Chapter Text
Soft rays of sunlight cut through my lids, rousing me slowly from unconsciousness. I turned over in bed, drawing the sheets over me as my sleepy haze dictated I shouldn’t be awake yet. And I was all too happy to comply. I sunk into the bed, my limbs feeling heavy in the only way sleep could do to you. All was quiet save for the chirping of birds outside.
I drew in a deep breath, the smoky smell of my pillow familiar to my nose but unfamiliar to my mind. That, along with my sleep muddled mind, was probably why it took me so long to realize that I shouldn’t be smelling smoke, nor should I be waking up to sunlight and the sounds of birds chirping.
The last thought was what jolted me awake, the fog in my brain lifting as I sat bolt upright in bed and froze before I could even look towards where my alarm clock should have been. Because, on all accounts, it probably wasn’t there. Because I wasn’t anywhere I recognized; the room I was in being small and relatively barren.
A shiver ran through my body, my brain already coming up with worst case scenarios as I looked around frantically for anyone else who might be in the room. But I seemed to be alone and I wasn’t restrained in any way since I had sat up just fine. I looked down to my hands and legs just to be sure I wasn’t tied up, and my mind blanked.
Those weren’t my hands and even though my legs were under covers still, they probably weren’t mine either. And this shirtless chest wasn’t mine. And these burn wounds definitely weren’t mine. One of those definitely-not-mine-but-I’m-controlling-it hands reached up to my head and ran through short spiky hair that also wasn’t mine.
A shudder wracked the body I didn’t own and in a robot like fashion the legs were swinging themselves off the side of the bed, giving me time to take in the sight of more burns that ran down to the ankles of the unknown man’s legs.
The cool hardwood flooring met the bottoms of these new feet and I didn’t put much thought into moving this new body before the arms were pushing me up off the bed and I was wobbling where I stood.
I’m tall. It felt like I was standing on the edge of a skyscraper, my feet were too far away from the rest of me for my liking and it felt like my center of gravity had moved towards my chest.
The legs moved themselves haltingly forward, the arms that were also covered with burn scars hovering away from my torso to help keep my balance.
The thought that I must be making whoever this was look like a newborn fawn flitted across my mind. Who is this anyways? I didn’t know anybody who had so many scars, then again with so many quirks there were so many people with oddities that burn scars didn’t seem all that strange.
Where am I going? The second thought had me stopping in the middle of the room. The new arms still hovering outwards and the feet halted in a half step as I looked around again. Like the last time there wasn’t much to see. The room was barren other than the unmade bed, a window, a wardrobe, and a nightstand with a phone on top of it.
I stared at the phone for a moment, almost wondering if it would begin ringing because surely if someone had traded bodies with someone else they would be trying to get in contact with them, right? But there was no ringing or flashing screen or any signs of a new notification asking how I had stolen a body.
Instead I moved just as jerkily back to the bed as I had been leaving it. I plopped back onto the edge of it with little grace as I picked up the phone.
The phone didn’t look that new, but it didn’t look outdated either and the lock screen gave nothing away as to who this person might be as there was only a generic screensaver for it. And that seemed to be the end of my investigation as it didn’t seem that whoever owned the device had bothered to use the thumb print recognition feature.
I placed the phone back on the nightstand, watching it for a moment more before standing again and taking stock of my surroundings. There were two doors in this room, one in the wall across from the bed and the other next to the wardrobe on the right side of the bed.
I headed towards the door on the right, still feeling uncoordinated with such long limbs and the uncomfortable stretching of the scarred skin all over my new body.
Now longer fingers reached out to grasp the cool metal doorknob and I watched as the staples in the wrist keeping the scarred skin on the healthy glinted and caught the sun rays. I couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened to this person to have such serious injuries.
It wasn’t until the legs started moving seemingly of their own accord again that I realized the door had been pushed inwards and led into a bathroom.
Like the room before, the bathroom was rather empty with only the necessities like a toilet, shower, and sink. The room didn’t seem all that well cared for as the grout between the tiles on the floor looked to be rotting away and the whites of the appliances were dull. It may not have been the person’s fault though as even in what I assumed was the bedroom things looked far more worn by time than by misuse. It may have been one of the only apartments they could get, even if I didn’t know where it was.
I returned from my trail of thought still standing in the doorway to the bathroom awkwardly. Right, I was controlling this body, sort of, I wasn’t just along for the ride.
I stepped forward slowly, a little hesitant to get in front of the mirror. I already knew I wasn’t in the right body, was it some subconscious fear that I could deny that fact until I saw a face that wasn’t mine?
Either way, I distracted myself by looking to a discarded bottle of hair dye on the counter by the sink. A black stained towel was sitting next to it in a heap, nearly covering a few dark silver bits of jewelry beside it. Movement to my left caught my eye and I looked up to see I had moved in front of the mirror unconsciously and the hand I seemed barely able to control had moved up to a head I didn’t recognize.
Bright blue eyes stared back at me, concern and surprise making the pupils wider than they should have been. Like the rest of the man’s body, his face had scars of times passed that were held together by a crude stapling job.
Two deep half circles sat under those bright blue eyes and what I’m sure would have been beautiful features were turned into a Frankenstein-esque look with purple-red scarred skin trailing from the man’s lower jaw to his collar bone.
It was all too easy to see the extent of the damage on the man’s upper half since he hadn’t worn a shirt to bed and it instilled a sense of sadness in me. I wasn’t sure why I was feeling sad for this man I didn’t even know, but I was sure that scars like these had to mean a bad past.
I finally had to tear my gaze from the lengthy scars of which the only I hadn’t seen the full length of being those on the man’s legs. Though from the feeling of stretching skin and pulling staples I could only guess the burns covered most of his legs like the rest of him.
