps a thirst trap of himself, sweaty and covered in rain and debris, and posts it on his Instagram once he gets home to change. The girlies always go crazy over action shots, or whatever. More likes for the Commission. It's normal.
But when he gets to the League hideout twenty minutes later, following a shower and new clothes, and he walks in to hear Toga screeching, “Look at what Hawksie posted, Dabi!”, what isn't normal is for Dabi to look at it and then immediately turn her phone to ash before it even hits the wall, a furious blush on his cheeks.
Keigo, uh, turns back around and goes home at that one. He’ll open that can of worms another day.