Chapter Text
Working with Ujiko isn’t a choice, per se. Dabi wears the title of lab assistant and field tester like chains around his neck, all while Ujiko continues to slip sly comments to the rest of the League.
I might have met one of you in passing, he’d claimed the first time he abducted them. Then, boisterously, I want Dabi to help me test out the High Ends. His taste! His aesthetic sense! They’re perfect! Such a strong connection!
Such a strong hint—that Ujiko had blackmail and wasn’t afraid to use it.
The old man putters around the lab as if he has the clearest of consciences. “Lab assistant!” he shouts. “Come help me get your cousin out of her pod! I have to make an adjustment.”
Dabi’s scowl deepens as he approaches the towering glass case and the eldritch-esque, scientific marvel inside it. Her name tag reads Venus-chan. Under that is a list of her quirks, at the top of which is carnivorous plant. Her head is mostly teeth. “For the last time, stop calling those things my cousins.”
Ujiko waves his command away, as if it’s no more than a buzzing fly. “It’s an accurate description. Although, I’d say Venus-chan is more like your second cousin. I’ve come so far since you landed on my doorstep.” Glass-shielded eyes pick apart the lines of scarring through Dabi’s face, trailing on the staples. “Far, indeed. You could use an update, my boy.”
“Like hell I’m getting back under your knife,” Dabi spits
“So dramatic.” Ujiko sighs in the manner of long-suffering parents. “Here I am, offering my help, and you scorn me. You’ve never appreciated all I’ve done for you.”
Dabi doesn’t take the guilt-laden bait. “You would have turned me into one of them if you’d known how at the time.” He tilts his head toward Venus-chan in emphasis. It’s everything he can do not to rub at the darkened skin on his arms, too alike to hers, though wrinkled by intense heat and barely held on. He tries not to think about the ten people who must have contributed to Venus-chan—how closely their stories might have matched his, only a handful of years later.
Ujiko’s modifications may be the reason Dabi can use his fire so devastatingly, but Dabi can’t thank him for it when he’s seen the outcome. Somewhere on Ujiko’s computer, there is a file labeled Noumu, Mark 3. That file has Dabi’s face in it. It also has weeks of security footage prior to his transformation, a missing person’s report, and pilfered medical records under his birth name.
“I could have turned you in instead,” Ujiko had said back in the earliest days. Dabi had been a prisoner of scientific advancement, shackled to a bed by the pain of recent surgery and the IVs keeping him alive. He’d been shown his new face three minutes prior. “You should be thanking me. No one will recognize you like this and you’ll finally be able to use that quirk of yours. I’ve given you a gift. Don’t be ungrateful.”
Most of his memories in that lab hazed over with time and medication. More than his skin had been replaced. Ujiko hadn’t had the pods yet. Dabi does specifically remember being demonstrated to an investor weeks before his sudden, inexplicable escape from a place which had been on perpetual lockdown for the entire duration of his stay.
He thinks he has the answer to that now. He asks his reflection in the glass how much of the near-decade has been made of his choices, and how much has been a well-orchestrated Noumu field test, designed to lead him back to All for One and Shigaraki.
But, looking at these new creations, he imagines he must have fallen out of their scope of interest years ago. Field test ended. He can’t do nearly the same amount of damage they can, so why reel him back in? Unless it’s all a sick, sick coincidence.
His eyes are drooping after he unloads Venus-chan from her pod, but he can’t fall asleep. Not here. Not when there’s a freshly emptied pod waiting.
John-chan waddles up to rub against his legs, like a cat rather than a monster. With a sigh, Dabi reaches down to pet his head. John-chan is a Mark 5: the first homegrown bio-form—test-tube baby—created after it became clear that a fully-human body simply couldn’t withstand the kind of quirk modification the investor was looking for.
I didn’t work, so they made you, Dabi thinks to John-chan. His fingers lightly brush against the dials in the helmet. It’s a docile creature. But an empty one. Bulging eyes hold nothing. Some days, Dabi’s own look much the same.
“Venus-chan will be ready for testing soon,” Ujiko pipes up. “Take your cousin on a nice walk, will you? Keep away from Endeavor, though. I don’t want any fiery family squabbles to get in the way of my experiment this time. Do you understand, Touya-chan?”
“I understand,” Dabi grits out, just as Ujiko swipes John-chan from around his legs and twists a dial. Various goo-covered members of the League come tumbling into the lab.
“After all,” Ujiko finishes as the new members steady themselves. He shoots a glance at Shigaraki, then returns it to Dabi, twice as sharp. “Even broken Nomus have their uses. We wouldn’t want more of them destroyed than necessary, hm, Dabi-chan?”
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It’s not until Dabi leaves, quietly fuming, that Shigaraki sidles up to the older scientist. “You have something on him,” Shigaraki says. “Dabi.”
“Perhaps, perhaps.”
Shigaraki tilts his head, hand plastered to his face. “Tell me.”
Ujiko almost bursts a lung laughing. “Sorry, Shigaraki Tomura, doctor-patient confidentiality.”
He glows gleeful as the cogs grind in Shigaraki’s mind. The young man glances over to the Noumu tanks, then back to him, and carefully arranges his face to be more neutral. “I see.”
Ujiko knows he is opening a can of worms.
But an old man has to stay entertained somehow.