Purposefully this time, I maneuvered the hand I didn’t own to touch the man’s hair. Now that I could see it in the mirror, it was a dark black; probably from the dye that he must have used the night prior. It was also somewhat bed tussled, but after running the hand through the surprisingly soft hair a few times it worked itself into soft spikes.
I was only a little surprised when the man’s hand didn’t return with traces of black dye on it.
Gaze trailing down from the man’s hair, my attention was brought to his ears that were discolored like the rest of his scars. My gaze continued, finding three more pieces of jewelry pierced in the left side of the man’s nose. Three small studs, all of which were the same darkish silver as what I guessed were the cuffs for his ears on the counter.
Other than the semi circles of discolored skin beneath the man’s bright blue eyes that made him look eternally tired, the scars on his lower jaw drew my attention. From how neat and symmetrical the scars were, nearly straight lines curving from the corners of his mouth up to his ears to form a distorted smile, it made me wonder how accidental these scars truly were. Even those under his eyes were both nearly entirely symmetrical with one another.
Yet I couldn’t help but wonder who would purposefully do this to themself. Unless the man hadn’t done it to himself. Did someone do this to him when he was younger? The thought crossed my mind and my gaze met the man’s eyes again. There was a sadness and sense of regret behind them that I knew was my own, but one I didn’t like to see regardless. It seemed wrong for whoever this was to be sad without a reason.
I blinked and when I looked back the man’s gaze was sharper, more determined, though there was still a frown turning down the edges of his mouth and tugging at the scars running up from his lower lip.
A chiming sound coming from the other room brought me from the trance I was half convinced those blue eyes had put me in.
I blinked rapidly, my gaze finally leaving the mirror as I looked out towards the bedroom I had just come from. As I stood there listening the sound registered more distinctly in my mind as a phone ringing.
I jolted towards the door, the first thought across my mind being that whoever’s body I was in right now was trying to get in touch with me. I pulled the door open wider and moved through it, the jolt of adrenaline in my system seeming to be what I needed to move less like a baby deer and more like a proper human being.
The phone stopped ringing halfway through my journey across the room and I stopped, standing still in the middle of the room for a moment.
It started ringing again and I jerked towards it, nearly falling onto the bed as I picked it up and swiped to answer the familiar number.
“Hello?” I answered without thinking and the unfamiliar masculine voice that left my mouth shocked me back into silence. I forgot I hadn’t spoken yet, I had been observing this man this entire time without even wondering what his voice sounded like. Now that it was leaving my mouth I decided I liked the deep drawling tones I heard, I just didn’t quite like that they were coming from me.
“Oh thank god.” I heard my own voice mutter over the phone and it gave me an odd sense of surrealness. I tuned my thoughts back in on this other person, myself, as they began talking again. “Y/N, right? You haven’t gotten any calls from anyone other than me, right?”
I blinked, a nervous feeling settling in my stomach at the other’s frantic tone. “I-no? Should I have?”
“No, no, but if you do just don’t answer them.” He, I could only guess since it seemed we had one another’s bodies, said, relief evident in my voice. It helped ease my own nervousness only slightly, but I still had many questions circling in my mind.
“Who are you?”
“You didn’t check my phone-?” There was a pause and I hadn’t realized he must have been doing something while on call until it fell silent. “No I forgot I don’t have thumb recognition. Call me Dabi. How far do you live from the Kamino ward?”
The information was so much to process all at once that I couldn’t help but continue the conversation or risk staying silent for too long. It sounded like Dabi had begun to move again. “About half an hour on the train. Why?”
“I’m coming to you. I have a feeling I know how this happened and I’m sure we both want this fixed up as soon as possible. Don’t leave my apartment.” The other’s tone shifted to some form of annoyance that I couldn’t exactly place before the phone clicked.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it, feeling a bit dazed by it all. How could this all have happened? Did this Dabi piss off someone with a quirk that did this? Was it some kind of prank? Why had I gotten dragged into it?
It wasn’t like I was very special, in fact I was one of the few in the population who never manifested a quirk. It wasn’t like I had a particularly important job or connections or anything either. Maybe it was all just unfortunate coincidence? And was Dabi expecting calls from other people? He had said he wasn’t, but then why would he ask in the first place?
The only reason I could guess he’d rather come to me than the other way around was because he didn’t like getting gawked at in public. It made sense, I guess. Even if Dabi wasn’t one of the oddest people I’ve ever seen, his scars certainly made him stand out more than most in a crowd.
And I’m still sitting in this man’s apartment half naked. The thought jolted me out of my spiral of questions and I jerked up from the bed.
Placing the phone back on the nightstand I moved towards his wardrobe, feeling as though I was invading this stranger’s privacy now that the fever dream quality faded thanks to the call.
I felt my borrowed face heating up in embarrassment, I had been walking around shirtless and been examining this stranger’s body for so long without even thinking about it. Thank god no one else had been around to see.
As I searched through the wardrobe, trying not to dig too far in to preserve some sense of privacy, I found myself wondering why I wasn’t cold. It was the middle of winter after all, and the apartment didn’t feel like it was heated particularly warmly, and I was walking around with only boxers on.
I found myself cringing in embarrassment again but I pushed past it as I slid some black jeans on and rooted around some more until I found a plain white tee that I slipped on with a grateful sigh.
It wasn’t so bad any more, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I should cover up more even if I wasn’t feeling the chill I should have. I bit my lip in thought but the feeling of a staple at the corner of my mouth caught me off guard and had me deciding not to do that.
Shifting through the clothing once more and still feeling like an ass while doing so, I ended up finding a gray sweatshirt near the back that I was happy to slip over my head as well and end my impromptu investigation of another person’s closet.
Now all there was for me to do was wait.